mark twain's letters - volume iii. by mark twain arranged with comment by albert bigelow paine xvi. letters, , chiefly to w. d. howells. literature and politics. planning a play with bret harte. the monday evening club of hartford was an association of most of the literary talent of that city, and it included a number of very distinguished members. the writers, the editors, the lawyers, and the ministers of the gospel who composed it were more often than not men of national or international distinction. there was but one paper at each meeting, and it was likely to be a paper that would later find its way into some magazine. naturally mark twain was one of its favorite members, and his contributions never failed to arouse interest and discussion. a “mark twain night” brought out every member. in the next letter we find the first mention of one of his most memorable contributions--a story of one of life's moral aspects. the tale, now included in his collected works, is, for some reason, little read to-day; yet the curious allegory, so vivid in its seeming reality, is well worth consideration. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hartford, jan. , ' . my dear howells,--indeed we haven't forgotten the howellses, nor scored up a grudge of any kind against them; but the fact is i was under the doctor's hands for four weeks on a stretch and have been disabled from working for a week or so beside. i thought i was well, about ten days ago, so i sent for a short-hand writer and dictated answers to a bushel or so of letters that had been accumulating during my illness. getting everything shipshape and cleared up, i went to work next day upon an atlantic article, which ought to be worth $ per page (which is the price they usually pay for my work, i believe) for although it is only pages ms (less than two days work, counting by bulk,) i have spent more days trimming, altering and working at it. i shall put in one more day's polishing on it, and then read it before our club, which is to meet at our house monday evening, the th inst. i think it will bring out considerable discussion among the gentlemen of the club--though the title of the article will not give them much notion of what is to follow,--this title being “the facts concerning the recent carnival of crime in connecticut”--which reminds me that today's tribune says there will be a startling article in the current atlantic, in which a being which is tangible bud invisible will figure-exactly the case with the sketch of mine which i am talking about! however, mine can lie unpublished a year or two as well as not--though i wish that contributor of yours had not interfered with his coincidence of heroes. but what i am coming at, is this: won't you and mrs. howells come down saturday the nd and remain to the club on monday night? we always have a rattling good time at the club and we do want you to come, ever so much. will you? now say you will. mrs. clemens and i are persuading ourselves that you twain will come. my volume of sketches is doing very well, considering the times; received my quarterly statement today from bliss, by which i perceive that , copies have been sold--or rather, , had been sold weeks ago; a lot more, by this time, no doubt. i am on the sick list again--and was, day before yesterday--but on the whole i am getting along. yrs ever mark howells wrote that he could not come down to the club meeting, adding that sickness was “quite out of character” for mark twain, and hardly fair on a man who had made so many other people feel well. he closed by urging that bliss “hurry out” 'tom sawyer.' “that boy is going to make a prodigious hit.” clemens answered: ***** to w. d. howells, in boston. hartford, jan. , ' . my dear howells,--thanks, and ever so many, for the good opinion of 'tom sawyer.' williams has made about rattling pictures for it--some of them very dainty. poor devil, what a genius he has and how he does murder it with rum. he takes a book of mine, and without suggestion from anybody builds no end of pictures just from his reading of it. there was never a man in the world so grateful to another as i was to you day before yesterday, when i sat down (in still rather wretched health) to set myself to the dreary and hateful task of making final revision of tom sawyer, and discovered, upon opening the package of ms that your pencil marks were scattered all along. this was splendid, and swept away all labor. instead of reading the ms, i simply hunted out the pencil marks and made the emendations which they suggested. i reduced the boy battle to a curt paragraph; i finally concluded to cut the sunday school speech down to the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book is to be for boys and girls; i tamed the various obscenities until i judged that they no longer carried offense. so, at a single sitting i began and finished a revision which i had supposed would occupy or . days and leave me mentally and physically fagged out at the end. i was careful not to inflict the ms upon you until i had thoroughly and painstakingly revised it. therefore, the only faults left were those that would discover themselves to others, not me--and these you had pointed out. there was one expression which perhaps you overlooked. when huck is complaining to tom of the rigorous system in vogue at the widow's, he says the servants harass him with all manner of compulsory decencies, and he winds up by saying: “and they comb me all to hell.” (no exclamation point.) long ago, when i read that to mrs. clemens, she made no comment; another time i created occasion to read that chapter to her aunt and her mother (both sensitive and loyal subjects of the kingdom of heaven, so to speak) and they let it pass. i was glad, for it was the most natural remark in the world for that boy to make (and he had been allowed few privileges of speech in the book;) when i saw that you, too, had let it go without protest, i was glad, and afraid; too--afraid you hadn't observed it. did you? and did you question the propriety of it? since the book is now professedly and confessedly a boy's and girl's hook, that darn word bothers me some, nights, but it never did until i had ceased to regard the volume as being for adults. don't bother to answer now, (for you've writing enough to do without allowing me to add to the burden,) but tell me when you see me again! which we do hope will be next saturday or sunday or monday. couldn't you come now and mull over the alterations which you are going to make in your ms, and make them after you go back? wouldn't it assist the work if you dropped out of harness and routine for a day or two and have that sort of revivification which comes of a holiday-forgetfulness of the work-shop? i can always work after i've been to your house; and if you will come to mine, now, and hear the club toot their various horns over the exasperating metaphysical question which i mean to lay before them in the disguise of a literary extravaganza, it would just brace you up like a cordial. (i feel sort of mean trying to persuade a man to put down a critical piece of work at a critical time, but yet i am honest in thinking it would not hurt the work nor impair your interest in it to come under the circumstances.) mrs. clemens says, “maybe the howellses could come monday if they cannot come saturday; ask them; it is worth trying.” well, how's that? could you? it would be splendid if you could. drop me a postal card--i should have a twinge of conscience if i forced you to write a letter, (i am honest about that,)--and if you find you can't make out to come, tell me that you bodies will come the next saturday if the thing is possible, and stay over sunday. yrs ever mark. howells, however, did not come to the club meeting, but promised to come soon when they could have a quiet time to themselves together. as to huck's language, he declared: “i'd have that swearing out in an instant. i suppose i didn't notice it because the locution was so familiar to my western sense, and so exactly the thing that huck would say.” clemens changed the phrase to, “they comb me all to thunder,” and so it stands to-day. the “carnival of crime,” having served its purpose at the club, found quick acceptance by howells for the atlantic. he was so pleased with it, in fact, that somewhat later he wrote, urging that its author allow it to be printed in a dainty book, by osgood, who made a specialty of fine publishing. meantime howells had written his atlantic notice of tom sawyer, and now inclosed clemens a proof of it. we may judge from the reply that it was satisfactory. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: apl , ' . my dear howells,--it is a splendid notice and will embolden weak-kneed journalistic admirers to speak out, and will modify or shut up the unfriendly. to “fear god and dread the sunday school” exactly described that old feeling which i used to have, but i couldn't have formulated it. i want to enclose one of the illustrations in this letter, if i do not forget it. of course the book is to be elaborately illustrated, and i think that many of the pictures are considerably above the american average, in conception if not in execution. i do not re-enclose your review to you, for you have evidently read and corrected it, and so i judge you do not need it. about two days after the atlantic issues i mean to begin to send books to principal journals and magazines. i read the “carnival of crime” proof in new york when worn and witless and so left some things unamended which i might possibly have altered had i been at home. for instance, “i shall always address you in your own s-n-i-v-e-l-i-n-g d-r-a-w-l, baby.” i saw that you objected to something there, but i did not understand what! was it that it was too personal? should the language be altered?--or the hyphens taken out? won't you please fix it the way it ought to be, altering the language as you choose, only making it bitter and contemptuous? “deuced” was not strong enough; so i met you halfway with “devilish.” mrs. clemens has returned from new york with dreadful sore throat, and bones racked with rheumatism. she keeps her bed. “aloha nui!” as the kanakas say. mark. henry irving once said to mark twain: “you made a mistake by not adopting the stage as a profession. you would have made even a greater actor than a writer.” mark twain would have made an actor, certainly, but not a very tractable one. his appearance in hartford in “the loan of a lover” was a distinguished event, and his success complete, though he made so many extemporaneous improvements on the lines of thick-headed peter spuyk, that he kept the other actors guessing as to their cues, and nearly broke up the performance. it was, of course, an amateur benefit, though augustin daly promptly wrote, offering to put it on for a long run. the “skeleton novelette” mentioned in the next letter refers to a plan concocted by howells and clemens, by which each of twelve authors was to write a story, using the same plot, “blindfolded” as to what the others had written. it was a regular “mark twain” notion, and it is hard to-day to imagine howells's continued enthusiasm in it. neither he nor clemens gave up the idea for a long time. it appears in their letters again and again, though perhaps it was just as well for literature that it was never carried out. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: apl. , . my dear howells, you'll see per enclosed slip that i appear for the first time on the stage next wednesday. you and mrs. h. come down and you shall skip in free. i wrote my skeleton novelette yesterday and today. it will make a little under pages. please tell aldrich i've got a photographer engaged, and tri-weekly issue is about to begin. show him the canvassing specimens and beseech him to subscribe. ever yours, s. l. c. in his next letter mark twain explains why tom sawyer is not to appear as soon as planned. the reference to “the literary nightmare” refers to the “punch, conductor, punch with care” sketch, which had recently appeared in the atlantic. many other versifiers had had their turn at horse-car poetry, and now a publisher was anxious to collect it in a book, provided he could use the atlantic sketch. clemens does not tell us here the nature of carlton's insult, forgiveness of which he was not yet qualified to grant, but there are at least two stories about it, or two halves of the same incident, as related afterward by clemens and canton. clemens said that when he took the jumping frog book to carlton, in , the latter, pointing to his stock, said, rather scornfully: “books? i don't want your book; my shelves are full of books now,” though the reader may remember that it was carlton himself who had given the frog story to the saturday press and had seen it become famous. carlton's half of the story was that he did not accept mark twain's book because the author looked so disreputable. long afterward, when the two men met in europe, the publisher said to the now rich and famous author: “mr. clemens, my one claim on immortality is that i declined your first book.” ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hartford, apl. , my dear howells,--thanks for giving me the place of honor. bliss made a failure in the matter of getting tom sawyer ready on time--the engravers assisting, as usual. i went down to see how much of a delay there was going to be, and found that the man had not even put a canvasser on, or issued an advertisement yet--in fact, that the electrotypes would not all be done for a month! but of course the main fact was that no canvassing had been done--because a subscription harvest is before publication, (not after, when people have discovered how bad one's book is.) well, yesterday i put in the courant an editorial paragraph stating that tam sawyer is “ready to issue, but publication is put off in order to secure english copyright by simultaneous publication there and here. the english edition is unavoidably delayed.” you see, part of that is true. very well. when i observed that my “sketches” had dropped from a sale of or a month down to a month, i said “this ain't no time to be publishing books; therefore, let tom lie still till autumn, mr. bliss, and make a holiday book of him to beguile the young people withal.” i shall print items occasionally, still further delaying tom, till i ease him down to autumn without shock to the waiting world. as to that “literary nightmare” proposition. i'm obliged to withhold consent, for what seems a good reason--to wit: a single page of horse-car poetry is all that the average reader can stand, without nausea; now, to stack together all of it that has been written, and then add it to my article would be to enrage and disgust each and every reader and win the deathless enmity of the lot. even if that reason were insufficient, there would still be a sufficient reason left, in the fact that mr. carlton seems to be the publisher of the magazine in which it is proposed to publish this horse-car matter. carlton insulted me in feb. , and so when the day arrives that sees me doing him a civility i shall feel that i am ready for paradise, since my list of possible and impossible forgivenesses will then be complete. mrs. clemens says my version of the blindfold novelette “a murder and a marriage” is “good.” pretty strong language--for her. the fieldses are coming down to the play tomorrow, and they promise to get you and mrs. howells to come too, but i hope you'll do nothing of the kind if it will inconvenience you, for i'm not going to play either strikingly bad enough or well enough to make the journey pay you. my wife and i think of going to boston may th to see anna dickinson's debut on the th. if i find we can go, i'll try to get a stage box and then you and mrs. howells must come to parker's and go with us to the crucifixion. (is that spelt right?--somehow it doesn't look right.) with our very kindest regards to the whole family. yrs ever, mark. the mention of anna dickinson, at the end of this letter, recalls a prominent reformer and lecturer of the civil war period. she had begun her crusades against temperance and slavery in , when she was but fifteen years old, when her success as a speaker had been immediate and extraordinary. now, in this later period, at the age of thirty-four, she aspired to the stage--unfortunately for her, as her gifts lay elsewhere. clemens and howells knew miss dickinson, and were anxious for the success which they hardly dared hope for. clemens arranged a box party. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: may , ' . my dear howells,--i shall reach boston on monday the th, either at : p.m. or p.m. (which is best?) and go straight to parker's. if you and mrs. howells cannot be there by half past , i'll not plan to arrive till the later train-time ( ,) because i don't want to be there alone--even a minute. still, joe twichell will doubtless go with me (forgot that,) he is going to try hard to. mrs. clemens has given up going, because susy is just recovering from about the savagest assault of diphtheria a child ever did recover from, and therefore will not be entirely her healthy self again by the th. would you and mrs. howells like to invite mr. and mrs. aldrich? i have a large proscenium box--plenty of room. use your own pleasure about it--i mainly (that is honest,) suggest it because i am seeking to make matters pleasant for you and mrs. howells. i invited twichell because i thought i knew you'd like that. i want you to fix it so that you and the madam can remain in boston all night; for i leave next day and we can't have a talk, otherwise. i am going to get two rooms and a parlor; and would like to know what you decide about the aldriches, so as to know whether to apply for an additional bedroom or not. don't dine that evening, for i shall arrive dinnerless and need your help. i'll bring my blindfold novelette, but shan't exhibit it unless you exhibit yours. you would simply go to work and write a novelette that would make mine sick. because you would know all about where my weak points lay. no, sir, i'm one of these old wary birds! don't bother to write a letter-- lines on a postal card is all that i can permit from a busy man. yrs ever mark. p. s. good! you'll not have to feel any call to mention that debut in the atlantic--they've made me pay the grand cash for my box!--a thing which most managers would be too worldly-wise to do, with journalistic folks. but i'm most honestly glad, for i'd rather pay three prices, any time, than to have my tongue half paralyzed with a dead-head ticket. hang that anna dickinson, a body can never depend upon her debuts! she has made five or six false starts already. if she fails to debut this time, i will never bet on her again. in his book, my mark twain, howells refers to the “tragedy” of miss dickinson's appearance. she was the author of numerous plays, some of which were successful, but her career as an actress was never brilliant. at elmira that summer the clemenses heard from their good friend doctor brown, of edinburgh, and sent eager replies. ***** to dr. john brown, in edinburgh: elmira, new york, u. s. june , . dear friend the doctor,--it was a perfect delight to see the well-known handwriting again! but we so grieve to know that you are feeling miserable. it must not last--it cannot last. the regal summer is come and it will smile you into high good cheer; it will charm away your pains, it will banish your distresses. i wish you were here, to spend the summer with us. we are perched on a hill-top that overlooks a little world of green valleys, shining rivers, sumptuous forests and billowy uplands veiled in the haze of distance. we have no neighbors. it is the quietest of all quiet places, and we are hermits that eschew caves and live in the sun. doctor, if you'd only come! i will carry your letter to mrs. c. now, and there will be a glad woman, i tell you! and she shall find one of those pictures to put in this for mrs. barclays and if there isn't one here we'll send right away to hartford and get one. come over, doctor john, and bring the barclays, the nicolsons and the browns, one and all! affectionately, saml. l. clemens. from may until august no letters appear to have passed between clemens and howells; the latter finally wrote, complaining of the lack of news. he was in the midst of campaign activities, he said, writing a life of hayes, and gaily added: “you know i wrote the life of lincoln, which elected him.” he further reported a comedy he had completed, and gave clemens a general stirring up as to his own work. mark twain, in his hillside study, was busy enough. summer was his time for work, and he had tried his hand in various directions. his mention of huck finn in his reply to howells is interesting, in that it shows the measure of his enthusiasm, or lack of it, as a gauge of his ultimate achievement ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: elmira, aug. , . my dear howells,--i was just about to write you when your letter came--and not one of those obscene postal cards, either, but reverently, upon paper. i shall read that biography, though the letter of acceptance was amply sufficient to corral my vote without any further knowledge of the man. which reminds me that a campaign club in jersey city wrote a few days ago and invited me to be present at the raising of a tilden and hendricks flag there, and to take the stand and give them some “counsel.” well, i could not go, but gave them counsel and advice by letter, and in the kindliest terms as to the raising of the flag--advised them “not to raise it.” get your book out quick, for this is a momentous time. if tilden is elected i think the entire country will go pretty straight to--mrs. howells's bad place. i am infringing on your patent--i started a record of our children's sayings, last night. which reminds me that last week i sent down and got susie a vast pair of shoes of a most villainous pattern, for i discovered that her feet were being twisted and cramped out of shape by a smaller and prettier article. she did not complain, but looked degraded and injured. at night her mamma gave her the usual admonition when she was about to say her prayers--to wit: “now, susie--think about god.” “mamma, i can't, with those shoes.” the farm is perfectly delightful this season. it is as quiet and peaceful as a south sea island. some of the sunsets which we have witnessed from this commanding eminence were marvelous. one evening a rainbow spanned an entire range of hills with its mighty arch, and from a black hub resting upon the hill-top in the exact centre, black rays diverged upward in perfect regularity to the rainbow's arch and created a very strongly defined and altogether the most majestic, magnificent and startling half-sunk wagon wheel you can imagine. after that, a world of tumbling and prodigious clouds came drifting up out of the west and took to themselves a wonderfully rich and brilliant green color--the decided green of new spring foliage. close by them we saw the intense blue of the skies, through rents in the cloud-rack, and away off in another quarter were drifting clouds of a delicate pink color. in one place hung a pall of dense black clouds, like compacted pitch-smoke. and the stupendous wagon wheel was still in the supremacy of its unspeakable grandeur. so you see, the colors present in the sky at once and the same time were blue, green, pink, black, and the vari-colored splendors of the rainbow. all strong and decided colors, too. i don't know whether this weird and astounding spectacle most suggested heaven, or hell. the wonder, with its constant, stately, and always surprising changes, lasted upwards of two hours, and we all stood on the top of the hill by my study till the final miracle was complete and the greatest day ended that we ever saw. our farmer, who is a grave man, watched that spectacle to the end, and then observed that it was “dam funny.” the double-barreled novel lies torpid. i found i could not go on with it. the chapters i had written were still too new and familiar to me. i may take it up next winter, but cannot tell yet; i waited and waited to see if my interest in it would not revive, but gave it up a month ago and began another boys' book--more to be at work than anything else. i have written pages on it--therefore it is very nearly half done. it is huck finn's autobiography. i like it only tolerably well, as far as i have got, and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the ms when it is done. so the comedy is done, and with a “fair degree of satisfaction.” that rejoices me, and makes me mad, too--for i can't plan a comedy, and what have you done that god should be so good to you? i have racked myself baldheaded trying to plan a comedy harness for some promising characters of mine to work in, and had to give it up. it is a noble lot of blooded stock and worth no end of money, but they must stand in the stable and be profitless. i want to be present when the comedy is produced and help enjoy the success. warner's book is mighty readable, i think. love to yez. yrs ever mark howells promptly wrote again, urging him to enter the campaign for hayes. “there is not another man in this country,” he said, “who could help him so much as you.” the “farce” which clemens refers to in his reply, was “the parlor car,” which seems to have been about the first venture of howells in that field. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: elmira, august , . my dear howells,--i am glad you think i could do hayes any good, for i have been wanting to write a letter or make a speech to that end. i'll be careful not to do either, however, until the opportunity comes in a natural, justifiable and unlugged way; and shall not then do anything unless i've got it all digested and worded just right. in which case i might do some good--in any other i should do harm. when a humorist ventures upon the grave concerns of life he must do his job better than another man or he works harm to his cause. the farce is wonderfully bright and delicious, and must make a hit. you read it to me, and it was mighty good; i read it last night and it was better; i read it aloud to the household this morning and it was better than ever. so it would be worth going a long way to see it well played; for without any question an actor of genius always adds a subtle something to any man's work that none but the writer knew was there before. even if he knew it. i have heard of readers convulsing audiences with my “aurelia's unfortunate young man.” if there is anything really funny in the piece, the author is not aware of it. all right--advertise me for the new volume. i send you herewith a sketch which will make pages of the atlantic. if you like it and accept it, you should get it into the december no. because i shall read it in public in boston the th and th of nov. if it went in a month earlier it would be too old for me to read except as old matter; and if it went in a month later it would be too old for the atlantic--do you see? and if you wish to use it, will you set it up now, and send me three proofs?--one to correct for atlantic, one to send to temple bar (shall i tell them to use it not earlier than their november no.) and one to use in practising for my boston readings. we must get up a less elaborate and a much better skeleton-plan for the blindfold novels and make a success of that idea. david gray spent sunday here and said we could but little comprehend what a rattling stir that thing would make in the country. he thought it would make a mighty strike. so do i. but with only pages to tell the tale in, the plot must be less elaborate, doubtless. what do you think? when we exchange visits i'll show you an unfinished sketch of elizabeth's time which shook david gray's system up pretty exhaustively. yrs ever, mark. the ms. sketch mentioned in the foregoing letter was “the canvasser's tale,” later included in the volume, tom sawyer abroad, and other stories. it is far from being mark twain's best work, but was accepted and printed in the atlantic. david gray was an able journalist and editor whom mark twain had known in buffalo. the “sketch of elizabeth's time” is a brilliant piece of writing --an imaginary record of conversation and court manners in the good old days of free speech and performance, phrased in the language of the period. gray, john hay, twichell, and others who had a chance to see it thought highly of it, and hay had it set in type and a few proofs taken for private circulation. some years afterward a west point officer had a special font of antique type made for it, and printed a hundred copies. but the present-day reader would hardly be willing to include “fireside conversation in the time of queen elizabeth” in mark twain's collected works. clemens was a strong republican in those days, as his letters of this period show. his mention of the “caves” in the next is another reference to “the canvasser's tale.” ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: sept. , . my dear howells,--yes, the collection of caves was the origin of it. i changed it to echoes because these being invisible and intangible, constituted a still more absurd species of property, and yet a man could really own an echo, and sell it, too, for a high figure--such an echo as that at the villa siminetti, two miles from milan, for instance. my first purpose was to have the man make a collection of caves and afterwards of echoes; but perceived that the element of absurdity and impracticability was so nearly identical as to amount to a repetition of an idea..... i will not, and do not, believe that there is a possibility of hayes's defeat, but i want the victory to be sweeping..... it seems odd to find myself interested in an election. i never was before. and i can't seem to get over my repugnance to reading or thinking about politics, yet. but in truth i care little about any party's politics--the man behind it is the important thing. you may well know that mrs. clemens liked the parlor car--enjoyed it ever so much, and was indignant at you all through, and kept exploding into rages at you for pretending that such a woman ever existed--closing each and every explosion with “but it is just what such a woman would do.”--“it is just what such a woman would say.” they all voted the parlor car perfection--except me. i said they wouldn't have been allowed to court and quarrel there so long, uninterrupted; but at each critical moment the odious train-boy would come in and pile foul literature all over them four or five inches deep, and the lover would turn his head aside and curse--and presently that train-boy would be back again (as on all those western roads) to take up the literature and leave prize candy. of course the thing is perfect, in the magazine, without the train-boy; but i was thinking of the stage and the groundlings. if the dainty touches went over their heads, the train-boy and other possible interruptions would fetch them every time. would it mar the flow of the thing too much to insert that devil? i thought it over a couple of hours and concluded it wouldn't, and that he ought to be in for the sake of the groundlings (and to get new copyright on the piece.) and it seemed to me that now that the fourth act is so successfully written, why not go ahead and write the preceding acts? and then after it is finished, let me put into it a low-comedy character (the girl's or the lover's father or uncle) and gobble a big pecuniary interest in your work for myself. do not let this generous proposition disturb your rest--but do write the other acts, and then it will be valuable to managers. and don't go and sell it to anybody, like harte, but keep it for yourself. harte's play can be doctored till it will be entirely acceptable and then it will clear a great sum every year. i am out of all patience with harte for selling it. the play entertained me hugely, even in its present crude state. love to you all. yrs ever, mark following the sellers success, clemens had made many attempts at dramatic writing. such undertakings had uniformly failed, but he had always been willing to try again. in the next letter we get the beginning of what proved his first and last direct literary association, that is to say, collaboration, with bret harte. clemens had great admiration for harte's ability and believed that between them they could turn out a successful play. whether or not this belief was justified will appear later. howells's biography of hayes, meanwhile, had not gone well. he reported that only two thousand copies had been sold in what was now the height of the campaign. “there's success for you,” he said; “it makes me despair of the republic.” clemens, on his part, had made a speech for hayes that howells declared had put civil-service reform in a nutshell; he added: “you are the only republican orator, quoted without distinction of party by all the newspapers.” ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hartford, oct. , . my dear howells, this is a secret, to be known to nobody but you (of course i comprehend that mrs. howells is part of you) that bret harte came up here the other day and asked me to help him write a play and divide the swag, and i agreed. i am to put in scotty briggs (see buck fanshaw's funeral, in “roughing it.”) and he is to put in a chinaman (a wonderfully funny creature, as bret presents him--for minutes--in his sandy bar play.) this chinaman is to be the character of the play, and both of us will work on him and develop him. bret is to draw a plot, and i am to do the same; we shall use the best of the two, or gouge from both and build a third. my plot is built--finished it yesterday--six days' work, or hours a day, and has nearly killed me. now the favor i ask of you is that you will have the words “ah sin, a drama,” printed in the middle of a note-paper page and send the same to me, with bill. we don't want anybody to know that we are building this play. i can't get this title page printed here without having to lie so much that the thought of it is disagreeable to one reared as i have been. and yet the title of the play must be printed--the rest of the application for copyright is allowable in penmanship. we have got the very best gang of servants in america, now. when george first came he was one of the most religious of men. he had but one fault--young george washington's. but i have trained him; and now it fairly breaks mrs. clemens's heart to hear george stand at that front door and lie to the unwelcome visitor. but your time is valuable; i must not dwell upon these things.....i'll ask warner and harte if they'll do blindfold novelettes. some time i'll simplify that plot. all it needs is that the hanging and the marriage shall not be appointed for the same day. i got over that difficulty, but it required too much ms to reconcile the thing--so the movement of the story was clogged. i came near agreeing to make political speeches with our candidate for governor the th and inst., but i had to give up the idea, for harte and i will be here at work then. yrs ever, mark mark twain was writing few letters these days to any one but howells, yet in november he sent one to an old friend of his youth, burrough, the literary chair-maker who had roomed with him in the days when he had been setting type for the st. louis evening news. ***** to mr. burrough, of st. louis: hartford, nov. , . my dear burroughs,--as you describe me i can picture myself as i was years ago. the portrait is correct. you think i have grown some; upon my word there was room for it. you have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug.... imagining that he is remodeling the world and is entirely capable of doing it right. ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle-headedness--and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all. that is what i was at and ; and that is what the average southerner is at today. northerners, too, of a certain grade. it is of children like this that voters are made. and such is the primal source of our government! a man hardly knows whether to swear or cry over it. i think i comprehend the position there--perfect freedom to vote just as you choose, provided you choose to vote as other people think--social ostracism, otherwise. the same thing exists here, among the irish. an irish republican is a pariah among his people. yet that race find fault with the same spirit in know-nothingism. fortunately a good deal of experience of men enabled me to choose my residence wisely. i live in the freest corner of the country. there are no social disabilities between me and my democratic personal friends. we break the bread and eat the salt of hospitality freely together and never dream of such a thing as offering impertinent interference in each other's political opinions. don't you ever come to new york again and not run up here to see me. i suppose we were away for the summer when you were east; but no matter, you could have telegraphed and found out. we were at elmira n. y. and right on your road, and could have given you a good time if you had allowed us the chance. yes, will bowen and i have exchanged letters now and then for several years, but i suspect that i made him mad with my last--shortly after you saw him in st. louis, i judge. there is one thing which i can't stand and won't stand, from many people. that is sham sentimentality--the kind a school-girl puts into her graduating composition; the sort that makes up the original poetry column of a country newspaper; the rot that deals in the “happy days of yore,” the “sweet yet melancholy past,” with its “blighted hopes” and its “vanished dreams” and all that sort of drivel. will's were always of this stamp. i stood it years. when i get a letter like that from a grown man and he a widower with a family, it gives me the stomach ache. and i just told will bowen so, last summer. i told him to stop being at ; told him to stop drooling about the sweet yet melancholy past, and take a pill. i said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is the past--can't be restored. well, i exaggerated some of these truths a little--but only a little--but my idea was to kill his sham sentimentality once and forever, and so make a good fellow of him again. i went to the unheard-of trouble of re-writing the letter and saying the same harsh things softly, so as to sugarcoat the anguish and make it a little more endurable and i asked him to write and thank me honestly for doing him the best and kindliest favor that any friend ever had done him--but he hasn't done it yet. maybe he will, sometime. i am grateful to god that i got that letter off before he was married (i get that news from you) else he would just have slobbered all over me and drowned me when that event happened. i enclose photograph for the young ladies. i will remark that i do not wear seal-skin for grandeur, but because i found, when i used to lecture in the winter, that nothing else was able to keep a man warm sometimes, in these high latitudes. i wish you had sent pictures of yourself and family--i'll trade picture for picture with you, straight through, if you are commercially inclined. your old friend, saml l. clemens. xvii. letters, . to bermuda with twichell. proposition to th. nast. the whittier dinner. mark twain must have been too busy to write letters that winter. those that have survived are few and unimportant. as a matter of fact, he was writing the play, “ah sin,” with bret harte, and getting it ready for production. harte was a guest in the clemens home while the play was being written, and not always a pleasant one. he was full of requirements, critical as to the 'menage,' to the point of sarcasm. the long friendship between clemens and harte weakened under the strain of collaboration and intimate daily intercourse, never to renew its old fiber. it was an unhappy outcome of an enterprise which in itself was to prove of little profit. the play, “ah sin,” had many good features, and with charles t. parsloe in an amusing chinese part might have been made a success, if the two authors could have harmoniously undertaken the needed repairs. it opened in washington in may, and a letter from parsloe, written at the moment, gives a hint of the situation. ***** from charles t. parsloe to s. l. clemens: washington, d. c. may th, . mr. clemens,--i forgot whether i acknowledged receipt of check by telegram. harte has been here since monday last and done little or nothing yet, but promises to have something fixed by tomorrow morning. we have been making some improvements among ourselves. the last act is weak at the end, and i do hope mr. harte will have something for a good finish to the piece. the other acts i think are all right, now. hope you have entirely recovered. i am not very well myself, the excitement of a first night is bad enough, but to have the annoyance with harte that i have is too much for a beginner. i ain't used to it. the houses have been picking up since tuesday mr. ford has worked well and hard for us. yours in, haste, chas. thos. parsloe. the play drew some good houses in washington, but it could not hold them for a run. never mind what was the matter with it; perhaps a very small change at the right point would have turned it into a fine success. we have seen in a former letter the obligation which mark twain confessed to harte--a debt he had tried in many ways to repay--obtaining for him a liberal book contract with bliss; advancing him frequent and large sums of money which harte could not, or did not, repay; seeking to advance his fortunes in many directions. the mistake came when he introduced another genius into the intricacies of his daily life. clemens went down to washington during the early rehearsals of “ah sin.” meantime, rutherford b. hayes had been elected president, and clemens one day called with a letter of introduction from howells, thinking to meet the chief executive. his own letter to howells, later, probably does not give the real reason of his failure, but it will be amusing to those who recall the erratic personality of george francis train. train and twain were sometimes confused by the very unlettered; or pretendedly, by mark twain's friends. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: baltimore, may , ' . my dear howells,--found i was not absolutely needed in washington so i only staid hours, and am on my way home, now. i called at the white house, and got admission to col. rodgers, because i wanted to inquire what was the right hour to go and infest the president. it was my luck to strike the place in the dead waste and middle of the day, the very busiest time. i perceived that mr. rodgers took me for george francis train and had made up his mind not to let me get at the president; so at the end of half an hour i took my letter of introduction from the table and went away. it was a great pity all round, and a great loss to the nation, for i was brim full of the eastern question. i didn't get to see the president or the chief magistrate either, though i had sort of a glimpse of a lady at a window who resembled her portraits. yrs ever, mark. howells condoled with him on his failure to see the president, “but,” he added, “if you and i had both been there, our combined skill would have no doubt procured us to be expelled from the white house by fred douglass. but the thing seems to be a complete failure as it was.” douglass at this time being the marshal of columbia, gives special point to howells's suggestion. later, in may, clemens took twichell for an excursion to bermuda. he had begged howells to go with them, but howells, as usual, was full of literary affairs. twichell and clemens spent four glorious days tramping the length and breadth of the beautiful island, and remembered it always as one of their happiest adventures. “put it down as an oasis!” wrote twichell on his return, “i'm afraid i shall not see as green a spot again soon. and it was your invention and your gift. and your company was the best of it. indeed, i never took more comfort in being with you than on this journey, which, my boy, is saying a great deal.” to howells, clemens triumphantly reported the success of the excursion. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: farmington avenue, hartford, may , . confound you, joe twichell and i roamed about bermuda day and night and never ceased to gabble and enjoy. about half the talk was--“it is a burning shame that howells isn't here.” “nobody could get at the very meat and marrow of this pervading charm and deliciousness like howells;” “how howells would revel in the quaintness, and the simplicity of this people and the sabbath repose of this land.” “what an imperishable sketch howells would make of capt. west the whaler, and capt. hope with the patient, pathetic face, wanderer in all the oceans for years, lucky in none; coming home defeated once more, now, minus his ship--resigned, uncomplaining, being used to this.” “what a rattling chapter howells would make out of the small boy alfred, with his alert eye and military brevity and exactness of speech; and out of the old landlady; and her sacred onions; and her daughter; and the visiting clergyman; and the ancient pianos of hamilton and the venerable music in vogue there--and forty other things which we shall leave untouched or touched but lightly upon, we not being worthy.” “dam howells for not being here!” (this usually from me, not twichell.) o, your insufferable pride, which will have a fall some day! if you had gone with us and let me pay the $ which the trip and the board and the various nicknacks and mementoes would cost, i would have picked up enough droppings from your conversation to pay me per cent profit in the way of the several magazine articles which i could have written, whereas i can now write only one or two and am therefore largely out of pocket by your proud ways. ponder these things. lord, what a perfectly bewitching excursion it was! i traveled under an assumed name and was never molested with a polite attention from anybody. love to you all. yrs ever mark aldrich, meantime, had invited the clemenses to ponkapog during the bermuda absence, and clemens hastened to send him a line expressing regrets. at the close he said: ***** to t. b. aldrich, in ponkapog, mass.: farmington avenue, hartford, june , . day after tomorrow we leave for the hills beyond elmira, n. y. for the summer, when i shall hope to write a book of some sort or other to beat the people with. a work similar to your new one in the atlantic is what i mean, though i have not heard what the nature of that one is. immoral, i suppose. well, you are right. such books sell best, howells says. howells says he is going to make his next book indelicate. he says he thinks there is money in it. he says there is a large class of the young, in schools and seminaries who--but you let him tell you. he has ciphered it all down to a demonstration. with the warmest remembrances to the pair of you ever yours samuel l. clemens. clemens would naturally write something about bermuda, and began at once, “random notes of an idle excursion,” and presently completed four papers, which howells eagerly accepted for the atlantic. then we find him plunging into another play, this time alone. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: elmira, june , . my dear howells,--if you should not like the first chapters, send them to me and begin with chapter --or part , i believe you call these things in the magazine. i have finished no. ., which closes the series, and will mail it tomorrow if i think of it. i like this one, i liked the preceding one (already mailed to you some time ago) but i had my doubts about and . do not hesitate to squelch them, even with derision and insult. today i am deep in a comedy which i began this morning--principal character, that old detective--i skeletoned the first act and wrote the second, today; and am dog-tired, now. fifty-four close pages of ms in hours. once i wrote pages at a sitting--that was on the opening chapters of the “gilded age” novel. when i cool down, an hour from now, i shall go to zero, i judge. yrs ever, mark. clemens had doubts as to the quality of the bermuda papers, and with some reason. they did not represent him at his best. nevertheless, they were pleasantly entertaining, and howells expressed full approval of them for atlantic use. the author remained troubled. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: elmira, july , . my dear howells,--it is splendid of you to say those pleasant things. but i am still plagued with doubts about parts and . if you have any, don't print. if otherwise, please make some cold villain like lathrop read and pass sentence on them. mind, i thought they were good, at first--it was the second reading that accomplished its hellish purpose on me. put them up for a new verdict. part has lain in my pigeon-hole a good while, and when i put it there i had a christian's confidence in aces in it; and you can be sure it will skip toward connecticut tomorrow before any fatal fresh reading makes me draw my bet. i've piled up ms pages on my comedy. the first, second and fourth acts are done, and done to my satisfaction, too. tomorrow and next day will finish the rd act and the play. i have not written less than pages any day since i began. never had so much fun over anything in my life-never such consuming interest and delight. (but lord bless you the second reading will fetch it!) and just think!--i had sol smith russell in my mind's eye for the old detective's part, and hang it he has gone off pottering with oliver optic, or else the papers lie. i read everything about the president's doings there with exultation. i wish that old ass of a private secretary hadn't taken me for george francis train. if ignorance were a means of grace i wouldn't trade that gorilla's chances for the archbishop of canterbury's. i shall call on the president again, by and by. i shall go in my war paint; and if i am obstructed the nation will have the unusual spectacle of a private secretary with a pen over one ear a tomahawk over the other. i read the entire atlantic this time. wonderful number. mrs. rose terry cooke's story was a ten-strike. i wish she would write old-time new england tales a year. good times to you all! mind if you don't run here for a few days you will go to hence without having had a fore-glimpse of heaven. mark. the play, “ah sin,” that had done little enough in washington, was that summer given another trial by augustin daly, at the fifth avenue theater, new york, with a fine company. clemens had undertaken to doctor the play, and it would seem to have had an enthusiastic reception on the opening night. but it was a summer audience, unspoiled by many attractions. “ah sin” was never a success in the new york season--never a money-maker on the road. the reference in the first paragraph of the letter that follows is to the bermuda chapters which mark twain was publishing simultaneously in england and america. elmira, aug , . my dear howells,--i have mailed one set of the slips to london, and told bentley you would print sept. , in october atlantic, and he must not print earlier in temple bar. have i got the dates and things right? i am powerful glad to see that no. reads a nation sight better in print than it did in ms. i told bentley we'd send him the slips, each time, weeks before day of publication. we can do that can't we? two months ahead would be still better i suppose, but i don't know. “ah sin” went a-booming at the fifth avenue. the reception of col. sellers was calm compared to it. the criticisms were just; the criticisms of the great new york dailies are always just, intelligent, and square and honest--notwithstanding, by a blunder which nobody was seriously to blame for, i was made to say exactly the opposite of this in a newspaper some time ago. never said it at all, and moreover i never thought it. i could not publicly correct it before the play appeared in new york, because that would look as if i had really said that thing and then was moved by fears for my pocket and my reputation to take it back. but i can correct it now, and shall do it; for now my motives cannot be impugned. when i began this letter, it had not occurred to me to use you in this connection, but it occurs to me now. your opinion and mine, uttered a year ago, and repeated more than once since, that the candor and ability of the new york critics were beyond question, is a matter which makes it proper enough that i should speak through you at this time. therefore if you will print this paragraph somewhere, it may remove the impression that i say unjust things which i do not think, merely for the pleasure of talking. there, now, can't you say-- “in a letter to mr. howells of the atlantic monthly, mark twain describes the reception of the new comedy 'ali sin,' and then goes on to say:” etc. beginning at the star with the words, “the criticisms were just.” mrs. clemens says, “don't ask that of mr. howells--it will be disagreeable to him.” i hadn't thought of it, but i will bet two to one on the correctness of her instinct. we shall see. will you cut that paragraph out of this letter and precede it with the remarks suggested (or with better ones,) and send it to the globe or some other paper? you can't do me a bigger favor; and yet if it is in the least disagreeable, you mustn't think of it. but let me know, right away, for i want to correct this thing before it grows stale again. i explained myself to only one critic (the world)--the consequence was a noble notice of the play. this one called on me, else i shouldn't have explained myself to him. i have been putting in a deal of hard work on that play in new york, but it is full of incurable defects. my old plunkett family seemed wonderfully coarse and vulgar on the stage, but it was because they were played in such an outrageously and inexcusably coarse way. the chinaman is killingly funny. i don't know when i have enjoyed anything as much as i did him. the people say there isn't enough of him in the piece. that's a triumph--there'll never be any more of him in it. john brougham said, “read the list of things which the critics have condemned in the piece, and you have unassailable proofs that the play contains all the requirements of success and a long life.” that is true. nearly every time the audience roared i knew it was over something that would be condemned in the morning (justly, too) but must be left in--for low comedies are written for the drawing-room, the kitchen and the stable, and if you cut out the kitchen and the stable the drawing-room can't support the play by itself. there was as much money in the house the first two nights as in the first ten of sellers. haven't heard from the third--i came away. yrs ever, mark. in a former letter we have seen how mark twain, working on a story that was to stand as an example of his best work, and become one of his surest claims to immortality (the adventures of huckleberry finn), displayed little enthusiasm in his undertaking. in the following letter, which relates the conclusion of his detective comedy, we find him at the other extreme, on very tiptoe with enthusiasm over something wholly without literary value or dramatic possibility. one of the hall-marks of genius is the inability to discriminate as to the value of its output. “simon wheeler, amateur detective” was a dreary, absurd, impossible performance, as wild and unconvincing in incident and dialogue as anything out of an asylum could well be. the title which he first chose for it, “balaam's ass,” was properly in keeping with the general scheme. yet mark twain, still warm with the creative fever, had the fullest faith in it as a work of art and a winner of fortune. it would never see the light of production, of course. we shall see presently that the distinguished playwright, dion boucicault, good-naturedly complimented it as being better than “ahi sin.” one must wonder what that skilled artist really thought, and how he could do even this violence to his conscience. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: elmira, wednesday p.m. ( ) my dear howells,--it's finished. i was misled by hurried mis-paging. there were ten pages of notes, and over pages of ms when the play was done. did it in hours, by the clock; pages of the atlantic--but then of course it's very “fat.” those are the figures, but i don't believe them myself, because the thing's impossible. but let that pass. all day long, and every day, since i finished (in the rough) i have been diligently altering, amending, re-writing, cutting down. i finished finally today. can't think of anything else in the way of an improvement. i thought i would stick to it while the interest was hot--and i am mighty glad i did. a week from now it will be frozen--then revising would be drudgery. (you see i learned something from the fatal blunder of putting “ah sin” aside before it was finished.) she's all right, now. she reads in two hours and minutes and will play not longer than / hours. nineteen characters; acts; (i bunched into .) tomorrow i will draw up an exhaustive synopsis to insert in the printed title-page for copyrighting, and then on friday or saturday i go to new york to remain a week or ten days and lay for an actor. wish you could run down there and have a holiday. 'twould be fun. my wife won't have “balaam's ass”; therefore i call the piece “cap'n simon wheeler, the amateur detective.” yrs mark. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: elmira, aug. , . my dear howells,--just got your letter last night. no, dern that article,--[one of the bermuda chapters.]--it made me cry when i read it in proof, it was so oppressively and ostentatiously poor. skim your eye over it again and you will think as i do. if isaac and the prophets of baal can be doctored gently and made permissible, it will redeem the thing: but if it can't, let's burn all of the articles except the tail-end of it and use that as an introduction to the next article--as i suggested in my letter to you of day before yesterday. (i had this proof from cambridge before yours came.) boucicault says my new play is ever so much better than “ah sin;” says the amateur detective is a bully character, too. an actor is chawing over the play in new york, to see if the old detective is suited to his abilities. haven't heard from him yet. if you've got that paragraph by you yet, and if in your judgment it would be good to publish it, and if you absolutely would not mind doing it, then i think i'd like to have you do it--or else put some other words in my mouth that will be properer, and publish them. but mind, don't think of it for a moment if it is distasteful--and doubtless it is. i value your judgment more than my own, as to the wisdom of saying anything at all in this matter. to say nothing leaves me in an injurious position--and yet maybe i might do better to speak to the men themselves when i go to new york. this was my latest idea, and it looked wise. we expect to leave here for home sept. , reaching there the th--but we may be delayed a week. curious thing. i read passages from my play, and a full synopsis, to boucicault, who was re-writing a play, which he wrote and laid aside or years ago. (my detective is about that age, you know.) then he read a passage from his play, where a real detective does some things that are as idiotic as some of my old wheeler's performances. showed me the passages, and behold, his man's name is wheeler! however, his wheeler is not a prominent character, so we'll not alter the names. my wheeler's name is taken from the old jumping frog sketch. i am re-reading ticknor's diary, and am charmed with it, though i still say he refers to too many good things when he could just as well have told them. think of the man traveling days in convoy and familiar intercourse with a band of outlaws through the mountain fastnesses of spain--he the fourth stranger they had encountered in thirty years--and compressing this priceless experience into a single colorless paragraph of his diary! they spun yarns to this unworthy devil, too. i wrote you a very long letter a day or two ago, but susy crane wanted to make a copy of it to keep, so it has not gone yet. it may go today, possibly. we unite in warm regards to you and yours. yrs ever, mark. the ticknor referred to in a former letter was professor george ticknor, of harvard college, a history-writer of distinction. on the margin of the “diary” mark twain once wrote, “ticknor is a millet, who makes all men fall in love with him.” and adds: “millet was the cause of lovable qualities in people, and then he admired and loved those persons for the very qualities which he (without knowing it) had created in them. perhaps it would be strictly truer of these two men to say that they bore within them the divine something in whose presence the evil in people fled away and hid itself, while all that was good in them came spontaneously forward out of the forgotten walls and comers in their systems where it was accustomed to hide.” it is frank millet, the artist, he is speaking of--a knightly soul whom all the clemens household loved, and who would one day meet his knightly end with those other brave men that found death together when the titanic went down. the clemens family was still at quarry farm at the end of august, and one afternoon there occurred a startling incident which mark twain thought worth setting down in practically duplicate letters to howells and to dr. john brown. it may be of interest to the reader to know that john t. lewis, the colored man mentioned, lived to a good old age--a pensioner of the clemens family and, in the course of time, of h. h. rogers. howells's letter follows. it is the “very long letter” referred to in the foregoing. ***** to w. d. howells and wife, in boston: elmira, aug. ' . my dear howellses,--i thought i ought to make a sort of record of it for further reference; the pleasantest way to do that would be to write it to somebody; but that somebody would let it leak into print and that we wish to avoid. the howellses would be safe--so let us tell the howellses about it. day before yesterday was a fine summer day away up here on the summit. aunt marsh and cousin may marsh were here visiting susie crane and livy at our farmhouse. by and by mother langdon came up the hill in the “high carriage” with nora the nurse and little jervis (charley langdon's little boy)--timothy the coachman driving. behind these came charley's wife and little girl in the buggy, with the new, young, spry, gray horse--a high-stepper. theodore crane arrived a little later. the bay and susy were on hand with their nurse, rosa. i was on hand, too. susy crane's trio of colored servants ditto--these being josie, house-maid; aunty cord, cook, aged , turbaned, very tall, very broad, very fine every way (see her portrait in “a true story just as i heard it” in my sketches;) chocklate (the laundress) (as the bay calls her--she can't say charlotte,) still taller, still more majestic of proportions, turbaned, very black, straight as an indian--age . then there was the farmer's wife (colored) and her little girl, susy. wasn't it a good audience to get up an excitement before? good excitable, inflammable material? lewis was still down town, three miles away, with his two-horse wagon, to get a load of manure. lewis is the farmer (colored). he is of mighty frame and muscle, stocky, stooping, ungainly, has a good manly face and a clear eye. age about --and the most picturesque of men, when he sits in his fluttering work-day rags, humped forward into a bunch, with his aged slouch hat mashed down over his ears and neck. it is a spectacle to make the broken-hearted smile. lewis has worked mighty hard and remained mighty poor. at the end of each whole year's toil he can't show a gain of fifty dollars. he had borrowed money of the cranes till he owed them $ and he being conscientious and honest, imagine what it was to him to have to carry this stubborn, helpless load year in and year out. well, sunset came, and ida the young and comely (charley langdon's wife) and her little julia and the nurse nora, drove out at the gate behind the new gray horse and started down the long hill--the high carriage receiving its load under the porte cochere. ida was seen to turn her face toward us across the fence and intervening lawn--theodore waved good-bye to her, for he did not know that her sign was a speechless appeal for help. the next moment livy said, “ida's driving too fast down hill!” she followed it with a sort of scream, “her horse is running away!” we could see two hundred yards down that descent. the buggy seemed to fly. it would strike obstructions and apparently spring the height of a man from the ground. theodore and i left the shrieking crowd behind and ran down the hill bare-headed and shouting. a neighbor appeared at his gate--a tenth of a second too late! the buggy vanished past him like a thought. my last glimpse showed it for one instant, far down the descent, springing high in the air out of a cloud of dust, and then it disappeared. as i flew down the road my impulse was to shut my eyes as i turned them to the right or left, and so delay for a moment the ghastly spectacle of mutilation and death i was expecting. i ran on and on, still spared this spectacle, but saying to myself: “i shall see it at the turn of the road; they never can pass that turn alive.” when i came in sight of that turn i saw two wagons there bunched together--one of them full of people. i said, “just so--they are staring petrified at the remains.” but when i got amongst that bunch, there sat ida in her buggy and nobody hurt, not even the horse or the vehicle. ida was pale but serene. as i came tearing down, she smiled back over her shoulder at me and said, “well, we're alive yet, aren't we?” a miracle had been performed--nothing else. you see lewis, the prodigious, humped upon his front seat, had been toiling up, on his load of manure; he saw the frantic horse plunging down the hill toward him, on a full gallop, throwing his heels as high as a man's head at every jump. so lewis turned his team diagonally across the road just at the “turn,” thus making a v with the fence--the running horse could not escape that, but must enter it. then lewis sprang to the ground and stood in this v. he gathered his vast strength, and with a perfect creedmoor aim he seized the gray horse's bit as he plunged by and fetched him up standing! it was down hill, mind you. ten feet further down hill neither lewis nor any other man could have saved them, for they would have been on the abrupt “turn,” then. but how this miracle was ever accomplished at all, by human strength, generalship and accuracy, is clean beyond my comprehension--and grows more so the more i go and examine the ground and try to believe it was actually done. i know one thing, well; if lewis had missed his aim he would have been killed on the spot in the trap he had made for himself, and we should have found the rest of the remains away down at the bottom of the steep ravine. ten minutes later theodore and i arrived opposite the house, with the servants straggling after us, and shouted to the distracted group on the porch, “everybody safe!” believe it? why how could they? they knew the road perfectly. we might as well have said it to people who had seen their friends go over niagara. however, we convinced them; and then, instead of saying something, or going on crying, they grew very still--words could not express it, i suppose. nobody could do anything that night, or sleep, either; but there was a deal of moving talk, with long pauses between pictures of that flying carriage, these pauses represented--this picture intruded itself all the time and disjointed the talk. but yesterday evening late, when lewis arrived from down town he found his supper spread, and some presents of books there, with very complimentary writings on the fly-leaves, and certain very complimentary letters, and more or less greenbacks of dignified denomination pinned to these letters and fly-leaves,--and one said, among other things, (signed by the cranes) “we cancel $ of your indebtedness to us,” &c. &c. (the end thereof is not yet, of course, for charley langdon is west and will arrive ignorant of all these things, today.) the supper-room had been kept locked and imposingly secret and mysterious until lewis should arrive; but around that part of the house were gathered lewis's wife and child, chocklate, josie, aunty cord and our rosa, canvassing things and waiting impatiently. they were all on hand when the curtain rose. now, aunty cord is a violent methodist and lewis an implacable dunker--baptist. those two are inveterate religious disputants. the revealments having been made aunty cord said with effusion-- “now, let folks go on saying there ain't no god! lewis, the lord sent you there to stop that horse.” says lewis: “then who sent the horse there in sich a shape?” but i want to call your attention to one thing. when lewis arrived the other evening, after saving those lives by a feat which i think is the most marvelous of any i can call to mind--when he arrived, hunched up on his manure wagon and as grotesquely picturesque as usual, everybody wanted to go and see how he looked. they came back and said he was beautiful. it was so, too--and yet he would have photographed exactly as he would have done any day these past years that he has occupied this farm. aug. . p. s. our little romance in real life is happily and satisfactorily completed. charley has come, listened, acted--and now john t. lewis has ceased to consider himself as belonging to that class called “the poor.” it has been known, during some years, that it was lewis's purpose to buy a thirty dollar silver watch some day, if he ever got where he could afford it. today ida has given him a new, sumptuous gold swiss stem-winding stop-watch; and if any scoffer shall say, “behold this thing is out of character,” there is an inscription within, which will silence him; for it will teach him that this wearer aggrandizes the watch, not the watch the wearer. i was asked beforehand, if this would be a wise gift, and i said “yes, the very wisest of all;” i know the colored race, and i know that in lewis's eyes this fine toy will throw the other more valuable testimonials far away into the shade. if he lived in england the humane society would give him a gold medal as costly as this watch, and nobody would say: “it is out of character.” if lewis chose to wear a town clock, who would become it better? lewis has sound common sense, and is not going to be spoiled. the instant he found himself possessed of money, he forgot himself in a plan to make his old father comfortable, who is wretchedly poor and lives down in maryland. his next act, on the spot, was the proffer to the cranes of the $ of his remaining indebtedness to them. this was put off by them to the indefinite future, for he is not going to be allowed to pay that at all, though he doesn't know it. a letter of acknowledgment from lewis contains a sentence which raises it to the dignity of literature: “but i beg to say, humbly, that inasmuch as divine providence saw fit to use me as a instrument for the saving of those presshious lives, the honner conferd upon me was greater than the feat performed.” that is well said. yrs ever mark. howells was moved to use the story in the “contributors' club,” and warned clemens against letting it get into the newspapers. he declared he thought it one of the most impressive things he had ever read. but clemens seems never to have allowed it to be used in any form. in its entirety, therefore, it is quite new matter. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hartford, sept. , . my dear howells,--i don't really see how the story of the runaway horse could read well with the little details of names and places and things left out. they are the true life of all narrative. it wouldn't quite do to print them at this time. we'll talk about it when you come. delicacy--a sad, sad false delicacy--robs literature of the best two things among its belongings. family-circle narrative and obscene stories. but no matter; in that better world which i trust we are all going to i have the hope and belief that they will not be denied us. say--twichell and i had an adventure at sea, months ago, which i did not put in my bermuda articles, because there was not enough to it. but the press dispatches bring the sequel today, and now there's plenty to it. a sailless, wasteless, chartless, compassless, grubless old condemned tub that has been drifting helpless about the ocean for months and a half, begging bread and water like any other tramp, flying a signal of distress permanently, and with innocent, marveling chuckleheaded bermuda niggers on board, taking a pleasure excursion! our ship fed the poor devils on the th of last may, far out at sea and left them to bullyrag their way to new york--and now they ain't as near new york as they were then by miles! they have drifted miles and are still drifting in the relentless gulf stream! what a delicious magazine chapter it would make--but i had to deny myself. i had to come right out in the papers at once, with my details, so as to try to raise the government's sympathy sufficiently to have better succor sent them than the cutter colfax, which went a little way in search of them the other day and then struck a fog and gave it up. if the president were in washington i would telegraph him. when i hear that the “jonas smith” has been found again, i mean to send for one of those darkies, to come to hartford and give me his adventures for an atlantic article. likely you will see my today's article in the newspapers. yrs ever, mark. the revenue cutter colfax went after the jonas smith, thinking there was mutiny or other crime on board. it occurs to me now that, since there is only mere suffering and misery and nobody to punish, it ceases to be a matter which (a republican form of) government will feel authorized to interfere in further. dam a republican form of government. clemens thought he had given up lecturing for good; he was prosperous and he had no love for the platform. but one day an idea popped into his head: thomas nast, the “father of the american cartoon,” had delivered a successful series of illustrated lectures --talks for which he made the drawings as he went along. mark twain's idea was to make a combination with nast. his letter gives us the plan in full. ***** to thomas nast, morristown, n. j.: hartford, conn. . my dear nast,--i did not think i should ever stand on a platform again until the time was come for me to say “i die innocent.” but the same old offers keep arriving. i have declined them all, just as usual, though sorely tempted, as usual. now, i do not decline because i mind talking to an audience, but because ( ) traveling alone is so heartbreakingly dreary, and ( ) shouldering the whole show is such a cheer-killing responsibility. therefore, i now propose to you what you proposed to me in , ten years ago (when i was unknown) viz., that you stand on the platform and make pictures, and i stand by you and blackguard the audience. i should enormously enjoy meandering around (to big towns--don't want to go to the little ones) with you for company. my idea is not to fatten the lecture agents and lyceums on the spoils, but put all the ducats religiously into two equal piles, and say to the artist and lecturer, “absorb these.” for instance--[here follows a plan and a possible list of cities to be visited. the letter continues] call the gross receipts $ , for four months and a half, and the profit from $ , to $ , (i try to make the figures large enough, and leave it to the public to reduce them.) i did not put in philadelphia because pugh owns that town, and last winter when i made a little reading-trip he only paid me $ and pretended his concert (i read fifteen minutes in the midst of a concert) cost him a vast sum, and so he couldn't afford any more. i could get up a better concert with a barrel of cats. i have imagined two or three pictures and concocted the accompanying remarks to see how the thing would go. i was charmed. well, you think it over, nast, and drop me a line. we should have some fun. yours truly, samuel l. clemens. the plan came to nothing. nast, like clemens, had no special taste for platforming, and while undoubtedly there would have been large profits in the combination, the promise of the venture did not compel his acceptance. in spite of his distaste for the platform mark twain was always giving readings and lectures, without charge, for some worthy hartford cause. he was ready to do what he could to help an entertainment along, if he could do it in his own way--an original way, sometimes, and not always gratifying to the committee, whose plans were likely to be prearranged. for one thing, clemens, supersensitive in the matter of putting himself forward in his own town, often objected to any special exploitation of his name. this always distressed the committee, who saw a large profit to their venture in the prestige of his fame. the following characteristic letter was written in self-defense when, on one such occasion, a committee had become sufficiently peevish to abandon a worthy enterprise. ***** to an entertainment committee, in hartford: nov. . e. s. sykes, esq: dr. sir,--mr. burton's note puts upon me all the blame of the destruction of an enterprise which had for its object the succor of the hartford poor. that is to say, this enterprise has been dropped because of the “dissatisfaction with mr. clemens's stipulations.” therefore i must be allowed to say a word in my defense. there were two “stipulations”--exactly two. i made one of them; if the other was made at all, it was a joint one, from the choir and me. my individual stipulation was, that my name should be kept out of the newspapers. the joint one was that sufficient tickets to insure a good sum should be sold before the date of the performance should be set. (understand, we wanted a good sum--i do not think any of us bothered about a good house; it was money we were after) now you perceive that my concern is simply with my individual stipulation. did that break up the enterprise? eugene burton said he would sell $ worth of the tickets himself.--mr. smith said he would sell $ or $ worth himself. my plan for asylum hill church would have ensured $ from that quarter.--all this in the face of my “stipulation.” it was proposed to raise $ ; did my stipulation render the raising of $ or $ in a dozen churches impossible? my stipulation is easily defensible. when a mere reader or lecturer has appeared or times in a town of hartford's size, he is a good deal more than likely to get a very unpleasant snub if he shoves himself forward about once or twice more. therefore i long ago made up my mind that whenever i again appeared here, it should be only in a minor capacity and not as a chief attraction. now, i placed that harmless and very justifiable stipulation before the committee the other day; they carried it to headquarters and it was accepted there. i am not informed that any objection was made to it, or that it was regarded as an offense. it seems late in the day, now, after a good deal of trouble has been taken and a good deal of thankless work done by the committees, to, suddenly tear up the contract and then turn and bowl me down from long range as being the destroyer of it. if the enterprise has failed because of my individual stipulation, here you have my proper and reasonable reasons for making that stipulation. if it has failed because of the joint stipulation, put the blame there, and let us share it collectively. i think our plan was a good one. i do not doubt that mr. burton still approves of it, too. i believe the objections come from other quarters, and not from him. mr. twichell used the following words in last sunday's sermon, (if i remember correctly): “my hearers, the prophet deuteronomy says this wise thing: 'though ye plan a goodly house for the poor, and plan it with wisdom, and do take off your coats and set to to build it, with high courage, yet shall the croaker presently come, and lift up his voice, (having his coat on,) and say, verily this plan is not well planned--and he will go his way; and the obstructionist will come, and lift up his voice, (having his coat on,) and say, behold, this is but a sick plan--and he will go his way; and the man that knows it all will come, and lift up his voice, (having his coat on,) and say, lo, call they this a plan? then will he go his way; and the places which knew him once shall know him no more forever, because he was not, for god took him. now therefore i say unto you, verily that house will not be budded. and i say this also: he that waiteth for all men to be satisfied with his plan, let him seek eternal life, for he shall need it.'” this portion of mr. twichell's sermon made a great impression upon me, and i was grieved that some one had not wakened me earlier so that i might have heard what went before. s. l. clemens. mr. sykes (of the firm of sykes & newton, the allen house pharmacy) replied that he had read the letter to the committee and that it had set those gentlemen right who had not before understood the situation. “if others were as ready to do their part as yourself our poor would not want assistance,” he said, in closing. we come now to an incident which assumes the proportions of an episode-even of a catastrophe--in mark twain's career. the disaster was due to a condition noted a few pages earlier--the inability of genius to judge its own efforts. the story has now become history --printed history--it having been sympathetically told by howells in my mark twain, and more exhaustively, with a report of the speech that invited the lightning, in a former work by the present writer. the speech was made at john greenleaf whittier's seventieth birthday dinner, given by the atlantic staff on the evening of december , . it was intended as a huge joke--a joke that would shake the sides of these venerable boston deities, longfellow, emerson, holmes, and the rest of that venerated group. clemens had been a favorite at the atlantic lunches and dinners--a speech by him always an event. this time he decided to outdo himself. he did that, but not in the way he had intended. to use one of his own metaphors, he stepped out to meet the rainbow and got struck by lightning. his joke was not of the boston kind or size. when its full nature burst upon the company--when the ears of the assembled diners heard the sacred names of longfellow, emerson, and holmes lightly associated with human aspects removed--oh, very far removed --from cambridge and concord, a chill fell upon the diners that presently became amazement, and then creeping paralysis. nobody knew afterward whether the great speech that he had so gaily planned ever came to a natural end or not. somebody--the next on the program--attempted to follow him, but presently the company melted out of the doors and crept away into the night. it seemed to mark twain that his career had come to an end. back in hartford, sweating and suffering through sleepless nights, he wrote howells his anguish. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: sunday night. . my dear howells,--my sense of disgrace does not abate. it grows. i see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies--a list of humiliations that extends back to when i was seven years old, and which keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentancies. i feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country; therefore it will be best that i retire from before the public at present. it will hurt the atlantic for me to appear in its pages, now. so it is my opinion and my wife's that the telephone story had better be suppressed. will you return those proofs or revises to me, so that i can use the same on some future occasion? it seems as if i must have been insane when i wrote that speech and saw no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom i reverenced so much. and what shame i brought upon you, after what you said in introducing me! it burns me like fire to think of it. the whole matter is a dreadful subject--let me drop it here--at least on paper. penitently yrs, mark. howells sent back a comforting letter. “i have no idea of dropping you out of the atlantic,” he wrote; “and mr. houghton has still less, if possible. you are going to help and not hurt us many a year yet, if you will.... you are not going to be floored by it; there is more justice than that, even in this world.” howells added that charles elliot norton had expressed just the right feeling concerning the whole affair, and that many who had not heard the speech, but read the newspaper reports of it, had found it without offense. clemens wrote contrite letters to holmes, emerson, and longfellow, and received most gracious acknowledgments. emerson, indeed, had not heard the speech: his faculties were already blurred by the mental mists that would eventually shut him in. clemens wrote again to howells, this time with less anguish. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hartford, friday, . my dear howells,--your letter was a godsend; and perhaps the welcomest part of it was your consent that i write to those gentlemen; for you discouraged my hints in that direction that morning in boston--rightly, too, for my offense was yet too new, then. warner has tried to hold up our hands like the good fellow he is, but poor twichell could not say a word, and confessed that he would rather take nearly any punishment than face livy and me. he hasn't been here since. it is curious, but i pitched early upon mr. norton as the very man who would think some generous thing about that matter, whether he said it or not. it is splendid to be a man like that--but it is given to few to be. i wrote a letter yesterday, and sent a copy to each of the three. i wanted to send a copy to mr. whittier also, since the offense was done also against him, being committed in his presence and he the guest of the occasion, besides holding the well-nigh sacred place he does in his people's estimation; but i didn't know whether to venture or not, and so ended by doing nothing. it seemed an intrusion to approach him, and even livy seemed to have her doubts as to the best and properest way to do in the case. i do not reverence mr. emerson less, but somehow i could approach him easier. send me those proofs, if you have got them handy; i want to submit them to wylie; he won't show them to anybody. had a very pleasant and considerate letter from mr. houghton, today, and was very glad to receive it. you can't imagine how brilliant and beautiful that new brass fender is, and how perfectly naturally it takes its place under the carved oak. how they did scour it up before they sent it! i lied a good deal about it when i came home--so for once i kept a secret and surprised livy on a christmas morning! i haven't done a stroke of work since the atlantic dinner; have only moped around. but i'm going to try tomorrow. how could i ever have. ah, well, i am a great and sublime fool. but then i am god's fool, and all his works must be contemplated with respect. livy and i join in the warmest regards to you and yours, yrs ever, mark. longfellow, in his reply, said: “i do not believe anybody was much hurt. certainly i was not, and holmes tells me he was not. so i think you may dismiss the matter from your mind without further remorse.” holmes wrote: “it never occurred to me for a moment to take offense, or feel wounded by your playful use of my name.” miss ellen emerson replied for her father (in a letter to mrs. clemens) that the speech had made no impression upon him, giving at considerable length the impression it had made on herself and other members of the family. clearly, it was not the principals who were hurt, but only those who held them in awe, though one can realize that this would not make it much easier for mark twain. xviii. letters from europe, - . tramping with twichell. writing a new travel book. life in munich. whether the unhappy occurrence at the whittier dinner had anything to do with mark twain's resolve to spend a year or two in europe cannot be known now. there were other good reasons for going, one in particular being a demand for another book of travel. it was also true, as he explains in a letter to his mother, that his days were full of annoyances, making it difficult for him to work. he had a tendency to invest money in almost any glittering enterprise that came along, and at this time he was involved in the promotion of a variety of patent rights that brought him no return other than assessment and vexation. clemens's mother was by this time living with her son onion and his wife, in iowa. ***** to mrs. jane clemens, in keokuk, iowa: hartford, feb. , my dear mother,--i suppose i am the worst correspondent in the whole world; and yet i grow worse and worse all the time. my conscience blisters me for not writing you, but it has ceased to abuse me for not writing other folks. life has come to be a very serious matter with me. i have a badgered, harassed feeling, a good part of my time. it comes mainly of business responsibilities and annoyances, and the persecution of kindly letters from well meaning strangers--to whom i must be rudely silent or else put in the biggest half of my time bothering over answers. there are other things also that help to consume my time and defeat my projects. well, the consequence is, i cannot write a book at home. this cuts my income down. therefore, i have about made up my mind to take my tribe and fly to some little corner of europe and budge no more until i shall have completed one of the half dozen books that lie begun, up stairs. please say nothing about this at present. we propose to sail the th of april. i shall go to fredonia to meet you, but it will not be well for livy to make that trip i am afraid. however, we shall see. i will hope she can go. mr. twichell has just come in, so i must go to him. we are all well, and send love to you all. affly, sam. he was writing few letters at this time, and doing but little work. there were always many social events during the winter, and what with his european plans and a diligent study of the german language, which the entire family undertook, his days and evenings were full enough. howells wrote protesting against the european travel and berating him for his silence: “i never was in berlin and don't know any family hotel there. i should be glad i didn't, if it would keep you from going. you deserve to put up at the sign of the savage in vienna. really, it's a great blow to me to hear of that prospected sojourn. it's a shame. i must see you, somehow, before you go. i'm in dreadfully low spirits about it. “i was afraid your silence meant something wicked.” clemens replied promptly, urging a visit to hartford, adding a postscript for mrs. howells, characteristic enough to warrant preservation. p. s. to mrs. howells, in boston: feb. ' . dear mrs. howells. mrs. clemens wrote you a letter, and handed it to me half an hour ago, while i was folding mine to mr. howells. i laid that letter on this table before me while i added the paragraph about r,'s application. since then i have been hunting and swearing, and swearing and hunting, but i can't find a sign of that letter. it is the most astonishing disappearance i ever heard of. mrs. clemens has gone off driving--so i will have to try and give you an idea of her communication from memory. mainly it consisted of an urgent desire that you come to see us next week, if you can possibly manage it, for that will be a reposeful time, the turmoil of breaking up beginning the week after. she wants you to tell her about italy, and advise her in that connection, if you will. then she spoke of her plans--hers, mind you, for i never have anything quite so definite as a plan. she proposes to stop a fortnight in (confound the place, i've forgotten what it was,) then go and live in dresden till sometime in the summer; then retire to switzerland for the hottest season, then stay a while in venice and put in the winter in munich. this program subject to modifications according to circumstances. she said something about some little by-trips here and there, but they didn't stick in my memory because the idea didn't charm me. (they have just telephoned me from the courant office that bayard taylor and family have taken rooms in our ship, the holsatia, for the th april.) do come, if you possibly can!--and remember and don't forget to avoid letting mrs. clemens find out i lost her letter. just answer her the same as if you had got it. sincerely yours s. l. clemens. the howellses came, as invited, for a final reunion before the breaking up. this was in the early half of march; the clemenses were to sail on the th of the following month. orion clemens, meantime, had conceived a new literary idea and was piling in his ms. as fast as possible to get his brother's judgment on it before the sailing-date. it was not a very good time to send ms., but mark twain seems to have read it and given it some consideration. “the journey in heaven,” of his own, which he mentions, was the story published so many years later under the title of “captain stormfield's visit to heaven.” he had began it in , on his voyage to san francisco, it having been suggested by conversations with capt. ned wakeman, of one of the pacific steamers. wakeman also appears in 'roughing it,' chap. l, as capt. ned blakely, and again in one of the “rambling notes of an idle excursion,” as “captain hurricane jones.” ***** to orion clemens, in keokuk: hartford, mch. , . my dear bro.,--every man must learn his trade--not pick it up. god requires that he learn it by slow and painful processes. the apprentice-hand, in black-smithing, in medicine, in literature, in everything, is a thing that can't be hidden. it always shows. but happily there is a market for apprentice work, else the “innocents abroad” would have had no sale. happily, too, there's a wider market for some sorts of apprentice literature than there is for the very best of journey-work. this work of yours is exceedingly crude, but i am free to say it is less crude than i expected it to be, and considerably better work than i believed you could do, it is too crude to offer to any prominent periodical, so i shall speak to the n. y. weekly people. to publish it there will be to bury it. why could not same good genius have sent me to the n. y. weekly with my apprentice sketches? you should not publish it in book form at all--for this reason: it is only an imitation of verne--it is not a burlesque. but i think it may be regarded as proof that verne cannot be burlesqued. in accompanying notes i have suggested that you vastly modify the first visit to hell, and leave out the second visit altogether. nobody would, or ought to print those things. you are not advanced enough in literature to venture upon a matter requiring so much practice. let me show you what a man has got to go through: nine years ago i mapped out my “journey in heaven.” i discussed it with literary friends whom i could trust to keep it to themselves. i gave it a deal of thought, from time to time. after a year or more i wrote it up. it was not a success. five years ago i wrote it again, altering the plan. that ms is at my elbow now. it was a considerable improvement on the first attempt, but still it wouldn't do--last year and year before i talked frequently with howells about the subject, and he kept urging me to do it again. so i thought and thought, at odd moments and at last i struck what i considered to be the right plan! mind i have never altered the ideas, from the first--the plan was the difficulty. when howells was here last, i laid before him the whole story without referring to my ms and he said: “you have got it sure this time. but drop the idea of making mere magazine stuff of it. don't waste it. print it by itself--publish it first in england--ask dean stanley to endorse it, which will draw some of the teeth of the religious press, and then reprint in america.” i doubt my ability to get dean stanley to do anything of the sort, but i shall do the rest--and this is all a secret which you must not divulge. now look here--i have tried, all these years, to think of some way of “doing” hell too--and have always had to give it up. hell, in my book, will not occupy five pages of ms i judge--it will be only covert hints, i suppose, and quickly dropped, i may end by not even referring to it. and mind you, in my opinion you will find that you can't write up hell so it will stand printing. neither howells nor i believe in hell or the divinity of the savior, but no matter, the savior is none the less a sacred personage, and a man should have no desire or disposition to refer to him lightly, profanely, or otherwise than with the profoundest reverence. the only safe thing is not to introduce him, or refer to him at all, i suspect. i have entirely rewritten one book (perhaps .) times, changing the plan every time-- pages of ms. wasted and burned--and shall tackle it again, one of these years and maybe succeed at last. therefore you need not expect to get your book right the first time. go to work and revamp or rewrite it. god only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. these are god's adjectives. you thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by. mr. perkins will send you and ma your checks when we are gone. but don't write him, ever, except a single line in case he forgets the checks--for the man is driven to death with work. i see you are half promising yourself a monthly return for your book. in my experience, previously counted chickens never do hatch. how many of mine i have counted! and never a one of them but failed! it is much better to hedge disappointment by not counting.--unexpected money is a delight. the same sum is a bitterness when you expected more. my time in america is growing mighty short. perhaps we can manage in this way: imprimis, if the n. y. weekly people know that you are my brother, they will turn that fact into an advertisement--a thing of value to them, but not to you and me. this must be prevented. i will write them a note to say you have a friend near keokuk, charles s. miller, who has a ms for sale which you think is a pretty clever travesty on verne; and if they want it they might write to him in your care. then if any correspondence ensues between you and them, let mollie write for you and sign your name--your own hand writing representing miller's. keep yourself out of sight till you make a strike on your own merits there is no other way to get a fair verdict upon your merits. later-i've written the note to smith, and with nothing in it which he can use as an advertisement. i'm called--good bye-love to you both. we leave here next wednesday for elmira: we leave there apl. or --and sail th yr bro. sam. in the letter that follows the mention of annie and sam refers, of course, to the children of mrs. moffett, who had been, pamela clemens. they were grown now, and annie moffett was married to charles l. webster, who later was to become mark twain's business partner. the moffetts and websters were living in fredonia at this time, and clemens had been to pay them a good-by visit. the taylor dinner mentioned was a farewell banquet given to bayard taylor, who had been appointed minister to germany, and was to sail on the ship with mark twain. mark twain's mother was visiting in fredonia when this letter was written. ***** to mrs. jane clemens, in fredonia: apr. , ' . my dear mother,--i have told livy all about annie's beautiful house, and about sam and charley, and about charley's ingenious manufactures and his strong manhood and good promise, and how glad i am that he and annie married. and i have told her about annie's excellent house-keeping, also about the great bacon conflict; (i told you it was a hundred to one that neither livy nor the european powers had heard of that desolating struggle.) and i have told her how beautiful you are in your age and how bright your mind is with its old-time brightness, and how she and the children would enjoy you. and i have told her how singularly young pamela is looking, and what a fine large fellow sam is, and how ill the lingering syllable “my” to his name fits his port and figure. well, pamela, after thinking it over for a day or so, i came near inquiring about a state-room in our ship for sam, to please you, but my wiser former resolution came back to me. it is not for his good that he have friends in the ship. his conduct in the bacon business shows that he will develop rapidly into a manly man as soon as he is cast loose from your apron strings. you don't teach him to push ahead and do and dare things for himself, but you do just the reverse. you are assisted in your damaging work by the tyrannous ways of a village--villagers watch each other and so make cowards of each other. after sam shall have voyaged to europe by himself, and rubbed against the world and taken and returned its cuffs, do you think he will hesitate to escort a guest into any whisky-mill in fredonia when he himself has no sinful business to transact there? no, he will smile at the idea. if he avoids this courtesy now from principle, of course i find no fault with it at all--only if he thinks it is principle he may be mistaken; a close examination may show it is only a bowing to the tyranny of public opinion. i only say it may--i cannot venture to say it will. hartford is not a large place, but it is broader than to have ways of that sort. three or four weeks ago, at a moody and sankey meeting, the preacher read a letter from somebody “exposing” the fact that a prominent clergyman had gone from one of those meetings, bought a bottle of lager beer and drank it on the premises (a drug store.) a tempest of indignation swept the town. our clergymen and everybody else said the “culprit” had not only done an innocent thing, but had done it in an open, manly way, and it was nobody's right or business to find fault with it. perhaps this dangerous latitude comes of the fact that we never have any temperance “rot” going on in hartford. i find here a letter from orion, submitting some new matter in his story for criticism. when you write him, please tell him to do the best he can and bang away. i can do nothing further in this matter, for i have but days left in which to settle a deal of important business and answer a bushel and a half of letters. i am very nearly tired to death. i was so jaded and worn, at the taylor dinner, that i found i could not remember sentences of the speech i had memorized, and therefore got up and said so and excused myself from speaking. i arrived here at o'clock this morning. i think the next days will finish me. the idea of sitting down to a job of literary criticism is simply ludicrous. a young lady passenger in our ship has been placed under livy's charge. livy couldn't easily get out of it, and did not want to, on her own account, but fully expected i would make trouble when i heard of it. but i didn't. a girl can't well travel alone, so i offered no objection. she leaves us at hamburg. so i've got people in my care, now--which is just too many for a man of my unexecutive capacity. i expect nothing else but to lose some of them overboard. we send our loving good-byes to all the household and hope to see you again after a spell. affly yrs. sam. there are no other american letters of this period. the clemens party, which included miss clara spaulding, of elmira, sailed as planned, on the holsatia, april , . as before stated, bayard taylor was on the ship; also murat halstead and family. on the eve of departure, clemens sent to howells this farewell word: “and that reminds me, ungrateful dog that i am, that i owe as much to your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city boss who takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art. i was talking to mrs. clemens about this the other day, and grieving because i never mentioned it to you, thereby seeming to ignore it, or to be unaware of it. nothing that has passed under your eye needs any revision before going into a volume, while all my other stuff does need so much.” a characteristic tribute, and from the heart. the first european letter came from frankfort, a rest on their way to heidelberg. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: frankfort on the main, may , . my dear howells,--i only propose to write a single line to say we are still around. ah, i have such a deep, grateful, unutterable sense of being “out of it all.” i think i foretaste some of the advantages of being dead. some of the joy of it. i don't read any newspapers or care for them. when people tell me england has declared war, i drop the subject, feeling that it is none of my business; when they tell me mrs. tilton has confessed and mr. b. denied, i say both of them have done that before, therefore let the worn stub of the plymouth white-wash brush be brought out once more, and let the faithful spit on their hands and get to work again regardless of me--for i am out of it all. we had almost devilish weeks at sea (and i tell you bayard taylor is a really lovable man--which you already knew) then we staid a week in the beautiful, the very beautiful city of hamburg; and since then we have been fooling along, hours per day by rail, with a courier, spending the other in hotels whose enormous bedchambers and private parlors are an overpowering marvel to me: day before yesterday, in cassel, we had a love of a bedroom, feet long, and a parlor with sofas, chairs, a writing desk and tables scattered around, here and there in it. made of red silk, too, by george. the times and times i wish you were along! you could throw some fun into the journey; whereas i go on, day by day, in a smileless state of solemn admiration. what a paradise this is! what clean clothes, what good faces, what tranquil contentment, what prosperity, what genuine freedom, what superb government. and i am so happy, for i am responsible for none of it. i am only here to enjoy. how charmed i am when i overhear a german word which i understand. with love from us to you . mark. p. s. we are not taking six days to go from hamburg to heidelberg because we prefer it. quite on the contrary. mrs. clemens picked up a dreadful cold and sore throat on board ship and still keeps them in stock--so she could only travel hours a day. she wanted to dive straight through, but i had different notions about the wisdom of it. i found that hours a day was the best she could do. before i forget it, our permanent address is care messrs. koester & co., backers, heidelberg. we go there tomorrow. poor susy! from the day we reached german soil, we have required rosa to speak german to the children--which they hate with all their souls. the other morning in hanover, susy came to us (from rosa, in the nursery) and said, in halting syllables, “papa, vie viel uhr ist es?”--then turned with pathos in her big eyes, and said, “mamma, i wish rosa was made in english.” (unfinished) frankfort was a brief halting-place, their destination being heidelberg. they were presently located there in the beautiful schloss hotel, which overlooks the old castle with its forest setting, the flowing neckar, and the distant valley of the rhine. clemens, who had discovered the location, and loved it, toward the end of may reported to howells his felicities. ***** fragment of a letter to w. d. howells, in boston: schloss-hotel heidelberg, sunday, a. m., may , . my dear howells,--....divinely located. from this airy porch among the shining groves we look down upon heidelberg castle, and upon the swift neckar, and the town, and out over the wide green level of the rhine valley--a marvelous prospect. we are in a cul-de-sac formed of hill-ranges and river; we are on the side of a steep mountain; the river at our feet is walled, on its other side, (yes, on both sides,) by a steep and wooded mountain-range which rises abruptly aloft from the water's edge; portions of these mountains are densely wooded; the plain of the rhine, seen through the mouth of this pocket, has many and peculiar charms for the eye. our bedroom has two great glass bird-cages (enclosed balconies) one looking toward the rhine valley and sunset, the other looking up the neckar cul-de-sac, and naturally we spend nearly all our time in these--when one is sunny the other is shady. we have tables and chairs in them; we do our reading, writing, studying, smoking and suppering in them. the view from these bird-cages is my despair. the pictures change from one enchanting aspect to another in ceaseless procession, never keeping one form half an hour, and never taking on an unlovely one. and then heidelberg on a dark night! it is massed, away down there, almost right under us, you know, and stretches off toward the valley. its curved and interlacing streets are a cobweb, beaded thick with lights--a wonderful thing to see; then the rows of lights on the arched bridges, and their glinting reflections in the water; and away at the far end, the eisenbahnhof, with its twenty solid acres of glittering gas-jets, a huge garden, as one may say, whose every plant is a flame. these balconies are the darlingest things. i have spent all the morning in this north one. counting big and little, it has panes of glass in it; so one is in effect right out in the free sunshine, and yet sheltered from wind and rain--and likewise doored and curtained from whatever may be going on in the bedroom. it must have been a noble genius who devised this hotel. lord, how blessed is the repose, the tranquillity of this place! only two sounds; the happy clamor of the birds in the groves, and the muffled music of the neckar, tumbling over the opposing dykes. it is no hardship to lie awake awhile, nights, for this subdued roar has exactly the sound of a steady rain beating upon a roof. it is so healing to the spirit; and it bears up the thread of one's imaginings as the accompaniment bears up a song. while livy and miss spaulding have been writing at this table, i have sat tilted back, near by, with a pipe and the last atlantic, and read charley warner's article with prodigious enjoyment. i think it is exquisite. i think it must be the roundest and broadest and completest short essay he has ever written. it is clear, and compact, and charmingly done. the hotel grounds join and communicate with the castle grounds; so we and the children loaf in the winding paths of those leafy vastnesses a great deal, and drink beer and listen to excellent music. when we first came to this hotel, a couple of weeks ago, i pointed to a house across the river, and said i meant to rent the centre room on the d floor for a work-room. jokingly we got to speaking of it as my office; and amused ourselves with watching “my people” daily in their small grounds and trying to make out what we could of their dress, &c., without a glass. well, i loafed along there one day and found on that house the only sign of the kind on that side of the river: “moblirte wohnung zu vermiethen!” i went in and rented that very room which i had long ago selected. there was only one other room in the whole double-house unrented. (it occurs to me that i made a great mistake in not thinking to deliver a very bad german speech, every other sentence pieced out with english, at the bayard taylor banquet in new york. i think i could have made it one of the features of the occasion.)--[he used this plan at a gathering of the american students in heidelberg, on july th, with great effect; so his idea was not wasted.] we left hartford before the end of march, and i have been idle ever since. i have waited for a call to go to work--i knew it would come. well, it began to come a week ago; my note-book comes out more and more frequently every day since; days ago i concluded to move my manuscript over to my den. now the call is loud and decided at last. so tomorrow i shall begin regular, steady work, and stick to it till middle of july or st august, when i look for twichell; we will then walk about germany or weeks, and then i'll go to work again--(perhaps in munich.) we both send a power of love to the howellses, and we do wish you were here. are you in the new house? tell us about it. yrs ever mark. there has been no former mention in the letters of the coming of twichell; yet this had been a part of the european plan. mark twain had invited his walking companion to make a tramp with him through europe, as his guest. material for the new book would grow faster with twichell as a companion; and these two in spite of their widely opposed views concerning providence and the general scheme of creation, were wholly congenial comrades. twichell, in hartford, expecting to receive the final summons to start, wrote: “oh, my! do you realize, mark, what a symposium it is to be? i do. to begin with, i am thoroughly tired, and the rest will be worth everything. to walk with you and talk with you for weeks together--why, it's my dream of luxury.” august st brought twichell, and the friends set out without delay on a tramp through the black forest, making short excursions at first, but presently extending them in the direction of switzerland. mrs. clemens and the others remained in heidelberg, to follow at their leisure. to mrs. clemens her husband sent frequent reports of their wanderings. it will be seen that their tramp did not confine itself to pedestrianism, though they did, in fact, walk a great deal, and mark twain in a note to his mother declared, “i loathe all travel, except on foot.” the reports to mrs. clemens follow: ***** letters to mrs. clemens, in heidelberg: allerheiligen aug. , : p.m. livy darling, we had a rattling good time to-day, but we came very near being left at baden-baden, for instead of waiting in the waiting-room, we sat down on the platform to wait where the trains come in from the other direction. we sat there full ten minutes--and then all of a sudden it occurred to me that that was not the right place. on the train the principal of the big english school at nauheim (of which mr. scheiding was a teacher), introduced himself to me, and then he mapped out our day for us (for today and tomorrow) and also drew a map and gave us directions how to proceed through switzerland. he had his entire school with him, taking them on a prodigious trip through switzerland--tickets for the round trip ten dollars apiece. he has done this annually for years. we took a post carriage from aachen to otterhofen for marks--stopped at the “pflug” to drink beer, and saw that pretty girl again at a distance. her father, mother, and two brothers received me like an ancient customer and sat down and talked as long as i had any german left. the big room was full of red-vested farmers (the gemeindrath of the district, with the burgermeister at the head,) drinking beer and talking public business. they had held an election and chosen a new member and had been drinking beer at his expense for several hours. (it was intensely black-foresty.) there was an australian there (a student from stuttgart or somewhere,) and joe told him who i was and he laid himself out to make our course plain, for us--so i am certain we can't get lost between here and heidelberg. we walked the carriage road till we came to that place where one sees the foot path on the other side of the ravine, then we crossed over and took that. for a good while we were in a dense forest and judged we were lost, but met a native women who said we were all right. we fooled along and got there at p.m.--ate supper, then followed down the ravine to the foot of the falls, then struck into a blind path to see where it would go, and just about dark we fetched up at the devil's pulpit on top of the hills. then home. and now to bed, pretty sleepy. joe sends love and i send a thousand times as much, my darling. s. l. c. hotel gennin. livy darling, we had a lovely day jogged right along, with a good horse and sensible driver--the last two hours right behind an open carriage filled with a pleasant german family--old gentleman and pretty daughters. at table d'hote tonight, dishes were enough for me, and then i bored along tediously through the bill of fare, with a back-ache, not daring to get up and bow to the german family and leave. i meant to sit it through and make them get up and do the bowing; but at last joe took pity on me and said he would get up and drop them a curtsy and put me out of my misery. i was grateful. he got up and delivered a succession of frank and hearty bows, accompanying them with an atmosphere of good-fellowship which would have made even an english family surrender. of course the germans responded--then i got right up and they had to respond to my salaams, too. so “that was done.” we walked up a gorge and saw a tumbling waterfall which was nothing to giessbach, but it made me resolve to drop you a line and urge you to go and see giessbach illuminated. don't fail--but take a long day's rest, first. i love you, sweetheart. saml. over the gemmi pass. . p.m. saturday, aug. , . livy darling, joe and i have had a most noble day. started to climb (on foot) at . this morning among the grandest peaks! every half hour carried us back a month in the season. we left them harvesting d crop of hay. at we were in july and found ripe strawberries; at . we were in june and gathered flowers belonging to that month; at we were in may and gathered a flower which appeared in heidelberg the th of that month; also forget-me-nots, which disappeared from heidelberg about mid-may; at . we were in april (by the flowers;) at noon we had rain and hail mixed, and wind and enveloping fogs, and considered it march; at . we had snowbanks above us and snowbanks below us, and considered it february. not good february, though, because in the midst of the wild desolation the forget-me-not still bloomed, lovely as ever. what a flower garden the gemmi pass is! after i had got my hands full joe made me a paper bag, which i pinned to my lapel and filled with choice specimens. i gathered no flowers which i had ever gathered before except or kinds. we took it leisurely and i picked all i wanted to. i mailed my harvest to you a while ago. don't send it to mrs. brooks until you have looked it over, flower by flower. it will pay. among the clouds and everlasting snows i found a brave and bright little forget-me-not growing in the very midst of a smashed and tumbled stone-debris, just as cheerful as if the barren and awful domes and ramparts that towered around were the blessed walls of heaven. i thought how lilly warner would be touched by such a gracious surprise, if she, instead of i, had seen it. so i plucked it, and have mailed it to her with a note. our walk was hours--the last down a path as steep as a ladder, almost, cut in the face of a mighty precipice. people are not allowed to ride down it. this part of the day's work taxed our knees, i tell you. we have been loafing about this village (leukerbad) for an hour, now we stay here over sunday. not tired at all. (joe's hat fell over the precipice--so he came here bareheaded.) i love you, my darling. saml. st. nicholas, aug. th, ' . livy darling, we came through a-whooping today, hours tramp up steep hills and down steep hills, in mud and water shoe-deep, and in a steady pouring rain which never moderated a moment. i was as chipper and fresh as a lark all the way and arrived without the slightest sense of fatigue. but we were soaked and my shoes full of water, so we ate at once, stripped and went to bed for / hours while our traps were thoroughly dried, and our boots greased in addition. then we put our clothes on hot and went to table d'hote. made some nice english friends and shall see them at zermatt tomorrow. gathered a small bouquet of new flowers, but they got spoiled. i sent you a safety-match box full of flowers last night from leukerbad. i have just telegraphed you to wire the family news to me at riffel tomorrow. i do hope you are all well and having as jolly a time as we are, for i love you, sweetheart, and also, in a measure, the bays.--[little susy's word for “babies.”]--give my love to clara spaulding and also to the cubs. saml. this, as far as it goes, is a truer and better account of the excursion than mark twain gave in the book that he wrote later. a tramp abroad has a quality of burlesque in it, which did not belong to the journey at all, but was invented to satisfy the craving for what the public conceived to be mark twain's humor. the serious portions of the book are much more pleasing--more like himself. the entire journey, as will be seen, lasted one week more than a month. twichell also made his reports home, some of which give us interesting pictures of his walking partner. in one place he wrote: “mark is a queer fellow. there is nothing he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. you can hardly get him to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations.” twichell tells how at kandersteg they were out together one evening where a brook comes plunging down from gasternthal and how he pushed in a drift to see it go racing along the current. “when i got back to the path mark was running down stream after it as hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstasy, and when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell. he said afterward that he had not been so excited in three months.” in other places twichell refers to his companion's consideration for the feeling of others, and for animals. “when we are driving, his concern is all about the horse. he can't bear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull hard.” after the walk over gemmi pass he wrote: “mark to-day was immensely absorbed in flowers. he scrambled around and gathered a great variety, and manifested the intensest pleasure in them. he crowded a pocket of his note-book with his specimens, and wanted more room.” whereupon twichell got out his needle and thread and some stiff paper he had and contrived the little paper bag to hang to the front of his vest. the tramp really ended at lausanne, where clemens joined his party, but a short excursion to chillon and chamonix followed, the travelers finally separating at geneva, twichell to set out for home by way of england, clemens to remain and try to write the story of their travels. he hurried a good-by letter after his comrade: ***** to rev. j. h. twichell: (no date) dear old joe,--it is actually all over! i was so low-spirited at the station yesterday, and this morning, when i woke, i couldn't seem to accept the dismal truth that you were really gone, and the pleasant tramping and talking at an end. ah, my boy! it has been such a rich holiday to me, and i feel under such deep and honest obligations to you for coming. i am putting out of my mind all memory of the times when i misbehaved toward you and hurt you: i am resolved to consider it forgiven, and to store up and remember only the charming hours of the journeys and the times when i was not unworthy to be with you and share a companionship which to me stands first after livy's. it is justifiable to do this; for why should i let my small infirmities of disposition live and grovel among my mental pictures of the eternal sublimities of the alps? livy can't accept or endure the fact that you are gone. but you are, and we cannot get around it. so take our love with you, and bear it also over the sea to harmony, and god bless you both. mark. from switzerland the clemens party worked down into italy, sight-seeing, a diversion in which mark twain found little enough of interest. he had seen most of the sights ten years before, when his mind was fresh. he unburdened himself to twichell and to howells, after a period of suffering. ***** to j. h. twichell, in hartford: rome, nov. , ' . dear joe,--.....i have received your several letters, and we have prodigiously enjoyed them. how i do admire a man who can sit down and whale away with a pen just the same as if it was fishing--or something else as full of pleasure and as void of labor. i can't do it; else, in common decency, i would when i write to you. joe, if i can make a book out of the matter gathered in your company over here, the book is safe; but i don't think i have gathered any matter before or since your visit worth writing up. i do wish you were in rome to do my sightseeing for me. rome interests me as much as east hartford could, and no more. that is, the rome which the average tourist feels an interest in; but there are other things here which stir me enough to make life worth living. livy and clara spaulding are having a royal time worshiping the old masters, and i as good a time gritting my ineffectual teeth over them. a friend waits for me. a power of love to you all. amen. mark. in his letter to howells he said: “i wish i could give those sharp satires on european life which you mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas i hate travel, and i hate hotels, and i hate the opera, and i hate the old masters. in truth, i don't ever seem to be in a good-enough humor with anything to satirize it. no, i want to stand up before it and curse it and foam at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. i have got in two or three chapters about wagner's operas, and managed to do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort would burst me!” from italy the clemens party went to munich, where they had arranged in advance for winter quarters. clemens claims, in his report of the matter to howells, that he took the party through without the aid of a courier, though thirty years later, in some comment which he set down on being shown the letter, he wrote concerning this paragraph: “probably a lie.” he wrote, also, that they acquired a great affection for fraulein dahlweiner: “acquired it at once and it outlasted the winter we spent in her house.” ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: no a, karlstrasse, e stock. care fraulein dahlweiner. munich, nov. , . my dear howells,--we arrived here night before last, pretty well fagged: an -hour pull from rome to florence; a rest there of a day and two nights; then / hours to bologna; one night's rest; then from noon to : p.m. carried us to trent, in the austrian tyrol, where the confounded hotel had not received our message, and so at that miserable hour, in that snowy region, the tribe had to shiver together in fireless rooms while beds were prepared and warmed, then up at in the morning and a noble view of snow-peaks glittering in the rich light of a full moon while the hotel-devils lazily deranged a breakfast for us in the dreary gloom of blinking candles; then a solid hours pull through the loveliest snow ranges and snow-draped forest--and at p.m. we hauled up, in drizzle and fog, at the domicile which had been engaged for us ten months before. munich did seem the horriblest place, the most desolate place, the most unendurable place!--and the rooms were so small, the conveniences so meagre, and the porcelain stoves so grim, ghastly, dismal, intolerable! so livy and clara (spaulding) sat down forlorn, and cried, and i retired to a private, place to pray. by and by we all retired to our narrow german beds; and when livy and i finished talking across the room, it was all decided that we would rest hours then pay whatever damages were required, and straightway fly to the south of france. but you see, that was simply fatigue. next morning the tribe fell in love with the rooms, with the weather, with munich, and head over heels in love with fraulein dahlweiner. we got a larger parlor--an ample one--threw two communicating bedrooms into one, for the children, and now we are entirely comfortable. the only apprehension, at present, is that the climate may not be just right for the children, in which case we shall have to go to france, but it will be with the sincerest regret. now i brought the tribe through from rome, myself. we never had so little trouble before. the next time anybody has a courier to put out to nurse, i shall not be in the market. last night the forlornities had all disappeared; so we gathered around the lamp, after supper, with our beer and my pipe, and in a condition of grateful snugness tackled the new magazines. i read your new story aloud, amid thunders of applause, and we all agreed that captain jenness and the old man with the accordion-hat are lovely people and most skillfully drawn--and that cabin-boy, too, we like. of course we are all glad the girl is gone to venice--for there is no place like venice. now i easily understand that the old man couldn't go, because you have a purpose in sending lyddy by herself: but you could send the old man over in another ship, and we particularly want him along. suppose you don't need him there? what of that? can't you let him feed the doves? can't you let him fall in the canal occasionally? can't you let his good-natured purse be a daily prey to guides and beggar-boys? can't you let him find peace and rest and fellowship under pere jacopo's kindly wing? (however, you are writing the book, not i--still, i am one of the people you are writing it for, you understand.) i only want to insist, in a friendly way, that the old man shall shed his sweet influence frequently upon the page--that is all. the first time we called at the convent, pere jacopo was absent; the next (just at this moment miss spaulding spoke up and said something about pere jacopo--there is more in this acting of one mind upon another than people think) time, he was there, and gave us preserved rose-leaves to eat, and talked about you, and mrs. howells, and winnie, and brought out his photographs, and showed us a picture of “the library of your new house,” but not so--it was the study in your cambridge house. he was very sweet and good. he called on us next day; the day after that we left venice, after a pleasant sojourn of or weeks. he expects to spend this winter in munich and will see us often, he said. pretty soon, i am going to write something, and when i finish it i shall know whether to put it to itself or in the “contributors' club.” that “contributors' club” was a most happy idea. by the way, i think that the man who wrote the paragraph beginning at the bottom of page has said a mighty sound and sensible thing. i wish his suggestion could be adopted. it is lovely of you to keep that old pipe in such a place of honor. while it occurs to me, i must tell you susie's last. she is sorely badgered with dreams; and her stock dream is that she is being eaten up by bears. she is a grave and thoughtful child, as you will remember. last night she had the usual dream. this morning she stood apart (after telling it,) for some time, looking vacantly at the floor, and absorbed in meditation. at last she looked up, and with the pathos of one who feels he has not been dealt by with even-handed fairness, said “but mamma, the trouble is, that i am never the bear, but always the person.” it would not have occurred to me that there might be an advantage, even in a dream, in occasionally being the eater, instead of always the party eaten, but i easily perceived that her point was well taken. i'm sending to heidelberg for your letter and winnie's, and i do hope they haven't been lost. my wife and i send love to you all. yrs ever, mark. the howells story, running at this time in the atlantic, and so much enjoyed by the clemens party, was “the lady of the aroostook.” the suggestions made for enlarging the part of the “old man” are eminently characteristic. mark twain's forty-third birthday came in munich, and in his letter conveying this fact to his mother we get a brief added outline of the daily life in that old bavarian city. certainly, it would seem to have been a quieter and more profitable existence than he had known amid the confusion of things left behind in, america. ***** to mrs. jane clemens and mrs. moffett, in america: no. a karlstrasse, dec. , munich. . my dear mother and sister,--i broke the back of life yesterday and started down-hill toward old age. this fact has not produced any effect upon me that i can detect. i suppose we are located here for the winter. i have a pleasant work-room a mile from here where i do my writing. the walk to and from that place gives me what exercise i need, and all i take. we staid three weeks in venice, a week in florence, a fortnight in rome, and arrived here a couple of weeks ago. livy and miss spaulding are studying drawing and german, and the children have a german day-governess. i cannot see but that the children speak german as well as they do english. susie often translates livy's orders to the servants. i cannot work and study german at the same time: so i have dropped the latter, and do not even read the language, except in the morning paper to get the news. we have all pretty good health, latterly, and have seldom had to call the doctor. the children have been in the open air pretty constantly for months now. in venice they were on the water in the gondola most of the time, and were great friends with our gondolier; and in rome and florence they had long daily tramps, for rosa is a famous hand to smell out the sights of a strange place. here they wander less extensively. the family all join in love to you all and to orion and mollie. affly your son sam. xix. letters . return to america. the great grant reunion life went on very well in munich. each day the family fell more in love with fraulein dahlweiner and her house. mark twain, however, did not settle down to his work readily. his “pleasant work-room” provided exercise, but no inspiration. when he discovered he could not find his swiss note-book he was ready to give up his travel-writing altogether. in the letter that follows we find him much less enthusiastic concerning his own performances than over the story by howells, which he was following in the atlantic. the “detective” chapter mentioned in this letter was not included in 'a tramp abroad.' it was published separately, as 'the stolen white elephant' in a volume bearing that title. the play, which he had now found “dreadfully witless and flat,” was no other than “simon wheeler, detective,” which he had once regarded so highly. the “stewart” referred to was the millionaire merchant, a. t. stewart, whose body was stolen in the expectation of reward. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: munich, jan. , ( ) my dear howells,--it's no use, your letter miscarried in some way and is lost. the consul has made a thorough search and says he has not been able to trace it. it is unaccountable, for all the letters i did not want arrived without a single grateful failure. well, i have read-up, now, as far as you have got, that is, to where there's a storm at sea approaching,--and we three think you are clear, out-howellsing howells. if your literature has not struck perfection now we are not able to see what is lacking. it is all such truth--truth to the life; every where your pen falls it leaves a photograph. i did imagine that everything had been said about life at sea that could be said, but no matter, it was all a failure and lies, nothing but lies with a thin varnish of fact,--only you have stated it as it absolutely is. and only you see people and their ways, and their insides and outsides as they are, and make them talk as they do talk. i think you are the very greatest artist in these tremendous mysteries that ever lived. there doesn't seem to be anything that can be concealed from your awful all-seeing eye. it must be a cheerful thing for one to live with you and be aware that you are going up and down in him like another conscience all the time. possibly you will not be a fully accepted classic until you have been dead a hundred years,--it is the fate of the shakespeares and of all genuine prophets,--but then your books will be as common as bibles, i believe. you're not a weed, but an oak; not a summer-house, but a cathedral. in that day i shall still be in the cyclopedias, too, thus: “mark twain; history and occupation unknown--but he was personally acquainted with howells.” there--i could sing your praises all day, and feel and believe every bit of it. my book is half finished; i wish to heaven it was done. i have given up writing a detective novel--can't write a novel, for i lack the faculty; but when the detectives were nosing around after stewart's loud remains, i threw a chapter into my present book in which i have very extravagantly burlesqued the detective business--if it is possible to burlesque that business extravagantly. you know i was going to send you that detective play, so that you could re-write it. well i didn't do it because i couldn't find a single idea in it that could be useful to you. it was dreadfully witless and flat. i knew it would sadden you and unfit you for work. i have always been sorry we threw up that play embodying orion which you began. it was a mistake to do that. do keep that ms and tackle it again. it will work out all right; you will see. i don't believe that that character exists in literature in so well-developed a condition as it exists in orion's person. now won't you put orion in a story? then he will go handsomely into a play afterwards. how deliciously you could paint him--it would make fascinating reading--the sort that makes a reader laugh and cry at the same time, for orion is as good and ridiculous a soul as ever was. ah, to think of bayard taylor! it is too sad to talk about. i was so glad there was not a single sting and so many good praiseful words in the atlantic's criticism of deukalion. love to you all yrs ever mark we remain here till middle of march. in 'a tramp abroad' there is an incident in which the author describes himself as hunting for a lost sock in the dark, in a vast hotel bedroom at heilbronn. the account of the real incident, as written to twichell, seems even more amusing. the “yarn about the limburger cheese and the box of guns,” like “the stolen white elephant,” did not find place in the travel-book, but was published in the same volume with the elephant story, added to the rambling notes of “an idle excursion.” with the discovery of the swiss note-book, work with mark twain was going better. his letter reflects his enthusiasm. ***** to rev. j. h. twichell, in hartford: munich, jan ' . dear old joe,--sunday. your delicious letter arrived exactly at the right time. it was laid by my plate as i was finishing breakfast at noon. livy and clara, (spaulding) arrived from church minutes later; i took a pipe and spread myself out on the sofa, and livy sat by and read, and i warmed to that butcher the moment he began to swear. there is more than one way of praying, and i like the butcher's way because the petitioner is so apt to be in earnest. i was peculiarly alive to his performance just at this time, for another reason, to wit: last night i awoke at this morning, and after raging to my self for interminable hours, i gave it up. i rose, assumed a catlike stealthiness, to keep from waking livy, and proceeded to dress in the pitch dark. slowly but surely i got on garment after garment--all down to one sock; i had one slipper on and the other in my hand. well, on my hands and knees i crept softly around, pawing and feeling and scooping along the carpet, and among chair-legs for that missing sock; i kept that up; and still kept it up and kept it up. at first i only said to myself, “blame that sock,” but that soon ceased to answer; my expletives grew steadily stronger and stronger,--and at last, when i found i was lost, i had to sit flat down on the floor and take hold of something to keep from lifting the roof off with the profane explosion that was trying to get out of me. i could see the dim blur of the window, but of course it was in the wrong place and could give me no information as to where i was. but i had one comfort--i had not waked livy; i believed i could find that sock in silence if the night lasted long enough. so i started again and softly pawed all over the place,--and sure enough at the end of half an hour i laid my hand on the missing article. i rose joyfully up and butted the wash-bowl and pitcher off the stand and simply raised----so to speak. livy screamed, then said, “who is that? what is the matter?” i said “there ain't anything the matter--i'm hunting for my sock.” she said, “are you hunting for it with a club?” i went in the parlor and lit the lamp, and gradually the fury subsided and the ridiculous features of the thing began to suggest themselves. so i lay on the sofa, with note-book and pencil, and transferred the adventure to our big room in the hotel at heilbronn, and got it on paper a good deal to my satisfaction. i found the swiss note-book, some time ago. when it was first lost i was glad of it, for i was getting an idea that i had lost my faculty of writing sketches of travel; therefore the loss of that note-book would render the writing of this one simply impossible, and let me gracefully out; i was about to write to bliss and propose some other book, when the confounded thing turned up, and down went my heart into my boots. but there was now no excuse, so i went solidly to work--tore up a great part of the ms written in heidelberg,--wrote and tore up,--continued to write and tear up,--and at last, reward of patient and noble persistence, my pen got the old swing again! since then i'm glad providence knew better what to do with the swiss note-book than i did, for i like my work, now, exceedingly, and often turn out over ms pages a day and then quit sorry that heaven makes the days so short. one of my discouragements had been the belief that my interest in this tour had been so slender that i couldn't gouge matter enough out of it to make a book. what a mistake. i've got pages written (not a word in it about the sea voyage) yet i stepped my foot out of heidelberg for the first time yesterday,--and then only to take our party of four on our first pedestrian tour--to heilbronn. i've got them dressed elaborately in walking costume--knapsacks, canteens, field-glasses, leather leggings, patent walking shoes, muslin folds around their hats, with long tails hanging down behind, sun umbrellas, and alpenstocks. they go all the way to wimpfen by rail-thence to heilbronn in a chance vegetable cart drawn by a donkey and a cow; i shall fetch them home on a raft; and if other people shall perceive that that was no pedestrian excursion, they themselves shall not be conscious of it.--this trip will take pages or more,--oh, goodness knows how many! for the mood is everything, not the material, and i already seem to see pages rising before me on that trip. then, i propose to leave heidelberg for good. don't you see, the book ( ms pages,) may really be finished before i ever get to switzerland? but there's one thing; i want to tell frank bliss and his father to be charitable toward me in,--that is, let me tear up all the ms i want to, and give me time to write more. i shan't waste the time--i haven't the slightest desire to loaf, but a consuming desire to work, ever since i got back my swing. and you see this book is either going to be compared with the innocents abroad, or contrasted with it, to my disadvantage. i think i can make a book that will be no dead corpse of a thing and i mean to do my level best to accomplish that. my crude plans are crystalizing. as the thing stands now, i went to europe for three purposes. the first you know, and must keep secret, even from the blisses; the second is to study art; and the third to acquire a critical knowledge of the german language. my ms already shows that the two latter objects are accomplished. it shows that i am moving about as an artist and a philologist, and unaware that there is any immodesty in assuming these titles. having three definite objects has had the effect of seeming to enlarge my domain and give me the freedom of a loose costume. it is three strings to my bow, too. well, your butcher is magnificent. he won't stay out of my mind.--i keep trying to think of some way of getting your account of him into my book without his being offended--and yet confound him there isn't anything you have said which he would see any offense in,--i'm only thinking of his friends--they are the parties who busy themselves with seeing things for people. but i'm bound to have him in. i'm putting in the yarn about the limburger cheese and the box of guns, too--mighty glad howells declined it. it seems to gather richness and flavor with age. i have very nearly killed several companies with that narrative,--the american artists club, here, for instance, and smith and wife and miss griffith (they were here in this house a week or two.) i've got other chapters that pretty nearly destroyed the same parties, too. o, switzerland! the further it recedes into the enriching haze of time, the more intolerably delicious the charm of it and the cheer of it and the glory and majesty and solemnity and pathos of it grow. those mountains had a soul; they thought; they spoke,--one couldn't hear it with the ears of the body, but what a voice it was!--and how real. deep down in my memory it is sounding yet. alp calleth unto alp!--that stately old scriptural wording is the right one for god's alps and god's ocean. how puny we were in that awful presence--and how painless it was to be so; how fitting and right it seemed, and how stingless was the sense of our unspeakable insignificance. and lord how pervading were the repose and peace and blessedness that poured out of the heart of the invisible great spirit of the mountains. now what is it? there are mountains and mountains and mountains in this world--but only these take you by the heart-strings. i wonder what the secret of it is. well, time and time again it has seemed to me that i must drop everything and flee to switzerland once more. it is a longing--a deep, strong, tugging longing--that is the word. we must go again, joe.--october days, let us get up at dawn and breakfast at the tower. i should like that first rate. livy and all of us send deluges of love to you and harmony and all the children. i dreamed last night that i woke up in the library at home and your children were frolicing around me and julia was sitting in my lap; you and harmony and both families of warners had finished their welcomes and were filing out through the conservatory door, wrecking patrick's flower pots with their dress skirts as they went. peace and plenty abide with you all! mark. i want the blisses to know their part of this letter, if possible. they will see that my delay was not from choice. following the life of mark twain, whether through his letters or along the sequence of detailed occurrence, we are never more than a little while, or a little distance, from his brother orion. in one form or another orion is ever present, his inquiries, his proposals, his suggestions, his plans for improving his own fortunes, command our attention. he was one of the most human creatures that ever lived; indeed, his humanity excluded every form of artificiality --everything that needs to be acquired. talented, trusting, child-like, carried away by the impulse of the moment, despite a keen sense of humor he was never able to see that his latest plan or project was not bound to succeed. mark twain loved him, pitied him--also enjoyed him, especially with howells. orion's new plan to lecture in the interest of religion found its way to munich, with the following result: ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: munich, feb. . ( ) my dear howells,--i have just received this letter from orion--take care of it, for it is worth preserving. i got as far as pages in my answer to it, when mrs. clemens shut down on it, and said it was cruel, and made me send the money and simply wish his lecture success. i said i couldn't lose my pages--so she said send them to you. but i will acknowledge that i thought i was writing a very kind letter. now just look at this letter of orion's. did you ever see the grotesquely absurd and the heart-breakingly pathetic more closely joined together? mrs. clemens said “raise his monthly pension.” so i wrote to perkins to raise it a trifle. now only think of it! he still has pages to write on his lecture, yet in one inking of his pen he has already swooped around the united states and invested the result! you must put him in a book or a play right away. you are the only man capable of doing it. you might die at any moment, and your very greatest work would be lost to the world. i could write orion's simple biography, and make it effective, too, by merely stating the bald facts--and this i will do if he dies before i do; but you must put him into romance. this was the understanding you and i had the day i sailed. observe orion's career--that is, a little of it: ( ) he has belonged to as many as five different religious denominations; last march he withdrew from the deaconship in a congregational church and the superintendency of its sunday school, in a speech in which he said that for many months (it runs in my mind that he said years,) he had been a confirmed infidel, and so felt it to be his duty to retire from the flock. . after being a republican for years, he wanted me to buy him a democratic newspaper. a few days before the presidential election, he came out in a speech and publicly went over to the democrats; he prudently “hedged” by voting for state republicans, also. the new convert was made one of the secretaries of the democratic meeting, and placed in the list of speakers. he wrote me jubilantly of what a ten-strike he was going to make with that speech. all right--but think of his innocent and pathetic candor in writing me something like this, a week later: “i was more diffident than i had expected to be, and this was increased by the silence with which i was received when i came forward; so i seemed unable to get the fire into my speech which i had calculated upon, and presently they began to get up and go out; and in a few minutes they all rose up and went away.” how could a man uncover such a sore as that and show it to another? not a word of complaint, you see--only a patient, sad surprise. . his next project was to write a burlesque upon paradise lost. . then, learning that the times was paying harte $ a column for stories, he concluded to write some for the same price. i read his first one and persuaded him not to write any more. . then he read proof on the n. y. eve. post at $ a week and meekly observed that the foreman swore at him and ordered him around “like a steamboat mate.” . being discharged from that post, he wanted to try agriculture--was sure he could make a fortune out of a chicken farm. i gave him $ and he went to a ten-house village a miles above keokuk on the river bank--this place was a railway station. he soon asked for money to buy a horse and light wagon,--because the trains did not run at church time on sunday and his wife found it rather far to walk. for a long time i answered demands for “loans” and by next mail always received his check for the interest due me to date. in the most guileless way he let it leak out that he did not underestimate the value of his custom to me, since it was not likely that any other customer of mine paid his interest quarterly, and this enabled me to use my capital twice in months instead of only once. but alas, when the debt at last reached $ or $ (i have forgotten which) the interest ate too formidably into his borrowings, and so he quietly ceased to pay it or speak of it. at the end of two years i found that the chicken farm had long ago been abandoned, and he had moved into keokuk. later in one of his casual moments, he observed that there was no money in fattening a chicken on cents worth of corn and then selling it for . . finally, if i would lend him $ a year for two years, (this was or years ago,) he knew he could make a success as a lawyer, and would prove it. this is the pension which we have just increased to $ . the first year his legal business brought him $ . it also brought him an unremunerative case where some villains were trying to chouse some negro orphans out of $ . he still has this case. he has waggled it around through various courts and made some booming speeches on it. the negro children have grown up and married off, now, i believe, and their litigated town-lot has been dug up and carted off by somebody--but orion still infests the courts with his documents and makes the welkin ring with his venerable case. the second year, he didn't make anything. the third he made $ , and i made bliss put a case in his hands--about half an hour's work. orion charged $ for it--bliss paid him $ . thus four or five years of slaving has brought him $ , but this will doubtless be increased when he gets done lecturing and buys that “law library.” meantime his office rent has been $ a year, and he has stuck to that lair day by day as patiently as a spider. . then he by and by conceived the idea of lecturing around america as “mark twain's brother”--that to be on the bills. subject of proposed lecture, “on the formation of character.” . i protested, and he got on his warpaint, couched his lance, and ran a bold tilt against total abstinence and the red ribbon fanatics. it raised a fine row among the virtuous keokukians. . i wrote to encourage him in his good work, but i had let a mail intervene; so by the time my letter reached him he was already winning laurels as a red ribbon howler. . afterward he took a rabid part in a prayer-meeting epidemic; dropped that to travesty jules verne; dropped that, in the middle of the last chapter, last march, to digest the matter of an infidel book which he proposed to write; and now he comes to the surface to rescue our “noble and beautiful religion” from the sacrilegious talons of bob ingersoll. now come! don't fool away this treasure which providence has laid at your feet, but take it up and use it. one can let his imagination run riot in portraying orion, for there is nothing so extravagant as to be out of character with him. well-good-bye, and a short life and a merry one be yours. poor old methusaleh, how did he manage to stand it so long? yrs ever, mark. ***** to orion clemens unsent and inclosed with the foregoing, to w. d. howells: munich, feb. , ( ) my dear bro.,--yours has just arrived. i enclose a draft on hartford for $ . you will have abandoned the project you wanted it for, by the time it arrives,--but no matter, apply it to your newer and present project, whatever it is. you see i have an ineradicable faith in your unsteadfastness,--but mind you, i didn't invent that faith, you conferred it on me yourself. but fire away, fire away! i don't see why a changeable man shouldn't get as much enjoyment out of his changes, and transformations and transfigurations as a steadfast man gets out of standing still and pegging at the same old monotonous thing all the time. that is to say, i don't see why a kaleidoscope shouldn't enjoy itself as much as a telescope, nor a grindstone have as good a time as a whetstone, nor a barometer as good a time as a yardstick. i don't feel like girding at you any more about fickleness of purpose, because i recognize and realize at last that it is incurable; but before i learned to accept this truth, each new weekly project of yours possessed the power of throwing me into the most exhausting and helpless convulsions of profanity. but fire away, now! your magic has lost its might. i am able to view your inspirations dispassionately and judicially, now, and say “this one or that one or the other one is not up to your average flight, or is above it, or below it.” and so, without passion, or prejudice, or bias of any kind, i sit in judgment upon your lecture project, and say it was up to your average, it was indeed above it, for it had possibilities in it, and even practical ones. while i was not sorry you abandoned it, i should not be sorry if you had stuck to it and given it a trial. but on the whole you did the wise thing to lay it aside, i think, because a lecture is a most easy thing to fail in; and at your time of life, and in your own town, such a failure would make a deep and cruel wound in your heart and in your pride. it was decidedly unwise in you to think for a moment of coming before a community who knew you, with such a course of lectures; because keokuk is not unaware that you have been a swedenborgian, a presbyterian, a congregationalist, and a methodist (on probation), and that just a year ago you were an infidel. if keokuk had gone to your lecture course, it would have gone to be amused, not instructed, for when a man is known to have no settled convictions of his own he can't convince other people. they would have gone to be amused and that would have been a deep humiliation to you. it could have been safe for you to appear only where you were unknown--then many of your hearers would think you were in earnest. and they would be right. you are in earnest while your convictions are new. but taking it by and large, you probably did best to discard that project altogether. but i leave you to judge of that, for you are the worst judge i know of. (unfinished.) that mark twain in many ways was hardly less child-like than his brother is now and again revealed in his letters. he was of steadfast purpose, and he possessed the driving power which orion clemens lacked; but the importance to him of some of the smaller matters of life, as shown in a letter like the following, bespeaks a certain simplicity of nature which he never outgrew: ***** to rev. j. h. twichell, in hartford: munich, feb. . ( ) dear old joe,--it was a mighty good letter, joe--and that idea of yours is a rattling good one. but i have not sot down here to answer your letter,--for it is down at my study,--but only to impart some information. for a months i had not shaved without crying. i'd spend / of an hour whetting away on my hand--no use, couldn't get an edge. tried a razor strop-same result. so i sat down and put in an hour thinking out the mystery. then it seemed plain--to wit: my hand can't give a razor an edge, it can only smooth and refine an edge that has already been given. i judge that a razor fresh from the hone is this shape v--the long point being the continuation of the edge--and that after much use the shape is this v--the attenuated edge all worn off and gone. by george i knew that was the explanation. and i knew that a freshly honed and freshly strapped razor won't cut, but after strapping on the hand as a final operation, it will cut.--so i sent out for an oil-stone; none to be had, but messenger brought back a little piece of rock the size of a safety-match box--(it was bought in a shoemaker's shop) bad flaw in middle of it, too, but i put drops of fine olive oil on it, picked out the razor marked “thursday” because it was never any account and would be no loss if i spoiled it--gave it a brisk and reckless honing for minutes, then tried it on a hair--it wouldn't cut. then i trotted it through a vigorous -minute course on a razor-strap and tried it on a hair-it wouldn't cut--tried it on my face--it made me cry--gave it a -minute stropping on my hand, and my land, what an edge she had! we thought we knew what sharp razors were when we were tramping in switzerland, but it was a mistake--they were dull beside this old thursday razor of mine--which i mean to name thursday october christian, in gratitude. i took my whetstone, and in minutes i put two more of my razors in splendid condition--but i leave them in the box--i never use any but thursday o. c., and shan't till its edge is gone--and then i'll know how to restore it without any delay. we all go to paris next thursday--address, monroe & co., bankers. with love ys ever mark. in paris they found pleasant quarters at the hotel normandy, but it was a chilly, rainy spring, and the travelers gained a rather poor impression of the french capital. mark twain's work did not go well, at first, because of the noises of the street. but then he found a quieter corner in the hotel and made better progress. in a brief note to aldrich he said: “i sleep like a lamb and write like a lion--i mean the kind of a lion that writes--if any such.” he expected to finish the book in six weeks; that is to say, before returning to america. he was looking after its illustrations himself, and a letter to frank bliss, of the american publishing company, refers to the frontpiece, which, from time to time, has caused question as to its origin. to bliss he says: “it is a thing which i manufactured by pasting a popular comic picture into the middle of a celebrated biblical one--shall attribute it to titian. it needs to be engraved by a master.” the weather continued bad in france and they left there in july to find it little better in england. they had planned a journey to scotland to visit doctor brown, whose health was not very good. in after years mark twain blamed himself harshly for not making the trip, which he declared would have meant so much to mrs. clemens. he had forgotten by that time the real reasons for not going--the continued storms and uncertainty of trains (which made it barely possible for them to reach liverpool in time for their sailing-date), and with characteristic self-reproach vowed that only perversity and obstinacy on his part had prevented the journey to scotland. from liverpool, on the eve of sailing, he sent doctor brown a good-by word. ***** to dr. john brown, in edinburgh: washington hotel, lime street, liverpool. aug. ( ) my dear mr. brown,--during all the months we have been spending on the continent, we have been promising ourselves a sight of you as our latest and most prized delight in a foreign land--but our hope has failed, our plan has miscarried. one obstruction after another intruded itself, and our short sojourn of three or four weeks on english soil was thus frittered gradually away, and we were at last obliged to give up the idea of seeing you at all. it is a great disappointment, for we wanted to show you how much “megalopis” has grown (she is now) and what a fine creature her sister is, and how prettily they both speak german. there are six persons in my party, and they are as difficult to cart around as nearly any other menagerie would be. my wife and miss spaulding are along, and you may imagine how they take to heart this failure of our long promised edinburgh trip. we never even wrote you, because we were always so sure, from day to day, that our affairs would finally so shape themselves as to let us get to scotland. but no,--everything went wrong we had only flying trips here and there in place of the leisurely ones which we had planned. we arrived in liverpool an hour ago very tired, and have halted at this hotel (by the advice of misguided friends)--and if my instinct and experience are worth anything, it is the very worst hotel on earth, without any exception. we shall move to another hotel early in the morning to spend to-morrow. we sail for america next day in the “gallic.” we all join in the sincerest love to you, and in the kindest remembrance to “jock”--[son of doctor brown.]--and your sister. truly yours, s. l. clemens. it was september , , that mark twain returned to america by the steamer gallic. in the seventeen months of his absence he had taken on a “traveled look” and had added gray hairs. a new york paper said of his arrival that he looked older than when he went to germany, and that his hair had turned quite gray. mark twain had not finished his book of travel in paris--in fact, it seemed to him far from complete--and he settled down rather grimly to work on it at quarry farm. when, after a few days no word of greeting came from howells, clemens wrote to ask if he were dead or only sleeping. howells hastily sent a line to say that he had been sleeping “the sleep of a torpid conscience. i will feign that i did not know where to write you; but i love you and all of yours, and i am tremendously glad that you are home again. when and where shall we meet? have you come home with your pockets full of atlantic papers?” clemens, toiling away at his book, was, as usual, not without the prospect of other plans. orion, as literary material, never failed to excite him. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: elmira, sept. , . my dear howells,--when and where? here on the farm would be an elegant place to meet, but of course you cannot come so far. so we will say hartford or belmont, about the beginning of november. the date of our return to hartford is uncertain, but will be three or four weeks hence, i judge. i hope to finish my book here before migrating. i think maybe i've got some atlantic stuff in my head, but there's none in ms, i believe. say--a friend of mine wants to write a play with me, i to furnish the broad-comedy cuss. i don't know anything about his ability, but his letter serves to remind me of our old projects. if you haven't used orion or old wakeman, don't you think you and i can get together and grind out a play with one of those fellows in it? orion is a field which grows richer and richer the more he mulches it with each new top-dressing of religion or other guano. drop me an immediate line about this, won't you? i imagine i see orion on the stage, always gentle, always melancholy, always changing his politics and religion, and trying to reform the world, always inventing something, and losing a limb by a new kind of explosion at the end of each of the four acts. poor old chap, he is good material. i can imagine his wife or his sweetheart reluctantly adopting each of his new religious in turn, just in time to see him waltz into the next one and leave her isolated once more. (mem. orion's wife has followed him into the outer darkness, after years' rabid membership in the presbyterian church.) well, with the sincerest and most abounding love to you and yours, from all this family, i am, yrs ever mark. the idea of the play interested howells, but he had twinges of conscience in the matter of using orion as material. he wrote: “more than once i have taken the skeleton of that comedy of ours and viewed it with tears..... i really have a compunction or two about helping to put your brother into drama. you can say that he is your brother, to do what you like with him, but the alien hand might inflict an incurable hurt on his tender heart.” as a matter of fact, orion clemens had a keen appreciation of his own shortcomings, and would have enjoyed himself in a play as much as any observer of it. indeed, it is more than likely that he would have been pleased at the thought of such distinguished dramatization. from the next letter one might almost conclude that he had received a hint of this plan, and was bent upon supplying rich material. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: elmira, oct. ' . my dear howells,--since my return, the mail facilities have enabled orion to keep me informed as to his intentions. twenty-eight days ago it was his purpose to complete a work aimed at religion, the preface to which he had already written. afterward he began to sell off his furniture, with the idea of hurrying to leadville and tackling silver-mining--threw up his law den and took in his sign. then he wrote to chicago and st. louis newspapers asking for a situation as “paragrapher”--enclosing a taste of his quality in the shape of two stanzas of “humorous rhymes.” by a later mail on the same day he applied to new york and hartford insurance companies for copying to do. however, it would take too long to detail all his projects. they comprise a removal to south-west missouri; application for a reporter's berth on a keokuk paper; application for a compositor's berth on a st. louis paper; a re-hanging of his attorney's sign, “though it only creaks and catches no flies;” but last night's letter informs me that he has retackled the religious question, hired a distant den to write in, applied to my mother for $ to re-buy his furniture, which has advanced in value since the sale--purposes buying $ worth of books necessary to his labors which he had previously been borrowing, and his first chapter is already on its way to me for my decision as to whether it has enough ungodliness in it or not. poor orion! your letter struck me while i was meditating a project to beguile you, and john hay and joe twichell, into a descent upon chicago which i dream of making, to witness the re-union of the great commanders of the western army corps on the th of next month. my sluggish soul needs a fierce upstirring, and if it would not get it when grant enters the meeting place i must doubtless “lay” for the final resurrection. can you and hay go? at the same time, confound it, i doubt if i can go myself, for this book isn't done yet. but i would give a heap to be there. i mean to heave some holiness into the hartford primaries when i go back; and if there was a solitary office in the land which majestic ignorance and incapacity, coupled with purity of heart, could fill, i would run for it. this naturally reminds me of bret harte--but let him pass. we propose to leave here for new york oct. , reaching hartford th or th. if, upon reflection, you howellses find, you can stop over here on your way, i wish you would do it, and telegraph me. getting pretty hungry to see you. i had an idea that this was your shortest way home, but like as not my geography is crippled again--it usually is. yrs ever mark. the “reunion of the great commanders,” mentioned in the foregoing, was a welcome to general grant after his journey around the world. grant's trip had been one continuous ovation--a triumphal march. in ' most of his old commanders were still alive, and they had planned to assemble in chicago to do him honor. a presidential year was coming on, but if there was anything political in the project there were no surface indications. mark twain, once a confederate soldier, had long since been completely “desouthernized”--at least to the point where he felt that the sight of old comrades paying tribute to the union commander would stir his blood as perhaps it had not been stirred, even in that earlier time, when that same commander had chased him through the missouri swamps. grant, indeed, had long since become a hero to mark twain, though it is highly unlikely that clemens favored the idea of a third term. some days following the preceding letter an invitation came for him to be present at the chicago reunion; but by this time he had decided not to go. the letter he wrote has been preserved. ***** to gen. william e. strong, in chicago: farmington avenue, hartford. oct. , . gen. wm. e. strong, ch'm, and gentlemen of the committee: i have been hoping during several weeks that it might be my good fortune to receive an invitation to be present on that great occasion in chicago; but now that my desire is accomplished my business matters have so shaped themselves as to bar me from being so far from home in the first half of november. it is with supreme regret that i lost this chance, for i have not had a thorough stirring up for some years, and i judged that if i could be in the banqueting hall and see and hear the veterans of the army of the tennessee at the moment that their old commander entered the room, or rose in his place to speak, my system would get the kind of upheaval it needs. general grant's progress across the continent is of the marvelous nature of the returning napoleon's progress from grenoble to paris; and as the crowning spectacle in the one case was the meeting with the old guard, so, likewise, the crowning spectacle in the other will be our great captain's meeting with his old guard--and that is the very climax which i wanted to witness. besides, i wanted to see the general again, any way, and renew the acquaintance. he would remember me, because i was the person who did not ask him for an office. however, i consume your time, and also wander from the point--which is, to thank you for the courtesy of your invitation, and yield up my seat at the table to some other guest who may possibly grace it better, but will certainly not appreciate its privileges more, than i should. with great respect, i am, gentlemen, very truly yours, s. l. clemens. private:--i beg to apologize for my delay, gentlemen, but the card of invitation went to elmira, n. y. and hence has only just now reached me. this letter was not sent. he reconsidered and sent an acceptance, agreeing to speak, as the committee had requested. certainly there was something picturesque in the idea of the missouri private who had been chased for a rainy fortnight through the swamps of ralls county being selected now to join in welcome to his ancient enemy. the great reunion was to be something more than a mere banquet. it would continue for several days, with processions, great assemblages, and much oratory. mark twain arrived in chicago in good season to see it all. three letters to mrs. clemens intimately present his experiences: his enthusiastic enjoyment and his own personal triumph. the first was probably written after the morning of his arrival. the doctor jackson in it was dr. a. reeves jackson, the guide-dismaying “doctor” of innocents abroad. ***** to mrs. clemens, in hartford: palmer house, chicago, nov. . livy darling, i am getting a trifle leg-weary. dr. jackson called and dragged me out of bed at noon, yesterday, and then went off. i went down stairs and was introduced to some scores of people, and among them an elderly german gentleman named raster, who said his wife owed her life to me--hurt in chicago fire and lay menaced with death a long time, but the innocents abroad kept her mind in a cheerful attitude, and so, with the doctor's help for the body she pulled through.... they drove me to dr. jackson's and i had an hour's visit with mrs. jackson. started to walk down michigan avenue, got a few steps on my way and met an erect, soldierly looking young gentleman who offered his hand; said, “mr. clemens, i believe--i wish to introduce myself--you were pointed out to me yesterday as i was driving down street--my name is grant.” “col. fred grant?” “yes. my house is not ten steps away, and i would like you to come and have a talk and a pipe, and let me introduce my wife.” so we turned back and entered the house next to jackson's and talked something more than an hour and smoked many pipes and had a sociable good time. his wife is very gentle and intelligent and pretty, and they have a cunning little girl nearly as big as bay but only three years old. they wanted me to come in and spend an evening, after the banquet, with them and gen. grant, after this grand pow-wow is over, but i said i was going home friday. then they asked me to come friday afternoon, when they and the general will receive a few friends, and i said i would. col. grant said he and gen. sherman used the innocents abroad as their guide book when they were on their travels. i stepped in next door and took dr. jackson to the hotel and we played billiards from to . p.m. and then went to a beer-mill to meet some twenty chicago journalists--talked, sang songs and made speeches till o'clock this morning. nobody got in the least degree “under the influence,” and we had a pleasant time. read awhile in bed, slept till , shaved, went to breakfast at noon, and by mistake got into the servants' hall. i remained there and breakfasted with twenty or thirty male and female servants, though i had a table to myself. a temporary structure, clothed and canopied with flags, has been erected at the hotel front, and connected with the second-story windows of a drawing-room. it was for gen. grant to stand on and review the procession. sixteen persons, besides reporters, had tickets for this place, and a seventeenth was issued for me. i was there, looking down on the packed and struggling crowd when gen. grant came forward and was saluted by the cheers of the multitude and the waving of ladies' handkerchiefs--for the windows and roofs of all neighboring buildings were massed full of life. gen. grant bowed to the people two or three times, then approached my side of the platform and the mayor pulled me forward and introduced me. it was dreadfully conspicuous. the general said a word or so--i replied, and then said, “but i'll step back, general, i don't want to interrupt your speech.” “but i'm not going to make any--stay where you are--i'll get you to make it for me.” general sherman came on the platform wearing the uniform of a full general, and you should have heard the cheers. gen. logan was going to introduce me, but i didn't want any more conspicuousness. when the head of the procession passed it was grand to see sheridan, in his military cloak and his plumed chapeau, sitting as erect and rigid as a statue on his immense black horse--by far the most martial figure i ever saw. and the crowd roared again. it was chilly, and gen. deems lent me his overcoat until night. he came a few minutes ago-- . p.m., and got it, but brought gen. willard, who lent me his for the rest of my stay, and will get another for himself when he goes home to dinner. mine is much too heavy for this warm weather. i have a seat on the stage at haverley's theatre, tonight, where the army of the tennessee will receive gen. grant, and where gen. sherman will make a speech. at midnight i am to attend a meeting of the owl club. i love you ever so much, my darling, and am hoping to get a word from you yet. saml. following the procession, which he describes, came the grand ceremonies of welcome at haverley's theatre. the next letter is written the following morning, or at least soiree time the following day, after a night of ratification. ***** to mrs. clemens, in hartford: chicago, nov. , ' . livy darling, it was a great time. there were perhaps thirty people on the stage of the theatre, and i think i never sat elbow-to-elbow with so many historic names before. grant, sherman, sheridan, schofield, pope, logan, augur, and so on. what an iron man grant is! he sat facing the house, with his right leg crossed over his left and his right boot-sole tilted up at an angle, and his left hand and arm reposing on the arm of his chair--you note that position? well, when glowing references were made to other grandees on the stage, those grandees always showed a trifle of nervous consciousness--and as these references came frequently, the nervous change of position and attitude were also frequent. but grant!--he was under a tremendous and ceaseless bombardment of praise and gratulation, but as true as i'm sitting here he never moved a muscle of his body for a single instant, during minutes! you could have played him on a stranger for an effigy. perhaps he never would have moved, but at last a speaker made such a particularly ripping and blood-stirring remark about him that the audience rose and roared and yelled and stamped and clapped an entire minute--grant sitting as serene as ever--when gen. sherman stepped to him, laid his hand affectionately on his shoulder, bent respectfully down and whispered in his ear. gen. grant got up and bowed, and the storm of applause swelled into a hurricane. he sat down, took about the same position and froze to it till by and by there was another of those deafening and protracted roars, when sherman made him get up and bow again. he broke up his attitude once more--the extent of something more than a hair's breadth--to indicate me to sherman when the house was keeping up a determined and persistent call for me, and poor bewildered sherman, (who did not know me), was peering abroad over the packed audience for me, not knowing i was only three feet from him and most conspicuously located, (gen. sherman was chairman.) one of the most illustrious individuals on that stage was “ole abe,” the historic war eagle. he stood on his perch--the old savage-eyed rascal--three or four feet behind gen. sherman, and as he had been in nearly every battle that was mentioned by the orators his soul was probably stirred pretty often, though he was too proud to let on. read logan's bosh, and try to imagine a burly and magnificent indian, in general's uniform, striking a heroic attitude and getting that stuff off in the style of a declaiming school-boy. please put the enclosed scraps in the drawer and i will scrap-book them. i only staid at the owl club till this morning and drank little or nothing. went to sleep without whisky. ich liebe dish. saml. but it is in the third letter that we get the climax. on the same day he wrote a letter to howells, which, in part, is very similar in substance and need not be included here. a paragraph, however, must not be omitted. “imagine what it was like to see a bullet-shredded old battle-flag reverently unfolded to the gaze of a thousand middle-aged soldiers, most of whom hadn't seen it since they saw it advancing over victorious fields, when they were in their prime. and imagine what it was like when grant, their first commander, stepped into view while they were still going mad over the flag, and then right in the midst of it all somebody struck up, 'when we were marching through georgia.' well, you should have heard the thousand voices lift that chorus and seen the tears stream down. if i live a hundred years i shan't ever forget these things, nor be able to talk about them.... grand times, my boy, grand times!” at the great banquet mark twain's speech had been put last on the program, to hold the house. he had been invited to respond to the toast of “the ladies,” but had replied that he had already responded to that toast more than once. there was one class of the community, he said, commonly overlooked on these occasions--the babies--he would respond to that toast. in his letter to howells he had not been willing to speak freely of his personal triumph, but to mrs. clemens he must tell it all, and with that child-like ingenuousness which never failed him to his last day. ***** to mrs. clemens, in hartford: chicago, nov. ' . a little after in the morning. i've just come to my room, livy darling, i guess this was the memorable night of my life. by george, i never was so stirred since i was born. i heard four speeches which i can never forget. one by emory storrs, one by gen. vilas (o, wasn't it wonderful!) one by gen. logan (mighty stirring), one by somebody whose name escapes me, and one by that splendid old soul, col. bob ingersoll,--oh, it was just the supremest combination of english words that was ever put together since the world began. my soul, how handsome he looked, as he stood on that table, in the midst of those shouting men, and poured the molten silver from his lips! lord, what an organ is human speech when it is played by a master! all these speeches may look dull in print, but how the lightning glared around them when they were uttered, and how the crowd roared in response! it was a great night, a memorable night. i am so richly repaid for my journey--and how i did wish with all my whole heart that you were there to be lifted into the very seventh heaven of enthusiasm, as i was. the army songs, the military music, the crashing applause--lord bless me, it was unspeakable. out of compliment they placed me last in the list--no. --i was to “hold the crowd”--and bless my life i was in awful terror when no. . rose, at a o'clock this morning and killed all the enthusiasm by delivering the flattest, insipidest, silliest of all responses to “woman” that ever a weary multitude listened to. then gen. sherman (chairman) announced my toast, and the crowd gave me a good round of applause as i mounted on top of the dinner table, but it was only on account of my name, nothing more--they were all tired and wretched. they let my first sentence go in silence, till i paused and added “we stand on common ground”--then they burst forth like a hurricane and i saw that i had them! from that time on, i stopped at the end of each sentence, and let the tornado of applause and laughter sweep around me--and when i closed with “and if the child is but the prophecy of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded,” i say it who oughtn't to say it, the house came down with a crash. for two hours and a half, now, i've been shaking hands and listening to congratulations. gen. sherman said, “lord bless you, my boy, i don't know how you do it--it's a secret that's beyond me--but it was great--give me your hand again.” and do you know, gen. grant sat through fourteen speeches like a graven image, but i fetched him! i broke him up, utterly! he told me he laughed till the tears came and every bone in his body ached. (and do you know, the biggest part of the success of the speech lay in the fact that the audience saw that for once in his life he had been knocked out of his iron serenity.) bless your soul, 'twas immense. i never was so proud in my life. lots and lots of people--hundreds i might say--told me my speech was the triumph of the evening--which was a lie. ladies, tom, dick and harry--even the policemen--captured me in the halls and shook hands, and scores of army officers said “we shall always be grateful to you for coming.” general pope came to bunt me up--i was afraid to speak to him on that theatre stage last night, thinking it might be presumptuous to tackle a man so high up in military history. gen. schofield, and other historic men, paid their compliments. sheridan was ill and could not come, but i'm to go with a general of his staff and see him before i go to col. grant's. gen. augur--well, i've talked with them all, received invitations from them all--from people living everywhere--and as i said before, it's a memorable night. i wouldn't have missed it for anything in the world. but my sakes, you should have heard ingersoll's speech on that table! half an hour ago he ran across me in the crowded halls and put his arms about me and said “mark, if i live a hundred years, i'll always be grateful for your speech--lord what a supreme thing it was.” but i told him it wasn't any use to talk, he had walked off with the honors of that occasion by something of a majority. bully boy is ingersoll--traveled with him in the cars the other day, and you can make up your mind we had a good time. of course i forgot to go and pay for my hotel car and so secure it, but the army officers told me an hour ago to rest easy, they would go at once, at this unholy hour of the night and compel the railways to do their duty by me, and said “you don't need to request the army of the tennessee to do your desires--you can command its services.” well, i bummed around that banquet hall from in the evening till in the morning, talking with people and listening to speeches, and i never ate a single bite or took a sup of anything but ice water, so if i seem excited now, it is the intoxication of supreme enthusiasm. by george, it was a grand night, a historical night. and now it is a quarter past a.m.--so good bye and god bless you and the bays,--[family word for babies]--my darlings saml. show it to joe if you want to--i saw some of his friends here. mark twain's admiration for robert ingersoll was very great, and we may believe that he was deeply impressed by the chicago speech, when we find him, a few days later, writing to ingersoll for a perfect copy to read to a young girls' club in hartford. ingersoll sent the speech, also some of his books, and the next letter is mark twain's acknowledgment. ***** to col. robert g. ingersoll: hartford, dec. . my dear ingersoll,--thank you most heartily for the books--i am devouring them--they have found a hungry place, and they content it and satisfy it to a miracle. i wish i could hear you speak these splendid chapters before a great audience--to read them by myself and hear the boom of the applause only in the ear of my imagination, leaves a something wanting--and there is also a still greater lack, your manner, and voice, and presence. the chicago speech arrived an hour too late, but i was all right anyway, for i found that my memory had been able to correct all the errors. i read it to the saturday club (of young girls) and told them to remember that it was doubtful if its superior existed in our language. truly yours, s. l. clemens. the reader may remember mark twain's whittier dinner speech of , and its disastrous effects. now, in , there was to be another atlantic gathering: a breakfast to dr. oliver wendell holmes, to which clemens was invited. he was not eager to accept; it would naturally recall memories of two years before, but being urged by both howells and warner, he agreed to attend if they would permit him to speak. mark twain never lacked courage and he wanted to redeem himself. to howells he wrote: ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hartford, nov. , . my dear howells,--if anybody talks, there, i shall claim the right to say a word myself, and be heard among the very earliest--else it would be confoundedly awkward for me--and for the rest, too. but you may read what i say, beforehand, and strike out whatever you choose. of course i thought it wisest not to be there at all; but warner took the opposite view, and most strenuously. speaking of johnny's conclusion to become an outlaw, reminds me of susie's newest and very earnest longing--to have crooked teeth and glasses--“like mamma.” i would like to look into a child's head, once, and see what its processes are. yrs ever, s. l. clemens. the matter turned out well. clemens, once more introduced by howells--this time conservatively, it may be said--delivered a delicate and fitting tribute to doctor holmes, full of graceful humor and grateful acknowledgment, the kind of speech he should have given at the whittier dinner of two years before. no reference was made to his former disaster, and this time he came away covered with glory, and fully restored in his self-respect. xx. letters of , chiefly to howells. “the prince and the pauper.” mark twain mugwump society. the book of travel,--[a tramp abroad.]--which mark twain had hoped to finish in paris, and later in elmira, for some reason would not come to an end. in december, in hartford, he was still working on it, and he would seem to have finished it, at last, rather by a decree than by any natural process of authorship. this was early in january, . to howells he reports his difficulties, and his drastic method of ending them. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hartford, jan. , ' . my dear howells,--am waiting for patrick to come with the carriage. mrs. clemens and i are starting (without the children) to stay indefinitely in elmira. the wear and tear of settling the house broke her down, and she has been growing weaker and weaker for a fortnight. all that time--in fact ever since i saw you--i have been fighting a life-and-death battle with this infernal book and hoping to get done some day. i required pages of ms, and i have written near since i saw you--and tore it all up except . this i was about to tear up yesterday and begin again, when mrs. perkins came up to the billiard room and said, “you will never get any woman to do the thing necessary to save her life by mere persuasion; you see you have wasted your words for three weeks; it is time to use force; she must have a change; take her home and leave the children here.” i said, “if there is one death that is painfuller than another, may i get it if i don't do that thing.” so i took the pages to bliss and told him that was the very last line i should ever write on this book. (a book which required pages of ms, and i have written nearer four thousand, first and last.) i am as soary (and flighty) as a rocket, to-day, with the unutterable joy of getting that old man of the sea off my back, where he has been roosting for more than a year and a half. next time i make a contract before writing the book, may i suffer the righteous penalty and be burnt, like the injudicious believer. i am mighty glad you are done your book (this is from a man who, above all others, feels how much that sentence means) and am also mighty glad you have begun the next (this is also from a man who knows the felicity of that, and means straightway to enjoy it.) the undiscovered starts off delightfully--i have read it aloud to mrs. c. and we vastly enjoyed it. well, time's about up--must drop a line to aldrich. yrs ever, mark. in a letter which mark twain wrote to his brother orion at this period we get the first hint of a venture which was to play an increasingly important part in the hartford home and fortunes during the next ten or a dozen years. this was the type-setting machine investment, which, in the end, all but wrecked mark twain's finances. there is but a brief mention of it in the letter to orion, and the letter itself is not worth preserving, but as references to the “machine” appear with increasing frequency, it seems proper to record here its first mention. in the same letter he suggests to his brother that he undertake an absolutely truthful autobiography, a confession in which nothing is to be withheld. he cites the value of casanova's memories, and the confessions of rousseau. of course, any literary suggestion from “brother sam” was gospel to orion, who began at once piling up manuscript at a great rate. meantime, mark twain himself, having got 'a tramp abroad' on the presses, was at work with enthusiasm on a story begun nearly three years before at quarry farm-a story for children-its name, as he called it then, “the little prince and the little pauper.” he was presently writing to howells his delight in the new work. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hartford, mch. , ' . my dear howells,--... i take so much pleasure in my story that i am loth to hurry, not wanting to get it done. did i ever tell you the plot of it? it begins at a.m., jan. , , seventeen and a half hours before henry viii's death, by the swapping of clothes and place, between the prince of wales and a pauper boy of the same age and countenance (and half as much learning and still more genius and imagination) and after that, the rightful small king has a rough time among tramps and ruffians in the country parts of kent, whilst the small bogus king has a gilded and worshipped and dreary and restrained and cussed time of it on the throne--and this all goes on for three weeks--till the midst of the coronation grandeurs in westminster abbey, feb. , when the ragged true king forces his way in but cannot prove his genuineness--until the bogus king, by a remembered incident of the first day is able to prove it for him--whereupon clothes are changed and the coronation proceeds under the new and rightful conditions. my idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the king himself and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them applied to others--all of which is to account for certain mildnesses which distinguished edward vi's reign from those that preceded and followed it. imagine this fact--i have even fascinated mrs. clemens with this yarn for youth. my stuff generally gets considerable damning with faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other way. she is become the horseleech's daughter and my mill doesn't grind fast enough to suit her. this is no mean triumph, my dear sir. last night, for the first time in ages, we went to the theatre--to see yorick's love. the magnificence of it is beyond praise. the language is so beautiful, the passion so fine, the plot so ingenious, the whole thing so stirring, so charming, so pathetic! but i will clip from the courant--it says it right. and what a good company it is, and how like live people they all acted! the “thee's” and the “thou's” had a pleasant sound, since it is the language of the prince and the pauper. you've done the country a service in that admirable work.... yrs ever, mark. the play, “yorick's love,” mentioned in this letter, was one which howells had done for lawrence barrett. onion clemens, meantime, was forwarding his manuscript, and for once seems to have won his brother's approval, so much so that mark twain was willing, indeed anxious, that howells should run the “autobiography” in the atlantic. we may imagine how onion prized the words of commendation which follow: ***** to orion clemens: may , ' . my dear brother,--it is a model autobiography. continue to develop your character in the same gradual inconspicuous and apparently unconscious way. the reader, up to this time, may have his doubts, perhaps, but he can't say decidedly, “this writer is not such a simpleton as he has been letting on to be.” keep him in that state of mind. if, when you shall have finished, the reader shall say, “the man is an ass, but i really don't know whether he knows it or not,” your work will be a triumph. stop re-writing. i saw places in your last batch where re-writing had done formidable injury. do not try to find those places, else you will mar them further by trying to better them. it is perilous to revise a book while it is under way. all of us have injured our books in that foolish way. keep in mind what i told you--when you recollect something which belonged in an earlier chapter, do not go back, but jam it in where you are. discursiveness does not hurt an autobiography in the least. i have penciled the ms here and there, but have not needed to make any criticisms or to knock out anything. the elder bliss has heart disease badly, and thenceforth his life hangs upon a thread. yr bro sam. but howells could not bring himself to print so frank a confession as orion had been willing to make. “it wrung my heart,” he said, “and i felt haggard after i had finished it. the writer's soul is laid bare; it is shocking.” howells added that the best touches in it were those which made one acquainted with the writer's brother; that is to say, mark twain, and that these would prove valuable material hereafter--a true prophecy, for mark twain's early biography would have lacked most of its vital incident, and at least half of its background, without those faithful chapters, fortunately preserved. had onion continued, as he began, the work might have proved an important contribution to literature, but he went trailing off into by-paths of theology and discussion where the interest was lost. there were, perhaps, as many as two thousand pages of it, which few could undertake to read. mark twain's mind was always busy with plans and inventions, many of them of serious intent, some semi-serious, others of a purely whimsical character. once he proposed a “modest club,” of which the first and main qualification for membership was modesty. “at present,” he wrote, “i am the only member; and as the modesty required must be of a quite aggravated type, the enterprise did seem for a time doomed to stop dead still with myself, for lack of further material; but upon reflection i have come to the conclusion that you are eligible. therefore, i have held a meeting and voted to offer you the distinction of membership. i do not know that we can find any others, though i have had some thought of hay, warner, twichell, aldrich, osgood, fields, higginson, and a few more --together with mrs. howells, mrs. clemens, and certain others of the sex.” howells replied that the only reason he had for not joining the modest club was that he was too modest--too modest to confess his modesty. “if i could get over this difficulty i should like to join, for i approve highly of the club and its object.... it ought to be given an annual dinner at the public expense. if you think i am not too modest you may put my name down and i will try to think the same of you. mrs. howells applauded the notion of the club from the very first. she said that she knew one thing: that she was modest enough, anyway. her manner of saying it implied that the other persons you had named were not, and created a painful impression in my mind. i have sent your letter and the rules to hay, but i doubt his modesty. he will think he has a right to belong to it as much as you or i; whereas, other people ought only to be admitted on sufferance.” our next letter to howells is, in the main, pure foolery, but we get in it a hint what was to become in time one of mask twain's strongest interests, the matter of copyright. he had both a personal and general interest in the subject. his own books were constantly pirated in canada, and the rights of foreign authors were not respected in america. we have already seen how he had drawn a petition which holmes, lowell, longfellow, and others were to sign, and while nothing had come of this plan he had never ceased to formulate others. yet he hesitated when he found that the proposed protection was likely to work a hardship to readers of the poorer class. once he wrote: “my notions have mightily changed lately.... i can buy a lot of the copyright classics, in paper, at from three to thirty cents apiece. these things must find their way into the very kitchens and hovels of the country..... and even if the treaty will kill canadian piracy, and thus save me an average of $ , a year, i am down on it anyway, and i'd like cussed well to write an article opposing the treaty.” ***** to w. d. howells, in belmont, mass.: thursday, june th, . my dear howells,--there you stick, at belmont, and now i'm going to washington for a few days; and of course, between you and providence that visit is going to get mixed, and you'll have been here and gone again just about the time i get back. bother it all, i wanted to astonish you with a chapter or two from orion's latest book--not the seventeen which he has begun in the last four months, but the one which he began last week. last night, when i went to bed, mrs. clemens said, “george didn't take the cat down to the cellar--rosa says he has left it shut up in the conservatory.” so i went down to attend to abner (the cat.) about in the morning mrs. c. woke me and said, “i do believe i hear that cat in the drawing-room--what did you do with him?” i answered up with the confidence of a man who has managed to do the right thing for once, and said “i opened the conservatory doors, took the library off the alarm, and spread everything open, so that there wasn't any obstruction between him and the cellar.” language wasn't capable of conveying this woman's disgust. but the sense of what she said, was, “he couldn't have done any harm in the conservatory--so you must go and make the entire house free to him and the burglars, imagining that he will prefer the coal-bins to the drawing-room. if you had had mr. howells to help you, i should have admired but not been astonished, because i should know that together you would be equal to it; but how you managed to contrive such a stately blunder all by yourself, is what i cannot understand.” so, you see, even she knows how to appreciate our gifts. brisk times here.--saturday, these things happened: our neighbor chas. smith was stricken with heart disease, and came near joining the majority; my publisher, bliss, ditto, ditto; a neighbor's child died; neighbor whitmore's sixth child added to his five other cases of measles; neighbor niles sent for, and responded; susie warner down, abed; mrs. george warner threatened with death during several hours; her son frank, whilst imitating the marvels in barnum's circus bills, thrown from his aged horse and brought home insensible: warner's friend max yortzburgh, shot in the back by a locomotive and broken into distinct pieces and his life threatened; and mrs. clemens, after writing all these cheerful things to clara spaulding, taken at midnight, and if the doctor had not been pretty prompt the contemplated clemens would have called before his apartments were ready. however, everybody is all right, now, except yortzburg, and he is mending--that is, he is being mended. i knocked off, during these stirring times, and don't intend to go to work again till we go away for the summer, or weeks hence. so i am writing to you not because i have anything to say, but because you don't have to answer and i need something to do this afternoon..... i have a letter from a congressman this morning, and he says congress couldn't be persuaded to bother about canadian pirates at a time like this when all legislation must have a political and presidential bearing, else congress won't look at it. so have changed my mind and my course; i go north, to kill a pirate. i must procure repose some way, else i cannot get down to work again. pray offer my most sincere and respectful approval to the president--is approval the proper word? i find it is the one i most value here in the household and seldomest get. with our affection to you both. yrs ever mark. it was always dangerous to send strangers with letters of introduction to mark twain. they were so apt to arrive at the wrong time, or to find him in the wrong mood. howells was willing to risk it, and that the result was only amusing instead of tragic is the best proof of their friendship. ***** to w. d. howells, in belmont, mass.: june , ' . well, old practical joker, the corpse of mr. x----has been here, and i have bedded it and fed it, and put down my work during hours and tried my level best to make it do something, or say something, or appreciate something--but no, it was worse than lazarus. a kind-hearted, well-meaning corpse was the boston young man, but lawsy bless me, horribly dull company. now, old man, unless you have great confidence in mr. x's judgment, you ought to make him submit his article to you before he prints it. for only think how true i was to you: every hour that he was here i was saying, gloatingly, “o g-- d--- you, when you are in bed and your light out, i will fix you” (meaning to kill him)...., but then the thought would follow--“no, howells sent him--he shall be spared, he shall be respected he shall travel hell-wards by his own route.” breakfast is frozen by this time, and mrs. clemens correspondingly hot. good bye. yrs ever, mark. “i did not expect you to ask that man to live with you,” howells answered. “what i was afraid of was that you would turn him out of doors, on sight, and so i tried to put in a good word for him. after this when i want you to board people, i'll ask you. i am sorry for your suffering. i suppose i have mostly lost my smell for bores; but yours is preternaturally keen. i shall begin to be afraid i bore you. (how does that make you feel?)” in a letter to twichell--a remarkable letter--when baby jean clemens was about a month old, we get a happy hint of conditions at quarry farm, and in the background a glimpse of mark twain's unfailing tragic reflection. ***** to rev. twichell, in hartford: quarry farm, aug. [' ]. dear old joe,--concerning jean clemens, if anybody said he “didn't see no pints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog,” i should think he was convicting himself of being a pretty poor sort of observer.... i will not go into details; it is not necessary; you will soon be in hartford, where i have already hired a hall; the admission fee will be but a trifle. it is curious to note the change in the stock-quotation of the affection board brought about by throwing this new security on the market. four weeks ago the children still put mamma at the head of the list right along, where she had always been. but now: jean mamma motley [a cat] fraulein [another] papa that is the way it stands, now mamma is become no. ; i have dropped from no. ., and am become no. . some time ago it used to be nip and tuck between me and the cats, but after the cats “developed” i didn't stand any more show. i've got a swollen ear; so i take advantage of it to lie abed most of the day, and read and smoke and scribble and have a good time. last evening livy said with deep concern, “o dear, i believe an abscess is forming in your ear.” i responded as the poet would have done if he had had a cold in the head-- “tis said that abscess conquers love, but o believe it not.” this made a coolness. been reading daniel webster's private correspondence. have read a hundred of his diffuse, conceited, “eloquent,” bathotic (or bathostic) letters written in that dim (no, vanished) past when he was a student; and lord, to think that this boy who is so real to me now, and so booming with fresh young blood and bountiful life, and sappy cynicisms about girls, has since climbed the alps of fame and stood against the sun one brief tremendous moment with the world's eyes upon him, and then--f-z-t-! where is he? why the only long thing, the only real thing about the whole shadowy business is the sense of the lagging dull and hoary lapse of time that has drifted by since then; a vast empty level, it seems, with a formless spectre glimpsed fitfully through the smoke and mist that lie along its remote verge. well, we are all getting along here first-rate; livy gains strength daily, and sits up a deal; the baby is five weeks old and--but no more of this; somebody may be reading this letter years hence. and so, my friend (you pitying snob, i mean, who are holding this yellow paper in your hand in ,) save yourself the trouble of looking further; i know how pathetically trivial our small concerns will seem to you, and i will not let your eye profane them. no, i keep my news; you keep your compassion. suffice it you to know, scoffer and ribald, that the little child is old and blind, now, and once more toothless; and the rest of us are shadows, these many, many years. yes, and your time cometh! mark. at the farm that year mark twain was working on the prince and the pauper, and, according to a letter to aldrich, brought it to an end september th. it is a pleasant letter, worth preserving. the book by aldrich here mentioned was 'the stillwater tragedy.' ***** to t. b. aldrich, in ponkapog, mass.: elmira, sept. , ' . my dear aldrich,--thank you ever so much for the book--i had already finished it, and prodigiously enjoyed it, in the periodical of the notorious howells, but it hits mrs. clemens just right, for she is having a reading holiday, now, for the first time in same months; so between-times, when the new baby is asleep and strengthening up for another attempt to take possession of this place, she is going to read it. her strong friendship for you makes her think she is going to like it. i finished a story yesterday, myself. i counted up and found it between sixty and eighty thousand words--about the size of your book. it is for boys and girls--been at work at it several years, off and on. i hope howells is enjoying his journey to the pacific. he wrote me that you and osgood were going, also, but i doubted it, believing he was in liquor when he wrote it. in my opinion, this universal applause over his book is going to land that man in a retreat inside of two months. i notice the papers say mighty fine things about your book, too. you ought to try to get into the same establishment with howells. but applause does not affect me--i am always calm--this is because i am used to it. well, good-bye, my boy, and good luck to you. mrs. clemens asks me to send her warmest regards to you and mrs. aldrich--which i do, and add those of yrs ever mark. while mark twain was a journalist in san francisco, there was a middle-aged man named soule, who had a desk near him on the morning call. soule was in those days highly considered as a poet by his associates, most of whom were younger and less gracefully poetic. but soule's gift had never been an important one. now, in his old age, he found his fame still local, and he yearned for wider recognition. he wished to have a volume of poems issued by a publisher of recognized standing. because mark twain had been one of soule's admirers and a warm friend in the old days, it was natural that soule should turn to him now, and equally natural that clemens should turn to howells. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: sunday, oct. ' . my dear howells,--here's a letter which i wrote you to san francisco the second time you didn't go there.... i told soule he needn't write you, but simply send the ms. to you. o dear, dear, it is dreadful to be an unrecognized poet. how wise it was in charles warren stoddard to take in his sign and go for some other calling while still young. i'm laying for that encyclopedical scotchman--and he'll need to lock the door behind him, when he comes in; otherwise when he hears my proposed tariff his skin will probably crawl away with him. he is accustomed to seeing the publisher impoverish the author--that spectacle must be getting stale to him--if he contracts with the undersigned he will experience a change in that programme that will make the enamel peel off his teeth for very surprise--and joy. no, that last is what mrs. clemens thinks--but it's not so. the proposed work is growing, mightily, in my estimation, day by day; and i'm not going to throw it away for any mere trifle. if i make a contract with the canny scot, i will then tell him the plan which you and i have devised (that of taking in the humor of all countries)--otherwise i'll keep it to myself, i think. why should we assist our fellowman for mere love of god? yrs ever mark. one wishes that howells might have found value enough in the verses of frank soule to recommend them to osgood. to clemens he wrote: “you have touched me in regard to him, and i will deal gently with his poetry. poor old fellow! i can imagine him, and how he must have to struggle not to be hard or sour.” the verdict, however, was inevitable. soule's graceful verses proved to be not poetry at all. no publisher of standing could afford to give them his imprint. the “encyclopedical scotchman” mentioned in the preceding letter was the publisher gebbie, who had a plan to engage howells and clemens to prepare some sort of anthology of the world's literature. the idea came to nothing, though the other plan mentioned--for a library of humor--in time grew into a book. mark twain's contracts with bliss for the publication of his books on the subscription plan had been made on a royalty basis, beginning with per cent. on 'the innocents abroad' increasing to per cent. on 'roughing it,' and to per cent. on later books. bliss had held that these later percentages fairly represented one half the profits. clemens, however, had never been fully satisfied, and his brother onion had more than once urged him to demand a specific contract on the half-profit basis. the agreement for the publication of 'a tramp abroad' was made on these terms. bliss died before clemens received his first statement of sales. whatever may have been the facts under earlier conditions, the statement proved to mark twain's satisfaction; at least, that the half-profit arrangement was to his advantage. it produced another result; it gave samuel clemens an excuse to place his brother onion in a position of independence. ***** to onion clemens, in keokuk, iowa: sunday, oct ' . my dear bro.,--bliss is dead. the aspect of the balance-sheet is enlightening. it reveals the fact, through my present contract, (which is for half the profits on the book above actual cost of paper, printing and binding,) that i have lost considerably by all this nonsense--sixty thousand dollars, i should say--and if bliss were alive i would stay with the concern and get it all back; for on each new book i would require a portion of that back pay; but as it is (this in the very strictest confidence,) i shall probably go to a new publisher or months hence, for i am afraid frank, with his poor health, will lack push and drive. out of the suspicions you bred in me years ago, has grown this result,--to wit, that i shall within the twelvemonth get $ , out of this “tramp” instead of $ , . twenty thousand dollars, after taxes and other expenses are stripped away, is worth to the investor about $ a month--so i shall tell mr. perkins to make your check that amount per month, hereafter, while our income is able to afford it. this ends the loan business; and hereafter you can reflect that you are living not on borrowed money but on money which you have squarely earned, and which has no taint or savor of charity about it--and you can also reflect that the money you have been receiving of me all these years is interest charged against the heavy bill which the next publisher will have to stand who gets a book of mine. jean got the stockings and is much obliged; mollie wants to know whom she most resembles, but i can't tell; she has blue eyes and brown hair, and three chins, and is very fat and happy; and at one time or another she has resembled all the different clemenses and langdons, in turn, that have ever lived. livy is too much beaten out with the baby, nights, to write, these times; and i don't know of anything urgent to say, except that a basket full of letters has accumulated in the days that i have been whooping and cursing over a cold in the head--and i must attack the pile this very minute. with love from us y aff sam $ enclosed. on the completion of the prince and pauper story, clemens had naturally sent it to howells for consideration. howells wrote: “i have read the two p's and i like it immensely, it begins well and it ends well.” he pointed out some things that might be changed or omitted, and added: “it is such a book as i would expect from you, knowing what a bottom of fury there is to your fun.” clemens had thought somewhat of publishing the story anonymously, in the fear that it would not be accepted seriously over his own signature. the “bull story” referred to in the next letter is the one later used in the joan of arc book, the story told joan by “uncle laxart,” how he rode a bull to a funeral. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: xmas eve, . my dear howells,--i was prodigiously delighted with what you said about the book--so, on the whole, i've concluded to publish intrepidly, instead of concealing the authorship. i shall leave out that bull story. i wish you had gone to new york. the company was small, and we had a first-rate time. smith's an enjoyable fellow. i liked barrett, too. and the oysters were as good as the rest of the company. it was worth going there to learn how to cook them. next day i attended to business--which was, to introduce twichell to gen. grant and procure a private talk in the interest of the chinese educational mission here in the u. s. well, it was very funny. joe had been sitting up nights building facts and arguments together into a mighty and unassailable array and had studied them out and got them by heart--all with the trembling half-hearted hope of getting grant to add his signature to a sort of petition to the viceroy of china; but grant took in the whole situation in a jiffy, and before joe had more than fairly got started, the old man said: “i'll write the viceroy a letter--a separate letter--and bring strong reasons to bear upon him; i know him well, and what i say will have weight with him; i will attend to it right away. no, no thanks--i shall be glad to do it--it will be a labor of love.” so all joe's laborious hours were for naught! it was as if he had come to borrow a dollar, and been offered a thousand before he could unfold his case.... but it's getting dark. merry christmas to all of you. yrs ever, mark. the chinese educational mission, mentioned in the foregoing, was a thriving hartford institution, projected eight years before by a yale graduate named yung wing. the mission was now threatened, and yung wing, knowing the high honor in which general grant was held in china, believed that through him it might be saved. twichell, of course, was deeply concerned and naturally overjoyed at grant's interest. a day or two following the return to hartford, clemens received a letter from general grant, in which he wrote: “li hung chang is the most powerful and most influential chinaman in his country. he professed great friendship for me when i was there, and i have had assurances of the same thing since. i hope, if he is strong enough with his government, that the decision to withdraw the chinese students from this country may be changed.” but perhaps li hung chang was experiencing one of his partial eclipses just then, or possibly he was not interested, for the hartford mission did not survive. xxi. letters , to howells and others. assisting a young sculptor. literary plans. with all of mark twain's admiration for grant, he had opposed him as a third-term president and approved of the nomination of garfield. he had made speeches for garfield during the campaign just ended, and had been otherwise active in his support. upon garfield's election, however, he felt himself entitled to no special favor, and the single request which he preferred at length could hardly be classed as, personal, though made for a “personal friend.” ***** to president-elect james a. garfield, in washington: hartford, jany. , ' . gen. garfield dear sir,--several times since your election persons wanting office have asked me “to use my influence” with you in their behalf. to word it in that way was such a pleasant compliment to me that i never complied. i could not without exposing the fact that i hadn't any influence with you and that was a thing i had no mind to do. it seems to me that it is better to have a good man's flattering estimate of my influence--and to keep it--than to fool it away with trying to get him an office. but when my brother--on my wife's side--mr. charles j. langdon--late of the chicago convention--desires me to speak a word for mr. fred douglass, i am not asked “to use my influence” consequently i am not risking anything. so i am writing this as a simple citizen. i am not drawing on my fund of influence at all. a simple citizen may express a desire with all propriety, in the matter of a recommendation to office, and so i beg permission to hope that you will retain mr. douglass in his present office of marshall of the district of columbia, if such a course will not clash with your own preferences or with the expediencies and interest of your administration. i offer this petition with peculiar pleasure and strong desire, because i so honor this man's high and blemishless character and so admire his brave, long crusade for the liberties and elevation of his race. he is a personal friend of mine, but that is nothing to the point, his history would move me to say these things without that, and i feel them too. with great respect i am, general, yours truly, s. l. clemens. clemens would go out of his way any time to grant favor to the colored race. his childhood associations were partly accountable for this, but he also felt that the white man owed the negro a debt for generations of enforced bondage. he would lecture any time in a colored church, when he would as likely as not refuse point-blank to speak for a white congregation. once, in elmira, he received a request, poorly and none too politely phrased, to speak for one of the churches. he was annoyed and about to send a brief refusal, when mrs. clemens, who was present, said: “i think i know that church, and if so this preacher is a colored man; he does not know how to write a polished letter--how should he?” her husband's manner changed so suddenly that she added: “i will give you a motto, and it will be useful to you if you will adopt it: consider every man colored until he is proved white.” ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hartford, feb. , . my dear howells,--i go to west point with twichell tomorrow, but shall be back tuesday or wednesday; and then just as soon thereafter as you and mrs. howells and winny can come you will find us ready and most glad to see you--and the longer you can stay the gladder we shall be. i am not going to have a thing to do, but you shall work if you want to. on the evening of march th, i am going to read to the colored folk in the african church here (no whites admitted except such as i bring with me), and a choir of colored folk will sing jubilee songs. i count on a good time, and shall hope to have you folks there, and livy. i read in twichell's chapel friday night and had a most rattling high time--but the thing that went best of all was uncle remus's tar baby. i mean to try that on my dusky audience. they've all heard that tale from childhood--at least the older members have. i arrived home in time to make a most noble blunder--invited charley warner here (in livy's name) to dinner with the gerhardts, and told him livy had invited his wife by letter and by word of mouth also. i don't know where i got these impressions, but i came home feeling as one does who realizes that he has done a neat thing for once and left no flaws or loop-holes. well, livy said she had never told me to invite charley and she hadn't dreamed of inviting susy, and moreover there wasn't any dinner, but just one lean duck. but susy warner's intuitions were correct--so she choked off charley, and staid home herself--we waited dinner an hour and you ought to have seen that duck when he was done drying in the oven. mark. clemens and his wife were always privately assisting worthy and ambitious young people along the way of achievement. young actors were helped through dramatic schools; young men and women were assisted through college and to travel abroad. among others clemens paid the way of two colored students, one through a southern institution and another through the yale law school. the mention of the name of gerhardt in the preceding letter introduces the most important, or at least the most extensive, of these benefactions. the following letter gives the beginning of the story: ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: private and confidential. hartford, feb. , . my dear howells,--well, here is our romance. it happened in this way. one morning, a month ago--no, three weeks--livy, and clara spaulding and i were at breakfast, at a.m., and i was in an irritable mood, for the barber was up stairs waiting and his hot water getting cold, when the colored george returned from answering the bell and said: “there's a lady in the drawing-room wants to see you.” “a book agent!” says i, with heat. “i won't see her; i will die in my tracks, first.” then i got up with a soul full of rage, and went in there and bent scowling over that person, and began a succession of rude and raspy questions--and without even offering to sit down. not even the defendant's youth and beauty and (seeming) timidity were able to modify my savagery, for a time--and meantime question and answer were going on. she had risen to her feet with the first question; and there she stood, with her pretty face bent floorward whilst i inquired, but always with her honest eyes looking me in the face when it came her turn to answer. and this was her tale, and her plea-diffidently stated, but straight-forwardly; and bravely, and most winningly simply and earnestly: i put it in my own fashion, for i do not remember her words: mr. karl gerhardt, who works in pratt & whitney's machine shops, has made a statue in clay, and would i be so kind as to come and look at it, and tell him if there is any promise in it? he has none to go to, and he would be so glad. “o, dear me,” i said, “i don't know anything about art--there's nothing i could tell him.” but she went on, just as earnestly and as simply as before, with her plea--and so she did after repeated rebuffs; and dull as i am, even i began by and by to admire this brave and gentle persistence, and to perceive how her heart of hearts was in this thing, and how she couldn't give it up, but must carry her point. so at last i wavered, and promised in general terms that i would come down the first day that fell idle--and as i conducted her to the door, i tamed more and more, and said i would come during the very next week--“we shall be so glad--but--but, would you please come early in the week?--the statue is just finished and we are so anxious--and--and--we did hope you could come this week--and”--well, i came down another peg, and said i would come monday, as sure as death; and before i got to the dining room remorse was doing its work and i was saying to myself, “damnation, how can a man be such a hound? why didn't i go with her now?” yes, and how mean i should have felt if i had known that out of her poverty she had hired a hack and brought it along to convey me. but luckily for what was left of my peace of mind, i didn't know that. well, it appears that from here she went to charley warner's. there was a better light, there, and the eloquence of her face had a better chance to do its office. warner fought, as i had done; and he was in the midst of an article and very busy; but no matter, she won him completely. he laid aside his ms and said, “come, let us go and see your father's statue. that is--is he your father?” “no, he is my husband.” so this child was married, you see. this was a saturday. next day warner came to dinner and said “go!--go tomorrow--don't fail.” he was in love with the girl, and with her husband too, and said he believed there was merit in the statue. pretty crude work, maybe, but merit in it. patrick and i hunted up the place, next day; the girl saw us driving up, and flew down the stairs and received me. her quarters were the second story of a little wooden house--another family on the ground floor. the husband was at the machine shop, the wife kept no servant, she was there alone. she had a little parlor, with a chair or two and a sofa; and the artist-husband's hand was visible in a couple of plaster busts, one of the wife, and another of a neighbor's child; visible also in a couple of water colors of flowers and birds; an ambitious unfinished portrait of his wife in oils: some paint decorations on the pine mantel; and an excellent human ear, done in some plastic material at . then we went into the kitchen, and the girl flew around, with enthusiasm, and snatched rag after rag from a tall something in the corner, and presently there stood the clay statue, life size--a graceful girlish creature, nude to the waist, and holding up a single garment with one hand the expression attempted being a modified scare--she was interrupted when about to enter the bath. then this young wife posed herself alongside the image and so remained--a thing i didn't understand. but presently i did--then i said: “o, it's you!” “yes,” she said, “i was the model. he has no model but me. i have stood for this many and many an hour--and you can't think how it does tire one! but i don't mind it. he works all day at the shop; and then, nights and sundays he works on his statue as long as i can keep up.” she got a big chisel, to use as a lever, and between us we managed to twist the pedestal round and round, so as to afford a view of the statue from all points. well, sir, it was perfectly charming, this girl's innocence and purity---exhibiting her naked self, as it were, to a stranger and alone, and never once dreaming that there was the slightest indelicacy about the matter. and so there wasn't; but it will be many along day before i run across another woman who can do the like and show no trace of self-consciousness. well, then we sat down, and i took a smoke, and she told me all about her people in massachusetts--her father is a physician and it is an old and respectable family--(i am able to believe anything she says.) and she told me how “karl” is years old; and how he has had passionate longings all his life toward art, but has always been poor and obliged to struggle for his daily bread; and how he felt sure that if he could only have one or two lessons in-- “lessons? hasn't he had any lessons?” no. he had never had a lesson. and presently it was dinner time and “karl” arrived--a slender young fellow with a marvelous head and a noble eye--and he was as simple and natural, and as beautiful in spirit as his wife was. but she had to do the talking--mainly--there was too much thought behind his cavernous eyes for glib speech. i went home enchanted. told livy and clara spaulding all about the paradise down yonder where those two enthusiasts are happy with a yearly expense of $ . livy and clara went there next day and came away enchanted. a few nights later the gerhardts kept their promise and came here for the evening. it was billiard night and i had company and so was not down; but livy and clara became more charmed with these children than ever. warner and i planned to get somebody to criticise the statue whose judgment would be worth something. so i laid for champney, and after two failures i captured him and took him around, and he said “this statue is full of faults--but it has merits enough in it to make up for them”--whereat the young wife danced around as delighted as a child. when we came away, champney said, “i did not want to say too much there, but the truth is, it seems to me an extraordinary performance for an untrained hand. you ask if there is promise enough there to justify the hartford folk in going to an expense of training this young man. i should say, yes, decidedly; but still, to make everything safe, you had better get the judgment of a sculptor.” warner was in new york. i wrote him, and he said he would fetch up ward--which he did. yesterday they went to the gerhardts and spent two hours, and ward came away bewitched with those people and marveling at the winning innocence of the young wife, who dropped naturally into model-attitude beside the statue (which is stark naked from head to heel, now--g. had removed the drapery, fearing ward would think he was afraid to try legs and hips) just as she has always done before. livy and i had two long talks with ward yesterday evening. he spoke strongly. he said, “if any stranger had told me that this apprentice did not model that thing from plaster casts, i would not have believed it.” he said “it is full of crudities, but it is full of genius, too. it is such a statue as the man of average talent would achieve after two years training in the schools. and the boldness of the fellow, in going straight to nature! he is an apprentice--his work shows that, all over; but the stuff is in him, sure. hartford must send him to paris--two years; then if the promise holds good, keep him there three more--and warn him to study, study, work, work, and keep his name out of the papers, and neither ask for orders nor accept them when offered.” well, you see, that's all we wanted. after ward was gone livy came out with the thing that was in her mind. she said, “go privately and start the gerhardts off to paris, and say nothing about it to any one else.” so i tramped down this morning in the snow-storm--and there was a stirring time. they will sail a week or ten days from now. as i was starting out at the front door, with gerhardt beside me and the young wife dancing and jubilating behind, this latter cried out impulsively, “tell mrs. clemens i want to hug her--i want to hug you both!” i gave them my old french book and they were going to tackle the language, straight off. now this letter is a secret--keep it quiet--i don't think livy would mind my telling you these things, but then she might, you know, for she is a queer girl. yrs ever, mark. champney was j. wells champney, a portrait-painter of distinction; ward was the sculptor, j. q. a. ward. the gerhardts were presently off to paris, well provided with means to make their dreams reality; in due time the letters will report them again. the uncle remus tales of joel chandler harris gave mark twain great pleasure. he frequently read them aloud, not only at home but in public. finally, he wrote harris, expressing his warm appreciation, and mentioning one of the negro stories of his own childhood, “the golden arm,” which he urged harris to look up and add to his collection. “you have pinned a proud feather in uncle-remus's cap,” replied harris. “i do not know what higher honor he could have than to appear before the hartford public arm in arm with mark twain.” he disclaimed any originality for the stories, adding, “i understand that my relations toward uncle remus are similar to those that exist between an almanac maker and the calendar.” he had not heard the “golden arm” story and asked for the outlines; also for some publishing advice, out of mark twain's long experience. ***** to joel chandler harris, in atlanta: elmira, n.y., aug. . my dear mr. harris,--you can argue yourself into the delusion that the principle of life is in the stories themselves and not in their setting; but you will save labor by stopping with that solitary convert, for he is the only intelligent one you will bag. in reality the stories are only alligator pears--one merely eats them for the sake of the salad-dressing. uncle remus is most deftly drawn, and is a lovable and delightful creation; he, and the little boy, and their relations with each other, are high and fine literature, and worthy to live, for their own sakes; and certainly the stories are not to be credited with them. but enough of this; i seem to be proving to the man that made the multiplication table that twice one are two. i have been thinking, yesterday and to-day (plenty of chance to think, as i am abed with lumbago at our little summering farm among the solitudes of the mountaintops,) and i have concluded that i can answer one of your questions with full confidence--thus: make it a subscription book. mighty few books that come strictly under the head of literature will sell by subscription; but if uncle remus won't, the gift of prophecy has departed out of me. when a book will sell by subscription, it will sell two or three times as many copies as it would in the trade; and the profit is bulkier because the retail price is greater..... you didn't ask me for a subscription-publisher. if you had, i should have recommended osgood to you. he inaugurates his subscription department with my new book in the fall..... now the doctor has been here and tried to interrupt my yarn about “the golden arm,” but i've got through, anyway. of course i tell it in the negro dialect--that is necessary; but i have not written it so, for i can't spell it in your matchless way. it is marvelous the way you and cable spell the negro and creole dialects. two grand features are lost in print: the weird wailing, the rising and falling cadences of the wind, so easily mimicked with one's mouth; and the impressive pauses and eloquent silences, and subdued utterances, toward the end of the yarn (which chain the attention of the children hand and foot, and they sit with parted lips and breathless, to be wrenched limb from limb with the sudden and appalling “you got it”). old uncle dan'l, a slave of my uncle's' aged , used to tell us children yarns every night by the kitchen fire (no other light;) and the last yarn demanded, every night, was this one. by this time there was but a ghastly blaze or two flickering about the back-log. we would huddle close about the old man, and begin to shudder with the first familiar words; and under the spell of his impressive delivery we always fell a prey to that climax at the end when the rigid black shape in the twilight sprang at us with a shout. when you come to glance at the tale you will recollect it--it is as common and familiar as the tar baby. work up the atmosphere with your customary skill and it will “go” in print. lumbago seems to make a body garrulous--but you'll forgive it. truly yours s. l. clemens the “golden arm” story was one that clemens often used in his public readings, and was very effective as he gave it. in his sketch, “how to tell a story,” it appears about as he used to tell it. harris, receiving the outlines of the old missouri tale, presently announced that he had dug up its georgia relative, an interesting variant, as we gather from mark twain's reply. ***** to joel chandler harris, in atlanta: hartford, ' . my dear mr. harris,--i was very sure you would run across that story somewhere, and am glad you have. a drummond light--no, i mean a brush light--is thrown upon the negro estimate of values by his willingness to risk his soul and his mighty peace forever for the sake of a silver sev'm-punce. and this form of the story seems rather nearer the true field-hand standard than that achieved by my florida, mo., negroes with their sumptuous arm of solid gold. i judge you haven't received my new book yet--however, you will in a day or two. meantime you must not take it ill if i drop osgood a hint about your proposed story of slave life..... when you come north i wish you would drop me a line and then follow it in person and give me a day or two at our house in hartford. if you will, i will snatch osgood down from boston, and you won't have to go there at all unless you want to. please to bear this strictly in mind, and don't forget it. sincerely yours s. l. clemens. charles warren stoddard, to whom the next letter is written, was one of the old california literary crowd, a graceful writer of verse and prose, never quite arriving at the success believed by his friends to be his due. he was a gentle, irresponsible soul, well loved by all who knew him, and always, by one or another, provided against want. the reader may remember that during mark twain's great lecture engagement in london, winter of - , stoddard lived with him, acting as his secretary. at a later period in his life he lived for several years with the great telephone magnate, theodore n. vail. at the time of this letter, stoddard had decided that in the warm light and comfort of the sandwich islands he could survive on his literary earnings. ***** to charles warren stoddard, in the sandwich islands: hartford, oct. ' . my dear charlie,--now what have i ever done to you that you should not only slide off to heaven before you have earned a right to go, but must add the gratuitous villainy of informing me of it?... the house is full of carpenters and decorators; whereas, what we really need here, is an incendiary. if the house would only burn down, we would pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes of the crater of haleakala and get a good rest; for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the telegraph. and after resting, we would come down the mountain a piece and board with a godly, breech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt and give thanks to whom all thanks belong, for these privileges, and never house-keep any more. i think my wife would be twice as strong as she is, but for this wearing and wearying slavery of house-keeping. however, she thinks she must submit to it for the sake of the children; whereas, i have always had a tenderness for parents too, so, for her sake and mine, i sigh for the incendiary. when the evening comes and the gas is lit and the wear and tear of life ceases, we want to keep house always; but next morning we wish, once more, that we were free and irresponsible boarders. work?--one can't you know, to any purpose. i don't really get anything done worth speaking of, except during the three or four months that we are away in the summer. i wish the summer were seven years long. i keep three or four books on the stocks all the time, but i seldom add a satisfactory chapter to one of them at home. yes, and it is all because my time is taken up with answering the letters of strangers. it can't be done through a short hand amanuensis--i've tried that--it wouldn't work--i couldn't learn to dictate. what does possess strangers to write so many letters? i never could find that out. however, i suppose i did it myself when i was a stranger. but i will never do it again. maybe you think i am not happy? the very thing that gravels me is that i am. i don't want to be happy when i can't work; i am resolved that hereafter i won't be. what i have always longed for, was the privilege of living forever away up on one of those mountains in the sandwich islands overlooking the sea. yours ever mark. that magazine article of yours was mighty good: up to your very best i think. i enclose a book review written by howells. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hartford, oct. ' . my dear howells,--i am delighted with your review, and so is mrs. clemens. what you have said, there, will convince anybody that reads it; a body cannot help being convinced by it. that is the kind of a review to have; the doubtful man; even the prejudiced man, is persuaded and succumbs. what a queer blunder that was, about the baronet. i can't quite see how i ever made it. there was an opulent abundance of things i didn't know; and consequently no need to trench upon the vest-pocketful of things i did know, to get material for a blunder. charley warren stoddard has gone to the sandwich islands permanently. lucky devil. it is the only supremely delightful place on earth. it does seem that the more advantage a body doesn't earn, here, the more of them god throws at his head. this fellow's postal card has set the vision of those gracious islands before my mind, again, with not a leaf withered, nor a rainbow vanished, nor a sun-flash missing from the waves, and now it will be months, i reckon, before i can drive it away again. it is beautiful company, but it makes one restless and dissatisfied. with love and thanks, yrs ever, mark. the review mentioned in this letter was of the prince and the pauper. what the queer “blunder” about the baronet was, the present writer confesses he does not know; but perhaps a careful reader could find it, at least in the early edition; very likely it was corrected without loss of time. clemens now and then found it necessary to pay a visit to canada in the effort to protect his copyright. he usually had a grand time on these trips, being lavishly entertained by the canadian literary fraternity. in november, , he made one of these journeys in the interest of the prince and the pauper, this time with osgood, who was now his publisher. in letters written home we get a hint of his diversions. the monsieur frechette mentioned was a canadian poet of considerable distinction. “clara” was miss clara spaulding, of elmira, who had accompanied mr. and mrs. clemens to europe in , and again in . later she became mrs. john b. staachfield, of new york city. her name has already appeared in these letters many times. ***** to mrs. clemens, in hartford: montreal, nov. ' . livy darling, you and clara ought to have been at breakfast in the great dining room this morning. english female faces, distinctive english costumes, strange and marvelous english gaits--and yet such honest, honorable, clean-souled countenances, just as these english women almost always have, you know. right away-- but they've come to take me to the top of mount royal, it being a cold, dry, sunny, magnificent day. going in a sleigh. yours lovingly, saml. ***** to mrs. clemens, in hartford: montreal, sunday, november , . livy dear, a mouse kept me awake last night till or o'clock--so i am lying abed this morning. i would not give sixpence to be out yonder in the storm, although it is only snow. [the above paragraph is written in the form of a rebus illustrated with various sketches.] there--that's for the children--was not sure that they could read writing; especially jean, who is strangely ignorant in some things. i can not only look out upon the beautiful snow-storm, past the vigorous blaze of my fire; and upon the snow-veiled buildings which i have sketched; and upon the churchward drifting umbrellas; and upon the buffalo-clad cabmen stamping their feet and thrashing their arms on the corner yonder: but i also look out upon the spot where the first white men stood, in the neighborhood of four hundred years ago, admiring the mighty stretch of leafy solitudes, and being admired and marveled at by an eager multitude of naked savages. the discoverer of this region, and namer of it, jacques cartier, has a square named for him in the city. i wish you were here; you would enjoy your birthday, i think. i hoped for a letter, and thought i had one when the mail was handed in, a minute ago, but it was only that note from sylvester baxter. you must write--do you hear?--or i will be remiss myself. give my love and a kiss to the children, and ask them to give you my love and a kiss from saml. ***** to mrs. clemens, in hartford: quebec, sunday. ' . livy darling, i received a letter from monsieur frechette this morning, in which certain citizens of montreal tendered me a public dinner next thursday, and by osgood's advice i accepted it. i would have accepted anyway, and very cheerfully but for the delay of two days--for i was purposing to go to boston tuesday and home wednesday; whereas, now i go to boston friday and home saturday. i have to go by boston on account of business. we drove about the steep hills and narrow, crooked streets of this old town during three hours, yesterday, in a sleigh, in a driving snow-storm. the people here don't mind snow; they were all out, plodding around on their affairs--especially the children, who were wallowing around everywhere, like snow images, and having a mighty good time. i wish i could describe the winter costume of the young girls, but i can't. it is grave and simple, but graceful and pretty--the top of it is a brimless fur cap. maybe it is the costume that makes pretty girls seem so monotonously plenty here. it was a kind of relief to strike a homely face occasionally. you descend into some of the streets by long, deep stairways; and in the strong moonlight, last night, these were very picturesque. i did wish you were here to see these things. you couldn't by any possibility sleep in these beds, though, or enjoy the food. good night, sweetheart, and give my respects to the cubs. saml. it had been hoped that w. d. howells would join the canadian excursion, but howells was not very well that autumn. he wrote that he had been in bed five weeks, “most of the time recovering; so you see how bad i must have been to begin with. but now i am out of any first-class pain; i have a good appetite, and i am as abusive and peremptory as guiteau.” clemens, returning to hartford, wrote him a letter that explains itself. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hartford, dec. ' . my dear howells,--it was a sharp disappointment--your inability to connect, on the canadian raid. what a gaudy good time we should have had! disappointed, again, when i got back to boston; for i was promising myself half an hour's look at you, in belmont; but your note to osgood showed that that could not be allowed out yet. the atlantic arrived an hour ago, and your faultless and delicious police report brought that blamed joe twichell powerfully before me. there's a man who can tell such things himself (by word of mouth,) and has as sure an eye for detecting a thing that is before his eyes, as any man in the world, perhaps--then why in the nation doesn't he report himself with a pen? one of those drenching days last week, he slopped down town with his cubs, and visited a poor little beggarly shed where were a dwarf, a fat woman, and a giant of honest eight feet, on exhibition behind tawdry show-canvases, but with nobody to exhibit to. the giant had a broom, and was cleaning up and fixing around, diligently. joe conceived the idea of getting some talk out of him. now that never would have occurred to me. so he dropped in under the man's elbow, dogged him patiently around, prodding him with questions and getting irritated snarls in return which would have finished me early--but at last one of joe's random shafts drove the centre of that giant's sympathies somehow, and fetched him. the fountains of his great deep were broken up, and he rained a flood of personal history that was unspeakably entertaining. among other things it turned out that he had been a turkish (native) colonel, and had fought all through the crimean war--and so, for the first time, joe got a picture of the charge of the six hundred that made him see the living spectacle, the flash of flag and tongue-flame, the rolling smoke, and hear the booming of the guns; and for the first time also, he heard the reasons for that wild charge delivered from the mouth of a master, and realized that nobody had “blundered,” but that a cold, logical, military brain had perceived this one and sole way to win an already lost battle, and so gave the command and did achieve the victory. and mind you joe was able to come up here, days afterwards, and reproduce that giant's picturesque and admirable history. but dern him, he can't write it--which is all wrong, and not as it should be. and he has gone and raked up the ms autobiography (written in ,) of mrs. phebe brown, (author of “i love to steal a while away,”) who educated yung wing in her family when he was a little boy; and i came near not getting to bed at all, last night, on account of the lurid fascinations of it. why in the nation it has never got into print, i can't understand. but, by jings! the postman will be here in a minute; so, congratulations upon your mending health, and gratitude that it is mending; and love to you all. yrs ever mark. don't answer--i spare the sick. xxii. letters, , mainly to howells. wasted fury. old scenes revisited. the mississippi book. a man of mark twain's profession and prominence must necessarily be the subject of much newspaper comment. jest, compliment, criticism --none of these things disturbed him, as a rule. he was pleased that his books should receive favorable notices by men whose opinion he respected, but he was not grieved by adverse expressions. jests at his expense, if well written, usually amused him; cheap jokes only made him sad; but sarcasms and innuendoes were likely to enrage him, particularly if he believed them prompted by malice. perhaps among all the letters he ever wrote, there is none more characteristic than this confession of violence and eagerness for reprisal, followed by his acknowledgment of error and a manifest appreciation of his own weakness. it should be said that mark twain and whitelaw reid were generally very good friends, and perhaps for the moment this fact seemed to magnify the offense. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hartford, jan. ' . my dear howells,--nobody knows better than i, that there are times when swearing cannot meet the emergency. how sharply i feel that, at this moment. not a single profane word has issued from my lips this mornin--i have not even had the impulse to swear, so wholly ineffectual would swearing have manifestly been, in the circumstances. but i will tell you about it. about three weeks ago, a sensitive friend, approaching his revelation cautiously, intimated that the n. y. tribune was engaged in a kind of crusade against me. this seemed a higher compliment than i deserved; but no matter, it made me very angry. i asked many questions, and gathered, in substance, this: since reid's return from europe, the tribune had been flinging sneers and brutalities at me with such persistent frequency “as to attract general remark.” i was an angered--which is just as good an expression, i take it, as an hungered. next, i learned that osgood, among the rest of the “general,” was worrying over these constant and pitiless attacks. next came the testimony of another friend, that the attacks were not merely “frequent,” but “almost daily.” reflect upon that: “almost daily” insults, for two months on a stretch. what would you have done? as for me, i did the thing which was the natural thing for me to do, that is, i set about contriving a plan to accomplish one or the other of two things: . force a peace; or . get revenge. when i got my plan finished, it pleased me marvelously. it was in six or seven sections, each section to be used in its turn and by itself; the assault to begin at once with no. , and the rest to follow, one after the other, to keep the communication open while i wrote my biography of reid. i meant to wind up with this latter great work, and then dismiss the subject for good. well, ever since then i have worked day and night making notes and collecting and classifying material. i've got collectors at work in england. i went to new york and sat three hours taking evidence while a stenographer set it down. as my labors grew, so also grew my fascination. malice and malignity faded out of me--or maybe i drove them out of me, knowing that a malignant book would hurt nobody but the fool who wrote it. i got thoroughly in love with this work; for i saw that i was going to write a book which the very devils and angels themselves would delight to read, and which would draw disapproval from nobody but the hero of it, (and mrs. clemens, who was bitter against the whole thing.) one part of my plan was so delicious that i had to try my hand on it right away, just for the luxury of it. i set about it, and sure enough it panned out to admiration. i wrote that chapter most carefully, and i couldn't find a fault with it. (it was not for the biography--no, it belonged to an immediate and deadlier project.) well, five days ago, this thought came into my mind (from mrs. clemens's): “wouldn't it be well to make sure that the attacks have been 'almost daily'?--and to also make sure that their number and character will justify me in doing what i am proposing to do?” i at once set a man to work in new york to seek out and copy every unpleasant reference which had been made to me in the tribune from nov. st to date. on my own part i began to watch the current numbers, for i had subscribed for the paper. the result arrived from my new york man this morning. o, what a pitiable wreck of high hopes! the “almost daily” assaults, for two months, consist of-- . adverse criticism of p. & p. from an enraged idiot in the london atheneum; . paragraph from some indignant englishman in the pall mall gazette who pays me the vast compliment of gravely rebuking some imaginary ass who has set me up in the neighborhood of rabelais; . a remark of the tribune's about the montreal dinner, touched with an almost invisible satire; . a remark of the tribune's about refusal of canadian copyright, not complimentary, but not necessarily malicious--and of course adverse criticism which is not malicious is a thing which none but fools irritate themselves about. there--that is the prodigious bugaboo, in its entirety! can you conceive of a man's getting himself into a sweat over so diminutive a provocation? i am sure i can't. what the devil can those friends of mine have been thinking about, to spread these or harmless things out into two months of daily sneers and affronts? the whole offense, boiled down, amounts to just this: one uncourteous remark of the tribune about my book--not me between nov. and dec. ; and a couple of foreign criticisms (of my writings, not me,) between nov. and jan. ! if i can't stand that amount of friction, i certainly need reconstruction. further boiled down, this vast outpouring of malice amounts to simply this: one jest from the tribune (one can make nothing more serious than that out of it.) one jest--and that is all; for the foreign criticisms do not count, they being matters of news, and proper for publication in anybody's newspaper. and to offset that one jest, the tribune paid me one compliment dec. , by publishing my note declining the new york new england dinner, while merely (in the same breath,) mentioning that similar letters were read from general sherman and other men whom we all know to be persons of real consequence. well, my mountain has brought forth its mouse, and a sufficiently small mouse it is, god knows. and my three weeks' hard work have got to go into the ignominious pigeon-hole. confound it, i could have earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble. however, i shouldn't have done it, for i am too lazy, now, in my sere and yellow leaf, to be willing to work for anything but love..... i kind of envy you people who are permitted for your righteousness' sake to dwell in a boarding house; not that i should always want to live in one, but i should like the change occasionally from this housekeeping slavery to that wild independence. a life of don't-care-a-damn in a boarding house is what i have asked for in many a secret prayer. i shall come by and by and require of you what you have offered me there. yours ever, mark. howells, who had already known something of the gathering storm, replied: “your letter was an immense relief to me, for although i had an abiding faith that you would get sick of your enterprise, i wasn't easy until i knew that you had given it up.” joel chandler harris appears again in the letters of this period. twichell, during a trip south about this time, had called on harris with some sort of proposition or suggestion from clemens that harris appear with him in public, and tell, or read, the remus stories from the platform. but harris was abnormally diffident. clemens later pronounced him “the shyest full-grown man” he had ever met, and the word which twichell brought home evidently did not encourage the platform idea. ***** to joel chandler harris, in atlanta: hartford, apl. , ' . private. my dear mr. harris,--jo twichell brought me your note and told me of his talk with you. he said you didn't believe you would ever be able to muster a sufficiency of reckless daring to make you comfortable and at ease before an audience. well, i have thought out a device whereby i believe we can get around that difficulty. i will explain when i see you. jo says you want to go to canada within a month or six weeks--i forget just exactly what he did say; but he intimated the trip could be delayed a while, if necessary. if this is so, suppose you meet osgood and me in new orleans early in may--say somewhere between the st and th? it will be well worth your while to do this, because the author who goes to canada unposted, will not know what course to pursue [to secure copyright] when he gets there; he will find himself in a hopeless confusion as to what is the correct thing to do. now osgood is the only man in america, who can lay out your course for you and tell you exactly what to do. therefore, you just come to new orleans and have a talk with him. our idea is to strike across lots and reach st. louis the th of april--thence we propose to drift southward, stopping at some town a few hours or a night, every day, and making notes. to escape the interviewers, i shall follow my usual course and use a fictitious name (c. l. samuel, of new york.) i don't know what osgood's name will be, but he can't use his own. if you see your way to meet us in new orleans, drop me a line, now, and as we approach that city i will telegraph you what day we shall arrive there. i would go to atlanta if i could, but shan't be able. we shall go back up the river to st. paul, and thence by rail x-lots home. (i am making this letter so dreadfully private and confidential because my movements must be kept secret, else i shan't be able to pick up the kind of book-material i want.) if you are diffident, i suspect that you ought to let osgood be your magazine-agent. he makes those people pay three or four times as much as an article is worth, whereas i never had the cheek to make them pay more than double. yrs sincerely s. l. clemens. “my backwardness is an affliction,” wrote harris..... “the ordeal of appearing on the stage would be a terrible one, but my experience is that when a diffident man does become familiar with his surroundings he has more impudence than his neighbors. extremes meet.” he was sorely tempted, but his courage became as water at the thought of footlights and assembled listeners. once in new york he appears to have been caught unawares at a tile club dinner and made to tell a story, but his agony was such that at the prospect of a similar ordeal in boston he avoided that city and headed straight for georgia and safety. the new orleans excursion with osgood, as planned by clemens, proved a great success. the little party took the steamer gold dust from st. louis down river toward new orleans. clemens was quickly recognized, of course, and his assumed name laid aside. the author of “uncle remus” made the trip to new orleans. george w. cable was there at the time, and we may believe that in the company of mark twain and osgood those southern authors passed two or three delightful days. clemens also met his old teacher bixby in new orleans, and came back up the river with him, spending most of his time in the pilot-house, as in the old days. it was a glorious trip, and, reaching st. louis, he continued it northward, stopping off at hannibal and quincy.' ***** to mrs. clemens, in hartford: quincy, ill. may , ' . livy darling, i am desperately homesick. but i have promised osgood, and must stick it out; otherwise i would take the train at once and break for home. i have spent three delightful days in hannibal, loitering around all day long, examining the old localities and talking with the grey-heads who were boys and girls with me or years ago. it has been a moving time. i spent my nights with john and helen garth, three miles from town, in their spacious and beautiful house. they were children with me, and afterwards schoolmates. now they have a daughter or years old. spent an hour, yesterday, with a. w. lamb, who was not married when i saw him last. he married a young lady whom i knew. and now i have been talking with their grown-up sons and daughters. lieutenant hickman, the spruce young handsomely-uniformed volunteer of , called on me--a grisly elephantine patriarch of now, his grace all vanished. that world which i knew in its blossoming youth is old and bowed and melancholy, now; its soft cheeks are leathery and wrinkled, the fire is gone out in its eyes, and the spring from its step. it will be dust and ashes when i come again. i have been clasping hands with the moribund--and usually they said, “it is for the last time.” now i am under way again, upon this hideous trip to st. paul, with a heart brimming full of thoughts and images of you and susie and bay and the peerless jean. and so good night, my love. saml. clemens's trip had been saddened by learning, in new orleans, the news of the death of dr. john brown, of edinburgh. to doctor brown's son, whom he had known as “jock,” he wrote immediately on his return to hartford. ***** to mr. john brown, in edinburgh hartford, june , . my dear mr. brown,--i was three thousand miles from home, at breakfast in new orleans, when the damp morning paper revealed the sorrowful news among the cable dispatches. there was no place in america, however remote, or however rich, or poor or high or humble where words of mourning for your father were not uttered that morning, for his works had made him known and loved all over the land. to mrs. clemens and me, the loss is personal; and our grief the grief one feels for one who was peculiarly near and dear. mrs. clemens has never ceased to express regret that we came away from england the last time without going to see him, and often we have since projected a voyage across the atlantic for the sole purpose of taking him by the hand and looking into his kind eyes once more before he should be called to his rest. we both thank you greatly for the edinburgh papers which you sent. my wife and i join in affectionate remembrances and greetings to yourself and your aunt, and in the sincere tender of our sympathies. faithfully yours, s. l. clemens. our susie is still “megalops.” he gave her that name: can you spare a photograph of your father? we have none but the one taken in a group with ourselves. william dean howells, at the age of forty-five, reached what many still regard his highest point of achievement in american realism. his novel, the rise of silas lapham, which was running as a century serial during the summer of , attracted wide attention, and upon its issue in book form took first place among his published novels. mark twain, to the end of his life, loved all that howells wrote. once, long afterward, he said: “most authors give us glimpses of a radiant moon, but howells's moon shines and sails all night long.” when the instalments of the rise of silas lapham began to appear, he overflowed in adjectives, the sincerity of which we need not doubt, in view of his quite open criticisms of the author's reading delivery. ***** to w. d. howells, in belmont, mass.: my dear howells,--i am in a state of wild enthusiasm over this july instalment of your story. it's perfectly dazzling--it's masterly--incomparable. yet i heard you read it--without losing my balance. well, the difference between your reading and your writing is-remarkable. i mean, in the effects produced and the impression left behind. why, the one is to the other as is one of joe twichell's yarns repeated by a somnambulist. goodness gracious, you read me a chapter, and it is a gentle, pearly dawn, with a sprinkle of faint stars in it; but by and by i strike it in print, and shout to myself, “god bless us, how has that pallid former spectacle been turned into these gorgeous sunset splendors!” well, i don't care how much you read your truck to me, you can't permanently damage it for me that way. it is always perfectly fresh and dazzling when i come on it in the magazine. of course i recognize the form of it as being familiar--but that is all. that is, i remember it as pyrotechnic figures which you set up before me, dead and cold, but ready for the match--and now i see them touched off and all ablaze with blinding fires. you can read, if you want to, but you don't read worth a damn. i know you can read, because your readings of cable and your repeatings of the german doctor's remarks prove that. that's the best drunk scene--because the truest--that i ever read. there are touches in it that i never saw any writer take note of before. and they are set before the reader with amazing accuracy. how very drunk, and how recently drunk, and how altogether admirably drunk you must have been to enable you to contrive that masterpiece! why i didn't notice that that religious interview between marcia and mrs. halleck was so deliciously humorous when you read it to me--but dear me, it's just too lovely for anything. (wrote clark to collar it for the “library.”) hang it, i know where the mystery is, now; when you are reading, you glide right along, and i don't get a chance to let the things soak home; but when i catch it in the magazine, i give a page or minutes in which to gently and thoroughly filter into me. your humor is so very subtle, and elusive--(well, often it's just a vanishing breath of perfume which a body isn't certain he smelt till he stops and takes another smell) whereas you can smell other... (remainder obliterated.) among mark twain's old schoolmates in hannibal was little helen kercheval, for whom in those early days he had a very tender spot indeed. but she married another schoolmate, john garth, who in time became a banker, highly respected and a great influence. john and helen garth have already been mentioned in the letter of may th. ***** to john garth, in hannibal: hartford, july ' . dear john,--your letter of june arrived just one day after we ought to have been in elmira, n. y. for the summer: but at the last moment the baby was seized with scarlet fever. i had to telegraph and countermand the order for special sleeping car; and in fact we all had to fly around in a lively way and undo the patient preparations of weeks--rehabilitate the dismantled house, unpack the trunks, and so on. a couple of days later, the eldest child was taken down with so fierce a fever that she was soon delirious--not scarlet fever, however. next, i myself was stretched on the bed with three diseases at once, and all of them fatal. but i never did care for fatal diseases if i could only have privacy and room to express myself concerning them. we gave early warning, and of course nobody has entered the house in all this time but one or two reckless old bachelors--and they probably wanted to carry the disease to the children of former flames of theirs. the house is still in quarantine and must remain so for a week or two yet--at which time we are hoping to leave for elmira. always your friend s. l. clemens. by the end of summer howells was in europe, and clemens, in elmira, was trying to finish his mississippi book, which was giving him a great deal of trouble. it was usually so with his non-fiction books; his interest in them was not cumulative; he was prone to grow weary of them, while the menace of his publisher's contract was maddening. howells's letters, meant to be comforting, or at least entertaining, did not always contribute to his peace of mind. the library of american humor which they had planned was an added burden. before sailing, howells had written: “do you suppose you can do your share of the reading at elmira, while you are writing at the mississippi book?” in a letter from london, howells writes of the good times he is having over there with osgood, hutton, john hay, aldrich, and alma tadema, excursioning to oxford, feasting, especially “at the mitre tavern, where they let you choose your dinner from the joints hanging from the rafter, and have passages that you lose yourself in every time you try to go to your room.... couldn't you and mrs. clemens step over for a little while?... we have seen lots of nice people and have been most pleasantly made of; but i would rather have you smoke in my face, and talk for half a day just for pleasure, than to go to the best house or club in london.” the reader will gather that this could not be entirely soothing to a man shackled by a contract and a book that refused to come to an end. ***** to w. d. howells, in london: hartford, conn. oct , . my dear howells,--i do not expect to find you, so i shan't spend many words on you to wind up in the perdition of some european dead-letter office. i only just want to say that the closing installments of the story are prodigious. all along i was afraid it would be impossible for you to keep up so splendidly to the end; but you were only, i see now, striking eleven. it is in these last chapters that you struck twelve. go on and write; you can write good books yet, but you can never match this one. and speaking of the book, i inclose something which has been happening here lately. we have only just arrived at home, and i have not seen clark on our matters. i cannot see him or any one else, until i get my book finished. the weather turned cold, and we had to rush home, while i still lacked thirty thousand words. i had been sick and got delayed. i am going to write all day and two thirds of the night, until the thing is done, or break down at it. the spur and burden of the contract are intolerable to me. i can endure the irritation of it no longer. i went to work at nine o'clock yesterday morning, and went to bed an hour after midnight. result of the day, (mainly stolen from books, tho' credit given,) words, so i reduced my burden by one third in one day. it was five days work in one. i have nothing more to borrow or steal; the rest must all be written. it is ten days work, and unless something breaks, it will be finished in five. we all send love to you and mrs. howells, and all the family. yours as ever, mark. again, from villeneuve, on lake geneva, howells wrote urging him this time to spend the winter with them in florence, where they would write their great american comedy of 'orme's motor,' “which is to enrich us beyond the dreams of avarice.... we could have a lot of fun writing it, and you could go home with some of the good old etruscan malaria in your bones, instead of the wretched pinch-beck hartford article that you are suffering from now.... it's a great opportunity for you. besides, nobody over there likes you half as well as i do.” it should be added that 'orme's motor' was the provisional title that clemens and howells had selected for their comedy, which was to be built, in some measure, at least, around the character, or rather from the peculiarities, of orion clemens. the cable mentioned in mark twain's reply is, of course, george w. cable, who only a little while before had come up from new orleans to conquer the north with his wonderful tales and readings. ***** to w. d. howells, in switzerland: hartford, nov. th, . my dear howells,--yes, it would be profitable for me to do that, because with your society to help me, i should swiftly finish this now apparently interminable book. but i cannot come, because i am not boss here, and nothing but dynamite can move mrs. clemens away from home in the winter season. i never had such a fight over a book in my life before. and the foolishest part of the whole business is, that i started osgood to editing it before i had finished writing it. as a consequence, large areas of it are condemned here and there and yonder, and i have the burden of these unfilled gaps harassing me and the thought of the broken continuity of the work, while i am at the same time trying to build the last quarter of the book. however, at last i have said with sufficient positiveness that i will finish the book at no particular date; that i will not hurry it; that i will not hurry myself; that i will take things easy and comfortably, write when i choose to write, leave it alone when i so prefer. the printers must wait, the artists, the canvassers, and all the rest. i have got everything at a dead standstill, and that is where it ought to be, and that is where it must remain; to follow any other policy would be to make the book worse than it already is. i ought to have finished it before showing to anybody, and then sent it across the ocean to you to be edited, as usual; for you seem to be a great many shades happier than you deserve to be, and if i had thought of this thing earlier, i would have acted upon it and taken the tuck somewhat out of your joyousness. in the same mail with your letter, arrived the enclosed from orme the motor man. you will observe that he has an office. i will explain that this is a law office and i think it probably does him as much good to have a law office without anything to do in it, as it would another man to have one with an active business attached. you see he is on the electric light lay now. going to light the city and allow me to take all the stock if i want to. and he will manage it free of charge. it never would occur to this simple soul how much less costly it would be to me, to hire him on a good salary not to manage it. do you observe the same old eagerness, the same old hurry, springing from the fear that if he does not move with the utmost swiftness, that colossal opportunity will escape him? now just fancy this same frantic plunging after vast opportunities, going on week after week with this same man, during fifty entire years, and he has not yet learned, in the slightest degree, that there isn't any occasion to hurry; that his vast opportunity will always wait; and that whether it waits or flies, he certainly will never catch it. this immortal hopefulness, fortified by its immortal and unteachable misjudgment, is the immortal feature of this character, for a play; and we will write that play. we should be fools else. that staccato postscript reads as if some new and mighty business were imminent, for it is slung on the paper telegraphically, all the small words left out. i am afraid something newer and bigger than the electric light is swinging across his orbit. save this letter for an inspiration. i have got a hundred more. cable has been here, creating worshipers on all hands. he is a marvelous talker on a deep subject. i do not see how even spencer could unwind a thought more smoothly or orderly, and do it in a cleaner, clearer, crisper english. he astounded twichell with his faculty. you know when it comes down to moral honesty, limpid innocence, and utterly blemishless piety, the apostles were mere policemen to cable; so with this in mind you must imagine him at a midnight dinner in boston the other night, where we gathered around the board of the summerset club; osgood, full, boyle o'reilly, full, fairchild responsively loaded, and aldrich and myself possessing the floor, and properly fortified. cable told mrs. clemens when he returned here, that he seemed to have been entertaining himself with horses, and had a dreamy idea that he must have gone to boston in a cattle-car. it was a very large time. he called it an orgy. and no doubt it was, viewed from his standpoint. i wish i were in switzerland, and i wish we could go to florence; but we have to leave these delights to you; there is no helping it. we all join in love to you and all the family. yours as ever mark. xxiii. letters, , to howells and others. a guest of the marquis of lorne. the history game. a play by howells and mark twain. mark twain, in due season, finished the mississippi book and placed it in osgood's hands for publication. it was a sort of partnership arrangement in which clemens was to furnish the money to make the book, and pay osgood a percentage for handling it. it was, in fact, the beginning of mark twain's adventures as a publisher. howells was not as happy in florence as he had hoped to be. the social life there overwhelmed him. in february he wrote: “our two months in florence have been the most ridiculous time that ever even half-witted people passed. we have spent them in chasing round after people for whom we cared nothing, and being chased by them. my story isn't finished yet, and what part of it is done bears the fatal marks of haste and distraction. of course, i haven't put pen to paper yet on the play. i wring my hands and beat my breast when i think of how these weeks have been wasted; and how i have been forced to waste them by the infernal social circumstances from which i couldn't escape.” clemens, now free from the burden of his own book, was light of heart and full of ideas and news; also of sympathy and appreciation. howells's story of this time was “a woman's reason.” governor jewell, of this letter, was marshall jewell, governor of connecticut from to . later, he was minister to russia, and in was united states postmaster-general. ***** to w. d. howells, in florence: hartford, march st, . my dear howells,--we got ourselves ground up in that same mill, once, in london, and another time in paris. it is a kind of foretaste of hell. there is no way to avoid it except by the method which you have now chosen. one must live secretly and cut himself utterly off from the human race, or life in europe becomes an unbearable burden and work an impossibility. i learned something last night, and maybe it may reconcile me to go to europe again sometime. i attended one of the astonishingly popular lectures of a man by the name of stoddard, who exhibits interesting stereopticon pictures and then knocks the interest all out of them with his comments upon them. but all the world go there to look and listen, and are apparently well satisfied. and they ought to be fully satisfied, if the lecturer would only keep still, or die in the first act. but he described how retired tradesmen and farmers in holland load a lazy scow with the family and the household effects, and then loaf along the waterways of the low countries all the summer long, paying no visits, receiving none, and just lazying a heavenly life out in their own private unpestered society, and doing their literary work, if they have any, wholly uninterrupted. if you had hired such a boat and sent for us we should have a couple of satisfactory books ready for the press now with no marks of interruption, vexatious wearinesses, and other hellishnesses visible upon them anywhere. we shall have to do this another time. we have lost an opportunity for the present. do you forget that heaven is packed with a multitude of all nations and that these people are all on the most familiar how-the-hell-are-you footing with talmage swinging around the circle to all eternity hugging the saints and patriarchs and archangels, and forcing you to do the same unless you choose to make yourself an object of remark if you refrain? then why do you try to get to heaven? be warned in time. we have all read your two opening numbers in the century, and consider them almost beyond praise. i hear no dissent from this verdict. i did not know there was an untouched personage in american life, but i had forgotten the auctioneer. you have photographed him accurately. i have been an utterly free person for a month or two; and i do not believe i ever so greatly appreciated and enjoyed--and realized the absence of the chains of slavery as i do this time. usually my first waking thought in the morning is, “i have nothing to do to-day, i belong to nobody, i have ceased from being a slave.” of course the highest pleasure to be got out of freedom, and having nothing to do, is labor. therefore i labor. but i take my time about it. i work one hour or four as happens to suit my mind, and quit when i please. and so these days are days of entire enjoyment. i told clark the other day, to jog along comfortable and not get in a sweat. i said i believed you would not be able to enjoy editing that library over there, where you have your own legitimate work to do and be pestered to death by society besides; therefore i thought if he got it ready for you against your return, that that would be best and pleasantest. you remember governor jewell, and the night he told about russia, down in the library. he was taken with a cold about three weeks ago, and i stepped over one evening, proposing to beguile an idle hour for him with a yarn or two, but was received at the door with whispers, and the information that he was dying. his case had been dangerous during that day only and he died that night, two hours after i left. his taking off was a prodigious surprise, and his death has been most widely and sincerely regretted. win. e. dodge, the father-in-law of one of jewell's daughters, dropped suddenly dead the day before jewell died, but jewell died without knowing that. jewell's widow went down to new york, to dodge's house, the day after jewell's funeral, and was to return here day before yesterday, and she did--in a coffin. she fell dead, of heart disease, while her trunks were being packed for her return home. florence strong, one of jewell's daughters, who lives in detroit, started east on an urgent telegram, but missed a connection somewhere, and did not arrive here in time to see her father alive. she was his favorite child, and they had always been like lovers together. he always sent her a box of fresh flowers once a week to the day of his death; a custom which he never suspended even when he was in russia. mrs. strong had only just reached her western home again when she was summoned to hartford to attend her mother's funeral. i have had the impulse to write you several times. i shall try to remember better henceforth. with sincerest regards to all of you, yours as ever, mark. mark twain made another trip to canada in the interest of copyright --this time to protect the mississippi book. when his journey was announced by the press, the marquis of lorne telegraphed an invitation inviting him to be his guest at rideau hall, in ottawa. clemens accepted, of course, and was handsomely entertained by the daughter of queen victoria and her husband, then governor-general of canada. on his return to hartford he found that osgood had issued a curious little book, for which clemens had prepared an introduction. it was an absurd volume, though originally issued with serious intent, its title being the new guide of the conversation in portuguese and english.'--[the new guide of the conversation in portuguese and english, by pedro caxolino, with an introduction by mark twain. osgood, boston, . ]--evidently the “new guide” was prepared by some simple portuguese soul with but slight knowledge of english beyond that which could be obtained from a dictionary, and his literal translation of english idioms are often startling, as, for instance, this one, taken at random: “a little learneds are happies enough for to may to satisfy their fancies on the literature.” mark twain thought this quaint book might amuse his royal hostess, and forwarded a copy in what he considered to be the safe and proper form. ***** to col. de winton, in ottawa, canada: hartford, june , ' . dear colonel de winton,--i very much want to send a little book to her royal highness--the famous portuguese phrase book; but i do not know the etiquette of the matter, and i would not wittingly infringe any rule of propriety. it is a book which i perfectly well know will amuse her “some at most” if she has not seen it before, and will still amuse her “some at least,” even if she has inspected it a hundred times already. so i will send the book to you, and you who know all about the proper observances will protect me from indiscretion, in case of need, by putting the said book in the fire, and remaining as dumb as i generally was when i was up there. i do not rebind the thing, because that would look as if i thought it worth keeping, whereas it is only worth glancing at and casting aside. will you please present my compliments to mrs. de winton and mrs. mackenzie?--and i beg to make my sincere compliments to you, also, for your infinite kindnesses to me. i did have a delightful time up there, most certainly. truly yours s. l. clemens. p. s. although the introduction dates a year back, the book is only just now issued. a good long delay. s. l. c. howells, writing from venice, in april, manifested special interest in the play project: “something that would run like scheherazade, for a thousand and one nights,” so perhaps his book was going better. he proposed that they devote the month of october to the work, and inclosed a letter from mallory, who owned not only a religious paper, the churchman, but also the madison square theater, and was anxious for a howells play. twenty years before howells had been consul to venice, and he wrote, now: “the idea of my being here is benumbing and silencing. i feel like the wandering jew, or the ghost of the cardiff giant.” he returned to america in july. clemens sent him word of welcome, with glowing reports of his own undertakings. the story on which he was piling up ms. was the adventures of huckleberry finn, begun seven years before at quarry farm. he had no great faith in it then, and though he had taken it up again in , his interest had not lasted to its conclusion. this time, however, he was in the proper spirit, and the story would be finished. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: elmira, july , ' . my dear howells,--we are desperately glad you and your gang are home again--may you never travel again, till you go aloft or alow. charley clark has gone to the other side for a run--will be back in august. he has been sick, and needed the trip very much. mrs. clemens had a long and wasting spell of sickness last spring, but she is pulling up, now. the children are booming, and my health is ridiculous, it's so robust, notwithstanding the newspaper misreports. i haven't piled up ms so in years as i have done since we came here to the farm three weeks and a half ago. why, it's like old times, to step right into the study, damp from the breakfast table, and sail right in and sail right on, the whole day long, without thought of running short of stuff or words. i wrote words to-day and i touch and upwards pretty often, and don't fall below any working day. and when i get fagged out, i lie abed a couple of days and read and smoke, and then go it again for or days. i have finished one small book, and am away along in a big one that i half-finished two or three years ago. i expect to complete it in a month or six weeks or two months more. and i shall like it, whether anybody else does or not. it's a kind of companion to tom sawyer. there's a raft episode from it in second or third chapter of life on the mississippi..... i'm booming, these days--got health and spirits to waste--got an overplus; and if i were at home, we would write a play. but we must do it anyhow by and by. we stay here till sep. ; then maybe a week at indian neck for sea air, then home. we are powerful glad you are all back; and send love according. yrs ever mark ***** to onion clemens and family, in keokuk, id.: elmira, july , ' . private. dear ma and orion and mollie,--i don't know that i have anything new to report, except that livy is still gaining, and all the rest of us flourishing. i haven't had such booming working-days for many years. i am piling up manuscript in a really astonishing way. i believe i shall complete, in two months, a book which i have been fooling over for years. this summer it is no more trouble to me to write than it is to lie. day before yesterday i felt slightly warned to knock off work for one day. so i did it, and took the open air. then i struck an idea for the instruction of the children, and went to work and carried it out. it took me all day. i measured off feet of the road-way in our farm grounds, with a foot-rule, and then divided it up among the english reigns, from the conqueror down to , allowing one foot to the year. i whittled out a basket of little pegs and drove one in the ground at the beginning of each reign, and gave it that king's name--thus: i measured all the reigns exactly as many feet to the reign as there were years in it. you can look out over the grounds and see the little pegs from the front door--some of them close together, like richard ii, richard cromwell, james ii, &c., and some prodigiously wide apart, like henry iii, edward iii, george iii, &c. it gives the children a realizing sense of the length or brevity of a reign. shall invent a violent game to go with it. and in bed, last night, i invented a way to play it indoors--in a far more voluminous way, as to multiplicity of dates and events--on a cribbage board. hello, supper's ready. love to all. good bye. saml. onion clemens would naturally get excited over the idea of the game and its commercial possibilities. not more so than his brother, however, who presently employed him to arrange a quantity of historical data which the game was to teach. for a season, indeed, interest in the game became a sort of midsummer madness which pervaded the two households, at keokuk and at quarry farm. howells wrote his approval of the idea of “learning history by the running foot,” which was a pun, even if unintentional, for in its out-door form it was a game of speed as well as knowledge. howells adds that he has noticed that the newspapers are exploiting mark twain's new invention of a history game, and we shall presently see how this happened. also, in this letter, howells speaks of an english nobleman to whom he has given a letter of introduction. “he seemed a simple, quiet, gentlemanly man, with a good taste in literature, which he evinced by going about with my books in his pockets, and talking of yours.” ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: my dear howells,--how odd it seems, to sit down to write a letter with the feeling that you've got time to do it. but i'm done work, for this season, and so have got time. i've done two seasons' work in one, and haven't anything left to do, now, but revise. i've written eight or nine hundred ms pages in such a brief space of time that i mustn't name the number of days; i shouldn't believe it myself, and of course couldn't expect you to. i used to restrict myself to or hours a day and days in the week, but this time i've wrought from breakfast till . p.m. six days in the week; and once or twice i smouched a sunday when the boss wasn't looking. nothing is half so good as literature hooked on sunday, on the sly. i wrote you and twichell on the same night, about the game, and was appalled to get a note from him saying he was going to print part of my letter, and was going to do it before i could get a chance to forbid it. i telegraphed him, but was of course too late. if you haven't ever tried to invent an indoor historical game, don't. i've got the thing at last so it will work, i guess, but i don't want any more tasks of that kind. when i wrote you, i thought i had it; whereas i was only merely entering upon the initiatory difficulties of it. i might have known it wouldn't be an easy job, or somebody would have invented a decent historical game long ago--a thing which nobody had done. i think i've got it in pretty fair shape--so i have caveated it. earl of onston--is that it? all right, we shall be very glad to receive them and get acquainted with them. and much obliged to you, too. there's plenty of worse people than the nobilities. i went up and spent a week with the marquis and the princess louise, and had as good a time as i want. i'm powerful glad you are all back again; and we will come up there if our little tribe will give us the necessary furlough; and if we can't get it, you folks must come to us and give us an extension of time. we get home sept. . hello, i think i see waring coming! good-by-letter from clark, which explains for him. love to you all from the clemenses. no--it wasn't waring. i wonder what the devil has become of that man. he was to spend to-day with us, and the day's most gone, now. we are enjoying your story with our usual unspeakableness; and i'm right glad you threw in the shipwreck and the mystery--i like it. mrs. crane thinks it's the best story you've written yet. we--but we always think the last one is the best. and why shouldn't it be? practice helps. p. s. i thought i had sent all our loves to all of you, but mrs. clemens says i haven't. damn it, a body can't think of everything; but a woman thinks you can. i better seal this, now--else there'll be more criticism. i perceive i haven't got the love in, yet. well, we do send the love of all the family to all the howellses. s. l. c. there had been some delay and postponement in the matter of the play which howells and clemens agreed to write. they did not put in the entire month of october as they had planned, but they did put in a portion of that month, the latter half, working out their old idea. in the end it became a revival of colonel sellers, or rather a caricature of that gentle hearted old visionary. clemens had always complained that the actor raymond had never brought out the finer shades of colonel sellers's character, but raymond in his worst performance never belied his original as did howells and clemens in his dramatic revival. these two, working together, let their imaginations run riot with disastrous results. the reader can judge something of this himself, from the american claimant the book which mark twain would later build from the play. but at this time they thought it a great triumph. they had “cracked their sides” laughing over its construction, as howells once said, and they thought the world would do the same over its performance. they decided to offer it to raymond, but rather haughtily, indifferently, because any number of other actors would be waiting for it. but this was a miscalculation. raymond now turned the tables. though favorable to the idea of a new play, he declared this one did not present his old sellers at all, but a lunatic. in the end he returned the ms. with a brief note. attempts had already been made to interest other actors, and would continue for some time. xxiv. letters, , to howells and others. cable's great april fool. “huck finn” in press. mark twain for cleveland. clemens and cable. mark twain had a lingering attack of the dramatic fever that winter. he made a play of the prince and pauper, which howells pronounced “too thin and slight and not half long enough.” he made another of tom sawyer, and probably destroyed it, for no trace of the ms. exists to-day. howells could not join in these ventures, for he was otherwise occupied and had sickness in his household. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: jan. , ' . my dear howells,--“o my goodn's”, as jean says. you have now encountered at last the heaviest calamity that can befall an author. the scarlet fever, once domesticated, is a permanent member of the family. money may desert you, friends forsake you, enemies grow indifferent to you, but the scarlet fever will be true to you, through thick and thin, till you be all saved or damned, down to the last one. i say these things to cheer you. the bare suggestion of scarlet fever in the family makes me shudder; i believe i would almost rather have osgood publish a book for me. you folks have our most sincere sympathy. oh, the intrusion of this hideous disease is an unspeakable disaster. my billiard table is stacked up with books relating to the sandwich islands: the walls axe upholstered with scraps of paper penciled with notes drawn from them. i have saturated myself with knowledge of that unimaginably beautiful land and that most strange and fascinating people. and i have begun a story. its hidden motive will illustrate a but-little considered fact in human nature; that the religious folly you are born in you will die in, no matter what apparently reasonabler religious folly may seem to have taken its place meanwhile, and abolished and obliterated it. i start bill ragsdale at years of age, and the heroine at , in the midst of the ancient idolatrous system, with its picturesque and amazing customs and superstitions, months before the arrival of the missionaries and the erection of a shallow christianity upon the ruins of the old paganism. then these two will become educated christians, and highly civilized. and then i will jump years, and do ragsdale's leper business. when we came to dramatize, we can draw a deal of matter from the story, all ready to our hand. yrs ever mark. he never finished the sandwich islands story which he and howells were to dramatize later. his head filled up with other projects, such as publishing plans, reading-tours, and the like. the type-setting machine does not appear in the letters of this period, but it was an important factor, nevertheless. it was costing several thousand dollars a month for construction and becoming a heavy drain on mark twain's finances. it was necessary to recuperate, and the anxiety for a profitable play, or some other adventure that would bring a quick and generous return, grew out of this need. clemens had established charles l. webster, his nephew by marriage, in a new york office, as selling agent for the mississippi book and for his plays. he was also planning to let webster publish the new book, huck finn. george w. cable had proven his ability as a reader, and clemens saw possibilities in a reading combination, which was first planned to include aldrich, and howells, and a private car. but aldrich and howells did not warm to the idea, and the car was eliminated from the plan. cable came to visit clemens in hartford, and was taken with the mumps, so that the reading-trip was postponed. the fortunes of the sellers play were most uncertain and becoming daily more doubtful. in february, howells wrote: “if you have got any comfort in regard to our play i wish you would heave it into my bosom.” cable recovered in time, and out of gratitude planned a great april-fool surprise for his host. he was a systematic man, and did it in his usual thorough way. he sent a “private and confidential” suggestion to a hundred and fifty of mark twain's friends and admirers, nearly all distinguished literary men. the suggestion was that each one of them should send a request for mark twain's autograph, timing it so that it would arrive on the st of april. all seemed to have responded. mark twain's writing-table on april fool morning was heaped with letters, asking in every ridiculous fashion for his “valuable autograph.” the one from aldrich was a fair sample. he wrote: “i am making a collection of autographs of our distinguished writers, and having read one of your works, gabriel convoy, i would like to add your name to the list.” of course, the joke in this was that gabriel convoy was by bret harte, who by this time was thoroughly detested by mark twain. the first one or two of the letters puzzled the victim; then he comprehended the size and character of the joke and entered into it thoroughly. one of the letters was from bloodgood h. cutter, the “poet lariat” of innocents abroad. cutter, of course, wrote in “poetry,” that is to say, doggerel. mark twain's april fool was a most pleasant one. ***** rhymed letter by bloodgood h. cutter to mark twain: little neck, long island. long island farmer, to his friend and pilgrim brother, samuel l. clemens, esq. friends, suggest in each one's behalf to write, and ask your autograph. to refuse that, i will not do, after the long voyage had with you. that was a memorable time you wrote in prose, i wrote in rhyme to describe the wonders of each place, and the queer customs of each race. that is in my memory yet for while i live i'll not forget. i often think of that affair and the many that were with us there. as your friends think it for the best i ask your autograph with the rest, hoping you will it to me send 'twill please and cheer your dear old friend: yours truly, bloodgood h. cutter. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hartford, apl , ' . my dear howells, it took my breath away, and i haven't recovered it yet, entirely--i mean the generosity of your proposal to read the proofs of huck finn. now if you mean it, old man--if you are in earnest--proceed, in god's name, and be by me forever blest. i cannot conceive of a rational man deliberately piling such an atrocious job upon himself; but if there is such a man and you be that man, why then pile it on. it will cost me a pang every time i think of it, but this anguish will be eingebusst to me in the joy and comfort i shall get out of the not having to read the verfluchtete proofs myself. but if you have repented of your augenblichlicher tobsucht and got back to calm cold reason again, i won't hold you to it unless i find i have got you down in writing somewhere. herr, i would not read the proof of one of my books for any fair and reasonable sum whatever, if i could get out of it. the proof-reading on the p & p cost me the last rags of my religion. m. howells had written that he would be glad to help out in the reading of the proofs of huck finn, which book webster by this time had in hand. replying to clemens's eager and grateful acceptance now, he wrote: “it is all perfectly true about the generosity, unless i am going to read your proofs from one of the shabby motives which i always find at the bottom of my soul if i examine it.” a characteristic utterance, though we may be permitted to believe that his shabby motives were fewer and less shabby than those of mankind in general. the proofs which howells was reading pleased him mightily. once, during the summer, he wrote: “if i had written half as good a book as huck finn i shouldn't ask anything better than to read the proofs; even as it is, i don't, so send them on; they will always find me somewhere.” this was the summer of the blaine-cleveland campaign. mark twain, in company with many other leading men, had mugwumped, and was supporting cleveland. from the next letter we gather something of the aspects of that memorable campaign, which was one of scandal and vituperation. we learn, too, that the young sculptor, karl gerhardt, having completed a three years' study in paris, had returned to america a qualified artist. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: elmira, aug. , ' . my dear howells,--this presidential campaign is too delicious for anything. isn't human nature the most consummate sham and lie that was ever invented? isn't man a creature to be ashamed of in pretty much all his aspects? man, “know thyself “--and then thou wilt despise thyself, to a dead moral certainty. take three quite good specimens--hawley, warner, and charley clark. even i do not loathe blaine more than they do; yet hawley is howling for blaine, warner and clark are eating their daily crow in the paper for him, and all three will vote for him. o stultification, where is thy sting, o slave where is thy hickory! i suppose you heard how a marble monument for which st. gaudens was pecuniarily responsible, burned down in hartford the other day, uninsured--for who in the world would ever think of insuring a marble shaft in a cemetery against a fire?--and left st. gauden out of pocket $ , . it was a bad day for artists. gerhardt finished my bust that day, and the work was pronounced admirable by all the kin and friends; but in putting it in plaster (or rather taking it out) next day it got ruined. it was four or five weeks hard work gone to the dogs. the news flew, and everybody on the farm flocked to the arbor and grouped themselves about the wreck in a profound and moving silence--the farm-help, the colored servants, the german nurse, the children, everybody--a silence interrupted at wide intervals by absent-minded ejaculations wising from unconscious breasts as the whole size of the disaster gradually worked its way home to the realization of one spirit after another. some burst out with one thing, some another; the german nurse put up her hands and said, “oh, schade! oh, schrecklich!” but gerhardt said nothing; or almost that. he couldn't word it, i suppose. but he went to work, and by dark had everything thoroughly well under way for a fresh start in the morning; and in three days' time had built a new bust which was a trifle better than the old one--and to-morrow we shall put the finishing touches on it, and it will be about as good a one as nearly anybody can make. yrs ever mark. if you run across anybody who wants a bust, be sure and recommend gerhardt on my say-so. but howells was determinedly for blaine. “i shall vote for blaine,” he replied. “i do not believe he is guilty of the things they accuse him of, and i know they are not proved against him. as for cleveland, his private life may be no worse than that of most men, but as an enemy of that contemptible, hypocritical, lop-sided morality which says a woman shall suffer all the shame of unchastity and man none, i want to see him destroyed politically by his past. the men who defend him would take their wives to the white house if he were president, but if he married his concubine--'made her an honest woman' they would not go near him. i can't stand that.” certainly this was sound logic, in that day, at least. but it left clemens far from satisfied. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: elmira, sept. , ' . my dear howells,--somehow i can't seem to rest quiet under the idea of your voting for blaine. i believe you said something about the country and the party. certainly allegiance to these is well; but as certainly a man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor--the party or the country come second to that, and never first. i don't ask you to vote at all--i only urge you to not soil yourself by voting for blaine. when you wrote before, you were able to say the charges against him were not proven. but you know now that they are proven, and it seems to me that that bars you and all other honest and honorable men (who are independently situated) from voting for him. it is not necessary to vote for cleveland; the only necessary thing to do, as i understand it, is that a man shall keep himself clean, (by withholding his vote for an improper man) even though the party and the country go to destruction in consequence. it is not parties that make or save countries or that build them to greatness--it is clean men, clean ordinary citizens, rank and file, the masses. clean masses are not made by individuals standing back till the rest become clean. as i said before, i think a man's first duty is to his own honor; not to his country and not to his party. don't be offended; i mean no offence. i am not so concerned about the rest of the nation, but--well, good-bye. ys ever mark. there does not appear to be any further discussion of the matter between howells and clemens. their letters for a time contained no suggestion of politics. perhaps mark twain's own political conscience was not entirely clear in his repudiation of his party; at least we may believe from his next letter that his cleveland enthusiasm was qualified by a willingness to support a republican who would command his admiration and honor. the idea of an eleventh-hour nomination was rather startling, whatever its motive. ***** to mr. pierce, in boston: hartford, oct. , ' . my dear mr. pierce,--you know, as well as i do, that the reason the majority of republicans are going to vote for blaine is because they feel that they cannot help themselves. do not you believe that if mr. edmunds would consent to run for president, on the independent ticket--even at this late day--he might be elected? well, if he wouldn't consent, but should even strenuously protest and say he wouldn't serve if elected, isn't it still wise and fair to nominate him and vote for him? since his protest would relieve him from all responsibility; and he couldn't surely find fault with people for forcing a compliment upon him. and do not you believe that his name thus compulsorily placed at the head of the independent column would work absolutely certain defeat to blain and save the country's honor? politicians often carry a victory by springing some disgraceful and rascally mine under the feet of the adversary at the eleventh hour; would it not be wholesome to vary this thing for once and spring as formidable a mine of a better sort under the enemy's works? if edmunds's name were put up, i would vote for him in the teeth of all the protesting and blaspheming he could do in a month; and there are lots of others who would do likewise. if this notion is not a foolish and wicked one, won't you just consult with some chief independents, and see if they won't call a sudden convention and whoop the thing through? to nominate edmunds the st of november, would be soon enough, wouldn't it? with kindest regards to you and the aldriches, yr truly s. l. clemens. clemens and cable set out on their reading-tour in november. they were a curiously-assorted pair: cable was of orthodox religion, exact as to habits, neat, prim, all that clemens was not. in the beginning cable undertook to read the bible aloud to clemens each evening, but this part of the day's program was presently omitted by request. if they spent sunday in a town, cable was up bright and early visiting the various churches and sunday-schools, while mark twain remained at the hotel, in bed, reading or asleep. xxv. the great year of . clemens and cable. publication of “huck finn.” the grant memoirs. mark twain at fifty. the year was in some respects the most important, certainly the most pleasantly exciting, in mark twain's life. it was the year in which he entered fully into the publishing business and launched one of the most spectacular of all publishing adventures, the personal memoirs of general u. s. grant. clemens had not intended to do general publishing when he arranged with webster to become sales-agent for the mississippi book, and later general agent for huck finn's adventures; he had intended only to handle his own books, because he was pretty thoroughly dissatisfied with other publishing arrangements. even the library of humor, which howells, with clark, of the courant, had put together for him, he left with osgood until that publisher failed, during the spring of . certainly he never dreamed of undertaking anything of the proportions of the grant book. he had always believed that grant could make a book. more than once, when they had met, he had urged the general to prepare his memoirs for publication. howells, in his 'my mark twain', tells of going with clemens to see grant, then a member of the ill-fated firm of grant and ward, and how they lunched on beans, bacon and coffee brought in from a near-by restaurant. it was while they were eating this soldier fare that clemens--very likely abetted by howells --especially urged the great commander to prepare his memoirs. but grant had become a financier, as he believed, and the prospect of literary earnings, however large, did not appeal to him. furthermore, he was convinced that he was without literary ability and that a book by him would prove a failure. but then, by and by, came a failure more disastrous than anything he had foreseen--the downfall of his firm through the napoleonic rascality of ward. general grant was utterly ruined; he was left without income and apparently without the means of earning one. it was the period when the great war series was appeasing in the century magazine. general grant, hard-pressed, was induced by the editors to prepare one or more articles, and, finding that he could write them, became interested in the idea of a book. it is unnecessary to repeat here the story of how the publication of this important work passed into the hands of mark twain; that is to say, the firm of charles l. webster & co., the details having been fully given elsewhere.--[see mark twain: a biography, chap. cliv.]-- we will now return for the moment to other matters, as reported in order by the letters. clemens and cable had continued their reading-tour into canada, and in february found themselves in montreal. here they were invited by the toque bleue snow-shoe club to join in one of their weekly excursions across mt. royal. they could not go, and the reasons given by mark twain are not without interest. the letter is to mr. george iles, author of flame, electricity, and the camera, and many other useful works. ***** to george iles, far the toque blew snow-shoe club, montreal: detroit, february , . midnight, p.s. my dear iles,--i got your other telegram a while ago, and answered it, explaining that i get only a couple of hours in the middle of the day for social life. i know it doesn't seem rational that a man should have to lie abed all day in order to be rested and equipped for talking an hour at night, and yet in my case and cable's it is so. unless i get a great deal of rest, a ghastly dulness settles down upon me on the platform, and turns my performance into work, and hard work, whereas it ought always to be pastime, recreation, solid enjoyment. usually it is just this latter, but that is because i take my rest faithfully, and prepare myself to do my duty by my audience. i am the obliged and appreciative servant of my brethren of the snow-shoe club, and nothing in the world would delight me more than to come to their house without naming time or terms on my own part--but you see how it is. my cast iron duty is to my audience--it leaves me no liberty and no option. with kindest regards to the club, and to you, i am sincerely yours s. l. clemens. in the next letter we reach the end of the clemens-cable venture and get a characteristic summing up of mark twain's general attitude toward the companion of his travels. it must be read only in the clear realization of mark twain's attitude toward orthodoxy, and his habit of humor. cable was as rigidly orthodox as mark twain was revolutionary. the two were never anything but the best of friends. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: philada. feb. , ' . my dear howells,--to-night in baltimore, to-morrow afternoon and night in washington, and my four-months platform campaign is ended at last. it has been a curious experience. it has taught me that cable's gifts of mind are greater and higher than i had suspected. but-- that “but” is pointing toward his religion. you will never, never know, never divine, guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the christian religion can be made until you come to know and study cable daily and hourly. mind you, i like him; he is pleasant company; i rage and swear at him sometimes, but we do not quarrel; we get along mighty happily together; but in him and his person i have learned to hate all religions. he has taught me to abhor and detest the sabbath-day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it. nat goodwin was on the train yesterday. he plays in washington all the coming week. he is very anxious to get our sellers play and play it under changed names. i said the only thing i could do would be to write to you. well, i've done it. ys ever mark. clemens and webster were often at the house of general grant during these early days of , and it must have been webster who was present with clemens on the great occasion described in the following telegram. it was on the last day and hour of president arthur's administration that the bill was passed which placed ulysses s. grant as full general with full pay on the retired list, and it is said that the congressional clock was set back in order that this enactment might become a law before the administration changed. general grant had by this time developed cancer and was already in feeble health. ***** telegram to mrs. clemens, in hartford: new york, mar. , . to mrs. s. l. clemens, we were at general grant's at noon and a telegram arrived that the last act of the expiring congress late this morning retired him with full general's rank and accompanying emoluments. the effect upon him was like raising the dead. we were present when the telegram was put in his hand. s. l. clemens. something has been mentioned before of mark twain's investments and the generally unprofitable habit of them. he had a trusting nature, and was usually willing to invest money on any plausible recommendation. he was one of thousands such, and being a person of distinction he now and then received letters of inquiry, complaint, or condolence. a minister wrote him that he had bought some stocks recommended by a hartford banker and advertised in a religious paper. he added, “after i made that purchase they wrote me that you had just bought a hundred shares and that you were a 'shrewd' man.” the writer closed by asking for further information. he received it, as follows: ***** to the rev. j----, in baltimore: washington, mch. ,' . my dear sir,--i take my earliest opportunity to answer your favor of feb. b---- was premature in calling me a “shrewd man.” i wasn't one at that time, but am one now--that is, i am at least too shrewd to ever again invest in anything put on the market by b----. i know nothing whatever about the bank note co., and never did know anything about it. b---- sold me about $ , or $ , worth of the stock at $ , and i own it yet. he sold me $ , worth of another rose-tinted stock about the same time. i have got that yet, also. i judge that a peculiarity of b----'s stocks is that they are of the staying kind. i think you should have asked somebody else whether i was a shrewd man or not for two reasons: the stock was advertised in a religious paper, a circumstance which was very suspicious; and the compliment came to you from a man who was interested to make a purchaser of you. i am afraid you deserve your loss. a financial scheme advertised in any religious paper is a thing which any living person ought to know enough to avoid; and when the factor is added that m. runs that religious paper, a dead person ought to know enough to avoid it. very truly yours s. l. clemens. the story of huck finn was having a wide success. webster handled it skillfully, and the sales were large. in almost every quarter its welcome was enthusiastic. here and there, however, could be found an exception; huck's morals were not always approved of by library reading-committees. the first instance of this kind was reported from concord; and would seem not to have depressed the author-publisher. ***** to chas. l. webster, in new york: mch , ' . dear charley,--the committee of the public library of concord, mass, have given us a rattling tip-top puff which will go into every paper in the country. they have expelled huck from their library as “trash and suitable only for the slums.” that will sell , copies for us sure. s. l. c. perhaps the concord free trade club had some idea of making amends to mark twain for the slight put upon his book by their librarians, for immediately after the huck finn incident they notified him of his election to honorary membership. those were the days of “authors' readings,” and clemens and howells not infrequently assisted at these functions, usually given as benefits of one kind or another. from the next letter, written following an entertainment given for the longfellow memorial, we gather that mark twain's opinion of howells's reading was steadily improving. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hartford, may , ' . my dear howells,--.... who taught you to read? observation and thought, i guess. and practice at the tavern club?--yes; and that was the best teaching of all: well, you sent even your daintiest and most delicate and fleeting points home to that audience--absolute proof of good reading. but you couldn't read worth a damn a few years ago. i do not say this to flatter. it is true i looked around for you when i was leaving, but you had already gone. alas, osgood has failed at last. it was easy to see that he was on the very verge of it a year ago, and it was also easy to see that he was still on the verge of it a month or two ago; but i continued to hope--but not expect that he would pull through. the library of humor is at his dwelling house, and he will hand it to you whenever you want it. to save it from any possibility of getting mixed up in the failure, perhaps you had better send down and get it. i told him, the other day, that an order of any kind from you would be his sufficient warrant for its delivery to you. in two days general grant has dictated pages of foolscap, and thus the wilderness and appomattox stand for all time in his own words. this makes the second volume of his book as valuable as the first. he looks mighty well, these latter days. yrs ever mark. “i am exceedingly glad,” wrote howells, “that you approve of my reading, for it gives me some hope that i may do something on the platform next winter.... but i would never read within a hundred miles of you, if i could help it. you simply straddled down to the footlights and took that house up in the hollow of your hand and tickled it.” ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: elmira, july , . my dear howells,--you are really my only author; i am restricted to you, i wouldn't give a damn for the rest. i bored through middlemarch during the past week, with its labored and tedious analyses of feelings and motives, its paltry and tiresome people, its unexciting and uninteresting story, and its frequent blinding flashes of single-sentence poetry, philosophy, wit, and what not, and nearly died from the overwork. i wouldn't read another of those books for a farm. i did try to read one other--daniel deronda. i dragged through three chapters, losing flesh all the time, and then was honest enough to quit, and confess to myself that i haven't any romance literature appetite, as far as i can see, except for your books. but what i started to say, was, that i have just read part ii of indian summer, and to my mind there isn't a waste line in it, or one that could be improved. i read it yesterday, ending with that opinion; and read it again to-day, ending with the same opinion emphasized. i haven't read part i yet, because that number must have reached hartford after we left; but we are going to send down town for a copy, and when it comes i am to read both parts aloud to the family. it is a beautiful story, and makes a body laugh all the time, and cry inside, and feel so old and so forlorn; and gives him gracious glimpses of his lost youth that fill him with a measureless regret, and build up in him a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted far-off land, and of being an exile now, and desolate--and lord, no chance ever to get back there again! that is the thing that hurts. well, you have done it with marvelous facility and you make all the motives and feelings perfectly clear without analyzing the guts out of them, the way george eliot does. i can't stand george eliot and hawthorne and those people; i see what they are at a hundred years before they get to it and they just tire me to death. and as for “the bostonians,” i would rather be damned to john bunyan's heaven than read that. yrs ever mark it is as easy to understand mark twain's enjoyment of indian summer as his revolt against daniel deronda and the bostonians. he cared little for writing that did not convey its purpose in the simplest and most direct terms. it is interesting to note that in thanking clemens for his compliment howells wrote: “what people cannot see is that i analyze as little as possible; they go on talking about the analytical school, which i am supposed to belong to, and i want to thank you for using your eyes..... did you ever read de foe's 'roxana'? if not, then read it, not merely for some of the deepest insights into the lying, suffering, sinning, well-meaning human soul, but for the best and most natural english that a book was ever written in.” general grant worked steadily on his book, dictating when he could, making brief notes on slips of paper when he could no longer speak. clemens visited him at mt. mcgregor and brought the dying soldier the comforting news that enough of his books were already sold to provide generously for his family, and that the sales would aggregate at least twice as much by the end of the year. this was some time in july. on the d of that month general grant died. immediately there was a newspaper discussion as to the most suitable place for the great chieftain to lie. mark twain's contribution to this debate, though in the form of an open letter, seems worthy of preservation here. ***** to the new york “sun,” on the proper place for grant's tomb: to the editor op' the sun:--sir,--the newspaper atmosphere is charged with objections to new york as a place of sepulchre for general grant, and the objectors are strenuous that washington is the right place. they offer good reasons--good temporary reasons--for both of these positions. but it seems to me that temporary reasons are not mete for the occasion. we need to consider posterity rather than our own generation. we should select a grave which will not merely be in the right place now, but will still be in the right place years from now. how does washington promise as to that? you have only to hit it in one place to kill it. some day the west will be numerically strong enough to move the seat of government; her past attempts are a fair warning that when the day comes she will do it. then the city of washington will lose its consequence and pass out of the public view and public talk. it is quite within the possibilities that, a century hence, people would wonder and say, “how did your predecessors come to bury their great dead in this deserted place?” but as long as american civilisation lasts new york will last. i cannot but think she has been well and wisely chosen as the guardian of a grave which is destined to become almost the most conspicuous in the world's history. twenty centuries from now new york will still be new york, still a vast city, and the most notable object in it will still be the tomb and monument of general grant. i observe that the common and strongest objection to new york is that she is not “national ground.” let us give ourselves no uneasiness about that. wherever general grant's body lies, that is national ground. s. l. clemens. elmira, july . the letter that follows is very long, but it seems too important and too interesting to be omitted in any part. general grant's early indulgence in liquors had long been a matter of wide, though not very definite, knowledge. every one had heard how lincoln, on being told that grant drank, remarked something to the effect that he would like to know what kind of whisky grant used so that he might get some of it for his other generals. henry ward beecher, selected to deliver a eulogy on the dead soldier, and doubtless wishing neither to ignore the matter nor to make too much of it, naturally turned for information to the publisher of grant's own memoirs, hoping from an advance copy to obtain light. ***** to henry ward beecher, brooklyn: elmira, n. y. sept. , ' . my dear mr. beecher,--my nephew webster is in europe making contracts for the memoirs. before he sailed he came to me with a writing, directed to the printers and binders, to this effect: “honor no order for a sight or copy of the memoirs while i am absent, even though it be signed by mr. clemens himself.” i gave my permission. there were weighty reasons why i should not only give my permission, but hold it a matter of honor to not dissolve the order or modify it at any time. so i did all of that--said the order should stand undisturbed to the end. if a principal could dissolve his promise as innocently as he can dissolve his written order unguarded by his promise, i would send you a copy of the memoirs instantly. i did not foresee you, or i would have made an exception. ........................... my idea gained from army men, is that the drunkenness (and sometimes pretty reckless spreeing, nights,) ceased before he came east to be lt. general. (refer especially to gen. wm. b. franklin--[if you could see franklin and talk with him--then he would unbosom,]) it was while grant was still in the west that mr. lincoln said he wished he could find out what brand of whisky that fellow used, so he could furnish it to some of the other generals. franklin saw grant tumble from his horse drunk, while reviewing troops in new orleans. the fall gave him a good deal of a hurt. he was then on the point of leaving for the chattanooga region. i naturally put “that and that together” when i read gen. o. o. howards's article in the christian union, three or four weeks ago--where he mentions that the new general arrived lame from a recent accident. (see that article.) and why not write howard? franklin spoke positively of the frequent spreeing. in camp--in time of war. ......................... captain grant was frequently threatened by the commandant of his oregon post with a report to the war department of his conduct unless he modified his intemperance. the report would mean dismissal from the service. at last the report had to be made out; and then, so greatly was the captain beloved, that he was privately informed, and was thus enabled to rush his resignation to washington ahead of the report. did the report go, nevertheless? i don't know. if it did, it is in the war department now, possibly, and seeable. i got all this from a regular army man, but i can't name him to save me. the only time general grant ever mentioned liquor to me was about last april or possibly may. he said: “if i could only build up my strength! the doctors urge whisky and champagne; but i can't take them; i can't abide the taste of any kind of liquor.” had he made a conquest so complete that even the taste of liquor was become an offense? or was he so sore over what had been said about his habit that he wanted to persuade others and likewise himself that he hadn't even ever had any taste for it? it sounded like the latter, but that's no evidence. he told me in the fall of ' that there was something the matter with his throat, and that at the suggestion of his physicians he had reduced his smoking to one cigar a day. then he added, in a casual fashion, that he didn't care for that one, and seldom smoked it. i could understand that feeling. he had set out to conquer not the habit but the inclination--the desire. he had gone at the root, not the trunk. it's the perfect way and the only true way (i speak from experience.) how i do hate those enemies of the human race who go around enslaving god's free people with pledges--to quit drinking instead of to quit wanting to drink. but sherman and van vliet know everything concerning grant; and if you tell them how you want to use the facts, both of them will testify. regular army men have no concealments about each other; and yet they make their awful statements without shade or color or malice with a frankness and a child-like naivety, indeed, which is enchanting-and stupefying. west point seems to teach them that, among other priceless things not to be got in any other college in this world. if we talked about our guild-mates as i have heard sherman, grant, van vliet and others talk about theirs--mates with whom they were on the best possible terms--we could never expect them to speak to us again. ....................... i am reminded, now, of another matter. the day of the funeral i sat an hour over a single drink and several cigars with van vliet and sherman and senator sherman; and among other things gen. sherman said, with impatient scorn: “the idea of all this nonsense about grant not being able to stand rude language and indelicate stories! why grant was full of humor, and full of the appreciation of it. i have sat with him by the hour listening to jim nye's yarns, and i reckon you know the style of jim nye's histories, clemens. it makes me sick--that newspaper nonsense. grant was no namby-pamby fool, he was a man--all over--rounded and complete.” i wish i had thought of it! i would have said to general grant: “put the drunkenness in the memoirs--and the repentance and reform. trust the people.” but i will wager there is not a hint in the book. he was sore, there. as much of the book as i have read gives no hint, as far as i recollect. the sick-room brought out the points of gen. grant's character--some of them particularly, to wit: his patience; his indestructible equability of temper; his exceeding gentleness, kindness, forbearance, lovingness, charity; his loyalty: to friends, to convictions, to promises, half-promises, infinitesimal fractions and shadows of promises; (there was a requirement of him which i considered an atrocity, an injustice, an outrage; i wanted to implore him to repudiate it; fred grant said, “save your labor, i know him; he is in doubt as to whether he made that half-promise or not--and, he will give the thing the benefit of the doubt; he will fulfill that half-promise or kill himself trying;” fred grant was right--he did fulfill it;) his aggravatingly trustful nature; his genuineness, simplicity, modesty, diffidence, self-depreciation, poverty in the quality of vanity-and, in no contradiction of this last, his simple pleasure in the flowers and general ruck sent to him by tom, dick and harry from everywhere--a pleasure that suggested a perennial surprise that he should be the object of so much fine attention--he was the most lovable great child in the world; (i mentioned his loyalty: you remember harrison, the colored body-servant? the whole family hated him, but that did not make any difference, the general always stood at his back, wouldn't allow him to be scolded; always excused his failures and deficiencies with the one unvarying formula, “we are responsible for these things in his race--it is not fair to visit our fault upon them--let him alone;” so they did let him alone, under compulsion, until the great heart that was his shield was taken away; then--well they simply couldn't stand him, and so they were excusable for determining to discharge him--a thing which they mortally hated to do, and by lucky accident were saved from the necessity of doing;) his toughness as a bargainer when doing business for other people or for his country (witness his “terms” at donelson, vicksburg, etc.; fred grant told me his father wound up an estate for the widow and orphans of a friend in st. louis--it took several years; at the end every complication had been straightened out, and the property put upon a prosperous basis; great sums had passed through his hands, and when he handed over the papers there were vouchers to show what had been done with every penny) and his trusting, easy, unexacting fashion when doing business for himself (at that same time he was paying out money in driblets to a man who was running his farm for him--and in his first presidency he paid every one of those driblets again (total, $ , f. said,) for he hadn't a scrap of paper to show that he had ever paid them before; in his dealings with me he would not listen to terms which would place my money at risk and leave him protected--the thought plainly gave him pain, and he put it from him, waved it off with his hands, as one does accounts of crushings and mutilations--wouldn't listen, changed the subject;) and his fortitude! he was under, sentence of death last spring; he sat thinking, musing, several days--nobody knows what about; then he pulled himself together and set to work to finish that book, a colossal task for a dying man. presently his hand gave out; fate seemed to have got him checkmated. dictation was suggested. no, he never could do that; had never tried it; too old to learn, now. by and by--if he could only do appomattox-well. so he sent for a stenographer, and dictated , words at a single sitting!--never pausing, never hesitating for a word, never repeating--and in the written-out copy he made hardly a correction. he dictated again, every two or three days--the intervals were intervals of exhaustion and slow recuperation--and at last he was able to tell me that he had written more matter than could be got into the book. i then enlarged the book--had to. then he lost his voice. he was not quite done yet, however:--there was no end of little plums and spices to be stuck in, here and there; and this work he patiently continued, a few lines a day, with pad and pencil, till far into july, at mt. mcgregor. one day he put his pencil aside, and said he was done--there was nothing more to do. if i had been there i could have foretold the shock that struck the world three days later. well, i've written all this, and it doesn't seem to amount to anything. but i do want to help, if i only could. i will enclose some scraps from my autobiography--scraps about general grant--they may be of some trifle of use, and they may not--they at least verify known traits of his character. my autobiography is pretty freely dictated, but my idea is to jack-plane it a little before i die, some day or other; i mean the rude construction and rotten grammar. it is the only dictating i ever did, and it was most troublesome and awkward work. you may return it to hartford. sincerely yours s. l. clemens. the old long-deferred library of humor came up again for discussion, when in the fall of howells associated himself with harper & brothers. howells's contract provided that his name was not to appear on any book not published by the harper firm. he wrote, therefore, offering to sell out his interest in the enterprise for two thousand dollars, in addition to the five hundred which he had already received--an amount considered to be less than he was to have received as joint author and compiler. mark twain's answer pretty fully covers the details of this undertaking. ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hartford, oct. , . private. my dear howells,--i reckon it would ruin the book that is, make it necessary to pigeon-hole it and leave it unpublished. i couldn't publish it without a very responsible name to support my own on the title page, because it has so much of my own matter in it. i bought osgood's rights for $ , cash, i have paid clark $ and owe him $ more, which must of course be paid whether i publish or not. yet i fully recognize that i have no sort of moral right to let that ancient and procrastinated contract hamper you in any way, and i most certainly won't. so, it is my decision,--after thinking over and rejecting the idea of trying to buy permission of the harpers for $ , to use your name, (a proposition which they would hate to refuse to a man in a perplexed position, and yet would naturally have to refuse it,) to pigeon-hole the “library”: not destroy it, but merely pigeon-hole it and wait a few years and see what new notion providence will take concerning it. he will not desert us now, after putting in four licks to our one on this book all this time. it really seems in a sense discourteous not to call it “providence's library of humor.” now that deal is all settled, the next question is, do you need and must you require that $ , now? since last march, you know, i am carrying a mighty load, solitary and alone--general grant's book--and must carry it till the first volume is days old (jan. st) before the relief money will begin to flow in. from now till the first of january every dollar is as valuable to me as it could be to a famishing tramp. if you can wait till then--i mean without discomfort, without inconvenience--it will be a large accommodation to me; but i will not allow you to do this favor if it will discommode you. so, speak right out, frankly, and if you need the money i will go out on the highway and get it, using violence, if necessary. mind, i am not in financial difficulties, and am not going to be. i am merely a starving beggar standing outside the door of plenty--obstructed by a yale time-lock which is set for jan. st. i can stand it, and stand it perfectly well; but the days do seem to fool along considerable slower than they used to. i am mighty glad you are with the harpers. i have noticed that good men in their employ go there to stay. yours ever, mark. in the next letter we begin to get some idea of the size of mark twain's first publishing venture, and a brief summary of results may not be out of place here. the grant life was issued in two volumes. in the early months of the year when the agents' canvass was just beginning, mark twain, with what seems now almost clairvoyant vision, prophesied a sale of three hundred thousand sets. the actual sales ran somewhat more than this number. on february , , charles l. webster & co. paid to mrs. grant the largest single royalty check in the history of book-publishing. the amount of it was two hundred thousand dollars. subsequent checks increased the aggregate return to considerably more than double this figure. in a memorandum made by clemens in the midst of the canvass he wrote. “during consecutive days the sales (i. e., subscriptions) of general grant's book averaged , sets ( , single volumes) per day: roughly stated, mrs. grant's income during all that time was $ , a day.” ***** to w. d. howells, in boston: hotel normandie new york, dec. , ' . my dear howells,--i told webster, this afternoon, to send you that $ , ; but he is in such a rush, these first days of publication, that he may possibly forget it; so i write lest i forget it too. remind me, if he should forget. when i postponed you lately, i did it because i thought i should be cramped for money until january, but that has turned out to be an error, so i hasten to cut short the postponement. i judge by the newspapers that you are in auburndale, but i don't know it officially. i've got the first volume launched safely; consequently, half of the suspense is over, and i am that much nearer the goal. we've bound and shipped , books; and by the th shall finish and ship the remaining , of the first edition. i got nervous and came down to help hump-up the binderies; and i mean to stay here pretty much all the time till the first days of march, when the second volume will issue. shan't have so much trouble, this time, though, if we get to press pretty soon, because we can get more binderies then than are to be had in front of the holidays. one lives and learns. i find it takes binderies four months to bind , books. this is a good book to publish. i heard a canvasser say, yesterday, that while delivering eleven books he took new subscriptions. but we shall be in a hell of a fix if that goes on--it will “ball up” the binderies again. yrs ever mark. november th that year was mark twain's fiftieth birthday, an event noticed by the newspapers generally, and especially observed by many of his friends. warner, stockton and many others sent letters; andrew lang contributed a fine poem; also oliver wendell. holmes --the latter by special request of miss gilder--for the critic. these attentions came as a sort of crowning happiness at the end of a golden year. at no time in his life were mark twain's fortunes and prospects brighter; he had a beautiful family and a perfect home. also, he had great prosperity. the reading-tour with cable had been a fine success. his latest book, the adventures of huckleberry finn, had added largely to his fame and income. the publication of the grant memoirs had been a dazzling triumph. mark twain had become recognized, not only as america's most distinguished author, but as its most envied publisher. and now, with his fiftieth birthday, had come this laurel from holmes, last of the brahmins, to add a touch of glory to all the rest. we feel his exaltation in his note of acknowledgment. ***** to dr. oliver wendell holmes, in boston: dear mr. holmes,--i shall never be able to tell you the half of how proud you have made me. if i could you would say you were nearly paid for the trouble you took. and then the family: if i can convey the electrical surprise and gratitude and exaltation of the wife and the children last night, when they happened upon that critic where i had, with artful artlessness, spread it open and retired out of view to see what would happen--well, it was great and fine and beautiful to see, and made me feel as the victor feels when the shouting hosts march by; and if you also could have seen it you would have said the account was squared. for i have brought them up in your company, as in the company of a warm and friendly and beneficent but far-distant sun; and so, for you to do this thing was for the sun to send down out of the skies the miracle of a special ray and transfigure me before their faces. i knew what that poem would be to them; i knew it would raise me up to remote and shining heights in their eyes, to very fellowship with the chambered nautilus itself, and that from that fellowship they could never more dissociate me while they should live; and so i made sure to be by when the surprise should come. charles dudley warner is charmed with the poem for its own felicitous sake; and so indeed am i, but more because it has drawn the sting of my fiftieth year; taken away the pain of it, the grief of it, the somehow shame of it, and made me glad and proud it happened. with reverence and affection, sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. holmes wrote with his own hand: “did miss gilder tell you i had twenty-three letters spread out for answer when her suggestion came about your anniversary? i stopped my correspondence and made my letters wait until the lines were done.” north american review no. dxcviii. september , chapters from my autobiography.--i.[ ] by mark twain. prefatory note.--mr. clemens began to write his autobiography many years ago, and he continues to add to it day by day. it was his original intention to permit no publication of his memoirs until after his death; but, after leaving "pier no. ," he concluded that a considerable portion might now suitably be given to the public. it is that portion, garnered from the quarter-million of words already written, which will appear in this review during the coming year. no part of the autobiography will be published in book form during the lifetime of the author.--editor n. a. r. introduction. i intend that this autobiography shall become a model for all future autobiographies when it is published, after my death, and i also intend that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its form and method--a form and method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along, like contact of flint with steel. moreover, this autobiography of mine does not select from my life its showy episodes, but deals mainly in the common experiences which go to make up the life of the average human being, because these episodes are of a sort which he is familiar with in his own life, and in which he sees his own life reflected and set down in print. the usual, conventional autobiographer seems to particularly hunt out those occasions in his career when he came into contact with celebrated persons, whereas his contacts with the uncelebrated were just as interesting to him, and would be to his reader, and were vastly more numerous than his collisions with the famous. howells was here yesterday afternoon, and i told him the whole scheme of this autobiography and its apparently systemless system--only apparently systemless, for it is not really that. it is a deliberate system, and the law of the system is that i shall talk about the matter which for the moment interests me, and cast it aside and talk about something else the moment its interest for me is exhausted. it is a system which follows no charted course and is not going to follow any such course. it is a system which is a complete and purposed jumble--a course which begins nowhere, follows no specified route, and can never reach an end while i am alive, for the reason that, if i should talk to the stenographer two hours a day for a hundred years, i should still never be able to set down a tenth part of the things which have interested me in my lifetime. i told howells that this autobiography of mine would live a couple of thousand years, without any effort, and would then take a fresh start and live the rest of the time. he said he believed it would, and asked me if i meant to make a library of it. i said that that was my design; but that, if i should live long enough, the set of volumes could not be contained merely in a city, it would require a state, and that there would not be any multi-billionaire alive, perhaps, at any time during its existence who would be able to buy a full set, except on the instalment plan. howells applauded, and was full of praises and endorsement, which was wise in him and judicious. if he had manifested a different spirit, i would have thrown him out of the window. i like criticism, but it must be my way. i. back of the virginia clemenses is a dim procession of ancestors stretching back to noah's time. according to tradition, some of them were pirates and slavers in elizabeth's time. but this is no discredit to them, for so were drake and hawkins and the others. it was a respectable trade, then, and monarchs were partners in it. in my time i have had desires to be a pirate myself. the reader--if he will look deep down in his secret heart, will find--but never mind what he will find there; i am not writing his autobiography, but mine. later, according to tradition, one of the procession was ambassador to spain in the time of james i, or of charles i, and married there and sent down a strain of spanish blood to warm us up. also, according to tradition, this one or another--geoffrey clement, by name--helped to sentence charles to death. i have not examined into these traditions myself, partly because i was indolent, and partly because i was so busy polishing up this end of the line and trying to make it showy; but the other clemenses claim that they have made the examination and that it stood the test. therefore i have always taken for granted that i did help charles out of his troubles, by ancestral proxy. my instincts have persuaded me, too. whenever we have a strong and persistent and ineradicable instinct, we may be sure that it is not original with us, but inherited--inherited from away back, and hardened and perfected by the petrifying influence of time. now i have been always and unchangingly bitter against charles, and i am quite certain that this feeling trickled down to me through the veins of my forebears from the heart of that judge; for it is not my disposition to be bitter against people on my own personal account i am not bitter against jeffreys. i ought to be, but i am not. it indicates that my ancestors of james ii's time were indifferent to him; i do not know why; i never could make it out; but that is what it indicates. and i have always felt friendly toward satan. of course that is ancestral; it must be in the blood, for i could not have originated it. ... and so, by the testimony of instinct, backed by the assertions of clemenses who said they had examined the records, i have always been obliged to believe that geoffrey clement the martyr-maker was an ancestor of mine, and to regard him with favor, and in fact pride. this has not had a good effect upon me, for it has made me vain, and that is a fault. it has made me set myself above people who were less fortunate in their ancestry than i, and has moved me to take them down a peg, upon occasion, and say things to them which hurt them before company. a case of the kind happened in berlin several years ago. william walter phelps was our minister at the emperor's court, then, and one evening he had me to dinner to meet count s., a cabinet minister. this nobleman was of long and illustrious descent. of course i wanted to let out the fact that i had some ancestors, too; but i did not want to pull them out of their graves by the ears, and i never could seem to get the chance to work them in in a way that would look sufficiently casual. i suppose phelps was in the same difficulty. in fact he looked distraught, now and then--just as a person looks who wants to uncover an ancestor purely by accident, and cannot think of a way that will seem accidental enough. but at last, after dinner, he made a try. he took us about his drawing-room, showing us the pictures, and finally stopped before a rude and ancient engraving. it was a picture of the court that tried charles i. there was a pyramid of judges in puritan slouch hats, and below them three bare-headed secretaries seated at a table. mr. phelps put his finger upon one of the three, and said with exulting indifference-- "an ancestor of mine." i put my finger on a judge, and retorted with scathing languidness-- "ancestor of mine. but it is a small matter. i have others." it was not noble in me to do it. i have always regretted it since. but it landed him. i wonder how he felt? however, it made no difference in our friendship, which shows that he was fine and high, notwithstanding the humbleness of his origin. and it was also creditable in me, too, that i could overlook it. i made no change in my bearing toward him, but always treated him as an equal. but it was a hard night for me in one way. mr. phelps thought i was the guest of honor, and so did count s.; but i didn't, for there was nothing in my invitation to indicate it. it was just a friendly offhand note, on a card. by the time dinner was announced phelps was himself in a state of doubt. something had to be done; and it was not a handy time for explanations. he tried to get me to go out with him, but i held back; then he tried s., and he also declined. there was another guest, but there was no trouble about him. we finally went out in a pile. there was a decorous plunge for seats, and i got the one at mr. phelps's left, the count captured the one facing phelps, and the other guest had to take the place of honor, since he could not help himself. we returned to the drawing-room in the original disorder. i had new shoes on, and they were tight. at eleven i was privately crying; i couldn't help it, the pain was so cruel. conversation had been dead for an hour. s. had been due at the bedside of a dying official ever since half past nine. at last we all rose by one blessed impulse and went down to the street door without explanations--in a pile, and no precedence; and so, parted. the evening had its defects; still, i got my ancestor in, and was satisfied. among the virginian clemenses were jere. (already mentioned), and sherrard. jere. clemens had a wide reputation as a good pistol-shot, and once it enabled him to get on the friendly side of some drummers when they wouldn't have paid any attention to mere smooth words and arguments. he was out stumping the state at the time. the drummers were grouped in front of the stand, and had been hired by the opposition to drum while he made his speech. when he was ready to begin, he got out his revolver and laid it before him, and said in his soft, silky way-- "i do not wish to hurt anybody, and shall try not to; but i have got just a bullet apiece for those six drums, and if you should want to play on them, don't stand behind them." sherrard clemens was a republican congressman from west virginia in the war days, and then went out to st. louis, where the james clemens branch lived, and still lives, and there he became a warm rebel. this was after the war. at the time that he was a republican i was a rebel; but by the time he had become a rebel i was become (temporarily) a republican. the clemenses have always done the best they could to keep the political balances level, no matter how much it might inconvenience them. i did not know what had become of sherrard clemens; but once i introduced senator hawley to a republican mass meeting in new england, and then i got a bitter letter from sherrard from st. louis. he said that the republicans of the north--no, the "mudsills of the north"--had swept away the old aristocracy of the south with fire and sword, and it ill became me, an aristocrat by blood, to train with that kind of swine. did i forget that i was a lambton? that was a reference to my mother's side of the house. as i have already said, she was a lambton--lambton with a p, for some of the american lamptons could not spell very well in early times, and so the name suffered at their hands. she was a native of kentucky, and married my father in lexington in , when she was twenty years old and he twenty-four. neither of them had an overplus of property. she brought him two or three negroes, but nothing else, i think. they removed to the remote and secluded village of jamestown, in the mountain solitudes of east tennessee. there their first crop of children was born, but as i was of a later vintage i do not remember anything about it. i was postponed--postponed to missouri. missouri was an unknown new state and needed attractions. i think that my eldest brother, orion, my sisters pamela and margaret, and my brother benjamin were born in jamestown. there may have been others, but as to that i am not sure. it was a great lift for that little village to have my parents come there. it was hoped that they would stay, so that it would become a city. it was supposed that they would stay. and so there was a boom; but by and by they went away, and prices went down, and it was many years before jamestown got another start. i have written about jamestown in the "gilded age," a book of mine, but it was from hearsay, not from personal knowledge. my father left a fine estate behind him in the region round about jamestown-- , acres.[ ] when he died in he had owned it about twenty years. the taxes were almost nothing (five dollars a year for the whole), and he had always paid them regularly and kept his title perfect. he had always said that the land would not become valuable in his time, but that it would be a commodious provision for his children some day. it contained coal, copper, iron and timber, and he said that in the course of time railways would pierce to that region, and then the property would be property in fact as well as in name. it also produced a wild grape of a promising sort. he had sent some samples to nicholas longworth, of cincinnati, to get his judgment upon them, and mr. longworth had said that they would make as good wine as his catawbas. the land contained all these riches; and also oil, but my father did not know that, and of course in those early days he would have cared nothing about it if he had known it. the oil was not discovered until about . i wish i owned a couple of acres of the land now. in which case i would not be writing autobiographies for a living. my father's dying charge was, "cling to the land and wait; let nothing beguile it away from you." my mother's favorite cousin, james lampton, who figures in the "gilded age" as "colonel sellers," always said of that land--and said it with blazing enthusiasm, too,--"there's millions in it--millions!" it is true that he always said that about everything--and was always mistaken, too; but this time he was right; which shows that a man who goes around with a prophecy-gun ought never to get discouraged; if he will keep up his heart and fire at everything he sees, he is bound to hit something by and by. many persons regarded "colonel sellers" as a fiction, an invention, an extravagant impossibility, and did me the honor to call him a "creation"; but they were mistaken. i merely put him on paper as he was; he was not a person who could be exaggerated. the incidents which looked most extravagant, both in the book and on the stage, were not inventions of mine but were facts of his life; and i was present when they were developed. john t. raymond's audiences used to come near to dying with laughter over the turnip-eating scene; but, extravagant as the scene was, it was faithful to the facts, in all its absurd details. the thing happened in lampton's own house, and i was present. in fact i was myself the guest who ate the turnips. in the hands of a great actor that piteous scene would have dimmed any manly spectator's eyes with tears, and racked his ribs apart with laughter at the same time. but raymond was great in humorous portrayal only. in that he was superb, he was wonderful--in a word, great; in all things else he was a pigmy of the pigmies. the real colonel sellers, as i knew him in james lampton, was a pathetic and beautiful spirit, a manly man, a straight and honorable man, a man with a big, foolish, unselfish heart in his bosom, a man born to be loved; and he was loved by all his friends, and by his family worshipped. it is the right word. to them he was but little less than a god. the real colonel sellers was never on the stage. only half of him was there. raymond could not play the other half of him; it was above his level. that half was made up of qualities of which raymond was wholly destitute. for raymond was not a manly man, he was not an honorable man nor an honest one, he was empty and selfish and vulgar and ignorant and silly, and there was a vacancy in him where his heart should have been. there was only one man who could have played the whole of colonel sellers, and that was frank mayo.[ ] it is a world of surprises. they fall, too, where one is least expecting them. when i introduced sellers into the book, charles dudley warner, who was writing the story with me, proposed a change of seller's christian name. ten years before, in a remote corner of the west, he had come across a man named eschol sellers, and he thought that eschol was just the right and fitting name for our sellers, since it was odd and quaint and all that. i liked the idea, but i said that that man might turn up and object. but warner said it couldn't happen; that he was doubtless dead by this time, a man with a name like that couldn't live long; and be he dead or alive we must have the name, it was exactly the right one and we couldn't do without it. so the change was made. warner's man was a farmer in a cheap and humble way. when the book had been out a week, a college-bred gentleman of courtly manners and ducal upholstery arrived in hartford in a sultry state of mind and with a libel suit in his eye, and _his_ name was eschol sellers! he had never heard of the other one, and had never been within a thousand miles of him. this damaged aristocrat's programme was quite definite and businesslike: the american publishing company must suppress the edition as far as printed, and change the name in the plates, or stand a suit for $ , . he carried away the company's promise and many apologies, and we changed the name back to colonel mulberry sellers, in the plates. apparently there is nothing that cannot happen. even the existence of two unrelated men wearing the impossible name of eschol sellers is a possible thing. james lampton floated, all his days, in a tinted mist of magnificent dreams, and died at last without seeing one of them realized. i saw him last in , when it had been twenty-six years since i ate the basin of raw turnips and washed them down with a bucket of water in his house. he was become old and white-headed, but he entered to me in the same old breezy way of his earlier life, and he was all there, yet--not a detail wanting: the happy light in his eye, the abounding hope in his heart, the persuasive tongue, the miracle-breeding imagination--they were all there; and before i could turn around he was polishing up his aladdin's lamp and flashing the secret riches of the world before me. i said to myself, "i did not overdraw him by a shade, i set him down as he was; and he is the same man to-day. cable will recognize him." i asked him to excuse me a moment, and ran into the next room, which was cable's; cable and i were stumping the union on a reading tour. i said-- "i am going to leave your door open, so that you can listen. there is a man in there who is interesting." i went back and asked lampton what he was doing now. he began to tell me of a "small venture" he had begun in new mexico through his son; "only a little thing--a mere trifle--partly to amuse my leisure, partly to keep my capital from lying idle, but mainly to develop the boy--develop the boy; fortune's wheel is ever revolving, he may have to work for his living some day--as strange things have happened in this world. but it's only a little thing--a mere trifle, as i said." and so it was--as he began it. but under his deft hands it grew, and blossomed, and spread--oh, beyond imagination. at the end of half an hour he finished; finished with the remark, uttered in an adorably languid manner: "yes, it is but a trifle, as things go nowadays--a bagatelle--but amusing. it passes the time. the boy thinks great things of it, but he is young, you know, and imaginative; lacks the experience which comes of handling large affairs, and which tempers the fancy and perfects the judgment. i suppose there's a couple of millions in it, possibly three, but not more, i think; still, for a boy, you know, just starting in life, it is not bad. i should not want him to make a fortune--let that come later. it could turn his head, at his time of life, and in many ways be a damage to him." then he said something about his having left his pocketbook lying on the table in the main drawing-room at home, and about its being after banking hours, now, and-- i stopped him, there, and begged him to honor cable and me by being our guest at the lecture--with as many friends as might be willing to do us the like honor. he accepted. and he thanked me as a prince might who had granted us a grace. the reason i stopped his speech about the tickets was because i saw that he was going to ask me to furnish them to him and let him pay next day; and i knew that if he made the debt he would pay it if he had to pawn his clothes. after a little further chat he shook hands heartily and affectionately, and took his leave. cable put his head in at the door, and said-- "that was colonel sellers." mark twain. (_to be continued._) footnotes: [ ] copyright, , by harper & brothers. all rights reserved. [ ] correction. : it was above , , it appears. [ ] raymond was playing "colonel sellers" in and along there. about twenty years later mayo dramatized "pudd'nhead wilson" and played the title role delightfully. north american review no. dxcix. september , . chapters from my autobiography.--ii. by mark twain. ii. my experiences as an author began early in . i came to new york from san francisco in the first month of that year and presently charles h. webb, whom i had known in san francisco as a reporter on _the bulletin_, and afterward editor of _the californian_, suggested that i publish a volume of sketches. i had but a slender reputation to publish it on, but i was charmed and excited by the suggestion and quite willing to venture it if some industrious person would save me the trouble of gathering the sketches together. i was loath to do it myself, for from the beginning of my sojourn in this world there was a persistent vacancy in me where the industry ought to be. ("ought to was" is better, perhaps, though the most of the authorities differ as to this.) webb said i had some reputation in the atlantic states, but i knew quite well that it must be of a very attenuated sort. what there was of it rested upon the story of "the jumping frog." when artemus ward passed through california on a lecturing tour, in or ' , i told him the "jumping frog" story, in san francisco, and he asked me to write it out and send it to his publisher, carleton, in new york, to be used in padding out a small book which artemus had prepared for the press and which needed some more stuffing to make it big enough for the price which was to be charged for it. it reached carleton in time, but he didn't think much of it, and was not willing to go to the typesetting expense of adding it to the book. he did not put it in the waste-basket, but made henry clapp a present of it, and clapp used it to help out the funeral of his dying literary journal, _the saturday press_. "the jumping frog" appeared in the last number of that paper, was the most joyous feature of the obsequies, and was at once copied in the newspapers of america and england. it certainly had a wide celebrity, and it still had it at the time that i am speaking of--but i was aware that it was only the frog that was celebrated. it wasn't i. i was still an obscurity. webb undertook to collate the sketches. he performed this office, then handed the result to me, and i went to carleton's establishment with it. i approached a clerk and he bent eagerly over the counter to inquire into my needs; but when he found that i had come to sell a book and not to buy one, his temperature fell sixty degrees, and the old-gold intrenchments in the roof of my mouth contracted three-quarters of an inch and my teeth fell out. i meekly asked the privilege of a word with mr. carleton, and was coldly informed that he was in his private office. discouragements and difficulties followed, but after a while i got by the frontier and entered the holy of holies. ah, now i remember how i managed it! webb had made an appointment for me with carleton; otherwise i never should have gotten over that frontier. carleton rose and said brusquely and aggressively, "well, what can i do for you?" i reminded him that i was there by appointment to offer him my book for publication. he began to swell, and went on swelling and swelling and swelling until he had reached the dimensions of a god of about the second or third degree. then the fountains of his great deep were broken up, and for two or three minutes i couldn't see him for the rain. it was words, only words, but they fell so densely that they darkened the atmosphere. finally he made an imposing sweep with his right hand, which comprehended the whole room and said, "books--look at those shelves! every one of them is loaded with books that are waiting for publication. do i want any more? excuse me, i don't. good morning." twenty-one years elapsed before i saw carleton again. i was then sojourning with my family at the schweitzerhof, in luzerne. he called on me, shook hands cordially, and said at once, without any preliminaries, "i am substantially an obscure person, but i have at least one distinction to my credit of such colossal dimensions that it entitles me to immortality--to wit: i refused a book of yours, and for this i stand without competitor as the prize ass of the nineteenth century." it was a most handsome apology, and i told him so, and said it was a long-delayed revenge but was sweeter to me than any other that could be devised; that during the lapsed twenty-one years i had in fancy taken his life several times every year, and always in new and increasingly cruel and inhuman ways, but that now i was pacified, appeased, happy, even jubilant; and that thenceforth i should hold him my true and valued friend and never kill him again. i reported my adventure to webb, and he bravely said that not all the carletons in the universe should defeat that book; he would publish it himself on a ten per cent. royalty. and so he did. he brought it out in blue and gold, and made a very pretty little book of it, i think he named it "the celebrated jumping frog of calaveras county, and other sketches," price $ . . he made the plates and printed and bound the book through a job-printing house, and published it through the american news company. in june i sailed in the _quaker city_ excursion. i returned in november, and in washington found a letter from elisha bliss, of the american publishing company of hartford, offering me five per cent. royalty on a book which should recount the adventures of the excursion. in lieu of the royalty, i was offered the alternative of ten thousand dollars cash upon delivery of the manuscript. i consulted a. d. richardson and he said "take the royalty." i followed his advice and closed with bliss. by my contract i was to deliver the manuscript in july of . i wrote the book in san francisco and delivered the manuscript within contract time. bliss provided a multitude of illustrations for the book, and then stopped work on it. the contract date for the issue went by, and there was no explanation of this. time drifted along and still there was no explanation. i was lecturing all over the country; and about thirty times a day, on an average, i was trying to answer this conundrum: "when is your book coming out?" i got tired of inventing new answers to that question, and by and by i got horribly tired of the question itself. whoever asked it became my enemy at once, and i was usually almost eager to make that appear. as soon as i was free of the lecture-field i hastened to hartford to make inquiries. bliss said that the fault was not his; that he wanted to publish the book but the directors of his company were staid old fossils and were afraid of it. they had examined the book, and the majority of them were of the opinion that there were places in it of a humorous character. bliss said the house had never published a book that had a suspicion like that attaching to it, and that the directors were afraid that a departure of this kind would seriously injure the house's reputation; that he was tied hand and foot, and was not permitted to carry out his contract. one of the directors, a mr. drake--at least he was the remains of what had once been a mr. drake--invited me to take a ride with him in his buggy, and i went along. he was a pathetic old relic, and his ways and his talk were also pathetic. he had a delicate purpose in view and it took him some time to hearten himself sufficiently to carry it out, but at last he accomplished it. he explained the house's difficulty and distress, as bliss had already explained it. then he frankly threw himself and the house upon my mercy and begged me to take away "the innocents abroad" and release the concern from the contract. i said i wouldn't--and so ended the interview and the buggy excursion. then i warned bliss that he must get to work or i should make trouble. he acted upon the warning, and set up the book and i read the proofs. then there was another long wait and no explanation. at last toward the end of july ( , i think), i lost patience and telegraphed bliss that if the book was not on sale in twenty-four hours i should bring suit for damages. that ended the trouble. half a dozen copies were bound and placed on sale within the required time. then the canvassing began, and went briskly forward. in nine months the book took the publishing house out of debt, advanced its stock from twenty-five to two hundred, and left seventy thousand dollars profit to the good. it was bliss that told me this--but if it was true, it was the first time that he had told the truth in sixty-five years. he was born in . iii. ... this was in . i was fourteen years old, then. we were still living in hannibal, missouri, on the banks of the mississippi, in the new "frame" house built by my father five years before. that is, some of us lived in the new part, the rest in the old part back of it--the "l." in the autumn my sister gave a party, and invited all the marriageable young people of the village. i was too young for this society, and was too bashful to mingle with young ladies, anyway, therefore i was not invited--at least not for the whole evening. ten minutes of it was to be my whole share. i was to do the part of a bear in a small fairy play. i was to be disguised all over in a close-fitting brown hairy stuff proper for a bear. about half past ten i was told to go to my room and put on this disguise, and be ready in half an hour. i started, but changed my mind; for i wanted to practise a little, and that room was very small. i crossed over to the large unoccupied house on the corner of main and hill streets,[ ] unaware that a dozen of the young people were also going there to dress for their parts. i took the little black slave boy, sandy, with me, and we selected a roomy and empty chamber on the second floor. we entered it talking, and this gave a couple of half-dressed young ladies an opportunity to take refuge behind a screen undiscovered. their gowns and things were hanging on hooks behind the door, but i did not see them; it was sandy that shut the door, but all his heart was in the theatricals, and he was as unlikely to notice them as i was myself. that was a rickety screen, with many holes in it, but as i did not know there were girls behind it, i was not disturbed by that detail. if i had known, i could not have undressed in the flood of cruel moonlight that was pouring in at the curtainless windows; i should have died of shame. untroubled by apprehensions, i stripped to the skin and began my practice. i was full of ambition; i was determined to make a hit; i was burning to establish a reputation as a bear and get further engagements; so i threw myself into my work with an abandon that promised great things. i capered back and forth from one end of the room to the other on all fours, sandy applauding with enthusiasm; i walked upright and growled and snapped and snarled; i stood on my head, i flung handsprings, i danced a lubberly dance with my paws bent and my imaginary snout sniffing from side to side; i did everything a bear could do, and many things which no bear could ever do and no bear with any dignity would want to do, anyway; and of course i never suspected that i was making a spectacle of myself to any one but sandy. at last, standing on my head, i paused in that attitude to take a minute's rest. there was a moment's silence, then sandy spoke up with excited interest and said-- "marse sam, has you ever seen a smoked herring?" "no. what is that?" "it's a fish." "well, what of it? anything peculiar about it?" "yes, suh, you bet you dey is. _dey eats 'em guts and all!_" there was a smothered burst of feminine snickers from behind the screen! all the strength went out of me and i toppled forward like an undermined tower and brought the screen down with my weight, burying the young ladies under it. in their fright they discharged a couple of piercing screams--and possibly others, but i did not wait to count. i snatched my clothes and fled to the dark hall below, sandy following. i was dressed in half a minute, and out the back way. i swore sandy to eternal silence, then we went away and hid until the party was over. the ambition was all out of me. i could not have faced that giddy company after my adventure, for there would be two performers there who knew my secret, and would be privately laughing at me all the time. i was searched for but not found, and the bear had to be played by a young gentleman in his civilized clothes. the house was still and everybody asleep when i finally ventured home. i was very heavy-hearted, and full of a sense of disgrace. pinned to my pillow i found a slip of paper which bore a line that did not lighten my heart, but only made my face burn. it was written in a laboriously disguised hand, and these were its mocking terms: "you probably couldn't have played _bear_, but you played _bare_ very well--oh, very very well!" we think boys are rude, unsensitive animals, but it is not so in all cases. each boy has one or two sensitive spots, and if you can find out where they are located you have only to touch them and you can scorch him as with fire. i suffered miserably over that episode. i expected that the facts would be all over the village in the morning, but it was not so. the secret remained confined to the two girls and sandy and me. that was some appeasement of my pain, but it was far from sufficient--the main trouble remained: i was under four mocking eyes, and it might as well have been a thousand, for i suspected all girls' eyes of being the ones i so dreaded. during several weeks i could not look any young lady in the face; i dropped my eyes in confusion when any one of them smiled upon me and gave me greeting; and i said to myself, "_that is one of them_," and got quickly away. of course i was meeting the right girls everywhere, but if they ever let slip any betraying sign i was not bright enough to catch it. when i left hannibal four years later, the secret was still a secret; i had never guessed those girls out, and was no longer expecting to do it. nor wanting to, either. one of the dearest and prettiest girls in the village at the time of my mishap was one whom i will call mary wilson, because that was not her name. she was twenty years old; she was dainty and sweet, peach-bloomy and exquisite, gracious and lovely in character, and i stood in awe of her, for she seemed to me to be made out of angel-clay and rightfully unapproachable by an unholy ordinary kind of a boy like me. i probably never suspected her. but-- the scene changes. to calcutta--forty-seven years later. it was in . i arrived there on my lecturing trip. as i entered the hotel a divine vision passed out of it, clothed in the glory of the indian sunshine--the mary wilson of my long-vanished boyhood! it was a startling thing. before i could recover from the bewildering shock and speak to her she was gone. i thought maybe i had seen an apparition, but it was not so, she was flesh. she was the granddaughter of the other mary, the original mary. that mary, now a widow, was up-stairs, and presently sent for me. she was old and gray-haired, but she looked young and was very handsome. we sat down and talked. we steeped our thirsty souls in the reviving wine of the past, the beautiful past, the dear and lamented past; we uttered the names that had been silent upon our lips for fifty years, and it was as if they were made of music; with reverent hands we unburied our dead, the mates of our youth, and caressed them with our speech; we searched the dusty chambers of our memories and dragged forth incident after incident, episode after episode, folly after folly, and laughed such good laughs over them, with the tears running down; and finally mary said suddenly, and without any leading up-- "tell me! what is the special peculiarity of smoked herrings?" it seemed a strange question at such a hallowed time as this. and so inconsequential, too. i was a little shocked. and yet i was aware of a stir of some kind away back in the deeps of my memory somewhere. it set me to musing--thinking--searching. smoked herrings. smoked herrings. the peculiarity of smo.... i glanced up. her face was grave, but there was a dim and shadowy twinkle in her eye which--all of a sudden i knew! and far away down in the hoary past i heard a remembered voice murmur, "dey eats 'em guts and all!" "at--last! i've found one of you, anyway! who was the other girl?" but she drew the line there. she wouldn't tell me. footnote: [ ] that house still stands. iv. ... but it was on a bench in washington square that i saw the most of louis stevenson. it was an outing that lasted an hour or more, and was very pleasant and sociable. i had come with him from his house, where i had been paying my respects to his family. his business in the square was to absorb the sunshine. he was most scantily furnished with flesh, his clothes seemed to fall into hollows as if there might be nothing inside but the frame for a sculptor's statue. his long face and lank hair and dark complexion and musing and melancholy expression seemed to fit these details justly and harmoniously, and the altogether of it seemed especially planned to gather the rays of your observation and focalize them upon stevenson's special distinction and commanding feature, his splendid eyes. they burned with a smouldering rich fire under the penthouse of his brows, and they made him beautiful. * * * * * i said i thought he was right about the others, but mistaken as to bret harte; in substance i said that harte was good company and a thin but pleasant talker; that he was always bright, but never brilliant; that in this matter he must not be classed with thomas bailey aldrich, nor must any other man, ancient or modern; that aldrich was always witty, always brilliant, if there was anybody present capable of striking his flint at the right angle; that aldrich was as sure and prompt and unfailing as the red-hot iron on the blacksmith's anvil--you had only to hit it competently to make it deliver an explosion of sparks. i added-- "aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and humorous sayings. none has equalled him, certainly none has surpassed him, in the felicity of phrasing with which he clothed these children of his fancy. aldrich was always brilliant, he couldn't help it, he is a fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is not speaking, you know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and glimmering around in him; when he speaks the diamonds flash. yes, he was always brilliant, he will always be brilliant; he will be brilliant in hell--you will see." stevenson, smiling a chuckly smile, "i hope not." "well, you will, and he will dim even those ruddy fires and look like a transfigured adonis backed against a pink sunset." * * * * * there on that bench we struck out a new phrase--one or the other of us, i don't remember which--"submerged renown." variations were discussed: "submerged fame," "submerged reputation," and so on, and a choice was made; "submerged renown" was elected, i believe. this important matter rose out of an incident which had been happening to stevenson in albany. while in a book-shop or book-stall there he had noticed a long rank of small books, cheaply but neatly gotten up, and bearing such titles as "davis's selected speeches," "davis's selected poetry," davis's this and davis's that and davis's the other thing; compilations, every one of them, each with a brief, compact, intelligent and useful introductory chapter by this same davis, whose first name i have forgotten. stevenson had begun the matter with this question: "can you name the american author whose fame and acceptance stretch widest in the states?" i thought i could, but it did not seem to me that it would be modest to speak out, in the circumstances. so i diffidently said nothing. stevenson noticed, and said-- "save your delicacy for another time--you are not the one. for a shilling you can't name the american author of widest note and popularity in the states. but i can." then he went on and told about that albany incident. he had inquired of the shopman-- "who is this davis?" the answer was-- "an author whose books have to have freight-trains to carry them, not baskets. apparently you have not heard of him?" stevenson said no, this was the first time. the man said-- "nobody has heard of davis: you may ask all around and you will see. you never see his name mentioned in print, not even in advertisement; these things are of no use to davis, not any more than they are to the wind and the sea. you never see one of davis's books floating on top of the united states, but put on your diving armor and get yourself lowered away down and down and down till you strike the dense region, the sunless region of eternal drudgery and starvation wages--there you'll find them by the million. the man that gets that market, his fortune is made, his bread and butter are safe, for those people will never go back on him. an author may have a reputation which is confined to the surface, and lose it and become pitied, then despised, then forgotten, entirely forgotten--the frequent steps in a surface reputation. at surface reputation, however great, is always mortal, and always killable if you go at it right--with pins and needles, and quiet slow poison, not with the club and tomahawk. but it is a different matter with the submerged reputation--down in the deep water; once a favorite there, always a favorite; once beloved, always beloved; once respected, always respected, honored, and believed in. for, what the reviewer says never finds its way down into those placid deeps; nor the newspaper sneers, nor any breath of the winds of slander blowing above. down there they never hear of these things. their idol may be painted clay, up then at the surface, and fade and waste and crumble and blow away, there being much weather there; but down below he is gold and adamant and indestructible." v. this is from this morning's paper: mark twain letter sold. _written to thomas nast, it proposed a joint tour._ a mark twain autograph letter brought $ yesterday at the auction by the merwin-clayton company of the library and correspondence of the late thomas nast, cartoonist. the letter is nine pages note-paper, is dated hartford, nov. , , and it addressed to nast. it reads in part as follows: hartford, _nov. _. my dear nast: i did not think i should ever stand on a platform again until the time was come for me to say i die innocent. but the same old offers keep arriving that have arriven every year, and been every year declined--$ for louisville, $ for st. louis, $ , gold for two nights in toronto, half gross proceeds for new york, boston, brooklyn, &c. i have declined them all just as usual, though sorely tempted as usual. now, i do not decline because i mind talking to an audience, but because ( ) travelling alone is so heart-breakingly dreary, and ( ) shouldering the whole show is such cheer-killing responsibility. therefore i now propose to you what you proposed to me in november, --ten years ago, (when i was unknown,) viz.; that you should stand on the platform and make pictures, and i stand by you and blackguard the audience. i should enormously enjoy meandering around (to big towns--don't want to go to little ones) with you for company. the letter includes a schedule of cities and the number of appearances planned for each. this is as it should be. this is worthy of all praise. i say it myself lest other competent persons should forget to do it. it appears that four of my ancient letters were sold at auction, three of them at twenty-seven dollars, twenty-eight dollars, and twenty-nine dollars respectively, and the one above mentioned at forty-three dollars. there is one very gratifying circumstance about this, to wit: that my literature has more than held its own as regards money value through this stretch of thirty-six years. i judge that the forty-three-dollar letter must have gone at about ten cents a word, whereas if i had written it to-day its market rate would be thirty cents--so i have increased in value two or three hundred per cent. i note another gratifying circumstance--that a letter of general grant's sold at something short of eighteen dollars. i can't rise to general grant's lofty place in the estimation of this nation, but it is a deep happiness to me to know that when it comes to epistolary literature he can't sit in the front seat along with me. this reminds me--nine years ago, when we were living in tedworth square, london, a report was cabled to the american journals that i was dying. i was not the one. it was another clemens, a cousin of mine,--dr. j. ross clemens, now of st. louis--who was due to die but presently escaped, by some chicanery or other characteristic of the tribe of clemens. the london representatives of the american papers began to flock in, with american cables in their hands, to inquire into my condition. there was nothing the matter with me, and each in his turn was astonished, and disappointed, to find me reading and smoking in my study and worth next to nothing as a text for transatlantic news. one of these men was a gentle and kindly and grave and sympathetic irishman, who hid his sorrow the best he could, and tried to look glad, and told me that his paper, the _evening sun_, had cabled him that it was reported in new york that i was dead. what should he cable in reply? i said-- "say the report is greatly exaggerated." he never smiled, but went solemnly away and sent the cable in those words. the remark hit the world pleasantly, and to this day it keeps turning up, now and then, in the newspapers when people have occasion to discount exaggerations. the next man was also an irishman. he had his new york cablegram in his hand--from the new york _world_--and he was so evidently trying to get around that cable with invented softnesses and palliations that my curiosity was aroused and i wanted to see what it did really say. so when occasion offered i slipped it out of his hand. it said, "if mark twain dying send five hundred words. if dead send a thousand." now that old letter of mine sold yesterday for forty-three dollars. when i am dead it will be worth eighty-six. mark twain. (_to be continued._) north american review no. dc. october , . chapters from my autobiography.--iii. by mark twain. vi. to-morrow will be the thirty-sixth anniversary of our marriage. my wife passed from this life one year and eight months ago, in florence, italy, after an unbroken illness of twenty-two months' duration. i saw her first in the form of an ivory miniature in her brother charley's stateroom in the steamer "quaker city," in the bay of smyrna, in the summer of , when she was in her twenty-second year. i saw her in the flesh for the first time in new york in the following december. she was slender and beautiful and girlish--and she was both girl and woman. she remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life. under a grave and gentle exterior burned inextinguishable fires of sympathy, energy, devotion, enthusiasm, and absolutely limitless affection. she was _always_ frail in body, and she lived upon her spirit, whose hopefulness and courage were indestructible. perfect truth, perfect honesty, perfect candor, were qualities of her character which were born with her. her judgments of people and things were sure and accurate. her intuitions almost never deceived her. in her judgments of the characters and acts of both friends and strangers, there was always room for charity, and this charity never failed. i have compared and contrasted her with hundreds of persons, and my conviction remains that hers was the most perfect character i have ever met. and i may add that she was the most winningly dignified person i have ever known. her character and disposition were of the sort that not only invites worship, but commands it. no servant ever left her service who deserved to remain in it. and, as she could choose with a glance of her eye, the servants she selected did in almost all cases deserve to remain, and they _did_ remain. she was always cheerful; and she was always able to communicate her cheerfulness to others. during the nine years that we spent in poverty and debt, she was always able to reason me out of my despairs, and find a bright side to the clouds, and make me see it. in all that time, i never knew her to utter a word of regret concerning our altered circumstances, nor did i ever know her children to do the like. for she had taught them, and they drew their fortitude from her. the love which she bestowed upon those whom she loved took the form of worship, and in that form it was returned--returned by relatives, friends and the servants of her household. it was a strange combination which wrought into one individual, so to speak, by marriage--her disposition and character and mine. she poured out her prodigal affections in kisses and caresses, and in a vocabulary of endearments whose profusion was always an astonishment to me. i was born _reserved_ as to endearments of speech and caresses, and hers broke upon me as the summer waves break upon gibraltar. i was reared in that atmosphere of reserve. as i have already said, in another chapter, i never knew a member of my father's family to kiss another member of it except once, and that at a death-bed. and our village was not a kissing community. the kissing and caressing ended with courtship--along with the deadly piano-playing of that day. she had the heart-free laugh of a girl. it came seldom, but when it broke upon the ear it was as inspiring as music. i heard it for the last time when she had been occupying her sickbed for more than a year, and i made a written note of it at the time--a note not to be repeated. to-morrow will be the thirty-sixth anniversary. we were married in her father's house in elmira, new york, and went next day, by special train, to buffalo, along with the whole langdon family, and with the beechers and the twichells, who had solemnized the marriage. we were to live in buffalo, where i was to be one of the editors of the buffalo "express," and a part owner of the paper. i knew nothing about buffalo, but i had made my household arrangements there through a friend, by letter. i had instructed him to find a boarding-house of as respectable a character as my light salary as editor would command. we were received at about nine o'clock at the station in buffalo, and were put into several sleighs and driven all over america, as it seemed to me--for, apparently, we turned all the corners in the town and followed all the streets there were--i scolding freely, and characterizing that friend of mine in very uncomplimentary words for securing a boarding-house that apparently had no definite locality. but there was a conspiracy--and my bride knew of it, but i was in ignorance. her father, jervis langdon, had bought and furnished a new house for us in the fashionable street, delaware avenue, and had laid in a cook and housemaids, and a brisk and electric young coachman, an irishman, patrick mcaleer--and we were being driven all over that city in order that one sleighful of those people could have time to go to the house, and see that the gas was lighted all over it, and a hot supper prepared for the crowd. we arrived at last, and when i entered that fairy place my indignation reached high-water mark, and without any reserve i delivered my opinion to that friend of mine for being so stupid as to put us into a boarding-house whose terms would be far out of my reach. then mr. langdon brought forward a very pretty box and opened it, and took from it a deed of the house. so the comedy ended very pleasantly, and we sat down to supper. the company departed about midnight, and left us alone in our new quarters. then ellen, the cook, came in to get orders for the morning's marketing--and neither of us knew whether beefsteak was sold by the barrel or by the yard. we exposed our ignorance, and ellen was fall of irish delight over it. patrick mcaleer, that brisk young irishman, came in to get his orders for next day--and that was our first glimpse of him.... our first child, langdon clemens, was born the th of november, , and lived twenty-two months. susy was born the th of march, , and passed from life in the hartford home, the th of august, . with her, when the end came, were jean and katy leary, and john and ellen (the gardener and his wife). clara and her mother and i arrived in england from around the world on the st of july, and took a house in guildford. a week later, when susy, katy and jean should have been arriving from america, we got a letter instead. it explained that susy was slightly ill--nothing of consequence. but we were disquieted, and began to cable for later news. this was friday. all day no answer--and the ship to leave southampton next day, at noon. clara and her mother began packing, to be ready in case the news should be bad. finally came a cablegram saying, "wait for cablegram in the morning." this was not satisfactory--not reassuring. i cabled again, asking that the answer be sent to southampton, for the day was now closing. i waited in the post-office that night till the doors were closed, toward midnight, in the hope that good news might still come, but there was no message. we sat silent at home till one in the morning, waiting--waiting for we knew not what. then we took the earliest morning train, and when we reached southampton the message was there. it said the recovery would be long, but certain. this was a great relief to me, but not to my wife. she was frightened. she and clara went aboard the steamer at once and sailed for america, to nurse susy. i remained behind to search for a larger house in guildford. that was the th of august, . three days later, when my wife and clara were about half-way across the ocean, i was standing in our dining-room thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. it said, "susy was peacefully released to-day." it is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. there is but one reasonable explanation of it. the intellect is stunned by the shock, and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. the power to realize their fall import is mercifully wanting. the mind has a dumb sense of vast loss--that is all. it will take mind and memory months, and possibly years, to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss. a man's house burns down. the smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. by and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. and, when he casts about for it, he finds that it was in that house. always it is an _essential_--there was but one of its kind. it cannot be replaced. it was in that house. it is irrevocably lost. he did not realize that it was an essential when he had it; he only discovers it now when he finds himself balked, hampered, by its absence. it will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster. the th of august brought me the awful tidings. the mother and the sister were out there in mid-atlantic, ignorant of what was happening; flying to meet this incredible calamity. all that could be done to protect them from the full force of the shock was done by relatives and good friends. they went down the bay and met the ship at night, but did not show themselves until morning, and then only to clara. when she returned to the stateroom she did not speak, and did not need to. her mother looked at her and said: "susy is dead." at half past ten o'clock that night, clara and her mother completed their circuit of the globe, and drew up at elmira by the same train and in the same car which had borne them and me westward from it one year, one month, and one week before. and again susy was there--not waving her welcome in the glare of the lights, as she had waved her farewell to us thirteen months before, but lying white and fair in her coffin, in the house where she was born. the last thirteen days of susy's life were spent in our own house in hartford, the home of her childhood, and always the dearest place in the earth to her. about her she had faithful old friends--her pastor, mr. twichell, who had known her from the cradle, and who had come a long journey to be with her; her uncle and aunt, mr. and mrs. theodore crane; patrick, the coachman; katy, who had begun to serve us when susy was a child of eight years; john and ellen, who had been with us many years. also jean was there. at the hour when my wife and clara set sail for america, susy was in no danger. three hours later there came a sudden change for the worse. meningitis set in, and it was immediately apparent that she was death-struck. that was saturday, the th of august. "that evening she took food for the last time," (jean's letter to me). the next morning the brain-fever was raging. she walked the floor a little in her pain and delirium, then succumbed to weakness and returned to her bed. previously she had found hanging in a closet a gown which she had seen her mother wear. she thought it was her mother, dead, and she kissed it, and cried. about noon she became blind (an effect of the disease) and bewailed it to her uncle. from jean's letter i take this sentence, which needs no comment: "about one in the afternoon susy spoke for the last time." it was only one word that she said when she spoke that last time, and it told of her longing. she groped with her hands and found katy, and caressed her face, and said "mamma." how gracious it was that, in that forlorn hour of wreck and ruin, with the night of death closing around her, she should have been granted that beautiful illusion--that the latest vision which rested upon the clouded mirror of her mind should have been the vision of her mother, and the latest emotion she should know in life the joy and peace of that dear imagined presence. about two o'clock she composed herself as if for sleep, and never moved again. she fell into unconsciousness and so remained two days and five hours, until tuesday evening at seven minutes past seven, when the release came. she was twenty-four years and five months old. on the d, her mother and her sisters saw her laid to rest--she that had been our wonder and our worship. in one of her own books i find some verses which i will copy here. apparently, she always put borrowed matter in quotation marks. these verses lack those marks, and therefore i take them to be her own: love came at dawn, when all the world was fair, when crimson glories' bloom and sun were rife; love came at dawn, when hope's wings fanned the air, and murmured, "i am life." love came at eve, and when the day was done, when heart and brain were tired, and slumber pressed; love came at eve, shut out the sinking sun, and whispered, "i am rest." the summer seasons of susy's childhood were spent at quarry farm, on the hills east of elmira, new york; the other seasons of the year at the home in hartford. like other children, she was blithe and happy, fond of play; unlike the average of children, she was at times much given to retiring within herself, and trying to search out the hidden meanings of the deep things that make the puzzle and pathos of human existence, and in all the ages have baffled the inquirer and mocked him. as a little child aged seven, she was oppressed and perplexed by the maddening repetition of the stock incidents of our race's fleeting sojourn here, just as the same thing has oppressed and perplexed maturer minds from the beginning of time. a myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle for bread; they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other; age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; shames and humiliations bring down their prides and their vanities; those they love are taken from them, and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. the burden of pain, care, misery, grows heavier year by year; at length, ambition is dead, pride is dead; vanity is dead; longing for release is in their place. it comes at last--the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them--and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; there they have left no sign that they have existed--a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever. then another myriad takes their place, and copies all they did, and goes along the same profitless road, and vanishes as they vanished--to make room for another, and another, and a million other myriads, to follow the same arid path through the same desert, and accomplish what the first myriad, and all the myriads that came after it, accomplished--nothing! "mamma, what is it all for?" asked susy, preliminarily stating the above details in her own halting language, after long brooding over them alone in the privacy of the nursery. a year later, she was groping her way alone through another sunless bog, but this time she reached a rest for her feet. for a week, her mother had not been able to go to the nursery, evenings, at the child's prayer hour. she spoke of it--was sorry for it, and said she would come to-night, and hoped she could continue to come every night and hear susy pray, as before. noticing that the child wished to respond, but was evidently troubled as to how to word her answer, she asked what the difficulty was. susy explained that miss foote (the governess) had been teaching her about the indians and their religious beliefs, whereby it appeared that they had not only a god, but several. this had set susy to thinking. as a result of this thinking, she had stopped praying. she qualified this statement--that is, she modified it--saying she did not now pray "in the same way" as she had formerly done. her mother said: "tell me about it, dear." "well, mamma, the indians believed they knew, but now we know they were wrong. by and by, it can turn out that we are wrong. so now i only pray that there may be a god and a heaven--or something better." i wrote down this pathetic prayer in its precise wording, at the time, in a record which we kept of the children's sayings, and my reverence for it has grown with the years that have passed over my head since then. its untaught grace and simplicity are a child's, but the wisdom and the pathos of it are of all the ages that have come and gone since the race of man has lived, and longed, and hoped, and feared, and doubted. to go back a year--susy aged seven. several times her mother said to her: "there, there, susy, you mustn't cry over little things." this furnished susy a text for thought she had been breaking her heart over what had seemed vast disasters--a broken toy; a picnic cancelled by thunder and lightning and rain; the mouse that was growing tame and friendly in the nursery caught and killed by the cat--and now came this strange revelation. for some unaccountable reason, these were not vast calamities. why? how is the size of calamities measured? what is the rule? there must be some way to tell the great ones from the small ones; what is the law of these proportions? she examined the problem earnestly and long. she gave it her best thought from time to time, for two or three days--but it baffled her--defeated her. and at last she gave up and went to her mother for help. "mamma, what is '_little_ things'?" it seemed a simple question--at first. and yet, before the answer could be put into words, unsuspected and unforeseen difficulties began to appear. they increased; they multiplied; they brought about another defeat. the effort to explain came to a standstill. then susy tried to help her mother out--with an instance, an example, an illustration. the mother was getting ready to go down-town, and one of her errands was to buy a long-promised toy-watch for susy. "if you forgot the watch, mamma, would that be a little thing?" she was not concerned about the watch, for she knew it would not be forgotten. what she was hoping for was that the answer would unriddle the riddle, and bring rest and peace to her perplexed little mind. the hope was disappointed, of course--for the reason that the size of a misfortune is not determinate by an outsider's measurement of it, but only by the measurements applied to it by the person specially affected by it. the king's lost crown is a vast matter to the king, but of no consequence to the child. the lost toy is a great matter to the child, but in the king's eyes it is not a thing to break the heart about. a verdict was reached, but it was based upon the above model, and susy was granted leave to measure her disasters thereafter with her own tape-line. as a child, susy had a passionate temper; and it cost her much remorse and many tears before she learned to govern it, but after that it was a wholesome salt, and her character was the stronger and healthier for its presence. it enabled her to be good with dignity; it preserved her not only from being good for vanity's sake, but from even the appearance of it. in looking back over the long vanished years, it seems but natural and excusable that i should dwell with longing affection and preference upon incidents of her young life which made it beautiful to us, and that i should let its few small offences go unsummoned and unreproached. in the summer of , when susy was just eight years of age, the family were at quarry farm, as usual at that season of the year. hay-cutting time was approaching, and susy and clara were counting the hours, for the time was big with a great event for them; they had been promised that they might mount the wagon and ride home from the fields on the summit of the hay mountain. this perilous privilege, so dear to their age and species, had never been granted them before. their excitement had no bounds. they could talk of nothing but this epoch-making adventure, now. but misfortune overtook susy on the very morning of the important day. in a sudden outbreak of passion, she corrected clara--with a shovel, or stick, or something of the sort. at any rate, the offence committed was of a gravity clearly beyond the limit allowed in the nursery. in accordance with the rule and custom of the house, susy went to her mother to confess, and to help decide upon the size and character of the punishment due. it was quite understood that, as a punishment could have but one rational object and function--to act as a reminder, and warn the transgressor against transgressing in the same way again--the children would know about as well as any how to choose a penalty which would be rememberable and effective. susy and her mother discussed various punishments, but none of them seemed adequate. this fault was an unusually serious one, and required the setting up of a danger-signal in the memory that would not blow out nor burn out, but remain a fixture there and furnish its saving warning indefinitely. among the punishments mentioned was deprivation of the hay-wagon ride. it was noticeable that this one hit susy hard. finally, in the summing up, the mother named over the list and asked: "which one do you think it ought to be, susy?" susy studied, shrank from her duty, and asked: "which do you think, mamma?" "well, susy, i would rather leave it to you. _you_ make the choice yourself." it cost susy a struggle, and much and deep thinking and weighing--but she came out where any one who knew her could have foretold she would. "well, mamma, i'll make it the hay-wagon, because you know the other things might not make me remember not to do it again, but if i don't get to ride on the hay-wagon i can remember it easily." in this world the real penalty, the sharp one, the lasting one, never falls otherwise than on the wrong person. it was not _i_ that corrected clara, but the remembrance of poor susy's lost hay-ride still brings _me_ a pang--after twenty-six years. apparently, susy was born with humane feelings for the animals, and compassion for their troubles. this enabled her to see a new point in an old story, once, when she was only six years old--a point which had been overlooked by older, and perhaps duller, people for many ages. her mother told her the moving story of the sale of joseph by his brethren, the staining of his coat with the blood of the slaughtered kid, and the rest of it. she dwelt upon the inhumanity of the brothers; their cruelty toward their helpless young brother; and the unbrotherly treachery which they practised upon him; for she hoped to teach the child a lesson in gentle pity and mercifulness which she would remember. apparently, her desire was accomplished, for the tears came into susy's eyes and she was deeply moved. then she said: "poor little kid!" a child's frank envy of the privileges and distinctions of its elders is often a delicately flattering attention and the reverse of unwelcome, but sometimes the envy is not placed where the beneficiary is expecting it to be placed. once, when susy was seven, she sat breathlessly absorbed in watching a guest of ours adorn herself for a ball. the lady was charmed by this homage; this mute and gentle admiration; and was happy in it. and when her pretty labors were finished, and she stood at last perfect, unimprovable, clothed like solomon in all his glory, she paused, confident and expectant, to receive from susy's tongue the tribute that was burning in her eyes. susy drew an envious little sigh and said: "i wish _i_ could have crooked teeth and spectacles!" once, when susy was six months along in her eighth year, she did something one day in the presence of company, which subjected her to criticism and reproof. afterward, when she was alone with her mother, as was her custom she reflected a little while over the matter. then she set up what i think--and what the shade of burns would think--was a quite good philosophical defence. "well, mamma, you know i didn't see myself, and so i couldn't know how it looked." in homes where the near friends and visitors are mainly literary people--lawyers, judges, professors and clergymen--the children's ears become early familiarized with wide vocabularies. it is natural for them to pick up any words that fall in their way; it is natural for them to pick up big and little ones indiscriminately; it is natural for them to use without fear any word that comes to their net, no matter how formidable it may be as to size. as a result, their talk is a curious and funny musketry clatter of little words, interrupted at intervals by the heavy artillery crash of a word of such imposing sound and size that it seems to shake the ground and rattle the windows. sometimes the child gets a wrong idea of a word which it has picked up by chance, and attaches to it a meaning which impairs its usefulness--but this does not happen as often as one might expect it would. indeed, it happens with an infrequency which may be regarded as remarkable. as a child, susy had good fortune with her large words, and she employed many of them. she made no more than her fair share of mistakes. once when she thought something very funny was going to happen (but it didn't), she was racked and torn with laughter, by anticipation. but, apparently, she still felt sure of her position, for she said, "if it had happened, i should have been transformed [transported] with glee." and earlier, when she was a little maid of five years, she informed a visitor that she had been in a church only once, and that was the time when clara was "crucified" [christened].... in heidelberg, when susy was six, she noticed that the schloss gardens were populous with snails creeping all about everywhere. one day she found a new dish on her table and inquired concerning it, and learned that it was made of snails. she was awed and impressed, and said: "wild ones, mamma?" she was thoughtful and considerate of others--an acquired quality, no doubt. no one seems to be born with it. one hot day, at home in hartford, when she was a little child, her mother borrowed her fan several times (a japanese one, value five cents), refreshed herself with it a moment or two, then handed it back with a word of thanks. susy knew her mother would use the fan all the time if she could do it without putting a deprivation upon its owner. she also knew that her mother could not be persuaded to do that. a relief most be devised somehow; susy devised it. she got five cents out of her money-box and carried it to patrick, and asked him to take it down-town (a mile and a half) and buy a japanese fan and bring it home. he did it--and thus thoughtfully and delicately was the exigency met and the mother's comfort secured. it is to the child's credit that she did not save herself expense by bringing down another and more costly kind of fan from up-stairs, but was content to act upon the impression that her mother desired the japanese kind--content to accomplish the desire and stop with that, without troubling about the wisdom or unwisdom of it. sometimes, while she was still a child, her speech fell into quaint and strikingly expressive forms. once--aged nine or ten--she came to her mother's room, when her sister jean was a baby, and said jean was crying in the nursery, and asked if she might ring for the nurse. her mother asked: "is she crying hard?"--meaning cross, ugly. "well, no, mamma. it is a weary, lonesome cry." it is a pleasure to me to recall various incidents which reveal the delicacies of feeling that were so considerable a part of her budding character. such a revelation came once in a way which, while creditable to her heart, was defective in another direction. she was in her eleventh year then. her mother had been making the christmas purchases, and she allowed susy to see the presents which were for patrick's children. among these was a handsome sled for jimmy, on which a stag was painted; also, in gilt capitals, the word "deer." susy was excited and joyous over everything, until she came to this sled. then she became sober and silent--yet the sled was the choicest of all the gifts. her mother was surprised, and also disappointed, and said: "why, susy, doesn't it please you? isn't it fine?" susy hesitated, and it was plain that she did not want to say the thing that was in her mind. however, being urged, she brought it haltingly out: "well, mamma, it _is_ fine, and of course it _did_ cost a good deal--but--but--why should that be mentioned?" seeing that she was not understood, she reluctantly pointed to that word "deer." it was her orthography that was at fault, not her heart. she had inherited both from her mother. mark twain. (_to be continued._) north american review no. dci. october , . chapters from my autobiography.--iv. by mark twain. when susy was thirteen, and was a slender little maid with plaited tails of copper-tinged brown hair down her back, and was perhaps the busiest bee in the household hive, by reason of the manifold studies, health exercises and recreations she had to attend to, she secretly, and of her own motion, and out of love, added another task to her labors--the writing of a biography of me. she did this work in her bedroom at night, and kept her record hidden. after a little, the mother discovered it and filched it, and let me see it; then told susy what she had done, and how pleased i was, and how proud. i remember that time with a deep pleasure. i had had compliments before, but none that touched me like this; none that could approach it for value in my eyes. it has kept that place always since. i have had no compliment, no praise, no tribute from any source, that was so precious to me as this one was and still is. as i read it _now_, after all these many years, it is still a king's message to me, and brings me the same dear surprise it brought me then--with the pathos added, of the thought that the eager and hasty hand that sketched it and scrawled it will not touch mine again--and i feel as the humble and unexpectant must feel when their eyes fall upon the edict that raises them to the ranks of the noble. yesterday while i was rummaging in a pile of ancient note-books of mine which i had not seen for years, i came across a reference to that biography. it is quite evident that several times, at breakfast and dinner, in those long-past days, i was posing for the biography. in fact, i clearly remember that i _was_ doing that--and i also remember that susy detected it. i remember saying a very smart thing, with a good deal of an air, at the breakfast-table one morning, and that susy observed to her mother privately, a little later, that papa was doing that for the biography. i cannot bring myself to change any line or word in susy's sketch of me, but will introduce passages from it now and then just as they came in their quaint simplicity out of her honest heart, which was the beautiful heart of a child. what comes from that source has a charm and grace of its own which may transgress all the recognized laws of literature, if it choose, and yet be literature still, and worthy of hospitality. i shall print the whole of this little biography, before i have done with it--every word, every sentence. the spelling is frequently desperate, but it was susy's, and it shall stand. i love it, and cannot profane it. to me, it is gold. to correct it would alloy it, not refine it. it would spoil it. it would take from it its freedom and flexibility and make it stiff and formal. even when it is most extravagant i am not shocked. it is susy's spelling, and she was doing the best she could--and nothing could better it for me.... susy began the biography in , when i was in the fiftieth year of my age, and she just entering the fourteenth of hers. she begins in this way: we are a very happy family. we consist of papa, mamma, jean, clara and me. it is papa i am writing about, and i shall have no trouble in not knowing what to say about him, as he is a _very_ striking character. but wait a minute--i will return to susy presently. in the matter of slavish imitation, man is the monkey's superior all the time. the average man is destitute of independence of opinion. he is not interested in contriving an opinion of his own, by study and reflection, but is only anxious to find out what his neighbor's opinion is and slavishly adopt it. a generation ago, i found out that the latest review of a book was pretty sure to be just a reflection of the _earliest_ review of it; that whatever the first reviewer found to praise or censure in the book would be repeated in the latest reviewer's report, with nothing fresh added. therefore more than once i took the precaution of sending my book, in manuscript, to mr. howells, when he was editor of the "atlantic monthly," so that he could prepare a review of it at leisure. i knew he would say the truth about the book--i also knew that he would find more merit than demerit in it, because i already knew that that was the condition of the book. i allowed no copy of it to go out to the press until after mr. howells's notice of it had appeared. that book was always safe. there wasn't a man behind a pen in all america that had the courage to find anything in the book which mr. howells had not found--there wasn't a man behind a pen in america that had spirit enough to say a brave and original thing about the book on his own responsibility. i believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value--certainly no large value. when charles dudley warner and i were about to bring out "the gilded age," the editor of the "daily graphic" persuaded me to let him have an advance copy, he giving me his word of honor that no notice of it would appear in his paper until after the "atlantic monthly" notice should have appeared. this reptile published a review of the book within three days afterward. i could not really complain, because he had only given me his word of honor as security; i ought to have required of him something substantial. i believe his notice did not deal mainly with the merit of the book, or the lack of it, but with my moral attitude toward the public. it was charged that i had used my reputation to play a swindle upon the public; that mr. warner had written as much as half of the book, and that i had used my name to float it and give it currency; a currency--so the critic averred--which it could not have acquired without my name, and that this conduct of mine was a grave fraud upon the people. the "graphic" was not an authority upon any subject whatever. it had a sort of distinction, in that it was the first and only illustrated daily newspaper that the world had seen; but it was without character; it was poorly and cheaply edited; its opinion of a book or of any other work of art was of no consequence. everybody knew this, yet all the critics in america, one after the other, copied the "graphic's" criticism, merely changing the phraseology, and left me under that charge of dishonest conduct. even the great chicago "tribune," the most important journal in the middle west, was not able to invent anything fresh, but adopted the view of the humble "daily graphic," dishonesty-charge and all. however, let it go. it is the will of god that we must have critics, and missionaries, and congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. meantime, i seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. but that is nothing. at the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and i am not unused to that. what i have been travelling toward all this time is this: the first critic that ever had occasion to describe my personal appearance littered his description with foolish and inexcusable errors whose aggregate furnished the result that i was distinctly and distressingly unhandsome. that description floated around the country in the papers, and was in constant use and wear for a quarter of a century. it seems strange to me that apparently no critic in the country could be found who could look at me and have the courage to take up his pen and destroy that lie. that lie began its course on the pacific coast, in , and it likened me in personal appearance to petroleum v. nasby, who had been out there lecturing. for twenty-five years afterward, no critic could furnish a description of me without fetching in nasby to help out my portrait. i knew nasby well, and he was a good fellow, but in my life i have not felt malignant enough about any more than three persons to charge those persons with resembling nasby. it hurts me to the heart. i was always handsome. anybody but a critic could have seen it. and it had long been a distress to my family--including susy--that the critics should go on making this wearisome mistake, year after year, when there was no foundation for it. even when a critic wanted to be particularly friendly and complimentary to me, he didn't dare to go beyond my clothes. he never ventured beyond that old safe frontier. when he had finished with my clothes he had said all the kind things, the pleasant things, the complimentary things he could risk. then he dropped back on nasby. yesterday i found this clipping in the pocket of one of those ancient memorandum-books of mine. it is of the date of thirty-nine years ago, and both the paper and the ink are yellow with the bitterness that i felt in that old day when i clipped it out to preserve it and brood over it, and grieve about it. i will copy it here, to wit: a correspondent of the philadelphia "press," writing of one of schuyler colfax's receptions, says of our washington correspondent: "mark twain, the delicate humorist, was present: quite a lion, as he deserves to be. mark is a bachelor, faultless in taste, whose snowy vest is suggestive of endless quarrels with washington washerwomen; but the heroism of mark is settled for all time, for such purity and smoothness were never seen before. his lavender gloves might have been stolen from some turkish harem, so delicate were they in size; but more likely--anything else were more likely than that. in form and feature he bears some resemblance to the immortal nasby; but whilst petroleum is brunette to the core, twain is golden, amber-hued, melting, blonde." let us return to susy's biography now, and get the opinion of one who is unbiassed: _from susy's biography._ papa's appearance has been described many times, but very incorrectly. he has beautiful gray hair, not any too thick or any too long, but just right; a roman nose, which greatly improves the beauty of his features; kind blue eyes and a small mustache. he has a wonderfully shaped head and profile. he has a very good figure--in short, he is an extrodinarily fine looking man. all his features are perfect, except that he hasn't extrodinary teeth. his complexion is very fair, and he doesn't ware a beard. he is a very good man and a very funny one. he _has_ got a temper, but we all of us have in this family. he is the loveliest man i ever saw or ever hope to see--and oh, so absent-minded. he does tell perfectly delightful stories. clara and i used to sit on each arm of his chair and listen while he told us stories about the pictures on the wall. i remember the story-telling days vividly. they were a difficult and exacting audience--those little creatures. along one side of the library, in the hartford home, the bookshelves joined the mantelpiece--in fact there were shelves on both sides of the mantelpiece. on these shelves, and on the mantelpiece, stood various ornaments. at one end of the procession was a framed oil-painting of a cat's head, at the other end was a head of a beautiful young girl, life-size--called emmeline, because she looked just about like that--an impressionist water-color. between the one picture and the other there were twelve or fifteen of the bric-à-brac things already mentioned; also an oil-painting by elihu vedder, "the young medusa." every now and then the children required me to construct a romance--always impromptu--not a moment's preparation permitted--and into that romance i had to get all that bric-à-brac and the three pictures. i had to start always with the cat and finish with emmeline. i was never allowed the refreshment of a change, end-for-end. it was not permissible to introduce a bric-à-brac ornament into the story out of its place in the procession. these bric-à-bracs were never allowed a peaceful day, a reposeful day, a restful sabbath. in their lives there was no sabbath, in their lives there was no peace; they knew no existence but a monotonous career of violence and bloodshed. in the course of time, the bric-à-brac and the pictures showed wear. it was because they had had so many and such tumultuous adventures in their romantic careers. as romancer to the children i had a hard time, even from the beginning. if they brought me a picture, in a magazine, and required me to build a story to it, they would cover the rest of the page with their pudgy hands to keep me from stealing an idea from it. the stories had to come hot from the bat, always. they had to be absolutely original and fresh. sometimes the children furnished me simply a character or two, or a dozen, and required me to start out at once on that slim basis and deliver those characters up to a vigorous and entertaining life of crime. if they heard of a new trade, or an unfamiliar animal, or anything like that, i was pretty sure to have to deal with those things in the next romance. once clara required me to build a sudden tale out of a plumber and a "bawgunstrictor," and i had to do it. she didn't know what a boa-constrictor was, until he developed in the tale--then she was better satisfied with it than ever. _from susy's biography._ papa's favorite game is billiards, and when he is tired and wishes to rest himself he stays up all night and plays billiards, it seems to rest his head. he smokes a great deal almost incessantly. he has the mind of an author exactly, some of the simplest things he cant understand. our burglar-alarm is often out of order, and papa had been obliged to take the mahogany-room off from the alarm altogether for a time, because the burglar-alarm had been in the habit of ringing even when the mahogany-room was closed. at length he thought that perhaps the burglar-alarm might be in order, and he decided to try and see; accordingly he put it on and then went down and opened the window; consequently the alarm bell rang, it would even if the alarm had been in order. papa went despairingly upstairs and said to mamma, "livy the mahogany-room won't go on. i have just opened the window to see." "why, youth," mamma replied "if you've opened the window, why of coarse the alarm will ring!" "that's what i've opened it for, why i just went down to see if it would ring!" mamma tried to explain to papa that when he wanted to go and see whether the alarm would ring while the window was closed he _mustn't_ go and open the window--but in vain, papa couldn't understand, and got very impatient with mamma for trying to make him believe an impossible thing true. this is a frank biographer, and an honest one; she uses no sand-paper on me. i have, to this day, the same dull head in the matter of conundrums and perplexities which susy had discovered in those long-gone days. complexities annoy me; they irritate me; then this progressive feeling presently warms into anger. i cannot get far in the reading of the commonest and simplest contract--with its "parties of the first part," and "parties of the second part," and "parties of the third part,"--before my temper is all gone. ashcroft comes up here every day and pathetically tries to make me understand the points of the lawsuit which we are conducting against henry butters, harold wheeler, and the rest of those plasmon buccaneers, but daily he has to give it up. it is pitiful to see, when he bends his earnest and appealing eyes upon me and says, after one of his efforts, "now you _do_ understand _that_, don't you?" i am always obliged to say, "i _don't_, ashcroft. i wish i could understand it, but i don't. send for the cat." in the days which susy is talking about, a perplexity fell to my lot one day. f. g. whitmore was my business agent, and he brought me out from town in his buggy. we drove by the _porte-cochère_ and toward the stable. now this was a _single_ road, and was like a spoon whose handle stretched from the gate to a great round flower-bed in the neighborhood of the stable. at the approach to the flower-bed the road divided and circumnavigated it, making a loop, which i have likened to the bowl of the spoon. as we neared the loop, i saw that whitmore was laying his course to port, (i was sitting on the starboard side--the side the house was on), and was going to start around that spoon-bowl on that left-hand side. i said, "don't do that, whitmore; take the right-hand side. then i shall be next to the house when we get to the door." he said, "_that_ will not happen in _any case_, it doesn't make any difference which way i go around this flower-bed." i explained to him that he was an ass, but he stuck to his proposition, and i said, "go on and try it, and see." he went on and tried it, and sure enough he fetched me up at the door on the very side that he had said i would be. i was not able to believe it then, and i don't believe it yet. i said, "whitmore, that is merely an accident. you can't do it again." he said he could--and he drove down into the street, fetched around, came back, and actually did it again. i was stupefied, paralyzed, petrified, with these strange results, but they did not convince me. i didn't believe he could do it another time, but he did. he said he could do it all day, and fetch up the same way every time. by that time my temper was gone, and i asked him to go home and apply to the asylum and i would pay the expenses; i didn't want to see him any more for a week. i went up-stairs in a rage and started to tell livy about it, expecting to get her sympathy for me and to breed aversion in her for whitmore; but she merely burst into peal after peal of laughter, as the tale of my adventure went on, for her head was like susy's: riddles and complexities had no terrors for it. her mind and susy's were analytical; i have tried to make it appear that mine was different. many and many a time i have told that buggy experiment, hoping against hope that i would some time or other find somebody who would be on my side, but it has never happened. and i am never able to go glibly forward and state the circumstances of that buggy's progress without having to halt and consider, and call up in my mind the spoon-handle, the bowl of the spoon, the buggy and the horse, and my position in the buggy: and the minute i have got that far and try to turn it to the left it goes to ruin; i can't see how it is ever going to fetch me out right when we get to the door. susy is right in her estimate. i can't understand things. that burglar-alarm which susy mentions led a gay and careless life, and had no principles. it was generally out of order at one point or another; and there was plenty of opportunity, because all the windows and doors in the house, from the cellar up to the top floor, were connected with it. however, in its seasons of being out of order it could trouble us for only a very little while: we quickly found out that it was fooling us, and that it was buzzing its blood-curdling alarm merely for its own amusement. then we would shut it off, and send to new york for the electrician--there not being one in all hartford in those days. when the repairs were finished we would set the alarm again and reestablish our confidence in it. it never did any real business except upon one single occasion. all the rest of its expensive career was frivolous and without purpose. just that one time it performed its duty, and its whole duty--gravely, seriously, admirably. it let fly about two o'clock one black and dreary march morning, and i turned out promptly, because i knew that it was not fooling, this time. the bath-room door was on my side of the bed. i stepped in there, turned up the gas, looked at the annunciator, and turned off the alarm--so far as the door indicated was concerned--thus stopping the racket. then i came back to bed. mrs. clemens opened the debate: "what was it?" "it was the cellar door." "was it a burglar, do you think?" "yes," i said, "of course it was. did you suppose it was a sunday-school superintendent?" "no. what do you suppose he wants?" "i suppose he wants jewelry, but he is not acquainted with the house and he thinks it is in the cellar. i don't like to disappoint a burglar whom i am not acquainted with, and who has done me no harm, but if he had had common sagacity enough to inquire, i could have told him we kept nothing down there but coal and vegetables. still it may be that he is acquainted with the place, and that what he really wants is coal and vegetables. on the whole, i think it is vegetables he is after." "are you going down to see?" "no; i could not be of any assistance. let him select for himself; i don't know where the things are." then she said, "but suppose he comes up to the ground floor!" "that's all right. we shall know it the minute he opens a door on that floor. it will set off the alarm." just then the terrific buzzing broke out again. i said, "he has arrived. i told you he would. i know all about burglars and their ways. they are systematic people." i went into the bath-room to see if i was right, and i was. i shut off the dining-room and stopped the buzzing, and came back to bed. my wife said, "what do you suppose he is after now?" i said, "i think he has got all the vegetables he wants and is coming up for napkin-rings and odds and ends for the wife and children. they all have families--burglars have--and they are always thoughtful of them, always take a few necessaries of life for themselves, and fill out with tokens of remembrance for the family. in taking them they do not forget us: those very things represent tokens of his remembrance of us, and also of our remembrance of him. we never get them again; the memory of the attention remains embalmed in our hearts." "are you going down to see what it is he wants now?" "no," i said, "i am no more interested than i was before. they are experienced people,--burglars; _they_ know what they want; i should be no help to him. i _think_ he is after ceramics and bric-à-brac and such things. if he knows the house he knows that that is all that he can find on the dining-room floor." she said, with a strong interest perceptible in her tone, "suppose he comes up here!" i said, "it is all right. he will give us notice." "what shall we do then then?" "climb out of the window." she said, a little restively, "well, what is the use of a burglar-alarm for us?" "you have seen, dear heart, that it has been useful up to the present moment, and i have explained to you how it will be continuously useful after he gets up here." that was the end of it. he didn't ring any more alarms. presently i said, "he is disappointed, i think. he has gone off with the vegetables and the bric-à-brac, and i think he is dissatisfied." we went to sleep, and at a quarter before eight in the morning i was out, and hurrying, for i was to take the . train for new york. i found the gas burning brightly--full head--all over the first floor. my new overcoat was gone; my old umbrella was gone; my new patent-leather shoes, which i had never worn, were gone. the large window which opened into the _ombra_ at the rear of the house was standing wide. i passed out through it and tracked the burglar down the hill through the trees; tracked him without difficulty, because he had blazed his progress with imitation silver napkin-rings, and my umbrella, and various other things which he had disapproved of; and i went back in triumph and proved to my wife that he _was_ a disappointed burglar. i had suspected he would be, from the start, and from his not coming up to our floor to get human beings. things happened to me that day in new york. i will tell about them another time. _from susy's biography._ papa has a peculiar gait we like, it seems just to sute him, but most people do not; he always walks up and down the room while thinking and between each coarse at meals. a lady distantly related to us came to visit us once in those days. she came to stay a week, but all our efforts to make her happy failed, we could not imagine why, and she got up her anchor and sailed the next morning. we did much guessing, but could not solve the mystery. later we found out what the trouble was. it was my tramping up and down between the courses. she conceived the idea that i could not stand her society. that word "youth," as the reader has perhaps already guessed, was my wife's pet name for me. it was gently satirical, but also affectionate. i had certain mental and material peculiarities and customs proper to a much younger person than i was. _from susy's biography._ papa is very fond of animals particularly of cats, we had a dear little gray kitten once that he named "lazy" (papa always wears gray to match his hair and eyes) and he would carry him around on his shoulder, it was a mighty pretty sight! the gray cat sound asleep against papa's gray coat and hair. the names that he has given our different cats, are realy remarkably funny, they are namely stray kit, abner, motley, fraeulein, lazy, bufalo bill, cleveland, sour mash, and pestilence and famine. at one time when the children were small, we had a very black mother-cat named satan, and satan had a small black offspring named sin. pronouns were a difficulty for the children. little clara came in one day, her black eyes snapping with indignation, and said, "papa, satan ought to be punished. she is out there at the greenhouse and there she stays and stays, and his kitten is down-stairs crying." _from susy's biography._ papa uses very strong language, but i have an idea not nearly so strong as when he first maried mamma. a lady acquaintance of his is rather apt to interupt what one is saying, and papa told mamma that he thought he should say to the lady's husband "i am glad your wife wasn't present when the deity said 'let there be light.'" it is as i have said before. this is a frank historian. she doesn't cover up one's deficiencies, but gives them an equal showing with one's handsomer qualities. of course i made the remark which she has quoted--and even at this distant day i am still as much as half persuaded that if that lady had been present when the creator said, "let there be light," she would have interrupted him and we shouldn't ever have got it. _from susy's biography._ papa said the other day, "i am a mugwump and a mugwump is pure from the marrow out." (papa knows that i am writing this biography of him, and he said this for it.) he doesn't like to go to church at all, why i never understood, until just now, he told us the other day that he couldn't bear to hear any one talk but himself, but that he could listen to himself talk for hours without getting tired, of course he said this in joke, but i've no dought it was founded on truth. mark twain. (_to be continued._) north american review no. dcii. november , . chapters from my autobiography.--v. by mark twain. susy's remark about my strong language troubles me, and i must go back to it. all through the first ten years of my married life i kept a constant and discreet watch upon my tongue while in the house, and went outside and to a distance when circumstances were too much for me and i was obliged to seek relief. i prized my wife's respect and approval above all the rest of the human race's respect and approval. i dreaded the day when she should discover that i was but a whited sepulchre partly freighted with suppressed language. i was so careful, during ten years, that i had not a doubt that my suppressions had been successful. therefore i was quite as happy in my guilt as i could have been if i had been innocent. but at last an accident exposed me. i went into the bath-room one morning to make my toilet, and carelessly left the door two or three inches ajar. it was the first time that i had ever failed to take the precaution of closing it tightly. i knew the necessity of being particular about this, because shaving was always a trying ordeal for me, and i could seldom carry it through to a finish without verbal helps. now this time i was unprotected, but did not suspect it. i had no extraordinary trouble with my razor on this occasion, and was able to worry through with mere mutterings and growlings of an improper sort, but with nothing noisy or emphatic about them--no snapping and barking. then i put on a shirt. my shirts are an invention of my own. they open in the back, and are buttoned there--when there are buttons. this time the button was missing. my temper jumped up several degrees in a moment, and my remarks rose accordingly, both in loudness and vigor of expression. but i was not troubled, for the bath-room door was a solid one and i supposed it was firmly closed. i flung up the window and threw the shirt out. it fell upon the shrubbery where the people on their way to church could admire it if they wanted to; there was merely fifty feet of grass between the shirt and the passer-by. still rumbling and thundering distantly, i put on another shirt. again the button was absent. i augmented my language to meet the emergency, and threw that shirt out of the window. i was too angry--too insane--to examine the third shirt, but put it furiously on. again the button was absent, and that shirt followed its comrades out of the window. then i straightened up, gathered my reserves, and let myself go like a cavalry charge. in the midst of that great assault, my eye fell upon that gaping door, and i was paralyzed. it took me a good while to finish my toilet. i extended the time unnecessarily in trying to make up my mind as to what i would best do in the circumstances. i tried to hope that mrs. clemens was asleep, but i knew better. i could not escape by the window. it was narrow, and suited only to shirts. at last i made up my mind to boldly loaf through the bedroom with the air of a person who had not been doing anything. i made half the journey successfully. i did not turn my eyes in her direction, because that would not be safe. it is very difficult to look as if you have not been doing anything when the facts are the other way, and my confidence in my performance oozed steadily out of me as i went along. i was aiming for the left-hand door because it was furthest from my wife. it had never been opened from the day that the house was built, but it seemed a blessed refuge for me now. the bed was this one, wherein i am lying now, and dictating these histories morning after morning with so much serenity. it was this same old elaborately carved black venetian bedstead--the most comfortable bedstead that ever was, with space enough in it for a family, and carved angels enough surmounting its twisted columns and its headboard and footboard to bring peace to the sleepers, and pleasant dreams. i had to stop in the middle of the room. i hadn't the strength to go on. i believed that i was under accusing eyes--that even the carved angels were inspecting me with an unfriendly gaze. you know how it is when you are convinced that somebody behind you is looking steadily at you. you _have_ to turn your face--you can't help it. i turned mine. the bed was placed as it is now, with the foot where the head ought to be. if it had been placed as it should have been, the high headboard would have sheltered me. but the footboard was no sufficient protection, for i could be seen over it. i was exposed. i was wholly without protection. i turned, because i couldn't help it--and my memory of what i saw is still vivid, after all these years. against the white pillows i saw the black head--i saw that young and beautiful face; and i saw the gracious eyes with a something in them which i had never seen there before. they were snapping and flashing with indignation. i felt myself crumbling; i felt myself shrinking away to nothing under that accusing gaze. i stood silent under that desolating fire for as much as a minute, i should say--it seemed a very, very long time. then my wife's lips parted, and from them issued--_my latest bath-room remark_. the language perfect, but the expression velvety, unpractical, apprenticelike, ignorant, inexperienced, comically inadequate, absurdly weak and unsuited to the great language. in my lifetime i had never heard anything so out of tune, so inharmonious, so incongruous, so ill-suited to each other as were those mighty words set to that feeble music. i tried to keep from laughing, for i was a guilty person in deep need of charity and mercy. i tried to keep from bursting, and i succeeded--until she gravely said, "there, now you know how it sounds." then i exploded; the air was filled with my fragments, and you could hear them whiz. i said, "oh livy, if it sounds like _that_ i will never do it again!" then she had to laugh herself. both of us broke into convulsions, and went on laughing until we were physically exhausted and spiritually reconciled. the children were present at breakfast--clara aged six and susy eight--and the mother made a guarded remark about strong language; guarded because she did not wish the children to suspect anything--a guarded remark which censured strong language. both children broke out in one voice with this comment, "why, mamma, papa uses it!" i was astonished. i had supposed that that secret was safe in my own breast, and that its presence had never been suspected. i asked, "how did you know, you little rascals?" "oh," they said, "we often listen over the balusters when you are in the hall explaining things to george." _from susy's biography._ one of papa's latest books is "the prince and the pauper" and it is unquestionably the best book he has ever written, some people want him to keep to his old style, some gentleman wrote him, "i enjoyed huckleberry finn immensely and am glad to see that you have returned to your old style." that enoyed me that enoyed me greatly, because it trobles me [susy was troubled by that word, and uncertain; she wrote a u above it in the proper place, but reconsidered the matter and struck it out] to have so few people know papa, i mean realy know him, they think of mark twain as a humorist joking at everything; "and with a mop of reddish brown hair which sorely needs the barbars brush a roman nose, short stubby mustache, a sad care-worn face, with maney crow's feet" etc. that is the way people picture papa, i have wanted papa to write a book that would reveal something of his kind sympathetic nature, and "the prince and the pauper" partly does it. the book is full of lovely charming ideas, and oh the language! it is _perfect_. i think that one of the most touching scenes in it, is where the pauper is riding on horseback with his nobles in the "recognition procession" and he sees his mother oh and then what followed! how she runs to his side, when she sees him throw up his hand palm outward, and is rudely pushed off by one of the king's officers, and then how the little pauper's consceince troubles him when he remembers the shameful words that were falling from his lips, when she was turned from his side "i know you not woman" and how his grandeurs were stricken valueless, and his pride consumed to ashes. it is a wonderfully beautiful and touching little scene, and papa has described it so wonderfully. i never saw a man with so much variety of feeling as papa has; now the "prince and the pauper" is full of touching places; but there is most always a streak of humor in them somewhere. now in the coronation--in the stirring coronation, just after the little king has got his crown back again papa brings that in about the seal, where the pauper says he used the seal "to crack nuts with." oh it is so funny and nice! papa very seldom writes a passage without some humor in it somewhere, and i dont think he ever will. the children always helped their mother to edit my books in manuscript. she would sit on the porch at the farm and read aloud, with her pencil in her hand, and the children would keep an alert and suspicious eye upon her right along, for the belief was well grounded in them that whenever she came across a particularly satisfactory passage she would strike it out. their suspicions were well founded. the passages which were so satisfactory to them always had an element of strength in them which sorely needed modification or expurgation, and were always sure to get it at their mother's hand. for my own entertainment, and to enjoy the protests of the children, i often abused my editor's innocent confidence. i often interlarded remarks of a studied and felicitously atrocious character purposely to achieve the children's brief delight, and then see the remorseless pencil do its fatal work. i often joined my supplications to the children's for mercy, and strung the argument out and pretended to be in earnest. they were deceived, and so was their mother. it was three against one, and most unfair. but it was very delightful, and i could not resist the temptation. now and then we gained the victory and there was much rejoicing. then i privately struck the passage out myself. it had served its purpose. it had furnished three of us with good entertainment, and in being removed from the book by me it was only suffering the fate originally intended for it. _from susy's biography._ papa was born in missouri. his mother is grandma clemens (jane lampton clemens) of kentucky. grandpa clemens was of the f.f.v's of virginia. without doubt it was i that gave susy that impression. i cannot imagine why, because i was never in my life much impressed by grandeurs which proceed from the accident of birth. i did not get this indifference from my mother. she was always strongly interested in the ancestry of the house. she traced her own line back to the lambtons of durham, england--a family which had been occupying broad lands there since saxon times. i am not sure, but i think that those lambtons got along without titles of nobility for eight or nine hundred years, then produced a great man, three-quarters of a century ago, and broke into the peerage. my mother knew all about the clemenses of virginia, and loved to aggrandize them to me, but she has long been dead. there has been no one to keep those details fresh in my memory, and they have grown dim. there was a jere. clemens who was a united states senator, and in his day enjoyed the usual senatorial fame--a fame which perishes whether it spring from four years' service or forty. after jere. clemens's fame as a senator passed away, he was still remembered for many years on account of another service which he performed. he shot old john brown's governor wise in the hind leg in a duel. however, i am not very clear about this. it may be that governor wise shot _him_ in the hind leg. however, i don't think it is important. i think that the only thing that is really important is that one of them got shot in the hind leg. it would have been better and nobler and more historical and satisfactory if both of them had got shot in the hind leg--but it is of no use for me to try to recollect history. i never had a historical mind. let it go. whichever way it happened i am glad of it, and that is as much enthusiasm as i can get up for a person bearing my name. but i am forgetting the first clemens--the one that stands furthest back toward the really original _first_ clemens, which was adam. _from susy's biography._ clara and i are sure that papa played the trick on grandma, about the whipping, that is related in "the adventures of tom sayer": "hand me that switch." the switch hovered in the air, the peril was desperate--"my, look behind you aunt!" the old lady whirled around and snatched her skirts out of danger. the lad fled on the instant, scrambling up the high board fence and dissapeared over it. susy and clara were quite right about that. then susy says: and we know papa played "hookey" all the time. and how readily would papa pretend to be dying so as not to have to go to school! these revelations and exposures are searching, but they are just if i am as transparent to other people as i was to susy, i have wasted much effort in this life. grandma couldn't make papa go to school, no she let him go into a printing-office to learn the trade. he did so, and gradually picked up enough education to enable him to do about as well as those who were more studious in early life. it is noticeable that susy does not get overheated when she is complimenting me, but maintains a proper judicial and biographical calm. it is noticeable, also, and it is to her credit as a biographer, that she distributes compliment and criticism with a fair and even hand. my mother had a good deal of trouble with me, but i think she enjoyed it. she had none at all with my brother henry, who was two years younger than i, and i think that the unbroken monotony of his goodness and truthfulness and obedience would have been a burden to her but for the relief and variety which i furnished in the other direction. i was a tonic. i was valuable to her. i never thought of it before, but now i see it. i never knew henry to do a vicious thing toward me, or toward any one else--but he frequently did righteous ones that cost me as heavily. it was his duty to report me, when i needed reporting and neglected to do it myself, and he was very faithful in discharging that duty. he is "sid" in "tom sawyer." but sid was not henry. henry was a very much finer and better boy than ever sid was. it was henry who called my mother's attention to the fact that the thread with which she had sewed my collar together to keep me from going in swimming, had changed color. my mother would not have discovered it but for that, and she was manifestly piqued when she recognized that that prominent bit of circumstantial evidence had escaped her sharp eye. that detail probably added a detail to my punishment. it is human. we generally visit our shortcomings on somebody else when there is a possible excuse for it--but no matter, i took it out of henry. there is always compensation for such as are unjustly used. i often took it out of him--sometimes as an advance payment for something which i hadn't yet done. these were occasions when the opportunity was too strong a temptation, and i had to draw on the future. i did not need to copy this idea from my mother, and probably didn't. still she wrought upon that principle upon occasion. if the incident of the broken sugar-bowl is in "tom sawyer"--i don't remember whether it is or not--that is an example of it. henry never stole sugar. he took it openly from the bowl. his mother knew he wouldn't take sugar when she wasn't looking, but she had her doubts about me. not exactly doubts, either. she knew very well i _would._ one day when she was not present, henry took sugar from her prized and precious old english sugar-bowl, which was an heirloom in the family--and he managed to break the bowl. it was the first time i had ever had a chance to tell anything on him, and i was inexpressibly glad. i told him i was going to tell on him, but he was not disturbed. when my mother came in and saw the bowl lying on the floor in fragments, she was speechless for a minute. i allowed that silence to work; i judged it would increase the effect. i was waiting for her to ask "who did that?"--so that i could fetch out my news. but it was an error of calculation. when she got through with her silence she didn't ask anything about it--she merely gave me a crack on the skull with her thimble that i felt all the way down to my heels. then i broke out with my injured innocence, expecting to make her very sorry that she had punished the wrong one. i expected her to do something remorseful and pathetic. i told her that i was not the one--it was henry. but there was no upheaval. she said, without emotion, "it's all right. it isn't any matter. you deserve it for something you've done that i didn't know about; and if you haven't done it, why then you deserve it for something that you are going to do, that i sha'n't hear about." there was a stairway outside the house, which led up to the rear part of the second story. one day henry was sent on an errand, and he took a tin bucket along. i knew he would have to ascend those stairs, so i went up and locked the door on the inside, and came down into the garden, which had been newly ploughed and was rich in choice firm clods of black mold. i gathered a generous equipment of these, and ambushed him. i waited till he had climbed the stairs and was near the landing and couldn't escape. then i bombarded him with clods, which he warded off with his tin bucket the best he could, but without much success, for i was a good marksman. the clods smashing against the weather-boarding fetched my mother out to see what was the matter, and i tried to explain that i was amusing henry. both of them were after me in a minute, but i knew the way over that high board fence and escaped for that time. after an hour or two, when i ventured back, there was no one around and i thought the incident was closed. but it was not. henry was ambushing me. with an unusually competent aim for him, he landed a stone on the side of my head which raised a bump there that felt like the matterhorn. i carried it to my mother straightway for sympathy, but she was not strongly moved. it seemed to be her idea that incidents like this would eventually reform me if i harvested enough of them. so the matter was only educational. i had had a sterner view of it than that, before. it was not right to give the cat the "pain-killer"; i realize it now. i would not repeat it in these days. but in those "tom sawyer" days it was a great and sincere satisfaction to me to see peter perform under its influence--and if actions _do_ speak as loud as words, he took as much interest in it as i did. it was a most detestable medicine, perry davis's pain-killer. mr. pavey's negro man, who was a person of good judgment and considerable curiosity, wanted to sample it, and i let him. it was his opinion that it was made of hell-fire. those were the cholera days of ' . the people along the mississippi were paralyzed with fright. those who could run away, did it. and many died of fright in the flight. fright killed three persons where the cholera killed one. those who couldn't flee kept themselves drenched with cholera preventives, and my mother chose perry davis's pain-killer for me. she was not distressed about herself. she avoided that kind of preventive. but she made me promise to take a teaspoonful of pain-killer every day. originally it was my intention to keep the promise, but at that time i didn't know as much about pain-killer as i knew after my first experiment with it. she didn't watch henry's bottle--she could trust henry. but she marked my bottle with a pencil, on the label, every day, and examined it to see if the teaspoonful had been removed. the floor was not carpeted. it had cracks in it, and i fed the pain-killer to the cracks with very good results--no cholera occurred down below. it was upon one of these occasions that that friendly cat came waving his tail and supplicating for pain-killer--which he got--and then went into those hysterics which ended with his colliding with all the furniture in the room and finally going out of the open window and carrying the flower-pots with him, just in time for my mother to arrive and look over her glasses in petrified astonishment and say, "what in the world is the matter with peter?" i don't remember what my explanation was, but if it is recorded in that book it may not be the right one. whenever my conduct was of such exaggerated impropriety that my mother's extemporary punishments were inadequate, she saved the matter up for sunday, and made me go to church sunday night--which was a penalty sometimes bearable, perhaps, but as a rule it was not, and i avoided it for the sake of my constitution. she would never believe that i had been to church until she had applied her test: she made me tell her what the text was. that was a simple matter, and caused me no trouble. i didn't have to go to church to get a text. i selected one for myself. this worked very well until one time when my text and the one furnished by a neighbor, who had been to church, didn't tally. after that my mother took other methods. i don't know what they were now. in those days men and boys wore rather long cloaks in the winter-time. they were black, and were lined with very bright and showy scotch plaids. one winter's night when i was starting to church to square a crime of some kind committed during the week, i hid my cloak near the gate and went off and played with the other boys until church was over. then i returned home. but in the dark i put the cloak on wrong side out, entered the room, threw the cloak aside, and then stood the usual examination. i got along very well until the temperature of the church was mentioned. my mother said, "it must have been impossible to keep warm there on such a night." i didn't see the art of that remark, and was foolish enough to explain that i wore my cloak all the time that i was in church. she asked if i kept it on from church home, too. i didn't see the bearing of that remark. i said that that was what i had done. she said, "you wore it in church with that red scotch plaid outside and glaring? didn't that attract any attention?" of course to continue such a dialogue would have been tedious and unprofitable, and i let it go, and took the consequences. that was about . tom nash was a boy of my own age--the postmaster's son. the mississippi was frozen across, and he and i went skating one night, probably without permission. i cannot see why we should go skating in the night unless without permission, for there could be no considerable amusement to be gotten out of skating at night if nobody was going to object to it. about midnight, when we were more than half a mile out toward the illinois shore, we heard some ominous rumbling and grinding and crashing going on between us and the home side of the river, and we knew what it meant--the ice was breaking up. we started for home, pretty badly scared. we flew along at full speed whenever the moonlight sifting down between the clouds enabled us to tell which was ice and which was water. in the pauses we waited; started again whenever there was a good bridge of ice; paused again when we came to naked water and waited in distress until a floating vast cake should bridge that place. it took us an hour to make the trip--a trip which we made in a misery of apprehension all the time. but at last we arrived within a very brief distance of the shore. we waited again; there was another place that needed bridging. all about us the ice was plunging and grinding along and piling itself up in mountains on the shore, and the dangers were increasing, not diminishing. we grew very impatient to get to solid ground, so we started too early and went springing from cake to cake. tom made a miscalculation, and fell short. he got a bitter bath, but he was so close to shore that he only had to swim a stroke or two--then his feet struck hard bottom and he crawled out. i arrived a little later, without accident. we had been in a drenching perspiration, and tom's bath was a disaster for him. he took to his bed sick, and had a procession of diseases. the closing one was scarlet-fever, and he came out of it stone deaf. within a year or two speech departed, of course. but some years later he was taught to talk, after a fashion--one couldn't always make out what it was he was trying to say. of course he could not modulate his voice, since he couldn't hear himself talk. when he supposed he was talking low and confidentially, you could hear him in illinois. four years ago ( ) i was invited by the university of missouri to come out there and receive the honorary degree of ll.d. i took that opportunity to spend a week in hannibal--a city now, a village in my day. it had been fifty-three years since tom nash and i had had that adventure. when i was at the railway station ready to leave hannibal, there was a crowd of citizens there. i saw tom nash approaching me across a vacant space, and i walked toward him, for i recognized him at once. he was old and white-headed, but the boy of fifteen was still visible in him. he came up to me, made a trumpet of his hands at my ear, nodded his head toward the citizens and said confidentially--in a yell like a fog-horn-- "same damned fools, sam!" _from susy's biography._ papa was about twenty years old when he went on the mississippi as a pilot. just before he started on his tripp grandma clemens asked him to promise her on the bible not to touch intoxicating liquors or swear, and he said "yes, mother, i will," and he kept that promise seven years when grandma released him from it. under the inspiring influence of that remark, what a garden of forgotten reforms rises upon my sight! mark twain. (_to be continued._) north american review no. dciii. november , . chapters from my autobiography.--vi. by mark twain. _from susy's biography_. papa made arrangements to read at vassar college the st of may, and i went with him. we went by way of new york city. mamma went with us to new york and stayed two days to do some shopping. we started tuesday, at / past two o'clock in the afternoon, and reached new york about / past six. papa went right up to general grants from the station and mamma and i went to the everett house. aunt clara came to supper with us up in our room.... we and aunt clara were going were going to the theatre right after supper, and we expected papa to take us there and to come home as early as he could. but we got through dinner and he didn't come, and didn't come, and mamma got more perplexed and worried, but at last we thought we would have to go without him. so we put on our things and started down stairs but before we'd goten half down we met papa coming up with a great bunch of roses in his hand. he explained that the reason he was so late was that his watch stopped and he didn't notice and kept thinking it an hour earlier than it really was. the roses he carried were some col. fred grant sent to mamma. we went to the theatre and enjoyed "adonis" [word illegible] acted very much. we reached home about / past eleven o'clock and went right to bed. wednesday morning we got up rather late and had breakfast about / past nine o'clock. after breakfast mamma went out shopping and papa and i went to see papa's agent about some business matters. after papa had gotten through talking to cousin charlie, [webster] papa's agent, we went to get a friend of papa's, major pond, to go and see a dog show with us. then we went to see the dogs with major pond and we had a delightful time seeing so many dogs together; when we got through seeing the dogs papa thought he would go and see general grant and i went with him--this was april , . papa went up into general grant's room and he took me with him, i felt greatly honored and delighted when papa took me into general grant's room and let me see the general and col. grant, for general grant is a man i shall be glad all my life that i have seen. papa and general grant had a long talk together and papa has written an account of his talk and visit with general grant for me to put into this biography. susy has inserted in this place that account of mine--as follows: april , . i called on general grant and took susy with me. the general was looking and feeling far better than he had looked or felt for some months. he had ventured to work again on his book that morning--the first time he had done any work for perhaps a month. this morning's work was his first attempt at dictating, and it was a thorough success, to his great delight. he had always said that it would be impossible for him to dictate anything, but i had said that he was noted for clearness of statement, and as a narrative was simply a statement of consecutive facts, he was consequently peculiarly qualified and equipped for dictation. this turned out to be true. for he had dictated two hours that morning to a shorthand writer, had never hesitated for words, had not repeated himself, and the manuscript when finished needed no revision. the two hours' work was an account of appomattox--and this was such an extremely important feature that his book would necessarily have been severely lame without it. therefore i had taken a shorthand writer there before, to see if i could not get him to write at least a few lines about appomattox.[ ] but he was at that time not well enough to undertake it. i was aware that of all the hundred versions of appomattox, not one was really correct. therefore i was extremely anxious that he should leave behind him the truth. his throat was not distressing him, and his voice was much better and stronger than usual. he was so delighted to have gotten appomattox accomplished once more in his life--to have gotten the matter off his mind--that he was as talkative as his old self. he received susy very pleasantly, and then fell to talking about certain matters which he hoped to be able to dictate next day; and he said in substance that, among other things, he wanted to settle once for all a question that had been bandied about from mouth to mouth and from newspaper to newspaper. that question was, "with whom originated the idea of the march to the sea? was it grant's, or was it sherman's idea?" whether i, or some one else (being anxious to get the important fact settled) asked him with whom the idea originated, i don't remember. but i remember his answer. i shall always remember his answer. general grant said: "neither of us originated the idea of sherman's march to the sea. the enemy did it." he went on to say that the enemy, however, necessarily originated a great many of the plans that the general on the opposite side gets the credit for; at the same time that the enemy is doing that, he is laying open other moves which the opposing general sees and takes advantage of. in this case, sherman had a plan all thought out, of course. he meant to destroy the two remaining railroads in that part of the country, and that would finish up that region. but general hood did not play the military part that he was expected to play. on the contrary, general hood made a dive at chattanooga. this left the march to the sea open to sherman, and so after sending part of his army to defend and hold what he had acquired in the chattanooga region, he was perfectly free to proceed, with the rest of it, through georgia. he saw the opportunity, and he would not have been fit for his place if he had not seized it. "he wrote me" (the general is speaking) "what his plan was, and i sent him word to go ahead. my staff were opposed to the movement." (i think the general said they tried to persuade him to stop sherman. the chief of his staff, the general said, even went so far as to go to washington without the general's knowledge and get the ear of the authorities, and he succeeded in arousing their fears to such an extent that they telegraphed general grant to stop sherman.) then general grant said, "out of deference to the government, i telegraphed sherman and stopped him twenty-four hours; and then considering that that was deference enough to the government, i telegraphed him to go ahead again." i have not tried to give the general's language, but only the general idea of what he said. the thing that mainly struck me was his terse remark that the enemy originated the idea of the march to the sea. it struck me because it was so suggestive of the general's epigrammatic fashion--saying a great deal in a single crisp sentence. (this is my account, and signed "mark twain.") _susy resumes._ after papa and general grant had had their talk, we went back to the hotel where mamma was, and papa told mamma all about his interview with general grant. mamma and i had a nice quiet afternoon together. that pair of devoted comrades were always shutting themselves up together when there was opportunity to have what susy called "a cozy time." from susy's nursery days to the end of her life, she and her mother were close friends; intimate friends, passionate adorers of each other. susy's was a beautiful mind, and it made her an interesting comrade. and with the fine mind she had a heart like her mother's. susy never had an interest or an occupation which she was not glad to put aside for that something which was in all cases more precious to her--a visit with her mother. susy died at the right time, the fortunate time of life; the happy age--twenty-four years. at twenty-four, such a girl has seen the best of life--life as a happy dream. after that age the risks begin; responsibility comes, and with it the cares, the sorrows, and the inevitable tragedy. for her mother's sake i would have brought her back from the grave if i could, but i would not have done it for my own. _from susy's biography_. then papa went to read in public; there were a great many authors that read, that thursday afternoon, beside papa; i would have liked to have gone and heard papa read, but papa said he was going to read in vassar just what he was planning to read in new york, so i stayed at home with mamma. the next day mamma planned to take the four o'clock car back to hartford. we rose quite early that morning and went to the vienna bakery and took breakfast there. from there we went to a german bookstore and bought some german books for clara's birthday. dear me, the power of association to snatch mouldy dead memories out of their graves and make them walk! that remark about buying foreign books throws a sudden white glare upon the distant past; and i see the long stretch of a new york street with an unearthly vividness, and john hay walking down it, grave and remorseful. i was walking down it too, that morning, and i overtook hay and asked him what the trouble was. he turned a lustreless eye upon me and said: "my case is beyond cure. in the most innocent way in the world i have committed a crime which will never be forgiven by the sufferers, for they will never believe--oh, well, no, i was going to say they would never believe that i did the thing innocently. the truth is they will know that i acted innocently, because they are rational people; but what of that? i never can look them in the face again--nor they me, perhaps." hay was a young bachelor, and at that time was on the "tribune" staff. he explained his trouble in these words, substantially: "when i was passing along here yesterday morning on my way down-town to the office, i stepped into a bookstore where i am acquainted, and asked if they had anything new from the other side. they handed me a french novel, in the usual yellow paper cover, and i carried it away. i didn't even look at the title of it. it was for recreation reading, and i was on my way to my work. i went mooning and dreaming along, and i think i hadn't gone more than fifty yards when i heard my name called. i stopped, and a private carriage drew up at the sidewalk and i shook hands with the inmates--mother and young daughter, excellent people. they were on their way to the steamer to sail for paris. the mother said, "'i saw that book in your hand and i judged by the look of it that it was a french novel. is it?' "i said it was. "she said, 'do let me have it, so that my daughter can practise her french on it on the way over.' "of course i handed her the book, and we parted. ten minutes ago i was passing that bookstore again, and i stepped in and fetched away another copy of that book. here it is. read the first page of it. that is enough. you will know what the rest is like. i think it must be the foulest book in the french language--one of the foulest, anyway. i would be ashamed to offer it to a harlot--but, oh dear, i gave it to that sweet young girl without shame. take my advice; don't give away a book until you have examined it." _from susy's biography._ then mamma and i went to do some shopping and papa went to see general grant. after we had finnished doing our shopping we went home to the hotel together. when we entered our rooms in the hotel we saw on the table a vase full of exquisett red roses. mamma who is very fond of flowers exclaimed "oh i wonder who could have sent them." we both looked at the card in the midst of the roses and saw that it was written on in papa's handwriting, it was written in german. 'liebes geshchenk on die mamma.' [i am sure i didn't say "on"--that is susy's spelling, not mine; also i am sure i didn't spell geschenk so liberally as all that.--s. l. c.] mamma was delighted. papa came home and gave mamma her ticket; and after visiting a while with her went to see major pond and mamma and i sat down to our lunch. after lunch most of our time was taken up with packing, and at about three o'clock we went to escort mamma to the train. we got on board the train with her and stayed with her about five minutes and then we said good-bye to her and the train started for hartford. it was the first time i had ever beene away from home without mamma in my life, although i was yrs. old. papa and i drove back to the hotel and got major pond and then went to see the brooklyn bridge we went across it to brooklyn on the cars and then walked back across it from brooklyn to new york. we enjoyed looking at the beautiful scenery and we could see the bridge moove under the intense heat of the sun. we had a perfectly delightful time, but weer pretty tired when we got back to the hotel. the next morning we rose early, took our breakfast and took an early train to poughkeepsie. we had a very pleasant journey to poughkeepsie. the hudson was magnificent--shrouded with beautiful mist. when we arived at poughkeepsie it was raining quite hard; which fact greatly dissapointed me because i very much wanted to see the outside of the buildings of vassar college and as it rained that would be impossible. it was quite a long drive from the station to vasser college and papa and i had a nice long time to discuss and laugh over german profanity. one of the german phrases papa particularly enjoys is "o heilige maria mutter jesus!" jean has a german nurse, and this was one of her phrases, there was a time when jean exclaimed "ach gott!" to every trifle, but when mamma found it out she was shocked and instantly put a stop to it. it brings that pretty little german girl vividly before me--a sweet and innocent and plump little creature with peachy cheeks; a clear-souled little maiden and without offence, notwithstanding her profanities, and she was loaded to the eyebrows with them. she was a mere child. she was not fifteen yet. she was just from germany, and knew no english. she was always scattering her profanities around, and they were such a satisfaction to me that i never dreamed of such a thing as modifying her. for my own sake, i had no disposition to tell on her. indeed i took pains to keep her from being found out. i told her to confine her religious exercises to the children's quarters, and urged her to remember that mrs. clemens was prejudiced against pieties on week-days. to the children, the little maid's profanities sounded natural and proper and right, because they had been used to that kind of talk in germany, and they attached no evil importance to it. it grieves me that i have forgotten those vigorous remarks. i long hoarded them in my memory as a treasure. but i remember one of them still, because i heard it so many times. the trial of that little creature's life was the children's hair. she would tug and strain with her comb, accompanying her work with her misplaced pieties. and when finally she was through with her triple job she always fired up and exploded her thanks toward the sky, where they belonged, in this form: "_gott sei dank ich bin fertig mit'm gott verdammtes haar!_" (i believe i am not quite brave enough to translate it.) _from susy's biography_. we at length reached vassar college and she looked very finely, her buildings and her grounds being very beautiful. we went to the front doore and range the bell. the young girl who came to the doore wished to know who we wanted to see. evidently we were not expected. papa told her who we wanted to see and she showed us to the parlor. we waited, no one came; and waited, no one came, still no one came. it was beginning to seem pretty awkward, "oh well this is a pretty piece of business," papa exclaimed. at length we heard footsteps coming down the long corridor and miss c, (the lady who had invited papa) came into the room. she greeted papa very pleasantly and they had a nice little chatt together. soon the lady principal also entered and she was very pleasant and agreable. she showed us to our rooms and said she would send for us when dinner was ready. we went into our rooms, but we had nothing to do for half an hour exept to watch the rain drops as they fell upon the window panes. at last we were called to dinner, and i went down without papa as he never eats anything in the middle of the day. i sat at the table with the lady principal and enjoyed very much seeing all the young girls trooping into the dining-room. after dinner i went around the college with the young ladies and papa stayed in his room and smoked. when it was supper time papa went down and ate supper with us and we had a very delightful supper. after supper the young ladies went to their rooms to dress for the evening. papa went to his room and i went with the lady principal. at length the guests began to arive, but papa still remained in his room until called for. papa read in the chapell. it was the first time i had ever heard him read in my life--that is in public. when he came out on to the stage i remember the people behind me exclaimed "oh how queer he is! isn't he funny!" i thought papa was very funny, although i did not think him queer. he read "a trying situation" and "the golden arm," a ghost story that he heard down south when he was a little boy. "the golden arm" papa had told me before, but he had startled me so that i did not much wish to hear it again. but i had resolved this time to be prepared and not to let myself be startled, but still papa did, and very very much; he startled the whole roomful of people and they jumped as one man. the other story was also very funny and interesting and i enjoyed the evening inexpressibly much. after papa had finished reading we all went down to the collation in the dining-room and after that there was dancing and singing. then the guests went away and papa and i went to bed. the next morning we rose early, took an early train for hartford and reached hartford at / past o'clock. we were very glad to get back. how charitably she treats that ghastly experience! it is a dear and lovely disposition, and a most valuable one, that can brush away indignities and discourtesies and seek and find the pleasanter features of an experience. susy had that disposition, and it was one of the jewels of her character that had come to her straight from her mother. it is a feature that was left out of me at birth. and, at seventy, i have not yet acquired it. i did not go to vassar college professionally, but as a guest--as a guest, and gratis. aunt clara (now mrs. john b. stanchfield) was a graduate of vassar and it was to please her that i inflicted that journey upon susy and myself. the invitation had come to me from both the lady mentioned by susy and the president of the college--a sour old saint who has probably been gathered to his fathers long ago; and i hope they enjoy him; i hope they value his society. i think i can get along without it, in either end of the next world. we arrived at the college in that soaking rain, and susy has described, with just a suggestion of dissatisfaction, the sort of reception we got. susy had to sit in her damp clothes half an hour while we waited in the parlor; then she was taken to a fireless room and left to wait there again, as she has stated. i do not remember that president's name, and i am sorry. he did not put in an appearance until it was time for me to step upon the platform in front of that great garden of young and lovely blossoms. he caught up with me and advanced upon the platform with me and was going to introduce me. i said in substance: "you have allowed me to get along without your help thus far, and if you will retire from the platform i will try to do the rest without it." i did not see him any more, but i detest his memory. of course my resentment did not extend to the students, and so i had an unforgettable good time talking to them. and i think they had a good time too, for they responded "as one man," to use susy's unimprovable phrase. girls are charming creatures. i shall have to be twice seventy years old before i change my mind as to that. i am to talk to a crowd of them this afternoon, students of barnard college (the sex's annex to columbia university), and i think i shall have as pleasant a time with those lasses as i had with the vassar girls twenty-one years ago. _from susy's biography._ i stopped in the middle of mamma's early history to tell about our tripp to vassar because i was afraid i would forget about it, now i will go on where i left off. some time after miss emma nigh died papa took mamma and little langdon to elmira for the summer. when in elmira langdon began to fail but i think mamma did not know just what was the matter with him. i was the cause of the child's illness. his mother trusted him to my care and i took him a long drive in an open barouche for an airing. it was a raw, cold morning, but he was well wrapped about with furs and, in the hands of a careful person, no harm would have come to him. but i soon dropped into a reverie and forgot all about my charge. the furs fell away and exposed his bare legs. by and by the coachman noticed this, and i arranged the wraps again, but it was too late. the child was almost frozen. i hurried home with him. i was aghast at what i had done, and i feared the consequences. i have always felt shame for that treacherous morning's work and have not allowed myself to think of it when i could help it. i doubt if i had the courage to make confession at that time. i think it most likely that i have never confessed until now. _from susy's biography._ at last it was time for papa to return to hartford, and langdon was real sick at that time, but still mamma decided to go with him, thinking the journey might do him good. but after they reached hartford he became very sick, and his trouble prooved to be diptheeria. he died about a week after mamma and papa reached hartford. he was burried by the side of grandpa at elmira, new york. [susy rests there with them.--s. l. c.] after that, mamma became very very ill, so ill that there seemed great danger of death, but with a great deal of good care she recovered. some months afterward mamma and papa [and susy, who was perhaps fourteen or fifteen months old at the time.--s. l. c.] went to europe and stayed for a time in scotland and england. in scotland mamma and papa became very well equanted with dr. john brown, the author of "rab and his friends," and he mett, but was not so well equanted with, mr. charles kingsley, mr. henry m. stanley, sir thomas hardy grandson of the captain hardy to whom nellson said "kiss me hardy," when dying on shipboard, mr. henry irving, robert browning, sir charles dilke, mr. charles reade, mr. william black, lord houghton, frank buckland, mr. tom hughes, anthony trollope, tom hood, son of the poet--and mamma and papa were quite well equanted with dr. macdonald and family, and papa met harrison ainsworth. i remember all these men very well indeed, except the last one. i do not recall ainsworth. by my count, susy mentions fourteen men. they are all dead except sir charles dilke. we met a great many other interesting people, among them lewis carroll, author of the immortal "alice"--but he was only interesting to look at, for he was the stillest and shyest full-grown man i have ever met except "uncle remus." dr. macdonald and several other lively talkers were present, and the talk went briskly on for a couple of hours, but carroll sat still all the while except that now and then he answered a question. his answers were brief. i do not remember that he elaborated any of them. at a dinner at smalley's we met herbert spencer. at a large luncheon party at lord houghton's we met sir arthur helps, who was a celebrity of world-wide fame at the time, but is quite forgotten now. lord elcho, a large vigorous man, sat at some distance down the table. he was talking earnestly about godalming. it was a deep and flowing and unarticulated rumble, but i got the godalming pretty clearly every time it broke free of the rumble, and as all the strength was on the first end of the word it startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing. in the middle of the luncheon lady houghton rose, remarked to the guests on her right and on her left in a matter-of-fact way, "excuse me, i have an engagement," and without further ceremony she went off to meet it. this would have been doubtful etiquette in america. lord houghton told a number of delightful stories. he told them in french, and i lost nothing of them but the nubs. mark twain. (_to be continued._) footnote: [ ] i was his publisher. i was putting his "personal memoirs" to press at the time.--s. l. c. north american review no. dciv. december , . chapters from my autobiography.--vii. by mark twain. i was always heedless. i was born heedless; and therefore i was constantly, and quite unconsciously, committing breaches of the minor proprieties, which brought upon me humiliations which ought to have humiliated me but didn't, because i didn't know anything had happened. but livy knew; and so the humiliations fell to her share, poor child, who had not earned them and did not deserve them. she always said i was the most difficult child she had. she was very sensitive about me. it distressed her to see me do heedless things which could bring me under criticism, and so she was always watchful and alert to protect me from the kind of transgressions which i have been speaking of. when i was leaving hartford for washington, upon the occasion referred to, she said: "i have written a small warning and put it in a pocket of your dress-vest. when you are dressing to go to the authors' reception at the white house you will naturally put your fingers in your vest pockets, according to your custom, and you will find that little note there. read it carefully, and do as it tells you. i cannot be with you, and so i delegate my sentry duties to this little note. if i should give you the warning by word of mouth, now, it would pass from your head and be forgotten in a few minutes." it was president cleveland's first term. i had never seen his wife--the young, the beautiful, the good-hearted, the sympathetic, the fascinating. sure enough, just as i had finished dressing to go to the white house i found that little note, which i had long ago forgotten. it was a grave little note, a serious little note, like its writer, but it made me laugh. livy's gentle gravities often produced that effect upon me, where the expert humorist's best joke would have failed, for i do not laugh easily. when we reached the white house and i was shaking hands with the president, he started to say something, but i interrupted him and said: "if your excellency will excuse me, i will come back in a moment; but now i have a very important matter to attend to, and it must be attended to at once." i turned to mrs. cleveland, the young, the beautiful, the fascinating, and gave her my card, on the back of which i had written "_he didn't_"--and i asked her to sign her name below those words. she said: "he didn't? he didn't what?" "oh," i said, "never mind. we cannot stop to discuss that now. this is urgent. won't you please sign your name?" (i handed her a fountain-pen.) "why," she said, "i cannot commit myself in that way. who is it that didn't?--and what is it that he didn't?" "oh," i said, "time is flying, flying, flying. won't you take me out of my distress and sign your name to it? it's all right. i give you my word it's all right." she looked nonplussed; but hesitatingly and mechanically she took the pen and said: "i will sign it. i will take the risk. but you must tell me all about it, right afterward, so that you can be arrested before you get out of the house in case there should be anything criminal about this." then she signed; and i handed her mrs. clements's note, which was very brief, very simple, and to the point. it said: "_don't wear your arctics in the white house._" it made her shout; and at my request she summoned a messenger and we sent that card at once to the mail on its way to mrs. clemens in hartford. when the little ruth was about a year or a year and a half old, mason, an old and valued friend of mine, was consul-general at frankfort-on-the-main. i had known him well in , ' and ' , in america, and i and mine had spent a good deal of time with him and his family in frankfort in ' . he was a thoroughly competent, diligent, and conscientious official. indeed he possessed these qualities in so large a degree that among american consuls he might fairly be said to be monumental, for at that time our consular service was largely--and i think i may say mainly--in the hands of ignorant, vulgar, and incapable men who had been political heelers in america, and had been taken care of by transference to consulates where they could be supported at the government's expense instead of being transferred to the poor house, which would have been cheaper and more patriotic. mason, in ' , had been consul-general in frankfort several years--four, i think. he had come from marseilles with a great record. he had been consul there during thirteen years, and one part of his record was heroic. there had been a desolating cholera epidemic, and mason was the only representative of any foreign country who stayed at his post and saw it through. and during that time he not only represented his own country, but he represented all the other countries in christendom and did their work, and did it well and was praised for it by them in words of no uncertain sound. this great record of mason's had saved him from official decapitation straight along while republican presidents occupied the chair, but now it was occupied by a democrat. mr. cleveland was not seated in it--he was not yet inaugurated--before he was deluged with applications from democratic politicians desiring the appointment of a thousand or so politically useful democrats to mason's place. a year or two later mason wrote me and asked me if i couldn't do something to save him from destruction. i was very anxious to keep him in his place, but at first i could not think of any way to help him, for i was a mugwump. we, the mugwumps, a little company made up of the unenslaved of both parties, the very best men to be found in the two great parties--that was our idea of it--voted sixty thousand strong for mr. cleveland in new york and elected him. our principles were high, and very definite. we were not a party; we had no candidates; we had no axes to grind. our vote laid upon the man we cast it for no obligation of any kind. by our rule we could not ask for office; we could not accept office. when voting, it was our duty to vote for the best man, regardless of his party name. we had no other creed. vote for the best man--that was creed enough. such being my situation, i was puzzled to know how to try to help mason, and, at the same time, save my mugwump purity undefiled. it was a delicate place. but presently, out of the ruck of confusions in my mind, rose a sane thought, clear and bright--to wit: since it was a mugwump's duty to do his best to put the beet man in office, necessarily it must be a mugwump's duty to try to _keep_ the best man in when he was already there. my course was easy now. it might not be quite delicate for a mugwump to approach the president directly, but i could approach him indirectly, with all delicacy, since in that case not even courtesy would require him to take notice of an application which no one could prove had ever reached him. yes, it was easy and simple sailing now. i could lay the matter before ruth, in her cradle, and wait for results. i wrote the little child, and said to her all that i have just been saying about mugwump principles and the limitations which they put upon me. i explained that it would not be proper for me to apply to her father in mr. mason's behalf, but i detailed to her mr. mason's high and honorable record and suggested that she take the matter in her own hands and do a patriotic work which i felt some delicacy about venturing upon myself. i asked her to forget that her father was only president of the united states, and her subject and servant; i asked her not to put her application in the form of a command, but to modify it, and give it the fictitious and pleasanter form of a mere request--that it would be no harm to let him gratify himself with the superstition that he was independent and could do as he pleased in the matter. i begged her to put stress, and plenty of it, upon the proposition that to keep mason in his place would be a benefaction to the nation; to enlarge upon that, and keep still about all other considerations. in due time i received a letter from the president, written with his own hand, signed by his own hand, acknowledging ruth's intervention and thanking me for enabling him to save to the country the services of so good and well-tried a servant as mason, and thanking me, also, for the detailed fulness of mason's record, which could leave no doubt in any one's mind that mason was in his right place and ought to be kept there. mason has remained in the service ever since, and is now consul-general at paris. during the time that we were living in buffalo in ' -' , mr. cleveland was sheriff, but i never happened to make his acquaintance, or even see him. in fact, i suppose i was not even aware of his existence. fourteen years later, he was become the greatest man in the state. i was not living in the state at the time. he was governor, and was about to step into the post of president of the united states. at that time i was on the public highway in company with another bandit, george w. cable. we were robbing the public with readings from our works during four months--and in the course of time we went to albany to levy tribute, and i said, "we ought to go and pay our respects to the governor." so cable and i went to that majestic capitol building and stated our errand. we were shown into the governor's private office, and i saw mr. cleveland for the first time. we three stood chatting together. i was born lazy, and i comforted myself by turning the corner of a table into a sort of seat. presently the governor said: "mr. clemens, i was a fellow citizen of yours in buffalo a good many months, a good while ago, and during those months you burst suddenly into a mighty fame, out of a previous long-continued and no doubt proper obscurity--but i was a nobody, and you wouldn't notice me nor have anything to do with me. but now that i have become somebody, you have changed your style, and you come here to shake hands with me and be sociable. how do you explain this kind of conduct?" "oh," i said, "it is very simple, your excellency. in buffalo you were nothing but a sheriff. i was in society. i couldn't afford to associate with sheriffs. but you are a governor now, and you are on your way to the presidency. it is a great difference, and it makes you worth while." there appeared to be about sixteen doors to that spacious room. from each door a young man now emerged, and the sixteen lined up and moved forward and stood in front of the governor with an aspect of respectful expectancy in their attitude. no one spoke for a moment. then the governor said: "you are dismissed, gentlemen. your services are not required. mr. clemens is sitting on the bells." there was a cluster of sixteen bell buttons on the corner of the table; my proportions at that end of me were just right to enable me to cover the whole of that nest, and that is how i came to hatch out those sixteen clerks. in accordance with the suggestion made in gilder's letter recently received i have written the following note to ex-president cleveland upon his sixty-ninth birthday: honored sir:-- your patriotic virtues have won for you the homage of half the nation and the enmity of the other half. this places your character as a citizen upon a summit as high as washington's. the verdict is unanimous and unassailable. the votes of both sides are necessary in cases like these, and the votes of the one side are quite as valuable as are the votes of the other. where the votes are all in a man's favor the verdict is against him. it is sand, and history will wash it away. but the verdict for you is rock, and will stand. s. l. clemens. as of date march , .... in a diary which mrs. clemens kept for a little while, a great many years ago, i find various mentions of mrs. harriet beecher stowe, who was a near neighbor of ours in hartford, with no fences between. and in those days she made as much use of our grounds as of her own, in pleasant weather. her mind had decayed, and she was a pathetic figure. she wandered about all the day long in the care of a muscular irishwoman. among the colonists of our neighborhood the doors always stood open in pleasant weather. mrs. stowe entered them at her own free will, and as she was always softly slippered and generally full of animal spirits, she was able to deal in surprises, and she liked to do it. she would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war-whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes. and she had other moods. sometimes we would hear gentle music in the drawing-room and would find her there at the piano singing ancient and melancholy songs with infinitely touching effect. her husband, old professor stowe, was a picturesque figure. he wore a broad slouch hat. he was a large man, and solemn. his beard was white and thick and hung far down on his breast. the first time our little susy ever saw him she encountered him on the street near our house and came flying wide-eyed to her mother and said, "santa claus has got loose!" which reminds me of rev. charley stowe's little boy--a little boy of seven years. i met rev. charley crossing his mother's grounds one morning and he told me this little tale. he had been out to chicago to attend a convention of congregational clergymen, and had taken his little boy with him. during the trip he reminded the little chap, every now and then, that he must be on his very best behavior there in chicago. he said: "we shall be the guests of a clergyman, there will be other guests--clergymen and their wives--and you must be careful to let those people see by your walk and conversation that you are of a godly household. be very careful about this." the admonition bore fruit. at the first breakfast which they ate in the chicago clergyman's house he heard his little son say in the meekest and most reverent way to the lady opposite him, "please, won't you, for christ's sake, pass the butter?" mark twain. (_to be continued._) north american review no. dcv. december , . chapters from my autobiography.--viii. by mark twain. [sidenote: ( .)] [_dictated in ._] in those early days duelling suddenly became a fashion in the new territory of nevada, and by everybody was anxious to have a chance in the new sport, mainly for the reason that he was not able to thoroughly respect himself so long as he had not killed or crippled somebody in a duel or been killed or crippled in one himself. at that time i had been serving as city editor on mr. goodman's virginia city "enterprise" for a matter of two years. i was twenty-nine years old. i was ambitious in several ways, but i had entirely escaped the seductions of that particular craze. i had had no desire to fight a duel; i had no intention of provoking one. i did not feel respectable, but i got a certain amount of satisfaction out of feeling safe. i was ashamed of myself; the rest of the staff were ashamed of me--but i got along well enough. i had always been accustomed to feeling ashamed of myself, for one thing or another, so there was no novelty for me in the situation. i bore it very well. plunkett was on the staff; r. m. daggett was on the staff. these had tried to get into duels, but for the present had failed, and were waiting. goodman was the only one of us who had done anything to shed credit upon the paper. the rival paper was the virginia "union." its editor for a little while was tom fitch, called the "silver-tongued orator of wisconsin"--that was where he came from. he tuned up his oratory in the editorial columns of the "union," and mr. goodman invited him out and modified him with a bullet. i remember the joy of the staff when goodman's challenge was accepted by fitch. we ran late that night, and made much of joe goodman. he was only twenty-four years old; he lacked the wisdom which a person has at twenty-nine, and he was as glad of being _it_ as i was that i wasn't. he chose major graves for his second (that name is not right, but it's close enough; i don't remember the major's name). graves came over to instruct joe in the duelling art. he had been a major under walker, the "gray-eyed man of destiny," and had fought all through that remarkable man's filibustering campaign in central america. that fact gauges the major. to say that a man was a major under walker, and came out of that struggle ennobled by walker's praise, is to say that the major was not merely a brave man but that he was brave to the very utmost limit of that word. all of walker's men were like that. i knew the gillis family intimately. the father made the campaign under walker, and with him one son. they were in the memorable plaza fight, and stood it out to the last against overwhelming odds, as did also all of the walker men. the son was killed at the father's side. the father received a bullet through the eye. the old man--for he was an old man at the time--wore spectacles, and the bullet and one of the glasses went into his skull and remained there. there were some other sons: steve, george, and jim, very young chaps--the merest lads--who wanted to be in the walker expedition, for they had their father's dauntless spirit. but walker wouldn't have them; he said it was a serious expedition, and no place for children. the major was a majestic creature, with a most stately and dignified and impressive military bearing, and he was by nature and training courteous, polite, graceful, winning; and he had that quality which i think i have encountered in only one other man--bob howland--a mysterious quality which resides in the eye; and when that eye is turned upon an individual or a squad, in warning, that is enough. the man that has that eye doesn't need to go armed; he can move upon an armed desperado and quell him and take him prisoner without saying a single word. i saw bob howland do that, once--a slender, good-natured, amiable, gentle, kindly little skeleton of a man, with a sweet blue eye that would win your heart when it smiled upon you, or turn cold and freeze it, according to the nature of the occasion. the major stood joe up straight; stood steve gillis up fifteen paces away; made joe turn right side towards steve, cock his navy six-shooter--that prodigious weapon--and hold it straight down against his leg; told him that _that_ was the correct position for the gun--that the position ordinarily in use at virginia city (that is to say, the gun straight up in the air, then brought slowly down to your man) was all wrong. at the word "_one_," you must raise the gun slowly and steadily to the place on the other man's body that you desire to convince. then, after a pause, "_two, three--fire--stop!_" at the word "stop," you may fire--but not earlier. you may give yourself as much time as you please _after_ that word. then, when you fire, you may advance and go on firing at your leisure and pleasure, if you can get any pleasure out of it. and, in the meantime, the other man, if he has been properly instructed and is alive to his privileges, is advancing on _you_, and firing--and it is always likely that more or less trouble will result. naturally, when joe's revolver had risen to a level it was pointing at steve's breast, but the major said "no, that is not wise. take all the risks of getting murdered yourself, but don't run any risk of murdering the other man. if you survive a duel you want to survive it in such a way that the memory of it will not linger along with you through the rest of your life and interfere with your sleep. aim at your man's leg; not at the knee, not above the knee; for those are dangerous spots. aim below the knee; cripple him, but leave the rest of him to his mother." by grace of these truly wise and excellent instructions, joe tumbled fitch down next morning with a bullet through his lower leg, which furnished him a permanent limp. and joe lost nothing but a lock of hair, which he could spare better then than he could now. for when i saw him here in new york a year ago, his crop was gone: he had nothing much left but a fringe, with a dome rising above. [sidenote: ( .)] about a year later i got _my_ chance. but i was not hunting for it. goodman went off to san francisco for a week's holiday, and left me to be chief editor. i had supposed that that was an easy berth, there being nothing to do but write one editorial per day; but i was disappointed in that superstition. i couldn't find anything to write an article about, the first day. then it occurred to me that inasmuch as it was the nd of april, , the next morning would be the three-hundredth anniversary of shakespeare's birthday--and what better theme could i want than that? i got the cyclopædia and examined it, and found out who shakespeare was and what he had done, and i borrowed all that and laid it before a community that couldn't have been better prepared for instruction about shakespeare than if they had been prepared by art. there wasn't enough of what shakespeare had done to make an editorial of the necessary length, but i filled it out with what he hadn't done--which in many respects was more important and striking and readable than the handsomest things he had really accomplished. but next day i was in trouble again. there were no more shakespeares to work up. there was nothing in past history, or in the world's future possibilities, to make an editorial out of, suitable to that community; so there was but one theme left. that theme was mr. laird, proprietor of the virginia "union." _his_ editor had gone off to san francisco too, and laird was trying his hand at editing. i woke up mr. laird with some courtesies of the kind that were fashionable among newspaper editors in that region, and he came back at me the next day in a most vitriolic way. he was hurt by something i had said about him--some little thing--i don't remember what it was now--probably called him a horse-thief, or one of those little phrases customarily used to describe another editor. they were no doubt just, and accurate, but laird was a very sensitive creature, and he didn't like it. so we expected a challenge from mr. laird, because according to the rules--according to the etiquette of duelling as reconstructed and reorganized and improved by the duellists of that region--whenever you said a thing about another person that he didn't like, it wasn't sufficient for him to talk back in the same offensive spirit: etiquette required him to send a challenge; so we waited for a challenge--waited all day. it didn't come. and as the day wore along, hour after hour, and no challenge came, the boys grew depressed. they lost heart. but i was cheerful; i felt better and better all the time. they couldn't understand it, but _i_ could understand it. it was my _make_ that enabled me to be cheerful when other people were despondent. so then it became necessary for us to waive etiquette and challenge mr. laird. when we reached that decision, they began to cheer up, but i began to lose some of my animation. however, in enterprises of this kind you are in the hands of your friends; there is nothing for you to do but to abide by what they consider to be the best course. daggett wrote a challenge for me, for daggett had the language--the right language--the convincing language--and i lacked it. daggett poured out a stream of unsavory epithets upon mr. laird, charged with a vigor and venom of a strength calculated to persuade him; and steve gillis, my second, carried the challenge and came back to wait for the return. it didn't come. the boys were exasperated, but i kept my temper. steve carried another challenge, hotter than the other, and we waited again. nothing came of it. i began to feel quite comfortable. i began to take an interest in the challenges myself. i had not felt any before; but it seemed to me that i was accumulating a great and valuable reputation at no expense, and my delight in this grew and grew, as challenge after challenge was declined, until by midnight i was beginning to think that there was nothing in the world so much to be desired as a chance to fight a duel. so i hurried daggett up; made him keep on sending challenge after challenge. oh, well, i overdid it; laird accepted. i might have known that that would happen--laird was a man you couldn't depend on. the boys were jubilant beyond expression. they helped me make my will, which was another discomfort--and i already had enough. then they took me home. i didn't sleep any--didn't want to sleep. i had plenty of things to think about, and less than four hours to do it in,--because five o'clock was the hour appointed for the tragedy, and i should have to use up one hour--beginning at four--in practising with the revolver and finding out which end of it to level at the adversary. at four we went down into a little gorge, about a mile from town, and borrowed a barn door for a mark--borrowed it of a man who was over in california on a visit--and we set the barn door up and stood a fence-rail up against the middle of it, to represent mr. laird. but the rail was no proper representative of him, for he was longer than a rail and thinner. nothing would ever fetch him but a line shot, and then as like as not he would split the bullet--the worst material for duelling purposes that could be imagined. i began on the rail. i couldn't hit the rail; then i tried the barn door; but i couldn't hit the barn door. there was nobody in danger except stragglers around on the flanks of that mark. i was thoroughly discouraged, and i didn't cheer up any when we presently heard pistol-shots over in the next little ravine. i knew what that was--that was laird's gang out practising him. they would hear my shots, and of course they would come up over the ridge to see what kind of a record i was making--see what their chances were against me. well, i hadn't any record; and i knew that if laird came over that ridge and saw my barn door without a scratch on it, he would be as anxious to fight as i was--or as i had been at midnight, before that disastrous acceptance came. now just at this moment, a little bird, no bigger than a sparrow, flew along by and lit on a sage-bush about thirty yards away. steve whipped out his revolver and shot its head off. oh, he was a marksman--much better than i was. we ran down there to pick up the bird, and just then, sure enough, mr. laird and his people came over the ridge, and they joined us. and when laird's second saw that bird, with its head shot off, he lost color, he faded, and you could see that he was interested. he said: "who did that?" before i could answer, steve spoke up and said quite calmly, and in a matter-of-fact way, "clemens did it." the second said, "why, that is wonderful. how far off was that bird?" steve said, "oh, not far--about thirty yards." the second said, "well, that is astonishing shooting. how often can he do that?" steve said languidly, "oh, about four times out of five." i knew the little rascal was lying, but i didn't say anything. the second said, "why, that is _amazing_ shooting; i supposed he couldn't hit a church." he was supposing very sagaciously, but i didn't say anything. well, they said good morning. the second took mr. laird home, a little tottery on his legs, and laird sent back a note in his own hand declining to fight a duel with me on any terms whatever. well, my life was saved--saved by that accident. i don't know what the bird thought about that interposition of providence, but i felt very, very comfortable over it--satisfied and content. now, we found out, later, that laird had _hit_ his mark four times out of six, right along. if the duel had come off, he would have so filled my skin with bullet-holes that it wouldn't have held my principles. by breakfast-time the news was all over town that i had sent a challenge and steve gillis had carried it. now that would entitle us to two years apiece in the penitentiary, according to the brand-new law. judge north sent us no message as coming from himself, but a message _came_ from a close friend of his. he said it would be a good idea for us to leave the territory by the first stage-coach. this would sail next morning, at four o'clock--and in the meantime we would be searched for, but not with avidity; and if we were in the territory after that stage-coach left, we would be the first victims of the new law. judge north was anxious to have some object-lessons for that law, and he would absolutely keep us in the prison the full two years. well, it seemed to me that our society was no longer desirable in nevada; so we stayed in our quarters and observed proper caution all day--except that once steve went over to the hotel to attend to another customer of mine. that was a mr. cutler. you see laird was not the only person whom i had tried to reform during my occupancy of the editorial chair. i had looked around and selected several other people, and delivered a new zest of life into them through warm criticism and disapproval--so that when i laid down my editorial pen i had four horse-whippings and two duels owing to me. we didn't care for the horse-whippings; there was no glory in them; they were not worth the trouble of collecting. but honor required that some notice should be taken of that other duel. mr. cutler had come up from carson city, and had sent a man over with a challenge from the hotel. steve went over to pacify him. steve weighed only ninety-five pounds, but it was well known throughout the territory that with his fists he could whip anybody that walked on two legs, let his weight and science be what they might. steve was a gillis, and when a gillis confronted a man and had a proposition to make, the proposition always contained business. when cutler found that steve was my second he cooled down; he became calm and rational, and was ready to listen. steve gave him fifteen minutes to get out of the hotel, and half an hour to get out of town or there would be results. so _that_ duel went off successfully, because mr. cutler immediately left for carson a convinced and reformed man. i have never had anything to do with duels since. i thoroughly disapprove of duels. i consider them unwise, and i know they are dangerous. also, sinful. if a man should challenge me now, i would go to that man and take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet retired spot, and _kill_ him. mark twain. (_to be continued._) north american review no. dcvi. january , . chapters from my autobiography.--ix. by mark twain. [_dictated december , ._] as regards the coming american monarchy. it was before the secretary of state had been heard from that the chairman of the banquet said: "in this time of unrest it is of great satisfaction that such a man as you, mr. root, is chief adviser of the president." mr. root then got up and in the most quiet and orderly manner touched off the successor to the san francisco earthquake. as a result, the several state governments were well shaken up and considerably weakened. mr. root was prophesying. he was prophesying, and it seems to me that no shrewder and surer forecasting has been done in this country for a good many years. he did not say, in so many words, that we are proceeding, in a steady march, toward eventual and unavoidable replacement of the republic by monarchy; but i suppose he was aware that that is the case. he notes the several steps, the customary steps, which in all the ages have led to the consolidation of loose and scattered governmental forces into formidable centralizations of authority; but he stops there, and doesn't add up the sum. he is not unaware that heretofore the sum has been ultimate monarchy, and that the same figures can fairly be depended upon to furnish the same sum whenever and wherever they can be produced, so long as human nature shall remain as it is; but it was not needful that he do the adding, since any one can do it; neither would it have been gracious in him to do it. in observing the changed conditions which in the course of time have made certain and sure the eventual seizure by the washington government of a number of state duties and prerogatives which have been betrayed and neglected by the several states, he does not attribute those changes and the vast results which are to flow from them to any thought-out policy of any party or of any body of dreamers or schemers, but properly and rightly attributes them to that stupendous power--_circumstance_-- which moves by laws of its own, regardless of parties and policies, and whose decrees are final, and must be obeyed by all--and will be. the railway is a circumstance, the steamship is a circumstance, the telegraph is a circumstance. they were mere happenings; and to the whole world, the wise and the foolish alike, they were entirely trivial, wholly inconsequential; indeed silly, comical, grotesque. no man, and no party, and no thought-out policy said, "behold, we will build railways and steamships and telegraphs, and presently you will see the condition and way of life of every man and woman and child in the nation totally changed; unimaginable changes of law and custom will follow, in spite of anything that anybody can do to prevent it." the changed conditions have come, and circumstance knows what is following, and will follow. so does mr. root. his language is not unclear, it is crystal: "our whole life has swung away from the old state centres, and is crystallizing about national centres." " ... the old barriers which kept the states as separate communities are completely lost from sight." " ... that [state] power of regulation and control is gradually passing into the hands of the national government." "sometimes by an assertion of the inter-state commerce power, sometimes by an assertion of the taxing power, the national government is taking up the performance of duties which under the changed conditions the separate states are no longer capable of adequately performing." "we are urging forward in a development of business and social life which tends more and more to the obliteration of state lines and the decrease of state power as compared with national power." "it is useless for the advocates of state rights to inveigh against ... the extension of national authority in the fields of necessary control where the states themselves fail in the performance of their duty." he is not announcing a policy; he is not forecasting what a party of planners will bring about; he is merely telling what the people will require and compel. and he could have added--which would be perfectly true--that the people will not be moved to it by speculation and cogitation and planning, but by _circumstance_--that power which arbitrarily compels all their actions, and over which they have not the slightest control. _"the end is not yet."_ it is a true word. we are on the march, but at present we are only just getting started. if the states continue to fail to do their duty as required by the people-- " ... _constructions of the constitution will be found_ to vest the power where it will be exercised--in the national government." i do not know whether that has a sinister meaning or not, and so i will not enlarge upon it lest i should chance to be in the wrong. it sounds like ship-money come again, but it may not be so intended. human nature being what it is, i suppose we must expect to drift into monarchy by and by. it is a saddening thought, but we cannot change our nature: we are all alike, we human beings; and in our blood and bone, and ineradicable, we carry the seeds out of which monarchies and aristocracies are grown: worship of gauds, titles, distinctions, power. we have to worship these things and their possessors, we are all born so, and we cannot help it. we have to be despised by somebody whom we regard as above us, or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to worship and envy, or we cannot be content. in america we manifest this in all the ancient and customary ways. in public we scoff at titles and hereditary privilege, but privately we hanker after them, and when we get a chance we buy them for cash and a daughter. sometimes we get a good man and worth the price, but we are ready to take him anyway, whether he be ripe or rotten, whether he be clean and decent, or merely a basket of noble and sacred and long-descended offal. and when we get him the whole nation publicly chaffs and scoffs--and privately envies; and also is proud of the honor which has been conferred upon us. we run over our list of titled purchases every now and then, in the newspapers, and discuss them and caress them, and are thankful and happy. like all the other nations, we worship money and the possessors of it--they being our aristocracy, and we have to have one. we like to read about rich people in the papers; the papers know it, and they do their best to keep this appetite liberally fed. they even leave out a football bull-fight now and then to get room for all the particulars of how--according to the display heading--"rich woman fell down cellar--not hurt." the falling down the cellar is of no interest to us when the woman is not rich, but no rich woman can fall down cellar and we not yearn to know all about it and wish it was us. in a monarchy the people willingly and rejoicingly revere and take pride in their nobilities, and are not humiliated by the reflection that this humble and hearty homage gets no return but contempt. contempt does not shame them, they are used to it, and they recognize that it is their proper due. we are all made like that. in europe we easily and quickly learn to take that attitude toward the sovereigns and the aristocracies; moreover, it has been observed that when we get the attitude we go on and exaggerate it, presently becoming more servile than the natives, and vainer of it. the next step is to rail and scoff at republics and democracies. all of which is natural, for we have not ceased to be human beings by becoming americans, and the human race was always intended to be governed by kingship, not by popular vote. i suppose we must expect that unavoidable and irresistible circumstances will gradually take away the powers of the states and concentrate them in the central government, and that the republic will then repeat the history of all time and become a monarchy; but i believe that if we obstruct these encroachments and steadily resist them the monarchy can be postponed for a good while yet. [sidenote: ( -' .)] [_dictated december , ._] an exciting event in our village (hannibal) was the arrival of the mesmerizer. i think the year was . as to that i am not sure, but i know the month--it was may; that detail has survived the wear of fifty-five years. a pair of connected little incidents of that month have served to keep the memory of it green for me all this time; incidents of no consequence, and not worth embalming, yet my memory has preserved them carefully and flung away things of real value to give them space and make them comfortable. the truth is, a person's memory has no more sense than his conscience, and no appreciation whatever of values and proportions. however, never mind those trifling incidents; my subject is the mesmerizer, now. he advertised his show, and promised marvels. admission as usual: cents, children and negroes half price. the village had heard of mesmerism, in a general way, but had not encountered it yet. not many people attended, the first night, but next day they had so many wonders to tell that everybody's curiosity was fired, and after that for a fortnight the magician had prosperous times. i was fourteen or fifteen years old--the age at which a boy is willing to endure all things, suffer all things, short of death by fire, if thereby he may be conspicuous and show off before the public; and so, when i saw the "subjects" perform their foolish antics on the platform and make the people laugh and shout and admire, i had a burning desire to be a subject myself. every night, for three nights, i sat in the row of candidates on the platform, and held the magic disk in the palm of my hand, and gazed at it and tried to get sleepy, but it was a failure; i remained wide awake, and had to retire defeated, like the majority. also, i had to sit there and be gnawed with envy of hicks, our journeyman; i had to sit there and see him scamper and jump when simmons the enchanter exclaimed, "see the snake! see the snake!" and hear him say, "my, how beautiful!" in response to the suggestion that he was observing a splendid sunset; and so on--the whole insane business. i couldn't laugh, i couldn't applaud; it filled me with bitterness to have others do it, and to have people make a hero of hicks, and crowd around him when the show was over, and ask him for more and more particulars of the wonders he had seen in his visions, and manifest in many ways that they were proud to be acquainted with him. hicks--the idea! i couldn't stand it; i was getting boiled to death in my own bile. on the fourth night temptation came, and i was not strong enough to resist. when i had gazed at the disk awhile i pretended to be sleepy, and began to nod. straightway came the professor and made passes over my head and down my body and legs and arms, finishing each pass with a snap of his fingers in the air, to discharge the surplus electricity; then he began to "draw" me with the disk, holding it in his fingers and telling me i could not take my eyes off it, try as i might; so i rose slowly, bent and gazing, and followed that disk all over the place, just as i had seen the others do. then i was put through the other paces. upon suggestion i fled from snakes; passed buckets at a fire; became excited over hot steamboat-races; made love to imaginary girls and kissed them; fished from the platform and landed mud-cats that outweighed me--and so on, all the customary marvels. but not in the customary way. i was cautious at first, and watchful, being afraid the professor would discover that i was an impostor and drive me from the platform in disgrace; but as soon as i realized that i was not in danger, i set myself the task of terminating hicks's usefulness as a subject, and of usurping his place. it was a sufficiently easy task. hicks was born honest; i, without that incumbrance--so some people said. hicks saw what he saw, and reported accordingly; i saw more than was visible, and added to it such details as could help. hicks had no imagination, i had a double supply. he was born calm, i was born excited. no vision could start a rapture in him, and he was constipated as to language, anyway; but if i saw a vision i emptied the dictionary onto it and lost the remnant of my mind into the bargain. at the end of my first half-hour hicks was a thing of the past, a fallen hero, a broken idol, and i knew it and was glad, and said in my heart, success to crime! hicks could never have been mesmerized to the point where he could kiss an imaginary girl in public, or a real one either, but i was competent. whatever hicks had failed in, i made it a point to succeed in, let the cost be what it might, physically or morally. he had shown several bad defects, and i had made a note of them. for instance, if the magician asked, "what do you see?" and left him to invent a vision for himself, hicks was dumb and blind, he couldn't see a thing nor say a word, whereas the magician soon found that when it came to seeing visions of a stunning and marketable sort i could get along better without his help than with it. then there was another thing: hicks wasn't worth a tallow dip on mute mental suggestion. whenever simmons stood behind him and gazed at the back of his skull and tried to drive a mental suggestion into it, hicks sat with vacant face, and never suspected. if he had been noticing, he could have seen by the rapt faces of the audience that something was going on behind his back that required a response. inasmuch as i was an impostor i dreaded to have this test put upon me, for i knew the professor would be "willing" me to do something, and as i couldn't know what it was, i should be exposed and denounced. however, when my time came, i took my chance. i perceived by the tense and expectant faces of the people that simmons was behind me willing me with all his might. i tried my best to imagine what he wanted, but nothing suggested itself. i felt ashamed and miserable, then. i believed that the hour of my disgrace was come, and that in another moment i should go out of that place disgraced. i ought to be ashamed to confess it, but my next thought was, not how i could win the compassion of kindly hearts by going out humbly and in sorrow for my misdoings, but how i could go out most sensationally and spectacularly. there was a rusty and empty old revolver lying on the table, among the "properties" employed in the performances. on may-day, two or three weeks before, there had been a celebration by the schools, and i had had a quarrel with a big boy who was the school-bully, and i had not come out of it with credit. that boy was now seated in the middle of the house, half-way down the main aisle. i crept stealthily and impressively toward the table, with a dark and murderous scowl on my face, copied from a popular romance, seized the revolver suddenly, flourished it, shouted the bully's name, jumped off the platform, and made a rush for him and chased him out of the house before the paralyzed people could interfere to save him. there was a storm of applause, and the magician, addressing the house, said, most impressively-- "that you may know how really remarkable this is, and how wonderfully developed a subject we have in this boy, i assure you that without a single spoken word to guide him he has carried out what i mentally commanded him to do, to the minutest detail. i could have stopped him at a moment in his vengeful career by a mere exertion of my will, therefore the poor fellow who has escaped was at no time in danger." so i was not in disgrace. i returned to the platform a hero, and happier than i have ever been in this world since. as regards mental suggestion, my fears of it were gone. i judged that in case i failed to guess what the professor might be willing me to do, i could count on putting up something that would answer just as well. i was right, and exhibitions of unspoken suggestion became a favorite with the public. whenever i perceived that i was being willed to do something i got up and did something--anything that occurred to me--and the magician, not being a fool, always ratified it. when people asked me, "how _can_ you tell what he is willing you to do?" i said, "it's just as easy," and they always said, admiringly, "well it beats _me_ how you can do it." hicks was weak in another detail. when the professor made passes over him and said "his whole body is without sensation now--come forward and test him, ladies and gentlemen," the ladies and gentlemen always complied eagerly, and stuck pins into hicks, and if they went deep hicks was sure to wince, then that poor professor would have to explain that hicks "wasn't sufficiently under the influence." but i didn't wince; i only suffered, and shed tears on the inside. the miseries that a conceited boy will endure to keep up his "reputation"! and so will a conceited man; i know it in my own person, and have seen it in a hundred thousand others. that professor ought to have protected me, and i often hoped he would, when the tests were unusually severe, but he didn't. it may be that he was deceived as well as the others, though i did not believe it nor think it possible. those were dear good people, but they must have carried simplicity and credulity to the limit. they would stick a pin in my arm and bear on it until they drove it a third of its length in, and then be lost in wonder that by a mere exercise of will-power the professor could turn my arm to iron and make it insensible to pain. whereas it was not insensible at all; i was suffering agonies of pain. after that fourth night, that proud night, that triumphant night, i was the only subject. simmons invited no more candidates to the platform. i performed alone, every night, the rest of the fortnight. in the beginning of the second week i conquered the last doubters. up to that time a dozen wise old heads, the intellectual aristocracy of the town, had held out, as implacable unbelievers. i was as hurt by this as if i were engaged in some honest occupation. there is nothing surprising about this. human beings feel dishonor the most, sometimes, when they most deserve it. that handful of overwise old gentlemen kept on shaking their heads all the first week, and saying they had seen no marvels there that could not have been produced by collusion; and they were pretty vain of their unbelief, too, and liked to show it and air it, and be superior to the ignorant and the gullible. particularly old dr. peake, who was the ringleader of the irreconcilables, and very formidable; for he was an f.f.v., he was learned, white-haired and venerable, nobly and richly clad in the fashions of an earlier and a courtlier day, he was large and stately, and he not only seemed wise, but was what he seemed, in that regard. he had great influence, and his opinion upon any matter was worth much more than that of any other person in the community. when i conquered him, at last, i knew i was undisputed master of the field; and now, after more than fifty years, i acknowledge, with a few dry old tears, that i rejoiced without shame. [sidenote: ( .)] [_dictated december , ._] in we were living in a large white house on the corner of hill and main streets--a house that still stands, but isn't large now, although it hasn't lost a plank; i saw it a year ago and noticed that shrinkage. my father died in it in march of the year mentioned, but our family did not move out of it until some months afterward. ours was not the only family in the house, there was another--dr. grant's. one day dr. grant and dr. reyburn argued a matter on the street with sword-canes, and grant was brought home multifariously punctured. old dr. peake calked the leaks, and came every day for a while, to look after him. the grants were virginians, like peake, and one day when grant was getting well enough to be on his feet and sit around in the parlor and talk, the conversation fell upon virginia and old times. i was present, but the group were probably quite unconscious of me, i being only a lad and a negligible quantity. two of the group--dr. peake and mrs. crawford, mrs. grant's mother--had been of the audience when the richmond theatre burned down, thirty-six years before, and they talked over the frightful details of that memorable tragedy. these were eye-witnesses, and with their eyes i saw it all with an intolerable vividness: i saw the black smoke rolling and tumbling toward the sky, i saw the flames burst through it and turn red, i heard the shrieks of the despairing, i glimpsed their faces at the windows, caught fitfully through the veiling smoke, i saw them jump to their death, or to mutilation worse than death. the picture is before me yet, and can never fade. in due course they talked of the colonial mansion of the peakes, with its stately columns and its spacious grounds, and by odds and ends i picked up a clearly defined idea of the place. i was strongly interested, for i had not before heard of such palatial things from the lips of people who had seen them with their own eyes. one detail, casually dropped, hit my imagination hard. in the wall, by the great front door, there was a round hole as big as a saucer--a british cannon-ball had made it, in the war of the revolution. it was breath-taking; it made history real; history had never been real to me before. very well, three or four years later, as already mentioned, i was king-bee and sole "subject" in the mesmeric show; it was the beginning of the second week; the performance was half over; just then the majestic dr. peake, with his ruffled bosom and wristbands and his gold-headed cane, entered, and a deferential citizen vacated his seat beside the grants and made the great chief take it. this happened while i was trying to invent something fresh in the way of a vision, in response to the professor's remark-- "concentrate your powers. look--look attentively. there--don't you see something? concentrate--concentrate. now then--describe it." without suspecting it, dr. peake, by entering the place, had reminded me of the talk of three years before. he had also furnished me capital and was become my confederate, an accomplice in my frauds. i began on a vision, a vague and dim one (that was part of the game at the beginning of a vision; it isn't best to see it too clearly at first, it might look as if you had come loaded with it). the vision developed, by degrees, and gathered swing, momentum, energy. it was the richmond fire. dr. peake was cold, at first, and his fine face had a trace of polite scorn in it; but when he began to recognize that fire, that expression changed, and his eyes began to light up. as soon as i saw that, i threw the valves wide open and turned on all the steam, and gave those people a supper of fire and horrors that was calculated to last them one while! they couldn't gasp, when i got through--they were petrified. dr. peake had risen, and was standing,--and breathing hard. he said, in a great voice-- "my doubts are ended. no collusion could produce that miracle. it was totally impossible for him to know those details, yet he has described them with the clarity of an eye-witness--and with what unassailable truthfulness god knows i know!" i saved the colonial mansion for the last night, and solidified and perpetuated dr. peake's conversion with the cannon-ball hole. he explained to the house that i could never have heard of that small detail, which differentiated this mansion from all other virginian mansions and perfectly identified it, therefore the fact stood proven that i had _seen_ it in my vision. lawks! it is curious. when the magician's engagement closed there was but one person in the village who did not believe in mesmerism, and i was the one. all the others were converted, but i was to remain an implacable and unpersuadable disbeliever in mesmerism and hypnotism for close upon fifty years. this was because i never would examine them, in after life. i couldn't. the subject revolted me. perhaps because it brought back to me a passage in my life which for pride's sake i wished to forget; though i thought--or persuaded myself i thought--i should never come across a "proof" which wasn't thin and cheap, and probably had a fraud like me behind it. the truth is, i did not have to wait long to get tired of my triumphs. not thirty days, i think. the glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. no doubt for a while i enjoyed having my exploits told and retold and told again in my presence and wondered over and exclaimed about, but i quite distinctly remember that there presently came a time when the subject was wearisome and odious to me and i could not endure the disgusting discomfort of it. i am well aware that the world-glorified doer of a deed of great and real splendor has just my experience; i know that he deliciously enjoys hearing about it for three or four weeks, and that pretty soon after that he begins to dread the mention of it, and by and by wishes he had been with the damned before he ever thought of doing that deed; i remember how general sherman used to rage and swear over "when we were marching through georgia," which was played at him and sung at him everywhere he went; still, i think i suffered a shade more than the legitimate hero does, he being privileged to soften his misery with the reflection that his glory was at any rate golden and reproachless in its origin, whereas i had no such privilege, there being no possible way to make mine respectable. how easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! thirty-five years after those evil exploits of mine i visited my old mother, whom i had not seen for ten years; and being moved by what seemed to me a rather noble and perhaps heroic impulse, i thought i would humble myself and confess my ancient fault. it cost me a great effort to make up my mind; i dreaded the sorrow that would rise in her face, and the shame that would look out of her eyes; but after long and troubled reflection, the sacrifice seemed due and right, and i gathered my resolution together and made the confession. to my astonishment there were no sentimentalities, no dramatics, no george washington effects; she was not moved in the least degree; she simply did not believe me, and said so! i was not merely disappointed, i was nettled, to have my costly truthfulness flung out of the market in this placid and confident way when i was expecting to get a profit out of it. i asserted, and reasserted, with rising heat, my statement that every single thing i had done on those long-vanished nights was a lie and a swindle; and when she shook her head tranquilly and said she knew better, i put up my hand and _swore_ to it--adding a triumphant "_now_ what do you say?" it did not affect her at all; it did not budge her the fraction of an inch from her position. if this was hard for me to endure, it did not begin with the blister she put upon the raw when she began to put my sworn oath out of court with _arguments_ to prove that i was under a delusion and did not know what i was talking about. arguments! arguments to show that a person on a man's outside can know better what is on his inside than he does himself! i had cherished some contempt for arguments before, i have not enlarged my respect for them since. she refused to believe that i had invented my visions myself; she said it was folly: that i was only a child at the time and could not have done it. she cited the richmond fire and the colonial mansion and said they were quite beyond my capacities. then i saw my chance! i said she was right--i didn't invent those, i got them from dr. peake. even this great shot did no damage. she said dr. peake's evidence was better than mine, and he had said in plain words that it was impossible for me to have heard about those things. dear, dear, what a grotesque and unthinkable situation: a confessed swindler convicted of honesty and condemned to acquittal by circumstantial evidence furnished by the swindled! i realised, with shame and with impotent vexation, that i was defeated all along the line. i had but one card left, but it was a formidable one. i played it--and stood from under. it seemed ignoble to demolish her fortress, after she had defended it so valiantly; but the defeated know not mercy. i played that matter card. it was the pin-sticking. i said, solemnly-- "i give you my honor, a pin was never stuck into me without causing me cruel pain." she only said-- "it is thirty-five years. i believe you do think that, _now_, but i was there, and i know better. you never winced." she was so calm! and i was so far from it, so nearly frantic. "oh, my goodness!" i said, "let me _show_ you that i am speaking the truth. here is my arm; drive a pin into it--drive it to the head--i shall not wince." she only shook her gray head and said, with simplicity and conviction-- "you are a man, now, and could dissemble the hurt; but you were only a child then, and could not have done it." and so the lie which i played upon her in my youth remained with her as an unchallengeable truth to the day of her death. carlyle said "a lie cannot live." it shows that he did not know how to tell them. if i had taken out a life policy on this one the premiums would have bankrupted me ages ago. mark twain. (_to be continued._) north american review no. dcvii. january , . chapters from my autobiography.--x. by mark twain. [sidenote: ( .)] [sidenote: ( .)] [_dictated march , ._] orion clemens was born in jamestown, fentress county, tennessee, in . he was the family's first-born, and antedated me ten years. between him and me came a sister, margaret, who died, aged ten, in , in that village of florida, missouri, where i was born; and pamela, mother of samuel e. moffett, who was an invalid all her life and died in the neighborhood of new york a year ago, aged about seventy-five. her character was without blemish, and she was of a most kindly and gentle disposition. also there was a brother, benjamin, who died in aged ten or twelve. [sidenote: ( .)] orion's boyhood was spent in that wee little log hamlet of jamestown up there among the "knobs"--so called--of east tennessee. the family migrated to florida, missouri, then moved to hannibal, missouri, when orion was twelve and a half years old. when he was fifteen or sixteen he was sent to st. louis and there he learned the printer's trade. one of his characteristics was eagerness. he woke with an eagerness about some matter or other every morning; it consumed him all day; it perished in the night and he was on fire with a fresh new interest next morning before he could get his clothes on. he exploited in this way three hundred and sixty-five red-hot new eagernesses every year of his life. but i am forgetting another characteristic, a very pronounced one. that was his deep glooms, his despondencies, his despairs; these had their place in each and every day along with the eagernesses. thus his day was divided--no, not divided, mottled--from sunrise to midnight with alternating brilliant sunshine and black cloud. every day he was the most joyous and hopeful man that ever was, i think, and also every day he was the most miserable man that ever was. while he was in his apprenticeship in st. louis, he got well acquainted with edward bates, who was afterwards in mr. lincoln's first cabinet. bates was a very fine man, an honorable and upright man, and a distinguished lawyer. he patiently allowed orion to bring to him each new project; he discussed it with him and extinguished it by argument and irresistible logic--at first. but after a few weeks he found that this labor was not necessary; that he could leave the new project alone and it would extinguish itself the same night. orion thought he would like to become a lawyer. mr. bates encouraged him, and he studied law nearly a week, then of course laid it aside to try something new. he wanted to become an orator. mr. bates gave him lessons. mr. bates walked the floor reading from an english book aloud and rapidly turning the english into french, and he recommended this exercise to orion. but as orion knew no french, he took up that study and wrought at it like a volcano for two or three days; then gave it up. during his apprenticeship in st. louis he joined a number of churches, one after another, and taught in their sunday-schools--changing his sunday-school every time he changed his religion. he was correspondingly erratic in his politics--whig to-day, democrat next week, and anything fresh that he could find in the political market the week after. i may remark here that throughout his long life he was always trading religions and enjoying the change of scenery. i will also remark that his sincerity was never doubted; his truthfulness was never doubted; and in matters of business and money his honesty was never questioned. notwithstanding his forever-recurring caprices and changes, his principles were high, always high, and absolutely unshakable. he was the strangest compound that ever got mixed in a human mould. such a person as that is given to acting upon impulse and without reflection; that was orion's way. everything he did he did with conviction and enthusiasm and with a vainglorious pride in the thing he was doing--and no matter what that thing was, whether good, bad or indifferent, he repented of it every time in sackcloth and ashes before twenty-four hours had sped. pessimists are born, not made. optimists are born, not made. but i think he was the only person i have ever known in whom pessimism and optimism were lodged in exactly equal proportions. except in the matter of grounded principle, he was as unstable as water. you could dash his spirits with a single word; you could raise them into the sky again with another one. you could break his heart with a word of disapproval; you could make him as happy as an angel with a word of approval. and there was no occasion to put any sense or any vestige of mentality of any kind into these miracles; anything you might say would answer. he had another conspicuous characteristic, and it was the father of those which i have just spoken of. this was an intense lust for approval. he was so eager to be approved, so girlishly anxious to be approved by anybody and everybody, without discrimination, that he was commonly ready to forsake his notions, opinions and convictions at a moment's notice in order to get the approval of any person who disagreed with them. i wish to be understood as reserving his fundamental principles all the time. he never forsook those to please anybody. born and reared among slaves and slaveholders, he was yet an abolitionist from his boyhood to his death. he was always truthful; he was always sincere; he was always honest and honorable. but in light matters--matters of small consequence, like religion and politics and such things--he never acquired a conviction that could survive a disapproving remark from a cat. he was always dreaming; he was a dreamer from birth, and this characteristic got him into trouble now and then. once when he was twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and was become a journeyman, he conceived the romantic idea of coming to hannibal without giving us notice, in order that he might furnish to the family a pleasant surprise. if he had given notice, he would have been informed that we had changed our residence and that that gruff old bass-voiced sailorman, dr. g., our family physician, was living in the house which we had formerly occupied and that orion's former room in that house was now occupied by dr. g.'s two middle-aged maiden sisters. orion arrived at hannibal per steamboat in the middle of the night, and started with his customary eagerness on his excursion, his mind all on fire with his romantic project and building and enjoying his surprise in advance. he was always enjoying things in advance; it was the make of him. he never could wait for the event, but must build it out of dream-stuff and enjoy it beforehand--consequently sometimes when the event happened he saw that it was not as good as the one he had invented in his imagination, and so he had lost profit by not keeping the imaginary one and letting the reality go. when he arrived at the house he went around to the back door and slipped off his boots and crept up-stairs and arrived at the room of those elderly ladies without having wakened any sleepers. he undressed in the dark and got into bed and snuggled up against somebody. he was a little surprised, but not much--for he thought it was our brother ben. it was winter, and the bed was comfortable, and the supposed ben added to the comfort--and so he was dropping off to sleep very well satisfied with his progress so far and full of happy dreams of what was going to happen in the morning. but something else was going to happen sooner than that, and it happened now. the maid that was being crowded fumed and fretted and struggled and presently came to a half-waking condition and protested against the crowding. that voice paralyzed orion. he couldn't move a limb; he couldn't get his breath; and the crowded one discovered his new whiskers and began to scream. this removed the paralysis, and orion was out of bed and clawing round in the dark for his clothes in a fraction of a second. both maids began to scream then, so orion did not wait to get his whole wardrobe. he started with such parts of it as he could grab. he flew to the head of the stairs and started down, and was paralyzed again at that point, because he saw the faint yellow flame of a candle soaring up the stairs from below and he judged that dr. g. was behind it, and he was. he had no clothes on to speak of, but no matter, he was well enough fixed for an occasion like this, because he had a butcher-knife in his hand. orion shouted to him, and this saved his life, for the doctor recognized his voice. then in those deep-sea-going bass tones of his that i used to admire so much when i was a little boy, he explained to orion the change that had been made, told him where to find the clemens family, and closed with some quite unnecessary advice about posting himself before he undertook another adventure like that--advice which orion probably never needed again as long as he lived. one bitter december night, orion sat up reading until three o'clock in the morning and then, without looking at a clock, sallied forth to call on a young lady. he hammered and hammered at the door; couldn't get any response; didn't understand it. anybody else would have regarded that as an indication of some kind or other and would have drawn inferences and gone home. but orion didn't draw inferences, he merely hammered and hammered, and finally the father of the girl appeared at the door in a dressing-gown. he had a candle in his hand and the dressing-gown was all the clothing he had on--except an expression of unwelcome which was so thick and so large that it extended all down his front to his instep and nearly obliterated the dressing-gown. but orion didn't notice that this was an unpleasant expression. he merely walked in. the old gentleman took him into the parlor, set the candle on a table, and stood. orion made the usual remarks about the weather, and sat down--sat down and talked and talked and went on talking--that old man looking at him vindictively and waiting for his chance--waiting treacherously and malignantly for his chance. orion had not asked for the young lady. it was not customary. it was understood that a young fellow came to see the girl of the house, not the founder of it. at last orion got up and made some remark to the effect that probably the young lady was busy and he would go now and call again. that was the old man's chance, and he said with fervency "why good land, aren't you going to stop to breakfast?" orion did not come to hannibal until two or three years after my father's death. meantime he remained in st louis. he was a journeyman printer and earning wages. out of his wage he supported my mother and my brother henry, who was two years younger than i. my sister pamela helped in this support by taking piano pupils. thus we got along, but it was pretty hard sledding. i was not one of the burdens, because i was taken from school at once, upon my father's death, and placed in the office of the hannibal "courier," as printer's apprentice, and mr. s., the editor and proprietor of the paper, allowed me the usual emolument of the office of apprentice--that is to say board and clothes, but no money. the clothes consisted of two suits a year, but one of the suits always failed to materialize and the other suit was not purchased so long as mr. s.'s old clothes held out. i was only about half as big as mr. s., consequently his shirts gave me the uncomfortable sense of living in a circus tent, and i had to turn up his pants to my ears to make them short enough. there were two other apprentices. one was steve wilkins, seventeen or eighteen years old and a giant. when he was in mr. s.'s clothes they fitted him as the candle-mould fits the candle--thus he was generally in a suffocated condition, particularly in the summer-time. he was a reckless, hilarious, admirable creature; he had no principles, and was delightful company. at first we three apprentices had to feed in the kitchen with the old slave cook and her very handsome and bright and well-behaved young mulatto daughter. for his own amusement--for he was not generally laboring for other people's amusement--steve was constantly and persistently and loudly and elaborately making love to that mulatto girl and distressing the life out of her and worrying the old mother to death. she would say, "now, marse steve, marse steve, can't you behave yourself?" with encouragement like that, steve would naturally renew his attentions and emphasize them. it was killingly funny to ralph and me. and, to speak truly, the old mother's distress about it was merely a pretence. she quite well understood that by the customs of slaveholding communities it was steve's right to make love to that girl if he wanted to. but the girl's distress was very real. she had a refined nature, and she took all steve's extravagant love-making in resentful earnest. we got but little variety in the way of food at that kitchen table, and there wasn't enough of it anyway. so we apprentices used to keep alive by arts of our own--that is to say, we crept into the cellar nearly every night, by a private entrance which we had discovered, and we robbed the cellar of potatoes and onions and such things, and carried them down-town to the printing-office, where we slept on pallets on the floor, and cooked them at the stove and had very good times. as i have indicated, mr. s.'s economies were of a pretty close and rigid kind. by and by, when we apprentices were promoted from the basement to the ground floor and allowed to sit at the family table, along with the one journeyman, harry h., the economies continued. mrs. s. was a bride. she had attained to that distinction very recently, after waiting a good part of a lifetime for it, and she was the right woman in the right place, according to the economics of the place, for she did not trust the sugar-bowl to us, but sweetened our coffee herself. that is, she went through the motions. she didn't really sweeten it. she seemed to put one heaping teaspoonful of brown sugar into each cup, but, according to steve, that was a deceit. he said she dipped the spoon in the coffee first to make the sugar stick, and then scooped the sugar out of the bowl with the spoon upside down, so that the effect to the eye was a heaped-up spoon, whereas the sugar on it was nothing but a layer. this all seems perfectly true to me, and yet that thing would be so difficult to perform that i suppose it really didn't happen, but was one of steve's lies. mark twain. (_to be continued._) north american review no. dcviii. february , . chapters from my autobiography.--xi. by mark twain. [sidenote: ( .)] [_dictated march th, ._] about or orion severed his connection with the printing-house in st. louis and came up to hannibal, and bought a weekly paper called the hannibal "journal," together with its plant and its good-will, for the sum of five hundred dollars cash. he borrowed the cash at ten per cent. interest, from an old farmer named johnson who lived five miles out of town. then he reduced the subscription price of the paper from two dollars to one dollar. he reduced the rates for advertising in about the same proportion, and thus he created one absolute and unassailable certainty--to wit: that the business would never pay him a single cent of profit. he took me out of the "courier" office and engaged my services in his own at three dollars and a half a week, which was an extravagant wage, but orion was always generous, always liberal with everybody except himself. it cost him nothing in my case, for he never was able to pay me a penny as long as i was with him. by the end of the first year he found he must make some economies. the office rent was cheap, but it was not cheap enough. he could not afford to pay rent of any kind, so he moved the whole plant into the house we lived in, and it cramped the dwelling-place cruelly. he kept that paper alive during four years, but i have at this time no idea how he accomplished it. toward the end of each year he had to turn out and scrape and scratch for the fifty dollars of interest due mr. johnson, and that fifty dollars was about the only cash he ever received or paid out, i suppose, while he was proprietor of that newspaper, except for ink and printing-paper. the paper was a dead failure. it had to be that from the start. finally he handed it over to mr. johnson, and went up to muscatine, iowa, and acquired a small interest in a weekly newspaper there. it was not a sort of property to marry on--but no matter. he came across a winning and pretty girl who lived in quincy, illinois, a few miles below keokuk, and they became engaged. he was always falling in love with girls, but by some accident or other he had never gone so far as engagement before. and now he achieved nothing but misfortune by it, because he straightway fell in love with a keokuk girl. he married the keokuk girl and they began a struggle for life which turned out to be a difficult enterprise, and very unpromising. to gain a living in muscatine was plainly impossible, so orion and his new wife went to keokuk to live, for she wanted to be near her relatives. he bought a little bit of a job-printing plant--on credit, of course--and at once put prices down to where not even the apprentices could get a living out of it, and this sort of thing went on. [sidenote: ( .)] i had not joined the muscatine migration. just before that happened (which i think was in ) i disappeared one night and fled to st. louis. there i worked in the composing-room of the "evening news" for a time, and then started on my travels to see the world. the world was new york city, and there was a little world's fair there. it had just been opened where the great reservoir afterward was, and where the sumptuous public library is now being built--fifth avenue and forty-second street. i arrived in new york with two or three dollars in pocket change and a ten-dollar bank-bill concealed in the lining of my coat. i got work at villainous wages in the establishment of john a. gray and green in cliff street, and i found board in a sufficiently villainous mechanics' boarding-house in duane street. the firm paid my wages in wildcat money at its face value, and my week's wage merely sufficed to pay board and lodging. by and by i went to philadelphia and worked there some months as a "sub" on the "inquirer" and the "public ledger." finally i made a flying trip to washington to see the sights there, and in i went back to the mississippi valley, sitting upright in the smoking-car two or three days and nights. when i reached st. louis i was exhausted. i went to bed on board a steamboat that was bound for muscatine. i fell asleep at once, with my clothes on, and didn't wake again for thirty-six hours. [sidenote: ( .)] ... i worked in that little job-office in keokuk as much as two years, i should say, without ever collecting a cent of wages, for orion was never able to pay anything--but dick higham and i had good times. i don't know what dick got, but it was probably only uncashable promises. [sidenote: ( .)] one day in the midwinter of or --i think it was --i was coming along the main street of keokuk in the middle of the forenoon. it was bitter weather--so bitter that that street was deserted, almost. a light dry snow was blowing here and there on the ground and on the pavement, swirling this way and that way and making all sorts of beautiful figures, but very chilly to look at. the wind blew a piece of paper past me and it lodged against a wall of a house. something about the look of it attracted my attention and i gathered it in. it was a fifty-dollar bill, the only one i had ever seen, and the largest assemblage of money i had ever encountered in one spot. i advertised it in the papers and suffered more than a thousand dollars' worth of solicitude and fear and distress during the next few days lest the owner should see the advertisement and come and take my fortune away. as many as four days went by without an applicant; then i could endure this kind of misery no longer. i felt sure that another four could not go by in this safe and secure way. i felt that i must take that money out of danger. so i bought a ticket for cincinnati and went to that city. i worked there several months in the printing-office of wrightson and company. i had been reading lieutenant herndon's account of his explorations of the amazon and had been mightily attracted by what he said of coca. i made up my mind that i would go to the head waters of the amazon and collect coca and trade in it and make a fortune. i left for new orleans in the steamer "paul jones" with this great idea filling my mind. one of the pilots of that boat was horace bixby. little by little i got acquainted with him, and pretty soon i was doing a lot of steering for him in his daylight watches. when i got to new orleans i inquired about ships leaving for pará and discovered that there weren't any, and learned that there probably wouldn't be any during that century. it had not occurred to me to inquire about those particulars before leaving cincinnati, so there i was. i couldn't get to the amazon. i had no friends in new orleans and no money to speak of. i went to horace bixby and asked him to make a pilot out of me. he said he would do it for a hundred dollars cash in advance. so i steered for him up to st. louis, borrowed the money from my brother-in-law and closed the bargain. i had acquired this brother-in-law several years before. this was mr. william a. moffett, a merchant, a virginian--a fine man in every way. he had married my sister pamela, and the samuel e. moffett of whom i have been speaking was their son. within eighteen months i became a competent pilot, and i served that office until the mississippi river traffic was brought to a standstill by the breaking out of the civil war. ... meantime orion had gone down the river and established his little job-printing-office in keokuk. on account of charging next to nothing for the work done in his job-office, he had almost nothing to do there. he was never able to comprehend that work done on a profitless basis deteriorates and is presently not worth anything, and that customers are then obliged to go where they can get better work, even if they must pay better prices for it. he had plenty of time, and he took up blackstone again. he also put up a sign which offered his services to the public as a lawyer. he never got a case, in those days, nor even an applicant, although he was quite willing to transact law business for nothing and furnish the stationery himself. he was always liberal that way. [sidenote: ( .)] presently he moved to a wee little hamlet called alexandria, two or three miles down the river, and he put up that sign there. he got no custom. he was by this time very hard aground. but by this time i was beginning to earn a wage of two hundred and fifty dollars a month as pilot, and so i supported him thenceforth until , when his ancient friend, edward bates, then a member of mr. lincoln's first cabinet, got him the place of secretary of the new territory of nevada, and orion and i cleared for that country in the overland stage-coach, i paying the fares, which were pretty heavy, and carrying with me what money i had been able to save--this was eight hundred dollars, i should say--and it was all in silver coin and a good deal of a nuisance because of its weight. and we had another nuisance, which was an unabridged dictionary. it weighed about a thousand pounds, and was a ruinous expense, because the stage-coach company charged for extra baggage by the ounce. we could have kept a family for a time on what that dictionary cost in the way of extra freight--and it wasn't a good dictionary anyway--didn't have any modern words in it--only had obsolete ones that they used to use when noah webster was a child. the government of the new territory of nevada was an interesting menagerie. governor nye was an old and seasoned politician from new york--politician, not statesman. he had white hair; he was in fine physical condition; he had a winningly friendly face and deep lustrous brown eyes that could talk as a native language the tongue of every feeling, every passion, every emotion. his eyes could outtalk his tongue, and this is saying a good deal, for he was a very remarkable talker, both in private and on the stump. he was a shrewd man; he generally saw through surfaces and perceived what was going on inside without being suspected of having an eye on the matter. when grown-up persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them. they have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job-lot of left-over standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life. there were many practical jokers in the new territory. i do not take pleasure in exposing this fact, for i liked those people; but what i am saying is true. i wish i could say a kindlier thing about them instead--that they were burglars, or hat-rack thieves, or something like that, that wouldn't be utterly uncomplimentary. i would prefer it, but i can't say those things, they would not be true. these people were practical jokers, and i will not try to disguise it. in other respects they were plenty good-enough people; honest people; reputable and likable. they played practical jokes upon each other with success, and got the admiration and applause and also the envy of the rest of the community. naturally they were eager to try their arts on big game, and that was what the governor was. but they were not able to score. they made several efforts, but the governor defeated these efforts without any trouble and went on smiling his pleasant smile as if nothing had happened. finally the joker chiefs of carson city and virginia city conspired together to see if their combined talent couldn't win a victory, for the jokers were getting into a very uncomfortable place: the people were laughing at them, instead of at their proposed victim. they banded themselves together to the number of ten and invited the governor to what was a most extraordinary attention in those days--pickled oyster stew and champagne--luxuries very seldom seen in that region, and existing rather as fabrics of the imagination than as facts. the governor took me with him. he said disparagingly, "it's a poor invention. it doesn't deceive. their idea is to get me drunk and leave me under the table, and from their standpoint this will be very funny. but they don't know me. i am familiar with champagne and have no prejudices against it." the fate of the joke was not decided until two o'clock in the morning. at that hour the governor was serene, genial, comfortable, contented, happy and sober, although he was so full that he couldn't laugh without shedding champagne tears. also, at that hour the last joker joined his comrades under the table, drunk to the last perfection. the governor remarked, "this is a dry place, sam, let's go and get something to drink and go to bed." the governor's official menagerie had been drawn from the humblest ranks of his constituents at home--harmless good fellows who had helped in his campaigns, and now they had their reward in petty salaries payable in greenbacks that were worth next to nothing. those boys had a hard time to make both ends meet. orion's salary was eighteen hundred dollars a year, and he wouldn't even support his dictionary on it. but the irishwoman who had come out on the governor's staff charged the menagerie only ten dollars a week apiece for board and lodging. orion and i were of her boarders and lodgers; and so, on these cheap terms the silver i had brought from home held out very well. [sidenote: (' or ' )] at first i roamed about the country seeking silver, but at the end of ' or the beginning of ' when i came up from aurora to begin a journalistic life on the virginia city "enterprise," i was presently sent down to carson city to report the legislative session. orion was soon very popular with the members of the legislature, because they found that whereas they couldn't usually trust each other, nor anybody else, they could trust him. he easily held the belt for honesty in that country, but it didn't do him any good in a pecuniary way, because he had no talent for either persuading or scaring legislators. but i was differently situated. i was there every day in the legislature to distribute compliment and censure with evenly balanced justice and spread the same over half a page of the "enterprise" every morning, consequently i was an influence. i got the legislature to pass a wise and very necessary law requiring every corporation doing business in the territory to record its charter in full, without skipping a word, in a record to be kept by the secretary of the territory--my brother. all the charters were framed in exactly the same words. for this record-service he was authorized to charge forty cents a folio of one hundred words for making the record; also five dollars for furnishing a certificate of each record, and so on. everybody had a toll-road franchise, but no toll-road. but the franchise had to be recorded and paid for. everybody was a mining corporation, and had to have himself recorded and pay for it. very well, we prospered. the record-service paid an average of a thousand dollars a month, in gold. governor nye was often absent from the territory. he liked to run down to san francisco every little while and enjoy a rest from territorial civilization. nobody complained, for he was prodigiously popular, he had been a stage-driver in his early days in new york or new england, and had acquired the habit of remembering names and faces, and of making himself agreeable to his passengers. as a politician this had been valuable to him, and he kept his arts in good condition by practice. by the time he had been governor a year, he had shaken hands with every human being in the territory of nevada, and after that he always knew these people instantly at sight and could call them by name. the whole population, of , persons, were his personal friends, and he could do anything he chose to do and count upon their being contented with it. whenever he was absent from the territory--which was generally--orion served his office in his place, as acting governor, a title which was soon and easily shortened to "governor." he recklessly built and furnished a house at a cost of twelve thousand dollars, and there was no other house in the sage-brush capital that could approach this property for style and cost. when governor nye's four-year term was drawing to a close, the mystery of why he had ever consented to leave the great state of new york and help inhabit that jack-rabbit desert was solved: he had gone out there in order to become a united states senator. all that was now necessary was to turn the territory into a state. he did it without any difficulty. that undeveloped country and that sparse population were not well fitted for the heavy burden of a state government, but no matter, the people were willing to have the change, and so the governor's game was made. orion's game was made too, apparently, for he was as popular because of his honesty as the governor was for more substantial reasons; but at the critical moment the inborn capriciousness of his character rose up without warning, and disaster followed. mark twain. (_to be continued._) north american review no. dcix. february , . chapters from my autobiography.--xii. by mark twain. [sidenote: ( - .)] _orion clemens--resumed._ [_dictated april , ._] there were several candidates for all the offices in the gift of the new state of nevada save two--united states senator, and secretary of state. nye was certain to get a senatorship, and orion was so sure to get the secretaryship that no one but him was named for that office. but he was hit with one of his spasms of virtue on the very day that the republican party was to make its nominations in the convention, and refused to go near the convention. he was urged, but all persuasions failed. he said his presence there would be an unfair and improper influence and that if he was to be nominated the compliment must come to him as a free and unspotted gift. this attitude would have settled his case for him without further effort, but he had another attack of virtue on the same day, that made it absolutely sure. it had been his habit for a great many years to change his religion with his shirt, and his ideas about temperance at the same time. he would be a teetotaler for a while and the champion of the cause; then he would change to the other side for a time. on nomination day he suddenly changed from a friendly attitude toward whiskey--which was the popular attitude--to uncompromising teetotalism, and went absolutely dry. his friends besought and implored, but all in vain. he could not be persuaded to cross the threshold of a saloon. the paper next morning contained the list of chosen nominees. his name was not in it. he had not received a vote. his rich income ceased when the state government came into power. he was without an occupation. something had to be done. he put up his sign as attorney-at-law, but he got no clients. it was strange. it was difficult to account for. i cannot account for it--but if i were going to guess at a solution i should guess that by the make of him he would examine both sides of a case so diligently and so conscientiously that when he got through with his argument neither he nor a jury would know which side he was on. i think that his client would find out his make in laying his case before him, and would take warning and withdraw it in time to save himself from probable disaster. i had taken up my residence in san francisco about a year before the time i have just been speaking of. one day i got a tip from mr. camp, a bold man who was always making big fortunes in ingenious speculations and losing them again in the course of six months by other speculative ingenuities. camp told me to buy some shares in the hale and norcross. i bought fifty shares at three hundred dollars a share. i bought on a margin, and put up twenty per cent. it exhausted my funds. i wrote orion and offered him half, and asked him to send his share of the money. i waited and waited. he wrote and said he was going to attend to it. the stock went along up pretty briskly. it went higher and higher. it reached a thousand dollars a share. it climbed to two thousand, then to three thousand; then to twice that figure. the money did not come, but i was not disturbed. by and by that stock took a turn and began to gallop down. then i wrote urgently. orion answered that he had sent the money long ago--said he had sent it to the occidental hotel. i inquired for it. they said it was not there. to cut a long story short, that stock went on down until it fell below the price i had paid for it. then it began to eat up the margin, and when at last i got out i was very badly crippled. when it was too late, i found out what had become of orion's money. any other human being would have sent a check, but he sent gold. the hotel clerk put it in the safe and went on vacation, and there it had reposed all this time enjoying its fatal work, no doubt. another man might have thought to tell me that the money was not in a letter, but was in an express package, but it never occurred to orion to do that. later, mr. camp gave me another chance. he agreed to buy our tennessee land for two hundred thousand dollars, pay a part of the amount in cash and give long notes for the rest. his scheme was to import foreigners from grape-growing and wine-making districts in europe, settle them on the land, and turn it into a wine-growing country. he knew what mr. longworth thought of those tennessee grapes, and was satisfied. i sent the contracts and things to orion for his signature, he being one of the three heirs. but they arrived at a bad time--in a doubly bad time, in fact. the temperance virtue was temporarily upon him in strong force, and he wrote and said that he would not be a party to debauching the country with wine. also he said how could he know whether mr. camp was going to deal fairly and honestly with those poor people from europe or not?--and so, without waiting to find out, he quashed the whole trade, and there it fell, never to be brought to life again. the land, from being suddenly worth two hundred thousand dollars, became as suddenly worth what it was before--nothing, and taxes to pay. i had paid the taxes and the other expenses for some years, but i dropped the tennessee land there, and have never taken any interest in it since, pecuniarily or otherwise, until yesterday. i had supposed, until yesterday, that orion had frittered away the last acre, and indeed that was his own impression. but a gentleman arrived yesterday from tennessee and brought a map showing that by a correction of the ancient surveys we still own a thousand acres, in a coal district, out of the hundred thousand acres which my father left us when he died in . the gentleman brought a proposition; also he brought a reputable and well-to-do citizen of new york. the proposition was that the tennesseean gentleman should sell that land; that the new york gentleman should pay all the expenses and fight all the lawsuits, in case any should turn up, and that of such profit as might eventuate the tennesseean gentleman should take a third, the new-yorker a third, and sam moffett and his sister and i--who are surviving heirs--the remaining third. this time i hope we shall get rid of the tennessee land for good and all and never hear of it again. [sidenote: ( .)] [sidenote: ( .)] i came east in january, . orion remained in carson city perhaps a year longer. then he sold his twelve-thousand-dollar house and its furniture for thirty-five hundred in greenbacks at about sixty per cent. discount. he and his wife took passage in the steamer for home in keokuk. about or ' they came to new york. orion had been trying to make a living in the law ever since he had arrived from the pacific coast, but he had secured only two cases. those he was to try free of charge--but the possible result will never be known, because the parties settled the cases out of court without his help. orion got a job as proof-reader on the new york "evening post" at ten dollars a week. by and by he came to hartford and wanted me to get him a place as reporter on a hartford paper. here was a chance to try my scheme again, and i did it. i made him go to the hartford "evening post," without any letter of introduction, and propose to scrub and sweep and do all sorts of things for nothing, on the plea that he didn't need money but only needed work, and that that was what he was pining for. within six weeks he was on the editorial staff of that paper at twenty dollars a week, and he was worth the money. he was presently called for by some other paper at better wages, but i made him go to the "post" people and tell them about it. they stood the raise and kept him. it was the pleasantest berth he had ever had in his life. it was an easy berth. he was in every way comfortable. but ill-luck came. it was bound to come. a new republican daily was to be started in a new england city by a stock company of well-to-do politicians, and they offered him the chief editorship at three thousand a year. he was eager to accept. my beseechings and reasonings went for nothing. i said, "you are as weak as water. those people will find it out right away. they will easily see that you have no backbone; that they can deal with you as they would deal with a slave. you may last six months, but not longer. then they will not dismiss you as they would dismiss a gentleman: they will fling you out as they would fling out an intruding tramp." it happened just so. then he and his wife migrated to keokuk once more. orion wrote from there that he was not resuming the law; that he thought that what his health needed was the open air, in some sort of outdoor occupation; that his father-in-law had a strip of ground on the river border a mile above keokuk with some sort of a house on it, and his idea was to buy that place and start a chicken-farm and provide keokuk with chickens and eggs, and perhaps butter--but i don't know whether you can raise butter on a chicken-farm or not. he said the place could be had for three thousand dollars cash, and i sent the money. he began to raise chickens, and he made a detailed monthly report to me, whereby it appeared that he was able to work off his chickens on the keokuk people at a dollar and a quarter a pair. but it also appeared that it cost a dollar and sixty cents to raise the pair. this did not seem to discourage orion, and so i let it go. meantime he was borrowing a hundred dollars per month of me regularly, month by month. now to show orion's stern and rigid business ways--and he really prided himself on his large business capacities--the moment he received the advance of a hundred dollars at the beginning of each month, he always sent me his note for the amount, and with it he sent, _out of that money, three months' interest_ on the hundred dollars at six per cent. per annum, these notes being always for three months. as i say, he always sent a detailed statement of the month's profit and loss on the chickens--at least the month's loss on the chickens--and this detailed statement included the various items of expense--corn for the chickens, boots for himself, and so on; even car fares, and the weekly contribution of ten cents to help out the missionaries who were trying to damn the chinese after a plan not satisfactory to those people. i think the poultry experiment lasted about a year, possibly two years. it had then cost me six thousand dollars. orion returned to the law business, and i suppose he remained in that harness off and on for the succeeding quarter of a century, but so far as my knowledge goes he was only a lawyer in name, and had no clients. [sidenote: ( .)] my mother died, in her eighty-eighth year, in the summer of . she had saved some money, and she left it to me, because it had come from me. i gave it to orion and he said, with thanks, that i had supported him long enough and now he was going to relieve me of that burden, and would also hope to pay back some of that expense, and maybe the whole of it. accordingly, he proceeded to use up that money in building a considerable addition to the house, with the idea of taking boarders and getting rich. we need not dwell upon this venture. it was another of his failures. his wife tried hard to make the scheme succeed, and if anybody could have made it succeed she would have done it. she was a good woman, and was greatly liked. she had a practical side, and she would have made that boarding-house lucrative if circumstances had not been against her. orion had other projects for recouping me, but as they always required capital i stayed out of them, and they did not materialize. once he wanted to start a newspaper. it was a ghastly idea, and i squelched it with a promptness that was almost rude. then he invented a wood-sawing machine and patched it together himself, and he really sawed wood with it. it was ingenious; it was capable; and it would have made a comfortable little fortune for him; but just at the wrong time providence interfered again. orion applied for a patent and found that the same machine had already been patented and had gone into business and was thriving. presently the state of new york offered a fifty-thousand-dollar prize for a practical method of navigating the erie canal with steam canal-boats. orion worked at that thing for two or three years, invented and completed a method, and was once more ready to reach out and seize upon imminent wealth when somebody pointed out a defect: his steam canal-boat could not be used in the winter-time; and in the summer-time the commotion its wheels would make in the water would wash away the state of new york on both sides. innumerable were orion's projects for acquiring the means to pay off the debt to me. these projects extended straight through the succeeding thirty years, but in every case they failed. during all those thirty years his well-established honesty kept him in offices of trust where other people's money had to be taken care of, but where no salary was paid. he was treasurer of all the benevolent institutions; he took care of the money and other property of widows and orphans; he never lost a cent for anybody, and never made one for himself. every time he changed his religion the church of his new faith was glad to get him; made him treasurer at once, and at once he stopped the graft and the leaks in that church. he exhibited a facility in changing his political complexion that was a marvel to the whole community. once the following curious thing happened, and he wrote me all about it himself. one morning he was a republican, and upon invitation he agreed to make a campaign speech at the republican mass-meeting that night. he prepared the speech. after luncheon he became a democrat and agreed to write a score of exciting mottoes to be painted upon the transparencies which the democrats would carry in their torchlight procession that night. he wrote these shouting democratic mottoes during the afternoon, and they occupied so much of his time that it was night before he had a chance to change his politics again; so he actually made a rousing republican campaign speech in the open air while his democratic transparencies passed by in front of him, to the joy of every witness present. he was a most strange creature--but in spite of his eccentricities he was beloved, all his life, in whatsoever community he lived. and he was also held in high esteem, for at bottom he was a sterling man. about twenty-five years ago--along there somewhere--i suggested to orion that he write an autobiography. i asked him to try to tell the straight truth in it; to refrain from exhibiting himself in creditable attitudes exclusively, and to honorably set down all the incidents of his life which he had found interesting to him, including those which were burned into his memory because he was ashamed of them. i said that this had never been done, and that if he could do it his autobiography would be a most valuable piece of literature. i said i was offering him a job which i could not duplicate in my own case, but i would cherish the hope that he might succeed with it. i recognise now that i was trying to saddle upon him an impossibility. i have been dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; i have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which i am ashamed of, but i have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet. i think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired when i finish these memoirs, if i ever finish them. i believe that if i should put in all or any of those incidents i should be sure to strike them out when i came to revise this book. orion wrote his autobiography and sent it to me. but great was my disappointment; and my vexation, too. in it he was constantly making a hero of himself, exactly as i should have done and am doing now, and he was constantly forgetting to put in the episodes which placed him in an unheroic light. i knew several incidents of his life which were distinctly and painfully unheroic, but when i came across them in his autobiography they had changed color. they had turned themselves inside out, and were things to be intemperately proud of. in my dissatisfaction i destroyed a considerable part of that autobiography. but in what remains there are passages which are interesting, and i shall quote from them here and there and now and then, as i go along. [sidenote: ( .)] while we were living in vienna in a cablegram came from keokuk announcing orion's death. he was seventy-two years old. he had gone down to the kitchen in the early hours of a bitter december morning; he had built the fire, and had then sat down at a table to write something; and there he died, with the pencil in his hand and resting against the paper in the middle of an unfinished word--an indication that his release from the captivity of a long and troubled and pathetic and unprofitable life was mercifully swift and painless. [_dictated in ._] a quarter of a century ago i was visiting john hay at whitelaw reid's house in new york, which hay was occupying for a few months while reid was absent on a holiday in europe. temporarily also, hay was editing reid's paper, the new york "tribune." i remember two incidents of that sunday visit particularly well. i had known john hay a good many years, i had known him when he was an obscure young editorial writer on the "tribune" in horace greely's time, earning three or four times the salary he got, considering the high character of the work which came from his pen. in those earlier days he was a picture to look at, for beauty of feature, perfection of form and grace of carriage and movement. he had a charm about him of a sort quite unusual to my western ignorance and inexperience--a charm of manner, intonation, apparently native and unstudied elocution, and all that--the groundwork of it native, the ease of it, the polish of it, the winning naturalness of it, acquired in europe where he had been chargé d'affaires some time at the court of vienna. he was joyous and cordial, a most pleasant comrade. one of the two incidents above referred to as marking that visit was this: in trading remarks concerning our ages i confessed to forty-two and hay to forty. then he asked if i had begun to write my autobiography, and i said i hadn't. he said that i ought to begin at once, and that i had already lost two years. then he said in substance this: "at forty a man reaches the top of the hill of life and starts down on the sunset side. the ordinary man, the average man, not to particularize too closely and say the commonplace man, has at that age succeeded or failed; in either case he has lived all of his life that is likely to be worth recording; also in either case the life lived is worth setting down, and cannot fail to be interesting if he comes as near to telling the truth about himself as he can. and he _will_ tell the truth in spite of himself, for his facts and his fictions will work loyally together for the protection of the reader; each fact and each fiction will be a dab of paint, each will fall in its right place, and together they will paint his portrait; not the portrait _he_ thinks they are painting, but his real portrait, the inside of him, the soul of him, his character. without intending to lie he will lie all the time; not bluntly, consciously, not dully unconsciously, but half-consciously-- consciousness in twilight; a soft and gentle and merciful twilight which makes his general form comely, with his virtuous prominences and projections discernible and his ungracious ones in shadow. his truths will be recognizable as truths, his modifications of facts which would tell against him will go for nothing, the reader will see the fact through the film and know his man. "there is a subtle devilish something or other about autobiographical composition that defeats all the writer's attempts to paint his portrait _his_ way." hay meant that he and i were ordinary average commonplace people, and i did not resent my share of the verdict, but nursed my wound in silence. his idea that we had finished our work in life, passed the summit and were westward bound down-hill, with me two years ahead of him and neither of us with anything further to do as benefactors to mankind, was all a mistake. i had written four books then, possibly five. i have been drowning the world in literary wisdom ever since, volume after volume; since that day's sun went down he has been the historian of mr. lincoln, and his book will never perish; he has been ambassador, brilliant orator, competent and admirable secretary of state. mark twain. (_to be continued._) north american review no. dcx. march , . chapters from my autobiography.--xiii. by mark twain. [sidenote: ( .)] ... as i have said, that vast plot of tennessee land[ ] was held by my father twenty years--intact. when he died in , we began to manage it ourselves. forty years afterward, we had managed it all away except , acres, and gotten nothing to remember the sales by. about --possibly it was earlier--the , went. my brother found a chance to trade it for a house and lot in the town of corry, in the oil regions of pennsylvania. about he sold this property for $ . that ended the tennessee land. if any penny of cash ever came out of my father's wise investment but that, i have no recollection of it. no, i am overlooking a detail. it furnished me a field for sellers and a book. out of my half of the book i got $ , or $ , ; out of the play i got $ , or $ , --just about a dollar an acre. it is curious: i was not alive when my father made the investment, therefore he was not intending any partiality; yet i was the only member of the family that ever profited by it. i shall have occasion to mention this land again, now and then, as i go along, for it influenced our life in one way or another during more than a generation. whenever things grew dark it rose and put out its hopeful sellers hand and cheered us up, and said "do not be afraid--trust in me--wait." it kept us hoping and hoping, during forty years, and forsook us at last. it put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us--dreamers and indolent. we were always going to be rich next year--no occasion to work. it is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich--these are wholesome; but to begin it _prospectively_ rich! the man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it. my parents removed to missouri in the early thirties; i do not remember just when, for i was not born then, and cared nothing for such things. it was a long journey in those days, and must have been a rough and tiresome one. the home was made in the wee village of florida, in monroe county, and i was born there in . the village contained a hundred people and i increased the population by one per cent. it is more than the best man in history ever did for any other town. it may not be modest in me to refer to this, but it is true. there is no record of a person doing as much--not even shakespeare. but i did it for florida, and it shows that i could have done it for any place--even london, i suppose. recently some one in missouri has sent me a picture of the house i was born in. heretofore i have always stated that it was a palace, but i shall be more guarded, now. i remember only one circumstance connected with my life in it. i remember it very well, though i was but two and a half years old at the time. the family packed up everything and started in wagons for hannibal, on the mississippi, thirty miles away. toward night, when they camped and counted up the children, one was missing. i was the one. i had been left behind. parents ought always to count the children before they start. i was having a good enough time playing by myself until i found that the doors were fastened and that there was a grisly deep silence brooding over the place. i knew, then, that the family were gone, and that they had forgotten me. i was well frightened, and i made all the noise i could, but no one was near and it did no good. i spent the afternoon in captivity and was not rescued until the gloaming had fallen and the place was alive with ghosts. my brother henry was six months old at that time. i used to remember his walking into a fire outdoors when he was a week old. it was remarkable in me to remember a thing like that, which occurred when i was so young. and it was still more remarkable that i should cling to the delusion, for thirty years, that i _did_ remember it--for of course it never happened; he would not have been able to walk at that age. if i had stopped to reflect, i should not have burdened my memory with that impossible rubbish so long. it is believed by many people that an impression deposited in a child's memory within the first two years of its life cannot remain there five years, but that is an error. the incident of benvenuto cellini and the salamander must be accepted as authentic and trustworthy; and then that remarkable and indisputable instance in the experience of helen keller--however, i will speak of that at another time. for many years i believed that i remembered helping my grandfather drink his whiskey toddy when i was six weeks old, but i do not tell about that any more, now; i am grown old, and my memory is not as active as it used to be. when i was younger i could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon i shall be so i cannot remember any but the things that happened. it is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it. my uncle, john a. quarles, was a farmer, and his place was in the country four miles from florida. he had eight children, and fifteen or twenty negroes, and was also fortunate in other ways. particularly in his character. i have not come across a better man than he was. i was his guest for two or three months every year, from the fourth year after we removed to hannibal till i was eleven or twelve years old. i have never consciously used him or his wife in a book, but his farm has come very handy to me in literature, once or twice. in "huck finn" and in "tom sawyer detective" i moved it down to arkansas. it was all of six hundred miles, but it was no trouble, it was not a very large farm; five hundred acres, perhaps, but i could have done it if it had been twice as large. and as for the morality of it, i cared nothing for that; i would move a state if the exigencies of literature required it. it was a heavenly place for a boy, that farm of my uncle john's. the house was a double log one, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting it with the kitchen. in the summer the table was set in the middle of that shady and breezy floor, and the sumptuous meals--well, it makes me cry to think of them. fried chicken, roast pig, wild and tame turkeys, ducks and geese; venison just killed; squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, partridges, prairie-chickens; biscuits, hot batter cakes, hot buckwheat cakes, hot "wheat bread," hot rolls, hot corn pone; fresh corn boiled on the ear, succotash, butter-beans, string-beans, tomatoes, pease, irish potatoes, sweet-potatoes; buttermilk, sweet milk, "clabber"; watermelons, musk-melons, cantaloups--all fresh from the garden--apple pie, peach pie, pumpkin pie, apple dumplings, peach cobbler--i can't remember the rest. the way that the things were cooked was perhaps the main splendor--particularly a certain few of the dishes. for instance, the corn bread, the hot biscuits and wheat bread, and the fried chicken. these things have never been properly cooked in the north--in fact, no one there is able to learn the art, so far as my experience goes. the north thinks it knows how to make corn bread, but this is gross superstition. perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as southern corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite so bad as the northern imitation of it. the north seldom tries to fry chicken, and this is well; the art cannot be learned north of the line of mason and dixon, nor anywhere in europe. this is not hearsay; it is experience that is speaking. in europe it is imagined that the custom of serving various kinds of bread blazing hot is "american," but that is too broad a spread; it is custom in the south, but is much less than that in the north. in the north and in europe hot bread is considered unhealthy. this is probably another fussy superstition, like the european superstition that ice-water is unhealthy. europe does not need ice-water, and does not drink it; and yet, notwithstanding this, its word for it is better than ours, because it describes it, whereas ours doesn't. europe calls it "iced" water. our word describes water made from melted ice--a drink which we have but little acquaintance with. it seem a pity that the world should throw away so many good things merely because they are unwholesome. i doubt if god has given us any refreshment which, taken in moderation, is unwholesome, except microbes. yet there are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. they pay this price for health. and health is all they get for it. how strange it is; it is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry. the farmhouse stood in the middle of a very large yard, and the yard was fenced on three sides with rails and on the rear side with high palings; against these stood the smokehouse; beyond the palings was the orchard; beyond the orchard were the negro quarter and the tobacco-fields. the front yard was entered over a stile, made of sawed-off logs of graduated heights; i do not remember any gate. in a corner of the front yard were a dozen lofty hickory-trees and a dozen black-walnuts, and in the nutting season riches were to be gathered there. down a piece, abreast the house, stood a little log cabin against the rail fence; and there the woody hill fell sharply away, past the barns, the corn-crib, the stables and the tobacco-curing house, to a limpid brook which sang along over its gravelly bed and curved and frisked in and out and here and there and yonder in the deep shade of overhanging foliage and vines--a divine place for wading, and it had swimming-pools, too, which were forbidden to us and therefore much frequented by us. for we were little christian children, and had early been taught the value of forbidden fruit. in the little log cabin lived a bedridden white-headed slave woman whom we visited daily, and looked upon with awe, for we believed she was upwards of a thousand years old and had talked with moses. the younger negroes credited these statistics, and had furnished them to us in good faith. we accommodated all the details which came to us about her; and so we believed that she had lost her health in the long desert trip coming out of egypt, and had never been able to get it back again. she had a round bald place on the crown of her head, and we used to creep around and gaze at it in reverent silence, and reflect that it was caused by fright through seeing pharaoh drowned. we called her "aunt" hannah, southern fashion. she was superstitious like the other negroes; also, like them, she was deeply religious. like them, she had great faith in prayer, and employed it in all ordinary exigencies, but not in cases where a dead certainty of result was urgent. whenever witches were around she tied up the remnant of her wool in little tufts, with white thread, and this promptly made the witches impotent. all the negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age we were in effect comrades. i say in effect, using the phrase as a modification. we were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of, and which rendered complete fusion impossible. we had a faithful and affectionate good friend, ally and adviser in "uncle dan'l," a middle-aged slave whose head was the best one in the negro quarter, whose sympathies were wide and warm, and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile. he has served me well, these many, many years. i have not seen him for more than half a century, and yet spiritually i have had his welcome company a good part of that time, and have staged him in books under his own name and as "jim," and carted him all around--to hannibal, down the mississippi on a raft, and even across the desert of sahara in a balloon--and he has endured it all with the patience and friendliness and loyalty which were his birthright. it was on the farm that i got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities. this feeling and this estimate have stood the test of sixty years and more and have suffered no impairment. the black face is as welcome to me now as it was then. in my schoolboy days i had no aversion to slavery. i was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. no one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that god approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the bible if he wished to settle his mind--and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing. in hannibal we seldom saw a slave misused; on the farm, never. there was, however, one small incident of my boyhood days which touched this matter, and it must have meant a good deal to me or it would not have stayed in my memory, clear and sharp, vivid and shadowless, all these slow-drifting years. we had a little slave boy whom we had hired from some one, there in hannibal. he was from the eastern shore of maryland, and had been brought away from his family and his friends, half-way across the american continent, and sold. he was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. all day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing--it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. at last, one day, i lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and i couldn't stand it, and _wouldn't_ she please shut him up. the tears came into her eyes, and her lip trembled, and she said something like this-- "poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, i am afraid he is thinking, and i cannot bear it. he will never see his mother again; if he can sing, i must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. if you were older, you would understand me; then that friendless child's noise would make you glad." it was a simple speech, and made up of small words, but it went home, and sandy's noise was not a trouble to me any more. she never used large words, but she had a natural gift for making small ones do effective work. she lived to reach the neighborhood of ninety years, and was capable with her tongue to the last--especially when a meanness or an injustice roused her spirit. she has come handy to me several times in my books, where she figures as tom sawyer's "aunt polly." i fitted her out with a dialect, and tried to think up other improvements for her, but did not find any. i used sandy once, also; it was in "tom sawyer"; i tried to get him to whitewash the fence, but it did not work. i do not remember what name i called him by in the book. i can see the farm yet, with perfect clearness. i can see all its belongings, all its details; the family room of the house, with a "trundle" bed in one corner and a spinning-wheel in another--a wheel whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the mournfulest of all sounds to me, and made me homesick and low-spirited, and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the dead: the vast fireplace, piled high, on winter nights, with flaming hickory logs from whose ends a sugary sap bubbled out but did not go to waste, for we scraped it off and ate it; the lazy cat spread out on the rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs and blinking; my aunt in one chimney-corner knitting, my uncle in the other smoking his corn-cob pipe; the slick and carpetless oak floor faintly mirroring the dancing flame-tongues and freckled with black indentations where fire-coals had popped out and died a leisurely death; half a dozen children romping in the background twilight; "split"-bottomed chairs here and there, some with rockers; a cradle--out of service, but waiting, with confidence; in the early cold mornings a snuggle of children, in shirts and chemises, occupying the hearthstone and procrastinating--they could not bear to leave that comfortable place and go out on the wind-swept floor-space between the house and kitchen where the general tin basin stood, and wash. along outside of the front fence ran the country road; dusty in the summer-time, and a good place for snakes--they liked to lie in it and sun themselves; when they were rattlesnakes or puff adders, we killed them: when they were black snakes, or racers, or belonged to the fabled "hoop" breed, we fled, without shame; when they were "house snakes" or "garters" we carried them home and put them in aunt patsy's work-basket for a surprise; for she was prejudiced against snakes, and always when she took the basket in her lap and they began to climb out of it it disordered her mind. she never could seem to get used to them; her opportunities went for nothing. and she was always cold toward bats, too, and could not bear them; and yet i think a bat is as friendly a bird as there is. my mother was aunt patsy's sister, and had the same wild superstitions. a bat is beautifully soft and silky: i do not know any creature that is pleasanter to the touch, or is more grateful for caressings, if offered in the right spirit. i know all about these coleoptera, because our great cave, three miles below hannibal, was multitudinously stocked with them, and often i brought them home to amuse my mother with. it was easy to manage if it was a school day, because then i had ostensibly been to school and hadn't any bats. she was not a suspicious person, but full of trust and confidence; and when i said "there's something in my coat pocket for you," she would put her hand in. but she always took it out again, herself; i didn't have to tell her. it was remarkable, the way she couldn't learn to like private bats. i think she was never in the cave in her life; but everybody else went there. many excursion parties came from considerable distances up and down the river to visit the cave. it was miles in extent, and was a tangled wilderness of narrow and lofty clefts and passages. it was an easy place to get lost in; anybody could do it--including the bats. i got lost in it myself, along with a lady, and our last candle burned down to almost nothing before we glimpsed the search-party's lights winding about in the distance. "injun joe" the half-breed got lost in there once, and would have starved to death if the bats had run short. but there was no chance of that; there were myriads of them. he told me all his story. in the book called "tom sawyer" i starved him entirely to death in the cave, but that was in the interest of art; it never happened. "general" gaines, who was our first town drunkard before jimmy finn got the place, was lost in there for the space of a week, and finally pushed his handkerchief out of a hole in a hilltop near saverton, several miles down the river from the cave's mouth, and somebody saw it and dug him out. there is nothing the matter with his statistics except the handkerchief. i knew him for years, and he hadn't any. but it could have been his nose. that would attract attention. beyond the road where the snakes sunned themselves was a dense young thicket, and through it a dim-lighted path led a quarter of a mile; then out of the dimness one emerged abruptly upon a level great prairie which was covered with wild strawberry-plants, vividly starred with prairie pinks, and walled in on all sides by forests. the strawberries were fragrant and fine, and in the season we were generally there in the crisp freshness of the early morning, while the dew-beads still sparkled upon the grass and the woods were ringing with the first songs of the birds. down the forest slopes to the left were the swings. they were made of bark stripped from hickory saplings. when they became dry they were dangerous. they usually broke when a child was forty feet in the air, and this was why so many bones had to be mended every year. i had no ill-luck myself, but none of my cousins escaped. there were eight of them, and at one time and another they broke fourteen arms among them. but it cost next to nothing, for the doctor worked by the year--$ for the whole family. i remember two of the florida doctors, chowning and meredith. they not only tended an entire family for $ a year, but furnished the medicines themselves. good measure, too. only the largest persons could hold a whole dose. castor-oil was the principal beverage. the dose was half a dipperful, with half a dipperful of new orleans molasses added to help it down and make it taste good, which it never did. the next standby was calomel; the next, rhubarb; and the next, jalap. then they bled the patient, and put mustard-plasters on him. it was a dreadful system, and yet the death-rate was not heavy. the calomel was nearly sure to salivate the patient and cost him some of his teeth. there were no dentists. when teeth became touched with decay or were otherwise ailing, the doctor knew of but one thing to do: he fetched his tongs and dragged them out. if the jaw remained, it was not his fault. doctors were not called, in cases of ordinary illness; the family's grandmother attended to those. every old woman was a doctor, and gathered her own medicines in the woods, and knew how to compound doses that would stir the vitals of a cast-iron dog. and then there was the "indian doctor"; a grave savage, remnant of his tribe, deeply read in the mysteries of nature and the secret properties of herbs; and most backwoodsmen had high faith in his powers and could tell of wonderful cures achieved by him. in mauritius, away off yonder in the solitudes of the indian ocean, there is a person who answers to our indian doctor of the old times. he is a negro, and has had no teaching as a doctor, yet there is one disease which he is master of and can cure, and the doctors can't. they send for him when they have a case. it is a child's disease of a strange and deadly sort, and the negro cures it with a herb medicine which he makes, himself, from a prescription which has come down to him from his father and grandfather. he will not let any one see it. he keeps the secret of its components to himself, and it is feared that he will die without divulging it; then there will be consternation in mauritius. i was told these things by the people there, in . we had the "faith doctor," too, in those early days--a woman. her specialty was toothache. she was a farmer's old wife, and lived five miles from hannibal. she would lay her hand on the patient's jaw and say "believe!" and the cure was prompt. mrs. utterback. i remember her very well. twice i rode out there behind my mother, horseback, and saw the cure performed. my mother was the patient. dr. meredith removed to hannibal, by and by, and was our family physician there, and saved my life several times. still, he was a good man and meant well. let it go. i was always told that i was a sickly and precarious and tiresome and uncertain child, and lived mainly on allopathic medicines during the first seven years of my life. i asked my mother about this, in her old age--she was in her th year--and said: "i suppose that during all that time you were uneasy about me?" "yes, the whole time." "afraid i wouldn't live?" after a reflective pause--ostensibly to think out the facts-- "no--afraid you would." it sounds like a plagiarism, but it probably wasn't. the country schoolhouse was three miles from my uncle's farm. it stood in a clearing in the woods, and would hold about twenty-five boys and girls. we attended the school with more or less regularity once or twice a week, in summer, walking to it in the cool of the morning by the forest paths, and back in the gloaming at the end of the day. all the pupils brought their dinners in baskets--corn-dodger, buttermilk and other good things--and sat in the shade of the trees at noon and ate them. it is the part of my education which i look back upon with the most satisfaction. my first visit to the school was when i was seven. a strapping girl of fifteen, in the customary sunbonnet and calico dress, asked me if i "used tobacco"--meaning did i chew it. i said, no. it roused her scorn. she reported me to all the crowd, and said-- "here is a boy seven years old who can't chaw tobacco." by the looks and comments which this produced, i realized that i was a degraded object; i was cruelly ashamed of myself. i determined to reform. but i only made myself sick; i was not able to learn to chew tobacco. i learned to smoke fairly well, but that did not conciliate anybody, and i remained a poor thing, and characterless. i longed to be respected, but i never was able to rise. children have but little charity for each other's defects. as i have said, i spent some part of every year at the farm until i was twelve or thirteen years old. the life which i led there with my cousins was full of charm, and so is the memory of it yet. i can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees, the far-off hammering of woodpeckers and the muffled drumming of wood-pheasants in the remoteness of the forest, the snap-shot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures skurrying through the grass,--i can call it all back and make it as real as it ever was, and as blessed. i can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky, with his wings spread wide and the blue of the vault showing through the fringe of their end-feathers. i can see the woods in their autumn dress, the oaks purple, the hickories washed with gold, the maples and the sumacs luminous with crimson fires, and i can hear the rustle made by the fallen leaves as we ploughed through them. i can see the blue clusters of wild grapes hanging amongst the foliage of the saplings, and i remember the taste of them and the smell. i know how the wild blackberries looked, and how they tasted; and the same with the pawpaws, the hazelnuts and the persimmons; and i can feel the thumping rain, upon my head, of hickory-nuts and walnuts when we were out in the frosty dawn to scramble for them with the pigs, and the gusts of wind loosed them and sent them down. i know the stain of blackberries, and how pretty it is; and i know the stain of walnut hulls, and how little it minds soap and water; also what grudged experience it had of either of them. i know the taste of maple sap, and when to gather it, and how to arrange the troughs and the delivery tubes, and how to boil down the juice, and how to hook the sugar after it is made; also how much better hooked sugar tastes than any that is honestly come by, let bigots say what they will. i know how a prize watermelon looks when it is sunning its fat rotundity among pumpkin-vines and "simblins"; i know how to tell when it is ripe without "plugging" it; i know how inviting it looks when it is cooling itself in a tub of water under the bed, waiting; i know how it looks when it lies on the table in the sheltered great floor-space between house and kitchen, and the children gathered for the sacrifice and their mouths watering; i know the crackling sound it makes when the carving-knife enters its end, and i can see the split fly along in front of the blade as the knife cleaves its way to the other end; i can see its halves fall apart and display the rich red meat and the black seeds, and the heart standing up, a luxury fit for the elect; i know how a boy looks, behind a yard-long slice of that melon, and i know how he feels; for i have been there. i know the taste of the watermelon which has been honestly come by, and i know the taste of the watermelon which has been acquired by art. both taste good, but the experienced know which tastes best. i know the look of green apples and peaches and pears on the trees, and i know how entertaining they are when they are inside of a person. i know how ripe ones look when they are piled in pyramids under the trees, and how pretty they are and how vivid their colors. i know how a frozen apple looks, in a barrel down cellar in the winter-time, and how hard it is to bite, and how the frost makes the teeth ache, and yet how good it is, notwithstanding. i know the disposition of elderly people to select the specked apples for the children, and i once knew ways to beat the game. i know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on a hearth on a winter's evening, and i know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream. i know the delicate art and mystery of so cracking hickory-nuts and walnuts on a flatiron with a hammer that the kernels will be delivered whole, and i know how the nuts, taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider and doughnuts, make old people's tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting, and juggle an evening away before you know what went with the time. i know the look of uncle dan'l's kitchen as it was on privileged nights when i was a child, and i can see the white and black children grouped on the hearth, with the firelight playing on their faces and the shadows flickering upon the walls, clear back toward the cavernous gloom of the rear, and i can hear uncle dan'l telling the immortal tales which uncle remus harris was to gather into his books and charm the world with, by and by; and i can feel again the creepy joy which quivered through me when the time for the ghost-story of the "golden arm" was reached--and the sense of regret, too, which came over me, for it was always the last story of the evening, and there was nothing between it and the unwelcome bed. i can remember the bare wooden stairway in my uncle's house, and the turn to the left above the landing, and the rafters and the slanting roof over my bed, and the squares of moonlight on the floor, and the white cold world of snow outside, seen through the curtainless window. i can remember the howling of the wind and the quaking of the house on stormy nights, and how snug and cozy one felt, under the blankets, listening, and how the powdery snow used to sift in, around the sashes, and lie in little ridges on the floor, and make the place look chilly in the morning, and curb the wild desire to get up--in case there was any. i can remember how very dark that room was, in the dark of the moon, and how packed it was with ghostly stillness when one woke up by accident away in the night, and forgotten sins came flocking out of the secret chambers of the memory and wanted a hearing; and how ill chosen the time seemed for this kind of business; and how dismal was the hoo-hooing of the owl and the wailing of the wolf, sent mourning by on the night wind. i remember the raging of the rain on that roof, summer nights, and how pleasant it was to lie and listen to it, and enjoy the white splendor of the lightning and the majestic booming and crashing of the thunder. it was a very satisfactory room; and there was a lightning-rod which was reachable from the window, an adorable and skittish thing to climb up and down, summer nights, when there were duties on hand of a sort to make privacy desirable. i remember the 'coon and 'possum hunts, nights, with the negroes, and the long marches through the black gloom of the woods, and the excitement which fired everybody when the distant bay of an experienced dog announced that the game was treed; then the wild scramblings and stumblings through briars and bushes and over roots to get to the spot; then the lighting of a fire and the felling of the tree, the joyful frenzy of the dogs and the negroes, and the weird picture it all made in the red glare--i remember it all well, and the delight that every one got out of it, except the 'coon. i remember the pigeon seasons, when the birds would come in millions, and cover the trees, and by their weight break down the branches. they were clubbed to death with sticks; guns were not necessary, and were not used. i remember the squirrel hunts, and the prairie-chicken hunts, and the wild-turkey hunts, and all that; and how we turned out, mornings, while it was still dark, to go on these expeditions, and how chilly and dismal it was, and how often i regretted that i was well enough to go. a toot on a tin horn brought twice as many dogs as were needed, and in their happiness they raced and scampered about, and knocked small people down, and made no end of unnecessary noise. at the word, they vanished away toward the woods, and we drifted silently after them in the melancholy gloom. but presently the gray dawn stole over the world, the birds piped up, then the sun rose and poured light and comfort all around, everything was fresh and dewy and fragrant, and life was a boon again. after three hours of tramping we arrived back wholesomely tired, overladen with game, very hungry, and just in time for breakfast. mark twain. (_to be continued._) footnote: [ ] , acres. north american review no. dcxi. march , . chapters from my autobiography.--xiv. by mark twain. [_dictated thursday, december , ._] _from susy's biography of me._ _feb. , sunday._ clara's reputation as a baby was always a fine one, mine exactly the contrary. one often related story concerning her braveness as a baby and her own opinion of this quality of hers is this. clara and i often got slivers in our hands and when mama took them out with a much dreaded needle, clara was always very brave, and i very cowardly. one day clara got one of these slivers in her hand, a very bad one, and while mama was taking it out, clara stood perfectly still without even wincing: i saw how brave she was and turning to mamma said "mamma isn't she a brave little thing!" presently mamma had to give the little hand quite a dig with the needle and noticing how perfectly quiet clara was about it she exclaimed, why clara! you are a brave little thing! clara responded "no bodys braver but god!"-- clara's pious remark is the main detail, and susy has accurately remembered its phrasing. the three-year-older's wound was of a formidable sort, and not one which the mother's surgery would have been equal to. the flesh of the finger had been burst by a cruel accident. it was the doctor that sewed it up, and to all appearances it was he, and the other independent witnesses, that did the main part of the suffering; each stitch that he took made clara wince slightly, but it shrivelled the others. i take pride in clara's remark, because it shows that although she was only three years old, her fireside teachings were already making her a thinker--a thinker and also an observer of proportions. i am not claiming any credit for this. i furnished to the children worldly knowledge and wisdom, but was not competent to go higher, and so i left their spiritual education in the hands of the mother. a result of this modesty of mine was made manifest to me in a very striking way, some years afterward, when jean was nine years old. we had recently arrived in berlin, at the time, and had begun housekeeping in a furnished apartment. one morning at breakfast a vast card arrived--an invitation. to be precise, it was a command from the emperor of germany to come to dinner. during several months i had encountered socially, on the continent, men bearing lofty titles; and all this while jean was becoming more and more impressed, and awed, and subdued, by these imposing events, for she had not been abroad before, and they were new to her--wonders out of dreamland turned into realities. the imperial card was passed from hand to hand, around the table, and examined with interest; when it reached jean she exhibited excitement and emotion, but for a time was quite speechless; then she said, "why, papa, if it keeps going on like this, pretty soon there won't be anybody left for you to get acquainted with but god." it was not complimentary to think i was not acquainted in that quarter, but she was young, and the young jump to conclusions without reflection. necessarily, i did myself the honor to obey the command of the emperor wilhelm ii. prince heinrich, and six or eight other guests were present. the emperor did most of the talking, and he talked well, and in faultless english. in both of these conspicuousnesses i was gratified to recognize a resemblance to myself--a very exact resemblance; no, almost exact, but not quite that--a modified exactness, with the advantage in favor of the emperor. my english, like his, is nearly faultless; like him i talk well; and when i have guests at dinner i prefer to do all the talking myself. it is the best way, and the pleasantest. also the most profitable for the others. i was greatly pleased to perceive that his majesty was familiar with my books, and that his attitude toward them was not uncomplimentary. in the course of his talk he said that my best and most valuable book was "old times on the mississippi." i will refer to that remark again, presently. an official who was well up in the foreign office at that time, and had served under bismarck for fourteen years, was still occupying his old place under chancellor caprivi. smith, i will call him of whom i am speaking, though that is not his name. he was a special friend of mine, and i greatly enjoyed his society, although in order to have it it was necessary for me to seek it as late as midnight, and not earlier. this was because government officials of his rank had to work all day, after nine in the morning, and then attend official banquets in the evening; wherefore they were usually unable to get life-restoring fresh air and exercise for their jaded minds and bodies earlier than midnight; then they turned out, in groups of two or three, and gratefully and violently tramped the deserted streets until two in the morning. smith had been in the government service, at home and abroad, for more than thirty years, and he was now sixty years old, or close upon it. he could not remember a year in which he had had a vacation of more than a fortnight's length; he was weary all through to the bones and the marrow, now, and was yearning for a holiday of a whole three months--yearning so longingly and so poignantly that he had at last made up his mind to make a desperate cast for it and stand the consequences, whatever they might be. it was against all rules to _ask_ for a vacation--quite against all etiquette; the shock of it would paralyze the chancellery; stem etiquette and usage required another form: the applicant was not privileged to ask for a vacation, he must send in his _resignation_. the chancellor would know that the applicant was not really trying to resign, and didn't want to resign, but was merely trying in this left-handed way to get a vacation. the night before the emperor's dinner i helped smith take his exercise, after midnight, and he was full of his project. he had sent in his resignation that day, and was trembling for the result; and naturally, because it might possibly be that the chancellor would be happy to fill his place with somebody else, in which case he could accept the resignation without comment and without offence. smith was in a very anxious frame of mind; not that he feared that caprivi was dissatisfied with him, for he had no such fear; it was the emperor that he was afraid of; he did not know how he stood with the emperor. he said that while apparently it was caprivi who would decide his case, it was in reality the emperor who would perform that service; that the emperor kept personal watch upon everything, and that no official sparrow could fall to the ground without his privity and consent; that the resignation would be laid before his majesty, who would accept it or decline to accept it, according to his pleasure, and that then his pleasure in the matter would be communicated by caprivi. smith said he would know his fate the next evening, after the imperial dinner; that when i should escort his majesty into the large salon contiguous to the dining-room, i would find there about thirty men--cabinet ministers, admirals, generals and other great officials of the empire--and that these men would be standing talking together in little separate groups of two or three persons; that the emperor would move from group to group and say a word to each, sometimes two words, sometimes ten words; and that the length of his speech, whether brief or not so brief, would indicate the exact standing in the emperor's regard, of the man accosted; and that by observing this thermometer an expert could tell, to half a degree, the state of the imperial weather in each case; that in berlin, as in the imperial days of rome, the emperor was the sun, and that his smile or his frown meant good fortune or disaster to the man upon whom it should fall. smith suggested that i watch the thermometer while the emperor went his rounds of the groups; and added that if his majesty talked four minutes with any person there present, it meant high favor, and that the sun was in the zenith, and cloudless, for that man. i mentally recorded that four-minute altitude, and resolved to see if any man there on that night stood in sufficient favor to achieve it. very well. after the dinner i watched the emperor while he passed from group to group, and privately i timed him with a watch. two or three times he came near to reaching the four-minute altitude, but always he fell short a little. the last man he came to was smith. he put his hand on smith's shoulder and began to talk to him; and when he finished, the thermometer had scored seven minutes! the company then moved toward the smoking-room, where cigars, beer and anecdotes would be in brisk service until midnight, and as smith passed me he whispered, "that settles it. the chancellor will ask me how much of a vacation i want, and i sha'n't be afraid to raise the limit. i shall call for six months." [sidenote: ( )] [sidenote: ( )] smith's dream had been to spend his three months' vacation--in case he got a vacation instead of the other thing--in one of the great capitals of the continent--a capital whose name i shall suppress, at present. the next day the chancellor asked him how much of a vacation he wanted, and where he desired to spend it. smith told him. his prayer was granted, and rather more than granted. the chancellor augmented his salary and attached him to the german embassy of that selected capital, giving him a place of high dignity bearing an imposing title, and with nothing to do except attend banquets of an extraordinary character at the embassy, once or twice a year. the term of his vacation was not specified; he was to continue it until requested to come back to his work in the foreign office. this was in . eight years later smith was passing through vienna, and he called upon me. there had been no interruption of his vacation, as yet, and there was no likelihood that an interruption of it would occur while he should still be among the living. [_dictated monday, december , ._] as i have already remarked, "old times on the mississippi" got the kaiser's best praise. it was after midnight when i reached home; i was usually out until toward midnight, and the pleasure of being out late was poisoned, every night, by the dread of what i must meet at my front door--an indignant face, a resentful face, the face of the _portier_. the _portier_ was a tow-headed young german, twenty-two or three years old; and it had been for some time apparent to me that he did not enjoy being hammered out of his sleep, nights, to let me in. he never had a kind word for me, nor a pleasant look. i couldn't understand it, since it was his business to be on watch and let the occupants of the several flats in at any and all hours of the night. i could not see why he so distinctly failed to get reconciled to it. the fact is, i was ignorantly violating, every night, a custom in which he was commercially interested. i did not suspect this. no one had told me of the custom, and if i had been left to guess it, it would have taken me a very long time to make a success of it. it was a custom which was so well established and so universally recognized, that it had all the force and dignity of law. by authority of this custom, whosoever entered a berlin house after ten at night must pay a trifling toll to the _portier_ for breaking his sleep to let him in. this tax was either two and a half cents or five cents, i don't remember which; but i had never paid it, and didn't know i owed it, and as i had been residing in berlin several weeks, i was so far in arrears that my presence in the german capital was getting to be a serious disaster to that young fellow. i arrived from the imperial dinner sorrowful and anxious, made my presence known and prepared myself to wait in patience the tedious minute or two which the _portier_ usually allowed himself to keep me tarrying--as a punishment. but this time there was no stage-wait; the door was instantly unlocked, unbolted, unchained and flung wide; and in it appeared the strange and welcome apparition of the _portier's_ round face all sunshine and smiles and welcome, in place of the black frowns and hostility that i was expecting. plainly he had not come out of his bed: he had been waiting for me, watching for me. he began to pour out upon me in the most enthusiastic and energetic way a generous stream of german welcome and homage, meanwhile dragging me excitedly to his small bedroom beside the front door; there he made me bend down over a row of german translations of my books and said, "there--you wrote them! i have found it out! by god, i did not know it before, and i ask a million pardons! that one there, the 'old times on the mississippi,' is the best book you ever wrote!" the usual number of those curious accidents which we call coincidences have fallen to my share in this life, but for picturesqueness this one puts all the others in the shade: that a crowned head and a _portier_, the very top of an empire and the very bottom of it, should pass the very same criticism and deliver the very same verdict upon a book of mine--and almost in the same hour and the same breath--is a coincidence which out-coincidences any coincidence which i could have imagined with such powers of imagination as i have been favored with; and i have not been accustomed to regard them as being small or of an inferior quality. it is always a satisfaction to me to remember that whereas i do not know, for sure, what any other nation thinks of any one of my twenty-three volumes, i do at least know for a certainty what one nation of fifty millions thinks of one of them, at any rate; for if the mutual verdict of the top of an empire and the bottom of it does not establish for good and all the judgment of the entire nation concerning that book, then the axiom that we can get a sure estimate of a thing by arriving at a general average of all the opinions involved, is a fallacy. [_dictated monday, february , ._] two months ago (december ) i was dictating a brief account of a private dinner in berlin, where the emperor of germany was host and i the chief guest. something happened day before yesterday which moves me to take up that matter again. at the dinner his majesty chatted briskly and entertainingly along in easy and flowing english, and now and then he interrupted himself to address a remark to me, or to some other individual of the guests. when the reply had been delivered, he resumed his talk. i noticed that the table etiquette tallied with that which was the law of my house at home when we had guests: that is to say, the guests answered when the host favored them with a remark, and then quieted down and behaved themselves until they got another chance. if i had been in the emperor's chair and he in mine, i should have felt infinitely comfortable and at home, and should have done a world of talking, and done it well; but i was guest now, and consequently i felt less at home. from old experience, i was familiar with the rules of the game, and familiar with their exercise from the high place of host; but i was not familiar with the trammelled and less satisfactory position of guest, therefore i felt a little strange and out of place. but there was no animosity--no, the emperor was host, therefore according to my own rule he had a right to do the talking, and it was my honorable duty to intrude no interruptions or other improvements, except upon invitation; and of course it could be _my_ turn some day: some day, on some friendly visit of inspection to america, it might be my pleasure and distinction to have him as guest at my table; then i would give him a rest, and a remarkably quiet time. in one way there was a difference between his table and mine--for instance, atmosphere; the guests stood in awe of him, and naturally they conferred that feeling upon me, for, after all, i am only human, although i regret it. when a guest answered a question he did it with deferential voice and manner; he did not put any emotion into it, and he did not spin it out, but got it out of his system as quickly as he could, and then looked relieved. the emperor was used to this atmosphere, and it did not chill his blood; maybe it was an inspiration to him, for he was alert, brilliant and full of animation; also he was most gracefully and felicitously complimentary to my books,--and i will remark here that the happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts, and the happy delivery of it another. in that other chapter i mentioned the high compliment which he paid to the book, "old times on the mississippi," but there were others; among them some gratifying praise of my description in "a tramp abroad" of certain striking phases of german student life. i mention these things here because i shall have occasion to hark back to them presently. [_dictated tuesday, february , ._] * * * * * those stars indicate the long chapter which i dictated yesterday, a chapter which is much too long for magazine purposes, and therefore must wait until this autobiography shall appear in book form, five years hence, when i am dead: five years according to my calculation, twenty-seven years according to the prediction furnished me a week ago by the latest and most confident of all the palmists who have ever read my future in my hand. the emperor's dinner, and its beer-and-anecdote appendix, covered six hours of diligent industry, and this accounts for the extraordinary length of that chapter. a couple of days ago a gentleman called upon me with a message. he had just arrived from berlin, where he had been acting for our government in a matter concerning tariff revision, he being a member of the commission appointed by our government to conduct our share of the affair. upon the completion of the commission's labors, the emperor invited the members of it to an audience, and in the course of the conversation he made a reference to me; continuing, he spoke of my chapter on the german language in "a tramp abroad," and characterized it by an adjective which is too complimentary for me to repeat here without bringing my modesty under suspicion. then he paid some compliments to "the innocents abroad," and followed these with the remark that my account in one of my books of certain striking phases of german student life was the best and truest that had ever been written. by this i perceive that he remembers that dinner of sixteen years ago, for he said the same thing to me about the student-chapter at that time. next he said he wished this gentleman to convey two messages to america from him and deliver them--one to the president, the other to me. the wording of the message to me was: "convey to mr. clemens my kindest regards. ask him if he remembers that dinner, and ask him why he didn't do any talking." why, how could i talk when he was talking? he "held the age," as the poker-clergy say, and two can't talk at the same time with good effect. it reminds me of the man who was reproached by a friend, who said, "i think it a shame that you have not spoken to your wife for fifteen years. how do you explain it? how do you justify it?" that poor man said, "i didn't want to interrupt her." if the emperor had been at my table, he would not have suffered from my silence, he would only have suffered from the sorrows of his own solitude. if i were not too old to travel, i would go to berlin and introduce the etiquette of my own table, which tallies with the etiquette observable at other royal tables. i would say, "invite me again, your majesty, and give me a chance"; then i would courteously waive rank and do all the talking myself. i thank his majesty for his kind message, and am proud to have it and glad to express my sincere reciprocation of its sentiments. [_dictated january , ._] ... rev. joseph t. harris and i have been visiting general sickles. once, twenty or twenty-five years ago, just as harris was coming out of his gate sunday morning to walk to his church and preach, a telegram was put into his hand. he read it immediately, and then, in a manner, collapsed. it said: "general sickles died last night at midnight." [he had been a chaplain under sickles through the war.] [sidenote: ( .)] it wasn't so. but no matter--it was so to harris at the time. he walked along--walked to the church--but his mind was far away. all his affection and homage and worship of his general had come to the fore. his heart was full of these emotions. he hardly knew where he was. in his pulpit, he stood up and began the service, but with a voice over which he had almost no command. the congregation had never seen him thus moved, before, in his pulpit. they sat there and gazed at him and wondered what was the matter; because he was now reading, in this broken voice and with occasional tears trickling down his face, what to them seemed a quite unemotional chapter--that one about moses begat aaron, and aaron begat deuteronomy, and deuteronomy begat st. peter, and st. peter begat cain, and cain begat abel--and he was going along with this, and half crying--his voice continually breaking. the congregation left the church that morning without being able to account for this most extraordinary thing--as it seemed to them. that a man who had been a soldier for more than four years, and who had preached in that pulpit so many, many times on really moving subjects, without even the quiver of a lip, should break all down over the begats, they couldn't understand. but there it is--any one can see how such a mystery as that would arouse the curiosity of those people to the boiling-point. harris has had many adventures. he has more adventures in a year than anybody else has in five. one saturday night he noticed a bottle on his uncle's dressing-bureau. he thought the label said "hair restorer," and he took it in his room and gave his head a good drenching and sousing with it and carried it back and thought no more about it. next morning when he got up his head was a bright green! he sent around everywhere and couldn't get a substitute preacher, so he had to go to his church himself and preach--and he did it. he hadn't a sermon in his barrel--as it happened--of any lightsome character, so he had to preach a very grave one--a very serious one--and it made the matter worse. the gravity of the sermon did not harmonize with the gayety of his head, and the people sat all through it with handkerchiefs stuffed in their mouths to try to keep down their joy. and harris told me that he was sure he never had seen his congregation--the whole body of his congregation--the _entire_ body of his congregation--absorbed in interest in his sermon, from beginning to end, before. always there had been an aspect of indifference, here and there, or wandering, somewhere; but this time there was nothing of the kind. those people sat there as if they thought, "good for this day and train only: we must have all there is of this show, not waste any of it." and he said that when he came down out of the pulpit more people waited to shake him by the hand and tell him what a good sermon it was, than ever before. and it seemed a pity that these people should do these fictions in such a place--right in the church--when it was quite plain they were not interested in the sermon at all; they only wanted to get a near view of his head. well, harris said--no, harris didn't say, _i_ say, that as the days went on and sunday followed sunday, the interest in harris's hair grew and grew; because it didn't stay merely and monotonously green, it took on deeper and deeper shades of green; and then it would change and become reddish, and would go from that to some other color--purplish, yellowish, bluish, and so on--but it was never a solid color. it was always mottled. and each sunday it was a little more interesting than it was the sunday before--and harris's head became famous, and people came from new york, and boston, and south carolina, and japan, and so on, to look. there wasn't seating-capacity for all the people that came while his head was undergoing these various and fascinating mottlings. and it was a good thing in several ways, because the business had been languishing a little, and now a lot of people joined the church so that they could have the show, and it was the beginning of a prosperity for that church which has never diminished in all these years. mark twain. (_to be continued._) north american review no. dcxii. april , . chapters from my autobiography.--xv. by mark twain. [_dictated october , ._] _from susy's biography of me._ papa says that if the collera comes here he will take sour mash to the mountains. [sidenote: ( .)] this remark about the cat is followed by various entries, covering a month, in which jean, general grant, the sculptor gerhardt, mrs. candace wheeler, miss dora wheeler, mr. frank stockton, mrs. mary mapes dodge, and the widow of general custer appear and drift in procession across the page, then vanish forever from the biography; then susy drops this remark in the wake of the vanished procession: sour mash is a constant source of anxiety, care, and pleasure to papa. i did, in truth, think a great deal of that old tortoise-shell harlot; but i haven't a doubt that in order to impress susy i was pretending agonies of solicitude which i didn't honestly feel. sour mash never gave me any real anxiety; she was always able to take care of herself, and she was ostentatiously vain of the fact; vain of it to a degree which often made me ashamed of her, much as i esteemed her. many persons would like to have the society of cats during the summer vacation in the country, but they deny themselves this pleasure because they think they must either take the cats along when they return to the city, where they would be a trouble and an encumbrance, or leave them in the country, houseless and homeless. these people have no ingenuity, no invention, no wisdom; or it would occur to them to do as i do: rent cats by the month for the summer and return them to their good homes at the end of it. early last may i rented a kitten of a farmer's wife, by the month; then i got a discount by taking three. they have been good company for about five months now, and are still kittens--at least they have not grown much, and to all intents and purposes are still kittens, and as full of romping energy and enthusiasm as they were in the beginning. this is remarkable. i am an expert in cats, but i have not seen a kitten keep its kittenhood nearly so long before. these are beautiful creatures--these triplets. two of them wear the blackest and shiniest and thickest of sealskin vestments all over their bodies except the lower half of their faces and the terminations of their paws. the black masks reach down below the eyes, therefore when the eyes are closed they are not visible; the rest of the face, and the gloves and stockings, are snow white. these markings are just the same on both cats--so exactly the same that when you call one the other is likely to answer, because they cannot tell each other apart. since the cats are precisely alike, and can't be told apart by any of us, they do not need two names, so they have but one between them. we call both of them sackcloth, and we call the gray one ashes. i believe i have never seen such intelligent cats as these before. they are full of the nicest discriminations. when i read german aloud they weep; you can see the tears run down. it shows what pathos there is in the german tongue. i had not noticed before that all german is pathetic, no matter what the subject is nor how it is treated. it was these humble observers that brought the knowledge to me. i have tried all kinds of german on these cats; romance, poetry, philosophy, theology, market reports; and the result has always been the same--the cats sob, and let the tears run down, which shows that all german is pathetic. french is not a familiar tongue to me, and the pronunciation is difficult, and comes out of me encumbered with a missouri accent; but the cats like it, and when i make impassioned speeches in that language they sit in a row and put up their paws, palm to palm, and frantically give thanks. hardly any cats are affected by music, but these are; when i sing they go reverently away, showing how deeply they feel it. sour mash never cared for these things. she had many noble qualities, but at bottom she was not refined, and cared little or nothing for theology and the arts. it is a pity to say it, but these cats are not above the grade of human beings, for i know by certain signs that they are not sincere in their exhibitions of emotion, but exhibit them merely to show off and attract attention--conduct which is distinctly human, yet with a difference: they do not know enough to conceal their desire to show off, but the grown human being does. what is ambition? it is only the desire to be conspicuous. the desire for fame is only the desire to be continuously conspicuous and attract attention and be talked about. these cats are like human beings in another way: when ashes began to work his fictitious emotions, and show off, the other members of the firm followed suit, in order to be in the fashion. that is the way with human beings; they are afraid to be outside; whatever the fashion happens to be, they conform to it, whether it be a pleasant fashion or the reverse, they lacking the courage to ignore it and go their own way. all human beings would like to dress in loose and comfortable and highly colored and showy garments, and they had their desire until a century ago, when a king, or some other influential ass, introduced sombre hues and discomfort and ugly designs into masculine clothing. the meek public surrendered to the outrage, and by consequence we are in that odious captivity to-day, and are likely to remain in it for a long time to come. fortunately the women were not included in the disaster, and so their graces and their beauty still have the enhancing help of delicate fabrics and varied and beautiful colors. their clothing makes a great opera audience an enchanting spectacle, a delight to the eye and the spirit, a garden of eden for charm and color. the men, clothed in dismal black, are scattered here and there and everywhere over the garden, like so many charred stumps, and they damage the effect, but cannot annihilate it. in summer we poor creatures have a respite, and may clothe ourselves in white garments; loose, soft, and in some degree shapely; but in the winter--the sombre winter, the depressing winter, the cheerless winter, when white clothes and bright colors are especially needed to brighten our spirits and lift them up--we all conform to the prevailing insanity, and go about in dreary black, each man doing it because the others do it, and not because he wants to. they are really no sincerer than sackcloth and ashes. at bottom the sackcloths do not care to exhibit their emotions when i am performing before them, they only do it because ashes started it. i would like to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks and velvets, resplendent with all the stunning dyes of the rainbow, and so would every sane man i have ever known; but none of us dares to venture it. there is such a thing as carrying conspicuousness to the point of discomfort; and if i should appear on fifth avenue on a sunday morning, at church-time, clothed as i would like to be clothed, the churches would be vacant, and i should have all the congregations tagging after me, to look, and secretly envy, and publicly scoff. it is the way human beings are made; they are always keeping their real feelings shut up inside, and publicly exploiting their fictitious ones. next after fine colors, i like plain white. one of my sorrows, when the summer ends, is that i must put off my cheery and comfortable white clothes and enter for the winter into the depressing captivity of the shapeless and degrading black ones. it is mid-october now, and the weather is growing cold up here in the new hampshire hills, but it will not succeed in freezing me out of these white garments, for here the neighbors are few, and it is only of crowds that i am afraid. i made a brave experiment, the other night, to see how it would feel to shock a crowd with these unseasonable clothes, and also to see how long it might take the crowd to reconcile itself to them and stop looking astonished and outraged. on a stormy evening i made a talk before a full house, in the village, clothed like a ghost, and looking as conspicuously, all solitary and alone on that platform, as any ghost could have looked; and i found, to my gratification, that it took the house less than ten minutes to forget about the ghost and give its attention to the tidings i had brought. i am nearly seventy-one, and i recognize that my age has given me a good many privileges; valuable privileges; privileges which are not granted to younger persons. little by little i hope to get together courage enough to wear white clothes all through the winter, in new york. it will be a great satisfaction to me to show off in this way; and perhaps the largest of all the satisfactions will be the knowledge that every scoffer, of my sex, will secretly envy me and wish he dared to follow my lead. that mention that i have acquired new and great privileges by grace of my age, is not an uncalculated remark. when i passed the seventieth mile-stone, ten months ago, i instantly realized that i had entered a new country and a new atmosphere. to all the public i was become recognizably old, undeniably old; and from that moment everybody assumed a new attitude toward me--the reverent attitude granted by custom to age--and straightway the stream of generous new privileges began to flow in upon me and refresh my life. since then, i have lived an ideal existence; and i now believe what choate said last march, and which at the time i didn't credit: that the best of life begins at seventy; for then your work is done; you know that you have done your best, let the quality of the work be what it may; that you have earned your holiday--a holiday of peace and contentment--and that thenceforth, to the setting of your sun, nothing will break it, nothing interrupt it. [_dictated january , ._] in an earlier chapter i inserted some verses beginning "love came at dawn" which had been found among susy's papers after her death. i was not able to say that they were hers, but i judged that they might be, for the reason that she had not enclosed them in quotation marks according to her habit when storing up treasures gathered from other people. stedman was not able to determine the authorship for me, as the verses were new to him, but the authorship has now been traced. the verses were written by william wilfred campbell, a canadian poet, and they form a part of the contents of his book called "beyond the hills of dream." the authorship of the beautiful lines which my wife and i inscribed upon susy's gravestone was untraceable for a time. we had found them in a book in india, but had lost the book and with it the author's name. but in time an application to the editor of "notes and queries" furnished me the author's name,[ ] and it has been added to the verses upon the gravestone. last night, at a dinner-party where i was present, mr. peter dunne dooley handed to the host several dollars, in satisfaction of a lost bet. i seemed to see an opportunity to better my condition, and i invited dooley, apparently disinterestedly, to come to my house friday and play billiards. he accepted, and i judge that there is going to be a deficit in the dooley treasury as a result. in great qualities of the heart and brain, dooley is gifted beyond all propriety. he is brilliant; he is an expert with his pen, and he easily stands at the head of all the satirists of this generation--but he is going to walk in darkness friday afternoon. it will be a fraternal kindness to teach him that with all his light and culture, he does not know all the valuable things; and it will also be a fraternal kindness to him to complete his education for him--and i shall do this on friday, and send him home in that perfected condition. i possess a billiard secret which can be valuable to the dooley sept, after i shall have conferred it upon dooley--for a consideration. it is a discovery which i made by accident, thirty-eight years ago, in my father-in-law's house in elmira. there was a scarred and battered and ancient billiard-table in the garret, and along with it a peck of checked and chipped balls, and a rackful of crooked and headless cues. i played solitaire up there every day with that difficult outfit. the table was not level, but slanted sharply to the southeast; there wasn't a ball that was round, or would complete the journey you started it on, but would always get tired and stop half-way and settle, with a jolty wabble, to a standstill on its chipped side. i tried making counts with four balls, but found it difficult and discouraging, so i added a fifth ball, then a sixth, then a seventh, and kept on adding until at last i had twelve balls on the table and a thirteenth to play with. my game was caroms--caroms solely--caroms plain, or caroms with cushion to help--anything that could furnish a count. in the course of time i found to my astonishment that i was never able to run fifteen, under any circumstances. by huddling the balls advantageously in the beginning, i could now and then coax fourteen out of them, but i couldn't reach fifteen by either luck or skill. sometimes the balls would get scattered into difficult positions and defeat me in that way; sometimes if i managed to keep them together, i would freeze; and always when i froze, and had to play away from the contact, there was sure to be nothing to play at but a wide and uninhabited vacancy. one day mr. dalton called on my brother-in-law, on a matter of business, and i was asked if i could entertain him awhile, until my brother-in-law should finish an engagement with another gentleman. i said i could, and took him up to the billiard-table. i had played with him many times at the club, and knew that he could play billiards tolerably well--only tolerably well--but not any better than i could. he and i were just a match. he didn't know our table; he didn't know those balls; he didn't know those warped and headless cues; he didn't know the southeastern slant of the table, and how to allow for it. i judged it would be safe and profitable to offer him a bet on my scheme. i emptied the avalanche of thirteen balls on the table and said: "take a ball and begin, mr. dalton. how many can you run with an outlay like that?" he said, with the half-affronted air of a mathematician who has been asked how much of the multiplication table he can recite without a break: "i suppose a million--eight hundred thousand, anyway." i said "you shall hove the privilege of placing the balls to suit yourself, and i want to bet you a dollar that you can't run fifteen." i will not dwell upon the sequel. at the end of an hour his face was red, and wet with perspiration; his outer garments lay scattered here and there over the place; he was the angriest man in the state, and there wasn't a rag or remnant of an injurious adjective left in him anywhere--and i had all his small change. when the summer was over, we went home to hartford, and one day mr. george robertson arrived from boston with two or three hours to spare between then and the return train, and as he was a young gentleman to whom we were in debt for much social pleasure, it was my duty, and a welcome duty, to make his two or three hours interesting for him. so i took him up-stairs and set up my billiard scheme for his comfort. mine was a good table, in perfect repair; the cues were in perfect condition; the balls were ivory, and flawless--but i knew that mr. robertson was my prey, just the same, for by exhaustive tests with this outfit i had found that my limit was thirty-one. i had proved to my satisfaction that whereas i could not fairly expect to get more than six or eight or a dozen caroms out of a run, i could now and then reach twenty and twenty-five, and after a long procession of failures finally achieve a run of thirty-one; but in no case had i ever got beyond thirty-one. robertson's game, as i knew, was a little better than mine, so i resolved to require him to make thirty-two. i believed it would entertain him. he was one of these brisk and hearty and cheery and self-satisfied young fellows who are brimful of confidence, and who plunge with grateful eagerness into any enterprise that offers a showy test of their abilities. i emptied the balls on the table and said, "take a cue and a ball, george, and begin. how many caroms do you think you can make out of that layout?" he laughed the laugh of the gay and the care-free, as became his youth and inexperience, and said, "i can punch caroms out of that bunch a week without a break." i said "place the balls to suit yourself, and begin." confidence is a necessary thing in billiards, but overconfidence is bad. george went at his task with much too much lightsomeness of spirit and disrespect for the situation. on his first shot he scored three caroms; on his second shot he scored four caroms; and on his third shot he missed as simple a carom as could be devised. he was very much astonished, and said he would not have supposed that careful play could be needed with an acre of bunched balls in front of a person. he began again, and played more carefully, but still with too much lightsomeness; he couldn't seem to learn to take the situation seriously. he made about a dozen caroms and broke down. he was irritated with himself now, and he thought he caught me laughing. he didn't. i do not laugh publicly at my client when this game is going on; i only do it inside--or save it for after the exhibition is over. but he thought he had caught me laughing, and it increased his irritation. of course i knew he thought i was laughing privately--for i was experienced; they all think that, and it has a good effect; it sharpens their annoyance and debilitates their play. he made another trial and failed. once more he was astonished; once more he was humiliated--and as for his anger, it rose to summer-heat. he arranged the balls again, grouping them carefully, and said he would win this time, or die. when a client reaches this condition, it is a good time to damage his nerve further, and this can always be done by saying some little mocking thing or other that has the outside appearance of a friendly remark--so i employed this art. i suggested that a bet might tauten his nerves, and that i would offer one, but that as i did not want it to be an expense to him, but only a help, i would make it small--a cigar, if he were willing--a cigar that he would fail again; not an expensive one, but a cheap native one, of the crown jewel breed, such as is manufactured in hartford for the clergy. it set him afire all over! i could see the blue flame issue from his eyes. he said, "make it a hundred!--and no connecticut cabbage-leaf product, but havana, $ the box!" i took him up, but said i was sorry to see him do this, because it did not seem to me right or fair for me to rob him under our own roof, when he had been so kind to us. he said, with energy and acrimony: "you take care of your own pocket, if you'll be so good, and leave me to take care of mine." and he plunged at the congress of balls with a vindictiveness which was infinitely contenting to me. he scored a failure--and began to undress. i knew it would come to that, for he was in the condition now that mr. dooley will be in at about that stage of the contest on friday afternoon. a clothes-rack will be provided for mr. dooley to hang his things on as fast as he shall from time to time shed them. george raised his voice four degrees and flung out the challenge-- "double or quits!" "done," i responded, in the gentle and compassionate voice of one who is apparently getting sorrier and sorrier. there was an hour and a half of straight disaster after that, and if it was a sin to enjoy it, it is no matter--i did enjoy it. it is half a lifetime ago, but i enjoy it yet, every time i think of it george made failure after failure. his fury increased with each failure as he scored it. with each defeat he flung off one or another rag of his raiment, and every time he started on a fresh inning he made it "double or quits" once more. twice he reached thirty and broke down; once he reached thirty-one and broke down. these "nears" made him frantic, and i believe i was never so happy in my life, except the time, a few years later, when the rev. j. h. twichell and i walked to boston and he had the celebrated conversation with the hostler at the inn at ashford, connecticut. at last, when we were notified that patrick was at the door to drive him to his train, george owed me five thousand cigars at twenty-five cents apiece, and i was so sorry i could have hugged him. but he shouted, "give me ten minutes more!" and added stormily, "it's double or quits again, and i'll win out free of debt or owe you ten thousand cigars, and you'll pay the funeral expenses." he began on his final effort, and i believe that in all my experience among both amateurs and experts, i have never seen a cue so carefully handled in my lifetime as george handled his upon this intensely interesting occasion. he got safely up to twenty-five, and then ceased to breathe. so did i. he labored along, and added a point, another point, still another point, and finally reached thirty-one. he stopped there, and we took a breath. by this time the balls were scattered all down the cushions, about a foot or two apart, and there wasn't a shot in sight anywhere that any man might hope to make. in a burst of anger and confessed defeat, he sent his ball flying around the table at random, and it crotched a ball that was packed against the cushion and sprang across to a ball against the bank on the opposite side, and counted! his luck had set him free, and he didn't owe me anything. he had used up all his spare time, but we carried his clothes to the carriage, and he dressed on his way to the station, greatly wondered at and admired by the ladies, as he drove along--but he got his train. i am very fond of mr. dooley, and shall await his coming with affectionate and pecuniary interest. _p.s. saturday._ he has been here. let us not talk about it. mark twain. (_to be continued._) footnote: [ ] robert richardson, deceased, of australia. north american review no. dcxiii. april , . chapters from my autobiography.--xvi. by mark twain. [_dictated january th, ._] ... but i am used to having my statements discounted. my mother began it before i was seven years old. yet all through my life my facts have had a substratum of truth, and therefore they were not without preciousness. any person who is familiar with me knows how to strike my average, and therefore knows how to get at the jewel of any fact of mine and dig it out of its blue-clay matrix. my mother knew that art. when i was seven or eight, or ten, or twelve years old--along there--a neighbor said to her, "do you ever believe anything that that boy says?" my mother said, "he is the well-spring of truth, but you can't bring up the whole well with one bucket"--and she added, "i know his average, therefore he never deceives me. i discount him thirty per cent. for embroidery, and what is left is perfect and priceless truth, without a flaw in it anywhere." now to make a jump of forty years, without breaking the connection: that word "embroidery" was used again in my presence and concerning me, when i was fifty years old, one night at rev. frank goodwin's house in hartford, at a meeting of the monday evening club. the monday evening club still exists. it was founded about forty-five years ago by that theological giant, rev. dr. bushnell, and some comrades of his, men of large intellectual calibre and more or less distinction, local or national. i was admitted to membership in it in the fall of and was an active member thenceforth until i left hartford in the summer of . the membership was restricted, in those days, to eighteen-- possibly twenty. the meetings began about the st of october and were held in the private houses of the members every fortnight thereafter throughout the cold months until the st of may. usually there were a dozen members present--sometimes as many as fifteen. there was an essay and a discussion. the essayists followed each other in alphabetical order through the season. the essayist could choose his own subject and talk twenty minutes on it, from ms. or orally, according to his preference. then the discussion followed, and each member present was allowed ten minutes in which to express his views. the wives of these people were always present. it was their privilege. it was also their privilege to keep still; they were not allowed to throw any light upon the discussion. after the discussion there was a supper, and talk, and cigars. this supper began at ten o'clock promptly, and the company broke up and went away at midnight. at least they did except upon one occasion. in my recent birthday speech i remarked upon the fact that i have always bought cheap cigars, and that is true. i have never bought costly ones. well, that night at the club meeting--as i was saying--george, our colored butler, came to me when the supper was nearly over, and i noticed that he was pale. normally his complexion was a clear black, and very handsome, but now it had modified to old amber. he said: "mr. clemens, what are we going to do? there is not a cigar in the house but those old wheeling long nines. can't nobody smoke them but you. they kill at thirty yards. it is too late to telephone--we couldn't get any cigars out from town--what can we do? ain't it best to say nothing, and let on that we didn't think?" "no," i said, "that would not be honest. fetch out the long nines"--which he did. i had just come across those "long nines" a few days or a week before. i hadn't seen a long nine for years. when i was a cub pilot on the mississippi in the late ' 's, i had had a great affection for them, because they were not only--to my mind--perfect, but you could get a basketful of them for a cent--or a dime, they didn't use cents out there in those days. so when i saw them advertised in hartford i sent for a thousand at once. they came out to me in badly battered and disreputable-looking old square pasteboard boxes, two hundred in a box. george brought a box, which was caved in on all sides, looking the worst it could, and began to pass them around. the conversation had been brilliantly animated up to that moment--but now a frost fell upon the company. that is to say, not all of a sudden, but the frost fell upon each man as he took up a cigar and held it poised in the air--and there, in the middle, his sentence broke off. that kind of thing went on all around the table, until when george had completed his crime the whole place was full of a thick solemnity and silence. those men began to light the cigars. rev. dr. parker was the first man to light. he took three or four heroic whiffs--then gave it up. he got up with the remark that he had to go to the bedside of a sick parishioner. he started out. rev. dr. burton was the next man. he took only one whiff, and followed parker. he furnished a pretext, and you could see by the sound of his voice that he didn't think much of the pretext, and was vexed with parker for getting in ahead with a fictitious ailing client. rev. mr. twichell followed, and said he had to go now because he must take the midnight train for boston. boston was the first place that occurred to him, i suppose. it was only a quarter to eleven when they began to distribute pretexts. at ten minutes to eleven all those people were out of the house. when nobody was left but george and me i was cheerful--i had no compunctions of conscience, no griefs of any kind. but george was beyond speech, because he held the honor and credit of the family above his own, and he was ashamed that this smirch had been put upon it. i told him to go to bed and try to sleep it off. i went to bed myself. at breakfast in the morning when george was passing a cup of coffee, i saw it tremble in his hand. i knew by that sign that there was something on his mind. he brought the cup to me and asked impressively, "mr. clemens, how far is it from the front door to the upper gate?" i said, "it is a hundred and twenty-five steps." he said, "mr. clemens, you can start at the front door and you can go plumb to the upper gate and tread on one of them cigars every time." it wasn't true in detail, but in essentials it was. the subject under discussion on the night in question was dreams. the talk passed from mouth to mouth in the usual serene way. i do not now remember what form my views concerning dreams took at the time. i don't remember now what my notion about dreams was then, but i do remember telling a dream by way of illustrating some detail of my speech, and i also remember that when i had finished it rev. dr. burton made that doubting remark which contained that word i have already spoken of as having been uttered by my mother, in some such connection, forty or fifty years before. i was probably engaged in trying to make those people believe that now and then, by some accident, or otherwise, a dream which was prophetic turned up in the dreamer's mind. the date of my memorable dream was about the beginning of may, . it was a remarkable dream, and i had been telling it several times every year for more than fifteen years--and now i was telling it again, here in the club. in i was a steersman on board the swift and popular new orleans and st. louis packet, "pennsylvania," captain kleinfelter. i had been lent to mr. brown, one of the pilots of the "pennsylvania," by my owner, mr. horace e. bixby, and i had been steering for brown about eighteen months, i think. then in the early days of may, , came a tragic trip--the last trip of that fleet and famous steamboat. i have told all about it in one of my books called "old times on the mississippi." but it is not likely that i told the dream in that book. it is impossible that i can ever have published it, i think, because i never wanted my mother to know about the dream, and she lived several years after i published that volume. i had found a place on the "pennsylvania" for my brother henry, who was two years my junior. it was not a place of profit, it was only a place of promise. he was "mud" clerk. mud clerks received no salary, but they were in the line of promotion. they could become, presently, third clerk and second clerk, then chief clerk--that is to say, purser. the dream begins when henry had been mud clerk about three months. we were lying in port at st. louis. pilots and steersmen had nothing to do during the three days that the boat lay in port in st. louis and new orleans, but the mud clerk had to begin his labors at dawn and continue them into the night, by the light of pine-knot torches. henry and i, moneyless and unsalaried, had billeted ourselves upon our brother-in-law, mr. moffet, as night lodgers while in port. we took our meals on board the boat. no, i mean _i_ lodged at the house, not henry. he spent the _evenings_ at the house, from nine until eleven, then went to the boat to be ready for his early duties. on the night of the dream he started away at eleven, shaking hands with the family, and said good-by according to custom. i may mention that hand-shaking as a good-by was not merely the custom of that family, but the custom of the region--the custom of missouri, i may say. in all my life, up to that time, i had never seen one member of the clemens family kiss another one--except once. when my father lay dying in our home in hannibal--the th of march, --he put his arm around my sister's neck and drew her down and kissed her, saying "let me die." i remember that, and i remember the death rattle which swiftly followed those words, which were his last. these good-bys of henry's were always executed in the family sitting-room on the second floor, and henry went from that room and down-stairs without further ceremony. but this time my mother went with him to the head of the stairs and said good-by _again_. as i remember it she was moved to this by something in henry's manner, and she remained at the head of the stairs while he descended. when he reached the door he hesitated, and climbed the stairs and shook hands good-by once more. in the morning, when i awoke i had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality, that it deceived me, and i thought it was real. in the dream i had seen henry a corpse. he lay in a metallic burial-case. he was dressed in a suit of my clothing, and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses, with a red rose in the centre. the casket stood upon a couple of chairs. i dressed, and moved toward that door, thinking i would go in there and look at it, but i changed my mind. i thought i could not yet bear to meet my mother. i thought i would wait awhile and make some preparation for that ordeal. the house was in locust street, a little above th, and i walked to th, and to the middle of the block beyond, before it suddenly flashed upon me that there was nothing real about this--it was only a dream. i can still feel something of the grateful upheaval of joy of that moment, and i can also still feel the remnant of doubt, the suspicion that maybe it _was_ real, after all. i returned to the house almost on a run, flew up the stairs two or three steps at a jump, and rushed into that sitting-room--and was made glad again, for there was no casket there. we made the usual eventless trip to new orleans--no, it was not eventless, for it was on the way down that i had the fight with mr. brown[ ] which resulted in his requiring that i be left ashore at new orleans. in new orleans i always had a job. it was my privilege to watch the freight-piles from seven in the evening until seven in the morning, and get three dollars for it. it was a three-night job and occurred every thirty-five days. henry always joined my watch about nine in the evening, when his own duties were ended, and we often walked my rounds and chatted together until midnight. this time we were to part, and so the night before the boat sailed i gave henry some advice. i said, "in case of disaster to the boat, don't lose your head--leave that unwisdom to the passengers--they are competent--they'll attend to it. but you rush for the hurricane-deck, and astern to one of the life-boats lashed aft the wheel-house, and obey the mate's orders--thus you will be useful. when the boat is launched, give such help as you can in getting the women and children into it, and be sure you don't try to get into it yourself. it is summer weather, the river is only a mile wide, as a rule, and you can swim that without any trouble." two or three days afterward the boat's boilers exploded at ship island, below memphis, early one morning--and what happened afterward i have already told in "old times on the mississippi." as related there, i followed the "pennsylvania" about a day later, on another boat, and we began to get news of the disaster at every port we touched at, and so by the time we reached memphis we knew all about it. i found henry stretched upon a mattress on the floor of a great building, along with thirty or forty other scalded and wounded persons, and was promptly informed, by some indiscreet person, that he had inhaled steam; that his body was badly scalded, and that he would live but a little while; also, i was told that the physicians and nurses were giving their whole attention to persons who had a chance of being saved. they were short-handed in the matter of physicians and nurses; and henry and such others as were considered to be fatally hurt were receiving only such attention as could be spared, from time to time, from the more urgent cases. but dr. peyton, a fine and large-hearted old physician of great reputation in the community, gave me his sympathy and took vigorous hold of the case, and in about a week he had brought henry around. dr. peyton never committed himself with prognostications which might not materialize, but at eleven o'clock one night he told me that henry was out of danger, and would get well. then he said, "at midnight these poor fellows lying here and there all over this place will begin to mourn and mutter and lament and make outcries, and if this commotion should disturb henry it will be bad for him; therefore ask the physician on watch to give him an eighth of a grain of morphine, but this is not to be done unless henry shall show signs that he is being disturbed." oh well, never mind the rest of it. the physicians on watch were young fellows hardly out of the medical college, and they made a mistake--they had no way of measuring the eighth of a grain of morphine, so they guessed at it and gave him a vast quantity heaped on the end of a knife-blade, and the fatal effects were soon apparent. i think he died about dawn, i don't remember as to that. he was carried to the dead-room and i went away for a while to a citizen's house and slept off some of my accumulated fatigue--and meantime something was happening. the coffins provided for the dead were of unpainted white pine, but in this instance some of the ladies of memphis had made up a fund of sixty dollars and bought a metallic case, and when i came back and entered the dead-room henry lay in that open case, and he was dressed in a suit of my clothing. he had borrowed it without my knowledge during our last sojourn in st. louis; and i recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these details went--and i think i missed one detail; but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the centre of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast. i told the dream there in the club that night just as i have told it here. rev. dr. burton swung his leonine head around, focussed me with his eye, and said: "when was it that this happened?" "in june, ' ." "it is a good many years ago. have you told it several times since?" "yes, i have, a good many times." "how many?" "why, i don't know how many." "well, strike an average. how many times a year do you think you have told it?" "well, i have told it as many as six times a year, possibly oftener." "very well, then you've told it, we'll say, seventy or eighty times since it happened?" "yes," i said, "that's a conservative estimate." "now then, mark, a very extraordinary thing happened to me a great many years ago, and i used to tell it a number of times--a good many times--every year, for it was so wonderful that it always astonished the hearer, and that astonishment gave me a distinct pleasure every time. i never suspected that that tale was acquiring any auxiliary advantages through repetition until one day after i had been telling it ten or fifteen years it struck me that either i was getting old, and slow in delivery, or that the tale was longer than it was when it was born. mark, i diligently and prayerfully examined that tale with this result: that i found that its proportions were now, as nearly as i could make oat, one part fact, straight fact, fact pure and undiluted, golden fact, and twenty-four parts embroidery. i never told that tale afterwards--i was never able to tell it again, for i had lost confidence in it, and so the pleasure of telling it was gone, and gone permanently. how much of this tale of yours is embroidery?" "well," i said, "i don't know. i don't think any of it is embroidery. i think it is all just as i have stated it, detail by detail." "very well," he said, "then it is all right, but i wouldn't tell it any more; because if you keep on, it will begin to collect embroidery sure. the safest thing is to stop now." that was a great many years ago. and to-day is the first time that i have told that dream since dr. burton scared me into fatal doubts about it. no, i don't believe i can say that. i don't believe that i ever really had any doubts whatever concerning the salient points of the dream, for those points are of such a nature that they are _pictures_, and pictures can be remembered, when they are vivid, much better than one can remember remarks and unconcreted facts. although it has been so many years since i have told that dream, i can see those pictures now just as clearly defined as if they were before me in this room. i have not told the entire dream. there was a good deal more of it. i mean i have not told all that happened in the dream's fulfilment. after the incident in the death-room i may mention one detail, and that is this. when i arrived in st. louis with the casket it was about eight o'clock in the morning, and i ran to my brother-in-law's place of business, hoping to find him there, but i missed him, for while i was on the way to his office he was on his way from the house to the boat. when i got back to the boat the casket was gone. he had conveyed it out to his house. i hastened thither, and when i arrived the men were just removing the casket from the vehicle to carry it up-stairs. i stopped that procedure, for i did not want my mother to see the dead face, because one side of it was drawn and distorted by the effects of the opium. when i went up-stairs, there stood the two chairs--placed to receive the coffin--just as i had seen them in my dream; and if i had arrived two or three minutes later, the casket would have been resting upon them, precisely as in my dream of several weeks before. mark twain. (_to be continued._) footnote: [ ] see "old times on the mississippi." north american review no. dcxiv. may , . chapters from my autobiography.--xvii. by mark twain. _from susy's biography of me._ _sept. , ' ._--mamma is teaching jean a little natural history and is making a little collection of insects for her. but mamma does not allow jean to kill any insects she only collects those insects that are found dead. mamma has told us all, perticularly jean, to bring her all the little dead insects that she finds. the other day as we were all sitting at supper jean broke into the room and ran triumfantly up to mamma and presented her with a plate full of dead flies. mamma thanked jean vary enthusiastically although she with difficulty concealed her amusement. just then soar mash entered the room and jean believing her hungry asked mamma for permission to give her the flies. mamma laughingly consented and the flies almost immediately dissapeared. [_monday, october , ._] sour hash's presence indicates that this adventure occurred at quarry farm. susy's biography interests itself pretty exclusively with historical facts; where they happen is not a matter of much concern to her. when other historians refer to the bunker hill monument they know it is not necessary to mention that that monument is in boston. susy recognizes that when she mentions sour mash it is not necessary to localize her. to susy, sour mash is the bunker hill monument of quarry farm. ordinary cats have some partiality for living flies, but none for dead ones; but susy does not trouble herself to apologize for sour mash's eccentricities of taste. this biography was for _us_, and susy knew that nothing that sour mash might do could startle us or need explanation, we being aware that she was not an ordinary cat, but moving upon a plane far above the prejudices and superstitions which are law to common catdom. once in hartford the flies were so numerous for a time, and so troublesome, that mrs. clemens conceived the idea of paying george[ ] a bounty on all the flies he might kill. the children saw an opportunity here for the acquisition of sudden wealth. they supposed that their mother merely wanted to accumulate dead flies, for some æsthetic or scientific reason or other, and they judged that the more flies she could get the happier she would be; so they went into business with george on a commission. straightway the dead flies began to arrive in such quantities that mrs. clemens was pleased beyond words with the success of her idea. next, she was astonished that one house could furnish so many. she was paying an extravagantly high bounty, and it presently began to look as if by this addition to our expenses we were now probably living beyond our income. after a few days there was peace and comfort; not a fly was discoverable in the house: there wasn't a straggler left. still, to mrs. clement's surprise, the dead flies continued to arrive by the plateful, and the bounty expense was as crushing as ever. then she made inquiry, and found that our innocent little rascals had established a fly trust, and had hired all the children in the neighborhood to collect flies on a cheap and unburdensome commission. mrs. clemens's experience in this matter was a new one for her, but the governments of the world had tried it, and wept over it, and discarded it, every half-century since man was created. any government could have told her that the best way to increase wolves in america, rabbits in australia, and snakes in india, is to pay a bounty on their scalps. then every patriot goes to raising them. _from susy's biography of me._ _sept. , ' ._--the other evening clara and i brought down our new soap bubble water and we all blew soap bubles. papa blew his soap bubles and filled them with tobacco smoke and as the light shone on then they took very beautiful opaline colors. papa would hold them and then let us catch them in our hand and they felt delightful to the touch the mixture of the smoke and water had a singularly pleasant effect. it is human life. we are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory--and sometimes not even that. i suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making. i remember those days of twenty-one years ago, and a certain pathos clings about them. susy, with her manifold young charms and her iridescent mind, was as lovely a bubble as any we made that day--and as transitory. she passed, as they passed, in her youth and beauty, and nothing of her is left but a heartbreak and a memory. that long-vanished day came vividly back to me a few weeks ago when, for the first time in twenty-one years, i found myself again amusing a child with smoke-charged soap-bubbles. [sidenote: ( .)] susy's next date is november th, , the eve of my fiftieth birthday. it seems a good while ago. i must have been rather young for my age then, for i was trying to tame an old-fashioned bicycle nine feet high. it is to me almost unbelievable, at my present stage of life, that there have really been people willing to trust themselves upon a dizzy and unstable altitude like that, and that i was one of them. twichell and i took lessons every day. he succeeded, and became a master of the art of riding that wild vehicle, but i had no gift in that direction and was never able to stay on mine long enough to get any satisfactory view of the planet. every time i tried to steal a look at a pretty girl, or any other kind of scenery, that single moment of inattention gave the bicycle the chance it had been waiting for, and i went over the front of it and struck the ground on my head or my back before i had time to realise that something was happening. i didn't always go over the front way; i had other ways, and practised them all; but no matter which way was chosen for me there was always one monotonous result--the bicycle skinned my leg and leaped up into the air and came down on top of me. sometimes its wires were so sprung by this violent performance that it had the collapsed look of an umbrella that had had a misunderstanding with a cyclone. after each day's practice i arrived at home with my skin hanging in ribbons, from my knees down. i plastered the ribbons on where they belonged, and bound them there with handkerchiefs steeped in pond's extract, and was ready for more adventures next day. it was always a surprise to me that i had so much skin, and that it held out so well. there was always plenty, and i soon came to understand that the supply was going to remain sufficient for all my needs. it turned out that i had nine skins, in layers, one on top of the other like the leaves of a book, and some of the doctors said it was quite remarkable. i was full of enthusiasm over this insane amusement. my teacher was a young german from the bicycle factory, a gentle, kindly, patient creature, with a pathetically grave face. he never smiled; he never made a remark; he always gathered me tenderly up when i plunged off, and helped me on again without a word. when he had been teaching me twice a day for three weeks i introduced a new gymnastic--one that he had never seen before--and so at last a compliment was wrung from him, a thing which i had been risking my life for days to achieve. he gathered me up and said mournfully: "mr. clemens, you can fall off a bicycle in more different ways than any person i ever saw before." [sidenote: ( .)] a boy's life is not all comedy; much of the tragic enters into it. the drunken tramp--mentioned in "tom sawyer" or "huck finn"--who was burned up in the village jail, lay upon my conscience a hundred nights afterward and filled them with hideous dreams--dreams in which i saw his appealing face as i had seen it in the pathetic reality, pressed against the window-bars, with the red hell glowing behind him--a face which seemed to say to me, "if you had not give me the matches, this would not have happened; you are responsible for my death." i was _not_ responsible for it, for i had meant him no harm, but only good, when i let him have the matches; but no matter, mine was a trained presbyterian conscience, and knew but the one duty--to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occasions; particularly when there was no sense or reason in it. the tramp--who was to blame--suffered ten minutes; i, who was not to blame, suffered three months. the shooting down of poor old smarr in the main street[ ] at noonday supplied me with some more dreams; and in them i always saw again the grotesque closing picture--the great family bible spread open on the profane old man's breast by some thoughtful idiot, and rising and sinking to the labored breathings, and adding the torture of its leaden weight to the dying struggles. we are curiously made. in all the throng of gaping and sympathetic onlookers there was not one with common sense enough to perceive that an anvil would have been in better taste there than the bible, less open to sarcastic criticism, and swifter in its atrocious work. in my nightmares i gasped and struggled for breath under the crush of that vast book for many a night. all within the space of a couple of years we had two or three other tragedies, and i had the ill-luck to be too near by on each occasion. there was the slave man who was struck down with a chunk of slag for some small offence; i saw him die. and the young california emigrant who was stabbed with a bowie knife by a drunken comrade: i saw the red life gush from his breast. and the case of the rowdy young hyde brothers and their harmless old uncle: one of them held the old man down with his knees on his breast while the other one tried repeatedly to kill him with an allen revolver which wouldn't go off. i happened along just then, of course. then there was the case of the young california emigrant who got drunk and proposed to raid the "welshman's house" all alone one dark and threatening night.[ ] this house stood half-way up holliday's hill ("cardiff" hill), and its sole occupants were a poor but quite respectable widow and her young and blameless daughter. the invading ruffian woke the whole village with his ribald yells and coarse challenges and obscenities. i went up there with a comrade--john briggs, i think--to look and listen. the figure of the man was dimly risible; the women were on their porch, but not visible in the deep shadow of its roof, but we heard the elder woman's voice. she had loaded an old musket with slugs, and she warned the man that if he stayed where he was while she counted ten it would cost him his life. she began to count, slowly: he began to laugh. he stopped laughing at "six"; then through the deep stillness, in a steady voice, followed the rest of the tale: "seven ... eight ... nine"--a long pause, we holding our breath--"ten!" a red spout of flame gushed out into the night, and the man dropped, with his breast riddled to rags. then the rain and the thunder burst loose and the waiting town swarmed up the hill in the glare of the lightning like an invasion of ants. those people saw the rest; i had had my share and was satisfied. i went home to dream, and was not disappointed. my teaching and training enabled me to see deeper into these tragedies than an ignorant person could have done. i knew what they were for. i tried to disguise it from myself, but down in the secret deeps of my heart i knew--and i _knew_ that i knew. they were inventions of providence to beguile me to a better life. it sounds curiously innocent and conceited, now, but to me there was nothing strange about it; it was quite in accordance with the thoughtful and judicious ways of providence as i understood them. it would not have surprised me, nor even over-flattered me, if providence had killed off that whole community in trying to save an asset like me. educated as i had been, it would have seemed just the thing, and well worth the expense. _why_ providence should take such an anxious interest in such a property--that idea never entered my head, and there was no one in that simple hamlet who would have dreamed of putting it there. for one thing, no one was equipped with it. it is quite true i took all the tragedies to myself; and tallied them off, in turn as they happened, saying to myself in each case, with a sigh, "another one gone--and on my account; this ought to bring me to repentance; his patience will not always endure." and yet privately i believed it would. that is, i believed it in the daytime; but not in the night. with the going down of the sun my faith failed, and the clammy fears gathered about my heart. it was then that i repented. those were awful nights, nights of despair, nights charged with the bitterness of death. after each tragedy i recognized the warning and repented; repented and begged; begged like a coward, begged like a dog; and not in the interest of those poor people who had been extinguished for my sake, but only in my own interest. it seems selfish, when i look back on it now. my repentances were very real, very earnest; and after each tragedy they happened every night for a long time. but as a rule they could not stand the daylight. they faded out and shredded away and disappeared in the glad splendor of the sun. they were the creatures of fear and darkness, and they could not live out of their own place. the day gave me cheer and peace, and at night i repented again. in all my boyhood life i am not sure that i ever tried to lead a better life in the daytime--or wanted to. in my age i should never think of wishing to do such a thing. but in my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. i realize that from the cradle up i have been like the rest of the race--never quite sane in the night. when "injun joe" died.[ ] ... but never mind: in another chapter i have already described what a raging hell of repentance i passed through then. i believe that for months i was as pure as the driven snow. after dark. it was back in those far-distant days-- or ' --that jim wolf came to us. he was from shelbyville, a hamlet thirty or forty miles back in the country, and he brought all his native sweetnesses and gentlenesses and simplicities with him. he was approaching seventeen, a grave and slender lad, trustful, honest, a creature to love and cling to. and he was incredibly bashful. it is to this kind that untoward things happen. my sister gave a "candy-pull" on a winter's night. i was too young to be of the company, and jim was too diffident. i was sent up to bed early, and jim followed of his own motion. his room was in the new part of the house, and his window looked out on the roof of the l annex. that roof was six inches deep in snow, and the snow had an ice-crust upon it which was as slick as glass. out of the comb of the roof projected a short chimney, a common resort for sentimental cats on moonlight nights--and this was a moonlight night. down at the eaves, below the chimney, a canopy of dead vines spread away to some posts, making a cozy shelter, and after an hour or two the rollicking crowd of young ladies and gentlemen grouped themselves in its shade, with their saucers of liquid and piping-hot candy disposed about them on the frozen ground to cool. there was joyous chaffing and joking and laughter--peal upon peal of it. about this time a couple of old disreputable tom-cats got up on the chimney and started a heated argument about something; also about this time i gave up trying to get to sleep, and went visiting to jim's room. he was awake and fuming about the cats and their intolerable yowling. i asked him, mockingly, why he didn't climb out and drive them away. he was nettled, and said over-boldly that for two cents he _would_. it was a rash remark, and was probably repented of before it was fairly out of his mouth. but it was too late--he was committed. i knew him; and i knew he would rather break his neck than back down, if i egged him on judiciously. "oh, of course you would! who's doubting it?" it galled him, and he burst out, with sharp irritation-- "maybe _you_ doubt it!" "i? oh no, i shouldn't think of such a thing. you are always doing wonderful things. with your mouth." he was in a passion, now. he snatched on his yarn socks and began to raise the window, saying in a voice unsteady with anger-- "_you_ think i dasn't--_you_ do! think what you blame please--_i_ don't care what you think. i'll show you!" the window made him rage; it wouldn't stay up. i said-- "never mind, i'll hold it." indeed, i would have done anything to help. i was only a boy, and was already in a radiant heaven of anticipation. he climbed carefully out, clung to the window-sill until his feet were safely placed, then began to pick his perilous way on all fours along the glassy comb, a foot and a hand on each side of it. i believe i enjoy it now as much as i did then: yet it is a good deal over fifty years ago. the frosty breeze flapped his short shirt about his lean legs; the crystal roof shone like polished marble in the intense glory of the moon; the unconscious cats sat erect upon the chimney, alertly watching each other, lashing their tails and pouring out their hollow grievances; and slowly and cautiously jim crept on, flapping as he went, the gay and frolicsome young creatures under the vine-canopy unaware, and outraging these solemnities with their misplaced laughter. every time jim slipped i had a hope; but always on he crept and disappointed it. at last he was within reaching distance. he paused, raised himself carefully up, measured his distance deliberately, then made a frantic grab at the nearest cat--and missed. of course he lost his balance. his heels flew up, he struck on his back, and like a rocket he darted down the roof feet first, crashed through the dead vines and landed in a sitting posture in fourteen saucers of red-hot candy, in the midst of all that party--and dressed as _he_ was: this lad who could not look a girl in the face with his clothes on. there was a wild scramble and a storm of shrieks, and jim fled up the stairs, dripping broken crockery all the way. [sidenote: ( .)] the incident was ended. but i was not done with it yet, though i supposed i was. eighteen or twenty years later i arrived in new york from california, and by that time i had failed in all my other undertakings and had stumbled into literature without intending it. this was early in . i was offered a large sum to write something for the "sunday mercury," and i answered with the tale of "jim wolf and the cats." i also collected the money for it--twenty-five dollars. it seemed over-pay, but i did not say anything about that, for i was not so scrupulous then as i am now. a year or two later "jim wolf and the cats" appeared in a tennessee paper in a new dress--as to spelling; spelling borrowed from artemus ward. the appropriator of the tale had a wide reputation in the west, and was exceedingly popular. deservedly so, i think. he wrote some of the breeziest and funniest things i have ever read, and did his work with distinguished ease and fluency. his name has passed out of my memory. a couple of years went by; then the original story--my own version--cropped up again and went floating around in the spelling, and with my name to it. soon first one paper and then another fell upon me rigorously for "stealing" jim wolf and the cats from the tennessee man. i got a merciless beating, but i did not mind it. it's all in the game. besides, i had learned, a good while before that, that it is not wise to keep the fire going under a slander unless you can get some large advantage out of keeping it alive. few slanders can stand the wear of silence. [sidenote: ( .)] [sidenote: ( .)] but i was not done with jim and the cats yet. in i was lecturing in london, in the queen's concert rooms, hanover square, and was living at the langham hotel, portland place. i had no domestic household, and no official household except george dolby, lecture-agent, and charles warren stoddard, the california poet, now ( ) professor of english literature in the roman catholic university, washington. ostensibly stoddard was my private secretary; in reality he was merely my comrade--i hired him in order to have his company. as secretary there was nothing for him to do except to scrap-book the daily reports of the great trial of the tichborne claimant for perjury. but he made a sufficient job out of that, for the reports filled six columns a day and he usually postponed the scrap-booking until sunday; then he had columns to cut out and paste in--a proper labor for hercules. he did his work well, but if he had been older and feebler it would have killed him once a week. without doubt he does his literary lectures well, but also without doubt he prepares them fifteen minutes before he is due on his platform and thus gets into them a freshness and sparkle which they might lack if they underwent the staling process of overstudy. he was good company when he was awake. he was refined, sensitive, charming, gentle, generous, honest himself and unsuspicious of other people's honesty, and i think he was the purest male i have known, in mind and speech. george dolby was something of a contrast to him, but the two were very friendly and sociable together, nevertheless. dolby was large and ruddy, full of life and strength and spirits, a tireless and energetic talker, and always overflowing with good-nature and bursting with jollity. it was a choice and satisfactory menagerie, this pensive poet and this gladsome gorilla. an indelicate story was a sharp distress to stoddard; dolby told him twenty-five a day. dolby always came home with us after the lecture, and entertained stoddard till midnight. me too. after he left, i walked the floor and talked, and stoddard went to sleep on the sofa. i hired him for company. dolby had been agent for concerts, and theatres, and charles dickens and all sorts of shows and "attractions" for many years; he had known the human being in many aspects, and he didn't much believe in him. but the poet did. the waifs and estrays found a friend in stoddard: dolby tried to persuade him that he was dispensing his charities unworthily, but he was never able to succeed. one night a young american got access to stoddard at the concert rooms and told him a moving tale. he said he was living on the surrey side, and for some strange reason his remittances had failed to arrive from home; he had no money, he was out of employment, and friendless; his girl-wife and his new baby were actually suffering for food; for the love of heaven could he lend him a sovereign until his remittances should resume? stoddard was deeply touched, and gave him a sovereign on my account. dolby scoffed, but stoddard stood his ground. each told me his story later in the evening, and i backed stoddard's judgment. dolby said we were women in disguise, and not a sane kind of women, either. the next week the young man came again. his wife was ill with the pleurisy, the baby had the bots, or something, i am not sure of the name of the disease; the doctor and the drugs had eaten up the money, the poor little family was starving. if stoddard "in the kindness of his heart could only spare him another sovereign," etc., etc. stoddard was much moved, and spared him a sovereign for me. dolby was outraged. he spoke up and said to the customer-- "now, young man, you are going to the hotel with us and state your case to the other member of the family. if you don't make him believe in you i sha'n't honor this poet's drafts in your interest any longer, for i don't believe in you myself." the young man was quite willing. i found no fault in him. on the contrary, i believed in him at once, and was solicitous to heal the wounds inflicted by dolby's too frank incredulity; therefore i did everything i could think of to cheer him up and entertain him and make him feel at home and comfortable. i spun many yarns; among others the tale of jim wolf and the cats. learning that he had done something in a small way in literature, i offered to try to find a market for him in that line. his face lighted joyfully at that, and he said that if i could only sell a small manuscript to tom hood's annual for him it would be the happiest event of his sad life and he would hold me in grateful remembrance always. that was a most pleasant night for three of us, but dolby was disgusted and sarcastic. next week the baby died. meantime i had spoken to tom hood and gained his sympathy. the young man had sent his manuscript to him, and the very day the child died the money for the ms. came--three guineas. the young man came with a poor little strip of crape around his arm and thanked me, and said that nothing could have been more timely than that money, and that his poor little wife was grateful beyond words for the service i had rendered. he wept, and in fact stoddard and i wept with him, which was but natural. also dolby wept. at least he wiped his eyes and wrung out his handkerchief, and sobbed stertorously and made other exaggerated shows of grief. stoddard and i were ashamed of dolby, and tried to make the young man understand that he meant no harm, it was only his way. the young man said sadly that he was not minding it, his grief was too deep for other hurts; that he was only thinking of the funeral, and the heavy expenses which-- we cut that short and told him not to trouble about it, leave it all to us; send the bills to mr. dolby and-- "yes," said dolby, with a mock tremor in his voice, "send them to me, and i will pay them. what, are you going? you must not go alone in your worn and broken condition; mr. stoddard and i will go with you. come, stoddard. we will comfort the bereaved mamma and get a lock of the baby's hair." it was shocking. we were ashamed of him again, and said so. but he was not disturbed. he said-- "oh, i know this kind, the woods are full of them. i'll make this offer: if he will show me his family i will give him twenty pounds. come!" the young man said he would not remain to be insulted; and he said good-night and took his hat. but dolby said he would go with him, and stay by him until he found the family. stoddard went along to soothe the young man and modify dolby. they drove across the river and all over southwark, but did not find the family. at last the young man confessed there wasn't any. the thing he sold to tom hood's annual was "jim and the cats." and he did not put my name to it. so that small tale was sold three times. i am selling it again, now. it is one of the best properties i have come across. mark twain. (_to be continued._) footnotes: [ ] the colored butler. [ ] see "adventures of huckleberry finn." [ ] used in "huck finn," i think. [ ] used in "tom sawyer." north american review no. dcxv. may , . chapters from my autobiography.--xviii. by mark twain. [_dictated december , ._] i wish to insert here some pages of susy's biography of me in which the biographer does not scatter, according to her custom, but sticks pretty steadily to a single subject until she has fought it to a finish: _feb. , ' ._--last summer while we were in elmira an article came out in the "christian union" by name "what ought he to have done" treating of the government of children, or rather giving an account of a fathers battle with his little baby boy, by the mother of the child and put in the form of a question as to whether the father disciplined the child corectly or not, different people wrote their opinions of the fathers behavior, and told what they thought he should have done. mamma had long known how to disciplin children, for in fact the bringing up of children had been one of her specialties for many years. she had a great many theories, but one of them was, that if a child was big enough to be nauty, it was big enough to be whipped and here we all agreed with her. i remember one morning when dr. ---- came up to the farm he had a long discussion with mamma, upon the following topic. mamma gave _this_ as illustrative of one important rule for punishing a child. she said we will suppose the boy has thrown a handkerchief onto the floor, i tell him to pick it up, he refuses. i tell him again, he refuses. then i say you must either pick up the handkerchief or have a whipping. my theory is never to make a child have a whipping and pick up the handkerchief too. i say "if you do not pick it up, i must punish you," if he doesn't he gets the whipping, but _i_ pick up the handkerchief, if he does he gets no punishment. i tell him to do a thing if he disobeys me he is punished for so doing, but not forced to obey me afterwards. when clara and i had been very nauty or were being very nauty, the nurse would go and call mamma and she would appear suddenly and look at us (she had a way of looking at us when she was displeased as if she could see right through us) till we were ready to sink through the floor from embarasment, and total absence of knowing what to say. this look was usually followed with "clara" or "susy what do you mean by this? do you want to come to the bath-room with me?" then followed the climax for clara and i both new only too well what going to the bath-room meant. but mamma's first and foremost object was to make the child understand that he is being punished for _his_ sake, and because the mother so loves him that she cannot allow him to do wrong; also that it is as hard for her to punish him as for him to be punished and even harder. mamma never allowed herself to punish us when she was angry with us she never struck us because she was enoyed at us and felt like striking us if we had been nauty and had enoyed her, so that she thought she felt or would show the least bit of temper toward us while punnishing us, she always postponed the punishment until _she_ was no more chafed by our behavior. she never humored herself by striking or punishing us because or while she was the least bit enoyed with us. our very worst nautinesses were punished by being taken to the bath-room and being whipped by the paper cutter. but after the whipping was over, mamma did not allow us to leave her until we were perfectly happy, and perfectly understood why we had been whipped. i never remember having felt the least bit bitterly toward mamma for punishing me. i always felt i had deserved my punishment, and was much happier for having received it. for after mamma had punished us and shown her displeasure, she showed no signs of further displeasure, but acted as if we had not displeased her in any way. ordinary punishments answered very well for susy. she was a thinker, and would reason out the purpose of them, apply the lesson, and achieve the reform required. but it was much less easy to devise punishments that would reform clara. this was because she was a philosopher who was always turning her attention to finding something good and satisfactory and entertaining in everything that came her way; consequently it was sometimes pretty discouraging to the troubled mother to find that after all her pains and thought in inventing what she meant to be a severe and reform-compelling punishment, the child had entirely missed the severities through her native disposition to get interest and pleasure out of them as novelties. the mother, in her anxiety to find a penalty that would take sharp hold and do its work effectively, at last resorted, with a sore heart, and with a reproachful conscience, to that punishment which the incorrigible criminal in the penitentiary dreads above all the other punitive miseries which the warden inflicts upon him for his good--solitary confinement in the dark chamber. the grieved and worried mother shut clara up in a very small clothes-closet and went away and left her there--for fifteen minutes--it was all that the mother-heart could endure. then she came softly back and listened--listened for the sobs, but there weren't any; there were muffled and inarticulate sounds, but they could not be construed into sobs. the mother waited half an hour longer; by that time she was suffering so intensely with sorrow and compassion for the little prisoner that she was not able to wait any longer for the distressed sounds which she had counted upon to inform her when there had been punishment enough and the reform accomplished. she opened the closet to set the prisoner free and take her back into her loving favor and forgiveness, but the result was not the one expected. the captive had manufactured a fairy cavern out of the closet, and friendly fairies out of the clothes hanging from the hooks, and was having a most sinful and unrepentant good time, and requested permission to spend the rest of the day there! _from susy's biography of me._ but mamma's oppinions and ideas upon the subject of bringing up children has always been more or less of a joke in our family, perticularly since papa's article in the "christian union," and i am sure clara and i have related the history of our old family paper-cutter, our punishments and privations with rather more pride and triumph than any other sentiment, because of mamma's way of rearing us. when the article "what ought he to have done?" came out mamma read it, and was very much interested in it. and when papa heard that she had read it he went to work and secretly wrote his opinion of what the father ought to have done. he told aunt susy, clara and i, about it but mamma was not to see it or hear any thing about it till it came out. he gave it to aunt susy to read, and after clara and i had gone up to get ready for bed he brought it up for us to read. he told what he thought the father ought to have done by telling what mamma would have done. the article was a beautiful tribute to mamma and every word in it true. but still in writing about mamma he partly forgot that the article was going to be published, i think, and expressed himself more fully than he would do the second time he wrote it; i think the article has done and will do a great deal of good, and i think it would have been perfect for the family and friend's enjoyment, but a little bit too private to have been published as it was. and papa felt so too, because the very next day or a few days after, he went down to new york to see if he couldn't get it back before it was published but it was too late, and he had to return without it. when the christian union reached the farm and papa's article in it all ready and waiting to be read to mamma papa hadn't the courage to show it to her (for he knew she wouldn't like it at all) at first, and he didn't but he might have let it go and never let her see it, but finally he gave his consent to her seeing it, and told clara and i we could take it to her, which we did, with tardiness, and we all stood around mamma while she read it, all wondering what she would say and think about it. she was too much surprised, (and pleased privately, too) to say much at first, but as we all expected publicly, (or rather when she remembered that this article was to be read by every one that took the christian union) she was rather shocked and a little displeased. clara and i had great fun the night papa gave it to us to read and then hide, so mamma couldn't see it, for just as we were in the midst of reading it mamma appeared, papa following anxiously and asked why we were not in bed? then a scuffle ensued for we told her it was a secret and tried to hide it; but she chased us wherever we went, till she thought it was time for us to go to bed, then she surendered and left us to tuck it under clara's matress. a little while after the article was published letters began to come in to papa crittisizing it, there were some very pleasant ones but a few very disagreable. one of these, the very worst, mamma got hold of and read, to papa's great regret, it was full of the most disagreble things, and so very enoying to papa that he for a time felt he must do something to show the author of it his great displeasure at being so insulted. but he finally decided not to, because he felt the man had some cause for feeling enoyed at, for papa had spoken of him, (he was the baby's father) rather slightingly in his christian union article. after all this, papa and mamma both wished i think they might never hear or be spoken to on the subject of the christian union article, and whenever any has spoken to me and told me "how much they did enjoy my father's article in the christian union" i almost laughed in their faces when i remembered what a great variety of oppinions had been expressed upon the subject of the christian union article of papa's. the article was written in july or august and just the other day papa received quite a bright letter from a gentleman who has read the c. u. article and gave his opinion of it in these words. it is missing. she probably put the letter between the leaves of the biography and it got lost out. she threw away the hostile letters, but tried to keep the pleasantest one for her book; surely there has been no kindlier biographer than this one. yet to a quite creditable degree she is loyal to the responsibilities of her position as historian--not eulogist--and honorably gives me a quiet prod now and then. but how many, many, many she has withheld that i deserved! i could prize them now; there would be no acid in her words, and it is loss to me that she did not set them all down. oh, susy, you sweet little biographer, you break my old heart with your gentle charities! i think a great deal of her work. her canvases are on their easels, and her brush flies about in a care-free and random way, delivering a dash here, a dash there and another yonder, and one might suppose that there would be no definite result; on the contrary i think that an intelligent reader of her little book must find that by the time he has finished it he has somehow accumulated a pretty clear and nicely shaded idea of the several members of this family--including susy herself--and that the random dashes on the canvases have developed into portraits. i feel that my own portrait, with some of the defects fined down and others left out, is here; and i am sure that any who knew the mother will recognize her without difficulty, and will say that the lines are drawn with a just judgment and a sure hand. little creature though susy was, the penetration which was born in her finds its way to the surface more than once in these pages. before susy began the biography she let fall a remark now and then concerning my character which showed that she had it under observation. in the record which we kept of the children's sayings there is an instance of this. she was twelve years old at the time. we had established a rule that each member of the family must bring a fact to breakfast--a fact drawn from a book or from any other source; any fact would answer. susy's first contribution was in substance as follows. two great exiles and former opponents in war met in ephesus--scipio and hannibal. scipio asked hannibal to name the greatest general the world had produced. "alexander"--and he explained why. "and the next greatest?" "pyrrhus"--and he explained why. "but where do you place yourself, then?" "if i had conquered you i would place myself before the others." susy's grave comment was-- "that _attracted_ me, it was just like papa--he is so frank about his books." so frank in admiring them, she meant. [_thursday, march , ._] some months ago i commented upon a chapter of susy's biography wherein she very elaborately discussed an article about the training and disciplining of children, which i had published in the "christian union" (this was twenty-one years ago), an article which was full of worshipful praises of mrs. clemens as a mother, and which little clara, and susy, and i had been hiding from this lovely and admirable mother because we knew she would disapprove of public and printed praises of herself. at the time that i was dictating these comments, several months ago, i was trying to call back to my memory some of the details of that article, but i was not able to do it, and i wished i had a copy of the article so that i could see what there was about it which gave it such large interest for susy. yesterday afternoon i elected to walk home from the luncheon at the st. regis, which is in th street and fifth avenue, for it was a fine spring day and i hadn't had a walk for a year or two, and felt the need of exercise. as i walked along down fifth avenue the desire to see that "christian union" article came into my head again. i had just reached the corner of nd street then, and there was the usual jam of wagons, carriages, and automobiles there. i stopped to let it thin out before trying to cross the street, but a stranger, who didn't require as much room as i do, came racing by and darted into a crack among the vehicles and made the crossing. but on his way past me he thrust a couple of ancient newspaper clippings into my hand, and said, "there, you don't know me, but i have saved them in my scrap-book for twenty years, and it occurred to me this morning that perhaps you would like to see them, so i was carrying them down-town to mail them, i not expecting to run across you in this accidental way, of course; but i will give them into your own hands now. good-by!"--and he disappeared among the wagons. those scraps which he had put into my hand were ancient newspaper copies of that "christian union" article! it is a handsome instance of mental telegraphy--or if it isn't that, it is a handsome case of coincidence. _from the biography._ _march th, ' ._--mr. laurence barrette and mr. and mrs. hutton were here a little while ago, and we had a very interesting visit from them. papa said mr. barette never had acted so well before when he had seen him, as he did the first night he was staying with us. and mrs. ---- said she never had seen an actor on the stage, whom she more wanted to speak with. papa has been very much interested of late, in the "mind cure" theory. and in fact so have we all. a young lady in town has worked wonders by using the "mind cure" upon people; she is constantly busy now curing peoples deseases in this way--and curing her own even, which to me seems the most remarkable of all. a little while past, papa was delighted with the knowledge of what he thought the best way of curing a cold, which was by starving it. this starving did work beautifully, and freed him from a great many severe colds. now he says it wasn't the starving that helped his colds, but the trust in the starving, the mind cure connected with the starving. i shouldn't wonder if we finally became firm believers in mind cure. the next time papa has a cold, i haven't a doubt, he will send for miss h---- the young lady who is doctoring in the "mind cure" theory, to cure him of it. mamma was over at mrs. george warners to lunch the other day, and miss h---- was there too. mamma asked if anything as natural as near sightedness could be cured she said oh yes just as well as other deseases. when mamma came home, she took me into her room, and told me that perhaps my near-sightedness could be cured by the "mind cure" and that she was going to have me try the treatment any way, there could be no harm in it, and there might be great good. if her plan succeeds there certainly will be a great deal in "mind cure" to my oppinion, for i am very near sighted and so is mamma, and i never expected there could be any more cure for it than for blindness, but now i dont know but what theres a cure for _that_. it was a disappointment; her near-sightedness remained with her to the end. she was born with it, no doubt; yet, strangely enough, she must have been four years old, and possibly five, before we knew of its existence. it is not easy to understand how that could have happened. i discovered the defect by accident. i was half-way up the hall stairs one day at home, and was leading her by the hand, when i glanced back through the open door of the dining-room and saw what i thought she would recognise as a pretty picture. it was "stray kit," the slender, the graceful, the sociable, the beautiful, the incomparable, the cat of cats, the tortoise-shell, curled up as round as a wheel and sound asleep on the fire-red cover of the dining-table, with a brilliant stream of sunlight falling across her. i exclaimed about it, but susy said she could see nothing there, neither cat nor table-cloth. the distance was so slight--not more than twenty feet, perhaps--that if it had been any other child i should not have credited the statement. _from the biography._ _march th, ' ._--clara sprained her ankle, a little while ago, by running into a tree, when coasting, and while she was unable to walk with it she played solotaire with cards a great deal. while clara was sick and papa saw her play solotaire so much, he got very much interested in the game, and finally began to play it himself a little, then jean took it up, and at last _mamma_, even played it ocasionally; jean's and papa's love for it rapidly increased, and now jean brings the cards every night to the table and papa and mamma help her play, and before dinner is at an end, papa has gotten a separate pack of cards, and is playing alone, with great interest. mamma and clara next are made subject to the contagious solatair, and there are four solotaireans at the table; while you hear nothing but "fill up the place" etc. it is dreadful! after supper clara goes into the library, and gets a little red mahogany table, and placing it under the gas fixture seats herself and begins to play again, then papa follows with another table of the same discription, and they play solatair till bedtime. we have just had our prince and pauper pictures taken; two groups and some little single ones. the groups (the interview and lady jane grey scene) were pretty good, the lady jane scene was perfect, just as pretty as it could be, the interview was not so good; and two of the little single pictures were very good indeed, but one was very bad. yet on the whole we think they were a success. papa has done a great deal in his life i think, that is good, and very remarkable, but i think if he had had the advantages with which he could have developed the gifts which he has made no use of in writing his books, or in any other way for other peoples pleasure and benefit outside of his own family and intimate friends, he could have done _more_ than he has and a great deal more even. he is known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in him that is earnest than that is humorous. he has a keen sense of the ludicrous, notices funny stories and incidents knows how to tell them, to improve upon them, and does not forget them. he has been through a great many of the funny adventures related in "tom sawyer" and in "huckleberry finn," _himself_ and he lived among just such boys, and in just such villages all the days of his early life. his "prince and pauper" is his most orriginal, and best production; it shows the most of any of his books what kind of pictures are in his mind, usually. not that the pictures of england in the th century and the adventures of a little prince and pauper are the kind of things he mainly thinks about; but that _that_ book, and those pictures represent the train of thought and imagination he would be likely to be thinking of to-day, to-morrow, or next day, more nearly than those given in "tom sawyer" or "huckleberry finn."[ ] papa can make exceedingly bright jokes, and he enjoys funny things, and when he is with people he jokes and laughs a great deal, but still he is more interested in earnest books and earnest subjects to talk upon, than in humorous ones.[ ] when we are all alone at home, nine times out of ten, he talks about some very earnest subjects, (with an ocasional joke thrown in) and he a good deal more often talks upon such subjects than upon the other kind. he is as much of a pholosopher as anything i think. i think he could have done a great deal in this direction if he had studied while young, for he seems to enjoy reasoning out things, no matter what; in a great many such directions he has greater ability than in the gifts which have made him famous. thus at fourteen she had made up her mind about me, and in no timorous or uncertain terms had set down her reasons for her opinion. fifteen years were to pass before any other critic--except mr. howells, i think--was to reutter that daring opinion and print it. right or wrong, it was a brave position for that little analyser to take. she never withdrew it afterward, nor modified it. she has spoken of herself as lacking physical courage, and has evinced her admiration of clara's; but she had moral courage, which is the rarest of human qualities, and she kept it functionable by exercising it. i think that in questions of morals and politics she was usually on my side; but when she was not she had her reasons and maintained her ground. two years after she passed out of my life i wrote a philosophy. of the three persons who have seen the manuscript only one understood it, and all three condemned it. if she could have read it, she also would have condemned it, possibly,--probably, in fact--but she would have understood it. it would have had no difficulties for her on that score; also she would have found a tireless pleasure in analyzing and discussing its problems. mark twain. (_to be continued._) footnotes: [ ] it is so yet--m. t. [ ] she has said it well and correctly. humor is a subject which has never had much interest for me. this is why i have never examined it, nor written about it nor used it as a topic for a speech. a hundred times it has been offered me as a topic in these past forty years, but in no case has it attracted me.--m. t. north american review no. dcxvi. june , . chapters from my autobiography.--xix. by mark twain. _from susy's biography of me._ _march , ' ._--the other day was my birthday, and i had a little birthday party in the evening and papa acted some very funny charades with mr. gherhardt, mr. jesse grant (who had come up from new york and was spending the evening with us) and mr. frank warner. one of them was "on his knees" honys-sneeze. there were a good many other funny ones, all of which i dont remember. mr. grant was very pleasant, and began playing the charades in the most delightful way. susy's spelling has defeated me, this time. i cannot make out what "honys-sneeze" stands for. impromptu charades were almost a nightly pastime of ours, from the children's earliest days--they played in them with me when they were only five or six years old. as they increased in years and practice their love for the sport almost amounted to a passion, and they acted their parts with a steadily increasing ability. at first they required much drilling; but later they were generally ready as soon as the parts were assigned, and they acted them according to their own devices. their stage facility and absence of constraint and self-consciousness in the "prince and pauper" was a result of their charading practice. at ten and twelve susy wrote plays, and she and daisy warner and clara played them in the library or up-stairs in the school-room, with only themselves and the servants for audience. they were of a tragic and tremendous sort, and were performed with great energy and earnestness. they were dramatized (freely) from english history, and in them mary queen of scots and elizabeth had few holidays. the clothes were borrowed from the mother's wardrobe and the gowns were longer than necessary, but that was not regarded as a defect. in one of these plays jean (three years old, perhaps) was sir francis bacon. she was not dressed for the part, and did not have to say anything, but sat silent and decorous at a tiny table and was kept busy signing death-warrants. it was a really important office, for few entered those plays and got out of them alive. _march ._--mamma and papa have been in new york for two or three days, and miss corey has been staying with us. they are coming home to-day at two o'clock. papa has just begun to play chess, and he is very fond of it, so he has engaged to play with mrs. charles warner every morning from to , he came down to supper last night, full of this pleasant prospect, but evidently with something on his mind. finally he said to mamma in an appologetical tone, susy warner and i have a plan. "well" mamma said "what now, i wonder?" papa said that susy warner and he were going to name the chess after some of the old bible heroes, and then play chess on sunday. _april , ' ._--mamma and papa clara and daisy have gone to new york to see the "mikado." they are coming home to-night at half past seven. last winter when mr. cable was lecturing with papa, he wrote this letter to him just before he came to visit us. dear uncle,--that's one nice thing about me, i never bother any one, to offer me a good thing twice. you dont ask me to stay over sunday, but then you dont ask me to leave saturday night, and knowing the nobility of your nature as i do--thank you, i'll stay till monday morning.[ ] your's and the dear familie's george w. cable. [_december , ._] it seems a prodigious while ago! two or three nights ago i dined at a friend's house with a score of other men, and at my side was cable--actually almost an old man, really almost an old man, that once so young chap! years old, frost on his head, seven grandchildren in stock, and a brand-new wife to re-begin life with! [_dictated nov. , ._] ever since papa and mamma were married, papa has written his books and then taken them to mamma in manuscript and she has expergated them. papa read "huckleberry finn" to us in manuscript just before it came out, and then he would leave parts of it with mamma to expergate, while he went off up to the study to work, and sometimes clara and i would be sitting with mamma while she was looking the manuscript over, and i remember so well, with what pangs of regret we used to see her turn down the leaves of the pages, which meant that some delightfully dreadful part must be scratched out. and i remember one part pertickularly which was perfectly fascinating it was dreadful, that clara and i used to delight in, and oh with what dispair we saw mamma turn down the leaf on which it was written, we thought the book would be almost ruined without it. but we gradually came to feel as mamma did. it would be a pity to replace the vivacity and quaintness and felicity of susy's innocent free spelling with the dull and petrified uniformities of the spelling-book. nearly all the grimness it taken out of the "expergating" of my books by the subtle mollification accidentally infused into the word by susy's modification of the spelling of it. i remember the special case mentioned by susy, and can see the group yet--two-thirds of it pleading for the life of the culprit sentence that was so fascinatingly dreadful and the other third of it patiently explaining why the court could not grant the prayer of the pleaders; but i do not remember what the condemned phrase was. it had much company, and they all went to the gallows; but it is possible that that specially dreadful one which gave those little people so much delight was cunningly devised and put into the book for just that function, and not with any hope or expectation that it would get by the "exper-gator" alive. it is possible, for i had that custom. susy's quaint and effective spelling falls quite opportunely into to-day's atmosphere, which is heavy with the rumblings and grumblings and mutterings of the simplified spelling reform. andrew carnegie started this storm, a couple of years ago, by moving a simplifying of english orthography, and establishing a fund for the prosecution and maintenance of the crusade. he began gently. he addressed a circular to some hundreds of his friends, asking them to simplify the spelling of a dozen of our badly spelt words--i think they were only words which end with the superfluous _ugh_. he asked that these friends use the suggested spellings in their private correspondence. by this, one perceives that the beginning was sufficiently quiet and unaggressive. next stage: a small committee was appointed, with brander matthews for managing director and spokesman. it issued a list of three hundred words, of average silliness as to spelling, and proposed new and sane spellings for these words. the president of the united states, unsolicited, adopted these simplified three hundred officially, and ordered that they be used in the official documents of the government. it was now remarked, by all the educated and the thoughtful except the clergy that sheol was to pay. this was most justly and comprehensively descriptive. the indignant british lion rose, with a roar that was heard across the atlantic, and stood there on his little isle, gazing, red-eyed, out over the glooming seas, snow-flecked with driving spindrift, and lathing his tail--a most scary spectacle to see. the lion was outraged because we, a nation of children, without any grown-up people among us, with no property in the language, but using it merely by courtesy of its owner the english nation, were trying to defile the sacredness of it by removing from it peculiarities which had been its ornament and which had made it holy and beautiful for ages. in truth there is a certain sardonic propriety in preserving our orthography, since ours is a mongrel language which started with a child's vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smouched from every unwatched language under the sun, the spelling of each individual word of the lot locating the source of the theft and preserving the memory of the revered crime. why is it that i have intruded into this turmoil and manifested a desire to get our orthography purged of its asininities? indeed i do not know why i should manifest any interest in the matter, for at bottom i disrespect our orthography most heartily, and as heartily disrespect everything that has been said by anybody in defence of it. nothing professing to be a defence of our ludicrous spellings has had any basis, so far as my observation goes, except sentimentality. in these "arguments" the term venerable is used instead of mouldy, and hallowed instead of devilish; whereas there is nothing properly venerable or antique about a language which is not yet four hundred years old, and about a jumble of imbecile spellings which were grotesque in the beginning, and which grow more and more grotesque with the flight of the years. [_dictated monday, november , ._] jean and papa were walking out past the barn the other day when jean saw some little newly born baby ducks, she exclaimed as she perceived them "i dont see why god gives us so much ducks when patrick kills them so." susy is mistaken as to the origin of the ducks. they were not a gift, i bought them. i am not finding fault with her, for that would be most unfair. she is remarkably accurate in her statements as a historian, as a rule, and it would not be just to make much of this small slip of hers; besides i think it was a quite natural slip, for by heredity and habit ours was a religious household, and it was a common thing with us whenever anybody did a handsome thing, to give the credit of it to providence, without examining into the matter. this may be called automatic religion--in fact that is what it is; it is so used to its work that it can do it without your help or even your privity; out of all the facts and statistics that may be placed before it, it will always get the one result, since it has never been taught to seek any other. it is thus the unreflecting cause of much injustice. as we have seen, it betrayed susy into an injustice toward me. it had to be automatic, for she would have been far from doing me an injustice when in her right mind. it was a dear little biographer, and she meant me no harm, and i am not censuring her now, but am only desirous of correcting in advance an erroneous impression which her words would be sure to convey to a reader's mind. no elaboration of this matter is necessary; it is sufficient to say _i_ provided the ducks. it was in hartford. the greensward sloped down-hill from the house to the sluggish little river that flowed through the grounds, and patrick, who was fertile in good ideas, had early conceived the idea of having home-made ducks for our table. every morning he drove them from the stable down to the river, and the children were always there to see and admire the waddling white procession; they were there again at sunset to see patrick conduct the procession back to its lodgings in the stable. but this was not always a gay and happy holiday show, with joy in it for the witnesses; no, too frequently there was a tragedy connected with it, and then there were tears and pain for the children. there was a stranded log or two in the river, and on these certain families of snapping-turtles used to congregate and drowse in the sun and give thanks, in their dumb way, to providence for benevolence extended to them. it was but another instance of misplaced credit; it was the young ducks that those pious reptiles were so thankful for--whereas they were _my_ ducks. i bought the ducks. when a crop of young ducks, not yet quite old enough for the table but approaching that age, began to join the procession, and paddle around in the sluggish water, and give thanks--not to me--for that privilege, the snapping-turtles would suspend their songs of praise and slide off the logs and paddle along under the water and chew the feet of the young ducks. presently patrick would notice that two or three of those little creatures were not moving about, but were apparently at anchor, and were not looking as thankful as they had been looking a short time before. he early found out what that sign meant--a submerged snapping-turtle was taking his breakfast, and silently singing his gratitude. every day or two patrick would rescue and fetch up a little duck with incomplete legs to stand upon--nothing left of their extremities but gnawed and bleeding stumps. then the children said pitying things and wept--and at dinner we finished the tragedy which the turtles had begun. thus, as will be seen--out of season, at least--it was really the turtles that gave us so much ducks. at my expense. papa has written a new version of "there is a happy land" it is-- "there is a boarding-house far, far away, where they have ham and eggs, three times a day. oh dont those boarders yell when they hear the dinner-bell, they give that land-lord rats three times a day." again susy has made a small error. it was not i that wrote the song. i heard billy rice sing it in the negro minstrel show, and i brought it home and sang it--with great spirit--for the elevation of the household. the children admired it to the limit, and made me sing it with burdensome frequency. to their minds it was superior to the battle hymn of the republic. how many years ago that was! where now is billy rice? he was a joy to me, and so were the other stars of the nigger-show--billy birch, david wambold, backus, and a delightful dozen of their brethren, who made life a pleasure to me forty years ago, and later. birch, wambold, and backus are gone years ago; and with them departed to return no more forever, i suppose, the real nigger-show--the genuine nigger-show, the extravagant nigger-show,--the show which to me had no peer and whose peer has not yet arrived, in my experience. we have the grand opera; and i have witnessed, and greatly enjoyed, the first act of everything which wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever i have witnessed two acts i have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever i have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide. but if i could have the nigger-show back again, in its pristine purity and perfection, i should have but little further use for opera. it seems to me that to the elevated mind and the sensitive spirit the hand-organ and the nigger-show are a standard and a summit to whose rarefied altitude the other forms of musical art may not hope to reach. [_dictated september , ._] it is years since i have examined "the children's record." i have turned over a few of its pages this morning. this book is a record in which mrs. clemens and i registered some of the sayings and doings of the children, in the long ago, when they were little chaps. of course, we wrote these things down at the time because they were of momentary interest--things of the passing hour, and of no permanent value--but at this distant day i find that they still possess an interest for me and also a value, because it turns out that they were _registrations of character_. the qualities then revealed by fitful glimpses, in childish acts and speeches, remained as a permanency in the children's characters in the drift of the years, and were always afterwards clearly and definitely recognizable. there is a masterful streak in jean that now and then moves her to set my authority aside for a moment and end a losing argument in that prompt and effective fashion. and here in this old book i find evidence that she was just like that before she was quite four years old. _from the children's record. quarry farm, july , ._--yesterday evening our cows (after being inspected and worshipped by jean from the shed for an hour,) wandered off down into the pasture, and left her bereft. i thought i was going to get back home, now, but that was an error. jean knew of some more cows, in a field somewhere, and took my hand and led me thitherward. when we turned the corner and took the right-hand road, i saw that we should presently be out of range of call and sight; so i began to argue against continuing the expedition, and jean began to argue in favor of it--she using english for light skirmishing, and german for "business." i kept up my end with vigor, and demolished her arguments in detail, one after the other, till i judged i had her about cornered. she hesitated a moment, then answered up sharply: "_wir werden nichts mehr darüber sprechen!_" (we won't talk any more about it!) it nearly took my breath away; though i thought i might possibly have misunderstood. i said: "why, you little rascal! _was hast du gesagt?_" but she said the same words over again, and in the same decided way. i suppose i ought to have been outraged; but i wasn't, i was charmed. and i suppose i ought to have spanked her; but i didn't, i fraternized with the enemy, and we went on and spent half an hour with the cows. that incident is followed in the "record" by the following paragraph, which is another instance of a juvenile characteristic maintaining itself into mature age. susy was persistently and conscientiously truthful throughout her life with the exception of one interruption covering several months, and perhaps a year. this was while she was still a little child. suddenly--not gradually--she began to lie; not furtively, but frankly, openly, and on a scale quite disproportioned to her size. her mother was so stunned, so nearly paralyzed for a day or two, that she did not know what to do with the emergency. reasonings, persuasions, beseechings, all went for nothing; they produced no effect; the lying went tranquilly on. other remedies were tried, but they failed. there is a tradition that success was finally accomplished by whipping. i think the record says so, but if it does it is because the record is incomplete. whipping was indeed tried, and was faithfully kept up during two or three weeks, but the results were merely temporary; the reforms achieved were discouragingly brief. fortunately for susy, an incident presently occurred which put a complete stop to all the mother's efforts in the direction of reform. this incident was the chance discovery in darwin of a passage which said that when a child exhibits a sudden and unaccountable disposition to forsake the truth and restrict itself to lying, the explanation must be sought away back in the past; that an ancestor of the child had had the same disease, at the same tender age; that it was irremovable by persuasion or punishment, and that it had ceased as suddenly and as mysteriously as it had come, when it had run its appointed course. i think mr. darwin said that nothing was necessary but to leave the matter alone and let the malady have its way and perish by the statute of limitations. we had confidence in darwin, and after that day susy was relieved of our reformatory persecutions. she went on lying without let or hindrance during several months, or a year; then the lying suddenly ceased, and she became as conscientiously and exactingly truthful as she had been before the attack, and she remained so to the end of her life. the paragraph in the record to which i have been leading up is in my handwriting, and is of a date so long posterior to the time of the lying malady that she had evidently forgotten that truth-speaking had ever had any difficulties for her. mama was speaking of a servant who had been pretty unveracious, but was now "trying to tell the truth." susy was a good deal surprised, and said she shouldn't think anybody would have to _try_ to tell the truth. in the record the children's acts and speeches quite definitely define their characters. susy's indicated the presence of mentality-- thought--and they were generally marked by gravity. she was timid, on her physical side, but had an abundance of moral courage. clara was sturdy, independent, orderly, practical, persistent, plucky--just a little animal, and very satisfactory. charles dudley warner said susy was made of mind, and clara of matter. when motley, the kitten, died, some one said that the thoughts of the two children need not be inquired into, they could be divined: that susy was wondering if this was the _end_ of motley, and had his life been worth while; whereas clara was merely interested in seeing to it that there should be a creditable funeral. in those days susy was a dreamer, a thinker, a poet and philosopher, and clara--well, clara wasn't. in after-years a passion for music developed the latent spirituality and intellectuality in clara, and her practicality took second and, in fact, even third place. jean was from the beginning orderly, steady, diligent, persistent; and remains so. she picked up languages easily, and kept them. _susy aged eleven, jean three._--susy said the other day when she saw jean bringing a cat to me of her own motion, "jean has found out already that mamma loves morals and papa loves cats." it is another of susy's remorselessly sound verdicts. as a child, jean neglected my books. when she was nine years old will gillette invited her and the rest of us to a dinner at the murray hill hotel in new york, in order that we might get acquainted with mrs. leslie and her daughters. elsie leslie was nine years old, and was a great celebrity on the stage. jean was astonished and awed to see that little slip of a thing sit up at table and take part in the conversation of the grown people, capably and with ease and tranquillity. poor jean was obliged to keep still, for the subjects discussed never happened to hit her level, but at last the talk fell within her limit and she had her chance to contribute to it. "tom sawyer" was mentioned. jean spoke gratefully up and said, "i know who wrote that book--harriet beecher stowe!" one evening susy had prayed, clara was curled up for sleep; she was reminded that it was her turn to pray now. she laid "oh! one's enough," and dropped off to slumber. _clara five years old._--we were in germany. the nurse, rosa, was not allowed to speak to the children otherwise than in german. clara grew very tired of it; by and by the little creature's patience was exhausted, and she said "aunt clara, i wish god had made rosa in english." _clara four years old, susy six._--this morning when clara discovered that this is my birthday, she was greatly troubled because she had provided no gift for me, and repeated her sorrow several times. finally she went musing to the nursery and presently returned with her newest and dearest treasure, a large toy horse, and said, "you shall have this horse for your birthday, papa." i accepted it with many thanks. after an hour she was racing up and down the room with the horse, when susy said, "why clara, you gave that horse to papa, and now you've tooken it again." _clara._--"i never give it to him for always; i give it to him for his birthday." in geneva, in september, i lay abed late one morning, and as clara was passing through the room i took her on my bed a moment. then the child went to clara spaulding and said, "aunt clara, papa is a good deal of trouble to me." "is he? why?" "well, he wants me to get in bed with him, and i can't do that with jelmuls [gentlemen]--i don't like jelmuls anyway." "what, you don't like gentlemen! don't you like uncle theodore crane?" "oh yes, but he's not a jelmul, he's a friend." mark twain. (_to be continued._) footnote: [ ] cable never travelled sundays. north american review no. dcxviii. july , . chapters from my autobiography.--xx. by mark twain. [sidenote: ( .)] [_notes on "innocents abroad." dictated in florence, italy, april, ._]--i will begin with a note upon the dedication. i wrote the book in the months of march and april, , in san francisco. it was published in august, . three years afterward mr. goodman, of virginia city, nevada, on whose newspaper i had served ten years before, came east, and we were walking down broadway one day when he said: "how did you come to steal oliver wendell holmes's dedication and put it in your book?" i made a careless and inconsequential answer, for i supposed he was joking. but he assured me that he was in earnest. he said: "i'm not discussing the question of whether you stole it or didn't--for that is a question that can be settled in the first bookstore we come to--i am only asking you _how_ you came to steal it, for that is where my curiosity is focalized." i couldn't accommodate him with this information, as i hadn't it in stock. i could have made oath that i had not stolen anything, therefore my vanity was not hurt nor my spirit troubled. at bottom i supposed that he had mistaken another book for mine, and was now getting himself into an untenable place and preparing sorrow for himself and triumph for me. we entered a bookstore and he asked for "the innocents abroad" and for the dainty little blue and gold edition of dr. oliver wendell holmes's poems. he opened the books, exposed their dedications and said: "read them. it is plain that the author of the second one stole the first one, isn't it?" i was very much ashamed, and unspeakably astonished. we continued our walk, but i was not able to throw any gleam of light upon that original question of his. i could not remember ever having seen dr. holmes's dedication. i knew the poems, but the dedication was new to me. i did not get hold of the key to that secret until months afterward, then it came in a curious way, and yet it was a natural way; for the natural way provided by nature and the construction of the human mind for the discovery of a forgotten event is to employ another forgotten event for its resurrection. [sidenote: ( .)] i received a letter from the rev. dr. rising, who had been rector of the episcopal church in virginia city in my time, in which letter dr. rising made reference to certain things which had happened to us in the sandwich islands six years before; among things he made casual mention of the honolulu hotel's poverty in the matter of literature. at first i did not see the bearing of the remark, it called nothing to my mind. but presently it did--with a flash! there was but one book in mr. kirchhof's hotel, and that was the first volume of dr. holmes's blue and gold series. i had had a fortnight's chance to get well acquainted with its contents, for i had ridden around the big island (hawaii) on horseback and had brought back so many saddle boils that if there had been a duty on them it would have bankrupted me to pay it. they kept me in my room, unclothed, and in persistent pain for two weeks, with no company but cigars and the little volume of poems. of course i read them almost constantly; i read them from beginning to end, then read them backwards, then began in the middle and read them both ways, then read them wrong end first and upside down. in a word, i read the book to rags, and was infinitely grateful to the hand that wrote it. here we have an exhibition of what repetition can do, when persisted in daily and hourly over a considerable stretch of time, where one is merely reading for entertainment, without thought or intention of preserving in the memory that which is read. it is a process which in the course of years dries all the juice out of a familiar verse of scripture, leaving nothing but a sapless husk behind. in that case you at least know the origin of the husk, but in the case in point i apparently preserved the husk but presently forgot whence it came. it lay lost in some dim corner of my memory a year or two, then came forward when i needed a dedication, and was promptly mistaken by me as a child of my own happy fancy. i was new, i was ignorant, the mysteries of the human mind were a sealed book to me as yet, and i stupidly looked upon myself as a tough and unforgivable criminal. i wrote to dr. holmes and told him the whole disgraceful affair, implored him in impassioned language to believe that i had never intended to commit this crime, and was unaware that i had committed it until i was confronted with the awful evidence. i have lost his answer, i could better have afforded to lose an uncle. of these i had a surplus, many of them of no real value to me, but that letter was beyond price, beyond uncledom, and unsparable. in it dr. holmes laughed the kindest and healingest laugh over the whole matter, and at considerable length and in happy phrase assured me that there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism; that i committed it every day, that he committed it every day, that every man alive on the earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he opens his mouth; that all our phrasings are spiritualized shadows cast multitudinously from our readings; that no happy phrase of ours is ever quite original with us, there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings and associations; that this slight change differentiates it from another man's manner of saying it, stamps it with our special style, and makes it our own for the time being; all the rest of it being old, moldy, antique, and smelling of the breath of a thousand generations of them that have passed it over their teeth before! in the thirty-odd years which have come and gone since then, i have satisfied myself that what dr. holmes said was true. i wish to make a note upon the preface of the "innocents." in the last paragraph of that brief preface, i speak of the proprietors of the "daily alta california" having "waived their rights" in certain letters which i wrote for that journal while absent on the "quaker city" trip. i was young then, i am white-headed now, but the insult of that word rankles yet, now that i am reading that paragraph for the first time in many years, reading it for the first time since it was written, perhaps. there were rights, it is true--such rights as the strong are able to acquire over the weak and the absent. early in ' george barnes invited me to resign my reportership on his paper, the san francisco "morning call," and for some months thereafter i was without money or work; then i had a pleasant turn of fortune. the proprietors of the "sacramento union," a great and influential daily journal, sent me to the sandwich islands to write four letters a month at twenty dollars apiece. i was there four or five months, and returned to find myself about the best known honest man on the pacific coast. thomas mcguire, proprietor of several theatres, said that now was the time to make my fortune--strike while the iron was hot!--break into the lecture field! i did it. i announced a lecture on the sandwich islands, closing the advertisement with the remark, "admission one dollar; doors open at half-past , the trouble begins at ." a true prophecy. the trouble certainly did begin at , when i found myself in front of the only audience i had ever faced, for the fright which pervaded me from head to foot was paralyzing. it lasted two minutes and was as bitter as death, the memory of it is indestructible, but it had its compensations, for it made me immune from timidity before audiences for all time to come. i lectured in all the principal californian towns and in nevada, then lectured once or twice more in san francisco, then retired from the field rich--for me--and laid out a plan to sail westward from san francisco, and go around the world. the proprietors of the "alta" engaged me to write an account of the trip for that paper--fifty letters of a column and a half each, which would be about two thousand words per letter, and the pay to be twenty dollars per letter. i went east to st. louis to say good-bye to my mother, and then i was bitten by the prospectus of captain duncan of the "quaker city" excursion, and i ended by joining it. during the trip i wrote and sent the fifty letters; six of them miscarried, and i wrote six new ones to complete my contract. then i put together a lecture on the trip and delivered it in san francisco at great and satisfactory pecuniary profit, then i branched out into the country and was aghast at the result: i had been entirely forgotten, i never had people enough in my houses to sit as a jury of inquest on my lost reputation! i inquired into this curious condition of things and found that the thrifty owners of that prodigiously rich "alta" newspaper had _copyrighted_ all those poor little twenty-dollar letters, and had threatened with prosecution any journal which should venture to copy a paragraph from them! and there i was! i had contracted to furnish a large book, concerning the excursion, to the american publishing co. of hartford, and i supposed i should need all those letters to fill it out with. i was in an uncomfortable situation--that is, if the proprietors of this stealthily acquired copyright should refuse to let me use the letters. that is just what they did; mr. mac--something--i have forgotten the rest of his name--said his firm were going to make a book out of the letters in order to get back the thousand dollars which they had paid for them. i said that if they had acted fairly and honorably, and had allowed the country press to use the letters or portions of them, my lecture-skirmish on the coast would have paid me ten thousand dollars, whereas the "alta" had lost me that amount. then he offered a compromise: he would publish the book and allow me ten per cent. royalty on it. the compromise did not appeal to me, and i said so. i was now quite unknown outside of san francisco, the book's sale would be confined to that city, and my royalty would not pay me enough to board me three months; whereas my eastern contract, if carried out, could be profitable to me, for i had a sort of reputation on the atlantic seaboard acquired through the publication of six excursion-letters in the new york "tribune" and one or two in the "herald." in the end mr. mac agreed to suppress his book, on certain conditions: in my preface i must thank the "alta" for waiving "rights" and granting me permission. i objected to the thanks. i could not with any large degree of sincerity thank the "alta" for bankrupting my lecture-raid. after considerable debate my point was conceded and the thanks left out. [sidenote: ( .)] [sidenote: ( .)] [sidenote: ( .)] noah brooks was the editor of the "alta" at the time, a man of sterling character and equipped with a right heart, also a good historian where facts were not essential. in biographical sketches of me written many years afterward ( ), he was quite eloquent in praises of the generosity of the "alta" people in giving to me without compensation a book which, as history had afterward shown, was worth a fortune. after all the fuss, i did not levy heavily upon the "alta" letters. i found that they were newspaper matter, not book matter. they had been written here and there and yonder, as opportunity had given me a chance working-moment or two during our feverish flight around about europe or in the furnace-heat of my stateroom on board the "quaker city," therefore they were loosely constructed, and needed to have some of the wind and water squeezed out of them. i used several of them--ten or twelve, perhaps. i wrote the rest of "the innocents abroad" in sixty days, and i could have added a fortnight's labor with the pen and gotten along without the letters altogether. i was very young in those days, exceedingly young, marvellously young, younger than i am now, younger than i shall ever be again, by hundreds of years. i worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad day in the morning, and as i did two hundred thousand words in the sixty days, the average was more than three thousand words a day--nothing for sir walter scott, nothing for louis stevenson, nothing for plenty of other people, but quite handsome for me. in , when we were living in tedworth square, london, and i was writing the book called "following the equator" my average was eighteen hundred words a day; here in florence ( ), my average seems to be fourteen hundred words per sitting of four or five hours.[ ] i was deducing from the above that i have been slowing down steadily in these thirty-six years, but i perceive that my statistics have a defect: three thousand words in the spring of when i was working seven or eight or nine hours at a sitting has little or no advantage over the sitting of to-day, covering half the time and producing half the output. figures often beguile me, particularly when i have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." [_dictated, january , ._]--the proverb says that providence protects children and idiots. this is really true. i know it because i have tested it. it did not protect george through the most of his campaign, but it saved him in his last inning, and the veracity of the proverb stood confirmed. [sidenote: ( .)] i have several times been saved by this mysterious interposition, when i was manifestly in extreme peril. it has been common, all my life, for smart people to perceive in me an easy prey for selfish designs, and i have walked without suspicion into the trap set for me, yet have often come out unscathed, against all the likelihoods. more than forty years ago, in san francisco, the office staff adjourned, upon conclusion of its work at two o'clock in the morning, to a great bowling establishment where there were twelve alleys. i was invited, rather perfunctorily, and as a matter of etiquette--by which i mean that i was invited politely, but not urgently. but when i diffidently declined, with thanks, and explained that i knew nothing about the game, those lively young fellows became at once eager and anxious and urgent to have my society. this flattered me, for i perceived no trap, and i innocently and gratefully accepted their invitation. i was given an alley all to myself. the boys explained the game to me, and they also explained to me that there would be an hour's play, and that the player who scored the fewest ten-strikes in the hour would have to provide oysters and beer for the combination. this disturbed me very seriously, since it promised me bankruptcy, and i was sorry that this detail had been overlooked in the beginning. but my pride would not allow me to back out now, so i stayed in, and did what i could to look satisfied and glad i had come. it is not likely that i looked as contented as i wanted to, but the others looked glad enough to make up for it, for they were quite unable to hide their evil joy. they showed me how to stand, and how to stoop, and how to aim the ball, and how to let fly; and then the game began. the results were astonishing. in my ignorance i delivered the balls in apparently every way except the right one; but no matter--during half an hour i never started a ball down the alley that didn't score a ten-strike, every time, at the other end. the others lost their grip early, and their joy along with it. now and then one of them got a ten-strike, but the occurrence was so rare that it made no show alongside of my giant score. the boys surrendered at the end of the half-hour, and put on their coats and gathered around me and in courteous, but sufficiently definite, language expressed their opinion of an experience-worn and seasoned expert who would stoop to lying and deception in order to rob kind and well-meaning friends who had put their trust in him under the delusion that he was an honest and honorable person. i was not able to convince them that i had not lied, for now my character was gone, and they refused to attach any value to anything i said. the proprietor of the place stood by for a while saying nothing, then he came to my defence. he said: "it looks like a mystery, gentlemen, but it isn't a mystery after it's explained. that is a _grooved_ alley; you've only to start a ball down it any way you please and the groove will do the rest; it will slam the ball against the northeast curve of the head pin every time, and nothing can save the ten from going down." it was true. the boys made the experiment and they found that there was no art that could send a ball down that alley and fail to score a ten-strike with it. when i had told those boys that i knew nothing about that game i was speaking only the truth; but it was ever thus, all through my life: whenever i have diverged from custom and principle and uttered a truth, the rule has been that the hearer hadn't strength of mind enough to believe it. [sidenote: ( .)] a quarter of a century ago i arrived in london to lecture a few weeks under the management of george dolby, who had conducted the dickens readings in america five or six years before. he took me to the albemarle and fed me, and in the course of the dinner he enlarged a good deal, and with great satisfaction, upon his reputation as a player of fifteen-ball pool, and when he learned by my testimony that i had never seen the game played, and knew nothing of the art of pocketing balls, he enlarged more and more, and still more, and kept on enlarging, until i recognized that i was either in the presence of the very father of fifteen-ball pool or in the presence of his most immediate descendant. at the end of the dinner dolby was eager to introduce me to the game and show me what he could do. we adjourned to the billiard-room and he framed the balls in a flat pyramid and told me to fire at the apex ball and then go on and do what i could toward pocketing the fifteen, after which he would take the cue and show me what a past-master of the game could do with those balls. i did as required. i began with the diffidence proper to my ignorant estate, and when i had finished my inning all the balls were in the pockets and dolby was burying me under a volcanic irruption of acid sarcasms. so i was a liar in dolby's belief. he thought he had been sold, and at a cheap rate; but he divided his sarcasms quite fairly and quite equally between the two of us. he was full of ironical admiration of his childishness and innocence in letting a wandering and characterless and scandalous american load him up with deceptions of so transparent a character that they ought not to have deceived the house cat. on the other hand, he was remorselessly severe upon me for beguiling him, by studied and discreditable artifice, into bragging and boasting about his poor game in the presence of a professional expert disguised in lies and frauds, who could empty more balls in billiard pockets in an hour than he could empty into a basket in a day. in the matter of fifteen-ball pool i never got dolby's confidence wholly back, though i got it in other ways, and kept it until his death. i have played that game a number of times since, but that first time was the only time in my life that i have ever pocketed all the fifteen in a single inning. [sidenote: ( .)] my unsuspicious nature has made it necessary for providence to save me from traps a number of times. thirty years ago, a couple of elmira bankers invited me to play the game of "quaker" with them. i had never heard of the game before, and said that if it required intellect, i should not be able to entertain them. but they said it was merely a game of chance, and required no mentality--so i agreed to make a trial of it. they appointed four in the afternoon for the sacrifice. as the place, they chose a ground-floor room with a large window in it. then they went treacherously around and advertised the "sell" which they were going to play upon me. i arrived on time, and we began the game--with a large and eager free-list to superintend it. these superintendents were outside, with their noses pressed against the window-pane. the bankers described the game to me. so far as i recollect, the pattern of it was this: they had a pile of mexican dollars on the table; twelve of them were of even date, fifty of them were of odd dates. the bankers were to separate a coin from the pile and hide it under a hand, and i must guess "odd" or "even." if i guessed correctly, the coin would be mine; if incorrectly, i lost a dollar. the first guess i made was "even," and was right. i guessed again, "even," and took the money. they fed me another one and i guessed "even" again, and took the money. i guessed "even" the fourth time, and took the money. it seemed to me that "even" was a good guess, and i might as well stay by it, which i did. i guessed "even" twelve times, and took the twelve dollars. i was doing as they secretly desired. their experience of human nature had convinced them that any human being as innocent as my face proclaimed me to be, would repeat his first guess if it won, and would go on repeating it if it should continue to win. it was their belief that an innocent would be almost sure at the beginning to guess "even," and not "odd," and that if an innocent should guess "even" twelve times in succession and win every time, he would go on guessing "even" to the end--so it was their purpose to let me win those twelve even dates and then advance the odd dates, one by one, until i should lose fifty dollars, and furnish those superintendents something to laugh about for a week to come. but it did not come out in that way; for by the time i had won the twelfth dollar and last even date, i withdrew from the game because it was so one-sided that it was monotonous, and did not entertain me. there was a burst of laughter from the superintendents at the window when i came out of the place, but i did not know what they were laughing at nor whom they were laughing at, and it was a matter of no interest to me anyway. through that incident i acquired an enviable reputation for smartness and penetration, but it was not my due, for i had not penetrated anything that the cow could not have penetrated. mark twain. (_to be continued._) footnote: [ ] with the pen, i mean. this autobiography is dictated, not written. north american review no. dcxx. august , . chapters from my autobiography.--xxi. by mark twain. _from susy's biography of me._ _feb. , ' ._ mamma and i have both been very much troubled of late because papa since he has been publishing gen. grant's book has seemed to forget his own books and work entirely, and the other evening as papa and i were promonading up and down the library he told me that he didn't expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or do anything, he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, and the only book that he had been pertickularly anxious to write was one locked up in the safe down stairs, not yet published.[ ] but this intended future of course will never do, and although papa usually holds to his own opinions and intents with outsiders, when mamma realy desires anything and says that it must be, papa allways gives up his plans (at least so far) and does as she says is right (and she is usually right, if she dissagrees with him at all). it was because he knew his great tendency to being convinced by her, that he published without her knowledge that article in the "christian union" concerning the government of children. so judging by the proofs of past years, i think that we will be able to persuade papa to go back to work as before, and not leave off writing with the end of his next story. mamma says that she sometimes feels, and i do too, that she would rather have papa depend on his writing for a living than to have him think of giving it up. [_dictated, november , ._] i have a defect of a sort which i think is not common; certainly i hope it isn't: it is rare that i can call before my mind's eye the form and face of either friend or enemy. if i should make a list, now, of persons whom i know in america and abroad--say to the number of even an entire thousand--it is quite unlikely that i could reproduce five of them in my mind's eye. of my dearest and most intimate friends, i could name eight whom i have seen and talked with four days ago, but when i try to call them before me they are formless shadows. jean has been absent, this past eight or ten days, in the country, and i wish i could reproduce her in the mirror of my mind, but i can't do it. it may be that this defect is not constitutional, but a result of lifelong absence of mind and indolent and inadequate observation. once or twice in my life it has been an embarrassment to me. twenty years ago, in the days of susy's biography of me, there was a dispute one morning at the breakfast-table about the color of a neighbor's eyes. i was asked for a verdict, but had to confess that if that valued neighbor and old friend had eyes i was not sure that i had ever seen them. it was then mockingly suggested that perhaps i didn't even know the color of the eyes of my own family, and i was required to shut my own at once and testify. i was able to name the color of mrs. clemens's eyes, but was not able to even suggest a color for jean's, or clara's, or susy's. all this talk is suggested by susy's remark: "the other evening as papa and i were promenading up and down the library." down to the bottom of my heart i am thankful that i can see _that_ picture! and it is not dim, but stands out clear in the unfaded light of twenty-one years ago. in those days susy and i used to "promonade" daily up and down the library, with our arms about each other's waists, and deal in intimate communion concerning affairs of state, or the deep questions of human life, or our small personal affairs. it was quite natural that i should think i had written myself out when i was only fifty years old, for everybody who has ever written has been smitten with that superstition at about that age. not even yet have i really written myself out. i have merely stopped writing because dictating is pleasanter work, and because dictating has given me a strong aversion to the pen, and because two hours of talking per day is enough, and because--but i am only damaging my mind with this digging around in it for pretexts where no pretext is needed, and where the simple truth is for this one time better than any invention, in this small emergency. i shall never finish my five or six unfinished books, for the reason that by forty years of slavery to the pen i have earned my freedom. i detest the pen and i wouldn't use it again to sign the death warrant of my dearest enemy. [_dictated, march , ._] for thirty years, i have received an average of a dozen letters a year from strangers who remember me, or whose fathers remember me as boy and young man. but these letters are almost always disappointing. i have not known these strangers nor their fathers. i have not heard of the names they mention; the reminiscences to which they call attention have had no part in my experience; all of which means that these strangers have been mistaking me for somebody else. but at last i have the refreshment, this morning, of a letter from a man who deals in names that were familiar to me in my boyhood. the writer encloses a newspaper clipping which has been wandering through the press for four or five weeks, and he wants to know if capt tonkray, lately deceased, was (as stated in the clipping) the original of "huckleberry finn." i have replied that "huckleberry finn" was frank f. as this inquirer evidently knew the hannibal of the forties, he will easily recall frank. frank's father was at one time town drunkard, an exceedingly well-defined and unofficial office of those days. he succeeded "general" gaines, and for a time he was sole and only incumbent of the office; but afterward jimmy finn proved competency and disputed the place with him, so we had two town drunkards at one time--and it made as much trouble in that village as christendom experienced in the fourteenth century when there were two popes at the same time. in "huckleberry finn" i have drawn frank exactly as he was. he was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had. his liberties were totally unrestricted. he was the only really independent person--boy or man--in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy, and was envied by all the rest of us. we liked him; we enjoyed his society. and as his society was forbidden us by our parents, the prohibition trebled and quadrupled its value, and therefore we sought and got more of his society than of any other boy's. i heard, four years ago, that he was justice of the peace in a remote village in the state of ----, and was a good citizen and was greatly respected. during jimmy finn's term he (jimmy) was not exclusive; he was not finical; he was not hypercritical; he was largely and handsomely democratic--and slept in the deserted tan-yard with the hogs. my father tried to reform him once, but did not succeed. my father was not a professional reformer. in him the spirit of reform was spasmodic. it only broke out now and then, with considerable intervals between. once he tried to reform injun joe. that also was a failure. it was a failure, and we boys were glad. for injun joe, drunk, was interesting and a benefaction to us, but injun joe, sober, was a dreary spectacle. we watched my father's experiments upon him with a good deal of anxiety, but it came out all right and we were satisfied. injun joe got drunk oftener than before, and became intolerably interesting. i think that in "tom sawyer" i starved injun joe to death in the cave. but that may have been to meet the exigencies of romantic literature. i can't remember now whether the real injun joe died in the cave or out of it, but i do remember that the news of his death reached me at a most unhappy time--that is to say, just at bedtime on a summer night when a prodigious storm of thunder and lightning accompanied by a deluging rain that turned the streets and lanes into rivers, caused me to repent and resolve to lead a better life. i can remember those awful thunder-bursts and the white glare of the lightning yet, and the wild lashing of the rain against the window-panes. by my teachings i perfectly well knew what all that wild riot was for--satan had come to get injun joe. i had no shadow of doubt about it. it was the proper thing when a person like injun joe was required in the under world, and i should have thought it strange and unaccountable if satan had come for him in a less impressive way. with every glare of lightning i shrivelled and shrunk together in mortal terror, and in the interval of black darkness that followed i poured out my lamentings over my lost condition, and my supplications for just one more chance, with an energy and feeling and sincerity quite foreign to my nature. but in the morning i saw that it was a false alarm and concluded to resume business at the old stand and wait for another reminder. the axiom says "history repeats itself." a week or two ago mr. blank-blank dined with us. at dinner he mentioned a circumstance which flashed me back over about sixty years and landed me in that little bedroom on that tempestuous night, and brought to my mind how creditable to me was my conduct through the whole night, and how barren it was of moral spot or fleck during that entire period: he said mr. x was sexton, or something, of the episcopal church in his town, and had been for many years the competent superintendent of all the church's worldly affairs, and was regarded by the whole congregation as a stay, a blessing, a priceless treasure. but he had a couple of defects--not large defects, but they seemed large when flung against the background of his profoundly religious character: he drank a good deal, and he could outswear a brakeman. a movement arose to persuade him to lay aside these vices, and after consulting with his pal, who occupied the same position as himself in the other episcopal church, and whose defects were duplicates of his own and had inspired regret in the congregation he was serving, they concluded to try for reform--not wholesale, but half at a time. they took the liquor pledge and waited for results. during nine days the results were entirely satisfactory, and they were recipients of many compliments and much congratulation. then on new-year's eve they had business a mile and a half out of town, just beyond the state line. everything went well with them that evening in the barroom of the inn--but at last the celebration of the occasion by those villagers came to be of a burdensome nature. it was a bitter cold night and the multitudinous hot toddies that were circulating began by and by to exert a powerful influence upon the new prohibitionists. at last x's friend remarked, "x, does it occur to you that we are _outside the diocese_?" that ended reform no. . then they took a chance in reform no. . for a while that one prospered, and they got much applause. i now reach the incident which sent me back a matter of sixty years, as i have remarked a while ago. one morning mr. blank-blank met x on the street and said, "you have made a gallant struggle against those defects of yours. i am aware that you failed on no. , but i am also aware that you are having better luck with no. ." "yes," x said; "no. is all right and sound up to date, and we are full of hope." blank-blank said, "x, of course you have your troubles like other people, but they never show on the outside. i have never seen you when you were not cheerful. are you always cheerful? really always cheerful?" "well, no," he said, "no, i can't say that i am always cheerful, but--well, you know that kind of a night that comes: _say_--you wake up 'way in the night and the whole world is sunk in gloom and there are storms and earthquakes and all sorts of disasters in the air threatening, and you get cold and clammy; and when that happens to me i recognize how sinful i am and it all goes clear to my heart and wrings it and i have such terrors and terrors!--oh, they are indescribable, those terrors that assail me, and i slip out of bed and get on my knees and pray and pray and promise that i will be good, if i can only have another chance. and then, you know, in the morning the sun shines out so lovely, and the birds sing and the whole world is so beautiful, and--_b' god, i rally!_" now i will quote a brief paragraph from this letter which i have a minute ago spoken of. the writer says: you no doubt are at a loss to know who i am. i will tell you. in my younger days i was a resident of hannibal, mo., and you and i were schoolmates attending mr. dawson's school along with sam and will bowen and andy fuqua and others whose names i have forgotten. i was then about the smallest boy in school, for my age, and they called me little aleck for short. i only dimly remember him, but i knew those other people as well as i knew the town drunkards. i remember dawson's schoolhouse perfectly. if i wanted to describe it i could save myself the trouble by conveying the description of it to these pages from "tom sawyer." i can remember the drowsy and inviting summer sounds that used to float in through the open windows from that distant boy-paradise, cardiff hill (holliday's hill), and mingle with the murmurs of the studying pupils and make them the more dreary by the contrast. i remember andy fuqua, the oldest pupil--a man of twenty-five. i remember the youngest pupil, nannie owsley, a child of seven. i remember george robards, eighteen or twenty years old, the only pupil who studied latin. i remember--in some cases vividly, in others vaguely--the rest of the twenty-five boys and girls. i remember mr. dawson very well. i remember his boy, theodore, who was as good as he could be. in fact, he was inordinately good, extravagantly good, offensively good, detestably good--and he had pop-eyes--and i would have drowned him if i had had a chance. in that school we were all about on an equality, and, so far as i remember, the passion of envy had no place in our hearts, except in the case of arch fuqua--the other one's brother. of course we all went barefoot in the summer-time. arch fuqua was about my own age--ten or eleven. in the winter we could stand him, because he wore shoes then, and his great gift was hidden from our sight and we were enabled to forget it. but in the summer-time he was a bitterness to us. he was our envy, for he could double back his big toe and let it fly and you could hear it snap thirty yards. there was not another boy in the school that could approach this feat. he had not a rival as regards a physical distinction--except in theodore eddy, who could work his ears like a horse. but he was no real rival, because you couldn't hear him work his ears; so all the advantage lay with arch fuqua. i am not done with dawson's school; i will return to it in a later chapter. [_dictated at hamilton, bermuda, january , ._] "that reminds me." in conversation we are always using that phrase, and seldom or never noticing how large a significance it bears. it stands for a curious and interesting fact, to wit: that sleeping or waking, dreaming or talking, the thoughts which swarm through our heads are almost constantly, almost continuously, accompanied by a like swarm of reminders of incidents and episodes of our past. a man can never know what a large traffic this commerce of association carries on in our minds until he sets out to write his autobiography; he then finds that a thought is seldom born to him that does not immediately remind him of some event, large or small, in his past experience. quite naturally these remarks remind me of various things, among others this: that sometimes a thought, by the power of association, will bring back to your mind a lost word or a lost name which you have not been able to recover by any other process known to your mental equipment. yesterday we had an instance of this. rev. joseph h. twichell is with me on this flying trip to bermuda. he was with me on my last visit to bermuda, and to-day we were trying to remember when it was. we thought it was somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty years ago, but that was as near as we could get at the date. twichell said that the landlady in whose boarding-house we sojourned in that ancient time could doubtless furnish us the date, and we must look her up. we wanted to see her, anyway, because she and her blooming daughter of eighteen were the only persons whose acquaintance we had made at that time, for we were travelling under fictitious names, and people who wear aliases are not given to seeking society and bringing themselves under suspicion. but at this point in our talk we encountered an obstruction: we could not recall the landlady's name. we hunted all around through our minds for that name, using all the customary methods of research, but without success; the name was gone from us, apparently permanently. we finally gave the matter up, and fell to talking about something else. the talk wandered from one subject to another, and finally arrived at twichell's school-days in hartford--the hartford of something more than half a century ago--and he mentioned several of his schoolmasters, dwelling with special interest upon the peculiarities of an aged one named olney. he remarked that olney, humble village schoolmaster as he was, was yet a man of superior parts, and had published text-books which had enjoyed a wide currency in america in their day. i said i remembered those books, and had studied olney's geography in school when i was a boy. then twichell said, "that reminds me--our landlady's name was a name that was associated with school-books of some kind or other fifty or sixty years ago. i wonder what it was. i believe it began with k." association did the rest, and did it instantly. i said, "kirkham's grammar!" that settled it. kirkham was the name; and we went out to seek for the owner of it. there was no trouble about that, for bermuda is not large, and is like the earlier garden of eden, in that everybody in it knows everybody else, just as it was in the serpent's headquarters in adam's time. we easily found miss kirkham--she that had been the blooming girl of a generation before--and she was still keeping boarders; but her mother had passed from this life. she settled the date for us, and did it with certainty, by help of a couple of uncommon circumstances, events of that ancient time. she said we had sailed from bermuda on the th of may, , which was the day on which her only nephew was born--and he is now thirty years of age. the other unusual circumstance--she called it an unusual circumstance, and i didn't say anything--was that on that day the rev. mr. twichell (bearing the assumed name of peters) had made a statement to her which she regarded as a fiction. i remembered the circumstance very well. we had bidden the young girl good-by and had gone fifty yards, perhaps, when twichell said he had forgotten something (i doubted it) and must go back. when he rejoined me he was silent, and this alarmed me, because i had not seen an example of it before. he seemed quite uncomfortable, and i asked him what the trouble was. he said he had been inspired to give the girl a pleasant surprise, and so had gone back and said to her-- "that young fellow's name is not wilkinson--that's mark twain." she did not lose her mind; she did not exhibit any excitement at all, but said quite simply, quite tranquilly, "tell it to the marines, mr. peters--if that should happen to be _your_ name." it was very pleasant to meet her again. we were white-headed, but she was not; in the sweet and unvexed spiritual atmosphere of the bermudas one does not achieve gray hairs at forty-eight. i had a dream last night, and of course it was born of association, like nearly everything else that drifts into a person's head, asleep or awake. on board ship, on the passage down, twichell was talking about the swiftly developing possibilities of aerial navigation, and he quoted those striking verses of tennyson's which forecast a future when air-borne vessels of war shall meet and fight above the clouds and redden the earth below with a rain of blood. this picture of carnage and blood and death reminded me of something which i had read a fortnight ago--statistics of railway accidents compiled by the united states government, wherein the appalling fact was set forth that on our , miles of railway we annually kill , persons outright and injure , . the war-ships in the air suggested the railway horrors, and three nights afterward the railway horrors suggested my dream. the work of association was going on in my head, unconsciously, all that time. it was an admirable dream, what there was of it. in it i saw a funeral procession; i saw it from a mountain peak; i saw it crawling along and curving here and there, serpentlike, through a level vast plain. i seemed to see a hundred miles of the procession, but neither the beginning of it nor the end of it was within the limits of my vision. the procession was in ten divisions, each division marked by a sombre flag, and the whole represented ten years of our railway activities in the accident line; each division was composed of , cripples, and was bearing its own year's , mutilated corpses to the grave: in the aggregate , cripples and , dead, drenched in blood! mark twain. (_to be continued._) footnote: [ ] it isn't yet. title of it, "captain stormfield's visit to heaven."--s. l. c. chapters from my autobiography.--xxii. by mark twain. [sidenote: ( .)] [_dictated, october , ._] susy has named a number of the friends who were assembled at onteora at the time of our visit, but there were others--among them laurence hutton, charles dudley warner, and carroll beckwith, and their wives. it was a bright and jolly company. some of those choice spirits are still with us; the others have passed from this life: mrs. clemens, susy, mr. warner, mary mapes dodge, laurence hutton, dean sage--peace to their ashes! susy is in error in thinking mrs. dodge was not there at that time; we were her guests. we arrived at nightfall, dreary from a tiresome journey; but the dreariness did not last. mrs. dodge had provided a home-made banquet, and the happy company sat down to it, twenty strong, or more. then the thing happened which always happens at large dinners, and is always exasperating: everybody talked to his elbow-mates and all talked at once, and gradually raised their voices higher, and higher, and higher, in the desperate effort to be heard. it was like a riot, an insurrection; it was an intolerable volume of noise. presently i said to the lady next me-- "i will subdue this riot, i will silence this racket. there is only one way to do it, but i know the art. you must tilt your head toward mine and seem to be deeply interested in what i am saying; i will talk in a low voice; then, just because our neighbors won't be able to hear me, they will _want_ to hear me. if i mumble long enough--say two minutes--you will see that the dialogues will one after another come to a standstill, and there will be silence, not a sound anywhere but my mumbling." then in a very low voice i began: "when i went out to chicago, eleven years ago, to witness the grant festivities, there was a great banquet on the first night, with six hundred ex-soldiers present. the gentleman who sat next me was mr. x. x. he was very hard of hearing, and he had a habit common to deaf people of shouting his remarks instead of delivering them in an ordinary voice. he would handle his knife and fork in reflective silence for five or six minutes at a time and then suddenly fetch out a shout that would make you jump out of the united states." by this time the insurrection at mrs. dodge's table--at least that part of it in my immediate neighborhood--had died down, and the silence was spreading, couple by couple, down the long table. i went on in a lower and still lower mumble, and most impressively-- "during one of mr. x. x.'s mute intervals, a man opposite us approached the end of a story which he had been telling his elbow-neighbor. he was speaking in a low voice--there was much noise--i was deeply interested, and straining my ears to catch his words, stretching my neck, holding my breath, to hear, unconscious of everything but the fascinating tale. i heard him say, 'at this point he seized her by her long hair--she shrieking and begging--bent her neck across his knee, and with one awful sweep of the razor--' "how do you like chica-a-ago?!!!" that was x. x.'s interruption, hearable at thirty miles. by the time i had reached that place in my mumblings mrs. dodge's dining-room was so silent, so breathlessly still, that if you had dropped a thought anywhere in it you could have heard it smack the floor.[ ] when i delivered that yell the entire dinner company jumped as one person, and punched their heads through the ceiling, damaging it, for it was only lath and plaster, and it all came down on us, and much of it went into the victuals and made them gritty, but no one was hurt. then i explained why it was that i had played that game, and begged them to take the moral of it home to their hearts and be rational and merciful thenceforth, and cease from screaming in mass, and agree to let one person talk at a time and the rest listen in grateful and unvexed peace. they granted my prayer, and we had a happy time all the rest of the evening; i do not think i have ever had a better time in my life. this was largely because the new terms enabled me to keep the floor--now that i had it--and do all the talking myself. i do like to hear myself talk. susy has exposed this in her biography of me. dean sage was a delightful man, yet in one way a terror to his friends, for he loved them so well that he could not refrain from playing practical jokes on them. we have to be pretty deeply in love with a person before we can do him the honor of joking familiarly with him. dean sage was the best citizen i have known in america. it takes courage to be a good citizen, and he had plenty of it. he allowed no individual and no corporation to infringe his smallest right and escape unpunished. he was very rich, and very generous, and benevolent, and he gave away his money with a prodigal hand; but if an individual or corporation infringed a right of his, to the value of ten cents, he would spend thousands of dollars' worth of time and labor and money and persistence on the matter, and would not lower his flag until he had won his battle or lost it. he and rev. mr. harris had been classmates in college, and to the day of sage's death they were as fond of each other as an engaged pair. it follows, without saying, that whenever sage found an opportunity to play a joke upon harris, harris was sure to suffer. along about sage fell a victim to an illness which reduced him to a skeleton, and defied all the efforts of the physicians to cure it. he went to the adirondacks and took harris with him. sage had always been an active man, and he couldn't idle any day wholly away in inanition, but walked every day to the limit of his strength. one day, toward nightfall, the pair came upon a humble log cabin which bore these words painted upon a shingle: "entertainment for man and beast." they were obliged to stop there for the night, sage's strength being exhausted. they entered the cabin and found its owner and sole occupant there, a rugged and sturdy and simple-hearted man of middle age. he cooked supper and placed it before the travellers--salt junk, boiled beans, corn bread and black coffee. sage's stomach could abide nothing but the most delicate food, therefore this banquet revolted him, and he sat at the table unemployed, while harris fed ravenously, limitlessly, gratefully; for he had been chaplain in a fighting regiment all through the war, and had kept in perfection the grand and uncritical appetite and splendid physical vigor which those four years of tough fare and activity had furnished him. sage went supperless to bed, and tossed and writhed all night upon a shuck mattress that was full of attentive and interested corn-cobs. in the morning harris was ravenous again, and devoured the odious breakfast as contentedly and as delightedly as he had devoured its twin the night before. sage sat upon the porch, empty, and contemplated the performance and meditated revenge. presently he beckoned to the landlord and took him aside and had a confidential talk with him. he said, "i am the paymaster. what is the bill?" "two suppers, fifty cents; two beds, thirty cents; two breakfasts, fifty cents--total, a dollar and thirty cents." sage said, "go back and make out the bill and fetch it to me here on the porch. make it thirteen dollars." "thirteen dollars! why, it's impossible! i am no robber. i am charging you what i charge everybody. it's a dollar and thirty cents, and that's all it is." "my man, i've got something to say about this as well as you. it's thirteen dollars. you'll make out your bill for that, and you'll _take_ it, too, or you'll not get a cent." the man was troubled, and said, "i don't understand this. i can't make it out." "well, i understand it. i know what i am about. it's thirteen dollars, and i want the bill made out for that. there's no other terms. get it ready and bring it out here. i will examine it and be outraged. you understand? i will dispute the bill. you must stand to it. you must refuse to take less. i will begin to lose my temper; you must begin to lose yours. i will call you hard names; you must answer with harder ones. i will raise my voice; you must raise yours. you must go into a rage--foam at the mouth, if you can; insert some soap to help it along. now go along and follow your instructions." the man played his assigned part, and played it well. he brought the bill and stood waiting for results. sage's face began to cloud up, his eyes to snap, and his nostrils to inflate like a horse's; then he broke out with-- "_thirteen dollars!_ you mean to say that you charge thirteen dollars for these damned inhuman hospitalities of yours? are you a professional buccaneer? is it your custom to--" the man burst in with spirit: "now, i don't want any more out of you--that's a plenty. the bill is thirteen dollars and you'll _pay_ it--that's all; a couple of characterless adventurers bilking their way through this country and attempting to dictate terms to a gentleman! a gentleman who received you supposing you were gentlemen yourselves, whereas in my opinion hell's full of--" sage broke in-- "not another word of that!--i won't have it. i regard you as the lowest-down thief that ever--" "don't you use that word again! by ----, i'll take you by the neck and--" harris came rushing out, and just as the two were about to grapple he pushed himself between them and began to implore-- "oh, dean, don't, _don't_--now, mr. smith, control yourself! oh, think of your family, dean!--think what a scandal--" but they burst out with maledictions, imprecations and all the hard names they could dig out of the rich accumulations of their educated memories, and in the midst of it the man shouted-- "when _gentlemen_ come to this house, i treat them _as_ gentlemen. when people come to this house with the ordinary appetites of gentlemen, i charge them a dollar and thirty cents for what i furnished you; but when a man brings a hell-fired famine here that gorges a barrel of pork and four barrels of beans at two sittings--" sage broke in, in a voice that was eloquent with remorse and self-reproach, "i never thought of that, and i ask your pardon; i am ashamed of myself and of my friend. here's your thirteen dollars, and my apologies along with it." [_dictated march , ._] i have always taken a great interest in other people's duels. one always feels an abiding interest in any heroic thing which has entered into his own experience. [sidenote: ( .)] in , fourteen years after my unmaterialized duel, messieurs fortu and gambetta fought a duel which made heroes of both of them in france, but made them rather ridiculous throughout the rest of the world. i was living in munich that fall and winter, and i was so interested in that funny tragedy that i wrote a long account of it, and it is in one of my books, somewhere--an account which had some inaccuracies in it, but as an exhibition of the _spirit_ of that duel, i think it was correct and trustworthy. and when i was living in vienna, thirty-four years after my ineffectual duel, my interest in that kind of incident was still strong; and i find here among my autobiographical manuscripts of that day a chapter which i began concerning it, but did not finish. i wanted to finish it, but held it open in the hope that the italian ambassador, m. nigra, would find time to furnish me the _full_ history of señor cavalotti's adventures in that line. but he was a busy man; there was always an interruption before he could get well started; so my hope was never fulfilled. the following is the unfinished chapter: [sidenote: ( .)] as concerns duelling. this pastime is as common in austria to-day as it is in france. but with this difference, that here in the austrian states the duel is dangerous, while in france it is not. here it is tragedy, in france it in comedy; here it is a solemnity, there it is monkey-shines; here the duellist risks his life, there he does not even risk his shirt. here he fights with pistol or sabre, in france with a hairpin--a blunt one. here the desperately wounded man tries to walk to the hospital; there they paint the scratch so that they can find it again, lay the sufferer on a stretcher, and conduct him off the field with a band of music. at the end of a french duel the pair hug and kiss and cry, and praise each other's valor; then the surgeons make an examination and pick out the scratched one, and the other one helps him on to the litter and pays his fare; and in return the scratched one treats to champagne and oysters in the evening, and then "the incident is closed," as the french say. it is all polite, and gracious, and pretty, and impressive. at the end of an austrian duel the antagonist that is alive gravely offers his hand to the other man, utters some phrases of courteous regret, then bids him good-by and goes his way, and that incident also is closed. the french duellist is painstakingly protected from danger, by the rules of the game. his antagonist's weapon cannot reach so far as his body; if he get a scratch it will not be above his elbow. but in austria the rules of the game do not provide against danger, they carefully provide _for_ it, usually. commonly the combat must be kept up until one of the men is disabled; a non-disabling slash or stab does not retire him. for a matter of three months i watched the viennese journals, and whenever a duel was reported in their telegraphic columns i scrap-booked it. by this record i find that duelling in austria is not confined to journalists and old maids, as in france, but is indulged in by military men, journalists, students, physicians, lawyers, members of the legislature, and even the cabinet, the bench and the police. duelling is forbidden by law; and so it seems odd to see the makers and administrators of the laws dancing on their work in this way. some months ago count bodeni, at that time chief of the government, fought a pistol-duel here in the capital city of the empire with representative wolf, and both of those distinguished christians came near getting turned out of the church--for the church as well as the state forbids duelling. in one case, lately, in hungary, the police interfered and stopped a duel after the first innings. this was a sabre-duel between the chief of police and the city attorney. unkind things were said about it by the newspapers. they said the police remembered their duty uncommonly well when their own officials were the parties concerned in duels. but i think the underlings showed good bread-and-butter judgment. if their superiors had carved each other well, the public would have asked, where were the police? and their places would have been endangered; but custom does not require them to be around where mere unofficial citizens are explaining a thing with sabres. there was another duel--a double duel--going on in the immediate neighborhood at the time, and in this case the police obeyed custom and did not disturb it. their bread and butter was not at stake there. in this duel a physician fought a couple of surgeons, and wounded both--one of them lightly, the other seriously. an undertaker wanted to keep people from interfering, but that was quite natural again. selecting at random from my record, i next find a duel at tarnopol between military men. an officer of the tenth dragoons charged an officer of the ninth dragoons with an offence against the laws of the card-table. there was a defect or a doubt somewhere in the matter, and this had to be examined and passed upon by a court of honor. so the case was sent up to lemberg for this purpose. one would like to know what the defect was, but the newspaper does not say. a man here who has fought many duels and has a graveyard, says that probably the matter in question was as to whether the accusation was true or not; that if the charge was a very grave one--cheating, for instance--proof of its truth would rule the guilty officer out of the field of honor; the court would not allow a gentleman to fight with such a person. you see what a solemn thing it is; you see how particular they are; any little careless act can lose you your privilege of getting yourself shot, here. the court seems to have gone into the matter in a searching and careful fashion, for several months elapsed before it reached a decision. it then sanctioned a duel and the accused killed his accuser. next i find a duel between a prince and a major; first with pistols--no result satisfactory to either party; then with sabres, and the major badly hurt. next, a sabre-duel between journalists--the one a strong man, the other feeble and in poor health. it was brief; the strong one drove his sword through the weak one, and death was immediate. next, a duel between a lieutenant and a student of medicine. according to the newspaper report these are the details. the student was in a restaurant one evening: passing along, he halted at a table to speak with some friends; near by sat a dozen military men; the student conceived that one of these was "staring" at him; he asked the officer to step outside and explain. this officer and another one gathered up their caps and sabres and went out with the student. outside--this is the student's account--the student introduced himself to the offending officer and said, "you seemed to stare at me"; for answer, the officer struck at the student with his fist; the student parried the blow; both officers drew their sabres and attacked the young fellow, and one of them gave him a wound on the left arm; then they withdrew. this was saturday night. the duel followed on monday, in the military riding-school--the customary duelling-ground all over austria, apparently. the weapons were pistols. the duelling terms were somewhat beyond custom in the matter of severity, if i may gather that from the statement that the combat was fought "_unter sehr schweren bedingungen_"--to wit, "distance, steps--with steps advance." there was but one exchange of shots. the student was hit. "he put his hand on his breast, his body began to bend slowly forward, then collapsed in death and sank to the ground." it is pathetic. there are other duels in my list, but i find in each and all of them one and the same ever-recurring defect--the _principals_ are never present, but only their sham representatives. the _real_ principals in any duel are not the duellists themselves, but their families. they do the mourning, the suffering, theirs is the loss and theirs the misery. they stake all that, the duellist stakes nothing but his life, and that is a trivial thing compared with what his death must cost those whom he leaves behind him. challenges should not mention the duellist; he has nothing much at stake, and the real vengeance cannot reach him. the challenge should summon the offender's old gray mother, and his young wife and his little children,--these, or any to whom he is a dear and worshipped possession--and should say, "you have done me no harm, but i am the meek slave of a custom which requires me to crush the happiness out of your hearts and condemn you to years of pain and grief, in order that i may wash clean with your tears a stain which has been put upon me by another person." the logic of it is admirable: a person has robbed me of a penny; i must beggar ten innocent persons to make good my loss. surely nobody's "honor" is worth all that. since the duellist's family are the real principals in a duel, the state ought to compel them to be present at it. custom, also, ought to be so amended as to require it; and without it no duel ought to be allowed to go on. if that student's unoffending mother had been present and watching the officer through her tears as he raised his pistol, he--why, he would have fired in the air. we know that. for we know how we are all made. laws ought to be based upon the ascertained facts of our nature. it would be a simple thing to make a duelling law which would stop duelling. as things are now, the mother is never invited. she submits to this; and without outward complaint, for she, too, is the vassal of custom, and custom requires her to conceal her pain when she learns the disastrous news that her son must go to the duelling-field, and by the powerful force that is lodged in habit and custom she is enabled to obey this trying requirement--a requirement which exacts a miracle of her, and gets it. last january a neighbor of ours who has a young son in the army was wakened by this youth at three o'clock one morning, and she sat up in bed and listened to his message: "i have come to tell you something, mother, which will distress you, but you must be good and brave, and bear it. i have been affronted by a fellow officer, and we fight at three this afternoon. lie down and sleep, now, and think no more about it." she kissed him good night and lay down paralyzed with grief and fear, but said nothing. but she did not sleep; she prayed and mourned till the first streak of dawn, then fled to the nearest church and implored the virgin for help; and from that church she went to another and another and another; church after church, and still church after church, and so spent all the day until three o'clock on her knees in agony and tears; then dragged herself home and sat down comfortless and desolate, to count the minutes, and wait, with an outward show of calm, for what had been ordained for her--happiness, or endless misery. presently she heard the clank of a sabre--she had not known before what music was in that sound!--and her son put his head in and said: "x was in the wrong, and he apologized." so that incident was closed; and for the rest of her life the mother will always find something pleasant about the clank of a sabre, no doubt. in one of my listed duels--however, let it go, there is nothing particularly striking about it except that the seconds interfered. and prematurely, too, for neither man was dead. this was certainly irregular. neither of the men liked it. it was a duel with cavalry sabres, between an editor and a lieutenant. the editor walked to the hospital, the lieutenant was carried. in this country an editor who can write well is valuable, but he is not likely to remain so unless he can handle a sabre with charm. the following very recent telegram shows that also in france duels are humanely stopped as soon as they approach the (french) danger-point: "_reuter's telegram._--paris, _march _.--the duel between colonels henry and picquart took place this morning in the riding school of the ecole militaire, the doors of which were strictly guarded in order to prevent intrusion. the combatants, who fought with swords, were in position at ten o'clock. "at the first reengagement lieutenant-colonel henry was slightly scratched in the fore arm, and just at the same moment his own blade appeared to touch his adversary's neck. senator ranc, who was colonel picquart's second, stopped the fight, but as it was found that his principal had not been touched, the combat continued. a very sharp encounter ensued, in which colonel henry was wounded in the elbow, and the duel terminated." after which, the stretcher and the band. in lurid contrast with this delicate flirtation, we have this fatal duel of day before yesterday in italy, where the earnest austrian duel is in vogue. i knew cavalotti slightly, and this gives me a sort of personal interest in his duel. i first saw him in rome several years ago. he was sitting on a block of stone in the forum, and was writing something in his note-book--a poem or a challenge, or something like that--and the friend who pointed him out to me said, "that is cavalotti--he has fought thirty duels; do not disturb him." i did not disturb him. [_may , ._] it is a long time ago. cavalotti--poet, orator, satirist, statesman, patriot--was a great man, and his death was deeply lamented by his countrymen: many monuments to his memory testify to this. in his duels he killed several of his antagonists and disabled the rest. by nature he was a little irascible. once when the officials of the library of bologna threw out his books the gentle poet went up there and challenged the whole fifteen! his parliamentary duties were exacting, but he proposed to keep coming up and fighting duels between trains until all those officials had been retired from the activities of life. although he always chose the sword to fight with, he had never had a lesson with that weapon. when game was called he waited for nothing, but always plunged at his opponent and rained such a storm of wild and original thrusts and whacks upon him that the man was dead or crippled before he could bring his science to bear. but his latest antagonist discarded science, and won. he held his sword straight forward like a lance when cavalotti made his plunge--with the result that he impaled himself upon it. it entered his mouth and passed out at the back of his neck. death was instantaneous. [_dictated december , ._] six months ago, when i was recalling early days in san francisco, i broke off at a place where i was about to tell about captain osborn's odd adventure at the "what cheer," or perhaps it was at another cheap feeding-place--the "miners' restaurant." it was a place where one could get good food on the cheapest possible terms, and its popularity was great among the multitudes whose purses were light it was a good place to go to, to observe mixed humanity. captain osborn and bret harte went there one day and took a meal, and in the course of it osborn fished up an interesting reminiscence of a dozen years before and told about it. it was to this effect: he was a midshipman in the navy when the californian gold craze burst upon the world and set it wild with excitement. his ship made the long journey around the horn and was approaching her goal, the golden gate, when an accident happened. "it happened to me," said osborn. "i fell overboard. there was a heavy sea running, but no one was much alarmed about me, because we had on board a newly patented life-saving device which was believed to be competent to rescue anything that could fall overboard, from a midshipman to an anchor. ours was the only ship that had this device; we were very proud of it, and had been anxious to give its powers a practical test. this thing was lashed to the garboard-strake of the main-to'gallant mizzen-yard amidships,[ ] and there was nothing to do but cut the lashings and heave it over; it would do the rest. one day the cry of 'man overboard!' brought all hands on deck. instantly the lashings were cut and the machine flung joyously over. damnation, it went to the bottom like an anvil! by the time that the ship was brought to and a boat manned, i was become but a bobbing speck on the waves half a mile astern and losing my strength very fast; but by good luck there was a common seaman on board who had practical ideas in his head and hadn't waited to see what the patent machine was going to do, but had run aft and sprung over after me the moment the alarm was cried through the ship. i had a good deal of a start of him, and the seas made his progress slow and difficult, but he stuck to his work and fought his way to me, and just in the nick of time he put his saving arms about me when i was about to go down. he held me up until the boat reached us and rescued us. by that time i was unconscious, and i was still unconscious when we arrived at the ship. a dangerous fever followed, and i was delirious for three days; then i come to myself and at once inquired for my benefactor, of course. he was gone. we were lying at anchor in the bay and every man had deserted to the gold-mines except the commissioned officers. i found out nothing about my benefactor but his name--burton sanders--a name which i have held in grateful memory ever since. every time i have been on the coast, these twelve or thirteen years, i have tried to get track of him, but have never succeeded. i wish i could find him and make him understand that his brave act has never been forgotten by me. harte, i would rather see him and take him by the hand than any other man on the planet." at this stage or a little later there was an interruption. a waiter near by said to another waiter, pointing, "take a look at that tramp that's coming in. ain't that the one that bilked the house, last week, out of ten cents?" "i believe it is. let him alone--don't pay any attention to him; wait till we can get a good look at him." the tramp approached timidly and hesitatingly, with the air of one unsure and apprehensive. the waiters watched him furtively. when he was passing behind harte's chair one of them said, "he's the one!"--and they pounced upon him and proposed to turn him over to the police as a bilk. he begged piteously. he confessed his guilt, but said he had been driven to his crime by necessity--that when he had eaten the plate of beans and flipped out without paying for it, it was because he was starving, and hadn't the ten cents to pay for it with. but the waiters would listen to no explanations, no palliations; he must be placed in custody. he brushed his hand across his eyes and said meekly that he would submit, being friendless. each waiter took him by an arm and faced him about to conduct him away. then his melancholy eyes fell upon captain osborn, and a light of glad and eager recognition flashed from them. he said, "weren't you a midshipman once, sir, in the old 'lancaster'?" "yes," said osborn. "why?" "didn't you fall overboard?" "yes, i did. how do you come to know about it?" "wasn't there a new patent machine aboard, and didn't they throw it over to save you?" "why, yes," said osborn, laughing gently, "but it didn't do it." "no, sir, it was a sailor that done it." "it certainly was. look here, my man, you are getting distinctly interesting. were you of our crew?" "yes, sir, i was." "i reckon you may be right. you do certainly know a good deal about that incident. what is your name?" "burton sanders." the captain sprang up, excited, and said, "give me your hand! give me both your hands! i'd rather shake them than inherit a fortune!"--and then he cried to the waiters, "let him go!--take your hands off! he is my guest, and can have anything and everything this house is able to furnish. i am responsible." there was a love-feast, then. captain osborn ordered it regardless of expense, and he and harte sat there and listened while the man told stirring adventures of his life and fed himself up to the eyebrows. then osborn wanted to be benefactor in his turn, and pay back some of his debt. the man said it could all be paid with ten dollars--that it had been so long since he had owned that amount of money that it would seem a fortune to him, and he should be grateful beyond words if the captain could spare him that amount. the captain spared him ten broad twenty-dollar gold pieces, and made him take them in spite of his modest protestations, and gave him his address and said he must never fail to give him notice when he needed grateful service. several months later harte stumbled upon the man in the street. he was most comfortably drunk, and pleasant and chatty. harte remarked upon the splendidly and movingly dramatic incident of the restaurant, and said, "how curious and fortunate and happy and interesting it was that you two should come together, after that long separation, and at exactly the right moment to save you from disaster and turn your defeat by the waiters into a victory. a preacher could make a great sermon out of that, for it does look as if the hand of providence was in it." the hero's face assumed a sweetly genial expression, and he said, "well now, it wasn't providence this time. i was running the arrangements myself." "how do you mean?" "oh, i hadn't ever seen the gentleman before. i was at the next table, with my back to you the whole time he was telling about it. i saw my chance, and slipped out and fetched the two waiters with me and offered to give them a commission out of what i could get out of the captain if they would do a quarrel act with me and give me an opening. so, then, after a minute or two i straggled back, and you know the rest of it as well as i do." mark twain. (_to be continued._) footnotes: [ ] this was tried. i well remember it.--m. t., _october, ' _. [ ] can this be correct? i think there must be some mistake.--m. t. north american review no. dcxxiii. october, . chapters from my autobiography.--xxiii. by mark twain. [sidenote: ( .)] [_dictated march , ._] ... i am talking of a time sixty years ago, and upwards. i remember the names of some of those schoolmates, and, by fitful glimpses, even their faces rise dimly before me for a moment--only just long enough to be recognized; then they vanish. i catch glimpses of george robards, the latin pupil--slender, pale, studious, bending over his book and absorbed in it, his long straight black hair hanging down below his jaws like a pair of curtains on the sides of his face. i can see him give his head a toss and flirt one of the curtains back around his head--to get it out of his way, apparently; really to show off. in that day it was a great thing among the boys to have hair of so flexible a sort that it could be flung back in that way, with a flirt of the head. george robards was the envy of us all. for there was no hair among us that was so competent for this exhibition as his--except, perhaps, the yellow locks of will bowen and john robards. my hair was a dense ruck of short curls, and so was my brother henry's. we tried all kinds of devices to get these crooks straightened out so that they would flirt, but we never succeeded. sometimes, by soaking our heads and then combing and brushing our hair down tight and flat to our skulls, we could get it straight, temporarily, and this gave us a comforting moment of joy; but the first time we gave it a flirt it all shrivelled into curls again and our happiness was gone. john robards was the little brother of george; he was a wee chap with silky golden curtains to his face which dangled to his shoulders and below, and could be flung back ravishingly. when he was twelve years old he crossed the plains with his father amidst the rush of the gold-seekers of ' ; and i remember the departure of the cavalcade when it spurred westward. we were all there to see and to envy. and i can still see that proud little chap sailing by on a great horse, with his long locks streaming out behind. we were all on hand to gaze and envy when he returned, two years later, in unimaginable glory--_for he had travelled_! none of us had ever been forty miles from home. but he had crossed the continent. he had been in the gold-mines, that fairyland of our imagination. and he had done a still more wonderful thing. he had been in ships--in ships on the actual ocean; in ships on three actual oceans. for he had sailed down the pacific and around the horn among icebergs and through snow-storms and wild wintry gales, and had sailed on and turned the corner and flown northward in the trades and up through the blistering equatorial waters--and there in his brown face were the proofs of what he had been through. we would have sold our souls to satan for the privilege of trading places with him. i saw him when i was out on that missouri trip four years ago. he was old then--though not quite so old as i--and the burden of life was upon him. he said his granddaughter, twelve years old, had read my books and would like to see me. it was a pathetic time, for she was a prisoner in her room and marked for death. and john knew that she was passing swiftly away. twelve years old--just her grandfather's age when he rode away on that great journey with his yellow hair flapping behind him. in her i seemed to see that boy again. it was as if he had come back out of that remote past and was present before me in his golden youth. her malady was heart disease, and her brief life came to a close a few days later. another of those schoolboys was john garth. he became a prosperous banker and a prominent and valued citizen; and a few years ago he died, rich and honored. _he died._ it is what i have to say about so many of those boys and girls. the widow still lives, and there are grandchildren. in her pantalette days and my barefoot days she was a schoolmate of mine. i saw john's tomb when i made that missouri visit. her father, mr. kercheval, had an apprentice in the early days when i was nine years old, and he had also a slave woman who had many merits. but i can't feel very kindly or forgivingly toward either that good apprentice boy or that good slave woman, for they saved my life. one day when i was playing on a loose log which i supposed was attached to a raft--but it wasn't--it tilted me into bear creek. and when i had been under water twice and was coming up to make the third and fatal descent my fingers appeared above the water and that slave woman seized them and pulled me out. within a week i was in again, and that apprentice had to come along just at the wrong time, and he plunged in and dived, pawed around on the bottom and found me, and dragged me out and emptied the water out of me, and i was saved again. i was drowned seven times after that before i learned to swim--once in bear creek and six times in the mississippi. i do not now know who the people were who interfered with the intentions of a providence wiser than themselves, but i hold a grudge against them yet. when i told the tale of these remarkable happenings to rev. dr. burton of hartford, he said he did not believe it. _he slipped on the ice the very next year and sprained his ankle._ will bowen was another schoolmate, and so was his brother, sam, who was his junior by a couple of years. before the civil war broke out, both became st. louis and new orleans pilots. both are dead, long ago. [sidenote: ( .)] [_dictated march , ._] we will return to those schoolchildren of sixty years ago. i recall mary miller. she was not my first sweetheart, but i think she was the first one that furnished me a broken heart. i fell in love with her when she was eighteen and i was nine, but she scorned me, and i recognized that this was a cold world. i had not noticed that temperature before. i believe i was as miserable as even a grown man could be. but i think that this sorrow did not remain with me long. as i remember it, i soon transferred my worship to artimisia briggs, who was a year older than mary miller. when i revealed my passion to her she did not scoff at it. she did not make fun of it. she was very kind and gentle about it. but she was also firm, and said she did not want to be pestered by children. and there was mary lacy. she was a schoolmate. but she also was out of my class because of her advanced age. she was pretty wild and determined and independent. but she married, and at once settled down and became in all ways a model matron and was as highly respected as any matron in the town. four years ago she was still living, and had been married fifty years. jimmie mcdaniel was another schoolmate. his age and mine about tallied. his father kept the candy-shop and he was the most envied little chap in the town--after tom blankenship ("huck finn")--for although we never saw him eating candy, we supposed that it was, nevertheless, his ordinary diet. he pretended that he never ate it, and didn't care for it because there was nothing forbidden about it--there was plenty of it and he could have as much of it as he wanted. he was the first human being to whom i ever told a humorous story, so far as i can remember. this was about jim wolfe and the cats; and i gave him that tale the morning after that memorable episode. i thought he would laugh his teeth out. i had never been so proud and happy before, and have seldom been so proud and happy since. i saw him four years ago when i was out there. he wore a beard, gray and venerable, that came half-way down to his knees, and yet it was not difficult for me to recognize him. he had been married fifty-four years. he had many children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and also even posterity, they all said-- thousands--yet the boy to whom i had told the cat story when we were callow juveniles was still present in that cheerful little old man. artimisia briggs got married not long after refusing me. she married richmond, the stone mason, who was my methodist sunday-school teacher in the earliest days, and he had one distinction which i envied him: at some time or other he had hit his thumb with his hammer and the result was a thumb nail which remained permanently twisted and distorted and curved and pointed, like a parrot's beak. i should not consider it an ornament now, i suppose, but it had a fascination for me then, and a vast value, because it was the only one in the town. he was a very kindly and considerate sunday-school teacher, and patient and compassionate, so he was the favorite teacher with us little chaps. in that school they had slender oblong pasteboard blue tickets, each with a verse from the testament printed on it, and you could get a blue ticket by reciting two verses. by reciting five verses you could get three blue tickets, and you could trade these at the bookcase and borrow a book for a week. i was under mr. richmond's spiritual care every now and then for two or three years, and he was never hard upon me. i always recited the same five verses every sunday. he was always satisfied with the performance. he never seemed to notice that these were the same five foolish virgins that he had been hearing about every sunday for months. i always got my tickets and exchanged them for a book. they were pretty dreary books, for there was not a bad boy in the entire bookcase. they were _all_ good boys and good girls and drearily uninteresting, but they were better society than none, and i was glad to have their company and disapprove of it. [sidenote: ( .)] twenty years ago mr. richmond had become possessed of tom sawyer's cave in the hills three miles from town, and had made a tourist-resort of it. in when the gold-seekers were streaming through our little town of hannibal, many of our grown men got the gold fever, and i think that all the boys had it. on the saturday holidays in summer-time we used to borrow skiffs whose owners were not present and go down the river three miles to the cave hollow (missourian for "valley"), and there we staked out claims and pretended to dig gold, panning out half a dollar a day at first; two or three times as much, later, and by and by whole fortunes, as our imaginations became inured to the work. stupid and unprophetic lads! we were doing this in play and never suspecting. why, that cave hollow and all the adjacent hills were made of gold! but we did not know it. we took it for dirt. we left its rich secret in its own peaceful possession and grew up in poverty and went wandering about the world struggling for bread--and this because we had not the gift of prophecy. that region was all dirt and rocks to us, yet all it needed was to be ground up and scientifically handled and it was gold. that is to say, the whole region was a cement-mine--and they make the finest kind of portland cement there now, five thousand barrels a day, with a plant that cost $ , , . for a little while reuel gridley attended that school of ours. he was an elderly pupil; he was perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three years old. then came the mexican war and he volunteered. a company of infantry was raised in our town and mr. hickman, a tall, straight, handsome athlete of twenty-five, was made captain of it and had a sword by his side and a broad yellow stripe down the leg of his gray pants. and when that company marched back and forth through the streets in its smart uniform--which it did several times a day for drill--its evolutions were attended by all the boys whenever the school hours permitted. i can see that marching company yet, and i can almost feel again the consuming desire that i had to join it. but they had no use for boys of twelve and thirteen, and before i had a chance in another war the desire to kill people to whom i had not been introduced had passed away. i saw the splendid hickman in his old age. he seemed about the oldest man i had ever seen--an amazing and melancholy contrast with the showy young captain i had seen preparing his warriors for carnage so many, many years before. hickman is dead--it is the old story. as susy said, "what is it all for?" reuel gridley went away to the wars and we heard of him no more for fifteen or sixteen years. then one day in carson city while i was having a difficulty with an editor on the sidewalk--an editor better built for war than i was--i heard a voice say, "give him the best you've got, sam, i'm at your back." it was reuel gridley. he said he had not recognized me by my face but by my drawling style of speech. he went down to the reese river mines about that time and presently he lost an election bet in his mining camp, and by the terms of it he was obliged to buy a fifty-pound sack of self-raising flour and carry it through the town, preceded by music, and deliver it to the winner of the bet. of course the whole camp was present and full of fluid and enthusiasm. the winner of the bet put up the sack at auction for the benefit of the united states sanitary fund, and sold it. the excitement grew and grew. the sack was sold over and over again for the benefit of the fund. the news of it came to virginia city by telegraph. it produced great enthusiasm, and reuel gridley was begged by telegraph to bring the sack and have an auction in virginia city. he brought it. an open barouche was provided, also a brass band. the sack was sold over and over again at gold hill, then was brought up to virginia city toward night and sold--and sold again, and again, and still again, netting twenty or thirty thousand dollars for the sanitary fund. gridley carried it across california and sold it at various towns. he sold it for large sums in sacramento and in san francisco. he brought it east, sold it in new york and in various other cities, then carried it out to a great fair at st. louis, and went on selling it; and finally made it up into small cakes and sold those at a dollar apiece. first and last, the sack of flour which had originally cost ten dollars, perhaps, netted more than two hundred thousand dollars for the sanitary fund. reuel gridley has been dead these many, many years--it is the old story. in that school were the first jews i had ever seen. it took me a good while to get over the awe of it. to my fancy they were clothed invisibly in the damp and cobwebby mould of antiquity. they carried me back to egypt, and in imagination i moved among the pharaohs and all the shadowy celebrities of that remote age. the name of the boys was levin. we had a collective name for them which was the only really large and handsome witticism that was ever born in that congressional district. we called them "twenty-two"--and even when the joke was old and had been worn threadbare we always followed it with the explanation, to make sure that it would be understood, "twice levin--twenty-two." there were other boys whose names remain with me. irving ayres--but no matter, he is dead. then there was george butler, whom i remember as a child of seven wearing a blue leather belt with a brass buckle, and hated and envied by all the boys on account of it. he was a nephew of general ben butler and fought gallantly at ball's bluff and in several other actions of the civil war. he is dead, long and long ago. will bowen (dead long ago), ed stevens (dead long ago) and john briggs were special mates of mine. john is still living. [sidenote: ( .)] in , when i was ten years old, there was an epidemic of measles in the town and it made a most alarming slaughter among the little people. there was a funeral almost daily, and the mothers of the town were nearly demented with fright. my mother was greatly troubled. she worried over pamela and henry and me, and took constant and extraordinary pains to keep us from coming into contact with the contagion. but upon reflection i believed that her judgment was at fault. it seemed to me that i could improve upon it if left to my own devices. i cannot remember now whether i was frightened about the measles or not, but i clearly remember that i grew very tired of the suspense i suffered on account of being continually under the threat of death. i remember that i got so weary of it and so anxious to have the matter settled one way or the other, and promptly, that this anxiety spoiled my days and my nights. i had no pleasure in them. i made up my mind to end this suspense and be done with it. will bowen was dangerously ill with the measles and i thought i would go down there and catch them. i entered the house by the front way and slipped along through rooms and halls, keeping sharp watch against discovery, and at last i reached will's bed-chamber in the rear of the house on the second floor and got into it uncaptured. but that was as far as my victory reached. his mother caught me there a moment later and snatched me out of the house and gave me a most competent scolding and drove me away. she was so scared that she could hardly get her words out, and her face was white. i saw that i must manage better next time, and i did. i hung about the lane at the rear of the house and watched through cracks in the fence until i was convinced that the conditions were favorable; then i slipped through the back yard and up the back way and got into the room and into the bed with will bowen without being observed. i don't know how long i was in the bed. i only remember that will bowen, as society, had no value for me, for he was too sick to even notice that i was there. when i heard his mother coming i covered up my head, but that device was a failure. it was dead summer-time--the cover was nothing more than a limp blanket or sheet, and anybody could see that there were two of us under it. it didn't remain two very long. mrs. bowen snatched me out of the bed and conducted me home herself, with a grip on my collar which she never loosened until she delivered me into my mother's hands along with her opinion of that kind of a boy. it was a good case of measles that resulted. it brought me within a shade of death's door. it brought me to where i no longer took any interest in anything, but, on the contrary, felt a total absence of interest--which was most placid and enchanting. i have never enjoyed anything in my life any more than i enjoyed dying that time. i _was_, in effect, dying. the word had been passed and the family notified to assemble around the bed and see me off. i knew them all. there was no doubtfulness in my vision. they were all crying, but that did not affect me. i took but the vaguest interest in it, and that merely because i was the centre of all this emotional attention and was gratified by it and vain of it. when dr. cunningham had made up his mind that nothing more could be done for me he put bags of hot ashes all over me. he put them on my breast, on my wrists, on my ankles; and so, very much to his astonishment--and doubtless to my regret--he dragged me back into this world and set me going again. [_dictated july , ._] in an article entitled "england's ovation to mark twain," sydney brooks--but never mind that, now. i was in oxford by seven o'clock that evening (june , ), and trying on the scarlet gown which the tailor had been constructing, and found it right--right and surpassingly becoming. at half past ten the next morning we assembled at all souls college and marched thence, gowned, mortar-boarded and in double file, down a long street to the sheldonian theatre, between solid walls of the populace, very much hurrah'd and limitlessly kodak'd. we made a procession of considerable length and distinction and picturesqueness, with the chancellor, lord curzon, late viceroy of india, in his rich robe of black and gold, in the lead, followed by a pair of trim little boy train-bearers, and the train-bearers followed by the young prince arthur of connaught, who was to be made a d.c.l. the detachment of d.c.l.'s were followed by the doctors of science, and these by the doctors of literature, and these in turn by the doctors of music. sidney colvin marched in front of me; i was coupled with sidney lee, and kipling followed us; general booth, of the salvation army, was in the squadron of d.c.l.'s. our journey ended, we were halted in a fine old hall whence we could see, through a corridor of some length, the massed audience in the theatre. here for a little time we moved about and chatted and made acquaintanceships; then the d.c.l.'s were summoned, and they marched through that corridor and the shouting began in the theatre. it would be some time before the doctors of literature and of science would be called for, because each of those d.c.l.'s had to have a couple of latin speeches made over him before his promotion would be complete--one by the regius professor of civil law, the other by the chancellor. after a while i asked sir william ramsay if a person might smoke here and not get shot. he said, "yes," but that whoever did it and got caught would be fined a guinea, and perhaps hanged later. he said he knew of a place where we could accomplish at least as much as half of a smoke before any informers would be likely to chance upon us, and he was ready to show the way to any who might be willing to risk the guinea and the hanging. by request he led the way, and kipling, sir norman lockyer and i followed. we crossed an unpopulated quadrangle and stood under one of its exits--an archway of massive masonry--and there we lit up and began to take comfort. the photographers soon arrived, but they were courteous and friendly and gave us no trouble, and we gave them none. they grouped us in all sorts of ways and photographed us at their diligent leisure, while we smoked and talked. we were there more than an hour; then we returned to headquarters, happy, content, and greatly refreshed. presently we filed into the theatre, under a very satisfactory hurrah, and waited in a crimson column, dividing the crowded pit through the middle, until each of us in his turn should be called to stand before the chancellor and hear our merits set forth in sonorous latin. meantime, kipling and i wrote autographs until some good kind soul interfered in our behalf and procured for us a rest. i will now save what is left of my modesty by quoting a paragraph from sydney brooks's "ovation." * * * * * let those stars take the place of it for the present. sydney brooks has done it well. it makes me proud to read it; as proud as i was in that old day, sixty-two years ago, when i lay dying, the centre of attraction, with one eye piously closed upon the fleeting vanities of this life--an excellent effect--and the other open a crack to observe the tears, the sorrow, the admiration--all for me--all for me! ah, that was the proudest moment of my long life--until oxford! * * * * * most americans have been to oxford and will remember what a dream of the middle ages it is, with its crooked lanes, its gray and stately piles of ancient architecture and its meditation-breeding air of repose and dignity and unkinship with the noise and fret and hurry and bustle of these modern days. as a dream of the middle ages oxford was not perfect until pageant day arrived and furnished certain details which had been for generations lacking. these details began to appear at mid-afternoon on the th. at that time singles, couples, groups and squadrons of the three thousand five hundred costumed characters who were to take part in the pageant began to ooze and drip and stream through house doors, all over the old town, and wend toward the meadows outside the walls. soon the lanes were thronged with costumes which oxford had from time to time seen and been familiar with in bygone centuries--fashions of dress which marked off centuries as by dates, and mile-stoned them back, and back, and back, until history faded into legend and tradition, when arthur was a fact and the round table a reality. in this rich commingling of quaint and strange and brilliantly colored fashions in dress the dress-changes of oxford for twelve centuries stood livid and realized to the eye; oxford as a dream of the middle ages was complete now as it had never, in our day, before been complete; at last there was no discord; the mouldering old buildings, and the picturesque throngs drifting past them, were in harmony; soon--astonishingly soon!--the only persons that seemed out of place, and grotesquely and offensively and criminally out of place were such persons as came intruding along clothed in the ugly and odious fashions of the twentieth century; they were a bitterness to the feelings, an insult to the eye. the make-ups of illustrious historic personages seemed perfect, both as to portraiture and costume; one had no trouble in recognizing them. also, i was apparently quite easily recognizable myself. the first corner i turned brought me suddenly face to face with henry viii, a person whom i had been implacably disliking for sixty years; but when he put out his hand with royal courtliness and grace and said, "welcome, well-beloved stranger, to my century and to the hospitalities of my realm," my old prejudices vanished away and i forgave him. i think now that henry the eighth has been over-abused, and that most of us, if we had been situated as he was, domestically, would not have been able to get along with as limited a graveyard as he forced himself to put up with. i feel now that he was one of the nicest men in history. personal contact with a king is more effective in removing baleful prejudices than is any amount of argument drawn from tales and histories. if i had a child i would name it henry the eighth, regardless of sex. do you remember charles the first?--and his broad slouch with the plume in it? and his slender, tall figure? and his body clothed in velvet doublet with lace sleeves, and his legs in leather, with long rapier at his side and his spurs on his heels? i encountered him at the next corner, and knew him in a moment--knew him as perfectly and as vividly as i should know the grand chain in the mississippi if i should see it from the pilot-house after all these years. he bent his body and gave his hat a sweep that fetched its plume within an inch of the ground, and gave me a welcome that went to my heart. this king has been much maligned; i shall understand him better hereafter, and shall regret him more than i have been in the habit of doing these fifty or sixty years. he did some things in his time, which might better have been left undone, and which cast a shadow upon his name--we all know that, we all concede it--but our error has been in regarding them as crimes and in calling them by that name, whereas i perceive now that they were only indiscretions. at every few steps i met persons of deathless name whom i had never encountered before outside of pictures and statuary and history, and these were most thrilling and charming encounters. i had hand-shakes with henry the second, who had not been seen in the oxford streets for nearly eight hundred years; and with the fair rosamond, whom i now believe to have been chaste and blameless, although i had thought differently about it before; and with shakespeare, one of the pleasantest foreigners i have ever gotten acquainted with; and with roger bacon; and with queen elizabeth, who talked five minutes and never swore once--a fact which gave me a new and good opinion of her and moved me to forgive her for beheading the scottish mary, if she really did it, which i now doubt; and with the quaintly and anciently clad young king harold harefoot, of near nine hundred years ago, who came flying by on a bicycle and smoking a pipe, but at once checked up and got off to shake with me; and also i met a bishop who had lost his way because this was the first time he had been inside the walls of oxford for as much as twelve hundred years or thereabouts. by this time i had grown so used to the obliterated ages and their best-known people that if i had met adam i should not have been either surprised or embarrassed; and if he had come in a racing automobile and a cloud of dust, with nothing on but his fig-leaf, it would have seemed to me all right and harmonious. mark twain. (_to be continued._) chapters from my autobiography.--xxiv. by mark twain. _from susy's biography of me_ [ - ]. mamma and papa have returned from onteora and they have had a delightful visit. mr. frank stockton was down in virginia and could not reach onteora in time, so they did not see him, and mrs. mary mapes dodge was ill and couldn't go to onteora, but mrs. general custer was there, and mamma said that she was a very attractive, sweet appearing woman. [_dictated october , ._] onteora was situated high up in the catskill mountains, in the centre of a far-reaching solitude. i do not mean that the region was wholly uninhabited; there were farmhouses here and there, at generous distances apart. their occupants were descendants of ancestors who had built the houses in rip van winkle's time, or earlier; and those ancestors were not more primitive than were this posterity of theirs. the city people were as foreign and unfamiliar and strange to them as monkeys would have been, and they would have respected the monkeys as much as they respected these elegant summer-resorters. the resorters were a puzzle to them, their ways were so strange and their interests so trivial. they drove the resorters over the mountain roads and listened in shamed surprise at their bursts of enthusiasm over the scenery. the farmers had had that scenery on exhibition from their mountain roosts all their lives, and had never noticed anything remarkable about it. by way of an incident: a pair of these primitives were overheard chatting about the resorters, one day, and in the course of their talk this remark was dropped: "i was a-drivin' a passel of 'em round about yisterday evenin', quiet ones, you know, still and solemn, and all to wunst they busted out to make your hair lift and i judged hell was to pay. now what do you reckon it was? it wa'n't anything but jest one of them common damned yaller sunsets." in those days-- [_tuesday, october , ._] ... warner is gone. stockton is gone. i attended both funerals. warner was a near neighbor, from the autumn of ' until his death, nineteen years afterward. it is not the privilege of the most of us to have many intimate friends--a dozen is our aggregate--but i think he could count his by the score. it is seldom that a man is so beloved by both sexes and all ages as warner was. there was a charm about his spirit, and his ways, and his words, that won all that came within the sphere of its influence. our children adopted him while they were little creatures, and thenceforth, to the end, he was "cousin charley" to them. he was "uncle charley" to the children of more than one other friend. mrs. clemens was very fond of him, and he always called her by her first name--shortened. warner died, as she died, and as i would die--without premonition, without a moment's warning. uncle remus still lives, and must be over a thousand years old. indeed, i know that this must be so, because i have seen a new photograph of him in the public prints within the last month or so, and in that picture his aspects are distinctly and strikingly geological, and one can see he is thinking about the mastodons and plesiosaurians that he used to play with when he was young. it is just a quarter of a century since i have seen uncle remus. he visited us in our home in hartford and was reverently devoured by the big eyes of susy and clara, for i made a deep and awful impression upon the little creatures--who knew his book by heart through my nightly declamation of its tales to them--by revealing to them privately that he was the real uncle remus whitewashed so that he could come into people's houses the front way. he was the bashfulest grown person i have ever met. when there were people about he stayed silent, and seemed to suffer until they were gone. but he was lovely, nevertheless; for the sweetness and benignity of the immortal remus looked out from his eyes, and the graces and sincerities of his character shone in his face. it may be that jim wolf was as bashful as harris. it hardly seems possible, yet as i look back fifty-six years and consider jim wolf, i am almost persuaded that he was. he was our long slim apprentice in my brother's printing-office in hannibal. he was seventeen, and yet he was as much as four times as bashful as i was, though i was only fourteen. he boarded and slept in the house, but he was always tongue-tied in the presence of my sister, and when even my gentle mother spoke to him he could not answer save in frightened monosyllables. he would not enter a room where a girl was; nothing could persuade him to do such a thing. once when he was in our small parlor alone, two majestic old maids entered and seated themselves in such a way that jim could not escape without passing by them. he would as soon have thought of passing by one of harris's plesiosaurians ninety feet long. i came in presently, was charmed with the situation, and sat down in a corner to watch jim suffer, and enjoy it. my mother followed a minute later and sat down with the visitors and began to talk. jim sat upright in his chair, and during a quarter of an hour he did not change his position by a shade--neither general grant nor a bronze image could have maintained that immovable pose more successfully. i mean as to body and limbs; with the face there was a difference. by fleeting revealments of the face i saw that something was happening--something out of the common. there would be a sudden twitch of the muscles of the face, an instant distortion, which in the next instant had passed and left no trace. these twitches gradually grew in frequency, but no muscle outside of the face lost any of its rigidity, or betrayed any interest in what was happening to jim. i mean if something _was_ happening to him, and i knew perfectly well that that was the case. at last a pair of tears began to swim slowly down his cheeks amongst the twitchings, but jim sat still and let them run; then i saw his right hand steal along his thigh until half-way to his knee, then take a vigorous grip upon the cloth. that was a _wasp_ that he was grabbing! a colony of them were climbing up his legs and prospecting around, and every time he winced they stabbed him to the hilt--so for a quarter of an hour one group of excursionists after another climbed up jim's legs and resented even the slightest wince or squirm that he indulged himself with, in his misery. when the entertainment had become nearly unbearable, he conceived the idea of gripping them between his fingers and putting them out of commission. he succeeded with many of them, but at great cost, for, as he couldn't see the wasp, he was as likely to take hold of the wrong end of him as he was the right; then the dying wasp gave him a punch to remember the incident by. if those ladies had stayed all day, and if all the wasps in missouri had come and climbed up jim's legs, nobody there would ever have known it but jim and the wasps and me. there he would have sat until the ladies left. when they finally went away we went up-stairs and he took his clothes off, and his legs were a picture to look at. they looked as if they were mailed all over with shirt buttons, each with a single red hole in the centre. the pain was intolerable--no, would have been intolerable, but the pain of the presence of those ladies had been so much harder to bear that the pain of the wasps' stings was quite pleasant and enjoyable by comparison. jim never could enjoy wasps. i remember once-- _from susy's biography of me_ [ - ]. mamma has given me a very pleasant little newspaper scrap about papa, to copy. i will put it in here. [_thursday, october , ._] it was a rather strong compliment; i think i will leave it out. it was from james redpath. the chief ingredients of redpath's make-up were honesty, sincerity, kindliness, and pluck. he wasn't afraid. he was one of ossawatomie brown's right-hand men in the bleeding kansas days; he was all through that struggle. he carried his life in his hands, and from one day to another it wasn't worth the price of a night's lodging. he had a small body of daring men under him, and they were constantly being hunted by the "jayhawkers," who were proslavery missourians, guerillas, modern free lances. [_friday, october , ._] ... i can't think of the name of that daredevil guerilla who led the jayhawkers and chased redpath up and down the country, and, in turn, was chased by redpath. by grace of the chances of war, the two men never met in the field, though they several times came within an ace of it. ten or twelve years later, redpath was earning his living in boston as chief of the lecture business in the united states. fifteen or sixteen years after his kansas adventures i became a public lecturer, and he was my agent. along there somewhere was a press dinner, one november night, at the tremont hotel in boston, and i attended it. i sat near the head of the table, with redpath between me and the chairman; a stranger sat on my other side. i tried several times to talk with the stranger, but he seemed to be out of words and i presently ceased from troubling him. he was manifestly a very shy man, and, moreover, he might have been losing sleep the night before. the first man called up was redpath. at the mention of the name the stranger started, and showed interest. he fixed a fascinated eye on redpath, and lost not a word of his speech. redpath told some stirring incidents of his career in kansas, and said, among other things: "three times i came near capturing the gallant jayhawker chief, and once he actually captured _me_, but didn't know me and let me go, because he said he was hot on redpath's trail and couldn't afford to waste time and rope on inconsequential small fry." my stranger was called up next, and when redpath heard his name he, in turn, showed a startled interest. the stranger said, bending a caressing glance upon redpath and speaking gently--i may even say sweetly: "you realize that i was that jayhawker chief. i am glad to know you now and take you to my heart and call you friend"--then he added, in a voice that was pathetic with regret, "but if i had only known you then, what tumultuous happiness i should have had in your society!--while it lasted." the last quarter of a century of my life has been pretty constantly and faithfully devoted to the study of the human race--that is to say, the study of myself, for, in my individual person, i am the entire human race compacted together. i have found that then is no ingredient of the race which i do not possess in either a small way or a large way. when it is small, as compared with the same ingredient in somebody else, there is still enough of it for all the purposes of examination. in my contacts with the species i find no one who possesses a quality which i do not possess. the shades of difference between other people and me serve to make variety and prevent monotony, but that is all; broadly speaking, we are all alike; and so by studying myself carefully and comparing myself with other people, and noting the divergences, i have been enabled to acquire a knowledge of the human race which i perceive is more accurate and more comprehensive than that which has been acquired and revealed by any other member of our species. as a result, my private and concealed opinion of myself is not of a complimentary sort. it follows that my estimate of the human race is the duplicate of my estimate of myself. i am not proposing to discuss all of the peculiarities of the human race, at this time; i only wish to touch lightly upon one or two of them. to begin with, i wonder why a man should prefer a good billiard-table to a poor one; and why he should prefer straight cues to crooked ones; and why he should prefer round balls to chipped ones; and why he should prefer a level table to one that slants; and why he should prefer responsive cushions to the dull and unresponsive kind. i wonder at these things, because when we examine the matter we find that the essentials involved in billiards are as competently and exhaustively furnished by a bad billiard outfit as they are by the best one. one of the essentials is amusement. very well, if there is any more amusement to be gotten out of the one outfit than out of the other, the facts are in favor of the bad outfit. the bad outfit will always furnish thirty per cent. more fun for the players and for the spectators than will the good outfit. another essential of the game is that the outfit shall give the players full opportunity to exercise their best skill, and display it in a way to compel the admiration of the spectators. very well, the bad outfit is nothing behind the good one in this regard. it is a difficult matter to estimate correctly the eccentricities of chipped balls and a slanting table, and make the right allowance for them and secure a count; the finest kind of skill is required to accomplish the satisfactory result. another essential of the game is that it shall add to the interest of the game by furnishing opportunities to bet. very well, in this regard no good outfit can claim any advantage over a bad one. i know, by experience, that a bad outfit is as valuable as the best one; that an outfit that couldn't be sold at auction for seven dollars is just as valuable for all the essentials of the game as an outfit that is worth a thousand. i acquired some of this learning in jackass gulch, california, more than forty years ago. jackass gulch had once been a rich and thriving surface-mining camp. by and by its gold deposits were exhausted; then the people began to go away, and the town began to decay, and rapidly; in my time it had disappeared. where the bank, and the city hall, and the church, and the gambling-dens, and the newspaper office, and the streets of brick blocks had been, was nothing now but a wide and beautiful expanse of green grass, a peaceful and charming solitude. half a dozen scattered dwellings were still inhabited, and there was still one saloon of a ruined and rickety character struggling for life, but doomed. in its bar was a billiard outfit that was the counterpart of the one in my father-in-law's garret. the balls were chipped, the cloth was darned and patched, the table's surface was undulating, and the cues were headless and had the curve of a parenthesis--but the forlorn remnant of marooned miners played games there, and those games were more entertaining to look at than a circus and a grand opera combined. nothing but a quite extraordinary skill could score a carom on that table--a skill that required the nicest estimate of force, distance, and how much to allow for the various slants of the table and the other formidable peculiarities and idiosyncrasies furnished by the contradictions of the outfit. last winter, here in new york, i saw hoppe and schaefer and sutton and the three or four other billiard champions of world-wide fame contend against each other, and certainly the art and science displayed were a wonder to see; yet i saw nothing there in the way of science and art that was more wonderful than shots which i had seen texas tom make on the wavy surface of that poor old wreck in the perishing saloon at jackass gulch forty years before. once i saw texas tom make a string of seven points on a single inning!--all calculated shots, and not a fluke or a scratch among them. i often saw him make runs of four, but when he made his great string of seven, the boys went wild with enthusiasm and admiration. the joy and the noise exceeded that which the great gathering at madison square produced when sutton scored five hundred points at the eighteen-inch game, on a world-famous night last winter. with practice, that champion could score nineteen or twenty on the jackass gulch table; but to start with, texas tom would show him miracles that would astonish him; also it might have another handsome result: it might persuade the great experts to discard their own trifling game and bring the jackass gulch outfit here and exhibit their skill in a game worth a hundred of the discarded one, for profound and breathless interest, and for displays of almost superhuman skill. in my experience, games played with a fiendish outfit furnish ecstasies of delight which games played with the other kind cannot match. twenty-seven years ago my budding little family spent the summer at bateman's point, near newport, rhode island. it was a comfortable boarding-place, well stocked with sweet mothers and little children, but the male sex was scarce; however, there was another young fellow besides myself, and he and i had good times--higgins was his name, but that was not his fault. he was a very pleasant and companionable person. on the premises there was what had once been a bowling-alley. it was a single alley, and it was estimated that it had been out of repair for sixty years--but not the balls, the balls were in good condition; there were forty-one of them, and they ranged in size from a grapefruit up to a lignum-vitæ sphere that you could hardly lift. higgins and i played on that alley day after day. at first, one of us located himself at the bottom end to set up the pins in case anything should happen to them, but nothing happened. the surface of that alley consisted of a rolling stretch of elevations and depressions, and neither of us could, by any art known to us, persuade a ball to stay on the alley until it should accomplish something. little balls and big, the same thing always happened--the ball left the alley before it was half-way home and went thundering down alongside of it the rest of the way and made the gamekeeper climb out and take care of himself. no matter, we persevered, and were rewarded. we examined the alley, noted and located a lot of its peculiarities, and little by little we learned how to deliver a ball in such a way that it would travel home and knock down a pin or two. by and by we succeeded in improving our game to a point where we were able to get all of the pins with thirty-five balls--so we made it a thirty-five-ball game. if the player did not succeed with thirty-five, he had lost the game. i suppose that all the balls, taken together, weighed five hundred pounds, or maybe a ton--or along there somewhere--but anyway it was hot weather, and by the time that a player had sent thirty-five of them home he was in a drench of perspiration, and physically exhausted. next, we started cocked hat--that is to say, a triangle of three pins, the other seven being discarded. in this game we used the three smallest balls and kept on delivering them until we got the three pins down. after a day or two of practice we were able to get the chief pin with an output of four balls, but it cost us a great many deliveries to get the other two; but by and by we succeeded in perfecting our art--at least we perfected it to our limit. we reached a scientific excellence where we could get the three pins down with twelve deliveries of the three small balls, making thirty-six shots to conquer the cocked hat. having reached our limit for daylight work, we set up a couple of candles and played at night. as the alley was fifty or sixty feet long, we couldn't see the pins, but the candles indicated their locality. we continued this game until we were able to knock down the invisible pins with thirty-six shots. having now reached the limit of the candle game, we changed and played it left-handed. we continued the left-handed game until we conquered its limit, which was fifty-four shots. sometimes we sent down a succession of fifteen balls without getting anything at all. we easily got out of that old alley five times the fun that anybody could have gotten out of the best alley in new york. one blazing hot day, a modest and courteous officer of the regular army appeared in our den and introduced himself. he was about thirty-five years old, well built and militarily erect and straight, and he was hermetically sealed up in the uniform of that ignorant old day--a uniform made of heavy material, and much properer for january than july. when he saw the venerable alley, and glanced from that to the long procession of shining balls in the trough, his eye lit with desire, and we judged that he was our meat. we politely invited him to take a hand, and he could not conceal his gratitude; though his breeding, and the etiquette of his profession, made him try. we explained the game to him, and said that there were forty-one balls, and that the player was privileged to extend his inning and keep on playing until he had used them all up--repeatedly--and that for every ten-strike he got a prize. we didn't name the prize--it wasn't necessary, as no prize would ever be needed or called for. he started a sarcastic smile, but quenched it, according to the etiquette of his profession. he merely remarked that he would like to select a couple of medium balls and one small one, adding that he didn't think he would need the rest. then he began, and he was an astonished man. he couldn't get a ball to stay on the alley. when he had fired about fifteen balls and hadn't yet reached the cluster of pins, his annoyance began to show out through his clothes. he wouldn't let it show in his face; but after another fifteen balls he was not able to control his face; he didn't utter a word, but he exuded mute blasphemy from every pore. he asked permission to take off his coat, which was granted; then he turned himself loose, with bitter determination, and although he was only an infantry officer he could have been mistaken for a battery, he got up such a volleying thunder with those balls. presently he removed his cravat; after a little he took off his vest; and still he went bravely on. higgins was suffocating. my condition was the same, but it would not be courteous to laugh; it would be better to burst, and we came near it. that officer was good pluck. he stood to his work without uttering a word, and kept the balls going until he had expended the outfit four times, making four times forty-one shots; then he had to give it up, and he did; for he was no longer able to stand without wobbling. he put on his clothes, bade us a courteous good-by, invited us to call at the fort, and started away. then he came back, and said, "what is the prize for the ten-strike?" we had to confess that we had not selected it yet. he said, gravely, that he thought there was no occasion for hurry about it. i believe bateman's alley was a better one than any other in america, in the matter of the essentials of the game. it compelled skill; it provided opportunity for bets; and if you could get a stranger to do the bowling for you, there was more and wholesomer and delightfuler entertainment to be gotten out of his industries than out of the finest game by the best expert, and played upon the best alley elsewhere in existence. mark twain. (_to be continued._) north american review no. dcxxv. december, . chapters from my autobiography.--xxv. by mark twain. _january , ._ answer to a letter received this morning: dear mrs. h.,--i am forever your debtor for reminding me of that curious passage in my life. during the first year or two after it happened, i could not bear to think of it. my pain and shame were so intense, and my sense of having been an imbecile so settled, established and confirmed, that i drove the episode entirely from my mind--and so all these twenty-eight or twenty-nine years i have lived in the conviction that my performance of that time was coarse, vulgar and destitute of humor. but your suggestion that you and your family found humor in it twenty-eight years ago moved me to look into the matter. so i commissioned a boston typewriter to delve among the boston papers of that bygone time and send me a copy of it. it came this morning, and if there is any vulgarity about it i am not able to discover it. if it isn't innocently and ridiculously funny, i am no judge. i will see to it that you get a copy. address of samuel l. clemens ("mark twain") from a report of the dinner given by the publishers of the atlantic monthly in honor of the seventieth anniversary of the birth of john greenleaf whittier, at the hotel brunswick, boston, december , , as published in the boston evening transcript, december , mr. chairman--this is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging up of pleasant reminiscences concerning literary folk; therefore i will drop lightly into history myself. standing here on the shore of the atlantic and contemplating certain of its largest literary billows, i am reminded of a thing which happened to me thirteen years ago, when i had just succeeded in stirring up a little nevadian literary puddle myself, whose spume-flakes were beginning to blow thinly californiawards. i started an inspection tramp through the southern mines of california. i was callow and conceited, and i resolved to try the virtue of my _nom de guerre._ i very soon had an opportunity. i knocked at a miner's lonely log cabin in the foothills of the sierras just at nightfall. it was snowing at the time. a jaded, melancholy man of fifty, barefooted, opened the door to me. when he heard my _nom de guerre_ he looked more dejected than before. he let me in--pretty reluctantly, i thought--and after the customary bacon and beans, black coffee and hot whiskey, i took a pipe. this sorrowful man had not said three words up to this time. now he spoke up and said, in the voice of one who is secretly suffering, "you're the fourth--i'm going to move." "the fourth what!" said i. "the fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours--i'm going to move." "you don't tell me!" said i; "who were the others!" "mr. longfellow, mr. emerson and mr. oliver wendell holmes--consound the lot!" you can easily believe i was interested. i supplicated--three hot whiskeys did the rest--and finally the melancholy miner began. said he-- "they came here just at dark yesterday evening, and i let them in of course. said they were going to the yosemite. they were a rough lot, but that's nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot. mr. emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed. mr. holmes as fat as a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundred, and double chins all the way down to his stomach. mr. longfellow built like a prize-fighter. his head was cropped and bristly, like as if he had a wig made of hair-brushes. his nose lay straight down his face, like a finger with the end joint tilted up. they had been drinking, i could see that. and what queer talk they used! mr. holmes inspected this cabin, then he took me by the buttonhole, and says he-- "'through the deep cares of thought i hear a voice that sings, build thee more stately mansions, o my soul!' "says i, 'i can't afford it, mr. holmes, and moreover i don't want to.' blamed if i liked it pretty well, either, coming from a stranger, that way. however, i started to get out my bacon and beans, when mr. emerson came and looked on awhile, and then he takes me aside by the buttonhole and says-- "'give me agates for my meat; give me cantharids to eat; from air and ocean bring me foods, from all zones and altitudes.' "says i, 'mr. emerson, if you'll excuse me, this ain't no hotel.' you see it sort of riled me--i warn't used to the ways of littery swells. but i went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes mr. longfellow and buttonholes me, and interrupts me. says he, "'honor be to mudjekeewis! you shall hear how pau-puk-keewis--' "but i broke in, and says i, 'beg your pardon, mr. longfellow, if you'll be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and let me get this grub ready, you'll do me proud.' well, sir, after they'd filled up i set out the jug. mr. holmes looks at it and then he fires up all of a sudden and yells-- "'flash out a stream of blood-red wine! for i would drink to other days.' "by george, i was getting kind of worked up. i don't deny it, i was getting kind of worked up. i turns to mr. holmes, and says i, 'looky here, my fat friend, i'm a-running this shanty, and if the court knows herself, you'll take whiskey straight or you'll go dry.' them's the very words i said to him. now i don't want to sass such famous littery people, but you see they kind of forced me. there ain't nothing onreasonable 'bout me; i don't mind a passel of guests a-treadin' on my tail three or four times, but when it comes to _standing_ on it it's different, 'and if the court knows herself,' i says, 'you'll take whiskey straight or you'll go dry.' well, between drinks they'd swell around the cabin and strike attitudes and spout; and pretty soon they got out a greasy old deck and went to playing euchre at ten cents a corner--on trust. i began to notice some pretty suspicious things. mr. emerson dealt, looked at his hand, shook his head, says-- "'i am the doubter and the doubt--' and ca'mly bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new layout. says he-- "'they reckon ill who leave me out; they know not well the subtle ways i keep. i pass and deal _again_!' hang'd if he didn't go ahead and do it, too! o, he was a cool one! well, in about a minute, things were running pretty tight, but all of a sudden i see by mr. emerson's eye he judged he had 'em. he had already corralled two tricks and each of the others one. so now he kind of lifts a little in his chair and says-- "'i tire of globes and aces!-- too long the game is played!' --and down he fetched a right bower. mr. longfellow smiles as sweet as pie and says-- "'thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, for the lesson thou hast taught,' --and blamed if he didn't down with _another_ right bower! emerson claps his hand on his bowie, longfellow claps his on his revolver, and i went under a bunk. there was going to be trouble; but that monstrous holmes rose up, wobbling his double chins, and says he, 'order, gentlemen; the first man that draws, i'll lay down on him and smother him!' all quiet on the potomac, you bet! "they were pretty how-come-you-so, by now, and they begun to blow. emerson says, 'the nobbiest thing i ever wrote was barbara frietchie.' says longfellow, 'it don't begin with my biglow papers.' says holmes, 'my thanatopsis lays over 'em both.' they mighty near ended in a fight. then they wished they had some more company--and mr. emerson pointed to me and says-- "'is yonder squalid peasant all that this proud nursery could breed?' he was a-whetting his bowie on his boot--so i let it pass. well, sir, next they took it into their heads that they would like some music; so they made me stand up and sing 'when johnny comes marching home' till i dropped--at thirteen minutes past four this morning. that's what i've been through, my friend. when i woke at seven, they were leaving, thank goodness, and mr. longfellow had my only boots on, and his'n under his arm. says i, 'hold on, there, evangeline, what are you going to do with _them_! he says, 'going to make tracks with 'em; because-- "'lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime; and, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.' as i said, mr. twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours--and i'm going to move; i ain't suited to a littery atmosphere." i said to the miner, "why, my dear sir, _these_ were not the gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these were impostors." the miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while; then said he, "ah! impostors, were they? are _you_? i did not pursue the subject, and since then i have not travelled on my _nom de guerre_ enough to hurt. such was the reminiscence i was moved to contribute, mr. chairman. in my enthusiasm i may have exaggerated the details a little, but you will easily forgive me that fault, since i believe it is the first time i have ever deflected from perpendicular fact on an occasion like this. what i have said to mrs. h. is true. i did suffer during a year or two from the deep humiliations of that episode. but at last, in , in venice, my wife and i came across mr. and mrs. a. p. c., of concord, massachusetts, and a friendship began then of the sort which nothing but death terminates. the c.'s were very bright people and in every way charming and companionable. we were together a month or two in venice and several months in rome, afterwards, and one day that lamented break of mine was mentioned. and when i was on the point of lathering those people for bringing it to my mind when i had gotten the memory of it almost squelched, i perceived with joy that the c.'s were indignant about the way that my performance had been received in boston. they poured out their opinions most freely and frankly about the frosty attitude of the people who were present at that performance, and about the boston newspapers for the position they had taken in regard to the matter. that position was that i had been irreverent beyond belief, beyond imagination. very well, i had accepted that as a fact for a year or two, and had been thoroughly miserable about it whenever i thought of it--which was not frequently, if i could help it. whenever i thought of it i wondered how i ever could have been inspired to do so unholy a thing. well, the c.'s comforted me, but they did not persuade me to continue to think about the unhappy episode. i resisted that. i tried to get it out of my mind, and let it die, and i succeeded. until mrs. h.'s letter came, it had been a good twenty-five years since i had thought of that matter; and when she said that the thing was funny i wondered if possibly she might be right. at any rate, my curiosity was aroused, and i wrote to boston and got the whole thing copied, as above set forth. i vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering--dimly i can see a hundred people--no, perhaps fifty--shadowy figures sitting at tables feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless forever more. i don't know who they were, but i can very distinctly see, seated at the grand table and facing the rest of us, mr. emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; mr. whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face; mr. longfellow, with his silken white hair and his benignant face; dr. oliver wendell holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good-fellowship everywhere like a rose-diamond whose facets are being turned toward the light first one way and then another--a charming man, and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he was sitting still (what _he_ would call still, but what would be more or lees motion to other people). i can see those figures with entire distinctness across this abyss of time. one other feature is clear--willie winter (for these past thousand years dramatic editor of the "new york tribune," and still occupying that high post in his old age) was there. he was much younger then than he is now, and he showed it. it was always a pleasure to me to see willie winter at a banquet. during a matter of twenty years i was seldom at a banquet where willie winter was not also present, and where he did not read a charming poem written for the occasion. he did it this time, and it was up to standard: dainty, happy, choicely phrased, and as good to listen to as music, and sounding exactly as if it was pouring unprepared out of heart and brain. now at that point ends all that was pleasurable about that notable celebration of mr. whittier's seventieth birthday--because i got up at that point and followed winter, with what i have no doubt i supposed would be the gem of the evening--the gay oration above quoted from the boston paper. i had written it all out the day before and had perfectly memorized it, and i stood up there at my genial and happy and self-satisfied ease, and began to deliver it. those majestic guests, that row of venerable and still active volcanoes, listened, as did everybody else in the house, with attentive interest. well, i delivered myself of--we'll say the first two hundred words of my speech. i was expecting no returns from that part of the speech, but this was not the case as regarded the rest of it. i arrived now at the dialogue: 'the old miner said, "you are the fourth, i'm going to move." "the fourth what?" said i. he answered, "the fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours. i am going to move." "why, you don't tell me," said i. "who were the others?" "mr. longfellow, mr. emerson, mr. oliver wendell holmes, consound the lot--"' now then the house's _attention_ continued, but the expression of interest in the faces turned to a sort of black frost. i wondered what the trouble was. i didn't know. i went on, but with difficulty--i struggled along, and entered upon that miner's fearful description of the bogus emerson, the bogus holmes, the bogus longfellow, always hoping--but with a gradually perishing hope--that somebody would laugh, or that somebody would at least smile, but nobody did. i didn't know enough to give it up and sit down, i was too new to public speaking, and so i went on with this awful performance, and carried it clear through to the end, in front of a body of people who seemed turned to stone with horror. it was the sort of expression their faces would have worn if i had been making these remarks about the deity and the rest of the trinity; there is no milder way in which to describe the petrified condition and the ghastly expression of those people. when i sat down it was with a heart which had long ceased to beat. i shall never be as dead again as i was then. i shall never be as miserable again as i was then. i speak now as one who doesn't know what the condition of things may be in the next world, but in this one i shall never be as wretched again as i was then. howells, who was near me, tried to say a comforting word, but couldn't get beyond a gasp. there was no use--he understood the whole size of the disaster. he had good intentions, but the words froze before they could get out. it was an atmosphere that would freeze anything. if benvenuto cellini's salamander had been in that place he would not have survived to be put into cellini's autobiography. there was a frightful pause. there was an awful silence, a desolating silence. then the next man on the list had to get up--there was no help for it. that was bishop--bishop had just burst handsomely upon the world with a most acceptable novel, which had appeared in the "atlantic monthly," a place which would make any novel respectable and any author noteworthy. in this case the novel itself was recognized as being, without extraneous help, respectable. bishop was away up in the public favor, and he was an object of high interest, consequently there was a sort of national expectancy in the air; we may say our american millions were standing, from maine to texas and from alaska to florida, holding their breath, their lips parted, their hands ready to applaud when bishop should get up on that occasion, and for the first time in his life speak in public. it was under these damaging conditions that he got up to "make good," as the vulgar say. i had spoken several times before, and that in the reason why i was able to go on without dying in my tracks, as i ought to have done--but bishop had had no experience. he was up facing those awful deities--facing those other people, those strangers--facing human beings for the first time in his life, with a speech to utter. no doubt it was well packed away in his memory, no doubt it was fresh and usable, until i had been heard from. i suppose that after that, and under the smothering pall of that dreary silence, it began to waste away and disappear out of his head like the rags breaking from the edge of a fog, and presently there wasn't any fog left. he didn't go on--he didn't last long. it was not many sentences after his first before he began to hesitate, and break, and lose his grip, and totter, and wobble, and at last he slumped down in a limp and mushy pile. well, the programme for the occasion was probably not more than one-third finished, but it ended there. nobody rose. the next man hadn't strength enough to get up, and everybody looked so dazed, so stupefied, paralyzed, it was impossible for anybody to do anything, or even try. nothing could go on in that strange atmosphere. howells mournfully, and without words, hitched himself to bishop and me and supported us out of the room. it was very kind--he was most generous. he towed us tottering away into some room in that building, and we sat down there. i don't know what my remark was now, but i know the nature of it. it was the kind of remark you make when you know that nothing in the world can help your case. but howells was honest--he had to say the heart-breaking things he did say: that there was no help for this calamity, this shipwreck, this cataclysm; that this was the most disastrous thing that had ever happened in anybody's history--and then he added, "that is, for _you_--and consider what you have done for bishop. it is bad enough in your case, you deserve to suffer. you have committed this crime, and you deserve to have all you are going to get. but here is an innocent man. bishop had never done you any harm, and see what you have done to him. he can never hold his head up again. the world can never look upon bishop as being a live person. he is a corpse." that is the history of that episode of twenty-eight years ago, which pretty nearly killed me with shame during that first year or two whenever it forced its way into my mind. now, then, i take that speech up and examine it. as i said, it arrived this morning, from boston. i have read it twice, and unless i am an idiot, it hasn't a single defect in it from the first word to the last. it is just as good as good can be. it is smart; it is saturated with humor. there isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere. what could have been the matter with that house? it is amazing, it is incredible, that they didn't shout with laughter, and those deities the loudest of them all. could the fault have been with me? did i lose courage when i saw those great men up there whom i was going to describe in such a strange fashion? if that happened, if i showed doubt, that can account for it, for you can't be successfully funny if you show that you are afraid of it. well, i can't account for it, but if i had those beloved and revered old literary immortals back here now on the platform at carnegie hall i would take that same old speech, deliver it, word for word, and melt them till they'd run all over that stage. oh, the fault must have been with _me_, it is not in the speech at all. [_dictated october , ._] in some ways, i was always honest; even from my earliest years i could never bring myself to use money which i had acquired in questionable ways; many a time i tried, but principle was always stronger than desire. six or eight months ago, lieutenant-general nelson a. miles was given a great dinner-party in new york, and when he and i were chatting together in the drawing-room before going out to dinner he said, "i've known you as much as thirty years, isn't it?" i said, "yes, that's about it, i think." he mused a moment or two and then said, "i wonder we didn't meet in washington in ; you were there at that time, weren't you?" i said, "yes, but there was a difference; i was not known then; i had not begun to bud--i was an obscurity; but you had been adding to your fine civil war record; you had just come back from your brilliant indian campaign in the far west, and had been rewarded with a brigadier-generalship in the regular army, and everybody was talking about you and praising you. if you had met me, you wouldn't be able to remember it now--unless some unusual circumstance of the meeting had burnt it into your memory. it is forty years ago, and people don't remember nobodies over a stretch of time like that." i didn't wish to continue the conversation along that line, so i changed the subject. i could have proven to him, without any trouble, that we did meet in washington in , but i thought it might embarrass one or the other of us, so i didn't do it. i remember the incident very well. this was the way of it: i had just come back from the quaker city excursion, and had made a contract with bliss of hartford to write "the innocents abroad." i was out of money, and i went down to washington to see if i could earn enough there to keep me in bread and butter while i should write the book. i came across william clinton, brother of the astronomer, and together we invented a scheme for our mutual sustenance; we became the fathers and originators of what is a common feature in the newspaper world now--the syndicate. we became the old original first newspaper syndicate on the planet; it was on a small scale, but that is usual with untried new enterprises. we had twelve journals on our list; they were all weeklies, all obscure and poor, and all scattered far away among the back settlements. it was a proud thing for those little newspapers to have a washington correspondence, and a fortunate thing for us that they felt in that way about it. each of the twelve took two letters a week from us, at a dollar per letter; each of us wrote one letter per week and sent off six duplicates of it to these benefactors, thus acquiring twenty-four dollars a week to live on--which was all we needed, in our cheap and humble quarters. clinton was one of the dearest and loveliest human beings i have ever known, and we led a charmed existence together, in a contentment which knew no bounds. clinton was refined by nature and breeding; he was a gentleman by nature and breeding; he was highly educated; he was of a beautiful spirit; he was pure in heart and speech. he was a scotchman, and a presbyterian; a presbyterian of the old and genuine school, being honest and sincere in his religion, and loving it, and finding serenity and peace in it. he hadn't a vice--unless a large and grateful sympathy with scotch whiskey may be called by that name. i didn't regard it as a vice, because he was a scotchman, and scotch whiskey to a scotchman is as innocent as milk is to the rest of the human race. in clinton's case it was a virtue, and not an economical one. twenty-four dollars a week would really have been riches to us if we hadn't had to support that jug; because of the jug we were always sailing pretty close to the wind, and any tardiness in the arrival of any part of our income was sure to cause us some inconvenience. i remember a time when a shortage occurred; we had to have three dollars, and we had to have it before the close of the day. i don't know now how we happened to want all that money at one time; i only know we had to have it. clinton told me to go out and find it--and he said he would also go out and see what he could do. he didn't seem to have any doubt that we would succeed, but i knew that that was his religion working in him; i hadn't the same confidence; i hadn't any idea where to turn to raise all that bullion, and i said so. i think he was ashamed of me, privately, because of my weak faith. he told me to give myself no uneasiness, no concern; and said in a simple, confident, and unquestioning way, "the lord will provide." i saw that he fully believed the lord would provide, but it seemed to me that if he had had my experience-- but never mind that; before he was done with me his strong faith had had its influence, and i went forth from the place almost convinced that the lord really would provide. i wandered around the streets for an hour, trying to think up some way to get that money, but nothing suggested itself. at last i lounged into the big lobby of the ebbitt house, which was then a new hotel, and sat down. presently a dog came loafing along. he paused, glanced up at me and said, with his eyes, "are you friendly?" i answered, with my eyes, that i was. he gave his tail a grateful little wag and came forward and rested his jaw on my knee and lifted his brown eyes to my face in a winningly affectionate way. he was a lovely creature--as beautiful as a girl, and he was made all of silk and velvet. i stroked his smooth brown head and fondled his drooping ears, and we were a pair of lovers right away. pretty soon brigadier-general miles, the hero of the land, came strolling by in his blue and gold splendors, with everybody's admiring gaze upon him. he saw the dog and stopped, and there was a light in his eye which showed that he had a warm place in his heart for dogs like this gracious creature; then he came forward and patted the dog and said, "he is very fine--he is a wonder; would you sell him?" i was greatly moved; it seemed a marvellous thing to me, the way clinton's prediction had come true. i said, "yes." the general said, "what do you ask for him?" "three dollars." the general was manifestly surprised. he said, "three dollars? only three dollars? why, that dog is a most uncommon dog; he can't possibly be worth leas than fifty. if he were mine, i wouldn't take a hundred for him. i'm afraid you are not aware of his value. reconsider your price if you like, i don't wish to wrong you." but if he had known me he would have known that i was no more capable of wronging him than he was of wronging me. i responded with the same quiet decision as before, "no--three dollars. that is his price." "very well, since you insist upon it," said the general, and he gave me three dollars and led the dog away, and disappeared up-stairs. in about ten minutes a gentle-faced middle-aged gentleman came along, and began to look around here and there and under tables and everywhere, and i said to him, "is it a dog you are looking for?" his face was sad, before, and troubled; but it lit up gladly now, and he answered, "yes--have you seen him?" "yes," i said, "he was here a minute ago, and i saw him follow a gentleman away. i think i could find him for you if you would like me to try." i have seldom seen a person look so grateful--and there was gratitude in his voice, too, when he conceded that he would like me to try. i said i would do it with great pleasure, but that as it might take a little time i hoped he would not mind paying me something for my trouble. he said he would do it most gladly--repeating that phrase "most gladly"--and asked me how much. i said-- "three dollars." he looked surprised, and said, "dear me, it is nothing! i will pay you ten, quite willingly." but i said, "no, three is the price"--and i started for the stairs without waiting for any further argument, for clinton had said that that was the amount that the lord would provide, and it seemed to me that it would be sacrilegious to take a penny more than was promised. i got the number of the general's room from the office-clerk, as i passed by his wicket, and when i reached the room i found the general there caressing his dog, and quite happy. i said, "i am sorry, but i have to take the dog again." he seemed very much surprised, and said, "take him again? why, he is my dog; you sold him to me, and at your own price." "yes," i said, "it is true--but i have to have him, because the man wants him again." "what man?" "the man that owns him; he wasn't my dog." the general looked even more surprised than before, and for a moment he couldn't seem to find his voice; then he said, "do you mean to tell me that you were selling another man's dog--and knew it?" "yes, i knew it wasn't my dog." "then why did you sell him?" i said, "well, that is a curious question to ask. i sold him because you wanted him. you offered to buy the dog; you can't deny that i was not anxious to sell him--i had not even thought of selling him, but it seemed to me that if it could be any accommodation to you--" he broke me off in the middle, and said, "_accommodation_ to me? it is the most extraordinary spirit of accommodation i have ever heard of--the idea of your selling a dog that didn't belong to you--" i broke him off there, and said, "there is no relevancy about this kind of argument; you said yourself that the dog was probably worth a hundred dollars, i only asked you three; was there anything unfair about that? you offered to pay more, you know you did. i only asked you three; you can't deny it." "oh, what in the world has that to do with it! the crux of the matter is that you didn't own the dog--can't you see that? you seem to think that there is no impropriety in selling property that isn't yours provided you sell it cheap. now, then--" i said, "please don't argue about it any more. you can't get around the fact that the price was perfectly fair, perfectly reasonable--considering that i didn't own the dog--and so arguing about it is only a waste of words. i have to have him back again because the man wants him; don't you see that i haven't any choice in the matter? put yourself in my place. suppose you had sold a dog that didn't belong to you; suppose you--" "oh," he said, "don't muddle my brains any more with your idiotic reasonings! take him along, and give me a rest." so i paid back the three dollars and led the dog down-stairs and passed him over to his owner, and collected three for my trouble. i went away then with a good conscience, because i had acted honorably; i never could have used the three that i sold the dog for, because it was not rightly my own, but the three i got for restoring him to his rightful owner was righteously and properly mine, because i had earned it. that man might never have gotten that dog back at all, if it hadn't been for me. my principles have remained to this day what they were then. i was always honest; i know i can never be otherwise. it is as i said in the beginning--i was never able to persuade myself to use money which i had acquired in questionable ways. now, then, that is the tale. some of it is true. mark twain. literary friends and acquaintances--my mark twain by william dean howells my mark twain i. it was in the little office of james t. fields, over the bookstore of ticknor & fields, at tremont street, boston, that i first met my friend of now forty-four years, samuel l. clemens. mr. fields was then the editor of the atlantic monthly, and i was his proud and glad assistant, with a pretty free hand as to manuscripts, and an unmanacled command of the book-notices at the end of the magazine. i wrote nearly all of them myself, and in i had written rather a long notice of a book just winning its way to universal favor. in this review i had intimated my reservations concerning the 'innocents abroad', but i had the luck, if not the sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had not had before. i forget just what i said in praise of it, and it does not matter; it is enough that i praised it enough to satisfy the author. he now signified as much, and he stamped his gratitude into my memory with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation, which the mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here. throughout my long acquaintance with him his graphic touch was always allowing itself a freedom which i cannot bring my fainter pencil to illustrate. he had the southwestern, the lincolnian, the elizabethan breadth of parlance, which i suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish; and i was often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; i could not bear to burn them, and i could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them. i shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that in it he was shakespearian, or if his ghost will not suffer me the word, then he was baconian. at the time of our first meeting, which must have been well toward the winter, clemens (as i must call him instead of mark twain, which seemed always somehow to mask him from my personal sense) was wearing a sealskin coat, with the fur out, in the satisfaction of a caprice, or the love of strong effect which he was apt to indulge through life. i do not know what droll comment was in fields's mind with respect to this garment, but probably he felt that here was an original who was not to be brought to any bostonian book in the judgment of his vivid qualities. with his crest of dense red hair, and the wide sweep of his flaming mustache, clemens was not discordantly clothed in that sealskin coat, which afterward, in spite of his own warmth in it, sent the cold chills through me when i once accompanied it down broadway, and shared the immense publicity it won him. he had always a relish for personal effect, which expressed itself in the white suit of complete serge which he wore in his last years, and in the oxford gown which he put on for every possible occasion, and said he would like to wear all the time. that was not vanity in him, but a keen feeling for costume which the severity of our modern tailoring forbids men, though it flatters women to every excess in it; yet he also enjoyed the shock, the offence, the pang which it gave the sensibilities of others. then there were times he played these pranks for pure fun, and for the pleasure of the witness. once i remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at hartford in a pair of white cowskin slippers, with the hair out, and do a crippled colored uncle to the joy of all beholders. or, i must not say all, for i remember also the dismay of mrs. clemens, and her low, despairing cry of, "oh, youth!" that was her name for him among their friends, and it fitted him as no other would, though i fancied with her it was a shrinking from his baptismal samuel, or the vernacular sam of his earlier companionships. he was a youth to the end of his days, the heart of a boy with the head of a sage; the heart of a good boy, or a bad boy, but always a wilful boy, and wilfulest to show himself out at every time for just the boy he was. ii. there is a gap in my recollections of clemens, which i think is of a year or two, for the next thing i remember of him is meeting him at a lunch in boston, given us by that genius of hospitality, the tragically destined ralph keeler, author of one of the most unjustly forgotten books, 'vagabond adventures', a true bit of picaresque autobiography. keeler never had any money, to the general knowledge, and he never borrowed, and he could not have had credit at the restaurant where he invited us to feast at his expense. there was t. b. aldrich, there was j. t. fields, much the oldest of our company, who had just freed himself from the trammels of the publishing business, and was feeling his freedom in every word; there was bret harte, who had lately come east in his princely progress from california; and there was clemens. nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless and joyful talk-play, beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless good stories from fields, of a heat-lightning shimmer of wit from aldrich, of an occasional concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full of good fellowship, bret harte's fleeting dramatization of clemens's mental attitude toward a symposium of boston illuminates. "why, fellows," he spluttered, "this is the dream of mark's life," and i remember the glance from under clemens's feathery eyebrows which betrayed his enjoyment of the fun. we had beefsteak with mushrooms, which in recognition of their shape aldrich hailed as shoe-pegs, and to crown the feast we had an omelette souse, which the waiter brought in as flat as a pancake, amid our shouts of congratulations to poor keeler, who took them with appreciative submission. it was in every way what a boston literary lunch ought not to have been in the popular ideal which harte attributed to clemens. our next meeting was at hartford, or, rather, at springfield, where clemens greeted us on the way to hartford. aldrich was going on to be his guest, and i was going to be charles dudley warner's, but clemens had come part way to welcome us both. in the good fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round. there was constant running in and out of friendly houses where the lively hosts and guests called one another by their christian names or nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at doors. clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance. the house was the design of that most original artist, edward potter, who once, when hard pressed by incompetent curiosity for the name of his style in a certain church, proposed that it should be called the english violet order of architecture; and this house was so absolutely suited to the owner's humor that i suppose there never was another house like it; but its character must be for recognition farther along in these reminiscences. the vividest impression which clemens gave us two ravenous young boston authors was of the satisfying, the surfeiting nature of subscription publication. an army of agents was overrunning the country with the prospectuses of his books, and delivering them by the scores of thousands in completed sale. of the 'innocents abroad' he said, "it sells right along just like the bible," and 'roughing it' was swiftly following, without perhaps ever quite overtaking it in popularity. but he lectured aldrich and me on the folly of that mode of publication in the trade which we had thought it the highest success to achieve a chance in. "anything but subscription publication is printing for private circulation," he maintained, and he so won upon our greed and hope that on the way back to boston we planned the joint authorship of a volume adapted to subscription publication. we got a very good name for it, as we believed, in memorable murders, and we never got farther with it, but by the time we reached boston we were rolling in wealth so deep that we could hardly walk home in the frugal fashion by which we still thought it best to spare car fare; carriage fare we did not dream of even in that opulence. iii. the visits to hartford which had begun with this affluence continued without actual increase of riches for me, but now i went alone, and in warner's european and egyptian absences i formed the habit of going to clemens. by this time he was in his new house, where he used to give me a royal chamber on the ground floor, and come in at night after i had gone to bed to take off the burglar alarm so that the family should not be roused if anybody tried to get in at my window. this would be after we had sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot scotch, while we both talked and talked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the waters under the earth. after two days of this talk i would come away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer. once, after some such bout of brains, we went down to new york together, and sat facing each other in the pullman smoker without passing a syllable till we had occasion to say, "well, we're there." then, with our installation in a now vanished hotel (the old brunswick, to be specific), the talk began again with the inspiration of the novel environment, and went on and on. we wished to be asleep, but we could not stop, and he lounged through the rooms in the long nightgown which he always wore in preference to the pajamas which he despised, and told the story of his life, the inexhaustible, the fairy, the arabian nights story, which i could never tire of even when it began to be told over again. or at times he would reason high-- "of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute," walking up and down, and halting now and then, with a fine toss and slant of his shaggy head, as some bold thought or splendid joke struck him. he was in those days a constant attendant at the church of his great friend, the rev. joseph h. twichell, and at least tacitly far from the entire negation he came to at last. i should say he had hardly yet examined the grounds of his passive acceptance of his wife's belief, for it was hers and not his, and he held it unscanned in the beautiful and tender loyalty to her which was the most moving quality of his most faithful soul. i make bold to speak of the love between them, because without it i could not make him known to others as he was known to me. it was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives, and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character. she was in a way the loveliest person i have ever seen, the gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and clemens not only accepted her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it. i am not sure that he noticed all her goodness in the actions that made it a heavenly vision to others, he so had the habit of her goodness; but if there was any forlorn and helpless creature in the room mrs. clemens was somehow promptly at his side or hers; she was always seeking occasion of kindness to those in her household or out of it; she loved to let her heart go beyond the reach of her hand, and imagined the whole hard and suffering world with compassion for its structural as well as incidental wrongs. i suppose she had her ladyhood limitations, her female fears of etiquette and convention, but she did not let them hamper the wild and splendid generosity with which clemens rebelled against the social stupidities and cruelties. she had been a lifelong invalid when he met her, and he liked to tell the beautiful story of their courtship to each new friend whom he found capable of feeling its beauty or worthy of hearing it. naturally, her father had hesitated to give her into the keeping of the young strange westerner, who had risen up out of the unknown with his giant reputation of burlesque humorist, and demanded guaranties, demanded proofs. "he asked me," clemens would say, "if i couldn't give him the names of people who knew me in california, and when it was time to hear from them i heard from him. 'well, mr. clemens,' he said, 'nobody seems to have a very good word for you.' i hadn't referred him to people that i thought were going to whitewash me. i thought it was all up with me, but i was disappointed. 'so i guess i shall have to back you myself.'" whether this made him faithfuler to the trust put in him i cannot say, but probably not; it was always in him to be faithful to any trust, and in proportion as a trust of his own was betrayed he was ruthlessly and implacably resentful. but i wish now to speak of the happiness of that household in hartford which responded so perfectly to the ideals of the mother when the three daughters, so lovely and so gifted, were yet little children. there had been a boy, and "yes, i killed him," clemens once said, with the unsparing self-blame in which he would wreak an unavailing regret. he meant that he had taken the child out imprudently, and the child had taken the cold which he died of, but it was by no means certain this was through its father's imprudence. i never heard him speak of his son except that once, but no doubt in his deep heart his loss was irreparably present. he was a very tender father and delighted in the minds of his children, but he was wise enough to leave their training altogether to the wisdom of their mother. he left them to that in everything, keeping for himself the pleasure of teaching them little scenes of drama, learning languages with them, and leading them in singing. they came to the table with their parents, and could have set him an example in behavior when, in moments of intense excitement, he used to leave his place and walk up and down the room, flying his napkin and talking and talking. it was after his first english sojourn that i used to visit him, and he was then full of praise of everything english: the english personal independence and public spirit, and hospitality, and truth. he liked to tell stories in proof of their virtues, but he was not blind to the defects of their virtues: their submissive acceptance of caste, their callousness with strangers; their bluntness with one another. mrs. clemens had been in a way to suffer socially more than he, and she praised the english less. she had sat after dinner with ladies who snubbed and ignored one another, and left her to find her own amusement in the absence of the attention with which americans perhaps cloy their guests, but which she could not help preferring. in their successive sojourns among them i believe he came to like the english less and she more; the fine delight of his first acceptance among them did not renew itself till his oxford degree was given him; then it made his cup run over, and he was glad the whole world should see it. his wife would not chill the ardor of his early anglomania, and in this, as in everything, she wished to humor him to the utmost. no one could have realized more than she his essential fineness, his innate nobleness. marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be, but from the outside i should say that this marriage was one of the most perfect. it lasted in his absolute devotion to the day of her death, that delayed long in cruel suffering, and that left one side of him in lasting night. from florence there came to me heartbreaking letters from him about the torture she was undergoing, and at last a letter saying she was dead, with the simple-hearted cry, "i wish i was with livy." i do not know why i have left saying till now that she was a very beautiful woman, classically regular in features, with black hair smooth over her forehead, and with tenderly peering, myopia eyes, always behind glasses, and a smile of angelic kindness. but this kindness went with a sense of humor which qualified her to appreciate the self-lawed genius of a man who will be remembered with the great humorists of all time, with cervantes, with swift, or with any others worthy his company; none of them was his equal in humanity. iv. clemens had appointed himself, with the architect's connivance, a luxurious study over the library in his new house, but as his children grew older this study, with its carved and cushioned arm-chairs, was given over to them for a school-room, and he took the room above his stable, which had been intended for his coachman. there we used to talk together, when we were not walking and talking together, until he discovered that he could make a more commodious use of the billiard-room at the top of his house, for the purposes of literature and friendship. it was pretty cold up there in the early spring and late fall weather with which i chiefly associate the place, but by lighting up all the gas-burners and kindling a reluctant fire on the hearth we could keep it well above freezing. clemens could also push the balls about, and, without rivalry from me, who could no more play billiards than smoke, could win endless games of pool, while he carried points of argument against imaginable differers in opinion. here he wrote many of his tales and sketches, and for anything i know some of his books. i particularly remember his reading me here his first rough sketch of captain stormfield's visit to heaven, with the real name of the captain, whom i knew already from his many stories about him. we had a peculiar pleasure in looking off from the high windows on the pretty hartford landscape, and down from them into the tops of the trees clothing the hillside by which his house stood. we agreed that there was a novel charm in trees seen from such a vantage, far surpassing that of the farther scenery. he had not been a country boy for nothing; rather he had been a country boy, or, still better, a village boy, for everything that nature can offer the young of our species, and no aspect of her was lost on him. we were natives of the same vast mississippi valley; and missouri was not so far from ohio but that we were akin in our first knowledges of woods and fields as we were in our early parlance. i had outgrown the use of mine through my greater bookishness, but i gladly recognized the phrases which he employed for their lasting juiciness and the long-remembered savor they had on his mental palate. i have elsewhere sufficiently spoken of his unsophisticated use of words, of the diction which forms the backbone of his manly style. if i mention my own greater bookishness, by which i mean his less quantitative reading, it is to give myself better occasion to note that he was always reading some vital book. it might be some out-of-the-way book, but it had the root of the human matter in it: a volume of great trials; one of the supreme autobiographies; a signal passage of history, a narrative of travel, a story of captivity, which gave him life at first-hand. as i remember, he did not care much for fiction, and in that sort he had certain distinct loathings; there were certain authors whose names he seemed not so much to pronounce as to spew out of his mouth. goldsmith was one of these, but his prime abhorrence was my dear and honored prime favorite, jane austen. he once said to me, i suppose after he had been reading some of my unsparing praises of her--i am always praising her, "you seem to think that woman could write," and he forbore withering me with his scorn, apparently because we had been friends so long, and he more pitied than hated me for my bad taste. he seemed not to have any preferences among novelists; or at least i never heard him express any. he used to read the modern novels i praised, in or out of print; but i do not think he much liked reading fiction. as for plays, he detested the theatre, and said he would as lief do a sum as follow a plot on the stage. he could not, or did not, give any reasons for his literary abhorrences, and perhaps he really had none. but he could have said very distinctly, if he had needed, why he liked the books he did. i was away at the time of his great browning passion, and i know of it chiefly from hearsay; but at the time tolstoy was doing what could be done to make me over clemens wrote, "that man seems to have been to you what browning was to me." i do not know that he had other favorites among the poets, but he had favorite poems which he liked to read to you, and he read, of course, splendidly. i have forgotten what piece of john hay's it was that he liked so much, but i remembered how he fiercely revelled in the vengefulness of william morris's 'sir guy of the dolorous blast,' and how he especially exalted in the lines which tell of the supposed speaker's joy in slaying the murderer of his brother: "i am threescore years and ten, and my hair is 'nigh turned gray, but i am glad to think of the moment when i took his life away." generally, i fancy his pleasure in poetry was not great, and i do not believe he cared much for the conventionally accepted masterpieces of literature. he liked to find out good things and great things for himself; sometimes he would discover these in a masterpiece new to him alone, and then, if you brought his ignorance home to him, he enjoyed it, and enjoyed it the more the more you rubbed it in. of all the literary men i have known he was the most unliterary in his make and manner. i do not know whether he had any acquaintance with latin, but i believe not the least; german he knew pretty well, and italian enough late in life to have fun with it; but he used english in all its alien derivations as if it were native to his own air, as if it had come up out of american, out of missourian ground. his style was what we know, for good and for bad, but his manner, if i may difference the two, was as entirely his own as if no one had ever written before. i have noted before this how he was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to. that is, he wrote as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an eye to what went before or should come after. if something beyond or beside what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page, and made it as much at home there as the nature of it would suffer him. then, when he was through with the welcoming of this casual and unexpected guest, he would go back to the company he was entertaining, and keep on with what he had been talking about. he observed this manner in the construction of his sentences, and the arrangement of his chapters, and the ordering or disordering of his compilations.--[nowhere is this characteristic better found than in twain's 'autobiography,' it was not a "style" it was unselfconscious thought d.w.]--i helped him with a library of humor, which he once edited, and when i had done my work according to tradition, with authors, times, and topics carefully studied in due sequence, he tore it all apart, and "chucked" the pieces in wherever the fancy for them took him at the moment. he was right: we were not making a text-book, but a book for the pleasure rather than the instruction of the reader, and he did not see why the principle on which he built his travels and reminiscences and tales and novels should not apply to it; and i do not now see, either, though at the time it confounded me. on minor points he was, beyond any author i have known, without favorite phrases or pet words. he utterly despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology. if a word served his turn better than a substitute, he would use it as many times in a page as he chose. v. at that time i had become editor of the atlantic monthly, and i had allegiances belonging to the conduct of what was and still remains the most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals. when clemens began to write for it he came willingly under its rules, for with all his wilfulness there never was a more biddable man in things you could show him a reason for. he never made the least of that trouble which so abounds for the hapless editor from narrower-minded contributors. if you wanted a thing changed, very good, he changed it; if you suggested that a word or a sentence or a paragraph had better be struck out, very good, he struck it out. his proof-sheets came back each a veritable "mush of concession," as emerson says. now and then he would try a little stronger language than 'the atlantic' had stomach for, and once when i sent him a proof i made him observe that i had left out the profanity. he wrote back: "mrs. clemens opened that proof, and lit into the room with danger in her eye. what profanity? you see, when i read the manuscript to her i skipped that." it was part of his joke to pretend a violence in that gentlest creature which the more amusingly realized the situation to their friends. i was always very glad of him and proud of him as a contributor, but i must not claim the whole merit, or the first merit of having him write for us. it was the publisher, the late h. o. houghton, who felt the incongruity of his absence from the leading periodical of the country, and was always urging me to get him to write. i will take the credit of being eager for him, but it is to the publisher's credit that he tried, so far as the modest traditions of 'the atlantic' would permit, to meet the expectations in pay which the colossal profits of clemens's books might naturally have bred in him. whether he was really able to do this he never knew from clemens himself, but probably twenty dollars a page did not surfeit the author of books that "sold right along just like the bible." we had several short contributions from clemens first, all of capital quality, and then we had the series of papers which went mainly to the making of his great book, 'life on the mississippi'. upon the whole i have the notion that clemens thought this his greatest book, and he was supported in his opinion by that of the 'portier' in his hotel at vienna, and that of the german emperor, who, as he told me with equal respect for the preference of each, united in thinking it his best; with such far-sundered social poles approaching in its favor, he apparently found himself without standing for opposition. at any rate, the papers won instant appreciation from his editor and publisher, and from the readers of their periodical, which they expected to prosper beyond precedent in its circulation. but those were days of simpler acceptance of the popular rights of newspapers than these are, when magazines strictly guard their vested interests against them. 'the new york times' and the 'st. louis democrat' profited by the advance copies of the magazine sent them to reprint the papers month by month. together they covered nearly the whole reading territory of the union, and the terms of their daily publication enabled them to anticipate the magazine in its own restricted field. its subscription list was not enlarged in the slightest measure, and the atlantic monthly languished on the news-stands as undesired as ever. vi. it was among my later visits to hartford that we began to talk up the notion of collaborating a play, but we did not arrive at any clear intention, and it was a telegram out of the clear sky that one day summoned me from boston to help with a continuation of colonel sellers. i had been a witness of the high joy of clemens in the prodigious triumph of the first colonel sellers, which had been dramatized from the novel of 'the gilded age.' this was the joint work of clemens and charles dudley warner, and the story had been put upon the stage by some one in utah, whom clemens first brought to book in the courts for violation of his copyright, and then indemnified for such rights as his adaptation of the book had given him. the structure of the play as john t. raymond gave it was substantially the work of this unknown dramatist. clemens never pretended, to me at any rate, that he had the least hand in it; he frankly owned that he was incapable of dramatization; yet the vital part was his, for the characters in the play were his as the book embodied them, and the success which it won with the public was justly his. this he shared equally with the actor, following the company with an agent, who counted out the author's share of the gate money, and sent him a note of the amount every day by postal card. the postals used to come about dinner-time, and clemens would read them aloud to us in wild triumph. one hundred and fifty dollars--two hundred dollars--three hundred dollars were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air before he sat down at table, or rose from it to brandish, and then, flinging his napkin into his chair, walked up and down to exult in. by-and-by the popularity of the play waned, and the time came when he sickened of the whole affair, and withdrew his agent, and took whatever gain from it the actor apportioned him. he was apt to have these sudden surceases, following upon the intensities of his earlier interest; though he seemed always to have the notion of making something more of colonel sellers. but when i arrived in hartford in answer to his summons, i found him with no definite idea of what he wanted to do with him. i represented that we must have some sort of plan, and he agreed that we should both jot down a scenario overnight and compare our respective schemes the next morning. as the author of a large number of little plays which have been privately presented throughout the united states and in parts of the united kingdom, without ever getting upon the public stage except for the noble ends of charity, and then promptly getting off it, i felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly nothing as chaos could be. he agreed hilariously with me, and was willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability. at the same time he liked my plot very much, which ultimated sellers, according to clemens's intention, as a man crazed by his own inventions and by his superstition that he was the rightful heir to an english earldom. the exuberant nature of sellers and the vast range of his imagination served our purpose in other ways. clemens made him a spiritualist, whose specialty in the occult was materialization; he became on impulse an ardent temperance reformer, and he headed a procession of temperance ladies after disinterestedly testing the deleterious effects of liquor upon himself until he could not walk straight; always he wore a marvellous fire-extinguisher strapped on his back, to give proof in any emergency of the effectiveness of his invention in that way. we had a jubilant fortnight in working the particulars of these things out. it was not possible for clemens to write like anybody else, but i could very easily write like clemens, and we took the play scene and scene about, quite secure of coming out in temperamental agreement. the characters remained for the most part his, and i varied them only to make them more like his than, if possible, he could. several years after, when i looked over a copy of the play, i could not always tell my work from his; i only knew that i had done certain scenes. we would work all day long at our several tasks, and then at night, before dinner, read them over to each other. no dramatists ever got greater joy out of their creations, and when i reflect that the public never had the chance of sharing our joy i pity the public from a full heart. i still believe that the play was immensely funny; i still believe that if it could once have got behind the footlights it would have continued to pack the house before them for an indefinite succession of nights. but this may be my fondness. at any rate, it was not to be. raymond had identified himself with sellers in the play-going imagination, and whether consciously or unconsciously we constantly worked with raymond in our minds. but before this time bitter displeasures had risen between clemens and raymond, and clemens was determined that raymond should never have the play. he first offered it to several other actors, who eagerly caught it, only to give it back with the despairing renunciation, "that is a raymond play." we tried managers with it, but their only question was whether they could get raymond to do it. in the mean time raymond had provided himself with a play for the winter--a very good play, by demarest lloyd; and he was in no hurry for ours. perhaps he did not really care for it perhaps he knew when he heard of it that it must come to him in the end. in the end it did, from my hand, for clemens would not meet him. i found him in a mood of sweet reasonableness, perhaps the more softened by one of those lunches which our publisher, the hospitable james r. osgood, was always bringing people together over in boston. he said that he could not do the play that winter, but he was sure that he should like it, and he had no doubt he would do it the next winter. so i gave him the manuscript, in spite of clemens's charges, for his suspicions and rancors were such that he would not have had me leave it for a moment in the actor's hands. but it seemed a conclusion that involved success and fortune for us. in due time, but i do not remember how long after, raymond declared himself delighted with the piece; he entered into a satisfactory agreement for it, and at the beginning of the next season he started with it to buffalo, where he was to give a first production. at rochester he paused long enough to return it, with the explanation that a friend had noted to him the fact that colonel sellers in the play was a lunatic, and insanity was so serious a thing that it could not be represented on the stage without outraging the sensibilities of the audience; or words to that effect. we were too far off to allege hamlet to the contrary, or king lear, or to instance the delight which generations of readers throughout the world had taken in the mad freaks of don quixote. whatever were the real reasons of raymond for rejecting the play, we had to be content with those he gave, and to set about getting it into other hands. in this effort we failed even more signally than before, if that were possible. at last a clever and charming elocutionist, who had long wished to get himself on the stage, heard of it and asked to see it. we would have shown it to any one by this time, and we very willingly showed it to him. he came to hartford and did some scenes from it for us. i must say he did them very well, quite as well as raymond could have done them, in whose manner he did them. but now, late toward spring, the question was where he could get an engagement with the play, and we ended by hiring a theatre in new york for a week of trial performances. clemens came on with me to boston, where we were going to make some changes in the piece, and where we made them to our satisfaction, but not to the effect of that high rapture which we had in the first draft. he went back to hartford, and then the cold fit came upon me, and "in visions of the night, in slumberings upon the bed," ghastly forms of failure appalled me, and when i rose in the morning i wrote him: "here is a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner. we are fools." whether clemens agreed with me or not in my conclusion, he agreed with me in my premises, and we promptly bought our play off the stage at a cost of seven hundred dollars, which we shared between us. but clemens was never a man to give up. i relinquished gratis all right and title i had in the play, and he paid its entire expenses for a week of one-night stands in the country. it never came to new york; and yet i think now that if it had come, it would have succeeded. so hard does the faith of the unsuccessful dramatist in his work die. vii. there is an incident of this time so characteristic of both men that i will yield to the temptation of giving it here. after i had gone to hartford in response to clemens's telegram, matthew arnold arrived in boston, and one of my family called on his, to explain why i was not at home to receive his introduction: i had gone to see mark twain. "oh, but he doesn't like that sort of thing, does he?" "he likes mr. clemens very much," my representative answered, "and he thinks him one of the greatest men he ever knew." i was still clemens's guest at hartford when arnold came there to lecture, and one night we went to meet him at a reception. while his hand laxly held mine in greeting, i saw his eyes fixed intensely on the other side of the room. "who-who in the world is that?" i looked and said, "oh, that is mark twain." i do not remember just how their instant encounter was contrived by arnold's wish, but i have the impression that they were not parted for long during the evening, and the next night arnold, as if still under the glamour of that potent presence, was at clemens's house. i cannot say how they got on, or what they made of each other; if clemens ever spoke of arnold, i do not recall what he said, but arnold had shown a sense of him from which the incredulous sniff of the polite world, now so universally exploded, had already perished. it might well have done so with his first dramatic vision of that prodigious head. clemens was then hard upon fifty, and he had kept, as he did to the end, the slender figure of his youth, but the ashes of the burnt-out years were beginning to gray the fires of that splendid shock of red hair which he held to the height of a stature apparently greater than it was, and tilted from side to side in his undulating walk. he glimmered at you from the narrow slits of fine blue-greenish eyes, under branching brows, which with age grew more and more like a sort of plumage, and he was apt to smile into your face with a subtle but amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence; you were all there for him, but he was not all there for you. viii. i shall not try to give chronological order to my recollections of him, but since i am just now with him in hartford i will speak of him in association with the place. once when i came on from cambridge he followed me to my room to see that the water was not frozen in my bath, or something of the kind, for it was very cold weather, and then hospitably lingered. not to lose time in banalities i began at once from the thread of thought in my mind. "i wonder why we hate the past so," and he responded from the depths of his own consciousness, "it's so damned humiliating," which is what any man would say of his past if he were honest; but honest men are few when it comes to themselves. clemens was one of the few, and the first of them among all the people i have known. i have known, i suppose, men as truthful, but not so promptly, so absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful. he could lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm; he was not stupidly truthful; but his first impulse was to say out the thing and everything that was in him. to those who can understand it will not be contradictory of his sense of humiliation from the past, that he was not ashamed for anything he ever did to the point of wishing to hide it. he could be, and he was, bitterly sorry for his errors, which he had enough of in his life, but he was not ashamed in that mean way. what he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent, and if it was bad he was rather amused than troubled as to the effect in your mind. he would not obtrude the fact upon you, but if it were in the way of personal history he would not dream of withholding it, far less of hiding it. he was the readiest of men to allow an error if he were found in it. in one of our walks about hartford, when he was in the first fine flush of his agnosticism, he declared that christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions, and that the world under the highest pagan civilization was as well off as it was under the highest christian influences. i happened to be fresh from the reading of charles loring brace's 'gesta christi'; or, 'history of humane progress', and i could offer him abundant proofs that he was wrong. he did not like that evidently, but he instantly gave way, saying he had not known those things. later he was more tolerant in his denials of christianity, but just then he was feeling his freedom from it, and rejoicing in having broken what he felt to have been the shackles of belief worn so long. he greatly admired robert ingersoll, whom he called an angelic orator, and regarded as an evangel of a new gospel--the gospel of free thought. he took the warmest interest in the newspaper controversy raging at the time as to the existence of a hell; when the noes carried the day, i suppose that no enemy of perdition was more pleased. he still loved his old friend and pastor, mr. twichell, but he no longer went to hear him preach his sage and beautiful sermons, and was, i think, thereby the greater loser. long before that i had asked him if he went regularly to church, and he groaned out: "oh yes, i go. it 'most kills me, but i go," and i did not need his telling me to understand that he went because his wife wished it. he did tell me, after they both ceased to go, that it had finally come to her saying, "well, if you are to be lost, i want to be lost with you." he could accept that willingness for supreme sacrifice and exult in it because of the supreme truth as he saw it. after they had both ceased to be formal christians, she was still grieved by his denial of immortality, so grieved that he resolved upon one of those heroic lies, which for love's sake he held above even the truth, and he went to her, saying that he had been thinking the whole matter over, and now he was convinced that the soul did live after death. it was too late. her keen vision pierced through his ruse, as it did when he brought the doctor who had diagnosticated her case as organic disease of the heart, and, after making him go over the facts of it again with her, made him declare it merely functional. to make an end of these records as to clemens's beliefs, so far as i knew them, i should say that he never went back to anything like faith in the christian theology, or in the notion of life after death, or in a conscious divinity. it is best to be honest in this matter; he would have hated anything else, and i do not believe that the truth in it can hurt any one. at one period he argued that there must have been a cause, a conscious source of things; that the universe could not have come by chance. i have heard also that in his last hours or moments he said, or his dearest ones hoped he had said, something about meeting again. but the expression, of which they could not be certain, was of the vaguest, and it was perhaps addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness. all his expressions to me were of a courageous, renunciation of any hope of living again, or elsewhere seeing those he had lost. he suffered terribly in their loss, and he was not fool enough to try ignoring his grief. he knew that for this there were but two medicines; that it would wear itself out with the years, and that meanwhile there was nothing for it but those respites in which the mourner forgets himself in slumber. i remember that in a black hour of my own when i was called down to see him, as he thought from sleep, he said with an infinite, an exquisite compassion, "oh, did i wake you, did i wake, you?" nothing more, but the look, the voice, were everything; and while i live they cannot pass from my sense. ix. he was the most caressing of men in his pity, but he had the fine instinct, which would have pleased lowell, of never putting his hands on you--fine, delicate hands, with taper fingers, and pink nails, like a girl's, and sensitively quivering in moments of emotion; he did not paw you with them to show his affection, as so many of us americans are apt to do. among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities that each of us becomes, i should say that clemens's central and final personality was something exquisite. his casual acquaintance might know him, perhaps, from his fierce intensity, his wild pleasure in shocking people with his ribaldries and profanities, or from the mere need of loosing his rebellious spirit in that way, as anything but exquisite, and yet that was what in the last analysis he was. they might come away loathing or hating him, but one could not know him well without realizing him the most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men. he was southwestern, and born amid the oppression of a race that had no rights as against ours, but i never saw a man more regardful of negroes. he had a yellow butler when i first began to know him, because he said he could not bear to order a white man about, but the terms of his ordering george were those of the softest entreaty which command ever wore. he loved to rely upon george, who was such a broken reed in some things, though so stanch in others, and the fervent republican in politics that clemens then liked him to be. he could interpret clemens's meaning to the public without conveying his mood, and could render his roughest answer smooth to the person denied his presence. his general instructions were that this presence was to be denied all but personal friends, but the soft heart of george was sometimes touched by importunity, and once he came up into the billiard-room saying that mr. smith wished to see clemens. upon inquiry, mr. smith developed no ties of friendship, and clemens said, "you go and tell mr. smith that i wouldn't come down to see the twelve apostles." george turned from the threshold where he had kept himself, and framed a paraphrase of this message which apparently sent mr. smith away content with himself and all the rest of the world. the part of him that was western in his southwestern origin clemens kept to the end, but he was the most desouthernized southerner i ever knew. no man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery, and no one has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand, walter-scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the southern ideal. he held himself responsible for the wrong which the white race had done the black race in slavery, and he explained, in paying the way of a negro student through yale, that he was doing it as his part of the reparation due from every white to every black man. he said he had never seen this student, nor ever wished to see him or know his name; it was quite enough that he was a negro. about that time a colored cadet was expelled from west point for some point of conduct "unbecoming an officer and gentleman," and there was the usual shabby philosophy in a portion of the press to the effect that a negro could never feel the claim of honor. the man was fifteen parts white, but, "oh yes," clemens said, with bitter irony, "it was that one part black that undid him." it made him a "nigger" and incapable of being a gentleman. it was to blame for the whole thing. the fifteen parts white were guiltless. clemens was entirely satisfied with the result of the civil war, and he was eager to have its facts and meanings brought out at once in history. he ridiculed the notion, held by many, that "it was not yet time" to philosophize the events of the great struggle; that we must "wait till its passions had cooled," and "the clouds of strife had cleared away." he maintained that the time would never come when we should see its motives and men and deeds more clearly, and that now, now, was the hour to ascertain them in lasting verity. picturesquely and dramatically he portrayed the imbecility of deferring the inquiry at any point to the distance of future years when inevitably the facts would begin to put on fable. he had powers of sarcasm and a relentless rancor in his contempt which those who knew him best appreciated most. the late noah brooks, who had been in california at the beginning of clemens's career, and had witnessed the effect of his ridicule before he had learned to temper it, once said to me that he would rather have any one else in the world down on him than mark twain. but as clemens grew older he grew more merciful, not to the wrong, but to the men who were in it. the wrong was often the source of his wildest drolling. he considered it in such hopelessness of ever doing it justice that his despair broke in laughter. x. i go back to that house in hartford, where i was so often a happy guest, with tenderness for each of its endearing aspects. over the chimney in the library which had been cured of smoking by so much art and science, clemens had written in perennial brass the words of emerson, "the ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it," and he gave his guests a welcome of the simplest and sweetest cordiality. but i must not go aside to them from my recollections of him, which will be of sufficient garrulity, if i give them as fully as i wish. the windows of the library looked northward from the hillside above which the house stood, and over the little valley with the stream in it, and they showed the leaves of the trees that almost brushed them as in a claude lorraine glass. to the eastward the dining-room opened amply, and to the south there was a wide hall, where the voices of friends made themselves heard as they entered without ceremony and answered his joyous hail. at the west was a little semicircular conservatory of a pattern invented by mrs. harriet beecher stowe, and adopted in most of the houses of her kindly neighborhood. the plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of a fountain companied by callas and other water-loving lilies. there, while we breakfasted, patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled the pretty bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the delicate accents of its varied blossoms. breakfast was clemens's best meal, and he sat longer at his steak and coffee than at the courses of his dinner; luncheon was nothing to him, unless, as might happen, he made it his dinner, and reserved the later repast as the occasion of walking up and down the room, and discoursing at large on anything that came into his head. like most good talkers, he liked other people to have their say; he did not talk them down; he stopped instantly at another's remark and gladly or politely heard him through; he even made believe to find suggestion or inspiration in what was said. his children came to the table, as i have told, and after dinner he was apt to join his fine tenor to their trebles in singing. fully half our meetings were at my house in cambridge, where he made himself as much at home as in hartford. he would come ostensibly to stay at the parker house, in boston, and take a room, where he would light the gas and leave it burning, after dressing, while he drove out to cambridge and stayed two or three days with us. once, i suppose it was after a lecture, he came in evening dress and passed twenty-four hours with us in that guise, wearing an overcoat to hide it when we went for a walk. sometimes he wore the slippers which he preferred to shoes at home, and if it was muddy, as it was wont to be in cambridge, he would put a pair of rubbers over them for our rambles. he liked the lawlessness and our delight in allowing it, and he rejoiced in the confession of his hostess, after we had once almost worn ourselves out in our pleasure with the intense talk, with the stories and the laughing, that his coming almost killed her, but it was worth it. in those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it. at first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided that, but later he appeared from boston with four bottles of lager-beer under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you go to sleep, and we provided that. still later, on a visit i paid him at hartford, i learned that hot scotch was the only soporific worth considering, and scotch-whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard. one day, very long afterward, i asked him if he were still taking hot scotch to make him sleep. he said he was not taking anything. for a while he had found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o'clock, and had gone promptly to sleep without anything. he had done the like with the like effect ever since. of course, it amused him; there were few experiences of life, grave or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they wronged him. he came on to cambridge in april, , to go with me to the centennial ceremonies at concord in celebration of the battle of the minute men with the british troops a hundred years before. we both had special invitations, including passage from boston; but i said, why bother to go into boston when we could just as well take the train for concord at the cambridge station? he equally decided that it would be absurd; so we breakfasted deliberately, and then walked to the station, reasoning of many things as usual. when the train stopped, we found it packed inside and out. people stood dense on the platforms of the cars; to our startled eyes they seemed to project from the windows, and unless memory betrays me they lay strewn upon the roofs like brakemen slain at the post of duty. whether this was really so or not, it is certain that the train presented an impenetrable front even to our imagination, and we left it to go its way without the slightest effort to board. we remounted the fame-worn steps of porter's station, and began exploring north cambridge for some means of transportation overland to concord, for we were that far on the road by which the british went and came on the day of the battle. the liverymen whom we appealed to received us, some with compassion, some with derision, but in either mood convinced us that we could not have hired a cat to attempt our conveyance, much less a horse, or vehicle of any description. it was a raw, windy day, very unlike the exceptionally hot april day when the routed redcoats, pursued by the colonials, fled panting back to boston, with "their tongues hanging out like dogs," but we could not take due comfort in the vision of their discomfiture; we could almost envy them, for they had at least got to concord. a swift procession of coaches, carriages, and buggies, all going to concord, passed us, inert and helpless, on the sidewalk in the peculiarly cold mud of north cambridge. we began to wonder if we might not stop one of them and bribe it to take us, but we had not the courage to try, and clemens seized the opportunity to begin suffering with an acute indigestion, which gave his humor a very dismal cast. i felt keenly the shame of defeat, and the guilt of responsibility for our failure, and when a gay party of students came toward us on the top of a tally ho, luxuriously empty inside, we felt that our chance had come, and our last chance. he said that if i would stop them and tell them who i was they would gladly, perhaps proudly, give us passage; i contended that if with his far vaster renown he would approach them, our success would be assured. while we stood, lost in this "contest of civilities," the coach passed us, with gay notes blown from the horns of the students, and then clemens started in pursuit, encouraged with shouts from the merry party who could not imagine who was trying to run them down, to a rivalry in speed. the unequal match could end only in one way, and i am glad i cannot recall what he said when he came back to me. since then i have often wondered at the grief which would have wrung those blithe young hearts if they could have known that they might have had the company of mark twain to concord that day and did not. we hung about, unavailingly, in the bitter wind a while longer, and then slowly, very slowly, made our way home. we wished to pass as much time as possible, in order to give probability to the deceit we intended to practise, for we could not bear to own ourselves baffled in our boasted wisdom of taking the train at porter's station, and had agreed to say that we had been to concord and got back. even after coming home to my house, we felt that our statement would be wanting in verisimilitude without further delay, and we crept quietly into my library, and made up a roaring fire on the hearth, and thawed ourselves out in the heat of it before we regained our courage for the undertaking. with all these precautions we failed, for when our statement was imparted to the proposed victim she instantly pronounced it unreliable, and we were left with it on our hands intact. i think the humor of this situation was finally a greater pleasure to clemens than an actual visit to concord would have been; only a few weeks before his death he laughed our defeat over with one of my family in bermuda, and exulted in our prompt detection. xi. from our joint experience in failing i argue that clemens's affection for me must have been great to enable him to condone in me the final defection which was apt to be the end of our enterprises. i have fancied that i presented to him a surface of such entire trustworthiness that he could not imagine the depths of unreliability beneath it; and that never realizing it, he always broke through with fresh surprise but unimpaired faith. he liked, beyond all things, to push an affair to the bitter end, and the end was never too bitter unless it brought grief or harm to another. once in a telegraph office at a railway station he was treated with such insolent neglect by the young lady in charge, who was preoccupied in a flirtation with a "gentleman friend," that emulous of the public spirit which he admired in the english, he told her he should report her to her superiors, and (probably to her astonishment) he did so. he went back to hartford, and in due time the poor girl came to me in terror and in tears; for i had abetted clemens in his action, and had joined my name to his in his appeal to the authorities. she was threatened with dismissal unless she made full apology to him and brought back assurance of its acceptance. i felt able to give this, and, of course, he eagerly approved; i think he telegraphed his approval. another time, some years afterward, we sat down together in places near the end of a car, and a brakeman came in looking for his official note-book. clemens found that he had sat down upon it, and handed it to him; the man scolded him very abusively, and came back again and again, still scolding him for having no more sense than to sit down on a note-book. the patience of clemens in bearing it was so angelic that i saw fit to comment, "i suppose you will report this fellow." "yes," he answered, slowly and sadly. "that's what i should have done once. but now i remember that he gets twenty dollars a month." nothing could have been wiser, nothing tenderer, and his humanity was not for humanity alone. he abhorred the dull and savage joy of the sportsman in a lucky shot, an unerring aim, and once when i met him in the country he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in bringing down a blackbird, and he described the poor, stricken, glossy thing, how it lay throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as he might have given a wounded child. i find this a fit place to say that his mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world, in fear of those who give them a chance for their livelihoods and underpay them all they can. he never went so far in socialism as i have gone, if he went that way at all, but he was fascinated with looking backward and had bellamy to visit him; and from the first he had a luminous vision of organized labor as the only present help for working-men. he would show that side with such clearness and such force that you could not say anything in hopeful contradiction; he saw with that relentless insight of his that with unions was the working-man's only present hope of standing up like a man against money and the power of it. there was a time when i was afraid that his eyes were a little holden from the truth; but in the very last talk i heard from him i found that i was wrong, and that this great humorist was as great a humanist as ever. i wish that all the work-folk could know this, and could know him their friend in life as he was in literature; as he was in such a glorious gospel of equality as the 'connecticut yankee in king arthur's court.' xii. whether i will or no i must let things come into my story thoughtwise, as he would have let them, for i cannot remember them in their order. one night, while we were giving a party, he suddenly stormed in with a friend of his and mine, mr. twichell, and immediately began to eat and drink of our supper, for they had come straight to our house from walking to boston, or so great a part of the way as to be a-hungered and a-thirst. i can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped oysters without which no party in cambridge was really a party, exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of their progress. they had broken their journey with a night's rest, and they had helped themselves lavishly out by rail in the last half; but still it had been a mighty walk to do in two days. clemens was a great walker, in those years, and was always telling of his tramps with mr. twichell to talcott's tower, ten miles out of hartford. as he walked of course he talked, and of course he smoked. whenever he had been a few days with us, the whole house had to be aired, for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime. he always went to bed with a cigar in his mouth, and sometimes, mindful of my fire insurance, i went up and took it away, still burning, after he had fallen asleep. i do not know how much a man may smoke and live, but apparently he smoked as much as a man could, for he smoked incessantly. he did not care much to meet people, as i fancied, and we were greedy of him for ourselves; he was precious to us; and i would not have exposed him to the critical edge of that cambridge acquaintance which might not have appreciated him at, say, his transatlantic value. in america his popularity was as instant as it was vast. but it must be acknowledged that for a much longer time here than in england polite learning hesitated his praise. in england rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. lord mayors, lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation. but in his own country it was different. in proportion as people thought themselves refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude. i went with him to see longfellow, but i do not think longfellow made much of him, and lowell made less. he stopped as if with the long semitic curve of clemens's nose, which in the indulgence of his passion for finding every one more or less a jew he pronounced unmistakably racial. it was two of my most fastidious cambridge friends who accepted him with the english, the european entirety--namely, charles eliot norton and professor francis j. child. norton was then newly back from a long sojourn abroad, and his judgments were delocalized. he met clemens as if they had both been in england, and rejoiced in his bold freedom from environment, and in the rich variety and boundless reach of his talk. child was of a personal liberty as great in its fastidious way as that of clemens himself, and though he knew him only at second hand, he exulted in the most audacious instance of his grotesquery, as i shall have to tell by-and-by, almost solely. i cannot say just why clemens seemed not to hit the favor of our community of scribes and scholars, as bret harte had done, when he came on from california, and swept them before him, disrupting their dinners and delaying their lunches with impunity; but it is certain he did not, and i had better say so. i am surprised to find from the bibliographical authorities that it was so late as when he came with the manuscript of tom sawyer, and asked me to read it, as a friend and critic, and not as an editor. i have an impression that this was at mrs. clemens's instance in his own uncertainty about printing it. she trusted me, i can say with a satisfaction few things now give me, to be her husband's true and cordial adviser, and i was so. i believe i never failed him in this part, though in so many of our enterprises and projects i was false as water through my temperamental love of backing out of any undertaking. i believe this never ceased to astonish him, and it has always astonished me; it appears to me quite out of character; though it is certain that an undertaking, when i have entered upon it, holds me rather than i it. but however this immaterial matter may be, i am glad to remember that i thoroughly liked tom sawyer, and said so with every possible amplification. very likely, i also made my suggestions for its improvement; i could not have been a real critic without that; and i have no doubt they were gratefully accepted and, i hope, never acted upon. i went with him to the horse-car station in harvard square, as my frequent wont was, and put him aboard a car with his ms. in his hand, stayed and reassured, so far as i counted, concerning it. i do not know what his misgivings were; perhaps they were his wife's misgivings, for she wished him to be known not only for the wild and boundless humor that was in him, but for the beauty and tenderness and "natural piety"; and she would not have had him judged by a too close fidelity to the rude conditions of tom sawyer's life. this is the meaning that i read into the fact of his coming to me with those doubts. xiii. clemens had then and for many years the habit of writing to me about what he was doing, and still more of what he was experiencing. nothing struck his imagination, in or out of the daily routine, but he wished to write me of it, and he wrote with the greatest fulness and a lavish dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or forty pages, so that i have now perhaps fifteen hundred pages of his letters. they will no doubt some day be published, but i am not even referring to them in these records, which i think had best come to the reader with an old man's falterings and uncertainties. with his frequent absences and my own abroad, and the intrusion of calamitous cares, the rich tide of his letters was more and more interrupted. at times it almost ceased, and then it would come again, a torrent. in the very last weeks of his life he burst forth, and, though too weak himself to write, he dictated his rage with me for recommending to him a certain author whose truthfulness he could not deny, but whom he hated for his truthfulness to sordid and ugly conditions. at heart clemens was romantic, and he would have had the world of fiction stately and handsome and whatever the real world was not; but he was not romanticistic, and he was too helplessly an artist not to wish his own work to show life as he had seen it. i was preparing to rap him back for these letters when i read that he had got home to die; he would have liked the rapping back. he liked coming to boston, especially for those luncheons and dinners in which the fertile hospitality of our publisher, osgood, abounded. he dwelt equidistant from boston and new york, and he had special friends in new york, but he said he much preferred coming to boston; of late years he never went there, and he had lost the habit of it long before he came home from europe to live in new york. at these feasts, which were often of after-dinner-speaking measure, he could always be trusted for something of amazing delightfulness. once, when osgood could think of no other occasion for a dinner, he gave himself a birthday dinner, and asked his friends and authors. the beautiful and splendid trooper-like blaring was there, and i recall how in the long, rambling speech in which clemens went round the table hitting every head at it, and especially visiting osgood with thanks for his ingenious pretext for our entertainment, he congratulated blaring upon his engineering genius and his hypnotic control of municipal governments. he said that if there was a plan for draining a city at a cost of a million, by seeking the level of the water in the down-hill course of the sewers, blaring would come with a plan to drain that town up-hill at twice the cost and carry it through the common council without opposition. it is hard to say whether the time was gladder at these dinners, or at the small lunches at which osgood and aldrich and i foregathered with him and talked the afternoon away till well toward the winter twilight. he was a great figure, and the principal figure, at one of the first of the now worn-out authors' readings, which was held in the boston museum to aid a longfellow memorial. it was the late george parsons lathrop (everybody seems to be late in these sad days) who imagined the reading, but when it came to a price for seats i can always claim the glory of fixing it at five dollars. the price if not the occasion proved irresistible, and the museum was packed from the floor to the topmost gallery. norton presided, and when it came clemens's turn to read he introduced him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give, but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which are the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. he was reminded of darwin's delight in mark twain, and how when he came from his long day's exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a volume of mark twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him, and whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt secure of a good night's rest from it. a sort of blank ensued which clemens filled in the only possible way. he said he should always be glad that he had contributed to the repose of that great man, whom science owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every breast to burst forth, he began to read. it was curious to watch his triumph with the house. his carefully studied effects would reach the first rows in the orchestra first, and ripple in laughter back to the standees against the wall, and then with a fine resurgence come again to the rear orchestra seats, and so rise from gallery to gallery till it fell back, a cataract of applause from the topmost rows of seats. he was such a practised speaker that he knew all the stops of that simple instrument man, and there is no doubt that these results were accurately intended from his unerring knowledge. he was the most consummate public performer i ever saw, and it was an incomparable pleasure to hear him lecture; on the platform he was the great and finished actor which he probably would not have been on the stage. he was fond of private theatricals, and liked to play in them with his children and their friends, in dramatizations of such stories of his as 'the prince and the pauper;' but i never saw him in any of these scenes. when he read his manuscript to you, it was with a thorough, however involuntary, recognition of its dramatic qualities; he held that an actor added fully half to the character the author created. with my own hurried and half-hearted reading of passages which i wished to try on him from unprinted chapters (say, out of 'the undiscovered country' or 'a modern instance') he said frankly that my reading could spoil anything. he was realistic, but he was essentially histrionic, and he was rightly so. what we have strongly conceived we ought to make others strongly imagine, and we ought to use every genuine art to that end. xiv. there came a time when the lecturing which had been the joy of his prime became his loathing, loathing unutterable, and when he renounced it with indescribable violence. yet he was always hankering for those fleshpots whose savor lingered on his palate and filled his nostrils after his withdrawal from the platform. the authors' readings when they had won their brief popularity abounded in suggestion for him. reading from one's book was not so bad as giving a lecture written for a lecture's purpose, and he was willing at last to compromise. he had a magnificent scheme for touring the country with aldrich and mr. g. w. cable and myself, in a private car, with a cook of our own, and every facility for living on the fat of the land. we should read only four times a week, in an entertainment that should not last more than an hour and a half. he would be the impresario, and would guarantee us others at least seventy-five dollars a day, and pay every expense of the enterprise, which he provisionally called the circus, himself. but aldrich and i were now no longer in those earlier thirties when we so cheerfully imagined 'memorable murders' for subscription publication; we both abhorred public appearances, and, at any rate, i was going to europe for a year. so the plan fell through except as regarded mr. cable, who, in his way, was as fine a performer as clemens, and could both read and sing the matter of his books. on a far less stupendous scale they two made the rounds of the great lecturing circuit together. but i believe a famous lecture-manager had charge of them and travelled with them. he was a most sanguine man, a most amiable person, and such a believer in fortune that clemens used to say of him, as he said of one of his early publishers, that you could rely upon fifty per cent. of everything he promised. i myself many years later became a follower of this hopeful prophet, and i can testify that in my case at least he was able to keep ninety-nine, and even a hundred, per cent. of his word. it was i who was much nearer failing of mine, for i promptly began to lose sleep from the nervous stress of my lecturing and from the gratifying but killing receptions afterward, and i was truly in that state from insomnia which clemens recognized in the brief letter i got from him in the western city, after half a dozen wakeful nights. he sardonically congratulated me on having gone into "the lecture field," and then he said: "i know where you are now. you are in hell." it was this perdition which he re-entered when he undertook that round-the-world lecturing tour for the payment of the debts left to him by the bankruptcy of his firm in the publishing business. it was not purely perdition for him, or, rather, it was perdition for only one-half of him, the author-half; for the actor-half it was paradise. the author who takes up lecturing without the ability to give histrionic support to the literary reputation which he brings to the crude test of his reader's eyes and ears, invokes a peril and a misery unknown to the lecturer who has made his first public from the platform. clemens was victorious on the platform from the beginning, and it would be folly to pretend that he did not exult in his triumphs there. but i suppose, with the wearing nerves of middle life, he hated more and more the personal swarming of interest upon him, and all the inevitable clatter of the thing. yet he faced it, and he labored round our tiresome globe that he might pay the uttermost farthing of debts which he had not knowingly contracted, the debts of his partners who had meant well and done ill, not because they were evil, but because they were unwise, and as unfit for their work as he was. "pay what thou owest." that is right, even when thou owest it by the error of others, and even when thou owest it to a bank, which had not lent it from love of thee, but in the hard line of business and thy need. clemens's behavior in this matter redounded to his glory among the nations of the whole earth, and especially in this nation, so wrapped in commerce and so little used to honor among its many thieves. he had behaved like walter scott, as millions rejoiced to know, who had not known how walter scott had behaved till they knew it was like clemens. no doubt it will be put to his credit in the books of the recording angel, but what the judge of all the earth will say of it at the last day there is no telling. i should not be surprised if he accounted it of less merit than some other things that clemens did and was: less than his abhorrence of the spanish war, and the destruction of the south-african republics, and our deceit of the filipinos, and his hate of slavery, and his payment of his portion of our race's debt to the race of the colored student whom he saw through college, and his support of a poor artist for three years in paris, and his loan of opportunity to the youth who became the most brilliant of our actor-dramatists, and his eager pardon of the thoughtless girl who was near paying the penalty of her impertinence with the loss of her place, and his remembering that the insolent brakeman got so few dollars a month, and his sympathy for working-men standing up to money in their unions, and even his pity for the wounded bird throbbing out its little life on the grass for the pleasure of the cruel fool who shot it. these and the thousand other charities and beneficences in which he abounded, openly or secretly, may avail him more than the discharge of his firm's liabilities with the judge of all the earth, who surely will do right, but whose measures and criterions no man knows, and i least of all men. he made no great show of sympathy with people in their anxieties, but it never failed, and at a time when i lay sick for many weeks his letters were of comfort to those who feared i might not rise again. his hand was out in help for those who needed help, and in kindness for those who needed kindness. there remains in my mind the dreary sense of a long, long drive to the uttermost bounds of the south end at boston, where he went to call upon some obscure person whose claim stretched in a lengthening chain from his early days in missouri--a most inadequate person, in whose vacuity the gloom of the dull day deepened till it was almost too deep for tears. he bore the ordeal with grim heroism, and silently smoked away the sense of it, as we drove back to cambridge, in his slippered feet, sombrely musing, sombrely swearing. but he knew he had done the right, the kind thing, and he was content. he came the whole way from hartford to go with me to a friendless play of mine, which alessandro salvini was giving in a series of matinees to houses never enlarging themselves beyond the count of the brave two hundred who sat it through, and he stayed my fainting spirit with a cheer beyond flagons, joining me in my joke at the misery of it, and carrying the fun farther. before that he had come to witness the aesthetic suicide of anna dickinson, who had been a flaming light of the political platform in the war days, and had been left by them consuming in a hapless ambition for the theatre. the poor girl had had a play written especially for her, and as anne boleyn she ranted and exhorted through the five acts, drawing ever nearer the utter defeat of the anticlimax. we could hardly look at each other for pity, clemens sitting there in the box he had taken, with his shaggy head out over the corner and his slippered feet curled under him: he either went to a place in his slippers or he carried them with him, and put them on as soon as he could put off his boots. when it was so that we could not longer follow her failure and live, he began to talk of the absolute close of her career which the thing was, and how probably she had no conception that it was the end. he philosophized the mercifulness of the fact, and of the ignorance of most of us, when mortally sick or fatally wounded. we think it is not the end, because we have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end. some can push by the awful hour and live again, but for anna dickinson there could be, and was, no such palingenesis. of course we got that solemn joy out of reading her fate aright which is the compensation of the wise spectator in witnessing the inexorable doom of others. xv. when messrs. houghton & mifflin became owners of the atlantic monthly, mr. houghton fancied having some breakfasts and dinners, which should bring the publisher and the editor face to face with the contributors, who were bidden from far and near. of course, the subtle fiend of advertising, who has now grown so unblushing bold, lurked under the covers at these banquets, and the junior partner and the young editor had their joint and separate fine anguishes of misgiving as to the taste and the principle of them; but they were really very simple-hearted and honestly meant hospitalities, and they prospered as they ought, and gave great pleasure and no pain. i forget some of the "emergent occasions," but i am sure of a birthday dinner most unexpectedly accepted by whittier, and a birthday luncheon to mrs. stowe, and i think a birthday dinner to longfellow; but the passing years have left me in the dark as to the pretext of that supper at which clemens made his awful speech, and came so near being the death of us all. at the breakfasts and luncheons we had the pleasure of our lady contributors' company, but that night there were only men, and because of our great strength we survived. i suppose the year was about , but here the almanac is unimportant, and i can only say that it was after clemens had become a very valued contributor of the magazine, where he found himself to his own great explicit satisfaction. he had jubilantly accepted our invitation, and had promised a speech, which it appeared afterward he had prepared with unusual care and confidence. it was his custom always to think out his speeches, mentally wording them, and then memorizing them by a peculiar system of mnemonics which he had invented. on the dinner-table a certain succession of knife, spoon, salt-cellar, and butter-plate symbolized a train of ideas, and on the billiard-table a ball, a cue, and a piece of chalk served the same purpose. with a diagram of these printed on the brain he had full command of the phrases which his excogitation had attached to them, and which embodied the ideas in perfect form. he believed he had been particularly fortunate in his notion for the speech of that evening, and he had worked it out in joyous self-reliance. it was the notion of three tramps, three deadbeats, visiting a california mining-camp, and imposing themselves upon the innocent miners as respectively ralph waldo emerson, henry wadsworth longfellow, and oliver wendell holmes. the humor of the conception must prosper or must fail according to the mood of the hearer, but clemens felt sure of compelling this to sympathy, and he looked forward to an unparalleled triumph. but there were two things that he had not taken into account. one was the species of religious veneration in which these men were held by those nearest them, a thing that i should not be able to realize to people remote from them in time and place. they were men of extraordinary dignity, of the thing called presence, for want of some clearer word, so that no one could well approach them in a personally light or trifling spirit. i do not suppose that anybody more truly valued them or more piously loved them than clemens himself, but the intoxication of his fancy carried him beyond the bounds of that regard, and emboldened him to the other thing which he had not taken into account-namely, the immense hazard of working his fancy out before their faces, and expecting them to enter into the delight of it. if neither emerson, nor longfellow, nor holmes had been there, the scheme might possibly have carried, but even this is doubtful, for those who so devoutly honored them would have overcome their horror with difficulty, and perhaps would not have overcome it at all. the publisher, with a modesty very ungrateful to me, had abdicated his office of host, and i was the hapless president, fulfilling the abhorred function of calling people to their feet and making them speak. when i came to clemens i introduced him with the cordial admiring i had for him as one of my greatest contributors and dearest friends. here, i said, in sum, was a humorist who never left you hanging your head for having enjoyed his joke; and then the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe was upon us. i believe that after the scope of the burlesque made itself clear, there was no one there, including the burlesquer himself, who was not smitten with a desolating dismay. there fell a silence, weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened from moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy. nobody knew whether to look at the speaker or down at his plate. i chose my plate as the least affliction, and so i do not know how clemens looked, except when i stole a glance at him, and saw him standing solitary amid his appalled and appalling listeners, with his joke dead on his hands. from a first glance at the great three whom his jest had made its theme, i was aware of longfellow sitting upright, and regarding the humorist with an air of pensive puzzle, of holmes busily writing on his menu, with a well-feigned effect of preoccupation, and of emerson, holding his elbows, and listening with a sort of jovian oblivion of this nether world in that lapse of memory which saved him in those later years from so much bother. clemens must have dragged his joke to the climax and left it there, but i cannot say this from any sense of the fact. of what happened afterward at the table where the immense, the wholly innocent, the truly unimagined affront was offered, i have no longer the least remembrance. i next remember being in a room of the hotel, where clemens was not to sleep, but to toss in despair, and charles dudley warner's saying, in the gloom, "well, mark, you're a funny fellow." it was as well as anything else he could have said, but clemens seemed unable to accept the tribute. i stayed the night with him, and the next morning, after a haggard breakfast, we drove about and he made some purchases of bric-a-brac for his house in hartford, with a soul as far away from bric-a-brac as ever the soul of man was. he went home by an early train, and he lost no time in writing back to the three divine personalities which he had so involuntarily seemed to flout. they all wrote back to him, making it as light for him as they could. i have heard that emerson was a good deal mystified, and in his sublime forgetfulness asked, who was this gentleman who appeared to think he had offered him some sort of annoyance! but i am not sure that this is accurate. what i am sure of is that longfellow, a few days after, in my study, stopped before a photograph of clemens and said, "ah, he is a wag!" and nothing more. holmes told me, with deep emotion, such as a brother humorist might well feel, that he had not lost an instant in replying to clemens's letter, and assuring him that there had not been the least offence, and entreating him never to think of the matter again. "he said that he was a fool, but he was god's fool," holmes quoted from the letter, with a true sense of the pathos and the humor of the self-abasement. to me clemens wrote a week later, "it doesn't get any better; it burns like fire." but now i understand that it was not shame that burnt, but rage for a blunder which he had so incredibly committed. that to have conceived of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our civilization, as impersonable by three hoboes, and then to have imagined that he could ask them personally to enjoy the monstrous travesty, was a break, he saw too late, for which there was no repair. yet the time came, and not so very long afterward, when some mention was made of the incident as a mistake, and he said, with all his fierceness, "but i don't admit that it was a mistake," and it was not so in the minds of all witnesses at second hand. the morning after the dreadful dinner there came a glowing note from professor child, who had read the newspaper report of it, praising clemens's burlesque as the richest piece of humor in the world, and betraying no sense of incongruity in its perpetration in the presence of its victims. i think it must always have ground in clemens's soul, that he was the prey of circumstances, and that if he had some more favoring occasion he could retrieve his loss in it by giving the thing the right setting. not more than two or three years ago, he came to try me as to trying it again at a meeting of newspaper men in washington. i had to own my fears, while i alleged child's note on the other hand, but in the end he did not try it with the newspaper men. i do not know whether he has ever printed it or not, but since the thing happened i have often wondered how much offence there really was in it. i am not sure but the horror of the spectators read more indignation into the subjects of the hapless drolling than they felt. but it must have been difficult for them to bear it with equanimity. to be sure, they were not themselves mocked; the joke was, of course, beside them; nevertheless, their personality was trifled with, and i could only end by reflecting that if i had been in their place i should not have liked it myself. clemens would have liked it himself, for he had the heart for that sort of wild play, and he so loved a joke that even if it took the form of a liberty, and was yet a good joke, he would have loved it. but perhaps this burlesque was not a good joke. xvi. clemens was oftenest at my house in cambridge, but he was also sometimes at my house in belmont; when, after a year in europe, we went to live in boston, he was more rarely with us. we could never be long together without something out of the common happening, and one day something far out of the common happened, which fortunately refused the nature of absolute tragedy, while remaining rather the saddest sort of comedy. we were looking out of my library window on that view of the charles which i was so proud of sharing with my all-but-next-door neighbor, doctor holmes, when another friend who was with us called out with curiously impersonal interest, "oh, see that woman getting into the water!" this would have excited curiosity and alarmed anxiety far less lively than ours, and clemens and i rushed downstairs and out through my basement and back gate. at the same time a coachman came out of a stable next door, and grappled by the shoulders a woman who was somewhat deliberately getting down the steps to the water over the face of the embankment. before we could reach them he had pulled her up to the driveway, and stood holding her there while she crazily grieved at her rescue. as soon as he saw us he went back into his stable, and left us with the poor wild creature on our hands. she was not very young and not very pretty, and we could not have flattered ourselves with the notion of anything romantic in her suicidal mania, but we could take her on the broad human level, and on this we proposed to escort her up beacon street till we could give her into the keeping of one of those kindly policemen whom our neighborhood knew. naturally there was no policeman known to us or unknown the whole way to the public garden. we had to circumvent our charge in her present design of drowning herself, and walk her past the streets crossing beacon to the river. at these points it needed considerable reasoning to overcome her wish and some active manoeuvring in both of us to enforce our arguments. nobody else appeared to be interested, and though we did not court publicity in the performance of the duty so strangely laid upon us, still it was rather disappointing to be so entirely ignored. there are some four or five crossings to the river between beacon street and the public garden, and the suggestions at our command were pretty well exhausted by the time we reached it. still the expected policeman was nowhere in sight; but a brilliant thought occurred to clemens. he asked me where the nearest police station was, and when i told him, he started off at his highest speed, leaving me in sole charge of our hapless ward. all my powers of suasion were now taxed to the utmost, and i began attracting attention as a short, stout gentleman in early middle life endeavoring to distrain a respectable female of her personal liberty, when his accomplice had abandoned him to his wicked design. after a much longer time than i thought i should have taken to get a policeman from the station, clemens reappeared in easy conversation with an officer who had probably realized that he was in the company of mark twain, and was in no hurry to end the interview. he took possession of our captive, and we saw her no more. i now wonder that with our joint instinct for failure we ever got rid of her; but i am sure we did, and few things in life have given me greater relief. when we got back to my house we found the friend we had left there quite unruffled and not much concerned to know the facts of our adventure. my impression is that he had been taking a nap on my lounge; he appeared refreshed and even gay; but if i am inexact in these details he is alive to refute me. xvii. a little after this clemens went abroad with his family, and lived several years in germany. his letters still came, but at longer intervals, and the thread of our intimate relations was inevitably broken. he would write me when something i had written pleased him, or when something signal occurred to him, or some political or social outrage stirred him to wrath, and he wished to free his mind in pious profanity. during this sojourn he came near dying of pneumonia in berlin, and he had slight relapses from it after coming home. in berlin also he had the honor of dining with the german emperor at the table of a cousin married to a high officer of the court. clemens was a man to enjoy such a distinction; he knew how to take it as a delegated recognition from the german people; but as coming from a rather cockahoop sovereign who had as yet only his sovereignty to value himself upon, he was not very proud of it. he expressed a quiet disdain of the event as between the imperiality and himself, on whom it was supposed to confer such glory, crowning his life with the topmost leaf of laurel. he was in the same mood in his account of an english dinner many years before, where there was a "little scotch lord" present, to whom the english tacitly referred clemens's talk, and laughed when the lord laughed, and were grave when he failed to smile. of all the men i have known he was the farthest from a snob, though he valued recognition, and liked the flattery of the fashionable fair when it came in his way. he would not go out of his way for it, but like most able and brilliant men he loved the minds of women, their wit, their agile cleverness, their sensitive perception, their humorous appreciation, the saucy things they would say, and their pretty, temerarious defiances. he had, of course, the keenest sense of what was truly dignified and truly undignified in people; but he was not really interested in what we call society affairs; they scarcely existed for him, though his books witness how he abhorred the dreadful fools who through some chance of birth or wealth hold themselves different from other men. commonly he did not keep things to himself, especially dislikes and condemnations. upon most current events he had strong opinions, and he uttered them strongly. after a while he was silent in them, but if you tried him you found him in them still. he was tremendously worked up by a certain famous trial, as most of us were who lived in the time of it. he believed the accused guilty, but when we met some months after it was over, and i tempted him to speak his mind upon it, he would only say, the man had suffered enough; as if the man had expiated his wrong, and he was not going to do anything to renew his penalty. i found that very curious, very delicate. his continued blame could not come to the sufferer's knowledge, but he felt it his duty to forbear it. he was apt to wear himself out in the vehemence of his resentments; or, he had so spent himself in uttering them that he had literally nothing more to say. you could offer clemens offences that would anger other men and he did not mind; he would account for them from human nature; but if he thought you had in any way played him false you were anathema and maranatha forever. yet not forever, perhaps, for by and-by, after years, he would be silent. there were two men, half a generation apart in their succession, whom he thought equally atrocious in their treason to him, and of whom he used to talk terrifyingly, even after they were out of the world. he went farther than heine, who said that he forgave his enemies, but not till they were dead. clemens did not forgive his dead enemies; their death seemed to deepen their crimes, like a base evasion, or a cowardly attempt to escape; he pursued them to the grave; he would like to dig them up and take vengeance upon their clay. so he said, but no doubt he would not have hurt them if he had had them living before him. he was generous without stint; he trusted without measure, but where his generosity was abused, or his trust betrayed, he was a fire of vengeance, a consuming flame of suspicion that no sprinkling of cool patience from others could quench; it had to burn itself out. he was eagerly and lavishly hospitable, but if a man seemed willing to batten on him, or in any way to lie down upon him, clemens despised him unutterably. in his frenzies of resentment or suspicion he would not, and doubtless could not, listen to reason. but if between the paroxysms he were confronted with the facts he would own them, no matter how much they told against him. at one period he fancied that a certain newspaper was hounding him with biting censure and poisonous paragraphs, and he was filling himself up with wrath to be duly discharged on the editor's head. later, he wrote me with a humorous joy in his mistake that warner had advised him to have the paper watched for these injuries. he had done so, and how many mentions of him did i reckon he had found in three months? just two, and they were rather indifferent than unfriendly. so the paper was acquitted, and the editor's life was spared. the wretch never knew how near he was to losing it, with incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a subsequent devotion to lasting infamy. his memory for favors was as good as for injuries, and he liked to return your friendliness with as loud a band of music as could be bought or bribed for the occasion. all that you had to do was to signify that you wanted his help. when my father was consul at toronto during arthur's administration, he fancied that his place was in danger, and he appealed to me. in turn i appealed to clemens, bethinking myself of his friendship with grant and grant's friendship with arthur. i asked him to write to grant in my father's behalf, but no, he answered me, i must come to hartford, and we would go on to new york together and see grant personally. this was before, and long before, clemens became grant's publisher and splendid benefactor, but the men liked each other as such men could not help doing. clemens made the appointment, and we went to find grant in his business office, that place where his business innocence was afterward so betrayed. he was very simple and very cordial, and i was instantly the more at home with him, because his voice was the soft, rounded, ohio river accent to which my years were earliest used from my steamboating uncles, my earliest heroes. when i stated my business he merely said, oh no; that must not be; he would write to mr. arthur; and he did so that day; and my father lived to lay down his office, when he tired of it, with no urgence from above. it is not irrelevant to clemens to say that grant seemed to like finding himself in company with two literary men, one of whom at least he could make sure of, and unlike that silent man he was reputed, he talked constantly, and so far as he might he talked literature. at least he talked of john phoenix, that delightfulest of the early pacific slope humorists, whom he had known under his real name of george h. derby, when they were fellow-cadets at west point. it was mighty pretty, as pepys would say, to see the delicate deference clemens paid our plain hero, and the manly respect with which he listened. while grant talked, his luncheon was brought in from some unassuming restaurant near by, and he asked us to join him in the baked beans and coffee which were served us in a little room out of the office with about the same circumstance as at a railroad refreshment-counter. the baked beans and coffee were of about the railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with grant was like sitting down to baked beans and coffee with julius caesar, or alexander, or some other great plutarchan captain. one of the highest satisfactions of clemens's often supremely satisfactory life was his relation to grant. it was his proud joy to tell how he found grant about to sign a contract for his book on certainly very good terms, and said to him that he would himself publish the book and give him a percentage three times as large. he said grant seemed to doubt whether he could honorably withdraw from the negotiation at that point, but clemens overbore his scruples, and it was his unparalleled privilege, his princely pleasure, to pay the author a far larger check for his work than had ever been paid to an author before. he valued even more than this splendid opportunity the sacred moments in which their business brought him into the presence of the slowly dying, heroically living man whom he was so befriending; and he told me in words which surely lost none of their simple pathos through his report how grant described his suffering. the prosperity, of this venture was the beginning of clemens's adversity, for it led to excesses of enterprise which were forms of dissipation. the young sculptor who had come back to him from paris modelled a small bust of grant, which clemens multiplied in great numbers to his great loss, and the success of grant's book tempted him to launch on publishing seas where his bark presently foundered. the first and greatest of his disasters was the life of pope leo xiii, which he came to tell me of, when he had imagined it, in a sort of delirious exultation. he had no words in which to paint the magnificence of the project, or to forecast its colossal success. it would have a currency bounded only by the number of catholics in christendom. it would be translated into every language which was anywhere written or printed; it would be circulated literally in every country of the globe, and clemens's book agents would carry the prospectuses and then the bound copies of the work to the ends of the whole earth. not only would every catholic buy it, but every catholic must, as he was a good catholic, as he hoped to be saved. it was a magnificent scheme, and it captivated me, as it had captivated clemens; it dazzled us both, and neither of us saw the fatal defect in it. we did not consider how often catholics could not read, how often when they could, they might not wish to read. the event proved that whether they could read or not the immeasurable majority did not wish to read the life of the pope, though it was written by a dignitary of the church and issued to the world with every sanction from the vatican. the failure was incredible to clemens; his sanguine soul was utterly confounded, and soon a silence fell upon it where it had been so exuberantly jubilant. xix. the occasions which brought us to new york together were not nearly so frequent as those which united us in boston, but there was a dinner given him by a friend which remains memorable from the fatuity of two men present, so different in everything but their fatuity. one was the sweet old comedian billy florence, who was urging the unsuccessful dramatist across the table to write him a play about oliver cromwell, and giving the reasons why he thought himself peculiarly fitted to portray the character of cromwell. the other was a modestly millioned rich man who was then only beginning to amass the moneys afterward heaped so high, and was still in the condition to be flattered by the condescension of a yet greater millionaire. his contribution to our gaiety was the verbatim report of a call he had made upon william h. vanderbilt, whom he had found just about starting out of town, with his trunks actually in the front hall, but who had stayed to receive the narrator. he had, in fact, sat down on one of the trunks, and talked with the easiest friendliness, and quite, we were given to infer, like an ordinary human being. clemens often kept on with some thread of the talk when we came away from a dinner, but now he was silent, as if "high sorrowful and cloyed"; and it was not till well afterward that i found he had noted the facts from the bitterness with which he mocked the rich man, and the pity he expressed for the actor. he had begun before that to amass those evidences against mankind which eventuated with him in his theory of what he called "the damned human race." this was not an expression of piety, but of the kind contempt to which he was driven by our follies and iniquities as he had observed them in himself as well as in others. it was as mild a misanthropy, probably, as ever caressed the objects of its malediction. but i believe it was about the year that his sense of our perdition became insupportable and broke out in a mixed abhorrence and amusement which spared no occasion, so that i could quite understand why mrs. clemens should have found some compensation, when kept to her room by sickness, in the reflection that now she should not hear so much about "the damned human race." he told of that with the same wild joy that he told of overhearing her repetition of one of his most inclusive profanities, and her explanation that she meant him to hear it so that he might know how it sounded. the contrast of the lurid blasphemy with her heavenly whiteness should have been enough to cure any one less grounded than he in what must be owned was as fixed a habit as smoking with him. when i first knew him he rarely vented his fury in that sort, and i fancy he was under a promise to her which he kept sacred till the wear and tear of his nerves with advancing years disabled him. then it would be like him to struggle with himself till he could struggle no longer and to ask his promise back, and it would be like her to give it back. his profanity was the heritage of his boyhood and young manhood in social conditions and under the duress of exigencies in which everybody swore about as impersonally as he smoked. it is best to recognize the fact of it, and i do so the more readily because i cannot suppose the recording angel really minded it much more than that guardian angel of his. it probably grieved them about equally, but they could equally forgive it. nothing came of his pose regarding "the damned human race" except his invention of the human race luncheon club. this was confined to four persons who were never all got together, and it soon perished of their indifference. in the earlier days that i have more specially in mind one of the questions that we used to debate a good deal was whether every human motive was not selfish. we inquired as to every impulse, the noblest, the holiest in effect, and he found them in the last analysis of selfish origin. pretty nearly the whole time of a certain railroad run from new york to hartford was taken up with the scrutiny of the self-sacrifice of a mother for her child, of the abandon of the lover who dies in saving his mistress from fire or flood, of the hero's courage in the field and the martyr's at the stake. each he found springing from the unconscious love of self and the dread of the greater pain which the self-sacrificer would suffer in forbearing the sacrifice. if we had any time left from this inquiry that day, he must have devoted it to a high regret that napoleon did not carry out his purpose of invading england, for then he would have destroyed the feudal aristocracy, or "reformed the lords," as it might be called now. he thought that would have been an incalculable blessing to the english people and the world. clemens was always beautifully and unfalteringly a republican. none of his occasional misgivings for america implicated a return to monarchy. yet he felt passionately the splendor of the english monarchy, and there was a time when he gloried in that figurative poetry by which the king was phrased as "the majesty of england." he rolled the words deep-throatedly out, and exulted in their beauty as if it were beyond any other glory of the world. he read, or read at, english history a great deal, and one of the by-products of his restless invention was a game of english kings (like the game of authors) for children. i do not know whether he ever perfected this, but i am quite sure it was not put upon the market. very likely he brought it to a practicable stage, and then tired of it, as he was apt to do in the ultimation of his vehement undertakings. xx. he satisfied the impassioned demand of his nature for incessant activities of every kind by taking a personal as well as a pecuniary interest in the inventions of others. at one moment "the damned human race" was almost to be redeemed by a process of founding brass without air bubbles in it; if this could once be accomplished, as i understood, or misunderstood, brass could be used in art-printing to a degree hitherto impossible. i dare say i have got it wrong, but i am not mistaken as to clemens's enthusiasm for the process, and his heavy losses in paying its way to ultimate failure. he was simultaneously absorbed in the perfection of a type-setting machine, which he was paying the inventor a salary to bring to a perfection so expensive that it was practically impracticable. we were both printers by trade, and i could take the same interest in this wonderful piece of mechanism that he could; and it was so truly wonderful that it did everything but walk and talk. its ingenious creator was so bent upon realizing the highest ideal in it that he produced a machine of quite unimpeachable efficiency. but it was so costly, when finished, that it could not be made for less than twenty thousand dollars, if the parts were made by hand. this sum was prohibitive of its introduction, unless the requisite capital could be found for making the parts by machinery, and clemens spent many months in vainly trying to get this money together. in the mean time simpler machines had been invented and the market filled, and his investment of three hundred thousand dollars in the beautiful miracle remained permanent but not profitable. i once went with him to witness its performance, and it did seem to me the last word in its way, but it had been spoken too exquisitely, too fastidiously. i never heard him devote the inventor to the infernal gods, as he was apt to do with the geniuses he lost money by, and so i think he did not regard him as a traitor. in these things, and in his other schemes for the 'subiti guadagni' of the speculator and the "sudden making of splendid names" for the benefactors of our species, clemens satisfied the colonel sellers nature in himself (from which he drew the picture of that wild and lovable figure), and perhaps made as good use of his money as he could. he did not care much for money in itself, but he luxuriated in the lavish use of it, and he was as generous with it as ever a man was. he liked giving it, but he commonly wearied of giving it himself, and wherever he lived he established an almoner, whom he fully trusted to keep his left hand ignorant of what his right hand was doing. i believe he felt no finality in charity, but did it because in its provisional way it was the only thing a man could do. i never heard him go really into any sociological inquiry, and i have a feeling that that sort of thing baffled and dispirited him. no one can read the connecticut yankee and not be aware of the length and breadth of his sympathies with poverty, but apparently he had not thought out any scheme for righting the economic wrongs we abound in. i cannot remember our ever getting quite down to a discussion of the matter; we came very near it once in the day of the vast wave of emotion sent over the world by 'looking backward,' and again when we were all so troubled by the great coal strike in pennsylvania; in considering that he seemed to be for the time doubtful of the justice of the workingman's cause. at all other times he seemed to know that whatever wrongs the workingman committed work was always in the right. when clemens returned to america with his family, after lecturing round the world, i again saw him in new york, where i so often saw him while he was shaping himself for that heroic enterprise. he would come to me, and talk sorrowfully over his financial ruin, and picture it to himself as the stuff of some unhappy dream, which, after long prosperity, had culminated the wrong way. it was very melancholy, very touching, but the sorrow to which he had come home from his long journey had not that forlorn bewilderment in it. he was looking wonderfully well, and when i wanted the name of his elixir, he said it was plasmon. he was apt, for a man who had put faith so decidedly away from him, to take it back and pin it to some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort. once, when he was well on in years, he came to new york without glasses, and announced that he and all his family, so astigmatic and myopic and old-sighted, had, so to speak, burned their spectacles behind them upon the instruction of some sage who had found out that they were a delusion. the next time he came he wore spectacles freely, almost ostentatiously, and i heard from others that the whole clemens family had been near losing their eyesight by the miracle worked in their behalf. now, i was not surprised to learn that "the damned human race" was to be saved by plasmon, if anything, and that my first duty was to visit the plasmon agency with him, and procure enough plasmon to secure my family against the ills it was heir to for evermore. i did not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the investments which he had made from "the substance of things hoped for," and in the destiny of a disastrous disappointment. but after paying off the creditors of his late publishing firm, he had to do something with his money, and it was not his fault if he did not make a fortune out of plasmon. xxi. for a time it was a question whether he should not go back with his family to their old home in hartford. perhaps the father's and mother's hearts drew them there all the more strongly because of the grief written ineffaceably over it, but for the younger ones it was no longer the measure of the world. it was easier for all to stay on indefinitely in new york, which is a sojourn without circumstance, and equally the home of exile and of indecision. the clemenses took a pleasant, spacious house at riverdale, on the hudson, and there i began to see them again on something like the sweet old terms. they lived far more unpretentiously than they used, and i think with a notion of economy, which they had never very successfully practised. i recall that at the end of a certain year in hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash for everything, clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed experiment, and asking me to guess how many bills they had at new year's; he hastened to say that a horse-car would not have held them. at riverdale they kept no carriage, and there was a snowy night when i drove up to their handsome old mansion in the station carryall, which was crusted with mud as from the going down of the deluge after transporting noah and his family from the ark to whatever point they decided to settle at provisionally. but the good talk, the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer poverty of mind or soul, was there, and we jubilantly found ourselves again in our middle youth. it was the mighty moment when clemens was building his engines of war for the destruction of christian science, which superstition nobody, and he least of all, expected to destroy. it would not be easy to say whether in his talk of it his disgust for the illiterate twaddle of mrs. eddy's book, or his admiration of her genius for organization was the greater. he believed that as a religious machine the christian science church was as perfect as the roman church and destined to be more formidable in its control of the minds of men. he looked for its spread over the whole of christendom, and throughout the winter he spent at riverdale he was ready to meet all listeners more than half-way with his convictions of its powerful grasp of the average human desire to get something for nothing. the vacuous vulgarity of its texts was a perpetual joy to him, while he bowed with serious respect to the sagacity which built so securely upon the everlasting rock of human credulity and folly. an interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not only his admiration for the masterly policy of the christian science hierarchy, but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be tried on his friends and family, if they wished it. he had a tender heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scientitians, but he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the failure of the regulars rather than upon their own successes, which also he believed in. he was recurrently, but not insistently, desirous that you should try their strange magics when you were going to try the familiar medicines. xxii. the order of my acquaintance, or call it intimacy, with clemens was this: our first meeting in boston, my visits to him in hartford, his visits to me in cambridge, in belmont, and in boston, our briefer and less frequent meetings in paris and new york, all with repeated interruptions through my absences in europe, and his sojourns in london, berlin, vienna, and florence, and his flights to the many ends, and odds and ends, of the earth. i will not try to follow the events, if they were not rather the subjective experiences, of those different periods and points of time which i must not fail to make include his summer at york harbor, and his divers residences in new york, on tenth street and on fifth avenue, at riverdale, and at stormfield, which his daughter has told me he loved best of all his houses and hoped to make his home for long years. not much remains to me of the week or so that we had together in paris early in the summer of . the first thing i got at my bankers was a cable message announcing that my father was stricken with paralysis, but urging my stay for further intelligence, and i went about, till the final summons came, with my head in a mist of care and dread. clemens was very kind and brotherly through it all. he was living greatly to his mind in one of those arcaded little hotels in the rue de rivoli, and he was free from all household duties to range with me. we drove together to make calls of digestion at many houses where he had got indigestion through his reluctance from their hospitality, for he hated dining out. but, as he explained, his wife wanted him to make these visits, and he did it, as he did everything she wanted. at one place, some suburban villa, he could get no answer to his ring, and he "hove" his cards over the gate just as it opened, and he had the shame of explaining in his unexplanatory french to the man picking them up. he was excruciatingly helpless with his cabmen, but by very cordially smiling and casting himself on the drivers' mercy he always managed to get where he wanted. the family was on the verge of their many moves, and he was doing some small errands; he said that the others did the main things, and left him to do what the cat might. it was with that return upon the buoyant billow of plasmon, renewed in look and limb, that clemens's universally pervasive popularity began in his own country. he had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or more largely imagined in europe, and i suppose it was my sense of this that inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider "the state of polite learning" among us, "you mustn't expect people to keep it up here as they do in england." but it appeared that his countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of him past all precedent. one does not go into a catalogue of dinners, receptions, meetings, speeches, and the like, when there are more vital things to speak of. he loved these obvious joys, and he eagerly strove with the occasions they gave him for the brilliancy which seemed so exhaustless and was so exhausting. his friends saw that he was wearing himself out, and it was not because of mrs. clemens's health alone that they were glad to have him take refuge at riverdale. the family lived there two happy, hopeless years, and then it was ordered that they should change for his wife's sake to some less exacting climate. clemens was not eager to go to florence, but his imagination was taken as it would have been in the old-young days by the notion of packing his furniture into flexible steel cages from his house in hartford and unpacking it from them untouched at his villa in fiesole. he got what pleasure any man could out of that triumph of mind over matter, but the shadow was creeping up his life. one sunny afternoon we sat on the grass before the mansion, after his wife had begun to get well enough for removal, and we looked up toward a balcony where by-and-by that lovely presence made itself visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud. a hand frailly waved a handkerchief; clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling tenderly: "what? what?" as if it might be an asking for him instead of the greeting it really was for me. it was the last time i saw her, if indeed i can be said to have seen her then, and long afterward when i said how beautiful we all thought her, how good, how wise, how wonderfully perfect in every relation of life, he cried out in a breaking voice: "oh, why didn't you ever tell her? she thought you didn't like her." what a pang it was then not to have told her, but how could we have told her? his unreason endeared him to me more than all his wisdom. to that riverdale sojourn belong my impressions of his most violent anti-christian science rages, which began with the postponement of his book, and softened into acceptance of the delay till he had well-nigh forgotten his wrath when it come out. there was also one of those joint episodes of ours, which, strangely enough, did not eventuate in entire failure, as most of our joint episodes did. he wrote furiously to me of a wrong which had been done to one of the most helpless and one of the most helped of our literary brethren, asking me to join with him in recovering the money paid over by that brother's publisher to a false friend who had withheld it and would not give any account of it. our hapless brother had appealed to clemens, as he had to me, with the facts, but not asking our help, probably because he knew he need not ask; and clemens enclosed to me a very taking-by-the-throat message which he proposed sending to the false friend. for once i had some sense, and answered that this would never do, for we had really no power in the matter, and i contrived a letter to the recreant so softly diplomatic that i shall always think of it with pride when my honesties no longer give me satisfaction, saying that this incident had come to our knowledge, and suggesting that we felt sure he would not finally wish to withhold the money. nothing more, practically, than that, but that was enough; there came promptly back a letter of justification, covering a very substantial check, which we hilariously forwarded to our beneficiary. but the helpless man who was so used to being helped did not answer with the gladness i, at least, expected of him. he acknowledged the check as he would any ordinary payment, and then he made us observe that there was still a large sum due him out of the moneys withheld. at this point i proposed to clemens that we should let the nonchalant victim collect the remnant himself. clouds of sorrow had gathered about the bowed head of the delinquent since we began on him, and my fickle sympathies were turning his way from the victim who was really to blame for leaving his affairs so unguardedly to him in the first place. clemens made some sort of grit assent, and we dropped the matter. he was more used to ingratitude from those he helped than i was, who found being lain down upon not so amusing as he found my revolt. he reckoned i was right, he said, and after that i think we never recurred to the incident. it was not ingratitude that he ever minded; it was treachery, that really maddened him past forgiveness. xxiii. during the summer he spent at york harbor i was only forty minutes away at kittery point, and we saw each other often; but this was before the last time at riverdale. he had a wide, low cottage in a pine grove overlooking york river, and we used to sit at a corner of the veranda farthest away from mrs. clemens's window, where we could read our manuscripts to each other, and tell our stories, and laugh our hearts out without disturbing her. at first she had been about the house, and there was one gentle afternoon when she made tea for us in the parlor, but that was the last time i spoke with her. after that it was really a question of how soonest and easiest she could be got back to riverdale; but, of course, there were specious delays in which she seemed no worse and seemed a little better, and clemens could work at a novel he had begun. he had taken a room in the house of a friend and neighbor, a fisherman and boatman; there was a table where he could write, and a bed where he could lie down and read; and there, unless my memory has played me one of those constructive tricks that people's memories indulge in, he read me the first chapters of an admirable story. the scene was laid in a missouri town, and the characters such as he had known in boyhood; but as often as i tried to make him own it, he denied having written any such story; it is possible that i dreamed it, but i hope the ms. will yet be found. upon reflection i cannot believe that i dreamed it, and i cannot believe that it was an effect of that sort of pseudomnemonics which i have mentioned. the characters in the novel are too clearly outlined in my recollection, together with some critical reservations of my own concerning them. not only does he seem to have read me those first chapters, but to have talked them over with me and outlined the whole story. i cannot say whether or not he believed that his wife would recover; he fought the fear of her death to the end; for her life was far more largely his than the lives of most men's wives are theirs. for his own life i believe he would never have much cared, if i may trust a saying of one who was so absolutely without pose as he was. he said that he never saw a dead man whom he did not envy for having had it over and being done with it. life had always amused him, and in the resurgence of its interests after his sorrow had ebbed away he was again deeply interested in the world and in the human race, which, though damned, abounded in subjects of curious inquiry. when the time came for his wife's removal from york harbor i went with him to boston, where he wished to look up the best means of her conveyance to new york. the inquiry absorbed him: the sort of invalid car he could get; how she could be carried to the village station; how the car could be detached from the eastern train at boston and carried round to the southern train on the other side of the city, and then how it could be attached to the hudson river train at new york and left at riverdale. there was no particular of the business which he did not scrutinize and master, not only with his poignant concern for her welfare, but with his strong curiosity as to how these unusual things were done with the usual means. with the inertness that grows upon an aging man he had been used to delegating more and more things, but of that thing i perceived that he would not delegate the least detail. he had meant never to go abroad again, but when it came time to go he did not look forward to returning; he expected to live in florence always after that; they were used to the life and they had been happy there some years earlier before he went with his wife for the cure of nauheim. but when he came home again it was for good and all. it was natural that he should wish to live in new york, where they had already had a pleasant year in tenth street. i used to see him there in an upper room, looking south over a quiet open space of back yards where we fought our battles in behalf of the filipinos and the boers, and he carried on his campaign against the missionaries in china. he had not yet formed his habit of lying for whole days in bed and reading and writing there, yet he was a good deal in bed, from weakness, i suppose, and for the mere comfort of it. my perspectives are not very clear, and in the foreshortening of events which always takes place in our review of the past i may not always time things aright. but i believe it was not until he had taken his house at fifth avenue that he began to talk to me of writing his autobiography. he meant that it should be a perfectly veracious record of his life and period; for the first time in literature there should be a true history of a man and a true presentation of the men the man had known. as we talked it over the scheme enlarged itself in our riotous fancy. we said it should be not only a book, it should be a library, not only a library, but a literature. it should make good the world's loss through omar's barbarity at alexandria; there was no image so grotesque, so extravagant that we did not play with it; and the work so far as he carried it was really done on a colossal scale. but one day he said that as to veracity it was a failure; he had begun to lie, and that if no man ever yet told the truth about himself it was because no man ever could. how far he had carried his autobiography i cannot say; he dictated the matter several hours each day; and the public has already seen long passages from it, and can judge, probably, of the make and matter of the whole from these. it is immensely inclusive, and it observes no order or sequence. whether now, after his death, it will be published soon or late i have no means of knowing. once or twice he said in a vague way that it was not to be published for twenty years, so that the discomfort of publicity might be minimized for all the survivors. suddenly he told me he was not working at it; but i did not understand whether he had finished it or merely dropped it; i never asked. we lived in the same city, but for old men rather far apart, he at tenth street and i at seventieth, and with our colds and other disabilities we did not see each other often. he expected me to come to him, and i would not without some return of my visits, but we never ceased to be friends, and good friends, so far as i know. i joked him once as to how i was going to come out in his autobiography, and he gave me some sort of joking reassurance. there was one incident, however, that brought us very frequently and actively together. he came one sunday afternoon to have me call with him on maxim gorky, who was staying at a hotel a few streets above mine. we were both interested in gorky, clemens rather more as a revolutionist and i as a realist, though i too wished the russian tsar ill, and the novelist well in his mission to the russian sympathizers in this republic. but i had lived through the episode of kossuth's visit to us and his vain endeavor to raise funds for the hungarian cause in , when we were a younger and nobler nation than now, with hearts if not hands, opener to the "oppressed of europe"; the oppressed of america, the four or five millions of slaves, we did not count. i did not believe that gorky could get the money for the cause of freedom in russia which he had come to get; as i told a valued friend of his and mine, i did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and i think now i set the figure too high. i had already refused to sign the sort of general appeal his friends were making to our principles and pockets because i felt it so wholly idle, and when the paper was produced in gorky's presence and clemens put his name to it i still refused. the next day gorky was expelled from his hotel with the woman who was not his wife, but who, i am bound to say, did not look as if she were not, at least to me, who am, however, not versed in those aspects of human nature. i might have escaped unnoted, but clemens's familiar head gave us away to the reporters waiting at the elevator's mouth for all who went to see gorky. as it was, a hunt of interviewers ensued for us severally and jointly. i could remain aloof in my hotel apartment, returning answer to such guardians of the public right to know everything that i had nothing to say of gorky's domestic affairs; for the public interest had now strayed far from the revolution, and centred entirely upon these. but with clemens it was different; he lived in a house with a street door kept by a single butler, and he was constantly rung for. i forget how long the siege lasted, but long enough for us to have fun with it. that was the moment of the great vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves in easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then "blowing a cone off," as the telegraphic phrase was. the roof of the great market in naples had just broken in under its load of ashes and cinders, and crushed hundreds of people; and we asked each other if we were not sorry we had not been there, where the pressure would have been far less terrific than it was with us in fifth avenue. the forbidden butler came up with a message that there were some gentlemen below who wanted to see clemens. "how many?" he demanded. "five," the butler faltered. "reporters?" the butler feigned uncertainty. "what would you do?" he asked me. "i wouldn't see them," i said, and then clemens went directly down to them. how or by what means he appeased their voracity i cannot say, but i fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless enough. they went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant satisfaction with having seen them. of course he was right and i wrong, and he was right as to the point at issue between gorky and those who had helplessly treated him with such cruel ignominy. in america it is not the convention for men to live openly in hotels with women who are not their wives. gorky had violated this convention and he had to pay the penalty; and concerning the destruction of his efficiency as an emissary of the revolution, his blunder was worse than a crime. xxiv. to the period of clemens's residence in fifth avenue belongs his efflorescence in white serge. he was always rather aggressively indifferent about dress, and at a very early date in our acquaintance aldrich and i attempted his reform by clubbing to buy him a cravat. but he would not put away his stiff little black bow, and until he imagined the suit of white serge, he wore always a suit of black serge, truly deplorable in the cut of the sagging frock. after his measure had once been taken he refused to make his clothes the occasion of personal interviews with his tailor; he sent the stuff by the kind elderly woman who had been in the service of the family from the earliest days of his marriage, and accepted the result without criticism. but the white serge was an inspiration which few men would have had the courage to act upon. the first time i saw him wear it was at the authors' hearing before the congressional committee on copyright in washington. nothing could have been more dramatic than the gesture with which he flung off his long loose overcoat, and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of his silvery head. it was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup; but the magnificent speech which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable farrago of nonsense about nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis of all copyright legislation, made you forget even his spectacularity. it is well known how proud he was of his oxford gown, not merely because it symbolized the honor in which he was held by the highest literary body in the world, but because it was so rich and so beautiful. the red and the lavender of the cloth flattered his eyes as the silken black of the same degree of doctor of letters, given him years before at yale, could not do. his frank, defiant happiness in it, mixed with a due sense of burlesque, was something that those lacking his poet-soul could never imagine; they accounted it vain, weak; but that would not have mattered to him if he had known it. in his london sojourn he had formed the top-hat habit, and for a while he lounged splendidly up and down fifth avenue in that society emblem; but he seemed to tire of it, and to return kindly to the soft hat of his southwestern tradition. he disliked clubs; i don't know whether he belonged to any in new york, but i never met him in one. as i have told, he himself had formed the human race club, but as he never could get it together it hardly counted. there was to have been a meeting of it the time of my only visit to stormfield in april of last year; but of three who were to have come i alone came. we got on very well without the absentees, after finding them in the wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those i used to have with him so many years before in hartford, but there was not the old ferment of subjects. many things had been discussed and put away for good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for each other, who were so differently parts of it. he showed his absolute content with his house, and that was the greater pleasure for me because it was my son who designed it. the architect had been so fortunate as to be able to plan it where a natural avenue of savins, the closeknit, slender, cypress-like cedars of new england, led away from the rear of the villa to the little level of a pergola, meant some day to be wreathed and roofed with vines. but in the early spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful nakedness of the northern winter. it opened in the surpassing loveliness of wooded and meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days blue, and the last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor. we walked up and down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for the sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now we were far past turbulence or anger. once we took a walk together across the yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far down clashed through and over the stones and the shards of ice. clemens pointed out the scenery he had bought to give himself elbow-room, and showed me the lot he was going to have me build on. the next day we came again with the geologist he had asked up to stormfield to analyze its rocks. truly he loved the place, though he had been so weary of change and so indifferent to it that he never saw it till he came to live in it. he left it all to the architect whom he had known from a child in the intimacy which bound our families together, though we bodily lived far enough apart. i loved his little ones and he was sweet to mine and was their delighted-in and wondered-at friend. once and once again, and yet again and again, the black shadow that shall never be lifted where it falls, fell in his house and in mine, during the forty years and more that we were friends, and endeared us the more to each other. xxv. my visit at stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his part and on mine. every morning before i dressed i heard him sounding my name through the house for the fun of it and i know for the fondness; and if i looked out of my door, there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with some one. the last morning a soft sugarsnow had fallen and was falling, and i drove through it down to the station in the carriage which had been given him by his wife's father when they were first married, and been kept all those intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use. its springs had not grown yielding with time; it had rather the stiffness and severity of age; but for him it must have swung low like the sweet chariot of the negro "spiritual" which i heard him sing with such fervor, when those wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way northward. 'go down, daniel', was one in which i can hear his quavering tenor now. he was a lover of the things he liked, and full of a passion for them which satisfied itself in reading them matchlessly aloud. no one could read 'uncle remus' like him; his voice echoed the voices of the negro nurses who told his childhood the wonderful tales. i remember especially his rapture with mr. cable's 'old creole days,' and the thrilling force with which he gave the forbidding of the leper's brother when the city's survey ran the course of an avenue through the cottage where the leper lived in hiding: "strit must not pass!" out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any i have known, the material given him by the mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation of clear and solid truth. at the last day he will not have to confess anything, for all his life was the free knowledge of any one who would ask him of it. the searcher of hearts will not bring him to shame at that day, for he did not try to hide any of the things for which he was often so bitterly sorry. he knew where the responsibility lay, and he took a man's share of it bravely; but not the less fearlessly he left the rest of the answer to the god who had imagined men. it is in vain that i try to give a notion of the intensity with which he pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he compassed the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then left trying. we had other meetings, insignificantly sad and brief; but the last time i saw him alive was made memorable to me by the kind, clear judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as the sole present help of the weak against the strong. next i saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour. after the voice of his old friend twichell had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through in broken-hearted supplication, i looked a moment at the face i knew so well; and it was patient with the patience i had so often seen in it: something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. emerson, longfellow, lowell, holmes--i knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but clemens was sole, incomparable, the lincoln of our literature. etext editor's bookmarks: absolute devotion to the day of her death, absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence amuse him, even when they wronged him amusingly realized the situation to their friends but now i remember that he gets twenty dollars a month" christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions church: "oh yes, i go it 'most kills me, but i go," clemens was sole, incomparable, the lincoln of our literature despair broke in laughter despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology everlasting rock of human credulity and folly flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour he did not care much for fiction he did not paw you with his hands to show his affection he was a youth to the end of his days heroic lies his coming almost killed her, but it was worth it honest men are few when it comes to themselves it was mighty pretty, as pepys would say jane austen left him to do what the cat might lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm liked to find out good things and great things for himself livy clemens: nthe loveliest person i have ever seen marriages are what the parties to them alone really know mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here most desouthernized southerner i ever knew most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men nearly nothing as chaos could be never saw a dead man whom he did not envy never saw a man more regardful of negroes no man ever yet told the truth about himself no man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery not possible for clemens to write like anybody else ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish polite learning hesitated his praise praised it enough to satisfy the author reparation due from every white to every black man shackles of belief worn so long some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort stupidly truthful the ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it truthful used to ingratitude from those he helped vacuous vulgarity of its texts walter-scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the southern ideal we have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end well, if you are to be lost, i want to be lost with you what he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent whether every human motive was not selfish wonder why we hate the past so--"it's so damned humiliating!" mark twain, a biography by albert bigelow paine volume iii, part : - ccxii the return of the conqueror it would be hard to exaggerate the stir which the newspapers and the public generally made over the homecoming of mark twain. he had left america, staggering under heavy obligation and set out on a pilgrimage of redemption. at the moment when this mecca, was in view a great sorrow had befallen him and, stirred a world-wide and soul-deep tide of human sympathy. then there had followed such ovation as has seldom been conferred upon a private citizen, and now approaching old age, still in the fullness of his mental vigor, he had returned to his native soil with the prestige of these honors upon him and the vast added glory of having made his financial fight single-handed-and won. he was heralded literally as a conquering hero. every paper in the land had an editorial telling the story of his debts, his sorrow, and his triumphs. "he had behaved like walter scott," says howells, "as millions rejoiced to know who had not known how walter scott had behaved till they knew it was like clemens." howells acknowledges that he had some doubts as to the permanency of the vast acclaim of the american public, remembering, or perhaps assuming, a national fickleness. says howells: he had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or more largely imagined in europe, and i suppose it was my sense of this that inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider "the state of polite learning" among us, "you mustn't expect people to keep it up here as they do in england." but it appeared that his countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of him past all precedent. clemens went to the earlington hotel and began search for a furnished house in new york. they would not return to hartford--at least not yet. the associations there were still too sad, and they immediately became more so. five days after mark twain's return to america, his old friend and co-worker, charles dudley warner, died. clemens went to hartford to act as a pall-bearer and while there looked into the old home. to sylvester baxter, of boston, who had been present, he wrote a few days later: it was a great pleasure to me to renew the other days with you, & there was a pathetic pleasure in seeing hartford & the house again; but i realized that if we ever enter the house again to live our hearts will break. i am not sure that we shall ever be strong enough to endure that strain. even if the surroundings had been less sorrowful it is not likely that clemens would have returned to hartford at this time. he had become a world-character, a dweller in capitals. everywhere he moved a world revolved about him. such a figure in germany would live naturally in berlin; in england london; in france, paris; in austria, vienna; in america his headquarters could only be new york. clemens empowered certain of his friends to find a home for him, and mr. frank n. doubleday discovered an attractive and handsomely furnished residence at west tenth street, which was promptly approved. doubleday, who was going to boston, left orders with the agent to draw the lease and take it up to the new tenant for signature. to clemens he said: "the house is as good as yours. all you've got to do is to sign the lease. you can consider it all settled." when doubleday returned from boston a few days later the agent called on him and complained that he couldn't find mark twain anywhere. it was reported at his hotel that he had gone and left no address. doubleday was mystified; then, reflecting, he had an inspiration. he walked over to west tenth street and found what he had suspected--mark twain had moved in. he had convinced the caretaker that everything was all right and he was quite at home. doubleday said: "why, you haven't executed the lease yet." "no," said clemens, "but you said the house was as good as mine," to which doubleday agreed, but suggested that they go up to the real-estate office and give the agent notice that he was in possession of the premises. doubleday's troubles were not quite over, however. clemens began to find defects in his new home and assumed to hold doubleday responsible for them. he sent a daily postal card complaining of the windows, furnace, the range, the water-whatever he thought might lend interest to doubleday's life. as a matter of fact, he was pleased with the place. to macalister he wrote: we were very lucky to get this big house furnished. there was not another one in town procurable that would answer us, but this one is all right-space enough in it for several families, the rooms all old-fashioned, great size. the house at west tenth street became suddenly one of the most conspicuous residences in new york. the papers immediately made its appearance familiar. many people passed down that usually quiet street, stopping to observe or point out where mark twain lived. there was a constant procession of callers of every kind. many were friends, old and new, but there was a multitude of strangers. hundreds came merely to express their appreciation of his work, hoping for a personal word or a hand-shake or an autograph; but there were other hundreds who came with this thing and that thing--axes to grind--and there were newspaper reporters to ask his opinion on politics, or polygamy, or woman's suffrage; on heaven and hell and happiness; on the latest novel; on the war in africa, the troubles in china; on anything under the sun, important or unimportant, interesting or inane, concerning which one might possibly hold an opinion. he was unfailing "copy" if they could but get a word with him. anything that he might choose to say upon any subject whatever was seized upon and magnified and printed with head-lines. sometimes opinions were invented for him. if he let fall a few words they were multiplied into a column interview. "that reporter worked a miracle equal to the loaves and fishes," he said of one such performance. many men would have become annoyed and irritable as these things continued; but mark twain was greater than that. eventually he employed a secretary to stand between him and the wash of the tide, as a sort of breakwater; but he seldom lost his temper no matter what was the request which was laid before him, for he recognized underneath it the great tribute of a great nation. of course his literary valuation would be affected by the noise of the general applause. magazines and syndicates besought him for manuscripts. he was offered fifty cents and even a dollar a word for whatever he might give them. he felt a child-like gratification in these evidences of his market advancement, but he was not demoralized by them. he confined his work to a few magazines, and in november concluded an arrangement with the new management of harper & brothers, by which that firm was to have the exclusive serial privilege of whatever he might write at a fixed rate of twenty cents per word--a rate increased to thirty cents by a later contract, which also provided an increased royalty for the publication of his books. the united states, as a nation, does not confer any special honors upon private citizens. we do not have decorations and titles, even though there are times when it seems that such things might be not inappropriately conferred. certain of the newspapers, more lavish in their enthusiasm than others, were inclined to propose, as one paper phrased it, "some peculiar recognition--something that should appeal to samuel l. clemens, the man, rather than to mark twain, the literate. just what form this recognition should take is doubtful, for the case has no exact precedent." perhaps the paper thought that mark twain was entitled--as he himself once humorously suggested-to the "thanks of congress" for having come home alive and out of debt, but it is just as well that nothing of the sort was ever seriously considered. the thanks of the public at large contained more substance, and was a tribute much more to his mind. the paper above quoted ended by suggesting a very large dinner and memorial of welcome as being more in keeping with the republican idea and the american expression of good-will. but this was an unneeded suggestion. if he had eaten all the dinners proposed he would not have lived to enjoy his public honors a month. as it was, he accepted many more dinners than he could eat, and presently fell into the habit of arriving when the banqueting was about over and the after-dinner speaking about to begin. even so the strain told on him. "his friends saw that he was wearing himself out," says howells, and perhaps this was true, for he grew thin and pale and contracted a hacking cough. he did not spare himself as often as he should have done. once to richard watson gilder he sent this line of regrets: in bed with a chest cold and other company--wednesday. dear gilder,--i can't. if i were a well man i could explain with this pencil, but in the cir---ces i will leave it all to your imagination. was it grady who killed himself trying to do all the dining and speeching? no, old man, no, no! ever yours, mark. he became again the guest of honor at the lotos club, which had dined him so lavishly seven years before, just previous to his financial collapse. that former dinner had been a distinguished occasion, but never before had the lotos club been so brimming with eager hospitality as on the second great occasion. in closing his introductory speech president frank lawrence said, "we hail him as one who has borne great burdens with manliness and courage, who has emerged from great struggles victorious," and the assembled diners roared out their applause. clemens in his reply said: your president has referred to certain burdens which i was weighted with. i am glad he did, as it gives me an opportunity which i wanted--to speak of those debts. you all knew what he meant when he referred to it, & of the poor bankrupt firm of c. l. webster & co. no one has said a word about those creditors. there were ninety-six creditors in all, & not by a finger's weight did ninety-five out of the ninety-six add to the burden of that time. they treated me well; they treated me handsomely. i never knew i owed them anything; not a sign came from them. it was like him to make that public acknowledgment. he could not let an unfair impression remain that any man or any set of men had laid an unnecessary burden upon him-his sense of justice would not consent to it. he also spoke on that occasion of certain national changes. how many things have happened in the seven years i have been away from home! we have fought a righteous war, and a righteous war is a rare thing in history. we have turned aside from our own comfort and seen to it that freedom should exist, not only within our own gates, but in our own neighborhood. we have set cuba free and placed her among the galaxy of free nations of the world. we started out to set those poor filipinos free, but why that righteous plan miscarried perhaps i shall never know. we have also been making a creditable showing in china, and that is more than all the other powers can say. the "yellow terror" is threatening the world, but no matter what happens the united states says that it has had no part in it. since i have been away we have been nursing free silver. we have watched by its cradle, we have done our best to raise that child, but every time it seemed to be getting along nicely along came some pestiferous republican and gave it the measles or something. i fear we will never raise that child. we've done more than that. we elected a president four years ago. we've found fault and criticized him, and here a day or two ago we go and elect him for another four years, with votes enough to spare to do it over again. one club followed another in honoring mark twain--the aldine, the st. nicholas, the press clubs, and other associations and societies. his old friends were at these dinners--howells, aldrich, depew, rogers, ex-speaker reed--and they praised him and gibed him to his and their hearts' content. it was a political year, and he generally had something to say on matters municipal, national, or international; and he spoke out more and more freely, as with each opportunity he warmed more righteously to his subject. at the dinner given to him by the st. nicholas club he said, with deep irony: gentlemen, you have here the best municipal government in the world, and the most fragrant and the purest. the very angels of heaven envy you and wish they had a government like it up there. you got it by your noble fidelity to civic duty; by the stern and ever watchful exercise of the great powers lodged in you as lovers and guardians of your city; by your manly refusal to sit inert when base men would have invaded her high places and possessed them; by your instant retaliation when any insult was offered you in her person, or any assault was made upon her fair fame. it is you who have made this government what it is, it is you who have made it the envy and despair of the other capitals of the world--and god bless you for it, gentlemen, god bless you! and when you get to heaven at last they'll say with joy, "oh, there they come, the representatives of the perfectest citizenship in the universe show them the archangel's box and turn on the limelight!" those hearers who in former years had been indifferent to mark twain's more serious purpose began to realize that, whatever he may have been formerly, he was by no means now a mere fun-maker, but a man of deep and grave convictions, able to give them the fullest and most forcible expression. he still might make them laugh, but he also made them think, and he stirred them to a truer gospel of patriotism. he did not preach a patriotism that meant a boisterous cheering of the stars and stripes right or wrong, but a patriotism that proposed to keep the stars and stripes clean and worth shouting for. in an article, perhaps it was a speech, begun at this time he wrote: we teach the boys to atrophy their independence. we teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter --exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. we teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, & so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it & out of place--the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. this is patriotism on the russian plan. howells tells of discussing these vital matters with him in "an upper room, looking south over a quiet, open space of back yards where," he says, "we fought our battles in behalf of the filipinos and boers, and he carried on his campaign against the missionaries in china." howells at the time expressed an amused fear that mark twain's countrymen, who in former years had expected him to be merely a humorist, should now, in the light of his wider acceptance abroad, demand that he be mainly serious. but the american people were quite ready to accept him in any of his phases, fully realizing that whatever his philosophy or doctrine it would have somewhat of the humorous form, and whatever his humor, there would somewhere be wisdom in it. he had in reality changed little; for a generation he had thought the sort of things which he now, with advanced years and a different audience, felt warranted in uttering openly. the man who in ' had written against corruption in san francisco, who a few years later had defended the emigrant chinese against persecution, who at the meetings of the monday evening club had denounced hypocrisy in politics, morals, and national issues, did not need to change to be able to speak out against similar abuses now. and a newer generation as willing to herald mark twain as a sage as well as a humorist, and on occasion to quite overlook the absence of the cap and bells. ccxiii mark twain--general spokesman clemens did not confine his speeches altogether to matters of reform. at a dinner given by the nineteenth century club in november, , he spoke on the "disappearance of literature," and at the close of the discussion of that subject, referring to milton and scott, he said: professor winchester also said something about there being no modern epics like "paradise lost." i guess he's right. he talked as if he was pretty familiar with that piece of literary work, and nobody would suppose that he never had read it. i don't believe any of you have ever read "paradise lost," and you don't want to. that's something that you just want to take on trust. it's a classic, just as professor winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic--something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. professor trent also had a good deal to say about the disappearance of literature. he said that scott would outlive all his critics. i guess that's true. that fact of the business is you've got to be one of two ages to appreciate scott. when you're eighteen you can read ivanhoe, and you want to wait until you're ninety to read some of the rest. it takes a pretty well-regulated abstemious critic to live ninety years. but a few days later he was back again in the forefront of reform, preaching at the berkeley lyceum against foreign occupation in china. it was there that he declared himself a boxer. why should not china be free from the foreigners, who are only making trouble on her soil? if they would only all go home what a pleasant place china would be for the chinese! we do not allow chinamen to come here, and i say, in all seriousness, that it would be a graceful thing to let china decide who shall go there. china never wanted foreigners any more than foreigners wanted chinamen, and on this question i am with the boxers every time. the boxer is a patriot. he loves his country better than he does the countries of other people. i wish him success. we drive the chinaman out of our country; the boxer believes in driving us out of his country. i am a boxer, too, on those terms. introducing winston churchill, of england, at a dinner some weeks later, he explained how generous england and america had been in not requiring fancy rates for "extinguished missionaries" in china as germany had done. germany had required territory and cash, he said, in payment for her missionaries, while the united states and england had been willing to settle for produce--firecrackers and tea. the churchill introduction would seem to have been his last speech for the year , and he expected it, with one exception, to be the last for a long time. he realized that he was tired and that the strain upon him made any other sort of work out of the question. writing to macalister at the end of the year, he said, "i seem to have made many speeches, but it is not so. it is not more than ten, i think." still, a respectable number in the space of two months, considering that each was carefully written and committed to memory, and all amid crushing social pressure. again to macalister: i declined banquets yesterday (which is double the daily average) & answered letters. i have slaved at my mail every day since we arrived in mid-october, but jean is learning to typewrite & presently i'll dictate & thereby save some scraps of time. he added that after january th he did not intend to speak again for a year--that he would not speak then only that the matter concerned the reform of city government. the occasion of january , , was a rather important one. it was a meeting of the city club, then engaged in the crusade for municipal reform. wheeler h. peckham presided, and bishop potter made the opening address. it all seems like ancient history now, and perhaps is not very vital any more; but the movement was making a great stir then, and mark twain's declaration that he believed forty-nine men out of fifty were honest, and that the forty-nine only needed to organize to disqualify the fiftieth man (always organized for crime), was quoted as a sort of slogan for reform. clemens was not permitted to keep his resolution that he wouldn't speak again that year. he had become a sort of general spokesman on public matters, and demands were made upon him which could not be denied. he declined a yale alumni dinner, but he could not refuse to preside at the lincoln birthday celebration at carnegie hall, february th, where he must introduce watterson as the speaker of the evening. "think of it!" he wrote twichell. "two old rebels functioning there: i as president and watterson as orator of the day! things have changed somewhat in these forty years, thank god!" the watterson introduction is one of the choicest of mark twain's speeches--a pure and perfect example of simple eloquence, worthy of the occasion which gave it utterance, worthy in spite of its playful paragraphs (or even because of them, for lincoln would have loved them), to become the matrix of that imperishable gettysburg phrase with which he makes his climax. he opened by dwelling for a moment on colonel watterson as a soldier, journalist, orator, statesman, and patriot; then he said: it is a curious circumstance that without collusion of any kind, but merely in obedience to a strange and pleasant and dramatic freak of destiny, he and i, kinsmen by blood--[colonel watterson's forebears had intermarried with the lamptons.]--for we are that--and one-time rebels--for we were that--should be chosen out of a million surviving quondam rebels to come here and bare our heads in reverence and love of that noble soul whom years ago we tried with all our hearts and all our strength to defeat and dispossess --abraham lincoln! is the rebellion ended and forgotten? are the blue and the gray one to-day? by authority of this sign we may answer yes; there was a rebellion--that incident is closed. i was born and reared in a slave state, my father was a slaveowner; and in the civil war i was a second lieutenant in the confederate service. for a while. this second cousin of mine, colonel watterson, the orator of this present occasion, was born and reared in a slave state, was a colonel in the confederate service, and rendered me such assistance as he could in my self-appointed great task of annihilating the federal armies and breaking up the union. i laid my plans with wisdom and foresight, and if colonel watterson had obeyed my orders i should have succeeded in my giant undertaking. it was my intention to drive general grant into the pacific--if i could get transportation--and i told colonel watterson to surround the eastern armies and wait till i came. but he was insubordinate, and stood upon a punctilio of military etiquette; he refused to take orders from a second lieutenant--and the union was saved. this is the first time that this secret has been revealed. until now no one outside the family has known the facts. but there they stand: watterson saved the union. yet to this day that man gets no pension. those were great days, splendid days. what an uprising it was! for the hearts of the whole nation, north and south, were in the war. we of the south were not ashamed; for, like the men of the north, we were fighting for 'flags we loved; and when men fight for these things, and under these convictions, with nothing sordid to tarnish their cause, that cause is holy, the blood spilt for it is sacred, the life that is laid down for it is consecrated. to-day we no longer regret the result, to-day we are glad it came out as it did, but we are not ashamed that we did our endeavor; we did our bravest best, against despairing odds, for the cause which was precious to us and which our consciences approved; and we are proud--and you are proud--the kindred blood in your veins answers when i say it--you are proud of the record we made in those mighty collisions in the fields. what an uprising it was! we did not have to supplicate for soldiers on either side. "we are coming, father abraham, three hundred thousand strong!" that was the music north and south. the very choicest young blood and brawn and brain rose up from maine to the gulf and flocked to the standards--just as men always do when in their eyes their cause is great and fine and their hearts are in it; just as men flocked to the crusades, sacrificing all they possessed to the cause, and entering cheerfully upon hardships which we cannot even imagine in this age, and upon toilsome and wasting journeys which in our time would be the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe five times over. north and south we put our hearts into that colossal struggle, and out of it came the blessed fulfilment of the prophecy of the immortal gettysburg speech which said: "we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under god, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." we are here to honor the birthday of the greatest citizen, and the noblest and the best, after washington, that this land or any other has yet produced. the old wounds are healed, you and we are brothers again; you testify it by honoring two of us, once soldiers of the lost cause, and foes of your great and good leader--with the privilege of assisting here; and we testify it by laying our honest homage at the feet of abraham lincoln, and in forgetting that you of the north and we of the south were ever enemies, and remembering only that we are now indistinguishably fused together and nameable by one common great name--americans! ccxiv mark twain and the missionaries mark twain had really begun his crusade for reform soon after his arrival in america in a practical hand-to-hand manner. his housekeeper, katie leary, one night employed a cabman to drive her from the grand central station to the house at west tenth street. no contract had been made as to price, and when she arrived there the cabman's extortionate charge was refused. he persisted in it, and she sent into the house for her employer. of all men, mark twain was the last one to countenance an extortion. he reasoned with the man kindly enough at first; when the driver at last became abusive clemens demanded his number, which was at first refused. in the end he paid the legal fare, and in the morning entered a formal complaint, something altogether unexpected, for the american public is accustomed to suffering almost any sort of imposition to avoid trouble and publicity. in some notes which clemens had made in london four years earlier he wrote: if you call a policeman to settle the dispute you can depend on one thing--he will decide it against you every time. and so will the new york policeman. in london if you carry your case into court the man that is entitled to win it will win it. in new york--but no one carries a cab case into court there. it is my impression that it is now more than thirty years since any one has carried a cab case into court there. nevertheless, he was promptly on hand when the case was called to sustain the charge and to read the cabdrivers' union and the public in general a lesson in good-citizenship. at the end of the hearing, to a representative of the union he said: "this is not a matter of sentiment, my dear sir. it is simply practical business. you cannot imagine that i am making money wasting an hour or two of my time prosecuting a case in which i can have no personal interest whatever. i am doing this just as any citizen should do. he has no choice. he has a distinct duty. he is a non-classified policeman. every citizen is, a policeman, and it is his duty to assist the police and the magistracy in every way he can, and give his time, if necessary, to do so. here is a man who is a perfectly natural product of an infamous system in this city--a charge upon the lax patriotism in this city of new york that this thing can exist. you have encouraged him, in every way you know how to overcharge. he is not the criminal here at all. the criminal is the citizen of new york and the absence of patriotism. i am not here to avenge myself on him. i have no quarrel with him. my quarrel is with the citizens of new york, who have encouraged him, and who created him by encouraging him to overcharge in this way." the driver's license was suspended. the case made a stir in the newspapers, and it is not likely that any one incident ever contributed more to cab-driving morals in new york city. but clemens had larger matters than this in prospect. his many speeches on municipal and national abuses he felt were more or less ephemeral. he proposed now to write himself down more substantially and for a wider hearing. the human race was behaving very badly: unspeakable corruption was rampant in the city; the boers were being oppressed in south africa; the natives were being murdered in the philippines; leopold of belgium was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the congo, and the allied powers, in the cause of christ, were slaughtering the chinese. in his letters he had more than once boiled over touching these matters, and for new-year's eve, , had written: a greeting from the nineteenth to the twentieth century i bring you the stately nation named christendom, returning, bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in kiao- chou, manchuria, south africa, and the philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. give her soap and towel, but hide the looking- glass.--[prepared for red cross society watch-meeting, which was postponed until march. clemens recalled his "greeting" for that reason and for one other, which he expressed thus: "the list of greeters thus far issued by you contains only vague generalities and one definite name--mine: 'some kings and queens and mark twain.' now i am not enjoying this sparkling solitude and distinction. it makes me feel like a circus-poster in a graveyard."] this was a sort of preliminary. then, restraining himself no longer, he embodied his sentiments in an article for the north american review entitled, "to the person sitting in darkness." there was crying need for some one to speak the right word. he was about the only one who could do it and be certain of a universal audience. he took as his text some christmas eve clippings from the new york tribune and sun which he had been saving for this purpose. the tribune clipping said: christmas will dawn in the united states over a people full of hope and aspiration and good cheer. such a condition means contentment and happiness. the carping grumbler who may here and there go forth will find few to listen to him. the majority will wonder what is the matter with him, and pass on. a sun clipping depicted the "terrible offenses against humanity committed in the name of politics in some of the most notorious east side districts "--the unmissionaried, unpoliced darker new york. the sun declared that they could not be pictured even verbally. but it suggested enough to make the reader shudder at the hideous depths of vice in the sections named. another clipping from the same paper reported the "rev. mr. ament, of the american board of foreign missions," as having collected indemnities for boxer damages in china at the rate of three hundred taels for each murder, "full payment for all destroyed property belonging to christians, and national fines amounting to thirteen times the indemnity." it quoted mr. ament as saying that the money so obtained was used for the propagation of the gospel, and that the amount so collected was moderate when compared with the amount secured by the catholics, who had demanded, in addition to money, life for life, that is to say, "head for head"--in one district six hundred and eighty heads having been so collected. the despatch made mr. ament say a great deal more than this, but the gist here is enough. mark twain, of course, was fiercely stirred. the missionary idea had seldom appealed to him, and coupled with this business of bloodshed, it was less attractive than usual. he printed the clippings in full, one following the other; then he said: by happy luck we get all these glad tidings on christmas eve--just the time to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gaiety and enthusiasm. our spirits soar and we find we can even make jokes; taels i win, heads you lose. he went on to score ament, to compare the missionary policy in china to that of the pawnee indians, and to propose for him a monument --subscriptions to be sent to the american board. he denounced the national policies in africa, china, and the philippines, and showed by the reports and by the private letters of soldiers home, how cruel and barbarous and fiendish had been the warfare made by those whose avowed purpose was to carry the blessed light of civilization and gospel "to the benighted native"--how in very truth these priceless blessings had been handed on the point of a bayonet to the "person sitting in darkness." mark twain never wrote anything more scorching, more penetrating in its sarcasm, more fearful in its revelation of injustice and hypocrisy, than his article "to the person sitting in darkness." he put aquafortis on all the raw places, and when it was finished he himself doubted the wisdom of printing it. howells, however, agreed that it should be published, and "it ought to be illustrated by dan beard," he added, "with such pictures as he made for the yankee in king arthur's court, but you'd better hang yourself afterward." meeting beard a few days later, clemens mentioned the matter and said: "so if you make the pictures, you hang with me." but pictures were not required. it was published in the north american review for february, , as the opening article; after which the cyclone. two storms moving in opposite directions produce a cyclone, and the storms immediately developed; one all for mark twain and his principles, the other all against him. every paper in england and america commented on it editorially, with bitter denunciations or with eager praise, according to their lights and convictions. at west tenth street letters, newspaper clippings, documents poured in by the bushel--laudations, vituperations, denunciations, vindications; no such tumult ever occurred in a peaceful literary home. it was really as if he had thrown a great missile into the human hive, one-half of which regarded it as a ball of honey and the remainder as a cobblestone. whatever other effect it may have had, it left no thinking person unawakened. clemens reveled in it. w. a. rogers, in harper's weekly, caricatured him as tom sawyer in a snow fort, assailed by the shower of snowballs, "having the time of his life." another artist, fred lewis, pictured him as huck finn with a gun. the american board was naturally disturbed. the ament clipping which clemens had used had been public property for more than a month--its authenticity never denied; but it was immediately denied now, and the cable kept hot with inquiries. the rev. judson smith, one of the board, took up the defense of dr. ament, declaring him to be one who had suffered for the cause, and asked mark twain, whose "brilliant article," he said, "would produce an effect quite beyond the reach of plain argument," not to do an innocent man an injustice. clemens in the same paper replied that such was not his intent, that mr. ament in his report had simply arraigned himself. then it suddenly developed that the cable report had "grossly exaggerated" the amount of mr. ament's collections. instead of thirteen times the indemnity it should have read "one and a third times" the indemnity; whereupon, in another open letter, the board demanded retraction and apology. clemens would not fail to make the apology--at least he would explain. it was precisely the kind of thing that would appeal to him--the delicate moral difference between a demand thirteen times as great as it should be and a demand that was only one and a third times the correct amount. "to my missionary critics," in the north american review for april ( ), was his formal and somewhat lengthy reply. "i have no prejudice against apologies," he wrote. "i trust i shall never withhold one when it is due." he then proceeded to make out his case categorically. touching the exaggerated indemnity, he said: to dr. smith the "thirteen-fold-extra" clearly stood for "theft and extortion," and he was right, distinctly right, indisputably right. he manifestly thinks that when it got scaled away down to a mere "one-third" a little thing like that was some other than "theft and extortion." why, only the board knows! i will try to explain this difficult problem so that the board can get an idea of it. if a pauper owes me a dollar and i catch him unprotected and make him pay me fourteen dollars thirteen of it is "theft and extortion." if i make him pay only one dollar thirty-three and a third cents the thirty-three and a third cents are "theft and extortion," just the same. i will put it in another way still simpler. if a man owes me one dog --any kind of a dog, the breed is of no consequence--and i--but let it go; the board would never understand it. it can't understand these involved and difficult things. he offered some further illustrations, including the "tale of a king and his treasure" and another tale entitled "the watermelons." i have it now. many years ago, when i was studying for the gallows, i had a dear comrade, a youth who was not in my line, but still a scrupulously good fellow though devious. he was preparing to qualify for a place on the board, for there was going to be a vacancy by superannuation in about five years. this was down south, in the slavery days. it was the nature of the negro then, as now, to steal watermelons. they stole three of the melons of an adoptive brother of mine, the only good ones he had. i suspected three of a neighbor's negroes, but there was no proof, and, besides, the watermelons in those negroes' private patches were all green and small and not up to indemnity standard. but in the private patches of three other negroes there was a number of competent melons. i consulted with my comrade, the understudy of the board. he said that if i would approve his arrangements he would arrange. i said, "consider me the board; i approve; arrange." so he took a gun and went and collected three large melons for my brother-on-the- halfshell, and one over. i was greatly pleased and asked: "who gets the extra one?" "widows and orphans." "a good idea, too. why didn't you take thirteen?" "it would have been wrong; a crime, in fact-theft and extortion." "what is the one-third extra--the odd melon--the same?" it caused him to reflect. but there was no result. the justice of the peace was a stern man. on the trial he found fault with the scheme and required us to explain upon what we based our strange conduct--as he called it. the understudy said: "on the custom of the niggers. they all do it."--[the point had been made by the board that it was the chinese custom to make the inhabitants of a village responsible for individual crimes; and custom, likewise, to collect a third in excess of the damage, such surplus having been applied to the support of widows and orphans of the slain converts.] the justice forgot his dignity and descended to sarcasm. "custom of the niggers! are our morals so inadequate that we have to borrow of niggers?" then he said to the jury: "three melons were owing; they were collected from persons not proven to owe them: this is theft; they were collected by compulsion: this is extortion. a melon was added for the widows and orphans. it was owed by no one. it is another theft, another extortion. return it whence it came, with the others. it is not permissible here to apply to any purpose goods dishonestly obtained; not even to the feeding of widows and orphans, for this would be to put a shame upon charity and dishonor it." he said it in open court, before everybody, and to me it did not seem very kind. it was in the midst of the tumult that clemens, perhaps feeling the need of sacred melody, wrote to andrew carnegie: dear sir & friend,--you seem to be in prosperity. could you lend an admirer $ . to buy a hymn-book with? god will bless you. i feel it; i know it. n. b.--if there should be other applications, this one not to count. yours, mark. p. s.-don't send the hymn-book; send the money; i want to make the selection myself. carnegie answered: nothing less than a two-dollar & a half hymn-book gilt will do for you. your place in the choir (celestial) demands that & you shall have it. there's a new gospel of saint mark in the north american which i like better than anything i've read for many a day. i am willing to borrow a thousand dollars to distribute that sacred message in proper form, & if the author don't object may i send that sum, when i can raise it, to the anti-imperialist league, boston, to which i am a contributor, the only missionary work i am responsible for. just tell me you are willing & many thousands of the holy little missals will go forth. this inimitable satire is to become a classic. i count among my privileges in life that i know you, the author. perhaps a few more of the letters invited by mark twain's criticism of missionary work in china may still be of interest to the reader: frederick t. cook, of the hospital saturday and sunday association, wrote: "i hail you as the voltaire of america. it is a noble distinction. god bless you and see that you weary not in well-doing in this noblest, sublimest of crusades." ministers were by no means all against him. the associate pastor of the every-day church, in boston, sent this line: "i want to thank you for your matchless article in the current north american. it must make converts of well-nigh all who read it." but a boston school-teacher was angry. "i have been reading the north american," she wrote, "and i am filled with shame and remorse that i have dreamed of asking you to come to boston to talk to the teachers." on the outside of the envelope clemens made this pencil note: "now, i suppose i offended that young lady by having an opinion of my own, instead of waiting and copying hers. i never thought. i suppose she must be as much as twenty-five, and probably the only patriot in the country." a critic with a sense of humor asked: "please excuse seeming impertinence, but were you ever adjudged insane? be honest. how much money does the devil give you for arraigning christianity and missionary causes?" but there were more of the better sort. edward s. martin, in a grateful letter, said: "how gratifying it is to feel that we have a man among us who understands the rarity of the plain truth, and who delights to utter it, and has the gift of doing so without cant and with not too much seriousness." sir hiram maxim wrote: "i give you my candid opinion that what you have done is of very great value to the civilization of the world. there is no man living whose words carry greater weight than your own, as no one's writings are so eagerly sought after by all classes." clemens himself in his note-book set down this aphorism: "do right and you will be conspicuous." ccxv summer at "the lair" in june clemens took the family to saranac lake, to ampersand. they occupied a log cabin which he called "the lair," on the south shore, near the water's edge, a remote and beautiful place where, as had happened before, they were so comfortable and satisfied that they hoped to return another summer. there were swimming and boating and long walks in the woods; the worry and noise of the world were far away. they gave little enough attention to the mails. they took only a weekly paper, and were likely to allow it to lie in the postoffice uncalled for. clemens, especially, loved the place, and wrote to twichell: i am on the front porch (lower one-main deck) of our little bijou of a dwelling-house. the lake edge (lower saranac) is so nearly under me that i can't see the shore, but only the water, small-poxed with rain splashes--for there is a heavy down pour. it is charmingly like sitting snuggled up on a ship's deck with the stretching sea all around but very much more satisfactory, for at sea a rainstorm is depressing, while here of course the effect engendered is just a deep sense of comfort & contentment. the heavy forest shuts us solidly in on three sides--there are no neighbors. there are beautiful little tan-colored impudent squirrels about. they take tea p.m. (not invited) at the table in the woods where jean does my typewriting, & one of them has been brave enough to sit upon jean's knee with his tail curved over his back & munch his food. they come to dinner p.m. on the front porch (not invited), but clara drives them away. it is an occupation which requires some industry & attention to business. they all have the one name --blennerhasset, from burr's friend--& none of them answers to it except when hungry. clemens could work at "the lair," often writing in shady seclusions along the shore, and he finished there the two-part serial,--[ published in harper's magazine for january and february, .]--"the double-barrelled detective story," intended originally as a burlesque on sherlock holmes. it did not altogether fulfil its purpose, and is hardly to be ranked as one of mark twain's successes. it contains, however, one paragraph at least by which it is likely to be remembered, a hoax--his last one--on the reader. it runs as follows: it was a crisp and spicy morning in early october. the lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of god. the warm light and luxury of this paragraph are factitious. the careful reader will, note that its various accessories are ridiculously associated, and only the most careless reader will accept the oesophagus as a bird. but it disturbed a great many admirers, and numerous letters of inquiry came wanting to know what it was all about. some suspected the joke and taunted him with it; one such correspondent wrote: my dear mark twain,--reading your "double-barrelled detective story" in the january harper's late one night i came to the paragraph where you so beautifully describe "a crisp and spicy morning in early october." i read along down the paragraph, conscious only of its woozy sound, until i brought up with a start against your oesophagus in the empty sky. then i read the paragraph again. oh, mark twain! mark twain! how could you do it? put a trap like that into the midst of a tragical story? do serenity and peace brood over you after you have done such a thing? who lit the lilacs, and which end up do they hang? when did larches begin to flame, and who set out the pomegranates in that canyon? what are deciduous flowers, and do they always "bloom in the fall, tra la"? i have been making myself obnoxious to various people by demanding their opinion of that paragraph without telling them the name of the author. they say, "very well done." "the alliteration is so pretty." "what's an oesophagus, a bird?" "what's it all mean, anyway?" i tell them it means mark twain, and that an oesophagus is a kind of swallow. am i right? or is it a gull? or a gullet? hereafter if you must write such things won't you please be so kind as to label them? very sincerely yours, alletta f. dean. mark twain to miss dean: don't you give that oesophagus away again or i'll never trust you with another privacy! so many wrote, that clemens finally felt called upon to make public confession, and as one searching letter had been mailed from springfield, massachusetts, he made his reply through the republican of that city. after some opening comment he said: i published a short story lately & it was in that that i put the oesophagus. i will say privately that i expected it to bother some people--in fact, that was the intention--but the harvest has been larger than i was calculating upon. the oesophagus has gathered in the guilty and the innocent alike, whereas i was only fishing for the innocent--the innocent and confiding. he quoted a letter from a schoolmaster in the philippines who thought the passage beautiful with the exception of the curious creature which "slept upon motionless wings." said clemens: do you notice? nothing in the paragraph disturbed him but that one word. it shows that that paragraph was most ably constructed for the deception it was intended to put upon the reader. it was my intention that it should read plausibly, and it is now plain that it does; it was my intention that it should be emotional and touching, and you see yourself that it fetched this public instructor. alas! if i had but left that one treacherous word out i should have scored, scored everywhere, and the paragraph would have slidden through every reader's sensibilities like oil and left not a suspicion behind. the other sample inquiry is from a professor in a new england university. it contains one naughty word (which i cannot bear to suppress), but he is not in the theological department, so it is no harm: "dear mr. clemens,--'far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing.' "it is not often i get a chance to read much periodical literature, but i have just gone through at this belated period, with much gratification and edification, your 'double-barrelled detective story.' "but what in hell is an oesophagus? i keep one myself, but it never sleeps in the air or anywhere else. my profession is to deal with words, and oesophagus interested me the moment i lighted upon it. but, as a companion of my youth used to say, 'i'll be eternally, co-eternally cussed' if i can make it out. is it a joke or am i an ignoramus?" between you and me, i was almost ashamed of having fooled that man, but for pride's sake i was not going to say so. i wrote and told him it was a joke--and that is what i am now saying to my springfield inquirer. and i told him to carefully read the whole paragraph and he would find not a vestige of sense in any detail of it. this also i recommend to my springfield inquirer. i have confessed. i am sorry--partially. i will not do so any more--for the present. don't ask me any more questions; let the oesophagus have a rest--on his same old motionless wing. he wrote twichell that the story had been a six-day 'tour de force', twenty-five thousand words, and he adds: how long it takes a literary seed to sprout sometimes! this seed was planted in your house many years ago when you sent me to bed with a book not heard of by me until then--sherlock holmes . . . . i've done a grist of writing here this summer, but not for publication soon, if ever. i did write two satisfactory articles for early print, but i've burned one of them & have buried the other in my large box of posthumous stuff. i've got stacks of literary remains piled up there. early in august clemens went with h. h. rogers in his yacht kanawha on a cruise to new brunswick and nova scotia. rogers had made up a party, including ex-speaker reed, dr. rice, and col. a. g. paine. young harry rogers also made one of the party. clemens kept a log of the cruise, certain entries of which convey something of its spirit. on the th, at yarmouth, he wrote: fog-bound. the garrison went ashore. officers visited the yacht in the evening & said an anvil had been missed. mr. rogers paid for the anvil. august th. there is a fine picture-gallery here; the sheriff photographed the garrison, with the exception of harry (rogers) and mr. clemens. august th. upon complaint of mr. reed another dog was procured. he said he had been a sailor all his life, and considered it dangerous to trust a ship to a dog-watch with only one dog in it. poker, for a change. august th. to rockland, maine, in the afternoon, arriving about p.m. in the night dr. rice baited the anchor with his winnings & caught a whale feet long. he said so himself. it is thought that if there had been another witness like dr. rice the whale would have been longer. august th. we could have had a happy time in bath but for the interruptions caused by people who wanted mr. reed to explain votes of the olden time or give back the money. mr. rogers recouped them. another anvil missed. the descendant of captain kidd is the only person who does not blush for these incidents. harry and mr. clemens blush continually. it is believed that if the rest of the garrison were like these two the yacht would be welcome everywhere instead of being quarantined by the police in all the ports. mr. clemens & harry have attracted a great deal of attention, & men have expressed a resolve to turn over a new leaf & copy after them from this out. evening. judge cohen came over from another yacht to pay his respects to harry and mr. clemens, he having heard of their reputation from the clergy of these coasts. he was invited by the gang to play poker apparently as a courtesy & in a spirit of seeming hospitality, he not knowing them & taking it all at par. mr. rogers lent him clothes to go home in. august th. the reformed statesman growling and complaining again --not in a frank, straightforward way, but talking at the commodore, while letting on to be talking to himself. this time he was dissatisfied about the anchor watch; said it was out of date, untrustworthy, & for real efficiency didn't begin with the waterbury, & was going on to reiterate, as usual, that he had been a pilot all his life & blamed if he ever saw, etc., etc., etc. but he was not allowed to finish. we put him ashore at portland. that is to say, reed landed at portland, the rest of the party returning with the yacht. "we had a noble good time in the yacht," clemens wrote twichell on their return. "we caught a chinee missionary and drowned him." twichell had been invited to make one of the party, and this letter was to make him feel sorry he had not accepted. ccxvi riverdale--a yale degree the clemens household did not return to west tenth street. they spent a week in elmira at the end of september, and after a brief stop in new york took up their residence on the northern metropolitan boundary, at riverdale-on-the-hudson, in the old appleton home. they had permanently concluded not to return to hartford. they had put the property there into an agent's hands for sale. mrs. clemens never felt that she had the strength to enter the house again. they had selected the riverdale place with due consideration. they decided that they must have easy access to the new york center, but they wished also to have the advantage of space and spreading lawn and trees, large rooms, and light. the appleton homestead provided these things. it was a house built in the first third of the last century by one of the morris family, so long prominent in new york history. on passing into the appleton ownership it had been enlarged and beautified and named "holbrook hall." it overlooked the hudson and the palisades. it had associations: the roosevelt family had once lived there, huxley, darwin, tyndall, and others of their intellectual rank had been entertained there during its occupation by the first appleton, the founder of the publishing firm. the great hall of the added wing was its chief feature. clemens once remembered: "we drifted from room to room on our tour of inspection, always with a growing doubt as to whether we wanted that house or not; but at last, when we arrived in a dining-room that was feet long, feet wide, and had two great fireplaces in it, that settled it." there were pleasant neighbors at riverdale, and had it not been for the illnesses that seemed always ready to seize upon that household the home there might have been ideal. they loved the place presently, so much so that they contemplated buying it, but decided that it was too costly. they began to prospect for other places along the hudson shore. they were anxious to have a home again--one that they could call their own. among the many pleasant neighbors at riverdale were the dodges, the quincy adamses, and the rev. mr. carstensen, a liberal-minded minister with whom clemens easily affiliated. clemens and carstensen visited back and forth and exchanged views. once mr. carstensen told him that he was going to town to dine with a party which included the reverend gottheil, a catholic bishop, an indian buddhist, and a chinese scholar of the confucian faith, after which they were all going to a yiddish theater. clemens said: "well, there's only one more thing you need to make the party complete --that is, either satan or me." howells often came to riverdale. he was living in a new york apartment, and it was handy and made an easy and pleasant outing for him. he says: "i began to see them again on something like the sweet old terms. they lived far more unpretentiously than they used, and i think with a notion of economy, which they had never very successfully practised. i recall that at the end of a certain year in hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash for everything, clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed experiment, and asking me to guess how many bills they had at new-year's; he hastened to say that a horse-car would not have held them. at riverdale they kept no carriage, and there was a snowy night when i drove up to their handsome old mansion in the station carryall, which was crusted with mud, as from the going down of the deluge after transporting noah and his family from the ark to whatever point they decided to settle provisionally. but the good talk, the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer poverty of mind or soul was there, and we jubilantly found ourselves again in our middle youth." both howells and clemens were made doctors of letters by yale that year and went over in october to receive their degrees. it was mark twain's second yale degree, and it was the highest rank that an american institution of learning could confer. twichell wrote: i want you to understand, old fellow, that it will be in its intention the highest public compliment, and emphatically so in your case, for it will be tendered you by a corporation of gentlemen, the majority of whom do not at all agree with the views on important questions which you have lately promulgated in speech and in writing, and with which you are identified to the public mind. they grant, of course, your right to hold and express those views, though for themselves they don't like 'em; but in awarding you the proposed laurel they will make no count of that whatever. their action will appropriately signify simply and solely their estimate of your merit and rank as a man of letters, and so, as i say, the compliment of it will be of the pure, unadulterated quality. howells was not especially eager to go, and tried to conspire with clemens to arrange some excuse which would keep them at home. i remember with satisfaction [he wrote] our joint success in keeping away from the concord centennial in , and i have been thinking we might help each other in this matter of the yale anniversary. what are your plans for getting left, or shall you trust to inspiration? their plans did not avail. both howells and clemens went to new haven to receive their honors. when they had returned, howells wrote formally, as became the new rank: dear sir,--i have long been an admirer of your complete works, several of which i have read, and i am with you shoulder to shoulder in the cause of foreign missions. i would respectfully request a personal interview, and if you will appoint some day and hour most inconvenient to you i will call at your baronial hall. i cannot doubt, from the account of your courtesy given me by the twelve apostles, who once visited you in your hartford home and were mistaken for a syndicate of lightning-rod men, that our meeting will be mutually agreeable. yours truly, w. d. howells. dr. clemens. ccxvii mark twain in politics there was a campaign for the mayoralty of new york city that fall, with seth low on the fusion ticket against edward m. shepard as the tammany candidate. mark twain entered the arena to try to defeat tammany hall. he wrote and he spoke in favor of clean city government and police reform. he was savagely in earnest and openly denounced the clan of croker, individually and collectively. he joined a society called 'the acorns'; and on the th of october, at a dinner given by the order at the waldorf-astoria, delivered a fierce arraignment, in which he characterized croker as the warren hastings of new york. his speech was really a set of extracts from edmund burke's great impeachment of hastings, substituting always the name of croker, and paralleling his career with that of the ancient boss of the east india company. it was not a humorous speech. it was too denunciatory for that. it probably contained less comic phrasing than any former effort. there is hardly even a suggestion of humor from beginning to end. it concluded with this paraphrase of burke's impeachment: i impeach richard croker of high crimes and misdemeanors. i impeach him in the name of the people, whose trust he has betrayed. i impeach him in the name of all the people of america, whose national character he has dishonored. i impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated. i impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition of life. the acorn speech was greatly relied upon for damage to the tammany ranks, and hundreds of thousands of copies of it were printed and circulated. --[the "edmund burke on croker and tammany" speech had originally been written as an article for the north american review.] clemens was really heart and soul in the campaign. he even joined a procession that marched up broadway, and he made a speech to a great assemblage at broadway and leonard street, when, as he said, he had been sick abed two days and, according to the doctor, should be in bed then. but i would not stay at home for a nursery disease, and that's what i've got. now, don't let this leak out all over town, but i've been doing some indiscreet eating--that's all. it wasn't drinking. if it had been i shouldn't have said anything about it. i ate a banana. i bought it just to clinch the italian vote for fusion, but i got hold of a tammany banana by mistake. just one little nub of it on the end was nice and white. that was the shepard end. the other nine-tenths were rotten. now that little white end won't make the rest of the banana good. the nine-tenths will make that little nub rotten, too. we must get rid of the whole banana, and our acorn society is going to do its share, for it is pledged to nothing but the support of good government all over the united states. we will elect the president next time. it won't be i, for i have ruined my chances by joining the acorns, and there can be no office-holders among us. there was a movement which clemens early nipped in the bud--to name a political party after him. "i should be far from willing to have a political party named after me," he wrote, "and i would not be willing to belong to a party which allowed its members to have political aspirations or push friends forward for political preferment." in other words, he was a knight-errant; his sole purpose for being in politics at all--something he always detested--was to do what he could for the betterment of his people. he had his reward, for when election day came, and the returns were in, the fusion ticket had triumphed and tammany had fallen. clemens received his share of the credit. one paper celebrated him in verse: who killed croker? i, said mark twain, i killed croker, i, the jolly joker! among samuel clemens's literary remains there is an outline plan for a "casting-vote party," whose main object was "to compel the two great parties to nominate their best man always." it was to be an organization of an infinite number of clubs throughout the nation, no member of which should seek or accept a nomination for office in any political appointment, but in each case should cast its vote as a unit for the candidate of one of the two great political parties, requiring that the man be of clean record and honest purpose. from constable up to president [runs his final clause] there is no office for which the two great parties cannot furnish able, clean, and acceptable men. whenever the balance of power shall be lodged in a permanent third party, with no candidate of its own and no function but to cast its whole vote for the best man put forward by the republicans and democrats, these two parties will select the best man they have in their ranks. good and clean government will follow, let its party complexion be what it may, and the country will be quite content. it was a utopian idea, very likely, as human nature is made; full of that native optimism which was always overflowing and drowning his gloomier logic. clearly he forgot his despair of humanity when he formulated that document, and there is a world of unselfish hope in these closing lines: if in the hands of men who regard their citizenship as a high trust this scheme shall fail upon trial a better must be sought, a better must be invented; for it cannot be well or safe to let the present political conditions continue indefinitely. they can be improved, and american citizenship should arouse up from its disheartenment and see that it is done. had this document been put into type and circulated it might have founded a true mark twain party. clemens made not many more speeches that autumn, closing the year at last with the "founder's night" speech at the players, the short address which, ending on the stroke of midnight, dedicates each passing year to the memory of edwin booth, and pledges each new year in a loving-cup passed in his honor. ccxviii new interests and investments the spirit which a year earlier had prompted mark twain to prepare his "salutation from the nineteenth to the twentieth century" inspired him now to conceive the "stupendous international procession," a gruesome pageant described in a document (unpublished) of twenty-two typewritten pages which begin: the stupendous procession at the appointed hour it moved across the world in following order: the twentieth century a fair young creature, drunk and disorderly, borne in the arms of satan. banner with motto, "get what you can, keep what you get." guard of honor--monarchs, presidents, tammany bosses, burglars, land thieves, convicts, etc., appropriately clothed and bearing the symbols of their several trades. christendom a majestic matron in flowing robes drenched with blood. on her head a golden crown of thorns; impaled on its spines the bleeding heads of patriots who died for their countries boers, boxers, filipinos; in one hand a slung-shot, in the other a bible, open at the text "do unto others," etc. protruding from pocket bottle labeled "we bring you the blessings of civilization." necklace-handcuffs and a burglar's jimmy. supporters--at one elbow slaughter, at the other hypocrisy. banner with motto--"love your neighbor's goods as yourself." ensign--the black flag. guard of honor--missionaries and german, french, russian, and british soldiers laden with loot. and so on, with a section for each nation of the earth, headed each by the black flag, each bearing horrid emblems, instruments of torture, mutilated prisoners, broken hearts, floats piled with bloody corpses. at the end of all, banners inscribed: "all white men are born free and equal." "christ died to make men holy, christ died to make men free." with the american flag furled and draped in crepe, and the shade of lincoln towering vast and dim toward the sky, brooding with sorrowful aspect over the far-reaching pageant. with much more of the same sort. it is a fearful document, too fearful, we may believe, for mrs. clemens ever to consent to its publication. advancing years did little toward destroying mark twain's interest in human affairs. at no time in his life was he more variously concerned and employed than in his sixty-seventh year--matters social, literary, political, religious, financial, scientific. he was always alive, young, actively cultivating or devising interests--valuable and otherwise, though never less than important to him. he had plenty of money again, for one thing, and he liked to find dazzlingly new ways for investing it. as in the old days, he was always putting "twenty-five or forty thousand dollars," as he said, into something that promised multiplied returns. howells tells how he found him looking wonderfully well, and when he asked the name of his elixir he learned that it was plasmon. i did not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the investments which he had made from "the substance of things hoped for," and in the destiny of a disastrous disappointment. but after paying off the creditors of his late publishing firm he had to do something with his money, and it was not his fault if he did not make a fortune out of plasmon. it was just at this period (the beginning of ) that he was promoting with his capital and enthusiasm the plasmon interests in america, investing in it one of the "usual amounts," promising to make howells over again body and soul with the life-giving albuminate. once he wrote him explicit instructions: yes--take it as a medicine--there is nothing better, nothing surer of desired results. if you wish to be elaborate--which isn't necessary--put a couple of heaping teaspoonfuls of the powder in an inch of milk & stir until it is a paste; put in some more milk and stir the paste to a thin gruel; then fill up the glass and drink. or, stir it into your soup. or, into your oatmeal. or, use any method you like, so's you get it down--that is the only essential. he put another "usual sum" about this time in a patent cash register which was acknowledged to be "a promise rather than a performance," and remains so until this day. he capitalized a patent spiral hat-pin, warranted to hold the hat on in any weather, and he had a number of the pins handsomely made to present to visitors of the sex naturally requiring that sort of adornment and protection. it was a pretty and ingenious device and apparently effective enough, though it failed to secure his invested thousands. he invested a lesser sum in shares of the booklover's library, which was going to revolutionize the reading world, and which at least paid a few dividends. even the old tennessee land will-o'-the-wisp-long since repudiated and forgotten--when it appeared again in the form of a possible equity in some overlooked fragment, kindled a gentle interest, and was added to his list of ventures. he made one substantial investment at this period. they became more and more in love with the hudson environment, its beauty and its easy access to new york. their house was what they liked it to be--a gathering --place for friends and the world's notables, who could reach it easily and quickly from new york. they had a steady procession of company when mrs. clemens's health would permit, and during a single week in the early part of this year entertained guests at no less than seventeen out of their twenty-one meals, and for three out of the seven nights--not an unusual week. their plan for buying a home on the hudson ended with the purchase of what was known as hillcrest, or the casey place, at tarrytown, overlooking that beautiful stretch of river, the tappan zee, close to the washington irving home. the beauty of its outlook and surroundings appealed to them all. the house was handsome and finely placed, and they planned to make certain changes that would adapt it to their needs. the price, which was less than fifty thousand dollars, made it an attractive purchase; and without doubt it would have made them a suitable and happy home had it been written in the future that they should so inherit it. clemens was writing pretty steadily these days. the human race was furnishing him with ever so many inspiring subjects, and he found time to touch more or less on most of them. he wreaked his indignation upon the things which exasperated him often--even usually--without the expectation of print; and he delivered himself even more inclusively at such times as he walked the floor between the luncheon or dinner courses, amplifying on the poverty of an invention that had produced mankind as a supreme handiwork. in a letter to howells he wrote: your comments on that idiot's "ideals" letter reminds me that i preached a good sermon to my family yesterday on his particular layer of the human race, that grotesquest of all the inventions of the creator. it was a good sermon, but coldly received, & it seemed best not to try to take up a collection. he once told howells, with the wild joy of his boyish heart, how mrs. clemens found some compensation, when kept to her room by illness, in the reflection that now she would not hear so much about the "damned human race." yet he was always the first man to champion that race, and the more unpromising the specimen the surer it was of his protection, and he never invited, never expected gratitude. one wonders how he found time to do all the things that he did. besides his legitimate literary labors and his preachments, he was always writing letters to this one and that, long letters on a variety of subjects, carefully and picturesquely phrased, and to people of every sort. he even formed a curious society, whose members were young girls--one in each country of the earth. they were supposed to write to him at intervals on some subject likely to be of mutual interest, to which letters he agreed to reply. he furnished each member with a typewritten copy of the constitution and by-laws of the juggernaut club, as he called it, and he apprised each of her election, usually after this fashion: i have a club--a private club, which is all my own. i appoint the members myself, & they can't help themselves, because i don't allow them to vote on their own appointment & i don't allow them to resign! they are all friends whom i have never seen (save one), but who have written friendly letters to me. by the laws of my club there can be only one member in each country, & there can be no male member but myself. some day i may admit males, but i don't know --they are capricious & inharmonious, & their ways provoke me a good deal. it is a matter, which the club shall decide. i have made four appointments in the past three or four months: you as a member for scotland--oh, this good while! a young citizeness of joan of arc's home region as a member for france; a mohammedan girl as member for bengal; & a dear & bright young niece of mine as member for the united states--for i do not represent a country myself, but am merely member-at-large for the human race. you must not try to resign, for the laws of the club do not allow that. you must console yourself by remembering that you are in the best company; that nobody knows of your membership except yourself; that no member knows another's name, but only her country; that no taxes are levied and no meetings held (but how dearly i should like to attend one!). one of my members is a princess of a royal house, another is the daughter of a village bookseller on the continent of europe, for the only qualification for membership is intellect & the spirit of good- will; other distinctions, hereditary or acquired, do not count. may i send you the constitution & laws of the club? i shall be so glad if i may. it was just one of his many fancies, and most of the active memberships would not long be maintained; though some continued faithful in their reports, as he did in his replies, to the end. one of the more fantastic of his conceptions was a plan to advertise for ante-mortem obituaries of himself--in order, as he said, that he might look them over and enjoy them and make certain corrections in the matter of detail. some of them he thought might be appropriate to read from the platform. i will correct them--not the facts, but the verdicts--striking out such clauses as could have a deleterious influence on the other side, and replacing them with clauses of a more judicious character. he was much taken with the new idea, and his request for such obituaries, with an offer of a prize for the best--a portrait of himself drawn by his own hand--really appeared in harper's weekly later in the year. naturally he got a shower of responses--serious, playful, burlesque. some of them were quite worth while. the obvious "death loves a shining mark" was of course numerously duplicated, and some varied it "death loves an easy mark," and there was "mark, the perfect man." the two that follow gave him especial pleasure. obituary for "mark twain" worthy of his portrait, a place on his monument, as well as a place among his "perennial-consolation heirlooms": "got up; washed; went to bed." the subject's own words (see innocents abroad). can't go back on your own words, mark twain. there's nothing "to strike out"; nothing "to replace." what more could be said of any one? "got up!"--think of the fullness of meaning! the possibilities of life, its achievements--physical, intellectual, spiritual. got up to the top!--the climax of human aspiration on earth! "washed"--every whit clean; purified--body, soul, thoughts, purposes. "went to bed"--work all done--to rest, to sleep. the culmination of the day well spent! god looks after the awakening. mrs. s. a. oren-haynes. mark twain was the only man who ever lived, so far as we know, whose lies were so innocent, and withal so helpful, as to make them worth more than a whole lot of fossilized priests' eternal truths. d. h. kenner. ccxix yachting and theology clemens made fewer speeches during the riverdale period. he was as frequently demanded, but he had a better excuse for refusing, especially the evening functions. he attended a good many luncheons with friendly spirits like howells, matthews, james l. ford, and hamlin garland. at the end of february he came down to the mayor's dinner given to prince henry of prussia, but he did not speak. clemens used to say afterward that he had not been asked to speak, and that it was probably because of his supposed breach of etiquette at the kaiser's dinner in berlin; but the fact that prince henry sought him out, and was most cordially and humanly attentive during a considerable portion of the evening, is against the supposition. clemens attended a yale alumni dinner that winter and incidentally visited twichell in hartford. the old question of moral responsibility came up and twichell lent his visitor a copy of jonathan edwards's 'freedom of the will' for train perusal. clemens found it absorbing. later he wrote twichell his views. dear joe,--(after compliments.)--[meaning "what a good time you gave me; what a happiness it was to be under your roof again," etc. see opening sentence of all translations of letters passing between lord roberts and indian princes and rulers.]--from bridgeport to new york, thence to home, & continuously until near midnight i wallowed & reeked with jonathan in his insane debauch; rose immensely refreshed & fine at ten this morning, but with a strange & haunting sense of having been on a three days' tear with a drunken lunatic. it is years since i have known these sensations. all through the book is the glare of a resplendent intellect gone mad--a marvelous spectacle. no, not all through the book--the drunk does not come on till the last third, where what i take to be calvinism & its god begins to show up & shine red & hideous in the glow from the fires of hell, their only right and proper adornment. jonathan seems to hold (as against the armenian position) that the man (or his soul or his will) never creates an impulse itself, but is moved to action by an impulse back of it. that's sound! also, that of two or more things offered it, it infallibly chooses the one which for the moment is most pleasing to itself. perfectly correct! an immense admission for a man not otherwise sane. up to that point he could have written chapters iii & iv of my suppressed gospel. but there we seem to separate. he seems to concede the indisputable & unshaken dominion of motive & necessity (call them what he may, these are exterior forces & not under the man's authority, guidance, or even suggestion); then he suddenly flies the logical track & (to all seeming) makes the man & not those exterior forces responsible to god for the man's thoughts, words, & acts. it is frank insanity. i think that when he concedes the autocratic dominion of motive and necessity he grants a third position of mine--that a man's mind is a mere machine--an automatic machine--which is handled entirely from the outside, the man himself furnishing it absolutely nothing; not an ounce of its fuel, & not so much as a bare suggestion to that exterior engineer as to what the machine shall do nor how it shall do it nor when. after that concession it was time for him to get alarmed & shirk --for he was pointed straight for the only rational & possible next station on that piece of road--the irresponsibility of man to god. and so he shirked. shirked, and arrived at this handsome result: man is commanded to do so & so. it has been ordained from the beginning of time that some men sha'n't & others can't. these are to blame: let them be damned. i enjoy the colonel very much, & shall enjoy the rest of him with an obscene delight. joe, the whole tribe shout love to you & yours! mark. clemens was moved to set down some theology of his own, and did so in a manuscript which he entitled, "if i could be there." it is in the dialogue form he often adopted for polemic writing. it is a colloquy between the master of the universe and a stranger. it begins: i if i could be there, hidden under the steps of the throne, i should hear conversations like this: a stranger. lord, there is one who needs to be punished, and has been overlooked. it is in the record. i have found it. lord. by searching? s. yes, lord. l. who is it? what is it? s. a man. l. proceed. s. he died in sin. sin committed by his great-grandfather. l. when was this? s. eleven million years ago. l. do you know what a microbe is? s. yes, lord. it is a creature too small to be detected by my eye. l. he commits depredations upon your blood? s. yes, lord. l. i give you leave to subject him to a billion years of misery for this offense. go! work your will upon him. s. but, lord, i have nothing against him; i am indifferent to him. l. why? s. he is so infinitely small and contemptible. i am to him as is a mountain-range to a grain of sand. l. what am i to man? s. (silent.) l. am i not, to a man, as is a billion solar systems to a grain of sand? s. it is true, lord. l. some microbes are larger than others. does man regard the difference? s. no, lord. to him there is no difference of consequence. to him they are all microbes, all infinitely little and equally inconsequential. l. to me there is no difference of consequence between a man & a microbe. man looks down upon the speck at his feet called a microbe from an altitude of a thousand miles, so to speak, and regards him with indifference; i look down upon the specks called a man and a microbe from an altitude of a billion leagues, so to speak, and to me they are of a size. to me both are inconsequential. man kills the microbes when he can? s. yes, lord. l. then what? does he keep him in mind years and years and go on contriving miseries for him? s. no, lord. l. does he forget him? s. yes, lord. l. why? s. he cares nothing more about him. l. employs himself with more important matters? s. yes, lord. l. apparently man is quite a rational and dignified person, and can divorce his mind from uninteresting trivialities. why does he affront me with the fancy that i interest myself in trivialities--like men and microbes? ii l. is it true the human race thinks the universe was created for its convenience? s. yes, lord. l. the human race is modest. speaking as a member of it, what do you think the other animals are for? s. to furnish food and labor for man. l. what is the sea for? s. to furnish food for man. fishes. l. and the air? s. to furnish sustenance for man. birds and breath. l. how many men are there? s. fifteen hundred millions. l. (referring to notes.) take your pencil and set down some statistics. in a healthy man's lower intestine , , microbes are born daily and die daily. in the rest of a man's body , , microbes are born daily and die daily. the two sums aggregate-what? s. about , , . l. in ten days the aggregate reaches what? s. fifteen hundred millions. l. it is for one person. what would it be for the whole human population? s. alas, lord, it is beyond the power of figures to set down that multitude. it is billions of billions multiplied by billions of billions, and these multiplied again and again by billions of billions. the figures would stretch across the universe and hang over into space on both sides. l. to what intent are these uncountable microbes introduced into the human race? s. that they may eat. l. now then, according to man's own reasoning, what is man for? s. alas-alas! l. what is he for? s. to-to-furnish food for microbes. l. manifestly. a child could see it. now then, with this common-sense light to aid your perceptions, what are the air, the land, and the ocean for? s. to furnish food for man so that he may nourish, support, and multiply and replenish the microbes. l. manifestly. does one build a boarding-house for the sake of the boarding-house itself or for the sake of the boarders? s. certainly for the sake of the boarders. l. man's a boarding-house. s. i perceive it, lord. l. he is a boarding-house. he was never intended for anything else. if he had had less vanity and a clearer insight into the great truths that lie embedded in statistics he would have found it out early. as concerns the man who has gone unpunished eleven million years, is it your belief that in life he did his duty by his microbes? s. undoubtedly, lord. he could not help it. l. then why punish him? he had no other duty to perform. whatever else may be said of this kind of doctrine, it is at least original and has a conclusive sound. mark twain had very little use for orthodoxy and conservatism. when it was announced that dr. jacques loeb, of the university of california, had demonstrated the creation of life by chemical agencies he was deeply interested. when a newspaper writer commented that a "consensus of opinion among biologists" would probably rate dr. loeb as a man of lively imagination rather than an inerrant investigator of natural phenomena, he felt called to chaff the consensus idea. i wish i could be as young as that again. although i seem so old now i was once as young as that. i remember, as if it were but thirty or forty years ago, how a paralyzing consensus of opinion accumulated from experts a-setting around about brother experts who had patiently and laboriously cold-chiseled their way into one or another of nature's safe-deposit vaults and were reporting that they had found something valuable was plenty for me. it settled it. but it isn't so now-no. because in the drift of the years i by and by found out that a consensus examines a new thing with its feelings rather oftener than with its mind. there was that primitive steam-engine-ages back, in greek times: a consensus made fun of it. there was the marquis of worcester's steam-engine years ago: a consensus made fun of it. there was fulton's steamboat of a century ago: a french consensus, including the great napoleon, made fun of it. there was priestley, with his oxygen: a consensus scoffed at him, mobbed him, burned him out, banished him. while a consensus was proving, by statistics and things, that a steamship could not cross the atlantic, a steamship did it. and so on through a dozen pages or more of lively satire, ending with an extract from adam's diary. then there was a consensus about it. it was the very first one. it sat six days and nights. it was then delivered of the verdict that a world could not be made out of nothing; that such small things as sun and moon and stars might, maybe, but it would take years and years if there was considerable many of them. then the consensus got up and looked out of the window, and there was the whole outfit, spinning and sparkling in space! you never saw such a disappointed lot. adam. he was writing much at this time, mainly for his own amusement, though now and then he offered one of his reflections for print. that beautiful fairy tale, "the five boons of life," of which the most precious is "death," was written at this period. maeterlinck's lovely story of the bee interested him; he wrote about that. somebody proposed a martyrs' day; he wrote a paper ridiculing the suggestion. in his note-book, too, there is a memorandum for a love-story of the quarternary epoch which would begin, "on a soft october afternoon , , years ago." john fiske's discovery of america, volume i, he said, was to furnish the animals and scenery, civilization and conversation to be the same as to-day; but apparently this idea was carried no further. he ranged through every subject from protoplasm to infinity, exalting, condemning, ridiculing, explaining; his brain was always busy--a dynamo that rested neither night nor day. in april clemens received notice of another yachting trip on the kanawha, which this time would sail for the bahama and west india islands. the guests were to be about the same.--[the invited ones of the party were hon. t. b. reed, a. g. paine, laurence hutton, dr. c. c. rice, w. t. foote, and s. l. clemens. "owners of the yacht," mr. rogers called them, signing himself as "their guest."] he sent this telegram: h. h. rogers, fairhaven, mass. can't get away this week. i have company here from tonight till middle of next week. will kanawha be sailing after that & can i go as sunday-school superintendent at half rate? answer and prepay. dr. clemens. the sailing date was conveniently arranged and there followed a happy cruise among those balmy islands. mark twain was particularly fond of "tom" reed, who had been known as "czar" reed in congress, but was delightfully human in his personal life. they argued politics a good deal, and reed, with all his training and intimate practical knowledge of the subject, confessed that he "couldn't argue with a man like that." "do you believe the things you say?" he asked once, in his thin, falsetto voice. "yes," said clemens. "some of them." "well, you want to look out. if you go on this way, by and by you'll get to believing nearly everything you say." draw poker appears to have been their favorite diversion. clemens in his notes reports that off the coast of florida reed won twenty-three pots in succession. it was said afterward that they made no stops at any harbor; that when the chief officer approached the poker-table and told them they were about to enter some important port he received peremptory orders to "sail on and not interrupt the game." this, however, may be regarded as more or less founded on fiction. ccxx mark twain and the philippines among the completed manuscripts of the early part of was a north american review article (published in april)--"does the race of man love a lord?"--a most interesting treatise on snobbery as a universal weakness. there were also some papers on the philippine situation. in one of these clemens wrote: we have bought some islands from a party who did not own them; with real smartness and a good counterfeit of disinterested friendliness we coaxed a confiding weak nation into a trap and closed it upon them; we went back on an honored guest of the stars and stripes when we had no further use for him and chased him to the mountains; we are as indisputably in possession of a wide-spreading archipelago as if it were our property; we have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by benevolent assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the sultan of sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. and so, by these providences of god--the phrase is the government's, not mine--we are a world power; and are glad and proud, and have a back seat in the family. with tacks in it. at least we are letting on to be glad and proud; it is the best way. indeed, it is the only way. we must maintain our dignity, for people are looking. we are a world power; we cannot get out of it now, and we must make the best of it. and again he wrote: i am not finding fault with this use of our flag, for in order not to seem eccentric i have swung around now and joined the nation in the conviction that nothing can sully a flag. i was not properly reared, and had the illusion that a flag was a thing which must be sacredly guarded against shameful uses and unclean contacts lest it suffer pollution; and so when it was sent out to the philippines to float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition i supposed it was polluted, and in an ignorant moment i said so. but i stand corrected. i concede and acknowledge that it was only the government that sent it on such an errand that was polluted. let us compromise on that. i am glad to have it that way. for our flag could not well stand pollution, never having been used to it, but it is different with the administration. but a much more conspicuous comment on the philippine policy was the so-called "defense of general funston" for what funston himself referred to as a "dirty irish trick"; that is to say, deception in the capture of aguinaldo. clemens, who found it hard enough to reconcile himself to-any form of warfare, was especially bitter concerning this particular campaign. the article appeared in the north american review for may, , and stirred up a good deal of a storm. he wrote much more on the subject--very much more--but it is still unpublished. ccxxi the return of the native one day in april, , samuel clemens received the following letter from the president of the university of missouri: my dear mr. clemens, although you received the degree of doctor of literature last fall from yale, and have had other honors conferred upon you by other great universities, we want to adopt you here as a son of the university of missouri. in asking your permission to confer upon you the degree of ll.d. the university of missouri does not aim to confer an honor upon you so much as to show her appreciation of you. the rules of the university forbid us to confer the degree upon any one in absentia. i hope very much that you can so arrange your plans as to be with us on the fourth day of next june, when we shall hold our annual commencement. very truly yours, r. h. jesse. clemens had not expected to make another trip to the west, but a proffered honor such as this from one's native state was not a thing to be declined. it was at the end of may when he arrived in st. louis, and he was met at the train there by his old river instructor and friend, horace bixby--as fresh, wiry, and capable as he had been forty-five years before. "i have become an old man. you are still thirty-five," clemens said. they went to the planters hotel, and the news presently got around that mark twain was there. there followed a sort of reception in the hotel lobby, after which bixby took him across to the rooms of the pilots association, where the rivermen gathered in force to celebrate his return. a few of his old comrades were still alive, among them beck jolly. the same afternoon he took the train for hannibal. it was a busy five days that he had in hannibal. high-school commencement day came first. he attended, and willingly, or at least patiently, sat through the various recitals and orations and orchestrations, dreaming and remembering, no doubt, other high-school commencements of more than half a century before, seeing in some of those young people the boys and girls he had known in that vanished time. a few friends of his youth were still there, but they were among the audience now, and no longer fresh and looking into the future. their heads were white, and, like him, they were looking down the recorded years. laura hawkins was there and helen kercheval (mrs. frazer and mrs. garth now), and there were others, but they were few and scattering. he was added to the program, and he made himself as one of the graduates, and told them some things of the young people of that earlier time that brought their laughter and their tears. he was asked to distribute the diplomas, and he undertook the work in his own way. he took an armful of them and said to the graduates: "take one. pick out a good one. don't take two, but be sure you get a good one." so each took one "unsight and unseen" aid made the more exact distributions among themselves later. next morning it was saturday--he visited the old home on hill street, and stood in the doorway all dressed in white while a battalion of photographers made pictures of "this return of the native" to the threshold of his youth. "it all seems so small to me," he said, as he looked through the house; "a boy's home is a big place to him. i suppose if i should come back again ten years from now it would be the size of a birdhouse." he went through the rooms and up-stairs where he had slept and looked out the window down in the back yard where, nearly sixty years before, tom sawyer, huck finn, joe harper, and the rest--that is to say, tom blankenship, john briggs, will pitts, and the bowen boys--set out on their nightly escapades. of that lightsome band will pitts and john briggs still remained, with half a dozen others--schoolmates of the less adventurous sort. buck brown, who had been his rival in the spelling contests, was still there, and john robards, who had worn golden curls and the medal for good conduct, and ed pierce. and while these were assembled in a little group on the pavement outside the home a small old man came up and put out his hand, and it was jimmy macdaniel, to whom so long before, sitting on the river-bank and eating gingerbread, he had first told the story of jim wolfe and the cats. they put him into a carriage, drove him far and wide, and showed the hills and resorts and rendezvous of tom sawyer and his marauding band. he was entertained that evening by the labinnah club (whose name was achieved by a backward spelling of hannibal), where he found most of the survivors of his youth. the news report of that occasion states that he was introduced by father mcloughlin, and that he "responded in a very humorous and touchingly pathetic way, breaking down in tears at the conclusion. commenting on his boyhood days and referring to his mother was too much for the great humorist. before him as he spoke were sitting seven of his boyhood friends." on sunday morning col. john robards escorted him to the various churches and sunday-schools. they were all new churches to samuel clemens, but he pretended not to recognize this fact. in each one he was asked to speak a few words, and he began by saying how good it was to be back in the old home sunday-school again, which as a boy he had always so loved, and he would go on and point out the very place he had sat, and his escort hardly knew whether or not to enjoy the proceedings. at one place he told a moral story. he said: little boys and girls, i want to tell you a story which illustrates the value of perseverance--of sticking to your work, as it were. it is a story very proper for a sunday-school. when i was a little boy in hannibal i used to play a good deal up here on holliday's hill, which of course you all know. john briggs and i played up there. i don't suppose there are any little boys as good as we were then, but of course that is not to be expected. little boys in those days were 'most always good little boys, because those were the good old times when everything was better than it is now, but never mind that. well, once upon a time, on holliday's hill, they were blasting out rock, and a man was drilling for a blast. he sat there and drilled and drilled and drilled perseveringly until he had a hole down deep enough for the blast. then he put in the powder and tamped and tamped it down, but maybe he tamped it a little too hard, for the blast went off and he went up into the air, and we watched him. he went up higher and higher and got smaller and smaller. first he looked as big as a child, then as big as a dog, then as big as a kitten, then as big as a bird, and finally he went out of sight. john briggs was with me, and we watched the place where he went out of sight, and by and by we saw him coming down first as big as a bird, then as big as a kitten, then as big as a dog, then as big as a child, and then he was a man again, and landed right in his seat and went to drilling just persevering, you see, and sticking to his work. little boys and girls, that's the secret of success, just like that poor but honest workman on holliday's hill. of course you won't always be appreciated. he wasn't. his employer was a hard man, and on saturday night when he paid him he docked him fifteen minutes for the time he was up in the air--but never mind, he had his reward. he told all this in his solemn, grave way, though the sunday-school was in a storm of enjoyment when he finished. there still remains a doubt in hannibal as to its perfect suitability, but there is no doubt as to its acceptability. that sunday afternoon, with john briggs, he walked over holliday's hill --the cardiff hill of tom sawyer. it was jest such a sunday as that one when they had so nearly demolished the negro driver and had damaged a cooper-shop. they calculated that nearly three thousand sundays had passed since then, and now here they were once more, two old men with the hills still fresh and green, the river still sweeping by and rippling in the sun. standing there together and looking across to the low-lying illinois shore, and to the green islands where they had played, and to lover's leap on the south, the man who had been sam clemens said: "john, that is one of the loveliest sights i ever saw. down there by the island is the place we used to swim, and yonder is where a man was drowned, and there's where the steamboat sank. down there on lover's leap is where the millerites put on their robes one night to go to heaven. none of them went that night, but i suppose most of them have gone now." john briggs said: "sam, do you remember the day we stole the peaches from old man price and one of his bow-legged niggers came after us with the dogs, and how we made up our minds that we'd catch that nigger and drown him?" they came to the place where they had pried out the great rock that had so nearly brought them to grief. sam clemens said: "john, if we had killed that man we'd have had a dead nigger on our hands without a cent to pay for him." and so they talked on of this thing and that, and by and by they drove along the river, and sam clemens pointed out the place where he swam it and was taken with a cramp on the return swim, and believed for a while that his career was about to close. "once, near the shore, i thought i would let down," he said, "but was afraid to, knowing that if the water was deep i was a goner, but finally my knees struck the sand and i crawled out. that was the closest call i ever had." they drove by the place where the haunted house had stood. they drank from a well they had always known, and from the bucket as they had always drunk, talking and always talking, fondling lovingly and lingeringly that most beautiful of all our possessions, the past. "sam," said john, when they parted, "this is probably the last time we shall meet on this earth. god bless you. perhaps somewhere we shall renew our friendship." "john," was the answer, "this day has been worth thousands of dollars to me. we were like brothers once, and i feel that we are the same now. good-by, john. i'll try to meet you--somewhere." ccxxii a prophet honored in his country clemens left next day for columbia. committees met him at rensselaer, monroe city, clapper, stoutsville, paris, madison, moberly--at every station along the line of his travel. at each place crowds were gathered when the train pulled in, to cheer and wave and to present him with flowers. sometimes he spoke a few words; but oftener his eyes were full of tears--his voice would not come. there is something essentially dramatic in official recognition by one's native state--the return of the lad who has set out unknown to battle with life, and who, having conquered, is invited back to be crowned. no other honor, however great and spectacular, is quite like that, for there is in it a pathos and a completeness that are elemental and stir emotions as old as life itself. it was on the th of june, , that mark twain received his doctor of laws degree from the state university at columbia, missouri. james wilson, secretary of agriculture, and ethan allen hitchcock, secretary of the interior, were among those similarly honored. mark twain was naturally the chief attraction. dressed in his yale scholastic gown he led the procession of graduating students, and, as in hannibal, awarded them their diplomas. the regular exercises were made purposely brief in order that some time might be allowed for the conferring of the degrees. this ceremony was a peculiarly impressive one. gardner lathrop read a brief statement introducing "america's foremost author and best-loved citizen, samuel langhorne clemens--mark twain." clemens rose, stepped out to the center of the stage, and paused. he seemed to be in doubt as to whether he should make a speech or simply express his thanks and retire. suddenly, and without a signal, the great audience rose as one man and stood in silence at his feet. he bowed, but he could not speak. then that vast assembly began a peculiar chant, spelling out slowly the word missouri, with a pause between each letter. it was dramatic; it was tremendous in its impressiveness. he had recovered himself when they finished. he said he didn't know whether he was expected to make a speech or not. they did not leave him in doubt. they cheered and demanded a speech, a speech, and he made them one--one of the speeches he could make best, full of quaint phrasing, happy humor, gentle and dramatic pathos. he closed by telling the watermelon story for its "moral effect." he was the guest of e. w. stevens in columbia, and a dinner was given in his honor. they would have liked to keep him longer, but he was due in st. louis again to join in the dedication of the grounds, where was to be held a world's fair, to celebrate the louisiana purchase. another ceremony he attended was the christening of the st. louis harbor-boat, or rather the rechristening, for it had been decided to change its name from the st. louis--[originally the elon g. smith, built in .]--to the mark twain. a short trip was made on it for the ceremony. governor francis and mayor wells were of the party, and count and countess rochambeau and marquis de lafayette, with the rest of the french group that had come over for the dedication of the world's fair grounds. mark twain himself was invited to pilot the harbor boat, and so returned for the last time to his old place at the wheel. they all collected in the pilot-house behind him, feeling that it was a memorable occasion. they were going along well enough when he saw a little ripple running out from the shore across the bow. in the old days he could have told whether it indicated a bar there or was only caused by the wind, but he could not be sure any more. turning to the pilot languidly, he said: "i feel a little tired. i guess you had better take the wheel." luncheon was served aboard, and mayor wells made the christening speech; then the countess rochambeau took a bottle of champagne from the hand of governor francis and smashed it on the deck, saying, "i christen thee, good boat, mark twain." so it was, the mississippi joined in according him honors. in his speech of reply he paid tribute to those illustrious visitors from france and recounted something of the story of french exploration along that great river. "the name of la salle will last as long as the river itself," he said; "will last until commerce is dead. we have allowed the commerce of the river to die, but it was to accommodate the railroads, and we must be grateful." carriages were waiting for them when the boat landed in the afternoon, and the party got in and were driven to a house which had been identified as eugene field's birthplace. a bronze tablet recording this fact had been installed, and this was to be the unveiling. the place was not in an inviting quarter of the town. it stood in what is known as walsh's row--was fashionable enough once, perhaps, but long since fallen into disrepute. ragged children played in the doorways, and thirsty lodgers were making trips with tin pails to convenient bar-rooms. a curious nondescript audience assembled around the little group of dedicators, wondering what it was all about. the tablet was concealed by the american flag, which could be easily pulled away by an attached cord. governor francis spoke a few words, to the effect that they had gathered here to unveil a tablet to an american poet, and that it was fitting that mark twain should do this. they removed their hats, and clemens, his white hair blowing in the wind, said: "my friends; we are here with reverence and respect to commemorate and enshrine in memory the house where was born a man who, by his life, made bright the lives of all who knew him, and by his literary efforts cheered the thoughts of thousands who never knew him. i take pleasure in unveiling the tablet of eugene field." the flag fell and the bronze inscription was revealed. by this time the crowd, generally, had recognized who it was that was speaking. a working-man proposed three cheers for mark twain, and they were heartily given. then the little party drove away, while the neighborhood collected to regard the old house with a new interest. it was reported to clemens later that there was some dispute as to the identity of the field birthplace. he said: "never mind. it is of no real consequence whether it is his birthplace or not. a rose in any other garden will bloom as sweet." ccxxiii at york harbor they decided to spend the summer at york harbor, maine. they engaged a cottage, there, and about the end of june mr. rogers brought his yacht kanawha to their water-front at riverdale, and in perfect weather took them to maine by sea. they landed at york harbor and took possession of their cottage, the pines, one of their many attractive summer lodges. howells, at kittery point, was not far away, and everything promised a happy summer. mrs. clemens wrote to mrs. crane: we are in the midst of pines. they come up right about us, and the house is so high and the roots of the trees are so far below the veranda that we are right in the branches. we drove over to call on mr. and mrs. howells. the drive was most beautiful, and never in my life have i seen such a variety of wild flowers in so short a space. howells tells us of the wide, low cottage in a pine grove overlooking york river, and how he used to sit with clemens that summer at a corner of the veranda farthest away from mrs. clemens's window, where they could read their manuscripts to each other, and tell their stories and laugh their hearts out without disturbing her. clemens, as was his habit, had taken a work-room in a separate cottage "in the house of a friend and neighbor, a fisherman and a boatman": there was a table where he could write, and a bed where he could lie down and read; and there, unless my memory has played me one of those constructive tricks that people's memories indulge in, he read me the first chapters of an admirable story. the scene was laid in a missouri town, and the characters such as he had known in boyhood; but often as i tried to make him own it, he denied having written any such story; it is possible that i dreamed it, but i hope the ms. will yet be found. howells did not dream it; but in one way his memory misled him. the story was one which clemens had heard in hannibal, and he doubtless related it in his vivid way. howells, writing at a later time, quite naturally included it among the several manuscripts which clemens read aloud to him. clemens may have intended to write the tale, may even have begun it, though this is unlikely. the incidents were too well known and too notorious in his old home for fiction. among the stories that clemens did show, or read, to howells that summer was "the belated passport," a strong, intensely interesting story with what howells in a letter calls a "goat's tail ending," perhaps meaning that it stopped with a brief and sudden shake--with a joke, in fact, altogether unimportant, and on the whole disappointing to the reader. a far more notable literary work of that summer grew out of a true incident which howells related to clemens as they sat chatting together on the veranda overlooking the river one summer afternoon. it was a pathetic episode in the life of some former occupants of the pines--the tale of a double illness in the household, where a righteous deception was carried on during several weeks for the benefit of a life that was about to slip away. out of this grew the story, "was it heaven? or hell?" a heartbreaking history which probes the very depths of the human soul. next to "hadleyburg," it is mark twain's greatest fictional sermon. clemens that summer wrote, or rather finished, his most pretentious poem. one day at riverdale, when mrs. clemens had been with him on the lawn, they had remembered together the time when their family of little folks had filled their lives so full, conjuring up dream-like glimpses of them in the years of play and short frocks and hair-plaits down their backs. it was pathetic, heart-wringing fancying; and later in the day clemens conceived and began the poem which now he brought to conclusion. it was built on the idea of a mother who imagines her dead child still living, and describes to any listener the pictures of her fancy. it is an impressive piece of work; but the author, for some reason, did not offer it for publication.--[this poem was completed on the anniversary of susy's death and is of considerable length. some selections from it will be found under appendix u, at the end of this work.] mrs. clemens, whose health earlier in the year had been delicate, became very seriously ill at york harbor. howells writes: at first she had been about the house, and there was one gentle afternoon when she made tea for us in the parlor, but that was the last time i spoke with her. after that it was really a question of how soonest and easiest she could be got back to riverdale. she had seemed to be in fairly good health and spirits for several weeks after the arrival at york. then, early in august, there came a great celebration of some municipal anniversary, and for two or three days there were processions, mass-meetings, and so on by day, with fireworks at night. mrs. clemens, always young in spirit, was greatly interested. she went about more than her strength warranted, seeing and hearing and enjoying all that was going on. she was finally persuaded to forego the remaining ceremonies and rest quietly on the pleasant veranda at home; but she had overtaxed herself and a collapse was inevitable. howells and two friends called one afternoon, and a friend of the queen of rumania, a madame hartwig, who had brought from that gracious sovereign a letter which closed in this simple and modest fashion: i beg your pardon for being a bore to one i so deeply love and admire, to whom i owe days and days of forgetfulness of self and troubles, and the intensest of all joys-hero-worship! people don't always realize what a happiness that is! god bless you for every beautiful thought you poured into my tired heart, and for every smile on a weary way. carmen sylva. this was the occasion mentioned by howells when mrs. clemens made tea for them in the parlor for the last time. her social life may be said to have ended that afternoon. next morning the break came. clemens, in his notebook for that day, writes: tuesday, august , . at a.m. livy taken violently ill. telephoned and dr. lambert was here in / hour. she could not breathe-was likely to stifle. also she had severe palpitation. she believed she was dying. i also believed it. nurses were summoned, and mrs. crane and others came from elmira. clara clemens took charge of the household and matters generally, and the patient was secluded and guarded from every disturbing influence. clemens slipped about with warnings of silence. a visitor found notices in mark twain's writing pinned to the trees near mrs. clemens's window warning the birds not to sing too loudly. the patient rallied, but she remained very much debilitated. on september d the note-book says: always mr. rogers keeps his yacht kanawha in commission & ready to fly here and take us to riverdale on telegraphic notice. but mrs. clemens was unable to return by sea. when it was decided at last, in october, that she could be removed to riverdale, clemens and howells went to boston and engaged an invalid car to make the journey from york harbor to riverdale without change. howells tells us that clemens gave his strictest personal attention to the arrangement of these details, and that they absorbed him. there was no particular of the business which he did not scrutinize and master . . . . with the inertness that grows upon an aging man he had been used to delegate more and more things, but of that thing i perceived that he would not delegate the least detail. they made the journey on the th, in nine and a half hours. with the exception of the natural weariness due to such a trip, the invalid was apparently no worse on their arrival. the stout english butler carried her to her room. it would be many months before she would leave it again. in one of his memoranda clemens wrote: our dear prisoner is where she is through overwork-day & night devotion to the children & me. we did not know how to value it. we know now. and in a notation, on a letter praising him for what he had done for the world's enjoyment, and for his splendid triumph over debt, he said: livy never gets her share of these applauses, but it is because the people do not know. yet she is entitled to the lion's share. he wrote twichell at the end of october: livy drags along drearily. it must be hard times for that turbulent spirit. it will be a long time before she is on her feet again. it is a most pathetic case. i wish i could transfer it to myself. between ripping & raging & smoking & reading i could get a good deal of holiday out of it. clara runs the house smoothly & capitally. heavy as was the cloud of illness, he could not help pestering twichell a little about a recent mishap--a sprained shoulder: i should like to know how & where it happened. in the pulpit, as like as not, otherwise you would not be taking so much pains to conceal it. this is not a malicious suggestion, & not a personally invented one: you told me yourself once that you threw artificial power & impressiveness in your sermons where needed by "banging the bible"--(your own words). you have reached a time of life when it is not wise to take these risks. you would better jump around. we all have to change our methods as the infirmities of age creep upon us. jumping around will be impressive now, whereas before you were gray it would have excited remark. mrs. clemens seemed to improve as the weeks passed, and they had great hopes of her complete recovery. clemens took up some work--a new huck finn story, inspired by his trip to hannibal. it was to have two parts --huck and tom in youth, and then their return in old age. he did some chapters quite in the old vein, and wrote to howells of his plan. howells answered: it is a great lay-out: what i shall enjoy most will be the return of the old fellows to the scene and their tall lying. there is a matchless chance there. i suppose you will put in plenty of pegs in this prefatory part. but the new story did not reach completion. huck and tom would not come back, even to go over the old scenes. ccxxiv the sixty-seventh birthday dinner it was on the evening of the th of november, , i at the metropolitan club, new york city, that col. george harvey, president of the harper company, gave mark twain a dinner in celebration of his sixty-seventh birthday. the actual date fell three days later; but that would bring it on sunday, and to give it on saturday night would be more than likely to carry it into sabbath morning, and so the th was chosen. colonel harvey himself presided, and howells led the speakers with a poem, "a double-barreled sonnet to mark twain," which closed: still, to have everything beyond cavil right, we will dine with you here till sunday night. thomas brackett reed followed with what proved to be the last speech he would ever make, as it was also one of his best. all the speakers did well that night, and they included some of the country's foremost in oratory: chauncey depew, st. clair mckelway, hamilton mabie, and wayne macveagh. dr. henry van dyke and john kendrick bangs read poems. the chairman constantly kept the occasion from becoming too serious by maintaining an attitude of "thinking ambassador" for the guest of the evening, gently pushing clemens back in his seat when he attempted to rise and expressing for him an opinion of each of the various tributes. "the limit has been reached," he announced at the close of dr. van dyke's poem. "more that is better could not be said. gentlemen, mr. clemens." it is seldom that mark twain has made a better after-dinner speech than he delivered then. he was surrounded by some of the best minds of the nation, men assembled to do him honor. they expected much of him--to mark twain always an inspiring circumstance. he was greeted with cheers and hand-clapping that came volley after volley, and seemed never ready to end. when it had died away at last he stood waiting a little in the stillness for his voice; then he said, "i think i ought to be allowed to talk as long as i want to," and again the storm broke. it is a speech not easy to abridge--a finished and perfect piece of after-dinner eloquence,--[the "sixty-seventh birthday speech" entire is included in the volume mark twain's speeches.]--full of humorous stories and moving references to old friends--to hay; and reed, and twichell, and howells, and rogers, the friends he had known so long and loved so well. he told of his recent trip to his boyhood home, and how he had stood with john briggs on holliday's hill and they had pointed out the haunts of their youth. then at the end he paid a tribute to the companion of his home, who could not be there to share his evening's triumph. this peroration--a beautiful heart-offering to her and to those that had shared in long friendship--demands admission: now, there is one invisible guest here. a part of me is not present; the larger part, the better part, is yonder at her home; that is my wife, and she has a good many personal friends here, and i think it won't distress any one of them to know that, although she is going to be confined to her bed for many months to come from that nervous prostration, there is not any danger and she is coming along very well--and i think it quite appropriate that i should speak of her. i knew her for the first time just in the same year that i first knew john hay and tom reed and mr. twichell--thirty-six years ago--and she has been the best friend i have ever had, and that is saying a good deal--she has reared me--she and twichell together --and what i am i owe to them. twichell--why, it is such a pleasure to look upon twichell's face! for five and twenty years i was under the rev. mr. twichell's tuition, i was in his pastorate occupying a pew in his church and held him in due reverence. that man is full of all the graces that go to make a person companionable and beloved; and wherever twichell goes to start a church the people flock there to buy the land; they find real estate goes up all around the spot, and the envious and the thoughtful always try to get twichell to move to their neighborhood and start a church; and wherever you see him go you can go and buy land there with confidence, feeling sure that there will be a double price for you before very long. i have tried to do good in this world, and it is marvelous in how many different ways i have done good, and it is comfortable to reflect--now, there's mr. rogers--just out of the affection i bear that man many a time i have given him points in finance that he had never thought of--and if he could lay aside envy, prejudice, and superstition, and utilize those ideas in his business, it would make a difference in his bank-account. well, i liked the poetry. i liked all the speeches and the poetry, too. i liked dr. van dyke's poem. i wish i could return thanks in proper measure to you, gentlemen, who have spoken and violated your feelings to pay me compliments; some were merited and some you overlooked, it is true; and colonel harvey did slander every one of you, and put things into my mouth that i never said, never thought of at all. and now my wife and i, out of our single heart, return you our deepest and most grateful thanks, and--yesterday was her birthday. the sixty-seventh birthday dinner was widely celebrated by the press, and newspaper men generally took occasion to pay brilliant compliments to mark twain. arthur brisbane wrote editorially: for more than a generation he has been the messiah of a genuine gladness and joy to the millions of three continents. it was little more than a week later that one of the old friends he had mentioned, thomas brackett reed, apparently well and strong that birthday evening, passed from the things of this world. clemens felt his death keenly, and in a "good-by" which he wrote for harper's weekly he said: his was a nature which invited affection--compelled it, in fact--and met it half-way. hence, he was "tom" to the most of his friends and to half of the nation . . . . i cannot remember back to a time when he was not "tom" reed to me, nor to a time when he could have been offended at being so addressed by me. i cannot remember back to a time when i could let him alone in an after-dinner speech if he was present, nor to a time when he did not take my extravagance concerning him and misstatements about him in good part, nor yet to a time when he did not pay them back with usury when his turn came. the last speech he made was at my birthday dinner at the end of november, when naturally i was his text; my last word to him was in a letter the next day; a day later i was illustrating a fantastic article on art with his portrait among others--a portrait now to be laid reverently away among the jests that begin in humor and end in pathos. these things happened only eight days ago, and now he is gone from us, and the nation is speaking of him as one who was. it seems incredible, impossible. such a man, such a friend, seems to us a permanent possession; his vanishing from our midst is unthinkable, as was the vanishing of the campanile, that had stood for a thousand years and was turned to dust in a moment. the appreciation closes: i have only wished to say how fine and beautiful was his life and character, and to take him by the hand and say good-by, as to a fortunate friend who has done well his work and gees a pleasant journey. ccxxv christian science controversies the north american review for december ( ) contained an instalment of the christian science series which mark twain had written in vienna several years before. he had renewed his interest in the doctrine, and his admiration for mrs. eddy's peculiar abilities and his antagonism toward her had augmented in the mean time. howells refers to the "mighty moment when clemens was building his engines of war for the destruction of christian science, which superstition nobody, and he least of all, expected to destroy": he believed that as a religious machine the christian science church was as perfect as the roman church, and destined to be more formidable in its control of the minds of men . . . . an interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not. only his admiration for the masterly policy of the christian science hierarchy, but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be tried on his friends and family if they wished it. he had a tender heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scienticians, but he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the failure of the regulars, rather than upon their own successes, which also he believed in. he was recurrently, but not insistently, desirous that you should try their strange magics when you were going to try the familiar medicines. clemens never had any quarrel with the theory of christian science or mental healing, or with any of the empiric practices. he acknowledged good in all of them, and he welcomed most of them in preference to materia medica. it is true that his animosity for the founder of the christian science cult sometimes seems to lap over and fringe the religion itself; but this is apparent rather than real. furthermore, he frequently expressed a deep obligation which humanity owed to the founder of the faith, in that she had organized a healing element ignorantly and indifferently employed hitherto. his quarrel with mrs. eddy lay in the belief that she herself, as he expressed it, was "a very unsound christian scientist." i believe she has a serious malady--self-edification--and that it will be well to have one of the experts demonstrate over her. [but he added]: closely examined, painstakingly studied, she is easily the most interesting person on the planet, and in several ways as easily the most extraordinary woman that was ever born upon it. necessarily, the forces of christian science were aroused by these articles, and there were various replies, among them, one by the founder herself, a moderate rejoinder in her usual literary form. "mrs. eddy in error," in the north american review for april, , completed what clemens had to say on the matter for this time. he was putting together a book on the subject, comprised of his various published papers and some added chapters. it would not be a large volume, and he offered to let his christian science opponents share it with him, stating their side of the case. mr. william d. mccrackan, one of the church's chief advocates, was among those invited to participate. mccrackan and clemens, from having begun as enemies, had become quite friendly, and had discussed their differences face to face at considerable length. early in the controversy clemens one night wrote mccrackan a pretty savage letter. he threw it on the hall table for mailing, but later got out of bed and slipped down-stairs to get it. it was too late--the letters had been gathered up and mailed. next evening a truly christian note came from mccrackan, returning the hasty letter, which he said he was sure the writer would wish to recall. their friendship began there. for some reason, however, the collaborated volume did not materialize. in the end, publication was delayed a number of years, by which time clemens's active interest was a good deal modified, though the practice itself never failed to invite his attention. howells refers to his anti-christian science rages, which began with the postponement of the book, and these clemens vented at the time in another manuscript entitled, "eddypus," an imaginary history of a thousand years hence, when eddyism should rule the world. by that day its founder would have become a deity, and the calendar would be changed to accord with her birth. it was not publishable matter, and really never intended as such. it was just one of the things which mark twain wrote to relieve mental pressure. ccxxvi "was it heaven? or hell?" the christmas number of harper's magazine for contained the story, "was it heaven? or hell?" and it immediately brought a flood of letters to its author from grateful readers on both sides of the ocean. an englishman wrote: "i want to thank you for writing so pathetic and so profoundly true a story"; and an american declared it to be the best short story ever written. another letter said: i have learned to love those maiden liars--love and weep over them --then put them beside dante's beatrice in paradise. there were plenty of such letters; but there was one of a different sort. it was a letter from a man who had but recently gone through almost precisely the experience narrated in the tale. his dead daughter had even borne the same name--helen. she had died of typhus while her mother was prostrated with the same malady, and the deception had been maintained in precisely the same way, even to the fictitiously written letters. clemens replied to this letter, acknowledging the striking nature of the coincidence it related, and added that, had he invented the story, he would have believed it a case of mental telegraphy. i was merely telling a true story just as it had been told to me by one who well knew the mother and the daughter & all the beautiful & pathetic details. i was living in the house where it had happened, three years before, & i put it on paper at once while it was fresh in my mind, & its pathos still straining at my heartstrings. clemens did not guess that the coincidences were not yet complete, that within a month the drama of the tale would be enacted in his own home. in his note-book, under the date of december ( ), he wrote: jean was hit with a chill: clara was completing her watch in her mother's room and there was no one able to force jean to go to bed. as a result she is pretty ill to-day-fever & high temperature. three days later he added: it was pneumonia. for days jean's temperature ranged between & / , till this morning, when it got down to . she looks like an escaped survivor of a forest fire. for days now my story in the christmas harper's "was it heaven? or hell?"--has been enacted in this household. every day clara & the nurses have lied about jean to her mother, describing the fine times she is having outdoors in the winter sports. that proved a hard, trying winter in the clemens home, and the burden of it fell chiefly, indeed almost entirely, upon clara clemens. mrs. clemens became still more frail, and no other member of the family, not even her husband, was allowed to see her for longer than the briefest interval. yet the patient was all the more anxious to know the news, and daily it had to be prepared--chiefly invented--for her comfort. in an account which clemens once set down of the "siege and season of unveracity," as he called it, he said: clara stood a daily watch of three or four hours, and hers was a hard office indeed. daily she sealed up in her heart a dozen dangerous truths, and thus saved her mother's life and hope and happiness with holy lies. she had never told her mother a lie in her life before, and i may almost say that she never told her a truth afterward. it was fortunate for us all that clara's reputation for truthfulness was so well established in her mother's mind. it was our daily protection from disaster. the mother never doubted clara's word. clara could tell her large improbabilities without exciting any suspicion, whereas if i tried to market even a small and simple one the case would have been different. i was never able to get a reputation like clara's. mrs. clemens questioned clara every day concerning jean's health, spirits, clothes, employments, and amusements, and how she was enjoying herself; and clara furnished the information right along in minute detail--every word of it false, of course. every day she had to tell how jean dressed, and in time she got so tired of using jean's existing clothes over and over again, and trying to get new effects out of them, that finally, as a relief to her hard-worked invention, she got to adding imaginary clothes to jean's wardrobe, and probably would have doubled it and trebled it if a warning note in her mother's comments had not admonished her that she was spending more money on these spectral gowns and things than the family income justified. some portions of detailed accounts of clara's busy days of this period, as written at the time by clemens to twichell and to mrs. crane, are eminently worth preserving. to mrs. crane: clara does not go to her monday lesson in new york today [her mother having seemed not so well through the night], but forgets that fact and enters her mother's room (where she has no business to be) toward train-time dressed in a wrapper. livy. why, clara, aren't you going to your lesson? clara (almost caught). yes. l. in that costume? cl. oh no. l. well, you can't make your train; it's impossible. cl. i know, but i'm going to take the other one. l. indeed that won't do--you'll be ever so much too late for your lesson. cl. no, the lesson-time has been put an hour later. l. (satisfied, then suddenly). but, clara, that train and the late lesson together will make you late to mrs. hapgood's luncheon. cl. no, the train leaves fifteen minutes earlier than it used to. l. (satisfied). tell mrs. hapgood, etc., etc., etc. (which clara promises to do). clara, dear, after the luncheon--i hate to put this on you--but could you do two or three little shopping-errands for me? cl. oh, it won't trouble me a bit-i can do it. (takes a list of the things she is to buy-a list which she will presently hand to another.) at or p.m. clara takes the things brought from new york, studies over her part a little, then goes to her mother's room. livy. it's very good of you, dear. of course, if i had known it was going to be so snowy and drizzly and sloppy i wouldn't have asked you to buy them. did you get wet? cl. oh, nothing to hurt. l. you took a cab both ways? cl. not from the station to the lesson-the weather was good enough till that was over. l. well, now, tell me everything mrs. hapgood said. clara tells her a long yarn-avoiding novelties and surprises and anything likely to inspire questions difficult to answer; and of course detailing the menu, for if it had been the feeding of the , livy would have insisted on knowing what kind of bread it was and how the fishes were served. by and by, while talking of something else: livy. clams!--in the end of december. are you sure it was clams? cl. i didn't say cl---i meant blue points. l. (tranquilized). it seemed odd. what is jean doing? cl. she said she was going to do a little typewriting. l. has she been out to-day? cl. only a moment, right after luncheon. she was determined to go out again, but---- l. how did you know she was out? cl. (saving herself in time). katie told me. she was determined to go out again in the rain and snow, but i persuaded her to stay in. l. (with moving and grateful admiration). clara, you are wonderful! the wise watch you keep over jean, and the influence you have over her; it's so lovely of you, and i tied here and can't take care of her myself. (and she goes on with these undeserved praises till clara is expiring with shame.) to twichell: i am to see livy a moment every afternoon until she has another bad night; and i stand in dread, for with all my practice i realize that in a sudden emergency i am but a poor, clumsy liar, whereas a fine alert and capable emergency liar is the only sort that is worth anything in a sick-chamber. now, joe, just see what reputation can do. all clara's life she has told livy the truth and now the reward comes; clara lies to her three and a half hours every day, and livy takes it all at par, whereas even when i tell her a truth it isn't worth much without corroboration . . . . soon my brief visit is due. i've just been up listening at livy's door. p.m. a great disappointment. i was sitting outside livy's door waiting. clara came out a minute ago and said l ivy is not so well, and the nurse can't let me see her to-day. that pathetic drama was to continue in some degree for many a long month. all that winter and spring mrs. clemens kept but a frail hold on life. clemens wrote little, and refused invitations everywhere he could. he spent his time largely in waiting for the two-minute period each day when he could stand at the bed-foot and say a few words to the invalid, and he confined his writing mainly to the comforting, affectionate messages which he was allowed to push under her door. he was always waiting there long before the moment he was permitted to enter. her illness and her helplessness made manifest what howells has fittingly characterized as his "beautiful and tender loyalty to her, which was the most moving quality of his most faithful soul." ccxxvii the second riverdale winter most of mark twain's stories have been dramatized at one time or another, and with more or less success. he had two plays going that winter, one of them the little "death disk," which--in story form had appeared a year before in harper's magazine. it was put on at the carnegie lyceum with considerable effect, but it was not of sufficient importance to warrant a long continuance. another play of that year was a dramatization of huckleberry finn, by lee arthur. this was played with a good deal of success in baltimore, philadelphia, and elsewhere, the receipts ranging from three hundred to twenty-one hundred dollars per night, according to the weather and locality. why the play was discontinued is not altogether apparent; certainly many a dramatic enterprise has gone further, faring worse. huck in book form also had been having adventures a little earlier, in being tabooed on account of his morals by certain librarians of denver and omaha. it was years since huck had been in trouble of that sort, and he acquired a good deal of newspaper notoriety in consequence. certain entries in mark twain's note-book reveal somewhat of his life and thought at this period. we find such entries as this: saturday, january , . the offspring of riches: pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny. sunday, january , . the offspring of poverty: greed, sordidness, envy, hate, malice, cruelty, meanness, lying, shirking, cheating, stealing, murder. monday, february , . d wedding anniversary. i was allowed to see livy minutes this morning in honor of the day. she makes but little progress toward recovery, still there is certainly some, we are sure. sunday, march , . we may not doubt that society in heaven consists mainly of undesirable persons. thursday, march , . susy's birthday. she would be now. the family illnesses, which presently included an allotment for himself, his old bronchitis, made him rage more than ever at the imperfections of the species which could be subject to such a variety of ills. once he wrote: man was made at the end of the week's work when god was tired. and again: adam, man's benefactor--he gave him all that he has ever received that was worth having--death. the riverdale home was in reality little more than a hospital that spring. jean had scarcely recovered her physical strength when she was attacked by measles, and clara also fell a victim to the infection. fortunately mrs. clemens's health had somewhat improved. it was during this period that clemens formulated his eclectic therapeutic doctrine. writing to twichell april , , he said: livy does make a little progress these past or days, progress which is visible to even the untrained eye. the physicians are doing good work for her, but my notion is, that no art of healing is the best for all ills. i should distribute the ailments around: surgery cases to the surgeon; lupus to the actinic-ray specialist; nervous prostration to the christian scientist; most ills to the allopath & the homeopath; & (in my own particular case) rheumatism, gout, & bronchial attack to the osteopathist. he had plenty of time to think and to read during those weeks of confinement, and to rage, and to write when he felt the need of that expression, though he appears to have completed not much for print beyond his reply to mrs. eddy, already mentioned, and his burlesque, "instructions in art," with pictures by himself, published in the metropolitan for april and may. howells called his attention to some military outrages in the philippines, citing a case where a certain lieutenant had tortured one of his men, a mild offender, to death out of pure deviltry, and had been tried but not punished for his fiendish crime.--[the torture to death of private edward c. richter, an american soldier, by orders of a commissioned officer of the united states army on the night of february , . private richter was bound and gagged and the gag held in his mouth by means of a club while ice-water was slowly poured into his face, a dipper full at a time, for two hours and a half, until life became extinct.] clemens undertook to give expression to his feelings on this subject, but he boiled so when he touched pen to paper to write of it that it was simply impossible for him to say anything within the bounds of print. then his only relief was to rise and walk the floor, and curse out his fury at the race that had produced such a specimen. mrs. clemens, who perhaps got some drift or the echo of these tempests, now and then sent him a little admonitory, affectionate note. among the books that clemens read, or tried to read, during his confinement were certain of the novels of sir walter scott. he had never been able to admire scott, and determined now to try to understand this author's popularity and his standing with the critics; but after wading through the first volume of one novel, and beginning another one, he concluded to apply to one who could speak as having authority. he wrote to brander matthews: dear brander,--i haven't been out of my bed for weeks, but-well, i have been reading a good deal, & it occurs to me to ask you to sit down, some time or other when you have or months to spare, & jot me down a certain few literary particulars for my help & elevation. your time need not be thrown away, for at your further leisure you can make columbian lectures out of the results & do your students a good turn. . are there in sir walter's novels passages done in good english --english which is neither slovenly nor involved? . are there passages whose english is not poor & thin & commonplace, but is of a quality above that? . are there passages which burn with real fire--not punk, fox- fire, make-believe? . has he heroes & heroines who are not cads and cadesses? . has he personages whose acts & talk correspond with their characters as described by him? . has he heroes & heroines whom the reader admires--admires and knows why? . has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages that are humorous? . does he ever chain the reader's interest & make him reluctant to lay the book down? . are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from admiring the placid flood & flow of his own dilution, ceases from being artificial, & is for a time, long or short, recognizably sincere & in earnest? . did he know how to write english, & didn't do it because he didn't want to? . did he use the right word only when he couldn't think of another one, or did he run so much to wrong words because he didn't know the right one when he saw it? . can you read him and keep your respect for him? of course a person could in his day--an era of sentimentality & sloppy romantics--but land! can a body do it to-day? brander, i lie here dying; slowly dying, under the blight of sir walter. i have read the first volume of rob roy, & as far as chapter xix of guy mannering, & i can no longer hold my head up or take my nourishment. lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy; & such wax figures & skeletons & specters. interest? why, it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these milk-&-water humbugs. and oh, the poverty of invention! not poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons for them. sir walter usually gives himself away when he arranges for a situation--elaborates & elaborates & elaborates till, if you live to get to it, you don't believe in it when it happens. i can't find the rest of rob roy, i, can't stand any more mannering --i do not know just what to do, but i will reflect, & not quit this great study rashly .... my, i wish i could see you & leigh hunt! sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. but a few days later he experienced a revelation. it came when he perseveringly attacked still a third work of scott--quentin durward. hastily he wrote to matthews again: i'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dullness since i broke into sir walter & lost my temper. i finished guy mannering that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows gibbering around a single flesh-&-blood being--dinmont; a book crazily put together out of the very refuse of the romance artist's stage properties--finished it & took up quentin durward & finished that. it was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living; it was like withdrawing from the infant class in the college of journalism to sit under the lectures in english literature in columbia university. i wonder who wrote quentin durward?--[this letter, enveloped, addressed, and stamped, was evidently mislaid. it was found and mailed seven years later, june, message from the dead.] among other books which he read that winter and spring was helen keller's 'the story of my life', then recently published. that he finished it in a mood of sweet gentleness we gather from a long, lovely letter which he wrote her--a letter in which he said: i am charmed with your book--enchanted. you are a wonderful creature, the most wonderful in the world--you and your other half together--miss sullivan, i mean--for it took the pair of you to make a complete & perfect whole. how she stands out in her letters! her brilliancy, penetration, originality, wisdom, character, & the fine literary competencies of her pen--they are all there. when reading and writing failed as diversion, mark twain often turned to mathematics. with no special talent for accuracy in the matter of figures, he had a curious fondness for calculations, scientific and financial, and he used to cover pages, ciphering at one thing and another, arriving pretty inevitably at the wrong results. when the problem was financial, and had to do with his own fortunes, his figures were as likely as not to leave him in a state of panic. the expenditures were naturally heavy that spring; and one night, when he had nothing better to do, he figured the relative proportion to his income. the result showed that they were headed straight for financial ruin. he put in the rest of the night fearfully rolling and tossing, and reconstructing his figures that grew always worse, and next morning summoned jean and clara and petrified them with the announcement that the cost of living was one hundred and twenty-five per cent. more than the money-supply. writing to macalister three days later he said: it was a mistake. when i came down in the morning, a gray and aged wreck, i found that in some unaccountable way (unaccountable to a business man, but not to me) i had multiplied the totals by two. by god, i dropped seventy-five years on the floor where i stood! do you know it affected me as one is affected when one wakes out of a hideous dream & finds it was only a dream. it was a great comfort & satisfaction to me to call the daughters to a private meeting of the board again. certainly there is a blistering & awful reality about a well-arranged unreality. it is quite within the possibilities that two or three nights like that of mine would drive a man to suicide. he would refuse to examine the figures, they would revolt him so, & he would go to his death unaware that there was nothing serious about them. i cannot get that night out of my head, it was so vivid, so real, so ghastly: in any other year of these thirty-three the relief would have been simple: go where you can, cut your cloth to fit your income. you can't do that when your wife can't be moved, even from one room to the next. the doctor & a specialist met in conspiracy five days ago, & in their belief she will by and by come out of this as good as new, substantially. they ordered her to italy for next winter--which seems to indicate that by autumn she will be able to undertake the voyage. so clara is writing to a florence friend to take a look around among the villas for us in the regions near that city. ccxxviii proffered honors mark twain had been at home well on toward three years; but his popularity showed no signs of diminishing. so far from having waned, it had surged to a higher point than ever before. his crusade against public and private abuses had stirred readers, and had set them to thinking; the news of illness in his household; a report that he was contemplating another residence abroad--these things moved deeply the public heart, and a tide of letters flowed in, letters of every sort--of sympathy, of love, or hearty endorsement, whatever his attitude of reform. when a writer in a new york newspaper said, "let us go outside the realm of practical politics next time in choosing our candidates for the presidency," and asked, "who is our ablest and most conspicuous private citizen?" another editorial writer, joseph hollister, replied that mark twain was "the greatest man of his day in private life, and entitled to the fullest measure of recognition." but clemens was without political ambitions. he knew the way of such things too well. when hollister sent him the editorial he replied only with a word of thanks, and did not, even in jest, encourage that tiny seed of a presidential boom. one would like to publish many of the beautiful letters received during this period, for they are beautiful, most of them, however illiterate in form, however discouraging in length --beautiful in that they overflow with the writers' sincerity and gratitude. so many of them came from children, usually without the hope of a reply, some signed only with initials, that the writers might not be open to the suspicion of being seekers for his autograph. almost more than any other reward, mark twain valued this love of the children. a department in the st. nicholas magazine offered a prize for a caricature drawing of some well-known man. there were one or two of certain prominent politicians and capitalists, and there was literally a wheelbarrow load of mark twain. when he was informed of this he wrote: "no tribute could have pleased me more than that--the friendship of the children." tributes came to him in many forms. in his native state it was proposed to form a mark twain association, with headquarters at hannibal, with the immediate purpose of having a week set apart at the st. louis world's fair, to be called the mark twain week, with a special mark twain day, on which a national literary convention would be held. but when his consent was asked, and his co-operation invited, he wrote characteristically: it is indeed a high compliment which you offer me, in naming an association after me and in proposing the setting apart of a mark twain day at the great st. louis fair, but such compliments are not proper for the living; they are proper and safe for the dead only. i value the impulse which moves you to tender me these honors. i value it as highly as any one can, and am grateful for it, but i should stand in a sort of terror of the honors themselves. so long as we remain alive we are not safe from doing things which, however righteously and honorably intended, can wreck our repute and extinguish our friendships. i hope that no society will be named for me while i am still alive, for i might at some time or other do something which would cause its members to regret having done me that honor. after i shall have joined the dead i shall follow the custom of those people, and be guilty of no conduct that can wound any friend; but until that time shall come i shall be a doubtful quantity, like the rest of our race. the committee, still hoping for his consent, again appealed to him. but again he wrote: while i am deeply touched by the desire of my friends of hannibal to confer these great honors upon me i must still forbear to accept them. spontaneous and unpremeditated honors, like those which came to me at hannibal, columbia, st. louis, and at the village stations all down the line, are beyond all price and are a treasure for life in the memory, for they are a free gift out of the heart and they come without solicitation; but i am a missourian, and so i shrink from distinctions which have to be arranged beforehand and with my privity, for i then become a party to my own exalting. i am humanly fond of honors that happen, but chary of those that come by canvass and intention. somewhat later he suggested a different feature for the fair; one that was not practical, perhaps, but which certainly would have aroused interest--that is to say, an old-fashioned six-day steamboat-race from new orleans to st. louis, with the old-fashioned accessories, such as torch-baskets, forecastle crowds of negro singers, with a negro on the safety-valve. in his letter to president francis he said: as to particulars, i think that the race should be a genuine reproduction of the old-time race, not just an imitation of it, and that it should cover the whole course. i think the boats should begin the trip at new orleans, and side by side (not an interval between), and end it at north st. louis, a mile or two above the big mound. in a subsequent letter to governor francis he wrote: it has been a dear wish of mine to exhibit myself at the great fair & get a prize, but circumstances beyond my control have interfered . . . . i suppose you will get a prize, because you have created the most prodigious fair the planet has ever seen. very well, you have indeed earned it, and with it the gratitude of the state and the nation. newspaper men used every inducement to get interviews from him. they invited him to name a price for any time he could give them, long or short. one reporter offered him five hundred dollars for a two-hour talk. another proposed to pay him one hundred dollars a week for a quarter of a day each week, allowing him to discuss any subject he pleased. one wrote asking him two questions: the first, "your favorite method of escaping from indians"; the second, "your favorite method of escaping capture by the indians when they were in pursuit of you." they inquired as to his favorite copy-book maxim; as to what he considered most important to a young man's success; his definition of a gentleman. they wished to know his plan for the settlement of labor troubles. but they did not awaken his interest, or his cupidity. to one applicant he wrote: no, there are temptations against which we are fire-proof. your proposition is one which comes to me with considerable frequency, but it never tempts me. the price isn't the objection; you offer plenty. it is the nature of the work that is the objection--a kind of work which i could not do well enough to satisfy me. to multiply the price by twenty would not enable me to do the work to my satisfaction, & by consequence would make no impression upon me. once he allowed himself to be interviewed for the herald, when from mr. rogers's yacht he had watched sir thomas lipton's shamrock go down to defeat; but this was a subject which appealed to him--a kind of hotweather subject--and he could be as light-minded about it as he chose. ccxxxix the last summer at elmira the clemenses were preparing to take up residence in florence, italy. the hartford house had been sold in may, ending forever the association with the city that had so long been a part of their lives. the tarrytown place, which they had never occupied, they also agreed to sell, for it was the belief now that mrs. clemens's health would never greatly prosper there. howells says, or at least implies, that they expected their removal to florence to be final. he tells us, too, of one sunny afternoon when he and clemens sat on the grass before the mansion at riverdale, after mrs. clemens had somewhat improved, and how they "looked up toward a balcony where by and by that lovely presence made itself visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud. a hand frailly waved a handkerchief; clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling tenderly." it was a greeting to howells the last he would ever receive from her. mrs. clemens was able to make a trip to elmira by the end of june, and on the st of july mr. rogers brought clemens and his wife down the river on his yacht to the lackawanna pier, and they reached quarry farm that evening. she improved in the quietude and restfulness of that beloved place. three weeks later clemens wrote to twichell: livy is coming along: eats well, sleeps some, is mostly very gay, not very often depressed; spends all day on the porch, sleeps there a part of the night; makes excursions in carriage & in wheel-chair; &, in the matter of superintending everything & everybody, has resumed business at the old stand. during three peaceful months she spent most of her days reclining on the wide veranda, surrounded by those dearest to her, and looking out on the dreamlike landscape--the long, grassy slope, the drowsy city, and the distant hills--getting strength for the far journey by sea. clemens did some writing, occupying the old octagonal study--shut in now and overgrown with vines--where during the thirty years since it was built so many of his stories had been written. 'a dog's tale'--that pathetic anti-vivisection story--appears to have been the last manuscript ever completed in the spot consecrated by huck and tom, and by tom canty the pauper and the little wandering prince. it was october th when they left elmira. two days earlier clemens had written in his note-book: today i placed flowers on susy's grave--for the last time probably --& read words: "good-night, dear heart, good-night." they did not return to riverdale, but went to the hotel grosvenor for the intervening weeks. they had engaged passage for italy on the princess irene, which would sail on the th. it was during the period of their waiting that clemens concluded his final harper contract. on that day, in his note-book, he wrote: the prophecy in cheiro the palmist examined my hand & said that in my th year ( ) i would become suddenly rich. i was a bankrupt & $ , in debt at the time through the failure of charles l. webster & co. two years later--in london--cheiro repeated this long-distance prediction, & added that the riches would come from a quite unexpected source. i am superstitious. i kept the prediction in mind & often thought of it. when at last it came true, october , , there was but a month & days to spare. the contract signed that day concentrates all my books in harper's hands & now at last they are valuable; in fact they are a fortune. they guarantee me $ , a year for years, and they will yield twice as much as that.--[in earlier note-books and letters clemens more than once refers to this prophecy and wonders if it is to be realized. the harper contract, which brought all of his books into the hands of one publisher (negotiated for him by mr. rogers), proved, in fact, a fortune. the books yielded always more than the guarantee; sometimes twice that amount, as he had foreseen.] during the conclusion of this contract clemens made frequent visits to fairhaven on the kanawha. joe goodman came from the pacific to pay him a good-by visit during this period. goodman had translated the mayan inscriptions, and his work had received official recognition and publication by the british museum. it was a fine achievement for a man in later life and clemens admired it immensely. goodman and clemens enjoyed each other in the old way at quiet resorts where they could talk over the old tales. another visitor of that summer was the son of an old friend, a hannibal printer named daulton. young daulton came with manuscripts seeking a hearing of the magazine editors, so clemens wrote a letter which would insure that favor: introducing mr. geo. daulton: to gilder, alden, harvey, mcclure, walker, page, bok, collier, and such other members of the sacred guild as privilege me to call them friends-these: although i have no personal knowledge of the bearer of this, i have what is better: he comes recommended to me by his own father--a thing not likely to happen in any of your families, i reckon. i ask you, as a favor to me, to waive prejudice & superstition for this once & examine his work with an eye to its literary merit, instead of to the chastity of its spelling. i wish to god you cared less for that particular. i set (or sat) type alongside of his father, in hannibal, more than years ago, when none but the pure in heart were in that business. a true man he was; and if i can be of any service to his son--and to you at the same time, let me hope--i am here heartily to try. yours by the sanctions of time & deserving, sincerely, s. l. clemens. among the kindly words which came to mark twain before leaving america was this one which rudyard kipling had written to his publisher, frank doubleday: i love to think of the great and godlike clemens. he is the biggest man you have on your side of the water by a damn sight, and don't you forget it. cervantes was a relation of his. it curiously happened that clemens at the same moment was writing to doubleday about kipling: i have been reading "the bell buoy" and "the old man" over and over again-my custom with kipling's work--and saving up the rest for other leisurely and luxurious meals. a bell-buoy is a deeply impressive fellow-being. in these many recent trips up and down the sound in the kanawha he has talked to me nightly sometimes in his pathetic and melancholy way, sometimes with his strenuous and urgent note, and i got his meaning--now i have his words! no one but kipling could do this strong and vivid thing. some day i hope to hear the poem chanted or sung-with the bell-buoy breaking in out of the distance. p. s.--your letter has arrived. it makes me proud and glad--what kipling says. i hope fate will fetch him to florence while we are there. i would rather see him than any other man. ccxxx the return to florence from the note-book: saturday, october , . sailed in the princess irene for genoa at . flowers & fruit from mrs. rogers & mrs. coe. we have with us katie leary (in our domestic service years) & miss margaret sherry (trained nurse). two days later he wrote: heavy storm all night. only stewardesses. ours served meals in rooms this morning. on the th: livy is enduring the voyage marvelously well. as well as clara & jean, i think, & far better than the trained nurse. she has been out on deck an hour. november . due at gibraltar days from new york. days to naples, then day to genoa. at supper the band played "cavalleria rusticana," which is forever associated in my mind with susy. i love it better than any other, but it breaks my heart. it was the "intermezzo" he referred to, which had been susy's favorite music, and whenever he heard it he remembered always one particular opera-night long ago, and susy's face rose before him. they were in naples on the th; thence to genoa, and to florence, where presently they were installed in the villa reale di quarto, a fine old italian palace built by cosimo more than four centuries ago. in later times it has been occupied and altered by royal families of wurtemberg and russia. now it was the property of the countess massiglia, from whom clemens had leased it. they had hoped to secure the villa papiniano, under fiesole, near professor fiske, but negotiations for it had fallen through. the villa quarto, as it is usually called, was a more pretentious place and as beautifully located, standing as it does in an ancient garden looking out over florence toward vallombrosa and the chianti hills. yet now in the retrospect, it seems hardly to have been the retreat for an invalid. its garden was supernaturally beautiful, all that one expects that a garden of italy should be--such a garden as maxfield parrish might dream; but its beauty was that which comes of antiquity--the accumulation of dead years. its funereal cypresses, its crumbling walls and arches, its clinging ivy and moldering marbles, and a clock that long ago forgot the hours, gave it a mortuary look. in a way it suggested arnold bocklin's "todteninsel," and it might well have served as the allegorical setting for a gateway to the bourne of silence. the house itself, one of the most picturesque of the old florentine suburban palaces, was historically interesting, rather than cheerful. the rooms, in number more than sixty, though richly furnished, were vast and barnlike, and there were numbers of them wholly unused and never entered. there was a dearth of the modern improvements which americans have learned to regard as a necessity, and the plumbing, such as it was, was not always in order. the place was approached by narrow streets, along which the more uninviting aspects of italy were not infrequent. youth and health and romance might easily have reveled in the place; but it seems now not to have been the best choice for that frail invalid, to whom cheer and brightness and freshness and the lovelier things of hope meant always so much.--[villa quarto has recently been purchased by signor p. de ritter lahony, and thoroughly restored and refreshed and beautified without the sacrifice of any of its romantic features.]--neither was the climate of florence all that they had hoped for. their former sunny winter had misled them. tradition to the contrary, italy--or at least tuscany--is not one perpetual dream of sunlight. it is apt to be damp and cloudy; it is likely to be cold. writing to macalister, clemens said: florentine sunshine? bless you, there isn't any. we have heavy fogs every morning & rain all day. this house is not merely large, it is vast--therefore i think it must always lack the home feeling. his dissatisfaction in it began thus early, and it grew as one thing after another went wrong. with it all, however, mrs. clemens seemed to gain a little, and was glad to see company--a reasonable amount of company--to brighten her surroundings. clemens began to work and wrote a story or two, and those lively articles about the italian language. to twichell he reported progress: i have a handsome success in one way here. i left new york under a sort of half-promise to furnish to the harper magazines , words this year. magazining is difficult work because every third page represents two pages that you have put in the fire (you are nearly sure to start wrong twice), & so when you have finished an article & are willing to let it go to print it represents only cents a word instead of . but this time i had the curious (& unprecedented) luck to start right in each case. i turned out , words in working days; & the reason i think i started right every time is, that not only have i approved and accepted the several articles, but the court of last resort (livy) has done the same. on many of the between-days i did some work, but only of an idle & not necessarily necessary sort, since it will not see print until i am dead. i shall continue this (an hour per day), but the rest of the year i expect to put in on a couple of long books (half- completed ones). no more magazine work hanging over my head. this secluded & silent solitude, this clean, soft air, & this enchanting view of florence, the great valley & snow-mountains that frame it, are the right conditions for work. they are a persistent inspiration. to-day is very lovely; when the afternoon arrives there will be a new picture every hour till dark, & each of them divine--or progressing from divine to diviner & divinest. on this (second) floor clara's room commands the finest; she keeps a window ten feet high wide open all the time & frames it in that. i go in from time to time every day & trade sass for a look. the central detail is a distant & stately snow-hump that rises above & behind black-forested hills, & its sloping vast buttresses, velvety & sun- polished, with purple shadows between, make the sort of picture we knew that time we walked in switzerland in the days of our youth. from this letter, which is of january , , we gather that the weather had greatly improved, and with it mrs. clemens's health, notwithstanding she had an alarming attack in december. one of the stories he had finished was "the $ , bequest." the work mentioned, which would not see print until after his death, was a continuation of those autobiographical chapters which for years he had been setting down as the mood seized him. he experimented with dictation, which he had tried long before with redpath, and for a time now found it quite to his liking. he dictated some of his copyright memories, and some anecdotes and episodes; but his amanuensis wrote only longhand, which perhaps hampered him, for he tired of it by and by and the dictations were discontinued. among these notes there is one elaborate description of the villa di quarto, dictated at the end of the winter, by which time we are not surprised to find he had become much attached to the place. the italian spring was in the air, and it was his habit to grow fond of his surroundings. some atmospheric paragraphs of these impressions invite us here: we are in the extreme south end of the house, if there is any such thing as a south end to a house, whose orientation cannot be determined by me, because i am incompetent in all cases where an object does not point directly north & south. this one slants across between, & is therefore a confusion. this little private parlor is in one of the two corners of what i call the south end of the house. the sun rises in such a way that all the morning it is pouring its light through the glass doors or windows which pierce the side of the house which looks upon the terrace & garden; the rest of the day the light floods this south end of the house, as i call it; at noon the sun is directly above florence yonder in the distance in the plain, directly across those architectural features which have been so familiar to the world in pictures for some centuries, the duomo, the campanile, the tomb of the medici, & the beautiful tower of the palazzo vecchio; in this position it begins to reveal the secrets of the delicious blue mountains that circle around into the west, for its light discovers, uncovers, & exposes a white snowstorm of villas & cities that you cannot train yourself to have confidence in, they appear & disappear so mysteriously, as if they might not be villas & cities at all, but the ghosts of perished ones of the remote & dim etruscan times; & late in the afternoon the sun sets down behind those mountains somewhere, at no particular time & at no particular place, so far as i can see. again at the end of march he wrote: now that we have lived in this house four and a half months my prejudices have fallen away one by one & the place has become very homelike to me. under certain conditions i should like to go on living in it indefinitely. i should wish the countess to move out of italy, out of europe, out of the planet. i should want her bonded to retire to her place in the next world & inform me which of the two it was, so that i could arrange for my own hereafter. complications with their landlady had begun early, and in time, next to mrs. clemens's health, to which it bore such an intimate and vital relation, the indifference of the countess massiglia to their needs became the supreme and absorbing concern of life at the villa, and led to continued and almost continuous house-hunting. days when the weather permitted, clemens drove over the hills looking for a villa which he could lease or buy--one with conveniences and just the right elevation and surroundings. there were plenty of villas; but some of them were badly situated as to altitude or view; some were falling to decay, and the search was rather a discouraging one. still it was not abandoned, and the reports of these excursions furnished new interest and new hope always to the invalid at home. "even if we find it," he wrote howells, "i am afraid it will be months before we can move mrs. clemens. of course it will. but it comforts us to let on that we think otherwise, and these pretensions help to keep hope alive in her." she had her bad days and her good days, days when it was believed she had passed the turning-point and was traveling the way to recovery; but the good days were always a little less hopeful, the bad days a little more discouraging. on february d clemens wrote in his note-book: at midnight livy's pulse went to & there was a collapse. great alarm. subcutaneous injection of brandy saved her. and to macalister toward the end of march: we are having quite perfect weather now & are hoping that it will bring effects for mrs. clemens. but a few days later he added that he was watching the driving rain through the windows, and that it was bad weather for the invalid. "but it will not last," he said. the invalid improved then, and there was a concert in florence at which clara clemens sang. clemens in his note-book says: april . clara's concert was a triumph. livy woke up & sent for her to tell her all about it, near midnight. but a day or two later she was worse again--then better. the hearts in that household were as pendulums, swinging always between hope and despair. one familiar with the clemens history might well have been filled with forebodings. already in january a member of the family, mollie clemens, orion's wife, died, news which was kept from mrs. clemens, as was the death of aldrich's son, and that of sir henry m. stanley, both of which occurred that spring. indeed, death harvested freely that year among the clemens friendships. clemens wrote twichell: yours has just this moment arrived-just as i was finishing a note to poor lady stanley. i believe the last country-house visit we paid in england was to stanley's. lord! how my friends & acquaintances fall about me now in my gray-headed days! vereshchagin, mommsen, dvorak, lenbach, & jokai, all so recently, & now stanley. i have known stanley years. goodness, who is there i haven't known? ccxxxi the close of a beautiful life in one of his notes near the end of april clemens writes that once more, as at riverdale, he has been excluded from mrs. clemens's room except for the briefest moment at a time. but on may th, to r. w. gilder, he reported: for two days now we have not been anxious about mrs. clemens (unberufen). after months of bedridden solitude & bodily misery she all of a sudden ceases to be a pallid, shrunken shadow, & looks bright & young & pretty. she remains what she always was, the most wonderful creature of fortitude, patience, endurance, and recuperative power that ever was. but ah, dear! it won't last; this fiendish malady will play new treacheries upon her, and i shall go back to my prayers again--unutterable from any pulpit! may , a.m. i have just paid one of my pair of permitted -minute visits per day to the sick-room. and found what i have learned to expect--retrogression. there was a day when she was brought out on the terrace in a wheel-chair to see the wonder of the early italian summer. she had been a prisoner so long that she was almost overcome with the delight of it all--the more so, perhaps, in the feeling that she might so soon be leaving it. it was on sunday, the th of june, that the end came. clemens and jean had driven out to make some calls, and had stopped at a villa, which promised to fulfil most of the requirements. they came home full of enthusiasm concerning it, and clemens, in his mind, had decided on the purchase. in the corridor clara said: "she is better to-day than she has been for three months." then quickly, under her breath, "unberufen," which the others, too, added hastily--superstitiously. mrs. clemens was, in fact, bright and cheerful, and anxious to hear all about the new property which was to become their home. she urged him to sit by her during the dinner-hour and tell her the details; but once, when the sense of her frailties came upon her, she said they must not mind if she could not go very soon, but be content where they were. he remained from half past seven until eight--a forbidden privilege, but permitted because she was so animated, feeling so well. their talk was as it had been in the old days, and once during it he reproached himself, as he had so often done, and asked forgiveness for the tears he had brought into her life. when he was summoned to go at last he chided himself for remaining so long; but she said there was no harm, and kissed him, saying: "you will come back," and he answered, "yes, to say good night," meaning at half past nine, as was the permitted custom. he stood a moment at the door throwing kisses to her, and she returning them, her face bright with smiles. he was so hopeful and happy that it amounted to exaltation. he went to his room at first, then he was moved to do a thing which he had seldom done since susy died. he went to the piano up-stairs and sang the old jubilee songs that susy had liked to hear him sing. jean came in presently, listening. she had not done this before, that he could remember. he sang "swing low, sweet chariot," and "my lord he calls me." he noticed jean then and stopped, but she asked him to go on. mrs. clemens, in her room, heard the distant music, and said to her attendant: "he is singing a good-night carol to me." the music ceased presently, and then a moment later she asked to be lifted up. almost in that instant life slipped away without a sound. clemens, coming to say good night, saw a little group about her bed, clara and jean standing as if dazed. he went and bent over and looked into her face, surprised that she did not greet him. he did not suspect what had happened until he heard one of the daughters ask: "katie, is it true? oh, katie, is it true?" he realized then that she was gone. in his note-book that night he wrote: at a quarter past this evening she that was the life of my life passed to the relief & the peace of death after as months of unjust & unearned suffering. i first saw her near years ago, & now i have looked upon her face for the last time. oh, so unexpected!... i was full of remorse for things done & said in these years of married life that hurt livy's heart. he envied her lying there, so free from it all, with the great peace upon her face. he wrote to howells and to twichell, and to mrs. crane, those nearest and dearest ones. to twichell he said: how sweet she was in death, how young, how beautiful, how like her dear girlish self of thirty years ago, not a gray hair showing! this rejuvenescence was noticeable within two hours after her death; & when i went down again ( . ) it was complete. in all that night & all that day she never noticed my caressing hand--it seemed strange. to howells he recalled the closing scene: i bent over her & looked in her face & i think i spoke--i was surprised & troubled that she did not notice me. then we understood & our hearts broke. how poor we are to-day! but how thankful i am that her persecutions are ended! i would not call her back if i could. to-day, treasured in her worn, old testament, i found a dear & gentle letter from you dated far rockaway, september , , about our poor susy's death. i am tired & old; i wish i were with livy. and in a few days: it would break livy's heart to see clara. we excuse ourself from all the friends that call--though, of course, only intimates come. intimates --but they are not the old, old friends, the friends of the old, old times when we laughed. shall we ever laugh again? if i could only see a dog that i knew in the old times & could put my arms around his neck and tell him all, everything, & ease my heart! ccxxxii the sad journey home a tidal wave of sympathy poured in. noble and commoner, friend and stranger--humanity of every station--sent their messages of condolence to the friend of mankind. the cablegrams came first--bundles of them from every corner of the world--then the letters, a steady inflow. howells, twichell, aldrich--those oldest friends who had themselves learned the meaning of grief--spoke such few and futile words as the language can supply to allay a heart's mourning, each recalling the rarity and beauty of the life that had slipped away. twichell and his wife wrote: dear, dear mark,--there is nothing we can say. what is there to say? but here we are--with you all every hour and every minute--filled with unutterable thoughts; unutterable affection for the dead and for the living. harmony and joe. howells in his letter said: she hallowed what she touched far beyond priests . . . . what are you going to do, you poor soul? a hundred letters crowd in for expression here, but must be denied--not, however, the beam of hope out of helen keller's illumined night: do try to reach through grief and feel the pressure of her hand, as i reach through darkness and feel the smile on my friends' lips and the light in their eyes though mine are closed. they were adrift again without plans for the future. they would return to america to lay mrs. clemens to rest by susy and little langdon, but beyond that they could not see. then they remembered a quiet spot in massachusetts, tyringham, near lee, where the gilders lived, and so, on june th, he wrote: dear gilder family,--i have been worrying and worrying to know what to do; at last i went to the girls with an idea--to ask the gilders to get us shelter near their summer home. it was the first time they have not shaken their heads. so to-morrow i will cable to you and shall hope to be in time. an hour ago the best heart that ever beat for me and mine was carried silent out of this house, and i am as one who wanders and has lost his way. she who is gone was our head, she was our hands. we are now trying to make plans--we: we who have never made a plan before, nor ever needed to. if she could speak to us she would make it all simple and easy with a word, & our perplexities would vanish away. if she had known she was near to death she would have told us where to go and what to do, but she was not suspecting, neither were we. she was all our riches and she is gone; she was our breath, she was our life, and now we are nothing. we send you our love-and with it the love of you that was in her heart when she died. s. l. clemens. they arranged to sail on the prince oscar on the th of june. there was an earlier steamer, but it was the princess irene, which had brought them, and they felt they would not make the return voyage on that vessel. during the period of waiting a curious thing happened. clemens one day got up in a chair in his room on the second floor to pull down the high window-sash. it did not move easily and his hand slipped. it was only by the merest chance that he saved himself from falling to the ground far below. he mentions this in his note-book, and once, speaking of it to frederick duneka, he said: "had i fallen it would probably have killed me, and in my bereaved circumstances the world would have been convinced that it was suicide. it was one of those curious coincidences which are always happening and being misunderstood." the homeward voyage and its sorrowful conclusion are pathetically conveyed in his notes: june , . sailed last night at . the bugle-call to breakfast. i recognized the notes and was distressed. when i heard them last livy heard them with me; now they fall upon her ear unheeded. in my life there have been junes--but how vague & colorless of them are contrasted with the deep blackness of this one! july , . i cannot reproduce livy's face in my mind's eye--i was never in my life able to reproduce a face. it is a curious infirmity--& now at last i realize it is a calamity. july , . in these years we have made many voyages together, livy dear--& now we are making our last; you down below & lonely; i above with the crowd & lonely. july , . ship-time, a.m. in hours & a quarter it will be weeks since livy died. thirty-one years ago we made our first voyage together--& this is our last one in company. susy was a year old then. she died at & had been in her grave years. july , . to-night it will be weeks. but to me it remains yesterday--as it has from the first. but this funeral march--how sad & long it is! two days more will end the second stage of it. july , (elmira). funeral private in the house of livy's young maidenhood. where she stood as a bride years ago there her coffin rested; & over it the same voice that had made her a wife then committed her departed spirit to god now. it was joseph twichell who rendered that last service. mr. beecher was long since dead. it was a simple, touching utterance, closing with this tender word of farewell: robert browning, when he was nearing the end of his earthly days, said that death was the thing that we did not believe in. nor do we believe in it. we who journeyed through the bygone years in companionship with the bright spirit now withdrawn are growing old. the way behind is long; the way before is short. the end cannot be far off. but what of that? can we not say, each one: "so long that power hath blessed me, sure it still will lead me on; o'er moor and fen; o'er crag and torrent, till the night is gone; and with the morn, their angel faces smile, which i have loved long since, and lost awhile!" and so good-by. good-by, dear heart! strong, tender, and true. good-by until for us the morning break and these shadows fly away. dr. eastman, who had succeeded mr. beecher, closed the service with a prayer, and so the last office we can render in this life for those we love was finished. clemens ordered that a simple marker should be placed at the grave, bearing, besides the name, the record of birth and death, followed by the german line: 'gott sei dir gnadig, o meine wonne'! ccxxxiii beginning another home there was an extra cottage on the gilder place at tyringham, and this they occupied for the rest of that sad summer. clemens, in his note-book, has preserved some of its aspects and incidents. july , . rain--rain--rain. cold. we built a fire in my room. then clawed the logs out & threw water, remembering there was a brood of swallows in the chimney. the tragedy was averted. july . lee, massachusetts (berkshire hills). last night the young people out on a moonlight ride. trolley frightened jean's horse --collision--horse killed. rodman gilder picked jean up, unconscious; she was taken to the doctor, per the car. face, nose, side, back contused; tendon of left ankle broken. august . new york. clam here sick--never well since june . jean is at the summer home in the berkshire hills crippled. the next entry records the third death in the clemens family within a period of eight months--that of mrs. moffett, who had been pamela clemens. clemens writes: september . died at greenwich, connecticut, my sister, pamela moffett, aged about . death dates this year january , june , september . that fall they took a house in new york city, on the corner of ninth street and fifth avenue, no. , remaining for a time at the grosvenor while the new home was being set in order. the home furniture was brought from hartford, unwrapped, and established in the light of strange environment. clemens wrote: we have not seen it for thirteen years. katie leary, our old housekeeper, who has been in our service more than twenty-four years, cried when she told me about it to-day. she said, "i had forgotten it was so beautiful, and it brought mrs. clemens right back to me--in that old time when she was so young and lovely." clara clemens had not recovered from the strain of her mother's long illness and the shock of her death, and she was ordered into retirement with the care of a trained nurse. the life at fifth avenue, therefore, began with only two remaining members of the broken family --clemens and jean. clemens had undertaken to divert himself with work at tyringham, though without much success. he was not well; he was restless and disturbed; his heart bleak with a great loneliness. he prepared an article on copyright for the 'north american review',--[published jan., . a dialogue presentation of copyright conditions, addressed to thorwald stolberg, register of copyrights, washington, d. c. one of the best of mark twain's papers on the subject.]--and he began, or at least contemplated, that beautiful fancy, 'eve's diary', which in the widest and most reverential sense, from the first word to the last, conveys his love, his worship, and his tenderness for the one he had laid away. adam's single comment at the end, "wheresoever she was, there was eden," was his own comment, and is perhaps the most tenderly beautiful line he ever wrote. these two books, adam's diary and eve's--amusing and sometimes absurd as they are, and so far removed from the literal--are as autobiographic as anything he has done, and one of them as lovely in its truth. like the first maker of men, mark twain created adam in his own image; and his rare eve is no less the companion with whom, half a lifetime before, he had begun the marriage journey. only here the likeness ceases. no serpent ever entered their eden. and they never left it; it traveled with them so long as they remained together. in the christmas harper for was published "saint joan of arc"--the same being the joan introduction prepared in london five years before. joan's proposed beatification had stirred a new interest in the martyred girl, and this most beautiful article became a sort of key-note of the public heart. those who read it were likely to go back and read the recollections, and a new appreciation grew for that masterpiece. in his later and wider acceptance by his own land, and by the world at large, the book came to be regarded with a fresh understanding. letters came from scores of readers, as if it were a newly issued volume. a distinguished educator wrote: i would rather have written your history of joan of arc than any other piece of literature in any language. and this sentiment grew. the demand for the book increased, and has continued to increase, steadily and rapidly. in the long and last analysis the good must prevail. a day will come when there will be as many readers of joan as of any other of mark twain's works. [the growing appreciation of joan is shown by the report of sales for the three years following . the sales for that year in america were , ; for , , for , , ; for , , . at this point it passed pudd'nhead wilson, the yankee, the gilded age, life on the mississippi, overtook the tramp abroad, and more than doubled the american claimant. only the innocents abroad, huckleberry finn, tom sawyer, and roughing it still ranged ahead of it, in the order named.] ccxxxiv life at fifth avenue the house at fifth avenue, built by the architect who had designed grace church, had a distinctly ecclesiastical suggestion about its windows, and was of fine and stately proportions within. it was a proper residence for a venerable author and a sage, and with the handsome hartford furnishings distributed through it, made a distinctly suitable setting for mark twain. but it was lonely for him. it lacked soul. he added, presently, a great aeolian orchestrelle, with a variety of music for his different moods. he believed that he would play it himself when he needed the comfort of harmony, and that jean, who had not received musical training, or his secretary could also play to him. he had a passion for music, or at least for melody and stately rhythmic measures, though his ear was not attuned to what are termed the more classical compositions. for wagner, for instance, he cared little, though in a letter to mrs. crane he said: certainly nothing in the world is so solemn and impressive and so divinely beautiful as "tannhauser." it ought to be used as a religious service. beethoven's sonatas and symphonies also moved him deeply. once, writing to jean, he asked: what is your favorite piece of music, dear? mine is beethoven's fifth symphony. i have found that out within a day or two. it was the majestic movement and melodies of the second part that he found most satisfying; but he oftener inclined to the still tenderer themes of chopin's nocturnes and one of schubert's impromptus, while the "lorelei" and the "erlking" and the scottish airs never wearied him. music thus became a chief consolation during these lonely days--rich organ harmonies that filled the emptiness of his heart and beguiled from dull, material surroundings back into worlds and dreams that he had known and laid away. he went out very little that winter--usually to the homes of old and intimate friends. once he attended a small dinner given him by george smalley at the metropolitan club; but it was a private affair, with only good friends present. still, it formed the beginning of his return to social life, and it was not in his nature to retire from the brightness of human society, or to submerge himself in mourning. as the months wore on he appeared here and there, and took on something of his old-time habit. then his annual bronchitis appeared, and he was confined a good deal to his home, where he wrote or planned new reforms and enterprises. the improvement of railway service, through which fewer persons should be maimed and destroyed each year, interested him. he estimated that the railroads and electric lines killed and wounded more than all of the wars combined, and he accumulated statistics and prepared articles on the subject, though he appears to have offered little of such matter for publication. once, however, when his sympathy was awakened by the victim of a frightful trolley and train collision in newark, new jersey, he wrote a letter which promptly found its way into print. dear miss madeline, your good & admiring & affectionate brother has told me of your sorrowful share in the trolley disaster which brought unaccustomed tears to millions of eyes & fierce resentment against those whose criminal indifference to their responsibilities caused it, & the reminder has brought back to me a pang out of that bygone time. i wish i could take you sound & whole out of your bed & break the legs of those officials & put them in it--to stay there. for in my spirit i am merciful, and would not break their necks & backs also, as some would who have no feeling. it is your brother who permits me to write this line--& so it is not an intrusion, you see. may you get well-& soon! sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. a very little later he was writing another letter on a similar subject to st. clair mckelway, who had narrowly escaped injury in a railway accident. dear mckelway, your innumerable friends are grateful, most grateful. as i understand the telegrams, the engineers of your train had never seen a locomotive before . . . . the government's official report, showing that our railways killed twelve hundred persons last year & injured sixty thousand, convinces me that under present conditions one providence is not enough properly & efficiently to take care of our railroad business. but it is characteristically american--always trying to get along short-handed & save wages. a massacre of jews in moscow renewed his animosity for semi-barbaric russia. asked for a christmas sentiment, he wrote: it is my warm & world-embracing christmas hope that all of us that deserve it may finally be gathered together in a heaven of rest & peace, & the others permitted to retire into the clutches of satan, or the emperor of russia, according to preference--if they have a preference. an article, "the tsar's soliloquy," written at this time, was published in the north american review for march ( ). he wrote much more, but most of the other matter he put aside. on a subject like that he always discarded three times as much as he published, and it was usually about three times as terrific as that which found its way into type. "the soliloquy," however, is severe enough. it represents the tsar as contemplating himself without his clothes, and reflecting on what a poor human specimen he presents: is it this that , , russians kiss the dust before and worship?--manifestly not! no one could worship this spectacle which is me. then who is it, what is it, that they worship? privately, none knows better than i: it is my clothes! without my clothes i should be as destitute of authority as any other naked person. no one could tell me from a parson and barber tutor. then who is the real emperor of russia! my clothes! there is no other. the emperor continues this fancy, and reflects on the fierce cruelties that are done in his name. it was a withering satire on russian imperialism, and it stirred a wide response. this encouraged clemens to something even more pretentious and effective in the same line. he wrote "king leopold's soliloquy," the reflections of the fiendish sovereign who had maimed and slaughtered fifteen millions of african subjects in his greed--gentle, harmless blacks-men, women, and little children whom he had butchered and mutilated in his congo rubber-fields. seldom in the history of the world have there been such atrocious practices as those of king leopold in the congo, and clemens spared nothing in his picture of them. the article was regarded as not quite suitable for magazine publication, and it was given to the congo reform association and issued as a booklet for distribution, with no return to the author, who would gladly have written a hundred times as much if he could have saved that unhappy race and have sent leopold to the electric chair.--[the book was price-marked twenty-five cents, but the returns from such as were sold went to the cause. thousands of them were distributed free. the congo, a domain four times as large as the german empire, had been made the ward of belgium at a convention in berlin by the agreement of fourteen nations, america and thirteen european states. leopold promptly seized the country for his personal advantage and the nations apparently found themselves powerless to depose him. no more terrible blunder was ever committed by an assemblage of civilized people.] various plans and movements were undertaken for congo reform, and clemens worked and wrote letters and gave his voice and his influence and exhausted his rage, at last, as one after another of the half-organized and altogether futile undertakings showed no results. his interest did not die, but it became inactive. eventually he declared: "i have said all i can say on that terrible subject. i am heart and soul in any movement that will rescue the congo and hang leopold, but i cannot write any more." his fires were likely to burn themselves out, they raged so fiercely. his final paragraph on the subject was a proposed epitaph for leopold when time should have claimed him. it ran: here under this gilded tomb lies rotting the body of one the smell of whose name will still offend the nostrils of men ages upon ages after all the caesars and washingtons & napoleons shall have ceased to be praised or blamed & been forgotten--leopold of belgium. clemens had not yet lost interest in the american policy in the philippines, and in his letters to twichell he did not hesitate to criticize the president's attitude in this and related matters. once, in a moment of irritation, he wrote: dear joe,--i knew i had in me somewhere a definite feeling about the president. if i could only find the words to define it with! here they are, to a hair--from leonard jerome: "for twenty years i have loved roosevelt the man, and hated roosevelt the statesman and politician." it's mighty good. every time in twenty-five years that i have met roosevelt the man a wave of welcome has streaked through me with the hand-grip; but whenever (as a rule) i meet roosevelt the statesman & politician i find him destitute of morals & not respect-worthy. it is plain that where his political self & party self are concerned he has nothing resembling a conscience; that under those inspirations he is naively indifferent to the restraints of duty & even unaware of them; ready to kick the constitution into the back yard whenever it gets in his way.... but roosevelt is excusable--i recognize it & (ought to) concede it. we are all insane, each in his own way, & with insanity goes irresponsibility. theodore the man is sane; in fairness we ought to keep in mind that theodore, as statesman & politician, is insane & irresponsible. he wrote a great deal more from time to time on this subject; but that is the gist of his conclusions, and whether justified by time, or otherwise, it expresses today the deduction of a very large number of people. it is set down here, because it is a part of mark twain's history, and also because a little while after his death there happened to creep into print an incomplete and misleading note (since often reprinted), which he once made in a moment of anger, when he was in a less judicial frame of mind. it seems proper that a man's honest sentiments should be recorded concerning the nation's servants. clemens wrote an article at this period which he called the "war prayer." it pictured the young recruits about to march away for war--the excitement and the celebration--the drum-beat and the heart-beat of patriotism--the final assembly in the church where the minister utters that tremendous invocation: god the all-terrible! thou who ordainest, thunder, thy clarion, and lightning, thy sword! and the "long prayer" for victory to the nation's armies. as the prayer closes a white-robed stranger enters, moves up the aisle, and takes the preacher's place; then, after some moments of impressive silence, he begins: "i come from the throne-bearing a message from almighty god!..... he has heard the prayer of his servant, your shepherd, & will grant it if such shall be your desire after i his messenger shall have explained to you its import--that is to say its full import. for it is like unto many of the prayers of men in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of--except he pause & think. "god's servant & yours has prayed his prayer. has he paused & taken thought? is it one prayer? no, it is two--one uttered, the other not. both have reached the ear of him who heareth all supplications, the spoken & the unspoken . . . . "you have heard your servant's prayer--the uttered part of it. i am commissioned of god to put into words the other part of it--that part which the pastor--and also you in your hearts--fervently prayed, silently. and ignorantly & unthinkingly? god grant that it was so! you heard these words: 'grant us the victory, o lord our god!' that is sufficient. the whole of the uttered prayer is completed into those pregnant words. "upon the listening spirit of god the father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. he commandeth me to put it into words. listen! "o lord our father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle--be thou near them! with them--in spirit--we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. "o lord our god, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended through wastes of their desolated land in rags & hunger & thirst, sport of the sun- flames of summer & the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave & denied it--for our sakes, who adore thee, lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! we ask of one who is the spirit of love & who is the ever-faithful refuge & friend of all that are sore beset, & seek his aid with humble & contrite hearts. grant our prayer, o lord; & thine shall be the praise & honor & glory now & ever, amen." (after a pause.) "ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak!--the messenger of the most high waits." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . it was believed, afterward, that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said. to dan beard, who dropped in to see him, clemens read the "war prayer," stating that he had read it to his daughter jean, and others, who had told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege. "still you--are going to publish it, are you not?" clemens, pacing up and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers, shook his head. "no," he said, "i have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. it can be published after i am dead." he did not care to invite the public verdict that he was a lunatic, or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions and traditions and conclusions of mankind. to twichell he wrote, playfully but sincerely: am i honest? i give you my word of honor (privately) i am not. for seven years i have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me i ought to publish. i hold it a duty to publish it. there are other difficult duties which i am equal to, but i am not equal to that one. yes, even i am dishonest. not in many ways, but in some. forty-one, i think it is. we are certainly all honest in one or several ways--every man in the world--though i have a reason to think i am the only one whose blacklist runs so light. sometimes i feel lonely enough in this lofty solitude. it was his gospel he referred to as his unpublished book, his doctrine of selfishness, and of man the irresponsible machine. to twichell he pretended to favor war, which he declared, to his mind, was one of the very best methods known of diminishing the human race. what a life it is!--this one! everything we try to do, somebody intrudes & obstructs it. after years of thought & labor i have arrived within one little bit of a step of perfecting my invention for exhausting the oxygen in the globe's air during a stretch of two minutes, & of course along comes an obstructor who is inventing something to protect human life. damn such a world anyway. he generally wrote twichell when he had things to say that were outside of the pale of print. he was sure of an attentive audience of one, and the audience, whether it agreed with him or not, would at least understand him and be honored by his confidence. in one letter of that year he said: i have written you to-day, not to do you a service, but to do myself one. there was bile in me. i had to empty it or lose my day to-morrow. if i tried to empty it into the north american review--oh, well, i couldn't afford the risk. no, the certainty! the certainty that i wouldn't be satisfied with the result; so i would burn it, & try again to-morrow; burn that and try again the next day. it happens so nearly every time. i have a family to support, & i can't afford this kind of dissipation. last winter when i was sick i wrote a magazine article three times before i got it to suit me. i put $ worth of work on it every day for ten days, & at last when i got it to suit me it contained but , words-$ . i burned it & said i would reform. and i have reformed. i have to work my bile off whenever it gets to where i can't stand it, but i can work it off on you economically, because i don't have to make it suit me. it may not suit you, but that isn't any matter; i'm not writing it for that. i have used you as an equilibrium--restorer more than once in my time, & shall continue, i guess. i would like to use mr. rogers, & he is plenty good-natured enough, but it wouldn't be fair to keep him rescuing me from my leather-headed business snarls & make him read interminable bile-irruptions besides; i can't use howells, he is busy & old & lazy, & won't stand it; i dasn't use clara, there's things i have to say which she wouldn't put up with--a very dear little ashcat, but has claws. and so--you're it. [see the preface to the "autobiography of mark twain": 'i am writing from the grave. on these terms only can a man be approximately frank. he cannot be straitly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it.' d.w.] ccxxxv a summer in new hampshire he took for the summer a house at dublin, new hampshire, the home of henry copley greene, lone tree hill, on the monadnock slope. it was in a lovely locality, and for neighbors there were artists, literary people, and those of kindred pursuits, among them a number of old friends. colonel higginson had a place near by, and abbott h. thayer, the painter, and george de forest brush, and the raphael pumpelly family, and many more. colonel higginson wrote clemens a letter of welcome as soon as the news got out that he was going to dublin; and clemens, answering, said: i early learned that you would be my neighbor in the summer & i rejoiced, recognizing in you & your family a large asset. i hope for frequent intercourse between the two households. i shall have my youngest daughter with me. the other one will go from the rest- cure in this city to the rest-cure in norfolk, connecticut; & we shall not see her before autumn. we have not seen her since the middle of october. jean, the younger daughter, went to dublin & saw the house & came back charmed with it. i know the thayers of old--manifestly there is no lack of attractions up there. mrs. thayer and i were shipmates in a wild excursion perilously near years ago. aldrich was here half an hour ago, like a breeze from over the fields, with the fragrance still upon his spirit. i am tired wanting for that man to get old. they went to dublin in may, and became at once a part of the summer colony which congregated there. there was much going to and fro among the different houses, pleasant afternoons in the woods, mountain-climbing for jean, and everywhere a spirit of fine, unpretentious comradeship. the copley greene house was romantically situated, with a charming outlook. clemens wrote to twichell: we like it here in the mountains, in the shadows of monadnock. it is a woody solitude. we have no near neighbors. we have neighbors and i can see their houses scattered in the forest distances, for we live on a hill. i am astonished to find that i have known of these neighbors a long time; years is the shortest; then seven beginning with years & running up to years' friendship. it is the most remarkable thing i ever heard of. this letter was written in july, and he states in it that he has turned out one hundred thousand words of a large manuscript. . it was a fantastic tale entitled " , years among the microbes," a sort of scientific revel--or revelry--the autobiography of a microbe that had been once a man, and through a failure in a biological experiment transformed into a cholera germ when the experimenter was trying to turn him into a bird. his habitat was the person of a disreputable tramp named blitzowski, a human continent of vast areas, with seething microbic nations and fantastic life problems. it was a satire, of course --gulliver's lilliput outdone--a sort of scientific, socialistic, mathematical jamboree. he tired of it before it reached completion, though not before it had attained the proportions of a book of size. as a whole it would hardly have added to his reputation, though it is not without fine and humorous passages, and certainly not without interest. its chief mission was to divert him mentally that summer during, those days and nights when he would otherwise have been alone and brooding upon his loneliness.--[for extracts from " , years among the microbes" see appendix v, at the end of this work.] mark twain's suggested title-page for his microbe book: years among the microbes by a microbe with notes added by the same hand years later translated from the original microbic by mark twain his inability to reproduce faces in his mind's eye he mourned as an increasing calamity. photographs were lifeless things, and when he tried to conjure up the faces of his dead they seemed to drift farther out of reach; but now and then kindly sleep brought to him something out of that treasure-house where all our realities are kept for us fresh and fair, perhaps for a day when we may claim them again. once he wrote to mrs. crane: susy dear,--i have had a lovely dream. livy, dressed in black, was sitting up in my bed (here) at my right & looking as young & sweet as she used to when she was in health. she said, "what is the name of your sweet sister?" i said, "pamela." "oh yes, that is it, i thought it was--(naming a name which has escaped me) won't you write it down for me?" i reached eagerly for a pen & pad, laid my hands upon both, then said to myself, "it is only a dream," and turned back sorrowfully & there she was still. the conviction flamed through me that our lamented disaster was a dream, & this a reality. i said, "how blessed it is, how blessed it is, it was all a dream, only a dream!" she only smiled and did not ask what dream i meant, which surprised me. she leaned her head against mine & kept saying, "i was perfectly sure it was a dream; i never would have believed it wasn't." i think she said several things, but if so they are gone from my memory. i woke & did not know i had been dreaming. she was gone. i wondered how she could go without my knowing it, but i did not spend any thought upon that. i was too busy thinking of how vivid & real was the dream that we had lost her, & how unspeakably blessed it was to find that it was not true & that she was still ours & with us. he had the orchestrelle moved to dublin, although it was no small undertaking, for he needed the solace of its harmonies; and so the days passed along, and he grew stronger in body and courage as his grief drifted farther behind him. sometimes, in the afternoon or in the evening; when the neighbors had come in for a little while, he would walk up and down and talk in his old, marvelous way of all the things on land and sea, of the past and of the future, "of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate," of the friends he had known and of the things he had done, of the sorrow and absurdities of the world. it was the same old scintillating, incomparable talk of which howells once said: "we shall never know its like again. when he dies it will die with him." it was during the summer at dublin that clemens and rogers together made up a philanthropic ruse on twichell. twichell, through his own prodigal charities, had fallen into debt, a fact which rogers knew. rogers was a man who concealed his philanthropies when he could, and he performed many of them of which the world will never know: in this case he said: "clemens, i want to help twichell out of his financial difficulty. i will supply the money and you will do the giving. twichell must think it comes from you." clemens agreed to this on the condition that he be permitted to leave a record of the matter for his children, so that he would not appear in a false light to them, and that twichell should learn the truth of the gift, sooner or later. so the deed was done, and twichell and his wife lavished their thanks upon clemens, who, with his wife, had more than once been their benefactors, making the deception easy enough now. clemens writhed under these letters of gratitude, and forwarded them to clara in norfolk, and later to rogers himself. he pretended to take great pleasure in this part of the conspiracy, but it was not an unmixed delight. to rogers he wrote: i wanted her [clara] to see what a generous father she's got. i didn't tell her it was you, but by and by i want to tell her, when i have your consent; then i shall want her to remember the letters. i want a record there, for my life when i am dead, & must be able to furnish the facts about the relief-of-lucknow-twichell in case i fall suddenly, before i get those facts with your consent, before the twichells themselves. i read those letters with immense pride! i recognized that i had scored one good deed for sure on my halo account. i haven't had anything that tasted so good since the stolen watermelon. p. s.-i am hurrying them off to you because i dasn't read them again! i should blush to my heels to fill up with this unearned gratitude again, pouring out of the thankful hearts of those poor swindled people who do not suspect you, but honestly believe i gave that money. mr. rogers hastily replied: my dear clemens,--the letters are lovely. don't breathe. they are so happy! it would be a crime to let them think that you have in any way deceived them. i can keep still. you must. i am sending you all traces of the crime, so that you may look innocent and tell the truth, as you usually do when you think you can escape detection. don't get rattled. seriously. you have done a kindness. you are proud of it, i know. you have made your friends happy, and you ought to be so glad as to cheerfully accept reproof from your conscience. joe wadsworth and i once stole a goose and gave it to a poor widow as a christmas present. no crime in that. i always put my counterfeit money on the plate. "the passer of the sasser" always smiles at me and i get credit for doing generous things. but seriously again, if you do feel a little uncomfortable wait until i see you before you tell anybody. avoid cultivating misery. i am trying to loaf ten solid days. we do hope to see you soon. the secret was kept, and the matter presently (and characteristically) passed out of clemens's mind altogether. he never remembered to tell twichell, and it is revealed here, according to his wish. the russian-japanese war was in progress that summer, and its settlement occurred in august. the terms of it did not please mark twain. when a newspaper correspondent asked him for an expression of opinion on the subject he wrote: russia was on the highroad to emancipation from an insane and intolerable slavery. i was hoping there would be no peace until russian liberty was safe. i think that this was a holy war, in the best and noblest sense of that abused term, and that no war was ever charged with a higher mission. i think there can be no doubt that that mission is now defeated and russia's chain riveted; this time to stay. i think the tsar will now withdraw the small humanities that have been forced from him, and resume his medieval barbarisms with a relieved spirit and an immeasurable joy. i think russian liberty has had its last chance and has lost it. i think nothing has been gained by the peace that is remotely comparable to what has been sacrificed by it. one more battle would have abolished the waiting chains of billions upon billions of unborn russians, and i wish it could have been fought. i hope i am mistaken, yet in all sincerity i believe that this peace is entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political history. it was the wisest public utterance on the subject--the deep, resonant note of truth sounding amid a clamor of foolish joy-bells. it was the message of a seer--the prophecy of a sage who sees with the clairvoyance of knowledge and human understanding. clemens, a few days later, was invited by colonel harvey to dine with baron rosen and m. sergius witte; but an attack of his old malady--rheumatism--prevented his acceptance. his telegram of declination apparently pleased the russian officials, for witte asked permission to publish it, and declared that he was going to take it home to show to the tsar. it was as follows: to colonel harvey,--i am still a cripple, otherwise i should be more than glad of this opportunity to meet the illustrious magicians who came here equipped with nothing but a pen, & with it have divided the honors of the war with the sword. it is fair to presume that in thirty centuries history will not get done in admiring these men who attempted what the world regarded as the impossible & achieved it. mark twain. but this was a modified form. his original draft would perhaps have been less gratifying to that russian embassy. it read: to colonel harvey,--i am still a cripple, otherwise i should be more than glad of this opportunity to meet those illustrious magicians who with the pen have annulled, obliterated, & abolished every high achievement of the japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay & blithesome comedy. if i may, let me in all respect and honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, i taking third place, as becomes one who was not born to modesty, but by diligence & hard work is acquiring it. mark. there was still another form, brief and expressive: dear colonel,--no, this is a love-feast; when you call a lodge of sorrow send for me. mark. clemens's war sentiment was given the widest newspaper circulation, and brought him many letters, most of them applauding his words. charles francis adams wrote him: it attracted my attention because it so exactly expresses the views i have myself all along entertained. and this was the gist of most of the expressed sentiments which came to him. clemens wrote a number of things that summer, among them a little essay entitled, "the privilege of the grave"--that is to say, free speech. he was looking forward, he said, to the time when he should inherit that privilege, when some of the things he had said, written and laid away, could be published without damage to his friends or family. an article entitled, "interpreting the deity," he counted as among the things to be uttered when he had entered into that last great privilege. it is an article on the reading of signs and auguries in all ages to discover the intentions of the almighty, with historical examples of god's judgments and vindications. here is a fair specimen. it refers to the chronicle of henry huntington: all through this book henry exhibits his familiarity with the intentions of god and with the reasons for the intentions. sometimes very often, in fact--the act follows the intention after such a wide interval of time that one wonders how henry could fit one act out of a hundred to one intention, and get the thing right every time, when there was such abundant choice among acts and intentions. sometimes a man offends the deity with a crime, and is punished for it thirty years later; meantime he has committed a million other crimes: no matter, henry can pick out the one that brought the worms. worms were generally used in those days for the slaying of particularly wicked people. this has gone out now, but in the old times it was a favorite. it always indicated a case of "wrath." for instance: "the just god avenging robert fitzhildebrand's perfidity, a worm grew in his vitals which, gradually gnawing its way through his intestines, fattened on the abandoned man till, tortured with excruciating sufferings and venting himself in bitter moans, he was by a fitting punishment brought to his end" (p. ). it was probably an alligator, but we cannot tell; we only know it was a particular breed, and only used to convey wrath. some authorities think it was an ichthyosaurus, but there is much doubt. the entire article is in this amusing, satirical strain, and might well enough be printed to-day. it is not altogether clear why it was withheld, even then. he finished his eve's diary that summer, and wrote a story which was originally planned to oblige mrs. minnie maddern fiske, to aid her in a crusade against bullfighting in spain. mrs. fiske wrote him that she had read his dog story, written against the cruelties of vivisection, and urged him to do something to save the horses that, after faithful service, were sacrificed in the bull-ring. her letter closed: i have lain awake nights very often wondering if i dare ask you to write a story of an old horse that is finally given over to the bull-ring. the story you would write would do more good than all the laws we are trying to have made and enforced for the prevention of cruelty to animals in spain. we would translate and circulate the story in that country. i have wondered if you would ever write it. with most devoted homage, sincerely yours, minnie maddern fiske. clemens promptly replied: dear mrs. fiske, i shall certainly write the story. but i may not get it to suit me, in which case it will go in the fire. later i will try it again--& yet again--& again. i am used to this. it has taken me twelve years to write a short story--the shortest one i ever wrote, i think. --[probably "the death disk:"]--so do not be discouraged; i will stick to this one in the same way. sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. it was an inspiring subject, and he began work on it immediately. within a month from the time he received mrs. fiske's letter he had written that pathetic, heartbreaking little story, "a horse's tale," and sent it to harper's magazine for illustration. in a letter written to mr. duneka at the time, he tells of his interest in the narrative, and adds: this strong interest is natural, for the heroine is my small daughter susy, whom we lost. it was not intentional--it was a good while before i found it out, so i am sending you her picture to use --& to reproduce with photographic exactness the unsurpassable expression & all. may you find an artist who has lost an idol. he explains how he had put in a good deal of work, with his secretary, on the orchestrelle to get the bugle-calls. we are to do these theatricals this evening with a couple of neighbors for audience, and then pass the hat. it is not one of mark twain's greatest stories, but its pathos brings the tears, and no one can read it without indignation toward the custom which it was intended to oppose. when it was published, a year later, mrs. fiske sent him her grateful acknowledgments, and asked permission to have it printed for pamphlet circulation m spain. a number of more or less notable things happened in this, mark twain's seventieth year. there was some kind of a reunion going on in california, and he was variously invited to attend. robert fulton, of nevada, was appointed a committee of one to invite him to reno for a great celebration which was to be held there. clemens replied that he remembered, as if it were but yesterday, when he had disembarked from the overland stage in front of the ormsby hotel, in carson city, and told how he would like to accept the invitation. if i were a few years younger i would accept it, and promptly, and i would go. i would let somebody else do the oration, but as for me i would talk--just talk. i would renew my youth; and talk--and talk--and talk--and have the time of my life! i would march the unforgotten and unforgetable antiques by, and name their names, and give them reverent hail and farewell as they passed--goodman, mccarthy, gillis, curry, baldwin, winters, howard, nye, stewart, neely johnson, hal clayton, north, root--and my brother, upon whom be peace!--and then the desperadoes, who made life a joy, and the "slaughter-house," a precious possession: sam brown, farmer pete, bill mayfield, six-fingered jake, jack williams, and the rest of the crimson discipleship, and so on, and so on. believe me, i would start a resurrection it would do you more good to look at than the next one will, if you go on the way you are going now. those were the days!--those old ones. they will come no more; youth will come no more. they were so full to the brim with the wine of life; there have been no others like them. it chokes me up to think of them. would you like me to come out there and cry? it would not beseem my white head. good-by. i drink to you all. have a good time-and take an old man's blessing. in reply to another invitation from h. h. bancroft, of san francisco, he wrote that his wandering days were over, and that it was his purpose to sit by the fire for the rest of his "remnant of life." a man who, like me, is going to strike on the th of next november has no business to be flitting around the way howells does --that shameless old fictitious butterfly. (but if he comes don't tell him i said it, for it would hurt him & i wouldn't brush a flake of powder from his wing for anything. i only say it in envy of his indestructible youth anyway. howells will be in october.) and it was either then or on a similar occasion that he replied after this fashion: i have done more for san francisco than any other of its old residents. since i left there it has increased in population fully , . i could have done more--i could have gone earlier--it was suggested. which, by the way, is a perfect example of mark twain's humorous manner, the delicately timed pause, and the afterthought. most humorists would have been contented to end with the statement, "i could have gone earlier." only mark twain could have added that final exquisite touch --"it was suggested." ccxxxvi at pier mark twain was nearing seventy, the scriptural limitation of life, and the returns were coming in. some one of the old group was dying all the time. the roll-call returned only a scattering answer. of his oldest friends, charles henry webb, john hay, and sir henry irving, all died that year. when hay died clemens gave this message to the press: i am deeply grieved, & i mourn with the nation this loss which is irreparable. my friendship with mr. hay & my admiration of him endured years without impairment. it was only a little earlier that he had written hay an anonymous letter, a copy of which he preserved. it here follows: dear & honored sir,--i never hear any one speak of you & of your long roll of illustrious services in other than terms of pride & praise--& out of the heart. i think i am right in believing you to be the only man in the civil service of the country the cleanness of whose motives is never questioned by any citizen, & whose acts proceed always upon a broad & high plane, never by accident or pressure of circumstance upon a narrow or low one. there are majorities that are proud of more than one of the nation's great servants, but i believe, & i think i know, that you are the only one of whom the entire nation is proud. proud & thankful. name & address are lacking here, & for a purpose: to leave you no chance to make my words a burden to you and a reproach to me, who would lighten your burdens if i could, not add to them. irving died in october, and clemens ordered a wreath for his funeral. to macalister he wrote: i profoundly grieve over irving's death. it is another reminder. my section of the procession has but a little way to go. i could not be very sorry if i tried. mark twain, nearing seventy, felt that there was not much left for him to celebrate; and when colonel harvey proposed a birthday gathering in his honor, clemens suggested a bohemian assembly over beer and sandwiches in some snug place, with howells, henry rogers, twichell, dr. rice, dr. edward quintard, augustus thomas, and such other kindred souls as were still left to answer the call. but harvey had something different in view: something more splendid even than the sixty-seventh birthday feast, more pretentious, indeed, than any former literary gathering. he felt that the attainment of seventy years by america's most distinguished man of letters and private citizen was a circumstance which could not be moderately or even modestly observed. the date was set five days later than the actual birthday--that is to say, on december th, in order that it might not conflict with the various thanksgiving holidays and occasions. delmonico's great room was chosen for the celebration of it, and invitations were sent out to practically every writer of any distinction in america, and to many abroad. of these nearly two hundred accepted, while such as could not come sent pathetic regrets. what an occasion it was! the flower of american literature gathered to do honor to its chief. the whole atmosphere of the place seemed permeated with his presence, and when colonel harvey presented william dean howells, and when howells had read another double-barreled sonnet, and introduced the guest of the evening with the words, "i will not say, 'o king, live forever,' but, 'o king, live as long as you like!'" and mark twain rose, his snow-white hair gleaming above that brilliant assembly, it seemed that a world was speaking out in a voice of applause and welcome. with a great tumult the throng rose, a billow of life, the white handkerchiefs flying foam-like on its crest. those who had gathered there realized that it was a mighty moment, not only in his life but in theirs. they were there to see this supreme embodiment of the american spirit as he scaled the mountain-top. he, too, realized the drama of that moment--the marvel of it--and he must have flashed a swift panoramic view backward over the long way he had come, to stand, as he had himself once expressed it, "for a single, splendid moment on the alps of fame outlined against the sun." he must have remembered; for when he came to speak he went back to the very beginning, to his very first banquet, as he called it, when, as he said, "i hadn't any hair; i hadn't any teeth; i hadn't any clothes." he sketched the meagerness of that little hamlet which had seen his birth, sketched it playfully, delightfully, so that his hearers laughed and shouted; but there was always a tenderness under it all, and often the tears were not far beneath the surface. he told of his habits of life, how he had attained seventy years by simply sticking to a scheme of living which would kill anybody else; how he smoked constantly, loathed exercise, and had no other regularity of habits. then, at last, he reached that wonderful, unforgetable close: threescore years and ten! it is the scriptural statute of limitations. after that you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. you are a time- expired man, to use kipling's military phrase: you have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. you are become an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not for you, nor any bugle-call but "lights out." you pay the time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline if you prefer--and without prejudice--for they are not legally collectable. the previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so many twinges, you can lay aside forever; on this side of the grave you will never need it again. if you shrink at thought of night, and winter, and the late homecomings from the banquet and the lights and laughter through the deserted streets--a desolation which would not remind you now, as for a generation it did, that your friends are sleeping and you must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them, but would only remind you that you need not tiptoe, you can never disturb them more--if you shrink at the thought of these things you need only reply, "your invitation honors me and pleases me because you still keep me in your remembrance, but i am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke my pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection, and that when you in your turn shall arrive at pier you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart." the tears that had been lying in wait were not restrained now. if there were any present who did not let them flow without shame, who did not shout their applause from throats choked with sobs, the writer of these lines failed to see them or to hear of them. there was not one who was ashamed to pay the great tribute of tears. many of his old friends, one after another, rose to tell their love for him--brander matthews, cable, kate douglas riggs, gilder, carnegie, bangs, bacheller--they kept it up far into the next morning. no other arrival at pier ever awoke a grander welcome. ccxxxvii aftermath the announcement of the seventieth birthday dinner had precipitated a perfect avalanche of letters, which continued to flow in until the news accounts of it precipitated another avalanche. the carriers' bags were stuffed with greetings that came from every part of the world, from every class of humanity. they were all full of love and tender wishes. a card signed only with initials said: "god bless your old sweet soul for having lived." aldrich, who could not attend the dinner, declared that all through the evening he had been listening in his mind to a murmur of voices in the hall at delmonico's. a group of english authors in london combined in a cable of congratulations. anstey, alfred austin, balfour, barrie, bryce, chesterton, dobson, doyle, gosse, hardy, hope, jacobs, kipling, lang, parker, tenniel, watson, and zangwill were among the signatures. helen keller wrote: and you are seventy years old? or is the report exaggerated, like that of your death? i remember, when i saw you last, at the house of dear mr. hutton, in princeton, you said: "if a man is a pessimist before he is forty-eight he knows too much. if he is an optimist after he is forty-eight he knows too little." now we know you are an optimist, and nobody would dare to accuse one on the "seven-terraced summit" of knowing little. so probably you are not seventy after all, but only forty-seven! helen keller was right. mark twain was not a pessimist in his heart, but only by premeditation. it was his observation and his logic that led him to write those things that, even in their bitterness, somehow conveyed that spirit of human sympathy which is so closely linked to hope. to miss keller he wrote: "oh, thank you for your lovely words!" he was given another birthday celebration that month--this time by the society of illustrators. dan beard, president, was also toast-master; and as he presented mark twain there was a trumpet-note, and a lovely girl, costumed as joan of arc, entered and, approaching him, presented him with a laurel wreath. it was planned and carried out as a surprise to him, and he hardly knew for the moment whether it was a vision or a reality. he was deeply affected, so much so that for several moments he could not find his voice to make any acknowledgments. clemens was more than ever sought now, and he responded when the cause was a worthy one. he spoke for the benefit of the russian sufferers at the casino on december th. madame sarah bernhardt was also there, and spoke in french. he followed her, declaring that it seemed a sort of cruelty to inflict upon an audience our rude english after hearing that divine speech flowing in that lucid gallic tongue. it has always been a marvel to me--that french language; it has always been a puzzle to me. how beautiful that language is! how expressive it seems to be! how full of grace it is! and when it comes from lips like those, how eloquent and how limpid it is! and, oh, i am always deceived--i always think i am going to understand it. it is such a delight to me, such a delight to me, to meet madame bernhardt, and laugh hand to hand and heart to heart with her. i have seen her play, as we all have, and, oh, that is divine; but i have always wanted to know madame bernhardt herself--her fiery self. i have wanted to know that beautiful character. why, she is the youngest person i ever saw, except myself--for i always feel young when i come in the presence of young people. and truly, at seventy, mark twain was young, his manner, his movement, his point of view-these were all, and always, young. a number of palmists about that time examined impressions of his hand without knowledge as to the owner, and they all agreed that it was the hand of a man with the characteristics of youth, with inspiration, and enthusiasm, and sympathy--a lover of justice and of the sublime. they all agreed, too, that he was a deep philosopher, though, alas! they likewise agreed that he lacked the sense of humor, which is not as surprising as it sounds, for with mark twain humor was never mere fun-making nor the love of it; rather it was the flower of his philosophy --its bloom and fragrance. when the fanfare and drum-beat of his birthday honors had passed by, and a moment of calm had followed, mark twain set down some reflections on the new estate he had achieved. the little paper, which forms a perfect pendant to the "seventieth birthday speech," here follows: old age i think it likely that people who have not been here will be interested to know what it is like. i arrived on the thirtieth of november, fresh from carefree & frivolous , & was disappointed. there is nothing novel about it, nothing striking, nothing to thrill you & make your eye glitter & your tongue cry out, "oh, it is wonderful, perfectly wonderful!" yes, it is disappointing. you say, "is this it?--this? after all this talk and fuss of a thousand generations of travelers who have crossed this frontier & looked about them & told what they saw & felt? why, it looks just like ." and that is true. also it is natural, for you have not come by the fast express; you have been lagging & dragging across the world's continents behind oxen; when that is your pace one country melts into the next one so gradually that you are not able to notice the change; looks like ; looked like ; looked like --& so on back & back to the beginning. if you climb to a summit & look back--ah, then you see! down that far-reaching perspective you can make out each country & climate that you crossed, all the way up from the hot equator to the ice-summit where you are perched. you can make out where infancy verged into boyhood; boyhood into down-lipped youth; youth into bearded, indefinite young-manhood; indefinite young-manhood into definite manhood; definite manhood, with large, aggressive ambitions, into sobered & heedful husbandhood & fatherhood; these into troubled & foreboding age, with graying hair; this into old age, white-headed, the temple empty, the idols broken, the worshipers in their graves, nothing left but you, a remnant, a tradition, belated fag-end of a foolish dream, a dream that was so ingeniously dreamed that it seemed real all the time; nothing left but you, center of a snowy desolation, perched on the ice-summit, gazing out over the stages of that long trek & asking yourself, "would you do it again if you had the chance?" ccxxxviii the writer meets mark twain we have reached a point in this history where the narrative becomes mainly personal, and where, at the risk of inviting the charge of egotism, the form of the telling must change. it was at the end of that i first met mark twain--at the players club on the night when he made the founder's address mentioned in an earlier chapter. i was not able to arrive in time for the address, but as i reached the head of the stairs i saw him sitting on the couch at the dining-room entrance, talking earnestly to some one, who, as i remember it, did not enter into my consciousness at all. i saw only that crown of white hair, that familiar profile, and heard the slow modulations of his measured speech. i was surprised to see how frail and old he looked. from his pictures i had conceived him different. i did not realize that it was a temporary condition due to a period of poor health and a succession of social demands. i have no idea how long i stood there watching him. he had been my literary idol from childhood, as he had been of so many others; more than that, for the personality in his work had made him nothing less than a hero to his readers. he rose presently to go, and came directly toward me. a year before i had done what new writers were always doing--i had sent him a book i had written, and he had done what he was always doing--acknowledged it with a kindly letter. i made my thanks now an excuse for addressing him. it warmed me to hear him say that he remembered the book, though at the time i confess i thought it doubtful. then he was gone; but the mind and ear had photographed those vivid first impressions that remain always clear. it was the following spring that i saw him again--at an afternoon gathering, and the memory of that occasion is chiefly important because i met mrs. clemens there for the only time, and like all who met her, however briefly, felt the gentleness and beauty of her spirit. i think i spoke with her at two or three different moments during the afternoon, and on each occasion was impressed with that feeling of acquaintanceship which we immediately experience with those rare beings whose souls are wells of human sympathy and free from guile. bret harte had just died, and during the afternoon mr. clemens asked me to obtain for him some item concerning the obsequies. it was more than three years before i saw him again. meantime, a sort of acquaintance had progressed. i had been engaged in writing the life of thomas nast, the cartoonist, and i had found among the material a number of letters to nast from mark twain. i was naturally anxious to use those fine characteristic letters, and i wrote him for his consent. he wished to see the letters, and the permission that followed was kindness itself. his admiration of nast was very great. it was proper, under the circumstances, to send him a copy of the book when it appeared; but that was , his year of sorrow and absence, and the matter was postponed. then came the great night of his seventieth birthday dinner, with an opportunity to thank him in person for the use of the letters. there was only a brief exchange of words, and it was the next day, i think, that i sent him a copy of the book. it did not occur to me that i should hear of it again. we step back a moment here. something more than a year earlier, through a misunderstanding, mark twain's long association with the players had been severed. it was a sorrow to him, and a still greater sorrow to the club. there was a movement among what is generally known' as the "round table group"--because its members have long had a habit of lunching at a large, round table in a certain window--to bring him back again. david munro, associate editor of the north american review--"david," a man well loved of men--and robert reid, the painter, prepared this simple document: to mark twain from the clansmen will ye no come back again? will ye no come back again? better lo'ed ye canna be, will ye no come back again? it was signed by munro and by reid and about thirty others, and it touched mark twain deeply. the lines had always moved him. he wrote: to robt. reid & the others-- well-beloved,--surely those lovely verses went to prince charlie's heart, if he had one, & certainly they have gone to mine. i shall be glad & proud to come back again after such a moving & beautiful compliment as this from comrades whom i have loved so long. i hope you can poll the necessary vote; i know you will try, at any rate. it will be many months before i can foregather with you, for this black border is not perfunctory, not a convention; it symbolizes the loss of one whose memory is the only thing i worship. it is not necessary for me to thank you--& words could not deliver what i feel, anyway. i will put the contents of your envelope in the small casket where i keep the things which have become sacred to me. s. l. c. so the matter was temporarily held in abeyance until he should return to social life. at the completion of his seventieth year the club had taken action, and mark twain had been brought back, not in the regular order of things, but as an honorary life member without dues or duties. there was only one other member of this class, sir henry irving. the players, as a club, does not give dinners. whatever is done in that way is done by one or more of the members in the private dining-room, where there is a single large table that holds twenty-five, even thirty when expanded to its limit. that room and that table have mingled with much distinguished entertainment, also with history. henry james made his first after-dinner speech there, for one thing--at least he claimed it was his first, though this is by the way. a letter came to me which said that those who had signed the plea for the prince's return were going to welcome him in the private dining-room on the th of january. it was not an invitation, but a gracious privilege. i was in new york a day or two in advance of the date, and i think david munro was the first person i met at the players. as he greeted me his eyes were eager with something he knew i would wish to hear. he had been delegated to propose the dinner to mark twain, and had found him propped up in bed, and noticed on the table near him a copy of the nast book. i suspect that munro had led him to speak of it, and that the result had lost nothing filtered through that radiant benevolence of his. the night of january , , remains a memory apart from other dinners. brander matthews presided, and gilder was there, and frank millet and willard metcalf and robert reid, and a score of others; some of them are dead now, david munro among them. it so happened that my seat was nearly facing the guest of the evening, who, by custom of the players, is placed at the side and not at the end of the long table. he was no longer frail and thin, as when i had first met him. he had a robust, rested look; his complexion had the tints of a miniature painting. lit by the glow of the shaded candles, relieved against the dusk richness of the walls, he made a picture of striking beauty. one could not take his eyes from it, and to one guest at least it stirred the farthest memories. i suddenly saw the interior of a farm-house sitting-room in the middle west, where i had first heard uttered the name of mark twain, and where night after night a group gathered around the evening lamp to hear the tale of the first pilgrimage, which, to a boy of eight, had seemed only a wonderful poem and fairy tale. to charles harvey genung, who sat next to me, i whispered something of this, and how, during the thirty-six years since then, no other human being to me had meant quite what mark twain had meant--in literature, in life, in the ineffable thing which means more than either, and which we call "inspiration," for lack of a truer word. now here he was, just across the table. it was the fairy tale come true. genung said: "you should write his life." his remark seemed a pleasant courtesy, and was put aside as such. when he persisted i attributed it to the general bloom of the occasion, and a little to the wine, maybe, for the dinner was in its sweetest stage just then--that happy, early stage when the first glass of champagne, or the second, has proved its quality. he urged, in support of his idea, the word that munro had brought concerning the nast book, but nothing of what he said kindled any spark of hope. i could not but believe that some one with a larger equipment of experience, personal friendship, and abilities had already been selected for the task. by and by the speaking began --delightful, intimate speaking in that restricted circle--and the matter went out of my mind. when the dinner had ended, and we were drifting about the table in general talk, i found an opportunity to say a word to the guest of the evening about his joan of arc, which i had recently re-read. to my happiness, he detained me while he told me the long-ago incident which had led to his interest, not only in the martyred girl, but in all literature. i think we broke up soon after, and descended to the lower rooms. at any rate, i presently found the faithful charles genung privately reasserting to me the proposition that i should undertake the biography of mark twain. perhaps it was the brief sympathy established by the name of joan of arc, perhaps it was only genung's insistent purpose--his faith, if i may be permitted the word. whatever it was, there came an impulse, in the instant of bidding good-by to our guest of honor, which prompted me to say: "may i call to see you, mr. clemens, some day?" and something--dating from the primal atom, i suppose--prompted him to answer: "yes, come soon." this was on wednesday night, or rather on thursday morning, for it was past midnight, and a day later i made an appointment with his secretary to call on saturday. i can say truly that i set out with no more than the barest hope of success, and wondering if i should have the courage, when i saw him, even to suggest the thought in my mind. i know i did not have the courage to confide in genung that i had made the appointment--i was so sure it would fail. i arrived at fifth avenue and was shown into that long library and drawing-room combined, and found a curious and deep interest in the books and ornaments along the shelves as i waited. then i was summoned, and i remember ascending the stairs, wondering why i had come on so futile an errand, and trying to think of an excuse to offer for having come at all. he was propped up in bed--in that stately bed-sitting, as was his habit, with his pillows placed at the foot, so that he might have always before him the rich, carved beauty of its headboard. he was delving through a copy of huckleberry finn, in search of a paragraph concerning which some random correspondent had asked explanation. he was commenting unfavorably on this correspondent and on miscellaneous letter-writing in general. he pushed the cigars toward me, and the talk of these matters ran along and blended into others more or less personal. by and by i told him what so many thousands had told him before: what he had meant to me, recalling the childhood impressions of that large, black-and-gilt-covered book with its wonderful pictures and adventures--the mediterranean pilgrimage. very likely it bored him--he had heard it so often--and he was willing enough, i dare say, to let me change the subject and thank him for the kindly word which david munro had brought. i do not remember what he said then, but i suddenly found myself suggesting that out of his encouragement had grown a hope--though certainly it was something less--that i might some day undertake a book about himself. i expected the chapter to end at this point, and his silence which followed seemed long and ominous. he said, at last, that at various times through his life he had been preparing some autobiographical matter, but that he had tired of the undertaking, and had put it aside. he added that he had hoped his daughters would one day collect his letters; but that a biography--a detailed story of personality and performance, of success and failure --was of course another matter, and that for such a work no arrangement had been made. he may have added one or two other general remarks; then, turning those piercing agate-blue eyes directly upon me, he said: "when would you like to begin?" there was a dresser with a large mirror behind him. i happened to catch my reflection in it, and i vividly recollect saying to it mentally: "this is not true; it is only one of many similar dreams." but even in a dream one must answer, and i said: "whenever you like. i can begin now." he was always eager in any new undertaking. "very good," he said. "the sooner, then, the better. let's begin while we are in the humor. the longer you postpone a thing of this kind the less likely you are ever to get at it." this was on saturday, as i have stated. i mentioned that my family was still in the country, and that it would require a day or two to get established in the city. i asked if tuesday, january th, would be too soon to begin. he agreed that tuesday would do, and inquired something about my plan of work. of course i had formed nothing definite, but i said that in similar undertakings a part of the work had been done with a stenographer, who had made the notes while i prompted the subject to recall a procession of incidents and episodes, to be supplemented with every variety of material obtainable--letters and other documentary accumulations. then he said: "i think i should enjoy dictating to a stenographer, with some one to prompt me and to act as audience. the room adjoining this was fitted up for my study. my manuscripts and notes and private books and many of my letters are there, and there are a trunkful or two of such things in the attic. i seldom use the room myself. i do my writing and reading in bed. i will turn that room over to you for this work. whatever you need will be brought to you. we can have the dictation here in the morning, and you can put in the rest of the day to suit yourself. you can have a key and come and go as you please." that was always his way. he did nothing by halves; nothing without unquestioning confidence and prodigality. he got up and showed me the lovely luxury of the study, with its treasures of material. i did not believe it true yet. it had all the atmosphere of a dream, and i have no distinct recollection of how i came away. when i returned to the players and found charles harvey genung there, and told him about it, it is quite certain that he perjured himself when he professed to believe it true and pretended that he was not surprised. ccxxxix working with mark twain on tuesday, january , , i was on hand with a capable stenographer --miss josephine hobby, who had successively, and successfully, held secretarial positions with charles dudley warner and mrs. mary mapes dodge, and was therefore peculiarly qualified for the work in hand. clemens, meantime, had been revolving our plans and adding some features of his own. he proposed to double the value and interest of our employment by letting his dictations continue the form of those earlier autobiographical chapters, begun with redpath in , and continued later in vienna and at the villa quarto. he said he did not think he could follow a definite chronological program; that he would like to wander about, picking up this point and that, as memory or fancy prompted, without any particular biographical order. it was his purpose, he declared, that his dictations should not be published until he had been dead a hundred years or more--a prospect which seemed to give him an especial gratification.--[as early as october, , he had proposed to harper & brothers a contract for publishing his personal memoirs at the expiration of one hundred years from date; and letters covering the details were exchanged with mr. rogers. the document, however, was not completed.] he wished to pay the stenographer, and to own these memoranda, he said, allowing me free access to them for any material i might find valuable. i could also suggest subjects for dictation, and ask particulars of any special episode or period. i believe this covered the whole arrangement, which did not require more than five minutes, and we set to work without further prologue. i ought to state that he was in bed when we arrived, and that he remained there during almost all of these earlier dictations, clad in a handsome silk dressing-gown of rich persian pattern, propped against great snowy pillows. he loved this loose luxury and ease, and found it conducive to thought. on the little table beside him, where lay his cigars, papers, pipes, and various knickknacks, shone a reading-lamp, making more brilliant the rich coloring of his complexion and the gleam of his shining hair. there was daylight, too, but it was north light, and the winter days were dull. also the walls of the room were a deep, unreflecting red, and his eyes were getting old. the outlines of that vast bed blending into the luxuriant background, the whole focusing to the striking central figure, remain in my mind to-day--a picture of classic value. he dictated that morning some matters connected with the history of the comstock mine; then he drifted back to his childhood, returning again to the more modern period, and closed, i think, with some comments on current affairs. it was absorbingly interesting; his quaint, unhurried fashion of speech, the unconscious movement of his hands, the play of his features as his fancies and phrases passed in mental review and were accepted or waved aside. we were watching one of the great literary creators of his time in the very process of his architecture. we constituted about the most select audience in the world enjoying what was, likely enough, its most remarkable entertainment. when he turned at last and inquired the time we were all amazed that two hours and more had slipped away. "and how much i have enjoyed it!" he said. "it is the ideal plan for this kind of work. narrative writing is always disappointing. the moment you pick up a pen you begin to lose the spontaneity of the personal relation, which contains the very essence of interest. with shorthand dictation one can talk as if he were at his own dinner-table --always a most inspiring place. i expect to dictate all the rest of my life, if you good people are willing to come and listen to it." the dictations thus begun continued steadily from week to week, and always with increasing charm. we never knew what he was going to talk about, and it was seldom that he knew until the moment of beginning; then he went drifting among episodes, incidents, and periods in his irresponsible fashion; the fashion of table-conversation, as he said, the methodless method of the human mind. it was always delightful, and always amusing, tragic, or instructive, and it was likely to be one of these at one instant, and another the next. i felt myself the most fortunate biographer in the world, as undoubtedly i was, though not just in the way that i first imagined. it was not for several weeks that i began to realize that these marvelous reminiscences bore only an atmospheric relation to history; that they were aspects of biography rather than its veritable narrative, and built largely--sometimes wholly--from an imagination that, with age, had dominated memory, creating details, even reversing them, yet with a perfect sincerity of purpose on the part of the narrator to set down the literal and unvarnished truth. it was his constant effort to be frank and faithful to fact, to record, to confess, and to condemn without stint. if you wanted to know the worst of mark twain you had only to ask him for it. he would give it, to the last syllable--worse than the worst, for his imagination would magnify it and adorn it with new iniquities, and if he gave it again, or a dozen times, he would improve upon it each time, until the thread of history was almost impossible to trace through the marvel of that fabric; and he would do the same for another person just as willingly. those vividly real personalities that he marched and countermarched before us were the most convincing creatures in the world; the most entertaining, the most excruciatingly humorous, or wicked, or tragic; but, alas, they were not always safe to include in a record that must bear a certain semblance to history. they often disagreed in their performance, and even in their characters, with the documents in the next room, as i learned by and by when those records, disentangled, began to rebuild the structure of the years. his gift of dramatization had been exercised too long to be discarded now. the things he told of mrs. clemens and of susy were true --marvelously and beautifully true, in spirit and in aspect--and the actual detail of these mattered little in such a record. the rest was history only as 'roughing it' is history, or the 'tramp abroad'; that is to say, it was fictional history, with fact as a starting-point. in a prefatory note to these volumes we have quoted mark twain's own lovely and whimsical admission, made once when he realized his deviations: "when i was younger i could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but i am getting old, and soon i shall remember only the latter." at another time he paraphrased one of josh billings's sayings in the remark: "it isn't so astonishing, the number of things that i can remember, as the number of things i can remember that aren't so." i do not wish to say, by any means, that his so-called autobiography is a mere fairy tale. it is far from that. it is amazingly truthful in the character-picture it represents of the man himself. it is only not reliable--and it is sometimes even unjust--as detailed history. yet, curiously enough, there were occasional chapters that were photographically exact, and fitted precisely with the more positive, if less picturesque, materials. it is also true that such chapters were likely to be episodes intrinsically so perfect as to not require the touch of art. in the talks which we usually had, when the dictations were ended and miss hobby had gone, i gathered much that was of still greater value. imagination was temporarily dispossessed, as it were, and, whether expounding some theory or summarizing some event, he cared little for literary effect, and only for the idea and the moment immediately present. it was at such times that he allowed me to make those inquiries we had planned in the beginning, and which apparently had little place in the dictations themselves. sometimes i led him to speak of the genesis of his various books, how he had come to write them, and i think there was not a single case where later i did not find his memory of these matters almost exactly in accord with the letters of the moment, written to howells or twichell, or to some member of his family. such reminiscence was usually followed by some vigorous burst of human philosophy, often too vigorous for print, too human, but as dazzling as a search-light in its revelation. it was during this earlier association that he propounded, one day, his theory of circumstance, already set down, that inevitable sequence of cause and effect, beginning with the first act of the primal atom. he had been dictating that morning his story of the clairvoyant dream which preceded his brother's death, and the talk of foreknowledge had continued. i said one might logically conclude from such a circumstance that the future was a fixed quantity. "as absolutely fixed as the past," he said; and added the remark already quoted.--[chap. lxxv] a little later he continued: "even the almighty himself cannot check or change that sequence of events once it is started. it is a fixed quantity, and a part of the scheme is a mental condition during certain moments usually of sleep--when the mind may reach out and grasp some of the acts which are still to come." it was a new angle to me--a line of logic so simple and so utterly convincing that i have remained unshaken in it to this day. i have never been able to find any answer to it, nor any one who could even attempt to show that the first act of the first created atom did not strike the key-note of eternity. at another time, speaking of the idea that god works through man, he burst out: "yes, of course, just about as much as a man works through his microbes!" he had a startling way of putting things like that, and it left not much to say. i was at this period interested a good deal in mental healing, and had been treated for neurasthenia with gratifying results. like most of the world, i had assumed, from his published articles, that he condemned christian science and its related practices out of hand. when i confessed, rather reluctantly, one day, the benefit i had received, he surprised me by answering: "of course you have been benefited. christian science is humanity's boon. mother eddy deserves a place in the trinity as much as any member of it. she has organized and made available a healing principle that for two thousand years has never been employed, except as the merest kind of guesswork. she is the benefactor of the age." it seemed strange, at the time, to hear him speak in this way concerning a practice of which he was generally regarded as the chief public antagonist. it was another angle of his many-sided character. ccxl the definition of a gentleman that was a busy winter for him socially. he was constantly demanded for this thing and that--for public gatherings, dinners--everywhere he was a central figure. once he presided at a valentine dinner given by some players to david munro. he had never presided at a dinner before, he said, and he did it in his own way, which certainly was a taking one, suitable to that carefree company and occasion--a real scotch occasion, with the munro tartan everywhere, the table banked with heather, and a wild piper marching up and down in the anteroom, blowing savage airs in honor of scotland's gentlest son. an important meeting of that winter was at carnegie hall--a great gathering which had assembled for the purpose of aiding booker t. washington in his work for the welfare of his race. the stage and the auditorium were thronged with notables. joseph h. choate and mark twain presided, and both spoke; also robert c. ogden and booker t. washington himself. it was all fine and interesting. choate's address was ably given, and mark twain was at his best. he talked of politics and of morals--public and private--how the average american citizen was true to his christian principles three hundred and sixty-three days in the year, and how on the other two days of the year he left those principles at home and went to the tax-office and the voting-booths, and did his best to damage and undo his whole year's faithful and righteous work. i used to be an honest man, but i am crumbling--no, i have crumbled. when they assessed me at $ , a fortnight ago i went out and tried to borrow the money and couldn't. then when i found they were letting a whole crowd of millionaires live in new york at a third of the price they were charging me i was hurt, i was indignant, and said, this is the last feather. i am not going to run this town all by myself. in that moment--in that memorable moment, i began to crumble. in fifteen minutes the disintegration was complete. in fifteen minutes i was become just a mere moral sand-pile, and i lifted up my hand, along with those seasoned and experienced deacons, and swore off every rag of personal property i've got in the world. i had never heard him address a miscellaneous audience. it was marvelous to see how he convulsed it, and silenced it, and controlled it at will. he did not undertake any special pleading for the negro cause; he only prepared the way with cheerfulness. clemens and choate joined forces again, a few weeks later, at a great public meeting assembled in aid of the adult blind. helen keller was to be present, but she had fallen ill through overwork. she sent to clemens one of her beautiful letters, in which she said: i should be happy if i could have spelled into my hand the words as they fall from your lips, and receive, even as it is uttered, the eloquence of our newest ambassador to the blind. clemens, dictating the following morning, told of his first meeting with helen keller at a little gathering in lawrence hutton's home, when she was about the age of fourteen. it was an incident that invited no elaboration, and probably received none. henry rogers and i went together. the company had all assembled and had been waiting a while. the wonderful child arrived now with her about equally wonderful teacher, miss sullivan, and seemed quite well to recognize the character of her surroundings. she said, "oh, the books, the books, so many, many books. how lovely!" the guests were brought one after another. as she shook hands with each she took her hand away and laid her fingers lightly against miss sullivan's lips, who spoke against them the person's name. mr. howells seated himself by helen on the sofa, and she put her fingers against his lips and he told her a story of considerable length, and you could see each detail of it pass into her mind and strike fire there and throw the flash of it into her face. after a couple of hours spent very pleasantly some one asked if helen would remember the feel of the hands of the company after this considerable interval of time and be able to discriminate the hands and name the possessors of them. miss sullivan said, "oh, she will have no difficulty about that." so the company filed past, shook hands in turn, and with each hand-shake helen greeted the owner of the hand pleasantly and spoke the name that belonged to it without hesitation. by and by the assemblage proceeded to the dining-room and sat down to the luncheon. i had to go away before it was over, and as i passed by helen i patted her lightly on the head and passed on. miss sullivan called to me and said, "stop, mr. clemens, helen is distressed because she did not recognize your hand. won't you come back and do that again?" i went back and patted her lightly on the head, and she said at once, "oh, it's mr. clemens." perhaps some one can explain this miracle, but i have never been able to do it. could she feel the wrinkles in my hand through her hair? some one else must answer this. it was three years following this dictation that the mystery received a very simple and rather amusing solution. helen had come to pay a visit to mark twain's connecticut home, stormfield, then but just completed. he had met her, meantime, but it had not occurred to him before to ask her how she had recognized him that morning at hutton's, in what had seemed such a marvelous way. she remembered, and with a smile said: "i smelled you." which, after all, did not make the incident seem much less marvelous. on one of the mornings after miss hobby had gone clemens said: "a very curious thing has happened--a very large-sized-joke." he was shaving at the time, and this information came in brief and broken relays, suited to a performance of that sort. the reader may perhaps imagine the effect without further indication of it. "i was going on a yachting trip once, with henry rogers, when a reporter stopped me with the statement that mrs. astor had said that there had never been a gentleman in the white house, and he wanted me to give him my definition of a gentleman. i didn't give him my definition; but he printed it, just the same, in the afternoon paper. i was angry at first, and wanted to bring a damage suit. when i came to read the definition it was a satisfactory one, and i let it go. now to-day comes a letter and a telegram from a man who has made a will in missouri, leaving ten thousand dollars to provide tablets for various libraries in the state, on which shall be inscribed mark twain's definition of a gentleman. he hasn't got the definition--he has only heard of it, and he wants me to tell him in which one of my books or speeches he can find it. i couldn't think, when i read that letter, what in the nation the man meant, but shaving somehow has a tendency to release thought, and just now it all came to me." it was a situation full of amusing possibilities; but he reached no conclusion in the matter. another telegram was brought in just then, which gave a sadder aspect to his thought, for it said that his old coachman, patrick mcaleer, who had begun in the clemens service with the bride and groom of thirty-six years before, was very low, and could not survive more than a few days. this led him to speak of patrick, his noble and faithful nature, and how he always claimed to be in their service, even during their long intervals of absence abroad. clemens gave orders that everything possible should be done for patrick's comfort. when the end came, a few days later, he traveled to hartford to lay flowers on patrick's bier, and to serve, with patrick's friends --neighbor coachmen and john o'neill, the gardener--as pall-bearer, taking his allotted place without distinction or favor. it was the following sunday, at the majestic theater, in new york, that mark twain spoke to the young men's christian association. for several reasons it proved an unusual meeting. a large number of free tickets had been given out, far more than the place would hold; and, further, it had been announced that when the ticket-holders had been seated the admission would be free to the public. the subject chosen for the talk was "reminiscences." when we arrived the streets were packed from side to side for a considerable distance and a riot was in progress. a great crowd had swarmed about the place, and the officials, instead of throwing the doors wide and letting the theater fill up, regardless of tickets, had locked them. as a result there was a shouting, surging human mass that presently dashed itself against the entrance. windows and doors gave way, and there followed a wild struggle for entrance. a moment later the house was packed solid. a detachment of police had now arrived, and in time cleared the street. it was said that amid the tumult some had lost their footing and had been trampled and injured, but of this we did not learn until later. we had been taken somehow to a side entrance and smuggled into boxes.--[the paper next morning bore the head-lines: " , stampeded at the mark twain meeting. well-dressed men and women clubbed by police at majestic theater." in this account the paper stated that the crowd had collected an hour before the time for opening; that nothing of the kind had been anticipated and no police preparation had been made.] it was peaceful enough in the theater until mark twain appeared on the stage. he was wildly greeted, and when he said, slowly and seriously, "i thank you for this signal recognition of merit," there was a still noisier outburst. in the quiet that followed he began his memories, and went wandering along from one anecdote to another in the manner of his daily dictations. at last it seemed to occur to him, in view of the character of his audience, that he ought to close with something in the nature of counsel suited to young men. it is from experiences such as mine [he said] that we get our education of life. we string them into jewels or into tinware, as we may choose. i have received recently several letters asking for counsel or advice, the principal request being for some incident that may prove helpful to the young. it is my mission to teach, and i am always glad to furnish something. there have been a lot of incidents in my career to help me along--sometimes they helped me along faster than i wanted to go. he took some papers from his pocket and started to unfold one of them; then, as if remembering, he asked how long he had been talking. the answer came, "thirty-five minutes." he made as if to leave the stage, but the audience commanded him to go on. "all right," he said, "i can stand more of my own talk than any one i ever knew." opening one of the papers, a telegram, he read: "in which one of your works can we find the definition of a gentleman?" then he added: i have not answered that telegram. i couldn't. i never wrote any such definition, though it seems to me that if a man has just, merciful, and kindly instincts he would be a gentleman, for he would need nothing else in this world. he opened a letter. "from howells," he said. my old friend, william dean howells--howells, the head of american literature. no one is able to stand with him. he is an old, old friend of mine, and he writes me, "to-morrow i shall be sixty-nine years old." why, i am surprised at howells writing so. i have known him myself longer than that. i am sorry to see a man trying to appear so young. let's see. howells says now, "i see you have been burying patrick. i suppose he was old, too." the house became very still. most of them had read an account of mark twain's journey to hartford and his last service to his faithful servitor. the speaker's next words were not much above a whisper, but every syllable was distinct. no, he was never old-patrick. he came to us thirty-six years ago. he was our coachman from the day that i drove my young bride to our new home. he was a young irishman, slender, tall, lithe, honest, truthful, and he never changed in all his life. he really was with us but twenty-five years, for he did not go with us to europe; but he never regarded that a separation. as the children grew up he was their guide. he was all honor, honesty, and affection. he was with us in new hampshire last summer, and his hair was just as black, his eyes were just as blue, his form just as straight, and his heart just as good as on the day we first met. in all the long years patrick never made a mistake. he never needed an order; he never received a command. he knew. i have been asked for my idea of an ideal gentleman, and i give it to you--patrick mcaleer. it was the sort of thing that no one but mark twain has quite been able to do, and it was just that recognized quality behind it that had made crowds jam the street and stampede the entrance to be in his presence-to see him and to hear his voice. ccxli gorky, howells, and mark twain clemens was now fairly back again in the wash of banquets and speech-making that had claimed him on his return from england, five years before. he made no less than a dozen speeches altogether that winter, and he was continually at some feasting or other, where he was sure to be called upon for remarks. he fell out of the habit of preparing his addresses, relying upon the inspiration of the moment, merely following the procedure of his daily dictations, which had doubtless given him confidence for this departure from his earlier method. there was seldom an afternoon or an evening that he was not required, and seldom a morning that the papers did not have some report of his doings. once more, and in a larger fashion than ever, he had become "the belle of new york." but he was something further. an editorial in the evening mail said: mark twain, in his "last and best of life for which the first was made," seems to be advancing rapidly to a position which makes him a kind of joint aristides, solon, and themistocles of the american metropolis--an aristides for justness and boldness as well as incessancy of opinion, a solon for wisdom and cogency, and a themistocles for the democracy of his views and the popularity of his person. things have reached the point where, if mark twain is not at a public meeting or banquet, he is expected to console it with one of his inimitable letters of advice and encouragement. if he deigns to make a public appearance there is a throng at the doors which overtaxes the energy and ability of the police. we must be glad that we have a public commentator like mark twain always at hand and his wit and wisdom continually on tap. his sound, breezy mississippi valley americanism is a corrective to all sorts of snobbery. he cultivates respect for human rights by always making sure that he has his own. he talked one afternoon to the barnard girls, and another afternoon to the women's university club, illustrating his talk with what purported to be moral tales. he spoke at a dinner given to city tax commissioner mr. charles putzel; and when he was introduced there as the man who had said, "when in doubt tell the truth," he replied that he had invented that maxim for others, but that when in doubt himself, he used more sagacity. the speeches he made kept his hearers always in good humor; but he made them think, too, for there was always substance and sound reason and searching satire in the body of what he said. it was natural that there should be reporters calling frequently at mark twain's home, and now and then the place became a veritable storm-center of news. such a moment arrived when it became known that a public library in brooklyn had banished huck finn and tom sawyer from the children's room, presided over by a young woman of rather severe morals. the incident had begun in november of the previous year. one of the librarians, asa don dickinson, who had vigorously voted against the decree, wrote privately of the matter. clemens had replied: dear sir,--i am greatly troubled by what you say. i wrote tom sawyer & huck finn for adults exclusively, & it always distresses me when i find that boys & girls have been allowed access to them. the mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. i know this by my own experience, & to this day i cherish an unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated bible through before i was years old. none can do that and ever draw a clean, sweet breath again this side of the grave. ask that young lady--she will tell you so. most honestly do i wish that i could say a softening word or two in defense of huck's character since you wish it, but really, in my opinion, it is no better than those of solomon, david, & the rest of the sacred brotherhood. if there is an unexpurgated in the children's department, won't you please help that young woman remove tom & huck from that questionable companionship? sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. i shall not show your letter to any one-it is safe with me. mr. dickinson naturally kept this letter from the public, though he read it aloud to the assembled librarians, and the fact of its existence and its character eventually leaked out.--[it has been supplied to the writer by mr. dickinson, and is published here with his consent.]--one of the librarians who had heard it mentioned it at a theater-party in hearing of an unrealized newspaper man. this was near the end of the following march. the "tip" was sufficient. telephone-bells began to jingle, and groups of newspaper men gathered simultaneously on mr. dickinson's and on mark twain's door-steps. at a fifth avenue you could hardly get in or out, for stepping on them. the evening papers surmised details, and huck and tom had a perfectly fresh crop of advertising, not only in america, but in distant lands. dickinson wrote clemens that he would not give out the letter without his authority, and clemens replied: be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove! the newspaper boys want that letter--don't you let them get hold of it. they say you refuse to allow them to see it without my consent. keep on refusing, and i'll take care of this end of the line. in a recent letter to the writer mr. dickinson states that mark twain's solicitude was for the librarian, whom he was unwilling to involve in difficulties with his official superiors, and he adds: there may be some doubt as to whether mark twain was or was not a religious man, for there are many definitions of the word religion. he was certainly a hater of conventions, had no patience with sanctimony and bibliolatry, and was perhaps irreverent. but any one who reads carefully the description of the conflict in huck's soul, in regard to the betrayal of jim, will credit the creator of the scene with deep and true moral feeling. the reporters thinned out in the course of a few days when no result was forthcoming; but they were all back again presently when the maxim gorky fiasco came along. the distinguished revolutionist, tchaykoffsky, as a sort of advance agent for gorky, had already called upon clemens to enlist his sympathy in their mission, which was to secure funds in the cause of russian emancipation. clemens gave his sympathy, and now promised his aid, though he did not hesitate to discourage the mission. he said that american enthusiasm in such matters stopped well above their pockets, and that this revolutionary errand would fail. howells, too, was of this opinion. in his account of the episode he says: i told a valued friend of his and mine that i did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and i think now i set the figure too high. clemens's interest, however, grew. he attended a dinner given to gorky at the "a club," no. fifth avenue, and introduced gorky to the diners. also he wrote a letter to be read by tchaykoffsky at a meeting held at the grand central palace, where three thousand people gathered to hear this great revolutionist recite the story of russia's wrongs. the letter ran: dear mr. tchaykoffsky,--my sympathies are with the russian revolution, of course. it goes without saying. i hope it will succeed, and now that i have talked with you i take heart to believe it will. government by falsified promises, by lies, by treachery, and by the butcher-knife, for the aggrandizement of a single family of drones and its idle and vicious kin has been borne quite long enough in russia, i should think. and it is to be hoped that the roused nation, now rising in its strength, will presently put an end to it and set up the republic in its place. some of us, even the white-headed, may live to see the blessed day when tsars and grand dukes will be as scarce there as i trust they are in heaven. most sincerely yours, mark twain. clemens and howells called on gorky and agreed to figure prominently in a literary dinner to be given in his honor. the movement was really assuming considerable proportions, when suddenly something happened which caused it to flatten permanently, and rather ridiculously. arriving at fifth avenue, one afternoon, i met howells coming out. i thought he had an unhappy, hunted look. i went up to the study, and on opening the door i found the atmosphere semi-opaque with cigar smoke, and clemens among the drifting blue wreaths and layers, pacing up and down rather fiercely. he turned, inquiringly, as i entered. i had clipped a cartoon from a morning paper, which pictured him as upsetting the tsar's throne--the kind of thing he was likely to enjoy. i said: "here is something perhaps you may wish to see, mr. clemens." he shook his head violently. "no, i can't see anything now," and in another moment had disappeared into his own room. something extraordinary had happened. i wondered if, after all their lifelong friendship, he and howells had quarreled. i was naturally curious, but it was not a good time to investigate. by and by i went down on the street, where the newsboys were calling extras. when i had bought one, and glanced at the first page, i knew. gorky had been expelled from his hotel for having brought to america, as his wife, a woman not so recognized by the american laws. madame andreieva, a russian actress, was a leader in the cause of freedom, and by russian custom her relation with gorky was recognized and respected; but it was not sufficiently orthodox for american conventions, and it was certainly unfortunate that an apostle of high purpose should come handicapped in that way. apparently the news had already reached howells and clemens, and they had been feverishly discussing what was best to do about the dinner. within a day or two gorky and madame andreieva were evicted from a procession of hotels, and of course the papers rang with the head-lines. an army of reporters was chasing clemens and howells. the russian revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more intimate domestic interest. howells came again, the reporters following and standing guard at the door below. in 'my mark twain' he says: that was the moment of the great vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves in easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then "blowing a cone off," as the telegraphic phrase was. the roof of the great market in naples had just broken in under its load of ashes and cinders, and crushed hundreds of people; and we asked each other if we were not sorry we had not been there, where the pressure would have been far less terrific than it was with us in fifth avenue. the forbidden butler came up with a message that there were some gentlemen below who wanted to see clemens. "how many?" he demanded. "five," the butler faltered. "reporters?" the butler feigned uncertainty. "what would you do?" he asked me. "i wouldn't see them," i said, and then clemens went directly down to them. how or by what means he appeased their voracity i cannot say, but i fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless enough. they went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant satisfaction with having seen them. it is not quite clear at this time just what word was sent to gorky but the matter must have been settled that night, for clemens was in a fine humor next morning. it was before dictation time, and he came drifting into the study and began at once to speak of the dinner and the impossibility of its being given now. then he said: "american public opinion is a delicate fabric. it shrivels like the webs of morning at the lightest touch." later in the day he made this memorandum: laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment. the penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted just the same. certainly, then, there can be but one wise thing for a visiting stranger to do--find out what the country's customs are and refrain from offending against them. the efforts which have been made in gorky's justification are entitled to all respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back of them, but i think that the ink was wasted. custom is custom: it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts, seasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon gibraltar.--[to dan beard he said, "gorky made an awful mistake, dan. he might as well have come over here in his shirt-tail."] the gorky disturbance had hardly begun to subside when there came another upheaval that snuffed it out completely. on the afternoon of the th of april i heard, at the players, a wandering telephonic rumor that a great earthquake was going on in san francisco. half an hour later, perhaps, i met clemens coming out of no. . he asked: "have you heard the news about san francisco?" i said i had heard a rumor of an earthquake; and had seen an extra with big scare-heads; but i supposed the matter was exaggerated. "no," he said, "i am afraid it isn't. we have just had a telephone message that it is even worse than at first reported. a great fire is consuming the city. come along to the news-stand and we'll see if there is a later edition." we walked to sixth avenue and eighth street and got some fresh extras. the news was indeed worse, than at first reported. san francisco was going to destruction. clemens was moved deeply, and began to recall this old friend and that whose lives and property might be in danger. he spoke of joe goodman and the gillis families, and pictured conditions in the perishing city. ccxlii mark twain's good-by to the platform it was on april , , the day following the great earthquake, that mark twain gave a "farewell lecture" at carnegie hall for the benefit of the robert fulton memorial association. some weeks earlier gen. frederick d. grant, its president, had proposed to pay one thousand dollars for a mark twain lecture; but clemens' had replied that he was permanently out of the field, and would never again address any audience that had to pay to hear him. "i always expect to talk as long as i can get people to listen to me," he sand, "but i never again expect to charge for it." later came one of his inspirations, and he wrote: "i will lecture for one thousand dollars, on one condition: that it will be understood to be my farewell lecture, and that i may contribute the thousand dollars to the fulton association." it was a suggestion not to be discouraged, and the bills and notices, "mark twain's farewell lecture," were published without delay. i first heard of the matter one afternoon when general grant had called. clemens came into the study where i was working; he often wandered in and out-sometimes without a word, sometimes to relieve himself concerning things in general. but this time he suddenly chilled me by saying: "i'm going to deliver my farewell lecture, and i want you to appear on the stage and help me." i feebly expressed my pleasure at the prospect. then he said: "i am going to lecture on fulton--on the story of his achievements. it will be a burlesque, of course, and i am going to pretend to forget my facts, and i want you to sit there in a chair. now and then, when i seem to get stuck, i'll lean over and pretend to ask you some thing, and i want you to pretend to prompt me. you don't need to laugh, or to pretend to be assisting in the performance any more than just that." handbill of mark twain's "farewell lecture": mark twain will deliver his farewell lecture --------------------------------- carnegie hall april th, for the benefit of robert fulton memorial association military organization old guard in full dress uniform will be present music by old guard band tickets and boxes on sale at carnegie hall and waldorf-astoria seats $ . , $ . , cents it was not likely that i should laugh. i had a sinking feeling in the cardiac region which does not go with mirth. it did not for the moment occur to me that the stage would be filled with eminent citizens and vice-presidents, and i had a vision of myself sitting there alone in the chair in that wide emptiness, with the chief performer directing attention to me every other moment or so, for perhaps an hour. let me hurry on to say that it did not happen. i dare say he realized my unfitness for the work, and the far greater appropriateness of conferring the honor on general grant, for in the end he gave him the assignment, to my immeasurable relief. it was a magnificent occasion. that spacious hall was hung with bunting, the stage was banked and festooned with decoration of every sort. general grant, surrounded by his splendidly uniformed staff, sat in the foreground, and behind was ranged a levee of foremost citizens of the republic. the band played "america" as mark twain entered, and the great audience rose and roared out its welcome. some of those who knew him best had hoped that on this occasion of his last lecture he would tell of that first appearance in san francisco, forty years before, when his fortunes had hung in the balance. perhaps he did not think of it, and no one had had the courage to suggest it. at all events, he did a different thing. he began by making a strong plea for the smitten city where the flames were still raging, urging prompt help for those who had lost not only their homes, but the last shred of their belongings and their means of livelihood. then followed his farcical history of fulton, with general grant to make the responses, and presently he drifted into the kind of lecture he had given so often in his long trip around the world-retelling the tales which had won him fortune and friends in many lands. i do not know whether the entertainment was long or short. i think few took account of time. to a letter of inquiry as to how long the entertainment would last, he had replied: i cannot say for sure. it is my custom to keep on talking till i get the audience cowed. sometimes it takes an hour and fifteen minutes, sometimes i can do it in an hour. there was no indication at any time that the audience was cowed. the house was packed, and the applause was so recurrent and continuous that often his voice was lost to those in its remoter corners. it did not matter. the tales were familiar to his hearers; merely to see mark twain, in his old age and in that splendid setting, relating them was enough. the audience realized that it was witnessing the close of a heroic chapter in a unique career. ccxliii an investment in redding many of the less important happenings seem worth remembering now. among them was the sale, at the nast auction, of the mark twain letters, already mentioned. the fact that these letters brought higher prices than any others offered in this sale was gratifying. roosevelt, grant, and even lincoln items were sold; but the mark twain letters led the list. one of them sold for forty-three dollars, which was said to be the highest price ever paid for the letter of a living man. it was the letter written in , quoted earlier in this work, in which clemens proposed the lecture tour to nast. none of the clemens-nast letters brought less than twenty-seven dollars, and some of them were very brief. it was a new measurement of public sentiment. clemens, when he heard of it, said: "i can't rise to general grant's lofty place in the estimation of this country; but it is a deep satisfaction to me to know that when it comes to letter-writing he can't sit in the front seat along with me. that forty-three-dollar letter ought to be worth as much as eighty-six dollars after i'm dead." a perpetual string of callers came to fifth avenue, and it kept the secretary busy explaining to most of them why mark twain could not entertain their propositions, or listen to their complaints, or allow them to express in person their views on public questions. he did see a great many of what might be called the milder type persons who were evidently sincere and not too heavily freighted with eloquence. of these there came one day a very gentle-spoken woman who had promised that she would stay but a moment, and say no more than a few words, if only she might sit face to face with the great man. it was in the morning hour before the dictations, and he received her, quite correctly clad in his beautiful dressing-robe and propped against his pillows. she kept her contract to the letter; but when she rose to go she said, in a voice of deepest reverence: "may i kiss your hand?" it was a delicate situation, and might easily have been made ludicrous. denial would have hurt her. as it was, he lifted his hand, a small, exquisite hand it was, with the gentle dignity and poise of a king, and she touched her lips to it with what was certainly adoration. then, as she went, she said: "how god must love you!" "i hope so," he said, softly, and he did not even smile; but after she had gone he could not help saying, in a quaint, half-pathetic voice "i guess she hasn't heard of our strained relations." sitting in that royal bed, clad in that rich fashion, he easily conveyed the impression of royalty, and watching him through those marvelous mornings he seemed never less than a king, as indeed he was--the king of a realm without national boundaries. some of those nearest to him fell naturally into the habit of referring to him as "the king," and in time the title crept out of the immediate household and was taken up by others who loved him. he had been more than once photographed in his bed; but it was by those who had come and gone in a brief time, with little chance to study his natural attitudes. i had acquired some knowledge of the camera, and i obtained his permission to let me photograph him--a permission he seldom denied to any one. we had no dictations on saturdays, and i took the pictures on one of these holiday mornings. he was so patient and tractable, and so natural in every attitude, that it was a delight to make the negatives. i was afraid he would become impatient, and made fewer exposures than i might otherwise have done. i think he expected very little from this amateur performance; but, by that happy element of accident which plays so large a part in photographic success, the results were better than i had hoped for. when i brought him the prints, a few days later, he expressed pleasure and asked, "why didn't you make more?" among them was one in an attitude which had grown so familiar to us, that of leaning over to get his pipe from the smoking-table, and this seemed to give him particular satisfaction. it being a holiday, he had not donned his dressing-gown, which on the whole was well for the photographic result. he spoke of other pictures that had been made of him, especially denouncing one photograph, taken some twenty years before by sarony, a picture, as he said, of a gorilla in an overcoat, which the papers and magazines had insisted on using ever since. "sarony was as enthusiastic about wild animals as he was about photography, and when du chaillu brought over the first gorilla he sent for me to look at it and see if our genealogy was straight. i said it was, and sarony was so excited that i had recognized the resemblance between us, that he wanted to make it more complete, so he borrowed my overcoat and put it on the gorilla and photographed it, and spread that picture out over the world as mine. it turns up every week in some newspaper or magazine; but it's not my favorite; i have tried to get it suppressed." mark twain made his first investment in redding that spring. i had located there the autumn before, and bought a vacant old house, with a few acres of land, at what seemed a modest price. i was naturally enthusiastic over the bargain, and the beauty and salubrity of the situation. his interest was aroused, and when he learned that there was a place adjoining, equally reasonable and perhaps even more attractive, he suggested immediately that i buy it for him; and he wanted to write a check then for the purchase price, for fear the opportunity might be lost. i think there was then no purpose in his mind of building a country home; but he foresaw that such a site, at no great distance from new york, would become more valuable, and he had plenty of idle means. the purchase was made without difficulty--a tract of seventy-five acres, to which presently was added another tract of one hundred and ten acres, and subsequently still other parcels of land, to complete the ownership of the hilltop, for it was not long until he had conceived the idea of a home. he was getting weary of the heavy pressure of city life. he craved the retirement of solitude--one not too far from the maelstrom, so that he might mingle with it now and then when he chose. the country home would not be begun for another year yet, but the purpose of it was already in the air. no one of the family had at this time seen the location. ccxliv traits and philosophies i brought to the dictation one morning the omar khayyam card which twichell had written him so long ago; i had found it among the letters. it furnished him a subject for that morning. he said: how strange there was a time when i had never heard of omar khayyam! when that card arrived i had already read the dozen quatrains or so in the morning paper, and was still steeped in the ecstasy of delight which they occasioned. no poem had ever given me so much pleasure before, and none has given me so much pleasure since. it is the only poem i have ever carried about with me. it has not been from under my hand all these years. he had no general fondness for poetry; but many poems appealed to him, and on occasion he liked to read them aloud. once, during the dictation, some verses were sent up by a young authoress who was waiting below for his verdict. the lines pictured a phase of negro life, and she wished to know if he thought them worthy of being read at some tuskegee ceremony. he did not fancy the idea of attending to the matter just then and said: "tell her she can read it. she has my permission. she may commit any crime she wishes in my name." it was urged that the verses were of high merit and the author a very charming young lady. "i'm very glad," he said, "and i am glad the lord made her; i hope he will make some more just like her. i don't always approve of his handiwork, but in this case i do." then suddenly he added: "well, let me see it--no time like the present to get rid of these things." he took the manuscript and gave such a rendition of those really fine verses as i believe could not be improved upon. we were held breathless by his dramatic fervor and power. he returned a message to that young aspirant that must have made her heart sing. when the dictation had ended that day, i mentioned his dramatic gift. "yes," he said, "it is a gift, i suppose, like spelling and punctuation and smoking. i seem to have inherited all those." continuing, he spoke of inherited traits in general. "there was paige," he said; "an ignorant man who could not make a machine himself that would stand up, nor draw the working plans for one; but he invented the eighteen thousand details of the most wonderful machine the world has ever known. he watched over the expert draftsmen, and superintended the building of that marvel. pratt & whitney built it; but it was paige's machine, nevertheless--the child of his marvelous gift. we don't create any of our traits; we inherit all of them. they have come down to us from what we impudently call the lower animals. man is the last expression, and combines every attribute of the animal tribes that preceded him. one or two conspicuous traits distinguish each family of animals from the others, and those one or two traits are found in every member of each family, and are so prominent as to eternally and unchangeably establish the character of that branch of the animal world. in these cases we concede that the several temperaments constitute a law of god, a command of god, and that whatsoever is done in obedience to that law is blameless. man, in his evolution, inherited the whole sum of these numerous traits, and with each trait its share of the law of god. he widely differs from them in this: that he possesses not a single characteristic that is equally prominent in each member of his race. you can say the housefly is limitlessly brave, and in saying it you describe the whole house-fly tribe; you can say the rabbit is limitlessly timid, and by the phrase you describe the whole rabbit tribe; you can say the spider and the tiger are limitlessly murderous, and by that phrase you describe the whole spider and tiger tribes; you can say the lamb is limitlessly innocent and sweet and gentle, and by that phrase you describe all the lambs. there is hardly a creature that you cannot definitely and satisfactorily describe by one single trait--except man. men are not all cowards like the rabbit, nor all brave like the house-fly, nor all sweet and innocent and gentle like the lamb, nor all murderous like the spider and the tiger and the wasp, nor all thieves like the fox and the bluejay, nor all vain like the peacock, nor all frisky like the monkey. these things are all in him somewhere, and they develop according to the proportion of each he received in his allotment: we describe a man by his vicious traits and condemn him; or by his fine traits and gifts, and praise him and accord him high merit for their possession. it is comical. he did not invent these things; he did not stock himself with them. god conferred them upon him in the first instant of creation. they constitute the law, and he could not escape obedience to the decree any more than paige could have built the type-setter he invented, or the pratt & whitney machinists could have invented the machine which they built." he liked to stride up and down, smoking as he talked, and generally his words were slowly measured, with varying pauses between them. he halted in the midst of his march, and without a suggestion of a smile added: "what an amusing creature the human being is!" it is absolutely impossible, of course, to preserve the atmosphere and personality of such talks as this--the delicacies of his speech and manner which carried an ineffable charm. it was difficult, indeed, to record the substance. i did not know shorthand, and i should not have taken notes at such times in any case; but i had trained myself in similar work to preserve, with a fair degree of accuracy, the form of phrase, and to some extent its wording, if i could get hold of pencil and paper soon enough afterward. in time i acquired a sort of phonographic faculty; though it always seemed to me that the bouquet, the subtleness of speech, was lacking in the result. sometimes, indeed, he would dictate next morning the substance of these experimental reflections; or i would find among his papers memoranda and fragmentary manuscripts where he had set them down himself, either before or after he had tried them verbally. in these cases i have not hesitated to amend my notes where it seemed to lend reality to his utterance, though, even so, there is always lacking--and must be--the wonder of his personality. ccxlv in the day's round a number of dictations of this period were about susy, her childhood, and the biography she had written of him, most of which he included in his chapters. more than once after such dictations he reproached himself bitterly for the misfortunes of his house. he consoled himself a little by saying that susy had died at the right time, in the flower of youth and happiness; but he blamed himself for the lack of those things which might have made her childhood still more bright. once he spoke of the biography she had begun, and added: "oh, i wish i had paid more attention to that little girl's work! if i had only encouraged her now and then, what it would have meant to her, and what a beautiful thing it would have been to have had her story of me told in her own way, year after year! if i had shown her that i cared, she might have gone on with it. we are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time nor the interest they deserve. we lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift-our personal association, which means so much to them-we give grudgingly and throw it away on those who care for it so little." then, after a moment of silence: "but we are repaid for it at last. there comes a time when we want their company and their interest. we want it more than anything in the world, and we are likely to be starved for it, just as they were starved so long ago. there is no appreciation of my books that is so precious to me as appreciation from my children. theirs is the praise we want, and the praise we are least likely to get." his moods of remorse seemed to overwhelm him at times. he spoke of henry's death and little langdon's, and charged himself with both. he declared that for years he had filled mrs. clemens's life with privations, that the sorrow of susy's death had hastened her own end. how darkly he painted it! one saw the jester, who for forty years had been making the world laugh, performing always before a background of tragedy. but such moods were evanescent. he was oftener gay than somber. one morning before we settled down to work he related with apparent joy how he had made a failure of story-telling at a party the night before. an artist had told him a yarn, he said, which he had considered the most amusing thing in the world. but he had not been satisfied with it, and had attempted to improve on it at the party. he had told it with what he considered the nicest elaboration of detail and artistic effect, and when he had concluded and expected applause, only a sickening silence had followed. "a crowd like that can make a good deal of silence when they combine," he said, "and it probably lasted as long as ten seconds, because it seemed an hour and a half. then a lady said, with evident feeling, 'lord, how pathetic!' for a moment i was stupefied. then the fountains of my great deeps were broken up, and i rained laughter for forty days and forty nights during as much as three minutes. by that time i realized it was my fault. i had overdone the thing. i started in to deceive them with elaborate burlesque pathos, in order to magnify the humorous explosion at the end; but i had constructed such a fog of pathos that when i got to the humor you couldn't find it." he was likely to begin the morning with some such incident which perhaps he did not think worth while to include in his dictations, and sometimes he interrupted his dictations to relate something aside, or to outline some plan or scheme which his thought had suggested. once, when he was telling of a magazine he had proposed to start, the back number, which was, to contain reprints of exciting events from history--newspaper gleanings--eye-witness narrations, which he said never lost their freshness of interest--he suddenly interrupted himself to propose that we start such a magazine in the near future--he to be its publisher and i its editor. i think i assented, and the dictation proceeded, but the scheme disappeared permanently. he usually had a number of clippings or slips among the many books on the bed beside him from which he proposed to dictate each day, but he seldom could find the one most needed. once, after a feverishly impatient search for a few moments, he invited miss hobby to leave the room temporarily, so, as he said, that he might swear. he got up and we began to explore the bed, his profanity increasing amazingly with each moment. it was an enormously large bed, and he began to disparage the size of it. "one could lose a dog in this bed," he declared. finally i suggested that he turn over the clipping which he had in his hand. he did so, and it proved to be the one he wanted. its discovery was followed by a period of explosions, only half suppressed as to volume. then he said: "there ought to be a room in this house to swear in. it's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that." a moment later, when miss hobby returned, he was serene and happy again. he was usually gentle during the dictations, and patient with those around him--remarkably so, i thought, as a rule. but there were moments that involved risk. he had requested me to interrupt his dictation at any time that i found him repeating or contradicting himself, or misstating some fact known to me. at first i hesitated to do this, and cautiously mentioned the matter when he had finished. then he was likely to say: "why didn't you stop me? why did you let me go on making a jackass of myself when you could have saved me?" so then i used to take the risk of getting struck by lightning, and nearly always stopped him at the time. but if it happened that i upset his thought the thunderbolt was apt to fly. he would say: "now you've knocked everything out of my head." then, of course, i would apologize and say i was sorry, which would rectify matters, though half an hour later it might happen again. i became lightning-proof at last; also i learned better to select the psychological moment for the correction. there was a humorous complexion to the dictations which perhaps i have not conveyed to the reader at all; humor was his natural breath and life, and was not wholly absent in his most somber intervals. but poetry was there as well. his presence was full of it: the grandeur of his figure; the grace of his movement; the music of his measured speech. sometimes there were long pauses when he was wandering in distant valleys of thought and did not speak at all. at such times he had a habit of folding and refolding the sleeve of his dressing-gown around his wrist, regarding it intently, as it seemed. his hands were so fair and shapely; the palms and finger-tips as pink as those of a child. then when he spoke he was likely to fling back his great, white mane, his eyes half closed yet showing a gleam of fire between the lids, his clenched fist lifted, or his index-finger pointing, to give force and meaning to his words. i cannot recall the picture too often, or remind myself too frequently how precious it was to be there, and to see him and to hear him. i do not know why i have not said before that he smoked continually during these dictations--probably as an aid to thought --though he smoked at most other times, for that matter. his cigars were of that delicious fragrance which characterizes domestic tobacco; but i had learned early to take refuge in another brand when he offered me one. they were black and strong and inexpensive, and it was only his early training in the printing-office and on the river that had seasoned him to tobacco of that temper. rich, admiring friends used to send him quantities of expensive imported cigars; but he seldom touched them, and they crumbled away or were smoked by visitors. once, to a minister who proposed to send him something very special, he wrote: i should accept your hospitable offer at once but for the fact that i couldn't do it and remain honest. that is to say, if i allowed you to send me what you believed to be good cigars it would distinctly mean that i meant to smoke them, whereas i should do nothing of the kind. i know a good cigar better than you do, for i have had years' experience. no, that is not what i mean; i mean i know a bad cigar better than anybody else. i judge by the price only; if it costs above cents i know it to be either foreign or half foreign & unsmokable--by me. i have many boxes of havana cigars, of all prices from cents apiece up to $ . apiece; i bought none of them, they were all presents; they are an accumulation of several years. i have never smoked one of them & never shall; i work them off on the visitor. you shall have a chance when you come. he smoked a pipe a good deal, and he preferred it to be old and violent; and once, when he had bought a new, expensive english brier-root he regarded it doubtfully for a time, and then handed it over to me, saying: "i'd like to have you smoke that a year or two, and when it gets so you can't stand it, maybe it will suit me." i am happy to add that subsequently he presented me with the pipe altogether, for it apparently never seemed to get qualified for his taste, perhaps because the tobacco used was too mild. one day, after the dictation, word was brought up that a newspaper man was down-stairs who wished to see him concerning a report that chauncey depew was to resign his senatorial seat and mark twain was to be nominated in his place. the fancy of this appealed to him, and the reporter was allowed to come up. he was a young man, and seemed rather nervous, and did not wish to state where the report had originated. his chief anxiety was apparently to have mark twain's comment on the matter. clemens said very little at the time. he did not wish to be a senator; he was too busy just now dictating biography, and added that he didn't think he would care for the job, anyway. when the reporter was gone, however, certain humorous possibilities developed. the senatorship would be a stepping-stone to the presidency, and with the combination of humorist, socialist, and peace-patriot in the presidential chair the nation could expect an interesting time. nothing further came of the matter. there was no such report. the young newspaper man had invented the whole idea to get a "story" out of mark twain. the item as printed next day invited a good deal of comment, and collier's weekly made it a text for an editorial on his mental vigor and general fitness for the place. if it happened that he had no particular engagement for the afternoon, he liked to walk out, especially when the pleasant weather came. sometimes we walked up fifth avenue, and i must admit that for a good while i could not get rid of a feeling of self-consciousness, for most people turned to look, though i was fully aware that i did not in the least come into their scope of vision. they saw only mark twain. the feeling was a more comfortably one at the players, where we sometimes went for luncheon, for the acquaintance there and the democracy of that institution had a tendency to eliminate contrasts and incongruities. we sat at the round table among those good fellows who were always so glad to welcome him. once we went to the "music master," that tender play of charles klein's, given by that matchless interpreter, david warfield. clemens was fascinated, and said more than once: "it is as permanent as 'rip van winkle.' warfield, like jefferson, can go on playing it all his life." we went behind when it was over, and i could see that warfield glowed with mark twain's unstinted approval. later, when i saw him at the players, he declared that no former compliment had ever made him so happy. there were some billiard games going on between the champions hoppe and sutton, at the madison square garden, and clemens, with his eager fondness for the sport, was anxious to attend them. he did not like to go anywhere alone, and one evening he invited me to accompany him. just as he stepped into the auditorium there was a vigorous round of applause. the players stopped, somewhat puzzled, for no especially brilliant shot had been made. then they caught the figure of mark twain and realized that the game, for the moment, was not the chief attraction. the audience applauded again, and waved their handkerchiefs. such a tribute is not often paid to a private citizen. clemens had a great admiration for the young champion hoppe, which the billiardist's extreme youth and brilliancy invited, and he watched his game with intense eagerness. when it was over the referee said a few words and invited mark twain to speak. he rose and told them a story-probably invented on the instant. he said: "once in nevada i dropped into a billiard-room casually, and picked up a cue and began to knock the balls around. the proprietor, who was a red-haired man, with such hair as i have never seen anywhere except on a torch, asked me if i would like to play. i said, 'yes.' he said, 'knock the balls around a little and let me see how you can shoot.' so i knocked them around, and thought i was doing pretty well, when he said, 'that's all right; i'll play you left-handed.' it hurt my pride, but i played him. we banked for the shot and he won it. then he commenced to play, and i commenced to chalk my cue to get ready to play, and he went on playing, and i went on chalking my cue; and he played and i chalked all through that game. when he had run his string out i said: "that's wonderful! perfectly wonderful! if you can play that way left-handed what could you do right-handed?' "'couldn't do anything,' he said. 'i'm a left-handed man.'" how it delighted them! i think it was the last speech of any sort he made that season. a week or two later he went to dublin, new hampshire, for the summer--this time to the upton house, which had been engaged a year before, the copley greene place being now occupied by its owner. ccxlvi the second summer at dublin the upton house stands on the edge of a beautiful beech forest some two or three miles from dublin, just under monadnock--a good way up the slope. it is a handsome, roomy frame-house, and had a long colonnaded veranda overlooking one of the most beautiful landscape visions on the planet: lake, forest, hill, and a far range of blue mountains--all the handiwork of god is there. i had seen these things in paintings, but i had not dreamed that such a view really existed. the immediate foreground was a grassy slope, with ancient, blooming apple-trees; and just at the right hand monadnock rose, superb and lofty, sloping down to the panorama below that stretched away, taking on an ever deeper blue, until it reached that remote range on which the sky rested and the world seemed to end. it was a masterpiece of the greater mind, and of the highest order, perhaps, for it had in it nothing of the touch of man. a church spire glinted here and there, but there was never a bit of field, or stone wall, or cultivated land. it was lonely; it was unfriendly; it cared nothing whatever for humankind; it was as if god, after creating all the world, had wrought his masterwork here, and had been so engrossed with the beauty of it that he had forgotten to give it a soul. in a sense this was true, for he had not made the place suitable for the habitation of men. it lacked the human touch; the human interest, and i could never quite believe in its reality. the time of arrival heightened this first impression. it was mid-may and the lilacs were prodigally in bloom; but the bright sunlight was chill and unnatural, and there was a west wind that laid the grass flat and moaned through the house, and continued as steadily as if it must never stop from year's end to year's end. it seemed a spectral land, a place of supernatural beauty. warm, still, languorous days would come, but that first feeling of unreality would remain permanent. i believe jean clemens was the only one who ever really loved the place. something about it appealed to her elemental side and blended with her melancholy moods. she dressed always in white, and she was tall and pale and classically beautiful, and she was often silent, like a spirit. she had a little retreat for herself farther up the mountain-side, and spent most of her days there wood-carving, which was her chief diversion. clara clemens did not come to the place at all. she was not yet strong, and went to norfolk, connecticut, where she could still be in quiet retirement and have her physician's care. miss hobby came, and on the st of may the dictations were resumed. we began in his bedroom, as before, but the feeling there was depressing--the absence of the great carved bed and other furnishings, which had been so much a part of the picture, was felt by all of us. nothing of the old luxury and richness was there. it was a summer-furnished place, handsome but with the customary bareness. at the end of this first session he dressed in his snowy flannels, which he had adopted in the place of linen for summer wear, and we descended to the veranda and looked out over that wide, wonderful expanse of scenery. "i think i shall like it," he said, "when i get acquainted with it, and get it classified and labeled, and i think we'll do our dictating out here hereafter. it ought to be an inspiring place." so the dictations were transferred to the long veranda, and he was generally ready for them, a white figure pacing up and down before that panoramic background. during the earlier, cooler weeks he usually continued walking with measured step during the dictations, pausing now and then to look across the far-lying horizon. when it stormed we moved into the great living-room, where at one end there was a fireplace with blazing logs, and at the other the orchestrelle, which had once more been freighted up those mountain heights for the comfort of its harmonies. sometimes, when the wind and rain were beating outside, and he was striding up and down the long room within, with only the blurred shapes of mountains and trees outlined through the trailing rain, the feeling of the unreality became so strong that it was hard to believe that somewhere down below, beyond the rain and the woods, there was a literal world--a commonplace world, where the ordinary things of life were going on in the usual way. when the dictation finished early, there would be music--the music that he loved most--beethoven's symphonies, or the schubert impromptu, or the sonata by chopin.--[schubert, op. , no. ; chopin, op. , no. .]--it is easy to understand that this carried one a remove farther from the customary things of life. it was a setting far out of the usual, though it became that unique white figure and his occupation. in my notes, made from day to day, i find that i have set down more than once an impression of the curious unreality of the place and its surroundings, which would show that it was not a mere passing fancy. i had lodgings in the village, and drove out mornings for the dictations, but often came out again afoot on pleasant afternoons; for he was not much occupied with social matters, and there was opportunity for quiet, informing interviews. there was a woods path to the upton place, and it was a walk through a fairyland. a part of the way was through such a growth of beech timber as i have never seen elsewhere: tall, straight, mottled trees with an undergrowth of laurel, the sunlight sifting through; one found it easy to expect there storybook ladies, wearing crowns and green mantles, riding on white palfreys. then came a more open way, an abandoned grass-grown road full of sunlight and perfume; and this led to a dim, religious place, a natural cathedral, where the columns were stately pine-trees branching and meeting at the top: a veritable temple in which it always seemed that music was about to play. you crossed a brook and climbed a little hill, and pushed through a hedge into a place more open, and the house stood there among the trees. the days drifted along, one a good deal like another, except, as the summer deepened, the weather became warmer, the foliage changed, a drowsy haze gathered along the valleys and on the mountain-side. he sat more often now in a large rocking-chair, and generally seemed to be looking through half-dosed lids toward the monadnock heights, that were always changing in aspect-in color and in form--as cloud shapes drifted by or gathered in those lofty hollows. white and yellow butterflies hovered over the grass, and there were some curious, large black ants--the largest i have ever seen and quite harmless--that would slip in and out of the cracks on the veranda floor, wholly undisturbed by us. now and then a light flutter of wind would come murmuring up from the trees below, and when the apple-bloom was falling there would be a whirl of white and pink petals that seemed a cloud of smaller butterflies. on june st i find in my note-book this entry: warm and pleasant. the dictation about grant continues; a great privilege to hear this foremost man, of letters review his associations with that foremost man of arms. he remained seated today, dressed in white as usual, a large yellow pansy in his buttonhole, his white hair ruffled by the breeze. he wears his worn morocco slippers with black hose; sits in the rocker, smoking and looking out over the hazy hills, delivering his sentences with a measured accuracy that seldom calls for change. he is speaking just now of a grant dinner which he attended where depew spoke. one is impressed with the thought that we are looking at and listening to the war-worn veteran of a thousand dinners--the honored guest of many; an honored figure of all. earlier, when he had been chastising some old offender, he added, "however, he's dead, and i forgive him." then, after a moment's reflection, "no; strike that last sentence out." when we laughed, he added, "we can't forgive him yet." a few days later--it was june th, the day before the second anniversary of the death of mrs. clemens--we found him at first in excellent humor from the long dictation of the day before. then his mind reverted to the tragedy of the season, and he began trying to tell of it. it was hard work. he walked back and forth in the soft sunlight, saying almost nothing. he gave it up at last, remarking, "we will not work to-morrow." so we went away. he did not dictate on the th or the th, but on the th he resumed the story of mrs. clemens's last days at florence. the weather had changed: the sunlight and warmth had all gone; a chill, penetrating mist was on the mountains; monadnock was blotted out. we expected him to go to the fire, but evidently he could not bear being shut in with that subject in his mind. a black cape was brought out and thrown about his shoulders, which seemed to fit exactly into the somberness of the picture. for two hours or more we sat there in the gloom and chill, while he paced up and down, detailing as graphically as might be that final chapter in the life of the woman he had loved. it is hardly necessary to say that beyond the dictation clemens did very little literary work during these months. he had brought his "manuscript trunk" as usual, thinking, perhaps, to finish the "microbe" story and other of the uncompleted things; but the dictation gave him sufficient mental exercise, and he did no more than look over his "stock in trade," as he called it, and incorporate a few of the finished manuscripts into "autobiography." among these were the notes of his trip down the rhone, made in , and the old stormfield story, which he had been treasuring and suppressing so long. he wrote howells in june: the dictating goes lazily and pleasantly on. with intervals. i find that i've been at it, off & on, nearly two hours for days since january . to be exact, i've dictated hours in days & loafed days. i've added , words in the month that i've been here; which indicates that i've dictated during days of that time-- hours, at an average of , words an hour. it's a plenty, & i'm satisfied. there's a good deal of "fat." i've dictated (from january ) , words, & the "fat" adds about , more. the "fat" is old pigeonholed things of the years gone by which i or editors didn't das't to print. for instance, i am dumping in the little old book which i read to you in hartford about years ago & which you said "publish & ask dean stanley to furnish an introduction; he'll do it" (captain stormfield's visit to heaven). it reads quite to suit me without altering a word now that it isn't to see print until i am dead. to-morrow i mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs & assigns burned alive if they venture to print it this side of a.d. --which i judge they won't. there'll be lots of such chapters if i live or years longer. the edition of a.d. will make a stir when it comes out. i shall be hovering around taking notice, along with other dead pals. you are invited. the chapter which was to invite death at the stake for his successors was naturally one of religious heresies a violent attack on the orthodox, scriptural god, but really an expression of the highest reverence for the god which, as he said, had created the earth and sky and the music of the constellations. mark twain once expressed himself concerning reverence and the lack of it: "i was never consciously and purposely irreverent in my life, yet one person or another is always charging me with a lack of reverence. reverence for what--for whom? who is to decide what ought to command my reverence--my neighbor or i? i think i ought to do the electing myself. the mohammedan reveres mohammed--it is his privilege; the christian doesn't--apparently that is his privilege; the account is square enough. they haven't any right to complain of the other, yet they do complain of each other, and that is where the unfairness comes in. each says that the other is irreverent, and both are mistaken, for manifestly you can't have reverence for a thing that doesn't command it. if you could do that you could digest what you haven't eaten, and do other miracles and get a reputation." he was not reading many books at this time--he was inclined rather to be lazy, as he said, and to loaf during the afternoons; but i remember that he read aloud 'after the wedding' and 'the mother'--those two beautiful word-pictures by howells--which he declared sounded the depths of humanity with a deep-sea lead. also he read a book by william allen white, 'in our town', a collection of tales that he found most admirable. i think he took the trouble to send white a personal, hand-written letter concerning them, although, with the habit of dictation, he had begun, as he said, to "loathe the use of the pen." there were usually some sort of mild social affairs going on in the neighborhood, luncheons and afternoon gatherings like those of the previous year, though he seems to have attended fewer of them, for he did not often leave the house. once, at least, he assisted in an afternoon entertainment at the dublin club, where he introduced his invention of the art of making an impromptu speech, and was assisted in its demonstration by george de forest brush and joseph lindon smith, to the very great amusement of a crowd of summer visitors. the "art" consisted mainly of having on hand a few reliable anecdotes and a set formula which would lead directly to them from any given subject. twice or more he collected the children of the neighborhood for charades and rehearsed them, and took part in the performance, as in the hartford days. sometimes he drove out or took an extended walk. but these things were seldom. now and then during the summer he made a trip to new york of a semi-business nature, usually going by the way of fairhaven, where he would visit for a few days, journeying the rest of the way in mr. rogers's yacht. once they made a cruise of considerable length to bar harbor and elsewhere. here is an amusing letter which he wrote to mrs. rogers after such a visit: dear mrs. rogers,--in packing my things in your house yesterday morning i inadvertently put in some articles that was laying around, i thinking about theology & not noticing, the way this family does in similar circumstances like these. two books, mr. rogers' brown slippers, & a ham. i thought it was ourn, it looks like one we used to have. i am very sorry it happened, but it sha'n't occur again & don't you worry. he will temper the wind to the shorn lamb & i will send some of the things back anyway if there is some that won't keep. ccxlvi dublin, continued in time mark twain became very lonely in dublin. after the brilliant winter the contrast was too great. he was not yet ready for exile. in one of his dictations he said: the skies are enchantingly blue. the world is a dazzle of sunshine. monadnock is closer to us than usual by several hundred yards. the vast extent of spreading valley is intensely green--the lakes as intensely blue. and there is a new horizon, a remoter one than we have known before, for beyond the mighty half-circle of hazy mountains that form the usual frame of the picture rise certain shadowy great domes that are unfamiliar to our eyes . . . . but there is a defect--only one, but it is a defect which almost entitles it to be spelled with a capital d. this is the defect of loneliness. we have not a single neighbor who is a neighbor. nobody lives within two miles of us except franklin macveagh, and he is the farthest off of any, because he is in europe . . . . i feel for adam and eve now, for i know how it was with them. i am existing, broken-hearted, in a garden of eden.... the garden of eden i now know was an unendurable solitude. i know that the advent of the serpent was a welcome change--anything for society . . . . i never rose to the full appreciation of the utter solitude of this place until a symbol of it--a compact and visible allegory of it --furnished me the lacking lift three days ago. i was standing alone on this veranda, in the late afternoon, mourning over the stillness, the far-spreading, beautiful desolation, and the absence of visible life, when a couple of shapely and graceful deer came sauntering across the grounds and stopped, and at their leisure impudently looked me over, as if they had an idea of buying me as bric-a-brac. then they seemed to conclude that they could do better for less money elsewhere, and they sauntered indolently away and disappeared among the trees. it sized up this solitude. it is so complete, so perfect, that even the wild animals are satisfied with it. those dainty creatures were not in the least degree afraid of me. this was no more than a mood--though real enough while it lasted--somber, and in its way regal. it was the loneliness of a king--king lear. yet he returned gladly enough to solitude after each absence. it was just before one of his departures that i made another set of pictures of him, this time on the colonnaded veranda, where his figure had become so familiar. he had determined to have his hair cut when he reached new york, and i was anxious to get the pictures before this happened. when the proofs came seven of them--he arranged them as a series to illustrate what he called "the progress of a moral purpose." he ordered a number of sets of this series, and he wrote a legend on each photograph, numbering them from to , laying each set in a sheet of letter-paper which formed a sort of wrapper, on which was written: this series of q photographs registers with scientific precision, stage by stage, the progress of a moral purpose through the mind of the human race's oldest friend. s. l. c. he added a personal inscription, and sent one to each of his more intimate friends. one of the pictures amused him more than the others, because during the exposure a little kitten, unnoticed, had walked into it, and paused near his foot. he had never outgrown his love for cats, and he had rented this kitten and two others for the summer from a neighbor. he didn't wish to own them, he said, for then he would have to leave them behind uncared for, so he preferred to rent them and pay sufficiently to insure their subsequent care. these kittens he called sackcloth and ashes--ashes being the joint name of the two that looked exactly alike, and so did not need distinctive titles. their gambols always amused him. he would stop any time in the midst of dictation to enjoy them. once, as he was about to enter the screen-door that led into the hall, two of the kittens ran up in front of him and stood waiting. with grave politeness he opened the door, made a low bow, and stepped back and said: "walk in, gentlemen. i always give precedence to royalty." and the kittens marched in, tails in air. all summer long they played up and down the wide veranda, or chased grasshoppers and butterflies down the clover slope. it was a never-ending amusement to him to see them jump into the air after some insect, miss it and tumble back, and afterward jump up, with a surprised expression and a look of disappointment and disgust. i remember once, when he was walking up and down discussing some very serious subject--and one of the kittens was lying on the veranda asleep--a butterfly came drifting along three feet or so above the floor. the kitten must have got a glimpse of the insect out of the corner of its eye, and perhaps did not altogether realize its action. at all events, it suddenly shot straight up into the air, exactly like a bounding rubber ball, missed the butterfly, fell back on the porch floor with considerable force and with much surprise. then it sprang to its feet, and, after spitting furiously once or twice, bounded away. clemens had seen the performance, and it completely took his subject out of his mind. he laughed extravagantly, and evidently cared more for that moment's entertainment than for many philosophies. in that remote solitude there was one important advantage--there was no procession of human beings with axes to grind, and few curious callers. occasionally an automobile would find its way out there and make a circuit of the drive, but this happened too seldom to annoy him. even newspaper men rarely made the long trip from boston or new york to secure his opinions, and when they came it was by permission and appointment. newspaper telegrams arrived now and then, asking for a sentiment on some public condition or event, and these he generally answered willingly enough. when the british premier, campbell-bannerman, celebrated his seventieth birthday, the london tribune and the new york herald requested a tribute. he furnished it, for bannerman was a very old friend. he had known him first at marienbad in ' , and in vienna in ' , in daily intercourse, when they had lived at the same hotel. his tribute ran: to his excellency the british premier,--congratulations, not condolences. before seventy we are merely respected, at best, and we have to behave all the time, or we lose that asset; but after seventy we are respected, esteemed, admired, revered, and don't have to behave unless we want to. when i first knew you, honored sir, one of us was hardly even respected. mark twain. he had some misgivings concerning the telegram after it had gone, but he did not recall it. clemens became the victim of a very clever hoax that summer. one day a friend gave him two examples of the most deliciously illiterate letters, supposed to have been written by a woman who had contributed certain articles of clothing to the san francisco sufferers, and later wished to recall them because of the protests of her household. he was so sure that the letters were genuine that he included them in his dictations, after reading them aloud with great effect. to tell the truth, they did seem the least bit too well done, too literary in their illiteracy; but his natural optimism refused to admit of any suspicion, and a little later he incorporated one of the jennie allen letters in a speech which he made at a press club dinner in new york on the subject of simplified spelling--offering it as an example of language with phonetic brevity exercising its supreme function, the direct conveyance of ideas. the letters, in the end, proved to be the clever work of miss grace donworth, who has since published them serially and in book form. clemens was not at all offended or disturbed by the exposure. he even agreed to aid the young author in securing a publisher, and wrote to miss stockbridge, through whom he had originally received the documents: dear miss stockbridge (if she really exists), benefit street (if there is any such place): yes, i should like a copy of that other letter. this whole fake is delightful; & i tremble with fear that you are a fake yourself & that i am your guileless prey. (but never mind, it isn't any matter.) now as to publication---- he set forth his views and promised his assistance when enough of the letters should be completed. clemens allowed his name to be included with the list of spelling reformers, but he never employed any of the reforms in his letters or writing. his interest was mainly theoretical, and when he wrote or spoke on the subject his remarks were not likely to be testimonials in its favor. his own theory was that the alphabet needed reform, first of all, so that each letter or character should have one sound, and one sound only; and he offered as a solution of this an adaptation of shorthand. he wrote and dictated in favor of this idea to the end of his life. once he said: "our alphabet is pure insanity. it can hardly spell any large word in the english language with any degree of certainty. its sillinesses are quite beyond enumeration. english orthography may need reforming and simplifying, but the english alphabet needs it a good many times as much." he would naturally favor simplicity in anything. i remember him reading, as an example of beautiful english, the death of king arthur, by sir thomas malory, and his verdict: "that is one of the most beautiful things ever written in english, and written when we had no vocabulary." "a vocabulary, then, is sometimes a handicap?" "it is indeed." still i think it was never a handicap with him, but rather the plumage of flight. sometimes, when just the right word did not come, he would turn his head a little at different angles, as if looking about him for the precise term. he would find it directly, and it was invariably the word needed. most writers employ, now and again, phrases that do not sharply present the idea--that blur the picture like a poor opera-glass. mark twain's english always focused exactly. ccxlviii "what is man?" and the autobiography clemens decided to publish anonymously, or, rather, to print privately, the gospel, which he had written in vienna some eight years before and added to from time to time. he arranged with frank doubleday to take charge of the matter, and the de vinne press was engaged to do the work. the book was copyrighted in the name of j. w. bothwell, the superintendent of the de vinne company, and two hundred and fifty numbered copies were printed on hand-made paper, to be gradually distributed to intimate friends.--[in an introductory word (dated february, ) the author states that the studies for these papers had been made twenty-five or twenty-seven years before. he probably referred to the monday evening club essay, "what is happiness?" (february, ). see chap. cxli.]--a number of the books were sent to newspaper reviewers, and so effectually had he concealed the personality of his work that no critic seems to have suspected the book's authorship. it was not over-favorably received. it was generally characterized as a clever, and even brilliant, expose of philosophies which were no longer startlingly new. the supremacy of self-interest and "man the irresponsible machine" are the main features of 'what is man' and both of these and all the rest are comprehended in his wider and more absolute doctrine of that inevitable life-sequence which began with the first created spark. there can be no training of the ideals, "upward and still upward," no selfishness and unselfishness, no atom of voluntary effort within the boundaries of that conclusion. once admitting the postulate, that existence is merely a sequence of cause and effect beginning with the primal atom, and we have a theory that must stand or fall as a whole. we cannot say that man is a creature of circumstance and then leave him free to select his circumstance, even in the minutest fractional degree. it was selected for him with his disposition; in that first instant of created life. clemens himself repeatedly emphasized this doctrine, and once, when it was suggested to him that it seemed to "surround every thing, like the sky," he answered: "yes, like the sky; you can't break through anywhere." colonel harvey came to dublin that summer and persuaded clemens to let him print some selections from the dictations in the new volume of the north american review, which he proposed to issue fortnightly. the matter was discussed a good deal, and it was believed that one hundred thousand words could be selected which would be usable forthwith, as well as in that long-deferred period for which it was planned. colonel harvey agreed to take a copy of the dictated matter and make the selections himself, and this plan was carried out. it may be said that most of the chapters were delightful enough; though, had it been possible to edit them with the more positive documents as a guide, certain complications might have been avoided. it does not matter now, and it was not a matter of very wide import then. the payment of these chapters netted clemens thirty thousand dollars--a comfortable sum, which he promptly proposed to spend in building on the property at redding. he engaged john mead howells to prepare some preliminary plans. clara clemens, at norfolk, was written to of the matter. a little later i joined her in redding, and she was the first of the family to see that beautiful hilltop. she was well pleased with the situation, and that day selected the spot where the house should stand. clemens wrote howells that he proposed to call it "autobiography house," as it was to be built out of the review money, and he said: "if you will build on my farm and live there it will set mrs. howells's health up for sure. come and i'll sell you the site for twenty-five dollars. john will tell you it is a choice place." the unusual summer was near its close. in my notebook, under date of september th, appears this entry: windy in valleys but not cold. this veranda is protected. it is peaceful here and perfect, but we are at the summer's end. this is my last entry, and the dictations must have ceased a few days later. i do not remember the date of the return to new york, and apparently i made no record of it; but i do not think it could have been later than the th. it had been four months since the day of arrival, a long, marvelous summer such as i would hardly know again. when i think of that time i shall always hear the ceaseless slippered, shuffling walk, and see the white figure with its rocking, rolling movement passing up and down the long gallery, with that preternaturally beautiful landscape behind, and i shall hear his deliberate speech--always deliberate, save at rare intervals; always impressive, whatever the subject might be; whether recalling some old absurdity of youth, or denouncing orthodox creeds, or detailing the shortcomings of human-kind. ccxlix billiards the return to new york marked the beginning of a new era in my relations with mark twain. i have not meant to convey up to this time that there was between us anything resembling a personal friendship. our relations were friendly, certainly, but they were relations of convenience and mainly of a business, or at least of a literary nature. he was twenty-six years my senior, and the discrepancy of experience and attainments was not measurable. with such conditions friendship must be a deliberate growth; something there must be to bridge the dividing gulf. truth requires the confession that, in this case, the bridge took a very solid, material form, it being, in fact, nothing less than a billiard-table.--[clemens had been without a billiard-table since , the old one having been disposed of on the departure from hartford.] it was a present from mrs. henry h. rogers, and had been intended for his christmas; but when he heard of it he could not wait, and suggested delicately that if he had it "right now" he could begin using it sooner. so he went one day with mr. rogers to the balke-collender company, and they selected a handsome combination table suitable to all games--the best that money could buy. he was greatly excited over the prospect, and his former bedroom was carefully measured, to be certain that it was large enough for billiard purposes. then his bed was moved into the study, and the bookcases and certain appropriate pictures were placed and hung in the billiard-room to give it the proper feeling. the billiard-table arrived and was put in place, the brilliant green cloth in contrast with the rich red wallpaper and the bookbindings and pictures making the room wonderfully handsome and inviting. meantime, clemens, with one of his sudden impulses, had conceived the notion of spending the winter in egypt, on the nile. he had gone so far, within a few hours after the idea developed, as to plan the time of his departure, and to partially engage a traveling secretary, so that he might continue his dictations. he was quite full of the idea just at the moment when the billiard table was being installed. he had sent for a book on the subject--the letters of lady duff-gordon, whose daughter, janet ross, had become a dear friend in florence during the viviani days. he spoke of this new purpose on the morning when we renewed the new york dictations, a month or more following the return from dublin. when the dictation ended he said: "have you any special place to lunch to-day?" i replied that i had not. "lunch here," he said, "and we'll try the new billiard-table." i said what was eminently true--that i could not play--that i had never played more "than a few games of pool, and those very long ago. "no matter," he answered; "the poorer you play, the better i shall like it." so i remained for luncheon and we began, november d, the first game ever played on the christmas table. we played the english game, in which caroms and pockets both count. i had a beginner's luck, on the whole, and i remember it as a riotous, rollicking game, the beginning of a closer understanding between us--of a distinct epoch in our association. when it was ended he said: "i'm not going to egypt. there was a man here yesterday afternoon who said it was bad for bronchitis, and, besides, it's too far away from this billiard-table." he suggested that i come back in the evening and play some more. i did so, and the game lasted until after midnight. he gave me odds, of course, and my "nigger luck," as he called it, continued. it kept him sweating and swearing feverishly to win. finally, once i made a great fluke--a carom, followed by most of the balls falling into the pockets. "well," he said, "when you pick up that cue this damn table drips at every pore." after that the morning dictations became a secondary interest. like a boy, he was looking forward to the afternoon of play, and it never seemed to come quick enough to suit him. i remained regularly for luncheon, and he was inclined to cut the courses short, that he might the sooner get up-stairs to the billiard-room. his earlier habit of not eating in the middle of the day continued; but he would get up and dress, and walk about the dining-room in his old fashion, talking that marvelous, marvelous talk which i was always trying to remember, and with only fractional success at best. to him it was only a method of killing time. i remember once, when he had been discussing with great earnestness the japanese question, he suddenly noticed that the luncheon was about ending, and he said: "now we'll proceed to more serious matters--it's your--shot." and he was quite serious, for the green cloth and the rolling balls afforded him a much larger interest. to the donor of his new possession clemens wrote: dear mrs. rogers,--the billiard-table is better than the doctors. i have a billiardist on the premises, & walk not less than ten miles every day with the cue in my hand. and the walking is not the whole of the exercise, nor the most health giving part of it, i think. through the multitude of the positions and attitudes it brings into play every muscle in the body & exercises them all. the games begin right after luncheons, daily, & continue until midnight, with hours' intermission for dinner & music. and so it is hours' exercise per day & or on sunday. yesterday & last night it was --& i slept until this morning without waking. the billiard-table as a sabbath-breaker can beat any coal-breaker in pennsylvania & give it in the game. if mr. rogers will take to daily billiards he can do without the doctors & the massageur, i think. we are really going to build a house on my farm, an hour & a half from new york. it is decided. with love & many thanks. s. l. c. naturally enough, with continued practice i improved my game, and he reduced my odds accordingly. he was willing to be beaten, but not too often. like any other boy, he preferred to have the balance in his favor. we set down a record of the games, and he went to bed happier if the tally-sheet showed him winner. it was natural, too, that an intimacy of association and of personal interest should grow under such conditions--to me a precious boon--and i wish here to record my own boundless gratitude to mrs. rogers for her gift, which, whatever it meant to him, meant so much more to me. the disparity of ages no longer existed; other discrepancies no longer mattered. the pleasant land of play is a democracy where such things do not count. to recall all the humors and interesting happenings of those early billiard-days would be to fill a large volume. i can preserve no more than a few characteristic phases. he was not an even-tempered player. when the balls were perverse in their movements and his aim unsteady, he was likely to become short with his opponent--critical and even fault-finding. then presently a reaction would set in, and he would be seized with remorse. he would become unnecessarily gentle and kindly--even attentive--placing the balls as i knocked them into the pockets, hurrying from one end of the table to render this service, endeavoring to show in every way except by actual confession in words that he was sorry for what seemed to him, no doubt, an unworthy display of temper, unjustified irritation. naturally, this was a mood that i enjoyed less than that which had induced it. i did not wish him to humble himself; i was willing that he should be severe, even harsh, if he felt so inclined; his age, his position, his genius entitled him to special privileges; yet i am glad, as i remember it now, that the other side revealed itself, for it completes the sum of his great humanity. indeed, he was always not only human, but superhuman; not only a man, but superman. nor does this term apply only to his psychology. in no other human being have i ever seen such physical endurance. i was comparatively a young man, and by no means an invalid; but many a time, far in the night, when i was ready to drop with exhaustion, he was still as fresh and buoyant and eager for the game as at the moment of beginning. he smoked and smoked continually, and followed the endless track around the billiard-table with the light step of youth. at three or four o'clock in the morning he would urge just one more game, and would taunt me for my weariness. i can truthfully testify that never until the last year of his life did he willingly lay down the billiard-cue, or show the least suggestion of fatigue. he played always at high pressure. now and then, in periods of adversity, he would fly into a perfect passion with things in general. but, in the end, it was a sham battle, and he saw the uselessness and humor of it, even in the moment of his climax. once, when he found it impossible to make any of his favorite shots, he became more and more restive, the lightning became vividly picturesque as the clouds blackened. finally, with a regular thunder-blast, he seized the cue with both hands and literally mowed the balls across the table, landing one or two of them on the floor. i do not recall his exact remarks during the performance; i was chiefly concerned in getting out of the way, and those sublime utterances were lost. i gathered up the balls and we went on playing as if nothing had happened, only he was very gentle and sweet, like the sun on the meadows after the storm has passed by. after a little he said: "this is a most amusing game. when you play badly it amuses me, and when i play badly and lose my temper it certainly must amuse you." his enjoyment of his opponent's perplexities was very keen. when he had left the balls in some unfortunate position which made it almost impossible for me to score he would laugh boisterously. i used to affect to be injured and disturbed by this ridicule. once, when he had made the conditions unusually hard for me, and was enjoying the situation accordingly, i was tempted to remark: "whenever i see you laugh at a thing like that i always doubt your sense of humor." which seemed to add to his amusement. sometimes, when the balls were badly placed for me, he would offer ostensible advice, suggesting that i should shoot here and there--shots that were possible, perhaps, but not promising. often i would follow his advice, and then when i failed to score his amusement broke out afresh. other billiardists came from time to time: colonel harvey, mr. duneka, and major leigh, of the harper company, and peter finley dunne (mr. dooley); but they were handicapped by their business affairs, and were not dependable for daily and protracted sessions. any number of his friends were willing, even eager, to come for his entertainment; but the percentage of them who could and would devote a number of hours each day to being beaten at billiards and enjoy the operation dwindled down to a single individual. even i could not have done it--could not have afforded it, however much i might have enjoyed the diversion--had it not been contributory to my work. to me the association was invaluable; it drew from him a thousand long-forgotten incidents; it invited a stream of picturesque comments and philosophies; it furnished the most intimate insight into his character. he was not always glad to see promiscuous callers, even some one that he might have met pleasantly elsewhere. one afternoon a young man whom he had casually invited to "drop in some day in town" happened to call in the midst of a very close series of afternoon games. it would all have been well enough if the visitor had been content to sit quietly on the couch and "bet on the game," as clemens suggested, after the greetings were over; but he was a very young man, and he felt the necessity of being entertaining. he insisted on walking about the room and getting in the way, and on talking about the mark twain books he had read, and the people he had met from time to time who had known mark twain on the river, or on the pacific coast, or elsewhere. i knew how fatal it was for him to talk to clemens during his play, especially concerning matters most of which had been laid away. i trembled for our visitor. if i could have got his ear privately i should have said: "for heaven's sake sit down and keep still or go away! there's going to be a combination of earthquake and cyclone and avalanche if you keep this thing up." i did what i could. i looked at my watch every other minute. at last, in desperation, i suggested that i retire from the game and let the visitor have my cue. i suppose i thought this would eliminate an element of danger. he declined on the ground that he seldom played, and continued his deadly visit. i have never been in an atmosphere so fraught with danger. i did not know how the game stood, and i played mechanically and forgot to count the score. clemens's face was grim and set and savage. he no longer ventured even a word. by and by i noticed that he was getting white, and i said, privately, "now, this young man's hour has come." it was certainly by the mercy of god just then that the visitor said: "i'm sorry, but i've got to go. i'd like to stay longer, but i've got an engagement for dinner." i don't remember how he got out, but i know that tons lifted as the door closed behind him. clemens made his shot, then very softly said: "if he had stayed another five minutes i should have offered him twenty-five cents to go." but a moment later he glared at me. "why in nation did you offer him your cue?" "wasn't that the courteous thing to do?" i asked. "no!" he ripped out. "the courteous and proper thing would have been to strike him dead. did you want to saddle that disaster upon us for life?" he was blowing off steam, and i knew it and encouraged it. my impulse was to lie down on the couch and shout with hysterical laughter, but i suspected that would be indiscreet. he made some further comment on the propriety of offering a visitor a cue, and suddenly began to sing a travesty of an old hymn: "how tedious are they who their sovereign obey," and so loudly that i said: "aren't you afraid he'll hear you and come back?" whereupon he pretended alarm and sang under his breath, and for the rest of the evening was in boundless good-humor. i have recalled this incident merely as a sample of things that were likely to happen at any time in his company, and to show the difficulty one might find in fitting himself to his varying moods. he was not to be learned in a day, or a week, or a month; some of those who knew him longest did not learn him at all. we celebrated his seventy-first birthday by playing billiards all day. he invented a new game for the occasion; inventing rules for it with almost every shot. it happened that no member of the family was at home on this birthday. ill health had banished every one, even the secretary. flowers, telegrams, and congratulations came, and there was a string of callers; but he saw no one beyond some intimate friends--the gilders--late in the afternoon. when they had gone we went down to dinner. we were entirely alone, and i felt the great honor of being his only guest on such an occasion. once between the courses, when he rose, as usual, to walk about, he wandered into the drawing-room, and seating himself at the orchestrelle began to play the beautiful flower-song from "faust." it was a thing i had not seen him do before, and i never saw him do it again. when he came back to the table he said: "speaking of companions of the long ago, after fifty years they become only shadows and might as well be in the grave. only those whom one has really loved mean anything at all. of my playmates i recall john briggs, john garth, and laura hawkins--just those three; the rest i buried long ago, and memory cannot even find their graves." he was in his loveliest humor all that day and evening; and that night, when he stopped playing, he said: "i have never had a pleasanter day at this game." i answered, "i hope ten years from to-night we shall still be playing it." "yes," he said, "still playing the best game on earth." ccl philosophy and pessimism in a letter to macalister, written at this time, he said: the doctors banished jean to the country weeks ago; they banished my secretary to the country for a fortnight last saturday; they banished clara to the country for a fortnight last monday . . . . they banished me to bermuda to sail next wednesday, but i struck and sha'n't go. my complaint is permanent bronchitis & is one of the very best assets i've got, for it excuses me from every public function this winter--& all other winters that may come. if he had bronchitis when this letter was written, it must have been of a very mild form, for it did not interfere with billiard games, which were more protracted and strenuous than at almost any other period. i conclude, therefore, that it was a convenient bronchitis, useful on occasion. for a full ten days we were alone in the big house with the servants. it was a holiday most of the time. we hurried through the mail in the morning and the telephone calls; then, while i answered such letters as required attention, he dictated for an hour or so to miss hobby, after which, billiards for the rest of the day and evening. when callers were reported by the butler, i went down and got rid of them. clara clemens, before her departure, had pinned up a sign, "no billiards after p.m.," which still hung on the wall, but it was outlawed. clemens occasionally planned excursions to bermuda and other places; but, remembering the billiard-table, which he could not handily take along, he abandoned these projects. he was a boy whose parents had been called away, left to his own devices, and bent on a good time. there were likely to be irritations in his morning's mail, and more often he did not wish to see it until it had been pretty carefully sifted. so many people wrote who wanted things, so many others who made the claim of more or less distant acquaintanceship the excuse for long and trivial letters. "i have stirred up three generations," he said; "first the grandparents, then the children, and now the grandchildren; the great-grandchildren will begin to arrive soon." his mail was always large; but often it did not look interesting. one could tell from the envelope and the superscription something of the contents. going over one assortment he burst out: "look at them! look how trivial they are! every envelope looks as if it contained a trivial human soul." many letters were filled with fulsome praise and compliment, usually of one pattern. he was sated with such things, and seldom found it possible to bear more than a line or two of them. yet a fresh, well-expressed note of appreciation always pleased him. "i can live for two months on a good compliment," he once said. certain persistent correspondents, too self-centered to realize their lack of consideration, or the futility of their purpose, followed him relentlessly. of one such he remarked: "that woman intends to pursue me to the grave. i wish something could be done to appease her." and again: "everybody in the world who wants something--something of no interest to me--writes to me to get it." these morning sessions were likely to be of great interest. once a letter spoke of the desirability of being an optimist. "that word perfectly disgusts me," he said, and his features materialized the disgust, "just as that other word, pessimist, does; and the idea that one can, by any effort of will, be one or the other, any more than he can change the color of his hair. the reason why a man is a pessimist or an optimist is not because he wants to be, but because he was born so; and this man [a minister of the gospel who was going to explain life to him] is going to tell me why he isn't a pessimist. oh, he'll do it, but he won't tell the truth; he won't make it short enough." yet he was always patient with any one who came with spiritual messages, theological arguments, and consolations. he might have said to them: "oh, dear friends, those things of which you speak are the toys that long ago i played with and set aside." he could have said it and spoken the truth; but i believe he did not even think it. he listened to any one for whom he had respect, and was grateful for any effort in his behalf. one morning he read aloud a lecture given in london by george bernard shaw on religion, commenting as he read. he said: "this letter is a frank breath of expression [and his comments were equally frank]. there is no such thing as morality; it is not immoral for the tiger to eat the wolf, or the wolf the cat, or the cat the bird, and so on down; that is their business. there is always enough for each one to live on. it is not immoral for one nation to seize another nation by force of arms, or for one man to seize another man's property or life if he is strong enough and wants to take it. it is not immoral to create the human species--with or without ceremony; nature intended exactly these things." at one place in the lecture shaw had said: "no one of good sense can accept any creed to-day without reservation." "certainly not," commented clemens; "the reservation is that he is a d--d fool to accept it at all." he was in one of his somber moods that morning. i had received a print of a large picture of thomas nast--the last one taken. the face had a pathetic expression which told the tragedy of his last years. clemens looked at the picture several moments without speaking. then he broke out: "why can't a man die when he's had his tragedy? i ought to have died long ago." and somewhat later: "once twichell heard me cussing the human race, and he said, 'why, mark, you are the last person in the world to do that--one selected and set apart as you are.' i said 'joe, you don't know what you are talking about. i am not cussing altogether about my own little troubles. any one can stand his own misfortunes; but when i read in the papers all about the rascalities and outrages going on i realize what a creature the human animal is. don't you care more about the wretchedness of others than anything that happens to you?' joe said he did, and shut up." it occurred to me to suggest that he should not read the daily papers. "no difference," he said. "i read books printed two hundred years ago, and they hurt just the same." "those people are all dead and gone," i objected. "they hurt just the same," he maintained. i sometimes thought of his inner consciousness as a pool darkened by his tragedies, its glassy surface, when calm, reflecting all the joy and sunlight and merriment of the world, but easily--so easily--troubled and stirred even to violence. once following the dictation, when i came to the billiard-room he was shooting the balls about the table, apparently much depressed. he said: "i have been thinking it out--if i live two years more i will put an end to it all. i will kill myself." "you have much to live for----" "but i am so tired of the eternal round," he interrupted; "so tired." and i knew he meant that he was ill of the great loneliness that had come to him that day in florence, and would never pass away. i referred to the pressure of social demands in the city, and the relief he would find in his country home. he shook his head. "the country home i need," he said, fiercely, "is a cemetery." yet the mood changed quickly enough when the play began. he was gay and hilarious presently, full of the humors and complexities of the game. h. h. rogers came in with a good deal of frequency, seldom making very long calls, but never seeming to have that air of being hurried which one might expect to find in a man whose day was only twenty-four hours long, and whose interests were so vast and innumerable. he would come in where we were playing, and sit down and watch the game, or perhaps would pick up a book and read, exchanging a remark now and then. more often, however, he sat in the bedroom, for his visits were likely to be in the morning. they were seldom business calls, or if they were, the business was quickly settled, and then followed gossip, humorous incident, or perhaps clemens would read aloud something he had written. but once, after greetings, he began: "well, rogers, i don't know what you think of it, but i think i have had about enough of this world, and i wish i were out of it." mr. rogers replied, "i don't say much about it, but that expresses my view." this from the foremost man of letters and one of the foremost financiers of the time was impressive. each at the mountain-top of his career, they agreed that the journey was not worth while--that what the world had still to give was not attractive enough to tempt them to prevent a desire to experiment with the next stage. one could remember a thousand poor and obscure men who were perfectly willing to go on struggling and starving, postponing the day of settlement as long as possible; but perhaps, when one has had all the world has to give, when there are no new worlds in sight to conquer, one has a different feeling. well, the realization lay not so far ahead for either of them, though at that moment they both seemed full of life and vigor--full of youth. one could not imagine the day when for them it would all be over. ccli a lobbying expedition clara clemens came home now and then to see how matters were progressing, and very properly, for clemens was likely to become involved in social intricacies which required a directing hand. the daughter inherited no little of the father's characteristics of thought and phrase, and it was always a delight to see them together when one could be just out of range of the crossfire. i remember soon after her return, when she was making some searching inquiries concerning the billiard-room sign, and other suggested or instituted reforms, he said: "oh well, never mind, it doesn't matter. i'm boss in this house." she replied, quickly: "oh no, you're not. you're merely owner. i'm the captain--the commander-in-chief." one night at dinner she mentioned the possibility of going abroad that year. during several previous summers she had planned to visit vienna to see her old music-master, leschetizky, once more before his death. she said: "leschetizky is getting so old. if i don't go soon i'm afraid i sha'n't be in time for his funeral." "yes," said her father, thoughtfully, "you keep rushing over to leschetizky's funeral, and you'll miss mine." he had made one or two social engagements without careful reflection, and the situation would require some delicacy of adjustment. during a moment between the courses, when he left the table and was taking his exercise in the farther room, she made some remark which suggested a doubt of her father's gift for social management. i said: "oh, well, he is a king, you know, and a king can do no wrong." "yes, i know," she answered. "the king can do no wrong; but he frightens me almost to death, sometimes, he comes so near it." he came back and began to comment rather critically on some recent performance of roosevelt's, which had stirred up a good deal of newspaper amusement--it was the storer matter and those indiscreet letters which roosevelt had written relative to the ambassadorship which storer so much desired. miss clemens was inclined to defend the president, and spoke with considerable enthusiasm concerning his elements of popularity, which had won him such extraordinary admiration. "certainly he is popular," clemens admitted, "and with the best of reasons. if the twelve apostles should call at the white house, he would say, 'come in, come in! i am delighted to see you. i've been watching your progress, and i admired it very much.' then if satan should come, he would slap him on the shoulder and say, 'why, satan, how do you do? i am so glad to meet you. i've read all your works and enjoyed every one of them.' anybody could be popular with a gift like that." it was that evening or the next, perhaps, that he said to her: "ben [one of his pet names for her], now that you are here to run the ranch, paine and i are going to washington on a vacation. you don't seem to admire our society much, anyhow." there were still other reasons for the washington expedition. there was an important bill up for the extension of the book royalty period, and the forces of copyright were going down in a body to use every possible means to get the measure through. clemens, during cleveland's first administration, some nineteen years before, had accompanied such an expedition, and through s. s. ("sunset") cox had obtained the "privileges of the floor" of the house, which had enabled him to canvass the members individually. cox assured the doorkeeper that clemens had received the thanks of congress for national literary service, and was therefore entitled to that privilege. this was not strictly true; but regulations were not very severe in those days, and the ruse had been regarded as a good joke, which had yielded excellent results. clemens had a similar scheme in mind now, and believed that his friendship with speaker cannon--"uncle joe"--would obtain for him a similar privilege. the copyright association working in its regular way was very well, he said, but he felt he could do more as an individual than by acting merely as a unit of that body. "i canvassed the entire house personally that other time," he said. "cox introduced me to the democrats, and john d. long, afterward secretary of the navy, introduced me to the republicans. i had a darling time converting those members, and i'd like to try the experiment again." i should have mentioned earlier, perhaps, that at this time he had begun to wear white clothing regularly, regardless of the weather and season. on the return from dublin he had said: "i can't bear to put on black clothes again. i wish i could wear white all winter. i should prefer, of course, to wear colors, beautiful rainbow hues, such as the women have monopolized. their clothing makes a great opera audience an enchanting spectacle, a delight to the eye and to the spirit--a garden of eden for charm and color. "the men, clothed in odious black, are scattered here and there over the garden like so many charred stumps. if we are going to be gay in spirit, why be clad in funeral garments? i should like to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks and velvets resplendent with stunning dyes, and so would every man i have ever known; but none of us dares to venture it. if i should appear on fifth avenue on a sunday morning clothed as i would like to be clothed the churches would all be vacant and the congregation would come tagging after me. they would scoff, of course, but they would envy me, too. when i put on black it reminds me of my funerals. i could be satisfied with white all the year round." it was not long after this that he said: "i have made up my mind not to wear black any more, but white, and let the critics say what they will." so his tailor was sent for, and six creamy flannel and serge suits were ordered, made with the short coats, which he preferred, with a gray suit or two for travel, and he did not wear black again, except for evening dress and on special occasions. it was a gratifying change, and though the newspapers made much of it, there was no one who was not gladdened by the beauty of his garments and their general harmony with his person. he had never worn anything so appropriate or so impressive. this departure of costume came along a week or two before the washington trip, and when his bags were being packed for the excursion he was somewhat in doubt as to the propriety of bursting upon washington in december in that snowy plumage. i ventured: "this is a lobbying expedition of a peculiar kind, and does not seem to invite any half-way measures. i should vote in favor of the white suit." i think miss clemens was for it, too. she must have been or the vote wouldn't have carried, though it was clear he strongly favored the idea. at all events, the white suits came along. we were off the following afternoon: howells, robert underwood johnson, one of the appletons, one of the putnams, george bowker, and others were on the train. on the trip down in the dining-car there was a discussion concerning the copyrighting of ideas, which finally resolved itself into the possibility of originating a new one. clemens said: "there is no such thing as a new idea. it is impossible. we simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. we give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. we keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages." we put up at the willard, and in the morning drove over to the congressional library, where the copyright hearing was in progress. there was a joint committee of the two houses seated round a long table at work, and a number of spectators more or less interested in the bill, mainly, it would seem, men concerned with the protection of mechanical music-rolls. the fact that this feature was mixed up with literature was not viewed with favor by most of the writers. clemens referred to the musical contingent as "those hand-organ men who ought to have a bill of their own." i should mention that early that morning clemens had written this letter to speaker cannon: december , . dear uncle joseph,--please get me the thanks of the congress--not next week, but right away. it is very necessary. do accomplish this for your affectionate old friend right away; by persuasion, if you can; by violence, if you must, for it is imperatively necessary that i get on the floor for two or three hours and talk to the members, man by man, in behalf of the support, encouragement, and protection of one of the nation's most valuable assets and industries--its literature. i have arguments with me, also a barrel with liquid in it. give me a chance. get me the thanks of congress. don't wait for others --there isn't time. i have stayed away and let congress alone for seventy-one years and i am entitled to thanks. congress knows it perfectly well, and i have long felt hurt that this quite proper and earned expression of gratitude has been merely felt by the house and never publicly uttered. send me an order on the sergeant-at-arms quick. when shall i come? with love and a benediction; mark twain. we went over to the capitol now to deliver to "uncle joe" this characteristic letter. we had picked up clemens's nephew, samuel e. moffett, at the library, and he came along and led the way to the speaker's room. arriving there, clemens laid off his dark overcoat and stood there, all in white, certainly a startling figure among those clerks, newspaper men, and incidental politicians. he had been noticed as he entered the capitol, and a number of reporters had followed close behind. within less than a minute word was being passed through the corridors that mark twain was at the capitol in his white suit. the privileged ones began to gather, and a crowd assembled in the hall outside. speaker cannon was not present at the moment; but a little later he "billowed" in--which seems to be the word to express it--he came with such a rush and tide of life. after greetings, clemens produced the letter and read it to him solemnly, as if he were presenting a petition. uncle joe listened quite seriously, his head bowed a little, as if it were really a petition, as in fact it was. he smiled, but he said, quite seriously: "that is a request that ought to be granted; but the time has gone by when i am permitted any such liberties. tom reed, when he was speaker, inaugurated a strict precedent excluding all outsiders from the use of the floor of the house." "i got in the other time," clemens insisted. "yes," said uncle joe; "but that ain't now. sunset cox could let you in, but i can't. they'd hang me." he reflected a moment, and added: "i'll tell you what i'll do: i've got a private room down-stairs that i never use. it's all fitted up with table and desk, stationery, chinaware, and cutlery; you could keep house there, if you wanted to. i'll let you have it as long as you want to stay here, and i'll give you my private servant, neal, who's been here all his life and knows every official, every senator and representative, and they all know him. he'll bring you whatever you want, and you can send in messages by him. you can have the members brought down singly or in bunches, and convert them as much as you please. i'd give you a key to the room, only i haven't got one myself. i never can get in when i want to, but neal can get in, and he'll unlock it for you. you can have the room, and you can have neal. now, will that do you?" clemens said it would. it was, in fact, an offer without precedent. probably never in the history of the country had a speaker given up his private room to lobbyists. we went in to see the house open, and then went down with neal and took possession of the room. the reporters had promptly seized upon the letter, and they now got hold of its author, led him to their own quarters, and, gathering around him, fired questions at him, and kept their note-books busy. he made a great figure, all in white there among them, and they didn't fail to realize the value of it as "copy." he talked about copyright, and about his white clothes, and about a silk hat which howells wore. back in the speaker's room, at last, he began laying out the campaign, which would begin next day. by and by he said: "look here! i believe i've got to speak over there in that committee-room to-day or to-morrow. i ought to know just when it is." i had not heard of this before, and offered to go over and see about it, which i did at once. i hurried back faster than i had gone. "mr. clemens, you are to speak in half an hour, and the room is crowded full; people waiting to hear you." "the devil!" he said. "well, all right; i'll just lie down here a few minutes and then we'll go over. take paper and pencil and make a few headings." there was a couch in the room. he lay down while i sat at the table with a pencil, making headings now and then, as he suggested, and presently he rose and, shoving the notes into his pocket, was ready. it was half past three when we entered the committee-room, which was packed with people and rather dimly lighted, for it was gloomy outside. herbert putnam, the librarian, led us to seats among the literary group, and clemens, removing his overcoat, stood in that dim room clad as in white armor. there was a perceptible stir. howells, startled for a moment, whispered: "what in the world did he wear that white suit for?" though in his heart he admired it as much as the others. i don't remember who was speaking when we came in, but he was saying nothing important. whoever it was, he was followed by dr. edward everett hale, whose age always commanded respect, and whose words always invited interest. then it was mark twain's turn. he did not stand by his chair, as the others had done, but walked over to the speaker's table, and, turning, faced his audience. i have never seen a more impressive sight than that snow-white figure in that dim-lit, crowded room. he never touched his notes; he didn't even remember them. he began in that even, quiet, deliberate voice of his the most even, the most quiet, the most deliberate voice in the world--and, without a break or a hesitation for a word, he delivered a copyright argument, full of humor and serious reasoning, such a speech as no one in that room, i suppose, had ever heard. certainly it was a fine and dramatic bit of impromptu pleading. the weary committee, which had been tortured all day with dull, statistical arguments made by the mechanical device fiends, and dreary platitudes unloaded by men whose chief ambition was to shine as copyright champions, suddenly realized that they were being rewarded for the long waiting. they began to brighten and freshen, and uplift and smile, like flowers that have been wilted by a drought when comes the refreshing shower that means renewed life and vigor. every listener was as if standing on tiptoe. when the last sentence was spoken the applause came like an explosion.--[howells in his book my mark twain speaks of clemens's white clothing as "an inspiration which few men would have had the courage to act upon." he adds: "the first time i saw him wear it was at the authors' hearing before the congressional committee on copyright in washington. nothing could have been more dramatic than the gesture with which he flung off his long, loose overcoat and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of his silvery head. it was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup; but the magnificent speech which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable farrago of nonsense about nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis of all copyright legislation, made you forget even his spectacularity."] there came a universal rush of men and women to get near enough for a word and to shake his hand. but he was anxious to get away. we drove to the willard and talked and smoked, and got ready for dinner. he was elated, and said the occasion required full-dress. we started down at last, fronted and frocked like penguins. i did not realize then the fullness of his love for theatrical effect. i supposed he would want to go down with as little ostentation as possible, so took him by the elevator which enters the dining-room without passing through the long corridor known as "peacock alley," because of its being a favorite place for handsomely dressed fashionables of the national capital. when we reached the entrance of the dining-room he said: "isn't there another entrance to this place?" i said there was, but that it was very conspicuous. we should have to go down the long corridor. "oh, well," he said, "i don't mind that. let's go back and try it over." so we went back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel, and came down to the f street entrance. there is a fine, stately flight of steps--a really royal stair--leading from this entrance down into "peacock alley." to slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to do. it is like descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal landing-place where cleopatra's barge might lie. i confess that i was somewhat nervous at the awfulness of the occasion, but i reflected that i was powerfully protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white ties, white-silk waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight. of course he was seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and the passage along the corridor was a perpetual gantlet. i realize now that this gave the dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with proper appetite for his dinner. i did not again make the mistake of taking him around to the more secluded elevator. i aided and abetted him every evening in making that spectacular descent of the royal stairway, and in running that fair and frivolous gantlet the length of "peacock alley." the dinner was a continuous reception. no sooner was he seated than this congressman and that senator came over to shake hands with mark twain. governor francis of missouri also came. eventually howells drifted in, and clemens reviewed the day, its humors and successes. back in the rooms at last he summed up the progress thus far--smoked, laughed over "uncle joe's" surrender to the "copyright bandits," and turned in for the night. we were at the capitol headquarters in speaker cannon's private room about eleven o'clock next morning. clemens was not in the best humor because i had allowed him to oversleep. he was inclined to be discouraged at the prospect, and did not believe many of the members would come down to see him. he expressed a wish for some person of influence and wide acquaintance, and walked up and down, smoking gloomily. i slipped out and found the speaker's colored body-guard, neal, and suggested that mr. clemens was ready now to receive the members. that was enough. they began to arrive immediately. john sharp williams came first, then boutell, from illinois, littlefield, of maine, and after them a perfect procession, including all the leading lights--dalzell, champ clark, mccall--one hundred and eighty or so in all during the next three or four hours. neal announced each name at the door, and in turn i announced it to clemens when the press was not too great. he had provided boxes of cigars, and the room was presently blue with smoke, clemens in his white suit in the midst of it, surrounded by those darker figures--shaking hands, dealing out copyright gospel and anecdotes--happy and wonderfully excited. there were chairs, but usually there was only standing room. he was on his feet for several hours and talked continually; but when at last it was over, and champ clark, who i believe remained longest and was most enthusiastic in the movement, had bade him good-by, he declared that he was not a particle tired, and added: "i believe if our bill could be presented now it would pass." he was highly elated, and pronounced everything a perfect success. neal, who was largely responsible for the triumph, received a ten-dollar bill. we drove to the hotel and dined that night with the dodges, who had been neighbors at riverdale. later, the usual crowd of admirers gathered around him, among them i remember the minister from costa rica, the italian minister, and others of the diplomatic service, most of whom he had known during his european residence. some one told of traveling in india and china, and how a certain hindu "god" who had exchanged autographs with mark twain during his sojourn there was familiar with only two other american names--george washington and chicago; while the king of siam had read but three english books--the bible, bryce's american commonwealth, and the innocents abroad. we were at thomas nelson page's for dinner next evening--a wonderfully beautiful home, full of art treasures. a number of guests had been invited. clemens naturally led the dinner-talk, which eventually drifted to reading. he told of mrs. clemens's embarrassment when stepniak had visited them and talked books, and asked her what her husband thought of balzac, thackeray, and the others. she had been obliged to say that he had not read them. "'how interesting!' said stepniak. but it wasn't interesting to mrs. clemens. it was torture." he was light-spirited and gay; but recalling mrs. clemens saddened him, perhaps, for he was silent as we drove to the hotel, and after he was in bed he said, with a weary despair which even the words do not convey: "if i had been there a minute earlier, it is possible--it is possible that she might have died in my arms. sometimes i think that perhaps there was an instant--a single instant--when she realized that she was dying and that i was not there." in new york i had once brought him a print of the superb "adams memorial," by saint-gaudens--the bronze woman who sits in the still court in the rock creek cemetery at washington. on the morning following the page dinner at breakfast, he said: "engage a carriage and we will drive out and see the saint-gaudens bronze." it was a bleak, dull december day, and as we walked down through the avenues of the dead there was a presence of realized sorrow that seemed exactly suited to such a visit. we entered the little inclosure of cedars where sits the dark figure which is art's supreme expression of the great human mystery of life and death. instinctively we removed our hats, and neither spoke until after we had come away. then: "what does he call it?" he asked. i did not know, though i had heard applied to it that great line of shakespeare's--"the rest is silence." "but that figure is not silent," he said. and later, as we were driving home: "it is in deep meditation on sorrowful things." when we returned to new york he had the little print framed, and kept it always on his mantelpiece. cclii theology and evolution from the washington trip dates a period of still closer association with mark twain. on the way to new york he suggested that i take up residence in his house--a privilege which i had no wish to refuse. there was room going to waste, he said, and it would be handier for the early and late billiard sessions. so, after that, most of the days and nights i was there. looking back on that time now, i see pretty vividly three quite distinct pictures. one of them, the rich, red interior of the billiard-room with the brilliant, green square in the center, on which the gay balls are rolling, and bending over it that luminous white figure in the instant of play. then there is the long, lighted drawing-room with the same figure stretched on a couch in the corner, drowsily smoking, while the rich organ tones fill the place summoning for him scenes and faces which others do not see. this was the hour between dinner and billiards--the hour which he found most restful of the day. sometimes he rose, walking the length of the parlors, his step timed to the music and his thought. of medium height, he gave the impression of being tall-his head thrown up, and like a lion's, rather large for his body. but oftener he lay among the cushions, the light flooding his white hair and dress and heightening his brilliant coloring. the third picture is that of the dinner-table--always beautifully laid, and always a shrine of wisdom when he was there. he did not always talk; but it was his habit to do so, and memory holds the clearer vision of him when, with eyes and face alive with interest, he presented some new angle of thought in fresh picturesqueness of speech. these are the pictures that have remained to me out of the days spent under his roof, and they will not fade while memory lasts. of mark twain's table philosophies it seems proper to make rather extended record. they were usually unpremeditated, and they presented the man as he was, and thought. i preserved as much of them as i could, and have verified phrase and idea, when possible, from his own notes and other unprinted writings. this dinner-table talk naturally varied in character from that of the billiard-room. the latter was likely to be anecdotal and personal; the former was more often philosophical and commentative, ranging through a great variety of subjects scientific, political, sociological, and religious. his talk was often of infinity--the forces of creation--and it was likely to be satire of the orthodox conceptions, intermingled with heresies of his own devising. once, after a period of general silence, he said: "no one who thinks can imagine the universe made by chance. it is too nicely assembled and regulated. there is, of course, a great master mind, but it cares nothing for our happiness or our unhappiness." it was objected, by one of those present, that as the infinite mind suggested perfect harmony, sorrow and suffering were defects which that mind must feel and eventually regulate. "yes," he said, "not a sparrow falls but he is noticing, if that is what you mean; but the human conception of it is that god is sitting up nights worrying over the individuals of this infinitesimal race." then he recalled a fancy which i have since found among his memoranda. in this note he had written: the suns & planets that form the constellations of a billion billion solar systems & go pouring, a tossing flood of shining globes, through the viewless arteries of space are the blood-corpuscles in the veins of god; & the nations are the microbes that swarm and wiggle & brag in each, & think god can tell them apart at that distance & has nothing better to do than try. this--the entertainment of an eternity. who so poor in his ambitions as to consent to be god on those terms? blasphemy? no, it is not blasphemy. if god is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if he is as little as that, he is beneath it. "the bible," he said, "reveals the character of its god with minute exactness. it is a portrait of a man, if one can imagine a man with evil impulses far beyond the human limit. in the old testament he is pictured as unjust, ungenerous, pitiless, and revengeful, punishing innocent children for the misdeeds of their parents; punishing unoffending people for the sins of their rulers, even descending to bloody vengeance upon harmless calves and sheep as punishment for puny trespasses committed by their proprietors. it is the most damnatory biography that ever found its way into print. its beginning is merely childish. adam is forbidden to eat the fruit of a certain tree, and gravely informed that if he disobeys he shall die. how could that impress adam? he could have no idea of what death meant. he had never seen a dead thing. he had never heard of one. if he had been told that if he ate the apples he would be turned into a meridian of longitude that threat would have meant just as much as the other one. the watery intellect that invented that notion could be depended on to go on and decree that all of adam's descendants down to the latest day should be punished for that nursery trespass in the beginning. "there is a curious poverty of invention in bibles. most of the great races each have one, and they all show this striking defect. each pretends to originality, without possessing any. each of them borrows from the other, confiscates old stage properties, puts them forth as fresh and new inspirations from on high. we borrowed the golden rule from confucius, after it had seen service for centuries, and copyrighted it without a blush. we went back to babylon for the deluge, and are as proud of it and as satisfied with it as if it had been worth the trouble; whereas we know now that noah's flood never happened, and couldn't have happened--not in that way. the flood is a favorite with bible-makers. another favorite with the founders of religions is the immaculate conception. it had been worn threadbare; but we adopted it as a new idea. it was old in egypt several thousand years before christ was born. the hindus prized it ages ago. the egyptians adopted it even for some of their kings. the romans borrowed the idea from greece. we got it straight from heaven by way of rome. we are still charmed with it." he would continue in this strain, rising occasionally and walking about the room. once, considering the character of god--the bible god-he said: "we haven't been satisfied with god's character as it is given in the old testament; we have amended it. we have called him a god of mercy and love and morals. he didn't have a single one of those qualities in the beginning. he didn't hesitate to send the plagues on egypt, the most fiendish punishments that could be devised--not for the king, but for his innocent subjects, the women and the little children, and then only to exhibit his power just to show off--and he kept hardening pharaoh's heart so that he could send some further ingenuity of torture, new rivers of blood, and swarms of vermin and new pestilences, merely to exhibit samples of his workmanship. now and then, during the forty years' wandering, moses persuaded him to be a little more lenient with the israelites, which would show that moses was the better character of the two. that old testament god never had an inspiration of his own." he referred to the larger conception of god, that infinite mind which had projected the universe. he said: "in some details that old bible god is probably a more correct picture than our conception of that incomparable one that created the universe and flung upon its horizonless ocean of space those giant suns, whose signal-lights are so remote that we only catch their flash when it has been a myriad of years on its way. for that supreme one is not a god of pity or mercy--not as we recognize these qualities. think of a god of mercy who would create the typhus germ, or the house-fly, or the centipede, or the rattlesnake, yet these are all his handiwork. they are a part of the infinite plan. the minister is careful to explain that all these tribulations are sent for a good purpose; but he hires a doctor to destroy the fever germ, and he kills the rattlesnake when he doesn't run from it, and he sets paper with molasses on it for the house-fly. "two things are quite certain: one is that god, the limitless god, manufactured those things, for no man could have done it. the man has never lived who could create even the humblest of god's creatures. the other conclusion is that god has no special consideration for man's welfare or comfort, or he wouldn't have created those things to disturb and destroy him. the human conception of pity and morality must be entirely unknown to that infinite god, as much unknown as the conceptions of a microbe to man, or at least as little regarded. "if god ever contemplates those qualities in man he probably admires them, as we always admire the thing which we do not possess ourselves; probably a little grain of pity in a man or a little atom of mercy would look as big to him as a constellation. he could create a constellation with a thought; but he has been all the measureless ages, and he has never acquired those qualities that we have named--pity and mercy and morality. he goes on destroying a whole island of people with an earthquake, or a whole cityful with a plague, when we punish a man in the electric chair for merely killing the poorest of our race. the human being needs to revise his ideas again about god. most of the scientists have done it already; but most of them don't dare to say so." he pointed out that the moral idea was undergoing constant change; that what was considered justifiable in an earlier day was regarded as highly immoral now. he pointed out that even the decalogue made no reference to lying, except in the matter of bearing false witness against a neighbor. also, that there was a commandment against covetousness, though covetousness to-day was the basis of all commerce: the general conclusion being that the morals of the lord had been the morals of the beginning; the morals of the first-created man, the morals of the troglodyte, the morals of necessity; and that the morals of mankind had kept pace with necessity, whereas those of the lord had remained unchanged. it is hardly necessary to say that no one ever undertook to contradict any statements of this sort from him. in the first place, there was no desire to do so; and in the second place, any one attempting it would have cut a puny figure with his less substantial arguments and his less vigorous phrase. it was the part of wisdom and immeasurably the part of happiness to be silent and listen. on another evening he began: "the mental evolution of the species proceeds apparently by regular progress side by side with the physical development until it comes to man, then there is a long, unexplained gulf. somewhere man acquired an asset which sets him immeasurably apart from the other animals--his imagination. out of it he created for himself a conscience, and clothes, and immodesty, and a hereafter, and a soul. i wonder where he got that asset. it almost makes one agree with alfred russel wallace that the world and the universe were created just for his benefit, that he is the chief love and delight of god. wallace says that the whole universe was made to take care of and to keep steady this little floating mote in the center of it, which we call the world. it looks like a good deal of trouble for such a small result; but it's dangerous to dispute with a learned astronomer like wallace. still, i don't think we ought to decide too soon about it--not until the returns are all in. there is the geological evidence, for instance. even after the universe was created, it took a long time to prepare the world for man. some of the scientists, ciphering out the evidence furnished by geology, have arrived at the conviction that the world is prodigiously old. lord kelvin doesn't agree with them. he says that it isn't more than a hundred million years old, and he thinks the human race has inhabited it about thirty thousand years of that time. even so, it was , , years getting ready, impatient as the creator doubtless was to see man and admire him. that was because god first had to make the oyster. you can't make an oyster out of nothing, nor you can't do it in a day. you've got to start with a vast variety of invertebrates, belemnites, trilobites, jebusites, amalekites, and that sort of fry, and put them into soak in a primary sea and observe and wait what will happen. some of them will turn out a disappointment; the belemnites and the amalekites and such will be failures, and they will die out and become extinct in the course of the nineteen million years covered by the experiment; but all is not lost, for the amalekites will develop gradually into encrinites and stalactites and blatherskites, and one thing and another, as the mighty ages creep on and the periods pile their lofty crags in the primordial seas, and at last the first grand stage in the preparation of the world for man stands completed; the oyster is done. now an oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a man has, so it is probable this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen million years was a preparation for him. that would be just like an oyster, and, anyway, this one could not know at that early date that he was only an incident in a scheme, and that there was some more to the scheme yet. "the oyster being finished, the next step in the preparation of the world for man was fish. so the old silurian seas were opened up to breed the fish in. it took twenty million years to make the fish and to fossilize him so we'd have the evidence later. "then, the paleozoic limit having been reached, it was necessary to start a new age to make the reptiles. man would have to have some reptiles --not to eat, but to develop himself from. thirty million years were required for the reptiles, and out of such material as was left were made those stupendous saurians that used to prowl about the steamy world in remote ages, with their snaky heads forty feet in the air and their sixty feet of body and tail racing and thrashing after them. they are all gone now, every one of them; just a few fossil remnants of them left on this far-flung fringe of time. "it took all those years to get one of those creatures properly constructed to proceed to the next step. then came the pterodactyl, who thought all that preparation all those millions of years had been intended to produce him, for there wasn't anything too foolish for a pterodactyl to imagine. i suppose he did attract a good deal of attention, for even the least observant could see that there was the making of a bird in him, also the making of a mammal, in the course of time. you can't say too much for the picturesqueness of the pterodactyl --he was the triumph of his period. he wore wings and had teeth, and was a starchy-looking creature. but the progression went right along. "during the next thirty million years the bird arrived, and the kangaroo, and by and by the mastodon, and the giant sloth, and the irish elk, and the old silurian ass, and some people thought that man was about due. but that was a mistake, for the next thing they knew there came a great ice-sheet, and those creatures all escaped across the bering strait and wandered around in asia and died, all except a few to carry on the preparation with. there were six of those glacial periods, with two million years or so between each. they chased those poor orphans up and down the earth, from weather to weather, from tropic temperature to fifty degrees below. they never knew what kind of weather was going to turn up next, and if they settled any place the whole continent suddenly sank from under them, and they had to make a scramble for dry land. sometimes a volcano would turn itself loose just as they got located. they led that uncertain, strenuous existence for about twenty-five million years, always wondering what was going to happen next, never suspecting that it was just a preparation for man, who had to be done just so or there wouldn't be any proper or harmonious place for him when he arrived, and then at last the monkey came, and everybody could see at a glance that man wasn't far off now, and that was true enough. the monkey went on developing for close upon five million years, and then he turned into a man--to all appearances. "it does look like a lot of fuss and trouble to go through to build anything, especially a human being, and nowhere along the way is there any evidence of where he picked up that final asset--his imagination. it makes him different from the others--not any better, but certainly different. those earlier animals didn't have it, and the monkey hasn't it or he wouldn't be so cheerful." [paine records twain's thoughts in that magnificent essay: "was the world made for man" published long after his death in the group of essays under the title "letters from the earth." there are minor additions in the published version: "coal to fry the fish"; and the remnants of life being chased from pole to pole "without a dry rag on them,"; and the "coat of paint" on top of the bulb on top the eiffel tower representing "man's portion of this world's history." ed.] he often held forth on the shortcomings of the human race--always a favorite subject--the incompetencies and imperfections of this final creation, in spite of, or because of, his great attribute--the imagination. once (this was in the billiard-room) i started him by saying that whatever the conditions in other planets, there seemed no reason why life should not develop in each, adapted as perfectly to prevailing conditions as man is suited to conditions here. he said: "is it your idea, then, that man is perfectly adapted to the conditions of this planet?" i began to qualify, rather weakly; but what i said did not matter. he was off on his favorite theme. "man adapted to the earth?" he said. "why, he can't sleep out-of-doors without freezing to death or getting the rheumatism or the malaria; he can't keep his nose under water over a minute without being drowned; he can't climb a tree without falling out and breaking his neck. why, he's the poorest, clumsiest excuse of all the creatures that inhabit this earth. he has got to be coddled and housed and swathed and bandaged and up holstered to be able to live at all. he is a rickety sort of a thing, anyway you take him, a regular british museum of infirmities and inferiorities. he is always under going repairs. a machine that is as unreliable as he is would have no market. the higher animals get their teeth without pain or inconvenience. the original cave man, the troglodyte, may have got his that way. but now they come through months and months of cruel torture, and at a time of life when he is least able to bear it. as soon as he gets them they must all be pulled out again, for they were of no value in the first place, not worth the loss of a night's rest. the second set will answer for a while; but he will never get a set that can be depended on until the dentist makes one. the animals are not much troubled that way. in a wild state, a natural state, they have few diseases; their main one is old age. but man starts in as a child and lives on diseases to the end as a regular diet. he has mumps, measles, whooping-cough, croup, tonsilitis, diphtheria, scarlet-fever, as a matter of course. afterward, as he goes along, his life continues to be threatened at every turn by colds, coughs, asthma, bronchitis, quinsy, consumption, yellow-fever, blindness, influenza, carbuncles, pneumonia, softening of the brain, diseases of the heart and bones, and a thousand other maladies of one sort and another. he's just a basketful of festering, pestilent corruption, provided for the support and entertainment of microbes. look at the workmanship of him in some of its particulars. what are his tonsils for? they perform no useful function; they have no value. they are but a trap for tonsilitis and quinsy. and what is the appendix for? it has no value. its sole interest is to lie and wait for stray grape-seeds and breed trouble. what is his beard for? it is just a nuisance. all nations persecute it with the razor. nature, however, always keeps him supplied with it, instead of putting it on his head, where it ought to be. you seldom see a man bald-headed on his chin, but on his head. a man wants to keep his hair. it is a graceful ornament, a comfort, the best of all protections against weather, and he prizes it above emeralds and rubies, and nature half the time puts it on so it won't stay. "man's sight and smell and hearing are all inferior. if he were suited to the conditions he could smell an enemy; he could hear him; he could see him, just as the animals can detect their enemies. the robin hears the earthworm burrowing his course under the ground; the bloodhound follows a scent that is two days old. man isn't even handsome, as compared with the birds; and as for style, look at the bengal tiger--that ideal of grace, physical perfection, and majesty. think of the lion and the tiger and the leopard, and then think of man--that poor thing!--the animal of the wig, the ear-trumpet, the glass eye, the porcelain teeth, the wooden leg, the trepanned skull, the silver wind-pipe--a creature that is mended and patched all over from top to bottom. if he can't get renewals of his bric-a-brac in the next world what will he look like? he has just that one stupendous superiority--his imagination, his intellect. it makes him supreme--the higher animals can't match him there. it's very curious." a letter which he wrote to j. howard moore concerning his book the universal kinship was of this period, and seems to belong here. dear mr. moore, the book has furnished me several days of deep pleasure & satisfaction; it has compelled my gratitude at the same time, since it saves me the labor of stating my own long-cherished opinions & reflections & resentments by doing it lucidly & fervently & irascibly for me. there is one thing that always puzzles me: as inheritors of the mentality of our reptile ancestors we have improved the inheritance by a thousand grades; but in the matter of the morals which they left us we have gone backward as many grades. that evolution is strange & to me unaccountable & unnatural. necessarily we started equipped with their perfect and blemishless morals; now we are wholly destitute; we have no real morals, but only artificial ones --morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural & healthy instincts. yes, we are a sufficiently comical invention, we humans. sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. ccliii an evening with helen keller i recall two pleasant social events of that winter: one a little party given at the clemenses' home on new-year's eve, with charades and story-telling and music. it was the music feature of this party that was distinctive; it was supplied by wire through an invention known as the telharmonium which, it was believed, would revolutionize musical entertainment in such places as hotels, and to some extent in private houses. the music came over the regular telephone wire, and was delivered through a series of horns or megaphones--similar to those used for phonographs--the playing being done, meanwhile, by skilled performers at the central station. just why the telharmonium has not made good its promises of popularity i do not know. clemens was filled with enthusiasm over the idea. he made a speech a little before midnight, in which he told how he had generally been enthusiastic about inventions which had turned out more or less well in about equal proportions. he did not dwell on the failures, but he told how he had been the first to use a typewriter for manuscript work; how he had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen; how he had installed the first telephone ever used in a private house, and how the audience now would have a demonstration of the first telharmonium music so employed. it was just about the stroke of midnight when he finished, and a moment later the horns began to play chimes and "auld lang syne" and "america." the other pleasant evening referred to was a little company given in honor of helen keller. it was fascinating to watch her, and to realize with what a store of knowledge she had lighted the black silence of her physical life. to see mark twain and helen keller together was something not easily to be forgotten. when mrs. macy (who, as miss sullivan, had led her so marvelously out of the shadows) communicated his words to her with what seemed a lightning touch of the fingers her face radiated every shade of his meaning-humorous, serious, pathetic. helen visited the various objects in the room, and seemed to enjoy them more than the usual observer of these things, and certainly in greater detail. her sensitive fingers spread over articles of bric-a-brac, and the exclamations she uttered were always fitting, showing that she somehow visualized each thing in all its particulars. there was a bronze cat of handsome workmanship and happy expression, and when she had run those all--seeing fingers of hers over it she said: "it is smiling." ccliv billiard-room notes the billiard games went along pretty steadily that winter. my play improved, and clemens found it necessary to eliminate my odds altogether, and to change the game frequently in order to keep me in subjection. frequently there were long and apparently violent arguments over the legitimacy of some particular shot or play--arguments to us quite as enjoyable as the rest of the game. sometimes he would count a shot which was clearly out of the legal limits, and then it was always a delight to him to have a mock-serious discussion over the matter of conscience, and whether or not his conscience was in its usual state of repair. it would always end by him saying: "i don't wish even to seem to do anything which can invite suspicion. i refuse to count that shot," or something of like nature. sometimes when i had let a questionable play pass without comment, he would watch anxiously until i had made a similar one and then insist on my scoring it to square accounts. his conscience was always repairing itself. he had experimented, a great many years before, with what was in the nature of a trick on some unsuspecting player. it consisted in turning out twelve pool-balls on the table with one cue ball, and asking his guest how many caroms he thought he could make with all those twelve balls to play on. he had learned that the average player would seldom make more than thirty-one counts, and usually, before this number was reached, he would miss through some careless play or get himself into a position where he couldn't play at all. the thing looked absurdly easy. it looked as if one could go on playing all day long, and the victim was usually eager to bet that he could make fifty or perhaps a hundred; but for more than an hour i tried it patiently, and seldom succeeded in scoring more than fifteen or twenty without missing. long after the play itself ceased to be amusing to me, he insisted on my going on and trying it some more, and he would throw himself back and roar with laughter, the tears streaming down his cheeks, to see me work and fume and fail. it was very soon after that that peter dunne ("mr. dooley") came down for luncheon, and after several games of the usual sort, clemens quietly--as if the idea had just occurred to him--rolled out the twelve balls and asked dunne how, many caroms he thought he could make without a miss. dunne said he thought he could make a thousand. clemens quite indifferently said that he didn't believe he could make fifty. dunne offered to bet five dollars that he could, and the wager was made. dunne scored about twenty-five the first time and missed; then he insisted on betting five dollars again, and his defeats continued until clemens had twenty-five dollars of dunne's money, and dunne was sweating and swearing, and mark twain rocking with delight. dunne went away still unsatisfied, promising that he would come back and try it again. perhaps he practised in his absence, for when he returned he had learned something. he won his twenty-five dollars back, and i think something more added. mark twain was still ahead, for dunne furnished him with a good five hundred dollars' worth of amusement. clemens never cared to talk and never wished to be talked to when the game was actually in progress. if there was anything to be said on either side, he would stop and rest his cue on the floor, or sit down on the couch, until the matter was concluded. such interruptions happened pretty frequently, and many of the bits of personal comment and incident scattered along through this work are the result of those brief rests. some shot, or situation, or word would strike back through the past and awaken a note long silent, and i generally kept a pad and pencil on the window-sill with the score-sheet, and later, during his play, i would scrawl some reminder that would be precious by and by. on one of these i find a memorandum of what he called his three recurrent dreams. all of us have such things, but his seem worth remembering. "there is never a month passes," he said, "that i do not dream of being in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a living. it is never a pleasant dream, either. i love to think about those days; but there's always something sickening about the thought that i have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream i am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell whether it is selma bluff, or hat island, or only a black wall of night. "another dream that i have of that kind is being compelled to go back to the lecture platform. i hate that dream worse than the other. in it i am always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to be funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that i am only making silly jokes. then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they commence to get up and leave. that dream always ends by my standing there in the semidarkness talking to an empty house. "my other dream is of being at a brilliant gathering in my night-garments. people don't seem to notice me there at first, and then pretty soon somebody points me out, and they all begin to look at me suspiciously, and i can see that they are wondering who i am and why i am there in that costume. then it occurs to me that i can fix it by making myself known. i take hold of some man and whisper to him, 'i am mark twain'; but that does not improve it, for immediately i can hear him whispering to the others, 'he says he is mark twain,' and they all look at me a good deal more suspiciously than before, and i can see that they don't believe it, and that it was a mistake to make that confession. sometimes, in that dream, i am dressed like a tramp instead of being in my night-clothes; but it all ends about the same--they go away and leave me standing there, ashamed. i generally enjoy my dreams, but not those three, and they are the ones i have oftenest." quite often some curious episode of the world's history would flash upon him--something amusing, or coarse, or tragic, and he would bring the game to a standstill and recount it with wonderful accuracy as to date and circumstance. he had a natural passion for historic events and a gift for mentally fixing them, but his memory in other ways was seldom reliable. he was likely to forget the names even of those he knew best and saw oftenest, and the small details of life seldom registered at all. he had his breakfast served in his room, and once, on a slip of paper, he wrote, for his own reminder: the accuracy of your forgetfulness is absolute--it seems never to fail. i prepare to pour my coffee so it can cool while i shave--and i always forget to pour it. yet, very curiously, he would sometimes single out a minute detail, something every one else had overlooked, and days or even weeks afterward would recall it vividly, and not always at an opportune moment. perhaps this also was a part of his old pilot-training. once clara clemens remarked: "it always amazes me the things that father does and does not remember. some little trifle that nobody else would notice, and you are hoping that he didn't, will suddenly come back to him just when you least expect it or care for it." my note-book contains the entry: february , . he said to-day: "a blindfolded chess-player can remember every play and discuss the game afterward, while we can't remember from one shot to the next." i mentioned his old pilot-memory as an example of what he could do if he wished. "yes," he answered, "those are special memories; a pilot will tell you the number of feet in every crossing at any time, but he can't remember what he had for breakfast." "how long did you keep your pilot-memory?" i asked. "not long; it faded out right away, but the training served me, for when i went to report on a paper a year or two later i never had to make any notes." "i suppose you still remember some of the river?" "not much. hat island, helena and here and there a place; but that is about all." cclv further personalities like every person living, mark twain had some peculiar and petty economies. such things in great men are noticeable. he lived extravagantly. his household expenses at the time amounted to more than fifty dollars a day. in the matter of food, the choicest, and most expensive the market could furnish was always served in lavish abundance. he had the best and highest-priced servants, ample as to number. his clothes he bought generously; he gave without stint to his children; his gratuities were always liberal. he never questioned pecuniary outgoes --seldom worried as to the state of his bank-account so long as there was plenty. he smoked cheap cigars because he preferred their flavor. yet he had his economies. i have seen him, before leaving a room, go around and carefully lower the gas-jets, to provide against that waste. i have known him to examine into the cost of a cab, and object to an apparent overcharge of a few cents. it seemed that his idea of economy might be expressed in these words: he abhorred extortion and visible waste. furthermore, he had exact ideas as to ownership. one evening, while we were playing billiards, i noticed a five-cent piece on the floor. i picked it up, saying: "here is five cents; i don't know whose it is." he regarded the coin rather seriously, i thought, and said: "i don't know, either." i laid it on the top of the book-shelves which ran around the room. the play went on, and i forgot the circumstance. when the game ended that night i went into his room with him, as usual, for a good-night word. as he took his change and keys from the pocket of his trousers, he looked the assortment over and said: "that five-cent piece you found was mine." i brought it to him at once, and he took it solemnly, laid it with the rest of his change, and neither of us referred to it again. it may have been one of his jokes, but i think it more likely that he remembered having had a five-cent piece, probably reserved for car fare, and that it was missing. more than once, in washington, he had said: "draw plenty of money for incidental expenses. don't bother to keep account of them." so it was not miserliness; it was just a peculiarity, a curious attention to a trifling detail. he had a fondness for riding on the then newly completed subway, which he called the underground. sometimes he would say: "i'll pay your fare on the underground if you want to take a ride with me." and he always insisted on paying the fare, and once when i rode far up-town with him to a place where he was going to luncheon, and had taken him to the door, he turned and said, gravely: "here is five cents to pay your way home." and i took it in the same spirit in which it had been offered. it was probably this trait which caused some one occasionally to claim that mark twain was close in money matters. perhaps there may have been times in his life when he was parsimonious; but, if so, i must believe that it was when he was sorely pressed and exercising the natural instinct of self-preservation. he wished to receive the full value (who does not?) of his labors and properties. he took a childish delight in piling up money; but it became greed only when he believed some one with whom he had dealings was trying to get an unfair division of profits. then it became something besides greed. it became an indignation that amounted to malevolence. i was concerned in a number of dealings with mark twain, and at a period in his life when human traits are supposed to become exaggerated, which is to say old age, and if he had any natural tendency to be unfair, or small, or greedy in his money dealings i think i should have seen it. personally, i found him liberal to excess, and i never observed in him anything less than generosity to those who were fair with him. once that winter, when a letter came from steve gillis saying that he was an invalid now, and would have plenty of time to read sam's books if he owned them, clemens ordered an expensive set from his publishers, and did what meant to him even more than the cost in money--he autographed each of those twenty-five volumes. then he sent them, charges paid, to that far californian retreat. it was hardly the act of a stingy man. he had the human fondness for a compliment when it was genuine and from an authoritative source, and i remember how pleased he was that winter with prof. william lyon phelps's widely published opinion, which ranked mark twain as the greatest american novelist, and declared that his fame would outlive any american of his time. phelps had placed him above holmes, howells, james, and even hawthorne. he had declared him to be more american than any of these--more american even than whitman. professor phelps's position in yale college gave this opinion a certain official weight; but i think the fact of phelps himself being a writer of great force, with an american freshness of style, gave it a still greater value. among the pleasant things that winter was a meeting with eugene f. ware, of kansas, with whose penname--"ironquill"--clemens had long been familiar. ware was a breezy western genius of the finest type. if he had abandoned law for poetry, there is no telling how far his fame might have reached. there was in his work that same spirit of americanism and humor and humanity that is found in mark twain's writings, and he had the added faculty of rhyme and rhythm, which would have set him in a place apart. i had known ware personally during a period of western residence, and later, when he was commissioner of pensions under roosevelt. i usually saw him when he came to new york, and it was a great pleasure now to bring together the two men whose work i so admired. they met at a small private luncheon at the players, and peter dunne was there, and robert collier, and it was such an afternoon as howells has told of when he and aldrich and bret harte and those others talked until the day faded into twilight, and twilight deepened into evening. clemens had put in most of the day before reading ware's book of poems, 'the rhymes of ironquill', and had declared his work to rank with the very greatest of american poetry--i think he called it the most truly american in flavor. i remember that at the luncheon he noted ware's big, splendid physique and his western liberties of syntax with a curious intentness. i believe he regarded him as being nearer his own type in mind and expression than any one he had met before. among ware's poems he had been especially impressed with the "fables," and with some verses entitled "whist," which, though rather more optimistic, conformed to his own philosophy. they have a distinctly "western" feeling. whist hour after hour the cards were fairly shuffled, and fairly dealt, and still i got no hand; the morning came; but i, with mind unruffled, did simply say, "i do not understand." life is a game of whist. from unseen sources the cards are shuffled, and the hands are dealt. blind are our efforts to control the forces that, though unseen, are no less strongly felt. i do not like the way the cards are shuffled, but still i like the game and want to play; and through the long, long night will i, unruffled, play what i get, until the break of day. \ mark twain, a biography by albert bigelow paine volume iii, part : - cclvi honors from oxford clemens made a brief trip to bermuda during the winter, taking twichell along; their first return to the island since the trip when they had promised to come back so soon-nearly thirty years before. they had been comparatively young men then. they were old now, but they found the green island as fresh and full of bloom as ever. they did not find their old landlady; they could not even remember her name at first, and then twichell recalled that it was the same as an author of certain schoolbooks in his youth, and clemens promptly said, "kirkham's grammar." kirkham was truly the name, and they went to find her; but she was dead, and the daughter, who had been a young girl in that earlier time, reigned in her stead and entertained the successors of her mother's guests. they walked and drove about the island, and it was like taking up again a long-discontinued book and reading another chapter of the same tale. it gave mark twain a fresh interest in bermuda, one which he did not allow to fade again. later in the year (march, ) i also made a journey; it having been agreed that i should take a trip to the mississippi and to the pacific coast to see those old friends of mark twain's who were so rapidly passing away. john briggs was still alive, and other hannibal schoolmates; also joe goodman and steve gillis, and a few more of the early pioneers--all eminently worth seeing in the matter of such work as i had in hand. the billiard games would be interrupted; but whatever reluctance to the plan there may have been on that account was put aside in view of prospective benefits. clemens, in fact, seemed to derive joy from the thought that he was commissioning a kind of personal emissary to his old comrades, and provided me with a letter of credentials. it was a long, successful trip that i made, and it was undertaken none too soon. john briggs, a gentle-hearted man, was already entering the valley of the shadow as he talked to me by his fire one memorable afternoon, and reviewed the pranks of those days along the river and in the cave and on holliday's hill. i think it was six weeks later that he died; and there were others of that scattering procession who did not reach the end of the year. joe goodman, still full of vigor (in ), journeyed with me to the green and dreamy solitudes of jackass hill to see steve and jim gillis, and that was an unforgetable sunday when steve gillis, an invalid, but with the fire still in his eyes and speech, sat up on his couch in his little cabin in that arcadian stillness and told old tales and adventures. when i left he said: "tell sam i'm going to die pretty soon, but that i love him; that i've loved him all my life, and i'll love him till i die. this is the last word i'll ever send to him." jim gillis, down in sonora, was already lying at the point of death, and so for him the visit was too late, though he was able to receive a message from his ancient mining partner, and to send back a parting word. i returned by way of new orleans and the mississippi river, for i wished to follow that abandoned water highway, and to visit its presiding genius, horace bixby,--[he died august , , at the age of ]--still alive and in service as pilot of the government snagboat, his headquarters at st. louis. coming up the river on one of the old passenger steam boats that still exist, i noticed in a paper which came aboard that mark twain was to receive from oxford university the literary doctor's degree. there had been no hint of this when i came away, and it seemed rather too sudden and too good to be true. that the little barefoot lad that had played along the river-banks at hannibal, and received such meager advantages in the way of schooling--whose highest ambition had been to pilot such a craft as this one--was about to be crowned by the world's greatest institution of learning, to receive the highest recognition for achievement in the world of letters, was a thing which would not be likely to happen outside of a fairy tale. returning to new york, i ran out to tuxedo, where he had taken a home for the summer (for it was already may), and walking along the shaded paths of that beautiful suburban park, he told me what he knew of the oxford matter. moberly bell, of the london times, had been over in april, and soon after his return to england there had come word of the proposed honor. clemens privately and openly (to bell) attributed it largely to his influence. he wrote to him: dear mr. bell,--your hand is in it & you have my best thanks. although i wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of the ship that carried me i am glad to do it for an oxford degree. i shall plan to sail for england a shade before the middle of june, so that i can have a few days in london before the th. a day or two later, when the time for sailing had been arranged, he overtook his letter with a cable: i perceive your hand in it. you have my best thanks. sail on minneapolis june th. due in southampton ten days later. clemens said that his first word of the matter had been a newspaper cablegram, and that he had been doubtful concerning it until a cablegram to himself had confirmed it. "i never expected to cross the water again," he said; "but i would be willing to journey to mars for that oxford degree." he put the matter aside then, and fell to talking of jim gillis and the others i had visited, dwelling especially on gillis's astonishing faculty for improvising romances, recalling how he had stood with his back to the fire weaving his endless, grotesque yarns, with no other guide than his fancy. it was a long, happy walk we had, though rather a sad one in its memories; and he seemed that day, in a sense, to close the gate of those early scenes behind him, for he seldom referred to them afterward. he was back at fifth avenue presently, arranging for his voyage. meantime, cable invitations of every sort were pouring in, from this and that society and dignitary; invitations to dinners and ceremonials, and what not, and it was clear enough that his english sojourn was to be a busy one. he had hoped to avoid this, and began by declining all but two invitations--a dinner-party given by ambassador whitelaw reid and a luncheon proposed by the "pilgrims." but it became clear that this would not do. england was not going to confer its greatest collegiate honor without being permitted to pay its wider and more popular tribute. clemens engaged a special secretary for the trip--mr. ralph w. ashcroft, a young englishman familiar with london life. they sailed on the th of june, by a curious coincidence exactly forty years from the day he had sailed on the quaker city to win his great fame. i went with him to the ship. his first elation had passed by this time, and he seemed a little sad, remembering, i think, the wife who would have enjoyed this honor with him but could not share it now. cclvii a true english welcome mark twain's trip across the atlantic would seem to have been a pleasant one. the minneapolis is a fine, big ship, and there was plenty of company. prof. archibald henderson, bernard shaw's biographer, was aboard;--[professor henderson has since then published a volume on mark twain-an interesting commentary on his writings--mainly from the sociological point of view.]--also president patton, of the princeton theological seminary; a well-known cartoonist, richards, and some very attractive young people--school-girls in particular, such as all through his life had appealed to mark twain. indeed, in his later life they made a stronger appeal than ever. the years had robbed him of his own little flock, and always he was trying to replace them. once he said: "during those years after my wife's death i was washing about on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making in high and holy causes, and these things furnished me intellectual cheer, and entertainment; but they got at my heart for an evening only, then left it dry and dusty. i had reached the grandfather stage of life without grandchildren, so i began to adopt some." he adopted several on that journey to england and on the return voyage, and he kept on adopting others during the rest of his life. these companionships became one of the happiest aspects of his final days, as we shall see by and by. there were entertainments on the ship, one of them given for the benefit of the seamen's orphanage. one of his adopted granddaughters--"charley" he called her--played a violin solo and clemens made a speech. later his autographs were sold at auction. dr. patton was auctioneer, and one autographed postal card brought twenty-five dollars, which is perhaps the record price for a single mark twain signature. he wore his white suit on this occasion, and in the course of his speech referred to it. he told first of the many defects in his behavior, and how members of his household had always tried to keep him straight. the children, he said, had fallen into the habit of calling it "dusting papa off." then he went on: when my daughter came to see me off last saturday at the boat she slipped a note in my hand and said, "read it when you get aboard the ship." i didn't think of it again until day before yesterday, and it was a "dusting off." and if i carry out all the instructions that i got there i shall be more celebrated in england for my behavior than for anything else. i got instructions how to act on every occasion. she underscored "now, don't you wear white clothes on ship or on shore until you get back," and i intended to obey. i have been used to obeying my family all my life, but i wore the white clothes to-night because the trunk that has the dark clothes in it is in the cellar. i am not apologizing for the white clothes; i am only apologizing to my daughter for not obeying her. he received a great welcome when the ship arrived at tilbury. a throng of rapid-fire reporters and photographers immediately surrounded him, and when he left the ship the stevedores gave him a round of cheers. it was the beginning of that almost unheard-of demonstration of affection and honor which never for a moment ceased, but augmented from day to day during the four weeks of his english sojourn. in a dictation following his return, mark twain said: who began it? the very people of all people in the world whom i would have chosen: a hundred men of my own class--grimy sons of labor, the real builders of empires and civilizations, the stevedores! they stood in a body on the dock and charged their masculine lungs, and gave me a welcome which went to the marrow of me. j. y. w. macalister was at the st. pancras railway station to meet him, and among others on the platform was bernard shaw, who had come down to meet professor henderson. clemens and shaw were presented, and met eagerly, for each greatly admired the other. a throng gathered. mark twain was extricated at last, and hurried away to his apartments at brown's hotel, "a placid, subdued, homelike, old-fashioned english inn," he called it, "well known to me years ago, a blessed retreat of a sort now rare in england, and becoming rarer every year." but brown's was not placid and subdued during his stay. the london newspapers declared that mark twain's arrival had turned brown's not only into a royal court, but a post-office--that the procession of visitors and the bundles of mail fully warranted this statement. it was, in fact, an experience which surpassed in general magnitude and magnificence anything he had hitherto known. his former london visits, beginning with that of , had been distinguished by high attentions, but all of them combined could not equal this. when england decides to get up an ovation, her people are not to be outdone even by the lavish americans. an assistant secretary had to be engaged immediately, and it sometimes required from sixteen to twenty hours a day for two skilled and busy men to receive callers and reduce the pile of correspondence. a pile of invitations had already accumulated, and others flowed in. lady stanley, widow of henry m. stanley, wrote: you know i want to see you and join right hand to right hand. i must see your dear face again . . . . you will have no peace, rest, or leisure during your stay in london, and you will end by hating human beings. let me come before you feel that way. mary cholmondeley, the author of red pottage, niece of that lovable reginald cholmondeley, and herself an old friend, sent greetings and urgent invitations. archdeacon wilberforce wrote: i have just been preaching about your indictment of that scoundrel king of the belgians and telling my people to buy the book. i am only a humble item among the very many who offer you a cordial welcome in england, but we long to see you again, and i should like to change hats with you again. do you remember? the athenaeum, the garrick, and a dozen other london clubs had anticipated his arrival with cards of honorary membership for the period of his stay. every leading photographer had put in a claim for sittings. it was such a reception as charles dickens had received in america in , and again in . a london paper likened it to voltaire's return to paris in , when france went mad over him. there is simply no limit to english affection and, hospitality once aroused. clemens wrote: surely such weeks as this must be very rare in this world: i had seen nothing like them before; i shall see nothing approaching them again! sir thomas lipton and bram stoker, old friends, were among the first to present themselves, and there was no break in the line of callers. clemens's resolutions for secluding himself were swept away. on the very next morning following his arrival he breakfasted with j. henniker heaton, father of international penny postage, at the bath club, just across dover street from brown's. he lunched at the ritz with marjorie bowen and miss bisland. in the afternoon he sat for photographs at barnett's, and made one or two calls. he could no more resist these things than a debutante in her first season. he was breakfasting again with heaton next morning; lunching with "toby, m.p.," and mrs. lucy; and having tea with lady stanley in the afternoon, and being elaborately dined next day at dorchester house by ambassador and mrs. reid. these were all old and tried friends. he was not a stranger among them, he said; he was at home. alfred austin, conan doyle, anthony hope, alma tadema, e. a. abbey, edmund goss, george smalley, sir norman lockyer, henry w. lucy, sidney brooks, and bram stoker were among those at dorchester house--all old comrades, as were many of the other guests. "i knew fully half of those present," he said afterward. mark twain's bursting upon london society naturally was made the most of by the london papers, and all his movements were tabulated and elaborated, and when there was any opportunity for humor in the situation it was not left unimproved. the celebrated ascot racing-cup was stolen just at the time of his arrival, and the papers suggestively mingled their head-lines, "mark twain arrives: ascot cup stolen," and kept the joke going in one form or another. certain state jewels and other regalia also disappeared during his stay, and the news of these burglaries was reported in suspicious juxtaposition with the news of mark twain's doings. english reporters adopted american habits for the occasion, and invented or embellished when the demand for a new sensation was urgent. once, when following the custom of the place, he descended the hotel elevator in a perfectly proper and heavy brown bath robe, and stepped across narrow dover street to the bath club, the papers flamed next day with the story that mark twain had wandered about the lobby of brown's and promenaded dover street in a sky-blue bath robe attracting wide attention. clara clemens, across the ocean, was naturally a trifle disturbed by such reports, and cabled this delicate "dusting off": "much worried. remember proprieties." to which he answered: "they all pattern after me," a reply to the last degree characteristic. it was on the fourth day after his arrival, june d, that he attended the king's garden-party at windsor castle. there were eighty-five hundred guests at the king's party, and if we may judge from the london newspapers, mark twain was quite as much a figure in that great throng as any member of the royal family. his presentation to the king and the queen is set down as an especially notable incident, and their conversation is quite fully given. clemens himself reported: his majesty was very courteous. in the course of the conversation i reminded him of an episode of fifteen years ago, when i had the honor to walk a mile with him when he was taking the waters at homburg, in germany. i said that i had often told about that episode, and that whenever i was the historian i made good history of it and it was worth listening to, but that it had found its way into print once or twice in unauthentic ways and was badly damaged thereby. i said i should like to go on repeating this history, but that i should be quite fair and reasonably honest, and while i should probably never tell it twice in the same way i should at least never allow it to deteriorate in my hands. his majesty intimated his willingness that i should continue to disseminate that piece of history; and he added a compliment, saying that he knew good and sound history would not suffer at my hands, and that if this good and sound history needed any improvement beyond the facts he would trust me to furnish that improvement. i think it is not an exaggeration to say that the queen looked as young and beautiful as she did thirty-five years ago when i saw her first. i did not say this to her, because i learned long ago never to say the obvious thing, but leave the obvious thing to commonplace and inexperienced people to say. that she still looked to me as young and beautiful as she did thirty-five years ago is good evidence that ten thousand people have already noticed this and have mentioned it to her. i could have said it and spoken the truth, but i was too wise for that. i kept the remark unuttered and saved her majesty the vexation of hearing it the ten-thousand-and-oneth time. all that report about my proposal to buy windsor castle and its grounds was a false rumor. i started it myself. one newspaper said i patted his majesty on the shoulder--an impertinence of which i was not guilty; i was reared in the most exclusive circles of missouri and i know how to behave. the king rested his hand upon my arm a moment or two while we were chatting, but he did it of his own accord. the newspaper which said i talked with her majesty with my hat on spoke the truth, but my reasons for doing it were good and sufficient--in fact unassailable. rain was threatening, the temperature had cooled, and the queen said, "please put your hat on, mr. clemens." i begged her pardon and excused myself from doing it. after a moment or two she said, "mr. clemens, put your hat on"--with a slight emphasis on the word "on" "i can't allow you to catch cold here." when a beautiful queen commands it is a pleasure to obey, and this time i obeyed--but i had already disobeyed once, which is more than a subject would have felt justified in doing; and so it is true, as charged; i did talk with the queen of england with my hat on, but it wasn't fair in the newspaper man to charge it upon me as an impoliteness, since there were reasons for it which he could not know of. nearly all the members of the british royal family were there, and there were foreign visitors which included the king of siam and a party of india princes in their gorgeous court costumes, which clemens admired openly and said he would like to wear himself. the english papers spoke of it as one of the largest and most distinguished parties ever given at windsor. clemens attended it in company with mr. and mrs. j. henniker heaton, and when it was over sir thomas lipton joined them and motored with them back to brown's. he was at archdeacon wilberforce's next day, where a curious circumstance developed. when he arrived wilberforce said to him, in an undertone: "come into my library. i have something to show you." in the library clemens was presented to a mr. pole, a plain-looking man, suggesting in dress and appearance the english tradesman. wilberforce said: "mr. pole, show to mr. clemens what you have brought here." mr. pole unrolled a long strip of white linen and brought to view at last a curious, saucer-looking vessel of silver, very ancient in appearance, and cunningly overlaid with green glass. the archdeacon took it and handed it to clemens as some precious jewel. clemens said: "what is it?" wilberforce impressively answered: "it is the holy grail." clemens naturally started with surprise. "you may well start," said wilberforce; "but it's the truth. that is the holy grail." then he gave this explanation: mr. pole, a grain merchant of bristol, had developed some sort of clairvoyant power, or at all events he had dreamed several times with great vividness the location of the true grail. another dreamer, a dr. goodchild, of bath, was mixed up in the matter, and between them this peculiar vessel, which was not a cup, or a goblet, or any of the traditional things, had been discovered. mr. pole seemed a man of integrity, and it was clear that the churchman believed the discovery to be genuine and authentic. of course there could be no positive proof. it was a thing that must be taken on trust. that the vessel itself was wholly different from anything that the generations had conceived, and was apparently of very ancient make, was opposed to the natural suggestion of fraud. clemens, to whom the whole idea of the holy grail was simply a poetic legend and myth, had the feeling that he had suddenly been transmigrated, like his own connecticut yankee, back into the arthurian days; but he made no question, suggested no doubt. whatever it was, it was to them the materialization of a symbol of faith which ranked only second to the cross itself, and he handled it reverently and felt the honor of having been one of the first permitted to see the relic. in a subsequent dictation he said: i am glad i have lived to see that half-hour--that astonishing half- hour. in its way it stands alone in my life's experience. in the belief of two persons present this was the very vessel which was brought by night and secretly delivered to nicodemus, nearly nineteen centuries ago, after the creator of the universe had delivered up his life on the cross for the redemption of the human race; the very cup which the stainless sir galahad had sought with knightly devotion in far fields of peril and adventure in arthur's time, fourteen hundred years ago; the same cup which princely knights of other bygone ages had laid down their lives in long and patient efforts to find, and had passed from life disappointed--and here it was at last, dug up by a grain-broker at no cost of blood or travel, and apparently no purity required of him above the average purity of the twentieth-century dealer in cereal futures; not even a stately name required--no sir galahad, no sir bors de ganis, no sir lancelot of the lake--nothing but a mere mr. pole.--[from the new york sun somewhat later: "mr. pole communicated the discovery to a dignitary of the church of england, who summoned a number of eminent persons, including psychologists, to see and discuss it. forty attended, including some peers with ecclesiastical interests, ambassador whitelaw reid, professor crookas, and ministers of various religious bodies, including the rev. r. j. campbell. they heard mr. pole's story with deep attention, but he could not prove the genuineness of the relic."] clemens saw mr. and mrs. rogers at claridge's hotel that evening; lunched with his old friends sir norman and lady lockyer next day; took tea with t. p. o'connor at the house of commons, and on the day following, which was june a th, he was the guest of honor at one of the most elaborate occasions of his visit--a luncheon given by the pilgrims at the savoy hotel. it would be impossible to set down here a report of the doings, or even a list of the guests, of that gathering. the pilgrims is a club with branches on both sides of the ocean, and mark twain, on either side, was a favorite associate. at this luncheon the picture on the bill of fare represented him as a robed pilgrim, with a great pen for his staff, turning his back on the mississippi river and being led along his literary way by a huge jumping frog, to which he is attached by a string. on a guest-card was printed: pilot of many pilgrims since the shout "mark twain!"--that serves you for a deathless sign --on mississippi's waterway rang out over the plummet's line-- still where the countless ripples laugh above the blue of halcyon seas long may you keep your course unbroken, buoyed upon a love ten thousand fathoms deep! --o. s. [owen seaman]. augustine birrell made the speech of introduction, closing with this paragraph: mark twain is a man whom englishmen and americans do well to honor. he is a true consolidator of nations. his delightful humor is of the kind which dissipates and destroys national prejudices. his truth and his honor--his love of truth and his love of honor --overflow all boundaries. he has made the world better by his presence, and we rejoice to see him here. long may he live to reap a plentiful harvest of hearty honest human affection. the toast was drunk standing. then clemens rose and made a speech which delighted all england. in his introduction mr. birrell had happened to say, "how i came here i will not ask!" clemens remembered this, and looking down into mr. birrell's wine-glass, which was apparently unused, he said: "mr. birrell doesn't know how he got here. but he will be able to get away all right--he has not drunk anything since he came." he told stories about howells and twichell, and how darwin had gone to sleep reading his books, and then he came down to personal things and company, and told them how, on the day of his arrival, he had been shocked to read on a great placard, "mark twain arrives: ascot cup stolen." no doubt many a person was misled by those sentences joined together in that unkind way. i have no doubt my character has suffered from it. i suppose i ought to defend my character, but how can i defend it? i can say here and now that anybody can see by my face that i am sincere--that i speak the truth, and that i have never seen that cup. i have not got the cup, i did not have a chance to get it. i have always had a good character in that way. i have hardly ever stolen anything, and if i did steal anything i had discretion enough to know about the value of it first. i do not steal things that are likely to get myself into trouble. i do not think any of us do that. i know we all take things--that is to be expected; but really i have never taken anything, certainly in england, that amounts to any great thing. i do confess that when i was here seven years ago i stole a hat--but that did not amount to anything. it was not a good hat it was only a clergyman's hat, anyway. i was at a luncheon-party and archdeacon wilberforce was there also. i dare say he is archdeacon now--he was a canon then--and he was serving in the westminster battery, if that is the proper term. i do not know, as you mix military and ecclesiastical things together so much. he recounted the incident of the exchanged hats; then he spoke of graver things. he closed: i cannot always be cheerful, and i cannot always be chaffing. i must sometimes lay the cap and bells aside and recognize that i am of the human race. i have my cares and griefs, and i therefore noticed what mr. birrell said--i was so glad to hear him say it --something that was in the nature of these verses here at the top of the program: he lit our life with shafts of sun and vanquished pain. thus two great nations stand as one in honoring twain. i am very glad to have those verses. i am very glad and very grateful for what mr. birrell said in that connection. i have received since i have been here, in this one week, hundreds of letters from all conditions of people in england, men, women, and children, and there is compliment, praise, and, above all, and better than all, there is in them a note of affection. praise is well, compliment is well, but affection--that is the last and final and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement, and i am very grateful to have that reward. all these letters make me feel that here in england, as in america, when i stand under the english or the american flag i am not a stranger, i am not an alien, but at home. cclviii doctor of literature, oxford he left, immediately following the pilgrim luncheon, with hon. robert p. porter, of the london times, for oxford, to remain his guest there during the various ceremonies. the encenia--the ceremony of conferring the degrees--occurred at the sheldonian theater the following morning, june , . it was a memorable affair. among those who were to receive degrees that morning besides samuel clemens were: prince arthur of connaught; prime minister campbell-bannerman; whitelaw reid; rudyard kipling; sidney lee; sidney colvin; lord archbishop of armagh, primate of ireland; sir norman lockyer; auguste rodin, the sculptor; saint-saens, and gen. william booth, of the salvation army-something more than thirty, in all, of the world's distinguished citizens. the candidates assembled at magdalen college, and led by lord curzon, the chancellor, and clad in their academic plumage, filed in radiant procession to the sheldonian theater, a group of men such as the world seldom sees collected together. the london standard said of it: so brilliant and so interesting was the list of those who had been selected by oxford university on convocation to receive degrees, 'honoris causa', in this first year of lord curzon's chancellorship, that it is small wonder that the sheldonian theater was besieged today at an early hour. shortly after o'clock the organ started playing the strains of "god save the king," and at once a great volume of sound arose as the anthem was taken up by the undergraduates and the rest of the assemblage. every one stood up as, headed by the mace of office, the procession slowly filed into the theater, under the leadership of lord curzon, in all the glory of his robes of office, the long black gown heavily embroidered with gold, the gold-tasseled mortar- board, and the medals on his breast forming an admirable setting, thoroughly in keeping with the dignity and bearing of the late viceroy of india. following him came the members of convocation, a goodly number consisting of doctors of divinity, whose robes of scarlet and black enhanced the brilliance of the scene. robes of salmon and scarlet-which proclaim the wearer to be a doctor of civil law--were also seen in numbers, while here and there was a gown of gray and scarlet, emblematic of the doctorate of science or of letters. the encenia is an impressive occasion; but it is not a silent one. there is a splendid dignity about it; but there goes with it all a sort of greek chorus of hilarity, the time-honored prerogative of the oxford undergraduate, who insists on having his joke and his merriment at the expense of those honored guests. the degrees of doctor of law were conferred first. prince arthur was treated with proper dignity by the gallery; but when whitelaw reid stepped forth a voice shouted, "where's your star-spangled banner?" and when england's prime minister-campbell-bannerman--came forward some one shouted, "what about the house of lords?" and so they kept it up, cheering and chaffing, until general booth was introduced as the "passionate advocate of the dregs of the people, leader of the submerged tenth," and "general of the salvation army," when the place broke into a perfect storm of applause, a storm that a few minutes later became, according to the daily news, "a veritable cyclone," for mark twain, clad in his robe of scarlet and gray, had been summoned forward to receive the highest academic honors which the world has to give. the undergraduates went wild then. there was such a mingling of yells and calls and questions, such as, "have you brought the jumping frog with you?" "where is the ascot cup?" "where are the rest of the innocents?" that it seemed as if it would not be possible to present him at all; but, finally, chancellor curzon addressed him (in latin), "most amiable and charming sir, you shake the sides of the whole world with your merriment," and the great degree was conferred. if only tom sawyer could have seen him then! if only olivia clemens could have sat among those who gave him welcome! but life is not like that. there is always an incompleteness somewhere, and the shadow across the path. rudyard kipling followed--another supreme favorite, who was hailed with the chorus, "for he's a jolly good fellow," and then came saint-satins. the prize poems and essays followed, and then the procession of newly created doctors left the theater with lord curzon at their head. so it was all over-that for which, as he said, he would have made the journey to mars. the world had nothing more to give him now except that which he had already long possessed-its honor and its love. the newly made doctors were to be the guests of lord curzon at all souls college for luncheon. as they left the theater (according to sidney lee): the people in the streets singled out mark twain, formed a vast and cheering body-guard around him and escorted him to the college gates. but before and after the lunch it was mark twain again whom everybody seemed most of all to want to meet. the maharajah of bikanir, for instance, finding himself seated at lunch next to mrs. riggs (kate douglas wiggin), and hearing that she knew mark twain, asked her to present him a ceremony duly performed later on the quadrangle. at the garden-party given the same afternoon in the beautiful grounds of st. john's, where the indefatigable mark put in an appearance, it was just the same--every one pressed forward for an exchange of greetings and a hand-shake. on the following day, when the oxford pageant took place, it was even more so. "mark twain's pageant," it was called by one of the papers.--[there was a dinner that evening at one of the colleges where, through mistaken information, clemens wore black evening dress when he should have worn his scarlet gown. "when i arrived," he said, "the place was just a conflagration--a kind of human prairie-fire. i looked as out of place as a presbyterian in hell."] clemens remained the guest of robert porter, whose house was besieged with those desiring a glimpse of their new doctor of letters. if he went on the streets he was instantly recognized by some newsboy or cabman or butcher-boy, and the word ran along like a cry of fire, while the crowds assembled. at a luncheon which the porters gave him the proprietor of the catering establishment garbed himself as a waiter in order to have the distinction of serving mark twain, and declared it to have been the greatest moment of his life. this gentleman--for he was no less than that--was a man well-read, and his tribute was not inspired by mere snobbery. clemens, learning of the situation, later withdrew from the drawing-room for a talk with him. "i found," he said, "that he knew about ten or fifteen times as much about my books as i knew about them myself." mark twain viewed the oxford pageant from a box with rudyard kipling and lord curzon, and as they sat there some one passed up a folded slip of paper, on the outside of which was written, "not true." opening it, they read: east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet, --a quotation from kipling. they saw the panorama of history file by, a wonderful spectacle which made oxford a veritable dream of the middle ages. the lanes and streets and meadows were thronged with such costumes as oxford had seen in its long history. history was realized in a manner which no one could appreciate more fully than mark twain. "i was particularly anxious to see this pageant," he said, "so that i could get ideas for my funeral procession, which i am planning on a large scale." he was not disappointed; it was a realization to him of all the gorgeous spectacles that his soul had dreamed from youth up. he easily recognized the great characters of history as they passed by, and he was recognized by them in turn; for they waved to him and bowed and sometimes called his name, and when he went down out of his box, by and by, henry viii. shook hands with him, a monarch he had always detested, though he was full of friendship for him now; and charles i. took off his broad, velvet-plumed hat when they met, and henry ii. and rosamond and queen elizabeth all saluted him--ghosts of the dead centuries. cclix london social honors we may not detail all the story of that english visit; even the path of glory leads to monotony at last. we may only mention a few more of the great honors paid to our unofficial ambassador to the world: among them a dinner given to members of the savage club by the lord mayor of london at the mansion house, also a dinner given by the american society at the hotel cecil in honor of the fourth of july. clemens was the guest of honor, and responded to the toast given by ambassador reid, "the day we celebrate." he made an amusing and not altogether unserious reference to the american habit of exploding enthusiasm in dangerous fireworks. to english colonists he gave credit for having established american independence, and closed: we have, however, one fourth of july which is absolutely our own, and that is the memorable proclamation issued forty years ago by that great american to whom sir mortimer durand paid that just and beautiful tribute--abraham lincoln: a proclamation which not only set the black slave free, but set his white owner free also. the owner was set free from that burden and offense, that sad condition of things where he was in so many instances a master and owner of slaves when he did not want to be. that proclamation set them all free. but even in this matter england led the way, for she had set her slaves free thirty years before, and we but followed her example. we always follow her example, whether it is good or bad. and it was an english judge, a century ago, that issued that other great proclamation, and established that great principle, that when a slave, let him belong to whom he may, and let him come whence he may, sets his foot upon english soil his fetters, by that act, fall away and he is a free man before the world! it is true, then, that all our fourths of july, and we have five of them, england gave to us, except that one that i have mentioned--the emancipation proclamation; and let us not forget that we owe this debt to her. let us be able to say to old england, this great- hearted, venerable old mother of the race, you gave us our fourths of july, that we love and that we honor and revere; you gave us the declaration of independence, which is the charter of our rights; you, the venerable mother of liberties, the champion and protector of anglo-saxon freedom--you gave us these things, and we do most honestly thank you for them. it was at this dinner that he characteristically confessed, at last, to having stolen the ascot cup. he lunched one day with bernard shaw, and the two discussed the philosophies in which they were mutually interested. shaw regarded clemens as a sociologist before all else, and gave it out with great frankness that america had produced just two great geniuses--edgar allan poe and mark twain. later shaw wrote him a note, in which he said: i am persuaded that the future historian of america will find your works as indispensable to him as a french historian finds the political tracts of voltaire. i tell you so because i am the author of a play in which a priest says, "telling the truth's the funniest joke in the world," a piece of wisdom which you helped to teach me. clemens saw a great deal of moberly bell. the two lunched and dined privately together when there was opportunity, and often met at the public gatherings. the bare memorandum of the week following july fourth will convey something of mark twain's london activities: friday, july . dined with lord and lady portsmouth. saturday, july . breakfasted at lord avebury's. lord kelvin, sir charles lyell, and sir archibald geikie were there. sat times for photos, at histed's. savage club dinner in the evening. white suit. ascot cup. sunday, july . called on lady langattock and others. lunched with sir norman lockyer. monday, july . lunched with plasmon directors at bath club. dined privately at c. f. moberly bell's. tuesday, july . lunched at the house with sir benjamin stone. balfour and komura were the other guests of honor. punch dinner in the evening. joy agnew and the cartoon. wednesday, july . went to liverpool with tay pay. attended banquet in the town hall in the evening. thursday, july . returned to london with tay pay. calls in the afternoon. the savage club would inevitably want to entertain him on its own account, and their dinner of july th was a handsome, affair. he felt at home with the savages, and put on white for the only time publicly in england. he made them one of his reminiscent speeches, recalling his association with them on his first visit to london, thirty-seven years before. then he said: that is a long time ago, and as i had come into a very strange land, and was with friends, as i could see, that has always remained in my mind as a peculiarly blessed evening, since it brought me into contact with men of my own kind and my own feelings. i am glad to be here, and to see you all, because it is very likely that i shall not see you again. i have been received, as you know, in the most delightfully generous way in england ever since i came here. it keeps me choked up all the time. everybody is so generous, and they do seem to give you such a hearty welcome. nobody in the world can appreciate it higher than i do. the club gave him a surprise in the course of the evening. a note was sent to him accompanied by a parcel, which, when opened, proved to contain a gilded plaster replica of the ascot gold cup. the note said: dere mark, i return the cup. you couldn't keep your mouth shut about it. 'tis pretty melt, as you want me ; nest time i work a pinch ile have a pard who don't make after-dinner speeches. there was a postcript which said: "i changed the acorn atop for another nut with my knife." the acorn was, in fact, replaced by a well-modeled head of mark twain. so, after all, the ascot cup would be one of the trophies which he would bear home with him across the atlantic. probably the most valued of his london honors was the dinner given to him by the staff of punch. punch had already saluted him with a front-page cartoon by bernard partridge, a picture in which the presiding genius of that paper, mr. punch himself, presents him with a glass of the patronymic beverage with the words, "sir, i honor myself by drinking your health. long life to you--and happiness--and perpetual youth!" mr. agnew, chief editor; linley sambourne, francis burnand, henry lucy, and others of the staff welcomed him at the punch offices at bouverie street, in the historic punch dining-room where thackeray had sat, and douglas jerrold, and so many of the great departed. mark twain was the first foreign visitor to be so honored--in fifty years the first stranger to sit at the sacred board--a mighty distinction. in the course of the dinner they gave him a pretty surprise, when little joy agnew presented him with the original drawing of partridge's cartoon. nothing could have appealed to him more, and the punch dinner, with its associations and that dainty presentation, remained apart in his memory from all other feastings. clemens had intended to return early in july, but so much was happening that he postponed his sailing until the th. before leaving america, he had declined a dinner offered by the lord mayor of liverpool. repeatedly urged to let liverpool share in his visit, he had reconsidered now, and on the day following the punch dinner, on july th, they carried him, with t. p. o'connor (tay pay) in the prince of wales's special coach to liverpool, to be guest of honor at the reception and banquet which lord mayor japp tendered him at the town hall. clemens was too tired to be present while the courses were being served, but arrived rested and fresh to respond to his toast. perhaps because it was his farewell speech in england, he made that night the most effective address of his four weeks' visit--one of the most effective of his whole career: he began by some light reference to the ascot cup and the dublin jewels and the state regalia, and other disappearances that had been laid to his charge, to amuse his hearers, and spoke at greater length than usual, and with even greater variety. then laying all levity aside, he told them, like the queen of sheba, all that was in his heart. . . . home is dear to us all, and now i am departing to my own home beyond the ocean. oxford has conferred upon me the highest honor that has ever fallen to my share of this life's prizes. it is the very one i would have chosen, as outranking all and any others, the one more precious to me than any and all others within the gift of man or state. during my four weeks' sojourn in england i have had another lofty honor, a continuous honor, an honor which has flowed serenely along, without halt or obstruction, through all these twenty-six days, a most moving and pulse-stirring honor--the heartfelt grip of the hand, and the welcome that does not descend from the pale-gray matter of the brain, but rushes up with the red blood from the heart. it makes me proud and sometimes it makes me humble, too. many and many a year ago i gathered an incident from dana's two years before the mast. it was like this: there was a presumptuous little self-important skipper in a coasting sloop engaged in the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade, and he was always hailing every ship that came in sight. he did it just to hear himself talk and to air his small grandeur. one day a majestic indiaman came plowing by with course on course of canvas towering into the sky, her decks and yards swarming with sailors, her hull burdened to the plimsoll line with a rich freightage of precious spices, lading the breezes with gracious and mysterious odors of the orient. it was a noble spectacle, a sublime spectacle! of course the little skipper popped into the shrouds and squeaked out a hail, "ship ahoy! what ship is that? and whence and whither?" in a deep and thunderous bass the answer came back through the speaking- trumpet, "the begum, of bengal-- days out from canton--homeward bound! what ship is that?" well, it just crushed that poor little creature's vanity flat, and he squeaked back most humbly, "only the mary ann, fourteen hours out from boston, bound for kittery point --with nothing to speak of!" oh, what an eloquent word that "only," to express the depths of his humbleness! that is just my case. during just one hour in the twenty-four--not more--i pause and reflect in the stillness of the night with the echoes of your english welcome still lingering in my ears, and then i am humble. then i am properly meek, and for that little while i am only the mary ann, fourteen hours out, cargoed with vegetables and tinware; but during all the other twenty-three hours my vain self-complacency rides high on the white crests of your approval, and then i am a stately indiaman, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas and laden with the kindest words that have ever been vouchsafed to any wandering alien in this world, i think; then my twenty-six fortunate days on this old mother soil seem to be multiplied by six, and i am the begum, of bengal, days out from canton--homeward bound! he returned to london, and with one of his young acquaintances, an american--he called her francesca--paid many calls. it took the dreariness out of that social function to perform it in that way. with a list of the calls they were to make they drove forth each day to cancel the social debt. they paid calls in every walk of life. his young companion was privileged to see the inside of london homes of almost every class, for he showed no partiality; he went to the homes of the poor and the rich alike. one day they visited the home of an old bookkeeper whom he had known in as a clerk in a large establishment, earning a salary of perhaps a pound a week, who now had risen mightily, for he had become head bookkeeper in that establishment on a salary of six pounds a week, and thought it great prosperity and fortune for his old age. he sailed on july th for home, besought to the last moment by a crowd of autograph-seekers and reporters and photographers, and a multitude who only wished to see him and to shout and wave good-by. he was sailing away from them for the last time. they hoped he would make a speech, but that would not have been possible. to the reporters he gave a farewell message: "it has been the most enjoyable holiday i have ever had, and i am sorry the end of it has come. i have met a hundred, old friends, and i have made a hundred new ones. it is a good kind of riches to have; there is none better, i think." and the london tribune declared that "the ship that bore him away had difficulty in getting clear, so thickly was the water strewn with the bay-leaves of his triumph. for mark twain has triumphed, and in his all-too-brief stay of a month has done more for the cause of the world's peace than will be accomplished by the hague conference. he has made the world laugh again." his ship was the minnetonka, and there were some little folks aboard to be adopted as grandchildren. on july th, in a fog, the minnetonka collided with the bark sterling, and narrowly escaped sinking her. on the whole, however, the homeward way was clear, and the vessel reached new york nearly a day in advance of their schedule. some ceremonies of welcome had been prepared for him; but they were upset by the early arrival, so that when he descended the gang-plank to his native soil only a few who had received special information were there to greet him. but perhaps he did not notice it. he seldom took account of the absence of such things. by early afternoon, however, the papers rang with the announcement that mark twain was home again. it is a sorrow to me that i was not at the dock to welcome him. i had been visiting in elmira, and timed my return for the evening of the a d, to be on hand the following morning, when the ship was due. when i saw the announcement that he had already arrived i called a greeting over the telephone, and was told to come down and play billiards. i confess i went with a certain degree of awe, for one could not but be overwhelmed with the echoes of the great splendor he had so recently achieved, and i prepared to sit a good way off in silence, and hear something of the tale of this returning conqueror; but when i arrived he was already in the billiard-room knocking the balls about--his coat off, for it was a hot night. as i entered he said: "get your cue. i have been inventing a new game." and i think there were scarcely ten words exchanged before we were at it. the pageant was over; the curtain was rung down. business was resumed at the old stand. cclx matters psychic and otherwise he returned to tuxedo and took up his dictations, and mingled freely with the social life; but the contrast between his recent london experience and his semi-retirement must have been very great. when i visited him now and then, he seemed to me lonely--not especially for companionship, but rather for the life that lay behind him--the great career which in a sense now had been completed since he had touched its highest point. there was no billiard-table at tuxedo, and he spoke expectantly of getting back to town and the games there, also of the new home which was then building in redding, and which would have a billiard-room where we could assemble daily--my own habitation being not far away. various diversions were planned for redding; among them was discussed a possible school of philosophy, such as hawthorne and emerson and alcott had established at concord. he spoke quite freely of his english experiences, but usually of the more amusing phases. he almost never referred to the honors that had been paid to him, yet he must have thought of them sometimes, and cherished them, for it had been the greatest national tribute ever paid to a private citizen; he must have known that in his heart. he spoke amusingly of his visit to marie corelli, in stratford, and of the holy grail incident, ending the latter by questioning--in words at least--all psychic manifestations. i said to him: "but remember your own dream, mr. clemens, which presaged the death of your brother." he answered: "i ask nobody to believe that it ever happened. to me it is true; but it has no logical right to be true, and i do not expect belief in it." which i thought a peculiar point of view, but on the whole characteristic. he was invited to be a special guest at the jamestown exposition on fulton day, in september, and mr. rogers lent him his yacht in which to make the trip. it was a break in the summer's monotonies, and the jamestown honors must have reminded him of those in london. when he entered the auditorium where the services were to be held there was a demonstration which lasted more than five minutes. every person in the hall rose and cheered, waving handkerchiefs and umbrellas. he made them a brief, amusing talk on fulton and other matters, then introduced admiral harrington, who delivered a masterly address and was followed by martin w. littleton, the real orator of the day. littleton acquitted himself so notably that mark twain conceived for him a deep admiration, and the two men quickly became friends. they saw each other often during the remainder of the jamestown stay, and clemens, learning that littleton lived just across ninth street from him in new york, invited him to come over when he had an evening to spare and join the billiard games. so it happened, somewhat later, when every one was back in town, mr. and mrs. littleton frequently came over for billiards, and the games became three-handed with an audience--very pleasant games played in that way. clemens sometimes set himself up as umpire, and became critic and gave advice, while littleton and i played. he had a favorite shot that he frequently used himself and was always wanting us to try, which was to drive the ball to the cushion at the beginning of the shot. he played it with a good deal of success, and achieved unexpected results with it. he was even inspired to write a poem on the subject. "cushion first" when all your days are dark with doubt, and dying hope is at its worst; when all life's balls are scattered wide, with not a shot in sight, to left or right, don't give it up; advance your cue and shut your eyes, and take the cushion first. the harry thaw trial was in progress just then, and littleton was thaw's chief attorney. it was most interesting to hear from him direct the day's proceedings and his views of the situation and of thaw. littleton and billiards recall a curious thing which happened one afternoon. i had been absent the evening before, and littleton had been over. it was after luncheon now, and clemens and i began preparing for the customary games. we were playing then a game with four balls, two white and two red. i began by placing the red balls on the table, and then went around looking in the pockets for the two white cue-balls. when i had made the round of the table i had found but one white ball. i thought i must have overlooked the other, and made the round again. then i said: "there is one white ball missing." clemens, to satisfy himself, also made the round of the pockets, and said: "it was here last night." he felt in the pockets of the little white-silk coat which he usually wore, thinking that he might unconsciously have placed it there at the end of the last game, but his coat pockets were empty. he said: "i'll bet littleton carried that ball home with him." then i suggested that near the end of the game it might have jumped off the table, and i looked carefully under the furniture and in the various corners, but without success. there was another set of balls, and out of it i selected a white one for our play, and the game began. it went along in the usual way, the balls constantly falling into the pockets, and as constantly being replaced on the table. this had continued for perhaps half an hour, there being no pocket that had not been frequently occupied and emptied during that time; but then it happened that clemens reached into the middle pocket, and taking out a white ball laid it in place, whereupon we made the discovery that three white balls lay upon the table. the one just taken from the pocket was the missing ball. we looked at each other, both at first too astonished to say anything at all. no one had been in the room since we began to play, and at no time during the play had there been more than two white balls in evidence, though the pockets had been emptied at the end of each shot. the pocket from which the missing ball had been taken had been filled and emptied again and again. then clemens said: "we must be dreaming." we stopped the game for a while to discuss it, but we could devise no material explanation. i suggested the kobold--that mischievous invisible which is supposed to play pranks by carrying off such things as pencils, letters, and the like, and suddenly restoring them almost before one's eyes. clemens, who, in spite of his material logic, was always a mystic at heart, said: "but that, so far as i know, has never happened to more than one person at a time, and has been explained by a sort of temporary mental blindness. this thing has happened to two of us, and there can be no question as to the positive absence of the object." "how about dematerialization?" "yes, if one of us were a medium that might be considered an explanation." he went on to recall that sir alfred russel wallace had written of such things, and cited instances which wallace had recorded. in the end he said: "well, it happened, that's all we can say, and nobody can ever convince me that it didn't." we went on playing, and the ball remained solid and substantial ever after, so far as i know. i am reminded of two more or less related incidents of this period. clemens was, one morning, dictating something about his christian union article concerning mrs. clemens's government of children, published in . i had discovered no copy of it among the materials, and he was wishing very much that he could see one. somewhat later, as he was walking down fifth avenue, the thought of this article and his desire for it suddenly entered his mind. reaching the corner of forty-second street, he stopped a moment to let a jam of vehicles pass. as he did so a stranger crossed the street, noticed him, and came dodging his way through the blockade and thrust some clippings into his hand. "mr. clemens," he said, "you don't know me, but here is something you may wish to have. i have been saving them for more than twenty years, and this morning it occurred to me to send them to you. i was going to mail them from my office, but now i will give them to you," and with a word or two he disappeared. the clippings were from the christian union of , and were the much-desired article. clemens regarded it as a remarkable case of mental telegraphy. "or, if it wasn't that," he said, "it was a most remarkable coincidence." the other circumstance has been thought amusing. i had gone to redding for a few days, and while there, one afternoon about five o'clock, fell over a coal-scuttle and scarified myself a good deal between the ankle and the knee. i mention the hour because it seems important. next morning i received a note, prompted by mr. clemens, in which he said: tell paine i am sorry he fell and skinned his shin at five o'clock yesterday afternoon. i was naturally astonished, and immediately wrote: i did fall and skin my shin at five o'clock yesterday afternoon, but how did you find it out? i followed the letter in person next day, and learned that at the same hour on the same afternoon clemens himself had fallen up the front steps and, as he said, peeled off from his "starboard shin a ribbon of skin three inches long." the disaster was still uppermost in his mind at the time of writing, and the suggestion of my own mishap had flashed out for no particular reason. clemens was always having his fortune told, in one way or another, being superstitious, as he readily confessed, though at times professing little faith in these prognostics. once when a clairvoyant, of whom he had never even heard, and whom he had reason to believe was ignorant of his family history, told him more about it than he knew himself, besides reading a list of names from a piece of paper which clemens had concealed in his vest pocket he came home deeply impressed. the clairvoyant added that he would probably live to a great age and die in a foreign land--a prophecy which did not comfort him. cclxi minor events and diversions mark twain was deeply interested during the autumn of in the children's theater of the jewish educational alliance, on the lower east side--a most worthy institution which ought to have survived. a miss alice m. herts, who developed and directed it, gave her strength and health to build up an institution through which the interest of the children could be diverted from less fortunate amusements. she had interested a great body of jewish children in the plays of shakespeare, and of more modern dramatists, and these they had performed from time to time with great success. the admission fee to the performance was ten cents, and the theater was always crowded with other children--certainly a better diversion for them than the amusements of the street, though of course, as a business enterprise, the theater could not pay. it required patrons. miss herts obtained permission to play "the prince and the pauper," and mark twain agreed to become a sort of chief patron in using his influence to bring together an audience who might be willing to assist financially in this worthy work. "the prince and the pauper" evening turned out a distinguished affair. on the night of november , , the hall of the educational alliance was crowded with such an audience as perhaps never before assembled on the east side; the finance and the fashion of new york were there. it was a gala night for the little east side performers. behind the curtain they whispered to each other that they were to play before queens. the performance they gave was an astonishing one. so fully did they enter into the spirit of tom canty's rise to royalty that they seemed absolutely to forget that they were lowly-born children of the ghetto. they had become little princesses and lords and maids-in-waiting, and they moved through their pretty tinsel parts as if all their ornaments were gems and their raiment cloth of gold. there was no hesitation, no awkwardness of speech or gesture, and they rose really to sublime heights in the barn scene where the little prince is in the hands of the mob. never in the history of the stage has there been assembled a mob more wonderful than that. these children knew mobs! a mob to them was a daily sight, and their reproduction of it was a thing to startle you with its realism. never was it absurd; never was there a single note of artificiality in it. it was hogarthian in its bigness. both mark twain and miss herts made brief addresses, and the audience shouted approval of their words. it seems a pity that such a project as that must fail, and i do not know why it happened. wealthy men and women manifested an interest; but there was some hitch somewhere, and the children's theater exists to-day only as history.--[in a letter to a mrs. amelia dunne hookway, who had conducted some children's plays at the howland school, chicago, mark twain once wrote: "if i were going to begin life over again i would have a children's theater and watch it, and work for it, and see it grow and blossom and bear its rich moral and intellectual fruitage; and i should get more pleasure and a saner and healthier profit out of my vocation than i should ever be able to get out of any other, constituted as i am. yes, you are easily the most fortunate of women, i think."] it was at a dinner at the players--a small, private dinner given by mr. george c. riggs-that i saw edward l. burlingame and mark twain for the only time together. they had often met during the forty-two years that had passed since their long-ago sandwich island friendship; but only incidentally, for mr. burlingame cared not much for great public occasions, and as editor of scribner's magazine he had been somewhat out of the line of mark twain's literary doings. howells was there, and gen. stewart l. woodford, and david bispham, john finley, evan shipman, nicholas biddle, and david munro. clemens told that night, for the first time, the story of general miles and the three-dollar dog, inventing it, i believe, as he went along, though for the moment it certainly did sound like history. he told it often after that, and it has been included in his book of speeches. later, in the cab, he said: "that was a mighty good dinner. riggs knows how to do that sort of thing. i enjoyed it ever so much. now we'll go home and play billiards." we began about eleven o'clock, and played until after midnight. i happened to be too strong for him, and he swore amazingly. he vowed that it was not a gentleman's game at all, that riggs's wine had demoralized the play. but at the end, when we were putting up the cues, he said: "well, those were good games. there is nothing like billiards after all." we did not play billiards on his birthday that year. he went to the theater in the afternoon; and it happened that, with jesse lynch williams, i attended the same performance--the "toy-maker of nuremberg" --written by austin strong. it proved to be a charming play, and i could see that clemens was enjoying it. he sat in a box next to the stage, and the actors clearly were doing their very prettiest for his benefit. when later i mentioned having seen him at the play, he spoke freely of his pleasure in it. "it is a fine, delicate piece of work," he said. "i wish i could do such things as that." "i believe you are too literary for play-writing." "yes, no doubt. there was never any question with the managers about my plays. they always said they wouldn't act. howells has come pretty near to something once or twice. i judge the trouble is that the literary man is thinking of the style and quality of the thing, while the playwright thinks only of how it will play. one is thinking of how it will sound, the other of how it will look." "i suppose," i said, "the literary man should have a collaborator with a genius for stage mechanism. john luther long's exquisite plays would hardly have been successful without david belasco to stage them. belasco cannot write a play himself, but in the matter of acting construction his genius is supreme." "yes, so it is; it was belasco who made it possible to play 'the prince and the pauper'--a collection of literary garbage before he got hold of it." clemens attended few public functions now. he was beset with invitations, but he declined most of them. he told the dog story one night to the pleiades club, assembled at the brevoort; but that was only a step away, and we went in after the dining was ended and came away before the exercises were concluded. he also spoke at a banquet given to andrew carnegie--saint andrew, as he called him--by the engineers club, and had his usual fun at the chief guest's expense. i have been chief guest at a good many banquets myself, and i know what brother andrew is feeling like now. he has been receiving compliments and nothing but compliments, but he knows that there is another side to him that needs censure. i am going to vary the complimentary monotony. while we have all been listening to the complimentary talk mr. carnegie's face has scintillated with fictitious innocence. you'd think he never committed a crime in his life. but he has. look at his pestiferous simplified spelling. imagine the calamity on two sides of the ocean when he foisted his simplified spelling on the whole human race. we've got it all now so that nobody could spell . . . . if mr. carnegie had left spelling alone we wouldn't have had any spots on the sun, or any san francisco quake, or any business depression. there, i trust he feels better now and that he has enjoyed my abuse more than he did his compliments. and now that i think i have him smoothed down and feeling comfortable i just want to say one thing more--that his simplified spelling is all right enough, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far. as he was about to go, carnegie called his attention to the beautiful souvenir bronze and gold-plated goblets that stood at each guest's plate. carnegie said: "the club had those especially made at tiffany's for this occasion. they cost ten dollars apiece." clemens sand: "is that so? well, i only meant to take my own; but if that's the case i'll load my cab with them." we made an attempt to reform on the matter of billiards. the continued strain of late hours was doing neither of us any particular good. more than once i journeyed into the country on one errand and another, mainly for rest; but a card saying that he was lonely and upset, for lack of his evening games, quickly brought me back again. it was my wish only to serve him; it was a privilege and an honor to give him happiness. billiards, however, was not his only recreation just then. he walked out a good deal, and especially of a pleasant sunday morning he liked the stroll up fifth avenue. sometimes we went as high as carnegie's, on ninety-second street, and rode home on top of the electric stage--always one of mark twain's favorite diversions. from that high seat he liked to look down on the panorama of the streets, and in that free, open air he could smoke without interference. oftener, however, we turned at fifty-ninth street, walking both ways. when it was pleasant we sometimes sat on a bench in central park; and once he must have left a handkerchief there, for a few days later one of his handkerchiefs came to him accompanied by a note. its finder, a mr. lockwood, received a reward, for mark twain wrote him: there is more rejoicing in this house over that one handkerchief that was lost and is found again than over the ninety and nine that never went to the wash at all. heaven will reward you, i know it will. on sunday mornings the return walk would be timed for about the hour that the churches would be dismissed. on the first sunday morning we had started a little early, and i thoughtlessly suggested, when we reached fifty-ninth street, that if we returned at once we would avoid the throng. he said, quietly: "i like the throng." so we rested in the plaza hotel until the appointed hour. men and women noticed him, and came over to shake his hand. the gigantic man in uniform; in charge of the carriages at the door, came in for a word. he had opened carriages for mr. clemens at the twenty-third street station, and now wanted to claim that honor. i think he received the most cordial welcome of any one who came. i am sure he did. it was mark twain's way to warm to the man of the lower social rank. he was never too busy, never too preoccupied, to grasp the hand of such a man; to listen to his story, and to say just the words that would make that man happy remembering them. we left the plaza hotel and presently were amid the throng of outpouring congregations. of course he was the object on which every passing eye turned; the presence to which every hat was lifted. i realized that this open and eagerly paid homage of the multitude was still dear to him, not in any small and petty way, but as the tribute of a nation, the expression of that affection which in his london and liverpool speeches he had declared to be the last and final and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement. it was his final harvest, and he had the courage to claim it--the aftermath of all his years of honorable labor and noble living. cclxii from mark twain's mail if the reader has any curiosity as to some of the less usual letters which a man of wide public note may inspire, perhaps he will find a certain interest in a few selected from the thousands which yearly came to mark twain. for one thing, he was constantly receiving prescriptions and remedies whenever the papers reported one of his bronchial or rheumatic attacks. it is hardly necessary to quote examples of these, but only a form of his occasional reply, which was likely to be in this wise: dear sir [or madam],--i try every remedy sent to me. i am now on no. . yours is , . i am looking forward to its beneficial results. of course a large number of the nostrums and palliatives offered were preparations made by the wildest and longest-haired medical cranks. one of these sent an advertisement of a certain elixir of life, which was guaranteed to cure everything--to "wash and cleanse the human molecules, and so restore youth and preserve life everlasting." anonymous letters are not usually popular or to be encouraged, but mark twain had an especial weakness for compliments that came in that way. they were not mercenary compliments. the writer had nothing to gain. two such letters follow--both written in england just at the time of his return. mark twain. dear sir,--please accept a poor widow's good-by and kindest wishes. i have had some of your books sent to me; have enjoyed them very much--only wish i could afford to buy some. i should very much like to have seen you. i have many photos of you which i have cut from several papers which i read. i have one where you are writing in bed, which i cut from the daily news. like myself, you believe in lots of sleep and rest. i am and i find i need plenty. please forgive the liberty i have taken in writing to you. if i can't come to your funeral may we meet beyond the river. may god guard you, is the wish of a lonely old widow. yours sincerely, the other letter also tells its own story: dear, kind mark twain,--for years i have wanted to write and thank you for the comfort you were to me once, only i never quite knew where you were, and besides i did not want to bother you; but to-day i was told by some one who saw you going into the lift at the savoy that you looked sad and i thought it might cheer you a little tiny bit to hear how you kept a poor lonely girl from ruining her eyes with crying every night for long months. ten years ago i had to leave home and earn my living as a governess and fate sent me to spend a winter with a very dull old country family in the depths of staffordshire. according to the genial english custom, after my five charges had gone to bed, i took my evening meal alone in the school-room, where "henry tudor had supped the night before bosworth," and there i had to stay without a soul to speak to till i went to bed. at first i used to cry every night, but a friend sent me a copy of your huckleberry finn and i never cried any more. i kept him handy under the copy-books and maps, and when henry tudor commenced to stretch out his chilly hands toward me i grabbed my dear huck and he never once failed me; i opened him at random and in two minutes i was in another world. that's why i am so grateful to you and so fond of you, and i thought you might like to know; for it is yourself that has the kind heart, as is easily seen from the way you wrote about the poor old nigger. i am a stenographer now and live at home, but i shall never forget how you helped me. god bless you and spare you long to those you are dear to. a letter which came to him soon after his return from england contained a clipping which reported the good work done by christian missionaries in the congo, especially among natives afflicted by the terrible sleeping sickness. the letter itself consisted merely of a line, which said: won't you give your friends, the missionaries, a good mark for this? the writer's name was signed, and mark twain answered: in china the missionaries are not wanted, & so they ought to be decent & go away. but i have not heard that in the congo the missionary servants of god are unwelcome to the native. evidently those missionaries axe pitying, compassionate, kind. how it would improve god to take a lesson from them! he invented & distributed the germ of that awful disease among those helpless, poor savages, & now he sits with his elbows on the balusters & looks down & enjoys this wanton crime. confidently, & between you & me --well, never mind, i might get struck by lightning if i said it. those are good and kindly men, those missionaries, but they are a measureless satire upon their master. to which the writer answered: o wicked mr. clemens! i have to ask saint joan of arc to pray for you; then one of these days, when we all stand before the golden gates and we no longer "see through a glass darkly and know only in part," there will be a struggle at the heavenly portals between joan of arc and st. peter, but your blessed joan will conquer and she'll lead mr. clemens through the gates of pearl and apologize and plead for him. of the letters that irritated him, perhaps the following is as fair a sample as any, and it has additional interest in its sequel. dear sir,--i have written a book--naturally--which fact, however, since i am not your enemy, need give you no occasion to rejoice. nor need you grieve, though i am sending you a copy. if i knew of any way of compelling you to read it i would do so, but unless the first few pages have that effect i can do nothing. try the first few pages. i have done a great deal more than that with your books, so perhaps you owe me some thing--say ten pages. if after that attempt you put it aside i shall be sorry--for you. i am afraid that the above looks flippant--but think of the twitterings of the soul of him who brings in his hand an unbidden book, written by himself. to such a one much is due in the way of indulgence. will you remember that? have you forgotten early twitterings of your own? in a memorandum made on this letter mark twain wrote: another one of those peculiarly depressing letters--a letter cast in artificially humorous form, whilst no art could make the subject humorous--to me. commenting further, he said: as i have remarked before about one thousand times the coat of arms of the human race ought to consist of a man with an ax on his shoulder proceeding toward a grindstone, or it ought to represent the several members of the human race holding out the hat to one another; for we are all beggars, each in his own way. one beggar is too proud to beg for pennies, but will beg for an introduction into society; another does not care for society, but he wants a postmastership; another will inveigle a lawyer into conversation and then sponge on him for free advice. the man who wouldn't do any of these things will beg for the presidency. each admires his own dignity and greatly guards it, but in his opinion the others haven't any. mendicancy is a matter of taste and temperament, no doubt, but no human being is without some form of it. i know my own form, you know yours. let us conceal them from view and abuse the others. there is no man so poor but what at intervals some man comes to him with an ax to grind. by and by the ax's aspect becomes familiar to the proprietor of the grindstone. he perceives that it is the same old ax. if you are a governor you know that the stranger wants an office. the first time he arrives you are deceived; he pours out such noble praises of you and your political record that you are moved to tears; there's a lump in your throat and you are thankful that you have lived for this happiness. then the stranger discloses his ax, and you are ashamed of yourself and your race. six repetitions will cure you. after that you interrupt the compliments and say, "yes, yes, that's all right; never mind about that. what is it you want?" but you and i are in the business ourselves. every now and then we carry our ax to somebody and ask a whet. i don't carry mine to strangers--i draw the line there; perhaps that is your way. this is bound to set us up on a high and holy pinnacle and make us look down in cold rebuke on persons who carry their axes to strangers. i do not know how to answer that stranger's letter. i wish he had spared me. never mind about him--i am thinking about myself. i wish he had spared me. the book has not arrived yet; but no matter, i am prejudiced against it. it was a few days later that he added: i wrote to that man. i fell back upon the old overworked, polite lie, and thanked him for his book and said i was promising myself the pleasure of reading it. of course that set me free; i was not obliged to read it now at all, and, being free, my prejudice was gone, and as soon as the book came i opened it to see what it was like. i was not able to put it down until i had finished. it was an embarrassing thing to have to write to that man and confess that fact, but i had to do it. that first letter was merely a lie. do you think i wrote the second one to give that man pleasure? well, i did, but it was second-hand pleasure. i wrote it first to give myself comfort, to make myself forget the original lie. mark twain's interest was once aroused by the following: dear sir,--i have had more or less of your works on my shelves for years, and believe i have practically a complete set now. this is nothing unusual, of course, but i presume it will seem to you unusual for any one to keep books constantly in sight which the owner regrets ever having read. every time my glance rests on the books i do regret having read them, and do not hesitate to tell you so to your face, and care not who may know my feelings. you, who must be kept busy attending to your correspondence, will probably pay little or no attention to this small fraction of it, yet my reasons, i believe, are sound and are probably shared by more people than you are aware of. probably you will not read far enough through this to see who has signed it, but if you do, and care to know why i wish i had left your work unread, i will tell you as briefly as possible if you will ask me. george b. lauder. clemens did not answer the letter, but put it in his pocket, perhaps intending to do so, and a few days later, in boston, when a reporter called, he happened to remember it. the reporter asked permission to print the queer document, and it appeared in his mark twain interview next morning. a few days later the writer of it sent a second letter, this time explaining: my dear sir,--i saw in to-day's paper a copy of the letter which i wrote you october th. i have read and re-read your works until i can almost recall some of them word for word. my familiarity with them is a constant source of pleasure which i would not have missed, and therefore the regret which i have expressed is more than offset by thankfulness. believe me, the regret which i feel for having read your works is entirely due to the unalterable fact that i can never again have the pleasure of reading them for the first time. your sincere admirer, george b. ladder. mark twain promptly replied this time: dear sir, you fooled me completely; i didn't divine what the letter was concealing, neither did the newspaper men, so you are a very competent deceiver. truly yours, s. l. clemens. it was about the end of that the new st. louis harbor boat, was completed. the editor of the st. louis republic reported that it has been christened "mark twain," and asked for a word of comment. clemens sent this line: may my namesake follow in my righteous footsteps, then neither of us will need any fire insurance. cclxiii some literary luncheons howells, in his book, refers to the human race luncheon club, which clemens once organized for the particular purpose of damning the species in concert. it was to consist, beside clemens himself, of howells, colonel harvey, and peter dunne; but it somehow never happened that even this small membership could be assembled while the idea was still fresh, and therefore potent. out of it, however, grew a number of those private social gatherings which clemens so dearly loved--small luncheons and dinners given at his own table. the first of these came along toward the end of , when howells was planning to spend the winter in italy. "howells is going away," he said, "and i should like to give him a stag-party. we'll enlarge the human race club for the occasion." so howells, colonel harvey, martin littleton, augustus thomas, robert porter, and paderewski were invited. paderewski was unable to come, and seven in all assembled. howells was first to arrive. "here comes howells," clemens said. "old howells a thousand years old." but howells didn't look it. his face was full of good-nature and apparent health, and he was by no means venerable, either in speech or action. thomas, porter, littleton, and harvey drifted in. cocktails were served and luncheon was announced. claude, the butler, had prepared the table with fine artistry--its center a mass of roses. there was to be no woman in the neighborhood--clemens announced this fact as a sort of warrant for general freedom of expression. thomas's play, "the witching hour," was then at the height of its great acceptance, and the talk naturally began there. thomas told something of the difficulty which he found in being able to convince a manager that it would succeed, and declared it to be his own favorite work. i believe there was no dissenting opinion as to its artistic value, or concerning its purpose and psychology, though these had been the stumbling-blocks from a managerial point of view. when the subject was concluded, and there had come a lull, colonel harvey, who was seated at clemens's left, said: "uncle mark"--he often called him that--"major leigh handed me a report of the year's sales just as i was leaving. it shows your royalty returns this year to be very close to fifty thousand dollars. i don't believe there is another such return from old books on record." this was said in an undertone, to clemens only, but was overheard by one or two of those who sat nearest. clemens was not unwilling to repeat it for the benefit of all, and did so. howells said: "a statement like that arouses my basest passions. the books are no good; it's just the advertising they get." clemens said: "yes, my contract compels the publisher to advertise. it costs them two hundred dollars every time they leave the advertisement out of the magazines." "and three hundred every time we put it in," said harvey. "we often debate whether it is more profitable to put in the advertisement or to leave it out." the talk switched back to plays and acting. thomas recalled an incident of beerbohm tree's performance of "hamlet." w. s. gilbert, of light-opera celebrity, was present at a performance, and when the play ended mrs. tree hurried over to him and said: "oh, mr. gilbert, what did you think of mr. tree's rendition of hamlet?" "remarkable," said gilbert. "funny without being vulgar." it was with such idle tales and talk-play that the afternoon passed. not much of it all is left to me, but i remember howells saying, "did it ever occur to you that the newspapers abolished hell? well, they did--it was never done by the church. there was a consensus of newspaper opinion that the old hell with its lake of fire and brimstone was an antiquated institution; in fact a dead letter." and again, "i was coming down broadway last night, and i stopped to look at one of the street-venders selling those little toy fighting roosters. it was a bleak, desolate evening; nobody was buying anything, and as he pulled the string and kept those little roosters dancing and fighting his remarks grew more and more cheerless and sardonic. "'japanese game chickens,' he said; 'pretty toys, amuse the children with their antics. child of three can operate it. take them home for christmas. chicken-fight at your own fireside.' i tried to catch his eye to show him that i understood his desolation and sorrow, but it was no use. he went on dancing his toy chickens, and saying, over and over, 'chicken-fight at your own fireside.'" the luncheon over, we wandered back into the drawing-room, and presently all left but colonel harvey. clemens and the colonel went up to the billiard-room and engaged in a game of cushion caroms, at twenty-five cents a game. i was umpire and stakeholder, and it was a most interesting occupation, for the series was close and a very cheerful one. it ended the day much to mark twain's satisfaction, for he was oftenest winner. that evening he said: "we will repeat that luncheon; we ought to repeat it once a month. howells will be gone, but we must have the others. we cannot have a thing like that too often." there was, in fact, a second stag-luncheon very soon after, at which george riggs was present and that rare irish musician, denis o'sullivan. it was another choice afternoon, with a mystical quality which came of the music made by o'sullivan on some hindu reeds-pipes of pan. but we shall have more of o'sullivan presently--all too little, for his days were few and fleeting. howells could not get away just yet. colonel harvey, who, like james osgood, would not fail to find excuse for entertainment, chartered two drawing-room cars, and with mrs. harvey took a party of fifty-five or sixty congenial men and women to lakewood for a good-by luncheon to howells. it was a day borrowed from june, warm and beautiful. the trip down was a sort of reception. most of the guests were acquainted, but many of them did not often meet. there was constant visiting back and forth the full length of the two coaches. denis o'sullivan was among the guests. he looked in the bloom of health, and he had his pipes and played his mystic airs; then he brought out the tin-whistle of ireland, and blew such rollicking melodies as capering fairies invented a long time ago. this was on the train going down. there was a brief program following the light-hearted feasting--an informal program fitting to that sunny day. it opened with some recitations by miss kitty cheatham; then colonel harvey introduced howells, with mention of his coming journey. as a rule, howells does not enjoy speaking. he is willing to read an address on occasion, but he has owned that the prospect of talking without his notes terrifies him. this time, however, there was no reluctance, though he had prepared no speech. he was among friends. he looked even happy when he got on his feet, and he spoke like a happy man. he talked about mark twain. it was all delicate, delicious chaffing which showed howells at his very best--all too short for his listeners. clemens, replying, returned the chaff, and rambled amusingly among his fancies, closing with a few beautiful words of "godspeed and safe return" to his old comrade and friend. then once more came denis and his pipes. no one will ever forget his part of the program. the little samples we had heard on the train were expanded and multiplied and elaborated in a way that fairly swept his listeners out of themselves into that land where perhaps denis himself wanders playing now; for a month later, strong and lusty and beautiful as he seemed that day, he suddenly vanished from among us and his reeds were silent. it never occurred to us then that denis could die; and as he finished each melody and song there was a shout for a repetition, and i think we could have sat there and let the days and years slip away unheeded, for time is banished by music like that, and one wonders if it might not even divert death. it was dark when we crossed the river homeward; the myriad lights from heaven-climbing windows made an enchanted city in the sky. the evening, like the day, was warm, and some of the party left the ferry-cabin to lean over and watch the magic spectacle, the like of which is not to be found elsewhere on the earth. cclxiv "captain stormfield" in print during the forty years or so that had elapsed since the publication of the "gates ajar" and the perpetration of mark twain's intended burlesque, built on captain ned wakeman's dream, the christian religion in its more orthodox aspects had undergone some large modifications. it was no longer regarded as dangerous to speak lightly of hell, or even to suggest that the golden streets and jeweled architecture of the sky might be regarded as symbols of hope rather than exhibits of actual bullion and lapidary construction. clemens re-read his extravaganza, captain stormfields visit to heaven, gave it a modernizing touch here and there, and handed it to his publishers, who must have agreed that it was no longer dangerous, for it was promptly accepted and appeared in the december and january numbers ( - ) of harper's magazine, and was also issued as a small book. if there were any readers who still found it blasphemous, or even irreverent, they did not say so; the letters that came--and they were a good many--expressed enjoyment and approval, also (some of them) a good deal of satisfaction that mark twain "had returned to his earlier form." the publication of this story recalled to clemens's mind another heresy somewhat similar which he had written during the winter of and in berlin. this was a dream of his own, in which he had set out on a train with the evangelist sam jones and the archbishop of canterbury for the other world. he had noticed that his ticket was to a different destination than the archbishop's, and so, when the prelate nodded and finally went to sleep, he changed the tickets in their hats with disturbing results. clemens thought a good deal of this fancy when he wrote it, and when mrs. clemens had refused to allow it to be printed he had laboriously translated it into german, with some idea of publishing it surreptitiously; but his conscience had been too much for him. he had confessed, and even the german version had been suppressed. clemens often allowed his fancy to play with the idea of the orthodox heaven, its curiosities of architecture, and its employments of continuous prayer, psalm-singing, and harpistry. "what a childish notion it was," he said, "and how curious that only a little while ago human beings were so willing to accept such fragile evidences about a place of so much importance. if we should find somewhere to-day an ancient book containing an account of a beautiful and blooming tropical paradise secreted in the center of eternal icebergs--an account written by men who did not even claim to have seen it themselves --no geographical society on earth would take any stock in that book, yet that account would be quite as authentic as any we have of heaven. if god has such a place prepared for us, and really wanted us to know it, he could have found some better way than a book so liable to alterations and misinterpretation. god has had no trouble to prove to man the laws of the constellations and the construction of the world, and such things as that, none of which agree with his so-called book. as to a hereafter, we have not the slightest evidence that there is any--no evidence that appeals to logic and reason. i have never seen what to me seemed an atom of proof that there is a future life." then, after a long pause, he added: "and yet--i am strongly inclined to expect one." cclxv lotos club honors it was on january , , that mark twain was given his last great banquet by the lotos club. the club was about to move again, into splendid new quarters, and it wished to entertain him once more in its old rooms. he wore white, and amid the throng of black-clad men was like a white moth among a horde of beetles. the room fairly swarmed with them, and they seemed likely to overwhelm him. president lawrence was toast-master of the evening, and he ended his customary address by introducing robert porter, who had been mark twain's host at oxford. porter told something of the great oxford week, and ended by introducing mark twain. it had been expected that clemens would tell of his london experiences. instead of doing this, he said he had started a new kind of collection, a collection of compliments. he had picked up a number of valuable ones abroad and some at home. he read selections from them, and kept the company going with cheers and merriment until just before the close of his speech. then he repeated, in his most impressive manner, that stately conclusion of his liverpool speech, and the room became still and the eyes of his hearers grew dim. it may have been even more moving than when originally given, for now the closing words, "homeward bound," had only the deeper meaning. dr. john macarthur followed with a speech that was as good a sermon as any he ever delivered, and closed it by saying: "i do not want men to prepare for heaven, but to prepare to remain on earth, and it is such men as mark twain who make other men not fit to die, but fit to live." andrew carnegie also spoke, and colonel harvey, and as the speaking ended robert porter stepped up behind clemens and threw over his shoulders the scarlet oxford robe which had been surreptitiously brought, and placed the mortar-board cap upon his head, while the diners vociferated their approval. clemens was quite calm. "i like this," he said, when the noise had subsided. "i like its splendid color. i would dress that way all the time, if i dared." in the cab going home i mentioned the success of his speech, how well it had been received. "yes," he said; "but then i have the advantage of knowing now that i am likely to be favorably received, whatever i say. i know that my audiences are warm and responseful. it is an immense advantage to feel that. there are cold places in almost every speech, and if your audience notices them and becomes cool, you get a chill yourself in those zones, and it is hard to warm up again. perhaps there haven't been so many lately; but i have been acquainted with them more than once." and then i could not help remembering that deadly whittier birthday speech of more than thirty years before--that bleak, arctic experience from beginning to end. "we have just time for four games," he said, as we reached the billiard-room; but there was no sign of stopping when the four games were over. we were winning alternately, and neither noted the time. i was leaving by an early train, and was willing to play all night. the milk-wagons were rattling outside when he said: "well, perhaps we'd better quit now. it seems pretty early, though." i looked at my watch. it was quarter to four, and we said good night. cclxvi a winter in bermuda edmund clarence stedman died suddenly at his desk, january , , and clemens, in response to telegrams, sent this message: i do not wish to talk about it. he was a valued friend from days that date back thirty-five years. his loss stuns me and unfits me to speak. he recalled the new england dinners which he used to attend, and where he had often met stedman. "those were great affairs," he said. "they began early, and they ended early. i used to go down from hartford with the feeling that it wasn't an all-night supper, and that it was going to be an enjoyable time. choate and depew and stedman were in their prime then--we were all young men together. their speeches were always worth listening to. stedman was a prominent figure there. there don't seem to be any such men now --or any such occasions." stedman was one of the last of the old literary group. aldrich had died the year before. howells and clemens were the lingering "last leaves." clemens gave some further luncheon entertainments to his friends, and added the feature of "doe" luncheons--pretty affairs where, with clara clemens as hostess, were entertained a group of brilliant women, such as mrs. kate douglas riggs, geraldine farrax, mrs. robert collier, mrs. frank doubleday, and others. i cannot report those luncheons, for i was not present, and the drift of the proceedings came to me later in too fragmentary a form to be used as history; but i gathered from clemens himself that he had done all of the talking, and i think they must have been very pleasant afternoons. among the acknowledgments that followed one of these affairs is this characteristic word-play from mrs. riggs: n. b.--a lady who is invited to and attends a doe luncheon is, of course, a doe. the question is, if she attends two doe luncheons in succession is she a doe-doe? if so is she extinct and can never attend a third? luncheons and billiards, however, failed to give sufficient brightness to the dull winter days, or to insure him against an impending bronchial attack, and toward the end of january he sailed away to bermuda, where skies were bluer and roadsides gay with bloom. his sojourn was brief this time, but long enough to cure him, he said, and he came back full of happiness. he had been driving about over the island with a newly adopted granddaughter, little margaret blackmer, whom he had met one morning in the hotel dining-room. a part of his dictated story will convey here this pretty experience. my first day in bermuda paid a dividend--in fact a double dividend: it broke the back of my cold and it added a jewel to my collection. as i entered the breakfast-room the first object i saw in that spacious and far-reaching place was a little girl seated solitary at a table for two. i bent down over her and patted her cheek and said: "i don't seem to remember your name; what is it?" by the sparkle in her brown eyes it amused her. she said: "why, you've never known it, mr. clemens, because you've never seen me before." "why, that is true, now that i come to think; it certainly is true, and it must be one of the reasons why i have forgotten your name. but i remember it now perfectly--it's mary." she was amused again; amused beyond smiling; amused to a chuckle, and she said: "oh no, it isn't; it's margaret." i feigned to be ashamed of my mistake and said: "ah, well, i couldn't have made that mistake a few years ago; but i am old, and one of age's earliest infirmities is a damaged memory; but i am clearer now--clearer-headed--it all comes back to me just as if it were yesterday. it's margaret holcomb." she was surprised into a laugh this time, the rippling laugh that a happy brook makes when it breaks out of the shade into the sunshine, and she said: "oh, you are wrong again; you don't get anything right. it isn't holcomb, it's blackmer." i was ashamed again, and confessed it; then: "how old are you, dear?" "twelve; new-year's. twelve and a month." we were close comrades-inseparables, in fact-for eight days. every day we made pedestrian excursions--called them that anyway, and honestly they were intended for that, and that is what they would have been but for the persistent intrusion of a gray and grave and rough-coated donkey by the name of maud. maud was four feet long; she was mounted on four slender little stilts, and had ears that doubled her altitude when she stood them up straight. her tender was a little bit of a cart with seat room for two in it, and you could fall out of it without knowing it, it was so close to the ground. this battery was in command of a nice, grave, dignified, gentlefaced little black boy whose age was about twelve, and whose name, for some reason or other, was reginald. reginald and maud--i shall not easily forget those names, nor the combination they stood for. the trips going and coming were five or six miles, and it generally took us three hours to make it. this was because maud set the pace. whenever she detected an ascending grade she respected it; she stopped and said with her ears: "this is getting unsatisfactory. we will camp here." the whole idea of these excursions was that margaret and i should employ them for the gathering of strength, by walking, yet we were oftener in the cart than out of it. she drove and i superintended. in the course of the first excursions i found a beautiful little shell on the beach at spanish point; its hinge was old and dry, and the two halves came apart in my hand. i gave one of them to margaret and said: "now dear, sometime or other in the future i shall run across you somewhere, and it may turn out that it is not you at all, but will be some girl that only resembles you. i shall be saying to myself 'i know that this is a margaret by the look of her, but i don't know for sure whether this is my margaret or somebody else's'; but, no matter, i can soon find out, for i shall take my half shell out of my pocket and say, 'i think you are my margaret, but i am not certain; if you are my margaret you can produce the other half of this shell.'" next morning when i entered the breakfast-room and saw the child i approached and scanned her searchingly all over, then said, sadly: "no, i am mistaken; it looks like my margaret,--but it isn't, and i am so sorry. i shall go away and cry now." her eyes danced triumphantly, and she cried out: "no, you don't have to. there!" and she fetched out the identifying shell. i was beside myself with gratitude and joyful surprise, and revealed it from every pore. the child could not have enjoyed this thrilling little drama more if we had been playing it on the stage. many times afterward she played the chief part herself, pretending to be in doubt as to my identity and challenging me to produce my half of the shell. she was always hoping to catch me without it, but i always defeated that game--wherefore she came to recognize at last that i was not only old, but very smart. sometimes, when they were not walking or driving, they sat on the veranda, and he prepared history-lessons for little margaret by making grotesque figures on cards with numerous legs and arms and other fantastic symbols end features to fix the length of some king's reign. for william the conqueror, for instance, who reigned twenty-one years, he drew a figure of eleven legs and ten arms. it was the proper method of impressing facts upon the mind of a child. it carried him back to those days at elmira when he had arranged for his own little girls the game of kings. a miss wallace, a friend of margaret's, and usually one of the pedestrian party, has written a dainty book of those bermudian days. --[mark twain and the happy islands, by elizabeth wallace.] miss wallace says: margaret felt for him the deep affection that children have for an older person who understands them and treats them with respect. mr. clemens never talked down to her, but considered her opinions with a sweet dignity. there were some pretty sequels to the shell incident. after mark twain had returned to new york, and margaret was there, she called one day with her mother, and sent up her card. he sent back word, saying: "i seem to remember the name; but if this is really the person whom i think it is she can identify herself by a certain shell i once gave her, of which i have the other half. if the two halves fit, i shall know that this is the same little margaret that i remember." the message went down, and the other half of the shell was promptly sent up. mark twain had the two half-shells incised firmly in gold, and one of these he wore on his watch-fob, and sent the other to margaret. he afterward corresponded with margaret, and once wrote her: i'm already making mistakes. when i was in new york, six weeks ago, i was on a corner of fifth avenue and i saw a small girl--not a big one--start across from the opposite corner, and i exclaimed to myself joyfully, "that is certainly my margaret!" so i rushed to meet her. but as she came nearer i began to doubt, and said to myself, "it's a margaret--that is plain enough--but i'm afraid it is somebody else's." so when i was passing her i held my shell so she couldn't help but see it. dear, she only glanced at it and passed on! i wondered if she could have overlooked it. it seemed best to find out; so i turned and followed and caught up with her, and said, deferentially; "dear miss, i already know your first name by the look of you, but would you mind telling me your other one?" she was vexed and said pretty sharply, "it's douglas, if you're so anxious to know. i know your name by your looks, and i'd advise you to shut yourself up with your pen and ink and write some more rubbish. i am surprised that they allow you to run' at large. you are likely to get run over by a baby-carriage any time. run along now and don't let the cows bite you." what an idea! there aren't any cows in fifth avenue. but i didn't smile; i didn't let on to perceive how uncultured she was. she was from the country, of course, and didn't know what a comical blunder. she was making. mr. rogers's health was very poor that winter, and clemens urged him to try bermuda, and offered to go back with him; so they sailed away to the summer island, and though margaret was gone, there was other entertaining company--other granddaughters to be adopted, and new friends and old friends, and diversions of many sorts. mr. rogers's son-in-law, william evarts benjamin, came down and joined the little group. it was one of mark twain's real holidays. mr. rogers's health improved rapidly, and mark twain was in fine trim. to mrs. rogers, at the end of the first week, he wrote: dear mrs. rogers, he is getting along splendidly! this was the very place for him. he enjoys himself & is as quarrelsome as a cat. but he will get a backset if benjamin goes home. benjamin is the brightest man in these regions, & the best company. bright? he is much more than that, he is brilliant. he keeps the crowd intensely alive. with love & all good wishes. s. l. c. mark twain and henry rogers were much together and much observed. they were often referred to as "the king" and "the rajah," and it was always a question whether it was "the king" who took care of "the rajah," or vice versa. there was generally a group to gather around them, and clemens was sure of an attentive audience, whether he wanted to air his philosophies, his views of the human race, or to read aloud from the verses of kipling. "i am not fond of all poetry," he would say; "but there's something in kipling that appeals to me. i guess he's just about my level." miss wallace recalls certain kipling readings in his room, when his friends gathered to listen. on those kipling evenings the 'mise-en-scene' was a striking one. the bare hotel room, the pine woodwork and pine furniture, loose windows which rattled in the sea-wind. once in a while a gust of asthmatic music from the spiritless orchestra downstairs came up the hallway. yellow, unprotected gas-lights burned uncertainly, and mark twain in the midst of this lay on his bed (there was no couch) still in his white serge suit, with the light from the jet shining down on the crown of his silver hair, making it gleam and glisten like frosted threads. in one hand he held his book, in the other he had his pipe, which he used principally to gesture with in the most dramatic passages. margaret's small successors became the earliest members of the angel fish club, which clemens concluded to organize after a visit to the spectacular bermuda aquarium. the pretty angel-fish suggested youth and feminine beauty to him, and his adopted granddaughters became angel-fish to him from that time forward. he bought little enamel angel-fish pins, and carried a number of them with him most of the time, so that he could create membership on short notice. it was just another of the harmless and happy diversions of his gentler side. he was always fond of youth and freshness. he regarded the decrepitude of old age as an unnecessary part of life. often he said: "if i had been helping the almighty when, he created man, i would have had him begin at the other end, and start human beings with old age. how much better it would have been to start old and have all the bitterness and blindness of age in the beginning! one would not mind then if he were looking forward to a joyful youth. think of the joyous prospect of growing young instead of old! think of looking forward to eighteen instead of eighty! yes, the almighty made a poor job of it. i wish he had invited my assistance." to one of the angel fish he wrote, just after his return: i miss you, dear. i miss bermuda, too, but not so much as i miss you; for you were rare, and occasional and select, and ltd.; whereas bermuda's charms and, graciousnesses were free and common and unrestricted--like the rain, you know, which falls upon the just and the unjust alike; a thing which would not happen if i were superintending the rain's affairs. no, i would rain softly and sweetly upon the just, but whenever i caught a sample of the unjust outdoors i would drown him. cclxvii views and addresses [as i am beginning this chapter, april , , the news comes of the loss, on her first trip, of the great white star line steamer titanic, with the destruction of many passengers, among whom are frank d. millet, william t. stead, isadore straus, john jacob astor, and other distinguished men. they died as heroes, remaining with the ship in order that the women and children might be saved. it was the kind of death frank millet would have wished to die. he was always a soldier--a knight. he has appeared from time to time in these pages, for he was a dear friend of the clemens household. one of america's foremost painters; at the time of his death he was head of the american academy of arts in rome.] mark twain made a number of addresses during the spring of . he spoke at the cartoonists' dinner, very soon after his return from bermuda; he spoke at the booksellers' banquet, expressing his debt of obligation to those who had published and sold his books; he delivered a fine address at the dinner given by the british schools and university club at delmonico's, may th, in honor of queen victoria's birthday. in that speech he paid high tribute to the queen for her attitude toward america, during the crisis of the civil wax, and to her royal consort, prince albert. what she did for us in america in our time of storm and stress we shall not forget, and whenever we call it to mind we shall always gratefully remember the wise and righteous mind that guided her in it and sustained and supported her--prince albert's. we need not talk any idle talk here to-night about either possible or impossible war between two countries; there will be no war while we remain sane and the son of victoria and albert sits upon the throne. in conclusion, i believe i may justly claim to utter the voice of my country in saying that we hold him in deep honor, and also in cordially wishing him a long life and a happy reign. but perhaps his most impressive appearance was at the dedication of the great city college (may , ), where president john finley, who had been struggling along with insufficient room, was to have space at last for his freer and fuller educational undertakings. a great number of honored scholars, statesmen, and diplomats assembled on the college campus, a spacious open court surrounded by stately college architecture of medieval design. these distinguished guests were clad in their academic robes, and the procession could not have been widely different from that one at oxford of a year before. but there was something rather fearsome about it, too. a kind of scaffolding had been reared in the center of the campus for the ceremonies; and when those grave men in their robes of state stood grouped upon it the picture was strikingly suggestive of one of george cruikshank's drawings of an execution scene at the tower of london. many of the robes were black--these would be the priests--and the few scarlet ones would be the cardinals who might have assembled for some royal martyrdom. there was a bright may sunlight over it all, one of those still, cool brightnesses which served to heighten the weird effect. i am sure that others felt it besides myself, for everybody seemed wordless and awed, even at times when there was no occasion for silence. there was something of another age about the whole setting, to say the least. we left the place in a motor-car, a crowd of boys following after. as clemens got in they gathered around the car and gave the college yell, ending with "twain! twain! twain!" and added three cheers for tom sawyer, huck finn, and pudd'nhead wilson. they called for a speech, but he only said a few words in apology for not granting their request. he made a speech to them that night at the waldorf--where he proposed for the city college a chair of citizenship, an idea which met with hearty applause. in the same address he referred to the "god trust" motto on the coins, and spoke approvingly of the president's order for its removal. we do not trust in god, in the important matters of life, and not even a minister of the gospel will take any coin for a cent more than its accepted value because of that motto. if cholera should ever reach these shores we should probably pray to be delivered from the plague, but we would put our main trust in the board of health. next morning, commenting on the report of this speech, he said: "if only the reporters would not try to improve on what i say. they seem to miss the fact that the very art of saying a thing effectively is in its delicacy, and as they can't reproduce the manner and intonation in type they make it emphatic and clumsy in trying to convey it to the reader." i pleaded that the reporters were often young men, eager, and unmellowed in their sense of literary art. "yes," he agreed, "they are so afraid their readers won't see my good points that they set up red flags to mark them and beat a gong. they mean well, but i wish they wouldn't do it." he referred to the portion of his speech concerning the motto on the coins. he had freely expressed similar sentiments on other public occasions, and he had received a letter criticizing him for saying that we do not really trust in god in any financial matter. "i wanted to answer it," he said; "but i destroyed it. it didn't seem worth noticing." i asked how the motto had originated. "about some idiot in congress wanted to announce to the world that this was a religious nation, and proposed putting it there, and no other congressman had courage enough to oppose it, of course. it took courage in those days to do a thing like that; but i think the same thing would happen to-day." "still the country has become broader. it took a brave man before the civil war to confess he had read the 'age of reason'." "so it did, and yet that seems a mild book now. i read it first when i was a cub pilot, read it with fear and hesitation, but marveling at its fearlessness and wonderful power. i read it again a year or two ago, for some reason, and was amazed to see how tame it had become. it seemed that paine was apologizing everywhere for hurting the feelings of the reader." he drifted, naturally, into a discussion of the knickerbocker trust company's suspension, which had tied up some fifty-five thousand dollars of his capital, and wondered how many were trusting in god for the return of these imperiled sums. clemens himself, at this time, did not expect to come out whole from that disaster. he had said very little when the news came, though it meant that his immediate fortunes were locked up, and it came near stopping the building activities at redding. it was only the smaller things of life that irritated him. he often met large calamities with a serenity which almost resembled indifference. in the knickerbocker situation he even found humor as time passed, and wrote a number of gay letters, some of which found their way into print. it should be added that in the end there was no loss to any of the knickerbocker depositors. cclxviii redding the building of the new home at redding had been going steadily forward for something more than a year. john mead howells had made the plans; w. w. sunderland and his son philip, of danbury, connecticut, were the builders, and in the absence of miss clemens, then on a concert tour, mark twain's secretary, miss i. v. lyon, had superintended the furnishing. "innocence at home," as the place was originally named, was to be ready for its occupant in june, with every detail in place, as he desired. he had never visited redding; he had scarcely even glanced at the plans or discussed any of the decorations of the new home. he had required only that there should be one great living-room for the orchestrelle, and another big room for the billiard-table, with plenty of accommodations for guests. he had required that the billiard-room be red, for something in his nature answered to the warm luxury of that color, particularly in moments of diversion. besides, his other billiard-rooms had been red, and such association may not be lightly disregarded. his one other requirement was that the place should be complete. "i don't want to see it," he said, "until the cat is purring on the hearth." howells says: "he had grown so weary of change, and so indifferent to it, that he was without interest." but it was rather, i think, that he was afraid of losing interest by becoming wearied with details which were likely to exasperate him; also, he wanted the dramatic surprise of walking into a home that had been conjured into existence as with a word. it was expected that the move would be made early in the month; but there were delays, and it was not until the th of june that he took possession. the plan, at this time, was only to use the redding place as a summer residence, and the fifth avenue house was not dismantled. a few days before the th the servants, with one exception, were taken up to the new house, clemens and myself remaining in the loneliness of no. , attending to the letters in the morning and playing billiards the rest of the time, waiting for the appointed day and train. it was really a pleasant three days. he invented a new game, and we were riotous and laughed as loudly as we pleased. i think he talked very little of the new home which he was so soon to see. it was referred to no oftener than once or twice a day, and then i believe only in connection with certain of the billiard-room arrangements. i have wondered since what picture of it he could have had in his mind, for he had never seen a photograph. he had a general idea that it was built upon a hill, and that its architecture was of the italian villa order. i confess i had moments of anxiety, for i had selected the land for him, and had been more or less accessory otherwise. i did not really worry, for i knew how beautiful and peaceful it all was; also something of his taste and needs. it had been a dry spring, and country roads were dusty, so that those who were responsible had been praying for rain, to be followed by a pleasant day for his arrival. both petitions were granted; june th would fall on thursday, and monday night there came a good, thorough, and refreshing shower that washed the vegetation clean and laid the dust. the morning of the th was bright and sunny and cool. clemens was up and shaved by six o'clock in order to be in time, though the train did not leave until four in the afternoon--an express newly timed to stop at redding--its first trip scheduled for the day of mark twain's arrival. we were still playing billiards when word was brought up that the cab was waiting. my daughter, louise, whose school on long island had closed that day, was with us. clemens wore his white flannels and a panama hat, and at the station a group quickly collected, reporters and others, to interview him and speed him to his new home. he was cordial and talkative, and quite evidently full of pleasant anticipation. a reporter or two and a special photographer came along, to be present at his arrival. the new, quick train, the green, flying landscape, with glimpses of the sound and white sails, the hillsides and clear streams becoming rapidly steeper and dearer as we turned northward: all seemed to gratify him, and when he spoke at all it was approvingly. the hour and a half required to cover the sixty miles of distance seemed very short. as the train slowed down for the redding station, he said: "we'll leave this box of candy"--he had bought a large box on the way --"those colored porters sometimes like candy, and we can get some more." he drew out a great handful of silver. "give them something--give everybody liberally that does any service." there was a sort of open-air reception in waiting. redding had recognized the occasion as historic. a varied assemblage of vehicles festooned with flowers had gathered to offer a gallant country welcome. it was now a little before six o'clock of that long june day, still and dreamlike; and to the people assembled there may have been something which was not quite reality in the scene. there was a tendency to be very still. they nodded, waved their hands to him, smiled, and looked their fill; but a spell lay upon them, and they did not cheer. it would have been a pity if they had done so. a noise, and the illusion would have been shattered. his carriage led away on the three-mile drive to the house on the hilltop, and the floral turnout fell in behind. no first impression of a fair land could have come at a sweeter time. hillsides were green, fields were white with daisies, dog-wood and laurel shone among the trees. and over all was the blue sky, and everywhere the fragrance of june. he was very quiet as we drove along. once with gentle humor, looking over a white daisy field, he said: "that is buckwheat. i always recognize buckwheat when i see it. i wish i knew as much about other things as i know about buckwheat. it seems to be very plentiful here; it even grows by the roadside." and a little later: "this is the kind of a road i like; a good country road through the woods." the water was flowing over the mill-dam where the road crosses the saugatuck, and he expressed approval of that clear, picturesque little river, one of those charming connecticut streams. a little farther on a brook cascaded down the hillside, and he compared it with some of the tiny streams of switzerland, i believe the giessbach. the lane that led to the new home opened just above, and as he entered the leafy way he said, "this is just the kind of a lane i like," thus completing his acceptance of everything but the house and the location. the last of the procession had dropped away at the entrance of the lane, and he was alone with those who had most anxiety for his verdict. they had not long to wait. as the carriage ascended higher to the open view he looked away, across the saugatuck valley to the nestling village and church-spire and farm-houses, and to the distant hills, and declared the land to be a good land and beautiful--a spot to satisfy one's soul. then came the house--simple and severe in its architecture--an italian villa, such as he had known in florence, adapted now to american climate and needs. the scars of building had not all healed yet, but close to the house waved green grass and blooming flowers that might have been there always. neither did the house itself look new. the soft, gray stucco had taken on a tone that melted into the sky and foliage of its background. at the entrance his domestic staff waited to greet him, and then he stepped across the threshold into the wide hall and stood in his own home for the first time in seventeen years. it was an anxious moment, and no one spoke immediately. but presently his eye had taken in the satisfying harmony of the place and followed on through the wide doors that led to the dining-room--on through the open french windows to an enchanting vista of tree-tops and distant farmside and blue hills. he said, very gently: "how beautiful it all is? i did not think it could be as beautiful as this." he was taken through the rooms; the great living-room at one end of the hall--a room on the walls of which there was no picture, but only color-harmony--and at the other end of the hall, the splendid, glowing billiard-room, where hung all the pictures in which he took delight. then to the floor above, with its spacious apartments and a continuation of color--welcome and concord, the windows open to the pleasant evening hills. when he had seen it all--the natural italian garden below the terraces; the loggia, whose arches framed landscape vistas and formed a rare picture-gallery; when he had completed the round and stood in the billiard-room--his especial domain--once more he said, as a final verdict: "it is a perfect house--perfect, so far as i can see, in every detail. it might have been here always." he was at home there from that moment--absolutely, marvelously at home, for he fitted the setting perfectly, and there was not a hitch or flaw in his adaptation. to see him over the billiard-table, five minutes later, one could easily fancy that mark twain, as well as the house, had "been there always." only the presence of his daughters was needed now to complete his satisfaction in everything. there were guests that first evening--a small home dinner-party--and so perfect were the appointments and service, that one not knowing would scarcely have imagined it to be the first dinner served in that lovely room. a little later; at the foot of the garden of bay and cedar, neighbors, inspired by dan beard, who had recently located near by, set off some fireworks. clemens stepped out on the terrace and saw rockets climbing through the summer sky to announce his arrival. "i wonder why they all go to so much trouble for me," he said, softly. "i never go to any trouble for anybody"--a statement which all who heard it, and all his multitude of readers in every land, stood ready to deny. that first evening closed with billiards--boisterous, triumphant billiards--and when with midnight the day ended and the cues were set in the rack, there was none to say that mark twain's first day in his new home had not been a happy one. cclxix first days at stormfield i went up next afternoon, for i knew how he dreaded loneliness. we played billiards for a time, then set out for a walk, following the long drive to the leafy lane that led to my own property. presently he said: "in one way i am sorry i did not see this place sooner. i never want to leave it again. if i had known it was so beautiful i should have vacated the house in town and moved up here permanently." i suggested that he could still do so, if he chose, and he entered immediately into the idea. by and by we turned down a deserted road, grassy and beautiful, that ran along his land. at one side was a slope facing the west, and dotted with the slender, cypress-like cedars of new england. he had asked if that were part of his land, and on being told it was he said: "i would like howells to have a house there. we must try to give that to howells." at the foot of the hill we came to a brook and followed it into a meadow. i told him that i had often caught fine trout there, and that soon i would bring in some for breakfast. he answered: "yes, i should like that. i don't care to catch them any more myself. i like them very hot." we passed through some woods and came out near my own ancient little house. he noticed it and said: "the man who built that had some memory of greece in his mind when he put on that little porch with those columns." my second daughter, frances, was coming from a distant school on the evening train, and the carriage was starting just then to bring her. i suggested that perhaps he would find it pleasant to make the drive. "yes," he agreed, "i should enjoy that." so i took the reins, and he picked up little joy, who came running out just then, and climbed into the back seat. it was another beautiful evening, and he was in a talkative humor. joy pointed out a small turtle in the road, and he said: "that is a wild turtle. do you think you could teach it arithmetic?" joy was uncertain. "well," he went on, "you ought to get an arithmetic--a little ten-cent arithmetic--and teach that turtle." we passed some swampy woods, rather dim and junglelike. "those," he said, "are elephant woods." but joy answered: "they are fairy woods. the fairies are there, but you can't see them because they wear magic cloaks." he said: "i wish i had one of those magic cloaks, sometimes. i had one once, but it is worn out now." joy looked at him reverently, as one who had once been the owner of a piece of fairyland. it was a sweet drive to and from the village. there are none too many such evenings in a lifetime. colonel harvey's little daughter, dorothy, came up a day or two later, and with my daughter louise spent the first week with him in the new home. they were created "angel-fishes"--the first in the new aquarium; that is to say, the billiard-room, where he followed out the idea by hanging a row of colored prints of bermuda fishes in a sort of frieze around the walls. each visiting member was required to select one as her particular patron fish and he wrote her name upon it. it was his delight to gather his juvenile guests in this room and teach them the science of billiard angles; but it was so difficult to resist taking the cue and making plays himself that he was required to stand on a little platform and give instruction just out of reach. his snowy flannels and gleaming white hair, against those rich red walls, with those small, summer-clad players, made a pretty picture. the place did not retain its original name. he declared that it would always be "innocence at home" to the angel-fish visitors, but that the title didn't remain continuously appropriate. the money which he had derived from captain stormfield's visit to heaven had been used to build the loggia wing, and he considered the name of "stormfield" as a substitute. when, presently, the summer storms gathered on that rock-bound, open hill, with its wide reaches of vine and shrub-wild, fierce storms that bent the birch and cedar, and strained at the bay and huckleberry, with lightning and turbulent wind and thunder, followed by the charging rain--the name seemed to become peculiarly appropriate. standing with his head bared to the tumult, his white hair tossing in the blast, and looking out upon the wide splendor of the spectacle, he rechristened the place, and "stormfield" it became and remained. the last day of mark twain's first week in redding, june th, was saddened by the news of the death of grover cleveland at his home in princeton, new jersey. clemens had always been an ardent cleveland admirer, and to mrs. cleveland now he sent this word of condolence-- your husband was a man i knew and loved and honored for twenty-five years. i mourn with you. and once during the evening he said: "he was one of our two or three real presidents. there is none to take his place." cclxx the aldrich memorial at the end of june came the dedication at portsmouth, new hampshire, of the thomas bailey aldrich memorial museum, which the poet's wife had established there in the old aldrich homestead. it was hot weather. we were obliged to take a rather poor train from south norwalk, and clemens was silent and gloomy most of the way to boston. once there, however, lodged in a cool and comfortable hotel, matters improved. he had brought along for reading the old copy of sir thomas malory's arthur tales, and after dinner he took off his clothes and climbed into bed and sat up and read aloud from those stately legends, with comments that i wish i could remember now, only stopping at last when overpowered with sleep. we went on a special train to portsmouth next morning through the summer heat, and assembled, with those who were to speak, in the back portion of the opera-house, behind the scenes: clemens was genial and good-natured with all the discomfort of it; and he liked to fancy, with howells, who had come over from kittery point, how aldrich must be amused at the whole circumstance if he could see them punishing themselves to do honor to his memory. richard watson gilder was there, and hamilton mabie; also governor floyd of new hampshire; colonel higginson, robert bridges, and other distinguished men. we got to the more open atmosphere of the stage presently, and the exercises began. clemens was last on the program. the others had all said handsome, serious things, and clemens himself had mentally prepared something of the sort; but when his turn came, and he rose to speak, a sudden reaction must have set in, for he delivered an address that certainly would have delighted aldrich living, and must have delighted him dead, if he could hear it. it was full of the most charming humor, delicate, refreshing, and spontaneous. the audience, that had been maintaining a proper gravity throughout, showed its appreciation in ripples of merriment that grew presently into genuine waves of laughter. he spoke out his regret for having worn black clothes. it was a mistake, he said, to consider this a solemn time --aldrich would not have wished it to be so considered. he had been a man who loved humor and brightness and wit, and had helped to make life merry and delightful. certainly, if he could know, he would not wish this dedication of his own home to be a lugubrious, smileless occasion. outside, when the services were ended, the venerable juvenile writer, j. t. trowbridge, came up to clemens with extended hand. clemens said: "trowbridge, are you still alive? you must be a thousand years old. why, i listened to your stories while i was being rocked in the cradle." trowbridge said: "mark, there's some mistake. my earliest infant smile was wakened with one of your jokes." they stood side by side against a fence in the blazing sun and were photographed--an interesting picture. we returned to boston that evening. clemens did not wish to hurry in the summer heat, and we remained another day quietly sight-seeing, and driving around and around commonwealth avenue in a victoria in the cool of the evening. once, remembering aldrich, he said: "i was just planning tom sawyer when he was beginning the 'story of a bad boy'. when i heard that he was writing that i thought of giving up mine, but aldrich insisted that it would be a foolish thing to do. he thought my missouri boy could not by any chance conflict with his boy of new england, and of course he was right." he spoke of how great literary minds usually came along in company. he said: "now and then, on the stream of time, small gobs of that thing which we call genius drift down, and a few of these lodge at some particular point, and others collect about them and make a sort of intellectual island--a towhead, as they say on the river--such an accumulation of intellect we call a group, or school, and name it. "thirty years ago there was the cambridge group. now there's been still another, which included aldrich and howells and stedman and cable. it will soon be gone. i suppose they will have to name it by and by." he pointed out houses here and there of people he had known and visited in other days. the driver was very anxious to go farther, to other and more distinguished sights. clemens mildly but firmly refused any variation of the program, and so we kept on driving around and around the shaded loop of beacon street until dusk fell and the lights began to twinkle among the trees. cclxxi death of "sam" moffett clemens' next absence from redding came on august , , when the sudden and shocking news was received of the drowning of his nephew, samuel e. moffett, in the surf of the jersey shore. moffett was his nearest male relative, and a man of fine intellect and talents. he was superior in those qualities which men love--he was large-minded and large-hearted, and of noble ideals. with much of the same sense of humor which had made his uncle's fame, he had what was really an abnormal faculty of acquiring and retaining encyclopedic data. once as a child he had visited hartford when clemens was laboring over his history game. the boy was much interested, and asked permission to help. his uncle willingly consented, and referred him to the library for his facts. but he did not need to consult the books; he already had english history stored away, and knew where to find every detail of it. at the time of his death moffett held an important editorial position on collier's weekly. clemens was fond and proud of his nephew. returning from the funeral, he was much depressed, and a day or two later became really ill. he was in bed for a few days, resting, he said, after the intense heat of the journey. then he was about again and proposed billiards as a diversion. we were all alone one very still, warm august afternoon playing, when he suddenly said: "i feel a little dizzy; i will sit down a moment." i brought him a glass of water and he seemed to recover, but when he rose and started to play i thought he had a dazed look. he said: "i have lost my memory. i don't know which is my ball. i don't know what game we are playing." but immediately this condition passed, and we thought little of it, considering it merely a phase of biliousness due to his recent journey. i have been told since, by eminent practitioners, that it was the first indication of a more serious malady. he became apparently quite himself again and showed his usual vigor-light of step and movement, able to skip up and down stairs as heretofore. in a letter to mrs. crane, august th, he spoke of recent happenings: dear aunt sue,--it was a most moving, a most heartbreaking sight, the spectacle of that stunned & crushed & inconsolable family. i came back here in bad shape, & had a bilious collapse, but i am all right again, though the doctor from new york has given peremptory orders that i am not to stir from here before frost. o fortunate sam moffett! fortunate livy clemens! doubly fortunate susy! those swords go through & through my heart, but there is never a moment that i am not glad, for the sake of the dead, that they have escaped. how livy would love this place! how her very soul would steep itself thankfully in this peace, this tranquillity, this deep stillness, this dreamy expanse of woodsy hill & valley! you must come, aunt sue, & stay with us a real good visit. since june we have had guests, & they have all liked it and said they would come again. to howells, on the same day, he wrote: won't you & mrs. howells & mildred come & give us as many days as you can spare & examine john's triumph? it is the most satisfactory house i am acquainted with, & the most satisfactorily situated . . . . i have dismissed my stenographer, & have entered upon a holiday whose other end is the cemetery. cclxxii stormfield adventures clemens had fully decided, by this time, to live the year round in the retirement at stormfield, and the house at fifth avenue was being dismantled. he had also, as he said, given up his dictations for the time, at least, after continuing them, with more or less regularity, for a period of two and a half years, during which he had piled up about half a million words of comment and reminiscence. his general idea had been to add portions of this matter to his earlier books as the copyrights expired, to give them new life and interest, and he felt that he had plenty now for any such purpose. he gave his time mainly to his guests, his billiards, and his reading, though of course he could not keep from writing on this subject and that as the fancy moved him, and a drawer in one of his dressers began to accumulate fresh though usually fragmentary manuscripts. . . he read the daily paper, but he no longer took the keen, restless interest in public affairs. new york politics did not concern him any more, and national politics not much. when the evening post wrote him concerning the advisability of renominating governor hughes he replied: if you had asked me two months ago my answer would have been prompt & loud & strong: yes, i want governor hughes renominated. but it is too late, & my mouth is closed. i have become a citizen & taxpayer of connecticut, & could not now, without impertinence, meddle in matters which are none of my business. i could not do it with impertinence without trespassing on the monopoly of another. howells speaks of mark twain's "absolute content" with his new home, and these are the proper words' to express it. he was like a storm-beaten ship that had drifted at last into a serene south sea haven. the days began and ended in tranquillity. there were no special morning regulations: one could have his breakfast at any time and at almost any place. he could have it in bed if he liked, or in the loggia or livingroom, or billiard-room. he might even have it in the diningroom, or on the terrace, just outside. guests--there were usually guests --might suit their convenience in this matter--also as to the forenoons. the afternoon brought games--that is, billiards, provided the guest knew billiards, otherwise hearts. those two games were his safety-valves, and while there were no printed requirements relating to them the unwritten code of stormfield provided that guests, of whatever age or previous faith, should engage in one or both of these diversions. clemens, who usually spent his forenoon in bed with his reading and his letters, came to the green table of skill and chance eager for the onset; if the fates were kindly, he approved of them openly. if not--well, the fates were old enough to know better, and, as heretofore, had to take the consequences. sometimes, when the weather was fine and there were no games (this was likely to be on sunday afternoons), there were drives among the hills and along the saugatuck through the bedding glen. the cat was always "purring on the hearth" at stormfield--several cats --for mark twain's fondness for this clean, intelligent domestic animal remained, to the end, one of his happiest characteristics. there were never too many cats at stormfield, and the "hearth" included the entire house, even the billiard-table. when, as was likely to happen at any time during the game, the kittens sinbad, or danbury, or billiards would decide to hop up and play with the balls, or sit in the pockets and grab at them as they went by, the game simply added this element of chance, and the uninvited player was not disturbed. the cats really owned stormfield; any one could tell that from their deportment. mark twain held the title deeds; but it was danbury and sinbad and the others that possessed the premises. they occupied any portion of the house or its furnishings at will, and they never failed to attract attention. mark twain might be preoccupied and indifferent to the comings and goings of other members of the household; but no matter what he was doing, let danbury appear in the offing and he was observed and greeted with due deference, and complimented and made comfortable. clemens would arise from the table and carry certain choice food out on the terrace to tammany, and be satisfied with almost no acknowledgment by way of appreciation. one could not imagine any home of mark twain where the cats were not supreme. in the evening, as at fifth avenue, there was music--the stately measures of the orchestrelle--while mark twain smoked and mingled unusual speculation with long, long backward dreams. it was three months from the day of arrival in redding that some guests came to stormfield without invitation--two burglars, who were carrying off some bundles of silver when they were discovered. claude, the butler, fired a pistol after them to hasten their departure, and clemens, wakened by the shots, thought the family was opening champagne and went to sleep again. it was far in the night; but neighbor h. a. lounsbury and deputy-sheriff banks were notified, and by morning the thieves were captured, though only after a pretty desperate encounter, during which the officer received a bullet-wound. lounsbury and a stormfield guest had tracked them in the dark with a lantern to bethel, a distance of some seven miles. the thieves, also their pursuers, had boarded the train there. sheriff banks was waiting at the west redding station when the train came down, and there the capture was made. it was a remarkably prompt and shrewd piece of work. clemens gave credit for its success chiefly to lounsbury, whose talents in many fields always impressed him. the thieves were taken to the redding town hall for a preliminary healing. subsequently they received severe sentences. clemens tacked this notice on his front door: notice to the next burglar there is nothing but plated ware in this house now and henceforth. you will find it in that brass thing in the dining-room over in the corner by the basket of kittens. if you want the basket put the kittens in the brass thing. do not make a noise--it disturbs the family. you will find rubbers in the front hall by that thing which has the umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, i think they call it, or pergola, or something like that. please close the door when you go away! very truly yours, s. l. clemens. cclxxiii stormfield philosophies now came the tranquil days of the connecticut autumn. the change of the landscape colors was a constant delight to mark twain. there were several large windows in his room, and he called them his picture-gallery. the window-panes were small, and each formed a separate picture of its own that was changing almost hourly. the red tones that began to run through the foliage; the red berry bushes; the fading grass, and the little touches of sparkling frost that came every now and then at early morning; the background of distant blue hills and changing skies-these things gave his gallery a multitude of variation that no art-museums could furnish. he loved it all, and he loved to walk out in it, pacing up and down the terrace, or the long path that led to the pergola at the foot of a natural garden. if a friend came, he was willing to walk much farther; and we often descended the hill in one direction or another, though usually going toward the "gorge," a romantic spot where a clear brook found its way through a deep and rather dangerous-looking chasm. once he was persuaded to descend into this fairy-like place, for it was well worth exploring; but his footing was no longer sure and he did not go far. he liked better to sit on the grass-grown, rocky arch above and look down into it, and let his talk follow his mood. he liked to contemplate the geology of his surroundings, the record of the ageless periods of construction required to build the world. the marvels of science always appealed to him. he reveled in the thought of the almost limitless stretches of time, the millions upon millions of years that had been required for this stratum and that--he liked to amaze himself with the sounding figures. i remember him expressing a wish to see the grand canon of arizona, where, on perpendicular walls six thousand feet high, the long story of geological creation is written. i had stopped there during my western trip of the previous year, and i told him something of its wonders. i urged him to see them for himself, offering to go with him. he said: "i should enjoy that; but the railroad journey is so far and i should have no peace. the papers would get hold of it, and i would have to make speeches and be interviewed, and i never want to do any of those things again." i suggested that the railroads would probably be glad to place a private car at his service, so that he might travel in comfort; but he shook his head. "that would only make me more conspicuous." "how about a disguise?" "yes," he said, "i might put on a red wig and false whiskers and change my name, but i couldn't disguise my drawling speech and they'd find me out." it was amusing, but it was rather sad, too. his fame had deprived him of valued privileges. he talked of many things during these little excursions. once he told how he had successively advised his nephew, moffett, in the matter of obtaining a desirable position. moffett had wanted to become a reporter. clemens devised a characteristic scheme. he said: "i will get you a place on any newspaper you may select if you promise faithfully to follow out my instructions." the applicant agreed, eagerly enough. clemens said: "go to the newspaper of your choice. say that you are idle and want work, that you are pining for work--longing for it, and that you ask no wages, and will support yourself. all that you ask is work. that you will do anything, sweep, fill the inkstands, mucilage-bottles, run errands, and be generally useful. you must never ask for wages. you must wait until the offer of wages comes to you. you must work just as faithfully and just as eagerly as if you were being paid for it. then see what happens." the scheme had worked perfectly. young moffett had followed his instructions to the letter. by and by he attracted attention. he was employed in a variety of ways that earned him the gratitude and the confidence of the office. in obedience to further instructions, he began to make short, brief, unadorned notices of small news matters that came under his eye and laid them on the city editor's desk. no pay was asked; none was expected. occasionally one of the items was used. then, of course, it happened, as it must sooner or later at a busy time, that he was given a small news assignment. there was no trouble about his progress after that. he had won the confidence of the management and shown that he was not afraid to work. the plan had been variously tried since, clemens said, and he could not remember any case in which it had failed. the idea may have grown out of his own pilot apprenticeship on the river, when cub pilots not only received no salary, but paid for the privilege of learning. clemens discussed public matters less often than formerly, but they were not altogether out of his mind. he thought our republic was in a fair way to become a monarchy--that the signs were already evident. he referred to the letter which he had written so long ago in boston, with its amusing fancy of the archbishop of dublin and his grace of ponkapog, and declared that, after all, it contained something of prophecy.--[see chap. xcvii; also appendix m.]--he would not live to see the actual monarchy, he said, but it was coming. "i'm not expecting it in my time nor in my children's time, though it may be sooner than we think. there are two special reasons for it and one condition. the first reason is, that it is in the nature of man to want a definite something to love, honor, reverently look up to and obey; a god and king, for example. the second reason is, that while little republics have lasted long, protected by their poverty and insignificance, great ones have not. and the condition is, vast power and wealth, which breed commercial and political corruptions, and incite public favorites to dangerous ambitions." he repeated what i had heard him say before, that in one sense we already had a monarchy; that is to say, a ruling public and political aristocracy which could create a presidential succession. he did not say these things bitterly now, but reflectively and rather indifferently. he was inclined to speak unhopefully of the international plans for universal peace, which were being agitated rather persistently. "the gospel of peace," he said, "is always making a deal of noise, always rejoicing in its progress but always neglecting to furnish statistics. there are no peaceful nations now. all christendom is a soldier-camp. the poor have been taxed in some nations to the starvation point to support the giant armaments which christian governments have built up, each to protect itself from the rest of the christian brotherhood, and incidentally to snatch any scrap of real estate left exposed by a weaker owner. king leopold ii. of belgium, the most intensely christian monarch, except alexander vi., that has escaped hell thus far, has stolen an entire kingdom in africa, and in fourteen years of christian endeavor there has reduced the population from thirty millions to fifteen by murder and mutilation and overwork, confiscating the labor of the helpless natives, and giving them nothing in return but salvation and a home in heaven, furnished at the last moment by the christian priest. "within the last generation each christian power has turned the bulk of its attention to finding out newer and still newer and more and more effective ways of killing christians, and, incidentally, a pagan now and then; and the surest way to get rich quickly in christ's earthly kingdom is to invent a kind of gun that can kill more christians at one shot than any other existing kind. all the christian nations are at it. the more advanced they are, the bigger and more destructive engines of war they create." once, speaking of battles great and small, and how important even a small battle must seem to a soldier who had fought in no other, he said: "to him it is a mighty achievement, an achievement with a big a, when to a wax-worn veteran it would be a mere incident. for instance, to the soldier of one battle, san juan hill was an achievement with an a as big as the pyramids of cheops; whereas, if napoleon had fought it, he would have set it down on his cuff at the time to keep from forgetting it had happened. but that is all natural and human enough. we are all like that." the curiosities and absurdities of religious superstitions never failed to furnish him with themes more or less amusing. i remember one sunday, when he walked down to have luncheon at my house, he sat under the shade and fell to talking of herod's slaughter of the innocents, which he said could not have happened. "tacitus makes no mention of it," he said, "and he would hardly have overlooked a sweeping order like that, issued by a petty ruler like herod. just consider a little king of a corner of the roman empire ordering the slaughter of the first-born of a lot of roman subjects. why, the emperor would have reached out that long arm of his and dismissed herod. that tradition is probably about as authentic as those connected with a number of old bridges in europe which are said to have been built by satan. the inhabitants used to go to satan to build bridges for them, promising him the soul of the first one that crossed the bridge; then, when satan had the bridge done, they would send over a rooster or a jackass--a cheap jackass; that was for satan, and of course they could fool him that way every time. satan must have been pretty simple, even according to the new testament, or he wouldn't have led christ up on a high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall down and worship him. that was a manifestly absurd proposition, because christ, as the son of god, already owned the world; and, besides, what satan showed him was only a few rocky acres of palestine. it is just as if some one should try to buy rockefeller, the owner of all the standard oil company, with a gallon of kerosene." he often spoke of the unseen forces of creation, the immutable laws that hold the planet in exact course and bring the years and the seasons always exactly on schedule time. "the great law" was a phrase often on his lips. the exquisite foliage, the cloud shapes, the varieties of color everywhere: these were for him outward manifestations of the great law, whose principle i understood to be unity--exact relations throughout all nature; and in this i failed to find any suggestion of pessimism, but only of justice. once he wrote on a card for preservation: from everlasting to everlasting, this is the law: the sum of wrong & misery shall always keep exact step with the sum of human blessedness. no "civilization," no "advance," has ever modified these proportions by even the shadow of a shade, nor ever can, while our race endures. cclxiv citizen and farmer the procession of guests at stormfield continued pretty steadily. clemens kept a book in which visitors set down their names and the dates of arrival and departure, and when they failed to attend to these matters he diligently did it himself after they were gone. members of the harper company came up with their wives; "angel-fish" swam in and out of the aquarium; bermuda friends came to see the new home; robert collier, the publisher, and his wife--"mrs. sally," as clemens liked to call her--paid their visits; lord northcliffe, who was visiting america, came with colonel harvey, and was so impressed with the architecture of stormfield that he adopted its plans for a country-place he was about to build in newfoundland. helen keller, with mr. and mrs. macy, came up for a week-end visit. mrs. crane came over from elmira; and, behold! one day came the long-ago sweetheart of his childhood, little laura hawkins--laura frazer now, widowed and in the seventies, with a granddaughter already a young lady quite grown up. that mark twain was not wearying of the new conditions we may gather from a letter written to mrs. rogers in october: i've grown young in these months of dissipation here. and i have left off drinking--it isn't necessary now. society & theology are sufficient for me. to helen allen, a bermuda "angel-fish," he wrote: we have good times here in this soundless solitude on the hilltop. the moment i saw the house i was glad i built it, & now i am gladder & gladder all the time. i was not dreaming of living here except in the summer-time--that was before i saw this region & the house, you see--but that is all changed now; i shall stay here winter & summer both & not go back to new york at all. my child, it's as tranquil & contenting as bermuda. you will be very welcome here, dear. he interested himself in the affairs and in the people of redding. not long after his arrival he had gathered in all the inhabitants of the country-side, neighbors of every quality, for closer acquaintance, and threw open to them for inspection every part of the new house. he appointed mrs. lounsbury, whose acquaintance was very wide; a sort of committee on reception, and stood at the entrance with her to welcome each visitor in person. it was a sort of gala day, and the rooms and the grounds were filled with the visitors. in the dining-room there were generous refreshments. again, not long afterward, he issued a special invitation to all of those-architects, builders, and workmen who had taken any part, however great or small, in the building of his home. mr. and mrs. littleton were visiting stormfield at this time, and both clemens and littleton spoke to these assembled guests from the terrace, and made them feel that their efforts had been worth while. presently the idea developed to establish something that would be of benefit to his neighbors, especially to those who did not have access to much reading-matter. he had been for years flooded with books by authors and publishers, and there was a heavy surplus at his home in the city. when these began to arrive he had a large number of volumes set aside as the nucleus of a public library. an unused chapel not far away--it could be seen from one of his windows--was obtained for the purpose; officers were elected; a librarian was appointed, and so the mark twain library of redding was duly established. clemens himself was elected its first president, with the resident physician, dr. ernest h. smith, vice-president, and another resident, william e. grumman, librarian. on the afternoon of its opening the president made a brief address. he said: i am here to speak a few instructive words to my fellow-farmers. i suppose you are all farmers: i am going to put in a crop next year, when i have been here long enough and know how. i couldn't make a turnip stay on a tree now after i had grown it. i like to talk. it would take more than the redding air to make me keep still, and i like to instruct people. it's noble to be good, and it's nobler to teach others to be good, and less trouble. i am glad to help this library. we get our morals from books. i didn't get mine from books, but i know that morals do come from books --theoretically at least. mr. beard or mr. adams will give some land, and by and by we are going to have a building of our own. this statement was news to both mr. beard and mr. adams and an inspiration of the moment; but mr. theodore adams, who owned a most desirable site, did in fact promptly resolve to donate it for library purposes. clemens continued: i am going to help build that library with contributions from my visitors. every male guest who comes to my house will have to contribute a dollar or go away without his baggage. --[a characteristic notice to guests requiring them to contribute a dollar to the library building fund was later placed on the billiard-room mantel at stormfield with good results.]--if those burglars that broke into my house recently had done that they would have been happier now, or if they'd have broken into this library they would have read a few books and led a better life. now they are in jail, and if they keep on they will go to congress. when a person starts downhill you can never tell where he's going to stop. i am sorry for those burglars. they got nothing that they wanted and scared away most of my servants. now we are putting in a burglar-alarm instead of a dog. some advised the dog, but it costs even more to entertain a dog than a burglar. i am having the ground electrified, so that for a mile around any one who puts his foot across the line sets off an alarm that will be heard in europe. now i will introduce the real president to you, a man whom you know already--dr. smith. so a new and important benefit was conferred upon the community, and there was a feeling that redding, besides having a literary colony, was to be literary in fact. it might have been mentioned earlier that redding already had literary associations when mark twain arrived. as far back as revolutionary days joel barlow, a poet of distinction, and once minister to france, had been a resident of redding, and there were still barlow descendants in the township. william edgar grumman, the librarian, had written the story of redding's share in the revolutionary war--no small share, for gen. israel putnam's army had been quartered there during at least one long, trying winter. charles burr todd, of one of the oldest redding families, himself--still a resident, was also the author of a redding history. of literary folk not native to redding, dora reed goodale and her sister elaine, the wife of dr. charles a. eastman, had, long been residents of redding center; jeanette l. gilder and ida m. tarbell had summer homes on redding ridge; dan beard, as already mentioned, owned a place near the banks of the saugatuck, while kate v. st. maur, also two of nathaniel hawthorne's granddaughters had recently located adjoining the stormfield lands. by which it will be seen that redding was in no way unsuitable as a home for mark twain. cclxv a mantel and a baby elephant mark twain was the receiver of two notable presents that year. the first of these, a mantel from hawaii, presented to him by the hawaiian promotion committee, was set in place in the billiard-room on the morning of his seventy-third birthday. this committee had written, proposing to build for his new home either a mantel or a chair, as he might prefer, the same to be carved from the native woods. clemens decided on a billiard-room mantel, and john howells forwarded the proper measurements. so, in due time, the mantel arrived, a beautiful piece of work and in fine condition, with the hawaiian word, "aloha," one of the sweetest forms of greeting in any tongue, carved as its central ornament. to the donors of the gift clemens wrote: the beautiful mantel was put in its place an hour ago, & its friendly "aloha" was the first uttered greeting received on my d birthday. it is rich in color, rich in quality, & rich in decoration; therefore it exactly harmonized with the taste for such things which was born in me & which i have seldom been able to indulge to my content. it will be a great pleasure to me, daily renewed, to have under my eye this lovely reminder of the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean, & i beg to thank the committee for providing me that pleasure. to f. n. otremba, who had carved the mantel, he sent this word: i am grateful to you for the valued compliment to me in the labor of heart and hand and brain which you have put upon it. it is worthy of the choicest place in the house and it has it. it was the second beautiful mantel in stormfield--the hartford library mantel, removed when that house was sold, having been installed in the stormfield living-room. altogether the seventy-third birthday was a pleasant one. clemens, in the morning, drove down to see the library lot which mr. theodore adams had presented, and the rest of the day there were fine, close billiard games, during which he was in the gentlest and happiest moods. he recalled the games of two years before, and as we stopped playing i said: "i hope a year from now we shall be here, still playing the great game." and he answered, as then: "yes, it is a great game--the best game on earth." and he held out his hand and thanked me for coming, as he never failed to do when we parted, though it always hurt me a little, for the debt was so largely mine. mark twain's second present came at christmas-time. about ten days earlier, a letter came from robert j. collier, saying that he had bought a baby elephant which he intended to present to mark twain as a christmas gift. he added that it would be sent as soon as he could get a car for it, and the loan of a keeper from barnum & bailey's headquarters at bridgeport. the news created a disturbance in stormfield. one could not refuse, discourteously and abruptly, a costly present like that; but it seemed a disaster to accept it. an elephant would require a roomy and warm place, also a variety of attention which stormfield was not prepared to supply. the telephone was set going and certain timid excuses were offered by the secretary. there was no good place to put an elephant in stormfield, but mr. collier said, quite confidently: "oh, put him in the garage." "but there's no heat in the garage." "well, put him in the loggia, then. that's closed in, isn't it, for the winter? plenty of sunlight--just the place for a young elephant." "but we play cards in the loggia. we use it for a sort of sun-parlor." "but that wouldn't matter. he's a kindly, playful little thing. he'll be just like a kitten. i'll send the man up to look over the place and tell you just how to take care of him, and i'll send up several bales of hay in advance. it isn't a large elephant, you know: just a little one --a regular plaything." there was nothing further to be done; only to wait and dread until the christmas present's arrival. a few days before christmas ten bales of hay arrived and several bushels of carrots. this store of provender aroused no enthusiasm at stormfield. it would seem there was no escape now. on christmas morning mr. lounsbury telephoned up that there was a man at the station who said he was an elephant-trainer from barnum & bailey's, sent by mr. collier to look at the elephant's quarters and get him settled when he should arrive. orders were given to bring the man over. the day of doom was at hand. but lounsbury's detective instinct came once more into play. he had seen a good many elephant-trainers at bridgeport, and he thought this one had a doubtful look. "where is the elephant?" he asked, as they drove along. "he will arrive at noon." "where are you going to put him?" "in the loggia." "how big is he?" "about the size of a cow." "how long have you been with barnum and bailey?" "six years." "then you must know some friends of mine" (naming two that had no existence until that moment). "oh yes, indeed. i know them well." lounsbury didn't say any more just then, but he had a feeling that perhaps the dread at stormfield had grown unnecessarily large. something told him that this man seemed rather more like a butler, or a valet, than an elephant-trainer. they drove to stormfield, and the trainer looked over the place. it would do perfectly, he said. he gave a few instructions as to the care of this new household feature, and was driven back to the station to bring it. lounsbury came back by and by, bringing the elephant but not the trainer. it didn't need a trainer. it was a beautiful specimen, with soft, smooth coat and handsome trappings, perfectly quiet, well-behaved and small --suited to the loggia, as collier had said--for it was only two feet long and beautifully made of cloth and cotton--one of the forest toy elephants ever seen anywhere. it was a good joke, such as mark twain loved--a carefully prepared, harmless bit of foolery. he wrote robert collier, threatening him with all sorts of revenge, declaring that the elephant was devastating stormfield. "to send an elephant in a trance, under pretense that it was dead or stuffed!" he said. "the animal came to life, as you knew it would, and began to observe christmas, and we now have no furniture left and no servants and no visitors, no friends, no photographs, no burglars --nothing but the elephant. be kind, be merciful, be generous; take him away and send us what is left of the earthquake." collier wrote that he thought it unkind of him to look a gift-elephant in the trunk. and with such chaffing and gaiety the year came to an end. cclxxvi shakespeare-bacon talk when the bad weather came there was not much company at stormfield, and i went up regularly each afternoon, for it was lonely on that bleak hill, and after his forenoon of reading or writing he craved diversion. my own home was a little more than a half mile away, and i enjoyed the walk, whatever the weather. i usually managed to arrive about three o'clock. he would watch from his high windows until he saw me raise the hilltop, and he would be at the door when i arrived, so that there might be no delay in getting at the games. or, if it happened that he wished to show me something in his room, i would hear his rich voice sounding down the stair. once, when i arrived, i heard him calling, and going up i found him highly pleased with the arrangement of two pictures on a chair, placed so that the glasses of them reflected the sunlight on the ceiling. he said: "they seem to catch the reflection of the sky and the winter colors. sometimes the hues are wonderfully iridescent." he pointed to a bunch of wild red berries on the mantel with the sun on them. "how beautifully they light up!" he said; "some of them in the sunlight, some still in the shadow." he walked to the window and stood looking out on the somber fields. "the lights and colors are always changing there," he said. "i never tire of it." to see him then so full of the interest and delight of the moment, one might easily believe he had never known tragedy and shipwreck. more than any one i ever knew, he lived in the present. most of us are either dreaming of the past or anticipating the future--forever beating the dirge of yesterday or the tattoo of to-morrow. mark twain's step was timed to the march of the moment. there were days when he recalled the past and grieved over it, and when he speculated concerning the future; but his greater interest was always of the now, and of the particular locality where he found it. the thing which caught his fancy, however slight or however important, possessed him fully for the time, even if never afterward. he was especially interested that winter in the shakespeare-bacon problem. he had long been unable to believe that the actor-manager from stratford had written those great plays, and now a book just published, 'the shakespeare problem restated', by george greenwood, and another one in press, 'some characteristic signatures of francis bacon', by william stone booth, had added the last touch of conviction that francis bacon, and bacon only, had written the shakespeare dramas. i was ardently opposed to this idea. the romance of the boy, will shakespeare, who had come up to london and began, by holding horses outside of the theater, and ended by winning the proudest place in the world of letters, was something i did not wish to let perish. i produced all the stock testimony--ben jonson's sonnet, the internal evidence of the plays themselves, the actors who had published them--but he refused to accept any of it. he declared that there was not a single proof to show that shakespeare had written one of them. "is there any evidence that he didn't?" i asked. "there's evidence that he couldn't," he said. "it required a man with the fullest legal equipment to have written them. when you have read greenwood's book you will see how untenable is any argument for shakespeare's authorship." i was willing to concede something, and offered a compromise. "perhaps," i said, "shakespeare was the belasoo of that day--the managerial genius, unable to write plays himself, but with the supreme gift of making effective drama from the plays of others. in that case it is not unlikely that the plays would be known as shakespeare's. even in this day john luther long's 'madam butterfly' is sometimes called belasco's play; though it is doubtful if belasco ever wrote a line of it." he considered this view, but not very favorably. the booth book was at this time a secret, and he had not told me anything concerning it; but he had it in his mind when he said, with an air of the greatest conviction: "i know that shakespeare did not write those plays, and i have reason to believe he did not touch the text in any way." "how can you be so positive?" i asked. he replied: "i have private knowledge from a source that cannot be questioned." i now suspected that he was joking, and asked if he had been consulting a spiritual medium; but he was clearly in earnest. "it is the great discovery of the age," he said, quite seriously. "the world will soon ring with it. i wish i could tell you about it, but i have passed my word. you will not have long to wait." i was going to sail for the mediterranean in february, and i asked if it would be likely that i would know this great secret before i sailed. he thought not; but he said that more than likely the startling news would be given to the world while i was on the water, and it might come to me on the ship by wireless. i confess i was amazed and intensely curious by this time. i conjectured the discovery of some document--some bacon or shakespeare private paper which dispelled all the mystery of the authorship. i hinted that he might write me a letter which i could open on the ship; but he was firm in his refusal. he had passed his word, he repeated, and the news might not be given out as soon as that; but he assured me more than once that wherever i might be, in whatever remote locality, it would come by cable, and the world would quake with it. i was tempted to give up my trip, to be with him at stormfield at the time of the upheaval. naturally the shakespeare theme was uppermost during the remaining days that we were together. he had engaged another stenographer, and was now dictating, forenoons, his own views on the subject--views coordinated with those of mr. greenwood, whom he liberally quoted, but embellished and decorated in his own gay manner. these were chapters for his autobiography, he said, and i think he had then no intention of making a book of them. i could not quite see why he should take all this argumentary trouble if he had, as he said, positive evidence that bacon, and not shakespeare, had written the plays. i thought the whole matter very curious. the shakespeare interest had diverging by-paths. one evening, when we were alone at dinner, he said: "there is only one other illustrious man in history about whom there is so little known," and he added, "jesus christ." he reviewed the statements of the gospels concerning christ, though he declared them to be mainly traditional and of no value. i agreed that they contained confusing statements, and inflicted more or less with justice and reason; but i said i thought there was truth in them, too. "why do you think so?" he asked. "because they contain matters that are self-evident--things eternally and essentially just." "then you make your own bible?" "yes, from those materials combined with human reason." "then it does not matter where the truth, as you call it, comes from?" i admitted that the source did not matter; that truth from shakespeare, epictetus, or aristotle was quite as valuable as from the scriptures. we were on common ground now. he mentioned marcus aurelius, the stoics, and their blameless lives. i, still pursuing the thought of jesus, asked: "do you not think it strange that in that day when christ came, admitting that there was a christ, such a character could have come at all--in the time of the pharisees and the sadducees, when all was ceremony and unbelief?" "i remember," he said, "the sadducees didn't believe in hell. he brought them one." "nor the resurrection. he brought them that, also." he did not admit that there had been a christ with the character and mission related by the gospels. "it is all a myth," he said. "there have been saviours in every age of the world. it is all just a fairy tale, like the idea of santa claus." "but," i argued, "even the spirit of christmas is real when it is genuine. suppose that we admit there was no physical saviour--that it is only an idea--a spiritual embodiment which humanity has made for itself and is willing to improve upon as its own spirituality improves, wouldn't that make it worthy?" "but then the fairy story of the atonement dissolves, and with it crumbles the very foundations of any established church. you can create your own testament, your own scripture, and your own christ, but you've got to give up your atonement." "as related to the crucifixion, yes, and good riddance to it; but the death of the old order and the growth of spirituality comes to a sort of atonement, doesn't it?" he said: "a conclusion like that has about as much to do with the gospels and christianity as shakespeare had to do with bacon's plays. you are preaching a doctrine that would have sent a man to the stake a few centuries ago. i have preached that in my own gospel." i remembered then, and realized that, by my own clumsy ladder, i had merely mounted from dogma, and superstition to his platform of training the ideals to a higher contentment of soul. cclxxvii "is shakespeare dead?" i set out on my long journey with much reluctance. however, a series of guests with various diversions had been planned, and it seemed a good time to go. clemens gave me letters of introduction, and bade me godspeed. it would be near the end of april before i should see him again. now and then on the ship, and in the course of my travels, i remembered the great news i was to hear concerning shakespeare. in cairo, at shepheard's, i looked eagerly through english newspapers, expecting any moment to come upon great head-lines; but i was always disappointed. even on the return voyage there was no one i could find who had heard any particular shakespeare news. arriving in new york, i found that clemens himself had published his shakespeare dictations in a little volume of his own, entitled, 'is shakespeare dead?' the title certainly suggested spiritistic matters, and i got a volume at harpers', and read it going up on the train, hoping to find somewhere in it a solution of the great mystery. but it was only matter i had already known; the secret was still unrevealed. at redding i lost not much time in getting up to stormfield. there had been changes in my absence. clara clemens had returned from her travels, and jean, whose health seemed improved, was coming home to be her father's secretary. he was greatly pleased with these things, and declared he was going to have a home once more with his children about him. he was quite alone that day, and we walked up and down the great living-room for an hour, perhaps, while he discussed his new plans. for one thing, he had incorporated his pen-name, mark twain, in order that the protection of his copyrights and the conduct of his literary business in general should not require his personal attention. he seemed to find a relief in this, as he always did in dismissing any kind of responsibility. when we went in for billiards i spoke of his book, which i had read on the way up, and of the great shakespearian secret which was to astonish the world. then he told me that the matter had been delayed, but that he was no longer required to suppress it; that the revelation was in the form of a book--a book which revealed conclusively to any one who would take the trouble to follow the directions that the acrostic name of francis bacon in a great variety of forms ran through many --probably through all of the so-called shakespeare plays. he said it was far and away beyond anything of the kind ever published; that ignatius donnelly and others had merely glimpsed the truth, but that the author of this book, william stone booth, had demonstrated, beyond any doubt or question, that the bacon signatures were there. the book would be issued in a few days, he said. he had seen a set of proofs of it, and while it had not been published in the best way to clearly demonstrate its great revelation, it must settle the matter with every reasoning mind. he confessed that his faculties had been more or less defeated in, attempting to follow the ciphers, and he complained bitterly that the evidence had not been set forth so that he who merely skims a book might grasp it. he had failed on the acrostics at first; but more recently he had understood the rule, and had been able to work out several bacon signatures. he complimented me by saying that he felt sure that when the book came i would have no trouble with it. without going further with this matter, i may say here that the book arrived presently, and between us we did work out a considerable number of the claimed acrostics by following the rules laid down. it was certainly an interesting if not wholly convincing occupation, and it would be a difficult task for any one to prove that the ciphers are not there. just why this pretentious volume created so little agitation it would be hard to say. certainly it did not cause any great upheaval in the literary world, and the name of william shakespeare still continues to be printed on the title-page of those marvelous dramas so long associated with his name. mark twain's own book on the subject--'is shakespeare dead?'--found a wide acceptance, and probably convinced as many readers. it contained no new arguments; but it gave a convincing touch to the old ones, and it was certainly readable.--[mark twain had the fullest conviction as to the bacon authorship of the shakespeare plays. one evening, with mr. edward loomis, we attended a fine performance of "romeo and juliet" given by sothern and marlowe. at the close of one splendid scene he said, quite earnestly, "that is about the best play that lord bacon ever wrote."] among the visitors who had come to stormfield was howells. clemens had called a meeting of the human race club, but only howells was able to attend. we will let him tell of his visit: we got on very well without the absentees, after finding them in the wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those i used to have with him so many years before in hartford, but there was not the old ferment of subjects. many things had been discussed and put away for good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for each other, who were so differently parts of it. he showed his absolute content with his house, and that was the greater pleasure for me because it was my son who designed it. the architect had been so fortunate as to be able to plan it where a natural avenue of savins, the close- knit, slender, cypress-like cedars of new england, led away from the rear of the villa to the little level of a pergola, meant some day to be wreathed and roofed with vines. but in the early spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful nakedness of the northern winter. it opened in the surpassing loveliness of wooded and meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days blue, and the last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor. we walked up and down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for the sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now we were far past turbulence or anger. once we took a walk together across the yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far down clashed through and over the stones and the shards of ice. clemens pointed out the scenery he had bought to give himself elbowroom, and showed me the lot he was going to have me build on. the next day we came again with the geologist he had asked up to stormfield to analyze its rocks. truly he loved the place . . . . my visit at stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his part and on mine. every morning before i dressed i heard him sounding my name through the house for the fun of it and i know for the fondness, and if i looked out of my door there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with some one. the last morning a soft sugar-snow had fallen and was falling, and i drove through it down to the station in the carriage which had been given him by his wife's father when they were first married, and had been kept all those intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use.--[this carriage--a finely built coup--had been presented to mrs. crane when the hartford house was closed. when stormfield was built she returned it to its original owner.]--its springs had not grown yielding with time, it had rather the stiffness and severity of age; but for him it must have swung low like the sweet chariot of the negro "spiritual" which i heard him sing with such fervor when those wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way northward. howells's visit resulted in a new inspiration. clemens started to write him one night when he could not sleep, and had been reading the volume of letters of james russell lowell. then, next morning, he was seized with the notion of writing a series of letters to such friends as howells, twichell, and rogers--letters not to be mailed, but to be laid away for some future public. he wrote two of these immediately--to howells and to twichell. the howells letter (or letters, for it was really double) is both pathetic and amusing. the first part ran: in the morning, april , . my pen has gone dry and the ink is out of reach. howells, did you write me day-before-day-before yesterday or did i dream it? in my mind's eye i most vividly see your hand-write on a square blue envelope in the mail-pile. i have hunted the house over, but there is no such letter. was it an illusion? i am reading lowell's letters & smoking. i woke an hour ago & am reading to keep from wasting the time. on page , vol. i, i have just margined a note: "young friend! i like that! you ought to see him now." it seemed startlingly strange to hear a person call you young. it was a brick out of a blue sky, & knocked me groggy for a moment. ah me, the pathos of it is that we were young then. and he--why, so was he, but he didn't know it. he didn't even know it years later, when we saw him approaching and you warned me, saying: "don't say anything about age--he has just turned & thinks he is old, & broods over it." well, clara did sing! and you wrote her a dear letter. time to go to sleep. yours ever, mark the second letter, begun at a.m., outlines the plan by which he is to write on the subject uppermost in his mind without restraint, knowing that the letter is not to be mailed. . . .the scheme furnishes a definite target for each letter, & you can choose the target that's going to be the most sympathetic for what you are hungering & thirsting to say at that particular moment. and you can talk with a quite unallowable frankness & freedom because you are not going to send the letter. when you are on fire with theology you'll not write it to rogers, who wouldn't be an inspiration; you'll write it to twichell, because it will make him writhe and squirm & break the furniture. when you are on fire with a good thing that's indecent you won't waste it on twichell; you'll save it for howells, who will love it. as he will never see it you can make it really indecenter than he could stand; & so no harm is done, yet a vast advantage is gained. the letter was not finished, and the scheme perished there. the twichell letter concerned missionaries, and added nothing to what he had already said on the subject. he wrote no letter to mr. rogers--perhaps never wrote to him again. cclxxviii the death of henry rogers clemens, a little before my return, had been on a trip to norfolk, virginia, to attend the opening ceremonies of the virginia railway. he had made a speech on that occasion, in which he had paid a public tribute to henry rogers, and told something of his personal obligation to the financier. he began by telling what mr. rogers had done for helen keller, whom he called "the most marvelous person of her sex that has existed on this earth since joan of arc." then he said: that is not all mr. rogers has done, but you never see that side of his character because it is never protruding; but he lends a helping hand daily out of that generous heart of his. you never hear of it. he is supposed to be a moon which has one side dark and the other bright. but the other side, though you don't see it, is not dark; it is bright, and its rays penetrate, and others do see it who are not god. i would take this opportunity to tell something that i have never been allowed to tell by mr. rogers, either by my mouth or in print, and if i don't look at him i can tell it now. in , when the publishing company of charles l. webster, of which i was financial agent, failed, it left me heavily in debt. if you will remember what commerce was at that time you will recall that you could not sell anything, and could not buy anything, and i was on my back; my books were not worth anything at all, and i could not give away my copyrights. mr. rogers had long-enough vision ahead to say, "your books have supported you before, and after the panic is over they will support you again," and that was a correct proposition. he saved my copyrights, and saved me from financial ruin. he it was who arranged with my creditors to allow me to roam the face of the earth and persecute the nations thereof with lectures, promising at the end of four years i would pay dollar for dollar. that arrangement was made, otherwise i would now be living out-of-doors under an umbrella, and a borrowed one at that. you see his white mustache and his hair trying to get white (he is always trying to look like me--i don't blame him for that). these are only emblematic of his character, and that is all. i say, without exception, hair and all, he is the whitest man i have ever known. this had been early in april. something more than a month later clemens was making a business trip to new york to see mr. rogers. i was telephoned early to go up and look over some matters with him before he started. i do not remember why i was not to go along that day, for i usually made such trips with him. i think it was planned that miss clemens, who was in the city, was to meet him at the grand central station. at all events, she did meet him there, with the news that during the night mr. rogers had suddenly died. this was may , . the news had already come to the house, and i had lost no time in preparations to follow by the next train. i joined him at the grosvenor hotel, on fifth avenue and tenth street. he was upset and deeply troubled by the loss of his stanch adviser and friend. he had a helpless look, and he said his friends were dying away from him and leaving him adrift. "and how i hate to do anything," he added, "that requires the least modicum of intelligence!" we remained at the grosvenor for mr. rogers's funeral. clemens served as one of the pall-bearers, but he did not feel equal to the trip to fairhaven. he wanted to be very quiet, he said. he could not undertake to travel that distance among those whom he knew so well, and with whom he must of necessity join in conversation; so we remained in the hotel apartment, reading and saying very little until bedtime. once he asked me to write a letter to jean: "say, 'your father says every little while, "how glad i am that jean is at home again!"' for that is true and i think of it all the time." but by and by, after a long period of silence, he said: "mr. rogers is under the ground now." and so passed out of earthly affairs the man who had contributed so largely to the comfort of mark twain's old age. he was a man of fine sensibilities and generous impulses; withal a keen sense of humor. one christmas, when he presented mark twain with a watch and a match-case, he wrote: my dear clemens,--for many years your friends have been complaining of your use of tobacco, both as to quantity and quality. complaints are now coming in of your use of time. most of your friends think that you are using your supply somewhat lavishly, but the chief complaint is in regard to the quality. i have been appealed to in the mean time, and have concluded that it is impossible to get the right kind of time from a blacking-box. therefore, i take the liberty of sending you herewith a machine that will furnish only the best. please use it with the kind wishes of yours truly, h. h. rogers. p. s.--complaint has also been made in regard to the furrows you make in your trousers in scratching matches. you will find a furrow on the bottom of the article inclosed. please use it. compliments of the season to the family. he was a man too busy to write many letters, but when he did write (to clemens at least) they were always playful and unhurried. one reading them would not find it easy to believe that the writer was a man on whose shoulders lay the burdens of stupendous finance-burdens so heavy that at last he was crushed beneath their weight. cclxxix an extension of copyright one of the pleasant things that came to mark twain that year was the passage of a copyright bill, which added to the royalty period an extension of fourteen years. champ clark had been largely instrumental in the success of this measure, and had been fighting for it steadily since mark twain's visit to washington in . following that visit, clark wrote: . . . it [the original bill] would never pass because the bill had literature and music all mixed together. being a missourian of course it would give me great pleasure to be of service to you. what i want to say is this: you have prepared a simple bill relating only to the copyright of books; send it to me and i will try to have it passed. clemens replied that he might have something more to say on the copyright question by and by--that he had in hand a dialogue--[similar to the "open letter to the register of copyrights," north american review, january, .]--which would instruct congress, but this he did not complete. meantime a simple bill was proposed and early in it became a law. in june clark wrote: dr. samuel l. clemens, stormfield, redding, conn. my dear doctor,--i am gradually becoming myself again, after a period of exhaustion that almost approximated prostration. after a long lecture tour last summer i went immediately into a hard campaign; as soon as the election was over, and i had recovered my disposition, i came here and went into those tariff hearings, which began shortly after breakfast each day, and sometimes lasted until midnight. listening patiently and meekly, withal, to the lying of tariff barons for many days and nights was followed by the work of the long session; that was followed by a hot campaign to take uncle joe's rules away from him; on the heels of that "campaign that failed" came the tariff fight in the house. i am now getting time to breathe regularly and i am writing to ask you if the copyright law is acceptable to you. if it is not acceptable to you i want to ask you to write and tell me how it should be changed and i will give my best endeavors to the work. i believe that your ideas and wishes in the matter constitute the best guide we have as to what should be done in the case. your friend, champ clark. to this clemens replied: stormfield, redding, conn, june , . dear champ clark,--is the new copyright law acceptable to me? emphatically yes! clark, it is the only sane & clearly defined & just & righteous copyright law that has ever existed in the united states. whosoever will compare it with its predecessors will have no trouble in arriving at that decision. the bill which was before the committee two years ago when i was down there was the most stupefying jumble of conflicting & apparently irreconcilable interests that was ever seen; and we all said "the case is hopeless, absolutely hopeless--out of this chaos nothing can be built." but we were in error; out of that chaotic mass this excellent bill has been constructed, the warring interests have been reconciled, and the result is as comely and substantial a legislative edifice as lifts its domes and towers and protective lightning-rods out of the statute book i think. when i think of that other bill, which even the deity couldn't understand, and of this one, which even i can understand, i take off my hat to the man or men who devised this one. was it r. u. johnson? was it the authors' league? was it both together? i don't know, but i take off my hat, anyway. johnson has written a valuable article about the new law--i inclose it. at last--at last and for the first time in copyright history--we are ahead of england! ahead of her in two ways: by length of time and by fairness to all interests concerned. does this sound like shouting? then i must modify it: all we possessed of copyright justice before the th of last march we owed to england's initiative. truly yours, s. l. clemens. clemens had prepared what was the final word an the subject of copyright just before this bill was passed--a petition for a law which he believed would regulate the whole matter. it was a generous, even if a somewhat utopian, plan, eminently characteristic of its author. the new fourteen-year extension, with the prospect of more, made this or any other compromise seem inadvisable.--[the reader may consider this last copyright document by mark twain under appendix n, at the end of this volume.] cclxxx a warning clemens had promised to go to baltimore for the graduation of "francesca" of his london visit in --and to make a short address to her class. it was the eighth of june when we set out on this journey,--[the reader may remember that it was the th of june, , that mark twain sailed for the holy land. it was the th of june, , that he sailed for england to take his oxford degree. this th of june, , was at least slightly connected with both events, for he was keeping an engagement made with francesca in london, and my notes show that he discussed, on the way to the station, some incidents of his holy land trip and his attitude at that time toward christian traditions. as he rarely mentioned the quaker city trip, the coincidence seems rather curious. it is most unlikely that clemens himself in any way associated the two dates.]--but the day was rather bleak and there was a chilly rain. clemens had a number of errands to do in new york, and we drove from one place to another, attending to them. finally, in the afternoon, the rain ceased, and while i was arranging some matters for him he concluded to take a ride on the top of a fifth avenue stage. it was fine and pleasant when he started, but the weather thickened again and when he returned he complained that he had felt a little chilly. he seemed in fine condition, however, next morning and was in good spirits all the way to baltimore. chauncey depew was on the train and they met in the dining-car--the last time, i think, they ever saw each other. he was tired when we reached the belvedere hotel in baltimore and did not wish to see the newspaper men. it happened that the reporters had a special purpose in coming just at this time, for it had suddenly developed that in his shakespeare book, through an oversight, due to haste in publication, full credit had not been given to mr. greenwood for the long extracts quoted from his work. the sensational head-lines in a morning paper, "is mark twain a plagiarist?" had naturally prompted the newspaper men to see what he would have to say on the subject. it was a simple matter, easily explained, and clemens himself was less disturbed about it than anybody. he felt no sense of guilt, he said; and the fact that he had been stealing and caught at it would give mr. greenwood's book far more advertising than if he had given him the full credit which he had intended. he found a good deal of amusement in the situation, his only worry being that clara and jean would see the paper and be troubled. he had taken off his clothes and was lying down, reading. after a little he got up and began walking up and down the room. presently he stopped and, facing me, placed his hand upon his breast. he said: "i think i must have caught a little cold yesterday on that fifth avenue stage. i have a curious pain in my breast." i suggested that he lie down again and i would fill his hot-water bag. the pain passed away presently, and he seemed to be dozing. i stepped into the next room and busied myself with some writing. by and by i heard him stirring again and went in where he was. he was walking up and down and began talking of some recent ethnological discoveries --something relating to prehistoric man. "what a fine boy that prehistoric man must have been," he said--"the very first one! think of the gaudy style of him, how he must have lorded it over those other creatures, walking on his hind legs, waving his arms, practising and getting ready for the pulpit." the fancy amused him, but presently he paused in his walk and again put his hand on his breast, saying: "that pain has come back. it's a curious, sickening, deadly kind of pain. i never had anything just like it." it seemed to me that his face had become rather gray. i said: "where is it, exactly, mr. clemens?" he laid his hand in the center of his breast and said: "it is here, and it is very peculiar indeed." remotely in my mind occurred the thought that he had located his heart, and the "peculiar deadly pain" he had mentioned seemed ominous. i suggested, however, that it was probably some rheumatic touch, and this opinion seemed warranted when, a few moments later, the hot water had again relieved it. this time the pain had apparently gone to stay, for it did not return while we were in baltimore. it was the first positive manifestation of the angina which eventually would take him from us. the weather was pleasant in baltimore, and his visit to st. timothy's school and his address there were the kind of diversions that meant most to him. the flock of girls, all in their pretty commencement dresses, assembled and rejoicing at his playfully given advice: not to smoke--to excess; not to drink--to excess; not to marry--to excess; he standing there in a garb as white as their own--it made a rare picture--a sweet memory--and it was the last time he ever gave advice from the platform to any one. edward s. martin also spoke to the school, and then there was a great feasting in the big assembly-hall. it was on the lawn that a reporter approached him with the news of the death of edward everett hale--another of the old group. clemens said thoughtfully, after a moment: "i had the greatest respect and esteem for edward everett hale, the greatest admiration for his work. i am as grieved to hear of his death as i can ever be to hear of the death of any friend, though my grief is always tempered with the satisfaction of knowing that for the one that goes, the hard, bitter struggle of life is ended." we were leaving the belvedere next morning, and when the subject of breakfast came up for discussion he said: "that was the most delicious baltimore fried chicken we had yesterday morning. i think we'll just repeat that order. it reminds me of john quarles's farm." we had been having our meals served in the rooms, but we had breakfast that morning down in the diningroom, and "francesca" and her mother were there. as he stood on the railway platform waiting for the train, he told me how once, fifty-five years before, as a boy of eighteen, he had changed cars there for washington and had barely caught his train--the crowd yelling at him as he ran. we remained overnight in new york, and that evening, at the grosvenor, he read aloud a poem of his own which i had not seen before. he had brought it along with some intention of reading it at st. timothy's, he said, but had not found the occasion suitable. "i wrote it a long time ago in paris. i'd been reading aloud to mrs. clemens and susy--in ' , i think--about lord clive and warren hastings, from macaulay--how great they were and how far they fell. then i took an imaginary case--that of some old demented man mumbling of his former state. i described him, and repeated some of his mumblings. susy and mrs. clemens said, 'write it'--so i did, by and by, and this is it. i call it 'the derelict.'" he read in his effective manner that fine poem, the opening stanza of which follows: you sneer, you ships that pass me by, your snow-pure canvas towering proud! you traders base!--why, once such fry paid reverence, when like a cloud storm-swept i drove along, my admiral at post, his pennon blue faint in the wilderness of sky, my long yards bristling with my gallant crew, my ports flung wide, my guns displayed, my tall spars hid in bellying sail! --you struck your topsails then, and made obeisance--now your manners fail. he had employed rhyme with more facility than was usual for him, and the figure and phrasing were full of vigor. "it is strong and fine," i said, when he had finished. "yes," he assented. "it seems so as i read it now. it is so long since i have seen it that it is like reading another man's work. i should call it good, i believe." he put the manuscript in his bag and walked up and down the floor talking. "there is no figure for the human being like the ship," he said; "no such figure for the storm-beaten human drift as the derelict--such men as clive and hastings could only be imagined as derelicts adrift, helpless, tossed by every wind and tide." we returned to redding next day. on the train going home he fell to talking of books and authors, mainly of the things he had never been able to read. "when i take up one of jane austen's books," he said, "such as pride and prejudice, i feel like a barkeeper entering the kingdom of heaven. i know, what his sensation would be and his private comments. he would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so." he recalled again how stepniak had come to hartford, and how humiliated mrs. clemens had been to confess that her husband was not familiar with the writings of thackeray and others. "i don't know anything about anything," he said, mournfully, "and never did. my brother used to try to get me to read dickens, long ago. i couldn't do it--i was ashamed; but i couldn't do it. yes, i have read the tale of two cities, and could do it again. i have read it a good many times; but i never could stand meredith and most of the other celebrities." by and by he handed me the saturday times review, saying: "here is a fine poem, a great poem, i think. i can stand that." it was "the palatine (in the 'dark ages')," by willa sibert cather, reprinted from mcclure's. the reader will understand better than i can express why these lofty opening stanzas appealed to mark twain: the palatine "have you been with the king to rome, brother, big brother?" "i've been there and i've come home, back to your play, little brother." "oh, how high is caesar's house, brother, big brother?" "goats about the doorways browse; night-hawks nest in the burnt roof-tree, home of the wild bird and home of the bee. a thousand chambers of marble lie wide to the sun and the wind and the sky. poppies we find amongst our wheat grow on caesar's banquet seat. cattle crop and neatherds drowse on the floors of caesar's house." "but what has become of caesar's gold, brother, big brother?" "the times are bad and the world is old --who knows the where of the caesar's gold? night comes black on the caesar's hill; the wells are deep and the tales are ill. fireflies gleam in the damp and mold, all that is left of the caesar's gold. back to your play, little brother." farther along in our journey he handed me the paper again, pointing to these lines of kipling: how is it not good for the christian's health to hurry the aryan brown, for the christian riles and the aryan smiles, and he weareth the christian down; and the end of the fight is a tombstone white and the name of the late deceased: and the epitaph drear: "a fool lies here who tried to hustle the east." "i could stand any amount of that," he said, and presently: "life is too long and too short. too long for the weariness of it; too short for the work to be done. at the very most, the average mind can only master a few languages and a little history." i said: "still, we need not worry. if death ends all it does not matter; and if life is eternal there will be time enough." "yes," he assented, rather grimly, "that optimism of yours is always ready to turn hell's back yard into a playground." i said that, old as i was, i had taken up the study of french, and mentioned bayard taylor's having begun greek at fifty, expecting to need it in heaven. clemens said, reflectively: "yes--but you see that was greek." cclxxxi the last summer at stormfield i was at stormfield pretty constantly during the rest of that year. at first i went up only for the day; but later, when his health did not improve, and when he expressed a wish for companionship evenings, i remained most of the nights as well. our rooms were separated only by a bath-room; and as neither of us was much given to sleep, there was likely to be talk or reading aloud at almost any hour when both were awake. in the very early morning i would usually slip in, softly, sometimes to find him propped up against his pillows sound asleep, his glasses on, the reading-lamp blazing away as it usually did, day or night; but as often as not he was awake, and would have some new plan or idea of which he was eager to be delivered, and there was always interest, and nearly always amusement in it, even if it happened to be three in the morning or earlier. sometimes, when he thought it time for me to be stirring, he would call softly, but loudly enough for me to hear if awake; and i would go in, and we would settle again problems of life and death and science, or, rather, he would settle them while i dropped in a remark here and there, merely to hold the matter a little longer in solution. the pains in his breast came back, and with a good deal of frequency as the summer advanced; also, they became more severe. dr. edward quintard came up from new york, and did not hesitate to say that the trouble proceeded chiefly from the heart, and counseled diminished smoking, with less active exercise, advising particularly against clemens's lifetime habit of lightly skipping up and down stairs. there was no prohibition as to billiards, however, or leisurely walking, and we played pretty steadily through those peaceful summer days, and often took a walk down into the meadows or perhaps in the other direction, when it was not too warm or windy. once we went as far as the river, and i showed him a part of his land he had not seen before--a beautiful cedar hillside, remote and secluded, a place of enchantment. on the way i pointed out a little corner of land which earlier he had given me to straighten our division line. i told him i was going to build a study on it, and call it "markland." he thought it an admirable building-site, and i think he was pleased with the name. later he said: "if you had a place for that extra billiard-table of mine [the rogers table, which had been left in new york] i would turn it over to you." i replied that i could adapt the size of my proposed study to fit a billiard-table, and he said: "now that will be very good. then, when i want exercise, i can walk down and play billiards with you, and when you want exercise you can walk up and play billiards with me. you must build that study." so it was we planned, and by and by mr. lounsbury had undertaken the work. during the walks clemens rested a good deal. there were the new england hills to climb, and then he found that he tired easily, and that weariness sometimes brought on the pain. as i remember now, i think how bravely he bore it. it must have been a deadly, sickening, numbing pain, for i have seen it crumple him, and his face become colorless while his hand dug at his breast; but he never complained, he never bewailed, and at billiards he would persist in going on and playing in his turn, even while he was bowed with the anguish of the attack. we had found that a glass of very hot water relieved it, and we kept always a thermos bottle or two filled and ready. at the first hint from him i would pour out a glass and another, and sometimes the relief came quickly; but there were times, and alas! they came oftener, when that deadly gripping did not soon release him. yet there would come a week or a fortnight when he was apparently perfectly well, and at such times we dismissed the thought of any heart malady, and attributed the whole trouble to acute indigestion, from which he had always suffered more or less. we were alone together most of the time. he did not appear to care for company that summer. clara clemens had a concert tour in prospect, and her father, eager for her success, encouraged her to devote a large part of her time to study. for jean, who was in love with every form of outdoor and animal life, he had established headquarters in a vacant farm-house on one corner of the estate, where she had collected some stock and poultry, and was over-flowingly happy. ossip gabrilowitsch was a guest in the house a good portion of the summer, but had been invalided through severe surgical operations, and for a long time rarely appeared, even at meal-times. so it came about that there could hardly have been a closer daily companionship than was ours during this the last year of mark twain's life. for me, of course, nothing can ever be like it again in this world. one is not likely to associate twice with a being from another star. cclxxxii personal memoranda in the notes i made of this period i caught a little drift of personality and utterance, and i do not know better how to preserve these things than to give them here as nearly as may be in the sequence and in the forth in which they were set down. one of the first of these entries occurs in june, when clemens was rereading with great interest and relish andrew d. white's science and theology, which he called a lovely book.--['a history of the warfare of science with theology in christendom'.] june . a peaceful afternoon, and we walked farther than usual, resting at last in the shade of a tree in the lane that leads to jean's farm-house. i picked a dandelion-ball, with some remark about its being one of the evidences of the intelligent principle in nature--the seeds winged for a wider distribution. "yes," he said, "those are the great evidences; no one who reasons can doubt them." and presently he added: "that is a most amusing book of white's. when you read it you see how those old theologians never reasoned at all. white tells of an old bishop who figured out that god created the world in an instant on a certain day in october exactly so many years before christ, and proved it. and i knew a preacher myself once who declared that the fossils in the rocks proved nothing as to the age of the world. he said that god could create the rocks with those fossils in them for ornaments if he wanted to. why, it takes twenty years to build a little island in the mississippi river, and that man actually believed that god created the whole world and all that's in it in six days. white tells of another bishop who gave two new reasons for thunder; one being that god wanted to show the world his power, and another that he wished to frighten sinners to repent. now consider the proportions of that conception, even in the pettiest way you can think of it. consider the idea of god thinking of all that. consider the president of the united states wanting to impress the flies and fleas and mosquitoes, getting up on the dome of the capitol and beating a bass-drum and setting off red fire." he followed the theme a little further, then we made our way slowly back up the long hill, he holding to my arm, and resting here and there, but arriving at the house seemingly fresh and ready for billiards. june . i came up this morning with a basket of strawberries. he was walking up and down, looking like an ancient roman. he said: "consider the case of elsie sigel--[granddaughter of gen. franz sigel. she was mysteriously murdered while engaged in settlement work among the chinese.]--what a ghastly ending to any life!" then turning upon me fiercely, he continued: "anybody that knows anything knows that there was not a single life that was ever lived that was worth living. not a single child ever begotten that the begetting of it was not a crime. suppose a community of people to be living on the slope of a volcano, directly under the crater and in the path of lava-flow; that volcano has been breaking out right along for ages and is certain to break out again. they do not know when it will break out, but they know it will do it--that much can be counted on. suppose those people go to a community in a far neighborhood and say, 'we'd like to change places with you. come take our homes and let us have yours.' those people would say, 'never mind, we are not interested in your country. we know what has happened there, and what will happen again.' we don't care to live under the blow that is likely to fall at any moment; and yet every time we bring a child into the world we are bringing it to a country, to a community gathered under the crater of a volcano, knowing that sooner or later death will come, and that before death there will be catastrophes infinitely worse. formerly it was much worse than now, for before the ministers abolished hell a man knew, when he was begetting a child, that he was begetting a soul that had only one chance in a hundred of escaping the eternal fires of damnation. he knew that in all probability that child would be brought to damnation--one of the ninety-nine black sheep. but since hell has been abolished death has become more welcome. i wrote a fairy story once. it was published somewhere. i don't remember just what it was now, but the substance of it was that a fairy gave a man the customary wishes. i was interested in seeing what he would take. first he chose wealth and went away with it, but it did not bring him happiness. then he came back for the second selection, and chose fame, and that did not bring happiness either. finally he went to the fairy and chose death, and the fairy said, in substance, 'if you hadn't been a fool you'd have chosen that in the first place.' "the papers called me a pessimist for writing that story. pessimist--the man who isn't a pessimist is a d---d fool." but this was one of his savage humors, stirred by tragic circumstance. under date of july th i find this happier entry: we have invented a new game, three-ball carom billiards, each player continuing until he has made five, counting the number of his shots as in golf, the one who finishes in the fewer shots wins. it is a game we play with almost exactly equal skill, and he is highly pleased with it. he said this afternoon: "i have never enjoyed billiards as i do now. i look forward to it every afternoon as my reward at the end of a good day's work."--[his work at this time was an article on marjorie fleming, the "wonder child," whose quaint writings and brief little life had been published to the world by dr. john brown. clemens always adored the thought of marjorie, and in this article one can see that she ranked almost next to joan of arc in his affections.] we went out in the loggia by and by and clemens read aloud from a book which professor zubelin left here a few days ago--'the religion of a democrat'. something in it must have suggested to clemens his favorite science, for presently he said: "i have been reading an old astronomy; it speaks of the perfect line of curvature of the earth in spite of mountains and abysses, and i have imagined a man three hundred thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and looking at it and holding it in his hand. it would be about like a billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub it with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might say, 'there seems to be some slight roughness here, but i can't detect it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look at.' the himalayas to him, the highest peak, would be one-sixty-thousandth of his height, or about the one- thousandth part of an inch as compared with the average man." i spoke of having somewhere read of some very tiny satellites, one as small, perhaps, as six miles in diameter, yet a genuine world. "could a man live on a world so small as that?" i asked. "oh yes," he said. "the gravitation that holds it together would hold him on, and he would always seem upright, the same as here. his horizon would be smaller, but even if he were six feet tall he would only have one foot for each mile of that world's diameter, so you see he would be little enough, even for a world that he could walk around in half a day." he talked astronomy a great deal--marvel astronomy. he had no real knowledge of the subject, and i had none of any kind, which made its ungraspable facts all the more thrilling. he was always thrown into a sort of ecstasy by the unthinkable distances of space--the supreme drama of the universe. the fact that alpha centauri was twenty-five trillions of miles away--two hundred and fifty thousand times the distance of our own remote sun, and that our solar system was traveling, as a whole, toward the bright star vega, in the constellation of lyra, at the rate of forty-four miles a second, yet would be thousands upon thousands of years reaching its destination, fairly enraptured him. the astronomical light-year--that is to say, the distance which light travels in a year--was one of the things which he loved to contemplate; but he declared that no two authorities ever figured it alike, and that he was going to figure it for himself. i came in one morning, to find that he had covered several sheets of paper with almost interminable rows of ciphers, and with a result, to him at least, entirely satisfactory. i am quite certain that he was prouder of those figures and their enormous aggregate than if he had just completed an immortal tale; and when he added that the nearest fixed star--alpha centauri--was between four and five light-years distant from the earth, and that there was no possible way to think that distance in miles or even any calculable fraction of it, his glasses shone and his hair was roached up as with the stimulation of these stupendous facts. by and by he said: "i came in with halley's comet in . it is coming again next year, and i expect to go out with it. it will be the greatest disappointment of my life if i don't go out with halley's comet. the almighty has said, no doubt: 'now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.' oh! i am looking forward to that." and a little later he added: "i've got some kind of a heart disease, and quintard won't tell me whether it is the kind that carries a man off in an instant or keeps him lingering along and suffering for twenty years or so. i was in hopes that quintard would tell me that i was likely to drop dead any minute; but he didn't. he only told me that my blood-pressure was too strong. he didn't give me any schedule; but i expect to go with halley's comet." i seem to have omitted making any entries for a few days; but among his notes i find this entry, which seems to refer to some discussion of a favorite philosophy, and has a special interest of its own: july , . yesterday's dispute resumed, i still maintaining that, whereas we can think, we generally don't do it. don't do it, & don't have to do it: we are automatic machines which act unconsciously. from morning till sleeping-time, all day long. all day long our machinery is doing things from habit & instinct, & without requiring any help or attention from our poor little -by- thinking apparatus. this reminded me of something: thirty years ago, in hartford, the billiard-room was my study, & i wrote my letters there the first thing every morning. my table lay two points off the starboard bow of the billiard-table, & the door of exit and entrance bore northeast&-by-east-half-east from that position, consequently you could see the door across the length of the billiard-table, but you couldn't see the floor by the said table. i found i was always forgetting to ask intruders to carry my letters down-stairs for the mail, so i concluded to lay them on the floor by the door; then the intruder would have to walk over them, & that would indicate to him what they were there for. did it? no, it didn't. he was a machine, & had habits. habits take precedence of thought. now consider this: a stamped & addressed letter lying on the floor --lying aggressively & conspicuously on the floor--is an unusual spectacle; so unusual a spectacle that you would think an intruder couldn't see it there without immediately divining that it was not there by accident, but had been deliberately placed there & for a definite purpose. very well--it may surprise you to learn that that most simple & most natural & obvious thought would never occur to any intruder on this planet, whether he be fool, half-fool, or the most brilliant of thinkers. for he is always an automatic machine & has habits, & his habits will act before his thinking apparatus can get a chance to exert its powers. my scheme failed because every human being has the habit of picking up any apparently misplaced thing & placing it where it won't be stepped on. my first intruder was george. he went and came without saying anything. presently i found the letters neatly piled up on the billiard-table. i was astonished. i put them on the floor again. the next intruder piled them on the billiard-table without a word. i was profoundly moved, profoundly interested. so i set the trap again. also again, & again, & yet again--all day long. i caught every member of the family, & every servant; also i caught the three finest intellects in the town. in every instance old, time-worn automatic habit got in its work so promptly that the thinking apparatus never got a chance. i do not remember this particular discussion, but i do distinctly recall being one of those whose intelligence was not sufficient to prevent my picking up the letter he had thrown on the floor in front of his bed, and being properly classified for doing it. clemens no longer kept note-books, as in an earlier time, but set down innumerable memoranda-comments, stray reminders, and the like--on small pads, and bunches of these tiny sheets accumulated on his table and about his room. i gathered up many of them then and afterward, and a few of these characteristic bits may be offered here. knee it is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest & truest & highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them. jehovah he is all-good. he made man for hell or hell for man, one or the other --take your choice. he made it hard to get into heaven and easy to get into hell. he commended man to multiply & replenish-what? hell. modesty antedates clothes & will be resumed when clothes are no more. [the latter part of this aphorism is erased and underneath it he adds:] modesty died when clothes were born. modesty died when false modesty was born. history a historian who would convey the truth has got to lie. often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it. morals are not the important thing--nor enlightenment--nor civilization. a man can do absolutely well without them, but he can't do without something to eat. the supremest thing is the needs of the body, not of the mind & spirit. suggestion there is conscious suggestion & there is unconscious suggestion--both come from outside--whence all ideas come. duels i think i could wipe out a dishonor by crippling the other man, but i don't see how i could do it by letting him cripple me. i have no feeling of animosity toward people who do not believe as i do; i merely do not respect 'em. in some serious matters (relig.) i would have them burnt. i am old now and once was a sinner. i often think of it with a kind of soft regret. i trust my days are numbered. i would not have that detail overlooked. she was always a girl, she was always young because her heart was young; & i was young because she lived in my heart & preserved its youth from decay. he often busied himself working out more extensively some of the ideas that came to him--moral ideas, he called them. one fancy which he followed in several forms (some of them not within the privilege of print) was that of an inquisitive little girl, bessie, who pursues her mother with difficult questionings.--[under appendix w, at the end of this volume, the reader will find one of the "bessie" dialogues.]--he read these aloud as he finished them, and it is certain that they lacked neither logic nor humor. sometimes he went to a big drawer in his dresser, where he kept his finished manuscripts, and took them out and looked over them, and read parts of them aloud, and talked of the plans he had had for them, and how one idea after another had been followed for a time and had failed to satisfy him in the end. two fiction schemes that had always possessed him he had been unable to bring to any conclusion. both of these have been mentioned in former chapters; one being the notion of a long period of dream-existence during a brief moment of sleep, and the other being the story of a mysterious visitant from another realm. he had experimented with each of these ideas in no less than three forms, and there was fine writing and dramatic narrative in all; but his literary architecture had somehow fallen short of his conception. "the mysterious stranger" in one of its forms i thought might be satisfactorily concluded, and he admitted that he could probably end it without much labor. he discussed something of his plans, and later i found the notes for its conclusion. but i suppose he was beyond the place where he could take up those old threads, though he contemplated, fondly enough, the possibility, and recalled how he had read at least one form of the dream tale to howells, who had urged him to complete it. cclxxxiii astronomy and dreams august , . this morning i noticed on a chair a copy of flaubert's salammbo which i recently lent him. i asked if he liked it. "no," he said, "i didn't like any of it." "but you read it?" "yes, i read every line of it." "you admitted its literary art?" "well, it's like this: if i should go to the chicago stockyards and they should kill a beef and cut it up and the blood should splash all over everything, and then they should take me to another pen and kill another beef and the blood should splash over everything again, and so on to pen after pen, i should care for it about as much as i do for that book." "but those were bloody days, and you care very much for that period in history." "yes, that is so. but when i read tacitus and know that i am reading history i can accept it as such and supply the imaginary details and enjoy it, but this thing is such a continuous procession of blood and slaughter and stench it worries me. it has great art--i can see that. that scene of the crucified lions and the death canon and the tent scene are marvelous, but i wouldn't read that book again without a salary." august . he is reading suetonius, which he already knows by heart--so full of the cruelties and licentiousness of imperial rome. this afternoon he began talking about claudius. "they called claudius a lunatic," he said, "but just see what nice fancies he had. he would go to the arena between times and have captives and wild beasts brought out and turned in together for his special enjoyment. sometimes when there were no captives on hand he would say, 'well, never mind; bring out a carpenter.' carpentering around the arena wasn't a popular job in those days. he went visiting once to a province and thought it would be pleasant to see how they disposed of criminals and captives in their crude, old-fashioned way, but there was no executioner on hand. no matter; the emperor of rome was in no hurry--he would wait. so he sat down and stayed there until an executioner came." i said, "how do you account for the changed attitude toward these things? we are filled with pity to-day at the thought of torture and suffering." "ah! but that is because we have drifted that way and exercised the quality of compassion. relax a muscle and it soon loses its vigor; relax that quality and in two generations--in one generation--we should be gloating over the spectacle of blood and torture just the same. why, i read somewhere a letter written just before the lisbon catastrophe in about a scene on the public square of lisbon: a lot of stakes with the fagots piled for burning and heretics chained for burning. the square was crowded with men and women and children, and when those fires were lighted, and the heretics began to shriek and writhe, those men and women and children laughed so they were fairly beside themselves with the enjoyment of the scene. the greeks don't seem to have done these things. i suppose that indicates earlier advancement in compassion." colonel harvey and mr. duneka came up to spend the night. mr. clemens had one of his seizures during the evening. they come oftener and last longer. one last night continued for an hour and a half. i slept there. september . to-day news of the north pole discovered by peary. five days ago the same discovery was reported by cook. clemens's comment: "it's the greatest joke of the ages." but a moment later he referred to the stupendous fact of arcturus being fifty thousand times as big as the sun. september . this morning he told me, with great glee, the dream he had had just before wakening. he said: "i was in an automobile going slowly, with 'a little girl beside me, and some uniformed person walking along by us. i said, 'i'll get out and walk, too'; but the officer replied, 'this is only one of the smallest of our fleet.' "then i noticed that the automobile had no front, and there were two cannons mounted where the front should be. i noticed, too, that we were traveling very low, almost down on the ground. presently we got to the bottom of a hill and started up another, and i found myself walking ahead of the 'mobile. i turned around to look for the little girl, and instead of her i found a kitten capering beside me, and when we reached the top of the hill we were looking out over a most barren and desolate waste of sand-heaps without a speck of vegetation anywhere, and the kitten said, 'this view beggars all admiration.' then all at once we were in a great group of people and i undertook to repeat to them the kitten's remark, but when i tried to do it the words were so touching that i broke down and cried, and all the group cried, too, over the kitten's moving remark." the joy with which he told this absurd sleep fancy made it supremely ridiculous and we laughed until tears really came. one morning he said: "i was awake a good deal in the night, and i tried to think of interesting things. i got to working out geological periods, trying to think of some way to comprehend them, and then astronomical periods. of course it's impossible, but i thought of a plan that seemed to mean something to me. i remembered that neptune is two billion eight hundred million miles away. that, of course, is incomprehensible, but then there is the nearest fixed star with its twenty-five trillion miles --twenty-five trillion--or nearly a thousand times as far, and then i took this book and counted the lines on a page and i found that there was an average of thirty-two lines to the page and two hundred and forty pages, and i figured out that, counting the distance to neptune as one line, there were still not enough lines in the book by nearly two thousand to reach the nearest fixed star, and somehow that gave me a sort of dim idea of the vastness of the distance and kind of a journey into space." later i figured out another method of comprehending a little of that great distance by estimating the existence of the human race at thirty thousand years (lord kelvin's figures) and the average generation to have been thirty-three years with a world population of , , , souls. i assumed the nearest fixed star to be the first station in paradise and the first soul to have started thirty thousand years ago. traveling at the rate of about thirty miles a second, it would just now be arriving in alpha centauri with all the rest of that buried multitude stringing out behind at an average distance of twenty miles apart. few things gave him more pleasure than the contemplation of such figures as these. we made occasional business trips to new york, and during one of them visited the museum of natural history to look at the brontosaur and the meteorites and the astronomical model in the entrance hall. to him these were the most fascinating things in the world. he contemplated the meteorites and the brontosaur, and lost himself in strange and marvelous imaginings concerning the far reaches of time and space whence they had come down to us. mark twain lived curiously apart from the actualities of life. dwelling mainly among his philosophies and speculations, he observed vaguely, or minutely, what went on about him; but in either case the fact took a place, not in the actual world, but in a world within his consciousness, or subconsciousness, a place where facts were likely to assume new and altogether different relations from those they had borne in the physical occurrence. it not infrequently happened, therefore, when he recounted some incident, even the most recent, that history took on fresh and startling forms. more than once i have known him to relate an occurrence of the day before with a reality of circumstance that carried absolute conviction, when the details themselves were precisely reversed. if his attention were called to the discrepancy, his face would take on a blank look, as of one suddenly aroused from dreamland, to be followed by an almost childish interest in your revelation and ready acknowledgment of his mistake. i do not think such mistakes humiliated him; but they often surprised and, i think, amused him. insubstantial and deceptive as was this inner world of his, to him it must have been much more real than the world of flitting physical shapes about him. he would fix you keenly with his attention, but you realized, at last, that he was placing you and seeing you not as a part of the material landscape, but as an item of his own inner world--a world in which philosophies and morals stood upright--a very good world indeed, but certainly a topsy-turvy world when viewed with the eye of mere literal scrutiny. and this was, mainly, of course, because the routine of life did not appeal to him. even members of his household did not always stir his consciousness. he knew they were there; he could call them by name; he relied upon them; but his knowledge of them always suggested the knowledge that mount everest might have of the forests and caves and boulders upon its slopes, useful, perhaps, but hardly necessary to the giant's existence, and in no important matter a part of its greater life. cclxxxiv a library concert in a letter which clemens wrote to miss wallace at this time, he tells of a concert given at stormfield on september st for the benefit of the new redding library. gabrilowitsch had so far recovered that he was up and about and able to play. david bispham, the great barytone, always genial and generous, agreed to take part, and clara clemens, already accustomed to public singing, was to join in the program. the letter to miss wallace supplies the rest of the history. we had a grand time here yesterday. concert in aid of the little library. team gabrilowitsch, pianist. david bispham, vocalist. clara clemens, ditto. mark twain, introduces of team. detachments and squads and groups and singles came from everywhere --danbury, new haven, norwalk, redding, redding ridge, ridgefield, and even from new york: some in -h.p. motor-cars, some in buggies and carriages, and a swarm of farmer-young-folk on foot from miles around-- altogether. if we hadn't stopped the sale of tickets a day and a half before the performance we should have been swamped. we jammed into the library (not quite all had seats), we filled the loggia, the dining- room, the hall, clear into the billiard-room, the stairs, and the brick-paved square outside the dining-room door. the artists were received with a great welcome, and it woke them up, and i tell you they performed to the queen's taste! the program was an hour and three-quarters long and the encores added a half-hour to it. the enthusiasm of the house was hair-lifting. they all stayed an hour after the close to shake hands and congratulate. we had no dollar seats except in the library, but we accumulated $ for the building fund. we had tea at half past six for a dozen--the hawthornes, jeannette gilder, and her niece, etc.; and after -o'clock dinner we had a private concert and a ball in the bare-stripped library until ; nobody present but the team and mr. and mrs. paine and jean and her dog. and me. bispham did "danny deever" and the "erlkonig" in his majestic, great organ-tones and artillery, and gabrilowitsch played the accompaniments as they were never played before, i do suppose. there is not much to add to that account. clemens, introducing the performers, was the gay feature of the occasion. he spoke of the great reputation of bispham and gabrilowitsch; then he said: "my daughter is not as famous as these gentlemen, but she is ever so much better-looking." the music of the evening that followed, with gabrilowitsch at the piano and david bispham to sing, was something not likely ever to be repeated. bispham sang the "erlkonig" and "killiecrankie" and the "grenadiers" and several other songs. he spoke of having sung wagner's arrangement of the "grenadiers" at the composer's home following his death, and how none of the family had heard it before. there followed dancing, and jean clemens, fine and handsome, apparently full of life and health, danced down that great living-room as care-free as if there was no shadow upon her life. and the evening was distinguished in another way, for before it ended clara clemens had promised ossip gabrilowitsch to become his wife. cclxxxv a wedding at stormfield the wedding of ossip gabrilowitsch and clara clemens was not delayed. gabrilowitsch had signed for a concert tour in europe, and unless the marriage took place forthwith it must be postponed many months. it followed, therefore, fifteen days after the engagement. they were busy days. clemens, enormously excited and pleased over the prospect of the first wedding in his family, personally attended to the selection of those who were to have announcement-cards, employing a stenographer to make the list. october th was a perfect wedding-day. it was one of those quiet, lovely fall days when the whole world seems at peace. claude, the butler, with his usual skill in such matters, had decorated the great living-room with gay autumn foliage and flowers, brought in mainly from the woods and fields. they blended perfectly with the warm tones of the walls and furnishings, and i do not remember ever having seen a more beautiful room. only relatives and a few of the nearest friends were invited to the ceremony. the twichells came over a day ahead, for twichell, who had assisted in the marriage rites between samuel clemens and olivia langdon, was to perform that ceremony for their daughter now. a fellow-student of the bride and groom when they had been pupils of leschetizky, in vienna --miss ethel newcomb--was at the piano and played softly the wedding march from "taunhauser." jean clemens was the only bridesmaid, and she was stately and classically beautiful, with a proud dignity in her office. jervis langdon, the bride's cousin and childhood playmate, acted as best man, and clemens, of course, gave the bride away. by request he wore his scarlet oxford gown over his snowy flannels, and was splendid beyond words. i do not write of the appearance of the bride and groom, for brides and grooms are always handsome and always happy, and certainly these were no exception. it was all so soon over, the feasting ended, and the principals whirling away into the future. i have a picture in my mind of them seated together in the automobile, with richard watson gilder standing on the step for a last good-by, and before them a wide expanse of autumn foliage and distant hills. i remember gilder's voice saying, when the car was on the turn, and they were waving back to us: "over the hills and far away, beyond the utmost purple rim, beyond the night, beyond the day, through all the world she followed him." the matter of the wedding had been kept from the newspapers until the eve of the wedding, when the associated press had been notified. a representative was there; but clemens had characteristically interviewed himself on the subject, and it was only necessary to hand the reporter a typewritten copy. replying to the question (put to himself), "are you pleased with the marriage?" he answered: yes, fully as much as any marriage could please me or any other father. there are two or three solemn things in life and a happy marriage is one of them, for the terrors of life are all to come. i am glad of this marriage, and mrs. clemens would be glad, for she always had a warm affection for gabrilowitsch. there was another wedding at stormfield on the following afternoon--an imitation wedding. little joy came up with me, and wished she could stand in just the spot where she had seen the bride stand, and she expressed a wish that she could get married like that. clemens said: "frankness is a jewel; only the young can afford it." then he happened to remember a ridiculous boy-doll--a white-haired creature with red coat and green trousers, a souvenir imitation of himself from one of the rogerses' christmas trees. he knew where it was, and he got it out. then he said: "now, joy, we will have another wedding. this is mr. colonel williams, and you are to become his wedded wife." so joy stood up very gravely and clemens performed the ceremony, and i gave the bride away, and joy to him became mrs. colonel williams thereafter, and entered happily into her new estate. cclxxxvi autumn days a harvest of letters followed the wedding: a general congratulatory expression, mingled with admiration, affection, and good-will. in his interview clemens had referred to the pain in his breast; and many begged him to deny that there was anything serious the matter with him, urging him to try this relief or that, pathetically eager for his continued life and health. they cited the comfort he had brought to world-weary humanity and his unfailing stand for human justice as reasons why he should live. such letters could not fail to cheer him. a letter of this period, from john bigelow, gave him a pleasure of its own. clemens had written bigelow, apropos of some adverse expression on the tariff: thank you for any hard word you can say about the tariff. i guess the government that robs its own people earns the future it is preparing for itself. bigelow was just then declining an invitation to the annual dinner of the chamber of commerce. in sending his regrets he said: the sentiment i would propose if i dared to be present would be the words of mark twain, the statesman: "the government that robs its own people earns the future it is preparing for itself." now to clemens himself he wrote: rochefoucault never said a cleverer thing, nor dr. franklin a wiser one . . . . be careful, or the demos will be running you for president when you are not on your guard. yours more than ever, john bigelow. among the tributes that came, was a sermon by the rev. fred window adams, of schenectady, new york, with mark twain as its subject. mr. adams chose for his text, "take mark and bring him with thee; for he is profitable for the ministry," and he placed the two marks, st. mark and mark twain, side by side as ministers to humanity, and characterized him as "a fearless knight of righteousness." a few weeks later mr. adams himself came to stormfield, and, like all open-minded ministers of the gospel, he found that he could get on very well indeed with mark twain. in spite of the good-will and the good wishes clemens's malady did not improve. as the days grew chillier he found that he must remain closer indoors. the cold air seemed to bring on the pains, and they were gradually becoming more severe; then, too, he did not follow the doctor's orders in the matter of smoking, nor altogether as to exercise. to miss wallace he wrote: i can't walk, i can't drive, i'm not down-stairs much, and i don't see company, but i drink barrels of water to keep the pain quiet; i read, and read, and read, and smoke, and smoke, and smoke all the time (as formerly), and it's a contented and comfortable life. but this was not altogether accurate as to details. he did come down-stairs many times daily, and he persisted in billiards regardless of the paroxysms. we found, too, that the seizures were induced by mental agitation. one night he read aloud to jean and myself the first chapter of an article, "the turning-point in my life," which he was preparing for harper's bazar. he had begun it with one of his impossible burlesque fancies, and he felt our attitude of disappointment even before any word had been said. suddenly he rose, and laying his hand on his breast said, "i must lie down," and started toward the stair. i supported him to his room and hurriedly poured out the hot water. he drank it and dropped back on the bed. "don't speak to me," he said; "don't make me talk." jean came in, and we sat there several moments in silence. i think we both wondered if this might not be the end; but presently he spoke of his own accord, declaring he was better, and ready for billiards. we played for at least an hour afterward, and he seemed no worse for the attack. it is a curious malady--that angina; even the doctors are acquainted with its manifestations, rather than its cause. clemens's general habits of body and mind were probably not such as to delay its progress; furthermore, there had befallen him that year one of those misfortunes which his confiding nature peculiarly invited--a betrayal of trust by those in whom it had been boundlessly placed--and it seems likely that the resulting humiliation aggravated his complaint. the writing of a detailed history of this episode afforded him occupation and a certain amusement, but probably did not contribute to his health. one day he sent for his attorney, mr. charles t. lark, and made some final revisions in his will.--[mark twain's estate, later appraised at something more than $ , was left in the hands of trustees for his daughters. the trustees were edward e. loomis, jervis langdon, and zoheth s. freeman. the direction of his literary affairs was left to his daughter clara and the writer of this history.] to see him you would never have suspected that he was ill. he was in good flesh, and his movement was as airy and his eye as bright and his face as full of bloom as at any time during the period i had known him; also, he was as light-hearted and full of ideas and plans, and he was even gentler--having grown mellow with age and retirement, like good wine. and of course he would find amusement in his condition. he said: "i have always pretended to be sick to escape visitors; now, for the first time, i have got a genuine excuse. it makes me feel so honest." and once, when jean reported a caller in the livingroom, he said: "jean, i can't see her. tell her i am likely to drop dead any minute and it would be most embarrassing." but he did see her, for it was a poet--angela morgan--and he read her poem, "god's man," aloud with great feeling, and later he sold it for her to collier's weekly. he still had violent rages now and then, remembering some of the most notable of his mistakes; and once, after denouncing himself, rather inclusively, as an idiot, he said: "i wish to god the lightning would strike me; but i've wished that fifty thousand times and never got anything out of it yet. i have missed several good chances. mrs. clemens was afraid of lightning, and would never let me bare my head to the storm." the element of humor was never lacking, and the rages became less violent and less frequent. i was at stormfield steadily now, and there was a regular routine of afternoon sessions of billiards or reading, in which we were generally alone; for jean, occupied with her farming and her secretary labors, seldom appeared except at meal-times. occasionally she joined in the billiard games; but it was difficult learning and her interest was not great. she would have made a fine player, for she had a natural talent for games, as she had for languages, and she could have mastered the science of angles as she had mastered tennis and french and german and italian. she had naturally a fine intellect, with many of her father's characteristics, and a tender heart that made every dumb creature her friend. katie leary, who had been jean's nurse, once told how, as a little child, jean had not been particularly interested in a picture of the lisbon earthquake, where the people were being swallowed up; but on looking at the next page, which showed a number of animals being overwhelmed, she had said: "poor things!" katie said: "why, you didn't say that about the people!" but jean answered: "oh, they could speak." one night at the dinner-table her father was saying how difficult it must be for a man who had led a busy life to give up the habit of work. "that is why the rogerses kill themselves," he said. "they would rather kill themselves in the old treadmill than stop and try to kill time. they have forgotten how to rest. they know nothing but to keep on till they drop." i told of something i had read not long before. it was about an aged lion that had broken loose from his cage at coney island. he had not offered to hurt any one; but after wandering about a little, rather aimlessly, he had come to a picket-fence, and a moment later began pacing up and down in front of it, just the length of his cage. they had come and led him back to his prison without trouble, and he had rushed eagerly into it. i noticed that jean was listening anxiously, and when i finished she said: "is that a true story?" she had forgotten altogether the point in illustration. she was concerned only with the poor old beast that had found no joy in his liberty. among the letters that clemens wrote just then was one to miss wallace, in which he described the glory of the fall colors as seen from his windows. the autumn splendors passed you by? what a pity! i wish you had been here. it was beyond words! it was heaven & hell & sunset & rainbows & the aurora all fused into one divine harmony, & you couldn't look at it and keep the tears back. such a singing together, & such a whispering together, & such a snuggling together of cozy, soft colors, & such kissing & caressing, & such pretty blushing when the sun breaks out & catches those dainty weeds at it--you remember that weed-garden of mine?--& then --then the far hills sleeping in a dim blue trance--oh, hearing about it is nothing, you should be here to see it! in the same letter he refers to some work that he was writing for his own satisfaction--'letters from the earth'; said letters supposed to have been written by an immortal visitant and addressed to other immortals in some remote sphere. i'll read passages to you. this book will never be published --in fact it couldn't be, because it would be felony . . . paine enjoys it, but paine is going to be damned one of these days, i suppose. i very well remember his writing those 'letters from the earth'. he read them to me from time to time as he wrote them, and they were fairly overflowing with humor and philosophy and satire concerning the human race. the immortal visitor pointed out, one after another, the absurdities of mankind, his ridiculous conception of heaven, and his special conceit in believing that he was the creator's pet--the particular form of life for which all the universe was created. clemens allowed his exuberant fancy free rein, being under no restrictions as to the possibility of print or public offense. he enjoyed them himself, too, as he read them aloud, and we laughed ourselves weak over his bold imaginings. one admissible extract will carry something of the flavor of these chapters. it is where the celestial correspondent describes man's religion. his heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. i give you my word it has not a single feature in it that he actually values. it consists--utterly and entirely--of diversions which he cares next to nothing about here in the earth, yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven. isn't it curious? isn't it interesting? you must not think i am exaggerating, for it is not so. i will give you the details. most, men do not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are singing if it be continued more than two hours. note that. only about two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in a hundred have any wish to learn how. set that down. many men pray, not many of them like to do it. a few pray long, the others make a short-cut. more men go to church than want to. to forty-nine men in fifty the sabbath day is a dreary, dreary bore. further, all sane people detest noise. all people, sane or insane, like to have variety in their lives. monotony quickly wearies them. now then, you have the facts. you know what men don't enjoy. well, they have invented a heaven, out of their own heads, all by themselves; guess what it is like? in fifteen hundred years you couldn't do it. they have left out the very things they care for most their dearest pleasures--and replaced them with prayer! in man's heaven everybody sings. there are no exceptions. the man who did not sing on earth sings there; the man who could not sing on earth sings there. thus universal singing is not casual, not occasional, not relieved by intervals of quiet; it goes on all day long and every day during a stretch of twelve hours. and everybody stays where on earth the place would be empty in two hours. the singing is of hymns alone. nay, it is one hymn alone. the words are always the same in number--they are only about a dozen--there is no rhyme--there is no poetry. "hosanna, hosanna, hosanna unto the highest!" and a few such phrases constitute the whole service. meantime, every person is playing on a harp! consider the deafening hurricane of sound. consider, further, it is a praise service--a service of compliment, flattery, adulation. do you ask who it is that is willing to endure this strange compliment, this insane compliment, and who not only endures it but likes it, enjoys it, requires it, commands it? hold your breath: it is god! this race's god i mean--their own pet invention. most of the ideas presented in this his last commentary on human absurdities were new only as to phrasing. he had exhausted the topic long ago, in one way or another; but it was one of the themes in which he never lost interest. many subjects became stale to him at last; but the curious invention called man remained a novelty to him to the end. from my note-book: october . i am constantly amazed at his knowledge of history--all history--religious, political, military. he seems to have read everything in the world concerning rome, france, and england particularly. last night we stopped playing billiards while he reviewed, in the most vivid and picturesque phrasing, the reasons of rome's decline. such a presentation would have enthralled any audience--i could not help feeling a great pity that he had not devoted some of his public effort to work of that sort. no one could have equaled him at it. he concluded with some comments on the possibility of america following rome's example, though he thought the vote of the people would always, or at least for a long period, prevent imperialism. november . to-day he has been absorbed in his old interest in shorthand. "it is the only rational alphabet," he declared. "all this spelling reform is nonsense. what we need is alphabet reform, and shorthand is the thing. take the letter m, for instance; it is made with one stroke in shorthand, while in longhand it requires at least three. the word mephistopheles can be written in shorthand with one-sixth the number of strokes that is required in longhand. i tell you shorthand should be adopted as the alphabet." i said: "there is this objection: the characters are so slightly different that each writer soon forms a system of his own and it is seldom that two can read each other's notes." "you are talking of stenographic reporting," he said, rather warmly. "nothing of the kind is true in the case of the regular alphabet. it is perfectly clear and legible." "would you have it in the schools, then?" "yes, it should be taught in the schools, not for stenographic purposes, but only for use in writing to save time." he was very much in earnest, and said he had undertaken an article on the subject. november . he said he could not sleep last night, for thinking what a fool he had been in his various investments. "i have always been the victim of somebody," he said, "and always an idiot myself, doing things that even a child would not do. never asking anybody's advice--never taking it when it was offered. i can't see how anybody could do the things i have done and have kept right on doing." i could see that the thought agitated him, and i suggested that we go to his room and read, which we did, and had a riotous time over the most recent chapters of the 'letters from the earth', and some notes he had made for future chapters on infant damnation and other distinctive features of orthodox creeds. he told an anecdote of an old minister who declared that presbyterianism without infant damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be identified because it had lost its tag. somewhat on the defensive i said, "but we must admit that the so- called christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive." he answered, "yes, but in spite of their religion, not because of it. the church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against eve. and every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. the greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before the christian religion was born. "i have been reading gibbon's celebrated fifteenth chapter," he said later, "and i don't see what christians found against it. it is so mild--so gentle in its sarcasm." he added that he had been reading also a little book of brief biographies and had found in it the saying of darwin's father, "unitarianism is a featherbed to catch falling christians." "i was glad to find and identify that saying," he said; "it is so good." he finished the evening by reading a chapter from carlyle's french revolution--a fine pyrotechnic passage--the gathering at versailles. i said that carlyle somehow reminded me of a fervid stump-speaker who pounded his fists and went at his audience fiercely, determined to convince them. "yes," he said, "but he is the best one that ever lived." november . this morning early he heard me stirring and called. i went in and found him propped up with a book, as usual. he said: "i seldom read christmas stories, but this is very beautiful. it has made me cry. i want you to read it." (it was booth tarkington's 'beasley's christmas party'.) "tarkington has the true touch," he said; "his work always satisfies me." another book he has been reading with great enjoyment is james branch cabell's chivalry. he cannot say enough of the subtle poetic art with which cabell has flung the light of romance about dark and sordid chapters of history. cclxxvii mark twain's reading perhaps here one may speak of mark twain's reading in general. on the table by him, and on his bed, and in the billiard-room shelves he kept the books he read most. they were not many--not more than a dozen--but they were manifestly of familiar and frequent usage. all, or nearly all, had annotations--spontaneously uttered marginal notes, title prefatories, or concluding comments. they were the books he had read again and again, and it was seldom that he had not had something to say with each fresh reading. there were the three big volumes by saint-simon--'the memoirs'--which he once told me he had read no less than twenty times. on the fly-leaf of the first volume he wrote-- this, & casanova & pepys, set in parallel columns, could afford a good coup d'oeil of french & english high life of that epoch. all through those finely printed volumes are his commentaries, sometimes no more than a word, sometimes a filled, closely written margin. he found little to admire in the human nature of saint-simon's period --little to approve in saint-simon himself beyond his unrestrained frankness, which he admired without stint, and in one paragraph where the details of that early period are set down with startling fidelity he wrote: "oh, incomparable saint-simon!" saint-simon is always frank, and mark twain was equally so. where the former tells one of the unspeakable compulsions of louis xiv., the latter has commented: we have to grant that god made this royal hog; we may also be permitted to believe that it was a crime to do so. and on another page: in her memories of this period the duchesse de st. clair makes this striking remark: "sometimes one could tell a gentleman, but it was only by his manner of using his fork." his comments on the orthodox religion of saint-simon's period are not marked by gentleness. of the author's reference to the edict of nantes, which he says depopulated half of the realm, ruined its commerce, and "authorized torments and punishments by which so many innocent people of both sexes were killed by thousands," clemens writes: so much blood has been shed by the church because of an omission from the gospel: "ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is." not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code. in the place where saint-simon describes the death of monseigneur, son of the king, and the court hypocrites are wailing their extravagantly pretended sorrow, clemens wrote: it is all so true, all so human. god made these animals. he must have noticed this scene; i wish i knew how it struck him. there were not many notes in the suetonius, nor in the carlyle revolution, though these were among the volumes he read oftenest. perhaps they expressed for him too completely and too richly their subject-matter to require anything at his hand. here and there are marked passages and occasional cross-references to related history and circumstance. there was not much room for comment on the narrow margins of the old copy of pepys, which he had read steadily since the early seventies; but here and there a few crisp words, and the underscoring and marked passages are plentiful enough to convey his devotion to that quaint record which, perhaps next to suetonius, was the book he read and quoted most. francis parkman's canadian histories he had read periodically, especially the story of the old regime and of the jesuits in north america. as late as january, , he wrote on the title-page of the old regime: very interesting. it tells how people religiously and otherwise insane came over from france and colonized canada. he was not always complimentary to those who undertook to christianize the indians; but he did not fail to write his admiration of their courage--their very willingness to endure privation and even the fiendish savage tortures for the sake of their faith. "what manner of men are these?" he wrote, apropos of the account of bressani, who had undergone the most devilish inflictions which savage ingenuity could devise, and yet returned maimed and disfigured the following spring to "dare again the knives and fiery brand of the iroquois." clemens was likely to be on the side of the indians, but hardly in their barbarism. in one place he wrote: that men should be willing to leave their happy homes and endure what the missionaries endured in order to teach these indians the road to hell would be rational, understandable, but why they should want to teach them a way to heaven is a thing which the mind somehow cannot grasp. other histories, mainly english and french, showed how he had read them --read and digested every word and line. there were two volumes of lecky, much worn; andrew d. white's 'science and theology'--a chief interest for at least one summer--and among the collection a well-worn copy of 'modern english literature--its blemishes and defects', by henry h. breen. on the title-page of this book clemens had written: hartford, . use with care, for it is a scarce book. england had to be ransacked in order to get it--or the bookseller speaketh falsely. he once wrote a paper for the saturday morning club, using for his text examples of slipshod english which breen had noted. clemens had a passion for biography, and especially for autobiography, diaries, letters, and such intimate human history. greville's 'journal of the reigns of george iv. and william iv.' he had read much and annotated freely. greville, while he admired byron's talents, abhorred the poet's personality, and in one place condemns him as a vicious person and a debauchee. he adds: then he despises pretenders and charlatans of all sorts, while he is himself a pretender, as all men are who assume a character which does not belong to them and affect to be something which they are all the time conscious they are not in reality. clemens wrote on the margin: but, dear sir, you are forgetting that what a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart. byron despised the race because he despised himself. i feel as byron did, and for the same reason. do you admire the race (& consequently yourself)? a little further along--where greville laments that byron can take no profit to himself from the sinful characters he depicts so faithfully, clemens commented: if byron--if any man--draws characters, they are all himself-- shades, moods, of his own character. and when the man draws them well why do they stir my admiration? because they are me--i recognize myself. a volume of plutarch was among the biographies that showed usage, and the life of p. t. barnum, written by himself. two years before the mast he loved, and never tired of. the more recent memoirs of andrew d. white and moncure d. conway both, i remember, gave him enjoyment, as did the letters of lowell. a volume of the letters of madame de sevigne had some annotated margins which were not complimentary to the translator, or for that matter to sevigne herself, whom he once designates as a "nauseating" person, many of whose letters had been uselessly translated, as well as poorly arranged for reading. but he would read any volume of letters or personal memoirs; none were too poor that had the throb of life in them, however slight. of such sort were the books that mark twain had loved best, and such were a few of his words concerning them. some of them belong to his earlier reading, and among these is darwin's 'descent of man', a book whose influence was always present, though i believe he did not read it any more in later years. in the days i knew him he read steadily not much besides suetonius and pepys and carlyle. these and his simple astronomies and geologies and the morte arthure and the poems of kipling were seldom far from his hand. cclxxxviii a bermuda birthday it was the middle of november, , when clemens decided to take another bermuda vacation, and it was the th that we sailed. i went to new york a day ahead and arranged matters, and on the evening of the th received the news that richard watson gilder had suddenly died. next morning there was other news. clemens's old friend, william m. laffan, of the sun, had died while undergoing a surgical operation. i met clemens at the train. he had already heard about gilder; but he had not yet learned of laffan's death. he said: "that's just it. gilder and laffan get all the good things that come along and i never get anything." then, suddenly remembering, he added: "how curious it is! i have been thinking of laffan coming down on the train, and mentally writing a letter to him on this stetson-eddy affair." i asked when he had begun thinking of laffan. he said: "within the hour." it was within the hour that i had received the news, and naturally in my mind had carried it instantly to him. perhaps there was something telepathic in it. he was not at all ill going down to bermuda, which was a fortunate thing, for the water was rough and i was quite disqualified. we did not even discuss astronomy, though there was what seemed most important news--the reported discovery of a new planet. but there was plenty of talk on the subject as soon as we got settled in the hamilton hotel. it was windy and rainy out-of-doors, and we looked out on the drenched semi-tropical foliage with a great bamboo swaying and bending in the foreground, while he speculated on the vast distance that the new planet must lie from our sun, to which it was still a satellite. the report had said that it was probably four hundred billions of miles distant, and that on this far frontier of the solar system the sun could not appear to it larger than the blaze of a tallow candle. to us it was wholly incredible how, in that dim remoteness, it could still hold true to the central force and follow at a snail-pace, yet with unvarying exactitude, its stupendous orbit. clemens said that heretofore neptune, the planetary outpost of our system, had been called the tortoise of the skies, but that comparatively it was rapid in its motion, and had become a near neighbor. he was a good deal excited at first, having somehow the impression that this new planet traveled out beyond the nearest fixed star; but then he remembered that the distance to that first solar neighbor was estimated in trillions, not billions, and that our little system, even with its new additions, was a child's handbreadth on the plane of the sky. he had brought along a small book called the pith of astronomy--a fascinating little volume--and he read from it about the great tempest of fire in the sun, where the waves of flame roll up two thousand miles high, though the sun itself is such a tiny star in the deeps of the universe. if i dwell unwarrantably on this phase of mark twain's character, it is because it was always so fascinating to me, and the contemplation of the drama of the skies always meant so much to him, and somehow always seemed akin to him in its proportions. he had been born under a flaming star, a wanderer of the skies. he was himself, to me, always a comet rushing through space, from mystery to mystery, regardless of sun and systems. it is not likely to rain long in bermuda, and when the sun comes back it brings summer, whatever the season. within a day after our arrival we were driving about those coral roads along the beaches, and by that marvelously variegated water. we went often to the south shore, especially to devonshire bay, where the reefs and the sea coloring seem more beautiful than elsewhere. usually, when we reached the bay, we got out to walk along the indurated shore, stopping here and there to look out over the jeweled water liquid turquoise, emerald lapis-lazuli, jade, the imperial garment of the lord. at first we went alone with only the colored driver, clifford trott, whose name clemens could not recollect, though he was always attempting resemblances with ludicrous results. a little later helen allen, an early angel-fish member already mentioned, was with us and directed the drives, for she had been born on the island and knew every attractive locality, though, for that matter, it would be hard to find there a place that was not attractive. clemens, in fact, remained not many days regularly at the hotel. he kept a room and his wardrobe there; but he paid a visit to bay house--the lovely and quiet home of helen's parents--and prolonged it from day to day, and from week to week, because it was a quiet and peaceful place with affectionate attention and limitless welcome. clifford trott had orders to come with the carriage each afternoon, and we drove down to bay house for mark twain and his playmate, and then went wandering at will among the labyrinth of blossom-bordered, perfectly kept roadways of a dainty paradise, that never, i believe, becomes quite a reality even to those who know it best. clemens had an occasional paroxysm during these weeks, but they were not likely to be severe or protracted; and i have no doubt the peace of his surroundings, the remoteness from disturbing events, as well as the balmy temperature, all contributed to his improved condition. he talked pretty continuously during these drives, and he by no means restricted his subjects to juvenile matters. he discussed history and his favorite sciences and philosophies, and i am sure that his drift was rarely beyond the understanding of his young companion, for it was mark twain's gift to phrase his thought so that it commanded not only the respect of age, but the comprehension and the interest of youth. i remember that once he talked, during an afternoon's drive, on the french revolution and the ridiculous episode of anacharsis cloots, "orator and advocate of the human race," collecting the vast populace of france to swear allegiance to a king even then doomed to the block. the very name of cloots suggested humor, and nothing could have been more delightful and graphic than the whole episode as he related it. helen asked if he thought such a thing as that could ever happen in america. "no," he said, "the american sense of humor would have laughed it out of court in a week; and the frenchman dreads ridicule, too, though he never seems to realize how ridiculous he is--the most ridiculous creature in the world." on the morning of his seventy-fourth birthday he was looking wonderfully well after a night of sound sleep, his face full of color and freshness, his eyes bright and keen and full of good-humor. i presented him with a pair of cuff-buttons silver-enameled with the bermuda lily, and i thought he seemed pleased with them. it was rather gloomy outside, so we remained indoors by the fire and played cards, game after game of hearts, at which he excelled, and he was usually kept happy by winning. there were no visitors, and after dinner helen asked him to read some of her favorite episodes from tom sawyer, so he read the whitewashing scene, peter and the pain-killer, and such chapters until tea-time. then there was a birthday cake, and afterward cigars and talk and a quiet fireside evening. once, in the course of his talk, he forgot a word and denounced his poor memory: "i'll forget the lord's middle name some time," he declared, "right in the midst of a storm, when i need all the help i can get." later he said: "nobody dreamed, seventy-four years ago to-day, that i would be in bermuda now." and i thought he meant a good deal more than the words conveyed. it was during this bermuda visit that mark twain added the finishing paragraph to his article, "the turning-point in my life," which, at howells's suggestion, he had been preparing for harper's bazar. it was a characteristic touch, and, as the last summary of his philosophy of human life, may be repeated here. necessarily the scene of the real turning-point of my life (and of yours) was the garden of eden. it was there that the first link was forged of the chain that was ultimately to lead to the emptying of me into the literary guild. adam's temperament was the first command the deity ever issued to a human being on this planet. and it was the only command adam would never be able to disobey. it said, "be weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable." the later command, to let the fruit alone, was certain to be disobeyed. not by adam himself, but by his temperament--which he did not create and had no authority over. for the temperament is the man; the thing tricked out with clothes and named man is merely its shadow, nothing more. the law of the tiger's temperament is, thou shaft kill; the law of the sheep's temperament is, thou shalt not kill. to issue later commands requiring the tiger to let the fat stranger alone, and requiring the sheep to imbrue its hands in the blood of the lion is not worth while, for those commands can't be obeyed. they would invite to violations of the law of temperament, which is supreme, and takes precedence of all other authorities. i cannot help feeling disappointed in adam and eve. that is, in their temperaments. not in them, poor helpless young creatures--afflicted with temperaments made out of butter, which butter was commanded to get into contact with fire and be melted. what i cannot help wishing is, that adam and eve had been postponed, and martin luther and joan of arc put in their place--that splendid pair equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of asbestos. by neither sugary persuasions nor by hell-fire could satan have beguiled them to eat the apple. there would have been results! indeed yes. the apple would be intact to-day; there would be no human race; there would be no you; there would be no me. and the old, old creation-dawn scheme of ultimately launching me into the literary guild would have been defeated. cclxxxix the death of jean he decided to go home for the holidays, and how fortunate it seems now that he did so! we sailed for america on the th of december, arriving the st. jean was at the wharf to meet us, blue and shivering with the cold, for it was wretchedly bleak there, and i had the feeling that she should not have come. she went directly, i think, to stormfield, he following a day or two later. on the d i was lunching with jean alone. she was full of interest in her christmas preparations. she had a handsome tree set up in the loggia, and the packages were piled about it, with new ones constantly arriving. with her farm management, her housekeeping, her secretary work, and her christmas preparations, it seemed to me that she had her hands overfull. such a mental pressure could not be good for her. i suggested that for a time at least i might assume a part of her burden. i was to remain at my own home that night, and i think it was as i left stormfield that i passed jean on the stair. she said, cheerfully, that she felt a little tired and was going up to lie down, so that she would be fresh for the evening. i did not go back, and i never saw her alive again. i was at breakfast next morning when word was brought in that one of the men from stormfield was outside and wished to see me immediately. when i went out he said: "miss jean is dead. they have just found her in her bath-room. mr. clemens sent me to bring you." it was as incomprehensible as such things always are. i could not realize at all that jean, so full of plans and industries and action less than a day before, had passed into that voiceless mystery which we call death. harry iles drove me rapidly up the hill. as i entered clemens's room he looked at me helplessly and said: "well, i suppose you have heard of this final disaster." he was not violent or broken down with grief. he had come to that place where, whatever the shock or the ill-turn of fortune, he could accept it, and even in that first moment of loss he realized that, for jean at least, the fortune was not ill. her malady had never been cured, and it had been one of his deepest dreads that he would leave her behind him. it was believed, at first; that jean had drowned, and dr. smith tried methods of resuscitation; but then he found that it was simply a case of heart cessation caused by the cold shock of her bath. the gabrilowitsches were by this time in europe, and clemens cabled them not to come. later in the day he asked me if we would be willing to close our home for the winter and come to stormfield. he said that he should probably go back to bermuda before long; but that he wished to keep the house open so that it would be there for him to come to at any time that he might need it. we came, of course, for there was no thought among any of his friends but for his comfort and peace of mind. jervis langdon was summoned from elmira, for jean would lie there with the others. in the loggia stood the half-trimmed christmas tree, and all about lay the packages of gifts, and in jean's room, on the chairs and upon her desk, were piled other packages. nobody had been forgotten. for her father she had bought a handsome globe; he had always wanted one. once when i went into his room he said: "i have been looking in at jean and envying her. i have never greatly envied any one but the dead. i always envy the dead." he told me how the night before they had dined together alone; how he had urged her to turn over a part of her work to me; how she had clung to every duty as if now, after all the years, she was determined to make up for lost time. while they were at dinner a telephone inquiry had come concerning his health, for the papers had reported him as returning from bermuda in a critical condition. he had written this playful answer: manager associated press, new york. i hear the newspapers say i am dying. the charge is not true. i would not do such a thing at my time of life. i am behaving as good as i can. merry christmas to everybody! mark twain. jean telephoned it for him to the press. it had been the last secretary service she had ever rendered. she had kissed his hand, he said, when they parted, for she had a severe cold and would not wish to impart it to him; then happily she had said good night, and he had not seen her again. the reciting of this was good to him, for it brought the comfort of tears. later, when i went in again, he was writing: "i am setting it down," he said--"everything. it is a relief to me to write it. it furnishes me an excuse for thinking." he continued writing most of the day, and at intervals during the next day, and the next. it was on christmas day that they went with jean on her last journey. katie leary, her baby nurse, had dressed her in the dainty gown which she had worn for clara's wedding, and they had pinned on it a pretty buckle which her father had brought her from bermuda, and which she had not seen. no greek statue was ever more classically beautiful than she was, lying there in the great living-room, which in its brief history had seen so much of the round of life. they were to start with jean at about six o'clock, and a little before that time clemens (he was unable to make the journey) asked me what had been her favorite music. i said that she seemed always to care most for the schubert impromptu.--[op. , no. .]--then he said: "play it when they get ready to leave with her, and add the intermezzo for susy and the largo for mrs. clemens. when i hear the music i shall know that they are starting. tell them to set lanterns at the door, so i can look down and see them go." so i sat at the organ and began playing as they lifted and bore her away. a soft, heavy snow was falling, and the gloom of those shortest days was closing in. there was not the least wind or noise, the whole world was muffled. the lanterns at the door threw their light out on the thickly falling flakes. i remained at the organ; but the little group at the door saw him come to the window above--the light on his white hair as he stood mournfully gazing down, watching jean going away from him for the last time. i played steadily on as he had instructed, the impromptu, the intermezzo from "cavalleria," and handel's largo. when i had finished i went up and found him. "poor little jean," he said; "but for her it is so good to go." in his own story of it he wrote: from my windows i saw the hearse and the carriages wind along the road and gradually grow vague and spectral in the falling snow, and presently disappear. jean was gone out of my life, and would not come back any more. the cousin she had played with when they were babies together--he and her beloved old katie--were conducting her to her distant childhood home, where she will lie by her mother's side once more, in the company of susy and langdon. he did not come down to dinner, and when i went up afterward i found him curiously agitated. he said: "for one who does not believe in spirits i have had a most peculiar experience. i went into the bath-room just now and closed the door. you know how warm it always is in there, and there are no draughts. all at once i felt a cold current of air about me. i thought the door must be open; but it was closed. i said, 'jean, is this you trying to let me know you have found the others?' then the cold air was gone." i saw that the incident had made a very great impression upon him; but i don't remember that he ever mentioned it afterward. next day the storm had turned into a fearful blizzard; the whole hilltop was a raging, driving mass of white. he wrote most of the day, but stopped now and then to read some of the telegrams or letters of condolence which came flooding in. sometimes he walked over to the window to look out on the furious tempest. once, during the afternoon, he said: "jean always so loved to see a storm like this, and just now at elmira they are burying her." later he read aloud some lines by alfred austin, which mrs. crane had sent him lines which he had remembered in the sorrow for susy: when last came sorrow, around barn and byre wind-careen snow, the year's white sepulchre, lay. "come in," i said, "and warm you by the fire"; and there she sits and never goes away. it was that evening that he came into the room where mrs. paine and i sat by the fire, bringing his manuscript. "i have finished my story of jean's death," he said. "it is the end of my autobiography. i shall never write any more. i can't judge it myself at all. one of you read it aloud to the other, and let me know what you think of it. if it is worthy, perhaps some day it may be published." it was, in fact, one of the most exquisite and tender pieces of writing in the language. he had ended his literary labors with that perfect thing which so marvelously speaks the loftiness and tenderness of his soul. it was thoroughly in keeping with his entire career that he should, with this rare dramatic touch, bring it to a close. a paragraph which he omitted may be printed now: december . did i know jean's value? no, i only thought i did. i knew a ten-thousandth fraction of it, that was all. it is always so, with us, it has always been so. we are like the poor ignorant private soldier-dead, now, four hundred years--who picked up the great sancy diamond on the field of the lost battle and sold it for a franc. later he knew what he had done. shall i ever be cheerful again, happy again? yes. and soon. for i know my temperament. and i know that the temperament is master of the man, and that he is its fettered and helpless slave and must in all things do as it commands. a man's temperament is born in him, and no circumstances can ever change it. my temperament has never allowed my spirits to remain depressed long at a time. that was a feature of jean's temperament, too. she inherited it from me. i think she got the rest of it from her mother. jean clemens had two natural endowments: the gift of justice and a genuine passion for all nature. in a little paper found in her desk she had written: i know a few people who love the country as i do, but not many. most of my acquaintances are enthusiastic over the spring and summer months, but very few care much for it the year round. a few people are interested in the spring foliage and the development of the wild flowers--nearly all enjoy the autumn colors--while comparatively few pay much attention to the coming and going of the birds, the changes in their plumage and songs, the apparent springing into life on some warm april day of the chipmunks and woodchucks, the skurrying of baby rabbits, and again in the fall the equally sudden disappearance of some of the animals and the growing shyness of others. to me it is all as fascinating as a book--more so, since i have never lost interest in it. it is simple and frank, like thoreau. perhaps, had she exercised it, there was a third gift--the gift of written thought. clemens remained at stormfield ten days after jean was gone. the weather was fiercely cold, the landscape desolate, the house full of tragedy. he kept pretty closely to his room, where he had me bring the heaps of letters, a few of which he answered personally; for the others he prepared a simple card of acknowledgment. he was for the most part in gentle mood during these days, though he would break out now and then, and rage at the hardness of a fate that had laid an unearned burden of illness on jean and shadowed her life. they were days not wholly without humor--none of his days could be altogether without that, though it was likely to be of a melancholy sort. many of the letters offered orthodox comfort, saying, in effect: "god does not willingly punish us." when he had read a number of these he said: "well, why does he do it then? we don't invite it. why does he give himself the trouble?" i suggested that it was a sentiment that probably gave comfort to the writer of it. "so it does," he said, "and i am glad of it--glad of anything that gives comfort to anybody." he spoke of the larger god--the god of the great unvarying laws, and by and by dropped off to sleep, quite peacefully, and indeed peace came more and more to him each day with the thought that jean and susy and their mother could not be troubled any more. to mrs. gabrilowitsch he wrote: redding, conn, december , . o, clara, clara dear, i am so glad she is out of it & safe--safe! i am not melancholy; i shall never be melancholy again, i think. you see, i was in such distress when i came to realize that you were gone far away & no one stood between her & danger but me--& i could die at any moment, & then--oh then what would become of her! for she was wilful, you know, & would not have been governable. you can't imagine what a darling she was that last two or three days; & how fine, & good, & sweet, & noble--& joyful, thank heaven! --& how intellectually brilliant. i had never been acquainted with jean before. i recognized that. but i mustn't try to write about her--i can't. i have already poured my heart out with the pen, recording that last day or two. i will send you that--& you must let no one but ossip read it. good-by. i love you so! and ossip. father. ccxc the return to bermuda i don't think he attempted any further writing for print. his mind was busy with ideas, but he was willing to talk, rather than to write, rather even than to play billiards, it seemed, although we had a few quiet games--the last we should ever play together. evenings he asked for music, preferring the scotch airs, such as "bonnie doon" and "the campbells are coming." i remember that once, after playing the latter for him, he told, with great feeling, how the highlanders, led by gen. colin campbell, had charged at lucknow, inspired by that stirring air. when he had retired i usually sat with him, and he drifted into literature, or theology, or science, or history--the story of the universe and man. one evening he spoke of those who had written but one immortal thing and stopped there. he mentioned "ben bolt." "i met that man once," he said. "in my childhood i sang 'sweet alice, ben bolt,' and in my old age, fifteen years ago, i met the man who wrote it. his name was brown.--[thomas dunn english. mr. clemens apparently remembered only the name satirically conferred upon him by edgar allan poe, "thomas dunn brown."]--he was aged, forgotten, a mere memory. i remember how it thrilled me to realize that this was the very author of 'sweet alice, ben bolt.' he was just an accident. he had a vision and echoed it. a good many persons do that--the thing they do is to put in compact form the thing which we have all vaguely felt. 'twenty years ago' is just like it 'i have wandered through the village, tom, and sat beneath the tree'--and holmes's 'last leaf' is another: the memory of the hallowed past, and the gravestones of those we love. it is all so beautiful--the past is always beautiful." he quoted, with great feeling and effect: the massy marbles rest on the lips that we have pressed in their bloom, and the names we love to hear have been carved for many a year on the tomb. he continued in this strain for an hour or more. he spoke of humor, and thought it must be one of the chief attributes of god. he cited plants and animals that were distinctly humorous in form and in their characteristics. these he declared were god's jokes. "why," he said, "humor is mankind's greatest blessing." "your own case is an example," i answered. "without it, whatever your reputation as a philosopher, you could never have had the wide-spread affection that is shown by the writers of that great heap of letters." "yes," he said, gently, "they have liked to be amused." i tucked him in for the night, promising to send him to bermuda, with claude to take care of him, if he felt he could undertake the journey in two days more. he was able, and he was eager to go, for he longed for that sunny island, and for the quiet peace of the allen home. his niece, mrs. loomis, came up to spend the last evening in stormfield, a happy evening full of quiet talk, and next morning, in the old closed carriage that had been his wedding-gift, he was driven to the railway station. this was on january , . he was to sail next day, and that night, at mr. loomis's, howells came in, and for an hour or two they reviewed some of the questions they had so long ago settled, or left forever unsettled, and laid away. i remember that at dinner clemens spoke of his old hartford butler, george, and how he had once brought george to new york and introduced him at the various publishing houses as his friend, with curious and sometimes rather embarrassing results. the talk drifted to sociology and to the labor-unions, which clemens defended as being the only means by which the workman could obtain recognition of his rights. howells in his book mentions this evening, which he says "was made memorable to me by the kind, clear, judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as the sole present help of the weak against the strong." they discussed dreams, and then in a little while howells rose to go. i went also, and as we walked to his near-by apartment he spoke of mark twain's supremacy. he said: "i turn to his books for cheer when i am down-hearted. there was never anybody like him; there never will be." clemens sailed next morning. they did not meet again. ccxci letters from bermuda stormfield was solemn and empty without mark twain; but he wrote by every steamer, at first with his own hand, and during the last week by the hand of one of his enlisted secretaries--some member of the allen family usually helen. his letters were full of brightness and pleasantry --always concerned more or less with business matters, though he was no longer disturbed by them, for bermuda was too peaceful and too far away, and, besides, he had faith in the mark twain company's ability to look after his affairs. i cannot do better, i believe, than to offer some portions of these letters here. he reached bermuda on the th of january, , and on the th he wrote: again i am living the ideal life. there is nothing to mar it but the bloody-minded bandit arthur,--[a small playmate of helen's of whom clemens pretended to be fiercely jealous. once he wrote a memorandum to helen: "let arthur read this book. there is a page in it that is poisoned."]--who still fetches and carries helen. presently he will be found drowned. claude comes to bay house twice a day to see if i need any service. he is invaluable. there was a military lecture last night at the officers' mess prospect; as the lecturer honored me with a special urgent invitation, and said he wanted to lecture to me particularly, i naturally took helen and her mother into the private carriage and went. as soon as we landed at the door with the crowd the governor came to me& was very cordial. i "met up" with that charming colonel chapman [we had known him on the previous visit] and other officers of the regiment & had a good time. a few days later he wrote: thanks for your letter & for its contenting news of the situation in that foreign & far-off & vaguely remembered country where you & loomis & lark and other beloved friends are. i had a letter from clara this morning. she is solicitous & wants me well & watchfully taken care of. my, my, she ought to see helen & her parents & claude administer that trust. also she says, "i hope to hear from you or mr. paine very soon." i am writing her & i know you will respond to your part of her prayer. she is pretty desolate now after jean's emancipation--the only kindness that god ever did that poor, unoffending child in all her hard life. send clara a copy of howells's gorgeous letter. the "gorgeous letter" mentioned was an appreciation of his recent bazar article, "the turning-point in my life," and here follows: january , . dear clemens,--while your wonderful words are warm in my mind yet i want to tell you what you know already: that you never wrote anything greater, finer, than that turning-point paper of yours. i shall feel it honor enough if they put on my tombstone "he was born in the same century and general section of middle western country with dr. s. l. clemens, oxon., and had his degree three years before him through a mistake of the university." i hope you are worse. you will never be riper for a purely intellectual life, and it is a pity to have you lagging along with a worn-out material body on top of your soul. yours ever, w. d. howells. on the margin of this letter clemens had written: i reckon this spontaneous outburst from the first critic of the day is good to keep, ain't it, paine? january th he wrote again of his contentment: life continues here the same as usual. there isn't a fault in it --good times, good home, tranquil contentment all day & every day without a break. i know familiarly several very satisfactory people & meet them frequently: mr. hamilton, the sloanes, mr. & mrs. fells, miss waterman, & so on. i shouldn't know how to go about bettering my situation. on february th he wrote that the climate and condition of his health might require him to stay in bermuda pretty continuously, but that he wished stormfield kept open so that he might come to it at any time. and he added: yesterday mr. allen took us on an excursion in mr. hamilton's big motor-boat. present: mrs. allen, mr. & mrs. & miss sloane, helen, mildred howells, claude, & me. several hours' swift skimming over ravishing blue seas, a brilliant sun; also a couple of hours of picnicking & lazying under the cedars in a secluded place. the orotava is arriving with passengers--i shall get letters by her, no doubt. p. s.--please send me the standard unabridged that is on the table in my bedroom. i have no dictionary here. there is no mention in any of these letters of his trouble; but he was having occasional spasms of pain, though in that soft climate they would seem to have come with less frequency, and there was so little to disturb him, and much that contributed to his peace. among the callers at the bay house to see him was woodrow wilson, and the two put in some pleasant hours at miniature golf, "putting" on the allen lawn. of course a catastrophe would come along now and then--such things could not always be guarded against. in a letter toward the end of february he wrote: it is . in the morning & i am writing because i can't sleep. i can't sleep because a professional pianist is coming to-morrow afternoon to play for me. my god! i wouldn't allow paderewski or gabrilowitsch to do that. i would rather have a leg amputated. i knew he was coming, but i never dreamed it was to play for me. when i heard the horrible news hours ago, be d---d if i didn't come near screaming. i meant to slip out and be absent, but now i can't. don't pray for me. the thing is just as d---d bad as it can be already. clemens's love for music did not include the piano, except for very gentle melodies, and he probably did not anticipate these from a professional player. he did not report the sequel of the matter; but it is likely that his imagination had discounted its tortures. sometimes his letters were pure nonsense. once he sent a sheet, on one side of which was written: bay house, march s, . received of s. l. c. two dollars and forty cents in return for my promise to believe everything he says hereafter. helen s. allen. and on the reverse: for sale the proprietor of the hereinbefore mentioned promise desires to part with it on account of ill health and obliged to go away somewheres so as to let it recipricate, and will take any reasonable amount for it above percent of its face because experienced parties think it will not keep but only a little while in this kind of weather & is a kind of proppity that don't give a cuss for cold storage nohow. clearly, however serious mark twain regarded his physical condition, he did not allow it to make him gloomy. he wrote that matters were going everywhere to his satisfaction; that clara was happy; that his household and business affairs no longer troubled him; that his personal surroundings were of the pleasantest sort. sometimes he wrote of what he was reading, and once spoke particularly of prof. william lyon phelps's literary essays, which he said he had been unable to lay down until he had finished the book.--[to phelps himself he wrote: "i thank you ever so much for the book, which i find charming--so charming, indeed, that i read it through in a single night, & did not regret the lost night's sleep. i am glad if i deserve what you have said about me; & even if i don't i am proud & well contented, since you think i deserve it."] so his days seemed full of comfort. but in march i noticed that he generally dictated his letters, and once when he sent some small photographs i thought he looked thinner and older. still he kept up his merriment. in one letter he said: while the matter is in my mind i will remark that if you ever send me another letter which is not paged at the top i will write you with my own hand, so that i may use with utter freedom & without embarrassment the kind of words which alone can describe such a criminal, to wit, - - - -; you will have to put into words those dashes because propriety will not allow me to do it myself in my secretary's hearing. you are forgiven, but don't let it occur again. he had still made no mention of his illness; but on the th of march he wrote something of his plans for coming home. he had engaged passage on the bermudian for april d, he said; and he added: but don't tell anybody. i don't want it known. i may have to go sooner if the pain in my breast does not mend its ways pretty considerable. i don't want to die here, for this is an unkind place for a person in that condition. i should have to lie in the undertaker's cellar until the ship would remove me & it is dark down there & unpleasant. the colliers will meet me on the pier, & i may stay with them a week or two before going home. it all depends on the breast pain. i don't want to die there. i am growing more and more particular about the place. but in the same letter he spoke of plans for the summer, suggesting that we must look into the magic-lantern possibilities, so that library entertainments could be given at stormfield. i confess that this letter, in spite of its light tone, made me uneasy, and i was tempted to sail for bermuda to bring him home. three days later he wrote again: i have been having a most uncomfortable time for the past four days with that breast pain, which turns out to be an affection of the heart, just as i originally suspected. the news from new york is to the effect that non-bronchial weather has arrived there at last; therefore, if i can get my breast trouble in traveling condition i may sail for home a week or two earlier than has been proposed. the same mail that brought this brought a letter from mr. allen, who frankly stated that matters had become very serious indeed. mr. clemens had had some dangerous attacks, and the physicians considered his condition critical. these letters arrived april st. i went to new york at once and sailed next morning. before sailing i consulted with dr. quintard, who provided me with some opiates and instructed me in the use of the hypodermic needle. he also joined me in a cablegram to the gabrilowitsches, then in italy, advising them to sail without delay. ccxcii the voyage home i sent no word to bermuda that i was coming, and when on the second morning i arrived at hamilton, i stepped quickly ashore from the tender and hurried to bay house. the doors were all open, as they usually are in that summer island, and no one was visible. i was familiar with the place, and, without knocking, i went through to the room occupied by mark twain. as i entered i saw that he was alone, sitting in a large chair, clad in the familiar dressing-gown. bay house stands upon the water, and the morning light, reflected in at the window, had an unusual quality. he was not yet shaven, and he seemed unnaturally pale and gray; certainly he was much thinner. i was too startled, for the moment, to say anything. when he turned and saw me he seemed a little dazed. "why," he said, holding out his hand, "you didn't tell us you were coming." "no," i said, "it is rather sudden. i didn't quite like the sound of your last letters." "but those were not serious," he protested. "you shouldn't have come on my account." i said then that i had come on my own account; that i had felt the need of recreation, and had decided to run down and come home with him. "that's--very--good," he said, in his slow, gentle fashion. "now i'm glad to see you." his breakfast came in and he ate with an appetite. when he had been shaved and freshly propped tip in his pillows it seemed to me, after all, that i must have been mistaken in thinking him so changed. certainly he was thinner, but his color was fine, his eyes were bright; he had no appearance of a man whose life was believed to be in danger. he told me then of the fierce attacks he had gone through, how the pains had torn at him, and how it had been necessary for him to have hypodermic injections, which he amusingly termed "hypnotic injunctions" and "subcutaneous applications," and he had his humor out of it, as of course he must have, even though death should stand there in person. from mr. and mrs. allen and from the physician i learned how slender had been his chances and how uncertain were the days ahead. mr. allen had already engaged passage on the oceana for the th, and the one purpose now was to get him physically in condition for the trip. how devoted those kind friends had been to him! they had devised every imaginable thing for his comfort. mr. allen had rigged an electric bell which connected with his own room, so that he could be aroused instantly at any hour of the night. clemens had refused to have a nurse, for it was only during the period of his extreme suffering that he needed any one, and he did not wish to have a nurse always around. when the pains were gone he was as bright and cheerful, and, seemingly, as well as ever. on the afternoon of my arrival we drove out, as formerly, and he discussed some of the old subjects in quite the old way. he had been rereading macaulay, he said, and spoke at considerable length of the hypocrisy and intrigue of the english court under james ii. he spoke, too, of the redding library. i had sold for him that portion of the land where jean's farm-house had stood, and it was in his mind to use the money for some sort of a memorial to jean. i had written, suggesting that perhaps he would like to put up a small library building, as the adams lot faced the corner where jean had passed every day when she rode to the station for the mail. he had been thinking this over, he said, and wished the idea carried out. he asked me to write at once to his lawyer, mr. lark, and have a paper prepared appointing trustees for a memorial library fund. the pain did not trouble him that afternoon, nor during several succeeding days. he was gay and quite himself, and he often went out on the lawn; but we did not drive out again. for the most part, he sat propped up in his bed, reading or smoking, or talking in the old way; and as i looked at him he seemed so full of vigor and the joy of life that i could not convince myself that he would not outlive us all. i found that he had been really very much alive during those three months--too much for his own good, sometimes--for he had not been careful of his hours or his diet, and had suffered in consequence. he had not been writing, though he had scribbled some playful valentines and he had amused himself one day by preparing a chapter of advice--for me it appeared--which, after reading it aloud to the allens and receiving their approval, he declared he intended to have printed for my benefit. as it would seem to have been the last bit of continued writing he ever did, and because it is characteristic and amusing, a few paragraphs may be admitted. the "advice" is concerning deportment on reaching the gate which st. peter is supposed to guard-- upon arrival do not speak to st. peter until spoken to. it is not your place to begin. do not begin any remark with "say." when applying for a ticket avoid trying to make conversation. if you must talk let the weather alone. st. peter cares not a damn for the weather. and don't ask him what time the . train goes; there aren't any trains in heaven, except through trains, and the less information you get about them the better for you. you can ask him for his autograph--there is no harm in that--but be careful and don't remark that it is one of the penalties of greatness. he has heard that before. don't try to kodak him. hell is full of people who have made that mistake. leave your dog outside. heaven goes by favor. if it went by merit you would stay out and the dog would go in. you will be wanting to slip down at night and smuggle water to those poor little chaps (the infant damned), but don't you try it. you would be caught, and nobody in heaven would respect you after that. explain to helen why i don't come. if you can. there were several pages of this counsel. one paragraph was written in shorthand. i meant to ask him to translate it; but there were many other things to think of, and i did not remember. i spent most of each day with him, merely sitting by the bed and reading while he himself read or dozed. his nights were wakeful--he found it easier to sleep by day--and he liked to think that some one was there. he became interested in hardy's jude, and spoke of it with high approval, urging me to read it. he dwelt a good deal on the morals of it, or rather on the lack of them. he followed the tale to the end, finishing it the afternoon before we sailed. it was his last continuous reading. i noticed, when he slept, that his breathing was difficult, and i could see from day to day that he did not improve; but each evening he would be gay and lively, and he liked the entire family to gather around, while he became really hilarious over the various happenings of the day. it was only a few days before we sailed that the very severe attacks returned. the night of the th was a hard one. the doctors were summoned, and it was only after repeated injections of morphine that the pain had been eased. when i returned in the early morning he was sitting in his chair trying to sing, after his old morning habit. he took my hand and said: "well, i had a picturesque night. every pain i had was on exhibition." he looked out the window at the sunlight on the bay and green dotted islands. "'sparkling and bright in the liquid light,'" he quoted. "that's hoffman. anything left of hoffman?" "no," i said. "i must watch for the bermudian and see if she salutes," he said, presently. "the captain knows i am here sick, and he blows two short whistles just as they come up behind that little island. those are for me." he said he could breathe easier if he could lean forward, and i placed a card-table in front of him. his breakfast came in, and a little later he became quite gay. he drifted to macaulay again, and spoke of king james's plot to assassinate william ii., and how the clergy had brought themselves to see that there was no difference between killing a king in battle and by assassination. he had taken his seat by the window to watch for the bermudian. she came down the bay presently, her bright red stacks towering vividly above the green island. it was a brilliant morning, the sky and the water a marvelous blue. he watched her anxiously and without speaking. suddenly there were two white puffs of steam, and two short, hoarse notes went up from her. "those are for me," he said, his face full of contentment. "captain fraser does not forget me." there followed another bad night. my room was only a little distance away, and claude came for me. i do not think any of us thought he would survive it; but he slept at last, or at least dozed. in the morning he said: "that breast pain stands watch all night and the short breath all day. i am losing enough sleep to supply a worn-out army. i want a jugful of that hypnotic injunction every night and every morning." we began to fear now that he would not be able to sail on the th; but by great good-fortune he had wonderfully improved by the th, so much so that i began to believe, if once he could be in stormfield, where the air was more vigorous, he might easily survive the summer. the humid atmosphere of the season increased the difficulty of his breathing. that evening he was unusually merry. mr. and mrs. allen and helen and myself went in to wish him good night. he was loath to let us leave, but was reminded that he would sail in the morning, and that the doctor had insisted that he must be quiet and lie still in bed and rest. he was never one to be very obedient. a little later mrs. allen and i, in the sitting-room, heard some one walking softly outside on the veranda. we went out there, and he was marching up and down in his dressing-gown as unconcerned as if he were not an invalid at all. he hadn't felt sleepy, he said, and thought a little exercise would do him good. perhaps it did, for he slept soundly that night--a great blessing. mr. allen had chartered a special tug to come to bay house landing in the morning and take him to the ship. he was carried in a little hand-chair to the tug, and all the way out he seemed light-spirited, anything but an invalid: the sailors carried him again in the chair to his state-room, and he bade those dear bermuda friends good-by, and we sailed away. as long as i remember anything i shall remember the forty-eight hours of that homeward voyage. it was a brief two days as time is measured; but as time is lived it has taken its place among those unmeasured periods by the side of which even years do not count. at first he seemed quite his natural self, and asked for a catalogue of the ship's library, and selected some memoirs of the countess of cardigan for his reading. he asked also for the second volume of carlyle's french revolution, which he had with him. but we ran immediately into the more humid, more oppressive air of the gulf stream, and his breathing became at first difficult, then next to impossible. there were two large port-holes, which i opened; but presently he suggested that it would be better outside. it was only a step to the main-deck, and no passengers were there. i had a steamer-chair brought, and with claude supported him to it and bundled him with rugs; but it had grown damp and chilly, and his breathing did not improve. it seemed to me that the end might come at any moment, and this thought was in his mind, too, for once in the effort for breath he managed to say: "i am going--i shall be gone in a moment." breath came; but i realized then that even his cabin was better than this. i steadied him back to his berth and shut out most of that deadly dampness. he asked for the "hypnotic 'injunction" (for his humor never left him), and though it was not yet the hour prescribed i could not deny it. it was impossible for him to lie down, even to recline, without great distress. the opiate made him drowsy, and he longed for the relief of sleep; but when it seemed about to possess him the struggle for air would bring him upright. during the more comfortable moments he spoke quite in the old way, and time and again made an effort to read, and reached for his pipe or a cigar which lay in the little berth hammock at his side. i held the match, and he would take a puff or two with satisfaction. then the peace of it would bring drowsiness, and while i supported him there would come a few moments, perhaps, of precious sleep. only a few moments, for the devil of suffocation was always lying in wait to bring him back for fresh tortures. over and over again this was repeated, varied by him being steadied on his feet or sitting on the couch opposite the berth. in spite of his suffering, two dominant characteristics remained--the sense of humor, and tender consideration for another. once when the ship rolled and his hat fell from the hook, and made the circuit of the cabin floor, he said: "the ship is passing the hat." again he said: "i am sorry for you, paine, but i can't help it--i can't hurry this dying business. can't you give me enough of the hypnotic injunction to put an end to me?" he thought if i could arrange the pillows so he could sit straight up it would not be necessary to support him, and then i could sit on the couch and read while he tried to doze. he wanted me to read jude, he said, so we could talk about it. i got all the pillows i could and built them up around him, and sat down with the book, and this seemed to give him contentment. he would doze off a little and then come up with a start, his piercing, agate eyes searching me out to see if i was still there. over and over--twenty times in an hour--this was repeated. when i could deny him no longer i administered the opiate, but it never completely possessed him or gave him entire relief. as i looked at him there, so reduced in his estate, i could not but remember all the labor of his years, and all the splendid honor which the world had paid to him. something of this may have entered his mind, too, for once, when i offered him some of the milder remedies which we had brought, he said: "after forty years of public effort i have become just a target for medicines." the program of change from berth to the floor, from floor to the couch, from the couch back to the berth among the pillows, was repeated again and again, he always thinking of the trouble he might be making, rarely uttering any complaint; but once he said: "i never guessed that i was not going to outlive john bigelow." and again: "this is such a mysterious disease. if we only had a bill of particulars we'd have something to swear at." time and again he picked up carlyle or the cardigan memoirs, and read, or seemed to read, a few lines; but then the drowsiness would come and the book would fall. time and again he attempted to smoke, or in his drowse simulated the motion of placing a cigar to his lips and puffing in the old way. two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber--one of a play in which the title-role of the general manager was always unfilled. he spoke of this now and then when it had passed, and it seemed to amuse him. the other was a discomfort: a college assembly was attempting to confer upon him some degree which he did not want. once, half roused, he looked at me searchingly and asked: "isn't there something i can resign and be out of all this? they keep trying to confer that degree upon me and i don't want it." then realizing, he said: "i am like a bird in a cage: always expecting to get out, and always beaten back by the wires." and, somewhat later: "oh, it is such a mystery, and it takes so long." toward the evening of the first day, when it grew dark outside, he asked: "how long have we been on this voyage?" i answered that this was the end of the first day. "how many more are there?" he asked. "only one, and two nights." "we'll never make it," he said. "it's an eternity." "but we must on clara's account," i told him, and i estimated that clara would be more than half-way across the ocean by now. "it is a losing race," he said; "no ship can outsail death." it has been written--i do not know with what proof--that certain great dissenters have recanted with the approach of death--have become weak, and afraid to ignore old traditions in the face of the great mystery. i wish to write here that mark twain, as he neared the end, showed never a single tremor of fear or even of reluctance. i have dwelt upon these hours when suffering was upon him, and death the imminent shadow, in order to show that at the end he was as he had always been, neither more nor less, and never less than brave. once, during a moment when he was comfortable and quite himself, he said, earnestly: "when i seem to be dying i don't want to be stimulated back to life. i want to be made comfortable to go." there was not a vestige of hesitation; there was no grasping at straws, no suggestion of dread. somehow those two days and nights went by. once, when he was partially relieved by the opiate, i slept, while claude watched; and again, in the fading end of the last night, when we had passed at length into the cold, bracing northern air, and breath had come back to him, and with it sleep. relatives, physicians, and news-gatherers were at the dock to welcome him. he was awake, and the northern air had brightened him, though it was the chill, i suppose, that brought on the pains in his breast, which, fortunately, he had escaped during the voyage. it was not a prolonged attack, and it was, blessedly, the last one. an invalid-carriage had been provided, and a compartment secured on the afternoon express to redding--the same train that had taken him there two years before. dr. robert h. halsey and dr. edward quintard attended him, and he made the journey really in cheerful comfort, for he could breathe now, and in the relief came back old interests. half reclining on the couch, he looked through the afternoon papers. it happened curiously that charles harvey genung, who, something more than four years earlier, had been so largely responsible for my association with mark twain, was on the same train, in the same coach, bound for his country-place at new hartford. lounsbury was waiting with the carriage, and on that still, sweet april evening we drove him to stormfield much as we had driven him two years before. now and then he mentioned the apparent backwardness of the season, for only a few of the trees were beginning to show their green. as we drove into the lane that led to the stormfield entrance, he said: "can we see where you have built your billiard-room?" the gable showed above the trees, and i pointed it out to him. "it looks quite imposing," he said. i think it was the last outside interest he ever showed in anything. he had been carried from the ship and from the train, but when we drew up to stormfield, where mrs. paine, with katie leary and others of the household, was waiting to greet him, he stepped from the carriage alone with something of his old lightness, and with all his old courtliness, and offered each one his hand. then, in the canvas chair which we had brought, claude and i carried him up-stairs to his room and delivered him to the physicians, and to the comforts and blessed air of home. this was thursday evening, april , . ccxciii the return to the invisible there would be two days more before ossip and clara gabrilowitsch could arrive. clemens remained fairly bright and comfortable during this interval, though he clearly was not improving. the physicians denied him the morphine, now, as he no longer suffered acutely. but he craved it, and once, when i went in, he said, rather mournfully: "they won't give me the subcutaneous any more." it was sunday morning when clara came. he was cheerful and able to talk quite freely. he did not dwell upon his condition, i think, but spoke rather of his plans for the summer. at all events, he did not then suggest that he counted the end so near; but a day later it became evident to all that his stay was very brief. his breathing was becoming heavier, though it seemed not to give him much discomfort. his articulation also became affected. i think the last continuous talking he did was to dr. halsey on the evening of april th--the day of clara's arrival. a mild opiate had been administered, and he said he wished to talk himself to sleep. he recalled one of his old subjects, dual personality, and discussed various instances that flitted through his mind--jekyll and hyde phases in literature and fact. he became drowsier as he talked. he said at last: "this is a peculiar kind of disease. it does not invite you to read; it does not invite you to be read to; it does not invite you to talk, nor to enjoy any of the usual sick-room methods of treatment. what kind of a disease is that? some kinds of sicknesses have pleasant features about them. you can read and smoke and have only to lie still." and a little later he added: "it is singular, very singular, the laws of mentality--vacuity. i put out my hand to reach a book or newspaper which i have been reading most glibly, and it isn't there, not a suggestion of it." he coughed violently, and afterward commented: "if one gets to meddling with a cough it very soon gets the upper hand and is meddling with you. that is my opinion--of seventy-four years' growth." the news of his condition, everywhere published, brought great heaps of letters, but he could not see them. a few messages were reported to him. at intervals he read a little. suetonius and carlyle lay on the bed beside him, and he would pick them up as the spirit moved him and read a paragraph or a page. sometimes, when i saw him thus-the high color still in his face, and the clear light in his eyes--i said: "it is not reality. he is not going to die." on tuesday, the th, he asked me to tell clara to come and sing to him. it was a heavy requirement, but she somehow found strength to sing some of the scotch airs which he loved, and he seemed soothed and comforted. when she came away he bade her good-by, saying that he might not see her again. but he lingered through the next day and the next. his mind was wandering a little on wednesday, and his speech became less and less articulate; but there were intervals when he was quite clear, quite vigorous, and he apparently suffered little. we did not know it, then, but the mysterious messenger of his birth-year, so long anticipated by him, appeared that night in the sky.--[the perihelion of halley's comet for was november th; for it was april th.] on thursday morning, the st, his mind was generally clear, and it was said by the nurses that he read a little from one of the volumes on his bed, from the suetonius, or from one of the volumes of carlyle. early in the forenoon he sent word by clara that he wished to see me, and when i came in he spoke of two unfinished manuscripts which he wished me to "throw away," as he briefly expressed it, for he had not many words left now. i assured him that i would take care of them, and he pressed my hand. it was his last word to me. once or twice that morning he tried to write some request which he could not put into intelligible words. and once he spoke to gabrilowitsch, who, he said, could understand him better than the others. most of the time he dozed. somewhat after midday, when clara was by him, he roused up and took her hand, and seemed to speak with less effort. "good-by," he said, and dr. quintard, who was standing near, thought he added: "if we meet"--but the words were very faint. he looked at her for a little while, without speaking, then he sank into a doze, and from it passed into a deeper slumber, and did not heed us any more. through that peaceful spring afternoon the life-wave ebbed lower and lower. it was about half past six, and the sun lay just on the horizon when dr. quintard noticed that the breathing, which had gradually become more subdued, broke a little. there was no suggestion of any struggle. the noble head turned a little to one side, there was a fluttering sigh, and the breath that had been unceasing through seventy-four tumultuous years had stopped forever. he had entered into the estate envied so long. in his own words--the words of one of his latest memoranda: "he had arrived at the dignity of death--the only earthly dignity that is not artificial--the only safe one. the others are traps that can beguile to humiliation. "death--the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all--the soiled and the pure--the rich and the poor--the loved and the unloved." ccxciv the last rites it is not often that a whole world mourns. nations have often mourned a hero--and races--but perhaps never before had the entire world really united in tender sorrow for the death of any man. in one of his aphorisms he wrote: "let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." and it was thus that mark twain himself had lived. no man had ever so reached the heart of the world, and one may not even attempt to explain just why. let us only say that it was because he was so limitlessly human that every other human heart, in whatever sphere or circumstance, responded to his touch. from every remote corner of the globe the cables of condolence swept in; every printed sheet in christendom was filled with lavish tribute; pulpits forgot his heresies and paid him honor. no king ever died that received so rich a homage as his. to quote or to individualize would be to cheapen this vast offering. we took him to new york to the brick church, and dr. henry van dyke spoke only a few simple words, and joseph twichell came from hartford and delivered brokenly a prayer from a heart wrung with double grief, for harmony, his wife, was nearing the journey's end, and a telegram that summoned him to her death-bed came before the services ended. mark twain, dressed in the white he loved so well, lay there with the nobility of death upon him, while a multitude of those who loved him passed by and looked at his face for the last time. the flowers, of which so many had been sent, were banked around him; but on the casket itself lay a single laurel wreath which dan beard and his wife had woven from the laurel which grows on stormfield hill. he was never more beautiful than as he lay there, and it was an impressive scene to see those thousands file by, regard him for a moment gravely, thoughtfully, and pass on. all sorts were there, rich and poor; some crossed themselves, some saluted, some paused a little to take a closer look; but no one offered even to pick a flower. howells came, and in his book he says: i looked a moment at the face i knew so well; and it was patient with the patience i had so often seen in it: something of a puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. that night we went with him to elmira, and next day--a somber day of rain--he lay in those stately parlors that had seen his wedding-day, and where susy had lain, and mrs. clemens, and jean, while dr. eastman spoke the words of peace which separate us from our mortal dead. then in the quiet, steady rain of that sunday afternoon we laid him beside those others, where he sleeps well, though some have wished that, like de soto, he might have been laid to rest in the bed of that great river which must always be associated with his name. ccxcv mark twain's religion there is such a finality about death; however interesting it may be as an experience, one cannot discuss it afterward with one's friends. i have thought it a great pity that mark twain could not discuss, with howells say, or with twichell, the sensations and the particulars of the change, supposing there be a recognizable change, in that transition of which we have speculated so much, with such slender returns. no one ever debated the undiscovered country more than he. in his whimsical, semi-serious fashion he had considered all the possibilities of the future state --orthodox and otherwise--and had drawn picturesquely original conclusions. he had sent captain stormfield in a dream to report the aspects of the early christian heaven. he had examined the scientific aspects of the more subtle philosophies. he had considered spiritualism, transmigration, the various esoteric doctrines, and in the end he had logically made up his mind that death concludes all, while with that less logical hunger which survives in every human heart he had never ceased to expect an existence beyond the grave. his disbelief and his pessimism were identical in their structure. they were of his mind; never of his heart. once a woman said to him: "mr. clemens, you are not a pessimist, you only think you are." and she might have added, with equal force and truth: "you are not a disbeliever in immortality; you only think you are." nothing could have conveyed more truly his attitude toward life and death. his belief in god, the creator, was absolute; but it was a god far removed from the creator of his early teaching. every man builds his god according to his own capacities. mark twain's god was of colossal proportions--so vast, indeed, that the constellated stars were but molecules in his veins--a god as big as space itself. mark twain had many moods, and he did not always approve of his own god; but when he altered his conception, it was likely to be in the direction of enlargement--a further removal from the human conception, and the problem of what we call our lives. in he wrote:--[see also , chap. lxxviii; , chap. ccv; and various talks, - , etc.] let us now consider the real god, the genuine god, the great god, the sublime and supreme god, the authentic creator of the real universe, whose remotenesses are visited by comets only comets unto which incredible distant neptune is merely an out post, a sandy hook to homeward-bound specters of the deeps of space that have not glimpsed it before for generations--a universe not made with hands and suited to an astronomical nursery, but spread abroad through the illimitable reaches of space by the flat of the real god just mentioned, by comparison with whom the gods whose myriads infest the feeble imaginations of men are as a swarm of gnats scattered and lost in the infinitudes of the empty sky. at an earlier period-the date is not exactly fixable, but the stationery used and the handwriting suggest the early eighties--he set down a few concisely written pages of conclusions--conclusions from which he did not deviate materially in after years. the document follows: i believe in god the almighty. i do not believe he has ever sent a message to man by anybody, or delivered one to him by word of mouth, or made himself visible to mortal eyes at any time in any place. i believe that the old and new testaments were imagined and written by man, and that no line in them was authorized by god, much less inspired by him. i think the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of god are manifested in his works: i perceive that they are manifested toward me in this life; the logical conclusion is that they will be manifested toward me in the life to come, if there should be one. i do not believe in special providences. i believe that the universe is governed by strict and immutable laws: if one man's family is swept away by a pestilence and another man's spared it is only the law working: god is not interfering in that small matter, either against the one man or in favor of the other. i cannot see how eternal punishment hereafter could accomplish any good end, therefore i am not able to believe in it. to chasten a man in order to perfect him might be reasonable enough; to annihilate him when he shall have proved himself incapable of reaching perfection might be reasonable enough; but to roast him forever for the mere satisfaction of seeing him roast would not be reasonable--even the atrocious god imagined by the jews would tire of the spectacle eventually. there may be a hereafter and there may not be. i am wholly indifferent about it. if i am appointed to live again i feel sure it will be for some more sane and useful purpose than to flounder about for ages in a lake of fire and brimstone for having violated a confusion of ill-defined and contradictory rules said (but not evidenced) to be of divine institution. if annihilation is to follow death i shall not be aware of the annihilation, and therefore shall not care a straw about it. i believe that the world's moral laws are the outcome of the world's experience. it needed no god to come down out of heaven to tell men that murder and theft and the other immoralities were bad, both for the individual who commits them and for society which suffers from them. if i break all these moral laws i cannot see how i injure god by it, for he is beyond the reach of injury from me--i could as easily injure a planet by throwing mud at it. it seems to me that my misconduct could only injure me and other men. i cannot benefit god by obeying these moral laws--i could as easily benefit the planet by withholding my mud. (let these sentences be read in the light of the fact that i believe i have received moral laws only from man --none whatever from god.) consequently i do not see why i should be either punished or rewarded hereafter for the deeds i do here. if the tragedies of life shook his faith in the goodness and justice and the mercy of god as manifested toward himself, he at any rate never questioned that the wider scheme of the universe was attuned to the immutable law which contemplates nothing less than absolute harmony. i never knew him to refer to this particular document; but he never destroyed it and never amended it, nor is it likely that he would have done either had it been presented to him for consideration even during the last year of his life. he was never intentionally dogmatic. in a memorandum on a fly-leaf of moncure d. conway's sacred anthology he wrote: religion the easy confidence with which i know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. mark twain, th cent. a.d. and in another note: i would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. i am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion maybe. but it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life hence it is a valuable possession to him. mark twain's religion was a faith too wide for doctrines--a benevolence too limitless for creeds. from the beginning he strove against oppression, sham, and evil in every form. he despised meanness; he resented with every drop of blood in him anything that savored of persecution or a curtailment of human liberties. it was a religion identified with his daily life and his work. he lived as he wrote, and he wrote as he believed. his favorite weapon was humor--good-humor--with logic behind it. a sort of glorified truth it was truth wearing a smile of gentleness, hence all the more quickly heeded. "he will be remembered with the great humorists of all time," says howells, "with cervantes, with swift, or with any others worthy of his company; none of them was his equal in humanity." mark twain understood the needs of men because he was himself supremely human. in one of his dictations he said: i have found that there is no ingredient of the race which i do not possess in either a small or a large way. when it is small, as compared with the same ingredient in somebody else, there is still enough of it for all the purposes of examination. with his strength he had inherited the weaknesses of our kind. with him, as with another, a myriad of dreams and schemes and purposes daily flitted by. with him, as with another, the spirit of desire led him often to a high mountain-top, and was not rudely put aside, but lingeringly--and often invited to return. with him, as with another, a crowd of jealousies and resentments, and wishes for the ill of others, daily went seething and scorching along the highways of the soul. with him, as with another, regret, remorse, and shame stood at the bedside during long watches of the night; and in the end, with him, the better thing triumphed--forgiveness and generosity and justice--in a word, humanity. certain of his aphorisms and memoranda each in itself constitutes an epitome of mark twain's creed. his paraphrase, "when in doubt tell the truth," is one of these, and he embodied his whole attitude toward infinity when in one of his stray pencilings he wrote: why, even poor little ungodlike man holds himself responsible for the welfare of his child to the extent of his ability. it is all that we require of god. ccxcvi postscript every life is a drama--a play in all its particulars; comedy, farce, tragedy--all the elements are there. to examine in detail any life, however conspicuous or obscure, is to become amazed not only at the inevitable sequence of events, but at the interlinking of details, often far removed, into a marvelously intricate pattern which no art can hope to reproduce, and can only feebly imitate. the biographer may reconstruct an episode, present a picture, or reflect a mood by which the reader is enabled to feel something of the glow of personality and know, perhaps, a little of the substance of the past. in so far as the historian can accomplish this his work is a success. at best his labor will be pathetically incomplete, for whatever its detail and its resemblance to life, these will record mainly but an outward expression, behind which was the mighty sweep and tumult of unwritten thought, the overwhelming proportion of any life, which no other human soul can ever really know. mark twain's appearance on the stage of the world was a succession of dramatic moments. he was always exactly in the setting. whatever he did, or whatever came to him, was timed for the instant of greatest effect. at the end he was more widely observed and loved and honored than ever before, and at the right moment and in the right manner he died. how little one may tell of such a life as his! he traveled always such a broad and brilliant highway, with plumes flying and crowds following after. such a whirling panorama of life, and death, and change! i have written so much, and yet i have put so much aside--and often the best things, it seemed afterward, perhaps because each in its way was best and the variety infinite. one may only strive to be faithful--and i would have made it better if i could. appendix appendix a letter from orion clemens to miss wood concerning henry clemens (see chapter xxvi) keokuk, iowa, october , . miss wood,--my mother having sent me your kind letter, with a request that myself and wife should write to you, i hasten to do so. in my memory i can go away back to henry's infancy; i see his large, blue eyes intently regarding my father when he rebuked him for his credulity in giving full faith to the boyish idea of planting his marbles, expecting a crop therefrom; then comes back the recollection of the time when, standing we three alone by our father's grave, i told them always to remember that brothers should be kind to each other; afterward i see henry returning from school with his books for the last time. he must go into my printing-office. he learned rapidly. a word of encouragement or a word of discouragement told upon his organization electrically. i could see the effects in his day's work. sometimes i would say, "henry!" he would stand full front with his eyes upon mine--all attention. if i commanded him to do something, without a word he was off instantly, probably in a run. if a cat was to be drowned or shot sam (though unwilling yet firm) was selected for the work. if a stray kitten was to be fed and taken care of henry was expected to attend to it, and he would faithfully do so. so they grew up, and many was the grave lecture commenced by ma, to the effect that sam was misleading and spoiling henry. but the lectures were never concluded, for sam would reply with a witticism, or dry, unexpected humor, that would drive the lecture clean out of my mother's mind, and change it to a laugh. those were happier days. my mother was as lively as any girl of sixteen. she is not so now. and sister pamela i have described in describing henry; for she was his counterpart. the blow falls crushingly on her. but the boys grew up--sam a rugged, brave, quick-tempered, generous-hearted fellow, henry quiet, observing, thoughtful, leaning on sam for protection; sam and i too leaning on him for knowledge picked up from conversation or books, for henry seemed never to forget anything, and devoted much of his leisure hours to reading. henry is gone! his death was horrible! how i could have sat by him, hung over him, watched day and night every change of expression, and ministered to every want in my power that i could discover. this was denied to me, but sam, whose organization is such as to feel the utmost extreme of every feeling, was there. both his capacity of enjoyment and his capacity of suffering are greater than mine; and knowing how it would have affected me to see so sad a scene, i can somewhat appreciate sam's sufferings. in this time of great trouble, when my two brothers, whose heartstrings have always been a part of my own, were suffering the utmost stretch of mortal endurance, you were there, like a good angel, to aid and console, and i bless and thank you for it with my whole heart. i thank all who helped them then; i thank them for the flowers they sent to henry, for the tears that fell for their sufferings, and when he died, and all of them for all the kind attentions they bestowed upon the poor boys. we thank the physicians, and we shall always gratefully remember the kindness of the gentleman who at so much expense to himself enabled us to deposit henry's remains by our father. with many kind wishes for your future welfare, i remain your earnest friend, respectfully, orion clemens. appendix b mark twain's burlesque of captain isaiah sellers (see chapter xxvii) the item which served as a text for the "sergeant fathom" communication was as follows: vicksburg, may , . my opinion for the benefit of the citizens of new orleans: the water is higher this far up than it has been since . my opinion is that the water will be four feet deep in canal street before the first of next june. mrs. turner's plantation at the head of big black island is all under water, and it has not been since . i. sellers.--[captain sellers, as in this case, sometimes signed his own name to his communications.] the burlesque introductory our friend sergeant fathom, one of the oldest cub pilots on the river, and now on the railroad line steamer trombone, sends us a rather bad account concerning the state of the river. sergeant fathom is a "cub" of much experience, and although we are loath to coincide in his view of the matter, we give his note a place in our columns, only hoping that his prophecy will not be verified in this instance. while introducing the sergeant, "we consider it but simple justice (we quote from a friend of his) to remark that he is distinguished for being, in pilot phrase, 'close,' as well as superhumanly 'safe.'" it is a well-known fact that he has made fourteen hundred and fifty trips in the new orleans and st. louis trade without causing serious damage to a steamboat. this astonishing success is attributed to the fact that he seldom runs his boat after early candle-light. it is related of the sergeant that upon one occasion he actually ran the chute of glasscock's island, down-stream, in the night, and at a time, too, when the river was scarcely more than bank full. his method of accomplishing this feat proves what we have just said of his "safeness"--he sounded the chute first, and then built a fire at the head of the island to run by. as to the sergeant's "closeness," we have heard it whispered that he once went up to the right of the "old hen,"--[glasscock's island and the "old hen" were phenomenally safe places.]--but this is probably a pardonable little exaggeration, prompted by the love and admiration in which he is held by various ancient dames of his acquaintance (for albeit the sergeant may have already numbered the allotted years of man, still his form is erect, his step is firm, his hair retains its sable hue, and, more than all, he hath a winning way about him, an air of docility and sweetness, if you will, and a smoothness of speech, together with an exhaustless fund of funny sayings; and, lastly, an overflowing stream, without beginning, or middle, or end, of astonishing reminiscences of the ancient mississippi, which, taken together, form a 'tout ensemble' which is sufficient excuse for the tender epithet which is, by common consent, applied to him by all those ancient dames aforesaid, of "che-arming creature!"). as the sergeant has been longer on the river, and is better acquainted with it than any other "cub" extant, his remarks are entitled to far more consideration, and are always read with the deepest interest by high and low, rich and poor, from "kiho" to kamschatka, for let it be known that his fame extends to the uttermost parts of the earth: the communication r.r. steamer trombone, vicksburg, may , . the river from new orleans up to natchez is higher than it has been since the niggers were executed (which was in the fall of ) and my opinion is that if the rise continues at this rate the water will be on the roof of the st. charles hotel before the middle of january. the point at cairo, which has not even been moistened by the river since , is now entirely under water. however, mr. editor, the inhabitants of the mississippi valley should not act precipitately and sell their plantations at a sacrifice on account of this prophecy of mine, for i shall proceed to convince them of a great fact in regard to this matter, viz.: that the tendency of the mississippi is to rise less and less high every year (with an occasional variation of the rule), that such has been the case for many centuries, and eventually that it will cease to rise at all. therefore, i would hint to the planters, as we say in an innocent little parlor game commonly called "draw," that if they can only "stand the rise" this time they may enjoy the comfortable assurance that the old river's banks will never hold a "full" again during their natural lives. in the summer of i came down the river on the old first jubilee. she was new then, however; a singular sort of a single-engine boat, with a chinese captain and a choctaw crew, forecastle on her stern, wheels in the center, and the jackstaff "nowhere," for i steered her with a window-shutter, and when we wanted to land we sent a line ashore and "rounded her to" with a yoke of oxen. well, sir, we wooded off the top of the big bluff above selmathe only dry land visible--and waited there three weeks, swapping knives and playing "seven up" with the indians, waiting for the river to fall. finally, it fell about a hundred feet, and we went on. one day we rounded to, and i got in a horse-trough, which my partner borrowed from the indians up there at selma while they were at prayers, and went down to sound around no. , and while i was gone my partner got aground on the hills at hickman. after three days' labor we finally succeeded in sparring her off with a capstan bar, and went on to memphis. by the time we got there the river had subsided to such an extent that we were able to land where the gayoso house now stands. we finished loading at memphis, and loaded part of the stone for the present st. louis court house (which was then in process of erection), to be taken up on our return trip. you can form some conception, by these memoranda, of how high the water was in . in it did not rise so high by thirty feet; in it missed the original mark at least sixty-five feet; in , one hundred and fifty feet; and in , nearly two hundred and fifty feet. these were "high-water" years. the "high waters" since then have been so insignificant that i have scarcely taken the trouble to notice them. thus, you will perceive that the planters need not feel uneasy. the river may make an occasional spasmodic effort at a flood, but the time is approaching when it will cease to rise altogether. in conclusion, sir, i will condescend to hint at the foundation of these arguments: when me and de soto discovered the mississippi i could stand at bolivar landing (several miles above "roaring waters bar") and pitch a biscuit to the main shore on the other side, and in low water we waded across at donaldsonville. the gradual widening and deepening of the river is the whole secret of the matter. yours, etc. sergeant fathom. appendix c i mark twain's empire city hoax (see chapter xli) the latest sensation. a victim to jeremy diddling trustees--he cuts his throat from ear to ear, scalps his wife, and dashes out the brains of six helpless children! from abram curry, who arrived here yesterday afternoon from carson, we learn the following particulars concerning a bloody massacre which was committed in ormsby county night before last. it seems that during the past six months a man named p. hopkins, or philip hopkins, has been residing with his family in the old log-house just at the edge of the great pine forest which lies between empire city and dutch nick's. the family consisted of nine children--five girls and four boys--the oldest of the group, mary, being nineteen years old, and the youngest, tommy, about a year and a half. twice in the past two months mrs. hopkins, while visiting carson, expressed fears concerning the sanity of her husband, remarking that of late he had been subject to fits of violence, and that during the prevalence of one of these he had threatened to take her life. it was mrs. hopkins's misfortune to be given to exaggeration, however, and but little attention was given to what she said. about o'clock on monday evening hopkins dashed into carson on horseback, with his throat cut from ear to ear, and bearing in his hand a reeking scalp, from which the warm, smoking blood was still dripping, and fell in a dying condition in front of the magnolia saloon. hopkins expired, in the course of five minutes, without speaking. the long, red hair of the scalp he bore marked it as that of mrs. hopkins. a number of citizens, headed by sheriff gasherie, mounted at once and rode down to hopkins's house, where a ghastly scene met their eyes. the scalpless corpse of mrs. hopkins lay across the threshold, with her head split open and her right hand almost severed from the wrist. near her lay the ax with which the murderous deed had been committed. in one of the bedrooms six of the children were found, one in bed and the others scattered about the floor. they were all dead. their brains had evidently been dashed out with a club, and every mark about them seemed to have been made with a blunt instrument. the children must have struggled hard for their lives, as articles of clothing and broken furniture were strewn about the room in the utmost confusion. julia and emma, aged respectively fourteen and seventeen, were found in the kitchen, bruised and insensible, but it is thought their recovery is possible. the eldest girl, mary, must have sought refuge, in her terror, in the garret, as her body was found there frightfully mutilated, and the knife with which her wounds had been inflicted still sticking in her side. the two girls julia and emma, who had recovered sufficiently to be able to talk yesterday morning, declare that their father knocked them down with a billet of wood and stamped on them. they think they were the first attacked. they further state that hopkins had shown evidence of derangement all day, but had exhibited no violence. he flew into a passion and attempted to murder them because they advised him to go to bed and compose his mind. curry says hopkins was about forty-two years of age, and a native of western pennsylvania; he was always affable and polite, and until very recently no one had ever heard of his ill-treating his family. he had been a heavy owner in the best mines of virginia and gold hill, but when the san francisco papers exposed our game of cooking dividends in order to bolster up our stocks he grew afraid and sold out, and invested an immense amount in the spring valley water company, of san francisco. he was advised to do this by a relative of his, one of the editors of the san francisco bulletin, who had suffered pecuniarily by the dividend-cooking system as applied to the daney mining company recently. hopkins had not long ceased to own in the various claims on the comstock lead, however, when several dividends were cooked on his newly acquired property, their water totally dried up, and spring valley stock went down to nothing. it is presumed that this misfortune drove him mad, and resulted in his killing himself and the greater portion of his family. the newspapers of san francisco permitted this water company to go on borrowing money and cooking dividends, under cover of which the cunning financiers crept out of the tottering concern, leaving the crash to come upon poor and unsuspecting stockholders, without offering to expose the villainy at work. we hope the fearful massacre detailed above may prove the saddest result of their silence. ii news-gathering with mark twain. alfred doten's son gives the following account of a reporting trip made by his father and mark twain, when the two were on comstock papers: my father and mark twain were once detailed to go over to como and write up some new mines that had been discovered over there. my father was on the gold hill news. he and mark had not met before, but became promptly acquainted, and were soon calling each other by their first names. they went to a little hotel at carson, agreeing to do their work there together next morning. when morning came they set out, and suddenly on a corner mark stopped and turned to my father, saying: "by gracious, alf! isn't that a brewery?" "it is, mark. let's go in." they did so, and remained there all day, swapping yarns, sipping beer, and lunching, going back to the hotel that night. the next morning precisely the same thing occurred. when they were on the same corner, mark stopped as if he had never been there before, and sand: "good gracious, alf! isn't that a brewery?" "it is, mark. let's go in." so again they went in, and again stayed all day. this happened again the next morning, and the next. then my father became uneasy. a letter had come from gold hill, asking him where his report of the mines was. they agreed that next morning they would really begin the story; that they would climb to the top of a hill that overlooked the mines, and write it from there. but the next morning, as before, mark was surprised to discover the brewery, and once more they went in. a few moments later, however, a man who knew all about the mines--a mining engineer connected with them--came in. he was a godsend. my father set down a valuable, informing story, while mark got a lot of entertaining mining yarns out of him. next day virginia city and gold hill were gaining information from my father's article, and entertainment from mark's story of the mines. appendix d from mark twain's first lecture, delivered october , . (see chapter liv) hawaiian importance to america. after a full elucidation of the sugar industry of the sandwich islands, its profits and possibilities, he said: i have dwelt upon this subject to show you that these islands have a genuine importance to america--an importance which is not generally appreciated by our citizens. they pay revenues into the united states treasury now amounting to over a half a million a year. i do not know what the sugar yield of the world is now, but ten years ago, according to the patent office reports, it was , hogsheads. the sandwich islands, properly cultivated by go-ahead americans, are capable of providing one-third as much themselves. with the pacific railroad built, the great china mail line of steamers touching at honolulu--we could stock the islands with americans and supply a third of the civilized world with sugar--and with the silkiest, longest-stapled cotton this side of the sea islands, and the very best quality of rice.... the property has got to fall to some heir, and why not the united states? native passion for funerals they are very fond of funerals. big funerals are their main weakness. fine grave clothes, fine funeral appointments, and a long procession are things they take a generous delight in. they are fond of their chief and their king; they reverence them with a genuine reverence and love them with a warm affection, and often look forward to the happiness they will experience in burying them. they will beg, borrow, or steal money enough, and flock from all the islands, to be present at a royal funeral on oahu. years ago a kanaka and his wife were condemned to be hanged for murder. they received the sentence with manifest satisfaction because it gave an opening for a funeral, you know. all they care for is a funeral. it makes but little difference to them whose it is; they would as soon attend their own funeral as anybody else's. this couple were people of consequence, and had landed estates. they sold every foot of ground they had and laid it out in fine clothes to be hung in. and the woman appeared on the scaffold in a white satin dress and slippers and fathoms of gaudy ribbon, and the man was arrayed in a gorgeous vest, blue claw-hammer coat and brass buttons, and white kid gloves. as the noose was adjusted around his neck, he blew his nose with a grand theatrical flourish, so as to show his embroidered white handkerchief. i never, never knew of a couple who enjoyed hanging more than they did. view from haleakala it is a solemn pleasure to stand upon the summit of the extinct crater of haleakala, ten thousand feet above the sea, and gaze down into its awful crater, miles in circumference and ago feet deep, and to picture to yourself the seething world of fire that once swept up out of the tremendous abyss ages ago. the prodigious funnel is dead and silent now, and even has bushes growing far down in its bottom, where the deep-sea line could hardly have reached in the old times, when the place was filled with liquid lava. these bushes look like parlor shrubs from the summit where you stand, and the file of visitors moving through them on their mules is diminished to a detachment of mice almost; and to them you, standing so high up against the sun, ten thousand feet above their heads, look no larger than a grasshopper. this in the morning; but at three or four in the afternoon a thousand little patches of white clouds, like handfuls of wool, come drifting noiselessly, one after another, into the crater, like a procession of shrouded phantoms, and circle round and round the vast sides, and settle gradually down and mingle together until the colossal basin is filled to the brim with snowy fog and all its seared and desolate wonders are hidden from sight. and then you may turn your back to the crater and look far away upon the broad valley below, with its sugar-houses glinting like white specks in the distance, and the great sugar-fields diminished to green veils amid the lighter-tinted verdure around them, and abroad upon the limitless ocean. but i should not say you look down; you look up at these things. you are ten thousand feet above them, but yet you seem to stand in a basin, with the green islands here and there, and the valleys and the wide ocean, and the remote snow-peak of mauna loa, all raised up before and above you, and pictured out like a brightly tinted map hung at the ceiling of a room. you look up at everything; nothing is below you. it has a singular and startling effect to see a miniature world thus seemingly hung in mid-air. but soon the white clouds come trooping along in ghostly squadrons and mingle together in heavy masses a quarter of a mile below you and shut out everything-completely hide the sea and all the earth save the pinnacle you stand on. as far as the eye can reach, it finds nothing to rest upon but a boundless plain of clouds tumbled into all manner of fantastic shapes-a billowy ocean of wool aflame with the gold and purple and crimson splendors of the setting sun! and so firm does this grand cloud pavement look that you can hardly persuade yourself that you could not walk upon it; that if you stepped upon it you would plunge headlong and astonish your friends at dinner ten thousand feet below. standing on that peak, with all the world shut out by that vast plain of clouds, a feeling of loneliness comes over a man which suggests to his mind the last man at the flood, perched high upon the last rock, with nothing visible on any side but a mournful waste of waters, and the ark departing dimly through the distant mists and leaving him to storm and night and solitude and death! notice of mark twain's lecture "the trouble is over" "the inimitable mark twain, delivered himself last night of his first lecture on the sandwich islands, or anything else. "some time before the hour appointed to open his head the academy of music (on pine street) was densely crowded with one of the most fashionable audiences it was ever my privilege to witness during my long residence in this city. the elite of the town were there, and so was the governor of the state, occupying one of the boxes, whose rotund face was suffused with a halo of mirth during the whole entertainment. the audience promptly notified mark by the usual sign--stamping--that the auspicious hour had arrived, and presently the lecturer came sidling and swinging out from the left of the stage. his very manner produced a generally vociferous laugh from the assemblage. he opened with an apology, by saying that he had partly succeeded in obtaining a band, but at the last moment the party engaged backed out. he explained that he had hired a man to play the trombone, but he, on learning that he was the only person engaged, came at the last moment and informed him that he could not play. this placed mark in a bad predicament, and wishing to know his reasons for deserting him at that critical moment, he replied, 'that he wasn't going to make a fool of himself by sitting up there on the stage and blowing his horn all by himself.' after the applause subsided, he assumed a very grave countenance and commenced his remarks proper with the following well-known sentence: 'when, in the course of human events,' etc. he lectured fully an hour and a quarter, and his humorous sayings were interspersed with geographical, agricultural, and statistical remarks, sometimes branching off and reaching beyond, soaring, in the very choicest language, up to the very pinnacle of descriptive power." appendix e from "the jumping frog" book (mark twain's first published volume) (see chapters lviii and lix) i advertisement "mark twain" is too well known to the public to require a formal introduction at my hands. by his story of the frog he scaled the heights of popularity at a single jump and won for himself the 'sobriquet' of the wild humorist of the pacific slope. he is also known to fame as the moralist of the main; and it is not unlikely that as such he will go down to posterity. it is in his secondary character, as humorist, however, rather than in the primal one of moralist, that i aim to present him in the present volume. and here a ready explanation will be found for the somewhat fragmentary character of many of these sketches; for it was necessary to snatch threads of humor wherever they could be found--very often detaching them from serious articles and moral essays with which they were woven and entangled. originally written for newspaper publication, many of the articles referred to events of the day, the interest of which has now passed away, and contained local allusions, which the general reader would fail to understand; in such cases excision became imperative. further than this, remark or comment is unnecessary. mark twain never resorts to tricks of spelling nor rhetorical buffoonery for the purpose of provoking a laugh; the vein of his humor runs too rich and deep to make surface gliding necessary. but there are few who can resist the quaint similes, keen satire, and hard, good sense which form the staple of his writing. j. p. ii from answers to correspondents "moral statistician"--i don't want any of your statistics. i took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it. i hate your kind of people. you are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc. . . . of course you can save money by denying yourself all these vicious little enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? what use can you put it to? money can't save your infinitesimal soul. all the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment, where is the use in accumulating cash? it won't do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. and you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good-humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your knees, with your eyes buried in the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give the revenue-officers a true statement of your income. now you all know all these things yourself, don't you? very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a clean and withered old age? what is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? in a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as "ornery" and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your ceaseless and villainous "moral statistics"? now, i don't approve of dissipation, and i don't indulge in it, either; but i haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatever, and so i don't want to hear from you any more. i think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice of smoking cigars and then came back, in my absence, with your vile, reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor-stove. iii from "a strange dream" (example of mark twain's early descriptive writing) . . . in due time i stood, with my companion, on the wall of the vast caldron which the natives, ages ago, named 'hale mau mau'--the abyss wherein they were wont to throw the remains of their chiefs, to the end that vulgar feet might never tread above them. we stood there, at dead of night, a mile above the level of the sea, and looked down a thousand feet upon a boiling, surging, roaring ocean of fire!--shaded our eyes from the blinding glare, and gazed far away over the crimson waves with a vague notion that a supernatural fleet, manned by demons and freighted with the damned, might presently sail up out of the remote distance; started when tremendous thunder-bursts shook the earth, and followed with fascinated eyes the grand jets of molten lava that sprang high up toward the zenith and exploded in a world of fiery spray that lit up the somber heavens with an infernal splendor. "what is your little bonfire of vesuvius to this?" my ejaculation roused my companion from his reverie, and we fell into a conversation appropriate to the occasion and the surroundings. we came at last to speak of the ancient custom of casting the bodies of dead chieftains into this fearful caldron; and my comrade, who is of the blood royal, mentioned that the founder of his race, old king kamehameha the first--that invincible old pagan alexander--had found other sepulture than the burning depths of the 'hale mau mau'. i grew interested at once; i knew that the mystery of what became of the corpse of the warrior king hail never been fathomed; i was aware that there was a legend connected with this matter; and i felt as if there could be no more fitting time to listen to it than the present. the descendant of the kamehamehas said: the dead king was brought in royal state down the long, winding road that descends from the rim of the crater to the scorched and chasm-riven plain that lies between the 'hale mau mau' and those beetling walls yonder in the distance. the guards were set and the troops of mourners began the weird wail for the departed. in the middle of the night came a sound of innumerable voices in the air and the rush of invisible wings; the funeral torches wavered, burned blue, and went out. the mourners and watchers fell to the ground paralyzed by fright, and many minutes elapsed before any one dared to move or speak; for they believed that the phantom messengers of the dread goddess of fire had been in their midst. when at last a torch was lighted the bier was vacant--the dead monarch had been spirited away! appendix f the innocents abroad (see chapter lx) new york "herald" editorial on the return of the "quaker city" pilgrimage, november , . in yesterday's herald we published a most amusing letter from the pen of that most amusing american genius, mark twain, giving an account of that most amusing of all modern pilgrimages--the pilgrimage of the 'quaker city'. it has been amusing all through, this quaker city affair. it might have become more serious than amusing if the ship had been sold at jaffa, alexandria, or yalta, in the black sea, as it appears might have happened. in such a case the passengers would have been more effectually sold than the ship. the descendants of the puritan pilgrims have, naturally enough, some of them, an affection for ships; but if all that is said about this religious cruise be true they have also a singularly sharp eye to business. it was scarcely wise on the part of the pilgrims, although it was well for the public, that so strange a genius as mark twain should have found admission into the sacred circle. we are not aware whether mr. twain intends giving us a book on this pilgrimage, but we do know that a book written from his own peculiar standpoint, giving an account of the characters and events on board ship and of the scenes which the pilgrims witnessed, would command an almost unprecedented sale. there are varieties of genius peculiar to america. of one of these varieties mark twain is a striking specimen. for the development of his peculiar genius he has never had a more fitting opportunity. besides, there are some things which he knows, and which the world ought to know, about this last edition of the mayflower. appendix g mark twain at the correspondents club, washington (see chapter lxiii) woman a eulogy of the fair sex. the washington correspondents club held its anniversary on saturday night. mr. clemens, better known as mark twain, responded to the toast, "woman, the pride of the professions and the jewel of ours." he said: mr. president,--i do not know why i should have been singled out to receive the greatest distinction of the evening--for so the office of replying to the toast to woman has been regarded in every age. [applause.] i do not know why i have received this distinction, unless it be that i am a trifle less homely than the other members of the club. but, be this as it may, mr. president, i am proud of the position, and you could not have chosen any one who would have accepted it more gladly, or labored with a heartier good--will to do the subject justice, than i. because, sir, i love the sex. [laughter.] i love all the women, sir, irrespective of age or color. [laughter.] human intelligence cannot estimate what we owe to woman, sir. she sews on our buttons [laughter]; she mends our clothes [laughter]; she ropes us in at the church fairs; she confides in us; she tells us whatever she can find out about the private affairs of the neighbors; she gives good advice, and plenty of it; she gives us a piece of her mind sometimes --and sometimes all of it; she soothes our aching brows; she bears our children. (ours as a general thing.)--[this last sentence appears in twain's published speeches and may have been added later. d.w.] in all relations of life, sir, it is but just and a graceful tribute to woman to say of her that she is a brick. [great laughter.] wheresoever you place woman, sir--in whatsoever position or estate--she is an ornament to that place she occupies, and a treasure to the world. [here mr. twain paused, looked inquiringly at his hearers, and remarked that the applause should come in at this point. it came in. mr. twain resumed his eulogy.] look at the noble names of history! look at cleopatra! look at desdemona! look at florence nightingale! look at joan of arc! look at lucretia borgia! [disapprobation expressed. "well," said mr. twain, scratching his head, doubtfully, "suppose we let lucretia slide."] look at joyce heth! look at mother eve! i repeat, sir, look at the illustrious names of history! look at the widow machree! look at lucy stone! look at elizabeth cady stanton! look at george francis train! [great laughter.] and, sir, i say with bowed head and deepest veneration, look at the mother of washington! she raised a boy that could not lie--could not lie. [applause.] but he never had any chance. it might have been different with him if he had belonged to a newspaper correspondents' club. [laughter, groans, hisses, cries of "put him out." mark looked around placidly upon his excited audience, and resumed.] i repeat, sir, that in whatsoever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. as a sweetheart she has few equals and no superior [laughter]; as a cousin she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper she is precious; as a wet nurse she has no equal among men! [laughter.] what, sir, would the people of this earth be without woman? they would be scarce, sir. (mighty scarce.)--[another line added later in the published 'speeches'. d.w.] then let us cherish her, let us protect her, let us give her our support, our encouragement, our sympathy--ourselves, if we get a chance. [laughter.] but, jesting aside, mr. president, woman is lovable, gracious, kind of heart, beautiful; worthy of all respect, of all esteem, of all deference. not any here will refuse to drink her health right cordially, for each and every one of us has personally known, loved, and honored the very best one of them all--his own mother! [applause.] appendix h announcement for lecture of july , (see chapter lxvi) the public to mark twain--correspondence san francisco, june th. mr. mark twain--dear sir,--hearing that you are about to sail for new york in the p. m. s. s. company's steamer of the th july, to publish a book, and learning with the deepest concern that you propose to read a chapter or two of that book in public before you go, we take this method of expressing our cordial desire that you will not. we beg and implore you do not. there is a limit to human endurance. we are your personal friends. we have your welfare at heart. we desire to see you prosper. and it is upon these accounts, and upon these only, that we urge you to desist from the new atrocity you contemplate. yours truly, names including: bret harte, maj.-gen. ord, maj.-gen. halleck, the orphan asylum, and various benevolent societies, citizens on foot and horseback, and in the steerage. (reply) san francisco, june th to the , and others,--it seems to me that your course is entirely unprecedented. heretofore, when lecturers, singers, actors, and other frauds have said they were about to leave town, you have always been the very first people to come out in a card beseeching them to hold on for just one night more, and inflict just one more performance on the public, but as soon as i want to take a farewell benefit you come after me, with a card signed by the whole community and the board of aldermen, praying me not to do it. but it isn't of any use. you cannot move me from my fell purpose. i will torment the people if i want to. i have a better right to do it than these strange lecturers and orators that come here from abroad. it only costs the public a dollar apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here for? am i to go away and let them have peace and quiet for a year and a half, and then come back and only lecture them twice? what do you take me for? no, gentlemen, ask of me anything else and i will do it cheerfully; but do not ask me not to afflict the people. i wish to tell them all i know about venice. i wish to tell them about the city of the sea--that most venerable, most brilliant, and proudest republic the world has ever seen. i wish to hint at what it achieved in twelve hundred years, and what it lost in two hundred. i wish to furnish a deal of pleasant information, somewhat highly spiced, but still palatable, digestible, and eminently fitted for the intellectual stomach. my last lecture was not as fine as i thought it was, but i have submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have pronounced it good. now, therefore, why should i withhold it? let me talk only just this once, and i will sail positively on the th of july, and stay away until i return from china--two years. yours truly, mark twain. (further remonstrance) san francisco, june th. mr. mark twain,--learning with profound regret that you have concluded to postpone your departure until the th july, and learning also, with unspeakable grief, that you propose to read from your forthcoming book, or lecture again before you go, at the new mercantile library, we hasten to beg of you that you will not do it. curb this spirit of lawless violence, and emigrate at once. have the vessel's bill for your passage sent to us. we will pay it. your friends, pacific board of brokers [and other financial and social institutions] san francisco, june th. mr. mark twain--dear sir,--will you start now, without any unnecessary delay? yours truly, proprietors of the alta, bulletin, times, call, examiner [and other san francisco publications]. san francisco, june th. mr. mark twain--dear sir,--do not delay your departure. you can come back and lecture another time. in the language of the worldly--you can "cut and come again." your friends, the clergy. san francisco, june th. mr. mark twain--dear sir,--you had better go. yours, the chief of police. (reply) san francisco, june th. gentlemen,--restrain your emotions; you observe that they cannot avail. read: new mercantile library bush street thursday evening, july , one night only farewell lecture of mark twain subject: the oldest of the republics venice past and present box-office open wednesday and thursday no extra charge for reserved seats admission . . . . . . . . . . . one dollar doors open at orgies to commence at p. m. the public displays and ceremonies projected to give fitting eclat to this occasion have been unavoidably delayed until the th. the lecture will be delivered certainly on the d, and the event will be celebrated two days afterward by a discharge of artillery on the th, a procession of citizens, the reading of the declaration of independence, and by a gorgeous display of fireworks from russian hill in the evening, which i have ordered at my sole expense, the cost amounting to eighty thousand dollars. at new mercantile library bush street thursday evening, july , appendix i mark twain's championship of thomas k. beecher (see chapter lxxiv) there was a religious turmoil in elmira in ; a disturbance among the ministers, due to the success of thomas k. beecher in a series of meetings he was conducting in the opera house. mr. beecher's teachings had never been very orthodox or doctrinal, but up to this time they had been seemingly unobjectionable to his brother clergymen, who fraternized with him and joined with him in the monday meetings of the ministerial union of elmira, when each monday a sermon was read by one of the members. the situation presently changed. mr. beecher was preaching his doubtful theology to large and nightly increasing audiences, and it was time to check the exodus. the ministerial union of elmira not only declined to recognize and abet the opera house gatherings, but they requested him to withdraw from their monday meetings, on the ground that his teachings were pernicious. mr. beecher said nothing of the matter, and it was not made public until a notice of it appeared in a religious paper. naturally such a course did not meet with the approval of the langdon family, and awoke the scorn of a man who so detested bigotry in any form as mark twain. he was a stranger in the place, and not justified to speak over his own signature, but he wrote an article and read it to members of the langdon family and to dr. and mrs. taylor, their intimate friends, who were spending an evening in the langdon home. it was universally approved, and the next morning appeared in the elmira advertiser, over the signature of "s'cat." it created a stir, of course. the article follows: mr. beecher and the clergy "the ministerial union of elmira, n. y., at a recent meeting passed resolutions disapproving the teachings of rev. t. k. beecher, declining to co-operate with him in his sunday evening services at the opera house, and requesting him to withdraw from their monday morning meeting. this has resulted in his withdrawal, and thus the pastors are relieved from further responsibility as to his action."--n. y. evangelist. poor beecher! all this time he could do whatever he pleased that was wrong, and then be perfectly serene and comfortable over it, because the ministerial union of elmira was responsible to god for it. he could lie if he wanted to, and those ministers had to answer for it; he could promote discord in the church of christ, and those parties had to make it right with the deity as best they could; he could teach false doctrines to empty opera houses, and those sorrowing lambs of the ministerial union had to get out their sackcloth and ashes and stand responsible for it. he had such a comfortable thing of it! but he went too far. in an evil hour he slaughtered the simple geese that laid the golden egg of responsibility for him, and now they will uncover their customary complacency, and lift up their customary cackle in his behalf no more. and so, at last, he finds himself in the novel position of being responsible to god for his acts, instead of to the ministerial union of elmira. to say that this is appalling is to state it with a degree of mildness which amounts to insipidity. we cannot justly estimate this calamity, without first reviewing certain facts that conspired to bring it about. mr. beecher was and is in the habit of preaching to a full congregation in the independent congregational church, in this city. the meeting-house was not large enough to accommodate all the people who desired admittance. mr. beecher regularly attended the meetings of the ministerial union of elmira every monday morning, and they received him into their fellowship, and never objected to the doctrines which he taught in his church. so, in an unfortunate moment, he conceived the strange idea that they would connive at the teaching of the same doctrines in the same way in a larger house. therefore he secured the opera house and proceeded to preach there every sunday evening to assemblages comprising from a thousand to fifteen hundred persons. he felt warranted in this course by a passage of scripture which says, "go ye into all the world and preach the gospel unto every creature." opera-houses were not ruled out specifically in this passage, and so he considered it proper to regard opera-houses as a part of "all the world." he looked upon the people who assembled there as coming under the head of "every creature." these ideas were as absurd as they were farfetched, but still they were the honest ebullitions of a diseased mind. his great mistake was in supposing that when he had the saviour's indorsement of his conduct he had all that was necessary. he overlooked the fact that there might possibly be a conflict of opinion between the saviour and the ministerial union of elmira. and there was. wherefore, blind and foolish mr. beecher went to his destruction. the ministerial union withdrew their approbation, and left him dangling in the air, with no other support than the countenance and approval of the gospel of christ. mr. beecher invited his brother ministers to join forces with him and help him conduct the opera house meetings. they declined with great unanimity. in this they were wrong. since they did not approve of those meetings, it was a duty they owed to their consciences and their god to contrive their discontinuance. they knew this. they felt it. yet they turned coldly away and refused to help at those meetings, when they well knew that their help, earnestly and persistently given, was able to kill any great religious enterprise that ever was conceived of. the ministers refused, and the calamitous meetings at the opera house continued; and not only continued, but grew in interest and importance, and sapped of their congregations churches where the gospel was preached with that sweet monotonous tranquillity and that impenetrable profundity which stir up such consternation in the strongholds of sin. it is a pity to have to record here that one clergyman refused to preach at the opera house at mr. beecher's request, even when that incendiary was sick and disabled; and if that man's conscience justifies him in that refusal i do not. under the plea of charity for a sick brother he could have preached to that opera house multitude a sermon that would have done incalculable damage to the opera house experiment. and he need not have been particular about the sermon he chose, either. he could have relied on any he had in his barrel. the opera house meetings went on; other congregations were thin, and grew thinner, but the opera house assemblages were vast. every sunday night, in spite of sense and reason, multitudes passed by the churches where they might have been saved, and marched deliberately to the opera house to be damned. the community talked, talked, talked. everybody discussed the fact that the ministerial union disapproved of the opera house meetings; also the fact that they disapproved of the teachings put forth there. and everybody wondered how the ministerial union could tell whether to approve or disapprove of those teachings, seeing that those clergymen had never attended an opera house meeting, and therefore didn't know what was taught there. everybody wondered over that curious question, and they had to take it out in wondering. mr. beecher asked the ministerial union to state their objections to the opera house matter. they could not--at least they did not. he said to them that if they would come squarely out and tell him that they desired the discontinuance of those meetings he would discontinue them. they declined to do that. why should they have declined? they had no right to decline, and no excuse to decline, if they honestly believed that those meetings interfered in the slightest degree with the best interests of religion. (that is a proposition which the profoundest head among them cannot get around.) but the opera house meetings went on. that was the mischief of it. and so, one monday morning, when mr. b. appeared at the usual ministers' meeting, his brother clergymen desired him to come there no more. he asked why. they gave no reason. they simply declined to have his company longer. mr. b. said he could not accept of this execution without a trial, and since he loved them and had nothing against them he must insist upon meeting with them in the future just the same as ever. and so, after that, they met in secret, and thus got rid of this man's importunate affection. the ministerial union had ruled out beecher--a point gained. he would get up an excitement about it in public. but that was a miscalculation. he never mentioned it. they waited and waited for the grand crash, but it never came. after all their labor-pains, their ministerial mountain had brought forth only a mouse--and a still-born one at that. beecher had not told on them; beecher malignantly persisted in not telling on them. the opportunity was slipping away. alas, for the humiliation of it, they had to come out and tell it themselves! and after all, their bombshell did not hurt anybody when they did explode it. they had ceased to be responsible to god for beecher, and yet nobody seemed paralyzed about it. somehow, it was not even of sufficient importance, apparently, to get into the papers, though even the poor little facts that smith has bought a trotting team and alderman jones's child has the measles are chronicled there with avidity. something must be done. as the ministerial union had told about their desolating action, when nobody else considered it of enough importance to tell, they would also publish it, now that the reporters failed to see anything in it important enough to print. and so they startled the entire religious world no doubt by solemnly printing in the evangelist the paragraph which heads this article. they have got their excommunication-bull started at last. it is going along quite lively now, and making considerable stir, let us hope. they even know it in podunk, wherever that may be. it excited a two-line paragraph there. happy, happy world, that knows at last that a little congress of congregationless clergymen of whom it had never heard before have crushed a famous beecher, and reduced his audiences from fifteen hundred down to fourteen hundred and seventy-five at one fell blow! happy, happy world, that knows at last that these obscure innocents are no longer responsible for the blemishless teachings, the power, the pathos, the logic, and the other and manifold intellectual pyrotechnics that seduce, but to damn, the opera house assemblages every sunday night in elmira! and miserable, o thrice miserable beecher! for the ministerial union of elmira will never, no, never more be responsible to god for his shortcomings. (excuse these tears.) (for the protection of a man who is uniformly charged with all the newspaper deviltry that sees the light in elmira journals, i take this opportunity of stating, under oath, duly subscribed before a magistrate, that mr. beecher did not write this article. and further still, that he did not inspire it. and further still, the ministerial union of elmira did not write it. and finally, the ministerial union did not ask me to write it. no, i have taken up this cudgel in defense of the ministerial union of elmira solely from a love of justice. without solicitation, i have constituted myself the champion of the ministerial union of elmira, and it shall be a labor of love with me to conduct their side of a quarrel in print for them whenever they desire me to do it; or if they are busy, and have not the time to ask me, i will cheerfully do it anyhow. in closing this i must remark that if any question the right of the clergymen of elmira to turn mr. beecher out of the ministerial union, to such i answer that mr. beecher recreated that institution after it had been dead for many years, and invited those gentlemen to come into it, which they did, and so of course they have a right to turn him out if they want to. the difference between beecher and the man who put an adder in his bosom is, that beecher put in more adders than he did, and consequently had a proportionately livelier time of it when they got warmed up.) cheerfully, s'cat. appendix j the indignity put upon the remains of george holland by the rev. mr. sabine. (see chapter lxxvii) what a ludicrous satire it was upon christian charity!--even upon the vague, theoretical idea of it which doubtless this small saint mouths from his own pulpit every sunday. contemplate this freak of nature, and think what a cardiff giant of self-righteousness is crowded into his pigmy skin. if we probe, and dissect; and lay open this diseased, this cancerous piety of his, we are forced to the conviction that it is the production of an impression on his part that his guild do about all the good that is done on the earth, and hence are better than common clay --hence are competent to say to such as george holland, "you are unworthy; you are a play-actor, and consequently a sinner; i cannot take the responsibility of recommending you to the mercy of heaven." it must have had its origin in that impression, else he would have thought, "we are all instruments for the carrying out of god's purposes; it is not for me to pass judgment upon your appointed share of the work, or to praise or to revile it; i have divine authority for it that we are all sinners, and therefore it is not for me to discriminate and say we will supplicate for this sinner, for he was a merchant prince or a banker, but we will beseech no forgiveness for this other one, for he was a play-actor." it surely requires the furthest possible reach of self-righteousness to enable a man to lift his scornful nose in the air and turn his back upon so poor and pitiable a thing as a dead stranger come to beg the last kindness that humanity can do in its behalf. this creature has violated the letter of the gospel, and judged george holland--not george holland, either, but his profession through him. then it is, in a measure, fair that we judge this creature's guild through him. in effect he has said, "we are the salt of the earth; we do all the good work that is done; to learn how to be good and do good men must come to us; actors and such are obstacles to moral progress." pray look at the thing reasonably a moment, laying aside all biases of education and custom. if a common public impression is fair evidence of a thing then this minister's legitimate, recognized, and acceptable business is to tell people calmly, coldly, and in stiff, written sentences, from the pulpit, to go and do right, be just, be merciful, be charitable. and his congregation forget it all between church and home. but for fifty years it was george holland's business on the stage to make his audience go and do right, and be just, merciful, and charitable--because by his living, breathing, feeling pictures he showed them what it was to do these things, and how to do them, and how instant and ample was the reward! is it not a singular teacher of men, this reverend gentleman who is so poorly informed himself as to put the whole stage under ban, and say, "i do not think it teaches moral lessons"? where was ever a sermon preached that could make filial ingratitude so hateful to men as the sinful play of "king lear"? or where was there ever a sermon that could so convince men of the wrong and the cruelty of harboring a pampered and unanalyzed jealousy as the sinful play of "othello"? and where are there ten preachers who can stand in the pulpit preaching heroism, unselfish devotion, and lofty patriotism, and hold their own against any one of five hundred william tells that can be raised upon five hundred stages in the land at a day's notice? it is almost fair and just to aver (although it is profanity) that nine-tenths of all the kindness and forbearance and christian charity and generosity in the hearts of the american people today got there by being filtered down from their fountain-head, the gospel of christ, through dramas and tragedies and comedies on the stage, and through the despised novel and the christmas story, and through the thousand and one lessons, suggestions, and narratives of generous deeds that stir the pulses, and exalt and augment the nobility of the nation day by day from the teeming columns of ten thousand newspapers, and not from the drowsy pulpit. all that is great and good in our particular civilization came straight from the hand of jesus christ, and many creatures, and of divers sorts, were doubtless appointed to disseminate it; and let us believe that this seed and the result are the main thing, and not the cut of the sower's garment; and that whosoever, in his way and according to his opportunity, sows the one and produces the other, has done high service and worthy. and further, let us try with all our strength to believe that whenever old simple-hearted george holland sowed this seed, and reared his crop of broader charities and better impulses in men's hearts, it was just as acceptable before the throne as if the seed had been scattered in vapid platitudes from the pulpit of the ineffable sabine himself. am i saying that the pulpit does not do its share toward disseminating the marrow, the meat of the gospel of christ? (for we are not talking of ceremonies and wire-drawn creeds now, but the living heart and soul of what is pretty often only a specter.) no, i am not saying that. the pulpit teaches assemblages of people twice a week nearly two hours altogether--and does what it can in that time. the theater teaches large audiences seven times a week-- or hours altogether--and the novels and newspapers plead, and argue, and illustrate, stir, move, thrill, thunder, urge, persuade, and supplicate, at the feet of millions and millions of people every single day, and all day long and far into the night; and so these vast agencies till nine-tenths of the vineyard, and the pulpit tills the other tenth. yet now and then some complacent blind idiot says, "you unanointed are coarse clay and useless; you are not as we, the regenerators of the world; go, bury yourselves elsewhere, for we cannot take the responsibility of recommending idlers and sinners to the yearning mercy of heaven." how does a soul like that stay in a carcass without getting mixed with the secretions and sweated out through the pores? think of this insect condemning the whole theatrical service as a disseminator of bad morals because it has black crooks in it; forgetting that if that were sufficient ground people would condemn the pulpit because it had crooks and kallochs and sabines in it! no, i am not trying to rob the pulpit of any atom of its full share and credit in the work of disseminating the meat and marrow of the gospel of christ; but i am trying to get a moment's hearing for worthy agencies in the same work, that with overwrought modesty seldom or never claim a recognition of their great services. i am aware that the pulpit does its excellent one-tenth (and credits itself with it now and then, though most of the time a press of business causes it to forget it); i am aware that in its honest and well-meaning way it bores the people with uninflammable truisms about doing good; bores them with correct compositions on charity; bores them, chloroforms them, stupefies them with argumentative mercy without a flaw in the grammar or an emotion which the minister could put in in the right place if he turned his back and took his finger off the manuscript. and in doing these things the pulpit is doing its duty, and let us believe that it is likewise doing its best, and doing it in the most harmless and respectable way. and so i have said, and shall keep on saying, let us give the pulpit its full share of credit in elevating and ennobling the people; but when a pulpit takes to itself authority to pass judgment upon the work and worth of just as legitimate an instrument of god as itself, who spent a long life preaching from the stage the selfsame gospel without the alteration of a single sentiment or a single axiom of right, it is fair and just that somebody who believes that actors were made for a high and good purpose, and that they accomplish the object of their creation and accomplish it well, should protest. and having protested, it is also fair and just--being driven to it, as it were--to whisper to the sabine pattern of clergyman, under the breath, a simple, instructive truth, and say, "ministers are not the only servants of god upon earth, nor his most efficient ones, either, by a very, very long distance!" sensible ministers already know this, and it may do the other kind good to find it out. but to cease teaching and go back to the beginning again, was it not pitiable--that spectacle? honored and honorable old george holland, whose theatrical ministry had for fifty years softened hard hearts, bred generosity in cold ones, kindled emotion in dead ones, uplifted base ones, broadened bigoted ones, and made many and many a stricken one glad and filled it brimful of gratitude, figuratively spit upon in his unoffending coffin by this crawling, slimy, sanctimonious, self-righteous reptile! appendix k a substitute for ruloff have we a sidney carton among us? (see chapter lxxxii) to editor of 'tribune'. sir,--i believe in capital punishment. i believe that when a murder has been done it should be answered for with blood. i have all my life been taught to feel this way, and the fetters of education are strong. the fact that the death--law is rendered almost inoperative by its very severity does not alter my belief in its righteousness. the fact that in england the proportion of executions to condemnations is one to sixteen, and in this country only one to twenty-two, and in france only one to thirty-eight, does not shake my steadfast confidence in the propriety of retaining the death-penalty. it is better to hang one murderer in sixteen, twenty-two, thirty-eight than not to hang any at all. feeling as i do, i am not sorry that ruloff is to be hanged, but i am sincerely sorry that he himself has made it necessary that his vast capabilities for usefulness should be lost to the world. in this, mine and the public's is a common regret. for it is plain that in the person of ruloff one of the most marvelous of intellects that any age has produced is about to be sacrificed, and that, too, while half the mystery of its strange powers is yet a secret. here is a man who has never entered the doors of a college or a university, and yet by the sheer might of his innate gifts has made himself such a colossus in abstruse learning that the ablest of our scholars are but pigmies in his presence. by the evidence of professor mather, mr. surbridge, mr. richmond, and other men qualified to testify, this man is as familiar with the broad domain of philology as common men are with the passing events of the day. his memory has such a limitless grasp that he is able to quote sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, chapter after chapter, from a gnarled and knotty ancient literature that ordinary scholars are capable of achieving little more than a bowing acquaintance with. but his memory is the least of his great endowments. by the testimony of the gentlemen above referred to he is able to critically analyze the works of the old masters of literature, and while pointing out the beauties of the originals with a pure and discriminating taste is as quick to detect the defects of the accepted translations; and in the latter case, if exceptions be taken to his judgment, he straightway opens up the quarries of his exhaustless knowledge, and builds a very chinese wall of evidence around his position. every learned man who enters ruloff's presence leaves it amazed and confounded by his prodigious capabilities and attainments. one scholar said he did not believe that in matters of subtle analysis, vast knowledge in his peculiar field of research, comprehensive grasp of subject, and serene kingship over its limitless and bewildering details, any land or any era of modern times had given birth to ruloff's intellectual equal. what miracles this murderer might have wrought, and what luster he might have shed upon his country, if he had not put a forfeit upon his life so foolishly! but what if the law could be satisfied, and the gifted criminal still be saved. if a life be offered up on the gallows to atone for the murder ruloff did, will that suffice? if so, give me the proofs, for in all earnestness and truth i aver that in such a case i will instantly bring forward a man who, in the interests of learning and science, will take ruloff's crime upon himself, and submit to be hanged in ruloff's place. i can, and will do this thing; and i propose this matter, and make this offer in good faith. you know me, and know my address. samuel langhorne. april , . appendix l about london address at a dinner given by the savage club, london, september , . (see chapter lxxxvii) reported by moncure d. conway in the cincinnati commercial it affords me sincere pleasure to meet this distinguished club, a club which has extended its hospitalities and its cordial welcome to so many of my countrymen. i hope [and here the speaker's voice became low and fluttering] you will excuse these clothes. i am going to the theater; that will explain these clothes. i have other clothes than these. judging human nature by what i have seen of it, i suppose that the customary thing for a stranger to do when he stands here is to make a pun on the name of this club, under the impression, of course, that he is the first man that that idea has occurred to. it is a credit to our human nature, not a blemish upon it; for it shows that underlying all our depravity (and god knows and you know we are depraved enough) and all our sophistication, and untarnished by them, there is a sweet germ of innocence and simplicity still. when a stranger says to me, with a glow of inspiration in his eye, some gentle, innocuous little thing about "twain and one flesh" and all that sort of thing, i don't try to crush that man into the earth--no. i feel like saying, "let me take you by the hand, sir; let me embrace you; i have not heard that pun for weeks." we will deal in palpable puns. we will call parties named king "your majesty" and we will say to the smiths that we think we have heard that name before somewhere. such is human nature. we cannot alter this. it is god that made us so for some good and wise purpose. let us not repine. but though i may seem strange, may seem eccentric, i mean to refrain from punning upon the name of this club, though i could make a very good one if i had time to think about it--a week. i cannot express to you what entire enjoyment i find in this first visit to this prodigious metropolis of yours. its wonders seem to me to be limitless. i go about as in a dream--as in a realm of enchantment--where many things are rare and beautiful, and all things are strange and marvelous. hour after hour i stand--i stand spellbound, as it were-and gaze upon the statuary in leicester square. [leicester square being a horrible chaos, with the relic of an equestrian statue in the center, the king being headless and limbless, and the horse in little better condition.] i visit the mortuary effigies of noble old henry viii., and judge jeffreys, and the preserved gorilla, and try to make up my mind which of my ancestors i admire the most. i go to that matchless hyde park and drive all around it, and then i start to enter it at the marble arch--and am induced to "change my mind." [cabs are not permitted in hyde park--nothing less aristocratic than a private carriage.] it is a great benefaction--is hyde park. there, in his hansom cab, the invalid can go--the poor, sad child of misfortune--and insert his nose between the railings, and breathe the pure, health-giving air of the country and of heaven. and if he is a swell invalid who isn't obliged to depend upon parks for his country air he can drive inside--if he owns his vehicle. i drive round and round hyde park and the more i see of the edges of it the more grateful i am that the margin is extensive. and i have been to the zoological gardens. what a wonderful place that is! i have never seen such a curious and interesting variety of wild-animals in any garden before--except mabille. i never believed before there were so many different kinds of animals in the world as you can find there--and i don't believe it yet. i have been to the british museum. i would advise you to drop in there some time when you have nothing to do for--five minutes--if you have never been there. it seems to me the noblest monument this nation has, yet erected to her greatness. i say to her, our greatness--as a nation. true, she has built other monuments, and stately ones, as well; but these she has uplifted in honor of two or three colossal demigods who have stalked across the world's stage, destroying tyrants and delivering nations, and whose prodigies will still live in the memories of men ages after their monuments shall have crumbled to dust--i refer to the wellington and nelson monuments, and--the albert memorial. [sarcasm. the albert memorial is the finest monument in the world, and celebrates the existence of as commonplace a person as good luck ever lifted out of obscurity.] the library at the british museum i find particularly astounding. i have read there hours together, and hardly made an impression on it. i revere that library. it is the author's friend. i don't care how mean a book is, it always takes one copy. [a copy of every book printed in great britain must by law be sent to the british museum, a law much complained of by publishers.] and then every day that author goes there to gaze at that book, and is encouraged to go on in the good work. and what a touching sight it is of a saturday afternoon to see the poor, careworn clergymen gathered together in that vast reading-room cabbaging sermons for sunday! you will pardon my referring to these things. everything in this monster city interests me, and i cannot keep from talking, even at the risk of being instructive. people here seem always to express distances by parables. to a stranger it is just a little confusing to be so parabolic--so to speak. i collar a citizen, and i think i am going to get some valuable information out of him. i ask him how far it is to birmingham, and he says it is twenty-one shillings and sixpence. now we know that doesn't help a man who is trying to learn. i find myself down-town somewhere, and i want to get some sort of idea where i am--being usually lost when alone--and i stop a citizen and say, "how far is it to charing cross?" "shilling fare in a cab," and off he goes. i suppose if i were to ask a londoner how far it is from the sublime to the ridiculous he would try to express it in a coin. but i am trespassing upon your time with these geological statistics and historical reflections. i will not longer keep you from your orgies. 'tis a real pleasure for me to be here, and i thank you for it. the name of the savage club is associated in my mind with the kindly interest and the friendly offices which you lavished upon an old friend of mine who came among you a stranger, and you opened your english hearts to him and gave him a welcome and a home--artemus ward. asking that you will join me, i give you his memory. appendix m letter written to mrs. clemens from boston, november, , prophesying a monarchy in sixty-one years. (see chapter xcvii) boston, november , . dear livy,--you observe i still call this beloved old place by the name it had when i was young. limerick! it is enough to make a body sick. the gentlemen-in-waiting stare to see me sit here telegraphing this letter to you, and no doubt they are smiling in their sleeves. but let them! the slow old fashions are good enough for me, thank god, and i will none other. when i see one of these modern fools sit absorbed, holding the end of a telegraph wire in his hand, and reflect that a thousand miles away there is another fool hitched to the other end of it, it makes me frantic with rage; and then i am more implacably fixed and resolved than ever to continue taking twenty minutes to telegraph you what i might communicate in ten seconds by the new way if i would so debase myself. and when i see a whole silent, solemn drawing-room full of idiots sitting with their hands on each other's foreheads "communing" i tug the white hairs from my head and curse till my asthma brings me the blessed relief of suffocation. in our old day such a gathering talked pure drivel and "rot," mostly, but better that, a thousand times, than these dreary conversational funerals that oppress our spirits in this mad generation. it is sixty years since i was here before. i walked hither then with my precious old friend. it seems incredible now that we did it in two days, but such is my recollection. i no longer mention that we walked back in a single day, it makes me so furious to see doubt in the face of the hearer. men were men in those old times. think of one of the puerile organisms in this effeminate age attempting such a feat. my air-ship was delayed by a collision with a fellow from china loaded with the usual cargo of jabbering, copper-colored missionaries, and so i was nearly an hour on my journey. but by the goodness of god thirteen of the missionaries were crippled and several killed, so i was content to lose the time. i love to lose time anyway because it brings soothing reminiscences of the creeping railroad days of old, now lost to us forever. our game was neatly played, and successfully. none expected us, of course. you should have seen the guards at the ducal palace stare when i said, "announce his grace the archbishop of dublin and the right honorable the earl of hartford." arrived within, we were all eyes to see the duke of cambridge and his duchess, wondering if we might remember their faces and they ours. in a moment they came tottering in; he, bent and withered and bald; she, blooming with wholesome old age. he peered through his glasses a moment, then screeched in a reedy voice, "come to my arms! away with titles--i'll know ye by no names but twain and twichell!" then fell he on our necks and jammed his trumpet in his ear, the which we filled with shoutings to this effect: "god bless you, old howells, what is left of you!" we talked late that night--none of your silent idiot "communings" for us --of the olden time. we rolled a stream of ancient anecdotes over our tongues and drank till the lord archbishop grew so mellow in the mellow past that dublin ceased to be dublin to him, and resumed its sweeter, forgotten name of new york. in truth he almost got back into his ancient religion, too, good jesuit as he has always been since o'mulligan the first established that faith in the empire. and we canvassed everybody. bailey aldrich, marquis of ponkapog, came in, got nobly drunk, and told us all about how poor osgood lost his earldom and was hanged for conspiring against the second emperor; but he didn't mention how near he himself came to being hanged, too, for engaging in the same enterprise. he was as chaffy as he was sixty years ago, too, and swore the archbishop and i never walked to boston; but there was never a day that ponkapog wouldn't lie, so be it by the grace of god he got the opportunity. the lord high admiral came in, a hale gentleman close upon seventy and bronzed by the suns and storms of many climes and scarred by the wounds got in many battles, and i told him how i had seen him sit in a high-chair and eat fruit and cakes and answer to the name of johnny. his granddaughter (the eldest) is but lately married to the youngest of the grand dukes, and so who knows but a day may come when the blood of the howellses may reign in the land? i must not forget to say, while i think of it, that your new false teeth are done, my dear, and your wig. keep your head well bundled with a shawl till the latter comes, and so cheat your persecuting neuralgias and rheumatisms. would you believe it?--the duchess of cambridge is deafer than you--deafer than her husband. they call her to breakfast with a salvo of artillery; and usually when it thunders she looks up expectantly and says, "come in." but she has become subdued and gentle with age and never destroys the furniture now, except when uncommonly vexed. god knows, my dear, it would be a happy thing if you and old lady harmony would imitate this spirit. but indeed the older you grow the less secure becomes the furniture. when i throw chairs through the window i have sufficient reason to back it. but you --you are but a creature of passion. the monument to the author of 'gloverson and his silent partners' is finished.--[ralph keeler. see chap. lxxxiii.]--it is the stateliest and the costliest ever erected to the memory of any man. this noble classic has now been translated into all the languages of the earth and is adored by all nations and known to all creatures. yet i have conversed as familiarly with the author of it as i do with my own great-grandchildren. i wish you could see old cambridge and ponkapog. i love them as dearly as ever, but privately, my dear, they are not much improvement on idiots. it is melancholy to hear them jabber over the same pointless anecdotes three and four times of an evening, forgetting that they had jabbered them over three or four times the evening before. ponkapog still writes poetry, but the old-time fire has mostly gone out of it. perhaps his best effort of late years is this: o soul, soul, soul of mine! soul, soul, soul of throe! thy soul, my soul, two souls entwine, and sing thy lauds in crystal wine! this he goes about repeating to everybody, daily and nightly, insomuch that he is become a sore affliction to all that know him. but i must desist. there are draughts here everywhere and my gout is something frightful. my left foot hath resemblance to a snuff-bladder. god be with you. hartford. these to lady hartford, in the earldom of hartford, in the upper portion of the city of dublin. appendix n mark twain and copyright i petition concerning copyright ( ) (see chapter cii) to the senate and house of representatives of the united states in congress assembled. we, your petitioners, do respectfully represent as follows, viz.: that justice, plain and simple, is a thing which right-feeling men stand ready at all times to accord to brothers and strangers alike. all such men will concede that it is but plain, simple justice that american authors should be protected by copyright in europe; also, that european authors should be protected by copyright here. both divisions of this proposition being true, it behooves our government to concern itself with that division of it which comes peculiarly within its province--viz., the latter moiety--and to grant to foreign authors with all convenient despatch a full and effective copyright in america without marring the grace of the act by stopping to inquire whether a similar justice will be done our own authors by foreign governments. if it were even known that those governments would not extend this justice to us it would still not justify us in withholding this manifest right from their authors. if a thing is right it ought to be done--the thing called "expediency" or "policy" has no concern with such a matter. and we desire to repeat, with all respect, that it is not a grace or a privilege we ask for our foreign brethren, but a right--a right received from god, and only denied them by man. we hold no ownership in these authors, and when we take their work from them, as at present, without their consent, it is robbery. the fact that the handiwork of our own authors is seized in the same way in foreign lands neither excuses nor mitigates our sin. with your permission we will say here, over our signatures, and earnestly and sincerely, that we very greatly desire that you shall grant a full copyright to foreign authors (the copyright fee for the entry in the office of the congressional librarian to be the same as we pay ourselves), and we also as greatly desire that this grant shall be made without a single hampering stipulation that american authors shall receive in turn an advantage of any kind from foreign governments. since no author who was applied to hesitated for a moment to append his signature to this petition we are satisfied that if time had permitted we could have procured the signature of every writer in the united states, great and small, obscure or famous. as it is, the list comprises the names of about all our writers whose works have at present a european market, and who are therefore chiefly concerned in this matter. no objection to our proposition can come from any reputable publisher among us--or does come from such a quarter, as the appended signatures of our greatest publishing firms will attest. a european copyright here would be a manifest advantage to them. as the matter stands now the moment they have thoroughly advertised a desirable foreign book, and thus at great expense aroused public interest in it, some small-spirited speculator (who has lain still in his kennel and spent nothing) rushes the same book on the market and robs the respectable publisher of half the gains. then, since neither our authors nor the decent among our publishing firms will object to granting an american copyright to foreign authors and artists, who can there be to object? surely nobody whose protest is entitled to any weight. trusting in the righteousness of our cause we, your petitioners, will ever pray, etc. with great respect, your ob't serv'ts. circular to american authors and publishers dear sir,--we believe that you will recognize the justice and the righteousness of the thing we desire to accomplish through the accompanying petition. and we believe that you will be willing that our country shall be the first in the world to grant to all authors alike the free exercise of their manifest right to do as they please with the fruit of their own labor without inquiring what flag they live under. if the sentiments of the petition meet your views, will you do us the favor to sign it and forward it by post at your earliest convenience to our secretary? }committee address -------------------secretary of the committee. ii communications supposed to have been written by the tsar of russia and the sultan of turkey to mark twain on the subject of international copyright, about . st. petersburg, february. col. mark twain, washington. your cablegram received. it should have been transmitted through my minister, but let that pass. i am opposed to international copyright. at present american literature is harmless here because we doctor it in such a way as to make it approve the various beneficent devices which we use to keep our people favorable to fetters as jewelry and pleased with siberia as a summer resort. but your bill would spoil this. we should be obliged to let you say your say in your own way. 'voila'! my empire would be a republic in five years and i should be sampling siberia myself. if you should run across mr. kennan--[george kennan, who had graphically pictured the fearful conditions of siberian exile.]--please ask him to come over and give some readings. i will take good care of him. alexander iii. --collect. constantinople, february. dr. mark twain, washington. great scott, no! by the beard of the prophet, no! how can you ask such a thing of me? i am a man of family. i cannot take chances, like other people. i cannot let a literature come in here which teaches that a man's wife is as good as the man himself. such a doctrine cannot do any particular harm, of course, where the man has only one wife, for then it is a dead-level between them, and there is no humiliating inequality, and no resulting disorder; but you take an extremely married person, like me, and go to teaching that his wife is times as good as he is, and what's hell to that harem, dear friend? i never saw such a fool as you. do not mind that expression; i already regret it, and would replace it with a softer one if i could do it without debauching the truth. i beseech you, do not pass that bill. roberts college is quite all the american product we can stand just now. on top of that, do you want to send us a flood of freedom-shrieking literature which we can't edit the poison out of, but must let it go among our people just as it is? my friend, we should be a republic inside of ten years. abdul ii. iii mark twain's last suggestion on copyright. a memorial respectfully tendered to the members of the senate and the house of representatives. (prepared early in at the suggestion of mr. champ clack but not offered. a bill adding fourteen years to the copyright period was passed about this time.) the policy of congress:--nineteen or twenty years ago james russell lowell, george haven putnam, and the under signed appeared before the senate committee on patents in the interest of copyright. up to that time, as explained by senator platt, of connecticut, the policy of congress had been to limit the life of a copyright by a term of years, with one definite end in view, and only one--to wit, that after an author had been permitted to enjoy for a reasonable length of time the income from literary property created by his hand and brain the property should then be transferred "to the public" as a free gift. that is still the policy of congress to-day. the purpose in view:--the purpose in view was clear: to so reduce the price of the book as to bring it within the reach of all purses, and spread it among the millions who had not been able to buy it while it was still under the protection of copyright. the purpose defeated:--this purpose has always been defeated. that is to say, that while the death of a copyright has sometimes reduced the price of a book by a half for a while, and in some cases by even more, it has never reduced it vastly, nor accomplished any reduction that was permanent and secure. the reason:--the reason is simple: congress has never made a reduction compulsory. congress was convinced that the removal of the author's royalty and the book's consequent (or at least probable) dispersal among several competing publishers would make the book cheap by force of the competition. it was an error. it has not turned out so. the reason is, a publisher cannot find profit in an exceedingly cheap edition if he must divide the market with competitors. proposed remedy:--the natural remedy would seem to be, amended law requiring the issue of cheap editions. copyright extension:--i think the remedy could be accomplished in the following way, without injury to author or publisher, and with extreme advantage to the public: by an amendment to the existing law providing as follows--to wit: that at any time between the beginning of a book's forty-first year and the ending of its forty-second the owner of the copyright may extend its life thirty years by issuing and placing on sale an edition of the book at one-tenth the price of the cheapest edition hitherto issued at any time during the ten immediately preceding years. this extension to lapse and become null and void if at any time during the thirty years he shall fail during the space of three consecutive months to furnish the ten per cent. book upon demand of any person or persons desiring to buy it. the result:--the result would be that no american classic enjoying the thirty-year extension would ever be out of the reach of any american purse, let its uncompulsory price be what it might. he would get a two-dollar book for cents, and he could get none but copyright-expired classics at any such rate. the final result:--at the end of the thirty-year extension the copyright would again die, and the price would again advance. this by a natural law, the excessively cheap edition no longer carrying with it an advantage to any publisher. reconstruction of the present law not necessary:--a clause of the suggested amendment could read about as follows, and would obviate the necessity of taking the present law to pieces and building it over again: all books and all articles enjoying forty-two years copyright-life under the present law shall be admitted to the privilege of the thirty-year extension upon complying with the condition requiring the producing and placing upon permanent sale of one grade or form of said book or article at a price of per cent. below the cheapest rate at which said book or article had been placed upon the market at any time during the immediately preceding ten years. remarks if the suggested amendment shall meet with the favor of the present congress and become law--and i hope it will--i shall have personal experience of its effects very soon. next year, in fact, in the person of my first book, 'the innocents abroad'. for its forty-two-year copyright-life will then cease and its thirty-year extension begin--and with the latter the permanent low-rate edition. at present the highest price of the book is eight dollars, and its lowest price three dollars per copy. thus the permanent low rate will be thirty cents per copy. a sweeping reduction like this is what congress from the beginning has desired to achieve, but has not been able to accomplish because no inducement was offered to publishers to run the risk. respectfully submitted, s. l. clemens. (a full and interesting elucidation of mark twain's views on copyright may be found in an article entitled "concerning copyright," published in the north american review for january, .) appendix o (see chapter cxiv) address of samuel l. clemens (mark twain) from a report of the dinner given by the publishers of the atlantic monthly in honor of the seventieth anniversary of the birth of john greenleaf whittier, at the hotel brunswick, boston, december , , as published in the boston evening transcript, december , . mr. chairman, this is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging up of pleasant reminiscences concerning literary folk, therefore i will drop lightly into history myself. standing here on the shore of the atlantic, and contemplating certain of its largest literary billows, i am reminded of a thing which happened to me thirteen years ago, when i had just succeeded in stirring up a little nevadian literary puddle myself, whose spume-flakes were beginning to blow thinly california-ward. i started an inspection tramp through the southern mines of california. i was callow and conceited, and i resolved to try the virtue of my 'nom de guerre'. i very soon had an opportunity. i knocked at a miner's lonely log cabin in the foothills of the sierras just at nightfall. it was snowing at the time. a jaded, melancholy man of fifty, barefooted, opened the door to me. when he heard my 'nom de guerre' he looked more dejected than before. he let me in-pretty reluctantly, i thought--and after the customary bacon and beans, black coffee and hot whisky, i took a pipe. this sorrowful man had not said three words up to this time. now he spoke up and said, in the voice of one who is secretly suffering, "you're the fourth--i'm going to move." "the fourth what?" said i. "the fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours--i'm going to move." "you don't tell me!" said i; "who were the others?" "mr. longfellow. mr. emerson, and mr. oliver wendell holmes--consound the lot!" you can easily believe i was interested. i supplicated--three hot whiskies did the rest--and finally the melancholy miner began. said he: "they came here just at dark yesterday evening, and i let them in, of course. said they were going to the yosemite. they were a rough lot, but that's nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot. mr. emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed. mr. holmes was as fat as a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundered, and had double chins all the way down to his stomach. mr. longfellow was built like a prize-fighter. his head was cropped and bristly, like as if he had a wig made of hair-brushes. his nose lay straight down in his face, like a finger with the end joint tilted up. they had been drinking, i could see that. and what queer talk they used! mr. holmes inspected this cabin, then he took me by the buttonhole and says he: "'through the deep caves of thought i hear a voice that sings, "build thee more stately mansions, o my soul!"' "says i, 'i can't afford it, mr. holmes, and moreover i don't want to.' blamed if i liked it pretty well, either, coming from a stranger that way. however, i started to get out my bacon and beans when mr. emerson came and looked on awhile, and then he takes me aside by the buttonhole and says: "'give me agates for my meat; give me cantharids to eat; from air and ocean bring me foods, from all zones and altitudes.' "says i, 'mr. emerson, if you'll excuse me, this ain't no hotel.' you see, it sort of riled me--i warn't used to the ways of jittery swells. but i went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes mr. longfellow and buttonholes me and interrupts me. says he: "'honor be to mudjekeewis! you shall hear how pau-puk-keewis--' "but i broke in, and says i, 'beg your pardon, mr. longfellow, if you'll be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and let me get this grub ready, you'll do me proud.' well, sir, after they'd filled up i set out the jug. mr. holmes looks at it and then he fires up all of a sudden and yells: "'flash out a stream of blood-red wine! for i would drink to other days.' "by george, i was getting kind of worked up. i don't deny it, i was getting kind of worked up. i turns to mr. holmes and says i, 'looky here, my fat friend, i'm a-running this shanty, and if the court knows herself you'll take whisky straight or you'll go dry.' them's the very words i said to him. now i don't want to sass such famous littery people, but you see they kind of forced me. there ain't nothing onreasonable 'bout me. i don't mind a passel of guests a-treadin' on my tail three or four times, but when it comes to standing on it it's different, 'and if the court knows herself,' i says, 'you'll take whisky straight or you'll go dry.' well, between drinks they'd swell around the cabin and strike attitudes and spout; and pretty soon they got out a greasy old deck and went to playing euchre at ten cents a corner--on trust. i began to notice some pretty suspicious things. mr. emerson dealt, looked at his hand, shook his head, says: "'i am the doubter and the doubt--' and calmly bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new lay-out. says he: "'they reckon ill who leave me out; they know not well the subtle ways i keep. i pass and deal again!' hang'd if he didn't go ahead and do it, too! oh, he was a cool one! well, in about a minute things were running pretty tight, but all of a sudden i see by mr. emerson's eye he judged he had 'em. he had already corralled two tricks and each of the others one. so now he kind of lifts a little in his chair and says, "'i tire of globes and aces! too long the game is played!' and down he fetched a right bower. mr. longfellow smiles as sweet as pie and says, "'thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, for the lesson thou hast taught,' and blamed if he didn't down with another right bower! emerson claps his hand on his bowie, longfellow claps his on his revolver, and i went under a bunk. there was going to be trouble; but that monstrous holmes rose up, wobbling his double chins, and says he, 'order, gentlemen; the first man that draws i'll lay down on him and smother him!' all quiet on the potomac, you bet! "they were pretty how-come-you-so by now, and they begun to blow. emerson says, 'the noblest thing i ever wrote was "barbara frietchie."' says longfellow, 'it don't begin with my "bigelow papers."' says holmes, 'my "thanatopsis" lays over 'em both.' they mighty near ended in a fight. then they wished they had some more company, and mr. emerson pointed to me and says: "'is yonder squalid peasant all that this proud nursery could breed?' he was a-whetting his bowie on his boot--so i let it pass. well, sir, next they took it into their heads that they would like some music; so they made me stand up and sing, 'when johnny comes marching home' till i dropped--at thirteen minutes past four this morning. that's what i've been through, my friend. when i woke at seven they were leaving, thank goodness, and mr. longfellow had my only boots on and his'n under his arm. says i, 'hold on there, evangeline, what are you going to do with them?' he says, 'going to make tracks with 'em, because-- "'lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime; and, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.' "as i said, mr. twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours and i'm going to move; i ain't suited to a littery atmosphere." i said to the miner, "why, my dear sir, these were not the gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these were impostors." the miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while; then said he, "ah! impostors, were they? are you?" i did not pursue the subject, and since then i have not traveled on my 'nom de guerre' enough to hurt. such was the reminiscence i was moved to contribute, mr. chairman. in my enthusiasm i may have exaggerated the details a little, but you will easily forgive me that fault, since i believe it is the first time i have ever deflected from perpendicular fact on an occasion like this. appendix p the adam monument petition (see chapter cxxxiv) to the honorable senate and house of representatives of the united states in congress assembled. whereas, a number of citizens of the city of elmira in the state of new york having covenanted among themselves to erect in that city a monument in memory of adam, the father of mankind, being moved thereto by a sentiment of love and duty, and these having appointed the undersigned to communicate with your honorable body, we beg leave to lay before you the following facts and append to the same our humble petition. . as far as is known no monument has ever been raised in any part of the world to commemorate the services rendered to our race by this great man, whilst many men of far less note and worship have been rendered immortal by means of stately and indestructible memorials. . the common father of mankind has been suffered to lie in entire neglect, although even the father of our country has now, and has had for many years, a monument in course of construction. . no right-feeling human being can desire to see this neglect continued, but all just men, even to the farthest regions of the globe, should and will rejoice to know that he to whom we owe existence is about to have reverent and fitting recognition of his works at the hands of the people of elmira. his labors were not in behalf of one locality, but for the extension of humanity at large and the blessings which go therewith; hence all races and all colors and all religions are interested in seeing that his name and fame shall be placed beyond the reach of the blight of oblivion by a permanent and suitable monument. . it will be to the imperishable credit of the united states if this monument shall be set up within her borders; moreover, it will be a peculiar grace to the beneficiary if this testimonial of affection and gratitude shall be the gift of the youngest of the nations that have sprung from his loins after , years of unappreciation on the part of its elders. . the idea of this sacred enterprise having originated in the city of elmira, she will be always grateful if the general government shall encourage her in the good work by securing to her a certain advantage through the exercise of its great authority. therefore, your petitioners beg that your honorable body will be pleased to issue a decree restricting to elmira the right to build a monument to adam and inflicting a heavy penalty upon any other community within the united states that shall propose or attempt to erect a monument or other memorial to the said adam, and to this end we will ever pray. names: ( signatures) appendix q general grant's grammar (written in . delivered at an army and navy club dinner in new york city) lately a great and honored author, matthew arnold, has been finding fault with general grant's english. that would be fair enough, maybe, if the examples of imperfect english averaged more instances to the page in general grant's book than they do in arnold's criticism on the book--but they do not. it would be fair enough, maybe, if such instances were commoner in general grant's book than they are in the works of the average standard author--but they are not. in fact, general grant's derelictions in the matter of grammar and construction are not more frequent than such derelictions in the works of a majority of the professional authors of our time, and of all previous times--authors as exclusively and painstakingly trained to the literary trade as was general grant to the trade of war. this is not a random statement: it is a fact, and easily demonstrable. i have a book at home called modern english literature: its blemishes and defects, by henry h. breen, a countryman of mr. arnold. in it i find examples of bad grammar and slovenly english from the pens of sydney smith, sheridan, hallam, whately, carlyle, disraeli, allison, junius, blair, macaulay, shakespeare, milton, gibbon, southey, lamb, landor, smollett, walpole, walker (of the dictionary), christopher north, kirk white, benjamin franklin, sir walter scott, and mr. lindley murray (who made the grammar). in mr. arnold's criticism on general grant's book we find two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly english, enough of them to entitle him to a lofty place in the illustrious list of delinquents just named. the following passage all by itself ought to elect him: "meade suggested to grant that he might wish to have immediately under him sherman, who had been serving with grant in the west. he begged him not to hesitate if he thought it for the good of the service. grant assured him that he had not thought of moving him, and in his memoirs, after relating what had passed, he adds, etc." to read that passage a couple of times would make a man dizzy; to read it four times would make him drunk. mr. breen makes this discriminating remark: "to suppose that because a man is a poet or a historian he must be correct in his grammar is to suppose that an architect must be a joiner, or a physician a compounder of medicine." people may hunt out what microscopic motes they please, but, after all, the fact remains, and cannot be dislodged, that general grant's book is a great and, in its peculiar department, a unique and unapproachable literary masterpiece. in their line there is no higher literature than those modest, simple memoirs. their style is at least flawless and no man could improve upon it, and great books are weighed and measured by their style and matter, and not by the trimmings and shadings of their grammar. there is that about the sun which makes us forget his spots, and when we think of general grant our pulses quicken and his grammar vanishes; we only remember that this is the simple soldier who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools and put into them a something which will still bring to american ears, as long as america shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts. what do we care for grammar when we think of those thunderous phrases, "unconditional and immediate surrender," "i propose to move immediately upon your works," "i propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." mr. arnold would doubtless claim that that last phrase is not strictly grammatical, and yet it did certainly wake up this nation as a hundred million tons of a-number-one fourth-proof, hard-boiled, hide-bound grammar from another mouth could not have done. and finally we have that gentler phrase, that one which shows you another true side of the man, shows you that in his soldier heart there was room for other than gory war mottoes and in his tongue the gift to fitly phrase them: "let us have peace." appendix r party allegiance. being a portion of a paper on "consistency," read before the monday evening club in . (see chapter clxiii) . . . i have referred to the fact that when a man retires from his political party he is a traitor--that he is so pronounced in plain language. that is bold; so bold as to deceive many into the fancy that it is true. desertion, treason--these are the terms applied. their military form reveals the thought in the man's mind who uses them: to him a political party is an army. well, is it? are the two things identical? do they even resemble each other? necessarily a political party is not an army of conscripts, for they are in the ranks by compulsion. then it must be a regular army or an army of volunteers. is it a regular army? no, for these enlist for a specified and well-understood term, and can retire without reproach when the term is up. is it an army of volunteers who have enlisted for the war, and may righteously be shot if they leave before the war is finished? no, it is not even an army in that sense. those fine military terms are high-sounding, empty lies, and are no more rationally applicable to a political party than they would be to an oyster-bed. the volunteer soldier comes to the recruiting office and strips himself and proves that he is so many feet high, and has sufficiently good teeth, and no fingers gone, and is sufficiently sound in body generally; he is accepted; but not until he has sworn a deep oath or made other solemn form of promise to march under, that flag until that war is done or his term of enlistment completed. what is the process when a voter joins a party? must he prove that he is sound in any way, mind or body? must he prove that he knows anything--is capable of anything--whatever? does he take an oath or make a promise of any sort?--or doesn't he leave himself entirely free? if he were informed by the political boss that if he join, it must be forever; that he must be that party's chattel and wear its brass collar the rest of his days--would not that insult him? it goes without saying. he would say some rude, unprintable thing, and turn his back on that preposterous organization. but the political boss puts no conditions upon him at all; and this volunteer makes no promises, enlists for no stated term. he has in no sense become a part of an army; he is in no way restrained of his freedom. yet he will presently find that his bosses and his newspapers have assumed just the reverse of that: that they have blandly arrogated to themselves an ironclad military authority over him; and within twelve months, if he is an average man, he will have surrendered his liberty, and will actually be silly enough to believe that he cannot leave that party, for any cause whatever, without being a shameful traitor, a deserter, a legitimately dishonored man. there you have the just measure of that freedom of conscience, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech and action which we hear so much inflated foolishness about as being the precious possession of the republic. whereas, in truth, the surest way for a man to make of himself a target for almost universal scorn, obloquy, slander, and insult is to stop twaddling about these priceless independencies and attempt to exercise one of them. if he is a preacher half his congregation will clamor for his expulsion--and will expel him, except they find it will injure real estate in the neighborhood; if he is a doctor his own dead will turn against him. i repeat that the new party-member who supposed himself independent will presently find that the party have somehow got a mortgage on his soul, and that within a year he will recognize the mortgage, deliver up his liberty, and actually believe he cannot retire from that party from any motive howsoever high and right in his own eyes without shame and dishonor. is it possible for human wickedness to invent a doctrine more infernal and poisonous than this? is there imaginable a baser servitude than it imposes? what slave is so degraded as the slave that is proud that he is a slave? what is the essential difference between a lifelong democrat and any other kind of lifelong slave? is it less humiliating to dance to the lash of one master than another? this infamous doctrine of allegiance to party plays directly into the hands of politicians of the baser sort--and doubtless for that it was borrowed--or stolen--from the monarchial system. it enables them to foist upon the country officials whom no self-respecting man would vote for if he could but come to understand that loyalty to himself is his first and highest duty, not loyalty to any party name. shall you say the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? shall you also say that it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter and become a mouthing lunatic besides? oh no, you say; it does not demand that. but what if it produce that in spite of you? there is no obligation upon a man to do things which he ought not to do when drunk, but most men will do them just the same; and so we hear no arguments about obligations in the matter--we only hear men warned to avoid the habit of drinking; get rid of the thing that can betray men into such things. this is a funny business all around. the same men who enthusiastically preach loyal consistency to church and party are always ready and willing and anxious to persuade a chinaman or an indian or a kanaka to desert his church or a fellow-american to desert his party. the man who deserts to them is all that is high and pure and beautiful--apparently; the man who deserts from them is all that is foul and despicable. this is consistency--with a capital c. with the daintiest and self-complacentest sarcasm the lifelong loyalist scoffs at the independent--or as he calls him, with cutting irony, the mugwump; makes himself too killingly funny for anything in this world about him. but--the mugwump can stand it, for there is a great history at his back; stretching down the centuries, and he comes of a mighty ancestry. he knows that in the whole history of the race of men no single great and high and beneficent thing was ever done for the souls and bodies, the hearts and the brains of the children of this world, but a mugwump started it and mugwumps carried it to victory: and their names are the stateliest in history: washington, garrison, galileo, luther, christ. loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world-end never will. appendix s original preface for "a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court" (see chapter clxxii) my object has been to group together some of the most odious laws which have had vogue in the christian countries within the past eight or ten centuries, and illustrate them by the incidents of a story. there was never a time when america applied the death-penalty to more than fourteen crimes. but england, within the memory of men still living, had in her list of crimes which were punishable by death! and yet from the beginning of our existence down to a time within the memory of babes england has distressed herself piteously over the ungentleness of our connecticut blue laws. those blue laws should have been spared english criticism for two reasons: . they were so insipidly mild, by contrast with the bloody and atrocious laws of england of the same period, as to seem characterless and colorless when one brings them into that awful presence. . the blue laws never had any existence. they were the fancy-work of an english clergyman; they were never a part of any statute-book. and yet they could have been made to serve a useful and merciful purpose; if they had been injected into the english law the dilution would have given to the whole a less lurid aspect; or, to figure the effect in another way, they would have been coca mixed into vitriol. i have drawn no laws and no illustrations from the twin civilizations of hell and russia. to have entered into that atmosphere would have defeated my purpose, which was to show a great and genuine progress in christendom in these few later generations toward mercifulness--a wide and general relaxing of the grip of the law. russia had to be left out because exile to siberia remains, and in that single punishment is gathered together and concentrated all the bitter inventions of all the black ages for the infliction of suffering upon human beings. exile for life from one's hearthstone and one's idols--this is rack, thumb-screw, the water-drop, fagot and stake, tearing asunder by horses, flaying alive--all these in one; and not compact into hours, but drawn out into years, each year a century, and the whole a mortal immortality of torture and despair. while exile to siberia remains one will be obliged to admit that there is one country in christendom where the punishments of all the ages are still preserved and still inflicted, that there is one country in christendom where no advance has been made toward modifying the medieval penalties for offenses against society and the state. appendix t a tribute to henry h. rogers (see chapter cc and earlier) april , . i owe more to henry rogers than to any other man whom i have known. he was born in fairhaven, connecticut, in , and is my junior by four years. he was graduated from the high school there in , when he was fourteen years old, and from that time forward he earned his own living, beginning at first as the bottom subordinate in the village store with hard-work privileges and a low salary. when he was twenty-four he went out to the newly discovered petroleum fields in pennsylvania and got work; then returned home, with enough money to pay passage, married a schoolmate, and took her to the oil regions. he prospered, and by and by established the standard oil trust with mr. rockefeller and others, and is still one of its managers and directors. in we fell together by accident one evening in the murray hill hotel, and our friendship began on the spot and at once. ever since then he has added my business affairs to his own and carried them through, and i have had no further trouble with them. obstructions and perplexities which would have driven me mad were simplicities to his master mind and furnished him no difficulties. he released me from my entanglements with paige and stopped that expensive outgo; when charles l. webster & company failed he saved my copyrights for mrs. clemens when she would have sacrificed them to the creditors although they were in no way entitled to them; he offered to lend me money wherewith to save the life of that worthless firm; when i started lecturing around the world to make the money to pay off the webster debts he spent more than a year trying to reconcile the differences between harper & brothers and the american publishing company and patch up a working-contract between them and succeeded where any other man would have failed; as fast as i earned money and sent it to him he banked it at interest and held onto it, refusing to pay any creditor until he could pay all of the alike; when i had earned enough to pay dollar for dollar he swept off the indebtedness and sent me the whole batch of complimentary letters which the creditors wrote in return; when i had earned $ , more, $ , of which was in his hands, i wrote him from vienna to put the latter into federal steel and leave it there; he obeyed to the extent of $ , , but sold it in two months at $ , profit, and said it would go ten points higher, but that it was his custom to "give the other man a chance" (and that was a true word--there was never a truer one spoken). that was at the end of ' and beginning of ; and from that day to this he has continued to break up my bad schemes and put better ones in their place, to my great advantage. i do things which ought to try man's patience, but they never seem to try his; he always finds a colorable excuse for what i have done. his soul was born superhumanly sweet, and i do not think anything can sour it. i have not known his equal among men for lovable qualities. but for his cool head and wise guidance i should never have come out of the webster difficulties on top; it was his good steering that enabled me to work out my salvation and pay a hundred cents on the dollar--the most valuable service any man ever did me. his character is full of fine graces, but the finest is this: that he can load you down with crushing obligations and then so conduct himself that you never feel their weight. if he would only require something in return--but that is not in his nature; it would not occur to him. with the harpers and the american company at war those copyrights were worth but little; he engineered a peace and made them valuable. he invests $ , for me here, and in a few months returns a profit of $ , . i invest (in london and here) $ , and must wait considerably for results (in case there shall be any). i tell him about it and he finds no fault, utters not a sarcasm. he was born serene, patient, all-enduring, where a friend is concerned, and nothing can extinguish that great quality in him. such a man is entitled to the high gift of humor: he has it at its very best. he is not only the best friend i have ever had, but is the best man i have known. s. l. clemens. appendix u from mark twain's last poem begun at riverdale, new york. finished at york harbor, maine, august , (see chapter ccxxiii) (a bereft and demented mother speaks) . . . o, i can see my darling yet: the little form in slip of flimsy stuff all creamy white, pink-belted waist with ample bows, blue shoes scarce bigger than the house-cat's ears--capering in delight and choked with glee. it was a summer afternoon; the hill rose green above me and about, and in the vale below the distant village slept, and all the world was steeped in dreams. upon me lay this peace, and i forgot my sorrow in its spell. and now my little maid passed by, and she was deep in thought upon a solemn thing: a disobedience, and my reproof. upon my face she must not look until the day was done; for she was doing penance . . . she? o, it was i! what mother knows not that? and so she passed, i worshiping and longing . . . it was not wrong? you do not think me wrong? i did it for the best. indeed i meant it so. she flits before me now: the peach-bloom of her gauzy crepe, the plaited tails of hair, the ribbons floating from the summer hat, the grieving face, dropp'd head absorbed with care. o, dainty little form! i see it move, receding slow along the path, by hovering butterflies besieged; i see it reach the breezy top clear-cut against the sky, . . . then pass beyond and sink from sight-forever! within, was light and cheer; without, a blustering winter's right. there was a play; it was her own; for she had wrought it out unhelped, from her own head-and she but turned sixteen! a pretty play, all graced with cunning fantasies, and happy songs, and peopled all with fays, and sylvan gods and goddesses, and shepherds, too, that piped and danced, and wore the guileless hours away in care-free romps and games. her girlhood mates played in the piece, and she as well: a goddess, she, --and looked it, as it seemed to me. 'twas fairyland restored-so beautiful it was and innocent. it made us cry, we elder ones, to live our lost youth o'er again with these its happy heirs. slowly, at last, the curtain fell. before us, there, she stood, all wreathed and draped in roses pearled with dew-so sweet, so glad, so radiant!--and flung us kisses through the storm of praise that crowned her triumph . . . . o, across the mists of time i see her yet, my goddess of the flowers! . . . the curtain hid her . . . . do you comprehend? till time shall end! out of my life she vanished while i looked! . . . ten years are flown. o, i have watched so long, so long. but she will come no more. no, she will come no more. it seems so strange . . . so strange . . . struck down unwarned! in the unbought grace, of youth laid low--in the glory of her fresh young bloom laid low--in the morning of her life cut down! and i not by! not by when the shadows fell, the night of death closed down the sun that lit my life went out. not by to answer when the latest whisper passed the lips that were so dear to me--my name! far from my post! the world's whole breadth away. o, sinking in the waves of death she cried to me for mother-help, and got for answer silence! we that are old--we comprehend; even we that are not mad: whose grown-up scions still abide; their tale complete: their earlier selves we glimpse at intervals far in the dimming past; we see the little forms as once they were, and whilst we ache to take them to our hearts, the vision fades. we know them lost to us--forever lost; we cannot have them back; we miss them as we miss the dead, we mourn them as we mourn the dead. appendix v selections from an unfinished book, " , years among the microbes" the autobiography of a microbe, who, in a former existence, had been a man--his present habitat being the organism of a tramp, blitzowski. (written at dublin, new hampshire, ) (see chapter ccxxxv) our world (the tramp) is as large and grand and awe-compelling to us microscopic creatures as is man's world to man. our tramp is mountainous, there are vast oceans in him, and lakes that are sea-like for size, there are many rivers (veins and arteries) which are fifteen miles across, and of a length so stupendous as to make the mississippi and the amazon trifling little rhode island brooks by comparison. as for our minor rivers, they are multitudinous, and the dutiable commerce of disease which they carry is rich beyond the dreams of the american custom-house. take a man like sir oliver lodge, and what secret of nature can be hidden from him? he says: "a billion, that is a million millions,[?? trillion d.w.] of atoms is truly an immense number, but the resulting aggregate is still excessively minute. a portion of substance consisting, of a billion atoms is only barely visible with the highest power of a microscope; and a speck or granule, in order to be visible to the naked eye, like a grain of lycopodium-dust, must be a million times bigger still." the human eye could see it then--that dainty little speck. but with my microbe-eye i could see every individual of the whirling billions of atoms that compose the speck. nothing is ever at rest--wood, iron, water, everything is alive, everything is raging, whirling, whizzing, day and night and night and day, nothing is dead, there is no such thing as death, everything is full of bristling life, tremendous life, even the bones of the crusader that perished before jerusalem eight centuries ago. there are no vegetables, all things are animal; each electron is an animal, each molecule is a collection of animals, and each has an appointed duty to perform and a soul to be saved. heaven was not made for man alone, and oblivion and neglect reserved for the rest of his creatures. he gave them life, he gave them humble services to perform, they have performed them, and they will not be forgotten, they will have their reward. man-always vain, windy, conceited-thinks he will be in the majority there. he will be disappointed. let him humble himself. but for the despised microbe and the persecuted bacillus, who needed a home and nourishment, he would not have been created. he has a mission, therefore a reason for existing: let him do the service he was made for, and keep quiet. three weeks ago i was a man myself, and thought and felt as men think and feel; i have lived , years since then [microbic time], and i see the foolishness of it now. we live to learn, and fortunate are we when we are wise enough to profit by it. in matters pertaining to microscopy we necessarily have an advantage here over the scientist of the earth, because, as i have just been indicating, we see with our naked eyes minutenesses which no man-made microscope can detect, and are therefore able to register as facts many things which exist for him as theories only. indeed, we know as facts several things which he has not yet divined even by theory. for example, he does not suspect that there is no life but animal life, and that all atoms are individual animals endowed each with a certain degree of consciousness, great or small, each with likes and dislikes, predilections and aversions--that, in a word, each has a character, a character of its own. yet such is the case. some of the molecules of a stone have an aversion for some of those of a vegetable or any other creature and will not associate with them--and would not be allowed to, if they tried. nothing is more particular about society than a molecule. and so there are no end of castes; in this matter india is not a circumstance. "tell me, franklin [a microbe of great learning], is the ocean an individual, an animal, a creature?" "yes." "then water--any water-is an individual?" "yes." "suppose you remove a drop of it? is what is left an individual?" "yes, and so is the drop." "suppose you divide the drop?" "then you have two individuals." "suppose you separate the hydrogen and the oxygen?" "again you have two individuals. but you haven't water any more." "of course. certainly. well, suppose you combine them again, but in a new way: make the proportions equal--one part oxygen to one of hydrogen?" "but you know you can't. they won't combine on equal terms." i was ashamed to have made that blunder. i was embarrassed; to cover it i started to say we used to combine them like that where i came from, but thought better of it, and stood pat. "now then," i said, "it amounts to this: water is an individual, an animal, and is alive; remove the hydrogen and it is an animal and is alive; the remaining oxygen is also an individual, an animal, and is alive. recapitulation: the two individuals combined constitute a third individual--and yet each continues to be an individual." i glanced at franklin, but . . . upon reflection, held my peace. i could have pointed out to him that here was mute nature explaining the sublime mystery of the trinity so luminously--that even the commonest understanding could comprehend it, whereas many a trained master of words had labored to do it with speech and failed. but he would not have known what i was talking about. after a moment i resumed: "listen--and see if i have understood you rightly, to wit: all the atoms that constitute each oxygen molecule are separate individuals, and each is a living animal; all the atoms that constitute each hydrogen molecule are separate individuals, and each one is a living animal; each drop of water consists of millions of living animals, the drop itself is an individual, a living animal, and the wide ocean is another. is that it?" "yes, that is correct." "by george, it beats the band!" he liked the expression, and set it down in his tablets. "franklin, we've got it down fine. and to think--there are other animals that are still smaller than a hydrogen atom, and yet it is so small that it takes five thousand of them to make a molecule--a molecule so minute that it could get into a microbe's eye and he wouldn't know it was there!" "yes, the wee creatures that inhabit the bodies of us germs and feed upon us, and rot us with disease: ah, what could they have been created for? they give us pain, they make our lives miserable, they murder us--and where is the use of it all, where the wisdom? ah, friend bkshp [microbic orthography], we live in a strange and unaccountable world; our birth is a mystery, our little life is a mystery, a trouble, we pass and are seen no more; all is mystery, mystery, mystery; we know not whence we came, nor why; we know not whither we go, nor why we go. we only know we were not made in vain, we only know we were made for a wise purpose, and that all is well! we shall not be cast aside in contumely and unblest after all we have suffered. let us be patient, let us not repine, let us trust. the humblest of us is cared for--oh, believe it!--and this fleeting stay is not the end!" you notice that? he did not suspect that he, also, was engaged in gnawing, torturing, defiling, rotting, and murdering a fellow-creature --he and all the swarming billions of his race. none of them suspects it. that is significant. it is suggestive--irresistibly suggestive --insistently suggestive. it hints at the possibility that the procession of known and listed devourers and persecutors is not complete. it suggests the possibility, and substantially the certainty, that man is himself a microbe, and his globe a blood-corpuscle drifting with its shining brethren of the milky way down a vein of the master and maker of all things, whose body, mayhap--glimpsed part-wise from the earth by night, and receding and lost to view in the measureless remotenesses of space--is what men name the universe. yes, that was all old to me, but to find that our little old familiar microbes were themselves loaded up with microbes that fed them, enriched them, and persistently and faithfully preserved them and their poor old tramp-planet from destruction--oh, that was new, and too delicious! i wanted to see them! i was in a fever to see them! i had lenses to two-million power, but of course the field was no bigger than a person's finger-nail, and so it wasn't possible to compass a considerable spectacle or a landscape with them; whereas what i had been craving was a thirty-foot field, which would represent a spread of several miles of country and show up things in a way to make them worth looking at. the boys and i had often tried to contrive this improvement, but had failed. i mentioned the matter to the duke and it made him smile. he said it was a quite simple thing-he had it at home. i was eager to bargain for the secret, but he said it was a trifle and not worth bargaining for. he said: "hasn't it occurred to you that all you have to do is to bend an x-ray to an angle-value of . and refract it with a parabolism, and there you are?" upon my word, i had never thought of that simple thing! you could have knocked me down with a feather. we rigged a microscope for an exhibition at once and put a drop of my blood under it, which got mashed flat when the lens got shut down upon it. the result was beyond my dreams. the field stretched miles away, green and undulating, threaded with streams and roads, and bordered all down the mellowing distances with picturesque hills. and there was a great white city of tents; and everywhere were parks of artillery and divisions of cavalry and infantry waiting. we had hit a lucky moment, evidently there was going to be a march-past or some thing like that. at the front where the chief banner flew there was a large and showy tent, with showy guards on duty, and about it were some other tents of a swell kind. the warriors--particularly the officers--were lovely to look at, they were so trim-built and so graceful and so handsomely uniformed. they were quite distinct, vividly distinct, for it was a fine day, and they were so immensely magnified that they looked to be fully a finger-nail high.--[my own expression, and a quite happy one. i said to the duke: "your grace, they're just about finger-milers!" "how do you mean, m'lord?" "this. you notice the stately general standing there with his hand resting upon the muzzle of a cannon? well, if you could stick your little finger down against the ground alongside of him his plumes would just reach up to where your nail joins the flesh." the duke said "finger-milers was good"--good and exact; and he afterward used it several times himself.]--everywhere you could see officers moving smartly about, and they looked gay, but the common soldiers looked sad. many wife-swinks ["swinks," an atomic race] and daughter-swinks and sweetheart-swinks were about--crying, mainly. it seemed to indicate that this was a case of war, not a summer-camp for exercise, and that the poor labor-swinks were being torn from their planet-saving industries to go and distribute civilization and other forms of suffering among the feeble benighted somewhere; else why should the swinkesses cry? the cavalry was very fine--shiny black horses, shapely and spirited; and presently when a flash of light struck a lifted bugle (delivering a command which we couldn't hear) and a division came tearing down on a gallop it was a stirring and gallant sight, until the dust rose an inch --the duke thought more--and swallowed it up in a rolling and tumbling long gray cloud, with bright weapons glinting and sparkling in it. before long the real business of the occasion began. a battalion of priests arrived carrying sacred pictures. that settled it: this was war; these far-stretching masses of troops were bound for the front. their little monarch came out now, the sweetest little thing that ever travestied the human shape i think, and he lifted up his hands and blessed the passing armies, and they looked as grateful as they could, and made signs of humble and real reverence as they drifted by the holy pictures. it was beautiful--the whole thing; and wonderful, too, when those serried masses swung into line and went marching down the valley under the long array of fluttering flags. evidently they were going somewhere to fight for their king, which was the little manny that blessed them; and to preserve him and his brethren that occupied the other swell tents; to civilize and grasp a valuable little unwatched country for them somewhere. but the little fellow and his brethren didn't fall in--that was a noticeable particular. they didn't fight; they stayed at home, where it was safe, and waited for the swag. very well, then-what ought we to do? had we no moral duty to perform? ought we to allow this war to begin? was it not our duty to stop it, in the name of right and righteousness? was it not our duty to administer a rebuke to this selfish and heartless family? the duke was struck by that, and greatly moved. he felt as i did about it, and was ready to do whatever was right, and thought we ought to pour boiling water on the family and extinguish it, which we did. it extinguished the armies, too, which was not intended. we both regretted this, but the duke said that these people were nothing to us, and deserved extinction anyway for being so poor-spirited as to serve such a family. he was loyally doing the like himself, and so was i, but i don't think we thought of that. and it wasn't just the same, anyway, because we were sooflaskies, and they were only swinks. franklin realizes that no atom is destructible; that it has always existed and will exist forever; but he thinks all atoms will go out of this world some day and continue their life in a happier one. old tolliver thinks no atom's life will ever end, but he also thinks blitzowski is the only world it will ever see, and that at no time in its eternity will it be either worse off or better off than it is now and always has been. of course he thinks the planet blitzowski is itself eternal and indestructible--at any rate he says he thinks that. it could make me sad, only i know better. d. t. will fetch blitzy yet one of these days. but these are alien thoughts, human thoughts, and they falsely indicate that i do not want this tramp to go on living. what would become of me if he should disintegrate? my molecules would scatter all around and take up new quarters in hundreds of plants and animals; each would carry its special feelings along with it, each would be content in its new estate, but where should i be? i should not have a rag of a feeling left, after my disintegration--with his--was complete. nothing to think with, nothing to grieve or rejoice with, nothing to hope or despair with. there would be no more me. i should be musing and thinking and dreaming somewhere else--in some distant animal maybe--perhaps a cat--by proxy of my oxygen i should be raging and fuming in some other creatures--a rat, perhaps; i should be smiling and hoping in still another child of nature --heir to my hydrogen--a weed, or a cabbage, or something; my carbonic acid (ambition) would be dreaming dreams in some lowly wood-violet that was longing for a showy career; thus my details would be doing as much feeling as ever, but i should not be aware of it, it would all be going on for the benefit of those others, and i not in it at all. i should be gradually wasting away, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, as the years went on, and at last i should be all distributed, and nothing left of what had once been me. it is curious, and not without impressiveness: i should still be alive, intensely alive, but so scattered that i would not know it. i should not be dead--no, one cannot call it that--but i should be the next thing to it. and to think what centuries and ages and aeons would drift over me before the disintegration was finished, the last bone turned to gas and blown away! i wish i knew what it is going to feel like, to lie helpless such a weary, weary time, and see my faculties decay and depart, one by one, like lights which burn low, and flicker and perish, until the ever-deepening gloom and darkness which--oh, away, away with these horrors, and let me think of something wholesome! my tramp is only ; there is good hope that he will live ten years longer-- , of my microbe years. so may it be. oh, dear, we are all so wise! each of us knows it all, and knows he knows it all--the rest, to a man, are fools and deluded. one man knows there is a hell, the next one knows there isn't; one man knows high tariff is right, the next man knows it isn't; one man knows monarchy is best, the next one knows it isn't; one age knows there are witches, the next one knows there aren't; one sect knows its religion is the only true one, there are sixty-four thousand five hundred million sects that know it isn't so. there is not a mind present among this multitude of verdict-deliverers that is the superior of the minds that persuade and represent the rest of the divisions of the multitude. yet this sarcastic fact does not humble the arrogance nor diminish the know-it-all bulk of a single verdict-maker of the lot by so much as a shade. mind is plainly an ass, but it will be many ages before it finds it out, no doubt. why do we respect the opinions of any man or any microbe that ever lived? i swear i don't know. why do i respect my own? well--that is different. appendix w little bessie would assist providence (see chapter cclxxxii) [it is dull, and i need wholesome excitements and distractions; so i will go lightly excursioning along the primrose path of theology.] little bessie was nearly three years old. she was a good child, and not shallow, not frivolous, but meditative and thoughtful, and much given to thinking out the reasons of things and trying to make them harmonize with results. one day she said: "mama, why is there so much pain and sorrow and suffering? what is it all for?" it was an easy question, and mama had no difficulty in answering it: "it is for our good, my child. in his wisdom and mercy the lord sends us these afflictions to discipline us and make us better." "is it he that sends them?" "yes." "does he send all of them, mama?" "yes, dear, all of them. none of them comes by accident; he alone sends them, and always out of love for us, and to make us better." "isn't it strange?" "strange? why, no, i have never thought of it in that way. i have not heard any one call it strange before. it has always seemed natural and right to me, and wise and most kindly and merciful." "who first thought of it like that, mama? was it you?" "oh no, child, i was taught it." "who taught you so, mama?" "why, really, i don't know--i can't remember. my mother, i suppose; or the preacher. but it's a thing that everybody knows." "well, anyway, it does seem strange. did he give billy norris the typhus?" "yes." "what for?" "why, to discipline him and make him good." "but he died, mama, and so it couldn't make him good." "well, then, i suppose it was for some other reason. we know it was a good reason, whatever it was." "what do you think it was, mama?" "oh, you ask so many questions! i think it was to discipline his parents." "well, then, it wasn't fair, mama. why should his life be taken away for their sake, when he wasn't doing anything?" "oh, i don't know! i only know it was for a good and wise and merciful reason." "what reason, mama?" "i think--i think-well, it was a judgment; it was to punish them for some sin they had committed." "but he was the one that was punished, mama. was that right?" "certainly, certainly. he does nothing that isn't right and wise and merciful. you can't understand these things now, dear, but when you are grown up you will understand them, and then you will see that they are just and wise." after a pause: "did he make the roof fall in on the stranger that was trying to save the crippled old woman from the fire, mama?" "yes, my child. wait! don't ask me why, because i don't know. i only know it was to discipline some one, or be a judgment upon somebody, or to show his power." "that drunken man that stuck a pitchfork into mrs. welch's baby when--" "never mind about it, you needn't go into particulars; it was to discipline the child--that much is certain, anyway." "mama, mr. burgess said in his sermon that billions of little creatures are sent into us to give us cholera, and typhoid, and lockjaw, and more than a thousand other sicknesses and--mama, does he send them?" "oh, certainly, child, certainly. of course." "what for?" "oh, to discipline us! haven't i told you so, over and over again?" "it's awful cruel, mama! and silly! and if i----" "hush, oh, hush! do you want to bring the lightning?" "you know the lightning did come last week, mama, and struck the new church, and burnt it down. was it to discipline the church?" (wearily.) "oh, i suppose so." "but it killed a hog that wasn't doing anything. was it to discipline the hog, mama?" "dear child, don't you want to run out and play a while? if you would like to----" "mama, only think! mr. hollister says there isn't a bird, or fish, or reptile, or any other animal that hasn't got an enemy that providence has sent to bite it and chase it and pester it and kill it and suck its blood and discipline it and make it good and religious. is that true, mother --because if it is true why did mr. hollister laugh at it?" "that hollister is a scandalous person, and i don't want you to listen to anything he says." "why, mama, he is very interesting, and i think he tries to be good. he says the wasps catch spiders and cram them down into their nests in the ground--alive, mama!--and there they live and suffer days and days and days, and the hungry little wasps chewing their legs and gnawing into their bellies all the time, to make them good and religious and praise god for his infinite mercies. i think mr. hollister is just lovely, and ever so kind; for when i asked him if he would treat a spider like that he said he hoped to be damned if he would; and then he----dear mama, have you fainted! i will run and bring help! now this comes of staying in town this hot weather." appendix x a chronological list of mark twain's work published and otherwise--from - note .--this is not a detailed bibliography, but merely a general list of mark twain's literary undertakings, in the order of performance, showing when, and usually where, the work was done, when and where first published, etc. an excellent mark twain bibliography has been compiled by mr. merle johnson, to whom acknowledgments are due for important items. note .--only a few of the more important speeches are noted. volumes that are merely collections of tales or articles are not noted. note .--titles are shortened to those most commonly in use, as "huck finn" or "huck" for "the adventures of huckleberry finn." names of periodicals are abbreviated. the initials u. e. stand for the "uniform edition" of mark twain's works. the chapter number or numbers in the line with the date refers to the place in this work where the items are mentioned. . (see chapter xviii of this work.) edited the hannibal journal during the absence of the owner and editor, orion clemens. wrote local items for the hannibal journal. burlesque of a rival editor in the hannibal journal. wrote two sketches for the sat. eve. post (philadelphia). to mary in h-l. hannibal journal. - . (see chapter xviii.) jim wolfe and the fire--hannibal journal. burlesque of a rival editor in the hannibal journal. . (see chapter xix.) wrote obituary poems--not published. wrote first letters home. - . (see chapters xx and xxi.) first after-dinner speech; delivered at a printers' banquet in keokuk, iowa. letters from cincinnati, november , , signed "snodgrass" --saturday post (keokuk). . (see chapter xxi.) letters from cincinnati, march , , signed "snodgrass"--saturday post (keokuk). . anonymous contributions to the new orleans crescent and probably to st. louis papers. . (see chapter xxvii; also appendix b.) burlesque of capt. isaiah sellers--true delta (new orleans), may or . . (see chapters xxxiii to xxxv.) letters home, published in the gate city (keokuk). . (see chapters xxxv to xxxviii.) letters and sketches, signed "josh," for the territorial enterprise (virginia city, nevada). report of the lecture of prof. personal pronoun--enterprise. report of a fourth of july oration--enterprise. the petrified man--enterprise. local news reporter for the enterprise from august. . (see chapters xli to xliii; also appendix c.) reported the nevada legislature for the enterprise. first used the name "mark twain," february . advice to the unreliable--enterprise. curing a cold--enterprise. u. e. information for the million--enterprise. advice to good little girls--enterprise. the dutch nick massacre--enterprise. many other enterprise sketches. the aged pilot man (poem)--"roughing it." u. e. . (see. chapters xliv to xlvii.) reported the nevada legislature for the enterprise. speech as "governor of the third house." letters to new york sunday mercury. local reporter on the san francisco call. articles and sketches for the golden era. articles and sketches for the californian. daily letters from san francisco to the enterprise. (several of the era and californian sketches appear in sketches new and old. u. e.) . (see chapters xlix to li; also appendix e.) notes for the jumping frog story; angel's camp, february. sketches etc., for the golden era and californian. daily letter to the enterprise. the jumping frog (san francisco) saturday press. new york, november . u. e. . (see chapters lii to lv; also appendix d.) daily letter to the enterprise. sandwich island letters to the sacramento union. lecture on the sandwich islands, san francisco, october . forty-three days in an open boat--harper's magazine, december (error in signature made it mark swain). . (see chapters lvii to lxv; also appendices e, f, and g.) letters to alta california from new york. jim wolfe and the cats--n. y. sunday mercury. the jumping frog--book, published by charles henry webb, may . u. e. lectured at cooper union, may, ' . letters to alta california and new york tribune from the quaker city --holy land excursion. letter to new york herald on the return from the holy land. after-dinner speech on "women" (washington). began arrangement for the publication of the innocents abroad. . (see chapters lxvi to lxix; also appendices h and i.) newspaper letters, etc., from washington, for new york citizen, tribune, herald, and other papers and periodicals. preparing quaker city letters (in washington and san francisco) for book publication. captain wakeman's (stormfield's) visit to heaven (san francisco), published harper's magazine, december, -january, (also book, harpers). lectured in california and nevada on the "holy land," july . s'cat! anonymous article on t. k. beecher (elmira), published in local paper. lecture-tour, season - . . (see chapters lxx to lxxni.) the innocents abroad--book (am. pub. co.), july . u. e. bought one-third ownership in the buffalo express. contributed editorials, sketches, etc., to the express. contributed sketches to packard's monthly, wood's magazine, etc. lecture-tour, season - . . (see chapters lxxiv to lxxx; also appendix j.) contributed various matter to buffalo express. contributed various matter under general head of "memoranda" to galaxy magazine, may to april, ' . roughing it begun in september (buffalo). shem's diary (buffalo) (unfinished). god, ancient and modern (unpublished). . (see chapters lxxxi and lxxxii; also appendix k.) memoranda continued in galaxy to april. autobiography and first romance--[the first romance had appeared in the express in . later included in sketches.]--booklet (sheldon & co.). u. e. roughing it finished (quarry farm). ruloff letter--tribune. wrote several sketches and lectures (quarry farm). western play (unfinished). lecture-tour, season - . . (see chapters lxxxiii to lxxxvii; also appendix l.) roughing it--book (am. pub. co.), february. u. e. the mark twain scrap-book invented (saybrook, connecticut). tom sawyer begun as a play (saybrook, connecticut). a few unimportant sketches published in "practical jokes," etc. began a book on england (london). . (see chapters lxxxviii to xcii.) letters on the sandwich islands-tribune, january and . the gilded age (with c. d. warner)--book (am. pub. co), december. u. e. the license of the press--paper for the monday evening club. lectured in london, october and season - . . (see chapters xciii to xcviii; also appendix m.) tom sawyer continued (in the new study at quarry farm). a true story (quarry farm)-atlantic, november. u. e. fables (quarry farm). u. e. colonel sellers--play (quarry farm) performed by john t. raymond. undertaker's love-story (quarry farm) (unpublished). old times on the mississippi (hartford) atlantic, january to july, . monarchy letter to mrs. clemens, dated (boston). . (see chapters c to civ; also appendix n.) universal suffrage--paper for the monday evening club. sketches new and old--book (am. pub. co.), july. u. e. tom sawyer concluded (hartford). the curious rep. of gondour--atlantic, october (unsigned). punch, conductor, punch--atlantic, february, . u. e. the second advent (unfinished). the mysterious chamber (unfinished). autobiography of a damn fool (unfinished). petition for international copyright. . (see chapters cvi to cx.) performed in the loan of the lover as peter spuyk (hartford). carnival of crime--paper for the monday evening club--atlantic, june. u. e. huck finn begun (quarry farm). canvasser's story (quarry farm)--atlantic, december. u. e. " " (quarry farm), privately printed. [and not edited by livy. d.w.] ah sin (with bret harte)--play, (hartford). tom sawyer--book (am. pub. co.), december. u. e. speech on "the weather," new england society, december . . (see chapters cxii to cxv; also appendix o.) loves of alonzo fitz-clarence, etc. (quarry farm)--atlantic. idle excursion (quarry farm)--atlantic, october, november, december. u. e. simon wheeler, detective--play (quarry farm) (not produced). prince and pauper begun (quarry farm). whittier birthday speech (boston), december. . (see chapters cxvii to cxx.) magnanimous incident (hartford)--atlantic, may. u. e. a tramp abroad (heidelberg and munich). mental telegraphy--harper's magazine, december, . u. e. gambetta duel--atlantic, february, (included in tramp). u. e. rev. in pitcairn--atlantic, march, . u. e. stolen white elephant--book (osgood & co.), . u. e. (the three items last named were all originally a part of the tramp abroad.) . (see chapters cxxi to cxxiv; also chapter cxxxiv and appendix p.) a tramp abroad continued (paris, elmira, and hartford). adam monument scheme (elmira). speech on "the babies" (grant dinner, chicago), november. speech on "plagiarism" (holmes breakfast, boston), december. . (see chapters cxxv to cxxxii.) prince and pauper concluded (hartford and elmira). huck finn continued (quarry farm, elmira). a cat story (quarry farm) (unpublished). a tramp abroad--book (am. pub. co.), march . u. e. edward mills and geo. benton (hartford)--atlantic, august. u. e. mrs. mcwilliams and the lightning (hartford)--atlantic, september. u. e. . (see chapters cxxxiv to cxxxvii.) a curious experience--century, november. u. e. a biography of ----- (unfinished). prince and pauper--book (osgood r; co.), december. burlesque etiquette (unfinished). [included in letters from the earth d.w.] . (see chapters cxl and cxli.) life on the mississippi (elmira and hartford). . (see chapters cxlii to cxlviii.) life on the mississippi--book (osgood r co.), may. u. e. what is happiness?--paper for the monday evening club. introduction to portuguese conversation book (hartford). huck finn concluded (quarry farm). history game (quarry farm). american claimant (with w. d. howells)--play (hartford), produced by a. p. burbank. dramatized tom sawyer and prince and pauper (not produced). . (see chapters cxlix to cliii.) embarked in publishing with charles l. webster. the carson footprints--the san franciscan. huck finn--book (charles l. webster & co.), december. u. e. platform-readings with george w. cable, season ' -' . . (see chapters cliv to clvii.) contracted for general grant's memoirs. a campaign that failed--century, december. u. e. the universal tinker--century, december (open letter signed x. y. z. letter on the government of children--christian union.) kiditchin (children's poem). . (see chapters clix to clxi; also appendix q.) introduced henry m. stanley (boston). connecticut yankee begun (hartford). english as she is taught--century, april, . luck--harper's, august, . general grant and matthew arnold--army and navy dinner speech. . (see chapters clxii to clxiv; also appendix r.) meisterschaft--play (hartford)-century, january, . u. e. knights of labor--essay (not published). to the queen of england--harper's magazine, december. u. e. consistency--paper for the monday evening club. . (see chapters clxv to clxviii.) introductory for "unsent letters" (unpublished). master of arts degree from yale. yale alumni address (unpublished). copyright controversy with brander matthews--princeton review. replies to matthew arnold's american criticisms (unpublished). yankee continued (elmira and hartford). introduction of nye and riley (boston). . (see chapters clxix to clxxiii; also appendix s.) a majestic literary fossil harper's magazine, february, . u. e. huck and tom among the indians (unfinished). introduction to yankee (not used). letter to elsie leslie--st nicholas, february, . connecticut yankee--book (webster & co.), december. u. e. . (see chapters clxxii to clxxiv.) letter to andrew lang about english criticism. (no important literary matters this year. mark twain engaged promoting the paige typesetting-machine.) . (see chapters clxxv to clxxvii.) american claimant (hartford) syndicated; also book (webster & co.), may, . u. e. european letters to new york sun. down the rhone (unfinished). kornerstrasse (unpublished). . (see chapters clxxx to clxxxii.) the german chicago (berlin--sun.) u. e. all kinds of ships (at sea). u. e. tom sawyer abroad (nauheim)--st. nicholas, november, ' , to april, ' . u. e. those extraordinary twins (nauheim). u. e. pudd'nhead wilson (nauheim and florence)--century, december, ' , to june, ' u. e. $ , bank-note (florence)--century, january, ' . u. e. . (see chapters clxxxiii to clxxxvii.) joan of arc begun (at villa viviani, florence) and completed up to the raising of the siege of orleans. californian's tale (florence) liber scriptorum, also harper's. adam's diary (florence)--niagara book, also harper's. esquimau maiden's romance--cosmopolitan, november. u. e. is he living or is he dead?--cosmopolitan, september. u. e. traveling with a reformer--cosmopolitan, december. u. e. in defense of harriet shelley (florence)--n. a.--rev., july, ' . u. e. fenimore cooper's literary offenses--[this may not have been written until early in .]--(players, new york)--n. a. rev., july,' u. e. . (see chapters clxxxviii to cxc.) joan of arc continued (etretat and paris). what paul bourget thinks of us (etretat)--n. a. rev., january, ' u. e. tom sawyer abroad--book (webster & co.), april. u. e. pudd'nhead wilson--book (am. pub. co.), november. u. e. the failure of charles l. webster & co., april . the derelict--poem (paris) (unpublished). . (see chapters clxxxix and cxcii.) joan of arc finished (paris), january , harper's magazine, april to december. mental telegraphy again--harper's, september. u. e. a little note to paul bourget. u. e. poem to mrs. beecher (elmira) (not published). u. e. lecture-tour around the world, begun at elmira, july , ended july . . (see chapters cxci to cxciv.) joan of arc--book (harpers) may. u. e. tom sawyer, detective, and other stories-book (harpers), november. following the equator begun ( tedworth square, london). . (see chapters cxcvii to cxcix.) following the equator--book (am. pub. co.), november. queen's jubilee (london), newspaper syndicate; book privately printed. james hammond trumbull--century, november. which was which? (london and switzerland) (unfinished). tom and huck (switzerland) (unfinished). hellfire hotchkiss (switzerland) (unfinished). in memoriam--poem (switzerland)-harper's magazine. u. e. concordia club speech (vienna). stirring times in austria (vienna)--harper's magazine, march, . u. e. . (see chapters cc to cciii; also appendix t.) the austrian edison keeping school again (vienna) century, august. u. e. at the appetite cure (vienna)--cosmopolitan, august. u. e. from the london times, (vienna)--century, november. u. e. about play-acting (vienna)--forum, october. u. e. concerning the jews (vienna)--harper's magazine, september, ' . u. e. christian science and mrs. eddy (vienna)--cosmopolitan, october. u. e. the man that corrupted hadleyburg (vienna)--harper's magazine, december, ' u. e. autobiographical chapters (vienna); some of them used in the n. a. rev., - . what is man? (kaltenleutgeben)--book (privately printed), august, . assassination of an empress (kaltenleutgeben) (unpublished). the mysterious stranger (unfinished). translations of german plays (unproduced). . (see chapters cciv to ccviii.) diplomatic pay and clothes (vienna)--forum, march. u. e. my literary debut (vienna)--century, december. u. e. christian science (vienna)--n. a. rev., december, , january and february, . translated german plays (vienna) (unproduced). collaborated with siegmund schlesinger on plays (vienna) (unfinished). planned a postal-check scheme (vienna). articles about the kellgren treatment (sanna, sweden) (unpublished). st. joan of arc (london)--harper's magazine, december, . u. e. my first lie, and how i got out of it (london)--new york world. u. e. articles on south african war (london) (unpublished) uniform edition of mark twain's works (am. pub. co.). . (see chapters ccix to ccxii.) two little tales (london)--century, november, . u. e. spoke on "copyright" before the house of lords. delivered many speeches in london and new york. . (see chapters ccxiii to ccxviii.) to the person sitting in darkness ( west tenth street, new york) --n. a. rev., february. to my missionary critics ( west tenth street, new york)--n. a. rev., april. double-barrel detective story (saranac lake, "the lair") harper's magazine, january and february, . lincoln birthday speech, february . many other speeches. plan for casting vote party (riverdale) (unpublished). the stupendous procession (riverdale) (unpublished). ante-mortem obituaries--harper's weekly. received degree of doctor of letters from yale. . (see chapters ccxix to ccxxiv; also appendix u.) does the race of man love a lord? (riverdale)--n. a. rev., april. u. e. five boons of life (riverdale)--harper's weekly, july . u. e. why not abolish it? (riverdale)--harper's weekly, july . defense of general funston (riverdale)--n. a. rev., may. if i could be there (riverdale unpublished). wrote various articles, unfinished or unpublished. received degree of ll.d. from the university of missouri, june. the belated passport (york harbor)--harper's weekly, december . u. e. was it heaven? or hell? (york harbor)--harper's magazine, december. u. e. poem (riverdale and york harbor) (unpublished) sixty-seventh birthday speech (new york), november . . (see chapters ccxxv to ccxxx.) mrs. eddy in error (riverdale)--n. a. rev., april. instructions in art (riverdale)-metropolitan, april and may. eddypus, and other c. s. articles (unfinished). a dog's tale (elmira)--harper's magazine, december. u. e. italian without a master (florence)--harper's weekly, january , . u. e. italian with grammar (florence)--harper's magazine, august, u. e. the $ , bequest (florence)--harper's weekly, december , . u. e. . (see chapters ccxxx to ccxxxiv.) autobiography (florence)--portions published, n. a. rev. and harper's weekly. concerning copyright (tyringham, massachusetts)--n. a. rev., january, . tsars soliloquy ( fifth avenue, new york)--n. a. rev., march, . adam's diary--book (harpers), april. . (see chapters ccxxxiv to ccxxxvii; also appendix v.) leopold's soliloquy ( fifth avenue, new york)--pamphlet, p. r. warren company. the war prayer ( fifth avenue, new york) (unpublished). eve's diary (dublin, new hampshire)--harper's magazine, december. , years among the microbes (unfinished). interpreting the deity (dublin new hampshire) (unpublished). a horse's tale (dublin, new hampshire)-harper's magazine, august and september, . seventieth birthday speech. w. d. howells ( fifth avenue, new york)-harper's magazine, july, . . (see chapters ccxxxix to ccli.) autobiography dictation ( fifth avenue, new york; and dublin, new hampshire)--selections published, n. a. rev., and . many speeches. farewell lecture, carnegie hall, april . what is man?--book (privately printed). copyright speech (washington), december. . (see chapters cclvi to cclxiii.) autobiography dictations ( fifth avenue, new york; and tuxedo). degree of doctor of literature conferred by oxford, june . made many london speeches. begum of bengal speech (liverpool). christian science--book (harpers), february. u. e. captain stormfield's visit to heaven--book (harpers). . (see chapters cclxiv to cclxx.) autobiography dictations ( fifth avenue, new york; and redding, connecticut). lotos club and other speeches. aldrich memorial speech. . (see chapters cclxxvi to cclxxxix; also appendices n and w.) is shakespeare dead?--book (harpers), april. a fable--harper's magazine december. copyright documents (unpublished). address to st. timothy school. marjorie fleming (stormfield)--harper's bazar, december. the turning-point of my life (stormfield)--harper's bazar, february, bessie dialogue (unpublished). letters from the earth (unfinished). the death of jean--harper's, december, . the international lightning trust (unpublished). . (see chapter ccxcii.) valentines to helen and others (not published). advice to paine (not published). mark twain, a biography by albert bigelow paine volume ii, part : - clxii browning, meredith, and meisterschaft the browning readings must have begun about this time. just what kindled mark twain's interest in the poetry of robert browning is not remembered, but very likely his earlier associations with the poet had something to do with it. whatever the beginning, we find him, during the winter of and , studiously, even violently, interested in browning's verses, entertaining a sort of club or class who gathered to hear his rich, sympathetic, and luminous reading of the payleyings--"with bernard de mandeville," "daniel bartoli," or "christopher smart." members of the saturday morning club were among his listeners and others-friends of the family. they were rather remarkable gatherings, and no one of that group but always vividly remembered the marvelously clear insight which mark twain's vocal personality gave to those somewhat obscure measures. they did not all of them realize that before reading a poem he studied it line by line, even word by word; dug out its last syllable of meaning, so far as lay within human possibility, and indicated with pencil every shade of emphasis which would help to reveal the poet's purpose. no student of browning ever more devoutly persisted in trying to compass a master's intent--in such poems as "sordello," for instance--than mark twain. just what permanent benefit he received from this particular passion it is difficult to know. once, at a class-meeting, after finishing "easter day," he made a remark which the class requested him to "write down." it is recorded on the fly-leaf of dramatis personae as follows: one's glimpses & confusions, as one reads browning, remind me of looking through a telescope (the small sort which you must move with your hand, not clock-work). you toil across dark spaces which are (to your lens) empty; but every now & then a splendor of stars & suns bursts upon you and fills the whole field with flame. feb. , . in another note he speaks of the "vague dim flash of splendid hamming-birds through a fog." whatever mental treasures he may or may not have laid up from browning there was assuredly a deep gratification in the discovery of those splendors of "stars and suns" and the flashing "humming-birds," as there must also have been in pointing out those wonders to the little circle of devout listeners. it all seemed so worth while. it was at a time when george meredith was a reigning literary favorite. there was a meredith cult as distinct as that of browning. possibly it exists to-day, but, if so, it is less militant. mrs. clemens and her associates were caught in the meredith movement and read diana of the crossways and the egoist with reverential appreciation. the meredith epidemic did not touch mark twain. he read but few novels at most, and, skilful as was the artistry of the english favorite, he found his characters artificialities--ingeniously contrived puppets rather than human beings, and, on the whole, overrated by their creator. diana of the crossways was read aloud, and, listening now and then, he was likely to say: "it doesn't seem to me that diana lives up to her reputation. the author keeps telling us how smart she is, how brilliant, but i never seem to hear her say anything smart or brilliant. read me some of diana's smart utterances." he was relentless enough in his criticism of a literature he did not care for, and he never learned to care for meredith. he read his favorite books over and over with an ever-changing point of view. he re-read carlyle's french revolution during the summer at the farm, and to howells he wrote: how stunning are the changes which age makes in man while he sleeps! when i finished carlyle's french revolution in i was a girondin; every time i have read it since i have read it differently--being influenced & changed, little by little, by life & environment (& taine & st. simon); & now i lay the book down once more, & recognize that i am a sansculotte!--and not a pale, characterless sansculotte, but a marat. carlyle teaches no such gospel, so the change is in me--in my vision of the evidences. people pretend that the bible means the same to them at that it did at all former milestones in their journey. i wonder how they can lie so. it comes of practice, no doubt. they would not say that of dickens's or scott's books. nothing remains the same. when a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood it has always shrunk; there is no instance of such house being as big as the picture in memory & imagination call for. shrunk how? why, to its correct dimensions; the house hasn't altered; this is the first time it has been in focus. well, that's loss. to have house & bible shrink so, under the disillusioning corrected angle, is loss--for a moment. but there are compensations. you tilt the tube skyward & bring planets & comets & corona flames a hundred & fifty thousand miles high into the field. which i see you have done, & found tolstoi. i haven't got him in focus yet, but i've got browning. in time the browning passion would wane and pass, and the club was succeeded by, or perhaps it blended with, a german class which met at regular intervals at the clemens home to study "der, die, and das" and the "gehabt habens" out of meisterschaft and such other text-books as professor schleutter could provide. they had monthly conversation days, when they discussed in german all sorts of things, real and imaginary. once dr. root, a prominent member, and clemens had a long wrangle over painting a house, in which they impersonated two german neighbors. clemens finally wrote for the class a three-act play "meisterschaft"--a literary achievement for which he was especially qualified, with its picturesque mixture of german and english and its unfailing humor. it seems unlike anything ever attempted before or since. no one but mark twain could have written it. it was given twice by the class with enormous success, and in modified form it was published in the century magazine (january, ). it is included to-day in his "complete works," but one must have a fair knowledge of german to capture the full delight of it.--[on the original manuscript mark twain wrote: "there is some tolerably rancid german here and there in this piece. it is attributable to the proof-reader." perhaps the proof-reader resented this and cut it out, for it does not appear as published.] mark twain probably exaggerated his sentiments a good deal when in the carlyle letter he claimed to be the most rabid of sansculottes. it is unlikely that he was ever very bare-kneed and crimson in his anarchy. he believed always that cruelty should be swiftly punished, whether in king or commoner, and that tyrants should be destroyed. he was for the people as against kings, and for the union of labor as opposed to the union of capital, though he wrote of such matters judicially--not radically. the knights of labor organization, then very powerful, seemed to clemens the salvation of oppressed humanity. he wrote a vehement and convincing paper on the subject, which he sent to howells, to whom it appealed very strongly, for howells was socialistic, in a sense, and clemens made his appeal in the best and largest sense, dramatizing his conception in a picture that was to include, in one grand league, labor of whatever form, and, in the end, all mankind in a final millennium. howells wrote that he had read the essay "with thrills amounting to yells of satisfaction," and declared it to be the best thing yet said on the subject. the essay closed: he [the unionized workman] is here and he will remain. he is the greatest birth of the greatest age the nations of the world have known. you cannot sneer at him--that time has gone by. he has before him the most righteous work that was ever given into the hand of man to do; and he will do it. yes, he is here; and the question is not--as it has been heretofore during a thousand ages--what shall we do with him? for the first time in history we are relieved of the necessity of managing his affairs for him. he is not a broken dam this time--he is the flood! it must have been about this time that clemens developed an intense, even if a less permanent, interest in another matter which was to benefit the species. he was one day walking up fifth avenue when he noticed the sign, professor loisette school of memory the instantaneous art of never forgetting clemens went inside. when he came out he had all of professor loisette's literature on "predicating correlation," and for the next several days was steeping himself in an infusion of meaningless words and figures and sentences and forms, which he must learn backward and forward and diagonally, so that he could repeat them awake and asleep in order to predicate his correlation to a point where remembering the ordinary facts of life, such as names, addresses, and telephone numbers, would be a mere diversion. it was another case of learning the multitudinous details of the mississippi river in order to do the apparently simple thing of steering a boat from new orleans to st. louis, and it is fair to say that, for the time he gave it, he achieved a like success. he was so enthusiastic over this new remedy for human distress that within a very brief time he was sending out a printed letter recommending loisette to the public at large. here is an extract: . . . i had no system--and some sort of rational order of procedure is, of course, necessary to success in any study. well, loisette furnished me a system. i cannot undertake to say it is the best, or the worst, because i don't know what the other systems are. loisette, among other cruelties, requires you to memorize a great long string of words that, haven't any apparent connection or meaning--there are perhaps of these words, arranged in maniacal lines of to or words in each line-- lines in all. of course your first impulse is to resign, but at the end of three or four hours you find to your surprise that you've got them and can deliver them backward or forward without mistake or hesitation. now, don't you see what a world of confidence that must necessarily breed? --confidence in a memory which before you wouldn't even venture to trust with the latin motto of the u. s. lest it mislay it and the country suffer. loisette doesn't make memories, he furnishes confidence in memories that already exist. isn't that valuable? indeed it is to me. whenever hereafter i shall choose to pack away a thing properly in that refrigerator i sha'n't be bothered with the aforetime doubts; i shall know i'm going to find it sound and sweet when i go for it again. loisette naturally made the most of this advertising and flooded the public with mark twain testimonials. but presently clemens decided that after all the system was not sufficiently simple to benefit the race at large. he recalled his printed letters and prevailed upon loisette to suppress his circulars. later he decided that the whole system was a humbug. clxiii letter to the queen of england it was one day in that clemens received evidence that his reputation as a successful author and publisher--a man of wealth and revenues--had penetrated even the dimness of the british tax offices. a formidable envelope came, inclosing a letter from his london publishers and a very large printed document all about the income tax which the queen's officers had levied upon his english royalties as the result of a report that he had taken buckenham hall, norwich, for a year, and was to become an english resident. the matter amused and interested him. to chatto & windus he wrote: i will explain that all that about buckenham hall was an english newspaper's mistake. i was not in england, and if i had been i wouldn't have been at buckenham hall anyway, but buckingham palace, or i would have endeavored to have found out the reason why . . . but we won't resist. we'll pay as if i were really a resident. the country that allows me copyright has a right to tax me. reflecting on the matter, clemens decided to make literature of it. he conceived the notion of writing an open letter to the queen in the character of a rambling, garrulous, but well-disposed countryman whose idea was that her majesty conducted all the business of the empire herself. he began: hartford, november , . madam, you will remember that last may mr. edward bright, the clerk of the inland revenue office, wrote me about a tax which he said was due from me to the government on books of mine published in london --that is to say, an income tax on the royalties. i do not know mr. bright, and it is embarrassing to me to correspond with strangers, for i was raised in the country and have always lived there, the early part in marion county, missouri, before the war, and this part in hartford county, connecticut, near bloomfield and about miles this side of farmington, though some call it , which it is impossible to be, for i have walked it many and many a time in considerably under three hours, and general hawley says he has done it in two and a quarter, which is not likely; so it has seemed best that i write your majesty. the letter proceeded to explain that he had never met her majesty personally, but that he once met her son, the prince of wales, in oxford street, at the head of a procession, while he himself was on the top of an omnibus. he thought the prince would probably remember him on account of a gray coat with flap pockets which he wore, he being the only person on the omnibus who had on that kind of a coat. "i remember him," he said, "as easily as i would a comet." he explained the difficulty he had in understanding under what heading he was taxed. there was a foot-note on the list which stated that he was taxed under "schedule d, section ." he had turned to that place and found these three things: "trades, offices, gas works." he did not regard authorship as a trade, and he had no office, so he did not consider that he was taxable under "schedule d, section ." the letter concludes: having thus shown your majesty that i am not taxable, but am the victim of the error of a clerk who mistakes the nature of my commerce, it only remains for me to beg that you will, of your justice, annul my letter that i spoke of, so that my publisher can keep back that tax money which, in the confusion and aberration caused by the document, i ordered him to pay. you will not miss the sum, but this is a hard year for authors, and as for lectures i do not suppose your majesty ever saw such a dull season. with always great and ever-increasing respect, i beg to sign myself your majesty's servant to command, mark twain. her majesty the queen, london. the letter, or "petition," as it was called, was published in the harper's magazine "drawer" (december, ), and is now included in the "complete works." taken as a whole it is one of the most exquisite of mark twain's minor humors. what other humorist could have refrained from hinting, at least, the inference suggested by the obvious "gas works"? yet it was a subtler art to let his old, simple-minded countryman ignore that detail. the little skit was widely copied and reached the queen herself in due time, and her son, prince edward, who never forgot its humor. clemens read a notable paper that year before the monday evening club. its subject was "consistency"--political consistency--and in it he took occasion to express himself pretty vigorously regarding the virtue of loyalty to party before principle, as exemplified in the blaine-cleveland campaign. it was in effect a scathing reply to those who, three years, before, had denounced twichell and himself for standing by their convictions.--[ characteristic paragraphs from this paper will be found under appendix r, at the end of last volume.] clxiv some further account of charles l. webster & co. flood-tide is a temporary condition, and the ebb in the business of charles l. webster & co., though very deliberate, was not delayed in its beginning. most of the books published--the early ones at least-were profitable. mcclellan's memoirs paid, as did others of the war series. even the life of pope leo xiii. paid. what a statement to make, after all their magnificent dreams and preparations! it was published simultaneously in six languages. it was exploited in every conceivable fashion, and its aggregate sales fell far short of the number which the general agents had promised for their first orders. it was amazing, it was incredible, but, alas! it was true. the prospective catholic purchaser had decided that the pope's life was not necessary to his salvation or even to his entertainment. howells explains it, to his own satisfaction at least, when he says: we did not consider how often catholics could not read, how often, when they could, they might not wish to read. the event proved that, whether they could read or not, the immeasurable majority did not wish to read the life of the pope, though it was written by a dignitary of the church and issued to the world with sanction from the vatican. howells, of course, is referring to the laboring catholic of that day. there are no catholics of this day--no american catholics, at least--who do not read, and money among them has become plentiful. perhaps had the pope's life been issued in this new hour of enlightenment the tale of its success might have been less sadly told. a variety of books followed. henry ward beecher agreed to write an autobiography, but he died just when he was beginning the work, and the biography, which his family put together, brought only a moderate return. a book of sandwich islands tales and legends, by his hawaiian majesty king kalakaua, edited by clemens's old friend, rollin m. daggett, who had become united states minister to the islands, barely paid for the cost of manufacture, while a volume of reminiscences by general hancock was still less fortunate. the running expenses of the business were heavy. on the strength of the grant success webster had moved into still larger quarters at no. east fifteenth street, and had a ground floor for a salesroom. the force had become numerous and costly. it was necessary that a book should pay largely to maintain this pretentious establishment. a number of books were published at a heavy loss. never mind their titles; we may forget them, with the name of the bookkeeper who presently embezzled thirty thousand dollars of the firm's money and returned but a trifling sum. by the end of there were three works in prospect on which great hopes were founded--'the library of humor', which howells and clark had edited; a personal memoir of general sheridan's, and a library of american literature in ten volumes, compiled by edmund clarence stedman and ellen mackay hutchinson. it was believed these would restore the fortunes and the prestige of the firm. they were all excellent, attractive features. the library of humor was ably selected and contained two hundred choice drawings by kemble. the sheridan memoir was finely written, and the public interest in it was bound to be general. the library of american literature was a collection of the best american writing, and seemed bound to appeal to every american reading-home. it was necessary to borrow most of the money required to build these books, for the profit made from the grant life and less fortunate ventures was pretty well exhausted. clemens presently found a little drift of his notes accumulating at this bank and that--a disturbing condition, when he remembered it, for he was financing the typesetting machine by this time, and it was costing a pretty sum. meantime, webster was no longer active in the management. in two years he had broken down from overwork, and was now desperately ill with an acute neuralgia that kept him away from the business most of the time. its burdens had fallen upon his assistant, fred j. hall, a willing, capable young man, persevering and hopeful, lacking only years and experience. hall worked like a beaver, and continually looked forward to success. he explained, with each month's report of affairs, just why the business had not prospered more during that particular month, and just why its profits would be greater during the next. webster finally retired from the business altogether, and hall was given a small partnership in the firm. he reduced expenses, worked desperately, pumping out the debts, and managed to keep the craft afloat. the library of humor, the life of sheridan, and the library of american literature all sold very well; not so well as had been hoped, but the sales yielded a fair profit. it was thought that if clemens himself would furnish a new book now and then the business might regain something of its original standing. we may believe that clemens had not been always patient, not always gentle, during this process of decline. he had differed with webster, and occasionally had gone down and reconstructed things after his own notions. once he wrote to orion that he had suddenly awakened to find that there was no more system in the office than in a nursery without a nurse. "but," he added, "i have spent a good deal of time there since, and reduced everything to exact order and system." just what were the new features of order instituted it would be interesting to know. that the financial pressure was beginning to be felt even in the clemens home is shown by a christmas letter to mrs. moffett. hartford, december , . dear pamela,--will you take this $ & buy some candy or other trifle for yourself & sam & his wife to remind you that we remember you? if we weren't a little crowded this year by the type-setter i'd send a check large enough to buy a family bible or some other useful thing like that. however, we go on & on, but the type-setter goes on forever--at $ , a month; which is much more satisfactory than was the case the first months, when the bill only averaged $ , , & promised to take a thousand years. we'll be through now in or months, i reckon, & then the strain will let up and we can breathe freely once more, whether success ensues or failure. even with a type-setter on hand we ought not to be in the least scrimped-but it would take a long letter to explain why & who is to blame. all the family send love to all of you, & best christmas wishes for your prosperity. affectionately, sam. clxv letters, visits, and visitors there were many pleasanter things, to be sure. the farm life never failed with each returning summer; the winters brought gay company and fair occasions. sir henry and lady stanley, visiting. america, were entertained in the clemens home, and clemens went on to boston to introduce stanley to his lecture audience. charles dickens's son, with his wife and daughter, followed a little later. an incident of their visit seems rather amusing now. there is a custom in england which requires the host to give the guest notice of bedtime by handing him a lighted candle. mrs. clemens knew of this custom, but did not have the courage to follow it in her own home, and the guests knew of no other way to relieve the situation; as a result, all sat up much later than usual. eventually clemens himself suggested that possibly the guests would like to retire. robert louis stevenson came down from saranac, and clemens went in to visit him at his new york hotel, the st. stevens, on east eleventh street. stevenson had orders to sit in the sunshine as much as possible, and during the few days of their association he and clemens would walk down to washington square and sit on one of the benches and talk. they discussed many things--philosophies, people, books; it seems a pity their talk could not have been preserved. stevenson was a great admirer of mark twain's work. he said that during a recent painting of his portrait he had insisted on reading huck finn aloud to the artist, a frenchman, who had at first protested, and finally had fallen a complete victim to huck's yarn. in one of stevenson's letters to clemens he wrote: my father, an old man, has been prevailed upon to read roughing it (his usual amusement being found in theology), and after one evening spent with the book he declared: "i am frightened. it cannot be safe for a man at my time of life to laugh so much." what heaps of letters, by the way, remain from this time, and how curious some of them are! many of them are requests of one sort or another, chiefly for money--one woman asking for a single day's income, conservatively estimated at five thousand dollars. clemens seldom answered an unwarranted letter; but at one time he began a series of unmailed answers--that is to say, answers in which he had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings and to restore his spiritual balance. he prepared an introduction for this series. in it he said: . . . you receive a letter. you read it. it will be tolerably sure to produce one of three results: , pleasure; , displeasure; , indifference. i do not need to say anything about nos. & ; everybody knows what to do with those breeds of letters; it is breed no. that i am after. it is the one that is loaded up with trouble. when you get an exasperating letter what happens? if you are young you answer it promptly, instantly--and mail the thing you have written. at forty what do you do? by that time you have found out that a letter written in a passion is a mistake in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred; that it usually wrongs two persons, and always wrongs one--yourself. you have grown weary of wronging yourself and repenting; so you manacle, you fetter, you log-chain the frantic impulse to write a pulverizing answer. you will wait a day or die. but in the mean time what do you do? why, if it is about dinner- time, you sit at table in a deep abstraction all through the meal; you try to throw it off and help do the talking; you get a start three or four times, but conversation dies on your lips every time --your mind isn't on it; your heart isn't in it. you give up, and subside into a bottomless deep of silence, permanently; people must speak to you two or three times to get your attention, and then say it over again to make you understand. this kind of thing goes on all the rest of the evening; nobody can interest you in anything; you are useless, a depressing influence, a burden. you go to bed at last; but at three in the morning you are as wide awake as you were in the beginning. thus we see what you have been doing for nine hours--on the outside. but what were you doing on the inside? you were writing letters--in your mind. and enjoying it, that is quite true; that is not to be denied. you have been flaying your correspondent alive with your incorporeal pen; you have been braining him, disemboweling him, carving him into little bits, and then--doing it all over again. for nine hours. it was wasted time, for you had no intention of putting any of this insanity on paper and mailing it. yes, you know that, and confess it--but what were you to do? where was your remedy? will anybody contend that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, go, and be obeyed? no, he cannot; that is certainly true. well, then, what is he to do? i will explain by the suggestion contained in my opening paragraph. during the nine hours he has written as many as forty- seven furious letters--in his mind. if he had put just one of them on paper it would have brought him relief, saved him eight hours of trouble, and given him an hour's red-hot pleasure besides. he is not to mail this letter; he understands that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no harm. he is only writing it to get the bile out. so to speak, he is a volcano: imaging himself erupting does no good; he must open up his crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he would get relief. before he has filled his first sheet sometimes the relief is there. he degenerates into good-nature from that point. sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one writes as many as three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a very angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot embers in it here and there. he pigeonholes these and then does one of two things--dismisses the whole matter from his mind or writes the proper sort of letter and mails it. to this day i lose my balance and send an overwarm letter--or more frequently telegram--two or three times a year. but that is better than doing it a hundred times a year, as i used to do years ago. perhaps i write about as many as ever, but i pigeonhole them. they ought not to be thrown away. such a letter a year or so old is as good as a sermon to the maw who wrote it. it makes him feel small and shabby, but--well, that wears off. any sermon does; but the sermon does some little good, anyway. an old cold letter like that makes you wonder how you could ever have got into such a rage about nothing. the unmailed answers that were to accompany this introduction were plentiful enough and generally of a fervent sort. one specimen will suffice. it was written to the chairman of a hospital committee. dear sir,--if i were smithfield i would certainly go out and get behind something and blush. according to your report, "the politicians are afraid to tax the people for the support" of so humane and necessary a thing as a hospital. and do your "people" propose to stand that?--at the hands of vermin officials whom the breath of their votes could blow out of official existence in a moment if they had the pluck to band themselves together and blow. oh, come, these are not "people"--they are cowed school-boys with backbones made of boiled macaroni. if you are not misreporting those "people" you are just in the right business passing the mendicant hat for them. dear sir, communities where anything like citizenship exists are accustomed to hide their shames, but here we have one proposing to get up a great "exposition" of its dishonor and advertise it all it can. it has been eleven years since i wrote anything for one of those graveyards called a "fair paper," and so i have doubtless lost the knack of it somewhat; still i have done the best i could for you. this was from a burning heart and well deserved. one may almost regret that he did not send it. once he received a letter intended for one samuel clements, of elma, new york, announcing that the said clements's pension had been allowed. but this was amusing. when clemens had forwarded the notice to its proper destination he could not resist sending this comment to the commissioner at washington: dear sir,--i have not applied for a pension. i have often wanted a pension--often--ever so often--i may say, but in as much as the only military service i performed during the war was in the confederate army, i have always felt a delicacy about asking you for it. however, since you have suggested the thing yourself, i feel strengthened. i haven't any very pensionable diseases myself, but i can furnish a substitute--a man who is just simply a chaos, a museum of all the different kinds of aches and pains, fractures, dislocations and malformations there are; a man who would regard "rheumatism and sore eyes" as mere recreation and refreshment after the serious occupations of his day. if you grant me the pension, dear sir, please hand it to general jos. hawley, united states senator--i mean hand him the certificate, not the money, and he will forward it to me. you will observe by this postal-card which i inclose that he takes a friendly interest in the matter. he thinks i've already got the pension, whereas i've only got the rheumatism; but didn't want that--i had that before. i wish it were catching. i know a man that i would load up with it pretty early. lord, but we all feel that way sometimes. i've seen the day when but never mind that; you may be busy; just hand it to hawley--the certificate, you understand, is not transferable. clemens was in good standing at washington during the cleveland administration, and many letters came, asking him to use his influence with the president to obtain this or that favor. he always declined, though once--a few years later, in europe--when he learned that frank mason, consul-general at frankfort, was about to be displaced, clemens, of his own accord, wrote to baby ruth cleveland about it. my dear ruth, i belong to the mugwumps, and one of the most sacred rules of our order prevents us from asking favors of officials or recommending men to office, but there is no harm in writing a friendly letter to you and telling you that an infernal outrage is about to be committed by your father in turning out of office the best consul i know (and i know a great many) just because he is a republican and a democrat wants his place. he went on to recall mason's high and honorable record, suggesting that miss ruth take the matter into her own hands. then he said: i can't send any message to the president, but the next time you have a talk with him concerning such matters i wish you would tell him about captain mason and what i think of a government that so treats its efficient officials. just what form of appeal the small agent made is not recorded, but by and by mark twain received a tiny envelope, postmarked washington, inclosing this note in president cleveland's handwriting: miss ruth cleveland begs to acknowledge the receipt of mr. twain's letter and say that she took the liberty of reading it to the president, who desires her to thank mr. twain for her information, and to say to him that captain mason will not be disturbed in the frankfort consulate. the president also desires miss cleveland to say that if mr. twain knows of any other cases of this kind he will be greatly obliged if he will write him concerning them at his earliest convenience. clemens immensely admired grover cleveland, also his young wife, and his visits to washington were not infrequent. mrs. clemens was not always able to accompany him, and he has told us how once (it was his first visit after the president's marriage) she put a little note in the pocket of his evening waistcoat, which he would be sure to find when dressing, warning him about his deportment. being presented to mrs. cleveland, he handed her a card on which he had written "he didn't," and asked her to sign her name below those words. mrs. cleveland protested that she couldn't sign it unless she knew what it was he hadn't done; but he insisted, and she promised to sign if he would tell her immediately afterward all about it. she signed, and he handed her mrs. clemens's note, which was very brief. it said: "don't wear your arctics in the white house." mrs. cleveland summoned a messenger and had the card she had signed mailed at once to mrs. clemens at hartford. he was not always so well provided against disaster. once, without consulting his engagements, he agreed to assist mrs. cleveland at a dedication, only to find that he must write an apology later. in his letter he said: i do not know how it is in the white house, but in this house of ours whenever the minor half of the administration tries to run itself without the help of the major half it gets aground. he explained his position, and added: i suppose the president often acts just like that; goes and makes an impossible promise, and you never find it out until it is next to impossible to break it up and set things straight again. well, that is just our way exactly--one-half the administration always busy getting the family into trouble and the other half busy getting it out. clvxi a "player" and a master of arts one morning early in january clemens received the following note: daly's theater, new york, january , . mr. augustin daly will be very much pleased to have mr. s. l. clemens meet mr. booth, mr. barrett, and mr. palmer and a few friends at lunch on friday next, january th (at one o'clock in delmonico's), to discuss the formation of a new club which it is thought will claim your (sic) interest. r. s. v. p. there were already in new york a variety of literary and artistic societies, such as the kinsmen and tile clubs, with which clemens was more or less associated. it was proposed now to form a more comprehensive and pretentious organization--one that would include the various associated arts. the conception of this new club, which was to be called the players, had grown out of a desire on the part of edwin booth to confer some enduring benefit upon the members of his profession. it had been discussed during a summer cruise on mr. e. c. benedict's steam-yacht by a little party which, besides the owner, consisted of booth himself, aldrich, lawrence barrett, william bispham, and laurence hutton. booth's original idea had been to endow some sort of an actors' home, but after due consideration this did not appear to be the best plan. some one proposed a club, and aldrich, with never-failing inspiration, suggested its name, the players, which immediately impressed booth and the others. it was then decided that members of all the kindred arts should be admitted, and this was the plan discussed and perfected at the daly luncheon. the guests became charter members, and the players became an incorporated fact early in january, . --[besides mr. booth himself, the charter members were: lawrence barrett, william bispham, samuel l. clemens, augustin daly, joseph f. daly, john drew, henry edwards, laurence hutton, joseph jefferson, john a. lane, james lewis, brander matthews, stephen h. olin, a. m. palmer, and william t. sherman.]--booth purchased the fine old brownstone residence at gramercy park, and had expensive alterations made under the directions of stanford white to adapt it for club purposes. he bore the entire cost, furnished it from garret to cellar, gave it his books and pictures, his rare collections of every sort. laurence hutton, writing of it afterward, said: and on the first founder's night, the st of december, , he transferred it all to the association, a munificent gift; absolutely without parallel in its way. the pleasure it gave to booth during the few remaining years of his life was very great. he made it his home. next to his own immediate family it was his chief interest, care, and consolation. he nursed and petted it, as it nursed and petted and honored him. he died in it. and it is certainly his greatest monument. there is no other club quite like the players. the personality of edwin booth pervades it, and there is a spirit in its atmosphere not found in other large clubs--a spirit of unity, and ancient friendship, and mellowness which usually come only of small membership and long establishment. mark twain was always fond of the players, and more than once made it his home. it is a true home, and its members are a genuine brotherhood. it was in june, , that yale college conferred upon samuel clemens the degree of master of arts. it was his first honor of this kind, and he was proud of it. to charles hopkins ("charley") clark, who had been appointed to apprise him of the honor, he wrote: i felt mighty proud of that degree; in fact i could squeeze the truth a little closer and say vain of it. and why shouldn't i be? i am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has ever been given a degree by any college in any age of the world as far as i know. to which clark answered: my dear friend, you are "the only literary animal of your particular subspecies" in existence, and you've no cause for humility in the fact. yale has done herself at least as much credit as she has done you, and "don't you forget it." c. h. c. clemens could not attend the alumni dinner, being at elmira and unable to get away, but in an address he made at yale college later in the year he thus freely expressed himself: i was sincerely proud and grateful to be made a master of arts by this great and venerable university, and i would have come last june to testify this feeling, as i do now testify it, but that the sudden and unexpected notice of the honor done me found me at a distance from home and unable to discharge that duty and enjoy that privilege. along at first, say for the first month or so, i, did not quite know hove to proceed because of my not knowing just what authorities and privileges belonged to the title which had been granted me, but after that i consulted some students of trinity--in hartford--and they made everything clear to me. it was through them that i found out that my title made me head of the governing body of the university, and lodged in me very broad and severely responsible powers. i was told that it would be necessary to report to you at this time, and of course i comply, though i would have preferred to put it off till i could make a better showing; for indeed i have been so pertinaciously hindered and obstructed at every turn by the faculty that it would be difficult to prove that the university is really in any better shape now than it was when i first took charge. by advice, i turned my earliest attention to the greek department. i told the greek professor i had concluded to drop the use of greek- written character because it is so hard to spell with, and so impossible to read after you get it spelt. let us draw the curtain there. i saw by what followed that nothing but early neglect saved him from being a very profane man. i ordered the professor of mathematics to simplify the whole system, because the way it was i couldn't understand it, and i didn't want things going on in the college in what was practically a clandestine fashion. i told him to drop the conundrum system; it was not suited to the dignity of a college, which should deal in facts, not guesses and suppositions; we didn't want any more cases of if a and b stand at opposite poles of the earth's surface and c at the equator of jupiter, at what variations of angle will the left limb of the moon appear to these different parties?--i said you just let that thing alone; it's plenty time to get in a sweat about it when it happens; as like as not it ain't going to do any harm, anyway. his reception of these instructions bordered on insubordination, insomuch that i felt obliged to take his number and report him. i found the astronomer of the university gadding around after comets and other such odds and ends--tramps and derelicts of the skies. i told him pretty plainly that we couldn't have that. i told him it was no economy to go on piling up and piling up raw material in the way of new stars and comets and asteroids that we couldn't ever have any use for till we had worked off the old stock. at bottom i don't really mind comets so much, but somehow i have always been down on asteroids. there is nothing mature about them; i wouldn't sit up nights the way that man does if i could get a basketful of them. he said it was the bast line of goods he had; he said he could trade them to rochester for comets, and trade the comets to harvard for nebulae, and trade the nebula to the smithsonian for flint hatchets. i felt obliged to stop this thing on the spot; i said we couldn't have the university turned into an astronomical junk shop. and while i was at it i thought i might as well make the reform complete; the astronomer is extraordinarily mutinous, and so, with your approval, i will transfer him to the law department and put one of the law students in his place. a boy will be more biddable, more tractable, also cheaper. it is true he cannot be intrusted with important work at first, but he can comb the skies for nebulae till he gets his hand in. i have other changes in mind, but as they are in the nature of surprises i judge it politic to leave them unspecified at this time. very likely it was in this new capacity, as the head of the governing body, that he wrote one morning to clark advising him as to the misuse of a word in the courant, though he thought it best to sign the communication with the names of certain learned friends, to give it weight with the public, as he afterward explained. sir,--the word "patricide" in your issue of this morning (telegrams) was an error. you meant it to describe the slayer of a father; you should have used "parricide" instead. patricide merely means the killing of an irishman--any irishman, male or female. respectfully, j. hammond trumbull. n. j. burton. j. h. twichell. clxvii notes and literary matters clemens' note-books of this time are full of the vexations of his business ventures, figures, suggestions, and a hundred imagined combinations for betterment--these things intermingled with the usual bits of philosophy and reflections, and amusing reminders. aldrich's man who painted the fat toads red, and naturalist chasing and trying to catch them. man who lost his false teeth over brooklyn bridge when he was on his way to propose to a widow. one believes st. simon and benvenuto and partly believes the margravine of bayreuth. there are things in the confession of rousseau which one must believe. what is biography? unadorned romance. what is romance? adorned biography. adorn it less and it will be better than it is. if god is what people say there can be none in the universe so unhappy as he; for he sees unceasingly myriads of his creatures suffering unspeakable miseries, and, besides this, foresees all they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. one might well say "as unhappy as god." in spite of the financial complexities and the drain of the enterprises already in hand he did not fail to conceive others. he was deeply interested in bunyan's pilgrim's progress at the moment, and from photography and scenic effect he presaged a possibility to-day realized in the moving picture. dress up some good actors as apollyon, greatheart, etc., & the other bunyan characters, take them to a wild gorge and photograph them--valley of the shadow of death; to other effective places & photo them along with the scenery; to paris, in their curious costumes, place them near the arc de l'etoile & photo them with the crowd-vanity fair; to cairo, venice, jerusalem, & other places (twenty interesting cities) & always make them conspicuous in the curious foreign crowds by their costume. take them to zululand. it would take two or three years to do the photographing & cost $ , ; but this stereopticon panorama of bunyan's pilgrim's progress could be exhibited in all countries at the same time & would clear a fortune in a year. by & by i will do this. if in i find myself not rich enough to carry out my scheme of buying christopher columbus's bones & burying them under the statue of liberty enlightening the world i will give the idea to somebody who is rich enough. incidentally he did an occasional piece of literary work. early in the year, with brander matthews, he instructed and entertained the public with a copyright controversy in the princeton review. matthews would appear to have criticized the english copyright protection, or rather the lack of it, comparing it unfavorably with american conditions. clemens, who had been amply protected in great britain, replied that america was in no position to criticize england; that if american authors suffered in england they had themselves to blame for not taking the proper trouble and precautions required by the english law, that is to say, "previous publication" on english soil. he declared that his own books had been as safe in england as at home since he had undertaken to comply with english requirements, and that professor matthews was altogether mistaken, both as to premise and conclusion. "you are the very wrong-headedest person in america," he said; "and you are injudicious." and of the article: "i read it to the cat--well, i never saw a cat carry on so before . . . . the american author can go to canada, spend three days there and come home with an english and american copyright as strong as if it had been built out of railroad iron." matthews replied that not every one could go to canada, any more than to corinth. he said: "it is not easy for a poor author who may chance to live in florida or texas, those noted homes of literature, to go to canada." clemens did not reply again; that is to say, he did not publish his reply. it was a capable bomb which he prepared, well furnished with amusing instance, sarcasm, and ridicule, but he did not use it. perhaps he was afraid it would destroy his opponent, which would not do. in his heart he loved matthews. he laid the deadly thing away and maintained a dignified reserve. clemens often felt called upon to criticize american institutions, but he was first to come to their defense, especially when the critic was an alien. when matthew arnold offered some strictures on america. clemens covered a good many quires of paper with caustic replies. he even defended american newspapers, which he had himself more than once violently assailed for misreporting him and for other journalistic shortcomings, and he bitterly denounced every shaky british institution, touched upon every weak spot in hereditary rule. he did not print--not then--[an article on the american press, probably the best of those prepared at this time, was used, in part, in the american claimant, as the paper read before the mechanics' club, by "parker," assistant editor of the 'democrat'.]--he was writing mainly for relief--without success, however, for he only kindled the fires of his indignation. he was at quarry farm and he plunged into his neglected story--a yankee in king arthur's court--and made his astonishing hero the mouthpiece of his doctrines. he worked with an inspiration and energy born of his ferocity. to whitmore, near the end of the summer, he wrote: i've got working-days left yet, and in that time i will add another , words to my book if i have luck. in his memoranda of this time he says: there was never a throne which did not represent a crime. there is no throne to-day which does not represent a crime .... show me a lord and i will show you a man whom you couldn't tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior; and in the shoemaker i will show you a dull animal, a poor-spirited insect; for there are enough of him to rise and chuck the lords and royalties into the sea where they belong, and he doesn't do it. but his violence waned, maybe, for he did not finish the yankee in the sixteen days as planned. he brought the manuscript back to hartford, but found it hard work there, owing to many interruptions. he went over to twichell's and asked for a room where he might work in seclusion. they gave him a big upper chamber, but some repairs were going on below. from a letter written to theodore crane we gather that it was not altogether quiet. friday, october , . dear theo, i am here in twichell's house at work, with the noise of the children and an army of carpenters to help: of course they don't help, but neither do they hinder. it's like a boiler factory for racket, and in nailing a wooden ceiling on to the room under me the hammering tickles my feet amazingly sometimes and jars my table a good deal, but i never am conscious of the racket at all, and i move my feet into positions of relief without knowing when i do it. i began here monday morning, and have done eighty pages since. i was so tired last night that i thought i would lie abed and rest to-day; but i couldn't resist. i mean to try to knock off tomorrow, but it's doubtful if i do. i want to finish the day the machine finishes, and a week ago the closest calculations for that indicated oct. --but experience teaches me that the calculations will miss fire as usual. the other day the children were projecting a purchase, livy and i to furnish the money--a dollar and a half. jean discouraged the idea. she said, "we haven't got any money. children, if you would think, you would remember the machine isn't done." it's billiards to-night. i wish you were here. with love to you both, s. l. c. p. s. i got it all wrong. it wasn't the children, it was marie. she wanted a box of blacking for the children's shoes. jean reproved her and said, "why, marie, you mustn't ask for things now. the machine isn't done." neither the yankee nor the machine was completed that fall, though returns from both were beginning to be badly needed. the financial pinch was not yet severe, but it was noticeable, and it did not relax. a memorandum of this time tells of an anniversary given to charles and susan warner in their own home. the guests assembled at the clemens home, the twichells among them, and slipped across to warner's, entering through a window. dinner was then announced to the warners, who were sitting by their library fire. they came across the hall and opened the dining-room door, to be confronted by a table fully spread and lighted and an array of guests already seated. clxviii introducing nye and riley and others it was the winter ( - ) that the bill nye and james whitcomb riley entertainment combination set out on its travels. mark twain introduced them to their first boston audience. major j. b. pond was exploiting nye and riley, and clemens went on to boston especially to hear them. pond happened upon him in the lobby of the parker house and insisted that nothing would do but he must introduce them. in his book of memories which he published later pond wrote: he replied that he believed i was his mortal enemy, and determined that he should never have an evening's enjoyment in my presence. he consented, however, and conducted his brother-humorist and the hoosier poet to the platform. mark's presence was a surprise to the audience, and when they recognized him the demonstration was tremendous. the audience rose in a body, and men and women shouted at the very top of their voices. handkerchiefs waved, the organist even opened every forte key and pedal in the great organ, and the noise went on unabated for minutes. it took some time for the crowd to get down to listening, but when they did subside, as mark stepped to the front, the silence was as impressive as the noise had been. he presented the nye-riley pair as the siamese twins. "i saw them first," he sand, "a great many years ago, when mr. barnum had them, and they were just fresh from siam. the ligature was their best hold then, but literature became their best hold later, when one of them committed an indiscretion, and they had to cut the old bond to accommodate the sheriff." he continued this comic fancy, and the audience was in a proper frame of mind, when he had finished, to welcome the "twins of genius" who were to entertain them: pond says: it was a carnival of fun in every sense of the word. bostonians will not have another such treat in this generation. pond proposed to clemens a regular tour with nye and riley. he wrote: i will go partners with you, and i will buy nye and riley's time and give an entertainment something like the one we gave in boston. let it be announced that you will introduce the "twins of genius." ostensibly a pleasure trip for you. i will take one-third of the profits and you two-thirds. i can tell you it will be the biggest thing that can be brought before the american public. but clemens, badly as he was beginning to need the money, put this temptation behind him. his chief diversion these days was in gratuitous appearances. he had made up his mind not to read or lecture again for pay, but he seemed to take a peculiar enjoyment in doing these things as a benefaction. that he was beginning to need the money may have added a zest to the joy of his giving. he did not respond to all invitations; he could have been traveling constantly had he done so. he consulted with mrs. clemens and gave himself to the cause that seemed most worthy. in january col. richard malcolm johnston was billed to give a reading with thomas nelson page in baltimore. page's wife fell ill and died, and colonel johnston, in extremity, wired charles dudley warner to come in page's place. warner, unable to go, handed the invitation to clemens, who promptly wired that he would come. they read to a packed house, and when the audience was gone and the returns had been counted an equal division of the profits was handed to each of the authors. clemens pushed his share over to johnston, saying: "that's yours, colonel. i'm not reading for money these days." colonel johnston, to whom the sum was important, tried to thank him, but he only said: "never mind, colonel, it only gave me pleasure to do you that little favor. you can pass it on some day." as a matter of fact, hard put to it as he was for funds, clemens at this time regarded himself as a potential multi-millionaire. the type-setting machine which for years had been sapping his financial strength was believed to be perfected, and ship-loads of money were waiting in the offing. however, we shall come to this later. clemens read for the cadets at west point and for a variety of institutions and on many special occasions. he usually gave chapters from his yankee, now soon to be finished, chapters generally beginning with the yankee's impression of the curious country and its people, ending with the battle of the sun-belt, when the yankee and his fifty-four adherents were masters of england, with twenty-five thousand dead men lying about them. he gave this at west point, including the chapter where the yankee has organized a west point of his own in king arthur's reign. in april, ' , he made an address at a dinner given to a victorious baseball team returning from a tour of the world by way of the sandwich islands. he was on familiar ground there. his heart was in his words. he began: i have been in the sandwich islands-twenty-three years ago--that peaceful land, that beautiful land, that far-off home of solitude, and soft idleness, and repose, and dreams, where life is one long slumberous sabbath, the climate one long summer day, and the good that die experience no change, for they but fall asleep in one heaven and wake up in another. and these boys have played baseball there!--baseball, which is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression, of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the living, tearing, booming nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries! he told of the curious island habits for his hearers' amusement, but at the close the poetry of his memories once more possessed him: ah, well, it is refreshment to the jaded, it is water to the thirsty, to look upon men who have so lately breathed the soft air of those isles of the blest and had before their eyes the inextinguishable vision of their beauty. no alien land in all the earth has any deep, strong charm for me but that one; no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. for me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; i can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; i can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, i hear the plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago. clxix the coming of kipling it was the summer of that mark twain first met rudyard kipling. kipling was making his tour around the world, a young man wholly unheard of outside of india. he was writing letters home to an indian journal, the pioneer, and he came to elmira especially to see mark twain. it was night when he arrived, and next morning some one at the hotel directed him to quarry farm. in a hired hack he made his way out through the suburbs, among the buzzing planing-mills and sash factories, and toiled up the long, dusty, roasting east hill, only to find that mark twain was at general langdon's, in the city he had just left behind. mrs. crane and susy clemens were the only ones left at the farm, and they gave him a seat on the veranda and brought him glasses of water or cool milk while he refreshed them with his talk-talk which mark twain once said might be likened to footprints, so strong and definite was the impression which it left behind. he gave them his card, on which the address was allahabad, and susy preserved it on that account, because to her india was a fairyland, made up of magic, airy architecture, and dark mysteries. clemens once dictated a memory of kipling's visit. kipling had written upon the card a compliment to me. this gave it an additional value in susy's eyes, since, as a distinction, it was the next thing to being recognized by a denizen of the moon. kipling came down that afternoon and spent a couple of hours with me, and at the end of that time i had surprised him as much as he had surprised me--and the honors were easy. i believed that he knew more than any person i had met before, and i knew that he knew that i knew less than any person he had met before--though he did not say it, and i was not expecting that he would. when he was gone mrs. langdon wanted to know about my visitor. i said: "he is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man--and i am the other one. between us we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and i know the rest." he was a stranger to me and to all the world, and remained so for twelve months, then he became suddenly known, and universally known. from that day to this he has held this unique distinction--that of being the only living person, not head of a nation, whose voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark; the only such voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail, but always travels first-class--by cable. about a year after kipling's visit in elmira george warner came into our library one morning in hartford with a small book in his hand and asked me if i had ever heard of rudyard kipling. i said, "no." he said i would hear of him very soon, and that the noise he was going to make would be loud and continuous. the little book was the plain tales, and he left it for me to read, saying it was charged with a new and inspiriting fragrance, and would blow a refreshing breath around the world that would revive the nations. a day or two later he brought a copy of the london world which had a sketch of kipling in it, and a mention of the fact that he had traveled in the united states. according to this sketch he had passed through elmira. this remark, with the additional fact that he hailed from india, attracted my attention--also susy's. she went to her room and brought his card from its place in the frame of her mirror, and the quarry farm visitor stood identified. kipling also has left an account of that visit. in his letter recording it he says: you are a contemptible lot over yonder. some of you are commissioners and some are lieutenant-governors, and some have the v. c., and a few are privileged to walk about the mall arm in arm with the viceroy; but i have seen mark twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand and smoked a cigar--no, two cigars--with him, and talked with him for more than two hours! understand clearly that i do not despise you; indeed, i don't. i am only very sorry for you, from the viceroy downward. a big, darkened drawing-room; a huge chair; a man with eyes, a mane of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a woman's, a strong, square hand shaking mine, and the slowest, calmest, levelest voice in all the world saying: "well, you think you owe me something, and you've come to tell me so. that's what i call squaring a debt handsomely." "piff!" from a cob-pipe (i always said that a missouri meerschaum was the best smoking in the world), and behold! mark twain had curled himself up in the big arm-chair, and i was smoking reverently, as befits one in the presence of his superior. the thing that struck me first was that he was an elderly man; yet, after a minute's thought, i perceived that it was otherwise, and in five minutes, the eyes looking at me, i saw that the gray hair was an accident of the most trivial. he was quite young. i was shaking his hand. i was smoking his cigar, and i was hearing him talk--this man i had learned to love and admire fourteen thousand miles away. reading his books, i had striven to get an idea of his personality, and all my preconceived notions were wrong and beneath the reality. blessed is the man who finds no disillusion when he is brought face to face with a revered writer. the meeting of those two men made the summer of ' memorable in later years. but it was recalled sadly, too. theodore crane, who had been taken suddenly and dangerously ill the previous autumn, had a recurring attack and died july d. it was the first death in the immediate families for more than seventeen years, mrs. clemens, remembering that earlier period of sorrow, was depressed with forebodings. clxx "the prince and the pauper" on the stage there was an unusual dramatic interest in the clemens home that autumn. abby sage richardson had dramatized 'the prince and the pauper', and daniel frohman had secured elsie leslie (lyde) to take the double role of the prince and tom canty. the rehearsals were going on, and the clemens children were naturally a good deal excited over the outcome. susy clemens was inspired to write a play of her own--a pretty greek fancy, called "the triumph of music," and when it was given on thanksgiving night, by herself, with clara and jean and margaret warner, it was really a lovely performance, and carried one back to the days when emotions were personified, and nymphs haunted the seclusions of arcady. clemens was proud of susy's achievement, and deeply moved by it. he insisted on having the play repeated, and it was given again later in the year. pretty elsie leslie became a favorite of the clemens household. she was very young, and when she visited hartford jean and she were companions and romped together in the hay-loft. she was also a favorite of william gillette. one day when clemens and gillette were together they decided to give the little girl a surprise--a unique one. they agreed to embroider a pair of slippers for her--to do the work themselves. writing to her of it, mark twain said: either one of us could have thought of a single slipper, but it took both of us to think of two slippers. in fact, one of us did think of one slipper, and then, quick as a flash, the other of the other one. it shows how wonderful the human mind is.... gillette embroidered his slipper with astonishing facility and splendor, but i have been a long time pulling through with mine. you see, it was my very first attempt at art, and i couldn't rightly get the hang of it along at first. and then i was so busy that i couldn't get a chance to work at it at home, and they wouldn't let me embroider on the cars; they said it made the other passengers afraid. they didn't like the light that flared into my eye when i had an inspiration. and even the most fair-minded people doubted me when i explained what it was i was making--especially brakemen. brakemen always swore at it and carried on, the way ignorant people do about art. they wouldn't take my word that it was a slipper; they said they believed it was a snow-shoe that had some kind of disease. he went on to explain and elucidate the pattern of the slipper, and how dr. root had come in and insisted on taking a hand in it, and how beautiful it was to see him sit there and tell mrs. clemens what had been happening while they were away during the summer, holding the slipper up toward the end of his nose, imagining the canvas was a "subject" with a scalp-wound, working with a "lovely surgical stitch," never hesitating a moment in his talk except to say "ouch!" when he stuck himself with the needle. take the slippers and wear them next your heart, elsie dear; for every stitch in them is a testimony of the affection which two of your loyalest friends bear you. every single stitch cost us blood. i've got twice as many pores in me now as i used to have; and you would never believe how many places you can stick a needle in yourself until you go into the embroidery line and devote yourself to art. do not wear these slippers in public, dear; it would only excite envy; and, as like as not, somebody would try to shoot you. merely use them to assist you in remembering that among the many, many people who think all the world of you is your friend, mark twain. the play of "the prince and the pauper," dramatized by mrs. richardson and arranged for the stage by david belasco, was produced at the park theater, philadelphia, on christmas eve. it was a success, but not a lavish one. the play was well written and staged, and elsie leslie was charming enough in her parts, but in the duality lay the difficulty. the strongest scenes in the story had to be omitted when one performer played both tom canty and the little prince. the play came to new york--to the broadway theater--and was well received. on the opening night there mark twain made a speech, in which he said that the presentation of "the prince and the pauper" realized a dream which fifteen years before had possessed him all through a long down-town tramp, amid the crowds and confusion of broadway. in elsie leslie, he said, he had found the embodiment of his dream, and to her he offered homage as the only prince clothed in a divine right which was not rags and sham--the divine right of an inborn supremacy in art. it seems incredible to-day that, realizing the play's possibilities as mark twain did, and as belasco and daniel frohman must have done, they did not complete their partial triumph by finding another child actress to take the part of tom canty. clemens urged and pleaded with them, but perhaps the undertaking seemed too difficult--at all events they did not find the little beggar king. then legal complications developed. edward house, to whom clemens had once given a permission to attempt a dramatization of the play, suddenly appeared with a demand for recognition, backed by a lawsuit against all those who had a proprietary interest in the production. house, with his adopted japanese daughter koto, during a period of rheumatism and financial depression, had made a prolonged visit in the clemens home and originally undertook the dramatization as a sort of return for hospitality. he appears not to have completed it and to have made no arrangement for its production or to have taken any definite step until mrs. richardson's play was profitably put on; whereupon his suit and injunction. by the time a settlement of this claim had been reached the play had run its course, and it was not revived in that form. it was brought out in england, where it was fairly prosperous, though it seems not to have been long continued. variously reconstructed, it has occasionally been played since, and always, when the parts of tom canty and the prince were separate, with great success. why this beautiful drama should ever be absent from the boards is one of the unexplainable things. it is a play for all times and seasons, the difficulty of obtaining suitable "twin" interpreters for the characters of the prince and the pauper being its only drawback. clxxi "a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court" from every point of view it seemed necessary to make the 'yankee in king arthur's court' an important and pretentious publication. it was mark twain's first book after a silence of five years; it was a book badly needed by his publishing business with which to maintain its prestige and profit; it was a book which was to come out of his maturity and present his deductions, as to humanity at large and kings in particular, to a waiting public. it was determined to spare no expense on the manufacture, also that its illustrations must be of a sort to illuminate and, indeed, to elaborate the text. clemens had admired some pictures made by daniel carter ("dan") beard for a chinese story in the cosmopolitan, and made up his mind that beard was the man for the yankee. the manuscript was sent to beard, who met clemens a little later in the office of webster & co. to discuss the matter. clemens said: "mr. beard, i do not want to subject you to any undue suffering, but i wish you would read the book before you make the pictures." beard replied that he had already read it twice. "very good," clemens said; "but i wasn't led to suppose that that was the usual custom among illustrators, judging from some results i have seen. you know," he went on, "this yankee of mine has neither the refinement nor the weakness of a college education; he is a perfect ignoramus; he is boss of a machine shop; he can build a locomotive or a colt's revolver, he can put up and run a telegraph line, but he's an ignoramus, nevertheless. i am not going to tell you what to draw. if a man comes to me and says, 'mr. clemens, i want you to write me a story,' i'll write it for him; but if he undertakes to tell me what to write i'll say, 'go hire a typewriter.'" to hall a few days later he wrote: tell beard to obey his own inspirations, and when he sees a picture in his mind put that picture on paper, be it humorous or be it serious. i want his genius to be wholly unhampered. i sha'n't have any fear as to results. without going further it is proper to say here that the pictures in the first edition of a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court justified the author's faith in the artist of his selection. they are far and away dan beard's best work. the socialism of the text strongly appealed to him. beard himself had socialistic tendencies, and the work inspired him to his highest flights of fancy and to the acme of his technic. clemens examined the pictures from time to time, and once was moved to write: my pleasure in them is as strong and as fresh as ever. i do not know of any quality they lack. grace, dignity, poetry, spirit, imagination, these enrich them and make them charming and beautiful; and wherever humor appears it is high and fine--easy, unforced, kept under, masterly, and delicious. he went on to describe his appreciation in detail, and when the drawings were complete he wrote again: hold me under permanent obligations. what luck it was to find you! there are hundreds of artists who could illustrate any other book of mine, but there was only one who could illustrate this one. yes, it was a fortunate hour that i went netting for lightning-bugs and caught a meteor. live forever! this was not too much praise. beard realized the last shade of the author's allegorical intent and portrayed it with a hundred accents which the average reader would otherwise be likely to miss. clemens submitted his manuscript to howells and to stedman, and he read portions of it, at least, to mrs. clemens, whose eyes were troubling her so that she could not read for herself. stedman suggested certain eliminations, but, on the whole, would seem to have approved of the book. howells was enthusiastic. it appealed to him as it had appealed to beard. its sociology and its socialism seemed to him the final word that could be said on those subjects. when he had partly finished it he wrote: it's a mighty great book and it makes my heart, burn with wrath. it seems that god didn't forget to put a soul in you. he shuts most literary men off with a brain, merely. a few days later he wrote again: the book is glorious-simply noble. what masses of virgin truth never touched in print before! and when he had finished it: last night i read your last chapter. as stedman says of the whole book, it's titanic. clemens declared, in one of his replies to howells: i'm not writing for those parties who miscall themselves critics, and i don't care to have them paw the book at all. it's my swan song, my retirement from literature permanently, and i wish to pass to the cemetery unclodded . . . . well, my book is written--let it go, but if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so many things left out. they burn in me; they keep multiplying and multiplying, but now they can't ever be said; and besides they would require a library--and a pen warmed up in hell. in another letter of this time to sylvester baxter, apropos of the tumbling brazilian throne, he wrote: when our great brethren, the disenslaved brazilians, frame their declaration of independence i hope they will insert this missing link: "we hold these truths to be self-evident--that all monarchs are usurpers and descendants of usurpers, for the reason that no throne was ever set up in this world by the will, freely exercised, of the only body possessing the legitimate right to set it up--the numerical mass of the nation." he was full of it, as he had been all along, and 'a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court' is nothing less than a brief for human rights and human privileges. that is what it is, and it is a pity that it should be more than that. it is a pity that he should have been beset by his old demon of the burlesque, and that no one should have had the wisdom or the strength to bring it under control. there is nothing more charming in any of mark twain's work than his introductory chapter, nothing more delightful than the armoring of the yankee and the outset and the wandering with alisande. there is nothing more powerful or inspiring than his splendid panoramic picture--of the king learning mercy through his own degradation, his daily intercourse with a band of manacled slaves; nothing more fiercely moving than that fearful incident of the woman burned to warm those freezing chattels, or than the great gallows scene, where the priest speaks for the young mother about to pay the death penalty for having stolen a halfpenny's worth, that her baby might have bread. such things as these must save the book from oblivion; but alas! its greater appeal is marred almost to ruin by coarse and extravagant burlesque, which destroys illusion and antagonizes the reader often at the very moment when the tale should fill him with a holy fire of a righteous wrath against wrong. as an example of mark twain at his literary worst and best the yankee ranks supreme. it is unnecessary to quote examples; one cannot pick up the volume and read ten pages of it, or five pages, without finding them. in the midst of some exalted passage, some towering sublimity, you are brought suddenly to earth with a phrase which wholly destroys the illusion and the diviner purpose. howells must have observed these things, or was he so dazzled by the splendor of its intent, its righteous charge upon the ranks of oppression, that he regarded its offenses against art as unimportant. this is hard to explain, for the very thing that would sustain such a great message and make it permanent would be the care, the restraint, the artistic worthiness of its construction. one must believe in a story like that to be convinced of its logic. to lose faith in it--in its narrative--is absolutely fatal to its purpose. the yankee in king arthur's court not only offended the english nation, but much of it offended the better taste of mark twain's own countrymen, and in time it must have offended even mark twain himself. reading it, one can visualize the author as a careering charger, with a bit in his teeth, trampling the poetry and the tradition of the romantic days, the very things which he himself in his happier moods cared for most. howells likened him to cervantes, laughing spain's chivalry away. the comparison was hardly justified. it was proper enough to laugh chivalry out of court when it was a reality; but mark twain, who loved sir thomas malory to the end of his days, the beauty and poetry of his chronicles; who had written 'the prince and the pauper', and would one day write that divine tale of the 'maid of orleans'; who was himself no more nor less than a knight always ready to redress wrong, would seem to have been the last person to wish to laugh it out of romance. and yet, when all is said, one may still agree with howells in ranking the yankee among mark twain's highest achievements in the way of "a greatly imagined and symmetrically developed tale." it is of that class, beyond doubt. howells goes further: of all the fanciful schemes in fiction it pleases me most, and i give myself with absolute delight to its notion of a keen east hartford yankee finding himself, by a retroactionary spell, at the court of king arthur of britain, and becoming part of the sixth century with all the customs and ideas of the nineteenth in him and about him. the field for humanizing satire which this scheme opens is illimitable. colossal it certainly is, as howells and stedman agreed: colossal in its grotesqueness as in its sublimity. howells, summarizing mark twain's gifts ( ), has written: he is apt to burlesque the lighter colloquiality, and it is only in the more serious and most tragical junctures that his people utter themselves with veracious simplicity and dignity. that great, burly fancy of his is always tempting him to the exaggeration which is the condition of so much of his personal humor, but which when it invades the drama spoils the illusion. the illusion renews itself in the great moments, but i wish it could be kept intact in the small, and i blame him that he does not rule his fancy better. all of which applies precisely to the writing of the yankee in king arthur's court. intended as a fierce heart-cry against human injustice --man's inhumanity to man--as such it will live and find readers; but, more than any other of mark twain's pretentious works, it needs editing --trimming by a fond but relentless hard. clxxii the "yankee" in england the london publishers of the yankee were keenly anxious to revise the text for their english readers. clemens wrote that he had already revised the yankee twice, that stedman had critically read it, and that mrs. clemens had made him strike out many passages and soften others. he added that he had read chapters of it in public several times where englishmen were present and had profited by their suggestions. then he said: now, mind you, i have taken all this pains because i wanted to say a yankee mechanic's say against monarchy and its several natural props, and yet make a book which you would be willing to print exactly as it comes to you, without altering a word. we are spoken of (by englishmen) as a thin-skinned people. it is you who are thin-skinned. an englishman may write with the most brutal frankness about any man or institution among us and we republish him without dreaming of altering a line or a word. but england cannot stand that kind of a book written about herself. it is england that is thin-skinned. it causeth me to smile when i read the modifications of my language which have been made in my english editions to fit them for the sensitive english palate. now, as i say, i have taken laborious pains to so trim this book of offense that you'll not lack the nerve to print it just as it stands. i am going to get the proofs to you just as early as i can. i want you to read it carefully. if you can publish it without altering a single word, go ahead. otherwise, please hand it to j. r. osgood in time for him to have it published at my expense. this is important, for the reason that the book was not written for america; it was written for england. so many englishmen have done their sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good intent by trying to pry up the english nation to a little higher level of manhood in turn. so the yankee was published in england just as he had written it,--[the preface was shortened and modified for both the american and english editions. the reader will find it as originally written under appendix s, at the end of last volume.]--and the criticisms were as plentiful as they were frank. it was referred to as a "lamentable failure" and as an "audacious sacrilege" and in terms still less polite. not all of the english critics were violent. the daily telegraph gave it something more than a column of careful review, which did not fail to point out the book's sins with a good deal of justice and dignity; but the majority of english papers joined in a sort of objurgatory chorus which, for a time at least, spared neither the author nor his work. strictures on the yankee extended to his earlier books. after all, mark twain's work was not for the cultivated class. these things must have begun to gravel clemens a good deal at last, for he wrote to andrew lang at considerable length, setting forth his case in general terms--that is to say, his position as an author--inviting lang to stand as his advocate before the english public. in part he said: the critic assumes every time that if a book doesn't meet the cultivated-class standard it isn't valuable . . . the critic has actually imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by raphael is more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a chromo; and the august opera more than the hurdy-gurdy and the villagers' singing society; and the latin classics than kipling's far-reaching bugle-note; and jonathan edwards than the salvation army . . . . if a critic should start a religion it would not have any object but to convert angels, and they wouldn't need it. it is not that little minority who are already saved that are best worth lifting up, i should think, but the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are underneath! that mass will never see the old masters--that sight is for the few; but the chromo-maker can lift them all one step upward toward appreciation of art; they cannot have the opera, but the hurdy-gurdy and the singing-class lift them a little way toward that far height; they will never know homer, but the passing rhymester of their day leaves them higher than he found them; they may never even hear of the latin classics, but they will strike step with kipling's drum-beat and they will march; for all jonathan edwards's help they would die in their slums, but the salvation army will beguile some of them to a purer air and a cleaner life. . . . i have never tried, in even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. i was not equipped for it either by native gifts or training. and i never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game--the masses. i have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but i have done my best to entertain them, for they can get instruction elsewhere . . . . my audience is dumb; it has no voice in print, and so i cannot know whether i have won its approval or only got its censure. he closed by asking that lang urge the critics to adopt a rule recognizing the masses, and to formulate a standard whereby work done for them might be judged. "no voice can reach further than yours in a case of this kind," he said, "or carry greater weight of authority." there was no humor in this letter, and the writer of it was clearly in earnest. lang's response was an article published in the illustrated london news on the art of mark twain. he began by gently ridiculing hyperculture --the new culture--and ended with a eulogy on huck finn. it seems worth while, however, to let andrew lang speak for himself. i have been educated till i nearly dropped; i have lived with the earliest apostles of culture, in the days when chippendale was first a name to conjure with, and japanese art came in like a raging lion, and ronsard was the favorite poet, and mr. william morris was a poet, too, and blue and green were the only wear, and the name of paradise was camelot. to be sure, i cannot say that i took all this quite seriously, but "we, too, have played" at it, and know all about it. generally speaking, i have kept up with culture. i can talk (if desired) about sainte-beuve, and merimee, and felicien rops; i could rhyme "ballades" when they were "in," and knew what a "pantoom" was . . . . and yet i have not culture. my works are but tinkling brass because i have not culture. for culture has got into new regions where i cannot enter, and, what is perhaps worse, i find myself delighting in a great many things which are under the ban of culture. he confesses that this is a dreadful position; one that makes a man feel like one of those liberal politicians who are always "sitting on the fence," and who follow their party, if follow it they do, with the reluctant acquiescence of the prophet's donkey. he further confesses that he has tried hartmann and prefers plato, that he is shaky about blake, though stalwart concerning rudyard kipling. this is not the worst of it. culture has hardly a new idol but i long to hurl things at it. culture can scarcely burn anything, but i am impelled to sacrifice to that same. i am coming to suspect that the majority of culture's modern disciples are a mere crowd of very slimly educated people who have no natural taste or impulses; who do not really know the best things in literature; who have a feverish desire to admire the newest thing, to follow the latest artistic fashion; who prate about "style," without the faintest acquaintance with the ancient examples of style in greek, french, or english; who talk about the classics and--criticize the classical critics and poets, without being able to read a line of them in the original. nothing of the natural man is left in these people; their intellectual equipment is made up of ignorant vanity and eager desire for novelty, and a yearning to be in the fashion. take, for example--and we have been a long time in coming to him--mark twain. [here follow some observations concerning the yankee, which lang confesses that he has not read, and has abstained from reading because----]. here mark twain is not, and cannot be, at the proper point of view. he has not the knowledge which would enable him to be a sound critic of the ideals of the middle ages. an arthurian knight in new york or in washington would find as much to blame, and justly, as a yankee at camelot. of mark twain's work in general he speaks with another conclusion: mark twain is a benefactor beyond most modern writers, and the cultured who do not laugh are merely to be pitied. but his art is not only that of the maker of the scarce article--mirth. i have no hesitation in saying that mark twain is one among the greatest contemporary makers of fiction . . . . i can never forget or be ungrateful for the exquisite pleasure with which i read huckleberry finn for the first time years ago. i read it again last night, deserting kenilworth for huck. i never laid it down till i had finished it. i perused several passages more than once, and rose from it with a higher opinion of its merits than ever. what is it that we want in a novel? we want a vivid and original picture of life; we want character naturally displayed in action; and if we get the excitement of adventure into the bargain, and that adventure possible and plausible, i so far differ from the newest school of criticism as to think that we have additional cause for gratitude. if, moreover, there is an unstrained sense of humor in the narrator we have a masterpiece, and huckleberry finn is, nothing less. he reviews huck sympathetically in detail, and closes: there are defects of taste, or passages that to us seem deficient in taste, but the book remains a nearly flawless gem of romance and of humor. the world appreciates it, no doubt, but "cultured critics" are probably unaware of its singular value. the great american novel has escaped the eyes of those who watch to see this new planet swim into their ken. and will mark twain never write such another? one is enough for him to live by, and for our gratitude, but not enough for our desire. in the brief column and a half which it occupies, this comment of andrew lang's constitutes as thoughtful and fair an estimate of mark twain's work as was ever written. w. t. stead, of the review of reviews, was about the only prominent english editor to approve of the yankee and to exploit its merits. stead brought down obloquy upon himself by so doing, and his separation from his business partner would seem to have been at least remotely connected with this heresy. the yankee in king arthur's court was dramatized in america by howard taylor, one of the enterprise compositors, whom clemens had known in the old comstock days. taylor had become a playwright of considerable success, with a number of well-known actors and actresses starring in his plays. the yankee, however, did not find a manager, or at least it seems not to have reached the point of production. clxxiii a summer at onteora with the exception of one article--"a majestic literary fossil" --[harper's magazine, february, . included in the "complete works."] --clemens was writing nothing of importance at this time. this article grew out of a curious old medical work containing absurd prescriptions which, with theodore crane, he had often laughed over at the farm. a sequel to huckleberry finn--huck finn and tom sawyer among the indians --was begun, and a number of its chapters were set in type on the new paige compositor, which had cost such a gallant sum, and was then thought to be complete. there seems to have been a plan to syndicate the story, but at the end of chapter ix huck and tom had got themselves into a predicament from which it seemed impossible to extricate them, and the plot was suspended for further inspiration, which apparently never came. clemens, in fact, was troubled with rheumatism in his arm and shoulder, which made writing difficult. mrs. clemens, too, had twinges of the malady. they planned to go abroad for the summer of , to take the waters of some of the german baths, but they were obliged to give up the idea. there were too many business complications; also the health of clemens's mother had become very feeble. they went to tannersville in the catskills, instead--to the onteora club, where mrs. candace wheeler had gathered a congenial colony in a number of picturesque cottages, with a comfortable hotel for the more transient visitor. the clemenses secured a cottage for the season. mrs. mary mapes dodge, laurence hutton, carroll beckwith, the painter; brander matthews, dr. heber newton, mrs. custer, and dora wheeler were among those who welcomed mark twain and his family at a generous home-made banquet. it was the beginning of a happy summer. there was a constant visiting from one cottage to another, with frequent assemblings at the bear and fox inn, their general headquarters. there were pantomimes and charades, in which mark twain and his daughters always had star parts. susy clemens, who was now eighteen, brilliant and charming, was beginning to rival her father as a leader of entertainment. her sister clara gave impersonations of modjeska and ada rehan. when fourth of july came there were burlesque races, of which mark twain was starter, and many of that lighthearted company took part. sometimes, in the evening, they gathered in one of the cottages and told stories by the firelight, and once he told the story of the golden arm, so long remembered, and brought them up with the same old jump at the sudden climax. brander matthews remembers that clemens was obliged frequently to go to new york on business connected with the machine and the publishing, and that during one of these absences a professional entertainer came along, and in the course of his program told a mark twain story, at which mrs. clemens and the girls laughed without recognizing its authorship. matthews also remembers jean, as a little girl of ten, allowed to ride a pony and to go barefoot, to her great delight, full of health and happiness, a favorite of the colony. clemens would seem to have forgiven brander matthews for his copyright articles, for he walked over to the matthews cottage one morning and asked to be taught piquet, the card game most in vogue there that season. at odd times he sat to carroll beckwith for his portrait, and smoked a cob pipe meantime, so beckwith painted him in that way. it was a season that closed sadly. clemens was called to keokuk in august, to his mother's bedside, for it was believed that her end was near. she rallied, and he returned to onteora. but on the th of october came the close of that long, active life, and the woman who two generations before had followed john clemens into the wilderness, and along the path of vicissitude, was borne by her children to hannibal and laid to rest at his side. she was in her eighty-eighth year. the clemens family were back in hartford by this time, and it was only a little later that mrs. clemens was summoned to the death-bed of her own mother, in elmira. clemens accompanied her, but jean being taken suddenly ill he returned to hartford. watching by the little girl's bedside on the night of the th of november, he wrote mrs. clemens a birthday letter, telling of jean's improved condition and sending other good news and as many loving messages as he could devise. but it proved a sad birthday for mrs. clemens, for on that day her mother's gentle and beautiful soul went out from among them. the foreboding she had felt at the passing of theodore crane had been justified. she had a dread that the harvest of death was not yet ended. matters in general were going badly with them, and an anxiety began to grow to get away from america, and so perhaps leave sorrow and ill-luck behind. clemens, near the end of december, writing to his publishing manager, hall, said: merry christmas to you, and i wish to god i could have one myself before i die. the house was emptier that winter than before, for susy was at bryn mawr. clemens planned some literary work, but the beginning, after his long idleness, was hard. a diversion was another portrait of himself, this time undertaken by charles noel flagg. clemens rather enjoyed portrait-sittings. he could talk and smoke, and he could incidentally acquire information. he liked to discuss any man's profession with him, and in his talks with flagg he made a sincere effort to get that insight which would enable him to appreciate the old masters. flagg found him a tractable sitter, and a most interesting one. once he paid him a compliment, then apologized for having said the obvious thing. "never mind the apology," said clemens. "the compliment that helps us on our way is not the one that is shut up in the mind, but the one that is spoken out." when flagg's portrait was about completed, mrs. clemens and mrs. crane came to the studio to look at it. mrs. clemens complained only that the necktie was crooked. "but it's always crooked," said flagg, "and i have a great fancy for the line it makes." she straightened it on clemens himself, but it immediately became crooked again. clemens said: "if you were to make that necktie straight people would say; 'good portrait, but there is something the matter with it. i don't know where it is.'" the tie was left unchanged. clxxiv the machine the reader may have realized that by the beginning of mark twain's finances were in a critical condition. the publishing business had managed to weather along. it was still profitable, and could have been made much more so if the capital necessary to its growth had not been continuously and relentlessly absorbed by that gigantic vampire of inventions--that remorseless frankenstein monster--the machine. the beginning of this vast tragedy (for it was no less than that) dated as far back as , when clemens one day had taken a minor and purely speculative interest in patent rights, which was to do away with setting type by hand. in some memoranda which he made more than ten years later, when the catastrophe was still a little longer postponed, he gave some account of the matter. this episode has now spread itself over more than one-fifth of my life, a considerable stretch of time, as i am now years old. ten or eleven years ago dwight buell, a jeweler, called at our house and was shown up to the billiard-room-which was my study; and the game got more study than the other sciences. he wanted me to take some stock in a type-setting machine. he said it was at the colt's arms factory, and was about finished. i took $ , of the stock. i was always taking little chances like that, and almost always losing by it, too. some time afterward i was invited to go down to the factory and see the machine. i went, promising myself nothing, for i knew all about type-setting by practical experience, and held the settled and solidified opinion that a successful type-setting machine was an impossibility, for the reason that a machine cannot be made to think, and the thing that sets movable type must think or retire defeated. so, the performance i witnessed did most thoroughly amaze me. here was a machine that was really setting type, and doing it with swiftness and accuracy, too. moreover, it was distributing its case at the same time. the distribution was automatic; the machine fed itself from a galley of dead matter and without human help or suggestion, for it began its work of its own accord when the type channels needed filling, and stopped of its own accord when they were full enough. the machine was almost a complete compositor; it lacked but one feature--it did not "justify" the lines. this was done by the operator's assistant. i saw the operator set at the rate of , ems an hour, which, counting distribution, was but little short of four casemen's work. william hamersley was there. he said he was already a considerable owner, and was going to take as much more of the stock as he could afford. wherefore, i set down my name for an additional $ , . it is here that the music begins. it was the so-called farnham machine that he saw, invented by james w. paige, and if they had placed it on the market then, without waiting for the inventor to devise improvements, the story might have been a different one. but paige was never content short of absolute perfection --a machine that was not only partly human, but entirely so. clemens' used to say later that the paige type-setter would do everything that a human being could do except drink and swear and go on a strike. he might properly have omitted the last item, but of that later. paige was a small, bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed man, with a crystal-clear mind, but a dreamer and a visionary. clemens says of him: "he is a poet; a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel." it is easy to see now that mark twain and paige did not make a good business combination. when paige declared that, wonderful as the machine was, he could do vastly greater things with it, make it worth many more and much larger fortunes by adding this attachment and that, clemens was just the man to enter into his dreams and to furnish the money to realize them. paige did not require much money at first, and on the capital already invested he tinkered along with his improvements for something like four or five years; hamersley and clemens meantime capitalizing the company and getting ready to place the perfected invention on the market. by the time the grant episode had ended clemens had no reason to believe but that incalculable wealth lay just ahead, when the newspapers should be apprised of the fact that their types were no longer to be set by hand. several contracts had been made with paige, and several new attachments had been added to the machine. it seemed to require only one thing more, the justifier, which would save the labor of the extra man. paige could be satisfied with nothing short of that, even though the extra man's wage was unimportant. he must have his machine do it all, and meantime five precious years had slipped away. clemens, in his memoranda, says: end of . paige arrives at my house unheralded. i had seen little or nothing of him for a year or two. he said: "what will you complete the machine for?" "what will it cost?" "twenty thousand dollars; certainly not over $ , ." "what will you give?" "i'll give you half." clemens was "flush" at this time. his reading tour with cable, the great sale of huck finn, the prospect of the grant book, were rosy realities. he said: "i'll do it, but the limit must be $ , ." they agreed to allow hamersley a tenth interest for the money he had already invested and for legal advice. hamersley consented readily enough, and when in february, , the new contract was drawn they believed themselves heir to the millions of the fourth estate. by this time f. g. whitmore had come into clemens's business affairs, and he did not altogether approve of the new contract. among other things, it required that clemens should not only complete the machine, but promote it, capitalize it commercially. whitmore said: "mr. clemens, that clause can bankrupt you." clemens answered: "never mind that, whitmore; i've considered that. i can get a thousand men worth a million apiece to go in with me if i can get a perfect machine." he immediately began to calculate the number of millions he would be worth presently when the machine was completed and announced to the waiting world. he covered pages with figures that never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion mark. colonel sellers in his happiest moments never dreamed more lavishly. he obtained a list of all the newspapers in the united states and in europe, and he counted up the machines that would be required by each. to his nephew, sam moffett, visiting him one day, he declared that it would take ten men to count the profits from the typesetter. he realized clearly enough that a machine which would set and distribute type and do the work of half a dozen men or more would revolutionize type composition. the fact that other inventors besides paige were working quite as diligently and perhaps toward more simple conclusions did not disturb him. rumors came of the rogers machine and the thorne machine and the mergenthaler linotype, but mark twain only smiled. when the promoters of the mergenthaler offered to exchange half their interests for a half interest in the paige patent, to obtain thereby a wider insurance of success, it only confirmed his trust, and he let the golden opportunity go by. clemens thinks the thirty thousand dollars lasted about a year. then paige confessed that the machine was still incomplete, but he said that four thousand dollars more would finish it, and that with ten thousand dollars he could finish it and give a big exhibition in new york. he had discarded the old machine altogether, it seems, and at pratt & whitney's shops was building a new one from the ground up--a machine of twenty thousand minutely exact parts, each of which must be made by expert hand workmanship after elaborate drawings and patterns even more expensive. it was an undertaking for a millionaire. paige offered to borrow from clemens the amount needed, offering the machine as security. clemens supplied the four thousand dollars, and continued to advance money from time to time at the rate of three to four thousand dollars a month, until he had something like eighty thousand dollars invested, with the machine still unfinished. this would be early in , by which time other machines had reached a state of completion and were being placed on the market. the mergenthaler, in particular, was attracting wide attention. paige laughed at it, and clemens, too, regarded it as a joke. the moment their machine was complete all other machines would disappear. even the fact that the tribune had ordered twenty-three of the linotypes, and other journals were only waiting to see the paper in its new dress before ordering, did not disturb them. those linotypes would all go into the scrap-heap presently. it was too bad people would waste their money so. in january, , paige promised that the machine would be done by the st of april. on the st of april he promised it for september, but in october he acknowledged there were still eighty-five days' work to be done on it. in november clemens wrote to orion: the machine is apparently almost done--but i take no privileges on that account; it must be done before i spend a cent that can be avoided. i have kept this family on very short commons for two years and they must go on scrimping until the machine is finished, no matter how long that may be. by the end of ' the income from the books and the business and mrs. clemens's elmira investments no longer satisfied the demands of the type-setter, in addition to the household expense, reduced though the latter was; and clemens began by selling and hypothecating his marketable securities. the whole household interest by this time centered in the machine. what the tennessee land had been to john and jane clemens and their children, the machine had now become to samuel clemens and his family. "when the machine is finished everything will be all right again" afforded the comfort of that long-ago sentence, "when the tennessee land is sold." they would have everything they wanted then. mrs. clemens planned benefactions, as was her wont. once she said to her sister: "how strange it will seem to have unlimited means, to be able to do whatever you want to do, to give whatever you want to give without counting the cost." straight along through another year the three thousand dollars and more a month continued, and then on the th of january, , there came what seemed the end--the machine and justifier were complete! in his notebook on that day mark twain set down this memorandum: eureka! saturday, january , - . p.m. at this moment i have seen a line of movable type spaced and justified by machinery! this is the first time in the history of the world that this amazing thing has ever been done. present: j. w. paige, the inventor; charles davis, | mathematical assistants earll | & mechanical graham | experts bates, foreman, and s. l. clemens. this record is made immediately after the prodigious event. two days later he made another note: monday, january -- . p.m. the first proper name ever set by this new keyboard was william shakspeare. i set it at the above hour; & i perceive, now that i see the name written, that i either misspelled it then or i've misspelled it now. the space-bar did its duty by the electric connections & steam & separated the two words preparatory to the reception of the space. it seemed to him that his troubles were at an end. he wrote overflowing letters, such as long ago he had written about his first mining claims, to orion and to other members of the family and to friends in america and europe. one of these letters, written to george standring, a london printer and publisher, also an author, will serve as an example. the machine is finished! an hour and forty minutes ago a line of movable type was spaced and justified by machinery for the first time in the history of the world. and i was there to see. that was the final function. i had before seen the machine set type, automatically, and distribute type, and automatically distribute its eleven different thicknesses of spaces. so now i have seen the machine, operated by one individual, do the whole thing, and do it a deal better than any man at the case can do it. this is by far and away the most marvelous invention ever contrived by man. and it is not a thing of rags and patches; it is made of massive steel, and will last a century. she will do the work of six men, and do it better than any six men that ever stood at a case. the death-warrant of all other type-setting machines in this world was signed at . this afternoon, when that first line was shot through this machine and came out perfectly spaced and justified. and automatically, mind you. there was a speck of invisible dirt on one of those nonpareil types. well, the machine allowed for that by inserting of its own accord a space which was the - , of an inch thinner than it would have used if the dirt had been absent. but when i send you the details you will see that that's nothing for this machine to do; you'll see that it knows more and has got more brains than all the printers in the world put together. his letter to orion was more technical, also more jubilant. at the end he said: all the witnesses made written record of the immense historical birth--the first justification of a line of movable type by machinery--& also set down the hour and the minute. nobody had drank anything, & yet everybody seemed drunk. well-dizzy, stupefied, stunned. all the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle. telephones, telegraphs, locomotives, cotton-gins, sewing- machines, babbage calculators, jacquard looms, perfecting presses, all mere toys, simplicities! the paige compositor marches alone and far in the land of human inventions. in one paragraph of orion's letter he refers to the machine as a "cunning devil, knowing more than any man that ever lived." that was a profound truth, though not as he intended it. that creation of james paige's brain reflected all the ingenuity and elusiveness of its creator, and added something on its own account. it was discovered presently that it had a habit of breaking the types. paige said it was a trifling thing: he could fix it, but it meant taking down the machine, and that deadly expense of three thousand or four thousand dollars a month for the band of workmen and experts in pratt & whitney's machine shops did not cease. in february the machine was again setting and justifying type "to a hair," and whitmore's son, fred, was running it at a rate of six thousand ems an hour, a rate of composition hitherto unknown in the history of the world. his speed was increased to eight thousand ems an hour by the end of the year, and the machine was believed to have a capacity of eleven thousand. no type-setter invented to this day could match it for accuracy and precision when it was in perfect order, but its point of perfection was apparently a vanishing point. it would be just reached, when it would suddenly disappear, and paige would discover other needed corrections. once, when it was apparently complete as to every detail; and running like a human thing, with such important customers as the new york herald and other great papers ready to place their orders, paige suddenly discovered that it required some kind of an air-blast, and it was all taken down again and the air-blast, which required months to invent and perfect, was added. but what is the use of remembering all these bitter details? the steady expense went on through another year, apparently increasing instead of diminishing, until, by the beginning of , clemens was finding it almost impossible to raise funds to continue the work. still he struggled on. it was the old mining fascination--"a foot farther into the ledge and we shall strike the vein of gold." he sent for joe goodman to come and help him organize a capital-stock company, in which senator jones and john mackay, old comstock friends, were to be represented. he never for a moment lost faith in the final outcome, and he believed that if they could build their own factory the delays and imperfections of construction would be avoided. pratt & whitney had been obliged to make all the parts by hand. with their own factory the new company would have vast and perfect machinery dedicated entirely to the production of type-setters. nothing short of two million dollars capitalization was considered, and goodman made at least three trips from california to the east and labored with jones and mackay all that winter and at intervals during the following year, through which that "cunning devil," the machine, consumed its monthly four thousand dollars--money that was the final gleanings and sweepings of every nook and corner of the strong-box and bank-account and savings of the clemens family resources. with all of mark twain's fame and honors his life at this period was far from an enviable one. it was, in fact, a fevered delirium, often a veritable nightmare. reporters who approached him for interviews, little guessing what he was passing through, reported that mark twain's success in life had made him crusty and sour. goodman remembers that when they were in washington, conferring with jones, and had rooms at the arlington, opening together, often in the night he would awaken to see a light burning in the next room and to hear mark twain's voice calling: "joe, are you awake?" "yes, mark, what is it?" "oh, nothing, only i can't sleep. won't you talk awhile? i know it's wrong to disturb you, but i am so d--d miserable that i can't help it." whereupon he would get up and talk and talk, and pace the floor and curse the delays until he had refreshed himself, and then perhaps wallow in millions until breakfast-time. jones and mackay, deeply interested, were willing to put up a reasonable amount of money, but they were unable to see a profit in investing so large a capital in a plant for constructing the machines. clemens prepared estimates showing that the american business alone would earn thirty-five million dollars a year, and the european business twenty million dollars more. these dazzled, but they did not convince the capitalists. jones was sincerely anxious to see the machine succeed, and made an engagement to come out to see it work, but a day or two before he was to come paige was seized with an inspiration. the type-setter was all in parts when the day came, and jones's visit had to be postponed. goodman wrote that the fatal delay had "sicklied over the bloom" of jones's original enthusiasm. yet clemens seems never to have been openly violent with paige. in the memorandum which he completed about this time he wrote: paige and i always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and yet he knows perfectly well that if i had him in a steel trap i would shut out all human succor and watch that trap until he died. he was grabbing at straws now. he offered a twentieth or a hundredth or a thousandth part of the enterprise for varying sums, ranging from one thousand to one hundred thousand dollars. he tried to capitalize his advance (machine) royalties, and did dispose of a few of these; but when the money came in for them he was beset by doubts as to the final outcome, and though at his wit's ends for further funds, he returned the checks to the friends who had sent them. one five-thousand-dollar check from a friend named arnot, in elmira, went back by the next mail. he was willing to sacrifice his own last penny, but he could not take money from those who were blindly backing his judgment only and not their own. he still had faith in jones, faith which lasted up to the th of february, . then came a final letter, in which jones said that he had canvassed the situation thoroughly with such men as mackay, don cameron, whitney, and others, with the result that they would have nothing to do with the machine. whitney and cameron, he said, were large stockholders in the mergenthaler. jones put it more kindly and more politely than that, and closed by saying that there could be no doubt as to the machine's future an ambiguous statement. a letter from young hall came about the same time, urging a heavy increase of capital in the business. the library of american literature, its leading feature, was handled on the instalment plan. the collections from this source were deferred driblets, while the bills for manufacture and promotion must be paid down in cash. clemens realized that for the present at least the dream was ended. the family securities were exhausted. the book trade was dull; his book royalties were insufficient even to the demands of the household. he signed further notes to keep business going, left the matter of the machine in abeyance, and turned once more to the trade of authorship. he had spent in the neighborhood of one hundred and ninety thousand dollars on the typesetter--money that would better have been thrown into the connecticut river, for then the agony had been more quickly over. as it was, it had shadowed many precious years. clxxv "the claimant"--leaving hartford for the first time in twenty years mark twain was altogether dependent on literature. he did not feel mentally unequal to the new problem; in fact, with his added store of experience, he may have felt himself more fully equipped for authorship than ever before. it had been his habit to write within his knowledge and observation. to a correspondent of this time he reviewed his stock in trade-- . . . i confine myself to life with which i am familiar when pretending to portray life. but i confined myself to the boy-life out on the mississippi because that had a peculiar charm for me, and not because i was not familiar with other phases of life. i was a soldier two weeks once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted like a rat the whole time. familiar? my splendid kipling himself hasn't a more burnt-in, hard-baked, and unforgetable familiarity with that death-on-the-pale-horse-with-hell-following-after, which is a raw soldier's first fortnight in the field--and which, without any doubt, is the most tremendous fortnight and the vividest he is ever going to see. yes, and i have shoveled silver tailings in a quartz-mill a couple of weeks, and acquired the last possibilities of culture in that direction. and i've done "pocket-mining" during three months in the one little patch of ground in the whole globe where nature conceals gold in pockets--or did before we robbed all of those pockets and exhausted, obliterated, annihilated the most curious freak nature ever indulged in. there are not thirty men left alive who, being told there was a pocket hidden on the broad slope of a mountain, would know how to go and find it, or have even the faintest idea of how to set about it; but i am one of the possible or who possess the secret, and i could go and put my hand on that hidden treasure with a most deadly precision. and i've been a prospector, and know pay rock from poor when i find it--just with a touch of the tongue. and i've been a silver miner and know how to dig and shovel and drill and put in a blast. and so i know the mines and the miners interiorly as well as bret harte knows them exteriorly. and i was a newspaper reporter four years in cities, and so saw the inside of many things; and was reporter in a legislature two sessions and the same in congress one session, and thus learned to know personally three sample bodies of the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that god makes. and i was some years a mississippi pilot, and familiarly knew all the different kinds of steamboatmen--a race apart, and not like other folk. and i was for some years a traveling "jour" printer, and wandered from city to city--and so i know that sect familiarly. and i was a lecturer on the public platform a number of seasons and was a responder to toasts at all the different kinds of banquets --and so i know a great many secrets about audiences--secrets not to be got out of books, but only acquirable by experience. and i watched over one dear project of mine for years, spent a fortune on it, and failed to make it go--and the history of that would make a large book in which a million men would see themselves as in a mirror; and they would testify and say, verily, this is not imagination; this fellow has been there--and after would they cast dust upon their heads, cursing and blaspheming. and i am a publisher, and did pay to one author's widow (general grant's) the largest copyright checks this world has seen --aggregating more than l , in the first year. and i have been an author for years and an ass for . now then: as the most valuable capital or culture or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience i ought to be well equipped for that trade. i surely have the equipment, a wide culture, and all of it real, none of it artificial, for i don't know anything about books. this generous bill of literary particulars was fully warranted. mark twain's equipment was equal to his occasions. it is true that he was no longer young, and that his health was not perfect, but his resolution and his energy had not waned. his need was imminent and he lost no time. he dug out from his pigeonholes such materials as he had in stock, selecting a few completed manuscripts for immediate disposal--among them his old article entitled, "mental telegraphy," written in , when he had hesitated to offer it, in the fear that it would not be accepted by the public otherwise than as a joke. he added to it now a supplement and sent it to mr. alden, of harper's magazine. psychic interest had progressed in twelve years; also mark twain had come to be rather more seriously regarded. the article was accepted promptly! --[the publication of this article created a good deal of a stir and resulted in the first general recognition of what later became known as telepathy. a good many readers insisted on regarding the whole matter as one of mark twain's jokes, but its serious acceptance was much wider.] --the old sketch, "luck," also found its way to harper's magazine, and other manuscripts were looked over and furbished up with a view to their disposal. even the history game was dragged from the dust of its retirement, and hall was instructed to investigate its chance of profit. then mark twain went to work in earnest. within a week after the collapse of the jones bubble he was hard at work on a new book--the transmigration of the old "claimant" play into a novel. ever since the appearance of the yankee there had been what was evidently a concerted movement to induce him to write a novel with the theories of henry george as the central idea. letters from every direction had urged him to undertake such a story, and these had suggested a more serious purpose for the claimant book. a motif in which there is a young lord who renounces his heritage and class to come to america and labor with his hands; who attends socialistic meetings at which men inspired by readings of 'progress and poverty' and 'looking backward' address their brothers of toil, could have in it something worth while. clemens inserted portions of some of his discarded essays in these addresses, and had he developed this element further, and abandoned colonel sellers's materialization lunacies to the oblivion they had earned, the result might have been more fortunate. but his faith in the new sellers had never died, and the temptation to use scenes from the abandoned play proved to be too strong to be resisted. the result was incongruous enough. the author, however, admired it amazingly at the time. he sent howells stirring reports of his progress. he wrote hall that the book would be ready soon and that there must be seventy-five thousand orders by the date of issue, "not a single one short of that." then suddenly, at the end of february, the rheumatism came back into his shoulder and right arm and he could hardly hold the pen. he conceived the idea of dictating into a phonograph, and wrote howells to test this invention and find out as to terms for three months, with cylinders enough to carry one hundred and seventy-five thousand words. i don't want to erase any of them. my right arm is nearly disabled by rheumatism, but i am bound to write this book (and sell , copies of it-no, i mean , , --next fall). i feel sure i can dictate the book into a phonograph if i don't have to yell. i write , words a day. i think i can dictate twice as many. but mind, if this is going to be too much trouble to you--go ahead and do it all the same. howells replied encouragingly. he had talked a letter into a phonograph and the phonograph man had talked his answer into it, after which the cylinder had been taken to a typewriter in the-next room and correctly written out. if a man had the "cheek" to dictate his story into a phonograph, howells said, all the rest seemed perfectly easy. clemens ordered a phonograph and gave it a pretty fair trial. it was only a partial success. he said he couldn't write literature with it because it hadn't any ideas or gift for elaboration, but was just as matter-of-fact, compressive and unresponsive, grave and unsmiling as the devil--a poor audience. i filled four dozen cylinders in two sittings, then i found i could have said it about as easy with the pen, and said it a deal better. then i resigned. he did not immediately give it up. to relieve his aching arm he alternated the phonograph with the pen, and the work progressed rapidly. early in may he was arranging for its serial disposition, and it was eventually sold for twelve thousand dollars to the mcclure syndicate, who placed it with a number of papers in america and with the idler magazine in england. w. m. laffan, of the sun, an old and tried friend, combined with mcclure in the arrangement. laffan also proposed to join with mcclure in paying mark twain a thousand dollars each for a series of six european letters. this was toward the end of may, , when clemens had already decided upon a long european sojourn. there were several reasons why this was desirable. neither clemens nor his wife was in good health. both of them were troubled with rheumatism, and a council of physicians had agreed that mrs. clemens had some disturbance of the heart. the death of charles l. webster in april--the fourth death among relatives in two years--had renewed her forebodings. susy, who had been at bryn mawr, had returned far from well. the european baths and the change of travel it was believed would be beneficial to the family health. furthermore, the maintenance of the hartford home was far too costly for their present and prospective income. the house with its associations of seventeen incomparable years must be closed. a great period had ended. they arranged to sail on the th of june by the french line.--[on the gascogne.]--mrs. crane was to accompany them, and came over in april to help in breaking the news to the servants. john and ellen o'neill (the gardener and his wife) were to remain in charge; places were found for george and patrick. katie leary was retained to accompany the family. it was a sad dissolution. the day came for departure and the carriage was at the door. mrs. clemens did not come immediately. she was looking into the rooms, bidding a kind of silent good-by to the home she had made and to all its memories. following the others she entered the carriage, and patrick mcaleer drove them together for the last time. they were going on a long journey. they did not guess how long, or that the place would never be home to them again. clxxvi a european summer they landed at havre and went directly to paris, where they remained about a week. from paris clemens wrote to hall that a deal by which he had hoped to sell out his interest in the type-setter to the mallorys, of the churchman, had fallen through. "therefore," he said, "you will have to modify your instalment system to meet the emergency of a constipated purse; for if you should need to borrow any more money i would not know how or where to raise it." the clemens party went to geneva, then rested for a time at the baths of aix; from aix to bayreuth to attend the wagner festival, and from bayreuth to marienbad for further additions of health. clemens began writing his newspaper letters at aix, the first of which consists of observations at that "paradise of rheumatics." this letter is really a careful and faithful description of aix-les-bains, with no particular drift of humor in it. he tells how in his own case the baths at first developed plenty of pain, but that the subsequent ones removed almost all of it. "i've got back the use of my arm the last few days, and i am going away now," he says, and concludes by describing the beautiful drives and scenery about aix--the pleasures to be found paddling on little lake bourget and the happy excursions to annecy. at the end of an hour you come to annecy and rattle through its old crooked lanes, built solidly up with curious old houses that are a dream of the middle ages, and presently you come to the main object of your trip--lake annecy. it is a revelation. it is a miracle. it brings the tears to a body's eyes. it is so enchanting. that is to say, it affects you just as all other things that you instantly recognize as perfect affect you--perfect music, perfect eloquence, perfect art, perfect joy, perfect grief. he was getting back into his old descriptive swing, but his dislike for travel was against him, and he found writing the letters hard. from bayreuth he wrote "at the shrine of st. wagner," one of the best descriptions of that great musical festival that has been put into words. he paid full tribute to the performance, also to the wagner devotion, confessing its genuineness. this opera of "tristan and isolde" last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and i know of some, and have heard of many, who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. i feel strongly out of place here. sometimes i feel like the one sane person in the community of the mad; sometimes i feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always during service i feel like a heretic in heaven. he tells how he really enjoyed two of the operas, and rejoiced in supposing that his musical regeneration was accomplished and perfected; but alas! he was informed by experts that those particular events were not real music at all. then he says: well, i ought to have recognized the sign the old, sure sign that has never failed me in matters of art. whenever i enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor. the private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo. however, my base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; i was the only man out of , who got his money back on those two operas. his third letter was from marienbad, in bohemia, another "health-factory," as he calls it, and is of the same general character as those preceding. in his fourth letter he told how he himself took charge of the family fortunes and became courier from aix to bayreuth. it is a very delightful letter, most of it, and probably not greatly burlesqued or exaggerated in its details. it is included now in the "complete works," as fresh and delightful as ever. they returned to germany at the end of august, to nuremberg, which he notes as the "city of exquisite glimpses," and to heidelberg, where they had their old apartment of thirteen years before, room at the schloss hotel, with its wonderful prospect of wood and hill, and the haze-haunted valley of the rhine. they remained less than a week in that beautiful place, and then were off for switzerland, lucerne, brienz, interlaken, finally resting at the hotel beau rivage, ouchy, lausanne, on beautiful lake leman. clemens had agreed to write six of the newspaper letters, and he had by this time finished five of them, the fifth being dated from interlaken, its subject, "switzerland, the cradle of liberty." he wrote to hall that it was his intention to write another book of travel and to take a year or two to collect the material. the century editors were after him for a series after the style of innocents abroad. he considered this suggestion, but declined by cable, explaining to hall that he intended to write for serial publication no more than the six newspaper letters. he said: to write a book of travel would be less trouble than to write six detached chapters. each of these letters requires the same variety of treatment and subject that one puts into a book; but in the book each chapter doesn't have to be rounded and complete in itself. he suggested that the six letters be gathered into a small volume which would contain about thirty-five or forty thousand words, to be sold as low as twenty-five cents, but this idea appears to have been dropped. at ouchy clemens conceived the idea of taking a little trip on his own account, an excursion that would be a rest after the strenuous three months' travel and sightseeing--one that he could turn into literature. he engaged joseph very, a courier used during their earlier european travels, and highly recommended in the tramp abroad. he sent joseph over to lake bourget to engage a boat and a boatman for a ten days' trip down the river rhone. for five dollars joseph bought a safe, flat-bottom craft; also he engaged the owner as pilot. a few days later--september --clemens followed. they stopped overnight on an island in lake bourget, and in his notes clemens tells how he slept in the old castle of chatillon, in the room where a pope was born. they started on their drift next morning. to mrs. clemens, in some good-by memoranda, he said: the lake is as smooth as glass; a brilliant sun is shining. our boat is so comfortable and shady with its awning. . . we have crossed the lake and are entering the canal. shall presently be in the rhone. noon. nearly down to the rhone, passing the village of chanaz. sunday, . p.m. we have been in the rhone three hours. it is unimaginably still & reposeful & cool & soft & breezy. no rowing or work of any kind to do--we merely float with the current we glide noiseless and swift--as fast as a london cab-horse rips along-- miles an hour--the swiftest current i've ever boated in. we have the entire river to ourselves nowhere a boat of any kind. pleasant it must have been in the warm september days to go swinging down that swift, gray stream which comes racing out of switzerland into france, fed from a thousand glaciers. he sent almost daily memoranda of his progress. half-way to arles he wrote: it's too delicious, floating with the swift current under the awning these superb, sunshiny days in deep peace and quietness. some of these curious old historical towns strangely persuade me, but it is so lovely afloat that i don't stop, but view them from the outside and sail on. we get abundance of grapes and peaches for next to nothing. my, but that inn was suffocating with garlic where we stayed last night! i had to hold my nose as we went up-stairs or i believe i should have fainted. little bit of a room, rude board floor unswept, chairs, unpainted white pine table--void the furniture! had a good firm bed, solid as a rock, & you could have brained an ox with the bolster. these six hours have been entirely delightful. i want to do all the rivers of europe in an open boat in summer weather. still further along he described one of their shore accommodations. night caught us yesterday where we had to take quarters in a peasant's house which was occupied by the family and a lot of cows & calves, also several rabbits.--[his word for fleas. neither fleas nor mosquitoes ever bit him--probably because of his steady use of tobacco.]--the latter had a ball & i was the ballroom; but they were very friendly and didn't bite. the peasants were mighty kind and hearty & flew around & did their best to make us comfortable. this morning i breakfasted on the shore in the open air with two sociable dogs & a cat. clean cloth, napkins & table furniture, white sugar, a vast hunk of excellent butter, good bread, first-class coffee with pure milk, fried fish just caught. wonderful that so much cleanliness should come out of such a phenomenally dirty house. an hour ago we saw the falls of the rhone, a prodigiously rough and dangerous-looking place; shipped a little water, but came to no harm. it was one of the most beautiful pieces of piloting & boat management i ever saw. our admiral knew his business. we have had to run ashore for shelter every time it has rained heretofore, but joseph has been putting in his odd time making a waterproof sun-bonnet for the boat, & now we sail along dry, although we have had many heavy showers this morning. here follows a pencil-drawing of the boat and its new awning, and he adds: "i'm on the stern, under the shelter, and out of sight." the trip down the rhone proved more valuable as an outing than as literary material. clemens covered one hundred and seventy-four pages with his notes of it, then gave it up. traveling alone with no one but joseph and the admiral (former owner of the craft) was reposeful and satisfactory, but it did not inspire literary flights. he tried to rectify the lack of companionship by introducing fictitious characters, such as uncle abner, fargo, and stavely, a young artist; also harris, from the tramp abroad; but harris was not really there this time, and mark twain's genius, given rather to elaboration than to construction, found it too severe a task to imagine a string of adventures without at least the customary ten per cent. of fact to build upon. it was a day above avignon that he had an experience worth while. they were abreast of an old castle, nearing a village, one of the huddled jumble of houses of that locality, when, glancing over his left shoulder toward the distant mountain range, he received what he referred to later as a soul-stirring shock. pointing to the outline of the distant range he said to the courier: "name it. who is it?" the courier said, "napoleon." clemens assented. the admiral, when questioned, also promptly agreed that the mountain outlined was none other than the reclining figure of the great commander himself. they watched and discussed the phenomenon until they reached the village. next morning clemens was up for a first daybreak glimpse of his discovery. later he reported it to mrs. clemens: i did so long for you and sue yesterday morning--the most superb sunrise--the most marvelous sunrise--& i saw it all, from the very faintest suspicion of the coming dawn, all the way through to the final explosion of glory. but it had an interest private to itself & not to be found elsewhere in the world; for between me & it, in the far-distant eastward, was a silhouetted mountain range, in which i had discovered, the previous afternoon, a most noble face upturned to the sky, & mighty form outstretched, which i had named napoleon dreaming of universal empire--& now this prodigious face, soft, rich, blue, spirituelle, asleep, tranquil, reposeful, lay against that giant conflagration of ruddy and golden splendors, all rayed like a wheel with the up-streaming & far-reaching lances of the sun. it made one want to cry for delight, it was so supreme in its unimaginable majesty & beauty. he made a pencil-sketch of the napoleon head in his note-book, and stated that the apparition could be seen opposite the castle of beauchastel; but in later years his treacherous memory betrayed him, and, forgetting these identifying marks, he told of it as lying a few hours above arles, and named it the "lost napoleon," because those who set out to find it did not succeed. he even wrote an article upon the subject, in which he urged tourists to take steamer from arles and make a short trip upstream, keeping watch on the right-hand bank, with the purpose of rediscovering the natural wonder. fortunately this sketch was not published. it would have been set down as a practical joke by disappointed travelers. one of mark twain's friends, mr. theodore stanton, made a persistent effort to find the napoleon, but with the wrong directions naturally failed. it required ten days to float to arles. then the current gave out and clemens ended the excursion and returned to lausanne by rail. he said: "it was twenty-eight miles to marseilles, and somebody would have to row. that would not have been pleasure; it would have meant work for the sailor, and i do not like work even when another person does it." to twichell in america he wrote: you ought to have been along--i could have made room for you easily, & you would have found that a pedestrian tour in europe doesn't begin with a raft voyage for hilarity & mild adventure & intimate contact with the unvisited native of the back settlements & extinction from the world and newspapers & a conscience in a state of coma & lazy comfort & solid happiness. in fact, there's nothing that's so lovely. but it's all over. i gave the raft away yesterday at arles & am loafing along back by short stages on the rail to ouchy, lausanne, where the tribe are staying at the beau rivage and are well and prosperous. clxxvii kornerstrasse, they had decided to spend the winter in berlin, and in october mrs. clemens and mrs. crane, after some previous correspondence with an agent, went up to that city to engage an apartment. the elevator had not reached the european apartment in those days, and it was necessary, on mrs. clemens's account, to have a ground floor. the sisters searched a good while without success, and at last reached kornerstrasse, a short, secluded street, highly recommended by the agent. the apartment they examined in kornerstrasse was number , and they were so much pleased with the conveniences and comfort of it and so tired that they did not notice closely its, general social environment. the agent supplied an assortment of furniture for a consideration, and they were soon settled in the attractive, roomy place. clemens and the children, arriving somewhat later, expressed themselves as satisfied. their contentment was somewhat premature. when they began to go out socially, which was very soon, and friends inquired as to their location, they noticed that the address produced a curious effect. semi-acquaintances said, "ah, yes, kornerstrasse"; acquaintances said, "dear me, do you like it?" an old friend exclaimed, "good gracious! how in the world did you ever come to locate there?" then they began to notice what they had not at first seen. kornerstrasse was not disreputable, but it certainly was not elegant. there were rag warehouses across the street and women who leaned out the windows to gossip. the street itself was thronged with children. they played on a sand pile and were often noisy and seldom clean. it was eminently not the place for a distinguished man of letters. the family began to be sensitive on the subject of their address. clemens, of course, made humor out of it. he wrote a newspaper letter on the subject, a burlesque, naturally, which the family prevailed upon him not to print. but the humiliation is out of it now, and a bit of its humor may be preserved. he takes upon himself the renting of the place, and pictures the tour of inspection with the agent's assistant. he was greatly moved when they came to the street and said, softly and lovingly: "ah, korner street, korner street, why did i not think of you before! a place fit for the gods, dear sir. quiet?--notice how still it is; and remember this is noonday--noonday. it is but one block long, you see, just a sweet, dear little nest hid away here in the heart of the great metropolis, its presence and its sacred quiet unsuspected by the restless crowds that swarm along the stately thoroughfares yonder at its two extremities. and----" "this building is handsome, but i don't think much of the others. they look pretty commonplace, compared with the rest of berlin." "dear! dear! have you noticed that? it is just an affectation of the nobility. what they want----" "the nobility? do they live in----" "in this street? that is good! very good, indeed! i wish the duke of sassafras-hagenstein could hear you say that. when the duke first moved in here he----" "does he live in this street?" "him! well, i should say so! do you see the big, plain house over there with the placard in the third floor window? that's his house." "the placard that says 'furnished rooms to let'? does he keep boarders?" "what an idea! him! with a rent-roll of twelve hundred thousand marks a year? oh, positively this is too good." "well, what does he have that sign up for?" the assistant took me by the buttonhole & said, with a merry light beaming in his eye: "why, my dear sir, a person would know you are new to berlin just by your innocent questions. our aristocracy, our old, real, genuine aristocracy, are full of the quaintest eccentricities, eccentricities inherited for centuries, eccentricities which they are prouder of than they are of their titles, and that sign-board there is one of them. they all hang them out. and it's regulated by an unwritten law. a baron is entitled to hang out two, a count five, a duke fifteen----" "then they are all dukes over on that side, i sup----" "every one of them. now the old duke of backofenhofenschwartz not the present duke, but the last but one, he----" "does he live over the sausage-shop in the cellar?" "no, the one farther along, where the eighteenth yellow cat is chewing the door-mat----" "but all the yellow cats are chewing the door-mats." "yes, but i mean the eighteenth one. count. no, never mind; there's a lot more come. i'll get you another mark. let me see---" they could not remain permanently in komerstrasse, but they stuck it out till the end of december--about two months. then they made such settlement with the agent as they could--that is to say, they paid the rest of their year's rent--and established themselves in a handsome apartment at the hotel royal, unter den linden. there was no need to be ashamed of this address, for it was one of the best in berlin. as for komerstrasse, it is cleaner now. it is still not aristocratic, but it is eminently respectable. there is a new post-office that takes in number , where one may post mail and send telegrams and use the fernsprecher--which is to say the telephone--and be politely treated by uniformed officials, who have all heard of mark twain, but have no knowledge of his former occupation of their premises. clxxviii a winter in berlin clemens, meantime, had been trying to establish himself in his work, but his rheumatism racked him occasionally and was always a menace. closing a letter to hall, he said: "i must stop-my arm is howling." he put in a good deal of time devising publishing schemes, principal among them being a plan for various cheap editions of his books, pamphlets, and such like, to sell for a few cents. these projects appear never to have been really undertaken, hall very likely fearing that a flood of cheap issues would interfere with the more important trade. it seemed dangerous to trifle with an apparently increasing prosperity, and clemens was willing enough to agree with this view. clemens had still another letter to write for laffan and mcclure, and he made a pretty careful study of berlin with that end in view. but his arm kept him from any regular work. he made notes, however. once he wrote: the first gospel of all monarchies should be rebellion; the second should be rebellion; and the third and all gospels, and the only gospel of any monarchy, should be rebellion--against church and state. and again: i wrote a chapter on this language years ago and tried my level best to improve it and simplify it for these people, and this is the result--a word of thirty-nine letters. it merely concentrates the alphabet with a shovel. it hurts me to know that that chapter is not in any of their text-books and they don't use it in the university. socially, that winter in berlin was eventful enough. william walter phelps, of new jersey (clemens had known him in america), was united states minister at the german capital, while at the emperor's court there was a cousin, frau von versen, nee clemens, one of the st. louis family. she had married a young german officer who had risen to the rank of a full general. mark twain and his family were welcome guests at all the diplomatic events--often brilliant levees, gatherings of distinguished men and women from every circle of achievement. labouchere of 'truth' was there, de blowitz of the 'times', and authors, ambassadors, and scientists of rank. clemens became immediately a distinguished figure at these assemblies. his popularity in germany was openly manifested. at any gathering he was surrounded by a brilliant company, eager to do him honor. he was recognized whenever he appeared on the street, and saluted, though in his notes he says he was sometimes mistaken for the historian mommsen, whom he resembled in hair and features. his books were displayed for sale everywhere, and a special cheap edition of them was issued at a few cents per copy. captain bingham (later general bingham, commissioner of police in new york city) and john jackson were attaches of the legation, both of them popular with the public in general, and especially so with the clemens family. susy clemens, writing to her father during a temporary absence, tells of a party at mrs. jackson's, and especially refers to captain bingham in the most complimentary terms. "he never left me sitting alone, nor in an awkward situation of any kind, but always came cordially to the rescue. my gratitude toward him was absolutely limitless." she adds that mrs. bingham was very handsome and decidedly the most attractive lady present. berlin was susy's first real taste of society, and she was reveling in it. in her letter she refers to minister phelps by the rather disrespectful nickname of "yaas," a term conferred because of his pronounciation of that affirmative. the clemens children were not entirely happy in the company of the minister. they were fond of him, but he was a great tease. they were quite young enough, but it seemed always to give him delight to make them appear much younger. in the letter above quoted susy says: when i saw mr. phelps i put out my hand enthusiastically and said, "oh, mr. phelps, good evening," whereat he drew back and said, so all could hear, "what, you here! why, you're too young. do you think you know how to behave?" as there were two or three young gentlemen near by to whom i hadn't been introduced i wasn't exactly overjoyed at this greeting. we may imagine that the nickname "yaas" had been invented by susy in secret retaliation, though she was ready enough to forgive him, for he was kindness itself at heart. in one of his later dictations clemens related an anecdote concerning a dinner with phelps, when he (clemens) had been invited to meet count s----, a cabinet minister of long and illustrious descent. clemens, and phelps too, it seems, felt overshadowed by this ancestry. of course i wanted to let out the fact that i had some ancestors, too; but i did not want to pull them out of their graves by the ears, and i never could seem to get the chance to work them in, in a way that would look sufficiently casual. i suppose phelps was in the same difficulty. in fact he looked distraught now and then just as a person looks who wants to uncover an ancestor purely by accident and cannot think of a way that will seem accidental enough. but at last, after dinner, he made a try. he took us about his drawing-room, showing us the pictures, and finally stopped before a rude and ancient engraving. it was a picture of the court that tried charles i. there was a pyramid of judges in puritan slouch hats, and below them three bareheaded secretaries seated at a table. mr. phelps put his finger upon one of the three and said, with exulting indifference: "an ancestor of mine." i put a finger on a judge and retorted with scathing languidness: "ancestor of mine. but it is a small matter. i have others." clemens was sincerely fond of phelps and spent a good deal of time at the legation headquarters. sometimes he wrote there. an american journalist, henry w. fischer, remembers seeing him there several times scribbling on such scraps of paper as came handy, and recalls that on one occasion he delivered an address to a german and english audience on the "awful german tongue." this was probably the lecture that brought clemens to bed with pneumonia. with mrs. clemens he had been down to ilsenburg, in the hartz mountains, for a week of change. it was pleasant there, and they would have remained longer but for the berlin lecture engagement. as it was, they found berlin very cold and the lecture-room crowded and hot. when the lecture was over they stopped at general von versen's for a ball, arriving at home about two in the morning. clemens awoke with a heavy cold and lung congestion. he remained in bed, a very sick man indeed, for the better part of a month. it was unpleasant enough at first, though he rather enjoyed the convalescent period. he could sit up in bed and read and receive occasional callers. fischer brought him memoirs of the margravine of bayreuth, always a favorite. --[clemens was deeply interested in the margravine, and at one time began a novel with her absorbing history as its theme. he gave it up, probably feeling that the romantic form could add nothing to the margravine's own story.]--the emperor sent frau von versen with an invitation for him to attend the consecration of some flags in the palace. when she returned, conveying thanks and excuses, his majesty commanded her to prepare a dinner at her home for mark twain and himself and a few special guests, the date to be arranged when clemens's physician should pronounce him well enough to attend. members of the clemens household were impressed by this royal attention. little jean was especially awed. she said: "i wish i could be in papa's clothes"; then, after reflection, "but that wouldn't be any use. i reckon the emperor wouldn't recognize me." and a little later, when she had been considering all the notables and nobilities of her father's recent association, she added: "why, papa, if it keeps on like this, pretty soon there won't be anybody for you to get acquainted with but god," which mark twain decided was not quite as much of a compliment as it had at first seemed. it was during the period of his convalescence that clemens prepared his sixth letter for the new york sun and mcclure's syndicate, "the german chicago," a finely descriptive article on berlin, and german customs and institutions generally. perhaps the best part of it is where he describes the grand and prolonged celebration which had been given in honor of professor virchow's seventieth birthday.--[rudolph virchow, an eminent german pathologist and anthropologist and scholar; then one of the most prominent figures of the german reichstag. he died in .] --he tells how the demonstrations had continued in one form or another day after day, and merged at last into the seventieth birthday of professor helmholtz--[herman von helmholtz, an eminent german physicist, one of the most distinguished scientists of the nineteenth century. he died in .]--also how these great affairs finally culminated in a mighty 'commers', or beer-fest, given in their honor by a thousand german students. this letter has been published in mark twain's "complete works," and is well worth reading to-day. his place had been at the table of the two heroes of the occasion, virchow and helmholtz, a place where he could see and hear all that went on; and he was immensely impressed at the honor which germany paid to her men of science. the climax came when mommsen unexpectedly entered the room.--[theodor mommsen ( - ), an eminent german historian and archeologist, a powerful factor in all liberal movements. from - permanent secretary of the berlin royal academy of sciences.] there seemed to be some signal whereby the students on the platform were made aware that a professor had arrived at the remote door of entrance, for you would see them suddenly rise to their feet, strike an erect military attitude, then draw their swords; the swords of all their brethren standing guard at the innumerable tables would flash from the scabbard and be held aloft--a handsome spectacle. three clear bugle-notes would ring out, then all these swords would come down with a crash, twice repeated, on the tables and be uplifted and held aloft again; then in the distance you would see the gay uniforms and uplifted swords of a guard of honor clearing the way and conducting the guest down to his place. the songs were stirring, and the immense outpour from young life and young lungs, the crash of swords, and the thunder of the beer-mugs gradually worked a body up to what seemed the last possible summit of excitement. it surely seemed to me that i had reached that summit, that i had reached my limit, and that there was no higher lift devisable for me. when apparently the last eminent guest had long ago taken his place, again those three bugle-blasts rang out, and once more the swords leaped from their scabbards. who might this late comer be? nobody was interested to inquire. still, indolent eyes were turned toward the distant entrance, and we saw the silken gleam and the lifted sword of a guard of honor plowing through the remote crowds. then we saw that end of the house rising to its feet; saw it rise abreast the advancing guard all along like a wave. this supreme honor had been offered to no one before. there was an excited whisper at our table--"mommsen!"--and the whole house rose --rose and shouted and stamped and clapped and banged the beer-mugs. just simply a storm! then the little man with his long hair and emersonian face edged his way past us and took his seat. i could have touched him with my hand--mommsen!--think of it! this was one of those immense surprises that can happen only a few times in one's life. i was not dreaming of him; he was to me only a giant myth, a world-shadowing specter, not a reality. the surprise of it all can be only comparable to a man's suddenly coming upon mont blanc, with its awful form towering into the sky, when he didn't suspect he was in its neighborhood. i would have walked a great many miles to get a sight of him, and here he was, without trouble, or tramp, or cost of any kind. here he was, clothed in a titanic deceptive modesty which made him look like other men. here he was, carrying the roman world and all the caesars in his hospitable skull, and doing it as easily as that other luminous vault, the skull of the universe, carries the milky way and the constellations. during his convalescent days, clemens had plenty of time to reflect and to look out of the window. his notebook preserves some of his reflections. in one place he says: the emperor passes in a modest open carriage. next that happy -year-old butcher-boy, all in white apron and turban, standing up & so proud! how fast they drive-nothing like it but in london. and the horses seem to be of very fine breed, though i am not an expert in horses & do not speak with assurance. i can always tell which is the front end of a horse, but beyond that my art is not above the ordinary. the "court gazette" of a german paper can be covered with a playing- card. in an english paper the movements of titled people take up about three times that room. in the papers of republican france from six to sixteen times as much. there, if a duke's dog should catch cold in the head they would stop the press to announce it and cry about it. in germany they respect titles, in england they revere them, in france they adore them. that is, the french newspapers do. been taken for mommsen twice. we have the same hair, but on examination it was found the brains were different. on february th he records that professor helmholtz called, but unfortunately leaves no further memorandum of that visit. he was quite recovered by this time, but was still cautioned about going out in the severe weather. in the final entry he says: thirty days sick abed--full of interest--read the debates and get excited over them, though don't 'versteh'. by reading keep in a state of excited ignorance, like a blind man in a house afire; flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don't know how i got in and can't find the way out, but i'm having a booming time all to myself. don't know what a 'schelgesetzentwurf' is, but i keep as excited over it and as worried about it as if it was my own child. i simply live on the sch.; it is my daily bread. i wouldn't have the question settled for anything in the world. especially now that i've lost the 'offentliche militargericht circus'. i read all the debates on that question with a never-failing interest, but all at once they sprung a vote on me a couple of days ago & did something by a vote of to , but i couldn't find out what it was. clxxix a dinner with william ii. the dinner with emperor william ii. at general von versen's was set for the th of february. a few days before, mark twain entered in his note-book: in that day the imperial lion and the democratic lamb shall sit down together, and a little general shall feed them. mark twain was the guest of honor on this occasion, and was seated at the emperor's right hand. the emperor's brother, prince heinrich, sat opposite; prince radolin farther along. rudolf lindau, of the foreign office, was also present. there were fourteen at the table, all told. in his memorandum made at the time, clemens gave no account of the dinner beyond the above details, only adding: after dinner or officers came in, & all hands adjourned to the big room out of the smoking-room and held a "smoking parliament" after the style of the ancient potsdam one, till midnight, when the emperor shook hands and left. it was not until fourteen years later that mark twain related some special matters pertaining to that evening. he may have expanded then somewhat to fill out spaces of his memory, and embroidered them, as was his wont; but that something happened, either in reality or in his imagination, which justified his version of it we may believe. he told it as here given, premising: "this may appear in print after i am dead, but not before. "from until day before yesterday i had never mentioned the matter, nor set it down with a pen, nor ever referred to it in any way--not even to my wife, to whom i was accustomed to tell everything that happened to me. "at the dinner his majesty chatted briskly and entertainingly along in easy and flowing english, and now and then he interrupted himself to address a remark to me or to some other individual of the guests. when the reply had been delivered he resumed his talk. i noticed that the table etiquette tallied with that which was the law of my house at home when we had guests; that is to say, the guests answered when the host favored them with a remark, and then quieted down and behaved themselves until they got another chance. if i had been in the emperor's chair and he in mine i should have felt infinitely comfortable and at home, but i was guest now, and consequently felt less at home. from old experience i was familiar with the rules of the game and familiar with their exercise from the high place of host; but i was not familiar with the trammeled and less satisfactory position of guest, therefore i felt a little strange and out of place. but there was no animosity--no, the emperor was host, therefore, according to my own rule, he had a right to do the talking, and it was my honorable duty to intrude no interruptions or other improvements except upon invitation; and of course it could be my turn some day--some day, on some friendly visit of inspection to america, it might be my pleasure and distinction to have him as guest at my table; then i would give him a rest and a quiet time. "in one way there was a difference between his table and mine-for instance, atmosphere; the guests stood in awe of him, and naturally they conferred that feeling upon me, for, after all, i am only human, although i regret it. when a guest answered a question he did it with a deferential voice and manner; he did not put any emotion into it, and he did not spin it out, but got it out of his system as quickly as he could, and then looked relieved. the emperor was used to this atmosphere, and it did not chill his blood; maybe it was an inspiration to him, for he was alert, brilliant, and full of animation; also he was most gracefully and felicitously complimentary to my books--and i will remark here that the happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts and the happy delivery of it another. i once mentioned the high compliment which he paid to the book 'old times on the mississippi'; but there were others, among them some high praise of my description in 'a tramp abroad' of certain striking phases of german student life. "fifteen or twenty minutes before the dinner ended the emperor made a remark to me in praise of our generous soldier pensions; then, without pausing, he continued the remark, not speaking to me, but across the table to his brother, prince heinrich. the prince replied, endorsing the emperor's view of the matter. then i followed with my own view of it. i said that in the beginning our government's generosity to the soldier was clear in its intent and praiseworthy, since the pensions were conferred upon soldiers who had earned them, soldiers who had been disabled in the war and could no longer earn a livelihood for themselves and their families, but that the pensions decreed and added later lacked the virtue of a clean motive, and had, little by little, degenerated into a wider and wider and more and more offensive system of vote-purchasing, and was now become a source of corruption, which was an unpleasant thing to contemplate and was a danger besides. i think that that was about the substance of my remark; but in any case the remark had a quite definite result, and that is the memorable thing about it --manifestly it made everybody uncomfortable. i seemed to perceive this quite plainly. i had committed an indiscretion. possibly it was in violating etiquette by intruding a remark when i had not been invited to make one; possibly it was in taking issue with an opinion promulgated by his majesty. i do not know which it was, but i quite clearly remember the effect which my act produced--to wit, the emperor refrained from addressing any remarks to me afterward, and not merely during the brief remainder of the dinner, but afterward in the kneip-room, where beer and cigars and hilarious anecdoting prevailed until about midnight. i am sure that the emperor's good night was the only thing he said to me in all that time. "was this rebuke studied and intentional? i don't know, but i regarded it in that way. i can't be absolutely sure of it because of modifying doubts created afterward by one or two circumstances. for example: the empress dowager invited me to her palace, and the reigning empress invited me to breakfast, and also sent for general von versen to come to her palace and read to her and her ladies from my books." it was a personal message from the emperor that fourteen years later recalled to him this curious circumstance. a gentleman whom clemens knew went on a diplomatic mission to germany. upon being presented to emperor william, the latter had immediately begun to talk of mark twain and his work. he spoke of the description of german student life as the greatest thing of its kind ever written, and of the sketch on the german language as wonderful; then he said: "convey to mr. clemens my kindest regards, ask him if he remembers that dinner at von versen's, and ask him why he didn't do any more talking at that dinner." it seemed a mysterious message. clemens thought it might have been meant to convey some sort of an imperial apology; but again it might have meant that mark twain's breach and the emperor's coolness on that occasion were purely imaginary, and that the emperor had really expected him to talk far more than he did. returning to the royal hotel after the von versen dinner, mark twain received his second high compliment that day on the mississippi book. the portier, a tow-headed young german, must have been comparatively new at the hotel; for apparently he had just that day learned that his favorite author, whose books he had long been collecting, was actually present in the flesh. clemens, all ready to apologize for asking so late an admission, was greeted by the portier's round face all sunshine and smiles. the young german then poured out a stream of welcome and compliments and dragged the author to a small bedroom near the front door, where he excitedly pointed out a row of books, german translations of mark twain. "there," he said; "you wrote them. i've found it out. lieber gott! i did not know it before, and i ask a million pardons. that one there, old times on the mississippi, is the best you ever wrote." the note-book records only one social event following the emperor's dinner--a dinner with the secretary of the legation. the note says: at the emperor's dinner black cravats were ordered. tonight i went in a black cravat and everybody else wore white ones. just my luck. the berlin activities came to an end then. he was still physically far from robust, and his doctors peremptorily ordered him to stay indoors or to go to a warmer climate. this was march st. clemens and his wife took joseph very, and, leaving the others for the time in berlin, set out for mentone, in the south of france. clxxx many wanderings mentone was warm and quiet, and clemens worked when his arm permitted. he was alone there with mrs. clemens, and they wandered about a good deal, idling and picture-making, enjoying a sort of belated honeymoon. clemens wrote to susy: joseph is gone to nice to educate himself in kodaking--and to get the pictures mounted which mama thinks she took here; but i noticed she didn't take the plug out, as a rule. when she did she took nine pictures on top of each other--composites. they remained a month in mentone, then went over to pisa, and sent joseph to bring the rest of the party to rome. in rome they spent another month--a period of sight-seeing, enjoyable, but to clemens pretty profitless. "i do not expect to be able to write any literature this year," he said in a letter to hall near the end of april. "the moment i take up my pen my rheumatism returns." still he struggled along and managed to pile up a good deal of copy in the course of weeks. from rome to florence, at the end of april, and so pleasing was the prospect, and so salubrious the air of that ancient city, that they resolved to engage residence there for the next winter. they inspected accommodations of various kinds, and finally, through prof. willard fiske, were directed to the villa viviani, near settignano, on a hill to the eastward of florence, with vineyard and olive-grove sloping away to the city lying in a haze-a vision of beauty and peace. they closed the arrangement for viviani, and about the middle of may went up to venice for a fortnight of sight-seeing--a break in the travel back to germany. william gedney bunce, the hartford artist, was in venice, and sarah orne jewett and other home friends. from venice, by way of lake como and "a tangled route" (his note-book says) to lucerne, and so northward to berlin and on to bad nauheim, where they had planned to spend the summer. clemens for some weeks had contemplated a trip to america, for matters there seemed to demand his personal attention. summer arrangements for the family being now concluded, he left within the week and set sail on the havel for new york. to jean he wrote a cheerful good-by letter, more cheerful, we may believe, than he felt. bremen, . a.m., june , . dear jean clemens,--i am up & shaved & got my clean shirt on & feel mighty fine, & am going down to show off before i put on the rest of my clothes. perhaps mama & mrs. hague can persuade the hauswirth to do right; but if he don't you go down & kill his dog. i wish you would invite the consul-general and his ladies down to take one of those slim dinners with mama, then he would complain to the government. clemens felt that his presence in america, was demanded by two things. hall's reports continued, as ever, optimistic; but the semi-annual statements were less encouraging. the library of literature and some of the other books were selling well enough; but the continuous increase of capital required by a business conducted on the instalment plan had steadily added to the firm's liabilities, while the prospect of a general tightening in the money-market made the outlook not a particularly happy one. clemens thought he might be able to dispose of the library or an interest in it, or even of his share of the business itself, to some one with means sufficient to put it on an easier financial footing. the uncertainties of trade and the burden of increased debt had become a nightmare which interfered with his sleep. it seemed hard enough to earn a living with a crippled arm, without this heavy business care. the second interest requiring attention was that other old one--the machine. clemens had left the matter in paige's hands, and paige, with persuasive eloquence, had interested chicago capital to a point where a company had been formed to manufacture the type-setter in that city. paige reported that he had got several million dollars subscribed for the construction of a factory, and that he had been placed on a salary as a sort of general "consulting omniscient" at five thousand dollars a month. clemens, who had been negotiating again with the mallorys for the disposal of his machine royalties, thought it proper to find out just what was going on. he remained in america less than two weeks, during which he made a flying trip to chicago and found that paige's company really had a factory started, and proposed to manufacture fifty machines. it was not easy to find out the exact status of this new company, but clemens at least was hopeful enough of its prospects to call off the negotiations with the mallorys which had promised considerable cash in hand. he had been able to accomplish nothing material in the publishing situation, but his heart-to-heart talk with hall for some reason had seemed comforting. the business had been expanding; they would now "concentrate." he returned on the lahn, and he must have been in better health and spirits, for it is said he kept the ship very merry during the passage. he told many extravagantly amusing yarns; so many that a court was convened to try him on the charge of "inordinate and unscientific lying." many witnesses testified, and his own testimony was so unconvincing that the jury convicted him without leaving the bench. he was sentenced to read aloud from his own works for a considerable period every day until the steamer should reach port. it is said that he faithfully carried out this part of the program, and that the proceeds from the trial and the various readings amounted to something more than six hundred dollars, which was turned over to the seamen's fund. clemens's arm was really much better, and he put in a good deal of spare time during the trip writing an article on "all sorts and conditions of ships," from noah's ark down to the fine new havel, then the latest word in ship-construction. it was an article written in a happy vein and is profitable reading to-day. the description of columbus as he appeared on the deck of his flag-ship is particularly rich and flowing: if the weather was chilly he came up clad from plumed helmet to spurred heel in magnificent plate-armor inlaid with arabesques of gold, having previously warmed it at the galley fire. if the weather was warm he came up in the ordinary sailor toggery of the time-great slouch hat of blue velvet, with a flowing brush of snowy ostrich-plumes, fastened on with a flashing cluster of diamonds and emeralds; gold-embroidered doublet of green velvet, with slashed sleeves exposing undersleeves of crimson satin; deep collar and cuff ruffles of rich, limp lace; trunk hose of pink velvet, with big knee-knots of brocaded yellow ribbon; pearl-tinted silk stockings, clocked and daintily embroidered; lemon-colored buskins of unborn kid, funnel-topped, and drooping low to expose the pretty stockings; deep gauntlets of finest white heretic skin, from the factory of the holy inquisition, formerly part of the person of a lady of rank; rapier with sheath crusted with jewels and hanging from a broad baldric upholstered with rubies and sapphires. clxxxi nauheim and the prince of wales clemens was able to write pretty steadily that summer in nauheim and turned off a quantity of copy. he completed several short articles and stories, and began, or at least continued work on, two books--'tom sawyer abroad' and 'those extraordinary twins'--the latter being the original form of 'pudd'nhead wilson'. as early as august th he wrote to hall that he had finished forty thousand words of the "tom sawyer" story, and that it was to be offered to some young people's magazine, harper's young people or st. nicholas; but then he suddenly decided that his narrative method was altogether wrong. to hall on the th he wrote: i have dropped that novel i wrote you about because i saw a more effective way of using the main episode--to wit, by telling it through the lips of huck finn. so i have started huck finn & tom sawyer (still years old) & their friend the freed slave jim around the world in a stray balloon, with huck as narrator, & somewhere after the end of that great voyage he will work in that original episode & then nobody will suspect that a whole book has been written & the globe circumnavigated merely to get that episode in in an effective (& at the same time apparently unintentional) way. i have written , words of this new narrative, & find that the humor flows as easily as the adventures & surprises--so i shall go along and make a book of from , to , words. it is a story for boys, of course, & i think it will interest any boy between years & . when i was in new york the other day mrs. dodge, editor of st. nicholas, wrote and offered me $ , for (serial right) a story for boys , words long. i wrote back and declined, for i had other matter in my mind then. i conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys, but will also strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. that immensely enlarges the audience. now, this story doesn't need to be restricted to a child's magazine --it is proper enough for any magazine, i should think, or for a syndicate. i don't swear it, but i think so. proposed title--new adventures of huckleberry finn. he was full of his usual enthusiasm in any new undertaking, and writes of the extraordinary twins: by and by i shall have to offer (for grown folks' magazine) a novel entitled, 'those extraordinary twins'. it's the howling farce i told you i had begun awhile back. i laid it aside to ferment while i wrote tom sawyer abroad, but i took it up again on a little different plan lately, and it is swimming along satisfactorily now. i think all sorts of folks will read it. it is clear out of the common order--it is a fresh idea--i don't think it resembles anything in literature. he was quite right; it did not resemble anything in literature, nor did it greatly resemble literature, though something at least related to literature would eventually grow out of it. in a letter written many years afterward by frank mason, then consul-general at frankfort, he refers to "that happy summer at nauheim." mason was often a visitor there, and we may believe that his memory of the summer was justified. for one thing, clemens himself was in better health and spirits and able to continue his work. but an even greater happiness lay in the fact that two eminent physicians had pronounced mrs. clemens free from any organic ills. to orion, clemens wrote: we are in the clouds because the bath physicians say positively that livy has no heart disease but has only weakness of the heart muscles and will soon be well again. that was worth going to europe to find out. it was enough to change the whole atmosphere of the household, and financial worries were less considered. another letter to orion relates history: the twichells have been here four days & we have had good times with them. joe & i ran over to homburg, the great pleasure-resort, saturday, to dine with friends, & in the morning i went walking in the promenade & met the british ambassador to the court of berlin and he introduced me to the prince of wales. i found him a most unusually comfortable and unembarrassing englishman. twichell has reported mark twain's meeting with the prince (later edward vii) as having come about by special request of the latter, made through the british ambassador. "the meeting," he says, "was a most cordial one on both sides, and presently the prince took mark twain's arm and the two marched up and down, talking earnestly together, the prince, solid, erect, and soldierlike, clemens weaving along in his curious, swinging gait in a full tide of talk, and brandishing a sun-umbrella of the most scandalous description." when they parted clemens said: "it has been, indeed, a great pleasure to meet your royal highness." the prince answered: "and it is a pleasure, mr. clemens, to have met you--again." clemens was puzzled to reply. "why," he said, "have we met before?" the prince smiled happily. "oh yes," he said; "don't you remember that day on the strand when you were on the top of a bus and i was heading a procession and you had on your new overcoat with flap-pockets?"--[see chap. clxiii, "a letter to the queen of england."] it was the highest compliment he could have paid, for it showed that he had read, and had remembered all those years. clemens expressed to twichell regret that he had forgotten to mention his visit to the prince's sister, louise, in ottawa, but he had his opportunity at a dinner next day. later the prince had him to supper and they passed an entire evening together. there was a certain uneasiness in the nauheim atmosphere that year, for the cholera had broken out at hamburg, and its victims were dying at a terrific rate. it was almost impossible to get authentic news as to the spread of the epidemic, for the german papers were curiously conservative in their reports. clemens wrote an article on the subject but concluded not to print it. a paragraph will convey its tenor. what i am trying to make the reader understand is the strangeness of the situation here--a mighty tragedy being played upon a stage that is close to us, & yet we are as ignorant of its details as we should be if the stage were in china. we sit "in front," & the audience is in fact the world; but the curtain is down, & from behind it we hear only an inarticulate murmur. the hamburg disaster must go into history as the disaster without a history. he closes with an item from a physician's letter--an item which he says "gives you a sudden and terrific sense of the situation there." for in a line it flashes before you--this ghastly picture--a thing seen by the physician: a wagon going along the street with five sick people in it, and with them four dead ones. clxxxii the villa viviani 'the american claimant', published in may l ( ), did not bring a very satisfactory return. for one thing, the book-trade was light, and then the claimant was not up to his usual standard. it had been written under hard circumstances and by a pen long out of practice; it had not paid, and its author must work all the harder on the new undertakings. the conditions at nauheim seemed favorable, and they lingered there until well into september. to mrs. crane, who had returned to america, clemens wrote on the th, from lucerne, in the midst of their travel to italy: we remained in nauheim a little too long. if we had left four or five days earlier we should have made florence in three days. hard trip because it was one of those trains that gets tired every minutes and stops to rest three-quarters of an hour. it took us / hours to get there instead of the regulation hours. we shall pull through to milan to-morrow if possible. next day we shall start at am and try to make bologna, hours. next day, florence, d. v. next year we will walk. phelps came to frankfort and we had some great times--dinner at his hotel; & the masons, supper at our inn--livy not in it. she was merely allowed a glimpse, no more. of course phelps said she was merely pretending to be ill; was never looking so well & fine. a paris journal has created a happy interest by inoculating one of its correspondents with cholera. a man said yesterday he wished to god they would inoculate all of them. yes, the interest is quite general and strong & much hope is felt. livy says i have said enough bad things, and better send all our loves & shut up. which i do--and shut up. they lingered at lucerne until mrs. clemens was rested and better able to continue the journey, arriving at last in florence, september th. they drove out to the villa viviani in the afternoon and found everything in readiness for their reception, even to the dinner, which was prepared and on the table. clemens, in his notes, speaks of this and adds: it takes but a sentence to state that, but it makes an indolent person tired to think of the planning & work and trouble that lie concealed in it. some further memoranda made at this time have that intimate interest which gives reality and charm. the 'contadino' brought up their trunks from the station, and clemens wrote: the 'contadino' is middle-aged & like the rest of the peasants--that is to say, brown, handsome, good-natured, courteous, & entirely independent without making any offensive show of it. he charged too much for the trunks, i was told. my informer explained that this was customary. september . the rest of the trunks brought up this morning. he charged too much again, but i was told that this was also customary. it's all right, then. i do not wish to violate the customs. hired landau, horses, & coachman. terms, francs a month & a pourboire to the coachman, i to furnish lodging for the man & the horses, but nothing else. the landau has seen better days & weighs tons. the horses are feeble & object to the landau; they stop & turn around every now & then & examine it with surprise & suspicion. this causes delay. but it entertains the people along the road. they came out & stood around with their hands in their pockets & discussed the matter with each other. i was told that they said that a -ton landau was not the thing for horses like those--what they needed was a wheelbarrow. his description of the house pictures it as exactly today as it did then, for it has not changed in these twenty years, nor greatly, perhaps, in the centuries since it was built. it is a plain, square building, like a box, & is painted light yellow & has green window-shutters. it stands in a commanding position on the artificial terrace of liberal dimensions, which is walled around with masonry. from the walls the vineyards & olive orchards of the estate slant away toward the valley. there are several tall trees, stately stone-pines, also fig-trees & trees of breeds not familiar to me. roses overflow the retaining-walls, & the battered & mossy stone urn on the gate-posts, in pink & yellow cataracts exactly as they do on the drop-curtains in the theaters. the house is a very fortress for strength. the main walls--all brick covered with plaster--are about feet thick. i have several times tried to count the rooms of the house, but the irregularities baffle me. there seem to be . there are plenty of windows & worlds of sunlight. the floors are sleek & shiny & full of reflections, for each is a mirror in its way, softly imaging all objects after the subdued fashion of forest lakes. the curious feature of the house is the salon. this is a spacious & lofty vacuum which occupies the center of the house. all the rest of the house is built around it; it extends up through both stories & its roof projects some feet above the rest of the building. the sense of its vastness strikes you the moment you step into it & cast your eyes around it & aloft. there are divans distributed along its walls. they make little or no show, though their aggregate length is feet. a piano in it is a lost object. we have tried to reduce the sense of desert space & emptiness with tables & things, but they have a defeated look, & do not do any good. whatever stands or moves under that soaring painted vault is belittled. he describes the interior of this vast room (they grew to love it), dwelling upon the plaster-relief portraits above its six doors, florentine senators and judges, ancient dwellers there and former owners of the estate. the date of one of them is --middle-aged, then, & a judge--he could have known, as a youth, the very greatest italian artists, & he could have walked & talked with dante, & probably did. the date of another is --he could have known boccaccio & spent his afternoons wandering in fiesole, gazing down on plague-reeking florence & listening to that man's improper tales, & he probably did. the date of another is --he could have met columbus & he knew the magnificent lorenzo, of course. these are all cerretanis --or cerretani-twains, as i may say, for i have adopted myself into their family on account of its antiquity--my origin having been heretofore too recent to suit me. we are considering the details of viviani at some length, for it was in this setting that he began and largely completed what was to be his most important work of this later time--in some respects his most important of any time--the 'personal recollections of joan of arc'. if the reader loves this book, and he must love it if he has read it, he will not begrudge the space here given to the scene of its inspiration. the outdoor picture of viviani is of even more importance, for he wrote oftener out-of-doors than elsewhere. clemens added it to his notes several months later, but it belongs here. the situation of this villa is perfect. it is three miles from florence, on the side of a hill. beyond some hill-spurs is fiesole perched upon its steep terraces; in the immediate foreground is the imposing mass of the ross castle, its walls and turrets rich with the mellow weather-stains of forgotten centuries; in the distant plain lies florence, pink & gray & brown, with the ruddy, huge dome of the cathedral dominating its center like a captive balloon, & flanked on the right by the smaller bulb of the medici chapel & on the left by the airy tower of the palazzo vecchio; all around the horizon is a billowy rim of lofty blue hills, snowed white with innumerable villas. after nine months of familiarity with this panorama i still think, as i thought in the beginning, that this is the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon, the most satisfying to the eye & the spirit. to see the sun sink down, drowned in his pink & purple & golden floods, & overwhelm florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim & faint & turn the solid city into a city of dreams, is a sight to stir the coldest nature & make a sympathetic one drunk with ecstasy. the clemens household at florence consisted of mr. and mrs. clemens, susy, and jean. clara had soon returned to berlin to attend mrs. willard's school and for piano instruction. mrs. clemens improved in the balmy autumn air of florence and in the peaceful life of their well-ordered villa. in a memorandum of october th clemens wrote: the first month is finished. we are wonted now. this carefree life at a florentine villa is an ideal existence. the weather is divine, the outside aspects lovely, the days and nights tranquil and reposeful, the seclusion from the world and its worries as satisfactory as a dream. late in the afternoons friends come out from the city & drink tea in the open air & tell what is happening in the world; & when the great sun sinks down upon florence & the daily miracle begins they hold their breath & look. it is not a time for talk. no wonder he could work in that environment. he finished 'tom sawyer abroad', also a short story, 'the l , , bank-note' (planned many years before), discovered the literary mistake of the 'extraordinary twins' and began converting it into the worthier tale, 'pudd'nhead wilson', soon completed and on its way to america. with this work out of his hands, clemens was ready for his great new undertaking. a seed sown by the wind more than forty years before was ready to bloom. he would write the story of joan of arc. clxxxiii the sieur de conte and joan in a note which he made many years later mark twain declared that he was fourteen years at work on joan of arc; that he had been twelve years preparing for it, and that he was two years in writing it. there is nothing in any of his earlier notes or letters to indicate that he contemplated the story of joan as early as the eighties; but there is a bibliographical list of various works on the subject, probably compiled for him not much later than , for the latest published work of the list bears that date. he was then too busy with his inventions and publishing schemes to really undertake a work requiring such vast preparation; but without doubt he procured a number of books and renewed that old interest begun so long ago when a stray wind had blown a leaf from that tragic life into his own. joan of arc, by janet tuckey, was apparently the first book he read with the definite idea of study, for this little volume had been recently issued, and his copy, which still exists, is filled with his marginal notes. he did not speak of this volume in discussing the matter in after-years. he may have forgotten it. he dwelt mainly on the old records of the trial which had been dug out and put into modern french by quicherat; the 'jeanne d'arc' of j. michelet, and the splendid 'life of the maid' of lord ronald gower, these being remembered as his chief sources of information.--[the book of janet tuckey, however, and ten others, including those mentioned, are credited as "authorities examined in verification" on a front page of his published book. in a letter written at the conclusion of "joan" in , the author states that in the first two-thirds of the story he used one french and one english authority, while in the last third he had constantly drawn from five french and five english sources.] "i could not get the quicherat and some of the other books in english," he said, "and i had to dig them out of the french. i began the story five times." none of these discarded beginnings exists to-day, but we may believe they were wisely put aside, for no story of the maid could begin more charmingly, more rarely, than the one supposedly told in his old age by sieur louis de conte, secretary of joan of arc, and translated by jean francois alden for the world to read. the impulse which had once prompted mark twain to offer the prince and the pauper anonymously now prevailed. he felt that the prince had missed a certain appreciation by being connected with his signature, and he resolved that its companion piece (he so regarded joan) should be accepted on its merits and without prejudice. walking the floor one day at viviani, smoking vigorously, he said to mrs. clemens and susy: "i shall never be accepted seriously over my own signature. people always want to laugh over what i write and are disappointed if they don't find a joke in it. this is to be a serious book. it means more to me than anything i have ever undertaken. i shall write it anonymously." so it was that that gentle, quaint sieur de conte took up the pen, and the tale of joan was begun in that beautiful spot which of all others seems now the proper environment for its lovely telling. he wrote rapidly once he got his plan perfected and his material arranged. the reading of his youth and manhood, with the vivid impressions of that earlier time, became now something remembered, not merely as reading, but as fact. others of the family went down into the city almost daily, but he remained in that still garden with joan as his companion--the old sieur de conte, saturated with memories, pouring out that marvelous and tragic tale. at the end of each day he would read to the others what he had written, to their enjoyment and wonder. how rapidly he worked may be judged from a letter which he wrote to hall in february, in which he said: i am writing a companion piece to 'the prince and the pauper', which is half done & will make , words. that is to say, he had written one hundred thousand words in a period of perhaps six weeks, marvelous work when one remembers that after all he was writing history, some of which he must dig laboriously from a foreign source. he had always, more or less, kept up his study of the french, begun so long ago on the river and it stood him in good stead now. still, it was never easy for him, and the multitude of notes along the margin of his french authorities bears evidence of his faithfulness and the magnitude of his toil. no previous work had ever required so much of him, such thorough knowledge; none had ever so completely commanded his interest. he would have been willing to remain shut away from visitors, to have been released altogether from social obligations; and he did avoid most of them. not all, for he could not always escape, and perhaps did not always really wish to. florence and its suburbs were full of delightful people--some of them his old friends. there were luncheons, dinners, teas, dances, concerts, operas always in progress somewhere, and not all of these were to be resisted even by an absorbed author who was no longer himself, but sad old sieur de conte, following again the banner of the maid of orleans, marshaling her twilight armies across his illumined page. clxxxiv new hope in the machine if all human events had not been ordered in the first act of the primal atom, and so become inevitable, it would seem a pity now that he must abandon his work half-way, and make another hard, distracting trip to america. but it was necessary for him to go. even hall was no longer optimistic. his letters provided only the barest shreds of hope. times were hard and there was every reason to believe they would be worse. the world's fair year promised to be what it speedily became--one of the hardest financial periods this country has ever seen. chicago could hardly have selected a more profitless time for her great exposition. clemens wrote urging hall to sell out all, or a portion, of the business--to do anything, indeed, that would avoid the necessity of further liability and increased dread. every payment that could be spared from the sales of his manuscript was left in hall's hands, and such moneys as still came to mrs. clemens from her elmira interests were flung into the general fund. the latter were no longer large, for langdon & co. were suffering heavily in the general depression, barely hoping to weather the financial storm. it is interesting to note that age and misfortune and illness had a tempering influence on mark twain's nature. instead of becoming harsh and severe and bitter, he had become more gentle, more kindly. he wrote often to hall, always considerately, even tenderly. once, when something in hall's letter suggested that he had perhaps been severe, he wrote: mrs. clemens is deeply distressed, for she thinks i have been blaming you or finding fault with you about something. but most assuredly that cannot be. i tell her that although i am prone to write hasty and regrettable things to other people i am not a bit likely to write such things to you. i can't believe i have done anything so ungrateful. if i have, pile coals of fire upon my head for i deserve it. you have done magnificently with the business, & we must raise the money somehow to enable you to reap a reward for all that labor. he was fond of hall. he realized how honest and resolute and industrious he had been. in another letter he wrote him that it was wonderful he had been able to "keep the ship afloat in the storm that has seen fleets and fleets go down"; and he added: "mrs. clemens says i must tell you not to send us any money for a month or two, so that you may be afforded what little relief is in our power." the type-setter situation seemed to promise something. in fact, the machine once more had become the principal hope of financial salvation. the new company seemed really to begetting ahead in spite of the money stringency, and was said to have fifty machines well under way: about the middle of march clemens packed up two of his shorter manuscripts which he had written at odd times and forwarded them to hall, in the hope that they would be disposed of and the money waiting him on his arrival; and a week later, march , , he sailed from genoa on the kaiser wilhelm ii, a fine, new boat. one of the manuscripts was 'the californian's tale' and the other was 'adam's diary'.--[it seems curious that neither of these tales should have found welcome with the magazines. "the californian's tale" was published in the liber scriptorum, an authors' club book, edited by arthur stedman. the 'diary' was disposed of to the niagara book, a souvenir of niagara falls, which contained sketches by howells, clemens, and others. harper's magazine republished both these stories in later years--the diary especially with great success.] some joke was likely to be played on mark twain during these ocean journeys, and for this particular voyage an original one was planned. they knew how he would fume and swear if he should be discovered with dutiable goods and held up in the custom house, and they planned for this effect. a few days before arriving in new york one passenger after another came to him, each with a box of expensive cigars, and some pleasant speech expressing friendship and appreciation and a hope that they would be remembered in absence, etc., until he had perhaps ten or a dozen very choice boxes of smoking material. he took them all with gratitude and innocence. he had never declared any dutiable baggage, entering new york alone, and it never occurred to him that he would need to do so now. his trunk and bags were full; he had the cigars made into a nice package, to be carried handily, and on his arrival at the north german lloyd docks stood waiting among his things for the formality of customs examination, his friends assembled for the explosion. they had not calculated well; the custom-house official came along presently with the usual "open your baggage, please," then suddenly recognizing the owner of it he said: "oh, mr. clemens, excuse me. we have orders to extend to you the courtesies of the port. no examination of your effects is necessary." it was the evening of monday, april d, when he landed in new york and went to the hotel glenham. in his notes he tells of having a two-hour talk with howells on the following night. they had not seen each other for two years, and their correspondence had been broken off. it was a happy, even if somewhat sad, reunion, for they were no longer young, and when they called the roll of friends there were many vacancies. they had reached an age where some one they loved died every year. writing to mrs. crane, clemens speaks of the ghosts of memory; then he says: i dreamed i was born & grew up & was a pilot on the mississippi & a miner & a journalist in nevada & a pilgrim in the quaker city & had a wife & children & went to live in a villa at florence--& this dream goes on & on & sometimes seems so real that i almost believe it is real. i wonder if it is? but there is no way to tell, for if one applies tests they would be part of the dream, too, & so would simply aid the deceit. i wish i knew whether it is a dream or real. he was made handsomely welcome in new york. his note-book says: wednesday. dined with mary mapes dodge, howells, rudyard kipling & wife, clarke,--[ william fayal clarke, now editor of st. nicholas magazine.]--jamie dodge & wife. thursday, th. dined with andrew carnegie, prof. goldwin smith, john cameron, mr. glenn. creation of league for absorbing canada into our union. carnegie also wants to add great britain & ireland. it was on this occasion that carnegie made his celebrated maxim about the basket and the eggs. clemens was suggesting that carnegie take an interest in the typesetter, and quoted the old adage that one should not put all of his eggs into one basket. carnegie regarded him through half-closed lids, as was his custom, and answered: "that's a mistake; put all your eggs into one basket--and watch that basket." he had not come to america merely for entertainment. he was at the new york office of the type-setter company, acquiring there what seemed to be good news, for he was assured that his interests were being taken care of, and that within a year at most his royalty returns would place him far beyond the fear of want. he forwarded this good news to italy, where it was sorely needed, for mrs. clemens found her courage not easy to sustain in his absence. that he had made his letter glowing enough, we may gather from her answer. it does not seem credible that we are really again to have money to spend. i think i will jump around and spend money just for fun, and give a little away, if we really get some. what should we do and how should we feel if we had no bright prospects before us, and yet how many people are situated in that way? he decided to make another trip to chicago to verify, with his own eyes, the manufacturing reports, and to see paige, who would appear to have become more elusive than ever as to contracts, written and implied. he took hall with him, and wrote orion to meet him at the great northern hotel. this would give him a chance to see orion and would give orion a chance to see the great fair. he was in chicago eleven days, and in bed with a heavy cold almost the whole of that time. paige came to see him at his rooms, and, as always, was rich in prospects and promises; full of protestations that, whatever came, when the tide of millions rolled in, they would share and share alike. the note-book says: paige shed even more tears than usual. what a talker he is! he could persuade a fish to come out and take a walk with him. when he is present i always believe him; i can't help it. clemens returned to new york as soon as he was able to travel. going down in the elevator a man stepped in from one of the floors swearing violently. clemens, leaning over to hall, with his hand to his mouth, and in a whisper audible to every one, said: "bishop of chicago." the man, with a quick glance, recognized his fellow-passenger and subsided. on may th clemens took the kaiser wilhelm ii. for genoa. he had accomplished little, but he was in better spirits as to the machine. if only the strain of his publishing business had slackened even for a moment! night and day it was always with him. hall presently wrote that the condition of the money-market was "something beyond description. you cannot get money on anything short of government bonds." the mount morris bank would no longer handle their paper. the clemens household resorted to economies hitherto undreamed of. mrs. clemens wrote to her sister that she really did not see sometimes where their next money would come from. she reported that her husband got up in the night and walked the floor in his distress. he wrote again to hall, urging him to sell and get rid of the debts and responsibilities at whatever sacrifice: i am terribly tired of business. i am by nature and disposition unfit for it, & i want to get out of it. i am standing on the mount morris volcano with help from the machine a long, long way off--& doubtless a long way further off than the connecticut company imagine. get me out of business! he knew something of the delays of completing a typesetting machine, and he had little faith in any near relief from that source. he wrote again go hall, urging him to sell some of his type-setter royalties. they should be worth something now since the manufacturing company was actually in operation; but with the terrible state of the money-market there was no sale for anything. clemens attempted to work, but put in most of his time footing up on the margin of his manuscript the amount of his indebtedness, the expenses of his household, and the possibilities of his income. it was weary, hard, nerve-racking employment. about the muddle of june they closed viviani. susy clemens went to paris to cultivate her voice, a rare soprano, with a view to preparing for the operatic stage. clemens took mrs. clemens, with little jean, to germany for the baths. clara, who had graduated from mrs. willard's school in berlin, joined them in munich, and somewhat later susy also joined them, for madame marchesi, the great master of voice-culture, had told her that she must acquire physique to carry that voice of hers before she would undertake to teach her. in spite of his disturbed state of mind clemens must have completed some literary work during this period, for we find first mention, in a letter to hall, of his immortal defense of harriet shelley, a piece of writing all the more marvelous when we consider the conditions of its performance. characteristically, in the same letter, he suddenly develops a plan for a new enterprise--this time for a magazine which arthur stedman or his father will edit, and the webster company will publish as soon as their present burdens are unloaded. but we hear no more of this project. but by august he was half beside himself with anxiety. on the th he wrote hall: here we never see a newspaper, but even if we did i could not come anywhere near appreciating or correctly estimating the tempest you have been buffeting your way through--only the man who is in it can do that--but i have tried not to burden you thoughtlessly or wantonly. i have been overwrought & unsettled in mind by apprehensions, & that is a thing that is not helpable when one is in a strange land & sees his resources melt down to a two months' supply & can't see any sure daylight beyond. the bloody machine offers but a doubtful outlook--& will still offer nothing much better for a long time to come; for when the "three weeks" are up, there will be three months' tinkering to follow, i guess. that is unquestionably the boss machine of the world, but is the toughest one on prophets when it is in an incomplete state that has ever seen the light. and three days later: great scott, but it's a long year--for you & me! i never knew the almanac to drag so. at least not since i was finishing that other machine. i watch for your letters hungrily--just as i used to watch for the telegram saying the machine's finished--but when "next week certainly" suddenly swelled into "three weeks sure" i recognized the old familiar tune i used to hear so much. w----don't know what sick-heartedness is--but he is in a way to find out. and finally, on the th: i am very glad indeed if you and mr. langdon are able to see any daylight ahead. to me none is visible. i strongly advise that every penny that comes in shall be applied to paying off debts. i may be in error about this, but it seems to me that we have no other course open. we can pay a part of the debts owing to outsiders --none to clemenses. in very prosperous times we might regard our stock & copyrights as assets sufficient, with the money owing to us, to square up & quit even, but i suppose we may not hope for such luck in the present condition of things. what i am mainly hoping for is to save my book royalties. if they come into danger i hope you will cable me so that i can come over & try to save them, for if they go i am a beggar. i would sail to-day if i had anybody to take charge of my family & help them through the difficult journeys commanded by the doctors. a few days later he could stand it no longer, and on august ( ) sailed, the second time that year, for new york. clxxxv an introduction to h. h. rogers clemens took a room at the players--"a cheap room," he wrote, "at $ . per day." it was now the end of september, the beginning of a long half-year, during which mark twain's fortunes were at a lower ebb than ever before; lower, even, than during those mining days among the bleak esmeralda hills. then he had no one but him self and was young. now, at fifty-eight, he had precious lives dependent upon him, and he was weighed down with a vast burden of debt. the liabilities of charles l. webster & co. were fully two hundred thousand dollars. something like sixty thousand dollars of this was money supplied by mrs. clemens, but the vast remaining sum was due to banks, to printers, to binders, and to dealers in various publishing materials. somehow it must be paid. as for their assets, they looked ample enough on paper, but in reality, at a time like this, they were problematical. in fact, their value was very doubtful indeed. what he was to do clemens did not know. he could not even send cheerful reports to europe. there was no longer anything to promise concerning the type-setter. the fifty machines which the company had started to build had dwindled to ten machines; there was a prospect that the ten would dwindle to one, and that one a reconstruction of the original hartford product, which had cost so much money and so many weary years. clemens spent a good part of his days at the players, reading or trying to write or seeking to divert his mind in the company of the congenial souls there, waiting for-he knew not what. yet at this very moment a factor was coming into his life, a human element, a man to whom in his old age mark twain owed more than to any other of his myriad of friends. one night, when he was with dr. clarence c. rice at the murray hill hotel, rice said: "clemens, i want you to know my friend, mr. h. h. rogers. he is an admirer of your books." clemens turned and was looking into the handsome, clean-cut features of the great financier, whose name was hardly so familiar then as it became at a later period, but whose power was already widely known and felt among his kind. "mr. clemens," said mr. rogers, "i was one of your early admirers. i heard you lecture a long time ago on the sandwich islands. i was interested in the subject in those days, and i heard that mark twain was a man who had been there. i didn't suppose i'd have any difficulty getting a seat, but i did; the house was jammed. when i came away i realized that mark twain was a great man, and i have read everything of yours since that i could get hold of." they sat down at a table, and clemens told some of his amusing stories. rogers was in a perpetual gale of laughter. when at last he rose to go the author and the financier were as old friends. mr. rogers urged him to visit him at his home. he must introduce him to mrs. rogers, he said, who was also his warm admirer. it was only a little while after this that dr. rice said to the millionaire: "mr. rogers, i wish you would look into clemens's finances a little: i am afraid they are a good deal confused." this would be near the end of september, . on october clemens wrote home concerning a possible combination of webster & co. with john brisben walker, of the 'cosmopolitan', and added: i have got the best and wisest man of the whole standard oil group-a multi-millionaire--a good deal interested in looking into the type- setter. he has been searching into that thing for three weeks and yesterday he said to me: "i find the machine to be all you represent it. i have here exhaustive reports from my own experts, and i know every detail of its capacity, its immense construction, its cost, its history, and all about its inventor's character. i know that the new york company and the chicago company are both stupid, and that they are unbusinesslike people, destitute of money and in a hopeless boggle." then he told me the scheme he had planned and said: "if i can arrange with these people on this basis--it will take several weeks to find out--i will see to it that they get the money they need. in the mean time you 'stop walking the floor'." of course, with this encouragement, clemens was in the clouds again. furthermore, rogers had suggested to his son-in-law, william evarts benjamin, also a subscription publisher, that he buy from the webster company the library of american literature for fifty thousand dollars, a sum which provided for the more insistent creditors. there was hope that the worst was over. clemens did in reality give up walking the floor, and for the time, at least, found happier diversions. he must not return to europe as yet, for the type-setter matter was still far from conclusion. on the th of november he was gorgeously entertained by the lotos club in its new building. introducing him, president frank lawrence said: "what name is there in literature that can be likened to his? perhaps some of the distinguished gentlemen about this table can tell us, but i know of none. himself his only parallel, it seems to me. he is all our own--a ripe and perfect product of the american soil." clxxxvi "the belle of new york" those were feverish weeks of waiting, with days of alternate depression and exaltation as the pendulum swung to and fro between hope and despair. by daylight clemens tried to keep himself strenuously busy; evenings and nights he plunged into social activities--dinners, amusements, suppers, balls, and the like. he was besieged with invitations, sought for by the gayest and the greatest; "jamie" dodge conferred upon him the appropriate title: of "the belle of new york." in his letters home he describes in detail many of the festivities and the wildness with which he has flung himself into them, dilating on his splendid renewal of health, his absolute immunity from fatigue. he attributes this to his indifference to diet and regularities of meals and sleep; but we may guess that it was due to a reaction from having shifted his burden to stronger financial shoulders. henry rogers had taken his load upon him. "it rests me," rogers said, "to experiment with the affairs of a friend when i am tired of my own. you enjoy yourself. let me work at the puzzle a little." and clemens, though his conscience pricked him, obeyed, as was his habit at such times. to mrs. clemens (in paris now, at the hotel brighton) he wrote: he is not common clay, but fine-fine & delicate. i did hate to burden his good heart & overworked head, but he took hold with avidity & said it was no burden to work for his friends, but a pleasure. when i arrived in september, lord! how black the prospect was & how desperate, how incurably desperate! webster & co. had to have a small sum of money or go under at once. i flew to hartford --to my friends--but they were not moved, not strongly interested, & i was ashamed that i went. it was from mr. rogers, a stranger, that i got the money and was by it saved. and then--while still a stranger--he set himself the task of saving my financial life without putting upon me (in his native delicacy) any sense that i was the recipient of a charity, a benevolence. he gave time to me --time, which could not be bought by any man at $ , a month--no, nor for three times the money. he adds that a friend has just offered to webster & co. a book that arraigns the standard oil magnates individual by individual. i wanted to say the only man i care for in the world, the only man i would give a d---n for, the only man who is lavishing his sweat & blood to save me & mine from starvation is a standard oil magnate. if you know me, you know whether i want the book or not. but i didn't say that. i said i didn't want any book; i wanted to get out of this publishing business & out of all business & was here for that purpose & would accomplish it if i could. he tells how he played billiards with rogers, tirelessly as always, until the millionaire had looked at him helplessly and asked: "don't you ever get tired?" and he answered: "i don't know what it is to get tired. i wish i did." he wrote of going with mr. rogers to the madison square garden to see an exhibition of boxing given by the then splendid star of pugilism, james j. corbett. dr. rice accompanied him, and painters robert reid and edward simmons, from the players. they had five seats in a box, and stanford white came along presently and took clemens into the champion's dressing-room. corbett has a fine face and is modest and diffident, besides being the most perfectly & beautifully constructed human animal in the world. i said: "you have whipped mitchell & maybe you will whip jackson in june --but you are not done then. you will have to tackle me." he answered, so gravely that one might easily have thought him in earnest: "no, i am not going to meet you in the ring. it is not fair or right to require it. you might chance to knock me out, by no merit of your own, but by a purely accidental blow, & then my reputation would be gone & you would have a double one. you have got fame enough & you ought not to want to take mine away from me." corbett was for a long time a clerk in the nevada bank, in san francisco. there were lots of little boxing-matches to entertain the crowd; then at last corbett appeared in the ring & the , people present went mad with enthusiasm. my two artists went mad about his form. they said they had never seen anything that came reasonably near equalling its perfection except greek statues, & they didn't surpass it. corbett boxed rounds with the middle-weight australian champion --oh, beautiful to see!--then the show was over and we struggled out through a perfect mash of humanity. when we reached the street i found i had left my arctics in the box. i had to have them, so simmons said he would go back & get them, & i didn't dissuade him. i wouldn't see how he was going to make his way a single yard into that solid incoming wave of people--yet he must plow through it full yards. he was back with the shoes in minutes! how do you reckon he accomplished that miracle? by saying: "way, gentlemen, please--coming to fetch mr. corbett's overshoes." the word flew from mouth to mouth, the red sea divided, & simmons walked comfortably through & back, dry-shod. this is fire-escape simmons, the inveterate talker, you know: exit--in case of simmons. i had an engagement at a beautiful dwelling close to the players for . ; i was there by . . thirty cultivated & very musical ladies & gentlemen present--all of them acquaintances & many of them personal friends of mine. that wonderful hungarian band was there (they charge $ for an evening). conversation and band until midnight; then a bite of supper; then the company was compactly grouped before me & i told them about dr. b. e. martin & the etchings, & followed it with the scotch-irish christening. my, but the martin is a darling story! next, the head tenor from the opera sang half a dozen great songs that set the company wild, yes, mad with delight, that nobly handsome young damrosch accompanying on the piano. just a little pause, then the band burst out into an explosion of weird and tremendous dance-music, a hungarian celebrity & his wife took the floor; i followed--i couldn't help it; the others drifted in, one by one, & it was onteora over again. by half past . i had danced all those people down--& yet was not tired; merely breathless. i was in bed at & asleep in ten minutes. up at & presently at work on this letter to you. i think i wrote until or half past. then i walked leisurely out to mr. rogers's (it is called miles, but is short of it), arriving at . , but he was out--to return at . --so i didn't stay, but dropped over and chatted with howells until five. --[two mark twain anecdotes are remembered of that winter at the players: just before christmas a member named scott said one day: "mr. clemens, you have an extra overcoat hanging in the coatroom. i've got to attend my uncle's funeral and it's raining very hard. i'd like to wear it." the coat was an old one, in the pockets of which clemens kept a melancholy assortment of pipes, soiled handkerchiefs, neckties, letters, and what not. "scott," he said, "if you won't lose anything out of the pockets of that coat you may wear it." an hour or two later clemens found a notice in his mail-box that a package for him was in the office. he called for it and found a neat bundle, which somehow had a christmas look. he carried it up to the reading-room with a showy, air. "now, boys," he said, "you may make all the fun of christmas you like, but it's pretty nice, after all, to be remembered." they gathered around and he undid the package. it was filled with the pipes, soiled handkerchiefs, and other articles from the old overcoat. scott had taken special precautions against losing them. mark twain regarded them a moment in silence, then he drawled: "well--, d---n scott. i hope his uncle's funeral will be a failure!" the second anecdote concerns the player egg-cups. they easily hold two eggs, but not three. one morning a new waiter came to take the breakfast order. clemens said: "boy, put three soft eggs in that cup for me." by and by the waiter returned, bringing the breakfast. clemens looked at the egg portion and asked: "boy, what was my order?" "three soft eggs broken in the cup, mr. clemens." "and you've filled that order, have you?" "yes, mr. clemens." "boy, you are trifling with the truth; i've been trying all winter to get three eggs into that cup."] in one letter he tells of a dinner with his old comstock friend, john mackay--a dinner without any frills, just soup and raw oysters and corned beef and cabbage, such as they had reveled in sometimes, in prosperous moments, thirty years before. "the guests were old gray pacific coasters," he said, "whom i knew when they were young and not gray. the talk was of the days when we went gipsying-along time ago--thirty years." indeed, it was a talk of the dead. mainly that. and of how they looked & the harum-scarum things they did & said. for there were no cares in that life, no aches & pains, & not time enough in the day (& three-fourths of the night) to work off one's surplus vigor & energy. of the midnight highway-robbery joke played upon me with revolvers at my head on the windswept & desolate gold hill divide no witness was left but me, the victim. those old fools last night laughed till they cried over the particulars of that old forgotten crime. in still another letter he told of a very wonderful entertainment at robert reid's studio. there were present, he says: coquelin; richard harding davis; harrison, the great outdoor painter; wm. h. chase, the artist; bettini, inventor of the new phonograph; nikola tesla, the world-wide illustrious electrician; see article about him in jan. or feb. century. john drew, actor; james barnes, a marvelous mimic; my, you should see him! smedley, the artist; zorn, " " zogbaum, " " reinhart, " " metcalf, " " ancona, head tenor at the opera; oh, & a great lot of others. everybody there had done something & was in his way famous. somebody welcomed coquelin in a nice little french speech, john drew did the like for me in english, & then the fun began. coquelin did some excellent french monologues--one of them an ungrammatical englishman telling a colorless historiette in french. it nearly killed the fifteen or twenty people who understood it. i told a yarn, ancona sang half a dozen songs, barnes did his darling imitations, handing davis sang the hanging of danny deever, which was of course good, but he followed it with that mast fascinating (for what reason i don't know) of all kipling's poems, "on the road to mandalay," sang it tenderly, & it searched me deeper & charmed me more than the deever. young gerrit smith played some ravishing dance-music, & we all danced about an hour. there couldn't be a pleasanter night than that one was. some of those people complained of fatigue, but i don't seem to know what the sense of fatigue is. in his reprieve he was like some wild thing that had regained liberty. he refers to susy's recent illness and to mrs. clemens's own poor state of health. dear, dear susy! my strength reproaches me when i think of her and you. it is an unspeakable pity that you should be without any one to go about with the girls, & it troubles me, & grieves me, & makes me curse & swear; but you see, dear heart, i've got to stick right where i am till i find out whether we are rich or whether the poorest person we are acquainted with in anybody's kitchen is better off than we are. . i stand on the land-end of a springboard, with the family clustered on the other end; if i take my foot---- he realized his hopes to her as a vessel trying to make port; once he wrote: the ship is in sight now .... when the anchor is down then i shall say: "farewell--a long farewell--to business! i will never touch it again!" i will live in literature, i will wallow in it, revel in it; i will swim in ink! 'joan of arc'--but all this is premature; the anchor is not down yet. sometimes he sent her impulsive cables calculating to sustain hope. mrs. clemens, writing to her sister in january, said: mr. clemens now for ten days has been hourly expecting to send me word that paige had signed the (new) contract, but as yet no despatch comes . . . . on the th of this month i received a cable, "expect good news in ten days." on the th i receive a cable, "look out for good news." on the th a cable, "nearing success." it appealed to her sense of humor even in these dark days. she added: they make me laugh, for they are so like my beloved "colonel." mr. rogers had agreed that he would bring paige to rational terms, and with clemens made a trip to chicago. all agreed now that the machine promised a certain fortune as soon as a contract acceptable to everybody could be concluded--paige and his lawyer being the last to dally and dicker as to terms. finally a telegram came from chicago saying that paige had agreed to terms. on that day clemens wrote in his note-book: this is a great date in my history. yesterday we were paupers with but months' rations of cash left and $ , in debt, my wife & i, but this telegram makes us wealthy. but it was not until a fortnight later that paige did actually sign. this was on the st of february, ' , and clemens that night cabled to paris, so that mrs. clemens would have it on her breakfast-plate the morning of their anniversary: "wedding news. our ship is safe in port. i sail the moment rogers can spare me." so this painted bubble, this thing of emptiness, had become as substance again--the grand hope. he was as concerned with it as if it had been an actual gold-mine with ore and bullion piled in heaps--that shadow, that farce, that nightmare. one longs to go back through the years and face him to the light and arouse him to the vast sham of it all. clxxxvii some literary matters clemens might have lectured that winter with profit, and major pond did his best to persuade him; but rogers agreed that his presence in new york was likely to be too important to warrant any schedule of absence. he went once to boston to lecture for charity, though his pleasure in the experience was a sufficient reward. on the evening before the lecture mrs. james t. fields had him to her house to dine with dr. holmes, then not far from the end of his long, beautiful life.--[he died that same year, october, .] clemens wrote to paris of their evening together: dr. oliver wendell holmes never goes out (he is in his th year), but he came out this time--said he wanted to "have a time" once more with me. mrs. fields said aldrich begged to come, & went away crying because she wouldn't let him. she allowed only her family (sarah orne jewett & sister) to be present, because much company would overtax dr. holmes. well, he was just delightful! he did as brilliant and beautiful talking (& listening) as he ever did in his life, i guess. fields and jewett said he hadn't been in such splendid form for years. he had ordered his carriage for . the coachman sent in for him at , but he said, "oh, nonsense!--leave glories & grandeurs like these? tell him to go away & come in an hour!" at he was called for again, & mrs. fields, getting uneasy, rose, but he wouldn't go--& so we rattled ahead the same as ever. twice more mrs. fields rose, but he wouldn't go--& he didn't go till half past --an unwarrantable dissipation for him in these days. he was prodigiously complimentary about some of my books, & is having pudd'nhead read to him. i told him you & i used the autocrat as a courting book & marked it all through, & that you keep it in the sacred green box with the loveletters, & it pleased him. one other address clemens delivered that winter, at fair haven, on the opening of the millicent library, a present to the town from mrs. rogers. mrs. rogers had suggested to her husband that perhaps mr. clemens would be willing to say a few words there. mr. rogers had replied, "oh, clemens is in trouble. i don't like to ask him," but a day or two later told him of mrs. rogers's wish, adding: "don't feel at all that you need to do it. i know just how you are feeling, how worried you are." clemens answered, "mr. rogers, do you think there is anything i could do for you that i wouldn't do?" it was on this occasion that he told for the first time the "stolen watermelon" story, so often reprinted since; how once he had stolen a watermelon, and when he found it to be a green one, had returned it to the farmer, with a lecture on honesty, and received a ripe one in its place. in spite of his cares and diversions clemens's literary activities of this time were considerable. he wrote an article for the youth's companion--"how to tell a story"--and another for the north american review on fenimore cooper's "literary offenses." mark twain had not much respect for cooper as a literary artist. cooper's stilted artificialities and slipshod english exasperated him and made it hard for him to see that in spite of these things the author of the deerslayer was a mighty story-teller. clemens had also promised some stories to walker, of the cosmopolitan, and gave him one for his christmas number, "traveling with a reformer," which had grown out of some incidents of that long-ago journey with osgood to chicago, supplemented by others that had happened on the more recent visit to that city with hall. this story had already appeared when clemens and rogers had made their chicago trip. rogers had written for passes over the pennsylvania road, and the president, replying, said: "no, i won't give mark twain a pass over our road. i've been reading his 'traveling with a reformer,' in which he abuses our road. i wouldn't let him ride over it again if i could help it. the only way i'll agree to let him go over it at all is in my private car. i have stocked it with everything he can possibly want, and have given orders that if there is anything else he wants the train is to be stopped until they can get it." "pudd'nhead wilson" was appearing in the century during this period, and "tom sawyer abroad" in the st. nicholas. the century had issued a tiny calendar of the pudd'nhead maxims, and these quaint bits of philosophy, the very gems of mark twain mental riches, were in everybody's mouth. with all this going on, and with his appearance at various social events, he was rather a more spectacular figure that winter than ever before. from the note-book: the haunted looking-glass. the guest (at midnight a dim light burning) wakes up & sees appear & disappear the faces that have looked into the glass during centuries. love seems the swiftest but is the slowest of all growths. no man and woman really know what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century. it is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right. of all god's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash--that one is the cat. truth is stranger than fiction--to some people, but i am measurably familiar with it. clxxxviii failure it was the first week in march before it was thought to be safe for clemens to return to france, even for a brief visit to his family. he hurried across and remained with them what seemed an infinitesimal time, a bare three weeks, and was back again in new york by the middle of april. the webster company difficulties had now reached an acute stage. mr. rogers had kept a close watch on its financial affairs, hoping to be able to pull it through or to close it without failure, paying all the creditors in full; but on the afternoon of the th of april, , hall arrived at clemens's room at the players in a panic. the mount morris bank had elected a new president and board of directors, and had straightway served notice on him that he must pay his notes--two notes of five thousand dollars each in a few days when due. mr. rogers was immediately notified, of course, and said he would sleep on it and advise them next day. he did not believe that the bank would really push them to the wall. the next day was spent in seeing what could be done, and by evening it was clear that unless a considerable sum of money was raised a voluntary assignment was the proper course. the end of the long struggle had come. clemens hesitated less on his own than on his wife's account. he knew that to her the word failure would be associated with disgrace. she had pinched herself with a hundred economies to keep the business afloat, and was willing to go on economizing to avert this final disaster. mr. rogers said: "mr. clemens, assure her from me that there is not even a tinge of disgrace in making this assignment. by doing it you will relieve yourself of a fearful load of dread, and in time will be able to pay everything and stand clear before the world. if you don't do it you will probably never be free from debt, and it will kill you and mrs. clemens both. if there is any disgrace it would be in not taking the course that will give you and her your freedom and your creditors a better chance for their claims. most of them will be glad enough to help you." it was on the afternoon of the next day, april , , that the firm of charles l. webster & co. executed assignment papers and closed its doors. a meeting of the creditors was called, at which h. h. rogers was present, representing clemens. for the most part the creditors were liberal and willing to agree to any equitable arrangement. but there were a few who were grumpy and fussy. they declared that mark twain should turn over his copyrights, his hartford home, and whatever other odds and ends could be discovered. mr. rogers, discussing the matter in , said: "they were bent on devouring every pound of flesh in sight and picking the bones afterward, as clemens and his wife were perfectly willing they should do. i was getting a little warm all the time at the highhanded way in which these few men were conducting the thing, and presently i got on my feet and said, 'gentlemen, you are not going to have this thing all your way. i have something to say about mr. clemens's affairs. mrs. clemens is the chief creditor of this firm. out of her own personal fortune she has lent it more than sixty thousand dollars. she will be a preferred creditor, and those copyrights will be assigned to her until her claim is paid in full. as for the home in hartford, it is hers already.' "there was a good deal of complaint, but i refused to budge. i insisted that mrs. clemens had the first claims on the copyrights, though, to tell the truth, these did not promise much then, for in that hard year the sale of books was small enough. besides mrs. clemens's claim the debts amounted to one hundred thousand dollars, and of course there must be a definite basis of settlement, so it was agreed that clemens should pay fifty cents on the dollar, when the assets were finally realized upon, and receive a quittance. clemens himself declared that sooner or later he would pay the other fifty cents, dollar for dollar, though i believe there was no one besides himself and his wife and me who believed he would ever be able to do it. clemens himself got discouraged sometimes, and was about ready to give it up, for he was getting on in years--nearly sixty--and he was in poor health. once when we found the debt, after the webster salvage, was going to be at least seventy thousand dollars, he said, 'i need not dream of paying it. i never could manage it.' but he stuck to it. he was at my house a good deal at first. we gave him a room there and he came and went as he chose. the worry told upon him. he became frail during those weeks, almost ethereal, yet it was strange how brilliant he was, how cheerful." the business that had begun so promisingly and prosperously a decade before had dwindled to its end. the last book it had in hand was 'tom sawyer abroad', just ready for issue. it curiously happened that on the day of the failure copies of it were filed in washington for copyright. frank bliss came over from hartford, and clemens arranged with him for the publication of 'pudd'nhead wilson', thereby renewing the old relationship with the american publishing company after a break of a dozen years. naturally, the failure of mark twain's publishing firm made a public stir, and it showed how many and sincere were his friends, how ready they were with sympathy and help of a more material kind. those who understood best, congratulated him on being out of the entanglement. poultney bigelow, douglas taylor, andrew carnegie, charles dudley warner, and others extended financial help, bigelow and taylor each inclosing him a check of one thousand dollars for immediate necessities. he was touched by these things, but the checks were returned. many of his creditors sent him personal letters assuring him that he was to forget his obligation to them completely until such time as the remembering would cost him no uneasiness. clemens, in fact, felt relieved, now that the worst had come, and wrote bright letters home. in one he said: mr. rogers is perfectly satisfied that our course was right, absolutely right and wise--cheer up, the best is yet to come. and again: now & then a good and dear joe twichell or susy warner condoles with me & says, "cheer up-don't be downhearted," and some other friend says, "i'm glad and surprised to see how cheerful you are & how bravely you stand it," & none of them suspect what a burden has been lifted from me & how blithe i am inside. except when i think of you, dear heart--then i am not blithe; for i seem to see you grieving and ashamed, & dreading to look people in the face. for in the thick of the fight there is cheer, but you are far away & cannot hear the drum nor see the wheeling squadrons. you only seem to see rout, retreat, & dishonored colors dragging in the dirt--whereas none of these things exist. there is temporary defeat, but no dishonor--& we will march again. charley warner said to-day, "sho, livy isn't worrying. so long as she's got you and the children she doesn't care what happens. she knows it isn't her affair." which didn't convince me. olivia clemens wrote bravely and encouragingly to him, and more cheerfully than she felt, for in a letter to her sister she said: the hideous news of webster & co.'s failure reached me by cable on thursday, and friday morning galignani's messenger had a squib about it. of course i knew it was likely to come, but i had great hope that it would be in some way averted. mr. rogers was so sure there was no way out but failure that i suppose it was true. but i have a perfect horror and heart-sickness over it. i cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace. i suppose it always will mean that to me. we have put a great deal of money into the concern, and perhaps there would have been nothing but to keep putting it in and losing it. we certainly now have not much to lose. we might have mortgaged the house; that was the only thing i could think of to do. mr. clemens felt that there would never be any end, and perhaps he was right. at any rate, i know that he was convinced that it was the only thing, because when he went back he promised me that if it was possible to save the thing he would do so if only on account of my sentiment in the matter. sue, if you were to see me you would see that i have grown old very fast during this last year. i have wrinkled. most of the time i want to lie down and cry. everything seems to me so impossible. i do not make things go very well, and i feel that my life is an absolute and irretrievable failure. perhaps i am thankless, but i so often feel that i should like to give it up and die. however, i presume that if i could have the opportunity i should at once desire to live. clemens now hurried back to paris, arriving about the middle of may, his second trip in two months. scarcely had he got the family settled at la bourboule-les-bains, a quiet watering-place in the southern part of france, when a cable from mr. rogers, stating that the typesetter was perfected, made him decide to hurry back to america to assist in securing the new fortune. he did not go, however. rogers wrote that the machine had been installed in the times-herald office, chicago, for a long and thorough trial. there would be plenty of time, and clemens concluded to rest with his family at la bourboule-les-bains. later in the summer they went to etretat, where he settled down to work. clxxxix an eventful year ends that summer (july, ' .) the 'north american review' published "in defense of harriet shelley," a rare piece of literary criticism and probably the most human and convincing plea ever made for that injured, ill-fated woman. an admirer of shelley's works, clemens could not resist taking up the defense of shelley's abandoned wife. it had become the fashion to refer to her slightingly, and to suggest that she had not been without blame for shelley's behavior. a shelley biography by professor dowden, clemens had found particularly irritating. in the midst of his tangle of the previous year he had paused to give it attention. there were times when mark twain wrote without much sequence, digressing this way and that, as his fancy led him, charmingly and entertainingly enough, with no large, logical idea. he pursued no such method in this instance. the paper on harriet shelley is a brief as direct and compact and cumulative as could have been prepared by a trained legal mind of the highest order, and it has the added advantage of being the utterance of a human soul voicing an indignation inspired by human suffering and human wrong. by no means does it lack humor, searching and biting sarcasm. the characterization of professor dowden's life of shelley as a "literary cake-walk" is a touch which only mark twain could have laid on. indeed, the "defense of harriet shelly," with those early chapters of joan at florence, maybe counted as the beginning for mark twain of a genuine literary renaissance. it was to prove a remarkable period less voluminous than the first, but even more choice, containing, as it would, besides joan and the shelley article, the rest of that remarkable series collected now as literary essays; the hadleyburg story; "was it heaven or hell?"; those masterly articles on our national policies; closing at last with those exquisite memories, in his final days. the summer of found mark twain in the proper frame of mind for literary work. he was no longer in a state of dread. at etretat, a watering-place on the french coast, he returned eagerly to the long-neglected tale of joan--"a book which writes itself," he wrote mr. rogers"--a tale which tells itself; i merely have to hold the pen." etretat, originally a fishing-village, was less pretentious than to-day, and the family had taken a small furnished cottage a little way back from the coast--a charming place, and a cheap one--as became their means. clemens worked steadily at etretat for more than a month, finishing the second part of his story, then went over to rouen to visit the hallowed precincts where joan dragged out those weary months that brought her to the stake. susy clemens was taken ill at rouen, and they lingered in that ancient city, wandering about its venerable streets, which have been changed but slowly by the centuries, and are still full of memories. they returned to paris at length--to the brighton; their quarters of the previous winter--but presently engaged for the winter the studio home of the artist pomroy at rue de l'universite, beyond the seine. mark twain wrote of it once: it was a lovely house; large, rambling, quaint, charmingly furnished and decorated, built upon no particular plan, delightfully uncertain and full of surprises. you were always getting lost in it, and finding nooks and corners which you did not know were there and whose presence you had not suspected before. it was built by a rich french artist, and he had also furnished it and decorated it himself. the studio was coziness itself. with us it served as a drawing-room, sitting-room, living-room, dancing-room--we used it for everything. we couldn't get enough of it. it is odd that it should have been so cozy, for it was feet long, feet high, and feet wide, with a vast fireplace on, each side, in the middle, and a musicians' gallery at one end. mrs. clemens had hoped to return to america, to their hartford home. that was her heart's desire--to go back once more to their old life and fireside, to forget all this period of exile and wandering. her letters were full of her home-longing; her three years of absence seemed like an eternity. in its way, the pomroy house was the best substitute for home they had found. its belongings were of the kind she loved. susy had better health, and her husband was happy in his work. they had much delightful and distinguished company. her letters tell of these attractive things, and of their economies to make their income reach. it was near the end of the year that the other great interest--the machine--came finally to a conclusion. reports from the test had been hopeful during the summer. early in october clemens, receiving a copy of the times-herald, partly set by the machine, wrote: "the herald has just arrived, and that column is healing for sore eyes. it affects me like columbus sighting land." and again on the th: it seems to me that things couldn't well be going better at chicago than they are. there's no other machine that can set type eight hours with only seventeen minutes' stoppage through cussedness. the others do rather more stopping than working. by and by our machines will be perfect; then they won't stop at all. but that was about the end of the good news. the stoppages became worse and worse. the type began to break--the machine had its old trouble: it was too delicately adjusted--too complicated. "great guns, what is the matter with it?" wrote clemens in november when he received a detailed account of its misconduct. mr. rogers and his son-in-law, mr. broughton, went out to chicago to investigate. they went to the times-herald office to watch the type-setter in action. mr. rogers once told of this visit to the writer of these chapters. he said: "certainly it was a marvelous invention. it was the nearest approach to a human being in the wonderful things it could do of any machine i have ever known. but that was just the trouble; it was too much of a human being and not enough of a machine. it had all the complications of the human mechanism, all the liability of getting out of repair, and it could not be replaced with the ease and immediateness of the human being. it was too costly; too difficult of construction; too hard to set up. i took out my watch and timed its work and counted its mistakes. we watched it a long time, for it was most interesting, most fascinating, but it was not practical--that to me was clear." it had failed to stand the test. the times-herald would have no more of it. mr. rogers himself could see the uselessness of the endeavor. he instructed mr. broughton to close up the matter as best he could and himself undertook the harder task of breaking the news to mark twain. his letters seem not to have been preserved, but the replies to them tell the story. rue de l'universite, paris, december , . dear mr. rogers,--i seemed to be entirely expecting your letter, and also prepared and resigned; but lord, it shows how little we know ourselves and how easily we can deceive ourselves. it hit me like a thunder-clap. it knocked every rag of sense out of my head, and i went flying here and there and yonder, not knowing what i was doing, and only one clearly defined thought standing up visible and substantial out of the crazy storm-drift--that my dream of ten years was in desperate peril and out of the , or , projects for its rescue that came flocking through my skull not one would hold still long enough for me to examine it and size it up. have you ever been like that? not so much, i reckon. there was another clearly defined idea--i must be there and see it die. that is, if it must die; and maybe if i were there we might hatch up some next-to-impossible way to make it take up its bed and take a walk. so, at the end of four hours i started, still whirling, and walked over to the rue scribe-- p.m.--and asked a question or two and was told i should be running a big risk if i took the p.m. train for london and southampton; "better come right along at . per havre special and step aboard the new york all easy and comfortable." very! and i about two miles from home and no packing done. then it occurred to me that none of these salvation notions that were whirlwinding through my head could be examined or made available unless at least a month's time could be secured. so i cabled you, and said to myself that i would take the french steamer to-morrow (which will be sunday). by bedtime mrs. clemens had reasoned me into a fairly rational and contented state of mind; but of course it didn't last long. so i went on thinking--mixing it with a smoke in the dressing-room once an hour--until dawn this morning. result--a sane resolution; no matter what your answer to my cable might be i would hold still and not sail until i should get an answer to this present letter which i am now writing or a cable answer from you saying "come" or "remain." i have slept hours, my pond has clarified, and i find the sediment of my , projects to be of this character: he follows with a detailed plan for reconstructing the machine, using brass type, etc., and concludes: don't say i'm wild. for really i'm sane again this morning. i am going right along with joan now, and wait untroubled till i hear from you. if you think i can be of the least use cable me "come." i can write joan on board ship and lose no time. also i could discuss my plan with the publisher for a de luxe joan, time being an object, for some of the pictures could be made over here, cheaply and quickly, that would cost much more time and money in america. the second letter followed five days later: rue de l'universite, paris, december , . dear mr. rogers,--notwithstanding your heart is "old and hard" you make a body choke up. i know you "mean every word you say" and i do take it "in the same spirit in which you tender it." i shall keep your regard while we two live--that i know; for i shall always remember what you have done for me, and that will insure me against ever doing anything that could forfeit it or impair it. it is six days or seven days ago that i lived through that despairing day, and then through a night without sleep; then settled down next day into my right mind (or thereabouts) and wrote you. i put in the rest of that day till p.m. plenty comfortably enough writing a long chapter of my book; then went to a masked ball blacked up as uncle remus, taking clara along, and we had a good time. i have lost no day since, and suffered no discomfort to speak of, but drove my troubles out of my mind and had good success in keeping them out--through watchfulness. i have done a good week's work and put the book a good way ahead in the great trial [of joan], which is the difficult part: the part which requires the most thought and carefulness. i cannot see the end of the trial yet, but i am on the road. i am creeping surely toward it. "why not leave them all to me?" my business brothers? i take you by the hand! i jump at the chance! i ought to be ashamed and i am trying my best to be ashamed--and yet i do jump at the chance in spite of it. i don't want to write irving and i don't want to write stoker. it doesn't seem as if i could. but i can suggest something for you to write them; and then if you see that i am unwise you can write them something quite different. now this is my idea: . to return stoker's $ to him and keep his stock. . and tell irving that when luck turns with me i will make good to him what the salvage from the dead co. fails to pay him of his $ . [p. s. madam says no, i must face the music. so i inclose my effort--to be used if you approve, but not otherwise.] we shall try to find a tenant for our hartford house; not an easy matter, for it costs heavily to live in. we can never live in it again; though it would break the family's hearts if they could believe it. nothing daunts mrs. clemens or makes the world look black to her --which is the reason i haven't drowned myself. i got the xmas journals which you sent and i thank you for that xmas remembrance. we all send our deepest and warmest greetings to you and all of yours and a happy new year! s. l. clemens. --[brain stoker and sir henry irving had each taken a small interest in the machine. the inclosure for stoker ran as follows:] my dear stoker,--i am not dating this, because it is not to be mailed at present. when it reaches you it will mean that there is a hitch in my machine enterprise--a hitch so serious as to make it take to itself the aspect of a dissolved dream. this letter, then, will contain cheque for the $ which you have paid. and will you tell irving for me --i can't get up courage enough to talk about this misfortune myself, except to you, whom by good luck i haven't damaged yet--that when the wreckage presently floats ashore he will get a good deal of his $ back; and a dab at a time i will make up to him the rest. i'm not feeling as fine as i was when i saw you there in your home. please remember me kindly to mrs. stoker. i gave up that london lecture-project entirely. had to--there's never been a chance since to find the time. sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. a week later he added what was about his final word on the subject: yours of december has arrived, containing the circular to stockholders, and i guess the co. will really quit--there doesn't seem to be any other wise course. there's one thing which makes it difficult for me to soberly realize that my ten-year dream is actually dissolved; and that is that it reverses my horoscope. the proverb says, "born lucky, always lucky." it was usual for one or two of our lads (per annum) to get drowned in the mississippi or in bear creek, but i was pulled out in a drowned condition times before i learned to swim, and was considered to be a cat in disguise. when the pennsylvania blew up and the telegraph reported my brother as fatally injured (with others) but made no mention of me, my uncle said to my mother "it means that sam was somewhere else, after being on that boat a year and a half--he was born lucky." yes, i was somewhere else. i am so superstitious that i have always been afraid to have business dealings with certain relatives and friends of mine because they were unlucky people. all my life i have stumbled upon lucky chances of large size, and whenever they were wasted it was because of my own stupidity and carelessness. and so i have felt entirely certain that the machine would turn up trumps eventually. it disappointed me lots of times, but i couldn't shake off the confidence of a lifetime in my luck. well, whatever i get out of the wreckage will be due to good luck --the good luck of getting you into the scheme--for, but for that there wouldn't be any wreckage; it would be total loss. i wish you had been in at the beginning. then we should have had the good luck to step promptly ashore. so it was that the other great interest died and was put away forever. clemens scarcely ever mentioned it again, even to members of his family. it was a dead issue; it was only a pity that it had ever seemed a live one. a combination known as the regius company took over paige's interest, but accomplished nothing. eventually--irony of fate--the mergenthaler company, so long scorned and derided, for twenty thousand dollars bought out the rights and assets and presented that marvelous work of genius, the mechanical wonder of the age, to the sibley college of engineering, where it is shown as the costliest piece of machinery, for its size, ever constructed. mark twain once received a letter from an author who had written a book calculated to assist inventors and patentees, asking for his indorsement. he replied: dear sir,--i have, as you say, been interested in patents and patentees. if your books tell how to exterminate inventors send me nine editions. send them by express. very truly yours, s. l. clemens. the collapse of the "great hope" meant to the clemens household that their struggle with debt was to continue, that their economies were to become more rigid. in a letter on her wedding anniversary, february a ( ), mrs. clemens wrote to her sister: as i was starting down the stairs for my breakfast this morning mr. clemens called me back and took out a five-franc piece and gave it to me, saying: "it is our silver-wedding day, and so i give you a present." it was a symbol of their reduced circumstances--of the change that twenty-five years had brought. literary matters, however, prospered. the new book progressed amazingly. the worst had happened; other and distracting interests were dead. he was deep in the third part-the story of joan's trial and condemnation, and he forgot most other things in his determination to make that one a reality. as at viviani, clemens read his chapters to the family circle. the story was drawing near the end now; tragedy was closing in on the frail martyr; the farce of her trial was wringing their hearts. susy would say, "wait, wait till i get a handkerchief," and one night when the last pages had been written and read, and joan had made the supreme expiation for devotion to a paltry king, susy wrote in her diary, "to-night joan of arc was burned at the stake," meaning that the book was finished. susy herself had literary taste and might have written had it not been that she desired to sing. there are fragments of her writing that show the true literary touch. her father, in an unpublished article which he once wrote of her, quoted a paragraph, doubtless intended some day to take its place at the end of a story: and now at last when they lie at rest they must go hence. it is always so. completion; perfection, satisfaction attained--a human life has fulfilled its earthly destiny. poor human life! it may not pause and rest, for it must hasten on to other realms and greater consummations. she was a deep reader, and she had that wonderful gift of brilliant, flowing, scintillating speech. from her father she had inherited a rare faculty of oral expression, born of a superior depth of mind, swiftness and clearness of comprehension, combined with rapid, brilliant, and forceful phrasing. her father wrote of her gift: sometimes in those days of swift development her speech was rocket- like for vividness and for the sense it carried of visibility. i seem to see it stream into the sky and burst full in a shower of colored fire. we are dwelling here a moment on susy, for she was at her best that winter. she was more at home than the others. her health did not permit her to go out so freely and her father had more of her companionship. they discussed many things--the problems of life and of those beyond life, philosophies of many kinds, and the subtleties of literary art. he recalled long after how once they lost themselves in trying to solve the mystery of the emotional effect of certain word-combinations--certain phrases and lines of verse--as, for instance, the wild, free breath of the open that one feels in "the days when we went gipsying a long time ago" and the tender, sunlit, grassy slope and mossy headstones suggested by the simple words, "departed this life." both susy and her father cared more for joan than any of the former books. to mr. rogers, clemens wrote: "possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for love." a memorandum which he made at the time, apparently for no one but himself, brings us very close to the personality behind it. do you know that shock? i mean when you come at your regular hour into the sick-room where you have watched for months and find the medicine-bottles all gone, the night-table removed, the bed stripped, the furniture set stiffly to rights, the windows up, the room cold, stark, vacant--& you catch your breath & realize what has happened. do you know that shock? the man who has written a long book has that experience the morning after he has revised it for the last time & sent it away to the printer. he steps into his study at the hour established by the habit of months--& he gets that little shock. all the litter & confusion are gone. the piles of dusty reference-books are gone from the chairs, the maps from the floor; the chaos of letters, manuscripts, note-books, paper-knives, pipes, matches, photographs, tobacco-jars, & cigar-boxes is gone from the writing-table, the furniture is back where it used to be in the long-ago. the housemaid, forbidden the place for five months, has been there & tidied it up & scoured it clean & made it repellent & awful. i stand here this morning contemplating this desolation, & i realize that if i would bring back the spirit that made this hospital home- like & pleasant to me i must restore the aids to lingering dissolution to their wonted places & nurse another patient through & send it forth for the last rites, with many or few to assist there, as may happen; & that i will do. cxc starting on the long trail the tragedy of 'pudd'nhead wilson', with its splendid illustrations by louis loeb, having finished its course in the century magazine, had been issued by the american publishing company. it proved not one of mark twain's great books, but only one of his good books. from first to last it is interesting, and there are strong situations and chapters finely written. the character of roxy is thoroughly alive, and her weird relationship with her half-breed son is startling enough. there are not many situations in fiction stronger than that where half-breed tom sells his mother down the river into slavery. the negro character is well drawn, of course-mark twain could not write it less than well, but its realism is hardly to be compared with similar matter in his other books --in tom sawyer, for instance, or huck finn. with the exceptions of tom, roxy, and pudd'nhead the characters are slight. the twins are mere bodiless names that might have been eliminated altogether. the character of pudd'nhead wilson is lovable and fine, and his final triumph at the murder trial is thrilling in the extreme. identification by thumb-marks was a new feature in fiction then--in law, too, for that matter. but it is chiefly pudd'nhead wilson's maxims, run at the head of each chapter, that will stick in the memory of men. perhaps the book would live without these, but with them it is certainly immortal. such aphorisms as: "nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits"; "few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example"; "when angry count four, and when very angry swear," cannot perish; these, with the forty or so others in this volume and the added collection of rare philosophies that head the chapters of following the equator, have insured to philosopher pudd'nhead a respectful hearing for all time.--[the story of pudd'nhead wilson was dramatized by frank mayo, who played it successfully as long as he lived. it is by no means dead, and still pays a royalty to the mayo and clemens estates.] clemens had meant to begin another book, but he decided first to make a trip to america, to give some personal attention to publishing matters there. they were a good deal confused. the harpers had arranged for the serial and book publication of joan, and were negotiating for the webster contracts. mr. rogers was devoting priceless time in an effort to establish amicable relations between the harpers and the american company at hartford so that they could work on some general basis that would be satisfactory and profitable to all concerned. it was time that clemens was on the scene of action. he sailed on the new york on the end of february, and a little more than a month later returned by the paris --that is, at the end of march. by this time he had altogether a new thought. it was necessary to earn a large sum of money as promptly as possible, and he adopted the plan which twice before in his life in and in :--had supplied him with needed funds. loathing the platform as he did, he was going back to it. major pond had proposed a lecture tour soon after his failure. "the loss of a fortune is tough," wrote pond, "but there are other resources for another fortune. you and i will make the tour together." now he had resolved to make a tour-one that even pond himself had not contemplated. he would go platforming around the world! he would take pond with him as far as the pacific coast, arranging with some one equally familiar with the lecture circuit on the other side of the pacific. he had heard of r. s. smythe, who had personally conducted henry m. stanley and other great lecturers through australia and the east, and he wrote immediately, asking information and advice concerning such a tour. clemens himself has told us in one of his chapters how his mental message found its way to smythe long before his written one, and how smythe's letter, proposing just such a trip, crossed his own. he sailed for america, with the family on the th of may, and a little more than a week later, after four years of exile, they found themselves once more at beautiful quarry farm. we may imagine how happy they were to reach that peaceful haven. mrs. clemens had written: "it is, in a way, hard to go home and feel that we are not able to open our house. but it is an immense delight to me to think of seeing our friends." little at the farm was changed. there were more vines on the home--the study was overgrown--that was all. even ellerslie remained as the children had left it, with all the small comforts and utensils in place. most of the old friends were there; only mrs. langdon and theodore crane were missing. the beechers drove up to see them, as formerly, and the old discussions on life and immortality were taken up in the old places. mrs. beecher once came with some curious thin layers of leaves of stone which she had found, knowing mark twain's interest in geology. later, when they had been discussing the usual problems, he said he would write an agreement on those imperishable leaves, to be laid away until the ages should solve their problems. he wrote it in verse: if you prove right and i prove wrong, a million years from now, in language plain and frank and strong my error i'll avow to your dear waking face. if i prove right, by god his grace, full sorry i shall be, for in that solitude no trace there'll be of you and me. a million years, o patient stone, you've waited for this message. deliver it a million hence; (survivor pays expressage.) mark twain contract with mrs. t. k. beecher, july , . pond came to elmira and the route westward was arranged. clemens decided to give selections from his books, as he had done with cable, and to start without much delay. he dreaded the prospect of setting out on that long journey alone, nor could mrs. clemens find it in her heart to consent to such a plan. it was bitterly hard to know what to do, but it was decided at last that she and one of the elder daughters should accompany him, the others remaining with their aunt at quarry farm. susy, who had the choice, dreaded ocean travel, and felt that she would be happier and healthier to rest in the quiet of that peaceful hilltop. she elected to remain with her aunt and jean; and it fell to clara to go. major pond and his wife would accompany them as far as vancouver. they left elmira on the night of the th of july. when the train pulled away their last glimpse was of susy, standing with the others under the electric light of the railway platform, waving them good-by. cxci clemens had been ill in elmira with a distressing carbuncle, and was still in no condition to undertake steady travel and entertainment in that fierce summer heat. he was fearful of failure. "i sha'n't be able to stand on a platform," he wrote mr. rogers; but they pushed along steadily with few delays. they began in cleveland, thence by the great lakes, traveling by steamer from one point to another, going constantly, with readings at every important point--duluth, minneapolis, st. paul, winnipeg, butte, and through the great northwest, arriving at vancouver at last on august th, but one day behind schedule time. it had been a hot, blistering journey, but of immense interest, for none of them had traveled through the northwest, and the wonder and grandeur of it all, its scenery, its bigness, its mighty agriculture, impressed them. clemens in his notes refers more than once to the "seas" and "ocean" of wheat. there is the peace of the ocean about it and a deep contentment, a heaven-wide sense of ampleness, spaciousness, where pettiness and all small thoughts and tempers must be out of place, not suited to it, and so not intruding. the scattering, far-off homesteads, with trees about them, were so homelike and remote from the warring world, so reposeful and enticing. the most distant and faintest under the horizon suggested fading ships at sea. the lake travel impressed him; the beauties and cleanliness of the lake steamers, which he compares with those of europe, to the disadvantage of the latter. entering port huron he wrote: the long approach through narrow ways with flat grass and wooded land on both sides, and on the left a continuous row of summer cottages, with small-boat accommodations for visiting across the little canals from family to family, the groups of summer-dressed young people all along waving flags and handkerchiefs and firing cannon, our boat replying with toots of the hoarse whistle and now and then a cannon, and meeting steamers in the narrow way, and once the stately sister-ship of the line crowded with summer-dressed people waving-the rich browns and greens of the rush-grown, far- reaching flat-lands, with little glimpses of water away on their farther edges, the sinking sun throwing a crinkled broad carpet of gold on the water-well, it is the perfection of voyaging. it had seemed a doubtful experiment to start with mrs. clemens on that journey in the summer heat; but, strange to say, her health improved, and she reached vancouver by no means unfit for the long voyage ahead. no doubt the change and continuous interest and their splendid welcome everywhere and their prosperity were accountable. everywhere they were entertained; flowers filled their rooms; carriages and committees were always waiting. it was known that mark twain had set out for the purpose of paying his debts, and no cause would make a deeper appeal to his countrymen than that, or, for that matter, to the world at large. from winnipeg he wrote to mr. rogers: at the end of an hour and a half i offered to let the audience go, but they said "go on," and i did. he had five thousand dollars to forward to rogers to place against his debt account by the time he reached the coast, a fine return for a month's travel in that deadly season. at no more than two places were the houses less than crowded. one of these was anaconda, then a small place, which they visited only because the manager of the entertainment hall there had known clemens somewhere back in the sixties and was eager to have him. he failed to secure the amount of the guarantee required by pond, and when pond reported to clemens that he had taken "all he had" clemens said: "and you took the last cent that poor fellow had. send him one hundred dollars, and if you can't afford to stand your share charge it all to me. i'm not going around robbing my friends who are disappointed in my commercial value. i don't want to get money that way." "i sent the money," said pond afterward, "and was glad of the privilege of standing my share." clemens himself had not been in the best of health during the trip. he had contracted a heavy cold and did not seem to gain strength. but in a presentation copy of 'roughing it', given to pond as a souvenir, he wrote: "here ends one of the smoothest and pleasantest trips across the continent that any group of five has ever made." there were heavy forest fires in the northwest that year, and smoke everywhere. the steamer waryimoo, which was to have sailed on the th, went aground in the smoke, and was delayed a week. while they were waiting, clemens lectured in victoria, with the governor-general and lady aberdeen and their little son in the audience. his note-book says: they came in at . , minutes late; wish they would always be present, for it isn't permissible to begin until they come; by that time the late-comers are all in. clemens wrote a number of final letters from vancouver. in one of them to mr. j. henry harper, of harper & brothers, he expressed the wish that his name might now be printed as the author of "joan," which had begun serially in the april magazine. he thought it might, help his lecturing tour and keep his name alive. but a few days later, with mrs. clemens's help, he had reconsidered, and wrote: my wife is a little troubled by my wanting my nom de plume put to the "joan of arc" so soon. she thinks it might go counter to your plans, and that you ought to be left free and unhampered in the matter. all right-so be it. i wasn't strenuous about it, and wasn't meaning to insist; i only thought my reasons were good, and i really think so yet, though i do confess the weight and fairness of hers. as a matter of fact the authorship of "joan" had been pretty generally guessed by the second or third issue. certain of its phrasing and humor could hardly have come from another pen than mark twain's. the authorship was not openly acknowledged, however, until the publication of the book, the following may. among the letters from vancouver was this one to rudyard kipling dear kipling,--it is reported that you are about to visit india. this has moved me to journey to that far country in order that i may unload from my conscience a debt long due to you. years ago you came from india to elmira to visit me, as you said at the time. it has always been my purpose to return that visit & that great compliment some day. i shall arrive next january & you must be ready. i shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with silver bells & ribbons & escorted by a troop of native howdahs richly clad & mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows; & you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for i shall be thirsty. to the press he gave this parting statement: it has been reported that i sacrificed for the benefit of the creditors the property of the publishing firm whose financial backer i was and that i am now lecturing for my own benefit. this is an error. i intend the lectures as well as the property for the creditors. the law recognizes no mortgage on a man's brain, and a merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the laws of insolvency and start free again for himself. but i am not a business man, and honor is a harder master than the law. it cannot compromise for less than cents on the dollar and its debts never outlaw. from my reception thus far on my lecturing tour i am confident that if i live i can pay off the last debt within four years, after which, at the age of sixty-four, i can make a fresh and unincumbered start in life. i am going to australia, india, and south africa, and next year i hope to make a tour of the great cities of the united states. i meant, when i began, to give my creditors all the benefit of this, but i am beginning to feel that i am gaining something from it, too, and that my dividends, if not available for banking purposes, may be even more satisfactory than theirs. there was one creditor, whose name need, not be "handed down to infamy," who had refused to consent to any settlement except immediate payment in full, and had pursued with threatened attachment of earnings and belongings, until clemens, exasperated, had been disposed to turn over to his creditors all remaining properties and let that suffice, once and for all. but this was momentary. he had presently instructed mr. rogers to "pay shylock in full," and to assure any others that he would pay them, too, in the end. but none of the others annoyed him. it was on the afternoon of august , , that they were off at last. major pond and his wife lunched with them on board and waved them good-by as long as they could see the vessel. the far voyage which was to carry them for the better part of the year to the under side of the world had begun. cxcii "following the equator" mark twain himself has written with great fulness the story of that traveling--setting down what happened, and mainly as it happened, with all the wonderful description, charm, and color of which he was so great a master. we need do little more than summarize then--adding a touch here and there, perhaps, from another point of view. they had expected to stop at the sandwich islands, but when they arrived in the roadstead of honolulu, word came that cholera had broken out and many were dying daily. they could not land. it was a double disappointment; not only were the lectures lost, but clemens had long looked forward to revisiting the islands he had so loved in the days of his youth. there was nothing for them to do but to sit on the decks in the shade of the awnings and look at the distant shore. in his book he says: we lay in luminous blue water; shoreward the water was green-green and brilliant; at the shore itself it broke in a long, white ruffle, and with no crash, no sound that we could hear. the town was buried under a mat of foliage that looked like a cushion of moss. the silky mountains were clothed in soft, rich splendors of melting color, and some of the cliffs were veiled in slanting mists. i recognized it all. it was just as i had seen it long before, with nothing of its beauty lost, nothing of its charm wanting. in his note-book he wrote: "if i might, i would go ashore and never leave." this was the st of august. two days later they were off again, sailing over the serene pacific, bearing to the southwest for australia. they crossed the equator, which he says was wisely put where it is, because if it had been run through europe all the kings would have tried to grab it. they crossed it september th, and he notes that clara kodaked it. a day or two later the north star disappeared behind them and the constellation of the cross came into view above the southern horizon. then presently they were among the islands of the southern pacific, and landed for a little time on one of the fiji group. they had twenty-four days of halcyon voyaging between vancouver and sydney with only one rough day. a ship's passengers get closely acquainted on a trip of that length and character. they mingle in all sorts of diversions to while away the time; and at the end have become like friends of many years. on the night of september th-a night so dark that from the ship's deck one could not see the water--schools of porpoises surrounded the ship, setting the water alive with phosphorescent splendors: "like glorified serpents thirty to fifty feet long. every curve of the tapering long body perfect. the whole snake dazzlingly illumined. it was a weird sight to see this sparkling ghost come suddenly flashing along out of the solid gloom and stream past like a meteor." they were in sydney next morning, september , , and landed in a pouring rain, the breaking up of a fierce drought. clemens announced that he had brought australia good-fortune, and should expect something in return. mr. smythe was ready for them and there was no time lost in getting to work. all australia was ready for them, in fact, and nowhere in their own country were they more lavishly and royally received than in that faraway pacific continent. crowded houses, ovations, and gorgeous entertainment--public and private--were the fashion, and a little more than two weeks after arrival clemens was able to send back another two thousand dollars to apply on his debts. but he had hard luck, too, for another carbuncle developed at melbourne and kept him laid up for nearly a week. when he was able to go before an audience again he said: "the doctor says i am on the verge of being a sick man. well, that may be true enough while i am lying abed all day trying to persuade his cantankerous, rebellious medicines to agree with each other; but when i come out at night and get a welcome like this i feel as young and healthy as anybody, and as to being on the verge of being a sick man i don't take any stock in that. i have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it's never happened yet." in his book clemens has told us his joy in australia, his interest in the perishing native tribes, in the wonderfully governed cities, in the gold-mines, and in the advanced industries. the climate he thought superb; "a darling climate," he says in a note-book entry. perhaps one ought to give a little idea of the character of his entertainment. his readings were mainly from his earlier books, 'roughing it' and 'innocents abroad'. the story of the dead man which, as a boy, he had discovered in his father's office was one that he often told, and the "mexican plug" and his "meeting with artemus ward" and the story of jim blaine's old ram; now and again he gave chapters from 'huck finn' and 'tom sawyer'. he was likely to finish with that old fireside tale of his early childhood, the "golden arm." but he sometimes told the watermelon story, written for mrs. rogers, or gave extracts from adam's diary, varying his program a good deal as he went along, and changing it entirely where he appeared twice in one city. mrs. clemens and clara, as often as they had heard him, generally went when the hour of entertainment came: they enjoyed seeing his triumph with the different audiences, watching the effect of his subtle art. one story, the "golden arm," had in it a pause, an effective, delicate pause which must be timed to the fraction of a second in order to realize its full value. somewhere before we have stated that no one better than mark twain knew the value of a pause. mrs. clemens and clara were willing to go night after night and hear that tale time and again, for its effect on each new, audience. from australia to new zealand--where clemens had his third persistent carbuncle,--[in following the equator the author says: "the dictionary says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel. humor is out of place in a dictionary."]--and again lost time in consequence. it was while he was in bed with this distressing ailment that he wrote twichell: i think it was a good stroke of luck that knocked me on my back here at napier instead of in some hotel in the center of a noisy city. here we have the smooth & placidly complaining sea at our door, with nothing between us & it but yards of shingle--& hardly a suggestion of life in that space to mar it or to make a noise. away down here fifty-five degrees south of the equator this sea seems to murmur in an unfamiliar tongue--a foreign tongue--a tongue bred among the ice-fields of the antarctic--a murmur with a note of melancholy in it proper to the vast unvisited solitudes it has come from. it was very delicious and solacing to wake in the night & find it still pulsing there. i wish you were here--land, but it would be fine! mrs. clemens and himself both had birthdays in new zealand; clemens turned sixty, and his wife passed the half-century mark. "i do not like it one single bit," she wrote to her sister. "fifty years old-think of it; that seems very far on." and clemens wrote: day before yesterday was livy's birthday (underworld time) & tomorrow will be mine. i shall be --no thanks for it! from new zealand back to australia, and then with the new year away to ceylon. here they were in the orient at last, the land of color, enchantment, and gentle races. clemens was ill with a heavy cold when they arrived; and in fact, at no time during this long journeying was his health as good as that of his companions. the papers usually spoke of him as looking frail, and he was continually warned that he must not remain in india until the time of the great heat. he was so determined to work, however, and working was so profitable, that he seldom spared himself. he traveled up and down and back and forth the length and breadth of india--from bombay to allahabad, to benares, to calcutta and darjeeling, to lahore, to lucknow, to delhi--old cities of romance--and to jeypore --through the heat and dust on poor, comfortless railways, fighting his battle and enjoying it too, for he reveled in that amazing land--its gorgeous, swarming life, the patience and gentleness of its servitude, its splendid pageantry, the magic of its architecture, the maze and mystery of its religions, the wonder of its ageless story. one railway trip he enjoyed--a thirty-five-mile flight down the steep mountain of darjeeling in a little canopied hand-car. in his book he says: that was the most enjoyable time i have spent in the earth. for rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that approaches the bird-flight down the himalayas in a handcar. it has no fault, no blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty- five miles of it, instead of five hundred. mark twain found india all that rudyard kipling had painted it and more. "india the marvelous" he printed in his note-book in large capitals, as an effort to picture his thought, and in his book he wrote: so far as i am able to judge nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make india the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. "where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile." marvelous india is, certainly; and he saw it all to the best advantage, for government official and native grandee spared no effort to do honor to his party--to make their visit something to be remembered for a lifetime. it was all very gratifying, and most of it of extraordinary interest. there are not many visitors who get to see the inner household of a native prince of india, and the letter which mark twain wrote to kumar shri samatsinhji, a prince of the palitana state, at bombay, gives us a notion of how his unostentatious, even if lavish, hospitality was appreciated. dear kumar sahib,--it would be hard for me to put into words how much my family & i enjoyed our visit to your hospitable house. it was our first glimpse of the home of an eastern prince, & the charm of it, the grace & beauty & dignity of it realized to us the pictures which we had long ago gathered from books of travel & oriental tales. we shall not forget that happy experience, nor your kind courtesies to us, nor those of her highness to my wife & daughter. we shall keep always the portrait & the beautiful things you gave us; & as long as we live a glance at them will bring your house and its life & its sumptuous belongings & rich harmonies of color instantly across the years & the oceans, & we shall see them again, & how welcome they will be! we make our salutation to your highness & to all members of your family--including, with affectionate regard, that littlest little sprite of a princess--& i beg to sign myself sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. benares, february , . they had been entertained in truly royal fashion by prince kumar, who, after refreshments, had ordered in "bales of rich stuffs" in the true arabian nights fashion, and commanded his servants to open them and allow his guests to select for themselves. with the possible exception of general grant's long trip in ' and ' there has hardly been a more royal progress than mark twain's trip around the world. everywhere they were overwhelmed with honors and invitations, and their gifts became so many that mrs. clemens wrote she did not see how they were going to carry them all. in a sense, it was like the grant trip, for it was a tribute which the nations paid not only to a beloved personality, but to the american character and people. the story of that east indian sojourn alone would fill a large book, and mark twain, in his own way, has written that book, in the second volume of following the equator, an informing, absorbing, and enchanting story of indian travel. clemens lectured everywhere to jammed houses, which were rather less profitable than in australia, because in india the houses were not built for such audiences as he could command. he had to lecture three times in calcutta, and then many people were turned away. at one place, however, his hall was large enough. this was in the great hall of the palace, where durbars are held, at bombay. altogether they were two months in india, and then about the middle of march an english physician at jeypore warned them to fly for calcutta and get out of the country immediately before the real heat set in. they sailed toward the end of march, touched at madras and again at ceylon, remaining a day or two at colombo, and then away to sea again, across the indian ocean on one of those long, peaceful, eventless, tropic voyages, where at night one steeps on deck and in daytime wears the whitest and lightest garments and cares to do little more than sit drowsily in a steamer-chair and read and doze and dream. from the note-book: here in the wastes of the indian ocean just under the equator the sea is blue, the motion gentle, the sunshine brilliant, the broad decks with their grouped companies of talking, reading, or game- playing folk suggestive of a big summer hotel--but outside of the ship is no life visible but the occasional flash of a flying-fish. i would like the voyage, under these conditions, to continue forever. the injian ocean sits and smiles so sof', so bright, so bloomin' blue, there aren't a wave for miles an' miles excep' the jiggle of the screw. --kip. how curiously unanecdotical the colonials and the ship-going english are--i believe i haven't told an anecdote or heard one since i left america, but americans when grouped drop into anecdotes as soon as they get a little acquainted. preserve your illusions. when they are gone you may still exist, but not live. swore off from profanity early this morning--i was on deck in the peaceful dawn, the calm of holy dawn. went down, dressed, bathed, put on white linen, shaved--a long, hot, troublesome job and no profanity. then started to breakfast. remembered my tonic--first time in months without being told--poured it into measuring-glass, held bottle in one hand, it in the other, the cork in my teeth --reached up & got a tumbler--measuring-glass slipped out of my fingers--caught it, poured out another dose, first setting the tumbler on wash-stand--just got it poured, ship lurched, heard a crash behind me--it was the tumbler, broken into millions of fragments, but the bottom hunk whole. picked it up to throw out of the open port, threw out the measuring-glass instead--then i released my voice. mrs. clemens behind me in the door. "don't reform any more. it is not an improvement." this is a good time to read up on scientific matters and improve the mind, for about us is the peace of the great deep. it invites to dreams, to study, to reflection. seventeen days ago this ship sailed out of calcutta, and ever since, barring a day or two in ceylon, there has been nothing in sight but the tranquil blue sea & a cloudless blue sky. all down the bay of bengal it was so. it is still so in the vast solitudes of the indian ocean-- days of heaven. in more it will end. there will be one passenger who will be sorry. one reads all day long in this delicious air. today i have been storing up knowledge from sir john lubbock about the ant. the thing which has struck me most and most astonished me is the ant's extraordinary powers of identification--memory of his friend's person. i will quote something which he says about formica fusca. formica fusca is not something to eat; it's the name of a breed of ants. he does quote at great length and he transferred most of it later to his book. in another note he says: in the past year have read vicar of wakefield and some of jane austen--thoroughly artificial. have begun children of the abbey. it begins with this "impromptu" from the sentimental heroine: "hail, sweet asylum of my infancy! content and innocence reside beneath your humble roof and charity unboastful of the good it renders . . . . here unmolested may i wait till the rude storm of sorrow is overblown and my father's arms are again extended to receive me." has the ear-marks of preparation. they were at the island of mauritius by the middle of april, that curious bit of land mainly known to the world in the romance of paul and virginia, a story supposed by some in mauritius to be "a part of the bible." they rested there for a fortnight and then set sail for south africa on the ship arundel castle, which he tells us is the finest boat he has seen in those waters. it was the end of the first week in may when they reached durban and felt that they were nearing home. one more voyage and they would be in england, where they had planned for susy and jean to join them. mrs. clemens, eager for letters, writes of her disappointment in not finding one from susy. the reports from quarry farm had been cheerful, and there had been small snap-shot photographs which were comforting, but her mother heart could not be entirely satisfied that susy did not send letters. she had a vague fear that some trouble, some illness, had come to susy which made her loath to write. susy was, in fact, far from well, though no one, not even susy herself, suspected how serious was her condition. mrs. clemens writes of her own hopefulness, but adds that her husband is often depressed. mr. clemens has not as much courage as i wish he had, but, poor old darling, he has been pursued with colds and inabilities of various sorts. then he is so impressed with the fact that he is sixty years old. naturally i combat that thought all i can, trying to make him rejoice that he is not seventy . . . . he does not believe that any good thing will come, but that we must all our lives live in poverty. he says he never wants to go back to america. i cannot think that things are as black as he paints them, and i trust that if i get him settled down for work in some quiet english village he will get back much of his cheerfulness; in fact, i believe he will because that is what he wants to do, and that is the work that he loves: the platform he likes for the two hours that he is on it, but all the rest of the time it grinds him, and he says he is ashamed of what he is doing. still, in spite of this sad undercurrent, we are having a delightful trip. people are so nice, and with people mr. clemens seems cheerful. then the ocean trips are a great rest to him. mrs. clemens and clara remained at the hotel in durban while clemens made his platform trip to the south african cities. it was just at the time when the transvaal invasion had been put down--when the jameson raid had come to grief and john hares hammond, chief of the reformers, and fifty or more supporters were lying in the jail at pretoria under various sentences, ranging from one to fifteen years, hammond himself having received the latter award. mrs. hammond was a fellow-missourian; clemens had known her in america. he went with her now to see the prisoners, who seemed to be having a pretty good time, expecting to be pardoned presently; pretending to regard their confinement mainly as a joke. clemens, writing of it to twichell, said: a boer guard was at my elbow all the time, but was courteous & polite, only he barred the way in the compound (quadrangle or big open court) & wouldn't let me cross a white mark that was on the ground--the "deathline," one of the prisoners called it. not in earnest, though, i think. i found that i had met hammond once when he was a yale senior & a guest of general franklin's. i also found that i had known captain mein intimately years ago. one of the english prisoners had heard me lecture in london years ago.... these prisoners are strong men, prominent men, & i believe they are all educated men. they are well off; some of them are wealthy. they have a lot of books to read, they play games & smoke, & for a while they will be able to bear up in their captivity; but not for long, not for very long, i take it. i am told they have times of deadly brooding and depression. i made them a speech--sitting down. it just happened so. i don't prefer that attitude. still, it has one advantage--it is only a talk, it doesn't take the form of a speech . . . . i advised them at considerable length to stay where they were--they would get used to it & like it presently; if they got out they would only get in again somewhere else, by the look of their countenances; & i promised to go and see the president & do what i could to get him to double their jail terms.... we had a very good sociable time till the permitted time was up &. a little over & we outsiders had to go. i went again to-day, but the rev. mr. gray had just arrived, & the warden, a genial, elderly boer named du plessis, explained that his orders wouldn't allow him to admit saint & sinner at the same time, particularly on a sunday. du plessis descended from the huguenot fugitives, you see, of years ago--but he hasn't any french left in him now--all dutch. clemens did visit president kruger a few days later, but not for the purpose explained. john hayes hammond, in a speech not long ago ( ), told how mark twain was interviewed by a reporter after he left the jail, and when the reporter asked if the prisoners were badly treated clemens had replied that he didn't think so, adding: "as a matter of fact, a great many of these gentlemen have fared far worse in the hotels and mining-camps of the west." said hammond in his speech: "the result of this was that the interview was reported literally and a leader appeared in the next morning's issue protesting against such lenience. the privations, already severe enough, were considerably augmented by that remark, and it required some three or four days' search on the part of some of our friends who were already outside of jail to get hold of mark twain and have him go and explain to kruger that it was all a joke." clemens made as good a plea to "oom paul" as he could, and in some degree may have been responsible for the improved treatment and the shortened terms of the unlucky reformers. they did not hurry away from south africa. clemens gave many readings and paid a visit to the kimberley mines. his note-book recalls how poor riley twenty-five years before had made his fatal journey. it was the th of july, , a year to a day since they left elmira, that they sailed by the steamer norman for england, arriving at southampton the st. it was from southampton that they had sailed for america fourteen months before. they had completed the circuit of the globe. cxcii the passing of susy it had been arranged that katie leary should bring jean and susy to england. it was expected that they would arrive soon, not later than the th, by which time the others would be established. the travelers proceeded immediately to london and engaged for the summer a house in guildford, modest quarters, for they were still economizing, though mark twain had reason to hope that with the money already earned and the profits of the book he would write of his travels he could pay himself free. altogether, the trip had been prosperous. now that it was behind him, his health and spirits had improved. the outlook was brighter. august th came, but it did not bring katie and the children. a letter came instead. clemens long afterward wrote: it explained that susy was slightly ill-nothing of consequence. but we were disquieted and began to cable for later news. this was friday. all day no answer--and the ship to leave southampton next day at noon. clara and her mother began packing, to be ready in case the news should be bad. finally came a cablegram saying, "wait for cablegram in the morning." this was not satisfactory--not reassuring. i cabled again, asking that the answer be sent to southampton, for the day was now closing. i waited in the post- office that night till the doors were closed, toward midnight, in the hope that good news might still come, but there was no message. we sat silent at home till one in the morning waiting--waiting for we knew not what. then we took the earlier morning train, and when we reached southampton the message was there. it said the recovery would be long but certain. this was a great relief to me, but not to my wife. she was frightened. she and clara went aboard the steamer at once and sailed for america, to nurse susy. i remained behind to search for another and larger house in guildford. that was the th of august, . three days later, when my wife and clara were about half-way across the ocean, i was standing in our dining-room, thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. it said, "susy was peacefully released to-day." some of those who in later years wondered at mark twain's occasional attitude of pessimism and bitterness toward all creation, when his natural instinct lay all the other way, may find here some reasons in his logic of gloom. for years he and his had been fighting various impending disasters. in the end he had torn his family apart and set out on a weary pilgrimage to pay, for long financial unwisdom, a heavy price--a penance in which all, without complaint, had joined. now, just when it seemed about ended, when they were ready to unite and be happy once more, when he could hold up his head among his fellows--in this moment of supreme triumph had come the message that susy's lovely and blameless life was ended. there are not many greater dramas in fiction or in history than this. the wonder is not that mark twain so often preached the doctrine of despair during his later life, but that he did not exemplify it--that he did not become a misanthrope in fact. mark twain's life had contained other tragedies, but no other that equaled this one. this time none of the elements were lacking--not the smallest detail. the dead girl had been his heart's pride; it was a year since he had seen her face, and now by this word he knew that he would never see it again. the blow had found him alone absolutely alone among strangers--those others--half-way across the ocean, drawing nearer and nearer to it, and he with no way to warn them, to prepare them, to comfort them. clemens sought no comfort for himself. just as nearly forty years before he had writhed in self-accusation for the death of his younger brother, and as later he held himself to blame for the death of his infant son, so now he crucified himself as the slayer of susy. to mrs. clemens he poured himself out in a letter in which he charged himself categorically as being wholly and solely responsible for the tragedy, detailing step by step with fearful reality his mistakes and weaknesses which had led to their downfall, the separation from susy, and this final incredible disaster. only a human being, he said, could have done these things. susy clemens had died in the old hartford home. she had been well for a time at quarry farm, well and happy, but during the summer of ' she had become restless, nervous, and unlike herself in many ways. her health seemed to be gradually failing, and she renewed the old interest in mental science, always with the approval of her parents. clemens had great faith in mind over matter, and mrs. clemens also believed that susy's high-strung nature was especially calculated to receive benefit from a serene and confident mental attitude. from bombay, in january, she wrote mrs. crane: i am very glad indeed that susy has taken up mental science, and i do hope it may do her as much good as she hopes. last winter we were so very anxious to have her get hold of it, and even felt at one time that we must go to america on purpose to have her have the treatment, so it all seems very fortunate that it should have come about as it has this winter. just how much or how little susy was helped by this treatment cannot be known. like stevenson, she had "a soul of flame in a body of gauze," a body to be guarded through the spirit. she worked continuously at her singing and undoubtedly overdid herself. early in the year she went over to hartford to pay some good-by visit, remaining most of the time in the home of charles dudley warner, working hard at her singing. her health did not improve, and when katie leary went to hartford to arrange for their departure she was startled at the change in her. "miss susy; you are sick," she said. "you must have the doctor come." susy refused at first, but she grew worse and the doctor was sent for. he thought her case not very serious--the result, he said, of overwork. he prescribed some soothing remedies, and advised that she be kept very quiet, away from company, and that she be taken to her own home, which was but a step away. it was then that the letter was written and the first cable sent to england. mrs. crane was summoned from elmira, also charles langdon. mr. twichell was notified and came down from his summer place in the adirondacks. susy did not improve. she became rapidly worse, and a few days later the doctor pronounced her ailment meningitis. this was on the th of august--that hot, terrible august of . susy's fever increased and she wandered through the burning rooms in delirium and pain; then her sight left her, an effect of the disease. she lay down at last, and once, when katie leary was near her, she put her hands on katie's face and said, "mama." she did not speak after that, but sank into unconsciousness, and on the evening of tuesday, august th, the flame went out forever. to twichell clemens wrote of it: ah, well, susy died at home. she had that privilege. her dying eyes rested upon no thing that was strange to them, but only upon things which they had known & loved always & which had made her young years glad; & she had you & sue & katie & & john & ellen. this was happy fortune--i am thankful that it was vouchsafed to her. if she had died in another house--well, i think i could not have borne that. to us our house was not unsentient matter--it had a heart & a soul & eyes to see us with, & approvals & solicitudes & deep sympathies; it was of us, & we were in its confidence, & lived in its grace & in the peace of its benediction. we never came home from an absence that its face did not light up & speak out its eloquent welcome--& we could not enter it unmoved. and could we now? oh, now, in spirit we should enter it unshod. a tugboat with dr. rice, mr. twichell, and other friends of the family went down the bay to meet the arriving vessel with mrs. clemens and clara on board. it was night when the ship arrived, and they did not show themselves until morning; then at first to clara. there had been little need to formulate a message--their presence there was enough--and when a moment later clara returned to the stateroom her mother looked into her face and she also knew. susy already had been taken to elmira, and at half past ten that night mrs. clemens and clara arrived there by the through train--the same train and in the same coach which they had taken one year and one month before on their journey westward around the world. and again susy was there, not waving her welcome in the glare of the lights as she had waved her farewell to us thirteen months before, but lying white and fair in her coffin in the house where she was born. they buried her with the langdon relatives and the little brother, and ordered a headstone with some lines which they had found in australia: warm summer sun shine kindly here; warm southern wind blow softly here; green sod above lie light, lie light good night, dear heart, good night, good night. --[these lines at first were generally attributed to clemens himself. when this was reported to him he ordered the name of the australian poet, robert richardson, cut beneath them. the word "southern" in the original read "northern," as in australia, the warm wind is from the north. richardson died in england in .] cxciv winter in tedworth square mrs. clemens, clara, and jean, with katie leary, sailed for england without delay. arriving there, they gave up the house in guildford, and in a secluded corner of chelsea, on the tiny and then almost unknown tedworth square (no. ), they hid themselves away for the winter. they did not wish to be visited; they did not wish their whereabouts known except to a few of their closest friends. they wanted to be alone with their sorrow, and not a target for curious attention. perhaps not a dozen people in london knew their address and the outside world was ignorant of it altogether. it was through this that a wild report started that mark twain's family had deserted him--that ill and in poverty he was laboring alone to pay his debts. this report--exploited in five-column head-lines by a hyper-hysterical paper of that period received wide attention. james ross clemens, of the st. louis branch, a nephew of frau von versen, was in london just then, and wrote at once, through chatto & windus, begging mark twain to command his relative's purse. the reply to this kind offer was an invitation to tea, and "young doctor jim," as he was called, found his famous relative by no means abandoned or in want, but in pleasant quarters, with his family still loyal. the general impression survived, however, that mark twain was sorely pressed, and the new york herald headed a public benefit fund for the payment of his debts. the herald subscribed one thousand dollars on its own account, and andrew carnegie followed with another thousand, but the enterprise was barely under way when clemens wrote a characteristic letter, in which he declared that while he would have welcomed the help offered, being weary of debt, his family did not wish him to accept and so long as he was able to take care of them through his own efforts. meantime he was back into literary harness; a notebook entry for october , , says: "wrote the fist chapter of the book to-day-'around the world'." he worked at it uninterruptedly, for in work; there was respite, though his note-books show something of his mental torture, also his spiritual heresies. his series of mistakes and misfortunes, ending with the death of susy, had tended to solidify his attitude of criticism toward things in general and the human race in particular. "man is the only animal that blushes, or that needs to," was one of his maxims of this period, and in another place he sets down the myriad diseases which human flesh is heir to and his contempt for a creature subject to such afflictions and for a providence that could invent them. even mrs. clemens felt the general sorrow of the race. "poor, poor human nature," she wrote once during that long, gloomy winter. many of mark twain's notes refer to susy. in one he says: "i did not hear her glorious voice at its supremest--that was in hartford a month or two before the end." notes of heavy regret most of them are, and self-reproach and the hopelessness of it all. in one place he records her accomplishment of speech, adding: "and i felt like saying 'you marvelous child,' but never said it; to my sorrow i remember it now. but i come of an undemonstrative race." he wrote to twichell: but i have this consolation: that dull as i was i always knew enough to be proud when she commended me or my work--as proud as if livy had done it herself--& i took it as the accolade from the hand of genius. i see now--as livy always saw--that she had greatness in her, & that she herself was dimly conscious of it. and now she is dead--& i can never tell her. and closing a letter to howells: good-by. will healing ever come, or life have value again? and shall we see susy? without doubt! without a shadow of doubt if it can furnish opportunity to break our hearts again. on november th, thanksgiving, occurs this note: "we did not celebrate it. seven years ago susy gave her play for the first time." and on christmas: london, . xmas morning. the square & adjacent streets are not merely quiet, they are dead. there is not a sound. at intervals a sunday-looking person passes along. the family have been to breakfast. we three sat & talked as usual, but the name of the day was not mentioned. it was in our minds, but we said nothing. and a little later: since bad luck struck us it is risky for people to have to do with us. our cook's sweetheart was healthy. he is rushing for the grave now. emily, one of the maids, has lost the sight of one eye and the other is in danger. wallace carried up coal & blacked the boots two months--has suddenly gone to the hospital--pleurisy and a bad case. we began to allow ourselves to see a good deal of our friends, the bigelows--straightway their baby sickened & died. next wilson got his skull fractured. january , . i wish the lord would disguise himself in citizen's clothing & make a personal examination of the sufferings of the poor in london. he would be moved & would do something for them himself. cxcv "personal recollections of joan of arc". meantime certain publishing events had occurred. during his long voyage a number of mark twain's articles had appeared in the magazines, among them "mental telegraphy again," in harpers, and in the north american review that scorching reply to paul bourget's reflections upon america. clemens could criticize his own nation freely enough, but he would hardly be patient under the strictures of a frenchman, especially upon american women. there had been book publication also during this period. the harpers had issued an edition of 'tom sawyer abroad', which included another tom and huck story 'tom sawyer, detective', written in paris, and the contents of the old white elephant book. but there had been a much more important book event. the chapters of his story of joan having run their course in harper's magazine had been issued as a volume. as already mentioned, joan had been early recognized as mark twain's work, and it was now formally acknowledged as such on the title-page. it is not certain now that the anonymous beginning had been a good thing. those who began reading it for its lofty charm, with the first hint of mark twain as the author became fearful of some joke or burlesque. some who now promptly hastened to read it as mark twain's, were inclined to be disappointed at the very lack of these features. when the book itself appeared the general public, still doubtful as to its merits, gave it a somewhat dubious reception. the early sales were disappointing. nor were the reviewers enthusiastic, as a rule. perhaps they did not read it over-carefully, or perhaps they were swayed a good deal by a sort of general verdict that, in attempting 'joan of arc', mark twain had gone out of his proper field. furthermore, there were a number of joan books published just then, mainly sober, somber books, in which joan was pictured properly enough as a saint, and never as anything else--never being permitted to smile or enjoy the lighter side of life, to be a human being, in fact, at all. but this is just the very wonder of mark twain's joan. she is a saint; she is rare, she is exquisite, she is all that is lovely, and she is a human being besides. considered from every point of view, joan of arc is mark twain's supreme literary expression, the loftiest, the most delicate, the most luminous example of his work. it is so from the first word of its beginning, that wonderful "translator's preface," to the last word of the last chapter, where he declares that the figure of joan with the martyr's crown upon her head shall stand for patriotism through all time. the idyllic picture of joan's childhood with her playmates around the fairy tree is so rare in its delicacy and reality that any attempt to recall it here would disturb its bloom. the little poem, "l'arbre fee de bourlemont," mark twain's own composition, is a perfect note, and that curiously enough, for in versification he was not likely to be strong. joan's girlhood, the picture of her father's humble cottage, the singing there by the wandering soldier of the great song of roland which stirred her deepest soul with the love of france, joan's heroism among her playmates, her wisdom, her spiritual ideals-are not these all reverently and nobly told, and with that touch of tenderness which only mark twain could give? and the story of her voices, and her march, and of her first appearance before the wavering king. and then the great coronation scene at rheims, and the dramatic moment when joan commands the march on paris --the dragging of the hopeless trial, and that last, fearful day of execution, what can surpass these? nor must we forget those charming, brighter moments where joan is shown just as a human being, laughing until the tears run at the absurdities of the paladin or the simple home prattle of her aged father and uncle. only here and there does one find a touch--and it is never more than that--of the forbidden thing, the burlesque note which was so likely to be mark twain's undoing. it seems incredible to-day that any reader, whatever his preconceived notions of the writer might have been, could have followed these chapters without realizing their majesty, and that this tale of joan was a book such as had not before been written. let any one who read it then and doubted, go back and consider it now. a surprise will await him, and it will be worth while. he will know the true personality of joan of arc more truly than ever before, and he will love her as the author loved her, for "the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable child the ages have produced." the tale is matchless in its workmanship. the quaint phrasing of the old sieur de conte is perfectly adapted to the subject-matter, and the lovely character of the old narrator himself is so perfectly maintained that we find ourselves all the time as in an atmosphere of consecration, and feel that somehow we are helping him to weave a garland to lay on joan's tomb. whatever the tale he tells, he is never more than a step away. we are within sound of his voice, we can touch his presence; we ride with him into battle; we laugh with him in the by-play and humors of warfare; we sit hushed at his side through the long, fearful days of the deadly trial, and when it is all ended it is to him that we turn to weep for joan--with him only would we mingle our tears. it is all bathed in the atmosphere of romance, but it is the ultimate of realism, too; not hard, sordid, ugly realism, but noble, spiritual, divine realism, belonging to no particular class or school--a creation apart. not all of mark twain's tales have been convincing, but there is no chapter of his joan that we doubt. we believe it all happened--we know that it must have happened, for our faith in the sieur de conte never for an instant wavers. aside from the personality of the book--though, in truth, one never is aside from it--the tale is a marvel in its pageantry, its splendid panorama and succession of stirring and stately scenes. the fight before orleans, the taking of the tourelles and of jargeau, all the movement of that splendid march to rheims, there are few better battle-pictures than these. howells, always interested mainly in the realism of to-day, in his review hints at staginess in the action and setting and even in joan herself. but howells himself did not accept his earlier judgment as final. five years later he wrote: "she is indeed realized to the modern sense as few figures of the past have been realized in fiction." as for the action, suppose we consider a brief bit of joan's warfare. it is from the attack on the tourelles: joan mounted her horse now with her staff about her, and when our people saw us coming they raised a great shout, and were at once eager for another assault on the boulevard. joan rode straight to the foss where she had received her wound, and, standing there in the rain of bolts and arrows, she ordered the paladin to let her long standard blow free, and to note when its fringes should touch the fortress. presently he said: "it touches." "now, then," said joan to the waiting battalions, "the place is yours--enter in! bugles, sound the assault! now, then--all together--go!" and go it was. you never saw anything like it. we swarmed up the ladders and over the battlements like a wave--and the place was our property. why, one might live a thousand years and never see so gorgeous a thing as that again.... we were busy and never heard the five cannon-shots fired, but they were fired a moment after joan had ordered the assault; and so, while we were hammering and being hammered in the smaller fortress, the reserve on the orleans side poured across the bridge and attacked the tourelles from that side. a fireboat was brought down and moored under the drawbridge which connected the tourelles with our boulevard; wherefore, when at last we drove our english ahead of us, and they tried to cross that drawbridge and join their friends in the tourelles, the burning timbers gave way under them and emptied them in a mass into the river in their heavy armor--and a pitiful sight it was to see brave men die such a death as that. "god pity them!" said joan, and wept to see that sorrowful spectacle. she said those gentle words and wept those compassionate tears, although one of those perishing men had grossly insulted her with a coarse name three days before when she had sent him a message asking him to surrender. that was their leader, sir william glasdale, a most valorous knight. he was clothed all in steel; so he plunged under the water like a lance, and of course came up no more. we soon patched a sort of bridge together and threw ourselves against the last stronghold of the english power that barred orleans from friends and supplies. before the sun was quite down joan's forever memorable day's work was finished, her banner floated from the fortress of the tourelles, her promise was fulfilled, she had raised the siege of orleans! england had resented the yankee, but it welcomed joan. andrew lang adored it, and some years later contemplated dedicating his own book, 'the maid of france', to mark twain.'--[his letter proposing this dedication, received in , appears to have been put aside and forgotten by mr. clemens, whose memory had not improved with failing health.] brander matthews ranks huck finn before joan of arc, but that is understandable. his literary culture and research enable him, in some measure, to comprehend the production of joan; whereas to him huck is pure magic. huck is not altogether magic to those who know the west--the character of that section and the mississippi river, especially of an older time--it is rather inspiration resulting from these existing things. joan is a truer literary magic--the reconstruction of a far-vanished life and time. to reincarnate, as in a living body of the present, that marvelous child whose life was all that was pure and exalted and holy, is veritable necromancy and something more. it is the apotheosis of history. throughout his life joan of arc had been mark twain's favorite character in the world's history. his love for her was a beautiful and a sacred thing. he adored young maidenhood always and nobility of character, and he was always the champion of the weak and the oppressed. the combination of these characteristics made him the ideal historian of an individuality and of a career like hers. it is fitting that in his old age (he was nearing sixty when it was finished) he should have written this marvelously beautiful thing. he could not have written it at an earlier time. it had taken him all these years to prepare for it; to become softened, to acquire the delicacy of expression, the refinement of feeling, necessary to the achievement. it was the only book of all he had written that mark twain considered worthy of this dedication: to my wife olivia langdon clemens this book is tendered on our wedding anniversary in grateful recognition of her twenty-five years of valued service as my literary adviser and editor. the author the personal recollections of joan of arc was a book not understood in the beginning, but to-day the public, that always renders justice in the end, has reversed its earlier verdict. the demand for joan has multiplied many fold and it continues to multiply with every year. its author lived long enough to see this change and to be comforted by it, for though the creative enthusiasm in his other books soon passed, his glory in the tale of joan never died. on his seventy-third birthday, when all of his important books were far behind him, and he could judge them without prejudice, he wrote as his final verdict: nov. , i like the joan of arc best of all my books; & it is the best; i know it perfectly well. and besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: years of preparation & a years of writing. the others needed no preparation, & got none. mark twain. cxcvi mr. rogers and helen keller it was during the winter of ' , in london, that clemens took an active interest in the education of helen keller and enlisted the most valuable adherent in that cause, that is to say, henry h. rogers. it was to mrs. rogers that he wrote, heading his letter: for & in behalf of helen keller, stone blind & deaf, & formerly dumb. dear mrs. rogers,--experience has convinced me that when one wished to set a hard-worked man at something which he mightn't prefer to be bothered with it is best to move upon him behind his wife. if she can't convince him it isn't worth while for other people to try. mr. rogers will remember our visit with that astonishing girl at lawrence hutton's house when she was fourteen years old. last july, in boston, when she was she underwent the harvard examination for admission to radcliffe college. she passed without a single condition. she was allowed only the same amount of time that is granted to other applicants, & this was shortened in her case by the fact that the question-papers had to be read to her. yet she scored an average of , as against an average of on the part of the other applicants. it won't do for america to allow this marvelous child to retire from her studies because of poverty. if she can go on with them she will make a fame that will endure in history for centuries. along her special lines she is the most extraordinary product of all the ages. there is danger that she must retire from the struggle for a college degree for lack of support for herself & for miss sullivan (the teacher who has been with her from the start--mr. rogers will remember her). mrs. hutton writes to ask me to interest rich englishmen in her case, & i would gladly try, but my secluded life will not permit it. i see nobody. nobody knows my address. nothing but the strictest hiding can enable me to write my book in time. so i thought of this scheme: beg you to lay siege to your husband & get him to interest himself and messrs. john d. & william rockefeller & the other standard oil chiefs in helen's case; get them to subscribe an annual aggregate of six or seven hundred or a thousand dollars--& agree to continue this for three or four years, until she has completed her college course. i'm not trying to limit their generosity--indeed no; they may pile that standard oil helen keller college fund as high as they please; they have my consent. mrs. hutton's idea is to raise a permanent fund, the interest upon which shall support helen & her teacher & put them out of the fear of want. i sha'n't say a word against it, but she will find it a difficult & disheartening job, & meanwhile what is to become of that miraculous girl? no, for immediate and sound effectiveness, the thing is for you to plead with mr. rogers for this hampered wonder of your sex, & send him clothed with plenary powers to plead with the other chiefs--they have spent mountains of money upon the worthiest benevolences, & i think that the same spirit which moved them to put their hands down through their hearts into their pockets in those cases will answer. "here!" when its name is called in this one. there--i don't need to apologize to you or to h. h. for this appeal that i am making; i know you too well for that: good-by, with love to all of you, s. l. clemens. the result of this letter was that mr. rogers personally took charge of helen keller's fortunes, and out of his own means made it possible for her to continue her education and to achieve for herself the enduring fame which mark twain had foreseen. mr. rogers wrote that, by a curious coincidence, a letter had come to him from mrs. hutton on the same morning that mrs. rogers had received hers from tedworth square. clemens sent grateful acknowledgments to mrs. rogers. dear mrs. rogers,--it is superb! and i am beyond measure grateful to you both. i knew you would be interested in that wonderful girl, & that mr. rogers was already interested in her & touched by her; & i was sure that if nobody else helped her you two would; but you have gone far & away beyond the sum i expected--may your lines fall in pleasant places here, & hereafter for it! the huttons are as glad & grateful as they can be, & i am glad for their sakes as well as for helen's. i want to thank mr. rogers for crucifying himself on the same old cross between bliss & harper; & goodness knows i hope he will come to enjoy it above all other dissipations yet, seeing that it has about it the elements of stability & permanency. however, at any time that he says sign we're going to do it. ever sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. cxcvii finishing the book of travel one reading the equator book to-day, and knowing the circumstances under which it was written, might be puzzled to reconcile the secluded household and its atmosphere of sorrow with certain gaieties of the subject matter. the author himself wondered at it, and to howells wrote: i don't mean that i am miserable; no-worse than that--indifferent. indifferent to nearly everything but work. i like that; i enjoy it, & stick to it. i do it without purpose & without ambition; merely for the love of it. indeed, i am a mud-image; & it puzzles me to know what it is in me that writes & has comedy fancies & finds pleasure in phrasing them. it is the law of our nature, of course, or it wouldn't happen; the thing in me forgets the presence of the mud-image, goes its own way wholly unconscious of it & apparently of no kinship with it. he saw little company. now and, then a good friend, j.y.w. macalister, came in for a smoke with him. once clemens sent this line: you speak a language which i understand. i would like to see you. could you come and smoke some manilas; i would, of course, say dine, but my family are hermits & cannot see any one, but i would have a fire in my study, & if you came at any time after your dinner that might be most convenient for you you would find me & a welcome. clemens occasionally went out to dinner, but very privately. he dined with bram stoker, who invited anthony hope and one or two others, and with the chattos and mr. percy spalding; also with andrew lang, who wrote, "your old friend, lord lome, wants to see you again"; with the henry m. stanleys and poultney bigelow, and with francis h. skrine, a government official he had met in india. but in all such affairs he was protected from strangers and his address was kept a secret from the public. finally, the new-found cousin, dr. jim clemens, fell ill, and the newspapers had it presently that mark twain was lying at the point of death. a reporter ferreted him out and appeared at tedworth square with cabled instructions from his paper. he was a young man, and innocently enough exhibited his credentials. his orders read: "if mark twain very ill, five hundred words. if dead, send one thousand." clemens smiled grimly as he handed back the cable. "you don't need as much as that," he said. "just say the report of my death has been grossly exaggerated." the young man went away quite seriously, and it was not until he was nearly to his office that he saw the joke. then, of course, it was flashed all over the world. clemens kept grinding steadily at the book, for it was to be a very large volume--larger than he had ever written before. to macalister, april , , he wrote, replying to some invitation: ah, but i mustn't stir from my desk before night now when the publisher is hurrying me & i am almost through. i am up at work now-- o'clock in the morning-and a few more spurts will pull me through. you come down here & smoke; that is better than tempting a working-man to strike & go to tea. and it would move me too deeply to see miss corelli. when i saw her last it was on the street in homburg, & susy was walking with me. on april th he makes a note-book entry: "i finished my book to-day," and on the th he wrote macalister, inclosing some bits of manuscript: i finished my book yesterday, and the madam edited this stuff out of it--on the ground that the first part is not delicate & the last part is indelicate. now, there's a nice distinction for you--& correctly stated, too, & perfectly true. it may interest the reader to consider briefly the manner in which mark twain's "editor" dealt with his manuscript, and a few pages of this particular book remain as examples. that he was not always entirely tractable, or at least submissive, but that he did yield, and graciously, is clearly shown. in one of her comments mrs. clemens wrote: page . i hate to say it, but it seems to me that you go too minutely into particulars in describing the feats of the aboriginals. i felt it in the boomerang-throwing. and clemens just below has written: boomerang has been furnished with a special train--that is, i've turned it into "appendix." will that answer? page . i don't like the "shady-principled cat that has a family in every port." then i'll modify him just a little. page . th line from the top. i think some other word would be better than "stench." you have used that pretty often. but can't i get it in anywhere? you've knocked it out every time. out it goes again. and yet "stench" is a noble, good word. page . i hate to have your father pictured as lashing a slave boy. it's out, and my father is whitewashed. page . d line from the bottom. change breech-clout. it's a word that you love and i abominate. i would take that and "offal" out of the language. you are steadily weakening the english tongue, livy. page . perhaps you don't care, but whoever told you that the prince's green stones were rubies told an untruth. they were superb emeralds. those strings of pearls and emeralds were famous all over bombay. all right, i'll make them emeralds, but it loses force. green rubies is a fresh thing. and besides it was one of the prince's own staff liars that told me. that the book was not quite done, even after the triumphant entry of april th, is shown by another note which followed something more than a month later: may , . finished the book again--addition of , words. and to macalister he wrote: i have finished the book at last--and finished it for good this time. now i am ready for dissipation with a good conscience. what night will you come down & smoke? his book finished, clemens went out rather more freely, and one evening allowed macalister to take him around to the savage club. there happened to be a majority of the club committee present, and on motion mark twain was elected an honorary life member. there were but three others on whom this distinction had been conferred--stanley, nansen, and the prince of wales. when they told mark twain this he said: "well, it must make the prince feel mighty fine."--[in a volume of savage club anecdotes the date of mark twain's election to honorary membership is given as . clemens's notebook gives it in .] he did not intend to rest; in another entry we find: may , . wrote first chapter of above story to-day. the "above story" is a synopsis of a tale which he tried then and later in various forms--a tale based on a scientific idea that one may dream an episode covering a period of years in minute detail in what, by our reckoning, may be no more than a few brief seconds. in this particular form of the story a man sits down to write some memories and falls into a doze. the smell of his cigarette smoke causes him to dream of the burning of his home, the destruction of his family, and of a long period of years following. awakening a few seconds later, and confronted by his wife and children, he refuses to believe in their reality, maintaining that this condition, and not the other, is the dream. clemens tried the psychological literary experiment in as many as three different ways during the next two or three years, and each at considerable length; but he developed none of them to his satisfaction, or at least he brought none of them to conclusion. perhaps the most weird of these attempts, and the most intensely interesting, so long as the verisimilitude is maintained, is a dream adventure in a drop of water which, through an incredible human reduction to microbic, even atomic, proportions, has become a vast tempestuous sea. mark twain had the imagination for these undertakings and the literary workmanship, lacking only a definite plan for development of his tale--a lack which had brought so many of his literary ventures to the rocks. cxcviii a summer in switzerland the queen's jubilee came along--june , , being the day chosen to celebrate the sixty-year reign. clemens had been asked to write about it for the american papers, and he did so after his own ideas, illustrating some of his material with pictures of his own selection. the selections were made from various fashion-plates, which gave him a chance to pick the kind of a prince or princess or other royal figure that he thought fitted his description without any handicap upon his imagination. under his portrait of henry v. (a very correctly dressed person in top hat and overcoat) he wrote: in the original the king has a crown on. that is no kind of a thing for the king to wear when he has come home on business. he ought to wear something he can collect taxes in. you will find this represenation of henry v. active, full of feeling, full of sublimity. i have pictured him looking out over the battle of agincourt and studying up where to begin. mark twain's account of the jubilee probably satisfied most readers; but james tufts, then managing editor of the san francisco examiner, had a rather matter-of-fact englishman on the staff, who, after reading the report, said: "well, jim tufts, i hope you are satisfied with that mark twain cable." "why, yes," said tufts; "aren't you?" "i should say not. just look what he says about the number of soldiers. he says, 'i never saw so many soldiers anywhere except on the stage of a theater.' why, tufts, don't you know that the soldiers in the theater are the same old soldiers marching around and around? there aren't more than a hundred soldiers in the biggest army ever put on the stage." it was decided to vacate the house in tedworth square and go to switzerland for the summer. mrs. crane and charles langdon's daughter, julia, joined them early in july, and they set out for switzerland a few days later. just before leaving, clemens received an offer from pond of fifty thousand dollars for one hundred and twenty-five nights on the platform in america. it was too great a temptation to resist at once, and they took it under advisement. clemens was willing to accept, but mrs. clemens opposed the plan. she thought his health no longer equal to steady travel. she believed that with continued economy they would be able to manage their problem without this sum. in the end the offer was declined. they journeyed to switzerland by way of holland and germany, the general destination being lucerne. they did not remain there, however. they found a pretty little village farther up the lake--weggis, at the foot of the rigi--where, in the villa buhlegg, they arranged for the summer at very moderate rates indeed. weggis is a beautiful spot, looking across the blue water to mount pilatus, the lake shore dotted with white villages. down by the water, but a few yards from the cottage--for it was scarcely a villa except by courtesy--there was a little inclosure, and a bench under a large tree, a quiet spot where clemens often sat to rest and smoke. the fact is remembered there to-day, and recorded. a small tablet has engraved upon it "mark twain ruhe." farther along the shore he discovered a neat, white cottage were some kindly working-people agreed to rent him an upper room for a study. it was a sunny room with windows looking out upon the lake, and he worked there steadily. to twichell he wrote: this is the charmingest place we have ever lived in for repose and restfulness, superb scenery whose beauty undergoes a perpetual change from one miracle to another, yet never runs short of fresh surprises and new inventions. we shall always come here for the summers if we can. the others have climbed the rigi, he says, and he expects to some day if twichell will come and climb it with him. they had climbed it together during that summer vagabondage, nineteen years before. he was full of enthusiasm over his work. to f. h. skrine, in london, he wrote that he had four or five books all going at once, and his note-book contains two or three pages merely of titles of the stories he proposed to write. but of the books begun that summer at weggis none appears to have been completed. there still exists a bulky, half-finished manuscript about tom and huck, most of which was doubtless written at this time, and there is the tale already mentioned, the "dream" story; and another tale with a plot of intricate psychology and crime; still another with the burning title of "hell-fire hotchkiss"--a story of hannibal life--and some short stories. clemens appeared to be at this time out of tune with fiction. perhaps his long book of travel had disqualified his invention. he realized that these various literary projects were leading nowhere, and one after another he dropped them. the fact that proofs of the big book were coming steadily may also have interfered with his creative faculty. as was his habit, clemens formed the acquaintance of a number of the native residents, and enjoyed talking to them about their business and daily affairs. they were usually proud and glad of these attentions, quick to see the humor of his remarks. but there was an old watchmaker-an 'uhrmacher' who remained indifferent. he would answer only in somber monosyllables, and he never smiled. clemens at last brought the cheapest kind of a watch for repairs. "be very careful of this watch," he said. "it is a fine one." the old man merely glared at him. "it is not a valuable watch. it is a worthless watch." "but i gave six francs for it in paris." "still, it is a cheap watch," was the unsmiling answer. defeat waits somewhere for every conqueror. which recalls another instance, though of a different sort. on one of his many voyages to america, he was sitting on deck in a steamer-chair when two little girls stopped before him. one of them said, hesitatingly: "are you mr. mark twain?" "why, yes, dear, they call me that." "won't you please say something funny?" and for the life of him he couldn't make the required remark. in one of his letters to twichell of that summer, clemens wrote of the arrival there of the colored jubilee singers, always favorites of his, and of his great delight in them. we went down to the village hotel & bought our tickets & entered the beer-hall, where a crowd of german & swiss men & women sat grouped around tables with their beer-mugs in front of them--self-contained & unimpressionable-looking people--an indifferent & unposted & disheartening audience--& up at the far end of the room sat the jubilees in a row. the singers got up & stood--the talking & glass- jingling went on. then rose & swelled out above those common earthly sounds one of those rich chords, the secret of whose make only the jubilees possess, & a spell fell upon that house. it was fine to see the faces light up with the pleased wonder & surprise of it. no one was indifferent any more; & when the singers finished the camp was theirs. it was a triumph. it reminded me of lancelot riding in sir kay's armor, astonishing complacent knights who thought they had struck a soft thing. the jubilees sang a lot of pieces. arduous & painstaking cultivation has not diminished or artificialized their music, but on the contrary--to my surprise--has mightily reinforced its eloquence and beauty. away back in the beginning--to my mind--their music made all other vocal music cheap; & that early notion is emphasized now. it is entirely beautiful to me; & it moves me infinitely more than any other music can. i think that in the jubilees & their songs america has produced the perfectest flower of the ages; & i wish it were a foreign product, so that she would worship it & lavish money on it & go properly crazy over it. now, these countries are different: they would do all that if it were native. it is true they praise god, but that is merely a formality, & nothing in it; they open out their whole hearts to no foreigner. as the first anniversary of susy's death drew near the tension became very great. a gloom settled on the household, a shadow of restraint. on the morning of the th clemens went early to his study. somewhat later mrs. clemens put on her hat and wrap, and taking a small bag left the house. the others saw her go toward the steamer-landing, but made no inquiries as to her destination. they guessed that she would take the little boat that touched at the various points along the lake shore. this she did, in fact, with no particular plan as to where she would leave it. one of the landing-places seemed quiet and inviting, and there she went ashore, and taking a quiet room at a small inn spent the day in reading susy's letters. it was evening when she returned, and her husband, lonely and anxious, was waiting for her at the landing. he had put in the day writing the beautiful poem, "in memoriam," a strain lofty, tender, and dirge-like-liquidly musical, though irregular in form.--[now included in the uniform edition.] cxcix winter in vienna they remained two months in weggis--until toward the end of september; thence to vienna, by way of innsbruck, in the tyrol, "where the mountains seem more approachable than in switzerland." clara clemens wished to study the piano under leschetizky, and this would take them to austria for the winter. arriving at vienna, they settled in the hotel metropole, on the banks of the danube. their rooms, a corner suite, looked out on a pretty green square, the merzimplatz, and down on the franz josef quay. a little bridge crosses the river there, over which all kinds of life are continually passing. on pleasant days clemens liked to stand on this bridge and watch the interesting phases of the austrian capital. the vienna humorist, poetzl, quickly formed his acquaintance, and they sometimes stood there together. once while clemens was making some notes, poetzl interested the various passers by asking each one--the errand-boy, the boot-black, the chestnut-vender, cabmen, and others--to guess who the stranger was and what he wanted. most of them recognized him when their attention was called, for the newspapers had proudly heralded his arrival and his picture was widely circulated. clemens had scarcely arrived in vienna, in fact, before he was pursued by photographers, journalists, and autograph-hunters. the viennese were his fond admirers, and knowing how the world elsewhere had honored him they were determined not to be outdone. the 'neues viener tageblatt', a fortnight after his arrival, said: it is seldom that a foreign author has found such a hearty reception in vienna as that accorded to mark twain, who not only has the reputation of being the foremost humorist in the whole civilized. world, but one whose personality arouses everywhere a peculiar interest on account of the genuine american character which sways it. he was the guest of honor at the concordia club soon after his arrival, and the great ones of vienna assembled to do him honor. charlemagne tower, then american minister, was also one of the guests. writers, diplomats, financiers, municipal officials, everybody in vienna that was worth while, was there. clemens gave them a surprise, for when ferdinand gross, concordia president, introduced him first in english, then in german, mark twain made his reply wholly in the latter language. the paper just quoted gives us a hint of the frolic and wassail of that old 'festkneipe' when it says: at o'clock mark twain appeared in the salon, and amid a storm of applause took his seat at the head of the table. his characteristic shaggy and flowing mane of hair adorning a youthful countenance attracted the attention at once of all present. after a few formal convivial commonplaces the president of the concordia, mr. ferdinand gross, delivered an excellent address in english, which he wound up with a few german sentences. then mr. tower was heard in praise of his august countryman. in the course of his remarks he said he could hardly find words enough to express his delight at the presence of the popular american. then followed the greatest attraction of the evening, an impromptu speech by mark twain in the german language, which it is true he has not fully mastered, but which he nevertheless controls sufficiently well to make it difficult to detect any harsh foreign accent. he had entitled his speech, "die schrecken der deutschen sprache" (the terrors of the german language). at times he would interrupt himself in english and ask, with a stuttering smile, "how do you call this word in german" or "i only know that in mother-tongue." the festkneipe lasted far into the morning hours. it was not long after their arrival in vienna that the friction among the unamalgamated austrian states flamed into a general outbreak in the austrian reichsrath, or imperial parliament. we need not consider just what the trouble was. any one wishing to know can learn from mark twain's article on the subject, for it is more clearly pictured there than elsewhere. it is enough to say here that the difficulty lay mainly between the hungarian and german wings of the house; and in the midst of it dr. otto lecher made his famous speech, which lasted twelve hours without a break, in order to hold the floor against the opposing forces. clemens was in the gallery most of the time while that speech, with its riotous accompaniment, was in progress.--["when that house is legislating you can't tell it from artillery practice." from mark twain's report, "stirring times in austria," in literary essays,]--he was intensely interested. nothing would appeal to him more than that, unless it should be some great astronomic or geologic change. he was also present somewhat later when a resolution was railroaded through which gave the chair the right to invoke the aid of the military, and he was there when the military arrived and took the insurgents in charge. it was a very great occasion, a "tremendous episode," he says. the memory of it will outlast all the others that exist to-day. in the whole history of free parliament the like of it had been seen but three times before. it takes imposing place among the world's unforgetable things. i think that in my lifetime i have not twice seen abiding history made before my eyes, but i know that i have seen it once. wild reports were sent to the american press; among them one that mark twain had been hustled out with the others, and that, having waved his handkerchief and shouted "hoch die deutschen!" he had been struck by an officer of the law. of course nothing of the kind happened. the sergeant-at-arms, who came to the gallery where he sat, said to a friend who suggested that clemens be allowed to remain: "oh, i know him very well. i recognize him by his pictures, and i should be very glad to let him stay, but i haven't any choice because of the strictness of the order." clemens, however, immediately ran across a london times correspondent, who showed him the way into the first gallery, which it seems was not emptied, so he lost none of the exhibit. mark twain's report of the austrian troubles, published in harper's magazine the following march and now included with the literary essays, will keep that episode alive and important as literature when otherwise it would have been merely embalmed, and dimly remembered, as history. it was during these exciting political times in vienna that a representative of a new york paper wrote, asking for a mark twain interview. clemens replied, giving him permission to call. when the reporter arrived clemens was at work writing in bed, as was so much his habit. at the doorway the reporter paused, waiting for a summons to enter. the door was ajar and he heard mrs. clemens say: "youth, don't you think it will be a little embarrassing for him, your being in bed?" and he heard mark twain's easy, gentle, deliberate voice reply: "why, livy, if you think so, we might have the other bed made up for him." clemens became a privileged character in vienna. official rules were modified for his benefit. everything was made easy for him. once, on a certain grand occasion, when nobody was permitted to pass beyond a prescribed line, he was stopped by a guard, when the officer in charge suddenly rode up: "let him pass," he commanded. "lieber gott! don't you see it's herr mark twain?" the clemens apartments at the metropole were like a court, where with those of social rank assembled the foremost authors, journalists, diplomats, painters, philosophers, scientists, of europe, and therefore of the world. a sister of the emperor of germany lived at the metropole that winter and was especially cordial. mark twain's daily movements were chronicled as if he had been some visiting potentate, and, as usual, invitations and various special permissions poured in. a vienna paper announced: he has been feted and dined from morn till eve. the homes of the aristocracy are thrown open to him, counts and princes delight to do him honor, and foreign audiences hang upon the words that fall from his lips, ready to burst out any instant into roars of laughter. deaths never came singly in the clemens family. it was on the th of december, , something more than a year after the death of susy, that orion clemens died, at the age of seventy-two. orion had remained the same to the end, sensitively concerned as to all his brother's doings, his fortunes and misfortunes: soaring into the clouds when any good news came; indignant, eager to lend help and advice in the hour of defeat; loyal, upright, and generally beloved by those who knew and understood his gentle nature. he had not been ill, and, in fact, only a few days before he died had written a fine congratulatory letter on his brother's success in accumulating means for the payment of his debts, entering enthusiastically into some literary plans which mark twain then had in prospect, offering himself for caricature if needed. i would fit in as a fool character, believing, what the tennessee mountaineers predicted, that i would grow up to be a great man and go to congress. i did not think it worth the trouble to be a common great man like andy johnson. i wouldn't give a pinch of snuff, little as i needed it, to be anybody, less than napoleon. so when a farmer took my father's offer for some chickens under advisement till the next day i said to myself, "would napoleon bonaparte have taken under advisement till the next day an offer to sell him some chickens?" to his last day and hour orion was the dreamer, always with a new plan. it was one morning early that he died. he had seated himself at a table with pencil and paper and was setting down the details of his latest project when death came to him, kindly enough, in the moment of new hope. there came also, just then, news of the death of their old hartford butler, george. it saddened them as if it had been a member of the household. jean, especially, wept bitterly. cc mark twain pays his debts 'following the equator'--[in england, more tramps abroad.]--had come from the press in november and had been well received. it was a large, elaborate subscription volume, more elaborate than artistic in appearance. clemens, wishing to make some acknowledgment to his benefactor, tactfully dedicated it to young harry rogers: "with recognition of what he is, and an apprehension of what he may become unless he form himself a little more closely upon the model of the author." following the equator was mark twain's last book of travel, and it did not greatly resemble its predecessors. it was graver than the innocents abroad; it was less inclined to cynicism and burlesque than the tramp. it was the thoughtful, contemplative observation and philosophizing of the soul-weary, world-weary pilgrim who has by no means lost interest, but only his eager, first enthusiasm. it is a gentler book than the tramp abroad, and for the most part a pleasanter one. it is better history and more informing. its humor, too, is of a worthier sort, less likely to be forced and overdone. the holy hindoo pilgrim's "itinerary of salvation" is one of the richest of all mark twain's fancies, and is about the best thing in the book. the revised philosophies of pudd'nhead wilson, that begin each chapter, have many of them passed into our daily speech. that some of mark twain's admirers were disappointed with the new book is very likely, but there were others who could not praise it enough. james whitcomb riley wrote: dear mr. clemens,--for a solid week-night sessions--i have been glorying in your last book-and if you've ever done anything better, stronger, or of wholesomer uplift i can't recall it. so here's my heart and here's my hand with all the augmented faith and applause of your proudest countryman! it's just a hail i'm sending you across the spaces--not to call you from your blessed work an instant, but simply to join my voice in the universal cheer that is steadfastly going up for you. as gratefully as delightedly, your abiding friend, james whitcomb riley. notwithstanding the belief that the sale of single subscription volumes had about ended, bliss did well with the new book. thirty or forty thousand copies were placed without much delay, and the accumulated royalties paid into mr. rogers's hands. the burden of debt had become a nightmare. clemens wrote: let us begin on those debts. i cannot bear the weight any longer. it totally unfits me for work. this was november , . december th he wrote: land, we are glad to see those debts diminishing. for the first time in my life i am getting more pleasure from paying money out than pulling it in. to howells, january d, clemens wrote that they had "turned the corner," and a month later: we've lived close to the bone and saved every cent we could, & there's no undisputed claim now that we can't cash. there are only two claims which i dispute & which i mean to look into personally before i pay them. but they are small. both together they amount to only $ , . i hope you will never get the like of the load saddled onto you that was saddled onto me years ago. and yet there is such a solid pleasure in paying the things that i reckon maybe it is worth while to get into that kind of a hobble after all. mrs. clemens gets millions of delight out of it; & the children have never uttered one complaint about the scrimping from the beginning. by the end of january, , mark twain had accumulated enough money to make the final payment to his creditors and stand clear of debt. at the time of his failure he said he had given himself five years in which to clear himself of the heavy obligation. he had achieved that result in less than three. the world heralded it as a splendid triumph. miss katharine i. harrison, henry rogers's secretary, who had been in charge of the details, wrote in her letter announcing his freedom: "i wish i could shout it across the water to you so that you would get it ten days ahead of this letter." miss harrison's letter shows that something like thirteen thousand dollars would remain to his credit after the last accounts were wiped away. clemens had kept his financial progress from the press, but the payment of the final claims was distinctly a matter of news and the papers made the most of it. head-lines shouted it, there were long editorials in which mark twain was heralded as a second walter scott, though it was hardly necessary that he should be compared with anybody; he had been in that--as in those peculiarities which had invited his disaster--just himself. one might suppose now that he had had enough of inventions and commercial enterprises of every sort that is, one who did not know mark twain might suppose this; but it would not be true. within a month after the debts were paid he had negotiated with the great austrian inventor, szczepanik, and his business manager for the american rights of a wonderful carpet-pattern machine, obtained an option for these rights at fifteen hundred thousand dollars, and, sellers-like, was planning to organize a company with a capital of fifteen hundred million dollars to control carpet-weaving industries of the world. he records in his note-book that a certain mr. wood, representing the american carpet interests, called upon him and, in the course of their conversation, asked him at what price he would sell his option. i declined, and got away from the subject. i was afraid he would offer me $ , for it. i should have been obliged to take it, but i was born with a speculative instinct & i did not want that temptation put in my way. he wrote to mr. rogers about the great scheme, inviting the standard oil to furnish the capital for it--but it appears not to have borne the test of mr. rogers's scrutiny, and is heard of no more. szczepanik had invented the 'fernseher', or telelectroscope, the machine by which one sees at a distance. clemens would have invested heavily in this, too, for he had implicit faith in its future, but the 'fernseher' was already controlled for the paris exposition; so he could only employ szczepanik as literary material, which he did in two instances: "the austrian edison keeping school again" and "from the london times of "--magazine articles published in the century later in the year. he was fond of szczepanik and szczepanik's backer, mr. kleinburg. in one of his note-book entries he says: szczepanik is not a paige. he is a gentleman; his backer, mr. kleinburg, is a gentleman, too, yet is not a clemens--that is to say, he is not an ass. clemens did not always consult his financial adviser, rogers, any more than he always consulted his spiritual adviser, twichell, or his literary adviser, howells, when he intended to commit heresies in their respective provinces. somewhat later an opportunity came along to buy an interest in a preparation of skimmed milk, an invalid food by which the human race was going to be healed of most of its ills. when clemens heard that virchow had recommended this new restorative, the name of which was plasmon, he promptly provided macalister with five thousand pounds to invest in a company then organizing in london. it should be added that this particular investment was not an entire loss, for it paid very good dividends for several years. we shall hear of it again. for the most part clemens was content to let henry rogers do his financiering, and as the market was low with an upward incline, rogers put the various accumulations into this thing and that, and presently had some fifty thousand dollars to mark twain's credit, a very comfortable balance for a man who had been twice that amount in debt only a few years before. it has been asserted most strenuously, by those in a position to know least about the matter, that henry rogers lent, and even gave, mark twain large sums, and pointed out opportunities whereby he could make heavily by speculation. no one of these statements is true. mr. rogers neither lent nor gave mark twain money for investment, and he never allowed him to speculate when he could prevent it. he invested for him wisely, but he never bought for him a share of stock that he did not have the money in hand to pay for in full-money belonging to and earned by clemens himself. what he did give to mark twain was his priceless counsel and time--gifts more precious than any mere sum of money--boons that mark twain could accept without humiliation. he did accept them and was unceasingly grateful.--[mark twain never lost an opportunity for showing his gratitude to henry rogers. the reader is referred to appendix t, at the end of the last volume, for a brief tribute which clemens prepared in . mr. rogers would not consent to its publication.] cci social life in vienna clemens, no longer worried about finances and full of ideas and prospects, was writing now at a great rate, mingling with all sorts of social events, lecturing for charities, and always in the lime-light. i have abundant peace of mind again--no sense of burden. work is become a pleasure--it is not labor any longer. he was the lion of the austrian capital, and it was natural that he should revel in his new freedom and in the universal tribute. mrs. clemens wrote that they were besieged with callers of every description: such funny combinations are here sometimes: one duke, several counts, several writers, several barons, two princes, newspaper women, etc. i find so far, without exception, that the high-up aristocracy are simple and cordial and agreeable. when clemens appeared as a public entertainer all society turned out to hear him and introductions were sought by persons of the most exclusive rank. once a royal introduction led to an adventure. he had been giving a charity reading in vienna, and at the end of it was introduced, with mrs. clemens, to her highness, countess bardi, a princess of the portuguese royal house by marriage and sister to the austrian archduchess maria theresa. they realized that something was required after such an introduction; that, in fact, they must go within a day or two and pay their respects by writing their names in the visitors' book, kept in a sort of anteroom of the royal establishment. a few days later, about noon, they drove to the archducal palace, inquired their way to the royal anteroom, and informed the grandly uniformed portier that they wished to write their names in the visitors' book. the portier did not produce the book, but summoned a man in livery and gold lace and directed him to take them up-stairs, remarking that her royal highness was out, but would be in presently. they protested that her royal highness was not looking for them, that they were not calling, but had merely come to sign the visitors' book, but he said: "you are americans, are you not?" "yes, we are americans." "then you are expected. please go up-stairs." mrs. clemens said: "oh no, we are not expected; there is some mistake. please let us sign the book and we will go away." but it was no use. he insisted that her royal highness would be back in a very little while; that she had commanded him to say so and that they must wait. they were shown up-stairs, clemens going willingly enough, for he scented an adventure; but mrs. clemens was far from happy. they were taken to a splendid drawing-room, and at the doorway she made her last stand, refusing to enter. she declared that there was certainly some mistake, and begged them to let her sign her name in the book and go, without parleying. it was no use. their conductor insisted that they remove their wraps and sit down, which they finally did--mrs. clemens miserable, her husband in a delightful state of anticipation. writing of it to twichell that night he said: i was hoping and praying that the princess would come and catch us up there, & that those other americans who were expected would arrive and be taken as impostors by the portier & be shot by the sentinels & then it would all go into the papers & be cabled all over the world & make an immense stir and be perfectly lovely. livy was in a state of mind; she said it was too theatrically ridiculous & that i would never be able to keep my mouth shut; that i would be sure to let it out & it would get into the papers, & she tried to make me promise. "promise what?" i said. "to be quiet about this." "indeed i won't; it's the best thing ever happened. i'll tell it and add to it & i wish joe & howells were here to make it perfect; i can't make all the rightful blunders by myself--it takes all three of us to do justice to an opportunity like this. i would just like to see howells get down to his work & explain & lie & work his futile & inventionless subterfuges when that princess comes raging in here & wanting to know." but livy could not hear fun--it was not a time to be trying to be funny. we were in a most miserable & shameful situation, & it --just then the door spread wide & our princess & more & little princes flowed in! our princess & her sister, the archduchess maria theresa (mother to the imperial heir & to the a young girl archduchesses present, & aunt to the little princes), & we shook hands all around & sat down & had a most sociable time for half an hour, & by & by it turned out that we were the right ones & had been sent for by a messenger who started too late to catch us at the hotel. we were invited for a o'clock, but we beat that arrangement by an hour & a half. wasn't it a rattling good comedy situation? seems a kind of pity we were the right ones. it would have been such nuts to see the right ones come and get fired out, & we chatting along comfortably & nobody suspecting us for impostors. mrs. clemens to mrs. crane: of course i know that i should have courtesied to her imperial majesty & not quite so deep to her royal highness, and that mr. clemens should have kissed their hands; but it was all so unexpected that i had no time to prepare, and if i had had i should not have been there; i only went in to help mr. c. with my bad german. when our minister's wife is going to be presented to the archduchess she practises her courtesying beforehand. they had met royalty in simple american fashion and no disaster had followed. we have already made mention of the distinguished visitors who gathered in the clemens apartments at the hotel metropole. they were of many nations and ranks. it was the winter in london of twenty-five years before over again. only mark twain was not the same. then he had been unsophisticated, new, not always at his ease; now he was the polished familiar of courts and embassies--at home equally with poets and princes, authors and ambassadors and kings. such famous ones were there as vereshchagin, leschetizky, mark hambourg, dvorak, lenbach, and jokai, with diplomats of many nations. a list of foreign names may mean little to the american reader, but among them were neigra, of italy; paraty, of portugal; lowenhaupt, of sweden; and ghiki, of rumania. the queen of rumania, carmen sylva, a poetess in her own right, was a friend and warm admirer of mark twain. the princess metternich, and madame de laschowska, of poland, were among those who came, and there were nansen and his wife, and campbell-bannerman, who was afterward british premier. also there was spiridon, the painter, who made portraits of clara clemens and her father, and other artists and potentates--the list is too long. those were brilliant, notable gatherings and are remembered in vienna today. they were not always entirely harmonious, for politics was in the air and differences of opinion were likely to be pretty freely expressed. clemens and his family, as americans, did not always have a happy time of it. it was the eve of the spanish american war and most of continental europe sided with spain. austria, in particular, was friendly to its related nation; and from every side the clemenses heard how america was about to take a brutal and unfair advantage of a weaker nation for the sole purpose of annexing cuba. charles langdon and his son jervis happened to arrive in vienna about this time, bringing straight from america the comforting assurance that the war was not one of conquest or annexation, but a righteous defense of the weak. mrs. clemens gave a dinner for them, at which, besides some american students, were mark hambourg, gabrilowitsch, and the great leschetizky himself. leschetizky, an impetuous and eloquent talker, took this occasion to inform the american visitors that their country was only shamming, that cuba would soon be an american dependency. no one not born to the language could argue with leschetizky. clemens once wrote of him: he is a most capable and felicitous talker-was born for an orator, i think. what life, energy, fire in a man past ! & how he does play! he is easily the greatest pianist in the world. he is just as great & just as capable today as ever he was. last sunday night, at dinner with us, he did all the talking for hours, and everybody was glad to let him. he told his experiences as a revolutionist years ago in ' , & his battle-pictures were magnificently worded. poetzl had never met him before. he is a talker himself & a good one--but he merely sat silent & gazed across the table at this inspired man, & drank in his words, & let his eyes fill & the blood come & go in his face & never said a word. whatever may have been his doubts in the beginning concerning the cuban war, mark twain, by the end of may, had made up his mind as to its justice. when theodore stanton invited him to the decoration day banquet to be held in paris, he replied: i thank you very much for your invitation and i would accept if i were foot-free. for i should value the privilege of helping you do honor to the men who rewelded our broken union and consecrated their great work with their lives; and also i should like to be there to do, homage to our soldiers and sailors of today who are enlisted for another most righteous war, and utter the hope that they may make short and decisive work of it and leave cuba free and fed when they face for home again. and finally i should like to be present and see you interweave those two flags which, more than any others, stand for freedom and progress in the earth-flags which represent two kindred nations, each great and strong by itself, competent sureties for the peace of the world when they stand together. that is to say, the flags of england and america. to an austrian friend he emphasized this thought: the war has brought england and america close together--and to my mind that is the biggest dividend that any war in this world has ever paid. if this feeling is ever to grow cold again i do not wish to live to see it. and to twichell, whose son david had enlisted: you are living your war-days over again in dave & it must be strong pleasure mixed with a sauce of apprehension . . . . i have never enjoyed a war, even in history, as i am enjoying this one, for this is the worthiest one that was ever fought, so far as my knowledge goes. it is a worthy thing to fight for one's own country. it is another sight finer to fight for another man's. and i think this is the first time it has been done. but it was a sad day for him when he found that the united states really meant to annex the philippines, and his indignation flamed up. he said: "when the united states sent word to spain that the cuban atrocities must end she occupied the highest moral position ever taken by a nation since the almighty made the earth. but when she snatched the philippines she stained the flag." ccii literary work in vienna one must wonder, with all the social demands upon him, how clemens could find time to write as much as he did during those vienna days. he piled up a great heap of manuscript of every sort. he wrote twichell: there may be idle people in the world, but i am not one of them. and to howells: i couldn't get along without work now. i bury myself in it up to the ears. long hours-- & on a stretch sometimes. it isn't all for print, by any means, for much of it fails to suit me; , words of it in the past year. it was because of the deadness which invaded me when susy died. he projected articles, stories, critiques, essays, novels, autobiography, even plays; he covered the whole literary round. among these activities are some that represent mark twain's choicest work. "concerning the jews," which followed the publication of his "stirring times in austria" (grew out of it, in fact), still remains the best presentation of the jewish character and racial situation. mark twain was always an ardent admirer of the jewish race, and its oppression naturally invited his sympathy. once he wrote to twichell: the difference between the brain of the average christian and that of the average jew--certainly in europe--is about the difference between a tadpole's brain & an archbishop's. it is a marvelous race; by long odds the most marvelous race the world has produced, i suppose. yet he did not fail to see its faults and to set them down in his summary of hebrew character. it was a reply to a letter written to him by a lawyer, and he replied as a lawyer might, compactly, logically, categorically, conclusively. the result pleased him. to mr. rogers he wrote: the jew article is my "gem of the ocean." i have taken a world of pleasure in writing it & doctoring it & fussing at it. neither jew nor christian will approve of it, but people who are neither jews nor christian will, for they are in a condition to know the truth when they see it. clemens was not given to race distinctions. in his article he says: i am quite sure that (bar one) i have no race prejudices, and i think i have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. indeed i know it. i can stand any society. all that i care to know is that a man is a human being, that is enough for me; he can't be any worse. we gather from something that follows that the one race which he bars is the french, and this, just then, mainly because of the dreyfus agitations. he also states in this article: i have no special regard for satan, but i can at least claim that i have no prejudice against him. it may even be that i lean a little his way on account of his not having a fair show. clemens indeed always had a friendly feeling toward satan (at least, as he conceived him), and just at this time addressed a number of letters to him concerning affairs in general--cordial, sympathetic, informing letters enough, though apparently not suited for publication. a good deal of the work done at this period did not find its way into print. an interview with satan; a dream-story concerning a platonic sweetheart, and some further comment on austrian politics, are among the condemned manuscripts. mark twain's interest in satan would seem later to have extended to his relatives, for there are at least three bulky manuscripts in which he has attempted to set down some episodes in the life of one "young satan," a nephew, who appears to have visited among the planets and promoted some astonishing adventures in austria several centuries ago. the idea of a mysterious, young, and beautiful stranger who would visit the earth and perform mighty wonders, was always one which mark twain loved to play with, and a nephew of satan's seemed to him properly qualified to carry out his intention. his idea was that this celestial visitant was not wicked, but only indifferent to good and evil and suffering, having no personal knowledge of any of these things. clemens tried the experiment in various ways, and portions of the manuscript are absorbingly interesting, lofty in conception, and rarely worked out--other portions being merely grotesque, in which the illusion of reality vanishes. among the published work of the vienna period is an article about a morality play, the "master of palmyra,"--[about play-acting, forum, october, .]--by adolf wilbrandt, an impressive play presenting death, the all-powerful, as the principal part. the cosmopolitan magazine for august published "at the appetite-cure," in which mark twain, in the guise of humor, set forth a very sound and sensible idea concerning dietetics, and in october the same magazine published his first article on "christian science and the book of mrs. eddy." as we have seen, clemens had been always deeply interested in mental healing, and in closing this humorous skit he made due acknowledgments to the unseen forces which, properly employed, through the imagination work physical benefits: "within the last quarter of a century," he says, "in america, several sects of curers have appeared under various names and have done notable things in the way of healing ailments without the use of medicines." clemens was willing to admit that mrs. eddy and her book had benefited humanity, but he could not resist the fun-making which certain of her formulas and her phrasing invited. the delightful humor of the cosmopolitan article awoke a general laugh, in which even devout christian scientists were inclined to join.--[it was so popular that john brisben walker voluntarily added a check for two hundred dollars to the eight hundred dollars already paid.]--nothing that he ever did exhibits more happily that peculiar literary gift upon which his fame rests. but there is another story of this period that will live when most of those others mentioned are but little remembered. it is the story of "the man that corrupted hadleyburg." this is a tale that in its own way takes its place with the half-dozen great english short stories of the world-with such stories as "the fall of the house of usher," by poe; "the luck of roaring camp," by harte; "the man who would be king," by kipling; and "the man without a country," by hale. as a study of the human soul, its flimsy pretensions and its pitiful frailties, it outranks all the rest. in it mark twain's pessimistic philosophy concerning the "human animal" found a free and moral vent. whatever his contempt for a thing, he was always amused at it; and in this tale we can imagine him a gigantic pantagruel dangling a ridiculous manikin, throwing himself back and roaring out his great bursting guffaws at its pitiful antics. the temptation and the downfall of a whole town was a colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally and sardonically worked out. human weakness and rotten moral force were never stripped so bare or so mercilessly jeered at in the marketplace. for once mark twain could hug himself with glee in derision of self-righteousness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and that none would be so bold as to gainsay his mockery. probably no one but mark twain ever conceived the idea of demoralizing a whole community--of making its "nineteen leading citizens" ridiculous by leading them into a cheap, glittering temptation, and having them yield and openly perjure themselves at the very moment when their boasted incorruptibility was to amaze the world. and it is all wonderfully done. the mechanism of the story is perfect, the drama of it is complete. the exposure of the nineteen citizens in the very sanctity of the church itself, and by the man they have discredited, completing the carefully prepared revenge of the injured stranger, is supreme in its artistic triumph. "the man that corrupted hadleyburg" is one of the mightiest sermons against self-righteousness ever preached. its philosophy, that every man is strong until his price is named; the futility of the prayer not to be led into temptation, when it is only by resisting temptation that men grow strong--these things blaze out in a way that makes us fairly blink with the truth of them. it is mark twain's greatest short story. it is fine that it should be that, as well as much more than that; for he was no longer essentially a story-teller. he had become more than ever a moralist and a sage. having seen all of the world, and richly enjoyed and deeply suffered at its hands, he sat now as in a seat of judgment, regarding the passing show and recording his philosophies. cciii an imperial tragedy for the summer they went to kaltenleutgeben, just out of vienna, where they had the villa paulhof, and it was while they were there, september , , that the empress elizabeth of austria was assassinated at geneva by an italian vagabond, whose motive seemed to have been to gain notoriety. the news was brought to them one evening, just at supper-time, by countess wydenbouck-esterhazy. clemens wrote to twichell: that good & unoffending lady, the empress, is killed by a madman, & i am living in the midst of world-history again. the queen's jubilee last year, the invasion of the reichsrath by the police, & now this murder, which will still be talked of & described & painted a thousand years from now. to have a personal friend of the wearer of two crowns burst in at the gate in the deep dusk of the evening & say, in a voice broken with tears, "my god! the empress is murdered," & fly toward her home before we can utter a question --why, it brings the giant event home to you, makes you a part of it & personally interested; it is as if your neighbor antony should come flying & say, "caesar is butchered--the head of the world is fallen!" of course there is no talk but of this. the mourning is universal and genuine, the consternation is stupefying. the austrian empire is being draped with black. vienna will be a spectacle to see by next saturday, when the funeral cortege marches. clemens and the others went into vienna for the funeral ceremonies and witnessed them from the windows of the new krantz hotel, which faces the capuchin church where the royal dead lie buried. it was a grandly impressive occasion, a pageant of uniforms of the allied nations that made up the empire of austria. clemens wrote of it at considerable length, and sent the article to mr. rogers to offer to the magazines. later, however, he recalled it just why is not clear. in one place he wrote: twice the empress entered vienna in state; the first time was in , when she was a bride of seventeen, & when she rode in measureless pomp through a world of gay flags & decorations down the streets, walled on both hands with the press of shouting & welcoming subjects; & the second time was last wednesday, when she entered the city in her coffin, & moved down the same streets in the dead of night under waving black flags, between human walls again, but everywhere was a deep stillness now & a stillness emphasized rather than broken by the muffled hoofbeats of the long cavalcade over pavements cushioned with sand, & the low sobbing of gray-headed women who had witnessed the first entrance, forty-four years before, when she & they were young & unaware.... she was so blameless--the empress; & so beautiful in mind & heart, in person & spirit; & whether with the crown upon her head, or without it & nameless, a grace to the human race, almost a justification of its creation; would be, indeed, but that the animal that struck her down re-establishes the doubt. they passed a quiet summer at kaltenleutgeben. clemens wrote some articles, did some translating of german plays, and worked on his "gospel," an elaboration of his old essay on contenting one's soul through selfishness, later to be published as 'what is man?' a. c. dunham and rev. dr. parker, of hartford, came to vienna, and clemens found them and brought them out to kaltenleutgeben and read them chapters of his doctrines, which, he said, mrs. clemens would not let him print. dr. parker and dunham returned to hartford and reported mark twain more than ever a philosopher; also that he was the "center of notability and his house a court." cciv the second winter in vienna the clemens family did not return to the metropole for the winter, but went to the new krantz, already mentioned, where they had a handsome and commodious suite looking down on the neuer markt and on the beautiful facade of the capuchin church, with the great cathedral only a step away. there they passed another brilliant and busy winter. never in europe had they been more comfortably situated; attention had been never more lavishly paid to them. their drawing-room was a salon which acquired the name of the "second embassy." clemens in his note-book wrote: during years now i have filled the position--with some credit, i trust, of self-appointed ambassador-at-large of the united states of america --without salary. which was a joke; but there was a large grain of truth in it, for mark twain, more than any other american in europe, was regarded as typically representing his nation and received more lavish honors. it had become the fashion to consult him on every question of public interest, for he was certain to say something worth printing, whether seriously or otherwise. when the tsar of russia proposed the disarmament of the nations william t. stead, editor of the review of reviews, wrote for mark twain's opinion. he replied: dear mr. steady,--the tsar is ready to disarm. i am ready to disarm. collect the others; it should not be much of a task now. mark twain. he was on a tide of prosperity once more, one that was to continue now until the end. he no longer had any serious financial qualms. he could afford to be independent. he refused ten thousand dollars for a tobacco indorsement, though he liked the tobacco well enough; and he was aware that even royalty was willing to put a value on its opinions. he declined ten thousand dollars a year for five years to lend his name as editor of a humorous periodical, though there was no reason to suppose that the paper would be otherwise than creditably conducted. he declined lecture propositions from pond at the rate of about one a month. he could get along without these things, he said, and still preserve some remnants of self-respect. in a letter to rogers he said: pond offers me $ , for nights, but i do not feel strongly tempted. mrs. clemens ditto. early in he wrote to howells that mrs. clemens had proved to him that they owned a house and furniture in hartford, that his english and american copyrights paid an income on the equivalent of two hundred thousand dollars, and that they had one hundred and seven thousand dollars' accumulation in the bank. "i have been out and bought a box of c. cigars," he says; "i was smoking / c. before." the things that men are most likely to desire had come to mark twain, and no man was better qualified to rejoice in them. that supreme, elusive thing which we call happiness might have been his now but for the tragedy of human bereavement and the torture of human ills. that he did rejoice --reveled indeed like a boy in his new fortunes, the honors paid him, and in all that gay viennese life-there is no doubt. he could wave aside care and grief and remorse, forget their very existence, it seemed; but in the end he had only driven them ahead a little way and they waited by his path. once, after reciting his occupations and successes, he wrote: all these things might move and interest one. but how, desperately more i have been moved to-night by the thought of a little old copy in the nursery of 'at the back of the north wind'. oh, what happy days they were when that book was read, and how susy loved it!... death is so kind, benignant, to whom he loves, but he goes by us others & will not look our way. and to twichell a few days later: a hartford with no susy in it--& no ned bunce!--it is not the city of hartford, it is the city of heartbreak.... it seems only a few weeks since i saw susy last--yet that was & this is .... my work does not go well to-day. it failed yesterday--& the day before & the day before that. and so i have concluded to put the ms. in the waste-basket & meddle with some other subject. i was trying to write an article advocating the quadrupling of the salaries of our ministers & ambassadors, & the devising of an official dress for them to wear. it seems an easy theme, yet i couldn't do the thing to my satisfaction. all i got out of it was an article on monaco & monte carlo--matters not connected with the subject at all. still, that was something--it's better than a total loss. he finished the article--"diplomatic pay and clothes"--in which he shows how absurd it is for america to expect proper representation on the trifling salaries paid to her foreign ministers, as compared with those allowed by other nations. he prepared also a reminiscent article--the old tale of the shipwrecked hornet and the magazine article intended as his literary debut a generation ago. now and again he worked on some one of the several unfinished longer tales, but brought none of them to completion. the german drama interested him. once he wrote to mr. rogers that he had translated "in purgatory" and sent it to charles frohman, who pronounced it "all jabber and no play." curious, too, for it tears these austrians to pieces with laughter. when i read it, now, it seems entirely silly; but when i see it on the stage it is exceedingly funny. he undertook a play for the burg theater, a collaboration with a vienna journalist, siegmund schlesinger. schlesinger had been successful with several dramas, and agreed with clemens to do some plays dealing with american themes. one of them was to be called "die goldgraeberin," that is, "the woman gold-miner." another, "the rival candidates," was to present the humors of female suffrage. schlesinger spoke very little english, and clemens always had difficulty in comprehending rapid-fire german. so the work did not progress very well. by the time they had completed a few scenes of mining-drama the interest died, and they good-naturedly agreed that it would be necessary to wait until they understood each other's language more perfectly before they could go on with the project. frau kati schratt, later morganatic wife of emperor franz josef, but then leading comedienne of the burg theater, is said to have been cast for the leading part in the mining-play; and director-general herr schlenther, head of the burg theater management, was deeply disappointed. he had never doubted that a play built by schlesinger and mark twain, with frau schratt in the leading role, would have been a great success. clemens continued the subject of christian science that winter. he wrote a number of articles, mainly criticizing mrs. eddy and her financial methods, and for the first time conceived the notion of a book on the subject. the new hierarchy not only amused but impressed him. he realized that it was no ephemeral propaganda, that its appeal to human need was strong, and that its system of organization was masterful and complete. to twichell he wrote: somehow i continue to feel sure of that cult's colossal future.... i am selling my lourdes stock already & buying christian science trust. i regard it as the standard oil of the future. he laid the article away for the time and, as was his custom, put the play quite out of his mind and invented a postal-check which would be far more simple than post-office orders, because one could buy them in any quantity and denomination and keep them on hand for immediate use, making them individually payable merely by writing in the name of the payee. it seems a fine, simple scheme, one that might have been adopted by the government long ago; but the idea has been advanced in one form or another several times since then, and still remains at this writing unadopted. he wrote john hay about it, remarking at the close that the government officials would probably not care to buy it as soon as they found they couldn't kill christians with it. he prepared a lengthy article on the subject, in dialogue form, making it all very clear and convincing, but for some reason none of the magazines would take it. perhaps it seemed too easy, too simple, too obvious. great ideas, once developed, are often like that. ccv speeches that were not made in a volume of mark twain's collected speeches there is one entitled "german for the hungarians--address at the jubilee celebration of the emancipation of the hungarian press, march , ." an introductory paragraph states that the ministers and members of parliament were present, and that the subject was the "ausgleich"--i.e., the arrangement for the apportionment of the taxes between hungary and austria. the speech as there set down begins: now that we are all here together i think that it will be a good idea to arrange the ausgleich. if you will act for hungary i shall be quite willing to act for austria, and this is the very time for it. it is an excellent speech, full of good-feeling and good-humor, but it was never delivered. it is only a speech that mark twain intended to deliver, and permitted to be copied by a representative of the press before he started for budapest. it was a grand dinner, brilliant and inspiring, and when, mark twain was presented to that distinguished company he took a text from something the introducer had said and became so interested in it that his prepared speech wholly disappeared from his memory. i think i will never embarrass myself with a set speech again [he wrote twichell]. my memory is old and rickety and cannot stand the strain. but i had this luck. what i did was to furnish a text for a part of the splendid speech which was made by the greatest living orator of the european world--a speech which it was a great delight to listen to, although i did not understand any word of it, it being in hungarian. i was glad i came, it was a great night, & i heard all the great men in the german tongue. the family accompanied clemens to budapest, and while there met franz, son of louis kossuth, and dined with him. i assure you [wrote mrs. clemens] that i felt stirred, and i kept saying to myself "this is louis kossuth's son." he came to our room one day, and we had quite a long and a very pleasant talk together. he is a man one likes immensely. he has a quiet dignity about him that is very winning. he seems to be a man highly esteemed in hungary. if i am not mistaken, the last time i saw the old picture of his father it was hanging in a room that we turned into a music-room for susy at the farm. they were most handsomely treated in budapest. a large delegation greeted them on arrival, and a carriage and attendants were placed continually at their disposal. they remained several days, and clemens showed his appreciation by giving a reading for charity. it was hinted to mark twain that spring, that before leaving vienna, it would be proper for him to pay his respects to emperor franz josef, who had expressed a wish to meet him. clemens promptly complied with the formalities and the meeting was arranged. he had a warm admiration for the austrian emperor, and naturally prepared himself a little for what he wanted to say to him. he claimed afterward that he had compacted a sort of speech into a single german sentence of eighteen words. he did not make use of it, however. when he arrived at the royal palace and was presented, the emperor himself began in such an entirely informal way that it did no occur to his visitor to deliver his prepared german sentence. when he returned from the audience he said: "we got along very well. i proposed to him a plan to exterminate the human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the air for a period of two minutes. i said szczepanik would invent it for him. i think it impressed him. after a while, in the course of our talk i remembered and told the emperor i had prepared and memorized a very good speech but had forgotten it. he was very agreeable about it. he said a speech wasn't necessary. he seemed to be a most kind-hearted emperor, with a great deal of plain, good, attractive human nature about him. necessarily he must have or he couldn't have unbent to me as he did. i couldn't unbend if i were an emperor. i should feel the stiffness of the position. franz josef doesn't feel it. he is just a natural man, although an emperor. i was greatly impressed by him, and i liked him exceedingly. his face is always the face of a pleasant man and he has a fine sense of humor. it is the emperor's personality and the confidence all ranks have in him that preserve the real political serenity in what has an outside appearance of being the opposite. he is a man as well as an emperor--an emperor and a man." clemens and howells were corresponding with something of the old-time frequency. the work that mark twain was doing--thoughtful work with serious intent--appealed strongly to howells. he wrote: you are the greatest man of your sort that ever lived, and there is no use saying anything else . . . . you have pervaded your century almost more than any other man of letters, if not more; and it is astonishing how you keep spreading . . . . you are my "shadow of a great rock in a weary land" more than any other writer. clemens, who was reading howells's serial, "their silver-wedding journey," then running in harper's magazine, responded: you are old enough to be a weary man with paling interests, but you do not show it; you do your work in the same old, delicate & delicious & forceful & searching & perfect way. i don't know how you can--but i suspect. i suspect that to you there is still dignity in human life, & that man is not a joke--a poor joke--the poorest that was ever contrived. since i wrote my bible--[the "gospel," what is man?]--(last year), which mrs. clemens loathes & shudders over & will not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it, man is not to me the respect-worthy person he was before, & so i have lost my pride in him & can't write gaily nor praisefully about him any more . . . . next morning. i have been reading the morning paper. i do it every morning--well knowing that i shall find in it the usual depravities & basenesses & hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization & cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. i cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet i do not despair. he was not greatly changed. perhaps he had fewer illusions and less iridescent ones, and certainly he had more sorrow; but the letters to howells do not vary greatly from those written twenty-five years before. there is even in them a touch of the old pretense as to mrs. clemens's violence. i mustn't stop to play now or i shall never get those helfiard letters answered. (that is not my spelling. it is mrs. clemens's, i have told her the right way a thousand times, but it does no good, she never remembers.) all through this vienna period (as during several years before and after) henry rogers was in full charge of mark twain's american affairs. clemens wrote him almost daily, and upon every matter, small or large, that developed, or seemed likely to develop, in his undertakings. the complications growing out of the type machine and webster failures were endless.--["i hope to goodness i sha'n't get you into any more jobs such as the type-setter and webster business and the bliss-harper campaigns have been. oh, they were sickeners." (clemens to rogers, november , .)]--the disposal of the manuscripts alone was work for a literary agent. the consideration of proposed literary, dramatic, and financial schemes must have required not only thought, but time. yet mr. rogers comfortably and genially took care of all these things and his own tremendous affairs besides, and apologized sometimes when he felt, perhaps, that he had wavered a little in his attention. clemens once wrote him: oh, dear me, you don't have to excuse yourself for neglecting me; you are entitled to the highest praise for being so limitlessly patient and good in bothering with my confused affairs, and pulling me out of a hole every little while. it makes me lazy, the way that steel stock is rising. if i were lazier--like rice--nothing could keep me from retiring. but i work right along, like a poor person. i shall figure up the rise, as the figures come in, and push up my literary prices accordingly, till i get my literature up to where nobody can afford it but the family. (n. b.--look here, are you charging storage? i am not going to stand that, you know.) meantime, i note those encouraging illogical words of yours about my not worrying because i am to be rich when i am ; why didn't you have cheiro make it , so that i could have plenty of room? it would be jolly good if some one should succeed in making a play out of "is he dead?"--[clemens himself had attempted to make a play out of his story "is he dead?" and had forwarded the ms. to rogers. later he wrote: "put 'is he dead?' in the fire. god will bless you. i too. i started to convince myself that i could write a play, or couldn't. i'm convinced. nothing can disturb that conviction."] --from what i gather from dramatists, he will have his hands something more than full--but let him struggle, let him struggle. is there some way, honest or otherwise, by which you can get a copy of mayo's play, "pudd'nhead wilson," for me? there is a capable young austrian here who saw it in new york and wants to translate it and see if he can stage it here. i don't think these people here would understand it or take to it, but he thinks it will pay us to try. a couple of london dramatists want to bargain with me for the right to make a high comedy out of the "million-pound note." barkis is willing. this is but one of the briefer letters. most of them were much longer and of more elaborate requirements. also they overflowed with the gaiety of good-fortune and with gratitude. from vienna in clemens wrote: why, it is just splendid! i have nothing to do but sit around and watch you set the hen and hatch out those big broods and make my living for me. don't you wish you had somebody to do the same for you?--a magician who can turn steel add copper and brooklyn gas into gold. i mean to raise your wages again--i begin to feel that i can afford it. i think the hen ought to have a name; she must be called unberufen. that is a german word which is equivalent to it "sh! hush' don't let the spirits hear you!" the superstition is that if you happen to let fall any grateful jubilation over good luck that you've had or are hoping to have you must shut square off and say "unberufen!" and knock wood. the word drives the evil spirits away; otherwise they would divine your joy or your hopes and go to work and spoil your game. set her again--do! oh, look here! you are just like everybody; merely because i am literary you think i'm a commercial somnambulist, and am not watching you with all that money in your hands. bless you, i've got a description of you and a photograph in every police-office in christendom, with the remark appended: "look out for a handsome, tall, slender young man with a gray mustache and courtly manners and an address well calculated to deceive, calling himself by the name of smith." don't you try to get away--it won't work. from the note-book: midnight. at miss bailie's home for english governesses. two comedies & some songs and ballads. was asked to speak & did it. (and rung in the "mexican plug.") a voice. "the princess hohenlohe wishes you to write on her fan." "with pleasure--where is she?" "at your elbow." i turned & took the fan & said, "your highness's place is in a fairy tale; & by & by i mean to write that tale," whereat she laughed a happy girlish laugh, & we moved through the crowd to get to a writing-table--& to get in a strong light so that i could see her better. beautiful little creature, with the dearest friendly ways & sincerities & simplicities & sweetnesses--the ideal princess of the fairy tales. she is or , i judge. mental telegraphy. mrs. clemens was pouring out the coffee this morning; i unfolded the neue freie presse, began to read a paragraph & said: "they've found a new way to tell genuine gems from false----" "by the roentgen ray!" she exclaimed. that is what i was going to say. she had not seen the paper, & there had been no talk about the ray or gems by herself or by me. it was a plain case of telegraphy. no man that ever lived has ever done a thing to please god --primarily. it was done to please himself, then god next. the being who to me is the real god is the one who created this majestic universe & rules it. he is the only originator, the only originator of thoughts; thoughts suggested from within, not from without; the originator of colors & of all their possible combinations; of forces & the laws that govern them; of forms & shapes of all forms-man has never invented a new one. he is the only originator. he made the materials of all things; he made the laws by which, & by which only, man may combine them into the machines & other things which outside influences suggest to him. he made character--man can portray it but not "create" it, for he is the only creator. he, is the perfect artisan, the perfect artist. ccvi a summer in sweden a part of the tragedy of their trip around the world had been the development in jean clemens of a malady which time had identified as epilepsy. the loss of one daughter and the invalidism of another was the burden which this household had now to bear. of course they did not for a moment despair of a cure for the beautiful girl who had been so cruelly stricken, and they employed any agent that promised relief. they decided now to go to london, in the hope of obtaining beneficial treatment. they left vienna at the end of may, followed to the station by a great crowd, who loaded their compartment with flowers and lingered on the platform waving and cheering, some of them in tears, while the train pulled away. leschetizky himself was among them, and wilbrandt, the author of the master of palmyra, and many artists and other notables, "most of whom," writes mrs. clemens, "we shall probably never see again in this world." their vienna sojourn had been one of the most brilliant periods of their life, as well as one of the saddest. the memory of susy had been never absent, and the failing health of jean was a gathering cloud. they stopped a day or two at prague, where they were invited by the prince of thurn and taxis to visit his castle. it gave them a glimpse of the country life of the bohemian nobility which was most interesting. the prince's children were entirely familiar with tom sawyer and huckleberry finn, which they had read both in english and in the translation. they journeyed to london by way of cologne, arriving by the end of may. poultney bigelow was there, and had recently been treated with great benefit by osteopathy (then known as the swedish movements), as practised by heinrick kellgren at sanna, sweden. clemens was all interest concerning kellgren's method and eager to try it for his daughter's malady. he believed she could be benefited, and they made preparation to spend some months at least in sanna. they remained several weeks in london, where they were welcomed with hospitality extraordinary. they had hardly arrived when they were invited by lord salisbury to hatfield house, and by james bryce to portland place, and by canon wilberforce to dean's yard. a rather amusing incident happened at one of the luncheon-parties. canon wilberforce was there and left rather early. when clemens was ready to go there was just one hat remaining. it was not his, and he suspected, by the initials on the inside, that it belonged to canon wilberforce. however, it fitted him exactly and he wore it away. that evening he wrote: prince of wales hotel, de vere gardens, july, , . dear canon wilberforce,--it is p.m. during the past four hours i have not been able to take anything that did not belong to me; during all that time i have not been able to stretch a fact beyond the frontiers of truth try as i might, & meantime, not only my morals have moved the astonishment of all who have come in contact with me, but my manners have gained more compliments than they have been accustomed to. this mystery is causing my family much alarm. it is difficult to account for it. i find i haven't my own hat. have you developed any novelties of conduct since you left mr. murray's, & have they been of a character to move the concern of your friends? i think it must be this that has put me under this happy charm; but, oh dear! i tremble for the other man! sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. scarcely was this note on its way to wilberforce when the following one arrived, having crossed it in transit: july , . dear mr. clemens,--i have been conscious of a vivacity and facility of expression this afternoon beyond the normal and i have just discovered the reason!! i have seen the historic signature "mark twain" in my hat!! doubtless you have been suffering from a corresponding dullness & have wondered why. i departed precipitately, the hat stood on my umbrella and was a new lincoln & bennett--it fitted me exactly and i did not discover the mistake till i got in this afternoon. please forgive me. if you should be passing this way to-morrow will you look in and change hats? or shall i send it to the hotel? i am, very sincerely yrs., dean's yard. basil wilberforce. clemens was demanded by all the bohemian clubs, the white friars, the vagabonds, the savage, the beefsteak, and the authors. he spoke to them, and those "mark twain evenings" have become historic occasions in each of the several institutions that gave him welcome. at the vagabonds he told them the watermelon story, and at the white friars he reviewed the old days when he had been elected to that society; "days," he said, "when all londoners were talking about nothing else than that they had discovered livingstone, and that the lost sir roger tichborne had been found and they were trying him for it." at the savage club, too, he recalled old times and old friends, and particularly that first london visit, his days in the club twenty-seven years before. "i was feet in those days," he said. "now i am feet / and daily diminishing in altitude, and the shrinkage of my principles goes on . . . . irving was here then, is here now. stanley is here, and joe hatton, but charles reade is gone and tom hood and harry lee and canon kingsley. in those days you could have carried kipling around in a lunch-basket; now he fills the world. i was young and foolish then; now i am old and foolisher." at the authors club he paid a special tribute to rudyard kipling, whose dangerous illness in new york city and whose daughter's death had aroused the anxiety and sympathy of the entire american nation. it had done much to bring england and america closer together, clemens said. then he added that he had been engaged the past eight days compiling a pun and had brought it there to lay at their feet, not to ask for their indulgence, but for their applause. it was this: "since england and america have been joined in kipling, may they not be severed in twain." hundreds of puns had been made on his pen-name, but this was probably his first and only attempt, and it still remains the best. they arrived in sweden early in july and remained until october. jean was certainly benefited by the kellgren treatment, and they had for a time the greatest hopes of her complete recovery. clemens became enthusiastic over osteopathy, and wrote eloquently to every one, urging each to try the great new curative which was certain to restore universal health. he wrote long articles on kellgren and his science, largely justified, no doubt, for certainly miraculous benefits were recorded; though clemens was not likely to underestimate a thing which appealed to both his imagination and his reason. writing to twichell he concluded, with his customary optimism over any new benefit: ten years hence no sane man will call a doctor except when the knife must be used--& such cases will be rare. the educated physician will himself be an osteopath. dave will become one after he has finished his medical training. young harmony ought to become one now. i do not believe there is any difference between kellgren's science and osteopathy; but i am sending to america to find out. i want osteopathy to prosper; it is common sense & scientific, & cures a wider range of ailments than the doctor's methods can reach. twichell was traveling in europe that summer, and wrote from switzerland: i seemed ever and anon to see you and me swinging along those glorious alpine woods, staring at the new unfoldings of splendor that every turn brought into view-talking, talking, endlessly talking the days through-days forever memorable to me. that was twenty-one years ago; think of it! we were youngsters then, mark, and how keen our relish of everything was! well, i can enjoy myself now; but not with that zest and rapture. oh, a lot of items of our tramp travel in that i had long forgotten came back to me as we sped through that enchanted region, and if i wasn't on duty with venice i'd stop and set down some of them, but venice must be attended to. for one thing, there is howells's book to be read at such intervals as can be snatched from the quick-time march on which our rustling leader keeps us. however, in venice so far we want to be gazing pretty steadily from morning till night, and by the grace of the gondola we can do it without exhaustion. really i am drunk with venice. but clemens was full of sweden. the skies there and the sunsets be thought surpassed any he had ever known. on an evening in september he wrote: dear joe,--i've no business in here-i ought to be outside. i shall never see another sunset to begin with it this side of heaven. venice? land, what a poor interest that is! this is the place to be. i have seen about sunsets here; & a good of them were away & beyond anything i had ever imagined before for dainty & exquisite & marvelous beauty & infinite change & variety. america? italy? the tropics? they have no notion of what a sunset ought to be. and this one--this unspeakable wonder! it discounts all the rest. it brings the tears, it is so unutterably beautiful. clemens read a book during his stay in sweden which interested him deeply. it was the open question, by elizabeth robbins--a fine study of life's sterner aspects. when he had finished he was moved to write the author this encouraging word: dear miss robbins,--a relative of matthew arnold lent us your 'open question' the other day, and mrs. clemens and i are in your debt. i am not able to put in words my feeling about the book--my admiration of its depth and truth and wisdom and courage, and the fine and great literary art and grace of the setting. at your age you cannot have lived the half of the things that are in the book, nor personally penetrated to the deeps it deals in, nor covered its wide horizons with your very own vision--and so, what is your secret? how have you written this miracle? perhaps one must concede that genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience. well, in any case, i am grateful to you. i have not been so enriched by a book for many years, nor so enchanted by one. i seem to be using strong language; still, i have weighed it. sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. ccvii , wellington court clemens himself took the kellgren treatment and received a good deal of benefit. "i have come back in sound condition and braced for work," he wrote macalister, upon his return to london. "a long, steady, faithful siege of it, and i begin now in five minutes." they had settled in a small apartment at , wellington court, albert gate, where they could be near the london branch of the kellgren institution, and he had a workroom with chatto & windus, his publishers. his work, however, was mainly writing speeches, for he was entertained constantly, and it seemed impossible for him to escape. his note-book became a mere jumble of engagements. he did write an article or a story now and then, one of which, "my first lie, and how i got out of it," was made the important christmas feature of the 'new york sunday world.' --[now included in the hadleyburg volume; "complete works."] another article of this time was the "st. joan of arc," which several years later appeared in harper's magazine. this article was originally written as the introduction of the english translation of the official record of the trials and rehabilitation of joan, then about to be elaborately issued. clemens was greatly pleased at being invited to prepare the introduction of this important volume, but a smug person with pedagogic proclivities was in charge of the copy and proceeded to edit mark twain's manuscript; to alter its phrasing to conform to his own ideas of the queen's english. then he had it all nicely typewritten, and returned it to show how much he had improved it, and to receive thanks and compliments. he did not receive any thanks. clemens recorded a few of the remarks that he made when he saw his edited manuscript: i will not deny that my feelings rose to in the shade. "the idea! that this long-eared animal this literary kangaroo this illiterate hostler with his skull full of axle-grease--this....." but i stopped there, for this was not the christian spirit. his would-be editor received a prompt order to return the manuscript, after which clemens wrote a letter, some of which will go very well here. dear mr. x.,--i have examined the first page of my amended introduction,--& will begin now & jot down some notes upon your corrections. if i find any changes which shall not seem to me to be improvements i will point out my reasons for thinking so. in this way i may chance to be helpful to you, & thus profit you perhaps as much as you have desired to profit me. first paragraph. "jeanne d'arc." this is rather cheaply pedantic, & is not in very good taste. joan is not known by that name among plain people of our race & tongue. i notice that the name of the deity occurs several times in the brief instalment of the trials which you have favored me with. to be consistent, it will be necessary that you strike out "god" & put in "dieu." do not neglect this. second paragraph. now you have begun on my punctuation. don't you realize that you ought not to intrude your help in a delicate art like that with your limitations? and do you think that you have added just the right smear of polish to the closing clause of the sentence? third paragraph. ditto. fourth paragraph. your word "directly" is misleading; it could be construed to mean "at once." plain clarity is better than ornate obscurity. i note your sensitive marginal remark: "rather unkind to french feelings--referring to moscow." indeed i have not been concerning myself about french feelings, but only about stating the facts. i have said several uncourteous things about the french --calling them a "nation of ingrates" in one place--but you have been so busy editing commas & semicolons that you overlooked them & failed to get scared at them. the next paragraph ends with a slur at the french, but i have reasons for thinking you mistook it for a compliment. it is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. you ought to get it out & dance on it. that would take some of the rigidity out of it. and you ought to use it sometimes; that would help. if you had done this every now & then along through life it would not have petrified. fifth paragraph. thus far i regard this as your masterpiece! you are really perfect in the great art of reducing simple & dignified speech to clumsy & vapid commonplace. sixth paragraph. you have a singularly fine & aristocratic disrespect for homely & unpretending english. every time i use "go back" you get out your polisher & slick it up to "return." "return" is suited only to the drawing-room--it is ducal, & says itself with a simper & a smirk. seventh paragraph. "permission" is ducal. ducal and affected. "her" great days were not "over," they were only half over. didn't you know that? haven't you read anything at all about joan of arc? the truth is you do not pay any attention; i told you on my very first page that the public part of her career lasted two years, & you have forgotten it already. you really must get your mind out and have it repaired; you see yourself that it is all caked together. eighth paragraph. she "rode away to assault & capture a stronghold." very well; but you do not tell us whether she succeeded or not. you should not worry the reader with uncertainties like that. i will remind you once more that clarity is a good thing in literature. an apprentice cannot do better than keep this useful rule in mind. ninth paragraph. "known" history. that word has a polish which is too indelicate for me; there doesn't seem to be any sense in it. this would have surprised me last week. . . . "breaking a lance" is a knightly & sumptuous phrase, & i honor it for its hoary age & for the faithful service it has done in the prize-composition of the school-girl, but i have ceased from employing it since i got my puberty, & must solemnly object to fathering it here. and, besides, it makes me hint that i have broken one of those things before in honor of the maid, an intimation not justified by the facts. i did not break any lances or other furniture; i only wrote a book about her. truly yours, mark twain. it cost me something to restrain myself and say these smooth & half- flattering things of this immeasurable idiot, but i did it, & have never regretted it. for it is higher & nobler to be kind to even a shad like him than just . . . . i could have said hundreds of unpleasant things about this tadpole, but i did not even feel them. yet, in the end, he seems not to have sent the letter. writing it had served every purpose. an important publishing event of was the issue by the american publishing company of mark twain's "complete works in uniform edition." clemens had looked forward to the day when this should be done, perhaps feeling that an assembling of his literary family in symmetrical dress constituted a sort of official recognition of his authorship. brander matthews was selected to write the introduction and prepared a fine "biographical criticism," which pleased clemens, though perhaps he did not entirely agree with its views. himself of a different cast of mind, he nevertheless admired matthews. writing to twichell he said: when you say, "i like brander matthews, he impresses me as a man of parts & power," i back you, right up to the hub--i feel the same way. and when you say he has earned your gratitude for cuffing me for my crimes against the leather-stockings & the vicar i ain't making any objection. dern your gratitude! his article is as sound as a nut. brander knows literature & loves it; he can talk about it & keep his temper; he can state his case so lucidly & so fairly & so forcibly that you have to agree with him even when you don't agree with him; & he can discover & praise such merits as a book has even when they are merely half a dozen diamonds scattered through an acre of mud. and so he has a right to be a critic. to detail just the opposite of the above invoice is to describe me. i haven't any right to criticize books, & i don't do it except when i hate them. i often want to criticize jane austen, but her books madden me so that i can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; & therefore i have to stop every time i begin.'--[once at a dinner given to matthews, mark twain made a speech which consisted almost entirely of intonations of the name "brander matthews" to express various shades of human emotion. it would be hopeless, of course, to attempt to convey in print any idea of this effort, which, by those who heard it, is said to have been a masterpiece of vocalization.] clemens also introduced the "uniform edition" with an author's preface, the jurisdiction of which, he said, was "restricted to furnishing reasons for the publication of the collection as a whole." this is not easy to do. aside from the ordinary commercial reasons i find none that i can offer with dignity: i cannot say without immodesty that the books have merit; i cannot say without immodesty that the public want a "uniform edition"; i cannot say without immodesty that a "uniform edition" will turn the nation toward high ideals & elevated thought; i cannot say without immodesty that a "uniform edition" will eradicate crime, though i think it will. i find no reason that i can offer without immodesty except the rather poor one that i should like to see a "uniform edition" myself. it is nothing; a cat could say it about her kittens. still, i believe i will stand upon that. i have to have a preface & a reason, by law of custom, & the reason which i am putting forward is at least without offense. ccviii mark twain and the wars english troubles in south africa came to a head that autumn. on the day when england's ultimatum to the boers expired clemens wrote: london, . p.m., wednesday, october , . the time is up! without a doubt the first shot in the war is being fired to-day in south africa at this moment. some man had to be the first to fall; he has fallen. whose heart is broken by this murder? for, be he boer or be he briton, it is murder, & england committed it by the hand of chamberlain & the cabinet, the lackeys of cecil rhodes & his forty thieves, the south africa company. mark twain would naturally sympathize with the boer--the weaker side, the man defending his home. he knew that for the sake of human progress england must conquer and must be upheld, but his heart was all the other way. in january, , he wrote a characteristic letter to twichell, which conveys pretty conclusively his sentiments concerning the two wars then in progress. dear joe,--apparently we are not proposing to set the filipinos free & give their islands to them; & apparently we are not proposing to hang the priests & confiscate their property. if these things are so the war out there has no interest for me. i have just been examining chapter lxx of following the equator to see if the boer's old military effectiveness is holding out. it reads curiously as if it had been written about the present war. i believe that in the next chapter my notion of the boer was rightly conceived. he is popularly called uncivilized; i do not know why. happiness, food, shelter, clothing, wholesome labor, modest & rational ambitions, honesty, kindliness, hospitality, love of freedom & limitless courage to fight for it, composure & fortitude in time of disaster, patience in time of hardship & privation, absence of noise & brag in time of victory, contentment with humble & peaceful life void of insane excitements--if there is a higher & better form of civilization than this i am not aware of it & do not know where to look for it. i suppose that we have the habit of imagining that a lot of artistic & intellectual & other artificialities must be added or it isn't complete. we & the english have these latter; but as we lack the great bulk of those others i think the boer civilization is the best of the two. my idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing & full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses, & hypocrisies. provided we could get something better in the place of it. but that is not possible perhaps. poor as it is, it is better than real savagery, therefore we must stand by it, extend it, & (in public) praise it. and so we must not utter any hurtful word about england in these days, nor fail to hope that she will win in this war, for her defeat & fall would be an irremediable disaster for the mangy human race. naturally, then, i am for england; but she is profoundly in the wrong, joe, & no (instructed) englishman doubts it. at least that is my belief. writing to howells somewhat later, he calls the conflict in south africa, a "sordid and criminal war," and says that every day he is writing (in his head) bitter magazine articles against it. but i have to stop with that. even if wrong--& she is wrong england must be upheld. he is an enemy of the human race who shall speak against her now. why was the human race created? or at least why wasn't something creditable created in place of it? . . . i talk the war with both sides--always waiting until the other man introduces the topic. then i say, "my head is with the briton, but my heart & such rags of morals as i have are with the boer--now we will talk, unembarrassed and without prejudice." and so we discuss & have no trouble. i notice that god is on both sides in this war; thus history repeats itself. but i am the only person who has noticed this; everybody here thinks he is playing the game for this side, & for this side only. clemens wrote one article for anonymous publication in the times. but when the manuscript was ready to mail in an envelope stamped and addressed to moberly bell--he reconsidered and withheld it. it still lies in the envelope with the accompanying letter, which says: don't give me away, whether you print it or not. but i think you ought to print it and get up a squabble, for the weather is just suitable. ccix plasmon, and a new magazine clemens was not wholly wedded to osteopathy. the financial interest which he had taken in the new milk albumen, "a food for invalids," tended to divide his faith and make him uncertain as to which was to be the chief panacea for all ills--osteopathy or plasmon. macalister, who was deeply interested in the plasmon fortunes, was anxious to get the product adopted by the army. he believed, if he could get an interview with the medical director-general, he could convince him of its merits. discussing the matter with clemens, the latter said: "macalister, you are going at it from the wrong end. you can't go direct to that man, a perfect stranger, and convince him of anything. who is his nearest friend?" macalister knew a man on terms of social intimacy with the official. clemens said, "that is the man to speak to the director-general." "but i don't know him, either," said macalister. "very good. do you know any one who does know him?" "yes, i know his most intimate friend." "then he is the man for you to approach. convince him that plasmon is what the army needs, that the military hospitals are suffering for it. let him understand that what you want is to get this to the director-general, and in due time it will get to him in the proper way. you'll see." this proved to be a true prophecy. it was only a little while until the british army had experimented with plasmon and adopted it. macalister reported the success of the scheme to clemens, and out of it grew the story entitled, "two little tales," published in november of the following year ( ) in the century magazine. perhaps the reader will remember that in the "two little tales" the emperor is very ill and the lowest of all his subjects knows a certain remedy, but he cannot seek the emperor direct, so he wisely approaches him through a series of progressive stages--finally reaching and curing his stricken majesty. clemens had the courage of his investments. he adopted plasmon as his own daily food, and induced various members of the family to take it in its more palatable forms, one of these being a preparation of chocolate. he kept the reading-table by his bed well stocked with a variety of the products and invited various callers to try a complimentary sample lot. it was really an excellent and harmless diet, and both the company and its patients would seem to have prospered--perhaps are prospering still. there was another business opportunity came along just at this time. s. s. mcclure was in england with a proposition for starting a new magazine whose complexion was to be peculiarly american, with mark twain as its editor. the magazine was to be called 'the universal', and by the proposition clemens was to receive a tenth interest in it for his first year's work, and an added twentieth interest for each of the two succeeding years, with a guarantee that his shares should not earn him less than five thousand dollars the first year, with a proportionate increase as his holdings grew. the scheme appealed to clemens, it being understood in the beginning that he was to give very little time to the work, with the privilege of doing it at his home, wherever that might happen to be. he wrote of the matter to mr. rogers, explaining in detail, and rogers replied, approving the plan. mr. rogers said he knew that he [rogers] would have to do most of the work in editing the magazine, and further added: one thing i shall insist upon, however, if i have anything to do with the matter, and it is this: that when you have made up your mind on the subject you will stick to it. i have not found in your composition that element of stubbornness which is a constant source of embarrassment to me in all friendly and social ways, but which, when applied to certain lines of business, brings in the dollar and fifty-cent pieces. if you accept the position, of course that means that you have to come to this country. if you do, the yachting will be a success. there was considerable correspondence with mcclure over the new periodical. in one letter clemens set forth his general views of the matter quite clearly: let us not deceive any one, nor allow any one to deceive himself, if it can be prevented. this is not to be comic magazine. it is to be simply a good, clean, wholesome collection of well-written & enticing literary products, like the other magazines of its class; not setting itself to please but one of man's moods, but all of them. it will not play but one kind of music, but all kinds. i should not be able to edit a comic periodical satisfactorily, for lack of interest in the work. i value humor highly, & am constitutionally fond of it, but i should not like it as a steady diet. for its own best interests, humor should take its outings in grave company; its cheerful dress gets heightened color from the proximity of sober hues. for me to edit a comic magazine would be an incongruity & out of character, for of the twenty-three books which i have written eighteen do not deal in humor as their chiefs feature, but are half & half admixtures of fun & seriousness. i think i have seldom deliberately set out to be humorous, but have nearly always allowed the humor to drop in or stay out, according to its fancy. although i have many times been asked to write something humorous for an editor or a publisher i have had wisdom enough to decline; a person could hardly be humorous with the other man watching him like that. i have never tried to write a humorous lecture; i have only tried to write serious ones--it is the only way not to succeed. i shall write for this magazine every time the spirit moves me; but i look for my largest entertainment in editing. i have been edited by all kinds of people for more than thirty-eight years; there has always been somebody in authority over my manuscript & privileged to improve it; this has fatigued me a good deal, & i have often longed to move up from the dock to the bench & rest myself and fatigue others. my opportunity is come, but i hope i shall not abuse it overmuch. i mean to do my best to make a good magazine; i mean to do my whole duty, & not shirk any part of it. there are plenty of distinguished artists, novelists, poets, story-tellers, philosophers, scientists, explorers, fighters, hunters, followers of the sea, & seekers of adventure; & with these to do the hard & the valuable part of the work with the pen & the pencil it will be comfort & joy to me to walk the quarter-deck & superintend. meanwhile mcclure's enthusiasm had had time to adjust itself to certain existing facts. something more than a month later he wrote from america at considerable length, setting forth the various editorial duties and laying stress upon the feature of intimate physical contact with the magazine. he went into the matter of the printing schedule, the various kinds of paper used, the advertising pages, illustrations--into all the detail, indeed, which a practical managing editor must compass in his daily rounds. it was pretty evident that clemens would not be able to go sailing about on mr. rogers's yacht or live at will in london or new york or vienna or elmira, but that he would be more or less harnessed to a revolving chair at an editorial desk, the thing which of all fates he would be most likely to dread the scheme appears to have died there--the correspondence to have closed. somewhat of the inducement in the mcclure scheme had been the thought in clemens's mind that it would bring him back to america. in a letter to mr. rogers (january , ) he said, "i am tired to death of this everlasting exile." mrs. clemens often wrote that he was restlessly impatient to return. they were, in fact, constantly discussing the practicability of returning to their own country now and opening the hartford home. clemens was ready to do that or to fall in with any plan that would bring him across the water and settle him somewhere permanently. he was tired of the wandering life they had been leading. besides the long trip of ' and ' they had moved two or three times a year regularly since leaving hartford, nine years before. it seemed to him that they were always packing and unpacking. "the poor man is willing to live anywhere if we will only let him 'stay put," wrote mrs. clemens, but he did want to settle in his own land. mrs. clemens, too, was weary with wandering, but the hartford home no longer held any attraction for her. there had been a time when her every letter dwelt on their hope of returning to it. now the thought filled her with dread. to her sister she wrote: do you think we can live through the first going into the house in hartford? i feel if we had gotten through the first three months all might be well, but consider the first night. the thought of the responsibility of that great house--the taking up again of the old life-disheartened her, too. she had added years and she had not gained in health or strength. when i was comparatively young i found the burden of that house very great. i don't think i was ever fitted for housekeeping. i dislike the practical part of it so much. i hate it when the servants don't do well, and i hate the correcting them. yet no one ever had better discipline in her domestic affairs or ever commanded more devoted service. her strength of character and the proportions of her achievement show large when we consider this confession. they planned to return in the spring, but postponed the date for sailing. jean was still under kellgren's treatment, and, though a cure had been promised her, progress was discouragingly slow. they began to look about for summer quarters in or near london. ccx london social affairs all this time clemens had been tossing on the london social tide. there was a call for him everywhere. no distinguished visitor of whatever profession or rank but must meet mark twain. the king of sweden was among his royal conquests of that season. he was more happy with men of his own kind. he was often with moberly bell, editor of the times; e. a. abbey, the painter; sir henry lucy, of punch (toby, m.p.); james bryce, and herbert gladstone; and there were a number of brilliant irishmen who were his special delight. once with mrs. clemens he dined with the author of his old favorite, 'european morals', william e. h. lecky. lady gregory was there and sir dennis fitz-patrick; who had been governor-general at lahore when they were in india, and a number of other irish ladies and gentlemen. it was a memorable evening. to twichell clemens wrote: joe, do you know the irish gentleman & the irish lady, the scotch gentleman & the scotch lady? these are darlings, every one. night before last it was all irish-- . one would have to travel far to match their ease & sociability & animation & sparkle & absence of shyness & self-consciousness. it was american in these fine qualities. this was at mr. lecky's. he is irish, you know. last night it was irish again, at lady gregory's. lord roberts is irish, & sir william butler, & kitchener, i think, & a disproportion of the other prominent generals are of irish & scotch breed keeping up the traditions of wellington & sir colin campbell, of the mutiny. you will have noticed that in s. a., as in the mutiny, it is usually the irish & scotch that are placed in the forefront of the battle.... sir william butler said, "the celt is the spearhead of the british lance." he mentions the news from the african war, which had been favorable to england, and what a change had come over everything in consequence. the dinner-parties had been lodges of sorrow and depressing. now everybody was smiling again. in a note-book entry of this time he wrote: relief of mafeking (may , ). the news came at . p.m. before all london was in the streets, gone mad with joy. by then the news was all over the american continent. clemens had been talking copyright a good deal in london, and introducing it into his speeches. finally, one day he was summoned before a committee of the house of lords to explain his views. his old idea that the product of a man's brain is his property in perpetuity and not for any term of years had not changed, and they permitted him to dilate on this (to them) curious doctrine. the committee consisted of lords monkswell, knutsford, avebury, farrar, and thwing. when they asked for his views he said: "in my opinion the copyright laws of england and america need only the removal of the forty-two-year limit and the return to perpetual copyright to be perfect. i consider that at least one of the reasons advanced in justification of limited copyright is fallacious--namely, the one which makes a distinction between an author's property and real estate, and pretends that the two are not created, produced, or acquired in the same way, thus warranting a different treatment of the two by law." continuing, he dwelt on the ancient doctrine that there was no property in an idea, showing how the far greater proportion of all property consisted of nothing more than elaborated ideas--the steamship, locomotive, telephone, the vast buildings in the world, how all of these had been constructed upon a basic idea precisely as a book is constructed, and were property only as a book is property, and therefore rightly subject to the same laws. he was carefully and searchingly examined by that shrewd committee. he kept them entertained and interested and left them in good-nature, even if not entirely converted. the papers printed his remarks, and london found them amusing. a few days after the copyright session, clemens, responding to the toast, "literature," at the royal literary fund banquet, made london laugh again, and early in june he was at the savoy hotel welcoming sir henry irving back to england after one of his successful american tours. on the fourth of july ( ) clemens dined with the lord chief-justice, and later attended an american banquet at the hotel cecil. he arrived late, when a number of the guests were already going. they insisted, however, that he make a speech, which he did, and considered the evening ended. it was not quite over. a sequel to his "luck" story, published nine years before, suddenly developed. to go back a little, the reader may recall that "luck" was a story which twichell had told him as being supposedly true. the hero of it was a military officer who had risen to the highest rank through what at least seemed to be sheer luck, including a number of fortunate blunders. clemens thought the story improbable, but wrote it and laid it away for several years, offering it at last in the general house-cleaning which took place after the first collapse of the machine. it was published in harper's magazine for august, , and something less than a year later, in rome, an english gentleman--a new acquaintance--said to him: "mr. clemens, shall you go to england?" "very likely." "shall you take your tomahawk with you?" "why--yes, if it shall seem best." "well, it will. be advised. take it with you." "why?" "because of that sketch of yours entitled 'luck.' that sketch is current in england, and you will surely need your tomahawk." "what makes you think so?" "i think so because the hero of the sketch will naturally want your scalp, and will probably apply for it. be advised. take your tomahawk along." "why, even with it i sha'n't stand any chance, because i sha'n't know him when he applies, and he will have my scalp before i know what his errand is." "come, do you mean to say that you don't know who the hero of that sketch is?" "indeed i haven't any idea who the hero of the sketch is. who is it?" his informant hesitated a moment, then named a name of world-wide military significance. as mask twain finished his fourth of july speech at the cecil and started to sit down a splendidly uniformed and decorated personage at his side said: "mr. clemens, i have been wanting to know you a long time," and he was looking down into the face of the hero of "luck." "i was caught unprepared," he said in his notes of it. "i didn't sit down--i fell down. i didn't have my tomahawk, and i didn't know what would happen. but he was, composed, and pretty soon i got composed and we had a good, friendly time. if he had ever heard of that sketch of mine he did not manifest it in any way, and at twelve, midnight, i took my scalp home intact." ccxi dollis hill and home it was early in july, , that they removed to dollis hill house, a beautiful old residence surrounded by trees on a peaceful hilltop, just outside of london. it was literally within a stone's-throw of the city limits, yet it was quite rural, for the city had not overgrown it then, and it retained all its pastoral features--a pond with lily-pads, the spreading oaks, the wide spaces of grassy lawn. gladstone, an intimate friend of the owner, had made it a favorite retreat at one period of his life, and the place to-day is converted into a public garden called gladstone park. the old english diplomat used to drive out and sit in the shade of the trees and read and talk and translate homer, and pace the lawn as he planned diplomacy, and, in effect, govern the english empire from that retired spot. clemens, in some memoranda made at the moment, doubts if gladstone was always at peace in his mind in this retirement. "was he always really tranquil within," he says, "or was he only externally so--for effect? we cannot know; we only know that his rustic bench under his favorite oak has no bark on its arms. facts like this speak louder than words." the red-brick residential wave of london was still some distance away in . clemens says: the rolling sea of green grass still stretches away on every hand, splotches with shadows of spreading oaks in whose black coolness flocks of sheep lie peacefully dreaming. dreaming of what? that they are in london, the metropolis of the world, post-office district, n. w.? indeed no. they are not aware of it. i am aware of it, but that is all. it is not possible to realize it. for there is no suggestion of city here; it is country, pure & simple, & as still & reposeful as is the bottom of the sea. they all loved dollis hill. mrs. clemens wrote as if she would like to remain forever in that secluded spot. it is simply divinely beautiful & peaceful; . . . the great old trees are beyond everything. i believe nowhere in the world do you find such trees as in england . . . . jean has a hammock swung between two such great trees, & on the other side of a little pond, which is full of white & yellow pond-lilies, there is tall grass & trees & clara & jean go there in the afternoons, spread down a rug on the grass in the shade & read & sleep. they all spent most of their time outdoors at dollis hill under those spreading trees. clemens to twichell in midsummer wrote: i am the only person who is ever in the house in the daytime, but i am working & deep in the luxury of it. but there is one tremendous defect. livy is all so enchanted with the place & so in love with it that she doesn't know how she is going to tear herself away from it. much company came to them at dollis hill. friends drove out from london, and friends from america came often, among them--the sages, prof. willard fiske, and brander matthews with his family. such callers were served with tea and refreshment on the lawn, and lingered, talking and talking, while the sun got lower and the shadows lengthened, reluctant to leave that idyllic spot. "dollis hill comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home i ever occupied," he wrote when the summer was about over. but there was still a greater attraction than dollis hill. toward the end of summer they willingly left that paradise, for they had decided at last to make that home-returning voyage which had invited them so long. they were all eager enough to go--clemens more eager than the rest, though he felt a certain sadness, too, in leaving the tranquil spot which in a brief summer they had so learned to love. writing to w. h. helm, a london newspaper man who had spent pleasant hours with him chatting in the shade, he said: . . . the packing & fussing & arranging have begun, for the removal to america &, by consequence, the peace of life is marred & its contents & satisfactions are departing. there is not much choice between a removal & a funeral; in fact, a removal is a funeral, substantially, & i am tired of attending them. they closed dollis hill, spent a few days at brown's hotel, and sailed for america, on the minnehaha, october , , bidding, as clemens believed, and hoped, a permanent good-by to foreign travel. they reached new york on the th, triumphantly welcomed after their long nine years of wandering. how glad mark twain was to get home may be judged from his remark to one of the many reporters who greeted him. "if i ever get ashore i am going to break both of my legs so i can't, get away again." following the equator a journey around the world by mark twain samuel l. clemens hartford, connecticut this book is affectionately inscribed to my young friend harry rogers with recognition of what he is, and apprehension of what he may become unless he form himself a little more closely upon the model of the author. the pudd'nhead maxims. these wisdoms are for the luring of youth toward high moral altitudes. the author did not gather them from practice, but from observation. to be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble. part contents chapter i. the party--across america to vancouver--on board the warrimo--steamer chairs-the captain-going home under a cloud--a gritty purser--the brightest passenger--remedy for bad habits--the doctor and the lumbago --a moral pauper--limited smoking--remittance-men. chapter ii. change of costume--fish, snake, and boomerang stories--tests of memory --a brahmin expert--general grant's memory--a delicately improper tale chapter iii. honolulu--reminiscences of the sandwich islands--king liholiho and his royal equipment--the tabu--the population of the island--a kanaka diver --cholera at honolulu--honolulu; past and present--the leper colony chapter iv. leaving honolulu--flying-fish--approaching the equator--why the ship went slow--the front yard of the ship--crossing the equator--horse billiards or shovel board--the waterbury watch--washing decks--ship painters--the great meridian--the loss of a day--a babe without a birthday chapter v. a lesson in pronunciation--reverence for robert burns--the southern cross--troublesome constellations--victoria for a name--islands on the map--alofa and fortuna--recruiting for the queensland plantations --captain warren's notebook--recruiting not thoroughly popular chapter vi. missionaries obstruct business--the sugar planter and the kanaka--the planter's view--civilizing the kanaka the missionary's view--the result --repentant kanakas--wrinkles--the death rate in queensland chapter vii. the fiji islands--suva--the ship from duluth--going ashore--midwinter in fiji--seeing the governor--why fiji was ceded to england--old time fijians--convicts among the fijians--a case where marriage was a failure immortality with limitations chapter viii. a wilderness of islands--two men without a country--a naturalist from new zealand--the fauna of australasia--animals, insects, and birds--the ornithorhynchus--poetry and plagiarism chapter ix. close to australia--porpoises at night--entrance to sydney harbor--the loss of the duncan dunbar--the harbor--the city of sydney--spring-time in australia--the climate--information for travelers--the size of australia --a dust-storm and hot wind chapter x. the discovery of australia--transportation of convicts--discipline --english laws, ancient and modern--flogging prisoners to death--arrival of settlers--new south wales corps--rum currency--intemperance everywhere $ , for one gallon of rum--development of the country--immense resources chapter xi. hospitality of english-speaking people--writers and their gratitude--mr. gane and the panegyrics--population of sydney an english city with american trimming--"squatters"--palaces and sheep kingdoms--wool and mutton--australians and americans--costermonger pronunciation--england is "home"--table talk--english and colonial audiences chapter xii. mr. x., a missionary--why christianity makes slow progress in india--a large dream--hindoo miracles and legends--sampson and hanuman--the sandstone ridge--where are the gates? chapter xiii. public works in australasia--botanical garden of sydney--four special socialties--the government house--a governor and his functions--the admiralty house--the tour of the harbor--shark fishing--cecil rhodes' shark and his first fortune--free board for sharks. chapter xiv. bad health--to melbourne by rail--maps defective--the colony of victoria --a round-trip ticket from sydney--change cars, from wide to narrow gauge, a peculiarity at albury--customs-fences--"my word"--the blue mountains--rabbit piles--government r. r. restaurants--duchesses for waiters--"sheep-dip"--railroad coffee--things seen and not seen chapter xv. wagga-wagga--the tichborne claimant--a stock mystery--the plan of the romance--the realization--the henry bascom mystery--bascom hall--the author's death and funeral chapter xvi. melbourne and its attractions--the melbourne cup races--cup day--great crowds--clothes regardless of cost--the australian larrikin--is he dead? australian hospitality--melbourne wool-brokers--the museums--the palaces --the origin of melbourne chapter xvii. the british empire--its exports and imports--the trade of australia--to adelaide--broken hill silver mine--a roundabout road--the scrub and its possibilities for the novelist--the aboriginal tracker--a test case--how does one cow-track differ from another? chapter xviii. gum trees--unsociable trees--gorse and broom--a universal defect--an adventurer--wanted l , got l , , --a vast land scheme--the smash-up--the corpse got up and danced--a unique business by one man --buying the kangaroo skin--the approach to adelaide--everything comes to him who waits--a healthy religious sphere--what is the matter with the specter? chapter xix. the botanical gardens--contributions from all countries--the zoological gardens of adelaide--the laughing jackass--the dingo--a misnamed province--telegraphing from melbourne to san francisco--a mania for holidays--the temperature--the death rate--celebration of the reading of the proclamation of --some old settlers at the commemoration--their staying powers--the intelligence of the aboriginal --the antiquity of the boomerang chapter xx. a caller--a talk about old times--the fox hunt--an accurate judgment of an idiot--how we passed the custom officers in italy chapter xxi. the "weet-weet"--keeping down the population--victoria--killing the aboriginals--pioneer days in queensland--material for a drama--the bush --pudding with arsenic revenge--a right spirit but a wrong method--death of donga billy chapter xxii. continued description of aboriginals--manly qualities--dodging balls --feats of spring--jumping--where the kangaroo learned its art 'well digging--endurance--surgery--artistic abilities--fennimore cooper's last chance--australian slang chapter xxiii. to horsham (colony of victoria)--description of horsham--at the hotel --pepper tree-the agricultural college, forty pupils--high temperature --width of road in chains, perches, etc.--the bird with a forgettable name--the magpie and the lady--fruit trees--soils--sheep shearing--to stawell --gold mining country--$ , per month income and able to keep house --fine grapes and wine--the dryest community on earth--the three sisters --gum trees and water chapter xxiv. road to ballarat--the city--great gold strike, --rush for australia --"great nuggets"--taxation--revolt and victory--peter lalor and the eureka stockade--"pencil mark"--fine statuary at ballarat--population --ballarat english chapter xxv. bound for bendigo--the priest at castlemaine--time saved by walking --description of bendigo--a valuable nugget--perseverence and success --mr. blank and his influence--conveyance of an idea--i had to like the irishman--corrigan castle, and the mark twain club--my bascom mystery solved chapter xxvi. where new zealand is--but few know--things people think they know--the yale professor and his visitor from n. z. chapter xxvii. the south pole swell--tasmania--extermination of the natives--the picture proclamation--the conciliator--the formidable sixteen chapter xxviii. when the moment comes the man appears--why ed. jackson called on commodore vanderbilt--their interview--welcome to the child of his friend --a big time but under inspection--sent on important business--a visit to the boys on the boat chapter xxix: tasmania, early days--description of the town of hobart--an englishman's love of home surroundings--neatest city on earth--the museum--a parrot with an acquired taste--glass arrow beads--refuge for the indigent too healthy chapter xxx. arrival at bluff, n. z.--where the rabbit plague began--the natural enemy of the rabbit--dunedin--a lovely town--visit to dr. hockin--his museum --a liquified caterpillar--the unperfected tape worm--the public museum and picture chapter xxxi. the express train--"a hell of a hotel at maryborough" --clocks and bells--railroad service. chapter xxxii. description of the town of christ church--a fine museum--jade-stone trinkets--the great man--the first maori in new zealand--women voters --"person" in new zealand law includes woman--taming an ornithorhynchus --a voyage in the 'flora' from lyttelton--cattle stalls for everybody --a wonderful time. chapter xxxiii. the town of nelson--"the mongatapu murders," the great event of the town --burgess' confession--summit of mount eden--rotorua and the hot lakes and geysers--thermal springs district--kauri gum--tangariwa mountains chapter xxxiv. the bay of gisborne--taking in passengers by the yard arm--the green ballarat fly--false teeth--from napier to hastings by the ballarat fly train--kauri trees--a case of mental telegraphy chapter xxxv. fifty miles in four hours--comfortable cars--town of wauganui--plenty of maoris--on the increase--compliments to the maoris--the missionary ways all wrong--the tabu among the maoris--a mysterious sign--curious war-monuments--wellington chapter xxxvi. the poems of mrs. moore--the sad fate of william upson--a fellow traveler imitating the prince of wales--a would-be dude--arrival at sydney --curious town names with poem chapter xxxvii. from sydney for ceylon--a lascar crew--a fine ship--three cats and a basket of kittens--dinner conversations--veuve cliquot wine--at anchor in king george's sound albany harbor--more cats--a vulture on board--nearing the equator again--dressing for dinner--ceylon, hotel bristol--servant brampy--a feminine man--japanese jinriksha or cart--scenes in ceylon--a missionary school--insincerity of clothes chapter xxxviii. steamer rosettes to bombay--limes cents a barrel--bombay, a bewitching city--descriptions of people and dress--woman as a road decoration --india, the land of dreams and romance--fourteen porters to carry baggage --correcting a servant--killing a slave--arranging a bedroom--three hours' work and a terrible racket--the bird of birds, the indian crow chapter xxxix. god vishnu, names--change of titles or hunting for an heir--bombay as a kaleidoscope--the native's man servant--servants' recommendations--how manuel got his name and his english--satan--a visit from god chapter xl. the government house at malabar point--mansion of kumar shri samatsin hji bahadur--the indian princess--a difficult game--wardrobe and jewels --ceremonials--decorations when leaving--the towers of silence--a funeral chapter xli. jain temple--mr. roychand's bungalow--a decorated six-gun prince--human fireworks--european dress, past and present--complexions--advantages with the zulu--festivities at the bungalow-nautch dancers--entrance of the prince--address to the prince chapter xlii. a hindoo betrothal, midnight, sleepers on the ground, home of the bride of twelve years dressed as a boy--illumination nautch girls--imitating snakes--later--illuminated porch filled with sleepers--the plague chapter xliii murder trial in bombay--confidence swindlers--some specialities of india --the plague, juggernaut, suttee, etc.--everything on gigantic scale --india first in everything-- states, more custom houses than cats--rich ground for thug society chapter xliv. thug book--supplies for traveling, bedding, and other freight--scene at railway station--making way for white man--waiting passengers, high and low caste, touch in the cars--our car--beds made up--dreaming of thugs --baroda--meet friends--indian well--the old town--narrow streets--a mad elephant chapter xlv. elephant riding--howdahs--the new palace--the prince's excursion--gold and silver artillery--a vice-royal visit--remarkable dog--the bench show --augustin daly's back door--fakeer chapter xlvi. the thugs--government efforts to exterminate them--choking a victim a fakeer spared--thief strangled chapter xlvii. thugs, continued--record of murders--a joy of hunting and killing men --gordon gumming--killing an elephant--family affection among thugs --burial places chapter xlviii. starting for allahabad--lower berths in sleepers--elderly ladies have preference of berths--an american lady takes one anyhow--how smythe lost his berth--how he got even--the suttee chapter xlix. pyjamas--day scene in india--clothed in a turban and a pocket handkerchief--land parceled out--established village servants--witches in families--hereditary midwifery--destruction of girl babies--wedding display--tiger-persuader--hailstorm discourages--the tyranny of the sweeper--elephant driver--water carrier--curious rivers--arrival at allahabad--english quarter--lecture hall like a snowstorm--private carriages--a milliner--early morning--the squatting servant--a religious fair chapter l. on the road to benares--dust and waiting--the bejeweled crowd--a native prince and his guard--zenana lady--the extremes of fashion--the hotel at benares--an annex a mile away--doors in india--the peepul tree--warning against cold baths--a strange fruit--description of benares--the beginning of creation--pilgrims to benares--a priest with a good business stand--protestant missionary--the trinity brahma, shiva, and vishnu --religion the business at benares chapter li. benares a religious temple--a guide for pilgrims to save time in securing salvation chapter lii. a curious way to secure salvation--the banks of the ganges--architecture represents piety--a trip on the river--bathers and their costumes --drinking the water--a scientific test of the nasty purifier--hindoo faith in the ganges--a cremation--remembrances of the suttee--all life sacred except human life--the goddess bhowanee, and the sacrificers--sacred monkeys--ugly idols everywhere--two white minarets--a great view with a monkey in it--a picture on the water chapter liii. still in benares--another living god--why things are wonderful--sri utterly perfect--how he came so--our visit to sri--a friendly deity exchanging autographs and books--sri's pupil--an interesting man --reverence and irreverence--dancing in a sepulchre chapter liv. rail to calcutta--population--the "city of palaces"--a fluted candle-stick--ochterlony--newspaper correspondence--average knowledge of countries--a wrong idea of chicago--calcutta and the black hole --description of the horrors--those who lived--the botanical gardens--the afternoon turnout--grand review--military tournament--excursion on the hoogly--the museum--what winter means calcutta chapter lv on the road again--flannels in order--across country--from greenland's icy mountain--swapping civilization--no field women in india--how it is in other countries--canvas-covered cars--the tiger country--my first hunt some elephants get away--the plains of india--the ghurkas--women for pack-horses--a substitute for a cab--darjeeling--the hotel--the highest thing in the himalayas--the club--kinchinjunga and mt. everest --thibetans--the prayer wheel--people going to the bazar chapter lvi. on the road again--the hand-car--a thirty-five-mile slide--the banyan tree--a dramatic performance--the railroad--the half-way house--the brain fever bird--the coppersmith bird--nightingales and cue owls chapter lvii. india the most extraordinary country on earth--nothing forgotten--the land of wonders--annual statistics everywhere about violence--tiger vs. man--a handsome fight--annual man killing and tiger killing--other animals--snakes--insurance and snake tables--the cobra bite--muzaffurpore --dinapore--a train that stopped for gossip--six hours for thirty-five miles--a rupee to the engineer--ninety miles an hour--again to benares, the piety hive to lucknow chapter lviii. the great mutiny--the massacre in cawnpore--terrible scenes in lucknow --the residency--the siege chapter lix. a visit to the residency--cawnpore--the adjutant bird and the hindoo corpse--the tai mahal--the true conception--the ice storm--true gems --syrian fountains--an exaggerated niagara chapter lx. to lahore--the governor's elephant--taking a ride-no danger from collision--rawal pindi--back to delhi--an orientalized englishman --monkeys and the paint-pot--monkey crying over my note-book--arrival at jeypore--in rajputana--watching servants--the jeypore hotel--our old and new satan--satan as a liar--the museum--a street show--blocks of houses --a religious procession chapter lxi. methods in american deaf and dumb asylums--methods in the public schools --a letter from a youth in punjab--highly educated service--a damage to the country--a little book from calcutta--writing poor english --embarrassed by a beggar girl--a specimen letter--an application for employment--a calcutta school examination--two samples of literature chapter lxii. sail from calcutta to madras--thence to ceylon--thence for mauritius --the indian ocean--our captain's peculiarity the scot has one too--the flying-fish that went hunting in the field--fined for smuggling--lots of pets on board--the color of the sea--the most important member of nature's family--the captain's story of cold weather--omissions in the ship's library--washing decks--pyjamas on deck--the cat's toilet--no interest in the bulletin--perfect rest--the milky way and the magellan clouds--mauritius--port louis--a hot country--under french control --a variety of people and complexions--train to curepipe--a wonderful office-holder--the wooden peg ornament--the prominent historical event of mauritius--"paul and virginia"--one of virginia's wedding gifts--heaven copied after mauritius--early history of mauritius--quarantines --population of all kinds--what the world consists of--where russia and germany are--a picture of milan cathedral--newspapers--the language--best sugar in the world--literature of mauritius chapter lxiii. port louis--matches no good--good roads--death notices--why european nations rob each other--what immigrants to mauritius do--population --labor wages--the camaron--the palmiste and other eatables--monkeys--the cyclone of --mauritius a sunday landscape chapter lxiv. the steamer "arundel castle"--poor beds in ships--the beds in noah's ark --getting a rest in europe--ship in sight--mozambique channel--the engineer and the band--thackeray's "madagascar"--africanders going home --singing on the after deck--an out-of-place story--dynamite explosion in johannesburg--entering delagoa bay--ashore--a hot winter--small town--no sights--no carriages--working women--barnum's purchase of shakespeare's birthplace, jumbo, and the nelson monument--arrival at durban chapter lxv. royal hotel durban--bells that did not ring--early inquiries for comforts --change of temperature after sunset-rickhaws--the hotel chameleon --natives not out after the bell--preponderance of blacks in natal--hair fashions in natal--zulus for police--a drive round the berea--the cactus and other trees--religion a vital matter--peculiar views about babies --zulu kings--a trappist monastery--transvaal politics--reasons why the trouble came about chapter lxvi. jameson over the border--his defeat and capture--sent to england for trial--arrest of citizens by the boers--commuted sentences--final release of all but two--interesting days for a stranger--hard to understand either side--what the reformers expected to accomplish--how they proposed to do it--testimonies a year later--a "woman's part"--the truth of the south african situation--"jameson's ride"--a poem chapter lxvil jameson's raid--the reform committee's difficult task--possible plans --advice that jameson ought to have--the war of and its lessons --statistics of losses of the combatants--jameson's battles--losses on both sides--the military errors--how the warfare should have been carried on to be successful chapter lxviii. judicious mr. rhodes--what south africa consists of--johannesburg--the gold mines--the heaven of american engineers--what the author knows about mining--description of the boer--what should be expected of him--what was a dizzy jump for rhodes--taxes--rhodesian method of reducing native population--journeying in cape colony--the cars--the country--the weather--tamed blacks--familiar figures in king william's town--boer dress--boer country life--sleeping accommodations--the reformers in boer prison--torturing a black prisoner chapter lxix. an absorbing novelty--the kimberley diamond mines--discovery of diamonds --the wronged stranger--where the gems are--a judicious change of boundary--modern machinery and appliances--thrilling excitement in finding a diamond--testing a diamond--fences--deep mining by natives in the compound--stealing--reward for the biggest diamond--a fortune in wine--the great diamond--office of the de beer co.--sorting the gems --cape town--the most imposing man in british provinces--various reasons for his supremacy--how he makes friends conclusion. table rock--table bay--the castle--government and parliament--the club --dutch mansions and their hospitality--dr. john barry and his doings--on the ship norman--madeira--arrived in southampton following the equator chapter i. a man may have no bad habits and have worse. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. the starting point of this lecturing-trip around the world was paris, where we had been living a year or two. we sailed for america, and there made certain preparations. this took but little time. two members of my family elected to go with me. also a carbuncle. the dictionary says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel. humor is out of place in a dictionary. we started westward from new york in midsummer, with major pond to manage the platform-business as far as the pacific. it was warm work, all the way, and the last fortnight of it was suffocatingly smoky, for in oregon and columbia the forest fires were raging. we had an added week of smoke at the seaboard, where we were obliged awhile for our ship. she had been getting herself ashore in the smoke, and she had to be docked and repaired. we sailed at last; and so ended a snail-paced march across the continent, which had lasted forty days. we moved westward about mid-afternoon over a rippled and summer sea; an enticing sea, a clean and cool sea, and apparently a welcome sea to all on board; it certainly was to the distressful dustings and smokings and swelterings of the past weeks. the voyage would furnish a three-weeks holiday, with hardly a break in it. we had the whole pacific ocean in front of us, with nothing to do but do nothing and be comfortable. the city of victoria was twinkling dim in the deep heart of her smoke-cloud, and getting ready to vanish and now we closed the field-glasses and sat down on our steamer chairs contented and at peace. but they went to wreck and ruin under us and brought us to shame before all the passengers. they had been furnished by the largest furniture-dealing house in victoria, and were worth a couple of farthings a dozen, though they had cost us the price of honest chairs. in the pacific and indian oceans one must still bring his own deck-chair on board or go without, just as in the old forgotten atlantic times--those dark ages of sea travel. ours was a reasonably comfortable ship, with the customary sea-going fare --plenty of good food furnished by the deity and cooked by the devil. the discipline observable on board was perhaps as good as it is anywhere in the pacific and indian oceans. the ship was not very well arranged for tropical service; but that is nothing, for this is the rule for ships which ply in the tropics. she had an over-supply of cockroaches, but this is also the rule with ships doing business in the summer seas--at least such as have been long in service. our young captain was a very handsome man, tall and perfectly formed, the very figure to show up a smart uniform's best effects. he was a man of the best intentions and was polite and courteous even to courtliness. there was a soft and finish about his manners which made whatever place he happened to be in seem for the moment a drawing room. he avoided the smoking room. he had no vices. he did not smoke or chew tobacco or take snuff; he did not swear, or use slang or rude, or coarse, or indelicate language, or make puns, or tell anecdotes, or laugh intemperately, or raise his voice above the moderate pitch enjoined by the canons of good form. when he gave an order, his manner modified it into a request. after dinner he and his officers joined the ladies and gentlemen in the ladies' saloon, and shared in the singing and piano playing, and helped turn the music. he had a sweet and sympathetic tenor voice, and used it with taste and effect the music he played whist there, always with the same partner and opponents, until the ladies' bedtime. the electric lights burned there as late as the ladies and their friends might desire; but they were not allowed to burn in the smoking-room after eleven. there were many laws on the ship's statute book of course; but so far as i could see, this and one other were the only ones that were rigidly enforced. the captain explained that he enforced this one because his own cabin adjoined the smoking-room, and the smell of tobacco smoke made him sick. i did not see how our smoke could reach him, for the smoking-room and his cabin were on the upper deck, targets for all the winds that blew; and besides there was no crack of communication between them, no opening of any sort in the solid intervening bulkhead. still, to a delicate stomach even imaginary smoke can convey damage. the captain, with his gentle nature, his polish, his sweetness, his moral and verbal purity, seemed pathetically out of place in his rude and autocratic vocation. it seemed another instance of the irony of fate. he was going home under a cloud. the passengers knew about his trouble, and were sorry for him. approaching vancouver through a narrow and difficult passage densely befogged with smoke from the forest fires, he had had the ill-luck to lose his bearings and get his ship on the rocks. a matter like this would rank merely as an error with you and me; it ranks as a crime with the directors of steamship companies. the captain had been tried by the admiralty court at vancouver, and its verdict had acquitted him of blame. but that was insufficient comfort. a sterner court would examine the case in sydney--the court of directors, the lords of a company in whose ships the captain had served as mate a number of years. this was his first voyage as captain. the officers of our ship were hearty and companionable young men, and they entered into the general amusements and helped the passengers pass the time. voyages in the pacific and indian oceans are but pleasure excursions for all hands. our purser was a young scotchman who was equipped with a grit that was remarkable. he was an invalid, and looked it, as far as his body was concerned, but illness could not subdue his spirit. he was full of life, and had a gay and capable tongue. to all appearances he was a sick man without being aware of it, for he did not talk about his ailments, and his bearing and conduct were those of a person in robust health; yet he was the prey, at intervals, of ghastly sieges of pain in his heart. these lasted many hours, and while the attack continued he could neither sit nor lie. in one instance he stood on his feet twenty-four hours fighting for his life with these sharp agonies, and yet was as full of life and cheer and activity the next day as if nothing had happened. the brightest passenger in the ship, and the most interesting and felicitous talker, was a young canadian who was not able to let the whisky bottle alone. he was of a rich and powerful family, and could have had a distinguished career and abundance of effective help toward it if he could have conquered his appetite for drink; but he could not do it, so his great equipment of talent was of no use to him. he had often taken the pledge to drink no more, and was a good sample of what that sort of unwisdom can do for a man--for a man with anything short of an iron will. the system is wrong in two ways: it does not strike at the root of the trouble, for one thing, and to make a pledge of any kind is to declare war against nature; for a pledge is a chain that is always clanking and reminding the wearer of it that he is not a free man. i have said that the system does not strike at the root of the trouble, and i venture to repeat that. the root is not the drinking, but the desire to drink. these are very different things. the one merely requires will--and a great deal of it, both as to bulk and staying capacity--the other merely requires watchfulness--and for no long time. the desire of course precedes the act, and should have one's first attention; it can do but little good to refuse the act over and over again, always leaving the desire unmolested, unconquered; the desire will continue to assert itself, and will be almost sure to win in the long run. when the desire intrudes, it should be at once banished out of the mind. one should be on the watch for it all the time--otherwise it will get in. it must be taken in time and not allowed to get a lodgment. a desire constantly repulsed for a fortnight should die, then. that should cure the drinking habit. the system of refusing the mere act of drinking, and leaving the desire in full force, is unintelligent war tactics, it seems to me. i used to take pledges--and soon violate them. my will was not strong, and i could not help it. and then, to be tied in any way naturally irks an otherwise free person and makes him chafe in his bonds and want to get his liberty. but when i finally ceased from taking definite pledges, and merely resolved that i would kill an injurious desire, but leave myself free to resume the desire and the habit whenever i should choose to do so, i had no more trouble. in five days i drove out the desire to smoke and was not obliged to keep watch after that; and i never experienced any strong desire to smoke again. at the end of a year and a quarter of idleness i began to write a book, and presently found that the pen was strangely reluctant to go. i tried a smoke to see if that would help me out of the difficulty. it did. i smoked eight or ten cigars and as many pipes a day for five months; finished the book, and did not smoke again until a year had gone by and another book had to be begun. i can quit any of my nineteen injurious habits at any time, and without discomfort or inconvenience. i think that the dr. tanners and those others who go forty days without eating do it by resolutely keeping out the desire to eat, in the beginning, and that after a few hours the desire is discouraged and comes no more. once i tried my scheme in a large medical way. i had been confined to my bed several days with lumbago. my case refused to improve. finally the doctor said,-- "my remedies have no fair chance. consider what they have to fight, besides the lumbago. you smoke extravagantly, don't you?" "yes." "you take coffee immoderately?" "yes." "and some tea?" "yes." "you eat all kinds of things that are dissatisfied with each other's company?" "yes." "you drink two hot scotches every night?" "yes." "very well, there you see what i have to contend against. we can't make progress the way the matter stands. you must make a reduction in these things; you must cut down your consumption of them considerably for some days." "i can't, doctor." "why can't you." "i lack the will-power. i can cut them off entirely, but i can't merely moderate them." he said that that would answer, and said he would come around in twenty-four hours and begin work again. he was taken ill himself and could not come; but i did not need him. i cut off all those things for two days and nights; in fact, i cut off all kinds of food, too, and all drinks except water, and at the end of the forty-eight hours the lumbago was discouraged and left me. i was a well man; so i gave thanks and took to those delicacies again. it seemed a valuable medical course, and i recommended it to a lady. she had run down and down and down, and had at last reached a point where medicines no longer had any helpful effect upon her. i said i knew i could put her upon her feet in a week. it brightened her up, it filled her with hope, and she said she would do everything i told her to do. so i said she must stop swearing and drinking, and smoking and eating for four days, and then she would be all right again. and it would have happened just so, i know it; but she said she could not stop swearing, and smoking, and drinking, because she had never done those things. so there it was. she had neglected her habits, and hadn't any. now that they would have come good, there were none in stock. she had nothing to fall back on. she was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw over lighten ship withal. why, even one or two little bad habits could have saved her, but she was just a moral pauper. when she could have acquired them she was dissuaded by her parents, who were ignorant people though reared in the best society, and it was too late to begin now. it seemed such a pity; but there was no help for it. these things ought to be attended to while a person is young; otherwise, when age and disease come, there is nothing effectual to fight them with. when i was a youth i used to take all kinds of pledges, and do my best to keep them, but i never could, because i didn't strike at the root of the habit--the desire; i generally broke down within the month. once i tried limiting a habit. that worked tolerably well for a while. i pledged myself to smoke but one cigar a day. i kept the cigar waiting until bedtime, then i had a luxurious time with it. but desire persecuted me every day and all day long; so, within the week i found myself hunting for larger cigars than i had been used to smoke; then larger ones still, and still larger ones. within the fortnight i was getting cigars made for me--on a yet larger pattern. they still grew and grew in size. within the month my cigar had grown to such proportions that i could have used it as a crutch. it now seemed to me that a one-cigar limit was no real protection to a person, so i knocked my pledge on the head and resumed my liberty. to go back to that young canadian. he was a "remittance man," the first one i had ever seen or heard of. passengers explained the term to me. they said that dissipated ne'er-do-wells belonging to important families in england and canada were not cast off by their people while there was any hope of reforming them, but when that last hope perished at last, the ne'er-do-well was sent abroad to get him out of the way. he was shipped off with just enough money in his pocket--no, in the purser's pocket--for the needs of the voyage--and when he reached his destined port he would find a remittance awaiting him there. not a large one, but just enough to keep him a month. a similar remittance would come monthly thereafter. it was the remittance-man's custom to pay his month's board and lodging straightway--a duty which his landlord did not allow him to forget--then spree away the rest of his money in a single night, then brood and mope and grieve in idleness till the next remittance came. it is a pathetic life. we had other remittance-men on board, it was said. at least they said they were r. m.'s. there were two. but they did not resemble the canadian; they lacked his tidiness, and his brains, and his gentlemanly ways, and his resolute spirit, and his humanities and generosities. one of them was a lad of nineteen or twenty, and he was a good deal of a ruin, as to clothes, and morals, and general aspect. he said he was a scion of a ducal house in england, and had been shipped to canada for the house's relief, that he had fallen into trouble there, and was now being shipped to australia. he said he had no title. beyond this remark he was economical of the truth. the first thing he did in australia was to get into the lockup, and the next thing he did was to proclaim himself an earl in the police court in the morning and fail to prove it. chapter ii. when in doubt, tell the truth. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. about four days out from victoria we plunged into hot weather, and all the male passengers put on white linen clothes. one or two days later we crossed the th parallel of north latitude, and then, by order, the officers of the ship laid away their blue uniforms and came out in white linen ones. all the ladies were in white by this time. this prevalence of snowy costumes gave the promenade deck an invitingly cool, and cheerful and picnicky aspect. from my diary: there are several sorts of ills in the world from which a person can never escape altogether, let him journey as far as he will. one escapes from one breed of an ill only to encounter another breed of it. we have come far from the snake liar and the fish liar, and there was rest and peace in the thought; but now we have reached the realm of the boomerang liar, and sorrow is with us once more. the first officer has seen a man try to escape from his enemy by getting behind a tree; but the enemy sent his boomerang sailing into the sky far above and beyond the tree; then it turned, descended, and killed the man. the australian passenger has seen this thing done to two men, behind two trees--and by the one arrow. this being received with a large silence that suggested doubt, he buttressed it with the statement that his brother once saw the boomerang kill a bird away off a hundred yards and bring it to the thrower. but these are ills which must be borne. there is no other way. the talk passed from the boomerang to dreams--usually a fruitful subject, afloat or ashore--but this time the output was poor. then it passed to instances of extraordinary memory--with better results. blind tom, the negro pianist, was spoken of, and it was said that he could accurately play any piece of music, howsoever long and difficult, after hearing it once; and that six months later he could accurately play it again, without having touched it in the interval. one of the most striking of the stories told was furnished by a gentleman who had served on the staff of the viceroy of india. he read the details from his note-book, and explained that he had written them down, right after the consummation of the incident which they described, because he thought that if he did not put them down in black and white he might presently come to think he had dreamed them or invented them. the viceroy was making a progress, and among the shows offered by the maharajah of mysore for his entertainment was a memory-exhibition. the viceroy and thirty gentlemen of his suite sat in a row, and the memory-expert, a high-caste brahmin, was brought in and seated on the floor in front of them. he said he knew but two languages, the english and his own, but would not exclude any foreign tongue from the tests to be applied to his memory. then he laid before the assemblage his program --a sufficiently extraordinary one. he proposed that one gentleman should give him one word of a foreign sentence, and tell him its place in the sentence. he was furnished with the french word 'est', and was told it was second in a sentence of three words. the next, gentleman gave him the german word 'verloren' and said it was the third in a sentence of four words. he asked the next gentleman for one detail in a sum in addition; another for one detail in a sum of subtraction; others for single details in mathematical problems of various kinds; he got them. intermediates gave him single words from sentences in greek, latin, spanish, portuguese, italian, and other languages, and told him their places in the sentences. when at last everybody had furnished him a single rag from a foreign sentence or a figure from a problem, he went over the ground again, and got a second word and a second figure and was told their places in the sentences and the sums; and so on and so on. he went over the ground again and again until he had collected all the parts of the sums and all the parts of the sentences--and all in disorder, of course, not in their proper rotation. this had occupied two hours. the brahmin now sat silent and thinking, a while, then began and repeated all the sentences, placing the words in their proper order, and untangled the disordered arithmetical problems and gave accurate answers to them all. in the beginning he had asked the company to throw almonds at him during the two hours, he to remember how many each gentleman had thrown; but none were thrown, for the viceroy said that the test would be a sufficiently severe strain without adding that burden to it. general grant had a fine memory for all kinds of things, including even names and faces, and i could have furnished an instance of it if i had thought of it. the first time i ever saw him was early in his first term as president. i had just arrived in washington from the pacific coast, a stranger and wholly unknown to the public, and was passing the white house one morning when i met a friend, a senator from nevada. he asked me if i would like to see the president. i said i should be very glad; so we entered. i supposed that the president would be in the midst of a crowd, and that i could look at him in peace and security from a distance, as another stray cat might look at another king. but it was in the morning, and the senator was using a privilege of his office which i had not heard of--the privilege of intruding upon the chief magistrate's working hours. before i knew it, the senator and i were in the presence, and there was none there but we three. general grant got slowly up from his table, put his pen down, and stood before me with the iron expression of a man who had not smiled for seven years, and was not intending to smile for another seven. he looked me steadily in the eyes--mine lost confidence and fell. i had never confronted a great man before, and was in a miserable state of funk and inefficiency. the senator said:-- "mr. president, may i have the privilege of introducing mr. clemens?" the president gave my hand an unsympathetic wag and dropped it. he did not say a word but just stood. in my trouble i could not think of anything to say, i merely wanted to resign. there was an awkward pause, a dreary pause, a horrible pause. then i thought of something, and looked up into that unyielding face, and said timidly:-- "mr. president, i--i am embarrassed. are you?" his face broke--just a little--a wee glimmer, the momentary flicker of a summer-lightning smile, seven years ahead of time--and i was out and gone as soon as it was. ten years passed away before i saw him the second time. meantime i was become better known; and was one of the people appointed to respond to toasts at the banquet given to general grant in chicago--by the army of the tennessee when he came back from his tour around the world. i arrived late at night and got up late in the morning. all the corridors of the hotel were crowded with people waiting to get a glimpse of general grant when he should pass to the place whence he was to review the great procession. i worked my way by the suite of packed drawing-rooms, and at the corner of the house i found a window open where there was a roomy platform decorated with flags, and carpeted. i stepped out on it, and saw below me millions of people blocking all the streets, and other millions caked together in all the windows and on all the house-tops around. these masses took me for general grant, and broke into volcanic explosions and cheers; but it was a good place to see the procession, and i stayed. presently i heard the distant blare of military music, and far up the street i saw the procession come in sight, cleaving its way through the huzzaing multitudes, with sheridan, the most martial figure of the war, riding at its head in the dress uniform of a lieutenant-general. and now general grant, arm-in-arm with major carter harrison, stepped out on the platform, followed two and two by the badged and uniformed reception committee. general grant was looking exactly as he had looked upon that trying occasion of ten years before--all iron and bronze self-possession. mr. harrison came over and led me to the general and formally introduced me. before i could put together the proper remark, general grant said-- "mr. clemens, i am not embarrassed. are you?"--and that little seven-year smile twinkled across his face again. seventeen years have gone by since then, and to-day, in new york, the streets are a crush of people who are there to honor the remains of the great soldier as they pass to their final resting-place under the monument; and the air is heavy with dirges and the boom of artillery, and all the millions of america are thinking of the man who restored the union and the flag, and gave to democratic government a new lease of life, and, as we may hope and do believe, a permanent place among the beneficent institutions of men. we had one game in the ship which was a good time-passer--at least it was at night in the smoking-room when the men were getting freshened up from the day's monotonies and dullnesses. it was the completing of non-complete stories. that is to say, a man would tell all of a story except the finish, then the others would try to supply the ending out of their own invention. when every one who wanted a chance had had it, the man who had introduced the story would give it its original ending--then you could take your choice. sometimes the new endings turned out to be better than the old one. but the story which called out the most persistent and determined and ambitious effort was one which had no ending, and so there was nothing to compare the new-made endings with. the man who told it said he could furnish the particulars up to a certain point only, because that was as much of the tale as he knew. he had read it in a volume of `sketches twenty-five years ago, and was interrupted before the end was reached. he would give any one fifty dollars who would finish the story to the satisfaction of a jury to be appointed by ourselves. we appointed a jury and wrestled with the tale. we invented plenty of endings, but the jury voted them all down. the jury was right. it was a tale which the author of it may possibly have completed satisfactorily, and if he really had that good fortune i would like to know what the ending was. any ordinary man will find that the story's strength is in its middle, and that there is apparently no way to transfer it to the close, where of course it ought to be. in substance the storiette was as follows: john brown, aged thirty-one, good, gentle, bashful, timid, lived in a quiet village in missouri. he was superintendent of the presbyterian sunday-school. it was but a humble distinction; still, it was his only official one, and he was modestly proud of it and was devoted to its work and its interests. the extreme kindliness of his nature was recognized by all; in fact, people said that he was made entirely out of good impulses and bashfulness; that he could always be counted upon for help when it was needed, and for bashfulness both when it was needed and when it wasn't. mary taylor, twenty-three, modest, sweet, winning, and in character and person beautiful, was all in all to him. and he was very nearly all in all to her. she was wavering, his hopes were high. her mother had been in opposition from the first. but she was wavering, too; he could see it. she was being touched by his warm interest in her two charity-proteges and by his contributions toward their support. these were two forlorn and aged sisters who lived in a log hut in a lonely place up a cross road four miles from mrs. taylor's farm. one of the sisters was crazy, and sometimes a little violent, but not often. at last the time seemed ripe for a final advance, and brown gathered his courage together and resolved to make it. he would take along a contribution of double the usual size, and win the mother over; with her opposition annulled, the rest of the conquest would be sure and prompt. he took to the road in the middle of a placid sunday afternoon in the soft missourian summer, and he was equipped properly for his mission. he was clothed all in white linen, with a blue ribbon for a necktie, and he had on dressy tight boots. his horse and buggy were the finest that the livery stable could furnish. the lap robe was of white linen, it was new, and it had a hand-worked border that could not be rivaled in that region for beauty and elaboration. when he was four miles out on the lonely road and was walking his horse over a wooden bridge, his straw hat blew off and fell in the creek, and floated down and lodged against a bar. he did not quite know what to do. he must have the hat, that was manifest; but how was he to get it? then he had an idea. the roads were empty, nobody was stirring. yes, he would risk it. he led the horse to the roadside and set it to cropping the grass; then he undressed and put his clothes in the buggy, petted the horse a moment to secure its compassion and its loyalty, then hurried to the stream. he swam out and soon had the hat. when he got to the top of the bank the horse was gone! his legs almost gave way under him. the horse was walking leisurely along the road. brown trotted after it, saying, "whoa, whoa, there's a good fellow;" but whenever he got near enough to chance a jump for the buggy, the horse quickened its pace a little and defeated him. and so this went on, the naked man perishing with anxiety, and expecting every moment to see people come in sight. he tagged on and on, imploring the horse, beseeching the horse, till he had left a mile behind him, and was closing up on the taylor premises; then at last he was successful, and got into the buggy. he flung on his shirt, his necktie, and his coat; then reached for--but he was too late; he sat suddenly down and pulled up the lap-robe, for he saw some one coming out of the gate--a woman; he thought. he wheeled the horse to the left, and struck briskly up the cross-road. it was perfectly straight, and exposed on both sides; but there were woods and a sharp turn three miles ahead, and he was very grateful when he got there. as he passed around the turn he slowed down to a walk, and reached for his tr---- too late again. he had come upon mrs. enderby, mrs. glossop, mrs. taylor, and mary. they were on foot, and seemed tired and excited. they came at once to the buggy and shook hands, and all spoke at once, and said eagerly and earnestly, how glad they were that he was come, and how fortunate it was. and mrs. enderby said, impressively: "it looks like an accident, his coming at such a time; but let no one profane it with such a name; he was sent--sent from on high." they were all moved, and mrs. glossop said in an awed voice: "sarah enderby, you never said a truer word in your life. this is no accident, it is a special providence. he was sent. he is an angel--an angel as truly as ever angel was--an angel of deliverance. i say angel, sarah enderby, and will have no other word. don't let any one ever say to me again, that there's no such thing as special providences; for if this isn't one, let them account for it that can." "i know it's so," said mrs. taylor, fervently. "john brown, i could worship you; i could go down on my knees to you. didn't something tell you?--didn't you feel that you were sent? i could kiss the hem of your laprobe." he was not able to speak; he was helpless with shame and fright. mrs. taylor went on: "why, just look at it all around, julia glossop. any person can see the hand of providence in it. here at noon what do we see? we see the smoke rising. i speak up and say, 'that's the old people's cabin afire.' didn't i, julia glossop?" "the very words you said, nancy taylor. i was as close to you as i am now, and i heard them. you may have said hut instead of cabin, but in substance it's the same. and you were looking pale, too." "pale? i was that pale that if--why, you just compare it with this laprobe. then the next thing i said was, 'mary taylor, tell the hired man to rig up the team-we'll go to the rescue.' and she said, 'mother, don't you know you told him he could drive to see his people, and stay over sunday?' and it was just so. i declare for it, i had forgotten it. 'then,' said i, 'we'll go afoot.' and go we did. and found sarah enderby on the road." "and we all went together," said mrs. enderby. "and found the cabin set fire to and burnt down by the crazy one, and the poor old things so old and feeble that they couldn't go afoot. and we got them to a shady place and made them as comfortable as we could, and began to wonder which way to turn to find some way to get them conveyed to nancy taylor's house. and i spoke up and said--now what did i say? didn't i say, 'providence will provide'?" "why sure as you live, so you did! i had forgotten it." "so had i," said mrs. glossop and mrs. taylor; "but you certainly said it. now wasn't that remarkable?" "yes, i said it. and then we went to mr. moseley's, two miles, and all of them were gone to the camp meeting over on stony fork; and then we came all the way back, two miles, and then here, another mile--and providence has provided. you see it yourselves" they gazed at each other awe-struck, and lifted their hands and said in unison: "it's per-fectly wonderful." "and then," said mrs. glossop, "what do you think we had better do let mr. brown drive the old people to nancy taylor's one at a time, or put both of them in the buggy, and him lead the horse?" brown gasped. "now, then, that's a question," said mrs. enderby. "you see, we are all tired out, and any way we fix it it's going to be difficult. for if mr. brown takes both of them, at least one of us must, go back to help him, for he can't load them into the buggy by himself, and they so helpless." "that is so," said mrs. taylor. "it doesn't look-oh, how would this do? --one of us drive there with mr. brown, and the rest of you go along to my house and get things ready. i'll go with him. he and i together can lift one of the old people into the buggy; then drive her to my house and---- "but who will take care of the other one?" said mrs. enderby. "we musn't leave her there in the woods alone, you know--especially the crazy one. there and back is eight miles, you see." they had all been sitting on the grass beside the buggy for a while, now, trying to rest their weary bodies. they fell silent a moment or two, and struggled in thought over the baffling situation; then mrs. enderby brightened and said: "i think i've got the idea, now. you see, we can't walk any more. think what we've done: four miles there, two to moseley's, is six, then back to here--nine miles since noon, and not a bite to eat; i declare i don't see how we've done it; and as for me, i am just famishing. now, somebody's got to go back, to help mr. brown--there's no getting mound that; but whoever goes has got to ride, not walk. so my idea is this: one of us to ride back with mr. brown, then ride to nancy taylor's house with one of the old people, leaving mr. brown to keep the other old one company, you all to go now to nancy's and rest and wait; then one of you drive back and get the other one and drive her to nancy's, and mr. brown walk." "splendid!" they all cried. "oh, that will do--that will answer perfectly." and they all said that mrs. enderby had the best head for planning, in the company; and they said that they wondered that they hadn't thought of this simple plan themselves. they hadn't meant to take back the compliment, good simple souls, and didn't know they had done it. after a consultation it was decided that mrs. enderby should drive back with brown, she being entitled to the distinction because she had invented the plan. everything now being satisfactorily arranged and settled, the ladies rose, relieved and happy, and brushed down their gowns, and three of them started homeward; mrs. enderby set her foot on the buggy-step and was about to climb in, when brown found a remnant of his voice and gasped out-- "please mrs. enderby, call them back--i am very weak; i can't walk, i can't, indeed." "why, dear mr. brown! you do look pale; i am ashamed of myself that i didn't notice it sooner. come back-all of you! mr. brown is not well. is there anything i can do for you, mr. brown?--i'm real sorry. are you in pain?" "no, madam, only weak; i am not sick, but only just weak--lately; not long, but just lately." the others came back, and poured out their sympathies and commiserations, and were full of self-reproaches for not having noticed how pale he was. and they at once struck out a new plan, and soon agreed that it was by far the best of all. they would all go to nancy taylor's house and see to brown's needs first. he could lie on the sofa in the parlor, and while mrs. taylor and mary took care of him the other two ladies would take the buggy and go and get one of the old people, and leave one of themselves with the other one, and---- by this time, without any solicitation, they were at the horse's head and were beginning to turn him around. the danger was imminent, but brown found his voice again and saved himself. he said-- "but ladies, you are overlooking something which makes the plan impracticable. you see, if you bring one of them home, and one remains behind with the other, there will be three persons there when one of you comes back for that other, for some one must drive the buggy back, and three can't come home in it." they all exclaimed, "why, sure-ly, that is so!" and they were, all perplexed again. "dear, dear, what can we do?" said mrs. glossop; "it is the most mixed-up thing that ever was. the fox and the goose and the corn and things-- oh, dear, they are nothing to it." they sat wearily down once more, to further torture their tormented heads for a plan that would work. presently mary offered a plan; it was her first effort. she said: "i am young and strong, and am refreshed, now. take mr. brown to our house, and give him help--you see how plainly he needs it. i will go back and take care of the old people; i can be there in twenty minutes. you can go on and do what you first started to do--wait on the main road at our house until somebody comes along with a wagon; then send and bring away the three of us. you won't have to wait long; the farmers will soon be coming back from town, now. i will keep old polly patient and cheered up--the crazy one doesn't need it." this plan was discussed and accepted; it seemed the best that could be done, in the circumstances, and the old people must be getting discouraged by this time. brown felt relieved, and was deeply thankful. let him once get to the main road and he would find a way to escape. then mrs. taylor said: "the evening chill will be coming on, pretty soon, and those poor old burnt-out things will need some kind of covering. take the lap-robe with you, dear." "very well, mother, i will." she stepped to the buggy and put out her hand to take it---- that was the end of the tale. the passenger who told it said that when he read the story twenty-five years ago in a train he was interrupted at that point--the train jumped off a bridge. at first we thought we could finish the story quite easily, and we set to work with confidence; but it soon began to appear that it was not a simple thing, but difficult and baffling. this was on account of brown's character--great generosity and kindliness, but complicated with unusual shyness and diffidence, particularly in the presence of ladies. there was his love for mary, in a hopeful state but not yet secure--just in a condition, indeed, where its affair must be handled with great tact, and no mistakes made, no offense given. and there was the mother wavering, half willing-by adroit and flawless diplomacy to be won over, now, or perhaps never at all. also, there were the helpless old people yonder in the woods waiting-their fate and brown's happiness to be determined by what brown should do within the next two seconds. mary was reaching for the lap-robe; brown must decide-there was no time to be lost. of course none but a happy ending of the story would be accepted by the jury; the finish must find brown in high credit with the ladies, his behavior without blemish, his modesty unwounded, his character for self sacrifice maintained, the old people rescued through him, their benefactor, all the party proud of him, happy in him, his praises on all their tongues. we tried to arrange this, but it was beset with persistent and irreconcilable difficulties. we saw that brown's shyness would not allow him to give up the lap-robe. this would offend mary and her mother; and it would surprise the other ladies, partly because this stinginess toward the suffering old people would be out of character with brown, and partly because he was a special providence and could not properly act so. if asked to explain his conduct, his shyness would not allow him to tell the truth, and lack of invention and practice would find him incapable of contriving a lie that would wash. we worked at the troublesome problem until three in the morning. meantime mary was still reaching for the lap-robe. we gave it up, and decided to let her continue to reach. it is the reader's privilege to determine for himself how the thing came out. chapter iii. it is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. on the seventh day out we saw a dim vast bulk standing up out of the wastes of the pacific and knew that that spectral promontory was diamond head, a piece of this world which i had not seen before for twenty-nine years. so we were nearing honolulu, the capital city of the sandwich islands--those islands which to me were paradise; a paradise which i had been longing all those years to see again. not any other thing in the world could have stirred me as the sight of that great rock did. in the night we anchored a mile from shore. through my port i could see the twinkling lights of honolulu and the dark bulk of the mountain-range that stretched away right and left. i could not make out the beautiful nuuana valley, but i knew where it lay, and remembered how it used to look in the old times. we used to ride up it on horseback in those days --we young people--and branch off and gather bones in a sandy region where one of the first kamehameha's battles was fought. he was a remarkable man, for a king; and he was also a remarkable man for a savage. he was a mere kinglet and of little or no consequence at the time of captain cook's arrival in ; but about four years afterward he conceived the idea of enlarging his sphere of influence. that is a courteous modern phrase which means robbing your neighbor--for your neighbor's benefit; and the great theater of its benevolences is africa. kamehameha went to war, and in the course of ten years he whipped out all the other kings and made himself master of every one of the nine or ten islands that form the group. but he did more than that. he bought ships, freighted them with sandal wood and other native products, and sent them as far as south america and china; he sold to his savages the foreign stuffs and tools and utensils which came back in these ships, and started the march of civilization. it is doubtful if the match to this extraordinary thing is to be found in the history of any other savage. savages are eager to learn from the white man any new way to kill each other, but it is not their habit to seize with avidity and apply with energy the larger and nobler ideas which he offers them. the details of kamehameha's history show that he was always hospitably ready to examine the white man's ideas, and that he exercised a tidy discrimination in making his selections from the samples placed on view. a shrewder discrimination than was exhibited by his son and successor, liholiho, i think. liholiho could have qualified as a reformer, perhaps, but as a king he was a mistake. a mistake because he tried to be both king and reformer. this is mixing fire and gunpowder together. a king has no proper business with reforming. his best policy is to keep things as they are; and if he can't do that, he ought to try to make them worse than they are. this is not guesswork; i have thought over this matter a good deal, so that if i should ever have a chance to become a king i would know how to conduct the business in the best way. when liholiho succeeded his father he found himself possessed of an equipment of royal tools and safeguards which a wiser king would have known how to husband, and judiciously employ, and make profitable. the entire country was under the one scepter, and his was that scepter. there was an established church, and he was the head of it. there was a standing army, and he was the head of that; an army of privates under command of generals and a field marshal. there was a proud and ancient hereditary nobility. there was still one other asset. this was the tabu--an agent endowed with a mysterious and stupendous power, an agent not found among the properties of any european monarch, a tool of inestimable value in the business. liholiho was headmaster of the tabu. the tabu was the most ingenious and effective of all the inventions that has ever been devised for keeping a people's privileges satisfactorily restricted. it required the sexes to live in separate houses. it did not allow people to eat in either house; they must eat in another place. it did not allow a man's woman-folk to enter his house. it did not allow the sexes to eat together; the men must eat first, and the women must wait on them. then the women could eat what was left--if anything was left--and wait on themselves. i mean, if anything of a coarse or unpalatable sort was left, the women could have it. but not the good things, the fine things, the choice things, such as pork, poultry, bananas, cocoanuts, the choicer varieties of fish, and so on. by the tabu, all these were sacred to the men; the women spent their lives longing for them and wondering what they might taste like; and they died without finding out. these rules, as you see, were quite simple and clear. it was easy to remember them; and useful. for the penalty for infringing any rule in the whole list was death. those women easily learned to put up with shark and taro and dog for a diet when the other things were so expensive. it was death for any one to walk upon tabu'd ground; or defile a tabu'd thing with his touch; or fail in due servility to a chief; or step upon the king's shadow. the nobles and the king and the priests were always suspending little rags here and there and yonder, to give notice to the people that the decorated spot or thing was tabu, and death lurking near. the struggle for life was difficult and chancy in the islands in those days. thus advantageously was the new king situated. will it be believed that the first thing he did was to destroy his established church, root and branch? he did indeed do that. to state the case figuratively, he was a prosperous sailor who burnt his ship and took to a raft. this church was a horrid thing. it heavily oppressed the people; it kept them always trembling in the gloom of mysterious threatenings; it slaughtered them in sacrifice before its grotesque idols of wood and stone; it cowed them, it terrorized them, it made them slaves to its priests, and through the priests to the king. it was the best friend a king could have, and the most dependable. to a professional reformer who should annihilate so frightful and so devastating a power as this church, reverence and praise would be due; but to a king who should do it, could properly be due nothing but reproach; reproach softened by sorrow; sorrow for his unfitness for his position. he destroyed his established church, and his kingdom is a republic today, in consequence of that act. when he destroyed the church and burned the idols he did a mighty thing for civilization and for his people's weal--but it was not "business." it was unkingly, it was inartistic. it made trouble for his line. the american missionaries arrived while the burned idols were still smoking. they found the nation without a religion, and they repaired the defect. they offered their own religion and it was gladly received. but it was no support to arbitrary kingship, and so the kingly power began to weaken from that day. forty-seven years later, when i was in the islands, kainehameha v. was trying to repair liholiho's blunder, and not succeeding. he had set up an established church and made himself the head of it. but it was only a pinchbeck thing, an imitation, a bauble, an empty show. it had no power, no value for a king. it could not harry or burn or slay, it in no way resembled the admirable machine which liholiho destroyed. it was an established church without an establishment; all the people were dissenters. long before that, the kingship had itself become but a name, a show. at an early day the missionaries had turned it into something very much like a republic; and here lately the business whites have turned it into something exactly like it. in captain cook's time ( ), the native population of the islands was estimated at , ; in at something short of , , in at , ; it is to-day, per census, , . all intelligent people praise kamehameha i. and liholiho for conferring upon their people the great boon of civilization. i would do it myself, but my intelligence is out of repair, now, from over-work. when i was in the islands nearly a generation ago, i was acquainted with a young american couple who had among their belongings an attractive little son of the age of seven--attractive but not practicably companionable with me, because he knew no english. he had played from his birth with the little kanakas on his father's plantation, and had preferred their language and would learn no other. the family removed to america a month after i arrived in the islands, and straightway the boy began to lose his kanaka and pick up english. by the time he was twelve be hadn't a word of kanaka left; the language had wholly departed from his tongue and from his comprehension. nine years later, when he was twenty-one, i came upon the family in one of the lake towns of new york, and the mother told me about an adventure which her son had been having. by trade he was now a professional diver. a passenger boat had been caught in a storm on the lake, and had gone down, carrying her people with her. a few days later the young diver descended, with his armor on, and entered the berth-saloon of the boat, and stood at the foot of the companionway, with his hand on the rail, peering through the dim water. presently something touched him on the shoulder, and he turned and found a dead man swaying and bobbing about him and seemingly inspecting him inquiringly. he was paralyzed with fright. his entry had disturbed the water, and now he discerned a number of dim corpses making for him and wagging their heads and swaying their bodies like sleepy people trying to dance. his senses forsook him, and in that condition he was drawn to the surface. he was put to bed at home, and was soon very ill. during some days he had seasons of delirium which lasted several hours at a time; and while they lasted he talked kanaka incessantly and glibly; and kanaka only. he was still very ill, and he talked to me in that tongue; but i did not understand it, of course. the doctor-books tell us that cases like this are not uncommon. then the doctors ought to study the cases and find out how to multiply them. many languages and things get mislaid in a person's head, and stay mislaid for lack of this remedy. many memories of my former visit to the islands came up in my mind while we lay at anchor in front of honolulu that night. and pictures--pictures pictures--an enchanting procession of them! i was impatient for the morning to come. when it came it brought disappointment, of course. cholera had broken out in the town, and we were not allowed to have any communication with the shore. thus suddenly did my dream of twenty-nine years go to ruin. messages came from friends, but the friends themselves i was not to have any sight of. my lecture-hall was ready, but i was not to see that, either. several of our passengers belonged in honolulu, and these were sent ashore; but nobody could go ashore and return. there were people on shore who were booked to go with us to australia, but we could not receive them; to do it would cost us a quarantine-term in sydney. they could have escaped the day before, by ship to san francisco; but the bars had been put up, now, and they might have to wait weeks before any ship could venture to give them a passage any whither. and there were hardships for others. an elderly lady and her son, recreation-seekers from massachusetts, had wandered westward, further and further from home, always intending to take the return track, but always concluding to go still a little further; and now here they were at anchor before honolulu positively their last westward-bound indulgence--they had made up their minds to that--but where is the use in making up your mind in this world? it is usually a waste of time to do it. these two would have to stay with us as far as australia. then they could go on around the world, or go back the way they had come; the distance and the accommodations and outlay of time would be just the same, whichever of the two routes they might elect to take. think of it: a projected excursion of five hundred miles gradually enlarged, without any elaborate degree of intention, to a possible twenty-four thousand. however, they were used to extensions by this time, and did not mind this new one much. and we had with us a lawyer from victoria, who had been sent out by the government on an international matter, and he had brought his wife with him and left the children at home with the servants and now what was to be done? go ashore amongst the cholera and take the risks? most certainly not. they decided to go on, to the fiji islands, wait there a fortnight for the next ship, and then sail for home. they couldn't foresee that they wouldn't see a homeward-bound ship again for six weeks, and that no word could come to them from the children, and no word go from them to the children in all that time. it is easy to make plans in this world; even a cat can do it; and when one is out in those remote oceans it is noticeable that a cat's plans and a man's are worth about the same. there is much the same shrinkage in both, in the matter of values. there was nothing for us to do but sit about the decks in the shade of the awnings and look at the distant shore. we lay in luminous blue water; shoreward the water was green-green and brilliant; at the shore itself it broke in a long white ruffle, and with no crash, no sound that we could hear. the town was buried under a mat of foliage that looked like a cushion of moss. the silky mountains were clothed in soft, rich splendors of melting color, and some of the cliffs were veiled in slanting mists. i recognized it all. it was just as i had seen it long before, with nothing of its beauty lost, nothing of its charm wanting. a change had come, but that was political, and not visible from the ship. the monarchy of my day was gone, and a republic was sitting in its seat. it was not a material change. the old imitation pomps, the fuss and feathers, have departed, and the royal trademark--that is about all that one could miss, i suppose. that imitation monarchy, was grotesque enough, in my time; if it had held on another thirty years it would have been a monarchy without subjects of the king's race. we had a sunset of a very fine sort. the vast plain of the sea was marked off in bands of sharply-contrasted colors: great stretches of dark blue, others of purple, others of polished bronze; the billowy mountains showed all sorts of dainty browns and greens, blues and purples and blacks, and the rounded velvety backs of certain of them made one want to stroke them, as one would the sleek back of a cat. the long, sloping promontory projecting into the sea at the west turned dim and leaden and spectral, then became suffused with pink--dissolved itself in a pink dream, so to speak, it seemed so airy and unreal. presently the cloud-rack was flooded with fiery splendors, and these were copied on the surface of the sea, and it made one drunk with delight to look upon it. from talks with certain of our passengers whose home was honolulu, and from a sketch by mrs. mary h. krout, i was able to perceive what the honolulu of to-day is, as compared with the honolulu of my time. in my time it was a beautiful little town, made up of snow-white wooden cottages deliciously smothered in tropical vines and flowers and trees and shrubs; and its coral roads and streets were hard and smooth, and as white as the houses. the outside aspects of the place suggested the presence of a modest and comfortable prosperity--a general prosperity --perhaps one might strengthen the term and say universal. there were no fine houses, no fine furniture. there were no decorations. tallow candles furnished the light for the bedrooms, a whale-oil lamp furnished it for the parlor. native matting served as carpeting. in the parlor one would find two or three lithographs on the walls--portraits as a rule: kamehameha iv., louis kossuth, jenny lind; and may be an engraving or two: rebecca at the well, moses smiting the rock, joseph's servants finding the cup in benjamin's sack. there would be a center table, with books of a tranquil sort on it: the whole duty of man, baxter's saints' rest, fox's martyrs, tupper's proverbial philosophy, bound copies of the missionary herald and of father damon's seaman's friend. a melodeon; a music stand, with 'willie, we have missed you', 'star of the evening', 'roll on silver moon', 'are we most there', 'i would not live alway', and other songs of love and sentiment, together with an assortment of hymns. a what-not with semi-globular glass paperweights, enclosing miniature pictures of ships, new england rural snowstorms, and the like; sea-shells with bible texts carved on them in cameo style; native curios; whale's tooth with full-rigged ship carved on it. there was nothing reminiscent of foreign parts, for nobody had been abroad. trips were made to san francisco, but that could not be called going abroad. comprehensively speaking, nobody traveled. but honolulu has grown wealthy since then, and of course wealth has introduced changes; some of the old simplicities have disappeared. here is a modern house, as pictured by mrs. krout: "almost every house is surrounded by extensive lawns and gardens enclosed by walls of volcanic stone or by thick hedges of the brilliant hibiscus. "the houses are most tastefully and comfortably furnished; the floors are either of hard wood covered with rugs or with fine indian matting, while there is a preference, as in most warm countries, for rattan or bamboo furniture; there are the usual accessories of bric-a-brac, pictures, books, and curios from all parts of the world, for these island dwellers are indefatigable travelers. "nearly every house has what is called a lanai. it is a large apartment, roofed, floored, open on three sides, with a door or a draped archway opening into the drawing-room. frequently the roof is formed by the thick interlacing boughs of the hou tree, impervious to the sun and even to the rain, except in violent storms. vines are trained about the sides--the stephanotis or some one of the countless fragrant and blossoming trailers which abound in the islands. there are also curtains of matting that may be drawn to exclude the sun or rain. the floor is bare for coolness, or partially covered with rugs, and the lanai is prettily furnished with comfortable chairs, sofas, and tables loaded with flowers, or wonderful ferns in pots. "the lanai is the favorite reception room, and here at any social function the musical program is given and cakes and ices are served; here morning callers are received, or gay riding parties, the ladies in pretty divided skirts, worn for convenience in riding astride, --the universal mode adopted by europeans and americans, as well as by the natives. "the comfort and luxury of such an apartment, especially at a seashore villa, can hardly be imagined. the soft breezes sweep across it, heavy with the fragrance of jasmine and gardenia, and through the swaying boughs of palm and mimosa there are glimpses of rugged mountains, their summits veiled in clouds, of purple sea with the white surf beating eternally against the reefs, whiter still in the yellow sunlight or the magical moonlight of the tropics." there: rugs, ices, pictures, lanais, worldly books, sinful bric-a-brac fetched from everywhere. and the ladies riding astride. these are changes, indeed. in my time the native women rode astride, but the white ones lacked the courage to adopt their wise custom. in my time ice was seldom seen in honolulu. it sometimes came in sailing vessels from new england as ballast; and then, if there happened to be a man-of-war in port and balls and suppers raging by consequence, the ballast was worth six hundred dollars a ton, as is evidenced by reputable tradition. but the ice-machine has traveled all over the world, now, and brought ice within everybody's reach. in lapland and spitzbergen no one uses native ice in our day, except the bears and the walruses. the bicycle is not mentioned. it was not necessary. we know that it is there, without inquiring. it is everywhere. but for it, people could never have had summer homes on the summit of mont blanc; before its day, property up there had but a nominal value. the ladies of the hawaiian capital learned too late the right way to occupy a horse--too late to get much benefit from it. the riding-horse is retiring from business everywhere in the world. in honolulu a few years from now he will be only a tradition. we all know about father damien, the french priest who voluntarily forsook the world and went to the leper island of molokai to labor among its population of sorrowful exiles who wait there, in slow-consuming misery, for death to cone and release them from their troubles; and we know that the thing which he knew beforehand would happen, did happen: that he became a leper himself, and died of that horrible disease. there was still another case of self-sacrifice, it appears. i asked after "billy" ragsdale, interpreter to the parliament in my time--a half-white. he was a brilliant young fellow, and very popular. as an interpreter he would have been hard to match anywhere. he used to stand up in the parliament and turn the english speeches into hawaiian and the hawaiian speeches into english with a readiness and a volubility that were astonishing. i asked after him, and was told that his prosperous career was cut short in a sudden and unexpected way, just as he was about to marry a beautiful half-caste girl. he discovered, by some nearly invisible sign about his skin, that the poison of leprosy was in him. the secret was his own, and might be kept concealed for years; but he would not be treacherous to the girl that loved him; he would not marry her to a doom like his. and so he put his affairs in order, and went around to all his friends and bade them good-bye, and sailed in the leper ship to molokai. there he died the loathsome and lingering death that all lepers die. in this place let me insert a paragraph or two from "the paradise of the pacific" (rev. h. h. gowen)-- "poor lepers! it is easy for those who have no relatives or friends among them to enforce the decree of segregation to the letter, but who can write of the terrible, the heart-breaking scenes which that enforcement has brought about? "a man upon hawaii was suddenly taken away after a summary arrest, leaving behind him a helpless wife about to give birth to a babe. the devoted wife with great pain and risk came the whole journey to honolulu, and pleaded until the authorities were unable to resist her entreaty that she might go and live like a leper with her leper husband. "a woman in the prime of life and activity is condemned as an incipient leper, suddenly removed from her home, and her husband returns to find his two helpless babes moaning for their lost mother. "imagine it! the case of the babies is hard, but its bitterness is a trifle--less than a trifle--less than nothing--compared to what the mother must suffer; and suffer minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, month by month, year by year, without respite, relief, or any abatement of her pain till she dies. "one woman, luka kaaukau, has been living with her leper husband in the settlement for twelve years. the man has scarcely a joint left, his limbs are only distorted ulcerated stumps, for four years his wife has put every particle of food into his mouth. he wanted his wife to abandon his wretched carcass long ago, as she herself was sound and well, but luka said that she was content to remain and wait on the man she loved till the spirit should be freed from its burden. "i myself have known hard cases enough:--of a girl, apparently in full health, decorating the church with me at easter, who before christmas is taken away as a confirmed leper; of a mother hiding her child in the mountains for years so that not even her dearest friends knew that she had a child alive, that he might not be taken away; of a respectable white man taken away from his wife and family, and compelled to become a dweller in the leper settlement, where he is counted dead, even by the insurance companies." and one great pity of it all is, that these poor sufferers are innocent. the leprosy does not come of sins which they committed, but of sins committed by their ancestors, who escaped the curse of leprosy! mr. gowan has made record of a certain very striking circumstance. would you expect to find in that awful leper settlement a custom worthy to be transplanted to your own country? they have one such, and it is inexpressibly touching and beautiful. when death sets open the prison-door of life there, the band salutes the freed soul with a burst of glad music! chapter iv. a dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic compliment. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. sailed from honolulu.--from diary: sept. . flocks of flying fish-slim, shapely, graceful, and intensely white. with the sun on them they look like a flight of silver fruit-knives. they are able to fly a hundred yards. sept. . in deg. ' north latitude, at breakfast. approaching the equator on a long slant. those of us who have never seen the equator are a good deal excited. i think i would rather see it than any other thing in the world. we entered the "doldrums" last night--variable winds, bursts of rain, intervals of calm, with chopping seas and a wobbly and drunken motion to the ship--a condition of things findable in other regions sometimes, but present in the doldrums always. the globe-girdling belt called the doldrums is degrees wide, and the thread called the equator lies along the middle of it. sept. . total eclipse of the moon last night. at . it began to go off. at total--or about that--it was like a rich rosy cloud with a tumbled surface framed in the circle and projecting from it--a bulge of strawberry-ice, so to speak. at half-eclipse the moon was like a gilded acorn in its cup. sept. . closing in on the equator this noon. a sailor explained to a young girl that the ship's speed is poor because we are climbing up the bulge toward the center of the globe; but that when we should once get over, at the equator, and start down-hill, we should fly. when she asked him the other day what the fore-yard was, he said it was the front yard, the open area in the front end of the ship. that man has a good deal of learning stored up, and the girl is likely to get it all. afternoon. crossed the equator. in the distance it looked like a blue ribbon stretched across the ocean. several passengers kodak'd it. we had no fool ceremonies, no fantastics, no horse play. all that sort of thing has gone out. in old times a sailor, dressed as neptune, used to come in over the bows, with his suite, and lather up and shave everybody who was crossing the equator for the first time, and then cleanse these unfortunates by swinging them from the yard-arm and ducking them three times in the sea. this was considered funny. nobody knows why. no, that is not true. we do know why. such a thing could never be funny on land; no part of the old-time grotesque performances gotten up on shipboard to celebrate the passage of the line would ever be funny on shore--they would seem dreary and less to shore people. but the shore people would change their minds about it at sea, on a long voyage. on such a voyage, with its eternal monotonies, people's intellects deteriorate; the owners of the intellects soon reach a point where they almost seem to prefer childish things to things of a maturer degree. one is often surprised at the juvenilities which grown people indulge in at sea, and the interest they take in them, and the consuming enjoyment they get out of them. this is on long voyages only. the mind gradually becomes inert, dull, blunted; it loses its accustomed interest in intellectual things; nothing but horse-play can rouse it, nothing but wild and foolish grotesqueries can entertain it. on short voyages it makes no such exposure of itself; it hasn't time to slump down to this sorrowful level. the short-voyage passenger gets his chief physical exercise out of "horse-billiards"--shovel-board. it is a good game. we play it in this ship. a quartermaster chalks off a diagram like this-on the deck. the player uses a cue that is like a broom-handle with a quarter-moon of wood fastened to the end of it. with this he shoves wooden disks the size of a saucer--he gives the disk a vigorous shove and sends it fifteen or twenty feet along the deck and lands it in one of the squares if he can. if it stays there till the inning is played out, it will count as many points in the game as the figure in the square it has stopped in represents. the adversary plays to knock that disk out and leave his own in its place--particularly if it rests upon the or or some other of the high numbers; but if it rests in the " off" he backs it up--lands his disk behind it a foot or two, to make it difficult for its owner to knock it out of that damaging place and improve his record. when the inning is played out it may be found that each adversary has placed his four disks where they count; it may be found that some of them are touching chalk lines and not counting; and very often it will be found that there has been a general wreckage, and that not a disk has been left within the diagram. anyway, the result is recorded, whatever it is, and the game goes on. the game is points, and it takes from twenty minutes to forty to play it, according to luck and the condition of the sea. it is an exciting game, and the crowd of spectators furnish abundance of applause for fortunate shots and plenty of laughter for the other kind. it is a game of skill, but at the same time the uneasy motion of the ship is constantly interfering with skill; this makes it a chancy game, and the element of luck comes largely in. we had a couple of grand tournaments, to determine who should be "champion of the pacific"; they included among the participants nearly all the passengers, of both sexes, and the officers of the ship, and they afforded many days of stupendous interest and excitement, and murderous exercise--for horse-billiards is a physically violent game. the figures in the following record of some of the closing games in the first tournament will show, better than any description, how very chancy the game is. the losers here represented had all been winners in the previous games of the series, some of them by fine majorities: chase, mrs. d., mortimer, the surgeon, miss c., mrs. t., clemens, taylor, taylor, davies, miss c., mortimer, thomas, roper, clemens, miss c., coomber, chase, and so on; until but three couples of winners were left. then i beat my man, young smith beat his man, and thomas beat his. this reduced the combatants to three. smith and i took the deck, and i led off. at the close of the first inning i was worse than nothing and smith had scored . the luck continued against me. when i was , smith was --within of out. the luck changed then. he picked up a -off or so, and couldn't recover. i beat him. the next game would end tournament no. . mr. thomas and i were the contestants. he won the lead and went to the bat--so to speak. and there he stood, with the crotch of his cue resting against his disk while the ship rose slowly up, sank slowly down, rose again, sank again. she never seemed to rise to suit him exactly. she started up once more; and when she was nearly ready for the turn, he let drive and landed his disk just within the left-hand end of the . (applause). the umpire proclaimed "a good ," and the game-keeper set it down. i played: my disk grazed the edge of mr. thomas's disk, and went out of the diagram. (no applause.) mr. thomas played again--and landed his second disk alongside of the first, and almost touching its right-hand side. "good ." (great applause.) i played, and missed both of them. (no applause.) mr. thomas delivered his third shot and landed his disk just at the right of the other two. "good ." (immense applause.) there they lay, side by side, the three in a row. it did not seem possible that anybody could miss them. still i did it. (immense silence.) mr. thomas played his last disk. it seems incredible, but he actually landed that disk alongside of the others, and just to the right of them-a straight solid row of disks. (tumultuous and long-continued applause.) then i played my last disk. again it did not seem possible that anybody could miss that row--a row which would have been inches long if the disks had been clamped together; whereas, with the spaces separating them they made a longer row than that. but i did it. it may be that i was getting nervous. i think it unlikely that that innings has ever had its parallel in the history of horse-billiards. to place the four disks side by side in the was an extraordinary feat; indeed, it was a kind of miracle. to miss them was another miracle. it will take a century to produce another man who can place the four disks in the ; and longer than that to find a man who can't knock them out. i was ashamed of my performance at the time, but now that i reflect upon it i see that it was rather fine and difficult. mr. thomas kept his luck, and won the game, and later the championship. in a minor tournament i won the prize, which was a waterbury watch. i put it in my trunk. in pretoria, south africa, nine months afterward, my proper watch broke down and i took the waterbury out, wound it, set it by the great clock on the parliament house ( . ), then went back to my room and went to bed, tired from a long railway journey. the parliamentary clock had a peculiarity which i was not aware of at the time --a peculiarity which exists in no other clock, and would not exist in that one if it had been made by a sane person; on the half-hour it strikes the succeeding hour, then strikes the hour again, at the proper time. i lay reading and smoking awhile; then, when i could hold my eyes open no longer and was about to put out the light, the great clock began to boom, and i counted ten. i reached for the waterbury to see how it was getting along. it was marking . . it seemed rather poor speed for a three-dollar watch, but i supposed that the climate was affecting it. i shoved it half an hour ahead; and took to my book and waited to see what would happen. at the great clock struck ten again. i looked--the waterbury was marking half-past . this was too much speed for the money, and it troubled me. i pushed the hands back a half hour, and waited once more; i had to, for i was vexed and restless now, and my sleepiness was gone. by and by the great clock struck . the waterbury was marking . . i pushed it ahead half an hour, with some show of temper. by and by the great clock struck again. the waterbury showed up . , now, and i beat her brains out against the bedstead. i was sorry next day, when i found out. to return to the ship. the average human being is a perverse creature; and when he isn't that, he is a practical joker. the result to the other person concerned is about the same: that is, he is made to suffer. the washing down of the decks begins at a very early hour in all ships; in but few ships are any measures taken to protect the passengers, either by waking or warning them, or by sending a steward to close their ports. and so the deckwashers have their opportunity, and they use it. they send a bucket of water slashing along the side of the ship and into the ports, drenching the passenger's clothes, and often the passenger himself. this good old custom prevailed in this ship, and under unusually favorable circumstances, for in the blazing tropical regions a removable zinc thing like a sugarshovel projects from the port to catch the wind and bring it in; this thing catches the wash-water and brings it in, too--and in flooding abundance. mrs. l, an invalid, had to sleep on the locker--sofa under her port, and every time she over-slept and thus failed to take care of herself, the deck-washers drowned her out. and the painters, what a good time they had! this ship would be going into dock for a month in sydney for repairs; but no matter, painting was going on all the time somewhere or other. the ladies' dresses were constantly getting ruined, nevertheless protests and supplications went for nothing. sometimes a lady, taking an afternoon nap on deck near a ventilator or some other thing that didn't need painting, would wake up by and by and find that the humorous painter had been noiselessly daubing that thing and had splattered her white gown all over with little greasy yellow spots. the blame for this untimely painting did not lie with the ship's officers, but with custom. as far back as noah's time it became law that ships must be constantly painted and fussed at when at sea; custom grew out of the law, and at sea custom knows no death; this custom will continue until the sea goes dry. sept. .--sunday. we are moving so nearly south that we cross only about two meridians of longitude a day. this morning we were in longitude west from greenwich, and degrees west from san francisco. to-morrow we shall be close to the center of the globe--the th degree of west longitude and th degree of east longitude. and then we must drop out a day-lose a day out of our lives, a day never to be found again. we shall all die one day earlier than from the beginning of time we were foreordained to die. we shall be a day behindhand all through eternity. we shall always be saying to the other angels, "fine day today," and they will be always retorting, "but it isn't to-day, it's tomorrow." we shall be in a state of confusion all the time and shall never know what true happiness is. next day. sure enough, it has happened. yesterday it was september , sunday; to-day, per the bulletin-board at the head of the companionway, it is september , tuesday. there is something uncanny about it. and uncomfortable. in fact, nearly unthinkable, and wholly unrealizable, when one comes to consider it. while we were crossing the th meridian it was sunday in the stern of the ship where my family were, and tuesday in the bow where i was. they were there eating the half of a fresh apple on the th, and i was at the same time eating the other half of it on the th--and i could notice how stale it was, already. the family were the same age that they were when i had left them five minutes before, but i was a day older now than i was then. the day they were living in stretched behind them half way round the globe, across the pacific ocean and america and europe; the day i was living in stretched in front of me around the other half to meet it. they were stupendous days for bulk and stretch; apparently much larger days than we had ever been in before. all previous days had been but shrunk-up little things by comparison. the difference in temperature between the two days was very marked, their day being hotter than mine because it was closer to the equator. along about the moment that we were crossing the great meridian a child was born in the steerage, and now there is no way to tell which day it was born on. the nurse thinks it was sunday, the surgeon thinks it was tuesday. the child will never know its own birthday. it will always be choosing first one and then the other, and will never be able to make up its mind permanently. this will breed vacillation and uncertainty in its opinions about religion, and politics, and business, and sweethearts, and everything, and will undermine its principles, and rot them away, and make the poor thing characterless, and its success in life impossible. every one in the ship says so. and this is not all--in fact, not the worst. for there is an enormously rich brewer in the ship who said as much as ten days ago, that if the child was born on his birthday he would give it ten thousand dollars to start its little life with. his birthday was monday, the th of september. if the ships all moved in the one direction--westward, i mean--the world would suffer a prodigious loss--in the matter of valuable time, through the dumping overboard on the great meridian of such multitudes of days by ships crews and passengers. but fortunately the ships do not all sail west, half of them sail east. so there is no real loss. these latter pick up all the discarded days and add them to the world's stock again; and about as good as new, too; for of course the salt water preserves them. chapter v. noise proves nothing. often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. wednesday, sept. . in this world we often make mistakes of judgment. we do not as a rule get out of them sound and whole, but sometimes we do. at dinner yesterday evening-present, a mixture of scotch, english, american, canadian, and australasian folk--a discussion broke out about the pronunciation of certain scottish words. this was private ground, and the non-scotch nationalities, with one exception, discreetly kept still. but i am not discreet, and i took a hand. i didn't know anything about the subject, but i took a hand just to have something to do. at that moment the word in dispute was the word three. one scotchman was claiming that the peasantry of scotland pronounced it three, his adversaries claimed that they didn't--that they pronounced it 'thraw'. the solitary scot was having a sultry time of it, so i thought i would enrich him with my help. in my position i was necessarily quite impartial, and was equally as well and as ill equipped to fight on the one side as on the other. so i spoke up and said the peasantry pronounced the word three, not thraw. it was an error of judgment. there was a moment of astonished and ominous silence, then weather ensued. the storm rose and spread in a surprising way, and i was snowed under in a very few minutes. it was a bad defeat for me--a kind of waterloo. it promised to remain so, and i wished i had had better sense than to enter upon such a forlorn enterprise. but just then i had a saving thought--at least a thought that offered a chance. while the storm was still raging, i made up a scotch couplet, and then spoke up and said: "very well, don't say any more. i confess defeat. i thought i knew, but i see my mistake. i was deceived by one of your scotch poets." "a scotch poet! o come! name him." "robert burns." it is wonderful the power of that name. these men looked doubtful--but paralyzed, all the same. they were quite silent for a moment; then one of them said--with the reverence in his voice which is always present in a scotchman's tone when he utters the name. "does robbie burns say--what does he say?" "this is what he says: 'there were nae bairns but only three --ane at the breast, twa at the knee.'" it ended the discussion. there was no man there profane enough, disloyal enough, to say any word against a thing which robert burns had settled. i shall always honor that great name for the salvation it brought me in this time of my sore need. it is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive. there are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. this is a superstition; there are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it. we are moving steadily southward-getting further and further down under the projecting paunch of the globe. yesterday evening we saw the big dipper and the north star sink below the horizon and disappear from our world. no, not "we," but they. they saw it--somebody saw it--and told me about it. but it is no matter, i was not caring for those things, i am tired of them, any way. i think they are well enough, but one doesn't want them always hanging around. my interest was all in the southern cross. i had never seen that. i had heard about it all my life, and it was but natural that i should be burning to see it. no other constellation makes so much talk. i had nothing against the big dipper --and naturally couldn't have anything against it, since it is a citizen of our own sky, and the property of the united states--but i did want it to move out of the way and give this foreigner a chance. judging by the size of the talk which the southern cross had made, i supposed it would need a sky all to itself. but that was a mistake. we saw the cross to-night, and it is not large. not large, and not strikingly bright. but it was low down toward the horizon, and it may improve when it gets up higher in the sky. it is ingeniously named, for it looks just as a cross would look if it looked like something else. but that description does not describe; it is too vague, too general, too indefinite. it does after a fashion suggest a cross across that is out of repair--or out of drawing; not correctly shaped. it is long, with a short cross-bar, and the cross-bar is canted out of the straight line. it consists of four large stars and one little one. the little one is out of line and further damages the shape. it should have been placed at the intersection of the stem and the cross-bar. if you do not draw an imaginary line from star to star it does not suggest a cross--nor anything in particular. one must ignore the little star, and leave it out of the combination--it confuses everything. if you leave it out, then you can make out of the four stars a sort of cross--out of true; or a sort of kite--out of true; or a sort of coffin-out of true. constellations have always been troublesome things to name. if you give one of them a fanciful name, it will always refuse to live up to it; it will always persist in not resembling the thing it has been named for. ultimately, to satisfy the public, the fanciful name has to be discarded for a common-sense one, a manifestly descriptive one. the great bear remained the great bear--and unrecognizable as such--for thousands of years; and people complained about it all the time, and quite properly; but as soon as it became the property of the united states, congress changed it to the big dipper, and now every body is satisfied, and there is no more talk about riots. i would not change the southern cross to the southern coffin, i would change it to the southern kite; for up there in the general emptiness is the proper home of a kite, but not for coffins and crosses and dippers. in a little while, now--i cannot tell exactly how long it will be--the globe will belong to the english-speaking race; and of course the skies also. then the constellations will be re-organized, and polished up, and re-named--the most of them "victoria," i reckon, but this one will sail thereafter as the southern kite, or go out of business. several towns and things, here and there, have been named for her majesty already. in these past few days we are plowing through a mighty milky way of islands. they are so thick on the map that one would hardly expect to find room between them for a canoe; yet we seldom glimpse one. once we saw the dim bulk of a couple of them, far away, spectral and dreamy things; members of the horne-alofa and fortuna. on the larger one are two rival native kings--and they have a time together. they are catholics; so are their people. the missionaries there are french priests. from the multitudinous islands in these regions the "recruits" for the queensland plantations were formerly drawn; are still drawn from them, i believe. vessels fitted up like old-time slavers came here and carried off the natives to serve as laborers in the great australian province. in the beginning it was plain, simple man-stealing, as per testimony of the missionaries. this has been denied, but not disproven. afterward it was forbidden by law to "recruit" a native without his consent, and governmental agents were sent in all recruiting vessels to see that the law was obeyed--which they did, according to the recruiting people; and which they sometimes didn't, according to the missionaries. a man could be lawfully recruited for a three-years term of service; he could volunteer for another term if he so chose; when his time was up he could return to his island. and would also have the means to do it; for the government required the employer to put money in its hands for this purpose before the recruit was delivered to him. captain wawn was a recruiting ship-master during many years. from his pleasant book one gets the idea that the recruiting business was quite popular with the islanders, as a rule. and yet that did not make the business wholly dull and uninteresting; for one finds rather frequent little breaks in the monotony of it--like this, for instance: "the afternoon of our arrival at leper island the schooner was lying almost becalmed under the lee of the lofty central portion of the island, about three-quarters of a mile from the shore. the boats were in sight at some distance. the recruiter-boat had run into a small nook on the rocky coast, under a high bank, above which stood a solitary hut backed by dense forest. the government agent and mate in the second boat lay about yards to the westward. "suddenly we heard the sound of firing, followed by yells from the natives on shore, and then we saw the recruiter-boat push out with a seemingly diminished crew. the mate's boat pulled quickly up, took her in tow, and presently brought her alongside, all her own crew being more or less hurt. it seems the natives had called them into the place on pretence of friendship. a crowd gathered about the stern of the boat, and several fellows even got into her. all of a sudden our men were attacked with clubs and tomahawks. the recruiter escaped the first blows aimed at him, making play with his fists until he had an opportunity to draw his revolver. 'tom sayers,' a mare man, received a tomahawk blow on the head which laid the scalp open but did not penetrate his skull, fortunately. 'bobby towns,' another mare boatman, had both his thumbs cut in warding off blows, one of them being so nearly severed from the hand that the doctors had to finish the operation. lihu, a lifu boy, the recruiter's special attendant, was cut and pricked in various places, but nowhere seriously. jack, an unlucky tanna recruit, who had been engaged to act as boatman, received an arrow through his forearm, the head of which--apiece of bone seven or eight inches long--was still in the limb, protruding from both sides, when the boats returned. the recruiter himself would have got off scot-free had not an arrow pinned one of his fingers to the loom of the steering-oar just as they were getting off. the fight had been short but sharp. the enemy lost two men, both shot dead." the truth is, captain wawn furnishes such a crowd of instances of fatal encounters between natives and french and english recruiting-crews (for the french are in the business for the plantations of new caledonia), that one is almost persuaded that recruiting is not thoroughly popular among the islanders; else why this bristling string of attacks and bloodcurdling slaughter? the captain lays it all to "exeter hall influence." but for the meddling philanthropists, the native fathers and mothers would be fond of seeing their children carted into exile and now and then the grave, instead of weeping about it and trying to kill the kind recruiters. chapter vi. he was as shy as a newspaper is when referring to its own merits. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. captain wawn is crystal-clear on one point: he does not approve of missionaries. they obstruct his business. they make "recruiting," as he calls it ("slave-catching," as they call it in their frank way) a trouble when it ought to be just a picnic and a pleasure excursion. the missionaries have their opinion about the manner in which the labor traffic is conducted, and about the recruiter's evasions of the law of the traffic, and about the traffic itself--and it is distinctly uncomplimentary to the traffic and to everything connected with it, including the law for its regulation. captain wawn's book is of very recent date; i have by me a pamphlet of still later date--hot from the press, in fact--by rev. wm. gray, a missionary; and the book and the pamphlet taken together make exceedingly interesting reading, to my mind. interesting, and easy to understand--except in one detail, which i will mention presently. it is easy to understand why the queensland sugar planter should want the kanaka recruit: he is cheap. very cheap, in fact. these are the figures paid by the planter: l to the recruiter for getting the kanaka or "catching" him, as the missionary phrase goes; l to the queensland government for "superintending" the importation; l deposited with the government for the kanaka's passage home when his three years are up, in case he shall live that long; about l to the kanaka himself for three years' wages and clothing; total payment for the use of a man three years, l ; or, including diet, l . altogether, a hundred dollars a year. one can understand why the recruiter is fond of the business; the recruit costs him a few cheap presents (given to the recruit's relatives, not himself), and the recruit is worth l to the recruiter when delivered in queensland. all this is clear enough; but the thing that is not clear is, what there is about it all to persuade the recruit. he is young and brisk; life at home in his beautiful island is one lazy, long holiday to him; or if he wants to work he can turn out a couple of bags of copra per week and sell it for four or five shillings a bag. in queensland he must get up at dawn and work from eight to twelve hours a day in the canefields--in a much hotter climate than he is used to--and get less than four shillings a week for it. i cannot understand his willingness to go to queensland. it is a deep puzzle to me. here is the explanation, from the planter's point of view; at least i gather from the missionary's pamphlet that it is the planter's: "when he comes from his home he is a savage, pure and simple. he feels no shame at his nakedness and want of adornment. when he returns home he does so well dressed, sporting a waterbury watch, collars, cuffs, boots, and jewelry. he takes with him one or more boxes--["box" is english for trunk.]--well filled with clothing, a musical instrument or two, and perfumery and other articles of luxury he has learned to appreciate." for just one moment we have a seeming flash of comprehension of, the kanaka's reason for exiling himself: he goes away to acquire civilization. yes, he was naked and not ashamed, now he is clothed and knows how to be ashamed; he was unenlightened; now he has a waterbury watch; he was unrefined, now he has jewelry, and something to make him smell good; he was a nobody, a provincial, now he has been to far countries and can show off. it all looks plausible--for a moment. then the missionary takes hold of this explanation and pulls it to pieces, and dances on it, and damages it beyond recognition. "admitting that the foregoing description is the average one, the average sequel is this: the cuffs and collars, if used at all, are carried off by youngsters, who fasten them round the leg, just below the knee, as ornaments. the waterbury, broken and dirty, finds its way to the trader, who gives a trifle for it; or the inside is taken out, the wheels strung on a thread and hung round the neck. knives, axes, calico, and handkerchiefs are divided among friends, and there is hardly one of these apiece. the boxes, the keys often lost on the road home, can be bought for s. d. they are to be seen rotting outside in almost any shore village on tanna. (i speak of what i have seen.) a returned kanaka has been furiously angry with me because i would not buy his trousers, which he declared were just my fit. he sold them afterwards to one of my aniwan teachers for d. worth of tobacco--a pair of trousers that probably cost him s. or s. in queensland. a coat or shirt is handy for cold weather. the white handkerchiefs, the 'senet' (perfumery), the umbrella, and perhaps the hat, are kept. the boots have to take their chance, if they do not happen to fit the copra trader. 'senet' on the hair, streaks of paint on the face, a dirty white handkerchief round the neck, strips of turtle shell in the ears, a belt, a sheath and knife, and an umbrella constitute the rig of returned kanaka at home the day after landing." a hat, an umbrella, a belt, a neckerchief. otherwise stark naked. all in a day the hard-earned "civilization" has melted away to this. and even these perishable things must presently go. indeed, there is but a single detail of his civilization that can be depended on to stay by him: according to the missionary, he has learned to swear. this is art, and art is long, as the poet says. in all countries the laws throw light upon the past. the queensland law for the regulation of the labor traffic is a confession. it is a confession that the evils charged by the missionaries upon the traffic had existed in the past, and that they still existed when the law was made. the missionaries make a further charge: that the law is evaded by the recruiters, and that the government agent sometimes helps them to do it. regulation reveals two things: that sometimes a young fool of a recruit gets his senses back, after being persuaded to sign away his liberty for three years, and dearly wants to get out of the engagement and stay at home with his own people; and that threats, intimidation, and force are used to keep him on board the recruiting-ship, and to hold him to his contract. regulation forbids these coercions. the law requires that he shall be allowed to go free; and another clause of it requires the recruiter to set him ashore--per boat, because of the prevalence of sharks. testimony from rev. mr. gray: "there are 'wrinkles' for taking the penitent kanaka. my first experience of the traffic was a case of this kind in . a vessel anchored just out of sight of our station, word was brought to me that some boys were stolen, and the relatives wished me to go and get them back. the facts were, as i found, that six boys had recruited, had rushed into the boat, the government agent informed me. they had all 'signed'; and, said the government agent, 'on board they shall remain.' i was assured that the six boys were of age and willing to go. yet on getting ready to leave the ship i found four of the lads ready to come ashore in the boat! this i forbade. one of them jumped into the water and persisted in coming ashore in my boat. when appealed to, the government agent suggested that we go and leave him to be picked up by the ship's boat, a quarter mile distant at the time!" the law and the missionaries feel for the repentant recruit--and properly, one may be permitted to think, for he is only a youth and ignorant and persuadable to his hurt--but sympathy for him is not kept in stock by the recruiter. rev. mr. gray says: "a captain many years in the traffic explained to me how a penitent could betaken. 'when a boy jumps overboard we just take a boat and pull ahead of him, then lie between him and the shore. if he has not tired himself swimming, and passes the boat, keep on heading him in this way. the dodge rarely fails. the boy generally tires of swimming, gets into the boat of his own accord, and goes quietly on board." yes, exhaustion is likely to make a boy quiet. if the distressed boy had been the speaker's son, and the captors savages, the speaker would have been surprised to see how differently the thing looked from the new point of view; however, it is not our custom to put ourselves in the other person's place. somehow there is something pathetic about that disappointed young savage's resignation. i must explain, here, that in the traffic dialect, "boy" does not always mean boy; it means a youth above sixteen years of age. that is by queensland law the age of consent, though it is held that recruiters allow themselves some latitude in guessing at ages. captain wawn of the free spirit chafes under the annoyance of "cast-iron regulations." they and the missionaries have poisoned his life. he grieves for the good old days, vanished to come no more. see him weep; hear him cuss between the lines! "for a long time we were allowed to apprehend and detain all deserters who had signed the agreement on board ship, but the 'cast-iron' regulations of the act of put a stop to that, allowing the kanaka to sign the agreement for three years' service, travel about in the ship in receipt of the regular rations, cadge all he could, and leave when he thought fit, so long as he did not extend his pleasure trip to queensland." rev. mr. gray calls this same restrictive cast-iron law a "farce." "there is as much cruelty and injustice done to natives by acts that are legal as by deeds unlawful. the regulations that exist are unjust and inadequate--unjust and inadequate they must ever be." he furnishes his reasons for his position, but they are too long for reproduction here. however, if the most a kanaka advantages himself by a three-years course in civilization in queensland, is a necklace and an umbrella and a showy imperfection in the art of swearing, it must be that all the profit of the traffic goes to the white man. this could be twisted into a plausible argument that the traffic ought to be squarely abolished. however, there is reason for hope that that can be left alone to achieve itself. it is claimed that the traffic will depopulate its sources of supply within the next twenty or thirty years. queensland is a very healthy place for white people--death-rate in , of the population --but the kanaka death-rate is away above that. the vital statistics for place it at ; for (mackay district), . the first six months of the kanaka's exile are peculiarly perilous for him because of the rigors of the new climate. the death-rate among the new men has reached as high as in the , . in the kanaka's native home his death-rate is in time of peace, and in time of war. thus exile to queensland--with the opportunity to acquire civilization, an umbrella, and a pretty poor quality of profanity--is twelve times as deadly for him as war. common christian charity, common humanity, does seem to require, not only that these people be returned to their homes, but that war, pestilence, and famine be introduced among them for their preservation. concerning these pacific isles and their peoples an eloquent prophet spoke long years ago--five and fifty years ago. in fact, he spoke a little too early. prophecy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks. this prophet was the right rev. m. russell, ll.d., d.c.l., of edinburgh: "is the tide of civilization to roll only to the foot of the rocky mountains, and is the sun of knowledge to set at last in the waves of the pacific? no; the mighty day of four thousand years is drawing to its close; the sun of humanity has performed its destined course; but long ere its setting rays are extinguished in the west, its ascending beams have glittered on the isles of the eastern seas . . . . and now we see the race of japhet setting forth to people the isles, and the seeds of another europe and a second england sown in the regions of the sun. but mark the words of the prophecy: 'he shall dwell in the tents of shem, and canaan shall be his servant.' it is not said canaan shall be his slave. to the anglo-saxon race is given the scepter of the globe, but there is not given either the lash of the slave-driver or the rack of the executioner. the east will not be stained with the same atrocities as the west; the frightful gangrene of an enthralled race is not to mar the destinies of the family of japhet in the oriental world; humanizing, not destroying, as they advance; uniting with, not enslaving, the inhabitants with whom they dwell, the british race may," etc., etc. and he closes his vision with an invocation from thomson: "come, bright improvement! on the car of time, and rule the spacious world from clime to clime." very well, bright improvement has arrived, you see, with her civilization, and her waterbury, and her umbrella, and her third-quality profanity, and her humanizing-not-destroying machinery, and her hundred-and-eighty death-rate, and everything is going along just as handsome! but the prophet that speaks last has an advantage over the pioneer in the business. rev. mr. gray says: "what i am concerned about is that we as a christian nation should wipe out these races to enrich ourselves." and he closes his pamphlet with a grim indictment which is as eloquent in its flowerless straightforward english as is the hand-painted rhapsody of the early prophet: "my indictment of the queensland-kanaka labor traffic is this " . it generally demoralizes and always impoverishes the kanaka, deprives him of his citizenship, and depopulates the islands fitted to his home. " . it is felt to lower the dignity of the white agricultural laborer in queensland, and beyond a doubt it lowers his wages there. " . the whole system is fraught with danger to australia and the islands on the score of health. " . on social and political grounds the continuance of the queensland kanaka labor traffic must be a barrier to the true federation of the australian colonies. " . the regulations under which the traffic exists in queensland are inadequate to prevent abuses, and in the nature of things they must remain so. " . the whole system is contrary to the spirit and doctrine of the gospel of jesus christ. the gospel requires us to help the weak, but the kanaka is fleeced and trodden down. " . the bed-rock of this traffic is that the life and liberty of a black man are of less value than those of a white man. and a traffic that has grown out of 'slave-hunting' will certainly remain to the end not unlike its origin." chapter vii. truth is the most valuable thing we have. let us economize it. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. from diary:--for a day or two we have been plowing among an invisible vast wilderness of islands, catching now and then a shadowy glimpse of a member of it. there does seem to be a prodigious lot of islands this year; the map of this region is freckled and fly-specked all over with them. their number would seem to be uncountable. we are moving among the fijis now-- islands and islets in the group. in front of us, to the west, the wilderness stretches toward australia, then curves upward to new guinea, and still up and up to japan; behind us, to the east, the wilderness stretches sixty degrees across the wastes of the pacific; south of us is new zealand. somewhere or other among these myriads samoa is concealed, and not discoverable on the map. still, if you wish to go there, you will have no trouble about finding it if you follow the directions given by robert louis stevenson to dr. conan doyle and to mr. j. m. barrie. "you go to america, cross the continent to san francisco, and then it's the second turning to the left." to get the full flavor of the joke one must take a glance at the map. wednesday, september .--yesterday we passed close to an island or so, and recognized the published fiji characteristics: a broad belt of clean white coral sand around the island; back of it a graceful fringe of leaning palms, with native huts nestling cosily among the shrubbery at their bases; back of these a stretch of level land clothed in tropic vegetation; back of that, rugged and picturesque mountains. a detail of the immediate foreground: a mouldering ship perched high up on a reef-bench. this completes the composition, and makes the picture artistically perfect. in the afternoon we sighted suva, the capital of the group, and threaded our way into the secluded little harbor--a placid basin of brilliant blue and green water tucked snugly in among the sheltering hills. a few ships rode at anchor in it--one of them a sailing vessel flying the american flag; and they said she came from duluth! there's a journey! duluth is several thousand miles from the sea, and yet she is entitled to the proud name of mistress of the commercial marine of the united states of america. there is only one free, independent, unsubsidized american ship sailing the foreign seas, and duluth owns it. all by itself that ship is the american fleet. all by itself it causes the american name and power to be respected in the far regions of the globe. all by itself it certifies to the world that the most populous civilized nation, in the earth has a just pride in her stupendous stretch of sea-front, and is determined to assert and maintain her rightful place as one of the great maritime powers of the planet. all by itself it is making foreign eyes familiar with a flag which they have not seen before for forty years, outside of the museum. for what duluth has done, in building, equipping, and maintaining at her sole expense the american foreign commercial fleet, and in thus rescuing the american name from shame and lifting it high for the homage of the nations, we owe her a debt of gratitude which our hearts shall confess with quickened beats whenever her name is named henceforth. many national toasts will die in the lapse of time, but while the flag flies and the republic survives, they who live under their shelter will still drink this one, standing and uncovered: health and prosperity to thee, o duluth, american queen of the alien seas! row-boats began to flock from the shore; their crews were the first natives we had seen. these men carried no overplus of clothing, and this was wise, for the weather was hot. handsome, great dusky men they were, muscular, clean-limbed, and with faces full of character and intelligence. it would be hard to find their superiors anywhere among the dark races, i should think. everybody went ashore to look around, and spy out the land, and have that luxury of luxuries to sea-voyagers--a land-dinner. and there we saw more natives: wrinkled old women, with their flat mammals flung over their shoulders, or hanging down in front like the cold-weather drip from the molasses-faucet; plump and smily young girls, blithe and content, easy and graceful, a pleasure to look at; young matrons, tall, straight, comely, nobly built, sweeping by with chin up, and a gait incomparable for unconscious stateliness and dignity; majestic young men athletes for build and muscle clothed in a loose arrangement of dazzling white, with bronze breast and bronze legs naked, and the head a cannon-swab of solid hair combed straight out from the skull and dyed a rich brick-red. only sixty years ago they were sunk in darkness; now they have the bicycle. we strolled about the streets of the white folks' little town, and around over the hills by paths and roads among european dwellings and gardens and plantations, and past clumps of hibiscus that made a body blink, the great blossoms were so intensely red; and by and by we stopped to ask an elderly english colonist a question or two, and to sympathize with him concerning the torrid weather; but he was surprised, and said: "this? this is not hot. you ought to be here in the summer time once." "we supposed that this was summer; it has the ear-marks of it. you could take it to almost any country and deceive people with it. but if it isn't summer, what does it lack?" "it lacks half a year. this is mid-winter." i had been suffering from colds for several months, and a sudden change of season, like this, could hardly fail to do me hurt. it brought on another cold. it is odd, these sudden jumps from season to season. a fortnight ago we left america in mid-summer, now it is midwinter; about a week hence we shall arrive in australia in the spring. after dinner i found in the billiard-room a resident whom i had known somewhere else in the world, and presently made, some new friends and drove with them out into the country to visit his excellency the head of the state, who was occupying his country residence, to escape the rigors of the winter weather, i suppose, for it was on breezy high ground and much more comfortable than the lower regions, where the town is, and where the winter has full swing, and often sets a person's hair afire when he takes off his hat to bow. there is a noble and beautiful view of ocean and islands and castellated peaks from the governor's high-placed house, and its immediate surroundings lie drowsing in that dreamy repose and serenity which are the charm of life in the pacific islands. one of the new friends who went out there with me was a large man, and i had been admiring his size all the way. i was still admiring it as he stood by the governor on the veranda, talking; then the fijian butler stepped out there to announce tea, and dwarfed him. maybe he did not quite dwarf him, but at any rate the contrast was quite striking. perhaps that dark giant was a king in a condition of political suspension. i think that in the talk there on the veranda it was said that in fiji, as in the sandwich islands, native kings and chiefs are of much grander size and build than the commoners. this man was clothed in flowing white vestments, and they were just the thing for him; they comported well with his great stature and his kingly port and dignity. european clothes would have degraded him and made him commonplace. i know that, because they do that with everybody that wears them. it was said that the old-time devotion to chiefs and reverence for their persons still survive in the native commoner, and in great force. the educated young gentleman who is chief of the tribe that live in the region about the capital dresses in the fashion of high-class european gentlemen, but even his clothes cannot damn him in the reverence of his people. their pride in his lofty rank and ancient lineage lives on, in spite of his lost authority and the evil magic of his tailor. he has no need to defile himself with work, or trouble his heart with the sordid cares of life; the tribe will see to it that he shall not want, and that he shall hold up his head and live like a gentleman. i had a glimpse of him down in the town. perhaps he is a descendant of the last king--the king with the difficult name whose memory is preserved by a notable monument of cut-stone which one sees in the enclosure in the middle of the town. thakombau--i remember, now; that is the name. it is easier to preserve it on a granite block than in your head. fiji was ceded to england by this king in . one of the gentlemen present at the governor's quoted a remark made by the king at the time of the session--a neat retort, and with a touch of pathos in it, too. the english commissioner had offered a crumb of comfort to thakombau by saying that the transfer of the kingdom to great britain was merely "a sort of hermit-crab formality, you know." "yes," said poor thakombau, "but with this difference--the crab moves into an unoccupied shell, but mine isn't." however, as far as i can make out from the books, the king was between the devil and the deep sea at the time, and hadn't much choice. he owed the united states a large debt--a debt which he could pay if allowed time, but time was denied him. he must pay up right away or the warships would be upon him. to protect his people from this disaster he ceded his country to britain, with a clause in the contract providing for the ultimate payment of the american debt. in old times the fijians were fierce fighters; they were very religious, and worshiped idols; the big chiefs were proud and haughty, and they were men of great style in many ways; all chiefs had several wives, the biggest chiefs sometimes had as many as fifty; when a chief was dead and ready for burial, four or five of his wives were strangled and put into the grave with him. in twenty-seven british convicts escaped from australia to fiji, and brought guns and ammunition with them. consider what a power they were, armed like that, and what an opportunity they had. if they had been energetic men and sober, and had had brains and known how to use them, they could have achieved the sovereignty of the archipelago twenty-seven kings and each with eight or nine islands under his scepter. but nothing came of this chance. they lived worthless lives of sin and luxury, and died without honor--in most cases by violence. only one of them had any ambition; he was an irishman named connor. he tried to raise a family of fifty children, and scored forty-eight. he died lamenting his failure. it was a foolish sort of avarice. many a father would have been rich enough with forty. it is a fine race, the fijians, with brains in their heads, and an inquiring turn of mind. it appears that their savage ancestors had a doctrine of immortality in their scheme of religion--with limitations. that is to say, their dead friend would go to a happy hereafter if he could be accumulated, but not otherwise. they drew the line; they thought that the missionary's doctrine was too sweeping, too comprehensive. they called his attention to certain facts. for instance, many of their friends had been devoured by sharks; the sharks, in their turn, were caught and eaten by other men; later, these men were captured in war, and eaten by the enemy. the original persons had entered into the composition of the sharks; next, they and the sharks had become part of the flesh and blood and bone of the cannibals. how, then, could the particles of the original men be searched out from the final conglomerate and put together again? the inquirers were full of doubts, and considered that the missionary had not examined the matter with--the gravity and attention which so serious a thing deserved. the missionary taught these exacting savages many valuable things, and got from them one--a very dainty and poetical idea: those wild and ignorant poor children of nature believed that the flowers, after they perish, rise on the winds and float away to the fair fields of heaven, and flourish there forever in immortal beauty! chapter viii. it could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native american criminal class except congress. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. when one glances at the map the members of the stupendous island wilderness of the pacific seem to crowd upon each other; but no, there is no crowding, even in the center of a group; and between groups there are lonely wide deserts of sea. not everything is known about the islands, their peoples and their languages. a startling reminder of this is furnished by the fact that in fiji, twenty years ago, were living two strange and solitary beings who came from an unknown country and spoke an unknown language. "they were picked up by a passing vessel many hundreds of miles from any known land, floating in the same tiny canoe in which they had been blown out to sea. when found they were but skin and bone. no one could understand what they said, and they have never named their country; or, if they have, the name does not correspond with that of any island on any chart. they are now fat and sleek, and as happy as the day is long. in the ship's log there is an entry of the latitude and longitude in which they were found, and this is probably all the clue they will ever have to their lost homes."--[forbes's "two years in fiji."] what a strange and romantic episode it is; and how one is tortured with curiosity to know whence those mysterious creatures came, those men without a country, errant waifs who cannot name their lost home, wandering children of nowhere. indeed, the island wilderness is the very home of romance and dreams and mystery. the loneliness, the solemnity, the beauty, and the deep repose of this wilderness have a charm which is all their own for the bruised spirit of men who have fought and failed in the struggle for life in the great world; and for men who have been hunted out of the great world for crime; and for other men who love an easy and indolent existence; and for others who love a roving free life, and stir and change and adventure; and for yet others who love an easy and comfortable career of trading and money-getting, mixed with plenty of loose matrimony by purchase, divorce without trial or expense, and limitless spreeing thrown in to make life ideally perfect. we sailed again, refreshed. the most cultivated person in the ship was a young english, man whose home was in new zealand. he was a naturalist. his learning in his specialty was deep and thorough, his interest in his subject amounted to a passion, he had an easy gift of speech; and so, when he talked about animals it was a pleasure to listen to him. and profitable, too, though he was sometimes difficult to understand because now and then he used scientific technicalities which were above the reach of some of us. they were pretty sure to be above my reach, but as he was quite willing to explain them i always made it a point to get him to do it. i had a fair knowledge of his subject--layman's knowledge--to begin with, but it was his teachings which crystalized it into scientific form and clarity--in a word, gave it value. his special interest was the fauna of australasia, and his knowledge of the matter was as exhaustive as it was accurate. i already knew a good deal about the rabbits in australasia and their marvelous fecundity, but in my talks with him i found that my estimate of the great hindrance and obstruction inflicted by the rabbit pest upon traffic and travel was far short of the facts. he told me that the first pair of rabbits imported into australasia bred so wonderfully that within six months rabbits were so thick in the land that people had to dig trenches through them to get from town to town. he told me a great deal about worms, and the kangaroo, and other coleoptera, and said he knew the history and ways of all such pachydermata. he said the kangaroo had pockets, and carried its young in them when it couldn't get apples. and he said that the emu was as big as an ostrich, and looked like one, and had an amorphous appetite and would eat bricks. also, that the dingo was not a dingo at all, but just a wild dog; and that the only difference between a dingo and a dodo was that neither of them barked; otherwise they were just the same. he said that the only game-bird in australia was the wombat, and the only song-bird the larrikin, and that both were protected by government. the most beautiful of the native birds was the bird of paradise. next came the two kinds of lyres; not spelt the same. he said the one kind was dying out, the other thickening up. he explained that the "sundowner" was not a bird it was a man; sundowner was merely the australian equivalent of our word, tramp. he is a loafer, a hard drinker, and a sponge. he tramps across the country in the sheep-shearing season, pretending to look for work; but he always times himself to arrive at a sheep-run just at sundown, when the day's labor ends; all he wants is whisky and supper and bed and breakfast; he gets them and then disappears. the naturalist spoke of the bell bird, the creature that at short intervals all day rings out its mellow and exquisite peal from the deeps of the forest. it is the favorite and best friend of the weary and thirsty sundowner; for he knows that wherever the bell bird is, there is water; and he goes somewhere else. the naturalist said that the oddest bird in australasia was the, laughing jackass, and the biggest the now extinct great moa. the moa stood thirteen feet high, and could step over an ordinary man's head or kick his hat off; and his head, too, for that matter. he said it was wingless, but a swift runner. the natives used to ride it. it could make forty miles an hour, and keep it up for four hundred miles and come out reasonably fresh. it was still in existence when the railway was introduced into new zealand; still in existence, and carrying the mails. the railroad began with the same schedule it has now: two expresses a week-time, twenty miles an hour. the company exterminated the moa to get the mails. speaking of the indigenous coneys and bactrian camels, the naturalist said that the coniferous and bacteriological output of australasia was remarkable for its many and curious departures from the accepted laws governing these species of tubercles, but that in his opinion nature's fondness for dabbling in the erratic was most notably exhibited in that curious combination of bird, fish, amphibian, burrower, crawler, quadruped, and christian called the ornithorhynchus--grotesquest of animals, king of the animalculae of the world for versatility of character and make-up. said he: "you can call it anything you want to, and be right. it is a fish, for it lives in the river half the time; it is a land animal, for it resides on the land half the time; it is an amphibian, since it likes both and does not know which it prefers; it is a hybernian, for when times are dull and nothing much going on it buries itself under the mud at the bottom of a puddle and hybernates there a couple of weeks at a time; it is a kind of duck, for it has a duck-bill and four webbed paddles; it is a fish and quadruped together, for in the water it swims with the paddles and on shore it paws itself across country with them; it is a kind of seal, for it has a seal's fur; it is carnivorous, herbivorous, insectivorous, and vermifuginous, for it eats fish and grass and butterflies, and in the season digs worms out of the mud and devours them; it is clearly a bird, for it lays eggs, and hatches them; it is clearly a mammal, for it nurses its young; and it is manifestly a kind of christian, for it keeps the sabbath when there is anybody around, and when there isn't, doesn't. it has all the tastes there are except refined ones, it has all the habits there are except good ones. "it is a survival--a survival of the fittest. mr. darwin invented the theory that goes by that name, but the ornithorhynchus was the first to put it to actual experiment and prove that it could be done. hence it should have as much of the credit as mr. darwin. it was never in the ark; you will find no mention of it there; it nobly stayed out and worked the theory. of all creatures in the world it was the only one properly equipped for the test. the ark was thirteen months afloat, and all the globe submerged; no land visible above the flood, no vegetation, no food for a mammal to eat, nor water for a mammal to drink; for all mammal food was destroyed, and when the pure floods from heaven and the salt oceans of the earth mingled their waters and rose above the mountain tops, the result was a drink which no bird or beast of ordinary construction could use and live. but this combination was nuts for the ornithorhynchus, if i may use a term like that without offense. its river home had always been salted by the flood-tides of the sea. on the face of the noachian deluge innumerable forest trees were floating. upon these the ornithorhynchus voyaged in peace; voyaged from clime to clime, from hemisphere to hemisphere, in contentment and comfort, in virile interest in the constant change of scene, in humble thankfulness for its privileges, in ever-increasing enthusiasm in the development of the great theory upon whose validity it had staked its life, its fortunes, and its sacred honor, if i may use such expressions without impropriety in connection with an episode of this nature. "it lived the tranquil and luxurious life of a creature of independent means. of things actually necessary to its existence and its happiness not a detail was wanting. when it wished to walk, it scrambled along the tree-trunk; it mused in the shade of the leaves by day, it slept in their shelter by night; when it wanted the refreshment of a swim, it had it; it ate leaves when it wanted a vegetable diet, it dug under the bark for worms and grubs; when it wanted fish it caught them, when it wanted eggs it laid them. if the grubs gave out in one tree it swam to another; and as for fish, the very opulence of the supply was an embarrassment. and finally, when it was thirsty it smacked its chops in gratitude over a blend that would have slain a crocodile. "when at last, after thirteen months of travel and research in all the zones it went aground on a mountain-summit, it strode ashore, saying in its heart, 'let them that come after me invent theories and dream dreams about the survival of the fittest if they like, but i am the first that has done it! "this wonderful creature dates back like the kangaroo and many other australian hydrocephalous invertebrates, to an age long anterior to the advent of man upon the earth; they date back, indeed, to a time when a causeway hundreds of miles wide, and thousands of miles long, joined australia to africa, and the animals of the two countries were alike, and all belonged to that remote geological epoch known to science as the old red grindstone post-pleosaurian. later the causeway sank under the sea; subterranean convulsions lifted the african continent a thousand feet higher than it was before, but australia kept her old level. in africa's new climate the animals necessarily began to develop and shade off into new forms and families and species, but the animals of australia as necessarily remained stationary, and have so remained until this day. in the course of some millions of years the african ornithorhynchus developed and developed and developed, and sluffed off detail after detail of its make-up until at last the creature became wholly disintegrated and scattered. whenever you see a bird or a beast or a seal or an otter in africa you know that he is merely a sorry surviving fragment of that sublime original of whom i have been speaking--that creature which was everything in general and nothing in particular--the opulently endowed 'e pluribus unum' of the animal world. "such is the history of the most hoary, the most ancient, the most venerable creature that exists in the earth today--ornithorhynchus platypus extraordinariensis--whom god preserve!" when he was strongly moved he could rise and soar like that with ease. and not only in the prose form, but in the poetical as well. he had written many pieces of poetry in his time, and these manuscripts he lent around among the passengers, and was willing to let them be copied. it seemed to me that the least technical one in the series, and the one which reached the loftiest note, perhaps, was his: invocation. "come forth from thy oozy couch, o ornithorhynchus dear! and greet with a cordial claw the stranger that longs to hear "from thy own own lips the tale of thy origin all unknown: thy misplaced bone where flesh should be and flesh where should be bone; "and fishy fin where should be paw, and beaver-trowel tail, and snout of beast equip'd with teeth where gills ought to prevail. "come, kangaroo, the good and true foreshortened as to legs, and body tapered like a churn, and sack marsupial, i' fegs, "and tells us why you linger here, thou relic of a vanished time, when all your friends as fossils sleep, immortalized in lime!" perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist; but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one. the above verses are indeed beautiful, and, in a way, touching; but there is a haunting something about them which unavoidably suggests the sweet singer of michigan. it can hardly be doubted that the author had read the works of that poet and been impressed by them. it is not apparent that he has borrowed from them any word or yet any phrase, but the style and swing and mastery and melody of the sweet singer all are there. compare this invocation with "frank dutton"--particularly stanzas first and seventeenth--and i think the reader will feel convinced that he who wrote the one had read the other: i. "frank dutton was as fine a lad as ever you wish to see, and he was drowned in pine island lake on earth no more will he be, his age was near fifteen years, and he was a motherless boy, he was living with his grandmother when he was drowned, poor boy." xvii. "he was drowned on tuesday afternoon, on sunday he was found, and the tidings of that drowned boy was heard for miles around. his form was laid by his mother's side, beneath the cold, cold ground, his friends for him will drop a tear when they view his little mound." the sentimental song book. by mrs. julia moore, p. . following the equator a journey around the world by mark twain samuel l. clemens part chapter xx. it is by the goodness of god that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. from diary: mr. g. called. i had not seen him since nauheim, germany--several years ago; the time that the cholera broke out at hamburg. we talked of the people we had known there, or had casually met; and g. said: "do you remember my introducing you to an earl--the earl of c.?" "yes. that was the last time i saw you. you and he were in a carriage, just starting--belated--for the train. i remember it." "i remember it too, because of a thing which happened then which i was not looking for. he had told me a while before, about a remarkable and interesting californian whom he had met and who was a friend of yours, and said that if he should ever meet you he would ask you for some particulars about that californian. the subject was not mentioned that day at nauheim, for we were hurrying away, and there was no time; but the thing that surprised me was this: when i induced you, you said, 'i am glad to meet your lordship gain.' the i again' was the surprise. he is a little hard of hearing, and didn't catch that word, and i thought you hadn't intended that he should. as we drove off i had only time to say, 'why, what do you know about him?' and i understood you to say, 'oh, nothing, except that he is the quickest judge of----' then we were gone, and i didn't get the rest. i wondered what it was that he was such a quick judge of. i have thought of it many times since, and still wondered what it could be. he and i talked it over, but could not guess it out. he thought it must be fox-hounds or horses, for he is a good judge of those--no one is a better. but you couldn't know that, because you didn't know him; you had mistaken him for some one else; it must be that, he said, because he knew you had never met him before. and of course you hadn't had you?" "yes, i had." "is that so? where?" "at a fox-hunt, in england." "how curious that is. why, he hadn't the least recollection of it. had you any conversation with him?" "some--yes." "well, it left not the least impression upon him. what did you talk about?" "about the fox. i think that was all." "why, that would interest him; that ought to have left an impression. what did he talk about?" "the fox." it's very curious. i don't understand it. did what he said leave an impression upon you?" "yes. it showed me that he was a quick judge of--however, i will tell you all about it, then you will understand. it was a quarter of a century ago or ' . i had an american friend in london named f., who was fond of hunting, and his friends the blanks invited him and me to come out to a hunt and be their guests at their country place. in the morning the mounts were provided, but when i saw the horses i changed my mind and asked permission to walk. i had never seen an english hunter before, and it seemed to me that i could hunt a fox safer on the ground. i had always been diffident about horses, anyway, even those of the common altitudes, and i did not feel competent to hunt on a horse that went on stilts. so then mrs. blank came to my help and said i could go with her in the dog-cart and we would drive to a place she knew of, and there we should have a good glimpse of the hunt as it went by. "when we got to that place i got out and went and leaned my elbows on a low stone wall which enclosed a turfy and beautiful great field with heavy wood on all its sides except ours. mrs. blank sat in the dog-cart fifty yards away, which was as near as she could get with the vehicle. i was full of interest, for i had never seen a fox-hunt. i waited, dreaming and imagining, in the deep stillness and impressive tranquility which reigned in that retired spot. presently, from away off in the forest on the left, a mellow bugle-note came floating; then all of a sudden a multitude of dogs burst out of that forest and went tearing by and disappeared in the forest on the right; there was a pause, and then a cloud of horsemen in black caps and crimson coats plunged out of the left-hand forest and went flaming across the field like a prairie-fire, a stirring sight to see. there was one man ahead of the rest, and he came spurring straight at me. he was fiercely excited. it was fine to see him ride; he was a master horseman. he came like, a storm till he was within seven feet of me, where i was leaning on the wall, then he stood his horse straight up in the air on his hind toe-nails, and shouted like a demon: "'which way'd the fox go?' "i didn't much like the tone, but i did not let on; for he was excited, you know. but i was calm; so i said softly, and without acrimony: "'which fox?' "it seemed to anger him. i don't know why; and he thundered out: "'which fox? why, the fox? which way did the fox go?' "i said, with great gentleness--even argumentatively: "'if you could be a little more definite--a little less vague--because i am a stranger, and there are many foxes, as you will know even better than i, and unless i know which one it is that you desire to identify, and----' "'you're certainly the damdest idiot that has escaped in a thousand years!' and he snatched his great horse around as easily as i would snatch a cat, and was away like a hurricane. a very excitable man. "i went back to mrs. blank, and she was excited, too--oh, all alive. she said: "'he spoke to you!--didn't he?' "'yes, it is what happened.' "'i knew it! i couldn't hear what he said, but i knew be spoke to you! do you know who it was? it was lord c., and he is master of the buckhounds! tell me--what do you think of him?' "'him? well, for sizing-up a stranger, he's got the most sudden and accurate judgment of any man i ever saw.' "it pleased her. i thought it would." g. got away from nauheim just in time to escape being shut in by the quarantine-bars on the frontiers; and so did we, for we left the next day. but g. had a great deal of trouble in getting by the italian custom-house, and we should have fared likewise but for the thoughtfulness of our consul-general in frankfort. he introduced me to the italian consul-general, and i brought away from that consulate a letter which made our way smooth. it was a dozen lines merely commending me in a general way to the courtesies of servants in his italian majesty's service, but it was more powerful than it looked. in addition to a raft of ordinary baggage, we had six or eight trunks which were filled exclusively with dutiable stuff--household goods purchased in frankfort for use in florence, where we had taken a house. i was going to ship these through by express; but at the last moment an order went throughout germany forbidding the moving of any parcels by train unless the owner went with them. this was a bad outlook. we must take these things along, and the delay sure to be caused by the examination of them in the custom-house might lose us our train. i imagined all sorts of terrors, and enlarged them steadily as we approached the italian frontier. we were six in number, clogged with all that baggage, and i was courier for the party the most incapable one they ever employed. we arrived, and pressed with the crowd into the immense custom-house, and the usual worries began; everybody crowding to the counter and begging to have his baggage examined first, and all hands clattering and chattering at once. it seemed to me that i could do nothing; it would be better to give it all up and go away and leave the baggage. i couldn't speak the language; i should never accomplish anything. just then a tall handsome man in a fine uniform was passing by and i knew he must be the station-master--and that reminded me of my letter. i ran to him and put it into his hands. he took it out of the envelope, and the moment his eye caught the royal coat of arms printed at its top, he took off his cap and made a beautiful bow to me, and said in english: "which is your baggage? please show it to me." i showed him the mountain. nobody was disturbing it; nobody was interested in it; all the family's attempts to get attention to it had failed--except in the case of one of the trunks containing the dutiable goods. it was just being opened. my officer said: "there, let that alone! lock it. now chalk it. chalk all of the lot. now please come and show the hand-baggage." he plowed through the waiting crowd, i following, to the counter, and he gave orders again, in his emphatic military way: "chalk these. chalk all of them." then he took off his cap and made that beautiful bow again, and went his way. by this time these attentions had attracted the wonder of that acre of passengers, and the whisper had gone around that the royal family were present getting their baggage chalked; and as we passed down in review on our way to the door, i was conscious of a pervading atmosphere of envy which gave me deep satisfaction. but soon there was an accident. my overcoat pockets were stuffed with german cigars and linen packages of american smoking tobacco, and a porter was following us around with this overcoat on his arm, and gradually getting it upside down. just as i, in the rear of my family, moved by the sentinels at the door, about three hatfuls of the tobacco tumbled out on the floor. one of the soldiers pounced upon it, gathered it up in his arms, pointed back whence i had come, and marched me ahead of him past that long wall of passengers again--he chattering and exulting like a devil, they smiling in peaceful joy, and i trying to look as if my pride was not hurt, and as if i did not mind being brought to shame before these pleased people who had so lately envied me. but at heart i was cruelly humbled. when i had been marched two-thirds of the long distance and the misery of it was at the worst, the stately station-master stepped out from somewhere, and the soldier left me and darted after him and overtook him; and i could see by the soldier's excited gestures that he was betraying to him the whole shabby business. the station-master was plainly very angry. he came striding down toward me, and when he was come near he began to pour out a stream of indignant italian; then suddenly took off his hat and made that beautiful bow and said: "oh, it is you! i beg a thousands pardons! this idiot here---" he turned to the exulting soldier and burst out with a flood of white-hot italian lava, and the next moment he was bowing, and the soldier and i were moving in procession again--he in the lead and ashamed, this time, i with my chin up. and so we marched by the crowd of fascinated passengers, and i went forth to the train with the honors of war. tobacco and all. chapter xxi. man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. before i saw australia i had never heard of the "weet-weet" at all. i met but few men who had seen it thrown--at least i met but few who mentioned having seen it thrown. roughly described, it is a fat wooden cigar with its butt-end fastened to a flexible twig. the whole thing is only a couple of feet long, and weighs less than two ounces. this feather--so to call it--is not thrown through the air, but is flung with an underhanded throw and made to strike the ground a little way in front of the thrower; then it glances and makes a long skip; glances again, skips again, and again and again, like the flat stone which a boy sends skating over the water. the water is smooth, and the stone has a good chance; so a strong man may make it travel fifty or seventy-five yards; but the weet-weet has no such good chance, for it strikes sand, grass, and earth in its course. yet an expert aboriginal has sent it a measured distance of two hundred and twenty yards. it would have gone even further but it encountered rank ferns and underwood on its passage and they damaged its speed. two hundred and twenty yards; and so weightless a toy--a mouse on the end of a bit of wire, in effect; and not sailing through the accommodating air, but encountering grass and sand and stuff at every jump. it looks wholly impossible; but mr. brough smyth saw the feat and did the measuring, and set down the facts in his book about aboriginal life, which he wrote by command of the victorian government. what is the secret of the feat? no one explains. it cannot be physical strength, for that could not drive such a feather-weight any distance. it must be art. but no one explains what the art of it is; nor how it gets around that law of nature which says you shall not throw any two-ounce thing yards, either through the air or bumping along the ground. rev. j. g. woods says: "the distance to which the weet-weet or kangaroo-rat can be thrown is truly astonishing. i have seen an australian stand at one side of kennington oval and throw the kangaroo rat completely across it." (width of kensington oval not stated.) "it darts through the air with the sharp and menacing hiss of a rifle-ball, its greatest height from the ground being some seven or eight feet . . . . . . when properly thrown it looks just like a living animal leaping along . . . . . . its movements have a wonderful resemblance to the long leaps of a kangaroo-rat fleeing in alarm, with its long tail trailing behind it." the old settler said that he had seen distances made by the weet-weet, in the early days, which almost convinced him that it was as extraordinary an instrument as the boomerang. there must have been a large distribution of acuteness among those naked skinny aboriginals, or they couldn't have been such unapproachable trackers and boomerangers and weet-weeters. it must have been race-aversion that put upon them a good deal of the low-rate intellectual reputation which they bear and have borne this long time in the world's estimate of them. they were lazy--always lazy. perhaps that was their trouble. it is a killing defect. surely they could have invented and built a competent house, but they didn't. and they could have invented and developed the agricultural arts, but they didn't. they went naked and houseless, and lived on fish and grubs and worms and wild fruits, and were just plain savages, for all their smartness. with a country as big as the united states to live and multiply in, and with no epidemic diseases among them till the white man came with those and his other appliances of civilization, it is quite probable that there was never a day in his history when he could muster , of his race in all australia. he diligently and deliberately kept population down by infanticide--largely; but mainly by certain other methods. he did not need to practise these artificialities any more after the white man came. the white man knew ways of keeping down population which were worth several of his. the white man knew ways of reducing a native population percent. in years. the native had never seen anything as fine as that before. for example, there is the case of the country now called victoria--a country eighty times as large as rhode island, as i have already said. by the best official guess there were , aboriginals in it when the whites came along in the middle of the 'thirties. of these, , lived in gippsland, a patch of territory the size of fifteen or sixteen rhode islands: they did not diminish as fast as some of the other communities; indeed, at the end of forty years there were still of them left. the geelong tribe diminished more satisfactorily: from persons it faded to in twenty years; at the end of another twenty the tribe numbered one person altogether. the two melbourne tribes could muster almost when the white man came; they could muster but twenty, thirty-seven years later, in . in that year there were still odds and ends of tribes scattered about the colony of victoria, but i was told that natives of full blood are very scarce now. it is said that the aboriginals continue in some force in the huge territory called queensland. the early whites were not used to savages. they could not understand the primary law of savage life: that if a man do you a wrong, his whole tribe is responsible--each individual of it--and you may take your change out of any individual of it, without bothering to seek out the guilty one. when a white killed an aboriginal, the tribe applied the ancient law, and killed the first white they came across. to the whites this was a monstrous thing. extermination seemed to be the proper medicine for such creatures as this. they did not kill all the blacks, but they promptly killed enough of them to make their own persons safe. from the dawn of civilization down to this day the white man has always used that very precaution. mrs. campbell praed lived in queensland, as a child, in the early days, and in her "sketches of australian life," we get informing pictures of the early struggles of the white and the black to reform each other. speaking of pioneer days in the mighty wilderness of queensland, mrs. praed says: "at first the natives retreated before the whites; and, except that they every now and then speared a beast in one of the herds, gave little cause for uneasiness. but, as the number of squatters increased, each one taking up miles of country and bringing two or three men in his train, so that shepherds' huts and stockmen's camps lay far apart, and defenseless in the midst of hostile tribes, the blacks' depredations became more frequent and murder was no unusual event. "the loneliness of the australian bush can hardly be painted in words. here extends mile after mile of primeval forest where perhaps foot of white man has never trod--interminable vistas where the eucalyptus trees rear their lofty trunks and spread forth their lanky limbs, from which the red gum oozes and hangs in fantastic pendants like crimson stalactites; ravines along the sides of which the long-bladed grass grows rankly; level untimbered plains alternating with undulating tracts of pasture, here and there broken by a stony ridge, steep gully, or dried-up creek. all wild, vast and desolate; all the same monotonous gray coloring, except where the wattle, when in blossom, shows patches of feathery gold, or a belt of scrub lies green, glossy, and impenetrable as indian jungle. "the solitude seems intensified by the strange sounds of reptiles, birds, and insects, and by the absence of larger creatures; of which in the day-time, the only audible signs are the stampede of a herd of kangaroo, or the rustle of a wallabi, or a dingo stirring the grass as it creeps to its lair. but there are the whirring of locusts, the demoniac chuckle of the laughing jack-ass, the screeching of cockatoos and parrots, the hissing of the frilled lizard, and the buzzing of innumerable insects hidden under the dense undergrowth. and then at night, the melancholy wailing of the curlews, the dismal howling of dingoes, the discordant croaking of tree-frogs, might well shake the nerves of the solitary watcher." that is the theater for the drama. when you comprehend one or two other details, you will perceive how well suited for trouble it was, and how loudly it invited it. the cattlemen's stations were scattered over that profound wilderness miles and miles apart--at each station half a dozen persons. there was a plenty of cattle, the black natives were always ill-nourished and hungry. the land belonged to them. the whites had not bought it, and couldn't buy it; for the tribes had no chiefs, nobody in authority, nobody competent to sell and convey; and the tribes themselves had no comprehension of the idea of transferable ownership of land. the ousted owners were despised by the white interlopers, and this opinion was not hidden under a bushel. more promising materials for a tragedy could not have been collated. let mrs. praed speak: "at nie station, one dark night, the unsuspecting hut-keeper, having, as he believed, secured himself against assault, was lying wrapped in his blankets sleeping profoundly. the blacks crept stealthily down the chimney and battered in his skull while he slept." one could guess the whole drama from that little text. the curtain was up. it would not fall until the mastership of one party or the other was determined--and permanently: "there was treachery on both sides. the blacks killed the whites when they found them defenseless, and the whites slew the blacks in a wholesale and promiscuous fashion which offended against my childish sense of justice. "they were regarded as little above the level of brutes, and in some cases were destroyed like vermin. "here is an instance. a squatter, whose station was surrounded by blacks, whom he suspected to be hostile and from whom he feared an attack, parleyed with them from his house-door. he told them it was christmas-time--a time at which all men, black or white, feasted; that there were flour, sugar-plums, good things in plenty in the store, and that he would make for them such a pudding as they had never dreamed of--a great pudding of which all might eat and be filled. the blacks listened and were lost. the pudding was made and distributed. next morning there was howling in the camp, for it had been sweetened with sugar and arsenic!" the white man's spirit was right, but his method was wrong. his spirit was the spirit which the civilized white has always exhibited toward the savage, but the use of poison was a departure from custom. true, it was merely a technical departure, not a real one; still, it was a departure, and therefore a mistake, in my opinion. it was better, kinder, swifter, and much more humane than a number of the methods which have been sanctified by custom, but that does not justify its employment. that is, it does not wholly justify it. its unusual nature makes it stand out and attract an amount of attention which it is not entitled to. it takes hold upon morbid imaginations and they work it up into a sort of exhibition of cruelty, and this smirches the good name of our civilization, whereas one of the old harsher methods would have had no such effect because usage has made those methods familiar to us and innocent. in many countries we have chained the savage and starved him to death; and this we do not care for, because custom has inured us to it; yet a quick death by poison is loving-kindness to it. in many countries we have burned the savage at the stake; and this we do not care for, because custom has inured us to it; yet a quick death is loving-kindness to it. in more than one country we have hunted the savage and his little children and their mother with dogs and guns through the woods and swamps for an afternoon's sport, and filled the region with happy laughter over their sprawling and stumbling flight, and their wild supplications for mercy; but this method we do not mind, because custom has inured us to it; yet a quick death by poison is loving-kindness to it. in many countries we have taken the savage's land from him, and made him our slave, and lashed him every day, and broken his pride, and made death his only friend, and overworked him till he dropped in his tracks; and this we do not care for, because custom has inured us to it; yet a quick death by poison is loving-kindness to it. in the matabeleland today--why, there we are confining ourselves to sanctified custom, we rhodes-beit millionaires in south africa and dukes in london; and nobody cares, because we are used to the old holy customs, and all we ask is that no notice-inviting new ones shall be intruded upon the attention of our comfortable consciences. mrs. praed says of the poisoner, "that squatter deserves to have his name handed down to the contempt of posterity." i am sorry to hear her say that. i myself blame him for one thing, and severely, but i stop there. i blame him for, the indiscretion of introducing a novelty which was calculated to attract attention to our civilization. there was no occasion to do that. it was his duty, and it is every loyal man's duty to protect that heritage in every way he can; and the best way to do that is to attract attention elsewhere. the squatter's judgment was bad--that is plain; but his heart was right. he is almost the only pioneering representative of civilization in history who has risen above the prejudices of his caste and his heredity and tried to introduce the element of mercy into the superior race's dealings with the savage. his name is lost, and it is a pity; for it deserves to be handed down to posterity with homage and reverence. this paragraph is from a london journal: "to learn what france is doing to spread the blessings of civilization in her distant dependencies we may turn with advantage to new caledonia. with a view to attracting free settlers to that penal colony, m. feillet, the governor, forcibly expropriated the kanaka cultivators from the best of their plantations, with a derisory compensation, in spite of the protests of the council general of the island. such immigrants as could be induced to cross the seas thus found themselves in possession of thousands of coffee, cocoa, banana, and bread-fruit trees, the raising of which had cost the wretched natives years of toil whilst the latter had a few five-franc pieces to spend in the liquor stores of noumea." you observe the combination? it is robbery, humiliation, and slow, slow murder, through poverty and the white man's whisky. the savage's gentle friend, the savage's noble friend, the only magnanimous and unselfish friend the savage has ever had, was not there with the merciful swift release of his poisoned pudding. there are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.--[see chapter on tasmania, post.] chapter xxii. nothing is so ignorant as a man's left hand, except a lady's watch. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. you notice that mrs. praed knows her art. she can place a thing before you so that you can see it. she is not alone in that. australia is fertile in writers whose books are faithful mirrors of the life of the country and of its history. the materials were surprisingly rich, both in quality and in mass, and marcus clarke, ralph boldrewood, cordon, kendall, and the others, have built out of them a brilliant and vigorous literature, and one which must endure. materials--there is no end to them! why, a literature might be made out of the aboriginal all by himself, his character and ways are so freckled with varieties--varieties not staled by familiarity, but new to us. you do not need to invent any picturesquenesses; whatever you want in that line he can furnish you; and they will not be fancies and doubtful, but realities and authentic. in his history, as preserved by the white man's official records, he is everything--everything that a human creature can be. he covers the entire ground. he is a coward--there are a thousand fact to prove it. he is brave--there are a thousand facts to prove it. he is treacherous --oh, beyond imagination! he is faithful, loyal, true--the white man's records supply you with a harvest of instances of it that are noble, worshipful, and pathetically beautiful. he kills the starving stranger who comes begging for food and shelter there is proof of it. he succors, and feeds, and guides to safety, to-day, the lost stranger who fired on him only yesterday--there is proof of it. he takes his reluctant bride by force, he courts her with a club, then loves her faithfully through a long life--it is of record. he gathers to himself another wife by the same processes, beats and bangs her as a daily diversion, and by and by lays down his life in defending her from some outside harm--it is of record. he will face a hundred hostiles to rescue one of his children, and will kill another of his children because the family is large enough without it. his delicate stomach turns, at certain details of the white man's food; but he likes over-ripe fish, and brazed dog, and cat, and rat, and will eat his own uncle with relish. he is a sociable animal, yet he turns aside and hides behind his shield when his mother-in-law goes by. he is childishly afraid of ghosts and other trivialities that menace his soul, but dread of physical pain is a weakness which he is not acquainted with. he knows all the great and many of the little constellations, and has names for them; he has a symbol-writing by means of which he can convey messages far and wide among the tribes; he has a correct eye for form and expression, and draws a good picture; he can track a fugitive by delicate traces which the white man's eye cannot discern, and by methods which the finest white intelligence cannot master; he makes a missile which science itself cannot duplicate without the model--if with it; a missile whose secret baffled and defeated the searchings and theorizings of the white mathematicians for seventy years; and by an art all his own he performs miracles with it which the white man cannot approach untaught, nor parallel after teaching. within certain limits this savage's intellect is the alertest and the brightest known to history or tradition; and yet the poor creature was never able to invent a counting system that would reach above five, nor a vessel that he could boil water in. he is the prize-curiosity of all the races. to all intents and purposes he is dead--in the body; but he has features that will live in literature. mr. philip chauncy, an officer of the victorian government, contributed to its archives a report of his personal observations of the aboriginals which has in it some things which i wish to condense slightly and insert here. he speaks of the quickness of their eyes and the accuracy of their judgment of the direction of approaching missiles as being quite extraordinary, and of the answering suppleness and accuracy of limb and muscle in avoiding the missile as being extraordinary also. he has seen an aboriginal stand as a target for cricket-balls thrown with great force ten or fifteen yards, by professional bowlers, and successfully dodge them or parry them with his shield during about half an hour. one of those balls, properly placed, could have killed him; "yet he depended, with the utmost self-possession, on the quickness of his eye and his agility." the shield was the customary war-shield of his race, and would not be a protection to you or to me. it is no broader than a stovepipe, and is about as long as a man's arm. the opposing surface is not flat, but slopes away from the centerline like a boat's bow. the difficulty about a cricket-ball that has been thrown with a scientific "twist" is, that it suddenly changes it course when it is close to its target and comes straight for the mark when apparently it was going overhead or to one side. i should not be able to protect myself from such balls for half-an-hour, or less. mr. chauncy once saw "a little native man" throw a cricket-ball yards. this is said to beat the english professional record by thirteen yards. we have all seen the circus-man bound into the air from a spring-board and make a somersault over eight horses standing side by side. mr. chauncy saw an aboriginal do it over eleven; and was assured that he had sometimes done it over fourteen. but what is that to this: "i saw the same man leap from the ground, and in going over he dipped his head, unaided by his hands, into a hat placed in an inverted position on the top of the head of another man sitting upright on horseback--both man and horse being of the average size. the native landed on the other side of the horse with the hat fairly on his head. the prodigious height of the leap, and the precision with which it was taken so as to enable him to dip his head into the hat, exceeded any feat of the kind i have ever beheld." i should think so! on board a ship lately i saw a young oxford athlete run four steps and spring into the air and squirm his hips by a side-twist over a bar that was five and one-half feet high; but he could not have stood still and cleared a bar that was four feet high. i know this, because i tried it myself. one can see now where the kangaroo learned its art. sir george grey and mr. eyre testify that the natives dug wells fourteen or fifteen feet deep and two feet in diameter at the bore--dug them in the sand--wells that were "quite circular, carried straight down, and the work beautifully executed." their tools were their hands and feet. how did they throw sand out from such a depth? how could they stoop down and get it, with only two feet of space to stoop in? how did they keep that sand-pipe from caving in on them? i do not know. still, they did manage those seeming impossibilities. swallowed the sand, may be. mr. chauncy speaks highly of the patience and skill and alert intelligence of the native huntsman when he is stalking the emu, the kangaroo, and other game: "as he walks through the bush his step is light, elastic, and noiseless; every track on the earth catches his keen eye; a leaf, or fragment of a stick turned, or a blade of grass recently bent by the tread of one of the lower animals, instantly arrests his attention; in fact, nothing escapes his quick and powerful sight on the ground, in the trees, or in the distance, which may supply him with a meal or warn him of danger. a little examination of the trunk of a tree which may be nearly covered with the scratches of opossums ascending and descending is sufficient to inform him whether one went up the night before without coming down again or not." fennimore cooper lost his chance. he would have known how to value these people. he wouldn't have traded the dullest of them for the brightest mohawk he ever invented. all savages draw outline pictures upon bark; but the resemblances are not close, and expression is usually lacking. but the australian aboriginal's pictures of animals were nicely accurate in form, attitude, carriage; and he put spirit into them, and expression. and his pictures of white people and natives were pretty nearly as good as his pictures of the other animals. he dressed his whites in the fashion of their day, both the ladies and the gentlemen. as an untaught wielder of the pencil it is not likely that he has had his equal among savage people. his place in art--as to drawing, not color-work--is well up, all things considered. his art is not to be classified with savage art at all, but on a plane two degrees above it and one degree above the lowest plane of civilized art. to be exact, his place in art is between botticelli and de maurier. that is to say, he could not draw as well as de maurier but better than boticelli. in feeling, he resembles both; also in grouping and in his preferences in the matter of subjects. his "corrobboree" of the australian wilds reappears in de maurier's belgravian ballrooms, with clothes and the smirk of civilization added; botticelli's "spring" is the "corrobboree" further idealized, but with fewer clothes and more smirk. and well enough as to intention, but--my word! the aboriginal can make a fire by friction. i have tried that. all savages are able to stand a good deal of physical pain. the australian aboriginal has this quality in a well-developed degree. do not read the following instances if horrors are not pleasant to you. they were recorded by the rev. henry n. wolloston, of melbourne, who had been a surgeon before he became a clergyman: . "in the summer of i started on horseback from albany, king george's sound, to visit at cape riche, accompanied by a native on foot. we traveled about forty miles the first day, then camped by a water-hole for the night. after cooking and eating our supper, i observed the native, who had said nothing to me on the subject, collect the hot embers of the fire together, and deliberately place his right foot in the glowing mass for a moment, then suddenly withdraw it, stamping on the ground and uttering a long-drawn guttural sound of mingled pain and satisfaction. this operation he repeated several times. on my inquiring the meaning of his strange conduct, he only said, 'me carpenter-make 'em' ('i am mending my foot'), and then showed me his charred great toe, the nail of which had been torn off by a tea-tree stump, in which it had been caught during the journey, and the pain of which he had borne with stoical composure until the evening, when he had an opportunity of cauterizing the wound in the primitive manner above described." and he proceeded on the journey the next day, "as if nothing had happened"--and walked thirty miles. it was a strange idea, to keep a surgeon and then do his own surgery. . "a native about twenty-five years of age once applied to me, as a doctor, to extract the wooden barb of a spear, which, during a fight in the bush some four months previously, had entered his chest, just missing the heart, and penetrated the viscera to a considerable depth. the spear had been cut off, leaving the barb behind, which continued to force its way by muscular action gradually toward the back; and when i examined him i could feel a hard substance between the ribs below the left blade-bone. i made a deep incision, and with a pair of forceps extracted the barb, which was made, as usual, of hard wood about four inches long and from half an inch to an inch thick. it was very smooth, and partly digested, so to speak, by the maceration to which it had been exposed during its four months' journey through the body. the wound made by the spear had long since healed, leaving only a small cicatrix; and after the operation, which the native bore without flinching, he appeared to suffer no pain. indeed, judging from his good state of health, the presence of the foreign matter did not materially annoy him. he was perfectly well in a few days." but no. is my favorite. whenever i read it i seem to enjoy all that the patient enjoyed--whatever it was: . "once at king george's sound a native presented himself to me with one leg only, and requested me to supply him with a wooden leg. he had traveled in this maimed state about ninety-six miles, for this purpose. i examined the limb, which had been severed just below the knee, and found that it had been charred by fire, while about two inches of the partially calcined bone protruded through the flesh. i at once removed this with the saw; and having made as presentable a stump of it as i could, covered the amputated end of the bone with a surrounding of muscle, and kept the patient a few days under my care to allow the wound to heal. on inquiring, the native told me that in a fight with other black-fellows a spear had struck his leg and penetrated the bone below the knee. finding it was serious, he had recourse to the following crude and barbarous operation, which it appears is not uncommon among these people in their native state. he made a fire, and dug a hole in the earth only sufficiently large to admit his leg, and deep enough to allow the wounded part to be on a level with the surface of the ground. he then surrounded the limb with the live coals or charcoal, which was replenished until the leg was literally burnt off. the cauterization thus applied completely checked the hemorrhage, and he was able in a day or two to hobble down to the sound, with the aid of a long stout stick, although he was more than a week on the road." but he was a fastidious native. he soon discarded the wooden leg made for him by the doctor, because "it had no feeling in it." it must have had as much as the one he burnt off, i should think. so much for the aboriginals. it is difficult for me to let them alone. they are marvelously interesting creatures. for a quarter of a century, now, the several colonial governments have housed their remnants in comfortable stations, and fed them well and taken good care of them in every way. if i had found this out while i was in australia i could have seen some of those people--but i didn't. i would walk thirty miles to see a stuffed one. australia has a slang of its own. this is a matter of course. the vast cattle and sheep industries, the strange aspects of the country, and the strange native animals, brute and human, are matters which would naturally breed a local slang. i have notes of this slang somewhere, but at the moment i can call to mind only a few of the words and phrases. they are expressive ones. the wide, sterile, unpeopled deserts have created eloquent phrases like "no man's land" and the "never-never country." also this felicitous form: "she lives in the never-never country"--that is, she is an old maid. and this one is not without merit: "heifer-paddock"--young ladies' seminary. "bail up" and "stick up" equivalent of our highwayman-term to "hold up" a stage-coach or a train. "new-chum" is the equivalent of our "tenderfoot"--new arrival. and then there is the immortal "my word!" "we must import it." "m-y word!" "in cold print it is the equivalent of our "ger-rreat caesar!" but spoken with the proper australian unction and fervency, it is worth six of it for grace and charm and expressiveness. our form is rude and explosive; it is not suited to the drawing-room or the heifer-paddock; but "m-y word!" is, and is music to the ear, too, when the utterer knows how to say it. i saw it in print several times on the pacific ocean, but it struck me coldly, it aroused no sympathy. that was because it was the dead corpse of the thing, the 'soul was not there--the tones were lacking--the informing spirit--the deep feeling--the eloquence. but the first time i heard an australian say it, it was positively thrilling. chapter xxiii. be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. we left adelaide in due course, and went to horsham, in the colony of victoria; a good deal of a journey, if i remember rightly, but pleasant. horsham sits in a plain which is as level as a floor--one of those famous dead levels which australian books describe so often; gray, bare, sombre, melancholy, baked, cracked, in the tedious long drouths, but a horizonless ocean of vivid green grass the day after a rain. a country town, peaceful, reposeful, inviting, full of snug homes, with garden plots, and plenty of shrubbery and flowers. "horsham, october . at the hotel. the weather divine. across the way, in front of the london bank of australia, is a very handsome cottonwood. it is in opulent leaf, and every leaf perfect. the full power of the on-rushing spring is upon it, and i imagine i can see it grow. alongside the bank and a little way back in the garden there is a row of soaring fountain-sprays of delicate feathery foliage quivering in the breeze, and mottled with flashes of light that shift and play through the mass like flash-lights through an opal--a most beautiful tree, and a striking contrast to the cottonwood. every leaf of the cottonwood is distinctly defined--it is a kodak for faithful, hard, unsentimental detail; the other an impressionist picture, delicious to look upon, full of a subtle and exquisite charm, but all details fused in a swoon of vague and soft loveliness." it turned out, upon inquiry, to be a pepper tree--an importation from china. it has a silky sheen, soft and rich. i saw some that had long red bunches of currant-like berries ambushed among the foliage. at a distance, in certain lights, they give the tree a pinkish tint and a new charm. there is an agricultural college eight miles from horsham. we were driven out to it by its chief. the conveyance was an open wagon; the time, noonday; no wind; the sky without a cloud, the sunshine brilliant --and the mercury at deg. in the shade. in some countries an indolent unsheltered drive of an hour and a half under such conditions would have been a sweltering and prostrating experience; but there was nothing of that in this case. it is a climate that is perfect. there was no sense of heat; indeed, there was no heat; the air was fine and pure and exhilarating; if the drive had lasted half a day i think we should not have felt any discomfort, or grown silent or droopy or tired. of course, the secret of it was the exceeding dryness of the atmosphere. in that plain deg. in the shade is without doubt no harder upon a man than is or deg. in new york. the road lay through the middle of an empty space which seemed to me to be a hundred yards wide between the fences. i was not given the width in yards, but only in chains and perches--and furlongs, i think. i would have given a good deal to know what the width was, but i did not pursue the matter. i think it is best to put up with information the way you get it; and seem satisfied with it, and surprised at it, and grateful for it, and say, "my word!" and never let on. it was a wide space; i could tell you how wide, in chains and perches and furlongs and things, but that would not help you any. those things sound well, but they are shadowy and indefinite, like troy weight and avoirdupois; nobody knows what they mean. when you buy a pound of a drug and the man asks you which you want, troy or avoirdupois, it is best to say "yes," and shift the subject. they said that the wide space dates from the earliest sheep and cattle-raising days. people had to drive their stock long distances --immense journeys--from worn-out places to new ones where were water and fresh pasturage; and this wide space had to be left in grass and unfenced, or the stock would have starved to death in the transit. on the way we saw the usual birds--the beautiful little green parrots, the magpie, and some others; and also the slender native bird of modest plumage and the eternally-forgettable name--the bird that is the smartest among birds, and can give a parrot to in the game and then talk him to death. i cannot recall that bird's name. i think it begins with m. i wish it began with g. or something that a person can remember. the magpie was out in great force, in the fields and on the fences. he is a handsome large creature, with snowy white decorations, and is a singer; he has a murmurous rich note that is lovely. he was once modest, even diffident; but he lost all that when he found out that he was australia's sole musical bird. he has talent, and cuteness, and impudence; and in his tame state he is a most satisfactory pet--never coming when he is called, always coming when he isn't, and studying disobedience as an accomplishment. he is not confined, but loafs all over the house and grounds, like the laughing jackass. i think he learns to talk, i know he learns to sing tunes, and his friends say that he knows how to steal without learning. i was acquainted with a tame magpie in melbourne. he had lived in a lady's house several years, and believed he owned it. the lady had tamed him, and in return he had tamed the lady. he was always on deck when not wanted, always having his own way, always tyrannizing over the dog, and always making the cat's life a slow sorrow and a martyrdom. he knew a number of tunes and could sing them in perfect time and tune; and would do it, too, at any time that silence was wanted; and then encore himself and do it again; but if he was asked to sing he would go out and take a walk. it was long believed that fruit trees would not grow in that baked and waterless plain around horsham, but the agricultural college has dissipated that idea. its ample nurseries were producing oranges, apricots, lemons, almonds, peaches, cherries, varieties of apples--in fact, all manner of fruits, and in abundance. the trees did not seem to miss the water; they were in vigorous and flourishing condition. experiments are made with different soils, to see what things thrive best in them and what climates are best for them. a man who is ignorantly trying to produce upon his farm things not suited to its soil and its other conditions can make a journey to the college from anywhere in australia, and go back with a change of scheme which will make his farm productive and profitable. there were forty pupils there--a few of them farmers, relearning their trade, the rest young men mainly from the cities--novices. it seemed a strange thing that an agricultural college should have an attraction for city-bred youths, but such is the fact. they are good stuff, too; they are above the agricultural average of intelligence, and they come without any inherited prejudices in favor of hoary ignorances made sacred by long descent. the students work all day in the fields, the nurseries, and the shearing-sheds, learning and doing all the practical work of the business--three days in a week. on the other three they study and hear lectures. they are taught the beginnings of such sciences as bear upon agriculture--like chemistry, for instance. we saw the sophomore class in sheep-shearing shear a dozen sheep. they did it by hand, not with the machine. the sheep was seized and flung down on his side and held there; and the students took off his coat with great celerity and adroitness. sometimes they clipped off a sample of the sheep, but that is customary with shearers, and they don't mind it; they don't even mind it as much as the sheep. they dab a splotch of sheep-dip on the place and go right ahead. the coat of wool was unbelievably thick. before the shearing the sheep looked like the fat woman in the circus; after it he looked like a bench. he was clipped to the skin; and smoothly and uniformly. the fleece comes from him all in one piece and has the spread of a blanket. the college was flying the australian flag--the gridiron of england smuggled up in the northwest corner of a big red field that had the random stars of the southern cross wandering around over it. from horsham we went to stawell. by rail. still in the colony of victoria. stawell is in the gold-mining country. in the bank-safe was half a peck of surface-gold--gold dust, grain gold; rich; pure in fact, and pleasant to sift through one's fingers; and would be pleasanter if it would stick. and there were a couple of gold bricks, very heavy to handle, and worth $ , a piece. they were from a very valuable quartz mine; a lady owns two-thirds of it; she has an income of $ , a month from it, and is able to keep house. the stawell region is not productive of gold only; it has great vineyards, and produces exceptionally fine wines. one of these vineyards--the great western, owned by mr. irving--is regarded as a model. its product has reputation abroad. it yields a choice champagne and a fine claret, and its hock took a prize in france two or three years ago. the champagne is kept in a maze of passages under ground, cut in the rock, to secure it an even temperature during the three-year term required to perfect it. in those vaults i saw , bottles of champagne. the colony of victoria has a population of , , , and those people are said to drink , , bottles of champagne per year. the dryest community on the earth. the government has lately reduced the duty upon foreign wines. that is one of the unkindnesses of protection. a man invests years of work and a vast sum of money in a worthy enterprise, upon the faith of existing laws; then the law is changed, and the man is robbed by his own government. on the way back to stawell we had a chance to see a group of boulders called the three sisters--a curiosity oddly located; for it was upon high ground, with the land sloping away from it, and no height above it from whence the boulders could have rolled down. relics of an early ice-drift, perhaps. they are noble boulders. one of them has the size and smoothness and plump sphericity of a balloon of the biggest pattern. the road led through a forest of great gum-trees, lean and scraggy and sorrowful. the road was cream-white--a clayey kind of earth, apparently. along it toiled occasional freight wagons, drawn by long double files of oxen. those wagons were going a journey of two hundred miles, i was told, and were running a successful opposition to the railway! the railways are owned and run by the government. those sad gums stood up out of the dry white clay, pictures of patience and resignation. it is a tree that can get along without water; still it is fond of it--ravenously so. it is a very intelligent tree and will detect the presence of hidden water at a distance of fifty feet, and send out slender long root-fibres to prospect it. they will find it; and will also get at it even through a cement wall six inches thick. once a cement water-pipe under ground at stawell began to gradually reduce its output, and finally ceased altogether to deliver water. upon examining into the matter it was found stopped up, wadded compactly with a mass of root-fibres, delicate and hair-like. how this stuff had gotten into the pipe was a puzzle for some little time; finally it was found that it had crept in through a crack that was almost invisible to the eye. a gum tree forty feet away had tapped the pipe and was drinking the water. chapter xxiv. there is no such thing as "the queen's english." the property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares! --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. frequently, in australia, one has cloud-effects of an unfamiliar sort. we had this kind of scenery, finely staged, all the way to ballarat. consequently we saw more sky than country on that journey. at one time a great stretch of the vault was densely flecked with wee ragged-edged flakes of painfully white cloud-stuff, all of one shape and size, and equidistant apart, with narrow cracks of adorable blue showing between. the whole was suggestive of a hurricane of snow-flakes drifting across the skies. by and by these flakes fused themselves together in interminable lines, with shady faint hollows between the lines, the long satin-surfaced rollers following each other in simulated movement, and enchantingly counterfeiting the majestic march of a flowing sea. later, the sea solidified itself; then gradually broke up its mass into innumerable lofty white pillars of about one size, and ranged these across the firmament, in receding and fading perspective, in the similitude of a stupendous colonnade--a mirage without a doubt flung from the far gates of the hereafter. the approaches to ballarat were beautiful. the features, great green expanses of rolling pasture-land, bisected by eye contenting hedges of commingled new-gold and old-gold gorse--and a lovely lake. one must put in the pause, there, to fetch the reader up with a slight jolt, and keep him from gliding by without noticing the lake. one must notice it; for a lovely lake is not as common a thing along the railways of australia as are the dry places. ninety-two in the shade again, but balmy and comfortable, fresh and bracing. a perfect climate. forty-five years ago the site now occupied by the city of ballarat was a sylvan solitude as quiet as eden and as lovely. nobody had ever heard of it. on the th of august, , the first great gold-strike made in australia was made here. the wandering prospectors who made it scraped up two pounds and a half of gold the first day-worth $ . a few days later the place was a hive--a town. the news of the strike spread everywhere in a sort of instantaneous way--spread like a flash to the very ends of the earth. a celebrity so prompt and so universal has hardly been paralleled in history, perhaps. it was as if the name ballarat had suddenly been written on the sky, where all the world could read it at once. the smaller discoveries made in the colony of new south wales three months before had already started emigrants toward australia; they had been coming as a stream, but they came as a flood, now. a hundred thousand people poured into melbourne from england and other countries in a single month, and flocked away to the mines. the crews of the ships that brought them flocked with them; the clerks in the government offices followed; so did the cooks, the maids, the coachmen, the butlers, and the other domestic servants; so did the carpenters, the smiths, the plumbers, the painters, the reporters, the editors, the lawyers, the clients, the barkeepers, the bummers, the blacklegs, the thieves, the loose women, the grocers, the butchers, the bakers, the doctors, the druggists, the nurses; so did the police; even officials of high and hitherto envied place threw up their positions and joined the procession. this roaring avalanche swept out of melbourne and left it desolate, sunday-like, paralyzed, everything at a stand-still, the ships lying idle at anchor, all signs of life departed, all sounds stilled save the rasping of the cloud-shadows as they scraped across the vacant streets. that grassy and leafy paradise at ballarat was soon ripped open, and lacerated and scarified and gutted, in the feverish search for its hidden riches. there is nothing like surface-mining to snatch the graces and beauties and benignities out of a paradise, and make an odious and repulsive spectacle of it. what fortunes were made! immigrants got rich while the ship unloaded and reloaded--and went back home for good in the same cabin they had come out in! not all of them. only some. i saw the others in ballarat myself, forty-five years later--what were left of them by time and death and the disposition to rove. they were young and gay, then; they are patriarchal and grave, now; and they do not get excited any more. they talk of the past. they live in it. their life is a dream, a retrospection. ballarat was a great region for "nuggets." no such nuggets were found in california as ballarat produced. in fact, the ballarat region has yielded the largest ones known to history. two of them weighed about pounds each, and together were worth $ , . they were offered to any poor person who would shoulder them and carry them away. gold was so plentiful that it made people liberal like that. ballarat was a swarming city of tents in the early days. everybody was happy, for a time, and apparently prosperous. then came trouble. the government swooped down with a mining tax. and in its worst form, too; for it was not a tax upon what the miner had taken out, but upon what he was going to take out--if he could find it. it was a license-tax license to work his claim--and it had to be paid before he could begin digging. consider the situation. no business is so uncertain as surface-mining. your claim may be good, and it may be worthless. it may make you well off in a month; and then again you may have to dig and slave for half a year, at heavy expense, only to find out at last that the gold is not there in cost-paying quantity, and that your time and your hard work have been thrown away. it might be wise policy to advance the miner a monthly sum to encourage him to develop the country's riches; but to tax him monthly in advance instead--why, such a thing was never dreamed of in america. there, neither the claim itself nor its products, howsoever rich or poor, were taxed. the ballarat miners protested, petitioned, complained--it was of no use; the government held its ground, and went on collecting the tax. and not by pleasant methods, but by ways which must have been very galling to free people. the rumblings of a coming storm began to be audible. by and by there was a result; and i think it may be called the finest thing in australasian history. it was a revolution--small in size; but great politically; it was a strike for liberty, a struggle for a principle, a stand against injustice and oppression. it was the barons and john, over again; it was hampden and ship-money; it was concord and lexington; small beginnings, all of them, but all of them great in political results, all of them epoch-making. it is another instance of a victory won by a lost battle. it adds an honorable page to history; the people know it and are proud of it. they keep green the memory of the men who fell at the eureka stockade, and peter lalor has his monument. the surface-soil of ballarat was full of gold. this soil the miners ripped and tore and trenched and harried and disembowled, and made it yield up its immense treasure. then they went down into the earth with deep shafts, seeking the gravelly beds of ancient rivers and brooks--and found them. they followed the courses of these streams, and gutted them, sending the gravel up in buckets to the upper world, and washing out of it its enormous deposits of gold. the next biggest of the two monster nuggets mentioned above came from an old river-channel feet under ground. finally the quartz lodes were attacked. that is not poor-man's mining. quartz-mining and milling require capital, and staying-power, and patience. big companies were formed, and for several decades, now, the lodes have been successfully worked, and have yielded great wealth. since the gold discovery in the ballarat mines--taking the three kinds of mining together--have contributed to the world's pocket something over three hundred millions of dollars, which is to say that this nearly invisible little spot on the earth's surface has yielded about one-fourth as much gold in forty-four years as all california has yielded in forty-seven. the californian aggregate, from to , inclusive, as reported by the statistician of the united states mint, is $ , , , . a citizen told me a curious thing about those mines. with all my experience of mining i had never heard of anything of the sort before. the main gold reef runs about north and south--of course for that is the custom of a rich gold reef. at ballarat its course is between walls of slate. now the citizen told me that throughout a stretch of twelve miles along the reef, the reef is crossed at intervals by a straight black streak of a carbonaceous nature--a streak in the slate; a streak no thicker than a pencil--and that wherever it crosses the reef you will certainly find gold at the junction. it is called the indicator. thirty feet on each side of the indicator (and down in the slate, of course) is a still finer streak--a streak as fine as a pencil mark; and indeed, that is its name pencil mark. whenever you find the pencil mark you know that thirty feet from it is the indicator; you measure the distance, excavate, find the indicator, trace it straight to the reef, and sink your shaft; your fortune is made, for certain. if that is true, it is curious. and it is curious anyway. ballarat is a town of only , population; and yet, since it is in australia, it has every essential of an advanced and enlightened big city. this is pure matter of course. i must stop dwelling upon these things. it is hard to keep from dwelling upon them, though; for it is difficult to get away from the surprise of it. i will let the other details go, this time, but i must allow myself to mention that this little town has a park of acres; a flower garden of acres, with an elaborate and expensive fernery in it and some costly and unusually fine statuary; and an artificial lake covering acres, equipped with a fleet of shells, small sail boats, and little steam yachts. at this point i strike out some other praiseful things which i was tempted to add. i do not strike them out because they were not true or not well said, but because i find them better said by another man--and a man more competent to testify, too, because he belongs on the ground, and knows. i clip them from a chatty speech delivered some years ago by mr. william little, who was at that time mayor of ballarat: "the language of our citizens, in this as in other parts of australasia, is mostly healthy anglo-saxon, free from americanisms, vulgarisms, and the conflicting dialects of our fatherland, and is pure enough to suit a trench or a latham. our youth, aided by climatic influence, are in point of physique and comeliness unsurpassed in the sunny south. our young men are well ordered; and our maidens, 'not stepping over the bounds of modesty,' are as fair as psyches, dispensing smiles as charming as november flowers." the closing clause has the seeming of a rather frosty compliment, but that is apparent only, not real. november is summer-time there. his compliment to the local purity of the language is warranted. it is quite free from impurities; this is acknowledged far and wide. as in the german empire all cultivated people claim to speak hanovarian german, so in australasia all cultivated people claim to speak ballarat english. even in england this cult has made considerable progress, and now that it is favored by the two great universities, the time is not far away when ballarat english will come into general use among the educated classes of great britain at large. its great merit is, that it is shorter than ordinary english--that is, it is more compressed. at first you have some difficulty in understanding it when it is spoken as rapidly as the orator whom i have quoted speaks it. an illustration will show what i mean. when he called and i handed him a chair, he bowed and said: "q." presently, when we were lighting our cigars, he held a match to mine and i said: "thank you," and he said: "km." then i saw. 'q' is the end of the phrase "i thank you" 'km' is the end of the phrase "you are welcome." mr. little puts no emphasis upon either of them, but delivers them so reduced that they hardly have a sound. all ballarat english is like that, and the effect is very soft and pleasant; it takes all the hardness and harshness out of our tongue and gives to it a delicate whispery and vanishing cadence which charms the ear like the faint rustling of the forest leaves. chapter xxv. "classic." a book which people praise and don't read. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. on the rail again--bound for bendigo. from diary: october . got up at , left at . ; soon reached castlemaine, one of the rich gold-fields of the early days; waited several hours for a train; left at . and reached bendigo in an hour. for comrade, a catholic priest who was better than i was, but didn't seem to know it--a man full of graces of the heart, the mind, and the spirit; a lovable man. he will rise. he will be a bishop some day. later an archbishop. later a cardinal. finally an archangel, i hope. and then he will recall me when i say, "do you remember that trip we made from ballarat to bendigo, when you were nothing but father c., and i was nothing to what i am now?" it has actually taken nine hours to come from ballarat to bendigo. we could have saved seven by walking. however, there was no hurry. bendigo was another of the rich strikes of the early days. it does a great quartz-mining business, now--that business which, more than any other that i know of, teaches patience, and requires grit and a steady nerve. the town is full of towering chimney-stacks, and hoisting-works, and looks like a petroleum-city. speaking of patience; for example, one of the local companies went steadily on with its deep borings and searchings without show of gold or a penny of reward for eleven years --then struck it, and became suddenly rich. the eleven years' work had cost $ , , and the first gold found was a grain the size of a pin's head. it is kept under locks and bars, as a precious thing, and is reverently shown to the visitor, "hats off." when i saw it i had not heard its history. "it is gold. examine it--take the glass. now how much should you say it is worth?" i said: "i should say about two cents; or in your english dialect, four farthings." "well, it cost l , ." "oh, come!" "yes, it did. ballarat and bendigo have produced the three monumental nuggets of the world, and this one is the monumentalest one of the three. the other two represent , a piece; this one a couple of thousand more. it is small, and not much to look at, but it is entitled to (its) name--adam. it is the adam-nugget of this mine, and its children run up into the millions." speaking of patience again, another of the mines was worked, under heavy expenses, during years before pay was struck, and still another one compelled a wait of years before pay was struck; then, in both instances, the outlay was all back in a year or two, with compound interest. bendigo has turned out even more gold than ballarat. the two together have produced $ , , worth--which is half as much as california has produced. it was through mr. blank--not to go into particulars about his name--it was mainly through mr. blank that my stay in bendigo was made memorably pleasant and interesting. he explained this to me himself. he told me that it was through his influence that the city government invited me to the town-hall to hear complimentary speeches and respond to them; that it was through his influence that i had been taken on a long pleasure-drive through the city and shown its notable features; that it was through his influence that i was invited to visit the great mines; that it was through his influence that i was taken to the hospital and allowed to see the convalescent chinaman who had been attacked at midnight in his lonely hut eight weeks before by robbers, and stabbed forty-six times and scalped besides; that it was through his influence that when i arrived this awful spectacle of piecings and patchings and bandagings was sitting up in his cot letting on to read one of my books; that it was through his influence that efforts had been made to get the catholic archbishop of bendigo to invite me to dinner; that it was through his influence that efforts had been made to get the anglican bishop of bendigo to ask me to supper; that it was through his influence that the dean of the editorial fraternity had driven me through the woodsy outlying country and shown me, from the summit of lone tree hill, the mightiest and loveliest expanse of forest-clad mountain and valley that i had seen in all australia. and when he asked me what had most impressed me in bendigo and i answered and said it was the taste and the public spirit which had adorned the streets with miles of shade trees, he said that it was through his influence that it had been done. but i am not representing him quite correctly. he did not say it was through his influence that all these things had happened--for that would have been coarse; be merely conveyed that idea; conveyed it so subtly that i only caught it fleetingly, as one catches vagrant faint breaths of perfume when one traverses the meadows in summer; conveyed it without offense and without any suggestion of egoism or ostentation--but conveyed it, nevertheless. he was an irishman; an educated gentleman; grave, and kindly, and courteous; a bachelor, and about forty-five or possibly fifty years old, apparently. he called upon me at the hotel, and it was there that we had this talk. he made me like him, and did it without trouble. this was partly through his winning and gentle ways, but mainly through the amazing familiarity with my books which his conversation showed. he was down to date with them, too; and if he had made them the study of his life he could hardly have been better posted as to their contents than he was. he made me better satisfied with myself than i had ever been before. it was plain that he had a deep fondness for humor, yet he never laughed; he never even chuckled; in fact, humor could not win to outward expression on his face at all. no, he was always grave--tenderly, pensively grave; but he made me laugh, all along; and this was very trying--and very pleasant at the same time--for it was at quotations from my own books. when he was going, he turned and said: "you don't remember me?" "i? why, no. have we met before?" "no, it was a matter of correspondence." "correspondence?" "yes, many years ago. twelve or fifteen. oh, longer than that. but of course you----" a musing pause. then he said: "do you remember corrigan castle?" "n-no, i believe i don't. i don't seem to recall the name." he waited a moment, pondering, with the door-knob in his hand, then started out; but turned back and said that i had once been interested in corrigan castle, and asked me if i would go with him to his quarters in the evening and take a hot scotch and talk it over. i was a teetotaler and liked relaxation, so i said i would. we drove from the lecture-hall together about half-past ten. he had a most comfortably and tastefully furnished parlor, with good pictures on the walls, indian and japanese ornaments on the mantel, and here and there, and books everywhere-largely mine; which made me proud. the light was brilliant, the easy chairs were deep-cushioned, the arrangements for brewing and smoking were all there. we brewed and lit up; then he passed a sheet of note-paper to me and said-- "do you remember that?" "oh, yes, indeed!" the paper was of a sumptuous quality. at the top was a twisted and interlaced monogram printed from steel dies in gold and blue and red, in the ornate english fashion of long years ago; and under it, in neat gothic capitals was this--printed in blue: the mark twain club corrigan castle ............ .. "my!" said i, "how did you come by this?" "i was president of it." "no!--you don't mean it." "it is true. i was its first president. i was re-elected annually as long as its meetings were held in my castle--corrigan--which was five years." then he showed me an album with twenty-three photographs of me in it. five of them were of old dates, the others of various later crops; the list closed with a picture taken by falk in sydney a month before. "you sent us the first five; the rest were bought." this was paradise! we ran late, and talked, talked, talked--subject, the mark twain club of corrigan castle, ireland. my first knowledge of that club dates away back; all of twenty years, i should say. it came to me in the form of a courteous letter, written on the note-paper which i have described, and signed "by order of the president; c. pembroke, secretary." it conveyed the fact that the club had been created in my honor, and added the hope that this token of appreciation of my work would meet with my approval. i answered, with thanks; and did what i could to keep my gratification from over-exposure. it was then that the long correspondence began. a letter came back, by order of the president, furnishing me the names of the members-thirty-two in number. with it came a copy of the constitution and by-laws, in pamphlet form, and artistically printed. the initiation fee and dues were in their proper place; also, schedule of meetings--monthly--for essays upon works of mine, followed by discussions; quarterly for business and a supper, without essays, but with after-supper speeches also, there was a list of the officers: president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer, etc. the letter was brief, but it was pleasant reading, for it told me about the strong interest which the membership took in their new venture, etc., etc. it also asked me for a photograph --a special one. i went down and sat for it and sent it--with a letter, of course. presently came the badge of the club, and very dainty and pretty it was; and very artistic. it was a frog peeping out from a graceful tangle of grass-sprays and rushes, and was done in enamels on a gold basis, and had a gold pin back of it. after i had petted it, and played with it, and caressed it, and enjoyed it a couple of hours, the light happened to fall upon it at a new angle, and revealed to me a cunning new detail; with the light just right, certain delicate shadings of the grass-blades and rush-stems wove themselves into a monogram--mine! you can see that that jewel was a work of art. and when you come to consider the intrinsic value of it, you must concede that it is not every literary club that could afford a badge like that. it was easily worth $ , in the opinion of messrs. marcus and ward of new york. they said they could not duplicate it for that and make a profit. by this time the club was well under way; and from that time forth its secretary kept my off-hours well supplied with business. he reported the club's discussions of my books with laborious fullness, and did his work with great spirit and ability. as a, rule, he synopsized; but when a speech was especially brilliant, he short-handed it and gave me the best passages from it, written out. there were five speakers whom he particularly favored in that way: palmer, forbes, naylor, norris, and calder. palmer and forbes could never get through a speech without attacking each other, and each in his own way was formidably effective--palmer in virile and eloquent abuse, forbes in courtly and elegant but scalding satire. i could always tell which of them was talking without looking for his name. naylor had a polished style and a happy knack at felicitous metaphor; norris's style was wholly without ornament, but enviably compact, lucid, and strong. but after all, calder was the gem. he never spoke when sober, he spoke continuously when he wasn't. and certainly they were the drunkest speeches that a man ever uttered. they were full of good things, but so incredibly mixed up and wandering that it made one's head swim to follow him. they were not intended to be funny, but they were,--funny for the very gravity which the speaker put into his flowing miracles of incongruity. in the course of five years i came to know the styles of the five orators as well as i knew the style of any speaker in my own club at home. these reports came every month. they were written on foolscap, words to the page, and usually about twenty-five pages in a report--a good , words, i should say,--a solid week's work. the reports were absorbingly entertaining, long as they were; but, unfortunately for me, they did not come alone. they were always accompanied by a lot of questions about passages and purposes in my books, which the club wanted answered; and additionally accompanied every quarter by the treasurer's report, and the auditor's report, and the committee's report, and the president's review, and my opinion of these was always desired; also suggestions for the good of the club, if any occurred to me. by and by i came to dread those things; and this dread grew and grew and grew; grew until i got to anticipating them with a cold horror. for i was an indolent man, and not fond of letter-writing, and whenever these things came i had to put everything by and sit down--for my own peace of mind--and dig and dig until i got something out of my head which would answer for a reply. i got along fairly well the first year; but for the succeeding four years the mark twain club of corrigan castle was my curse, my nightmare, the grief and misery of my life. and i got so, so sick of sitting for photographs. i sat every year for five years, trying to satisfy that insatiable organization. then at last i rose in revolt. i could endure my oppressions no longer. i pulled my fortitude together and tore off my chains, and was a free man again, and happy. from that day i burned the secretary's fat envelopes the moment they arrived, and by and by they ceased to come. well, in the sociable frankness of that night in bendigo i brought this all out in full confession. then mr. blank came out in the same frank way, and with a preliminary word of gentle apology said that he was the mark twain club, and the only member it had ever had! why, it was matter for anger, but i didn't feel any. he said he never had to work for a living, and that by the time he was thirty life had become a bore and a weariness to him. he had no interests left; they had paled and perished, one by one, and left him desolate. he had begun to think of suicide. then all of a sudden he thought of that happy idea of starting an imaginary club, and went straightway to work at it, with enthusiasm and love. he was charmed with it; it gave him something to do. it elaborated itself on his hands;--it became twenty times more complex and formidable than was his first rude draft of it. every new addition to his original plan which cropped up in his mind gave him a fresh interest and a new pleasure. he designed the club badge himself, and worked over it, altering and improving it, a number of days and nights; then sent to london and had it made. it was the only one that was made. it was made for me; the "rest of the club" went without. he invented the thirty-two members and their names. he invented the five favorite speakers and their five separate styles. he invented their speeches, and reported them himself. he would have kept that club going until now, if i hadn't deserted, he said. he said he worked like a slave over those reports; each of them cost him from a week to a fortnight's work, and the work gave him pleasure and kept him alive and willing to be alive. it was a bitter blow to him when the club died. finally, there wasn't any corrigan castle. he had invented that, too. it was wonderful--the whole thing; and altogether the most ingenious and laborious and cheerful and painstaking practical joke i have ever heard of. and i liked it; liked to bear him tell about it; yet i have been a hater of practical jokes from as long back as i can remember. finally he said-- "do you remember a note from melbourne fourteen or fifteen years ago, telling about your lecture tour in australia, and your death and burial in melbourne?--a note from henry bascomb, of bascomb hall, upper holywell hants." "yes." "i wrote it." "m-y-word!" "yes, i did it. i don't know why. i just took the notion, and carried it out without stopping to think. it was wrong. it could have done harm. i was always sorry about it afterward. you must forgive me. i was mr. bascom's guest on his yacht, on his voyage around the world. he often spoke of you, and of the pleasant times you had had together in his home; and the notion took me, there in melbourne, and i imitated his hand, and wrote the letter." so the mystery was cleared up, after so many, many years. chapter xxvi. there are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one! keep from telling their happinesses to the unhappy. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. after visits to maryborough and some other australian towns, we presently took passage for new zealand. if it would not look too much like showing off, i would tell the reader where new zealand is; for he is as i was; he thinks he knows. and he thinks he knows where hertzegovina is; and how to pronounce pariah; and how to use the word unique without exposing himself to the derision of the dictionary. but in truth, he knows none of these things. there are but four or five people in the world who possess this knowledge, and these make their living out of it. they travel from place to place, visiting literary assemblages, geographical societies, and seats of learning, and springing sudden bets that these people do not know these things. since all people think they know them, they are an easy prey to these adventurers. or rather they were an easy prey until the law interfered, three months ago, and a new york court decided that this kind of gambling is illegal, "because it traverses article iv, section , of the constitution of the united states, which forbids betting on a sure thing." this decision was rendered by the full bench of the new york supreme court, after a test sprung upon the court by counsel for the prosecution, which showed that none of the nine judges was able to answer any of the four questions. all people think that new zealand is close to australia or asia, or somewhere, and that you cross to it on a bridge. but that is not so. it is not close to anything, but lies by itself, out in the water. it is nearest to australia, but still not near. the gap between is very wide. it will be a surprise to the reader, as it was to me, to learn that the distance from australia to new zealand is really twelve or thirteen hundred miles, and that there is no bridge. i learned this from professor x., of yale university, whom i met in the steamer on the great lakes when i was crossing the continent to sail across the pacific. i asked him about new zealand, in order to make conversation. i supposed he would generalize a little without compromising himself, and then turn the subject to something he was acquainted with, and my object would then be attained; the ice would be broken, and we could go smoothly on, and get acquainted, and have a pleasant time. but, to my surprise, he was not only not embarrassed by my question, but seemed to welcome it, and to take a distinct interest in it. he began to talk--fluently, confidently, comfortably; and as he talked, my admiration grew and grew; for as the subject developed under his hands, i saw that he not only knew where new zealand was, but that he was minutely familiar with every detail of its history, politics, religions, and commerce, its fauna, flora, geology, products, and climatic peculiarities. when he was done, i was lost in wonder and admiration, and said to myself, he knows everything; in the domain of human knowledge he is king. i wanted to see him do more miracles; and so, just for the pleasure of hearing him answer, i asked him about hertzegovina, and pariah, and unique. but he began to generalize then, and show distress. i saw that with new zealand gone, he was a samson shorn of his locks; he was as other men. this was a curious and interesting mystery, and i was frank with him, and asked him to explain it. he tried to avoid it at first; but then laughed and said that after all, the matter was not worth concealment, so he would let me into the secret. in substance, this is his story: "last autumn i was at work one morning at home, when a card came up--the card of a stranger. under the name was printed a line which showed that this visitor was professor of theological engineering in wellington university, new zealand. i was troubled--troubled, i mean, by the shortness of the notice. college etiquette required that he be at once invited to dinner by some member of the faculty--invited to dine on that day--not, put off till a subsequent day. i did not quite know what to do. college etiquette requires, in the case of a foreign guest, that the dinner-talk shall begin with complimentary references to his country, its great men, its services to civilization, its seats of learning, and things like that; and of course the host is responsible, and must either begin this talk himself or see that it is done by some one else. i was in great difficulty; and the more i searched my memory, the more my trouble grew. i found that i knew nothing about new zealand. i thought i knew where it was, and that was all. i had an impression that it was close to australia, or asia, or somewhere, and that one went over to it on a bridge. this might turn out to be incorrect; and even if correct, it would not furnish matter enough for the purpose at the dinner, and i should expose my college to shame before my guest; he would see that i, a member of the faculty of the first university in america, was wholly ignorant of his country, and he would go away and tell this, and laugh at it. the thought of it made my face burn. "i sent for my wife and told her how i was situated, and asked for her help, and she thought of a thing which i might have thought of myself, if i had not been excited and worried. she said she would go and tell the visitor that i was out but would be in in a few minutes; and she would talk, and keep him busy while i got out the back way and hurried over and make professor lawson give the dinner. for lawson knew everything, and could meet the guest in a creditable way and save the reputation of the university. i ran to lawson, but was disappointed. he did not know anything about new zealand. he said that, as far as his recollection went it was close to australia, or asia, or somewhere, and you go over to it on a bridge; but that was all he knew. it was too bad. lawson was a perfect encyclopedia of abstruse learning; but now in this hour of our need, it turned out that he did not know any useful thing. "we consulted. he saw that the reputation of the university was in very real peril, and he walked the floor in anxiety, talking, and trying to think out some way to meet the difficulty. presently he decided that we must try the rest of the faculty--some of them might know about new zealand. so we went to the telephone and called up the professor of astronomy and asked him, and he said that all he knew was, that it was close to australia, or asia, or somewhere, and you went over to it on---- "we shut him off and called up the professor of biology, and he said that all he knew was that it was close to aus----. "we shut him off, and sat down, worried and disheartened, to see if we could think up some other scheme. we shortly hit upon one which promised well, and this one we adopted, and set its machinery going at once. it was this. lawson must give the dinner. the faculty must be notified by telephone to prepare. we must all get to work diligently, and at the end of eight hours and a half we must come to dinner acquainted with new zealand; at least well enough informed to appear without discredit before this native. to seem properly intelligent we should have to know about new zealand's population, and politics, and form of government, and commerce, and taxes, and products, and ancient history, and modern history, and varieties of religion, and nature of the laws, and their codification, and amount of revenue, and whence drawn, and methods of collection, and percentage of loss, and character of climate, and--well, a lot of things like that; we must suck the maps and cyclopedias dry. and while we posted up in this way, the faculty's wives must flock over, one after the other, in a studiedly casual way, and help my wife keep the new zealander quiet, and not let him get out and come interfering with our studies. the scheme worked admirably; but it stopped business, stopped it entirely. "it is in the official log-book of yale, to be read and wondered at by future generations--the account of the great blank day--the memorable blank day--the day wherein the wheels of culture were stopped, a sunday silence prevailed all about, and the whole university stood still while the faculty read-up and qualified itself to sit at meat, without shame, in the presence of the professor of theological engineering from new zealand: "when we assembled at the dinner we were miserably tired and worn--but we were posted. yes, it is fair to claim that. in fact, erudition is a pale name for it. new zealand was the only subject; and it was just beautiful to hear us ripple it out. and with such an air of unembarrassed ease, and unostentatious familiarity with detail, and trained and seasoned mastery of the subject-and oh, the grace and fluency of it! "well, finally somebody happened to notice that the guest was looking dazed, and wasn't saying anything. so they stirred him up, of course. then that man came out with a good, honest, eloquent compliment that made the faculty blush. he said he was not worthy to sit in the company of men like these; that he had been silent from admiration; that he had been silent from another cause also--silent from shame--silent from ignorance! 'for,' said he, 'i, who have lived eighteen years in new zealand and have served five in a professorship, and ought to know much about that country, perceive, now, that i know almost nothing about it. i say it with shame, that i have learned fifty times, yes, a hundred times more about new zealand in these two hours at this table than i ever knew before in all the eighteen years put together. i was silent because i could not help myself. what i knew about taxes, and policies, and laws, and revenue, and products, and history, and all that multitude of things, was but general, and ordinary, and vague-unscientific, in a word--and it would have been insanity to expose it here to the searching glare of your amazingly accurate and all-comprehensive knowledge of those matters, gentlemen. i beg you to let me sit silent--as becomes me. but do not change the subject; i can at least follow you, in this one; whereas if you change to one which shall call out the full strength of your mighty erudition, i shall be as one lost. if you know all this about a remote little inconsequent patch like new zealand, ah, what wouldn't you know about any other subject!'" chapter xxvil man is the only animal that blushes. or needs to. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. the universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession, what there is of it. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. from diary: november --noon. a fine day, a brilliant sun. warm in the sun, cold in the shade--an icy breeze blowing out of the south. a solemn long swell rolling up northward. it comes from the south pole, with nothing in the way to obstruct its march and tone its energy down. i have read somewhere that an acute observer among the early explorers--cook? or tasman?--accepted this majestic swell as trustworthy circumstantial evidence that no important land lay to the southward, and so did not waste time on a useless quest in that direction, but changed his course and went searching elsewhere. afternoon. passing between tasmania (formerly van diemen's land) and neighboring islands--islands whence the poor exiled tasmanian savages used to gaze at their lost homeland and cry; and die of broken hearts. how glad i am that all these native races are dead and gone, or nearly so. the work was mercifully swift and horrible in some portions of australia. as far as tasmania is concerned, the extermination was complete: not a native is left. it was a strife of years, and decades of years. the whites and the blacks hunted each other, ambushed each other, butchered each other. the blacks were not numerous. but they were wary, alert, cunning, and they knew their country well. they lasted a long time, few as they were, and inflicted much slaughter upon the whites. the government wanted to save the blacks from ultimate extermination, if possible. one of its schemes was to capture them and coop them up, on a neighboring island, under guard. bodies of whites volunteered for the hunt, for the pay was good--l for each black captured and delivered, but the success achieved was not very satisfactory. the black was naked, and his body was greased. it was hard to get a grip on him that would hold. the whites moved about in armed bodies, and surprised little families of natives, and did make captures; but it was suspected that in these surprises half a dozen natives were killed to one caught--and that was not what the government desired. another scheme was to drive the natives into a corner of the island and fence them in by a cordon of men placed in line across the country; but the natives managed to slip through, constantly, and continue their murders and arsons. the governor warned these unlettered savages by printed proclamation that they must stay in the desolate region officially appointed for them! the proclamation was a dead letter; the savages could not read it. afterward a picture-proclamation was issued. it was painted up on boards, and these were nailed to trees in the forest. herewith is a photographic reproduction of this fashion-plate. substantially it means: . the governor wishes the whites and the blacks to love each other; . he loves his black subjects; . blacks who kill whites will be hanged; . whites who kill blacks will be hanged. upon its several schemes the government spent l , and employed the labors and ingenuities of several thousand whites for a long time with failure as a result. then, at last, a quarter of a century after the beginning of the troubles between the two races, the right man was found. no, he found himself. this was george augustus robinson, called in history "the conciliator." he was not educated, and not conspicuous in any way. he was a working bricklayer, in hobart town. but he must have been an amazing personality; a man worth traveling far to see. it may be his counterpart appears in history, but i do not know where to look for it. he set himself this incredible task: to go out into the wilderness, the jungle, and the mountain-retreats where the hunted and implacable savages were hidden, and appear among them unarmed, speak the language of love and of kindness to them, and persuade them to forsake their homes and the wild free life that was so dear to them, and go with him and surrender to the hated whites and live under their watch and ward, and upon their charity the rest of their lives! on its face it was the dream of a madman. in the beginning, his moral-suasion project was sarcastically dubbed the sugar plum speculation. if the scheme was striking, and new to the world's experience, the situation was not less so. it was this. the white population numbered , in ; the black population numbered three hundred. not warriors, but men, women, and children. the whites were armed with guns, the blacks with clubs and spears. the whites had fought the blacks for a quarter of a century, and had tried every thinkable way to capture, kill, or subdue them; and could not do it. if white men of any race could have done it, these would have accomplished it. but every scheme had failed, the splendid , the matchless were unconquered, and manifestly unconquerable. they would not yield, they would listen to no terms, they would fight to the bitter end. yet they had no poet to keep up their heart, and sing the marvel of their magnificent patriotism. at the end of five-and-twenty years of hard fighting, the surviving naked patriots were still defiant, still persistent, still efficacious with their rude weapons, and the governor and the , knew not which way to turn, nor what to do. then the bricklayer--that wonderful man--proposed to go out into the wilderness, with no weapon but his tongue, and no protection but his honest eye and his humane heart; and track those embittered savages to their lairs in the gloomy forests and among the mountain snows. naturally, he was considered a crank. but he was not quite that. in fact, he was a good way short of that. he was building upon his long and intimate knowledge of the native character. the deriders of his project were right--from their standpoint--for they believed the natives to be mere wild beasts; and robinson was right, from his standpoint--for he believed the natives to be human beings. the truth did really lie between the two. the event proved that robinson's judgment was soundest; but about once a month for four years the event came near to giving the verdict to the deriders, for about that frequently robinson barely escaped falling under the native spears. but history shows that he had a thinking head, and was not a mere wild sentimentalist. for instance, he wanted the war parties (called) in before he started unarmed upon his mission of peace. he wanted the best chance of success--not a half-chance. and he was very willing to have help; and so, high rewards were advertised, for any who would go unarmed with him. this opportunity was declined. robinson persuaded some tamed natives of both sexes to go with him--a strong evidence of his persuasive powers, for those natives well knew that their destruction would be almost certain. as it turned out, they had to face death over and over again. robinson and his little party had a difficult undertaking upon their hands. they could not ride off, horseback, comfortably into the woods and call leonidas and his together for a talk and a treaty the following day; for the wild men were not in a body; they were scattered, immense distances apart, over regions so desolate that even the birds could not make a living with the chances offered--scattered in groups of twenty, a dozen, half a dozen, even in groups of three. and the mission must go on foot. mr. bonwick furnishes a description of those horrible regions, whereby it will be seen that even fugitive gangs of the hardiest and choicest human devils the world has seen--the convicts set apart to people the "hell of macquarrie harbor station"--were never able, but once, to survive the horrors of a march through them, but starving and struggling, and fainting and failing, ate each other, and died: "onward, still onward, was the order of the indomitable robinson. no one ignorant of the western country of tasmania can form a correct idea of the traveling difficulties. while i was resident in hobart town, the governor, sir john franklin, and his lady, undertook the western journey to macquarrie harbor, and suffered terribly. one man who assisted to carry her ladyship through the swamps, gave me his bitter experience of its miseries. several were disabled for life. no wonder that but one party, escaping from macquarrie harbor convict settlement, arrived at the civilized region in safety. men perished in the scrub, were lost in snow, or were devoured by their companions. this was the territory traversed by mr. robinson and his black guides. all honor to his intrepidity, and their wonderful fidelity! when they had, in the depth of winter, to cross deep and rapid rivers, pass among mountains six thousand feet high, pierce dangerous thickets, and find food in a country forsaken even by birds, we can realize their hardships. "after a frightful journey by cradle mountain, and over the lofty plateau of middlesex plains, the travelers experienced unwonted misery, and the circumstances called forth the best qualities of the noble little band. mr. robinson wrote afterwards to mr. secretary burnett some details of this passage of horrors. in that letter, of oct , , he states that his natives were very reluctant to go over the dreadful mountain passes; that 'for seven successive days we continued traveling over one solid body of snow;' that 'the snows were of incredible depth;' that 'the natives were frequently up to their middle in snow.' but still the ill-clad, ill-fed, diseased, and way-worn men and women were sustained by the cheerful voice of their unconquerable friend, and responded most nobly to his call." mr. bonwick says that robinson's friendly capture of the big river tribe remember, it was a whole tribe--"was by far the grandest feature of the war, and the crowning glory of his efforts." the word "war" was not well chosen, and is misleading. there was war still, but only the blacks were conducting it--the whites were holding off until robinson could give his scheme a fair trial. i think that we are to understand that the friendly capture of that tribe was by far the most important thing, the highest in value, that happened during the whole thirty years of truceless hostilities; that it was a decisive thing, a peaceful waterloo, the surrender of the native napoleon and his dreaded forces, the happy ending of the long strife. for "that tribe was the terror of the colony," its chief "the black douglas of bush households." robinson knew that these formidable people were lurking somewhere, in some remote corner of the hideous regions just described, and he and his unarmed little party started on a tedious and perilous hunt for them. at last, "there, under the shadows of the frenchman's cap, whose grim cone rose five thousand feet in the uninhabited westward interior," they were found. it was a serious moment. robinson himself believed, for once, that his mission, successful until now, was to end here in failure, and that his own death-hour had struck. the redoubtable chief stood in menacing attitude, with his eighteen-foot spear poised; his warriors stood massed at his back, armed for battle, their faces eloquent with their long-cherished loathing for white men. "they rattled their spears and shouted their war-cry." their women were back of them, laden with supplies of weapons, and keeping their eager dogs quiet until the chief should give the signal to fall on. "i think we shall soon be in the resurrection," whispered a member of robinson's little party. "i think we shall," answered robinson; then plucked up heart and began his persuasions--in the tribe's own dialect, which surprised and pleased the chief. presently there was an interruption by the chief: "who are you?" "we are gentlemen." "where are your guns?" "we have none." the warrior was astonished. "where your little guns?" (pistols). "we have none." a few minutes passed--in by-play--suspense--discussion among the tribesmen--robinson's tamed squaws ventured to cross the line and begin persuasions upon the wild squaws. then the chief stepped back "to confer with the old women--the real arbiters of savage war." mr. bonwick continues: "as the fallen gladiator in the arena looks for the signal of life or death from the president of the amphitheatre, so waited our friends in anxious suspense while the conference continued. in a few minutes, before a word was uttered, the women of the tribe threw up their arms three times. this was the inviolable sign of peace! down fell the spears. forward, with a heavy sigh of relief, and upward glance of gratitude, came the friends of peace. the impulsive natives rushed forth with tears and cries, as each saw in the other's rank a loved one of the past. "it was a jubilee of joy. a festival followed. and, while tears flowed at the recital of woe, a corrobory of pleasant laughter closed the eventful day." in four years, without the spilling of a drop of blood, robinson brought them all in, willing captives, and delivered them to the white governor, and ended the war which powder and bullets, and thousands of men to use them, had prosecuted without result since . marsyas charming the wild beasts with his music--that is fable; but the miracle wrought by robinson is fact. it is history--and authentic; and surely, there is nothing greater, nothing more reverence-compelling in the history of any country, ancient or modern. and in memory of the greatest man australasia ever developed or ever will develop, there is a stately monument to george augustus robinson, the conciliator in--no, it is to another man, i forget his name. however, robertson's own generation honored him, and in manifesting it honored themselves. the government gave him a money-reward and a thousand acres of land; and the people held mass-meetings and praised him and emphasized their praise with a large subscription of money. a good dramatic situation; but the curtain fell on another: "when this desperate tribe was thus captured, there was much surprise to find that the l , of a little earlier day had been spent, and the whole population of the colony placed under arms, in contention with an opposing force of sixteen men with wooden spears! yet such was the fact. the celebrated big river tribe, that had been raised by european fears to a host, consisted of sixteen men, nine women, and one child. with a knowledge of the mischief done by these few, their wonderful marches and their widespread aggressions, their enemies cannot deny to them the attributes of courage and military tact. a wallace might harass a large army with a small and determined band; but the contending parties were at least equal in arms and civilization. the zulus who fought us in africa, the maories in new zealand, the arabs in the soudan, were far better provided with weapons, more advanced in the science of war, and considerably more numerous, than the naked tasmanians. governor arthur rightly termed them a noble race." these were indeed wonderful people, the natives. they ought not to have been wasted. they should have been crossed with the whites. it would have improved the whites and done the natives no harm. but the natives were wasted, poor heroic wild creatures. they were gathered together in little settlements on neighboring islands, and paternally cared for by the government, and instructed in religion, and deprived of tobacco, because the superintendent of the sunday-school was not a smoker, and so considered smoking immoral. the natives were not used to clothes, and houses, and regular hours, and church, and school, and sunday-school, and work, and the other misplaced persecutions of civilization, and they pined for their lost home and their wild free life. too late they repented that they had traded that heaven for this hell. they sat homesick on their alien crags, and day by day gazed out through their tears over the sea with unappeasable longing toward the hazy bulk which was the specter of what had been their paradise; one by one their hearts broke and they died. in a very few years nothing but a scant remnant remained alive. a handful lingered along into age. in the last man died, in the last woman died, and the spartans of australasia were extinct. the whites always mean well when they take human fish out of the ocean and try to make them dry and warm and happy and comfortable in a chicken coop; but the kindest-hearted white man can always be depended on to prove himself inadequate when he deals with savages. he cannot turn the situation around and imagine how he would like it to have a well-meaning savage transfer him from his house and his church and his clothes and his books and his choice food to a hideous wilderness of sand and rocks and snow, and ice and sleet and storm and blistering sun, with no shelter, no bed, no covering for his and his family's naked bodies, and nothing to eat but snakes and grubs and 'offal. this would be a hell to him; and if he had any wisdom he would know that his own civilization is a hell to the savage--but he hasn't any, and has never had any; and for lack of it he shut up those poor natives in the unimaginable perdition of his civilization, committing his crime with the very best intentions, and saw those poor creatures waste away under his tortures; and gazed at it, vaguely troubled and sorrowful, and wondered what could be the matter with them. one is almost betrayed into respecting those criminals, they were so sincerely kind, and tender, and humane; and well-meaning. they didn't know why those exiled savages faded away, and they did their honest best to reason it out. and one man, in a like case in new south wales, did reason it out and arrive at a solution: "it is from the wrath of god, which is revealed from heaven against cold ungodliness and unrighteousness of men." that settles it. chapter xxviii. let us be thankful for the fools. but for them the rest of us could not succeed. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. the aphorism does really seem true: "given the circumstances, the man will appear." but the man musn't appear ahead of time, or it will spoil everything. in robinson's case the moment had been approaching for a quarter of a century--and meantime the future conciliator was tranquilly laying bricks in hobart. when all other means had failed, the moment had arrived, and the bricklayer put down his trowel and came forward. earlier he would have been jeered back to his trowel again. it reminds me of a tale that was told me by a kentuckian on the train when we were crossing montana. he said the tale was current in louisville years ago. he thought it had been in print, but could not remember. at any rate, in substance it was this, as nearly as i can call it back to mind. a few years before the outbreak of the civil war it began to appear that memphis, tennessee, was going to be a great tobacco entrepot--the wise could see the signs of it. at that time memphis had a wharf boat, of course. there was a paved sloping wharf, for the accommodation of freight, but the steamers landed on the outside of the wharfboat, and all loading and unloading was done across it, between steamer and shore. a number of wharfboat clerks were needed, and part of the time, every day, they were very busy, and part of the time tediously idle. they were boiling over with youth and spirits, and they had to make the intervals of idleness endurable in some way; and as a rule, they did it by contriving practical jokes and playing them upon each other. the favorite butt for the jokes was ed jackson, because he played none himself, and was easy game for other people's--for he always believed whatever was told him. one day he told the others his scheme for his holiday. he was not going fishing or hunting this time--no, he had thought out a better plan. out of his $ a month he had saved enough for his purpose, in an economical way, and he was going to have a look at new york. it was a great and surprising idea. it meant travel immense travel--in those days it meant seeing the world; it was the equivalent of a voyage around it in ours. at first the other youths thought his mind was affected, but when they found that he was in earnest, the next thing to be thought of was, what sort of opportunity this venture might afford for a practical joke. the young men studied over the matter, then held a secret consultation and made a plan. the idea was, that one of the conspirators should offer ed a letter of introduction to commodore vanderbilt, and trick him into delivering it. it would be easy to do this. but what would ed do when he got back to memphis? that was a serious matter. he was good-hearted, and had always taken the jokes patiently; but they had been jokes which did not humiliate him, did not bring him to shame; whereas, this would be a cruel one in that way, and to play it was to meddle with fire; for with all his good nature, ed was a southerner--and the english of that was, that when he came back he would kill as many of the conspirators as he could before falling himself. however, the chances must be taken--it wouldn't do to waste such a joke as that. so the letter was prepared with great care and elaboration. it was signed alfred fairchild, and was written in an easy and friendly spirit. it stated that the bearer was the bosom friend of the writer's son, and was of good parts and sterling character, and it begged the commodore to be kind to the young stranger for the writer's sake. it went on to say, "you may have forgotten me, in this long stretch of time, but you will easily call me back out of your boyhood memories when i remind you of how we robbed old stevenson's orchard that night; and how, while he was chasing down the road after us, we cut across the field and doubled back and sold his own apples to his own cook for a hat-full of doughnuts; and the time that we----" and so forth and so on, bringing in names of imaginary comrades, and detailing all sorts of wild and absurd and, of course, wholly imaginary schoolboy pranks and adventures, but putting them into lively and telling shape. with all gravity ed was asked if he would like to have a letter to commodore vanderbilt, the great millionaire. it was expected that the question would astonish ed, and it did. "what? do you know that extraordinary man?" "no; but my father does. they were schoolboys together. and if you like, i'll write and ask father. i know he'll be glad to give it to you for my sake." ed could not find words capable of expressing his gratitude and delight. the three days passed, and the letter was put into his bands. he started on his trip, still pouring out his thanks while he shook good-bye all around. and when he was out of sight his comrades let fly their laughter in a storm of happy satisfaction--and then quieted down, and were less happy, less satisfied. for the old doubts as to the wisdom of this deception began to intrude again. arrived in new york, ed found his way to commodore vanderbilt's business quarters, and was ushered into a large anteroom, where a score of people were patiently awaiting their turn for a two-minute interview with the millionaire in his private office. a servant asked for ed's card, and got the letter instead. ed was sent for a moment later, and found mr. vanderbilt alone, with the letter--open--in his hand. "pray sit down, mr. --er--" "jackson." " ah--sit down, mr. jackson. by the opening sentences it seems to be a letter from an old friend. allow me--i will run my eye through it. he says he says--why, who is it?" he turned the sheet and found the signature. "alfred fairchild--hm--fairchild--i don't recall the name. but that is nothing--a thousand names have gone from me. he says--he says-hm-hmoh, dear, but it's good! oh, it's rare! i don't quite remember it, but i seem to it'll all come back to me presently. he says --he says--hm--hm-oh, but that was a game! oh, spl-endid! how it carries me back! it's all dim, of course it's a long time ago--and the names--some of the names are wavery and indistinct--but sho', i know it happened--i can feel it! and lord, how it warms my heart, and brings back my lost youth! well, well, well, i've got to come back into this work-a-day world now--business presses and people are waiting--i'll keep the rest for bed to-night, and live my youth over again. and you'll thank fairchild for me when you see him--i used to call him alf, i think --and you'll give him my gratitude for--what this letter has done for the tired spirit of a hard-worked man; and tell him there isn't anything that i can do for him or any friend of his that i won't do. and as for you, my lad, you are my guest; you can't stop at any hotel in new york. sit. where you are a little while, till i get through with these people, then we'll go home. i'll take care of you, my boy--make yourself easy as to that." ed stayed a week, and had an immense time--and never suspected that the commodore's shrewd eye was on him, and that he was daily being weighed and measured and analyzed and tried and tested. yes, he had an immense time; and never wrote home, but saved it all up to tell when he should get back. twice, with proper modesty and decency, he proposed to end his visit, but the commodore said, "no--wait; leave it to me; i'll tell you when to go." in those days the commodore was making some of those vast combinations of his--consolidations of warring odds and ends of railroads into harmonious systems, and concentrations of floating and rudderless commerce in effective centers--and among other things his farseeing eye had detected the convergence of that huge tobacco-commerce, already spoken of, toward memphis, and he had resolved to set his grasp upon it and make it his own. the week came to an end. then the commodore said: "now you can start home. but first we will have some more talk about that tobacco matter. i know you now. i know your abilities as well as you know them yourself--perhaps better. you understand that tobacco matter; you understand that i am going to take possession of it, and you also understand the plans which i have matured for doing it. what i want is a man who knows my mind, and is qualified to represent me in memphis, and be in supreme command of that important business--and i appoint you." "me!" "yes. your salary will be high--of course-for you are representing me. later you will earn increases of it, and will get them. you will need a small army of assistants; choose them yourself--and carefully. take no man for friendship's sake; but, all things being equal, take the man you know, take your friend, in preference to the stranger." after some further talk under this head, the commodore said: "good-bye, my boy, and thank alf for me, for sending you to me." when ed reached memphis he rushed down to the wharf in a fever to tell his great news and thank the boys over and over again for thinking to give him the letter to mr. vanderbilt. it happened to be one of those idle times. blazing hot noonday, and no sign of life on the wharf. but as ed threaded his way among the freight piles, he saw a white linen figure stretched in slumber upon a pile of grain-sacks under an awning, and said to himself, "that's one of them," and hastened his step; next, he said, "it's charley--it's fairchild good"; and the next moment laid an affectionate hand on the sleeper's shoulder. the eyes opened lazily, took one glance, the face blanched, the form whirled itself from the sack-pile, and in an instant ed was alone and fairchild was flying for the wharf-boat like the wind! ed was dazed, stupefied. was fairchild crazy? what could be the meaning of this? he started slow and dreamily down toward the wharf-boat; turned the corner of a freight-pile and came suddenly upon two of the boys. they were lightly laughing over some pleasant matter; they heard his step, and glanced up just as he discovered them; the laugh died abruptly; and before ed could speak they were off, and sailing over barrels and bales like hunted deer. again ed was paralyzed. had the boys all gone mad? what could be the explanation of this extraordinary conduct? and so, dreaming along, he reached the wharf-boat, and stepped aboard nothing but silence there, and vacancy. he crossed the deck, turned the corner to go down the outer guard, heard a fervent-- "o lord!" and saw a white linen form plunge overboard. the youth came up coughing and strangling, and cried out-- "go 'way from here! you let me alone. i didn't do it, i swear i didn't!" "didn't do what?" "give you the----" "never mind what you didn't do--come out of that! what makes you all act so? what have i done?" "you? why you haven't done anything. but----" "well, then, what have you got against me? what do you all treat me so for?" "i--er--but haven't you got anything against us?" "of course not. what put such a thing into your head?" "honor bright--you haven't? "honor bright." "swear it!" "i don't know what in the world you mean, but i swear it, anyway." "and you'll shake hands with me?" "goodness knows i'll be glad to! why, i'm just starving to shake hands with somebody!" the swimmer muttered, "hang him, he smelt a rat and never delivered the letter!--but it's all right, i'm not going to fetch up the subject." and he crawled out and came dripping and draining to shake hands. first one and then another of the conspirators showed up cautiously--armed to the teeth--took in the amicable situation, then ventured warily forward and joined the love-feast. and to ed's eager inquiry as to what made them act as they had been acting, they answered evasively, and pretended that they had put it up as a joke, to see what he would do. it was the best explanation they could invent at such short notice. and each said to himself, "he never delivered that letter, and the joke is on us, if he only knew it or we were dull enough to come out and tell." then, of course, they wanted to know all about the trip; and he said-- "come right up on the boiler deck and order the drinks it's my treat. i'm going to tell you all about it. and to-night it's my treat again --and we'll have oysters and a time!" when the drinks were brought and cigars lighted, ed said: "well, when, i delivered the letter to mr. vanderbilt----" "great scott!" "gracious, how you scared me. what's the matter?" "oh--er--nothing. nothing--it was a tack in the chair-seat," said one. "but you all said it. however, no matter. when i delivered the letter----" "did you deliver it?" and they looked at each other as people might who thought that maybe they were dreaming. then they settled to listening; and as the story deepened and its marvels grew, the amazement of it made them dumb, and the interest of it took their breath. they hardly uttered a whisper during two hours, but sat like petrifactions and drank in the immortal romance. at last the tale was ended, and ed said-- "and it's all owing to you, boys, and you'll never find me ungrateful --bless your hearts, the best friends a fellow ever had! you'll all have places; i want every one of you. i know you--i know you 'by the back,' as the gamblers say. you're jokers, and all that, but you're sterling, with the hallmark on. and charley fairchild, you shall be my first assistant and right hand, because of your first-class ability, and because you got me the letter, and for your father's sake who wrote it for me, and to please mr. vanderbilt, who said it would! and here's to that great man--drink hearty!" yes, when the moment comes, the man appears--even if he is a thousand miles away, and has to be discovered by a practical joke. chapter xxix. when people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. necessarily, the human interest is the first interest in the log-book of any country. the annals of tasmania, in whose shadow we were sailing, are lurid with that feature. tasmania was a convict-dump, in old times; this has been indicated in the account of the conciliator, where reference is made to vain attempts of desperate convicts to win to permanent freedom, after escaping from macquarrie harbor and the "gates of hell." in the early days tasmania had a great population of convicts, of both sexes and all ages, and a bitter hard life they had. in one spot there was a settlement of juvenile convicts--children--who had been sent thither from their home and their friends on the other side of the globe to expiate their "crimes." in due course our ship entered the estuary called the derwent, at whose head stands hobart, the capital of tasmania. the derwent's shores furnish scenery of an interesting sort. the historian laurie, whose book, "the story of australasia," is just out, invoices its features with considerable truth and intemperance: "the marvelous picturesqueness of every point of view, combined with the clear balmy atmosphere and the transparency of the ocean depths, must have delighted and deeply impressed" the early explorers. "if the rock-bound coasts, sullen, defiant, and lowering, seemed uninviting, these were occasionally broken into charmingly alluring coves floored with golden sand, clad with evergreen shrubbery, and adorned with every variety of indigenous wattle, she-oak, wild flower, and fern, from the delicately graceful 'maiden-hair' to the palm-like 'old man'; while the majestic gum-tree, clean and smooth as the mast of 'some tall admiral' pierces the clear air to the height of feet or more." it looked so to me. "coasting along tasman's peninsula, what a shock of pleasant wonder must have struck the early mariner on suddenly sighting cape pillar, with its cluster of black-ribbed basaltic columns rising to a height of feet, the hydra head wreathed in a turban of fleecy cloud, the base lashed by jealous waves spouting angry fountains of foam." that is well enough, but i did not suppose those snags were feet high. still they were a very fine show. they stood boldly out by themselves, and made a fascinatingly odd spectacle. but there was nothing about their appearance to suggest the heads of a hydra. they looked like a row of lofty slabs with their upper ends tapered to the shape of a carving-knife point; in fact, the early voyager, ignorant of their great height, might have mistaken them for a rusty old rank of piles that had sagged this way and that out of the perpendicular. the peninsula is lofty, rocky, and densely clothed with scrub, or brush, or both. it is joined to the main by a low neck. at this junction was formerly a convict station called port arthur--a place hard to escape from. behind it was the wilderness of scrub, in which a fugitive would soon starve; in front was the narrow neck, with a cordon of chained dogs across it, and a line of lanterns, and a fence of living guards, armed. we saw the place as we swept by--that is, we had a glimpse of what we were told was the entrance to port arthur. the glimpse was worth something, as a remembrancer, but that was all. the voyage thence up the derwent frith displays a grand succession of fairy visions, in its entire length elsewhere unequaled. in gliding over the deep blue sea studded with lovely islets luxuriant to the water's edge, one is at a loss which scene to choose for contemplation and to admire most. when the huon and bruni have been passed, there seems no possible chance of a rival; but suddenly mount wellington, massive and noble like his brother etna, literally heaves in sight, sternly guarded on either hand by mounts nelson and rumney; presently we arrive at sullivan's cove--hobart! it is an attractive town. it sits on low hills that slope to the harbor --a harbor that looks like a river, and is as smooth as one. its still surface is pictured with dainty reflections of boats and grassy banks and luxuriant foliage. back of the town rise highlands that are clothed in woodland loveliness, and over the way is that noble mountain, wellington, a stately bulk, a most majestic pile. how beautiful is the whole region, for form, and grouping, and opulence, and freshness of foliage, and variety of color, and grace and shapeliness of the hills, the capes, the, promontories; and then, the splendor of the sunlight, the dim rich distances, the charm of the water-glimpses! and it was in this paradise that the yellow-liveried convicts were landed, and the corps-bandits quartered, and the wanton slaughter of the kangaroo-chasing black innocents consummated on that autumn day in may, in the brutish old time. it was all out of keeping with the place, a sort of bringing of heaven and hell together. the remembrance of this paradise reminds me that it was at hobart that we struck the head of the procession of junior englands. we were to encounter other sections of it in new zealand, presently, and others later in natal. wherever the exiled englishman can find in his new home resemblances to his old one, he is touched to the marrow of his being; the love that is in his heart inspires his imagination, and these allied forces transfigure those resemblances into authentic duplicates of the revered originals. it is beautiful, the feeling which works this enchantment, and it compels one's homage; compels it, and also compels one's assent--compels it always--even when, as happens sometimes, one does not see the resemblances as clearly as does the exile who is pointing them out. the resemblances do exist, it is quite true; and often they cunningly approximate the originals--but after all, in the matter of certain physical patent rights there is only one england. now that i have sampled the globe, i am not in doubt. there is a beauty of switzerland, and it is repeated in the glaciers and snowy ranges of many parts of the earth; there is a beauty of the fiord, and it is repeated in new zealand and alaska; there is a beauty of hawaii, and it is repeated in ten thousand islands of the southern seas; there is a beauty of the prairie and the plain, and it is repeated here and there in the earth; each of these is worshipful, each is perfect in its way, yet holds no monopoly of its beauty; but that beauty which is england is alone--it has no duplicate. it is made up of very simple details--just grass, and trees, and shrubs, and roads, and hedges, and gardens, and houses, and vines, and churches, and castles, and here and there a ruin--and over it all a mellow dream-haze of history. but its beauty is incomparable, and all its own. hobart has a peculiarity--it is the neatest town that the sun shines on; and i incline to believe that it is also the cleanest. however that may be, its supremacy in neatness is not to be questioned. there cannot be another town in the world that has no shabby exteriors; no rickety gates and fences, no neglected houses crumbling to ruin, no crazy and unsightly sheds, no weed-grown front-yards of the poor, no back-yards littered with tin cans and old boots and empty bottles, no rubbish in the gutters, no clutter on the sidewalks, no outer-borders fraying out into dirty lanes and tin-patched huts. no, in hobart all the aspects are tidy, and all a comfort to the eye; the modestest cottage looks combed and brushed, and has its vines, its flowers, its neat fence, its neat gate, its comely cat asleep on the window ledge. we had a glimpse of the museum, by courtesy of the american gentleman who is curator of it. it has samples of half-a-dozen different kinds of marsupials--[a marsupial is a plantigrade vertebrate whose specialty is its pocket. in some countries it is extinct, in the others it is rare. the first american marsupials were stephen girard, mr. aston and the opossum; the principal marsupials of the southern hemisphere are mr. rhodes, and the kangaroo. i, myself, am the latest marsupial. also, i might boast that i have the largest pocket of them all. but there is nothing in that.]--one, the "tasmanian devil;" that is, i think he was one of them. and there was a fish with lungs. when the water dries up it can live in the mud. most curious of all was a parrot that kills sheep. on one great sheep-run this bird killed a thousand sheep in a whole year. he doesn't want the whole sheep, but only the kidney-fat. this restricted taste makes him an expensive bird to support. to get the fat he drives his beak in and rips it out; the wound is mortal. this parrot furnishes a notable example of evolution brought about by changed conditions. when the sheep culture was introduced, it presently brought famine to the parrot by exterminating a kind of grub which had always thitherto been the parrot's diet. the miseries of hunger made the bird willing to eat raw flesh, since it could get no other food, and it began to pick remnants of meat from sheep skins hung out on the fences to dry. it soon came to prefer sheep meat to any other food, and by and by it came to prefer the kidney-fat to any other detail of the sheep. the parrot's bill was not well shaped for digging out the fat, but nature fixed that matter; she altered the bill's shape, and now the parrot can dig out kidney-fat better than the chief justice of the supreme court, or anybody else, for that matter--even an admiral. and there was another curiosity--quite a stunning one, i thought: arrow-heads and knives just like those which primeval man made out of flint, and thought he had done such a wonderful thing--yes, and has been humored and coddled in that superstition by this age of admiring scientists until there is probably no living with him in the other world by now. yet here is his finest and nicest work exactly duplicated in our day; and by people who have never heard of him or his works: by aborigines who lived in the islands of these seas, within our time. and they not only duplicated those works of art but did it in the brittlest and most treacherous of substances--glass: made them out of old brandy bottles flung out of the british camps; millions of tons of them. it is time for primeval man to make a little less noise, now. he has had his day. he is not what he used to be. we had a drive through a bloomy and odorous fairy-land, to the refuge for the indigent--a spacious and comfortable home, with hospitals, etc., for both sexes. there was a crowd in there, of the oldest people i have ever seen. it was like being suddenly set down in a new world--a weird world where youth has never been, a world sacred to age, and bowed forms, and wrinkles. out of the persons present, , were ex-convicts, and could have told stirring tales, no doubt, if they had been minded to talk; of the were past , and several were close upon ; the average age at death there is years. as for me, i have no use for that place; it is too healthy. seventy is old enough--after that, there is too much risk. youth and gaiety might vanish, any day--and then, what is left? death in life; death without its privileges, death without its benefits. there were women in that refuge, and of them were ex-convicts. the steamer disappointed us. instead of making a long visit at hobart, as usual, she made a short one. so we got but a glimpse of tasmania, and then moved on. following the equator a journey around the world by mark twain samuel l. clemens part chapter ix. it is your human environment that makes climate. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. sept. --night. close to australia now. sydney miles distant. that note recalls an experience. the passengers were sent for, to come up in the bow and see a fine sight. it was very dark. one could not follow with the eye the surface of the sea more than fifty yards in any direction it dimmed away and became lost to sight at about that distance from us. but if you patiently gazed into the darkness a little while, there was a sure reward for you. presently, a quarter of a mile away you would see a blinding splash or explosion of light on the water--a flash so sudden and so astonishingly brilliant that it would make you catch your breath; then that blotch of light would instantly extend itself and take the corkscrew shape and imposing length of the fabled sea-serpent, with every curve of its body and the "break" spreading away from its head, and the wake following behind its tail clothed in a fierce splendor of living fire. and my, but it was coming at a lightning gait! almost before you could think, this monster of light, fifty feet long, would go flaming and storming by, and suddenly disappear. and out in the distance whence he came you would see another flash; and another and another and another, and see them turn into sea-serpents on the instant; and once sixteen flashed up at the same time and came tearing towards us, a swarm of wiggling curves, a moving conflagration, a vision of bewildering beauty, a spectacle of fire and energy whose equal the most of those people will not see again until after they are dead. it was porpoises--porpoises aglow with phosphorescent light. they presently collected in a wild and magnificent jumble under the bows, and there they played for an hour, leaping and frollicking and carrying on, turning summersaults in front of the stem or across it and never getting hit, never making a miscalculation, though the stem missed them only about an inch, as a rule. they were porpoises of the ordinary length --eight or ten feet--but every twist of their bodies sent a long procession of united and glowing curves astern. that fiery jumble was an enchanting thing to look at, and we stayed out the performance; one cannot have such a show as that twice in a lifetime. the porpoise is the kitten of the sea; he never has a serious thought, he cares for nothing but fun and play. but i think i never saw him at his winsomest until that night. it was near a center of civilization, and he could have been drinking. by and by, when we had approached to somewhere within thirty miles of sydney heads the great electric light that is posted on one of those lofty ramparts began to show, and in time the little spark grew to a great sun and pierced the firmament of darkness with a far-reaching sword of light. sydney harbor is shut in behind a precipice that extends some miles like a wall, and exhibits no break to the ignorant stranger. it has a break in the middle, but it makes so little show that even captain cook sailed by it without seeing it. near by that break is a false break which resembles it, and which used to make trouble for the mariner at night, in the early days before the place was lighted. it caused the memorable disaster to the duncan dunbar, one of the most pathetic tragedies in the history of that pitiless ruffian, the sea. the ship was a sailing vessel; a fine and favorite passenger packet, commanded by a popular captain of high reputation. she was due from england, and sydney was waiting, and counting the hours; counting the hours, and making ready to give her a heart-stirring welcome; for she was bringing back a great company of mothers and daughters, the long-missed light and bloom of life of sydney homes; daughters that had been years absent at school, and mothers that had been with them all that time watching over them. of all the world only india and australasia have by custom freighted ships and fleets with their hearts, and know the tremendous meaning of that phrase; only they know what the waiting is like when this freightage is entrusted to the fickle winds, not steam, and what the joy is like when the ship that is returning this treasure comes safe to port and the long dread is over. on board the duncan dunbar, flying toward sydney heads in the waning afternoon, the happy home-comers made busy preparation, for it was not doubted that they would be in the arms of their friends before the day was done; they put away their sea-going clothes and put on clothes meeter for the meeting, their richest and their loveliest, these poor brides of the grave. but the wind lost force, or there was a miscalculation, and before the heads were sighted the darkness came on. it was said that ordinarily the captain would have made a safe offing and waited for the morning; but this was no ordinary occasion; all about him were appealing faces, faces pathetic with disappointment. so his sympathy moved him to try the dangerous passage in the dark. he had entered the heads seventeen times, and believed he knew the ground. so he steered straight for the false opening, mistaking it for the true one. he did not find out that he was wrong until it was too late. there was no saving the ship. the great seas swept her in and crushed her to splinters and rubbish upon the rock tushes at the base of the precipice. not one of all that fair and gracious company was ever seen again alive. the tale is told to every stranger that passes the spot, and it will continue to be told to all that come, for generations; but it will never grow old, custom cannot stale it, the heart-break that is in it can never perish out of it. there were two hundred persons in the ship, and but one survived the disaster. he was a sailor. a huge sea flung him up the face of the precipice and stretched him on a narrow shelf of rock midway between the top and the bottom, and there he lay all night. at any other time he would have lain there for the rest of his life, without chance of discovery; but the next morning the ghastly news swept through sydney that the duncan dunbar had gone down in sight of home, and straightway the walls of the heads were black with mourners; and one of these, stretching himself out over the precipice to spy out what might be seen below, discovered this miraculously preserved relic of the wreck. ropes were brought and the nearly impossible feat of rescuing the man was accomplished. he was a person with a practical turn of mind, and he hired a hall in sydney and exhibited himself at sixpence a head till he exhausted the output of the gold fields for that year. we entered and cast anchor, and in the morning went oh-ing and ah-ing in admiration up through the crooks and turns of the spacious and beautiful harbor--a harbor which is the darling of sydney and the wonder of the world. it is not surprising that the people are proud of it, nor that they put their enthusiasm into eloquent words. a returning citizen asked me what i thought of it, and i testified with a cordiality which i judged would be up to the market rate. i said it was beautiful--superbly beautiful. then by a natural impulse i gave god the praise. the citizen did not seem altogether satisfied. he said: "it is beautiful, of course it's beautiful--the harbor; but that isn't all of it, it's only half of it; sydney's the other half, and it takes both of them together to ring the supremacy-bell. god made the harbor, and that's all right; but satan made sydney." of course i made an apology; and asked him to convey it to his friend. he was right about sydney being half of it. it would be beautiful without sydney, but not above half as beautiful as it is now, with sydney added. it is shaped somewhat like an oak-leaf-a roomy sheet of lovely blue water, with narrow off-shoots of water running up into the country on both sides between long fingers of land, high wooden ridges with sides sloped like graves. handsome villas are perched here and there on these ridges, snuggling amongst the foliage, and one catches alluring glimpses of them as the ship swims by toward the city. the city clothes a cluster of hills and a ruffle of neighboring ridges with its undulating masses of masonry, and out of these masses spring towers and spires and other architectural dignities and grandeurs that break the flowing lines and give picturesqueness to the general effect. the narrow inlets which i have mentioned go wandering out into the land everywhere and hiding themselves in it, and pleasure-launches are always exploring them with picnic parties on board. it is said by trustworthy people that if you explore them all you will find that you have covered miles of water passage. but there are liars everywhere this year, and they will double that when their works are in good going order. october was close at hand, spring was come. it was really spring --everybody said so; but you could have sold it for summer in canada, and nobody would have suspected. it was the very weather that makes our home summers the perfection of climatic luxury; i mean, when you are out in the wood or by the sea. but these people said it was cool, now--a person ought to see sydney in the summer time if he wanted to know what warm weather is; and he ought to go north ten or fifteen hundred miles if he wanted to know what hot weather is. they said that away up there toward the equator the hens laid fried eggs. sydney is the place to go to get information about other people's climates. it seems to me that the occupation of unbiased traveler seeking information is the pleasantest and most irresponsible trade there is. the traveler can always find out anything he wants to, merely by asking. he can get at all the facts, and more. everybody helps him, nobody hinders him. anybody who has an old fact in stock that is no longer negotiable in the domestic market will let him have it at his own price. an accumulation of such goods is easily and quickly made. they cost almost nothing and they bring par in the foreign market. travelers who come to america always freight up with the same old nursery tales that their predecessors selected, and they carry them back and always work them off without any trouble in the home market. if the climates of the world were determined by parallels of latitude, then we could know a place's climate by its position on the map; and so we should know that the climate of sydney was the counterpart of the climate of columbia, s. c., and of little rock, arkansas, since sydney is about the same distance south of the equator that those other towns are north of-it-thirty-four degrees. but no, climate disregards the parallels of latitude. in arkansas they have a winter; in sydney they have the name of it, but not the thing itself. i have seen the ice in the mississippi floating past the mouth of the arkansas river; and at memphis, but a little way above, the mississippi has been frozen over, from bank to bank. but they have never had a cold spell in sydney which brought the mercury down to freezing point. once in a mid-winter day there, in the month of july, the mercury went down to deg., and that remains the memorable "cold day" in the history of the town. no doubt little rock has seen it below zero. once, in sydney, in mid-summer, about new year's day, the mercury went up to deg. in the shade, and that is sydney's memorable hot day. that would about tally with little rock's hottest day also, i imagine. my sydney figures are taken from a government report, and are trustworthy. in the matter of summer weather arkansas has no advantage over sydney, perhaps, but when it comes to winter weather, that is another affair. you could cut up an arkansas winter into a hundred sydney winters and have enough left for arkansas and the poor. the whole narrow, hilly belt of the pacific side of new south wales has the climate of its capital--a mean winter temperature of deg. and a mean summer one of deg. it is a climate which cannot be improved upon for healthfulness. but the experts say that deg. in new south wales is harder to bear than deg. in the neighboring colony of victoria, because the atmosphere of the former is humid, and of the latter dry. the mean temperature of the southernmost point of new south wales is the same as that of nice-- deg.--yet nice is further from the equator by miles than is the former. but nature is always stingy of perfect climates; stingier in the case of australia than usual. apparently this vast continent has a really good climate nowhere but around the edges. if we look at a map of the world we are surprised to see how big australia is. it is about two-thirds as large as the united states was before we added alaska. but where as one finds a sufficiently good climate and fertile land almost everywhere in the united states, it seems settled that inside of the australian border-belt one finds many deserts and in spots a climate which nothing can stand except a few of the hardier kinds of rocks. in effect, australia is as yet unoccupied. if you take a map of the united states and leave the atlantic sea-board states in their places; also the fringe of southern states from florida west to the mouth of the mississippi; also a narrow, inhabited streak up the mississippi half-way to its head waters; also a narrow, inhabited border along the pacific coast: then take a brushful of paint and obliterate the whole remaining mighty stretch of country that lies between the atlantic states and the pacific-coast strip, your map will look like the latest map of australia. this stupendous blank is hot, not to say torrid; a part of it is fertile, the rest is desert; it is not liberally watered; it has no towns. one has only to cross the mountains of new south wales and descend into the westward-lying regions to find that he has left the choice climate behind him, and found a new one of a quite different character. in fact, he would not know by the thermometer that he was not in the blistering plains of india. captain sturt, the great explorer, gives us a sample of the heat. "the wind, which had been blowing all the morning from the n.e., increased to a heavy gale, and i shall never forget its withering effect. i sought shelter behind a large gum-tree, but the blasts of heat were so terrific that i wondered the very grass did not take fire. this really was nothing ideal: everything both animate and inanimate gave way before it; the horses stood with their backs to the wind and their noses to the ground, without the muscular strength to raise their heads; the birds were mute, and the leaves of the trees under which we were sitting fell like a snow shower around us. at noon i took a thermometer graded to deg., out of my box, and observed that the mercury was up to . thinking that it had been unduly influenced, i put it in the fork of a tree close to me, sheltered alike from the wind and the sun. i went to examine it about an hour afterwards, when i found the mercury had risen to the-top of the instrument and had burst the bulb, a circumstance that i believe no traveler has ever before had to record. i cannot find language to convey to the reader's mind an idea of the intense and oppressive nature of the heat that prevailed." that hot wind sweeps over sydney sometimes, and brings with it what is called a "dust-storm." it is said that most australian towns are acquainted with the dust-storm. i think i know what it is like, for the following description by mr. gape tallies very well with the alkali duststorm of nevada, if you leave out the "shovel" part. still the shovel part is a pretty important part, and seems to indicate that my nevada storm is but a poor thing, after all. "as we proceeded the altitude became less, and the heat proportionately greater until we reached dubbo, which is only feet above sea-level. it is a pretty town, built on an extensive plain . . . . after the effects of a shower of rain have passed away the surface of the ground crumbles into a thick layer of dust, and occasionally, when the wind is in a particular quarter, it is lifted bodily from the ground in one long opaque cloud. in the midst of such a storm nothing can be seen a few yards ahead, and the unlucky person who happens to be out at the time is compelled to seek the nearest retreat at hand. when the thrifty housewife sees in the distance the dark column advancing in a steady whirl towards her house, she closes the doors and windows with all expedition. a drawing-room, the window of which has been carelessly left open during a dust-storm, is indeed an extraordinary sight. a lady who has resided in dubbo for some years says that the dust lies so thick on the carpet that it is necessary to use a shovel to remove it." and probably a wagon. i was mistaken; i have not seen a proper duststorm. to my mind the exterior aspects and character of australia are fascinating things to look at and think about, they are so strange, so weird, so new, so uncommonplace, such a startling and interesting contrast to the other sections of the planet, the sections that are known to us all, familiar to us all. in the matter of particulars--a detail here, a detail there--we have had the choice climate of new south wales' seacoast; we have had the australian heat as furnished by captain sturt; we have had the wonderful dust-storm; and we have considered the phenomenon of an almost empty hot wilderness half as big as the united states, with a narrow belt of civilization, population, and good climate around it. chapter x. everything human is pathetic. the secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. there is no humor in heaven. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. captain cook found australia in , and eighteen years later the british government began to transport convicts to it. altogether, new south wales received , in years. the convicts wore heavy chains; they were ill-fed and badly treated by the officers set over them; they were heavily punished for even slight infractions of the rules; "the cruelest discipline ever known" is one historian's description of their life.--[the story of australasia. j. s. laurie.] english law was hard-hearted in those days. for trifling offenses which in our day would be punished by a small fine or a few days' confinement, men, women, and boys were sent to this other end of the earth to serve terms of seven and fourteen years; and for serious crimes they were transported for life. children were sent to the penal colonies for seven years for stealing a rabbit! when i was in london twenty-three years ago there was a new penalty in force for diminishing garroting and wife-beating-- lashes on the bare back with the cat-o'-nine-tails. it was said that this terrible punishment was able to bring the stubbornest ruffians to terms; and that no man had been found with grit enough to keep his emotions to himself beyond the ninth blow; as a rule the man shrieked earlier. that penalty had a great and wholesome effect upon the garroters and wife-beaters; but humane modern london could not endure it; it got its law rescinded. many a bruised and battered english wife has since had occasion to deplore that cruel achievement of sentimental "humanity." twenty-five lashes! in australia and tasmania they gave a convict fifty for almost any little offense; and sometimes a brutal officer would add fifty, and then another fifty, and so on, as long as the sufferer could endure the torture and live. in tasmania i read the entry, in an old manuscript official record, of a case where a convict was given three hundred lashes--for stealing some silver spoons. and men got more than that, sometimes. who handled the cat? often it was another convict; sometimes it was the culprit's dearest comrade; and he had to lay on with all his might; otherwise he would get a flogging himself for his mercy --for he was under watch--and yet not do his friend any good: the friend would be attended to by another hand and suffer no lack in the matter of full punishment. the convict life in tasmania was so unendurable, and suicide so difficult to accomplish that once or twice despairing men got together and drew straws to determine which of them should kill another of the group--this murder to secure death to the perpetrator and to the witnesses of it by the hand of the hangman! the incidents quoted above are mere hints, mere suggestions of what convict life was like--they are but a couple of details tossed into view out of a shoreless sea of such; or, to change the figure, they are but a pair of flaming steeples photographed from a point which hides from sight the burning city which stretches away from their bases on every hand. some of the convicts--indeed, a good many of them--were very bad people, even for that day; but the most of them were probably not noticeably worse than the average of the people they left behind them at home. we must believe this; we cannot avoid it. we are obliged to believe that a nation that could look on, unmoved, and see starving or freezing women hanged for stealing twenty-six cents' worth of bacon or rags, and boys snatched from their mothers, and men from their families, and sent to the other side of the world for long terms of years for similar trifling offenses, was a nation to whom the term "civilized" could not in any large way be applied. and we must also believe that a nation that knew, during more than forty years, what was happening to those exiles and was still content with it, was not advancing in any showy way toward a higher grade of civilization. if we look into the characters and conduct of the officers and gentlemen who had charge of the convicts and attended to their backs and stomachs, we must grant again that as between the convict and his masters, and between both and the nation at home, there was a quite noticeable monotony of sameness. four years had gone by, and many convicts had come. respectable settlers were beginning to arrive. these two classes of colonists had to be protected, in case of trouble among themselves or with the natives. it is proper to mention the natives, though they could hardly count they were so scarce. at a time when they had not as yet begun to be much disturbed--not as yet being in the way--it was estimated that in new south wales there was but one native to , acres of territory. people had to be protected. officers of the regular army did not want this service--away off there where neither honor nor distinction was to be gained. so england recruited and officered a kind of militia force of , uniformed civilians called the "new south wales corps" and shipped it. this was the worst blow of all. the colony fairly staggered under it. the corps was an object-lesson of the moral condition of england outside of the jails. the colonists trembled. it was feared that next there would be an importation of the nobility. in those early days the colony was non-supporting. all the necessaries of life--food, clothing, and all--were sent out from england, and kept in great government store-houses, and given to the convicts and sold to the settlers--sold at a trifling advance upon cost. the corps saw its opportunity. its officers went into commerce, and in a most lawless way. they went to importing rum, and also to manufacturing it in private stills, in defiance of the government's commands and protests. they leagued themselves together and ruled the market; they boycotted the government and the other dealers; they established a close monopoly and kept it strictly in their own hands. when a vessel arrived with spirits, they allowed nobody to buy but themselves, and they forced the owner to sell to them at a price named by themselves--and it was always low enough. they bought rum at an average of two dollars a gallon and sold it at an average of ten. they made rum the currency of the country--for there was little or no money--and they maintained their devastating hold and kept the colony under their heel for eighteen or twenty years before they were finally conquered and routed by the government. meantime, they had spread intemperance everywhere. and they had squeezed farm after farm out of the settlers hands for rum, and thus had bountifully enriched themselves. when a farmer was caught in the last agonies of thirst they took advantage of him and sweated him for a drink. in one instance they sold a man a gallon of rum worth two dollars for a piece of property which was sold some years later for $ , . when the colony was about eighteen or twenty years old it was discovered that the land was specially fitted for the wool-culture. prosperity followed, commerce with the world began, by and by rich mines of the noble metals were opened, immigrants flowed in, capital likewise. the result is the great and wealthy and enlightened commonwealth of new south wales. it is a country that is rich in mines, wool ranches, trams, railways, steamship lines, schools, newspapers, botanical gardens, art galleries, libraries, museums, hospitals, learned societies; it is the hospitable home of every species of culture and of every species of material enterprise, and there is a, church at every man's door, and a race-track over the way. chapter xi. we should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it--and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. she will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again--and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. all english-speaking colonies are made up of lavishly hospitable people, and new south wales and its capital are like the rest in this. the english-speaking colony of the united states of america is always called lavishly hospitable by the english traveler. as to the other english-speaking colonies throughout the world from canada all around, i know by experience that the description fits them. i will not go more particularly into this matter, for i find that when writers try to distribute their gratitude here and there and yonder by detail they run across difficulties and do some ungraceful stumbling. mr. gane ("new south wales and victoria in "), tried to distribute his gratitude, and was not lucky: "the inhabitants of sydney are renowned for their hospitality. the treatment which we experienced at the hands of this generous-hearted people will help more than anything else to make us recollect with pleasure our stay amongst them. in the character of hosts and hostesses they excel. the 'new chum' needs only the acquaintanceship of one of their number, and he becomes at once the happy recipient of numerous complimentary invitations and thoughtful kindnesses. of the towns it has been our good fortune to visit, none have portrayed home so faithfully as sydney." nobody could say it finer than that. if he had put in his cork then, and stayed away from dubbo----but no; heedless man, he pulled it again. pulled it when he was away along in his book, and his memory of what he had said about sydney had grown dim: "we cannot quit the promising town of dubbo without testifying, in warm praise, to the kind-hearted and hospitable usages of its inhabitants. sydney, though well deserving the character it bears of its kindly treatment of strangers, possesses a little formality and reserve. in dubbo, on the contrary, though the same congenial manners prevail, there is a pleasing degree of respectful familiarity which gives the town a homely comfort not often met with elsewhere. in laying on one side our pen we feel contented in having been able, though so late in this work, to bestow a panegyric, however unpretentious, on a town which, though possessing no picturesque natural surroundings, nor interesting architectural productions, has yet a body of citizens whose hearts cannot but obtain for their town a reputation for benevolence and kind-heartedness." i wonder what soured him on sydney. it seems strange that a pleasing degree of three or four fingers of respectful familiarity should fill a man up and give him the panegyrics so bad. for he has them, the worst way--any one can see that. a man who is perfectly at himself does not throw cold detraction at people's architectural productions and picturesque surroundings, and let on that what he prefers is a dubbonese dust-storm and a pleasing degree of respectful familiarity, no, these are old, old symptoms; and when they appear we know that the man has got the panegyrics. sydney has a population of , . when a stranger from america steps ashore there, the first thing that strikes him is that the place is eight or nine times as large as he was expecting it to be; and the next thing that strikes him is that it is an english city with american trimmings. later on, in melbourne, he will find the american trimmings still more in evidence; there, even the architecture will often suggest america; a photograph of its stateliest business street might be passed upon him for a picture of the finest street in a large american city. i was told that the most of the fine residences were the city residences of squatters. the name seemed out of focus somehow. when the explanation came, it offered a new instance of the curious changes which words, as well as animals, undergo through change of habitat and climate. with us, when you speak of a squatter you are always supposed to be speaking of a poor man, but in australia when you speak of a squatter you are supposed to be speaking of a millionaire; in america the word indicates the possessor of a few acres and a doubtful title, in australia it indicates a man whose landfront is as long as a railroad, and whose title has been perfected in one way or another; in america the word indicates a man who owns a dozen head of live stock, in australia a man who owns anywhere from fifty thousand up to half a million head; in america the word indicates a man who is obscure and not important, in australia a man who is prominent and of the first importance; in america you take off your hat to no squatter, in australia you do; in america if your uncle is a squatter you keep it dark, in australia you advertise it; in america if your friend is a squatter nothing comes of it, but with a squatter for your friend in australia you may sup with kings if there are any around. in australia it takes about two acres and a half of pastureland (some people say twice as many), to support a sheep; and when the squatter has half a million sheep his private domain is about as large as rhode island, to speak in general terms. his annual wool crop may be worth a quarter or a half million dollars. he will live in a palace in melbourne or sydney or some other of the large cities, and make occasional trips to his sheep-kingdom several hundred miles away in the great plains to look after his battalions of riders and shepherds and other hands. he has a commodious dwelling out there, and if he approve of you he will invite you to spend a week in it, and will make you at home and comfortable, and let you see the great industry in all its details, and feed you and slake you and smoke you with the best that money can buy. on at least one of these vast estates there is a considerable town, with all the various businesses and occupations that go to make an important town; and the town and the land it stands upon are the property of the squatters. i have seen that town, and it is not unlikely that there are other squatter-owned towns in australia. australia supplies the world not only with fine wool, but with mutton also. the modern invention of cold storage and its application in ships has created this great trade. in sydney i visited a huge establishment where they kill and clean and solidly freeze a thousand sheep a day, for shipment to england. the australians did not seem to me to differ noticeably from americans, either in dress, carriage, ways, pronunciation, inflections, or general appearance. there were fleeting and subtle suggestions of their english origin, but these were not pronounced enough, as a rule, to catch one's attention. the people have easy and cordial manners from the beginning --from the moment that the introduction is completed. this is american. to put it in another way, it is english friendliness with the english shyness and self-consciousness left out. now and then--but this is rare--one hears such words as piper for paper, lydy for lady, and tyble for table fall from lips whence one would not expect such pronunciations to come. there is a superstition prevalent in sydney that this pronunciation is an australianism, but people who have been "home"--as the native reverently and lovingly calls england--know better. it is "costermonger." all over australasia this pronunciation is nearly as common among servants as it is in london among the uneducated and the partially educated of all sorts and conditions of people. that mislaid 'y' is rather striking when a person gets enough of it into a short sentence to enable it to show up. in the hotel in sydney the chambermaid said, one morning: "the tyble is set, and here is the piper; and if the lydy is ready i'll tell the wyter to bring up the breakfast." i have made passing mention, a moment ago, of the native australasian's custom of speaking of england as "home." it was always pretty to hear it, and often it was said in an unconsciously caressing way that made it touching; in a way which transmuted a sentiment into an embodiment, and made one seem to see australasia as a young girl stroking mother england's old gray head. in the australasian home the table-talk is vivacious and unembarrassed; it is without stiffness or restraint. this does not remind one of england so much as it does of america. but australasia is strictly democratic, and reserves and restraints are things that are bred by differences of rank. english and colonial audiences are phenomenally alert and responsive. where masses of people are gathered together in england, caste is submerged, and with it the english reserve; equality exists for the moment, and every individual is free; so free from any consciousness of fetters, indeed, that the englishman's habit of watching himself and guarding himself against any injudicious exposure of his feelings is forgotten, and falls into abeyance--and to such a degree indeed, that he will bravely applaud all by himself if he wants to--an exhibition of daring which is unusual elsewhere in the world. but it is hard to move a new english acquaintance when he is by himself, or when the company present is small and new to him. he is on his guard then, and his natural reserve is to the fore. this has given him the false reputation of being without humor and without the appreciation of humor. americans are not englishmen, and american humor is not english humor; but both the american and his humor had their origin in england, and have merely undergone changes brought about by changed conditions and a new environment. about the best humorous speeches i have yet heard were a couple that were made in australia at club suppers--one of them by an englishman, the other by an australian. chapter xii. there are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow: yet it was the schoolboy who said "faith is believing what you know ain't so." --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. in sydney i had a large dream, and in the course of talk i told it to a missionary from india who was on his way to visit some relatives in new zealand. i dreamed that the visible universe is the physical person of god; that the vast worlds that we see twinkling millions of miles apart in the fields of space are the blood corpuscles in his veins; and that we and the other creatures are the microbes that charge with multitudinous life the corpuscles. mr. x., the missionary, considered the dream awhile, then said: "it is not surpassable for magnitude, since its metes and bounds are the metes and bounds of the universe itself; and it seems to me that it almost accounts for a thing which is otherwise nearly unaccountable--the origin of the sacred legends of the hindoos. perhaps they dream them, and then honestly believe them to be divine revelations of fact. it looks like that, for the legends are built on so vast a scale that it does not seem reasonable that plodding priests would happen upon such colossal fancies when awake." he told some of the legends, and said that they were implicitly believed by all classes of hindoos, including those of high social position and intelligence; and he said that this universal credulity was a great hindrance to the missionary in his work. then he said something like this: "at home, people wonder why christianity does not make faster progress in india. they hear that the indians believe easily, and that they have a natural trust in miracles and give them a hospitable reception. then they argue like this: since the indian believes easily, place christianity before them and they must believe; confirm its truths by the biblical miracles, and they will no longer doubt, the natural deduction is, that as christianity makes but indifferent progress in india, the fault is with us: we are not fortunate in presenting the doctrines and the miracles. "but the truth is, we are not by any means so well equipped as they think. we have not the easy task that they imagine. to use a military figure, we are sent against the enemy with good powder in our guns, but only wads for bullets; that is to say, our miracles are not effective; the hindoos do not care for them; they have more extraordinary ones of their own. all the details of their own religion are proven and established by miracles; the details of ours must be proven in the same way. when i first began my work in india i greatly underestimated the difficulties thus put upon my task. a correction was not long in coming. i thought as our friends think at home--that to prepare my childlike wonder-lovers to listen with favor to my grave message i only needed to charm the way to it with wonders, marvels, miracles. with full confidence i told the wonders performed by samson, the strongest man that had ever lived--for so i called him. "at first i saw lively anticipation and strong interest in the faces of my people, but as i moved along from incident to incident of the great story, i was distressed to see that i was steadily losing the sympathy of my audience. i could not understand it. it was a surprise to me, and a disappointment. before i was through, the fading sympathy had paled to indifference. thence to the end the indifference remained; i was not able to make any impression upon it. "a good old hindoo gentleman told me where my trouble lay. he said 'we hindoos recognize a god by the work of his hands--we accept no other testimony. apparently, this is also the rule with you christians. and we know when a man has his power from a god by the fact that he does things which he could not do, as a man, with the mere powers of a man. plainly, this is the christian's way also, of knowing when a man is working by a god's power and not by his own. you saw that there was a supernatural property in the hair of samson; for you perceived that when his hair was gone he was as other men. it is our way, as i have said. there are many nations in the world, and each group of nations has its own gods, and will pay no worship to the gods of the others. each group believes its own gods to be strongest, and it will not exchange them except for gods that shall be proven to be their superiors in power. man is but a weak creature, and needs the help of gods--he cannot do without it. shall he place his fate in the hands of weak gods when there may be stronger ones to be found? that would be foolish. no, if he hear of gods that are stronger than his own, he should not turn a deaf ear, for it is not a light matter that is at stake. how then shall he determine which gods are the stronger, his own or those that preside over the concerns of other nations? by comparing the known works of his own gods with the works of those others; there is no other way. now, when we make this comparison, we are not drawn towards the gods of any other nation. our gods are shown by their works to be the strongest, the most powerful. the christians have but few gods, and they are new--new, and not strong; as it seems to us. they will increase in number, it is true, for this has happened with all gods, but that time is far away, many ages and decades of ages away, for gods multiply slowly, as is meet for beings to whom a thousand years is but a single moment. our own gods have been born millions of years apart. the process is slow, the gathering of strength and power is similarly slow. in the slow lapse of the ages the steadily accumulating power of our gods has at last become prodigious. we have a thousand proofs of this in the colossal character of their personal acts and the acts of ordinary men to whom they have given supernatural qualities. to your samson was given supernatural power, and when he broke the withes, and slew the thousands with the jawbone of an ass, and carried away the gate's of the city upon his shoulders, you were amazed--and also awed, for you recognized the divine source of his strength. but it could not profit to place these things before your hindoo congregation and invite their wonder; for they would compare them with the deed done by hanuman, when our gods infused their divine strength into his muscles; and they would be indifferent to them--as you saw. in the old, old times, ages and ages gone by, when our god rama was warring with the demon god of ceylon, rama bethought him to bridge the sea and connect ceylon with india, so that his armies might pass easily over; and he sent his general, hanuman, inspired like your own samson with divine strength, to bring the materials for the bridge. in two days hanuman strode fifteen hundred miles, to the himalayas, and took upon his shoulder a range of those lofty mountains two hundred miles long, and started with it toward ceylon. it was in the night; and, as he passed along the plain, the people of govardhun heard the thunder of his tread and felt the earth rocking under it, and they ran out, and there, with their snowy summits piled to heaven, they saw the himalayas passing by. and as this huge continent swept along overshadowing the earth, upon its slopes they discerned the twinkling lights of a thousand sleeping villages, and it was as if the constellations were filing in procession through the sky. while they were looking, hanuman stumbled, and a small ridge of red sandstone twenty miles long was jolted loose and fell. half of its length has wasted away in the course of the ages, but the other ten miles of it remain in the plain by govardhun to this day as proof of the might of the inspiration of our gods. you must know, yourself, that hanuman could not have carried those mountains to ceylon except by the strength of the gods. you know that it was not done by his own strength, therefore, you know that it was done by the strength of the gods, just as you know that samson carried the gates by the divine strength and not by his own. i think you must concede two things: first, that in carrying the gates of the city upon his shoulders, samson did not establish the superiority of his gods over ours; secondly, that his feat is not supported by any but verbal evidence, while hanuman's is not only supported by verbal evidence, but this evidence is confirmed, established, proven, by visible, tangible evidence, which is the strongest of all testimony. we have the sandstone ridge, and while it remains we cannot doubt, and shall not. have you the gates?'" chapter xiii. the timid man yearns for full value and asks a tenth. the bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. one is sure to be struck by the liberal way in which australasia spends money upon public works--such as legislative buildings, town halls, hospitals, asylums, parks, and botanical gardens. i should say that where minor towns in america spend a hundred dollars on the town hall and on public parks and gardens, the like towns in australasia spend a thousand. and i think that this ratio will hold good in the matter of hospitals, also. i have seen a costly and well-equipped, and architecturally handsome hospital in an australian village of fifteen hundred inhabitants. it was built by private funds furnished by the villagers and the neighboring planters, and its running expenses were drawn from the same sources. i suppose it would be hard to match this in any country. this village was about to close a contract for lighting its streets with the electric light, when i was there. that is ahead of london. london is still obscured by gas--gas pretty widely scattered, too, in some of the districts; so widely indeed, that except on moonlight nights it is difficult to find the gas lamps. the botanical garden of sydney covers thirty-eight acres, beautifully laid out and rich with the spoil of all the lands and all the climes of the world. the garden is on high ground in the middle of the town, overlooking the great harbor, and it adjoins the spacious grounds of government house--fifty-six acres; and at hand also, is a recreation ground containing eighty-two acres. in addition, there are the zoological gardens, the race-course, and the great cricket-grounds where the international matches are played. therefore there is plenty of room for reposeful lazying and lounging, and for exercise too, for such as like that kind of work. there are four specialties attainable in the way of social pleasure. if you enter your name on the visitor's book at government house you will receive an invitation to the next ball that takes place there, if nothing can be proven against you. and it will be very pleasant; for you will see everybody except the governor, and add a number of acquaintances and several friends to your list. the governor will be in england. he always is. the continent has four or five governors, and i do not know how many it takes to govern the outlying archipelago; but anyway you will not see them. when they are appointed they come out from england and get inaugurated, and give a ball, and help pray for rain, and get aboard ship and go back home. and so the lieutenant-governor has to do all the work. i was in australasia three months and a half, and saw only one governor. the others were at home. the australasian governor would not be so restless, perhaps, if he had a war, or a veto, or something like that to call for his reserve-energies, but he hasn't. there isn't any war, and there isn't any veto in his hands. and so there is really little or nothing doing in his line. the country governs itself, and prefers to do it; and is so strenuous about it and so jealous of its independence that it grows restive if even the imperial government at home proposes to help; and so the imperial veto, while a fact, is yet mainly a name. thus the governor's functions are much more limited than are a governor's functions with us. and therefore more fatiguing. he is the apparent head of the state, he is the real head of society. he represents culture, refinement, elevated sentiment, polite life, religion; and by his example he propagates these, and they spread and flourish and bear good fruit. he creates the fashion, and leads it. his ball is the ball of balls, and his countenance makes the horse-race thrive. he is usually a lord, and this is well; for his position compels him to lead an expensive life, and an english lord is generally well equipped for that. another of sydney's social pleasures is the visit to the admiralty house; which is nobly situated on high ground overlooking the water. the trim boats of the service convey the guests thither; and there, or on board the flag-ship, they have the duplicate of the hospitalities of government house. the admiral commanding a station in british waters is a magnate of the first degree, and he is sumptuously housed, as becomes the dignity of his office. third in the list of special pleasures is the tour of the harbor in a fine steam pleasure-launch. your richer friends own boats of this kind, and they will invite you, and the joys of the trip will make a long day seem short. and finally comes the shark-fishing. sydney harbor is populous with the finest breeds of man-eating sharks in the world. some people make their living catching them; for the government pays a cash bounty on them. the larger the shark the larger the bounty, and some of the sharks are twenty feet long. you not only get the bounty, but everything that is in the shark belongs to you. sometimes the contents are quite valuable. the shark is the swiftest fish that swims. the speed of the fastest steamer afloat is poor compared to his. and he is a great gad-about, and roams far and wide in the oceans, and visits the shores of all of them, ultimately, in the course of his restless excursions. i have a tale to tell now, which has not as yet been in print. in a young stranger arrived in sydney, and set about finding something to do; but he knew no one, and brought no recommendations, and the result was that he got no employment. he had aimed high, at first, but as time and his money wasted away he grew less and less exacting, until at last he was willing to serve in the humblest capacities if so he might get bread and shelter. but luck was still against him; he could find no opening of any sort. finally his money was all gone. he walked the streets all day, thinking; he walked them all night, thinking, thinking, and growing hungrier and hungrier. at dawn he found himself well away from the town and drifting aimlessly along the harbor shore. as he was passing by a nodding shark-fisher the man looked up and said---- "say, young fellow, take my line a spell, and change my luck for me." "how do you know i won't make it worse?" "because you can't. it has been at its worst all night. if you can't change it, no harm's done; if you do change it, it's for the better, of course. come." "all right, what will you give?" "i'll give you the shark, if you catch one." "and i will eat it, bones and all. give me the line." "here you are. i will get away, now, for awhile, so that my luck won't spoil yours; for many and many a time i've noticed that if----there, pull in, pull in, man, you've got a bite! i knew how it would be. why, i knew you for a born son of luck the minute i saw you. all right--he's landed." it was an unusually large shark--"a full nineteen-footer," the fisherman said, as he laid the creature open with his knife. "now you rob him, young man, while i step to my hamper for a fresh bait. there's generally something in them worth going for. you've changed my luck, you see. but my goodness, i hope you haven't changed your own." "oh, it wouldn't matter; don't worry about that. get your bait. i'll rob him." when the fisherman got back the young man had just finished washing his hands in the bay, and was starting away. "what, you are not going?" "yes. good-bye." "but what about your shark?" "the shark? why, what use is he to me?" "what use is he? i like that. don't you know that we can go and report him to government, and you'll get a clean solid eighty shillings bounty? hard cash, you know. what do you think about it now?" "oh, well, you can collect it." "and keep it? is that what you mean?" "yes." "well, this is odd. you're one of those sort they call eccentrics, i judge. the saying is, you mustn't judge a man by his clothes, and i'm believing it now. why yours are looking just ratty, don't you know; and yet you must be rich." "i am." the young man walked slowly back to the town, deeply musing as he went. he halted a moment in front of the best restaurant, then glanced at his clothes and passed on, and got his breakfast at a "stand-up." there was a good deal of it, and it cost five shillings. he tendered a sovereign, got his change, glanced at his silver, muttered to himself, "there isn't enough to buy clothes with," and went his way. at half-past nine the richest wool-broker in sydney was sitting in his morning-room at home, settling his breakfast with the morning paper. a servant put his head in and said: "there's a sundowner at the door wants to see you, sir." "what do you bring that kind of a message here for? send him about his business." "he won't go, sir. i've tried." "he won't go? that's--why, that's unusual. he's one of two things, then: he's a remarkable person, or he's crazy. is he crazy?" "no, sir. he don't look it." "then he's remarkable. what does he say he wants?" "he won't tell, sir; only says it's very important." "and won't go. does he say he won't go?" "says he'll stand there till he sees you, sir, if it's all day." "and yet isn't crazy. show him up." the sundowner was shown in. the broker said to himself, "no, he's not crazy; that is easy to see; so he must be the other thing." then aloud, "well, my good fellow, be quick about it; don't waste any words; what is it you want?" "i want to borrow a hundred thousand pounds." "scott! (it's a mistake; he is crazy . . . . no--he can't be--not with that eye.) why, you take my breath away. come, who are you?" "nobody that you know." "what is your name?" "cecil rhodes." "no, i don't remember hearing the name before. now then--just for curiosity's sake--what has sent you to me on this extraordinary errand?" "the intention to make a hundred thousand pounds for you and as much for myself within the next sixty days." "well, well, well. it is the most extraordinary idea that--sit down--you interest me. and somehow you--well, you fascinate me; i think that that is about the word. and it isn't your proposition--no, that doesn't fascinate me; it's something else, i don't quite know what; something that's born in you and oozes out of you, i suppose. now then just for curiosity's sake again, nothing more: as i understand it, it is your desire to bor----" "i said intention." "pardon, so you did. i thought it was an unheedful use of the word--an unheedful valuing of its strength, you know." "i knew its strength." "well, i must say--but look here, let me walk the floor a little, my mind is getting into a sort of whirl, though you don't seem disturbed any. (plainly this young fellow isn't crazy; but as to his being remarkable --well, really he amounts to that, and something over.) now then, i believe i am beyond the reach of further astonishment. strike, and spare not. what is your scheme?" "to buy the wool crop--deliverable in sixty days." "what, the whole of it?" "the whole of it." "no, i was not quite out of the reach of surprises, after all. why, how you talk! do you know what our crop is going to foot up?" "two and a half million sterling--maybe a little more." "well, you've got your statistics right, any way. now, then, do you know what the margins would foot up, to buy it at sixty days?" "the hundred thousand pounds i came here to get." "right, once more. well, dear me, just to see what would happen, i wish you had the money. and if you had it, what would you do with it?" "i shall make two hundred thousand pounds out of it in sixty days." "you mean, of course, that you might make it if----" "i said 'shall'." "yes, by george, you did say 'shall'! you are the most definite devil i ever saw, in the matter of language. dear, dear, dear, look here! definite speech means clarity of mind. upon my word i believe you've got what you believe to be a rational reason, for venturing into this house, an entire stranger, on this wild scheme of buying the wool crop of an entire colony on speculation. bring it out--i am prepared--acclimatized, if i may use the word. why would you buy the crop, and why would you make that sum out of it? that is to say, what makes you think you----" "i don't think--i know." "definite again. how do you know?" "because france has declared war against germany, and wool has gone up fourteen per cent. in london and is still rising." "oh, in-deed? now then, i've got you! such a thunderbolt as you have just let fly ought to have made me jump out of my chair, but it didn't stir me the least little bit, you see. and for a very simple reason: i have read the morning paper. you can look at it if you want to. the fastest ship in the service arrived at eleven o'clock last night, fifty days out from london. all her news is printed here. there are no war-clouds anywhere; and as for wool, why, it is the low-spiritedest commodity in the english market. it is your turn to jump, now . . . . well, why, don't you jump? why do you sit there in that placid fashion, when----" "because i have later news." "later news? oh, come--later news than fifty days, brought steaming hot from london by the----" "my news is only ten days old." "oh, mun-chausen, hear the maniac talk! where did you get it?" "got it out of a shark." "oh, oh, oh, this is too much! front! call the police bring the gun --raise the town! all the asylums in christendom have broken loose in the single person of----" "sit down! and collect yourself. where is the use in getting excited? am i excited? there is nothing to get excited about. when i make a statement which i cannot prove, it will be time enough for you to begin to offer hospitality to damaging fancies about me and my sanity." "oh, a thousand, thousand pardons! i ought to be ashamed of myself, and i am ashamed of myself for thinking that a little bit of a circumstance like sending a shark to england to fetch back a market report----" "what does your middle initial stand for, sir?" "andrew. what are you writing?" "wait a moment. proof about the shark--and another matter. only ten lines. there--now it is done. sign it." "many thanks--many. let me see; it says--it says oh, come, this is interesting! why--why--look here! prove what you say here, and i'll put up the money, and double as much, if necessary, and divide the winnings with you, half and half. there, now--i've signed; make your promise good if you can. show me a copy of the london times only ten days old." "here it is--and with it these buttons and a memorandum book that belonged to the man the shark swallowed. swallowed him in the thames, without a doubt; for you will notice that the last entry in the book is dated 'london,' and is of the same date as the times, and says, 'ber confequentz der kreigeseflarun, reife ich heute nach deutchland ab, aur bak ich mein leben auf dem ultar meines landes legen mag'----, as clean native german as anybody can put upon paper, and means that in consequence of the declaration of war, this loyal soul is leaving for home to-day, to fight. and he did leave, too, but the shark had him before the day was done, poor fellow." "and a pity, too. but there are times for mourning, and we will attend to this case further on; other matters are pressing, now. i will go down and set the machinery in motion in a quiet way and buy the crop. it will cheer the drooping spirits of the boys, in a transitory way. everything is transitory in this world. sixty days hence, when they are called to deliver the goods, they will think they've been struck by lightning. but there is a time for mourning, and we will attend to that case along with the other one. come along, i'll take you to my tailor. what did you say your name is?" "cecil rhodes." "it is hard to remember. however, i think you will make it easier by and by, if you live. there are three kinds of people--commonplace men, remarkable men, and lunatics. i'll classify you with the remarkables, and take the chances." the deal went through, and secured to the young stranger the first fortune he ever pocketed. the people of sydney ought to be afraid of the sharks, but for some reason they do not seem to be. on saturdays the young men go out in their boats, and sometimes the water is fairly covered with the little sails. a boat upsets now and then, by accident, a result of tumultuous skylarking; sometimes the boys upset their boat for fun--such as it is with sharks visibly waiting around for just such an occurrence. the young fellows scramble aboard whole--sometimes--not always. tragedies have happened more than once. while i was in sydney it was reported that a boy fell out of a boat in the mouth of the paramatta river and screamed for help and a boy jumped overboard from another boat to save him from the assembling sharks; but the sharks made swift work with the lives of both. the government pays a bounty for the shark; to get the bounty the fishermen bait the hook or the seine with agreeable mutton; the news spreads and the sharks come from all over the pacific ocean to get the free board. in time the shark culture will be one of the most successful things in the colony. chapter xiv. we can secure other people's approval, if we do right and try hard; but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. my health had broken down in new york in may; it had remained in a doubtful but fairish condition during a succeeding period of days; it broke again on the pacific. it broke again in sydney, but not until after i had had a good outing, and had also filled my lecture engagements. this latest break lost me the chance of seeing queensland. in the circumstances, to go north toward hotter weather was not advisable. so we moved south with a westward slant, hours by rail to the capital of the colony of victoria, melbourne--that juvenile city of sixty years, and half a million inhabitants. on the map the distance looked small; but that is a trouble with all divisions of distance in such a vast country as australia. the colony of victoria itself looks small on the map--looks like a county, in fact--yet it is about as large as england, scotland, and wales combined. or, to get another focus upon it, it is just times as large as the state of rhode island, and one-third as large as the state of texas. outside of melbourne, victoria seems to be owned by a handful of squatters, each with a rhode island for a sheep farm. that is the impression which one gathers from common talk, yet the wool industry of victoria is by no means so great as that of new south wales. the climate of victoria is favorable to other great industries--among others, wheat-growing and the making of wine. we took the train at sydney at about four in the afternoon. it was american in one way, for we had a most rational sleeping car; also the car was clean and fine and new--nothing about it to suggest the rolling stock of the continent of europe. but our baggage was weighed, and extra weight charged for. that was continental. continental and troublesome. any detail of railroading that is not troublesome cannot honorably be described as continental. the tickets were round-trip ones--to melbourne, and clear to adelaide in south australia, and then all the way back to sydney. twelve hundred more miles than we really expected to make; but then as the round trip wouldn't cost much more than the single trip, it seemed well enough to buy as many miles as one could afford, even if one was not likely to need them. a human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs. now comes a singular thing: the oddest thing, the strangest thing, the most baffling and unaccountable marvel that australasia can show. at the frontier between new south wales and victoria our multitude of passengers were routed out of their snug beds by lantern-light in the morning in the biting-cold of a high altitude to change cars on a road that has no break in it from sydney to melbourne! think of the paralysis of intellect that gave that idea birth; imagine the boulder it emerged from on some petrified legislator's shoulders. it is a narrow-gage road to the frontier, and a broader gauge thence to melbourne. the two governments were the builders of the road and are the owners of it. one or two reasons are given for this curious state of things. one is, that it represents the jealousy existing between the colonies--the two most important colonies of australasia. what the other one is, i have forgotten. but it is of no consequence. it could be but another effort to explain the inexplicable. all passengers fret at the double-gauge; all shippers of freight must of course fret at it; unnecessary expense, delay, and annoyance are imposed upon everybody concerned, and no one is benefitted. each australian colony fences itself off from its neighbor with a custom-house. personally, i have no objection, but it must be a good deal of inconvenience to the people. we have something resembling it here and there in america, but it goes by another name. the large empire of the pacific coast requires a world of iron machinery, and could manufacture it economically on the spot if the imposts on foreign iron were removed. but they are not. protection to pennsylvania and alabama forbids it. the result to the pacific coast is the same as if there were several rows of custom-fences between the coast and the east. iron carted across the american continent at luxurious railway rates would be valuable enough to be coined when it arrived. we changed cars. this was at albury. and it was there, i think, that the growing day and the early sun exposed the distant range called the blue mountains. accurately named. "my word!" as the australians say, but it was a stunning color, that blue. deep, strong, rich, exquisite; towering and majestic masses of blue--a softly luminous blue, a smouldering blue, as if vaguely lit by fires within. it extinguished the blue of the sky--made it pallid and unwholesome, whitey and washed-out. a wonderful color--just divine. a resident told me that those were not mountains; he said they were rabbit-piles. and explained that long exposure and the over-ripe condition of the rabbits was what made them look so blue. this man may have been right, but much reading of books of travel has made me distrustful of gratis information furnished by unofficial residents of a country. the facts which such people give to travelers are usually erroneous, and often intemperately so. the rabbit-plague has indeed been very bad in australia, and it could account for one mountain, but not for a mountain range, it seems to me. it is too large an order. we breakfasted at the station. a good breakfast, except the coffee; and cheap. the government establishes the prices and placards them. the waiters were men, i think; but that is not usual in australasia. the usual thing is to have girls. no, not girls, young ladies--generally duchesses. dress? they would attract attention at any royal levee in europe. even empresses and queens do not dress as they do. not that they could not afford it, perhaps, but they would not know how. all the pleasant morning we slid smoothly along over the plains, through thin--not thick--forests of great melancholy gum trees, with trunks rugged with curled sheets of flaking bark--erysipelas convalescents, so to speak, shedding their dead skins. and all along were tiny cabins, built sometimes of wood, sometimes of gray-blue corrugated iron; and the doorsteps and fences were clogged with children--rugged little simply-clad chaps that looked as if they had been imported from the banks of the mississippi without breaking bulk. and there were little villages, with neat stations well placarded with showy advertisements--mainly of almost too self-righteous brands of "sheepdip." if that is the name--and i think it is. it is a stuff like tar, and is dabbed on to places where the shearer clips a piece out of the sheep. it bars out the flies, and has healing properties, and a nip to it which makes the sheep skip like the cattle on a thousand hills. it is not good to eat. that is, it is not good to eat except when mixed with railroad coffee. it improves railroad coffee. without it railroad coffee is too vague. but with it, it is quite assertive and enthusiastic. by itself, railroad coffee is too passive; but sheep-dip makes it wake up and get down to business. i wonder where they get railroad coffee? we saw birds, but not a kangaroo, not an emu, not an ornithorhynchus, not a lecturer, not a native. indeed, the land seemed quite destitute of game. but i have misused the word native. in australia it is applied to australian-born whites only. i should have said that we saw no aboriginals--no "blackfellows." and to this day i have never seen one. in the great museums you will find all the other curiosities, but in the curio of chiefest interest to the stranger all of them are lacking. we have at home an abundance of museums, and not an american indian in them. it is clearly an absurdity, but it never struck me before. chapter xv. truth is stranger than fiction--to some people, but i am measurably familiar with it. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. the air was balmy and delicious, the sunshine radiant; it was a charming excursion. in the course of it we came to a town whose odd name was famous all over the world a quarter of a century ago--wagga-wagga. this was because the tichborne claimant had kept a butcher-shop there. it was out of the midst of his humble collection of sausages and tripe that he soared up into the zenith of notoriety and hung there in the wastes of space a time, with the telescopes of all nations leveled at him in unappeasable curiosity--curiosity as to which of the two long-missing persons he was: arthur orton, the mislaid roustabout of wapping, or sir roger tichborne, the lost heir of a name and estates as old as english history. we all know now, but not a dozen people knew then; and the dozen kept the mystery to themselves and allowed the most intricate and fascinating and marvelous real-life romance that has ever been played upon the world's stage to unfold itself serenely, act by act, in a british court by the long and laborious processes of judicial development. when we recall the details of that great romance we marvel to see what daring chances truth may freely take in constructing a tale, as compared with the poor little conservative risks permitted to fiction. the fiction-artist could achieve no success with the materials of this splendid tichborne romance. he would have to drop out the chief characters; the public would say such people are impossible. he would have to drop out a number of the most picturesque incidents; the public would say such things could never happen. and yet the chief characters did exist, and the incidents did happen. it cost the tichborne estates $ , to unmask the claimant and drive him out; and even after the exposure multitudes of englishmen still believed in him. it cost the british government another $ , to convict him of perjury; and after the conviction the same old multitudes still believed in him; and among these believers were many educated and intelligent men; and some of them had personally known the real sir roger. the claimant was sentenced to years' imprisonment. when he got out of prison he went to new york and kept a whisky saloon in the bowery for a time, then disappeared from view. he always claimed to be sir roger tichborne until death called for him. this was but a few months ago--not very much short of a generation since he left wagga-wagga to go and possess himself of his estates. on his death-bed he yielded up his secret, and confessed in writing that he was only arthur orton of wapping, able seaman and butcher--that and nothing more. but it is scarcely to be doubted that there are people whom even his dying confession will not convince. the old habit of assimilating incredibilities must have made strong food a necessity in their case; a weaker article would probably disagree with them. i was in london when the claimant stood his trial for perjury. i attended one of his showy evenings in the sumptuous quarters provided for him from the purses of his adherents and well-wishers. he was in evening dress, and i thought him a rather fine and stately creature. there were about twenty-five gentlemen present; educated men, men moving in good society, none of them commonplace; some of them were men of distinction, none of them were obscurities. they were his cordial friends and admirers. it was "sir roger," always "sir roger," on all hands; no one withheld the title, all turned it from the tongue with unction, and as if it tasted good. for many years i had had a mystery in stock. melbourne, and only melbourne, could unriddle it for me. in i arrived in london with my wife and young child, and presently received a note from naples signed by a name not familiar to me. it was not bascom, and it was not henry; but i will call it henry bascom for convenience's sake. this note, of about six lines, was written on a strip of white paper whose end-edges were ragged. i came to be familiar with those strips in later years. their size and pattern were always the same. their contents were usually to the same effect: would i and mine come to the writer's country-place in england on such and such a date, by such and such a train, and stay twelve days and depart by such and such a train at the end of the specified time? a carriage would meet us at the station. these invitations were always for a long time ahead; if we were in europe, three months ahead; if we were in america, six to twelve months ahead. they always named the exact date and train for the beginning and also for the end of the visit. this first note invited us for a date three months in the future. it asked us to arrive by the . p.m. train from london, august th. the carriage would be waiting. the carriage would take us away seven days later-train specified. and there were these words: "speak to tom hughes." i showed the note to the author of "tom brown at rugby," and be said: "accept, and be thankful." he described mr. bascom as being a man of genius, a man of fine attainments, a choice man in every way, a rare and beautiful character. he said that bascom hall was a particularly fine example of the stately manorial mansion of elizabeth's days, and that it was a house worth going a long way to see--like knowle; that mr. b. was of a social disposition; liked the company of agreeable people, and always had samples of the sort coming and going. we paid the visit. we paid others, in later years--the last one in . soon after that mr. bascom started on a voyage around the world in a steam yacht--a long and leisurely trip, for he was making collections, in all lands, of birds, butterflies, and such things. the day that president garfield was shot by the assassin guiteau, we were at a little watering place on long island sound; and in the mail matter of that day came a letter with the melbourne post-mark on it. it was for my wife, but i recognized mr. bascom's handwriting on the envelope, and opened it. it was the usual note--as to paucity of lines--and was written on the customary strip of paper; but there was nothing usual about the contents. the note informed my wife that if it would be any assuagement of her grief to know that her husband's lecture-tour in australia was a satisfactory venture from the beginning to the end, he, the writer, could testify that such was the case; also, that her husband's untimely death had been mourned by all classes, as she would already know by the press telegrams, long before the reception of this note; that the funeral was attended by the officials of the colonial and city governments; and that while he, the writer, her friend and mine, had not reached melbourne in time to see the body, he had at least had the sad privilege of acting as one of the pall-bearers. signed, "henry bascom." my first thought was, why didn't he have the coffin opened? he would have seen that the corpse was an imposter, and he could have gone right ahead and dried up the most of those tears, and comforted those sorrowing governments, and sold the remains and sent me the money. i did nothing about the matter. i had set the law after living lecture doubles of mine a couple of times in america, and the law had not been able to catch them; others in my trade had tried to catch their impostor-doubles and had failed. then where was the use in harrying a ghost? none--and so i did not disturb it. i had a curiosity to know about that man's lecture-tour and last moments, but that could wait. when i should see mr. bascom he would tell me all about it. but he passed from life, and i never saw him again.. my curiosity faded away. however, when i found that i was going to australia it revived. and naturally: for if the people should say that i was a dull, poor thing compared to what i was before i died, it would have a bad effect on business. well, to my surprise the sydney journalists had never heard of that impostor! i pressed them, but they were firm--they had never heard of him, and didn't believe in him. i could not understand it; still, i thought it would all come right in melbourne. the government would remember; and the other mourners. at the supper of the institute of journalists i should find out all about the matter. but no--it turned out that they had never heard of it. so my mystery was a mystery still. it was a great disappointment. i believed it would never be cleared up--in this life--so i dropped it out of my mind. but at last! just when i was least expecting it---- however, this is not the place for the rest of it; i shall come to the matter again, in a far-distant chapter. chapter xvi. there is a moral sense, and there is an immoral sense. history shows us that the moral sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it, and that the immoral sense enables us to perceive immorality and how to enjoy it. -pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. melbourne spreads around over an immense area of ground. it is a stately city architecturally as well as in magnitude. it has an elaborate system of cable-car service; it has museums, and colleges, and schools, and public gardens, and electricity, and gas, and libraries, and theaters, and mining centers, and wool centers, and centers of the arts and sciences, and boards of trade, and ships, and railroads, and a harbor, and social clubs, and journalistic clubs, and racing clubs, and a squatter club sumptuously housed and appointed, and as many churches and banks as can make a living. in a word, it is equipped with everything that goes to make the modern great city. it is the largest city of australasia, and fills the post with honor and credit. it has one specialty; this must not be jumbled in with those other things. it is the mitred metropolitan of the horse-racing cult. its race-ground is the mecca of australasia. on the great annual day of sacrifice--the th of november, guy fawkes's day--business is suspended over a stretch of land and sea as wide as from new york to san francisco, and deeper than from the northern lakes to the gulf of mexico; and every man and woman, of high degree or low, who can afford the expense, put away their other duties and come. they begin to swarm in by ship and rail a fortnight before the day, and they swarm thicker and thicker day after day, until all the vehicles of transportation are taxed to their uttermost to meet the demands of the occasion, and all hotels and lodgings are bulging outward because of the pressure from within. they come a hundred thousand strong, as all the best authorities say, and they pack the spacious grounds and grandstands and make a spectacle such as is never to be seen in australasia elsewhere. it is the "melbourne cup" that brings this multitude together. their clothes have been ordered long ago, at unlimited cost, and without bounds as to beauty and magnificence, and have been kept in concealment until now, for unto this day are they consecrate. i am speaking of the ladies' clothes; but one might know that. and so the grand-stands make a brilliant and wonderful spectacle, a delirium of color, a vision of beauty. the champagne flows, everybody is vivacious, excited, happy; everybody bets, and gloves and fortunes change hands right along, all the time. day after day the races go on, and the fun and the excitement are kept at white heat; and when each day is done, the people dance all night so as to be fresh for the race in the morning. and at the end of the great week the swarms secure lodgings and transportation for next year, then flock away to their remote homes and count their gains and losses, and order next year's cup-clothes, and then lie down and sleep two weeks, and get up sorry to reflect that a whole year must be put in somehow or other before they can be wholly happy again. the melbourne cup is the australasian national day. it would be difficult to overstate its importance. it overshadows all other holidays and specialized days of whatever sort in that congeries of colonies. overshadows them? i might almost say it blots them out. each of them gets attention, but not everybody's; each of them evokes interest, but not everybody's; each of them rouses enthusiasm, but not everybody's; in each case a part of the attention, interest, and enthusiasm is a matter of habit and custom, and another part of it is official and perfunctory. cup day, and cup day only, commands an attention, an interest, and an enthusiasm which are universal--and spontaneous, not perfunctory. cup day is supreme it has no rival. i can call to mind no specialized annual day, in any country, which can be named by that large name--supreme. i can call to mind no specialized annual day, in any country, whose approach fires the whole land with a conflagration of conversation and preparation and anticipation and jubilation. no day save this one; but this one does it. in america we have no annual supreme day; no day whose approach makes the whole nation glad. we have the fourth of july, and christmas, and thanksgiving. neither of them can claim the primacy; neither of them can arouse an enthusiasm which comes near to being universal. eight grown americans out of ten dread the coming of the fourth, with its pandemonium and its perils, and they rejoice when it is gone--if still alive. the approach of christmas brings harassment and dread to many excellent people. they have to buy a cart-load of presents, and they never know what to buy to hit the various tastes; they put in three weeks of hard and anxious work, and when christmas morning comes they are so dissatisfied with the result, and so disappointed that they want to sit down and cry. then they give thanks that christmas comes but once a year. the observance of thanksgiving day--as a function--has become general of late years. the thankfulness is not so general. this is natural. two-thirds of the nation have always had hard luck and a hard time during the year, and this has a calming effect upon their enthusiasm. we have a supreme day--a sweeping and tremendous and tumultuous day, a day which commands an absolute universality of interest and excitement; but it is not annual. it comes but once in four years; therefore it cannot count as a rival of the melbourne cup. in great britain and ireland they have two great days--christmas and the queen's birthday. but they are equally popular; there is no supremacy. i think it must be conceded that the position of the australasian day is unique, solitary, unfellowed; and likely to hold that high place a long time. the next things which interest us when we travel are, first, the people; next, the novelties; and finally the history of the places and countries visited. novelties are rare in cities which represent the most advanced civilization of the modern day. when one is familiar with such cities in the other parts of the world he is in effect familiar with the cities of australasia. the outside aspects will furnish little that is new. there will be new names, but the things which they represent will sometimes be found to be less new than their names. there may be shades of difference, but these can easily be too fine for detection by the incompetent eye of the passing stranger. in the larrikin he will not be able to discover a new species, but only an old one met elsewhere, and variously called loafer, rough, tough, bummer, or blatherskite, according to his geographical distribution. the larrikin differs by a shade from those others, in that he is more sociable toward the stranger than they, more kindly disposed, more hospitable, more hearty, more friendly. at least it seemed so to me, and i had opportunity to observe. in sydney, at least. in melbourne i had to drive to and from the lecture-theater, but in sydney i was able to walk both ways, and did it. every night, on my way home at ten, or a quarter past, i found the larrikin grouped in considerable force at several of the street corners, and he always gave me this pleasant salutation: "hello, mark!" "here's to you, old chap! "say--mark!--is he dead?"--a reference to a passage in some book of mine, though i did not detect, at that time, that that was its source. and i didn't detect it afterward in melbourne, when i came on the stage for the first time, and the same question was dropped down upon me from the dizzy height of the gallery. it is always difficult to answer a sudden inquiry like that, when you have come unprepared and don't know what it means. i will remark here--if it is not an indecorum--that the welcome which an american lecturer gets from a british colonial audience is a thing which will move him to his deepest deeps, and veil his sight and break his voice. and from winnipeg to africa, experience will teach him nothing; he will never learn to expect it, it will catch him as a surprise each time. the war-cloud hanging black over england and america made no trouble for me. i was a prospective prisoner of war, but at dinners, suppers, on the platform, and elsewhere, there was never anything to remind me of it. this was hospitality of the right metal, and would have been prominently lacking in some countries, in the circumstances. and speaking of the war-flurry, it seemed to me to bring to light the unexpected, in a detail or two. it seemed to relegate the war-talk to the politicians on both sides of the water; whereas whenever a prospective war between two nations had been in the air theretofore, the public had done most of the talking and the bitterest. the attitude of the newspapers was new also. i speak of those of australasia and india, for i had access to those only. they treated the subject argumentatively and with dignity, not with spite and anger. that was a new spirit, too, and not learned of the french and german press, either before sedan or since. i heard many public speeches, and they reflected the moderation of the journals. the outlook is that the english-speaking race will dominate the earth a hundred years from now, if its sections do not get to fighting each other. it would be a pity to spoil that prospect by baffling and retarding wars when arbitration would settle their differences so much better and also so much more definitely. no, as i have suggested, novelties are rare in the great capitals of modern times. even the wool exchange in melbourne could not be told from the familiar stock exchange of other countries. wool brokers are just like stockbrokers; they all bounce from their seats and put up their hands and yell in unison--no stranger can tell what--and the president calmly says "sold to smith & co., threpence farthing--next!"--when probably nothing of the kind happened; for how should he know? in the museums you will find acres of the most strange and fascinating things; but all museums are fascinating, and they do so tire your eyes, and break your back, and burn out your vitalities with their consuming interest. you always say you will never go again, but you do go. the palaces of the rich, in melbourne, are much like the palaces of the rich in america, and the life in them is the same; but there the resemblance ends. the grounds surrounding the american palace are not often large, and not often beautiful, but in the melbourne case the grounds are often ducally spacious, and the climate and the gardeners together make them as beautiful as a dream. it is said that some of the country seats have grounds--domains--about them which rival in charm and magnitude those which surround the country mansion of an english lord; but i was not out in the country; i had my hands full in town. and what was the origin of this majestic city and its efflorescence of palatial town houses and country seats? its first brick was laid and its first house built by a passing convict. australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer, and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. it does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies. and all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. it is full of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened. chapter xvii. the english are mentioned in the bible: blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. when we consider the immensity of the british empire in territory, population, and trade, it requires a stern exercise of faith to believe in the figures which represent australasia's contribution to the empire's commercial grandeur. as compared with the landed estate of the british empire, the landed estate dominated by any other power except one --russia--is not very impressive for size. my authorities make the british empire not much short of a fourth larger than the russian empire. roughly proportioned, if you will allow your entire hand to represent the british empire, you may then cut off the fingers a trifle above the middle joint of the middle finger, and what is left of the hand will represent russia. the populations ruled by great britain and china are about the same-- , , each. no other power approaches these figures. even russia is left far behind. the population of australasia-- , , --sinks into nothingness, and is lost from sight in that british ocean of , , . yet the statistics indicate that it rises again and shows up very conspicuously when its share of the empire's commerce is the matter under consideration. the value of england's annual exports and imports is stated at three billions of dollars,--[new south wales blue book.]--and it is claimed that more than one-tenth of this great aggregate is represented by australasia's exports to england and imports from england. in addition to this, australasia does a trade with countries other than england, amounting to a hundred million dollars a year, and a domestic intercolonial trade amounting to a hundred and fifty millions. in round numbers the , , buy and sell about $ , , worth of goods a year. it is claimed that about half of this represents commodities of australasian production. the products exported annually by india are worth a trifle over $ , , . now, here are some faith-straining figures: indian production ( , , population), $ , , . australasian production ( , , population), $ , , . that is to say, the product of the individual indian, annually (for export some whither), is worth $ . ; that of the individual australasian (for export some whither), $ ! or, to put it in another way, the indian family of man and wife and three children sends away an annual result worth $ . , while the australasian family sends away $ worth. there are trustworthy statistics furnished by sir richard temple and others, which show that the individual indian's whole annual product, both for export and home use, is worth in gold only $ . ; or, $ . for the family-aggregate. ciphered out on a like ratio of multiplication, the australasian family's aggregate production would be nearly $ , . truly, nothing is so astonishing as figures, if they once get started. we left melbourne by rail for adelaide, the capital of the vast province of south australia--a seventeen-hour excursion. on the train we found several sydney friends; among them a judge who was going out on circuit, and was going to hold court at broken hill, where the celebrated silver mine is. it seemed a curious road to take to get to that region. broken hill is close to the western border of new south wales, and sydney is on the eastern border. a fairly straight line, miles long, drawn westward from sydney, would strike broken hill, just as a somewhat shorter one drawn west from boston would strike buffalo. the way the judge was traveling would carry him over , miles by rail, he said; southwest from sydney down to melbourne, then northward up to adelaide, then a cant back northeastward and over the border into new south wales once more--to broken hill. it was like going from boston southwest to richmond, virginia, then northwest up to erie, pennsylvania, then a cant back northeast and over the border--to buffalo, new york. but the explanation was simple. years ago the fabulously rich silver discovery at broken hill burst suddenly upon an unexpectant world. its stocks started at shillings, and went by leaps and bounds to the most fanciful figures. it was one of those cases where the cook puts a month's wages into shares, and comes next mouth and buys your house at your own price, and moves into it herself; where the coachman takes a few shares, and next month sets up a bank; and where the common sailor invests the price of a spree, and next month buys out the steamship company and goes into business on his own hook. in a word, it was one of those excitements which bring multitudes of people to a common center with a rush, and whose needs must be supplied, and at once. adelaide was close by, sydney was far away. adelaide threw a short railway across the border before sydney had time to arrange for a long one; it was not worth while for sydney to arrange at all. the whole vast trade-profit of broken hill fell into adelaide's hands, irrevocably. new south wales furnishes for broken hill and sends her judges , miles--mainly through alien countries--to administer it, but adelaide takes the dividends and makes no moan. we started at . in the afternoon, and moved across level until night. in the morning we had a stretch of "scrub" country--the kind of thing which is so useful to the australian novelist. in the scrub the hostile aboriginal lurks, and flits mysteriously about, slipping out from time to time to surprise and slaughter the settler; then slipping back again, and leaving no track that the white man can follow. in the scrub the novelist's heroine gets lost, search fails of result; she wanders here and there, and finally sinks down exhausted and unconscious, and the searchers pass within a yard or two of her, not suspecting that she is near, and by and by some rambler finds her bones and the pathetic diary which she had scribbled with her failing hand and left behind. nobody can find a lost heroine in the scrub but the aboriginal "tracker," and he will not lend himself to the scheme if it will interfere with the novelist's plot. the scrub stretches miles and miles in all directions, and looks like a level roof of bush-tops without a break or a crack in it --as seamless as a blanket, to all appearance. one might as well walk under water and hope to guess out a route and stick to it, i should think. yet it is claimed that the aboriginal "tracker" was able to hunt out people lost in the scrub. also in the "bush"; also in the desert; and even follow them over patches of bare rocks and over alluvial ground which had to all appearance been washed clear of footprints. from reading australian books and talking with the people, i became convinced that the aboriginal tracker's performances evince a craft, a penetration, a luminous sagacity, and a minuteness and accuracy of observation in the matter of detective-work not found in nearly so remarkable a degree in any other people, white or colored. in an official account of the blacks of australia published by the government of victoria, one reads that the aboriginal not only notices the faint marks left on the bark of a tree by the claws of a climbing opossum, but knows in some way or other whether the marks were made to-day or yesterday. and there is the case, on records where a., a settler, makes a bet with b., that b. may lose a cow as effectually as he can, and a. will produce an aboriginal who will find her. b. selects a cow and lets the tracker see the cow's footprint, then be put under guard. b. then drives the cow a few miles over a course which drifts in all directions, and frequently doubles back upon itself; and he selects difficult ground all the time, and once or twice even drives the cow through herds of other cows, and mingles her tracks in the wide confusion of theirs. he finally brings his cow home; the aboriginal is set at liberty, and at once moves around in a great circle, examining all cow-tracks until he finds the one he is after; then sets off and follows it throughout its erratic course, and ultimately tracks it to the stable where b. has hidden the cow. now wherein does one cow-track differ from another? there must be a difference, or the tracker could not have performed the feat; a difference minute, shadowy, and not detectible by you or me, or by the late sherlock holmes, and yet discernible by a member of a race charged by some people with occupying the bottom place in the gradations of human intelligence. chapter xviii. it is easier to stay out than get out. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. the train was now exploring a beautiful hill country, and went twisting in and out through lovely little green valleys. there were several varieties of gum trees; among them many giants. some of them were bodied and barked like the sycamore; some were of fantastic aspect, and reminded one of the quaint apple trees in japanese pictures. and there was one peculiarly beautiful tree whose name and breed i did not know. the foliage seemed to consist of big bunches of pine-spines, the lower half of each bunch a rich brown or old-gold color, the upper half a most vivid and strenuous and shouting green. the effect was altogether bewitching. the tree was apparently rare. i should say that the first and last samples of it seen by us were not more than half an hour apart. there was another tree of striking aspect, a kind of pine, we were told. its foliage was as fine as hair, apparently, and its mass sphered itself above the naked straight stem like an explosion of misty smoke. it was not a sociable sort; it did not gather in groups or couples, but each individual stood far away from its nearest neighbor. it scattered itself in this spacious and exclusive fashion about the slopes of swelling grassy great knolls, and stood in the full flood of the wonderful sunshine; and as far as you could see the tree itself you could also see the ink-black blot of its shadow on the shining green carpet at its feet. on some part of this railway journey we saw gorse and broom--importations from england--and a gentleman who came into our compartment on a visit tried to tell me which--was which; but as he didn't know, he had difficulty. he said he was ashamed of his ignorance, but that he had never been confronted with the question before during the fifty years and more that he had spent in australia, and so he had never happened to get interested in the matter. but there was no need to be ashamed. the most of us have his defect. we take a natural interest in novelties, but it is against nature to take an interest in familiar things. the gorse and the broom were a fine accent in the landscape. here and there they burst out in sudden conflagrations of vivid yellow against a background of sober or sombre color, with a so startling effect as to make a body catch his breath with the happy surprise of it. and then there was the wattle, a native bush or tree, an inspiring cloud of sumptuous yellow bloom. it is a favorite with the australians, and has a fine fragrance, a quality usually wanting in australian blossoms. the gentleman who enriched me with the poverty of his formation about the gorse and the broom told me that he came out from england a youth of twenty and entered the province of south australia with thirty-six shillings in his pocket--an adventurer without trade, profession, or friends, but with a clearly-defined purpose in his head: he would stay until he was worth l , then go back home. he would allow himself five years for the accumulation of this fortune. "that was more than fifty years ago," said he. "and here i am, yet." as he went out at the door he met a friend, and turned and introduced him to me, and the friend and i had a talk and a smoke. i spoke of the previous conversation and said there something very pathetic about this half century of exile, and that i wished the l scheme had succeeded. "with him? oh, it did. it's not so sad a case. he is modest, and he left out some of the particulars. the lad reached south australia just in time to help discover the burra-burra copper mines. they turned out l , in the first three years. up to now they have yielded l , , . he has had his share. before that boy had been in the country two years he could have gone home and bought a village; he could go now and buy a city, i think. no, there is nothing very pathetic about his case. he and his copper arrived at just a handy time to save south australia. it had got mashed pretty flat under the collapse of a land boom a while before." there it is again; picturesque history --australia's specialty. in south australia hadn't a white man in it. in the british parliament erected it--still a solitude--into a province, and gave it a governor and other governmental machinery. speculators took hold, now, and inaugurated a vast land scheme, and invited immigration, encouraging it with lurid promises of sudden wealth. it was well worked in london; and bishops, statesmen, and all ports of people made a rush for the land company's shares. immigrants soon began to pour into the region of adelaide and select town lots and farms in the sand and the mangrove swamps by the sea. the crowds continued to come, prices of land rose high, then higher and still higher, everybody was prosperous and happy, the boom swelled into gigantic proportions. a village of sheet iron huts and clapboard sheds sprang up in the sand, and in these wigwams fashion made display; richly-dressed ladies played on costly pianos, london swells in evening dress and patent-leather boots were abundant, and this fine society drank champagne, and in other ways conducted itself in this capital of humble sheds as it had been accustomed to do in the aristocratic quarters of the metropolis of the world. the provincial government put up expensive buildings for its own use, and a palace with gardens for the use of its governor. the governor had a guard, and maintained a court. roads, wharves, and hospitals were built. all this on credit, on paper, on wind, on inflated and fictitious values--on the boom's moonshine, in fact. this went on handsomely during four or five years. then of a sudden came a smash. bills for a huge amount drawn the governor upon the treasury were dishonored, the land company's credit went up in smoke, a panic followed, values fell with a rush, the frightened immigrants seized their grips and fled to other lands, leaving behind them a good imitation of a solitude, where lately had been a buzzing and populous hive of men. adelaide was indeed almost empty; its population had fallen to , . during two years or more the death-trance continued. prospect of revival there was none; hope of it ceased. then, as suddenly as the paralysis had come, came the resurrection from it. those astonishingly rich copper mines were discovered, and the corpse got up and danced. the wool production began to grow; grain-raising followed--followed so vigorously, too, that four or five years after the copper discovery, this little colony, which had had to import its breadstuffs formerly, and pay hard prices for them--once $ a barrel for flour--had become an exporter of grain. the prosperities continued. after many years providence, desiring to show especial regard for new south wales and exhibit loving interest in its welfare which should certify to all nations the recognition of that colony's conspicuous righteousness and distinguished well-deserving, conferred upon it that treasury of inconceivable riches, broken hill; and south australia went over the border and took it, giving thanks. among our passengers was an american with a unique vocation. unique is a strong word, but i use it justifiably if i did not misconceive what the american told me; for i understood him to say that in the world there was not another man engaged in the business which he was following. he was buying the kangaroo-skin crop; buying all of it, both the australian crop and the tasmanian; and buying it for an american house in new york. the prices were not high, as there was no competition, but the year's aggregate of skins would cost him l , . i had had the idea that the kangaroo was about extinct in tasmania and well thinned out on the continent. in america the skins are tanned and made into shoes. after the tanning, the leather takes a new name--which i have forgotten--i only remember that the new name does not indicate that the kangaroo furnishes the leather. there was a german competition for a while, some years ago, but that has ceased. the germans failed to arrive at the secret of tanning the skins successfully, and they withdrew from the business. now then, i suppose that i have seen a man whose occupation is really entitled to bear that high epithet--unique. and i suppose that there is not another occupation in the world that is restricted to the hands of a sole person. i can think of no instance of it. there is more than one pope, there is more than one emperor, there is even more than one living god, walking upon the earth and worshiped in all sincerity by large populations of men. i have seen and talked with two of these beings myself in india, and i have the autograph of one of them. it can come good, by and by, i reckon, if i attach it to a "permit." approaching adelaide we dismounted from the train, as the french say, and were driven in an open carriage over the hills and along their slopes to the city. it was an excursion of an hour or two, and the charm of it could not be overstated, i think. the road wound around gaps and gorges, and offered all varieties of scenery and prospect--mountains, crags, country homes, gardens, forests--color, color, color everywhere, and the air fine and fresh, the skies blue, and not a shred of cloud to mar the downpour of the brilliant sunshine. and finally the mountain gateway opened, and the immense plain lay spread out below and stretching away into dim distances on every hand, soft and delicate and dainty and beautiful. on its near edge reposed the city. we descended and entered. there was nothing to remind one of the humble capital, of buts and sheds of the long-vanished day of the land-boom. no, this was a modern city, with wide streets, compactly built; with fine homes everywhere, embowered in foliage and flowers, and with imposing masses of public buildings nobly grouped and architecturally beautiful. there was prosperity, in the air; for another boom was on. providence, desiring to show especial regard for the neighboring colony on the west called western australia--and exhibit a loving interest in its welfare which should certify to all nations the recognition of that colony's conspicuous righteousness and distinguished well-deserving, had recently conferred upon it that majestic treasury of golden riches, coolgardie; and now south australia had gone around the corner and taken it, giving thanks. everything comes to him who is patient and good, and waits. but south australia deserves much, for apparently she is a hospitable home for every alien who chooses to come; and for his religion, too. she has a population, as per the latest census, of only , -odd, and yet her varieties of religion indicate the presence within her borders of samples of people from pretty nearly every part of the globe you can think of. tabulated, these varieties of religion make a remarkable show. one would have to go far to find its match. i copy here this cosmopolitan curiosity, and it comes from the published census: church of england,........... , roman catholic,.............. , wesleyan,.................... , lutheran,.................... , presbyterian,................ , congregationalist,........... , bible christian,............. , primitive methodist,......... , baptist,..................... , christian brethren,.......... methodist new connexion,..... unitarian,................... church of christ,............ , society of friends,.......... salvation army,.............. , new jerusalem church,........ jews,........................ protestants (undefined),..... , mohammedans,................. confucians, etc.,............ , other religions,............. , object,...................... , not stated,.................. , total,....................... , the item in the above list "other religions" includes the following as returned: agnostics, atheists, believers in christ, buddhists, calvinists, christadelphians, christians, christ's chapel, christian israelites, christian socialists, church of god, cosmopolitans, deists, evangelists, exclusive brethren, free church, free methodists, freethinkers, followers of christ, gospel meetings, greek church, infidels, maronites, memnonists, moravians, mormons, naturalists, orthodox, others (indefinite), pagans, pantheists, plymouth brethren, rationalists, reformers, secularists, seventh-day adventists, shaker, shintoists, spiritualists, theosophists, town (city) mission, welsh church, huguenot, hussite, zoroastrians, zwinglian, about roads to the other world. you see how healthy the religious atmosphere is. anything can live in it. agnostics, atheists, freethinkers, infidels, mormons, pagans, indefinites they are all there. and all the big sects of the world can do more than merely live in it: they can spread, flourish, prosper. all except the spiritualists and the theosophists. that is the most curious feature of this curious table. what is the matter with the specter? why do they puff him away? he is a welcome toy everywhere else in the world. chapter xix. pity is for the living, envy is for the dead. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. the successor of the sheet-iron hamlet of the mangrove marshes has that other australian specialty, the botanical gardens. we cannot have these paradises. the best we could do would be to cover a vast acreage under glass and apply steam heat. but it would be inadequate, the lacks would still be so great: the confined sense, the sense of suffocation, the atmospheric dimness, the sweaty heat--these would all be there, in place of the australian openness to the sky, the sunshine and the breeze. whatever will grow under glass with us will flourish rampantly out of doors in australia.--[the greatest heat in victoria, that there is an authoritative record of, was at sandhurst, in january, . the thermometer then registered degrees in the shade. in january, , the heat at adelaide, south australia, was degrees in the sun.] when the white man came the continent was nearly as poor, in variety of vegetation, as the desert of sahara; now it has everything that grows on the earth. in fact, not australia only, but all australasia has levied tribute upon the flora of the rest of the world; and wherever one goes the results appear, in gardens private and public, in the woodsy walls of the highways, and in even the forests. if you see a curious or beautiful tree or bush or flower, and ask about it, the people, answering, usually name a foreign country as the place of its origin--india, africa, japan, china, england, america, java, sumatra, new guinea, polynesia, and so on. in the zoological gardens of adelaide i saw the only laughing jackass that ever showed any disposition to be courteous to me. this one opened his head wide and laughed like a demon; or like a maniac who was consumed with humorous scorn over a cheap and degraded pun. it was a very human laugh. if he had been out of sight i could have believed that the laughter came from a man. it is an odd-looking bird, with a head and beak that are much too large for its body. in time man will exterminate the rest of the wild creatures of australia, but this one will probably survive, for man is his friend and lets him alone. man always has a good reason for his charities towards wild things, human or animal when he has any. in this case the bird is spared because he kills snakes. if l. j. he will not kill all of them. in that garden i also saw the wild australian dog--the dingo. he was a beautiful creature--shapely, graceful, a little wolfish in some of his aspects, but with a most friendly eye and sociable disposition. the dingo is not an importation; he was present in great force when the whites first came to the continent. it may be that he is the oldest dog in the universe; his origin, his descent, the place where his ancestors first appeared, are as unknown and as untraceable as are the camel's. he is the most precious dog in the world, for he does not bark. but in an evil hour he got to raiding the sheep-runs to appease his hunger, and that sealed his doom. he is hunted, now, just as if he were a wolf. he has been sentenced to extermination, and the sentence will be carried out. this is all right, and not objectionable. the world was made for man--the white man. south australia is confusingly named. all of the colonies have a southern exposure except one--queensland. properly speaking, south australia is middle australia. it extends straight up through the center of the continent like the middle board in a center-table. it is , miles high, from south to north, and about a third as wide. a wee little spot down in its southeastern corner contains eight or nine-tenths of its population; the other one or two-tenths are elsewhere--as elsewhere as they could be in the united states with all the country between denver and chicago, and canada and the gulf of mexico to scatter over. there is plenty of room. a telegraph line stretches straight up north through that , miles of wilderness and desert from adelaide to port darwin on the edge of the upper ocean. south australia built the line; and did it in - when her population numbered only , . it was a great work; for there were no roads, no paths; , miles of the route had been traversed but once before by white men; provisions, wire, and poles had to be carried over immense stretches of desert; wells had to be dug along the route to supply the men and cattle with water. a cable had been previously laid from port darwin to java and thence to india, and there was telegraphic communication with england from india. and so, if adelaide could make connection with port darwin it meant connection with the whole world. the enterprise succeeded. one could watch the london markets daily, now; the profit to the wool-growers of australia was instant and enormous. a telegram from melbourne to san francisco covers approximately , miles--the equivalent of five-sixths of the way around the globe. it has to halt along the way a good many times and be repeated; still, but little time is lost. these halts, and the distances between them, are here tabulated.--[from "round the empire." (george r. parkin), all but the last two.] miles. melbourne-mount gambier,....... mount gambier-adelaide,........ adelaide-port augusta,......... port augusta-alice springs... , alice springs-port darwin,..... port darwin-banjoewangie,... , banjoewangie-batavia,.......... batavia-singapore,............. singapore-penang,.............. penang-madras,............... , madras-bombay,................. bombay-aden,................. , aden-suez,................... , suez-alexandria,............... alexandria-malta,.............. malta-gibraltar,............. , gibraltar-falmouth,.......... , falmouth-london,............... london-new york,............. , new york-san francisco,...... , i was in adelaide again, some months later, and saw the multitudes gather in the neighboring city of glenelg to commemorate the reading of the proclamation--in --which founded the province. if i have at any time called it a colony, i withdraw the discourtesy. it is not a colony, it is a province; and officially so. moreover, it is the only one so named in australasia. there was great enthusiasm; it was the province's national holiday, its fourth of july, so to speak. it is the pre-eminent holiday; and that is saying much, in a country where they seem to have a most un-english mania for holidays. mainly they are workingmen's holidays; for in south australia the workingman is sovereign; his vote is the desire of the politician--indeed, it is the very breath of the politician's being; the parliament exists to deliver the will of the workingman, and the government exists to execute it. the workingman is a great power everywhere in australia, but south australia is his paradise. he has had a hard time in this world, and has earned a paradise. i am glad he has found it. the holidays there are frequent enough to be bewildering to the stranger. i tried to get the hang of the system, but was not able to do it. you have seen that the province is tolerant, religious-wise. it is so politically, also. one of the speakers at the commemoration banquet--the minister of public works-was an american, born and reared in new england. there is nothing narrow about the province, politically, or in any other way that i know of. sixty-four religions and a yankee cabinet minister. no amount of horse-racing can damn this community. the mean temperature of the province is deg. the death-rate is in the , --about half what it is in the city of new york, i should think, and new york is a healthy city. thirteen is the death-rate for the average citizen of the province, but there seems to be no death-rate for the old people. there were people at the commemoration banquet who could remember cromwell. there were six of them. these old settlers had all been present at the original reading of the proclamation, in . they showed signs of the blightings and blastings of time, in their outward aspect, but they were young within; young and cheerful, and ready to talk; ready to talk, and talk all you wanted; in their turn, and out of it. they were down for six speeches, and they made . the governor and the cabinet and the mayor were down for speeches, and they made . they have splendid grit, the old settlers, splendid staying power. but they do not hear well, and when they see the mayor going through motions which they recognize as the introducing of a speaker, they think they are the one, and they all get up together, and begin to respond, in the most animated way; and the more the mayor gesticulates, and shouts "sit down! sit down!" the more they take it for applause, and the more excited and reminiscent and enthusiastic they get; and next, when they see the whole house laughing and crying, three of them think it is about the bitter old-time hardships they are describing, and the other three think the laughter is caused by the jokes they have been uncorking--jokes of the vintage of --and then the way they do go on! and finally when ushers come and plead, and beg, and gently and reverently crowd them down into their seats, they say, "oh, i'm not tired--i could bang along a week!" and they sit there looking simple and childlike, and gentle, and proud of their oratory, and wholly unconscious of what is going on at the other end of the room. and so one of the great dignitaries gets a chance, and begins his carefully prepared speech, impressively and with solemnity-- "when we, now great and prosperous and powerful, bow our heads in reverent wonder in the contemplation of those sublimities of energy, of wisdom, of forethought, of----" up come the immortal six again, in a body, with a joyous "hey, i've thought of another one!" and at it they go, with might and main, hearing not a whisper of the pandemonium that salutes them, but taking all the visible violences for applause, as before, and hammering joyously away till the imploring ushers pray them into their seats again. and a pity, too; for those lovely old boys did so enjoy living their heroic youth over, in these days of their honored antiquity; and certainly the things they had to tell were usually worth the telling and the hearing. it was a stirring spectacle; stirring in more ways than one, for it was amazingly funny, and at the same time deeply pathetic; for they had seen so much, these time-worn veterans, end had suffered so much; and had built so strongly and well, and laid the foundations of their commonwealth so deep, in liberty and tolerance; and had lived to see the structure rise to such state and dignity and hear themselves so praised for honorable work. one of these old gentlemen told me some things of interest afterward; things about the aboriginals, mainly. he thought them intelligent --remarkably so in some directions--and he said that along with their unpleasant qualities they had some exceedingly good ones; and he considered it a great pity that the race had died out. he instanced their invention of the boomerang and the "weet-weet" as evidences of their brightness; and as another evidence of it he said he had never seen a white man who had cleverness enough to learn to do the miracles with those two toys that the aboriginals achieved. he said that even the smartest whites had been obliged to confess that they could not learn the trick of the boomerang in perfection; that it had possibilities which they could not master. the white man could not control its motions, could not make it obey him; but the aboriginal could. he told me some wonderful things--some almost incredible things--which he had seen the blacks do with the boomerang and the weet-weet. they have been confirmed to me since by other early settlers and by trustworthy books. it is contended--and may be said to be conceded--that the boomerang was known to certain savage tribes in europe in roman times. in support of this, virgil and two other roman poets are quoted. it is also contended that it was known to the ancient egyptians. one of two things is then apparent, either some one with a boomerang arrived in australia in the days of antiquity before european knowledge of the thing had been lost, or the australian aboriginal reinvented it. it will take some time to find out which of these two propositions is the fact. but there is no hurry. life on the mississippi by mark twain part . chapter the metropolis of the south the approaches to new orleans were familiar; general aspects were unchanged. when one goes flying through london along a railway propped in the air on tall arches, he may inspect miles of upper bedrooms through the open windows, but the lower half of the houses is under his level and out of sight. similarly, in high-river stage, in the new orleans region, the water is up to the top of the enclosing levee-rim, the flat country behind it lies low--representing the bottom of a dish-- and as the boat swims along, high on the flood, one looks down upon the houses and into the upper windows. there is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction. the old brick salt-warehouses clustered at the upper end of the city looked as they had always looked; warehouses which had had a kind of aladdin's lamp experience, however, since i had seen them; for when the war broke out the proprietor went to bed one night leaving them packed with thousands of sacks of vulgar salt, worth a couple of dollars a sack, and got up in the morning and found his mountain of salt turned into a mountain of gold, so to speak, so suddenly and to so dizzy a height had the war news sent up the price of the article. the vast reach of plank wharves remained unchanged, and there were as many ships as ever: but the long array of steamboats had vanished; not altogether, of course, but not much of it was left. the city itself had not changed--to the eye. it had greatly increased in spread and population, but the look of the town was not altered. the dust, waste-paper-littered, was still deep in the streets; the deep, trough-like gutters alongside the curbstones were still half full of reposeful water with a dusty surface; the sidewalks were still--in the sugar and bacon region--encumbered by casks and barrels and hogsheads; the great blocks of austerely plain commercial houses were as dusty- looking as ever. canal street was finer, and more attractive and stirring than formerly, with its drifting crowds of people, its several processions of hurrying street-cars, and--toward evening--its broad second-story verandas crowded with gentlemen and ladies clothed according to the latest mode. not that there is any 'architecture' in canal street: to speak in broad, general terms, there is no architecture in new orleans, except in the cemeteries. it seems a strange thing to say of a wealthy, far- seeing, and energetic city of a quarter of a million inhabitants, but it is true. there is a huge granite u.s. custom-house--costly enough, genuine enough, but as a decoration it is inferior to a gasometer. it looks like a state prison. but it was built before the war. architecture in america may be said to have been born since the war. new orleans, i believe, has had the good luck--and in a sense the bad luck-- to have had no great fire in late years. it must be so. if the opposite had been the case, i think one would be able to tell the 'burnt district' by the radical improvement in its architecture over the old forms. one can do this in boston and chicago. the 'burnt district' of boston was commonplace before the fire; but now there is no commercial district in any city in the world that can surpass it--or perhaps even rival it--in beauty, elegance, and tastefulness. however, new orleans has begun--just this moment, as one may say. when completed, the new cotton exchange will be a stately and beautiful building; massive, substantial, full of architectural graces; no shams or false pretenses or uglinesses about it anywhere. to the city, it will be worth many times its cost, for it will breed its species. what has been lacking hitherto, was a model to build toward; something to educate eye and taste; a suggester, so to speak. the city is well outfitted with progressive men--thinking, sagacious, long-headed men. the contrast between the spirit of the city and the city's architecture is like the contrast between waking and sleep. apparently there is a 'boom' in everything but that one dead feature. the water in the gutters used to be stagnant and slimy, and a potent disease-breeder; but the gutters are flushed now, two or three times a day, by powerful machinery; in many of the gutters the water never stands still, but has a steady current. other sanitary improvements have been made; and with such effect that new orleans claims to be (during the long intervals between the occasional yellow-fever assaults) one of the healthiest cities in the union. there's plenty of ice now for everybody, manufactured in the town. it is a driving place commercially, and has a great river, ocean, and railway business. at the date of our visit, it was the best lighted city in the union, electrically speaking. the new orleans electric lights were more numerous than those of new york, and very much better. one had this modified noonday not only in canal and some neighboring chief streets, but all along a stretch of five miles of river frontage. there are good clubs in the city now--several of them but recently organized--and inviting modern-style pleasure resorts at west end and spanish fort. the telephone is everywhere. one of the most notable advances is in journalism. the newspapers, as i remember them, were not a striking feature. now they are. money is spent upon them with a free hand. they get the news, let it cost what it may. the editorial work is not hack- grinding, but literature. as an example of new orleans journalistic achievement, it may be mentioned that the 'times-democrat' of august , , contained a report of the year's business of the towns of the mississippi valley, from new orleans all the way to st. paul--two thousand miles. that issue of the paper consisted of forty pages; seven columns to the page; two hundred and eighty columns in all; fifteen hundred words to the column; an aggregate of four hundred and twenty thousand words. that is to say, not much short of three times as many words as there are in this book. one may with sorrow contrast this with the architecture of new orleans. i have been speaking of public architecture only. the domestic article in new orleans is reproachless, notwithstanding it remains as it always was. all the dwellings are of wood--in the american part of the town, i mean--and all have a comfortable look. those in the wealthy quarter are spacious; painted snow-white usually, and generally have wide verandas, or double-verandas, supported by ornamental columns. these mansions stand in the center of large grounds, and rise, garlanded with roses, out of the midst of swelling masses of shining green foliage and many- colored blossoms. no houses could well be in better harmony with their surroundings, or more pleasing to the eye, or more home-like and comfortable-looking. one even becomes reconciled to the cistern presently; this is a mighty cask, painted green, and sometimes a couple of stories high, which is propped against the house-corner on stilts. there is a mansion-and- brewery suggestion about the combination which seems very incongruous at first. but the people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water. neither can they conveniently have cellars, or graves,{footnote [the israelites are buried in graves--by permission, i take it, not requirement; but none else, except the destitute, who are buried at public expense. the graves are but three or four feet deep.]} the town being built upon 'made' ground; so they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of the others. chapter hygiene and sentiment they bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. these vaults have a resemblance to houses--sometimes to temples; are built of marble, generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely; they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when one moves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees their white roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand, the phrase 'city of the dead' has all at once a meaning to him. many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. when one goes from the levee or the business streets near it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it; and besides, their quarter would be the wonder and admiration of the business world. fresh flowers, in vases of water, are to be seen at the portals of many of the vaults: placed there by the pious hands of bereaved parents and children, husbands and wives, and renewed daily. a milder form of sorrow finds its inexpensive and lasting remembrancer in the coarse and ugly but indestructible 'immortelle'--which is a wreath or cross or some such emblem, made of rosettes of black linen, with sometimes a yellow rosette at the conjunction of the cross's bars--kind of sorrowful breast-pin, so to say. the immortelle requires no attention: you just hang it up, and there you are; just leave it alone, it will take care of your grief for you, and keep it in mind better than you can; stands weather first-rate, and lasts like boiler-iron. on sunny days, pretty little chameleons--gracefullest of legged reptiles--creep along the marble fronts of the vaults, and catch flies. their changes of color--as to variety--are not up to the creature's reputation. they change color when a person comes along and hangs up an immortelle; but that is nothing: any right-feeling reptile would do that. i will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. i have been trying all i could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but i cannot accomplish it. i think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it. it is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible. graveyards may have been justifiable in the bygone ages, when nobody knew that for every dead body put into the ground, to glut the earth and the plant-roots, and the air with disease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must die before their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now, when even the children know that a dead saint enters upon a century-long career of assassination the moment the earth closes over his corpse. it is a grim sort of a thought. the relics of st. anne, up in canada, have now, after nineteen hundred years, gone to curing the sick by the dozen. but it is merest matter-of-course that these same relics, within a generation after st. anne's death and burial, made several thousand people sick. therefore these miracle-performances are simply compensation, nothing more. st. anne is somewhat slow pay, for a saint, it is true; but better a debt paid after nineteen hundred years, and outlawed by the statute of limitations, than not paid at all; and most of the knights of the halo do not pay at all. where you find one that pays--like st. anne--you find a hundred and fifty that take the benefit of the statute. and none of them pay any more than the principal of what they owe--they pay none of the interest either simple or compound. a saint can never quite return the principal, however; for his dead body kills people, whereas his relics heal only--they never restore the dead to life. that part of the account is always left unsettled. 'dr. f. julius le moyne, after fifty years of medical practice, wrote: "the inhumation of human bodies, dead from infectious diseases, results in constantly loading the atmosphere, and polluting the waters, with not only the germs that rise from simply putrefaction, but also with the specific germs of the diseases from which death resulted." 'the gases (from buried corpses) will rise to the surface through eight or ten feet of gravel, just as coal-gas will do, and there is practically no limit to their power of escape. 'during the epidemic in new orleans in , dr. e. h. barton reported that in the fourth district the mortality was four hundred and fifty-two per thousand--more than double that of any other. in this district were three large cemeteries, in which during the previous year more than three thousand bodies had been buried. in other districts the proximity of cemeteries seemed to aggravate the disease. 'in professor bianchi demonstrated how the fearful reappearance of the plague at modena was caused by excavations in ground where, three hundred years previously, the victims of the pestilence had been buried. mr. cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics, remarks that the opening of the plague burial-grounds at eyam resulted in an immediate outbreak of disease.'--north american review, no. , vol. . in an address before the chicago medical society, in advocacy of cremation, dr. charles w. purdy made some striking comparisons to show what a burden is laid upon society by the burial of the dead:-- 'one and one-fourth times more money is expended annually in funerals in the united states than the government expends for public-school purposes. funerals cost this country in enough money to pay the liabilities of all the commercial failures in the united states during the same year, and give each bankrupt a capital of $ , with which to resume business. funerals cost annually more money than the value of the combined gold and silver yield of the united states in the year ! these figures do not include the sums invested in burial-grounds and expended in tombs and monuments, nor the loss from depreciation of property in the vicinity of cemeteries.' for the rich, cremation would answer as well as burial; for the ceremonies connected with it could be made as costly and ostentatious as a hindu suttee; while for the poor, cremation would be better than burial, because so cheap {footnote [four or five dollars is the minimum cost.]}--so cheap until the poor got to imitating the rich, which they would do by-and-bye. the adoption of cremation would relieve us of a muck of threadbare burial-witticisms; but, on the other hand, it would resurrect a lot of mildewed old cremation-jokes that have had a rest for two thousand years. i have a colored acquaintance who earns his living by odd jobs and heavy manual labor. he never earns above four hundred dollars in a year, and as he has a wife and several young children, the closest scrimping is necessary to get him through to the end of the twelve months debtless. to such a man a funeral is a colossal financial disaster. while i was writing one of the preceding chapters, this man lost a little child. he walked the town over with a friend, trying to find a coffin that was within his means. he bought the very cheapest one he could find, plain wood, stained. it cost him twenty-six dollars. it would have cost less than four, probably, if it had been built to put something useful into. he and his family will feel that outlay a good many months. chapter the art of inhumation about the same time, i encountered a man in the street, whom i had not seen for six or seven years; and something like this talk followed. i said-- 'but you used to look sad and oldish; you don't now. where did you get all this youth and bubbling cheerfulness? give me the address.' he chuckled blithely, took off his shining tile, pointed to a notched pink circlet of paper pasted into its crown, with something lettered on it, and went on chuckling while i read, 'j. b----, undertaker.' then he clapped his hat on, gave it an irreverent tilt to leeward, and cried out-- 'that's what's the matter! it used to be rough times with me when you knew me--insurance-agency business, you know; mighty irregular. big fire, all right--brisk trade for ten days while people scared; after that, dull policy-business till next fire. town like this don't have fires often enough--a fellow strikes so many dull weeks in a row that he gets discouraged. but you bet you, this is the business! people don't wait for examples to die. no, sir, they drop off right along--there ain't any dull spots in the undertaker line. i just started in with two or three little old coffins and a hired hearse, and now look at the thing! i've worked up a business here that would satisfy any man, don't care who he is. five years ago, lodged in an attic; live in a swell house now, with a mansard roof, and all the modern inconveniences.' 'does a coffin pay so well. is there much profit on a coffin?' 'go-way! how you talk!' then, with a confidential wink, a dropping of the voice, and an impressive laying of his hand on my arm; 'look here; there's one thing in this world which isn't ever cheap. that's a coffin. there's one thing in this world which a person don't ever try to jew you down on. that's a coffin. there's one thing in this world which a person don't say--"i'll look around a little, and if i find i can't do better i'll come back and take it." that's a coffin. there's one thing in this world which a person won't take in pine if he can go walnut; and won't take in walnut if he can go mahogany; and won't take in mahogany if he can go an iron casket with silver door-plate and bronze handles. that's a coffin. and there's one thing in this world which you don't have to worry around after a person to get him to pay for. and that's a coffin. undertaking?--why it's the dead-surest business in christendom, and the nobbiest. 'why, just look at it. a rich man won't have anything but your very best; and you can just pile it on, too--pile it on and sock it to him-- he won't ever holler. and you take in a poor man, and if you work him right he'll bust himself on a single lay-out. or especially a woman. f'r instance: mrs. o'flaherty comes in--widow--wiping her eyes and kind of moaning. unhandkerchiefs one eye, bats it around tearfully over the stock; says-- '"and fhat might ye ask for that wan?" '"thirty-nine dollars, madam," says i. '"it 's a foine big price, sure, but pat shall be buried like a gintleman, as he was, if i have to work me fingers off for it. i'll have that wan, sor." '"yes, madam," says i, "and it is a very good one, too; not costly, to be sure, but in this life we must cut our garment to our clothes, as the saying is." and as she starts out, i heave in, kind of casually, "this one with the white satin lining is a beauty, but i am afraid--well, sixty-five dollars is a rather--rather--but no matter, i felt obliged to say to mrs. o'shaughnessy--" '"d'ye mane to soy that bridget o'shaughnessy bought the mate to that joo-ul box to ship that dhrunken divil to purgatory in?" '"yes, madam." '"then pat shall go to heaven in the twin to it, if it takes the last rap the o'flaherties can raise; and moind you, stick on some extras, too, and i'll give ye another dollar." 'and as i lay-in with the livery stables, of course i don't forget to mention that mrs. o'shaughnessy hired fifty-four dollars' worth of hacks and flung as much style into dennis's funeral as if he had been a duke or an assassin. and of course she sails in and goes the o'shaughnessy about four hacks and an omnibus better. that used to be, but that's all played now; that is, in this particular town. the irish got to piling up hacks so, on their funerals, that a funeral left them ragged and hungry for two years afterward; so the priest pitched in and broke it all up. he don't allow them to have but two hacks now, and sometimes only one.' 'well,' said i, 'if you are so light-hearted and jolly in ordinary times, what must you be in an epidemic?' he shook his head. 'no, you're off, there. we don't like to see an epidemic. an epidemic don't pay. well, of course i don't mean that, exactly; but it don't pay in proportion to the regular thing. don't it occur to you, why?' no. 'think.' 'i can't imagine. what is it?' 'it's just two things.' 'well, what are they?' 'one's embamming.' 'and what's the other?' 'ice.' 'how is that?' 'well, in ordinary times, a person dies, and we lay him up in ice; one day two days, maybe three, to wait for friends to come. takes a lot of it--melts fast. we charge jewelry rates for that ice, and war-prices for attendance. well, don't you know, when there's an epidemic, they rush 'em to the cemetery the minute the breath's out. no market for ice in an epidemic. same with embamming. you take a family that's able to embam, and you've got a soft thing. you can mention sixteen different ways to do it--though there ain't only one or two ways, when you come down to the bottom facts of it--and they'll take the highest-priced way, every time. it's human nature--human nature in grief. it don't reason, you see. time being, it don't care a dam. all it wants is physical immortality for deceased, and they're willing to pay for it. all you've got to do is to just be ca'm and stack it up--they'll stand the racket. why, man, you can take a defunct that you couldn't give away; and get your embamming traps around you and go to work; and in a couple of hours he is worth a cool six hundred--that's what he's worth. there ain't anything equal to it but trading rats for di'monds in time of famine. well, don't you see, when there's an epidemic, people don't wait to embam. no, indeed they don't; and it hurts the business like hell-th, as we say--hurts it like hell-th, health, see?--our little joke in the trade. well, i must be going. give me a call whenever you need any--i mean, when you're going by, sometime.' in his joyful high spirits, he did the exaggerating himself, if any has been done. i have not enlarged on him. with the above brief references to inhumation, let us leave the subject. as for me, i hope to be cremated. i made that remark to my pastor once, who said, with what he seemed to think was an impressive manner-- 'i wouldn't worry about that, if i had your chances.' much he knew about it--the family all so opposed to it. chapter city sights the old french part of new orleans--anciently the spanish part--bears no resemblance to the american end of the city: the american end which lies beyond the intervening brick business-center. the houses are massed in blocks; are austerely plain and dignified; uniform of pattern, with here and there a departure from it with pleasant effect; all are plastered on the outside, and nearly all have long, iron-railed verandas running along the several stories. their chief beauty is the deep, warm, varicolored stain with which time and the weather have enriched the plaster. it harmonizes with all the surroundings, and has as natural a look of belonging there as has the flush upon sunset clouds. this charming decoration cannot be successfully imitated; neither is it to be found elsewhere in america. the iron railings are a specialty, also. the pattern is often exceedingly light and dainty, and airy and graceful--with a large cipher or monogram in the center, a delicate cobweb of baffling, intricate forms, wrought in steel. the ancient railings are hand-made, and are now comparatively rare and proportionately valuable. they are become bric-a-brac. the party had the privilege of idling through this ancient quarter of new orleans with the south's finest literary genius, the author of 'the grandissimes.' in him the south has found a masterly delineator of its interior life and its history. in truth, i find by experience, that the untrained eye and vacant mind can inspect it, and learn of it, and judge of it, more clearly and profitably in his books than by personal contact with it. with mr. cable along to see for you, and describe and explain and illuminate, a jog through that old quarter is a vivid pleasure. and you have a vivid sense as of unseen or dimly seen things--vivid, and yet fitful and darkling; you glimpse salient features, but lose the fine shades or catch them imperfectly through the vision of the imagination: a case, as it were, of ignorant near-sighted stranger traversing the rim of wide vague horizons of alps with an inspired and enlightened long- sighted native. we visited the old st. louis hotel, now occupied by municipal offices. there is nothing strikingly remarkable about it; but one can say of it as of the academy of music in new york, that if a broom or a shovel has ever been used in it there is no circumstantial evidence to back up the fact. it is curious that cabbages and hay and things do not grow in the academy of music; but no doubt it is on account of the interruption of the light by the benches, and the impossibility of hoeing the crop except in the aisles. the fact that the ushers grow their buttonhole- bouquets on the premises shows what might be done if they had the right kind of an agricultural head to the establishment. we visited also the venerable cathedral, and the pretty square in front of it; the one dim with religious light, the other brilliant with the worldly sort, and lovely with orange-trees and blossomy shrubs; then we drove in the hot sun through the wilderness of houses and out on to the wide dead level beyond, where the villas are, and the water wheels to drain the town, and the commons populous with cows and children; passing by an old cemetery where we were told lie the ashes of an early pirate; but we took him on trust, and did not visit him. he was a pirate with a tremendous and sanguinary history; and as long as he preserved unspotted, in retirement, the dignity of his name and the grandeur of his ancient calling, homage and reverence were his from high and low; but when at last he descended into politics and became a paltry alderman, the public 'shook' him, and turned aside and wept. when he died, they set up a monument over him; and little by little he has come into respect again; but it is respect for the pirate, not the alderman. to-day the loyal and generous remember only what he was, and charitably forget what he became. thence, we drove a few miles across a swamp, along a raised shell road, with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other; and here and there, in the distance, a ragged and angular-limbed and moss-bearded cypress, top standing out, clear cut against the sky, and as quaint of form as the apple-trees in japanese pictures--such was our course and the surroundings of it. there was an occasional alligator swimming comfortably along in the canal, and an occasional picturesque colored person on the bank, flinging his statue-rigid reflection upon the still water and watching for a bite. and by-and-bye we reached the west end, a collection of hotels of the usual light summer-resort pattern, with broad verandas all around, and the waves of the wide and blue lake pontchartrain lapping the thresholds. we had dinner on a ground-veranda over the water--the chief dish the renowned fish called the pompano, delicious as the less criminal forms of sin. thousands of people come by rail and carriage to west end and to spanish fort every evening, and dine, listen to the bands, take strolls in the open air under the electric lights, go sailing on the lake, and entertain themselves in various and sundry other ways. we had opportunities on other days and in other places to test the pompano. notably, at an editorial dinner at one of the clubs in the city. he was in his last possible perfection there, and justified his fame. in his suite was a tall pyramid of scarlet cray-fish--large ones; as large as one's thumb--delicate, palatable, appetizing. also deviled whitebait; also shrimps of choice quality; and a platter of small soft- shell crabs of a most superior breed. the other dishes were what one might get at delmonico's, or buckingham palace; those i have spoken of can be had in similar perfection in new orleans only, i suppose. in the west and south they have a new institution--the broom brigade. it is composed of young ladies who dress in a uniform costume, and go through the infantry drill, with broom in place of musket. it is a very pretty sight, on private view. when they perform on the stage of a theater, in the blaze of colored fires, it must be a fine and fascinating spectacle. i saw them go through their complex manual with grace, spirit, and admirable precision. i saw them do everything which a human being can possibly do with a broom, except sweep. i did not see them sweep. but i know they could learn. what they have already learned proves that. and if they ever should learn, and should go on the war- path down tchoupitoulas or some of those other streets around there, those thoroughfares would bear a greatly improved aspect in a very few minutes. but the girls themselves wouldn't; so nothing would be really gained, after all. the drill was in the washington artillery building. in this building we saw many interesting relics of the war. also a fine oil-painting representing stonewall jackson's last interview with general lee. both men are on horseback. jackson has just ridden up, and is accosting lee. the picture is very valuable, on account of the portraits, which are authentic. but, like many another historical picture, it means nothing without its label. and one label will fit it as well as another-- first interview between lee and jackson. last interview between lee and jackson. jackson introducing himself to lee. jackson accepting lee's invitation to dinner. jackson declining lee's invitation to dinner--with thanks. jackson apologizing for a heavy defeat. jackson reporting a great victory. jackson asking lee for a match. it tells one story, and a sufficient one; for it says quite plainly and satisfactorily, 'here are lee and jackson together.' the artist would have made it tell that this is lee and jackson's last interview if he could have done it. but he couldn't, for there wasn't any way to do it. a good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture. in rome, people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in front of the celebrated 'beatrice cenci the day before her execution.' it shows what a label can do. if they did not know the picture, they would inspect it unmoved, and say, 'young girl with hay fever; young girl with her head in a bag.' i found the half-forgotten southern intonations and elisions as pleasing to my ear as they had formerly been. a southerner talks music. at least it is music to me, but then i was born in the south. the educated southerner has no use for an r, except at the beginning of a word. he says 'honah,' and 'dinnah,' and 'gove'nuh,' and 'befo' the waw,' and so on. the words may lack charm to the eye, in print, but they have it to the ear. when did the r disappear from southern speech, and how did it come to disappear? the custom of dropping it was not borrowed from the north, nor inherited from england. many southerners--most southerners-- put a y into occasional words that begin with the k sound. for instance, they say mr. k'yahtah (carter) and speak of playing k'yahds or of riding in the k'yahs. and they have the pleasant custom--long ago fallen into decay in the north--of frequently employing the respectful 'sir.' instead of the curt yes, and the abrupt no, they say 'yes, suh', 'no, suh.' but there are some infelicities. such as 'like' for 'as,' and the addition of an 'at' where it isn't needed. i heard an educated gentleman say, 'like the flag-officer did.' his cook or his butler would have said, 'like the flag-officer done.' you hear gentlemen say, 'where have you been at?' and here is the aggravated form--heard a ragged street arab say it to a comrade: 'i was a-ask'n' tom whah you was a-sett'n' at.' the very elect carelessly say 'will' when they mean 'shall'; and many of them say, 'i didn't go to do it,' meaning 'i didn't mean to do it.' the northern word 'guess'--imported from england, where it used to be common, and now regarded by satirical englishmen as a yankee original--is but little used among southerners. they say 'reckon.' they haven't any 'doesn't' in their language; they say 'don't' instead. the unpolished often use 'went' for 'gone.' it is nearly as bad as the northern 'hadn't ought.' this reminds me that a remark of a very peculiar nature was made here in my neighborhood (in the north) a few days ago: 'he hadn't ought to have went.' how is that? isn't that a good deal of a triumph? one knows the orders combined in this half- breed's architecture without inquiring: one parent northern, the other southern. to-day i heard a schoolmistress ask, 'where is john gone?' this form is so common--so nearly universal, in fact--that if she had used 'whither' instead of 'where,' i think it would have sounded like an affectation. we picked up one excellent word--a word worth traveling to new orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word--'lagniappe.' they pronounce it lanny-yap. it is spanish--so they said. we discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. it has a restricted meaning, but i think the people spread it out a little when they choose. it is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a 'baker's dozen.' it is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. the custom originated in the spanish quarter of the city. when a child or a servant buys something in a shop--or even the mayor or the governor, for aught i know--he finishes the operation by saying-- 'give me something for lagniappe.' the shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of licorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor--i don't know what he gives the governor; support, likely. when you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and then in new orleans--and you say, 'what, again?--no, i've had enough;' the other party says, 'but just this one time more--this is for lagniappe.' when the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too high, and sees by the young lady's countenance that the edifice would have been better with the top compliment left off, he puts his 'i beg pardon--no harm intended,' into the briefer form of 'oh, that's for lagniappe.' if the waiter in the restaurant stumbles and spills a gill of coffee down the back of your neck, he says 'for lagniappe, sah,' and gets you another cup without extra charge. chapter southern sports in the north one hears the war mentioned, in social conversation, once a month; sometimes as often as once a week; but as a distinct subject for talk, it has long ago been relieved of duty. there are sufficient reasons for this. given a dinner company of six gentlemen to-day, it can easily happen that four of them--and possibly five--were not in the field at all. so the chances are four to two, or five to one, that the war will at no time during the evening become the topic of conversation; and the chances are still greater that if it become the topic it will remain so but a little while. if you add six ladies to the company, you have added six people who saw so little of the dread realities of the war that they ran out of talk concerning them years ago, and now would soon weary of the war topic if you brought it up. the case is very different in the south. there, every man you meet was in the war; and every lady you meet saw the war. the war is the great chief topic of conversation. the interest in it is vivid and constant; the interest in other topics is fleeting. mention of the war will wake up a dull company and set their tongues going, when nearly any other topic would fail. in the south, the war is what a.d. is elsewhere: they date from it. all day long you hear things 'placed' as having happened since the waw; or du'in' the waw; or befo' the waw; or right aftah the waw; or 'bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo' the waw or aftah the waw. it shows how intimately every individual was visited, in his own person, by that tremendous episode. it gives the inexperienced stranger a better idea of what a vast and comprehensive calamity invasion is than he can ever get by reading books at the fireside. at a club one evening, a gentleman turned to me and said, in an aside-- 'you notice, of course, that we are nearly always talking about the war. it isn't because we haven't anything else to talk about, but because nothing else has so strong an interest for us. and there is another reason: in the war, each of us, in his own person, seems to have sampled all the different varieties of human experience; as a consequence, you can't mention an outside matter of any sort but it will certainly remind some listener of something that happened during the war--and out he comes with it. of course that brings the talk back to the war. you may try all you want to, to keep other subjects before the house, and we may all join in and help, but there can be but one result: the most random topic would load every man up with war reminiscences, and shut him up, too; and talk would be likely to stop presently, because you can't talk pale inconsequentialities when you've got a crimson fact or fancy in your head that you are burning to fetch out.' the poet was sitting some little distance away; and presently he began to speak--about the moon. the gentleman who had been talking to me remarked in an 'aside:' 'there, the moon is far enough from the seat of war, but you will see that it will suggest something to somebody about the war; in ten minutes from now the moon, as a topic, will be shelved.' the poet was saying he had noticed something which was a surprise to him; had had the impression that down here, toward the equator, the moonlight was much stronger and brighter than up north; had had the impression that when he visited new orleans, many years ago, the moon-- interruption from the other end of the room-- 'let me explain that. reminds me of an anecdote. everything is changed since the war, for better or for worse; but you'll find people down here born grumblers, who see no change except the change for the worse. there was an old negro woman of this sort. a young new-yorker said in her presence, "what a wonderful moon you have down here!" she sighed and said, "ah, bless yo' heart, honey, you ought to seen dat moon befo' de waw!"' the new topic was dead already. but the poet resurrected it, and gave it a new start. a brief dispute followed, as to whether the difference between northern and southern moonlight really existed or was only imagined. moonlight talk drifted easily into talk about artificial methods of dispelling darkness. then somebody remembered that when farragut advanced upon port hudson on a dark night--and did not wish to assist the aim of the confederate gunners--he carried no battle-lanterns, but painted the decks of his ships white, and thus created a dim but valuable light, which enabled his own men to grope their way around with considerable facility. at this point the war got the floor again--the ten minutes not quite up yet. i was not sorry, for war talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull. we went to a cockpit in new orleans on a saturday afternoon. i had never seen a cock-fight before. there were men and boys there of all ages and all colors, and of many languages and nationalities. but i noticed one quite conspicuous and surprising absence: the traditional brutal faces. there were no brutal faces. with no cock-fighting going on, you could have played the gathering on a stranger for a prayer-meeting; and after it began, for a revival--provided you blindfolded your stranger--for the shouting was something prodigious. a negro and a white man were in the ring; everybody else outside. the cocks were brought in in sacks; and when time was called, they were taken out by the two bottle-holders, stroked, caressed, poked toward each other, and finally liberated. the big black cock plunged instantly at the little gray one and struck him on the head with his spur. the gray responded with spirit. then the babel of many-tongued shoutings broke out, and ceased not thenceforth. when the cocks had been fighting some little time, i was expecting them momently to drop dead, for both were blind, red with blood, and so exhausted that they frequently fell down. yet they would not give up, neither would they die. the negro and the white man would pick them up every few seconds, wipe them off, blow cold water on them in a fine spray, and take their heads in their mouths and hold them there a moment--to warm back the perishing life perhaps; i do not know. then, being set down again, the dying creatures would totter gropingly about, with dragging wings, find each other, strike a guesswork blow or two, and fall exhausted once more. i did not see the end of the battle. i forced myself to endure it as long as i could, but it was too pitiful a sight; so i made frank confession to that effect, and we retired. we heard afterward that the black cock died in the ring, and fighting to the last. evidently there is abundant fascination about this 'sport' for such as have had a degree of familiarity with it. i never saw people enjoy anything more than this gathering enjoyed this fight. the case was the same with old gray-heads and with boys of ten. they lost themselves in frenzies of delight. the 'cocking-main' is an inhuman sort of entertainment, there is no question about that; still, it seems a much more respectable and far less cruel sport than fox-hunting--for the cocks like it; they experience, as well as confer enjoyment; which is not the fox's case. we assisted--in the french sense--at a mule race, one day. i believe i enjoyed this contest more than any other mule there. i enjoyed it more than i remember having enjoyed any other animal race i ever saw. the grand-stand was well filled with the beauty and the chivalry of new orleans. that phrase is not original with me. it is the southern reporter's. he has used it for two generations. he uses it twenty times a day, or twenty thousand times a day; or a million times a day-- according to the exigencies. he is obliged to use it a million times a day, if he have occasion to speak of respectable men and women that often; for he has no other phrase for such service except that single one. he never tires of it; it always has a fine sound to him. there is a kind of swell medieval bulliness and tinsel about it that pleases his gaudy barbaric soul. if he had been in palestine in the early times, we should have had no references to 'much people' out of him. no, he would have said 'the beauty and the chivalry of galilee' assembled to hear the sermon on the mount. it is likely that the men and women of the south are sick enough of that phrase by this time, and would like a change, but there is no immediate prospect of their getting it. the new orleans editor has a strong, compact, direct, unflowery style; wastes no words, and does not gush. not so with his average correspondent. in the appendix i have quoted a good letter, penned by a trained hand; but the average correspondent hurls a style which differs from that. for instance-- the 'times-democrat' sent a relief-steamer up one of the bayous, last april. this steamer landed at a village, up there somewhere, and the captain invited some of the ladies of the village to make a short trip with him. they accepted and came aboard, and the steamboat shoved out up the creek. that was all there was 'to it.' and that is all that the editor of the 'times-democrat' would have got out of it. there was nothing in the thing but statistics, and he would have got nothing else out of it. he would probably have even tabulated them, partly to secure perfect clearness of statement, and partly to save space. but his special correspondent knows other methods of handling statistics. he just throws off all restraint and wallows in them-- 'on saturday, early in the morning, the beauty of the place graced our cabin, and proud of her fair freight the gallant little boat glided up the bayou.' twenty-two words to say the ladies came aboard and the boat shoved out up the creek, is a clean waste of ten good words, and is also destructive of compactness of statement. the trouble with the southern reporter is--women. they unsettle him; they throw him off his balance. he is plain, and sensible, and satisfactory, until a woman heaves in sight. then he goes all to pieces; his mind totters, he becomes flowery and idiotic. from reading the above extract, you would imagine that this student of sir walter scott is an apprentice, and knows next to nothing about handling a pen. on the contrary, he furnishes plenty of proofs, in his long letter, that he knows well enough how to handle it when the women are not around to give him the artificial-flower complaint. for instance-- 'at o'clock ominous clouds began to gather in the south-east, and presently from the gulf there came a blow which increased in severity every moment. it was not safe to leave the landing then, and there was a delay. the oaks shook off long tresses of their mossy beards to the tugging of the wind, and the bayou in its ambition put on miniature waves in mocking of much larger bodies of water. a lull permitted a start, and homewards we steamed, an inky sky overhead and a heavy wind blowing. as darkness crept on, there were few on board who did not wish themselves nearer home.' there is nothing the matter with that. it is good description, compactly put. yet there was great temptation, there, to drop into lurid writing. but let us return to the mule. since i left him, i have rummaged around and found a full report of the race. in it i find confirmation of the theory which i broached just now--namely, that the trouble with the southern reporter is women: women, supplemented by walter scott and his knights and beauty and chivalry, and so on. this is an excellent report, as long as the women stay out of it. but when they intrude, we have this frantic result-- 'it will be probably a long time before the ladies' stand presents such a sea of foam-like loveliness as it did yesterday. the new orleans women are always charming, but never so much so as at this time of the year, when in their dainty spring costumes they bring with them a breath of balmy freshness and an odor of sanctity unspeakable. the stand was so crowded with them that, walking at their feet and seeing no possibility of approach, many a man appreciated as he never did before the peri's feeling at the gates of paradise, and wondered what was the priceless boon that would admit him to their sacred presence. sparkling on their white-robed breasts or shoulders were the colors of their favorite knights, and were it not for the fact that the doughty heroes appeared on unromantic mules, it would have been easy to imagine one of king arthur's gala-days.' there were thirteen mules in the first heat; all sorts of mules, they were; all sorts of complexions, gaits, dispositions, aspects. some were handsome creatures, some were not; some were sleek, some hadn't had their fur brushed lately; some were innocently gay and frisky; some were full of malice and all unrighteousness; guessing from looks, some of them thought the matter on hand was war, some thought it was a lark, the rest took it for a religious occasion. and each mule acted according to his convictions. the result was an absence of harmony well compensated by a conspicuous presence of variety--variety of a picturesque and entertaining sort. all the riders were young gentlemen in fashionable society. if the reader has been wondering why it is that the ladies of new orleans attend so humble an orgy as a mule-race, the thing is explained now. it is a fashion-freak; all connected with it are people of fashion. it is great fun, and cordially liked. the mule-race is one of the marked occasions of the year. it has brought some pretty fast mules to the front. one of these had to be ruled out, because he was so fast that he turned the thing into a one-mule contest, and robbed it of one of its best features--variety. but every now and then somebody disguises him with a new name and a new complexion, and rings him in again. the riders dress in full jockey costumes of bright-colored silks, satins, and velvets. the thirteen mules got away in a body, after a couple of false starts, and scampered off with prodigious spirit. as each mule and each rider had a distinct opinion of his own as to how the race ought to be run, and which side of the track was best in certain circumstances, and how often the track ought to be crossed, and when a collision ought to be accomplished, and when it ought to be avoided, these twenty-six conflicting opinions created a most fantastic and picturesque confusion, and the resulting spectacle was killingly comical. mile heat; time : . eight of the thirteen mules distanced. i had a bet on a mule which would have won if the procession had been reversed. the second heat was good fun; and so was the 'consolation race for beaten mules,' which followed later; but the first heat was the best in that respect. i think that much the most enjoyable of all races is a steamboat race; but, next to that, i prefer the gay and joyous mule-rush. two red-hot steamboats raging along, neck-and-neck, straining every nerve--that is to say, every rivet in the boilers--quaking and shaking and groaning from stem to stern, spouting white steam from the pipes, pouring black smoke from the chimneys, raining down sparks, parting the river into long breaks of hissing foam--this is sport that makes a body's very liver curl with enjoyment. a horse-race is pretty tame and colorless in comparison. still, a horse-race might be well enough, in its way, perhaps, if it were not for the tiresome false starts. but then, nobody is ever killed. at least, nobody was ever killed when i was at a horse-race. they have been crippled, it is true; but this is little to the purpose. === life on the mississippi by mark twain part . chapter enchantments and enchanters the largest annual event in new orleans is a something which we arrived too late to sample--the mardi-gras festivities. i saw the procession of the mystic crew of comus there, twenty-four years ago--with knights and nobles and so on, clothed in silken and golden paris-made gorgeousnesses, planned and bought for that single night's use; and in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquerie--a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking and flickering torches; but it is said that in these latter days the spectacle is mightily augmented, as to cost, splendor, and variety. there is a chief personage--'rex;' and if i remember rightly, neither this king nor any of his great following of subordinates is known to any outsider. all these people are gentlemen of position and consequence; and it is a proud thing to belong to the organization; so the mystery in which they hide their personality is merely for romance's sake, and not on account of the police. mardi-gras is of course a relic of the french and spanish occupation; but i judge that the religious feature has been pretty well knocked out of it now. sir walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary, and he will stay. his medieval business, supplemented by the monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy- land, is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabble of the priest's day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holy one is reached. this mardi-gras pageant was the exclusive possession of new orleans until recently. but now it has spread to memphis and st. louis and baltimore. it has probably reached its limit. it is a thing which could hardly exist in the practical north; would certainly last but a very brief time; as brief a time as it would last in london. for the soul of it is the romantic, not the funny and the grotesque. take away the romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles, and mardi-gras would die, down there in the south. the very feature that keeps it alive in the south--girly-girly romance--would kill it in the north or in london. puck and punch, and the press universal, would fall upon it and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would be also its last. against the crimes of the french revolution and of bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the revolution broke the chains of the ancien regime and of the church, and made of a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty, that whereas crowned heads in europe were gods before, they are only men, since, and can never be gods again, but only figureheads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which bonaparte and the revolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress. then comes sir walter scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. he did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our south they flourish pretty forcefully still. not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. there, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the walter scott middle-age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. but for the sir walter disease, the character of the southerner--or southron, according to sir walter's starchier way of phrasing it--would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the south would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. it was sir walter that made every gentleman in the south a major or a colonel, or a general or a judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. for it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of sir walter. sir walter had so large a hand in making southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. it seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for sir walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. the southerner of the american revolution owned slaves; so did the southerner of the civil war: but the former resembles the latter as an englishman resembles a frenchman. the change of character can be traced rather more easily to sir walter's influence than to that of any other thing or person. one may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds. if one take up a northern or southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality--all imitated from sir walter, and sufficiently badly done, too--innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact. this sort of literature being the fashion in both sections of the country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition; and as a consequence, the south was able to show as many well-known literary names, proportioned to population, as the north could. but a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair competition between north and south. for the north has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the southern writer still clings to it-- clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence. there is as much literary talent in the south, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language. but when a southerner of genius writes modern english, his book goes upon crutches no longer, but upon wings; and they carry it swiftly all about america and england, and through the great english reprint publishing houses of germany--as witness the experience of mr. cable and uncle remus, two of the very few southern authors who do not write in the southern style. instead of three or four widely-known literary names, the south ought to have a dozen or two--and will have them when sir walter's time is out. a curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by 'don quixote' and those wrought by 'ivanhoe.' the first swept the world's admiration for the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. as far as our south is concerned, the good work done by cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has scott's pernicious work undermined it. chapter uncle remus and mr. cable mr. joel chandler harris ('uncle remus') was to arrive from atlanta at seven o'clock sunday morning; so we got up and received him. we were able to detect him among the crowd of arrivals at the hotel-counter by his correspondence with a description of him which had been furnished us from a trustworthy source. he was said to be undersized, red-haired, and somewhat freckled. he was the only man in the party whose outside tallied with this bill of particulars. he was said to be very shy. he is a shy man. of this there is no doubt. it may not show on the surface, but the shyness is there. after days of intimacy one wonders to see that it is still in about as strong force as ever. there is a fine and beautiful nature hidden behind it, as all know who have read the uncle remus book; and a fine genius, too, as all know by the same sign. i seem to be talking quite freely about this neighbor; but in talking to the public i am but talking to his personal friends, and these things are permissible among friends. he deeply disappointed a number of children who had flocked eagerly to mr. cable's house to get a glimpse of the illustrious sage and oracle of the nation's nurseries. they said-- 'why, he 's white!' they were grieved about it. so, to console them, the book was brought, that they might hear uncle remus's tar-baby story from the lips of uncle remus himself--or what, in their outraged eyes, was left of him. but it turned out that he had never read aloud to people, and was too shy to venture the attempt now. mr. cable and i read from books of ours, to show him what an easy trick it was; but his immortal shyness was proof against even this sagacious strategy, so we had to read about brer rabbit ourselves. mr. harris ought to be able to read the negro dialect better than anybody else, for in the matter of writing it he is the only master the country has produced. mr. cable is the only master in the writing of french dialects that the country has produced; and he reads them in perfection. it was a great treat to hear him read about jean-ah poquelin, and about innerarity and his famous 'pigshoo' representing 'louisihanna rif-fusing to hanter the union,' along with passages of nicely-shaded german dialect from a novel which was still in manuscript. it came out in conversation, that in two different instances mr. cable got into grotesque trouble by using, in his books, next-to-impossible french names which nevertheless happened to be borne by living and sensitive citizens of new orleans. his names were either inventions or were borrowed from the ancient and obsolete past, i do not now remember which; but at any rate living bearers of them turned up, and were a good deal hurt at having attention directed to themselves and their affairs in so excessively public a manner. mr. warner and i had an experience of the same sort when we wrote the book called 'the gilded age.' there is a character in it called 'sellers.' i do not remember what his first name was, in the beginning; but anyway, mr. warner did not like it, and wanted it improved. he asked me if i was able to imagine a person named 'eschol sellers.' of course i said i could not, without stimulants. he said that away out west, once, he had met, and contemplated, and actually shaken hands with a man bearing that impossible name--'eschol sellers.' he added-- 'it was twenty years ago; his name has probably carried him off before this; and if it hasn't, he will never see the book anyhow. we will confiscate his name. the name you are using is common, and therefore dangerous; there are probably a thousand sellerses bearing it, and the whole horde will come after us; but eschol sellers is a safe name--it is a rock.' so we borrowed that name; and when the book had been out about a week, one of the stateliest and handsomest and most aristocratic looking white men that ever lived, called around, with the most formidable libel suit in his pocket that ever--well, in brief, we got his permission to suppress an edition of ten million {footnote [figures taken from memory, and probably incorrect. think it was more.]} copies of the book and change that name to 'mulberry sellers' in future editions. chapter sugar and postage one day, on the street, i encountered the man whom, of all men, i most wished to see--horace bixby; formerly pilot under me--or rather, over me--now captain of the great steamer 'city of baton rouge,' the latest and swiftest addition to the anchor line. the same slender figure, the same tight curls, the same springy step, the same alertness, the same decision of eye and answering decision of hand, the same erect military bearing; not an inch gained or lost in girth, not an ounce gained or lost in weight, not a hair turned. it is a curious thing, to leave a man thirty-five years old, and come back at the end of twenty-one years and find him still only thirty-five. i have not had an experience of this kind before, i believe. there were some crow's-feet, but they counted for next to nothing, since they were inconspicuous. his boat was just in. i had been waiting several days for her, purposing to return to st. louis in her. the captain and i joined a party of ladies and gentlemen, guests of major wood, and went down the river fifty-four miles, in a swift tug, to ex-governor warmouth's sugar plantation. strung along below the city, were a number of decayed, ram- shackly, superannuated old steamboats, not one of which had i ever seen before. they had all been built, and worn out, and thrown aside, since i was here last. this gives one a realizing sense of the frailness of a mississippi boat and the briefness of its life. six miles below town a fat and battered brick chimney, sticking above the magnolias and live-oaks, was pointed out as the monument erected by an appreciative nation to celebrate the battle of new orleans--jackson's victory over the british, january , . the war had ended, the two nations were at peace, but the news had not yet reached new orleans. if we had had the cable telegraph in those days, this blood would not have been spilt, those lives would not have been wasted; and better still, jackson would probably never have been president. we have gotten over the harms done us by the war of , but not over some of those done us by jackson's presidency. the warmouth plantation covers a vast deal of ground, and the hospitality of the warmouth mansion is graduated to the same large scale. we saw steam-plows at work, here, for the first time. the traction engine travels about on its own wheels, till it reaches the required spot; then it stands still and by means of a wire rope pulls the huge plow toward itself two or three hundred yards across the field, between the rows of cane. the thing cuts down into the black mold a foot and a half deep. the plow looks like a fore-and-aft brace of a hudson river steamer, inverted. when the negro steersman sits on one end of it, that end tilts down near the ground, while the other sticks up high in air. this great see-saw goes rolling and pitching like a ship at sea, and it is not every circus rider that could stay on it. the plantation contains two thousand six hundred acres; six hundred and fifty are in cane; and there is a fruitful orange grove of five thousand trees. the cane is cultivated after a modern and intricate scientific fashion, too elaborate and complex for me to attempt to describe; but it lost $ , last year. i forget the other details. however, this year's crop will reach ten or twelve hundred tons of sugar, consequently last year's loss will not matter. these troublesome and expensive scientific methods achieve a yield of a ton and a half and from that to two tons, to the acre; which is three or four times what the yield of an acre was in my time. the drainage-ditches were everywhere alive with little crabs-- 'fiddlers.' one saw them scampering sidewise in every direction whenever they heard a disturbing noise. expensive pests, these crabs; for they bore into the levees, and ruin them. the great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks and vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery. the process of making sugar is exceedingly interesting. first, you heave your cane into the centrifugals and grind out the juice; then run it through the evaporating pan to extract the fiber; then through the bone-filter to remove the alcohol; then through the clarifying tanks to discharge the molasses; then through the granulating pipe to condense it; then through the vacuum pan to extract the vacuum. it is now ready for market. i have jotted these particulars down from memory. the thing looks simple and easy. do not deceive yourself. to make sugar is really one of the most difficult things in the world. and to make it right, is next to impossible. if you will examine your own supply every now and then for a term of years, and tabulate the result, you will find that not two men in twenty can make sugar without getting sand into it. we could have gone down to the mouth of the river and visited captain eads' great work, the 'jetties,' where the river has been compressed between walls, and thus deepened to twenty-six feet; but it was voted useless to go, since at this stage of the water everything would be covered up and invisible. we could have visited that ancient and singular burg, 'pilot-town,' which stands on stilts in the water--so they say; where nearly all communication is by skiff and canoe, even to the attending of weddings and funerals; and where the littlest boys and girls are as handy with the oar as unamphibious children are with the velocipede. we could have done a number of other things; but on account of limited time, we went back home. the sail up the breezy and sparkling river was a charming experience, and would have been satisfyingly sentimental and romantic but for the interruptions of the tug's pet parrot, whose tireless comments upon the scenery and the guests were always this- worldly, and often profane. he had also a superabundance of the discordant, ear-splitting, metallic laugh common to his breed--a machine-made laugh, a frankenstein laugh, with the soul left out of it. he applied it to every sentimental remark, and to every pathetic song. he cackled it out with hideous energy after 'home again, home again from a foreign shore,' and said he 'wouldn't give a damn for a tug-load of such rot.' romance and sentiment cannot long survive this sort of discouragement; so the singing and talking presently ceased; which so delighted the parrot that he cursed himself hoarse for joy. then the male members of the party moved to the forecastle, to smoke and gossip. there were several old steamboatmen along, and i learned from them a great deal of what had been happening to my former river friends during my long absence. i learned that a pilot whom i used to steer for is become a spiritualist, and for more than fifteen years has been receiving a letter every week from a deceased relative, through a new york spiritualist medium named manchester--postage graduated by distance: from the local post-office in paradise to new york, five dollars; from new york to st. louis, three cents. i remember mr. manchester very well. i called on him once, ten years ago, with a couple of friends, one of whom wished to inquire after a deceased uncle. this uncle had lost his life in a peculiarly violent and unusual way, half a dozen years before: a cyclone blew him some three miles and knocked a tree down with him which was four feet through at the butt and sixty- five feet high. he did not survive this triumph. at the seance just referred to, my friend questioned his late uncle, through mr. manchester, and the late uncle wrote down his replies, using mr. manchester's hand and pencil for that purpose. the following is a fair example of the questions asked, and also of the sloppy twaddle in the way of answers, furnished by manchester under the pretense that it came from the specter. if this man is not the paltriest fraud that lives, i owe him an apology-- question. where are you? answer. in the spirit world. q. are you happy? a. very happy. perfectly happy. q. how do you amuse yourself? a. conversation with friends, and other spirits. q. what else? a. nothing else. nothing else is necessary. q. what do you talk about? a. about how happy we are; and about friends left behind in the earth, and how to influence them for their good. q. when your friends in the earth all get to the spirit land, what shall you have to talk about then?--nothing but about how happy you all are? no reply. it is explained that spirits will not answer frivolous questions. q. how is it that spirits that are content to spend an eternity in frivolous employments, and accept it as happiness, are so fastidious about frivolous questions upon the subject? no reply. q. would you like to come back? a. no. q. would you say that under oath? a. yes. q. what do you eat there? a. we do not eat. q. what do you drink? a. we do not drink. q. what do you smoke? a. we do not smoke. q. what do you read? a. we do not read. q. do all the good people go to your place? a. yes. q. you know my present way of life. can you suggest any additions to it, in the way of crime, that will reasonably insure my going to some other place. a. no reply. q. when did you die? a. i did not die, i passed away. q. very well, then, when did you pass away? how long have you been in the spirit land? a. we have no measurements of time here. q. though you may be indifferent and uncertain as to dates and times in your present condition and environment, this has nothing to do with your former condition. you had dates then. one of these is what i ask for. you departed on a certain day in a certain year. is not this true? a. yes. q. then name the day of the month. (much fumbling with pencil, on the part of the medium, accompanied by violent spasmodic jerkings of his head and body, for some little time. finally, explanation to the effect that spirits often forget dates, such things being without importance to them.) q. then this one has actually forgotten the date of its translation to the spirit land? this was granted to be the case. q. this is very curious. well, then, what year was it? (more fumbling, jerking, idiotic spasms, on the part of the medium. finally, explanation to the effect that the spirit has forgotten the year.) q. this is indeed stupendous. let me put one more question, one last question, to you, before we part to meet no more;--for even if i fail to avoid your asylum, a meeting there will go for nothing as a meeting, since by that time you will easily have forgotten me and my name: did you die a natural death, or were you cut off by a catastrophe? a. (after long hesitation and many throes and spasms.) natural death. this ended the interview. my friend told the medium that when his relative was in this poor world, he was endowed with an extraordinary intellect and an absolutely defectless memory, and it seemed a great pity that he had not been allowed to keep some shred of these for his amusement in the realms of everlasting contentment, and for the amazement and admiration of the rest of the population there. this man had plenty of clients--has plenty yet. he receives letters from spirits located in every part of the spirit world, and delivers them all over this country through the united states mail. these letters are filled with advice--advice from 'spirits' who don't know as much as a tadpole--and this advice is religiously followed by the receivers. one of these clients was a man whom the spirits (if one may thus plurally describe the ingenious manchester) were teaching how to contrive an improved railway car-wheel. it is coarse employment for a spirit, but it is higher and wholesomer activity than talking for ever about 'how happy we are.' chapter episodes in pilot life in the course of the tug-boat gossip, it came out that out of every five of my former friends who had quitted the river, four had chosen farming as an occupation. of course this was not because they were peculiarly gifted, agriculturally, and thus more likely to succeed as farmers than in other industries: the reason for their choice must be traced to some other source. doubtless they chose farming because that life is private and secluded from irruptions of undesirable strangers--like the pilot- house hermitage. and doubtless they also chose it because on a thousand nights of black storm and danger they had noted the twinkling lights of solitary farm-houses, as the boat swung by, and pictured to themselves the serenity and security and coziness of such refuges at such times, and so had by-and-bye come to dream of that retired and peaceful life as the one desirable thing to long for, anticipate, earn, and at last enjoy. but i did not learn that any of these pilot-farmers had astonished anybody with their successes. their farms do not support them: they support their farms. the pilot-farmer disappears from the river annually, about the breaking of spring, and is seen no more till next frost. then he appears again, in damaged homespun, combs the hayseed out of his hair, and takes a pilot-house berth for the winter. in this way he pays the debts which his farming has achieved during the agricultural season. so his river bondage is but half broken; he is still the river's slave the hardest half of the year. one of these men bought a farm, but did not retire to it. he knew a trick worth two of that. he did not propose to pauperize his farm by applying his personal ignorance to working it. no, he put the farm into the hands of an agricultural expert to be worked on shares--out of every three loads of corn the expert to have two and the pilot the third. but at the end of the season the pilot received no corn. the expert explained that his share was not reached. the farm produced only two loads. some of the pilots whom i had known had had adventures--the outcome fortunate, sometimes, but not in all cases. captain montgomery, whom i had steered for when he was a pilot, commanded the confederate fleet in the great battle before memphis; when his vessel went down, he swam ashore, fought his way through a squad of soldiers, and made a gallant and narrow escape. he was always a cool man; nothing could disturb his serenity. once when he was captain of the 'crescent city,' i was bringing the boat into port at new orleans, and momently expecting orders from the hurricane deck, but received none. i had stopped the wheels, and there my authority and responsibility ceased. it was evening--dim twilight--the captain's hat was perched upon the big bell, and i supposed the intellectual end of the captain was in it, but such was not the case. the captain was very strict; therefore i knew better than to touch a bell without orders. my duty was to hold the boat steadily on her calamitous course, and leave the consequences to take care of themselves--which i did. so we went plowing past the sterns of steamboats and getting closer and closer--the crash was bound to come very soon--and still that hat never budged; for alas, the captain was napping in the texas.... things were becoming exceedingly nervous and uncomfortable. it seemed to me that the captain was not going to appear in time to see the entertainment. but he did. just as we were walking into the stern of a steamboat, he stepped out on deck, and said, with heavenly serenity, 'set her back on both'--which i did; but a trifle late, however, for the next moment we went smashing through that other boat's flimsy outer works with a most prodigious racket. the captain never said a word to me about the matter afterwards, except to remark that i had done right, and that he hoped i would not hesitate to act in the same way again in like circumstances. one of the pilots whom i had known when i was on the river had died a very honorable death. his boat caught fire, and he remained at the wheel until he got her safe to land. then he went out over the breast- board with his clothing in flames, and was the last person to get ashore. he died from his injuries in the course of two or three hours, and his was the only life lost. the history of mississippi piloting affords six or seven instances of this sort of martyrdom, and half a hundred instances of escapes from a like fate which came within a second or two of being fatally too late; but there is no instance of a pilot deserting his post to save his life while by remaining and sacrificing it he might secure other lives from destruction. it is well worth while to set down this noble fact, and well worth while to put it in italics, too. the 'cub' pilot is early admonished to despise all perils connected with a pilot's calling, and to prefer any sort of death to the deep dishonor of deserting his post while there is any possibility of his being useful in it. and so effectively are these admonitions inculcated, that even young and but half-tried pilots can be depended upon to stick to the wheel, and die there when occasion requires. in a memphis graveyard is buried a young fellow who perished at the wheel a great many years ago, in white river, to save the lives of other men. he said to the captain that if the fire would give him time to reach a sand bar, some distance away, all could be saved, but that to land against the bluff bank of the river would be to insure the loss of many lives. he reached the bar and grounded the boat in shallow water; but by that time the flames had closed around him, and in escaping through them he was fatally burned. he had been urged to fly sooner, but had replied as became a pilot to reply-- 'i will not go. if i go, nobody will be saved; if i stay, no one will be lost but me. i will stay.' there were two hundred persons on board, and no life was lost but the pilot's. there used to be a monument to this young fellow, in that memphis graveyard. while we tarried in memphis on our down trip, i started out to look for it, but our time was so brief that i was obliged to turn back before my object was accomplished. the tug-boat gossip informed me that dick kennet was dead--blown up, near memphis, and killed; that several others whom i had known had fallen in the war--one or two of them shot down at the wheel; that another and very particular friend, whom i had steered many trips for, had stepped out of his house in new orleans, one night years ago, to collect some money in a remote part of the city, and had never been seen again--was murdered and thrown into the river, it was thought; that ben thornburgh was dead long ago; also his wild 'cub' whom i used to quarrel with, all through every daylight watch. a heedless, reckless creature he was, and always in hot water, always in mischief. an arkansas passenger brought an enormous bear aboard, one day, and chained him to a life-boat on the hurricane deck. thornburgh's 'cub' could not rest till he had gone there and unchained the bear, to 'see what he would do.' he was promptly gratified. the bear chased him around and around the deck, for miles and miles, with two hundred eager faces grinning through the railings for audience, and finally snatched off the lad's coat-tail and went into the texas to chew it. the off-watch turned out with alacrity, and left the bear in sole possession. he presently grew lonesome, and started out for recreation. he ranged the whole boat--visited every part of it, with an advance guard of fleeing people in front of him and a voiceless vacancy behind him; and when his owner captured him at last, those two were the only visible beings anywhere; everybody else was in hiding, and the boat was a solitude. i was told that one of my pilot friends fell dead at the wheel, from heart disease, in . the captain was on the roof at the time. he saw the boat breaking for the shore; shouted, and got no answer; ran up, and found the pilot lying dead on the floor. mr. bixby had been blown up, in madrid bend; was not injured, but the other pilot was lost. george ritchie had been blown up near memphis--blown into the river from the wheel, and disabled. the water was very cold; he clung to a cotton bale--mainly with his teeth--and floated until nearly exhausted, when he was rescued by some deck hands who were on a piece of the wreck. they tore open the bale and packed him in the cotton, and warmed the life back into him, and got him safe to memphis. he is one of bixby's pilots on the 'baton rouge' now. into the life of a steamboat clerk, now dead, had dropped a bit of romance--somewhat grotesque romance, but romance nevertheless. when i knew him he was a shiftless young spendthrift, boisterous, goodhearted, full of careless generosities, and pretty conspicuously promising to fool his possibilities away early, and come to nothing. in a western city lived a rich and childless old foreigner and his wife; and in their family was a comely young girl--sort of friend, sort of servant. the young clerk of whom i have been speaking--whose name was not george johnson, but who shall be called george johnson for the purposes of this narrative--got acquainted with this young girl, and they sinned; and the old foreigner found them out, and rebuked them. being ashamed, they lied, and said they were married; that they had been privately married. then the old foreigner's hurt was healed, and he forgave and blessed them. after that, they were able to continue their sin without concealment. by-and-bye the foreigner's wife died; and presently he followed after her. friends of the family assembled to mourn; and among the mourners sat the two young sinners. the will was opened and solemnly read. it bequeathed every penny of that old man's great wealth to mrs. george johnson! and there was no such person. the young sinners fled forth then, and did a very foolish thing: married themselves before an obscure justice of the peace, and got him to antedate the thing. that did no sort of good. the distant relatives flocked in and exposed the fraudful date with extreme suddenness and surprising ease, and carried off the fortune, leaving the johnsons very legitimately, and legally, and irrevocably chained together in honorable marriage, but with not so much as a penny to bless themselves withal. such are the actual facts; and not all novels have for a base so telling a situation. chapter the 'original jacobs' we had some talk about captain isaiah sellers, now many years dead. he was a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both ashore and on the river. he was very tall, well built, and handsome; and in his old age--as i remember him--his hair was as black as an indian's, and his eye and hand were as strong and steady and his nerve and judgment as firm and clear as anybody's, young or old, among the fraternity of pilots. he was the patriarch of the craft; he had been a keelboat pilot before the day of steamboats; and a steamboat pilot before any other steamboat pilot, still surviving at the time i speak of, had ever turned a wheel. consequently his brethren held him in the sort of awe in which illustrious survivors of a bygone age are always held by their associates. he knew how he was regarded, and perhaps this fact added some trifle of stiffening to his natural dignity, which had been sufficiently stiff in its original state. he left a diary behind him; but apparently it did not date back to his first steamboat trip, which was said to be , the year the first steamboat disturbed the waters of the mississippi. at the time of his death a correspondent of the 'st. louis republican' culled the following items from the diary-- 'in february, , he shipped on board the steamer "rambler," at florence, ala., and made during that year three trips to new orleans and back--this on the "gen. carrol," between nashville and new orleans. it was during his stay on this boat that captain sellers introduced the tap of the bell as a signal to heave the lead, previous to which time it was the custom for the pilot to speak to the men below when soundings were wanted. the proximity of the forecastle to the pilot-house, no doubt, rendered this an easy matter; but how different on one of our palaces of the present day. 'in we find him on board the "president," a boat of two hundred and eighty-five tons burden, and plying between smithland and new orleans. thence he joined the "jubilee" in , and on this boat he did his first piloting in the st. louis trade; his first watch extending from herculaneum to st. genevieve. on may , , he completed and left pittsburgh in charge of the steamer "prairie," a boat of four hundred tons, and the first steamer with a state-room cabin ever seen at st. louis. in he introduced the signal for meeting boats, and which has, with some slight change, been the universal custom of this day; in fact, is rendered obligatory by act of congress. 'as general items of river history, we quote the following marginal notes from his general log-- 'in march, , gen. lafayette left new orleans for st. louis on the low-pressure steamer "natchez." 'in january, , twenty-one steamers left the new orleans wharf to celebrate the occasion of gen. jackson's visit to that city. 'in the "north american" made the run from new orleans to memphis in six days--best time on record to that date. it has since been made in two days and ten hours. 'in the red river cut-off formed. 'in steamer "hudson" made the run from white river to helena, a distance of seventy-five miles, in twelve hours. this was the source of much talk and speculation among parties directly interested. 'in great horseshoe cut-off formed. 'up to the present time, a term of thirty-five years, we ascertain, by reference to the diary, he has made four hundred and sixty round trips to new orleans, which gives a distance of one million one hundred and four thousand miles, or an average of eighty-six miles a day.' whenever captain sellers approached a body of gossiping pilots, a chill fell there, and talking ceased. for this reason: whenever six pilots were gathered together, there would always be one or two newly fledged ones in the lot, and the elder ones would be always 'showing off' before these poor fellows; making them sorrowfully feel how callow they were, how recent their nobility, and how humble their degree, by talking largely and vaporously of old-time experiences on the river; always making it a point to date everything back as far as they could, so as to make the new men feel their newness to the sharpest degree possible, and envy the old stagers in the like degree. and how these complacent baldheads would swell, and brag, and lie, and date back--ten, fifteen, twenty years,--and how they did enjoy the effect produced upon the marveling and envying youngsters! and perhaps just at this happy stage of the proceedings, the stately figure of captain isaiah sellers, that real and only genuine son of antiquity, would drift solemnly into the midst. imagine the size of the silence that would result on the instant. and imagine the feelings of those bald-heads, and the exultation of their recent audience when the ancient captain would begin to drop casual and indifferent remarks of a reminiscent nature--about islands that had disappeared, and cutoffs that had been made, a generation before the oldest bald-head in the company had ever set his foot in a pilot-house! many and many a time did this ancient mariner appear on the scene in the above fashion, and spread disaster and humiliation around him. if one might believe the pilots, he always dated his islands back to the misty dawn of river history; and he never used the same island twice; and never did he employ an island that still existed, or give one a name which anybody present was old enough to have heard of before. if you might believe the pilots, he was always conscientiously particular about little details; never spoke of 'the state of mississippi,' for instance --no, he would say, 'when the state of mississippi was where arkansas now is,' and would never speak of louisiana or missouri in a general way, and leave an incorrect impression on your mind--no, he would say, 'when louisiana was up the river farther,' or 'when missouri was on the illinois side.' the old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them 'mark twain,' and give them to the 'new orleans picayune.' they related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable; and thus far, they contained no poison. but in speaking of the stage of the river to-day, at a given point, the captain was pretty apt to drop in a little remark about this being the first time he had seen the water so high or so low at that particular point for forty-nine years; and now and then he would mention island so- and-so, and follow it, in parentheses, with some such observation as 'disappeared in , if i remember rightly.' in these antique interjections lay poison and bitterness for the other old pilots, and they used to chaff the 'mark twain' paragraphs with unsparing mockery. it so chanced that one of these paragraphs--{footnote [the original ms. of it, in the captain's own hand, has been sent to me from new orleans. it reads as follows-- vicksburg may , . 'my opinion for the benefit of the citizens of new orleans: the water is higher this far up than it has been since . my opinion is that the water will be feet deep in canal street before the first of next june. mrs. turner's plantation at the head of big black island is all under water, and it has not been since . 'i. sellers.']} became the text for my first newspaper article. i burlesqued it broadly, very broadly, stringing my fantastics out to the extent of eight hundred or a thousand words. i was a 'cub' at the time. i showed my performance to some pilots, and they eagerly rushed it into print in the 'new orleans true delta.' it was a great pity; for it did nobody any worthy service, and it sent a pang deep into a good man's heart. there was no malice in my rubbish; but it laughed at the captain. it laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful. i did not know then, though i do now, that there is no suffering comparable with that which a private person feels when he is for the first time pilloried in print. captain sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day forth. when i say he did me the honor, i am not using empty words. it was a very real honor to be in the thoughts of so great a man as captain sellers, and i had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud of it. it was distinction to be loved by such a man; but it was a much greater distinction to be hated by him, because he loved scores of people; but he didn't sit up nights to hate anybody but me. he never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again signed 'mark twain' to anything. at the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, i was on the pacific coast. i was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so i confiscated the ancient mariner's discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands--a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how i have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say. the captain had an honorable pride in his profession and an abiding love for it. he ordered his monument before he died, and kept it near him until he did die. it stands over his grave now, in bellefontaine cemetery, st. louis. it is his image, in marble, standing on duty at the pilot wheel; and worthy to stand and confront criticism, for it represents a man who in life would have stayed there till he burned to a cinder, if duty required it. the finest thing we saw on our whole mississippi trip, we saw as we approached new orleans in the steam-tug. this was the curving frontage of the crescent city lit up with the white glare of five miles of electric lights. it was a wonderful sight, and very beautiful. === life on the mississippi by mark twain part . chapter reminiscences we left for st. louis in the 'city of baton rouge,' on a delightfully hot day, but with the main purpose of my visit but lamely accomplished. i had hoped to hunt up and talk with a hundred steamboatmen, but got so pleasantly involved in the social life of the town that i got nothing more than mere five-minute talks with a couple of dozen of the craft. i was on the bench of the pilot-house when we backed out and 'straightened up' for the start--the boat pausing for a 'good ready,' in the old-fashioned way, and the black smoke piling out of the chimneys equally in the old-fashioned way. then we began to gather momentum, and presently were fairly under way and booming along. it was all as natural and familiar--and so were the shoreward sights--as if there had been no break in my river life. there was a 'cub,' and i judged that he would take the wheel now; and he did. captain bixby stepped into the pilot- house. presently the cub closed up on the rank of steamships. he made me nervous, for he allowed too much water to show between our boat and the ships. i knew quite well what was going to happen, because i could date back in my own life and inspect the record. the captain looked on, during a silent half-minute, then took the wheel himself, and crowded the boat in, till she went scraping along within a hand-breadth of the ships. it was exactly the favor which he had done me, about a quarter of a century before, in that same spot, the first time i ever steamed out of the port of new orleans. it was a very great and sincere pleasure to me to see the thing repeated--with somebody else as victim. we made natchez (three hundred miles) in twenty-two hours and a half-- much the swiftest passage i have ever made over that piece of water. the next morning i came on with the four o'clock watch, and saw ritchie successfully run half a dozen crossings in a fog, using for his guidance the marked chart devised and patented by bixby and himself. this sufficiently evidenced the great value of the chart. by and by, when the fog began to clear off, i noticed that the reflection of a tree in the smooth water of an overflowed bank, six hundred yards away, was stronger and blacker than the ghostly tree itself. the faint spectral trees, dimly glimpsed through the shredding fog, were very pretty things to see. we had a heavy thunder-storm at natchez, another at vicksburg, and still another about fifty miles below memphis. they had an old-fashioned energy which had long been unfamiliar to me. this third storm was accompanied by a raging wind. we tied up to the bank when we saw the tempest coming, and everybody left the pilot-house but me. the wind bent the young trees down, exposing the pale underside of the leaves; and gust after gust followed, in quick succession, thrashing the branches violently up and down, and to this side and that, and creating swift waves of alternating green and white according to the side of the leaf that was exposed, and these waves raced after each other as do their kind over a wind-tossed field of oats. no color that was visible anywhere was quite natural--all tints were charged with a leaden tinge from the solid cloud-bank overhead. the river was leaden; all distances the same; and even the far-reaching ranks of combing white-caps were dully shaded by the dark, rich atmosphere through which their swarming legions marched. the thunder-peals were constant and deafening; explosion followed explosion with but inconsequential intervals between, and the reports grew steadily sharper and higher-keyed, and more trying to the ear; the lightning was as diligent as the thunder, and produced effects which enchanted the eye and sent electric ecstasies of mixed delight and apprehension shivering along every nerve in the body in unintermittent procession. the rain poured down in amazing volume; the ear-splitting thunder-peals broke nearer and nearer; the wind increased in fury and began to wrench off boughs and tree-tops and send them sailing away through space; the pilot-house fell to rocking and straining and cracking and surging, and i went down in the hold to see what time it was. people boast a good deal about alpine thunderstorms; but the storms which i have had the luck to see in the alps were not the equals of some which i have seen in the mississippi valley. i may not have seen the alps do their best, of course, and if they can beat the mississippi, i don't wish to. on this up trip i saw a little towhead (infant island) half a mile long, which had been formed during the past nineteen years. since there was so much time to spare that nineteen years of it could be devoted to the construction of a mere towhead, where was the use, originally, in rushing this whole globe through in six days? it is likely that if more time had been taken, in the first place, the world would have been made right, and this ceaseless improving and repairing would not be necessary now. but if you hurry a world or a house, you are nearly sure to find out by and by that you have left out a towhead, or a broom-closet, or some other little convenience, here and there, which has got to be supplied, no matter how much expense and vexation it may cost. we had a succession of black nights, going up the river, and it was observable that whenever we landed, and suddenly inundated the trees with the intense sunburst of the electric light, a certain curious effect was always produced: hundreds of birds flocked instantly out from the masses of shining green foliage, and went careering hither and thither through the white rays, and often a song-bird tuned up and fell to singing. we judged that they mistook this superb artificial day for the genuine article. we had a delightful trip in that thoroughly well- ordered steamer, and regretted that it was accomplished so speedily. by means of diligence and activity, we managed to hunt out nearly all the old friends. one was missing, however; he went to his reward, whatever it was, two years ago. but i found out all about him. his case helped me to realize how lasting can be the effect of a very trifling occurrence. when he was an apprentice-blacksmith in our village, and i a schoolboy, a couple of young englishmen came to the town and sojourned a while; and one day they got themselves up in cheap royal finery and did the richard iii swordfight with maniac energy and prodigious powwow, in the presence of the village boys. this blacksmith cub was there, and the histrionic poison entered his bones. this vast, lumbering, ignorant, dull-witted lout was stage-struck, and irrecoverably. he disappeared, and presently turned up in st. louis. i ran across him there, by and by. he was standing musing on a street corner, with his left hand on his hip, the thumb of his right supporting his chin, face bowed and frowning, slouch hat pulled down over his forehead--imagining himself to be othello or some such character, and imagining that the passing crowd marked his tragic bearing and were awestruck. i joined him, and tried to get him down out of the clouds, but did not succeed. however, he casually informed me, presently, that he was a member of the walnut street theater company--and he tried to say it with indifference, but the indifference was thin, and a mighty exultation showed through it. he said he was cast for a part in julius caesar, for that night, and if i should come i would see him. if i should come! i said i wouldn't miss it if i were dead. i went away stupefied with astonishment, and saying to myself, 'how strange it is! we always thought this fellow a fool; yet the moment he comes to a great city, where intelligence and appreciation abound, the talent concealed in this shabby napkin is at once discovered, and promptly welcomed and honored.' but i came away from the theater that night disappointed and offended; for i had had no glimpse of my hero, and his name was not in the bills. i met him on the street the next morning, and before i could speak, he asked-- 'did you see me?' 'no, you weren't there.' he looked surprised and disappointed. he said-- 'yes, i was. indeed i was. i was a roman soldier.' 'which one?' 'why didn't you see them roman soldiers that stood back there in a rank, and sometimes marched in procession around the stage?' 'do you mean the roman army?--those six sandaled roustabouts in nightshirts, with tin shields and helmets, that marched around treading on each other's heels, in charge of a spider-legged consumptive dressed like themselves?' 'that's it! that's it! i was one of them roman soldiers. i was the next to the last one. a half a year ago i used to always be the last one; but i've been promoted.' well, they told me that that poor fellow remained a roman soldier to the last--a matter of thirty-four years. sometimes they cast him for a 'speaking part,' but not an elaborate one. he could be trusted to go and say, 'my lord, the carriage waits,' but if they ventured to add a sentence or two to this, his memory felt the strain and he was likely to miss fire. yet, poor devil, he had been patiently studying the part of hamlet for more than thirty years, and he lived and died in the belief that some day he would be invited to play it! and this is what came of that fleeting visit of those young englishmen to our village such ages and ages ago! what noble horseshoes this man might have made, but for those englishmen; and what an inadequate roman soldier he did make! a day or two after we reached st. louis, i was walking along fourth street when a grizzly-headed man gave a sort of start as he passed me, then stopped, came back, inspected me narrowly, with a clouding brow, and finally said with deep asperity-- 'look here, have you got that drink yet?' a maniac, i judged, at first. but all in a flash i recognized him. i made an effort to blush that strained every muscle in me, and answered as sweetly and winningly as ever i knew how-- 'been a little slow, but am just this minute closing in on the place where they keep it. come in and help.' he softened, and said make it a bottle of champagne and he was agreeable. he said he had seen my name in the papers, and had put all his affairs aside and turned out, resolved to find me or die; and make me answer that question satisfactorily, or kill me; though the most of his late asperity had been rather counterfeit than otherwise. this meeting brought back to me the st. louis riots of about thirty years ago. i spent a week there, at that time, in a boarding-house, and had this young fellow for a neighbor across the hall. we saw some of the fightings and killings; and by and by we went one night to an armory where two hundred young men had met, upon call, to be armed and go forth against the rioters, under command of a military man. we drilled till about ten o'clock at night; then news came that the mob were in great force in the lower end of the town, and were sweeping everything before them. our column moved at once. it was a very hot night, and my musket was very heavy. we marched and marched; and the nearer we approached the seat of war, the hotter i grew and the thirstier i got. i was behind my friend; so, finally, i asked him to hold my musket while i dropped out and got a drink. then i branched off and went home. i was not feeling any solicitude about him of course, because i knew he was so well armed, now, that he could take care of himself without any trouble. if i had had any doubts about that, i would have borrowed another musket for him. i left the city pretty early the next morning, and if this grizzled man had not happened to encounter my name in the papers the other day in st. louis, and felt moved to seek me out, i should have carried to my grave a heart-torturing uncertainty as to whether he ever got out of the riots all right or not. i ought to have inquired, thirty years ago; i know that. and i would have inquired, if i had had the muskets; but, in the circumstances, he seemed better fixed to conduct the investigations than i was. one monday, near the time of our visit to st. louis, the 'globe- democrat' came out with a couple of pages of sunday statistics, whereby it appeared that , st. louis people attended the morning and evening church services the day before, and , children attended sunday-school. thus , persons, out of the city's total of , population, respected the day religious-wise. i found these statistics, in a condensed form, in a telegram of the associated press, and preserved them. they made it apparent that st. louis was in a higher state of grace than she could have claimed to be in my time. but now that i canvass the figures narrowly, i suspect that the telegraph mutilated them. it cannot be that there are more than , catholics in the town; the other , must be classified as protestants. out of these , , according to this questionable telegram, only , attended church and sunday-school, while out of the , catholics, , went to church and sunday-school. chapter a burning brand all at once the thought came into my mind, 'i have not sought out mr. brown.' upon that text i desire to depart from the direct line of my subject, and make a little excursion. i wish to reveal a secret which i have carried with me nine years, and which has become burdensome. upon a certain occasion, nine years ago, i had said, with strong feeling, 'if ever i see st. louis again, i will seek out mr. brown, the great grain merchant, and ask of him the privilege of shaking him by the hand.' the occasion and the circumstances were as follows. a friend of mine, a clergyman, came one evening and said-- 'i have a most remarkable letter here, which i want to read to you, if i can do it without breaking down. i must preface it with some explanations, however. the letter is written by an ex-thief and ex-vagabond of the lowest origin and basest rearing, a man all stained with crime and steeped in ignorance; but, thank god, with a mine of pure gold hidden away in him, as you shall see. his letter is written to a burglar named williams, who is serving a nine-year term in a certain state prison, for burglary. williams was a particularly daring burglar, and plied that trade during a number of years; but he was caught at last and jailed, to await trial in a town where he had broken into a house at night, pistol in hand, and forced the owner to hand over to him $ , in government bonds. williams was not a common sort of person, by any means; he was a graduate of harvard college, and came of good new england stock. his father was a clergyman. while lying in jail, his health began to fail, and he was threatened with consumption. this fact, together with the opportunity for reflection afforded by solitary confinement, had its effect--its natural effect. he fell into serious thought; his early training asserted itself with power, and wrought with strong influence upon his mind and heart. he put his old life behind him, and became an earnest christian. some ladies in the town heard of this, visited him, and by their encouraging words supported him in his good resolutions and strengthened him to continue in his new life. the trial ended in his conviction and sentence to the state prison for the term of nine years, as i have before said. in the prison he became acquainted with the poor wretch referred to in the beginning of my talk, jack hunt, the writer of the letter which i am going to read. you will see that the acquaintanceship bore fruit for hunt. when hunt's time was out, he wandered to st. louis; and from that place he wrote his letter to williams. the letter got no further than the office of the prison warden, of course; prisoners are not often allowed to receive letters from outside. the prison authorities read this letter, but did not destroy it. they had not the heart to do it. they read it to several persons, and eventually it fell into the hands of those ladies of whom i spoke a while ago. the other day i came across an old friend of mine--a clergyman--who had seen this letter, and was full of it. the mere remembrance of it so moved him that he could not talk of it without his voice breaking. he promised to get a copy of it for me; and here it is --an exact copy, with all the imperfections of the original preserved. it has many slang expressions in it--thieves' argot--but their meaning has been interlined, in parentheses, by the prison authorities'-- st. louis, june th . mr. w---- friend charlie if i may call you so: i no you are surprised to get a letter from me, but i hope you won't be mad at my writing to you. i want to tell you my thanks for the way you talked to me when i was in prison--it has led me to try and be a better man; i guess you thought i did not cair for what you said, & at the first go off i didn't, but i noed you was a man who had don big work with good men & want no sucker, nor want gasing & all the boys knod it. i used to think at nite what you said, & for it i nocked off swearing months before my time was up, for i saw it want no good, nohow--the day my time was up you told me if i would shake the cross (quit stealing) & live on the square for months, it would be the best job i ever done in my life. the state agent give me a ticket to here, & on the car i thought more of what you said to me, but didn't make up my mind. when we got to chicago on the cars from there to here, i pulled off an old woman's leather; (robbed her of her pocketbook) i hadn't no more than got it off when i wished i hadn't done it, for awhile before that i made up my mind to be a square bloke, for months on your word, but forgot it when i saw the leather was a grip (easy to get)--but i kept clos to her & when she got out of the cars at a way place i said, marm have you lost anything. & she tumbled (discovered) her leather was off (gone)--is this it says i, giving it to her--well if you aint honest, says she, but i hadn't got cheak enough to stand that sort of talk, so i left her in a hurry. when i got here i had $ and cents left & i didn't get no work for days as i aint strong enough for roust about on a steam bote (for a deck hand)--the afternoon of the rd day i spent my last cts for moons (large, round sea-biscuit) & cheese & i felt pretty rough & was thinking i would have to go on the dipe (picking pockets) again, when i thought of what you once said about a fellows calling on the lord when he was in hard luck, & i thought i would try it once anyhow, but when i tryed it i got stuck on the start, & all i could get off wos, lord give a poor fellow a chance to square it for months for christ's sake, amen; & i kept a thinking, of it over and over as i went along--about an hour after that i was in th st. & this is what happened & is the cause of my being where i am now & about which i will tell you before i get done writing. as i was walking along herd a big noise & saw a horse running away with a carriage with children in it, & i grabed up a peace of box cover from the side walk & run in the middle of the street, & when the horse came up i smashed him over the head as hard as i could drive--the bord split to peces & the horse checked up a little & i grabbed the reigns & pulled his head down until he stopped--the gentleman what owned him came running up & soon as he saw the children were all rite, he shook hands with me and gave me a $ green back, & my asking the lord to help me come into my head, & i was so thunderstruck i couldn't drop the reigns nor say nothing--he saw something was up, & coming back to me said, my boy are you hurt? & the thought come into my head just then to ask him for work; & i asked him to take back the bill and give me a job--says he, jump in here & lets talk about it, but keep the money--he asked me if i could take care of horses & i said yes, for i used to hang round livery stables & often would help clean & drive horses, he told me he wanted a man for that work, & would give me $ a month & bord me. you bet i took that chance at once. that nite in my little room over the stable i sat a long time thinking over my past life & of what had just happened & i just got down on my nees & thanked the lord for the job & to help me to square it, & to bless you for putting me up to it, & the next morning i done it again & got me some new togs (clothes) & a bible for i made up my mind after what the lord had done for me i would read the bible every nite and morning, & ask him to keep an eye on me. when i had been there about a week mr. brown (that's his name) came in my room one nite and saw me reading the bible--he asked me if i was a christian & i told him no--he asked me how it was i read the bible instead of papers & books--well charlie i thought i had better give him a square deal in the start, so i told him all about my being in prison & about you, & how i had almost done give up looking for work & how the lord got me the job when i asked him; & the only way i had to pay him back was to read the bible & square it, & i asked him to give me a chance for months--he talked to me like a father for a long time, & told me i could stay & then i felt better than ever i had done in my life, for i had given mr. brown a fair start with me & now i didn't fear no one giving me a back cap (exposing his past life) & running me off the job--the next morning he called me into the library & gave me another square talk, & advised me to study some every day, & he would help me one or hours every nite, & he gave me a arithmetic, a spelling book, a geography & a writing book, & he hers me every nite--he lets me come into the house to prayers every morning, & got me put in a bible class in the sunday school which i likes very much for it helps me to understand my bible better. now, charlie the months on the square are up months ago, & as you said, it is the best job i ever did in my life, & i commenced another of the same sort right away, only it is to god helping me to last a lifetime charlie--i wrote this letter to tell you i do think god has forgiven my sins & herd your prayers, for you told me you should pray for me--i no i love to read his word & tell him all my troubles & he helps me i know for i have plenty of chances to steal but i don't feel to as i once did & now i take more pleasure in going to church than to the theater & that wasnt so once--our minister and others often talk with me & a month ago they wanted me to join the church, but i said no, not now, i may be mistaken in my feelings, i will wait awhile, but now i feel that god has called me & on the first sunday in july i will join the church--dear friend i wish i could write to you as i feel, but i cant do it yet--you no i learned to read and write while prisons & i aint got well enough along to write as i would talk; i no i aint spelled all the words rite in this & lots of other mistakes but you will excuse it i no, for you no i was brought up in a poor house until i run away, & that i never new who my father and mother was & i dont no my right name, & i hope you wont be mad at me, but i have as much rite to one name as another & i have taken your name, for you wont use it when you get out i no, & you are the man i think most of in the world; so i hope you wont be mad--i am doing well, i put $ a month in bank with $ of the $ -- if you ever want any or all of it let me know, & it is yours. i wish you would let me send you some now. i send you with this a receipt for a year of littles living age, i didn't know what you would like & i told mr. brown & he said he thought you would like it--i wish i was nere you so i could send you chuck (refreshments) on holidays; it would spoil this weather from here, but i will send you a box next thanksgiving any way--next week mr. brown takes me into his store as lite porter & will advance me as soon as i know a little more--he keeps a big granary store, wholesale--i forgot to tell you of my mission school, sunday school class--the school is in the sunday afternoon, i went out two sunday afternoons, and picked up seven kids (little boys) & got them to come in. two of them new as much as i did & i had them put in a class where they could learn something. i dont no much myself, but as these kids cant read i get on nicely with them. i make sure of them by going after them every sunday hour before school time, i also got girls to come. tell mack and harry about me, if they will come out here when their time is up i will get them jobs at once. i hope you will excuse this long letter & all mistakes, i wish i could see you for i cant write as i would talk--i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--i was afraid when you was bleeding you would die--give my respects to all the boys and tell them how i am doing--i am doing well and every one here treats me as kind as they can--mr. brown is going to write to you sometime--i hope some day you will write to me, this letter is from your very true friend c---- w---- who you know as jack hunt. i send you mr. brown's card. send my letter to him. here was true eloquence; irresistible eloquence; and without a single grace or ornament to help it out. i have seldom been so deeply stirred by any piece of writing. the reader of it halted, all the way through, on a lame and broken voice; yet he had tried to fortify his feelings by several private readings of the letter before venturing into company with it. he was practising upon me to see if there was any hope of his being able to read the document to his prayer-meeting with anything like a decent command over his feelings. the result was not promising. however, he determined to risk it; and did. he got through tolerably well; but his audience broke down early, and stayed in that condition to the end. the fame of the letter spread through the town. a brother minister came and borrowed the manuscript, put it bodily into a sermon, preached the sermon to twelve hundred people on a sunday morning, and the letter drowned them in their own tears. then my friend put it into a sermon and went before his sunday morning congregation with it. it scored another triumph. the house wept as one individual. my friend went on summer vacation up into the fishing regions of our northern british neighbors, and carried this sermon with him, since he might possibly chance to need a sermon. he was asked to preach, one day. the little church was full. among the people present were the late dr. j. g. holland, the late mr. seymour of the 'new york times,' mr. page, the philanthropist and temperance advocate, and, i think, senator frye, of maine. the marvelous letter did its wonted work; all the people were moved, all the people wept; the tears flowed in a steady stream down dr. holland's cheeks, and nearly the same can be said with regard to all who were there. mr. page was so full of enthusiasm over the letter that he said he would not rest until he made pilgrimage to that prison, and had speech with the man who had been able to inspire a fellow-unfortunate to write so priceless a tract. ah, that unlucky page!--and another man. if they had only been in jericho, that letter would have rung through the world and stirred all the hearts of all the nations for a thousand years to come, and nobody might ever have found out that it was the confoundedest, brazenest, ingeniousest piece of fraud and humbuggery that was ever concocted to fool poor confiding mortals with! the letter was a pure swindle, and that is the truth. and take it by and large, it was without a compeer among swindles. it was perfect, it was rounded, symmetrical, complete, colossal! the reader learns it at this point; but we didn't learn it till some miles and weeks beyond this stage of the affair. my friend came back from the woods, and he and other clergymen and lay missionaries began once more to inundate audiences with their tears and the tears of said audiences; i begged hard for permission to print the letter in a magazine and tell the watery story of its triumphs; numbers of people got copies of the letter, with permission to circulate them in writing, but not in print; copies were sent to the sandwich islands and other far regions. charles dudley warner was at church, one day, when the worn letter was read and wept over. at the church door, afterward, he dropped a peculiarly cold iceberg down the clergyman's back with the question-- 'do you know that letter to be genuine?' it was the first suspicion that had ever been voiced; but it had that sickening effect which first-uttered suspicions against one's idol always have. some talk followed-- 'why--what should make you suspect that it isn't genuine?' 'nothing that i know of, except that it is too neat, and compact, and fluent, and nicely put together for an ignorant person, an unpractised hand. i think it was done by an educated man.' the literary artist had detected the literary machinery. if you will look at the letter now, you will detect it yourself--it is observable in every line. straightway the clergyman went off, with this seed of suspicion sprouting in him, and wrote to a minister residing in that town where williams had been jailed and converted; asked for light; and also asked if a person in the literary line (meaning me) might be allowed to print the letter and tell its history. he presently received this answer-- rev. ---- ---- my dear friend,--in regard to that 'convict's letter' there can be no doubt as to its genuineness. 'williams,' to whom it was written, lay in our jail and professed to have been converted, and rev. mr. ----, the chaplain, had great faith in the genuineness of the change--as much as one can have in any such case. the letter was sent to one of our ladies, who is a sunday-school teacher,--sent either by williams himself, or the chaplain of the state's prison, probably. she has been greatly annoyed in having so much publicity, lest it might seem a breach of confidence, or be an injury to williams. in regard to its publication, i can give no permission; though if the names and places were omitted, and especially if sent out of the country, i think you might take the responsibility and do it. it is a wonderful letter, which no christian genius, much less one unsanctified, could ever have written. as showing the work of grace in a human heart, and in a very degraded and wicked one, it proves its own origin and reproves our weak faith in its power to cope with any form of wickedness. 'mr. brown' of st. louis, some one said, was a hartford man. do all whom you send from hartford serve their master as well? p.s.--williams is still in the state's prison, serving out a long sentence--of nine years, i think. he has been sick and threatened with consumption, but i have not inquired after him lately. this lady that i speak of corresponds with him, i presume, and will be quite sure to look after him. this letter arrived a few days after it was written--and up went mr. williams's stock again. mr. warner's low-down suspicion was laid in the cold, cold grave, where it apparently belonged. it was a suspicion based upon mere internal evidence, anyway; and when you come to internal evidence, it's a big field and a game that two can play at: as witness this other internal evidence, discovered by the writer of the note above quoted, that 'it is a wonderful letter--which no christian genius, much less one unsanctified, could ever have written.' i had permission now to print--provided i suppressed names and places and sent my narrative out of the country. so i chose an australian magazine for vehicle, as being far enough out of the country, and set myself to work on my article. and the ministers set the pumps going again, with the letter to work the handles. but meantime brother page had been agitating. he had not visited the penitentiary, but he had sent a copy of the illustrious letter to the chaplain of that institution, and accompanied it with--apparently inquiries. he got an answer, dated four days later than that other brother's reassuring epistle; and before my article was complete, it wandered into my hands. the original is before me, now, and i here append it. it is pretty well loaded with internal evidence of the most solid description-- state's prison, chaplain's office, july , . dear bro. page,--herewith please find the letter kindly loaned me. i am afraid its genuineness cannot be established. it purports to be addressed to some prisoner here. no such letter ever came to a prisoner here. all letters received are carefully read by officers of the prison before they go into the hands of the convicts, and any such letter could not be forgotten. again, charles williams is not a christian man, but a dissolute, cunning prodigal, whose father is a minister of the gospel. his name is an assumed one. i am glad to have made your acquaintance. i am preparing a lecture upon life seen through prison bars, and should like to deliver the same in your vicinity. and so ended that little drama. my poor article went into the fire; for whereas the materials for it were now more abundant and infinitely richer than they had previously been, there were parties all around me, who, although longing for the publication before, were a unit for suppression at this stage and complexion of the game. they said: 'wait --the wound is too fresh, yet.' all the copies of the famous letter except mine disappeared suddenly; and from that time onward, the aforetime same old drought set in in the churches. as a rule, the town was on a spacious grin for a while, but there were places in it where the grin did not appear, and where it was dangerous to refer to the ex-convict's letter. a word of explanation. 'jack hunt,' the professed writer of the letter, was an imaginary person. the burglar williams--harvard graduate, son of a minister--wrote the letter himself, to himself: got it smuggled out of the prison; got it conveyed to persons who had supported and encouraged him in his conversion--where he knew two things would happen: the genuineness of the letter would not be doubted or inquired into; and the nub of it would be noticed, and would have valuable effect--the effect, indeed, of starting a movement to get mr. williams pardoned out of prison. that 'nub' is so ingeniously, so casually, flung in, and immediately left there in the tail of the letter, undwelt upon, that an indifferent reader would never suspect that it was the heart and core of the epistle, if he even took note of it at all, this is the 'nub'-- 'i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--i was afraid when you was bleeding you would die--give my respects,' etc. that is all there is of it--simply touch and go--no dwelling upon it. nevertheless it was intended for an eye that would be swift to see it; and it was meant to move a kind heart to try to effect the liberation of a poor reformed and purified fellow lying in the fell grip of consumption. when i for the first time heard that letter read, nine years ago, i felt that it was the most remarkable one i had ever encountered. and it so warmed me toward mr. brown of st. louis that i said that if ever i visited that city again, i would seek out that excellent man and kiss the hem of his garment if it was a new one. well, i visited st. louis, but i did not hunt for mr. brown; for, alas! the investigations of long ago had proved that the benevolent brown, like 'jack hunt,' was not a real person, but a sheer invention of that gifted rascal, williams-- burglar, harvard graduate, son of a clergyman. chapter my boyhood's home we took passage in one of the fast boats of the st. louis and st. paul packet company, and started up the river. when i, as a boy, first saw the mouth of the missouri river, it was twenty-two or twenty-three miles above st. louis, according to the estimate of pilots; the wear and tear of the banks have moved it down eight miles since then; and the pilots say that within five years the river will cut through and move the mouth down five miles more, which will bring it within ten miles of st. louis. about nightfall we passed the large and flourishing town of alton, illinois; and before daylight next morning the town of louisiana, missouri, a sleepy village in my day, but a brisk railway center now; however, all the towns out there are railway centers now. i could not clearly recognize the place. this seemed odd to me, for when i retired from the rebel army in ' i retired upon louisiana in good order; at least in good enough order for a person who had not yet learned how to retreat according to the rules of war, and had to trust to native genius. it seemed to me that for a first attempt at a retreat it was not badly done. i had done no advancing in all that campaign that was at all equal to it. there was a railway bridge across the river here well sprinkled with glowing lights, and a very beautiful sight it was. at seven in the morning we reached hannibal, missouri, where my boyhood was spent. i had had a glimpse of it fifteen years ago, and another glimpse six years earlier, but both were so brief that they hardly counted. the only notion of the town that remained in my mind was the memory of it as i had known it when i first quitted it twenty-nine years ago. that picture of it was still as clear and vivid to me as a photograph. i stepped ashore with the feeling of one who returns out of a dead-and-gone generation. i had a sort of realizing sense of what the bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out and look upon paris after years of captivity, and note how curiously the familiar and the strange were mixed together before them. i saw the new houses-- saw them plainly enough--but they did not affect the older picture in my mind, for through their solid bricks and mortar i saw the vanished houses, which had formerly stood there, with perfect distinctness. it was sunday morning, and everybody was abed yet. so i passed through the vacant streets, still seeing the town as it was, and not as it is, and recognizing and metaphorically shaking hands with a hundred familiar objects which no longer exist; and finally climbed holiday's hill to get a comprehensive view. the whole town lay spread out below me then, and i could mark and fix every locality, every detail. naturally, i was a good deal moved. i said, 'many of the people i once knew in this tranquil refuge of my childhood are now in heaven; some, i trust, are in the other place.' the things about me and before me made me feel like a boy again--convinced me that i was a boy again, and that i had simply been dreaming an unusually long dream; but my reflections spoiled all that; for they forced me to say, 'i see fifty old houses down yonder, into each of which i could enter and find either a man or a woman who was a baby or unborn when i noticed those houses last, or a grandmother who was a plump young bride at that time.' from this vantage ground the extensive view up and down the river, and wide over the wooded expanses of illinois, is very beautiful--one of the most beautiful on the mississippi, i think; which is a hazardous remark to make, for the eight hundred miles of river between st. louis and st. paul afford an unbroken succession of lovely pictures. it may be that my affection for the one in question biases my judgment in its favor; i cannot say as to that. no matter, it was satisfyingly beautiful to me, and it had this advantage over all the other friends whom i was about to greet again: it had suffered no change; it was as young and fresh and comely and gracious as ever it had been; whereas, the faces of the others would be old, and scarred with the campaigns of life, and marked with their griefs and defeats, and would give me no upliftings of spirit. an old gentleman, out on an early morning walk, came along, and we discussed the weather, and then drifted into other matters. i could not remember his face. he said he had been living here twenty-eight years. so he had come after my time, and i had never seen him before. i asked him various questions; first about a mate of mine in sunday school--what became of him? 'he graduated with honor in an eastern college, wandered off into the world somewhere, succeeded at nothing, passed out of knowledge and memory years ago, and is supposed to have gone to the dogs.' 'he was bright, and promised well when he was a boy.' 'yes, but the thing that happened is what became of it all.' i asked after another lad, altogether the brightest in our village school when i was a boy. 'he, too, was graduated with honors, from an eastern college; but life whipped him in every battle, straight along, and he died in one of the territories, years ago, a defeated man.' i asked after another of the bright boys. 'he is a success, always has been, always will be, i think.' i inquired after a young fellow who came to the town to study for one of the professions when i was a boy. 'he went at something else before he got through--went from medicine to law, or from law to medicine--then to some other new thing; went away for a year, came back with a young wife; fell to drinking, then to gambling behind the door; finally took his wife and two young children to her father's, and went off to mexico; went from bad to worse, and finally died there, without a cent to buy a shroud, and without a friend to attend the funeral.' 'pity, for he was the best-natured, and most cheery and hopeful young fellow that ever was.' i named another boy. 'oh, he is all right. lives here yet; has a wife and children, and is prospering.' same verdict concerning other boys. i named three school-girls. 'the first two live here, are married and have children; the other is long ago dead--never married.' i named, with emotion, one of my early sweethearts. 'she is all right. been married three times; buried two husbands, divorced from the third, and i hear she is getting ready to marry an old fellow out in colorado somewhere. she's got children scattered around here and there, most everywheres.' the answer to several other inquiries was brief and simple-- 'killed in the war.' i named another boy. 'well, now, his case is curious! there wasn't a human being in this town but knew that that boy was a perfect chucklehead; perfect dummy; just a stupid ass, as you may say. everybody knew it, and everybody said it. well, if that very boy isn't the first lawyer in the state of missouri to-day, i'm a democrat!' 'is that so?' 'it's actually so. i'm telling you the truth.' 'how do you account for it?' 'account for it? there ain't any accounting for it, except that if you send a damned fool to st. louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned fool they'll never find it out. there's one thing sure--if i had a damned fool i should know what to do with him: ship him to st. louis-- it's the noblest market in the world for that kind of property. well, when you come to look at it all around, and chew at it and think it over, don't it just bang anything you ever heard of?' 'well, yes, it does seem to. but don't you think maybe it was the hannibal people who were mistaken about the boy, and not the st. louis people' 'oh, nonsense! the people here have known him from the very cradle-- they knew him a hundred times better than the st. louis idiots could have known him. no, if you have got any damned fools that you want to realize on, take my advice--send them to st. louis.' i mentioned a great number of people whom i had formerly known. some were dead, some were gone away, some had prospered, some had come to naught; but as regarded a dozen or so of the lot, the answer was comforting: 'prosperous--live here yet--town littered with their children.' i asked about miss ----. died in the insane asylum three or four years ago--never was out of it from the time she went in; and was always suffering, too; never got a shred of her mind back.' if he spoke the truth, here was a heavy tragedy, indeed. thirty-six years in a madhouse, that some young fools might have some fun! i was a small boy, at the time; and i saw those giddy young ladies come tiptoeing into the room where miss ---- sat reading at midnight by a lamp. the girl at the head of the file wore a shroud and a doughface, she crept behind the victim, touched her on the shoulder, and she looked up and screamed, and then fell into convulsions. she did not recover from the fright, but went mad. in these days it seems incredible that people believed in ghosts so short a time ago. but they did. after asking after such other folk as i could call to mind, i finally inquired about myself: 'oh, he succeeded well enough--another case of damned fool. if they'd sent him to st. louis, he'd have succeeded sooner.' it was with much satisfaction that i recognized the wisdom of having told this candid gentleman, in the beginning, that my name was smith. chapter past and present being left to myself, up there, i went on picking out old houses in the distant town, and calling back their former inmates out of the moldy past. among them i presently recognized the house of the father of lem hackett (fictitious name). it carried me back more than a generation in a moment, and landed me in the midst of a time when the happenings of life were not the natural and logical results of great general laws, but of special orders, and were freighted with very precise and distinct purposes--partly punitive in intent, partly admonitory; and usually local in application. when i was a small boy, lem hackett was drowned--on a sunday. he fell out of an empty flat-boat, where he was playing. being loaded with sin, he went to the bottom like an anvil. he was the only boy in the village who slept that night. we others all lay awake, repenting. we had not needed the information, delivered from the pulpit that evening, that lem's was a case of special judgment--we knew that, already. there was a ferocious thunder-storm, that night, and it raged continuously until near dawn. the winds blew, the windows rattled, the rain swept along the roof in pelting sheets, and at the briefest of intervals the inky blackness of the night vanished, the houses over the way glared out white and blinding for a quivering instant, then the solid darkness shut down again and a splitting peal of thunder followed, which seemed to rend everything in the neighborhood to shreds and splinters. i sat up in bed quaking and shuddering, waiting for the destruction of the world, and expecting it. to me there was nothing strange or incongruous in heaven's making such an uproar about lem hackett. apparently it was the right and proper thing to do. not a doubt entered my mind that all the angels were grouped together, discussing this boy's case and observing the awful bombardment of our beggarly little village with satisfaction and approval. there was one thing which disturbed me in the most serious way; that was the thought that this centering of the celestial interest on our village could not fail to attract the attention of the observers to people among us who might otherwise have escaped notice for years. i felt that i was not only one of those people, but the very one most likely to be discovered. that discovery could have but one result: i should be in the fire with lem before the chill of the river had been fairly warmed out of him. i knew that this would be only just and fair. i was increasing the chances against myself all the time, by feeling a secret bitterness against lem for having attracted this fatal attention to me, but i could not help it--this sinful thought persisted in infesting my breast in spite of me. every time the lightning glared i caught my breath, and judged i was gone. in my terror and misery, i meanly began to suggest other boys, and mention acts of theirs which were wickeder than mine, and peculiarly needed punishment--and i tried to pretend to myself that i was simply doing this in a casual way, and without intent to divert the heavenly attention to them for the purpose of getting rid of it myself. with deep sagacity i put these mentions into the form of sorrowing recollections and left-handed sham- supplications that the sins of those boys might be allowed to pass unnoticed--'possibly they may repent.' 'it is true that jim smith broke a window and lied about it--but maybe he did not mean any harm. and although tom holmes says more bad words than any other boy in the village, he probably intends to repent--though he has never said he would. and whilst it is a fact that john jones did fish a little on sunday, once, he didn't really catch anything but only just one small useless mud-cat; and maybe that wouldn't have been so awful if he had thrown it back--as he says he did, but he didn't. pity but they would repent of these dreadful things--and maybe they will yet.' but while i was shamefully trying to draw attention to these poor chaps --who were doubtless directing the celestial attention to me at the same moment, though i never once suspected that--i had heedlessly left my candle burning. it was not a time to neglect even trifling precautions. there was no occasion to add anything to the facilities for attracting notice to me--so i put the light out. it was a long night to me, and perhaps the most distressful one i ever spent. i endured agonies of remorse for sins which i knew i had committed, and for others which i was not certain about, yet was sure that they had been set down against me in a book by an angel who was wiser than i and did not trust such important matters to memory. it struck me, by and by, that i had been making a most foolish and calamitous mistake, in one respect: doubtless i had not only made my own destruction sure by directing attention to those other boys, but had already accomplished theirs!--doubtless the lightning had stretched them all dead in their beds by this time! the anguish and the fright which this thought gave me made my previous sufferings seem trifling by comparison. things had become truly serious. i resolved to turn over a new leaf instantly; i also resolved to connect myself with the church the next day, if i survived to see its sun appear. i resolved to cease from sin in all its forms, and to lead a high and blameless life for ever after. i would be punctual at church and sunday-school; visit the sick; carry baskets of victuals to the poor (simply to fulfil the regulation conditions, although i knew we had none among us so poor but they would smash the basket over my head for my pains); i would instruct other boys in right ways, and take the resulting trouncings meekly; i would subsist entirely on tracts; i would invade the rum shop and warn the drunkard-- and finally, if i escaped the fate of those who early become too good to live, i would go for a missionary. the storm subsided toward daybreak, and i dozed gradually to sleep with a sense of obligation to lem hackett for going to eternal suffering in that abrupt way, and thus preventing a far more dreadful disaster--my own loss. but when i rose refreshed, by and by, and found that those other boys were still alive, i had a dim sense that perhaps the whole thing was a false alarm; that the entire turmoil had been on lem's account and nobody's else. the world looked so bright and safe that there did not seem to be any real occasion to turn over a new leaf. i was a little subdued, during that day, and perhaps the next; after that, my purpose of reforming slowly dropped out of my mind, and i had a peaceful, comfortable time again, until the next storm. that storm came about three weeks later; and it was the most unaccountable one, to me, that i had ever experienced; for on the afternoon of that day, 'dutchy' was drowned. dutchy belonged to our sunday-school. he was a german lad who did not know enough to come in out of the rain; but he was exasperatingly good, and had a prodigious memory. one sunday he made himself the envy of all the youth and the talk of all the admiring village, by reciting three thousand verses of scripture without missing a word; then he went off the very next day and got drowned. circumstances gave to his death a peculiar impressiveness. we were all bathing in a muddy creek which had a deep hole in it, and in this hole the coopers had sunk a pile of green hickory hoop poles to soak, some twelve feet under water. we were diving and 'seeing who could stay under longest.' we managed to remain down by holding on to the hoop poles. dutchy made such a poor success of it that he was hailed with laughter and derision every time his head appeared above water. at last he seemed hurt with the taunts, and begged us to stand still on the bank and be fair with him and give him an honest count--'be friendly and kind just this once, and not miscount for the sake of having the fun of laughing at him.' treacherous winks were exchanged, and all said 'all right, dutchy--go ahead, we'll play fair.' dutchy plunged in, but the boys, instead of beginning to count, followed the lead of one of their number and scampered to a range of blackberry bushes close by and hid behind it. they imagined dutchy's humiliation, when he should rise after a superhuman effort and find the place silent and vacant, nobody there to applaud. they were 'so full of laugh' with the idea, that they were continually exploding into muffled cackles. time swept on, and presently one who was peeping through the briers, said, with surprise-- 'why, he hasn't come up, yet!' the laughing stopped. 'boys, it 's a splendid dive,' said one. 'never mind that,' said another, 'the joke on him is all the better for it.' there was a remark or two more, and then a pause. talking ceased, and all began to peer through the vines. before long, the boys' faces began to look uneasy, then anxious, then terrified. still there was no movement of the placid water. hearts began to beat fast, and faces to turn pale. we all glided out, silently, and stood on the bank, our horrified eyes wandering back and forth from each other's countenances to the water. 'somebody must go down and see!' yes, that was plain; but nobody wanted that grisly task. 'draw straws!' so we did--with hands which shook so, that we hardly knew what we were about. the lot fell to me, and i went down. the water was so muddy i could not see anything, but i felt around among the hoop poles, and presently grasped a limp wrist which gave me no response--and if it had i should not have known it, i let it go with such a frightened suddenness. the boy had been caught among the hoop poles and entangled there, helplessly. i fled to the surface and told the awful news. some of us knew that if the boy were dragged out at once he might possibly be resuscitated, but we never thought of that. we did not think of anything; we did not know what to do, so we did nothing--except that the smaller lads cried, piteously, and we all struggled frantically into our clothes, putting on anybody's that came handy, and getting them wrong- side-out and upside-down, as a rule. then we scurried away and gave the alarm, but none of us went back to see the end of the tragedy. we had a more important thing to attend to: we all flew home, and lost not a moment in getting ready to lead a better life. the night presently closed down. then came on that tremendous and utterly unaccountable storm. i was perfectly dazed; i could not understand it. it seemed to me that there must be some mistake. the elements were turned loose, and they rattled and banged and blazed away in the most blind and frantic manner. all heart and hope went out of me, and the dismal thought kept floating through my brain, 'if a boy who knows three thousand verses by heart is not satisfactory, what chance is there for anybody else?' of course i never questioned for a moment that the storm was on dutchy's account, or that he or any other inconsequential animal was worthy of such a majestic demonstration from on high; the lesson of it was the only thing that troubled me; for it convinced me that if dutchy, with all his perfections, was not a delight, it would be vain for me to turn over a new leaf, for i must infallibly fall hopelessly short of that boy, no matter how hard i might try. nevertheless i did turn it over--a highly educated fear compelled me to do that--but succeeding days of cheerfulness and sunshine came bothering around, and within a month i had so drifted backward that again i was as lost and comfortable as ever. breakfast time approached while i mused these musings and called these ancient happenings back to mind; so i got me back into the present and went down the hill. on my way through town to the hotel, i saw the house which was my home when i was a boy. at present rates, the people who now occupy it are of no more value than i am; but in my time they would have been worth not less than five hundred dollars apiece. they are colored folk. after breakfast, i went out alone again, intending to hunt up some of the sunday-schools and see how this generation of pupils might compare with their progenitors who had sat with me in those places and had probably taken me as a model--though i do not remember as to that now. by the public square there had been in my day a shabby little brick church called the 'old ship of zion,' which i had attended as a sunday- school scholar; and i found the locality easily enough, but not the old church; it was gone, and a trig and rather hilarious new edifice was in its place. the pupils were better dressed and better looking than were those of my time; consequently they did not resemble their ancestors; and consequently there was nothing familiar to me in their faces. still, i contemplated them with a deep interest and a yearning wistfulness, and if i had been a girl i would have cried; for they were the offspring, and represented, and occupied the places, of boys and girls some of whom i had loved to love, and some of whom i had loved to hate, but all of whom were dear to me for the one reason or the other, so many years gone by--and, lord, where be they now! i was mightily stirred, and would have been grateful to be allowed to remain unmolested and look my fill; but a bald-summited superintendent who had been a tow-headed sunday-school mate of mine on that spot in the early ages, recognized me, and i talked a flutter of wild nonsense to those children to hide the thoughts which were in me, and which could not have been spoken without a betrayal of feeling that would have been recognized as out of character with me. making speeches without preparation is no gift of mine; and i was resolved to shirk any new opportunity, but in the next and larger sunday-school i found myself in the rear of the assemblage; so i was very willing to go on the platform a moment for the sake of getting a good look at the scholars. on the spur of the moment i could not recall any of the old idiotic talks which visitors used to insult me with when i was a pupil there; and i was sorry for this, since it would have given me time and excuse to dawdle there and take a long and satisfying look at what i feel at liberty to say was an array of fresh young comeliness not matchable in another sunday-school of the same size. as i talked merely to get a chance to inspect; and as i strung out the random rubbish solely to prolong the inspection, i judged it but decent to confess these low motives, and i did so. if the model boy was in either of these sunday-schools, i did not see him. the model boy of my time--we never had but the one--was perfect: perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie. this fellow's reproachlessness was a standing reproach to every lad in the village. he was the admiration of all the mothers, and the detestation of all their sons. i was told what became of him, but as it was a disappointment to me, i will not enter into details. he succeeded in life. chapter a vendetta and other things during my three days' stay in the town, i woke up every morning with the impression that i was a boy--for in my dreams the faces were all young again, and looked as they had looked in the old times--but i went to bed a hundred years old, every night--for meantime i had been seeing those faces as they are now. of course i suffered some surprises, along at first, before i had become adjusted to the changed state of things. i met young ladies who did not seem to have changed at all; but they turned out to be the daughters of the young ladies i had in mind--sometimes their grand-daughters. when you are told that a stranger of fifty is a grandmother, there is nothing surprising about it; but if, on the contrary, she is a person whom you knew as a little girl, it seems impossible. you say to yourself, 'how can a little girl be a grandmother.' it takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still, in that matter. i noticed that the greatest changes observable were with the women, not the men. i saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. these were good women; it is very wearing to be good. there was a saddler whom i wished to see; but he was gone. dead, these many years, they said. once or twice a day, the saddler used to go tearing down the street, putting on his coat as he went; and then everybody knew a steamboat was coming. everybody knew, also, that john stavely was not expecting anybody by the boat--or any freight, either; and stavely must have known that everybody knew this, still it made no difference to him; he liked to seem to himself to be expecting a hundred thousand tons of saddles by this boat, and so he went on all his life, enjoying being faithfully on hand to receive and receipt for those saddles, in case by any miracle they should come. a malicious quincy paper used always to refer to this town, in derision as 'stavely's landing.' stavely was one of my earliest admirations; i envied him his rush of imaginary business, and the display he was able to make of it, before strangers, as he went flying down the street struggling with his fluttering coat. but there was a carpenter who was my chiefest hero. he was a mighty liar, but i did not know that; i believed everything he said. he was a romantic, sentimental, melodramatic fraud, and his bearing impressed me with awe. i vividly remember the first time he took me into his confidence. he was planing a board, and every now and then he would pause and heave a deep sigh; and occasionally mutter broken sentences-- confused and not intelligible--but out of their midst an ejaculation sometimes escaped which made me shiver and did me good: one was, 'o god, it is his blood!' i sat on the tool-chest and humbly and shudderingly admired him; for i judged he was full of crime. at last he said in a low voice-- 'my little friend, can you keep a secret?' i eagerly said i could. 'a dark and dreadful one?' i satisfied him on that point. 'then i will tell you some passages in my history; for oh, i must relieve my burdened soul, or i shall die!' he cautioned me once more to be 'as silent as the grave;' then he told me he was a 'red-handed murderer.' he put down his plane, held his hands out before him, contemplated them sadly, and said-- 'look--with these hands i have taken the lives of thirty human beings!' the effect which this had upon me was an inspiration to him, and he turned himself loose upon his subject with interest and energy. he left generalizing, and went into details,--began with his first murder; described it, told what measures he had taken to avert suspicion; then passed to his second homicide, his third, his fourth, and so on. he had always done his murders with a bowie-knife, and he made all my hairs rise by suddenly snatching it out and showing it to me. at the end of this first seance i went home with six of his fearful secrets among my freightage, and found them a great help to my dreams, which had been sluggish for a while back. i sought him again and again, on my saturday holidays; in fact i spent the summer with him--all of it which was valuable to me. his fascinations never diminished, for he threw something fresh and stirring, in the way of horror, into each successive murder. he always gave names, dates, places--everything. this by and by enabled me to note two things: that he had killed his victims in every quarter of the globe, and that these victims were always named lynch. the destruction of the lynches went serenely on, saturday after saturday, until the original thirty had multiplied to sixty--and more to be heard from yet; then my curiosity got the better of my timidity, and i asked how it happened that these justly punished persons all bore the same name. my hero said he had never divulged that dark secret to any living being; but felt that he could trust me, and therefore he would lay bare before me the story of his sad and blighted life. he had loved one 'too fair for earth,' and she had reciprocated 'with all the sweet affection of her pure and noble nature.' but he had a rival, a 'base hireling' named archibald lynch, who said the girl should be his, or he would 'dye his hands in her heart's best blood.' the carpenter, 'innocent and happy in love's young dream,' gave no weight to the threat, but led his 'golden- haired darling to the altar,' and there, the two were made one; there also, just as the minister's hands were stretched in blessing over their heads, the fell deed was done--with a knife--and the bride fell a corpse at her husband's feet. and what did the husband do? he plucked forth that knife, and kneeling by the body of his lost one, swore to 'consecrate his life to the extermination of all the human scum that bear the hated name of lynch.' that was it. he had been hunting down the lynches and slaughtering them, from that day to this--twenty years. he had always used that same consecrated knife; with it he had murdered his long array of lynches, and with it he had left upon the forehead of each victim a peculiar mark--a cross, deeply incised. said he-- 'the cross of the mysterious avenger is known in europe, in america, in china, in siam, in the tropics, in the polar seas, in the deserts of asia, in all the earth. wherever in the uttermost parts of the globe, a lynch has penetrated, there has the mysterious cross been seen, and those who have seen it have shuddered and said, "it is his mark, he has been here." you have heard of the mysterious avenger--look upon him, for before you stands no less a person! but beware--breathe not a word to any soul. be silent, and wait. some morning this town will flock aghast to view a gory corpse; on its brow will be seen the awful sign, and men will tremble and whisper, "he has been here--it is the mysterious avenger's mark!" you will come here, but i shall have vanished; you will see me no more.' this ass had been reading the 'jibbenainosay,' no doubt, and had had his poor romantic head turned by it; but as i had not yet seen the book then, i took his inventions for truth, and did not suspect that he was a plagiarist. however, we had a lynch living in the town; and the more i reflected upon his impending doom, the more i could not sleep. it seemed my plain duty to save him, and a still plainer and more important duty to get some sleep for myself, so at last i ventured to go to mr. lynch and tell him what was about to happen to him--under strict secrecy. i advised him to 'fly,' and certainly expected him to do it. but he laughed at me; and he did not stop there; he led me down to the carpenter's shop, gave the carpenter a jeering and scornful lecture upon his silly pretensions, slapped his face, made him get down on his knees and beg--then went off and left me to contemplate the cheap and pitiful ruin of what, in my eyes, had so lately been a majestic and incomparable hero. the carpenter blustered, flourished his knife, and doomed this lynch in his usual volcanic style, the size of his fateful words undiminished; but it was all wasted upon me; he was a hero to me no longer, but only a poor, foolish, exposed humbug. i was ashamed of him, and ashamed of myself; i took no further interest in him, and never went to his shop any more. he was a heavy loss to me, for he was the greatest hero i had ever known. the fellow must have had some talent; for some of his imaginary murders were so vividly and dramatically described that i remember all their details yet. the people of hannibal are not more changed than is the town. it is no longer a village; it is a city, with a mayor, and a council, and water- works, and probably a debt. it has fifteen thousand people, is a thriving and energetic place, and is paved like the rest of the west and south--where a well-paved street and a good sidewalk are things so seldom seen, that one doubts them when he does see them. the customary half-dozen railways center in hannibal now, and there is a new depot which cost a hundred thousand dollars. in my time the town had no specialty, and no commercial grandeur; the daily packet usually landed a passenger and bought a catfish, and took away another passenger and a hatful of freight; but now a huge commerce in lumber has grown up and a large miscellaneous commerce is one of the results. a deal of money changes hands there now. bear creek--so called, perhaps, because it was always so particularly bare of bears--is hidden out of sight now, under islands and continents of piled lumber, and nobody but an expert can find it. i used to get drowned in it every summer regularly, and be drained out, and inflated and set going again by some chance enemy; but not enough of it is unoccupied now to drown a person in. it was a famous breeder of chills and fever in its day. i remember one summer when everybody in town had this disease at once. many chimneys were shaken down, and all the houses were so racked that the town had to be rebuilt. the chasm or gorge between lover's leap and the hill west of it is supposed by scientists to have been caused by glacial action. this is a mistake. there is an interesting cave a mile or two below hannibal, among the bluffs. i would have liked to revisit it, but had not time. in my time the person who then owned it turned it into a mausoleum for his daughter, aged fourteen. the body of this poor child was put into a copper cylinder filled with alcohol, and this was suspended in one of the dismal avenues of the cave. the top of the cylinder was removable; and it was said to be a common thing for the baser order of tourists to drag the dead face into view and examine it and comment upon it. === life on the mississippi by mark twain part . chapter a question of law the slaughter-house is gone from the mouth of bear creek and so is the small jail (or 'calaboose') which once stood in its neighborhood. a citizen asked, 'do you remember when jimmy finn, the town drunkard, was burned to death in the calaboose?' observe, now, how history becomes defiled, through lapse of time and the help of the bad memories of men. jimmy finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. when i say natural death, i mean it was a natural death for jimmy finn to die. the calaboose victim was not a citizen; he was a poor stranger, a harmless whiskey-sodden tramp. i know more about his case than anybody else; i knew too much of it, in that bygone day, to relish speaking of it. that tramp was wandering about the streets one chilly evening, with a pipe in his mouth, and begging for a match; he got neither matches nor courtesy; on the contrary, a troop of bad little boys followed him around and amused themselves with nagging and annoying him. i assisted; but at last, some appeal which the wayfarer made for forbearance, accompanying it with a pathetic reference to his forlorn and friendless condition, touched such sense of shame and remnant of right feeling as were left in me, and i went away and got him some matches, and then hied me home and to bed, heavily weighted as to conscience, and unbuoyant in spirit. an hour or two afterward, the man was arrested and locked up in the calaboose by the marshal--large name for a constable, but that was his title. at two in the morning, the church bells rang for fire, and everybody turned out, of course--i with the rest. the tramp had used his matches disastrously: he had set his straw bed on fire, and the oaken sheathing of the room had caught. when i reached the ground, two hundred men, women, and children stood massed together, transfixed with horror, and staring at the grated windows of the jail. behind the iron bars, and tugging frantically at them, and screaming for help, stood the tramp; he seemed like a black object set against a sun, so white and intense was the light at his back. that marshal could not be found, and he had the only key. a battering-ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder of its blows upon the door had so encouraging a sound that the spectators broke into wild cheering, and believed the merciful battle won. but it was not so. the timbers were too strong; they did not yield. it was said that the man's death-grip still held fast to the bars after he was dead; and that in this position the fires wrapped him about and consumed him. as to this, i do not know. what was seen after i recognized the face that was pleading through the bars was seen by others, not by me. i saw that face, so situated, every night for a long time afterward; and i believed myself as guilty of the man's death as if i had given him the matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them. i had not a doubt that i should be hanged if my connection with this tragedy were found out. the happenings and the impressions of that time are burnt into my memory, and the study of them entertains me as much now as they themselves distressed me then. if anybody spoke of that grisly matter, i was all ears in a moment, and alert to hear what might be said, for i was always dreading and expecting to find out that i was suspected; and so fine and so delicate was the perception of my guilty conscience, that it often detected suspicion in the most purposeless remarks, and in looks, gestures, glances of the eye which had no significance, but which sent me shivering away in a panic of fright, just the same. and how sick it made me when somebody dropped, howsoever carelessly and barren of intent, the remark that 'murder will out!' for a boy of ten years, i was carrying a pretty weighty cargo. all this time i was blessedly forgetting one thing--the fact that i was an inveterate talker in my sleep. but one night i awoke and found my bed-mate--my younger brother--sitting up in bed and contemplating me by the light of the moon. i said-- 'what is the matter?' 'you talk so much i can't sleep.' i came to a sitting posture in an instant, with my kidneys in my throat and my hair on end. 'what did i say. quick--out with it--what did i say?' 'nothing much.' 'it's a lie--you know everything.' 'everything about what?' 'you know well enough. about that.' 'about what?--i don't know what you are talking about. i think you are sick or crazy or something. but anyway, you're awake, and i'll get to sleep while i've got a chance.' he fell asleep and i lay there in a cold sweat, turning this new terror over in the whirling chaos which did duty as my mind. the burden of my thought was, how much did i divulge? how much does he know?--what a distress is this uncertainty! but by and by i evolved an idea--i would wake my brother and probe him with a supposititious case. i shook him up, and said-- 'suppose a man should come to you drunk--' 'this is foolish--i never get drunk.' 'i don't mean you, idiot--i mean the man. suppose a man should come to you drunk, and borrow a knife, or a tomahawk, or a pistol, and you forgot to tell him it was loaded, and--' 'how could you load a tomahawk?' 'i don't mean the tomahawk, and i didn't say the tomahawk; i said the pistol. now don't you keep breaking in that way, because this is serious. there's been a man killed.' 'what! in this town?' 'yes, in this town.' 'well, go on--i won't say a single word.' 'well, then, suppose you forgot to tell him to be careful with it, because it was loaded, and he went off and shot himself with that pistol--fooling with it, you know, and probably doing it by accident, being drunk. well, would it be murder?' 'no--suicide.' 'no, no. i don't mean his act, i mean yours: would you be a murderer for letting him have that pistol?' after deep thought came this answer-- 'well, i should think i was guilty of something--maybe murder--yes, probably murder, but i don't quite know.' this made me very uncomfortable. however, it was not a decisive verdict. i should have to set out the real case--there seemed to be no other way. but i would do it cautiously, and keep a watch out for suspicious effects. i said-- 'i was supposing a case, but i am coming to the real one now. do you know how the man came to be burned up in the calaboose?' 'no.' 'haven't you the least idea?' 'not the least.' 'wish you may die in your tracks if you have?' 'yes, wish i may die in my tracks.' 'well, the way of it was this. the man wanted some matches to light his pipe. a boy got him some. the man set fire to the calaboose with those very matches, and burnt himself up.' 'is that so?' 'yes, it is. now, is that boy a murderer, do you think?' 'let me see. the man was drunk?' 'yes, he was drunk.' 'very drunk?' 'yes.' 'and the boy knew it?' 'yes, he knew it.' there was a long pause. then came this heavy verdict-- 'if the man was drunk, and the boy knew it, the boy murdered that man. this is certain.' faint, sickening sensations crept along all the fibers of my body, and i seemed to know how a person feels who hears his death sentence pronounced from the bench. i waited to hear what my brother would say next. i believed i knew what it would be, and i was right. he said-- 'i know the boy.' i had nothing to say; so i said nothing. i simply shuddered. then he added-- 'yes, before you got half through telling about the thing, i knew perfectly well who the boy was; it was ben coontz!' i came out of my collapse as one who rises from the dead. i said, with admiration-- 'why, how in the world did you ever guess it?' 'you told it in your sleep.' i said to myself, 'how splendid that is! this is a habit which must be cultivated.' my brother rattled innocently on-- 'when you were talking in your sleep, you kept mumbling something about "matches," which i couldn't make anything out of; but just now, when you began to tell me about the man and the calaboose and the matches, i remembered that in your sleep you mentioned ben coontz two or three times; so i put this and that together, you see, and right away i knew it was ben that burnt that man up.' i praised his sagacity effusively. presently he asked-- 'are you going to give him up to the law?' 'no,' i said; 'i believe that this will be a lesson to him. i shall keep an eye on him, of course, for that is but right; but if he stops where he is and reforms, it shall never be said that i betrayed him.' 'how good you are!' 'well, i try to be. it is all a person can do in a world like this.' and now, my burden being shifted to other shoulders, my terrors soon faded away. the day before we left hannibal, a curious thing fell under my notice-- the surprising spread which longitudinal time undergoes there. i learned it from one of the most unostentatious of men--the colored coachman of a friend of mine, who lives three miles from town. he was to call for me at the park hotel at . p.m., and drive me out. but he missed it considerably--did not arrive till ten. he excused himself by saying-- 'de time is mos' an hour en a half slower in de country en what it is in de town; you'll be in plenty time, boss. sometimes we shoves out early for church, sunday, en fetches up dah right plum in de middle er de sermon. diffunce in de time. a body can't make no calculations 'bout it.' i had lost two hours and a half; but i had learned a fact worth four. chapter an archangel from st. louis northward there are all the enlivening signs of the presence of active, energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practical nineteenth-century populations. the people don't dream, they work. the happy result is manifest all around in the substantial outside aspect of things, and the suggestions of wholesome life and comfort that everywhere appear. quincy is a notable example--a brisk, handsome, well-ordered city; and now, as formerly, interested in art, letters, and other high things. but marion city is an exception. marion city has gone backwards in a most unaccountable way. this metropolis promised so well that the projectors tacked 'city' to its name in the very beginning, with full confidence; but it was bad prophecy. when i first saw marion city, thirty-five years ago, it contained one street, and nearly or quite six houses. it contains but one house now, and this one, in a state of ruin, is getting ready to follow the former five into the river. doubtless marion city was too near to quincy. it had another disadvantage: it was situated in a flat mud bottom, below high-water mark, whereas quincy stands high up on the slope of a hill. in the beginning quincy had the aspect and ways of a model new england town: and these she has yet: broad, clean streets, trim, neat dwellings and lawns, fine mansions, stately blocks of commercial buildings. and there are ample fair-grounds, a well kept park, and many attractive drives; library, reading-rooms, a couple of colleges, some handsome and costly churches, and a grand court-house, with grounds which occupy a square. the population of the city is thirty thousand. there are some large factories here, and manufacturing, of many sorts, is done on a great scale. la grange and canton are growing towns, but i missed alexandria; was told it was under water, but would come up to blow in the summer. keokuk was easily recognizable. i lived there in --an extraordinary year there in real-estate matters. the 'boom' was something wonderful. everybody bought, everybody sold--except widows and preachers; they always hold on; and when the tide ebbs, they get left. anything in the semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated, was salable, and at a figure which would still have been high if the ground had been sodded with greenbacks. the town has a population of fifteen thousand now, and is progressing with a healthy growth. it was night, and we could not see details, for which we were sorry, for keokuk has the reputation of being a beautiful city. it was a pleasant one to live in long ago, and doubtless has advanced, not retrograded, in that respect. a mighty work which was in progress there in my day is finished now. this is the canal over the rapids. it is eight miles long, three hundred feet wide, and is in no place less than six feet deep. its masonry is of the majestic kind which the war department usually deals in, and will endure like a roman aqueduct. the work cost four or five millions. after an hour or two spent with former friends, we started up the river again. keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasional loafing-place of that erratic genius, henry clay dean. i believe i never saw him but once; but he was much talked of when i lived there. this is what was said of him-- he began life poor and without education. but he educated himself--on the curbstones of keokuk. he would sit down on a curbstone with his book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce and the tramp of the passing crowds, and bury himself in his studies by the hour, never changing his position except to draw in his knees now and then to let a dray pass unobstructed; and when his book was finished, its contents, however abstruse, had been burnt into his memory, and were his permanent possession. in this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning, and had it pigeon-holed in his head where he could put his intellectual hand on it whenever it was wanted. his clothes differed in no respect from a 'wharf-rat's,' except that they were raggeder, more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and therefore more extravagantly picturesque), and several layers dirtier. nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself. he was an orator--by nature in the first place, and later by the training of experience and practice. when he was out on a canvass, his name was a lodestone which drew the farmers to his stump from fifty miles around. his theme was always politics. he used no notes, for a volcano does not need notes. in , a son of keokuk's late distinguished citizen, mr. claggett, gave me this incident concerning dean-- the war feeling was running high in keokuk (in ' ), and a great mass meeting was to be held on a certain day in the new athenaeum. a distinguished stranger was to address the house. after the building had been packed to its utmost capacity with sweltering folk of both sexes, the stage still remained vacant--the distinguished stranger had failed to connect. the crowd grew impatient, and by and by indignant and rebellious. about this time a distressed manager discovered dean on a curb-stone, explained the dilemma to him, took his book away from him, rushed him into the building the back way, and told him to make for the stage and save his country. presently a sudden silence fell upon the grumbling audience, and everybody's eyes sought a single point--the wide, empty, carpetless stage. a figure appeared there whose aspect was familiar to hardly a dozen persons present. it was the scarecrow dean--in foxy shoes, down at the heels; socks of odd colors, also 'down;' damaged trousers, relics of antiquity, and a world too short, exposing some inches of naked ankle; an unbuttoned vest, also too short, and exposing a zone of soiled and wrinkled linen between it and the waistband; shirt bosom open; long black handkerchief, wound round and round the neck like a bandage; bob- tailed blue coat, reaching down to the small of the back, with sleeves which left four inches of forearm unprotected; small, stiff-brimmed soldier-cap hung on a corner of the bump of--whichever bump it was. this figure moved gravely out upon the stage and, with sedate and measured step, down to the front, where it paused, and dreamily inspected the house, saying no word. the silence of surprise held its own for a moment, then was broken by a just audible ripple of merriment which swept the sea of faces like the wash of a wave. the figure remained as before, thoughtfully inspecting. another wave started-- laughter, this time. it was followed by another, then a third--this last one boisterous. and now the stranger stepped back one pace, took off his soldier-cap, tossed it into the wing, and began to speak, with deliberation, nobody listening, everybody laughing and whispering. the speaker talked on unembarrassed, and presently delivered a shot which went home, and silence and attention resulted. he followed it quick and fast, with other telling things; warmed to his work and began to pour his words out, instead of dripping them; grew hotter and hotter, and fell to discharging lightnings and thunder--and now the house began to break into applause, to which the speaker gave no heed, but went hammering straight on; unwound his black bandage and cast it away, still thundering; presently discarded the bob tailed coat and flung it aside, firing up higher and higher all the time; finally flung the vest after the coat; and then for an untimed period stood there, like another vesuvius, spouting smoke and flame, lava and ashes, raining pumice-stone and cinders, shaking the moral earth with intellectual crash upon crash, explosion upon explosion, while the mad multitude stood upon their feet in a solid body, answering back with a ceaseless hurricane of cheers, through a thrashing snowstorm of waving handkerchiefs. 'when dean came,' said claggett, 'the people thought he was an escaped lunatic; but when he went, they thought he was an escaped archangel.' burlington, home of the sparkling burdette, is another hill city; and also a beautiful one; unquestionably so; a fine and flourishing city, with a population of twenty-five thousand, and belted with busy factories of nearly every imaginable description. it was a very sober city, too--for the moment--for a most sobering bill was pending; a bill to forbid the manufacture, exportation, importation, purchase, sale, borrowing, lending, stealing, drinking, smelling, or possession, by conquest, inheritance, intent, accident, or otherwise, in the state of iowa, of each and every deleterious beverage known to the human race, except water. this measure was approved by all the rational people in the state; but not by the bench of judges. burlington has the progressive modern city's full equipment of devices for right and intelligent government; including a paid fire department, a thing which the great city of new orleans is without, but still employs that relic of antiquity, the independent system. in burlington, as in all these upper-river towns, one breathes a go-ahead atmosphere which tastes good in the nostrils. an opera-house has lately been built there which is in strong contrast with the shabby dens which usually do duty as theaters in cities of burlington's size. we had not time to go ashore in muscatine, but had a daylight view of it from the boat. i lived there awhile, many years ago, but the place, now, had a rather unfamiliar look; so i suppose it has clear outgrown the town which i used to know. in fact, i know it has; for i remember it as a small place--which it isn't now. but i remember it best for a lunatic who caught me out in the fields, one sunday, and extracted a butcher-knife from his boot and proposed to carve me up with it, unless i acknowledged him to be the only son of the devil. i tried to compromise on an acknowledgment that he was the only member of the family i had met; but that did not satisfy him; he wouldn't have any half-measures; i must say he was the sole and only son of the devil--he whetted his knife on his boot. it did not seem worth while to make trouble about a little thing like that; so i swung round to his view of the matter and saved my skin whole. shortly afterward, he went to visit his father; and as he has not turned up since, i trust he is there yet. and i remember muscatine--still more pleasantly--for its summer sunsets. i have never seen any, on either side of the ocean, that equaled them. they used the broad smooth river as a canvas, and painted on it every imaginable dream of color, from the mottled daintinesses and delicacies of the opal, all the way up, through cumulative intensities, to blinding purple and crimson conflagrations which were enchanting to the eye, but sharply tried it at the same time. all the upper mississippi region has these extraordinary sunsets as a familiar spectacle. it is the true sunset land: i am sure no other country can show so good a right to the name. the sunrises are also said to be exceedingly fine. i do not know. chapter on the upper river the big towns drop in, thick and fast, now: and between stretch processions of thrifty farms, not desolate solitude. hour by hour, the boat plows deeper and deeper into the great and populous north-west; and with each successive section of it which is revealed, one's surprise and respect gather emphasis and increase. such a people, and such achievements as theirs, compel homage. this is an independent race who think for themselves, and who are competent to do it, because they are educated and enlightened; they read, they keep abreast of the best and newest thought, they fortify every weak place in their land with a school, a college, a library, and a newspaper; and they live under law. solicitude for the future of a race like this is not in order. this region is new; so new that it may be said to be still in its babyhood. by what it has accomplished while still teething, one may forecast what marvels it will do in the strength of its maturity. it is so new that the foreign tourist has not heard of it yet; and has not visited it. for sixty years, the foreign tourist has steamed up and down the river between st. louis and new orleans, and then gone home and written his book, believing he had seen all of the river that was worth seeing or that had anything to see. in not six of all these books is there mention of these upper river towns--for the reason that the five or six tourists who penetrated this region did it before these towns were projected. the latest tourist of them all ( ) made the same old regulation trip--he had not heard that there was anything north of st. louis. yet there was. there was this amazing region, bristling with great towns, projected day before yesterday, so to speak, and built next morning. a score of them number from fifteen hundred to five thousand people. then we have muscatine, ten thousand; winona, ten thousand; moline, ten thousand; rock island, twelve thousand; la crosse, twelve thousand; burlington, twenty-five thousand; dubuque, twenty-five thousand; davenport, thirty thousand; st. paul, fifty-eight thousand, minneapolis, sixty thousand and upward. the foreign tourist has never heard of these; there is no note of them in his books. they have sprung up in the night, while he slept. so new is this region, that i, who am comparatively young, am yet older than it is. when i was born, st. paul had a population of three persons, minneapolis had just a third as many. the then population of minneapolis died two years ago; and when he died he had seen himself undergo an increase, in forty years, of fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine persons. he had a frog's fertility. i must explain that the figures set down above, as the population of st. paul and minneapolis, are several months old. these towns are far larger now. in fact, i have just seen a newspaper estimate which gives the former seventy-one thousand, and the latter seventy-eight thousand. this book will not reach the public for six or seven months yet; none of the figures will be worth much then. we had a glimpse of davenport, which is another beautiful city, crowning a hill--a phrase which applies to all these towns; for they are all comely, all well built, clean, orderly, pleasant to the eye, and cheering to the spirit; and they are all situated upon hills. therefore we will give that phrase a rest. the indians have a tradition that marquette and joliet camped where davenport now stands, in . the next white man who camped there, did it about a hundred and seventy years later--in . davenport has gathered its thirty thousand people within the past thirty years. she sends more children to her schools now, than her whole population numbered twenty-three years ago. she has the usual upper river quota of factories, newspapers, and institutions of learning; she has telephones, local telegraphs, an electric alarm, and an admirable paid fire department, consisting of six hook and ladder companies, four steam fire engines, and thirty churches. davenport is the official residence of two bishops--episcopal and catholic. opposite davenport is the flourishing town of rock island, which lies at the foot of the upper rapids. a great railroad bridge connects the two towns--one of the thirteen which fret the mississippi and the pilots, between st. louis and st. paul. the charming island of rock island, three miles long and half a mile wide, belongs to the united states, and the government has turned it into a wonderful park, enhancing its natural attractions by art, and threading its fine forests with many miles of drives. near the center of the island one catches glimpses, through the trees, of ten vast stone four-story buildings, each of which covers an acre of ground. these are the government workshops; for the rock island establishment is a national armory and arsenal. we move up the river--always through enchanting scenery, there being no other kind on the upper mississippi--and pass moline, a center of vast manufacturing industries; and clinton and lyons, great lumber centers; and presently reach dubuque, which is situated in a rich mineral region. the lead mines are very productive, and of wide extent. dubuque has a great number of manufacturing establishments; among them a plow factory which has for customers all christendom in general. at least so i was told by an agent of the concern who was on the boat. he said-- 'you show me any country under the sun where they really know how to plow, and if i don't show you our mark on the plow they use, i'll eat that plow; and i won't ask for any woostershyre sauce to flavor it up with, either.' all this part of the river is rich in indian history and traditions. black hawk's was once a puissant name hereabouts; as was keokuk's, further down. a few miles below dubuque is the tete de mort--death's- head rock, or bluff--to the top of which the french drove a band of indians, in early times, and cooped them up there, with death for a certainty, and only the manner of it matter of choice--to starve, or jump off and kill themselves. black hawk adopted the ways of the white people, toward the end of his life; and when he died he was buried, near des moines, in christian fashion, modified by indian custom; that is to say, clothed in a christian military uniform, and with a christian cane in his hand, but deposited in the grave in a sitting posture. formerly, a horse had always been buried with a chief. the substitution of the cane shows that black hawk's haughty nature was really humbled, and he expected to walk when he got over. we noticed that above dubuque the water of the mississippi was olive- green--rich and beautiful and semi-transparent, with the sun on it. of course the water was nowhere as clear or of as fine a complexion as it is in some other seasons of the year; for now it was at flood stage, and therefore dimmed and blurred by the mud manufactured from caving banks. the majestic bluffs that overlook the river, along through this region, charm one with the grace and variety of their forms, and the soft beauty of their adornment. the steep verdant slope, whose base is at the water's edge is topped by a lofty rampart of broken, turreted rocks, which are exquisitely rich and mellow in color--mainly dark browns and dull greens, but splashed with other tints. and then you have the shining river, winding here and there and yonder, its sweep interrupted at intervals by clusters of wooded islands threaded by silver channels; and you have glimpses of distant villages, asleep upon capes; and of stealthy rafts slipping along in the shade of the forest walls; and of white steamers vanishing around remote points. and it is all as tranquil and reposeful as dreamland, and has nothing this-worldly about it-- nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon. until the unholy train comes tearing along--which it presently does, ripping the sacred solitude to rags and tatters with its devil's warwhoop and the roar and thunder of its rushing wheels--and straightway you are back in this world, and with one of its frets ready to hand for your entertainment: for you remember that this is the very road whose stock always goes down after you buy it, and always goes up again as soon as you sell it. it makes me shudder to this day, to remember that i once came near not getting rid of my stock at all. it must be an awful thing to have a railroad left on your hands. the locomotive is in sight from the deck of the steamboat almost the whole way from st. louis to st. paul--eight hundred miles. these railroads have made havoc with the steamboat commerce. the clerk of our boat was a steamboat clerk before these roads were built. in that day the influx of population was so great, and the freight business so heavy, that the boats were not able to keep up with the demands made upon their carrying capacity; consequently the captains were very independent and airy--pretty 'biggity,' as uncle remus would say. the clerk nut-shelled the contrast between the former time and the present, thus-- 'boat used to land--captain on hurricane roof--mighty stiff and straight--iron ramrod for a spine--kid gloves, plug tile, hair parted behind--man on shore takes off hat and says-- '"got twenty-eight tons of wheat, cap'n--be great favor if you can take them." 'captain says-- '"'ll take two of them"--and don't even condescend to look at him. 'but nowadays the captain takes off his old slouch, and smiles all the way around to the back of his ears, and gets off a bow which he hasn't got any ramrod to interfere with, and says-- '"glad to see you, smith, glad to see you--you're looking well--haven't seen you looking so well for years--what you got for us?" '"nuth'n", says smith; and keeps his hat on, and just turns his back and goes to talking with somebody else. 'oh, yes, eight years ago, the captain was on top; but it's smith's turn now. eight years ago a boat used to go up the river with every stateroom full, and people piled five and six deep on the cabin floor; and a solid deck-load of immigrants and harvesters down below, into the bargain. to get a first-class stateroom, you'd got to prove sixteen quarterings of nobility and four hundred years of descent, or be personally acquainted with the nigger that blacked the captain's boots. but it's all changed now; plenty staterooms above, no harvesters below--there's a patent self-binder now, and they don't have harvesters any more; they've gone where the woodbine twineth--and they didn't go by steamboat, either; went by the train.' up in this region we met massed acres of lumber rafts coming down--but not floating leisurely along, in the old-fashioned way, manned with joyous and reckless crews of fiddling, song-singing, whiskey-drinking, breakdown-dancing rapscallions; no, the whole thing was shoved swiftly along by a powerful stern-wheeler, modern fashion, and the small crews were quiet, orderly men, of a sedate business aspect, with not a suggestion of romance about them anywhere. along here, somewhere, on a black night, we ran some exceedingly narrow and intricate island-chutes by aid of the electric light. behind was solid blackness--a crackless bank of it; ahead, a narrow elbow of water, curving between dense walls of foliage that almost touched our bows on both sides; and here every individual leaf, and every individual ripple stood out in its natural color, and flooded with a glare as of noonday intensified. the effect was strange, and fine, and very striking. we passed prairie du chien, another of father marquette's camping- places; and after some hours of progress through varied and beautiful scenery, reached la crosse. here is a town of twelve or thirteen thousand population, with electric lighted streets, and with blocks of buildings which are stately enough, and also architecturally fine enough, to command respect in any city. it is a choice town, and we made satisfactory use of the hour allowed us, in roaming it over, though the weather was rainier than necessary. chapter legends and scenery we added several passengers to our list, at la crosse; among others an old gentleman who had come to this north-western region with the early settlers, and was familiar with every part of it. pardonably proud of it, too. he said-- 'you'll find scenery between here and st. paul that can give the hudson points. you'll have the queen's bluff--seven hundred feet high, and just as imposing a spectacle as you can find anywheres; and trempeleau island, which isn't like any other island in america, i believe, for it is a gigantic mountain, with precipitous sides, and is full of indian traditions, and used to be full of rattlesnakes; if you catch the sun just right there, you will have a picture that will stay with you. and above winona you'll have lovely prairies; and then come the thousand islands, too beautiful for anything; green? why you never saw foliage so green, nor packed so thick; it's like a thousand plush cushions afloat on a looking-glass--when the water 's still; and then the monstrous bluffs on both sides of the river--ragged, rugged, dark-complected--just the frame that's wanted; you always want a strong frame, you know, to throw up the nice points of a delicate picture and make them stand out.' the old gentleman also told us a touching indian legend or two--but not very powerful ones. after this excursion into history, he came back to the scenery, and described it, detail by detail, from the thousand islands to st. paul; naming its names with such facility, tripping along his theme with such nimble and confident ease, slamming in a three-ton word, here and there, with such a complacent air of 't isn't-anything,-i-can-do-it-any-time-i- want-to, and letting off fine surprises of lurid eloquence at such judicious intervals, that i presently began to suspect-- but no matter what i began to suspect. hear him-- 'ten miles above winona we come to fountain city, nestling sweetly at the feet of cliffs that lift their awful fronts, jovelike, toward the blue depths of heaven, bathing them in virgin atmospheres that have known no other contact save that of angels' wings. 'and next we glide through silver waters, amid lovely and stupendous aspects of nature that attune our hearts to adoring admiration, about twelve miles, and strike mount vernon, six hundred feet high, with romantic ruins of a once first-class hotel perched far among the cloud shadows that mottle its dizzy heights--sole remnant of once-flourishing mount vernon, town of early days, now desolate and utterly deserted. 'and so we move on. past chimney rock we fly--noble shaft of six hundred feet; then just before landing at minnieska our attention is attracted by a most striking promontory rising over five hundred feet-- the ideal mountain pyramid. its conic shape--thickly-wooded surface girding its sides, and its apex like that of a cone, cause the spectator to wonder at nature's workings. from its dizzy heights superb views of the forests, streams, bluffs, hills and dales below and beyond for miles are brought within its focus. what grander river scenery can be conceived, as we gaze upon this enchanting landscape, from the uppermost point of these bluffs upon the valleys below? the primeval wildness and awful loneliness of these sublime creations of nature and nature's god, excite feelings of unbounded admiration, and the recollection of which can never be effaced from the memory, as we view them in any direction. 'next we have the lion's head and the lioness's head, carved by nature's hand, to adorn and dominate the beauteous stream; and then anon the river widens, and a most charming and magnificent view of the valley before us suddenly bursts upon our vision; rugged hills, clad with verdant forests from summit to base, level prairie lands, holding in their lap the beautiful wabasha, city of the healing waters, puissant foe of bright's disease, and that grandest conception of nature's works, incomparable lake pepin--these constitute a picture whereon the tourist's eye may gaze uncounted hours, with rapture unappeased and unappeasable. 'and so we glide along; in due time encountering those majestic domes, the mighty sugar loaf, and the sublime maiden's rock--which latter, romantic superstition has invested with a voice; and oft-times as the birch canoe glides near, at twilight, the dusky paddler fancies he hears the soft sweet music of the long-departed winona, darling of indian song and story. 'then frontenac looms upon our vision, delightful resort of jaded summer tourists; then progressive red wing; and diamond bluff, impressive and preponderous in its lone sublimity; then prescott and the st. croix; and anon we see bursting upon us the domes and steeples of st. paul, giant young chief of the north, marching with seven-league stride in the van of progress, banner-bearer of the highest and newest civilization, carving his beneficent way with the tomahawk of commercial enterprise, sounding the warwhoop of christian culture, tearing off the reeking scalp of sloth and superstition to plant there the steam-plow and the school-house--ever in his front stretch arid lawlessness, ignorance, crime, despair; ever in his wake bloom the jail, the gallows, and the pulpit; and ever--' 'have you ever traveled with a panorama?' 'i have formerly served in that capacity.' my suspicion was confirmed. 'do you still travel with it?' 'no, she is laid up till the fall season opens. i am helping now to work up the materials for a tourist's guide which the st. louis and st. paul packet company are going to issue this summer for the benefit of travelers who go by that line.' 'when you were talking of maiden's rock, you spoke of the long-departed winona, darling of indian song and story. is she the maiden of the rock?--and are the two connected by legend?' 'yes, and a very tragic and painful one. perhaps the most celebrated, as well as the most pathetic, of all the legends of the mississippi.' we asked him to tell it. he dropped out of his conversational vein and back into his lecture-gait without an effort, and rolled on as follows-- 'a little distance above lake city is a famous point known as maiden's rock, which is not only a picturesque spot, but is full of romantic interest from the event which gave it its name, not many years ago this locality was a favorite resort for the sioux indians on account of the fine fishing and hunting to be had there, and large numbers of them were always to be found in this locality. among the families which used to resort here, was one belonging to the tribe of wabasha. we-no-na (first-born) was the name of a maiden who had plighted her troth to a lover belonging to the same band. but her stern parents had promised her hand to another, a famous warrior, and insisted on her wedding him. the day was fixed by her parents, to her great grief. she appeared to accede to the proposal and accompany them to the rock, for the purpose of gathering flowers for the feast. on reaching the rock, we-no-na ran to its summit and standing on its edge upbraided her parents who were below, for their cruelty, and then singing a death-dirge, threw herself from the precipice and dashed them in pieces on the rock below.' 'dashed who in pieces--her parents?' 'yes.' 'well, it certainly was a tragic business, as you say. and moreover, there is a startling kind of dramatic surprise about it which i was not looking for. it is a distinct improvement upon the threadbare form of indian legend. there are fifty lover's leaps along the mississippi from whose summit disappointed indian girls have jumped, but this is the only jump in the lot hat turned out in the right and satisfactory way. what became of winona?' 'she was a good deal jarred up and jolted: but she got herself together and disappeared before the coroner reached the fatal spot; and 'tis said she sought and married her true love, and wandered with him to some distant clime, where she lived happy ever after, her gentle spirit mellowed and chastened by the romantic incident which had so early deprived her of the sweet guidance of a mother's love and a father's protecting arm, and thrown her, all unfriended, upon the cold charity of a censorious world.' i was glad to hear the lecturer's description of the scenery, for it assisted my appreciation of what i saw of it, and enabled me to imagine such of it as we lost by the intrusion of night. as the lecturer remarked, this whole region is blanketed with indian tales and traditions. but i reminded him that people usually merely mention this fact--doing it in a way to make a body's mouth water--and judiciously stopped there. why? because the impression left, was that these tales were full of incident and imagination--a pleasant impression which would be promptly dissipated if the tales were told. i showed him a lot of this sort of literature which i had been collecting, and he confessed that it was poor stuff, exceedingly sorry rubbish; and i ventured to add that the legends which he had himself told us were of this character, with the single exception of the admirable story of winona. he granted these facts, but said that if i would hunt up mr. schoolcraft's book, published near fifty years ago, and now doubtless out of print, i would find some indian inventions in it that were very far from being barren of incident and imagination; that the tales in hiawatha were of this sort, and they came from schoolcraft's book; and that there were others in the same book which mr. longfellow could have turned into verse with good effect. for instance, there was the legend of 'the undying head.' he could not tell it, for many of the details had grown dim in his memory; but he would recommend me to find it and enlarge my respect for the indian imagination. he said that this tale, and most of the others in the book, were current among the indians along this part of the mississippi when he first came here; and that the contributors to schoolcraft's book had got them directly from indian lips, and had written them down with strict exactness, and without embellishments of their own. i have found the book. the lecturer was right. there are several legends in it which confirm what he said. i will offer two of them-- 'the undying head,' and 'peboan and seegwun, an allegory of the seasons.' the latter is used in hiawatha; but it is worth reading in the original form, if only that one may see how effective a genuine poem can be without the helps and graces of poetic measure and rhythm-- peboan and seegwun. an old man was sitting alone in his lodge, by the side of a frozen stream. it was the close of winter, and his fire was almost out, he appeared very old and very desolate. his locks were white with age, and he trembled in every joint. day after day passed in solitude, and he heard nothing but the sound of the tempest, sweeping before it the new- fallen snow. one day, as his fire was just dying, a handsome young man approached and entered his dwelling. his cheeks were red with the blood of youth, his eyes sparkled with animation, and a smile played upon his lips. he walked with a light and quick step. his forehead was bound with a wreath of sweet grass, in place of a warrior's frontlet, and he carried a bunch of flowers in his hand. 'ah, my son,' said the old man, 'i am happy to see you. come in. come and tell me of your adventures, and what strange lands you have been to see. let us pass the night together. i will tell you of my prowess and exploits, and what i can perform. you shall do the same, and we will amuse ourselves.' he then drew from his sack a curiously wrought antique pipe, and having filled it with tobacco, rendered mild by a mixture of certain leaves, handed it to his guest. when this ceremony was concluded they began to speak. 'i blow my breath,' said the old man, 'and the stream stands still. the water becomes stiff and hard as clear stone.' 'i breathe,' said the young man, 'and flowers spring up over the plain.' 'i shake my locks,' retorted the old man, 'and snow covers the land. the leaves fall from the trees at my command, and my breath blows them away. the birds get up from the water, and fly to a distant land. the animals hide themselves from my breath, and the very ground becomes as hard as flint.' 'i shake my ringlets,' rejoined the young man, 'and warm showers of soft rain fall upon the earth. the plants lift up their heads out of the earth, like the eyes of children glistening with delight. my voice recalls the birds. the warmth of my breath unlocks the streams. music fills the groves wherever i walk, and all nature rejoices.' at length the sun began to rise. a gentle warmth came over the place. the tongue of the old man became silent. the robin and bluebird began to sing on the top of the lodge. the stream began to murmur by the door, and the fragrance of growing herbs and flowers came softly on the vernal breeze. daylight fully revealed to the young man the character of his entertainer. when he looked upon him, he had the icy visage of peboan.{footnote [winter.]} streams began to flow from his eyes. as the sun increased, he grew less and less in stature, and anon had melted completely away. nothing remained on the place of his lodge-fire but the miskodeed,{footnote [the trailing arbutus.]} a small white flower, with a pink border, which is one of the earliest species of northern plants. 'the undying head' is a rather long tale, but it makes up in weird conceits, fairy-tale prodigies, variety of incident, and energy of movement, for what it lacks in brevity.{footnote [see appendix d.]} chapter speculations and conclusions we reached st. paul, at the head of navigation of the mississippi, and there our voyage of two thousand miles from new orleans ended. it is about a ten-day trip by steamer. it can probably be done quicker by rail. i judge so because i know that one may go by rail from st. louis to hannibal--a distance of at least a hundred and twenty miles--in seven hours. this is better than walking; unless one is in a hurry. the season being far advanced when we were in new orleans, the roses and magnolia blossoms were falling; but here in st. paul it was the snow, in new orleans we had caught an occasional withering breath from over a crater, apparently; here in st. paul we caught a frequent benumbing one from over a glacier, apparently. but i wander from my theme. st. paul is a wonderful town. it is put together in solid blocks of honest brick and stone, and has the air of intending to stay. its post-office was established thirty-six years ago; and by and by, when the postmaster received a letter, he carried it to washington, horseback, to inquire what was to be done with it. such is the legend. two frame houses were built that year, and several persons were added to the population. a recent number of the leading st. paul paper, the 'pioneer press,' gives some statistics which furnish a vivid contrast to that old state of things, to wit: population, autumn of the present year ( ), , ; number of letters handled, first half of the year, , , ; number of houses built during three- quarters of the year, ; their cost, $ , , . the increase of letters over the corresponding six months of last year was fifty per cent. last year the new buildings added to the city cost above $ , , . st. paul's strength lies in her commerce--i mean his commerce. he is a manufacturing city, of course--all the cities of that region are--but he is peculiarly strong in the matter of commerce. last year his jobbing trade amounted to upwards of $ , , . he has a custom-house, and is building a costly capitol to replace the one recently burned--for he is the capital of the state. he has churches without end; and not the cheap poor kind, but the kind that the rich protestant puts up, the kind that the poor irish 'hired-girl' delights to erect. what a passion for building majestic churches the irish hired-girl has. it is a fine thing for our architecture but too often we enjoy her stately fanes without giving her a grateful thought. in fact, instead of reflecting that 'every brick and every stone in this beautiful edifice represents an ache or a pain, and a handful of sweat, and hours of heavy fatigue, contributed by the back and forehead and bones of poverty,' it is our habit to forget these things entirely, and merely glorify the mighty temple itself, without vouchsafing one praiseful thought to its humble builder, whose rich heart and withered purse it symbolizes. this is a land of libraries and schools. st. paul has three public libraries, and they contain, in the aggregate, some forty thousand books. he has one hundred and sixteen school-houses, and pays out more than seventy thousand dollars a year in teachers' salaries. there is an unusually fine railway station; so large is it, in fact, that it seemed somewhat overdone, in the matter of size, at first; but at the end of a few months it was perceived that the mistake was distinctly the other way. the error is to be corrected. the town stands on high ground; it is about seven hundred feet above the sea level. it is so high that a wide view of river and lowland is offered from its streets. it is a very wonderful town indeed, and is not finished yet. all the streets are obstructed with building material, and this is being compacted into houses as fast as possible, to make room for more--for other people are anxious to build, as soon as they can get the use of the streets to pile up their bricks and stuff in. how solemn and beautiful is the thought, that the earliest pioneer of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the sabbath-school, never the missionary--but always whiskey! such is the case. look history over; you will see. the missionary comes after the whiskey--i mean he arrives after the whiskey has arrived; next comes the poor immigrant, with ax and hoe and rifle; next, the trader; next, the miscellaneous rush; next, the gambler, the desperado, the highwayman, and all their kindred in sin of both sexes; and next, the smart chap who has bought up an old grant that covers all the land; this brings the lawyer tribe; the vigilance committee brings the undertaker. all these interests bring the newspaper; the newspaper starts up politics and a railroad; all hands turn to and build a church and a jail--and behold, civilization is established for ever in the land. but whiskey, you see, was the van- leader in this beneficent work. it always is. it was like a foreigner-- and excusable in a foreigner--to be ignorant of this great truth, and wander off into astronomy to borrow a symbol. but if he had been conversant with the facts, he would have said-- westward the jug of empire takes its way. this great van-leader arrived upon the ground which st. paul now occupies, in june . yes, at that date, pierre parrant, a canadian, built the first cabin, uncorked his jug, and began to sell whiskey to the indians. the result is before us. all that i have said of the newness, briskness, swift progress, wealth, intelligence, fine and substantial architecture, and general slash and go, and energy of st. paul, will apply to his near neighbor, minneapolis--with the addition that the latter is the bigger of the two cities. these extraordinary towns were ten miles apart, a few months ago, but were growing so fast that they may possibly be joined now, and getting along under a single mayor. at any rate, within five years from now there will be at least such a substantial ligament of buildings stretching between them and uniting them that a stranger will not be able to tell where the one siamese twin leaves off and the other begins. combined, they will then number a population of two hundred and fifty thousand, if they continue to grow as they are now growing. thus, this center of population at the head of mississippi navigation, will then begin a rivalry as to numbers, with that center of population at the foot of it--new orleans. minneapolis is situated at the falls of st. anthony, which stretch across the river, fifteen hundred feet, and have a fall of eighty-two feet--a waterpower which, by art, has been made of inestimable value, business-wise, though somewhat to the damage of the falls as a spectacle, or as a background against which to get your photograph taken. thirty flouring-mills turn out two million barrels of the very choicest of flour every year; twenty sawmills produce two hundred million feet of lumber annually; then there are woolen mills, cotton mills, paper and oil mills; and sash, nail, furniture, barrel, and other factories, without number, so to speak. the great flouring-mills here and at st. paul use the 'new process' and mash the wheat by rolling, instead of grinding it. sixteen railroads meet in minneapolis, and sixty-five passenger trains arrive and depart daily. in this place, as in st. paul, journalism thrives. here there are three great dailies, ten weeklies, and three monthlies. there is a university, with four hundred students--and, better still, its good efforts are not confined to enlightening the one sex. there are sixteen public schools, with buildings which cost $ , ; there are six thousand pupils and one hundred and twenty-eight teachers. there are also seventy churches existing, and a lot more projected. the banks aggregate a capital of $ , , , and the wholesale jobbing trade of the town amounts to $ , , a year. near st. paul and minneapolis are several points of interest--fort snelling, a fortress occupying a river-bluff a hundred feet high; the falls of minnehaha, white-bear lake, and so forth. the beautiful falls of minnehaha are sufficiently celebrated--they do not need a lift from me, in that direction. the white-bear lake is less known. it is a lovely sheet of water, and is being utilized as a summer resort by the wealth and fashion of the state. it has its club-house, and its hotel, with the modern improvements and conveniences; its fine summer residences; and plenty of fishing, hunting, and pleasant drives. there are a dozen minor summer resorts around about st. paul and minneapolis, but the white-bear lake is the resort. connected with white-bear lake is a most idiotic indian legend. i would resist the temptation to print it here, if i could, but the task is beyond my strength. the guide-book names the preserver of the legend, and compliments his 'facile pen.' without further comment or delay then, let us turn the said facile pen loose upon the reader-- a legend of white-bear lake. every spring, for perhaps a century, or as long as there has been a nation of red men, an island in the middle of white-bear lake has been visited by a band of indians for the purpose of making maple sugar. tradition says that many springs ago, while upon this island, a young warrior loved and wooed the daughter of his chief, and it is said, also, the maiden loved the warrior. he had again and again been refused her hand by her parents, the old chief alleging that he was no brave, and his old consort called him a woman! the sun had again set upon the 'sugar-bush,' and the bright moon rose high in the bright blue heavens, when the young warrior took down his flute and went out alone, once more to sing the story of his love, the mild breeze gently moved the two gay feathers in his head-dress, and as he mounted on the trunk of a leaning tree, the damp snow fell from his feet heavily. as he raised his flute to his lips, his blanket slipped from his well-formed shoulders, and lay partly on the snow beneath. he began his weird, wild love-song, but soon felt that he was cold, and as he reached back for his blanket, some unseen hand laid it gently on his shoulders; it was the hand of his love, his guardian angel. she took her place beside him, and for the present they were happy; for the indian has a heart to love, and in this pride he is as noble as in his own freedom, which makes him the child of the forest. as the legend runs, a large white-bear, thinking, perhaps, that polar snows and dismal winter weather extended everywhere, took up his journey southward. he at length approached the northern shore of the lake which now bears his name, walked down the bank and made his way noiselessly through the deep heavy snow toward the island. it was the same spring ensuing that the lovers met. they had left their first retreat, and were now seated among the branches of a large elm which hung far over the lake. (the same tree is still standing, and excites universal curiosity and interest.) for fear of being detected, they talked almost in a whisper, and now, that they might get back to camp in good time and thereby avoid suspicion, they were just rising to return, when the maiden uttered a shriek which was heard at the camp, and bounding toward the young brave, she caught his blanket, but missed the direction of her foot and fell, bearing the blanket with her into the great arms of the ferocious monster. instantly every man, woman, and child of the band were upon the bank, but all unarmed. cries and wailings went up from every mouth. what was to be done'? in the meantime this white and savage beast held the breathless maiden in his huge grasp, and fondled with his precious prey as if he were used to scenes like this. one deafening yell from the lover warrior is heard above the cries of hundreds of his tribe, and dashing away to his wigwam he grasps his faithful knife, returns almost at a single bound to the scene of fear and fright, rushes out along the leaning tree to the spot where his treasure fell, and springing with the fury of a mad panther, pounced upon his prey. the animal turned, and with one stroke of his huge paw brought the lovers heart to heart, but the next moment the warrior, with one plunge of the blade of his knife, opened the crimson sluices of death, and the dying bear relaxed his hold. that night there was no more sleep for the band or the lovers, and as the young and the old danced about the carcass of the dead monster, the gallant warrior was presented with another plume, and ere another moon had set he had a living treasure added to his heart. their children for many years played upon the skin of the white-bear--from which the lake derives its name--and the maiden and the brave remembered long the fearful scene and rescue that made them one, for kis-se-me-pa and ka-go- ka could never forget their fearful encounter with the huge monster that came so near sending them to the happy hunting-ground. it is a perplexing business. first, she fell down out of the tree--she and the blanket; and the bear caught her and fondled her--her and the blanket; then she fell up into the tree again--leaving the blanket; meantime the lover goes war-whooping home and comes back 'heeled,' climbs the tree, jumps down on the bear, the girl jumps down after him-- apparently, for she was up the tree--resumes her place in the bear's arms along with the blanket, the lover rams his knife into the bear, and saves--whom, the blanket? no--nothing of the sort. you get yourself all worked up and excited about that blanket, and then all of a sudden, just when a happy climax seems imminent you are let down flat--nothing saved but the girl. whereas, one is not interested in the girl; she is not the prominent feature of the legend. nevertheless, there you are left, and there you must remain; for if you live a thousand years you will never know who got the blanket. a dead man could get up a better legend than this one. i don't mean a fresh dead man either; i mean a man that's been dead weeks and weeks. we struck the home-trail now, and in a few hours were in that astonishing chicago--a city where they are always rubbing the lamp, and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities. it is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with chicago--she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. she is always a novelty; for she is never the chicago you saw when you passed through the last time. the pennsylvania road rushed us to new york without missing schedule time ten minutes anywhere on the route; and there ended one of the most enjoyable five-thousand-mile journeys i have ever had the good fortune to make. appendix a (from the new orleans times democrat of march , .) voyage of the times-democrat's relief boat through the inundated regions it was nine o'clock thursday morning when the 'susie' left the mississippi and entered old river, or what is now called the mouth of the red. ascending on the left, a flood was pouring in through and over the levees on the chandler plantation, the most northern point in pointe coupee parish. the water completely covered the place, although the levees had given way but a short time before. the stock had been gathered in a large flat-boat, where, without food, as we passed, the animals were huddled together, waiting for a boat to tow them off. on the right-hand side of the river is turnbull's island, and on it is a large plantation which formerly was pronounced one of the most fertile in the state. the water has hitherto allowed it to go scot-free in usual floods, but now broad sheets of water told only where fields were. the top of the protecting levee could be seen here and there, but nearly all of it was submerged. the trees have put on a greener foliage since the water has poured in, and the woods look bright and fresh, but this pleasant aspect to the eye is neutralized by the interminable waste of water. we pass mile after mile, and it is nothing but trees standing up to their branches in water. a water-turkey now and again rises and flies ahead into the long avenue of silence. a pirogue sometimes flits from the bushes and crosses the red river on its way out to the mississippi, but the sad- faced paddlers never turn their heads to look at our boat. the puffing of the boat is music in this gloom, which affects one most curiously. it is not the gloom of deep forests or dark caverns, but a peculiar kind of solemn silence and impressive awe that holds one perforce to its recognition. we passed two negro families on a raft tied up in the willows this morning. they were evidently of the well-to-do class, as they had a supply of meal and three or four hogs with them. their rafts were about twenty feet square, and in front of an improvised shelter earth had been placed, on which they built their fire. the current running down the atchafalaya was very swift, the mississippi showing a predilection in that direction, which needs only to be seen to enforce the opinion of that river's desperate endeavors to find a short way to the gulf. small boats, skiffs, pirogues, etc., are in great demand, and many have been stolen by piratical negroes, who take them where they will bring the greatest price. from what was told me by mr. c. p. ferguson, a planter near red river landing, whose place has just gone under, there is much suffering in the rear of that place. the negroes had given up all thoughts of a crevasse there, as the upper levee had stood so long, and when it did come they were at its mercy. on thursday a number were taken out of trees and off of cabin roofs and brought in, many yet remaining. one does not appreciate the sight of earth until he has traveled through a flood. at sea one does not expect or look for it, but here, with fluttering leaves, shadowy forest aisles, house-tops barely visible, it is expected. in fact a grave-yard, if the mounds were above water, would be appreciated. the river here is known only because there is an opening in the trees, and that is all. it is in width, from fort adams on the left bank of the mississippi to the bank of rapides parish, a distance of about sixty miles. a large portion of this was under cultivation, particularly along the mississippi and back of the red. when red river proper was entered, a strong current was running directly across it, pursuing the same direction as that of the mississippi. after a run of some hours, black river was reached. hardly was it entered before signs of suffering became visible. all the willows along the banks were stripped of their leaves. one man, whom your correspondent spoke to, said that he had had one hundred and fifty head of cattle and one hundred head of hogs. at the first appearance of water he had started to drive them to the high lands of avoyelles, thirty-five miles off, but he lost fifty head of the beef cattle and sixty hogs. black river is quite picturesque, even if its shores are under water. a dense growth of ash, oak, gum, and hickory make the shores almost impenetrable, and where one can get a view down some avenue in the trees, only the dim outlines of distant trunks can be barely distinguished in the gloom. a few miles up this river, the depth of water on the banks was fully eight feet, and on all sides could be seen, still holding against the strong current, the tops of cabins. here and there one overturned was surrounded by drift-wood, forming the nucleus of possibly some future island. in order to save coal, as it was impossible to get that fuel at any point to be touched during the expedition, a look-out was kept for a wood-pile. on rounding a point a pirogue, skilfully paddled by a youth, shot out, and in its bow was a girl of fifteen, of fair face, beautiful black eyes, and demure manners. the boy asked for a paper, which was thrown to him, and the couple pushed their tiny craft out into the swell of the boat. presently a little girl, not certainly over twelve years, paddled out in the smallest little canoe and handled it with all the deftness of an old voyageur. the little one looked more like an indian than a white child, and laughed when asked if she were afraid. she had been raised in a pirogue and could go anywhere. she was bound out to pick willow leaves for the stock, and she pointed to a house near by with water three inches deep on the floors. at its back door was moored a raft about thirty feet square, with a sort of fence built upon it, and inside of this some sixteen cows and twenty hogs were standing. the family did not complain, except on account of losing their stock, and promptly brought a supply of wood in a flat. from this point to the mississippi river, fifteen miles, there is not a spot of earth above water, and to the westward for thirty-five miles there is nothing but the river's flood. black river had risen during thursday, the rd, {three-quarters} inches, and was going up at night still. as we progress up the river habitations become more frequent, but are yet still miles apart. nearly all of them are deserted, and the out-houses floated off. to add to the gloom, almost every living thing seems to have departed, and not a whistle of a bird nor the bark of the squirrel can be heard in this solitude. sometimes a morose gar will throw his tail aloft and disappear in the river, but beyond this everything is quiet--the quiet of dissolution. down the river floats now a neatly whitewashed hen-house, then a cluster of neatly split fence- rails, or a door and a bloated carcass, solemnly guarded by a pair of buzzards, the only bird to be seen, which feast on the carcass as it bears them along. a picture-frame in which there was a cheap lithograph of a soldier on horseback, as it floated on told of some hearth invaded by the water and despoiled of this ornament. at dark, as it was not prudent to run, a place alongside the woods was hunted and to a tall gum-tree the boat was made fast for the night. a pretty quarter of the moon threw a pleasant light over forest and river, making a picture that would be a delightful piece of landscape study, could an artist only hold it down to his canvas. the motion of the engines had ceased, the puffing of the escaping steam was stilled, and the enveloping silence closed upon us, and such silence it was! usually in a forest at night one can hear the piping of frogs, the hum of insects, or the dropping of limbs; but here nature was dumb. the dark recesses, those aisles into this cathedral, gave forth no sound, and even the ripplings of the current die away. at daylight friday morning all hands were up, and up the black we started. the morning was a beautiful one, and the river, which is remarkably straight, put on its loveliest garb. the blossoms of the haw perfumed the air deliciously, and a few birds whistled blithely along the banks. the trees were larger, and the forest seemed of older growth than below. more fields were passed than nearer the mouth, but the same scene presented itself--smoke-houses drifting out in the pastures, negro quarters anchored in confusion against some oak, and the modest residence just showing its eaves above water. the sun came up in a glory of carmine, and the trees were brilliant in their varied shades of green. not a foot of soil is to be seen anywhere, and the water is apparently growing deeper and deeper, for it reaches up to the branches of the largest trees. all along, the bordering willows have been denuded of leaves, showing how long the people have been at work gathering this fodder for their animals. an old man in a pirogue was asked how the willow leaves agreed with his cattle. he stopped in his work, and with an ominous shake of his head replied: 'well, sir, it 's enough to keep warmth in their bodies and that's all we expect, but it's hard on the hogs, particularly the small ones. they is dropping off powerful fast. but what can you do? it 's all we've got.' at thirty miles above the mouth of black river the water extends from natchez on the mississippi across to the pine hills of louisiana, a distance of seventy-three miles, and there is hardly a spot that is not ten feet under it. the tendency of the current up the black is toward the west. in fact, so much is this the case, the waters of red river have been driven down from toward the calcasieu country, and the waters of the black enter the red some fifteen miles above the mouth of the former, a thing never before seen by even the oldest steamboatmen. the water now in sight of us is entirely from the mississippi. up to trinity, or rather troy, which is but a short distance below, the people have nearly all moved out, those remaining having enough for their present personal needs. their cattle, though, are suffering and dying off quite fast, as the confinement on rafts and the food they get breeds disease. after a short stop we started, and soon came to a section where there were many open fields and cabins thickly scattered about. here were seen more pictures of distress. on the inside of the houses the inmates had built on boxes a scaffold on which they placed the furniture. the bed- posts were sawed off on top, as the ceiling was not more than four feet from the improvised floor. the buildings looked very insecure, and threatened every moment to float off. near the houses were cattle standing breast high in the water, perfectly impassive. they did not move in their places, but stood patiently waiting for help to come. the sight was a distressing one, and the poor creatures will be sure to die unless speedily rescued. cattle differ from horses in this peculiar quality. a horse, after finding no relief comes, will swim off in search of food, whereas a beef will stand in its tracks until with exhaustion it drops in the water and drowns. at half-past twelve o'clock a hail was given from a flat-boat inside the line of the bank. rounding to we ran alongside, and general york stepped aboard. he was just then engaged in getting off stock, and welcomed the 'times-democrat' boat heartily, as he said there was much need for her. he said that the distress was not exaggerated in the least. people were in a condition it was difficult even for one to imagine. the water was so high there was great danger of their houses being swept away. it had already risen so high that it was approaching the eaves, and when it reaches this point there is always imminent risk of their being swept away. if this occurs, there will be great loss of life. the general spoke of the gallant work of many of the people in their attempts to save their stock, but thought that fully twenty-five per cent. had perished. already twenty-five hundred people had received rations from troy, on black river, and he had towed out a great many cattle, but a very great quantity remained and were in dire need. the water was now eighteen inches higher than in , and there was no land between vidalia and the hills of catahoula. at two o'clock the 'susie' reached troy, sixty-five miles above the mouth of black river. here on the left comes in little river; just beyond that the ouachita, and on the right the tensas. these three rivers form the black river. troy, or a portion of it, is situated on and around three large indian mounds, circular in shape, which rise above the present water about twelve feet. they are about one hundred and fifty feet in diameter, and are about two hundred yards apart. the houses are all built between these mounds, and hence are all flooded to a depth of eighteen inches on their floors. these elevations, built by the aborigines, hundreds of years ago, are the only points of refuge for miles. when we arrived we found them crowded with stock, all of which was thin and hardly able to stand up. they were mixed together, sheep, hogs, horses, mules, and cattle. one of these mounds has been used for many years as the grave-yard, and to-day we saw attenuated cows lying against the marble tomb-stones, chewing their cud in contentment, after a meal of corn furnished by general york. here, as below, the remarkable skill of the women and girls in the management of the smaller pirogues was noticed. children were paddling about in these most ticklish crafts with all the nonchalance of adepts. general york has put into operation a perfect system in regard to furnishing relief. he makes a personal inspection of the place where it is asked, sees what is necessary to be done, and then, having two boats chartered, with flats, sends them promptly to the place, when the cattle are loaded and towed to the pine hills and uplands of catahoula. he has made troy his headquarters, and to this point boats come for their supply of feed for cattle. on the opposite side of little river, which branches to the left out of black, and between it and the ouachita, is situated the town of trinity, which is hourly threatened with destruction. it is much lower than troy, and the water is eight and nine feet deep in the houses. a strong current sweeps through it, and it is remarkable that all of its houses have not gone before. the residents of both troy and trinity have been cared for, yet some of their stock have to be furnished with food. as soon as the 'susie' reached troy, she was turned over to general york, and placed at his disposition to carry out the work of relief more rapidly. nearly all her supplies were landed on one of the mounds to lighten her, and she was headed down stream to relieve those below. at tom hooper's place, a few miles from troy, a large flat, with about fifty head of stock on board, was taken in tow. the animals were fed, and soon regained some strength. to-day we go on little river, where the suffering is greatest. down black river saturday evening, march . we started down black river quite early, under the direction of general york, to bring out what stock could be reached. going down river a flat in tow was left in a central locality, and from there men poled her back in the rear of plantations, picking up the animals wherever found. in the loft of a gin-house there were seventeen head found, and after a gangway was built they were led down into the flat without difficulty. taking a skiff with the general, your reporter was pulled up to a little house of two rooms, in which the water was standing two feet on the floors. in one of the large rooms were huddled the horses and cows of the place, while in the other the widow taylor and her son were seated on a scaffold raised on the floor. one or two dug-outs were drifting about in the roam ready to be put in service at any time. when the flat was brought up, the side of the house was cut away as the only means of getting the animals out, and the cattle were driven on board the boat. general york, in this as in every case, inquired if the family desired to leave, informing them that major burke, of 'the times-democrat,' has sent the 'susie' up for that purpose. mrs. taylor said she thanked major burke, but she would try and hold out. the remarkable tenacity of the people here to their homes is beyond all comprehension. just below, at a point sixteen miles from troy, information was received that the house of mr. tom ellis was in danger, and his family were all in it. we steamed there immediately, and a sad picture was presented. looking out of the half of the window left above water, was mrs. ellis, who is in feeble health, whilst at the door were her seven children, the oldest not fourteen years. one side of the house was given up to the work animals, some twelve head, besides hogs. in the next room the family lived, the water coming within two inches of the bed-rail. the stove was below water, and the cooking was done on a fire on top of it. the house threatened to give way at any moment: one end of it was sinking, and, in fact, the building looked a mere shell. as the boat rounded to, mr. ellis came out in a dug-out, and general york told him that he had come to his relief; that 'the times-democrat' boat was at his service, and would remove his family at once to the hills, and on monday a flat would take out his stock, as, until that time, they would be busy. notwithstanding the deplorable situation himself and family were in, mr. ellis did not want to leave. he said he thought he would wait until monday, and take the risk of his house falling. the children around the door looked perfectly contented, seeming to care little for the danger they were in. these are but two instances of the many. after weeks of privation and suffering, people still cling to their houses and leave only when there is not room between the water and the ceiling to build a scaffold on which to stand. it seemed to be incomprehensible, yet the love for the old place was stronger than that for safety. after leaving the ellis place, the next spot touched at was the oswald place. here the flat was towed alongside the gin-house where there were fifteen head standing in water; and yet, as they stood on scaffolds, their heads were above the top of the entrance. it was found impossible to get them out without cutting away a portion of the front; and so axes were brought into requisition and a gap made. after much labor the horses and mules were securely placed on the flat. at each place we stop there are always three, four, or more dug-outs arriving, bringing information of stock in other places in need. notwithstanding the fact that a great many had driven a part of their stock to the hills some time ago, there yet remains a large quantity, which general york, who is working with indomitable energy, will get landed in the pine hills by tuesday. all along black river the 'susie' has been visited by scores of planters, whose tales are the repetition of those already heard of suffering and loss. an old planter, who has lived on the river since , said there never was such a rise, and he was satisfied more than one quarter of the stock has been lost. luckily the people cared first for their work stock, and when they could find it horses and mules were housed in a place of safety. the rise which still continues, and was two inches last night, compels them to get them out to the hills; hence it is that the work of general york is of such a great value. from daylight to late at night he is going this way and that, cheering by his kindly words and directing with calm judgment what is to be done. one unpleasant story, of a certain merchant in new orleans, is told all along the river. it appears for some years past the planters have been dealing with this individual, and many of them had balances in his hands. when the overflow came they wrote for coffee, for meal, and, in fact, for such little necessities as were required. no response to these letters came, and others were written, and yet these old customers, with plantations under water, were refused even what was necessary to sustain life. it is needless to say he is not popular now on back river. the hills spoken of as the place of refuge for the people and stock on black river are in catahoula parish, twenty-four miles from black river. after filling the flat with cattle we took on board the family of t. s. hooper, seven in number, who could not longer remain in their dwelling, and we are now taking them up little river to the hills. the flood still rising troy: march , , noon. the flood here is rising about three and a half inches every twenty-four hours, and rains have set in which will increase this. general york feels now that our efforts ought to be directed towards saving life, as the increase of the water has jeopardized many houses. we intend to go up the tensas in a few minutes, and then we will return and go down black river to take off families. there is a lack of steam transportation here to meet the emergency. the general has three boats chartered, with flats in tow, but the demand for these to tow out stock is greater than they can meet with promptness. all are working night and day, and the 'susie' hardly stops for more than an hour anywhere. the rise has placed trinity in a dangerous plight, and momentarily it is expected that some of the houses will float off. troy is a little higher, yet all are in the water. reports have come in that a woman and child have been washed away below here, and two cabins floated off. their occupants are the same who refused to come off day before yesterday. one would not believe the utter passiveness of the people. as yet no news has been received of the steamer 'delia,' which is supposed to be the one sunk in yesterday's storm on lake catahoula. she is due here now, but has not arrived. even the mail here is most uncertain, and this i send by skiff to natchez to get it to you. it is impossible to get accurate data as to past crops, etc., as those who know much about the matter have gone, and those who remain are not well versed in the production of this section. general york desires me to say that the amount of rations formerly sent should be duplicated and sent at once. it is impossible to make any estimate, for the people are fleeing to the hills, so rapid is the rise. the residents here are in a state of commotion that can only be appreciated when seen, and complete demoralization has set in, if rations are drawn for any particular section hereabouts, they would not be certain to be distributed, so everything should be sent to troy as a center, and the general will have it properly disposed of. he has sent for one hundred tents, and, if all go to the hills who are in motion now, two hundred will be required. appendix b the mississippi river commission the condition of this rich valley of the lower mississippi, immediately after and since the war, constituted one of the disastrous effects of war most to be deplored. fictitious property in slaves was not only righteously destroyed, but very much of the work which had depended upon the slave labor was also destroyed or greatly impaired, especially the levee system. it might have been expected by those who have not investigated the subject, that such important improvements as the construction and maintenance of the levees would have been assumed at once by the several states. but what can the state do where the people are under subjection to rates of interest ranging from to per cent., and are also under the necessity of pledging their crops in advance even of planting, at these rates, for the privilege of purchasing all of their supplies at per cent. profit? it has needed but little attention to make it perfectly obvious that the control of the mississippi river, if undertaken at all, must be undertaken by the national government, and cannot be compassed by states. the river must be treated as a unit; its control cannot be compassed under a divided or separate system of administration. neither are the states especially interested competent to combine among themselves for the necessary operations. the work must begin far up the river; at least as far as cairo, if not beyond; and must be conducted upon a consistent general plan throughout the course of the river. it does not need technical or scientific knowledge to comprehend the elements of the case if one will give a little time and attention to the subject, and when a mississippi river commission has been constituted, as the existing commission is, of thoroughly able men of different walks in life, may it not be suggested that their verdict in the case should be accepted as conclusive, so far as any a priori theory of construction or control can be considered conclusive? it should be remembered that upon this board are general gilmore, general comstock, and general suter, of the united states engineers; professor henry mitchell (the most competent authority on the question of hydrography), of the united states coast survey; b. b. harrod, the state engineer of louisiana; jas. b. eads, whose success with the jetties at new orleans is a warrant of his competency, and judge taylor, of indiana. it would be presumption on the part of any single man, however skilled, to contest the judgment of such a board as this. the method of improvement proposed by the commission is at once in accord with the results of engineering experience and with observations of nature where meeting our wants. as in nature the growth of trees and their proneness where undermined to fall across the slope and support the bank secures at some points a fair depth of channel and some degree of permanence, so in the project of the engineer the use of timber and brush and the encouragement of forest growth are the main features. it is proposed to reduce the width where excessive by brushwood dykes, at first low, but raised higher and higher as the mud of the river settles under their shelter, and finally slope them back at the angle upon which willows will grow freely. in this work there are many details connected with the forms of these shelter dykes, their arrangements so as to present a series of settling basins, etc., a description of which would only complicate the conception. through the larger part of the river works of contraction will not be required, but nearly all the banks on the concave side of the beds must be held against the wear of the stream, and much of the opposite banks defended at critical points. the works having in view this conservative object may be generally designated works of revetment; and these also will be largely of brushwood, woven in continuous carpets, or twined into wire-netting. this veneering process has been successfully employed on the missouri river; and in some cases they have so covered themselves with sediments, and have become so overgrown with willows, that they may be regarded as permanent. in securing these mats rubble-stone is to be used in small quantities, and in some instances the dressed slope between high and low river will have to be more or less paved with stone. any one who has been on the rhine will have observed operations not unlike those to which we have just referred; and, indeed, most of the rivers of europe flowing among their own alluvia have required similar treatment in the interest of navigation and agriculture. the levee is the crowning work of bank revetment, although not necessarily in immediate connection. it may be set back a short distance from the revetted bank; but it is, in effect, the requisite parapet. the flood river and the low river cannot be brought into register, and compelled to unite in the excavation of a single permanent channel, without a complete control of all the stages; and even the abnormal rise must be provided against, because this would endanger the levee, and once in force behind the works of revetment would tear them also away. under the general principle that the local slope of a river is the result and measure of the resistance of its bed, it is evident that a narrow and deep stream should have less slope, because it has less frictional surface in proportion to capacity; i.e., less perimeter in proportion to area of cross section. the ultimate effect of levees and revetments confining the floods and bringing all the stages of the river into register is to deepen the channel and let down the slope. the first effect of the levees is to raise the surface; but this, by inducing greater velocity of flow, inevitably causes an enlargement of section, and if this enlargement is prevented from being made at the expense of the banks, the bottom must give way and the form of the waterway be so improved as to admit this flow with less rise. the actual experience with levees upon the mississippi river, with no attempt to hold the banks, has been favorable, and no one can doubt, upon the evidence furnished in the reports of the commission, that if the earliest levees had been accompanied by revetment of banks, and made complete, we should have to-day a river navigable at low water, and an adjacent country safe from inundation. of course it would be illogical to conclude that the constrained river can ever lower its flood slope so as to make levees unnecessary, but it is believed that, by this lateral constraint, the river as a conduit may be so improved in form that even those rare floods which result from the coincident rising of many tributaries will find vent without destroying levees of ordinary height. that the actual capacity of a channel through alluvium depends upon its service during floods has been often shown, but this capacity does not include anomalous, but recurrent, floods. it is hardly worth while to consider the projects for relieving the mississippi river floods by creating new outlets, since these sensational propositions have commended themselves only to unthinking minds, and have no support among engineers. were the river bed cast- iron, a resort to openings for surplus waters might be a necessity; but as the bottom is yielding, and the best form of outlet is a single deep channel, as realizing the least ratio of perimeter to area of cross section, there could not well be a more unphilosophical method of treatment than the multiplication of avenues of escape. in the foregoing statement the attempt has been made to condense in as limited a space as the importance of the subject would permit, the general elements of the problem, and the general features of the proposed method of improvement which has been adopted by the mississippi river commission. the writer cannot help feeling that it is somewhat presumptuous on his part to attempt to present the facts relating to an enterprise which calls for the highest scientific skill; but it is a matter which interests every citizen of the united states, and is one of the methods of reconstruction which ought to be approved. it is a war claim which implies no private gain, and no compensation except for one of the cases of destruction incident to war, which may well be repaired by the people of the whole country. edward atkinson. boston: april , . appendix c reception of captain basil hall's book in the united states having now arrived nearly at the end of our travels, i am induced, ere i conclude, again to mention what i consider as one of the most remarkable traits in the national character of the americans; namely, their exquisite sensitiveness and soreness respecting everything said or written concerning them. of this, perhaps, the most remarkable example i can give is the effect produced on nearly every class of readers by the appearance of captain basil hall's 'travels in north america.' in fact, it was a sort of moral earthquake, and the vibration it occasioned through the nerves of the republic, from one corner of the union to the other, was by no means over when i left the country in july , a couple of years after the shock. i was in cincinnati when these volumes came out, but it was not till july , that i procured a copy of them. one bookseller to whom i applied told me that he had had a few copies before he understood the nature of the work, but that, after becoming acquainted with it, nothing should induce him to sell another. other persons of his profession must, however, have been less scrupulous; for the book was read in city, town, village, and hamlet, steamboat, and stage-coach, and a sort of war-whoop was sent forth perfectly unprecedented in my recollection upon any occasion whatever. an ardent desire for approbation, and a delicate sensitiveness under censure, have always, i believe, been considered as amiable traits of character; but the condition into which the appearance of captain hall's work threw the republic shows plainly that these feelings, if carried to excess, produce a weakness which amounts to imbecility. it was perfectly astonishing to hear men who, on other subjects, were of some judgment, utter their opinions upon this. i never heard of any instance in which the commonsense generally found in national criticism was so overthrown by passion. i do not speak of the want of justice, and of fair and liberal interpretation: these, perhaps, were hardly to be expected. other nations have been called thin-skinned, but the citizens of the union have, apparently, no skins at all; they wince if a breeze blows over them, unless it be tempered with adulation. it was not, therefore, very surprising that the acute and forcible observations of a traveler they knew would be listened to should be received testily. the extraordinary features of the business were, first, the excess of the rage into which they lashed themselves; and, secondly, the puerility of the inventions by which they attempted to account for the severity with which they fancied they had been treated. not content with declaring that the volumes contained no word of truth, from beginning to end (which is an assertion i heard made very nearly as often as they were mentioned), the whole country set to work to discover the causes why captain hall had visited the united states, and why he had published his book. i have heard it said with as much precision and gravity as if the statement had been conveyed by an official report, that captain hall had been sent out by the british government expressly for the purpose of checking the growing admiration of england for the government of the united states,--that it was by a commission from the treasury he had come, and that it was only in obedience to orders that he had found anything to object to. i do not give this as the gossip of a coterie; i am persuaded that it is the belief of a very considerable portion of the country. so deep is the conviction of this singular people that they cannot be seen without being admired, that they will not admit the possibility that any one should honestly and sincerely find aught to disapprove in them or their country. the american reviews are, many of them, i believe, well known in england; i need not, therefore, quote them here, but i sometimes wondered that they, none of them, ever thought of translating obadiah's curse into classic american; if they had done so, on placing (he, basil hall) between brackets, instead of (he, obadiah) it would have saved them a world of trouble. i can hardly describe the curiosity with which i sat down at length to peruse these tremendous volumes; still less can i do justice to my surprise at their contents. to say that i found not one exaggerated statement throughout the work is by no means saying enough. it is impossible for any one who knows the country not to see that captain hall earnestly sought out things to admire and commend. when he praises, it is with evident pleasure; and when he finds fault, it is with evident reluctance and restraint, excepting where motives purely patriotic urge him to state roundly what it is for the benefit of his country should be known. in fact, captain hall saw the country to the greatest possible advantage. furnished, of course, with letters of introduction to the most distinguished individuals, and with the still more influential recommendation of his own reputation, he was received in full drawing- room style and state from one end of the union to the other. he saw the country in full dress, and had little or no opportunity of judging of it unhouselled, unanointed, unannealed, with all its imperfections on its head, as i and my family too often had. captain hall had certainly excellent opportunities of making himself acquainted with the form of the government and the laws; and of receiving, moreover, the best oral commentary upon them, in conversation with the most distinguished citizens. of these opportunities he made excellent use; nothing important met his eye which did not receive that sort of analytical attention which an experienced and philosophical traveler alone can give. this has made his volumes highly interesting and valuable; but i am deeply persuaded, that were a man of equal penetration to visit the united states with no other means of becoming acquainted with the national character than the ordinary working-day intercourse of life, he would conceive an infinitely lower idea of the moral atmosphere of the country than captain hall appears to have done; and the internal conviction on my mind is strong, that if captain hall had not placed a firm restraint on himself, he must have given expression to far deeper indignation than any he has uttered against many points in the american character, with which he shows from other circumstances that he was well acquainted. his rule appears to have been to state just so much of the truth as would leave on the mind of his readers a correct impression, at the least cost of pain to the sensitive folks he was writing about. he states his own opinions and feelings, and leaves it to be inferred that he has good grounds for adopting them; but he spares the americans the bitterness which a detail of the circumstances would have produced. if any one chooses to say that some wicked antipathy to twelve millions of strangers is the origin of my opinion, i must bear it; and were the question one of mere idle speculation, i certainly would not court the abuse i must meet for stating it. but it is not so. . . . . . . . the candor which he expresses, and evidently feels, they mistake for irony, or totally distrust; his unwillingness to give pain to persons from whom he has received kindness, they scornfully reject as affectation, and although they must know right well, in their own secret hearts, how infinitely more they lay at his mercy than he has chosen to betray; they pretend, even to themselves, that he has exaggerated the bad points of their character and institutions; whereas, the truth is, that he has let them off with a degree of tenderness which may be quite suitable for him to exercise, however little merited; while, at the same time, he has most industriously magnified their merits, whenever he could possibly find anything favorable. appendix d the undying head in a remote part of the north lived a man and his sister, who had never seen a human being. seldom, if ever, had the man any cause to go from home; for, as his wants demanded food, he had only to go a little distance from the lodge, and there, in some particular spot, place his arrows, with their barbs in the ground. telling his sister where they had been placed, every morning she would go in search, and never fail of finding each stuck through the heart of a deer. she had then only to drag them into the lodge and prepare their food. thus she lived till she attained womanhood, when one day her brother, whose name was iamo, said to her: 'sister, the time is at hand when you will be ill. listen to my advice. if you do not, it will probably be the cause of my death. take the implements with which we kindle our fires. go some distance from our lodge and build a separate fire. when you are in want of food, i will tell you where to find it. you must cook for yourself, and i will for myself. when you are ill, do not attempt to come near the lodge, or bring any of the utensils you use. be sure always to fasten to your belt the implements you need, for you do not know when the time will come. as for myself, i must do the best i can.' his sister promised to obey him in all he had said. shortly after, her brother had cause to go from home. she was alone in her lodge, combing her hair. she had just untied the belt to which the implements were fastened, when suddenly the event, to which her brother had alluded, occurred. she ran out of the lodge, but in her haste forgot the belt. afraid to return, she stood for some time thinking. finally, she decided to enter the lodge and get it. for, thought she, my brother is not at home, and i will stay but a moment to catch hold of it. she went back. running in suddenly, she caught hold of it, and was coming out when her brother came in sight. he knew what was the matter. 'oh,' he said, 'did i not tell you to take care. but now you have killed me.' she was going on her way, but her brother said to her, 'what can you do there now. the accident has happened. go in, and stay where you have always stayed. and what will become of you? you have killed me.' he then laid aside his hunting-dress and accoutrements, and soon after both his feet began to turn black, so that he could not move. still he directed his sister where to place the arrows, that she might always have food. the inflammation continued to increase, and had now reached his first rib; and he said: 'sister, my end is near. you must do as i tell you. you see my medicine-sack, and my war-club tied to it. it contains all my medicines, and my war-plumes, and my paints of all colors. as soon as the inflammation reaches my breast, you will take my war-club. it has a sharp point, and you will cut off my head. when it is free from my body, take it, place its neck in the sack, which you must open at one end. then hang it up in its former place. do not forget my bow and arrows. one of the last you will take to procure food. the remainder, tie in my sack, and then hang it up, so that i can look towards the door. now and then i will speak to you, but not often.' his sister again promised to obey. in a little time his breast was affected. 'now,' said he, 'take the club and strike off my head.' she was afraid, but he told her to muster courage. 'strike,' said he, and a smile was on his face. mustering all her courage, she gave the blow and cut off the head. 'now,' said the head, 'place me where i told you.' and fearfully she obeyed it in all its commands. retaining its animation, it looked around the lodge as usual, and it would command its sister to go in such places as it thought would procure for her the flesh of different animals she needed. one day the head said: 'the time is not distant when i shall be freed from this situation, and i shall have to undergo many sore evils. so the superior manito decrees, and i must bear all patiently.' in this situation we must leave the head. in a certain part of the country was a village inhabited by a numerous and warlike band of indians. in this village was a family of ten young men--brothers. it was in the spring of the year that the youngest of these blackened his face and fasted. his dreams were propitious. having ended his fast, he went secretly for his brothers at night, so that none in the village could overhear or find out the direction they intended to go. though their drum was heard, yet that was a common occurrence. having ended the usual formalities, he told how favorable his dreams were, and that he had called them together to know if they would accompany him in a war excursion. they all answered they would. the third brother from the eldest, noted for his oddities, coming up with his war-club when his brother had ceased speaking, jumped up. 'yes,' said he, 'i will go, and this will be the way i will treat those i am going to fight;' and he struck the post in the center of the lodge, and gave a yell. the others spoke to him, saying: 'slow, slow, mudjikewis, when you are in other people's lodges.' so he sat down. then, in turn, they took the drum, and sang their songs, and closed with a feast. the youngest told them not to whisper their intention to their wives, but secretly to prepare for their journey. they all promised obedience, and mudjikewis was the first to say so. the time for their departure drew near. word was given to assemble on a certain night, when they would depart immediately. mudjikewis was loud in his demands for his moccasins. several times his wife asked him the reason. 'besides,' said she, 'you have a good pair on.' 'quick, quick,' said he, 'since you must know, we are going on a war excursion; so be quick.' he thus revealed the secret. that night they met and started. the snow was on the ground, and they traveled all night, lest others should follow them. when it was daylight, the leader took snow and made a ball of it, then tossing it into the air, he said: 'it was in this way i saw snow fall in a dream, so that i could not be tracked.' and he told them to keep close to each other for fear of losing themselves, as the snow began to fall in very large flakes. near as they walked, it was with difficulty they could see each other. the snow continued falling all that day and the following night, so it was impossible to track them. they had now walked for several days, and mudjikewis was always in the rear. one day, running suddenly forward, he gave the saw-saw- quan,{footnote [war-whoop.]} and struck a tree with his war-club, and it broke into pieces as if struck with lightning. 'brothers,' said he, 'this will be the way i will serve those we are going to fight.' the leader answered, 'slow, slow, mudjikewis, the one i lead you to is not to be thought of so lightly.' again he fell back and thought to himself: 'what! what! who can this be he is leading us to?' he felt fearful and was silent. day after day they traveled on, till they came to an extensive plain, on the borders of which human bones were bleaching in the sun. the leader spoke: 'they are the bones of those who have gone before us. none has ever yet returned to tell the sad tale of their fate.' again mudjikewis became restless, and, running forward, gave the accustomed yell. advancing to a large rock which stood above the ground, he struck it, and it fell to pieces. 'see, brothers,' said he, 'thus will i treat those whom we are going to fight.' 'still, still,' once more said the leader; 'he to whom i am leading you is not to be compared to the rock.' mudjikewis fell back thoughtful, saying to himself: 'i wonder who this can be that he is going to attack;' and he was afraid. still they continued to see the remains of former warriors, who had been to the place where they were now going, some of whom had retreated as far back as the place where they first saw the bones, beyond which no one had ever escaped. at last they came to a piece of rising ground, from which they plainly distinguished, sleeping on a distant mountain, a mammoth bear. the distance between them was very great, but the size of the animal caused him to be plainly seen. 'there,' said the leader, 'it is he to whom i am leading you; here our troubles will commence, for he is a mishemokwa and a manito. it is he who has that we prize so dearly (i.e. wampum), to obtain which, the warriors whose bones we saw, sacrificed their lives. you must not be fearful: be manly. we shall find him asleep.' then the leader went forward and touched the belt around the animal's neck. 'this,' said he, 'is what we must get. it contains the wampum.' then they requested the eldest to try and slip the belt over the bear's head, who appeared to be fast asleep, as he was not in the least disturbed by the attempt to obtain the belt. all their efforts were in vain, till it came to the one next the youngest. he tried, and the belt moved nearly over the monster's head, but he could get it no farther. then the youngest one, and the leader, made his attempt, and succeeded. placing it on the back of the oldest, he said, 'now we must run,' and off they started. when one became fatigued with its weight, another would relieve him. thus they ran till they had passed the bones of all former warriors, and were some distance beyond, when looking back, they saw the monster slowly rising. he stood some time before he missed his wampum. soon they heard his tremendous howl, like distant thunder, slowly filling all the sky; and then they heard him speak and say, 'who can it be that has dared to steal my wampum? earth is not so large but that i can find them;' and he descended from the hill in pursuit. as if convulsed, the earth shook with every jump he made. very soon he approached the party. they, however, kept the belt, exchanging it from one to another, and encouraging each other; but he gained on them fast. 'brothers,' said the leader, 'has never any one of you, when fasting, dreamed of some friendly spirit who would aid you as a guardian?' a dead silence followed. 'well,' said he, 'fasting, i dreamed of being in danger of instant death, when i saw a small lodge, with smoke curling from its top. an old man lived in it, and i dreamed he helped me; and may it be verified soon,' he said, running forward and giving the peculiar yell, and a howl as if the sounds came from the depths of his stomach, and what is called checaudum. getting upon a piece of rising ground, behold! a lodge, with smoke curling from its top, appeared. this gave them all new strength, and they ran forward and entered it. the leader spoke to the old man who sat in the lodge, saying, 'nemesho, help us; we claim your protection, for the great bear will kill us.' 'sit down and eat, my grandchildren,' said the old man. 'who is a great manito?' said he. 'there is none but me; but let me look,' and he opened the door of the lodge, when, lo! at a little distance he saw the enraged animal coming on, with slow but powerful leaps. he closed the door. 'yes,' said he, 'he is indeed a great manito: my grandchildren, you will be the cause of my losing my life; you asked my protection, and i granted it; so now, come what may, i will protect you. when the bear arrives at the door, you must run out of the other door of the lodge.' then putting his hand to the side of the lodge where he sat, he brought out a bag which he opened. taking out two small black dogs, he placed them before him. 'these are the ones i use when i fight,' said he; and he commenced patting with both hands the sides of one of them, and he began to swell out, so that he soon filled the lodge by his bulk; and he had great strong teeth. when he attained his full size he growled, and from that moment, as from instinct, he jumped out at the door and met the bear, who in another leap would have reached the lodge. a terrible combat ensued. the skies rang with the howls of the fierce monsters. the remaining dog soon took the field. the brothers, at the onset, took the advice of the old man, and escaped through the opposite side of the lodge. they had not proceeded far before they heard the dying cry of one of the dogs, and soon after of the other. 'well,' said the leader, 'the old man will share their fate: so run; he will soon be after us.' they started with fresh vigor, for they had received food from the old man: but very soon the bear came in sight, and again was fast gaining upon them. again the leader asked the brothers if they could do nothing for their safety. all were silent. the leader, running forward, did as before. 'i dreamed,' he cried, 'that, being in great trouble, an old man helped me who was a manito; we shall soon see his lodge.' taking courage, they still went on. after going a short distance they saw the lodge of the old manito. they entered immediately and claimed his protection, telling him a manito was after them. the old man, setting meat before them, said: 'eat! who is a manito? there is no manito but me; there is none whom i fear;' and the earth trembled as the monster advanced. the old man opened the door and saw him coming. he shut it slowly, and said: 'yes, my grandchildren, you have brought trouble upon me.' procuring his medicine-sack, he took out his small war-clubs of black stone, and told the young men to run through the other side of the lodge. as he handled the clubs, they became very large, and the old man stepped out just as the bear reached the door. then striking him with one of the clubs, it broke in pieces; the bear stumbled. renewing the attempt with the other war-club, that also was broken, but the bear fell senseless. each blow the old man gave him sounded like a clap of thunder, and the howls of the bear ran along till they filled the heavens. the young men had now run some distance, when they looked back. they could see that the bear was recovering from the blows. first he moved his paws, and soon they saw him rise on his feet. the old man shared the fate of the first, for they now heard his cries as he was torn in pieces. again the monster was in pursuit, and fast overtaking them. not yet discouraged, the young men kept on their way; but the bear was now so close, that the leader once more applied to his brothers, but they could do nothing. 'well,' said he, 'my dreams will soon be exhausted; after this i have but one more.' he advanced, invoking his guardian spirit to aid him. 'once,' said he, 'i dreamed that, being sorely pressed, i came to a large lake, on the shore of which was a canoe, partly out of water, having ten paddles all in readiness. do not fear,' he cried, 'we shall soon get it.' and so it was, even as he had said. coming to the lake, they saw the canoe with ten paddles, and immediately they embarked. scarcely had they reached the center of the lake, when they saw the bear arrive at its borders. lifting himself on his hind legs, he looked all around. then he waded into the water; then losing his footing he turned back, and commenced making the circuit of the lake. meantime the party remained stationary in the center to watch his movements. he traveled all around, till at last he came to the place from whence he started. then he commenced drinking up the water, and they saw the current fast setting in towards his open mouth. the leader encouraged them to paddle hard for the opposite shore. when only a short distance from land, the current had increased so much, that they were drawn back by it, and all their efforts to reach it were in vain. then the leader again spoke, telling them to meet their fates manfully. 'now is the time, mudjikewis,' said he, 'to show your prowess. take courage and sit at the bow of the canoe; and when it approaches his mouth, try what effect your club will have on his head.' he obeyed, and stood ready to give the blow; while the leader, who steered, directed the canoe for the open mouth of the monster. rapidly advancing, they were just about to enter his mouth, when mudjikewis struck him a tremendous blow on the head, and gave the saw- saw-quan. the bear's limbs doubled under him, and he fell, stunned by the blow. but before mudjikewis could renew it, the monster disgorged all the water he had drank, with a force which sent the canoe with great velocity to the opposite shore. instantly leaving the canoe, again they fled, and on they went till they were completely exhausted. the earth again shook, and soon they saw the monster hard after them. their spirits drooped, and they felt discouraged. the leader exerted himself, by actions and words, to cheer them up; and once more he asked them if they thought of nothing, or could do nothing for their rescue; and, as before, all were silent. 'then,' he said, 'this is the last time i can apply to my guardian spirit. now, if we do not succeed, our fates are decided.' he ran forward, invoking his spirit with great earnestness, and gave the yell. 'we shall soon arrive,' said he to his brothers, 'at the place where my last guardian spirit dwells. in him i place great confidence. do not, do not be afraid, or your limbs will be fear-bound. we shall soon reach his lodge. run, run,' he cried. returning now to iamo, he had passed all the time in the same condition we had left him, the head directing his sister, in order to procure food, where to place the magic arrows, and speaking at long intervals. one day the sister saw the eyes of the head brighten, as if with pleasure. at last it spoke. 'oh, sister,' it said, 'in what a pitiful situation you have been the cause of placing me! soon, very soon, a party of young men will arrive and apply to me for aid; but alas! how can i give what i would have done with so much pleasure? nevertheless, take two arrows, and place them where you have been in the habit of placing the others, and have meat prepared and cooked before they arrive. when you hear them coming and calling on my name, go out and say, "alas! it is long ago that an accident befell him. i was the cause of it." if they still come near, ask them in, and set meat before them. and now you must follow my directions strictly. when the bear is near, go out and meet him. you will take my medicine-sack, bows and arrows, and my head. you must then untie the sack, and spread out before you my paints of all colors, my war-eagle feathers, my tufts of dried hair, and whatever else it contains. as the bear approaches, you will take all these articles, one by one, and say to him, "this is my deceased brother's paint," and so on with all the other articles, throwing each of them as far as you can. the virtues contained in them will cause him to totter; and, to complete his destruction, you will take my head, and that too you will cast as far off as you can, crying aloud, "see, this is my deceased brother's head." he will then fall senseless. by this time the young men will have eaten, and you will call them to your assistance. you must then cut the carcass into pieces, yes, into small pieces, and scatter them to the four winds; for, unless you do this, he will again revive.' she promised that all should be done as he said. she had only time to prepare the meat, when the voice of the leader was heard calling upon iamo for aid. the woman went out and said as her brother had directed. but the war party being closely pursued, came up to the lodge. she invited them in, and placed the meat before them. while they were eating, they heard the bear approaching. untying the medicine-sack and taking the head, she had all in readiness for his approach. when he came up she did as she had been told; and, before she had expended the paints and feathers, the bear began to totter, but, still advancing, came close to the woman. saying as she was commanded, she then took the head, and cast it as far from her as she could. as it rolled along the ground, the blood, excited by the feelings of the head in this terrible scene, gushed from the nose and mouth. the bear, tottering, soon fell with a tremendous noise. then she cried for help, and the young men came rushing out, having partially regained their strength and spirits. mudjikewis, stepping up, gave a yell and struck him a blow upon the head. this he repeated, till it seemed like a mass of brains, while the others, as quick as possible, cut him into very small pieces, which they then scattered in every direction. while thus employed, happening to look around where they had thrown the meat, wonderful to behold, they saw starting up and turning off in every direction small black bears, such as are seen at the present day. the country was soon overspread with these black animals. and it was from this monster that the present race of bears derived their origin. having thus overcome their pursuer, they returned to the lodge. in the meantime, the woman, gathering the implements she had used, and the head, placed them again in the sack. but the head did not speak again, probably from its great exertion to overcome the monster. having spent so much time and traversed so vast a country in their flight, the young men gave up the idea of ever returning to their own country, and game being plenty, they determined to remain where they now were. one day they moved off some distance from the lodge for the purpose of hunting, having left the wampum with the woman. they were very successful, and amused themselves, as all young men do when alone, by talking and jesting with each other. one of them spoke and said, 'we have all this sport to ourselves; let us go and ask our sister if she will not let us bring the head to this place, as it is still alive. it may be pleased to hear us talk, and be in our company. in the meantime take food to our sister.' they went and requested the head. she told them to take it, and they took it to their hunting-grounds, and tried to amuse it, but only at times did they see its eyes beam with pleasure. one day, while busy in their encampment, they were unexpectedly attacked by unknown indians. the skirmish was long contested and bloody; many of their foes were slain, but still they were thirty to one. the young men fought desperately till they were all killed. the attacking party then retreated to a height of ground, to muster their men, and to count the number of missing and slain. one of their young men had stayed away, and, in endeavoring to overtake them, came to the place where the head was hung up. seeing that alone retain animation, he eyed it for some time with fear and surprise. however, he took it down and opened the sack, and was much pleased to see the beautiful feathers, one of which he placed on his head. starting off, it waved gracefully over him till he reached his party, when he threw down the head and sack, and told them how he had found it, and that the sack was full of paints and feathers. they all looked at the head and made sport of it. numbers of the young men took the paint and painted themselves, and one of the party took the head by the hair and said-- 'look, you ugly thing, and see your paints on the faces of warriors.' but the feathers were so beautiful, that numbers of them also placed them on their heads. then again they used all kinds of indignity to the head, for which they were in turn repaid by the death of those who had used the feathers. then the chief commanded them to throw away all except the head. 'we will see,' said he, 'when we get home, what we can do with it. we will try to make it shut its eyes.' when they reached their homes they took it to the council-lodge, and hung it up before the fire, fastening it with raw hide soaked, which would shrink and become tightened by the action of the fire. 'we will then see,' they said, 'if we cannot make it shut its eyes.' meantime, for several days, the sister had been waiting for the young men to bring back the head; till, at last, getting impatient, she went in search of it. the young men she found lying within short distances of each other, dead, and covered with wounds. various other bodies lay scattered in different directions around them. she searched for the head and sack, but they were nowhere to be found. she raised her voice and wept, and blackened her face. then she walked in different directions, till she came to the place from whence the head had been taken. then she found the magic bow and arrows, where the young men, ignorant of their qualities, had left them. she thought to herself that she would find her brother's head, and came to a piece of rising ground, and there saw some of his paints and feathers. these she carefully put up, and hung upon the branch of a tree till her return. at dusk she arrived at the first lodge of a very extensive village. here she used a charm, common among indians when they wish to meet with a kind reception. on applying to the old man and woman of the lodge, she was kindly received. she made known her errand. the old man promised to aid her, and told her the head was hung up before the council-fire, and that the chiefs of the village, with their young men, kept watch over it continually. the former are considered as manitoes. she said she only wished to see it, and would be satisfied if she could only get to the door of the lodge. she knew she had not sufficient power to take it by force. 'come with me,' said the indian, 'i will take you there.' they went, and they took their seats near the door. the council-lodge was filled with warriors, amusing themselves with games, and constantly keeping up a fire to smoke the head, as they said, to make dry meat. they saw the head move, and not knowing what to make of it, one spoke and said: 'ha! ha! it is beginning to feel the effects of the smoke.' the sister looked up from the door, and her eyes met those of her brother, and tears rolled down the cheeks of the head. 'well,' said the chief, 'i thought we would make you do something at last. look! look at it--shedding tears,' said he to those around him; and they all laughed and passed their jokes upon it. the chief, looking around, and observing the woman, after some time said to the man who came with her: 'who have you got there? i have never seen that woman before in our village.' 'yes,' replied the man, 'you have seen her; she is a relation of mine, and seldom goes out. she stays at my lodge, and asked me to allow her to come with me to this place.' in the center of the lodge sat one of those young men who are always forward, and fond of boasting and displaying themselves before others. 'why,' said he, 'i have seen her often, and it is to this lodge i go almost every night to court her.' all the others laughed and continued their games. the young man did not know he was telling a lie to the woman's advantage, who by that means escaped. she returned to the man's lodge, and immediately set out for her own country. coming to the spot where the bodies of her adopted brothers lay, she placed them together, their feet toward the east. then taking an ax which she had, she cast it up into the air, crying out, 'brothers, get up from under it, or it will fall on you.' this she repeated three times, and the third time the brothers all arose and stood on their feet. mudjikewis commenced rubbing his eyes and stretching himself. 'why,' said he, 'i have overslept myself.' 'no, indeed,' said one of the others, 'do you not know we were all killed, and that it is our sister who has brought us to life?' the young men took the bodies of their enemies and burned them. soon after, the woman went to procure wives for them, in a distant country, they knew not where; but she returned with ten young women, which she gave to the ten young men, beginning with the eldest. mudjikewis stepped to and fro, uneasy lest he should not get the one he liked. but he was not disappointed, for she fell to his lot. and they were well matched, for she was a female magician. they then all moved into a very large lodge, and their sister told them that the women must now take turns in going to her brother's head every night, trying to untie it. they all said they would do so with pleasure. the eldest made the first attempt, and with a rushing noise she fled through the air. toward daylight she returned. she had been unsuccessful, as she succeeded in untying only one of the knots. all took their turns regularly, and each one succeeded in untying only one knot each time. but when the youngest went, she commenced the work as soon as she reached the lodge; although it had always been occupied, still the indians never could see any one. for ten nights now, the smoke had not ascended, but filled the lodge and drove them out. this last night they were all driven out, and the young woman carried off the head. the young people and the sister heard the young woman coming high through the air, and they heard her saying: 'prepare the body of our brother.' and as soon as they heard it, they went to a small lodge where the black body of iamo lay. his sister commenced cutting the neck part, from which the neck had been severed. she cut so deep as to cause it to bleed; and the others who were present, by rubbing the body and applying medicines, expelled the blackness. in the meantime, the one who brought it, by cutting the neck of the head, caused that also to bleed. as soon as she arrived, they placed that close to the body, and, by aid of medicines and various other means, succeeded in restoring iamo to all his former beauty and manliness. all rejoiced in the happy termination of their troubles, and they had spent some time joyfully together, when iamo said: 'now i will divide the wampum,' and getting the belt which contained it, he commenced with the eldest, giving it in equal portions. but the youngest got the most splendid and beautiful, as the bottom of the belt held the richest and rarest. they were told that, since they had all once died, and were restored to life, they were no longer mortal, but spirits, and they were assigned different stations in the invisible world. only mudjikewis's place was, however, named. he was to direct the west wind, hence generally called kebeyun, there to remain for ever. they were commanded, as they had it in their power, to do good to the inhabitants of the earth, and, forgetting their sufferings in procuring the wampum, to give all things with a liberal hand. and they were also commanded that it should also be held by them sacred; those grains or shells of the pale hue to be emblematic of peace, while those of the darker hue would lead to evil and war. the spirits then, amid songs and shouts, took their flight to their respective abodes on high; while iamo, with his sister iamoqua, descended into the depths below. life on the mississippi by mark twain part . chapter racing days it was always the custom for the boats to leave new orleans between four and five o'clock in the afternoon. from three o'clock onward they would be burning rosin and pitch pine (the sign of preparation), and so one had the picturesque spectacle of a rank, some two or three miles long, of tall, ascending columns of coal-black smoke; a colonnade which supported a sable roof of the same smoke blended together and spreading abroad over the city. every outward-bound boat had its flag flying at the jack-staff, and sometimes a duplicate on the verge staff astern. two or three miles of mates were commanding and swearing with more than usual emphasis; countless processions of freight barrels and boxes were spinning athwart the levee and flying aboard the stage-planks, belated passengers were dodging and skipping among these frantic things, hoping to reach the forecastle companion way alive, but having their doubts about it; women with reticules and bandboxes were trying to keep up with husbands freighted with carpet-sacks and crying babies, and making a failure of it by losing their heads in the whirl and roar and general distraction; drays and baggage-vans were clattering hither and thither in a wild hurry, every now and then getting blocked and jammed together, and then during ten seconds one could not see them for the profanity, except vaguely and dimly; every windlass connected with every forehatch, from one end of that long array of steamboats to the other, was keeping up a deafening whiz and whir, lowering freight into the hold, and the half-naked crews of perspiring negroes that worked them were roaring such songs as 'de las' sack! de las' sack!'--inspired to unimaginable exaltation by the chaos of turmoil and racket that was driving everybody else mad. by this time the hurricane and boiler decks of the steamers would be packed and black with passengers. the 'last bells' would begin to clang, all down the line, and then the powwow seemed to double; in a moment or two the final warning came,--a simultaneous din of chinese gongs, with the cry, 'all dat ain't goin', please to git asho'!'--and behold, the powwow quadrupled! people came swarming ashore, overturning excited stragglers that were trying to swarm aboard. one more moment later a long array of stage-planks was being hauled in, each with its customary latest passenger clinging to the end of it with teeth, nails, and everything else, and the customary latest procrastinator making a wild spring shoreward over his head. now a number of the boats slide backward into the stream, leaving wide gaps in the serried rank of steamers. citizens crowd the decks of boats that are not to go, in order to see the sight. steamer after steamer straightens herself up, gathers all her strength, and presently comes swinging by, under a tremendous head of steam, with flag flying, black smoke rolling, and her entire crew of firemen and deck-hands (usually swarthy negroes) massed together on the forecastle, the best 'voice' in the lot towering from the midst (being mounted on the capstan), waving his hat or a flag, and all roaring a mighty chorus, while the parting cannons boom and the multitudinous spectators swing their hats and huzza! steamer after steamer falls into line, and the stately procession goes winging its flight up the river. in the old times, whenever two fast boats started out on a race, with a big crowd of people looking on, it was inspiring to hear the crews sing, especially if the time were night-fall, and the forecastle lit up with the red glare of the torch-baskets. racing was royal fun. the public always had an idea that racing was dangerous; whereas the opposite was the case--that is, after the laws were passed which restricted each boat to just so many pounds of steam to the square inch. no engineer was ever sleepy or careless when his heart was in a race. he was constantly on the alert, trying gauge-cocks and watching things. the dangerous place was on slow, plodding boats, where the engineers drowsed around and allowed chips to get into the 'doctor' and shut off the water supply from the boilers. in the 'flush times' of steamboating, a race between two notoriously fleet steamers was an event of vast importance. the date was set for it several weeks in advance, and from that time forward, the whole mississippi valley was in a state of consuming excitement. politics and the weather were dropped, and people talked only of the coming race. as the time approached, the two steamers 'stripped' and got ready. every encumbrance that added weight, or exposed a resisting surface to wind or water, was removed, if the boat could possibly do without it. the 'spars,' and sometimes even their supporting derricks, were sent ashore, and no means left to set the boat afloat in case she got aground. when the 'eclipse' and the 'a. l. shotwell' ran their great race many years ago, it was said that pains were taken to scrape the gilding off the fanciful device which hung between the 'eclipse's' chimneys, and that for that one trip the captain left off his kid gloves and had his head shaved. but i always doubted these things. if the boat was known to make her best speed when drawing five and a half feet forward and five feet aft, she was carefully loaded to that exact figure--she wouldn't enter a dose of homoeopathic pills on her manifest after that. hardly any passengers were taken, because they not only add weight but they never will 'trim boat.' they always run to the side when there is anything to see, whereas a conscientious and experienced steamboatman would stick to the center of the boat and part his hair in the middle with a spirit level. no way-freights and no way-passengers were allowed, for the racers would stop only at the largest towns, and then it would be only 'touch and go.' coal flats and wood flats were contracted for beforehand, and these were kept ready to hitch on to the flying steamers at a moment's warning. double crews were carried, so that all work could be quickly done. the chosen date being come, and all things in readiness, the two great steamers back into the stream, and lie there jockeying a moment, and apparently watching each other's slightest movement, like sentient creatures; flags drooping, the pent steam shrieking through safety- valves, the black smoke rolling and tumbling from the chimneys and darkening all the air. people, people everywhere; the shores, the house- tops, the steamboats, the ships, are packed with them, and you know that the borders of the broad mississippi are going to be fringed with humanity thence northward twelve hundred miles, to welcome these racers. presently tall columns of steam burst from the 'scape-pipes of both steamers, two guns boom a good-bye, two red-shirted heroes mounted on capstans wave their small flags above the massed crews on the forecastles, two plaintive solos linger on the air a few waiting seconds, two mighty choruses burst forth--and here they come! brass bands bray hail columbia, huzza after huzza thunders from the shores, and the stately creatures go whistling by like the wind. those boats will never halt a moment between new orleans and st. louis, except for a second or two at large towns, or to hitch thirty-cord wood- boats alongside. you should be on board when they take a couple of those wood-boats in tow and turn a swarm of men into each; by the time you have wiped your glasses and put them on, you will be wondering what has become of that wood. two nicely matched steamers will stay in sight of each other day after day. they might even stay side by side, but for the fact that pilots are not all alike, and the smartest pilots will win the race. if one of the boats has a 'lightning' pilot, whose 'partner' is a trifle his inferior, you can tell which one is on watch by noting whether that boat has gained ground or lost some during each four-hour stretch. the shrewdest pilot can delay a boat if he has not a fine genius for steering. steering is a very high art. one must not keep a rudder dragging across a boat's stem if he wants to get up the river fast. there is a great difference in boats, of course. for a long time i was on a boat that was so slow we used to forget what year it was we left port in. but of course this was at rare intervals. ferryboats used to lose valuable trips because their passengers grew old and died, waiting for us to get by. this was at still rarer intervals. i had the documents for these occurrences, but through carelessness they have been mislaid. this boat, the 'john j. roe,' was so slow that when she finally sunk in madrid bend, it was five years before the owners heard of it. that was always a confusing fact to me, but it is according to the record, any way. she was dismally slow; still, we often had pretty exciting times racing with islands, and rafts, and such things. one trip, however, we did rather well. we went to st. louis in sixteen days. but even at this rattling gait i think we changed watches three times in fort adams reach, which is five miles long. a 'reach' is a piece of straight river, and of course the current drives through such a place in a pretty lively way. that trip we went to grand gulf, from new orleans, in four days (three hundred and forty miles); the 'eclipse' and 'shotwell' did it in one. we were nine days out, in the chute of (seven hundred miles); the 'eclipse' and 'shotwell' went there in two days. something over a generation ago, a boat called the 'j. m. white' went from new orleans to cairo in three days, six hours, and forty-four minutes. in the 'eclipse' made the same trip in three days, three hours, and twenty minutes.{footnote [time disputed. some authorities add hour and minutes to this.]} in the 'r. e. lee' did it in three days and one hour. this last is called the fastest trip on record. i will try to show that it was not. for this reason: the distance between new orleans and cairo, when the 'j. m. white' ran it, was about eleven hundred and six miles; consequently her average speed was a trifle over fourteen miles per hour. in the 'eclipse's' day the distance between the two ports had become reduced to one thousand and eighty miles; consequently her average speed was a shade under fourteen and three-eighths miles per hour. in the 'r. e. lee's' time the distance had diminished to about one thousand and thirty miles; consequently her average was about fourteen and one-eighth miles per hour. therefore the 'eclipse's' was conspicuously the fastest time that has ever been made. the record of some famous trips (from commodore rollingpin's almanack.) fast time on the western waters from new orleans to natchez-- miles d. h. m. orleans made the run in comet " " enterprise " " washington " " shelby " " paragon " " tecumseh " " tuscarora " " natchez " " ed. shippen " " belle of the west " sultana " " magnolia " " a. l. shotwell " " southern belle " " princess (no. ) " eclipse " " princess (new) " " natchez (new) " " princess (new) " " natchez " " r. e. lee " " from new orleans to cairo-- , miles d. h. m. j. m. white made the run in reindeer " " eclipse " " a. l. shotwell " " dexter " " natchez " " r. e. lee " " from new orleans to louisville-- , miles d. h. m. enterprise made the run in washington " " . shelby " " paragon " " tecumseh " " tuscarora " " gen. brown " " randolph " " empress " " sultana " " ed. shippen " " belle of the west " duke of orleans" " sultana " " bostona " " belle key " " reindeer " " eclipse " " a. l. shotwell " " eclipse " " from new orleans to donaldsonville-- miles h. m. a. l. shotwell made the run in eclipse " " sultana " " atlantic " " gen. quitman " " ruth " " r. e. lee " " from new orleans to st. louis-- , miles d. h. m. j. m. white made the run in missouri " " dexter " " natchez " " r. e. lee " " from louisville to cincinnati-- miles d. h. m. gen. pike made the run in paragon " " wheeling packet " " moselle " " duke of orleans " " congress " " ben franklin (no. ) " alleghaney " " pittsburgh " " telegraph no. " " from louisville to st. louis-- miles d. h. m. congress made the run in pike " " northerner " " southemer " " from cincinnati to pittsburgh-- miles d. h. telegraph no. made the run in buckeye state " " pittsburgh " " from st. louis to alton-- miles d. m. altona made the run in golden eagle " " war eagle " " miscellaneous runs in june, , the st. louis and keokuk packet, city of louisiana, made the run from st. louis to keokuk ( miles) in hours and minutes, the best time on record. in the steamer hawkeye state, of the northern packet company, made the run from st. louis to st. paul ( miles) in days and hours. never was beaten. in the steamer polar star made the run from st. louis to st. joseph, on the missouri river, in hours. in july, , the steamer jas. h. lucas, andy wineland, master, made the same run in hours and minutes. the distance between the ports is miles, and when the difficulties of navigating the turbulent missouri are taken into consideration, the performance of the lucas deserves especial mention. the run of the robert e. lee the time made by the r. e. lee from new orleans to st. louis in , in her famous race with the natchez, is the best on record, and, inasmuch as the race created a national interest, we give below her time table from port to port. left new orleans, thursday, june th, , at o'clock and minutes, p.m.; reached d. h. m. carrollton {half} harry hills {half} red church bonnet carre college point {half} donaldsonville plaquemine {half} baton rouge bayou sara red river stamps bryaro {half} hinderson's natchez cole's creek waterproof rodney st. joseph grand gulf hard times half mile below warrenton vicksburg milliken's bend bailey's lake providence greenville napoleon white river australia helena half mile below st. francis memphis foot of island foot of island tow-head, island new madrid dry bar no. foot of island upper tow-head--lucas bend cairo st. louis the lee landed at st. louis at . a.m., on july th, -- hours and minutes ahead of the natchez. the officers of the natchez claimed hours and minute stoppage on account of fog and repairing machinery. the r. e. lee was commanded by captain john w. cannon, and the natchez was in charge of that veteran southern boatman, captain thomas p. leathers. chapter cut-offs and stephen these dry details are of importance in one particular. they give me an opportunity of introducing one of the mississippi's oddest peculiarities,--that of shortening its length from time to time. if you will throw a long, pliant apple-paring over your shoulder, it will pretty fairly shape itself into an average section of the mississippi river; that is, the nine or ten hundred miles stretching from cairo, illinois, southward to new orleans, the same being wonderfully crooked, with a brief straight bit here and there at wide intervals. the two hundred-mile stretch from cairo northward to st. louis is by no means so crooked, that being a rocky country which the river cannot cut much. the water cuts the alluvial banks of the 'lower' river into deep horseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in some places if you were to get ashore at one extremity of the horseshoe and walk across the neck, half or three quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest a couple of hours while your steamer was coming around the long elbow, at a speed of ten miles an hour, to take you aboard again. when the river is rising fast, some scoundrel whose plantation is back in the country, and therefore of inferior value, has only to watch his chance, cut a little gutter across the narrow neck of land some dark night, and turn the water into it, and in a wonderfully short time a miracle has happened: to wit, the whole mississippi has taken possession of that little ditch, and placed the countryman's plantation on its bank (quadrupling its value), and that other party's formerly valuable plantation finds itself away out yonder on a big island; the old watercourse around it will soon shoal up, boats cannot approach within ten miles of it, and down goes its value to a fourth of its former worth. watches are kept on those narrow necks, at needful times, and if a man happens to be caught cutting a ditch across them, the chances are all against his ever having another opportunity to cut a ditch. pray observe some of the effects of this ditching business. once there was a neck opposite port hudson, louisiana, which was only half a mile across, in its narrowest place. you could walk across there in fifteen minutes; but if you made the journey around the cape on a raft, you traveled thirty-five miles to accomplish the same thing. in the river darted through that neck, deserted its old bed, and thus shortened itself thirty-five miles. in the same way it shortened itself twenty- five miles at black hawk point in . below red river landing, raccourci cut-off was made (forty or fifty years ago, i think). this shortened the river twenty-eight miles. in our day, if you travel by river from the southernmost of these three cut-offs to the northernmost, you go only seventy miles. to do the same thing a hundred and seventy- six years ago, one had to go a hundred and fifty-eight miles!-- shortening of eighty-eight miles in that trifling distance. at some forgotten time in the past, cut-offs were made above vidalia, louisiana; at island ; at island ; and at hale's point. these shortened the river, in the aggregate, seventy-seven miles. since my own day on the mississippi, cut-offs have been made at hurricane island; at island ; at napoleon, arkansas; at walnut bend; and at council bend. these shortened the river, in the aggregate, sixty-seven miles. in my own time a cut-off was made at american bend, which shortened the river ten miles or more. therefore, the mississippi between cairo and new orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. it was eleven hundred and eighty after the cut-off of . it was one thousand and forty after the american bend cut-off. it has lost sixty- seven miles since. consequently its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present. now, if i wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and 'let on' to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here! geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! nor 'development of species,' either! glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague--vague. please observe:-- in the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the lower mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. that is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the old oolitic silurian period,' just a million years ago next november, the lower mississippi river was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the gulf of mexico like a fishing-rod. and by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty- two years from now the lower mississippi will be only a mile and three- quarters long, and cairo and new orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. there is something fascinating about science. one gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. when the water begins to flow through one of those ditches i have been speaking of, it is time for the people thereabouts to move. the water cleaves the banks away like a knife. by the time the ditch has become twelve or fifteen feet wide, the calamity is as good as accomplished, for no power on earth can stop it now. when the width has reached a hundred yards, the banks begin to peel off in slices half an acre wide. the current flowing around the bend traveled formerly only five miles an hour; now it is tremendously increased by the shortening of the distance. i was on board the first boat that tried to go through the cut-off at american bend, but we did not get through. it was toward midnight, and a wild night it was--thunder, lightning, and torrents of rain. it was estimated that the current in the cut-off was making about fifteen or twenty miles an hour; twelve or thirteen was the best our boat could do, even in tolerably slack water, therefore perhaps we were foolish to try the cut-off. however, mr. brown was ambitious, and he kept on trying. the eddy running up the bank, under the 'point,' was about as swift as the current out in the middle; so we would go flying up the shore like a lightning express train, get on a big head of steam, and 'stand by for a surge' when we struck the current that was whirling by the point. but all our preparations were useless. the instant the current hit us it spun us around like a top, the water deluged the forecastle, and the boat careened so far over that one could hardly keep his feet. the next instant we were away down the river, clawing with might and main to keep out of the woods. we tried the experiment four times. i stood on the forecastle companion way to see. it was astonishing to observe how suddenly the boat would spin around and turn tail the moment she emerged from the eddy and the current struck her nose. the sounding concussion and the quivering would have been about the same if she had come full speed against a sand-bank. under the lightning flashes one could see the plantation cabins and the goodly acres tumble into the river; and the crash they made was not a bad effort at thunder. once, when we spun around, we only missed a house about twenty feet, that had a light burning in the window; and in the same instant that house went overboard. nobody could stay on our forecastle; the water swept across it in a torrent every time we plunged athwart the current. at the end of our fourth effort we brought up in the woods two miles below the cut-off; all the country there was overflowed, of course. a day or two later the cut-off was three-quarters of a mile wide, and boats passed up through it without much difficulty, and so saved ten miles. the old raccourci cut-off reduced the river's length twenty-eight miles. there used to be a tradition connected with it. it was said that a boat came along there in the night and went around the enormous elbow the usual way, the pilots not knowing that the cut-off had been made. it was a grisly, hideous night, and all shapes were vague and distorted. the old bend had already begun to fill up, and the boat got to running away from mysterious reefs, and occasionally hitting one. the perplexed pilots fell to swearing, and finally uttered the entirely unnecessary wish that they might never get out of that place. as always happens in such cases, that particular prayer was answered, and the others neglected. so to this day that phantom steamer is still butting around in that deserted river, trying to find her way out. more than one grave watchman has sworn to me that on drizzly, dismal nights, he has glanced fearfully down that forgotten river as he passed the head of the island, and seen the faint glow of the specter steamer's lights drifting through the distant gloom, and heard the muffled cough of her 'scape-pipes and the plaintive cry of her leadsmen. in the absence of further statistics, i beg to close this chapter with one more reminiscence of 'stephen.' most of the captains and pilots held stephen's note for borrowed sums, ranging from two hundred and fifty dollars upward. stephen never paid one of these notes, but he was very prompt and very zealous about renewing them every twelve months. of course there came a time, at last, when stephen could no longer borrow of his ancient creditors; so he was obliged to lie in wait for new men who did not know him. such a victim was good-hearted, simple natured young yates (i use a fictitious name, but the real name began, as this one does, with a y). young yates graduated as a pilot, got a berth, and when the month was ended and he stepped up to the clerk's office and received his two hundred and fifty dollars in crisp new bills, stephen was there! his silvery tongue began to wag, and in a very little while yates's two hundred and fifty dollars had changed hands. the fact was soon known at pilot headquarters, and the amusement and satisfaction of the old creditors were large and generous. but innocent yates never suspected that stephen's promise to pay promptly at the end of the week was a worthless one. yates called for his money at the stipulated time; stephen sweetened him up and put him off a week. he called then, according to agreement, and came away sugar-coated again, but suffering under another postponement. so the thing went on. yates haunted stephen week after week, to no purpose, and at last gave it up. and then straightway stephen began to haunt yates! wherever yates appeared, there was the inevitable stephen. and not only there, but beaming with affection and gushing with apologies for not being able to pay. by and by, whenever poor yates saw him coming, he would turn and fly, and drag his company with him, if he had company; but it was of no use; his debtor would run him down and corner him. panting and red- faced, stephen would come, with outstretched hands and eager eyes, invade the conversation, shake both of yates's arms loose in their sockets, and begin-- 'my, what a race i've had! i saw you didn't see me, and so i clapped on all steam for fear i'd miss you entirely. and here you are! there, just stand so, and let me look at you! just the same old noble countenance.' [to yates's friend:] 'just look at him! look at him! ain't it just good to look at him! ain't it now? ain't he just a picture! some call him a picture; i call him a panorama! that's what he is--an entire panorama. and now i'm reminded! how i do wish i could have seen you an hour earlier! for twenty-four hours i've been saving up that two hundred and fifty dollars for you; been looking for you everywhere. i waited at the planter's from six yesterday evening till two o'clock this morning, without rest or food; my wife says, "where have you been all night?" i said, "this debt lies heavy on my mind." she says, "in all my days i never saw a man take a debt to heart the way you do." i said, "it's my nature; how can i change it?" she says, "well, do go to bed and get some rest." i said, "not till that poor, noble young man has got his money." so i set up all night, and this morning out i shot, and the first man i struck told me you had shipped on the "grand turk" and gone to new orleans. well, sir, i had to lean up against a building and cry. so help me goodness, i couldn't help it. the man that owned the place come out cleaning up with a rag, and said he didn't like to have people cry against his building, and then it seemed to me that the whole world had turned against me, and it wasn't any use to live any more; and coming along an hour ago, suffering no man knows what agony, i met jim wilson and paid him the two hundred and fifty dollars on account; and to think that here you are, now, and i haven't got a cent! but as sure as i am standing here on this ground on this particular brick,--there, i've scratched a mark on the brick to remember it by,--i'll borrow that money and pay it over to you at twelve o'clock sharp, tomorrow! now, stand so; let me look at you just once more.' and so on. yates's life became a burden to him. he could not escape his debtor and his debtor's awful sufferings on account of not being able to pay. he dreaded to show himself in the street, lest he should find stephen lying in wait for him at the corner. bogart's billiard saloon was a great resort for pilots in those days. they met there about as much to exchange river news as to play. one morning yates was there; stephen was there, too, but kept out of sight. but by and by, when about all the pilots had arrived who were in town, stephen suddenly appeared in the midst, and rushed for yates as for a long-lost brother. 'oh, i am so glad to see you! oh my soul, the sight of you is such a comfort to my eyes! gentlemen, i owe all of you money; among you i owe probably forty thousand dollars. i want to pay it; i intend to pay it every last cent of it. you all know, without my telling you, what sorrow it has cost me to remain so long under such deep obligations to such patient and generous friends; but the sharpest pang i suffer--by far the sharpest--is from the debt i owe to this noble young man here; and i have come to this place this morning especially to make the announcement that i have at last found a method whereby i can pay off all my debts! and most especially i wanted him to be here when i announced it. yes, my faithful friend,--my benefactor, i've found the method! i've found the method to pay off all my debts, and you'll get your money!' hope dawned in yates's eye; then stephen, beaming benignantly, and placing his hand upon yates's head, added, 'i am going to pay them off in alphabetical order!' then he turned and disappeared. the full significance of stephen's 'method' did not dawn upon the perplexed and musing crowd for some two minutes; and then yates murmured with a sigh-- 'well, the y's stand a gaudy chance. he won't get any further than the c's in this world, and i reckon that after a good deal of eternity has wasted away in the next one, i'll still be referred to up there as "that poor, ragged pilot that came here from st. louis in the early days!" chapter i take a few extra lessons during the two or two and a half years of my apprenticeship, i served under many pilots, and had experience of many kinds of steamboatmen and many varieties of steamboats; for it was not always convenient for mr. bixby to have me with him, and in such cases he sent me with somebody else. i am to this day profiting somewhat by that experience; for in that brief, sharp schooling, i got personally and familiarly acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. the fact is daily borne in upon me, that the average shore-employment requires as much as forty years to equip a man with this sort of an education. when i say i am still profiting by this thing, i do not mean that it has constituted me a judge of men--no, it has not done that; for judges of men are born, not made. my profit is various in kind and degree; but the feature of it which i value most is the zest which that early experience has given to my later reading. when i find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, i generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that i have known him before--met him on the river. the figure that comes before me oftenest, out of the shadows of that vanished time, is that of brown, of the steamer 'pennsylvania'--the man referred to in a former chapter, whose memory was so good and tiresome. he was a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-shaven, horse-faced, ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault hunting, mote-magnifying tyrant. i early got the habit of coming on watch with dread at my heart. no matter how good a time i might have been having with the off-watch below, and no matter how high my spirits might be when i started aloft, my soul became lead in my body the moment i approached the pilot-house. i still remember the first time i ever entered the presence of that man. the boat had backed out from st. louis and was 'straightening down;' i ascended to the pilot-house in high feather, and very proud to be semi- officially a member of the executive family of so fast and famous a boat. brown was at the wheel. i paused in the middle of the room, all fixed to make my bow, but brown did not look around. i thought he took a furtive glance at me out of the corner of his eye, but as not even this notice was repeated, i judged i had been mistaken. by this time he was picking his way among some dangerous 'breaks' abreast the woodyards; therefore it would not be proper to interrupt him; so i stepped softly to the high bench and took a seat. there was silence for ten minutes; then my new boss turned and inspected me deliberately and painstakingly from head to heel for about--as it seemed to me--a quarter of an hour. after which he removed his countenance and i saw it no more for some seconds; then it came around once more, and this question greeted me-- 'are you horace bigsby's cub?' 'yes, sir.' after this there was a pause and another inspection. then-- 'what's your name?' i told him. he repeated it after me. it was probably the only thing he ever forgot; for although i was with him many months he never addressed himself to me in any other way than 'here!' and then his command followed. 'where was you born?' 'in florida, missouri.' a pause. then-- 'dern sight better staid there!' by means of a dozen or so of pretty direct questions, he pumped my family history out of me. the leads were going now, in the first crossing. this interrupted the inquest. when the leads had been laid in, he resumed-- 'how long you been on the river?' i told him. after a pause-- 'where'd you get them shoes?' i gave him the information. 'hold up your foot!' i did so. he stepped back, examined the shoe minutely and contemptuously, scratching his head thoughtfully, tilting his high sugar-loaf hat well forward to facilitate the operation, then ejaculated, 'well, i'll be dod derned!' and returned to his wheel. what occasion there was to be dod derned about it is a thing which is still as much of a mystery to me now as it was then. it must have been all of fifteen minutes--fifteen minutes of dull, homesick silence-- before that long horse-face swung round upon me again--and then, what a change! it was as red as fire, and every muscle in it was working. now came this shriek-- 'here!--you going to set there all day?' i lit in the middle of the floor, shot there by the electric suddenness of the surprise. as soon as i could get my voice i said, apologetically:--'i have had no orders, sir.' 'you've had no orders! my, what a fine bird we are! we must have orders! our father was a gentleman--owned slaves--and we've been to school. yes, we are a gentleman, too, and got to have orders! orders, is it? orders is what you want! dod dern my skin, i'll learn you to swell yourself up and blow around here about your dod-derned orders! g'way from the wheel!' (i had approached it without knowing it.) i moved back a step or two, and stood as in a dream, all my senses stupefied by this frantic assault. 'what you standing there for? take that ice-pitcher down to the texas- tender-come, move along, and don't you be all day about it!' the moment i got back to the pilot-house, brown said-- 'here! what was you doing down there all this time?' 'i couldn't find the texas-tender; i had to go all the way to the pantry.' 'derned likely story! fill up the stove.' i proceeded to do so. he watched me like a cat. presently he shouted-- 'put down that shovel! deadest numskull i ever saw--ain't even got sense enough to load up a stove.' all through the watch this sort of thing went on. yes, and the subsequent watches were much like it, during a stretch of months. as i have said, i soon got the habit of coming on duty with dread. the moment i was in the presence, even in the darkest night, i could feel those yellow eyes upon me, and knew their owner was watching for a pretext to spit out some venom on me. preliminarily he would say-- 'here! take the wheel.' two minutes later-- 'where in the nation you going to? pull her down! pull her down!' after another moment-- 'say! you going to hold her all day? let her go--meet her! meet her!' then he would jump from the bench, snatch the wheel from me, and meet her himself, pouring out wrath upon me all the time. george ritchie was the other pilot's cub. he was having good times now; for his boss, george ealer, was as kindhearted as brown wasn't. ritchie had steeled for brown the season before; consequently he knew exactly how to entertain himself and plague me, all by the one operation. whenever i took the wheel for a moment on ealer's watch, ritchie would sit back on the bench and play brown, with continual ejaculations of 'snatch her! snatch her! derndest mud-cat i ever saw!' 'here! where you going now? going to run over that snag?' 'pull her down! don't you hear me? pull her down!' 'there she goes! just as i expected! i told you not to cramp that reef. g'way from the wheel!' so i always had a rough time of it, no matter whose watch it was; and sometimes it seemed to me that ritchie's good-natured badgering was pretty nearly as aggravating as brown's dead-earnest nagging. i often wanted to kill brown, but this would not answer. a cub had to take everything his boss gave, in the way of vigorous comment and criticism; and we all believed that there was a united states law making it a penitentiary offense to strike or threaten a pilot who was on duty. however, i could imagine myself killing brown; there was no law against that; and that was the thing i used always to do the moment i was abed. instead of going over my river in my mind as was my duty, i threw business aside for pleasure, and killed brown. i killed brown every night for months; not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new and picturesque ones;--ways that were sometimes surprising for freshness of design and ghastliness of situation and environment. brown was always watching for a pretext to find fault; and if he could find no plausible pretext, he would invent one. he would scold you for shaving a shore, and for not shaving it; for hugging a bar, and for not hugging it; for 'pulling down' when not invited, and for not pulling down when not invited; for firing up without orders, and for waiting for orders. in a word, it was his invariable rule to find fault with everything you did; and another invariable rule of his was to throw all his remarks (to you) into the form of an insult. one day we were approaching new madrid, bound down and heavily laden. brown was at one side of the wheel, steering; i was at the other, standing by to 'pull down' or 'shove up.' he cast a furtive glance at me every now and then. i had long ago learned what that meant; viz., he was trying to invent a trap for me. i wondered what shape it was going to take. by and by he stepped back from the wheel and said in his usual snarly way-- 'here!--see if you've got gumption enough to round her to.' this was simply bound to be a success; nothing could prevent it; for he had never allowed me to round the boat to before; consequently, no matter how i might do the thing, he could find free fault with it. he stood back there with his greedy eye on me, and the result was what might have been foreseen: i lost my head in a quarter of a minute, and didn't know what i was about; i started too early to bring the boat around, but detected a green gleam of joy in brown's eye, and corrected my mistake; i started around once more while too high up, but corrected myself again in time; i made other false moves, and still managed to save myself; but at last i grew so confused and anxious that i tumbled into the very worst blunder of all--i got too far down before beginning to fetch the boat around. brown's chance was come. his face turned red with passion; he made one bound, hurled me across the house with a sweep of his arm, spun the wheel down, and began to pour out a stream of vituperation upon me which lasted till he was out of breath. in the course of this speech he called me all the different kinds of hard names he could think of, and once or twice i thought he was even going to swear--but he didn't this time. 'dod dern' was the nearest he ventured to the luxury of swearing, for he had been brought up with a wholesome respect for future fire and brimstone. that was an uncomfortable hour; for there was a big audience on the hurricane deck. when i went to bed that night, i killed brown in seventeen different ways--all of them new. chapter brown and i exchange compliments two trips later, i got into serious trouble. brown was steering; i was 'pulling down.' my younger brother appeared on the hurricane deck, and shouted to brown to stop at some landing or other a mile or so below. brown gave no intimation that he had heard anything. but that was his way: he never condescended to take notice of an under clerk. the wind was blowing; brown was deaf (although he always pretended he wasn't), and i very much doubted if he had heard the order. if i had two heads, i would have spoken; but as i had only one, it seemed judicious to take care of it; so i kept still. presently, sure enough, we went sailing by that plantation. captain klinefelter appeared on the deck, and said-- 'let her come around, sir, let her come around. didn't henry tell you to land here?' 'no, sir!' 'i sent him up to do, it.' 'he did come up; and that's all the good it done, the dod-derned fool. he never said anything.' 'didn't you hear him?' asked the captain of me. of course i didn't want to be mixed up in this business, but there was no way to avoid it; so i said-- 'yes, sir.' i knew what brown's next remark would be, before he uttered it; it was-- 'shut your mouth! you never heard anything of the kind.' i closed my mouth according to instructions. an hour later, henry entered the pilot-house, unaware of what had been going on. he was a thoroughly inoffensive boy, and i was sorry to see him come, for i knew brown would have no pity on him. brown began, straightway-- 'here! why didn't you tell me we'd got to land at that plantation?' 'i did tell you, mr. brown.' 'it's a lie!' i said-- 'you lie, yourself. he did tell you.' brown glared at me in unaffected surprise; and for as much as a moment he was entirely speechless; then he shouted to me-- 'i'll attend to your case in half a minute!' then to henry, 'and you leave the pilot-house; out with you!' it was pilot law, and must be obeyed. the boy started out, and even had his foot on the upper step outside the door, when brown, with a sudden access of fury, picked up a ten-pound lump of coal and sprang after him; but i was between, with a heavy stool, and i hit brown a good honest blow which stretched-him out. i had committed the crime of crimes--i had lifted my hand against a pilot on duty! i supposed i was booked for the penitentiary sure, and couldn't be booked any surer if i went on and squared my long account with this person while i had the chance; consequently i stuck to him and pounded him with my fists a considerable time--i do not know how long, the pleasure of it probably made it seem longer than it really was;--but in the end he struggled free and jumped up and sprang to the wheel: a very natural solicitude, for, all this time, here was this steamboat tearing down the river at the rate of fifteen miles an hour and nobody at the helm! however, eagle bend was two miles wide at this bank-full stage, and correspondingly long and deep; and the boat was steering herself straight down the middle and taking no chances. still, that was only luck--a body might have found her charging into the woods. perceiving, at a glance, that the 'pennsylvania' was in no danger, brown gathered up the big spy-glass, war-club fashion, and ordered me out of the pilot-house with more than comanche bluster. but i was not afraid of him now; so, instead of going, i tarried, and criticized his grammar; i reformed his ferocious speeches for him, and put them into good english, calling his attention to the advantage of pure english over the bastard dialect of the pennsylvanian collieries whence he was extracted. he could have done his part to admiration in a cross-fire of mere vituperation, of course; but he was not equipped for this species of controversy; so he presently laid aside his glass and took the wheel, muttering and shaking his head; and i retired to the bench. the racket had brought everybody to the hurricane deck, and i trembled when i saw the old captain looking up from the midst of the crowd. i said to myself, 'now i am done for!'--for although, as a rule, he was so fatherly and indulgent toward the boat's family, and so patient of minor shortcomings, he could be stern enough when the fault was worth it. i tried to imagine what he would do to a cub pilot who had been guilty of such a crime as mine, committed on a boat guard-deep with costly freight and alive with passengers. our watch was nearly ended. i thought i would go and hide somewhere till i got a chance to slide ashore. so i slipped out of the pilot-house, and down the steps, and around to the texas door--and was in the act of gliding within, when the captain confronted me! i dropped my head, and he stood over me in silence a moment or two, then said impressively-- 'follow me.' i dropped into his wake; he led the way to his parlor in the forward end of the texas. we were alone, now. he closed the after door; then moved slowly to the forward one and closed that. he sat down; i stood before him. he looked at me some little time, then said-- 'so you have been fighting mr. brown?' i answered meekly-- 'yes, sir.' 'do you know that that is a very serious matter?' 'yes, sir.' 'are you aware that this boat was plowing down the river fully five minutes with no one at the wheel?' 'yes, sir.' 'did you strike him first?' 'yes, sir.' 'what with?' 'a stool, sir.' 'hard?' 'middling, sir.' 'did it knock him down?' 'he--he fell, sir.' 'did you follow it up? did you do anything further?' 'yes, sir.' 'what did you do?' 'pounded him, sir.' 'pounded him?' 'yes, sir.' 'did you pound him much?--that is, severely?' 'one might call it that, sir, maybe.' 'i'm deuced glad of it! hark ye, never mention that i said that. you have been guilty of a great crime; and don't you ever be guilty of it again, on this boat. but--lay for him ashore! give him a good sound thrashing, do you hear? i'll pay the expenses. now go--and mind you, not a word of this to anybody. clear out with you!--you've been guilty of a great crime, you whelp!' i slid out, happy with the sense of a close shave and a mighty deliverance; and i heard him laughing to himself and slapping his fat thighs after i had closed his door. when brown came off watch he went straight to the captain, who was talking with some passengers on the boiler deck, and demanded that i be put ashore in new orleans--and added-- 'i'll never turn a wheel on this boat again while that cub stays.' the captain said-- 'but he needn't come round when you are on watch, mr. brown. 'i won't even stay on the same boat with him. one of us has got to go ashore.' 'very well,' said the captain, 'let it be yourself;' and resumed his talk with the passengers. during the brief remainder of the trip, i knew how an emancipated slave feels; for i was an emancipated slave myself. while we lay at landings, i listened to george ealer's flute; or to his readings from his two bibles, that is to say, goldsmith and shakespeare; or i played chess with him--and would have beaten him sometimes, only he always took back his last move and ran the game out differently. chapter a catastrophe we lay three days in new orleans, but the captain did not succeed in finding another pilot; so he proposed that i should stand a daylight watch, and leave the night watches to george ealer. but i was afraid; i had never stood a watch of any sort by myself, and i believed i should be sure to get into trouble in the head of some chute, or ground the boat in a near cut through some bar or other. brown remained in his place; but he would not travel with me. so the captain gave me an order on the captain of the 'a. t. lacey,' for a passage to st. louis, and said he would find a new pilot there and my steersman's berth could then be resumed. the 'lacey' was to leave a couple of days after the 'pennsylvania.' the night before the 'pennsylvania' left, henry and i sat chatting on a freight pile on the levee till midnight. the subject of the chat, mainly, was one which i think we had not exploited before--steamboat disasters. one was then on its way to us, little as we suspected it; the water which was to make the steam which should cause it, was washing past some point fifteen hundred miles up the river while we talked;--but it would arrive at the right time and the right place. we doubted if persons not clothed with authority were of much use in cases of disaster and attendant panic; still, they might be of some use; so we decided that if a disaster ever fell within our experience we would at least stick to the boat, and give such minor service as chance might throw in the way. henry remembered this, afterward, when the disaster came, and acted accordingly. the 'lacey' started up the river two days behind the 'pennsylvania.' we touched at greenville, mississippi, a couple of days out, and somebody shouted-- 'the "pennsylvania" is blown up at ship island, and a hundred and fifty lives lost!' at napoleon, arkansas, the same evening, we got an extra, issued by a memphis paper, which gave some particulars. it mentioned my brother, and said he was not hurt. further up the river we got a later extra. my brother was again mentioned; but this time as being hurt beyond help. we did not get full details of the catastrophe until we reached memphis. this is the sorrowful story-- it was six o'clock on a hot summer morning. the 'pennsylvania' was creeping along, north of ship island, about sixty miles below memphis on a half-head of steam, towing a wood-flat which was fast being emptied. george ealer was in the pilot-house-alone, i think; the second engineer and a striker had the watch in the engine room; the second mate had the watch on deck; george black, mr. wood, and my brother, clerks, were asleep, as were also brown and the head engineer, the carpenter, the chief mate, and one striker; captain klinefelter was in the barber's chair, and the barber was preparing to shave him. there were a good many cabin passengers aboard, and three or four hundred deck passengers --so it was said at the time--and not very many of them were astir. the wood being nearly all out of the flat now, ealer rang to 'come ahead' full steam, and the next moment four of the eight boilers exploded with a thunderous crash, and the whole forward third of the boat was hoisted toward the sky! the main part of the mass, with the chimneys, dropped upon the boat again, a mountain of riddled and chaotic rubbish--and then, after a little, fire broke out. many people were flung to considerable distances, and fell in the river; among these were mr. wood and my brother, and the carpenter. the carpenter was still stretched upon his mattress when he struck the water seventy-five feet from the boat. brown, the pilot, and george black, chief clerk, were never seen or heard of after the explosion. the barber's chair, with captain klinefelter in it and unhurt, was left with its back overhanging vacancy--everything forward of it, floor and all, had disappeared; and the stupefied barber, who was also unhurt, stood with one toe projecting over space, still stirring his lather unconsciously, and saying, not a word. when george ealer saw the chimneys plunging aloft in front of him, he knew what the matter was; so he muffled his face in the lapels of his coat, and pressed both hands there tightly to keep this protection in its place so that no steam could get to his nose or mouth. he had ample time to attend to these details while he was going up and returning. he presently landed on top of the unexploded boilers, forty feet below the former pilot-house, accompanied by his wheel and a rain of other stuff, and enveloped in a cloud of scalding steam. all of the many who breathed that steam, died; none escaped. but ealer breathed none of it. he made his way to the free air as quickly as he could; and when the steam cleared away he returned and climbed up on the boilers again, and patiently hunted out each and every one of his chessmen and the several joints of his flute. by this time the fire was beginning to threaten. shrieks and groans filled the air. a great many persons had been scalded, a great many crippled; the explosion had driven an iron crowbar through one man's body--i think they said he was a priest. he did not die at once, and his sufferings were very dreadful. a young french naval cadet, of fifteen, son of a french admiral, was fearfully scalded, but bore his tortures manfully. both mates were badly scalded, but they stood to their posts, nevertheless. they drew the wood-boat aft, and they and the captain fought back the frantic herd of frightened immigrants till the wounded could be brought there and placed in safety first. when mr. wood and henry fell in the water, they struck out for shore, which was only a few hundred yards away; but henry presently said he believed he was not hurt (what an unaccountable error!), and therefore would swim back to the boat and help save the wounded. so they parted, and henry returned. by this time the fire was making fierce headway, and several persons who were imprisoned under the ruins were begging piteously for help. all efforts to conquer the fire proved fruitless; so the buckets were presently thrown aside and the officers fell-to with axes and tried to cut the prisoners out. a striker was one of the captives; he said he was not injured, but could not free himself; and when he saw that the fire was likely to drive away the workers, he begged that some one would shoot him, and thus save him from the more dreadful death. the fire did drive the axmen away, and they had to listen, helpless, to this poor fellow's supplications till the flames ended his miseries. the fire drove all into the wood-flat that could be accommodated there; it was cut adrift, then, and it and the burning steamer floated down the river toward ship island. they moored the flat at the head of the island, and there, unsheltered from the blazing sun, the half-naked occupants had to remain, without food or stimulants, or help for their hurts, during the rest of the day. a steamer came along, finally, and carried the unfortunates to memphis, and there the most lavish assistance was at once forthcoming. by this time henry was insensible. the physicians examined his injuries and saw that they were fatal, and naturally turned their main attention to patients who could be saved. forty of the wounded were placed upon pallets on the floor of a great public hall, and among these was henry. there the ladies of memphis came every day, with flowers, fruits, and dainties and delicacies of all kinds, and there they remained and nursed the wounded. all the physicians stood watches there, and all the medical students; and the rest of the town furnished money, or whatever else was wanted. and memphis knew how to do all these things well; for many a disaster like the 'pennsylvania's' had happened near her doors, and she was experienced, above all other cities on the river, in the gracious office of the good samaritan' the sight i saw when i entered that large hall was new and strange to me. two long rows of prostrate forms--more than forty, in all--and every face and head a shapeless wad of loose raw cotton. it was a gruesome spectacle. i watched there six days and nights, and a very melancholy experience it was. there was one daily incident which was peculiarly depressing: this was the removal of the doomed to a chamber apart. it was done in order that the morale of the other patients might not be injuriously affected by seeing one of their number in the death-agony. the fated one was always carried out with as little stir as possible, and the stretcher was always hidden from sight by a wall of assistants; but no matter: everybody knew what that cluster of bent forms, with its muffled step and its slow movement meant; and all eyes watched it wistfully, and a shudder went abreast of it like a wave. i saw many poor fellows removed to the 'death-room,' and saw them no more afterward. but i saw our chief mate carried thither more than once. his hurts were frightful, especially his scalds. he was clothed in linseed oil and raw cotton to his waist, and resembled nothing human. he was often out of his mind; and then his pains would make him rave and shout and sometimes shriek. then, after a period of dumb exhaustion, his disordered imagination would suddenly transform the great apartment into a forecastle, and the hurrying throng of nurses into the crew; and he would come to a sitting posture and shout, 'hump yourselves, hump yourselves, you petrifactions, snail-bellies, pall-bearers! going to be all day getting that hatful of freight out?' and supplement this explosion with a firmament-obliterating irruption or profanity which nothing could stay or stop till his crater was empty. and now and then while these frenzies possessed him, he would tear off handfuls of the cotton and expose his cooked flesh to view. it was horrible. it was bad for the others, of course--this noise and these exhibitions; so the doctors tried to give him morphine to quiet him. but, in his mind or out of it, he would not take it. he said his wife had been killed by that treacherous drug, and he would die before he would take it. he suspected that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicines and in his water--so he ceased from putting either to his lips. once, when he had been without water during two sweltering days, he took the dipper in his hand, and the sight of the limpid fluid, and the misery of his thirst, tempted him almost beyond his strength; but he mastered himself and threw it away, and after that he allowed no more to be brought near him. three times i saw him carried to the death-room, insensible and supposed to be dying; but each time he revived, cursed his attendants, and demanded to be taken back. he lived to be mate of a steamboat again. but he was the only one who went to the death-room and returned alive. dr. peyton, a principal physician, and rich in all the attributes that go to constitute high and flawless character, did all that educated judgment and trained skill could do for henry; but, as the newspapers had said in the beginning, his hurts were past help. on the evening of the sixth day his wandering mind busied itself with matters far away, and his nerveless fingers 'picked at his coverlet.' his hour had struck; we bore him to the death-room, poor boy. life on the mississippi by mark twain part . the 'body of the nation' but the basin of the mississippi is the body of the nation. all the other parts are but members, important in themselves, yet more important in their relations to this. exclusive of the lake basin and of , square miles in texas and new mexico, which in many aspects form a part of it, this basin contains about , , square miles. in extent it is the second great valley of the world, being exceeded only by that of the amazon. the valley of the frozen obi approaches it in extent; that of la plata comes next in space, and probably in habitable capacity, having about eight-ninths of its area; then comes that of the yenisei, with about seven-ninths; the lena, amoor, hoang-ho, yang-tse-kiang, and nile, five-ninths; the ganges, less than one-half; the indus, less than one-third; the euphrates, one-fifth; the rhine, one-fifteenth. it exceeds in extent the whole of europe, exclusive of russia, norway, and sweden. it would contain austria four times, germany or spain five times, france six times, the british islands or italy ten times. conceptions formed from the river-basins of western europe are rudely shocked when we consider the extent of the valley of the mississippi; nor are those formed from the sterile basins of the great rivers of siberia, the lofty plateaus of central asia, or the mighty sweep of the swampy amazon more adequate. latitude, elevation, and rainfall all combine to render every part of the mississippi valley capable of supporting a dense population. as a dwelling-place for civilized man it is by far the first upon our globe. editor's table, harper's magazine, february chapter the river and its history the mississippi is well worth reading about. it is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. considering the missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world--four thousand three hundred miles. it seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. it discharges three times as much water as the st. lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the thames. no other river has so vast a drainage-basin: it draws its water supply from twenty-eight states and territories; from delaware, on the atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and idaho on the pacific slope--a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. the mississippi receives and carries to the gulf water from fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats, and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels. the area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of england, wales, scotland, ireland, france, spain, portugal, germany, austria, italy, and turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile; the mississippi valley, proper, is exceptionally so. it is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. from the junction of the ohio to a point half way down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high water: thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the 'passes,' above the mouth, it is but little over half a mile. at the junction of the ohio the mississippi's depth is eighty- seven feet; the depth increases gradually, reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth. the difference in rise and fall is also remarkable--not in the upper, but in the lower river. the rise is tolerably uniform down to natchez (three hundred and sixty miles above the mouth)--about fifty feet. but at bayou la fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet; at new orleans only fifteen, and just above the mouth only two and one half. an article in the new orleans 'times-democrat,' based upon reports of able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundred and six million tons of mud into the gulf of mexico--which brings to mind captain marryat's rude name for the mississippi--'the great sewer.' this mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundred and forty-one feet high. the mud deposit gradually extends the land--but only gradually; it has extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundred years which have elapsed since the river took its place in history. the belief of the scientific people is, that the mouth used to be at baton rouge, where the hills cease, and that the two hundred miles of land between there and the gulf was built by the river. this gives us the age of that piece of country, without any trouble at all--one hundred and twenty thousand years. yet it is much the youthfullest batch of country that lies around there anywhere. the mississippi is remarkable in still another way--its disposition to make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow necks of land, and thus straightening and shortening itself. more than once it has shortened itself thirty miles at a single jump! these cut-offs have had curious effects: they have thrown several river towns out into the rural districts, and built up sand bars and forests in front of them. the town of delta used to be three miles below vicksburg: a recent cutoff has radically changed the position, and delta is now two miles above vicksburg. both of these river towns have been retired to the country by that cut- off. a cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions: for instance, a man is living in the state of mississippi to-day, a cut-off occurs to-night, and to-morrow the man finds himself and his land over on the other side of the river, within the boundaries and subject to the laws of the state of louisiana! such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times, could have transferred a slave from missouri to illinois and made a free man of him. the mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone: it is always changing its habitat bodily--is always moving bodily sidewise. at hard times, la., the river is two miles west of the region it used to occupy. as a result, the original site of that settlement is not now in louisiana at all, but on the other side of the river, in the state of mississippi. nearly the whole of that one thousand three hundred miles of old mississippi river which la salle floated down in his canoes, two hundred years ago, is good solid dry ground now. the river lies to the right of it, in places, and to the left of it in other places. although the mississippi's mud builds land but slowly, down at the mouth, where the gulfs billows interfere with its work, it builds fast enough in better protected regions higher up: for instance, prophet's island contained one thousand five hundred acres of land thirty years ago; since then the river has added seven hundred acres to it. but enough of these examples of the mighty stream's eccentricities for the present--i will give a few more of them further along in the book. let us drop the mississippi's physical history, and say a word about its historical history--so to speak. we can glance briefly at its slumbrous first epoch in a couple of short chapters; at its second and wider-awake epoch in a couple more; at its flushest and widest-awake epoch in a good many succeeding chapters; and then talk about its comparatively tranquil present epoch in what shall be left of the book. the world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word 'new' in connection with our country, that we early get and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it. we do of course know that there are several comparatively old dates in american history, but the mere figures convey to our minds no just idea, no distinct realization, of the stretch of time which they represent. to say that de soto, the first white man who ever saw the mississippi river, saw it in , is a remark which states a fact without interpreting it: it is something like giving the dimensions of a sunset by astronomical measurements, and cataloguing the colors by their scientific names;--as a result, you get the bald fact of the sunset, but you don't see the sunset. it would have been better to paint a picture of it. the date , standing by itself, means little or nothing to us; but when one groups a few neighboring historical dates and facts around it, he adds perspective and color, and then realizes that this is one of the american dates which is quite respectable for age. for instance, when the mississippi was first seen by a white man, less than a quarter of a century had elapsed since francis i.'s defeat at pavia; the death of raphael; the death of bayard, sans peur et sans reproche; the driving out of the knights-hospitallers from rhodes by the turks; and the placarding of the ninety-five propositions,--the act which began the reformation. when de soto took his glimpse of the river, ignatius loyola was an obscure name; the order of the jesuits was not yet a year old; michael angelo's paint was not yet dry on the last judgment in the sistine chapel; mary queen of scots was not yet born, but would be before the year closed. catherine de medici was a child; elizabeth of england was not yet in her teens; calvin, benvenuto cellini, and the emperor charles v. were at the top of their fame, and each was manufacturing history after his own peculiar fashion; margaret of navarre was writing the 'heptameron' and some religious books,--the first survives, the others are forgotten, wit and indelicacy being sometimes better literature preservers than holiness; lax court morals and the absurd chivalry business were in full feather, and the joust and the tournament were the frequent pastime of titled fine gentlemen who could fight better than they could spell, while religion was the passion of their ladies, and classifying their offspring into children of full rank and children by brevet their pastime. in fact, all around, religion was in a peculiarly blooming condition: the council of trent was being called; the spanish inquisition was roasting, and racking, and burning, with a free hand; elsewhere on the continent the nations were being persuaded to holy living by the sword and fire; in england, henry viii. had suppressed the monasteries, burnt fisher and another bishop or two, and was getting his english reformation and his harem effectively started. when de soto stood on the banks of the mississippi, it was still two years before luther's death; eleven years before the burning of servetus; thirty years before the st. bartholomew slaughter; rabelais was not yet published; 'don quixote' was not yet written; shakespeare was not yet born; a hundred long years must still elapse before englishmen would hear the name of oliver cromwell. unquestionably the discovery of the mississippi is a datable fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity. de soto merely glimpsed the river, then died and was buried in it by his priests and soldiers. one would expect the priests and the soldiers to multiply the river's dimensions by ten--the spanish custom of the day-- and thus move other adventurers to go at once and explore it. on the contrary, their narratives when they reached home, did not excite that amount of curiosity. the mississippi was left unvisited by whites during a term of years which seems incredible in our energetic days. one may 'sense' the interval to his mind, after a fashion, by dividing it up in this way: after de soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of a quarter of a century elapsed, and then shakespeare was born; lived a trifle more than half a century, then died; and when he had been in his grave considerably more than half a century, the second white man saw the mississippi. in our day we don't allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. if somebody should discover a creek in the county next to the one that the north pole is in, europe and america would start fifteen costly expeditions thither: one to explore the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt for each other. for more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white settlements on our atlantic coasts. these people were in intimate communication with the indians: in the south the spaniards were robbing, slaughtering, enslaving and converting them; higher up, the english were trading beads and blankets to them for a consideration, and throwing in civilization and whiskey, 'for lagniappe;' and in canada the french were schooling them in a rudimentary way, missionarying among them, and drawing whole populations of them at a time to quebec, and later to montreal, to buy furs of them. necessarily, then, these various clusters of whites must have heard of the great river of the far west; and indeed, they did hear of it vaguely,--so vaguely and indefinitely, that its course, proportions, and locality were hardly even guessable. the mere mysteriousness of the matter ought to have fired curiosity and compelled exploration; but this did not occur. apparently nobody happened to want such a river, nobody needed it, nobody was curious about it; so, for a century and a half the mississippi remained out of the market and undisturbed. when de soto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and had no present occasion for one; consequently he did not value it or even take any particular notice of it. but at last la salle the frenchman conceived the idea of seeking out that river and exploring it. it always happens that when a man seizes upon a neglected and important idea, people inflamed with the same notion crop up all around. it happened so in this instance. naturally the question suggests itself, why did these people want the river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations? apparently it was because at this late day they thought they had discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be believed that the mississippi emptied into the gulf of california, and therefore afforded a short cut from canada to china. previously the supposition had been that it emptied into the atlantic, or sea of virginia. chapter the river and its explorers la salle himself sued for certain high privileges, and they were graciously accorded him by louis xiv of inflated memory. chief among them was the privilege to explore, far and wide, and build forts, and stake out continents, and hand the same over to the king, and pay the expenses himself; receiving, in return, some little advantages of one sort or another; among them the monopoly of buffalo hides. he spent several years and about all of his money, in making perilous and painful trips between montreal and a fort which he had built on the illinois, before he at last succeeded in getting his expedition in such a shape that he could strike for the mississippi. and meantime other parties had had better fortune. in joliet the merchant, and marquette the priest, crossed the country and reached the banks of the mississippi. they went by way of the great lakes; and from green bay, in canoes, by way of fox river and the wisconsin. marquette had solemnly contracted, on the feast of the immaculate conception, that if the virgin would permit him to discover the great river, he would name it conception, in her honor. he kept his word. in that day, all explorers traveled with an outfit of priests. de soto had twenty-four with him. la salle had several, also. the expeditions were often out of meat, and scant of clothes, but they always had the furniture and other requisites for the mass; they were always prepared, as one of the quaint chroniclers of the time phrased it, to 'explain hell to the savages.' on the th of june, , the canoes of joliet and marquette and their five subordinates reached the junction of the wisconsin with the mississippi. mr. parkman says: 'before them a wide and rapid current coursed athwart their way, by the foot of lofty heights wrapped thick in forests.' he continues: 'turning southward, they paddled down the stream, through a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man.' a big cat-fish collided with marquette's canoe, and startled him; and reasonably enough, for he had been warned by the indians that he was on a foolhardy journey, and even a fatal one, for the river contained a demon 'whose roar could be heard at a great distance, and who would engulf them in the abyss where he dwelt.' i have seen a mississippi cat- fish that was more than six feet long, and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds; and if marquette's fish was the fellow to that one, he had a fair right to think the river's roaring demon was come. 'at length the buffalo began to appear, grazing in herds on the great prairies which then bordered the river; and marquette describes the fierce and stupid look of the old bulls as they stared at the intruders through the tangled mane which nearly blinded them.' the voyagers moved cautiously: 'landed at night and made a fire to cook their evening meal; then extinguished it, embarked again, paddled some way farther, and anchored in the stream, keeping a man on the watch till morning.' they did this day after day and night after night; and at the end of two weeks they had not seen a human being. the river was an awful solitude, then. and it is now, over most of its stretch. but at the close of the fortnight they one day came upon the footprints of men in the mud of the western bank--a robinson crusoe experience which carries an electric shiver with it yet, when one stumbles on it in print. they had been warned that the river indians were as ferocious and pitiless as the river demon, and destroyed all comers without waiting for provocation; but no matter, joliet and marquette struck into the country to hunt up the proprietors of the tracks. they found them, by and by, and were hospitably received and well treated--if to be received by an indian chief who has taken off his last rag in order to appear at his level best is to be received hospitably; and if to be treated abundantly to fish, porridge, and other game, including dog, and have these things forked into one's mouth by the ungloved fingers of indians is to be well treated. in the morning the chief and six hundred of his tribesmen escorted the frenchmen to the river and bade them a friendly farewell. on the rocks above the present city of alton they found some rude and fantastic indian paintings, which they describe. a short distance below 'a torrent of yellow mud rushed furiously athwart the calm blue current of the mississippi, boiling and surging and sweeping in its course logs, branches, and uprooted trees.' this was the mouth of the missouri, 'that savage river,' which 'descending from its mad career through a vast unknown of barbarism, poured its turbid floods into the bosom of its gentle sister.' by and by they passed the mouth of the ohio; they passed cane-brakes; they fought mosquitoes; they floated along, day after day, through the deep silence and loneliness of the river, drowsing in the scant shade of makeshift awnings, and broiling with the heat; they encountered and exchanged civilities with another party of indians; and at last they reached the mouth of the arkansas (about a month out from their starting-point), where a tribe of war-whooping savages swarmed out to meet and murder them; but they appealed to the virgin for help; so in place of a fight there was a feast, and plenty of pleasant palaver and fol-de-rol. they had proved to their satisfaction, that the mississippi did not empty into the gulf of california, or into the atlantic. they believed it emptied into the gulf of mexico. they turned back, now, and carried their great news to canada. but belief is not proof. it was reserved for la salle to furnish the proof. he was provokingly delayed, by one misfortune after another, but at last got his expedition under way at the end of the year . in the dead of winter he and henri de tonty, son of lorenzo tonty, who invented the tontine, his lieutenant, started down the illinois, with a following of eighteen indians brought from new england, and twenty-three frenchmen. they moved in procession down the surface of the frozen river, on foot, and dragging their canoes after them on sledges. at peoria lake they struck open water, and paddled thence to the mississippi and turned their prows southward. they plowed through the fields of floating ice, past the mouth of the missouri; past the mouth of the ohio, by-and-by; 'and, gliding by the wastes of bordering swamp, landed on the th of february near the third chickasaw bluffs,' where they halted and built fort prudhomme. 'again,' says mr. parkman, 'they embarked; and with every stage of their adventurous progress, the mystery of this vast new world was more and more unveiled. more and more they entered the realms of spring. the hazy sunlight, the warm and drowsy air, the tender foliage, the opening flowers, betokened the reviving life of nature.' day by day they floated down the great bends, in the shadow of the dense forests, and in time arrived at the mouth of the arkansas. first, they were greeted by the natives of this locality as marquette had before been greeted by them--with the booming of the war drum and the flourish of arms. the virgin composed the difficulty in marquette's case; the pipe of peace did the same office for la salle. the white man and the red man struck hands and entertained each other during three days. then, to the admiration of the savages, la salle set up a cross with the arms of france on it, and took possession of the whole country for the king--the cool fashion of the time--while the priest piously consecrated the robbery with a hymn. the priest explained the mysteries of the faith 'by signs,' for the saving of the savages; thus compensating them with possible possessions in heaven for the certain ones on earth which they had just been robbed of. and also, by signs, la salle drew from these simple children of the forest acknowledgments of fealty to louis the putrid, over the water. nobody smiled at these colossal ironies. these performances took place on the site of the future town of napoleon, arkansas, and there the first confiscation-cross was raised on the banks of the great river. marquette's and joliet's voyage of discovery ended at the same spot--the site of the future town of napoleon. when de soto took his fleeting glimpse of the river, away back in the dim early days, he took it from that same spot--the site of the future town of napoleon, arkansas. therefore, three out of the four memorable events connected with the discovery and exploration of the mighty river, occurred, by accident, in one and the same place. it is a most curious distinction, when one comes to look at it and think about it. france stole that vast country on that spot, the future napoleon; and by and by napoleon himself was to give the country back again!--make restitution, not to the owners, but to their white american heirs. the voyagers journeyed on, touching here and there; 'passed the sites, since become historic, of vicksburg and grand gulf,' and visited an imposing indian monarch in the teche country, whose capital city was a substantial one of sun-baked bricks mixed with straw--better houses than many that exist there now. the chiefs house contained an audience room forty feet square; and there he received tonty in state, surrounded by sixty old men clothed in white cloaks. there was a temple in the town, with a mud wall about it ornamented with skulls of enemies sacrificed to the sun. the voyagers visited the natchez indians, near the site of the present city of that name, where they found a 'religious and political despotism, a privileged class descended from the sun, a temple and a sacred fire.' it must have been like getting home again; it was home with an advantage, in fact, for it lacked louis xiv. a few more days swept swiftly by, and la salle stood in the shadow of his confiscating cross, at the meeting of the waters from delaware, and from itaska, and from the mountain ranges close upon the pacific, with the waters of the gulf of mexico, his task finished, his prodigy achieved. mr. parkman, in closing his fascinating narrative, thus sums up: 'on that day, the realm of france received on parchment a stupendous accession. the fertile plains of texas; the vast basin of the mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders of the gulf; from the woody ridges of the alleghanies to the bare peaks of the rocky mountains--a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath the scepter of the sultan of versailles; and all by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile.' chapter frescoes from the past apparently the river was ready for business, now. but no, the distribution of a population along its banks was as calm and deliberate and time-devouring a process as the discovery and exploration had been. seventy years elapsed, after the exploration, before the river's borders had a white population worth considering; and nearly fifty more before the river had a commerce. between la salle's opening of the river and the time when it may be said to have become the vehicle of anything like a regular and active commerce, seven sovereigns had occupied the throne of england, america had become an independent nation, louis xiv. and louis xv. had rotted and died, the french monarchy had gone down in the red tempest of the revolution, and napoleon was a name that was beginning to be talked about. truly, there were snails in those days. the river's earliest commerce was in great barges--keelboats, broadhorns. they floated and sailed from the upper rivers to new orleans, changed cargoes there, and were tediously warped and poled back by hand. a voyage down and back sometimes occupied nine months. in time this commerce increased until it gave employment to hordes of rough and hardy men; rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrific hardships with sailor-like stoicism; heavy drinkers, coarse frolickers in moral sties like the natchez-under-the-hill of that day, heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one, elephantinely jolly, foul-witted, profane; prodigal of their money, bankrupt at the end of the trip, fond of barbaric finery, prodigious braggarts; yet, in the main, honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty, and often picturesquely magnanimous. by and by the steamboat intruded. then for fifteen or twenty years, these men continued to run their keelboats down-stream, and the steamers did all of the upstream business, the keelboatmen selling their boats in new orleans, and returning home as deck passengers in the steamers. but after a while the steamboats so increased in number and in speed that they were able to absorb the entire commerce; and then keelboating died a permanent death. the keelboatman became a deck hand, or a mate, or a pilot on the steamer; and when steamer-berths were not open to him, he took a berth on a pittsburgh coal-flat, or on a pine-raft constructed in the forests up toward the sources of the mississippi. in the heyday of the steamboating prosperity, the river from end to end was flaked with coal-fleets and timber rafts, all managed by hand, and employing hosts of the rough characters whom i have been trying to describe. i remember the annual processions of mighty rafts that used to glide by hannibal when i was a boy,--an acre or so of white, sweet- smelling boards in each raft, a crew of two dozen men or more, three or four wigwams scattered about the raft's vast level space for storm- quarters,--and i remember the rude ways and the tremendous talk of their big crews, the ex-keelboatmen and their admiringly patterning successors; for we used to swim out a quarter or third of a mile and get on these rafts and have a ride. by way of illustrating keelboat talk and manners, and that now-departed and hardly-remembered raft-life, i will throw in, in this place, a chapter from a book which i have been working at, by fits and starts, during the past five or six years, and may possibly finish in the course of five or six more. the book is a story which details some passages in the life of an ignorant village boy, huck finn, son of the town drunkard of my time out west, there. he has run away from his persecuting father, and from a persecuting good widow who wishes to make a nice, truth-telling, respectable boy of him; and with him a slave of the widow's has also escaped. they have found a fragment of a lumber raft (it is high water and dead summer time), and are floating down the river by night, and hiding in the willows by day,--bound for cairo,--whence the negro will seek freedom in the heart of the free states. but in a fog, they pass cairo without knowing it. by and by they begin to suspect the truth, and huck finn is persuaded to end the dismal suspense by swimming down to a huge raft which they have seen in the distance ahead of them, creeping aboard under cover of the darkness, and gathering the needed information by eavesdropping:-- but you know a young person can't wait very well when he is impatient to find a thing out. we talked it over, and by and by jim said it was such a black night, now, that it wouldn't be no risk to swim down to the big raft and crawl aboard and listen--they would talk about cairo, because they would be calculating to go ashore there for a spree, maybe, or anyway they would send boats ashore to buy whiskey or fresh meat or something. jim had a wonderful level head, for a nigger: he could most always start a good plan when you wanted one. i stood up and shook my rags off and jumped into the river, and struck out for the raft's light. by and by, when i got down nearly to her, i eased up and went slow and cautious. but everything was all right-- nobody at the sweeps. so i swum down along the raft till i was most abreast the camp fire in the middle, then i crawled aboard and inched along and got in amongst some bundles of shingles on the weather side of the fire. there was thirteen men there--they was the watch on deck of course. and a mighty rough-looking lot, too. they had a jug, and tin cups, and they kept the jug moving. one man was singing--roaring, you may say; and it wasn't a nice song--for a parlor anyway. he roared through his nose, and strung out the last word of every line very long. when he was done they all fetched a kind of injun war-whoop, and then another was sung. it begun:-- 'there was a woman in our towdn, in our towdn did dwed'l (dwell,) she loved her husband dear-i-lee, but another man twyste as wed'l. singing too, riloo, riloo, riloo, ri-too, riloo, rilay - - - e, she loved her husband dear-i-lee, but another man twyste as wed'l. and so on--fourteen verses. it was kind of poor, and when he was going to start on the next verse one of them said it was the tune the old cow died on; and another one said, 'oh, give us a rest.' and another one told him to take a walk. they made fun of him till he got mad and jumped up and begun to cuss the crowd, and said he could lame any thief in the lot. they was all about to make a break for him, but the biggest man there jumped up and says-- 'set whar you are, gentlemen. leave him to me; he's my meat.' then he jumped up in the air three times and cracked his heels together every time. he flung off a buckskin coat that was all hung with fringes, and says, 'you lay thar tell the chawin-up's done;' and flung his hat down, which was all over ribbons, and says, 'you lay thar tell his sufferin's is over.' then he jumped up in the air and cracked his heels together again and shouted out-- 'whoo-oop! i'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper- bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of arkansaw!--look at me! i'm the man they call sudden death and general desolation! sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side! look at me! i take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when i'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when i'm ailing! i split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and i squench the thunder when i speak! whoo-oop! stand back and give me room according to my strength! blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! cast your eye on me, gentlemen!--and lay low and hold your breath, for i'm bout to turn myself loose!' all the time he was getting this off, he was shaking his head and looking fierce, and kind of swelling around in a little circle, tucking up his wrist-bands, and now and then straightening up and beating his breast with his fist, saying, 'look at me, gentlemen!' when he got through, he jumped up and cracked his heels together three times, and let off a roaring 'whoo-oop! i'm the bloodiest son of a wildcat that lives!' then the man that had started the row tilted his old slouch hat down over his right eye; then he bent stooping forward, with his back sagged and his south end sticking out far, and his fists a-shoving out and drawing in in front of him, and so went around in a little circle about three times, swelling himself up and breathing hard. then he straightened, and jumped up and cracked his heels together three times, before he lit again (that made them cheer), and he begun to shout like this-- 'whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the kingdom of sorrow's a- coming! hold me down to the earth, for i feel my powers a-working! whoo- oop! i'm a child of sin, don't let me get a start! smoked glass, here, for all! don't attempt to look at me with the naked eye, gentlemen! when i'm playful i use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the atlantic ocean for whales! i scratch my head with the lightning, and purr myself to sleep with the thunder! when i'm cold, i bile the gulf of mexico and bathe in it; when i'm hot i fan myself with an equinoctial storm; when i'm thirsty i reach up and suck a cloud dry like a sponge; when i range the earth hungry, famine follows in my tracks! whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread! i put my hand on the sun's face and make it night in the earth; i bite a piece out of the moon and hurry the seasons; i shake myself and crumble the mountains! contemplate me through leather--don't use the naked eye! i'm the man with a petrified heart and biler-iron bowels! the massacre of isolated communities is the pastime of my idle moments, the destruction of nationalities the serious business of my life! the boundless vastness of the great american desert is my enclosed property, and i bury my dead on my own premises!' he jumped up and cracked his heels together three times before he lit (they cheered him again), and as he come down he shouted out: 'whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the pet child of calamity's a-coming! ' then the other one went to swelling around and blowing again--the first one--the one they called bob; next, the child of calamity chipped in again, bigger than ever; then they both got at it at the same time, swelling round and round each other and punching their fists most into each other's faces, and whooping and jawing like injuns; then bob called the child names, and the child called him names back again: next, bob called him a heap rougher names and the child come back at him with the very worst kind of language; next, bob knocked the child's hat off, and the child picked it up and kicked bob's ribbony hat about six foot; bob went and got it and said never mind, this warn't going to be the last of this thing, because he was a man that never forgot and never forgive, and so the child better look out, for there was a time a-coming, just as sure as he was a living man, that he would have to answer to him with the best blood in his body. the child said no man was willinger than he was for that time to come, and he would give bob fair warning, now, never to cross his path again, for he could never rest till he had waded in his blood, for such was his nature, though he was sparing him now on account of his family, if he had one. both of them was edging away in different directions, growling and shaking their heads and going on about what they was going to do; but a little black-whiskered chap skipped up and says-- 'come back here, you couple of chicken-livered cowards, and i'll thrash the two of ye!' and he done it, too. he snatched them, he jerked them this way and that, he booted them around, he knocked them sprawling faster than they could get up. why, it warn't two minutes till they begged like dogs-- and how the other lot did yell and laugh and clap their hands all the way through, and shout 'sail in, corpse-maker!' 'hi! at him again, child of calamity!' 'bully for you, little davy!' well, it was a perfect pow- wow for a while. bob and the child had red noses and black eyes when they got through. little davy made them own up that they were sneaks and cowards and not fit to eat with a dog or drink with a nigger; then bob and the child shook hands with each other, very solemn, and said they had always respected each other and was willing to let bygones be bygones. so then they washed their faces in the river; and just then there was a loud order to stand by for a crossing, and some of them went forward to man the sweeps there, and the rest went aft to handle the after-sweeps. i laid still and waited for fifteen minutes, and had a smoke out of a pipe that one of them left in reach; then the crossing was finished, and they stumped back and had a drink around and went to talking and singing again. next they got out an old fiddle, and one played and another patted juba, and the rest turned themselves loose on a regular old- fashioned keel-boat break-down. they couldn't keep that up very long without getting winded, so by and by they settled around the jug again. they sung 'jolly, jolly raftman's the life for me,' with a musing chorus, and then they got to talking about differences betwixt hogs, and their different kind of habits; and next about women and their different ways: and next about the best ways to put out houses that was afire; and next about what ought to be done with the injuns; and next about what a king had to do, and how much he got; and next about how to make cats fight; and next about what to do when a man has fits; and next about differences betwixt clear-water rivers and muddy-water ones. the man they called ed said the muddy mississippi water was wholesomer to drink than the clear water of the ohio; he said if you let a pint of this yaller mississippi water settle, you would have about a half to three-quarters of an inch of mud in the bottom, according to the stage of the river, and then it warn't no better than ohio water--what you wanted to do was to keep it stirred up--and when the river was low, keep mud on hand to put in and thicken the water up the way it ought to be. the child of calamity said that was so; he said there was nutritiousness in the mud, and a man that drunk mississippi water could grow corn in his stomach if he wanted to. he says-- 'you look at the graveyards; that tells the tale. trees won't grow worth chucks in a cincinnati graveyard, but in a sent louis graveyard they grow upwards of eight hundred foot high. it's all on account of the water the people drunk before they laid up. a cincinnati corpse don't richen a soil any.' and they talked about how ohio water didn't like to mix with mississippi water. ed said if you take the mississippi on a rise when the ohio is low, you'll find a wide band of clear water all the way down the east side of the mississippi for a hundred mile or more, and the minute you get out a quarter of a mile from shore and pass the line, it is all thick and yaller the rest of the way across. then they talked about how to keep tobacco from getting moldy, and from that they went into ghosts and told about a lot that other folks had seen; but ed says-- 'why don't you tell something that you've seen yourselves? now let me have a say. five years ago i was on a raft as big as this, and right along here it was a bright moonshiny night, and i was on watch and boss of the stabboard oar forrard, and one of my pards was a man named dick allbright, and he come along to where i was sitting, forrard--gaping and stretching, he was--and stooped down on the edge of the raft and washed his face in the river, and come and set down by me and got out his pipe, and had just got it filled, when he looks up and says-- '"why looky-here," he says, "ain't that buck miller's place, over yander in the bend." '"yes," says i, "it is--why." he laid his pipe down and leant his head on his hand, and says-- '"i thought we'd be furder down." i says-- '"i thought it too, when i went off watch"--we was standing six hours on and six off--"but the boys told me," i says, "that the raft didn't seem to hardly move, for the last hour," says i, "though she's a slipping along all right, now," says i. he give a kind of a groan, and says-- '"i've seed a raft act so before, along here," he says, "'pears to me the current has most quit above the head of this bend durin' the last two years," he says. 'well, he raised up two or three times, and looked away off and around on the water. that started me at it, too. a body is always doing what he sees somebody else doing, though there mayn't be no sense in it. pretty soon i see a black something floating on the water away off to stabboard and quartering behind us. i see he was looking at it, too. i says-- '"what's that?" he says, sort of pettish,-- '"tain't nothing but an old empty bar'l." '"an empty bar'l!" says i, "why," says i, "a spy-glass is a fool to your eyes. how can you tell it's an empty bar'l?" he says-- '"i don't know; i reckon it ain't a bar'l, but i thought it might be," says he. '"yes," i says, "so it might be, and it might be anything else, too; a body can't tell nothing about it, such a distance as that," i says. 'we hadn't nothing else to do, so we kept on watching it. by and by i says-- '"why looky-here, dick allbright, that thing's a-gaining on us, i believe." 'he never said nothing. the thing gained and gained, and i judged it must be a dog that was about tired out. well, we swung down into the crossing, and the thing floated across the bright streak of the moonshine, and, by george, it was bar'l. says i-- '"dick allbright, what made you think that thing was a bar'l, when it was a half a mile off," says i. says he-- '"i don't know." says i-- '"you tell me, dick allbright." he says-- '"well, i knowed it was a bar'l; i've seen it before; lots has seen it; they says it's a haunted bar'l." 'i called the rest of the watch, and they come and stood there, and i told them what dick said. it floated right along abreast, now, and didn't gain any more. it was about twenty foot off. some was for having it aboard, but the rest didn't want to. dick allbright said rafts that had fooled with it had got bad luck by it. the captain of the watch said he didn't believe in it. he said he reckoned the bar'l gained on us because it was in a little better current than what we was. he said it would leave by and by. 'so then we went to talking about other things, and we had a song, and then a breakdown; and after that the captain of the watch called for another song; but it was clouding up, now, and the bar'l stuck right thar in the same place, and the song didn't seem to have much warm-up to it, somehow, and so they didn't finish it, and there warn't any cheers, but it sort of dropped flat, and nobody said anything for a minute. then everybody tried to talk at once, and one chap got off a joke, but it warn't no use, they didn't laugh, and even the chap that made the joke didn't laugh at it, which ain't usual. we all just settled down glum, and watched the bar'l, and was oneasy and oncomfortable. well, sir, it shut down black and still, and then the wind begin to moan around, and next the lightning begin to play and the thunder to grumble. and pretty soon there was a regular storm, and in the middle of it a man that was running aft stumbled and fell and sprained his ankle so that he had to lay up. this made the boys shake their heads. and every time the lightning come, there was that bar'l with the blue lights winking around it. we was always on the look-out for it. but by and by, towards dawn, she was gone. when the day come we couldn't see her anywhere, and we warn't sorry, neither. 'but next night about half-past nine, when there was songs and high jinks going on, here she comes again, and took her old roost on the stabboard side. there warn't no more high jinks. everybody got solemn; nobody talked; you couldn't get anybody to do anything but set around moody and look at the bar'l. it begun to cloud up again. when the watch changed, the off watch stayed up, 'stead of turning in. the storm ripped and roared around all night, and in the middle of it another man tripped and sprained his ankle, and had to knock off. the bar'l left towards day, and nobody see it go. 'everybody was sober and down in the mouth all day. i don't mean the kind of sober that comes of leaving liquor alone--not that. they was quiet, but they all drunk more than usual--not together--but each man sidled off and took it private, by himself. 'after dark the off watch didn't turn in; nobody sung, nobody talked; the boys didn't scatter around, neither; they sort of huddled together, forrard; and for two hours they set there, perfectly still, looking steady in the one direction, and heaving a sigh once in a while. and then, here comes the bar'l again. she took up her old place. she staid there all night; nobody turned in. the storm come on again, after midnight. it got awful dark; the rain poured down; hail, too; the thunder boomed and roared and bellowed; the wind blowed a hurricane; and the lightning spread over everything in big sheets of glare, and showed the whole raft as plain as day; and the river lashed up white as milk as far as you could see for miles, and there was that bar'l jiggering along, same as ever. the captain ordered the watch to man the after sweeps for a crossing, and nobody would go--no more sprained ankles for them, they said. they wouldn't even walk aft. well then, just then the sky split wide open, with a crash, and the lightning killed two men of the after watch, and crippled two more. crippled them how, says you? why, sprained their ankles! 'the bar'l left in the dark betwixt lightnings, towards dawn. well, not a body eat a bite at breakfast that morning. after that the men loafed around, in twos and threes, and talked low together. but none of them herded with dick allbright. they all give him the cold shake. if he come around where any of the men was, they split up and sidled away. they wouldn't man the sweeps with him. the captain had all the skiffs hauled up on the raft, alongside of his wigwam, and wouldn't let the dead men be took ashore to be planted; he didn't believe a man that got ashore would come back; and he was right. 'after night come, you could see pretty plain that there was going to be trouble if that bar'l come again; there was such a muttering going on. a good many wanted to kill dick allbright, because he'd seen the bar'l on other trips, and that had an ugly look. some wanted to put him ashore. some said, let's all go ashore in a pile, if the bar'l comes again. 'this kind of whispers was still going on, the men being bunched together forrard watching for the bar'l, when, lo and behold you, here she comes again. down she comes, slow and steady, and settles into her old tracks. you could a heard a pin drop. then up comes the captain, and says:-- '"boys, don't be a pack of children and fools; i don't want this bar'l to be dogging us all the way to orleans, and you don't; well, then, how's the best way to stop it? burn it up,--that's the way. i'm going to fetch it aboard," he says. and before anybody could say a word, in he went. 'he swum to it, and as he come pushing it to the raft, the men spread to one side. but the old man got it aboard and busted in the head, and there was a baby in it! yes, sir, a stark naked baby. it was dick allbright's baby; he owned up and said so. '"yes," he says, a-leaning over it, "yes, it is my own lamented darling, my poor lost charles william allbright deceased," says he,--for he could curl his tongue around the bulliest words in the language when he was a mind to, and lay them before you without a jint started, anywheres. yes, he said he used to live up at the head of this bend, and one night he choked his child, which was crying, not intending to kill it,--which was prob'ly a lie,--and then he was scared, and buried it in a bar'l, before his wife got home, and off he went, and struck the northern trail and went to rafting; and this was the third year that the bar'l had chased him. he said the bad luck always begun light, and lasted till four men was killed, and then the bar'l didn't come any more after that. he said if the men would stand it one more night,--and was a-going on like that,--but the men had got enough. they started to get out a boat to take him ashore and lynch him, but he grabbed the little child all of a sudden and jumped overboard with it hugged up to his breast and shedding tears, and we never see him again in this life, poor old suffering soul, nor charles william neither.' 'who was shedding tears?' says bob; 'was it allbright or the baby?' 'why, allbright, of course; didn't i tell you the baby was dead. been dead three years--how could it cry?' 'well, never mind how it could cry--how could it keep all that time?' says davy. 'you answer me that.' 'i don't know how it done it,' says ed. 'it done it though--that's all i know about it.' 'say--what did they do with the bar'l?' says the child of calamity. 'why, they hove it overboard, and it sunk like a chunk of lead.' 'edward, did the child look like it was choked?' says one. 'did it have its hair parted?' says another. 'what was the brand on that bar'l, eddy?' says a fellow they called bill. 'have you got the papers for them statistics, edmund?' says jimmy. 'say, edwin, was you one of the men that was killed by the lightning.' says davy. 'him? o, no, he was both of 'em,' says bob. then they all haw-hawed. 'say, edward, don't you reckon you'd better take a pill? you look bad-- don't you feel pale?' says the child of calamity. 'o, come, now, eddy,' says jimmy, 'show up; you must a kept part of that bar'l to prove the thing by. show us the bunghole--do--and we'll all believe you.' 'say, boys,' says bill, 'less divide it up. thar's thirteen of us. i can swaller a thirteenth of the yarn, if you can worry down the rest.' ed got up mad and said they could all go to some place which he ripped out pretty savage, and then walked off aft cussing to himself, and they yelling and jeering at him, and roaring and laughing so you could hear them a mile. 'boys, we'll split a watermelon on that,' says the child of calamity; and he come rummaging around in the dark amongst the shingle bundles where i was, and put his hand on me. i was warm and soft and naked; so he says 'ouch!' and jumped back. 'fetch a lantern or a chunk of fire here, boys--there's a snake here as big as a cow!' so they run there with a lantern and crowded up and looked in on me. 'come out of that, you beggar!' says one. 'who are you?' says another. 'what are you after here? speak up prompt, or overboard you go. 'snake him out, boys. snatch him out by the heels.' i began to beg, and crept out amongst them trembling. they looked me over, wondering, and the child of calamity says-- 'a cussed thief! lend a hand and less heave him overboard!' 'no,' says big bob, 'less get out the paint-pot and paint him a sky blue all over from head to heel, and then heave him over!' 'good, that 's it. go for the paint, jimmy.' when the paint come, and bob took the brush and was just going to begin, the others laughing and rubbing their hands, i begun to cry, and that sort of worked on davy, and he says-- ''vast there! he 's nothing but a cub. 'i'll paint the man that tetches him!' so i looked around on them, and some of them grumbled and growled, and bob put down the paint, and the others didn't take it up. 'come here to the fire, and less see what you're up to here,' says davy. 'now set down there and give an account of yourself. how long have you been aboard here?' 'not over a quarter of a minute, sir,' says i. 'how did you get dry so quick?' 'i don't know, sir. i'm always that way, mostly.' 'oh, you are, are you. what's your name?' i warn't going to tell my name. i didn't know what to say, so i just says-- 'charles william allbright, sir.' then they roared--the whole crowd; and i was mighty glad i said that, because maybe laughing would get them in a better humor. when they got done laughing, davy says-- 'it won't hardly do, charles william. you couldn't have growed this much in five year, and you was a baby when you come out of the bar'l, you know, and dead at that. come, now, tell a straight story, and nobody'll hurt you, if you ain't up to anything wrong. what is your name?' 'aleck hopkins, sir. aleck james hopkins.' 'well, aleck, where did you come from, here?' 'from a trading scow. she lays up the bend yonder. i was born on her. pap has traded up and down here all his life; and he told me to swim off here, because when you went by he said he would like to get some of you to speak to a mr. jonas turner, in cairo, and tell him--' 'oh, come!' 'yes, sir; it's as true as the world; pap he says--' 'oh, your grandmother!' they all laughed, and i tried again to talk, but they broke in on me and stopped me. 'now, looky-here,' says davy; 'you're scared, and so you talk wild. honest, now, do you live in a scow, or is it a lie?' 'yes, sir, in a trading scow. she lays up at the head of the bend. but i warn't born in her. it's our first trip.' 'now you're talking! what did you come aboard here, for? to steal?' 'no, sir, i didn't.--it was only to get a ride on the raft. all boys does that.' 'well, i know that. but what did you hide for?' 'sometimes they drive the boys off.' 'so they do. they might steal. looky-here; if we let you off this time, will you keep out of these kind of scrapes hereafter?' ''deed i will, boss. you try me.' 'all right, then. you ain't but little ways from shore. overboard with you, and don't you make a fool of yourself another time this way.--blast it, boy, some raftsmen would rawhide you till you were black and blue!' i didn't wait to kiss good-bye, but went overboard and broke for shore. when jim come along by and by, the big raft was away out of sight around the point. i swum out and got aboard, and was mighty glad to see home again. the boy did not get the information he was after, but his adventure has furnished the glimpse of the departed raftsman and keelboatman which i desire to offer in this place. i now come to a phase of the mississippi river life of the flush times of steamboating, which seems to me to warrant full examination--the marvelous science of piloting, as displayed there. i believe there has been nothing like it elsewhere in the world. chapter the boys' ambition when i was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village{footnote [ . hannibal, missouri]} on the west bank of the mississippi river. that was, to be a steamboatman. we had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. when a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, god would permit us to be pirates. these ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained. once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from st. louis, and another downward from keokuk. before these events, the day was glorious with expectancy; after them, the day was a dead and empty thing. not only the boys, but the whole village, felt this. after all these years i can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the water street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep--with shingle-shavings enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk, doing a good business in watermelon rinds and seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles scattered about the 'levee;' a pile of 'skids' on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side; the 'point' above the town, and the 'point' below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of those remote 'points;' instantly a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, 's-t-e- a-m-boat a-comin'!' and the scene changes! the town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving. drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurrying from many quarters to a common center, the wharf. assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time. and the boat is rather a handsome sight, too. she is long and sharp and trim and pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys, with a gilded device of some kind swung between them; a fanciful pilot-house, a glass and 'gingerbread', perched on top of the 'texas' deck behind them; the paddle-boxes are gorgeous with a picture or with gilded rays above the boat's name; the boiler deck, the hurricane deck, and the texas deck are fenced and ornamented with clean white railings; there is a flag gallantly flying from the jack-staff; the furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys--a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before arriving at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecastle; the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied deckhand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gauge- cocks, the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steamer is at rest. then such a scramble as there is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take in freight and to discharge freight, all at one and the same time; and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facilitate it all with! ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, with no flag on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys. after ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkard asleep by the skids once more. my father was a justice of the peace, and i supposed he possessed the power of life and death over all men and could hang anybody that offended him. this was distinction enough for me as a general thing; but the desire to be a steamboatman kept intruding, nevertheless. i first wanted to be a cabin-boy, so that i could come out with a white apron on and shake a tablecloth over the side, where all my old comrades could see me; later i thought i would rather be the deckhand who stood on the end of the stage-plank with the coil of rope in his hand, because he was particularly conspicuous. but these were only day-dreams,--they were too heavenly to be contemplated as real possibilities. by and by one of our boys went away. he was not heard of for a long time. at last he turned up as apprentice engineer or 'striker' on a steamboat. this thing shook the bottom out of all my sunday-school teachings. that boy had been notoriously worldly, and i just the reverse; yet he was exalted to this eminence, and i left in obscurity and misery. there was nothing generous about this fellow in his greatness. he would always manage to have a rusty bolt to scrub while his boat tarried at our town, and he would sit on the inside guard and scrub it, where we could all see him and envy him and loathe him. and whenever his boat was laid up he would come home and swell around the town in his blackest and greasiest clothes, so that nobody could help remembering that he was a steamboatman; and he used all sorts of steamboat technicalities in his talk, as if he were so used to them that he forgot common people could not understand them. he would speak of the 'labboard' side of a horse in an easy, natural way that would make one wish he was dead. and he was always talking about 'st. looy' like an old citizen; he would refer casually to occasions when he 'was coming down fourth street,' or when he was 'passing by the planter's house,' or when there was a fire and he took a turn on the brakes of 'the old big missouri;' and then he would go on and lie about how many towns the size of ours were burned down there that day. two or three of the boys had long been persons of consideration among us because they had been to st. louis once and had a vague general knowledge of its wonders, but the day of their glory was over now. they lapsed into a humble silence, and learned to disappear when the ruthless 'cub'-engineer approached. this fellow had money, too, and hair oil. also an ignorant silver watch and a showy brass watch chain. he wore a leather belt and used no suspenders. if ever a youth was cordially admired and hated by his comrades, this one was. no girl could withstand his charms. he 'cut out' every boy in the village. when his boat blew up at last, it diffused a tranquil contentment among us such as we had not known for months. but when he came home the next week, alive, renowned, and appeared in church all battered up and bandaged, a shining hero, stared at and wondered over by everybody, it seemed to us that the partiality of providence for an undeserving reptile had reached a point where it was open to criticism. this creature's career could produce but one result, and it speedily followed. boy after boy managed to get on the river. the minister's son became an engineer. the doctor's and the post-master's sons became 'mud clerks;' the wholesale liquor dealer's son became a barkeeper on a boat; four sons of the chief merchant, and two sons of the county judge, became pilots. pilot was the grandest position of all. the pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary--from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay. two months of his wages would pay a preacher's salary for a year. now some of us were left disconsolate. we could not get on the river--at least our parents would not let us. so by and by i ran away. i said i never would come home again till i was a pilot and could come in glory. but somehow i could not manage it. i went meekly aboard a few of the boats that lay packed together like sardines at the long st. louis wharf, and very humbly inquired for the pilots, but got only a cold shoulder and short words from mates and clerks. i had to make the best of this sort of treatment for the time being, but i had comforting daydreams of a future when i should be a great and honored pilot, with plenty of money, and could kill some of these mates and clerks and pay for them. chapter i want to be a cub-pilot months afterward the hope within me struggled to a reluctant death, and i found myself without an ambition. but i was ashamed to go home. i was in cincinnati, and i set to work to map out a new career. i had been reading about the recent exploration of the river amazon by an expedition sent out by our government. it was said that the expedition, owing to difficulties, had not thoroughly explored a part of the country lying about the head-waters, some four thousand miles from the mouth of the river. it was only about fifteen hundred miles from cincinnati to new orleans, where i could doubtless get a ship. i had thirty dollars left; i would go and complete the exploration of the amazon. this was all the thought i gave to the subject. i never was great in matters of detail. i packed my valise, and took passage on an ancient tub called the 'paul jones,' for new orleans. for the sum of sixteen dollars i had the scarred and tarnished splendors of 'her' main saloon principally to myself, for she was not a creature to attract the eye of wiser travelers. when we presently got under way and went poking down the broad ohio, i became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration. i was a traveler! a word never had tasted so good in my mouth before. i had an exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distant climes which i never have felt in so uplifting a degree since. i was in such a glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departed out of me, and i was able to look down and pity the untraveled with a compassion that had hardly a trace of contempt in it. still, when we stopped at villages and wood-yards, i could not help lolling carelessly upon the railings of the boiler deck to enjoy the envy of the country boys on the bank. if they did not seem to discover me, i presently sneezed to attract their attention, or moved to a position where they could not help seeing me. and as soon as i knew they saw me i gaped and stretched, and gave other signs of being mightily bored with traveling. i kept my hat off all the time, and stayed where the wind and the sun could strike me, because i wanted to get the bronzed and weather-beaten look of an old traveler. before the second day was half gone i experienced a joy which filled me with the purest gratitude; for i saw that the skin had begun to blister and peel off my face and neck. i wished that the boys and girls at home could see me now. we reached louisville in time--at least the neighborhood of it. we stuck hard and fast on the rocks in the middle of the river, and lay there four days. i was now beginning to feel a strong sense of being a part of the boat's family, a sort of infant son to the captain and younger brother to the officers. there is no estimating the pride i took in this grandeur, or the affection that began to swell and grow in me for those people. i could not know how the lordly steamboatman scorns that sort of presumption in a mere landsman. i particularly longed to acquire the least trifle of notice from the big stormy mate, and i was on the alert for an opportunity to do him a service to that end. it came at last. the riotous powwow of setting a spar was going on down on the forecastle, and i went down there and stood around in the way--or mostly skipping out of it--till the mate suddenly roared a general order for somebody to bring him a capstan bar. i sprang to his side and said: 'tell me where it is--i'll fetch it!' if a rag-picker had offered to do a diplomatic service for the emperor of russia, the monarch could not have been more astounded than the mate was. he even stopped swearing. he stood and stared down at me. it took him ten seconds to scrape his disjointed remains together again. then he said impressively: 'well, if this don't beat hell!' and turned to his work with the air of a man who had been confronted with a problem too abstruse for solution. i crept away, and courted solitude for the rest of the day. i did not go to dinner; i stayed away from supper until everybody else had finished. i did not feel so much like a member of the boat's family now as before. however, my spirits returned, in installments, as we pursued our way down the river. i was sorry i hated the mate so, because it was not in (young) human nature not to admire him. he was huge and muscular, his face was bearded and whiskered all over; he had a red woman and a blue woman tattooed on his right arm,--one on each side of a blue anchor with a red rope to it; and in the matter of profanity he was sublime. when he was getting out cargo at a landing, i was always where i could see and hear. he felt all the majesty of his great position, and made the world feel it, too. when he gave even the simplest order, he discharged it like a blast of lightning, and sent a long, reverberating peal of profanity thundering after it. i could not help contrasting the way in which the average landsman would give an order, with the mate's way of doing it. if the landsman should wish the gang-plank moved a foot farther forward, he would probably say: 'james, or william, one of you push that plank forward, please;' but put the mate in his place and he would roar out: 'here, now, start that gang-plank for'ard! lively, now! what're you about! snatch it! snatch it! there! there! aft again! aft again! don't you hear me. dash it to dash! are you going to sleep over it! 'vast heaving. 'vast heaving, i tell you! going to heave it clear astern? where're you going with that barrel! for'ard with it 'fore i make you swallow it, you dash-dash-dash-dashed split between a tired mud-turtle and a crippled hearse-horse!' i wished i could talk like that. when the soreness of my adventure with the mate had somewhat worn off, i began timidly to make up to the humblest official connected with the boat--the night watchman. he snubbed my advances at first, but i presently ventured to offer him a new chalk pipe; and that softened him. so he allowed me to sit with him by the big bell on the hurricane deck, and in time he melted into conversation. he could not well have helped it, i hung with such homage on his words and so plainly showed that i felt honored by his notice. he told me the names of dim capes and shadowy islands as we glided by them in the solemnity of the night, under the winking stars, and by and by got to talking about himself. he seemed over-sentimental for a man whose salary was six dollars a week-- or rather he might have seemed so to an older person than i. but i drank in his words hungrily, and with a faith that might have moved mountains if it had been applied judiciously. what was it to me that he was soiled and seedy and fragrant with gin? what was it to me that his grammar was bad, his construction worse, and his profanity so void of art that it was an element of weakness rather than strength in his conversation? he was a wronged man, a man who had seen trouble, and that was enough for me. as he mellowed into his plaintive history his tears dripped upon the lantern in his lap, and i cried, too, from sympathy. he said he was the son of an english nobleman--either an earl or an alderman, he could not remember which, but believed was both; his father, the nobleman, loved him, but his mother hated him from the cradle; and so while he was still a little boy he was sent to 'one of them old, ancient colleges'--he couldn't remember which; and by and by his father died and his mother seized the property and 'shook' him as he phrased it. after his mother shook him, members of the nobility with whom he was acquainted used their influence to get him the position of 'loblolly-boy in a ship;' and from that point my watchman threw off all trammels of date and locality and branched out into a narrative that bristled all along with incredible adventures; a narrative that was so reeking with bloodshed and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes and the most engaging and unconscious personal villainies, that i sat speechless, enjoying, shuddering, wondering, worshipping. it was a sore blight to find out afterwards that he was a low, vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the wilds of illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated its marvels, until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess into this yarn, and then gone on telling it to fledglings like me, until he had come to believe it himself. following the equator a journey around the world by mark twain samuel l. clemens part chapter li. let me make the superstitions of a nation and i care not who makes its laws or its songs either. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. yes, the city of benares is in effect just a big church, a religious hive, whose every cell is a temple, a shrine or a mosque, and whose every conceivable earthly and heavenly good is procurable under one roof, so to speak--a sort of army and navy stores, theologically stocked. i will make out a little itinerary for the pilgrim; then you will see how handy the system is, how convenient, how comprehensive. if you go to benares with a serious desire to spiritually benefit yourself, you will find it valuable. i got some of the facts from conversations with the rev. mr. parker and the others from his guide to benares; they are therefore trustworthy. . purification. at sunrise you must go down to the ganges and bathe, pray, and drink some of the water. this is for your general purification. . protection against hunger. next, you must fortify yourself against the sorrowful earthly ill just named. this you will do by worshiping for a moment in the cow temple. by the door of it you will find an image of ganesh, son of shiva; it has the head of an elephant on a human body; its face and hands are of silver. you will worship it a little, and pass on, into a covered veranda, where you will find devotees reciting from the sacred books, with the help of instructors. in this place are groups of rude and dismal idols. you may contribute something for their support; then pass into the temple, a grim and stenchy place, for it is populous with sacred cows and with beggars. you will give something to the beggars, and "reverently kiss the tails" of such cows as pass along, for these cows are peculiarly holy, and this act of worship will secure you from hunger for the day. . "the poor man's friend." you will next worship this god. he is at the bottom of a stone cistern in the temple of dalbhyeswar, under the shade of a noble peepul tree on the bluff overlooking the ganges, so you must go back to the river. the poor man's friend is the god of material prosperity in general, and the god of the rain in particular. you will secure material prosperity, or both, by worshiping him. he is shiva, under a new alias, and he abides in the bottom of that cistern, in the form of a stone lingam. you pour ganges water over him, and in return for this homage you get the promised benefits. if there is any delay about the rain, you must pour water in until the cistern is full; the rain will then be sure to come. . fever. at the kedar ghat you will find a long flight of stone steps leading down to the river. half way down is a tank filled with sewage. drink as much of it as you want. it is for fever. . smallpox. go straight from there to the central ghat. at its upstream end you will find a small whitewashed building, which is a temple sacred to sitala, goddess of smallpox. her under-study is there --a rude human figure behind a brass screen. you will worship this for reasons to be furnished presently. . the well of fate. for certain reasons you will next go and do homage at this well. you will find it in the dandpan temple, in the city. the sunlight falls into it from a square hole in the masonry above. you will approach it with awe, for your life is now at stake. you will bend over and look. if the fates are propitious, you will see your face pictured in the water far down in the well. if matters have been otherwise ordered, a sudden cloud will mask the sun and you will see nothing. this means that you have not six months to live. if you are already at the point of death, your circumstances are now serious. there is no time to lose. let this world go, arrange for the next one. handily situated, at your very elbow, is opportunity for this. you turn and worship the image of maha kal, the great fate, and happiness in the life to come is secured. if there is breath in your body yet, you should now make an effort to get a further lease of the present life. you have a chance. there is a chance for everything in this admirably stocked and wonderfully systemized spiritual and temporal army and navy store. you must get yourself carried to the . well of long life. this is within the precincts of the mouldering and venerable briddhkal temple, which is one of the oldest in benares. you pass in by a stone image of the monkey god, hanuman, and there, among the ruined courtyards, you will find a shallow pool of stagnant sewage. it smells like the best limburger cheese, and is filthy with the washings of rotting lepers, but that is nothing, bathe in it; bathe in it gratefully and worshipfully, for this is the fountain of youth; these are the waters of long life. your gray hairs will disappear, and with them your wrinkles and your rheumatism, the burdens of care and the weariness of age, and you will come out young, fresh, elastic, and full of eagerness for the new race of life. now will come flooding upon you the manifold desires that haunt the dear dreams of the morning of life. you will go whither you will find . fulfillment of desire. to wit, to the kameshwar temple, sacred to shiva as the lord of desires. arrange for yours there. and if you like to look at idols among the pack and jam of temples, there you will find enough to stock a museum. you will begin to commit sins now with a fresh, new vivacity; therefore, it will be well to go frequently to a place where you can get . temporary cleansing from sin. to wit, to the well of the earring. you must approach this with the profoundest reverence, for it is unutterably sacred. it is, indeed, the most sacred place in benares, the very holy of holies, in the estimation of the people. it is a railed tank, with stone stairways leading down to the water. the water is not clean. of course it could not be, for people are always bathing in it. as long as you choose to stand and look, you will see the files of sinners descending and ascending--descending soiled with sin, ascending purged from it. "the liar, the thief, the murderer, and the adulterer may here wash and be clean," says the rev. mr. parker, in his book. very well. i know mr. parker, and i believe it; but if anybody else had said it, i should consider him a person who had better go down in the tank and take another wash. the god vishnu dug this tank. he had nothing to dig with but his "discus." i do not know what a discus is, but i know it is a poor thing to dig tanks with, because, by the time this one was finished, it was full of sweat--vishnu's sweat. he constructed the site that benares stands on, and afterward built the globe around it, and thought nothing of it, yet sweated like that over a little thing like this tank. one of these statements is doubtful. i do not know which one it is, but i think it difficult not to believe that a god who could build a world around benares would not be intelligent enough to build it around the tank too, and not have to dig it. youth, long life, temporary purification from sin, salvation through propitiation of the great fate --these are all good. but you must do something more. you must . make salvation sure. there are several ways. to get drowned in the ganges is one, but that is not pleasant. to die within the limits of benares is another; but that is a risky one, because you might be out of town when your time came. the best one of all is the pilgrimage around the city. you must walk; also, you must go barefoot. the tramp is forty-four miles, for the road winds out into the country a piece, and you will be marching five or six days. but you will have plenty of company. you will move with throngs and hosts of happy pilgrims whose radiant costumes will make the spectacle beautiful and whose glad songs and holy pans of triumph will banish your fatigues and cheer your spirit; and at intervals there will be temples where you may sleep and be refreshed with food. the pilgrimage completed, you have purchased salvation, and paid for it. but you may not get it unless you . get your redemption recorded. you can get this done at the sakhi binayak temple, and it is best to do it, for otherwise you might not be able to prove that you had made the pilgrimage in case the matter should some day come to be disputed. that temple is in a lane back of the cow temple. over the door is a red image of ganesh of the elephant head, son and heir of shiva, and prince of wales to the theological monarchy, so to speak. within is a god whose office it is to record your pilgrimage and be responsible for you. you will not see him, but you will see a brahmin who will attend to the matter and take the money. if he should forget to collect the money, you can remind him. he knows that your salvation is now secure, but of course you would like to know it yourself. you have nothing to do but go and pray, and pay at the . well of the knowledge of salvation. it is close to the golden temple. there you will see, sculptured out of a single piece of black marble, a bull which is much larger than any living bull you have ever seen, and yet is not a good likeness after all. and there also you will see a very uncommon thing--an image of shiva. you have seen his lingam fifty thousand times already, but this is shiva himself, and said to be a good likeness. it has three eyes. he is the only god in the firm that has three. "the well is covered by a fine canopy of stone supported by forty pillars," and around it you will find what you have already seen at almost every shrine you have visited in benares, a mob of devout and eager pilgrims. the sacred water is being ladled out to them; with it comes to them the knowledge, clear, thrilling, absolute, that they are saved; and you can see by their faces that there is one happiness in this world which is supreme, and to which no other joy is comparable. you receive your water, you make your deposit, and now what more would you have? gold, diamonds, power, fame? all in a single moment these things have withered to dirt, dust, ashes. the world has nothing to give you now. for you it is bankrupt. i do not claim that the pilgrims do their acts of worship in the order and sequence above charted out in this itinerary of mine, but i think logic suggests that they ought to do so. instead of a helter-skelter worship, we then have a definite starting-place, and a march which carries the pilgrim steadily forward by reasoned and logical progression to a definite goal. thus, his ganges bath in the early morning gives him an appetite; he kisses the cow-tails, and that removes it. it is now business hours, and longings for material prosperity rise in his mind, and be goes and pours water over shiva's symbol; this insures the prosperity, but also brings on a rain, which gives him a fever. then he drinks the sewage at the kedar ghat to cure the fever; it cures the fever but gives him the smallpox. he wishes to know how it is going to turn out; he goes to the dandpan temple and looks down the well. a clouded sun shows him that death is near. logically his best course for the present, since he cannot tell at what moment he may die, is to secure a happy hereafter; this he does, through the agency of the great fate. he is safe, now, for heaven; his next move will naturally be to keep out of it as long as he can. therefore he goes to the briddhkal temple and secures youth and long life by bathing in a puddle of leper-pus which would kill a microbe. logically, youth has re-equipped him for sin and with the disposition to commit it; he will naturally go to the fane which is consecrated to the fulfillment of desires, and make arrangements. logically, he will now go to the well of the earring from time to time to unload and freshen up for further banned enjoyments. but first and last and all the time he is human, and therefore in his reflective intervals he will always be speculating in "futures." he will make the great pilgrimage around the city and so make his salvation absolutely sure; he will also have record made of it, so that it may remain absolutely sure and not be forgotten or repudiated in the confusion of the final settlement. logically, also, he will wish to have satisfying and tranquilizing personal knowledge that that salvation is secure; therefore he goes to the well of the knowledge of salvation, adds that completing detail, and then goes about his affairs serene and content; serene and content, for he is now royally endowed with an advantage which no religion in this world could give him but his own; for henceforth he may commit as many million sins as he wants to and nothing can come of it. thus the system, properly and logically ordered, is neat, compact, clearly defined, and covers the whole ground. i desire to recommend it to such as find the other systems too difficult, exacting, and irksome for the uses of this fretful brief life of ours. however, let me not deceive any one. my itinerary lacks a detail. i must put it in. the truth is, that after the pilgrim has faithfully followed the requirements of the itinerary through to the end and has secured his salvation and also the personal knowledge of that fact, there is still an accident possible to him which can annul the whole thing. if he should ever cross to the other side of the ganges and get caught out and die there he would at once come to life again in the form of an ass. think of that, after all this trouble and expense. you see how capricious and uncertain salvation is there. the hindoo has a childish and unreasoning aversion to being turned into an ass. it is hard to tell why. one could properly expect an ass to have an aversion to being turned into a hindoo. one could understand that he could lose dignity by it; also self-respect, and nine-tenths of his intelligence. but the hindoo changed into an ass wouldn't lose anything, unless you count his religion. and he would gain much--release from his slavery to two million gods and twenty million priests, fakeers, holy mendicants, and other sacred bacilli; he would escape the hindoo hell; he would also escape the hindoo heaven. these are advantages which the hindoo ought to consider; then he would go over and die on the other side. benares is a religious vesuvius. in its bowels the theological forces have been heaving and tossing, rumbling, thundering and quaking, boiling, and weltering and flaming and smoking for ages. but a little group of missionaries have taken post at its base, and they have hopes. there are the baptist missionary society, the church missionary society, the london missionary society, the wesleyan missionary society, and the zenana bible and medical mission. they have schools, and the principal work seems to be among the children. and no doubt that part of the work prospers best, for grown people everywhere are always likely to cling to the religion they were brought up in. chapter lii. wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. in one of those benares temples we saw a devotee working for salvation in a curious way. he had a huge wad of clay beside him and was making it up into little wee gods no bigger than carpet tacks. he stuck a grain of rice into each--to represent the lingam, i think. he turned them out nimbly, for he had had long practice and had acquired great facility. every day he made , gods, then threw them into the holy ganges. this act of homage brought him the profound homage of the pious--also their coppers. he had a sure living here, and was earning a high place in the hereafter. the ganges front is the supreme show-place of benares. its tall bluffs are solidly caked from water to summit, along a stretch of three miles, with a splendid jumble of massive and picturesque masonry, a bewildering and beautiful confusion of stone platforms, temples, stair-flights, rich and stately palaces--nowhere a break, nowhere a glimpse of the bluff itself; all the long face of it is compactly walled from sight by this crammed perspective of platforms, soaring stairways, sculptured temples, majestic palaces, softening away into the distances; and there is movement, motion, human life everywhere, and brilliantly costumed --streaming in rainbows up and down the lofty stairways, and massed in metaphorical flower-gardens on the miles of great platforms at the river's edge. all this masonry, all this architecture represents piety. the palaces were built by native princes whose homes, as a rule, are far from benares, but who go there from time to time to refresh their souls with the sight and touch of the ganges, the river of their idolatry. the stairways are records of acts of piety; the crowd of costly little temples are tokens of money spent by rich men for present credit and hope of future reward. apparently, the rich christian who spends large sums upon his religion is conspicuous with us, by his rarity, but the rich hindoo who doesn't spend large sums upon his religion is seemingly non-existent. with us the poor spend money on their religion, but they keep back some to live on. apparently, in india, the poor bankrupt themselves daily for their religion. the rich hindoo can afford his pious outlays; he gets much glory for his spendings, yet keeps back a sufficiency of his income for temporal purposes; but the poor hindoo is entitled to compassion, for his spendings keep him poor, yet get him no glory. we made the usual trip up and down the river, seated in chairs under an awning on the deck of the usual commodious hand-propelled ark; made it two or three times, and could have made it with increasing interest and enjoyment many times more; for, of course, the palaces and temples would grow more and more beautiful every time one saw them, for that happens with all such things; also, i think one would not get tired of the bathers, nor their costumes, nor of their ingenuities in getting out of them and into them again without exposing too much bronze, nor of their devotional gesticulations and absorbed bead-tellings. but i should get tired of seeing them wash their mouths with that dreadful water and drink it. in fact, i did get tired of it, and very early, too. at one place where we halted for a while, the foul gush from a sewer was making the water turbid and murky all around, and there was a random corpse slopping around in it that had floated down from up country. ten steps below that place stood a crowd of men, women, and comely young maidens waist deep in the water-and they were scooping it up in their hands and drinking it. faith can certainly do wonders, and this is an instance of it. those people were not drinking that fearful stuff to assuage thirst, but in order to purify their souls and the interior of their bodies. according to their creed, the ganges water makes everything pure that it touches--instantly and utterly pure. the sewer water was not an offence to them, the corpse did not revolt them; the sacred water had touched both, and both were now snow-pure, and could defile no one. the memory of that sight will always stay by me; but not by request. a word further concerning the nasty but all-purifying ganges water. when we went to agra, by and by, we happened there just in time to be in at the birth of a marvel--a memorable scientific discovery--the discovery that in certain ways the foul and derided ganges water is the most puissant purifier in the world! this curious fact, as i have said, had just been added to the treasury of modern science. it had long been noted as a strange thing that while benares is often afflicted with the cholera she does not spread it beyond her borders. this could not be accounted for. mr. henkin, the scientist in the employ of the government of agra, concluded to examine the water. he went to benares and made his tests. he got water at the mouths of the sewers where they empty into the river at the bathing ghats; a cubic centimetre of it contained millions of germs; at the end of six hours they were all dead. he caught a floating corpse, towed it to the shore, and from beside it he dipped up water that was swarming with cholera germs; at the end of six hours they were all dead. he added swarm after swarm of cholera germs to this water; within the six hours they always died, to the last sample. repeatedly, he took pure well water which was bare of animal life, and put into it a few cholera germs; they always began to propagate at once, and always within six hours they swarmed--and were numberable by millions upon millions. for ages and ages the hindoos have had absolute faith that the water of the ganges was absolutely pure, could not be defiled by any contact whatsoever, and infallibly made pure and clean whatsoever thing touched it. they still believe it, and that is why they bathe in it and drink it, caring nothing for its seeming filthiness and the floating corpses. the hindoos have been laughed at, these many generations, but the laughter will need to modify itself a little from now on. how did they find out the water's secret in those ancient ages? had they germ-scientists then? we do not know. we only know that they had a civilization long before we emerged from savagery. but to return to where i was before; i was about to speak of the burning-ghat. they do not burn fakeers--those revered mendicants. they are so holy that they can get to their place without that sacrament, provided they be consigned to the consecrating river. we saw one carried to mid-stream and thrown overboard. he was sandwiched between two great slabs of stone. we lay off the cremation-ghat half an hour and saw nine corpses burned. i should not wish to see any more of it, unless i might select the parties. the mourners follow the bier through the town and down to the ghat; then the bier-bearers deliver the body to some low-caste natives --doms--and the mourners turn about and go back home. i heard no crying and saw no tears, there was no ceremony of parting. apparently, these expressions of grief and affection are reserved for the privacy of the home. the dead women came draped in red, the men in white. they are laid in the water at the river's edge while the pyre is being prepared. the first subject was a man. when the doms unswathed him to wash him, he proved to be a sturdily built, well-nourished and handsome old gentleman, with not a sign about him to suggest that he had ever been ill. dry wood was brought and built up into a loose pile; the corpse was laid upon it and covered over with fuel. then a naked holy man who was sitting on high ground a little distance away began to talk and shout with great energy, and he kept up this noise right along. it may have been the funeral sermon, and probably was. i forgot to say that one of the mourners remained behind when the others went away. this was the dead man's son, a boy of ten or twelve, brown and handsome, grave and self-possessed, and clothed in flowing white. he was there to burn his father. he was given a torch, and while he slowly walked seven times around the pyre the naked black man on the high ground poured out his sermon more clamorously than ever. the seventh circuit completed, the boy applied the torch at his father's head, then at his feet; the flames sprang briskly up with a sharp crackling noise, and the lad went away. hindoos do not want daughters, because their weddings make such a ruinous expense; but they want sons, so that at death they may have honorable exit from the world; and there is no honor equal to the honor of having one's pyre lighted by one's son. the father who dies sonless is in a grievous situation indeed, and is pitied. life being uncertain, the hindoo marries while he is still a boy, in the hope that he will have a son ready when the day of his need shall come. but if he have no son, he will adopt one. this answers every purpose. meantime the corpse is burning, also several others. it is a dismal business. the stokers did not sit down in idleness, but moved briskly about, punching up the fires with long poles, and now and then adding fuel. sometimes they hoisted the half of a skeleton into the air, then slammed it down and beat it with the pole, breaking it up so that it would burn better. they hoisted skulls up in the same way and banged and battered them. the sight was hard to bear; it would have been harder if the mourners had stayed to witness it. i had but a moderate desire to see a cremation, so it was soon satisfied. for sanitary reasons it would be well if cremation were universal; but this form is revolting, and not to be recommended. the fire used is sacred, of course--for there is money in it. ordinary fire is forbidden; there is no money in it. i was told that this sacred fire is all furnished by one person, and that he has a monopoly of it and charges a good price for it. sometimes a rich mourner pays a thousand rupees for it. to get to paradise from india is an expensive thing. every detail connected with the matter costs something, and helps to fatten a priest. i suppose it is quite safe to conclude that that fire-bug is in holy orders. close to the cremation-ground stand a few time-worn stones which are remembrances of the suttee. each has a rough carving upon it, representing a man and a woman standing or walking hand in hand, and marks the spot where a widow went to her death by fire in the days when the suttee flourished. mr. parker said that widows would burn themselves now if the government would allow it. the family that can point to one of these little memorials and say: "she who burned herself there was an ancestress of ours," is envied. it is a curious people. with them, all life seems to be sacred except human life. even the life of vermin is sacred, and must not be taken. the good jain wipes off a seat before using it, lest he cause the death of-some valueless insect by sitting down on it. it grieves him to have to drink water, because the provisions in his stomach may not agree with the microbes. yet india invented thuggery and the suttee. india is a hard country to understand. we went to the temple of the thug goddess, bhowanee, or kali, or durga. she has these names and others. she is the only god to whom living sacrifices are made. goats are sacrificed to her. monkeys would be cheaper. there are plenty of them about the place. being sacred, they make themselves very free, and scramble around wherever they please. the temple and its porch are beautifully carved, but this is not the case with the idol. bhowanee is not pleasant to look at. she has a silver face, and a projecting swollen tongue painted a deep red. she wears a necklace of skulls. in fact, none of the idols in benares are handsome or attractive. and what a swarm of them there is! the town is a vast museum of idols--and all of them crude, misshapen, and ugly. they flock through one's dreams at night, a wild mob of nightmares. when you get tired of them in the temples and take a trip on the river, you find idol giants, flashily painted, stretched out side by side on the shore. and apparently wherever there is room for one more lingam, a lingam is there. if vishnu had foreseen what his town was going to be, he would have called it idolville or lingamburg. the most conspicuous feature of benares is the pair of slender white minarets which tower like masts from the great mosque of aurangzeb. they seem to be always in sight, from everywhere, those airy, graceful, inspiring things. but masts is not the right word, for masts have a perceptible taper, while these minarets have not. they are feet high, and only / feet in diameter at the base, and / at the summit--scarcely any taper at all. these are the proportions of a candle; and fair and fairylike candles these are. will be, anyway, some day, when the christians inherit them and top them with the electric light. there is a great view from up there--a wonderful view. a large gray monkey was part of it, and damaged it. a monkey has no judgment. this one was skipping about the upper great heights of the mosque --skipping across empty yawning intervals which were almost too wide for him, and which he only just barely cleared, each time, by the skin of his teeth. he got me so nervous that i couldn't look at the view. i couldn't look at anything but him. every time he went sailing over one of those abysses my breath stood still, and when he grabbed for the perch he was going for, i grabbed too, in sympathy. and he was perfectly indifferent, perfectly unconcerned, and i did all the panting myself. he came within an ace of losing his life a dozen times, and i was so troubled about him that i would have shot him if i had had anything to do it with. but i strongly recommend the view. there is more monkey than view, and there is always going to be more monkey while that idiot survives, but what view you get is superb. all benares, the river, and the region round about are spread before you. take a gun, and look at the view. the next thing i saw was more reposeful. it was a new kind of art. it was a picture painted on water. it was done by a native. he sprinkled fine dust of various colors on the still surface of a basin of water, and out of these sprinklings a dainty and pretty picture gradually grew, a picture which a breath could destroy. somehow it was impressive, after so much browsing among massive and battered and decaying fanes that rest upon ruins, and those ruins upon still other ruins, and those upon still others again. it was a sermon, an allegory, a symbol of instability. those creations in stone were only a kind of water pictures, after all. a prominent episode in the indian career of warren hastings had benares for its theater. wherever that extraordinary man set his foot, he left his mark. he came to benares in to collect a fine of l , which he had levied upon its rajah, cheit singly on behalf of the east india company. hastings was a long way from home and help. there were, probably, not a dozen englishmen within reach; the rajah was in his fort with his myriads around him. but no matter. from his little camp in a neighboring garden, hastings sent a party to arrest the sovereign. he sent on this daring mission a couple of hundred native soldiers sepoys --under command of three young english lieutenants. the rajah submitted without a word. the incident lights up the indian situation electrically, and gives one a vivid sense of the strides which the english had made and the mastership they had acquired in the land since the date of clive's great victory. in a quarter of a century, from being nobodies, and feared by none, they were become confessed lords and masters, feared by all, sovereigns included, and served by all, sovereigns included. it makes the fairy tales sound true. the english had not been afraid to enlist native soldiers to fight against their own people and keep them obedient. and now hastings was not afraid to come away out to this remote place with a handful of such soldiers and send them to arrest a native sovereign. the lieutenants imprisoned the rajah in his own fort. it was beautiful, the pluckiness of it, the impudence of it. the arrest enraged the rajah's people, and all benares came storming about the place and threatening vengeance. and yet, but for an accident, nothing important would have resulted, perhaps. the mob found out a most strange thing, an almost incredible thing--that this handful of soldiers had come on this hardy errand with empty guns and no ammunition. this has been attributed to thoughtlessness, but it could hardly have been that, for in such large emergencies as this, intelligent people do think. it must have been indifference, an over-confidence born of the proved submissiveness of the native character, when confronted by even one or two stern britons in their war paint. but, however that may be, it was a fatal discovery that the mob had made. they were full of courage, now, and they broke into the fort and massacred the helpless soldiers and their officers. hastings escaped from benares by night and got safely away, leaving the principality in a state of wild insurrection; but he was back again within the month, and quieted it down in his prompt and virile way, and took the rajah's throne away from him and gave it to another man. he was a capable kind of person was warren hastings. this was the only time he was ever out of ammunition. some of his acts have left stains upon his name which can never be washed away, but he saved to england the indian empire, and that was the best service that was ever done to the indians themselves, those wretched heirs of a hundred centuries of pitiless oppression and abuse. chapter liii. true irreverence is disrespect for another man's god. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. it was in benares that i saw another living god. that makes two. i believe i have seen most of the greater and lesser wonders of the world, but i do not remember that any of them interested me so overwhelmingly as did that pair of gods. when i try to account for this effect i find no difficulty about it. i find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. we get almost all our wonders at second hand. we are eager to see any celebrated thing--and we never fail of our reward; just the deep privilege of gazing upon an object which has stirred the enthusiasm or evoked the reverence or affection or admiration of multitudes of our race is a thing which we value; we are profoundly glad that we have seen it, we are permanently enriched from having seen it, we would not part with the memory of that experience for a great price. and yet that very spectacle may be the taj. you cannot keep your enthusiasms down, you cannot keep your emotions within bounds when that soaring bubble of marble breaks upon your view. but these are not your enthusiasms and emotions--they are the accumulated emotions and enthusiasms of a thousand fervid writers, who have been slowly and steadily storing them up in your heart day by day and year by year all your life; and now they burst out in a flood and overwhelm you; and you could not be a whit happier if they were your very own. by and by you sober down, and then you perceive that you have been drunk on the smell of somebody else's cork. for ever and ever the memory of my distant first glimpse of the taj will compensate me for creeping around the globe to have that great privilege. but the taj--with all your inflation of delusive emotions, acquired at second-hand from people to whom in the majority of cases they were also delusions acquired at second-hand--a thing which you fortunately did not think of or it might have made you doubtful of what you imagined were your own what is the taj as a marvel, a spectacle and an uplifting and overpowering wonder, compared with a living, breathing, speaking personage whom several millions of human beings devoutly and sincerely and unquestioningly believe to be a god, and humbly and gratefully worship as a god? he was sixty years old when i saw him. he is called sri swami bhaskarananda saraswati. that is one form of it. i think that that is what you would call him in speaking to him--because it is short. but you would use more of his name in addressing a letter to him; courtesy would require this. even then you would not have to use all of it, but only this much: sri matparamahansrzpairivrajakacharyaswamibhaskaranandasaraswati. you do not put "esq." after it, for that is not necessary. the word which opens the volley is itself a title of honor "sri." the " " stands for the rest of his names, i believe. vishnu has names which he does not use in business, and no doubt it is a custom of gods and a privilege sacred to their order to keep extra ones in stock. just the restricted name set down above is a handsome property, without the . by my count it has letters in it. this removes the long german words from competition; they are permanently out of the race. sri s. b. saraswati has attained to what among the hindoos is called the "state of perfection." it is a state which other hindoos reach by being born again and again, and over and over again into this world, through one re-incarnation after another--a tiresome long job covering centuries and decades of centuries, and one that is full of risks, too, like the accident of dying on the wrong side of the ganges some time or other and waking up in the form of an ass, with a fresh start necessary and the numerous trips to be made all over again. but in reaching perfection, sri s. b. s. has escaped all that. he is no longer a part or a feature of this world; his substance has changed, all earthiness has departed out of it; he is utterly holy, utterly pure; nothing can desecrate this holiness or stain this purity; he is no longer of the earth, its concerns are matters foreign to him, its pains and griefs and troubles cannot reach him. when he dies, nirvana is his; he will be absorbed into the substance of the supreme deity and be at peace forever. the hindoo scriptures point out how this state is to be reached, but it is only once in a thousand years, perhaps, that candidate accomplishes it. this one has traversed the course required, stage by stage, from the beginning to the end, and now has nothing left to do but wait for the call which shall release him from a world in which he has now no part nor lot. first, he passed through the student stage, and became learned in the holy books. next he became citizen, householder, husband, and father. that was the required second stage. then--like john bunyan's christian he bade perpetual good-bye to his family, as required, and went wandering away. he went far into the desert and served a term as hermit. next, he became a beggar, "in accordance with the rites laid down in the scriptures," and wandered about india eating the bread of mendicancy. a quarter of a century ago he reached the stage of purity. this needs no garment; its symbol is nudity; he discarded the waist-cloth which he had previously worn. he could resume it now if he chose, for neither that nor any other contact can defile him; but he does not choose. there are several other stages, i believe, but i do not remember what they are. but he has been through them. throughout the long course he was perfecting himself in holy learning, and writing commentaries upon the sacred books. he was also meditating upon brahma, and he does that now. white marble relief-portraits of him are sold all about india. he lives in a good house in a noble great garden in benares, all meet and proper to his stupendous rank. necessarily he does not go abroad in the streets. deities would never be able to move about handily in any country. if one whom we recognized and adored as a god should go abroad in our streets, and the day it was to happen were known, all traffic would be blocked and business would come to a standstill. this god is comfortably housed, and yet modestly, all things considered, for if he wanted to live in a palace he would only need to speak and his worshipers would gladly build it. sometimes he sees devotees for a moment, and comforts them and blesses them, and they kiss his feet and go away happy. rank is nothing to him, he being a god. to him all men are alike. he sees whom he pleases and denies himself to whom he pleases. sometimes he sees a prince and denies himself to a pauper; at other times he receives the pauper and turns the prince away. however, he does not receive many of either class. he has to husband his time for his meditations. i think he would receive rev. mr. parker at any time. i think he is sorry for mr. parker, and i think mr. parker is sorry for him; and no doubt this compassion is good for both of them. when we arrived we had to stand around in the garden a little while and wait, and the outlook was not good, for he had been turning away maharajas that day and receiving only the riff-raff, and we belonged in between, somewhere. but presently, a servant came out saying it was all right, he was coming. and sure enough, he came, and i saw him--that object of the worship of millions. it was a strange sensation, and thrilling. i wish i could feel it stream through my veins again. and yet, to me he was not a god, he was only a taj. the thrill was not my thrill, but had come to me secondhand from those invisible millions of believers. by a hand-shake with their god i had ground-circuited their wire and got their monster battery's whole charge. he was tall and slender, indeed emaciated. he had a clean cut and conspicuously intellectual face, and a deep and kindly eye. he looked many years older than he really was, but much study and meditation and fasting and prayer, with the arid life he had led as hermit and beggar, could account for that. he is wholly nude when he receives natives, of whatever rank they may be, but he had white cloth around his loins now, a concession to mr. parker's europe prejudices, no doubt. as soon as i had sobered down a little we got along very well together, and i found him a most pleasant and friendly deity. he had heard a deal about chicago, and showed a quite remarkable interest in it, for a god. it all came of the world's fair and the congress of religions. if india knows about nothing else american, she knows about those, and will keep them in mind one while. he proposed an exchange of autographs, a delicate attention which made me believe in him, but i had been having my doubts before. he wrote his in his book, and i have a reverent regard for that book, though the words run from right to left, and so i can't read it. it was a mistake to print in that way. it contains his voluminous comments on the hindoo holy writings, and if i could make them out i would try for perfection myself. i gave him a copy of huckleberry finn. i thought it might rest him up a little to mix it in along with his meditations on brahma, for he looked tired, and i knew that if it didn't do him any good it wouldn't do him any harm. he has a scholar meditating under him--mina bahadur rana--but we did not see him. he wears clothes and is very imperfect. he has written a little pamphlet about his master, and i have that. it contains a wood-cut of the master and himself seated on a rug in the garden. the portrait of the master is very good indeed. the posture is exactly that which brahma himself affects, and it requires long arms and limber legs, and can be accumulated only by gods and the india-rubber man. there is a life-size marble relief of shri , s.b.s. in the garden. it represents him in this same posture. dear me! it is a strange world. particularly the indian division of it. this pupil, mina bahadur rana, is not a commonplace person, but a man of distinguished capacities and attainments, and, apparently, he had a fine worldly career in front of him. he was serving the nepal government in a high capacity at the court of the viceroy of india, twenty years ago. he was an able man, educated, a thinker, a man of property. but the longing to devote himself to a religious life came upon him, and he resigned his place, turned his back upon the vanities and comforts of the world, and went away into the solitudes to live in a hut and study the sacred writings and meditate upon virtue and holiness and seek to attain them. this sort of religion resembles ours. christ recommended the rich to give away all their property and follow him in poverty, not in worldly comfort. american and english millionaires do it every day, and thus verify and confirm to the world the tremendous forces that lie in religion. yet many people scoff at them for this loyalty to duty, and many will scoff at mina bahadur rana and call him a crank. like many christians of great character and intellect, he has made the study of his scriptures and the writing of books of commentaries upon them the loving labor of his life. like them, he has believed that his was not an idle and foolish waste of his life, but a most worthy and honorable employment of it. yet, there are many people who will see in those others, men worthy of homage and deep reverence, but in him merely a crank. but i shall not. he has my reverence. and i don't offer it as a common thing and poor, but as an unusual thing and of value. the ordinary reverence, the reverence defined and explained by the dictionary costs nothing. reverence for one's own sacred things--parents, religion, flag, laws, and respect for one's own beliefs--these are feelings which we cannot even help. they come natural to us; they are involuntary, like breathing. there is no personal merit in breathing. but the reverence which is difficult, and which has personal merit in it, is the respect which you pay, without compulsion, to the political or religious attitude of a man whose beliefs are not yours. you can't revere his gods or his politics, and no one expects you to do that, but you could respect his belief in them if you tried hard enough; and you could respect him, too, if you tried hard enough. but it is very, very difficult; it is next to impossible, and so we hardly ever try. if the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. i mean it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him. we are always canting about people's "irreverence," always charging this offense upon somebody or other, and thereby intimating that we are better than that person and do not commit that offense ourselves. whenever we do this we are in a lying attitude, and our speech is cant; for none of us are reverent--in a meritorious way; deep down in our hearts we are all irreverent. there is probably not a single exception to this rule in the earth. there is probably not one person whose reverence rises higher than respect for his own sacred things; and therefore, it is not a thing to boast about and be proud of, since the most degraded savage has that --and, like the best of us, has nothing higher. to speak plainly, we despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our own list of sacred things. and yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us. suppose we should meet with a paragraph like the following, in the newspapers: "yesterday a visiting party of the british nobility had a picnic at mount vernon, and in the tomb of washington they ate their luncheon, sang popular songs, played games, and danced waltzes and polkas." should we be shocked? should we feel outraged? should we be amazed? should we call the performance a desecration? yes, that would all happen. we should denounce those people in round terms, and call them hard names. and suppose we found this paragraph in the newspapers: "yesterday a visiting party of american pork-millionaires had a picnic in westminster abbey, and in that sacred place they ate their luncheon, sang popular songs, played games, and danced waltzes and polkas." would the english be shocked? would they feel outraged? would they be amazed? would they call the performance a desecration? that would all happen. the pork-millionaires would be denounced in round terms; they would be called hard names. in the tomb at mount vernon lie the ashes of america's most honored son; in the abbey, the ashes of england's greatest dead; the tomb of tombs, the costliest in the earth, the wonder of the world, the taj, was built by a great emperor to honor the memory of a perfect wife and perfect mother, one in whom there was no spot or blemish, whose love was his stay and support, whose life was the light of the world to him; in it her ashes lie, and to the mohammedan millions of india it is a holy place; to them it is what mount vernon is to americans, it is what the abbey is to the english. major sleeman wrote forty or fifty years ago (the italics are mine): "i would here enter my humble protest against the quadrille and lunch parties which are sometimes given to european ladies and gentlemen of the station at this imperial tomb; drinking and dancing are no doubt very good things in their season, but they are sadly out of place in a sepulchre." were there any americans among those lunch parties? if they were invited, there were. if my imagined lunch-parties in westminster and the tomb of washington should take place, the incident would cause a vast outbreak of bitter eloquence about barbarism and irreverence; and it would come from two sets of people who would go next day and dance in the taj if they had a chance. as we took our leave of the benares god and started away we noticed a group of natives waiting respectfully just within the gate--a rajah from somewhere in india, and some people of lesser consequence. the god beckoned them to come, and as we passed out the rajah was kneeling and reverently kissing his sacred feet. if barnum--but barnum's ambitions are at rest. this god will remain in the holy peace and seclusion of his garden, undisturbed. barnum could not have gotten him, anyway. still, he would have found a substitute that would answer. chapter liv. do not undervalue the headache. while it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $ a minute. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. a comfortable railway journey of seventeen and a half hours brought us to the capital of india, which is likewise the capital of bengal--calcutta. like bombay, it has a population of nearly a million natives and a small gathering of white people. it is a huge city and fine, and is called the city of palaces. it is rich in historical memories; rich in british achievement--military, political, commercial; rich in the results of the miracles done by that brace of mighty magicians, clive and hastings. and has a cloud kissing monument to one ochterlony. it is a fluted candlestick feet high. this lingam is the only large monument in calcutta, i believe. it is a fine ornament, and will keep ochterlony in mind. wherever you are, in calcutta, and for miles around, you can see it; and always when you see it you think of ochterlony. and so there is not an hour in the day that you do not think of ochterlony and wonder who he was. it is good that clive cannot come back, for he would think it was for plassey; and then that great spirit would be wounded when the revelation came that it was not. clive would find out that it was for ochterlony; and he would think ochterlony was a battle. and he would think it was a great one, too, and he would say, "with three thousand i whipped sixty thousand and founded the empire--and there is no monument; this other soldier must have whipped a billion with a dozen and saved the world." but he would be mistaken. ochterlony was a man, not a battle. and he did good and honorable service, too; as good and honorable service as has been done in india by seventy-five or a hundred other englishmen of courage, rectitude, and distinguished capacity. for india has been a fertile breeding-ground of such men, and remains so; great men, both in war and in the civil service, and as modest as great. but they have no monuments, and were not expecting any. ochterlony could not have been expecting one, and it is not at all likely that he desired one--certainly not until clive and hastings should be supplied. every day clive and hastings lean on the battlements of heaven and look down and wonder which of the two the monument is for; and they fret and worry because they cannot find out, and so the peace of heaven is spoiled for them and lost. but not for ochterlony. ochterlony is not troubled. he doesn't suspect that it is his monument. heaven is sweet and peaceful to him. there is a sort of unfairness about it all. indeed, if monuments were always given in india for high achievements, duty straitly performed, and smirchless records, the landscape would be monotonous with them. the handful of english in india govern the indian myriads with apparent ease, and without noticeable friction, through tact, training, and distinguished administrative ability, reinforced by just and liberal laws--and by keeping their word to the native whenever they give it. england is far from india and knows little about the eminent services performed by her servants there, for it is the newspaper correspondent who makes fame, and he is not sent to india but to the continent, to report the doings of the princelets and the dukelets, and where they are visiting and whom they are marrying. often a british official spends thirty or forty years in india, climbing from grade to grade by services which would make him celebrated anywhere else, and finishes as a vice-sovereign, governing a great realm and millions of subjects; then he goes home to england substantially unknown and unheard of, and settles down in some modest corner, and is as one extinguished. ten years later there is a twenty-line obituary in the london papers, and the reader is paralyzed by the splendors of a career which he is not sure that he had ever heard of before. but meanwhile he has learned all about the continental princelets and dukelets. the average man is profoundly ignorant of countries that lie remote from his own. when they are mentioned in his presence one or two facts and maybe a couple of names rise like torches in his mind, lighting up an inch or two of it and leaving the rest all dark. the mention of egypt suggests some biblical facts and the pyramids-nothing more. the mention of south africa suggests kimberly and the diamonds and there an end. formerly the mention, to a hindoo, of america suggested a name--george washington--with that his familiarity with our country was exhausted. latterly his familiarity with it has doubled in bulk; so that when america is mentioned now, two torches flare up in the dark caverns of his mind and he says, "ah, the country of the great man washington; and of the holy city--chicago." for he knows about the congress of religion, and this has enabled him to get an erroneous impression of chicago. when india is mentioned to the citizen of a far country it suggests clive, hastings, the mutiny, kipling, and a number of other great events; and the mention of calcutta infallibly brings up the black hole. and so, when that citizen finds himself in the capital of india he goes first of all to see the black hole of calcutta--and is disappointed. the black hole was not preserved; it is gone, long, long ago. it is strange. just as it stood, it was itself a monument; a ready-made one. it was finished, it was complete, its materials were strong and lasting, it needed no furbishing up, no repairs; it merely needed to be let alone. it was the first brick, the foundation stone, upon which was reared a mighty empire--the indian empire of great britain. it was the ghastly episode of the black hole that maddened the british and brought clive, that young military marvel, raging up from madras; it was the seed from which sprung plassey; and it was that extraordinary battle, whose like had not been seen in the earth since agincourt, that laid deep and strong the foundations of england's colossal indian sovereignty. and yet within the time of men who still live, the black hole was torn down and thrown away as carelessly as if its bricks were common clay, not ingots of historic gold. there is no accounting for human beings. the supposed site of the black hole is marked by an engraved plate. i saw that; and better that than nothing. the black hole was a prison--a cell is nearer the right word--eighteen feet square, the dimensions of an ordinary bedchamber; and into this place the victorious nabob of bengal packed of his english prisoners. there was hardly standing room for them; scarcely a breath of air was to be got; the time was night, the weather sweltering hot. before the dawn came, the captives were all dead but twenty-three. mr. holwell's long account of the awful episode was familiar to the world a hundred years ago, but one seldom sees in print even an extract from it in our day. among the striking things in it is this. mr. holwell, perishing with thirst, kept himself alive by sucking the perspiration from his sleeves. it gives one a vivid idea of the situation. he presently found that while he was busy drawing life from one of his sleeves a young english gentleman was stealing supplies from the other one. holwell was an unselfish man, a man of the most generous impulses; he lived and died famous for these fine and rare qualities; yet when he found out what was happening to that unwatched sleeve, he took the precaution to suck that one dry first. the miseries of the black hole were able to change even a nature like his. but that young gentleman was one of the twenty-three survivors, and he said it was the stolen perspiration that saved his life. from the middle of mr. holwell's narrative i will make a brief excerpt: "then a general prayer to heaven, to hasten the approach of the flames to the right and left of us, and put a period to our misery. but these failing, they whose strength and spirits were quite exhausted laid themselves down and expired quietly upon their fellows: others who had yet some strength and vigor left made a last effort at the windows, and several succeeded by leaping and scrambling over the backs and heads of those in the first rank, and got hold of the bars, from which there was no removing them. many to the right and left sunk with the violent pressure, and were soon suffocated; for now a steam arose from the living and the dead, which affected us in all its circumstances as if we were forcibly held with our heads over a bowl full of strong volatile spirit of hartshorn, until suffocated; nor could the effluvia of the one be distinguished from the other, and frequently, when i was forced by the load upon my head and shoulders to hold my face down, i was obliged, near as i was to the window, instantly to raise it again to avoid suffocation. i need not, my dear friend, ask your commiseration, when i tell you, that in this plight, from half an hour past eleven till near two in the morning, i sustained the weight of a heavy man, with his knees in my back, and the pressure of his whole body on my head. a dutch surgeon who had taken his seat upon my left shoulder, and a topaz (a black christian soldier) bearing on my right; all which nothing could have enabled me to support but the props and pressure equally sustaining me all around. the two latter i frequently dislodged by shifting my hold on the bars and driving my knuckles into their ribs; but my friend above stuck fast, held immovable by two bars. "i exerted anew my strength and fortitude; but the repeated trials and efforts i made to dislodge the insufferable incumbrances upon me at last quite exhausted me; and towards two o'clock, finding i must quit the window or sink where i was, i resolved on the former, having bore, truly for the sake of others, infinitely more for life than the best of it is worth. in the rank close behind me was an officer of one of the ships, whose name was cary, and who had behaved with much bravery during the siege (his wife, a fine woman, though country born, would not quit him, but accompanied him into the prison, and was one who survived). this poor wretch had been long raving for water and air; i told him i was determined to give up life, and recommended his gaining my station. on my quitting it he made a fruitless attempt to get my place; but the dutch surgeon, who sat on my shoulder, supplanted him. poor cary expressed his thankfulness, and said he would give up life too; but it was with the utmost labor we forced our way from the window (several in the inner ranks appearing to me dead standing, unable to fall by the throng and equal pressure around). he laid himself down to die; and his death, i believe, was very sudden; for he was a short, full, sanguine man. his strength was great; and, i imagine, had he not retired with me, i should never have been able to force my way. i was at this time sensible of no pain, and little uneasiness; i can give you no better idea of my situation than by repeating my simile of the bowl of spirit of hartshorn. i found a stupor coming on apace, and laid myself down by that gallant old man, the rev. mr. jervas bellamy, who laid dead with his son, the lieutenant, hand in hand, near the southernmost wall of the prison. when i had lain there some little time, i still had reflection enough to suffer some uneasiness in the thought that i should be trampled upon, when dead, as i myself had done to others. with some difficulty i raised myself, and gained the platform a second time, where i presently lost all sensation; the last trace of sensibility that i have been able to recollect after my laying down, was my sash being uneasy about my waist, which i untied, and threw from me. of what passed in this interval, to the time of my resurrection from this hole of horrors, i can give you no account." there was plenty to see in calcutta, but there was not plenty of time for it. i saw the fort that clive built; and the place where warren hastings and the author of the junius letters fought their duel; and the great botanical gardens; and the fashionable afternoon turnout in the maidan; and a grand review of the garrison in a great plain at sunrise; and a military tournament in which great bodies of native soldiery exhibited the perfection of their drill at all arms, a spectacular and beautiful show occupying several nights and closing with the mimic storming of a native fort which was as good as the reality for thrilling and accurate detail, and better than the reality for security and comfort; we had a pleasure excursion on the 'hoogly' by courtesy of friends, and devoted the rest of the time to social life and the indian museum. one should spend a month in the museum, an enchanted palace of indian antiquities. indeed, a person might spend half a year among the beautiful and wonderful things without exhausting their interest. it was winter. we were of kipling's "hosts of tourists who travel up and down india in the cold weather showing how things ought to be managed." it is a common expression there, "the cold weather," and the people think there is such a thing. it is because they have lived there half a lifetime, and their perceptions have become blunted. when a person is accustomed to in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable. i had read, in the histories, that the june marches made between lucknow and cawnpore by the british forces in the time of the mutiny were made weather-- in the shade and had taken it for historical embroidery. i had read it again in serjeant-major forbes-mitchell's account of his military experiences in the mutiny --at least i thought i had--and in calcutta i asked him if it was true, and he said it was. an officer of high rank who had been in the thick of the mutiny said the same. as long as those men were talking about what they knew, they were trustworthy, and i believed them; but when they said it was now "cold weather," i saw that they had traveled outside of their sphere of knowledge and were floundering. i believe that in india "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy. it was observable that brass ones were in use while i was in calcutta, showing that it was not yet time to change to porcelain; i was told the change to porcelain was not usually made until may. but this cold weather was too warm for us; so we started to darjeeling, in the himalayas--a twenty-four hour journey. chapter lv. there are different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden. thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. from diary: february . we left at : p.m. until dark we moved through rich vegetation, then changed to a boat and crossed the ganges. february . up with the sun. a brilliant morning, and frosty. a double suit of flannels is found necessary. the plain is perfectly level, and seems to stretch away and away and away, dimming and softening, to the uttermost bounds of nowhere. what a soaring, strenuous, gushing fountain spray of delicate greenery a bunch of bamboo is! as far as the eye can reach, these grand vegetable geysers grace the view, their spoutings refined to steam by distance. and there are fields of bananas, with the sunshine glancing from the varnished surface of their drooping vast leaves. and there are frequent groves of palm; and an effective accent is given to the landscape by isolated individuals of this picturesque family, towering, clean-stemmed, their plumes broken and hanging ragged, nature's imitation of an umbrella that has been out to see what a cyclone is like and is trying not to look disappointed. and everywhere through the soft morning vistas we glimpse the villages, the countless villages, the myriad villages, thatched, built of clean new matting, snuggling among grouped palms and sheaves of bamboo; villages, villages, no end of villages, not three hundred yards apart, and dozens and dozens of them in sight all the time; a mighty city, hundreds of miles long, hundreds of miles broad, made all of villages, the biggest city in the earth, and as populous as a european kingdom. i have seen no such city as this before. and there is a continuously repeated and replenished multitude of naked men in view on both sides and ahead. we fly through it mile after mile, but still it is always there, on both sides and ahead--brown-bodied, naked men and boys, plowing in the fields. but not woman. in these two hours i have not seen a woman or a girl working in the fields. "from greenland's icy mountains, from india's coral strand, where afric's sunny fountains roll down their golden sand. from many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain, they call us to deliver their land from error's chain." those are beautiful verses, and they have remained in my memory all my life. but if the closing lines are true, let us hope that when we come to answer the call and deliver the land from its errors, we shall secrete from it some of our high-civilization ways, and at the same time borrow some of its pagan ways to enrich our high system with. we have a right to do this. if we lift those people up, we have a right to lift ourselves up nine or ten grades or so, at their expense. a few years ago i spent several weeks at tolz, in bavaria. it is a roman catholic region, and not even benares is more deeply or pervasively or intelligently devout. in my diary of those days i find this: "we took a long drive yesterday around about the lovely country roads. but it was a drive whose pleasure was damaged in a couple of ways: by the dreadful shrines and by the shameful spectacle of gray and venerable old grandmothers toiling in the fields. the shrines were frequent along the roads--figures of the saviour nailed to the cross and streaming with blood from the wounds of the nails and the thorns. "when missionaries go from here do they find fault with the pagan idols? i saw many women seventy and even eighty years old mowing and binding in the fields, and pitchforking the loads into the wagons." i was in austria later, and in munich. in munich i saw gray old women pushing trucks up hill and down, long distances, trucks laden with barrels of beer, incredible loads. in my austrian diary i find this: "in the fields i often see a woman and a cow harnessed to the plow, and a man driving. "in the public street of marienbad to-day, i saw an old, bent, gray-headed woman, in harness with a dog, drawing a laden sled over bare dirt roads and bare pavements; and at his ease walked the driver, smoking his pipe, a hale fellow not thirty years old." five or six years ago i bought an open boat, made a kind of a canvas wagon-roof over the stern of it to shelter me from sun and rain; hired a courier and a boatman, and made a twelve-day floating voyage down the rhone from lake bourget to marseilles. in my diary of that trip i find this entry. i was far down the rhone then: "passing st. etienne, : p.m. on a distant ridge inland, a tall openwork structure commandingly situated, with a statue of the virgin standing on it. a devout country. all down this river, wherever there is a crag there is a statue of the virgin on it. i believe i have seen a hundred of them. and yet, in many respects, the peasantry seem to be mere pagans, and destitute of any considerable degree of civilization. " . . . . we reached a not very promising looking village about o'clock, and i concluded to tie up for the day; munching fruit and fogging the hood with pipe-smoke had grown monotonous; i could not have the hood furled, because the floods of rain fell unceasingly. the tavern was on the river bank, as is the custom. it was dull there, and melancholy--nothing to do but look out of the window into the drenching rain, and shiver; one could do that, for it was bleak and cold and windy, and country france furnishes no fire. winter overcoats did not help me much; they had to be supplemented with rugs. the raindrops were so large and struck the river with such force that they knocked up the water like pebble-splashes. "with the exception of a very occasional woodenshod peasant, nobody was abroad in this bitter weather--i mean nobody of our sex. but all weathers are alike to the women in these continental countries. to them and the other animals, life is serious; nothing interrupts their slavery. three of them were washing clothes in the river under the window when i arrived, and they continued at it as long as there was light to work by. one was apparently thirty; another--the mother!--above fifty; the third--grandmother!--so old and worn and gray she could have passed for eighty; i took her to be that old. they had no waterproofs nor rubbers, of course; over their shoulders they wore gunnysacks--simply conductors for rivers of water; some of the volume reached the ground; the rest soaked in on the way. "at last a vigorous fellow of thirty-five arrived, dry and comfortable, smoking his pipe under his big umbrella in an open donkey-cart-husband, son, and grandson of those women! he stood up in the cart, sheltering himself, and began to superintend, issuing his orders in a masterly tone of command, and showing temper when they were not obeyed swiftly enough. "without complaint or murmur the drowned women patiently carried out the orders, lifting the immense baskets of soggy, wrung-out clothing into the cart and stowing them to the man's satisfaction. there were six of the great baskets, and a man of mere ordinary strength could not have lifted any one of them. the cart being full now, the frenchman descended, still sheltered by his umbrella, entered the tavern, and the women went drooping homeward, trudging in the wake of the cart, and soon were blended with the deluge and lost to sight. "when i went down into the public room, the frenchman had his bottle of wine and plate of food on a bare table black with grease, and was "chomping" like a horse. he had the little religious paper which is in everybody's hands on the rhone borders, and was enlightening himself with the histories of french saints who used to flee to the desert in the middle ages to escape the contamination of woman. for two hundred years france has been sending missionaries to other savage lands. to spare to the needy from poverty like hers is fine and true generosity." but to get back to india--where, as my favorite poem says-- "every prospect pleases, and only man is vile." it is because bavaria and austria and france have not introduced their civilization to him yet. but bavaria and austria and france are on their way. they are coming. they will rescue him; they will refine the vileness out of him. some time during the forenoon, approaching the mountains, we changed from the regular train to one composed of little canvas-sheltered cars that skimmed along within a foot of the ground and seemed to be going fifty miles an hour when they were really making about twenty. each car had seating capacity for half-a-dozen persons; and when the curtains were up one was substantially out of doors, and could see everywhere, and get all the breeze, and be luxuriously comfortable. it was not a pleasure excursion in name only, but in fact. after a while the stopped at a little wooden coop of a station just within the curtain of the sombre jungle, a place with a deep and dense forest of great trees and scrub and vines all about it. the royal bengal tiger is in great force there, and is very bold and unconventional. from this lonely little station a message once went to the railway manager in calcutta: "tiger eating station-master on front porch; telegraph instructions." it was there that i had my first tiger hunt. i killed thirteen. we were presently away again, and the train began to climb the mountains. in one place seven wild elephants crossed the track, but two of them got away before i could overtake them. the railway journey up the mountain is forty miles, and it takes eight hours to make it. it is so wild and interesting and exciting and enchanting that it ought to take a week. as for the vegetation, it is a museum. the jungle seemed to contain samples of every rare and curious tree and bush that we had ever seen or heard of. it is from that museum, i think, that the globe must have been supplied with the trees and vines and shrubs that it holds precious. the road is infinitely and charmingly crooked. it goes winding in and out under lofty cliffs that are smothered in vines and foliage, and around the edges of bottomless chasms; and all the way one glides by files of picturesque natives, some carrying burdens up, others going down from their work in the tea-gardens; and once there was a gaudy wedding procession, all bright tinsel and color, and a bride, comely and girlish, who peeped out from the curtains of her palanquin, exposing her face with that pure delight which the young and happy take in sin for sin's own sake. by and by we were well up in the region of the clouds, and from that breezy height we looked down and afar over a wonderful picture--the plains of india, stretching to the horizon, soft and fair, level as a floor, shimmering with heat, mottled with cloud-shadows, and cloven with shining rivers. immediately below us, and receding down, down, down, toward the valley, was a shaven confusion of hilltops, with ribbony roads and paths squirming and snaking cream-yellow all over them and about them, every curve and twist sharply distinct. at an elevation of , feet we entered a thick cloud, and it shut out the world and kept it shut out. we climbed , feet higher, then began to descend, and presently got down to darjeeling, which is , feet above the level of the plains. we had passed many a mountain village on the way up, and seen some new kinds of natives, among them many samples of the fighting ghurkas. they are not large men, but they are strong and resolute. there are no better soldiers among britain's native troops. and we had passed shoals of their women climbing the forty miles of steep road from the valley to their mountain homes, with tall baskets on their backs hitched to their foreheads by a band, and containing a freightage weighing--i will not say how many hundreds of pounds, for the sum is unbelievable. these were young women, and they strode smartly along under these astonishing burdens with the air of people out for a holiday. i was told that a woman will carry a piano on her back all the way up the mountain; and that more than once a woman had done it. if these were old women i should regard the ghurkas as no more civilized than the europeans. at the railway station at darjeeling you find plenty of cab-substitutes --open coffins, in which you sit, and are then borne on men's shoulders up the steep roads into the town. up there we found a fairly comfortable hotel, the property of an indiscriminate and incoherent landlord, who looks after nothing, but leaves everything to his army of indian servants. no, he does look after the bill--to be just to him--and the tourist cannot do better than follow his example. i was told by a resident that the summit of kinchinjunga is often hidden in the clouds, and that sometimes a tourist has waited twenty-two days and then been obliged to go away without a sight of it. and yet went not disappointed; for when he got his hotel bill he recognized that he was now seeing the highest thing in the himalayas. but this is probably a lie. after lecturing i went to the club that night, and that was a comfortable place. it is loftily situated, and looks out over a vast spread of scenery; from it you can see where the boundaries of three countries come together, some thirty miles away; thibet is one of them, nepaul another, and i think herzegovina was the other. apparently, in every town and city in india the gentlemen of the british civil and military service have a club; sometimes it is a palatial one, always it is pleasant and homelike. the hotels are not always as good as they might be, and the stranger who has access to the club is grateful for his privilege and knows how to value it. next day was sunday. friends came in the gray dawn with horses, and my party rode away to a distant point where kinchinjunga and mount everest show up best, but i stayed at home for a private view; for it was very old, and i was not acquainted with the horses, any way. i got a pipe and a few blankets and sat for two hours at the window, and saw the sun drive away the veiling gray and touch up the snow-peaks one after another with pale pink splashes and delicate washes of gold, and finally flood the whole mighty convulsion of snow-mountains with a deluge of rich splendors. kinchinjunga's peak was but fitfully visible, but in the between times it was vividly clear against the sky--away up there in the blue dome more than , feet above sea level--the loftiest land i had ever seen, by , feet or more. it was miles away. mount everest is a thousand feet higher, but it was not a part of that sea of mountains piled up there before me, so i did not see it; but i did not care, because i think that mountains that are as high as that are disagreeable. i changed from the back to the front of the house and spent the rest of the morning there, watching the swarthy strange tribes flock by from their far homes in the himalayas. all ages and both sexes were represented, and the breeds were quite new to me, though the costumes of the thibetans made them look a good deal like chinamen. the prayer-wheel was a frequent feature. it brought me near to these people, and made them seem kinfolk of mine. through our preacher we do much of our praying by proxy. we do not whirl him around a stick, as they do, but that is merely a detail. the swarm swung briskly by, hour after hour, a strange and striking pageant. it was wasted there, and it seemed a pity. it should have been sent streaming through the cities of europe or america, to refresh eyes weary of the pale monotonies of the circus-pageant. these people were bound for the bazar, with things to sell. we went down there, later, and saw that novel congress of the wild peoples, and plowed here and there through it, and concluded that it would be worth coming from calcutta to see, even if there were no kinchinjunga and everest. chapter lvi. there are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. on monday and tuesday at sunrise we again had fair-to-middling views of the stupendous mountains; then, being well cooled off and refreshed, we were ready to chance the weather of the lower world once more. we traveled up hill by the regular train five miles to the summit, then changed to a little canvas-canopied hand-car for the -mile descent. it was the size of a sleigh, it had six seats and was so low that it seemed to rest on the ground. it had no engine or other propelling power, and needed none to help it fly down those steep inclines. it only needed a strong brake, to modify its flight, and it had that. there was a story of a disastrous trip made down the mountain once in this little car by the lieutenant-governor of bengal, when the car jumped the track and threw its passengers over a precipice. it was not true, but the story had value for me, for it made me nervous, and nervousness wakes a person up and makes him alive and alert, and heightens the thrill of a new and doubtful experience. the car could really jump the track, of course; a pebble on the track, placed there by either accident or malice, at a sharp curve where one might strike it before the eye could discover it, could derail the car and fling it down into india; and the fact that the lieutenant-governor had escaped was no proof that i would have the same luck. and standing there, looking down upon the indian empire from the airy altitude of , feet, it seemed unpleasantly far, dangerously far, to be flung from a handcar. but after all, there was but small danger-for me. what there was, was for mr. pugh, inspector of a division of the indian police, in whose company and protection we had come from calcutta. he had seen long service as an artillery officer, was less nervous than i was, and so he was to go ahead of us in a pilot hand-car, with a ghurka and another native; and the plan was that when we should see his car jump over a precipice we must put on our break [sp.] and send for another pilot. it was a good arrangement. also mr. barnard, chief engineer of the mountain-division of the road, was to take personal charge of our car, and he had been down the mountain in it many a time. everything looked safe. indeed, there was but one questionable detail left: the regular train was to follow us as soon as we should start, and it might run over us. privately, i thought it would. the road fell sharply down in front of us and went corkscrewing in and out around the crags and precipices, down, down, forever down, suggesting nothing so exactly or so uncomfortably as a croaked toboggan slide with no end to it. mr. pugh waved his flag and started, like an arrow from a bow, and before i could get out of the car we were gone too. i had previously had but one sensation like the shock of that departure, and that was the gaspy shock that took my breath away the first time that i was discharged from the summit of a toboggan slide. but in both instances the sensation was pleasurable--intensely so; it was a sudden and immense exaltation, a mixed ecstasy of deadly fright and unimaginable joy. i believe that this combination makes the perfection of human delight. the pilot car's flight down the mountain suggested the swoop of a swallow that is skimming the ground, so swiftly and smoothly and gracefully it swept down the long straight reaches and soared in and out of the bends and around the corners. we raced after it, and seemed to flash by the capes and crags with the speed of light; and now and then we almost overtook it--and had hopes; but it was only playing with us; when we got near, it released its brake, make a spring around a corner, and the next time it spun into view, a few seconds later, it looked as small as a wheelbarrow, it was so far away. we played with the train in the same way. we often got out to gather flowers or sit on a precipice and look at the scenery, then presently we would hear a dull and growing roar, and the long coils of the train would come into sight behind and above us; but we did not need to start till the locomotive was close down upon us --then we soon left it far behind. it had to stop at every station, therefore it was not an embarrassment to us. our brake was a good piece of machinery; it could bring the car to a standstill on a slope as steep as a house-roof. the scenery was grand and varied and beautiful, and there was no hurry; we could always stop and examine it. there was abundance of time. we did not need to hamper the train; if it wanted the road, we could switch off and let it go by, then overtake it and pass it later. we stopped at one place to see the gladstone cliff, a great crag which the ages and the weather have sculptured into a recognizable portrait of the venerable statesman. mr. gladstone is a stockholder in the road, and nature began this portrait ten thousand years ago, with the idea of having the compliment ready in time for the event. we saw a banyan tree which sent down supporting stems from branches which were sixty feet above the ground. that is, i suppose it was a banyan; its bark resembled that of the great banyan in the botanical gardens at calcutta, that spider-legged thing with its wilderness of vegetable columns. and there were frequent glimpses of a totally leafless tree upon whose innumerable twigs and branches a cloud of crimson butterflies had lighted--apparently. in fact these brilliant red butterflies were flowers, but the illusion was good. afterward in south africa, i saw another splendid effect made by red flowers. this flower was probably called the torch-plant--should have been so named, anyway. it had a slender stem several feet high, and from its top stood up a single tongue of flame, an intensely red flower of the size and shape of a small corn-cob. the stems stood three or four feet apart all over a great hill-slope that was a mile long, and make one think of what the place de la concorde would be if its myriad lights were red instead of white and yellow. a few miles down the mountain we stopped half an hour to see a thibetan dramatic performance. it was in the open air on the hillside. the audience was composed of thibetans, ghurkas, and other unusual people. the costumes of the actors were in the last degree outlandish, and the performance was in keeping with the clothes. to an accompaniment of barbarous noises the actors stepped out one after another and began to spin around with immense swiftness and vigor and violence, chanting the while, and soon the whole troupe would be spinning and chanting and raising the dust. they were performing an ancient and celebrated historical play, and a chinaman explained it to me in pidjin english as it went along. the play was obscure enough without the explanation; with the explanation added, it was (opake). as a drama this ancient historical work of art was defective, i thought, but as a wild and barbarous spectacle the representation was beyond criticism. far down the mountain we got out to look at a piece of remarkable loop-engineering--a spiral where the road curves upon itself with such abruptness that when the regular train came down and entered the loop, we stood over it and saw the locomotive disappear under our bridge, then in a few moments appear again, chasing its own tail; and we saw it gain on it, overtake it, draw ahead past the rear cars, and run a race with that end of the train. it was like a snake swallowing itself. half-way down the mountain we stopped about an hour at mr. barnard's house for refreshments, and while we were sitting on the veranda looking at the distant panorama of hills through a gap in the forest, we came very near seeing a leopard kill a calf.--[it killed it the day before.] --it is a wild place and lovely. from the woods all about came the songs of birds,--among them the contributions of a couple of birds which i was not then acquainted with: the brain-fever bird and the coppersmith. the song of the brain-fever demon starts on a low but steadily rising key, and is a spiral twist which augments in intensity and severity with each added spiral, growing sharper and sharper, and more and more painful, more and more agonizing, more and more maddening, intolerable, unendurable, as it bores deeper and deeper and deeper into the listener's brain, until at last the brain fever comes as a relief and the man dies. i am bringing some of these birds home to america. they will be a great curiosity there, and it is believed that in our climate they will multiply like rabbits. the coppersmith bird's note at a certain distance away has the ring of a sledge on granite; at a certain other distance the hammering has a more metallic ring, and you might think that the bird was mending a copper kettle; at another distance it has a more woodeny thump, but it is a thump that is full of energy, and sounds just like starting a bung. so he is a hard bird to name with a single name; he is a stone-breaker, coppersmith, and bung-starter, and even then he is not completely named, for when he is close by you find that there is a soft, deep, melodious quality in his thump, and for that no satisfying name occurs to you. you will not mind his other notes, but when he camps near enough for you to hear that one, you presently find that his measured and monotonous repetition of it is beginning to disturb you; next it will weary you, soon it will distress you, and before long each thump will hurt your head; if this goes on, you will lose your mind with the pain and misery of it, and go crazy. i am bringing some of these birds home to america. there is nothing like them there. they will be a great surprise, and it is said that in a climate like ours they will surpass expectation for fecundity. i am bringing some nightingales, too, and some cue-owls. i got them in italy. the song of the nightingale is the deadliest known to ornithology. that demoniacal shriek can kill at thirty yards. the note of the cue-owl is infinitely soft and sweet--soft and sweet as the whisper of a flute. but penetrating--oh, beyond belief; it can bore through boiler-iron. it is a lingering note, and comes in triplets, on the one unchanging key: hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o; then a silence of fifteen seconds, then the triplet again; and so on, all night. at first it is divine; then less so; then trying; then distressing; then excruciating; then agonizing, and at the end of two hours the listener is a maniac. and so, presently we took to the hand-car and went flying down the mountain again; flying and stopping, flying and stopping, till at last we were in the plain once more and stowed for calcutta in the regular train. that was the most enjoyable day i have spent in the earth. for rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that approaches the bird-flight down the himalayas in a hand-car. it has no fault, no blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty-five miles of it instead of five hundred. chapter lvii. she was not quite what you would call refined. she was not quite what you would call unrefined. she was the kind of person that keeps a parrot. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. so far as i am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make india the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his round. nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing over looked. always, when you think you have come to the end of her tremendous specialties and have finished banging tags upon her as the land of the thug, the land of the plague, the land of famine, the land of giant illusions, the land of stupendous mountains, and so forth, another specialty crops up and another tag is required. i have been overlooking the fact that india is by an unapproachable supremacy--the land of murderous wild creatures. perhaps it will be simplest to throw away the tags and generalize her with one all-comprehensive name, as the land of wonders. for many years the british indian government has been trying to destroy the murderous wild creatures, and has spent a great deal of money in the effort. the annual official returns show that the undertaking is a difficult one. these returns exhibit a curious annual uniformity in results; the sort of uniformity which you find in the annual output of suicides in the world's capitals, and the proportions of deaths by this, that, and the other disease. you can always come close to foretelling how many suicides will occur in paris, london, and new york, next year, and also how many deaths will result from cancer, consumption, dog-bite, falling out of the window, getting run over by cabs, etc., if you know the statistics of those matters for the present year. in the same way, with one year's indian statistics before you, you can guess closely at how many people were killed in that empire by tigers during the previous year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and at how many were killed in each of those years by bears, how many by wolves, and how many by snakes; and you can also guess closely at how many people are going to be killed each year for the coming five years by each of those agencies. you can also guess closely at how many of each agency the government is going to kill each year for the next five years. i have before me statistics covering a period of six consecutive years. by these, i know that in india the tiger kills something over persons every year, and that the government responds by killing about double as many tigers every year. in four of the six years referred to, the tiger got odd; in one of the remaining two years he got only , but in the other remaining year he made his average good by scoring . he is always sure of his average. anyone who bets that the tiger will kill , people in india in any three consecutive years has invested his money in a certainty; anyone who bets that he will kill , in any three consecutive years, is absolutely sure to lose. as strikingly uniform as are the statistics of suicide, they are not any more so than are those of the tiger's annual output of slaughtered human beings in india. the government's work is quite uniform, too; it about doubles the tiger's average. in six years the tiger killed , persons, minus ; in the same six years , tigers were killed, minus . the wolf kills nearly as many people as the tiger-- a year to the tiger's odd--but while he is doing it, more than , of his tribe fall. the leopard kills an average of people per year, but loses , of his own mess while he is doing it. the bear kills people per year at a cost of , of his own tribe. the tiger, as the figures show, makes a very handsome fight against man. but it is nothing to the elephant's fight. the king of beasts, the lord of the jungle, loses four of his mess per year, but he kills forty--five persons to make up for it. but when it comes to killing cattle, the lord of the jungle is not interested. he kills but in six years--horses of hunters, no doubt --but in the same six the tiger kills more than , , the leopard , , the bear , , the wolf , , the hyena more than , , other wild beasts , , and the snakes , , a grand total of more than , ; an average of , head per year. in response, the government kills, in the six years, a total of , , wild beasts and snakes. ten for one. it will be perceived that the snakes are not much interested in cattle; they kill only , odd per year. the snakes are much more interested in man. india swarms with deadly snakes. at the head of the list is the cobra, the deadliest known to the world, a snake whose bite kills where the rattlesnake's bite merely entertains. in india, the annual man-killings by snakes are as uniform, as regular, and as forecastable as are the tiger-average and the suicide-average. anyone who bets that in india, in any three consecutive years the snakes will kill , persons, will win his bet; and anyone who bets that in india in any three consecutive years, the snakes will kill , persons, will lose his bet. in india the snakes kill , people a year; they hardly ever fall short of it; they as seldom exceed it. an insurance actuary could take the indian census tables and the government's snake tables and tell you within sixpence how much it would be worth to insure a man against death by snake-bite there. if i had a dollar for every person killed per year in india, i would rather have it than any other property, as it is the only property in the world not subject to shrinkage. i should like to have a royalty on the government-end of the snake business, too, and am in london now trying to get it; but when i get it it is not going to be as regular an income as the other will be if i get that; i have applied for it. the snakes transact their end of the business in a more orderly and systematic way than the government transacts its end of it, because the snakes have had a long experience and know all about the traffic. you can make sure that the government will never kill fewer than , snakes in a year, and that it will newer quite reach , too much room for oscillation; good speculative stock, to bear or bull, and buy and sell long and short, and all that kind of thing, but not eligible for investment like the other. the man that speculates in the government's snake crop wants to go carefully. i would not advise a man to buy a single crop at all--i mean a crop of futures for the possible wobble is something quite extraordinary. if he can buy six future crops in a bunch, seller to deliver , , altogether, that is another matter. i do not know what snakes are worth now, but i know what they would be worth then, for the statistics show that the seller could not come within , of carrying out his contract. however, i think that a person who speculates in snakes is a fool, anyway. he always regrets it afterwards. to finish the statistics. in six years the wild beasts kill , persons, and the snakes kill , . in the same six the government kills , , snakes. plenty left. there are narrow escapes in india. in the very jungle where i killed sixteen tigers and all those elephants, a cobra bit me but it got well; everyone was surprised. this could not happen twice in ten years, perhaps. usually death would result in fifteen minutes. we struck out westward or northwestward from calcutta on an itinerary of a zig-zag sort, which would in the course of time carry us across india to its northwestern corner and the border of afghanistan. the first part of the trip carried us through a great region which was an endless garden--miles and miles of the beautiful flower from whose juices comes the opium, and at muzaffurpore we were in the midst of the indigo culture; thence by a branch road to the ganges at a point near dinapore, and by a train which would have missed the connection by a week but for the thoughtfulness of some british officers who were along, and who knew the ways of trains that are run by natives without white supervision. this train stopped at every village; for no purpose connected with business, apparently. we put out nothing, we took nothing aboard. the train bands stepped ashore and gossiped with friends a quarter of an hour, then pulled out and repeated this at the succeeding villages. we had thirty-five miles to go and six hours to do it in, but it was plain that we were not going to make it. it was then that the english officers said it was now necessary to turn this gravel train into an express. so they gave the engine-driver a rupee and told him to fly. it was a simple remedy. after that we made ninety miles an hour. we crossed the ganges just at dawn, made our connection, and went to benares, where we stayed twenty-four hours and inspected that strange and fascinating piety-hive again; then left for lucknow, a city which is perhaps the most conspicuous of the many monuments of british fortitude and valor that are scattered about the earth. the heat was pitiless, the flat plains were destitute of grass, and baked dry by the sun they were the color of pale dust, which was flying in clouds. but it was much hotter than this when the relieving forces marched to lucknow in the time of the mutiny. those were the days of deg. in the shade. chapter, lviii. make it a point to do something every day that you don't want to do. this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. it seems to be settled, now, that among the many causes from which the great mutiny sprang, the main one was the annexation of the kingdom of oudh by the east india company--characterized by sir henry lawrence as "the most unrighteous act that was ever committed." in the spring of , a mutinous spirit was observable in many of the native garrisons, and it grew day by day and spread wider and wider. the younger military men saw something very serious in it, and would have liked to take hold of it vigorously and stamp it out promptly; but they were not in authority. old-men were in the high places of the army--men who should have been retired long before, because of their great age--and they regarded the matter as a thing of no consequence. they loved their native soldiers, and would not believe that anything could move them to revolt. everywhere these obstinate veterans listened serenely to the rumbling of the volcanoes under them, and said it was nothing. and so the propagators of mutiny had everything their own way. they moved from camp to camp undisturbed, and painted to the native soldier the wrongs his people were suffering at the hands of the english, and made his heart burn for revenge. they were able to point to two facts of formidable value as backers of their persuasions: in clive's day, native armies were incoherent mobs, and without effective arms; therefore, they were weak against clive's organized handful of well-armed men, but the thing was the other way, now. the british forces were native; they had been trained by the british, organized by the british, armed by the british, all the power was in their hands--they were a club made by british hands to beat out british brains with. there was nothing to oppose their mass, nothing but a few weak battalions of british soldiers scattered about india, a force not worth speaking of. this argument, taken alone, might not have succeeded, for the bravest and best indian troops had a wholesome dread of the white soldier, whether he was weak or strong; but the agitators backed it with their second and best point prophecy--a prophecy a hundred years old. the indian is open to prophecy at all times; argument may fail to convince him, but not prophecy. there was a prophecy that a hundred years from the year of that battle of clive's which founded the british indian empire, the british power would be overthrown and swept away by the natives. the mutiny broke out at meerut on the th of may, , and fired a train of tremendous historical explosions. nana sahib's massacre of the surrendered garrison of cawnpore occurred in june, and the long siege of lucknow began. the military history of england is old and great, but i think it must be granted that the crushing of the mutiny is the greatest chapter in it. the british were caught asleep and unprepared. they were a few thousands, swallowed up in an ocean of hostile populations. it would take months to inform england and get help, but they did not falter or stop to count the odds, but with english resolution and english devotion they took up their task, and went stubbornly on with it, through good fortune and bad, and fought the most unpromising fight that one may read of in fiction or out of it, and won it thoroughly. the mutiny broke out so suddenly, and spread with such rapidity that there was but little time for occupants of weak outlying stations to escape to places of safety. attempts were made, of course, but they were attended by hardships as bitter as death in the few cases which were successful; for the heat ranged between and in the shade; the way led through hostile peoples, and food and water were hardly to be had. for ladies and children accustomed to ease and comfort and plenty, such a journey must have been a cruel experience. sir g. o. trevelyan quotes an example: "this is what befell mrs. m----, the wife of the surgeon at a certain station on the southern confines of the insurrection. 'i heard,' she says, 'a number of shots fired, and, looking out, i saw my husband driving furiously from the mess-house, waving his whip. i ran to him, and, seeing a bearer with my child in his arms, i caught her up, and got into the buggy. at the mess-house we found all the officers assembled, together with sixty sepoys, who had remained faithful. we went off in one large party, amidst a general conflagration of our late homes. we reached the caravanserai at chattapore the next morning, and thence started for callinger. at this point our sepoy escort deserted us. we were fired upon by match-lockmen, and one officer was shot dead. we heard, likewise, that the people had risen at callinger, so we returned and walked back ten miles that day. m---- and i carried the child alternately. presently mrs. smalley died of sunstroke. we had no food amongst us. an officer kindly lent us a horse. we were very faint. the major died, and was buried; also the sergeant-major and some women. the bandsmen left us on the nineteenth of june. we were fired at again by match-lockmen, and changed direction for allahabad. our party consisted of nine gentlemen, two children, the sergeant and his wife. on the morning of the twentieth, captain scott took lottie on to his horse. i was riding behind my husband, and she was so crushed between us. she was two years old on the first of the month. we were both weak through want of food and the effect of the sun. lottie and i had no head covering. m---- had a sepoy's cap i found on the ground. soon after sunrise we were followed by villagers armed with clubs and spears. one of them struck captain scott's horse on the leg. he galloped off with lottie, and my poor husband never saw his child again. we rode on several miles, keeping away from villages, and then crossed the river. our thirst was extreme. m---- had dreadful cramps, so that i had to hold him on the horse. i was very uneasy about him. the day before i saw the drummer's wife eating chupatties, and asked her to give a piece to the child, which she did. i now saw water in a ravine. the descent was steep, and our only drinkingvessel was m----'s cap. our horse got water, and i bathed my neck. i had no stockings, and my feet were torn and blistered. two peasants came in sight, and we were frightened and rode off. the sergeant held our horse, and m---- put me up and mounted. i think he must have got suddenly faint, for i fell and he over me, on the road, when the horse started off. some time before he said, and barber, too, that he could not live many hours. i felt he was dying before we came to the ravine. he told me his wishes about his children and myself, and took leave. my brain seemed burnt up. no tears came. as soon as we fell, the sergeant let go the horse, and it went off; so that escape was cut off. we sat down on the ground waiting for death. poor fellow! he was very weak; his thirst was frightful, and i went to get him water. some villagers came, and took my rupees and watch. i took off my wedding-ring, and twisted it in my hair, and replaced the guard. i tore off the skirt of my dress to bring water in, but was no use, for when i returned my beloved's eyes were fixed, and, though i called and tried to restore him, and poured water into his mouth, it only rattled in his throat. he never spoke to me again. i held him in my arms till he sank gradually down. i felt frantic, but could not cry. i was alone. i bound his head and face in my dress, for there was no earth to buy him. the pain in my hands and feet was dreadful. i went down to the ravine, and sat in the water on a stone, hoping to get off at night and look for lottie. when i came back from the water, i saw that they had not taken her little watch, chain, and seals, so i tied them under my petticoat. in an hour, about thirty villagers came, they dragged me out of the ravine, and took off my jacket, and found the little chain. they then dragged me to a village, mocking me all the way, and disputing as to whom i was to belong to. the whole population came to look at me. i asked for a bedstead, and lay down outside the door of a hut. they had a dozen of cows, and yet refused me milk. when night came, and the village was quiet, some old woman brought me a leafful of rice. i was too parched to eat, and they gave me water. the morning after a neighboring rajah sent a palanquin and a horseman to fetch me, who told me that a little child and three sahibs had come to his master's house. and so the poor mother found her lost one, 'greatly blistered,' poor little creature. it is not for europeans in india to pray that their flight be not in the winter." in the first days of june the aged general, sir hugh wheeler commanding the forces at cawnpore, was deserted by his native troops; then he moved out of the fort and into an exposed patch of open flat ground and built a four-foot mud wall around it. he had with him a few hundred white soldiers and officers, and apparently more women and children than soldiers. he was short of provisions, short of arms, short of ammunition, short of military wisdom, short of everything but courage and devotion to duty. the defense of that open lot through twenty-one days and nights of hunger, thirst, indian heat, and a never-ceasing storm of bullets, bombs, and cannon-balls--a defense conducted, not by the aged and infirm general, but by a young officer named moore--is one of the most heroic episodes in history. when at last the nana found it impossible to conquer these starving men and women with powder and ball, he resorted to treachery, and that succeeded. he agreed to supply them with food and send them to allahabad in boats. their mud wall and their barracks were in ruins, their provisions were at the point of exhaustion, they had done all that the brave could do, they had conquered an honorable compromise,--their forces had been fearfully reduced by casualties and by disease, they were not able to continue the contest longer. they came forth helpless but suspecting no treachery, the nana's host closed around them, and at a signal from a trumpet the massacre began. about two hundred women and children were spared--for the present--but all the men except three or four were killed. among the incidents of the massacre quoted by sir g. o. trevelyan, is this: "when, after the lapse of some twenty minutes, the dead began to outnumber the living;--when the fire slackened, as the marks grew few and far between; then the troopers who had been drawn up to the right of the temple plunged into the river, sabre between teeth, and pistol in hand. thereupon two half-caste christian women, the wives of musicians in the band of the fifty-sixth, witnessed a scene which should not be related at second-hand. 'in the boat where i was to have gone,' says mrs. bradshaw, confirmed throughout by mrs. betts, 'was the school-mistress and twenty-two misses. general wheeler came last in a palkee. they carried him into the water near the boat. i stood close by. he said, 'carry me a little further towards the boat.' but a trooper said, 'no, get out here.' as the general got out of the palkee, head-foremost, the trooper gave him a cut with his sword into the neck, and he fell into the water. my son was killed near him. i saw it; alas! alas! some were stabbed with bayonets; others cut down. little infants were torn in pieces. we saw it; we did; and tell you only what we saw. other children were stabbed and thrown into the river. the schoolgirls were burnt to death. i saw their clothes and hair catch fire. in the water, a few paces off, by the next boat, we saw the youngest daughter of colonel williams. a sepoy was going to kill her with his bayonet. she said, 'my father was always kind to sepoys.' he turned away, and just then a villager struck her on the head with a club, and she fell into the water. these people likewise saw good mr. moncrieff, the clergyman, take a book from his pocket that he never had leisure to open, and heard him commence a prayer for mercy which he was not permitted to conclude. another deponent observed an european making for a drain like a scared water-rat, when some boatmen, armed with cudgels, cut off his retreat, and beat him down dead into the mud." the women and children who had been reserved from the massacre were imprisoned during a fortnight in a small building, one story high--a cramped place, a slightly modified black hole of calcutta. they were waiting in suspense; there was none who could foretaste their fate. meantime the news of the massacre had traveled far and an army of rescuers with havelock at its head was on its way--at least an army which hoped to be rescuers. it was crossing the country by forced marches, and strewing its way with its own dead men struck down by cholera, and by a heat which reached deg. it was in a vengeful fury, and it stopped for nothing neither heat, nor fatigue, nor disease, nor human opposition. it tore its impetuous way through hostile forces, winning victory after victory, but still striding on and on, not halting to count results. and at last, after this extraordinary march, it arrived before the walls of cawnpore, met the nana's massed strength, delivered a crushing defeat, and entered. but too late--only a few hours too late. for at the last moment the nana had decided upon the massacre of the captive women and children, and had commissioned three mohammedans and two hindoos to do the work. sir g. o. trevelyan says: "thereupon the five men entered. it was the short gloaming of hindostan--the hour when ladies take their evening drive. she who had accosted the officer was standing in the doorway. with her were the native doctor and two hindoo menials. that much of the business might be seen from the veranda, but all else was concealed amidst the interior gloom. shrieks and scuffing acquainted those without that the journeymen were earning their hire. survur khan soon emerged with his sword broken off at the hilt. he procured another from the nana's house, and a few minutes after appeared again on the same errand. the third blade was of better temper; or perhaps the thick of the work was already over. by the time darkness had closed in, the men came forth and locked up the house for the night. then the screams ceased, but the groans lasted till morning. "the sun rose as usual. when he had been up nearly three hours the five repaired to the scene of their labors over night. they were attended by a few sweepers, who proceeded to transfer the contents of the house to a dry well situated behind some trees which grew hard by. 'the bodies,' says one who was present throughout, 'were dragged out, most of them by the hair of the head. those who had clothing worth taking were stripped. some of the women were alive. i cannot say how many; but three could speak. they prayed for the sake of god that an end might be put to their sufferings. i remarked one very stout woman, a half-caste, who was severely wounded in both arms, who entreated to be killed. she and two or three others were placed against the bank of the cut by which bullocks go down in drawing water. the dead were first thrown in. yes: there was a great crowd looking on; they were standing along the walls of the compound. they were principally city people and villagers. yes: there were also sepoys. three boys were alive. they were fair children. the eldest, i think, must have been six or seven, and the youngest five years. they were running around the well (where else could they go to?), and there was none to save them. no one said a word or tried to save them.' "at length the smallest of them made an infantile attempt to get away. the little thing had been frightened past bearing by the murder of one of the surviving ladies. he thus attracted the observation of a native who flung him and his companions down the well." the soldiers had made a march of eighteen days, almost without rest, to save the women and the children, and now they were too late--all were dead and the assassin had flown. what happened then, trevelyan hesitated to put into words. "of what took place, the less said is the better." then he continues: "but there was a spectacle to witness which might excuse much. those who, straight from the contested field, wandered sobbing through the rooms of the ladies' house, saw what it were well could the outraged earth have straightway hidden. the inner apartment was ankle-deep in blood. the plaster was scored with sword-cuts; not high up as where men have fought, but low down, and about the corners, as if a creature had crouched to avoid the blow. strips of dresses, vainly tied around the handles of the doors, signified the contrivance to which feminine despair had resorted as a means of keeping out the murderers. broken combs were there, and the frills of children's trousers, and torn cuffs and pinafores, and little round hats, and one or two shoes with burst latchets, and one or two daguerreotype cases with cracked glasses. an officer picked up a few curls, preserved in a bit of cardboard, and marked 'ned's hair, with love'; but around were strewn locks, some near a yard in length, dissevered, not as a keepsake, by quite other scissors." the battle of waterloo was fought on the th of june, . i do not state this fact as a reminder to the reader, but as news to him. for a forgotten fact is news when it comes again. writers of books have the fashion of whizzing by vast and renowned historical events with the remark, "the details of this tremendous episode are too familiar to the reader to need repeating here." they know that that is not true. it is a low kind of flattery. they know that the reader has forgotten every detail of it, and that nothing of the tremendous event is left in his mind but a vague and formless luminous smudge. aside from the desire to flatter the reader, they have another reason for making the remark-two reasons, indeed. they do not remember the details themselves, and do not want the trouble of hunting them up and copying them out; also, they are afraid that if they search them out and print them they will be scoffed at by the book-reviewers for retelling those worn old things which are familiar to everybody. they should not mind the reviewer's jeer; he doesn't remember any of the worn old things until the book which he is reviewing has retold them to him. i have made the quoted remark myself, at one time and another, but i was not doing it to flatter the reader; i was merely doing it to save work. if i had known the details without brushing up, i would have put them in; but i didn't, and i did not want the labor of posting myself; so i said, "the details of this tremendous episode are too familiar to the reader to need repeating here." i do not like that kind of a lie; still, it does save work. i am not trying to get out of repeating the details of the siege of lucknow in fear of the reviewer; i am not leaving them out in fear that they would not interest the reader; i am leaving them out partly to save work; mainly for lack of room. it is a pity, too; for there is not a dull place anywhere in the great story. ten days before the outbreak (may th) of the mutiny, all was serene at lucknow, the huge capital of oudh, the kingdom which had recently been seized by the india company. there was a great garrison, composed of about , native troops and between and whites. these white soldiers and their families were probably the only people of their race there; at their elbow was that swarming population of warlike natives, a race of born soldiers, brave, daring, and fond of fighting. on high ground just outside the city stood the palace of that great personage, the resident, the representative of british power and authority. it stood in the midst of spacious grounds, with its due complement of outbuildings, and the grounds were enclosed by a wall--a wall not for defense, but for privacy. the mutinous spirit was in the air, but the whites were not afraid, and did not feel much troubled. then came the outbreak at meerut, then the capture of delhi by the mutineers; in june came the three-weeks leaguer of sir hugh wheeler in his open lot at cawnpore-- miles distant from lucknow--then the treacherous massacre of that gallant little garrison; and now the great revolt was in full flower, and the comfortable condition of things at lucknow was instantly changed. there was an outbreak there, and sir henry lawrence marched out of the residency on the th of june to put it down, but was defeated with heavy loss, and had difficulty in getting back again. that night the memorable siege of the residency--called the siege of lucknow--began. sir henry was killed three days later, and brigadier inglis succeeded him in command. outside of the residency fence was an immense host of hostile and confident native besiegers; inside it were loyal native soldiers, white ones, and women and children. in those days the english garrisons always managed to hamper themselves sufficiently with women and children. the natives established themselves in houses close at hand and began to rain bullets and cannon-balls into the residency; and this they kept up, night and day, during four months and a half, the little garrison industriously replying all the time. the women and children soon became so used to the roar of the guns that it ceased to disturb their sleep. the children imitated siege and defense in their play. the women--with any pretext, or with none--would sally out into the storm-swept grounds. the defense was kept up week after week, with stubborn fortitude, in the midst of death, which came in many forms--by bullet, small-pox, cholera, and by various diseases induced by unpalatable and insufficient food, by the long hours of wearying and exhausting overwork in the daily and nightly battle in the oppressive indian heat, and by the broken rest caused by the intolerable pest of mosquitoes, flies, mice, rats, and fleas. six weeks after the beginning of the siege more than one-half of the original force of white soldiers was dead, and close upon three-fifths of the original native force. but the fighting went on just the same. the enemy mined, the english counter-mined, and, turn about, they blew up each other's posts. the residency grounds were honey-combed with the enemy's tunnels. deadly courtesies were constantly exchanged--sorties by the english in the night; rushes by the enemy in the night--rushes whose purpose was to breach the walls or scale them; rushes which cost heavily, and always failed. the ladies got used to all the horrors of war--the shrieks of mutilated men, the sight of blood and death. lady inglis makes this mention in her diary: "mrs. bruere's nurse was carried past our door to-day, wounded in the eye. to extract the bullet it was found necessary to take out the eye--a fearful operation. her mistress held her while it was performed." the first relieving force failed to relieve. it was under havelock and outram; and arrived when the siege had been going on for three months. it fought its desperate way to lucknow, then fought its way through the city against odds of a hundred to one, and entered the residency; but there was not enough left of it, then, to do any good. it lost more men in its last fight than it found in the residency when it got in. it became captive itself. the fighting and starving and dying by bullets and disease went steadily on. both sides fought with energy and industry. captain birch puts this striking incident in evidence. he is speaking of the third month of the siege: "as an instance of the heavy firing brought to bear on our position this month may be mentioned the cutting down of the upper story of a brick building simply by musketry firring. this building was in a most exposed position. all the shots which just missed the top of the rampart cut into the dead wall pretty much in a straight line, and at length cut right through and brought the upper story tumbling down. the upper structure on the top of the brigade-mess also fell in. the residency house was a wreck. captain anderson's post had long ago been knocked down, and innes' post also fell in. these two were riddled with round shot. as many as were picked up by colonel masters." the exhausted garrison fought doggedly on all through the next month october. then, november d, news came sir colin campbell's relieving force would soon be on its way from cawnpore. on the th the boom of his guns was heard. on the th the sounds came nearer--he was slowly, but steadily, cutting his way through, storming one stronghold after another. on the th he captured the martiniere college, and ran up the british flag there. it was seen from the residency. next he took the dilkoosha. on the th he took the former mess-house of the d regiment--a fortified building, and very strong. "a most exciting, anxious day," writes lady inglis in her diary. "about p.m., two strange officers walked through our yard, leading their horses"--and by that sign she knew that communication was established between the forces, that the relief was real, this time, and that the long siege of lucknow was ended. the last eight or ten miles of sir colin campbell's march was through seas of, blood. the weapon mainly used was the bayonet, the fighting was desperate. the way was mile-stoned with detached strong buildings of stone, fortified, and heavily garrisoned, and these had to be taken by assault. neither side asked for quarter, and neither gave it. at the secundrabagh, where nearly two thousand of the enemy occupied a great stone house in a garden, the work of slaughter was continued until every man was killed. that is a sample of the character of that devastating march. there were but few trees in the plain at that time, and from the residency the progress of the march, step by step, victory by victory, could be noted; the ascending clouds of battle-smoke marked the way to the eye, and the thunder of the guns marked it to the ear. sir colin campbell had not come to lucknow to hold it, but to save the occupants of the residency, and bring them away. four or five days after his arrival the secret evacuation by the troops took place, in the middle of a dark night, by the principal gate, (the bailie guard). the two hundred women and two hundred and fifty children had been previously removed. captain birch says: "and now commenced a movement of the most perfect arrangement and successful generalship--the withdrawal of the whole of the various forces, a combined movement requiring the greatest care and skill. first, the garrison in immediate contact with the enemy at the furthest extremity of the residency position was marched out. every other garrison in turn fell in behind it, and so passed out through the bailie guard gate, till the whole of our position was evacuated. then havelock's force was similarly withdrawn, post by post, marching in rear of our garrison. after them in turn came the forces of the commander-in-chief, which joined on in the rear of havelock's force. regiment by regiment was withdrawn with--the utmost order and regularity. the whole operation resembled the movement of a telescope. stern silence was kept, and the enemy took no alarm." lady inglis, referring to her husband and to general sir james outram, sets down the closing detail of this impressive midnight retreat, in darkness and by stealth, of this shadowy host through the gate which it had defended so long and so well: "at twelve precisely they marched out, john and sir james outram remaining till all had passed, and then they took off their hats to the bailie guard, the scene of as noble a defense as i think history will ever have to relate." chapter lix. don't part with your illusions. when they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. we were driven over sir colin campbell's route by a british officer, and when i arrived at the residency i was so familiar with the road that i could have led a retreat over it myself; but the compass in my head has been out of order from my birth, and so, as soon as i was within the battered bailie guard and turned about to review the march and imagine the relieving forces storming their way along it, everything was upside down and wrong end first in a moment, and i was never able to get straightened out again. and now, when i look at the battle-plan, the confusion remains. in me the east was born west, the battle-plans which have the east on the right-hand side are of no use to me. the residency ruins are draped with flowering vines, and are impressive and beautiful. they and the grounds are sacred now, and will suffer no neglect nor be profaned by any sordid or commercial use while the british remain masters of india. within the grounds are buried the dead who gave up their lives there in the long siege. after a fashion, i was able to imagine the fiery storm that raged night and day over the place during so many months, and after a fashion i could imagine the men moving through it, but i could not satisfactorily place the women, and i could do nothing at all with the children. i knew by lady inglis' diary that the children carried on their small affairs very much as if blood and carnage and the crash and thunder of a siege were natural and proper features of nursery life, and i tried to realize it; but when her little johnny came rushing, all excitement, through the din and smoke, shouting, "oh, mamma, the white hen has laid an egg!" i saw that i could not do it. johnny's place was under the bed. i could imagine him there, because i could imagine myself there; and i think i should not have been interested in a hen that was laying an egg; my interest would have been with the parties that were laying the bombshells. i sat at dinner with one of those children in the club's indian palace, and i knew that all through the siege he was perfecting his teething and learning to talk; and while to me he was the most impressive object in lucknow after the residency ruins, i was not able to imagine what his life had been during that tempestuous infancy of his, nor what sort of a curious surprise it must have been to him to be marched suddenly out into a strange dumb world where there wasn't any noise, and nothing going on. he was only forty-one when i saw him, a strangely youthful link to connect the present with so ancient an episode as the great mutiny. by and by we saw cawnpore, and the open lot which was the scene of moore's memorable defense, and the spot on the shore of the ganges where the massacre of the betrayed garrison occurred, and the small indian temple whence the bugle-signal notified the assassins to fall on. this latter was a lonely spot, and silent. the sluggish river drifted by, almost currentless. it was dead low water, narrow channels with vast sandbars between, all the way across the wide bed; and the only living thing in sight was that grotesque and solemn bald-headed bird, the adjutant, standing on his six-foot stilts, solitary on a distant bar, with his head sunk between his shoulders, thinking; thinking of his prize, i suppose--the dead hindoo that lay awash at his feet, and whether to eat him alone or invite friends. he and his prey were a proper accent to that mournful place. they were in keeping with it, they emphasized its loneliness and its solemnity. and we saw the scene of the slaughter of the helpless women and children, and also the costly memorial that is built over the well which contains their remains. the black hole of calcutta is gone, but a more reverent age is come, and whatever remembrancer still exists of the moving and heroic sufferings and achievements of the garrisons of lucknow and cawnpore will be guarded and preserved. in agra and its neighborhood, and afterwards at delhi, we saw forts, mosques, and tombs, which were built in the great days of the mohammedan emperors, and which are marvels of cost, magnitude, and richness of materials and ornamentation, creations of surpassing grandeur, wonders which do indeed make the like things in the rest of the world seem tame and inconsequential by comparison. i am not purposing to describe them. by good fortune i had not read too much about them, and therefore was able to get a natural and rational focus upon them, with the result that they thrilled, blessed, and exalted me. but if i had previously overheated my imagination by drinking too much pestilential literary hot scotch, i should have suffered disappointment and sorrow. i mean to speak of only one of these many world-renowned buildings, the taj mahal, the most celebrated construction in the earth. i had read a great deal too much about it. i saw it in the daytime, i saw it in the moonlight, i saw it near at hand, i saw it from a distance; and i knew all the time, that of its kind it was the wonder of the world, with no competitor now and no possible future competitor; and yet, it was not my taj. my taj had been built by excitable literary people; it was solidly lodged in my head, and i could not blast it out. i wish to place before the reader some of the usual descriptions of the taj, and ask him to take note of the impressions left in his mind. these descriptions do really state the truth--as nearly as the limitations of language will allow. but language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure vehicle, and it can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way that they will not inflate the facts--by help of the reader's imagination, which is always ready to take a hand, and work for nothing, and do the bulk of it at that. i will begin with a few sentences from the excellent little local guide-book of mr. satya chandra mukerji. i take them from here and there in his description: "the inlaid work of the taj and the flowers and petals that are to be found on all sides on the surface of the marble evince a most delicate touch." that is true. "the inlaid work, the marble, the flowers, the buds, the leaves, the petals, and the lotus stems are almost without a rival in the whole of the civilized world." "the work of inlaying with stones and gems is found in the highest perfection in the taj." gems, inlaid flowers, buds, and leaves to be found on all sides. what do you see before you? is the fairy structure growing? is it becoming a jewel casket? "the whole of the taj produces a wonderful effect that is equally sublime and beautiful." then sir william wilson hunter: "the taj mahal with its beautiful domes, 'a dream of marble,' rises on the river bank." "the materials are white marble and red sandstone." "the complexity of its design and the delicate intricacy of the workmanship baffle description." sir william continues. i will italicize some of his words: "the mausoleum stands on a raised marble platform at each of whose corners rises a tall and slender minaret of graceful proportions and of exquisite beauty. beyond the platform stretch the two wings, one of which is itself a mosque of great architectural merit. in the center of the whole design the mausoleum occupies a square of feet, with the angles deeply truncated so also form an unequal octagon. the main feature in this central pile is the great dome, which swells upward to nearly two-thirds of a sphere and tapers at its extremity into a pointed spire crowned by a crescent. beneath it an enclosure of marble trellis-work surrounds the tomb of the princess and of her husband, the emperor. each corner of the mausoleum is covered by a similar though much smaller dome erected on a pediment pierced with graceful saracenic arches. light is admitted into the interior through a double screen of pierced marble, which tempers the glare of an indian sky while its whiteness prevents the mellow effect from degenerating into gloom. the internal decorations consist of inlaid work in precious stones, such as agate, jasper, etc., with which every squandril or salient point in the architecture is richly fretted. brown and violet marble is also freely employed in wreaths, scrolls, and lintels to relieve the monotony of white wall. in regard to color and design, the interior of the taj may rank first in the world for purely decorative workmanship; while the perfect symmetry of its exterior, once seen can never be forgotten, nor the aerial grace of its domes, rising like marble bubbles into the clear sky. the taj represents the most highly elaborated stage of ornamentation reached by the indo-mohammedan builders, the stage in which the architect ends and the jeweler begins. in its magnificent gateway the diagonal ornamentation at the corners, which satisfied the designers of the gateways of itimad-ud-doulah and sikandra mausoleums is superseded by fine marble cables, in bold twists, strong and handsome. the triangular insertions of white marble and large flowers have in like manner given place to fine inlaid work. firm perpendicular lines in black marble with well proportioned panels of the same material are effectively used in the interior of the gateway. on its top the hindu brackets and monolithic architraves of sikandra are replaced by moorish carped arches, usually single blocks of red sandstone, in the kiosks and pavilions which adorn the roof. from the pillared pavilions a magnificent view is obtained of the taj gardens below, with the noble jumna river at their farther end, and the city and fort of agra in the distance. from this beautiful and splendid gateway one passes up a straight alley shaded by evergreen trees cooled by a broad shallow piece of water running along the middle of the path to the taj itself. the taj is entirely of marble and gems. the red sandstone of the other mohammedan buildings has entirely disappeared, or rather the red sandstone which used to form the thickness of the walls, is in the taj itself overlaid completely with white marble, and the white marble is itself inlaid with precious stones arranged in lovely patterns of flowers. a feeling of purity impresses itself on the eye and the mind from the absence of the coarser material which forms so invariable a material in agra architecture. the lower wall and panels are covered with tulips, oleanders, and fullblown lilies, in flat carving on the white marble; and although the inlaid work of flowers done in gems is very brilliant when looked at closely, there is on the whole but little color, and the all-prevailing sentiment is one of whiteness, silence, and calm. the whiteness is broken only by the fine color of the inlaid gems, by lines in black marble, and by delicately written inscriptions, also in black, from the koran. under the dome of the vast mausoleum a high and beautiful screen of open tracery in white marble rises around the two tombs, or rather cenotaphs of the emperor and his princess; and in this marvel of marble the carving has advanced from the old geometrical patterns to a trellis-work of flowers and foliage, handled with great freedom and spirit. the two cenotaphs in the center of the exquisite enclosure have no carving except the plain kalamdan or oblong pen-box on the tomb of emperor shah jehan. but both cenotaphs are inlaid with flowers made of costly gems, and with the ever graceful oleander scroll." bayard taylor, after describing the details of the taj, goes on to say: "on both sides the palm, the banyan, and the feathery bamboo mingle their foliage; the song of birds meets your ears, and the odor of roses and lemon flowers sweetens the air. down such a vista and over such a foreground rises the taj. there is no mystery, no sense of partial failure about the taj. a thing of perfect beauty and of absolute finish in every detail, it might pass for the work of genii who knew naught of the weaknesses and ills with which mankind are beset." all of these details are true. but, taken together, they state a falsehood--to you. you cannot add them up correctly. those writers know the values of their words and phrases, but to you the words and phrases convey other and uncertain values. to those writers their phrases have values which i think i am now acquainted with; and for the help of the reader i will here repeat certain of those words and phrases, and follow them with numerals which shall represent those values--then we shall see the difference between a writer's ciphering and a mistaken reader's-- precious stones, such as agate, jasper, etc.-- . with which every salient point is richly fretted-- . first in the world for purely decorative workmanship-- . the taj represents the stage where the architect ends and the jeweler begins-- . the taj is entirely of marble and gems-- . inlaid with precious stones in lovely patterns of flowers-- . the inlaid work of flowers done in gems is very brilliant (followed by a most important modification which the reader is sure to read too carelessly)-- . the vast mausoleum-- . this marvel of marble-- . the exquisite enclosure-- . inlaid with flowers made of costly gems-- . a thing of perfect beauty and absolute finish-- . those details are correct; the figures which i have placed after them represent quite fairly their individual, values. then why, as a whole, do they convey a false impression to the reader? it is because the reader--beguiled by, his heated imagination--masses them in the wrong way. the writer would mass the first three figures in the following way, and they would speak the truth total-- but the reader masses them thus--and then they tell a lie-- . the writer would add all of his twelve numerals together, and then the sum would express the whole truth about the taj, and the truth only-- . but the reader--always helped by his imagination--would put the figures in a row one after the other, and get this sum, which would tell him a noble big lie: . you must put in the commas yourself; i have to go on with my work. the reader will always be sure to put the figures together in that wrong way, and then as surely before him will stand, sparkling in the sun, a gem-crusted taj tall as the matterhorn. i had to visit niagara fifteen times before i succeeded in getting my imaginary falls gauged to the actuality and could begin to sanely and wholesomely wonder at them for what they were, not what i had expected them to be. when i first approached them it was with my face lifted toward the sky, for i thought i was going to see an atlantic ocean pouring down thence over cloud-vexed himalayan heights, a sea-green wall of water sixty miles front and six miles high, and so, when the toy reality came suddenly into view--that beruiled little wet apron hanging out to dry--the shock was too much for me, and i fell with a dull thud. yet slowly, surely, steadily, in the course of my fifteen visits, the proportions adjusted themselves to the facts, and i came at last to realize that a waterfall a hundred and sixty-five feet high and a quarter of a mile wide was an impressive thing. it was not a dipperful to my vanished great vision, but it would answer. i know that i ought to do with the taj as i was obliged to do with niagara--see it fifteen times, and let my mind gradually get rid of the taj built in it by its describers, by help of my imagination, and substitute for it the taj of fact. it would be noble and fine, then, and a marvel; not the marvel which it replaced, but still a marvel, and fine enough. i am a careless reader, i suppose--an impressionist reader; an impressionist reader of what is not an impressionist picture; a reader who overlooks the informing details or masses their sum improperly, and gets only a large splashy, general effect--an effect which is not correct, and which is not warranted by the particulars placed before me particulars which i did not examine, and whose meanings i did not cautiously and carefully estimate. it is an effect which is some thirty-five or forty times finer than the reality, and is therefore a great deal better and more valuable than the reality; and so, i ought never to hunt up the reality, but stay miles away from it, and thus preserve undamaged my own private mighty niagara tumbling out of the vault of heaven, and my own ineffable taj, built of tinted mists upon jeweled arches of rainbows supported by colonnades of moonlight. it is a mistake for a person with an unregulated imagination to go and look at an illustrious world's wonder. i suppose that many, many years ago i gathered the idea that the taj's place in the achievements of man was exactly the place of the ice-storm in the achievements of nature; that the taj represented man's supremest possibility in the creation of grace and beauty and exquisiteness and splendor, just as the ice-storm represents nature's supremest possibility in the combination of those same qualities. i do not know how long ago that idea was bred in me, but i know that i cannot remember back to a time when the thought of either of these symbols of gracious and unapproachable perfection did not at once suggest the other. if i thought of the ice-storm, the taj rose before me divinely beautiful; if i thought of the taj, with its encrustings and inlayings of jewels, the vision of the ice-storm rose. and so, to me, all these years, the taj has had no rival among the temples and palaces of men, none that even remotely approached it it was man's architectural ice-storm. here in london the other night i was talking with some scotch and english friends, and i mentioned the ice-storm, using it as a figure--a figure which failed, for none of them had heard of the ice-storm. one gentleman, who was very familiar with american literature, said he had never seen it mentioned in any book. that is strange. and i, myself, was not able to say that i had seen it mentioned in a book; and yet the autumn foliage, with all other american scenery, has received full and competent attention. the oversight is strange, for in america the ice-storm is an event. and it is not an event which one is careless about. when it comes, the news flies from room to room in the house, there are bangings on the doors, and shoutings, "the ice-storm! the ice-storm!" and even the laziest sleepers throw off the covers and join the rush for the windows. the ice-storm occurs in midwinter, and usually its enchantments are wrought in the silence and the darkness of the night. a fine drizzling rain falls hour after hour upon the naked twigs and branches of the trees, and as it falls it freezes. in time the trunk and every branch and twig are incased in hard pure ice; so that the tree looks like a skeleton tree made all of glass--glass that is crystal-clear. all along the underside of every branch and twig is a comb of little icicles--the frozen drip. sometimes these pendants do not quite amount to icicles, but are round beads--frozen tears. the weather clears, toward dawn, and leaves a brisk pure atmosphere and a sky without a shred of cloud in it--and everything is still, there is not a breath of wind. the dawn breaks and spreads, the news of the storm goes about the house, and the little and the big, in wraps and blankets, flock to the window and press together there, and gaze intently out upon the great white ghost in the grounds, and nobody says a word, nobody stirs. all are waiting; they know what is coming, and they are waiting waiting for the miracle. the minutes drift on and on and on, with not a sound but the ticking of the clock; at last the sun fires a sudden sheaf of rays into the ghostly tree and turns it into a white splendor of glittering diamonds. everybody catches his breath, and feels a swelling in his throat and a moisture in his eyes-but waits again; for he knows what is coming; there is more yet. the sun climbs higher, and still higher, flooding the tree from its loftiest spread of branches to its lowest, turning it to a glory of white fire; then in a moment, without warning, comes the great miracle, the supreme miracle, the miracle without its fellow in the earth; a gust of wind sets every branch and twig to swaying, and in an instant turns the whole white tree into a spouting and spraying explosion of flashing gems of every conceivable color; and there it stands and sways this way and that, flash! flash! flash! a dancing and glancing world of rubies, emeralds, diamonds, sapphires, the most radiant spectacle, the most blinding spectacle, the divinest, the most exquisite, the most intoxicating vision of fire and color and intolerable and unimaginable splendor that ever any eye has rested upon in this world, or will ever rest upon outside of the gates of heaven. by, all my senses, all my faculties, i know that the icestorm is nature's supremest achievement in the domain of the superb and the beautiful; and by my reason, at least, i know that the taj is man's ice-storm. in the ice-storm every one of the myriad ice-beads pendant from twig and branch is an individual gem, and changes color with every motion caused by the wind; each tree carries a million, and a forest-front exhibits the splendors of the single tree multiplied by a thousand. it occurs to me now that i have never seen the ice-storm put upon canvas, and have not heard that any painter has tried to do it. i wonder why that is. is it that paint cannot counterfeit the intense blaze of a sun-flooded jewel? there should be, and must be, a reason, and a good one, why the most enchanting sight that nature has created has been neglected by the brush. often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth. the describers of the taj have used the word gem in its strictest sense--its scientific sense. in that sense it is a mild word, and promises but little to the eye-nothing bright, nothing brilliant, nothing sparkling, nothing splendid in the way of color. it accurately describes the sober and unobtrusive gem-work of the taj; that is, to the very highly-educated one person in a thousand; but it most falsely describes it to the . but the are the people who ought to be especially taken care of, and to them it does not mean quiet-colored designs wrought in carnelians, or agates, or such things; they know the word in its wide and ordinary sense only, and so to them it means diamonds and rubies and opals and their kindred, and the moment their eyes fall upon it in print they see a vision of glorious colors clothed in fire. these describers are writing for the "general," and so, in order to make sure of being understood, they ought to use words in their ordinary sense, or else explain. the word fountain means one thing in syria, where there is but a handful of people; it means quite another thing in north america, where there are , , . if i were describing some syrian scenery, and should exclaim, "within the narrow space of a quarter of a mile square i saw, in the glory of the flooding moonlight, two hundred noble fountains--imagine the spectacle!" the north american would have a vision of clustering columns of water soaring aloft, bending over in graceful arches, bursting in beaded spray and raining white fire in the moonlight-and he would be deceived. but the syrian would not be deceived; he would merely see two hundred fresh-water springs--two hundred drowsing puddles, as level and unpretentious and unexcited as so many door-mats, and even with the help of the moonlight he would not lose his grip in the presence of the exhibition. my word "fountain" would be correct; it would speak the strict truth; and it would convey the strict truth to the handful of syrians, and the strictest misinformation to the north american millions. with their gems--and gems--and more gems--and gems again--and still other gems--the describers of the taj are within their legal but not their moral rights; they are dealing in the strictest scientific truth; and in doing it they succeed to admiration in telling "what ain't so." chapter lx. satan (impatiently) to new-comer. the trouble with you chicago people is, that you think you are the best people down here; whereas you are merely the most numerous. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. we wandered contentedly around here and there in india; to lahore, among other places, where the lieutenant-governor lent me an elephant. this hospitality stands out in my experiences in a stately isolation. it was a fine elephant, affable, gentlemanly, educated, and i was not afraid of it. i even rode it with confidence through the crowded lanes of the native city, where it scared all the horses out of their senses, and where children were always just escaping its feet. it took the middle of the road in a fine independent way, and left it to the world to get out of the way or take the consequences. i am used to being afraid of collisions when i ride or drive, but when one is on top of an elephant that feeling is absent. i could have ridden in comfort through a regiment of runaway teams. i could easily learn to prefer an elephant to any other vehicle, partly because of that immunity from collisions, and partly because of the fine view one has from up there, and partly because of the dignity one feels in that high place, and partly because one can look in at the windows and see what is going on privately among the family. the lahore horses were used to elephants, but they were rapturously afraid of them just the same. it seemed curious. perhaps the better they know the elephant the more they respect him in that peculiar way. in our own case--we are not afraid of dynamite till we get acquainted with it. we drifted as far as rawal pindi, away up on the afghan frontier--i think it was the afghan frontier, but it may have been hertzegovina--it was around there somewhere--and down again to delhi, to see the ancient architectural wonders there and in old delhi and not describe them, and also to see the scene of the illustrious assault, in the mutiny days, when the british carried delhi by storm, one of the marvels of history for impudent daring and immortal valor. we had a refreshing rest, there in delhi, in a great old mansion which possessed historical interest. it was built by a rich englishman who had become orientalized--so much so that he had a zenana. but he was a broadminded man, and remained so. to please his harem he built a mosque; to please himself he built an english church. that kind of a man will arrive, somewhere. in the mutiny days the mansion was the british general's headquarters. it stands in a great garden--oriental fashion --and about it are many noble trees. the trees harbor monkeys; and they are monkeys of a watchful and enterprising sort, and not much troubled with fear. they invade the house whenever they get a chance, and carry off everything they don't want. one morning the master of the house was in his bath, and the window was open. near it stood a pot of yellow paint and a brush. some monkeys appeared in the window; to scare them away, the gentleman threw his sponge at them. they did not scare at all; they jumped into the room and threw yellow paint all over him from the brush, and drove him out; then they painted the walls and the floor and the tank and the windows and the furniture yellow, and were in the dressing-room painting that when help arrived and routed them. two of these creatures came into my room in the early morning, through a window whose shutters i had left open, and when i woke one of them was before the glass brushing his hair, and the other one had my note-book, and was reading a page of humorous notes and crying. i did not mind the one with the hair-brush, but the conduct of the other one hurt me; it hurts me yet. i threw something at him, and that was wrong, for my host had told me that the monkeys were best left alone. they threw everything at me that they could lift, and then went into the bathroom to get some more things, and i shut the door on them. at jeypore, in rajputana, we made a considerable stay. we were not in the native city, but several miles from it, in the small european official suburb. there were but few europeans--only fourteen but they were all kind and hospitable, and it amounted to being at home. in jeypore we found again what we had found all about india--that while the indian servant is in his way a very real treasure, he will sometimes bear watching, and the englishman watches him. if he sends him on an errand, he wants more than the man's word for it that he did the errand. when fruit and vegetables were sent to us, a "chit" came with them--a receipt for us to sign; otherwise the things might not arrive. if a gentleman sent up his carriage, the chit stated "from" such-and-such an hour "to" such-and-such an hour--which made it unhandy for the coachman and his two or three subordinates to put us off with a part of the allotted time and devote the rest of it to a lark of their own. we were pleasantly situated in a small two-storied inn, in an empty large compound which was surrounded by a mud wall as high as a man's head. the inn was kept by nine hindoo brothers, its owners. they lived, with their families, in a one-storied building within the compound, but off to one side, and there was always a long pile of their little comely brown children loosely stacked in its veranda, and a detachment of the parents wedged among them, smoking the hookah or the howdah, or whatever they call it. by the veranda stood a palm, and a monkey lived in it, and led a lonesome life, and always looked sad and weary, and the crows bothered him a good deal. the inn cow poked about the compound and emphasized the secluded and country air of the place, and there was a dog of no particular breed, who was always present in the compound, and always asleep, always stretched out baking in the sun and adding to the deep tranquility and reposefulness of the place, when the crows were away on business. white-draperied servants were coming and going all the time, but they seemed only spirits, for their feet were bare and made no sound. down the lane a piece lived an elephant in the shade of a noble tree, and rocked and rocked, and reached about with his trunk, begging of his brown mistress or fumbling the children playing at his feet. and there were camels about, but they go on velvet feet, and were proper to the silence and serenity of the surroundings. the satan mentioned at the head of this chapter was not our satan, but the other one. our satan was lost to us. in these later days he had passed out of our life--lamented by me, and sincerely. i was missing him; i am missing him yet, after all these months. he was an astonishing creature to fly around and do things. he didn't always do them quite right, but he did them, and did them suddenly. there was no time wasted. you would say: "pack the trunks and bags, satan." "wair good" (very good). then there would be a brief sound of thrashing and slashing and humming and buzzing, and a spectacle as of a whirlwind spinning gowns and jackets and coats and boots and things through the air, and then with bow and touch-- "awready, master." it was wonderful. it made one dizzy. he crumpled dresses a good deal, and he had no particular plan about the work--at first--except to put each article into the trunk it didn't belong in. but he soon reformed, in this matter. not entirely; for, to the last, he would cram into the satchel sacred to literature any odds and ends of rubbish that he couldn't find a handy place for elsewhere. when threatened with death for this, it did not trouble him; he only looked pleasant, saluted with soldierly grace, said "wair good," and did it again next day. he was always busy; kept the rooms tidied up, the boots polished, the clothes brushed, the wash-basin full of clean water, my dress clothes laid out and ready for the lecture-hall an hour ahead of time; and he dressed me from head to heel in spite of my determination to do it myself, according to my lifelong custom. he was a born boss, and loved to command, and to jaw and dispute with inferiors and harry them and bullyrag them. he was fine at the railway station--yes, he was at his finest there. he would shoulder and plunge and paw his violent way through the packed multitude of natives with nineteen coolies at his tail, each bearing a trifle of luggage--one a trunk, another a parasol, another a shawl, another a fan, and so on; one article to each, and the longer the procession, the better he was suited --and he was sure to make for some engaged sleeper and begin to hurl the owner's things out of it, swearing that it was ours and that there had been a mistake. arrived at our own sleeper, he would undo the bedding-bundles and make the beds and put everything to rights and shipshape in two minutes; then put his head out at, a window and have a restful good time abusing his gang of coolies and disputing their bill until we arrived and made him pay them and stop his noise. speaking of noise, he certainly was the noisest little devil in india --and that is saying much, very much, indeed. i loved him for his noise, but the family detested him for it. they could not abide it; they could not get reconciled to it. it humiliated them. as a rule, when we got within six hundred yards of one of those big railway stations, a mighty racket of screaming and shrieking and shouting and storming would break upon us, and i would be happy to myself, and the family would say, with shame: "there--that's satan. why do you keep him?" and, sure enough, there in the whirling midst of fifteen hundred wondering people we would find that little scrap of a creature gesticulating like a spider with the colic, his black eyes snapping, his fez-tassel dancing, his jaws pouring out floods of billingsgate upon his gang of beseeching and astonished coolies. i loved him; i couldn't help it; but the family--why, they could hardly speak of him with patience. to this day i regret his loss, and wish i had him back; but they--it is different with them. he was a native, and came from surat. twenty degrees of latitude lay between his birthplace and manuel's, and fifteen hundred between their ways and characters and dispositions. i only liked manuel, but i loved satan. this latter's real name was intensely indian. i could not quite get the hang of it, but it sounded like bunder rao ram chunder clam chowder. it was too long for handy use, anyway; so i reduced it. when he had been with us two or three weeks, he began to make mistakes which i had difficulty in patching up for him. approaching benares one day, he got out of the train to see if he could get up a misunderstanding with somebody, for it had been a weary, long journey and he wanted to freshen up. he found what he was after, but kept up his pow-wow a shade too long and got left. so there we were in a strange city and no chambermaid. it was awkward for us, and we told him he must not do so any more. he saluted and said in his dear, pleasant way, "wair good." then at lucknow he got drunk. i said it was a fever, and got the family's compassion, and solicitude aroused; so they gave him a teaspoonful of liquid quinine and it set his vitals on fire. he made several grimaces which gave me a better idea of the lisbon earthquake than any i have ever got of it from paintings and descriptions. his drunk was still portentously solid next morning, but i could have pulled him through with the family if he would only have taken another spoonful of that remedy; but no, although he was stupefied, his memory still had flickerings of life; so he smiled a divinely dull smile and said, fumblingly saluting: "scoose me, mem saheb, scoose me, missy saheb; satan not prefer it, please." then some instinct revealed to them that he was drunk. they gave him prompt notice that next time this happened he must go. he got out a maudlin and most gentle "wair good," and saluted indefinitely. only one short week later he fell again. and oh, sorrow! not in a hotel this time, but in an english gentleman's private house. and in agra, of all places. so he had to go. when i told him, he said patiently, "wair good," and made his parting salute, and went out from us to return no more forever. dear me! i would rather have lost a hundred angels than that one poor lovely devil. what style he used to put on, in a swell hotel or in a private house--snow-white muslin from his chin to his bare feet, a crimson sash embroidered with gold thread around his waist, and on his head a great sea-green turban like to the turban of the grand turk. he was not a liar; but he will become one if he keeps on. he told me once that he used to crack cocoanuts with his teeth when he was a boy; and when i asked how he got them into his mouth, he said he was upward of six feet high at that time, and had an unusual mouth. and when i followed him up and asked him what had become of that other foot, he said a house fell on him and he was never able to get his stature back again. swervings like these from the strict line of fact often beguile a truthful man on and on until he eventually becomes a liar. his successor was a mohammedan, sahadat mohammed khan; very dark, very tall, very grave. he went always in flowing masses of white, from the top of his big turban down to his bare feet. his voice was low. he glided about in a noiseless way, and looked like a ghost. he was competent and satisfactory. but where he was, it seemed always sunday. it was not so in satan's time. jeypore is intensely indian, but it has two or three features which indicate the presence of european science and european interest in the weal of the common public, such as the liberal water-supply furnished by great works built at the state's expense; good sanitation, resulting in a degree of healthfulness unusually high for india; a noble pleasure garden, with privileged days for women; schools for the instruction of native youth in advanced art, both ornamental and utilitarian; and a new and beautiful palace stocked with a museum of extraordinary interest and value. without the maharaja's sympathy and purse these beneficences could not have been created; but he is a man of wide views and large generosities, and all such matters find hospitality with him. we drove often to the city from the hotel kaiser-i-hind, a journey which was always full of interest, both night and day, for that country road was never quiet, never empty, but was always india in motion, always a streaming flood of brown people clothed in smouchings from the rainbow, a tossing and moiling flood, happy, noisy, a charming and satisfying confusion of strange human and strange animal life and equally strange and outlandish vehicles. and the city itself is a curiosity. any indian city is that, but this one is not like any other that we saw. it is shut up in a lofty turreted wall; the main body of it is divided into six parts by perfectly straight streets that are more than a hundred feet wide; the blocks of houses exhibit a long frontage of the most taking architectural quaintnesses, the straight lines being broken everywhere by pretty little balconies, pillared and highly ornamented, and other cunning and cozy and inviting perches and projections, and many of the fronts are curiously pictured by the brush, and the whole of them have the soft rich tint of strawberry ice-cream. one cannot look down the far stretch of the chief street and persuade himself that these are real houses, and that it is all out of doors--the impression that it is an unreality, a picture, a scene in a theater, is the only one that will take hold. then there came a great day when this illusion was more pronounced than ever. a rich hindoo had been spending a fortune upon the manufacture of a crowd of idols and accompanying paraphernalia whose purpose was to illustrate scenes in the life of his especial god or saint, and this fine show was to be brought through the town in processional state at ten in the morning. as we passed through the great public pleasure garden on our way to the city we found it crowded with natives. that was one sight. then there was another. in the midst of the spacious lawns stands the palace which contains the museum--a beautiful construction of stone which shows arched colonnades, one above another, and receding, terrace-fashion, toward the sky. every one of these terraces, all the way to the top one, was packed and jammed with natives. one must try to imagine those solid masses of splendid color, one above another, up and up, against the blue sky, and the indian sun turning them all to beds of fire and flame. later, when we reached the city, and glanced down the chief avenue, smouldering in its crushed-strawberry tint, those splendid effects were repeated; for every balcony, and every fanciful bird-cage of a snuggery countersunk in the house-fronts, and all the long lines of roofs were crowded with people, and each crowd was an explosion of brilliant color. then the wide street itself, away down and down and down into the distance, was alive with gorgeously-clothed people not still, but moving, swaying, drifting, eddying, a delirious display of all colors and all shades of color, delicate, lovely, pale, soft, strong, stunning, vivid, brilliant, a sort of storm of sweetpea blossoms passing on the wings of a hurricane; and presently, through this storm of color, came swaying and swinging the majestic elephants, clothed in their sunday best of gaudinesses, and the long procession of fanciful trucks freighted with their groups of curious and costly images, and then the long rearguard of stately camels, with their picturesque riders. for color, and picturesqueness, and novelty, and outlandishness, and sustained interest and fascination, it was the most satisfying show i had ever seen, and i suppose i shall not have the privilege of looking upon its like again. roughing it by mark twain part . chapter lxxi. at four o'clock in the afternoon we were winding down a mountain of dreary and desolate lava to the sea, and closing our pleasant land journey. this lava is the accumulation of ages; one torrent of fire after another has rolled down here in old times, and built up the island structure higher and higher. underneath, it is honey-combed with caves; it would be of no use to dig wells in such a place; they would not hold water--you would not find any for them to hold, for that matter. consequently, the planters depend upon cisterns. the last lava flow occurred here so long ago that there are none now living who witnessed it. in one place it enclosed and burned down a grove of cocoa-nut trees, and the holes in the lava where the trunks stood are still visible; their sides retain the impression of the bark; the trees fell upon the burning river, and becoming partly submerged, left in it the perfect counterpart of every knot and branch and leaf, and even nut, for curiosity seekers of a long distant day to gaze upon and wonder at. there were doubtless plenty of kanaka sentinels on guard hereabouts at that time, but they did not leave casts of their figures in the lava as the roman sentinels at herculaneum and pompeii did. it is a pity it is so, because such things are so interesting; but so it is. they probably went away. they went away early, perhaps. however, they had their merits; the romans exhibited the higher pluck, but the kanakas showed the sounder judgment. shortly we came in sight of that spot whose history is so familiar to every school-boy in the wide world--kealakekua bay--the place where captain cook, the great circumnavigator, was killed by the natives, nearly a hundred years ago. the setting sun was flaming upon it, a summer shower was falling, and it was spanned by two magnificent rainbows. two men who were in advance of us rode through one of these and for a moment their garments shone with a more than regal splendor. why did not captain cook have taste enough to call his great discovery the rainbow islands? these charming spectacles are present to you at every turn; they are common in all the islands; they are visible every day, and frequently at night also--not the silvery bow we see once in an age in the states, by moonlight, but barred with all bright and beautiful colors, like the children of the sun and rain. i saw one of them a few nights ago. what the sailors call "raindogs"--little patches of rainbow --are often seen drifting about the heavens in these latitudes, like stained cathedral windows. kealakekua bay is a little curve like the last kink of a snail-shell, winding deep into the land, seemingly not more than a mile wide from shore to shore. it is bounded on one side--where the murder was done--by a little flat plain, on which stands a cocoanut grove and some ruined houses; a steep wall of lava, a thousand feet high at the upper end and three or four hundred at the lower, comes down from the mountain and bounds the inner extremity of it. from this wall the place takes its name, kealakekua, which in the native tongue signifies "the pathway of the gods." they say, (and still believe, in spite of their liberal education in christianity), that the great god lono, who used to live upon the hillside, always traveled that causeway when urgent business connected with heavenly affairs called him down to the seashore in a hurry. as the red sun looked across the placid ocean through the tall, clean stems of the cocoanut trees, like a blooming whiskey bloat through the bars of a city prison, i went and stood in the edge of the water on the flat rock pressed by captain cook's feet when the blow was dealt which took away his life, and tried to picture in my mind the doomed man struggling in the midst of the multitude of exasperated savages--the men in the ship crowding to the vessel's side and gazing in anxious dismay toward the shore--the--but i discovered that i could not do it. it was growing dark, the rain began to fall, we could see that the distant boomerang was helplessly becalmed at sea, and so i adjourned to the cheerless little box of a warehouse and sat down to smoke and think, and wish the ship would make the land--for we had not eaten much for ten hours and were viciously hungry. plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of captain cook's assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide. wherever he went among the islands, he was cordially received and welcomed by the inhabitants, and his ships lavishly supplied with all manner of food. he returned these kindnesses with insult and ill-treatment. perceiving that the people took him for the long vanished and lamented god lono, he encouraged them in the delusion for the sake of the limitless power it gave him; but during the famous disturbance at this spot, and while he and his comrades were surrounded by fifteen thousand maddened savages, he received a hurt and betrayed his earthly origin with a groan. it was his death-warrant. instantly a shout went up: "he groans!--he is not a god!" so they closed in upon him and dispatched him. his flesh was stripped from the bones and burned (except nine pounds of it which were sent on board the ships). the heart was hung up in a native hut, where it was found and eaten by three children, who mistook it for the heart of a dog. one of these children grew to be a very old man, and died in honolulu a few years ago. some of cook's bones were recovered and consigned to the deep by the officers of the ships. small blame should attach to the natives for the killing of cook. they treated him well. in return, he abused them. he and his men inflicted bodily injury upon many of them at different times, and killed at least three of them before they offered any proportionate retaliation. near the shore we found "cook's monument"--only a cocoanut stump, four feet high and about a foot in diameter at the butt. it had lava boulders piled around its base to hold it up and keep it in its place, and it was entirely sheathed over, from top to bottom, with rough, discolored sheets of copper, such as ships' bottoms are coppered with. each sheet had a rude inscription scratched upon it--with a nail, apparently--and in every case the execution was wretched. most of these merely recorded the visits of british naval commanders to the spot, but one of them bore this legend: "near this spot fell captain james cook, the distinguished circumnavigator, who discovered these islands a. d. ." after cook's murder, his second in command, on board the ship, opened fire upon the swarms of natives on the beach, and one of his cannon balls cut this cocoanut tree short off and left this monumental stump standing. it looked sad and lonely enough to us, out there in the rainy twilight. but there is no other monument to captain cook. true, up on the mountain side we had passed by a large inclosure like an ample hog-pen, built of lava blocks, which marks the spot where cook's flesh was stripped from his bones and burned; but this is not properly a monument since it was erected by the natives themselves, and less to do honor to the circumnavigator than for the sake of convenience in roasting him. a thing like a guide-board was elevated above this pen on a tall pole, and formerly there was an inscription upon it describing the memorable occurrence that had there taken place; but the sun and the wind have long ago so defaced it as to render it illegible. toward midnight a fine breeze sprang up and the schooner soon worked herself into the bay and cast anchor. the boat came ashore for us, and in a little while the clouds and the rain were all gone. the moon was beaming tranquilly down on land and sea, and we two were stretched upon the deck sleeping the refreshing sleep and dreaming the happy dreams that are only vouchsafed to the weary and the innocent. chapter lxxii. in the breezy morning we went ashore and visited the ruined temple of the last god lono. the high chief cook of this temple--the priest who presided over it and roasted the human sacrifices--was uncle to obookia, and at one time that youth was an apprentice-priest under him. obookia was a young native of fine mind, who, together with three other native boys, was taken to new england by the captain of a whaleship during the reign of kamehameha i, and they were the means of attracting the attention of the religious world to their country. this resulted in the sending of missionaries there. and this obookia was the very same sensitive savage who sat down on the church steps and wept because his people did not have the bible. that incident has been very elaborately painted in many a charming sunday school book--aye, and told so plaintively and so tenderly that i have cried over it in sunday school myself, on general principles, although at a time when i did not know much and could not understand why the people of the sandwich islands needed to worry so much about it as long as they did not know there was a bible at all. obookia was converted and educated, and was to have returned to his native land with the first missionaries, had he lived. the other native youths made the voyage, and two of them did good service, but the third, william kanui, fell from grace afterward, for a time, and when the gold excitement broke out in california he journeyed thither and went to mining, although he was fifty years old. he succeeded pretty well, but the failure of page, bacon & co. relieved him of six thousand dollars, and then, to all intents and purposes, he was a bankrupt in his old age and he resumed service in the pulpit again. he died in honolulu in . quite a broad tract of land near the temple, extending from the sea to the mountain top, was sacred to the god lono in olden times--so sacred that if a common native set his sacrilegious foot upon it it was judicious for him to make his will, because his time had come. he might go around it by water, but he could not cross it. it was well sprinkled with pagan temples and stocked with awkward, homely idols carved out of logs of wood. there was a temple devoted to prayers for rain--and with fine sagacity it was placed at a point so well up on the mountain side that if you prayed there twenty-four times a day for rain you would be likely to get it every time. you would seldom get to your amen before you would have to hoist your umbrella. and there was a large temple near at hand which was built in a single night, in the midst of storm and thunder and rain, by the ghastly hands of dead men! tradition says that by the weird glare of the lightning a noiseless multitude of phantoms were seen at their strange labor far up the mountain side at dead of night--flitting hither and thither and bearing great lava-blocks clasped in their nerveless fingers--appearing and disappearing as the pallid lustre fell upon their forms and faded away again. even to this day, it is said, the natives hold this dread structure in awe and reverence, and will not pass by it in the night. at noon i observed a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing in the sea, and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen. i begged them to come out, for the sea was rising and i was satisfied that they were running some risk. but they were not afraid, and presently went on with their sport. they were finished swimmers and divers, and enjoyed themselves to the last degree. they swam races, splashed and ducked and tumbled each other about, and filled the air with their laughter. it is said that the first thing an islander learns is how to swim; learning to walk being a matter of smaller consequence, comes afterward. one hears tales of native men and women swimming ashore from vessels many miles at sea--more miles, indeed, than i dare vouch for or even mention. and they tell of a native diver who went down in thirty or forty-foot waters and brought up an anvil! i think he swallowed the anvil afterward, if my memory serves me. however i will not urge this point. i have spoken, several times, of the god lono--i may as well furnish two or three sentences concerning him. the idol the natives worshipped for him was a slender, unornamented staff twelve feet long. tradition says he was a favorite god on the island of hawaii--a great king who had been deified for meritorious services--just our own fashion of rewarding heroes, with the difference that we would have made him a postmaster instead of a god, no doubt. in an angry moment he slew his wife, a goddess named kaikilani aiii. remorse of conscience drove him mad, and tradition presents us the singular spectacle of a god traveling "on the shoulder;" for in his gnawing grief he wandered about from place to place boxing and wrestling with all whom he met. of course this pastime soon lost its novelty, inasmuch as it must necessarily have been the case that when so powerful a deity sent a frail human opponent "to grass" he never came back any more. therefore, he instituted games called makahiki, and ordered that they should be held in his honor, and then sailed for foreign lands on a three-cornered raft, stating that he would return some day--and that was the last of lono. he was never seen any more; his raft got swamped, perhaps. but the people always expected his return, and thus they were easily led to accept captain cook as the restored god. some of the old natives believed cook was lono to the day of their death; but many did not, for they could not understand how he could die if he was a god. only a mile or so from kealakekua bay is a spot of historic interest--the place where the last battle was fought for idolatry. of course we visited it, and came away as wise as most people do who go and gaze upon such mementoes of the past when in an unreflective mood. while the first missionaries were on their way around the horn, the idolatrous customs which had obtained in the island, as far back as tradition reached were suddenly broken up. old kamehameha i., was dead, and his son, liholiho, the new king was a free liver, a roystering, dissolute fellow, and hated the restraints of the ancient tabu. his assistant in the government, kaahumanu, the queen dowager, was proud and high-spirited, and hated the tabu because it restricted the privileges of her sex and degraded all women very nearly to the level of brutes. so the case stood. liholiho had half a mind to put his foot down, kaahumahu had a whole mind to badger him into doing it, and whiskey did the rest. it was probably the rest. it was probably the first time whiskey ever prominently figured as an aid to civilization. liholiho came up to kailua as drunk as a piper, and attended a great feast; the determined queen spurred his drunken courage up to a reckless pitch, and then, while all the multitude stared in blank dismay, he moved deliberately forward and sat down with the women! they saw him eat from the same vessel with them, and were appalled! terrible moments drifted slowly by, and still the king ate, still he lived, still the lightnings of the insulted gods were withheld! then conviction came like a revelation--the superstitions of a hundred generations passed from before the people like a cloud, and a shout went up, "the tabu is broken! the tabu is broken!" thus did king liholiho and his dreadful whiskey preach the first sermon and prepare the way for the new gospel that was speeding southward over the waves of the atlantic. the tabu broken and destruction failing to follow the awful sacrilege, the people, with that childlike precipitancy which has always characterized them, jumped to the conclusion that their gods were a weak and wretched swindle, just as they formerly jumped to the conclusion that captain cook was no god, merely because he groaned, and promptly killed him without stopping to inquire whether a god might not groan as well as a man if it suited his convenience to do it; and satisfied that the idols were powerless to protect themselves they went to work at once and pulled them down--hacked them to pieces--applied the torch--annihilated them! the pagan priests were furious. and well they might be; they had held the fattest offices in the land, and now they were beggared; they had been great--they had stood above the chiefs--and now they were vagabonds. they raised a revolt; they scared a number of people into joining their standard, and bekuokalani, an ambitious offshoot of royalty, was easily persuaded to become their leader. in the first skirmish the idolaters triumphed over the royal army sent against them, and full of confidence they resolved to march upon kailua. the king sent an envoy to try and conciliate them, and came very near being an envoy short by the operation; the savages not only refused to listen to him, but wanted to kill him. so the king sent his men forth under major general kalaimoku and the two host met a kuamoo. the battle was long and fierce--men and women fighting side by side, as was the custom--and when the day was done the rebels were flying in every direction in hopeless panic, and idolatry and the tabu were dead in the land! the royalists marched gayly home to kailua glorifying the new dispensation. "there is no power in the gods," said they; "they are a vanity and a lie. the army with idols was weak; the army without idols was strong and victorious!" the nation was without a religion. the missionary ship arrived in safety shortly afterward, timed by providential exactness to meet the emergency, and the gospel was planted as in a virgin soil. chapter lxxiii. at noon, we hired a kanaka to take us down to the ancient ruins at honaunan in his canoe--price two dollars--reasonable enough, for a sea voyage of eight miles, counting both ways. the native canoe is an irresponsible looking contrivance. i cannot think of anything to liken it to but a boy's sled runner hollowed out, and that does not quite convey the correct idea. it is about fifteen feet long, high and pointed at both ends, is a foot and a half or two feet deep, and so narrow that if you wedged a fat man into it you might not get him out again. it sits on top of the water like a duck, but it has an outrigger and does not upset easily, if you keep still. this outrigger is formed of two long bent sticks like plow handles, which project from one side, and to their outer ends is bound a curved beam composed of an extremely light wood, which skims along the surface of the water and thus saves you from an upset on that side, while the outrigger's weight is not so easily lifted as to make an upset on the other side a thing to be greatly feared. still, until one gets used to sitting perched upon this knifeblade, he is apt to reason within himself that it would be more comfortable if there were just an outrigger or so on the other side also. i had the bow seat, and billings sat amidships and faced the kanaka, who occupied the stern of the craft and did the paddling. with the first stroke the trim shell of a thing shot out from the shore like an arrow. there was not much to see. while we were on the shallow water of the reef, it was pastime to look down into the limpid depths at the large bunches of branching coral--the unique shrubbery of the sea. we lost that, though, when we got out into the dead blue water of the deep. but we had the picture of the surf, then, dashing angrily against the crag-bound shore and sending a foaming spray high into the air. there was interest in this beetling border, too, for it was honey-combed with quaint caves and arches and tunnels, and had a rude semblance of the dilapidated architecture of ruined keeps and castles rising out of the restless sea. when this novelty ceased to be a novelty, we turned our eyes shoreward and gazed at the long mountain with its rich green forests stretching up into the curtaining clouds, and at the specks of houses in the rearward distance and the diminished schooner riding sleepily at anchor. and when these grew tiresome we dashed boldly into the midst of a school of huge, beastly porpoises engaged at their eternal game of arching over a wave and disappearing, and then doing it over again and keeping it up--always circling over, in that way, like so many well-submerged wheels. but the porpoises wheeled themselves away, and then we were thrown upon our own resources. it did not take many minutes to discover that the sun was blazing like a bonfire, and that the weather was of a melting temperature. it had a drowsing effect, too. in one place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing. each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea, (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell! it did not seem that a lightning express train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed. i tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. i got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself.--the board struck the shore in three quarters of a second, without any cargo, and i struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me. none but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly. at the end of an hour, we had made the four miles, and landed on a level point of land, upon which was a wide extent of old ruins, with many a tall cocoanut tree growing among them. here was the ancient city of refuge--a vast inclosure, whose stone walls were twenty feet thick at the base, and fifteen feet high; an oblong square, a thousand and forty feet one way and a fraction under seven hundred the other. within this inclosure, in early times, has been three rude temples; each two hundred and ten feet long by one hundred wide, and thirteen high. in those days, if a man killed another anywhere on the island the relatives were privileged to take the murderer's life; and then a chase for life and liberty began--the outlawed criminal flying through pathless forests and over mountain and plain, with his hopes fixed upon the protecting walls of the city of refuge, and the avenger of blood following hotly after him! sometimes the race was kept up to the very gates of the temple, and the panting pair sped through long files of excited natives, who watched the contest with flashing eye and dilated nostril, encouraging the hunted refugee with sharp, inspiriting ejaculations, and sending up a ringing shout of exultation when the saving gates closed upon him and the cheated pursuer sank exhausted at the threshold. but sometimes the flying criminal fell under the hand of the avenger at the very door, when one more brave stride, one more brief second of time would have brought his feet upon the sacred ground and barred him against all harm. where did these isolated pagans get this idea of a city of refuge--this ancient oriental custom? this old sanctuary was sacred to all--even to rebels in arms and invading armies. once within its walls, and confession made to the priest and absolution obtained, the wretch with a price upon his head could go forth without fear and without danger--he was tabu, and to harm him was death. the routed rebels in the lost battle for idolatry fled to this place to claim sanctuary, and many were thus saved. close to the corner of the great inclosure is a round structure of stone, some six or eight feet high, with a level top about ten or twelve in diameter. this was the place of execution. a high palisade of cocoanut piles shut out the cruel scenes from the vulgar multitude. here criminals were killed, the flesh stripped from the bones and burned, and the bones secreted in holes in the body of the structure. if the man had been guilty of a high crime, the entire corpse was burned. the walls of the temple are a study. the same food for speculation that is offered the visitor to the pyramids of egypt he will find here--the mystery of how they were constructed by a people unacquainted with science and mechanics. the natives have no invention of their own for hoisting heavy weights, they had no beasts of burden, and they have never even shown any knowledge of the properties of the lever. yet some of the lava blocks quarried out, brought over rough, broken ground, and built into this wall, six or seven feet from the ground, are of prodigious size and would weigh tons. how did they transport and how raise them? both the inner and outer surfaces of the walls present a smooth front and are very creditable specimens of masonry. the blocks are of all manner of shapes and sizes, but yet are fitted together with the neatest exactness. the gradual narrowing of the wall from the base upward is accurately preserved. no cement was used, but the edifice is firm and compact and is capable of resisting storm and decay for centuries. who built this temple, and how was it built, and when, are mysteries that may never be unraveled. outside of these ancient walls lies a sort of coffin-shaped stone eleven feet four inches long and three feet square at the small end (it would weigh a few thousand pounds), which the high chief who held sway over this district many centuries ago brought thither on his shoulder one day to use as a lounge! this circumstance is established by the most reliable traditions. he used to lie down on it, in his indolent way, and keep an eye on his subjects at work for him and see that there was no "soldiering" done. and no doubt there was not any done to speak of, because he was a man of that sort of build that incites to attention to business on the part of an employee. he was fourteen or fifteen feet high. when he stretched himself at full length on his lounge, his legs hung down over the end, and when he snored he woke the dead. these facts are all attested by irrefragable tradition. on the other side of the temple is a monstrous seven-ton rock, eleven feet long, seven feet wide and three feet thick. it is raised a foot or a foot and a half above the ground, and rests upon half a dozen little stony pedestals. the same old fourteen-footer brought it down from the mountain, merely for fun (he had his own notions about fun), and propped it up as we find it now and as others may find it a century hence, for it would take a score of horses to budge it from its position. they say that fifty or sixty years ago the proud queen kaahumanu used to fly to this rock for safety, whenever she had been making trouble with her fierce husband, and hide under it until his wrath was appeased. but these kanakas will lie, and this statement is one of their ablest efforts--for kaahumanu was six feet high--she was bulky--she was built like an ox--and she could no more have squeezed herself under that rock than she could have passed between the cylinders of a sugar mill. what could she gain by it, even if she succeeded? to be chased and abused by a savage husband could not be otherwise than humiliating to her high spirit, yet it could never make her feel so flat as an hour's repose under that rock would. we walked a mile over a raised macadamized road of uniform width; a road paved with flat stones and exhibiting in its every detail a considerable degree of engineering skill. some say that that wise old pagan, kamehameha i planned and built it, but others say it was built so long before his time that the knowledge of who constructed it has passed out of the traditions. in either case, however, as the handiwork of an untaught and degraded race it is a thing of pleasing interest. the stones are worn and smooth, and pushed apart in places, so that the road has the exact appearance of those ancient paved highways leading out of rome which one sees in pictures. the object of our tramp was to visit a great natural curiosity at the base of the foothills--a congealed cascade of lava. some old forgotten volcanic eruption sent its broad river of fire down the mountain side here, and it poured down in a great torrent from an overhanging bluff some fifty feet high to the ground below. the flaming torrent cooled in the winds from the sea, and remains there to-day, all seamed, and frothed and rippled a petrified niagara. it is very picturesque, and withal so natural that one might almost imagine it still flowed. a smaller stream trickled over the cliff and built up an isolated pyramid about thirty feet high, which has the semblance of a mass of large gnarled and knotted vines and roots and stems intricately twisted and woven together. we passed in behind the cascade and the pyramid, and found the bluff pierced by several cavernous tunnels, whose crooked courses we followed a long distance. two of these winding tunnels stand as proof of nature's mining abilities. their floors are level, they are seven feet wide, and their roofs are gently arched. their height is not uniform, however. we passed through one a hundred feet long, which leads through a spur of the hill and opens out well up in the sheer wall of a precipice whose foot rests in the waves of the sea. it is a commodious tunnel, except that there are occasional places in it where one must stoop to pass under. the roof is lava, of course, and is thickly studded with little lava-pointed icicles an inch long, which hardened as they dripped. they project as closely together as the iron teeth of a corn-sheller, and if one will stand up straight and walk any distance there, he can get his hair combed free of charge. chapter lxxiv. we got back to the schooner in good time, and then sailed down to kau, where we disembarked and took final leave of the vessel. next day we bought horses and bent our way over the summer-clad mountain-terraces, toward the great volcano of kilauea (ke-low-way-ah). we made nearly a two days' journey of it, but that was on account of laziness. toward sunset on the second day, we reached an elevation of some four thousand feet above sea level, and as we picked our careful way through billowy wastes of lava long generations ago stricken dead and cold in the climax of its tossing fury, we began to come upon signs of the near presence of the volcano--signs in the nature of ragged fissures that discharged jets of sulphurous vapor into the air, hot from the molten ocean down in the bowels of the mountain. shortly the crater came into view. i have seen vesuvius since, but it was a mere toy, a child's volcano, a soup-kettle, compared to this. mount vesuvius is a shapely cone thirty-six hundred feet high; its crater an inverted cone only three hundred feet deep, and not more than a thousand feet in diameter, if as much as that; its fires meagre, modest, and docile.--but here was a vast, perpendicular, walled cellar, nine hundred feet deep in some places, thirteen hundred in others, level-floored, and ten miles in circumference! here was a yawning pit upon whose floor the armies of russia could camp, and have room to spare. perched upon the edge of the crater, at the opposite end from where we stood, was a small look-out house--say three miles away. it assisted us, by comparison, to comprehend and appreciate the great depth of the basin --it looked like a tiny martin-box clinging at the eaves of a cathedral. after some little time spent in resting and looking and ciphering, we hurried on to the hotel. by the path it is half a mile from the volcano house to the lookout-house. after a hearty supper we waited until it was thoroughly dark and then started to the crater. the first glance in that direction revealed a scene of wild beauty. there was a heavy fog over the crater and it was splendidly illuminated by the glare from the fires below. the illumination was two miles wide and a mile high, perhaps; and if you ever, on a dark night and at a distance beheld the light from thirty or forty blocks of distant buildings all on fire at once, reflected strongly against over-hanging clouds, you can form a fair idea of what this looked like. a colossal column of cloud towered to a great height in the air immediately above the crater, and the outer swell of every one of its vast folds was dyed with a rich crimson luster, which was subdued to a pale rose tint in the depressions between. it glowed like a muffled torch and stretched upward to a dizzy height toward the zenith. i thought it just possible that its like had not been seen since the children of israel wandered on their long march through the desert so many centuries ago over a path illuminated by the mysterious "pillar of fire." and i was sure that i now had a vivid conception of what the majestic "pillar of fire" was like, which almost amounted to a revelation. arrived at the little thatched lookout house, we rested our elbows on the railing in front and looked abroad over the wide crater and down over the sheer precipice at the seething fires beneath us. the view was a startling improvement on my daylight experience. i turned to see the effect on the balance of the company and found the reddest-faced set of men i almost ever saw. in the strong light every countenance glowed like red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity! the place below looked like the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up on a furlough. i turned my eyes upon the volcano again. the "cellar" was tolerably well lighted up. for a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated; beyond these limits the mists hung down their gauzy curtains and cast a deceptive gloom over all that made the twinkling fires in the remote corners of the crater seem countless leagues removed--made them seem like the camp-fires of a great army far away. here was room for the imagination to work! you could imagine those lights the width of a continent away--and that hidden under the intervening darkness were hills, and winding rivers, and weary wastes of plain and desert--and even then the tremendous vista stretched on, and on, and on!--to the fires and far beyond! you could not compass it--it was the idea of eternity made tangible--and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye! the greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! it looked like a colossal railroad map of the state of massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. imagine it--imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled net-work of angry fire! here and there were gleaming holes a hundred feet in diameter, broken in the dark crust, and in them the melted lava--the color a dazzling white just tinged with yellow--was boiling and surging furiously; and from these holes branched numberless bright torrents in many directions, like the spokes of a wheel, and kept a tolerably straight course for a while and then swept round in huge rainbow curves, or made a long succession of sharp worm-fence angles, which looked precisely like the fiercest jagged lightning. these streams met other streams, and they mingled with and crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction, like skate tracks on a popular skating ground. sometimes streams twenty or thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without dividing --and through the opera-glasses we could see that they ran down small, steep hills and were genuine cataracts of fire, white at their source, but soon cooling and turning to the richest red, grained with alternate lines of black and gold. every now and then masses of the dark crust broke away and floated slowly down these streams like rafts down a river. occasionally the molten lava flowing under the superincumbent crust broke through--split a dazzling streak, from five hundred to a thousand feet long, like a sudden flash of lightning, and then acre after acre of the cold lava parted into fragments, turned up edgewise like cakes of ice when a great river breaks up, plunged downward and were swallowed in the crimson cauldron. then the wide expanse of the "thaw" maintained a ruddy glow for a while, but shortly cooled and became black and level again. during a "thaw," every dismembered cake was marked by a glittering white border which was superbly shaded inward by aurora borealis rays, which were a flaming yellow where they joined the white border, and from thence toward their points tapered into glowing crimson, then into a rich, pale carmine, and finally into a faint blush that held its own a moment and then dimmed and turned black. some of the streams preferred to mingle together in a tangle of fantastic circles, and then they looked something like the confusion of ropes one sees on a ship's deck when she has just taken in sail and dropped anchor--provided one can imagine those ropes on fire. through the glasses, the little fountains scattered about looked very beautiful. they boiled, and coughed, and spluttered, and discharged sprays of stringy red fire--of about the consistency of mush, for instance--from ten to fifteen feet into the air, along with a shower of brilliant white sparks--a quaint and unnatural mingling of gouts of blood and snow-flakes! we had circles and serpents and streaks of lightning all twined and wreathed and tied together, without a break throughout an area more than a mile square (that amount of ground was covered, though it was not strictly "square"), and it was with a feeling of placid exultation that we reflected that many years had elapsed since any visitor had seen such a splendid display--since any visitor had seen anything more than the now snubbed and insignificant "north" and "south" lakes in action. we had been reading old files of hawaiian newspapers and the "record book" at the volcano house, and were posted. i could see the north lake lying out on the black floor away off in the outer edge of our panorama, and knitted to it by a web-work of lava streams. in its individual capacity it looked very little more respectable than a schoolhouse on fire. true, it was about nine hundred feet long and two or three hundred wide, but then, under the present circumstances, it necessarily appeared rather insignificant, and besides it was so distant from us. i forgot to say that the noise made by the bubbling lava is not great, heard as we heard it from our lofty perch. it makes three distinct sounds--a rushing, a hissing, and a coughing or puffing sound; and if you stand on the brink and close your eyes it is no trick at all to imagine that you are sweeping down a river on a large low-pressure steamer, and that you hear the hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing from her escape-pipes and the churning rush of the water abaft her wheels. the smell of sulphur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner. we left the lookout house at ten o'clock in a half cooked condition, because of the heat from pele's furnaces, and wrapping up in blankets, for the night was cold, we returned to our hotel. chapter lxxv. the next night was appointed for a visit to the bottom of the crater, for we desired to traverse its floor and see the "north lake" (of fire) which lay two miles away, toward the further wall. after dark half a dozen of us set out, with lanterns and native guides, and climbed down a crazy, thousand-foot pathway in a crevice fractured in the crater wall, and reached the bottom in safety. the irruption of the previous evening had spent its force and the floor looked black and cold; but when we ran out upon it we found it hot yet, to the feet, and it was likewise riven with crevices which revealed the underlying fires gleaming vindictively. a neighboring cauldron was threatening to overflow, and this added to the dubiousness of the situation. so the native guides refused to continue the venture, and then every body deserted except a stranger named marlette. he said he had been in the crater a dozen times in daylight and believed he could find his way through it at night. he thought that a run of three hundred yards would carry us over the hottest part of the floor and leave us our shoe-soles. his pluck gave me back-bone. we took one lantern and instructed the guides to hang the other to the roof of the look-out house to serve as a beacon for us in case we got lost, and then the party started back up the precipice and marlette and i made our run. we skipped over the hot floor and over the red crevices with brisk dispatch and reached the cold lava safe but with pretty warm feet. then we took things leisurely and comfortably, jumping tolerably wide and probably bottomless chasms, and threading our way through picturesque lava upheavals with considerable confidence. when we got fairly away from the cauldrons of boiling fire, we seemed to be in a gloomy desert, and a suffocatingly dark one, surrounded by dim walls that seemed to tower to the sky. the only cheerful objects were the glinting stars high overhead. by and by marlette shouted "stop!" i never stopped quicker in my life. i asked what the matter was. he said we were out of the path. he said we must not try to go on till we found it again, for we were surrounded with beds of rotten lava through which we could easily break and plunge down a thousand feet. i thought eight hundred would answer for me, and was about to say so when marlette partly proved his statement by accidentally crushing through and disappearing to his arm-pits. he got out and we hunted for the path with the lantern. he said there was only one path and that it was but vaguely defined. we could not find it. the lava surface was all alike in the lantern light. but he was an ingenious man. he said it was not the lantern that had informed him that we were out of the path, but his feet. he had noticed a crisp grinding of fine lava-needles under his feet, and some instinct reminded him that in the path these were all worn away. so he put the lantern behind him, and began to search with his boots instead of his eyes. it was good sagacity. the first time his foot touched a surface that did not grind under it he announced that the trail was found again; and after that we kept up a sharp listening for the rasping sound and it always warned us in time. it was a long tramp, but an exciting one. we reached the north lake between ten and eleven o'clock, and sat down on a huge overhanging lava-shelf, tired but satisfied. the spectacle presented was worth coming double the distance to see. under us, and stretching away before us, was a heaving sea of molten fire of seemingly limitless extent. the glare from it was so blinding that it was some time before we could bear to look upon it steadily. it was like gazing at the sun at noon-day, except that the glare was not quite so white. at unequal distances all around the shores of the lake were nearly white-hot chimneys or hollow drums of lava, four or five feet high, and up through them were bursting gorgeous sprays of lava-gouts and gem spangles, some white, some red and some golden--a ceaseless bombardment, and one that fascinated the eye with its unapproachable splendor. the mere distant jets, sparkling up through an intervening gossamer veil of vapor, seemed miles away; and the further the curving ranks of fiery fountains receded, the more fairy-like and beautiful they appeared. now and then the surging bosom of the lake under our noses would calm down ominously and seem to be gathering strength for an enterprise; and then all of a sudden a red dome of lava of the bulk of an ordinary dwelling would heave itself aloft like an escaping balloon, then burst asunder, and out of its heart would flit a pale-green film of vapor, and float upward and vanish in the darkness--a released soul soaring homeward from captivity with the damned, no doubt. the crashing plunge of the ruined dome into the lake again would send a world of seething billows lashing against the shores and shaking the foundations of our perch. by and by, a loosened mass of the hanging shelf we sat on tumbled into the lake, jarring the surroundings like an earthquake and delivering a suggestion that may have been intended for a hint, and may not. we did not wait to see. we got lost again on our way back, and were more than an hour hunting for the path. we were where we could see the beacon lantern at the look-out house at the time, but thought it was a star and paid no attention to it. we reached the hotel at two o'clock in the morning pretty well fagged out. kilauea never overflows its vast crater, but bursts a passage for its lava through the mountain side when relief is necessary, and then the destruction is fearful. about it rent its overburdened stomach and sent a broad river of fire careering down to the sea, which swept away forests, huts, plantations and every thing else that lay in its path. the stream was five miles broad, in places, and two hundred feet deep, and the distance it traveled was forty miles. it tore up and bore away acre-patches of land on its bosom like rafts--rocks, trees and all intact. at night the red glare was visible a hundred miles at sea; and at a distance of forty miles fine print could be read at midnight. the atmosphere was poisoned with sulphurous vapors and choked with falling ashes, pumice stones and cinders; countless columns of smoke rose up and blended together in a tumbled canopy that hid the heavens and glowed with a ruddy flush reflected from the fires below; here and there jets of lava sprung hundreds of feet into the air and burst into rocket-sprays that returned to earth in a crimson rain; and all the while the laboring mountain shook with nature's great palsy and voiced its distress in moanings and the muffled booming of subterranean thunders. fishes were killed for twenty miles along the shore, where the lava entered the sea. the earthquakes caused some loss of human life, and a prodigious tidal wave swept inland, carrying every thing before it and drowning a number of natives. the devastation consummated along the route traversed by the river of lava was complete and incalculable. only a pompeii and a herculaneum were needed at the foot of kilauea to make the story of the irruption immortal. chapter lxxvi. we rode horseback all around the island of hawaii (the crooked road making the distance two hundred miles), and enjoyed the journey very much. we were more than a week making the trip, because our kanaka horses would not go by a house or a hut without stopping--whip and spur could not alter their minds about it, and so we finally found that it economized time to let them have their way. upon inquiry the mystery was explained: the natives are such thorough-going gossips that they never pass a house without stopping to swap news, and consequently their horses learn to regard that sort of thing as an essential part of the whole duty of man, and his salvation not to be compassed without it. however, at a former crisis of my life i had once taken an aristocratic young lady out driving, behind a horse that had just retired from a long and honorable career as the moving impulse of a milk wagon, and so this present experience awoke a reminiscent sadness in me in place of the exasperation more natural to the occasion. i remembered how helpless i was that day, and how humiliated; how ashamed i was of having intimated to the girl that i had always owned the horse and was accustomed to grandeur; how hard i tried to appear easy, and even vivacious, under suffering that was consuming my vitals; how placidly and maliciously the girl smiled, and kept on smiling, while my hot blushes baked themselves into a permanent blood-pudding in my face; how the horse ambled from one side of the street to the other and waited complacently before every third house two minutes and a quarter while i belabored his back and reviled him in my heart; how i tried to keep him from turning corners and failed; how i moved heaven and earth to get him out of town, and did not succeed; how he traversed the entire settlement and delivered imaginary milk at a hundred and sixty-two different domiciles, and how he finally brought up at a dairy depot and refused to budge further, thus rounding and completing the revealment of what the plebeian service of his life had been; how, in eloquent silence, i walked the girl home, and how, when i took leave of her, her parting remark scorched my soul and appeared to blister me all over: she said that my horse was a fine, capable animal, and i must have taken great comfort in him in my time--but that if i would take along some milk-tickets next time, and appear to deliver them at the various halting places, it might expedite his movements a little. there was a coolness between us after that. in one place in the island of hawaii, we saw a laced and ruffled cataract of limpid water leaping from a sheer precipice fifteen hundred feet high; but that sort of scenery finds its stanchest ally in the arithmetic rather than in spectacular effect. if one desires to be so stirred by a poem of nature wrought in the happily commingled graces of picturesque rocks, glimpsed distances, foliage, color, shifting lights and shadows, and failing water, that the tears almost come into his eyes so potent is the charm exerted, he need not go away from america to enjoy such an experience. the rainbow fall, in watkins glen (n.y.), on the erie railway, is an example. it would recede into pitiable insignificance if the callous tourist drew on arithmetic on it; but left to compete for the honors simply on scenic grace and beauty--the grand, the august and the sublime being barred the contest--it could challenge the old world and the new to produce its peer. in one locality, on our journey, we saw some horses that had been born and reared on top of the mountains, above the range of running water, and consequently they had never drank that fluid in their lives, but had been always accustomed to quenching their thirst by eating dew-laden or shower-wetted leaves. and now it was destructively funny to see them sniff suspiciously at a pail of water, and then put in their noses and try to take a bite out of the fluid, as if it were a solid. finding it liquid, they would snatch away their heads and fall to trembling, snorting and showing other evidences of fright. when they became convinced at last that the water was friendly and harmless, they thrust in their noses up to their eyes, brought out a mouthful of water, and proceeded to chew it complacently. we saw a man coax, kick and spur one of them five or ten minutes before he could make it cross a running stream. it spread its nostrils, distended its eyes and trembled all over, just as horses customarily do in the presence of a serpent--and for aught i know it thought the crawling stream was a serpent. in due course of time our journey came to an end at kawaehae (usually pronounced to-a-hi--and before we find fault with this elaborate orthographical method of arriving at such an unostentatious result, let us lop off the ugh from our word "though"). i made this horseback trip on a mule. i paid ten dollars for him at kau (kah-oo), added four to get him shod, rode him two hundred miles, and then sold him for fifteen dollars. i mark the circumstance with a white stone (in the absence of chalk--for i never saw a white stone that a body could mark anything with, though out of respect for the ancients i have tried it often enough); for up to that day and date it was the first strictly commercial transaction i had ever entered into, and come out winner. we returned to honolulu, and from thence sailed to the island of maui, and spent several weeks there very pleasantly. i still remember, with a sense of indolent luxury, a picnicing excursion up a romantic gorge there, called the iao valley. the trail lay along the edge of a brawling stream in the bottom of the gorge--a shady route, for it was well roofed with the verdant domes of forest trees. through openings in the foliage we glimpsed picturesque scenery that revealed ceaseless changes and new charms with every step of our progress. perpendicular walls from one to three thousand feet high guarded the way, and were sumptuously plumed with varied foliage, in places, and in places swathed in waving ferns. passing shreds of cloud trailed their shadows across these shining fronts, mottling them with blots; billowy masses of white vapor hid the turreted summits, and far above the vapor swelled a background of gleaming green crags and cones that came and went, through the veiling mists, like islands drifting in a fog; sometimes the cloudy curtain descended till half the canon wall was hidden, then shredded gradually away till only airy glimpses of the ferny front appeared through it--then swept aloft and left it glorified in the sun again. now and then, as our position changed, rocky bastions swung out from the wall, a mimic ruin of castellated ramparts and crumbling towers clothed with mosses and hung with garlands of swaying vines, and as we moved on they swung back again and hid themselves once more in the foliage. presently a verdure-clad needle of stone, a thousand feet high, stepped out from behind a corner, and mounted guard over the mysteries of the valley. it seemed to me that if captain cook needed a monument, here was one ready made--therefore, why not put up his sign here, and sell out the venerable cocoanut stump? but the chief pride of maui is her dead volcano of haleakala--which means, translated, "the house of the sun." we climbed a thousand feet up the side of this isolated colossus one afternoon; then camped, and next day climbed the remaining nine thousand feet, and anchored on the summit, where we built a fire and froze and roasted by turns, all night. with the first pallor of dawn we got up and saw things that were new to us. mounted on a commanding pinnacle, we watched nature work her silent wonders. the sea was spread abroad on every hand, its tumbled surface seeming only wrinkled and dimpled in the distance. a broad valley below appeared like an ample checker-board, its velvety green sugar plantations alternating with dun squares of barrenness and groves of trees diminished to mossy tufts. beyond the valley were mountains picturesquely grouped together; but bear in mind, we fancied that we were looking up at these things--not down. we seemed to sit in the bottom of a symmetrical bowl ten thousand feet deep, with the valley and the skirting sea lifted away into the sky above us! it was curious; and not only curious, but aggravating; for it was having our trouble all for nothing, to climb ten thousand feet toward heaven and then have to look up at our scenery. however, we had to be content with it and make the best of it; for, all we could do we could not coax our landscape down out of the clouds. formerly, when i had read an article in which poe treated of this singular fraud perpetrated upon the eye by isolated great altitudes, i had looked upon the matter as an invention of his own fancy. i have spoken of the outside view--but we had an inside one, too. that was the yawning dead crater, into which we now and then tumbled rocks, half as large as a barrel, from our perch, and saw them go careering down the almost perpendicular sides, bounding three hundred feet at a jump; kicking up cast-clouds wherever they struck; diminishing to our view as they sped farther into distance; growing invisible, finally, and only betraying their course by faint little puffs of dust; and coming to a halt at last in the bottom of the abyss, two thousand five hundred feet down from where they started! it was magnificent sport. we wore ourselves out at it. the crater of vesuvius, as i have before remarked, is a modest pit about a thousand feet deep and three thousand in circumference; that of kilauea is somewhat deeper, and ten miles in circumference. but what are either of them compared to the vacant stomach of haleakala? i will not offer any figures of my own, but give official ones--those of commander wilkes, u.s.n., who surveyed it and testifies that it is twenty-seven miles in circumference! if it had a level bottom it would make a fine site for a city like london. it must have afforded a spectacle worth contemplating in the old days when its furnaces gave full rein to their anger. presently vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea and the valley; then they came in couples and groups; then in imposing squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly together, a thousand feet under us, and totally shut out land and ocean --not a vestige of anything was left in view but just a little of the rim of the crater, circling away from the pinnacle whereon we sat (for a ghostly procession of wanderers from the filmy hosts without had drifted through a chasm in the crater wall and filed round and round, and gathered and sunk and blended together till the abyss was stored to the brim with a fleecy fog). thus banked, motion ceased, and silence reigned. clear to the horizon, league on league, the snowy floor stretched without a break--not level, but in rounded folds, with shallow creases between, and with here and there stately piles of vapory architecture lifting themselves aloft out of the common plain--some near at hand, some in the middle distances, and others relieving the monotony of the remote solitudes. there was little conversation, for the impressive scene overawed speech. i felt like the last man, neglected of the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished world. while the hush yet brooded, the messengers of the coming resurrection appeared in the east. a growing warmth suffused the horizon, and soon the sun emerged and looked out over the cloud-waste, flinging bars of ruddy light across it, staining its folds and billow-caps with blushes, purpling the shaded troughs between, and glorifying the massy vapor-palaces and cathedrals with a wasteful splendor of all blendings and combinations of rich coloring. it was the sublimest spectacle i ever witnessed, and i think the memory of it will remain with me always. chapter lxxvii. i stumbled upon one curious character in the island of mani. he became a sore annoyance to me in the course of time. my first glimpse of him was in a sort of public room in the town of lahaina. he occupied a chair at the opposite side of the apartment, and sat eyeing our party with interest for some minutes, and listening as critically to what we were saying as if he fancied we were talking to him and expecting him to reply. i thought it very sociable in a stranger. presently, in the course of conversation, i made a statement bearing upon the subject under discussion--and i made it with due modesty, for there was nothing extraordinary about it, and it was only put forth in illustration of a point at issue. i had barely finished when this person spoke out with rapid utterance and feverish anxiety: "oh, that was certainly remarkable, after a fashion, but you ought to have seen my chimney--you ought to have seen my chimney, sir! smoke! i wish i may hang if--mr. jones, you remember that chimney--you must remember that chimney! no, no--i recollect, now, you warn't living on this side of the island then. but i am telling you nothing but the truth, and i wish i may never draw another breath if that chimney didn't smoke so that the smoke actually got caked in it and i had to dig it out with a pickaxe! you may smile, gentlemen, but the high sheriff's got a hunk of it which i dug out before his eyes, and so it's perfectly easy for you to go and examine for yourselves." the interruption broke up the conversation, which had already begun to lag, and we presently hired some natives and an out-rigger canoe or two, and went out to overlook a grand surf-bathing contest. two weeks after this, while talking in a company, i looked up and detected this same man boring through and through me with his intense eye, and noted again his twitching muscles and his feverish anxiety to speak. the moment i paused, he said: "beg your pardon, sir, beg your pardon, but it can only be considered remarkable when brought into strong outline by isolation. sir, contrasted with a circumstance which occurred in my own experience, it instantly becomes commonplace. no, not that--for i will not speak so discourteously of any experience in the career of a stranger and a gentleman--but i am obliged to say that you could not, and you would not ever again refer to this tree as a large one, if you could behold, as i have, the great yakmatack tree, in the island of ounaska, sea of kamtchatka--a tree, sir, not one inch less than four hundred and fifteen feet in solid diameter!--and i wish i may die in a minute if it isn't so! oh, you needn't look so questioning, gentlemen; here's old cap saltmarsh can say whether i know what i'm talking about or not. i showed him the tree." captain saltmarsh--"come, now, cat your anchor, lad--you're heaving too taut. you promised to show me that stunner, and i walked more than eleven mile with you through the cussedest jungle i ever see, a hunting for it; but the tree you showed me finally warn't as big around as a beer cask, and you know that your own self, markiss." "hear the man talk! of course the tree was reduced that way, but didn't i explain it? answer me, didn't i? didn't i say i wished you could have seen it when i first saw it? when you got up on your ear and called me names, and said i had brought you eleven miles to look at a sapling, didn't i explain to you that all the whale-ships in the north seas had been wooding off of it for more than twenty-seven years? and did you s'pose the tree could last for-ever, con-found it? i don't see why you want to keep back things that way, and try to injure a person that's never done you any harm." somehow this man's presence made me uncomfortable, and i was glad when a native arrived at that moment to say that muckawow, the most companionable and luxurious among the rude war-chiefs of the islands, desired us to come over and help him enjoy a missionary whom he had found trespassing on his grounds. i think it was about ten days afterward that, as i finished a statement i was making for the instruction of a group of friends and acquaintances, and which made no pretence of being extraordinary, a familiar voice chimed instantly in on the heels of my last word, and said: "but, my dear sir, there was nothing remarkable about that horse, or the circumstance either--nothing in the world! i mean no sort of offence when i say it, sir, but you really do not know anything whatever about speed. bless your heart, if you could only have seen my mare margaretta; there was a beast!--there was lightning for you! trot! trot is no name for it--she flew! how she could whirl a buggy along! i started her out once, sir--colonel bilgewater, you recollect that animal perfectly well --i started her out about thirty or thirty-five yards ahead of the awfullest storm i ever saw in my life, and it chased us upwards of eighteen miles! it did, by the everlasting hills! and i'm telling you nothing but the unvarnished truth when i say that not one single drop of rain fell on me--not a single drop, sir! and i swear to it! but my dog was a-swimming behind the wagon all the way!" for a week or two i stayed mostly within doors, for i seemed to meet this person everywhere, and he had become utterly hateful to me. but one evening i dropped in on captain perkins and his friends, and we had a sociable time. about ten o'clock i chanced to be talking about a merchant friend of mine, and without really intending it, the remark slipped out that he was a little mean and parsimonious about paying his workmen. instantly, through the steam of a hot whiskey punch on the opposite side of the room, a remembered voice shot--and for a moment i trembled on the imminent verge of profanity: "oh, my dear sir, really you expose yourself when you parade that as a surprising circumstance. bless your heart and hide, you are ignorant of the very a b c of meanness! ignorant as the unborn babe! ignorant as unborn twins! you don't know anything about it! it is pitiable to see you, sir, a well-spoken and prepossessing stranger, making such an enormous pow-wow here about a subject concerning which your ignorance is perfectly humiliating! look me in the eye, if you please; look me in the eye. john james godfrey was the son of poor but honest parents in the state of mississippi--boyhood friend of mine--bosom comrade in later years. heaven rest his noble spirit, he is gone from us now. john james godfrey was hired by the hayblossom mining company in california to do some blasting for them--the "incorporated company of mean men," the boys used to call it. "well, one day he drilled a hole about four feet deep and put in an awful blast of powder, and was standing over it ramming it down with an iron crowbar about nine foot long, when the cussed thing struck a spark and fired the powder, and scat! away john godfrey whizzed like a skyrocket, him and his crowbar! well, sir, he kept on going up in the air higher and higher, till he didn't look any bigger than a boy--and he kept going on up higher and higher, till he didn't look any bigger than a doll--and he kept on going up higher and higher, till he didn't look any bigger than a little small bee--and then he went out of sight! presently he came in sight again, looking like a little small bee--and he came along down further and further, till he looked as big as a doll again--and down further and further, till he was as big as a boy again--and further and further, till he was a full-sized man once more; and then him and his crowbar came a wh-izzing down and lit right exactly in the same old tracks and went to r-ramming down, and r-ramming down, and r-ramming down again, just the same as if nothing had happened! now do you know, that poor cuss warn't gone only sixteen minutes, and yet that incorporated company of mean men docked him for the lost time!" i said i had the headache, and so excused myself and went home. and on my diary i entered "another night spoiled" by this offensive loafer. and a fervent curse was set down with it to keep the item company. and the very next day i packed up, out of all patience, and left the island. almost from the very beginning, i regarded that man as a liar. the line of points represents an interval of years. at the end of which time the opinion hazarded in that last sentence came to be gratifyingly and remarkably endorsed, and by wholly disinterested persons. the man markiss was found one morning hanging to a beam of his own bedroom (the doors and windows securely fastened on the inside), dead; and on his breast was pinned a paper in his own handwriting begging his friends to suspect no innocent person of having any thing to do with his death, for that it was the work of his own hands entirely. yet the jury brought in the astounding verdict that deceased came to his death "by the hands of some person or persons unknown!" they explained that the perfectly undeviating consistency of markiss's character for thirty years towered aloft as colossal and indestructible testimony, that whatever statement he chose to make was entitled to instant and unquestioning acceptance as a lie. and they furthermore stated their belief that he was not dead, and instanced the strong circumstantial evidence of his own word that he was dead--and beseeched the coroner to delay the funeral as long as possible, which was done. and so in the tropical climate of lahaina the coffin stood open for seven days, and then even the loyal jury gave him up. but they sat on him again, and changed their verdict to "suicide induced by mental aberration"--because, said they, with penetration, "he said he was dead, and he was dead; and would he have told the truth if he had been in his right mind? no, sir." chapter lxxviii. after half a year's luxurious vagrancy in the islands, i took shipping in a sailing vessel, and regretfully returned to san francisco--a voyage in every way delightful, but without an incident: unless lying two long weeks in a dead calm, eighteen hundred miles from the nearest land, may rank as an incident. schools of whales grew so tame that day after day they played about the ship among the porpoises and the sharks without the least apparent fear of us, and we pelted them with empty bottles for lack of better sport. twenty-four hours afterward these bottles would be still lying on the glassy water under our noses, showing that the ship had not moved out of her place in all that time. the calm was absolutely breathless, and the surface of the sea absolutely without a wrinkle. for a whole day and part of a night we lay so close to another ship that had drifted to our vicinity, that we carried on conversations with her passengers, introduced each other by name, and became pretty intimately acquainted with people we had never heard of before, and have never heard of since. this was the only vessel we saw during the whole lonely voyage. we had fifteen passengers, and to show how hard pressed they were at last for occupation and amusement, i will mention that the gentlemen gave a good part of their time every day, during the calm, to trying to sit on an empty champagne bottle (lying on its side), and thread a needle without touching their heels to the deck, or falling over; and the ladies sat in the shade of the mainsail, and watched the enterprise with absorbing interest. we were at sea five sundays; and yet, but for the almanac, we never would have known but that all the other days were sundays too. i was home again, in san francisco, without means and without employment. i tortured my brain for a saving scheme of some kind, and at last a public lecture occurred to me! i sat down and wrote one, in a fever of hopeful anticipation. i showed it to several friends, but they all shook their heads. they said nobody would come to hear me, and i would make a humiliating failure of it. they said that as i had never spoken in public, i would break down in the delivery, anyhow. i was disconsolate now. but at last an editor slapped me on the back and told me to "go ahead." he said, "take the largest house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket." the audacity of the proposition was charming; it seemed fraught with practical worldly wisdom, however. the proprietor of the several theatres endorsed the advice, and said i might have his handsome new opera-house at half price --fifty dollars. in sheer desperation i took it--on credit, for sufficient reasons. in three days i did a hundred and fifty dollars' worth of printing and advertising, and was the most distressed and frightened creature on the pacific coast. i could not sleep--who could, under such circumstances? for other people there was facetiousness in the last line of my posters, but to me it was plaintive with a pang when i wrote it: "doors open at / . the trouble will begin at ." that line has done good service since. showmen have borrowed it frequently. i have even seen it appended to a newspaper advertisement reminding school pupils in vacation what time next term would begin. as those three days of suspense dragged by, i grew more and more unhappy. i had sold two hundred tickets among my personal friends, but i feared they might not come. my lecture, which had seemed "humorous" to me, at first, grew steadily more and more dreary, till not a vestige of fun seemed left, and i grieved that i could not bring a coffin on the stage and turn the thing into a funeral. i was so panic-stricken, at last, that i went to three old friends, giants in stature, cordial by nature, and stormy-voiced, and said: "this thing is going to be a failure; the jokes in it are so dim that nobody will ever see them; i would like to have you sit in the parquette, and help me through." they said they would. then i went to the wife of a popular citizen, and said that if she was willing to do me a very great kindness, i would be glad if she and her husband would sit prominently in the left-hand stage-box, where the whole house could see them. i explained that i should need help, and would turn toward her and smile, as a signal, when i had been delivered of an obscure joke--"and then," i added, "don't wait to investigate, but respond!" she promised. down the street i met a man i never had seen before. he had been drinking, and was beaming with smiles and good nature. he said: "my name's sawyer. you don't know me, but that don't matter. i haven't got a cent, but if you knew how bad i wanted to laugh, you'd give me a ticket. come, now, what do you say?" "is your laugh hung on a hair-trigger?--that is, is it critical, or can you get it off easy?" my drawling infirmity of speech so affected him that he laughed a specimen or two that struck me as being about the article i wanted, and i gave him a ticket, and appointed him to sit in the second circle, in the centre, and be responsible for that division of the house. i gave him minute instructions about how to detect indistinct jokes, and then went away, and left him chuckling placidly over the novelty of the idea. i ate nothing on the last of the three eventful days--i only suffered. i had advertised that on this third day the box-office would be opened for the sale of reserved seats. i crept down to the theater at four in the afternoon to see if any sales had been made. the ticket seller was gone, the box-office was locked up. i had to swallow suddenly, or my heart would have got out. "no sales," i said to myself; "i might have known it." i thought of suicide, pretended illness, flight. i thought of these things in earnest, for i was very miserable and scared. but of course i had to drive them away, and prepare to meet my fate. i could not wait for half-past seven--i wanted to face the horror, and end it --the feeling of many a man doomed to hang, no doubt. i went down back streets at six o'clock, and entered the theatre by the back door. i stumbled my way in the dark among the ranks of canvas scenery, and stood on the stage. the house was gloomy and silent, and its emptiness depressing. i went into the dark among the scenes again, and for an hour and a half gave myself up to the horrors, wholly unconscious of everything else. then i heard a murmur; it rose higher and higher, and ended in a crash, mingled with cheers. it made my hair raise, it was so close to me, and so loud. there was a pause, and then another; presently came a third, and before i well knew what i was about, i was in the middle of the stage, staring at a sea of faces, bewildered by the fierce glare of the lights, and quaking in every limb with a terror that seemed like to take my life away. the house was full, aisles and all! the tumult in my heart and brain and legs continued a full minute before i could gain any command over myself. then i recognized the charity and the friendliness in the faces before me, and little by little my fright melted away, and i began to talk within three or four minutes i was comfortable, and even content. my three chief allies, with three auxiliaries, were on hand, in the parquette, all sitting together, all armed with bludgeons, and all ready to make an onslaught upon the feeblest joke that might show its head. and whenever a joke did fall, their bludgeons came down and their faces seemed to split from ear to ear. sawyer, whose hearty countenance was seen looming redly in the centre of the second circle, took it up, and the house was carried handsomely. inferior jokes never fared so royally before. presently i delivered a bit of serious matter with impressive unction (it was my pet), and the audience listened with an absorbed hush that gratified me more than any applause; and as i dropped the last word of the clause, i happened to turn and catch mrs.--'s intent and waiting eye; my conversation with her flashed upon me, and in spite of all i could do i smiled. she took it for the signal, and promptly delivered a mellow laugh that touched off the whole audience; and the explosion that followed was the triumph of the evening. i thought that that honest man sawyer would choke himself; and as for the bludgeons, they performed like pile-drivers. but my poor little morsel of pathos was ruined. it was taken in good faith as an intentional joke, and the prize one of the entertainment, and i wisely let it go at that. all the papers were kind in the morning; my appetite returned; i had a abundance of money. all's well that ends well. chapter lxxix. i launched out as a lecturer, now, with great boldness. i had the field all to myself, for public lectures were almost an unknown commodity in the pacific market. they are not so rare, now, i suppose. i took an old personal friend along to play agent for me, and for two or three weeks we roamed through nevada and california and had a very cheerful time of it. two days before i lectured in virginia city, two stagecoaches were robbed within two miles of the town. the daring act was committed just at dawn, by six masked men, who sprang up alongside the coaches, presented revolvers at the heads of the drivers and passengers, and commanded a general dismount. everybody climbed down, and the robbers took their watches and every cent they had. then they took gunpowder and blew up the express specie boxes and got their contents. the leader of the robbers was a small, quick-spoken man, and the fame of his vigorous manner and his intrepidity was in everybody's mouth when we arrived. the night after instructing virginia, i walked over the desolate "divide" and down to gold hill, and lectured there. the lecture done, i stopped to talk with a friend, and did not start back till eleven. the "divide" was high, unoccupied ground, between the towns, the scene of twenty midnight murders and a hundred robberies. as we climbed up and stepped out on this eminence, the gold hill lights dropped out of sight at our backs, and the night closed down gloomy and dismal. a sharp wind swept the place, too, and chilled our perspiring bodies through. "i tell you i don't like this place at night," said mike the agent. "well, don't speak so loud," i said. "you needn't remind anybody that we are here." just then a dim figure approached me from the direction of virginia--a man, evidently. he came straight at me, and i stepped aside to let him pass; he stepped in the way and confronted me again. then i saw that he had a mask on and was holding something in my face--i heard a click-click and recognized a revolver in dim outline. i pushed the barrel aside with my hand and said: "don't!" he ejaculated sharply: "your watch! your money!" i said: "you can have them with pleasure--but take the pistol away from my face, please. it makes me shiver." "no remarks! hand out your money!" "certainly--i--" "put up your hands! don't you go for a weapon! put 'em up! higher!" i held them above my head. a pause. then: "are you going to hand out your money or not?" i dropped my hands to my pockets and said: certainly! i--" "put up your hands! do you want your head blown off? higher!" i put them above my head again. another pause. are you going to hand out your money or not? ah-ah--again? put up your hands! by george, you want the head shot off you awful bad!" "well, friend, i'm trying my best to please you. you tell me to give up my money, and when i reach for it you tell me to put up my hands. if you would only--. oh, now--don't! all six of you at me! that other man will get away while.--now please take some of those revolvers out of my face--do, if you please! every time one of them clicks, my liver comes up into my throat! if you have a mother--any of you--or if any of you have ever had a mother--or a--grandmother--or a--" "cheese it! will you give up your money, or have we got to--. there --there--none of that! put up your hands!" "gentlemen--i know you are gentlemen by your--" "silence! if you want to be facetious, young man, there are times and places more fitting. this is a serious business." "you prick the marrow of my opinion. the funerals i have attended in my time were comedies compared to it. now i think--" "curse your palaver! your money!--your money!--your money! hold!--put up your hands!" "gentlemen, listen to reason. you see how i am situated--now don't put those pistols so close--i smell the powder. "you see how i am situated. if i had four hands--so that i could hold up two and--" "throttle him! gag him! kill him!" "gentlemen, don't! nobody's watching the other fellow. why don't some of you--. ouch! take it away, please! "gentlemen, you see that i've got to hold up my hands; and so i can't take out my money--but if you'll be so kind as to take it out for me, i will do as much for you some--" "search him beauregard--and stop his jaw with a bullet, quick, if he wags it again. help beauregard, stonewall." then three of them, with the small, spry leader, adjourned to mike and fell to searching him. i was so excited that my lawless fancy tortured me to ask my two men all manner of facetious questions about their rebel brother-generals of the south, but, considering the order they had received, it was but common prudence to keep still. when everything had been taken from me,--watch, money, and a multitude of trifles of small value,--i supposed i was free, and forthwith put my cold hands into my empty pockets and began an inoffensive jig to warm my feet and stir up some latent courage--but instantly all pistols were at my head, and the order came again: they stood mike up alongside of me, with strict orders to keep his hands above his head, too, and then the chief highwayman said: "beauregard, hide behind that boulder; phil sheridan, you hide behind that other one; stonewall jackson, put yourself behind that sage-bush there. keep your pistols bearing on these fellows, and if they take down their hands within ten minutes, or move a single peg, let them have it!" then three disappeared in the gloom toward the several ambushes, and the other three disappeared down the road toward virginia. it was depressingly still, and miserably cold. now this whole thing was a practical joke, and the robbers were personal friends of ours in disguise, and twenty more lay hidden within ten feet of us during the whole operation, listening. mike knew all this, and was in the joke, but i suspected nothing of it. to me it was most uncomfortably genuine. when we had stood there in the middle of the road five minutes, like a couple of idiots, with our hands aloft, freezing to death by inches, mike's interest in the joke began to wane. he said: "the time's up, now, aint it?" "no, you keep still. do you want to take any chances with these bloody savages?" presently mike said: "now the time's up, anyway. i'm freezing." "well freeze. better freeze than carry your brains home in a basket. maybe the time is up, but how do we know?--got no watch to tell by. i mean to give them good measure. i calculate to stand here fifteen minutes or die. don't you move." so, without knowing it, i was making one joker very sick of his contract. when we took our arms down at last, they were aching with cold and fatigue, and when we went sneaking off, the dread i was in that the time might not yet be up and that we would feel bullets in a moment, was not sufficient to draw all my attention from the misery that racked my stiffened body. the joke of these highwayman friends of ours was mainly a joke upon themselves; for they had waited for me on the cold hill-top two full hours before i came, and there was very little fun in that; they were so chilled that it took them a couple of weeks to get warm again. moreover, i never had a thought that they would kill me to get money which it was so perfectly easy to get without any such folly, and so they did not really frighten me bad enough to make their enjoyment worth the trouble they had taken. i was only afraid that their weapons would go off accidentally. their very numbers inspired me with confidence that no blood would be intentionally spilled. they were not smart; they ought to have sent only one highwayman, with a double-barrelled shot gun, if they desired to see the author of this volume climb a tree. however, i suppose that in the long run i got the largest share of the joke at last; and in a shape not foreseen by the highwaymen; for the chilly exposure on the "divide" while i was in a perspiration gave me a cold which developed itself into a troublesome disease and kept my hands idle some three months, besides costing me quite a sum in doctor's bills. since then i play no practical jokes on people and generally lose my temper when one is played upon me. when i returned to san francisco i projected a pleasure journey to japan and thence westward around the world; but a desire to see home again changed my mind, and i took a berth in the steamship, bade good-bye to the friendliest land and livest, heartiest community on our continent, and came by the way of the isthmus to new york--a trip that was not much of a pic-nic excursion, for the cholera broke out among us on the passage and we buried two or three bodies at sea every day. i found home a dreary place after my long absence; for half the children i had known were now wearing whiskers or waterfalls, and few of the grown people i had been acquainted with remained at their hearthstones prosperous and happy--some of them had wandered to other scenes, some were in jail, and the rest had been hanged. these changes touched me deeply, and i went away and joined the famous quaker city european excursion and carried my tears to foreign lands. thus, after seven years of vicissitudes, ended a "pleasure trip" to the silver mines of nevada which had originally been intended to occupy only three months. however, i usually miss my calculations further than that. moral. if the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to it, he is in error. the moral of it is this: if you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are "no account," go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not. thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them--if the people you go among suffer by the operation. appendix. a. brief sketch of mormon history. mormonism is only about forty years old, but its career has been full of stir and adventure from the beginning, and is likely to remain so to the end. its adherents have been hunted and hounded from one end of the country to the other, and the result is that for years they have hated all "gentiles" indiscriminately and with all their might. joseph smith, the finder of the book of mormon and founder of the religion, was driven from state to state with his mysterious copperplates and the miraculous stones he read their inscriptions with. finally he instituted his "church" in ohio and brigham young joined it. the neighbors began to persecute, and apostasy commenced. brigham held to the faith and worked hard. he arrested desertion. he did more--he added converts in the midst of the trouble. he rose in favor and importance with the brethren. he was made one of the twelve apostles of the church. he shortly fought his way to a higher post and a more powerful--president of the twelve. the neighbors rose up and drove the mormons out of ohio, and they settled in missouri. brigham went with them. the missourians drove them out and they retreated to nauvoo, illinois. they prospered there, and built a temple which made some pretensions to architectural grace and achieved some celebrity in a section of country where a brick court-house with a tin dome and a cupola on it was contemplated with reverential awe. but the mormons were badgered and harried again by their neighbors. all the proclamations joseph smith could issue denouncing polygamy and repudiating it as utterly anti-mormon were of no avail; the people of the neighborhood, on both sides of the mississippi, claimed that polygamy was practised by the mormons, and not only polygamy but a little of everything that was bad. brigham returned from a mission to england, where he had established a mormon newspaper, and he brought back with him several hundred converts to his preaching. his influence among the brethren augmented with every move he made. finally nauvoo was invaded by the missouri and illinois gentiles, and joseph smith killed. a mormon named rigdon assumed the presidency of the mormon church and government, in smith's place, and even tried his hand at a prophecy or two. but a greater than he was at hand. brigham seized the advantage of the hour and without other authority than superior brain and nerve and will, hurled rigdon from his high place and occupied it himself. he did more. he launched an elaborate curse at rigdon and his disciples; and he pronounced rigdon's "prophecies" emanations from the devil, and ended by "handing the false prophet over to the buffetings of satan for a thousand years"--probably the longest term ever inflicted in illinois. the people recognized their master. they straightway elected brigham young president, by a prodigious majority, and have never faltered in their devotion to him from that day to this. brigham had forecast--a quality which no other prominent mormon has probably ever possessed. he recognized that it was better to move to the wilderness than be moved. by his command the people gathered together their meagre effects, turned their backs upon their homes, and their faces toward the wilderness, and on a bitter night in february filed in sorrowful procession across the frozen mississippi, lighted on their way by the glare from their burning temple, whose sacred furniture their own hands had fired! they camped, several days afterward, on the western verge of iowa, and poverty, want, hunger, cold, sickness, grief and persecution did their work, and many succumbed and died--martyrs, fair and true, whatever else they might have been. two years the remnant remained there, while brigham and a small party crossed the country and founded great salt lake city, purposely choosing a land which was outside the ownership and jurisdiction of the hated american nation. note that. this was in . brigham moved his people there and got them settled just in time to see disaster fall again. for the war closed and mexico ceded brigham's refuge to the enemy--the united states! in the mormons organized a "free and independent" government and erected the "state of deseret," with brigham young as its head. but the very next year congress deliberately snubbed it and created the "territory of utah" out of the same accumulation of mountains, sage-brush, alkali and general desolation,--but made brigham governor of it. then for years the enormous migration across the plains to california poured through the land of the mormons and yet the church remained staunch and true to its lord and master. neither hunger, thirst, poverty, grief, hatred, contempt, nor persecution could drive the mormons from their faith or their allegiance; and even the thirst for gold, which gleaned the flower of the youth and strength of many nations was not able to entice them! that was the final test. an experiment that could survive that was an experiment with some substance to it somewhere. great salt lake city throve finely, and so did utah. one of the last things which brigham young had done before leaving iowa, was to appear in the pulpit dressed to personate the worshipped and lamented prophet smith, and confer the prophetic succession, with all its dignities, emoluments and authorities, upon "president brigham young!" the people accepted the pious fraud with the maddest enthusiasm, and brigham's power was sealed and secured for all time. within five years afterward he openly added polygamy to the tenets of the church by authority of a "revelation" which he pretended had been received nine years before by joseph smith, albeit joseph is amply on record as denouncing polygamy to the day of his death. now was brigham become a second andrew johnson in the small beginning and steady progress of his official grandeur. he had served successively as a disciple in the ranks; home missionary; foreign missionary; editor and publisher; apostle; president of the board of apostles; president of all mormondom, civil and ecclesiastical; successor to the great joseph by the will of heaven; "prophet," "seer," "revelator." there was but one dignity higher which he could aspire to, and he reached out modestly and took that--he proclaimed himself a god! he claims that he is to have a heaven of his own hereafter, and that he will be its god, and his wives and children its goddesses, princes and princesses. into it all faithful mormons will be admitted, with their families, and will take rank and consequence according to the number of their wives and children. if a disciple dies before he has had time to accumulate enough wives and children to enable him to be respectable in the next world any friend can marry a few wives and raise a few children for him after he is dead, and they are duly credited to his account and his heavenly status advanced accordingly. let it be borne in mind that the majority of the mormons have always been ignorant, simple, of an inferior order of intellect, unacquainted with the world and its ways; and let it be borne in mind that the wives of these mormons are necessarily after the same pattern and their children likely to be fit representatives of such a conjunction; and then let it be remembered that for forty years these creatures have been driven, driven, driven, relentlessly! and mobbed, beaten, and shot down; cursed, despised, expatriated; banished to a remote desert, whither they journeyed gaunt with famine and disease, disturbing the ancient solitudes with their lamentations and marking the long way with graves of their dead--and all because they were simply trying to live and worship god in the way which they believed with all their hearts and souls to be the true one. let all these things be borne in mind, and then it will not be hard to account for the deathless hatred which the mormons bear our people and our government. that hatred has "fed fat its ancient grudge" ever since mormon utah developed into a self-supporting realm and the church waxed rich and strong. brigham as territorial governor made it plain that mormondom was for the mormons. the united states tried to rectify all that by appointing territorial officers from new england and other anti-mormon localities, but brigham prepared to make their entrance into his dominions difficult. three thousand united states troops had to go across the plains and put these gentlemen in office. and after they were in office they were as helpless as so many stone images. they made laws which nobody minded and which could not be executed. the federal judges opened court in a land filled with crime and violence and sat as holiday spectacles for insolent crowds to gape at--for there was nothing to try, nothing to do nothing on the dockets! and if a gentile brought a suit, the mormon jury would do just as it pleased about bringing in a verdict, and when the judgment of the court was rendered no mormon cared for it and no officer could execute it. our presidents shipped one cargo of officials after another to utah, but the result was always the same--they sat in a blight for awhile they fairly feasted on scowls and insults day by day, they saw every attempt to do their official duties find its reward in darker and darker looks, and in secret threats and warnings of a more and more dismal nature--and at last they either succumbed and became despised tools and toys of the mormons, or got scared and discomforted beyond all endurance and left the territory. if a brave officer kept on courageously till his pluck was proven, some pliant buchanan or pierce would remove him and appoint a stick in his place. in general harney came very near being appointed governor of utah. and so it came very near being harney governor and cradlebaugh judge! --two men who never had any idea of fear further than the sort of murky comprehension of it which they were enabled to gather from the dictionary. simply (if for nothing else) for the variety they would have made in a rather monotonous history of federal servility and helplessness, it is a pity they were not fated to hold office together in utah. up to the date of our visit to utah, such had been the territorial record. the territorial government established there had been a hopeless failure, and brigham young was the only real power in the land. he was an absolute monarch--a monarch who defied our president--a monarch who laughed at our armies when they camped about his capital--a monarch who received without emotion the news that the august congress of the united states had enacted a solemn law against polygamy, and then went forth calmly and married twenty-five or thirty more wives. b. the mountain meadows massacre. the persecutions which the mormons suffered so long--and which they consider they still suffer in not being allowed to govern themselves --they have endeavored and are still endeavoring to repay. the now almost forgotten "mountain meadows massacre" was their work. it was very famous in its day. the whole united states rang with its horrors. a few items will refresh the reader's memory. a great emigrant train from missouri and arkansas passed through salt lake city and a few disaffected mormons joined it for the sake of the strong protection it afforded for their escape. in that matter lay sufficient cause for hot retaliation by the mormon chiefs. besides, these one hundred and forty-five or one hundred and fifty unsuspecting emigrants being in part from arkansas, where a noted mormon missionary had lately been killed, and in part from missouri, a state remembered with execrations as a bitter persecutor of the saints when they were few and poor and friendless, here were substantial additional grounds for lack of love for these wayfarers. and finally, this train was rich, very rich in cattle, horses, mules and other property--and how could the mormons consistently keep up their coveted resemblance to the israelitish tribes and not seize the "spoil" of an enemy when the lord had so manifestly "delivered it into their hand?" wherefore, according to mrs. c. v. waite's entertaining book, "the mormon prophet," it transpired that-- "a 'revelation' from brigham young, as great grand archee or god, was dispatched to president j. c. haight, bishop higbee and j. d. lee (adopted son of brigham), commanding them to raise all the forces they could muster and trust, follow those cursed gentiles (so read the revelation), attack them disguised as indians, and with the arrows of the almighty make a clean sweep of them, and leave none to tell the tale; and if they needed any assistance they were commanded to hire the indians as their allies, promising them a share of the booty. they were to be neither slothful nor negligent in their duty, and to be punctual in sending the teams back to him before winter set in, for this was the mandate of almighty god." the command of the "revelation" was faithfully obeyed. a large party of mormons, painted and tricked out as indians, overtook the train of emigrant wagons some three hundred miles south of salt lake city, and made an attack. but the emigrants threw up earthworks, made fortresses of their wagons and defended themselves gallantly and successfully for five days! your missouri or arkansas gentleman is not much afraid of the sort of scurvy apologies for "indians" which the southern part of utah affords. he would stand up and fight five hundred of them. at the end of the five days the mormons tried military strategy. they retired to the upper end of the "meadows," resumed civilized apparel, washed off their paint, and then, heavily armed, drove down in wagons to the beleaguered emigrants, bearing a flag of truce! when the emigrants saw white men coming they threw down their guns and welcomed them with cheer after cheer! and, all unconscious of the poetry of it, no doubt, they lifted a little child aloft, dressed in white, in answer to the flag of truce! the leaders of the timely white "deliverers" were president haight and bishop john d. lee, of the mormon church. mr. cradlebaugh, who served a term as a federal judge in utah and afterward was sent to congress from nevada, tells in a speech delivered in congress how these leaders next proceeded: "they professed to be on good terms with the indians, and represented them as being very mad. they also proposed to intercede and settle the matter with the indians. after several hours parley they, having (apparently) visited the indians, gave the ultimatum of the savages; which was, that the emigrants should march out of their camp, leaving everything behind them, even their guns. it was promised by the mormon bishops that they would bring a force and guard the emigrants back to the settlements. the terms were agreed to, the emigrants being desirous of saving the lives of their families. the mormons retired, and subsequently appeared with thirty or forty armed men. the emigrants were marched out, the women and children in front and the men behind, the mormon guard being in the rear. when they had marched in this way about a mile, at a given signal the slaughter commenced. the men were almost all shot down at the first fire from the guard. two only escaped, who fled to the desert, and were followed one hundred and fifty miles before they were overtaken and slaughtered. the women and children ran on, two or three hundred yards further, when they were overtaken and with the aid of the indians they were slaughtered. seventeen individuals only, of all the emigrant party, were spared, and they were little children, the eldest of them being only seven years old. thus, on the th day of september, , was consummated one of the most cruel, cowardly and bloody murders known in our history." the number of persons butchered by the mormons on this occasion was one hundred and twenty. with unheard-of temerity judge cradlebaugh opened his court and proceeded to make mormondom answer for the massacre. and what a spectacle it must have been to see this grim veteran, solitary and alone in his pride and his pluck, glowering down on his mormon jury and mormon auditory, deriding them by turns, and by turns "breathing threatenings and slaughter!" an editorial in the territorial enterprise of that day says of him and of the occasion: "he spoke and acted with the fearlessness and resolution of a jackson; but the jury failed to indict, or even report on the charges, while threats of violence were heard in every quarter, and an attack on the u.s. troops intimated, if he persisted in his course. "finding that nothing could be done with the juries, they were discharged with a scathing rebuke from the judge. and then, sitting as a committing magistrate, he commenced his task alone. he examined witnesses, made arrests in every quarter, and created a consternation in the camps of the saints greater than any they had ever witnessed before, since mormondom was born. at last accounts terrified elders and bishops were decamping to save their necks; and developments of the most starling character were being made, implicating the highest church dignitaries in the many murders and robberies committed upon the gentiles during the past eight years." had harney been governor, cradlebaugh would have been supported in his work, and the absolute proofs adduced by him of mormon guilt in this massacre and in a number of previous murders, would have conferred gratuitous coffins upon certain citizens, together with occasion to use them. but cumming was the federal governor, and he, under a curious pretense of impartiality, sought to screen the mormons from the demands of justice. on one occasion he even went so far as to publish his protest against the use of the u.s. troops in aid of cradlebaugh's proceedings. mrs. c. v. waite closes her interesting detail of the great massacre with the following remark and accompanying summary of the testimony--and the summary is concise, accurate and reliable: "for the benefit of those who may still be disposed to doubt the guilt of young and his mormons in this transaction, the testimony is here collated and circumstances given which go not merely to implicate but to fasten conviction upon them by 'confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ:' " . the evidence of mormons themselves, engaged in the affair, as shown by the statements of judge cradlebaugh and deputy u.s. marshall rodgers. " . the failure of brigham young to embody any account of it in his report as superintendent of indian affairs. also his failure to make any allusion to it whatever from the pulpit, until several years after the occurrence " . the flight to the mountains of men high in authority in the mormon church and state, when this affair was brought to the ordeal of a judicial investigation. " . the failure of the deseret news, the church organ, and the only paper then published in the territory, to notice the massacre until several months afterward, and then only to deny that mormons were engaged in it. " . the testimony of the children saved from the massacre. " . the children and the property of the emigrants found in possession of the mormons, and that possession traced back to the very day after the massacre. " . the statements of indians in the neighborhood of the scene of the massacre: these statements are shown, not only by cradlebaugh and rodgers, but by a number of military officers, and by j. forney, who was, in , superintendent of indian affairs for the territory. to all these were such statements freely and frequently made by the indians. " . the testimony of r. p. campbell, capt. d dragoons, who was sent in the spring of to santa clara, to protect travelers on the road to california and to inquire into indian depredations." c. concerning a frightful assassination that was never consummated if ever there was a harmless man, it is conrad wiegand, of gold hill, nevada. if ever there was a gentle spirit that thought itself unfired gunpowder and latent ruin, it is conrad wiegand. if ever there was an oyster that fancied itself a whale; or a jack-o'lantern, confined to a swamp, that fancied itself a planet with a billion-mile orbit; or a summer zephyr that deemed itself a hurricane, it is conrad wiegand. therefore, what wonder is it that when he says a thing, he thinks the world listens; that when he does a thing the world stands still to look; and that when he suffers, there is a convulsion of nature? when i met conrad, he was "superintendent of the gold hill assay office"--and he was not only its superintendent, but its entire force. and he was a street preacher, too, with a mongrel religion of his own invention, whereby he expected to regenerate the universe. this was years ago. here latterly he has entered journalism; and his journalism is what it might be expected to be: colossal to ear, but pigmy to the eye. it is extravagant grandiloquence confined to a newspaper about the size of a double letter sheet. he doubtless edits, sets the type, and prints his paper, all alone; but he delights to speak of the concern as if it occupies a block and employs a thousand men. [something less than two years ago, conrad assailed several people mercilessly in his little "people's tribune," and got himself into trouble. straightway he airs the affair in the "territorial enterprise," in a communication over his own signature, and i propose to reproduce it here, in all its native simplicity and more than human candor. long as it is, it is well worth reading, for it is the richest specimen of journalistic literature the history of america can furnish, perhaps:] from the territorial enterprise, jan. , . seeming plot for assassination miscarried. to the editor of the enterprise: months ago, when mr. sutro incidentally exposed mining management on the comstock, and among others roused me to protest against its continuance, in great kindness you warned me that any attempt by publications, by public meetings and by legislative action, aimed at the correction of chronic mining evils in storey county, must entail upon me (a) business ruin, (b) the burden of all its costs, (c) personal violence, and if my purpose were persisted in, then (d) assassination, and after all nothing would be effected. your prophecy fulfilling. in large part at least your prophecies have been fulfilled, for (a) assaying, which was well attended to in the gold hill assay office (of which i am superintendent), in consequence of my publications, has been taken elsewhere, so the president of one of the companies assures me. with no reason assigned, other work has been taken away. with but one or two important exceptions, our assay business now consists simply of the gleanings of the vicinity. (b) though my own personal donations to the people's tribune association have already exceeded $ , , outside of our own numbers we have received (in money) less than $ as contributions and subscriptions for the journal. (c) on thursday last, on the main street in gold hill, near noon, with neither warning nor cause assigned, by a powerful blow i was felled to the ground, and while down i was kicked by a man who it would seem had been led to believe that i had spoken derogatorily of him. by whom he was so induced to believe i am as yet unable to say. on saturday last i was again assailed and beaten by a man who first informed me why he did so, and who persisted in making his assault even after the erroneous impression under which he also was at first laboring had been clearly and repeatedly pointed out. this same man, after failing through intimidation to elicit from me the names of our editorial contributors, against giving which he knew me to be pledged, beat himself weary upon me with a raw hide, i not resisting, and then pantingly threatened me with permanent disfiguring mayhem, if ever again i should introduce his name into print, and who but a few minutes before his attack upon me assured me that the only reason i was "permitted" to reach home alive on wednesday evening last (at which time the people's tribune was issued) was, that he deems me only half-witted, and be it remembered the very next morning i was knocked down and kicked by a man who seemed to be prepared for flight. [he sees doom impending:] when will the circle join? how long before the whole of your prophecy will be fulfilled i cannot say, but under the shadow of so much fulfillment in so short a time, and with such threats from a man who is one of the most prominent exponents of the san francisco mining-ring staring me and this whole community defiantly in the face and pointing to a completion of your augury, do you blame me for feeling that this communication is the last i shall ever write for the press, especially when a sense alike of personal self-respect, of duty to this money-oppressed and fear-ridden community, and of american fealty to the spirit of true liberty all command me, and each more loudly than love of life itself, to declare the name of that prominent man to be john b. winters, president of the yellow jacket company, a political aspirant and a military general? the name of his partially duped accomplice and abettor in this last marvelous assault, is no other than philip lynch, editor and proprietor of the gold hill news. despite the insult and wrong heaped upon me by john b. winters, on saturday afternoon, only a glimpse of which i shall be able to afford your readers, so much do i deplore clinching (by publicity) a serious mistake of any one, man or woman, committed under natural and not self-wrought passion, in view of his great apparent excitement at the time and in view of the almost perfect privacy of the assault, i am far from sure that i should not have given him space for repentance before exposing him, were it not that he himself has so far exposed the matter as to make it the common talk of the town that he has horsewhipped me. that fact having been made public, all the facts in connection need to be also, or silence on my part would seem more than singular, and with many would be proof either that i was conscious of some unworthy aim in publishing the article, or else that my "non-combatant" principles are but a convenient cloak alike of physical and moral cowardice. i therefore shall try to present a graphic but truthful picture of this whole affair, but shall forbear all comments, presuming that the editors of our own journal, if others do not, will speak freely and fittingly upon this subject in our next number, whether i shall then be dead or living, for my death will not stop, though it may suspend, the publication of the people's tribune. [the "non-combatant" sticks to principle, but takes along a friend or two of a conveniently different stripe:] the trap set. on saturday morning john b. winters sent verbal word to the gold hill assay office that he desired to see me at the yellow jacket office. though such a request struck me as decidedly cool in view of his own recent discourtesies to me there alike as a publisher and as a stockholder in the yellow jacket mine, and though it seemed to me more like a summons than the courteous request by one gentleman to another for a favor, hoping that some conference with sharon looking to the betterment of mining matters in nevada might arise from it, i felt strongly inclined to overlook what possibly was simply an oversight in courtesy. but as then it had only been two days since i had been bruised and beaten under a hasty and false apprehension of facts, my caution was somewhat aroused. moreover i remembered sensitively his contemptuousness of manner to me at my last interview in his office. i therefore felt it needful, if i went at all, to go accompanied by a friend whom he would not dare to treat with incivility, and whose presence with me might secure exemption from insult. accordingly i asked a neighbor to accompany me. the trap almost detected. although i was not then aware of this fact, it would seem that previous to my request this same neighbor had heard dr. zabriskie state publicly in a saloon, that mr. winters had told him he had decided either to kill or to horsewhip me, but had not finally decided on which. my neighbor, therefore, felt unwilling to go down with me until he had first called on mr. winters alone. he therefore paid him a visit. from that interview he assured me that he gathered the impression that he did not believe i would have any difficulty with mr. winters, and that he (winters) would call on me at four o'clock in my own office. my own precautions. as sheriff cummings was in gold hill that afternoon, and as i desired to converse with him about the previous assault, i invited him to my office, and he came. although a half hour had passed beyond four o'clock, mr. winters had not called, and we both of us began preparing to go home. just then, philip lynch, publisher of the gold hill news, came in and said, blandly and cheerily, as if bringing good news: "hello, john b. winters wants to see you." i replied, "indeed! why he sent me word that he would call on me here this afternoon at four o'clock!" "o, well, it don't do to be too ceremonious just now, he's in my office, and that will do as well--come on in, winters wants to consult with you alone. he's got something to say to you." though slightly uneasy at this change of programme, yet believing that in an editor's house i ought to be safe, and anyhow that i would be within hail of the street, i hurriedly, and but partially whispered my dim apprehensions to mr. cummings, and asked him if he would not keep near enough to hear my voice in case i should call. he consented to do so while waiting for some other parties, and to come in if he heard my voice or thought i had need of protection. on reaching the editorial part of the news office, which viewed from the street is dark, i did not see mr. winters, and again my misgivings arose. had i paused long enough to consider the case, i should have invited sheriff cummings in, but as lynch went down stairs, he said: "this way, wiegand--it's best to be private," or some such remark. [i do not desire to strain the reader's fancy, hurtfully, and yet it would be a favor to me if he would try to fancy this lamb in battle, or the duelling ground or at the head of a vigilance committee--m. t.:] i followed, and without mr. cummings, and without arms, which i never do or will carry, unless as a soldier in war, or unless i should yet come to feel i must fight a duel, or to join and aid in the ranks of a necessary vigilance committee. but by following i made a fatal mistake. following was entering a trap, and whatever animal suffers itself to be caught should expect the common fate of a caged rat, as i fear events to come will prove. traps commonly are not set for benevolence. [his body-guard is shut out:] the trap inside. i followed lynch down stairs. at their foot a door to the left opened into a small room. from that room another door opened into yet another room, and once entered i found myself inveigled into what many will ever henceforth regard as a private subterranean gold hill den, admirably adapted in proper hands to the purposes of murder, raw or disguised, for from it, with both or even one door closed, when too late, i saw that i could not be heard by sheriff cummings, and from it, by violence and by force, i was prevented from making a peaceable exit, when i thought i saw the studious object of this "consultation" was no other than to compass my killing, in the presence of philip lynch as a witness, as soon as by insult a proverbially excitable man should be exasperated to the point of assailing mr. winters, so that mr. lynch, by his conscience and by his well known tenderness of heart toward the rich and potent would be compelled to testify that he saw gen. john b. winters kill conrad wiegand in "self-defence." but i am going too fast. our host. mr. lynch was present during the most of the time (say a little short of an hour), but three times he left the room. his testimony, therefore, would be available only as to the bulk of what transpired. on entering this carpeted den i was invited to a seat near one corner of the room. mr. lynch took a seat near the window. j. b. winters sat (at first) near the door, and began his remarks essentially as follows: "i have come here to exact of you a retraction, in black and white, of those damnably false charges which you have preferred against me in that---infamous lying sheet of yours, and you must declare yourself their author, that you published them knowing them to be false, and that your motives were malicious." "hold, mr. winters. your language is insulting and your demand an enormity. i trust i was not invited here either to be insulted or coerced. i supposed myself here by invitation of mr. lynch, at your request." "nor did i come here to insult you. i have already told you that i am here for a very different purpose." "yet your language has been offensive, and even now shows strong excitement. if insult is repeated i shall either leave the room or call in sheriff cummings, whom i just left standing and waiting for me outside the door." "no, you won't, sir. you may just as well understand it at once as not. here you are my man, and i'll tell you why! months ago you put your property out of your hands, boasting that you did so to escape losing it on prosecution for libel." "it is true that i did convert all my immovable property into personal property, such as i could trust safely to others, and chiefly to escape ruin through possible libel suits." "very good, sir. having placed yourself beyond the pale of the law, may god help your soul if you don't make precisely such a retraction as i have demanded. i've got you now, and by--before you can get out of this room you've got to both write and sign precisely the retraction i have demanded, and before you go, anyhow--you---low-lived--lying---, i'll teach you what personal responsibility is outside of the law; and, by--, sheriff cummings and all the friends you've got in the world besides, can't save you, you---, etc.! no, sir. i'm alone now, and i'm prepared to be shot down just here and now rather than be villified by you as i have been, and suffer you to escape me after publishing those charges, not only here where i am known and universally respected, but where i am not personally known and may be injured." i confess this speech, with its terrible and but too plainly implied threat of killing me if i did not sign the paper he demanded, terrified me, especially as i saw he was working himself up to the highest possible pitch of passion, and instinct told me that any reply other than one of seeming concession to his demands would only be fuel to a raging fire, so i replied: "well, if i've got to sign--," and then i paused some time. resuming, i said, "but, mr. winters, you are greatly excited. besides, i see you are laboring under a total misapprehension. it is your duty not to inflame but to calm yourself. i am prepared to show you, if you will only point out the article that you allude to, that you regard as 'charges' what no calm and logical mind has any right to regard as such. show me the charges, and i will try, at all events; and if it becomes plain that no charges have been preferred, then plainly there can be nothing to retract, and no one could rightly urge you to demand a retraction. you should beware of making so serious a mistake, for however honest a man may be, every one is liable to misapprehend. besides you assume that i am the author of some certain article which you have not pointed out. it is hasty to do so." he then pointed to some numbered paragraphs in a tribune article, headed "what's the matter with yellow jacket?" saying "that's what i refer to." to gain time for general reflection and resolution, i took up the paper and looked it over for awhile, he remaining silent, and as i hoped, cooling. i then resumed saying, "as i supposed. i do not admit having written that article, nor have you any right to assume so important a point, and then base important action upon your assumption. you might deeply regret it afterwards. in my published address to the people, i notified the world that no information as to the authorship of any article would be given without the consent of the writer. i therefore cannot honorably tell you who wrote that article, nor can you exact it." "if you are not the author, then i do demand to know who is?" "i must decline to say." "then, by--, i brand you as its author, and shall treat you accordingly." "passing that point, the most important misapprehension which i notice is, that you regard them as 'charges' at all, when their context, both at their beginning and end, show they are not. these words introduce them: 'such an investigation [just before indicated], we think might result in showing some of the following points.' then follow eleven specifications, and the succeeding paragraph shows that the suggested investigation 'might exonerate those who are generally believed guilty.' you see, therefore, the context proves they are not preferred as charges, and this you seem to have overlooked." while making those comments, mr. winters frequently interrupted me in such a way as to convince me that he was resolved not to consider candidly the thoughts contained in my words. he insisted upon it that they were charges, and "by--," he would make me take them back as charges, and he referred the question to philip lynch, to whom i then appealed as a literary man, as a logician, and as an editor, calling his attention especially to the introductory paragraph just before quoted. he replied, "if they are not charges, they certainly are insinuations," whereupon mr. winters renewed his demands for retraction precisely such as he had before named, except that he would allow me to state who did write the article if i did not myself, and this time shaking his fist in my face with more cursings and epithets. when he threatened me with his clenched fist, instinctively i tried to rise from my chair, but winters then forcibly thrust me down, as he did every other time (at least seven or eight), when under similar imminent danger of bruising by his fist (or for aught i could know worse than that after the first stunning blow), which he could easily and safely to himself have dealt me so long as he kept me down and stood over me. this fact it was, which more than anything else, convinced me that by plan and plot i was purposely made powerless in mr. winters' hands, and that he did not mean to allow me that advantage of being afoot, which he possessed. moreover, i then became convinced, that philip lynch (and for what reason i wondered) would do absolutely nothing to protect me in his own house. i realized then the situation thoroughly. i had found it equally vain to protest or argue, and i would make no unmanly appeal for pity, still less apologize. yet my life had been by the plainest possible implication threatened. i was a weak man. i was unarmed. i was helplessly down, and winters was afoot and probably armed. lynch was the only "witness." the statements demanded, if given and not explained, would utterly sink me in my own self-respect, in my family's eyes, and in the eyes of the community. on the other hand, should i give the author's name how could i ever expect that confidence of the people which i should no longer deserve, and how much dearer to me and to my family was my life than the life of the real author to his friends. yet life seemed dear and each minute that remained seemed precious if not solemn. i sincerely trust that neither you nor any of your readers, and especially none with families, may ever be placed in such seeming direct proximity to death while obliged to decide the one question i was compelled to, viz.: what should i do--i, a man of family, and not as mr. winters is, "alone." [the reader is requested not to skip the following.--m. t.:] strategy and mesmerism. to gain time for further reflection, and hoping that by a seeming acquiescence i might regain my personal liberty, at least till i could give an alarm, or take advantage of some momentary inadvertence of winters, and then without a cowardly flight escape, i resolved to write a certain kind of retraction, but previously had inwardly decided: first.--that i would studiously avoid every action which might be construed into the drawing of a weapon, even by a self-infuriated man, no matter what amount of insult might be heaped upon me, for it seemed to me that this great excess of compound profanity, foulness and epithet must be more than a mere indulgence, and therefore must have some object. "surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird." therefore, as before without thought, i thereafter by intent kept my hands away from my pockets, and generally in sight and spread upon my knees. second.--i resolved to make no motion with my arms or hands which could possibly be construed into aggression. third.--i resolved completely to govern my outward manner and suppress indignation. to do this, i must govern my spirit. to do that, by force of imagination i was obliged like actors on the boards to resolve myself into an unnatural mental state and see all things through the eyes of an assumed character. fourth.--i resolved to try on winters, silently, and unconsciously to himself a mesmeric power which i possess over certain kinds of people, and which at times i have found to work even in the dark over the lower animals. does any one smile at these last counts? god save you from ever being obliged to beat in a game of chess, whose stake is your life, you having but four poor pawns and pieces and your adversary with his full force unshorn. but if you are, provided you have any strength with breadth of will, do not despair. though mesmeric power may not save you, it may help you; try it at all events. in this instance i was conscious of power coming into me, and by a law of nature, i know winters was correspondingly weakened. if i could have gained more time i am sure he would not even have struck me. it takes time both to form such resolutions and to recite them. that time, however, i gained while thinking of my retraction, which i first wrote in pencil, altering it from time to time till i got it to suit me, my aim being to make it look like a concession to demands, while in fact it should tersely speak the truth into mr. winters' mind. when it was finished, i copied it in ink, and if correctly copied from my first draft it should read as follows. in copying i do not think i made any material change. copy. to philip lynch, editor of the gold hill news: i learn that gen. john b. winters believes the following (pasted on) clipping from the people's tribune of january to contain distinct charges of mine against him personally, and that as such he desires me to retract them unqualifiedly. in compliance with his request, permit me to say that, although mr. winters and i see this matter differently, in view of his strong feelings in the premises, i hereby declare that i do not know those "charges" (if such they are) to be true, and i hope that a critical examination would altogether disprove them. conrad wiegand. gold hill, january , . i then read what i had written and handed it to mr. lynch, whereupon mr. winters said: "that's not satisfactory, and it won't do;" and then addressing himself to mr. lynch, he further said: "how does it strike you?" "well, i confess i don't see that it retracts anything." "nor do i," said winters; "in fact, i regard it as adding insult to injury. mr. wiegand you've got to do better than that. you are not the man who can pull wool over my eyes." "that, sir, is the only retraction i can write." "no it isn't, sir, and if you so much as say so again you do it at your peril, for i'll thrash you to within an inch of your life, and, by--, sir, i don't pledge myself to spare you even that inch either. i want you to understand i have asked you for a very different paper, and that paper you've got to sign." "mr. winters, i assure you that i do not wish to irritate you, but, at the same time, it is utterly impossible for me to write any other paper than that which i have written. if you are resolved to compel me to sign something, philip lynch's hand must write at your dictation, and if, when written, i can sign it i will do so, but such a document as you say you must have from me, i never can sign. i mean what i say." "well, sir, what's to be done must be done quickly, for i've been here long enough already. i'll put the thing in another shape (and then pointing to the paper); don't you know those charges to be false?" "i do not." "do you know them to be true?" "of my own personal knowledge i do not." "why then did you print them?" "because rightly considered in their connection they are not charges, but pertinent and useful suggestions in answer to the queries of a correspondent who stated facts which are inexplicable." "don't you know that i know they are false?" "if you do, the proper course is simply to deny them and court an investigation." "and do you claim the right to make me come out and deny anything you may choose to write and print?" to that question i think i made no reply, and he then further said: "come, now, we've talked about the matter long enough. i want your final answer--did you write that article or not?" "i cannot in honor tell you who wrote it." "did you not see it before it was printed?" "most certainly, sir." "and did you deem it a fit thing to publish?" "most assuredly, sir, or i would never have consented to its appearance. of its authorship i can say nothing whatever, but for its publication i assume full, sole and personal responsibility." "and do you then retract it or not?" "mr. winters, if my refusal to sign such a paper as you have demanded must entail upon me all that your language in this room fairly implies, then i ask a few minutes for prayer." "prayer!---you, this is not your hour for prayer--your time to pray was when you were writing those--lying charges. will you sign or not?" "you already have my answer." "what! do you still refuse?" "i do, sir." "take that, then," and to my amazement and inexpressible relief he drew only a rawhide instead of what i expected--a bludgeon or pistol. with it, as he spoke, he struck at my left ear downwards, as if to tear it off, and afterwards on the side of the head. as he moved away to get a better chance for a more effective shot, for the first time i gained a chance under peril to rise, and i did so pitying him from the very bottom of my soul, to think that one so naturally capable of true dignity, power and nobility could, by the temptations of this state, and by unfortunate associations and aspirations, be so deeply debased as to find in such brutality anything which he could call satisfaction--but the great hope for us all is in progress and growth, and john b. winters, i trust, will yet be able to comprehend my feelings. he continued to beat me with all his great force, until absolutely weary, exhausted and panting for breath. i still adhered to my purpose of non-aggressive defence, and made no other use of my arms than to defend my head and face from further disfigurement. the mere pain arising from the blows he inflicted upon my person was of course transient, and my clothing to some extent deadened its severity, as it now hides all remaining traces. when i supposed he was through, taking the butt end of his weapon and shaking it in my face, he warned me, if i correctly understood him, of more yet to come, and furthermore said, if ever i again dared introduce his name to print, in either my own or any other public journal, he would cut off my left ear (and i do not think he was jesting) and send me home to my family a visibly mutilated man, to be a standing warning to all low-lived puppies who seek to blackmail gentlemen and to injure their good names. and when he did so operate, he informed me that his implement would not be a whip but a knife. when he had said this, unaccompanied by mr. lynch, as i remember it, he left the room, for i sat down by mr. lynch, exclaiming: "the man is mad --he is utterly mad--this step is his ruin--it is a mistake--it would be ungenerous in me, despite of all the ill usage i have here received, to expose him, at least until he has had an opportunity to reflect upon the matter. i shall be in no haste." "winters is very mad just now," replied mr. lynch, "but when he is himself he is one of the finest men i ever met. in fact, he told me the reason he did not meet you upstairs was to spare you the humiliation of a beating in the sight of others." i submit that that unguarded remark of philip lynch convicts him of having been privy in advance to mr. winters' intentions whatever they may have been, or at least to his meaning to make an assault upon me, but i leave to others to determine how much censure an editor deserves for inveigling a weak, non-combatant man, also a publisher, to a pen of his own to be horsewhipped, if no worse, for the simple printing of what is verbally in the mouth of nine out of ten men, and women too, upon the street. while writing this account two theories have occurred to me as possibly true respecting this most remarkable assault: first--the aim may have been simply to extort from me such admissions as in the hands of money and influence would have sent me to the penitentiary for libel. this, however, seems unlikely, because any statements elicited by fear or force could not be evidence in law or could be so explained as to have no force. the statements wanted so badly must have been desired for some other purpose. second--the other theory has so dark and wilfully murderous a look that i shrink from writing it, yet as in all probability my death at the earliest practicable moment has already been decreed, i feel i should do all i can before my hour arrives, at least to show others how to break up that aristocratic rule and combination which has robbed all nevada of true freedom, if not of manhood itself. although i do not prefer this hypothesis as a "charge," i feel that as an american citizen i still have a right both to think and to speak my thoughts even in the land of sharon and winters, and as much so respecting the theory of a brutal assault (especially when i have been its subject) as respecting any other apparent enormity. i give the matter simply as a suggestion which may explain to the proper authorities and to the people whom they should represent, a well ascertained but notwithstanding a darkly mysterious fact. the scheme of the assault may have been: first--to terrify me by making me conscious of my own helplessness after making actual though not legal threats against my life. second--to imply that i could save my life only by writing or signing certain specific statements which if not subsequently explained would eternally have branded me as infamous and would have consigned my family to shame and want, and to the dreadful compassion and patronage of the rich. third--to blow my brains out the moment i had signed, thereby preventing me from making any subsequent explanation such as could remove the infamy. fourth--philip lynch to be compelled to testify that i was killed by john b. winters in self-defence, for the conviction of winters would bring him in as an accomplice. if that was the programme in john b. winters' mind nothing saved my life but my persistent refusal to sign, when that refusal seemed clearly to me to be the choice of death. the remarkable assertion made to me by mr. winters, that pity only spared my life on wednesday evening last, almost compels me to believe that at first he could not have intended me to leave that room alive; and why i was allowed to, unless through mesmeric or some other invisible influence, i cannot divine. the more i reflect upon this matter, the more probable as true does this horrible interpretation become. the narration of these things i might have spared both to mr. winters and to the public had he himself observed silence, but as he has both verbally spoken and suffered a thoroughly garbled statement of facts to appear in the gold hill news i feel it due to myself no less than to this community, and to the entire independent press of america and great britain, to give a true account of what even the gold hill news has pronounced a disgraceful affair, and which it deeply regrets because of some alleged telegraphic mistake in the account of it. [who received the erroneous telegrams?] though he may not deem it prudent to take my life just now, the publication of this article i feel sure must compel gen. winters (with his peculiar views about his right to exemption from criticism by me) to resolve on my violent death, though it may take years to compass it. notwithstanding i bear him no ill will; and if w. c. ralston and william sharon, and other members of the san francisco mining and milling ring feel that he above all other men in this state and california is the most fitting man to supervise and control yellow jacket matters, until i am able to vote more than half their stock i presume he will be retained to grace his present post. meantime, i cordially invite all who know of any sort of important villainy which only can be cured by exposure (and who would expose it if they felt sure they would not be betrayed under bullying threats), to communicate with the people's tribune; for until i am murdered, so long as i can raise the means to publish, i propose to continue my efforts at least to revive the liberties of the state, to curb oppression, and to benefit man's world and god's earth. conrad wiegand. [it does seem a pity that the sheriff was shut out, since the good sense of a general of militia and of a prominent editor failed to teach them that the merited castigation of this weak, half-witted child was a thing that ought to have been done in the street, where the poor thing could have a chance to run. when a journalist maligns a citizen, or attacks his good name on hearsay evidence, he deserves to be thrashed for it, even if he is a "non-combatant" weakling; but a generous adversary would at least allow such a lamb the use of his legs at such a time.--m. t.] life on the mississippi by mark twain part . chapter reminiscences we left for st. louis in the 'city of baton rouge,' on a delightfully hot day, but with the main purpose of my visit but lamely accomplished. i had hoped to hunt up and talk with a hundred steamboatmen, but got so pleasantly involved in the social life of the town that i got nothing more than mere five-minute talks with a couple of dozen of the craft. i was on the bench of the pilot-house when we backed out and 'straightened up' for the start--the boat pausing for a 'good ready,' in the old-fashioned way, and the black smoke piling out of the chimneys equally in the old-fashioned way. then we began to gather momentum, and presently were fairly under way and booming along. it was all as natural and familiar--and so were the shoreward sights--as if there had been no break in my river life. there was a 'cub,' and i judged that he would take the wheel now; and he did. captain bixby stepped into the pilot- house. presently the cub closed up on the rank of steamships. he made me nervous, for he allowed too much water to show between our boat and the ships. i knew quite well what was going to happen, because i could date back in my own life and inspect the record. the captain looked on, during a silent half-minute, then took the wheel himself, and crowded the boat in, till she went scraping along within a hand-breadth of the ships. it was exactly the favor which he had done me, about a quarter of a century before, in that same spot, the first time i ever steamed out of the port of new orleans. it was a very great and sincere pleasure to me to see the thing repeated--with somebody else as victim. we made natchez (three hundred miles) in twenty-two hours and a half-- much the swiftest passage i have ever made over that piece of water. the next morning i came on with the four o'clock watch, and saw ritchie successfully run half a dozen crossings in a fog, using for his guidance the marked chart devised and patented by bixby and himself. this sufficiently evidenced the great value of the chart. by and by, when the fog began to clear off, i noticed that the reflection of a tree in the smooth water of an overflowed bank, six hundred yards away, was stronger and blacker than the ghostly tree itself. the faint spectral trees, dimly glimpsed through the shredding fog, were very pretty things to see. we had a heavy thunder-storm at natchez, another at vicksburg, and still another about fifty miles below memphis. they had an old-fashioned energy which had long been unfamiliar to me. this third storm was accompanied by a raging wind. we tied up to the bank when we saw the tempest coming, and everybody left the pilot-house but me. the wind bent the young trees down, exposing the pale underside of the leaves; and gust after gust followed, in quick succession, thrashing the branches violently up and down, and to this side and that, and creating swift waves of alternating green and white according to the side of the leaf that was exposed, and these waves raced after each other as do their kind over a wind-tossed field of oats. no color that was visible anywhere was quite natural--all tints were charged with a leaden tinge from the solid cloud-bank overhead. the river was leaden; all distances the same; and even the far-reaching ranks of combing white-caps were dully shaded by the dark, rich atmosphere through which their swarming legions marched. the thunder-peals were constant and deafening; explosion followed explosion with but inconsequential intervals between, and the reports grew steadily sharper and higher-keyed, and more trying to the ear; the lightning was as diligent as the thunder, and produced effects which enchanted the eye and sent electric ecstasies of mixed delight and apprehension shivering along every nerve in the body in unintermittent procession. the rain poured down in amazing volume; the ear-splitting thunder-peals broke nearer and nearer; the wind increased in fury and began to wrench off boughs and tree-tops and send them sailing away through space; the pilot-house fell to rocking and straining and cracking and surging, and i went down in the hold to see what time it was. people boast a good deal about alpine thunderstorms; but the storms which i have had the luck to see in the alps were not the equals of some which i have seen in the mississippi valley. i may not have seen the alps do their best, of course, and if they can beat the mississippi, i don't wish to. on this up trip i saw a little towhead (infant island) half a mile long, which had been formed during the past nineteen years. since there was so much time to spare that nineteen years of it could be devoted to the construction of a mere towhead, where was the use, originally, in rushing this whole globe through in six days? it is likely that if more time had been taken, in the first place, the world would have been made right, and this ceaseless improving and repairing would not be necessary now. but if you hurry a world or a house, you are nearly sure to find out by and by that you have left out a towhead, or a broom-closet, or some other little convenience, here and there, which has got to be supplied, no matter how much expense and vexation it may cost. we had a succession of black nights, going up the river, and it was observable that whenever we landed, and suddenly inundated the trees with the intense sunburst of the electric light, a certain curious effect was always produced: hundreds of birds flocked instantly out from the masses of shining green foliage, and went careering hither and thither through the white rays, and often a song-bird tuned up and fell to singing. we judged that they mistook this superb artificial day for the genuine article. we had a delightful trip in that thoroughly well- ordered steamer, and regretted that it was accomplished so speedily. by means of diligence and activity, we managed to hunt out nearly all the old friends. one was missing, however; he went to his reward, whatever it was, two years ago. but i found out all about him. his case helped me to realize how lasting can be the effect of a very trifling occurrence. when he was an apprentice-blacksmith in our village, and i a schoolboy, a couple of young englishmen came to the town and sojourned a while; and one day they got themselves up in cheap royal finery and did the richard iii swordfight with maniac energy and prodigious powwow, in the presence of the village boys. this blacksmith cub was there, and the histrionic poison entered his bones. this vast, lumbering, ignorant, dull-witted lout was stage-struck, and irrecoverably. he disappeared, and presently turned up in st. louis. i ran across him there, by and by. he was standing musing on a street corner, with his left hand on his hip, the thumb of his right supporting his chin, face bowed and frowning, slouch hat pulled down over his forehead--imagining himself to be othello or some such character, and imagining that the passing crowd marked his tragic bearing and were awestruck. i joined him, and tried to get him down out of the clouds, but did not succeed. however, he casually informed me, presently, that he was a member of the walnut street theater company--and he tried to say it with indifference, but the indifference was thin, and a mighty exultation showed through it. he said he was cast for a part in julius caesar, for that night, and if i should come i would see him. if i should come! i said i wouldn't miss it if i were dead. i went away stupefied with astonishment, and saying to myself, 'how strange it is! we always thought this fellow a fool; yet the moment he comes to a great city, where intelligence and appreciation abound, the talent concealed in this shabby napkin is at once discovered, and promptly welcomed and honored.' but i came away from the theater that night disappointed and offended; for i had had no glimpse of my hero, and his name was not in the bills. i met him on the street the next morning, and before i could speak, he asked-- 'did you see me?' 'no, you weren't there.' he looked surprised and disappointed. he said-- 'yes, i was. indeed i was. i was a roman soldier.' 'which one?' 'why didn't you see them roman soldiers that stood back there in a rank, and sometimes marched in procession around the stage?' 'do you mean the roman army?--those six sandaled roustabouts in nightshirts, with tin shields and helmets, that marched around treading on each other's heels, in charge of a spider-legged consumptive dressed like themselves?' 'that's it! that's it! i was one of them roman soldiers. i was the next to the last one. a half a year ago i used to always be the last one; but i've been promoted.' well, they told me that that poor fellow remained a roman soldier to the last--a matter of thirty-four years. sometimes they cast him for a 'speaking part,' but not an elaborate one. he could be trusted to go and say, 'my lord, the carriage waits,' but if they ventured to add a sentence or two to this, his memory felt the strain and he was likely to miss fire. yet, poor devil, he had been patiently studying the part of hamlet for more than thirty years, and he lived and died in the belief that some day he would be invited to play it! and this is what came of that fleeting visit of those young englishmen to our village such ages and ages ago! what noble horseshoes this man might have made, but for those englishmen; and what an inadequate roman soldier he did make! a day or two after we reached st. louis, i was walking along fourth street when a grizzly-headed man gave a sort of start as he passed me, then stopped, came back, inspected me narrowly, with a clouding brow, and finally said with deep asperity-- 'look here, have you got that drink yet?' a maniac, i judged, at first. but all in a flash i recognized him. i made an effort to blush that strained every muscle in me, and answered as sweetly and winningly as ever i knew how-- 'been a little slow, but am just this minute closing in on the place where they keep it. come in and help.' he softened, and said make it a bottle of champagne and he was agreeable. he said he had seen my name in the papers, and had put all his affairs aside and turned out, resolved to find me or die; and make me answer that question satisfactorily, or kill me; though the most of his late asperity had been rather counterfeit than otherwise. this meeting brought back to me the st. louis riots of about thirty years ago. i spent a week there, at that time, in a boarding-house, and had this young fellow for a neighbor across the hall. we saw some of the fightings and killings; and by and by we went one night to an armory where two hundred young men had met, upon call, to be armed and go forth against the rioters, under command of a military man. we drilled till about ten o'clock at night; then news came that the mob were in great force in the lower end of the town, and were sweeping everything before them. our column moved at once. it was a very hot night, and my musket was very heavy. we marched and marched; and the nearer we approached the seat of war, the hotter i grew and the thirstier i got. i was behind my friend; so, finally, i asked him to hold my musket while i dropped out and got a drink. then i branched off and went home. i was not feeling any solicitude about him of course, because i knew he was so well armed, now, that he could take care of himself without any trouble. if i had had any doubts about that, i would have borrowed another musket for him. i left the city pretty early the next morning, and if this grizzled man had not happened to encounter my name in the papers the other day in st. louis, and felt moved to seek me out, i should have carried to my grave a heart-torturing uncertainty as to whether he ever got out of the riots all right or not. i ought to have inquired, thirty years ago; i know that. and i would have inquired, if i had had the muskets; but, in the circumstances, he seemed better fixed to conduct the investigations than i was. one monday, near the time of our visit to st. louis, the 'globe- democrat' came out with a couple of pages of sunday statistics, whereby it appeared that , st. louis people attended the morning and evening church services the day before, and , children attended sunday-school. thus , persons, out of the city's total of , population, respected the day religious-wise. i found these statistics, in a condensed form, in a telegram of the associated press, and preserved them. they made it apparent that st. louis was in a higher state of grace than she could have claimed to be in my time. but now that i canvass the figures narrowly, i suspect that the telegraph mutilated them. it cannot be that there are more than , catholics in the town; the other , must be classified as protestants. out of these , , according to this questionable telegram, only , attended church and sunday-school, while out of the , catholics, , went to church and sunday-school. chapter a burning brand all at once the thought came into my mind, 'i have not sought out mr. brown.' upon that text i desire to depart from the direct line of my subject, and make a little excursion. i wish to reveal a secret which i have carried with me nine years, and which has become burdensome. upon a certain occasion, nine years ago, i had said, with strong feeling, 'if ever i see st. louis again, i will seek out mr. brown, the great grain merchant, and ask of him the privilege of shaking him by the hand.' the occasion and the circumstances were as follows. a friend of mine, a clergyman, came one evening and said-- 'i have a most remarkable letter here, which i want to read to you, if i can do it without breaking down. i must preface it with some explanations, however. the letter is written by an ex-thief and ex-vagabond of the lowest origin and basest rearing, a man all stained with crime and steeped in ignorance; but, thank god, with a mine of pure gold hidden away in him, as you shall see. his letter is written to a burglar named williams, who is serving a nine-year term in a certain state prison, for burglary. williams was a particularly daring burglar, and plied that trade during a number of years; but he was caught at last and jailed, to await trial in a town where he had broken into a house at night, pistol in hand, and forced the owner to hand over to him $ , in government bonds. williams was not a common sort of person, by any means; he was a graduate of harvard college, and came of good new england stock. his father was a clergyman. while lying in jail, his health began to fail, and he was threatened with consumption. this fact, together with the opportunity for reflection afforded by solitary confinement, had its effect--its natural effect. he fell into serious thought; his early training asserted itself with power, and wrought with strong influence upon his mind and heart. he put his old life behind him, and became an earnest christian. some ladies in the town heard of this, visited him, and by their encouraging words supported him in his good resolutions and strengthened him to continue in his new life. the trial ended in his conviction and sentence to the state prison for the term of nine years, as i have before said. in the prison he became acquainted with the poor wretch referred to in the beginning of my talk, jack hunt, the writer of the letter which i am going to read. you will see that the acquaintanceship bore fruit for hunt. when hunt's time was out, he wandered to st. louis; and from that place he wrote his letter to williams. the letter got no further than the office of the prison warden, of course; prisoners are not often allowed to receive letters from outside. the prison authorities read this letter, but did not destroy it. they had not the heart to do it. they read it to several persons, and eventually it fell into the hands of those ladies of whom i spoke a while ago. the other day i came across an old friend of mine--a clergyman--who had seen this letter, and was full of it. the mere remembrance of it so moved him that he could not talk of it without his voice breaking. he promised to get a copy of it for me; and here it is --an exact copy, with all the imperfections of the original preserved. it has many slang expressions in it--thieves' argot--but their meaning has been interlined, in parentheses, by the prison authorities'-- st. louis, june th . mr. w---- friend charlie if i may call you so: i no you are surprised to get a letter from me, but i hope you won't be mad at my writing to you. i want to tell you my thanks for the way you talked to me when i was in prison--it has led me to try and be a better man; i guess you thought i did not cair for what you said, & at the first go off i didn't, but i noed you was a man who had don big work with good men & want no sucker, nor want gasing & all the boys knod it. i used to think at nite what you said, & for it i nocked off swearing months before my time was up, for i saw it want no good, nohow--the day my time was up you told me if i would shake the cross (quit stealing) & live on the square for months, it would be the best job i ever done in my life. the state agent give me a ticket to here, & on the car i thought more of what you said to me, but didn't make up my mind. when we got to chicago on the cars from there to here, i pulled off an old woman's leather; (robbed her of her pocketbook) i hadn't no more than got it off when i wished i hadn't done it, for awhile before that i made up my mind to be a square bloke, for months on your word, but forgot it when i saw the leather was a grip (easy to get)--but i kept clos to her & when she got out of the cars at a way place i said, marm have you lost anything. & she tumbled (discovered) her leather was off (gone)--is this it says i, giving it to her--well if you aint honest, says she, but i hadn't got cheak enough to stand that sort of talk, so i left her in a hurry. when i got here i had $ and cents left & i didn't get no work for days as i aint strong enough for roust about on a steam bote (for a deck hand)--the afternoon of the rd day i spent my last cts for moons (large, round sea-biscuit) & cheese & i felt pretty rough & was thinking i would have to go on the dipe (picking pockets) again, when i thought of what you once said about a fellows calling on the lord when he was in hard luck, & i thought i would try it once anyhow, but when i tryed it i got stuck on the start, & all i could get off wos, lord give a poor fellow a chance to square it for months for christ's sake, amen; & i kept a thinking, of it over and over as i went along--about an hour after that i was in th st. & this is what happened & is the cause of my being where i am now & about which i will tell you before i get done writing. as i was walking along herd a big noise & saw a horse running away with a carriage with children in it, & i grabed up a peace of box cover from the side walk & run in the middle of the street, & when the horse came up i smashed him over the head as hard as i could drive--the bord split to peces & the horse checked up a little & i grabbed the reigns & pulled his head down until he stopped--the gentleman what owned him came running up & soon as he saw the children were all rite, he shook hands with me and gave me a $ green back, & my asking the lord to help me come into my head, & i was so thunderstruck i couldn't drop the reigns nor say nothing--he saw something was up, & coming back to me said, my boy are you hurt? & the thought come into my head just then to ask him for work; & i asked him to take back the bill and give me a job--says he, jump in here & lets talk about it, but keep the money--he asked me if i could take care of horses & i said yes, for i used to hang round livery stables & often would help clean & drive horses, he told me he wanted a man for that work, & would give me $ a month & bord me. you bet i took that chance at once. that nite in my little room over the stable i sat a long time thinking over my past life & of what had just happened & i just got down on my nees & thanked the lord for the job & to help me to square it, & to bless you for putting me up to it, & the next morning i done it again & got me some new togs (clothes) & a bible for i made up my mind after what the lord had done for me i would read the bible every nite and morning, & ask him to keep an eye on me. when i had been there about a week mr. brown (that's his name) came in my room one nite and saw me reading the bible--he asked me if i was a christian & i told him no--he asked me how it was i read the bible instead of papers & books--well charlie i thought i had better give him a square deal in the start, so i told him all about my being in prison & about you, & how i had almost done give up looking for work & how the lord got me the job when i asked him; & the only way i had to pay him back was to read the bible & square it, & i asked him to give me a chance for months--he talked to me like a father for a long time, & told me i could stay & then i felt better than ever i had done in my life, for i had given mr. brown a fair start with me & now i didn't fear no one giving me a back cap (exposing his past life) & running me off the job--the next morning he called me into the library & gave me another square talk, & advised me to study some every day, & he would help me one or hours every nite, & he gave me a arithmetic, a spelling book, a geography & a writing book, & he hers me every nite--he lets me come into the house to prayers every morning, & got me put in a bible class in the sunday school which i likes very much for it helps me to understand my bible better. now, charlie the months on the square are up months ago, & as you said, it is the best job i ever did in my life, & i commenced another of the same sort right away, only it is to god helping me to last a lifetime charlie--i wrote this letter to tell you i do think god has forgiven my sins & herd your prayers, for you told me you should pray for me--i no i love to read his word & tell him all my troubles & he helps me i know for i have plenty of chances to steal but i don't feel to as i once did & now i take more pleasure in going to church than to the theater & that wasnt so once--our minister and others often talk with me & a month ago they wanted me to join the church, but i said no, not now, i may be mistaken in my feelings, i will wait awhile, but now i feel that god has called me & on the first sunday in july i will join the church--dear friend i wish i could write to you as i feel, but i cant do it yet--you no i learned to read and write while prisons & i aint got well enough along to write as i would talk; i no i aint spelled all the words rite in this & lots of other mistakes but you will excuse it i no, for you no i was brought up in a poor house until i run away, & that i never new who my father and mother was & i dont no my right name, & i hope you wont be mad at me, but i have as much rite to one name as another & i have taken your name, for you wont use it when you get out i no, & you are the man i think most of in the world; so i hope you wont be mad--i am doing well, i put $ a month in bank with $ of the $ -- if you ever want any or all of it let me know, & it is yours. i wish you would let me send you some now. i send you with this a receipt for a year of littles living age, i didn't know what you would like & i told mr. brown & he said he thought you would like it--i wish i was nere you so i could send you chuck (refreshments) on holidays; it would spoil this weather from here, but i will send you a box next thanksgiving any way--next week mr. brown takes me into his store as lite porter & will advance me as soon as i know a little more--he keeps a big granary store, wholesale--i forgot to tell you of my mission school, sunday school class--the school is in the sunday afternoon, i went out two sunday afternoons, and picked up seven kids (little boys) & got them to come in. two of them new as much as i did & i had them put in a class where they could learn something. i dont no much myself, but as these kids cant read i get on nicely with them. i make sure of them by going after them every sunday hour before school time, i also got girls to come. tell mack and harry about me, if they will come out here when their time is up i will get them jobs at once. i hope you will excuse this long letter & all mistakes, i wish i could see you for i cant write as i would talk--i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--i was afraid when you was bleeding you would die--give my respects to all the boys and tell them how i am doing--i am doing well and every one here treats me as kind as they can--mr. brown is going to write to you sometime--i hope some day you will write to me, this letter is from your very true friend c---- w---- who you know as jack hunt. i send you mr. brown's card. send my letter to him. here was true eloquence; irresistible eloquence; and without a single grace or ornament to help it out. i have seldom been so deeply stirred by any piece of writing. the reader of it halted, all the way through, on a lame and broken voice; yet he had tried to fortify his feelings by several private readings of the letter before venturing into company with it. he was practising upon me to see if there was any hope of his being able to read the document to his prayer-meeting with anything like a decent command over his feelings. the result was not promising. however, he determined to risk it; and did. he got through tolerably well; but his audience broke down early, and stayed in that condition to the end. the fame of the letter spread through the town. a brother minister came and borrowed the manuscript, put it bodily into a sermon, preached the sermon to twelve hundred people on a sunday morning, and the letter drowned them in their own tears. then my friend put it into a sermon and went before his sunday morning congregation with it. it scored another triumph. the house wept as one individual. my friend went on summer vacation up into the fishing regions of our northern british neighbors, and carried this sermon with him, since he might possibly chance to need a sermon. he was asked to preach, one day. the little church was full. among the people present were the late dr. j. g. holland, the late mr. seymour of the 'new york times,' mr. page, the philanthropist and temperance advocate, and, i think, senator frye, of maine. the marvelous letter did its wonted work; all the people were moved, all the people wept; the tears flowed in a steady stream down dr. holland's cheeks, and nearly the same can be said with regard to all who were there. mr. page was so full of enthusiasm over the letter that he said he would not rest until he made pilgrimage to that prison, and had speech with the man who had been able to inspire a fellow-unfortunate to write so priceless a tract. ah, that unlucky page!--and another man. if they had only been in jericho, that letter would have rung through the world and stirred all the hearts of all the nations for a thousand years to come, and nobody might ever have found out that it was the confoundedest, brazenest, ingeniousest piece of fraud and humbuggery that was ever concocted to fool poor confiding mortals with! the letter was a pure swindle, and that is the truth. and take it by and large, it was without a compeer among swindles. it was perfect, it was rounded, symmetrical, complete, colossal! the reader learns it at this point; but we didn't learn it till some miles and weeks beyond this stage of the affair. my friend came back from the woods, and he and other clergymen and lay missionaries began once more to inundate audiences with their tears and the tears of said audiences; i begged hard for permission to print the letter in a magazine and tell the watery story of its triumphs; numbers of people got copies of the letter, with permission to circulate them in writing, but not in print; copies were sent to the sandwich islands and other far regions. charles dudley warner was at church, one day, when the worn letter was read and wept over. at the church door, afterward, he dropped a peculiarly cold iceberg down the clergyman's back with the question-- 'do you know that letter to be genuine?' it was the first suspicion that had ever been voiced; but it had that sickening effect which first-uttered suspicions against one's idol always have. some talk followed-- 'why--what should make you suspect that it isn't genuine?' 'nothing that i know of, except that it is too neat, and compact, and fluent, and nicely put together for an ignorant person, an unpractised hand. i think it was done by an educated man.' the literary artist had detected the literary machinery. if you will look at the letter now, you will detect it yourself--it is observable in every line. straightway the clergyman went off, with this seed of suspicion sprouting in him, and wrote to a minister residing in that town where williams had been jailed and converted; asked for light; and also asked if a person in the literary line (meaning me) might be allowed to print the letter and tell its history. he presently received this answer-- rev. ---- ---- my dear friend,--in regard to that 'convict's letter' there can be no doubt as to its genuineness. 'williams,' to whom it was written, lay in our jail and professed to have been converted, and rev. mr. ----, the chaplain, had great faith in the genuineness of the change--as much as one can have in any such case. the letter was sent to one of our ladies, who is a sunday-school teacher,--sent either by williams himself, or the chaplain of the state's prison, probably. she has been greatly annoyed in having so much publicity, lest it might seem a breach of confidence, or be an injury to williams. in regard to its publication, i can give no permission; though if the names and places were omitted, and especially if sent out of the country, i think you might take the responsibility and do it. it is a wonderful letter, which no christian genius, much less one unsanctified, could ever have written. as showing the work of grace in a human heart, and in a very degraded and wicked one, it proves its own origin and reproves our weak faith in its power to cope with any form of wickedness. 'mr. brown' of st. louis, some one said, was a hartford man. do all whom you send from hartford serve their master as well? p.s.--williams is still in the state's prison, serving out a long sentence--of nine years, i think. he has been sick and threatened with consumption, but i have not inquired after him lately. this lady that i speak of corresponds with him, i presume, and will be quite sure to look after him. this letter arrived a few days after it was written--and up went mr. williams's stock again. mr. warner's low-down suspicion was laid in the cold, cold grave, where it apparently belonged. it was a suspicion based upon mere internal evidence, anyway; and when you come to internal evidence, it's a big field and a game that two can play at: as witness this other internal evidence, discovered by the writer of the note above quoted, that 'it is a wonderful letter--which no christian genius, much less one unsanctified, could ever have written.' i had permission now to print--provided i suppressed names and places and sent my narrative out of the country. so i chose an australian magazine for vehicle, as being far enough out of the country, and set myself to work on my article. and the ministers set the pumps going again, with the letter to work the handles. but meantime brother page had been agitating. he had not visited the penitentiary, but he had sent a copy of the illustrious letter to the chaplain of that institution, and accompanied it with--apparently inquiries. he got an answer, dated four days later than that other brother's reassuring epistle; and before my article was complete, it wandered into my hands. the original is before me, now, and i here append it. it is pretty well loaded with internal evidence of the most solid description-- state's prison, chaplain's office, july , . dear bro. page,--herewith please find the letter kindly loaned me. i am afraid its genuineness cannot be established. it purports to be addressed to some prisoner here. no such letter ever came to a prisoner here. all letters received are carefully read by officers of the prison before they go into the hands of the convicts, and any such letter could not be forgotten. again, charles williams is not a christian man, but a dissolute, cunning prodigal, whose father is a minister of the gospel. his name is an assumed one. i am glad to have made your acquaintance. i am preparing a lecture upon life seen through prison bars, and should like to deliver the same in your vicinity. and so ended that little drama. my poor article went into the fire; for whereas the materials for it were now more abundant and infinitely richer than they had previously been, there were parties all around me, who, although longing for the publication before, were a unit for suppression at this stage and complexion of the game. they said: 'wait --the wound is too fresh, yet.' all the copies of the famous letter except mine disappeared suddenly; and from that time onward, the aforetime same old drought set in in the churches. as a rule, the town was on a spacious grin for a while, but there were places in it where the grin did not appear, and where it was dangerous to refer to the ex-convict's letter. a word of explanation. 'jack hunt,' the professed writer of the letter, was an imaginary person. the burglar williams--harvard graduate, son of a minister--wrote the letter himself, to himself: got it smuggled out of the prison; got it conveyed to persons who had supported and encouraged him in his conversion--where he knew two things would happen: the genuineness of the letter would not be doubted or inquired into; and the nub of it would be noticed, and would have valuable effect--the effect, indeed, of starting a movement to get mr. williams pardoned out of prison. that 'nub' is so ingeniously, so casually, flung in, and immediately left there in the tail of the letter, undwelt upon, that an indifferent reader would never suspect that it was the heart and core of the epistle, if he even took note of it at all, this is the 'nub'-- 'i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--i was afraid when you was bleeding you would die--give my respects,' etc. that is all there is of it--simply touch and go--no dwelling upon it. nevertheless it was intended for an eye that would be swift to see it; and it was meant to move a kind heart to try to effect the liberation of a poor reformed and purified fellow lying in the fell grip of consumption. when i for the first time heard that letter read, nine years ago, i felt that it was the most remarkable one i had ever encountered. and it so warmed me toward mr. brown of st. louis that i said that if ever i visited that city again, i would seek out that excellent man and kiss the hem of his garment if it was a new one. well, i visited st. louis, but i did not hunt for mr. brown; for, alas! the investigations of long ago had proved that the benevolent brown, like 'jack hunt,' was not a real person, but a sheer invention of that gifted rascal, williams-- burglar, harvard graduate, son of a clergyman. chapter my boyhood's home we took passage in one of the fast boats of the st. louis and st. paul packet company, and started up the river. when i, as a boy, first saw the mouth of the missouri river, it was twenty-two or twenty-three miles above st. louis, according to the estimate of pilots; the wear and tear of the banks have moved it down eight miles since then; and the pilots say that within five years the river will cut through and move the mouth down five miles more, which will bring it within ten miles of st. louis. about nightfall we passed the large and flourishing town of alton, illinois; and before daylight next morning the town of louisiana, missouri, a sleepy village in my day, but a brisk railway center now; however, all the towns out there are railway centers now. i could not clearly recognize the place. this seemed odd to me, for when i retired from the rebel army in ' i retired upon louisiana in good order; at least in good enough order for a person who had not yet learned how to retreat according to the rules of war, and had to trust to native genius. it seemed to me that for a first attempt at a retreat it was not badly done. i had done no advancing in all that campaign that was at all equal to it. there was a railway bridge across the river here well sprinkled with glowing lights, and a very beautiful sight it was. at seven in the morning we reached hannibal, missouri, where my boyhood was spent. i had had a glimpse of it fifteen years ago, and another glimpse six years earlier, but both were so brief that they hardly counted. the only notion of the town that remained in my mind was the memory of it as i had known it when i first quitted it twenty-nine years ago. that picture of it was still as clear and vivid to me as a photograph. i stepped ashore with the feeling of one who returns out of a dead-and-gone generation. i had a sort of realizing sense of what the bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out and look upon paris after years of captivity, and note how curiously the familiar and the strange were mixed together before them. i saw the new houses-- saw them plainly enough--but they did not affect the older picture in my mind, for through their solid bricks and mortar i saw the vanished houses, which had formerly stood there, with perfect distinctness. it was sunday morning, and everybody was abed yet. so i passed through the vacant streets, still seeing the town as it was, and not as it is, and recognizing and metaphorically shaking hands with a hundred familiar objects which no longer exist; and finally climbed holiday's hill to get a comprehensive view. the whole town lay spread out below me then, and i could mark and fix every locality, every detail. naturally, i was a good deal moved. i said, 'many of the people i once knew in this tranquil refuge of my childhood are now in heaven; some, i trust, are in the other place.' the things about me and before me made me feel like a boy again--convinced me that i was a boy again, and that i had simply been dreaming an unusually long dream; but my reflections spoiled all that; for they forced me to say, 'i see fifty old houses down yonder, into each of which i could enter and find either a man or a woman who was a baby or unborn when i noticed those houses last, or a grandmother who was a plump young bride at that time.' from this vantage ground the extensive view up and down the river, and wide over the wooded expanses of illinois, is very beautiful--one of the most beautiful on the mississippi, i think; which is a hazardous remark to make, for the eight hundred miles of river between st. louis and st. paul afford an unbroken succession of lovely pictures. it may be that my affection for the one in question biases my judgment in its favor; i cannot say as to that. no matter, it was satisfyingly beautiful to me, and it had this advantage over all the other friends whom i was about to greet again: it had suffered no change; it was as young and fresh and comely and gracious as ever it had been; whereas, the faces of the others would be old, and scarred with the campaigns of life, and marked with their griefs and defeats, and would give me no upliftings of spirit. an old gentleman, out on an early morning walk, came along, and we discussed the weather, and then drifted into other matters. i could not remember his face. he said he had been living here twenty-eight years. so he had come after my time, and i had never seen him before. i asked him various questions; first about a mate of mine in sunday school--what became of him? 'he graduated with honor in an eastern college, wandered off into the world somewhere, succeeded at nothing, passed out of knowledge and memory years ago, and is supposed to have gone to the dogs.' 'he was bright, and promised well when he was a boy.' 'yes, but the thing that happened is what became of it all.' i asked after another lad, altogether the brightest in our village school when i was a boy. 'he, too, was graduated with honors, from an eastern college; but life whipped him in every battle, straight along, and he died in one of the territories, years ago, a defeated man.' i asked after another of the bright boys. 'he is a success, always has been, always will be, i think.' i inquired after a young fellow who came to the town to study for one of the professions when i was a boy. 'he went at something else before he got through--went from medicine to law, or from law to medicine--then to some other new thing; went away for a year, came back with a young wife; fell to drinking, then to gambling behind the door; finally took his wife and two young children to her father's, and went off to mexico; went from bad to worse, and finally died there, without a cent to buy a shroud, and without a friend to attend the funeral.' 'pity, for he was the best-natured, and most cheery and hopeful young fellow that ever was.' i named another boy. 'oh, he is all right. lives here yet; has a wife and children, and is prospering.' same verdict concerning other boys. i named three school-girls. 'the first two live here, are married and have children; the other is long ago dead--never married.' i named, with emotion, one of my early sweethearts. 'she is all right. been married three times; buried two husbands, divorced from the third, and i hear she is getting ready to marry an old fellow out in colorado somewhere. she's got children scattered around here and there, most everywheres.' the answer to several other inquiries was brief and simple-- 'killed in the war.' i named another boy. 'well, now, his case is curious! there wasn't a human being in this town but knew that that boy was a perfect chucklehead; perfect dummy; just a stupid ass, as you may say. everybody knew it, and everybody said it. well, if that very boy isn't the first lawyer in the state of missouri to-day, i'm a democrat!' 'is that so?' 'it's actually so. i'm telling you the truth.' 'how do you account for it?' 'account for it? there ain't any accounting for it, except that if you send a damned fool to st. louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned fool they'll never find it out. there's one thing sure--if i had a damned fool i should know what to do with him: ship him to st. louis-- it's the noblest market in the world for that kind of property. well, when you come to look at it all around, and chew at it and think it over, don't it just bang anything you ever heard of?' 'well, yes, it does seem to. but don't you think maybe it was the hannibal people who were mistaken about the boy, and not the st. louis people' 'oh, nonsense! the people here have known him from the very cradle-- they knew him a hundred times better than the st. louis idiots could have known him. no, if you have got any damned fools that you want to realize on, take my advice--send them to st. louis.' i mentioned a great number of people whom i had formerly known. some were dead, some were gone away, some had prospered, some had come to naught; but as regarded a dozen or so of the lot, the answer was comforting: 'prosperous--live here yet--town littered with their children.' i asked about miss ----. died in the insane asylum three or four years ago--never was out of it from the time she went in; and was always suffering, too; never got a shred of her mind back.' if he spoke the truth, here was a heavy tragedy, indeed. thirty-six years in a madhouse, that some young fools might have some fun! i was a small boy, at the time; and i saw those giddy young ladies come tiptoeing into the room where miss ---- sat reading at midnight by a lamp. the girl at the head of the file wore a shroud and a doughface, she crept behind the victim, touched her on the shoulder, and she looked up and screamed, and then fell into convulsions. she did not recover from the fright, but went mad. in these days it seems incredible that people believed in ghosts so short a time ago. but they did. after asking after such other folk as i could call to mind, i finally inquired about myself: 'oh, he succeeded well enough--another case of damned fool. if they'd sent him to st. louis, he'd have succeeded sooner.' it was with much satisfaction that i recognized the wisdom of having told this candid gentleman, in the beginning, that my name was smith. chapter past and present being left to myself, up there, i went on picking out old houses in the distant town, and calling back their former inmates out of the moldy past. among them i presently recognized the house of the father of lem hackett (fictitious name). it carried me back more than a generation in a moment, and landed me in the midst of a time when the happenings of life were not the natural and logical results of great general laws, but of special orders, and were freighted with very precise and distinct purposes--partly punitive in intent, partly admonitory; and usually local in application. when i was a small boy, lem hackett was drowned--on a sunday. he fell out of an empty flat-boat, where he was playing. being loaded with sin, he went to the bottom like an anvil. he was the only boy in the village who slept that night. we others all lay awake, repenting. we had not needed the information, delivered from the pulpit that evening, that lem's was a case of special judgment--we knew that, already. there was a ferocious thunder-storm, that night, and it raged continuously until near dawn. the winds blew, the windows rattled, the rain swept along the roof in pelting sheets, and at the briefest of intervals the inky blackness of the night vanished, the houses over the way glared out white and blinding for a quivering instant, then the solid darkness shut down again and a splitting peal of thunder followed, which seemed to rend everything in the neighborhood to shreds and splinters. i sat up in bed quaking and shuddering, waiting for the destruction of the world, and expecting it. to me there was nothing strange or incongruous in heaven's making such an uproar about lem hackett. apparently it was the right and proper thing to do. not a doubt entered my mind that all the angels were grouped together, discussing this boy's case and observing the awful bombardment of our beggarly little village with satisfaction and approval. there was one thing which disturbed me in the most serious way; that was the thought that this centering of the celestial interest on our village could not fail to attract the attention of the observers to people among us who might otherwise have escaped notice for years. i felt that i was not only one of those people, but the very one most likely to be discovered. that discovery could have but one result: i should be in the fire with lem before the chill of the river had been fairly warmed out of him. i knew that this would be only just and fair. i was increasing the chances against myself all the time, by feeling a secret bitterness against lem for having attracted this fatal attention to me, but i could not help it--this sinful thought persisted in infesting my breast in spite of me. every time the lightning glared i caught my breath, and judged i was gone. in my terror and misery, i meanly began to suggest other boys, and mention acts of theirs which were wickeder than mine, and peculiarly needed punishment--and i tried to pretend to myself that i was simply doing this in a casual way, and without intent to divert the heavenly attention to them for the purpose of getting rid of it myself. with deep sagacity i put these mentions into the form of sorrowing recollections and left-handed sham- supplications that the sins of those boys might be allowed to pass unnoticed--'possibly they may repent.' 'it is true that jim smith broke a window and lied about it--but maybe he did not mean any harm. and although tom holmes says more bad words than any other boy in the village, he probably intends to repent--though he has never said he would. and whilst it is a fact that john jones did fish a little on sunday, once, he didn't really catch anything but only just one small useless mud-cat; and maybe that wouldn't have been so awful if he had thrown it back--as he says he did, but he didn't. pity but they would repent of these dreadful things--and maybe they will yet.' but while i was shamefully trying to draw attention to these poor chaps --who were doubtless directing the celestial attention to me at the same moment, though i never once suspected that--i had heedlessly left my candle burning. it was not a time to neglect even trifling precautions. there was no occasion to add anything to the facilities for attracting notice to me--so i put the light out. it was a long night to me, and perhaps the most distressful one i ever spent. i endured agonies of remorse for sins which i knew i had committed, and for others which i was not certain about, yet was sure that they had been set down against me in a book by an angel who was wiser than i and did not trust such important matters to memory. it struck me, by and by, that i had been making a most foolish and calamitous mistake, in one respect: doubtless i had not only made my own destruction sure by directing attention to those other boys, but had already accomplished theirs!--doubtless the lightning had stretched them all dead in their beds by this time! the anguish and the fright which this thought gave me made my previous sufferings seem trifling by comparison. things had become truly serious. i resolved to turn over a new leaf instantly; i also resolved to connect myself with the church the next day, if i survived to see its sun appear. i resolved to cease from sin in all its forms, and to lead a high and blameless life for ever after. i would be punctual at church and sunday-school; visit the sick; carry baskets of victuals to the poor (simply to fulfil the regulation conditions, although i knew we had none among us so poor but they would smash the basket over my head for my pains); i would instruct other boys in right ways, and take the resulting trouncings meekly; i would subsist entirely on tracts; i would invade the rum shop and warn the drunkard-- and finally, if i escaped the fate of those who early become too good to live, i would go for a missionary. the storm subsided toward daybreak, and i dozed gradually to sleep with a sense of obligation to lem hackett for going to eternal suffering in that abrupt way, and thus preventing a far more dreadful disaster--my own loss. but when i rose refreshed, by and by, and found that those other boys were still alive, i had a dim sense that perhaps the whole thing was a false alarm; that the entire turmoil had been on lem's account and nobody's else. the world looked so bright and safe that there did not seem to be any real occasion to turn over a new leaf. i was a little subdued, during that day, and perhaps the next; after that, my purpose of reforming slowly dropped out of my mind, and i had a peaceful, comfortable time again, until the next storm. that storm came about three weeks later; and it was the most unaccountable one, to me, that i had ever experienced; for on the afternoon of that day, 'dutchy' was drowned. dutchy belonged to our sunday-school. he was a german lad who did not know enough to come in out of the rain; but he was exasperatingly good, and had a prodigious memory. one sunday he made himself the envy of all the youth and the talk of all the admiring village, by reciting three thousand verses of scripture without missing a word; then he went off the very next day and got drowned. circumstances gave to his death a peculiar impressiveness. we were all bathing in a muddy creek which had a deep hole in it, and in this hole the coopers had sunk a pile of green hickory hoop poles to soak, some twelve feet under water. we were diving and 'seeing who could stay under longest.' we managed to remain down by holding on to the hoop poles. dutchy made such a poor success of it that he was hailed with laughter and derision every time his head appeared above water. at last he seemed hurt with the taunts, and begged us to stand still on the bank and be fair with him and give him an honest count--'be friendly and kind just this once, and not miscount for the sake of having the fun of laughing at him.' treacherous winks were exchanged, and all said 'all right, dutchy--go ahead, we'll play fair.' dutchy plunged in, but the boys, instead of beginning to count, followed the lead of one of their number and scampered to a range of blackberry bushes close by and hid behind it. they imagined dutchy's humiliation, when he should rise after a superhuman effort and find the place silent and vacant, nobody there to applaud. they were 'so full of laugh' with the idea, that they were continually exploding into muffled cackles. time swept on, and presently one who was peeping through the briers, said, with surprise-- 'why, he hasn't come up, yet!' the laughing stopped. 'boys, it 's a splendid dive,' said one. 'never mind that,' said another, 'the joke on him is all the better for it.' there was a remark or two more, and then a pause. talking ceased, and all began to peer through the vines. before long, the boys' faces began to look uneasy, then anxious, then terrified. still there was no movement of the placid water. hearts began to beat fast, and faces to turn pale. we all glided out, silently, and stood on the bank, our horrified eyes wandering back and forth from each other's countenances to the water. 'somebody must go down and see!' yes, that was plain; but nobody wanted that grisly task. 'draw straws!' so we did--with hands which shook so, that we hardly knew what we were about. the lot fell to me, and i went down. the water was so muddy i could not see anything, but i felt around among the hoop poles, and presently grasped a limp wrist which gave me no response--and if it had i should not have known it, i let it go with such a frightened suddenness. the boy had been caught among the hoop poles and entangled there, helplessly. i fled to the surface and told the awful news. some of us knew that if the boy were dragged out at once he might possibly be resuscitated, but we never thought of that. we did not think of anything; we did not know what to do, so we did nothing--except that the smaller lads cried, piteously, and we all struggled frantically into our clothes, putting on anybody's that came handy, and getting them wrong- side-out and upside-down, as a rule. then we scurried away and gave the alarm, but none of us went back to see the end of the tragedy. we had a more important thing to attend to: we all flew home, and lost not a moment in getting ready to lead a better life. the night presently closed down. then came on that tremendous and utterly unaccountable storm. i was perfectly dazed; i could not understand it. it seemed to me that there must be some mistake. the elements were turned loose, and they rattled and banged and blazed away in the most blind and frantic manner. all heart and hope went out of me, and the dismal thought kept floating through my brain, 'if a boy who knows three thousand verses by heart is not satisfactory, what chance is there for anybody else?' of course i never questioned for a moment that the storm was on dutchy's account, or that he or any other inconsequential animal was worthy of such a majestic demonstration from on high; the lesson of it was the only thing that troubled me; for it convinced me that if dutchy, with all his perfections, was not a delight, it would be vain for me to turn over a new leaf, for i must infallibly fall hopelessly short of that boy, no matter how hard i might try. nevertheless i did turn it over--a highly educated fear compelled me to do that--but succeeding days of cheerfulness and sunshine came bothering around, and within a month i had so drifted backward that again i was as lost and comfortable as ever. breakfast time approached while i mused these musings and called these ancient happenings back to mind; so i got me back into the present and went down the hill. on my way through town to the hotel, i saw the house which was my home when i was a boy. at present rates, the people who now occupy it are of no more value than i am; but in my time they would have been worth not less than five hundred dollars apiece. they are colored folk. after breakfast, i went out alone again, intending to hunt up some of the sunday-schools and see how this generation of pupils might compare with their progenitors who had sat with me in those places and had probably taken me as a model--though i do not remember as to that now. by the public square there had been in my day a shabby little brick church called the 'old ship of zion,' which i had attended as a sunday- school scholar; and i found the locality easily enough, but not the old church; it was gone, and a trig and rather hilarious new edifice was in its place. the pupils were better dressed and better looking than were those of my time; consequently they did not resemble their ancestors; and consequently there was nothing familiar to me in their faces. still, i contemplated them with a deep interest and a yearning wistfulness, and if i had been a girl i would have cried; for they were the offspring, and represented, and occupied the places, of boys and girls some of whom i had loved to love, and some of whom i had loved to hate, but all of whom were dear to me for the one reason or the other, so many years gone by--and, lord, where be they now! i was mightily stirred, and would have been grateful to be allowed to remain unmolested and look my fill; but a bald-summited superintendent who had been a tow-headed sunday-school mate of mine on that spot in the early ages, recognized me, and i talked a flutter of wild nonsense to those children to hide the thoughts which were in me, and which could not have been spoken without a betrayal of feeling that would have been recognized as out of character with me. making speeches without preparation is no gift of mine; and i was resolved to shirk any new opportunity, but in the next and larger sunday-school i found myself in the rear of the assemblage; so i was very willing to go on the platform a moment for the sake of getting a good look at the scholars. on the spur of the moment i could not recall any of the old idiotic talks which visitors used to insult me with when i was a pupil there; and i was sorry for this, since it would have given me time and excuse to dawdle there and take a long and satisfying look at what i feel at liberty to say was an array of fresh young comeliness not matchable in another sunday-school of the same size. as i talked merely to get a chance to inspect; and as i strung out the random rubbish solely to prolong the inspection, i judged it but decent to confess these low motives, and i did so. if the model boy was in either of these sunday-schools, i did not see him. the model boy of my time--we never had but the one--was perfect: perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie. this fellow's reproachlessness was a standing reproach to every lad in the village. he was the admiration of all the mothers, and the detestation of all their sons. i was told what became of him, but as it was a disappointment to me, i will not enter into details. he succeeded in life. chapter a vendetta and other things during my three days' stay in the town, i woke up every morning with the impression that i was a boy--for in my dreams the faces were all young again, and looked as they had looked in the old times--but i went to bed a hundred years old, every night--for meantime i had been seeing those faces as they are now. of course i suffered some surprises, along at first, before i had become adjusted to the changed state of things. i met young ladies who did not seem to have changed at all; but they turned out to be the daughters of the young ladies i had in mind--sometimes their grand-daughters. when you are told that a stranger of fifty is a grandmother, there is nothing surprising about it; but if, on the contrary, she is a person whom you knew as a little girl, it seems impossible. you say to yourself, 'how can a little girl be a grandmother.' it takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still, in that matter. i noticed that the greatest changes observable were with the women, not the men. i saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. these were good women; it is very wearing to be good. there was a saddler whom i wished to see; but he was gone. dead, these many years, they said. once or twice a day, the saddler used to go tearing down the street, putting on his coat as he went; and then everybody knew a steamboat was coming. everybody knew, also, that john stavely was not expecting anybody by the boat--or any freight, either; and stavely must have known that everybody knew this, still it made no difference to him; he liked to seem to himself to be expecting a hundred thousand tons of saddles by this boat, and so he went on all his life, enjoying being faithfully on hand to receive and receipt for those saddles, in case by any miracle they should come. a malicious quincy paper used always to refer to this town, in derision as 'stavely's landing.' stavely was one of my earliest admirations; i envied him his rush of imaginary business, and the display he was able to make of it, before strangers, as he went flying down the street struggling with his fluttering coat. but there was a carpenter who was my chiefest hero. he was a mighty liar, but i did not know that; i believed everything he said. he was a romantic, sentimental, melodramatic fraud, and his bearing impressed me with awe. i vividly remember the first time he took me into his confidence. he was planing a board, and every now and then he would pause and heave a deep sigh; and occasionally mutter broken sentences-- confused and not intelligible--but out of their midst an ejaculation sometimes escaped which made me shiver and did me good: one was, 'o god, it is his blood!' i sat on the tool-chest and humbly and shudderingly admired him; for i judged he was full of crime. at last he said in a low voice-- 'my little friend, can you keep a secret?' i eagerly said i could. 'a dark and dreadful one?' i satisfied him on that point. 'then i will tell you some passages in my history; for oh, i must relieve my burdened soul, or i shall die!' he cautioned me once more to be 'as silent as the grave;' then he told me he was a 'red-handed murderer.' he put down his plane, held his hands out before him, contemplated them sadly, and said-- 'look--with these hands i have taken the lives of thirty human beings!' the effect which this had upon me was an inspiration to him, and he turned himself loose upon his subject with interest and energy. he left generalizing, and went into details,--began with his first murder; described it, told what measures he had taken to avert suspicion; then passed to his second homicide, his third, his fourth, and so on. he had always done his murders with a bowie-knife, and he made all my hairs rise by suddenly snatching it out and showing it to me. at the end of this first seance i went home with six of his fearful secrets among my freightage, and found them a great help to my dreams, which had been sluggish for a while back. i sought him again and again, on my saturday holidays; in fact i spent the summer with him--all of it which was valuable to me. his fascinations never diminished, for he threw something fresh and stirring, in the way of horror, into each successive murder. he always gave names, dates, places--everything. this by and by enabled me to note two things: that he had killed his victims in every quarter of the globe, and that these victims were always named lynch. the destruction of the lynches went serenely on, saturday after saturday, until the original thirty had multiplied to sixty--and more to be heard from yet; then my curiosity got the better of my timidity, and i asked how it happened that these justly punished persons all bore the same name. my hero said he had never divulged that dark secret to any living being; but felt that he could trust me, and therefore he would lay bare before me the story of his sad and blighted life. he had loved one 'too fair for earth,' and she had reciprocated 'with all the sweet affection of her pure and noble nature.' but he had a rival, a 'base hireling' named archibald lynch, who said the girl should be his, or he would 'dye his hands in her heart's best blood.' the carpenter, 'innocent and happy in love's young dream,' gave no weight to the threat, but led his 'golden- haired darling to the altar,' and there, the two were made one; there also, just as the minister's hands were stretched in blessing over their heads, the fell deed was done--with a knife--and the bride fell a corpse at her husband's feet. and what did the husband do? he plucked forth that knife, and kneeling by the body of his lost one, swore to 'consecrate his life to the extermination of all the human scum that bear the hated name of lynch.' that was it. he had been hunting down the lynches and slaughtering them, from that day to this--twenty years. he had always used that same consecrated knife; with it he had murdered his long array of lynches, and with it he had left upon the forehead of each victim a peculiar mark--a cross, deeply incised. said he-- 'the cross of the mysterious avenger is known in europe, in america, in china, in siam, in the tropics, in the polar seas, in the deserts of asia, in all the earth. wherever in the uttermost parts of the globe, a lynch has penetrated, there has the mysterious cross been seen, and those who have seen it have shuddered and said, "it is his mark, he has been here." you have heard of the mysterious avenger--look upon him, for before you stands no less a person! but beware--breathe not a word to any soul. be silent, and wait. some morning this town will flock aghast to view a gory corpse; on its brow will be seen the awful sign, and men will tremble and whisper, "he has been here--it is the mysterious avenger's mark!" you will come here, but i shall have vanished; you will see me no more.' this ass had been reading the 'jibbenainosay,' no doubt, and had had his poor romantic head turned by it; but as i had not yet seen the book then, i took his inventions for truth, and did not suspect that he was a plagiarist. however, we had a lynch living in the town; and the more i reflected upon his impending doom, the more i could not sleep. it seemed my plain duty to save him, and a still plainer and more important duty to get some sleep for myself, so at last i ventured to go to mr. lynch and tell him what was about to happen to him--under strict secrecy. i advised him to 'fly,' and certainly expected him to do it. but he laughed at me; and he did not stop there; he led me down to the carpenter's shop, gave the carpenter a jeering and scornful lecture upon his silly pretensions, slapped his face, made him get down on his knees and beg--then went off and left me to contemplate the cheap and pitiful ruin of what, in my eyes, had so lately been a majestic and incomparable hero. the carpenter blustered, flourished his knife, and doomed this lynch in his usual volcanic style, the size of his fateful words undiminished; but it was all wasted upon me; he was a hero to me no longer, but only a poor, foolish, exposed humbug. i was ashamed of him, and ashamed of myself; i took no further interest in him, and never went to his shop any more. he was a heavy loss to me, for he was the greatest hero i had ever known. the fellow must have had some talent; for some of his imaginary murders were so vividly and dramatically described that i remember all their details yet. the people of hannibal are not more changed than is the town. it is no longer a village; it is a city, with a mayor, and a council, and water- works, and probably a debt. it has fifteen thousand people, is a thriving and energetic place, and is paved like the rest of the west and south--where a well-paved street and a good sidewalk are things so seldom seen, that one doubts them when he does see them. the customary half-dozen railways center in hannibal now, and there is a new depot which cost a hundred thousand dollars. in my time the town had no specialty, and no commercial grandeur; the daily packet usually landed a passenger and bought a catfish, and took away another passenger and a hatful of freight; but now a huge commerce in lumber has grown up and a large miscellaneous commerce is one of the results. a deal of money changes hands there now. bear creek--so called, perhaps, because it was always so particularly bare of bears--is hidden out of sight now, under islands and continents of piled lumber, and nobody but an expert can find it. i used to get drowned in it every summer regularly, and be drained out, and inflated and set going again by some chance enemy; but not enough of it is unoccupied now to drown a person in. it was a famous breeder of chills and fever in its day. i remember one summer when everybody in town had this disease at once. many chimneys were shaken down, and all the houses were so racked that the town had to be rebuilt. the chasm or gorge between lover's leap and the hill west of it is supposed by scientists to have been caused by glacial action. this is a mistake. there is an interesting cave a mile or two below hannibal, among the bluffs. i would have liked to revisit it, but had not time. in my time the person who then owned it turned it into a mausoleum for his daughter, aged fourteen. the body of this poor child was put into a copper cylinder filled with alcohol, and this was suspended in one of the dismal avenues of the cave. the top of the cylinder was removable; and it was said to be a common thing for the baser order of tourists to drag the dead face into view and examine it and comment upon it. life on the mississippi by mark twain part . chapter a cub-pilot's experience what with lying on the rocks four days at louisville, and some other delays, the poor old 'paul jones' fooled away about two weeks in making the voyage from cincinnati to new orleans. this gave me a chance to get acquainted with one of the pilots, and he taught me how to steer the boat, and thus made the fascination of river life more potent than ever for me. it also gave me a chance to get acquainted with a youth who had taken deck passage--more's the pity; for he easily borrowed six dollars of me on a promise to return to the boat and pay it back to me the day after we should arrive. but he probably died or forgot, for he never came. it was doubtless the former, since he had said his parents were wealthy, and he only traveled deck passage because it was cooler.{footnote [ . 'deck' passage, i.e. steerage passage.]} i soon discovered two things. one was that a vessel would not be likely to sail for the mouth of the amazon under ten or twelve years; and the other was that the nine or ten dollars still left in my pocket would not suffice for so imposing an exploration as i had planned, even if i could afford to wait for a ship. therefore it followed that i must contrive a new career. the 'paul jones' was now bound for st. louis. i planned a siege against my pilot, and at the end of three hard days he surrendered. he agreed to teach me the mississippi river from new orleans to st. louis for five hundred dollars, payable out of the first wages i should receive after graduating. i entered upon the small enterprise of 'learning' twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great mississippi river with the easy confidence of my time of life. if i had really known what i was about to require of my faculties, i should not have had the courage to begin. i supposed that all a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river, and i did not consider that that could be much of a trick, since it was so wide. the boat backed out from new orleans at four in the afternoon, and it was 'our watch' until eight. mr. bixby, my chief, 'straightened her up,' plowed her along past the sterns of the other boats that lay at the levee, and then said, 'here, take her; shave those steamships as close as you'd peel an apple.' i took the wheel, and my heart-beat fluttered up into the hundreds; for it seemed to me that we were about to scrape the side off every ship in the line, we were so close. i held my breath and began to claw the boat away from the danger; and i had my own opinion of the pilot who had known no better than to get us into such peril, but i was too wise to express it. in half a minute i had a wide margin of safety intervening between the 'paul jones' and the ships; and within ten seconds more i was set aside in disgrace, and mr. bixby was going into danger again and flaying me alive with abuse of my cowardice. i was stung, but i was obliged to admire the easy confidence with which my chief loafed from side to side of his wheel, and trimmed the ships so closely that disaster seemed ceaselessly imminent. when he had cooled a little he told me that the easy water was close ashore and the current outside, and therefore we must hug the bank, up-stream, to get the benefit of the former, and stay well out, down-stream, to take advantage of the latter. in my own mind i resolved to be a down-stream pilot and leave the up-streaming to people dead to prudence. now and then mr. bixby called my attention to certain things. said he, 'this is six-mile point.' i assented. it was pleasant enough information, but i could not see the bearing of it. i was not conscious that it was a matter of any interest to me. another time he said, 'this is nine-mile point.' later he said, 'this is twelve-mile point.' they were all about level with the water's edge; they all looked about alike to me; they were monotonously unpicturesque. i hoped mr. bixby would change the subject. but no; he would crowd up around a point, hugging the shore with affection, and then say: 'the slack water ends here, abreast this bunch of china-trees; now we cross over.' so he crossed over. he gave me the wheel once or twice, but i had no luck. i either came near chipping off the edge of a sugar plantation, or i yawed too far from shore, and so dropped back into disgrace again and got abused. the watch was ended at last, and we took supper and went to bed. at midnight the glare of a lantern shone in my eyes, and the night watchman said-- 'come! turn out!' and then he left. i could not understand this extraordinary procedure; so i presently gave up trying to, and dozed off to sleep. pretty soon the watchman was back again, and this time he was gruff. i was annoyed. i said:-- 'what do you want to come bothering around here in the middle of the night for. now as like as not i'll not get to sleep again to-night.' the watchman said-- 'well, if this an't good, i'm blest.' the 'off-watch' was just turning in, and i heard some brutal laughter from them, and such remarks as 'hello, watchman! an't the new cub turned out yet? he's delicate, likely. give him some sugar in a rag and send for the chambermaid to sing rock-a-by-baby to him.' about this time mr. bixby appeared on the scene. something like a minute later i was climbing the pilot-house steps with some of my clothes on and the rest in my arms. mr. bixby was close behind, commenting. here was something fresh--this thing of getting up in the middle of the night to go to work. it was a detail in piloting that had never occurred to me at all. i knew that boats ran all night, but somehow i had never happened to reflect that somebody had to get up out of a warm bed to run them. i began to fear that piloting was not quite so romantic as i had imagined it was; there was something very real and work-like about this new phase of it. it was a rather dingy night, although a fair number of stars were out. the big mate was at the wheel, and he had the old tub pointed at a star and was holding her straight up the middle of the river. the shores on either hand were not much more than half a mile apart, but they seemed wonderfully far away and ever so vague and indistinct. the mate said:-- 'we've got to land at jones's plantation, sir.' the vengeful spirit in me exulted. i said to myself, i wish you joy of your job, mr. bixby; you'll have a good time finding mr. jones's plantation such a night as this; and i hope you never will find it as long as you live. mr. bixby said to the mate:-- 'upper end of the plantation, or the lower?' 'upper.' 'i can't do it. the stumps there are out of water at this stage: it's no great distance to the lower, and you'll have to get along with that.' 'all right, sir. if jones don't like it he'll have to lump it, i reckon.' and then the mate left. my exultation began to cool and my wonder to come up. here was a man who not only proposed to find this plantation on such a night, but to find either end of it you preferred. i dreadfully wanted to ask a question, but i was carrying about as many short answers as my cargo-room would admit of, so i held my peace. all i desired to ask mr. bixby was the simple question whether he was ass enough to really imagine he was going to find that plantation on a night when all plantations were exactly alike and all the same color. but i held in. i used to have fine inspirations of prudence in those days. mr. bixby made for the shore and soon was scraping it, just the same as if it had been daylight. and not only that, but singing-- 'father in heaven, the day is declining,' etc. it seemed to me that i had put my life in the keeping of a peculiarly reckless outcast. presently he turned on me and said:-- 'what's the name of the first point above new orleans?' i was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and i did. i said i didn't know. 'don't know?' this manner jolted me. i was down at the foot again, in a moment. but i had to say just what i had said before. 'well, you're a smart one,' said mr. bixby. 'what's the name of the next point?' once more i didn't know. 'well, this beats anything. tell me the name of any point or place i told you.' i studied a while and decided that i couldn't. 'look here! what do you start out from, above twelve-mile point, to cross over?' 'i--i--don't know.' 'you--you--don't know?' mimicking my drawling manner of speech. 'what do you know?' 'i--i--nothing, for certain.' 'by the great caesar's ghost, i believe you! you're the stupidest dunderhead i ever saw or ever heard of, so help me moses! the idea of you being a pilot--you! why, you don't know enough to pilot a cow down a lane.' oh, but his wrath was up! he was a nervous man, and he shuffled from one side of his wheel to the other as if the floor was hot. he would boil a while to himself, and then overflow and scald me again. 'look here! what do you suppose i told you the names of those points for?' i tremblingly considered a moment, and then the devil of temptation provoked me to say:-- 'well--to--to--be entertaining, i thought.' this was a red rag to the bull. he raged and stormed so (he was crossing the river at the time) that i judge it made him blind, because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. of course the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. never was a man so grateful as mr. bixby was: because he was brim full, and here were subjects who would talk back. he threw open a window, thrust his head out, and such an irruption followed as i never had heard before. the fainter and farther away the scowmen's curses drifted, the higher mr. bixby lifted his voice and the weightier his adjectives grew. when he closed the window he was empty. you could have drawn a seine through his system and not caught curses enough to disturb your mother with. presently he said to me in the gentlest way-- 'my boy, you must get a little memorandum book, and every time i tell you a thing, put it down right away. there's only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. you have to know it just like a b c.' that was a dismal revelation to me; for my memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges. however, i did not feel discouraged long. i judged that it was best to make some allowances, for doubtless mr. bixby was 'stretching.' presently he pulled a rope and struck a few strokes on the big bell. the stars were all gone now, and the night was as black as ink. i could hear the wheels churn along the bank, but i was not entirely certain that i could see the shore. the voice of the invisible watchman called up from the hurricane deck-- 'what's this, sir?' 'jones's plantation.' i said to myself, i wish i might venture to offer a small bet that it isn't. but i did not chirp. i only waited to see. mr. bixby handled the engine bells, and in due time the boat's nose came to the land, a torch glowed from the forecastle, a man skipped ashore, a darky's voice on the bank said, 'gimme de k'yarpet-bag, mars' jones,' and the next moment we were standing up the river again, all serene. i reflected deeply awhile, and then said--but not aloud--'well, the finding of that plantation was the luckiest accident that ever happened; but it couldn't happen again in a hundred years.' and i fully believed it was an accident, too. by the time we had gone seven or eight hundred miles up the river, i had learned to be a tolerably plucky up-stream steersman, in daylight, and before we reached st. louis i had made a trifle of progress in night- work, but only a trifle. i had a note-book that fairly bristled with the names of towns, 'points,' bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc.; but the information was to be found only in the notebook--none of it was in my head. it made my heart ache to think i had only got half of the river set down; for as our watch was four hours off and four hours on, day and night, there was a long four-hour gap in my book for every time i had slept since the voyage began. my chief was presently hired to go on a big new orleans boat, and i packed my satchel and went with him. she was a grand affair. when i stood in her pilot-house i was so far above the water that i seemed perched on a mountain; and her decks stretched so far away, fore and aft, below me, that i wondered how i could ever have considered the little 'paul jones' a large craft. there were other differences, too. the 'paul jones's' pilot-house was a cheap, dingy, battered rattle-trap, cramped for room: but here was a sumptuous glass temple; room enough to have a dance in; showy red and gold window-curtains; an imposing sofa; leather cushions and a back to the high bench where visiting pilots sit, to spin yarns and 'look at the river;' bright, fanciful 'cuspadores' instead of a broad wooden box filled with sawdust; nice new oil-cloth on the floor; a hospitable big stove for winter; a wheel as high as my head, costly with inlaid work; a wire tiller-rope; bright brass knobs for the bells; and a tidy, white-aproned, black 'texas-tender,' to bring up tarts and ices and coffee during mid-watch, day and night. now this was 'something like,' and so i began to take heart once more to believe that piloting was a romantic sort of occupation after all. the moment we were under way i began to prowl about the great steamer and fill myself with joy. she was as clean and as dainty as a drawing-room; when i looked down her long, gilded saloon, it was like gazing through a splendid tunnel; she had an oil-picture, by some gifted sign-painter, on every stateroom door; she glittered with no end of prism-fringed chandeliers; the clerk's office was elegant, the bar was marvelous, and the bar-keeper had been barbered and upholstered at incredible cost. the boiler deck (i.e. the second story of the boat, so to speak) was as spacious as a church, it seemed to me; so with the forecastle; and there was no pitiful handful of deckhands, firemen, and roustabouts down there, but a whole battalion of men. the fires were fiercely glaring from a long row of furnaces, and over them were eight huge boilers! this was unutterable pomp. the mighty engines--but enough of this. i had never felt so fine before. and when i found that the regiment of natty servants respectfully 'sir'd' me, my satisfaction was complete. chapter a daring deed when i returned to the pilot-house st. louis was gone and i was lost. here was a piece of river which was all down in my book, but i could make neither head nor tail of it: you understand, it was turned around. i had seen it when coming up-stream, but i had never faced about to see how it looked when it was behind me. my heart broke again, for it was plain that i had got to learn this troublesome river both ways. the pilot-house was full of pilots, going down to 'look at the river.' what is called the 'upper river' (the two hundred miles between st. louis and cairo, where the ohio comes in) was low; and the mississippi changes its channel so constantly that the pilots used to always find it necessary to run down to cairo to take a fresh look, when their boats were to lie in port a week; that is, when the water was at a low stage. a deal of this 'looking at the river' was done by poor fellows who seldom had a berth, and whose only hope of getting one lay in their being always freshly posted and therefore ready to drop into the shoes of some reputable pilot, for a single trip, on account of such pilot's sudden illness, or some other necessity. and a good many of them constantly ran up and down inspecting the river, not because they ever really hoped to get a berth, but because (they being guests of the boat) it was cheaper to 'look at the river' than stay ashore and pay board. in time these fellows grew dainty in their tastes, and only infested boats that had an established reputation for setting good tables. all visiting pilots were useful, for they were always ready and willing, winter or summer, night or day, to go out in the yawl and help buoy the channel or assist the boat's pilots in any way they could. they were likewise welcome because all pilots are tireless talkers, when gathered together, and as they talk only about the river they are always understood and are always interesting. your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings. we had a fine company of these river-inspectors along, this trip. there were eight or ten; and there was abundance of room for them in our great pilot-house. two or three of them wore polished silk hats, elaborate shirt-fronts, diamond breast-pins, kid gloves, and patent-leather boots. they were choice in their english, and bore themselves with a dignity proper to men of solid means and prodigious reputation as pilots. the others were more or less loosely clad, and wore upon their heads tall felt cones that were suggestive of the days of the commonwealth. i was a cipher in this august company, and felt subdued, not to say torpid. i was not even of sufficient consequence to assist at the wheel when it was necessary to put the tiller hard down in a hurry; the guest that stood nearest did that when occasion required--and this was pretty much all the time, because of the crookedness of the channel and the scant water. i stood in a corner; and the talk i listened to took the hope all out of me. one visitor said to another-- 'jim, how did you run plum point, coming up?' 'it was in the night, there, and i ran it the way one of the boys on the "diana" told me; started out about fifty yards above the wood pile on the false point, and held on the cabin under plum point till i raised the reef--quarter less twain--then straightened up for the middle bar till i got well abreast the old one-limbed cotton-wood in the bend, then got my stern on the cotton-wood and head on the low place above the point, and came through a-booming--nine and a half.' 'pretty square crossing, an't it?' 'yes, but the upper bar 's working down fast.' another pilot spoke up and said-- 'i had better water than that, and ran it lower down; started out from the false point--mark twain--raised the second reef abreast the big snag in the bend, and had quarter less twain.' one of the gorgeous ones remarked-- 'i don't want to find fault with your leadsmen, but that's a good deal of water for plum point, it seems to me.' there was an approving nod all around as this quiet snub dropped on the boaster and 'settled' him. and so they went on talk-talk-talking. meantime, the thing that was running in my mind was, 'now if my ears hear aright, i have not only to get the names of all the towns and islands and bends, and so on, by heart, but i must even get up a warm personal acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed cotton-wood and obscure wood pile that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve hundred miles; and more than that, i must actually know where these things are in the dark, unless these guests are gifted with eyes that can pierce through two miles of solid blackness; i wish the piloting business was in jericho and i had never thought of it.' at dusk mr. bixby tapped the big bell three times (the signal to land), and the captain emerged from his drawing-room in the forward end of the texas, and looked up inquiringly. mr. bixby said-- 'we will lay up here all night, captain.' 'very well, sir.' that was all. the boat came to shore and was tied up for the night. it seemed to me a fine thing that the pilot could do as he pleased, without asking so grand a captain's permission. i took my supper and went immediately to bed, discouraged by my day's observations and experiences. my late voyage's note-booking was but a confusion of meaningless names. it had tangled me all up in a knot every time i had looked at it in the daytime. i now hoped for respite in sleep; but no, it reveled all through my head till sunrise again, a frantic and tireless nightmare. next morning i felt pretty rusty and low-spirited. we went booming along, taking a good many chances, for we were anxious to 'get out of the river' (as getting out to cairo was called) before night should overtake us. but mr. bixby's partner, the other pilot, presently grounded the boat, and we lost so much time in getting her off that it was plain that darkness would overtake us a good long way above the mouth. this was a great misfortune, especially to certain of our visiting pilots, whose boats would have to wait for their return, no matter how long that might be. it sobered the pilot-house talk a good deal. coming up-stream, pilots did not mind low water or any kind of darkness; nothing stopped them but fog. but down-stream work was different; a boat was too nearly helpless, with a stiff current pushing behind her; so it was not customary to run down-stream at night in low water. there seemed to be one small hope, however: if we could get through the intricate and dangerous hat island crossing before night, we could venture the rest, for we would have plainer sailing and better water. but it would be insanity to attempt hat island at night. so there was a deal of looking at watches all the rest of the day, and a constant ciphering upon the speed we were making; hat island was the eternal subject; sometimes hope was high and sometimes we were delayed in a bad crossing, and down it went again. for hours all hands lay under the burden of this suppressed excitement; it was even communicated to me, and i got to feeling so solicitous about hat island, and under such an awful pressure of responsibility, that i wished i might have five minutes on shore to draw a good, full, relieving breath, and start over again. we were standing no regular watches. each of our pilots ran such portions of the river as he had run when coming up-stream, because of his greater familiarity with it; but both remained in the pilot house constantly. an hour before sunset, mr. bixby took the wheel and mr. w----stepped aside. for the next thirty minutes every man held his watch in his hand and was restless, silent, and uneasy. at last somebody said, with a doomful sigh-- 'well, yonder's hat island--and we can't make it.' all the watches closed with a snap, everybody sighed and muttered something about its being 'too bad, too bad--ah, if we could only have got here half an hour sooner!' and the place was thick with the atmosphere of disappointment. some started to go out, but loitered, hearing no bell-tap to land. the sun dipped behind the horizon, the boat went on. inquiring looks passed from one guest to another; and one who had his hand on the door-knob and had turned it, waited, then presently took away his hand and let the knob turn back again. we bore steadily down the bend. more looks were exchanged, and nods of surprised admiration--but no words. insensibly the men drew together behind mr. bixby, as the sky darkened and one or two dim stars came out. the dead silence and sense of waiting became oppressive. mr. bixby pulled the cord, and two deep, mellow notes from the big bell floated off on the night. then a pause, and one more note was struck. the watchman's voice followed, from the hurricane deck-- 'labboard lead, there! stabboard lead!' the cries of the leadsmen began to rise out of the distance, and were gruffly repeated by the word-passers on the hurricane deck. 'm-a-r-k three!.... m-a-r-k three!.... quarter-less three! .... half twain! .... quarter twain! .... m-a-r-k twain! .... quarter-less--' mr. bixby pulled two bell-ropes, and was answered by faint jinglings far below in the engine room, and our speed slackened. the steam began to whistle through the gauge-cocks. the cries of the leadsmen went on--and it is a weird sound, always, in the night. every pilot in the lot was watching now, with fixed eyes, and talking under his breath. nobody was calm and easy but mr. bixby. he would put his wheel down and stand on a spoke, and as the steamer swung into her (to me) utterly invisible marks--for we seemed to be in the midst of a wide and gloomy sea--he would meet and fasten her there. out of the murmur of half-audible talk, one caught a coherent sentence now and then--such as-- 'there; she's over the first reef all right!' after a pause, another subdued voice-- 'her stern's coming down just exactly right, by george!' 'now she's in the marks; over she goes!' somebody else muttered-- 'oh, it was done beautiful--beautiful!' now the engines were stopped altogether, and we drifted with the current. not that i could see the boat drift, for i could not, the stars being all gone by this time. this drifting was the dismalest work; it held one's heart still. presently i discovered a blacker gloom than that which surrounded us. it was the head of the island. we were closing right down upon it. we entered its deeper shadow, and so imminent seemed the peril that i was likely to suffocate; and i had the strongest impulse to do something, anything, to save the vessel. but still mr. bixby stood by his wheel, silent, intent as a cat, and all the pilots stood shoulder to shoulder at his back. 'she'll not make it!' somebody whispered. the water grew shoaler and shoaler, by the leadsman's cries, till it was down to-- 'eight-and-a-half!.... e-i-g-h-t feet!.... e-i-g-h-t feet!.... seven- and--' mr. bixby said warningly through his speaking tube to the engineer-- 'stand by, now!' 'aye-aye, sir!' 'seven-and-a-half! seven feet! six-and--' we touched bottom! instantly mr. bixby set a lot of bells ringing, shouted through the tube, 'now, let her have it--every ounce you've got!' then to his partner, 'put her hard down! snatch her! snatch her!' the boat rasped and ground her way through the sand, hung upon the apex of disaster a single tremendous instant, and then over she went! and such a shout as went up at mr. bixby's back never loosened the roof of a pilot-house before! there was no more trouble after that. mr. bixby was a hero that night; and it was some little time, too, before his exploit ceased to be talked about by river men. fully to realize the marvelous precision required in laying the great steamer in her marks in that murky waste of water, one should know that not only must she pick her intricate way through snags and blind reefs, and then shave the head of the island so closely as to brush the overhanging foliage with her stern, but at one place she must pass almost within arm's reach of a sunken and invisible wreck that would snatch the hull timbers from under her if she should strike it, and destroy a quarter of a million dollars' worth of steam-boat and cargo in five minutes, and maybe a hundred and fifty human lives into the bargain. the last remark i heard that night was a compliment to mr. bixby, uttered in soliloquy and with unction by one of our guests. he said-- 'by the shadow of death, but he's a lightning pilot!' chapter perplexing lessons at the end of what seemed a tedious while, i had managed to pack my head full of islands, towns, bars, 'points,' and bends; and a curiously inanimate mass of lumber it was, too. however, inasmuch as i could shut my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names without leaving out more than ten miles of river in every fifty, i began to feel that i could take a boat down to new orleans if i could make her skip those little gaps. but of course my complacency could hardly get start enough to lift my nose a trifle into the air, before mr. bixby would think of something to fetch it down again. one day he turned on me suddenly with this settler-- 'what is the shape of walnut bend?' he might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm. i reflected respectfully, and then said i didn't know it had any particular shape. my gunpowdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives. i had learned long ago that he only carried just so many rounds of ammunition, and was sure to subside into a very placable and even remorseful old smooth-bore as soon as they were all gone. that word 'old' is merely affectionate; he was not more than thirty-four. i waited. by and by he said-- 'my boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly. it is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. everything else is blotted out and gone. but mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the night that it has in the day-time.' 'how on earth am i ever going to learn it, then?' 'how do you follow a hall at home in the dark. because you know the shape of it. you can't see it.' 'do you mean to say that i've got to know all the million trifling variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as i know the shape of the front hall at home?' 'on my honor, you've got to know them better than any man ever did know the shapes of the halls in his own house.' 'i wish i was dead!' 'now i don't want to discourage you, but--' 'well, pile it on me; i might as well have it now as another time.' 'you see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting around it. a clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly you would claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. you would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. you can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. then there's your pitch- dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. all shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd run them for straight lines only you know better. you boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for you. then there's your gray mist. you take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore. a gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. well, then, different kinds of moonlight change the shape of the river in different ways. you see--' 'oh, don't say any more, please! have i got to learn the shape of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? if i tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop- shouldered.' 'no! you only learn the shape of the river, and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's in your head, and never mind the one that's before your eyes.' 'very well, i'll try it; but after i have learned it can i depend on it. will it keep the same form and not go fooling around?' before mr. bixby could answer, mr. w---- came in to take the watch, and he said-- 'bixby, you'll have to look out for president's island and all that country clear away up above the old hen and chickens. the banks are caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. why, you wouldn't know the point above . you can go up inside the old sycamore- snag, now.{footnote [ . it may not be necessary, but still it can do no harm to explain that 'inside' means between the snag and the shore.-- m.t.]} so that question was answered. here were leagues of shore changing shape. my spirits were down in the mud again. two things seemed pretty apparent to me. one was, that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was, that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours. that night we had the watch until twelve. now it was an ancient river custom for the two pilots to chat a bit when the watch changed. while the relieving pilot put on his gloves and lit his cigar, his partner, the retiring pilot, would say something like this-- 'i judge the upper bar is making down a little at hale's point; had quarter twain with the lower lead and mark twain {footnote [two fathoms. 'quarter twain' is two-and-a-quarter fathoms, thirteen-and-a-half feet. 'mark three' is three fathoms.]} with the other.' 'yes, i thought it was making down a little, last trip. meet any boats?' 'met one abreast the head of , but she was away over hugging the bar, and i couldn't make her out entirely. i took her for the "sunny south"- -hadn't any skylights forward of the chimneys.' and so on. and as the relieving pilot took the wheel his partner{footnote ['partner' is a technical term for 'the other pilot'.]} would mention that we were in such-and-such a bend, and say we were abreast of such-and-such a man's wood-yard or plantation. this was courtesy; i supposed it was necessity. but mr. w---- came on watch full twelve minutes late on this particular night,--a tremendous breach of etiquette; in fact, it is the unpardonable sin among pilots. so mr. bixby gave him no greeting whatever, but simply surrendered the wheel and marched out of the pilot-house without a word. i was appalled; it was a villainous night for blackness, we were in a particularly wide and blind part of the river, where there was no shape or substance to anything, and it seemed incredible that mr. bixby should have left that poor fellow to kill the boat trying to find out where he was. but i resolved that i would stand by him any way. he should find that he was not wholly friendless. so i stood around, and waited to be asked where we were. but mr. w---- plunged on serenely through the solid firmament of black cats that stood for an atmosphere, and never opened his mouth. here is a proud devil, thought i; here is a limb of satan that would rather send us all to destruction than put himself under obligations to me, because i am not yet one of the salt of the earth and privileged to snub captains and lord it over everything dead and alive in a steamboat. i presently climbed up on the bench; i did not think it was safe to go to sleep while this lunatic was on watch. however, i must have gone to sleep in the course of time, because the next thing i was aware of was the fact that day was breaking, mr. w---- gone, and mr. bixby at the wheel again. so it was four o'clock and all well--but me; i felt like a skinful of dry bones and all of them trying to ache at once. mr. bixby asked me what i had stayed up there for. i confessed that it was to do mr. w---- a benevolence,--tell him where he was. it took five minutes for the entire preposterousness of the thing to filter into mr. bixby's system, and then i judge it filled him nearly up to the chin; because he paid me a compliment--and not much of a one either. he said, 'well, taking you by-and-large, you do seem to be more different kinds of an ass than any creature i ever saw before. what did you suppose he wanted to know for?' i said i thought it might be a convenience to him. 'convenience d-nation! didn't i tell you that a man's got to know the river in the night the same as he'd know his own front hall?' 'well, i can follow the front hall in the dark if i know it is the front hall; but suppose you set me down in the middle of it in the dark and not tell me which hall it is; how am i to know?' 'well you've got to, on the river!' 'all right. then i'm glad i never said anything to mr. w---- ' 'i should say so. why, he'd have slammed you through the window and utterly ruined a hundred dollars' worth of window-sash and stuff.' i was glad this damage had been saved, for it would have made me unpopular with the owners. they always hated anybody who had the name of being careless, and injuring things. i went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding and ungraspable objects that ever i tried to get mind or hands on, that was the chief. i would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of me, and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as i was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction, we would draw up toward it and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank! if there had been a conspicuous dead tree standing upon the very point of the cape, i would find that tree inconspicuously merged into the general forest, and occupying the middle of a straight shore, when i got abreast of it! no prominent hill would stick to its shape long enough for me to make up my mind what its form really was, but it was as dissolving and changeful as if it had been a mountain of butter in the hottest corner of the tropics. nothing ever had the same shape when i was coming downstream that it had borne when i went up. i mentioned these little difficulties to mr. bixby. he said-- 'that's the very main virtue of the thing. if the shapes didn't change every three seconds they wouldn't be of any use. take this place where we are now, for instance. as long as that hill over yonder is only one hill, i can boom right along the way i'm going; but the moment it splits at the top and forms a v, i know i've got to scratch to starboard in a hurry, or i'll bang this boat's brains out against a rock; and then the moment one of the prongs of the v swings behind the other, i've got to waltz to larboard again, or i'll have a misunderstanding with a snag that would snatch the keelson out of this steamboat as neatly as if it were a sliver in your hand. if that hill didn't change its shape on bad nights there would be an awful steamboat grave-yard around here inside of a year.' it was plain that i had got to learn the shape of the river in all the different ways that could be thought of,--upside down, wrong end first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and 'thortships,'--and then know what to do on gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all. so i set about it. in the course of time i began to get the best of this knotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more. mr. bixby was all fixed, and ready to start it to the rear again. he opened on me after this fashion-- 'how much water did we have in the middle crossing at hole-in-the-wall, trip before last?' i considered this an outrage. i said-- 'every trip, down and up, the leadsmen are singing through that tangled place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch. how do you reckon i can remember such a mess as that?' 'my boy, you've got to remember it. you've got to remember the exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the shoalest water, in everyone of the five hundred shoal places between st. louis and new orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings and marks of another, either, for they're not often twice alike. you must keep them separate.' when i came to myself again, i said-- 'when i get so that i can do that, i'll be able to raise the dead, and then i won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. i want to retire from this business. i want a slush-bucket and a brush; i'm only fit for a roustabout. i haven't got brains enough to be a pilot; and if i had i wouldn't have strength enough to carry them around, unless i went on crutches.' 'now drop that! when i say i'll learn {footnote ['teach' is not in the river vocabulary.]} a man the river, i mean it. and you can depend on it, i'll learn him or kill him.' chapter continued perplexities there was no use in arguing with a person like this. i promptly put such a strain on my memory that by and by even the shoal water and the countless crossing-marks began to stay with me. but the result was just the same. i never could more than get one knotty thing learned before another presented itself. now i had often seen pilots gazing at the water and pretending to read it as if it were a book; but it was a book that told me nothing. a time came at last, however, when mr. bixby seemed to think me far enough advanced to bear a lesson on water- reading. so he began-- 'do you see that long slanting line on the face of the water? now, that's a reef. moreover, it's a bluff reef. there is a solid sand-bar under it that is nearly as straight up and down as the side of a house. there is plenty of water close up to it, but mighty little on top of it. if you were to hit it you would knock the boat's brains out. do you see where the line fringes out at the upper end and begins to fade away?' 'yes, sir.' 'well, that is a low place; that is the head of the reef. you can climb over there, and not hurt anything. cross over, now, and follow along close under the reef--easy water there--not much current.' i followed the reef along till i approached the fringed end. then mr. bixby said-- 'now get ready. wait till i give the word. she won't want to mount the reef; a boat hates shoal water. stand by--wait--wait--keep her well in hand. now cramp her down! snatch her! snatch her!' he seized the other side of the wheel and helped to spin it around until it was hard down, and then we held it so. the boat resisted, and refused to answer for a while, and next she came surging to starboard, mounted the reef, and sent a long, angry ridge of water foaming away from her bows. 'now watch her; watch her like a cat, or she'll get away from you. when she fights strong and the tiller slips a little, in a jerky, greasy sort of way, let up on her a trifle; it is the way she tells you at night that the water is too shoal; but keep edging her up, little by little, toward the point. you are well up on the bar, now; there is a bar under every point, because the water that comes down around it forms an eddy and allows the sediment to sink. do you see those fine lines on the face of the water that branch out like the ribs of a fan. well, those are little reefs; you want to just miss the ends of them, but run them pretty close. now look out--look out! don't you crowd that slick, greasy-looking place; there ain't nine feet there; she won't stand it. she begins to smell it; look sharp, i tell you! oh blazes, there you go! stop the starboard wheel! quick! ship up to back! set her back! the engine bells jingled and the engines answered promptly, shooting white columns of steam far aloft out of the 'scape pipes, but it was too late. the boat had 'smelt' the bar in good earnest; the foamy ridges that radiated from her bows suddenly disappeared, a great dead swell came rolling forward and swept ahead of her, she careened far over to larboard, and went tearing away toward the other shore as if she were about scared to death. we were a good mile from where we ought to have been, when we finally got the upper hand of her again. during the afternoon watch the next day, mr. bixby asked me if i knew how to run the next few miles. i said-- 'go inside the first snag above the point, outside the next one, start out from the lower end of higgins's wood-yard, make a square crossing and--' 'that's all right. i'll be back before you close up on the next point.' but he wasn't. he was still below when i rounded it and entered upon a piece of river which i had some misgivings about. i did not know that he was hiding behind a chimney to see how i would perform. i went gaily along, getting prouder and prouder, for he had never left the boat in my sole charge such a length of time before. i even got to 'setting' her and letting the wheel go, entirely, while i vaingloriously turned my back and inspected the stem marks and hummed a tune, a sort of easy indifference which i had prodigiously admired in bixby and other great pilots. once i inspected rather long, and when i faced to the front again my heart flew into my mouth so suddenly that if i hadn't clapped my teeth together i should have lost it. one of those frightful bluff reefs was stretching its deadly length right across our bows! my head was gone in a moment; i did not know which end i stood on; i gasped and could not get my breath; i spun the wheel down with such rapidity that it wove itself together like a spider's web; the boat answered and turned square away from the reef, but the reef followed her! i fled, and still it followed, still it kept--right across my bows! i never looked to see where i was going, i only fled. the awful crash was imminent--why didn't that villain come! if i committed the crime of ringing a bell, i might get thrown overboard. but better that than kill the boat. so in blind desperation i started such a rattling 'shivaree' down below as never had astounded an engineer in this world before, i fancy. amidst the frenzy of the bells the engines began to back and fill in a furious way, and my reason forsook its throne--we were about to crash into the woods on the other side of the river. just then mr. bixby stepped calmly into view on the hurricane deck. my soul went out to him in gratitude. my distress vanished; i would have felt safe on the brink of niagara, with mr. bixby on the hurricane deck. he blandly and sweetly took his tooth-pick out of his mouth between his fingers, as if it were a cigar-- we were just in the act of climbing an overhanging big tree, and the passengers were scudding astern like rats--and lifted up these commands to me ever so gently-- 'stop the starboard. stop the larboard. set her back on both.' the boat hesitated, halted, pressed her nose among the boughs a critical instant, then reluctantly began to back away. 'stop the larboard. come ahead on it. stop the starboard. come ahead on it. point her for the bar.' i sailed away as serenely as a summer's morning mr. bixby came in and said, with mock simplicity-- 'when you have a hail, my boy, you ought to tap the big bell three times before you land, so that the engineers can get ready.' i blushed under the sarcasm, and said i hadn't had any hail. 'ah! then it was for wood, i suppose. the officer of the watch will tell you when he wants to wood up.' i went on consuming and said i wasn't after wood. 'indeed? why, what could you want over here in the bend, then? did you ever know of a boat following a bend up-stream at this stage of the river?' 'no sir,--and i wasn't trying to follow it. i was getting away from a bluff reef.' 'no, it wasn't a bluff reef; there isn't one within three miles of where you were.' 'but i saw it. it was as bluff as that one yonder.' 'just about. run over it!' 'do you give it as an order?' 'yes. run over it.' 'if i don't, i wish i may die.' 'all right; i am taking the responsibility.' i was just as anxious to kill the boat, now, as i had been to save her before. i impressed my orders upon my memory, to be used at the inquest, and made a straight break for the reef. as it disappeared under our bows i held my breath; but we slid over it like oil. 'now don't you see the difference? it wasn't anything but a wind reef. the wind does that.' 'so i see. but it is exactly like a bluff reef. how am i ever going to tell them apart?' 'i can't tell you. it is an instinct. by and by you will just naturally know one from the other, but you never will be able to explain why or how you know them apart' it turned out to be true. the face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book--a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. and it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. there never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparkingly renewed with every reperusal. the passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface (on the rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether); but to the pilot that was an italicized passage; indeed, it was more than that, it was a legend of the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it; for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated. it is the faintest and simplest expression the water ever makes, and the most hideous to a pilot's eye. in truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading-matter. now when i had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as i knew the letters of the alphabet, i had made a valuable acquisition. but i had lost something, too. i had lost something which could never be restored to me while i lived. all the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! i still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which i witnessed when steamboating was new to me. a broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the somber shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. there were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring. i stood like one bewitched. i drank it in, in a speechless rapture. the world was new to me, and i had never seen anything like this at home. but as i have said, a day came when i began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when i ceased altogether to note them. then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, i should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: this sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark. no, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. all the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. since those days, i have pitied doctors from my heart. what does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease. are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? and doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade? chapter completing my education whosoever has done me the courtesy to read my chapters which have preceded this may possibly wonder that i deal so minutely with piloting as a science. it was the prime purpose of those chapters; and i am not quite done yet. i wish to show, in the most patient and painstaking way, what a wonderful science it is. ship channels are buoyed and lighted, and therefore it is a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run them; clear-water rivers, with gravel bottoms, change their channels very gradually, and therefore one needs to learn them but once; but piloting becomes another matter when you apply it to vast streams like the mississippi and the missouri, whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sandbars are never at rest, whose channels are for ever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions must be confronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single light-house or a single buoy; for there is neither light nor buoy to be found anywhere in all this three or four thousand miles of villainous river.{footnote [true at the time referred to; not true now ( ).]} i feel justified in enlarging upon this great science for the reason that i feel sure no one has ever yet written a paragraph about it who had piloted a steamboat himself, and so had a practical knowledge of the subject. if the theme were hackneyed, i should be obliged to deal gently with the reader; but since it is wholly new, i have felt at liberty to take up a considerable degree of room with it. when i had learned the name and position of every visible feature of the river; when i had so mastered its shape that i could shut my eyes and trace it from st. louis to new orleans; when i had learned to read the face of the water as one would cull the news from the morning paper; and finally, when i had trained my dull memory to treasure up an endless array of soundings and crossing-marks, and keep fast hold of them, i judged that my education was complete: so i got to tilting my cap to the side of my head, and wearing a tooth-pick in my mouth at the wheel. mr. bixby had his eye on these airs. one day he said-- 'what is the height of that bank yonder, at burgess's?' 'how can i tell, sir. it is three-quarters of a mile away.' 'very poor eye--very poor. take the glass.' i took the glass, and presently said--'i can't tell. i suppose that that bank is about a foot and a half high.' 'foot and a half! that's a six-foot bank. how high was the bank along here last trip?' 'i don't know; i never noticed.' 'you didn't? well, you must always do it hereafter.' 'why?' 'because you'll have to know a good many things that it tells you. for one thing, it tells you the stage of the river--tells you whether there's more water or less in the river along here than there was last trip.' 'the leads tell me that.' i rather thought i had the advantage of him there. 'yes, but suppose the leads lie? the bank would tell you so, and then you'd stir those leadsmen up a bit. there was a ten-foot bank here last trip, and there is only a six-foot bank now. what does that signify?' 'that the river is four feet higher than it was last trip.' 'very good. is the river rising or falling?' 'rising.' 'no it ain't.' 'i guess i am right, sir. yonder is some drift-wood floating down the stream.' 'a rise starts the drift-wood, but then it keeps on floating a while after the river is done rising. now the bank will tell you about this. wait till you come to a place where it shelves a little. now here; do you see this narrow belt of fine sediment that was deposited while the water was higher. you see the driftwood begins to strand, too. the bank helps in other ways. do you see that stump on the false point?' 'ay, ay, sir.' 'well, the water is just up to the roots of it. you must make a note of that.' 'why?' 'because that means that there's seven feet in the chute of .' 'but is a long way up the river yet.' 'that's where the benefit of the bank comes in. there is water enough in now, yet there may not be by the time we get there; but the bank will keep us posted all along. you don't run close chutes on a falling river, up-stream, and there are precious few of them that you are allowed to run at all down-stream. there's a law of the united states against it. the river may be rising by the time we get to , and in that case we'll run it. we are drawing--how much?' 'six feet aft,--six and a half forward.' 'well, you do seem to know something.' 'but what i particularly want to know is, if i have got to keep up an everlasting measuring of the banks of this river, twelve hundred miles, month in and month out?' 'of course!' my emotions were too deep for words for a while. presently i said--' and how about these chutes. are there many of them?' 'i should say so. i fancy we shan't run any of the river this trip as you've ever seen it run before--so to speak. if the river begins to rise again, we'll go up behind bars that you've always seen standing out of the river, high and dry like the roof of a house; we'll cut across low places that you've never noticed at all, right through the middle of bars that cover three hundred acres of river; we'll creep through cracks where you've always thought was solid land; we'll dart through the woods and leave twenty-five miles of river off to one side; we'll see the hind-side of every island between new orleans and cairo.' 'then i've got to go to work and learn just as much more river as i already know.' 'just about twice as much more, as near as you can come at it.' 'well, one lives to find out. i think i was a fool when i went into this business.' 'yes, that is true. and you are yet. but you'll not be when you've learned it.' 'ah, i never can learn it.' 'i will see that you do.' by and by i ventured again-- 'have i got to learn all this thing just as i know the rest of the river--shapes and all--and so i can run it at night?' 'yes. and you've got to have good fair marks from one end of the river to the other, that will help the bank tell you when there is water enough in each of these countless places--like that stump, you know. when the river first begins to rise, you can run half a dozen of the deepest of them; when it rises a foot more you can run another dozen; the next foot will add a couple of dozen, and so on: so you see you have to know your banks and marks to a dead moral certainty, and never get them mixed; for when you start through one of those cracks, there's no backing out again, as there is in the big river; you've got to go through, or stay there six months if you get caught on a falling river. there are about fifty of these cracks which you can't run at all except when the river is brim full and over the banks.' 'this new lesson is a cheerful prospect.' 'cheerful enough. and mind what i've just told you; when you start into one of those places you've got to go through. they are too narrow to turn around in, too crooked to back out of, and the shoal water is always up at the head; never elsewhere. and the head of them is always likely to be filling up, little by little, so that the marks you reckon their depth by, this season, may not answer for next.' 'learn a new set, then, every year?' 'exactly. cramp her up to the bar! what are you standing up through the middle of the river for?' the next few months showed me strange things. on the same day that we held the conversation above narrated, we met a great rise coming down the river. the whole vast face of the stream was black with drifting dead logs, broken boughs, and great trees that had caved in and been washed away. it required the nicest steering to pick one's way through this rushing raft, even in the day-time, when crossing from point to point; and at night the difficulty was mightily increased; every now and then a huge log, lying deep in the water, would suddenly appear right under our bows, coming head-on; no use to try to avoid it then; we could only stop the engines, and one wheel would walk over that log from one end to the other, keeping up a thundering racket and careening the boat in a way that was very uncomfortable to passengers. now and then we would hit one of these sunken logs a rattling bang, dead in the center, with a full head of steam, and it would stun the boat as if she had hit a continent. sometimes this log would lodge, and stay right across our nose, and back the mississippi up before it; we would have to do a little craw-fishing, then, to get away from the obstruction. we often hit white logs, in the dark, for we could not see them till we were right on them; but a black log is a pretty distinct object at night. a white snag is an ugly customer when the daylight is gone. of course, on the great rise, down came a swarm of prodigious timber- rafts from the head waters of the mississippi, coal barges from pittsburgh, little trading scows from everywhere, and broad-horns from 'posey county,' indiana, freighted with 'fruit and furniture'--the usual term for describing it, though in plain english the freight thus aggrandized was hoop-poles and pumpkins. pilots bore a mortal hatred to these craft; and it was returned with usury. the law required all such helpless traders to keep a light burning, but it was a law that was often broken. all of a sudden, on a murky night, a light would hop up, right under our bows, almost, and an agonized voice, with the backwoods 'whang' to it, would wail out-- 'whar'n the ---- you goin' to! cain't you see nothin', you dash-dashed aig-suckin', sheep-stealin', one-eyed son of a stuffed monkey!' then for an instant, as we whistled by, the red glare from our furnaces would reveal the scow and the form of the gesticulating orator as if under a lightning-flash, and in that instant our firemen and deck-hands would send and receive a tempest of missiles and profanity, one of our wheels would walk off with the crashing fragments of a steering-oar, and down the dead blackness would shut again. and that flatboatman would be sure to go into new orleans and sue our boat, swearing stoutly that he had a light burning all the time, when in truth his gang had the lantern down below to sing and lie and drink and gamble by, and no watch on deck. once, at night, in one of those forest-bordered crevices (behind an island) which steamboatmen intensely describe with the phrase 'as dark as the inside of a cow,' we should have eaten up a posey county family, fruit, furniture, and all, but that they happened to be fiddling down below, and we just caught the sound of the music in time to sheer off, doing no serious damage, unfortunately, but coming so near it that we had good hopes for a moment. these people brought up their lantern, then, of course; and as we backed and filled to get away, the precious family stood in the light of it--both sexes and various ages--and cursed us till everything turned blue. once a coalboatman sent a bullet through our pilot-house, when we borrowed a steering oar of him in a very narrow place. life on the mississippi by mark twain part . chapter the professor's yarn it was in the early days. i was not a college professor then. i was a humble-minded young land-surveyor, with the world before me--to survey, in case anybody wanted it done. i had a contract to survey a route for a great mining-ditch in california, and i was on my way thither, by sea --a three or four weeks' voyage. there were a good many passengers, but i had very little to say to them; reading and dreaming were my passions, and i avoided conversation in order to indulge these appetites. there were three professional gamblers on board--rough, repulsive fellows. i never had any talk with them, yet i could not help seeing them with some frequency, for they gambled in an upper-deck stateroom every day and night, and in my promenades i often had glimpses of them through their door, which stood a little ajar to let out the surplus tobacco smoke and profanity. they were an evil and hateful presence, but i had to put up with it, of course, there was one other passenger who fell under my eye a good deal, for he seemed determined to be friendly with me, and i could not have gotten rid of him without running some chance of hurting his feelings, and i was far from wishing to do that. besides, there was something engaging in his countrified simplicity and his beaming good-nature. the first time i saw this mr. john backus, i guessed, from his clothes and his looks, that he was a grazier or farmer from the backwoods of some western state--doubtless ohio--and afterward when he dropped into his personal history and i discovered that he was a cattle-raiser from interior ohio, i was so pleased with my own penetration that i warmed toward him for verifying my instinct. he got to dropping alongside me every day, after breakfast, to help me make my promenade; and so, in the course of time, his easy-working jaw had told me everything about his business, his prospects, his family, his relatives, his politics--in fact everything that concerned a backus, living or dead. and meantime i think he had managed to get out of me everything i knew about my trade, my tribe, my purposes, my prospects, and myself. he was a gentle and persuasive genius, and this thing showed it; for i was not given to talking about my matters. i said something about triangulation, once; the stately word pleased his ear; he inquired what it meant; i explained; after that he quietly and inoffensively ignored my name, and always called me triangle. what an enthusiast he was in cattle! at the bare name of a bull or a cow, his eye would light and his eloquent tongue would turn itself loose. as long as i would walk and listen, he would walk and talk; he knew all breeds, he loved all breeds, he caressed them all with his affectionate tongue. i tramped along in voiceless misery whilst the cattle question was up; when i could endure it no longer, i used to deftly insert a scientific topic into the conversation; then my eye fired and his faded; my tongue fluttered, his stopped; life was a joy to me, and a sadness to him. one day he said, a little hesitatingly, and with somewhat of diffidence-- 'triangle, would you mind coming down to my stateroom a minute, and have a little talk on a certain matter?' i went with him at once. arrived there, he put his head out, glanced up and down the saloon warily, then closed the door and locked it. he sat down on the sofa, and he said-- 'i'm a-going to make a little proposition to you, and if it strikes you favorable, it'll be a middling good thing for both of us. you ain't a-going out to californy for fun, nuther am i--it's business, ain't that so? well, you can do me a good turn, and so can i you, if we see fit. i've raked and scraped and saved, a considerable many years, and i've got it all here.' he unlocked an old hair trunk, tumbled a chaos of shabby clothes aside, and drew a short stout bag into view for a moment, then buried it again and relocked the trunk. dropping his voice to a cautious low tone, he continued, 'she's all there--a round ten thousand dollars in yellow-boys; now this is my little idea: what i don't know about raising cattle, ain't worth knowing. there's mints of money in it, in californy. well, i know, and you know, that all along a line that 's being surveyed, there 's little dabs of land that they call "gores," that fall to the surveyor free gratis for nothing. all you've got to do, on your side, is to survey in such a way that the "gores" will fall on good fat land, then you turn 'em over to me, i stock 'em with cattle, in rolls the cash, i plank out your share of the dollars regular, right along, and--' i was sorry to wither his blooming enthusiasm, but it could not be helped. i interrupted, and said severely-- 'i am not that kind of a surveyor. let us change the subject, mr. backus.' it was pitiful to see his confusion and hear his awkward and shamefaced apologies. i was as much distressed as he was--especially as he seemed so far from having suspected that there was anything improper in his proposition. so i hastened to console him and lead him on to forget his mishap in a conversational orgy about cattle and butchery. we were lying at acapulco; and, as we went on deck, it happened luckily that the crew were just beginning to hoist some beeves aboard in slings. backus's melancholy vanished instantly, and with it the memory of his late mistake. 'now only look at that!' cried he; 'my goodness, triangle, what would they say to it in ohio. wouldn't their eyes bug out, to see 'em handled like that?--wouldn't they, though?' all the passengers were on deck to look--even the gamblers--and backus knew them all, and had afflicted them all with his pet topic. as i moved away, i saw one of the gamblers approach and accost him; then another of them; then the third. i halted; waited; watched; the conversation continued between the four men; it grew earnest; backus drew gradually away; the gamblers followed, and kept at his elbow. i was uncomfortable. however, as they passed me presently, i heard backus say, with a tone of persecuted annoyance-- 'but it ain't any use, gentlemen; i tell you again, as i've told you a half a dozen times before, i warn't raised to it, and i ain't a-going to resk it.' i felt relieved. 'his level head will be his sufficient protection,' i said to myself. during the fortnight's run from acapulco to san francisco i several times saw the gamblers talking earnestly with backus, and once i threw out a gentle warning to him. he chuckled comfortably and said-- 'oh, yes! they tag around after me considerable--want me to play a little, just for amusement, they say--but laws-a-me, if my folks have told me once to look out for that sort of live-stock, they've told me a thousand times, i reckon.' by-and-bye, in due course, we were approaching san francisco. it was an ugly black night, with a strong wind blowing, but there was not much sea. i was on deck, alone. toward ten i started below. a figure issued from the gamblers' den, and disappeared in the darkness. i experienced a shock, for i was sure it was backus. i flew down the companion-way, looked about for him, could not find him, then returned to the deck just in time to catch a glimpse of him as he re-entered that confounded nest of rascality. had he yielded at last? i feared it. what had he gone below for?--his bag of coin? possibly. i drew near the door, full of bodings. it was a-crack, and i glanced in and saw a sight that made me bitterly wish i had given my attention to saving my poor cattle-friend, instead of reading and dreaming my foolish time away. he was gambling. worse still, he was being plied with champagne, and was already showing some effect from it. he praised the 'cider,' as he called it, and said now that he had got a taste of it he almost believed he would drink it if it was spirits, it was so good and so ahead of anything he had ever run across before. surreptitious smiles, at this, passed from one rascal to another, and they filled all the glasses, and whilst backus honestly drained his to the bottom they pretended to do the same, but threw the wine over their shoulders. i could not bear the scene, so i wandered forward and tried to interest myself in the sea and the voices of the wind. but no, my uneasy spirit kept dragging me back at quarter-hour intervals; and always i saw backus drinking his wine--fairly and squarely, and the others throwing theirs away. it was the painfullest night i ever spent. the only hope i had was that we might reach our anchorage with speed-- that would break up the game. i helped the ship along all i could with my prayers. at last we went booming through the golden gate, and my pulses leaped for joy. i hurried back to that door and glanced in. alas, there was small room for hope--backus's eyes were heavy and bloodshot, his sweaty face was crimson, his speech maudlin and thick, his body sawed drunkenly about with the weaving motion of the ship. he drained another glass to the dregs, whilst the cards were being dealt. he took his hand, glanced at it, and his dull eyes lit up for a moment. the gamblers observed it, and showed their gratification by hardly perceptible signs. 'how many cards?' 'none!' said backus. one villain--named hank wiley--discarded one card, the others three each. the betting began. heretofore the bets had been trifling--a dollar or two; but backus started off with an eagle now, wiley hesitated a moment, then 'saw it' and 'went ten dollars better.' the other two threw up their hands. backus went twenty better. wiley said-- 'i see that, and go you a hundred better!' then smiled and reached for the money. 'let it alone,' said backus, with drunken gravity. 'what! you mean to say you're going to cover it?' 'cover it? well, i reckon i am--and lay another hundred on top of it, too.' he reached down inside his overcoat and produced the required sum. 'oh, that's your little game, is it? i see your raise, and raise it five hundred!' said wiley. 'five hundred better.' said the foolish bull-driver, and pulled out the amount and showered it on the pile. the three conspirators hardly tried to conceal their exultation. all diplomacy and pretense were dropped now, and the sharp exclamations came thick and fast, and the yellow pyramid grew higher and higher. at last ten thousand dollars lay in view. wiley cast a bag of coin on the table, and said with mocking gentleness-- 'five thousand dollars better, my friend from the rural districts--what do you say now?' 'i call you!' said backus, heaving his golden shot-bag on the pile. 'what have you got?' 'four kings, you d--d fool!' and wiley threw down his cards and surrounded the stakes with his arms. 'four aces, you ass!' thundered backus, covering his man with a cocked revolver. 'i'm a professional gambler myself, and i've been laying for you duffers all this voyage!' down went the anchor, rumbledy-dum-dum! and the long trip was ended. well--well, it is a sad world. one of the three gamblers was backus's 'pal.' it was he that dealt the fateful hands. according to an understanding with the two victims, he was to have given backus four queens, but alas, he didn't. a week later, i stumbled upon backus--arrayed in the height of fashion-- in montgomery street. he said, cheerily, as we were parting-- 'ah, by-the-way, you needn't mind about those gores. i don't really know anything about cattle, except what i was able to pick up in a week's apprenticeship over in jersey just before we sailed. my cattle- culture and cattle-enthusiasm have served their turn--i shan't need them any more.' next day we reluctantly parted from the 'gold dust' and her officers, hoping to see that boat and all those officers again, some day. a thing which the fates were to render tragically impossible! chapter the end of the 'gold dust' for, three months later, august , while i was writing one of these foregoing chapters, the new york papers brought this telegram-- a terrible disaster. seventeen persons killed by an explosion on the steamer 'gold dust.' 'nashville, aug. .--a despatch from hickman, ky., says-- 'the steamer "gold dust" exploded her boilers at three o'clock to-day, just after leaving hickman. forty-seven persons were scalded and seventeen are missing. the boat was landed in the eddy just above the town, and through the exertions of the citizens the cabin passengers, officers, and part of the crew and deck passengers were taken ashore and removed to the hotels and residences. twenty-four of the injured were lying in holcomb's dry-goods store at one time, where they received every attention before being removed to more comfortable places.' a list of the names followed, whereby it appeared that of the seventeen dead, one was the barkeeper; and among the forty-seven wounded, were the captain, chief mate, second mate, and second and third clerks; also mr. lem s. gray, pilot, and several members of the crew. in answer to a private telegram, we learned that none of these was severely hurt, except mr. gray. letters received afterward confirmed this news, and said that mr. gray was improving and would get well. later letters spoke less hopefully of his case; and finally came one announcing his death. a good man, a most companionable and manly man, and worthy of a kindlier fate. chapter the house beautiful we took passage in a cincinnati boat for new orleans; or on a cincinnati boat--either is correct; the former is the eastern form of putting it, the latter the western. mr. dickens declined to agree that the mississippi steamboats were 'magnificent,' or that they were 'floating palaces,'--terms which had always been applied to them; terms which did not over-express the admiration with which the people viewed them. mr. dickens's position was unassailable, possibly; the people's position was certainly unassailable. if mr. dickens was comparing these boats with the crown jewels; or with the taj, or with the matterhorn; or with some other priceless or wonderful thing which he had seen, they were not magnificent--he was right. the people compared them with what they had seen; and, thus measured, thus judged, the boats were magnificent--the term was the correct one, it was not at all too strong. the people were as right as was mr. dickens. the steamboats were finer than anything on shore. compared with superior dwelling-houses and first-class hotels in the valley, they were indubitably magnificent, they were 'palaces.' to a few people living in new orleans and st. louis, they were not magnificent, perhaps; not palaces; but to the great majority of those populations, and to the entire populations spread over both banks between baton rouge and st. louis, they were palaces; they tallied with the citizen's dream of what magnificence was, and satisfied it. every town and village along that vast stretch of double river-frontage had a best dwelling, finest dwelling, mansion,--the home of its wealthiest and most conspicuous citizen. it is easy to describe it: large grassy yard, with paling fence painted white--in fair repair; brick walk from gate to door; big, square, two-story 'frame' house, painted white and porticoed like a grecian temple--with this difference, that the imposing fluted columns and corinthian capitals were a pathetic sham, being made of white pine, and painted; iron knocker; brass door knob--discolored, for lack of polishing. within, an uncarpeted hall, of planed boards; opening out of it, a parlor, fifteen feet by fifteen--in some instances five or ten feet larger; ingrain carpet; mahogany center- table; lamp on it, with green-paper shade--standing on a gridiron, so to speak, made of high-colored yarns, by the young ladies of the house, and called a lamp-mat; several books, piled and disposed, with cast-iron exactness, according to an inherited and unchangeable plan; among them, tupper, much penciled; also, 'friendship's offering,' and 'affection's wreath,' with their sappy inanities illustrated in die-away mezzotints; also, ossian; 'alonzo and melissa:' maybe 'ivanhoe:' also 'album,' full of original 'poetry' of the thou-hast-wounded-the-spirit-that-loved-thee breed; two or three goody-goody works--'shepherd of salisbury plain,' etc.; current number of the chaste and innocuous godey's 'lady's book,' with painted fashion-plate of wax-figure women with mouths all alike-- lips and eyelids the same size--each five-foot woman with a two-inch wedge sticking from under her dress and letting-on to be half of her foot. polished air-tight stove (new and deadly invention), with pipe passing through a board which closes up the discarded good old fireplace. on each end of the wooden mantel, over the fireplace, a large basket of peaches and other fruits, natural size, all done in plaster, rudely, or in wax, and painted to resemble the originals--which they don't. over middle of mantel, engraving--washington crossing the delaware; on the wall by the door, copy of it done in thunder-and- lightning crewels by one of the young ladies--work of art which would have made washington hesitate about crossing, if he could have foreseen what advantage was going to be taken of it. piano--kettle in disguise-- with music, bound and unbound, piled on it, and on a stand near by: battle of prague; bird waltz; arkansas traveler; rosin the bow; marseilles hymn; on a lone barren isle (st. helena); the last link is broken; she wore a wreath of roses the night when last we met; go, forget me, why should sorrow o'er that brow a shadow fling; hours there were to memory dearer; long, long ago; days of absence; a life on the ocean wave, a home on the rolling deep; bird at sea; and spread open on the rack, where the plaintive singer has left it, ro-holl on, silver moo-hoon, guide the trav-el-lerr his way, etc. tilted pensively against the piano, a guitar--guitar capable of playing the spanish fandango by itself, if you give it a start. frantic work of art on the wall--pious motto, done on the premises, sometimes in colored yarns, sometimes in faded grasses: progenitor of the 'god bless our home' of modern commerce. framed in black moldings on the wall, other works of arts, conceived and committed on the premises, by the young ladies; being grim black-and-white crayons; landscapes, mostly: lake, solitary sail-boat, petrified clouds, pre-geological trees on shore, anthracite precipice; name of criminal conspicuous in the corner. lithograph, napoleon crossing the alps. lithograph, the grave at st. helena. steel-plates, trumbull's battle of bunker hill, and the sally from gibraltar. copper- plates, moses smiting the rock, and return of the prodigal son. in big gilt frame, slander of the family in oil: papa holding a book ('constitution of the united states'); guitar leaning against mamma, blue ribbons fluttering from its neck; the young ladies, as children, in slippers and scalloped pantelettes, one embracing toy horse, the other beguiling kitten with ball of yarn, and both simpering up at mamma, who simpers back. these persons all fresh, raw, and red--apparently skinned. opposite, in gilt frame, grandpa and grandma, at thirty and twenty-two, stiff, old-fashioned, high-collared, puff-sleeved, glaring pallidly out from a background of solid egyptian night. under a glass french clock dome, large bouquet of stiff flowers done in corpsy-white wax. pyramidal what-not in the corner, the shelves occupied chiefly with bric-a-brac of the period, disposed with an eye to best effect: shell, with the lord's prayer carved on it; another shell--of the long-oval sort, narrow, straight orifice, three inches long, running from end to end--portrait of washington carved on it; not well done; the shell had washington's mouth, originally--artist should have built to that. these two are memorials of the long-ago bridal trip to new orleans and the french market. other bric-a-brac: californian 'specimens'--quartz, with gold wart adhering; old guinea-gold locket, with circlet of ancestral hair in it; indian arrow-heads, of flint; pair of bead moccasins, from uncle who crossed the plains; three 'alum' baskets of various colors-- being skeleton-frame of wire, clothed-on with cubes of crystallized alum in the rock-candy style--works of art which were achieved by the young ladies; their doubles and duplicates to be found upon all what-nots in the land; convention of desiccated bugs and butterflies pinned to a card; painted toy-dog, seated upon bellows-attachment--drops its under jaw and squeaks when pressed upon; sugar-candy rabbit--limbs and features merged together, not strongly defined; pewter presidential- campaign medal; miniature card-board wood-sawyer, to be attached to the stove-pipe and operated by the heat; small napoleon, done in wax; spread-open daguerreotypes of dim children, parents, cousins, aunts, and friends, in all attitudes but customary ones; no templed portico at back, and manufactured landscape stretching away in the distance--that came in later, with the photograph; all these vague figures lavishly chained and ringed--metal indicated and secured from doubt by stripes and splashes of vivid gold bronze; all of them too much combed, too much fixed up; and all of them uncomfortable in inflexible sunday-clothes of a pattern which the spectator cannot realize could ever have been in fashion; husband and wife generally grouped together--husband sitting, wife standing, with hand on his shoulder--and both preserving, all these fading years, some traceable effect of the daguerreotypist's brisk 'now smile, if you please!' bracketed over what-not--place of special sacredness--an outrage in water-color, done by the young niece that came on a visit long ago, and died. pity, too; for she might have repented of this in time. horse-hair chairs, horse-hair sofa which keeps sliding from under you. window shades, of oil stuff, with milk-maids and ruined castles stenciled on them in fierce colors. lambrequins dependent from gaudy boxings of beaten tin, gilded. bedrooms with rag carpets; bedsteads of the 'corded' sort, with a sag in the middle, the cords needing tightening; snuffy feather-bed--not aired often enough; cane- seat chairs, splint-bottomed rocker; looking-glass on wall, school-slate size, veneered frame; inherited bureau; wash-bowl and pitcher, possibly --but not certainly; brass candlestick, tallow candle, snuffers. nothing else in the room. not a bathroom in the house; and no visitor likely to come along who has ever seen one. that was the residence of the principal citizen, all the way from the suburbs of new orleans to the edge of st. louis. when he stepped aboard a big fine steamboat, he entered a new and marvelous world: chimney-tops cut to counterfeit a spraying crown of plumes--and maybe painted red; pilot-house, hurricane deck, boiler-deck guards, all garnished with white wooden filigree work of fanciful patterns; gilt acorns topping the derricks; gilt deer-horns over the big bell; gaudy symbolical picture on the paddle-box, possibly; big roomy boiler-deck, painted blue, and furnished with windsor armchairs; inside, a far-receding snow-white 'cabin;' porcelain knob and oil-picture on every stateroom door; curving patterns of filigree-work touched up with gilding, stretching overhead all down the converging vista; big chandeliers every little way, each an april shower of glittering glass-drops; lovely rainbow-light falling everywhere from the colored glazing of the skylights; the whole a long- drawn, resplendent tunnel, a bewildering and soul-satisfying spectacle! in the ladies' cabin a pink and white wilton carpet, as soft as mush, and glorified with a ravishing pattern of gigantic flowers. then the bridal chamber--the animal that invented that idea was still alive and unhanged, at that day--bridal chamber whose pretentious flummery was necessarily overawing to the now tottering intellect of that hosannahing citizen. every state-room had its couple of cozy clean bunks, and perhaps a looking-glass and a snug closet; and sometimes there was even a washbowl and pitcher, and part of a towel which could be told from mosquito netting by an expert--though generally these things were absent, and the shirt-sleeved passengers cleansed themselves at a long row of stationary bowls in the barber shop, where were also public towels, public combs, and public soap. take the steamboat which i have just described, and you have her in her highest and finest, and most pleasing, and comfortable, and satisfactory estate. now cake her over with a layer of ancient and obdurate dirt, and you have the cincinnati steamer awhile ago referred to. not all over--only inside; for she was ably officered in all departments except the steward's. but wash that boat and repaint her, and she would be about the counterpart of the most complimented boat of the old flush times: for the steamboat architecture of the west has undergone no change; neither has steamboat furniture and ornamentation undergone any. chapter manufactures and miscreants where the river, in the vicksburg region, used to be corkscrewed, it is now comparatively straight--made so by cut-off; a former distance of seventy miles is reduced to thirty-five. it is a change which threw vicksburg's neighbor, delta, louisiana, out into the country and ended its career as a river town. its whole river-frontage is now occupied by a vast sand-bar, thickly covered with young trees--a growth which will magnify itself into a dense forest by-and-bye, and completely hide the exiled town. in due time we passed grand gulf and rodney, of war fame, and reached natchez, the last of the beautiful hill-cities--for baton rouge, yet to come, is not on a hill, but only on high ground. famous natchez-under- the-hill has not changed notably in twenty years; in outward aspect-- judging by the descriptions of the ancient procession of foreign tourists--it has not changed in sixty; for it is still small, straggling, and shabby. it had a desperate reputation, morally, in the old keel-boating and early steamboating times--plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there, among the riff-raff of the river, in those days. but natchez-on-top-of-the-hill is attractive; has always been attractive. even mrs. trollope ( ) had to confess its charms: 'at one or two points the wearisome level line is relieved by bluffs, as they call the short intervals of high ground. the town of natchez is beautifully situated on one of those high spots. the contrast that its bright green hill forms with the dismal line of black forest that stretches on every side, the abundant growth of the pawpaw, palmetto and orange, the copious variety of sweet-scented flowers that flourish there, all make it appear like an oasis in the desert. natchez is the furthest point to the north at which oranges ripen in the open air, or endure the winter without shelter. with the exception of this sweet spot, i thought all the little towns and villages we passed wretched- looking in the extreme.' natchez, like her near and far river neighbors, has railways now, and is adding to them--pushing them hither and thither into all rich outlying regions that are naturally tributary to her. and like vicksburg and new orleans, she has her ice-factory: she makes thirty tons of ice a day. in vicksburg and natchez, in my time, ice was jewelry; none but the rich could wear it. but anybody and everybody can have it now. i visited one of the ice-factories in new orleans, to see what the polar regions might look like when lugged into the edge of the tropics. but there was nothing striking in the aspect of the place. it was merely a spacious house, with some innocent steam machinery in one end of it and some big porcelain pipes running here and there. no, not porcelain--they merely seemed to be; they were iron, but the ammonia which was being breathed through them had coated them to the thickness of your hand with solid milk-white ice. it ought to have melted; for one did not require winter clothing in that atmosphere: but it did not melt; the inside of the pipe was too cold. sunk into the floor were numberless tin boxes, a foot square and two feet long, and open at the top end. these were full of clear water; and around each box, salt and other proper stuff was packed; also, the ammonia gases were applied to the water in some way which will always remain a secret to me, because i was not able to understand the process. while the water in the boxes gradually froze, men gave it a stir or two with a stick occasionally--to liberate the air-bubbles, i think. other men were continually lifting out boxes whose contents had become hard frozen. they gave the box a single dip into a vat of boiling water, to melt the block of ice free from its tin coffin, then they shot the block out upon a platform car, and it was ready for market. these big blocks were hard, solid, and crystal-clear. in certain of them, big bouquets of fresh and brilliant tropical flowers had been frozen-in; in others, beautiful silken-clad french dolls, and other pretty objects. these blocks were to be set on end in a platter, in the center of dinner- tables, to cool the tropical air; and also to be ornamental, for the flowers and things imprisoned in them could be seen as through plate glass. i was told that this factory could retail its ice, by wagon, throughout new orleans, in the humblest dwelling-house quantities, at six or seven dollars a ton, and make a sufficient profit. this being the case, there is business for ice-factories in the north; for we get ice on no such terms there, if one take less than three hundred and fifty pounds at a delivery. the rosalie yarn mill, of natchez, has a capacity of , spindles and looms, and employs hands. the natchez cotton mills company began operations four years ago in a two-story building of x feet, with , spindles and looms; capital $ , , all subscribed in the town. two years later, the same stockholders increased their capital to $ , ; added a third story to the mill, increased its length to feet; added machinery to increase the capacity to , spindles and looms. the company now employ operatives, many of whom are citizens of natchez. 'the mill works , bales of cotton annually and manufactures the best standard quality of brown shirtings and sheetings and drills, turning out , , yards of these goods per year.'{footnote [new orleans times-democrat, aug, .]} a close corporation--stock held at $ , per share, but none in the market. the changes in the mississippi river are great and strange, yet were to be expected; but i was not expecting to live to see natchez and these other river towns become manufacturing strongholds and railway centers. speaking of manufactures reminds me of a talk upon that topic which i heard--which i overheard--on board the cincinnati boat. i awoke out of a fretted sleep, with a dull confusion of voices in my ears. i listened-- two men were talking; subject, apparently, the great inundation. i looked out through the open transom. the two men were eating a late breakfast; sitting opposite each other; nobody else around. they closed up the inundation with a few words--having used it, evidently, as a mere ice-breaker and acquaintanceship-breeder--then they dropped into business. it soon transpired that they were drummers--one belonging in cincinnati, the other in new orleans. brisk men, energetic of movement and speech; the dollar their god, how to get it their religion. 'now as to this article,' said cincinnati, slashing into the ostensible butter and holding forward a slab of it on his knife-blade, 'it's from our house; look at it--smell of it--taste it. put any test on it you want to. take your own time--no hurry--make it thorough. there now-- what do you say? butter, ain't it. not by a thundering sight--it's oleomargarine! yes, sir, that's what it is--oleomargarine. you can't tell it from butter; by george, an expert can't. it's from our house. we supply most of the boats in the west; there's hardly a pound of butter on one of them. we are crawling right along--jumping right along is the word. we are going to have that entire trade. yes, and the hotel trade, too. you are going to see the day, pretty soon, when you can't find an ounce of butter to bless yourself with, in any hotel in the mississippi and ohio valleys, outside of the biggest cities. why, we are turning out oleomargarine now by the thousands of tons. and we can sell it so dirt-cheap that the whole country has got to take it--can't get around it you see. butter don't stand any show--there ain't any chance for competition. butter's had its day--and from this out, butter goes to the wall. there's more money in oleomargarine than--why, you can't imagine the business we do. i've stopped in every town from cincinnati to natchez; and i've sent home big orders from every one of them.' and so-forth and so-on, for ten minutes longer, in the same fervid strain. then new orleans piped up and said-- yes, it's a first-rate imitation, that's a certainty; but it ain't the only one around that's first-rate. for instance, they make olive-oil out of cotton-seed oil, nowadays, so that you can't tell them apart.' 'yes, that's so,' responded cincinnati, 'and it was a tip-top business for a while. they sent it over and brought it back from france and italy, with the united states custom-house mark on it to indorse it for genuine, and there was no end of cash in it; but france and italy broke up the game--of course they naturally would. cracked on such a rattling impost that cotton-seed olive-oil couldn't stand the raise; had to hang up and quit.' 'oh, it did, did it? you wait here a minute.' goes to his state-room, brings back a couple of long bottles, and takes out the corks--says: 'there now, smell them, taste them, examine the bottles, inspect the labels. one of 'm's from europe, the other's never been out of this country. one's european olive-oil, the other's american cotton-seed olive-oil. tell 'm apart? 'course you can't. nobody can. people that want to, can go to the expense and trouble of shipping their oils to europe and back--it's their privilege; but our firm knows a trick worth six of that. we turn out the whole thing--clean from the word go--in our factory in new orleans: labels, bottles, oil, everything. well, no, not labels: been buying them abroad--get them dirt-cheap there. you see, there's just one little wee speck, essence, or whatever it is, in a gallon of cotton-seed oil, that give it a smell, or a flavor, or something--get that out, and you're all right--perfectly easy then to turn the oil into any kind of oil you want to, and there ain't anybody that can detect the true from the false. well, we know how to get that one little particle out--and we're the only firm that does. and we turn out an olive-oil that is just simply perfect--undetectable! we are doing a ripping trade, too--as i could easily show you by my order-book for this trip. maybe you'll butter everybody's bread pretty soon, but we'll cotton-seed his salad for him from the gulf to canada, and that's a dead-certain thing.' cincinnati glowed and flashed with admiration. the two scoundrels exchanged business-cards, and rose. as they left the table, cincinnati said-- 'but you have to have custom-house marks, don't you? how do you manage that?' i did not catch the answer. we passed port hudson, scene of two of the most terrific episodes of the war--the night-battle there between farragut's fleet and the confederate land batteries, april th, ; and the memorable land battle, two months later, which lasted eight hours--eight hours of exceptionally fierce and stubborn fighting--and ended, finally, in the repulse of the union forces with great slaughter. chapter castles and culture baton rouge was clothed in flowers, like a bride--no, much more so; like a greenhouse. for we were in the absolute south now--no modifications, no compromises, no half-way measures. the magnolia-trees in the capitol grounds were lovely and fragrant, with their dense rich foliage and huge snow-ball blossoms. the scent of the flower is very sweet, but you want distance on it, because it is so powerful. they are not good bedroom blossoms--they might suffocate one in his sleep. we were certainly in the south at last; for here the sugar region begins, and the plantations--vast green levels, with sugar-mill and negro quarters clustered together in the middle distance--were in view. and there was a tropical sun overhead and a tropical swelter in the air. and at this point, also, begins the pilot's paradise: a wide river hence to new orleans, abundance of water from shore to shore, and no bars, snags, sawyers, or wrecks in his road. sir walter scott is probably responsible for the capitol building; for it is not conceivable that this little sham castle would ever have been built if he had not run the people mad, a couple of generations ago, with his medieval romances. the south has not yet recovered from the debilitating influence of his books. admiration of his fantastic heroes and their grotesque 'chivalry' doings and romantic juvenilities still survives here, in an atmosphere in which is already perceptible the wholesome and practical nineteenth-century smell of cotton-factories and locomotives; and traces of its inflated language and other windy humbuggeries survive along with it. it is pathetic enough, that a whitewashed castle, with turrets and things--materials all ungenuine within and without, pretending to be what they are not--should ever have been built in this otherwise honorable place; but it is much more pathetic to see this architectural falsehood undergoing restoration and perpetuation in our day, when it would have been so easy to let dynamite finish what a charitable fire began, and then devote this restoration- money to the building of something genuine. baton rouge has no patent on imitation castles, however, and no monopoly of them. here is a picture from the advertisement of the 'female institute' of columbia; tennessee. the following remark is from the same advertisement-- 'the institute building has long been famed as a model of striking and beautiful architecture. visitors are charmed with its resemblance to the old castles of song and story, with its towers, turreted walls, and ivy-mantled porches.' keeping school in a castle is a romantic thing; as romantic as keeping hotel in a castle. by itself the imitation castle is doubtless harmless, and well enough; but as a symbol and breeder and sustainer of maudlin middle-age romanticism here in the midst of the plainest and sturdiest and infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has seen, it is necessarily a hurtful thing and a mistake. here is an extract from the prospectus of a kentucky 'female college.' female college sounds well enough; but since the phrasing it in that unjustifiable way was done purely in the interest of brevity, it seems to me that she-college would have been still better--because shorter, and means the same thing: that is, if either phrase means anything at all-- 'the president is southern by birth, by rearing, by education, and by sentiment; the teachers are all southern in sentiment, and with the exception of those born in europe were born and raised in the south. believing the southern to be the highest type of civilization this continent has seen, the young ladies are trained according to the southern ideas of delicacy, refinement, womanhood, religion, and propriety; hence we offer a first-class female college for the south and solicit southern patronage.' {footnote (long one) [illustrations of it thoughtlessly omitted by the advertiser: knoxville, tenn., october .--this morning a few minutes after ten o'clock, general joseph a. mabry, thomas o'connor, and joseph a. mabry, jr., were killed in a shooting affray. the difficulty began yesterday afternoon by general mabry attacking major o'connor and threatening to kill him. this was at the fair grounds, and o'connor told mabry that it was not the place to settle their difficulties. mabry then told o'connor he should not live. it seems that mabry was armed and o'connor was not. the cause of the difficulty was an old feud about the transfer of some property from mabry to o'connor. later in the afternoon mabry sent word to o'connor that he would kill him on sight. this morning major o'connor was standing in the door of the mechanics' national bank, of which he was president. general mabry and another gentleman walked down gay street on the opposite side from the bank. o'connor stepped into the bank, got a shot gun, took deliberate aim at general mabry and fired. mabry fell dead, being shot in the left side. as he fell o'connor fired again, the shot taking effect in mabry's thigh. o'connor then reached into the bank and got another shot gun. about this time joseph a. mabry, jr., son of general mabry, came rushing down the street, unseen by o'connor until within forty feet, when the young man fired a pistol, the shot taking effect in o'connor's right breast, passing through the body near the heart. the instant mabry shot, o'connor turned and fired, the load taking effect in young mabry's right breast and side. mabry fell pierced with twenty buckshot, and almost instantly o'connor fell dead without a struggle. mabry tried to rise, but fell back dead. the whole tragedy occurred within two minutes, and neither of the three spoke after he was shot. general mabry had about thirty buckshot in his body. a bystander was painfully wounded in the thigh with a buckshot, and another was wounded in the arm. four other men had their clothing pierced by buckshot. the affair caused great excitement, and gay street was thronged with thousands of people. general mabry and his son joe were acquitted only a few days ago of the murder of moses lusby and don lusby, father and son, whom they killed a few weeks ago. will mabry was killed by don lusby last christmas. major thomas o'connor was president of the mechanics' national bank here, and was the wealthiest man in the state.--associated press telegram. one day last month, professor sharpe, of the somerville, tenn., female college, 'a quiet and gentlemanly man,' was told that his brother-in- law, a captain burton, had threatened to kill him. burton, t seems, had already killed one man and driven his knife into another. the professor armed himself with a double-barreled shot gun, started out in search of his brother-in-law, found him playing billiards in a saloon, and blew his brains out. the 'memphis avalanche' reports that the professor's course met with pretty general approval in the community; knowing that the law was powerless, in the actual condition of public sentiment, to protect him, he protected himself. about the same time, two young men in north carolina quarreled about a girl, and 'hostile messages' were exchanged. friends tried to reconcile them, but had their labor for their pains. on the th the young men met in the public highway. one of them had a heavy club in his hand, the other an ax. the man with the club fought desperately for his life, but it was a hopeless fight from the first. a well-directed blow sent his club whirling out of his grasp, and the next moment he was a dead man. about the same time, two 'highly connected' young virginians, clerks in a hardware store at charlottesville, while 'skylarking,' came to blows. peter dick threw pepper in charles roads's eyes; roads demanded an apology; dick refused to give it, and it was agreed that a duel was inevitable, but a difficulty arose; the parties had no pistols, and it was too late at night to procure them. one of them suggested that butcher-knives would answer the purpose, and the other accepted the suggestion; the result was that roads fell to the floor with a gash in his abdomen that may or may not prove fatal. if dick has been arrested, the news has not reached us. he 'expressed deep regret,' and we are told by a staunton correspondent of the philadelphia press that 'every effort has been made to hush the matter up.'--extracts from the public journals.]} what, warder, ho! the man that can blow so complacent a blast as that, probably blows it from a castle. from baton rouge to new orleans, the great sugar plantations border both sides of the river all the way, and stretch their league-wide levels back to the dim forest-walls of bearded cypress in the rear. shores lonely no longer. plenty of dwellings all the way, on both banks-- standing so close together, for long distances, that the broad river lying between the two rows, becomes a sort of spacious street. a most home-like and happy-looking region. and now and then you see a pillared and porticoed great manor-house, embowered in trees. here is testimony of one or two of the procession of foreign tourists that filed along here half a century ago. mrs. trollope says-- 'the unbroken flatness of the banks of the mississippi continued unvaried for many miles above new orleans; but the graceful and luxuriant palmetto, the dark and noble ilex, and the bright orange, were everywhere to be seen, and it was many days before we were weary of looking at them.' captain basil hall-- 'the district of country which lies adjacent to the mississippi, in the lower parts of louisiana, is everywhere thickly peopled by sugar planters, whose showy houses, gay piazzas, trig gardens, and numerous slave-villages, all clean and neat, gave an exceedingly thriving air to the river scenery. all the procession paint the attractive picture in the same way. the descriptions of fifty years ago do not need to have a word changed in order to exactly describe the same region as it appears to-day--except as to the 'trigness' of the houses. the whitewash is gone from the negro cabins now; and many, possibly most, of the big mansions, once so shining white, have worn out their paint and have a decayed, neglected look. it is the blight of the war. twenty-one years ago everything was trim and trig and bright along the 'coast,' just as it had been in , as described by those tourists. unfortunate tourists! people humbugged them with stupid and silly lies, and then laughed at them for believing and printing the same. they told mrs. trollope that the alligators--or crocodiles, as she calls them-- were terrible creatures; and backed up the statement with a blood- curdling account of how one of these slandered reptiles crept into a squatter cabin one night, and ate up a woman and five children. the woman, by herself, would have satisfied any ordinarily-impossible alligator; but no, these liars must make him gorge the five children besides. one would not imagine that jokers of this robust breed would be sensitive--but they were. it is difficult, at this day, to understand, and impossible to justify, the reception which the book of the grave, honest, intelligent, gentle, manly, charitable, well-meaning capt. basil hall got. mrs. trollope's account of it may perhaps entertain the reader; therefore i have put it in the appendix.{footnote [see appendix c.]} following the equator a journey around the world by mark twain samuel l. clemens part chapter xxx. nature makes the locust with an appetite for crops; man would have made him with an appetite for sand. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. we spent part of an afternoon and a night at sea, and reached bluff, in new zealand, early in the morning. bluff is at the bottom of the middle island, and is away down south, nearly forty-seven degrees below the equator. it lies as far south of the line as quebec lies north of it, and the climates of the two should be alike; but for some reason or other it has not been so arranged. quebec is hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but bluff's climate is less intense; the cold weather is not very cold, the hot weather is not very hot; and the difference between the hottest month and the coldest is but degrees fahrenheit. in new zealand the rabbit plague began at bluff. the man who introduced the rabbit there was banqueted and lauded; but they would hang him, now, if they could get him. in england the natural enemy of the rabbit is detested and persecuted; in the bluff region the natural enemy of the rabbit is honored, and his person is sacred. the rabbit's natural enemy in england is the poacher, in bluff its natural enemy is the stoat, the weasel, the ferret, the cat, and the mongoose. in england any person below the heir who is caught with a rabbit in his possession must satisfactorily explain how it got there, or he will suffer fine and imprisonment, together with extinction of his peerage; in bluff, the cat found with a rabbit in its possession does not have to explain--everybody looks the other way; the person caught noticing would suffer fine and imprisonment, with extinction of peerage. this is a sure way to undermine the moral fabric of a cat. thirty years from now there will not be a moral cat in new zealand. some think there is none there now. in england the poacher is watched, tracked, hunted--he dare not show his face; in bluff the cat, the weasel, the stoat, and the mongoose go up and down, whither they will, unmolested. by a law of the legislature, posted where all may read, it is decreed that any person found in possession of one of these creatures (dead) must satisfactorily explain the circumstances or pay a fine of not less than l , nor more than l . the revenue from this source is not large. persons who want to pay a hundred dollars for a dead cat are getting rarer and rarer every day. this is bad, for the revenue was to go to the endowment of a university. all governments are more or less short-sighted: in england they fine the poacher, whereas he ought to be banished to new zealand. new zealand would pay his way, and give him wages. it was from bluff that we ought to have cut across to the west coast and visited the new zealand switzerland, a land of superb scenery, made up of snowy grandeurs, anal mighty glaciers, and beautiful lakes; and over there, also, are the wonderful rivals of the norwegian and alaskan fiords; and for neighbor, a waterfall of , feet; but we were obliged to postpone the trip to some later and indefinite time. november . a lovely summer morning; brilliant blue sky. a few miles out from invercargill, passed through vast level green expanses snowed over with sheep. fine to see. the green, deep and very vivid sometimes; at other times less so, but delicate and lovely. a passenger reminds me that i am in "the england of the far south." dunedin, same date. the town justifies michael davitt's praises. the people are scotch. they stopped here on their way from home to heaven-thinking they had arrived. the population is stated at , , by malcolm ross, journalist; stated by an m. p. at , . a journalist cannot lie. to the residence of dr. hockin. he has a fine collection of books relating to new zealand; and his house is a museum of maori art and antiquities. he has pictures and prints in color of many native chiefs of the past--some of them of note in history. there is nothing of the savage in the faces; nothing could be finer than these men's features, nothing more intellectual than these faces, nothing more masculine, nothing nobler than their aspect. the aboriginals of australia and tasmania looked the savage, but these chiefs looked like roman patricians. the tattooing in these portraits ought to suggest the savage, of course, but it does not. the designs are so flowing and graceful and beautiful that they are a most satisfactory decoration. it takes but fifteen minutes to get reconciled to the tattooing, and but fifteen more to perceive that it is just the thing. after that, the undecorated european face is unpleasant and ignoble. dr. hockiu gave us a ghastly curiosity--a lignified caterpillar with a plant growing out of the back of its neck--a plant with a slender stem inches high. it happened not by accident, but by design--nature's design. this caterpillar was in the act of loyally carrying out a law inflicted upon him by nature--a law purposely inflicted upon him to get him into trouble--a law which was a trap; in pursuance of this law he made the proper preparations for turning himself into a night-moth; that is to say, he dug a little trench, a little grave, and then stretched himself out in it on his stomach and partially buried himself--then nature was ready for him. she blew the spores of a peculiar fungus through the air with a purpose. some of them fell into a crease in the back of the caterpillar's neck, and began to sprout and grow--for there was soil there--he had not washed his neck. the roots forced themselves down into the worm's person, and rearward along through its body, sucking up the creature's juices for sap; the worm slowly died, and turned to wood. and here he was now, a wooden caterpillar, with every detail of his former physique delicately and exactly preserved and perpetuated, and with that stem standing up out of him for his monument--monument commemorative of his own loyalty and of nature's unfair return for it. nature is always acting like that. mrs. x. said (of course) that the caterpillar was not conscious and didn't suffer. she should have known better. no caterpillar can deceive nature. if this one couldn't suffer, nature would have known it and would have hunted up another caterpillar. not that she would have let this one go, merely because it was defective. no. she would have waited and let him turn into a night-moth; and then fried him in the candle. nature cakes a fish's eyes over with parasites, so that it shan't be able to avoid its enemies or find its food. she sends parasites into a star-fish's system, which clog up its prongs and swell them and make them so uncomfortable that the poor creature delivers itself from the prong to ease its misery; and presently it has to part with another prong for the sake of comfort, and finally with a third. if it re-grows the prongs, the parasite returns and the same thing is repeated. and finally, when the ability to reproduce prongs is lost through age, that poor old star-fish can't get around any more, and so it dies of starvation. in australia is prevalent a horrible disease due to an "unperfected tapeworm." unperfected--that is what they call it, i do not know why, for it transacts business just as well as if it were finished and frescoed and gilded, and all that. november . to the museum and public picture gallery with the president of the society of artists. some fine pictures there, lent by the s. of a. several of them they bought, the others came to them by gift. next, to the gallery of the s. of a.--annual exhibition--just opened. fine. think of a town like this having two such collections as this, and a society of artists. it is so all over australasia. if it were a monarchy one might understand it. i mean an absolute monarchy, where it isn't necessary to vote money, but take it. then art flourishes. but these colonies are republics--republics with a wide suffrage; voters of both sexes, this one of new zealand. in republics, neither the government nor the rich private citizen is much given to propagating art. all over australasia pictures by famous european artists are bought for the public galleries by the state and by societies of citizens. living citizens--not dead ones. they rob themselves to give, not their heirs. this s. of a. here owns its buildings built it by subscription. chapter xxxi. the spirit of wrath--not the words--is the sin; and the spirit of wrath is cursing. we begin to swear before we can talk. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. november . on the road. this train-express goes twenty and one-half miles an hour, schedule time; but it is fast enough, the outlook upon sea and land is so interesting, and the cars so comfortable. they are not english, and not american; they are the swiss combination of the two. a narrow and railed porch along the side, where a person can walk up and down. a lavatory in each car. this is progress; this is nineteenth-century spirit. in new zealand, these fast expresses run twice a week. it is well to know this if you want to be a bird and fly through the country at a -mile gait; otherwise you may start on one of the five wrong days, and then you will get a train that can't overtake its own shadow. by contrast, these pleasant cars call to mind the branch-road cars at maryborough, australia, and the passengers' talk about the branch-road and the hotel. somewhere on the road to maryborough i changed for a while to a smoking-carriage. there were two gentlemen there; both riding backward, one at each end of the compartment. they were acquaintances of each other. i sat down facing the one that sat at the starboard window. he had a good face, and a friendly look, and i judged from his dress that he was a dissenting minister. he was along toward fifty. of his own motion he struck a match, and shaded it with his hand for me to light my cigar. i take the rest from my diary: in order to start conversation i asked him something about maryborough. he said, in a most pleasant--even musical voice, but with quiet and cultured decision: "it's a charming town, with a hell of a hotel." i was astonished. it seemed so odd to hear a minister swear out loud. he went placidly on: "it's the worst hotel in australia. well, one may go further, and say in australasia." "bad beds?" "no--none at all. just sand-bags." "the pillows, too?" "yes, the pillows, too. just sand. and not a good quality of sand. it packs too hard, and has never been screened. there is too much gravel in it. it is like sleeping on nuts." "isn't there any good sand?" "plenty of it. there is as good bed-sand in this region as the world can furnish. aerated sand--and loose; but they won't buy it. they want something that will pack solid, and petrify." "how are the rooms?" "eight feet square; and a sheet of iced oil-cloth to step on in the morning when you get out of the sand-quarry." "as to lights?" "coal-oil lamp." "a good one?" "no. it's the kind that sheds a gloom." "i like a lamp that burns all night." "this one won't. you must blow it out early." "that is bad. one might want it again in the night. can't find it in the dark." "there's no trouble; you can find it by the stench." "wardrobe?" "two nails on the door to hang seven suits of clothes on if you've got them." "bells?" "there aren't any." "what do you do when you want service?" "shout. but it won't fetch anybody." "suppose you want the chambermaid to empty the slopjar?" "there isn't any slop-jar. the hotels don't keep them. that is, outside of sydney and melbourne." "yes, i knew that. i was only talking. it's the oddest thing in australia. another thing: i've got to get up in the dark, in the morning, to take the o'clock train. now if the boots----" "there isn't any." "well, the porter." "there isn't any." "but who will call me?" "nobody. you'll call yourself. and you'll light yourself, too. there'll not be a light burning in the halls or anywhere. and if you don't carry a light, you'll break your neck." "but who will help me down with my baggage?" "nobody. however, i will tell you what to do. in maryborough there's an american who has lived there half a lifetime; a fine man, and prosperous and popular. he will be on the lookout for you; you won't have any trouble. sleep in peace; he will rout you out, and you will make your train. where is your manager?" "i left him at ballarat, studying the language. and besides, he had to go to melbourne and get us ready for new zealand. i've not tried to pilot myself before, and it doesn't look easy." "easy! you've selected the very most difficult piece of railroad in australia for your experiment. there are twelve miles of this road which no man without good executive ability can ever hope--tell me, have you good executive ability? first-rate executive ability?" "i--well, i think so, but----" "that settles it. the tone of----oh, you wouldn't ever make it in the world. however, that american will point you right, and you'll go. you've got tickets?" "yes--round trip; all the way to sydney." "ah, there it is, you see! you are going in the o'clock by castlemaine--twelve miles--instead of the . by ballarat--in order to save two hours of fooling along the road. now then, don't interrupt--let me have the floor. you're going to save the government a deal of hauling, but that's nothing; your ticket is by ballarat, and it isn't good over that twelve miles, and so----" "but why should the government care which way i go?" "goodness knows! ask of the winds that far away with fragments strewed the sea, as the boy that stood on the burning deck used to say. the government chooses to do its railway business in its own way, and it doesn't know as much about it as the french. in the beginning they tried idiots; then they imported the french--which was going backwards, you see; now it runs the roads itself--which is going backwards again, you see. why, do you know, in order to curry favor with the voters, the government puts down a road wherever anybody wants it--anybody that owns two sheep and a dog; and by consequence we've got, in the colony of victoria, railway stations, and the business done at eighty of them doesn't foot up twenty shillings a week." "five dollars? oh, come!" "it's true. it's the absolute truth." "why, there are three or four men on wages at every station." "i know it. and the station-business doesn't pay for the sheep-dip to sanctify their coffee with. it's just as i say. and accommodating? why, if you shake a rag the train will stop in the midst of the wilderness to pick you up. all that kind of politics costs, you see. and then, besides, any town that has a good many votes and wants a fine station, gets it. don't you overlook that maryborough station, if you take an interest in governmental curiosities. why, you can put the whole population of maryborough into it, and give them a sofa apiece, and have room for more. you haven't fifteen stations in america that are as big, and you probably haven't five that are half as fine. why, it's perfectly elegant. and the clock! everybody will show you the clock. there isn't a station in europe that's got such a clock. it doesn't strike--and that's one mercy. it hasn't any bell; and as you'll have cause to remember, if you keep your reason, all australia is simply bedamned with bells. on every quarter-hour, night and day, they jingle a tiresome chime of half a dozen notes--all the clocks in town at once, all the clocks in australasia at once, and all the very same notes; first, downward scale: mi, re, do, sol--then upward scale: sol, si, re, do--down again: mi, re, do, sol--up again: sol, si, re, do--then the clock--say at midnight clang--clang--clang--clang--clang-clang--clang--clang--clang --clang----and, by that time you're--hello, what's all this excitement about? a runaway--scared by the train; why, you think this train could scare anything. well, when they build eighty stations at a loss and a lot of palace-stations and clocks like maryborough's at another loss, the government has got to economize somewhere hasn't it? very well look at the rolling stock. that's where they save the money. why, that train from maryborough will consist of eighteen freight-cars and two passenger-kennels; cheap, poor, shabby, slovenly; no drinking water, no sanitary arrangements, every imaginable inconvenience; and slow?--oh, the gait of cold molasses; no air-brake, no springs, and they'll jolt your head off every time they start or stop. that's where they make their little economies, you see. they spend tons of money to house you palatially while you wait fifteen minutes for a train, then degrade you to six hours' convict-transportation to get the foolish outlay back. what a rational man really needs is discomfort while he's waiting, then his journey in a nice train would be a grateful change. but no, that would be common sense--and out of place in a government. and then, besides, they save in that other little detail, you know--repudiate their own tickets, and collect a poor little illegitimate extra shilling out of you for that twelve miles, and----" "well, in any case----" "wait--there's more. leave that american out of the account and see what would happen. there's nobody on hand to examine your ticket when you arrive. but the conductor will come and examine it when the train is ready to start. it is too late to buy your extra ticket now; the train can't wait, and won't. you must climb out." "but can't i pay the conductor?" "no, he is not authorized to receive the money, and he won't. you must climb out. there's no other way. i tell you, the railway management is about the only thoroughly european thing here--continentally european i mean, not english. it's the continental business in perfection; down fine. oh, yes, even to the peanut-commerce of weighing baggage." the train slowed up at his place. as he stepped out he said: "yes, you'll like maryborough. plenty of intelligence there. it's a charming place--with a hell of a hotel." then he was gone. i turned to the other gentleman: "is your friend in the ministry?" "no--studying for it." chapter xxxii. the man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. it was junior england all the way to christchurch--in fact, just a garden. and christchurch is an english town, with an english-park annex, and a winding english brook just like the avon--and named the avon; but from a man, not from shakespeare's river. its grassy banks are bordered by the stateliest and most impressive weeping willows to be found in the world, i suppose. they continue the line of a great ancestor; they were grown from sprouts of the willow that sheltered napoleon's grave in st. helena. it is a settled old community, with all the serenities, the graces, the conveniences, and the comforts of the ideal home-life. if it had an established church and social inequality it would be england over again with hardly a lack. in the museum we saw many curious and interesting things; among others a fine native house of the olden time, with all the details true to the facts, and the showy colors right and in their proper places. all the details: the fine mats and rugs and things; the elaborate and wonderful wood carvings--wonderful, surely, considering who did them wonderful in design and particularly in execution, for they were done with admirable sharpness and exactness, and yet with no better tools than flint and jade and shell could furnish; and the totem-posts were there, ancestor above ancestor, with tongues protruded and hands clasped comfortably over bellies containing other people's ancestors--grotesque and ugly devils, every one, but lovingly carved, and ably; and the stuffed natives were present, in their proper places, and looking as natural as life; and the housekeeping utensils were there, too, and close at hand the carved and finely ornamented war canoe. and we saw little jade gods, to hang around the neck--not everybody's, but sacred to the necks of natives of rank. also jade weapons, and many kinds of jade trinkets--all made out of that excessively hard stone without the help of any tool of iron. and some of these things had small round holes bored through them--nobody knows how it was done; a mystery, a lost art. i think it was said that if you want such a hole bored in a piece of jade now, you must send it to london or amsterdam where the lapidaries are. also we saw a complete skeleton of the giant moa. it stood ten feet high, and must have been a sight to look at when it was a living bird. it was a kicker, like the ostrich; in fight it did not use its beak, but its foot. it must have been a convincing kind of kick. if a person had his back to the bird and did not see who it was that did it, he would think he had been kicked by a wind-mill. there must have been a sufficiency of moas in the old forgotten days when his breed walked the earth. his bones are found in vast masses, all crammed together in huge graves. they are not in caves, but in the ground. nobody knows how they happened to get concentrated there. mind, they are bones, not fossils. this means that the moa has not been extinct very long. still, this is the only new zealand creature which has no mention in that otherwise comprehensive literature, the native legends. this is a significant detail, and is good circumstantial evidence that the moa has been extinct years, since the maori has himself--by tradition--been in new zealand since the end of the fifteenth century. he came from an unknown land--the first maori did--then sailed back in his canoe and brought his tribe, and they removed the aboriginal peoples into the sea and into the ground and took the land. that is the tradition. that that first maori could come, is understandable, for anybody can come to a place when he isn't trying to; but how that discoverer found his way back home again without a compass is his secret, and he died with it in him. his language indicates that he came from polynesia. he told where he came from, but he couldn't spell well, so one can't find the place on the map, because people who could spell better than he could, spelt the resemblance all out of it when they made the map. however, it is better to have a map that is spelt right than one that has information in it. in new zealand women have the right to vote for members of the legislature, but they cannot be members themselves. the law extending the suffrage to them event into effect in . the population of christchurch (census of ) was , . the first election under the law was held in november of that year. number of men who voted, , ; number of women who voted, , . these figures ought to convince us that women are not as indifferent about politics as some people would have us believe. in new zealand as a whole, the estimated adult female population was , ; of these , qualified and registered their names on the rolls . per cent. of the whole. of these, , went to the polls and voted-- . per cent. do men ever turn out better than that--in america or elsewhere? here is a remark to the other sex's credit, too--i take it from the official report: "a feature of the election was the orderliness and sobriety of the people. women were in no way molested." at home, a standing argument against woman suffrage has always been that women could not go to the polls without being insulted. the arguments against woman suffrage have always taken the easy form of prophecy. the prophets have been prophesying ever since the woman's rights movement began in --and in forty-seven years they have never scored a hit. men ought to begin to feel a sort of respect for their mothers and wives and sisters by this time. the women deserve a change of attitude like that, for they have wrought well. in forty-seven years they have swept an imposingly large number of unfair laws from the statute books of america. in that brief time these serfs have set themselves free essentially. men could not have done so much for themselves in that time without bloodshed--at least they never have; and that is argument that they didn't know how. the women have accomplished a peaceful revolution, and a very beneficent one; and yet that has not convinced the average man that they are intelligent, and have courage and energy and perseverance and fortitude. it takes much to convince the average man of anything; and perhaps nothing can ever make him realize that he is the average woman's inferior--yet in several important details the evidences seems to show that that is what he is. man has ruled the human race from the beginning--but he should remember that up to the middle of the present century it was a dull world, and ignorant and stupid; but it is not such a dull world now, and is growing less and less dull all the time. this is woman's opportunity--she has had none before. i wonder where man will be in another forty-seven years? in the new zealand law occurs this: "the word person wherever it occurs throughout the act includes woman." that is promotion, you see. by that enlargement of the word, the matron with the garnered wisdom and experience of fifty years becomes at one jump the political equal of her callow kid of twenty-one. the white population of the colony is , , the maori population is , . the whites elect seventy members of the house of representatives, the maoris four. the maori women vote for their four members. november . after four pleasant days in christchurch, we are to leave at midnight to-night. mr. kinsey gave me an ornithorhynchus, and i am taming it. sunday, th. sailed last night in the flora, from lyttelton. so we did. i remember it yet. the people who sailed in the flora that night may forget some other things if they live a good while, but they will not live long, enough to forget that. the flora is about the equivalent of a cattle-scow; but when the union company find it inconvenient to keep a contract and lucrative to break it, they smuggle her into passenger service, and "keep the change." they give no notice of their projected depredation; you innocently buy tickets for the advertised passenger boat, and when you get down to lyttelton at midnight, you find that they have substituted the scow. they have plenty of good boats, but no competition--and that is the trouble. it is too late now to make other arrangements if you have engagements ahead. it is a powerful company, it has a monopoly, and everybody is afraid of it--including the government's representative, who stands at the end of the stage-plank to tally the passengers and see that no boat receives a greater number than the law allows her to carry. this conveniently-blind representative saw the scow receive a number which was far in excess of its privilege, and winked a politic wink and said nothing. the passengers bore with meekness the cheat which had been put upon them, and made no complaint. it was like being at home in america, where abused passengers act in just the same way. a few days before, the union company had discharged a captain for getting a boat into danger, and had advertised this act as evidence of its vigilance in looking after the safety of the passengers --for thugging a captain costs the company nothing, but when opportunity offered to send this dangerously overcrowded tub to sea and save a little trouble and a tidy penny by it, it forgot to worry about the passenger's safety. the first officer told me that the flora was privileged to carry passengers. she must have had all of on board. all the cabins were full, all the cattle-stalls in the main stable were full, the spaces at the heads of companionways were full, every inch of floor and table in the swill-room was packed with sleeping men and remained so until the place was required for breakfast, all the chairs and benches on the hurricane deck were occupied, and still there were people who had to walk about all night! if the flora had gone down that night, half of the people on board would have been wholly without means of escape. the owners of that boat were not technically guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, but they were morally guilty of it. i had a cattle-stall in the main stable--a cavern fitted up with a long double file of two-storied bunks, the files separated by a calico partition--twenty men and boys on one side of it, twenty women and girls on the other. the place was as dark as the soul of the union company, and smelt like a kennel. when the vessel got out into the heavy seas and began to pitch and wallow, the cavern prisoners became immediately seasick, and then the peculiar results that ensued laid all my previous experiences of the kind well away in the shade. and the wails, the groans, the cries, the shrieks, the strange ejaculations--it was wonderful. the women and children and some of the men and boys spent the night in that place, for they were too ill to leave it; but the rest of us got up, by and by, and finished the night on the hurricane-deck. that boat was the foulest i was ever in; and the smell of the breakfast saloon when we threaded our way among the layers of steaming passengers stretched upon its floor and its tables was incomparable for efficiency. a good many of us got ashore at the first way-port to seek another ship. after a wait of three hours we got good rooms in the mahinapua, a wee little bridal-parlor of a boat--only tons burthen; clean and comfortable; good service; good beds; good table, and no crowding. the seas danced her about like a duck, but she was safe and capable. next morning early she went through the french pass--a narrow gateway of rock, between bold headlands--so narrow, in fact, that it seemed no wider than a street. the current tore through there like a mill-race, and the boat darted through like a telegram. the passage was made in half a minute; then we were in a wide place where noble vast eddies swept grandly round and round in shoal water, and i wondered what they would do with the little boat. they did as they pleased with her. they picked her up and flung her around like nothing and landed her gently on the solid, smooth bottom of sand--so gently, indeed, that we barely felt her touch it, barely felt her quiver when she came to a standstill. the water was as clear as glass, the sand on the bottom was vividly distinct, and the fishes seemed to be swimming about in nothing. fishing lines were brought out, but before we could bait the hooks the boat was off and away again. chapter xxxiii. let us be grateful to adam our benefactor. he cut us out of the "blessing of idleness," and won for us the "curse of labor." --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. we soon reached the town of nelson, and spent the most of the day there, visiting acquaintances and driving with them about the garden--the whole region is a garden, excepting the scene of the "maungatapu murders," of thirty years ago. that is a wild place--wild and lonely; an ideal place for a murder. it is at the base of a vast, rugged, densely timbered mountain. in the deep twilight of that forest solitude four desperate rascals--burgess, sullivan, levy, and kelley--ambushed themselves beside the mountain-trail to murder and rob four travelers--kempthorne, mathieu, dudley, and de pontius, the latter a new yorker. a harmless old laboring man came wandering along, and as his presence was an embarrassment, they choked him, hid him, and then resumed their watch for the four. they had to wait a while, but eventually everything turned out as they desired. that dark episode is the one large event in the history of nelson. the fame of it traveled far. burgess made a confession. it is a remarkable paper. for brevity, succinctness, and concentration, it is perhaps without its peer in the literature of murder. there are no waste words in it; there is no obtrusion of matter not pertinent to the occasion, nor any departure from the dispassionate tone proper to a formal business statement--for that is what it is: a business statement of a murder, by the chief engineer of it, or superintendent, or foreman, or whatever one may prefer to call him. "we were getting impatient, when we saw four men and a pack-horse coming. i left my cover and had a look at the men, for levy had told me that mathieu was a small man and wore a large beard, and that it was a chestnut horse. i said, 'here they come.' they were then a good distance away; i took the caps off my gun, and put fresh ones on. i said, 'you keep where you are, i'll put them up, and you give me your gun while you tie them.' it was arranged as i have described. the men came; they arrived within about fifteen yards when i stepped up and said, 'stand! bail up!' that means all of them to get together. i made them fall back on the upper side of the road with their faces up the range, and sullivan brought me his gun, and then tied their hands behind them. the horse was very quiet all the time, he did not move. when they were all tied, sullivan took the horse up the hill, and put him in the bush; he cut the rope and let the swags--[a "swag" is a kit, a pack, small baggage.]--fall on the ground, and then came to me. we then marched the men down the incline to the creek; the water at this time barely running. up this creek we took the men; we went, i daresay, five or six hundred yards up it, which took us nearly half-an-hour to accomplish. then we turned to the right up the range; we went, i daresay, one hundred and fifty yards from the creek, and there we sat down with the men. i said to sullivan, 'put down your gun and search these men,' which he did. i asked them their several names; they told me. i asked them if they were expected at nelson. they said, 'no.' if such their lives would have been spared. in money we took l odd. i said, 'is this all you have? you had better tell me.' sullivan said, 'here is a bag of gold.' i said, 'what's on that pack-horse? is there any gold ?' when kempthorne said, 'yes, my gold is in the portmanteau, and i trust you will not take it all.' 'well,' i said, 'we must take you away one at a time, because the range is steep just here, and then we will let you go.' they said, 'all right,' most cheerfully. we tied their feet, and took dudley with us; we went about sixty yards with him. this was through a scrub. it was arranged the night previously that it would be best to choke them, in case the report of the arms might be heard from the road, and if they were missed they never would be found. so we tied a handkerchief over his eyes, when sullivan took the sash off his waist, put it round his neck, and so strangled him. sullivan, after i had killed the old laboring man, found fault with the way he was choked. he said, 'the next we do i'll show you my way.' i said, 'i have never done such a thing before. i have shot a man, but never choked one.' we returned to the others, when kempthorne said, 'what noise was that?' i said it was caused by breaking through the scrub. this was taking too much time, so it was agreed to shoot them. with that i said, 'we'll take you no further, but separate you, and then loose one of you, and he can relieve the others.' so with that, sullivan took de pontius to the left of where kempthorne was sitting. i took mathieu to the right. i tied a strap round his legs, and shot him with a revolver. he yelled, i ran from him with my gun in my hand, i sighted kempthorne, who had risen to his feet. i presented the gun, and shot him behind the right ear; his life's blood welled from him, and he died instantaneously. sullivan had shot. de pontius in the meantime, and then came to me. i said, 'look to mathieu,' indicating the spot where he lay. he shortly returned and said, 'i had to "chiv" that fellow, he was not dead,' a cant word, meaning that he had to stab him. returning to the road we passed where de pontius lay and was dead. sullivan said, 'this is the digger, the others were all storekeepers; this is the digger, let's cover him up, for should the others be found, they'll think he done it and sloped,' meaning he had gone. so with that we threw all the stones on him, and then left him. this bloody work took nearly an hour and a half from the time we stopped the men." anyone who reads that confession will think that the man who wrote it was destitute of emotions, destitute of feeling. that is partly true. as regarded others he was plainly without feeling--utterly cold and pitiless; but as regarded himself the case was different. while he cared nothing for the future of the murdered men, he cared a great deal for his own. it makes one's flesh creep to read the introduction to his confession. the judge on the bench characterized it as "scandalously blasphemous," and it certainly reads so, but burgess meant no blasphemy. he was merely a brute, and whatever he said or wrote was sure to expose the fact. his redemption was a very real thing to him, and he was as jubilantly happy on the gallows as ever was christian martyr at the stake. we dwellers in this world are strangely made, and mysteriously circumstanced. we have to suppose that the murdered men are lost, and that burgess is saved; but we cannot suppress our natural regrets. "written in my dungeon drear this th of august, in the year of grace, . to god be ascribed all power and glory in subduing the rebellious spirit of a most guilty wretch, who has been brought, through the instrumentality of a faithful follower of christ, to see his wretched and guilty state, inasmuch as hitherto he has led an awful and wretched life, and through the assurance of this faithful soldier of christ, he has been led and also believes that christ will yet receive and cleanse him from all his deep-dyed and bloody sins. i lie under the imputation which says, 'come now and let us reason together, saith the lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.' on this promise i rely." we sailed in the afternoon late, spent a few hours at new plymouth, then sailed again and reached auckland the next day, november th, and remained in that fine city several days. its situation is commanding, and the sea-view is superb. there are charming drives all about, and by courtesy of friends we had opportunity to enjoy them. from the grassy crater-summit of mount eden one's eye ranges over a grand sweep and variety of scenery--forests clothed in luxuriant foliage, rolling green fields, conflagrations of flowers, receding and dimming stretches of green plain, broken by lofty and symmetrical old craters--then the blue bays twinkling and sparkling away into the dreamy distances where the mountains loom spiritual in their veils of haze. it is from auckland that one goes to rotorua, the region of the renowned hot lakes and geysers--one of the chief wonders of new zealand; but i was not well enough to make the trip. the government has a sanitorium there, and everything is comfortable for the tourist and the invalid. the government's official physician is almost over-cautious in his estimates of the efficacy of the baths, when he is talking about rheumatism, gout, paralysis, and such things; but when he is talking about the effectiveness of the waters in eradicating the whisky-habit, he seems to have no reserves. the baths will cure the drinking-habit no matter how chronic it is--and cure it so effectually that even the desire to drink intoxicants will come no more. there should be a rush from europe and america to that place; and when the victims of alcoholism find out what they can get by going there, the rush will begin. the thermal-springs district of new zealand comprises an area of upwards of , acres, or close on , square miles. rotorua is the favorite place. it is the center of a rich field of lake and mountain scenery; from rotorua as a base the pleasure-seeker makes excursions. the crowd of sick people is great, and growing. rotorua is the carlsbad of australasia. it is from auckland that the kauri gum is shipped. for a long time now about , tons of it have been brought into the town per year. it is worth about $ per ton, unassorted; assorted, the finest grades are worth about $ , . it goes to america, chiefly. it is in lumps, and is hard and smooth, and looks like amber--the light-colored like new amber, and the dark brown like rich old amber. and it has the pleasant feel of amber, too. some of the light-colored samples were a tolerably fair counterfeit of uncut south african diamonds, they were so perfectly smooth and polished and transparent. it is manufactured into varnish; a varnish which answers for copal varnish and is cheaper. the gum is dug up out of the ground; it has been there for ages. it is the sap of the kauri tree. dr. campbell of auckland told me he sent a cargo of it to england fifty years ago, but nothing came of the venture. nobody knew what to do with it; so it was sold at a ton, to light fires with. november -- p.m., sailed. vast and beautiful harbor. land all about for hours. tangariwa, the mountain that "has the same shape from every point of view." that is the common belief in auckland. and so it has --from every point of view except thirteen. perfect summer weather. large school of whales in the distance. nothing could be daintier than the puffs of vapor they spout up, when seen against the pink glory of the sinking sun, or against the dark mass of an island reposing in the deep blue shadow of a storm cloud . . . . great barrier rock standing up out of the sea away to the left. sometime ago a ship hit it full speed in a fog-- miles out of her course-- lives lost; the captain committed suicide without waiting a moment. he knew that, whether he was to blame or not, the company owning the vessel would discharge him and make a devotion--to--passengers' safety advertisement out of it, and his chance to make a livelihood would be permanently gone. chapter xxxiv. let us not be too particular. it is better to have old second-hand diamonds than none at all. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. november . to-day we reached gisborne, and anchored in a big bay; there was a heavy sea on, so we remained on board. we were a mile from shore; a little steam-tug put out from the land; she was an object of thrilling interest; she would climb to the summit of a billow, reel drunkenly there a moment, dim and gray in the driving storm of spindrift, then make a plunge like a diver and remain out of sight until one had given her up, then up she would dart again, on a steep slant toward the sky, shedding niagaras of water from her forecastle--and this she kept up, all the way out to us. she brought twenty-five passengers in her stomach--men and women mainly a traveling dramatic company. in sight on deck were the crew, in sou'westers, yellow waterproof canvas suits, and boots to the thigh. the deck was never quiet for a moment, and seldom nearer level than a ladder, and noble were the seas which leapt aboard and went flooding aft. we rove a long line to the yard-arm, hung a most primitive basketchair to it and swung it out into the spacious air of heaven, and there it swayed, pendulum-fashion, waiting for its chance--then down it shot, skillfully aimed, and was grabbed by the two men on the forecastle. a young fellow belonging to our crew was in the chair, to be a protection to the lady-comers. at once a couple of ladies appeared from below, took seats in his lap, we hoisted them into the sky, waited a moment till the roll of the ship brought them in overhead, then we lowered suddenly away, and seized the chair as it struck the deck. we took the twenty-five aboard, and delivered twenty-five into the tug--among them several aged ladies, and one blind one--and all without accident. it was a fine piece of work. ours is a nice ship, roomy, comfortable, well-ordered, and satisfactory. now and then we step on a rat in a hotel, but we have had no rats on shipboard lately; unless, perhaps in the flora; we had more serious things to think of there, and did not notice. i have noticed that it is only in ships and hotels which still employ the odious chinese gong, that you find rats. the reason would seem to be, that as a rat cannot tell the time of day by a clock, he won't stay where he cannot find out when dinner is ready. november . the doctor tells me of several old drunkards, one spiritless loafer, and several far-gone moral wrecks who have been reclaimed by the salvation army and have remained staunch people and hard workers these two years. wherever one goes, these testimonials to the army's efficiency are forthcoming . . . . this morning we had one of those whizzing green ballarat flies in the room, with his stunning buzz-saw noise--the swiftest creature in the world except the lightning-flash. it is a stupendous force that is stored up in that little body. if we had it in a ship in the same proportion, we could spin from liverpool to new york in the space of an hour--the time it takes to eat luncheon. the new zealand express train is called the ballarat fly . . . . bad teeth in the colonies. a citizen told me they don't have teeth filled, but pull them out and put in false ones, and that now and then one sees a young lady with a full set. she is fortunate. i wish i had been born with false teeth and a false liver and false carbuncles. i should get along better. december . monday. left napier in the ballarat fly the one that goes twice a week. from napier to hastings, twelve miles; time, fifty-five minutes--not so far short of thirteen miles an hour . . . . a perfect summer day; cool breeze, brilliant sky, rich vegetation. two or three times during the afternoon we saw wonderfully dense and beautiful forests, tumultuously piled skyward on the broken highlands--not the customary roof-like slant of a hillside, where the trees are all the same height. the noblest of these trees were of the kauri breed, we were told the timber that is now furnishing the wood-paving for europe, and is the best of all wood for that purpose. sometimes these towering upheavals of forestry were festooned and garlanded with vine-cables, and sometimes the masses of undergrowth were cocooned in another sort of vine of a delicate cobwebby texture--they call it the "supplejack," i think. tree ferns everywhere--a stem fifteen feet high, with a graceful chalice of fern-fronds sprouting from its top--a lovely forest ornament. and there was a ten-foot reed with a flowing suit of what looked like yellow hair hanging from its upper end. i do not know its name, but if there is such a thing as a scalp-plant, this is it. a romantic gorge, with a brook flowing in its bottom, approaching palmerston north. waitukurau. twenty minutes for luncheon. with me sat my wife and daughter, and my manager, mr. carlyle smythe. i sat at the head of the table, and could see the right-hand wall; the others had their backs to it. on that wall, at a good distance away, were a couple of framed pictures. i could not see them clearly, but from the groupings of the figures i fancied that they represented the killing of napoleon iii's son by the zulus in south africa. i broke into the conversation, which was about poetry and cabbage and art, and said to my wife-- "do you remember when the news came to paris----" "of the killing of the prince?" (those were the very words i had in my mind.) "yes, but what prince?" "napoleon. lulu." "what made you think of that?" "i don't know." there was no collusion. she had not seen the pictures, and they had not been mentioned. she ought to have thought of some recent news that came to paris, for we were but seven months from there and had been living there a couple of years when we started on this trip; but instead of that she thought of an incident of our brief sojourn in paris of sixteen years before. here was a clear case of mental telegraphy; of mind-transference; of my mind telegraphing a thought into hers. how do i know? because i telegraphed an error. for it turned out that the pictures did not represent the killing of lulu at all, nor anything connected with lulu. she had to get the error from my head--it existed nowhere else. chapter xxxv. the autocrat of russia possesses more power than any other man in the earth; but he cannot stop a sneeze. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. wauganiui, december . a pleasant trip, yesterday, per ballarat fly. four hours. i do not know the distance, but it must have been well along toward fifty miles. the fly could have spun it out to eight hours and not discommoded me; for where there is comfort, and no need for hurry, speed is of no value--at least to me; and nothing that goes on wheels can be more comfortable, more satisfactory, than the new zealand trains. outside of america there are no cars that are so rationally devised. when you add the constant presence of charming scenery and the nearly constant absence of dust--well, if one is not content then, he ought to get out and walk. that would change his spirit, perhaps? i think so. at the end of an hour you would find him waiting humbly beside the track, and glad to be taken aboard again. much horseback riding, in and around this town; many comely girls in cool and pretty summer gowns; much salvation army; lots of maoris; the faces and bodies of some of the old ones very tastefully frescoed. maori council house over the river-large, strong, carpeted from end to end with matting, and decorated with elaborate wood carvings, artistically executed. the maoris were very polite. i was assured by a member of the house of representatives that the native race is not decreasing, but actually increasing slightly. it is another evidence that they are a superior breed of savages. i do not call to mind any savage race that built such good houses, or such strong and ingenious and scientific fortresses, or gave so much attention to agriculture, or had military arts and devices which so nearly approached the white man's. these, taken together with their high abilities in boat-building, and their tastes and capacities in the ornamental arts modify their savagery to a semi-civilization--or at least to, a quarter-civilization. it is a compliment to them that the british did not exterminate them, as they did the australians and the tasmanians, but were content with subduing them, and showed no desire to go further. and it is another compliment to them that the british did not take the whole of their choicest lands, but left them a considerable part, and then went further and protected them from the rapacities of landsharks--a protection which the new zealand government still extends to them. and it is still another compliment to the maoris that the government allows native representation--in both the legislature and the cabinet, and gives both sexes the vote. and in doing these things the government also compliments itself; it has not been the custom of the world for conquerors to act in this large spirit toward the conquered. the highest class white men who lived among the maoris in the earliest time had a high opinion of them and a strong affection for them. among the whites of this sort was the author of "old new zealand;" and dr. campbell of auckland was another. dr. campbell was a close friend of several chiefs, and has many pleasant things to say of their fidelity, their magnanimity, and their generosity. also of their quaint notions about the white man's queer civilization, and their equally quaint comments upon it. one of them thought the missionary had got everything wrong end first and upside down. "why, he wants us to stop worshiping and supplicating the evil gods, and go to worshiping and supplicating the good one! there is no sense in that. a good god is not going to do us any harm." the maoris had the tabu; and had it on a polynesian scale of comprehensiveness and elaboration. some of its features could have been importations from india and judea. neither the maori nor the hindoo of common degree could cook by a fire that a person of higher caste had used, nor could the high maori or high hindoo employ fire that had served a man of low grade; if a low-grade maori or hindoo drank from a vessel belonging to a high-grade man, the vessel was defiled, and had to be destroyed. there were other resemblances between maori tabu and hindoo caste-custom. yesterday a lunatic burst into my quarters and warned me that the jesuits were going to "cook" (poison) me in my food, or kill me on the stage at night. he said a mysterious sign was visible upon my posters and meant my death. he said he saved rev. mr. haweis's life by warning him that there were three men on his platform who would kill him if he took his eyes off them for a moment during his lecture. the same men were in my audience last night, but they saw that he was there. "will they be there again to-night?" he hesitated; then said no, he thought they would rather take a rest and chance the poison. this lunatic has no delicacy. but he was not uninteresting. he told me a lot of things. he said he had "saved so many lecturers in twenty years, that they put him in the asylum." i think he has less refinement than any lunatic i have met. december . a couple of curious war-monuments here at wanganui. one is in honor of white men "who fell in defence of law and order against fanaticism and barbarism." fanaticism. we americans are english in blood, english in speech, english in religion, english in the essentials of our governmental system, english in the essentials of our civilization; and so, let us hope, for the honor of the blend, for the honor of the blood, for the honor of the race, that that word got there through lack of heedfulness, and will not be suffered to remain. if you carve it at thermopylae, or where winkelried died, or upon bunker hill monument, and read it again "who fell in defence of law and order against fanaticism" you will perceive what the word means, and how mischosen it is. patriotism is patriotism. calling it fanaticism cannot degrade it; nothing can degrade it. even though it be a political mistake, and a thousand times a political mistake, that does not affect it; it is honorable always honorable, always noble--and privileged to hold its head up and look the nations in the face. it is right to praise these brave white men who fell in the maori war--they deserve it; but the presence of that word detracts from the dignity of their cause and their deeds, and makes them appear to have spilt their blood in a conflict with ignoble men, men not worthy of that costly sacrifice. but the men were worthy. it was no shame to fight them. they fought for their homes, they fought for their country; they bravely fought and bravely fell; and it would take nothing from the honor of the brave englishmen who lie under the monument, but add to it, to say that they died in defense of english laws and english homes against men worthy of the sacrifice--the maori patriots. the other monument cannot be rectified. except with dynamite. it is a mistake all through, and a strangely thoughtless one. it is a monument erected by white men to maoris who fell fighting with the whites and against their own people, in the maori war. "sacred to the memory of the brave men who fell on the th of may, ," etc. on one side are the names of about twenty maoris. it is not a fancy of mine; the monument exists. i saw it. it is an object-lesson to the rising generation. it invites to treachery, disloyalty, unpatriotism. its lesson, in frank terms is, "desert your flag, slay your people, burn their homes, shame your nationality--we honor such." december . wellington. ten hours from wanganui by the fly. december . it is a fine city and nobly situated. a busy place, and full of life and movement. have spent the three days partly in walking about, partly in enjoying social privileges, and largely in idling around the magnificent garden at hutt, a little distance away, around the shore. i suppose we shall not see such another one soon. we are packing to-night for the return-voyage to australia. our stay in new zealand has been too brief; still, we are not unthankful for the glimpse which we have had of it. the sturdy maoris made the settlement of the country by the whites rather difficult. not at first--but later. at first they welcomed the whites, and were eager to trade with them--particularly for muskets; for their pastime was internecine war, and they greatly preferred the white man's weapons to their own. war was their pastime--i use the word advisedly. they often met and slaughtered each other just for a lark, and when there was no quarrel. the author of "old new zealand" mentions a case where a victorious army could have followed up its advantage and exterminated the opposing army, but declined to do it; explaining naively that "if we did that, there couldn't be any more fighting." in another battle one army sent word that it was out of ammunition, and would be obliged to stop unless the opposing army would send some. it was sent, and the fight went on. in the early days things went well enough. the natives sold land without clearly understanding the terms of exchange, and the whites bought it without being much disturbed about the native's confusion of mind. but by and by the maori began to comprehend that he was being wronged; then there was trouble, for he was not the man to swallow a wrong and go aside and cry about it. he had the tasmanian's spirit and endurance, and a notable share of military science besides; and so he rose against the oppressor, did this gallant "fanatic," and started a war that was not brought to a definite end until more than a generation had sped. chapter xxxvi. there are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. names are not always what they seem. the common welsh name bzjxxllwep is pronounced jackson. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. friday, december . sailed, at p.m., in the 'mararoa'. summer seas and a good ship-life has nothing better. monday. three days of paradise. warm and sunny and smooth; the sea a luminous mediterranean blue . . . . one lolls in a long chair all day under deck-awnings, and reads and smokes, in measureless content. one does not read prose at such a time, but poetry. i have been reading the poems of mrs. julia a. moore, again, and i find in them the same grace and melody that attracted me when they were first published, twenty years ago, and have held me in happy bonds ever since. "the sentimental song book" has long been out of print, and has been forgotten by the world in general, but not by me. i carry it with me always--it and goldsmith's deathless story. indeed, it has the same deep charm for me that the vicar of wakefield has, and i find in it the same subtle touch--the touch that makes an intentionally humorous episode pathetic and an intentionally pathetic one funny. in her time mrs. moore was called "the sweet singer of michigan," and was best known by that name. i have read her book through twice today, with the purpose of determining which of her pieces has most merit, and i am persuaded that for wide grasp and sustained power, "william upson" may claim first place: william upson. air--"the major's only son." come all good people far and near, oh, come and see what you can hear, it's of a young man true and brave, that is now sleeping in his grave. now, william upson was his name if it's not that, it's all the same he did enlist in a cruel strife, and it caused him to lose his life. he was perry upson's eldest son, his father loved his noble son, this son was nineteen years of age when first in the rebellion he engaged. his father said that he might go, but his dear mother she said no, "oh! stay at home, dear billy," she said, but she could not turn his head. he went to nashville, in tennessee, there his kind friends he could not see; he died among strangers, so far away, they did not know where his body lay. he was taken sick and lived four weeks, and oh! how his parents weep, but now they must in sorrow mourn, for billy has gone to his heavenly home. oh! if his mother could have seen her son, for she loved him, her darling son; if she could heard his dying prayer, it would ease her heart till she met him there. how it would relieve his mother's heart to see her son from this world depart, and hear his noble words of love, as he left this world for that above. now it will relieve his mother's heart, for her son is laid in our graveyard; for now she knows that his grave is near, she will not shed so many tears. although she knows not that it was her son, for his coffin could not be opened it might be someone in his place, for she could not see his noble face. december, . reached sydney. december, . in the train. fellow of with four valises; a slim creature, with teeth which made his mouth look like a neglected churchyard. he had solidified hair--solidified with pomatum; it was all one shell. he smoked the most extraordinary cigarettes--made of some kind of manure, apparently. these and his hair made him smell like the very nation. he had a low-cut vest on, which exposed a deal of frayed and broken and unclean shirtfront. showy studs, of imitation gold--they had made black disks on the linen. oversized sleeve buttons of imitation gold, the copper base showing through. ponderous watch-chain of imitation gold. i judge that he couldn't tell the time by it, for he asked smythe what time it was, once. he wore a coat which had been gay when it was young; -o'clock-tea-trousers of a light tint, and marvelously soiled; yellow mustache with a dashing upward whirl at the ends; foxy shoes, imitation patent leather. he was a novelty--an imitation dude. he would have been a real one if he could have afforded it. but he was satisfied with himself. you could see it in his expression, and in all his attitudes and movements. he was living in a dude dreamland where all his squalid shams were genuine, and himself a sincerity. it disarmed criticism, it mollified spite, to see him so enjoy his imitation languors, and arts, and airs, and his studied daintinesses of gesture and misbegotten refinements. it was plain to me that he was imagining himself the prince of wales, and was doing everything the way he thought the prince would do it. for bringing his four valises aboard and stowing them in the nettings, he gave his porter four cents, and lightly apologized for the smallness of the gratuity --just with the condescendingest little royal air in the world. he stretched himself out on the front seat and rested his pomatum-cake on the middle arm, and stuck his feet out of the window, and began to pose as the prince and work his dreams and languors for exhibition; and he would indolently watch the blue films curling up from his cigarette, and inhale the stench, and look so grateful; and would flip the ash away with the daintiest gesture, unintentionally displaying his brass ring in the most intentional way; why, it was as good as being in marlborough house itself to see him do it so like. there was other scenery in the trip. that of the hawksbury river, in the national park region, fine--extraordinarily fine, with spacious views of stream and lake imposingly framed in woody hills; and every now and then the noblest groupings of mountains, and the most enchanting rearrangements of the water effects. further along, green flats, thinly covered with gum forests, with here and there the huts and cabins of small farmers engaged in raising children. still further along, arid stretches, lifeless and melancholy. then newcastle, a rushing town, capital of the rich coal regions. approaching scone, wide farming and grazing levels, with pretty frequent glimpses of a troublesome plant--a particularly devilish little prickly pear, daily damned in the orisons of the agriculturist; imported by a lady of sentiment, and contributed gratis to the colony. blazing hot, all day. december . back to sydney. blazing hot again. from the newspaper, and from the map, i have made a collection of curious names of australasian towns, with the idea of making a poem out of them: tumut takee murriwillumba bowral ballarat mullengudgery murrurundi wagga-wagga wyalong murrumbidgee goomeroo wolloway wangary wanilla worrow koppio yankalilla yaranyacka yackamoorundie kaiwaka coomooroo tauranga geelong tongariro kaikoura wakatipu oohipara waitpinga goelwa munno para nangkita myponga kapunda kooringa penola nangwarry kongorong comaum koolywurtie killanoola naracoorte muloowurtie binnum wallaroo wirrega mundoora hauraki rangiriri teawamute taranaki toowoomba goondiwindi jerrilderie whangaroa wollongong woolloomooloo bombola coolgardie bendigo coonamble cootamundra woolgoolga mittagong jamberoo kondoparinga kuitpo tungkillo oukaparinga talunga yatala parawirra moorooroo whangarei woolundunga booleroo pernatty parramatta taroom narrandera deniliquin kawakawa. it may be best to build the poem now, and make the weather help a sweltering day in australia. (to be read soft and low, with the lights turned down.) the bombola faints in the hot bowral tree, where fierce mullengudgery's smothering fires far from the breezes of coolgardie burn ghastly and blue as the day expires; and murriwillumba complaineth in song for the garlanded bowers of woolloomooloo, and the ballarat fly and the lone wollongong they dream of the gardens of jamberoo; the wallabi sighs for the murrubidgee, for the velvety sod of the munno parah, where the waters of healing from muloowurtie flow dim in the gloaming by yaranyackah; the koppio sorrows for lost wolloway, and sigheth in secret for murrurundi, the whangeroo wombat lamenteth the day that made him an exile from jerrilderie; the teawamute tumut from wirrega's glade, the nangkita swallow, the wallaroo swan, they long for the peace of the timaru shade and thy balmy soft airs, o sweet mittagong! the kooringa buffalo pants in the sun, the kondoparinga lies gaping for breath, the kongorong camaum to the shadow has won, but the goomeroo sinks in the slumber of death; in the weltering hell of the moorooroo plain the yatala wangary withers and dies, and the worrow wanilla, demented with pain, to the woolgoolga woodlands despairingly flies; sweet nangwarry's desolate, coonamble wails, and tungkillo kuito in sables is drest, for the whangerei winds fall asleep in the sails and the booleroo life-breeze is dead in the west. mypongo, kapunda, o slumber no more yankalilla, parawirra, be warned there's death in the air! killanoola, wherefore shall the prayer of penola be scorned? cootamundra, and takee, and wakatipu, toowoomba, kaikoura are lost from onkaparinga to far oamaru all burn in this hell's holocaust! paramatta and binnum are gone to their rest in the vale of tapanni taroom, kawakawa, deniliquin--all that was best in the earth are but graves and a tomb! narrandera mourns, cameron answers not when the roll of the scathless we cry tongariro, goondiwindi, woolundunga, the spot is mute and forlorn where ye lie. those are good words for poetry. among the best i have ever seen. there are in the list. i did not need them all, but i have knocked down of them; which is a good bag, it seems to me, for a person not in the business. perhaps a poet laureate could do better, but a poet laureate gets wages, and that is different. when i write poetry i do not get any wages; often i lose money by it. the best word in that list, and the most musical and gurgly, is woolloomoolloo. it is a place near sydney, and is a favorite pleasure-resort. it has eight o's in it. chapter xxxvii. to succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. monday,--december , . sailed from sydney for ceylon in the p. & o. steamer 'oceana'. a lascar crew mans this ship--the first i have seen. white cotton petticoat and pants; barefoot; red shawl for belt; straw cap, brimless, on head, with red scarf wound around it; complexion a rich dark brown; short straight black hair; whiskers fine and silky; lustrous and intensely black. mild, good faces; willing and obedient people; capable, too; but are said to go into hopeless panics when there is danger. they are from bombay and the coast thereabouts. left some of the trunks in sydney, to be shipped to south africa by a vessel advertised to sail three months hence. the proverb says: "separate not yourself from your baggage." this 'oceana' is a stately big ship, luxuriously appointed. she has spacious promenade decks. large rooms; a surpassingly comfortable ship. the officers' library is well selected; a ship's library is not usually that . . . . for meals, the bugle call, man-of-war fashion; a pleasant change from the terrible gong . . . . three big cats--very friendly loafers; they wander all over the ship; the white one follows the chief steward around like a dog. there is also a basket of kittens. one of these cats goes ashore, in port, in england, australia, and india, to see how his various families are getting along, and is seen no more till the ship is ready to sail. no one knows how he finds out the sailing date, but no doubt he comes down to the dock every day and takes a look, and when he sees baggage and passengers flocking in, recognizes that it is time to get aboard. this is what the sailors believe. the chief engineer has been in the china and india trade thirty three years, and has had but three christmases at home in that time . . . . conversational items at dinner, "mocha! sold all over the world! it is not true. in fact, very few foreigners except the emperor of russia have ever seen a grain of it, or ever will, while they live." another man said: "there is no sale in australia for australian wine. but it goes to france and comes back with a french label on it, and then they buy it." i have heard that the most of the french-labeled claret in new york is made in california. and i remember what professor s. told me once about veuve cliquot--if that was the wine, and i think it was. he was the guest of a great wine merchant whose town was quite near that vineyard, and this merchant asked him if very much v. c. was drunk in america. "oh, yes," said s., "a great abundance of it." "is it easy to be had?" "oh, yes--easy as water. all first and second-class hotels have it." "what do you pay for it?" "it depends on the style of the hotel--from fifteen to twenty-five francs a bottle." "oh, fortunate country! why, it's worth francs right here on the ground." "no!" "yes!" "do you mean that we are drinking a bogus veuve-cliquot over there?" "yes--and there was never a bottle of the genuine in america since columbus's time. that wine all comes from a little bit of a patch of ground which isn't big enough to raise many bottles; and all of it that is produced goes every year to one person--the emperor of russia. he takes the whole crop in advance, be it big or little." january , . christmas in melbourne, new year's day in adelaide, and saw most of the friends again in both places . . . . lying here at anchor all day--albany (king george's sound), western australia. it is a perfectly landlocked harbor, or roadstead--spacious to look at, but not deep water. desolate-looking rocks and scarred hills. plenty of ships arriving now, rushing to the new gold-fields. the papers are full of wonderful tales of the sort always to be heard in connection with new gold diggings. a sample: a youth staked out a claim and tried to sell half for l ; no takers; he stuck to it fourteen days, starving, then struck it rich and sold out for l , . . . about sunset, strong breeze blowing, got up the anchor. we were in a small deep puddle, with a narrow channel leading out of it, minutely buoyed, to the sea. i stayed on deck to see how we were going to manage it with such a big ship and such a strong wind. on the bridge our giant captain, in uniform; at his side a little pilot in elaborately gold-laced uniform; on the forecastle a white mate and quartermaster or two, and a brilliant crowd of lascars standing by for business. our stern was pointing straight at the head of the channel; so we must turn entirely around in the puddle--and the wind blowing as described. it was done, and beautifully. it was done by help of a jib. we stirred up much mud, but did not touch the bottom. we turned right around in our tracks--a seeming impossibility. we had several casts of quarter-less , and one cast of half -- feet; we were drawing astern. by the time we were entirely around and pointed, the first buoy was not more than a hundred yards in front of us. it was a fine piece of work, and i was the only passenger that saw it. however, the others got their dinner; the p. & o. company got mine . . . . more cats developed. smythe says it is a british law that they must be carried; and he instanced a case of a ship not allowed to sail till she sent for a couple. the bill came, too: "debtor, to cats, shillings." . . . news comes that within this week siam has acknowledged herself to be, in effect, a french province. it seems plain that all savage and semi-civilized countries are going to be grabbed . . . . a vulture on board; bald, red, queer-shaped head, featherless red places here and there on his body, intense great black eyes set in featherless rims of inflamed flesh; dissipated look; a businesslike style, a selfish, conscienceless, murderous aspect--the very look of a professional assassin, and yet a bird which does no murder. what was the use of getting him up in that tragic style for so innocent a trade as his? for this one isn't the sort that wars upon the living, his diet is offal--and the more out of date it is the better he likes it. nature should give him a suit of rusty black; then he would be all right, for he would look like an undertaker and would harmonize with his business; whereas the way he is now he is horribly out of true. january . at this morning we passed cape leeuwin (lioness) and ceased from our long due-west course along the southern shore of australia. turning this extreme southwestern corner, we now take a long straight slant nearly n. w., without a break, for ceylon. as we speed northward it will grow hotter very fast--but it isn't chilly, now. . . . the vulture is from the public menagerie at adelaide--a great and interesting collection. it was there that we saw the baby tiger solemnly spreading its mouth and trying to roar like its majestic mother. it swaggered, scowling, back and forth on its short legs just as it had seen her do on her long ones, and now and then snarling viciously, exposing its teeth, with a threatening lift of its upper lip and bristling moustache; and when it thought it was impressing the visitors, it would spread its mouth wide and do that screechy cry which it meant for a roar, but which did not deceive. it took itself quite seriously, and was lovably comical. and there was a hyena--an ugly creature; as ugly as the tiger-kitty was pretty. it repeatedly arched its back and delivered itself of such a human cry; a startling resemblance; a cry which was just that of a grown person badly hurt. in the dark one would assuredly go to its assistance--and be disappointed . . . . many friends of australasian federation on board. they feel sure that the good day is not far off, now. but there seems to be a party that would go further --have australasia cut loose from the british empire and set up housekeeping on her own hook. it seems an unwise idea. they point to the united states, but it seems to me that the cases lack a good deal of being alike. australasia governs herself wholly--there is no interference; and her commerce and manufactures are not oppressed in any way. if our case had been the same we should not have gone out when we did. january . unspeakably hot. the equator is arriving again. we are within eight degrees of it. ceylon present. dear me, it is beautiful! and most sumptuously tropical, as to character of foliage and opulence of it. "what though the spicy breezes blow soft o'er ceylon's isle"--an eloquent line, an incomparable line; it says little, but conveys whole libraries of sentiment, and oriental charm and mystery, and tropic deliciousness--a line that quivers and tingles with a thousand unexpressed and inexpressible things, things that haunt one and find no articulate voice . . . . colombo, the capital. an oriental town, most manifestly; and fascinating. in this palatial ship the passengers dress for dinner. the ladies' toilettes make a fine display of color, and this is in keeping with the elegance of the vessel's furnishings and the flooding brilliancies of the electric light. on the stormy atlantic one never sees a man in evening dress, except at the rarest intervals; and then there is only one, not two; and he shows up but once on the voyage--the night before the ship makes port--the night when they have the "concert" and do the amateur wailings and recitations. he is the tenor, as a rule . . . . there has been a deal of cricket-playing on board; it seems a queer game for a ship, but they enclose the promenade deck with nettings and keep the ball from flying overboard, and the sport goes very well, and is properly violent and exciting . . . . we must part from this vessel here. january . hotel bristol. servant brompy. alert, gentle, smiling, winning young brown creature as ever was. beautiful shining black hair combed back like a woman's, and knotted at the back of his head --tortoise-shell comb in it, sign that he is a singhalese; slender, shapely form; jacket; under it is a beltless and flowing white cotton gown--from neck straight to heel; he and his outfit quite unmasculine. it was an embarrassment to undress before him. we drove to the market, using the japanese jinriksha--our first acquaintanceship with it. it is a light cart, with a native to draw it. he makes good speed for half-an-hour, but it is hard work for him; he is too slight for it. after the half-hour there is no more pleasure for you; your attention is all on the man, just as it would be on a tired horse, and necessarily your sympathy is there too. there's a plenty of these 'rickshas, and the tariff is incredibly cheap. i was in cairo years ago. that was oriental, but there was a lack. when you are in florida or new orleans you are in the south--that is granted; but you are not in the south; you are in a modified south, a tempered south. cairo was a tempered orient--an orient with an indefinite something wanting. that feeling was not present in ceylon. ceylon was oriental in the last measure of completeness--utterly oriental; also utterly tropical; and indeed to one's unreasoning spiritual sense the two things belong together. all the requisites were present. the costumes were right; the black and brown exposures, unconscious of immodesty, were right; the juggler was there, with his basket, his snakes, his mongoose, and his arrangements for growing a tree from seed to foliage and ripe fruitage before one's eyes; in sight were plants and flowers familiar to one on books but in no other way celebrated, desirable, strange, but in production restricted to the hot belt of the equator; and out a little way in the country were the proper deadly snakes, and fierce beasts of prey, and the wild elephant and the monkey. and there was that swoon in the air which one associates with the tropics, and that smother of heat, heavy with odors of unknown flowers, and that sudden invasion of purple gloom fissured with lightnings,--then the tumult of crashing thunder and the downpour and presently all sunny and smiling again; all these things were there; the conditions were complete, nothing was lacking. and away off in the deeps of the jungle and in the remotenesses of the mountains were the ruined cities and mouldering temples, mysterious relics of the pomps of a forgotten time and a vanished race--and this was as it should be, also, for nothing is quite satisfyingly oriental that lacks the somber and impressive qualities of mystery and antiquity. the drive through the town and out to the galle face by the seashore, what a dream it was of tropical splendors of bloom and blossom, and oriental conflagrations of costume! the walking groups of men, women, boys, girls, babies--each individual was a flame, each group a house afire for color. and such stunning colors, such intensely vivid colors, such rich and exquisite minglings and fusings of rainbows and lightnings! and all harmonious, all in perfect taste; never a discordant note; never a color on any person swearing at another color on him or failing to harmonize faultlessly with the colors of any group the wearer might join. the stuffs were silk-thin, soft, delicate, clinging; and, as a rule, each piece a solid color: a splendid green, a splendid blue, a splendid yellow, a splendid purple, a splendid ruby, deep, and rich with smouldering fires they swept continuously by in crowds and legions and multitudes, glowing, flashing, burning, radiant; and every five seconds came a burst of blinding red that made a body catch his breath, and filled his heart with joy. and then, the unimaginable grace of those costumes! sometimes a woman's whole dress was but a scarf wound about her person and her head, sometimes a man's was but a turban and a careless rag or two--in both cases generous areas of polished dark skin showing--but always the arrangement compelled the homage of the eye and made the heart sing for gladness. i can see it to this day, that radiant panorama, that wilderness of rich color, that incomparable dissolving-view of harmonious tints, and lithe half-covered forms, and beautiful brown faces, and gracious and graceful gestures and attitudes and movements, free, unstudied, barren of stiffness and restraint, and-- just then, into this dream of fairyland and paradise a grating dissonance was injected. out of a missionary school came marching, two and two, sixteen prim and pious little christian black girls, europeanly clothed--dressed, to the last detail, as they would have been dressed on a summer sunday in an english or american village. those clothes--oh, they were unspeakably ugly! ugly, barbarous, destitute of taste, destitute of grace, repulsive as a shroud. i looked at my womenfolk's clothes--just full-grown duplicates of the outrages disguising those poor little abused creatures --and was ashamed to be seen in the street with them. then i looked at my own clothes, and was ashamed to be seen in the street with myself. however, we must put up with our clothes as they are--they have their reason for existing. they are on us to expose us--to advertise what we wear them to conceal. they are a sign; a sign of insincerity; a sign of suppressed vanity; a pretense that we despise gorgeous colors and the graces of harmony and form; and we put them on to propagate that lie and back it up. but we do not deceive our neighbor; and when we step into ceylon we realize that we have not even deceived ourselves. we do love brilliant colors and graceful costumes; and at home we will turn out in a storm to see them when the procession goes by--and envy the wearers. we go to the theater to look at them and grieve that we can't be clothed like that. we go to the king's ball, when we get a chance, and are glad of a sight of the splendid uniforms and the glittering orders. when we are granted permission to attend an imperial drawing-room we shut ourselves up in private and parade around in the theatrical court-dress by the hour, and admire ourselves in the glass, and are utterly happy; and every member of every governor's staff in democratic america does the same with his grand new uniform--and if he is not watched he will get himself photographed in it, too. when i see the lord mayor's footman i am dissatisfied with my lot. yes, our clothes are a lie, and have been nothing short of that these hundred years. they are insincere, they are the ugly and appropriate outward exposure of an inward sham and a moral decay. the last little brown boy i chanced to notice in the crowds and swarms of colombo had nothing on but a twine string around his waist, but in my memory the frank honesty of his costume still stands out in pleasant contrast with the odious flummery in which the little sunday-school dowdies were masquerading. chapter xxxviii. prosperity is the best protector of principle. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. evening-- th. sailed in the rosetta. this is a poor old ship, and ought to be insured and sunk. as in the 'oceana', just so here: everybody dresses for dinner; they make it a sort of pious duty. these fine and formal costumes are a rather conspicuous contrast to the poverty and shabbiness of the surroundings . . . . if you want a slice of a lime at four o'clock tea, you must sign an order on the bar. limes cost cents a barrel. january th. we have been running up the arabian sea, latterly. closing up on bombay now, and due to arrive this evening. january th. bombay! a bewitching place, a bewildering place, an enchanting place--the arabian nights come again? it is a vast city; contains about a million inhabitants. natives, they are, with a slight sprinkling of white people--not enough to have the slightest modifying effect upon the massed dark complexion of the public. it is winter here, yet the weather is the divine weather of june, and the foliage is the fresh and heavenly foliage of june. there is a rank of noble great shade trees across the way from the hotel, and under them sit groups of picturesque natives of both sexes; and the juggler in his turban is there with his snakes and his magic; and all day long the cabs and the multitudinous varieties of costumes flock by. it does not seem as if one could ever get tired of watching this moving show, this shining and shifting spectacle . . . . in the great bazar the pack and jam of natives was marvelous, the sea of rich-colored turbans and draperies an inspiring sight, and the quaint and showy indian architecture was just the right setting for it. toward sunset another show; this is the drive around the sea-shore to malabar point, where lord sandhurst, the governor of the bombay presidency, lives. parsee palaces all along the first part of the drive; and past them all the world is driving; the private carriages of wealthy englishmen and natives of rank are manned by a driver and three footmen in stunning oriental liveries--two of these turbaned statues standing up behind, as fine as monuments. sometimes even the public carriages have this superabundant crew, slightly modified--one to drive, one to sit by and see it done, and one to stand up behind and yell--yell when there is anybody in the way, and for practice when there isn't. it all helps to keep up the liveliness and augment the general sense of swiftness and energy and confusion and pow-wow. in the region of scandal point--felicitous name--where there are handy rocks to sit on and a noble view of the sea on the one hand, and on the other the passing and reprising whirl and tumult of gay carriages, are great groups of comfortably-off parsee women--perfect flower-beds of brilliant color, a fascinating spectacle. tramp, tramp, tramping along the road, in singles, couples, groups, and gangs, you have the working-man and the working-woman--but not clothed like ours. usually the man is a nobly-built great athlete, with not a rag on but his loin-handkerchief; his color a deep dark brown, his skin satin, his rounded muscles knobbing it as if it had eggs under it. usually the woman is a slender and shapely creature, as erect as a lightning-rod, and she has but one thing on--a bright-colored piece of stuff which is wound about her head and her body down nearly half-way to her knees, and which clings like her own skin. her legs and feet are bare, and so are her arms, except for her fanciful bunches of loose silver rings on her ankles and on her arms. she has jewelry bunched on the side of her nose also, and showy clusterings on her toes. when she undresses for bed she takes off her jewelry, i suppose. if she took off anything more she would catch cold. as a rule she has a large shiney brass water jar of graceful shape on her head, and one of her naked arms curves up and the hand holds it there. she is so straight, so erect, and she steps with such style, and such easy grace and dignity; and her curved arm and her brazen jar are such a help to the picture indeed, our working-women cannot begin with her as a road-decoration. it is all color, bewitching color, enchanting color--everywhere all around--all the way around the curving great opaline bay clear to government house, where the turbaned big native 'chuprassies' stand grouped in state at the door in their robes of fiery red, and do most properly and stunningly finish up the splendid show and make it theatrically complete. i wish i were a 'chuprassy'. this is indeed india! the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations--the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. even now, after the lapse of a year, the delirium of those days in bombay has not left me, and i hope never will. it was all new, no detail of it hackneyed. and india did not wait for morning, it began at the hotel --straight away. the lobbies and halls were full of turbaned, and fez'd and embroidered, cap'd, and barefooted, and cotton-clad dark natives, some of them rushing about, others at rest squatting, or sitting on the ground; some of them chattering with energy, others still and dreamy; in the dining-room every man's own private native servant standing behind his chair, and dressed for a part in the arabian nights. our rooms were high up, on the front. a white man--he was a burly german --went up with us, and brought three natives along to see to arranging things. about fourteen others followed in procession, with the hand-baggage; each carried an article--and only one; a bag, in some cases, in other cases less. one strong native carried my overcoat, another a parasol, another a box of cigars, another a novel, and the last man in the procession had no load but a fan. it was all done with earnestness and sincerity, there was not a smile in the procession from the head of it to the tail of it. each man waited patiently, tranquilly, in no sort of hurry, till one of us found time to give him a copper, then he bent his head reverently, touched his forehead with his fingers, and went his way. they seemed a soft and gentle race, and there was something both winning and touching about their demeanor. there was a vast glazed door which opened upon the balcony. it needed closing, or cleaning, or something, and a native got down on his knees and went to work at it. he seemed to be doing it well enough, but perhaps he wasn't, for the burly german put on a look that betrayed dissatisfaction, then without explaining what was wrong, gave the native a brisk cuff on the jaw and then told him where the defect was. it seemed such a shame to do that before us all. the native took it with meekness, saying nothing, and not showing in his face or manner any resentment. i had not seen the like of this for fifty years. it carried me back to my boyhood, and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the usual way of explaining one's desires to a slave. i was able to remember that the method seemed right and natural to me in those days, i being born to it and unaware that elsewhere there were other methods; but i was also able to remember that those unresented cuffings made me sorry for the victim and ashamed for the punisher. my father was a refined and kindly gentleman, very grave, rather austere, of rigid probity, a sternly just and upright man, albeit he attended no church and never spoke of religious matters, and had no part nor lot in the pious joys of his presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to suffer from this deprivation. he laid his hand upon me in punishment only twice in his life, and then not heavily; once for telling him a lie--which surprised me, and showed me how unsuspicious he was, for that was not my maiden effort. he punished me those two times only, and never any other member of the family at all; yet every now and then he cuffed our harmless slave boy, lewis, for trifling little blunders and awkwardnesses. my father had passed his life among the slaves from his cradle up, and his cuffings proceeded from the custom of the time, not from his nature. when i was ten years old i saw a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slaveman in anger, for merely doing something awkwardly--as if that were a crime. it bounded from the man's skull, and the man fell and never spoke again. he was dead in an hour. i knew the man had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it seemed a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong i was not deep enough to explain if i had been asked to do it. nobody in the village approved of that murder, but of course no one said much about it. it is curious--the space-annihilating power of thought. for just one second, all that goes to make the me in me was in a missourian village, on the other side of the globe, vividly seeing again these forgotten pictures of fifty years ago, and wholly unconscious of all things but just those; and in the next second i was back in bombay, and that kneeling native's smitten cheek was not done tingling yet! back to boyhood--fifty years; back to age again, another fifty; and a flight equal to the circumference of the globe-all in two seconds by the watch! some natives--i don't remember how many--went into my bedroom, now, and put things to rights and arranged the mosquito-bar, and i went to bed to nurse my cough. it was about nine in the evening. what a state of things! for three hours the yelling and shouting of natives in the hall continued, along with the velvety patter of their swift bare feet--what a racket it was! they were yelling orders and messages down three flights. why, in the matter of noise it amounted to a riot, an insurrection, a revolution. and then there were other noises mixed up with these and at intervals tremendously accenting them--roofs falling in, i judged, windows smashing, persons being murdered, crows squawking, and deriding, and cursing, canaries screeching, monkeys jabbering, macaws blaspheming, and every now and then fiendish bursts of laughter and explosions of dynamite. by midnight i had suffered all the different kinds of shocks there are, and knew that i could never more be disturbed by them, either isolated or in combination. then came peace--stillness deep and solemn and lasted till five. then it all broke loose again. and who re-started it? the bird of birds the indian crow. i came to know him well, by and by, and be infatuated with him. i suppose he is the hardest lot that wears feathers. yes, and the cheerfulest, and the best satisfied with himself. he never arrived at what he is by any careless process, or any sudden one; he is a work of art, and "art is long"; he is the product of immemorial ages, and of deep calculation; one can't make a bird like that in a day. he has been reincarnated more times than shiva; and he has kept a sample of each incarnation, and fused it into his constitution. in the course of his evolutionary promotions, his sublime march toward ultimate perfection, he has been a gambler, a low comedian, a dissolute priest, a fussy woman, a blackguard, a scoffer, a liar, a thief, a spy, an informer, a trading politician, a swindler, a professional hypocrite, a patriot for cash, a reformer, a lecturer, a lawyer, a conspirator, a rebel, a royalist, a democrat, a practicer and propagator of irreverence, a meddler, an intruder, a busybody, an infidel, and a wallower in sin for the mere love of it. the strange result, the incredible result, of this patient accumulation of all damnable traits is, that be does not know what care is, he does not know what sorrow is, he does not know what remorse is, his life is one long thundering ecstasy of happiness, and he will go to his death untroubled, knowing that he will soon turn up again as an author or something, and be even more intolerably capable and comfortable than ever he was before. in his straddling wide forward-step, and his springy side-wise series of hops, and his impudent air, and his cunning way of canting his head to one side upon occasion, he reminds one of the american blackbird. but the sharp resemblances stop there. he is much bigger than the blackbird; and he lacks the blackbird's trim and slender and beautiful build and shapely beak; and of course his sober garb of gray and rusty black is a poor and humble thing compared with the splendid lustre of the blackbird's metallic sables and shifting and flashing bronze glories. the blackbird is a perfect gentleman, in deportment and attire, and is not noisy, i believe, except when holding religious services and political conventions in a tree; but this indian sham quaker is just a rowdy, and is always noisy when awake--always chaffing, scolding, scoffing, laughing, ripping, and cursing, and carrying on about something or other. i never saw such a bird for delivering opinions. nothing escapes him; he notices everything that happens, and brings out his opinion about it, particularly if it is a matter that is none of his business. and it is never a mild opinion, but always violent--violent and profane--the presence of ladies does not affect him. his opinions are not the outcome of reflection, for he never thinks about anything, but heaves out the opinion that is on top in his mind, and which is often an opinion about some quite different thing and does not fit the case. but that is his way; his main idea is to get out an opinion, and if he stopped to think he would lose chances. i suppose he has no enemies among men. the whites and mohammedans never seemed to molest him; and the hindoos, because of their religion, never take the life of any creature, but spare even the snakes and tigers and fleas and rats. if i sat on one end of the balcony, the crows would gather on the railing at the other end and talk about me; and edge closer, little by little, till i could almost reach them; and they would sit there, in the most unabashed way, and talk about my clothes, and my hair, and my complexion, and probable character and vocation and politics, and how i came to be in india, and what i had been doing, and how many days i had got for it, and how i had happened to go unhanged so long, and when would it probably come off, and might there be more of my sort where i came from, and when would they be hanged,--and so on, and so on, until i could not longer endure the embarrassment of it; then i would shoo them away, and they would circle around in the air a little while, laughing and deriding and mocking, and presently settle on the rail and do it all over again. they were very sociable when there was anything to eat--oppressively so. with a little encouragement they would come in and light on the table and help me eat my breakfast; and once when i was in the other room and they found themselves alone, they carried off everything they could lift; and they were particular to choose things which they could make no use of after they got them. in india their number is beyond estimate, and their noise is in proportion. i suppose they cost the country more than the government does; yet that is not a light matter. still, they pay; their company pays; it would sadden the land to take their cheerful voice out of it. life on the mississippi by mark twain part . chapter a thumb-print and what came of it we were approaching napoleon, arkansas. so i began to think about my errand there. time, noonday; and bright and sunny. this was bad--not best, anyway; for mine was not (preferably) a noonday kind of errand. the more i thought, the more that fact pushed itself upon me--now in one form, now in another. finally, it took the form of a distinct question: is it good common sense to do the errand in daytime, when, by a little sacrifice of comfort and inclination, you can have night for it, and no inquisitive eyes around. this settled it. plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities. i got my friends into my stateroom, and said i was sorry to create annoyance and disappointment, but that upon reflection it really seemed best that we put our luggage ashore and stop over at napoleon. their disapproval was prompt and loud; their language mutinous. their main argument was one which has always been the first to come to the surface, in such cases, since the beginning of time: 'but you decided and agreed to stick to this boat, etc.; as if, having determined to do an unwise thing, one is thereby bound to go ahead and make two unwise things of it, by carrying out that determination. i tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with reasonably good success: under which encouragement, i increased my efforts; and, to show them that i had not created this annoying errand, and was in no way to blame for it, i presently drifted into its history--substantially as follows: toward the end of last year, i spent a few months in munich, bavaria. in november i was living in fraulein dahlweiner's pension, a, karlstrasse; but my working quarters were a mile from there, in the house of a widow who supported herself by taking lodgers. she and her two young children used to drop in every morning and talk german to me--by request. one day, during a ramble about the city, i visited one of the two establishments where the government keeps and watches corpses until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in a trance state. it was a grisly place, that spacious room. there were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows--all of them with wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds. along the sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows; and in each of these lay several marble- visaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands. around a finger of each of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring; and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a watch-room yonder, where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring to the aid of any of that pallid company who, waking out of death, shall make a movement--for any, even the slightest, movement will twitch the wire and ring that fearful bell. i imagined myself a death-sentinel drowsing there alone, far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that awful summons! so i inquired about this thing; asked what resulted usually? if the watchman died, and the restored corpse came and did what it could to make his last moments easy. but i was rebuked for trying to feed an idle and frivolous curiosity in so solemn and so mournful a place; and went my way with a humbled crest. next morning i was telling the widow my adventure, when she exclaimed-- 'come with me! i have a lodger who shall tell you all you want to know. he has been a night-watchman there.' he was a living man, but he did not look it. he was abed, and had his head propped high on pillows; his face was wasted and colorless, his deep-sunken eyes were shut; his hand, lying on his breast, was talon- like, it was so bony and long-fingered. the widow began her introduction of me. the man's eyes opened slowly, and glittered wickedly out from the twilight of their caverns; he frowned a black frown; he lifted his lean hand and waved us peremptorily away. but the widow kept straight on, till she had got out the fact that i was a stranger and an american. the man's face changed at once; brightened, became even eager--and the next moment he and i were alone together. i opened up in cast-iron german; he responded in quite flexible english; thereafter we gave the german language a permanent rest. this consumptive and i became good friends. i visited him every day, and we talked about everything. at least, about everything but wives and children. let anybody's wife or anybody's child be mentioned, and three things always followed: the most gracious and loving and tender light glimmered in the man's eyes for a moment; faded out the next, and in its place came that deadly look which had flamed there the first time i ever saw his lids unclose; thirdly, he ceased from speech, there and then for that day; lay silent, abstracted, and absorbed; apparently heard nothing that i said; took no notice of my good-byes, and plainly did not know, by either sight or hearing, when i left the room. when i had been this karl ritter's daily and sole intimate during two months, he one day said, abruptly-- 'i will tell you my story.' a dying man s confession then he went on as follows:-- i have never given up, until now. but now i have given up. i am going to die. i made up my mind last night that it must be, and very soon, too. you say you are going to revisit your river, by-and-bye, when you find opportunity. very well; that, together with a certain strange experience which fell to my lot last night, determines me to tell you my history--for you will see napoleon, arkansas; and for my sake you will stop there, and do a certain thing for me--a thing which you will willingly undertake after you shall have heard my narrative. let us shorten the story wherever we can, for it will need it, being long. you already know how i came to go to america, and how i came to settle in that lonely region in the south. but you do not know that i had a wife. my wife was young, beautiful, loving, and oh, so divinely good and blameless and gentle! and our little girl was her mother in miniature. it was the happiest of happy households. one night--it was toward the close of the war--i woke up out of a sodden lethargy, and found myself bound and gagged, and the air tainted with chloroform! i saw two men in the room, and one was saying to the other, in a hoarse whisper, 'i told her i would, if she made a noise, and as for the child--' the other man interrupted in a low, half-crying voice-- 'you said we'd only gag them and rob them, not hurt them; or i wouldn't have come.' 'shut up your whining; had to change the plan when they waked up; you done all you could to protect them, now let that satisfy you; come, help rummage.' both men were masked, and wore coarse, ragged 'nigger' clothes; they had a bull's-eye lantern, and by its light i noticed that the gentler robber had no thumb on his right hand. they rummaged around my poor cabin for a moment; the head bandit then said, in his stage whisper-- 'it's a waste of time--he shall tell where it's hid. undo his gag, and revive him up.' the other said-- 'all right--provided no clubbing.' 'no clubbing it is, then--provided he keeps still.' they approached me; just then there was a sound outside; a sound of voices and trampling hoofs; the robbers held their breath and listened; the sounds came slowly nearer and nearer; then came a shout-- 'hello, the house! show a light, we want water.' 'the captain's voice, by g--!' said the stage-whispering ruffian, and both robbers fled by the way of the back door, shutting off their bull's-eye as they ran. the strangers shouted several times more, then rode by--there seemed to be a dozen of the horses--and i heard nothing more. i struggled, but could not free myself from my bonds. i tried to speak, but the gag was effective; i could not make a sound. i listened for my wife's voice and my child's--listened long and intently, but no sound came from the other end of the room where their bed was. this silence became more and more awful, more and more ominous, every moment. could you have endured an hour of it, do you think? pity me, then, who had to endure three. three hours--? it was three ages! whenever the clock struck, it seemed as if years had gone by since i had heard it last. all this time i was struggling in my bonds; and at last, about dawn, i got myself free, and rose up and stretched my stiff limbs. i was able to distinguish details pretty well. the floor was littered with things thrown there by the robbers during their search for my savings. the first object that caught my particular attention was a document of mine which i had seen the rougher of the two ruffians glance at and then cast away. it had blood on it! i staggered to the other end of the room. oh, poor unoffending, helpless ones, there they lay, their troubles ended, mine begun! did i appeal to the law--i? does it quench the pauper's thirst if the king drink for him? oh, no, no, no--i wanted no impertinent interference of the law. laws and the gallows could not pay the debt that was owing to me! let the laws leave the matter in my hands, and have no fears: i would find the debtor and collect the debt. how accomplish this, do you say? how accomplish it, and feel so sure about it, when i had neither seen the robbers' faces, nor heard their natural voices, nor had any idea who they might be? nevertheless, i was sure-- quite sure, quite confident. i had a clue--a clue which you would not have valued--a clue which would not have greatly helped even a detective, since he would lack the secret of how to apply it. i shall come to that, presently--you shall see. let us go on, now, taking things in their due order. there was one circumstance which gave me a slant in a definite direction to begin with: those two robbers were manifestly soldiers in tramp disguise; and not new to military service, but old in it--regulars, perhaps; they did not acquire their soldierly attitude, gestures, carriage, in a day, nor a month, nor yet in a year. so i thought, but said nothing. and one of them had said, 'the captain's voice, by g--!'--the one whose life i would have. two miles away, several regiments were in camp, and two companies of u.s. cavalry. when i learned that captain blakely, of company c had passed our way, that night, with an escort, i said nothing, but in that company i resolved to seek my man. in conversation i studiously and persistently described the robbers as tramps, camp followers; and among this class the people made useless search, none suspecting the soldiers but me. working patiently, by night, in my desolated home, i made a disguise for myself out of various odds and ends of clothing; in the nearest village i bought a pair of blue goggles. by-and-bye, when the military camp broke up, and company c was ordered a hundred miles north, to napoleon, i secreted my small hoard of money in my belt, and took my departure in the night. when company c arrived in napoleon, i was already there. yes, i was there, with a new trade--fortune-teller. not to seem partial, i made friends and told fortunes among all the companies garrisoned there; but i gave company c the great bulk of my attentions. i made myself limitlessly obliging to these particular men; they could ask me no favor, put upon me no risk, which i would decline. i became the willing butt of their jokes; this perfected my popularity; i became a favorite. i early found a private who lacked a thumb--what joy it was to me! and when i found that he alone, of all the company, had lost a thumb, my last misgiving vanished; i was sure i was on the right track. this man's name was kruger, a german. there were nine germans in the company. i watched, to see who might be his intimates; but he seemed to have no especial intimates. but i was his intimate; and i took care to make the intimacy grow. sometimes i so hungered for my revenge that i could hardly restrain myself from going on my knees and begging him to point out the man who had murdered my wife and child; but i managed to bridle my tongue. i bided my time, and went on telling fortunes, as opportunity offered. my apparatus was simple: a little red paint and a bit of white paper. i painted the ball of the client's thumb, took a print of it on the paper, studied it that night, and revealed his fortune to him next day. what was my idea in this nonsense? it was this: when i was a youth, i knew an old frenchman who had been a prison-keeper for thirty years, and he told me that there was one thing about a person which never changed, from the cradle to the grave--the lines in the ball of the thumb; and he said that these lines were never exactly alike in the thumbs of any two human beings. in these days, we photograph the new criminal, and hang his picture in the rogues' gallery for future reference; but that frenchman, in his day, used to take a print of the ball of a new prisoner's thumb and put that away for future reference. he always said that pictures were no good--future disguises could make them useless; 'the thumb's the only sure thing,' said he; 'you can't disguise that.' and he used to prove his theory, too, on my friends and acquaintances; it always succeeded. i went on telling fortunes. every night i shut myself in, all alone, and studied the day's thumb-prints with a magnifying-glass. imagine the devouring eagerness with which i pored over those mazy red spirals, with that document by my side which bore the right-hand thumb-and-finger- marks of that unknown murderer, printed with the dearest blood--to me-- that was ever shed on this earth! and many and many a time i had to repeat the same old disappointed remark, 'will they never correspond!' but my reward came at last. it was the print of the thumb of the forty- third man of company c whom i had experimented on--private franz adler. an hour before, i did not know the murderer's name, or voice, or figure, or face, or nationality; but now i knew all these things! i believed i might feel sure; the frenchman's repeated demonstrations being so good a warranty. still, there was a way to make sure. i had an impression of kruger's left thumb. in the morning i took him aside when he was off duty; and when we were out of sight and hearing of witnesses, i said, impressively-- 'a part of your fortune is so grave, that i thought it would be better for you if i did not tell it in public. you and another man, whose fortune i was studying last night,--private adler,--have been murdering a woman and a child! you are being dogged: within five days both of you will be assassinated.' he dropped on his knees, frightened out of his wits; and for five minutes he kept pouring out the same set of words, like a demented person, and in the same half-crying way which was one of my memories of that murderous night in my cabin-- 'i didn't do it; upon my soul i didn't do it; and i tried to keep him from doing it; i did, as god is my witness. he did it alone.' this was all i wanted. and i tried to get rid of the fool; but no, he clung to me, imploring me to save him from the assassin. he said-- 'i have money--ten thousand dollars--hid away, the fruit of loot and thievery; save me--tell me what to do, and you shall have it, every penny. two-thirds of it is my cousin adler's; but you can take it all. we hid it when we first came here. but i hid it in a new place yesterday, and have not told him--shall not tell him. i was going to desert, and get away with it all. it is gold, and too heavy to carry when one is running and dodging; but a woman who has been gone over the river two days to prepare my way for me is going to follow me with it; and if i got no chance to describe the hiding-place to her i was going to slip my silver watch into her hand, or send it to her, and she would understand. there's a piece of paper in the back of the case, which tells it all. here, take the watch--tell me what to do!' he was trying to press his watch upon me, and was exposing the paper and explaining it to me, when adler appeared on the scene, about a dozen yards away. i said to poor kruger-- 'put up your watch, i don't want it. you shan't come to any harm. go, now; i must tell adler his fortune. presently i will tell you how to escape the assassin; meantime i shall have to examine your thumbmark again. say nothing to adler about this thing--say nothing to anybody.' he went away filled with fright and gratitude, poor devil. i told adler a long fortune--purposely so long that i could not finish it; promised to come to him on guard, that night, and tell him the really important part of it--the tragical part of it, i said--so must be out of reach of eavesdroppers. they always kept a picket-watch outside the town--mere discipline and ceremony--no occasion for it, no enemy around. toward midnight i set out, equipped with the countersign, and picked my way toward the lonely region where adler was to keep his watch. it was so dark that i stumbled right on a dim figure almost before i could get out a protecting word. the sentinel hailed and i answered, both at the same moment. i added, 'it's only me--the fortune-teller.' then i slipped to the poor devil's side, and without a word i drove my dirk into his heart! ya wohl, laughed i, it was the tragedy part of his fortune, indeed! as he fell from his horse, he clutched at me, and my blue goggles remained in his hand; and away plunged the beast dragging him, with his foot in the stirrup. i fled through the woods, and made good my escape, leaving the accusing goggles behind me in that dead man's hand. this was fifteen or sixteen years ago. since then i have wandered aimlessly about the earth, sometimes at work, sometimes idle; sometimes with money, sometimes with none; but always tired of life, and wishing it was done, for my mission here was finished, with the act of that night; and the only pleasure, solace, satisfaction i had, in all those tedious years, was in the daily reflection, 'i have killed him!' four years ago, my health began to fail. i had wandered into munich, in my purposeless way. being out of money, i sought work, and got it; did my duty faithfully about a year, and was then given the berth of night watchman yonder in that dead-house which you visited lately. the place suited my mood. i liked it. i liked being with the dead--liked being alone with them. i used to wander among those rigid corpses, and peer into their austere faces, by the hour. the later the time, the more impressive it was; i preferred the late time. sometimes i turned the lights low: this gave perspective, you see; and the imagination could play; always, the dim receding ranks of the dead inspired one with weird and fascinating fancies. two years ago--i had been there a year then--i was sitting all alone in the watch-room, one gusty winter's night, chilled, numb, comfortless; drowsing gradually into unconsciousness; the sobbing of the wind and the slamming of distant shutters falling fainter and fainter upon my dulling ear each moment, when sharp and suddenly that dead-bell rang out a blood-curdling alarum over my head! the shock of it nearly paralyzed me; for it was the first time i had ever heard it. i gathered myself together and flew to the corpse-room. about midway down the outside rank, a shrouded figure was sitting upright, wagging its head slowly from one side to the other--a grisly spectacle! its side was toward me. i hurried to it and peered into its face. heavens, it was adler! can you divine what my first thought was? put into words, it was this: 'it seems, then, you escaped me once: there will be a different result this time!' evidently this creature was suffering unimaginable terrors. think what it must have been to wake up in the midst of that voiceless hush, and, look out over that grim congregation of the dead! what gratitude shone in his skinny white face when he saw a living form before him! and how the fervency of this mute gratitude was augmented when his eyes fell upon the life-giving cordials which i carried in my hands! then imagine the horror which came into this pinched face when i put the cordials behind me, and said mockingly-- 'speak up, franz adler--call upon these dead. doubtless they will listen and have pity; but here there is none else that will.' he tried to speak, but that part of the shroud which bound his jaws, held firm and would not let him. he tried to lift imploring hands, but they were crossed upon his breast and tied. i said-- 'shout, franz adler; make the sleepers in the distant streets hear you and bring help. shout--and lose no time, for there is little to lose. what, you cannot? that is a pity; but it is no matter--it does not always bring help. when you and your cousin murdered a helpless woman and child in a cabin in arkansas--my wife, it was, and my child!--they shrieked for help, you remember; but it did no good; you remember that it did no good, is it not so? your teeth chatter--then why cannot you shout? loosen the bandages with your hands--then you can. ah, i see-- your hands are tied, they cannot aid you. how strangely things repeat themselves, after long years; for my hands were tied, that night, you remember? yes, tied much as yours are now--how odd that is. i could not pull free. it did not occur to you to untie me; it does not occur to me to untie you. sh--! there's a late footstep. it is coming this way. hark, how near it is! one can count the footfalls--one--two--three. there--it is just outside. now is the time! shout, man, shout!--it is the one sole chance between you and eternity! ah, you see you have delayed too long--it is gone by. there--it is dying out. it is gone! think of it--reflect upon it--you have heard a human footstep for the last time. how curious it must be, to listen to so common a sound as that, and know that one will never hear the fellow to it again.' oh, my friend, the agony in that shrouded face was ecstasy to see! i thought of a new torture, and applied it--assisting myself with a trifle of lying invention-- 'that poor kruger tried to save my wife and child, and i did him a grateful good turn for it when the time came. i persuaded him to rob you; and i and a woman helped him to desert, and got him away in safety.' a look as of surprise and triumph shone out dimly through the anguish in my victim's face. i was disturbed, disquieted. i said-- 'what, then--didn't he escape?' a negative shake of the head. 'no? what happened, then?' the satisfaction in the shrouded face was still plainer. the man tried to mumble out some words--could not succeed; tried to express something with his obstructed hands--failed; paused a moment, then feebly tilted his head, in a meaning way, toward the corpse that lay nearest him. 'dead?' i asked. 'failed to escape?--caught in the act and shot?' negative shake of the head. 'how, then?' again the man tried to do something with his hands. i watched closely, but could not guess the intent. i bent over and watched still more intently. he had twisted a thumb around and was weakly punching at his breast with it. 'ah--stabbed, do you mean?' affirmative nod, accompanied by a spectral smile of such peculiar devilishness, that it struck an awakening light through my dull brain, and i cried-- 'did i stab him, mistaking him for you?--for that stroke was meant for none but you.' the affirmative nod of the re-dying rascal was as joyous as his failing strength was able to put into its expression. 'o, miserable, miserable me, to slaughter the pitying soul that, stood a friend to my darlings when they were helpless, and would have saved them if he could! miserable, oh, miserable, miserable me!' i fancied i heard the muffled gurgle of a, mocking laugh. i took my face out of my hands, and saw my enemy sinking back upon his inclined board. he was a satisfactory long time dying. he had a wonderful vitality, an astonishing constitution. yes, he was a pleasant long time at it. i got a chair and a newspaper, and sat down by him and read. occasionally i took a sip of brandy. this was necessary, on account of the cold. but i did it partly because i saw, that along at first, whenever i reached for the bottle, he thought i was going to give him some. i read aloud: mainly imaginary accounts of people snatched from the grave's threshold and restored to life and vigor by a few spoonsful of liquor and a warm bath. yes, he had a long, hard death of it--three hours and six minutes, from the time he rang his bell. it is believed that in all these eighteen years that have elapsed since the institution of the corpse-watch, no shrouded occupant of the bavarian dead-houses has ever rung its bell. well, it is a harmless belief. let it stand at that. the chill of that death-room had penetrated my bones. it revived and fastened upon me the disease which had been afflicting me, but which, up to that night, had been steadily disappearing. that man murdered my wife and my child; and in three days hence he will have added me to his list. no matter--god! how delicious the memory of it!--i caught him escaping from his grave, and thrust him back into it. after that night, i was confined to my bed for a week; but as soon as i could get about, i went to the dead-house books and got the number of the house which adler had died in. a wretched lodging-house, it was. it was my idea that he would naturally have gotten hold of kruger's effects, being his cousin; and i wanted to get kruger's watch, if i could. but while i was sick, adler's things had been sold and scattered, all except a few old letters, and some odds and ends of no value. however, through those letters, i traced out a son of kruger's, the only relative left. he is a man of thirty now, a shoemaker by trade, and living at no. konigstrasse, mannheim--widower, with several small children. without explaining to him why, i have furnished two-thirds of his support, ever since. now, as to that watch--see how strangely things happen! i traced it around and about germany for more than a year, at considerable cost in money and vexation; and at last i got it. got it, and was unspeakably glad; opened it, and found nothing in it! why, i might have known that that bit of paper was not going to stay there all this time. of course i gave up that ten thousand dollars then; gave it up, and dropped it out of my mind: and most sorrowfully, for i had wanted it for kruger's son. last night, when i consented at last that i must die, i began to make ready. i proceeded to burn all useless papers; and sure enough, from a batch of adler's, not previously examined with thoroughness, out dropped that long-desired scrap! i recognized it in a moment. here it is--i will translate it: 'brick livery stable, stone foundation, middle of town, corner of orleans and market. corner toward court-house. third stone, fourth row. stick notice there, saying how many are to come.' there--take it, and preserve it. kruger explained that that stone was removable; and that it was in the north wall of the foundation, fourth row from the top, and third stone from the west. the money is secreted behind it. he said the closing sentence was a blind, to mislead in case the paper should fall into wrong hands. it probably performed that office for adler. now i want to beg that when you make your intended journey down the river, you will hunt out that hidden money, and send it to adam kruger, care of the mannheim address which i have mentioned. it will make a rich man of him, and i shall sleep the sounder in my grave for knowing that i have done what i could for the son of the man who tried to save my wife and child--albeit my hand ignorantly struck him down, whereas the impulse of my heart would have been to shield and serve him. chapter the disposal of a bonanza 'such was ritter's narrative,' said i to my two friends. there was a profound and impressive silence, which lasted a considerable time; then both men broke into a fusillade of exciting and admiring ejaculations over the strange incidents of the tale; and this, along with a rattling fire of questions, was kept up until all hands were about out of breath. then my friends began to cool down, and draw off, under shelter of occasional volleys, into silence and abysmal reverie. for ten minutes now, there was stillness. then rogers said dreamily-- 'ten thousand dollars.' adding, after a considerable pause-- 'ten thousand. it is a heap of money.' presently the poet inquired-- 'are you going to send it to him right away?' 'yes,' i said. 'it is a queer question.' no reply. after a little, rogers asked, hesitatingly: 'all of it?--that is--i mean--' 'certainly, all of it.' i was going to say more, but stopped--was stopped by a train of thought which started up in me. thompson spoke, but my mind was absent, and i did not catch what he said. but i heard rogers answer-- 'yes, it seems so to me. it ought to be quite sufficient; for i don't see that he has done anything.' presently the poet said-- 'when you come to look at it, it is more than sufficient. just look at it--five thousand dollars! why, he couldn't spend it in a lifetime! and it would injure him, too; perhaps ruin him--you want to look at that. in a little while he would throw his last away, shut up his shop, maybe take to drinking, maltreat his motherless children, drift into other evil courses, go steadily from bad to worse--' 'yes, that's it,' interrupted rogers, fervently, 'i've seen it a hundred times--yes, more than a hundred. you put money into the hands of a man like that, if you want to destroy him, that's all; just put money into his hands, it's all you've got to do; and if it don't pull him down, and take all the usefulness out of him, and all the self-respect and everything, then i don't know human nature--ain't that so, thompson? and even if we were to give him a third of it; why, in less than six months--' 'less than six weeks, you'd better say!' said i, warming up and breaking in. 'unless he had that three thousand dollars in safe hands where he couldn't touch it, he would no more last you six weeks than--' 'of course he wouldn't,' said thompson; 'i've edited books for that kind of people; and the moment they get their hands on the royalty--maybe it's three thousand, maybe it's two thousand--' 'what business has that shoemaker with two thousand dollars, i should like to know?' broke in rogers, earnestly. 'a man perhaps perfectly contented now, there in mannheim, surrounded by his own class, eating his bread with the appetite which laborious industry alone can give, enjoying his humble life, honest, upright, pure in heart; and blest!-- yes, i say blest! blest above all the myriads that go in silk attire and walk the empty artificial round of social folly--but just you put that temptation before him once! just you lay fifteen hundred dollars before a man like that, and say--' 'fifteen hundred devils!' cried i, 'five hundred would rot his principles, paralyze his industry, drag him to the rumshop, thence to the gutter, thence to the almshouse, thence to ----' 'why put upon ourselves this crime, gentlemen?' interrupted the poet earnestly and appealingly. 'he is happy where he is, and as he is. every sentiment of honor, every sentiment of charity, every sentiment of high and sacred benevolence warns us, beseeches us, commands us to leave him undisturbed. that is real friendship, that is true friendship. we could follow other courses that would be more showy; but none that would be so truly kind and wise, depend upon it.' after some further talk, it became evident that each of us, down in his heart, felt some misgivings over this settlement of the matter. it was manifest that we all felt that we ought to send the poor shoemaker something. there was long and thoughtful discussion of this point; and we finally decided to send him a chromo. well, now that everything seemed to be arranged satisfactorily to everybody concerned, a new trouble broke out: it transpired that these two men were expecting to share equally in the money with me. that was not my idea. i said that if they got half of it between them they might consider themselves lucky. rogers said-- 'who would have had any if it hadn't been for me? i flung out the first hint--but for that it would all have gone to the shoemaker.' thompson said that he was thinking of the thing himself at the very moment that rogers had originally spoken. i retorted that the idea would have occurred to me plenty soon enough, and without anybody's help. i was slow about thinking, maybe, but i was sure. this matter warmed up into a quarrel; then into a fight; and each man got pretty badly battered. as soon as i had got myself mended up after a fashion, i ascended to the hurricane deck in a pretty sour humor. i found captain mccord there, and said, as pleasantly as my humor would permit-- 'i have come to say good-bye, captain. i wish to go ashore at napoleon.' 'go ashore where?' 'napoleon.' the captain laughed; but seeing that i was not in a jovial mood, stopped that and said-- 'but are you serious?' 'serious? i certainly am.' the captain glanced up at the pilot-house and said-- 'he wants to get off at napoleon!' 'napoleon ?' 'that's what he says.' 'great caesar's ghost!' uncle mumford approached along the deck. the captain said-- 'uncle, here's a friend of yours wants to get off at napoleon!' 'well, by ---?' i said-- 'come, what is all this about? can't a man go ashore at napoleon if he wants to?' 'why, hang it, don't you know? there isn't any napoleon any more. hasn't been for years and years. the arkansas river burst through it, tore it all to rags, and emptied it into the mississippi!' 'carried the whole town away?-banks, churches, jails, newspaper-offices, court-house, theater, fire department, livery stable everything ?' 'everything. just a fifteen-minute job.' or such a matter. didn't leave hide nor hair, shred nor shingle of it, except the fag-end of a shanty and one brick chimney. this boat is paddling along right now, where the dead-center of that town used to be; yonder is the brick chimney-all that's left of napoleon. these dense woods on the right used to be a mile back of the town. take a look behind you--up-stream--now you begin to recognize this country, don't you?' 'yes, i do recognize it now. it is the most wonderful thing i ever heard of; by a long shot the most wonderful--and unexpected.' mr. thompson and mr. rogers had arrived, meantime, with satchels and umbrellas, and had silently listened to the captain's news. thompson put a half-dollar in my hand and said softly-- 'for my share of the chromo.' rogers followed suit. yes, it was an astonishing thing to see the mississippi rolling between unpeopled shores and straight over the spot where i used to see a good big self-complacent town twenty years ago. town that was county-seat of a great and important county; town with a big united states marine hospital; town of innumerable fights--an inquest every day; town where i had used to know the prettiest girl, and the most accomplished in the whole mississippi valley; town where we were handed the first printed news of the 'pennsylvania's' mournful disaster a quarter of a century ago; a town no more--swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the fishes; nothing left but a fragment of a shanty and a crumbling brick chimney! chapter refreshments and ethics in regard to island , which is situated not far from the former napoleon, a freak of the river here has sorely perplexed the laws of men and made them a vanity and a jest. when the state of arkansas was chartered, she controlled 'to the center of the river'--a most unstable line. the state of mississippi claimed 'to the channel'--another shifty and unstable line. no. belonged to arkansas. by and by a cut-off threw this big island out of arkansas, and yet not within mississippi. 'middle of the river' on one side of it, 'channel' on the other. that is as i understand the problem. whether i have got the details right or wrong, this fact remains: that here is this big and exceedingly valuable island of four thousand acres, thrust out in the cold, and belonging to neither the one state nor the other; paying taxes to neither, owing allegiance to neither. one man owns the whole island, and of right is 'the man without a country.' island belongs to arkansas. the river moved it over and joined it to mississippi. a chap established a whiskey shop there, without a mississippi license, and enriched himself upon mississippi custom under arkansas protection (where no license was in those days required). we glided steadily down the river in the usual privacy--steamboat or other moving thing seldom seen. scenery as always: stretch upon stretch of almost unbroken forest, on both sides of the river; soundless solitude. here and there a cabin or two, standing in small openings on the gray and grassless banks--cabins which had formerly stood a quarter or half-mile farther to the front, and gradually been pulled farther and farther back as the shores caved in. as at pilcher's point, for instance, where the cabins had been moved back three hundred yards in three months, so we were told; but the caving banks had already caught up with them, and they were being conveyed rearward once more. napoleon had but small opinion of greenville, mississippi, in the old times; but behold, napoleon is gone to the cat-fishes, and here is greenville full of life and activity, and making a considerable flourish in the valley; having three thousand inhabitants, it is said, and doing a gross trade of $ , , annually. a growing town. there was much talk on the boat about the calhoun land company, an enterprise which is expected to work wholesome results. colonel calhoun, a grandson of the statesman, went to boston and formed a syndicate which purchased a large tract of land on the river, in chicot county, arkansas--some ten thousand acres--for cotton-growing. the purpose is to work on a cash basis: buy at first hands, and handle their own product; supply their negro laborers with provisions and necessaries at a trifling profit, say or per cent.; furnish them comfortable quarters, etc., and encourage them to save money and remain on the place. if this proves a financial success, as seems quite certain, they propose to establish a banking-house in greenville, and lend money at an unburdensome rate of interest-- per cent. is spoken of. the trouble heretofore has been--i am quoting remarks of planters and steamboatmen--that the planters, although owning the land, were without cash capital; had to hypothecate both land and crop to carry on the business. consequently, the commission dealer who furnishes the money takes some risk and demands big interest--usually per cent., and {half} per cent. for negotiating the loan. the planter has also to buy his supplies through the same dealer, paying commissions and profits. then when he ships his crop, the dealer adds his commissions, insurance, etc. so, taking it by and large, and first and last, the dealer's share of that crop is about per cent.'{footnote ['but what can the state do where the people are under subjection to rates of interest ranging from to per cent., and are also under the necessity of purchasing their crops in advance even of planting, at these rates, for the privilege of purchasing all their supplies at per cent. profit?'--edward atkinson.]} a cotton-planter's estimate of the average margin of profit on planting, in his section: one man and mule will raise ten acres of cotton, giving ten bales cotton, worth, say, $ ; cost of producing, say $ ; net profit, $ , or $ per acre. there is also a profit now from the cotton-seed, which formerly had little value--none where much transportation was necessary. in sixteen hundred pounds crude cotton four hundred are lint, worth, say, ten cents a pound; and twelve hundred pounds of seed, worth $ or $ per ton. maybe in future even the stems will not be thrown away. mr. edward atkinson says that for each bale of cotton there are fifteen hundred pounds of stems, and that these are very rich in phosphate of lime and potash; that when ground and mixed with ensilage or cotton-seed meal (which is too rich for use as fodder in large quantities), the stem mixture makes a superior food, rich in all the elements needed for the production of milk, meat, and bone. heretofore the stems have been considered a nuisance. complaint is made that the planter remains grouty toward the former slave, since the war; will have nothing but a chill business relation with him, no sentiment permitted to intrude, will not keep a 'store' himself, and supply the negro's wants and thus protect the negro's pocket and make him able and willing to stay on the place and an advantage to him to do it, but lets that privilege to some thrifty israelite, who encourages the thoughtless negro and wife to buy all sorts of things which they could do without--buy on credit, at big prices, month after month, credit based on the negro's share of the growing crop; and at the end of the season, the negro's share belongs to the israelite,' the negro is in debt besides, is discouraged, dissatisfied, restless, and both he and the planter are injured; for he will take steamboat and migrate, and the planter must get a stranger in his place who does not know him, does not care for him, will fatten the israelite a season, and follow his predecessor per steamboat. it is hoped that the calhoun company will show, by its humane and protective treatment of its laborers, that its method is the most profitable for both planter and negro; and it is believed that a general adoption of that method will then follow. and where so many are saying their say, shall not the barkeeper testify? he is thoughtful, observant, never drinks; endeavors to earn his salary, and would earn it if there were custom enough. he says the people along here in mississippi and louisiana will send up the river to buy vegetables rather than raise them, and they will come aboard at the landings and buy fruits of the barkeeper. thinks they 'don't know anything but cotton;' believes they don't know how to raise vegetables and fruit--'at least the most of them.' says 'a nigger will go to h for a watermelon' ('h' is all i find in the stenographer's report--means halifax probably, though that seems a good way to go for a watermelon). barkeeper buys watermelons for five cents up the river, brings them down and sells them for fifty. 'why does he mix such elaborate and picturesque drinks for the nigger hands on the boat?' because they won't have any other. 'they want a big drink; don't make any difference what you make it of, they want the worth of their money. you give a nigger a plain gill of half-a-dollar brandy for five cents--will he touch it? no. ain't size enough to it. but you put up a pint of all kinds of worthless rubbish, and heave in some red stuff to make it beautiful--red's the main thing--and he wouldn't put down that glass to go to a circus.' all the bars on this anchor line are rented and owned by one firm. they furnish the liquors from their own establishment, and hire the barkeepers 'on salary.' good liquors? yes, on some of the boats, where there are the kind of passengers that want it and can pay for it. on the other boats? no. nobody but the deck hands and firemen to drink it. 'brandy? yes, i've got brandy, plenty of it; but you don't want any of it unless you've made your will.' it isn't as it used to be in the old times. then everybody traveled by steamboat, everybody drank, and everybody treated everybody else. 'now most everybody goes by railroad, and the rest don't drink.' in the old times the barkeeper owned the bar himself, 'and was gay and smarty and talky and all jeweled up, and was the toniest aristocrat on the boat; used to make $ , on a trip. a father who left his son a steamboat bar, left him a fortune. now he leaves him board and lodging; yes, and washing, if a shirt a trip will do. yes, indeedy, times are changed. why, do you know, on the principal line of boats on the upper mississippi, they don't have any bar at all! sounds like poetry, but it's the petrified truth.' chapter tough yarns stack island. i remembered stack island; also lake providence, louisiana--which is the first distinctly southern-looking town you come to, downward-bound; lies level and low, shade-trees hung with venerable gray beards of spanish moss; 'restful, pensive, sunday aspect about the place,' comments uncle mumford, with feeling--also with truth. a mr. h. furnished some minor details of fact concerning this region which i would have hesitated to believe if i had not known him to be a steamboat mate. he was a passenger of ours, a resident of arkansas city, and bound to vicksburg to join his boat, a little sunflower packet. he was an austere man, and had the reputation of being singularly unworldly, for a river man. among other things, he said that arkansas had been injured and kept back by generations of exaggerations concerning the mosquitoes here. one may smile, said he, and turn the matter off as being a small thing; but when you come to look at the effects produced, in the way of discouragement of immigration, and diminished values of property, it was quite the opposite of a small thing, or thing in any wise to be coughed down or sneered at. these mosquitoes had been persistently represented as being formidable and lawless; whereas 'the truth is, they are feeble, insignificant in size, diffident to a fault, sensitive'--and so on, and so on; you would have supposed he was talking about his family. but if he was soft on the arkansas mosquitoes, he was hard enough on the mosquitoes of lake providence to make up for it--'those lake providence colossi,' as he finely called them. he said that two of them could whip a dog, and that four of them could hold a man down; and except help come, they would kill him--'butcher him,' as he expressed it. referred in a sort of casual way--and yet significant way--to 'the fact that the life policy in its simplest form is unknown in lake providence--they take out a mosquito policy besides.' he told many remarkable things about those lawless insects. among others, said he had seen them try to vote. noticing that this statement seemed to be a good deal of a strain on us, he modified it a little: said he might have been mistaken, as to that particular, but knew he had seen them around the polls 'canvassing.' there was another passenger--friend of h.'s--who backed up the harsh evidence against those mosquitoes, and detailed some stirring adventures which he had had with them. the stories were pretty sizable, merely pretty sizable; yet mr. h. was continually interrupting with a cold, inexorable 'wait--knock off twenty-five per cent. of that; now go on;' or, 'wait--you are getting that too strong; cut it down, cut it down-- you get a leetle too much costumery on to your statements: always dress a fact in tights, never in an ulster;' or, 'pardon, once more: if you are going to load anything more on to that statement, you want to get a couple of lighters and tow the rest, because it's drawing all the water there is in the river already; stick to facts--just stick to the cold facts; what these gentlemen want for a book is the frozen truth--ain't that so, gentlemen?' he explained privately that it was necessary to watch this man all the time, and keep him within bounds; it would not do to neglect this precaution, as he, mr. h., 'knew to his sorrow.' said he, 'i will not deceive you; he told me such a monstrous lie once, that it swelled my left ear up, and spread it so that i was actually not able to see out around it; it remained so for months, and people came miles to see me fan myself with it.' chapter vicksburg during the trouble we used to plow past the lofty hill-city, vicksburg, down-stream; but we cannot do that now. a cut-off has made a country town of it, like osceola, st. genevieve, and several others. there is currentless water --also a big island--in front of vicksburg now. you come down the river the other side of the island, then turn and come up to the town; that is, in high water: in low water you can't come up, but must land some distance below it. signs and scars still remain, as reminders of vicksburg's tremendous war experiences; earthworks, trees crippled by the cannon balls, cave- refuges in the clay precipices, etc. the caves did good service during the six weeks' bombardment of the city--may to july , . they were used by the non-combatants--mainly by the women and children; not to live in constantly, but to fly to for safety on occasion. they were mere holes, tunnels, driven into the perpendicular clay bank, then branched y shape, within the hill. life in vicksburg, during the six weeks was perhaps--but wait; here are some materials out of which to reproduce it:-- population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and three thousand non- combatants; the city utterly cut off from the world--walled solidly in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiers and batteries; hence, no buying and selling with the outside; no passing to and fro; no god- speeding a parting guest, no welcoming a coming one; no printed acres of world-wide news to be read at breakfast, mornings--a tedious dull absence of such matter, instead; hence, also, no running to see steamboats smoking into view in the distance up or down, and plowing toward the town--for none came, the river lay vacant and undisturbed; no rush and turmoil around the railway station, no struggling over bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobs of hackmen--all quiet there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel, sugar thirty, corn ten dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound, rum a hundred dollars a gallon; other things in proportion: consequently, no roar and racket of drays and carriages tearing along the streets; nothing for them to do, among that handful of non-combatants of exhausted means; at three o'clock in the morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured tramp of a sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out of hearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute: all in a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery, the sky is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streaming from soaring bomb- shells, and a rain of iron fragments descends upon the city; descends upon the empty streets: streets which are not empty a moment later, but mottled with dim figures of frantic women and children scurrying from home and bed toward the cave dungeons--encouraged by the humorous grim soldiery, who shout 'rats, to your holes!' and laugh. the cannon-thunder rages, shells scream and crash overhead, the iron rain pours down, one hour, two hours, three, possibly six, then stops; silence follows, but the streets are still empty; the silence continues; by-and-bye a head projects from a cave here and there and yonder, and reconnoitres, cautiously; the silence still continuing, bodies follow heads, and jaded, half smothered creatures group themselves about, stretch their cramped limbs, draw in deep draughts of the grateful fresh air, gossip with the neighbors from the next cave; maybe straggle off home presently, or take a lounge through the town, if the stillness continues; and will scurry to the holes again, by-and-bye, when the war- tempest breaks forth once more. there being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers--merely the population of a village--would they not come to know each other, after a week or two, and familiarly; insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate experiences of one would be of interest to all? those are the materials furnished by history. from them might not almost anybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in vicksburg? could you, who did not experience it, come nearer to reproducing it to the imagination of another non-participant than could a vicksburger who did experience it? it seems impossible; and yet there are reasons why it might not really be. when one makes his first voyage in a ship, it is an experience which multitudinously bristles with striking novelties; novelties which are in such sharp contrast with all this person's former experiences that they take a seemingly deathless grip upon his imagination and memory. by tongue or pen he can make a landsman live that strange and stirring voyage over with him; make him see it all and feel it all. but if he wait? if he make ten voyages in succession--what then? why, the thing has lost color, snap, surprise; and has become commonplace. the man would have nothing to tell that would quicken a landsman's pulse. years ago, i talked with a couple of the vicksburg non-combatants--a man and his wife. left to tell their story in their own way, those people told it without fire, almost without interest. a week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues eloquent for ever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore the novelty all out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home and into the ground; the matter became commonplace. after that, the possibility of their ever being startlingly interesting in their talks about it was gone. what the man said was to this effect:-- 'it got to be sunday all the time. seven sundays in the week--to us, anyway. we hadn't anything to do, and time hung heavy. seven sundays, and all of them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the night, by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron. at first we used to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did afterwards. the first time, i forgot the children, and maria fetched them both along. when she was all safe in the cave she fainted. two or three weeks afterwards, when she was running for the holes, one morning, through a shell-shower, a big shell burst near her, and covered her all over with dirt, and a piece of the iron carried away her game-bag of false hair from the back of her head. well, she stopped to get that game-bag before she shoved along again! was getting used to things already, you see. we all got so that we could tell a good deal about shells; and after that we didn't always go under shelter if it was a light shower. us men would loaf around and talk; and a man would say, 'there she goes!' and name the kind of shell it was from the sound of it, and go on talking--if there wasn't any danger from it. if a shell was bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood still;-- uncomfortable, yes, but it wasn't safe to move. when it let go, we went on talking again, if nobody hurt--maybe saying, 'that was a ripper!' or some such commonplace comment before we resumed; or, maybe, we would see a shell poising itself away high in the air overhead. in that case, every fellow just whipped out a sudden, 'see you again, gents!' and shoved. often and often i saw gangs of ladies promenading the streets, looking as cheerful as you please, and keeping an eye canted up watching the shells; and i've seen them stop still when they were uncertain about what a shell was going to do, and wait and make certain; and after that they sa'ntered along again, or lit out for shelter, according to the verdict. streets in some towns have a litter of pieces of paper, and odds and ends of one sort or another lying around. ours hadn't; they had iron litter. sometimes a man would gather up all the iron fragments and unbursted shells in his neighborhood, and pile them into a kind of monument in his front yard--a ton of it, sometimes. no glass left; glass couldn't stand such a bombardment; it was all shivered out. windows of the houses vacant--looked like eye-holes in a skull. whole panes were as scarce as news. 'we had church sundays. not many there, along at first; but by-and-bye pretty good turnouts. i've seen service stop a minute, and everybody sit quiet--no voice heard, pretty funeral-like then--and all the more so on account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead; and pretty soon, when a body could be heard, service would go on again. organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerful queer combination--along at first. coming out of church, one morning, we had an accident--the only one that happened around me on a sunday. i was just having a hearty handshake with a friend i hadn't seen for a while, and saying, 'drop into our cave to-night, after bombardment; we've got hold of a pint of prime wh--.' whiskey, i was going to say, you know, but a shell interrupted. a chunk of it cut the man's arm off, and left it dangling in my hand. and do you know the thing that is going to stick the longest in my memory, and outlast everything else, little and big, i reckon, is the mean thought i had then? it was 'the whiskey is saved.' and yet, don't you know, it was kind of excusable; because it was as scarce as diamonds, and we had only just that little; never had another taste during the siege. 'sometimes the caves were desperately crowded, and always hot and close. sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it; no turning-room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn't have made a candle burn in it. a child was born in one of those caves one night, think of that; why, it was like having it born in a trunk. 'twice we had sixteen people in our cave; and a number of times we had a dozen. pretty suffocating in there. we always had eight; eight belonged there. hunger and misery and sickness and fright and sorrow, and i don't know what all, got so loaded into them that none of them were ever rightly their old selves after the siege. they all died but three of us within a couple of years. one night a shell burst in front of the hole and caved it in and stopped it up. it was lively times, for a while, digging out. some of us came near smothering. after that we made two openings--ought to have thought of it at first. 'mule meat. no, we only got down to that the last day or two. of course it was good; anything is good when you are starving. this man had kept a diary during--six weeks? no, only the first six days. the first day, eight close pages; the second, five; the third, one--loosely written; the fourth, three or four lines; a line or two the fifth and sixth days; seventh day, diary abandoned; life in terrific vicksburg having now become commonplace and matter of course. the war history of vicksburg has more about it to interest the general reader than that of any other of the river-towns. it is full of variety, full of incident, full of the picturesque. vicksburg held out longer than any other important river-town, and saw warfare in all its phases, both land and water--the siege, the mine, the assault, the repulse, the bombardment, sickness, captivity, famine. the most beautiful of all the national cemeteries is here. over the great gateway is this inscription:-- "here rest in peace , who died for their country in the years to " the grounds are nobly situated; being very high and commanding a wide prospect of land and river. they are tastefully laid out in broad terraces, with winding roads and paths; and there is profuse adornment in the way of semi-tropical shrubs and flowers,' and in one part is a piece of native wild-wood, left just as it grew, and, therefore, perfect in its charm. everything about this cemetery suggests the hand of the national government. the government's work is always conspicuous for excellence, solidity, thoroughness, neatness. the government does its work well in the first place, and then takes care of it. by winding-roads--which were often cut to so great a depth between perpendicular walls that they were mere roofless tunnels--we drove out a mile or two and visited the monument which stands upon the scene of the surrender of vicksburg to general grant by general pemberton. its metal will preserve it from the hackings and chippings which so defaced its predecessor, which was of marble; but the brick foundations are crumbling, and it will tumble down by-and-bye. it overlooks a picturesque region of wooded hills and ravines; and is not unpicturesque itself, being well smothered in flowering weeds. the battered remnant of the marble monument has been removed to the national cemetery. on the road, a quarter of a mile townward, an aged colored man showed us, with pride, an unexploded bomb-shell which has lain in his yard since the day it fell there during the siege. 'i was a-stannin' heah, an' de dog was a-stannin' heah; de dog he went for de shell, gwine to pick a fuss wid it; but i didn't; i says, "jes' make you'seff at home heah; lay still whah you is, or bust up de place, jes' as you's a mind to, but i's got business out in de woods, i has!"' vicksburg is a town of substantial business streets and pleasant residences; it commands the commerce of the yazoo and sunflower rivers; is pushing railways in several directions, through rich agricultural regions, and has a promising future of prosperity and importance. apparently, nearly all the river towns, big and little, have made up their minds that they must look mainly to railroads for wealth and upbuilding, henceforth. they are acting upon this idea. the signs are, that the next twenty years will bring about some noteworthy changes in the valley, in the direction of increased population and wealth, and in the intellectual advancement and the liberalizing of opinion which go naturally with these. and yet, if one may judge by the past, the river towns will manage to find and use a chance, here and there, to cripple and retard their progress. they kept themselves back in the days of steamboating supremacy, by a system of wharfage-dues so stupidly graded as to prohibit what may be called small retail traffic in freights and passengers. boats were charged such heavy wharfage that they could not afford to land for one or two passengers or a light lot of freight. instead of encouraging the bringing of trade to their doors, the towns diligently and effectively discouraged it. they could have had many boats and low rates; but their policy rendered few boats and high rates compulsory. it was a policy which extended--and extends--from new orleans to st. paul. we had a strong desire to make a trip up the yazoo and the sunflower--an interesting region at any time, but additionally interesting at this time, because up there the great inundation was still to be seen in force--but we were nearly sure to have to wait a day or more for a new orleans boat on our return; so we were obliged to give up the project. here is a story which i picked up on board the boat that night. i insert it in this place merely because it is a good story, not because it belongs here--for it doesn't. it was told by a passenger--a college professor--and was called to the surface in the course of a general conversation which began with talk about horses, drifted into talk about astronomy, then into talk about the lynching of the gamblers in vicksburg half a century ago, then into talk about dreams and superstitions; and ended, after midnight, in a dispute over free trade and protection. roughing it by mark twain part . chapter xli. captain nye was very ill indeed, with spasmodic rheumatism. but the old gentleman was himself--which is to say, he was kind-hearted and agreeable when comfortable, but a singularly violent wild-cat when things did not go well. he would be smiling along pleasantly enough, when a sudden spasm of his disease would take him and he would go out of his smile into a perfect fury. he would groan and wail and howl with the anguish, and fill up the odd chinks with the most elaborate profanity that strong convictions and a fine fancy could contrive. with fair opportunity he could swear very well and handle his adjectives with considerable judgment; but when the spasm was on him it was painful to listen to him, he was so awkward. however, i had seen him nurse a sick man himself and put up patiently with the inconveniences of the situation, and consequently i was willing that he should have full license now that his own turn had come. he could not disturb me, with all his raving and ranting, for my mind had work on hand, and it labored on diligently, night and day, whether my hands were idle or employed. i was altering and amending the plans for my house, and thinking over the propriety of having the billard-room in the attic, instead of on the same floor with the dining-room; also, i was trying to decide between green and blue for the upholstery of the drawing-room, for, although my preference was blue i feared it was a color that would be too easily damaged by dust and sunlight; likewise while i was content to put the coachman in a modest livery, i was uncertain about a footman--i needed one, and was even resolved to have one, but wished he could properly appear and perform his functions out of livery, for i somewhat dreaded so much show; and yet, inasmuch as my late grandfather had had a coachman and such things, but no liveries, i felt rather drawn to beat him;--or beat his ghost, at any rate; i was also systematizing the european trip, and managed to get it all laid out, as to route and length of time to be devoted to it --everything, with one exception--namely, whether to cross the desert from cairo to jerusalem per camel, or go by sea to beirut, and thence down through the country per caravan. meantime i was writing to the friends at home every day, instructing them concerning all my plans and intentions, and directing them to look up a handsome homestead for my mother and agree upon a price for it against my coming, and also directing them to sell my share of the tennessee land and tender the proceeds to the widows' and orphans' fund of the typographical union of which i had long been a member in good standing. [this tennessee land had been in the possession of the family many years, and promised to confer high fortune upon us some day; it still promises it, but in a less violent way.] when i had been nursing the captain nine days he was somewhat better, but very feeble. during the afternoon we lifted him into a chair and gave him an alcoholic vapor bath, and then set about putting him on the bed again. we had to be exceedingly careful, for the least jar produced pain. gardiner had his shoulders and i his legs; in an unfortunate moment i stumbled and the patient fell heavily on the bed in an agony of torture. i never heard a man swear so in my life. he raved like a maniac, and tried to snatch a revolver from the table--but i got it. he ordered me out of the house, and swore a world of oaths that he would kill me wherever he caught me when he got on his feet again. it was simply a passing fury, and meant nothing. i knew he would forget it in an hour, and maybe be sorry for it, too; but it angered me a little, at the moment. so much so, indeed, that i determined to go back to esmeralda. i thought he was able to get along alone, now, since he was on the war path. i took supper, and as soon as the moon rose, began my nine-mile journey, on foot. even millionaires needed no horses, in those days, for a mere nine-mile jaunt without baggage. as i "raised the hill" overlooking the town, it lacked fifteen minutes of twelve. i glanced at the hill over beyond the canyon, and in the bright moonlight saw what appeared to be about half the population of the village massed on and around the wide west croppings. my heart gave an exulting bound, and i said to myself, "they have made a new strike to-night--and struck it richer than ever, no doubt." i started over there, but gave it up. i said the "strick" would keep, and i had climbed hill enough for one night. i went on down through the town, and as i was passing a little german bakery, a woman ran out and begged me to come in and help her. she said her husband had a fit. i went in, and judged she was right--he appeared to have a hundred of them, compressed into one. two germans were there, trying to hold him, and not making much of a success of it. i ran up the street half a block or so and routed out a sleeping doctor, brought him down half dressed, and we four wrestled with the maniac, and doctored, drenched and bled him, for more than an hour, and the poor german woman did the crying. he grew quiet, now, and the doctor and i withdrew and left him to his friends. it was a little after one o'clock. as i entered the cabin door, tired but jolly, the dingy light of a tallow candle revealed higbie, sitting by the pine table gazing stupidly at my note, which he held in his fingers, and looking pale, old, and haggard. i halted, and looked at him. he looked at me, stolidly. i said: "higbie, what--what is it?" "we're ruined--we didn't do the work--the blind lead's relocated!" it was enough. i sat down sick, grieved--broken-hearted, indeed. a minute before, i was rich and brimful of vanity; i was a pauper now, and very meek. we sat still an hour, busy with thought, busy with vain and useless self-upbraidings, busy with "why didn't i do this, and why didn't i do that," but neither spoke a word. then we dropped into mutual explanations, and the mystery was cleared away. it came out that higbie had depended on me, as i had on him, and as both of us had on the foreman. the folly of it! it was the first time that ever staid and steadfast higbie had left an important matter to chance or failed to be true to his full share of a responsibility. but he had never seen my note till this moment, and this moment was the first time he had been in the cabin since the day he had seen me last. he, also, had left a note for me, on that same fatal afternoon--had ridden up on horseback, and looked through the window, and being in a hurry and not seeing me, had tossed the note into the cabin through a broken pane. here it was, on the floor, where it had remained undisturbed for nine days: "don't fail to do the work before the ten days expire. w. has passed through and given me notice. i am to join him at mono lake, and we shall go on from there to-night. he says he will find it this time, sure. cal." "w." meant whiteman, of course. that thrice accursed "cement!" that was the way of it. an old miner, like higbie, could no more withstand the fascination of a mysterious mining excitement like this "cement" foolishness, than he could refrain from eating when he was famishing. higbie had been dreaming about the marvelous cement for months; and now, against his better judgment, he had gone off and "taken the chances" on my keeping secure a mine worth a million undiscovered cement veins. they had not been followed this time. his riding out of town in broad daylight was such a common-place thing to do that it had not attracted any attention. he said they prosecuted their search in the fastnesses of the mountains during nine days, without success; they could not find the cement. then a ghastly fear came over him that something might have happened to prevent the doing of the necessary work to hold the blind lead (though indeed he thought such a thing hardly possible), and forthwith he started home with all speed. he would have reached esmeralda in time, but his horse broke down and he had to walk a great part of the distance. and so it happened that as he came into esmeralda by one road, i entered it by another. his was the superior energy, however, for he went straight to the wide west, instead of turning aside as i had done--and he arrived there about five or ten minutes too late! the "notice" was already up, the "relocation" of our mine completed beyond recall, and the crowd rapidly dispersing. he learned some facts before he left the ground. the foreman had not been seen about the streets since the night we had located the mine--a telegram had called him to california on a matter of life and death, it was said. at any rate he had done no work and the watchful eyes of the community were taking note of the fact. at midnight of this woful tenth day, the ledge would be "relocatable," and by eleven o'clock the hill was black with men prepared to do the relocating. that was the crowd i had seen when i fancied a new "strike" had been made--idiot that i was. [we three had the same right to relocate the lead that other people had, provided we were quick enough.] as midnight was announced, fourteen men, duly armed and ready to back their proceedings, put up their "notice" and proclaimed their ownership of the blind lead, under the new name of the "johnson." but a. d. allen our partner (the foreman) put in a sudden appearance about that time, with a cocked revolver in his hand, and said his name must be added to the list, or he would "thin out the johnson company some." he was a manly, splendid, determined fellow, and known to be as good as his word, and therefore a compromise was effected. they put in his name for a hundred feet, reserving to themselves the customary two hundred feet each. such was the history of the night's events, as higbie gathered from a friend on the way home. higbie and i cleared out on a new mining excitement the next morning, glad to get away from the scene of our sufferings, and after a month or two of hardship and disappointment, returned to esmeralda once more. then we learned that the wide west and the johnson companies had consolidated; that the stock, thus united, comprised five thousand feet, or shares; that the foreman, apprehending tiresome litigation, and considering such a huge concern unwieldy, had sold his hundred feet for ninety thousand dollars in gold and gone home to the states to enjoy it. if the stock was worth such a gallant figure, with five thousand shares in the corporation, it makes me dizzy to think what it would have been worth with only our original six hundred in it. it was the difference between six hundred men owning a house and five thousand owning it. we would have been millionaires if we had only worked with pick and spade one little day on our property and so secured our ownership! it reads like a wild fancy sketch, but the evidence of many witnesses, and likewise that of the official records of esmeralda district, is easily obtainable in proof that it is a true history. i can always have it to say that i was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million dollars, once, for ten days. a year ago my esteemed and in every way estimable old millionaire partner, higbie, wrote me from an obscure little mining camp in california that after nine or ten years of buffetings and hard striving, he was at last in a position where he could command twenty-five hundred dollars, and said he meant to go into the fruit business in a modest way. how such a thought would have insulted him the night we lay in our cabin planning european trips and brown stone houses on russian hill! chapter xlii. what to do next? it was a momentous question. i had gone out into the world to shift for myself, at the age of thirteen (for my father had endorsed for friends; and although he left us a sumptuous legacy of pride in his fine virginian stock and its national distinction, i presently found that i could not live on that alone without occasional bread to wash it down with). i had gained a livelihood in various vocations, but had not dazzled anybody with my successes; still the list was before me, and the amplest liberty in the matter of choosing, provided i wanted to work--which i did not, after being so wealthy. i had once been a grocery clerk, for one day, but had consumed so much sugar in that time that i was relieved from further duty by the proprietor; said he wanted me outside, so that he could have my custom. i had studied law an entire week, and then given it up because it was so prosy and tiresome. i had engaged briefly in the study of blacksmithing, but wasted so much time trying to fix the bellows so that it would blow itself, that the master turned me adrift in disgrace, and told me i would come to no good. i had been a bookseller's clerk for awhile, but the customers bothered me so much i could not read with any comfort, and so the proprietor gave me a furlough and forgot to put a limit to it. i had clerked in a drug store part of a summer, but my prescriptions were unlucky, and we appeared to sell more stomach pumps than soda water. so i had to go. i had made of myself a tolerable printer, under the impression that i would be another franklin some day, but somehow had missed the connection thus far. there was no berth open in the esmeralda union, and besides i had always been such a slow compositor that i looked with envy upon the achievements of apprentices of two years' standing; and when i took a "take," foremen were in the habit of suggesting that it would be wanted "some time during the year." i was a good average st. louis and new orleans pilot and by no means ashamed of my abilities in that line; wages were two hundred and fifty dollars a month and no board to pay, and i did long to stand behind a wheel again and never roam any more--but i had been making such an ass of myself lately in grandiloquent letters home about my blind lead and my european excursion that i did what many and many a poor disappointed miner had done before; said "it is all over with me now, and i will never go back home to be pitied--and snubbed." i had been a private secretary, a silver miner and a silver mill operative, and amounted to less than nothing in each, and now-- what to do next? i yielded to higbie's appeals and consented to try the mining once more. we climbed far up on the mountain side and went to work on a little rubbishy claim of ours that had a shaft on it eight feet deep. higbie descended into it and worked bravely with his pick till he had loosened up a deal of rock and dirt and then i went down with a long-handled shovel (the most awkward invention yet contrived by man) to throw it out. you must brace the shovel forward with the side of your knee till it is full, and then, with a skilful toss, throw it backward over your left shoulder. i made the toss, and landed the mess just on the edge of the shaft and it all came back on my head and down the back of my neck. i never said a word, but climbed out and walked home. i inwardly resolved that i would starve before i would make a target of myself and shoot rubbish at it with a long-handled shovel. i sat down, in the cabin, and gave myself up to solid misery--so to speak. now in pleasanter days i had amused myself with writing letters to the chief paper of the territory, the virginia daily territorial enterprise, and had always been surprised when they appeared in print. my good opinion of the editors had steadily declined; for it seemed to me that they might have found something better to fill up with than my literature. i had found a letter in the post office as i came home from the hill side, and finally i opened it. eureka! [i never did know what eureka meant, but it seems to be as proper a word to heave in as any when no other that sounds pretty offers.] it was a deliberate offer to me of twenty-five dollars a week to come up to virginia and be city editor of the enterprise. i would have challenged the publisher in the "blind lead" days--i wanted to fall down and worship him, now. twenty-five dollars a week--it looked like bloated luxury--a fortune a sinful and lavish waste of money. but my transports cooled when i thought of my inexperience and consequent unfitness for the position--and straightway, on top of this, my long array of failures rose up before me. yet if i refused this place i must presently become dependent upon somebody for my bread, a thing necessarily distasteful to a man who had never experienced such a humiliation since he was thirteen years old. not much to be proud of, since it is so common--but then it was all i had to be proud of. so i was scared into being a city editor. i would have declined, otherwise. necessity is the mother of "taking chances." i do not doubt that if, at that time, i had been offered a salary to translate the talmud from the original hebrew, i would have accepted--albeit with diffidence and some misgivings--and thrown as much variety into it as i could for the money. i went up to virginia and entered upon my new vocation. i was a rusty looking city editor, i am free to confess--coatless, slouch hat, blue woolen shirt, pantaloons stuffed into boot-tops, whiskered half down to the waist, and the universal navy revolver slung to my belt. but i secured a more christian costume and discarded the revolver. i had never had occasion to kill anybody, nor ever felt a desire to do so, but had worn the thing in deference to popular sentiment, and in order that i might not, by its absence, be offensively conspicuous, and a subject of remark. but the other editors, and all the printers, carried revolvers. i asked the chief editor and proprietor (mr. goodman, i will call him, since it describes him as well as any name could do) for some instructions with regard to my duties, and he told me to go all over town and ask all sorts of people all sorts of questions, make notes of the information gained, and write them out for publication. and he added: "never say 'we learn' so-and-so, or 'it is reported,' or 'it is rumored,' or 'we understand' so-and-so, but go to headquarters and get the absolute facts, and then speak out and say 'it is so-and-so.' otherwise, people will not put confidence in your news. unassailable certainly is the thing that gives a newspaper the firmest and most valuable reputation." it was the whole thing in a nut-shell; and to this day when i find a reporter commencing his article with "we understand," i gather a suspicion that he has not taken as much pains to inform himself as he ought to have done. i moralize well, but i did not always practise well when i was a city editor; i let fancy get the upper hand of fact too often when there was a dearth of news. i can never forget my first day's experience as a reporter. i wandered about town questioning everybody, boring everybody, and finding out that nobody knew anything. at the end of five hours my notebook was still barren. i spoke to mr. goodman. he said: "dan used to make a good thing out of the hay wagons in a dry time when there were no fires or inquests. are there no hay wagons in from the truckee? if there are, you might speak of the renewed activity and all that sort of thing, in the hay business, you know. "it isn't sensational or exciting, but it fills up and looks business like." i canvassed the city again and found one wretched old hay truck dragging in from the country. but i made affluent use of it. i multiplied it by sixteen, brought it into town from sixteen different directions, made sixteen separate items out of it, and got up such another sweat about hay as virginia city had never seen in the world before. this was encouraging. two nonpareil columns had to be filled, and i was getting along. presently, when things began to look dismal again, a desperado killed a man in a saloon and joy returned once more. i never was so glad over any mere trifle before in my life. i said to the murderer: "sir, you are a stranger to me, but you have done me a kindness this day which i can never forget. if whole years of gratitude can be to you any slight compensation, they shall be yours. i was in trouble and you have relieved me nobly and at a time when all seemed dark and drear. count me your friend from this time forth, for i am not a man to forget a favor." if i did not really say that to him i at least felt a sort of itching desire to do it. i wrote up the murder with a hungry attention to details, and when it was finished experienced but one regret--namely, that they had not hanged my benefactor on the spot, so that i could work him up too. next i discovered some emigrant wagons going into camp on the plaza and found that they had lately come through the hostile indian country and had fared rather roughly. i made the best of the item that the circumstances permitted, and felt that if i were not confined within rigid limits by the presence of the reporters of the other papers i could add particulars that would make the article much more interesting. however, i found one wagon that was going on to california, and made some judicious inquiries of the proprietor. when i learned, through his short and surly answers to my cross-questioning, that he was certainly going on and would not be in the city next day to make trouble, i got ahead of the other papers, for i took down his list of names and added his party to the killed and wounded. having more scope here, i put this wagon through an indian fight that to this day has no parallel in history. my two columns were filled. when i read them over in the morning i felt that i had found my legitimate occupation at last. i reasoned within myself that news, and stirring news, too, was what a paper needed, and i felt that i was peculiarly endowed with the ability to furnish it. mr. goodman said that i was as good a reporter as dan. i desired no higher commendation. with encouragement like that, i felt that i could take my pen and murder all the immigrants on the plains if need be and the interests of the paper demanded it. chapter xliii. however, as i grew better acquainted with the business and learned the run of the sources of information i ceased to require the aid of fancy to any large extent, and became able to fill my columns without diverging noticeably from the domain of fact. i struck up friendships with the reporters of the other journals, and we swapped "regulars" with each other and thus economized work. "regulars" are permanent sources of news, like courts, bullion returns, "clean-ups" at the quartz mills, and inquests. inasmuch as everybody went armed, we had an inquest about every day, and so this department was naturally set down among the "regulars." we had lively papers in those days. my great competitor among the reporters was boggs of the union. he was an excellent reporter. once in three or four months he would get a little intoxicated, but as a general thing he was a wary and cautious drinker although always ready to tamper a little with the enemy. he had the advantage of me in one thing; he could get the monthly public school report and i could not, because the principal hated the enterprise. one snowy night when the report was due, i started out sadly wondering how i was going to get it. presently, a few steps up the almost deserted street i stumbled on boggs and asked him where he was going. "after the school report." "i'll go along with you." "no, sir. i'll excuse you." "just as you say." a saloon-keeper's boy passed by with a steaming pitcher of hot punch, and boggs snuffed the fragrance gratefully. he gazed fondly after the boy and saw him start up the enterprise stairs. i said: "i wish you could help me get that school business, but since you can't, i must run up to the union office and see if i can get them to let me have a proof of it after they have set it up, though i don't begin to suppose they will. good night." "hold on a minute. i don't mind getting the report and sitting around with the boys a little, while you copy it, if you're willing to drop down to the principal's with me." "now you talk like a rational being. come along." we plowed a couple of blocks through the snow, got the report and returned to our office. it was a short document and soon copied. meantime boggs helped himself to the punch. i gave the manuscript back to him and we started out to get an inquest, for we heard pistol shots near by. we got the particulars with little loss of time, for it was only an inferior sort of bar-room murder, and of little interest to the public, and then we separated. away at three o'clock in the morning, when we had gone to press and were having a relaxing concert as usual --for some of the printers were good singers and others good performers on the guitar and on that atrocity the accordion--the proprietor of the union strode in and desired to know if anybody had heard anything of boggs or the school report. we stated the case, and all turned out to help hunt for the delinquent. we found him standing on a table in a saloon, with an old tin lantern in one hand and the school report in the other, haranguing a gang of intoxicated cornish miners on the iniquity of squandering the public moneys on education "when hundreds and hundreds of honest hard-working men are literally starving for whiskey." [riotous applause.] he had been assisting in a regal spree with those parties for hours. we dragged him away and put him to bed. of course there was no school report in the union, and boggs held me accountable, though i was innocent of any intention or desire to compass its absence from that paper and was as sorry as any one that the misfortune had occurred. but we were perfectly friendly. the day that the school report was next due, the proprietor of the "genessee" mine furnished us a buggy and asked us to go down and write something about the property--a very common request and one always gladly acceded to when people furnished buggies, for we were as fond of pleasure excursions as other people. in due time we arrived at the "mine"--nothing but a hole in the ground ninety feet deep, and no way of getting down into it but by holding on to a rope and being lowered with a windlass. the workmen had just gone off somewhere to dinner. i was not strong enough to lower boggs's bulk; so i took an unlighted candle in my teeth, made a loop for my foot in the end of the rope, implored boggs not to go to sleep or let the windlass get the start of him, and then swung out over the shaft. i reached the bottom muddy and bruised about the elbows, but safe. i lit the candle, made an examination of the rock, selected some specimens and shouted to boggs to hoist away. no answer. presently a head appeared in the circle of daylight away aloft, and a voice came down: "are you all set?" "all set--hoist away." "are you comfortable?" "perfectly." "could you wait a little?" "oh certainly--no particular hurry." "well--good by." "why? where are you going?" "after the school report!" and he did. i staid down there an hour, and surprised the workmen when they hauled up and found a man on the rope instead of a bucket of rock. i walked home, too--five miles--up hill. we had no school report next morning; but the union had. six months after my entry into journalism the grand "flush times" of silverland began, and they continued with unabated splendor for three years. all difficulty about filling up the "local department" ceased, and the only trouble now was how to make the lengthened columns hold the world of incidents and happenings that came to our literary net every day. virginia had grown to be the "livest" town, for its age and population, that america had ever produced. the sidewalks swarmed with people--to such an extent, indeed, that it was generally no easy matter to stem the human tide. the streets themselves were just as crowded with quartz wagons, freight teams and other vehicles. the procession was endless. so great was the pack, that buggies frequently had to wait half an hour for an opportunity to cross the principal street. joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in every eye, that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in every heart. money was as plenty as dust; every individual considered himself wealthy, and a melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen. there were military companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, "hurdy-gurdy houses," wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey mill every fifteen steps, a board of aldermen, a mayor, a city surveyor, a city engineer, a chief of the fire department, with first, second and third assistants, a chief of police, city marshal and a large police force, two boards of mining brokers, a dozen breweries and half a dozen jails and station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church. the "flush times" were in magnificent flower! large fire-proof brick buildings were going up in the principal streets, and the wooden suburbs were spreading out in all directions. town lots soared up to prices that were amazing. the great "comstock lode" stretched its opulent length straight through the town from north to south, and every mine on it was in diligent process of development. one of these mines alone employed six hundred and seventy-five men, and in the matter of elections the adage was, "as the 'gould and curry' goes, so goes the city." laboring men's wages were four and six dollars a day, and they worked in three "shifts" or gangs, and the blasting and picking and shoveling went on without ceasing, night and day. the "city" of virginia roosted royally midway up the steep side of mount davidson, seven thousand two hundred feet above the level of the sea, and in the clear nevada atmosphere was visible from a distance of fifty miles! it claimed a population of fifteen thousand to eighteen thousand, and all day long half of this little army swarmed the streets like bees and the other half swarmed among the drifts and tunnels of the "comstock," hundreds of feet down in the earth directly under those same streets. often we felt our chairs jar, and heard the faint boom of a blast down in the bowels of the earth under the office. the mountain side was so steep that the entire town had a slant to it like a roof. each street was a terrace, and from each to the next street below the descent was forty or fifty feet. the fronts of the houses were level with the street they faced, but their rear first floors were propped on lofty stilts; a man could stand at a rear first floor window of a c street house and look down the chimneys of the row of houses below him facing d street. it was a laborious climb, in that thin atmosphere, to ascend from d to a street, and you were panting and out of breath when you got there; but you could turn around and go down again like a house a-fire--so to speak. the atmosphere was so rarified, on account of the great altitude, that one's blood lay near the surface always, and the scratch of a pin was a disaster worth worrying about, for the chances were that a grievous erysipelas would ensue. but to offset this, the thin atmosphere seemed to carry healing to gunshot wounds, and therefore, to simply shoot your adversary through both lungs was a thing not likely to afford you any permanent satisfaction, for he would be nearly certain to be around looking for you within the month, and not with an opera glass, either. from virginia's airy situation one could look over a vast, far-reaching panorama of mountain ranges and deserts; and whether the day was bright or overcast, whether the sun was rising or setting, or flaming in the zenith, or whether night and the moon held sway, the spectacle was always impressive and beautiful. over your head mount davidson lifted its gray dome, and before and below you a rugged canyon clove the battlemented hills, making a sombre gateway through which a soft-tinted desert was glimpsed, with the silver thread of a river winding through it, bordered with trees which many miles of distance diminished to a delicate fringe; and still further away the snowy mountains rose up and stretched their long barrier to the filmy horizon--far enough beyond a lake that burned in the desert like a fallen sun, though that, itself, lay fifty miles removed. look from your window where you would, there was fascination in the picture. at rare intervals--but very rare--there were clouds in our skies, and then the setting sun would gild and flush and glorify this mighty expanse of scenery with a bewildering pomp of color that held the eye like a spell and moved the spirit like music. chapter xliv. my salary was increased to forty dollars a week. but i seldom drew it. i had plenty of other resources, and what were two broad twenty-dollar gold pieces to a man who had his pockets full of such and a cumbersome abundance of bright half dollars besides? [paper money has never come into use on the pacific coast.] reporting was lucrative, and every man in the town was lavish with his money and his "feet." the city and all the great mountain side were riddled with mining shafts. there were more mines than miners. true, not ten of these mines were yielding rock worth hauling to a mill, but everybody said, "wait till the shaft gets down where the ledge comes in solid, and then you will see!" so nobody was discouraged. these were nearly all "wild cat" mines, and wholly worthless, but nobody believed it then. the "ophir," the "gould & curry," the "mexican," and other great mines on the comstock lead in virginia and gold hill were turning out huge piles of rich rock every day, and every man believed that his little wild cat claim was as good as any on the "main lead" and would infallibly be worth a thousand dollars a foot when he "got down where it came in solid." poor fellow, he was blessedly blind to the fact that he never would see that day. so the thousand wild cat shafts burrowed deeper and deeper into the earth day by day, and all men were beside themselves with hope and happiness. how they labored, prophesied, exulted! surely nothing like it was ever seen before since the world began. every one of these wild cat mines--not mines, but holes in the ground over imaginary mines--was incorporated and had handsomely engraved "stock" and the stock was salable, too. it was bought and sold with a feverish avidity in the boards every day. you could go up on the mountain side, scratch around and find a ledge (there was no lack of them), put up a "notice" with a grandiloquent name in it, start a shaft, get your stock printed, and with nothing whatever to prove that your mine was worth a straw, you could put your stock on the market and sell out for hundreds and even thousands of dollars. to make money, and make it fast, was as easy as it was to eat your dinner. every man owned "feet" in fifty different wild cat mines and considered his fortune made. think of a city with not one solitary poor man in it! one would suppose that when month after month went by and still not a wild cat mine (by wild cat i mean, in general terms, any claim not located on the mother vein, i.e., the "comstock") yielded a ton of rock worth crushing, the people would begin to wonder if they were not putting too much faith in their prospective riches; but there was not a thought of such a thing. they burrowed away, bought and sold, and were happy. new claims were taken up daily, and it was the friendly custom to run straight to the newspaper offices, give the reporter forty or fifty "feet," and get them to go and examine the mine and publish a notice of it. they did not care a fig what you said about the property so you said something. consequently we generally said a word or two to the effect that the "indications" were good, or that the ledge was "six feet wide," or that the rock "resembled the comstock" (and so it did--but as a general thing the resemblance was not startling enough to knock you down). if the rock was moderately promising, we followed the custom of the country, used strong adjectives and frothed at the mouth as if a very marvel in silver discoveries had transpired. if the mine was a "developed" one, and had no pay ore to show (and of course it hadn't), we praised the tunnel; said it was one of the most infatuating tunnels in the land; driveled and driveled about the tunnel till we ran entirely out of ecstasies--but never said a word about the rock. we would squander half a column of adulation on a shaft, or a new wire rope, or a dressed pine windlass, or a fascinating force pump, and close with a burst of admiration of the "gentlemanly and efficient superintendent" of the mine --but never utter a whisper about the rock. and those people were always pleased, always satisfied. occasionally we patched up and varnished our reputation for discrimination and stern, undeviating accuracy, by giving some old abandoned claim a blast that ought to have made its dry bones rattle--and then somebody would seize it and sell it on the fleeting notoriety thus conferred upon it. there was nothing in the shape of a mining claim that was not salable. we received presents of "feet" every day. if we needed a hundred dollars or so, we sold some; if not, we hoarded it away, satisfied that it would ultimately be worth a thousand dollars a foot. i had a trunk about half full of "stock." when a claim made a stir in the market and went up to a high figure, i searched through my pile to see if i had any of its stock --and generally found it. the prices rose and fell constantly; but still a fall disturbed us little, because a thousand dollars a foot was our figure, and so we were content to let it fluctuate as much as it pleased till it reached it. my pile of stock was not all given to me by people who wished their claims "noticed." at least half of it was given me by persons who had no thought of such a thing, and looked for nothing more than a simple verbal "thank you;" and you were not even obliged by law to furnish that. if you are coming up the street with a couple of baskets of apples in your hands, and you meet a friend, you naturally invite him to take a few. that describes the condition of things in virginia in the "flush times." every man had his pockets full of stock, and it was the actual custom of the country to part with small quantities of it to friends without the asking. very often it was a good idea to close the transaction instantly, when a man offered a stock present to a friend, for the offer was only good and binding at that moment, and if the price went to a high figure shortly afterward the procrastination was a thing to be regretted. mr. stewart (senator, now, from nevada) one day told me he would give me twenty feet of "justis" stock if i would walk over to his office. it was worth five or ten dollars a foot. i asked him to make the offer good for next day, as i was just going to dinner. he said he would not be in town; so i risked it and took my dinner instead of the stock. within the week the price went up to seventy dollars and afterward to a hundred and fifty, but nothing could make that man yield. i suppose he sold that stock of mine and placed the guilty proceeds in his own pocket. [my revenge will be found in the accompanying portrait.] i met three friends one afternoon, who said they had been buying "overman" stock at auction at eight dollars a foot. one said if i would come up to his office he would give me fifteen feet; another said he would add fifteen; the third said he would do the same. but i was going after an inquest and could not stop. a few weeks afterward they sold all their "overman" at six hundred dollars a foot and generously came around to tell me about it--and also to urge me to accept of the next forty-five feet of it that people tried to force on me. these are actual facts, and i could make the list a long one and still confine myself strictly to the truth. many a time friends gave us as much as twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a foot, and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest a cigar. these were "flush times" indeed! i thought they were going to last always, but somehow i never was much of a prophet. to show what a wild spirit possessed the mining brain of the community, i will remark that "claims" were actually "located" in excavations for cellars, where the pick had exposed what seemed to be quartz veins--and not cellars in the suburbs, either, but in the very heart of the city; and forthwith stock would be issued and thrown on the market. it was small matter who the cellar belonged to--the "ledge" belonged to the finder, and unless the united states government interfered (inasmuch as the government holds the primary right to mines of the noble metals in nevada--or at least did then), it was considered to be his privilege to work it. imagine a stranger staking out a mining claim among the costly shrubbery in your front yard and calmly proceeding to lay waste the ground with pick and shovel and blasting powder! it has been often done in california. in the middle of one of the principal business streets of virginia, a man "located" a mining claim and began a shaft on it. he gave me a hundred feet of the stock and i sold it for a fine suit of clothes because i was afraid somebody would fall down the shaft and sue for damages. i owned in another claim that was located in the middle of another street; and to show how absurd people can be, that "east india" stock (as it was called) sold briskly although there was an ancient tunnel running directly under the claim and any man could go into it and see that it did not cut a quartz ledge or anything that remotely resembled one. one plan of acquiring sudden wealth was to "salt" a wild cat claim and sell out while the excitement was up. the process was simple. the schemer located a worthless ledge, sunk a shaft on it, bought a wagon load of rich "comstock" ore, dumped a portion of it into the shaft and piled the rest by its side, above ground. then he showed the property to a simpleton and sold it to him at a high figure. of course the wagon load of rich ore was all that the victim ever got out of his purchase. a most remarkable case of "salting" was that of the "north ophir." it was claimed that this vein was a "remote extension" of the original "ophir," a valuable mine on the "comstock." for a few days everybody was talking about the rich developments in the north ophir. it was said that it yielded perfectly pure silver in small, solid lumps. i went to the place with the owners, and found a shaft six or eight feet deep, in the bottom of which was a badly shattered vein of dull, yellowish, unpromising rock. one would as soon expect to find silver in a grindstone. we got out a pan of the rubbish and washed it in a puddle, and sure enough, among the sediment we found half a dozen black, bullet-looking pellets of unimpeachable "native" silver. nobody had ever heard of such a thing before; science could not account for such a queer novelty. the stock rose to sixty-five dollars a foot, and at this figure the world-renowned tragedian, mckean buchanan, bought a commanding interest and prepared to quit the stage once more--he was always doing that. and then it transpired that the mine had been "salted"--and not in any hackneyed way, either, but in a singularly bold, barefaced and peculiarly original and outrageous fashion. on one of the lumps of "native" silver was discovered the minted legend, "ted states of," and then it was plainly apparent that the mine had been "salted" with melted half-dollars! the lumps thus obtained had been blackened till they resembled native silver, and were then mixed with the shattered rock in the bottom of the shaft. it is literally true. of course the price of the stock at once fell to nothing, and the tragedian was ruined. but for this calamity we might have lost mckean buchanan from the stage. chapter xlv. the "flush times" held bravely on. something over two years before, mr. goodman and another journeyman printer, had borrowed forty dollars and set out from san francisco to try their fortunes in the new city of virginia. they found the territorial enterprise, a poverty-stricken weekly journal, gasping for breath and likely to die. they bought it, type, fixtures, good-will and all, for a thousand dollars, on long time. the editorial sanctum, news-room, press-room, publication office, bed-chamber, parlor, and kitchen were all compressed into one apartment and it was a small one, too. the editors and printers slept on the floor, a chinaman did their cooking, and the "imposing-stone" was the general dinner table. but now things were changed. the paper was a great daily, printed by steam; there were five editors and twenty-three compositors; the subscription price was sixteen dollars a year; the advertising rates were exorbitant, and the columns crowded. the paper was clearing from six to ten thousand dollars a month, and the "enterprise building" was finished and ready for occupation--a stately fireproof brick. every day from five all the way up to eleven columns of "live" advertisements were left out or crowded into spasmodic and irregular "supplements." the "gould & curry" company were erecting a monster hundred-stamp mill at a cost that ultimately fell little short of a million dollars. gould & curry stock paid heavy dividends--a rare thing, and an experience confined to the dozen or fifteen claims located on the "main lead," the "comstock." the superintendent of the gould & curry lived, rent free, in a fine house built and furnished by the company. he drove a fine pair of horses which were a present from the company, and his salary was twelve thousand dollars a year. the superintendent of another of the great mines traveled in grand state, had a salary of twenty-eight thousand dollars a year, and in a law suit in after days claimed that he was to have had one per cent. on the gross yield of the bullion likewise. money was wonderfully plenty. the trouble was, not how to get it,--but how to spend it, how to lavish it, get rid of it, squander it. and so it was a happy thing that just at this juncture the news came over the wires that a great united states sanitary commission had been formed and money was wanted for the relief of the wounded sailors and soldiers of the union languishing in the eastern hospitals. right on the heels of it came word that san francisco had responded superbly before the telegram was half a day old. virginia rose as one man! a sanitary committee was hurriedly organized, and its chairman mounted a vacant cart in c street and tried to make the clamorous multitude understand that the rest of the committee were flying hither and thither and working with all their might and main, and that if the town would only wait an hour, an office would be ready, books opened, and the commission prepared to receive contributions. his voice was drowned and his information lost in a ceaseless roar of cheers, and demands that the money be received now --they swore they would not wait. the chairman pleaded and argued, but, deaf to all entreaty, men plowed their way through the throng and rained checks of gold coin into the cart and skurried away for more. hands clutching money, were thrust aloft out of the jam by men who hoped this eloquent appeal would cleave a road their strugglings could not open. the very chinamen and indians caught the excitement and dashed their half dollars into the cart without knowing or caring what it was all about. women plunged into the crowd, trimly attired, fought their way to the cart with their coin, and emerged again, by and by, with their apparel in a state of hopeless dilapidation. it was the wildest mob virginia had ever seen and the most determined and ungovernable; and when at last it abated its fury and dispersed, it had not a penny in its pocket. to use its own phraseology, it came there "flush" and went away "busted." after that, the commission got itself into systematic working order, and for weeks the contributions flowed into its treasury in a generous stream. individuals and all sorts of organizations levied upon themselves a regular weekly tax for the sanitary fund, graduated according to their means, and there was not another grand universal outburst till the famous "sanitary flour sack" came our way. its history is peculiar and interesting. a former schoolmate of mine, by the name of reuel gridley, was living at the little city of austin, in the reese river country, at this time, and was the democratic candidate for mayor. he and the republican candidate made an agreement that the defeated man should be publicly presented with a fifty-pound sack of flour by the successful one, and should carry it home on his shoulder. gridley was defeated. the new mayor gave him the sack of flour, and he shouldered it and carried it a mile or two, from lower austin to his home in upper austin, attended by a band of music and the whole population. arrived there, he said he did not need the flour, and asked what the people thought he had better do with it. a voice said: "sell it to the highest bidder, for the benefit of the sanitary fund." the suggestion was greeted with a round of applause, and gridley mounted a dry-goods box and assumed the role of auctioneer. the bids went higher and higher, as the sympathies of the pioneers awoke and expanded, till at last the sack was knocked down to a mill man at two hundred and fifty dollars, and his check taken. he was asked where he would have the flour delivered, and he said: "nowhere--sell it again." now the cheers went up royally, and the multitude were fairly in the spirit of the thing. so gridley stood there and shouted and perspired till the sun went down; and when the crowd dispersed he had sold the sack to three hundred different people, and had taken in eight thousand dollars in gold. and still the flour sack was in his possession. the news came to virginia, and a telegram went back: "fetch along your flour sack!" thirty-six hours afterward gridley arrived, and an afternoon mass meeting was held in the opera house, and the auction began. but the sack had come sooner than it was expected; the people were not thoroughly aroused, and the sale dragged. at nightfall only five thousand dollars had been secured, and there was a crestfallen feeling in the community. however, there was no disposition to let the matter rest here and acknowledge vanquishment at the hands of the village of austin. till late in the night the principal citizens were at work arranging the morrow's campaign, and when they went to bed they had no fears for the result. at eleven the next morning a procession of open carriages, attended by clamorous bands of music and adorned with a moving display of flags, filed along c street and was soon in danger of blockade by a huzzaing multitude of citizens. in the first carriage sat gridley, with the flour sack in prominent view, the latter splendid with bright paint and gilt lettering; also in the same carriage sat the mayor and the recorder. the other carriages contained the common council, the editors and reporters, and other people of imposing consequence. the crowd pressed to the corner of c and taylor streets, expecting the sale to begin there, but they were disappointed, and also unspeakably surprised; for the cavalcade moved on as if virginia had ceased to be of importance, and took its way over the "divide," toward the small town of gold hill. telegrams had gone ahead to gold hill, silver city and dayton, and those communities were at fever heat and rife for the conflict. it was a very hot day, and wonderfully dusty. at the end of a short half hour we descended into gold hill with drums beating and colors flying, and enveloped in imposing clouds of dust. the whole population--men, women and children, chinamen and indians, were massed in the main street, all the flags in town were at the mast head, and the blare of the bands was drowned in cheers. gridley stood up and asked who would make the first bid for the national sanitary flour sack. gen. w. said: "the yellow jacket silver mining company offers a thousand dollars, coin!" a tempest of applause followed. a telegram carried the news to virginia, and fifteen minutes afterward that city's population was massed in the streets devouring the tidings--for it was part of the programme that the bulletin boards should do a good work that day. every few minutes a new dispatch was bulletined from gold hill, and still the excitement grew. telegrams began to return to us from virginia beseeching gridley to bring back the flour sack; but such was not the plan of the campaign. at the end of an hour gold hill's small population had paid a figure for the flour sack that awoke all the enthusiasm of virginia when the grand total was displayed upon the bulletin boards. then the gridley cavalcade moved on, a giant refreshed with new lager beer and plenty of it--for the people brought it to the carriages without waiting to measure it--and within three hours more the expedition had carried silver city and dayton by storm and was on its way back covered with glory. every move had been telegraphed and bulletined, and as the procession entered virginia and filed down c street at half past eight in the evening the town was abroad in the thoroughfares, torches were glaring, flags flying, bands playing, cheer on cheer cleaving the air, and the city ready to surrender at discretion. the auction began, every bid was greeted with bursts of applause, and at the end of two hours and a half a population of fifteen thousand souls had paid in coin for a fifty-pound sack of flour a sum equal to forty thousand dollars in greenbacks! it was at a rate in the neighborhood of three dollars for each man, woman and child of the population. the grand total would have been twice as large, but the streets were very narrow, and hundreds who wanted to bid could not get within a block of the stand, and could not make themselves heard. these grew tired of waiting and many of them went home long before the auction was over. this was the greatest day virginia ever saw, perhaps. gridley sold the sack in carson city and several california towns; also in san francisco. then he took it east and sold it in one or two atlantic cities, i think. i am not sure of that, but i know that he finally carried it to st. louis, where a monster sanitary fair was being held, and after selling it there for a large sum and helping on the enthusiasm by displaying the portly silver bricks which nevada's donation had produced, he had the flour baked up into small cakes and retailed them at high prices. it was estimated that when the flour sack's mission was ended it had been sold for a grand total of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in greenbacks! this is probably the only instance on record where common family flour brought three thousand dollars a pound in the public market. it is due to mr. gridley's memory to mention that the expenses of his sanitary flour sack expedition of fifteen thousand miles, going and returning, were paid in large part if not entirely, out of his own pocket. the time he gave to it was not less than three months. mr. gridley was a soldier in the mexican war and a pioneer californian. he died at stockton, california, in december, , greatly regretted. chapter xlvi. there were nabobs in those days--in the "flush times," i mean. every rich strike in the mines created one or two. i call to mind several of these. they were careless, easy-going fellows, as a general thing, and the community at large was as much benefited by their riches as they were themselves--possibly more, in some cases. two cousins, teamsters, did some hauling for a man and had to take a small segregated portion of a silver mine in lieu of $ cash. they gave an outsider a third to open the mine, and they went on teaming. but not long. ten months afterward the mine was out of debt and paying each owner $ , to $ , a month--say $ , a year. one of the earliest nabobs that nevada was delivered of wore $ , worth of diamonds in his bosom, and swore he was unhappy because he could not spend his money as fast as he made it. another nevada nabob boasted an income that often reached $ , a month; and he used to love to tell how he had worked in the very mine that yielded it, for five dollars a day, when he first came to the country. the silver and sage-brush state has knowledge of another of these pets of fortune--lifted from actual poverty to affluence almost in a single night--who was able to offer $ , for a position of high official distinction, shortly afterward, and did offer it--but failed to get it, his politics not being as sound as his bank account. then there was john smith. he was a good, honest, kind-hearted soul, born and reared in the lower ranks of life, and miraculously ignorant. he drove a team, and owned a small ranch--a ranch that paid him a comfortable living, for although it yielded but little hay, what little it did yield was worth from $ to $ in gold per ton in the market. presently smith traded a few acres of the ranch for a small undeveloped silver mine in gold hill. he opened the mine and built a little unpretending ten-stamp mill. eighteen months afterward he retired from the hay business, for his mining income had reached a most comfortable figure. some people said it was $ , a month, and others said it was $ , . smith was very rich at any rate. and then he went to europe and traveled. and when he came back he was never tired of telling about the fine hogs he had seen in england, and the gorgeous sheep he had seen in spain, and the fine cattle he had noticed in the vicinity of rome. he was full of wonders of the old world, and advised everybody to travel. he said a man never imagined what surprising things there were in the world till he had traveled. one day, on board ship, the passengers made up a pool of $ , which was to be the property of the man who should come nearest to guessing the run of the vessel for the next twenty-four hours. next day, toward noon, the figures were all in the purser's hands in sealed envelopes. smith was serene and happy, for he had been bribing the engineer. but another party won the prize! smith said: "here, that won't do! he guessed two miles wider of the mark than i did." the purser said, "mr. smith, you missed it further than any man on board. we traveled two hundred and eight miles yesterday." "well, sir," said smith, "that's just where i've got you, for i guessed two hundred and nine. if you'll look at my figgers again you'll find a and two 's, which stands for , don't it?--and after 'em you'll find a ( ), which stands for two hundred and nine. i reckon i'll take that money, if you please." the gould & curry claim comprised twelve hundred feet, and it all belonged originally to the two men whose names it bears. mr. curry owned two thirds of it--and he said that he sold it out for twenty-five hundred dollars in cash, and an old plug horse that ate up his market value in hay and barley in seventeen days by the watch. and he said that gould sold out for a pair of second-hand government blankets and a bottle of whisky that killed nine men in three hours, and that an unoffending stranger that smelt the cork was disabled for life. four years afterward the mine thus disposed of was worth in the san francisco market seven millions six hundred thousand dollars in gold coin. in the early days a poverty-stricken mexican who lived in a canyon directly back of virginia city, had a stream of water as large as a man's wrist trickling from the hill-side on his premises. the ophir company segregated a hundred feet of their mine and traded it to him for the stream of water. the hundred feet proved to be the richest part of the entire mine; four years after the swap, its market value (including its mill) was $ , , . an individual who owned twenty feet in the ophir mine before its great riches were revealed to men, traded it for a horse, and a very sorry looking brute he was, too. a year or so afterward, when ophir stock went up to $ , a foot, this man, who had not a cent, used to say he was the most startling example of magnificence and misery the world had ever seen--because he was able to ride a sixty-thousand-dollar horse--yet could not scrape up cash enough to buy a saddle, and was obliged to borrow one or ride bareback. he said if fortune were to give him another sixty-thousand-dollar horse it would ruin him. a youth of nineteen, who was a telegraph operator in virginia on a salary of a hundred dollars a month, and who, when he could not make out german names in the list of san francisco steamer arrivals, used to ingeniously select and supply substitutes for them out of an old berlin city directory, made himself rich by watching the mining telegrams that passed through his hands and buying and selling stocks accordingly, through a friend in san francisco. once when a private dispatch was sent from virginia announcing a rich strike in a prominent mine and advising that the matter be kept secret till a large amount of the stock could be secured, he bought forty "feet" of the stock at twenty dollars a foot, and afterward sold half of it at eight hundred dollars a foot and the rest at double that figure. within three months he was worth $ , , and had resigned his telegraphic position. another telegraph operator who had been discharged by the company for divulging the secrets of the office, agreed with a moneyed man in san francisco to furnish him the result of a great virginia mining lawsuit within an hour after its private reception by the parties to it in san francisco. for this he was to have a large percentage of the profits on purchases and sales made on it by his fellow-conspirator. so he went, disguised as a teamster, to a little wayside telegraph office in the mountains, got acquainted with the operator, and sat in the office day after day, smoking his pipe, complaining that his team was fagged out and unable to travel--and meantime listening to the dispatches as they passed clicking through the machine from virginia. finally the private dispatch announcing the result of the lawsuit sped over the wires, and as soon as he heard it he telegraphed his friend in san francisco: "am tired waiting. shall sell the team and go home." it was the signal agreed upon. the word "waiting" left out, would have signified that the suit had gone the other way. the mock teamster's friend picked up a deal of the mining stock, at low figures, before the news became public, and a fortune was the result. for a long time after one of the great virginia mines had been incorporated, about fifty feet of the original location were still in the hands of a man who had never signed the incorporation papers. the stock became very valuable, and every effort was made to find this man, but he had disappeared. once it was heard that he was in new york, and one or two speculators went east but failed to find him. once the news came that he was in the bermudas, and straightway a speculator or two hurried east and sailed for bermuda--but he was not there. finally he was heard of in mexico, and a friend of his, a bar-keeper on a salary, scraped together a little money and sought him out, bought his "feet" for a hundred dollars, returned and sold the property for $ , . but why go on? the traditions of silverland are filled with instances like these, and i would never get through enumerating them were i to attempt do it. i only desired to give, the reader an idea of a peculiarity of the "flush times" which i could not present so strikingly in any other way, and which some mention of was necessary to a realizing comprehension of the time and the country. i was personally acquainted with the majority of the nabobs i have referred to, and so, for old acquaintance sake, i have shifted their occupations and experiences around in such a way as to keep the pacific public from recognizing these once notorious men. no longer notorious, for the majority of them have drifted back into poverty and obscurity again. in nevada there used to be current the story of an adventure of two of her nabobs, which may or may not have occurred. i give it for what it is worth: col. jim had seen somewhat of the world, and knew more or less of its ways; but col. jack was from the back settlements of the states, had led a life of arduous toil, and had never seen a city. these two, blessed with sudden wealth, projected a visit to new york,--col. jack to see the sights, and col. jim to guard his unsophistication from misfortune. they reached san francisco in the night, and sailed in the morning. arrived in new york, col. jack said: "i've heard tell of carriages all my life, and now i mean to have a ride in one; i don't care what it costs. come along." they stepped out on the sidewalk, and col. jim called a stylish barouche. but col. jack said: "no, sir! none of your cheap-john turn-outs for me. i'm here to have a good time, and money ain't any object. i mean to have the nobbiest rig that's going. now here comes the very trick. stop that yaller one with the pictures on it--don't you fret--i'll stand all the expenses myself." so col. jim stopped an empty omnibus, and they got in. said col. jack: "ain't it gay, though? oh, no, i reckon not! cushions, and windows, and pictures, till you can't rest. what would the boys say if they could see us cutting a swell like this in new york? by george, i wish they could see us." then he put his head out of the window, and shouted to the driver: "say, johnny, this suits me!--suits yours truly, you bet, you! i want this shebang all day. i'm on it, old man! let 'em out! make 'em go! we'll make it all right with you, sonny!" the driver passed his hand through the strap-hole, and tapped for his fare--it was before the gongs came into common use. col. jack took the hand, and shook it cordially. he said: "you twig me, old pard! all right between gents. smell of that, and see how you like it!" and he put a twenty-dollar gold piece in the driver's hand. after a moment the driver said he could not make change. "bother the change! ride it out. put it in your pocket." then to col. jim, with a sounding slap on his thigh: "ain't it style, though? hanged if i don't hire this thing every day for a week." the omnibus stopped, and a young lady got in. col. jack stared a moment, then nudged col. jim with his elbow: "don't say a word," he whispered. "let her ride, if she wants to. gracious, there's room enough." the young lady got out her porte-monnaie, and handed her fare to col. jack. "what's this for?" said he. "give it to the driver, please." "take back your money, madam. we can't allow it. you're welcome to ride here as long as you please, but this shebang's chartered, and we can't let you pay a cent." the girl shrunk into a corner, bewildered. an old lady with a basket climbed in, and proffered her fare. "excuse me," said col. jack. "you're perfectly welcome here, madam, but we can't allow you to pay. set right down there, mum, and don't you be the least uneasy. make yourself just as free as if you was in your own turn-out." within two minutes, three gentlemen, two fat women, and a couple of children, entered. "come right along, friends," said col. jack; "don't mind us. this is a free blow-out." then he whispered to col. jim, "new york ain't no sociable place, i don't reckon--it ain't no name for it!" he resisted every effort to pass fares to the driver, and made everybody cordially welcome. the situation dawned on the people, and they pocketed their money, and delivered themselves up to covert enjoyment of the episode. half a dozen more passengers entered. "oh, there's plenty of room," said col. jack. "walk right in, and make yourselves at home. a blow-out ain't worth anything as a blow-out, unless a body has company." then in a whisper to col. jim: "but ain't these new yorkers friendly? and ain't they cool about it, too? icebergs ain't anywhere. i reckon they'd tackle a hearse, if it was going their way." more passengers got in; more yet, and still more. both seats were filled, and a file of men were standing up, holding on to the cleats overhead. parties with baskets and bundles were climbing up on the roof. half-suppressed laughter rippled up from all sides. "well, for clean, cool, out-and-out cheek, if this don't bang anything that ever i saw, i'm an injun!" whispered col. jack. a chinaman crowded his way in. "i weaken!" said col. jack. "hold on, driver! keep your seats, ladies, and gents. just make yourselves free--everything's paid for. driver, rustle these folks around as long as they're a mind to go--friends of ours, you know. take them everywheres--and if you want more money, come to the st. nicholas, and we'll make it all right. pleasant journey to you, ladies and gents--go it just as long as you please--it shan't cost you a cent!" the two comrades got out, and col. jack said: "jimmy, it's the sociablest place i ever saw. the chinaman waltzed in as comfortable as anybody. if we'd staid awhile, i reckon we'd had some niggers. b' george, we'll have to barricade our doors to-night, or some of these ducks will be trying to sleep with us." chapter xlvii. somebody has said that in order to know a community, one must observe the style of its funerals and know what manner of men they bury with most ceremony. i cannot say which class we buried with most eclat in our "flush times," the distinguished public benefactor or the distinguished rough--possibly the two chief grades or grand divisions of society honored their illustrious dead about equally; and hence, no doubt the philosopher i have quoted from would have needed to see two representative funerals in virginia before forming his estimate of the people. there was a grand time over buck fanshaw when he died. he was a representative citizen. he had "killed his man"--not in his own quarrel, it is true, but in defence of a stranger unfairly beset by numbers. he had kept a sumptuous saloon. he had been the proprietor of a dashing helpmeet whom he could have discarded without the formality of a divorce. he had held a high position in the fire department and been a very warwick in politics. when he died there was great lamentation throughout the town, but especially in the vast bottom-stratum of society. on the inquest it was shown that buck fanshaw, in the delirium of a wasting typhoid fever, had taken arsenic, shot himself through the body, cut his throat, and jumped out of a four-story window and broken his neck--and after due deliberation, the jury, sad and tearful, but with intelligence unblinded by its sorrow, brought in a verdict of death "by the visitation of god." what could the world do without juries? prodigious preparations were made for the funeral. all the vehicles in town were hired, all the saloons put in mourning, all the municipal and fire-company flags hung at half-mast, and all the firemen ordered to muster in uniform and bring their machines duly draped in black. now --let us remark in parenthesis--as all the peoples of the earth had representative adventurers in the silverland, and as each adventurer had brought the slang of his nation or his locality with him, the combination made the slang of nevada the richest and the most infinitely varied and copious that had ever existed anywhere in the world, perhaps, except in the mines of california in the "early days." slang was the language of nevada. it was hard to preach a sermon without it, and be understood. such phrases as "you bet!" "oh, no, i reckon not!" "no irish need apply," and a hundred others, became so common as to fall from the lips of a speaker unconsciously--and very often when they did not touch the subject under discussion and consequently failed to mean anything. after buck fanshaw's inquest, a meeting of the short-haired brotherhood was held, for nothing can be done on the pacific coast without a public meeting and an expression of sentiment. regretful resolutions were passed and various committees appointed; among others, a committee of one was deputed to call on the minister, a fragile, gentle, spiritual new fledgling from an eastern theological seminary, and as yet unacquainted with the ways of the mines. the committeeman, "scotty" briggs, made his visit; and in after days it was worth something to hear the minister tell about it. scotty was a stalwart rough, whose customary suit, when on weighty official business, like committee work, was a fire helmet, flaming red flannel shirt, patent leather belt with spanner and revolver attached, coat hung over arm, and pants stuffed into boot tops. he formed something of a contrast to the pale theological student. it is fair to say of scotty, however, in passing, that he had a warm heart, and a strong love for his friends, and never entered into a quarrel when he could reasonably keep out of it. indeed, it was commonly said that whenever one of scotty's fights was investigated, it always turned out that it had originally been no affair of his, but that out of native good-heartedness he had dropped in of his own accord to help the man who was getting the worst of it. he and buck fanshaw were bosom friends, for years, and had often taken adventurous "pot-luck" together. on one occasion, they had thrown off their coats and taken the weaker side in a fight among strangers, and after gaining a hard-earned victory, turned and found that the men they were helping had deserted early, and not only that, but had stolen their coats and made off with them! but to return to scotty's visit to the minister. he was on a sorrowful mission, now, and his face was the picture of woe. being admitted to the presence he sat down before the clergyman, placed his fire-hat on an unfinished manuscript sermon under the minister's nose, took from it a red silk handkerchief, wiped his brow and heaved a sigh of dismal impressiveness, explanatory of his business. he choked, and even shed tears; but with an effort he mastered his voice and said in lugubrious tones: "are you the duck that runs the gospel-mill next door?" "am i the--pardon me, i believe i do not understand?" with another sigh and a half-sob, scotty rejoined: "why you see we are in a bit of trouble, and the boys thought maybe you would give us a lift, if we'd tackle you--that is, if i've got the rights of it and you are the head clerk of the doxology-works next door." "i am the shepherd in charge of the flock whose fold is next door." "the which?" "the spiritual adviser of the little company of believers whose sanctuary adjoins these premises." scotty scratched his head, reflected a moment, and then said: "you ruther hold over me, pard. i reckon i can't call that hand. ante and pass the buck." "how? i beg pardon. what did i understand you to say?" "well, you've ruther got the bulge on me. or maybe we've both got the bulge, somehow. you don't smoke me and i don't smoke you. you see, one of the boys has passed in his checks and we want to give him a good send-off, and so the thing i'm on now is to roust out somebody to jerk a little chin-music for us and waltz him through handsome." "my friend, i seem to grow more and more bewildered. your observations are wholly incomprehensible to me. cannot you simplify them in some way? at first i thought perhaps i understood you, but i grope now. would it not expedite matters if you restricted yourself to categorical statements of fact unencumbered with obstructing accumulations of metaphor and allegory?" another pause, and more reflection. then, said scotty: "i'll have to pass, i judge." "how?" "you've raised me out, pard." "i still fail to catch your meaning." "why, that last lead of yourn is too many for me--that's the idea. i can't neither-trump nor follow suit." the clergyman sank back in his chair perplexed. scotty leaned his head on his hand and gave himself up to thought. presently his face came up, sorrowful but confident. "i've got it now, so's you can savvy," he said. "what we want is a gospel-sharp. see?" "a what?" "gospel-sharp. parson." "oh! why did you not say so before? i am a clergyman--a parson." "now you talk! you see my blind and straddle it like a man. put it there!"--extending a brawny paw, which closed over the minister's small hand and gave it a shake indicative of fraternal sympathy and fervent gratification. "now we're all right, pard. let's start fresh. don't you mind my snuffling a little--becuz we're in a power of trouble. you see, one of the boys has gone up the flume--" "gone where?" "up the flume--throwed up the sponge, you understand." "thrown up the sponge?" "yes--kicked the bucket--" "ah--has departed to that mysterious country from whose bourne no traveler returns." "return! i reckon not. why pard, he's dead!" "yes, i understand." "oh, you do? well i thought maybe you might be getting tangled some more. yes, you see he's dead again--" "again? why, has he ever been dead before?" "dead before? no! do you reckon a man has got as many lives as a cat? but you bet you he's awful dead now, poor old boy, and i wish i'd never seen this day. i don't want no better friend than buck fanshaw. i knowed him by the back; and when i know a man and like him, i freeze to him--you hear me. take him all round, pard, there never was a bullier man in the mines. no man ever knowed buck fanshaw to go back on a friend. but it's all up, you know, it's all up. it ain't no use. they've scooped him." "scooped him?" "yes--death has. well, well, well, we've got to give him up. yes indeed. it's a kind of a hard world, after all, ain't it? but pard, he was a rustler! you ought to seen him get started once. he was a bully boy with a glass eye! just spit in his face and give him room according to his strength, and it was just beautiful to see him peel and go in. he was the worst son of a thief that ever drawed breath. pard, he was on it! he was on it bigger than an injun!" "on it? on what?" "on the shoot. on the shoulder. on the fight, you understand. he didn't give a continental for any body. beg your pardon, friend, for coming so near saying a cuss-word--but you see i'm on an awful strain, in this palaver, on account of having to cramp down and draw everything so mild. but we've got to give him up. there ain't any getting around that, i don't reckon. now if we can get you to help plant him--" "preach the funeral discourse? assist at the obsequies?" "obs'quies is good. yes. that's it--that's our little game. we are going to get the thing up regardless, you know. he was always nifty himself, and so you bet you his funeral ain't going to be no slouch --solid silver door-plate on his coffin, six plumes on the hearse, and a nigger on the box in a biled shirt and a plug hat--how's that for high? and we'll take care of you, pard. we'll fix you all right. there'll be a kerridge for you; and whatever you want, you just 'scape out and we'll 'tend to it. we've got a shebang fixed up for you to stand behind, in no. 's house, and don't you be afraid. just go in and toot your horn, if you don't sell a clam. put buck through as bully as you can, pard, for anybody that knowed him will tell you that he was one of the whitest men that was ever in the mines. you can't draw it too strong. he never could stand it to see things going wrong. he's done more to make this town quiet and peaceable than any man in it. i've seen him lick four greasers in eleven minutes, myself. if a thing wanted regulating, he warn't a man to go browsing around after somebody to do it, but he would prance in and regulate it himself. he warn't a catholic. scasely. he was down on 'em. his word was, 'no irish need apply!' but it didn't make no difference about that when it came down to what a man's rights was--and so, when some roughs jumped the catholic bone-yard and started in to stake out town-lots in it he went for 'em! and he cleaned 'em, too! i was there, pard, and i seen it myself." "that was very well indeed--at least the impulse was--whether the act was strictly defensible or not. had deceased any religious convictions? that is to say, did he feel a dependence upon, or acknowledge allegiance to a higher power?" more reflection. "i reckon you've stumped me again, pard. could you say it over once more, and say it slow?" "well, to simplify it somewhat, was he, or rather had he ever been connected with any organization sequestered from secular concerns and devoted to self-sacrifice in the interests of morality?" "all down but nine--set 'em up on the other alley, pard." "what did i understand you to say?" "why, you're most too many for me, you know. when you get in with your left i hunt grass every time. every time you draw, you fill; but i don't seem to have any luck. lets have a new deal." "how? begin again?" "that's it." "very well. was he a good man, and--" "there--i see that; don't put up another chip till i look at my hand. a good man, says you? pard, it ain't no name for it. he was the best man that ever--pard, you would have doted on that man. he could lam any galoot of his inches in america. it was him that put down the riot last election before it got a start; and everybody said he was the only man that could have done it. he waltzed in with a spanner in one hand and a trumpet in the other, and sent fourteen men home on a shutter in less than three minutes. he had that riot all broke up and prevented nice before anybody ever got a chance to strike a blow. he was always for peace, and he would have peace--he could not stand disturbances. pard, he was a great loss to this town. it would please the boys if you could chip in something like that and do him justice. here once when the micks got to throwing stones through the methodis' sunday school windows, buck fanshaw, all of his own notion, shut up his saloon and took a couple of six-shooters and mounted guard over the sunday school. says he, 'no irish need apply!' and they didn't. he was the bulliest man in the mountains, pard! he could run faster, jump higher, hit harder, and hold more tangle-foot whisky without spilling it than any man in seventeen counties. put that in, pard--it'll please the boys more than anything you could say. and you can say, pard, that he never shook his mother." "never shook his mother?" "that's it--any of the boys will tell you so." "well, but why should he shake her?" "that's what i say--but some people does." "not people of any repute?" "well, some that averages pretty so-so." "in my opinion the man that would offer personal violence to his own mother, ought to--" "cheese it, pard; you've banked your ball clean outside the string. what i was a drivin' at, was, that he never throwed off on his mother --don't you see? no indeedy. he give her a house to live in, and town lots, and plenty of money; and he looked after her and took care of her all the time; and when she was down with the small-pox i'm d---d if he didn't set up nights and nuss her himself! beg your pardon for saying it, but it hopped out too quick for yours truly. "you've treated me like a gentleman, pard, and i ain't the man to hurt your feelings intentional. i think you're white. i think you're a square man, pard. i like you, and i'll lick any man that don't. i'll lick him till he can't tell himself from a last year's corpse! put it there!" [another fraternal hand-shake--and exit.] the obsequies were all that "the boys" could desire. such a marvel of funeral pomp had never been seen in virginia. the plumed hearse, the dirge-breathing brass bands, the closed marts of business, the flags drooping at half mast, the long, plodding procession of uniformed secret societies, military battalions and fire companies, draped engines, carriages of officials, and citizens in vehicles and on foot, attracted multitudes of spectators to the sidewalks, roofs and windows; and for years afterward, the degree of grandeur attained by any civic display in virginia was determined by comparison with buck fanshaw's funeral. scotty briggs, as a pall-bearer and a mourner, occupied a prominent place at the funeral, and when the sermon was finished and the last sentence of the prayer for the dead man's soul ascended, he responded, in a low voice, but with feelings: "amen. no irish need apply." as the bulk of the response was without apparent relevancy, it was probably nothing more than a humble tribute to the memory of the friend that was gone; for, as scotty had once said, it was "his word." scotty briggs, in after days, achieved the distinction of becoming the only convert to religion that was ever gathered from the virginia roughs; and it transpired that the man who had it in him to espouse the quarrel of the weak out of inborn nobility of spirit was no mean timber whereof to construct a christian. the making him one did not warp his generosity or diminish his courage; on the contrary it gave intelligent direction to the one and a broader field to the other. if his sunday-school class progressed faster than the other classes, was it matter for wonder? i think not. he talked to his pioneer small-fry in a language they understood! it was my large privilege, a month before he died, to hear him tell the beautiful story of joseph and his brethren to his class "without looking at the book." i leave it to the reader to fancy what it was like, as it fell, riddled with slang, from the lips of that grave, earnest teacher, and was listened to by his little learners with a consuming interest that showed that they were as unconscious as he was that any violence was being done to the sacred proprieties! chapter xlviii. the first twenty-six graves in the virginia cemetery were occupied by murdered men. so everybody said, so everybody believed, and so they will always say and believe. the reason why there was so much slaughtering done, was, that in a new mining district the rough element predominates, and a person is not respected until he has "killed his man." that was the very expression used. if an unknown individual arrived, they did not inquire if he was capable, honest, industrious, but--had he killed his man? if he had not, he gravitated to his natural and proper position, that of a man of small consequence; if he had, the cordiality of his reception was graduated according to the number of his dead. it was tedious work struggling up to a position of influence with bloodless hands; but when a man came with the blood of half a dozen men on his soul, his worth was recognized at once and his acquaintance sought. in nevada, for a time, the lawyer, the editor, the banker, the chief desperado, the chief gambler, and the saloon keeper, occupied the same level in society, and it was the highest. the cheapest and easiest way to become an influential man and be looked up to by the community at large, was to stand behind a bar, wear a cluster-diamond pin, and sell whisky. i am not sure but that the saloon-keeper held a shade higher rank than any other member of society. his opinion had weight. it was his privilege to say how the elections should go. no great movement could succeed without the countenance and direction of the saloon-keepers. it was a high favor when the chief saloon-keeper consented to serve in the legislature or the board of aldermen. youthful ambition hardly aspired so much to the honors of the law, or the army and navy as to the dignity of proprietorship in a saloon. to be a saloon-keeper and kill a man was to be illustrious. hence the reader will not be surprised to learn that more than one man was killed in nevada under hardly the pretext of provocation, so impatient was the slayer to achieve reputation and throw off the galling sense of being held in indifferent repute by his associates. i knew two youths who tried to "kill their men" for no other reason--and got killed themselves for their pains. "there goes the man that killed bill adams" was higher praise and a sweeter sound in the ears of this sort of people than any other speech that admiring lips could utter. the men who murdered virginia's original twenty-six cemetery-occupants were never punished. why? because alfred the great, when he invented trial by jury and knew that he had admirably framed it to secure justice in his age of the world, was not aware that in the nineteenth century the condition of things would be so entirely changed that unless he rose from the grave and altered the jury plan to meet the emergency, it would prove the most ingenious and infallible agency for defeating justice that human wisdom could contrive. for how could he imagine that we simpletons would go on using his jury plan after circumstances had stripped it of its usefulness, any more than he could imagine that we would go on using his candle-clock after we had invented chronometers? in his day news could not travel fast, and hence he could easily find a jury of honest, intelligent men who had not heard of the case they were called to try --but in our day of telegraphs and newspapers his plan compels us to swear in juries composed of fools and rascals, because the system rigidly excludes honest men and men of brains. i remember one of those sorrowful farces, in virginia, which we call a jury trial. a noted desperado killed mr. b., a good citizen, in the most wanton and cold-blooded way. of course the papers were full of it, and all men capable of reading, read about it. and of course all men not deaf and dumb and idiotic, talked about it. a jury-list was made out, and mr. b. l., a prominent banker and a valued citizen, was questioned precisely as he would have been questioned in any court in america: "have you heard of this homicide?" "yes." "have you held conversations upon the subject?" "yes." "have you formed or expressed opinions about it?" "yes." "have you read the newspaper accounts of it?" "yes." "we do not want you." a minister, intelligent, esteemed, and greatly respected; a merchant of high character and known probity; a mining superintendent of intelligence and unblemished reputation; a quartz mill owner of excellent standing, were all questioned in the same way, and all set aside. each said the public talk and the newspaper reports had not so biased his mind but that sworn testimony would overthrow his previously formed opinions and enable him to render a verdict without prejudice and in accordance with the facts. but of course such men could not be trusted with the case. ignoramuses alone could mete out unsullied justice. when the peremptory challenges were all exhausted, a jury of twelve men was impaneled--a jury who swore they had neither heard, read, talked about nor expressed an opinion concerning a murder which the very cattle in the corrals, the indians in the sage-brush and the stones in the streets were cognizant of! it was a jury composed of two desperadoes, two low beer-house politicians, three bar-keepers, two ranchmen who could not read, and three dull, stupid, human donkeys! it actually came out afterward, that one of these latter thought that incest and arson were the same thing. the verdict rendered by this jury was, not guilty. what else could one expect? the jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty, and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury. it is a shame that we must continue to use a worthless system because it was good a thousand years ago. in this age, when a gentleman of high social standing, intelligence and probity, swears that testimony given under solemn oath will outweigh, with him, street talk and newspaper reports based upon mere hearsay, he is worth a hundred jurymen who will swear to their own ignorance and stupidity, and justice would be far safer in his hands than in theirs. why could not the jury law be so altered as to give men of brains and honesty and equal chance with fools and miscreants? is it right to show the present favoritism to one class of men and inflict a disability on another, in a land whose boast is that all its citizens are free and equal? i am a candidate for the legislature. i desire to tamper with the jury law. i wish to so alter it as to put a premium on intelligence and character, and close the jury box against idiots, blacklegs, and people who do not read newspapers. but no doubt i shall be defeated --every effort i make to save the country "misses fire." my idea, when i began this chapter, was to say something about desperadoism in the "flush times" of nevada. to attempt a portrayal of that era and that land, and leave out the blood and carnage, would be like portraying mormondom and leaving out polygamy. the desperado stalked the streets with a swagger graded according to the number of his homicides, and a nod of recognition from him was sufficient to make a humble admirer happy for the rest of the day. the deference that was paid to a desperado of wide reputation, and who "kept his private graveyard," as the phrase went, was marked, and cheerfully accorded. when he moved along the sidewalk in his excessively long-tailed frock-coat, shiny stump-toed boots, and with dainty little slouch hat tipped over left eye, the small-fry roughs made room for his majesty; when he entered the restaurant, the waiters deserted bankers and merchants to overwhelm him with obsequious service; when he shouldered his way to a bar, the shouldered parties wheeled indignantly, recognized him, and --apologized. they got a look in return that froze their marrow, and by that time a curled and breast-pinned bar keeper was beaming over the counter, proud of the established acquaintanceship that permitted such a familiar form of speech as: "how're ye, billy, old fel? glad to see you. what'll you take--the old thing?" the "old thing" meant his customary drink, of course. the best known names in the territory of nevada were those belonging to these long-tailed heroes of the revolver. orators, governors, capitalists and leaders of the legislature enjoyed a degree of fame, but it seemed local and meagre when contrasted with the fame of such men as sam brown, jack williams, billy mulligan, farmer pease, sugarfoot mike, pock marked jake, el dorado johnny, jack mcnabb, joe mcgee, jack harris, six-fingered pete, etc., etc. there was a long list of them. they were brave, reckless men, and traveled with their lives in their hands. to give them their due, they did their killing principally among themselves, and seldom molested peaceable citizens, for they considered it small credit to add to their trophies so cheap a bauble as the death of a man who was "not on the shoot," as they phrased it. they killed each other on slight provocation, and hoped and expected to be killed themselves --for they held it almost shame to die otherwise than "with their boots on," as they expressed it. i remember an instance of a desperado's contempt for such small game as a private citizen's life. i was taking a late supper in a restaurant one night, with two reporters and a little printer named--brown, for instance--any name will do. presently a stranger with a long-tailed coat on came in, and not noticing brown's hat, which was lying in a chair, sat down on it. little brown sprang up and became abusive in a moment. the stranger smiled, smoothed out the hat, and offered it to brown with profuse apologies couched in caustic sarcasm, and begged brown not to destroy him. brown threw off his coat and challenged the man to fight --abused him, threatened him, impeached his courage, and urged and even implored him to fight; and in the meantime the smiling stranger placed himself under our protection in mock distress. but presently he assumed a serious tone, and said: "very well, gentlemen, if we must fight, we must, i suppose. but don't rush into danger and then say i gave you no warning. i am more than a match for all of you when i get started. i will give you proofs, and then if my friend here still insists, i will try to accommodate him." the table we were sitting at was about five feet long, and unusually cumbersome and heavy. he asked us to put our hands on the dishes and hold them in their places a moment--one of them was a large oval dish with a portly roast on it. then he sat down, tilted up one end of the table, set two of the legs on his knees, took the end of the table between his teeth, took his hands away, and pulled down with his teeth till the table came up to a level position, dishes and all! he said he could lift a keg of nails with his teeth. he picked up a common glass tumbler and bit a semi-circle out of it. then he opened his bosom and showed us a net-work of knife and bullet scars; showed us more on his arms and face, and said he believed he had bullets enough in his body to make a pig of lead. he was armed to the teeth. he closed with the remark that he was mr. ---- of cariboo--a celebrated name whereat we shook in our shoes. i would publish the name, but for the suspicion that he might come and carve me. he finally inquired if brown still thirsted for blood. brown turned the thing over in his mind a moment, and then--asked him to supper. with the permission of the reader, i will group together, in the next chapter, some samples of life in our small mountain village in the old days of desperadoism. i was there at the time. the reader will observe peculiarities in our official society; and he will observe also, an instance of how, in new countries, murders breed murders. chapter xlix. an extract or two from the newspapers of the day will furnish a photograph that can need no embellishment: fatal shooting affray.--an affray occurred, last evening, in a billiard saloon on c street, between deputy marshal jack williams and wm. brown, which resulted in the immediate death of the latter. there had been some difficulty between the parties for several months. an inquest was immediately held, and the following testimony adduced: officer geo. birdsall, sworn, says:--i was told wm. brown was drunk and was looking for jack williams; so soon as i heard that i started for the parties to prevent a collision; went into the billiard saloon; saw billy brown running around, saying if anybody had anything against him to show cause; he was talking in a boisterous manner, and officer perry took him to the other end of the room to talk to him; brown came back to me; remarked to me that he thought he was as good as anybody, and knew how to take care of himself; he passed by me and went to the bar; don't know whether he drank or not; williams was at the end of the billiard-table, next to the stairway; brown, after going to the bar, came back and said he was as good as any man in the world; he had then walked out to the end of the first billiard-table from the bar; i moved closer to them, supposing there would be a fight; as brown drew his pistol i caught hold of it; he had fired one shot at williams; don't know the effect of it; caught hold of him with one hand, and took hold of the pistol and turned it up; think he fired once after i caught hold of the pistol; i wrenched the pistol from him; walked to the end of the billiard-table and told a party that i had brown's pistol, and to stop shooting; i think four shots were fired in all; after walking out, mr. foster remarked that brown was shot dead. oh, there was no excitement about it--he merely "remarked" the small circumstance! four months later the following item appeared in the same paper (the enterprise). in this item the name of one of the city officers above referred to (deputy marshal jack williams) occurs again: robbery and desperate affray.--on tuesday night, a german named charles hurtzal, engineer in a mill at silver city, came to this place, and visited the hurdy-gurdy house on b street. the music, dancing and teutonic maidens awakened memories of faderland until our german friend was carried away with rapture. he evidently had money, and was spending if freely. late in the evening jack williams and andy blessington invited him down stairs to take a cup of coffee. williams proposed a game of cards and went up stairs to procure a deck, but not finding any returned. on the stairway he met the german, and drawing his pistol knocked him down and rifled his pockets of some seventy dollars. hurtzal dared give no alarm, as he was told, with a pistol at his head, if he made any noise or exposed them, they would blow his brains out. so effectually was he frightened that he made no complaint, until his friends forced him. yesterday a warrant was issued, but the culprits had disappeared. this efficient city officer, jack williams, had the common reputation of being a burglar, a highwayman and a desperado. it was said that he had several times drawn his revolver and levied money contributions on citizens at dead of night in the public streets of virginia. five months after the above item appeared, williams was assassinated while sitting at a card table one night; a gun was thrust through the crack of the door and williams dropped from his chair riddled with balls. it was said, at the time, that williams had been for some time aware that a party of his own sort (desperadoes) had sworn away his life; and it was generally believed among the people that williams's friends and enemies would make the assassination memorable--and useful, too--by a wholesale destruction of each other. it did not so happen, but still, times were not dull during the next twenty-four hours, for within that time a woman was killed by a pistol shot, a man was brained with a slung shot, and a man named reeder was also disposed of permanently. some matters in the enterprise account of the killing of reeder are worth nothing--especially the accommodating complaisance of a virginia justice of the peace. the italics in the following narrative are mine: more cutting and shooting.--the devil seems to have again broken loose in our town. pistols and guns explode and knives gleam in our streets as in early times. when there has been a long season of quiet, people are slow to wet their hands in blood; but once blood is spilled, cutting and shooting come easy. night before last jack williams was assassinated, and yesterday forenoon we had more bloody work, growing out of the killing of williams, and on the same street in which he met his death. it appears that tom reeder, a friend of williams, and george gumbert were talking, at the meat market of the latter, about the killing of williams the previous night, when reeder said it was a most cowardly act to shoot a man in such a way, giving him "no show." gumbert said that williams had "as good a show as he gave billy brown," meaning the man killed by williams last march. reeder said it was a d---d lie, that williams had no show at all. at this, gumbert drew a knife and stabbed reeder, cutting him in two places in the back. one stroke of the knife cut into the sleeve of reeder's coat and passed downward in a slanting direction through his clothing, and entered his body at the small of the back; another blow struck more squarely, and made a much more dangerous wound. gumbert gave himself up to the officers of justice, and was shortly after discharged by justice atwill, on his own recognizance, to appear for trial at six o'clock in the evening. in the meantime reeder had been taken into the office of dr. owens, where his wounds were properly dressed. one of his wounds was considered quite dangerous, and it was thought by many that it would prove fatal. but being considerably under the influence of liquor, reeder did not feel his wounds as he otherwise would, and he got up and went into the street. he went to the meat market and renewed his quarrel with gumbert, threatening his life. friends tried to interfere to put a stop to the quarrel and get the parties away from each other. in the fashion saloon reeder made threats against the life of gumbert, saying he would kill him, and it is said that he requested the officers not to arrest gumbert, as he intended to kill him. after these threats gumbert went off and procured a double-barreled shot gun, loaded with buck-shot or revolver balls, and went after reeder. two or three persons were assisting him along the street, trying to get him home, and had him just in front of the store of klopstock & harris, when gumbert came across toward him from the opposite side of the street with his gun. he came up within about ten or fifteen feet of reeder, and called out to those with him to "look out! get out of the way!" and they had only time to heed the warning, when he fired. reeder was at the time attempting to screen himself behind a large cask, which stood against the awning post of klopstock & harris's store, but some of the balls took effect in the lower part of his breast, and he reeled around forward and fell in front of the cask. gumbert then raised his gun and fired the second barrel, which missed reeder and entered the ground. at the time that this occurred, there were a great many persons on the street in the vicinity, and a number of them called out to gumbert, when they saw him raise his gun, to "hold on," and "don't shoot!" the cutting took place about ten o'clock and the shooting about twelve. after the shooting the street was instantly crowded with the inhabitants of that part of the town, some appearing much excited and laughing--declaring that it looked like the "good old times of ' ." marshal perry and officer birdsall were near when the shooting occurred, and gumbert was immediately arrested and his gun taken from him, when he was marched off to jail. many persons who were attracted to the spot where this bloody work had just taken place, looked bewildered and seemed to be asking themselves what was to happen next, appearing in doubt as to whether the killing mania had reached its climax, or whether we were to turn in and have a grand killing spell, shooting whoever might have given us offence. it was whispered around that it was not all over yet --five or six more were to be killed before night. reeder was taken to the virginia city hotel, and doctors called in to examine his wounds. they found that two or three balls had entered his right side; one of them appeared to have passed through the substance of the lungs, while another passed into the liver. two balls were also found to have struck one of his legs. as some of the balls struck the cask, the wounds in reeder's leg were probably from these, glancing downwards, though they might have been caused by the second shot fired. after being shot, reeder said when he got on his feet --smiling as he spoke--"it will take better shooting than that to kill me." the doctors consider it almost impossible for him to recover, but as he has an excellent constitution he may survive, notwithstanding the number and dangerous character of the wounds he has received. the town appears to be perfectly quiet at present, as though the late stormy times had cleared our moral atmosphere; but who can tell in what quarter clouds are lowering or plots ripening? reeder--or at least what was left of him--survived his wounds two days! nothing was ever done with gumbert. trial by jury is the palladium of our liberties. i do not know what a palladium is, having never seen a palladium, but it is a good thing no doubt at any rate. not less than a hundred men have been murdered in nevada--perhaps i would be within bounds if i said three hundred--and as far as i can learn, only two persons have suffered the death penalty there. however, four or five who had no money and no political influence have been punished by imprisonment--one languished in prison as much as eight months, i think. however, i do not desire to be extravagant--it may have been less. however, one prophecy was verified, at any rate. it was asserted by the desperadoes that one of their brethren (joe mcgee, a special policeman) was known to be the conspirator chosen by lot to assassinate williams; and they also asserted that doom had been pronounced against mcgee, and that he would be assassinated in exactly the same manner that had been adopted for the destruction of williams--a prophecy which came true a year later. after twelve months of distress (for mcgee saw a fancied assassin in every man that approached him), he made the last of many efforts to get out of the country unwatched. he went to carson and sat down in a saloon to wait for the stage--it would leave at four in the morning. but as the night waned and the crowd thinned, he grew uneasy, and told the bar-keeper that assassins were on his track. the bar-keeper told him to stay in the middle of the room, then, and not go near the door, or the window by the stove. but a fatal fascination seduced him to the neighborhood of the stove every now and then, and repeatedly the bar-keeper brought him back to the middle of the room and warned him to remain there. but he could not. at three in the morning he again returned to the stove and sat down by a stranger. before the bar-keeper could get to him with another warning whisper, some one outside fired through the window and riddled mcgee's breast with slugs, killing him almost instantly. by the same discharge the stranger at mcgee's side also received attentions which proved fatal in the course of two or three days. chapter l. these murder and jury statistics remind me of a certain very extraordinary trial and execution of twenty years ago; it is a scrap of history familiar to all old californians, and worthy to be known by other peoples of the earth that love simple, straightforward justice unencumbered with nonsense. i would apologize for this digression but for the fact that the information i am about to offer is apology enough in itself. and since i digress constantly anyhow, perhaps it is as well to eschew apologies altogether and thus prevent their growing irksome. capt. ned blakely--that name will answer as well as any other fictitious one (for he was still with the living at last accounts, and may not desire to be famous)--sailed ships out of the harbor of san francisco for many years. he was a stalwart, warm-hearted, eagle-eyed veteran, who had been a sailor nearly fifty years--a sailor from early boyhood. he was a rough, honest creature, full of pluck, and just as full of hard-headed simplicity, too. he hated trifling conventionalities--"business" was the word, with him. he had all a sailor's vindictiveness against the quips and quirks of the law, and steadfastly believed that the first and last aim and object of the law and lawyers was to defeat justice. he sailed for the chincha islands in command of a guano ship. he had a fine crew, but his negro mate was his pet--on him he had for years lavished his admiration and esteem. it was capt. ned's first voyage to the chinchas, but his fame had gone before him--the fame of being a man who would fight at the dropping of a handkerchief, when imposed upon, and would stand no nonsense. it was a fame well earned. arrived in the islands, he found that the staple of conversation was the exploits of one bill noakes, a bully, the mate of a trading ship. this man had created a small reign of terror there. at nine o'clock at night, capt. ned, all alone, was pacing his deck in the starlight. a form ascended the side, and approached him. capt. ned said: "who goes there?" "i'm bill noakes, the best man in the islands." "what do you want aboard this ship?" "i've heard of capt. ned blakely, and one of us is a better man than 'tother--i'll know which, before i go ashore." "you've come to the right shop--i'm your man. i'll learn you to come aboard this ship without an invite." he seized noakes, backed him against the mainmast, pounded his face to a pulp, and then threw him overboard. noakes was not convinced. he returned the next night, got the pulp renewed, and went overboard head first, as before. he was satisfied. a week after this, while noakes was carousing with a sailor crowd on shore, at noonday, capt. ned's colored mate came along, and noakes tried to pick a quarrel with him. the negro evaded the trap, and tried to get away. noakes followed him up; the negro began to run; noakes fired on him with a revolver and killed him. half a dozen sea-captains witnessed the whole affair. noakes retreated to the small after-cabin of his ship, with two other bullies, and gave out that death would be the portion of any man that intruded there. there was no attempt made to follow the villains; there was no disposition to do it, and indeed very little thought of such an enterprise. there were no courts and no officers; there was no government; the islands belonged to peru, and peru was far away; she had no official representative on the ground; and neither had any other nation. however, capt. ned was not perplexing his head about such things. they concerned him not. he was boiling with rage and furious for justice. at nine o'clock at night he loaded a double-barreled gun with slugs, fished out a pair of handcuffs, got a ship's lantern, summoned his quartermaster, and went ashore. he said: "do you see that ship there at the dock?" "ay-ay, sir." "it's the venus." "ay-ay, sir." "you--you know me." "ay-ay, sir." "very well, then. take the lantern. carry it just under your chin. i'll walk behind you and rest this gun-barrel on your shoulder, p'inting forward--so. keep your lantern well up so's i can see things ahead of you good. i'm going to march in on noakes--and take him--and jug the other chaps. if you flinch--well, you know me." "ay-ay, sir." in this order they filed aboard softly, arrived at noakes's den, the quartermaster pushed the door open, and the lantern revealed the three desperadoes sitting on the floor. capt. ned said: "i'm ned blakely. i've got you under fire. don't you move without orders--any of you. you two kneel down in the corner; faces to the wall --now. bill noakes, put these handcuffs on; now come up close. quartermaster, fasten 'em. all right. don't stir, sir. quartermaster, put the key in the outside of the door. now, men, i'm going to lock you two in; and if you try to burst through this door--well, you've heard of me. bill noakes, fall in ahead, and march. all set. quartermaster, lock the door." noakes spent the night on board blakely's ship, a prisoner under strict guard. early in the morning capt. ned called in all the sea-captains in the harbor and invited them, with nautical ceremony, to be present on board his ship at nine o'clock to witness the hanging of noakes at the yard-arm! "what! the man has not been tried." "of course he hasn't. but didn't he kill the nigger?" "certainly he did; but you are not thinking of hanging him without a trial?" "trial! what do i want to try him for, if he killed the nigger?" "oh, capt. ned, this will never do. think how it will sound." "sound be hanged! didn't he kill the nigger?" "certainly, certainly, capt. ned,--nobody denies that,--but--" "then i'm going to hang him, that's all. everybody i've talked to talks just the same way you do. everybody says he killed the nigger, everybody knows he killed the nigger, and yet every lubber of you wants him tried for it. i don't understand such bloody foolishness as that. tried! mind you, i don't object to trying him, if it's got to be done to give satisfaction; and i'll be there, and chip in and help, too; but put it off till afternoon--put it off till afternoon, for i'll have my hands middling full till after the burying--" "why, what do you mean? are you going to hang him any how--and try him afterward?" "didn't i say i was going to hang him? i never saw such people as you. what's the difference? you ask a favor, and then you ain't satisfied when you get it. before or after's all one--you know how the trial will go. he killed the nigger. say--i must be going. if your mate would like to come to the hanging, fetch him along. i like him." there was a stir in the camp. the captains came in a body and pleaded with capt. ned not to do this rash thing. they promised that they would create a court composed of captains of the best character; they would empanel a jury; they would conduct everything in a way becoming the serious nature of the business in hand, and give the case an impartial hearing and the accused a fair trial. and they said it would be murder, and punishable by the american courts if he persisted and hung the accused on his ship. they pleaded hard. capt. ned said: "gentlemen, i'm not stubborn and i'm not unreasonable. i'm always willing to do just as near right as i can. how long will it take?" "probably only a little while." "and can i take him up the shore and hang him as soon as you are done?" "if he is proven guilty he shall be hanged without unnecessary delay." "if he's proven guilty. great neptune, ain't he guilty? this beats my time. why you all know he's guilty." but at last they satisfied him that they were projecting nothing underhanded. then he said: "well, all right. you go on and try him and i'll go down and overhaul his conscience and prepare him to go--like enough he needs it, and i don't want to send him off without a show for hereafter." this was another obstacle. they finally convinced him that it was necessary to have the accused in court. then they said they would send a guard to bring him. "no, sir, i prefer to fetch him myself--he don't get out of my hands. besides, i've got to go to the ship to get a rope, anyway." the court assembled with due ceremony, empaneled a jury, and presently capt. ned entered, leading the prisoner with one hand and carrying a bible and a rope in the other. he seated himself by the side of his captive and told the court to "up anchor and make sail." then he turned a searching eye on the jury, and detected noakes's friends, the two bullies. he strode over and said to them confidentially: "you're here to interfere, you see. now you vote right, do you hear?--or else there'll be a double-barreled inquest here when this trial's off, and your remainders will go home in a couple of baskets." the caution was not without fruit. the jury was a unit--the verdict. "guilty." capt. ned sprung to his feet and said: "come along--you're my meat now, my lad, anyway. gentlemen you've done yourselves proud. i invite you all to come and see that i do it all straight. follow me to the canyon, a mile above here." the court informed him that a sheriff had been appointed to do the hanging, and-- capt. ned's patience was at an end. his wrath was boundless. the subject of a sheriff was judiciously dropped. when the crowd arrived at the canyon, capt. ned climbed a tree and arranged the halter, then came down and noosed his man. he opened his bible, and laid aside his hat. selecting a chapter at random, he read it through, in a deep bass voice and with sincere solemnity. then he said: "lad, you are about to go aloft and give an account of yourself; and the lighter a man's manifest is, as far as sin's concerned, the better for him. make a clean breast, man, and carry a log with you that'll bear inspection. you killed the nigger?" no reply. a long pause. the captain read another chapter, pausing, from time to time, to impress the effect. then he talked an earnest, persuasive sermon to him, and ended by repeating the question: "did you kill the nigger?" no reply--other than a malignant scowl. the captain now read the first and second chapters of genesis, with deep feeling--paused a moment, closed the book reverently, and said with a perceptible savor of satisfaction: "there. four chapters. there's few that would have took the pains with you that i have." then he swung up the condemned, and made the rope fast; stood by and timed him half an hour with his watch, and then delivered the body to the court. a little after, as he stood contemplating the motionless figure, a doubt came into his face; evidently he felt a twinge of conscience--a misgiving--and he said with a sigh: "well, p'raps i ought to burnt him, maybe. but i was trying to do for the best." when the history of this affair reached california (it was in the "early days") it made a deal of talk, but did not diminish the captain's popularity in any degree. it increased it, indeed. california had a population then that "inflicted" justice after a fashion that was simplicity and primitiveness itself, and could therefore admire appreciatively when the same fashion was followed elsewhere. roughing it by mark twain part . chapter xxi. we were approaching the end of our long journey. it was the morning of the twentieth day. at noon we would reach carson city, the capital of nevada territory. we were not glad, but sorry. it had been a fine pleasure trip; we had fed fat on wonders every day; we were now well accustomed to stage life, and very fond of it; so the idea of coming to a stand-still and settling down to a humdrum existence in a village was not agreeable, but on the contrary depressing. visibly our new home was a desert, walled in by barren, snow-clad mountains. there was not a tree in sight. there was no vegetation but the endless sage-brush and greasewood. all nature was gray with it. we were plowing through great deeps of powdery alkali dust that rose in thick clouds and floated across the plain like smoke from a burning house. we were coated with it like millers; so were the coach, the mules, the mail-bags, the driver--we and the sage-brush and the other scenery were all one monotonous color. long trains of freight wagons in the distance envelope in ascending masses of dust suggested pictures of prairies on fire. these teams and their masters were the only life we saw. otherwise we moved in the midst of solitude, silence and desolation. every twenty steps we passed the skeleton of some dead beast of burthen, with its dust-coated skin stretched tightly over its empty ribs. frequently a solemn raven sat upon the skull or the hips and contemplated the passing coach with meditative serenity. by and by carson city was pointed out to us. it nestled in the edge of a great plain and was a sufficient number of miles away to look like an assemblage of mere white spots in the shadow of a grim range of mountains overlooking it, whose summits seemed lifted clear out of companionship and consciousness of earthly things. we arrived, disembarked, and the stage went on. it was a "wooden" town; its population two thousand souls. the main street consisted of four or five blocks of little white frame stores which were too high to sit down on, but not too high for various other purposes; in fact, hardly high enough. they were packed close together, side by side, as if room were scarce in that mighty plain. the sidewalk was of boards that were more or less loose and inclined to rattle when walked upon. in the middle of the town, opposite the stores, was the "plaza" which is native to all towns beyond the rocky mountains --a large, unfenced, level vacancy, with a liberty pole in it, and very useful as a place for public auctions, horse trades, and mass meetings, and likewise for teamsters to camp in. two other sides of the plaza were faced by stores, offices and stables. the rest of carson city was pretty scattering. we were introduced to several citizens, at the stage-office and on the way up to the governor's from the hotel--among others, to a mr. harris, who was on horseback; he began to say something, but interrupted himself with the remark: "i'll have to get you to excuse me a minute; yonder is the witness that swore i helped to rob the california coach--a piece of impertinent intermeddling, sir, for i am not even acquainted with the man." then he rode over and began to rebuke the stranger with a six-shooter, and the stranger began to explain with another. when the pistols were emptied, the stranger resumed his work (mending a whip-lash), and mr. harris rode by with a polite nod, homeward bound, with a bullet through one of his lungs, and several in his hips; and from them issued little rivulets of blood that coursed down the horse's sides and made the animal look quite picturesque. i never saw harris shoot a man after that but it recalled to mind that first day in carson. this was all we saw that day, for it was two o'clock, now, and according to custom the daily "washoe zephyr" set in; a soaring dust-drift about the size of the united states set up edgewise came with it, and the capital of nevada territory disappeared from view. still, there were sights to be seen which were not wholly uninteresting to new comers; for the vast dust cloud was thickly freckled with things strange to the upper air--things living and dead, that flitted hither and thither, going and coming, appearing and disappearing among the rolling billows of dust--hats, chickens and parasols sailing in the remote heavens; blankets, tin signs, sage-brush and shingles a shade lower; door-mats and buffalo robes lower still; shovels and coal scuttles on the next grade; glass doors, cats and little children on the next; disrupted lumber yards, light buggies and wheelbarrows on the next; and down only thirty or forty feet above ground was a scurrying storm of emigrating roofs and vacant lots. it was something to see that much. i could have seen more, if i could have kept the dust out of my eyes. but seriously a washoe wind is by no means a trifling matter. it blows flimsy houses down, lifts shingle roofs occasionally, rolls up tin ones like sheet music, now and then blows a stage coach over and spills the passengers; and tradition says the reason there are so many bald people there, is, that the wind blows the hair off their heads while they are looking skyward after their hats. carson streets seldom look inactive on summer afternoons, because there are so many citizens skipping around their escaping hats, like chambermaids trying to head off a spider. the "washoe zephyr" (washoe is a pet nickname for nevada) is a peculiar scriptural wind, in that no man knoweth "whence it cometh." that is to say, where it originates. it comes right over the mountains from the west, but when one crosses the ridge he does not find any of it on the other side! it probably is manufactured on the mountain-top for the occasion, and starts from there. it is a pretty regular wind, in the summer time. its office hours are from two in the afternoon till two the next morning; and anybody venturing abroad during those twelve hours needs to allow for the wind or he will bring up a mile or two to leeward of the point he is aiming at. and yet the first complaint a washoe visitor to san francisco makes, is that the sea winds blow so, there! there is a good deal of human nature in that. we found the state palace of the governor of nevada territory to consist of a white frame one-story house with two small rooms in it and a stanchion supported shed in front--for grandeur--it compelled the respect of the citizen and inspired the indians with awe. the newly arrived chief and associate justices of the territory, and other machinery of the government, were domiciled with less splendor. they were boarding around privately, and had their offices in their bedrooms. the secretary and i took quarters in the "ranch" of a worthy french lady by the name of bridget o'flannigan, a camp follower of his excellency the governor. she had known him in his prosperity as commander-in-chief of the metropolitan police of new york, and she would not desert him in his adversity as governor of nevada. our room was on the lower floor, facing the plaza, and when we had got our bed, a small table, two chairs, the government fire-proof safe, and the unabridged dictionary into it, there was still room enough left for a visitor--may be two, but not without straining the walls. but the walls could stand it--at least the partitions could, for they consisted simply of one thickness of white "cotton domestic" stretched from corner to corner of the room. this was the rule in carson--any other kind of partition was the rare exception. and if you stood in a dark room and your neighbors in the next had lights, the shadows on your canvas told queer secrets sometimes! very often these partitions were made of old flour sacks basted together; and then the difference between the common herd and the aristocracy was, that the common herd had unornamented sacks, while the walls of the aristocrat were overpowering with rudimental fresco--i.e., red and blue mill brands on the flour sacks. occasionally, also, the better classes embellished their canvas by pasting pictures from harper's weekly on them. in many cases, too, the wealthy and the cultured rose to spittoons and other evidences of a sumptuous and luxurious taste. [washoe people take a joke so hard that i must explain that the above description was only the rule; there were many honorable exceptions in carson--plastered ceilings and houses that had considerable furniture in them.--m. t.] we had a carpet and a genuine queen's-ware washbowl. consequently we were hated without reserve by the other tenants of the o'flannigan "ranch." when we added a painted oilcloth window curtain, we simply took our lives into our own hands. to prevent bloodshed i removed up stairs and took up quarters with the untitled plebeians in one of the fourteen white pine cot-bedsteads that stood in two long ranks in the one sole room of which the second story consisted. it was a jolly company, the fourteen. they were principally voluntary camp-followers of the governor, who had joined his retinue by their own election at new york and san francisco and came along, feeling that in the scuffle for little territorial crumbs and offices they could not make their condition more precarious than it was, and might reasonably expect to make it better. they were popularly known as the "irish brigade," though there were only four or five irishmen among all the governor's retainers. his good-natured excellency was much annoyed at the gossip his henchmen created--especially when there arose a rumor that they were paid assassins of his, brought along to quietly reduce the democratic vote when desirable! mrs. o'flannigan was boarding and lodging them at ten dollars a week apiece, and they were cheerfully giving their notes for it. they were perfectly satisfied, but bridget presently found that notes that could not be discounted were but a feeble constitution for a carson boarding-house. so she began to harry the governor to find employment for the "brigade." her importunities and theirs together drove him to a gentle desperation at last, and he finally summoned the brigade to the presence. then, said he: "gentlemen, i have planned a lucrative and useful service for you --a service which will provide you with recreation amid noble landscapes, and afford you never ceasing opportunities for enriching your minds by observation and study. i want you to survey a railroad from carson city westward to a certain point! when the legislature meets i will have the necessary bill passed and the remuneration arranged." "what, a railroad over the sierra nevada mountains?" "well, then, survey it eastward to a certain point!" he converted them into surveyors, chain-bearers and so on, and turned them loose in the desert. it was "recreation" with a vengeance! recreation on foot, lugging chains through sand and sage-brush, under a sultry sun and among cattle bones, cayotes and tarantulas. "romantic adventure" could go no further. they surveyed very slowly, very deliberately, very carefully. they returned every night during the first week, dusty, footsore, tired, and hungry, but very jolly. they brought in great store of prodigious hairy spiders--tarantulas--and imprisoned them in covered tumblers up stairs in the "ranch." after the first week, they had to camp on the field, for they were getting well eastward. they made a good many inquiries as to the location of that indefinite "certain point," but got no information. at last, to a peculiarly urgent inquiry of "how far eastward?" governor nye telegraphed back: "to the atlantic ocean, blast you!--and then bridge it and go on!" this brought back the dusty toilers, who sent in a report and ceased from their labors. the governor was always comfortable about it; he said mrs. o'flannigan would hold him for the brigade's board anyhow, and he intended to get what entertainment he could out of the boys; he said, with his old-time pleasant twinkle, that he meant to survey them into utah and then telegraph brigham to hang them for trespass! the surveyors brought back more tarantulas with them, and so we had quite a menagerie arranged along the shelves of the room. some of these spiders could straddle over a common saucer with their hairy, muscular legs, and when their feelings were hurt, or their dignity offended, they were the wickedest-looking desperadoes the animal world can furnish. if their glass prison-houses were touched ever so lightly they were up and spoiling for a fight in a minute. starchy?--proud? indeed, they would take up a straw and pick their teeth like a member of congress. there was as usual a furious "zephyr" blowing the first night of the brigade's return, and about midnight the roof of an adjoining stable blew off, and a corner of it came crashing through the side of our ranch. there was a simultaneous awakening, and a tumultuous muster of the brigade in the dark, and a general tumbling and sprawling over each other in the narrow aisle between the bedrows. in the midst of the turmoil, bob h---- sprung up out of a sound sleep, and knocked down a shelf with his head. instantly he shouted: "turn out, boys--the tarantulas is loose!" no warning ever sounded so dreadful. nobody tried, any longer, to leave the room, lest he might step on a tarantula. every man groped for a trunk or a bed, and jumped on it. then followed the strangest silence--a silence of grisly suspense it was, too--waiting, expectancy, fear. it was as dark as pitch, and one had to imagine the spectacle of those fourteen scant-clad men roosting gingerly on trunks and beds, for not a thing could be seen. then came occasional little interruptions of the silence, and one could recognize a man and tell his locality by his voice, or locate any other sound a sufferer made by his gropings or changes of position. the occasional voices were not given to much speaking--you simply heard a gentle ejaculation of "ow!" followed by a solid thump, and you knew the gentleman had felt a hairy blanket or something touch his bare skin and had skipped from a bed to the floor. another silence. presently you would hear a gasping voice say: "su--su--something's crawling up the back of my neck!" every now and then you could hear a little subdued scramble and a sorrowful "o lord!" and then you knew that somebody was getting away from something he took for a tarantula, and not losing any time about it, either. directly a voice in the corner rang out wild and clear: "i've got him! i've got him!" [pause, and probable change of circumstances.] "no, he's got me! oh, ain't they never going to fetch a lantern!" the lantern came at that moment, in the hands of mrs. o'flannigan, whose anxiety to know the amount of damage done by the assaulting roof had not prevented her waiting a judicious interval, after getting out of bed and lighting up, to see if the wind was done, now, up stairs, or had a larger contract. the landscape presented when the lantern flashed into the room was picturesque, and might have been funny to some people, but was not to us. although we were perched so strangely upon boxes, trunks and beds, and so strangely attired, too, we were too earnestly distressed and too genuinely miserable to see any fun about it, and there was not the semblance of a smile anywhere visible. i know i am not capable of suffering more than i did during those few minutes of suspense in the dark, surrounded by those creeping, bloody-minded tarantulas. i had skipped from bed to bed and from box to box in a cold agony, and every time i touched anything that was furzy i fancied i felt the fangs. i had rather go to war than live that episode over again. nobody was hurt. the man who thought a tarantula had "got him" was mistaken--only a crack in a box had caught his finger. not one of those escaped tarantulas was ever seen again. there were ten or twelve of them. we took candles and hunted the place high and low for them, but with no success. did we go back to bed then? we did nothing of the kind. money could not have persuaded us to do it. we sat up the rest of the night playing cribbage and keeping a sharp lookout for the enemy. chapter xxii. it was the end of august, and the skies were cloudless and the weather superb. in two or three weeks i had grown wonderfully fascinated with the curious new country and concluded to put off my return to "the states" awhile. i had grown well accustomed to wearing a damaged slouch hat, blue woolen shirt, and pants crammed into boot-tops, and gloried in the absence of coat, vest and braces. i felt rowdyish and "bully," (as the historian josephus phrases it, in his fine chapter upon the destruction of the temple). it seemed to me that nothing could be so fine and so romantic. i had become an officer of the government, but that was for mere sublimity. the office was an unique sinecure. i had nothing to do and no salary. i was private secretary to his majesty the secretary and there was not yet writing enough for two of us. so johnny k---- and i devoted our time to amusement. he was the young son of an ohio nabob and was out there for recreation. he got it. we had heard a world of talk about the marvellous beauty of lake tahoe, and finally curiosity drove us thither to see it. three or four members of the brigade had been there and located some timber lands on its shores and stored up a quantity of provisions in their camp. we strapped a couple of blankets on our shoulders and took an axe apiece and started--for we intended to take up a wood ranch or so ourselves and become wealthy. we were on foot. the reader will find it advantageous to go horseback. we were told that the distance was eleven miles. we tramped a long time on level ground, and then toiled laboriously up a mountain about a thousand miles high and looked over. no lake there. we descended on the other side, crossed the valley and toiled up another mountain three or four thousand miles high, apparently, and looked over again. no lake yet. we sat down tired and perspiring, and hired a couple of chinamen to curse those people who had beguiled us. thus refreshed, we presently resumed the march with renewed vigor and determination. we plodded on, two or three hours longer, and at last the lake burst upon us--a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still! it was a vast oval, and one would have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling around it. as it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface i thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords. we found the small skiff belonging to the brigade boys, and without loss of time set out across a deep bend of the lake toward the landmarks that signified the locality of the camp. i got johnny to row--not because i mind exertion myself, but because it makes me sick to ride backwards when i am at work. but i steered. a three-mile pull brought us to the camp just as the night fell, and we stepped ashore very tired and wolfishly hungry. in a "cache" among the rocks we found the provisions and the cooking utensils, and then, all fatigued as i was, i sat down on a boulder and superintended while johnny gathered wood and cooked supper. many a man who had gone through what i had, would have wanted to rest. it was a delicious supper--hot bread, fried bacon, and black coffee. it was a delicious solitude we were in, too. three miles away was a saw-mill and some workmen, but there were not fifteen other human beings throughout the wide circumference of the lake. as the darkness closed down and the stars came out and spangled the great mirror with jewels, we smoked meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and our pains. in due time we spread our blankets in the warm sand between two large boulders and soon feel asleep, careless of the procession of ants that passed in through rents in our clothing and explored our persons. nothing could disturb the sleep that fettered us, for it had been fairly earned, and if our consciences had any sins on them they had to adjourn court for that night, any way. the wind rose just as we were losing consciousness, and we were lulled to sleep by the beating of the surf upon the shore. it is always very cold on that lake shore in the night, but we had plenty of blankets and were warm enough. we never moved a muscle all night, but waked at early dawn in the original positions, and got up at once, thoroughly refreshed, free from soreness, and brim full of friskiness. there is no end of wholesome medicine in such an experience. that morning we could have whipped ten such people as we were the day before --sick ones at any rate. but the world is slow, and people will go to "water cures" and "movement cures" and to foreign lands for health. three months of camp life on lake tahoe would restore an egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. i do not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones. the air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. and why shouldn't it be?--it is the same the angels breathe. i think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered together that a man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side. not under a roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there in the summer time. i know a man who went there to die. but he made a failure of it. he was a skeleton when he came, and could barely stand. he had no appetite, and did nothing but read tracts and reflect on the future. three months later he was sleeping out of doors regularly, eating all he could hold, three times a day, and chasing game over mountains three thousand feet high for recreation. and he was a skeleton no longer, but weighed part of a ton. this is no fancy sketch, but the truth. his disease was consumption. i confidently commend his experience to other skeletons. i superintended again, and as soon as we had eaten breakfast we got in the boat and skirted along the lake shore about three miles and disembarked. we liked the appearance of the place, and so we claimed some three hundred acres of it and stuck our "notices" on a tree. it was yellow pine timber land--a dense forest of trees a hundred feet high and from one to five feet through at the butt. it was necessary to fence our property or we could not hold it. that is to say, it was necessary to cut down trees here and there and make them fall in such a way as to form a sort of enclosure (with pretty wide gaps in it). we cut down three trees apiece, and found it such heart-breaking work that we decided to "rest our case" on those; if they held the property, well and good; if they didn't, let the property spill out through the gaps and go; it was no use to work ourselves to death merely to save a few acres of land. next day we came back to build a house--for a house was also necessary, in order to hold the property. we decided to build a substantial log-house and excite the envy of the brigade boys; but by the time we had cut and trimmed the first log it seemed unnecessary to be so elaborate, and so we concluded to build it of saplings. however, two saplings, duly cut and trimmed, compelled recognition of the fact that a still modester architecture would satisfy the law, and so we concluded to build a "brush" house. we devoted the next day to this work, but we did so much "sitting around" and discussing, that by the middle of the afternoon we had achieved only a half-way sort of affair which one of us had to watch while the other cut brush, lest if both turned our backs we might not be able to find it again, it had such a strong family resemblance to the surrounding vegetation. but we were satisfied with it. we were land owners now, duly seized and possessed, and within the protection of the law. therefore we decided to take up our residence on our own domain and enjoy that large sense of independence which only such an experience can bring. late the next afternoon, after a good long rest, we sailed away from the brigade camp with all the provisions and cooking utensils we could carry off--borrow is the more accurate word --and just as the night was falling we beached the boat at our own landing. chapter xxiii. if there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our timber ranch for the next two or three weeks, it must be a sort of life which i have not read of in books or experienced in person. we did not see a human being but ourselves during the time, or hear any sounds but those that were made by the wind and the waves, the sighing of the pines, and now and then the far-off thunder of an avalanche. the forest about us was dense and cool, the sky above us was cloudless and brilliant with sunshine, the broad lake before us was glassy and clear, or rippled and breezy, or black and storm-tossed, according to nature's mood; and its circling border of mountain domes, clothed with forests, scarred with land-slides, cloven by canons and valleys, and helmeted with glittering snow, fitly framed and finished the noble picture. the view was always fascinating, bewitching, entrancing. the eye was never tired of gazing, night or day, in calm or storm; it suffered but one grief, and that was that it could not look always, but must close sometimes in sleep. we slept in the sand close to the water's edge, between two protecting boulders, which took care of the stormy night-winds for us. we never took any paregoric to make us sleep. at the first break of dawn we were always up and running foot-races to tone down excess of physical vigor and exuberance of spirits. that is, johnny was--but i held his hat. while smoking the pipe of peace after breakfast we watched the sentinel peaks put on the glory of the sun, and followed the conquering light as it swept down among the shadows, and set the captive crags and forests free. we watched the tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the water till every little detail of forest, precipice and pinnacle was wrought in and finished, and the miracle of the enchanter complete. then to "business." that is, drifting around in the boat. we were on the north shore. there, the rocks on the bottom are sometimes gray, sometimes white. this gives the marvelous transparency of the water a fuller advantage than it has elsewhere on the lake. we usually pushed out a hundred yards or so from shore, and then lay down on the thwarts, in the sun, and let the boat drift by the hour whither it would. we seldom talked. it interrupted the sabbath stillness, and marred the dreams the luxurious rest and indolence brought. the shore all along was indented with deep, curved bays and coves, bordered by narrow sand-beaches; and where the sand ended, the steep mountain-sides rose right up aloft into space--rose up like a vast wall a little out of the perpendicular, and thickly wooded with tall pines. so singularly clear was the water, that where it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that the boat seemed floating in the air! yes, where it was even eighty feet deep. every little pebble was distinct, every speckled trout, every hand's-breadth of sand. often, as we lay on our faces, a granite boulder, as large as a village church, would start out of the bottom apparently, and seem climbing up rapidly to the surface, till presently it threatened to touch our faces, and we could not resist the impulse to seize an oar and avert the danger. but the boat would float on, and the boulder descend again, and then we could see that when we had been exactly above it, it must still have been twenty or thirty feet below the surface. down through the transparency of these great depths, the water was not merely transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so. all objects seen through it had a bright, strong vividness, not only of outline, but of every minute detail, which they would not have had when seen simply through the same depth of atmosphere. so empty and airy did all spaces seem below us, and so strong was the sense of floating high aloft in mid-nothingness, that we called these boat-excursions "balloon-voyages." we fished a good deal, but we did not average one fish a week. we could see trout by the thousand winging about in the emptiness under us, or sleeping in shoals on the bottom, but they would not bite--they could see the line too plainly, perhaps. we frequently selected the trout we wanted, and rested the bait patiently and persistently on the end of his nose at a depth of eighty feet, but he would only shake it off with an annoyed manner, and shift his position. we bathed occasionally, but the water was rather chilly, for all it looked so sunny. sometimes we rowed out to the "blue water," a mile or two from shore. it was as dead blue as indigo there, because of the immense depth. by official measurement the lake in its centre is one thousand five hundred and twenty-five feet deep! sometimes, on lazy afternoons, we lolled on the sand in camp, and smoked pipes and read some old well-worn novels. at night, by the camp-fire, we played euchre and seven-up to strengthen the mind--and played them with cards so greasy and defaced that only a whole summer's acquaintance with them could enable the student to tell the ace of clubs from the jack of diamonds. we never slept in our "house." it never recurred to us, for one thing; and besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough. we did not wish to strain it. by and by our provisions began to run short, and we went back to the old camp and laid in a new supply. we were gone all day, and reached home again about night-fall, pretty tired and hungry. while johnny was carrying the main bulk of the provisions up to our "house" for future use, i took the loaf of bread, some slices of bacon, and the coffee-pot, ashore, set them down by a tree, lit a fire, and went back to the boat to get the frying-pan. while i was at this, i heard a shout from johnny, and looking up i saw that my fire was galloping all over the premises! johnny was on the other side of it. he had to run through the flames to get to the lake shore, and then we stood helpless and watched the devastation. the ground was deeply carpeted with dry pine-needles, and the fire touched them off as if they were gunpowder. it was wonderful to see with what fierce speed the tall sheet of flame traveled! my coffee-pot was gone, and everything with it. in a minute and a half the fire seized upon a dense growth of dry manzanita chapparal six or eight feet high, and then the roaring and popping and crackling was something terrific. we were driven to the boat by the intense heat, and there we remained, spell-bound. within half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of flame! it went surging up adjacent ridges--surmounted them and disappeared in the canons beyond--burst into view upon higher and farther ridges, presently--shed a grander illumination abroad, and dove again --flamed out again, directly, higher and still higher up the mountain-side--threw out skirmishing parties of fire here and there, and sent them trailing their crimson spirals away among remote ramparts and ribs and gorges, till as far as the eye could reach the lofty mountain-fronts were webbed as it were with a tangled network of red lava streams. away across the water the crags and domes were lit with a ruddy glare, and the firmament above was a reflected hell! every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the lake! both pictures were sublime, both were beautiful; but that in the lake had a bewildering richness about it that enchanted the eye and held it with the stronger fascination. we sat absorbed and motionless through four long hours. we never thought of supper, and never felt fatigue. but at eleven o'clock the conflagration had traveled beyond our range of vision, and then darkness stole down upon the landscape again. hunger asserted itself now, but there was nothing to eat. the provisions were all cooked, no doubt, but we did not go to see. we were homeless wanderers again, without any property. our fence was gone, our house burned down; no insurance. our pine forest was well scorched, the dead trees all burned up, and our broad acres of manzanita swept away. our blankets were on our usual sand-bed, however, and so we lay down and went to sleep. the next morning we started back to the old camp, but while out a long way from shore, so great a storm came up that we dared not try to land. so i baled out the seas we shipped, and johnny pulled heavily through the billows till we had reached a point three or four miles beyond the camp. the storm was increasing, and it became evident that it was better to take the hazard of beaching the boat than go down in a hundred fathoms of water; so we ran in, with tall white-caps following, and i sat down in the stern-sheets and pointed her head-on to the shore. the instant the bow struck, a wave came over the stern that washed crew and cargo ashore, and saved a deal of trouble. we shivered in the lee of a boulder all the rest of the day, and froze all the night through. in the morning the tempest had gone down, and we paddled down to the camp without any unnecessary delay. we were so starved that we ate up the rest of the brigade's provisions, and then set out to carson to tell them about it and ask their forgiveness. it was accorded, upon payment of damages. we made many trips to the lake after that, and had many a hair-breadth escape and blood-curdling adventure which will never be recorded in any history. chapter xxiv. i resolved to have a horse to ride. i had never seen such wild, free, magnificent horsemanship outside of a circus as these picturesquely-clad mexicans, californians and mexicanized americans displayed in carson streets every day. how they rode! leaning just gently forward out of the perpendicular, easy and nonchalant, with broad slouch-hat brim blown square up in front, and long riata swinging above the head, they swept through the town like the wind! the next minute they were only a sailing puff of dust on the far desert. if they trotted, they sat up gallantly and gracefully, and seemed part of the horse; did not go jiggering up and down after the silly miss-nancy fashion of the riding-schools. i had quickly learned to tell a horse from a cow, and was full of anxiety to learn more. i was resolved to buy a horse. while the thought was rankling in my mind, the auctioneer came skurrying through the plaza on a black beast that had as many humps and corners on him as a dromedary, and was necessarily uncomely; but he was "going, going, at twenty-two!--horse, saddle and bridle at twenty-two dollars, gentlemen!" and i could hardly resist. a man whom i did not know (he turned out to be the auctioneer's brother) noticed the wistful look in my eye, and observed that that was a very remarkable horse to be going at such a price; and added that the saddle alone was worth the money. it was a spanish saddle, with ponderous 'tapidaros', and furnished with the ungainly sole-leather covering with the unspellable name. i said i had half a notion to bid. then this keen-eyed person appeared to me to be "taking my measure"; but i dismissed the suspicion when he spoke, for his manner was full of guileless candor and truthfulness. said he: "i know that horse--know him well. you are a stranger, i take it, and so you might think he was an american horse, maybe, but i assure you he is not. he is nothing of the kind; but--excuse my speaking in a low voice, other people being near--he is, without the shadow of a doubt, a genuine mexican plug!" i did not know what a genuine mexican plug was, but there was something about this man's way of saying it, that made me swear inwardly that i would own a genuine mexican plug, or die. "has he any other--er--advantages?" i inquired, suppressing what eagerness i could. he hooked his forefinger in the pocket of my army-shirt, led me to one side, and breathed in my ear impressively these words: "he can out-buck anything in america!" "going, going, going--at twent--ty--four dollars and a half, gen--" "twenty-seven!" i shouted, in a frenzy. "and sold!" said the auctioneer, and passed over the genuine mexican plug to me. i could scarcely contain my exultation. i paid the money, and put the animal in a neighboring livery-stable to dine and rest himself. in the afternoon i brought the creature into the plaza, and certain citizens held him by the head, and others by the tail, while i mounted him. as soon as they let go, he placed all his feet in a bunch together, lowered his back, and then suddenly arched it upward, and shot me straight into the air a matter of three or four feet! i came as straight down again, lit in the saddle, went instantly up again, came down almost on the high pommel, shot up again, and came down on the horse's neck--all in the space of three or four seconds. then he rose and stood almost straight up on his hind feet, and i, clasping his lean neck desperately, slid back into the saddle and held on. he came down, and immediately hoisted his heels into the air, delivering a vicious kick at the sky, and stood on his forefeet. and then down he came once more, and began the original exercise of shooting me straight up again. the third time i went up i heard a stranger say: "oh, don't he buck, though!" while i was up, somebody struck the horse a sounding thwack with a leathern strap, and when i arrived again the genuine mexican plug was not there. a california youth chased him up and caught him, and asked if he might have a ride. i granted him that luxury. he mounted the genuine, got lifted into the air once, but sent his spurs home as he descended, and the horse darted away like a telegram. he soared over three fences like a bird, and disappeared down the road toward the washoe valley. i sat down on a stone, with a sigh, and by a natural impulse one of my hands sought my forehead, and the other the base of my stomach. i believe i never appreciated, till then, the poverty of the human machinery--for i still needed a hand or two to place elsewhere. pen cannot describe how i was jolted up. imagination cannot conceive how disjointed i was--how internally, externally and universally i was unsettled, mixed up and ruptured. there was a sympathetic crowd around me, though. one elderly-looking comforter said: "stranger, you've been taken in. everybody in this camp knows that horse. any child, any injun, could have told you that he'd buck; he is the very worst devil to buck on the continent of america. you hear me. i'm curry. old curry. old abe curry. and moreover, he is a simon-pure, out-and-out, genuine d--d mexican plug, and an uncommon mean one at that, too. why, you turnip, if you had laid low and kept dark, there's chances to buy an american horse for mighty little more than you paid for that bloody old foreign relic." i gave no sign; but i made up my mind that if the auctioneer's brother's funeral took place while i was in the territory i would postpone all other recreations and attend it. after a gallop of sixteen miles the californian youth and the genuine mexican plug came tearing into town again, shedding foam-flakes like the spume-spray that drives before a typhoon, and, with one final skip over a wheelbarrow and a chinaman, cast anchor in front of the "ranch." such panting and blowing! such spreading and contracting of the red equine nostrils, and glaring of the wild equine eye! but was the imperial beast subjugated? indeed he was not. his lordship the speaker of the house thought he was, and mounted him to go down to the capitol; but the first dash the creature made was over a pile of telegraph poles half as high as a church; and his time to the capitol--one mile and three quarters--remains unbeaten to this day. but then he took an advantage--he left out the mile, and only did the three quarters. that is to say, he made a straight cut across lots, preferring fences and ditches to a crooked road; and when the speaker got to the capitol he said he had been in the air so much he felt as if he had made the trip on a comet. in the evening the speaker came home afoot for exercise, and got the genuine towed back behind a quartz wagon. the next day i loaned the animal to the clerk of the house to go down to the dana silver mine, six miles, and he walked back for exercise, and got the horse towed. everybody i loaned him to always walked back; they never could get enough exercise any other way. still, i continued to loan him to anybody who was willing to borrow him, my idea being to get him crippled, and throw him on the borrower's hands, or killed, and make the borrower pay for him. but somehow nothing ever happened to him. he took chances that no other horse ever took and survived, but he always came out safe. it was his daily habit to try experiments that had always before been considered impossible, but he always got through. sometimes he miscalculated a little, and did not get his rider through intact, but he always got through himself. of course i had tried to sell him; but that was a stretch of simplicity which met with little sympathy. the auctioneer stormed up and down the streets on him for four days, dispersing the populace, interrupting business, and destroying children, and never got a bid--at least never any but the eighteen-dollar one he hired a notoriously substanceless bummer to make. the people only smiled pleasantly, and restrained their desire to buy, if they had any. then the auctioneer brought in his bill, and i withdrew the horse from the market. we tried to trade him off at private vendue next, offering him at a sacrifice for second-hand tombstones, old iron, temperance tracts--any kind of property. but holders were stiff, and we retired from the market again. i never tried to ride the horse any more. walking was good enough exercise for a man like me, that had nothing the matter with him except ruptures, internal injuries, and such things. finally i tried to give him away. but it was a failure. parties said earthquakes were handy enough on the pacific coast--they did not wish to own one. as a last resort i offered him to the governor for the use of the "brigade." his face lit up eagerly at first, but toned down again, and he said the thing would be too palpable. just then the livery stable man brought in his bill for six weeks' keeping--stall-room for the horse, fifteen dollars; hay for the horse, two hundred and fifty! the genuine mexican plug had eaten a ton of the article, and the man said he would have eaten a hundred if he had let him. i will remark here, in all seriousness, that the regular price of hay during that year and a part of the next was really two hundred and fifty dollars a ton. during a part of the previous year it had sold at five hundred a ton, in gold, and during the winter before that there was such scarcity of the article that in several instances small quantities had brought eight hundred dollars a ton in coin! the consequence might be guessed without my telling it: peopled turned their stock loose to starve, and before the spring arrived carson and eagle valleys were almost literally carpeted with their carcases! any old settler there will verify these statements. i managed to pay the livery bill, and that same day i gave the genuine mexican plug to a passing arkansas emigrant whom fortune delivered into my hand. if this ever meets his eye, he will doubtless remember the donation. now whoever has had the luck to ride a real mexican plug will recognize the animal depicted in this chapter, and hardly consider him exaggerated --but the uninitiated will feel justified in regarding his portrait as a fancy sketch, perhaps. chapter xxv. originally, nevada was a part of utah and was called carson county; and a pretty large county it was, too. certain of its valleys produced no end of hay, and this attracted small colonies of mormon stock-raisers and farmers to them. a few orthodox americans straggled in from california, but no love was lost between the two classes of colonists. there was little or no friendly intercourse; each party staid to itself. the mormons were largely in the majority, and had the additional advantage of being peculiarly under the protection of the mormon government of the territory. therefore they could afford to be distant, and even peremptory toward their neighbors. one of the traditions of carson valley illustrates the condition of things that prevailed at the time i speak of. the hired girl of one of the american families was irish, and a catholic; yet it was noted with surprise that she was the only person outside of the mormon ring who could get favors from the mormons. she asked kindnesses of them often, and always got them. it was a mystery to everybody. but one day as she was passing out at the door, a large bowie knife dropped from under her apron, and when her mistress asked for an explanation she observed that she was going out to "borry a wash-tub from the mormons!" in silver lodes were discovered in "carson county," and then the aspect of things changed. californians began to flock in, and the american element was soon in the majority. allegiance to brigham young and utah was renounced, and a temporary territorial government for "washoe" was instituted by the citizens. governor roop was the first and only chief magistrate of it. in due course of time congress passed a bill to organize "nevada territory," and president lincoln sent out governor nye to supplant roop. at this time the population of the territory was about twelve or fifteen thousand, and rapidly increasing. silver mines were being vigorously developed and silver mills erected. business of all kinds was active and prosperous and growing more so day by day. the people were glad to have a legitimately constituted government, but did not particularly enjoy having strangers from distant states put in authority over them--a sentiment that was natural enough. they thought the officials should have been chosen from among themselves from among prominent citizens who had earned a right to such promotion, and who would be in sympathy with the populace and likewise thoroughly acquainted with the needs of the territory. they were right in viewing the matter thus, without doubt. the new officers were "emigrants," and that was no title to anybody's affection or admiration either. the new government was received with considerable coolness. it was not only a foreign intruder, but a poor one. it was not even worth plucking --except by the smallest of small fry office-seekers and such. everybody knew that congress had appropriated only twenty thousand dollars a year in greenbacks for its support--about money enough to run a quartz mill a month. and everybody knew, also, that the first year's money was still in washington, and that the getting hold of it would be a tedious and difficult process. carson city was too wary and too wise to open up a credit account with the imported bantling with anything like indecent haste. there is something solemnly funny about the struggles of a new-born territorial government to get a start in this world. ours had a trying time of it. the organic act and the "instructions" from the state department commanded that a legislature should be elected at such-and-such a time, and its sittings inaugurated at such-and-such a date. it was easy to get legislators, even at three dollars a day, although board was four dollars and fifty cents, for distinction has its charm in nevada as well as elsewhere, and there were plenty of patriotic souls out of employment; but to get a legislative hall for them to meet in was another matter altogether. carson blandly declined to give a room rent-free, or let one to the government on credit. but when curry heard of the difficulty, he came forward, solitary and alone, and shouldered the ship of state over the bar and got her afloat again. i refer to "curry--old curry--old abe curry." but for him the legislature would have been obliged to sit in the desert. he offered his large stone building just outside the capital limits, rent-free, and it was gladly accepted. then he built a horse-railroad from town to the capitol, and carried the legislators gratis. he also furnished pine benches and chairs for the legislature, and covered the floors with clean saw-dust by way of carpet and spittoon combined. but for curry the government would have died in its tender infancy. a canvas partition to separate the senate from the house of representatives was put up by the secretary, at a cost of three dollars and forty cents, but the united states declined to pay for it. upon being reminded that the "instructions" permitted the payment of a liberal rent for a legislative hall, and that that money was saved to the country by mr. curry's generosity, the united states said that did not alter the matter, and the three dollars and forty cents would be subtracted from the secretary's eighteen hundred dollar salary--and it was! the matter of printing was from the beginning an interesting feature of the new government's difficulties. the secretary was sworn to obey his volume of written "instructions," and these commanded him to do two certain things without fail, viz.: . get the house and senate journals printed; and, . for this work, pay one dollar and fifty cents per "thousand" for composition, and one dollar and fifty cents per "token" for press-work, in greenbacks. it was easy to swear to do these two things, but it was entirely impossible to do more than one of them. when greenbacks had gone down to forty cents on the dollar, the prices regularly charged everybody by printing establishments were one dollar and fifty cents per "thousand" and one dollar and fifty cents per "token," in gold. the "instructions" commanded that the secretary regard a paper dollar issued by the government as equal to any other dollar issued by the government. hence the printing of the journals was discontinued. then the united states sternly rebuked the secretary for disregarding the "instructions," and warned him to correct his ways. wherefore he got some printing done, forwarded the bill to washington with full exhibits of the high prices of things in the territory, and called attention to a printed market report wherein it would be observed that even hay was two hundred and fifty dollars a ton. the united states responded by subtracting the printing-bill from the secretary's suffering salary--and moreover remarked with dense gravity that he would find nothing in his "instructions" requiring him to purchase hay! nothing in this world is palled in such impenetrable obscurity as a u.s. treasury comptroller's understanding. the very fires of the hereafter could get up nothing more than a fitful glimmer in it. in the days i speak of he never could be made to comprehend why it was that twenty thousand dollars would not go as far in nevada, where all commodities ranged at an enormous figure, as it would in the other territories, where exceeding cheapness was the rule. he was an officer who looked out for the little expenses all the time. the secretary of the territory kept his office in his bedroom, as i before remarked; and he charged the united states no rent, although his "instructions" provided for that item and he could have justly taken advantage of it (a thing which i would have done with more than lightning promptness if i had been secretary myself). but the united states never applauded this devotion. indeed, i think my country was ashamed to have so improvident a person in its employ. those "instructions" (we used to read a chapter from them every morning, as intellectual gymnastics, and a couple of chapters in sunday school every sabbath, for they treated of all subjects under the sun and had much valuable religious matter in them along with the other statistics) those "instructions" commanded that pen-knives, envelopes, pens and writing-paper be furnished the members of the legislature. so the secretary made the purchase and the distribution. the knives cost three dollars apiece. there was one too many, and the secretary gave it to the clerk of the house of representatives. the united states said the clerk of the house was not a "member" of the legislature, and took that three dollars out of the secretary's salary, as usual. white men charged three or four dollars a "load" for sawing up stove-wood. the secretary was sagacious enough to know that the united states would never pay any such price as that; so he got an indian to saw up a load of office wood at one dollar and a half. he made out the usual voucher, but signed no name to it--simply appended a note explaining that an indian had done the work, and had done it in a very capable and satisfactory way, but could not sign the voucher owing to lack of ability in the necessary direction. the secretary had to pay that dollar and a half. he thought the united states would admire both his economy and his honesty in getting the work done at half price and not putting a pretended indian's signature to the voucher, but the united states did not see it in that light. the united states was too much accustomed to employing dollar-and-a-half thieves in all manner of official capacities to regard his explanation of the voucher as having any foundation in fact. but the next time the indian sawed wood for us i taught him to make a cross at the bottom of the voucher--it looked like a cross that had been drunk a year--and then i "witnessed" it and it went through all right. the united states never said a word. i was sorry i had not made the voucher for a thousand loads of wood instead of one. the government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and i think i might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if i had remained in the public service a year or two. that was a fine collection of sovereigns, that first nevada legislature. they levied taxes to the amount of thirty or forty thousand dollars and ordered expenditures to the extent of about a million. yet they had their little periodical explosions of economy like all other bodies of the kind. a member proposed to save three dollars a day to the nation by dispensing with the chaplain. and yet that short-sighted man needed the chaplain more than any other member, perhaps, for he generally sat with his feet on his desk, eating raw turnips, during the morning prayer. the legislature sat sixty days, and passed private tollroad franchises all the time. when they adjourned it was estimated that every citizen owned about three franchises, and it was believed that unless congress gave the territory another degree of longitude there would not be room enough to accommodate the toll-roads. the ends of them were hanging over the boundary line everywhere like a fringe. the fact is, the freighting business had grown to such important proportions that there was nearly as much excitement over suddenly acquired toll-road fortunes as over the wonderful silver mines. chapter xxvi. by and by i was smitten with the silver fever. "prospecting parties" were leaving for the mountains every day, and discovering and taking possession of rich silver-bearing lodes and ledges of quartz. plainly this was the road to fortune. the great "gould and curry" mine was held at three or four hundred dollars a foot when we arrived; but in two months it had sprung up to eight hundred. the "ophir" had been worth only a mere trifle, a year gone by, and now it was selling at nearly four thousand dollars a foot! not a mine could be named that had not experienced an astonishing advance in value within a short time. everybody was talking about these marvels. go where you would, you heard nothing else, from morning till far into the night. tom so-and-so had sold out of the "amanda smith" for $ , --hadn't a cent when he "took up" the ledge six months ago. john jones had sold half his interest in the "bald eagle and mary ann" for $ , , gold coin, and gone to the states for his family. the widow brewster had "struck it rich" in the "golden fleece" and sold ten feet for $ , --hadn't money enough to buy a crape bonnet when sing-sing tommy killed her husband at baldy johnson's wake last spring. the "last chance" had found a "clay casing" and knew they were "right on the ledge"--consequence, "feet" that went begging yesterday were worth a brick house apiece to-day, and seedy owners who could not get trusted for a drink at any bar in the country yesterday were roaring drunk on champagne to-day and had hosts of warm personal friends in a town where they had forgotten how to bow or shake hands from long-continued want of practice. johnny morgan, a common loafer, had gone to sleep in the gutter and waked up worth a hundred thousand dollars, in consequence of the decision in the "lady franklin and rough and ready" lawsuit. and so on--day in and day out the talk pelted our ears and the excitement waxed hotter and hotter around us. i would have been more or less than human if i had not gone mad like the rest. cart-loads of solid silver bricks, as large as pigs of lead, were arriving from the mills every day, and such sights as that gave substance to the wild talk about me. i succumbed and grew as frenzied as the craziest. every few days news would come of the discovery of a bran-new mining region; immediately the papers would teem with accounts of its richness, and away the surplus population would scamper to take possession. by the time i was fairly inoculated with the disease, "esmeralda" had just had a run and "humboldt" was beginning to shriek for attention. "humboldt! humboldt!" was the new cry, and straightway humboldt, the newest of the new, the richest of the rich, the most marvellous of the marvellous discoveries in silver-land was occupying two columns of the public prints to "esmeralda's" one. i was just on the point of starting to esmeralda, but turned with the tide and got ready for humboldt. that the reader may see what moved me, and what would as surely have moved him had he been there, i insert here one of the newspaper letters of the day. it and several other letters from the same calm hand were the main means of converting me. i shall not garble the extract, but put it in just as it appeared in the daily territorial enterprise: but what about our mines? i shall be candid with you. i shall express an honest opinion, based upon a thorough examination. humboldt county is the richest mineral region upon god's footstool. each mountain range is gorged with the precious ores. humboldt is the true golconda. the other day an assay of mere croppings yielded exceeding four thousand dollars to the ton. a week or two ago an assay of just such surface developments made returns of seven thousand dollars to the ton. our mountains are full of rambling prospectors. each day and almost every hour reveals new and more startling evidences of the profuse and intensified wealth of our favored county. the metal is not silver alone. there are distinct ledges of auriferous ore. a late discovery plainly evinces cinnabar. the coarser metals are in gross abundance. lately evidences of bituminous coal have been detected. my theory has ever been that coal is a ligneous formation. i told col. whitman, in times past, that the neighborhood of dayton (nevada) betrayed no present or previous manifestations of a ligneous foundation, and that hence i had no confidence in his lauded coal mines. i repeated the same doctrine to the exultant coal discoverers of humboldt. i talked with my friend captain burch on the subject. my pyrhanism vanished upon his statement that in the very region referred to he had seen petrified trees of the length of two hundred feet. then is the fact established that huge forests once cast their grim shadows over this remote section. i am firm in the coal faith. have no fears of the mineral resources of humboldt county. they are immense--incalculable. let me state one or two things which will help the reader to better comprehend certain items in the above. at this time, our near neighbor, gold hill, was the most successful silver mining locality in nevada. it was from there that more than half the daily shipments of silver bricks came. "very rich" (and scarce) gold hill ore yielded from $ to $ to the ton; but the usual yield was only $ to $ per ton--that is to say, each hundred pounds of ore yielded from one dollar to two dollars. but the reader will perceive by the above extract, that in humboldt from one fourth to nearly half the mass was silver! that is to say, every one hundred pounds of the ore had from two hundred dollars up to about three hundred and fifty in it. some days later this same correspondent wrote: i have spoken of the vast and almost fabulous wealth of this region--it is incredible. the intestines of our mountains are gorged with precious ore to plethora. i have said that nature has so shaped our mountains as to furnish most excellent facilities for the working of our mines. i have also told you that the country about here is pregnant with the finest mill sites in the world. but what is the mining history of humboldt? the sheba mine is in the hands of energetic san francisco capitalists. it would seem that the ore is combined with metals that render it difficult of reduction with our imperfect mountain machinery. the proprietors have combined the capital and labor hinted at in my exordium. they are toiling and probing. their tunnel has reached the length of one hundred feet. from primal assays alone, coupled with the development of the mine and public confidence in the continuance of effort, the stock had reared itself to eight hundred dollars market value. i do not know that one ton of the ore has been converted into current metal. i do know that there are many lodes in this section that surpass the sheba in primal assay value. listen a moment to the calculations of the sheba operators. they purpose transporting the ore concentrated to europe. the conveyance from star city (its locality) to virginia city will cost seventy dollars per ton; from virginia to san francisco, forty dollars per ton; from thence to liverpool, its destination, ten dollars per ton. their idea is that its conglomerate metals will reimburse them their cost of original extraction, the price of transportation, and the expense of reduction, and that then a ton of the raw ore will net them twelve hundred dollars. the estimate may be extravagant. cut it in twain, and the product is enormous, far transcending any previous developments of our racy territory. a very common calculation is that many of our mines will yield five hundred dollars to the ton. such fecundity throws the gould & curry, the ophir and the mexican, of your neighborhood, in the darkest shadow. i have given you the estimate of the value of a single developed mine. its richness is indexed by its market valuation. the people of humboldt county are feet crazy. as i write, our towns are near deserted. they look as languid as a consumptive girl. what has become of our sinewy and athletic fellow-citizens? they are coursing through ravines and over mountain tops. their tracks are visible in every direction. occasionally a horseman will dash among us. his steed betrays hard usage. he alights before his adobe dwelling, hastily exchanges courtesies with his townsmen, hurries to an assay office and from thence to the district recorder's. in the morning, having renewed his provisional supplies, he is off again on his wild and unbeaten route. why, the fellow numbers already his feet by the thousands. he is the horse-leech. he has the craving stomach of the shark or anaconda. he would conquer metallic worlds. this was enough. the instant we had finished reading the above article, four of us decided to go to humboldt. we commenced getting ready at once. and we also commenced upbraiding ourselves for not deciding sooner--for we were in terror lest all the rich mines would be found and secured before we got there, and we might have to put up with ledges that would not yield more than two or three hundred dollars a ton, maybe. an hour before, i would have felt opulent if i had owned ten feet in a gold hill mine whose ore produced twenty-five dollars to the ton; now i was already annoyed at the prospect of having to put up with mines the poorest of which would be a marvel in gold hill. chapter xxvii. hurry, was the word! we wasted no time. our party consisted of four persons--a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and myself. we bought a wagon and two miserable old horses. we put eighteen hundred pounds of provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove out of carson on a chilly december afternoon. the horses were so weak and old that we soon found that it would be better if one or two of us got out and walked. it was an improvement. next, we found that it would be better if a third man got out. that was an improvement also. it was at this time that i volunteered to drive, although i had never driven a harnessed horse before and many a man in such a position would have felt fairly excused from such a responsibility. but in a little while it was found that it would be a fine thing if the drive got out and walked also. it was at this time that i resigned the position of driver, and never resumed it again. within the hour, we found that it would not only be better, but was absolutely necessary, that we four, taking turns, two at a time, should put our hands against the end of the wagon and push it through the sand, leaving the feeble horses little to do but keep out of the way and hold up the tongue. perhaps it is well for one to know his fate at first, and get reconciled to it. we had learned ours in one afternoon. it was plain that we had to walk through the sand and shove that wagon and those horses two hundred miles. so we accepted the situation, and from that time forth we never rode. more than that, we stood regular and nearly constant watches pushing up behind. we made seven miles, and camped in the desert. young clagett (now member of congress from montana) unharnessed and fed and watered the horses; oliphant and i cut sagebrush, built the fire and brought water to cook with; and old mr. ballou the blacksmith did the cooking. this division of labor, and this appointment, was adhered to throughout the journey. we had no tent, and so we slept under our blankets in the open plain. we were so tired that we slept soundly. we were fifteen days making the trip--two hundred miles; thirteen, rather, for we lay by a couple of days, in one place, to let the horses rest. we could really have accomplished the journey in ten days if we had towed the horses behind the wagon, but we did not think of that until it was too late, and so went on shoving the horses and the wagon too when we might have saved half the labor. parties who met us, occasionally, advised us to put the horses in the wagon, but mr. ballou, through whose iron-clad earnestness no sarcasm could pierce, said that that would not do, because the provisions were exposed and would suffer, the horses being "bituminous from long deprivation." the reader will excuse me from translating. what mr. ballou customarily meant, when he used a long word, was a secret between himself and his maker. he was one of the best and kindest hearted men that ever graced a humble sphere of life. he was gentleness and simplicity itself--and unselfishness, too. although he was more than twice as old as the eldest of us, he never gave himself any airs, privileges, or exemptions on that account. he did a young man's share of the work; and did his share of conversing and entertaining from the general stand-point of any age--not from the arrogant, overawing summit-height of sixty years. his one striking peculiarity was his partingtonian fashion of loving and using big words for their own sakes, and independent of any bearing they might have upon the thought he was purposing to convey. he always let his ponderous syllables fall with an easy unconsciousness that left them wholly without offensiveness. in truth his air was so natural and so simple that one was always catching himself accepting his stately sentences as meaning something, when they really meant nothing in the world. if a word was long and grand and resonant, that was sufficient to win the old man's love, and he would drop that word into the most out-of-the-way place in a sentence or a subject, and be as pleased with it as if it were perfectly luminous with meaning. we four always spread our common stock of blankets together on the frozen ground, and slept side by side; and finding that our foolish, long-legged hound pup had a deal of animal heat in him, oliphant got to admitting him to the bed, between himself and mr. ballou, hugging the dog's warm back to his breast and finding great comfort in it. but in the night the pup would get stretchy and brace his feet against the old man's back and shove, grunting complacently the while; and now and then, being warm and snug, grateful and happy, he would paw the old man's back simply in excess of comfort; and at yet other times he would dream of the chase and in his sleep tug at the old man's back hair and bark in his ear. the old gentleman complained mildly about these familiarities, at last, and when he got through with his statement he said that such a dog as that was not a proper animal to admit to bed with tired men, because he was "so meretricious in his movements and so organic in his emotions." we turned the dog out. it was a hard, wearing, toilsome journey, but it had its bright side; for after each day was done and our wolfish hunger appeased with a hot supper of fried bacon, bread, molasses and black coffee, the pipe-smoking, song-singing and yarn-spinning around the evening camp-fire in the still solitudes of the desert was a happy, care-free sort of recreation that seemed the very summit and culmination of earthly luxury. it is a kind of life that has a potent charm for all men, whether city or country-bred. we are descended from desert-lounging arabs, and countless ages of growth toward perfect civilization have failed to root out of us the nomadic instinct. we all confess to a gratified thrill at the thought of "camping out." once we made twenty-five miles in a day, and once we made forty miles (through the great american desert), and ten miles beyond--fifty in all --in twenty-three hours, without halting to eat, drink or rest. to stretch out and go to sleep, even on stony and frozen ground, after pushing a wagon and two horses fifty miles, is a delight so supreme that for the moment it almost seems cheap at the price. we camped two days in the neighborhood of the "sink of the humboldt." we tried to use the strong alkaline water of the sink, but it would not answer. it was like drinking lye, and not weak lye, either. it left a taste in the mouth, bitter and every way execrable, and a burning in the stomach that was very uncomfortable. we put molasses in it, but that helped it very little; we added a pickle, yet the alkali was the prominent taste and so it was unfit for drinking. the coffee we made of this water was the meanest compound man has yet invented. it was really viler to the taste than the unameliorated water itself. mr. ballou, being the architect and builder of the beverage felt constrained to endorse and uphold it, and so drank half a cup, by little sips, making shift to praise it faintly the while, but finally threw out the remainder, and said frankly it was "too technical for him." but presently we found a spring of fresh water, convenient, and then, with nothing to mar our enjoyment, and no stragglers to interrupt it, we entered into our rest. chapter xxviii. after leaving the sink, we traveled along the humboldt river a little way. people accustomed to the monster mile-wide mississippi, grow accustomed to associating the term "river" with a high degree of watery grandeur. consequently, such people feel rather disappointed when they stand on the shores of the humboldt or the carson and find that a "river" in nevada is a sickly rivulet which is just the counterpart of the erie canal in all respects save that the canal is twice as long and four times as deep. one of the pleasantest and most invigorating exercises one can contrive is to run and jump across the humboldt river till he is overheated, and then drink it dry. on the fifteenth day we completed our march of two hundred miles and entered unionville, humboldt county, in the midst of a driving snow-storm. unionville consisted of eleven cabins and a liberty-pole. six of the cabins were strung along one side of a deep canyon, and the other five faced them. the rest of the landscape was made up of bleak mountain walls that rose so high into the sky from both sides of the canyon that the village was left, as it were, far down in the bottom of a crevice. it was always daylight on the mountain tops a long time before the darkness lifted and revealed unionville. we built a small, rude cabin in the side of the crevice and roofed it with canvas, leaving a corner open to serve as a chimney, through which the cattle used to tumble occasionally, at night, and mash our furniture and interrupt our sleep. it was very cold weather and fuel was scarce. indians brought brush and bushes several miles on their backs; and when we could catch a laden indian it was well--and when we could not (which was the rule, not the exception), we shivered and bore it. i confess, without shame, that i expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground. i expected to see it glittering in the sun on the mountain summits. i said nothing about this, for some instinct told me that i might possibly have an exaggerated idea about it, and so if i betrayed my thought i might bring derision upon myself. yet i was as perfectly satisfied in my own mind as i could be of anything, that i was going to gather up, in a day or two, or at furthest a week or two, silver enough to make me satisfactorily wealthy--and so my fancy was already busy with plans for spending this money. the first opportunity that offered, i sauntered carelessly away from the cabin, keeping an eye on the other boys, and stopping and contemplating the sky when they seemed to be observing me; but as soon as the coast was manifestly clear, i fled away as guiltily as a thief might have done and never halted till i was far beyond sight and call. then i began my search with a feverish excitement that was brimful of expectation--almost of certainty. i crawled about the ground, seizing and examining bits of stone, blowing the dust from them or rubbing them on my clothes, and then peering at them with anxious hope. presently i found a bright fragment and my heart bounded! i hid behind a boulder and polished it and scrutinized it with a nervous eagerness and a delight that was more pronounced than absolute certainty itself could have afforded. the more i examined the fragment the more i was convinced that i had found the door to fortune. i marked the spot and carried away my specimen. up and down the rugged mountain side i searched, with always increasing interest and always augmenting gratitude that i had come to humboldt and come in time. of all the experiences of my life, this secret search among the hidden treasures of silver-land was the nearest to unmarred ecstasy. it was a delirious revel. by and by, in the bed of a shallow rivulet, i found a deposit of shining yellow scales, and my breath almost forsook me! a gold mine, and in my simplicity i had been content with vulgar silver! i was so excited that i half believed my overwrought imagination was deceiving me. then a fear came upon me that people might be observing me and would guess my secret. moved by this thought, i made a circuit of the place, and ascended a knoll to reconnoiter. solitude. no creature was near. then i returned to my mine, fortifying myself against possible disappointment, but my fears were groundless--the shining scales were still there. i set about scooping them out, and for an hour i toiled down the windings of the stream and robbed its bed. but at last the descending sun warned me to give up the quest, and i turned homeward laden with wealth. as i walked along i could not help smiling at the thought of my being so excited over my fragment of silver when a nobler metal was almost under my nose. in this little time the former had so fallen in my estimation that once or twice i was on the point of throwing it away. the boys were as hungry as usual, but i could eat nothing. neither could i talk. i was full of dreams and far away. their conversation interrupted the flow of my fancy somewhat, and annoyed me a little, too. i despised the sordid and commonplace things they talked about. but as they proceeded, it began to amuse me. it grew to be rare fun to hear them planning their poor little economies and sighing over possible privations and distresses when a gold mine, all our own, lay within sight of the cabin and i could point it out at any moment. smothered hilarity began to oppress me, presently. it was hard to resist the impulse to burst out with exultation and reveal everything; but i did resist. i said within myself that i would filter the great news through my lips calmly and be serene as a summer morning while i watched its effect in their faces. i said: "where have you all been?" "prospecting." "what did you find?" "nothing." "nothing? what do you think of the country?" "can't tell, yet," said mr. ballou, who was an old gold miner, and had likewise had considerable experience among the silver mines. "well, haven't you formed any sort of opinion?" "yes, a sort of a one. it's fair enough here, may be, but overrated. seven thousand dollar ledges are scarce, though. "that sheba may be rich enough, but we don't own it; and besides, the rock is so full of base metals that all the science in the world can't work it. we'll not starve, here, but we'll not get rich, i'm afraid." "so you think the prospect is pretty poor?" "no name for it!" "well, we'd better go back, hadn't we?" "oh, not yet--of course not. we'll try it a riffle, first." "suppose, now--this is merely a supposition, you know--suppose you could find a ledge that would yield, say, a hundred and fifty dollars a ton --would that satisfy you?" "try us once!" from the whole party. "or suppose--merely a supposition, of course--suppose you were to find a ledge that would yield two thousand dollars a ton--would that satisfy you?" "here--what do you mean? what are you coming at? is there some mystery behind all this?" "never mind. i am not saying anything. you know perfectly well there are no rich mines here--of course you do. because you have been around and examined for yourselves. anybody would know that, that had been around. but just for the sake of argument, suppose--in a kind of general way--suppose some person were to tell you that two-thousand-dollar ledges were simply contemptible--contemptible, understand--and that right yonder in sight of this very cabin there were piles of pure gold and pure silver--oceans of it--enough to make you all rich in twenty-four hours! come!" "i should say he was as crazy as a loon!" said old ballou, but wild with excitement, nevertheless. "gentlemen," said i, "i don't say anything--i haven't been around, you know, and of course don't know anything--but all i ask of you is to cast your eye on that, for instance, and tell me what you think of it!" and i tossed my treasure before them. there was an eager scramble for it, and a closing of heads together over it under the candle-light. then old ballou said: "think of it? i think it is nothing but a lot of granite rubbish and nasty glittering mica that isn't worth ten cents an acre!" so vanished my dream. so melted my wealth away. so toppled my airy castle to the earth and left me stricken and forlorn. moralizing, i observed, then, that "all that glitters is not gold." mr. ballou said i could go further than that, and lay it up among my treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold. so i learned then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. however, like the rest of the world, i still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. commonplace human nature cannot rise above that. chapter xxix. true knowledge of the nature of silver mining came fast enough. we went out "prospecting" with mr. ballou. we climbed the mountain sides, and clambered among sage-brush, rocks and snow till we were ready to drop with exhaustion, but found no silver--nor yet any gold. day after day we did this. now and then we came upon holes burrowed a few feet into the declivities and apparently abandoned; and now and then we found one or two listless men still burrowing. but there was no appearance of silver. these holes were the beginnings of tunnels, and the purpose was to drive them hundreds of feet into the mountain, and some day tap the hidden ledge where the silver was. some day! it seemed far enough away, and very hopeless and dreary. day after day we toiled, and climbed and searched, and we younger partners grew sicker and still sicker of the promiseless toil. at last we halted under a beetling rampart of rock which projected from the earth high upon the mountain. mr. ballou broke off some fragments with a hammer, and examined them long and attentively with a small eye-glass; threw them away and broke off more; said this rock was quartz, and quartz was the sort of rock that contained silver. contained it! i had thought that at least it would be caked on the outside of it like a kind of veneering. he still broke off pieces and critically examined them, now and then wetting the piece with his tongue and applying the glass. at last he exclaimed: "we've got it!" we were full of anxiety in a moment. the rock was clean and white, where it was broken, and across it ran a ragged thread of blue. he said that that little thread had silver in it, mixed with base metal, such as lead and antimony, and other rubbish, and that there was a speck or two of gold visible. after a great deal of effort we managed to discern some little fine yellow specks, and judged that a couple of tons of them massed together might make a gold dollar, possibly. we were not jubilant, but mr. ballou said there were worse ledges in the world than that. he saved what he called the "richest" piece of the rock, in order to determine its value by the process called the "fire-assay." then we named the mine "monarch of the mountains" (modesty of nomenclature is not a prominent feature in the mines), and mr. ballou wrote out and stuck up the following "notice," preserving a copy to be entered upon the books in the mining recorder's office in the town. "notice." "we the undersigned claim three claims, of three hundred feet each (and one for discovery), on this silver-bearing quartz lead or lode, extending north and south from this notice, with all its dips, spurs, and angles, variations and sinuosities, together with fifty feet of ground on either side for working the same." we put our names to it and tried to feel that our fortunes were made. but when we talked the matter all over with mr. ballou, we felt depressed and dubious. he said that this surface quartz was not all there was of our mine; but that the wall or ledge of rock called the "monarch of the mountains," extended down hundreds and hundreds of feet into the earth --he illustrated by saying it was like a curb-stone, and maintained a nearly uniform thickness-say twenty feet--away down into the bowels of the earth, and was perfectly distinct from the casing rock on each side of it; and that it kept to itself, and maintained its distinctive character always, no matter how deep it extended into the earth or how far it stretched itself through and across the hills and valleys. he said it might be a mile deep and ten miles long, for all we knew; and that wherever we bored into it above ground or below, we would find gold and silver in it, but no gold or silver in the meaner rock it was cased between. and he said that down in the great depths of the ledge was its richness, and the deeper it went the richer it grew. therefore, instead of working here on the surface, we must either bore down into the rock with a shaft till we came to where it was rich--say a hundred feet or so --or else we must go down into the valley and bore a long tunnel into the mountain side and tap the ledge far under the earth. to do either was plainly the labor of months; for we could blast and bore only a few feet a day--some five or six. but this was not all. he said that after we got the ore out it must be hauled in wagons to a distant silver-mill, ground up, and the silver extracted by a tedious and costly process. our fortune seemed a century away! but we went to work. we decided to sink a shaft. so, for a week we climbed the mountain, laden with picks, drills, gads, crowbars, shovels, cans of blasting powder and coils of fuse and strove with might and main. at first the rock was broken and loose and we dug it up with picks and threw it out with shovels, and the hole progressed very well. but the rock became more compact, presently, and gads and crowbars came into play. but shortly nothing could make an impression but blasting powder. that was the weariest work! one of us held the iron drill in its place and another would strike with an eight-pound sledge--it was like driving nails on a large scale. in the course of an hour or two the drill would reach a depth of two or three feet, making a hole a couple of inches in diameter. we would put in a charge of powder, insert half a yard of fuse, pour in sand and gravel and ram it down, then light the fuse and run. when the explosion came and the rocks and smoke shot into the air, we would go back and find about a bushel of that hard, rebellious quartz jolted out. nothing more. one week of this satisfied me. i resigned. clagget and oliphant followed. our shaft was only twelve feet deep. we decided that a tunnel was the thing we wanted. so we went down the mountain side and worked a week; at the end of which time we had blasted a tunnel about deep enough to hide a hogshead in, and judged that about nine hundred feet more of it would reach the ledge. i resigned again, and the other boys only held out one day longer. we decided that a tunnel was not what we wanted. we wanted a ledge that was already "developed." there were none in the camp. we dropped the "monarch" for the time being. meantime the camp was filling up with people, and there was a constantly growing excitement about our humboldt mines. we fell victims to the epidemic and strained every nerve to acquire more "feet." we prospected and took up new claims, put "notices" on them and gave them grandiloquent names. we traded some of our "feet" for "feet" in other people's claims. in a little while we owned largely in the "gray eagle," the "columbiana," the "branch mint," the "maria jane," the "universe," the "root-hog-or-die," the "samson and delilah," the "treasure trove," the "golconda," the "sultana," the "boomerang," the "great republic," the "grand mogul," and fifty other "mines" that had never been molested by a shovel or scratched with a pick. we had not less than thirty thousand "feet" apiece in the "richest mines on earth" as the frenzied cant phrased it--and were in debt to the butcher. we were stark mad with excitement--drunk with happiness--smothered under mountains of prospective wealth--arrogantly compassionate toward the plodding millions who knew not our marvellous canyon--but our credit was not good at the grocer's. it was the strangest phase of life one can imagine. it was a beggars' revel. there was nothing doing in the district--no mining--no milling --no productive effort--no income--and not enough money in the entire camp to buy a corner lot in an eastern village, hardly; and yet a stranger would have supposed he was walking among bloated millionaires. prospecting parties swarmed out of town with the first flush of dawn, and swarmed in again at nightfall laden with spoil--rocks. nothing but rocks. every man's pockets were full of them; the floor of his cabin was littered with them; they were disposed in labeled rows on his shelves. chapter xxx. i met men at every turn who owned from one thousand to thirty thousand "feet" in undeveloped silver mines, every single foot of which they believed would shortly be worth from fifty to a thousand dollars--and as often as any other way they were men who had not twenty-five dollars in the world. every man you met had his new mine to boast of, and his "specimens" ready; and if the opportunity offered, he would infallibly back you into a corner and offer as a favor to you, not to him, to part with just a few feet in the "golden age," or the "sarah jane," or some other unknown stack of croppings, for money enough to get a "square meal" with, as the phrase went. and you were never to reveal that he had made you the offer at such a ruinous price, for it was only out of friendship for you that he was willing to make the sacrifice. then he would fish a piece of rock out of his pocket, and after looking mysteriously around as if he feared he might be waylaid and robbed if caught with such wealth in his possession, he would dab the rock against his tongue, clap an eyeglass to it, and exclaim: "look at that! right there in that red dirt! see it? see the specks of gold? and the streak of silver? that's from the uncle abe. there's a hundred thousand tons like that in sight! right in sight, mind you! and when we get down on it and the ledge comes in solid, it will be the richest thing in the world! look at the assay! i don't want you to believe me--look at the assay!" then he would get out a greasy sheet of paper which showed that the portion of rock assayed had given evidence of containing silver and gold in the proportion of so many hundreds or thousands of dollars to the ton. i little knew, then, that the custom was to hunt out the richest piece of rock and get it assayed! very often, that piece, the size of a filbert, was the only fragment in a ton that had a particle of metal in it--and yet the assay made it pretend to represent the average value of the ton of rubbish it came from! on such a system of assaying as that, the humboldt world had gone crazy. on the authority of such assays its newspaper correspondents were frothing about rock worth four and seven thousand dollars a ton! and does the reader remember, a few pages back, the calculations, of a quoted correspondent, whereby the ore is to be mined and shipped all the way to england, the metals extracted, and the gold and silver contents received back by the miners as clear profit, the copper, antimony and other things in the ore being sufficient to pay all the expenses incurred? everybody's head was full of such "calculations" as those --such raving insanity, rather. few people took work into their calculations--or outlay of money either; except the work and expenditures of other people. we never touched our tunnel or our shaft again. why? because we judged that we had learned the real secret of success in silver mining--which was, not to mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our brows and the labor of our hands, but to sell the ledges to the dull slaves of toil and let them do the mining! before leaving carson, the secretary and i had purchased "feet" from various esmeralda stragglers. we had expected immediate returns of bullion, but were only afflicted with regular and constant "assessments" instead--demands for money wherewith to develop the said mines. these assessments had grown so oppressive that it seemed necessary to look into the matter personally. therefore i projected a pilgrimage to carson and thence to esmeralda. i bought a horse and started, in company with mr. ballou and a gentleman named ollendorff, a prussian--not the party who has inflicted so much suffering on the world with his wretched foreign grammars, with their interminable repetitions of questions which never have occurred and are never likely to occur in any conversation among human beings. we rode through a snow-storm for two or three days, and arrived at "honey lake smith's," a sort of isolated inn on the carson river. it was a two-story log house situated on a small knoll in the midst of the vast basin or desert through which the sickly carson winds its melancholy way. close to the house were the overland stage stables, built of sun-dried bricks. there was not another building within several leagues of the place. towards sunset about twenty hay-wagons arrived and camped around the house and all the teamsters came in to supper--a very, very rough set. there were one or two overland stage drivers there, also, and half a dozen vagabonds and stragglers; consequently the house was well crowded. we walked out, after supper, and visited a small indian camp in the vicinity. the indians were in a great hurry about something, and were packing up and getting away as fast as they could. in their broken english they said, "by'm-by, heap water!" and by the help of signs made us understand that in their opinion a flood was coming. the weather was perfectly clear, and this was not the rainy season. there was about a foot of water in the insignificant river--or maybe two feet; the stream was not wider than a back alley in a village, and its banks were scarcely higher than a man's head. so, where was the flood to come from? we canvassed the subject awhile and then concluded it was a ruse, and that the indians had some better reason for leaving in a hurry than fears of a flood in such an exceedingly dry time. at seven in the evening we went to bed in the second story--with our clothes on, as usual, and all three in the same bed, for every available space on the floors, chairs, etc., was in request, and even then there was barely room for the housing of the inn's guests. an hour later we were awakened by a great turmoil, and springing out of bed we picked our way nimbly among the ranks of snoring teamsters on the floor and got to the front windows of the long room. a glance revealed a strange spectacle, under the moonlight. the crooked carson was full to the brim, and its waters were raging and foaming in the wildest way--sweeping around the sharp bends at a furious speed, and bearing on their surface a chaos of logs, brush and all sorts of rubbish. a depression, where its bed had once been, in other times, was already filling, and in one or two places the water was beginning to wash over the main bank. men were flying hither and thither, bringing cattle and wagons close up to the house, for the spot of high ground on which it stood extended only some thirty feet in front and about a hundred in the rear. close to the old river bed just spoken of, stood a little log stable, and in this our horses were lodged. while we looked, the waters increased so fast in this place that in a few minutes a torrent was roaring by the little stable and its margin encroaching steadily on the logs. we suddenly realized that this flood was not a mere holiday spectacle, but meant damage--and not only to the small log stable but to the overland buildings close to the main river, for the waves had now come ashore and were creeping about the foundations and invading the great hay-corral adjoining. we ran down and joined the crowd of excited men and frightened animals. we waded knee-deep into the log stable, unfastened the horses and waded out almost waist-deep, so fast the waters increased. then the crowd rushed in a body to the hay-corral and began to tumble down the huge stacks of baled hay and roll the bales up on the high ground by the house. meantime it was discovered that owens, an overland driver, was missing, and a man ran to the large stable, and wading in, boot-top deep, discovered him asleep in his bed, awoke him, and waded out again. but owens was drowsy and resumed his nap; but only for a minute or two, for presently he turned in his bed, his hand dropped over the side and came in contact with the cold water! it was up level with the mattress! he waded out, breast-deep, almost, and the next moment the sun-burned bricks melted down like sugar and the big building crumbled to a ruin and was washed away in a twinkling. at eleven o'clock only the roof of the little log stable was out of water, and our inn was on an island in mid-ocean. as far as the eye could reach, in the moonlight, there was no desert visible, but only a level waste of shining water. the indians were true prophets, but how did they get their information? i am not able to answer the question. we remained cooped up eight days and nights with that curious crew. swearing, drinking and card playing were the order of the day, and occasionally a fight was thrown in for variety. dirt and vermin--but let us forget those features; their profusion is simply inconceivable--it is better that they remain so. there were two men----however, this chapter is long enough. life on the mississippi by mark twain part . chapter enchantments and enchanters the largest annual event in new orleans is a something which we arrived too late to sample--the mardi-gras festivities. i saw the procession of the mystic crew of comus there, twenty-four years ago--with knights and nobles and so on, clothed in silken and golden paris-made gorgeousnesses, planned and bought for that single night's use; and in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquerie--a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking and flickering torches; but it is said that in these latter days the spectacle is mightily augmented, as to cost, splendor, and variety. there is a chief personage--'rex;' and if i remember rightly, neither this king nor any of his great following of subordinates is known to any outsider. all these people are gentlemen of position and consequence; and it is a proud thing to belong to the organization; so the mystery in which they hide their personality is merely for romance's sake, and not on account of the police. mardi-gras is of course a relic of the french and spanish occupation; but i judge that the religious feature has been pretty well knocked out of it now. sir walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary, and he will stay. his medieval business, supplemented by the monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy- land, is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabble of the priest's day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holy one is reached. this mardi-gras pageant was the exclusive possession of new orleans until recently. but now it has spread to memphis and st. louis and baltimore. it has probably reached its limit. it is a thing which could hardly exist in the practical north; would certainly last but a very brief time; as brief a time as it would last in london. for the soul of it is the romantic, not the funny and the grotesque. take away the romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles, and mardi-gras would die, down there in the south. the very feature that keeps it alive in the south--girly-girly romance--would kill it in the north or in london. puck and punch, and the press universal, would fall upon it and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would be also its last. against the crimes of the french revolution and of bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the revolution broke the chains of the ancien regime and of the church, and made of a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty, that whereas crowned heads in europe were gods before, they are only men, since, and can never be gods again, but only figureheads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which bonaparte and the revolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress. then comes sir walter scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. he did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our south they flourish pretty forcefully still. not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. there, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the walter scott middle-age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. but for the sir walter disease, the character of the southerner--or southron, according to sir walter's starchier way of phrasing it--would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the south would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. it was sir walter that made every gentleman in the south a major or a colonel, or a general or a judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. for it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of sir walter. sir walter had so large a hand in making southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. it seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for sir walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. the southerner of the american revolution owned slaves; so did the southerner of the civil war: but the former resembles the latter as an englishman resembles a frenchman. the change of character can be traced rather more easily to sir walter's influence than to that of any other thing or person. one may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds. if one take up a northern or southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality--all imitated from sir walter, and sufficiently badly done, too--innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact. this sort of literature being the fashion in both sections of the country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition; and as a consequence, the south was able to show as many well-known literary names, proportioned to population, as the north could. but a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair competition between north and south. for the north has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the southern writer still clings to it-- clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence. there is as much literary talent in the south, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language. but when a southerner of genius writes modern english, his book goes upon crutches no longer, but upon wings; and they carry it swiftly all about america and england, and through the great english reprint publishing houses of germany--as witness the experience of mr. cable and uncle remus, two of the very few southern authors who do not write in the southern style. instead of three or four widely-known literary names, the south ought to have a dozen or two--and will have them when sir walter's time is out. a curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by 'don quixote' and those wrought by 'ivanhoe.' the first swept the world's admiration for the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. as far as our south is concerned, the good work done by cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has scott's pernicious work undermined it. chapter uncle remus and mr. cable mr. joel chandler harris ('uncle remus') was to arrive from atlanta at seven o'clock sunday morning; so we got up and received him. we were able to detect him among the crowd of arrivals at the hotel-counter by his correspondence with a description of him which had been furnished us from a trustworthy source. he was said to be undersized, red-haired, and somewhat freckled. he was the only man in the party whose outside tallied with this bill of particulars. he was said to be very shy. he is a shy man. of this there is no doubt. it may not show on the surface, but the shyness is there. after days of intimacy one wonders to see that it is still in about as strong force as ever. there is a fine and beautiful nature hidden behind it, as all know who have read the uncle remus book; and a fine genius, too, as all know by the same sign. i seem to be talking quite freely about this neighbor; but in talking to the public i am but talking to his personal friends, and these things are permissible among friends. he deeply disappointed a number of children who had flocked eagerly to mr. cable's house to get a glimpse of the illustrious sage and oracle of the nation's nurseries. they said-- 'why, he 's white!' they were grieved about it. so, to console them, the book was brought, that they might hear uncle remus's tar-baby story from the lips of uncle remus himself--or what, in their outraged eyes, was left of him. but it turned out that he had never read aloud to people, and was too shy to venture the attempt now. mr. cable and i read from books of ours, to show him what an easy trick it was; but his immortal shyness was proof against even this sagacious strategy, so we had to read about brer rabbit ourselves. mr. harris ought to be able to read the negro dialect better than anybody else, for in the matter of writing it he is the only master the country has produced. mr. cable is the only master in the writing of french dialects that the country has produced; and he reads them in perfection. it was a great treat to hear him read about jean-ah poquelin, and about innerarity and his famous 'pigshoo' representing 'louisihanna rif-fusing to hanter the union,' along with passages of nicely-shaded german dialect from a novel which was still in manuscript. it came out in conversation, that in two different instances mr. cable got into grotesque trouble by using, in his books, next-to-impossible french names which nevertheless happened to be borne by living and sensitive citizens of new orleans. his names were either inventions or were borrowed from the ancient and obsolete past, i do not now remember which; but at any rate living bearers of them turned up, and were a good deal hurt at having attention directed to themselves and their affairs in so excessively public a manner. mr. warner and i had an experience of the same sort when we wrote the book called 'the gilded age.' there is a character in it called 'sellers.' i do not remember what his first name was, in the beginning; but anyway, mr. warner did not like it, and wanted it improved. he asked me if i was able to imagine a person named 'eschol sellers.' of course i said i could not, without stimulants. he said that away out west, once, he had met, and contemplated, and actually shaken hands with a man bearing that impossible name--'eschol sellers.' he added-- 'it was twenty years ago; his name has probably carried him off before this; and if it hasn't, he will never see the book anyhow. we will confiscate his name. the name you are using is common, and therefore dangerous; there are probably a thousand sellerses bearing it, and the whole horde will come after us; but eschol sellers is a safe name--it is a rock.' so we borrowed that name; and when the book had been out about a week, one of the stateliest and handsomest and most aristocratic looking white men that ever lived, called around, with the most formidable libel suit in his pocket that ever--well, in brief, we got his permission to suppress an edition of ten million {footnote [figures taken from memory, and probably incorrect. think it was more.]} copies of the book and change that name to 'mulberry sellers' in future editions. chapter sugar and postage one day, on the street, i encountered the man whom, of all men, i most wished to see--horace bixby; formerly pilot under me--or rather, over me--now captain of the great steamer 'city of baton rouge,' the latest and swiftest addition to the anchor line. the same slender figure, the same tight curls, the same springy step, the same alertness, the same decision of eye and answering decision of hand, the same erect military bearing; not an inch gained or lost in girth, not an ounce gained or lost in weight, not a hair turned. it is a curious thing, to leave a man thirty-five years old, and come back at the end of twenty-one years and find him still only thirty-five. i have not had an experience of this kind before, i believe. there were some crow's-feet, but they counted for next to nothing, since they were inconspicuous. his boat was just in. i had been waiting several days for her, purposing to return to st. louis in her. the captain and i joined a party of ladies and gentlemen, guests of major wood, and went down the river fifty-four miles, in a swift tug, to ex-governor warmouth's sugar plantation. strung along below the city, were a number of decayed, ram- shackly, superannuated old steamboats, not one of which had i ever seen before. they had all been built, and worn out, and thrown aside, since i was here last. this gives one a realizing sense of the frailness of a mississippi boat and the briefness of its life. six miles below town a fat and battered brick chimney, sticking above the magnolias and live-oaks, was pointed out as the monument erected by an appreciative nation to celebrate the battle of new orleans--jackson's victory over the british, january , . the war had ended, the two nations were at peace, but the news had not yet reached new orleans. if we had had the cable telegraph in those days, this blood would not have been spilt, those lives would not have been wasted; and better still, jackson would probably never have been president. we have gotten over the harms done us by the war of , but not over some of those done us by jackson's presidency. the warmouth plantation covers a vast deal of ground, and the hospitality of the warmouth mansion is graduated to the same large scale. we saw steam-plows at work, here, for the first time. the traction engine travels about on its own wheels, till it reaches the required spot; then it stands still and by means of a wire rope pulls the huge plow toward itself two or three hundred yards across the field, between the rows of cane. the thing cuts down into the black mold a foot and a half deep. the plow looks like a fore-and-aft brace of a hudson river steamer, inverted. when the negro steersman sits on one end of it, that end tilts down near the ground, while the other sticks up high in air. this great see-saw goes rolling and pitching like a ship at sea, and it is not every circus rider that could stay on it. the plantation contains two thousand six hundred acres; six hundred and fifty are in cane; and there is a fruitful orange grove of five thousand trees. the cane is cultivated after a modern and intricate scientific fashion, too elaborate and complex for me to attempt to describe; but it lost $ , last year. i forget the other details. however, this year's crop will reach ten or twelve hundred tons of sugar, consequently last year's loss will not matter. these troublesome and expensive scientific methods achieve a yield of a ton and a half and from that to two tons, to the acre; which is three or four times what the yield of an acre was in my time. the drainage-ditches were everywhere alive with little crabs-- 'fiddlers.' one saw them scampering sidewise in every direction whenever they heard a disturbing noise. expensive pests, these crabs; for they bore into the levees, and ruin them. the great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks and vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery. the process of making sugar is exceedingly interesting. first, you heave your cane into the centrifugals and grind out the juice; then run it through the evaporating pan to extract the fiber; then through the bone-filter to remove the alcohol; then through the clarifying tanks to discharge the molasses; then through the granulating pipe to condense it; then through the vacuum pan to extract the vacuum. it is now ready for market. i have jotted these particulars down from memory. the thing looks simple and easy. do not deceive yourself. to make sugar is really one of the most difficult things in the world. and to make it right, is next to impossible. if you will examine your own supply every now and then for a term of years, and tabulate the result, you will find that not two men in twenty can make sugar without getting sand into it. we could have gone down to the mouth of the river and visited captain eads' great work, the 'jetties,' where the river has been compressed between walls, and thus deepened to twenty-six feet; but it was voted useless to go, since at this stage of the water everything would be covered up and invisible. we could have visited that ancient and singular burg, 'pilot-town,' which stands on stilts in the water--so they say; where nearly all communication is by skiff and canoe, even to the attending of weddings and funerals; and where the littlest boys and girls are as handy with the oar as unamphibious children are with the velocipede. we could have done a number of other things; but on account of limited time, we went back home. the sail up the breezy and sparkling river was a charming experience, and would have been satisfyingly sentimental and romantic but for the interruptions of the tug's pet parrot, whose tireless comments upon the scenery and the guests were always this- worldly, and often profane. he had also a superabundance of the discordant, ear-splitting, metallic laugh common to his breed--a machine-made laugh, a frankenstein laugh, with the soul left out of it. he applied it to every sentimental remark, and to every pathetic song. he cackled it out with hideous energy after 'home again, home again from a foreign shore,' and said he 'wouldn't give a damn for a tug-load of such rot.' romance and sentiment cannot long survive this sort of discouragement; so the singing and talking presently ceased; which so delighted the parrot that he cursed himself hoarse for joy. then the male members of the party moved to the forecastle, to smoke and gossip. there were several old steamboatmen along, and i learned from them a great deal of what had been happening to my former river friends during my long absence. i learned that a pilot whom i used to steer for is become a spiritualist, and for more than fifteen years has been receiving a letter every week from a deceased relative, through a new york spiritualist medium named manchester--postage graduated by distance: from the local post-office in paradise to new york, five dollars; from new york to st. louis, three cents. i remember mr. manchester very well. i called on him once, ten years ago, with a couple of friends, one of whom wished to inquire after a deceased uncle. this uncle had lost his life in a peculiarly violent and unusual way, half a dozen years before: a cyclone blew him some three miles and knocked a tree down with him which was four feet through at the butt and sixty- five feet high. he did not survive this triumph. at the seance just referred to, my friend questioned his late uncle, through mr. manchester, and the late uncle wrote down his replies, using mr. manchester's hand and pencil for that purpose. the following is a fair example of the questions asked, and also of the sloppy twaddle in the way of answers, furnished by manchester under the pretense that it came from the specter. if this man is not the paltriest fraud that lives, i owe him an apology-- question. where are you? answer. in the spirit world. q. are you happy? a. very happy. perfectly happy. q. how do you amuse yourself? a. conversation with friends, and other spirits. q. what else? a. nothing else. nothing else is necessary. q. what do you talk about? a. about how happy we are; and about friends left behind in the earth, and how to influence them for their good. q. when your friends in the earth all get to the spirit land, what shall you have to talk about then?--nothing but about how happy you all are? no reply. it is explained that spirits will not answer frivolous questions. q. how is it that spirits that are content to spend an eternity in frivolous employments, and accept it as happiness, are so fastidious about frivolous questions upon the subject? no reply. q. would you like to come back? a. no. q. would you say that under oath? a. yes. q. what do you eat there? a. we do not eat. q. what do you drink? a. we do not drink. q. what do you smoke? a. we do not smoke. q. what do you read? a. we do not read. q. do all the good people go to your place? a. yes. q. you know my present way of life. can you suggest any additions to it, in the way of crime, that will reasonably insure my going to some other place. a. no reply. q. when did you die? a. i did not die, i passed away. q. very well, then, when did you pass away? how long have you been in the spirit land? a. we have no measurements of time here. q. though you may be indifferent and uncertain as to dates and times in your present condition and environment, this has nothing to do with your former condition. you had dates then. one of these is what i ask for. you departed on a certain day in a certain year. is not this true? a. yes. q. then name the day of the month. (much fumbling with pencil, on the part of the medium, accompanied by violent spasmodic jerkings of his head and body, for some little time. finally, explanation to the effect that spirits often forget dates, such things being without importance to them.) q. then this one has actually forgotten the date of its translation to the spirit land? this was granted to be the case. q. this is very curious. well, then, what year was it? (more fumbling, jerking, idiotic spasms, on the part of the medium. finally, explanation to the effect that the spirit has forgotten the year.) q. this is indeed stupendous. let me put one more question, one last question, to you, before we part to meet no more;--for even if i fail to avoid your asylum, a meeting there will go for nothing as a meeting, since by that time you will easily have forgotten me and my name: did you die a natural death, or were you cut off by a catastrophe? a. (after long hesitation and many throes and spasms.) natural death. this ended the interview. my friend told the medium that when his relative was in this poor world, he was endowed with an extraordinary intellect and an absolutely defectless memory, and it seemed a great pity that he had not been allowed to keep some shred of these for his amusement in the realms of everlasting contentment, and for the amazement and admiration of the rest of the population there. this man had plenty of clients--has plenty yet. he receives letters from spirits located in every part of the spirit world, and delivers them all over this country through the united states mail. these letters are filled with advice--advice from 'spirits' who don't know as much as a tadpole--and this advice is religiously followed by the receivers. one of these clients was a man whom the spirits (if one may thus plurally describe the ingenious manchester) were teaching how to contrive an improved railway car-wheel. it is coarse employment for a spirit, but it is higher and wholesomer activity than talking for ever about 'how happy we are.' chapter episodes in pilot life in the course of the tug-boat gossip, it came out that out of every five of my former friends who had quitted the river, four had chosen farming as an occupation. of course this was not because they were peculiarly gifted, agriculturally, and thus more likely to succeed as farmers than in other industries: the reason for their choice must be traced to some other source. doubtless they chose farming because that life is private and secluded from irruptions of undesirable strangers--like the pilot- house hermitage. and doubtless they also chose it because on a thousand nights of black storm and danger they had noted the twinkling lights of solitary farm-houses, as the boat swung by, and pictured to themselves the serenity and security and coziness of such refuges at such times, and so had by-and-bye come to dream of that retired and peaceful life as the one desirable thing to long for, anticipate, earn, and at last enjoy. but i did not learn that any of these pilot-farmers had astonished anybody with their successes. their farms do not support them: they support their farms. the pilot-farmer disappears from the river annually, about the breaking of spring, and is seen no more till next frost. then he appears again, in damaged homespun, combs the hayseed out of his hair, and takes a pilot-house berth for the winter. in this way he pays the debts which his farming has achieved during the agricultural season. so his river bondage is but half broken; he is still the river's slave the hardest half of the year. one of these men bought a farm, but did not retire to it. he knew a trick worth two of that. he did not propose to pauperize his farm by applying his personal ignorance to working it. no, he put the farm into the hands of an agricultural expert to be worked on shares--out of every three loads of corn the expert to have two and the pilot the third. but at the end of the season the pilot received no corn. the expert explained that his share was not reached. the farm produced only two loads. some of the pilots whom i had known had had adventures--the outcome fortunate, sometimes, but not in all cases. captain montgomery, whom i had steered for when he was a pilot, commanded the confederate fleet in the great battle before memphis; when his vessel went down, he swam ashore, fought his way through a squad of soldiers, and made a gallant and narrow escape. he was always a cool man; nothing could disturb his serenity. once when he was captain of the 'crescent city,' i was bringing the boat into port at new orleans, and momently expecting orders from the hurricane deck, but received none. i had stopped the wheels, and there my authority and responsibility ceased. it was evening--dim twilight--the captain's hat was perched upon the big bell, and i supposed the intellectual end of the captain was in it, but such was not the case. the captain was very strict; therefore i knew better than to touch a bell without orders. my duty was to hold the boat steadily on her calamitous course, and leave the consequences to take care of themselves--which i did. so we went plowing past the sterns of steamboats and getting closer and closer--the crash was bound to come very soon--and still that hat never budged; for alas, the captain was napping in the texas.... things were becoming exceedingly nervous and uncomfortable. it seemed to me that the captain was not going to appear in time to see the entertainment. but he did. just as we were walking into the stern of a steamboat, he stepped out on deck, and said, with heavenly serenity, 'set her back on both'--which i did; but a trifle late, however, for the next moment we went smashing through that other boat's flimsy outer works with a most prodigious racket. the captain never said a word to me about the matter afterwards, except to remark that i had done right, and that he hoped i would not hesitate to act in the same way again in like circumstances. one of the pilots whom i had known when i was on the river had died a very honorable death. his boat caught fire, and he remained at the wheel until he got her safe to land. then he went out over the breast- board with his clothing in flames, and was the last person to get ashore. he died from his injuries in the course of two or three hours, and his was the only life lost. the history of mississippi piloting affords six or seven instances of this sort of martyrdom, and half a hundred instances of escapes from a like fate which came within a second or two of being fatally too late; but there is no instance of a pilot deserting his post to save his life while by remaining and sacrificing it he might secure other lives from destruction. it is well worth while to set down this noble fact, and well worth while to put it in italics, too. the 'cub' pilot is early admonished to despise all perils connected with a pilot's calling, and to prefer any sort of death to the deep dishonor of deserting his post while there is any possibility of his being useful in it. and so effectively are these admonitions inculcated, that even young and but half-tried pilots can be depended upon to stick to the wheel, and die there when occasion requires. in a memphis graveyard is buried a young fellow who perished at the wheel a great many years ago, in white river, to save the lives of other men. he said to the captain that if the fire would give him time to reach a sand bar, some distance away, all could be saved, but that to land against the bluff bank of the river would be to insure the loss of many lives. he reached the bar and grounded the boat in shallow water; but by that time the flames had closed around him, and in escaping through them he was fatally burned. he had been urged to fly sooner, but had replied as became a pilot to reply-- 'i will not go. if i go, nobody will be saved; if i stay, no one will be lost but me. i will stay.' there were two hundred persons on board, and no life was lost but the pilot's. there used to be a monument to this young fellow, in that memphis graveyard. while we tarried in memphis on our down trip, i started out to look for it, but our time was so brief that i was obliged to turn back before my object was accomplished. the tug-boat gossip informed me that dick kennet was dead--blown up, near memphis, and killed; that several others whom i had known had fallen in the war--one or two of them shot down at the wheel; that another and very particular friend, whom i had steered many trips for, had stepped out of his house in new orleans, one night years ago, to collect some money in a remote part of the city, and had never been seen again--was murdered and thrown into the river, it was thought; that ben thornburgh was dead long ago; also his wild 'cub' whom i used to quarrel with, all through every daylight watch. a heedless, reckless creature he was, and always in hot water, always in mischief. an arkansas passenger brought an enormous bear aboard, one day, and chained him to a life-boat on the hurricane deck. thornburgh's 'cub' could not rest till he had gone there and unchained the bear, to 'see what he would do.' he was promptly gratified. the bear chased him around and around the deck, for miles and miles, with two hundred eager faces grinning through the railings for audience, and finally snatched off the lad's coat-tail and went into the texas to chew it. the off-watch turned out with alacrity, and left the bear in sole possession. he presently grew lonesome, and started out for recreation. he ranged the whole boat--visited every part of it, with an advance guard of fleeing people in front of him and a voiceless vacancy behind him; and when his owner captured him at last, those two were the only visible beings anywhere; everybody else was in hiding, and the boat was a solitude. i was told that one of my pilot friends fell dead at the wheel, from heart disease, in . the captain was on the roof at the time. he saw the boat breaking for the shore; shouted, and got no answer; ran up, and found the pilot lying dead on the floor. mr. bixby had been blown up, in madrid bend; was not injured, but the other pilot was lost. george ritchie had been blown up near memphis--blown into the river from the wheel, and disabled. the water was very cold; he clung to a cotton bale--mainly with his teeth--and floated until nearly exhausted, when he was rescued by some deck hands who were on a piece of the wreck. they tore open the bale and packed him in the cotton, and warmed the life back into him, and got him safe to memphis. he is one of bixby's pilots on the 'baton rouge' now. into the life of a steamboat clerk, now dead, had dropped a bit of romance--somewhat grotesque romance, but romance nevertheless. when i knew him he was a shiftless young spendthrift, boisterous, goodhearted, full of careless generosities, and pretty conspicuously promising to fool his possibilities away early, and come to nothing. in a western city lived a rich and childless old foreigner and his wife; and in their family was a comely young girl--sort of friend, sort of servant. the young clerk of whom i have been speaking--whose name was not george johnson, but who shall be called george johnson for the purposes of this narrative--got acquainted with this young girl, and they sinned; and the old foreigner found them out, and rebuked them. being ashamed, they lied, and said they were married; that they had been privately married. then the old foreigner's hurt was healed, and he forgave and blessed them. after that, they were able to continue their sin without concealment. by-and-bye the foreigner's wife died; and presently he followed after her. friends of the family assembled to mourn; and among the mourners sat the two young sinners. the will was opened and solemnly read. it bequeathed every penny of that old man's great wealth to mrs. george johnson! and there was no such person. the young sinners fled forth then, and did a very foolish thing: married themselves before an obscure justice of the peace, and got him to antedate the thing. that did no sort of good. the distant relatives flocked in and exposed the fraudful date with extreme suddenness and surprising ease, and carried off the fortune, leaving the johnsons very legitimately, and legally, and irrevocably chained together in honorable marriage, but with not so much as a penny to bless themselves withal. such are the actual facts; and not all novels have for a base so telling a situation. chapter the 'original jacobs' we had some talk about captain isaiah sellers, now many years dead. he was a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both ashore and on the river. he was very tall, well built, and handsome; and in his old age--as i remember him--his hair was as black as an indian's, and his eye and hand were as strong and steady and his nerve and judgment as firm and clear as anybody's, young or old, among the fraternity of pilots. he was the patriarch of the craft; he had been a keelboat pilot before the day of steamboats; and a steamboat pilot before any other steamboat pilot, still surviving at the time i speak of, had ever turned a wheel. consequently his brethren held him in the sort of awe in which illustrious survivors of a bygone age are always held by their associates. he knew how he was regarded, and perhaps this fact added some trifle of stiffening to his natural dignity, which had been sufficiently stiff in its original state. he left a diary behind him; but apparently it did not date back to his first steamboat trip, which was said to be , the year the first steamboat disturbed the waters of the mississippi. at the time of his death a correspondent of the 'st. louis republican' culled the following items from the diary-- 'in february, , he shipped on board the steamer "rambler," at florence, ala., and made during that year three trips to new orleans and back--this on the "gen. carrol," between nashville and new orleans. it was during his stay on this boat that captain sellers introduced the tap of the bell as a signal to heave the lead, previous to which time it was the custom for the pilot to speak to the men below when soundings were wanted. the proximity of the forecastle to the pilot-house, no doubt, rendered this an easy matter; but how different on one of our palaces of the present day. 'in we find him on board the "president," a boat of two hundred and eighty-five tons burden, and plying between smithland and new orleans. thence he joined the "jubilee" in , and on this boat he did his first piloting in the st. louis trade; his first watch extending from herculaneum to st. genevieve. on may , , he completed and left pittsburgh in charge of the steamer "prairie," a boat of four hundred tons, and the first steamer with a state-room cabin ever seen at st. louis. in he introduced the signal for meeting boats, and which has, with some slight change, been the universal custom of this day; in fact, is rendered obligatory by act of congress. 'as general items of river history, we quote the following marginal notes from his general log-- 'in march, , gen. lafayette left new orleans for st. louis on the low-pressure steamer "natchez." 'in january, , twenty-one steamers left the new orleans wharf to celebrate the occasion of gen. jackson's visit to that city. 'in the "north american" made the run from new orleans to memphis in six days--best time on record to that date. it has since been made in two days and ten hours. 'in the red river cut-off formed. 'in steamer "hudson" made the run from white river to helena, a distance of seventy-five miles, in twelve hours. this was the source of much talk and speculation among parties directly interested. 'in great horseshoe cut-off formed. 'up to the present time, a term of thirty-five years, we ascertain, by reference to the diary, he has made four hundred and sixty round trips to new orleans, which gives a distance of one million one hundred and four thousand miles, or an average of eighty-six miles a day.' whenever captain sellers approached a body of gossiping pilots, a chill fell there, and talking ceased. for this reason: whenever six pilots were gathered together, there would always be one or two newly fledged ones in the lot, and the elder ones would be always 'showing off' before these poor fellows; making them sorrowfully feel how callow they were, how recent their nobility, and how humble their degree, by talking largely and vaporously of old-time experiences on the river; always making it a point to date everything back as far as they could, so as to make the new men feel their newness to the sharpest degree possible, and envy the old stagers in the like degree. and how these complacent baldheads would swell, and brag, and lie, and date back--ten, fifteen, twenty years,--and how they did enjoy the effect produced upon the marveling and envying youngsters! and perhaps just at this happy stage of the proceedings, the stately figure of captain isaiah sellers, that real and only genuine son of antiquity, would drift solemnly into the midst. imagine the size of the silence that would result on the instant. and imagine the feelings of those bald-heads, and the exultation of their recent audience when the ancient captain would begin to drop casual and indifferent remarks of a reminiscent nature--about islands that had disappeared, and cutoffs that had been made, a generation before the oldest bald-head in the company had ever set his foot in a pilot-house! many and many a time did this ancient mariner appear on the scene in the above fashion, and spread disaster and humiliation around him. if one might believe the pilots, he always dated his islands back to the misty dawn of river history; and he never used the same island twice; and never did he employ an island that still existed, or give one a name which anybody present was old enough to have heard of before. if you might believe the pilots, he was always conscientiously particular about little details; never spoke of 'the state of mississippi,' for instance --no, he would say, 'when the state of mississippi was where arkansas now is,' and would never speak of louisiana or missouri in a general way, and leave an incorrect impression on your mind--no, he would say, 'when louisiana was up the river farther,' or 'when missouri was on the illinois side.' the old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them 'mark twain,' and give them to the 'new orleans picayune.' they related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable; and thus far, they contained no poison. but in speaking of the stage of the river to-day, at a given point, the captain was pretty apt to drop in a little remark about this being the first time he had seen the water so high or so low at that particular point for forty-nine years; and now and then he would mention island so- and-so, and follow it, in parentheses, with some such observation as 'disappeared in , if i remember rightly.' in these antique interjections lay poison and bitterness for the other old pilots, and they used to chaff the 'mark twain' paragraphs with unsparing mockery. it so chanced that one of these paragraphs--{footnote [the original ms. of it, in the captain's own hand, has been sent to me from new orleans. it reads as follows-- vicksburg may , . 'my opinion for the benefit of the citizens of new orleans: the water is higher this far up than it has been since . my opinion is that the water will be feet deep in canal street before the first of next june. mrs. turner's plantation at the head of big black island is all under water, and it has not been since . 'i. sellers.']} became the text for my first newspaper article. i burlesqued it broadly, very broadly, stringing my fantastics out to the extent of eight hundred or a thousand words. i was a 'cub' at the time. i showed my performance to some pilots, and they eagerly rushed it into print in the 'new orleans true delta.' it was a great pity; for it did nobody any worthy service, and it sent a pang deep into a good man's heart. there was no malice in my rubbish; but it laughed at the captain. it laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful. i did not know then, though i do now, that there is no suffering comparable with that which a private person feels when he is for the first time pilloried in print. captain sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day forth. when i say he did me the honor, i am not using empty words. it was a very real honor to be in the thoughts of so great a man as captain sellers, and i had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud of it. it was distinction to be loved by such a man; but it was a much greater distinction to be hated by him, because he loved scores of people; but he didn't sit up nights to hate anybody but me. he never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again signed 'mark twain' to anything. at the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, i was on the pacific coast. i was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so i confiscated the ancient mariner's discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands--a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how i have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say. the captain had an honorable pride in his profession and an abiding love for it. he ordered his monument before he died, and kept it near him until he did die. it stands over his grave now, in bellefontaine cemetery, st. louis. it is his image, in marble, standing on duty at the pilot wheel; and worthy to stand and confront criticism, for it represents a man who in life would have stayed there till he burned to a cinder, if duty required it. the finest thing we saw on our whole mississippi trip, we saw as we approached new orleans in the steam-tug. this was the curving frontage of the crescent city lit up with the white glare of five miles of electric lights. it was a wonderful sight, and very beautiful. roughing it by mark twain part . chapter xi. and sure enough, two or three years afterward, we did hear him again. news came to the pacific coast that the vigilance committee in montana (whither slade had removed from rocky ridge) had hanged him. i find an account of the affair in the thrilling little book i quoted a paragraph from in the last chapter--"the vigilantes of montana; being a reliable account of the capture, trial and execution of henry plummer's notorious road agent band: by prof. thos. j. dimsdale, virginia city, m.t." mr. dimsdale's chapter is well worth reading, as a specimen of how the people of the frontier deal with criminals when the courts of law prove inefficient. mr. dimsdale makes two remarks about slade, both of which are accurately descriptive, and one of which is exceedingly picturesque: "those who saw him in his natural state only, would pronounce him to be a kind husband, a most hospitable host and a courteous gentleman; on the contrary, those who met him when maddened with liquor and surrounded by a gang of armed roughs, would pronounce him a fiend incarnate." and this: "from fort kearney, west, he was feared a great deal more than the almighty." for compactness, simplicity and vigor of expression, i will "back" that sentence against anything in literature. mr. dimsdale's narrative is as follows. in all places where italics occur, they are mine: after the execution of the five men on the th of january, the vigilantes considered that their work was nearly ended. they had freed the country of highwaymen and murderers to a great extent, and they determined that in the absence of the regular civil authority they would establish a people's court where all offenders should be tried by judge and jury. this was the nearest approach to social order that the circumstances permitted, and, though strict legal authority was wanting, yet the people were firmly determined to maintain its efficiency, and to enforce its decrees. it may here be mentioned that the overt act which was the last round on the fatal ladder leading to the scaffold on which slade perished, was the tearing in pieces and stamping upon a writ of this court, followed by his arrest of the judge alex. davis, by authority of a presented derringer, and with his own hands. j. a. slade was himself, we have been informed, a vigilante; he openly boasted of it, and said he knew all that they knew. he was never accused, or even suspected, of either murder or robbery, committed in this territory (the latter crime was never laid to his charge, in any place); but that he had killed several men in other localities was notorious, and his bad reputation in this respect was a most powerful argument in determining his fate, when he was finally arrested for the offence above mentioned. on returning from milk river he became more and more addicted to drinking, until at last it was a common feat for him and his friends to "take the town." he and a couple of his dependents might often be seen on one horse, galloping through the streets, shouting and yelling, firing revolvers, etc. on many occasions he would ride his horse into stores, break up bars, toss the scales out of doors and use most insulting language to parties present. just previous to the day of his arrest, he had given a fearful beating to one of his followers; but such was his influence over them that the man wept bitterly at the gallows, and begged for his life with all his power. it had become quite common, when slade was on a spree, for the shop-keepers and citizens to close the stores and put out all the lights; being fearful of some outrage at his hands. for his wanton destruction of goods and furniture, he was always ready to pay, when sober, if he had money; but there were not a few who regarded payment as small satisfaction for the outrage, and these men were his personal enemies. from time to time slade received warnings from men that he well knew would not deceive him, of the certain end of his conduct. there was not a moment, for weeks previous to his arrest, in which the public did not expect to hear of some bloody outrage. the dread of his very name, and the presence of the armed band of hangers-on who followed him alone prevented a resistance which must certainly have ended in the instant murder or mutilation of the opposing party. slade was frequently arrested by order of the court whose organization we have described, and had treated it with respect by paying one or two fines and promising to pay the rest when he had money; but in the transaction that occurred at this crisis, he forgot even this caution, and goaded by passion and the hatred of restraint, he sprang into the embrace of death. slade had been drunk and "cutting up" all night. he and his companions had made the town a perfect hell. in the morning, j. m. fox, the sheriff, met him, arrested him, took him into court and commenced reading a warrant that he had for his arrest, by way of arraignment. he became uncontrollably furious, and seizing the writ, he tore it up, threw it on the ground and stamped upon it. the clicking of the locks of his companions' revolvers was instantly heard, and a crisis was expected. the sheriff did not attempt his retention; but being at least as prudent as he was valiant, he succumbed, leaving slade the master of the situation and the conqueror and ruler of the courts, law and law-makers. this was a declaration of war, and was so accepted. the vigilance committee now felt that the question of social order and the preponderance of the law-abiding citizens had then and there to be decided. they knew the character of slade, and they were well aware that they must submit to his rule without murmur, or else that he must be dealt with in such fashion as would prevent his being able to wreak his vengeance on the committee, who could never have hoped to live in the territory secure from outrage or death, and who could never leave it without encountering his friend, whom his victory would have emboldened and stimulated to a pitch that would have rendered them reckless of consequences. the day previous he had ridden into dorris's store, and on being requested to leave, he drew his revolver and threatened to kill the gentleman who spoke to him. another saloon he had led his horse into, and buying a bottle of wine, he tried to make the animal drink it. this was not considered an uncommon performance, as he had often entered saloons and commenced firing at the lamps, causing a wild stampede. a leading member of the committee met slade, and informed him in the quiet, earnest manner of one who feels the importance of what he is saying: "slade, get your horse at once, and go home, or there will be ---- to pay." slade started and took a long look, with his dark and piercing eyes, at the gentleman. "what do you mean?" said he. "you have no right to ask me what i mean," was the quiet reply, "get your horse at once, and remember what i tell you." after a short pause he promised to do so, and actually got into the saddle; but, being still intoxicated, he began calling aloud to one after another of his friends, and at last seemed to have forgotten the warning he had received and became again uproarious, shouting the name of a well-known courtezan in company with those of two men whom he considered heads of the committee, as a sort of challenge; perhaps, however, as a simple act of bravado. it seems probable that the intimation of personal danger he had received had not been forgotten entirely; though fatally for him, he took a foolish way of showing his remembrance of it. he sought out alexander davis, the judge of the court, and drawing a cocked derringer, he presented it at his head, and told him that he should hold him as a hostage for his own safety. as the judge stood perfectly quiet, and offered no resistance to his captor, no further outrage followed on this score. previous to this, on account of the critical state of affairs, the committee had met, and at last resolved to arrest him. his execution had not been agreed upon, and, at that time, would have been negatived, most assuredly. a messenger rode down to nevada to inform the leading men of what was on hand, as it was desirable to show that there was a feeling of unanimity on the subject, all along the gulch. the miners turned out almost en masse, leaving their work and forming in solid column about six hundred strong, armed to the teeth, they marched up to virginia. the leader of the body well knew the temper of his men on the subject. he spurred on ahead of them, and hastily calling a meeting of the executive, he told them plainly that the miners meant "business," and that, if they came up, they would not stand in the street to be shot down by slade's friends; but that they would take him and hang him. the meeting was small, as the virginia men were loath to act at all. this momentous announcement of the feeling of the lower town was made to a cluster of men, who were deliberation behind a wagon, at the rear of a store on main street. the committee were most unwilling to proceed to extremities. all the duty they had ever performed seemed as nothing to the task before them; but they had to decide, and that quickly. it was finally agreed that if the whole body of the miners were of the opinion that he should be hanged, that the committee left it in their hands to deal with him. off, at hot speed, rode the leader of the nevada men to join his command. slade had found out what was intended, and the news sobered him instantly. he went into p. s. pfouts' store, where davis was, and apologized for his conduct, saying that he would take it all back. the head of the column now wheeled into wallace street and marched up at quick time. halting in front of the store, the executive officer of the committee stepped forward and arrested slade, who was at once informed of his doom, and inquiry was made as to whether he had any business to settle. several parties spoke to him on the subject; but to all such inquiries he turned a deaf ear, being entirely absorbed in the terrifying reflections on his own awful position. he never ceased his entreaties for life, and to see his dear wife. the unfortunate lady referred to, between whom and slade there existed a warm affection, was at this time living at their ranch on the madison. she was possessed of considerable personal attractions; tall, well-formed, of graceful carriage, pleasing manners, and was, withal, an accomplished horsewoman. a messenger from slade rode at full speed to inform her of her husband's arrest. in an instant she was in the saddle, and with all the energy that love and despair could lend to an ardent temperament and a strong physique, she urged her fleet charger over the twelve miles of rough and rocky ground that intervened between her and the object of her passionate devotion. meanwhile a party of volunteers had made the necessary preparations for the execution, in the valley traversed by the branch. beneath the site of pfouts and russell's stone building there was a corral, the gate-posts of which were strong and high. across the top was laid a beam, to which the rope was fastened, and a dry-goods box served for the platform. to this place slade was marched, surrounded by a guard, composing the best armed and most numerous force that has ever appeared in montana territory. the doomed man had so exhausted himself by tears, prayers and lamentations, that he had scarcely strength left to stand under the fatal beam. he repeatedly exclaimed, "my god! my god! must i die? oh, my dear wife!" on the return of the fatigue party, they encountered some friends of slade, staunch and reliable citizens and members of the committee, but who were personally attached to the condemned. on hearing of his sentence, one of them, a stout-hearted man, pulled out his handkerchief and walked away, weeping like a child. slade still begged to see his wife, most piteously, and it seemed hard to deny his request; but the bloody consequences that were sure to follow the inevitable attempt at a rescue, that her presence and entreaties would have certainly incited, forbade the granting of his request. several gentlemen were sent for to see him, in his last moments, one of whom (judge davis) made a short address to the people; but in such low tones as to be inaudible, save to a few in his immediate vicinity. one of his friends, after exhausting his powers of entreaty, threw off his coat and declared that the prisoner could not be hanged until he himself was killed. a hundred guns were instantly leveled at him; whereupon he turned and fled; but, being brought back, he was compelled to resume his coat, and to give a promise of future peaceable demeanor. scarcely a leading man in virginia could be found, though numbers of the citizens joined the ranks of the guard when the arrest was made. all lamented the stern necessity which dictated the execution. everything being ready, the command was given, "men, do your duty," and the box being instantly slipped from beneath his feet, he died almost instantaneously. the body was cut down and carried to the virginia hotel, where, in a darkened room, it was scarcely laid out, when the unfortunate and bereaved companion of the deceased arrived, at headlong speed, to find that all was over, and that she was a widow. her grief and heart-piercing cries were terrible evidences of the depth of her attachment for her lost husband, and a considerable period elapsed before she could regain the command of her excited feelings. there is something about the desperado-nature that is wholly unaccountable--at least it looks unaccountable. it is this. the true desperado is gifted with splendid courage, and yet he will take the most infamous advantage of his enemy; armed and free, he will stand up before a host and fight until he is shot all to pieces, and yet when he is under the gallows and helpless he will cry and plead like a child. words are cheap, and it is easy to call slade a coward (all executed men who do not "die game" are promptly called cowards by unreflecting people), and when we read of slade that he "had so exhausted himself by tears, prayers and lamentations, that he had scarcely strength left to stand under the fatal beam," the disgraceful word suggests itself in a moment--yet in frequently defying and inviting the vengeance of banded rocky mountain cut-throats by shooting down their comrades and leaders, and never offering to hide or fly, slade showed that he was a man of peerless bravery. no coward would dare that. many a notorious coward, many a chicken-livered poltroon, coarse, brutal, degraded, has made his dying speech without a quaver in his voice and been swung into eternity with what looked liked the calmest fortitude, and so we are justified in believing, from the low intellect of such a creature, that it was not moral courage that enabled him to do it. then, if moral courage is not the requisite quality, what could it have been that this stout-hearted slade lacked?--this bloody, desperate, kindly-mannered, urbane gentleman, who never hesitated to warn his most ruffianly enemies that he would kill them whenever or wherever he came across them next! i think it is a conundrum worth investigating. chapter xii. just beyond the breakfast-station we overtook a mormon emigrant train of thirty-three wagons; and tramping wearily along and driving their herd of loose cows, were dozens of coarse-clad and sad-looking men, women and children, who had walked as they were walking now, day after day for eight lingering weeks, and in that time had compassed the distance our stage had come in eight days and three hours--seven hundred and ninety-eight miles! they were dusty and uncombed, hatless, bonnetless and ragged, and they did look so tired! after breakfast, we bathed in horse creek, a (previously) limpid, sparkling stream--an appreciated luxury, for it was very seldom that our furious coach halted long enough for an indulgence of that kind. we changed horses ten or twelve times in every twenty-four hours--changed mules, rather--six mules--and did it nearly every time in four minutes. it was lively work. as our coach rattled up to each station six harnessed mules stepped gayly from the stable; and in the twinkling of an eye, almost, the old team was out, and the new one in and we off and away again. during the afternoon we passed sweetwater creek, independence rock, devil's gate and the devil's gap. the latter were wild specimens of rugged scenery, and full of interest--we were in the heart of the rocky mountains, now. and we also passed by "alkali" or "soda lake," and we woke up to the fact that our journey had stretched a long way across the world when the driver said that the mormons often came there from great salt lake city to haul away saleratus. he said that a few days gone by they had shoveled up enough pure saleratus from the ground (it was a dry lake) to load two wagons, and that when they got these two wagons-loads of a drug that cost them nothing, to salt lake, they could sell it for twenty-five cents a pound. in the night we sailed by a most notable curiosity, and one we had been hearing a good deal about for a day or two, and were suffering to see. this was what might be called a natural ice-house. it was august, now, and sweltering weather in the daytime, yet at one of the stations the men could scape the soil on the hill-side under the lee of a range of boulders, and at a depth of six inches cut out pure blocks of ice--hard, compactly frozen, and clear as crystal! toward dawn we got under way again, and presently as we sat with raised curtains enjoying our early-morning smoke and contemplating the first splendor of the rising sun as it swept down the long array of mountain peaks, flushing and gilding crag after crag and summit after summit, as if the invisible creator reviewed his gray veterans and they saluted with a smile, we hove in sight of south pass city. the hotel-keeper, the postmaster, the blacksmith, the mayor, the constable, the city marshal and the principal citizen and property holder, all came out and greeted us cheerily, and we gave him good day. he gave us a little indian news, and a little rocky mountain news, and we gave him some plains information in return. he then retired to his lonely grandeur and we climbed on up among the bristling peaks and the ragged clouds. south pass city consisted of four log cabins, one if which was unfinished, and the gentleman with all those offices and titles was the chiefest of the ten citizens of the place. think of hotel-keeper, postmaster, blacksmith, mayor, constable, city marshal and principal citizen all condensed into one person and crammed into one skin. bemis said he was "a perfect allen's revolver of dignities." and he said that if he were to die as postmaster, or as blacksmith, or as postmaster and blacksmith both, the people might stand it; but if he were to die all over, it would be a frightful loss to the community. two miles beyond south pass city we saw for the first time that mysterious marvel which all western untraveled boys have heard of and fully believe in, but are sure to be astounded at when they see it with their own eyes, nevertheless--banks of snow in dead summer time. we were now far up toward the sky, and knew all the time that we must presently encounter lofty summits clad in the "eternal snow" which was so common place a matter of mention in books, and yet when i did see it glittering in the sun on stately domes in the distance and knew the month was august and that my coat was hanging up because it was too warm to wear it, i was full as much amazed as if i never had heard of snow in august before. truly, "seeing is believing"--and many a man lives a long life through, thinking he believes certain universally received and well established things, and yet never suspects that if he were confronted by those things once, he would discover that he did not really believe them before, but only thought he believed them. in a little while quite a number of peaks swung into view with long claws of glittering snow clasping them; and with here and there, in the shade, down the mountain side, a little solitary patch of snow looking no larger than a lady's pocket-handkerchief but being in reality as large as a "public square." and now, at last, we were fairly in the renowned south pass, and whirling gayly along high above the common world. we were perched upon the extreme summit of the great range of the rocky mountains, toward which we had been climbing, patiently climbing, ceaselessly climbing, for days and nights together--and about us was gathered a convention of nature's kings that stood ten, twelve, and even thirteen thousand feet high--grand old fellows who would have to stoop to see mount washington, in the twilight. we were in such an airy elevation above the creeping populations of the earth, that now and then when the obstructing crags stood out of the way it seemed that we could look around and abroad and contemplate the whole great globe, with its dissolving views of mountains, seas and continents stretching away through the mystery of the summer haze. as a general thing the pass was more suggestive of a valley than a suspension bridge in the clouds--but it strongly suggested the latter at one spot. at that place the upper third of one or two majestic purple domes projected above our level on either hand and gave us a sense of a hidden great deep of mountains and plains and valleys down about their bases which we fancied we might see if we could step to the edge and look over. these sultans of the fastnesses were turbaned with tumbled volumes of cloud, which shredded away from time to time and drifted off fringed and torn, trailing their continents of shadow after them; and catching presently on an intercepting peak, wrapped it about and brooded there --then shredded away again and left the purple peak, as they had left the purple domes, downy and white with new-laid snow. in passing, these monstrous rags of cloud hung low and swept along right over the spectator's head, swinging their tatters so nearly in his face that his impulse was to shrink when they came closet. in the one place i speak of, one could look below him upon a world of diminishing crags and canyons leading down, down, and away to a vague plain with a thread in it which was a road, and bunches of feathers in it which were trees,--a pretty picture sleeping in the sunlight--but with a darkness stealing over it and glooming its features deeper and deeper under the frown of a coming storm; and then, while no film or shadow marred the noon brightness of his high perch, he could watch the tempest break forth down there and see the lightnings leap from crag to crag and the sheeted rain drive along the canyon-sides, and hear the thunders peal and crash and roar. we had this spectacle; a familiar one to many, but to us a novelty. we bowled along cheerily, and presently, at the very summit (though it had been all summit to us, and all equally level, for half an hour or more), we came to a spring which spent its water through two outlets and sent it in opposite directions. the conductor said that one of those streams which we were looking at, was just starting on a journey westward to the gulf of california and the pacific ocean, through hundreds and even thousands of miles of desert solitudes. he said that the other was just leaving its home among the snow-peaks on a similar journey eastward --and we knew that long after we should have forgotten the simple rivulet it would still be plodding its patient way down the mountain sides, and canyon-beds, and between the banks of the yellowstone; and by and by would join the broad missouri and flow through unknown plains and deserts and unvisited wildernesses; and add a long and troubled pilgrimage among snags and wrecks and sandbars; and enter the mississippi, touch the wharves of st. louis and still drift on, traversing shoals and rocky channels, then endless chains of bottomless and ample bends, walled with unbroken forests, then mysterious byways and secret passages among woody islands, then the chained bends again, bordered with wide levels of shining sugar-cane in place of the sombre forests; then by new orleans and still other chains of bends--and finally, after two long months of daily and nightly harassment, excitement, enjoyment, adventure, and awful peril of parched throats, pumps and evaporation, pass the gulf and enter into its rest upon the bosom of the tropic sea, never to look upon its snow-peaks again or regret them. i freighted a leaf with a mental message for the friends at home, and dropped it in the stream. but i put no stamp on it and it was held for postage somewhere. on the summit we overtook an emigrant train of many wagons, many tired men and women, and many a disgusted sheep and cow. in the wofully dusty horseman in charge of the expedition i recognized john -----. of all persons in the world to meet on top of the rocky mountains thousands of miles from home, he was the last one i should have looked for. we were school-boys together and warm friends for years. but a boyish prank of mine had disruptured this friendship and it had never been renewed. the act of which i speak was this. i had been accustomed to visit occasionally an editor whose room was in the third story of a building and overlooked the street. one day this editor gave me a watermelon which i made preparations to devour on the spot, but chancing to look out of the window, i saw john standing directly under it and an irresistible desire came upon me to drop the melon on his head, which i immediately did. i was the loser, for it spoiled the melon, and john never forgave me and we dropped all intercourse and parted, but now met again under these circumstances. we recognized each other simultaneously, and hands were grasped as warmly as if no coldness had ever existed between us, and no allusion was made to any. all animosities were buried and the simple fact of meeting a familiar face in that isolated spot so far from home, was sufficient to make us forget all things but pleasant ones, and we parted again with sincere "good-bye" and "god bless you" from both. we had been climbing up the long shoulders of the rocky mountains for many tedious hours--we started down them, now. and we went spinning away at a round rate too. we left the snowy wind river mountains and uinta mountains behind, and sped away, always through splendid scenery but occasionally through long ranks of white skeletons of mules and oxen--monuments of the huge emigration of other days--and here and there were up-ended boards or small piles of stones which the driver said marked the resting-place of more precious remains. it was the loneliest land for a grave! a land given over to the cayote and the raven--which is but another name for desolation and utter solitude. on damp, murky nights, these scattered skeletons gave forth a soft, hideous glow, like very faint spots of moonlight starring the vague desert. it was because of the phosphorus in the bones. but no scientific explanation could keep a body from shivering when he drifted by one of those ghostly lights and knew that a skull held it. at midnight it began to rain, and i never saw anything like it--indeed, i did not even see this, for it was too dark. we fastened down the curtains and even caulked them with clothing, but the rain streamed in in twenty places, nothwithstanding. there was no escape. if one moved his feet out of a stream, he brought his body under one; and if he moved his body he caught one somewhere else. if he struggled out of the drenched blankets and sat up, he was bound to get one down the back of his neck. meantime the stage was wandering about a plain with gaping gullies in it, for the driver could not see an inch before his face nor keep the road, and the storm pelted so pitilessly that there was no keeping the horses still. with the first abatement the conductor turned out with lanterns to look for the road, and the first dash he made was into a chasm about fourteen feet deep, his lantern following like a meteor. as soon as he touched bottom he sang out frantically: "don't come here!" to which the driver, who was looking over the precipice where he had disappeared, replied, with an injured air: "think i'm a dam fool?" the conductor was more than an hour finding the road--a matter which showed us how far we had wandered and what chances we had been taking. he traced our wheel-tracks to the imminent verge of danger, in two places. i have always been glad that we were not killed that night. i do not know any particular reason, but i have always been glad. in the morning, the tenth day out, we crossed green river, a fine, large, limpid stream--stuck in it with the water just up to the top of our mail-bed, and waited till extra teams were put on to haul us up the steep bank. but it was nice cool water, and besides it could not find any fresh place on us to wet. at the green river station we had breakfast--hot biscuits, fresh antelope steaks, and coffee--the only decent meal we tasted between the united states and great salt lake city, and the only one we were ever really thankful for. think of the monotonous execrableness of the thirty that went before it, to leave this one simple breakfast looming up in my memory like a shot-tower after all these years have gone by! at five p.m. we reached fort bridger, one hundred and seventeen miles from the south pass, and one thousand and twenty-five miles from st. joseph. fifty-two miles further on, near the head of echo canyon, we met sixty united states soldiers from camp floyd. the day before, they had fired upon three hundred or four hundred indians, whom they supposed gathered together for no good purpose. in the fight that had ensued, four indians were captured, and the main body chased four miles, but nobody killed. this looked like business. we had a notion to get out and join the sixty soldiers, but upon reflecting that there were four hundred of the indians, we concluded to go on and join the indians. echo canyon is twenty miles long. it was like a long, smooth, narrow street, with a gradual descending grade, and shut in by enormous perpendicular walls of coarse conglomerate, four hundred feet high in many places, and turreted like mediaeval castles. this was the most faultless piece of road in the mountains, and the driver said he would "let his team out." he did, and if the pacific express trains whiz through there now any faster than we did then in the stage-coach, i envy the passengers the exhilaration of it. we fairly seemed to pick up our wheels and fly--and the mail matter was lifted up free from everything and held in solution! i am not given to exaggeration, and when i say a thing i mean it. however, time presses. at four in the afternoon we arrived on the summit of big mountain, fifteen miles from salt lake city, when all the world was glorified with the setting sun, and the most stupendous panorama of mountain peaks yet encountered burst on our sight. we looked out upon this sublime spectacle from under the arch of a brilliant rainbow! even the overland stage-driver stopped his horses and gazed! half an hour or an hour later, we changed horses, and took supper with a mormon "destroying angel." "destroying angels," as i understand it, are latter-day saints who are set apart by the church to conduct permanent disappearances of obnoxious citizens. i had heard a deal about these mormon destroying angels and the dark and bloody deeds they had done, and when i entered this one's house i had my shudder all ready. but alas for all our romances, he was nothing but a loud, profane, offensive, old blackguard! he was murderous enough, possibly, to fill the bill of a destroyer, but would you have any kind of an angel devoid of dignity? could you abide an angel in an unclean shirt and no suspenders? could you respect an angel with a horse-laugh and a swagger like a buccaneer? there were other blackguards present--comrades of this one. and there was one person that looked like a gentleman--heber c. kimball's son, tall and well made, and thirty years old, perhaps. a lot of slatternly women flitted hither and thither in a hurry, with coffee-pots, plates of bread, and other appurtenances to supper, and these were said to be the wives of the angel--or some of them, at least. and of course they were; for if they had been hired "help" they would not have let an angel from above storm and swear at them as he did, let alone one from the place this one hailed from. this was our first experience of the western "peculiar institution," and it was not very prepossessing. we did not tarry long to observe it, but hurried on to the home of the latter-day saints, the stronghold of the prophets, the capital of the only absolute monarch in america--great salt lake city. as the night closed in we took sanctuary in the salt lake house and unpacked our baggage. chapter xiii. we had a fine supper, of the freshest meats and fowls and vegetables--a great variety and as great abundance. we walked about the streets some, afterward, and glanced in at shops and stores; and there was fascination in surreptitiously staring at every creature we took to be a mormon. this was fairy-land to us, to all intents and purposes--a land of enchantment, and goblins, and awful mystery. we felt a curiosity to ask every child how many mothers it had, and if it could tell them apart; and we experienced a thrill every time a dwelling-house door opened and shut as we passed, disclosing a glimpse of human heads and backs and shoulders--for we so longed to have a good satisfying look at a mormon family in all its comprehensive ampleness, disposed in the customary concentric rings of its home circle. by and by the acting governor of the territory introduced us to other "gentiles," and we spent a sociable hour with them. "gentiles" are people who are not mormons. our fellow-passenger, bemis, took care of himself, during this part of the evening, and did not make an overpowering success of it, either, for he came into our room in the hotel about eleven o'clock, full of cheerfulness, and talking loosely, disjointedly and indiscriminately, and every now and then tugging out a ragged word by the roots that had more hiccups than syllables in it. this, together with his hanging his coat on the floor on one side of a chair, and his vest on the floor on the other side, and piling his pants on the floor just in front of the same chair, and then comtemplating the general result with superstitious awe, and finally pronouncing it "too many for him" and going to bed with his boots on, led us to fear that something he had eaten had not agreed with him. but we knew afterward that it was something he had been drinking. it was the exclusively mormon refresher, "valley tan." valley tan (or, at least, one form of valley tan) is a kind of whisky, or first cousin to it; is of mormon invention and manufactured only in utah. tradition says it is made of (imported) fire and brimstone. if i remember rightly no public drinking saloons were allowed in the kingdom by brigham young, and no private drinking permitted among the faithful, except they confined themselves to "valley tan." next day we strolled about everywhere through the broad, straight, level streets, and enjoyed the pleasant strangeness of a city of fifteen thousand inhabitants with no loafers perceptible in it; and no visible drunkards or noisy people; a limpid stream rippling and dancing through every street in place of a filthy gutter; block after block of trim dwellings, built of "frame" and sunburned brick--a great thriving orchard and garden behind every one of them, apparently--branches from the street stream winding and sparkling among the garden beds and fruit trees--and a grand general air of neatness, repair, thrift and comfort, around and about and over the whole. and everywhere were workshops, factories, and all manner of industries; and intent faces and busy hands were to be seen wherever one looked; and in one's ears was the ceaseless clink of hammers, the buzz of trade and the contented hum of drums and fly-wheels. the armorial crest of my own state consisted of two dissolute bears holding up the head of a dead and gone cask between them and making the pertinent remark, "united, we stand--(hic!)--divided, we fall." it was always too figurative for the author of this book. but the mormon crest was easy. and it was simple, unostentatious, and fitted like a glove. it was a representation of a golden beehive, with the bees all at work! the city lies in the edge of a level plain as broad as the state of connecticut, and crouches close down to the ground under a curving wall of mighty mountains whose heads are hidden in the clouds, and whose shoulders bear relics of the snows of winter all the summer long. seen from one of these dizzy heights, twelve or fifteen miles off, great salt lake city is toned down and diminished till it is suggestive of a child's toy-village reposing under the majestic protection of the chinese wall. on some of those mountains, to the southwest, it had been raining every day for two weeks, but not a drop had fallen in the city. and on hot days in late spring and early autumn the citizens could quit fanning and growling and go out and cool off by looking at the luxury of a glorious snow-storm going on in the mountains. they could enjoy it at a distance, at those seasons, every day, though no snow would fall in their streets, or anywhere near them. salt lake city was healthy--an extremely healthy city. they declared there was only one physician in the place and he was arrested every week regularly and held to answer under the vagrant act for having "no visible means of support." they always give you a good substantial article of truth in salt lake, and good measure and good weight, too. [very often, if you wished to weigh one of their airiest little commonplace statements you would want the hay scales.] we desired to visit the famous inland sea, the american "dead sea," the great salt lake--seventeen miles, horseback, from the city--for we had dreamed about it, and thought about it, and talked about it, and yearned to see it, all the first part of our trip; but now when it was only arm's length away it had suddenly lost nearly every bit of its interest. and so we put it off, in a sort of general way, till next day--and that was the last we ever thought of it. we dined with some hospitable gentiles; and visited the foundation of the prodigious temple; and talked long with that shrewd connecticut yankee, heber c. kimball (since deceased), a saint of high degree and a mighty man of commerce. we saw the "tithing-house," and the "lion house," and i do not know or remember how many more church and government buildings of various kinds and curious names. we flitted hither and thither and enjoyed every hour, and picked up a great deal of useful information and entertaining nonsense, and went to bed at night satisfied. the second day, we made the acquaintance of mr. street (since deceased) and put on white shirts and went and paid a state visit to the king. he seemed a quiet, kindly, easy-mannered, dignified, self-possessed old gentleman of fifty-five or sixty, and had a gentle craft in his eye that probably belonged there. he was very simply dressed and was just taking off a straw hat as we entered. he talked about utah, and the indians, and nevada, and general american matters and questions, with our secretary and certain government officials who came with us. but he never paid any attention to me, notwithstanding i made several attempts to "draw him out" on federal politics and his high handed attitude toward congress. i thought some of the things i said were rather fine. but he merely looked around at me, at distant intervals, something as i have seen a benignant old cat look around to see which kitten was meddling with her tail. by and by i subsided into an indignant silence, and so sat until the end, hot and flushed, and execrating him in my heart for an ignorant savage. but he was calm. his conversation with those gentlemen flowed on as sweetly and peacefully and musically as any summer brook. when the audience was ended and we were retiring from the presence, he put his hand on my head, beamed down on me in an admiring way and said to my brother: "ah--your child, i presume? boy, or girl?" chapter xiv. mr. street was very busy with his telegraphic matters--and considering that he had eight or nine hundred miles of rugged, snowy, uninhabited mountains, and waterless, treeless, melancholy deserts to traverse with his wire, it was natural and needful that he should be as busy as possible. he could not go comfortably along and cut his poles by the road-side, either, but they had to be hauled by ox teams across those exhausting deserts--and it was two days' journey from water to water, in one or two of them. mr. street's contract was a vast work, every way one looked at it; and yet to comprehend what the vague words "eight hundred miles of rugged mountains and dismal deserts" mean, one must go over the ground in person--pen and ink descriptions cannot convey the dreary reality to the reader. and after all, mr. s.'s mightiest difficulty turned out to be one which he had never taken into the account at all. unto mormons he had sub-let the hardest and heaviest half of his great undertaking, and all of a sudden they concluded that they were going to make little or nothing, and so they tranquilly threw their poles overboard in mountain or desert, just as it happened when they took the notion, and drove home and went about their customary business! they were under written contract to mr. street, but they did not care anything for that. they said they would "admire" to see a "gentile" force a mormon to fulfil a losing contract in utah! and they made themselves very merry over the matter. street said--for it was he that told us these things: "i was in dismay. i was under heavy bonds to complete my contract in a given time, and this disaster looked very much like ruin. it was an astounding thing; it was such a wholly unlooked-for difficulty, that i was entirely nonplussed. i am a business man--have always been a business man--do not know anything but business--and so you can imagine how like being struck by lightning it was to find myself in a country where written contracts were worthless!--that main security, that sheet-anchor, that absolute necessity, of business. my confidence left me. there was no use in making new contracts--that was plain. i talked with first one prominent citizen and then another. they all sympathized with me, first rate, but they did not know how to help me. but at last a gentile said, 'go to brigham young!--these small fry cannot do you any good.' i did not think much of the idea, for if the law could not help me, what could an individual do who had not even anything to do with either making the laws or executing them? he might be a very good patriarch of a church and preacher in its tabernacle, but something sterner than religion and moral suasion was needed to handle a hundred refractory, half-civilized sub-contractors. but what was a man to do? i thought if mr. young could not do anything else, he might probably be able to give me some advice and a valuable hint or two, and so i went straight to him and laid the whole case before him. he said very little, but he showed strong interest all the way through. he examined all the papers in detail, and whenever there seemed anything like a hitch, either in the papers or my statement, he would go back and take up the thread and follow it patiently out to an intelligent and satisfactory result. then he made a list of the contractors' names. finally he said: "'mr. street, this is all perfectly plain. these contracts are strictly and legally drawn, and are duly signed and certified. these men manifestly entered into them with their eyes open. i see no fault or flaw anywhere.' "then mr. young turned to a man waiting at the other end of the room and said: 'take this list of names to so-and-so, and tell him to have these men here at such-and-such an hour.' "they were there, to the minute. so was i. mr. young asked them a number of questions, and their answers made my statement good. then he said to them: "'you signed these contracts and assumed these obligations of your own free will and accord?' "'yes.' "'then carry them out to the letter, if it makes paupers of you! go!' "and they did go, too! they are strung across the deserts now, working like bees. and i never hear a word out of them. "there is a batch of governors, and judges, and other officials here, shipped from washington, and they maintain the semblance of a republican form of government--but the petrified truth is that utah is an absolute monarchy and brigham young is king!" mr. street was a fine man, and i believe his story. i knew him well during several years afterward in san francisco. our stay in salt lake city amounted to only two days, and therefore we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter. i had the will to do it. with the gushing self-sufficiency of youth i was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here--until i saw the mormon women. then i was touched. my heart was wiser than my head. it warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically "homely" creatures, and as i turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, i said, "no--the man that marries one of them has done an act of christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure--and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence." [for a brief sketch of mormon history, and the noted mountain meadow massacre, see appendices a and b. ] chapter xv. it is a luscious country for thrilling evening stories about assassinations of intractable gentiles. i cannot easily conceive of anything more cosy than the night in salt lake which we spent in a gentile den, smoking pipes and listening to tales of how burton galloped in among the pleading and defenceless "morisites" and shot them down, men and women, like so many dogs. and how bill hickman, a destroying angel, shot drown and arnold dead for bringing suit against him for a debt. and how porter rockwell did this and that dreadful thing. and how heedless people often come to utah and make remarks about brigham, or polygamy, or some other sacred matter, and the very next morning at daylight such parties are sure to be found lying up some back alley, contentedly waiting for the hearse. and the next most interesting thing is to sit and listen to these gentiles talk about polygamy; and how some portly old frog of an elder, or a bishop, marries a girl--likes her, marries her sister--likes her, marries another sister--likes her, takes another--likes her, marries her mother--likes her, marries her father, grandfather, great grandfather, and then comes back hungry and asks for more. and how the pert young thing of eleven will chance to be the favorite wife and her own venerable grandmother have to rank away down toward d in their mutual husband's esteem, and have to sleep in the kitchen, as like as not. and how this dreadful sort of thing, this hiving together in one foul nest of mother and daughters, and the making a young daughter superior to her own mother in rank and authority, are things which mormon women submit to because their religion teaches them that the more wives a man has on earth, and the more children he rears, the higher the place they will all have in the world to come--and the warmer, maybe, though they do not seem to say anything about that. according to these gentile friends of ours, brigham young's harem contains twenty or thirty wives. they said that some of them had grown old and gone out of active service, but were comfortably housed and cared for in the henery--or the lion house, as it is strangely named. along with each wife were her children--fifty altogether. the house was perfectly quiet and orderly, when the children were still. they all took their meals in one room, and a happy and home-like sight it was pronounced to be. none of our party got an opportunity to take dinner with mr. young, but a gentile by the name of johnson professed to have enjoyed a sociable breakfast in the lion house. he gave a preposterous account of the "calling of the roll," and other preliminaries, and the carnage that ensued when the buckwheat cakes came in. but he embellished rather too much. he said that mr. young told him several smart sayings of certain of his "two-year-olds," observing with some pride that for many years he had been the heaviest contributor in that line to one of the eastern magazines; and then he wanted to show mr. johnson one of the pets that had said the last good thing, but he could not find the child. he searched the faces of the children in detail, but could not decide which one it was. finally he gave it up with a sigh and said: "i thought i would know the little cub again but i don't." mr. johnson said further, that mr. young observed that life was a sad, sad thing --"because the joy of every new marriage a man contracted was so apt to be blighted by the inopportune funeral of a less recent bride." and mr. johnson said that while he and mr. young were pleasantly conversing in private, one of the mrs. youngs came in and demanded a breast-pin, remarking that she had found out that he had been giving a breast-pin to no. , and she, for one, did not propose to let this partiality go on without making a satisfactory amount of trouble about it. mr. young reminded her that there was a stranger present. mrs. young said that if the state of things inside the house was not agreeable to the stranger, he could find room outside. mr. young promised the breast-pin, and she went away. but in a minute or two another mrs. young came in and demanded a breast-pin. mr. young began a remonstrance, but mrs. young cut him short. she said no. had got one, and no. was promised one, and it was "no use for him to try to impose on her--she hoped she knew her rights." he gave his promise, and she went. and presently three mrs. youngs entered in a body and opened on their husband a tempest of tears, abuse, and entreaty. they had heard all about no. , no. , and no. . three more breast-pins were promised. they were hardly gone when nine more mrs. youngs filed into the presence, and a new tempest burst forth and raged round about the prophet and his guest. nine breast-pins were promised, and the weird sisters filed out again. and in came eleven more, weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth. eleven promised breast-pins purchased peace once more. "that is a specimen," said mr. young. "you see how it is. you see what a life i lead. a man can't be wise all the time. in a heedless moment i gave my darling no. --excuse my calling her thus, as her other name has escaped me for the moment--a breast-pin. it was only worth twenty-five dollars--that is, apparently that was its whole cost--but its ultimate cost was inevitably bound to be a good deal more. you yourself have seen it climb up to six hundred and fifty dollars--and alas, even that is not the end! for i have wives all over this territory of utah. i have dozens of wives whose numbers, even, i do not know without looking in the family bible. they are scattered far and wide among the mountains and valleys of my realm. and mark you, every solitary one of them will hear of this wretched breast pin, and every last one of them will have one or die. no. 's breast pin will cost me twenty-five hundred dollars before i see the end of it. and these creatures will compare these pins together, and if one is a shade finer than the rest, they will all be thrown on my hands, and i will have to order a new lot to keep peace in the family. sir, you probably did not know it, but all the time you were present with my children your every movement was watched by vigilant servitors of mine. if you had offered to give a child a dime, or a stick of candy, or any trifle of the kind, you would have been snatched out of the house instantly, provided it could be done before your gift left your hand. otherwise it would be absolutely necessary for you to make an exactly similar gift to all my children--and knowing by experience the importance of the thing, i would have stood by and seen to it myself that you did it, and did it thoroughly. once a gentleman gave one of my children a tin whistle--a veritable invention of satan, sir, and one which i have an unspeakable horror of, and so would you if you had eighty or ninety children in your house. but the deed was done--the man escaped. i knew what the result was going to be, and i thirsted for vengeance. i ordered out a flock of destroying angels, and they hunted the man far into the fastnesses of the nevada mountains. but they never caught him. i am not cruel, sir--i am not vindictive except when sorely outraged--but if i had caught him, sir, so help me joseph smith, i would have locked him into the nursery till the brats whistled him to death. by the slaughtered body of st. parley pratt (whom god assail!) there was never anything on this earth like it! i knew who gave the whistle to the child, but i could, not make those jealous mothers believe me. they believed i did it, and the result was just what any man of reflection could have foreseen: i had to order a hundred and ten whistles--i think we had a hundred and ten children in the house then, but some of them are off at college now--i had to order a hundred and ten of those shrieking things, and i wish i may never speak another word if we didn't have to talk on our fingers entirely, from that time forth until the children got tired of the whistles. and if ever another man gives a whistle to a child of mine and i get my hands on him, i will hang him higher than haman! that is the word with the bark on it! shade of nephi! you don't know anything about married life. i am rich, and everybody knows it. i am benevolent, and everybody takes advantage of it. i have a strong fatherly instinct and all the foundlings are foisted on me. "every time a woman wants to do well by her darling, she puzzles her brain to cipher out some scheme for getting it into my hands. why, sir, a woman came here once with a child of a curious lifeless sort of complexion (and so had the woman), and swore that the child was mine and she my wife--that i had married her at such-and-such a time in such-and-such a place, but she had forgotten her number, and of course i could not remember her name. well, sir, she called my attention to the fact that the child looked like me, and really it did seem to resemble me--a common thing in the territory--and, to cut the story short, i put it in my nursery, and she left. and by the ghost of orson hyde, when they came to wash the paint off that child it was an injun! bless my soul, you don't know anything about married life. it is a perfect dog's life, sir--a perfect dog's life. you can't economize. it isn't possible. i have tried keeping one set of bridal attire for all occasions. but it is of no use. first you'll marry a combination of calico and consumption that's as thin as a rail, and next you'll get a creature that's nothing more than the dropsy in disguise, and then you've got to eke out that bridal dress with an old balloon. that is the way it goes. and think of the wash-bill--(excuse these tears)--nine hundred and eighty-four pieces a week! no, sir, there is no such a thing as economy in a family like mine. why, just the one item of cradles--think of it! and vermifuge! soothing syrup! teething rings! and 'papa's watches' for the babies to play with! and things to scratch the furniture with! and lucifer matches for them to eat, and pieces of glass to cut themselves with! the item of glass alone would support your family, i venture to say, sir. let me scrimp and squeeze all i can, i still can't get ahead as fast as i feel i ought to, with my opportunities. bless you, sir, at a time when i had seventy-two wives in this house, i groaned under the pressure of keeping thousands of dollars tied up in seventy-two bedsteads when the money ought to have been out at interest; and i just sold out the whole stock, sir, at a sacrifice, and built a bedstead seven feet long and ninety-six feet wide. but it was a failure, sir. i could not sleep. it appeared to me that the whole seventy-two women snored at once. the roar was deafening. and then the danger of it! that was what i was looking at. they would all draw in their breath at once, and you could actually see the walls of the house suck in--and then they would all exhale their breath at once, and you could see the walls swell out, and strain, and hear the rafters crack, and the shingles grind together. my friend, take an old man's advice, and don't encumber yourself with a large family--mind, i tell you, don't do it. in a small family, and in a small family only, you will find that comfort and that peace of mind which are the best at last of the blessings this world is able to afford us, and for the lack of which no accumulation of wealth, and no acquisition of fame, power, and greatness can ever compensate us. take my word for it, ten or eleven wives is all you need--never go over it." some instinct or other made me set this johnson down as being unreliable. and yet he was a very entertaining person, and i doubt if some of the information he gave us could have been acquired from any other source. he was a pleasant contrast to those reticent mormons. chapter xvi. all men have heard of the mormon bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. i brought away a copy from salt lake. the book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. it is chloroform in print. if joseph smith composed this book, the act was a miracle--keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. if he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone, in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason. the book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the old testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the new testament. the author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our king james's translation of the scriptures; and the result is a mongrel--half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. the latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast. whenever he found his speech growing too modern--which was about every sentence or two--he ladled in a few such scriptural phrases as "exceeding sore," "and it came to pass," etc., and made things satisfactory again. "and it came to pass" was his pet. if he had left that out, his bible would have been only a pamphlet. the title-page reads as follows: the book of mormon: an account written by the hand of mormon, upon plates taken from the plates of nephi. wherefore it is an abridgment of the record of the people of nephi, and also of the lamanites; written to the lamanites, who are a remnant of the house of israel; and also to jew and gentile; written by way of commandment, and also by the spirit of prophecy and of revelation. written and sealed up, and hid up unto the lord, that they might not be destroyed; to come forth by the gift and power of god unto the interpretation thereof; sealed by the hand of moroni, and hid up unto the lord, to come forth in due time by the way of gentile; the interpretation thereof by the gift of god. an abridgment taken from the book of ether also; which is a record of the people of jared; who were scattered at the time the lord confounded the language of the people when they were building a tower to get to heaven. "hid up" is good. and so is "wherefore"--though why "wherefore"? any other word would have answered as well--though--in truth it would not have sounded so scriptural. next comes: the testimony of three witnesses. be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people unto whom this work shall come, that we, through the grace of god the father, and our lord jesus christ, have seen the plates which contain this record, which is a record of the people of nephi, and also of the lamanites, their brethren, and also of the people of jared, who came from the tower of which hath been spoken; and we also know that they have been translated by the gift and power of god, for his voice hath declared it unto us; wherefore we know of a surety that the work is true. and we also testify that we have seen the engravings which are upon the plates; and they have been shown unto us by the power of god, and not of man. and we declare with words of soberness, that an angel of god came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates, and the engravings thereon; and we know that it is by the grace of god the father, and our lord jesus christ, that we beheld and bear record that these things are true; and it is marvellous in our eyes; nevertheless the voice of the lord commanded us that we should bear record of it; wherefore, to be obedient unto the commandments of god, we bear testimony of these things. and we know that if we are faithful in christ, we shall rid our garments of the blood of all men, and be found spotless before the judgment-seat of christ, and shall dwell with him eternally in the heavens. and the honor be to the father, and to the son, and to the holy ghost, which is one god. amen. oliver cowdery, david whitmer, martin harris. some people have to have a world of evidence before they can come anywhere in the neighborhood of believing anything; but for me, when a man tells me that he has "seen the engravings which are upon the plates," and not only that, but an angel was there at the time, and saw him see them, and probably took his receipt for it, i am very far on the road to conviction, no matter whether i ever heard of that man before or not, and even if i do not know the name of the angel, or his nationality either. next is this: and also the testimony of eight witnesses. be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people unto whom this work shall come, that joseph smith, jr., the translator of this work, has shown unto us the plates of which hath been spoken, which have the appearance of gold; and as many of the leaves as the said smith has translated, we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of ancient work, and of curious workmanship. and this we bear record with words of soberness, that the said smith has shown unto us, for we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said smith has got the plates of which we have spoken. and we give our names unto the world, to witness unto the world that which we have seen; and we lie not, god bearing witness of it. christian whitmer, jacob whitmer, peter whitmer, jr., john whitmer, hiram page, joseph smith, sr., hyrum smith, samuel h. smith. and when i am far on the road to conviction, and eight men, be they grammatical or otherwise, come forward and tell me that they have seen the plates too; and not only seen those plates but "hefted" them, i am convinced. i could not feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire whitmer family had testified. the mormon bible consists of fifteen "books"--being the books of jacob, enos, jarom, omni, mosiah, zeniff, alma, helaman, ether, moroni, two "books" of mormon, and three of nephi. in the first book of nephi is a plagiarism of the old testament, which gives an account of the exodus from jerusalem of the "children of lehi"; and it goes on to tell of their wanderings in the wilderness, during eight years, and their supernatural protection by one of their number, a party by the name of nephi. they finally reached the land of "bountiful," and camped by the sea. after they had remained there "for the space of many days"--which is more scriptural than definite--nephi was commanded from on high to build a ship wherein to "carry the people across the waters." he travestied noah's ark--but he obeyed orders in the matter of the plan. he finished the ship in a single day, while his brethren stood by and made fun of it--and of him, too--"saying, our brother is a fool, for he thinketh that he can build a ship." they did not wait for the timbers to dry, but the whole tribe or nation sailed the next day. then a bit of genuine nature cropped out, and is revealed by outspoken nephi with scriptural frankness--they all got on a spree! they, "and also their wives, began to make themselves merry, insomuch that they began to dance, and to sing, and to speak with much rudeness; yea, they were lifted up unto exceeding rudeness." nephi tried to stop these scandalous proceedings; but they tied him neck and heels, and went on with their lark. but observe how nephi the prophet circumvented them by the aid of the invisible powers: and it came to pass that after they had bound me, insomuch that i could not move, the compass, which had been prepared of the lord, did cease to work; wherefore, they knew not whither they should steer the ship, insomuch that there arose a great storm, yea, a great and terrible tempest, and we were driven back upon the waters for the space of three days; and they began to be frightened exceedingly, lest they should be drowned in the sea; nevertheless they did not loose me. and on the fourth day, which we had been driven back, the tempest began to be exceeding sore. and it came to pass that we were about to be swallowed up in the depths of the sea. then they untied him. and it came to pass after they had loosed me, behold, i took the compass, and it did work whither i desired it. and it came to pass that i prayed unto the lord; and after i had prayed, the winds did cease, and the storm did cease, and there was a great calm. equipped with their compass, these ancients appear to have had the advantage of noah. their voyage was toward a "promised land"--the only name they give it. they reached it in safety. polygamy is a recent feature in the mormon religion, and was added by brigham young after joseph smith's death. before that, it was regarded as an "abomination." this verse from the mormon bible occurs in chapter ii. of the book of jacob: for behold, thus saith the lord, this people begin to wax in iniquity; they understand not the scriptures; for they seek to excuse themselves in committing whoredoms, because of the things which were written concerning david, and solomon his son. behold, david and solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the lord; wherefore, thus saith the lord, i have led this people forth out of the land of jerusalem, by the power of mine arm, that i might raise up unto me a righteous branch from the fruit of the loins of joseph. wherefore, i the lord god, will no suffer that this people shall do like unto them of old. however, the project failed--or at least the modern mormon end of it--for brigham "suffers" it. this verse is from the same chapter: behold, the lamanites your brethren, whom ye hate, because of their filthiness and the cursings which hath come upon their skins, are more righteous than you; for they have not forgotten the commandment of the lord, which was given unto our fathers, that they should have, save it were one wife; and concubines they should have none. the following verse (from chapter ix. of the book of nephi) appears to contain information not familiar to everybody: and now it came to pass that when jesus had ascended into heaven, the multitude did disperse, and every man did take his wife and his children, and did return to his own home. and it came to pass that on the morrow, when the multitude was gathered together, behold, nephi and his brother whom he had raised from the dead, whose name was timothy, and also his son, whose name was jonas, and also mathoni, and mathonihah, his brother, and kumen, and kumenenhi, and jeremiah, and shemnon, and jonas, and zedekiah, and isaiah; now these were the names of the disciples whom jesus had chosen. in order that the reader may observe how much more grandeur and picturesqueness (as seen by these mormon twelve) accompanied on of the tenderest episodes in the life of our saviour than other eyes seem to have been aware of, i quote the following from the same "book"--nephi: and it came to pass that jesus spake unto them, and bade them arise. and they arose from the earth, and he said unto them, blessed are ye because of your faith. and now behold, my joy is full. and when he had said these words, he wept, and the multitude bear record of it, and he took their little children, one by one, and blessed them, and prayed unto the father for them. and when he had done this he wept again, and he spake unto the multitude, and saith unto them, behold your little ones. and as they looked to behold, they cast their eyes toward heaven, and they saw the heavens open, and they saw angels descending out of heaven as it were, in the midst of fire; and they came down and encircled those little ones about, and they were encircled about with fire; and the angels did minister unto them, and the multitude did see and hear and bear record; and they know that their record is true, for they all of them did see and hear, every man for himself; and they were in number about two thousand and five hundred souls; and they did consist of men, women, and children. and what else would they be likely to consist of? the book of ether is an incomprehensible medley of if "history," much of it relating to battles and sieges among peoples whom the reader has possibly never heard of; and who inhabited a country which is not set down in the geography. these was a king with the remarkable name of coriantumr,^^ and he warred with shared, and lib, and shiz, and others, in the "plains of heshlon"; and the "valley of gilgal"; and the "wilderness of akish"; and the "land of moran"; and the "plains of agosh"; and "ogath," and "ramah," and the "land of corihor," and the "hill comnor," by "the waters of ripliancum," etc., etc., etc. "and it came to pass," after a deal of fighting, that coriantumr, upon making calculation of his losses, found that "there had been slain two millions of mighty men, and also their wives and their children"--say , , or , , in all--"and he began to sorrow in his heart." unquestionably it was time. so he wrote to shiz, asking a cessation of hostilities, and offering to give up his kingdom to save his people. shiz declined, except upon condition that coriantumr would come and let him cut his head off first--a thing which coriantumr would not do. then there was more fighting for a season; then four years were devoted to gathering the forces for a final struggle--after which ensued a battle, which, i take it, is the most remarkable set forth in history,--except, perhaps, that of the kilkenny cats, which it resembles in some respects. this is the account of the gathering and the battle: . and it came to pass that they did gather together all the people, upon all the face of the land, who had not been slain, save it was ether. and it came to pass that ether did behold all the doings of the people; and he beheld that the people who were for coriantumr, were gathered together to the army of coriantumr; and the people who were for shiz, were gathered together to the army of shiz; wherefore they were for the space of four years gathering together the people, that they might get all who were upon the face of the land, and that they might receive all the strength which it was possible that they could receive. and it came to pass that when they were all gathered together, every one to the army which he would, with their wives and their children; both men, women, and children being armed with weapons of war, having shields, and breast-plates, and head-plates, and being clothed after the manner of war, they did march forth one against another, to battle; and they fought all that day, and conquered not. and it came to pass that when it was night they were weary, and retired to their camps; and after they had retired to their camps, they took up a howling and a lamentation for the loss of the slain of their people; and so great were their cries, their howlings and lamentations, that it did rend the air exceedingly. and it came to pass that on the morrow they did go again to battle, and great and terrible was that day; nevertheless they conquered not, and when the night came again, they did rend the air with their cries, and their howlings, and their mournings, for the loss of the slain of their people. . and it came to pass that coriantumr wrote again an epistle unto shiz, desiring that he would not come again to battle, but that he would take the kingdom, and spare the lives of the people. but behold, the spirit of the lord had ceased striving with them, and satan had full power over the hearts of the people, for they were given up unto the hardness of their hearts, and the blindness of their minds that they might be destroyed; wherefore they went again to battle. and it came to pass that they fought all that day, and when the night came they slept upon their swords; and on the morrow they fought even until the night came; and when the night came they were drunken with anger, even as a man who is drunken with wine; and they slept again upon their swords; and on the morrow they fought again; and when the night came they had all fallen by the sword save it were fifty and two of the people of coriantumr, and sixty and nine of the people of shiz. and it came to pass that they slept upon their swords that night, and on the morrow they fought again, and they contended in their mights with their swords, and with their shields, all that day; and when the night came there were thirty and two of the people of shiz, and twenty and seven of the people of coriantumr. . and it came to pass that they ate and slept, and prepared for death on the morrow. and they were large and mighty men, as to the strength of men. and it came to pass that they fought for the space of three hours, and they fainted with the loss of blood. and it came to pass that when the men of coriantumr had received sufficient strength, that they could walk, they were about to flee for their lives, but behold, shiz arose, and also his men, and he swore in his wrath that he would slay coriantumr, or he would perish by the sword: wherefore he did pursue them, and on the morrow he did overtake them; and they fought again with the sword. and it came to pass that when they had all fallen by the sword, save it were coriantumr and shiz, behold shiz had fainted with loss of blood. and it came to pass that when coriantumr had leaned upon his sword, that he rested a little, he smote off the head of shiz. and it came to pass that after he had smote off the head of shiz, that shiz raised upon his hands and fell; and after that he had struggled for breath, he died. and it came to pass that coriantumr fell to the earth, and became as if he had no life. and the lord spake unto ether, and said unto him, go forth. and he went forth, and beheld that the words of the lord had all been fulfilled; and he finished his record; and the hundredth part i have not written. it seems a pity he did not finish, for after all his dreary former chapters of commonplace, he stopped just as he was in danger of becoming interesting. the mormon bible is rather stupid and tiresome to read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings. its code of morals is unobjectionable --it is "smouched" [milton] from the new testament and no credit given. chapter xvii. at the end of our two days' sojourn, we left great salt lake city hearty and well fed and happy--physically superb but not so very much wiser, as regards the "mormon question," than we were when we arrived, perhaps. we had a deal more "information" than we had before, of course, but we did not know what portion of it was reliable and what was not--for it all came from acquaintances of a day--strangers, strictly speaking. we were told, for instance, that the dreadful "mountain meadows massacre" was the work of the indians entirely, and that the gentiles had meanly tried to fasten it upon the mormons; we were told, likewise, that the indians were to blame, partly, and partly the mormons; and we were told, likewise, and just as positively, that the mormons were almost if not wholly and completely responsible for that most treacherous and pitiless butchery. we got the story in all these different shapes, but it was not till several years afterward that mrs. waite's book, "the mormon prophet," came out with judge cradlebaugh's trial of the accused parties in it and revealed the truth that the latter version was the correct one and that the mormons were the assassins. all our "information" had three sides to it, and so i gave up the idea that i could settle the "mormon question" in two days. still i have seen newspaper correspondents do it in one. i left great salt lake a good deal confused as to what state of things existed there--and sometimes even questioning in my own mind whether a state of things existed there at all or not. but presently i remembered with a lightening sense of relief that we had learned two or three trivial things there which we could be certain of; and so the two days were not wholly lost. for instance, we had learned that we were at last in a pioneer land, in absolute and tangible reality. the high prices charged for trifles were eloquent of high freights and bewildering distances of freightage. in the east, in those days, the smallest moneyed denomination was a penny and it represented the smallest purchasable quantity of any commodity. west of cincinnati the smallest coin in use was the silver five-cent piece and no smaller quantity of an article could be bought than "five cents' worth." in overland city the lowest coin appeared to be the ten-cent piece; but in salt lake there did not seem to be any money in circulation smaller than a quarter, or any smaller quantity purchasable of any commodity than twenty-five cents' worth. we had always been used to half dimes and "five cents' worth" as the minimum of financial negotiations; but in salt lake if one wanted a cigar, it was a quarter; if he wanted a chalk pipe, it was a quarter; if he wanted a peach, or a candle, or a newspaper, or a shave, or a little gentile whiskey to rub on his corns to arrest indigestion and keep him from having the toothache, twenty-five cents was the price, every time. when we looked at the shot-bag of silver, now and then, we seemed to be wasting our substance in riotous living, but if we referred to the expense account we could see that we had not been doing anything of the kind. but people easily get reconciled to big money and big prices, and fond and vain of both--it is a descent to little coins and cheap prices that is hardest to bear and slowest to take hold upon one's toleration. after a month's acquaintance with the twenty-five cent minimum, the average human being is ready to blush every time he thinks of his despicable five-cent days. how sunburnt with blushes i used to get in gaudy nevada, every time i thought of my first financial experience in salt lake. it was on this wise (which is a favorite expression of great authors, and a very neat one, too, but i never hear anybody say on this wise when they are talking). a young half-breed with a complexion like a yellow-jacket asked me if i would have my boots blacked. it was at the salt lake house the morning after we arrived. i said yes, and he blacked them. then i handed him a silver five-cent piece, with the benevolent air of a person who is conferring wealth and blessedness upon poverty and suffering. the yellow-jacket took it with what i judged to be suppressed emotion, and laid it reverently down in the middle of his broad hand. then he began to contemplate it, much as a philosopher contemplates a gnat's ear in the ample field of his microscope. several mountaineers, teamsters, stage-drivers, etc., drew near and dropped into the tableau and fell to surveying the money with that attractive indifference to formality which is noticeable in the hardy pioneer. presently the yellow-jacket handed the half dime back to me and told me i ought to keep my money in my pocket-book instead of in my soul, and then i wouldn't get it cramped and shriveled up so! what a roar of vulgar laughter there was! i destroyed the mongrel reptile on the spot, but i smiled and smiled all the time i was detaching his scalp, for the remark he made was good for an "injun." yes, we had learned in salt lake to be charged great prices without letting the inward shudder appear on the surface--for even already we had overheard and noted the tenor of conversations among drivers, conductors, and hostlers, and finally among citizens of salt lake, until we were well aware that these superior beings despised "emigrants." we permitted no tell-tale shudders and winces in our countenances, for we wanted to seem pioneers, or mormons, half-breeds, teamsters, stage-drivers, mountain meadow assassins--anything in the world that the plains and utah respected and admired--but we were wretchedly ashamed of being "emigrants," and sorry enough that we had white shirts and could not swear in the presence of ladies without looking the other way. and many a time in nevada, afterwards, we had occasion to remember with humiliation that we were "emigrants," and consequently a low and inferior sort of creatures. perhaps the reader has visited utah, nevada, or california, even in these latter days, and while communing with himself upon the sorrowful banishment of these countries from what he considers "the world," has had his wings clipped by finding that he is the one to be pitied, and that there are entire populations around him ready and willing to do it for him--yea, who are complacently doing it for him already, wherever he steps his foot. poor thing, they are making fun of his hat; and the cut of his new york coat; and his conscientiousness about his grammar; and his feeble profanity; and his consumingly ludicrous ignorance of ores, shafts, tunnels, and other things which he never saw before, and never felt enough interest in to read about. and all the time that he is thinking what a sad fate it is to be exiled to that far country, that lonely land, the citizens around him are looking down on him with a blighting compassion because he is an "emigrant" instead of that proudest and blessedest creature that exists on all the earth, a "forty-niner." the accustomed coach life began again, now, and by midnight it almost seemed as if we never had been out of our snuggery among the mail sacks at all. we had made one alteration, however. we had provided enough bread, boiled ham and hard boiled eggs to last double the six hundred miles of staging we had still to do. and it was comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate the majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat ham and hard boiled eggs while our spiritual natures revelled alternately in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets. nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. ham and eggs, and after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and scenery, a "down grade," a flying coach, a fragrant pipe and a contented heart--these make happiness. it is what all the ages have struggled for. chapter xviii. at eight in the morning we reached the remnant and ruin of what had been the important military station of "camp floyd," some forty-five or fifty miles from salt lake city. at four p.m. we had doubled our distance and were ninety or a hundred miles from salt lake. and now we entered upon one of that species of deserts whose concentrated hideousness shames the diffused and diluted horrors of sahara--an "alkali" desert. for sixty-eight miles there was but one break in it. i do not remember that this was really a break; indeed it seems to me that it was nothing but a watering depot in the midst of the stretch of sixty-eight miles. if my memory serves me, there was no well or spring at this place, but the water was hauled there by mule and ox teams from the further side of the desert. there was a stage station there. it was forty-five miles from the beginning of the desert, and twenty-three from the end of it. we plowed and dragged and groped along, the whole live-long night, and at the end of this uncomfortable twelve hours we finished the forty-five-mile part of the desert and got to the stage station where the imported water was. the sun was just rising. it was easy enough to cross a desert in the night while we were asleep; and it was pleasant to reflect, in the morning, that we in actual person had encountered an absolute desert and could always speak knowingly of deserts in presence of the ignorant thenceforward. and it was pleasant also to reflect that this was not an obscure, back country desert, but a very celebrated one, the metropolis itself, as you may say. all this was very well and very comfortable and satisfactory--but now we were to cross a desert in daylight. this was fine--novel--romantic--dramatically adventurous --this, indeed, was worth living for, worth traveling for! we would write home all about it. this enthusiasm, this stern thirst for adventure, wilted under the sultry august sun and did not last above one hour. one poor little hour--and then we were ashamed that we had "gushed" so. the poetry was all in the anticipation--there is none in the reality. imagine a vast, waveless ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes; imagine this solemn waste tufted with ash-dusted sage-bushes; imagine the lifeless silence and solitude that belong to such a place; imagine a coach, creeping like a bug through the midst of this shoreless level, and sending up tumbled volumes of dust as if it were a bug that went by steam; imagine this aching monotony of toiling and plowing kept up hour after hour, and the shore still as far away as ever, apparently; imagine team, driver, coach and passengers so deeply coated with ashes that they are all one colorless color; imagine ash-drifts roosting above moustaches and eyebrows like snow accumulations on boughs and bushes. this is the reality of it. the sun beats down with dead, blistering, relentless malignity; the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface--it is absorbed before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound--not a sigh--not a whisper--not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of bird--not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that dead air. and so the occasional sneezing of the resting mules, and the champing of the bits, grate harshly on the grim stillness, not dissipating the spell but accenting it and making one feel more lonesome and forsaken than before. the mules, under violent swearing, coaxing and whip-cracking, would make at stated intervals a "spurt," and drag the coach a hundred or may be two hundred yards, stirring up a billowy cloud of dust that rolled back, enveloping the vehicle to the wheel-tops or higher, and making it seem afloat in a fog. then a rest followed, with the usual sneezing and bit-champing. then another "spurt" of a hundred yards and another rest at the end of it. all day long we kept this up, without water for the mules and without ever changing the team. at least we kept it up ten hours, which, i take it, is a day, and a pretty honest one, in an alkali desert. it was from four in the morning till two in the afternoon. and it was so hot! and so close! and our water canteens went dry in the middle of the day and we got so thirsty! it was so stupid and tiresome and dull! and the tedious hours did lag and drag and limp along with such a cruel deliberation! it was so trying to give one's watch a good long undisturbed spell and then take it out and find that it had been fooling away the time and not trying to get ahead any! the alkali dust cut through our lips, it persecuted our eyes, it ate through the delicate membranes and made our noses bleed and kept them bleeding--and truly and seriously the romance all faded far away and disappeared, and left the desert trip nothing but a harsh reality--a thirsty, sweltering, longing, hateful reality! two miles and a quarter an hour for ten hours--that was what we accomplished. it was hard to bring the comprehension away down to such a snail-pace as that, when we had been used to making eight and ten miles an hour. when we reached the station on the farther verge of the desert, we were glad, for the first time, that the dictionary was along, because we never could have found language to tell how glad we were, in any sort of dictionary but an unabridged one with pictures in it. but there could not have been found in a whole library of dictionaries language sufficient to tell how tired those mules were after their twenty-three mile pull. to try to give the reader an idea of how thirsty they were, would be to "gild refined gold or paint the lily." somehow, now that it is there, the quotation does not seem to fit--but no matter, let it stay, anyhow. i think it is a graceful and attractive thing, and therefore have tried time and time again to work it in where it would fit, but could not succeed. these efforts have kept my mind distracted and ill at ease, and made my narrative seem broken and disjointed, in places. under these circumstances it seems to me best to leave it in, as above, since this will afford at least a temporary respite from the wear and tear of trying to "lead up" to this really apt and beautiful quotation. chapter xix. on the morning of the sixteenth day out from st. joseph we arrived at the entrance of rocky canyon, two hundred and fifty miles from salt lake. it was along in this wild country somewhere, and far from any habitation of white men, except the stage stations, that we came across the wretchedest type of mankind i have ever seen, up to this writing. i refer to the goshoot indians. from what we could see and all we could learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised digger indians of california; inferior to all races of savages on our continent; inferior to even the terra del fuegans; inferior to the hottentots, and actually inferior in some respects to the kytches of africa. indeed, i have been obliged to look the bulky volumes of wood's "uncivilized races of men" clear through in order to find a savage tribe degraded enough to take rank with the goshoots. i find but one people fairly open to that shameful verdict. it is the bosjesmans (bushmen) of south africa. such of the goshoots as we saw, along the road and hanging about the stations, were small, lean, "scrawny" creatures; in complexion a dull black like the ordinary american negro; their faces and hands bearing dirt which they had been hoarding and accumulating for months, years, and even generations, according to the age of the proprietor; a silent, sneaking, treacherous looking race; taking note of everything, covertly, like all the other "noble red men" that we (do not) read about, and betraying no sign in their countenances; indolent, everlastingly patient and tireless, like all other indians; prideless beggars--for if the beggar instinct were left out of an indian he would not "go," any more than a clock without a pendulum; hungry, always hungry, and yet never refusing anything that a hog would eat, though often eating what a hog would decline; hunters, but having no higher ambition than to kill and eat jack-ass rabbits, crickets and grasshoppers, and embezzle carrion from the buzzards and cayotes; savages who, when asked if they have the common indian belief in a great spirit show a something which almost amounts to emotion, thinking whiskey is referred to; a thin, scattering race of almost naked black children, these goshoots are, who produce nothing at all, and have no villages, and no gatherings together into strictly defined tribal communities--a people whose only shelter is a rag cast on a bush to keep off a portion of the snow, and yet who inhabit one of the most rocky, wintry, repulsive wastes that our country or any other can exhibit. the bushmen and our goshoots are manifestly descended from the self-same gorilla, or kangaroo, or norway rat, which-ever animal--adam the darwinians trace them to. one would as soon expect the rabbits to fight as the goshoots, and yet they used to live off the offal and refuse of the stations a few months and then come some dark night when no mischief was expected, and burn down the buildings and kill the men from ambush as they rushed out. and once, in the night, they attacked the stage-coach when a district judge, of nevada territory, was the only passenger, and with their first volley of arrows (and a bullet or two) they riddled the stage curtains, wounded a horse or two and mortally wounded the driver. the latter was full of pluck, and so was his passenger. at the driver's call judge mott swung himself out, clambered to the box and seized the reins of the team, and away they plunged, through the racing mob of skeletons and under a hurtling storm of missiles. the stricken driver had sunk down on the boot as soon as he was wounded, but had held on to the reins and said he would manage to keep hold of them until relieved. and after they were taken from his relaxing grasp, he lay with his head between judge mott's feet, and tranquilly gave directions about the road; he said he believed he could live till the miscreants were outrun and left behind, and that if he managed that, the main difficulty would be at an end, and then if the judge drove so and so (giving directions about bad places in the road, and general course) he would reach the next station without trouble. the judge distanced the enemy and at last rattled up to the station and knew that the night's perils were done; but there was no comrade-in-arms for him to rejoice with, for the soldierly driver was dead. let us forget that we have been saying harsh things about the overland drivers, now. the disgust which the goshoots gave me, a disciple of cooper and a worshipper of the red man--even of the scholarly savages in the "last of the mohicans" who are fittingly associated with backwoodsmen who divide each sentence into two equal parts: one part critically grammatical, refined and choice of language, and the other part just such an attempt to talk like a hunter or a mountaineer, as a broadway clerk might make after eating an edition of emerson bennett's works and studying frontier life at the bowery theatre a couple of weeks--i say that the nausea which the goshoots gave me, an indian worshipper, set me to examining authorities, to see if perchance i had been over-estimating the red man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance. the revelations that came were disenchanting. it was curious to see how quickly the paint and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous, filthy and repulsive--and how quickly the evidences accumulated that wherever one finds an indian tribe he has only found goshoots more or less modified by circumstances and surroundings--but goshoots, after all. they deserve pity, poor creatures; and they can have mine--at this distance. nearer by, they never get anybody's. there is an impression abroad that the baltimore and washington railroad company and many of its employees are goshoots; but it is an error. there is only a plausible resemblance, which, while it is apt enough to mislead the ignorant, cannot deceive parties who have contemplated both tribes. but seriously, it was not only poor wit, but very wrong to start the report referred to above; for however innocent the motive may have been, the necessary effect was to injure the reputation of a class who have a hard enough time of it in the pitiless deserts of the rocky mountains, heaven knows! if we cannot find it in our hearts to give those poor naked creatures our christian sympathy and compassion, in god's name let us at least not throw mud at them. chapter xx. on the seventeenth day we passed the highest mountain peaks we had yet seen, and although the day was very warm the night that followed upon its heels was wintry cold and blankets were next to useless. on the eighteenth day we encountered the eastward-bound telegraph-constructors at reese river station and sent a message to his excellency gov. nye at carson city (distant one hundred and fifty-six miles). on the nineteenth day we crossed the great american desert--forty memorable miles of bottomless sand, into which the coach wheels sunk from six inches to a foot. we worked our passage most of the way across. that is to say, we got out and walked. it was a dreary pull and a long and thirsty one, for we had no water. from one extremity of this desert to the other, the road was white with the bones of oxen and horses. it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that we could have walked the forty miles and set our feet on a bone at every step! the desert was one prodigious graveyard. and the log-chains, wagon tyres, and rotting wrecks of vehicles were almost as thick as the bones. i think we saw log-chains enough rusting there in the desert, to reach across any state in the union. do not these relics suggest something of an idea of the fearful suffering and privation the early emigrants to california endured? at the border of the desert lies carson lake, or the "sink" of the carson, a shallow, melancholy sheet of water some eighty or a hundred miles in circumference. carson river empties into it and is lost--sinks mysteriously into the earth and never appears in the light of the sun again--for the lake has no outlet whatever. there are several rivers in nevada, and they all have this mysterious fate. they end in various lakes or "sinks," and that is the last of them. carson lake, humboldt lake, walker lake, mono lake, are all great sheets of water without any visible outlet. water is always flowing into them; none is ever seen to flow out of them, and yet they remain always level full, neither receding nor overflowing. what they do with their surplus is only known to the creator. on the western verge of the desert we halted a moment at ragtown. it consisted of one log house and is not set down on the map. this reminds me of a circumstance. just after we left julesburg, on the platte, i was sitting with the driver, and he said: "i can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. horace greeley went over this road once. when he was leaving carson city he told the driver, hank monk, that he had an engagement to lecture at placerville and was very anxious to go through quick. hank monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. the coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons all off of horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at hank monk and begged him to go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago. but hank monk said, 'keep your seat, horace, and i'll get you there on time'--and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!" a day or two after that we picked up a denver man at the cross roads, and he told us a good deal about the country and the gregory diggings. he seemed a very entertaining person and a man well posted in the affairs of colorado. by and by he remarked: "i can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. horace greeley went over this road once. when he was leaving carson city he told the driver, hank monk, that he had an engagement to lecture at placerville and was very anxious to go through quick. hank monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. the coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons all off of horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at hank monk and begged him to go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago. but hank monk said, 'keep your seat, horace, and i'll get you there on time!'--and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!" at fort bridger, some days after this, we took on board a cavalry sergeant, a very proper and soldierly person indeed. from no other man during the whole journey, did we gather such a store of concise and well-arranged military information. it was surprising to find in the desolate wilds of our country a man so thoroughly acquainted with everything useful to know in his line of life, and yet of such inferior rank and unpretentious bearing. for as much as three hours we listened to him with unabated interest. finally he got upon the subject of trans-continental travel, and presently said: "i can tell you a very laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. horace greeley went over this road once. when he was leaving carson city he told the driver, hank monk, that he had an engagement to lecture at placerville and was very anxious to go through quick. hank monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. the coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons all off of horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at hank monk and begged him to go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago. but hank monk said, 'keep your seat, horace, and i'll get you there on time!'--and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!" when we were eight hours out from salt lake city a mormon preacher got in with us at a way station--a gentle, soft-spoken, kindly man, and one whom any stranger would warm to at first sight. i can never forget the pathos that was in his voice as he told, in simple language, the story of his people's wanderings and unpitied sufferings. no pulpit eloquence was ever so moving and so beautiful as this outcast's picture of the first mormon pilgrimage across the plains, struggling sorrowfully onward to the land of its banishment and marking its desolate way with graves and watering it with tears. his words so wrought upon us that it was a relief to us all when the conversation drifted into a more cheerful channel and the natural features of the curious country we were in came under treatment. one matter after another was pleasantly discussed, and at length the stranger said: "i can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. horace greeley went over this road once. when he was leaving carson city he told the driver, hank monk, that he had an engagement to lecture in placerville, and was very anxious to go through quick. hank monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. the coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons all off of horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at hank monk and begged him to go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago. but hank monk said, 'keep your seat, horace, and i'll get you there on time!'--and you bet you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!" ten miles out of ragtown we found a poor wanderer who had lain down to die. he had walked as long as he could, but his limbs had failed him at last. hunger and fatigue had conquered him. it would have been inhuman to leave him there. we paid his fare to carson and lifted him into the coach. it was some little time before he showed any very decided signs of life; but by dint of chafing him and pouring brandy between his lips we finally brought him to a languid consciousness. then we fed him a little, and by and by he seemed to comprehend the situation and a grateful light softened his eye. we made his mail-sack bed as comfortable as possible, and constructed a pillow for him with our coats. he seemed very thankful. then he looked up in our faces, and said in a feeble voice that had a tremble of honest emotion in it: "gentlemen, i know not who you are, but you have saved my life; and although i can never be able to repay you for it, i feel that i can at least make one hour of your long journey lighter. i take it you are strangers to this great thorough fare, but i am entirely familiar with it. in this connection i can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. horace greeley----" i said, impressively: "suffering stranger, proceed at your peril. you see in me the melancholy wreck of a once stalwart and magnificent manhood. what has brought me to this? that thing which you are about to tell. gradually but surely, that tiresome old anecdote has sapped my strength, undermined my constitution, withered my life. pity my helplessness. spare me only just this once, and tell me about young george washington and his little hatchet for a change." we were saved. but not so the invalid. in trying to retain the anecdote in his system he strained himself and died in our arms. i am aware, now, that i ought not to have asked of the sturdiest citizen of all that region, what i asked of that mere shadow of a man; for, after seven years' residence on the pacific coast, i know that no passenger or driver on the overland ever corked that anecdote in, when a stranger was by, and survived. within a period of six years i crossed and recrossed the sierras between nevada and california thirteen times by stage and listened to that deathless incident four hundred and eighty-one or eighty-two times. i have the list somewhere. drivers always told it, conductors told it, landlords told it, chance passengers told it, the very chinamen and vagrant indians recounted it. i have had the same driver tell it to me two or three times in the same afternoon. it has come to me in all the multitude of tongues that babel bequeathed to earth, and flavored with whiskey, brandy, beer, cologne, sozodont, tobacco, garlic, onions, grasshoppers--everything that has a fragrance to it through all the long list of things that are gorged or guzzled by the sons of men. i never have smelt any anecdote as often as i have smelt that one; never have smelt any anecdote that smelt so variegated as that one. and you never could learn to know it by its smell, because every time you thought you had learned the smell of it, it would turn up with a different smell. bayard taylor has written about this hoary anecdote, richardson has published it; so have jones, smith, johnson, ross browne, and every other correspondence-inditing being that ever set his foot upon the great overland road anywhere between julesburg and san francisco; and i have heard that it is in the talmud. i have seen it in print in nine different foreign languages; i have been told that it is employed in the inquisition in rome; and i now learn with regret that it is going to be set to music. i do not think that such things are right. stage-coaching on the overland is no more, and stage drivers are a race defunct. i wonder if they bequeathed that bald-headed anecdote to their successors, the railroad brakemen and conductors, and if these latter still persecute the helpless passenger with it until he concludes, as did many a tourist of other days, that the real grandeurs of the pacific coast are not yo semite and the big trees, but hank monk and his adventure with horace greeley. [and what makes that worn anecdote the more aggravating, is, that the adventure it celebrates never occurred. if it were a good anecdote, that seeming demerit would be its chiefest virtue, for creative power belongs to greatness; but what ought to be done to a man who would wantonly contrive so flat a one as this? if i were to suggest what ought to be done to him, i should be called extravagant--but what does the sixteenth chapter of daniel say? aha!] mark twain, a biography by albert bigelow paine volume ii, part : - cv mark twain at forty in conversation with john hay, hay said to clemens: "a man reaches the zenith at forty, the top of the hill. from that time forward he begins to descend. if you have any great undertaking ahead, begin it now. you will never be so capable again." of course this was only a theory of hay's, a rule where rules do not apply, where in the end the problem resolves itself into a question of individualities. john hay did as great work after forty as ever before, so did mark twain, and both of them gained in intellectual strength and public honor to the very end. yet it must have seemed to many who knew him, and to himself, like enough, that mark twain at forty had reached the pinnacle of his fame and achievement. his name was on every lip; in whatever environment observation and argument were likely to be pointed with some saying or anecdote attributed, rightly or otherwise, to mark twain. "as mark twain says," or, "you know that story of mark twain's," were universal and daily commonplaces. it was dazzling, towering fame, not of the best or most enduring kind as yet, but holding somewhere within it the structure of immortality. he was in a constant state of siege, besought by all varieties and conditions of humanity for favors such as only human need and abnormal ingenuity can invent. his ever-increasing mail presented a marvelous exhibition of the human species on undress parade. true, there were hundreds of appreciative tributes from readers who spoke only out of a heart's gratitude; but there were nearly as great a number who came with a compliment, and added a petition, or a demand, or a suggestion, usually unwarranted, often impertinent. politicians, public speakers, aspiring writers, actors, elocutionists, singers, inventors (most of them he had never seen or heard of) cheerfully asked him for a recommendation as to their abilities and projects. young men wrote requesting verses or sentiments to be inscribed in young ladies' autograph albums; young girls wrote asking him to write the story of his life, to be used as a school composition; men starting obscure papers coolly invited him to lend them his name as editor, assuring him that he would be put to no trouble, and that it would help advertise his books; a fruitful humorist wrote that he had invented some five thousand puns, and invited mark twain to father this terrific progeny in book form for a share of the returns. but the list is endless. he said once: "the symbol of the race ought to be a human being carrying an ax, for every human being has one concealed about him somewhere, and is always seeking the opportunity to grind it." even p. t. barnum had an ax, the large ax of advertising, and he was perpetually trying to grind it on mark twain's reputation; in other words, trying to get him to write something that would help to popularize "the greatest show on earth." there were a good many curious letters-letters from humorists, would-be and genuine. a bright man in duluth sent him an old allen "pepper-box" revolver with the statement that it had been found among a pile of bones under a tree, from the limb of which was suspended a lasso and a buffalo skull; this as evidence that the weapon was the genuine allen which bemis had lost on that memorable overland buffalo-hunt. mark twain enjoyed that, and kept the old pepper-box as long as he lived. there were letters from people with fads; letters from cranks of every description; curious letters even from friends. reginald cholmondeley, that lovely eccentric of condover hall, where mr. and mrs. clemens had spent some halcyon days in , wrote him invitations to be at his castle on a certain day, naming the hour, and adding that he had asked friends to meet him. cholmondeley had a fancy for birds, and spared nothing to improve his collection. once he wrote clemens asking him to collect for him two hundred and five american specimens, naming the varieties and the amount which he was to pay for each. clemens was to catch these birds and bring them over to england, arriving at condover on a certain day, when there would be friends to meet him, of course. then there was a report which came now and then from another english castle--the minutes of a certain "mark twain club," all neatly and elaborately written out, with the speech of each member and the discussions which had followed--the work, he found out later, of another eccentric; for there was no mark twain club, the reports being just the mental diversion of a rich young man, with nothing else to do.--[in following the equator clemens combined these two pleasant characters in one story, with elaborations.] letters came queerly addressed. there is one envelope still in existence which bears clemens's name in elaborate design and a very good silhouette likeness, the work of some talented artist. "mark twain, united states," was a common address; "mark twain, the world," was also used; "mark twain, somewhere," mailed in a foreign country, reached him promptly, and "mark twain, anywhere," found its way to hartford in due season. then there was a letter (though this was later; he was abroad at the time), mailed by brander matthews and francis wilson, addressed, "mark twain, god knows where." it found him after traveling half around the world on its errand, and in his answer he said, "he did." then some one sent a letter addressed, "the devil knows where." which also reached him, and he answered, "he did, too." surely this was the farthest horizon of fame. countless mark twain anecdotes are told of this period, of every period, and will be told and personally vouched for so long as the last soul of his generation remains alive. for seventy years longer, perhaps, there will be those who will relate "personal recollections" of mark twain. many of them will be interesting; some of them will be true; most of them will become history at last. it is too soon to make history of much of this drift now. it is only safe to admit a few authenticated examples. it happens that one of the oftenest-told anecdotes has been the least elaborated. it is the one about his call on mrs. stowe. twichell's journal entry, set down at the time, verifies it: mrs. stowe was leaving for florida one morning, and clemens ran over early to say good-by. on his return mrs. clemens regarded him disapprovingly: "why, youth," she said, "you haven't on any collar and tie." he said nothing, but went up to his room, did up these items in a neat package, and sent it over by a servant, with a line: "herewith receive a call from the rest of me." mrs. stowe returned a witty note, in which she said that he had discovered a new principle, the principle of making calls by instalments, and asked whether, in extreme cases, a man might not send his hat, coat, and boots and be otherwise excused. col. henry watterson tells the story of an after-theater supper at the brevoort house, where murat halstead, mark twain, and himself were present. a reporter sent in a card for colonel watterson, who was about to deny himself when clemens said: "give it to me; i'll fix it." and left the table. he came back in a moment and beckoned to watterson. "he is young and as innocent as a lamb," he said. "i represented myself as your secretary. i said that you were not here, but if mr. halstead would do as well i would fetch him out. i'll introduce you as halstead, and we'll have some fun." now, while watterson and halstead were always good friends, they were political enemies. it was a political season and the reporter wanted that kind of an interview. watterson gave it to him, repudiating every principle that halstead stood for, reversing him in every expressed opinion. halstead was for hard money and given to flying the "bloody shirt" of sectional prejudice; watterson lowered the bloody shirt and declared for greenbacks in halstead's name. then he and clemens returned to the table and told frankly what they had done. of course, nobody believed it. the report passed the world night-editor, and appeared, next morning. halstead woke up, then, and wrote a note to the world, denying the interview throughout. the world printed his note with the added line: "when mr. halstead saw our reporter he had dined." it required john hay (then on the tribune) to place the joke where it belonged. there is a lotos club anecdote of mark twain that carries the internal evidence of truth. saturday evening at the lotos always brought a gathering of the "wits," and on certain evenings--"hens and chickens" nights--each man had to tell a story, make a speech, or sing a song. on one evening a young man, an invited guest, was called upon and recited a very long poem. one by one those who sat within easy reach of the various exits melted away, until no one remained but mark twain. perhaps he saw the earnestness of the young man, and sympathized with it. he may have remembered a time when he would have been grateful for one such attentive auditor. at all events, he sat perfectly still, never taking his eyes from the reader, never showing the least inclination toward discomfort or impatience, but listening, as with rapt attention, to the very last line. douglas taylor, one of the faithful saturday-night members, said to him later: "mark, how did you manage to sit through that dreary, interminable poem?" "well," he said, "that young man thought he had a divine message to deliver, and i thought he was entitled to at least one auditor, so i stayed with him." we may believe that for that one auditor the young author was willing to sacrifice all the others. one might continue these anecdotes for as long as the young man's poem lasted, and perhaps hold as large an audience. but anecdotes are not all of history. these are set down because they reflect a phase of the man and an aspect of his life at this period. for at the most we can only present an angle here and there, and tell a little of the story, letting each reader from his fancy construct the rest. cvi his first stage appearance once that winter the monday evening club met at mark twain's home, and instead of the usual essay he read them a story: "the facts concerning the recent carnival of crime in connecticut." it was the story of a man's warfare with a personified conscience--a sort of "william wilson" idea, though less weird, less somber, and with more actuality, more verisimilitude. it was, in fact, autobiographical, a setting-down of the author's daily self-chidings. the climax, where conscience is slain, is a startling picture which appeals to most of humanity. so vivid is it all, that it is difficult in places not to believe in the reality of the tale, though the allegory is always present. the club was deeply impressed by the little fictional sermon. one of its ministerial members offered his pulpit for the next sunday if mark twain would deliver it to his congregation. howells welcomed it for the atlantic, and published it in june. it was immensely successful at the time, though for some reason it seems to be little known or remembered to-day. now and then a reader mentions it, always with enthusiasm. howells referred to it repeatedly in his letters, and finally persuaded clemens to let osgood bring it out, with "a true story," in dainty, booklet form. if the reader does not already know the tale, it will pay him to look it up and read it, and then to read it again. meantime tom sawyer remained unpublished. "get bliss to hurry it up!" wrote howells. "that boy is going to make a prodigious hit." but clemens delayed the book, to find some means to outwit the canadian pirates, who thus far had laid hands on everything, and now were clamoring at the atlantic because there was no more to steal. moncure d. conway was in america, and agreed to take the manuscript of sawyer to london and arrange for its publication and copyright. in conway's memoirs he speaks of mark twain's beautiful home, comparing it and its surroundings with the homes of surrey, england. he tells of an entertainment given to harriet beecher stowe, a sort of animated jarley wax-works. clemens and conway went over as if to pay a call, when presently the old lady was rather startled by an invasion of costumed. figures. clemens rose and began introducing them in his gay, fanciful fashion. he began with a knight in full armor, saying, as if in an aside, "bring along that tinshop," and went on to tell the romance of the knight's achievements. conway read tom sawyer on the ship and was greatly excited over it. later, in london, he lectured on it, arranging meantime for its publication with chatto & windus, thus establishing a friendly business relation with that firm which mark twain continued during his lifetime. clemens lent himself to a number of institutional amusements that year, and on the th of april, , made his first public appearance on the dramatic stage. it was an amateur performance, but not of the usual kind. there was genuine dramatic talent in hartford, and the old play of the "loan of the lover," with mark twain as peter spuyk and miss helen smith--[now mrs. william w. ellsworth.]--as gertrude, with a support sufficient for their needs, gave a performance that probably furnished as much entertainment as that pleasant old play is capable of providing. mark twain had in him the making of a great actor. henry irving once said to him: "you made a mistake by not adopting the stage as a profession. you would have made even a greater actor than a writer." yet it is unlikely that he would ever have been satisfied with the stage. he had too many original literary ideas. he would never have been satisfied to repeat the same part over and over again, night after night from week to month, and from month to year. he could not stick to the author's lines even for one night. in his performance of the easy-going, thick-headed peter spuyk his impromptu additions to the lines made it hard on the company, who found their cues all at sixes and sevens, but it delighted the audience beyond measure. no such impersonation of that. character was ever given before, or ever will be given again. it was repeated with new and astonishing variations on the part of peter, and it could have been put on for a long run. augustin daly wrote immediately, offering the fifth avenue theater for a "benefit" performance, and again, a few days later, urging acceptance. "not for one night, but for many." clemens was tempted, no doubt. perhaps, if he had yielded, he would today have had one more claim on immortality. cvii howells, clemens, and "george" howells and clemens were visiting back and forth rather oftener just then. clemens was particularly fond of the boston crowd--aldrich, fields, osgood, and the rest--delighting in those luncheons or dinners which osgood, that hospitable publisher, was always giving on one pretext or another. no man ever loved company more than osgood, or to play the part of host and pay for the enjoyment of others. his dinners were elaborate affairs, where the sages and poets and wits of that day (and sometimes their wives) gathered. they were happy reunions, those fore-gatherings, though perhaps a more intimate enjoyment was found at the luncheons, where only two or three were invited, usually aldrich, howells, and clemens, and the talk continued through the afternoon and into the deepening twilight, such company and such twilight as somehow one seems never to find any more. on one of the visits which howells made to hartford that year he took his son john, then a small boy, with him. john was about six years old at the time, with his head full of stories of aladdin, and of other arabian fancies. on the way over his father said to him: "now, john, you will see a perfect palace." they arrived, and john was awed into silence by the magnificence and splendors of his surroundings until they went to the bath-room to wash off the dust of travel. there he happened to notice a cake of pink soap. "why," he said, "they've even got their soap painted!" next morning he woke early--they were occupying the mahogany room on the ground floor --and slipping out through the library, and to the door of the dining-room, he saw the colored butler, george--the immortal george--setting the breakfast-table. he hurriedly tiptoed back and whispered to his father: "come quick! the slave is setting the table!" this being the second mention of george, it seems proper here that he should be formally presented. clemens used to say that george came one day to wash windows and remained eighteen years. he was precisely the sort of character that mark twain loved. he had formerly been the body-servant of an army general and was typically racially southern, with those delightful attributes of wit and policy and gentleness which go with the best type of negro character. the children loved him no less than did their father. mrs. clemens likewise had a weakness for george, though she did not approve of him. george's morals were defective. he was an inveterate gambler. he would bet on anything, though prudently and with knowledge. he would investigate before he invested. if he placed his money on a horse, he knew the horse's pedigree and the pedigree of the horses against it, also of their riders. if he invested in an election, he knew all about the candidates. he had agents among his own race, and among the whites as well, to supply him with information. he kept them faithful to him by lending them money--at ruinous interest. he buttonholed mark twain's callers while he was removing their coats concerning the political situation, much to the chagrin of mrs. clemens, who protested, though vainly, for the men liked george and his ways, and upheld him in his iniquities. mrs. clemens's disapproval of george reached the point, now and then, where she declared he could not remain. she even discharged him once, but next morning george was at the breakfast-table, in attendance, as usual. mrs. clemens looked at him gravely: "george," she said, "didn't i discharge you yesterday?" "yes, mis' clemens, but i knew you couldn't get along without me, so i thought i'd better stay a while." in one of the letters to howells, clemens wrote: when george first came he was one of the most religious of men. he had but one fault--young george washington's. but i have trained him; and now it fairly breaks mrs. clemens's heart to hear him stand at that front door and lie to an unwelcome visitor. george was a fine diplomat. he would come up to the billiard-room with a card or message from some one waiting below, and clemens would fling his soul into a sultry denial which became a soothing and balmy subterfuge before it reached the front door. the "slave" must have been setting the table in good season, for the clemens breakfasts were likely to be late. they usually came along about nine o'clock, by which time howells and john were fairly clawing with hunger. clemens did not have an early appetite, but when it came it was a good one. breakfast and dinner were his important meals. he seldom ate at all during the middle of the day, though if guests were present he would join them at luncheon-time and walk up and down while they were eating, talking and gesticulating in his fervent, fascinating way. sometimes mrs. clemens would say: "oh, youth, do come and sit down with us. we can listen so much better." but he seldom did. at dinner, too, it was his habit, between the courses, to rise from the table and walk up and down the room, waving his napkin and talking!--talking in a strain and with a charm that he could never quite equal with his pen. it's the opinion of most people who knew mark twain personally that his impromptu utterances, delivered with that ineffable quality of speech, manifested the culmination of his genius. when clemens came to boston the howells household was regulated, or rather unregulated, without regard to former routine. mark twain's personality was of a sort that unconsciously compelled the general attendance of any household. the reader may recall josh billings's remark on the subject. howells tells how they kept their guest to themselves when he visited their home in cambridge, permitting him to indulge in as many unconventions as he chose; how clemens would take a room at the parker house, leaving the gas burning day and night, and perhaps arrive at cambridge, after a dinner or a reading, in evening dress and slippers, and joyously remain with them for a day or more in that guise, slipping on an overcoat and a pair of rubbers when they went for a walk. also, how he smoked continuously in every room of the house, smoked during every waking moment, and how howells, mindful of his insurance, sometimes slipped in and removed the still-burning cigar after he was asleep. clemens had difficulty in getting to sleep in that earlier day, and for a time found it soothing to drink a little champagne on retiring. once, when he arrived in boston, howells said: "clemens, we've laid in a bottle of champagne for you." but he answered: "oh, that's no good any more. beer's the thing." so howells provided the beer, and always afterward had a vision of his guest going up-stairs that night with a pint bottle under each arm. he invented other methods of inducing slumber as the years went by, and at one time found that this precious boon came more easily when he stretched himself on the bath-room floor. he was a perpetual joy to the howells family when he was there, even though the household required a general reorganization when he was gone. mildred howells remembers how, as a very little girl, her mother cautioned her not to ask for anything she wanted at the table when company was present, but to speak privately of it to her. miss howells declares that while mark twain was their guest she nearly starved because it was impossible to get her mother's attention; and mrs. howells, after one of those visits of hilarity and disorder, said: "well, it 'most kills me, but it pays," a remark which clemens vastly enjoyed. howells himself once wrote: your visit was a perfect ovation for us; we never enjoy anything so much as those visits of yours. the smoke and the scotch and the late hours almost kill us; but we look each other in the eyes when you are gone, and say what a glorious time it was, and air the library, and begin sleeping and longing to have you back again.... cviii summer labors at quarry farm they went to elmira, that summer of ' , to be "hermits and eschew caves and live in the sun," as clemens wrote in a letter to dr. brown. they returned to the place as to paradise: clemens to his study and the books which he always called for, mrs. clemens to a blessed relief from social obligations, the children to the shady play-places, the green, sloping hill, where they could race and tumble, and to all their animal friends. susy was really growing up. she had had several birthdays, quite grand affairs, when she had been brought down in the morning, decked, and with proper ceremonies, with subsequent celebration. she was a strange, thoughtful child, much given to reflecting on the power and presence of infinity, for she was religiously taught. down in the city, one night, there was a grand display of fireworks, and the hilltop was a good place from which to enjoy it; but it grew late after a little, and susy was ordered to bed. she said, thoughtfully: "i wish i could sit up all night, as god does." the baby, whom they still called "bay," was a tiny, brown creature who liked to romp in the sun and be rocked to sleep at night with a song. clemens often took them for extended' walks, pushing bay in her carriage. once, in a preoccupied moment, he let go of the little vehicle and it started downhill, gaining speed rapidly. he awoke then, and set off in wild pursuit. before he could overtake the runaway carriage it had turned to the roadside and upset. bay was lying among the stones and her head was bleeding. hastily binding the wound with a handkerchief he started full speed with her up the hill toward the house, calling for restoratives as he came. it was no serious matter. the little girl was strong and did not readily give way to affliction. the children were unlike: susy was all contemplation and nerves; bay serene and practical. it was said, when a pet cat died--this was some years later--that susy deeply reflected as to its life here and hereafter, while bay was concerned only as to the style of its funeral. susy showed early her father's quaintness of remark. once they bought her a heavier pair of shoes than she approved of. she was not in the best of humors during the day, and that night, when at prayer-time her mother said, "now, susy, put your thoughts on god," she answered, "mama, i can't with those shoes." clemens worked steadily that summer and did a variety of things. he had given up a novel, begun with much enthusiasm, but he had undertaken another long manuscript. by the middle of august he had written several hundred pages of a story which was to be a continuation of tam sawyer --the adventures of huckleberry finn. now, here is a curious phase of genius. the novel which for a time had filled him with enthusiasm and faith had no important literary value, whereas, concerning this new tale, he says: "i like it only tolerably well, as far as i have gone, and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the manuscript when it is done"--this of the story which, of his books of pure fiction, will perhaps longest survive. he did, in fact, give the story up, and without much regret, when it was about half completed, and let it lie unfinished for years. he wrote one short tale, "the canvasser's story," a burlesque of no special distinction, and he projected for the atlantic a scheme of "blindfold novelettes," a series of stories to be written by well-known authors and others, each to be constructed on the same plot. one can easily imagine clemens's enthusiasm over a banal project like that; his impulses were always rainbow-hued, whether valuable or not; but it is curious that howells should welcome and even encourage an enterprise so far removed from all the traditions of art. it fell to pieces, at last, of inherent misconstruction. the title was to be, "a murder and a marriage." clemens could not arrive at a logical climax that did not bring the marriage and the hanging on the same day. the atlantic started its "contributors' club," and howells wrote to clemens for a paragraph or more of personal opinion on any subject, assuring him that he could "spit his spite" out at somebody or something as if it were a passage from a letter. that was a fairly large permission to give mark twain. the paragraph he sent was the sort of thing he would write with glee, and hug himself over in the thought of howells's necessity of rejecting it. in the accompanying note he said: say, boss, do you want this to lighten up your old freight-train with? i suppose you won't, but then it won't take long to say, so. he was always sending impossible offerings to the magazines; innocently enough sometimes, but often out of pure mischievousness. yet they were constantly after him, for they knew they were likely to get a first-water gem. mary mopes dodge, of st. nicholas, wrote time and again, and finally said: "i know a man who was persecuted by an editor till he went distracted." in his reading that year at the farm he gave more than customary attention to one of his favorite books, pepys' diary, that captivating old record which no one can follow continuously without catching the infection of its manner and the desire of imitation. he had been reading diligently one day, when he determined to try his hand on an imaginary record of conversation and court manners of a bygone day, written in the phrase of the period. the result was fireside conversation in the time of queen elizabeth, or, as he later called it, . the "conversation," recorded by a supposed pepys of that period, was written with all the outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day, when fireside sociabilities were limited only by the range of loosened fancy, vocabulary, and physical performance, and not by any bounds of convention. howells has spoken of mark twain's "elizabethan breadth of parlance," and how he, howells, was always hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which clemens had "loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion." "i could not bear to burn them," he declares, "and i could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them." in the mark twain outdid himself in the elizabethan field. it was written as a letter to that robust divine, rev. joseph twichell, who had no special scruples concerning shakespearian parlance and customs. before it was mailed it was shown to david gray, who was spending a sunday at elmira. gray said: "print it and put your name to it, mark. you have never done a greater piece of work than that." john hay, whom it also reached in due time, pronounce it a classic--a "most exquisite bit of old english morality." hay surreptitiously permitted some proofs to be made of it, and it has been circulated privately, though sparingly, ever since. at one time a special font of antique type was made for it and one hundred copies were taken on hand-made paper. they would easily bring a hundred dollars each to-day. is a genuine classic, as classics of that sort go. it is better than the gross obscenities of rabelais, and perhaps, in some day to come, the taste that justified gargantua and the decameron will give this literary refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writings of mark twain. human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is purely a matter of environment and point of view.--[in a note-book of a later period clemens himself wrote: "it depends on who writes a thing whether it is coarse or not. i once wrote a conversation between elizabeth, shakespeare, ben jonson, beaumont, sir w. raleigh, lord bacon, sir nicholas throckmorton, and a stupid old nobleman--this latter being cup-bearer to the queen and ostensible reporter of the talk. "there were four maids of honor present and a sweet young girl two years younger than the boy beaumont. i built a conversation which could have happened--i used words such as were used at that time-- . i sent it anonymously to a magazine, and how the editor abused it and the sender! but that man was a praiser of rabelais, and had been saying, 'o that we had a rabelais!' i judged that i could furnish him one."] eighteen hundred and seventy-six was a presidential year--the year of the hayes-tilden campaign. clemens and howells were both warm republicans and actively interested in the outcome, clemens, as he confessed, for the first time in his life. before his return to hartford he announced himself publicly as a hayes man, made so by governor hayes's letter of acceptance, which, he said, "expresses my own political convictions." his politics had not been generally known up to that time, and a tilden and hendricks club in jersey city had invited him to be present and give them some political counsel, at a flag-raising. he wrote, declining pleasantly enough, then added: "you have asked me for some political counsel or advice: in view of mr. tilden's civil war record my advice is not to raise the flag." he wrote howells: "if tilden is elected i think the entire country will go pretty straight to--mrs. howells's bad place." howells was writing a campaign biography of hayes, which he hoped would have a large sale, and clemens urged him to get it out quickly and save the country. howells, working like a beaver, in turn urged clemens to take the field in the cause. returning to hartford, clemens presided at a political rally and made a speech, the most widely quoted of the campaign. all papers, without distinction as to party, quoted it, and all readers, regardless of politics, read it with joy. yet conditions did not improve. when howells's book had been out a reasonable length of time he wrote that it had sold only two thousand copies. "there's success for you," he said. "it makes me despair of the republic, i can tell you." clemens, however, did not lose faith, and went on shouting for hayes and damning tilden till the final vote was cast. in later life he changed his mind about tilden (as did many others) through sympathy. sympathy could make--mark twain change his mind any time. he stood for the right, but, above all, for justice. he stood for the wronged, regardless of all other things. cix the public appearance of "tom sawyer" clemens gave a few readings in boston and philadelphia, but when urged to go elsewhere made the excuse that he was having his portrait painted and could not leave home. as a matter of fact, he was enjoying himself with frank millet, who had been invited to the house to do the portrait and had captured the fervent admiration of the whole family. millet was young, handsome, and lively; clemens couldn't see enough of him, the children adored him and added his name to the prayer which included each member of the household--the "holy family," clemens called it. millet had brought with him but one piece of canvas for the portrait, and when the first sketch was finished mrs. clemens was so delighted with it that she did not wish him to touch it again. she was afraid of losing some particular feeling in it which she valued. millet went to the city. for another canvas and clemens accompanied him. while millet was doing his shopping it happened to occur to clemens that it would be well to fill in the time by having his hair cut. he left word with a clerk to tell millet that he had gone across the street. by and by the artist came over, and nearly wept with despair when he saw his subject sheared of the auburn, gray-sprinkled aureola that had made his first sketch a success. he tried it again, and the result was an excellent likeness, but it never satisfied millet. the 'adventures of tom sawyer' appeared late in december ( ), and immediately took its place as foremost of american stories of boy life, a place which it unquestionably holds to this day. we have already considered the personal details of this story, for they were essentially nothing more than the various aspects of mark twain's own boyhood. it is only necessary to add a word concerning the elaboration of this period in literary form. from every point it is a masterpiece, this picture of boy life in a little lazy, drowsy town, with all the irresponsibility and general disreputability of boy character coupled with that indefinable, formless, elusive something we call boy conscience, which is more likely to be boy terror and a latent instinct of manliness. these things are so truly portrayed that every boy and man reader finds the tale fitting into his own remembered years, as if it had grown there. every boy has played off sick to escape school; every boy has reflected in his heart tom's picture of himself being brought home dead, and gloated over the stricken consciences of those who had blighted his young life; every boy--of that day, at least--every normal, respectable boy, grew up to "fear god and dread the sunday-school," as howells puts it in his review. as for the story itself, the narrative of it, it is pure delight. the pirate camp on the island is simply boy heaven. what boy, for instance, would not change any other glory or boon that the world holds for this: they built a fire against the side of a great log twenty or thirty steps within the somber depths of the forest, and then cooked some bacon in the frying-pan for supper, and used up half of the corn "pone" stock they had brought. it seemed glorious sport to be feasting in that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and they said they never would return to civilization. the climbing fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the pillared tree-trunks of their forest-temple, and upon the varnished foliage and the festooning vines. there is a magic in it. mark twain, when he wrote it, felt renewed in him all the old fascination of those days and nights with tom blankenship, john briggs, and the bowen boys on glasscock's island. everywhere in tom sawyer there is a quality, entirely apart from the humor and the narrative, which the younger reader is likely to overlook. no one forgets the whitewashing scene, but not many of us, from our early reading, recall this delicious bit of description which introduces it: the locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. cardiff hill, beyond the village and above it, was green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a delectable land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting. tom's night visit home; the graveyard scene, with the murder of dr. robinson; the adventures of tom and becky in the cave--these are all marvelously invented. literary thrill touches the ultimate in one incident of the cave episode. brander matthews has written: nor is there any situation quite as thrilling as that awful moment in the cave when the boy and girl are lost in the darkness, and when tom suddenly sees a human hand bearing a light, and then finds that the hand is the hand of indian joe, his one mortal enemy. i have always thought that the vision of the hand in the cave in tom sawyer was one of the very finest things in the literature of adventure since robinson crusoe first saw a single footprint in the sand of the sea-shore. mark twain's invention was not always a reliable quantity, but with that eccentricity which goes with any attribute of genius, it was likely at any moment to rise supreme. if to the critical, hardened reader the tale seems a shade overdone here and there, a trifle extravagant in its delineations, let him go back to his first long-ago reading of it and see if he recalls anything but his pure delight in it then. as a boy's story it has not been equaled. tom sawyer has ranked in popularity with roughing it. its sales go steadily on from year to year, and are likely to continue so long as boys and girls do not change, and men and women remember. --[col. henry watterson, when he finished tom sawyer, wrote: "i have just laid down tom sawyer, and cannot resist the pressure. it is immense! i read every word of it, didn't skip a line, and nearly disgraced myself several times in the presence of a sleeping-car full of honorable and pious people. once i had to get to one side and have a cry, and as for an internal compound of laughter and tears there was no end to it.... the 'funeral' of the boys, the cave business, and the hunt for the hidden treasure are as dramatic as anything i know of in fiction, while the pathos--particularly everything relating to huck and aunt polly--makes a cross between dickens's skill and thackeray's nature, which, resembling neither, is thoroughly impressive and original."] cx mark twain and bret harte write a play it was the fall and winter of ' that bret harte came to hartford and collaborated with mark twain on the play "ah sin," a comedy-drama, or melodrama, written for charles t. parsloe, the great impersonator of chinese character. harte had written a successful play which unfortunately he had sold outright for no great sum, and was eager for another venture. harte had the dramatic sense and constructive invention. he also had humor, but he felt the need of the sort of humor that mark twain could furnish. furthermore, he believed that a play backed by both their reputations must start with great advantages. clemens also realized these things, and the arrangement was made. speaking of their method of working, clemens once said: "well, bret came down to hartford and we talked it over, and then bret wrote it while i played billiards, but of course i had to go over it to get the dialect right. bret never did know anything about dialect." which is hardly a fair statement of the case. they both worked on the play, and worked hard. during the period of its construction harte had an order for a story which he said he must finish at once, as he needed the money. it must be delivered by the following night, and he insisted that he must be getting at it without a moment's delay. still he seemed in no haste to begin. the evening passed; bedtime came. then he asked that an open fire might be made in his room and a bottle of whisky sent up, in case he needed. something to keep him awake. george attended to these matters, and nothing more was heard of harte until very early next morning, when he rang for george and asked for a fresh fire and an additional supply of whisky. at breakfast-time he appeared, fresh, rosy, and elate, with the announcement that his story was complete. that forenoon the saturday morning club met at the clemens home. it was a young women's club, of which mark twain was a sort of honorary member --a club for the purpose of intellectual advancement, somewhat on the order of the monday evening club of men, except that the papers read before it were not prepared by members, but by men and women prominent in some field of intellectual progress. bret harte had agreed to read to them on this particular occasion, and he gaily appeared and gave them the story just finished, "thankful blossom," a tale which mark twain always regarded as one of harte's very best. the new play, "ah sin," by mark twain and bret harte, was put on at washington, at the national theater, on the evening of may , . it had been widely exploited in the newspapers, and the fame of the authors insured a crowded opening. clemens was unable to go over on account of a sudden attack of bronchitis. parsloe was nervous accordingly, and the presence of harte does not seem to have added to his happiness. "i am not very well myself," he wrote to clemens. "the excitement of the first night is bad enough, but to have the annoyance with harte that i have is too much for a new beginner." nevertheless, the play seems to have gone well, with parsloe as ah sin --a chinese laundryman who was also a great number of other diverting things--with a fair support and a happy-go-lucky presentation of frontier life, which included a supposed murder, a false accusation, and a general clearing-up of mystery by the pleasant and wily and useful and entertaining ah sin. it was not a great play. it was neither very coherent nor convincing, but it had a lot of good fun in it, with character parts which, if not faithful to life, were faithful enough to the public conception of it to be amusing and exciting. at the end of each act not only parsloe, but also the principal members of the company, were called before the curtain for special acknowledgments. when it was over there was a general call for ah sin, who came before the curtain and read a telegram. charles t. parsloe,--i am on the sick-list, and therefore cannot come to washington; but i have prepared two speeches--one to deliver in event of failure of the play, and the other if successful. please tell me which i shall send. may be better to put it to vote. mark twain. the house cheered the letter, and when it was put to vote decided unanimously that the play had been a success--a verdict more kindly than true. j. i. ford, of the theater management, wrote to clemens, next morning after the first performance, urging him to come to washington in person and "wet nurse" the play until "it could do for itself." ford expressed satisfaction with the play and its prospects, and concludes: i inclose notices. come if you can. "your presence will be worth ten thousand men. the king's name is a tower of strength." i have urged the president to come to-night. the play made no money in washington, but augustin daly decided to put it on in new york at the fifth avenue theater, with a company which included, besides parsloe, edmund collier, p. a. anderson, dora goldthwaite, henry crisp, and mrs. wells, a very worthy group of players indeed. clemens was present at the opening, dressed in white, which he affected only for warm-weather use in those days, and made a speech at the end of the third act. "ah sin" did not excite much enthusiasm among new york dramatic critics. the houses were promising for a time, but for some reason the performance as a whole did not contain the elements of prosperity. it set out on its provincial travels with no particular prestige beyond the reputation of its authors; and it would seem that this was not enough, for it failed to pay, and all parties concerned presently abandoned it to its fate and it was heard of no more. just why "ah sin" did not prosper it would not become us to decide at this far remove of time and taste. poorer plays have succeeded and better plays have failed since then, and no one has ever been able to demonstrate the mystery. a touch somewhere, a pulling-about and a readjustment, might have saved "ali sin," but the pullings and haulings which they gave it did not. perhaps it still lies in some managerial vault, and some day may be dragged to light and reconstructed and recast, and come into its reward. who knows? or it may have drifted to that harbor of forgotten plays, whence there is no returning. as between harte and clemens, the whole matter was unfortunate. in the course of their association there arose a friction and the long-time friendship disappeared. cxi a bermuda holiday on the th of may, , mark twain set out on what, in his note-book, he declared to be "the first actual pleasure-trip" he had ever taken, meaning that on every previous trip he had started with a purpose other than that of mere enjoyment. he took with him his, friend and pastor, the rev. joseph h. twichell, and they sailed for bermuda, an island resort not so well known or so fashionable as to-day. they did not go to a hotel. under assumed names they took up quarters in a boarding-house, with a mrs. kirkham, and were unmolested and altogether happy in their wanderings through four golden days. mark twain could not resist keeping a note-book, setting down bits of scenery and character and incident, just as he had always done. he was impressed with the cheapness of property and living in the bermuda of that period. he makes special mention of some cottages constructed of coral blocks: "all as beautiful and as neat as a pin, at the cost of four hundred and eighty dollars each." to twichell he remarked: "joe, this place is like heaven, and i'm going to make the most of it." "mark," said twichell, "that's right; make the most of a place that is like heaven while you have a chance." in one of the entries--the final one--clemens says: "bermuda is free (at present) from the triple curse of railways, telegraphs, and newspapers, but this will not last the year. i propose to spend next year here and no more." when they were ready to leave, and started for the steamer, twichell made an excuse to go back, his purpose being to tell their landlady and her daughter that, without knowing it, they had been entertaining mark twain. "did you ever hear of mark twain?" asked twichell. the daughter answered. "yes," she said, "until i'm tired of the name. i know a young man who never talks of anything else." "well," said twichell, "that gentleman with me is mark twain." the kirkhams declined to believe it at first, and then were in deep sorrow that they had not known it earlier. twichell promised that he and clemens would come back the next year; and they meant to go back--we always mean to go back to places--but it was thirty years before they returned at last, and then their pleasant landlady was dead. on the home trip they sighted a wandering vessel, manned by blacks, trying to get to new york. she had no cargo and was pretty helpless. later, when she was reported again, clemens wrote about it in a hartford paper, telling the story as he knew it. the vessel had shipped the crew, on a basis of passage to new york, in exchange for labor. so it was a "pleasure-excursion!" clemens dwelt on this fancy: i have heard of a good many pleasure-excursions, but this heads the list. it is monumental, and if ever the tired old tramp is found i should like to be there and see him in his sorrowful rags and his venerable head of grass and seaweed, and hear the ancient mariners tell the story of their mysterious wanderings through the solemn solitudes of the ocean. long afterward this vagrant craft was reported again, still drifting with the relentless gulf stream. perhaps she reached new york in time; one would like to know, but there seems no good way to find out. that first bermuda voyage was always a happy memory to mark twain. to twichell he wrote that it was the "joyousest trip" he had ever made: not a heartache anywhere, not a twinge of conscience. i often come to myself out of a reverie and detect an undertone of thought that had been thinking itself without volition of mind--viz., that if we had only had ten days of those walks and talks instead of four. there was but one regret: howells had not been with them. clemens denounced him for his absence: if you had gone with us and let me pay the fifty dollars, which the trip and the board and the various knick-knacks and mementos would cost, i would have picked up enough droppings from your conversation to pay me five hundred per cent. profit in the way of the several magazine articles which i could have written; whereas i can now write only one or two, and am therefore largely out of pocket by your proud ways. clemens would not fail to write about his trip. he could not help doing that, and he began "some rambling notes of an idle excursion" as soon as he landed in hartford. they were quite what the name would signify --leisurely, pleasant commentaries on a loafing, peaceful vacation. they are not startling in their humor or description, but are gently amusing and summery, reflecting, bubble-like, evanescent fancies of bermuda. howells, shut up in a boston editorial office, found them delightful enough, and very likely his atlantic readers agreed with him. the story of "isaac and the prophets of baal" was one that capt. ned wakeman had told to twichell during a voyage which the latter had made to aspinwall with that vigorous old seafarer; so in the "rambling notes" wakeman appears as captain hurricane jones, probably a step in the evolution of the later name of stormfield. the best feature of the series (there were four papers in all) is a story of a rescue in mid-ocean; but surely the brightest ripple of humor is the reference to bermuda's mahogany-tree: there was exactly one mahogany-tree on the island. i know this to be reliable because i saw a man who said he had counted it many a time and could not be mistaken. he was a man with a haze lip and a pure heart, and everybody said he was as true as steel. such men are all too few. clemens cared less for these papers than did howells. he had serious doubts about the first two and suggested their destruction, but with howells's appreciation his own confidence in them returned and he let them all go in. they did not especially advance his reputation, but perhaps they did it no harm. cxii a new play and a new tale he wrote a short story that year which is notable mainly for the fact that in it the telephone becomes a literary property, probably for the first time. "the loves of alonzo fitz-clarence and rosannah ethelton" employed in the consummation what was then a prospect, rather than a reality--long-distance communication. his work that summer consisted mainly of two extensive undertakings, one of which he completed without delay. he still had the dramatic ambition, and he believed that he was capable now of constructing a play entirely from his own resources. to howells, in june, he wrote: to-day i am deep in a comedy which i began this morning--principal character an old detective. i skeletoned the first act and wrote the second to-day, and am dog-tired now. fifty-four pages of ms. in seven hours. seven days later, the fourth of july, he said: i have piled up one hundred and fifty-one pages on my comedy. the first, second and fourth acts are done, and done to my satisfaction, too. to-morrow and next day will finish the third act, and the play. never had so much fun over anything in my life never such consuming interest and delight. and just think! i had sol smith russell in my mind's eye for the old detective's part, and bang it! he has gone off pottering with oliver optic, or else the papers lie. he was working with enthusiasm, you see, believing in it with a faith which, alas, was no warrant for its quality. even howells caught his enthusiasm and became eager to see the play, and to have the story it contained told for the atlantic. but in the end it proved a mistake. dion boucicault, when he read the manuscript, pronounced it better than "ah sin," but that was only qualified praise. actors who considered the play, anxious enough to have mark twain's name on their posters and small bills, were obliged to admit that, while it contained marvelous lines, it wouldn't "go." john brougham wrote: there is an absolute "embarrassment of riches" in your "detective" most assuredly, but the difficulty is to put it into profitable form. the quartz is there in abundance, only requiring the necessary manipulation to extract the gold. in narrative structure the story would be full of life, character, and the most exuberant fun, but it is altogether too diffuse in its present condition for dramatic representation, and i confess i do not feel sufficient confidence in my own experience (even if i had the time, which on reflection i find i have not) to undertake what, under different circumstances, would be a "labor of love." yours sincerely, john brougham. that was frank, manly, and to the point; it covered the ground exactly. "simon wheeler, the amateur detective," had plenty of good material in it--plenty of dialogue and situations; but the dialogue wouldn't play, and the situations wouldn't act. clemens realized that perhaps the drama was not, after all, his forte; he dropped "simon wheeler," lost his interest in "ah sin," even leased "colonel sellers" for the coming season, and so, in a sort of fury, put theatrical matters out of his mind. he had entered upon what, for him, was a truer domain. one day he picked up from among the books at the farm a little juvenile volume, an english story of the thirteenth century by charlotte m. yonge, entitled, the prince and the page. it was a story of edward i. and his cousins, richard and henry de montfort; in part it told of the submerged personality of the latter, picturing him as having dwelt in disguise as a blind beggar for a period of years. it was a story of a sort and with a setting that mark twain loved, and as he read there came a correlative idea. not only would he disguise a prince as a beggar, but a beggar as a prince. he would have them change places in the world, and each learn the burdens of the other's life.--[there is no point of resemblance between the prince and the pauper and the tale that inspired it. no one would ever guess that the one had grown out of the readings of the other, and no comparison of any sort is possible between them.] the plot presented physical difficulties. he still had some lurking thought of stage performance, and saw in his mind a spectacular presentation, with all the costumery of an early period as background for a young and beautiful creature who would play the part of prince. the old device of changelings in the cradle (later used in pudd'nhead wilson) presented itself to him, but it could not provide the situations he had in mind. finally came the thought of a playful interchange of raiment and state (with startling and unlooked-for consequence)--the guise and personality of tom canty, of offal court, for those of the son of henry viii., little edward tudor, more lately sixth english king of that name. this little prince was not his first selection for the part. his original idea had been to use the late king edward vii. (then prince of wales) at about fifteen, but he found that it would never answer to lose a prince among the slums of modern london, and have his proud estate denied and jeered at by a modern mob. he felt that he could not make it seem real; so he followed back through history, looking along for the proper time and prince, till he came to little edward, who was too young --but no matter, he would do. he decided to begin his new venture in story form. he could dramatize it later. the situation appealed to him immensely. the idea seemed a brand-new one; it was delightful, it was fascinating, and he was saturated with the atmosphere and literature and history--the data and detail of that delightful old time. he put away all thought of cheap, modern play-acting and writing, to begin one of the loveliest and most entertaining and instructive tales of old english life. he decided to be quite accurate in his picture of the period, and he posted himself on old london very carefully. he bought a pocket-map which he studied in the minutest detail. he wrote about four hundred manuscript pages of the tale that summer; then, as the inspiration seemed to lag a little, put it aside, as was his habit, to wait until the ambition for it should be renewed. it was a long wait, as usual. he did not touch it again for more than three years. cxiii two domestic dramas some unusual happenings took place that summer of . john t. lewis (colored), already referred to as the religious antagonist of auntie cord, by great presence of mind and bravery saved the lives of mrs. clemens's sister-in-law, mrs. charles ("charley") langdon, her little daughter julia, and her nurse-maid. they were in a buggy, and their runaway horse was flying down east hill toward elmira to certain destruction, when lewis, laboring slowly homeward with a loaded wagon, saw them coming and turned his team across the road, after which he leaped out and with extraordinary strength and quickness grabbed the horse's bridle and brought him to a standstill. the clemens and crane families, who had seen the runaway start at the farm gate, arrived half wild with fear, only to find the supposed victims entirely safe. everybody contributed in rewarding lewis. he received money ($ , ) and various other presents, including inscribed books and trinkets, also, what he perhaps valued more than anything, a marvelous stem-winding gold watch. clemens, writing a full account to dr. brown of the watch, says: and if any scoffer shall say, "behold this thing is out of character," there is an inscription within which will silence him; for it will teach him that this wearer aggrandizes the watch, not the watch the wearer. in another paragraph he says: when lewis arrived the other evening, after having saved those lives by a feat which i think is the most marvelous i can call to mind, when he arrived hunched up on his manure-wagon and as grotesquely picturesque as usual, everybody wanted to go and see how he looked. they came back and said he was beautiful. it was so, too, and yet he would have photographed exactly as he would have done any day these past seven years that he has occupied this farm. lewis acknowledged his gifts in a letter which closed with a paragraph of rare native loftiness: but i beg to say, humbly, that inasmuch as divine providence saw fit to use me as an instrument for the saving of those preshious lives, the honner conferd upon me was greater than the feat performed. lewis lived to enjoy his prosperity, and the honor of the clemens and langdon households, for twenty-nine years. when he was too old to work there was a pension, to which clemens contributed; also henry h. rogers. so the simple-hearted, noble old negro closed his days in peace. mrs. crane, in a letter, late in july, , told of his death: he was always cheerful, and seemed not to suffer much pain, told stories, and was able to eat almost everything. three days ago a new difficulty appeared, on account of which his doctor said he must go to the hospital for care such as it was quite impossible to give in his home. he died on his way there. thus it happened that he died on the road where he had performed his great deed. a second unusual incident of that summer occurred in hartford. there had been a report of a strange man seen about the clemens place, thought to be a prospecting burglar, and clemens went over to investigate. a little searching inquiry revealed that the man was not a burglar, but a mechanic out of employment, a lover of one of the house-maids, who had given him food and shelter on the premises, intending no real harm. when the girl found that her secret was discovered, she protested that he was her fiance, though she said he appeared lately to have changed his mind and no longer wished to marry her. the girl seemed heartbroken, and sympathy for her was naturally the first and about the only feeling which clemens developed, for the time being. he reasoned with the young man, but without making much headway. finally his dramatic instinct prompted him to a plan of a sort which would have satisfied even tom sawyer. he asked twichell to procure a license for the couple, and to conceal himself in a ground floor bath-room. he arranged with the chief of police to be on hand in another room; with the rest of the servants quietly to prepare a wedding-feast, and finally with lizzie herself to be dressed for the ceremony. he had already made an appointment with the young man to come to, see him at a certain hour on a "matter of business," and the young man arrived in the belief, no doubt, that it was something which would lead to profitable employment. when he came in clemens gently and quietly reviewed the situation, told him of the young girl's love for him; how he had been sheltered and fed by her; how through her kindness to him she had compromised her reputation for honesty and brought upon her all the suspicion of having sheltered a burglar; how she was ready and willing to marry him, and how he (clemens) was ready to assist them to obtain work and a start in life. but the young man was not enthusiastic. he was a swede and slow of action. he resolutely declared that he was not ready to marry yet, and in the end refused to do so. then came the dramatic moment. clemens quietly but firmly informed him that the wedding ceremony must take place; that by infesting his premises he had broken the law, not only against trespass, but most likely against house-breaking. there was a brief discussion of this point. finally clemens gave him five minutes to make up his mind, with the statement that he had an officer in waiting, and unless he would consent to the wedding he would be taken in charge. the young man began to temporize, saying that it would be necessary for him to get a license and a preacher. but clemens stepped to the door of the bath-room, opened it, and let out twichell, who had been sweltering there in that fearful place for more than an hour, it being august. the delinquent lover found himself confronted with all the requisites of matrimony except the bride, and just then this detail appeared on the scene, dressed for the occasion. behind her ranged the rest of the servants and a few invited guests. before the young man knew it he had a wife, and on the whole did not seem displeased. it ended with a gay supper and festivities. then clemens started them handsomely by giving each of them a check for one hundred dollars; and in truth (which in this case, at least, is stranger than fiction) they lived happily and prosperously ever after. some years later mark twain based a story on this episode, but it was never entirely satisfactory and remains unpublished. cxiv the whittier birthday speech it was the night of december , , that mark twain made his unfortunate speech at the dinner given by the atlantic staff to john g. whittier on his seventieth birthday. clemens had attended a number of the dinners which the atlantic gave on one occasion or another, and had provided a part of the entertainment. it is only fair to say that his after-dinner speeches at such times had been regarded as very special events, genuine triumphs of humor and delivery. but on this particular occasion he determined to outdo himself, to prepare something unusual, startling, something altogether unheard of. when mark twain had an impulse like that it was possible for it to result in something dangerous, especially in those earlier days. this time it produced a bombshell; not just an ordinary bombshell, or even a twelve-inch projectile, but a shell of planetary size. it was a sort of hoax-always a doubtful plaything--and in this case it brought even quicker and more terrible retribution than usual. it was an imaginary presentation of three disreputable frontier tramps who at some time had imposed themselves on a lonely miner as longfellow, emerson, and holmes, quoting apposite selections from their verses to the accompaniment of cards and drink, and altogether conducting themselves in a most unsavory fashion. at the end came the enlightenment that these were not what they pretended to be, but only impostors--disgusting frauds. a feature like that would be a doubtful thing to try in any cultured atmosphere. the thought of associating, ever so remotely, those three old bummers which he had conjured up with the venerable and venerated emerson, longfellow, and holmes, the olympian trinity, seems ghastly enough to-day, and must have seemed even more so then. but clemens, dazzled by the rainbow splendor of his conception, saw in it only a rare colossal humor, which would fairly lift and bear his hearers along on a tide of mirth. he did not show his effort to any one beforehand. he wanted its full beauty to burst upon the entire company as a surprise. it did that. howells was toastmaster, and when he came to present clemens he took particular pains to introduce him as one of his foremost contributors and dearest friends. here, he said, was "a humorist who never left you hanging you head for having enjoyed his joke." thirty years later clemens himself wrote of his impressions as he rose to deliver his speech. i vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering: dimly i can see a hundred people--no, perhaps fifty--shadowy figures, sitting at tables feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless forevermore. i don't know who they were, but i can very distinctly see, seated at the grand table and facing the rest of us, mr. emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; mr. whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face; mr. longfellow, with his silken-white hair and his benignant face; dr. oliver wendell holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good- fellowship everywhere, like a rose-diamond whose facets are being turned toward the light, first one way and then another--a charming man, and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he was sitting still (what he would call still, but what would be more or less motion to other people). i can see those figures with entire distinctiness across this abyss of time. william winter, the poet, had just preceded him, and it seemed a moment aptly chosen for his so-different theme. "and then," to quote howells, "the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe was upon us." after the first two or three hundred words, when the general plan and purpose of the burlesque had developed, when the names of longfellow, emerson, and holmes began to be flung about by those bleary outcasts, and their verses given that sorry association, those atlantic diners became petrified with amazement and horror. too late, then, the speaker realized his mistake. he could not stop, he must go on to the ghastly end. and somehow he did it, while "there fell a silence weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened from moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy." howells can remember little more than that, but clemens recalls that one speaker made an effort to follow him--bishop, the novelist, and that bishop didn't last long. it was not many sentences after his first before he began to hesitate and break, and lose his grip, and totter and wobble, and at last he slumped down in a limp and mushy pile. the next man had not strength to rise, and somehow the company broke up. howells's next recollection is of being in a room of the hotel, and of hearing charles dudley warner saying in the gloom: "well, mark, you're a funny fellow." he remembers how, after a sleepless night, clemens went out to buy some bric-a-brac, with a soul far from bric-a-brac, and returned to hartford in a writhing agony of spirit. he believed that he was ruined forever, so far as his boston associations were concerned; and when he confessed all the tragedy to mrs. clemens it seemed to her also that the mistake could never be wholly repaired. the fact that certain papers quoted the speech and spoke well of it, and certain readers who had not listened to it thought it enormously funny, gave very little comfort. but perhaps his chief concern was the ruin which he believed he had brought upon howells. he put his heart into a brief letter: my dear howells,--my sense of disgrace does not abate. it grows. i see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies, a list of humiliations that extends back to when i was seven years old, and which keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentances. i feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country; therefore it will be best that i retire from before the public at present. it will hurt the atlantic for me to appear in its pages now. so it is my opinion, and my wife's, that the telephone story had better be suppressed. will you return those proofs or revises to me, so that i can use the same on some future occasion? it seems as if i must have been insane when i wrote that speech and saw no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom i reverenced so much. and what shame i brought upon you, after what you said in introducing me! it burns me like fire to think of it. the whole matter is a dreadful subject. let me drop it here--at least on paper. penitently yours, mark so, all in a moment, his world had come to an end--as it seemed. but howells's letter, which came rushing back by first mail, brought hope. "it was a fatality," howells said. "one of those sorrows into which a man walks with his eyes wide open, no one knows why." howells assured him that longfellow, emerson, and holmes would so consider it, beyond doubt; that charles eliot norton had already expressed himself exactly in the right spirit concerning it. howells declared that there was no intention of dropping mark twain's work from the atlantic. you are not going to be floored by it; there is more justice than that even in this world. especially as regards me, just call the sore spot well. i can say more, and with better heart, in praise of your good feeling (which was what i always liked in you), since this thing happened than i could before. it was agreed that he should at once write a letter to longfellow, emerson, and holmes, and he did write, laying his heart bare to them. longfellow and holmes answered in a fine spirit of kindliness, and miss emerson wrote for her father in the same tone. emerson had not been offended, for he had not heard the speech, having arrived even then at that stage of semi-oblivion as to immediate things which eventually so completely shut him away. longfellow's letter made light of the whole matter. the newspapers, he said, had caused all the mischief. a bit of humor at a dinner-table talk is one thing; a report of it in the morning papers is another. one needs the lamplight and the scenery. these failing, what was meant in jest assumes a serious aspect. i do not believe that anybody was much hurt. certainly i was not, and holmes tells me that he was not. so i think you may dismiss the matter from your mind, without further remorse. it was a very pleasant dinner, and i think whittier enjoyed it very much. holmes likewise referred to it as a trifle. it never occurred to me for a moment to take offense, or to feel wounded by your playful use of my name. i have heard some mild questioning as to whether, even in fun, it was good taste to associate the names of the authors with the absurdly unlike personalities attributed to them, but it seems to be an open question. two of my friends, gentlemen of education and the highest social standing, were infinitely amused by your speech, and stoutly defended it against the charge of impropriety. more than this, one of the cleverest and best-known ladies we have among us was highly delighted with it. miss emerson's letter was to mrs. clemens and its homelike new england fashion did much to lift the gloom. dear mrs. clemens,--at new year's our family always meets, to spend two days together. to-day my father came last, and brought with him mr. clemens's letter, so that i read it to the assembled family, and i have come right up-stairs to write to you about it. my sister said, "oh, let father write!" but my mother said, "no, don't wait for him. go now; don't stop to pick that up. go this minute and write. i think that is a noble letter. tell them so." first let me say that no shadow of indignation has ever been in any of our minds. the night of the dinner, my father says, he did not hear mr. clemens's speech. he was too far off, and my mother says that when she read it to him the next day it amused him. but what you will want is to know, without any softening, how we did feel. we were disappointed. we have liked almost everything we have ever seen over mark twain's signature. it has made us like the man, and we have delighted in the fun. father has often asked us to repeat certain passages of the innocents abroad, and of a speech at a london dinner in , and we all expect both to approve and to enjoy when we see his name. therefore, when we read this speech it was a real disappointment. i said to my brother that it didn't seem good or funny, and he said, "no, it was unfortunate. still some of those quotations were very good"; and he gave them with relish and my father laughed, though never having seen a card in his life, he couldn't understand them like his children. my mother read it lightly and had hardly any second thoughts about it. to my father it is as if it had not been; he never quite heard, never quite understood it, and he forgets easily and entirely. i think it doubtful whether he writes to mr. clemens, for he is old and long ago gave up answering letters, i think you can see just how bad, and how little bad, it was as far as we are concerned, and this lovely heartbreaking letter makes up for our disappointment in our much- liked author, and restores our former feeling about him. ellen t. emerson. the sorrow dulled a little as the days passed. just after christmas clemens wrote to howells: i haven't done a stroke of work since the atlantic dinner. but i'm going to try to-morrow. how could i ever---- ah, well, i am a great and sublime fool. but then i am god's fool, and all his work must be contemplated with respect. so long as that unfortunate speech is remembered there will be differences of opinion as to its merits and propriety. clemens himself, reading it for the first time in nearly thirty years, said: "i find it gross, coarse--well, i needn't go on with particulars. i don't like any part of it, from the beginning to the end. i find it always offensive and detestable. how do i account for this change of view? i don't know." but almost immediately afterward he gave it another consideration and reversed his opinion completely. all the spirit and delight of his old first conception returned, and preparing it for publication, he wrote: --[north american review, december, , now with comment included in the volume of "speeches." (also see appendix o, at the end of last volume.)--i have read it twice, and unless i am an idiot it hasn't a single defect in it, from the first word to the last. it is just as good as good can be. it is smart; it is saturated with humor. there isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere.] it was altogether like mark twain to have those two absolutely opposing opinions in that brief time; for, after all, it was only a question of the human point of view, and mark twain's points of view were likely to be as extremely human as they were varied. of course the first of these impressions, the verdict of the fresh mind uninfluenced by the old conception, was the more correct one. the speech was decidedly out of place in that company. the skit was harmless enough, but it was of the comstock grain. it lacked refinement, and, what was still worse, it lacked humor, at least the humor of a kind suited to that long-ago company of listeners. it was another of those grievous mistakes which genius (and not talent) can make, for genius is a sort of possession. the individual is pervaded, dominated for a time by an angel or an imp, and he seldom, of himself, is able to discriminate between his controls. a literary imp was always lying in wait for mark twain; the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the 'outre', the outlandish, the shocking thing. it was this that olivia clemens had to labor hardest against: the cheapening of his own high purpose with an extravagant false note, at which sincerity, conviction, and artistic harmony took wings and fled away. notably he did a good burlesque now and then, but his fame would not have suffered if he had been delivered altogether from his besetting temptation. cxv hartford and billiards clemens was never much inclined to work, away from his elmira study. "magnanimous incident literature" (for the atlantic) was about his only completed work of the winter of - . he was always tinkering with the "visit to heaven," and after one reconstruction howells suggested that he bring it out as a book, in england, with dean stanley's indorsement, though this may have been only semi-serious counsel. the story continued to lie in seclusion. clemens had one new book in the field--a small book, but profitable. dan slote's firm issued for him the mark twain scrap-book, and at the end of the first royalty period rendered a statement of twenty-five thousand copies sold, which was well enough for a book that did not contain a single word that critics could praise or condemn. slote issued another little book for him soon after punch, brothers, punch!--which, besides that lively sketch, contained the "random notes" and seven other selections. mark twain was tempted to go into the lecture field that winter, not by any of the offers, though these were numerous enough, but by the idea of a combination which he thought night be not only profitable but pleasant. thomas nast had made a great success of his caricature lectures, and clemens, recalling nast's long-ago proposal, found it newly attractive. he wrote characteristically: my dear nast,--i did not think i should ever stand on a platform again until the time was come for me to say, "i die innocent." but the same old offers keep arriving. i have declined them all, just as usual, though sorely tempted, as usual. now, i do not decline because i mind talking to an audience, but because ( ) traveling alone is so heartbreakingly dreary, and ( ) shouldering the whole show is such a cheer-killing responsibility. therefore, i now propose to you what you proposed to me in , ten years ago (when i was unknown)--viz., that you stand on the platform and make pictures, and i stand by you and blackguard the audience. i should enormously enjoy meandering around (to big towns--don't want to go to the little ones), with you for company. my idea is not to fatten the lecture agents and lyceums on the spoils, but to put all the ducats religiously into two equal piles, and say to the artist and lecturer, "absorb these." for instance, [here follows a plan and a possible list of the cities to be visited]. the letter continues: call the gross receipts $ , for four months and a half, and the profit from $ , to $ , (i try to make the figures large enough, and leave it to the public to reduce them). i did not put in philadelphia because pugh owns that town, and last winter, when i made a little reading-trip, he only paid me $ , and pretended his concert (i read fifteen minutes in the midst of a concert) cost him a vast sum, and so he couldn't afford any more. i could get up a better concert with a barrel of cats. i have imagined two or three pictures and concocted the accompanying remarks, to see how the thing would go. i was charmed. well, you think it over, nast, and drop me a line. we should have some fun. undoubtedly this would have been a profitable combination, but nast had a distaste for platforming--had given it up, as he thought, for life. so clemens settled down to the fireside days, that afforded him always the larger comfort. the children were at an age "to be entertaining, and to be entertained." in either case they furnished him plenty of diversion when he did not care to write. they had learned his gift as a romancer, and with this audience he might be as extravagant as he liked. they sometimes assisted by furnishing subjects. they would bring him a picture, requiring him to invent a story for it without a moment's delay. sometimes they suggested the names of certain animals or objects, and demanded that these be made into a fairy tale. if they heard the name of any new creature or occupation they were likely to offer them as impromptu inspiration. once he was suddenly required to make a story out of a plumber and a "bawgunstrictor," but he was equal to it. on one side of the library, along the book-shelves that joined the mantelpiece, were numerous ornaments and pictures. at one end was the head of a girl, that they called "emeline," and at the other was an oil-painting of a cat. when other subjects failed, the romancer was obliged to build a story impromptu, and without preparation, beginning with the cat, working along through the bric-a-brac, and ending with "emeline." this was the unvarying program. he was not allowed to begin with "emeline" and end with the cat, and he was not permitted to introduce an ornament from any other portion of the room. he could vary the story as much as he liked. in fact, he was required to do that. the trend of its chapters, from the cat to "emeline," was a well-trodden and ever-entertaining way. he gave up his luxurious study to the children as a sort of nursery and playroom, and took up his writing-quarters, first in a room over the stables, then in the billiard-room, which, on the whole, he preferred to any other place, for it was a third-story remoteness, and he could knock the balls about for inspiration. the billiard-room became his headquarters. he received his callers there and impressed them into the game. if they could play, well and good; if they could not play, so much the better--he could beat them extravagantly, and he took a huge delight in such conquests. every friday evening, or oftener, a small party of billiard-lovers gathered, and played until a late hour, told stories, and smoked till the room was blue, comforting themselves with hot scotch and general good-fellowship. mark twain always had a genuine passion for billiards. he was never tired of the game. he could play all night. he would stay till the last man gave out from sheer weariness; then he would go on knocking the balls about alone. he liked to invent new games and new rules for old games, often inventing a rule on the spur of the moment to fit some particular shot or position on the table. it amused him highly to do this, to make the rule advantage his own play, and to pretend a deep indignation when his opponents disqualified his rulings and rode him down. s. c. dunham was among those who belonged to the "friday evening club," as they called it, and henry c. robinson, long dead, and rare ned bunce, and f. g. whitmore; and the old room there at the top of the house, with its little outside balcony, rang with their voices and their laughter in that day when life and the world for them was young. clemens quoted to them sometimes: come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring your winter garment of repentance fling; the bird of time has but a little way to flutter, and the bird is on the wing. omar was new then on this side of the atlantic, and to his serene "eat, drink, and be merry" philosophy, in fitzgerald's rhyme, these were early converts. mark twain had an impressive, musical delivery of verse; the players were willing at any moment to listen as he recited: for some we loved, the loveliest and best that from his vintage rolling time has prest, have drunk their cup a round or two before, and one by one crept silently to rest. ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, before we too into the dust descend; dust unto dust, and under dust to lie, sans wine, sans song, sans singer, and--sans end.' --[the 'rubaiyat' had made its first appearance, in hartford, a little before in a column of extracts published in the courant.] twichell immediately wrote clemens a card: "read (if you haven't) the extracts from oman khayyam, on the first page of this morning's courant. i think we'll have to get the book. i never yet came across anything that uttered certain thoughts of mine so. adequately. and it's only a translation. read it, and we'll talk it over. there is something in it very like the passage of emerson you read me last night, in fact identical with it in thought. "surely this omar was a great poet. anyhow, he has given me an immense revelation this morning. "hoping that you are better, j. h. t." twichell's "only a translation" has acquired a certain humor with time. cxvi off for germany the german language became one of the interests of the clemens home during the early months of . the clemenses had long looked forward to a sojourn in europe, and the demand for another mark twain book of travel furnished an added reason for their going. they planned for the spring sailing, and to spend a year or more on the continent, making their headquarters in germany. so they entered into the study of the language with an enthusiasm and perseverance that insured progress. there was a german nurse for the children, and the whole atmosphere of the household presently became lingually teutonic. it amused mark twain, as everything amused him, but he was a good student; he acquired a working knowledge of the language in an extraordinarily brief time, just as in an earlier day he had picked up piloting. he would never become a german scholar, but his vocabulary and use of picturesque phrases, particularly those that combined english and german words, were often really startling, not only for their humor, but for their expressiveness. necessarily the new study would infect his literature. he conceived a plan for making captain wakeman (stormfield) come across a copy of ollendorf in heaven, and proceed to learn the language of a near-lying district. they arranged to sail early in april, and, as on their former trip, persuaded miss clara spaulding, of elmira, to accompany them. they wrote to the howellses, breaking the news of the journey, urging them to come to hartford for a good-by visit. howells and his wife came. the twichells, warners, and other hartford friends paid repeated farewell calls. the furniture was packed, the rooms desolated, the beautiful home made ready for closing. they were to have pleasant company on the ship. bayard taylor, then recently appointed minister to germany, wrote that he had planned to sail on the same vessel; murat halstead's wife and daughter were listed among the passengers. clemens made a brief speech at taylor's "farewell dinner." the "mark twain" party, consisting of mr. and mrs. clemens, miss spaulding, little susy and clara ("bay"), and a nurse-maid, rosa, sailed on the holsatia, april , . bayard taylor and the halstead ladies also sailed, as per program; likewise murat halstead himself, for whom no program had been made. there was a storm outside, and the holsatia anchored down the bay to wait until the worst was over. as the weather began to moderate halstead and others came down in a tug for a final word of good-by. when the tug left, halstead somehow managed to get overlooked, and was presently on his way across the ocean with only such wardrobe as he had on, and what bayard taylor, a large man like himself, was willing to lend him. halstead was accused of having intentionally allowed himself to be left behind, and his case did have a suspicious look; but in any event they were glad to have him along. in a written word of good-by to howells, clemens remembered a debt of gratitude, and paid it in the full measure that was his habit. and that reminds me, ungrateful dog that i am, that i owe as much to your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city boss who takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art. i was talking to mrs. clemens about this the other day, and grieving because i never mentioned it to you, thereby seeming to ignore it or to be unaware of it. nothing that has passed under your eye needs any revision before going into a volume, while all my other stuff does need so much. in that ancient day, before the wireless telegraph, the voyager, when the land fell away behind him, felt a mighty sense of relief and rest, which to some extent has gone now forever. he cannot entirely escape the world in this new day; but then he had a complete sense of dismissal from all encumbering cares of life. among the first note-book entries mark twain wrote: to go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings--"i am no longer of ye; what ye say of me is now of no consequence--but of how much consequence when i am with ye and of ye. i know you will refrain from saying harsh things because they cannot hurt me, since i am out of reach and cannot hear them. this is why we say no harsh things of the dead." it was a rough voyage outside, but the company made it pleasant within. halstead and taylor were good smoking-room companions. taylor had a large capacity for languages and a memory that was always a marvel. he would repeat for them arabian, hungarian, and russian poetry, and show them the music and construction of it. he sang german folk-lore songs for them, and the "lorelei," then comparatively unknown in america. such was his knowledge of the language that even educated germans on board submitted questions of construction to him and accepted his decisions. he was wisely chosen for the mission he had to fill, but unfortunately he did not fill it long. both halstead and taylor were said to have heart trouble. halstead, however, survived many years. taylor died december , . cxvii germany and german from the note-book: it is a marvel that never loses its surprise by repetition, this aiming a ship at a mark three thousand miles away and hitting the bull's-eye in a fog--as we did. when the fog fell on us the captain said we ought to be at such and such a spot (it had been eighteen hours since an observation was had), with the scilly islands bearing so and so, and about so many miles away. hove the lead and got forty-eight fathoms; looked on the chart, and sure enough this depth of water showed that we were right where the captain said we were. another idea. for ages man probably did not know why god carpeted the ocean bottom with sand in one place, shells in another, and so on. but we see now; the kind of bottom the lead brings up shows where a ship is when the soundings don't, and also it confirms the soundings. they reached hamburg after two weeks' stormy sailing. they rested a few days there, then went to hanover and frankfort, arriving at heidelberg early in may. they had no lodgings selected in heidelberg, and leaving the others at an inn, clemens set out immediately to find apartments. chance or direction, or both, led him to the beautiful schloss hotel, on a hill overlooking the city, and as fair a view as one may find in all germany. he did not go back after his party. he sent a message telling them to take carriage and drive at once to the schloss, then he sat down to enjoy the view. coming up the hill they saw him standing on the veranda, waving his hat in welcome. he led them to their rooms--spacious apartments--and pointed to the view. they were looking down on beautiful heidelberg castle, densely wooded hills, the far-flowing neckar, and the haze-empurpled valley of the rhine. by and by, pointing to a small cottage on the hilltop, he said: "i have been picking out my little house to work in; there it is over there; the one with the gable in the roof. mine is the middle room on the third floor." mrs. clemens thought the occupants of the house might be surprised if he should suddenly knock and tell them he had come to take possession of his room. nevertheless, they often looked over in that direction and referred to it as his office. they amused themselves by watching his "people" and trying to make out what they were like. one day he went over there, and sure enough there was a sign out, "moblirte wohnung zu vermiethen." a day or two later he was established in the very room he had selected, it being the only room but one vacant. in a tramp abroad mark twain tells of the beauty of their heidelberg environment. to howells he wrote: our bedroom has two great glass bird-cages (inclosed balconies), one looking toward the rhine valley and sunset, the other looking up the neckar cul-de-sac, and naturally we spend pearly all our time in these. we have tables and chairs in them; we do our reading, writing, studying, smoking, and suppering in them . . . . it must have been a noble genius who devised this hotel. lord, how blessed is the repose, the tranquillity of this place! only two sounds: the happy clamor of the birds in the groves and the muffled music of the neckar tumbling over the opposing dikes. it is no hardship to lie awake awhile nights, for this subdued roar has exactly the sound of a steady rain beating upon a roof. it is so healing to the spirit; and it bears up the thread of one's imaginings as the accompaniment bears up a song.... i have waited for a "call" to go to work--i knew it would come. well, it began to come a week ago; my note-book comes out more and more frequently every day since; three days ago i concluded to move my manuscripts over to my den. now the call is loud and decided at last. so to-morrow i shall begin regular, steady work, and stick to it till the middle of july or august st, when i look for twichell; we will then walk about germany two or three weeks, and then i'll go to work again (perhaps in munich). the walking tour with twichell had been contemplated in the scheme for gathering book material, but the plan for it had not been completed when he left hartford. now he was anxious that they should start as soon as possible. twichell, receiving the news in hartford, wrote that it was a great day for him: that his third son had been happily born early that morning, and now the arrival of this glorious gift of a tramp through germany and switzerland completed his blessings. i am almost too joyful for pleasure [he wrote]. i labor with my felicities. how i shall get to sleep to-night i don't know, though i have had a good start, in not having slept much last night. oh, my! do you realize, mark, what a symposium it is to be? i do. to begin with, i am thoroughly tired and the rest will be worth everything. to walk with you and talk with you for weeks together --why, it's my dream of luxury. harmony, who at sunrise this morning deemed herself the happiest woman on the continent when i read your letter to her, widened her smile perceptibly, and revived another degree of strength in a minute. she refused to consider her being left alone; but: only the great chance opened to me. shoes--mark, remember that ever so much of our pleasure depends upon your shoes. don't fail to have adequate preparation made in that department. meantime, the struggle with the "awful german language" went on. it was a general hand-to-hand contest. from the head of the household down to little clara not one was exempt. to clemens it became a sort of nightmare. once in his note-book he says: "dreamed all bad foreigners went to german heaven; couldn't talk, and wished they had gone to the other place"; and a little farther along, "i wish i could hear myself talk german." to mrs. crane, in elmira, he reported their troubles: clara spaulding is working herself to death with her german; never loses an instant while she is awake--or asleep, either, for that matter; dreams of enormous serpents, who poke their heads up under her arms and glare upon her with red-hot eyes, and inquire about the genitive case and the declensions of the definite article. livy is bully-ragging herself about as hard; pesters over her grammar and her reader and her dictionary all day; then in the evening these two students stretch themselves out on sofas and sigh and say, "oh, there's no use! we never can learn it in the world!" then livy takes a sentence to go to bed on: goes gaping and stretching to her pillow murmuring, "ich bin ihnen sehr verbunden--ich bin ihnen sehr verbunden--ich bin ihnen sehr verbunden--i wonder if i can get that packed away so it will stay till morning"--and about an hour after midnight she wakes me up and says, "i do so hate to disturb you, but is it 'ich ben jonson sehr befinden'?" and mrs. clemens wrote: oh, sue dear, strive to enter in at the straight gate, for many shall seek to enter it and shall not be able. i am not striving these days. i am just interested in german. rosa, the maid, was required to speak to the children only in german, though bay at first would have none of it. the nurse and governess tried to blandish her, in vain. she maintained a calm and persistent attitude of scorn. little susy tried, and really made progress; but one, day she said, pathetically: "mama, i wish rosa was made in english." yet a little later susy herself wrote her aunt sue: i know a lot of german; everybody says i know a lot. i give you a million dollars to see you, and you would give two hundred dollars to see the lovely woods that we see. even howells, in far-off america, caught the infection and began a letter in german, though he hastened to add, "or do you prefer english by this time? really i could imagine the german going hard with you, for you always seemed to me a man who liked to be understood with the least possible personal inconvenience." clemens declared more than once that he scorned the "outrageous and impossible german grammar," and abandoned it altogether. in his note-book he records how two germans, strangers in heidelberg, asked him a direction, and that when he gave it, in the most elaborate and correct german he could muster, one of them only lifted his eyes and murmured: "gott im himmel!" he was daily impressed with the lingual attainments of foreigners and his own lack of them. in the notes he comments: am addressed in german, and when i can't speak it immediately the person tackles me in french, and plainly shows astonishment when i stop him. they naturally despise such an ignoramus. our doctor here speaks as pure english, as i. on the fourth of july he addressed the american students in heidelberg in one of those mixtures of tongues for which he had a peculiar gift. the room he had rented for a study was let by a typical german family, and he was a great delight to them. he practised his german on them, and interested himself in their daily affairs. howells wrote insistently for some assurance of contributions to the atlantic. "i must begin printing your private letters to satisfy the popular demand," he said. "people are constantly asking when you are going to begin." clemens replied that he would be only too glad to write for the atlantic if his contributions could be copyrighted in canada, where pirates were persistently enterprising. i do not know that i have any printable stuff just now--separatable stuff, that is--but i shall have by and by. it is very gratifying to hear that it is wanted by anybody. i stand always prepared to hear the reverse, and am constantly surprised that it is delayed so long. consequently it is not going to astonish me when it comes. the clemens party enjoyed heidelberg, though in different ways. the children romped and picnicked in the castle grounds, which adjoined the hotel; mrs. clemens and miss spaulding were devoted to bric-a-brac hunting, picture-galleries, and music. clemens took long walks, or made excursions by rail and diligence to farther points. art and opera did not appeal to him. the note-book says: i have attended operas, whenever i could not help it, for fourteen years now; i am sure i know of no agony comparable to the listening to an unfamiliar opera. i am enchanted with the airs of "trovatore" and other old operas which the hand-organ and the music-box have made entirely familiar to my ear. i am carried away with delighted enthusiasm when they are sung at the opera. but oh, how far between they are! and what long, arid, heartbreaking and headaching "between-times" of that sort of intense but incoherent noise which always so reminds me of the time the orphan asylum burned down. sunday night, th. huge crowd out to-night to hear the band play the "fremersberg." i suppose it is very low-grade music--i know it must be low-grade music--because it so delighted me, it so warmed me, moved me, stirred me, uplifted me, enraptured me, that at times i could have cried, and at others split my throat with shouting. the great crowd was another evidence that it was low-grade music, for only the few are educated up to a point where high-class music gives pleasure. i have never heard enough classic music to be able to enjoy it, and the simple truth is i detest it. not mildly, but with all my heart. what a poor lot we human beings are anyway! if base music gives me wings, why should i want any other? but i do. i want to like the higher music because the higher and better like it. but you see i want to like it without taking the necessary trouble, and giving the thing the necessary amount of time and attention. the natural suggestion is, to get into that upper tier, that dress-circle, by a lie--we will pretend we like it. this lie, this pretense, gives to opera what support it has in america. and then there is painting. what a red rag is to a bull turner's "slave ship" is to me. mr. ruskin is educated in art up to a point where that picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure as it throws me into one of rage. his cultivation enables him to see water in that yellow mud; his cultivation reconciles the floating of unfloatable things to him--chains etc.; it reconciles him to fishes swimming on top of the water. the most of the picture is a manifest impossibility, that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can enable a man to find truth in a lie. a boston critic said the "slave ship" reminded him of a cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes. that went home to my non-cultivation, and i thought, here is a man with an unobstructed eye. mark twain has dwelt somewhat upon these matters in 'a tramp abroad'. he confesses in that book that later he became a great admirer of turner, though perhaps never of the "slave ship" picture. in fact, mark twain was never artistic, in the common acceptance of that term; neither his art nor his tastes were of an "artistic" kind. cxviii tramping with twichell twichell arrived on time, august st. clemens met him at baden-baden, and they immediately set out on a tramp through the black forest, excursioning as pleased them, and having an idyllic good time. they did not always walk, but they often did. at least they did sometimes, when the weather was just right and clemens's rheumatism did not trouble him. but they were likely to take a carriage, or a donkey-cart, or a train, or any convenient thing that happened along. they did not hurry, but idled and talked and gathered flowers, or gossiped with wayside natives and tourists, though always preferring to wander along together, beguiling the way with discussion and speculation and entertaining tales. they crossed on into switzerland in due time and considered the conquest of the alps. the family followed by rail or diligence, and greeted them here and there when they rested from their wanderings. mark twain found an immunity from attention in switzerland, which for years he had not known elsewhere. his face was not so well known and his pen-name was carefully concealed. it was a large relief to be no longer an object of public curiosity; but twichell, as in the bermuda trip, did not feel quite honest, perhaps, in altogether preserving the mask of unrecognition. in one of his letters home he tells how; when a young man at their table was especially delighted with mark twain's conversation, he could not resist taking the young man aside and divulging to him the speaker's identity. "i could not forbear telling him who mark was," he says, "and the mingled surprise and pleasure his face exhibited made me glad i had done so." they climbed the rigi, after which clemens was not in good walking trim for some time; so twichell went on a trip on his own account, to give his comrade a chance to rest. then away again to interlaken, where the jungfrau rises, cold and white; on over the loneliness of gemini pass, with glaciers for neighbors and the unfading white peaks against the blue; to visp and to zermatt, where the matterhorn points like a finger that directs mankind to god. this was true alpine wandering--sweet vagabondage. the association of the wanderers was a very intimate one. their minds were closely attuned, and there were numerous instances of thought--echo-mind answering to mind--without the employment of words. clemens records in his notes: sunday a.m., august th. been reading romola yesterday afternoon, last night, and this morning; at last i came upon the only passage which has thus far hit me with force--tito compromising with his conscience, and resolving to do; not a bad thing, but not the best thing. joe entered the room five minutes--no, three minutes later --and without prelude said, "i read that book you've got there six years ago, and got a mighty good text for a sermon out of it the passage where the young fellow compromises with his conscience, and resolves to do, not a bad thing, but not the best thing." this is joe's first reference to this book since he saw me buy it twenty- four hours ago. so my mind operated on his in this instance. he said he was sitting yonder in the reading-room, three minutes ago (i have not got up yet), thinking of nothing in particular, and didn't know what brought romola into his head; but into his head it came and that particular passage. now i, forty feet away, in another room, was reading that particular passage at that particular moment. couldn't suggest romola to him earlier, because nothing in the book had taken hold of me till i came to that one passage on page , tauchnitz edition. and again: the instances of mind-telegraphing are simply innumerable. this evening joe and i sat long at the edge of the village looking at the matterhorn. then joe said, "we ought to go to the cervin hotel and inquire for livy's telegram." if he had been but one instant later i should have said those words instead of him. such entries are frequent, and one day there came along a kind of object-lesson. they were toiling up a mountainside, when twichell began telling a very interesting story which had happened in connection with a friend still living, though twichell had no knowledge of his whereabouts at this time. the story finished just as they rounded a turn in, the cliff, and twichell, looking up, ended his last sentence, "and there's the man!" which was true, for they were face to face with the very man of whom he had been telling. another subject that entered into their discussion was the law of accidents. clemens held that there was no such thing an accident: that it was all forewritten in the day of the beginning; that every event, however slight, was embryonic in that first instant of created life, and immutably timed to its appearance in the web of destiny. once on their travels, when they were on a high bank above a brawling stream, a little girl, who started to run toward them, slipped and rolled under the bottom rail of the protecting fence, her feet momentarily hanging out over the precipice and the tearing torrent below. it seemed a miraculous escape from death, and furnished an illustration for their discussion. the condition of the ground, the force of her fall, the nearness of the fatal edge, all these had grown inevitably out of the first great projection of thought, and the child's fall and its escape had been invested in life's primal atom. the author of a tramp abroad tells us of the rushing stream that flows out of the arcadian sky valley, the gasternthal, and goes plunging down to kandersteg, and how he took exercise by making "harris" (twichell) set stranded logs adrift while he lounged comfortably on a boulder, and watched them go tearing by; also how he made harris run a race with one of those logs. but that is literature. twichell, in a letter home, has preserved a likelier and lovelier story: mark is a queer fellow. there is nothing that he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. you can hardly get him to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations. to throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. tonight, as we were on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood caught by the torrent side below the path, i climbed down and threw it in. when i got back to the path mark was running down-stream after it as hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstasy, and when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell. he said afterward that he hadn't been so excited in three months. he acted just like a boy; another feature of his extreme sensitiveness in certain directions. then generalizing, twichell adds: he has coarse spots in him. but i never knew a person so finely regardful of the feelings of others in some ways. he hates to pass another person walking, and will practise some subterfuge to take off what he feels is the discourtesy of it. and he is exceedingly timid, tremblingly timid, about approaching strangers; hates to ask a question. his sensitive regard for others extends to animals. when we are driving his concern is all about the horse. he can't bear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull hard. to-day, when the driver clucked up his horse and quickened his pace a little, mark said, "the fellow's got the notion that we are in a hurry." he is exceedingly considerate toward me in regard of everything--or most things. the days were not all sunshine. sometimes it rained and they took shelter by the wayside, or, if there was no shelter, they plodded along under their umbrellas, still talking away, and if something occurred that clemens wanted to put down they would stand stock still in the rain, and twichell would hold the umbrella while clemens wrote--a good while sometimes--oblivious to storm and discomfort and the long way yet ahead. after the day on gemmi pass twichell wrote home: mark, to-day, was immensely absorbed in the flowers. he scrambled around and gathered a great variety, and manifested the intensest pleasure in them. he crowded a pocket of his note-book with his specimens and wanted more room. so i stopped the guide and got out my needle and thread, and out of a stiff paper, a hotel advertisement, i had about me made a paper bag, a cornucopia like, and tied it to his vest in front, and it answered the purpose admirably. he filled it full with a beautiful collection, and as soon as we got here to-night he transferred it to a cardboard box and sent it by mail to livy. a strange mark he is, full of contradictions. i spoke last night of his sensitive to others' feelings. to-day the guide got behind, and came up as if he would like to go by, yet hesitated to do so. mark paused, went aside and busied himself a minute picking a flower. in the halt the guide got by and resumed his place in front. mark threw the flower away, saying, "i didn't want that. i only wanted to give the old man a chance to go on without seeming to pass us." mark is splendid to walk with amid such grand scenery, for he talks so well about it, has such a power of strong, picturesque expression. i wish you might have heard him to-day. his vigorous speech nearly did justice to the things we saw. in an address which twichell gave many years later he recalls another pretty incident of their travels. they had been toiling up the gorner grat. as we paused for a rest, a lamb from a flock of sheep near by ventured inquisitively toward us, whereupon mark seated himself on a rock, and with beckoning hand and soft words tried to get it to come to him. on the lamb's part it was a struggle between curiosity and timidity, but in a succession of advances and retreats it gained confidence, though at a very gradual rate. it was a scene for a painter: the great american humorist on one side of the game and that silly little creature on the other, with the matterhorn for a background. mark was reminded that the time he was consuming was valuable--but to no purpose. the gorner grat could wait. he held on with undiscouraged perseverance till he carried his point: the lamb finally put its nose in his hand, and he was happy over it all the rest of the day. the matter of religion came up now and again in the drift of their discussions. it was twichell's habit to have prayers in their room every night at the hotels, and clemens was willing to join in the observances. once twichell, finding him in a responsive mood--a remorseful mood--gave his sympathy, and spoke of the larger sympathy of divinity. clemens listened and seemed soothed and impressed, but his philosophies were too wide and too deep for creeds and doctrines. a day or two later, as they were tramping along in the hot sun, his honesty had to speak out. "joe," he said, "i'm going to make a confession. i don't believe in your religion at all. i've been living a lie right straight along whenever i pretended to. for a moment, sometimes, i have been almost a believer, but it immediately drifts away from me again. i don't believe one word of your bible was inspired by god any more than any other book. i believe it is entirely the work of man from beginning to end--atonement and all. the problem of life and death and eternity and the true conception of god is a bigger thing than is contained in that book." so the personal side of religious discussion closed between them, and was never afterward reopened. they joined mrs. clemens and the others at lausanne at last, and their swiss holiday was over. twichell set out for home by way of england, and clemens gave himself up to reflection and rest after his wanderings. then, as the days of their companionship passed in review, quickly and characteristically he sent a letter after his comrade: dear old joe, it is actually all over! i was so low-spirited at the station yesterday, and this morning, when i woke, i couldn't seem to accept the dismal truth that you were really gone, and the pleasant tramping and talking at an end. ah, my boy! it has been such a rich holiday to me, and i feel under such deep and honest obligations to you for coming. i am putting out of my mind all memory of the times when i misbehaved toward you and hurt you; i am resolved to consider it forgiven, and to store up and remember only the charming hours of the journeys and the times when i was not unworthy to be with you and share a companionship which to me stands first after livy's. it is justifiable to do this; for why should i let my small infirmities of disposition live and grovel among my mental pictures of the eternal sublimities of the alps? livy can't accept or endure the fact that you are gone. but you are, and we cannot get around it. so take our love with you, and bear it also over the sea to harmony, and god bless you both. mark. cxix italian days the clemens party wandered down into italy--to the lakes, venice, florence, rome--loitering through the galleries, gathering here and there beautiful furnishings--pictures, marbles, and the like--for the hartford home. in venice they bought an old careen bed, a massive regal affair with serpentine columns surmounted by singularly graceful cupids, and with other cupids sporting on the headboard: the work of some artist who had been dust three centuries maybe, for this bed had come out of an old venetian palace, dismantled and abandoned. it was a furniture with a long story, and the years would add mightily to its memories. it would become a stately institution in the clemens household. the cupids on the posts were removable, and one of the highest privileges of childhood would be to occupy that bed and have down one of the cupids to play with. it was necessary to be ill to acquire that privilege--not violently and dangerously ill, but interestingly so--ill enough to be propped up with pillows and have one's meals served on a tray, with dolls and picture-books handy, and among them a beautiful rosewood cupid who had kept dimpled and dainty for so many, many years. they spent three weeks in venice: a dreamlike experience, especially for the children, who were on the water most of the time, and became fast friends with their gondolier, who taught them some italian words; then a week in florence and a fortnight in rome. --[from the note-book: "bay--when the waiter brought my breakfast this morning i spoke to him in italian. "mama--what did you say? "b.--i said, 'polly-vo fransay.' "m.--what does it mean? "b.--i don't know. what does it mean, susy? "s.--it means, 'polly wants a cracker.'"] clemens discovered that in twelve years his attitude had changed somewhat concerning the old masters. he no longer found the bright, new copies an improvement on the originals, though the originals still failed to wake his enthusiasm. mrs. clemens and miss spaulding spent long hours wandering down avenues of art, accompanied by him on occasion, though not always willingly. he wrote his sorrow to twichell: i do wish you were in rome to do my sight-seeing for me. rome interests me as much as east hartford could, and no more; that is, the rome which the average tourist feels an interest in. there are other things here which stir me enough to make life worth living. livy and clara are having a royal time worshiping the old masters, and i as good a time gritting my ineffectual teeth over them. once when sarah orne jewett was with the party he remarked that if the old masters had labeled their fruit one wouldn't be so likely to mistake pears for turnips. "youth," said mrs. clemens, gravely, "if you do not care for these masterpieces yourself, you might at least consider the feelings of others"; and miss jewett, regarding him severely, added, in her quaint yankee fashion: "now, you've been spoke to!" he felt duly reprimanded, but his taste did not materially reform. he realized that he was no longer in a proper frame of mind to write of general sight-seeing. one must be eager, verdant, to write happily the story of travel. replying to a letter from howells on the subject he said: i wish i could give those sharp satires on european life which you mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas i hate travel, and i hate hotels, and i hate the opera, and i hate the old masters. in truth i don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with anything to satirize it. no, i want to stand up before it and curse it and foam at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. i have got in two or three chapters about wagner's operas, and managed to do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort would burst me. clemens became his own courier for a time in italy, and would seem to have made more of a success of it than he did a good many years afterward, if we may believe the story he has left us of his later attempt: "am a shining success as a courier," he records, "by the use of francs. have learned how to handle the railway guide intelligently and with confidence." he declares that he will have no more couriers; but possibly he could have employed one to advantage on the trip out of italy, for it was a desperately hard one, with bad connections and delayed telegrams. when, after thirty-six hours weary, continuous traveling, they arrived at last in munich in a drizzle and fog, and were domiciled in their winter quarters, at no. a, karlstrasse, they felt that they had reached the home of desolation itself, the very throne of human misery. and the rooms were so small, the conveniences so meager, and the porcelain stove was grim, ghastly, dismal, intolerable! so livy and clara spaulding sat down forlorn and cried, and i retired to a private place to pray. by and by we all retired to our narrow german beds, and when livy and i had finished talking across the room it was all decided that we should rest twenty-four hours, then pay whatever damages were required and straightway fly to the south of france. the rooms had been engaged by letter, months before, of their proprietress, fraulein dahlweiner, who had met them at the door with a lantern in her hand, full of joy in their arrival and faith in her ability to make them happy. it was a faith that was justified. next morning, when they all woke, rested, the weather had cleared, there were bright fires in the rooms, the world had taken on a new aspect. fraulein dahlweiner, the pathetic, hard-working little figure, became almost beautiful in their eyes in her efforts for their comfort. she arranged larger rooms and better conveniences for them. their location was central and there was a near-by park. they had no wish to change. clemens, in his letter to howells, boasts that he brought the party through from rome himself, and that they never had so little trouble before; but in looking over this letter, thirty years later, he commented, "probably a lie." he secured a room some distance away for his work, but then could not find his swiss note-book. he wrote twichell that he had lost it, and that after all he might not be obliged to write a volume of travels. but the notebook turned up and the work on the new book proceeded. for a time it went badly. he wrote many chapters, only to throw them aside. he had the feeling that he had somehow lost the knack of descriptive narrative. he had become, as it seemed, too didactic. he thought his description was inclined to be too literal, his humor manufactured. these impressions passed, by and by; interest developed, and with it enthusiasm and confidence. in a letter to twichell he reported his progress: i was about to write to my publisher and propose some other book, when the confounded thing [the note-book] turned up, and down went my heart into my boots. but there was now no excuse, so i went solidly to work, tore up a great part of the ms. written in heidelberg--wrote and tore up, continued to write and tear up--and at last, reward of patient and noble persistence, my pen got the old swing again! since then i'm glad that providence knew better what to do with the swiss notebook than i did. further along in the same letter there breaks forth a true heart-answer to that voice of the alps which, once heard, is never wholly silent: o switzerland! the further it recedes into the enriching haze of time, the more intolerably delicious the charm of it and the cheer of it and the glory and majesty, and solemnity and pathos of it grow. those mountains had a soul: they thought, they spoke. and what a voice it was! and how real! deep down in my memory it is sounding yet. alp calleth unto alp! that stately old scriptural wording is the right one for god's alps and god's ocean. how puny we were in that awful presence, and how painless it was to be so! how fitting and right it seemed, and how stingless was the sense of our unspeakable insignificance! and lord, how pervading were the repose and peace and blessedness that poured out of the heart of the invisible great spirit of the mountains! now what is it? there are mountains and mountains and mountains in this world, but only these take you by the heartstrings. i wonder what the secret of it is. well, time and time and again it has seemed to me that i must drop everything and flee to switzerland once more. it is a longings deep, strong, tugging longing. that is the word. we must go again, joe. cxx in munich that winter in munich was not recalled as an unpleasant one in after-years. his work went well enough--always a chief source of gratification. mrs. clemens and miss spaulding found interest in the galleries, in quaint shops, in the music and picturesque life of that beautiful old bavarian town. the children also liked munich. it was easy for them to adopt any new environment or custom. the german christmas, with its lavish tree and toys and cakes, was an especial delight. the german language they seemed fairly to absorb. writing to his mother clemens said: i cannot see but that the children speak german as well as they do english. susy often translates livy's orders to the servants. i cannot work and study german at the same time; so i have dropped the latter and do not even read the language, except in the morning paper to get the news. in munich--as was the case wherever they were known--there were many callers. most americans and many foreigners felt it proper to call on mark twain. it was complimentary, but it was wearying sometimes. mrs. clemens, in a letter written from venice, where they had received even more than usual attention, declared there were moments when she almost wished she might never see a visitor again. originally there was a good deal about munich in the new book, and some of the discarded chapters might have been retained with advantage. they were ruled out in the final weeding as being too serious, along with the french chapters. only a few italian memories were left to follow the switzerland wanderings. the book does record one munich event, though transferring it to heilsbronn. it is the incident of the finding of the lost sock in the vast bedroom. it may interest the reader to compare what really happened, as set down in a letter to twichell, with the story as written for publication: last night i awoke at three this morning, and after raging to myself for two interminable hours i gave it up. i rose, assumed a catlike stealthiness, to keep from waking livy, and proceeded to dress in the pitch-dark. slowly but surely i got on garment after garment --all down to one sock; i had one slipper on and the other in my hand. well, on my hands and knees i crept softly around, pawing and feeling and scooping along the carpet, and among chair-legs, for that missing sock, i kept that up, and still kept it up, and kept it up. at first i only said to myself, "blame that sock," but that soon ceased to answer. my expletives grew steadily stronger and stronger, and at last, when i found i was lost, i had to sit flat down on the floor and take hold of something to keep from lifting the roof off with the profane explosion that was trying to get out of me. i could see the dim blur of the window, but of course it was in the wrong place and could give me no information as to where i was. but i had one comfort--i had not waked livy; i believed i could find that sock in silence if the night lasted long enough. so i started again and softly pawed all over the place, and sure enough, at the end of half an hour i laid my hand on the missing article. i rose joyfully up and butted the washbowl and pitcher off the stand, and simply raised----so to speak. livy screamed, then said, "who is it? what is the matter?" i said, "there ain't anything the matter. i'm hunting for my sock." she said, "are you hunting for it with a club?" i went in the parlor and lit the lamp, and gradually the fury subsided and the ridiculous features of the thing began to suggest themselves. so i lay on the sofa with note-book and pencil, and transferred the adventure to our big room in the hotel at heilsbronn, and got it on paper a good deal to my satisfaction. he wrote with frequency to howells, and sent him something for the magazine now and then: the "gambetta duel" burlesque, which would make a chapter in the book later, and the story of "the great revolution in pitcairn."--[included in the stolen white elephant volume. the "pitcairn" and "elephant" tales were originally chapters in 'a tramp abroad'; also the unpleasant "coffin-box" yarn, which howells rejected for the atlantic and generally condemned, though for a time it remained a favorite with its author.] howells's novel, 'the lady of the aroostook', was then running through the 'atlantic', and in one of his letters clemens expresses the general deep satisfaction of his household in that tale: if your literature has not struck perfection now we are not able to see what is lacking. it is all such truth--truth to the life; everywhere your pen falls it leaves a photograph . . . . possibly you will not be a fully accepted classic until you have been dead one hundred years --it is the fate of the shakespeares of all genuine professions--but then your books will be as common as bibles, i believe. in that day i shall be in the encyclopedias too, thus: "mark twain, history and occupation unknown; but he was personally acquainted with howells." though in humorous form, this was a sincere tribute. clemens always regarded with awe william dean howells's ability to dissect and photograph with such delicacy the minutiae of human nature; just as howells always stood in awe of mark twain's ability to light, with a single flashing sentence, the whole human horizon. cxxi paris, england, and homeward bound they decided to spend the spring months in paris, so they gave up their pleasant quarters with fraulein dahlweiner, and journeyed across europe, arriving at the french capital february , . here they met another discouraging prospect, for the weather was cold and damp, the cabmen seemed brutally ill-mannered, their first hotel was chilly, dingy, uninviting. clemens, in his note-book, set down his impressions of their rooms. a paragraph will serve: ten squatty, ugly arm-chairs, upholstered in the ugliest and coarsest conceivable scarlet plush; two hideous sofas of the same --uncounted armless chairs ditto. five ornamental chairs, seats covered with a coarse rag, embroidered in flat expanse with a confusion of leaves such as no tree ever bore, six or seven a dirty white and the rest a faded red. how those hideous chairs do swear at the hideous sofa near them! this is the very hatefulest room i have seen in europe. oh, how cold and raw and unwarmable it is! it was better than that when the sun came out, and they found happier quarters presently at the hotel normandy, rue de l'echelle. but, alas, the sun did not come out often enough. it was one of those french springs and summers when it rains nearly every day, and is distressingly foggy and chill between times. clemens received a bad impression of france and the french during that parisian-sojourn, from which he never entirely recovered. in his note-book he wrote: "france has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country." the weather may not have been entirely accountable for his prejudice, but from whatever cause mark twain, to the day of his death, had no great love for the french as a nation. conversely, the french as a nation did not care greatly for mark twain. there were many individual frenchmen that mark twain admired, as there were many frenchmen who admired the work and personality of mark twain; but on neither side was there the warm, fond, general affection which elsewhere throughout europe he invited and returned. his book was not yet finished. in paris he worked on it daily, but without enthusiasm. the city was too noisy, the weather too dismal. his note-book says: may th. i wish this terrible winter would come to an end. have had rain almost without intermission for two months and one week. may th. this is one of the coldest days of this most damnable and interminable winter. it was not all gloom and discomfort. there was congenial company in paris, and dinner-parties, and a world of callers. aldrich the scintillating--[ of aldrich clemens used to say: "when aldrich speaks it seems to me he is the bright face of the moon, and i feel like the other side." aldrich, unlike clemens, was not given to swearing. the parisian note-book has this memorandum: "aldrich gives his seat in the horse-car to a crutched cripple, and discovers that what he took for a crutch is only a length of walnut beading and the man not lame; whereupon aldrich uses the only profanity that ever escaped his lips: 'damn a dam'd man who would carry a dam'd piece of beading under his dam'd arm!'"]--was there, also gedney bunce, of hartford, frank millet and his wife, hjalinar hjorth boyesen and his wife, and a mr. and mrs. chamberlain, artist people whom the clemenses had met pleasantly in italy. turgenieff, as in london, came to call; also baron tauchnitz, that nobly born philanthropist of german publishers, who devoted his life, often at his personal cost, to making the literature of other nations familiar to his own. tauchnitz had early published the 'innocents', following it with other mark twain volumes as they appeared, paying always, of his own will and accord, all that he could afford to pay for this privilege; which was not really a privilege, for the law did not require him to pay at all. he traveled down to paris now to see the author, and to pay his respects to him. "a mighty nice old gentleman," clemens found him. richard whiteing was in paris that winter, and there were always plenty of young american painters whom it was good to know. they had what they called the stomach club, a jolly organization, whose purpose was indicated by its name. mark twain occasionally attended its sessions, and on one memorable evening, when edwin a. abbey was there, speeches were made which never appeared in any printed proceedings. mark twain's address that night has obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs of the world, though no line of it, or even its title has ever found its way into published literature. clemens had a better time in paris than the rest of his party. he could go and come, and mingle with the sociabilities when the abnormal weather kept the others housed in. he did a good deal of sight-seeing of his own kind, and once went up in a captive balloon. they were all studying french, more or less, and they read histories and other books relating to france. clemens renewed his old interest in joan of arc, and for the first time appears to have conceived the notion of writing the story of that lovely character. the reign of terror interested him. he reread carlyle's revolution, a book which he was never long without reading, and they all read 'a tale of two cities'. when the weather permitted they visited the scenes of that grim period. in his note-book he comments: "the reign of terror shows that, without distinction or rank, the people were savages. marquises, dukes, lawyers, blacksmiths, they each figure in due proportion to their crafts." and again: "for , years this savage nation indulged itself in massacre; every now and then a big massacre or a little one. the spirit is peculiar to france--i mean in christendom--no other state has had it. in this france has always walked abreast, kept her end up with her brethren, the turks and the burmese. their chief traits--love of glory and massacre." yet it was his sense of fairness that made him write, as a sort of quittance: "you perceive i generalize with intrepidity from single instances. it is the tourists' custom. when i see a man jump from the vendome column i say, 'they like to do that in paris.'" following this implied atonement, he records a few conclusions, drawn doubtless from parisian reading and observation: "childish race and great." "i'm for cremation." "i disfavor capital punishment." "samson was a jew, therefore not a fool. the jews have the best average brain of any people in the world. the jews are the only race in the world who work wholly with their brains, and never with their hands. there are no jew beggars, no jew tramps, no jew ditchers, hod-carriers, day-laborers, or followers of toilsome mechanical trade. "they are peculiarly and conspicuously the world's intellectual aristocracy." "communism is idiocy. they want to divide up the property. suppose they did it. it requires brains to keep money as well as to make it. in a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again. the division would have to be remade every three years or it would do the communist no good." a curious thing happened one day in paris. boyesen; in great excitement, came to the normandy and was shown to the clemens apartments. he was pale and could hardly speak, for his emotion. he asked immediately if his wife had come to their rooms. on learning that she had not, he declared that she was lost or had met with an accident. she had been gone several hours, he said, and had sent no word, a thing which she had never done before. he besought clemens to aid him in his search for her, to do something to help him find her. clemens, without showing the least emotion or special concentration of interest, said quietly: "i will." "where will you go first," boyesen demanded. still in the same even voice clemens said: "to the elevator." he passed out of the room, with boyesen behind him, into the hall. the elevator was just coming up, and as they reached it, it stopped at their landing, and mrs. boyesen stepped out. she had been delayed by a breakdown and a blockade. clemens said afterward that he had a positive conviction that she would be on the elevator when they reached it. it was one of those curious psychic evidences which we find all along during his life; or, if the skeptics prefer to call them coincidences, they are privileged to do so. paris, june , . still this vindictive winter continues. had a raw, cold rain to-day. to-night we sit around a rousing wood fire. they stood it for another month, and then on the th of july, when it was still chilly and disagreeable, they gave it up and left for brussels, which he calls "a dirty, beautiful (architecturally), interesting town." two days in brussels, then to antwerp, where they dined on the trenton with admiral roan, then to rotterdam, dresden, amsterdam, and london, arriving there the th of july, which was rainy and cold, in keeping with all europe that year. had to keep a rousing big cannel-coal fire blazing in the grate all day. a remarkable summer, truly! london meant a throng of dinners, as always: brilliant, notable affairs, too far away to recall. a letter written by mrs. clemens at the time preserves one charming, fresh bit of that departed bloom. clara [spaulding] went in to dinner with mr. henry james; she enjoyed him very much. i had a little chat with him before dinner, and he was exceedingly pleasant and easy to talk with. i had expected just the reverse, thinking one would feel looked over by him and criticized. mr. whistler, the artist, was at the dinner, but he did not attract me. then there was a lady, over eighty years old, a mrs. stuart, who was washington irving's love, and she is said to have been his only love, and because of her he went unmarried to his grave. --[mrs. clemens was misinformed. irving's only "love" was a miss hoffman.]--she was also an intimate friend of madame bonaparte. you would judge mrs. stuart to be about fifty, and she was the life of the drawing-room after dinner, while the ladies were alone, before the gentlemen came up. it was lovely to see such a sweet old age; every one was so fond of her, every one deferred to her, yet every one was joking her, making fun of her, but she was always equal to the occasion, giving back as bright replies as possible; you had not the least sense that she was aged. she quoted french in her stories with perfect ease and fluency, and had all the time such a kindly, lovely way. when she entered the room, before dinner, mr. james, who was then talking with me, shook hands with her and said, "good evening, you wonderful lady." after she had passed . . . he said, "she is the youngest person in london. she has the youngest feelings and the youngest interests . . . . she is always interested." it was a perfect delight to hear her and see her. for more than two years they had had an invitation from reginald cholmondeley to pay him another visit. so they went for a week to condover, where many friends were gathered, including millais, the painter, and his wife (who had been the wife of ruskin), numerous relatives, and other delightful company. it was one of the happiest chapters of their foreign sojourn.--[moncure d. conway, who was in london at the time, recalls, in his autobiography, a visit which he made with mr. and mrs. clemens to stratford-on-avon. "mrs. clemens was an ardent shakespearian, and mark twain determined to give her a surprise. he told her that we were going on a journey to epworth, and persuaded me to connive with the joke by writing to charles flower not to meet us himself, but send his carriage. on arrival at the station we directed the driver to take us straight to the church. when we entered, and mrs. clemens read on shakespeare's grave, 'good friend, for jesus' sake, forbear,' she started back, exclaiming, 'where am i?' mark received her reproaches with an affluence of guilt, but never did lady enjoy a visit more than that to avonbank. mrs. charles flower (nee martineau) took mrs. clemens to her heart, and contrived that every social or other attraction of that region should surround her."] from the note-book: sunday, august ,' . raw and cold, and a drenching rain. went to hear mr. spurgeon. house three-quarters full-say three thousand people. first hour, lacking one minute, taken up with two prayers, two ugly hymns, and scripture-reading. sermon three-quarters of an hour long. a fluent talker, good, sonorous voice. topic treated in the unpleasant, old fashion: man a mighty bad child, god working at him in forty ways and having a world of trouble with him. a wooden-faced congregation; just the sort to see no incongruity in the majesty of heaven stooping to plead and sentimentalize over such, and see in their salvation an important matter. tuesday, august th. went up windermere lake in the steamer. talked with the great darwin. they had planned to visit dr. brown in scotland. mrs. clemens, in particular, longed to go, for his health had not been of the best, and she felt that they would never have a chance to see him again. clemens in after years blamed himself harshly for not making the trip, declaring that their whole reason for not going was an irritable reluctance on his part to take the troublesome journey and a perversity of spirit for which there was no real excuse. there is documentary evidence against this harsh conclusion. they were, in fact, delayed here and there by misconnections and the continued terrific weather, barely reaching liverpool in time for their sailing date, august d. unquestionably he was weary of railway travel, far he always detested it. time would magnify his remembered reluctance, until, in the end, he would load his conscience with the entire burden of blame. their ship was the gallia, and one night, when they were nearing the opposite side of the atlantic, mark twain, standing on deck, saw for the third time in his experience a magnificent lunar rainbow: a complete arch, the colors part of the time very brilliant, but little different from a day rainbow. it is not given to many persons in this world to see even one of these phenomena. after each previous vision there had come to him a period of good-fortune. perhaps this also boded well for him. cxxii an interlude the gallia reached new york september , . a report of his arrival, in the new york sun, stated that mark twain had changed in his absence; that only his drawl seemed natural. his hat, as he stood on the deck of the incoming cunarder, gallia, was of the pattern that english officers wear in india, and his suit of clothes was such as a merchant might wear in his store. he looked older than when he went to germany, and his hair has turned quite gray. it was a late hour when they were finally up to the dock, and clemens, anxious to get through the custom house, urged the inspector to accept his carefully prepared list of dutiable articles, without opening the baggage. but the official was dubious. clemens argued eloquently, and a higher authority was consulted. again clemens stated his case and presented his arguments. a still higher chief of inspection was summoned, evidently from his bed. he listened sleepily to the preamble, then suddenly said: "oh, chalk his baggage, of course! don't you know it's mark twain and that he'll talk all night?" they went directly to the farm, for whose high sunlit loveliness they had been longing through all their days of absence. mrs. clemens, in her letters, had never failed to dwell on her hunger for that fair hilltop. from his accustomed study-table clemens wrote to twichell: "you have run about a good deal, joe, but you have never seen any place that was so divine as the farm. why don't you come here and take a foretaste of heaven?" clemens declared he would roam no more forever, and settled down to the happy farm routine. he took up his work, which had not gone well in paris, and found his interest in it renewed. in the letter to twichell he said: i am revising my ms. i did not expect to like it, but i do. i have been knocking out early chapters for more than a year now, not because they had not merit, but merely because they hindered the flow of the narrative; it was a dredging process. day before yesterday my shovel fetched up three more chapters and laid them, reeking, on the festering shore-pile of their predecessors, and now i think the yarn swims right along, without hitch or halt. i believe it will be a readable book of travels. i cannot see that it lacks anything but information. mrs. clemens was no less weary of travel than her husband. yet she had enjoyed their roaming, and her gain from it had been greater than his. her knowledge of art and literature, and of the personal geography of nations, had vastly increased; her philosophy of life had grown beyond all counting. she had lost something, too; she had outstripped her traditions. one day, when she and her sister had walked across the fields, and had stopped to rest in a little grove by a pretty pond, she confessed, timidly enough and not without sorrow, how she had drifted away from her orthodox views. she had ceased to believe, she said, in the orthodox bible god, who exercised a personal supervision over every human soul. the hordes of people she had seen in many lands, the philosophies she had listened to from her husband and those wise ones about him, the life away from the restricted round of home, all had contributed to this change. her god had become a larger god; the greater mind which exerts its care of the individual through immutable laws of time and change and environment--the supreme good which comprehends the individual flower, dumb creature, or human being only as a unit in the larger scheme of life and love. her sister was not shocked or grieved; she too had grown with the years, and though perhaps less positively directed, had by a path of her own reached a wider prospect of conclusions. it was a sweet day there in the little grove by the water, and would linger in the memory of both so long as life lasted. certainly it was the larger faith; though the moment must always come when the narrower, nearer, more humanly protecting arm of orthodoxy lends closer comfort. long afterward, in the years that followed the sorrow of heavy bereavement, clemens once said to his wife, "livy, if it comforts you to lean on the christian faith do so," and she answered, "i can't, youth. i haven't any." and the thought that he had destroyed her illusion, without affording a compensating solace, was one that would come back to him, now and then, all his days. cxxiii the grant speech of if the lunar rainbow had any fortuitous significance, perhaps we may find it in the two speeches which mark twain made in november and december of that year. the first of these was delivered at chicago, on the occasion of the reception of general grant by the army of the tennessee, on the evening of november , . grant had just returned from his splendid tour of the world. his progress from san francisco eastward had been such an ovation as is only accorded to sovereignty. clemens received an invitation to the reunion, but, dreading the long railway journey, was at first moved to decline. he prepared a letter in which he made "business" his excuse, and expressed his regret that he would not be present to see and hear the veterans of the army of the tennessee at the moment when their old commander entered the room and rose in his place to speak. "besides," he said, "i wanted to see the general again anyway and renew the acquaintance. he would remember me, because i was the person who did not ask him for an office." he did not send the letter. reconsidering, it seemed to him that there was something strikingly picturesque in the idea of a confederate soldier who had been chased for a fortnight in the rain through ralls and monroe counties, missouri, now being invited to come and give welcome home to his old imaginary pursuer. it was in the nature of an imperative command, which he could not refuse to obey. he accepted and agreed to speak. they had asked him to respond to the toast of "the ladies," but for him the subject was worn out. he had already responded to that toast at least twice. he telegraphed that there was one class of the community that had always been overlooked upon such occasions, and that if they would allow him to do so he would take that class for a toast: the babies. necessarily they agreed, and he prepared himself accordingly. he arrived in chicago in time for the prodigious procession of welcome. grant was to witness the march from a grand reviewing stand, which had been built out from the second story of the palmer house. clemens had not seen the general since the "embarrassing" introduction in washington, twelve years before. their meeting was characteristic enough. carter harrison, mayor of chicago, arriving with grant, stepped over to clemens, and asked him if he wouldn't like to be presented. grant also came forward, and a moment later harrison was saying: "general, let me present mr. clemens, a man almost as great as yourself." they shook hands; there was a pause of a moment, then grant said, looking at him gravely: "mr. clemens, i am not embarrassed, are you?" so he remembered that first, long-ago meeting. it was a conspicuous performance. the crowd could not hear the words, but they saw the greeting and the laugh, and cheered both men. following the procession, there were certain imposing ceremonies of welcome at haverly's theater where long, laudatory eloquence was poured out upon the returning hero, who sat unmoved while the storm of music and cheers and oratory swept about him. clemens, writing of it that evening to mrs. clemens, said: i never sat elbow to elbow with so many historic names before. grant, sherman, sheridan, schofield, pope, logan, and so on. what an iron man grant is! he sat facing the house, with his right leg crossed over his left, his right boot sole tilted up at an angle, and his left hand and arm reposing on the arm of his chair. you note that position? well, when glowing references were made to other grandees on the stage, those grandees always showed a trifle of nervous consciousness, and as these references came frequently the nervous changes of position and attitude were also frequent. but grant! he was under a tremendous and ceaseless bombardment of praise and congratulation; but as true as i'm sitting here he never moved a muscle of his body for a single instant during thirty minutes! you could have played him on a stranger for an effigy. perhaps he never would have moved, but at last a speaker made such a particularly ripping and blood-stirring remark about him that the audience rose and roared and yelled and stamped and clapped an entire minute--grant sitting as serene as ever-when general sherman stepped up to him, laid his hand affectionately on his shoulder, bent respectfully down, and whispered in his ear. then grant got up and bowed, and the storm of applause swelled into a hurricane. but it was the next evening that the celebration rose to a climax. this was at the grand banquet at the palmer house, where six hundred guests sat down to dinner and grant himself spoke, and logan and hurlbut, and vilas and woodford and pope, fifteen in all, including robert g. ingersoll and mark twain. chicago has never known a greater event than that dinner, for there has never been a time since when those great soldiers and citizens could have been gathered there. to howells clemens wrote: imagine what it was like to see a bullet-shredded old battle-flag reverently unfolded to the gaze of a thousand middle-aged soldiers, most of whom hadn't seen it since they saw it advancing over victorious fields when they were in their prime. and imagine what it was like when grant, their first commander, stepped into view while they were still going mad over the flag, and then right in the midst of it all somebody struck up "when we were marching through georgia." well, you should have heard the thousand voices lift that chorus and seen the tears stream down. if i live a hundred years i sha'n't ever forget these things, nor be able to talk about them. i sha'n't ever forget that i saw phil sheridan, with martial cloak and plumed chapeau, riding his big black horse in the midst of his own cannon; by all odds the superbest figure of a soldier. i ever looked upon! grand times, my boy, grand times! mark twain declared afterward that he listened to four speeches that night which he would remember as long as he lived. one of them was by emory storrs, another by general vilas, another by logan, and the last and greatest by robert ingersoll, whose eloquence swept the house like a flame. the howells letter continues: i doubt if america has ever seen anything quite equal to it; i am well satisfied i shall not live to see its equal again. how pale those speeches are in print, but how radiant, how full of color, how blinding they were in the delivery! bob ingersoll's music will sing through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my ears. and i shall always see him, as he stood that night on a dinner-table, under the flash of lights and banners, in the midst of seven hundred frantic shouters, the most beautiful human creature that ever lived. "they fought, that a mother might own her child." the words look like any other print, but, lord bless me! he borrowed the very accent of the angel of mercy to say them in, and you should have seen that vast house rise to its feet; and you should have heard the hurricane that followed. that's the only test! people may shout, clap their hands, stamp, wave their napkins, but none but the master can make them get up on their feet. clemens's own speech came last. he had been placed at the end to hold the house. he was preceded by a dull speaker, and his heart sank, for it was two o'clock and the diners were weary and sleepy, and the dreary speech had made them unresponsive. they gave him a round of applause when he stepped up upon the table in front of him--a tribute to his name. then he began the opening words of that memorable, delightful fancy. "we haven't all had the good-fortune to be ladies; we haven't all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies--we stand on common ground--" the tired audience had listened in respectful silence through the first half of the sentence. he made one of his effective pauses on the word "babies," and when he added, in that slow, rich measure of his, "we stand on common ground," they let go a storm of applause. there was no weariness and inattention after that. at the end of each sentence, he had to stop to let the tornado roar itself out and sweep by. when he reached the beginning of the final paragraph, "among the three or four million cradles now rocking in the land are some which this nation would preserve for ages as sacred things if we could know which ones they are," the vast audience waited breathless for his conclusion. step by step he led toward some unseen climax--some surprise, of course, for that would be his way. then steadily, and almost without emphasis, he delivered the opening of his final sentence: "and now in his cradle, somewhere under the flag, the future illustrious commander-in-chief of the american armies is so little burdened with his approaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole strategic mind, at this moment, to trying to find out some way to get his own big toe into his mouth, an achievement which (meaning no disrespect) the illustrious guest of this evening also turned his attention to some fifty-six years ago." he paused, and the vast crowd had a chill of fear. after all, he seemed likely to overdo it to spoil everything with a cheap joke at the end. no one ever knew better than mark twain the value of a pause. he waited now long enough to let the silence become absolute, until the tension was painful, then wheeling to grant himself he said, with all the dramatic power of which he was master: "and if the child is but the father of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded!" the house came down with a crash. the linking of their hero's great military triumphs with that earliest of all conquests seemed to them so grand a figure that they went mad with the joy of it. even grant's iron serenity broke; he rocked and laughed while the tears streamed down his cheeks. they swept around the speaker with their congratulations, in their efforts to seize his hand. he was borne up and down the great dining-hall. grant himself pressed up to make acknowledgments. "it tore me all to pieces," he said; and sherman exclaimed, "lord bless you, my boy! i don't know how you do it!" the little speech has been in "cold type" so many years since then that the reader of it to-day may find it hard to understand the flame of response it kindled so long ago. but that was another day--and another nation--and mark twain, like robert ingersoll, knew always his period and his people. cxxiv another "atlantic" speech the december good-fortune was an opportunity clemens had to redeem himself with the atlantic contingent, at a breakfast given to dr. holmes. howells had written concerning it as early as october, and the first impulse had been to decline. it would be something of an ordeal; for though two years had passed since the fatal whittier dinner, clemens had not been in that company since, and the lapse of time did not signify. both howells and warner urged him to accept, and he agreed to do so on condition that he be allowed to speak. if anybody talks there i shall claim the right to say a word myself, and be heard among the very earliest, else it would be confoundedly awkward for me--and for the rest, too. but you may read what i say beforehand, and strike out whatever you choose. howells advised against any sort of explanation. clemens accepted this as wise counsel, and prepared an address relevant only to the guest of honor. it was a noble gathering. most of the guests of the whittier dinner were present, and this time there were ladies. emerson, longfellow, and whittier were there, harriet beecher stowe and julia ward howe; also the knightly colonel waring, and stedman, and parkman, and grand old john bigelow, old even then.--[he died in in his th year.] howells was conservative in his introduction this time. it was better taste to be so. he said simply: "we will now listen to a few words of truth and soberness from mark twain." clemens is said to have risen diffidently, but that was his natural manner. it probably did not indicate anything of the inner tumult he really felt. outwardly he was calm enough, and what he said was delicate and beautiful, the kind of thing that he could say so well. it seems fitting that it should be included here, the more so that it tells a story not elsewhere recorded. this is the speech in full: mr. chairman, ladies, and gentlemen,--i would have traveled a much greater distance than i have come to witness the paying of honors to dr. holmes, for my feeling toward him has always been one of peculiar warmth. when one receives a letter from a great man for the first time in his life it is a large event to him, as all of you know by your own experience. you never can receive letters enough from famous men afterward to obliterate that one or dim the memory of the pleasant surprise it was and the gratification it gave you. lapse of time cannot make it commonplace or cheap. well, the first great man who ever wrote me a letter was our guest, oliver wendell holmes. he was also the first great literary man i ever stole anything from, and that is how i came to write to him and he to me. when my first book was new a friend of mine said, "the dedication is very neat." yes, i said, i thought it was. my friend said, "i always admired it, even before i saw it in the innocents abroad." i naturally said, "what do you mean? where did you ever see it before?" "well, i saw it first, some years ago, as dr. holmes's dedication to his songs in many keys." of course my first impulse was to prepare this man's remains for burial, but upon reflection i said i would reprieve him for a moment or two, and give him a chance to prove his assertion if he could. we stepped into a book-store. and he did prove it. i had stolen that dedication almost word for word. i could not imagine how this curious thing happened; for i knew one thing, for a dead certainty--that a certain amount of pride always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that this pride protects a man from deliberately stealing other people's ideas. that is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man, and admirers had often told me i had nearly a basketful, though they were rather reserved as to the size of the basket. however, i thought the thing out and solved the mystery. some years before i had been laid up a couple of weeks in the sandwich islands, and had read and reread dr. holmes's poems till my mental reservoir was filled with them to the brim. the dedication lay on top and handy, so by and by i unconsciously took it. well, of course, i wrote to dr. holmes and told him i hadn't meant to steal, and he wrote back and said, in the kindest way, that it was all right, and no harm done, and added that he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves. he stated a truth and did it in such a pleasant way, and salved over my sore spot so gently and so healingly, that i was rather glad i had committed the crime, for the sake of the letter. i afterward called on him and told him to make perfectly free with any ideas of mine that struck him as good protoplasm for poetry. he could see by that time that there wasn't anything mean about me; so we got along, right from the start.--[holmes in his letter had said: "i rather think the innocents abroad will have many more readers than songs in many keys. . . you will be stolen from a great deal oftener than you will borrow from other people."] i have met dr. holmes many times since; and lately he said--however, i am wandering wildly away from the one thing which i got on my feet to do; that is, to make my compliments to you, my fellow-teachers of the great public, and likewise to say i am right glad to see that dr. holmes is still in his prime and full of generous life, and as age is not determined by years but by trouble, and by infirmities of mind and body, i hope it may be a very long time yet before any can truthfully say, "he is growing old." whatever mark twain may have lost on that former occasion, came back to him multiplied when he had finished this happy tribute. so the year for him closed prosperously. the rainbow of promise was justified. cxxv the quieter things of home upset and disturbed as mark twain often was, he seldom permitted his distractions to interfere with the program of his fireside. his days and his nights might be fevered, but the evenings belonged to another world. the long european wandering left him more than ever enamoured of his home; to him it had never been so sweet before, so beautiful, so full of peace. company came: distinguished guests and the old neighborhood circles. dinner-parties were more frequent than ever, and they were likely to be brilliant affairs. the best minds, the brightest wits, gathered around mark twain's table. booth, barrett, irving, sheridan, sherman, howells, aldrich: they all assembled, and many more. there was always some one on the way to boston or new york who addressed himself for the day or the night, or for a brief call, to the mark twain fireside. certain visitors from foreign lands were surprised at his environment, possibly expecting to find him among less substantial, more bohemian surroundings. henry drummond, the author of natural law in the spiritual world, in a letter of this time, said: i had a delightful day at hartford last wednesday . . . . called on mark twain, mrs. harriet beecher stowe, and the widow of horace bushnell. i was wishing a----had been at the mark twain interview. he is funnier than any of his books, and to my surprise a most respected citizen, devoted to things esthetic, and the friend of the poor and struggling.--[life of henry drummond, by george adam smith.] the quieter evenings were no less delightful. clemens did not often go out. he loved his own home best. the children were old enough now to take part in a form of entertainment that gave him and them especial pleasure-acting charades. these he invented for them, and costumed the little performers, and joined in the acting as enthusiastically and as unrestrainedly as if he were back in that frolicsome boyhood on john quarles's farm. the warner and twichell children were often there and took part in the gay amusements. the children of that neighborhood played their impromptu parts well and naturally. they were in a dramatic atmosphere, and had been from infancy. there was never any preparation for the charades. a word was selected and the parts of it were whispered to the little actors. then they withdrew to the hall, where all sorts of costumes had been laid out for the evening, dressed their parts, and each detachment marched into the library, performed its syllable and retired, leaving the audience, mainly composed of parents, to guess the answer. often they invented their own words, did their own costuming, and conducted the entire performance independent of grown-up assistance or interference. now and then, even at this early period, they conceived and produced little plays, and of course their father could not resist joining in these. at other times, evenings, after dinner, he would sit at the piano and recall the old darky songs-spirituals and jubilee choruses-singing them with fine spirit, if not with perfect technic, the children joining in these moving melodies. he loved to read aloud to them. it was his habit to read his manuscript to mrs. clemens, and, now that the children were older, he was likely to include them in his critical audience. it would seem to have been the winter after their return from europe that this custom was inaugurated, for 'the prince and the pauper' manuscript was the first one so read, and it was just then he was resuming work on this tale. each afternoon or evening, when he had finished his chapter, he assembled his little audience and read them the result. the children were old enough to delight in that half real, half fairy tale of the wandering prince and the royal pauper: and the charm and simplicity of the story are measurably due to those two small listeners, to whom it was adapted in that early day of its creation. clemens found the prince a blessed relief from 'a tramp abroad', which had become a veritable nightmare. he had thought it finished when he left the farm, but discovered that he must add several hundred pages to complete its bulk. it seemed to him that he had been given a life-sentence. he wrote six hundred pages and tore up all but two hundred and eighty-eight. he was about to destroy these and begin again, when mrs. clemens's health became poor and he was advised to take her to elmira, though it was then midwinter. to howells he wrote: i said, "if there is one death that is painfuler than another, may i get it if i don't do that thing." so i took the pages to bliss and told him that was the very last line i should ever write on this book (a book which required pages of ms., and i have written nearly four thousand, first and last). i am as soary (and flighty) as a rocket to-day, with the unutterable joy of getting that old man of the sea off my back, where he has been roosting more than a year and a half. they remained a month at elmira, and on their return clemens renewed work on 'the prince and the pauper'. he reported to howells that if he never sold a copy his jubilant delight in writing it would suffer no diminution. a week later his enthusiasm had still further increased: i take so much pleasure in my story that i am loath to hurry, not wanting to get it done. did i ever tell you the plot of it? it begins at a.m., january , . he follows with a detailed synopsis of his plot, which in this instance he had worked out with unusual completeness--a fact which largely accounts for the unity of the tale. then he adds: my idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the king himself, and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them applied to others; all of which is to account for certain mildnesses which distinguished edward vi.'s reign from those that precede it and follow it. imagine this fact: i have even fascinated mrs. clemens with this yarn for youth. my stuff generally gets considerable damning with faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other way. she is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill doesn't grind fast enough to suit her. this is no mean triumph, my dear sir. he forgot, perhaps, to mention his smaller auditors, but we may believe they were no less eager in their demands for the tale's continuance. cxxvi "a tramp abroad" 'a tramp abroad' came from the presses on the th of march, . it had been widely heralded, and there was an advance sale of twenty-five thousand copies. it was of the same general size and outward character as the innocents, numerously illustrated, and was regarded by its publishers as a satisfactory book. it bore no very striking resemblance to the innocents on close examination. its pictures-drawn, for the most part, by a young art student named brown, whom clemens had met in paris--were extraordinarily bad, while the crude engraving process by which they had been reproduced; tended to bring them still further into disrepute. a few drawings by true williams were better, and those drawn by clemens himself had a value of their own. the book would have profited had there been more of what the author calls his "works of art." mark twain himself had dubious anticipations as to the book's reception. but howells wrote: well, you are a blessing. you ought to believe in god's goodness, since he has bestowed upon the world such a delightful genius as yours to lighten its troubles. clemens replied: your praises have been the greatest uplift i ever had. when a body is not even remotely expecting such things, how the surprise takes the breath away! we had been interpreting your stillness to melancholy and depression, caused by that book. this is honest. why, everything looks brighter now. a check for untold cash could not have made our hearts sing as your letter has done. a letter from tauchnitz, proposing to issue an illustrated edition in germany, besides putting it into his regular series, was an added satisfaction. to be in a tauchnitz series was of itself a recognition of the book's merit. to twichell, clemens presented a special copy of the tramp with a personal inscription, which must not be omitted here: my dear "harris"--no, i mean my dear joe,--just imagine it for a moment: i was collecting material in europe during fourteen months for a book, and now that the thing is printed i find that you, who were with me only a month and a half of the fourteen, are in actual presence (not imaginary) in of the pages the book contains! hang it, if you had stayed at home it would have taken me fourteen years to get the material. you have saved me an intolerable whole world of hated labor, and i'll not forget it, my boy. you'll find reminders of things, all along, that happened to us, and of others that didn't happen; but you'll remember the spot where they were invented. you will see how the imaginary perilous trip up the riffelberg is preposterously expanded. that horse-student is on page . the "fremersberg" is neighboring. the black forest novel is on page . i remember when and where we projected that: in the leafy glades with the mountain sublimities dozing in the blue haze beyond the gorge of allerheiligen. there's the "new member," page ; the dentist yarn, ; the true chamois, ; at page is a pretty long yarn, spun from a mighty brief text meeting, for a moment, that pretty girl who knew me and whom i had forgotten; at is "harris," and should have been so entitled, but bliss has made a mistake and turned you into some other character; brings back the whole rigi tramp to me at a glance; at and are specimens of my art; and the frontispiece is the combination which i made by pasting one familiar picture over the lower half of an equally familiar one. this fine work being worthy of titian, i have shed the credit of it upon him. well, you'll find more reminders of things scattered through here than are printed, or could have been printed, in many books. all the "legends of the neckar," which i invented for that unstoried region, are here; one is in the appendix. the steel portrait of me is just about perfect. we had a mighty good time, joe, and the six weeks i would dearly like to repeat any time; but the rest of the fourteen months-never. with love, yours, mark. hartford, march , . possibly twichell had vague doubts concerning a book of which he was so large a part, and its favorable reception by the critics and the public generally was a great comfort. when the howells letter was read to him he is reported as having sat with his hands on his knees, his head bent forward--a favorite attitude--repeating at intervals: "howells said that, did he? old howells said that!" there have been many and varying opinions since then as to the literary merits of 'a tramp abroad'. human tastes differ, and a "mixed" book of this kind invites as many opinions as it has chapters. the word "uneven" pretty safely describes any book of size, but it has a special application to this one. written under great stress and uncertainty of mind, it could hardly be uniform. it presents mark twain at his best, and at his worst. almost any american writer was better than mark twain at his worst: mark twain at his best was unapproachable. it is inevitable that 'a tramp abroad' and 'the innocents abroad' should be compared, though with hardly the warrant of similarity. the books are as different as was their author at the periods when they were written. 'a tramp abroad' is the work of a man who was traveling and observing for the purpose of writing a book, and for no other reason. the innocents abroad was written by a man who was reveling in every scene and experience, every new phase and prospect; whose soul was alive to every historic association, and to every humor that a gay party of young sight-seers could find along the way. the note-books of that trip fairly glow with the inspiration of it; those of the later wanderings are mainly filled with brief, terse records, interspersed with satire and denunciation. in the 'innocents' the writer is the enthusiast with a sense of humor. in the 'tramp' he has still the sense of humor, but he has become a cynic; restrained, but a cynic none the less. in the 'innocents' he laughs at delusions and fallacies--and enjoys them. in the 'tramp' he laughs at human foibles and affectations--and wants to smash them. very often he does not laugh heartily and sincerely at all, but finds his humor in extravagant burlesque. in later life his gentler laughter, his old, untroubled enjoyment of human weakness, would return, but just now he was in that middle period, when the "damned human race" amused him indeed, though less tenderly. (it seems proper to explain that in applying this term to mankind he did not mean that the race was foredoomed, but rather that it ought to be.) reading the 'innocents', the conviction grows that, with all its faults, it is literature from beginning to end. reading the 'tramp', the suspicion arises that, regardless of technical improvement, its percentage of literature is not large. yet, as noted in an earlier volume, so eminent a critic as brander matthews has pronounced in its favor, and he undoubtedly had a numerous following; howells expressed. his delight in the book at the time of its issue, though one wonders how far the personal element entered into his enjoyment, and what would be his final decision if he read the two books side by side to-day. he reviewed 'a tramp abroad' adequately and finely in the atlantic, and justly; for on the whole it is a vastly entertaining book, and he did not overpraise it. 'a tramp abroad' had an "introduction" in the manuscript, a pleasant word to the reader but not a necessary one, and eventually it was omitted. fortunately the appendix remained. beyond question it contains some of the very best things in the book. the descriptions of the german portier and the german newspaper are happy enough, and the essay on the awful german language is one of mark twain's supreme bits of humor. it is mark twain at his best; mark twain in a field where he had no rival, the field of good-natured, sincere fun-making-ridicule of the manifest absurdities of some national custom or institution which the nation itself could enjoy, while the individual suffered no wound. the present emperor of germany is said to find comfort in this essay on his national speech when all other amusements fail. it is delicious beyond words to express; it is unique. in the body of the book there are also many delights. the description of the ant might rank next to the german language almost in its humor, and the meeting with the unrecognized girl at lucerne has a lively charm. of the serious matter, some of the word-pictures are flawless in their beauty; this, for instance, suggested by the view of the jungfrau from interlaken: there was something subduing in the influence of that silent and solemn and awful presence; one seemed to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast. one had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice--a spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of ages, upon a million vanished races of men and judged them; and would judge a million more--and still be there, watching unchanged and unchangeable, after all life should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation while i was feeling these things, i was groping, without knowing it, toward an understanding of what the spell is which people find in the alps, and in no other mountains; that strange, deep, nameless influence which, once felt, cannot be forgotten; once felt, leaves always behind it a restless longing to feel it again--a longing which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning, which will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will. i met dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative, cultivated and uncultivated, who had come from far countries and roamed through the swiss alps year after year--they could not explain why. they had come first, they said, out of idle curiosity, because everybody talked about it; they had come since because they could not help it, and they should keep on coming, while they lived, for the same reason; they had tried to break their chains and stay away, but it was futile; now they had no desire to break them. others came nearer formulating what they felt; they said they could find perfect rest and peace nowhere else when they were troubled: all frets and worries and chafings sank to sleep in the presence of the benignant serenity of the alps; the great spirit of the mountain breathed his own peace upon their hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them; they could not think base thoughts or do mean and sordid things here, before the visible throne of god. indeed, all the serious matter in the book is good. the reader's chief regret is likely to be that there is not more of it. the main difficulty with the humor is that it seems overdone. it is likely to be carried too far, and continued too long. the ascent of riffelberg is an example. though spotted with delights it seems, to one reader at least, less admirable than other of the book's important features, striking, as it does, more emphatically the chief note of the book's humor--that is to say, exaggeration. without doubt there must be many--very many--who agree in finding a fuller enjoyment in 'a tramp abroad' than in the 'innocents'; only, the burden of the world's opinion lies the other way. the world has a weakness for its illusions: the splendor that falls on castle walls, the glory of the hills at evening, the pathos of the days that are no more. it answers to tenderness, even on the page of humor, and to genuine enthusiasm, sharply sensing the lack of these things; instinctively resenting, even when most amused by it, extravagance and burlesque. the innocents abroad is more soul-satisfying than its successor, more poetic; more sentimental, if you will. the tramp contains better english usage, without doubt, but it is less full of happiness and bloom and the halo of romance. the heart of the world has felt this, and has demanded the book in fewer numbers.--[the sales of the innocents during the earlier years more than doubled those of the tramp during a similar period. the later ratio of popularity is more nearly three to one. it has been repeatedly stated that in england the tramp has the greater popularity, an assertion not sustained by the publisher's accountings.] cxxvii letters, tales, and plans the reader has not failed to remark the great number of letters which samuel clemens wrote to his friend william dean howells; yet comparatively few can even be mentioned. he was always writing to howells, on every subject under the sun; whatever came into his mind --business, literature, personal affairs--he must write about it to howells. once, when nothing better occurred, he sent him a series of telegrams, each a stanza from an old hymn, possibly thinking they might carry comfort.--["clemens had then and for many years the habit of writing to me about what he was doing, and still more of what he was experiencing. nothing struck his imagination, in or out of the daily routine, but he wished to write me of it, and he wrote with the greatest fullness and a lavish dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or forty pages:" (my mark twain, by w. d. howells.)] whatever of picturesque happened in the household he immediately set it down for howells's entertainment. some of these domestic incidents carry the flavor of his best humor. once he wrote: last night, when i went to bed, mrs. clemens said, "george didn't take the cat down to the cellar; rosa says he has left it shut up in the conservatory." so i went down to attend to abner (the cat). about three in the morning mrs. c. woke me and said, "i do believe i hear that cat in the drawing-room. what did you do with him?" i answered with the confidence of a man who has managed to do the right thing for once, and said, "i opened the conservatory doors, took the library off the alarm, and spread everything open, so that there wasn't any obstruction between him and the cellar." language wasn't capable of conveying this woman's disgust. but the sense of what she said was, "he couldn't have done any harm in the conservatory; so you must go and make the entire house free to him and the burglars, imagining that he will prefer the coal-bins to the drawing-room. if you had had mr. howells to help you i should have admired, but not have been astonished, because i should know that together you would be equal to it; but how you managed to contrive such a stately blunder all by yourself is what i cannot understand." so, you see, even she knows how to appreciate our gifts.... i knocked off during these stirring hours, and don't intend to go to work again till we go away for the summer, four or six weeks hence. so i am writing to you, not because i have anything to say, but because you don't have to answer and i need something to do this afternoon. the rightful earl has---- friday, th. well, never mind about the rightful earl; he merely wanted to-borrow money. i never knew an american earl that didn't. after a trip to boston, during which mrs. clemens did some bric-a-brac shopping, he wrote: mrs. clemens has two imperishable topics now: the museum of andirons which she collected and your dinner. it is hard to tell which she admires the most. sometimes she leans one way and sometimes the other; but i lean pretty steadily toward the dinner because i can appreciate that, whereas i am no prophet in andirons. there has been a procession of adams express wagons filing before the door all day delivering andirons. in a more serious vein he refers to the aged violinist ole bull and his wife, whom they had met during their visit, and their enjoyment of that gentle-hearted pair. clemens did some shorter work that spring, most of which found its way into the atlantic. "edward mills and george benton," one of the contributions of this time, is a moral sermon in its presentation of a pitiful human spectacle and misdirected human zeal. it brought a pack of letters of approval, not only from laity, but the church, and in some measure may have helped to destroy the silly sentimentalism which manifested itself in making heroes of spectacular criminals. that fashion has gone out, largely. mark twain wrote frequently on the subject, though never more effectively than in this particular instance. "mrs. mcwilliams and the lightning" was another atlantic story, a companion piece to "mrs. mcwilliams's experience with the membranous croup," and in the same delightful vein--a vein in which mark twain was likely to be at his best--the transcription of a scene not so far removed in character from that in the "cat" letter just quoted: something which may or may not have happened, but might have happened, approximately as set down. rose terry cooke wrote: horrid man, how did you know the way i behave in a thunderstorm? have you been secreted in the closet or lurking on the shed roof? i hope you got thoroughly rained on; and worst of all is that you made me laugh at myself; my real terrors turned round and grimaced at me: they were sublime, and you have made them ridiculous just come out here another year and have four houses within a few rods of you struck and then see if you write an article of such exasperating levity. i really hate you, but you are funny. in addition to his own work, he conceived a plan for orion. clemens himself had been attempting, from time to time, an absolutely faithful autobiography; a document in which his deeds and misdeeds, even his moods and inmost thoughts, should be truly set down. he had found it an impossible task. he confessed freely that he lacked the courage, even the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his soul bare, but he believed orion equal to the task. he knew how rigidly honest he was, how ready to confess his shortcomings, how eager to be employed at some literary occupation. it was mark twain's belief that if orion would record in detail his long, weary struggle, his succession of attempts and failures, his past dreams and disappointments, along with his sins of omission and commission, it would make one of those priceless human documents such as have been left by benvenuto cellini, cazenova, and rousseau. "simply tell your story to yourself," he wrote, "laying all hideousness utterly bare, reserving nothing. banish the idea of the audience and all hampering things." orion, out in keokuk, had long since abandoned the chicken farm and a variety of other enterprises. he had prospected insurance, mining, journalism, his old trade of printing, and had taken down and hung up his law shingle between each of these seizures. aside from business, too, he had been having a rather spectacular experience. he had changed his politics three times (twice in one day), and his religion as many more. once when he was delivering a political harangue in the street, at night, a parade of the opposition (he had but just abandoned them) marched by carrying certain flaming transparencies, which he himself had made for them the day before. finally, after delivering a series of infidel lectures; he had been excommunicated and condemned to eternal flames by the presbyterian church. he was therefore ripe for any new diversion, and the autobiography appealed to him. he set about it with splendid enthusiasm, wrote a hundred pages or so of his childhood with a startling minutia of detail and frankness, and mailed them to his brother for inspection. they were all that mark twain had expected; more than he had expected. he forwarded them to howells with great satisfaction, suggesting, with certain excisions, they be offered anonymously to the atlantic readers. but howells's taste for realism had its limitations. he found the story interesting--indeed, torturingly, heart-wringingly so--and, advising strongly against its publication, returned it. onion was steaming along at the rate of ten to twenty pages a day now, forwarding them as fast as written, while his courage was good and the fires warm. clemens, receiving a package by every morning mail, soon lost interest, then developed a hunted feeling, becoming finally desperate. he wrote wildly to shut orion off, urging him to let his manuscript accumulate, and to send it in one large consignment at the end. this orion did, and it is fair to say that in this instance at least he stuck to his work faithfully to the bitter, disheartening end. and it would have been all that mark twain had dreamed it would be, had orion maintained the simple narrative spirit of its early pages. but he drifted off into theological byways; into discussions of his excommunication and infidelities, which were frank enough, but lacked human interest. in old age mark twain once referred to orion's autobiography in print and his own disappointment in it, which he attributed to orion's having departed from the idea of frank and unrestricted confession to exalt himself as a hero-a statement altogether unwarranted, and due to one of those curious confusions of memory and imagination that more than once resulted in a complete reversal of the facts. a quantity of orion's manuscript has been lost and destroyed, but enough fragments of it remain to show its fidelity to the original plan. it is just one long record of fleeting hope, futile effort, and humiliation. it is the story of a life of disappointment; of a man who has been defeated and beaten down and crushed by the world until he has nothing but confession left to surrender.--[howells, in his letter concerning the opening chapters, said that they would some day make good material. fortunately the earliest of these chapters were preserved, and, as the reader may remember, furnished much of the childhood details for this biography.] whatever may have been mark twain's later impression of his brother's manuscript, its story of failure and disappointment moved him to definite action at the time. several years before, in hartford, orion had urged him to make his publishing contracts on a basis of half profits, instead of on the royalty plan. clemens, remembering this, had insisted on such an arrangement for the publication of 'a tramp abroad', and when his first statement came in he realized that the new contract was very largely to his advantage. he remembered orion's anxiety in the matter, and made it now a valid excuse for placing his brother on a firm financial footing. out of the suspicions which you bred in me years ago has grown this result, to wit: that i shall within the twelve months get $ , out of this tramp, instead of $ , . $ , , after taxes and other expenses are stripped away, is worth to the investor about $ a month, so i shall tell mr. perkins [his lawyer and financial agent] to make your check that amount per month hereafter.... this ends the loan business, and hereafter you can reflect that you are living not on borrowed money, but on money which you have squarely earned, and which has no taint or savor of charity about it, and you can also reflect that the money which you have been receiving of me is charged against the heavy bill which the next publisher will have to stand who gets a book of mine. from that time forward orion clemens was worth substantially twenty thousand dollars--till the day of his death, and, after him, his widow. far better was it for him that the endowment be conferred in the form of an income, than had the capital amount been placed in his hands. cxxviii mark twain's absent-mindedness. a number of amusing incidents have been more or less accurately reported concerning mark twain's dim perception of certain physical surroundings, and his vague resulting memories--his absent-mindedness, as we say. it was not that he was inattentive--no man was ever less so if the subject interested him--but only that the casual, incidental thing seemed not to find a fixed place in his deeper consciousness. by no means was mark twain's absent-mindedness a development of old age. on the two occasions following he was in the very heyday of his mental strength. especially was it, when he was engaged upon some absorbing or difficult piece of literature, that his mind seemed to fold up and shut most of the world away. soon after his return from europe, when he was still struggling with 'a tramp abroad', he wearily put the manuscript aside, one day, and set out to invite f. g. whitmore over for a game of billiards. whitmore lived only a little way down the street, and clemens had been there time and again. it was such a brief distance that he started out in his slippers and with no hat. but when he reached the corner where the house, a stone's-throw away, was in plain view he stopped. he did not recognize it. it was unchanged, but its outlines had left no impress upon his mind. he stood there uncertainly a little while, then returned and got the coachman, patrick mcaleer, to show him the way. the second, and still more picturesque instance, belongs also to this period. one day, when he was playing billiards with whitmore, george, the butler, came up with a card. "who is he, george?" clemens asked, without looking at the card. "i don't know, suh, but he's a gentleman, mr. clemens." "now, george, how many times have i told you i don't want to see strangers when i'm playing billiards! this is just some book agent, or insurance man, or somebody with something to sell. i don't want to see him, and i'm not going to." "oh, but this is a gentleman, i'm sure, mr. clemens. just look at his card, suh." "yes, of course, i see--nice engraved card--but i don't know him, and if it was st. peter himself i wouldn't buy the key of salvation! you tell him so--tell him--oh, well, i suppose i've got to go and get rid of him myself. i'll be back in a minute, whitmore." he ran down the stairs, and as he got near the parlor door, which stood open, he saw a man sitting on a couch with what seemed to be some framed water-color pictures on the floor near his feet. "ah, ha!" he thought, "i see. a picture agent. i'll soon get rid of him." he went in with his best, "well, what can i do for you?" air, which he, as well as any man living, knew how to assume; a friendly air enough, but not encouraging. the gentleman rose and extended his hand. "how are you, mr. clemens?" he said. of course this was the usual thing with men who had axes to grind or goods to sell. clemens did not extend a very cordial hand. he merely raised a loose, indifferent hand--a discouraging hand. "and how is mrs. clemens?" asked the uninvited guest. so this was his game. he would show an interest in the family and ingratiate himself in that way; he would be asking after the children next. "well--mrs. clemens is about as usual--i believe." "and the children--miss susie and little clara?" this was a bit startling. he knew their names! still, that was easy to find out. he was a smart agent, wonderfully smart. he must be got rid of. "the children are well, quite well," and (pointing down at the pictures) --"we've got plenty like these. we don't want any more. no, we don't care for any more," skilfully working his visitor toward the door as he talked. the man, looking non-plussed--a good deal puzzled--allowed himself to be talked into the hall and toward the front door. here he paused a moment: "mr. clemens, will you tell me where mr. charles dudley warner lives?" this was the chance! he would work him off on charlie warner. perhaps warner needed pictures. "oh, certainly, certainly! right across the yard. i'll show you. there's a walk right through. you don't need to go around the front way at all. you'll find him at home, too, i'm pretty sure"; all the time working his caller out and down the step and in the right direction. the visitor again extended his hand. "please remember me to mrs. clemens and the children." "oh, certainly, certainly, with pleasure. good day. yes, that's the house good-by." on the way back to the billiard-room mrs. clemens called to him. she was ill that day. "youth!" "yes, livy." he went in for a word. "george brought me mr. b----'s card. i hope you were very nice to him; the b----s were so nice to us, once last year, when you were gone.", "the b----s--why, livy----" "yes, of course, and i asked him to be sure to call when he came to hartford." he gazed at her helplessly. "well, he's been here." "oh, youth, have you done anything?" "yes, of course i have. he seemed to have some pictures to sell, so i sent him over to warner's. i noticed he didn't take them with him. land sakes, livy, what can i do?" "which way did he go, youth?" "why, i sent him to charlie warner's. i thought----" "go right after him. go quick! tell him what you have done." he went without further delay, bareheaded and in his slippers, as usual. warner and b----were in cheerful and friendly converse. they had met before. clemens entered gaily: "oh yes, i see! you found him all right. charlie, we met mr. b----and his wife in europe last summer and they made things pleasant for us. i wanted to come over here with him, but was a good deal occupied just then. livy isn't very well, but she seems a good deal better, so i just followed along to have a good talk, all together." he stayed an hour, and whatever bad impression had formed in b----'s mind faded long before the hour ended. returning home clemens noticed the pictures still on the parlor floor. "george," he said, "what pictures are those that gentleman left?" "why, mr. clemens, those are our own pictures. i've been straightening up the room a little, and mrs. clemens had me set them around to see how they would look in new places. the gentleman was looking at them while he was waiting for you to come down." cxxix further affairs at the farm it was at elmira, in july ( ), that the third little girl came--jane lampton, for her grandmother, but always called jean. she was a large, lovely baby, robust and happy. when she had been with them a little more than a month clemens, writing to twichell, said: dear old joe,--concerning jean clemens, if anybody said he "didn't see no pints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog," i should think he was convicting himself of being a pretty poor sort of observer. she is the comeliest and daintiest and perfectest little creature the continents and archipelagos have seen since the bay and susy were her size. i will not go into details; it is not necessary; you will soon be in hartford, where i have already hired a hall; the admission fee will be but a trifle. it is curious to note the change in the stock-quotations of the affection board brought about by throwing this new security on the market. four weeks ago the children still put mama at the head of the list right along, where she had always been. but now: jean mama motley |cats fraulein | papa that is the way it stands now. mama is become no. ; i have dropped from no. , and am become no. . some time ago it used to be nip and tuck between me and the cats, but after the cats "developed" i didn't stand any more show. been reading daniel webster's private correspondence. have read a hundred of his diffuse, conceited, "eloquent," bathotic (or bathostic) letters, written in that dim (no, vanished) past, when he was a student. and lord! to think that this boy, who is so real to me now, and so booming with fresh young blood and bountiful life, and sappy cynicisms about girls, has since climbed the alps of fame and stood against the sun one brief, tremendous moment with the world's eyes on him, and then----fzt! where is he? why, the only long thing, the only real thing about the whole shadowy business, is the sense of the lagging dull and hoary lapse of time that has drifted by since then; a vast, empty level, it seems, with a formless specter glimpsed fitfully through the smoke and mist that lie along its remote verge. well, we are all getting along here first-rate. livy gains strength daily and sits up a deal; the baby is five weeks old and----but no more of this. somebody may be reading this letter eighty years hence. and so, my friend (you pitying snob, i mean, who are holding this yellow paper in your hand in ), save yourself the trouble of looking further. i know how pathetically trivial our small concerns would seem to you, and i will not let your eye profane them. no, i keep my news; you keep your compassion. suffice it you to know, scoffer and ribald, that the little child is old and blind now, and once more tooth less; and the rest of us are shadows these many, many years. yes, and your time cometh! mark. it is the ageless story. he too had written his youthful letters, and later had climbed the alps of fame and was still outlined against the sun. happily, the little child was to evade that harsher penalty--the unwarranted bitterness and affront of a lingering, palsied age. mrs. clemens, in a letter somewhat later, set down a thought similar to his: "we are all going so fast. pretty soon we shall have been dead a hundred years." clemens varied his work that summer, writing alternately on 'the prince and the pauper' and on the story about 'huck finn', which he had begun four years earlier. he read the latter over and found in it a new interest. it did not fascinate him, as did the story of the wandering prince. he persevered only as the spirit moved him, piling up pages on both the tales. he always took a boy's pride in the number of pages he could complete at a sitting, and if the day had gone well he would count them triumphantly, and, lighting a fresh cigar, would come tripping down the long stair that led to the level of the farm-house, and, gathering his audience, would read to them the result of his industry; that is to say, he proceeded with the story of the prince. apparently he had not yet acquired confidence or pride enough in poor huck to exhibit him, even to friends. the reference (in the letter to twichell) to the cats at the farm introduces one of the most important features of that idyllic resort. there were always cats at the farm. mark twain himself dearly loved cats, and the children inherited this passion. susy once said: "the difference between papa and mama is, that mama loves morals and papa loves cats." the cats did not always remain the same, but some of the same ones remained a good while, and were there from season to season, always welcomed and adored. they were commendable cats, with such names as fraulein, blatherskite, sour mash, stray kit, sin, and satan, and when, as happened now and then, a vacancy occurred in the cat census there followed deep sorrow and elaborate ceremonies. naturally, there would be stories about cats: impromptu bedtime stories, which began anywhere and ended nowhere, and continued indefinitely through a land inhabited only by cats and dreams. one of these stories, as remembered and set down later, began: once upon a time there was a noble, big cat whose christian name was catasaqua, because she lived in that region; but she didn't have any surname, because she was a short-tailed cat, being a manx, and didn't need one. it is very just and becoming in a long-tailed cat to have a surname, but it would be very ostentatious, and even dishonorable, in a manx. well, catasaqua had a beautiful family of cattings; and they were of different colors, to harmonize with their characters. cattaraugus, the eldest, was white, and he had high impulses and a pure heart; catiline, the youngest, was black, and he had a self-seeking nature, his motives were nearly always base, he was truculent and insincere. he was vain and foolish, and often said that he would rather be what he was, and live like a bandit, yet have none above him, than be a cat-o'-nine-tails and eat with the king. and so on without end, for the audience was asleep presently and the end could wait. there was less enthusiasm over dogs at quarry farm. mark twain himself had no great love for the canine breed. to a woman who wrote, asking for his opinion on dogs, he said, in part: by what right has the dog come to be regarded as a "noble" animal? the more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward you can never get her full confidence again. he was not harsh to dogs; occasionally he made friends with them. there was once at the farm a gentle hound, named bones, that for some reason even won his way into his affections. bones was always a welcome companion, and when the end of summer came, and clemens, as was his habit, started down the drive ahead of the carriage, bones, half-way to the entrance, was waiting for him. clemens stooped down, put his arms around him, and bade him an affectionate good-by. he always recalled bones tenderly, and mentioned him in letters to the farm. cxxx copyright and other fancies the continued assault of canadian pirates on his books kept mark twain's interest sharply alive on the subject of copyright reform. he invented one scheme after another, but the public-mind was hazy on the subject, and legislators were concerned with purposes that interested a larger number of voters. there were too few authors to be of much value at the polls, and even of those few only a small percentage were vitally concerned. for the others, foreign publishers rarely paid them the compliment of piracy, while at home the copyright limit of forty-two years was about forty-two times as long as they needed protection. bliss suggested a law making the selling of pirated books a penal offense, a plan with a promising look, but which came to nothing. clemens wrote to his old friend rollin m. daggett, who by this time was a congressman. daggett replied that he would be glad to introduce any bill that the authors might agree upon, and clemens made at least one trip to washington to discuss the matter, but it came to nothing in the end. it was a presidential year, and it would do just as well to keep the authors quiet by promising to do something next year. any legislative stir is never a good thing for a campaign. clemens's idea for copyright betterment was not a fixed one. somewhat later, when an international treaty which would include protection for authors was being discussed, his views had undergone a change. he wrote, asking howells: will the proposed treaty protect us (and effectually) against canadian piracy? because, if it doesn't, there is not a single argument in favor of international copyright which a rational american senate could entertain for a moment. my notions have mightily changed lately. i can buy macaulay's history, three vols.; bound, for $ . ; chambers's cyclopaedia, ten vols., cloth, for $ . (we paid $ ), and other english copyrights in proportion; i can buy a lot of the great copyright classics, in paper, at from three cents to thirty cents apiece. these things must find their way into the very kitchens and hovels of the country. a generation of this sort of thing ought to make this the most intelligent and the best-read nation in the world. international copyright must becloud this sun and bring on the former darkness and dime novel reading. morally this is all wrong; governmentally it is all right. for it is the duty of governments and families to be selfish, and look out simply for their own. international copyright would benefit a few english authors and a lot of american publishers, and be a profound detriment to twenty million americans; it would benefit a dozen american authors a few dollars a year, and there an end. the real advantages all go to english authors and american publishers. and even if the treaty will kill canadian piracy, and thus save me an average of $ , a year, i'm down on it anyway, and i'd like cussed well to write an article opposing the treaty. it is a characteristic expression. mark twain might be first to grab for the life-preserver, but he would also be first to hand it to a humanity in greater need. he could damn the human race competently, but in the final reckoning it was the interest of that race that lay closest to his heart. mention has been made in an earlier chapter of clemens's enthusiasms or "rages" for this thing and that which should benefit humankind. he was seldom entirely without them. whether it was copyright legislation, the latest invention, or a new empiric practice, he rarely failed to have a burning interest in some anodyne that would provide physical or mental easement for his species. howells tells how once he was going to save the human race with accordion letter-files--the system of order which would grow out of this useful device being of such nerve and labor saving proportions as to insure long life and happiness to all. the fountain-pen, in its first imperfect form, must have come along about the same time, and clemens was one of the very earliest authors to own one. for a while it seemed that the world had known no greater boon since the invention of printing; but when it clogged and balked, or suddenly deluged his paper and spilled in his pocket, he flung it to the outer darkness. after which, the stylo-graphic pen. he tried one, and wrote severally to dr. brown, to howells, and to twichell, urging its adoption. even in a letter to mrs. howells he could not forget his new possession: and speaking of howells, he ought to use the stylographic pen, the best fountain-pen yet invented; he ought to, but of course he won't --a blamed old sodden-headed conservative--but you see yourself what a nice, clean, uniform ms. it makes. and at the same time to twichell: i am writing with a stylographic pen. it takes a royal amount of cussing to make the thing go the first few days or a week, but by that time the dullest ass gets the hang of the thing, and after that no enrichments of expression are required, and said ass finds the stylographic a genuine god's blessing. i carry one in each breeches pocket, and both loaded. i'd give you one of them if i had you where i could teach you how to use it--not otherwise. for the average ass flings the thing out of the window in disgust the second day, believing it hath no virtue, no merit of any sort; whereas the lack lieth in himself, god of his mercy damn him. it was not easy to withstand mark twain's enthusiasm. howells, twichell, and dr. brown were all presently struggling and swearing (figuratively) over their stylographic pens, trying to believe that salvation lay in their conquest. but in the midst of one letter, at last, howells broke down, seized his old steel weapon, and wrote savagely: "no white man ought to use a stylographic pen, anyhow!" then, with the more ancient implement, continued in a calmer spirit. it was only a little later that clemens himself wrote: you see i am trying a new pen. i stood the stylograph as long as i could, and then retired to the pencil. the thing i am trying now is that fountain-pen which is advertised to employ and accommodate itself to any kind of pen. so i selected an ordinary gold pen--a limber one--and sent it to new york and had it cut and fitted to this thing. it goes very well indeed--thus far; but doubtless the devil will be in it by tomorrow. mark twain's schemes were not all in the line of human advancement; some of them were projected, primarily at least, for diversion. he was likely at any moment to organize a club, a sort of private club, and at the time of which we are writing he proposed what was called the "modest" club. he wrote to howells, about it: at present i am the only member, and as the modesty required must be of a quite aggravated type the enterprise did seem for a time doomed to stop dead still with myself, for lack of further material; but on reflection i have come to the conclusion that you are eligible. therefore, i have held a meeting and voted to offer you the distinction of membership. i do not know that we can find any others, though i have had some thought of hay, warner, twichell, aldrich, osgood, fields, higginson, and a few more, together with mrs. howells, mrs. clemens, and certain others of the sex. i have long felt there ought to be an organized gang of our kind. he appends the by-laws, the main ones being: the object of the club shall be to eat and talk. qualification for membership shall be aggravated modesty, unobtrusiveness, native humility, learning, talent, intelligence, unassailable character. there shall be no officers except a president, and any member who has anything to eat and talk about may constitute himself president for the time being. any brother or sister of the order finding a brother or a sister in imminently deadly peril shall forsake his own concerns, no matter at what cost, and call the police. any member knowing anything scandalous about himself shall immediately inform the club, so that they shall call a meeting and have the first chance to talk about it. it was one of his whimsical fancies, and howells replied that he would like to join it, only that he was too modest--that is, too modest to confess that he was modest enough for membership. he added that he had sent a letter, with the rules, to hay, but doubted his modesty. he said: "he will think he has a right to belong as much as you or i." howells agreed that his own name might be put down, but the idea seems never to have gone any further. perhaps the requirements of membership were too severe. cxxxi working for garfield eighteen hundred and eighty was a presidential year. general garfield was nominated on the republican ticket (against general hancock), and clemens found him satisfactory. garfield suits me thoroughly and exactly [he wrote howells]. i prefer him to grant's friends. the presidency can't add anything to grant; he will shine on without it. it is ephemeral; he is eternal. that was the year when the republican party became panicky over the disaffection in its ranks, due to the defeat of grant in the convention, and at last, by pleadings and promises, conciliated platt and conkling and brought them into the field. general grant also was induced to save the party from defeat, and made a personal tour of oratory for that purpose. he arrived in hartford with his family on the th of october, and while his reception was more or less partizan, it was a momentous event. a vast procession passed in review before him, and everywhere houses and grounds were decorated. to mrs. clemens, still in elmira, clemens wrote: i found mr. beals hard at work in the rain with his decorations. with a ladder he had strung flags around our bedroom balcony, and thence around to the porte-cochere, which was elaborately flagged; thence the flags of all nations were suspended from a line which stretched past the greenhouse to the limit of our grounds. against each of the two trees on the mound, half-way down to our gate, stands a knight in complete armor. piles of still-bundled flags clutter up the ombra (to be put up), also gaudy shields of various shapes (arms of this and other countries), also some huge glittering arches and things done in gold and silver paper, containing mottoes in big letters. i broke mr. beals's heart by persistently and inflexibly annulling and forbidding the biggest and gorgeousest of the arches--it had on it, in all the fires of the rainbow, "the home of mark twain," in letters as big as your head. oh, we're going to be decorated sufficient, don't you worry about that, madam. clemens was one of those delegated to receive grant and to make a speech of welcome. it was a short speech but an effective one, for it made grant laugh. he began: "i am among those deputed to welcome you to the sincere and cordial hospitalities of hartford, the city of the historic and revered charter oak, of which most of the town is built." he seemed to be at loss what to say next, and, leaning over, pretended to whisper to grant; then, as if he had obtained the information he wanted, he suddenly straightened up and poured out the old-fashioned eulogy on grant's achievements, adding, in an aside, as he finished: "i nearly forgot that part of my speech," which evoked roars of laughter from the assembly and a grim smile from grant. he spoke of grant as being out of public employment, with private opportunities closed against him, and added, "but your country will reward you, never fear." then he closed: when wellington won waterloo, a battle about on a level with any one of a dozen of your victories, sordid england tried to pay him for that service with wealth and grandeurs. she made him a duke and gave him $ , , . if you had done and suffered for any other country what you have done and suffered for your own you would have been affronted in the same sordid way. but, thank god! this vast and rich and mighty republic is imbued to the core with a delicacy which will forever preserve her from so degrading you. your country loves you--your country's proud of you--your country is grateful to you. her applauses, which have been many, thundering in your ears all these weeks and months, will never cease while the flag you saved continues to wave. your country stands ready from this day forth to testify her measureless love and pride and gratitude toward you in every conceivable--inexpensive way. welcome to hartford, great soldier, honored statesman, unselfish citizen. grant's grim smile showed itself more than once during the speech, and when clemens reached the sentence that spoke of his country rewarding him in "every conceivable--inexpensive way" his composure broke up completely and he "nearly laughed his entire head off," according to later testimony, while the spectators shouted their approval. grant's son, col. fred grant,--[maj.-gen'l, u. s. army, . died april, .]--dined at the clemens home that night, and rev. joseph twichell and henry c. robinson. twichell's invitation was in the form of a telegram. it said: i want you to dine with us saturday half past five and meet col. fred grant. no ceremony. wear the same shirt you always wear. the campaign was at its height now, and on the evening of october th there was a grand republican rally at the opera-house with addresses by charles dudley warner, henry c. robinson, and mark twain. it was an unpleasant, drizzly evening, but the weather had no effect on their audience. the place was jammed and packed, the aisles, the windows, and the gallery railings full. hundreds who came as late as the hour announced for the opening were obliged to turn back, for the building had been thronged long before. mark twain's speech that night is still remembered in hartford as the greatest effort of his life. it was hardly that, except to those who were caught in the psychology of the moment, the tumult and the shouting of patriotism, the surge and sweep of the political tide. the roaring delight of the audience showed that to them at least it was convincing. howells wrote that he had read it twice, and that he could not put it out of his mind. whatever its general effect was need not now be considered. garfield was elected, and perhaps grant's visit to hartford and the great mass-meeting that followed contributed their mite to that result. clemens saw general grant again that year, but not on political business. the educational mission, which china had established in hartford--a thriving institution for eight years or more--was threatened now by certain chinese authorities with abolishment. yung wing (a yale graduate), the official by whom it had been projected and under whose management it had prospered, was deeply concerned, as was the rev. joseph twichell, whose interest in the mission was a large and personal one. yung wing declared that if influence could be brought upon li hung chang, then the most influential of chinese counselors, the mission might be saved. twichell, remembering the great honors which li hung chang had paid to general grant in china, also grant's admiration of mark twain, went to the latter without delay. necessarily clemens would be enthusiastic, and act promptly. he wrote to grant, and grant replied by telegraph, naming a day when he would see them in new york. they met at the fifth avenue hotel. grant was in fine spirits, and by no means the "silent man" of his repute. he launched at once into as free and flowing talk as i have ever heard [says twichell], marked by broad and intelligent views on the subject of china, her wants, disadvantages, etc. now and then he asked a question, but kept the lead of the conversation. at last he proposed, of his own accord, to write a letter to li hung chang, advising the continuance of the mission, asking only that i would prepare him some notes, giving him points to go by. thus we succeeded easily beyond our expectations, thanks, very largely, to clemens's assistance. clemens wrote howells of the interview, detailing at some length twichell's comical mixture of delight and chagrin at not being given time to air the fund of prepared statistics with which he had come loaded. it was as if he had come to borrow a dollar and had been offered a thousand before he could unfold his case. cxxxii a new publisher it was near the end of the year that clemens wrote to his mother: i have two stories, and by the verbal agreement they are both going into the same book; but livy says they're not, and by george! she ought to know. she says they're going into separate books, and that one of them is going to be elegantly gotten up, even if the elegance of it eats up the publisher's profits and mine too. i anticipate that publisher's melancholy surprise when he calls here tuesday. however, let him suffer; it is his own fault. people who fix up agreements with me without first finding out what livy's plans are take their fate into their own hands. i said two stories, but one of them is only half done; two or three months' work on it yet. i shall tackle it wednesday or thursday; that is, if livy yields and allows both stories to go in one book, which i hope she won't. the reader may surmise that the finished story--the highly regarded story--was 'the prince and the pauper'. the other tale--the unfinished and less considered one was 'the adventures of huckleberry finn'. nobody appears to have been especially concerned about huck, except, possibly, the publisher. the publisher was not the american company. elisha bliss, after long ill health, had died that fall, and this fact, in connection with a growing dissatisfaction over the earlier contracts, had induced clemens to listen to offers from other makers of books. the revelation made by the "half-profit" returns from a tramp abroad meant to him, simply that the profits had not been fairly apportioned, and he was accordingly hostile. to orion he wrote that, had bliss lived, he would have remained with the company and made it reimburse him for his losses, but that as matters stood he would sever the long connection. it seemed a pity, later, that he did this, but the break was bound to come. clemens was not a business man, and bliss was not a philanthropist. he was, in fact, a shrewd, capable publisher, who made as good a contract as he could; yet he was square in his dealings, and the contract which clemens held most bitterly against him--that of 'roughing it'--had been made in good faith and in accordance with the conditions, of that period. in most of the later contracts clemens himself had named his royalties, and it was not in human nature--business human nature--for bliss to encourage the size of these percentages. if one wished to draw a strictly moral conclusion from the situation, one might say that it would have been better for the american publishing company, knowing mark twain, voluntarily to have allowed him half profits, which was the spirit of his old understanding even if not the letter of it, rather than to have waited till he demanded it and then to lose him by the result. perhaps that would be also a proper business deduction; only, as a rule, business morals are regulated by the contract, and the contract is regulated by the necessities and the urgency of demand. never mind. mark twain revised 'the prince and the pauper', sent it to howells, who approved of it mightily (though with reservations as to certain chapters), and gave it to james r. osgood, who was grateful and agreed to make it into a book upon which no expense for illustration or manufacture should be spared. it was to be a sort of partnership arrangement as between author and publisher, and large returns were anticipated. among the many letters which clemens was just then writing to howells one was dated "xmas eve." it closes with the customary pleasantries and the final line: "but it is growing dark. merry christmas to all of you!" that last was a line of large significance. it meant that the air was filled with the whisper of hovering events and that he must mingle with the mystery of preparation. christmas was an important season in the clemens home. almost the entire day before, patrick was out with the sleigh, delivering food and other gifts in baskets to the poor, and the home preparations were no less busy. there was always a tree--a large one--and when all the gifts had been gathered in--when elmira and fredonia had delivered their contributions, and orion and his wife in keokuk had sent the annual sack of hickory-nuts (the big river-bottom nuts, big as a silver dollar almost, such nuts as few children of this later generation ever see) when all this happy revenue had been gathered, and the dusk of christmas eve had hurried the children off to bed, it was mrs. clemens who superintended the dressing of the tree, her husband assisting, with a willingness that was greater than his skill, and with a boy's anticipation in the surprise of it next morning. then followed the holidays, with parties and dances and charades, and little plays, with the warner and twichell children. to the clemens home the christmas season brought all the old round of juvenile happiness--the spirit of kindly giving, the brightness and the merrymaking, the gladness and tenderness and mystery that belong to no other season, and have been handed down through all the ages since shepherds watched on the plains of bethlehem. cxxxiii the three fires--some benefactions the tradition that fires occur in groups of three was justified in the clemens household that winter. on each of three successive days flames started that might have led to ghastly results. the children were croupy, and one morning an alcohol lamp near little clara's bed, blown by the draught, set fire to the canopy. rosa, the nurse, entered just as the blaze was well started. she did not lose her presence of mind,--[rosa was not the kind to lose her head. once, in europe, when bay had crept between the uprights of a high balustrade, and was hanging out over destruction, rosa, discovering her, did not scream but spoke to her playfully and lifted her over into safety.]--but snatched the little girl out of danger, then opened the window and threw the burning bedding on the lawn. the child was only slightly scorched, but the escape was narrow enough. next day little jean was lying asleep in her crib, in front of an open wood fire, carefully protected by a firescreen, when a spark, by some ingenuity, managed to get through the mesh of the screen and land on the crib's lace covering. jean's nurse, julia, arrived to find the lace a gust of flame and the fire spreading. she grabbed the sleeping jean and screamed. rosa, again at hand, heard the scream, and rushing in once more opened a window and flung out the blazing bedclothes. clemens himself also arrived, and together they stamped out the fire. on the third morning, just before breakfast-time, susy was practising at the piano in the school-room, which adjoined the nursery. at one end of the room a fire of large logs was burning. susy was at the other end of the room, her back to the fire. a log burned in two and fell, scattering coals around the woodwork which supported the mantel. just as the blaze was getting fairly started a barber, waiting to trim mr. clemens's hair, chanced to look in and saw what was going on. he stepped into the nursery bath-room, brought a pitcher of water and extinguished the flames. this period was always referred to in the clemens household as the "three days of fire." clemens would naturally make philosophical deductions from these coincidental dangers and the manner in which they had been averted. he said that all these things were comprehended in the first act of the first atom; that, but for some particular impulse given in that remote time, the alcohol flame would not have blown against the canopy, the spark would not have found its way through the screen, the log would not have broken apart in that dangerous way, and that rosa and julia and the barber would not have been at hand to save precious life and property. he did not go further and draw moral conclusions as to the purpose of these things: he never drew conclusions as to purpose. he was willing to rest with the event. logically he did not believe in reasons for things, but only that things were. nevertheless, he was always trying to change them; to have a hand in their improvement. had you asked him, he would have said that this, too, was all in the primal atom; that his nature, such as it was, had been minutely embodied there. in that charming volume, 'my mark twain', howells tells us of clemens's consideration, and even tenderness, for the negro race and his effort to repair the wrong done by his nation. mark twain's writings are full of similar evidence, and in his daily life he never missed an opportunity to pay tribute to the humbler race. he would go across the street to speak to an old negro, and to take his hand. he would read for a negro church when he would have refused a cathedral. howells mentions the colored student whose way through college clemens paid as a partial reparation "due from every white man to every black man."--[mark twain paid two colored students through college. one of them, educated in a southern institution, became a minister of the gospel. the other graduated from the yale law school.]--this incident belongs just to the period of which we are now writing, and there is another which, though different enough, indicates the same tendency. garfield was about to be inaugurated, and it was rumored that frederick douglass might lose his position as marshal of the district of columbia. clemens was continually besought by one and another to use his influence with the administration, and in every case had refused. douglass had made no such, application. clemens, learning that the old negro's place was in danger, interceded for him of his own accord. he closed his letter to general garfield: a simple citizen may express a desire, with all propriety, in the matter of recommendation to office, and so i beg permission to hope that you will retain mr. douglass in his present office of marshal of the district of columbia, if such a course will not clash with your own preferences or with the expediencies and interests of your administration. i offer this petition with peculiar pleasure and strong desire, because i so honor this man's high and blemishless character, and so admire his brave, long crusade for the liberties and elevation of his race. he is a personal friend of mine, but that is nothing to the point; his history would move me to say these things without that, and i feel them, too. douglass wrote to clemens, thanking him for his interest; at the end he said: i think if a man is mean enough to want an office he ought to be noble enough to ask for it, and use all honorable means of getting it. i mean to ask, and i will use your letter as a part of my petition. it will put the president-elect in a good humor, in any case, and that is very important. with great respect, gratefully yours, frederick douglass. mark twain's benefactions were not all for the colored race. one morning in february of this same year, while the family were at late breakfast, george came in to announce "a lady waiting to see mr. clemens in the drawing-room." clemens growled. "george," he said, "it's a book agent. i won't see her. i'll die, in my tracks first." he went, fuming and raging inwardly, and began at once to ask the nature of the intruder's business. then he saw that she was very young and modest, with none of the assurance of a canvasser, so he gave her a chance to speak. she told him that a young man employed in pratt & whitney's machine-shops had made a statue in clay, and would like to have mark twain come and look at it and see if it showed any promise of future achievement. his name, she said, was karl gerhardt, and he was her husband. clemens protested that he knew nothing about art, but the young woman's manner and appearance (she seemed scarcely more than a child) won him. he wavered, and finally promised that he would come the first chance he had; that in fact he would come some time during the next week. on her suggestion he agreed to come early in the week; he specified monday, "without fail." when she was gone, and the door shut behind her, his usual remorse came upon him. he said to himself: "why didn't i go now? why didn't i go with her now?" she went from clemens's over to warner's. warner also resisted, but, tempted beyond his strength by her charm, laid down his work and went at once. when he returned he urged clemens to go without fail, and, true to promise, clemens took patrick, the coachman, and hunted up the place. clemens saw the statue, a seminude, for which the young wife had posed, and was struck by its evident merit. mrs. gerhardt told him the story of her husband's struggles between his daily work and the effort to develop his talent. he had never had a lesson, she said; if he could only have lessons what might he not accomplish? mrs. clemens and miss spaulding called next day, and were equally carried away with karl gerhardt, his young wife, and his effort to win his way in art. clemens and warner made up their minds to interest themselves personally in the matter, and finally persuaded the painter j. wells champney to come over from new york and go with them to the gerhardts' humble habitation, to see his work. champney approved of it. he thought it well worth while, he said, for the people of hartford to go to the expense of gerhardt's art education. he added that it would be better to get the judgment of a sculptor. so they brought over john quincy adams ward, who, like all the others, came away bewitched with these young people and their struggles for the sake of art. ward said: "if any stranger had told me that this 'prentice did not model that thing from plaster-casts i should not have believed it. it's full of crudities, but it's full of genius, too. hartford must send him to paris for two years; then, if the promise holds good, keep him there three more." when he was gone mrs. clemens said: "youth, we won't wait for hartford to do it. it would take too long. let us send the gerhardts to paris ourselves, and say nothing about it to any one else." so the gerhardts, provided with funds and an arrangement that would enable them to live for five years in paris if necessary, were started across the sea without further delay. clemens and his wife were often doing something of this sort. there was seldom a time that they were not paying the way of some young man or woman through college, or providing means and opportunity for development in some special field of industry. cxxxiv literary projects and a monument to adam mark twain's literary work languished during this period. he had a world of plans, as usual, and wrote plentifully, but without direction or conclusion. "a curious experience," which relates a circumstance told to him by an army officer, is about the most notable of the few completed manuscripts of this period. of the books projected (there were several), a burlesque manual of etiquette would seem to have been the most promising. howells had faith in it, and of the still remaining fragments a few seem worth quoting: at billiards if your ball glides along in the intense and immediate vicinity of the object-ball, and a count seems exquisitely imminent, lift one leg; then one shoulder; then squirm your body around in sympathy with the direction of the moving ball; and at the instant when the ball seems on the point of colliding throw up both of your arms violently. your cue will probably break a chandelier, but no matter; you have done what you could to help the count. at the dog-fight if it occur in your block, courteously give way to strangers desiring a view, particularly ladies. avoid showing partiality toward the one dog, lest you hurt the feelings of the other one. let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight--this is magnanimity; but bet on the other one--this is business. at poker if you draw to a flush and fail to fill, do not continue the conflict. if you hold a pair of trays, and your opponent is blind, and it costs you fifty to see him, let him remain unperceived. if you hold nothing but ace high, and by some means you know that the other man holds the rest of the aces, and he calls, excuse yourself; let him call again another time. wall street if you live in the country, buy at , sell at . avoid all forms of eccentricity. in the restaurant when you wish to get the waiter's attention, do not sing out "say!" simply say "szt!" his old abandoned notion of "hamlet" with an added burlesque character came back to him and stirred his enthusiasm anew, until even howells manifested deep interest in the matter. one reflects how young howells must have been in those days; how full of the joy of existence; also how mournfully he would consider such a sacrilege now. clemens proposed almost as many things to howells as his brother orion proposed to him. there was scarcely a letter that didn't contain some new idea, with a request for advice or co-operation. now it was some book that he meant to write some day, and again it would be a something that he wanted howells to write. once he urged howells to make a play, or at least a novel, out of orion. at another time he suggested as material the "rightful earl of durham." he is a perfectly stunning literary bonanza, and must be dug up and put on the market. you must get his entire biography out of him and have it ready for osgood's magazine. even if it isn't worth printing, you must have it anyway, and use it one of these days in one of your stories or in a play. it was this notion about 'the american claimant' which somewhat later would lead to a collaboration with howells on a drama, and eventually to a story of that title. but clemens's chief interest at this time lay in publishing, rather than in writing. his association with osgood inspired him to devise new ventures of profit. he planned a 'library of american humor', which howells (soon to leave the atlantic) and "charley" clark--[charles hopkins clark, managing editor of the hartford courant.]--were to edit, and which osgood would publish, for subscription sale. without realizing it, clemens was taking his first step toward becoming his own publisher. his contract with osgood for 'the prince and the pauper' made him essentially that, for by the terms of it he agreed to supply all the money for the making of the book, and to pay osgood a royalty of seven and one-half per cent. for selling it, reversing the usual conditions. the contract for the library of humor was to be a similar one, though in this case osgood was to have a larger royalty return, and to share proportionately in the expense and risk. mark twain was entering into a field where he did not belong; where in the end he would harvest only disaster and regret. one curious project came to an end in --the plan for a monument to adam. in a sketch written a great many years later mark twain tells of the memorial which the rev. thomas k. beecher and himself once proposed to erect to our great common ancestor. the story is based on a real incident. clemens, in elmira one day (it was october, ), heard of a jesting proposal made by f. g. hall to erect a monument in elmira to adam. the idea promptly caught mark twain's fancy. he observed to beecher that the human race really showed a pretty poor regard for its great progenitor, who was about to be deposed by darwin's simian, not to pay him the tribute of a single monument. mankind, he said, would probably accept the monkey ancestor, and in time the very name of adam would be forgotten. he declared mr. hall's suggestion to be a sound idea. beecher agreed that there were many reasons why a monument should be erected to adam, and suggested that a subscription be started for the purpose. certain business men, seeing an opportunity for advertising the city, took the matter semi-seriously, and offered to contribute large sums in the interest of the enterprise. then it was agreed that congress should be petitioned to sanction the idea exclusively to elmira, prohibiting the erection of any such memorial elsewhere. a document to this effect was prepared, headed by f. g. hall, and signed by other leading citizens of elmira, including beecher himself. general joe hawley came along just then on a political speech-making tour. clemens introduced him, and hawley, in turn, agreed to father the petition in congress. what had begun merely as pleasantry began to have a formidable look. but alas! in the end hawley's courage had failed him. he began to hate his undertaking. he was afraid of the national laugh it would arouse, the jeers of the newspapers. it was certain to leak out that mark twain was behind it, in spite of the fact that his name nowhere appeared; that it was one of his colossal jokes. now and then, in the privacy of his own room at night, hawley would hunt up the adam petition and read it and feel the cold sweat breaking out. he postponed the matter from one session to another till the summer of , when he was about to sail for europe. then he gave the document to his wife, to turn over to clemens, and ignominiously fled. [for text of the petition in full, etc., see appendix p, at the end of last volume.] mark twain's introduction of hawley at elmira contained this pleasantry: "general hawley was president of the centennial commission. was a gallant soldier in the war. he has been governor of connecticut, member of congress, and was president of the convention that nominated abraham lincoln." general hawley: "that nominated grant." twain: "he says it was grant, but i know better. he is a member of my church at hartford, and the author of 'beautiful snow.' maybe he will deny that. but i am only here to give him a character from his last place. as a pure citizen, i respect him; as a personal friend of years, i have the warmest regard for him; as a neighbor whose vegetable garden joins mine, why--why, i watch him. that's nothing; we all do that with any neighbor. general hawley keeps his promises, not only in private, but in public. he is an editor who believes what he writes in his own paper. as the author of 'beautiful snow' he added a new pang to winter. he is broad-souled, generous, noble, liberal, alive to his moral and religious responsibilities. whenever the contribution-box was passed i never knew him to take out a cent." cxxxv a trip with sherman and an interview with grant. the army of the potomac gave a dinner in hartford on the th of june, . but little memory remains of it now beyond mark twain's speech and a bill of fare containing original comments, ascribed to various revered authors, such as johnson, milton, and carlyle. a pleasant incident followed, however, which clemens himself used to relate. general sherman attended the banquet, and secretary of war, robert lincoln. next morning clemens and twichell were leaving for west point, where they were to address the military students, guests on the same special train on which lincoln and sherman had their private car. this car was at the end of the train, and when the two passengers reached the station, sherman and lincoln were out on the rear platform addressing the multitude. clemens and twichell went in and, taking seats, waited for them. as the speakers finished the train started, but they still remained outside, bowing and waving to the assembled citizens, so that it was under good headway before they came in. sherman came up to clemens, who sat smoking unconcernedly. "well," he said, "who told you you could go in this car?" "nobody," said clemens. "do you expect to pay extra fare?" asked sherman. "no," said clemens. "i don't expect to pay any fare." "oh, you don't. then you'll work your way." sherman took off his coat and military hat and made clemens put them on. "now," said he, "whenever the train stops you go out on the platform and represent me and make a speech." it was not long before the train stopped, and clemens, according to orders, stepped out on the rear platform and bowed to the crowd. there was a cheer at the sight of his military uniform. then the cheer waned, became a murmur of uncertainty, followed by an undertone of discussion. presently somebody said: "say, that ain't sherman, that's mark twain," which brought another cheer. then sherman had to come out too, and the result was that both spoke. they kept this up at the different stations, and sometimes lincoln came out with them. when there was time all three spoke, much to the satisfaction of their audiences. president garfield was shot that summer--july , .--[on the day that president garfield was shot mrs. clemens received from their friend reginald cholmondeley a letter of condolence on the death of her husband in australia; startling enough, though in reality rather comforting than otherwise, for the reason that the "mark twain" who had died in australia was a very persistent impostor. clemens wrote cholmondeley: "being dead i might be excused from writing letters, but i am not that kind of a corpse. may i never be so dead as to neglect the hail of a friend from a far land." out of this incident grew a feature of an anecdote related in following the equator the joke played by the man from bendigo.]--he died september th, and arthur came into power. there was a great feeling of uncertainty as to what he would do. he was regarded as "an excellent gentleman with a weakness for his friends." incumbents holding appointive offices were in a state of dread. howells's father was consul at toronto, and, believing his place to be in danger, he appealed to his son. in his book howells tells how, in turn, he appealed to clemens, remembering his friendship with grant and grant's friendship with arthur. he asked clemens to write to grant, but clemens would hear of nothing less than a call on the general, during which the matter would be presented to him in person. howells relates how the three of them lunched together, in a little room just out of the office, on baked beans and coffee, brought in from some near-by restaurant: the baked beans and coffee were of about the railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with grant was like sitting down to baked beans and coffee with julius caesar, or alexander, or some other great plutarchan captain. clemens, also recalling the interview, once added some interesting details: "i asked grant if he wouldn't write a word on a card which howells could carry to washington and hand to the president. but, as usual, general grant was his natural self--that is to say, ready and determined to do a great deal more for you than you could possibly ask him to do. he said he was going to washington in a couple of days to dine with the president, and he would speak to him himself on the subject and make it a personal matter. grant was in the humor to talk--he was always in a humor to talk when no strangers were present--he forced us to stay and take luncheon in a private room, and continued to talk all the time. it was baked beans, but how 'he sits and towers,' howells said, quoting dame. grant remembered 'squibob' derby (john phoenix) at west point very well. he said that derby was always drawing caricatures of the professors and playing jokes on every body. he told a thing which i had heard before but had never seen in print. a professor questioning a class concerning certain particulars of a possible siege said, 'suppose a thousand men are besieging a fortress whose equipment of provisions is so-and-so; it is a military axiom that at the end of forty-five days the fort will surrender. now, young men, if any of you were in command of such a fortress, how would you proceed?' "derby held up his hand in token that he had an answer for that question. he said, 'i would march out, let the enemy in, and at the end of forty-five days i would change places with him.' "i tried hard, during that interview, to get general grant to agree to write his personal memoirs for publication, but he wouldn't listen to the suggestion. his inborn diffidence made him shrink from voluntarily coming before the public and placing himself under criticism as an author. he had no confidence in his ability to write well; whereas we all know now that he possessed an admirable literary gift and style. he was also sure that the book would have no sale, and of course that would be a humility too. i argued that the book would have an enormous sale, and that out of my experience i could save him from making unwise contracts with publishers, and would have the contract arranged in such a way that they could not swindle him, but he said he had no necessity for any addition to his income. of course he could not foresee that he was camping on a volcano; that as ward's partner he was a ruined man even then, and of course i had no suspicion that in four years from that time i would become his publisher. he would not agree to write his memoirs. he only said that some day he would make very full notes and leave them behind him, and then if his children chose to make them into a book they could do so. we came away then. he fulfilled his promise entirely concerning howells's father, who held his office until he resigned of his own accord." cxxxvi "the prince and the pauper" during the summer absence alterations were made in the hartford home, with extensive decorations by tiffany. the work was not completed when the family returned. clemens wrote to charles warren stoddard, then in the sandwich islands, that the place was full of carpenters and decorators, whereas what they really needed was "an incendiary." if the house would only burn down we would pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes of the crater of haleakala and get a good rest, for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the telegraph; and after resting we would come down the mountain a piece and board with a godly, breech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt, and give thanks to whom all thanks belong for these privileges, and never housekeep any more. they had acquired more ground. one morning in the spring mark twain had looked out of his window just in time to see a man lift an ax to cut down a tree on the lot which lay between his own and that of his neighbor. he had heard that a house was to be built there; altogether too close to him for comfort and privacy. leaning out of the window he called sonorously, "woodman, spare that tree!" then he hurried down, obtained a stay of proceedings, and without delay purchased the lot from the next-door neighbor who owned it, acquiring thereby one hundred feet of extra ground and a greenhouse which occupied it. it was a costly purchase; the owner knew he could demand his own price; he asked and received twelve thousand dollars for the strip. in november, clemens found that he must make another trip to canada. 'the prince and the pauper' was ready for issue, and to insure canadian copyright the author must cross the line in person. he did not enjoy the prospect of a cold-weather trip to the north, and tried to tempt howells to go with him, but only succeeded in persuading osgood, who would do anything or go anywhere that offered the opportunity for pleasant company and junket. it was by no means an unhappy fortnight. clemens took a note-book, and there are plenty of items that give reality to that long-ago excursion. he found the canadian girls so pretty that he records it as a relief now and then to see a plain one. on another page he tells how one night in the hotel a mouse gnawed and kept him awake, and how he got up and hunted for it, hoping to destroy it. he made a rebus picture for the children of this incident in a letter home. we get a glimpse just here of how he was constantly viewing himself as literary material--human material--an example from which some literary aspect or lesson may be drawn. following the mouse adventure we find it thus dramatized: trace father brebeuf all through this trip, and when i am in a rage and can't endure the mouse be reading of brebeuf's marvelous endurances and be shamed. and finally, after chasing the bright-eyed rascal several days, and throwing things and trying to jump on him when in my overshoes, he darts away with those same bright eyes, then straightway i read brebeuf's magnificent martyrdom, and turn in, subdued and wondering. by and by the thought occurs to me, brebeuf, with his good, great heart would spare even that poor humble mousie--and for his sake so will i--i will throw the trap in the fire--jump out of bed, reach under, fetch out the trap, and find him throttled there and not two minutes dead. they gave him a dinner in montreal. louis frechette, the canadian poet, was there and clemens addressed him handsomely in the response he made to the speech of welcome. from that moment frechette never ceased to adore mark twain, and visited him soon after the return to hartford. 'the prince and the pauper' was published in england, canada, germany, and america early in december, . there had been no stint of money, and it was an extremely handsome book. the pen-and-ink drawings were really charming, and they were lavish as to number. it was an attractive volume from every standpoint, and it was properly dedicated "to those good-mannered and agreeable children, susy and clara clemens." the story itself was totally unlike anything that mark twain had done before. enough of its plan and purpose has been given in former chapters to make a synopsis of it unnecessary here. the story of the wandering prince and the pauper king--an impressive picture of ancient legal and regal cruelty--is as fine and consistent a tale as exists in the realm of pure romance. unlike its great successor, the 'yankee at king arthur's court', it never sacrifices the illusion to the burlesque, while through it all there runs a delicate vein of humor. only here and there is there the slightest disillusion, and this mainly in the use of some ultra-modern phrase or word. mark twain never did any better writing than some of the splendid scenes in 'the prince and the pauper'. the picture of old london bridge; the scene in the vagabond's retreat, with its presentation to the little king of the wrongs inflicted by the laws of his realm; the episode of the jail where his revelation reaches a climax--these are but a few of the splendid pictures which the chapters portray, while the spectacle of england acquiring mercy at the hands of two children, a king and a beggar, is one which only genius could create. one might quote here, but to do so without the context would be to sacrifice atmosphere, half the story's charm. how breathlessly interesting is the tale of it! we may imagine that first little audience at mark twain's fireside hanging expectant on every paragraph, hungry always for more. of all mark twain's longer works of fiction it is perhaps the most coherent as to plot, the most carefully thought out, the most perfect as to workmanship. this is not to say that it is his greatest story. probably time will not give it that rank, but it comes near to being a perfectly constructed story, and it has an imperishable charm. it was well received, though not always understood by the public. the reviewer was so accustomed to looking for the joke in mark twain's work, that he found it hard to estimate this new product. some even went so far as to refer to it as one of mark twain's big jokes, meaning probably that he had created a chapter in english history with no foundation beyond his fancy. of course these things pained the author of the book. at one time, he had been inclined to publish it anonymously, to avert this sort of misunderstanding, and sometimes now he regretted not having done so. yet there were many gratifying notices. the new york herald reviewer gave the new book two columns of finely intelligent appreciation. in part he said: to those who have followed the career of mark twain, his appearance as the author of a charming and noble romance is really no more of a surprise than to see a stately structure risen upon sightly ground owned by an architect of genius, with the resources of abundant building material and ample training at command. of his capacity they have had no doubt, and they rejoice in his taking a step which they felt he was able to take. through all his publications may be traced the marks of the path which half led up to this happy height. his humor has often been the cloak, but not the mask, of a sturdy purpose. his work has been characterized by a manly love of truth, a hatred of humbug, and a scorn for cant. a genial warmth and whole-souledness, a beautiful fancy, a fertile imagination, and a native feeling for the picturesque and a fine eye for color have afforded the basis of a style which has become more and more plastic and finished. and in closing: the characters of these two boys, twins in spirit, will rank with the purest and loveliest creations of child-life in the realm of fiction. cxxxvii certain attacks and reprisals beyond the publication of the prince and the pauper clemens was sparingly represented in print in ' . a chapter originally intended for the book, the "whipping boy's story," he gave to the bazaar budget, a little special-edition sheet printed in hartford. it was the story of the 'bull and the bees' which he later adapted for use in joan of arc, the episode in which joan's father rides a bull to a funeral. howells found that it interfered with the action in the story of the prince, and we might have spared it from the story of joan, though hardly without regret. the military story "a curious episode" was published in the century magazine for november. the fact that clemens had heard, and not invented, the story was set forth quite definitely and fully in his opening paragraphs. nevertheless, a "captious reader" thought it necessary to write to a new york publication concerning its origin: i am an admirer of the writings of mr. mark twain, and consequently, when i saw the table of contents of the november number of the century, i bought it and turned at once to the article bearing his name, and entitled, "a curious episode." when i began to read it, it struck me as strangely familiar, and i soon recognized the story as a true one, told me in the summer of by an officer of the united states artillery. query: did mr. twain expect the public to credit this narrative to his clever brain? the editor, seeing a chance for mark twain "copy," forwarded a clipping to clemens and asked him if he had anything to say in the matter. clemens happened to know the editor very well, and he did have something to say, not for print, but for the editor's private ear. the newspaper custom of shooting a man in the back and then calling upon him to come out in a card and prove that he was not engaged in any infamy at the time is a good enough custom for those who think it justifiable. your correspondent is not stupid, i judge, but purely and simply malicious. he knew there was not the shadow of a suggestion, from the beginning to the end of "a curious episode," that the story was an invention; he knew he had no warrant for trying to persuade the public that i had stolen the narrative and was endeavoring to palm it off as a piece of literary invention; he also knew that he was asking his closing question with a base motive, else he would have asked it of me by letter, not spread it before the public. i have never wronged you in any way, and i think you had no right to print that communication; no right, neither any excuse. as to publicly answering that correspondent, i would as soon think of bandying words in public with any other prostitute. the editor replied in a manly, frank acknowledgment of error. he had not looked up the article itself in the century before printing the communication. "your letter has taught me a lesson," he said. "the blame belongs to me for not hunting up the proofs. please accept my apology." mark twain was likely to be peculiarly sensitive to printed innuendos. not always. sometimes he would only laugh at them or be wholly indifferent. indeed, in his later years, he seldom cared to read anything about himself, one way or the other, but at the time of which we are now writing--the period of the early eighties--he was alive to any comment of the press. his strong sense of humor, and still stronger sense of human weakness, caused him to overlook many things which another might regard as an affront; but if the thing printed were merely an uncalled-for slur, an inexcusable imputation, he was inclined to rage and plan violence. sometimes he conceived retribution in the form of libel suits with heavy damages. sometimes he wrote blasting answers, which mrs. clemens would not let him print. at one time he planned a biography of a certain editor who seemed to be making a deliberate personal campaign against his happiness. clemens had heard that offending items were being printed in this man's paper; friends, reporting with customary exaggeration, declared that these sneers and brutalities appeared almost daily, so often as to cause general remark. this was enough. he promptly began to collect data--damaging data --relating to that editor's past history. he even set a man to work in england collecting information concerning his victim. one of his notebooks contains the memoranda; a few items will show how terrific was to be the onslaught. when the naturalist finds a new kind of animal, he writes him up in the interest of science. no matter if it is an unpleasant animal. this is a new kind of animal, and in the cause of society must be written up. he is the polecat of our species . . . . he is purely and simply a guiteau with the courage left out . . . . steel portraits of him as a sort of idiot, from infancy up--to a dozen scattered through the book--all should resemble him. but never mind the rest. when he had got thoroughly interested in his project mrs. clemens, who had allowed the cyclone to wear itself out a little with its own vehemence, suggested that perhaps it would be well to have some one make an examination of the files of the paper and see just what had been said of him. so he subscribed for the paper himself and set a man to work on the back numbers. we will let him tell the conclusion of the matter himself, in his report of it to howells: the result arrived from my new york man this morning. oh, what a pitiable wreck of high hopes! the "almost daily" assaults for two months consist of ( ) adverse criticism of p. & p. from an enraged idiot in the london athenaeum, ( ) paragraphs from some indignant englishman in the pall mall gazette, who pays me the vast compliment of gravely rebuking some imaginary ass who has set me up in the neighborhood of rabelais, ( ) a remark about the montreal dinner, touched with an almost invisible satire, and, ( ) a remark about refusal of canadian copyright, not complimentary, but not necessarily malicious; and of course adverse criticism which is not malicious is a thing which none but fools irritate themselves about. there, that is the prodigious bugaboo in its entirety! can you conceive of a man's getting himself into a sweat over so diminutive a provocation? i am sure i can't. what the devil can those friends of mine have been thinking about to spread those three or four harmless things out into two months of daily sneers and affronts? boiled down, this vast outpouring of malice amounts to simply this: one jest (one can make nothing more serious than that out of it). one jest, and that is all; for foreign criticisms do not count, they being matters of news, and proper for publication in anybody's newspaper . . . . well, my mountain has brought forth its mouse, and a sufficiently small mouse it is, god knows. and my three weeks' hard work has got to go into the ignominious pigeonhole. confound it, i could have earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble. howells refers to this episode, and concludes: so the paper was acquitted and the editor's life was spared. the wretch never, never knew how near he was to losing it, with incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a subsequent devotion to lasting infamy. cxxxviii many undertakings to write a detailed biography of mark twain at this period would be to defy perusal. even to set down all the interesting matters, interesting to the public of his time, would mean not only to exhaust the subject, but the reader. he lived at the top of his bent, and almost anything relating to him was regarded as news. daily and hourly he mingled with important matters or spoke concerning them. a bare list of the interesting events of mark twain's life would fill a large volume. he was so busy, so deeply interested himself, so vitally alive to every human aspect. he read the papers through, and there was always enough to arouse his indignation--the doings of the human race at large could be relied upon to do that--and he would write, and write, to relieve himself. his mental niagara was always pouring away, turning out articles, essays, communications on every conceivable subject, mainly with the idea of reform. there were many public and private abuses, and he wanted to correct them all. he covered reams of paper with lurid heresies--political, religious, civic--for most of which there was no hope of publication. now and then he was allowed to speak out: an order from the past-office department at washington concerning the superscription of envelopes seemed to him unwarranted. he assailed it, and directly the nation was being entertained by a controversy between mark twain and the postmaster-general's private secretary, who subsequently receded from the field. at another time, on the matter of postage rates he wrote a paper which began: "reader, suppose you were an idiot. and suppose you were a member of congress. but i repeat myself." it is hardly necessary to add that the paper did not appear. on the whole, clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to print, and such of these papers as are preserved to-day form a curious collection of human documents. many of them could be printed to-day, without distress to any one. the conditions that invited them are changed; the heresies are not heresies any more. he may have had some thought of their publication in later years, for once he wrote: sometimes my feelings are so hot that i have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because i can't print the result. i have just finished an article of this kind, and it satisfies me entirely. it does my weather-beaten soul good to read it, and admire the trouble it would make for me and the family. i will leave it behind and utter it from the grave. there is a free speech there, and no harm to the family. it is too late and too soon to print most of these things; too late to print them for their salutary influence, too soon to print them as literature. he was interested in everything: in music, as little as he knew of it. he had an ear for melody, a dramatic vision, and the poetic conception of sound. reading some lilting lyric, he could fancy the words marching to melody, and would cast about among his friends for some one who could supply a tuneful setting. once he wrote to his friend the rev. dr. parker, who was a skilled musician, urging him to write a score for tennyson's "bugle song," outlining an attractive scheme for it which the order of his fancy had formulated. dr. parker replied that the "bugle song," often attempted, had been the despair of many musicians. he was interested in business affairs. already, before the european trip, he had embarked in, and disembarked from, a number of pecuniary ventures. he had not been satisfied with a strictly literary income. the old tendency to speculative investment, acquired during those restless mining days, always possessed him. there were no silver mines in the east, no holes in the ground into which to empty money and effort; but there were plenty of equivalents--inventions, stock companies, and the like. he had begun by putting five thousand dollars into the american publishing company; but that was a sound and profitable venture, and deserves to be remembered for that reason. then a man came along with a patent steam generator which would save ninety per cent. of the fuel energy, or some such amount, and mark twain was early persuaded that it would revolutionize the steam manufactures of the world; so he put in whatever bank surplus he had and bade it a permanent good-by. following the steam generator came a steam pulley, a rather small contrivance, but it succeeded in extracting thirty-two thousand dollars from his bank account in a period of sixteen months. by the time he had accumulated a fresh balance, a new method of marine telegraphy was shown him, so he used it up on that, twenty-five thousand dollars being the price of this adventure. a watch company in western new york was ready to sell him a block of shares by the time he was prepared to experiment again, but it did not quite live to declare the first dividend on his investment. senator john p. jones invited him to join in the organization of an accident insurance company, and such was jones's confidence in the venture that he guaranteed clemens against loss. mark twain's only profit from this source was in the delivery of a delicious speech, which he made at a dinner given to cornelius walford, of london, an insurance author of repute. jones was paying back the money presently, and about that time came a young inventor named graham bell, offering stock in a contrivance for carrying the human voice on an electric wire. at almost any other time clemens would eagerly have welcomed this opportunity; but he was so gratified at having got his money out of the insurance venture that he refused to respond to the happy "hello" call of fortune. in some memoranda made thirty years later he said: i declined. i said i didn't want anything more to do with wildcat speculation. then he [bell] offered the stock to me at twenty-five. i said i didn't want it at any price. he became eager; insisted that i take five hundred dollars' worth. he said he would sell me as much as i wanted for five hundred dollars; offered to let me gather it up in my hands and measure it in a plug hat; said i could have a whole hatful for five hundred dollars. but i was the burnt child, and i resisted all these temptations-resisted them easily; went off with my check intact, and next day lent five thousand of it, on an unendorsed note, to a friend who was going to go bankrupt three days later. about the end of the year i put up a telephone wire from my house down to the courant office, the only telephone wire in town, and the first one that was ever used in a private house in the world. that had been only a little while before he sailed for europe. when he returned he would have been willing to accept a very trifling interest in the telephone industry for the amount of his insurance salvage. he had a fresh interest in patents now, and when his old friend dan slote got hold of a new process for engraving--the kaolatype or "chalk-plate" process--which was going to revolutionize the world of illustration, he promptly acquired a third interest, and eventually was satisfied with nothing short of control. it was an ingenious process: a sheet of perfectly smooth steel was coated with a preparation of kaolin (or china clay), and a picture was engraved through the coating down to the steel surface. this formed the matrix into which the molten metal was poured to make the stereotype plate, or die, for printing. it was clemens's notion that he could utilize this process for the casting of brass dies for stamping book covers--that, so applied, the fortunes to be made out of it would be larger and more numerous. howells tells how, at one time, clemens thought the "damned human race" was almost to be redeemed by a process of founding brass without air-bubbles in it. this was the time referred to and the race had to go unredeemed; for, after long, worried, costly experimenting, the brass refused to accommodate its nature to the new idea, while the chalk plate itself, with all its subsidiary and auxiliary possibilities, was infringed upon right and left, and the protecting patent failed to hold. the process was doomed, in any case. it was barely established before the photographic etching processes, superior in all ways, were developed and came quickly into use. the kaolatype enterprise struggled nobly for a considerable period. clemens brought his niece's husband, young charles l. webster, from fredonia to manage it for him, and backed it liberally. webster was vigorous, hard-working, and capable; but the end of each month showed a deficit, until clemens was from forty to fifty thousand dollars out of pocket in his effort to save the race with chalk and brass. the history of these several ventures (and there were others), dismissed here in a few paragraphs, would alone make a volume not without interest, certainly not without humor. following came the type-setting machine, but we are not ready for that. of necessity it is a longer, costlier story. mrs. clemens did not share his enthusiasm in these various enterprises. she did not oppose them, at least not strenuously, but she did not encourage them. she did not see their need. their home was beautiful; they were happy; he could do his work in deliberation and comfort. she knew the value of money better than he, cared more for it in her own way; but she had not his desire to heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in torrential golden showers. she was willing to let well enough alone. clemens could not do this, and suffered accordingly. in the midst of fair home surroundings and honors we find him writing to his mother: life has come to be a very serious matter with me. i have a badgered, harassed feeling a good part of my time. it comes mainly from business responsibilities and annoyances. he had no moral right to be connected with business at all. he had a large perception of business opportunity, but no vision of its requirements--its difficulties and details. he was the soul of honor, but in anything resembling practical direction he was but a child. during any period of business venture he was likely to be in hot water: eagerly excited, worried, impatient; alternately suspicious and over-trusting, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset. yet never, even to the end of his days, would he permanently lose faith in speculative ventures. human traits are sometimes modified, but never eliminated. the man who is born to be a victim of misplaced confidence will continue to be one so long as he lives and there are men willing to victimize him. the man who believes in himself as an investor will uphold that faith against all disaster so long as he draws breath and has money to back his judgments. cxxxix financial and literary by a statement made on the st of january, , of mark twain's disbursements for the preceding year, it is shown that considerably more than one hundred thousand dollars had been expended during that twelve months. it is a large sum for an author to pay out in one year. it would cramp most authors to do it, and it was not the best financing, even for mark twain. it required all that the books could earn, all the income from the various securities, and a fair sum from their principal. there is a good deal of biography in the statement. of the amount expended forty-six thousand dollars represented investments; but of this comfortable sum less than five thousand dollars would cover the legitimate purchases; the rest had gone in the "ventures" from whose bourne no dollar would ever return. also, a large sum had been spent for the additional land and for improvements on the home--somewhat more than thirty thousand dollars altogether--while the home life had become more lavish, the establishment had grown each year to a larger scale, the guests and entertainments had become more and, more numerous, until the actual household expenditure required about as much as the books and securities could earn. it was with the increased scale of living that clemens had become especially eager for some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. like colonel sellers, he must have something with "millions in it." almost any proposition that seemed to offer these possible millions appealed to him, and in his imagination he saw the golden freshet pouring in. his natural taste was for a simple, inexpensive life; yet in his large hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur, he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and delight of his guests. there were always guests; they were coming and going constantly. clemens used to say that he proposed to establish a bus line between their house and the station for the accommodation of his company. he had the southern hospitality. much company appealed to a very large element in his strangely compounded nature. for the better portion of the year he was willing to pay the price of it, whether in money or in endurance, and mrs. clemens heroically did her part. she loved these things also, in her own way. she took pride in them, and realized that they were a part of his vast success. yet in her heart she often longed for the simpler life--above all, for the farm life at elmira. her spirit cried out for the rest and comfort there. in one of her letters she says: the house has been full of company, and i have been "whirled around." how can a body help it? oh, i cannot help sighing for the peace and quiet of the farm. this is my work, and i know that i do very wrong when i feel chafed by it, but how can i be right about it? sometimes it seems as if the simple sight of people would drive me mad. i am all wrong; if i would simply accept the fact that this is my work and let other things go, i know i should not be so fretted; but i want so much to do other things, to study and do things with the children, and i cannot. i have the best french teacher that i ever had, and if i could give any time to it i could not help learning french. when we reflect on the conditions, we are inclined to say how much better it would have been to have remained there among the hills in that quiet, inexpensive environment, to have let the world go. but that was not possible. the game was of far larger proportions than any that could be restricted to the limits of retirement and the simpler round of life. mark twain's realm had become too large for his court to be established in a cottage. it is hard to understand that in spite of a towering fame mark twain was still not regarded by certain american arbiters of reputations as a literary fixture; his work was not yet recognized by them as being of important meaning and serious purport. in boston, at that time still the athens of america, he was enjoyed, delighted in; but he was not honored as being quite one of the elect. howells tells us that: in proportion as people thought themselves refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude. even at the atlantic dinners his place was "below the salt"--a place of honor, but not of the greatest honor. he did not sit on the dais with emerson, longfellow, holmes, whittier, howells, and aldrich. we of a later period, who remember him always as the center of every board--the one supreme figure, his splendid head and crown of silver hair the target of every eye-find it hard to realize the cambridge conservatism that clad him figuratively always in motley, and seated him lower than the throne itself. howells clearly resented this condition, and from random review corners had ventured heresy. now in he seems to have determined to declare himself, in a large, free way, concerning his own personal estimate of mark twain. he prepared for the century magazine a biographical appreciation, in which he served notice to the world that mark twain's work, considered even as literature, was of very considerable importance indeed. whether or not howells then realized the "inspired knowledge of the multitude," and that most of the nation outside of the counties of suffolk and essex already recognized his claim, is not material. very likely he did; but he also realized the mental dusk of the cultured uninspired and his prerogative to enlighten them. his century article was a kind of manifesto, a declaration of independence, no longer confined to the obscurities of certain book notices, where of course one might be expected to stretch friendly favor a little for a popular atlantic contributor. in the open field of the century magazine howells ventured to declare: mark twain's humor is as simple in form and as direct as the statesmanship of lincoln or the generalship of grant. when i think how purely and wholly american it is i am a little puzzled at its universal acceptance . . . . why, in fine, should an english chief-justice keep mark twain's books always at hand? why should darwin have gone to them for rest and refreshment at midnight, when spent with scientific research? i suppose that mark twain transcends all other american humorists in the universal qualities. he deals very little with the pathetic, which he nevertheless knows very well how to manage, as he has shown, notably in the true story of the old slave-mother; but there is a poetic lift in his work, even when he permits you to recognize it only as something satirized. there is always the touch of nature, the presence of a sincere and frank manliness in what he says, the companionship of a spirit which is at once delightfully open and deliciously shrewd. elsewhere i have tried to persuade the reader that his humor is, at its best, the foamy break of the strong tide of earnestness in him. but it would be limiting him unjustly to describe him as a satirist, and it is hardly practicable to establish him in people's minds as a moralist; he has made them laugh too long; they will not believe him serious; they think some joke is always intended. this is the penalty, as dr. holmes has pointed out, of making one's first success as a humorist. there was a paper of mark twain's printed in the atlantic monthly some years ago and called, "the facts concerning the late carnival of crime in connecticut," which ought to have won popular recognition of the ethical intelligence underlying his humor. it was, of course, funny; but under the fun it was an impassioned study of the human conscience. hawthorne or bunyan might have been proud to imagine that powerful allegory, which had a grotesque force far beyond either of them.... yet it quite failed of the response i had hoped for it, and i shall not insist here upon mark twain as a moralist; though i warn the reader that if he leaves out of the account an indignant sense of right and wrong, a scorn of all affectations and pretense, an ardent hate of meanness and injustice, he will come infinitely short of knowing mark twain. howells realized the unwisdom and weakness of dogmatic insistence, and the strength of understatement. to him mark twain was already the moralist, the philosopher, and the statesman; he was willing that the reader should take his time to realize these things. the article, with his subject's portrait as a frontispiece, appeared in the century for september, . if it carried no new message to many of its readers, it at least set the stamp of official approval upon what they had already established in their hearts. cxl down the river osgood was doing no great things with the prince and the pauper, but clemens gave him another book presently, a collection of sketches--the stolen white elephant. it was not an especially important volume, though some of the features, such as "mrs. mcwilliams and the lightning" and the "carnival of crime," are among the best of their sort, while the "elephant" story is an amazingly good take-off on what might be called the spectacular detective. the interview between inspector blunt and the owner of the elephant is typical. the inspector asks: "now what does this elephant eat, and how much?" "well, as to what he eats--he will eat anything. he will eat a man, he will eat a bible; he will eat anything between a man and a bible." "good-very good, indeed, but too general. details are necessary; details are the only valuable thing in our trade. very well, as to men. at one meal--or, if you prefer, during one day--how many men will he eat if fresh?" "he would not care whether they were fresh or not; at a single meal he would eat five ordinary men." "very good; five men. we will put that down. what nationalities would he prefer?" "he is indifferent about nationalities. he prefers acquaintances, but is not prejudiced against strangers." "very good. now, as to bibles. how many bibles would he eat at a meal?" "he would eat an entire edition." clemens and osgood had a more important publishing enterprise on hand. the long-deferred completion of the mississippi book was to be accomplished; the long-deferred trip down the river was to be taken. howells was going abroad, but the charming osgood was willing to make the excursion, and a young man named roswell phelps, of hartford, was engaged as a stenographer to take the notes. clemens made a farewell trip to boston to see howells before his departure, and together they went to concord to call on emerson; a fortunate thing, for he lived but a few weeks longer. they went again in the evening, not to see him, but to stand reverently outside and look at his house. this was in april. longfellow had died in march. the fact that howells was going away indefinitely, made them reminiscent and sad. just what breach clemens committed during this visit is not remembered now, and it does not matter; but his letter to howells, after his return to hartford, makes it pretty clear that it was memorable enough at the time. half-way in it he breaks out: but oh, hell, there is no hope for a person that is built like me, because there is no cure, no cure. if i could only know when i have committed a crime: then i could conceal it, and not go stupidly dribbling it out, circumstance by circumstance, into the ears of a person who will give no sign till the confession is complete; and then the sudden damnation drops on a body like the released pile-driver, and he finds himself in the earth down to his chin. when he merely supposed he was being entertaining. next day he was off with osgood and the stenographer for st. louis, where they took the steamer gold dust down the river. he intended to travel under an assumed name, but was promptly recognized, both at the southern hotel and on the boat. in 'life on the mississippi' he has given us the atmosphere of his trip, with his new impressions of old scenes; also his first interview with the pilot, whom he did not remember, but who easily remembered him. "i did not write that story in the book quite as it happened," he reflected once, many years later. "we went on board at night. next morning i was up bright and early and out on deck to see if i could recognize any of the old landmarks. i could not remember any. i did not know where we were at all. it was a new river to me entirely. i climbed up in the pilot-house and there was a fellow of about forty at the wheel. i said 'good morning.' he answered pleasantly enough. his face was entirely strange to me. then i sat down on the high seat back of the wheel and looked out at the river and began to ask a few questions, such as a landsman would ask. he began, in the old way, to fill me up with the old lies, and i enjoyed letting him do it. then suddenly he turned round to me and said: "'i want to get a cup of coffee. you hold her, will you, till i come back?' and before i could say a word he was out of the pilot-house door and down the steps. it all came so suddenly that i sprang to the wheel, of course, as i would have done twenty years before. then in a moment i realized my position. here i was with a great big steamboat in the middle of the mississippi river, without any further knowledge than that fact, and the pilot out of sight. i settled my mind on three conclusions: first, that the pilot might be a lunatic; second, that he had recognized me and thought i knew the river; third, that we were in a perfectly safe place, where i could not possibly kill the steamboat. but that last conclusion, though the most comforting, was an extremely doubtful one. i knew perfectly well that no sane pilot would trust his steamboat for a single moment in the hands of a greenhorn unless he were standing by the greenhorn's side. of course, by force of habit, when i grabbed the wheel, i had taken the steering marks ahead and astern, and i made up my mind to hold her on those marks to the hair; but i could feel myself getting old and gray. then all at once i recognized where we were; we were in what is called the grand chain--a succession of hidden rocks, one of the most dangerous places on the river. there were two rocks there only about seventy feet apart, and you've got to go exactly between them or wreck the boat. there was a time when i could have done it without a tremor, but that time wasn't now. i would have given any reasonable sum to have been on the shore just at that moment. i think i was about ready to drop dead when i heard a step on the pilothouse stair; then the door opened and the pilot came in, quietly picking his teeth, and took the wheel, and i crawled weakly back to the seat. he said: "'you thought you were playing a nice joke on me, didn't you? you thought i didn't know who you were. why, i recognized that drawl of yours as soon as you opened your mouth.' "i said, 'who the h--l are you? i don't remember you.' "'well,' he said, 'perhaps you don't, but i was a cub pilot on the river before the war, when you were a licensed pilot, and i couldn't get a license when i was qualified for one, because the pilots' association was so strong at that time that they could keep new pilots out if they wanted to, and the law was that i had to be examined by two licensed pilots, and for a good while i could not get any one to make that examination. but one day you and another pilot offered to do it, and you put me through a good, healthy examination and indorsed my application for a license. i had never seen you before, and i have never seen you since until now, but i recognized you.' "'all right,' i said. 'but if i had gone half a mile farther with that steamboat we might have all been at the bottom of the river.' "we got to be good friends, of course, and i spent most of my time up there with him. when we got down below cairo, and there was a big, full river--for it was highwater season and there was no danger of the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river--i had her most of the time on his watch. he would lie down and sleep, and leave me there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that i was still a pilot, happy and care-free as i had been twenty years before." from the book we gather that he could not keep out of the pilot-house. he was likely to get up at any hour of the night to stand his watch, and truly enough the years had slipped away. he was the young fellow in his twenties again, speculating on the problems of existence and reading his fortune in the stars. to heighten the illusion, he had himself called regularly with the four-o'clock watch, in order not to miss the mornings. --[it will repay the reader to turn to chap. xxx of life on the mississippi, and consider mark twain's word-picture of the river sunrise.] the majesty and solitude of the river impressed him more than ever before, especially its solitude. it had been so full of life in his time; now it had returned once more to its primal loneliness--the loneliness of god. at one place two steamboats were in sight at once an unusual spectacle. once, in the mouth of a river, he noticed a small boat, which he made out to be the mark twain. there had been varied changes in twenty-one years; only the old fascination of piloting remained unchanged. to bixby afterward he wrote: "i'd rather be a pilot than anything else i've ever done in my life. how do you run plum point?" he met bixby at new orleans. bixby was captain now on a splendid new anchor line steamboat, the city of baton rouge. the anchor line steamers were the acme of mississippi river steamboat-building, and they were about the end of it. they were imposingly magnificent, but they were only as gorgeous clouds that marked the sunset of mississippi steamboat travel. mark twain made his trip down the river just in time. in new orleans he met george w. cable and joel chandler harris, and they had a fraternizing good time together, mousing about the old french quarter or mingling with the social life of the modern city. he made a trip with bixby in a tug to the warmouth plantation, and they reviewed old days together, as friends parted for twenty-one years will. altogether the new orleans sojourn was a pleasant one, saddened only by a newspaper notice of the death, in edinburgh, of the kindly and gentle and beloved dr. brown. clemens arranged to make the trip up the river on the baton rouge. bixby had one pretty inefficient pilot, and stood most of the watches himself, so that with "sam clemens" in the pilot-house with him, it was wonderfully like those old first days of learning the river, back in the fifties. "sam was ever making notes in his memorandum-book, just as he always did," said bixby to the writer, recalling the time. "i was sorry i had to stay at the wheel so much. i wanted to have more time with sam without thinking of the river at all. sam was sorry, too, from what he wrote after he got home." bixby produced a letter in the familiar handwriting. it was a tender, heart-spoken letter: i didn't see half enough of you. it was a sore disappointment. osgood could have told you, if he would--discreet old dog--i expected to have you with me all the time. altogether, the most pleasant part of my visit with you was after we arrived in st. louis, and you were your old natural self again. twenty years have not added a month to your age or taken a fraction from your loveliness. said bixby: "when we arrived in st. louis we came to the planters' hotel; to this very table where you and i are sitting now, and we had a couple of hot scotches between us, just as we have now, and we had a good last talk over old times and old acquaintances. after he returned to new york he sent for my picture. he wanted to use it in his book." at st. louis the travelers changed boats, and proceeded up the mississippi toward st. paul. clemens laid off three days at hannibal. delightful days [he wrote home]. loitering around all day long, examining the old localities, and talking with the gray heads who were boys and girls with me thirty or forty years ago. i spent my nights with john and helen garth, three miles from town, in their spacious and beautiful house. they were children with me, and afterward schoolmates. that world which i knew in its blooming youth is old and bowed and melancholy now; its soft cheeks are leathery and withered, the fire has gone out of its eyes, the spring from its step. it will be dust and ashes when i come again. he had never seen the far upper river, and he found it very satisfying. his note-book says: the bluffs all along up above st. paul are exquisitely beautiful where the rough and broken turreted rocks stand up against the sky above the steep, verdant slopes. they are inexpressibly rich and mellow in color; soft dark browns mingled with dull greens--the very tints to make an artist worship. in a final entry he wrote: the romance of boating is gone now. in hannibal the steamboat man is no longer the god. cxli literature and philosophy clemens took a further step toward becoming a publisher on his own account. not only did he contract to supply funds for the mississippi book, but, as kaolatype, the chalk-engraving process, which had been lingeringly and expensively dying, was now become merely something to swear at, he had his niece's husband, webster, installed as osgood's new york subscription manager, with charge of the general agencies. there was no delay in this move. webster must get well familiarized with the work before the mississippi book's publication. he had expected to have the manuscript finished pretty promptly, but the fact that he had promised it for a certain time paralyzed his effort. even at the farm he worked without making much headway. at the end of october he wrote howells: the weather turned cold, and we had to rush home, while i still lacked thirty thousand words. i had been sick and got delayed. i am going to write all day and two-thirds of the night until the thing is done or break down at it. the spur and burden of the contract are intolerable to me. i can endure the irritation of it no longer. i went to work at nine o'clock yesterday morning and went to bed an hour after midnight. result of the day (mainly stolen from books though credit given), , words, so i reduced my burden by one-third in one day. it was five days' work in one. i have nothing more to borrow or steal; the rest must all be written. it is ten days' work and unless something breaks it will be finished in five. he had sworn once, when he had finally finished 'a tramp abroad', that he would never limit himself as to time again. but he had forgotten that vow, and was suffering accordingly. howells wrote from london urging him to drop everything and come over to europe for refreshment. we have seen lots of nice people, and have been most pleasantly made of; but i would rather have you smoke in my face and talk for half a day, just for pleasure, than to go to the best house or club in london. clemens answered: yes, it would be more profitable to me to do that because, with your society to help me, i should swiftly finish this now apparently interminable book. but i cannot come, because i am not boss here, and nothing but dynamite can move mrs. clemens away from home in the winter season. this was in november, and he had broken all restrictions as to time. he declared that he had never had such a fight over any book before, and that he had told osgood and everybody concerned that they must wait. i have said with sufficient positiveness that i will finish the book at no particular date; that i will not hurry it; that i will not hurry myself; that i will take things easy and comfortably--write when i choose to write, leave it alone when i do so prefer . . . i have got everything at a dead standstill, and that is where it ought to be, and that is where it must remain; to follow any other policy would be to make the book worse than it already is. i ought to have finished it before showing it to anybody, and then sent it across the ocean to you to be edited, as usual; for you seem to be a great many shades happier than you deserve to be, and if i had thought of this thing earlier i would have acted upon it and taken the tuck somewhat out of your joyousness. it was a long, heartfelt letter. near the end of it he said: cable has been here, creating worshipers on all hands. he is a marvelous talker on a deep subject. i do not see how even spencer could unwind a thought more smoothly or orderly, and do it in cleaner, clearer, crisper english. he astounded twichell with his faculty. you know that when it comes down to moral honesty, limpid innocence, and utterly blemishless piety, the apostles were mere policemen to cable; so with this in mind you must imagine him at a midnight dinner in boston the other night, where we gathered around the board of the summerset club: osgood full, boyle o'reilly full, fairchild responsively loaded, and aldrich and myself possessing the floor and properly fortified. cable told mrs. clemens, when he returned here, that he seemed to have been entertaining himself with horses, and had a dreamy idea that he must have gone to boston in a cattle-car. it was a very large time. he called it an orgy. and no doubt it was, viewed from his standpoint. osgood wanted mark twain to lecture that fall, as preliminary advertising for the book, with "life on the mississippi" as his subject. osgood was careful to make this proposition by mail, and probably it was just as well; for if there was any single straw that could have broken the back of clemens's endurance and made him violent at this particular time, it was a proposition to go back on the platform. his answer to osgood has not been preserved. clemens spoke little that winter. in february he addressed the monday evening club on "what is happiness?" presenting a theory which in later years he developed as a part of his "gospel," and promulgated in a privately printed volume, 'what is man'? it is the postulate already mentioned in connection with his reading of lecky, that every human action, bad or good, is the result of a selfish impulse; that is to say, the result of a desire for the greater content of spirit. it is not a new idea; philosophers in all ages have considered it, and accepted or rejected it, according to their temperament and teachings, but it was startling and apparently new to the monday evening club. they scoffed and jeered at it; denounced it as a manifest falsity. they did not quite see then that there may be two sorts of selfishness--brutal and divine; that he who sacrifices others to himself exemplifies the first, whereas he who sacrifices himself for others personifies the second--the divine contenting of his soul by serving the happiness of his fellow-men. mark twain left this admonition in furtherance of that better sort: "diligently train your ideals upward, and still upward, toward a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure, in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and the community." it is a divine admonition, even if, in its suggested moral freedom, it does seem to conflict with that other theory--the inevitable sequence of cause and effect, descending from the primal atom. there is seeming irrelevance in introducing this matter here; but it has a chronological relation, and it presents a mental aspect of the time. clemens was forty-eight, and becoming more and more the philosopher; also, in logic at least, a good deal of a pessimist. he made a birthday aphorism on the subject: "the man who is a pessimist before he is forty-eight knows too much; the man who is an optimist after he is forty-eight knows too little." he was never more than a pessimist in theory at any time. in practice he would be a visionary; a builder of dreams and fortunes, a veritable colonel sellers to the end of his days. cxlii "life on the mississippi" the mississippi book was completed at last and placed in osgood's hands for publication. clemens was immensely fond of osgood. osgood would come down to hartford and spend days discussing plans and playing billiards, which to mark twain's mind was the proper way to conduct business. besides, there was webster, who by this time, or a very little later, had the word "publisher" printed in his letter-heads, and was truly that, so far as the new book was concerned. osgood had become little more than its manufacturer, shipping-agent, and accountant. it should be added that he made the book well, though somewhat expensively. he was unaccustomed to getting out big subscription volumes. his taste ran to the artistic, expensive product. "that book cost me fifty thousand dollars to make," clemens once declared. "bliss could have built a whole library, for that sum. but osgood was a lovely fellow." life on the mississippi was issued about the middle of may. it was a handsome book of its kind and a successful book, but not immediately a profitable one, because of the manner of its issue. it was experimental, and experiments are likely to be costly, even when successful in the final result. among other things, it pronounced the final doom of kaolatype. the artists who drew the pictures for it declined to draw them if they were to be reproduced by that process, or indeed unless some one of the lately discovered photographic processes was used. furthermore, the latter were much cheaper, and it was to the advantage of clemens himself to repudiate kaolatype, even for his own work. webster was ordered to wind up the last ends of the engraving business with as little sacrifice as possible, and attend entirely to more profitable affairs--viz., the distribution of books. as literature, the mississippi book will rank with mark twain's best--so far, at least, as the first twenty chapters of it are concerned. earlier in this history these have been sufficiently commented upon. they constitute a literary memorial seemingly as enduring as the river itself. concerning the remaining chapters of the book, they are also literature, but of a different class. the difference is about the same as that between 'a tramp abroad' and the 'innocents'. it is the difference between the labors of love and duty; between art and industry, literature and journalism. but the last is hardly fair. it is journalism, but it is literary journalism, and there are unquestionably areas that are purely literary, and not journalistic at all. there would always be those in any book of travel he might write. the story of the river revisited is an interesting theme; and if the revisiting had been done, let us say eight or ten years earlier, before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and before the river itself had become a background for pessimism, the tale might have had more of the literary glamour and illusion, even if less that is otherwise valuable. 'life on the mississippi' has been always popular in germany. the emperor william of germany once assured mark twain that it was his favorite american book, and on the same evening the portier of the author's lodging in berlin echoed the emperor's opinion. paul lindau, a distinguished german author and critic, in an interview at the time the mississippi book appeared, spoke of the general delight of his countrymen in its author. when he was asked, "but have not the germans been offended by mark twain's strictures on their customs and language in his 'tramp abroad'" he replied, "we know what we are and how we look, and the fanciful picture presented to our eyes gives us only food for laughter, not cause for resentment. the jokes he made on our long words, our inverted sentences, and the position of the verb have really led to a reform in style which will end in making our language as compact and crisp as the french or english. i regard mark twain as the foremost humorist of the age." howells, traveling through europe, found lindau's final sentiment echoed elsewhere, and he found something more: in europe mark twain was already highly regarded as a serious writer. thomas hardy said to howells one night at dinner: "why don't people understand that mark twain is not merely a great humorist? he is a very remarkable fellow in a very different way." the rev. dr. parker, returning from england just then, declared that, wherever he went among literary people, the talk was about mark twain; also that on two occasions, when he had ventured diffidently to say that he knew that author personally, he was at once so evidently regarded as lying for effect that he felt guilty, and looked it, and did not venture to say it any more; thus, in a manner, practising untruth to save his reputation for veracity. that the mississippi book throughout did much to solidify this foreign opinion of mark twain's literary importance cannot be doubted, and it is one of his books that will live longest in the memory of men. cxliii a guest of royalty for purposes of copyright another trip to canada was necessary, and when the newspapers announced (may, ) that mark twain was about to cross the border there came one morning the following telegram: meeting of literary and scientific society at ottawa from d to th. it would give me much pleasure if you could come and be my guest during that time. lorne. the marquis of lorne, then governor-general of canada, was the husband of queen victoria's daughter, the princess louise. the invitation was therefore in the nature of a command. clemens obeyed it graciously enough, and with a feeling of exaltation no doubt. he had been honored by the noble and the great in many lands, but this was royalty--english royalty--paying a tribute to an american writer whom neither the marquis nor the princess, his wife, had ever seen. they had invited him because they had cared enough for his books to make them wish to see him, to have him as a guest in rideau hall, their home. mark twain was democratic. a king to him was no more than any other man; rather less if he were not a good king. but there was something national in this tribute; and, besides, lord lorne and the princess louise were the kind of sovereigns that honored their rank, instead of being honored by it. it is a good deal like a fairy tale when you think of it; the barefooted boy of hannibal, who had become a printer, a pilot, a rough-handed miner, being summoned, not so many years later, by royalty as one of america's foremost men of letters. the honor was no greater than many others he had received, certainly not greater than the calls of canon kingsley and robert browning and turgenieff at his london hotel lodgings, but it was of a less usual kind. clemens enjoyed his visit. princess louise and the marquis of lorne kept him with them almost continually, and were loath to let him go. once they took him tobogganing--an exciting experience. it happened that during his stay with them the opening of the canadian parliament took place. lord lorne and the principal dignitaries of state entered one carriage, and in a carriage behind them followed princess louise with mark twain. as they approached the parliament house the customary salute was fired. clemens pretended to the princess considerable gratification. the temptation was too strong to resist: "your highness," he said, "i have had other compliments paid to me, but none equal to this one. i have never before had a salute fired in my honor." returning to hartford, he sent copies of his books to lord lorne, and to the princess a special copy of that absurd manual, the new guide of the conversation in portuguese and english, for which he had written an introduction.--[a serious work, in portugal, though issued by osgood (' ) as a joke. clemens in the introduction says: "its delicious, unconscious ridiculousness and its enchanting naivety are as supreme and unapproachable in their way as shakespeare's sublimities." an extract, the closing paragraph from the book's preface, will illustrate his meaning: "we expect then, who the little book (for the care that we wrote him, and for her typographical correction), that maybe worth the acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the youth, at which we dedicate him particularly."] cxliv a summer literary harvest arriving at the farm in june, clemens had a fresh crop of ideas for stories of many lengths and varieties. his note-book of that time is full of motifs and plots, most of them of that improbable and extravagant kind which tended to defeat any literary purpose, whether humorous or otherwise. it seems worth while setting down one or more of these here, for they are characteristic of the myriad conceptions that came and went, and beyond these written memoranda left no trace behind. here is a fair example of many: two men starving on a raft. the pauper has a boston cracker, resolves to keep it till the multimillionaire is beginning to starve, then make him pay $ , for it. millionaire agrees. pauper's cupidity rises, resolves to wait and get more; twenty-four hours later asks him a million for the cracker. millionaire agrees. pauper has a wild dream of becoming enormously rich off his cracker; backs down; lies all night building castles in the air; next day raises his price higher and higher, till millionaire has offered $ , , , every cent he has in the world. pauper accepts. millionaire: "now give it to me." pauper: "no; it isn't a trade until you sign documental history of the transaction and make an oath to pay." while pauper is finishing the document millionaire sees a ship. when pauper says, "sign and take the cracker," millionaire smiles a smile, declines, and points to the ship. yet this is hardly more extravagant than another idea that is mentioned repeatedly among the notes--that of an otherwise penniless man wandering about london with a single million-pound bank-note in his possession, a motif which developed into a very good story indeed. idea for "stormfield's visit to heaven" in modern times the halls of heaven are warmed by registers connected with hell; and this is greatly applauded by jonathan edwards, calvin, baxter and company, because it adds a new pang to the sinner's sufferings to know that the very fire which tortures him is the means of making the righteous comfortable. then there was to be another story, in which the various characters were to have a weird, pestilential nomenclature; such as "lockjaw harris," "influenza smith," "sinapism davis," and a dozen or two more, a perfect outbreak of disorders. another--probably the inspiration of some very hot afternoon--was to present life in the interior of an iceberg, where a colony would live for a generation or two, drifting about in a vast circular current year after year, subsisting on polar bears and other arctic game. an idea which he followed out and completed was the d arabian night, in which scheherazade continues her stories, until she finally talks the sultan to death. that was a humorous idea, certainly; but when howells came home and read it in the usual way he declared that, while the opening was killingly funny, when he got into the story itself it seemed to him that he was "made a fellow-sufferer with the sultan from scheherazade's prolixity." "on the whole," he said, "it is not your best, nor your second best; but all the way it skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't afford to indulge in." and that was the truth. so the tale, neatly typewritten, retired to seclusion, and there remains to this day. clemens had one inspiration that summer which was not directly literary, but historical, due to his familiarity with english dates. he wrote twichell: day before yesterday, feeling not in condition for writing, i left the study, but i couldn't hold in--had to do something; so i spent eight hours in the sun with a yardstick, measuring off the reigns of the english kings on the roads in these grounds, from william the conqueror to , calculating to invent an open-air game which shall fill the children's heads with dates without study. i give each king's reign one foot of space to the year and drive one stake in the ground to mark the beginning of each reign, and i make the children call the stake by the king's name. you can stand in the door and take a bird's-eye view of english monarchy, from the conqueror to edward iv.; then you can turn and follow the road up the hill to the study and beyond with an opera-glass, and bird's-eye view the rest of it to . you can mark the sharp difference in the length of reigns by the varying distances of the stakes apart. you can see richard ii., two feet; oliver cromwell, two feet; james ii., three feet, and so on --and then big skips; pegs standing forty-five, forty-six, fifty, fifty-six, and sixty feet apart (elizabeth, victoria, edward iii., henry iii., and george iii.). by the way, third's a lucky number for length of days, isn't it? yes, sir; by my scheme you get a realizing notion of the time occupied by reigns. the reason it took me eight hours was because, with little jean's interrupting assistance, i had to measure from the conquest to the end of henry vi. three times over, and besides i had to whittle out all those pegs. i did a full day's work and a third over, yesterday, but was full of my game after i went to bed trying to fit it for indoors. so i didn't get to sleep till pretty late; but when i did go off i had contrived a new way to play my history game with cards and a board. we may be sure the idea of the game would possess him, once it got a fair start like that. he decided to save the human race that year with a history game. when he had got the children fairly going and interested in playing it, he adapted it to a cribbage-board, and spent his days and nights working it out and perfecting it to a degree where the world at large might learn all the facts of all the histories, not only without effort, but with an actual hunger for chronology. he would have a game not only of the english kings, but of the kings of every other nation; likewise of great statesmen, vice-chancellors, churchmen, of celebrities in every line. he would prepare a book to accompany these games. each game would contain one thousand facts, while the book would contain eight thousand; it would be a veritable encyclopedia. he would organize clubs throughout the united states for playing the game; prizes were to be given. experts would take it up. he foresaw a department in every newspaper devoted to the game and its problems, instead of to chess and whist and other useless diversions. he wrote to orion, and set him to work gathering facts and dates by the bushel. he wrote to webster, sent him a plan, and ordered him to apply for the patent without delay. patents must also be applied for abroad. with all nations playing this great game, very likely it would produce millions in royalties; and so, in the true sellers fashion, the iridescent bubble was blown larger and larger, until finally it blew up. the game on paper had become so large, so elaborate, so intricate, that no one could play it. yet the first idea was a good one: the king stakes driven along the driveway and up the hillside of quarry farm. the children enjoyed it, and played it through many sweet summer afternoons. once, in the days when he had grown old, he wrote, remembering: among the principal merits of the games which we played by help of the pegs were these: that they had to be played in the open air, and that they compelled brisk exercise. the peg of william the conqueror stood in front of the house; one could stand near the conqueror and have all english history skeletonized and landmarked and mile-posted under his eye . . . . the eye has a good memory. many years have gone by and the pegs have disappeared, but i still see them and each in its place; and no king's name falls upon my ear without my seeing his pegs at once, and noticing just how many feet of space he takes up along the road. it turned out an important literary year after all. in the mississippi book he had used a chapter from the story he had been working at from time to time for a number of years, 'the adventures of huckleberry finn'. reading over the manuscript now he found his interest in it sharp and fresh, his inspiration renewed. the trip down the river had revived it. the interest in the game became quiescent, and he set to work to finish the story at a dead heat. to howells, august ( ), he wrote: i have written eight or nine hundred manuscript pages in such a brief space of time that i mustn't name the number of days; i shouldn't believe it myself, and of course couldn't expect you to. i used to restrict myself to four and five hours a day and five days in the week, but this time i have wrought from breakfast till . p.m. six days in the week, and once or twice i smouched a sunday when the boss wasn't looking. nothing is half so good as literature hooked on sunday, on the sly. he refers to the game, though rather indifferently. when i wrote you i thought i had it; whereas i was merely entering upon the initiatory difficulties of it. i might have known it wouldn't be an easy job or somebody would have invented a decent historical game long ago--a thing which nobody has done. notwithstanding the fact that he was working at huck with enthusiasm, he seems to have been in no hurry to revise it for publication, either as a serial or as a book. but the fact that he persevered until huck finn at last found complete utterance was of itself a sufficient matter for congratulation. cxlv howells and clemens write a play before howells went abroad clemens had written: now i think that the play for you to write would be one entitled, "colonel mulberry sellers in age" ( ), with lafayette hawkins (at ) still sticking to him and believing in him and calling him "my lord." he [sellers] is a specialist and a scientist in various ways. your refined people and purity of speech would make the best possible background, and when you are done, i could take your manuscript and rewrite the colonel's speeches, and make him properly extravagant, and i would let the play go to raymond, and bind him up with a contract that would give him the bellyache every time he read it. shall we think this over, or drop it as being nonsense? howells, returned and settled in boston once more, had revived an interest in the play idea. he corresponded with clemens concerning it and agreed that the american claimant, leathers, should furnish the initial impulse of the drama. they decided to revive colonel sellers and make him the heir; colonel sellers in old age, more wildly extravagant than ever, with new schemes, new patents, new methods of ameliorating the ills of mankind. howells came down to hartford from boston full of enthusiasm. he found clemens with some ideas of the plan jotted down: certain effects and situations which seemed to him amusing, but there was no general scheme of action. howells, telling of it, says: i felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly nothing as chaos could be. he agreed hilariously with me, and was willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability. howells, in turn, proposed a plan which clemens approved, and they set to work. howells could imitate clemens's literary manner, and they had a riotously jubilant fortnight working out their humors. howells has told about it in his book, and he once related it to the writer of this memoir. he said: "clemens took one scene and i another. we had loads and loads of fun about it. we cracked our sides laughing over it as it went along. we thought it mighty good, and i think to this day that it was mighty good. we called the play 'colonel sellers.' we revived him. clemens had a notion of sellers as a spiritual medium-there was a good deal of excitement about spiritualism then; he also had a notion of sellers leading a women's temperance crusade. we conceived the idea of sellers wanting to try, in the presence of the audience, how a man felt who had fallen, through drink. sellers was to end with a sort of corkscrew performance on the stage. he always wore a marvelous fire extinguisher, one of his inventions, strapped on his back, so in any sudden emergency, he could give proof of its effectiveness." in connection with the extinguisher, howells provided sellers with a pair of wings, which sellers declared would enable him to float around in any altitude where the flames might break out. the extinguisher, was not to be charged with water or any sort of liquid, but with greek fire, on the principle that like cures like; in other words, the building was to be inoculated with greek fire against the ordinary conflagration. of course the whole thing was as absurd as possible, and, reading the old manuscript to-day, one is impressed with the roaring humor of some of the scenes, and with the wild extravagance of the farce motive, not wholly warranted by the previous character of sellers, unless, indeed, he had gone stark mad. it is, in fact, sellers caricatured. the gentle, tender side of sellers--the best side--the side which clemens and howells themselves cared for most, is not there. chapter iii of mark twain's novel, the american claimant, contains a scene between colonel sellers and washington hawkins which presents the extravagance of the colonel's materialization scheme. it is a modified version of one of the scenes in the play, and is as amusing and unoffending as any. the authors' rollicking joy in their work convinced them that they had produced a masterpiece for which the public in general, and the actors in particular, were waiting. howells went back to boston tired out, but elate in the prospect of imminent fortune. cxlvi distinguished visitors meantime, while howells had been in hartford working at the play with clemens, matthew arnold had arrived in boston. on inquiring for howells, at his home, the visitor was told that he had gone to see mark twain. arnold was perhaps the only literary englishman left who had not accepted mark twain at his larger value. he seemed surprised and said: "oh, but he doesn't like that sort of thing, does he?" to which mrs. howells replied: "he likes mr. clemens very much, and he thinks him one of the greatest men he ever knew." arnold proceeded to hartford to lecture, and one night howells and clemens went to meet him at a reception. says howells: while his hand laxly held mine in greeting i saw his eyes fixed intensely on the other side of the room. "who--who in the world is that?" i looked and said, "oh, that is mark twain." i do not remember just how their instant encounter was contrived by arnold's wish; but i have the impression that they were not parted for long during the evening, and the next night arnold, as if still under the glamour of that potent presence, was at clemens's house. he came there to dine with the twichells and the rev. dr. edwin p. parker. dr. parker and arnold left together, and, walking quietly homeward, discussed the remarkable creature whose presence they had just left. clemens had been at his best that night--at his humorous best. he had kept a perpetual gale of laughter going, with a string of comment and anecdote of a kind which twichell once declared the world had never before seen and would never see again. arnold seemed dazed by it, unable to come out from under its influence. he repeated some of the things mark twain had said; thoughtfully, as if trying to analyze their magic. then he asked solemnly: "and is he never serious?" and dr. parker as solemnly answered: "mr. arnold, he is the most serious man in the world." dr. parker, recalling this incident, remembered also that protap chunder mazoomdar, a hindoo christian prelate of high rank, visited hartford in , and that his one desire was to meet mark twain. in some memoranda of this visit dr. parker has written: i said that mark twain was a friend of mine, and we would immediately go to his house. he was all eagerness, and i perceived that i had risen greatly in this most refined and cultivated gentleman's estimation. arriving at mr. clemens's residence, i promptly sought a brief private interview with my friend for his enlightenment concerning the distinguished visitor, after which they were introduced and spent a long while together. in due time mazoomdar came forth with mark's likeness and autograph, and as we walked away his whole air and manner seemed to say, with simeon of old, "lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace!" cxlvii the fortunes of a play howells is of the impression that the "claimant" play had been offered to other actors before raymond was made aware of it; but there are letters (to webster) which indicate that raymond was to see the play first, though clemens declares, in a letter of instruction, that he hopes raymond will not take it. then he says: why do i offer him the play at all? for these reasons: he plays that character well; there are not thirty actors in the country who can do it better; and, too, he has a sort of sentimental right to be offered the piece, though no moral, or legal, or other kind of right. therefore we do offer it to him; but only once, not twice. let us have no hemming and hawing; make short, sharp work of the business. i decline to have any correspondence with r. myself in any way. this was at the end of november, , while the play was still being revised. negotiations with raymond had already begun, though he does not appear to have actually seen the play during that theatrical season, and many and various were the attempts made to place it elsewhere; always with one result--that each actor or manager, in the end, declared it to be strictly a raymond play. the thing was hanging fire for nearly a year, altogether, while they were waiting on raymond, who had a profitable play, and was in no hurry for the recrudescence of sellers. howells tells how he eventually took the manuscript to raymond, whom he found "in a mood of sweet reasonableness" at one of osgood's luncheons. raymond said he could not do the play then, but was sure he would like it for the coming season, and in any case would be glad to read it. in due time raymond reported favorably on the play, at least so far as the first act was concerned, but he objected to the materialization feature and to sellers as claimant for the english earldom. he asked that these features be eliminated, or at least much ameliorated; but as these constituted the backbone and purpose of the whole play, clemens and howells decided that what was left would be hardly worth while. raymond finally agreed to try the play as it was in one of the larger towns --howells thinks in buffalo. a week later the manuscript came back to webster, who had general charge of the business negotiations, as indeed he had of all mark twain's affairs at this time, and with it a brief line: dear sir,--i have just finished rereading the play, and am convinced that in its present form it would not prove successful. i return the manuscript by express to your address. thanking you for your courtesy, i am, yours truly, john t. raymond. p.s.--if the play is altered and made longer i will be pleased to read it again. in his former letter raymond had declared that "sellers, while a very sanguine man, was not a lunatic, and no one but a lunatic could for a moment imagine that he had done such a work" (meaning the materialization). clearly raymond wanted a more serious presentation, something akin to his earlier success, and on the whole we can hardly blame him. but the authors had faith in their performance as it stood, and agreed they would make no change. finally a well-known elocutionist, named burbank, conceived the notion of impersonating raymond as well as sellers, making of it a sort of double burlesque, and agreed to take the play on those terms. burbank came to hartford and showed what he could do. howells and clemens agreed to give him the play, and they hired the old lyceum theater for a week, at seven hundred dollars, for its trial presentation. daniel frohman promoted it. clemens and howells went over the play and made some changes, but they were not as hilarious over it or as full of enthusiasm as they had been in the beginning. howells put in a night of suffering--long, dark hours of hot and cold waves of fear--and rising next morning from a tossing bed, wrote: "here's a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner. we are fools." clemens hurried over to boston to consult with howells, and in the end they agreed to pay the seven hundred dollars for the theater, take the play off and give burbank his freedom. but clemens's faith in it did not immediately die. howells relinquished all right and title in it, and clemens started it out with burbank and a traveling company, doing one-night stands, and kept it going for a week or more at his own expense. it never reached new york. "and yet," says howells, "i think now that if it had come it would have been successful. so hard does the faith of the unsuccessful dramatist die."--[this was as late as the spring of , at which time howells's faith in the play was exceedingly shaky. in one letter he wrote: "it is a lunatic that we have created, and while a lunatic in one act might amuse, i'm afraid that in three he would simply bore." and again: "as it stands, i believe the thing will fail, and it would be a disgrace to have it succeed."] cxlviii cable and his great joke meanwhile, with the completion of the sellers play clemens had flung himself into dramatic writing once more with a new and more violent impetuosity than ever. howells had hardly returned to boston when he wrote: now let's write a tragedy. the inclosed is not fancy, it is history; except that the little girl was a passing stranger, and not kin to any of the parties. i read the incident in carlyle's cromwell a year ago, and made a note in my note-book; stumbled on the note to-day, and wrote up the closing scene of a possible tragedy, to see how it might work. if we made this colonel a grand fellow, and gave him a wife to suit--hey? it's right in the big historical times--war; cromwell in big, picturesque power, and all that. come, let's do this tragedy, and do it well. curious, but didn't florence want a cromwell? but cromwell would not be the chief figure here. it was the closing scene of that pathetic passage in history from which he would later make his story, "the death disc." howells was too tired and too occupied to undertake immediately a new dramatic labor, so clemens went steaming ahead alone. my billiard-table is stacked up with books relating to the sandwich islands; the walls are upholstered with scraps of paper penciled with notes drawn from them. i have saturated myself with knowledge of that unimaginably beautiful land and that most strange and fascinating people. and i have begun a story. its hidden motive will illustrate a but-little considered fact in human nature: that the religious folly you are born in you will die in, no matter what apparently reasonabler religious folly may seem to have taken its place; meanwhile abolished and obliterated it. i start bill ragsdale at eleven years of age, and the heroine at four, in the midst of the ancient idolatrous system, with its picturesque and amazing customs and superstitions, three months before the arrival of the missionaries and--the erection of a shallow christianity upon the ruins of the old paganism. then these two will become educated christians and highly civilized. and then i will jump fifteen years and do ragsdale's leper business. when we come to dramatize, we can draw a deal of matter from the story, all ready to our hand. he made elaborate preparations for the sandwich islands story, which he and howells would dramatize later, and within the space of a few weeks he actually did dramatize 'the prince and the pauper' and 'tom sawyer', and was prodding webster to find proper actors or managers; stipulating at first severe and arbitrary terms, which were gradually modified, as one after another of the prospective customers found these dramatic wares unsuited to their needs. mark twain was one of the most dramatic creatures that ever lived, but he lacked the faculty of stage arrangement of the dramatic idea. it is one of the commonest defects in the literary make-up; also one of the hardest to realize and to explain. the winter of - was a gay one in the clemens home. henry irving was among those entertained, augustus saint-gaudens, aldrich and his wife, howells of course, and george w. cable. cable had now permanently left the south for the promised land which all authors of the south and west seek eventually, and had in due course made his way to hartford. clemens took cable's fortunes in hand, as he had done with many another, invited him to his home, and undertook to open negotiations with the american publishing company, of which frank bliss was now the manager, for the improvement of his fortunes. cable had been giving readings from his stories and had somewhere picked up the measles. he suddenly came down with the complaint during his visit to clemens, and his case was a violent one. it required the constant attendance of a trained nurse and one or two members of the household to pull him through. in the course of time he was convalescent, and when contagion was no longer to be feared guests were invited in for his entertainment. at one of these gatherings, cable produced a curious book, which he said had been lent to him by prof. francis bacon, of new haven, as a great rarity. it was a little privately printed pamphlet written by a southern youth, named s. watson wolston, a yale student of , and was an absurd romance of the hyperflorid, grandiloquent sort, entitled, "love triumphant, or the enemy conquered." its heroine's name was ambulinia, and its flowery, half-meaningless periods and impossible situations delighted clemens beyond measure. he begged cable to lend it to him, to read at the saturday morning club, declaring that he certainly must own the book, at whatever cost. henry c. robinson, who was present, remembered having seen a copy in his youth, and twichell thought he recalled such a book on sale in new haven during his college days. twichell said nothing as to any purpose in the matter; but somewhat later, being in new haven, he stepped into the old book-store and found the same proprietor, who remembered very well the book and its author. twichell rather fearfully asked if by any chance a copy of it might still be obtained. "well," was the answer, "i undertook to put my cellar in order the other day, and found about a cord of them down there. i think i can supply you." twichell took home six of the books at ten cents each, and on their first spring walk to talcott's tower casually mentioned to clemens the quest for the rare ambulinia. but clemens had given up the pursuit. new york dealers had reported no success in the matter. the book was no longer in existence. "what would you give for a copy?" asked. twichell. clemens became excited. "it isn't a question of price," he said; "that would be for the owner to set if i could find him." twichell drew a little package from his pocket. "well, mark," he said, "here are six copies of that book, to begin with. if that isn't enough, i can get you a wagon-load." it was enough. but it did not deter clemens in his purpose, which was to immortalize the little book by pointing out its peculiar charms. he did this later, and eventually included the entire story, with comments, in one of his own volumes. clemens and twichell did not always walk that spring. the early form of bicycle, the prehistoric high-wheel, had come into vogue, and they each got one and attempted its conquest. they practised in the early morning hours on farmington avenue, which was wide and smooth, and they had an instructor, a young german, who, after a morning or two, regarded mark twain helplessly and said: "mr. clemens, it's remarkable--you can fall off of a bicycle more different ways than the man that invented it." they were curious things, those old high-wheel machines. you were perched away up in the air, with the feeling that you were likely at any moment to strike a pebble or something that would fling you forward with damaging results. frequently that is what happened. the word "header" seems to have grown out of that early bicycling period. perhaps mark twain invented it. he had enough experience to do it. he always declared afterward that he invented all the new bicycle profanity that has since come into general use. once he wrote: there was a row of low stepping-stones across one end of the street, a measured yard apart. even after i got so i could steer pretty fairly i was so afraid of those stones that i always hit them. they gave me the worst falls i ever got in that street, except those which i got from dogs. i have seen it stated that no expert is quick enough to run over a dog; that a dog is always able to skip out of his way. i think that that may be true; but i think that the reason he couldn't run over the dog was because he was trying to. i did not try to run over any dog. but i ran over every dog that came along. i think it makes a great deal of difference. if you try to run over the dog he knows how to calculate, but if you are trying to miss him he does not know how to calculate, and is liable to jump the wrong way every time. it was always so in my experience. even when i could not hit a wagon i could hit a dog that came to see me practise. they all liked to see me practise, and they all came, for there was very little going on in our neighborhood to entertain a dog. he conquered, measurably, that old, discouraging thing, and he and twichell would go on excursions, sometimes as far as wethersfield or to the tower. it was a pleasant change, at least it was an interesting one; but bicycling on the high wheel was never a popular diversion with mark twain, and his enthusiasm in the sport had died before the "safety" came along. he had his machine sent out to elmira, but there were too many hills in chemung county, and after one brief excursion he came in, limping and pushing his wheel, and did not try it again. to return to cable. when the st of april ( ) approached he concluded it would be a good time to pay off his debt of gratitude for his recent entertainment in the clemens's home. he went to work at it systematically. he had a "private and confidential" circular letter printed, and he mailed it to one hundred and fifty of mark twain's literary friends in boston, hartford, springfield, new york, brooklyn, washington, and elsewhere, suggesting that they write to him, so that their letters would reach him simultaneously april st, asking for his autograph. no stamps or cards were to be inclosed for reply, and it was requested that "no stranger to mr. clemens and no minor" should take part. mrs. clemens was let into the secret, so that she would see to it that her husband did not reject his mail or commit it to the flames unopened. it would seem that every one receiving the invitation must have responded to it, for on the morning of april st a stupefying mass of letters was unloaded on mark twain's table. he did not know what to make of it, and mrs. clemens stood off to watch the results. the first one he opened was from dean sage, a friend whom he valued highly. sage wrote from brooklyn: dear clemens,--i have recently been asked by a young lady who unfortunately has a mania for autograph-collecting, but otherwise is a charming character, and comely enough to suit your fastidious taste, to secure for her the sign manual of the few distinguished persons fortunate enough to have my acquaintance. in enumerating them to her, after mentioning the names of geo. shepard page, joe michell, capt. isaiah ryndus, mr. willard, dan mace, and j. l. sullivan, i came to yours. "oh!" said she, "i have read all his works--little breeches, the heathen chinee, and the rest--and think them delightful. do oblige me by asking him for his autograph, preceded by any little sentiment that may occur to him, provided it is not too short." of course i promised, and hope you will oblige me by sending some little thing addressed to miss oakes. we are all pretty well at home just now, though indisposition has been among us for the past fortnight. with regards to mrs. clemens and the children, in which my wife joins, yours truly, dean sage. it amused and rather surprised him, and it fooled him completely; but when he picked up a letter from brander matthews, asking, in some absurd fashion, for his signature, and another from ellen terry, and from irving, and from stedman, and from warner, and waring, and h. c. bunner, and sarony, and laurence hutton, and john hay, and r. u. johnson, and modjeska, the size and quality of the joke began to overawe him. he was delighted, of course; for really it was a fine compliment, in its way, and most of the letters were distinctly amusing. some of them asked for autographs by the yard, some by the pound. henry irving said: i have just got back from a very late rehearsal-five o'clock--very tired--but there will be no rest till i get your autograph. some requested him to sit down and copy a few chapters from the innocents abroad for them or to send an original manuscript. others requested that his autograph be attached to a check of interesting size. john hay suggested that he copy a hymn, a few hundred lines of young's "night thoughts," and an equal amount of pollak's "course of time." i want my boy to form a taste for serious and elevated poetry, and it will add considerable commercial value to have them in your handwriting. altogether the reading of the letters gave him a delightful day, and his admiration for cable grew accordingly. cable, too, was pleased with the success of his joke, though he declared he would never risk such a thing again. a newspaper of the time reports him as saying: i never suffered so much agony as for a few days previous to the st of april. i was afraid the letters would reach mark when he was in affliction, in which case all of us would never have ceased flying to make it up to him. when i visited mark we used to open our budgets of letters together at breakfast. we used to sing out whenever we struck an autograph- hunter. i think the idea came from that. the first person i spoke to about it was robert underwood johnson, of the century. my most enthusiastic ally was the rev. henry ward beecher. we never thought it would get into the papers. i never played a practical joke before. i never will again, certainly. mark twain in those days did not encourage the regular autograph-collectors, and seldom paid any attention to their requests for his signature. he changed all this in later years, and kept a supply always on hand to satisfy every request; but in those earlier days he had no patience with collecting fads, and it required a particularly pleasing application to obtain his signature. cxlix mark twain in business samuel clemens by this time was definitely engaged in the publishing business. webster had a complete office with assistants at broadway, and had acquired a pretty thorough and practical knowledge of subscription publishing. he was a busy, industrious young man, tirelessly energetic, and with a good deal of confidence, by no means unnecessary to commercial success. he placed this mental and physical capital against mark twain's inspiration and financial backing, and the combination of charles l. webster & co. seemed likely to be a strong one. already, in the spring of ., webster had the new mark twain book, 'the adventures of huckleberry finn', well in hand, and was on the watch for promising subscription books by other authors. clemens, with his usual business vision and eye for results, with a generous disregard of detail, was supervising the larger preliminaries, and fulminating at the petty distractions and difficulties as they came along. certain plays he was trying to place were enough to keep him pretty thoroughly upset during this period, and proof-reading never added to his happiness. to howells he wrote: my days are given up to cursings, both loud and deep, for i am reading the 'huck finn' proofs. they don't make a very great many mistakes, but those that do occur are of a nature that make a man swear his teeth loose. whereupon howells promptly wrote him that he would help him out with the huck finn proofs for the pleasure of reading the story. clemens, among other things, was trying to place a patent grape-scissors, invented by howells's father, so that there was, in some degree, an equivalent for the heavy obligation. that it was a heavy one we gather from his fervent acknowledgment: it took my breath away, and i haven't recovered it yet, entirely--i mean the generosity of your proposal to read the proofs of huck finn. now, if you mean it, old man--if you are in earnest-proceed, in god's name, and be by me forever blessed. i can't conceive of a rational man deliberately piling such an atrocious job upon himself. but if there be such a man, and you be that man, pile it on. the proof-reading of 'the prince and the pauper' cost me the last rags of my religion. clemens decided to have the huckleberry finn book illustrated after his own ideas. he looked through the various comic papers to see if he could find the work of some new man that appealed to his fancy. in the pages of life he discovered some comic pictures illustrating the possibility of applying electrical burners to messenger boys, waiters, etc. the style and the spirit of these things amused him. he instructed webster to look up the artist, who proved to be a young man, e. w. kemble by name, later one of our foremost cartoonists. webster engaged kemble and put the manuscript in his hands. through the publication of certain chapters of huck finn in the century magazine, kemble was brought to the notice of its editors, who wrote clemens that they were profoundly indebted to him for unearthing "such a gem of an illustrator." clemens, encouraged and full of enthusiasm, now endeavored to interest himself in the practical details of manufacture, but his stock of patience was light and the details were many. his early business period resembles, in some of its features, his mining experience in esmeralda, his letters to webster being not unlike those to orion in that former day. they are much oftener gentle, considerate, even apologetic, but they are occasionally terse, arbitrary, and profane. it required effort for him to be entirely calm in his business correspondence. a criticism of one of webster's assistants will serve as an example of his less quiet method: charley, your proof-reader, is an idiot; and not only an idiot, but blind; and not only blind, but partly dead. of course, one must regard many of mark twain's business aspects humorously. to consider them otherwise is to place him in a false light altogether. he wore himself out with his anxieties and irritations; but that even he, in the midst of his furies, saw the humor of it all is sufficiently evidenced by the form of his savage phrasing. there were few things that did not amuse him, and certainly nothing amused more, or oftener, than himself. it is proper to add a detail in evidence of a business soundness which he sometimes manifested. he had observed the methods of bliss and osgood, and had drawn his conclusions. in the beginning of the huck finn canvass he wrote webster: keep it diligently in mind that we don't issue till we have made a big sale. get at your canvassing early and drive it with all your might, with an intent and purpose of issuing on the th or th of next december (the best time in the year to tumble a big pile into the trade); but if we haven't , subscriptions we simply postpone publication till we've got them. it is a plain, simple policy, and would have saved both of my last books if it had been followed. [that is to say, 'the prince and the pauper' and the mississippi book, neither of which had sold up to his expectations on the initial canvass.] cl farm pictures gerhardt returned from paris that summer, after three years of study, a qualified sculptor. he was prepared to take commissions, and came to elmira to model a bust of his benefactor. the work was finished after four or five weeks of hard effort and pronounced admirable; but gerhardt, attempting to make a cast one morning, ruined it completely. the family gathered round the disaster, which to them seemed final, but the sculptor went immediately to work, and in an amazingly brief time executed a new bust even better than the first, an excellent piece of modeling and a fine likeness. it was decided that a cut of it should be used as a frontispiece for the new book, the adventures of huckleberry finn. clemens was at this time giving the final readings to the huck finn pages, a labor in which mrs. clemens and the children materially assisted. in the childish biography which susy began of her father, a year later, she says: ever since papa and mama were married papa has written his books and then taken them to mama in manuscript, and she has expurgated --[susy's spelling is preserved]--them. papa read huckleberry finn to us in manuscript,--[probably meaning proof.]--just before it came out, and then he would leave parts of it with mama to expurgate, while he went off to the study to work, and sometimes clara and i would be sitting with mama while she was looking the manuscript over, and i remember so well, with what pangs of regret we used to see her turn down the leaves of the pages, which meant that some delightfully terrible part must be scratched out. and i remember one part pertickularly which was perfectly fascinating it was so terrible, that clara and i used to delight in and oh, with what despair we saw mama turn down the leaf on which it was written, we thought the book would almost be ruined without it. but we gradually came to think as mama did. commenting on this phase of huck's evolution mark twain has since written: i remember the special case mentioned by susy, and can see the group yet--two-thirds of it pleading for the life of the culprit sentence that was so fascinatingly dreadful, and the other third of it patiently explaining why the court could not grant the prayer of the pleaders; but i do not remember what the condemned phrase was. it had much company, and they all went to the gallows; but it is possible that that especially dreadful one which gave those little people so much delight was cunningly devised and put into the book for just that function, and not with any hope or expectation that it would get by the "expergator" alive. it is possible, for i had that custom. little jean was probably too youthful yet to take part in that literary arbitration. she was four, and had more interest in cows. in some memoranda which her father kept of that period--the "children's book"--he says: she goes out to the barn with one of us every evening toward six o'clock, to look at the cows--which she adores--no weaker word can express her feeling for them. she sits rapt and contented while david milks the three, making a remark now and then--always about the cows. the time passes slowly and drearily for her attendant, but not for her. she could stand a week of it. when the milking is finished, and "blanche," "jean," and "the cross cow" are turned into the adjoining little cow-lot, we have to set jean on a shed in that lot, and stay by her half an hour, till eliza, the german nurse, comes to take her to bed. the cows merely stand there, and do nothing; yet the mere sight of them is all-sufficient for jean. she requires nothing more. the other evening, after contemplating them a long time, as they stood in the muddy muck chewing the cud, she said, with deep and reverent appreciation, "ain't this a sweet little garden?" yesterday evening our cows (after being inspected and worshiped by jean from the shed for an hour) wandered off down into the pasture and left her bereft. i thought i was going to get back home, now, but that was an error. jean knew of some more cows in a field somewhere, and took my hand and led me thitherward. when we turned the corner and took the right-hand road, i saw that we should presently be out of range of call and sight; so i began to argue against continuing the expedition, and jean began to argue in favor of it, she using english for light skirmishing and german for "business." i kept up my end with vigor, and demolished her arguments in detail, one after the other, till i judged i had her about cornered. she hesitated a moment, then answered up, sharply: "wir werden nichts mehr daruber sprechen!" (we won't talk any more about it.) it nearly took my breath away, though i thought i might possibly have misunderstood. i said: "why, you little rascal! was hast du gesagt?" but she said the same words over again, and in the same decided way. i suppose i ought to have been outraged, but i wasn't; i was charmed. his own note-books of that summer are as full as usual, but there are fewer literary ideas and more philosophies. there was an excitement, just then, about the trichina germ in pork, and one of his memoranda says: i think we are only the microscopic trichina concealed in the blood of some vast creature's veins, and that it is that vast creature whom god concerns himself about and not us. and there is another which says: people, in trying to justify eternity, say we can put it in by learning all the knowledge acquired by the inhabitants of the myriads of stars. we sha'n't need that. we could use up two eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world, and the thousands of nations that have risen, and flourished, and vanished from it. mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years. he records an incident which he related more fully in a letter to howells: before i forget it i must tell you that mrs. clemens has said a bright thing. a drop-letter came to me asking me to lecture here for a church debt. i began to rage over the exceedingly cool wording of the request, when mrs. clemens said: "i think i know that church, and, if so, this preacher is a colored man; he doesn't know how to write a polished letter. how should he?" my manner changed so suddenly and so radically that mrs. c. said: "i will give you a motto, and it will be useful to you if you will adopt it: 'consider every man colored till he is proved white.'" it is dern good, i think. one of the note-books contains these entries: talking last night about home matters, i said, "i wish i had said to george when we were leaving home, 'now, george, i wish you would take advantage of these three or four months' idle time while i am away----'" "to learn to let my matches alone," interrupted livy. the very words i was going to use. yet george had not been mentioned before, nor his peculiarities. several years ago i said: "suppose i should live to be ninety-two, and just as i was dying a messenger should enter and say----" "you are become earl of durham," interrupted livy. the very words i was going to utter. yet there had not been a word said about the earl, or any other person, nor had there been any conversation calculated to suggest any such subject. cli mark twain mugwumps the republican presidential nomination of james g. blaine resulted in a political revolt such as the nation had not known. blaine was immensely popular, but he had many enemies in his own party. there were strong suspicions of his being connected with doubtful financiering-enterprises, more or less sensitive to official influence, and while these scandals had become quieted a very large portion of the republican constituency refused to believe them unjustified. what might be termed the intellectual element of republicanism was against blame: george william curtis, charles dudley warner, james russell lowell, henry ward beecher, thomas nast, the firm of harper & brothers, joseph w. hawley, joseph twichell, mark twain--in fact the majority of thinking men who held principle above party in their choice. on the day of the chicago nomination, henry c. robinson, charles e. perkins, edward m. bunce, f. g. whitmore, and samuel c. dunham were collected with mark twain in his billiard-room, taking turns at the game and discussing the political situation, with george, the colored butler, at the telephone down-stairs to report the returns as they came in. as fast as the ballot was received at the political headquarters down-town, it was telephoned up to the house and george reported it through the speaking-tube. the opposition to blaine in the convention was so strong that no one of the assembled players seriously expected his nomination. what was their amazement, then, when about mid-afternoon george suddenly announced through the speaking-tube that blaine was the nominee. the butts of the billiard cues came down on the floor with a bump, and for a moment the players were speechless. then henry robinson said: "it's hard luck to have to vote for that man." clemens looked at him under his heavy brows. "but--we don't--have to vote for him," he said. "do you mean to say that you're not going to vote for him?" "yes, that is what i mean to say. i am not going to vote for him." there was a general protest. most of those assembled declared that when a party's representatives chose a man one must stand by him. they might choose unwisely, but the party support must be maintained. clemens said: "no party holds the privilege of dictating to me how i shall vote. if loyalty to party is a form of patriotism, i am no patriot. if there is any valuable difference between a monarchist and an american, it lies in the theory that the american can decide for himself what is patriotic and what isn't. i claim that difference. i am the only person in the sixty millions that is privileged to dictate my patriotism." there was a good deal of talk back and forth, and, in the end, most of those there present remained loyal to blaine. general hawley and his paper stood by blaine. warner withdrew from his editorship of the courant and remained neutral. twichell stood with clemens and came near losing his pulpit by it. open letters were published in the newspapers about him. it was a campaign when politics divided neighbors, families, and congregations. if we except the civil war period, there never had been a more rancorous political warfare than that waged between the parties of james g. blaine and grover cleveland in . that howells remained true to blaine was a grief to clemens. he had gone to the farm with howells on his political conscience and had written fervent and imploring letters on the subject. as late as september th, he said: somehow i can't seem to rest quiet under the idea of your voting for blaine. i believe you said something about the country and the party. certainly allegiance to these is well, but certainly a man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor; the party and country come second to that, and never first. i don't ask you to vote at all. i only urge you not to soil yourself by voting for blaine.... don't be offended; i mean no offense. i am not concerned about the rest of the nation, but well, good-by. yours ever, mark. beyond his prayerful letters to howells, clemens did not greatly concern himself with politics on the farm, but, returning to hartford, he went vigorously into the campaign, presided, as usual, at mass-meetings, and made political speeches which invited the laughter of both parties, and were universally quoted and printed without regard to the paper's convictions. it was during one such speech as this that, in the course of his remarks, a band outside came marching by playing patriotic music so loudly as to drown his voice. he waited till the band got by, but by the time he was well under way again another band passed, and once more he was obliged to wait till the music died away in the distance. then he said, quite serenely: "you will find my speech, without the music, in the morning paper." in introducing carl schurz at a great mugwump mass-meeting at hartford, october , ., he remarked that he [clemens] was the only legitimately elected officer, and was expected to read a long list of vice-presidents; but he had forgotten all about it, and he would ask all the gentlemen there, of whatever political complexion, to do him a great favor by acting as vice-presidents. then he said: as far as my own political change of heart is concerned, i have not been convinced by any democratic means. the opinion i hold of mr. blaine is due to the comments of the republican press before the nomination. not that they have said bitter or scandalous things, because republican papers are above that, but the things they said did not seem to be complimentary, and seemed to me to imply editorial disapproval of mr. blame and the belief that he was not qualified to be president of the united states. it is just a little indelicate for me to be here on this occasion before an assemblage of voters, for the reason that the ablest newspaper in colorado--the ablest newspaper in the world--has recently nominated me for president. it is hardly fit for me to preside at a discussion of the brother candidate, but the best among us will do the most repulsive things the moment we are smitten with a presidential madness. if i had realized that this canvass was to turn on the candidate's private character i would have started that colorado paper sooner. i know the crimes that can be imputed and proved against me can be told on the fingers of your hands. this cannot be said of any other presidential candidate in the field. inasmuch as the blaine-cleveland campaign was essentially a campaign of scurrility, this touch was loudly applauded. mark twain voted for grover cleveland, though up to the very eve of election he was ready to support a republican nominee in whom he had faith, preferably edmunds, and he tried to inaugurate a movement by which edmunds might be nominated as a surprise candidate and sweep the country. it was probably dr. burchard's ill-advised utterance concerning the three alleged r's of democracy, "rum, romanism, and rebellion," that defeated blaine, and by some strange, occult means mark twain's butler george got wind of this damning speech before it became news on the streets of hartford. george had gone with his party, and had a considerable sum of money wagered on blaine's election; but he knew it was likely to be very close, and he had an instant and deep conviction that these three fatal words and blaine's failure to repudiate them meant the candidate's downfall. he immediately abandoned everything in the shape of household duties, and within the briefest possible time had changed enough money to make him safe, and leave him a good margin of winnings besides, in the event of blame's defeat. this was evening. a very little later the news of blaine's blunder, announced from the opera-house stage, was like the explosion of a bomb. but it was no news to george, who went home rejoicing with his enemies. clii platforming with cable the drain of many investments and the establishment of a publishing house had told heavily on clemens's finances. it became desirable to earn a large sum of money with as much expedition as possible. authors' readings had become popular, and clemens had read in philadelphia and boston with satisfactory results. he now conceived the idea of a grand tour of authors as a commercial enterprise. he proposed to aldrich, howells, and cable that he charter a private car for the purpose, and that with their own housekeeping arrangements, cooking, etc., they could go swinging around the circuit, reaping, a golden harvest. he offered to be general manager of the expedition, the impresario as it were, and agreed to guarantee the others not less than seventy-five dollars a day apiece as their net return from the "circus," as he called it. howells and aldrich liked well enough to consider it as an amusing prospect, but only cable was willing to realize it. he had been scouring the country on his own account, and he was willing enough to join forces with mark twain. clemens detested platforming, but the idea of reading from his books or manuscript for some reason seemed less objectionable, and, as already stated, the need of much money had become important. he arranged with j. b. pond for the business side of the expedition, though in reality he was its proprietor. the private-car idea was given up, but he employed cable at a salary of four hundred and fifty dollars a week and expenses, and he paid pond a commission. perhaps, without going any further, we may say that the tour was a financial success, and yielded a large return of the needed funds. clemens and cable had a pleasant enough time, and had it not been for the absence from home and the disagreeableness of railway travel, there would have been little to regret. they were a curiously associated pair. cable was orthodox in his religion, devoted to sunday-school, bible reading, and church affairs in general. clemens--well, clemens was different. on the first evening of their tour, when the latter was comfortably settled in bed with an entertaining book, cable appeared with his bible, and proceeded to read a chapter aloud. clemens made no comment, and this went on for an evening or two more. then he said: "see here, cable, we'll have to cut this part of the program out. you can read the bible as much as you please so long as you don't read it to me." cable retired courteously. he had a keen sense of humor, and most things that mark twain did, whether he approved or not, amused him. cable did not smoke, but he seemed always to prefer the smoking compartment when they traveled, to the more respectable portions of the car. one day clemens sand to him: "cable, why do you sit in here? you don't smoke, and you know i always smoke, and sometimes swear." cable said, "i know, mark, i don't do these things, but i can't help admiring the way you do them." when sunday came it was mark twain's great happiness to stay in bed all day, resting after his week of labor; but cable would rise, bright and chipper, dress himself in neat and suitable attire, and visit the various churches and sunday-schools in town, usually making a brief address at each, being always invited to do so. it seems worth while to include one of the clemens-cable programs here --a most satisfactory one. they varied it on occasion, and when they were two nights in a place changed it completely, but the program here given was the one they were likely to use after they had proved its worth: program richling's visit to kate riley geo. w. cable king sollermun mark twain (a) kate riley and ristofolo (b) narcisse in mourning for "lady byron" (c) mary's night ride geo. w. cable (a) tragic tale of the fishwife (b) a trying situation (c) a ghost story mark twain at a mark twain memorial meeting (november , ), where the few who were left of his old companions told over quaint and tender memories, george cable recalled their reading days together and told of mark twain's conscientious effort to do his best, to be worthy of himself, regardless of all other concerns. he told how when they had been traveling for a while clemens seemed to realize that he was only giving the audience nonsense; making them laugh at trivialities which they would forget before they had left the entertainment hall. cable said that up to that time he had supposed clemens's chief thought was the entertainment of the moment, and that if the audience laughed he was satisfied. he told how he had sat in the wings, waiting his turn, and heard the tides of laughter gather and roll forward and break against the footlights, time and time again, and how he had believed his colleague to be glorying in that triumph. what was his surprise, then, on the way to the hotel in the carriage, when clemens groaned and seemed writhing in spirit and said: "oh, cable, i am demeaning myself. i am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon. it's ghastly. i can't endure it any longer." cable added that all that night and the next day mark twain devoted himself to the study and rehearsal of selections which were justified not only as humor, but as literature and art. a good many interesting and amusing things would happen on such a tour. many of these are entirely forgotten, of course, but of others certain memoranda have been preserved. grover cleveland had been elected when they set out on their travels, but was still holding his position in albany as governor of new york. when they reached albany cable and clemens decided to call on him. they drove to the capitol and were shown into the governor's private office. cleveland made them welcome, and, after greetings, said to clemens: "mr. clemens, i was a fellow-citizen of yours in buffalo a good many months some years ago, but you never called on me then. how do you explain this?" clemens said: "oh, that is very simple to answer, your excellency. in buffalo you were a sheriff. i kept away from the sheriff as much as possible, but you're governor now, and on the way to the presidency. it's worth while coming to see you." clemens meantime had been resting, half sitting, on the corner of the executive desk. he leaned back a little, and suddenly about a dozen young men opened various doors, filed in and stood at attention, as if waiting for orders. no one spoke for a moment; then the governor said to this collection of attendants: "you are dismissed, young gentlemen. your services are not required. mr. clemens is sitting on the bells." in buffalo, when clemens appeared on the stage, he leisurely considered the audience for a moment; then he said: "i miss a good many faces. they have gone--gone to the tomb, to the gallows, or to the white house. all of us are entitled to at least one of these distinctions, and it behooves us to be wise and prepare for all." on thanksgiving eve the readers were in morristown, new jersey, where they were entertained by thomas nast. the cartoonist prepared a quiet supper for them and they remained overnight in the nast home. they were to leave next morning by an early train, and mrs. nast had agreed to see that they were up in due season. when she woke next morning there seemed a strange silence in the house and she grew suspicious. going to the servants' room, she found them sleeping soundly. the alarm-clock in the back hall had stopped at about the hour the guests retired. the studio clock was also found stopped; in fact, every timepiece on the premises had retired from business. clemens had found that the clocks interfered with his getting to sleep, and he had quieted them regardless of early trains and reading engagements. on being accused of duplicity he said: "well, those clocks were all overworked, anyway. they will feel much better for a night's rest." a few days later nast sent him a caricature drawing--a picture which showed mark twain getting rid of the offending clocks. at christmas-time they took a fortnight's holiday and clemens went home to hartford. a surprise was awaiting him there. mrs. clemens had made an adaptation of 'the prince and the pauper' play, and the children of the neighborhood had prepared a presentation of it for his special delectation. he knew, on his arrival home, that something mysterious was in progress, for certain rooms were forbidden him; but he had no inkling of their plan until just before the performance--when he was led across the grounds to george warner's home, into the large room there where it was to be given, and placed in a seat directly in front of the stage. gerhardt had painted the drop-curtain, and assisted in the general construction of scenery and effects. the result was really imposing; but presently, when the curtain rose and the guest of honor realized what it was all about, and what they had undertaken for his pleasure, he was deeply moved and supremely gratified. there was but one hitch in the performance. there is a place where the prince says, "fathers be alike, mayhap; mine hath not a doll's temper." this was susy's part, and as she said it the audience did not fail to remember its literal appropriateness. there was a moment's silence, then a titter, followed by a roar of laughter, in which everybody but the little actors joined. they did not see the humor and were disturbed and grieved. curiously enough, mrs clemens herself, in arranging and casting the play, had not considered the possibility of this effect. the parts were all daintily played. the children wore their assumed personalities as if native to them. daisy warner played the part of tom canty, clara clemens was lady jane grey. it was only the beginning of the prince and the pauper productions. the play was repeated, clemens assisting, adding to the parts, and himself playing the role of miles hendon. in her childish biography susy says: papa had only three days to learn the part in, but still we were all sure that he could do it. the scene that he acted in was the scene between miles hendon and the prince, the "prithee, pour the water" scene. i was the prince and papa and i rehearsed together two or three times a day for the three days before the appointed evening. papa acted his part beautifully, and he added to the scene, making it a good deal longer. he was inexpressibly funny, with his great slouch hat and gait----oh such a gait! papa made the miles hendon scene a splendid success and every one was delighted with the scene, and papa too. we had great fun with our "prince and pauper," and i think we none of us shall forget how immensely funny papa was in it. he certainly could have been an actor as well as an author. the holidays over, cable and clemens were off on the circuit again. at rochester an incident happened which led to the writing of one of mark twain's important books, 'a connecticut yankee at king arthur's court'. clemens and cable had wandered into a book-store for the purpose of finding something to read. pulling over some volumes on one of the tables, clemens happened to pick up a little green, cloth-bound book, and after looking at the title turned the pages rather curiously and with increasing interest. "cable," he said, "do you know anything about this book, the arthurian legends of sir thomas malory, morte arthure?" cable answered: "mark, that is one of the most beautiful books in the world. let me buy it for you. you will love it more than any book you ever read." so clemens came to know the old chronicler's version of the rare round table legends, and from that first acquaintance with them to the last days of his life seldom let the book go far from him. he read and reread those quaint, stately tales and reverenced their beauty, while fairly reveling in the absurdities of that ancient day. sir ector's lament he regarded as one of the most simply beautiful pieces of writing in the english tongue, and some of the combats and quests as the most ridiculous absurdities in romance. presently he conceived the idea of linking that day, with its customs, costumes, and abuses, with the progress of the present, or carrying back into that age of magicians and armor and superstition and cruelties a brisk american of progressive ideas who would institute reforms. his note-book began to be filled with memoranda of situations and possibilities for the tale he had in mind. these were vague, unformed fancies as yet, and it would be a long time before the story would become a fact. this was the first entry: dream of being a knight-errant in armor in the middle ages. have the notions and habits, though, of the present day mixed with the necessities of that. no pockets in the armor. no way to manage certain requirements of nature. can't scratch. cold in the head and can't blow. can't get a handkerchief; can't use iron sleeve; iron gets red-hot in the sun; leaks in the rain; gets white with frost and freezes me solid in winter; makes disagreeable clatter when i enter church. can't dress or undress myself. always getting struck by lightning. fall down and can't get up. twenty-one years later, discussing the genesis of the story, he said: "as i read those quaint and curious old legends i suppose i naturally contrasted those days with ours, and it made me curious to fancy what might be the picturesque result if we could dump the nineteenth century down into the sixth century and observe the consequences." the reading tour continued during the first two months of the new year and carried them as far west as chicago. they read in hannibal and keokuk, and clemens spent a day in the latter place with his mother, now living with orion, brisk and active for her years and with her old-time force of character. mark twain, arranging for her keokuk residence, had written: ma wants to board with you, and pay her board. she will pay you $ a month (she wouldn't pay a cent more in heaven; she is obstinate on this point), and as long as she remains with you and is content i will add $ a month to the sum perkins already sends you. jane clemens attended the keokuk reading, and later, at home, when her children asked her if she could still dance, she rose, and at eighty-one tripped as lightly as a girl. it was the last time that mark twain ever saw his mother in the health and vigor which had been always so much a part of her personality. clemens saw another relative on that trip; in st. louis, james lampton, the original of colonel sellers, called. he was become old and white-headed, but he entered to me in the same old breezy way of his earlier life, and he was all there, yet--not a detail wanting: the happy light in his eye, the abounding hope in his heart, the persuasive tongue, the miracle-breeding imagination--they were all there; and before i could turn around he was polishing up his aladdin's lamp and flashing the secret riches of the world before me. i said to myself: "i did not overdraw him by a shade, i set him down as he was; and he is the same man to-day. cable will recognize him." clemens opened the door into cable's room and allowed the golden dream-talk to float in. it was of a "small venture" which the caller had undertaken through his son. "only a little thing--a mere trifle--a bagatelle. i suppose there's a couple of millions in it, possibly three, but not more, i think; still, for a boy, you know----" it was the same old cousin jim. later, when he had royally accepted some tickets for the reading and bowed his exit, cable put his head in at the door. "that was colonel sellers," he said. cliii huck finn comes into his own in the december century ( ) appeared a chapter from 'the adventures of huckleberry finn', "the grangerford-shepherdson feud," a piece of writing which edmund clarence stederian, brander matthews, and others promptly ranked as among mark twain's very best; when this was followed, in the january number, by "king sollermun," a chapter which in its way delighted quite as many readers, the success of the new book was accounted certain. --[stedman, writing to clemens of this instalment, said: "to my mind it is not only the most finished and condensed thing you have done but as dramatic and powerful an episode as i know in modern literature."] 'the adventures of huckleberry finn' was officially published in england and america in december, , but the book was not in the canvassers' hands for delivery until february. by this time the orders were approximately for forty thousand copies, a number which had increased to fifty thousand a few weeks later. webster's first publication venture was in the nature of a triumph. clemens wrote to him march th: "your news is splendid. huck certainly is a success." he felt that he had demonstrated his capacity as a general director and webster had proved his efficiency as an executive. he had no further need of an outside publisher. the story of huck finn will probably stand as the best of mark twain's purely fictional writings. a sequel to tom sawyer, it is greater than its predecessor; greater artistically, though perhaps with less immediate interest for the juvenile reader. in fact, the books are so different that they are not to be compared--wherein lies the success of the later one. sequels are dangerous things when the story is continuous, but in huckleberry finn the story is a new one, wholly different in environment, atmosphere, purpose, character, everything. the tale of huck and nigger jim drifting down the mighty river on a raft, cross-secting the various primitive aspects of human existence, constitutes one of the most impressive examples of picaresque fiction in any language. it has been ranked greater than gil blas, greater even than don quixote; certainly it is more convincing, more human, than either of these tales. robert louis stevenson once wrote, "it is a book i have read four times, and am quite ready to begin again to-morrow." it is by no means a flawless book, though its defects are trivial enough. the illusion of huck as narrator fails the least bit here and there; the "four dialects" are not always maintained; the occasional touch of broad burlesque detracts from the tale's reality. we are inclined to resent this. we never wish to feel that huck is anything but a real character. we want him always the huck who was willing to go to hell if necessary, rather than sacrifice nigger jim; the huck who watched the river through long nights, and, without caring to explain why, felt his soul go out to the sunrise. two or three days and nights went by; i reckon i might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. here is the way we put in the time. it was a monstrous big river down there --sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as the night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up--nearly always in the dead water under a towhead; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows and hid the raft with them. then we set out the lines. next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. not a sound anywheres--perfectly still--just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe. the first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line--that was the woods on t'other side, you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn't black anymore, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away--trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks--rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by- and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a wood-yard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers.... and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it! this is the huck we want, and this is the huck we usually have, and that the world has long been thankful for. take the story as a whole, it is a succession of startling and unique pictures. the cabin in the swamp which huck and his father used together in their weird, ghastly relationship; the night adventure with jim on the wrecked steamboat; huck's night among the towheads; the grangerford-shepherdson battle; the killing of boggs--to name a few of the many vivid presentations--these are of no time or literary fashion and will never lose their flavor nor their freshness so long as humanity itself does not change. the terse, unadorned grangerford-shepherdson episode--built out of the darnell--watson feuds--[see life on the mississippi, chap. xxvi. mark twain himself, as a cub pilot, came near witnessing the battle he describes.]--is simply classic in its vivid casualness, and the same may be said of almost every incident on that long river-drift; but this is the strength, the very essence of picaresque narrative. it is the way things happen in reality; and the quiet, unexcited frame of mind in which huck is prompted to set them down would seem to be the last word in literary art. to huck, apparently, the killing of boggs and colonel sherburn's defiance of the mob are of about the same historical importance as any other incidents of the day's travel. when colonel sherburn threw his shotgun across his arm and bade the crowd disperse huck says: the crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all apart and went tearing off every which way, and buck harkness he heeled it after them, looking tolerable cheap. i could a staid if i'd a wanted to, but i didn't want to. i went to the circus, and loafed around the back side till the watchman went by, and then dived in under the tent. that is all. no reflections, no hysterics; a murder and a mob dispersed, all without a single moral comment. and when the shepherdsons had got done killing the grangerfords, and huck had tugged the two bodies ashore and covered buck grangerford's face with a handkerchief, crying a little because buck had been good to him, he spent no time in sentimental reflection or sermonizing, but promptly hunted up jim and the raft and sat down to a meal of corn-dodgers, buttermilk, pork and cabbage, and greens: there ain't nothing in the world so good, when it is cooked right; and while i eat my supper we talked, and had a good time. i was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was jim to get away from the swamp. we said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't; you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft. it was huck finn's morality that caused the book to be excluded from the concord library, and from other libraries here and there at a later day. the orthodox mental attitude of certain directors of juvenile literature could not condone huck's looseness in the matter of statement and property rights, and in spite of new england traditions, massachusetts librarians did not take any too kindly to his uttered principle that, after thinking it over and taking due thought on the deadly sin of abolition, he had decided that he'd go to hell rather than give jim over to slavery. poor vagrant ben blankenship, hiding his runaway negro in an illinois swamp, could not dream that his humanity would one day supply the moral episode of an immortal book. able critics have declared that the psychology of huck finn is the book's large feature: huck's moral point of view--the struggle between his heart and his conscience concerning the sin of jim's concealment, and his final decision of self-sacrifice. time may show that as an epic of the river, the picture of a vanished day, it will rank even greater. the problems of conscience we have always with us, but periods once passed are gone forever. certainly huck's loyalty to that lovely soul nigger jim was beautiful, though after all it may not have been so hard for huck, who could be loyal to anything. huck was loyal to his father, loyal to tom sawyer of course, loyal even to those two river tramps and frauds, the king and the duke, for whom he lied prodigiously, only weakening when a new and livelier loyalty came into view--loyalty to mary wilks. the king and the duke, by the way, are not elsewhere matched in fiction. the duke was patterned after a journeyman-printer clemens had known in virginia city, but the king was created out of refuse from the whole human family--"all tears and flapdoodle," the very ultimate of disrepute and hypocrisy--so perfect a specimen that one must admire, almost love, him. "hain't we all the fools in town on our side? and ain't that a big enough majority in any town?" he asks in a critical moment--a remark which stamps him as a philosopher of classic rank. we are full of pity at last when this pair of rapscallions ride out of the history on a rail, and feel some of huck's inclusive loyalty and all the sorrowful truth of his comment: "human beings can be awful cruel to one another." the "poor old king" huck calls him, and confesses how he felt "ornery and humble and to blame, somehow," for the old scamp's misfortunes. "a person's conscience ain't got no sense," he says, and huck is never more real to us, or more lovable, than in that moment. huck is what he is because, being made so, he cannot well be otherwise. he is a boy throughout--such a boy as mark twain had known and in some degree had been. one may pettily pick a flaw here and there in the tale's construction if so minded, but the moral character of huck himself is not open to criticism. and indeed any criticism of this the greatest of mark twain's tales of modern life would be as the mere scratching of the granite of an imperishable structure. huck finn is a monument that no puny pecking will destroy. it is built of indestructible blocks of human nature; and if the blocks do not always fit, and the ornaments do not always agree, we need not fear. time will blur the incongruities and moss over the mistakes. the edifice will grow more beautiful with the years. cliv the memoirs of general grant the success of huck finn, though sufficiently important in itself, prepared the way for a publishing venture by the side of which it dwindled to small proportions. one night (it was early in november, ), when cable and clemens had finished a reading at chickering hall, clemens, coming out into the wet blackness, happened to hear richard watson gilder's voice say to some unseen companion: "do you know general grant has actually determined to write his memoirs and publish them. he has said so to-day, in so many words." of course clemens was immediately interested. it was the thing he had proposed to grant some three years previously, during his call that day with howells concerning the toronto consulship. with mrs. clemens, he promptly overtook gilder and accompanied him to his house, where they discussed the matter in its various particulars. gilder said that the century editors had endeavored to get grant to contribute to their war series, but that not until his financial disaster, as a member of the firm of grant & ward, had he been willing to consider the matter. he said that grant now welcomed the idea of contributing three papers to the series, and that the promised payment of five hundred dollars each for these articles had gladdened his heart and relieved him of immediate anxiety.--[somewhat later the century company, voluntarily, added liberally to this sum.] gilder added that general grant seemed now determined to continue his work until he had completed a book, though this at present was only a prospect. clemens was in the habit of calling on grant, now and then, to smoke a cigar with him, and he dropped in next morning to find out just how far the book idea had developed, and what were the plans of publication. he found the general and his son, colonel fred grant, discussing some memoranda, which turned out to be a proposition from the century company for the book publication of his memoirs. clemens asked to be allowed to look over the proposed terms, and when he had done so he said: "general, it is clear that the century people do not realize the importance--the commercial magnitude of your book. it is not strange that this is true, for they are comparatively new publishers and have had little or no experience with books of this class. the terms they propose indicate that they expect to sell five, possibly ten thousand copies. a book from your hand, telling the story of your life and battles, should sell not less than a quarter of a million, perhaps twice that sum. it should be sold only by subscription, and you are entitled to double the royalty here proposed. i do not believe it is to your interest to conclude this contract without careful thought and investigation. write to the american publishing company at hartford and see what they will do for you." but grant demurred. he said that, while no arrangements had been made with the century company, he thought it only fair and right that they should have the book on reasonable terms; certainly on terms no greater than he could obtain elsewhere. he said that, all things being equal, the book ought to go to the man who had first suggested it to him. clemens spoke up: "general, if that is so, it belongs to me." grant did not understand until clemens recalled to him how he had urged him, in that former time, to write his memoirs; had pleaded with him, agreeing to superintend the book's publication. then he said: "general, i am publishing my own book, and by the time yours is ready it is quite possible that i shall have the best equipped subscription establishment in the country. if you will place your book with my firm --and i feel that i have at least an equal right in the consideration--i will pay you twenty per cent. of the list price, or, if you prefer, i will give you seventy per cent. of the net returns and i will pay all office expenses out of my thirty per cent." general grant was really grieved at this proposal. it seemed to him that here was a man who was offering to bankrupt himself out of pure philanthropy--a thing not to be permitted. he intimated that he had asked the century company president, roswell smith, a careful-headed business man, if he thought his book would pay as well as sherman's, which the scribners had published at a profit to sherman of twenty-five thousand dollars, and that smith had been unwilling to guarantee that amount to the author.--[mark twain's note-book, under date of march, , contains this memorandum: "roswell smith said to me: 'i'm glad you got the book, mr. clemens; glad there was somebody with courage enough to take it, under the circumstances. what do you think the general wanted to require of me?' "'he wanted me to insure a sale of twenty-five thousand sets of his book. i wouldn't risk such a guarantee on any book that was ever published.'" yet roswell smith, not so many years later, had so far enlarged his views of subscription publishing that he fearlessly and successfully invested a million dollars or more in a dictionary, regardless of the fact that the market was already thought to be supplied.] clemens said: "general, i have my check-book with me. i will draw you a check now for twenty-five thousand dollars for the first volume of your memoirs, and will add a like amount for each volume you may write as an advance royalty payment, and your royalties will continue right along when this amount has been reached." colonel fred grant now joined in urging that matters be delayed, at least until more careful inquiry concerning the possibilities of publishing could be made. clemens left then, and set out on his trip with cable, turning the whole matter over to webster and colonel fred for settlement. meantime, the word that general grant was writing his memoirs got into the newspapers and various publishing propositions came to him. in the end the general sent over to philadelphia for his old friend, george w. childs, and laid the whole matter before him. childs said later it was plain that general grant, on the score of friendship, if for no other reason, distinctly wished to give the book to mark twain. it seemed not to be a question of how much money he would make, but of personal feeling entirely. webster's complete success with huck finn being now demonstrated, colonel fred grant agreed that he believed clemens and webster could handle the book as profitably as anybody; and after investigation childs was of the same opinion. the decision was that the firm of charles l. webster & co. should have the book, and arrangements for drawing the contract were made. general grant, however, was still somewhat uneasy as to the terms. he thought he was taking an unfair advantage in receiving so large a proportion of the profits. he wrote to clemens, asking him which of his two propositions--the twenty per cent. gross-royalty or the seventy per cent. of the net profit--would be the best all around. clemens sent webster to tell him that he believed the simplest, as well as the most profitable for the author, would be the twenty per cent. arrangement. whereupon grant replied that he would take the alternative; as in that case, if the book were a failure, and there were no profits, clemens would not be obliged to pay him anything. he could not consent to the thought of receiving twenty per cent. on a book published at a loss. meantime, grant had developed a serious illness. the humiliation of his business failure had undermined his health. the papers announced his malady as cancer of the tongue. in a memorandum which clemens made, february , , he states that on the st he called at the grant home, east th street, and was astonished to see how thin and weak the general looked. he was astonished because the newspaper, in a second report, had said the threatening symptoms had disappeared, that the cancer alarm was a false one. i took for granted the report, and said i had been glad to see that news. he smiled and said, "yes--if it had only been true." one of the physicians was present, and he startled me by saying the general's condition was the opposite of encouraging. then the talk drifted to business, and the general presently said: "i mean you shall have the book--i have about made up my mind to that--but i wish to write to mr. roswell smith first, and tell him i have so decided. i think this is due him." from the beginning the general has shown a fine delicacy toward those people--a delicacy which was native to the character of the man who put into the appomattox terms of surrender the words, "officers may retain their side-arms," to save general lee the humiliation of giving up his sword. [note-book.] the physician present was dr. douglas, and upon clemens assuming that the general's trouble was probably due to smoking, also that it was a warning to those who smoked to excess, himself included, dr. douglas said that general grant's affliction could not be attributed altogether to smoking, but far more to his distress of mind, his year-long depression of spirit, the grief of his financial disaster. dr. douglas's remark started general grant upon the subject of his connection with ward, which he discussed with great freedom and apparent relief of mind. never at any time did he betray any resentment toward ward, but characterized him as one might an offending child. he spoke as a man who has been deeply wronged and humiliated and betrayed, but without a venomous expression or one with revengeful nature. clemens confessed in his notes that all the time he himself was "inwardly boiling--scalping ward--flaying him alive --breaking him on the wheel--pounding him to a jelly." while he was talking colonel grant said: "father is letting you see that the grant family are a pack of fools, mr. clemens." the general objected to this statement. he said that the facts could be produced which would show that when ward laid siege to a man he was pretty certain to turn out to be a fool; as much of a fool as any of the grant family. he said that nobody could call the president of the erie railroad a fool, yet ward had beguiled him of eight hundred thousand dollars, robbed him of every cent of it. he cited another man that no one could call a fool who had invested in ward to the extent of half a million. he went on to recall many such cases. he told of one man who had come to the office on the eve of departure for europe and handed ward a check for fifty thousand dollars, saying: "i have no use for it at present. see what you can do with it for me." by and by this investor, returning from europe, dropped in and said: "well, did anything happen?" ward indifferently turned to his private ledger, consulted it, then drew a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and handed it over, with the casual remark: "well, yes, something happened; not much yet--a little too soon." the man stared at the check, then thrust it back into ward's hand. "that's all right. it's plenty good enough for me. set that hen again," and left the place. of course ward made no investments. his was the first playing on a colossal scale of the now worn-out "get rich quick" confidence game. such dividends as were made came out of the principal. ward was the napoleon of that game, whether he invented it or not. clemens agreed that, as far as himself or any of his relatives were concerned, they would undoubtedly have trusted ward. colonel grant followed him to the door when he left, and told him that the physicians feared his father might not live more than a few weeks longer, but that meantime he had been writing steadily, and that the first volume was complete and fully half the second. three days later the formal contract was closed, and webster & co. promptly advanced. general grant ten thousand dollars for imminent demands, a welcome arrangement, for grant's debts and expenses were many, and his available resources restricted to the century payments for his articles. immediately the office of webster & co. was warm with affairs. reporters were running hot-foot for news of the great contract by which mark twain was to publish the life of general grant. no publishing enterprise of such vast moment had ever been undertaken, and no publishing event, before or since, ever received the amount of newspaper comment. the names of general grant and mark twain associated would command columns, whatever the event, and that mark twain was to become the publisher of grant's own story of his battles was of unprecedented importance. the partners were sufficiently occupied. estimates and prices for vast quantities of paper were considered, all available presses were contracted for, binderies were pledged exclusively for the grant book. clemens was boiling over with plans and suggestions for distribution. webster was half wild with the tumult of the great campaign. applications for agencies poured in. in those days there were general subscription agencies which divided the country into districts, and the heads of these agencies webster summoned to new york and laid down the law to them concerning the new book. it was not a time for small dealings, and webster rose to the occasion. by the time these men returned to their homes they had practically pledged themselves to a quarter of a million sets of the grant memoirs, and this estimate they believed to be conservative. webster now moved into larger and more pretentious quarters. he took a store-room at east th street, union square, and surrounded himself with a capable force of assistants. he had become, all at once, the most conspicuous publisher in the world. clv days with a dying hero the contract for the publication of the grant life was officially closed february , . five days later, on the last day and at the last hour of president arthur's administration, and of the congress then sitting, a bill was passed placing grant as full general, with full pay, on the retired army list. the bill providing for this somewhat tardy acknowledgment was rushed through at the last moment, and it is said that the congressional clock was set back so that this enactment might become a law before the administration changed. clemens was with general grant when the news of this action was read to him. grant had greatly desired such recognition, and it meant more to him than to any one present, yet clemens in his notes records: every face there betrayed strong excitement and emotion except one --general grant's. he read the telegram, but not a shade or suggestion of a change exhibited itself in his iron countenance. the volume of his emotion was greater than all the other emotions there present combined, but he was able to suppress all expression of it and make no sign. grant's calmness, endurance, and consideration during these final days astonished even those most familiar with his noble character. one night gerhardt came into the library at hartford with the announcement that he wished to show his patron a small bust he had been making in clay of general grant. clemens did not show much interest in the prospect, but when the work was uncovered he became enthusiastic. he declared it was the first likeness he had ever seen of general grant that approached reality. he agreed that the grant family ought to see it, and that he would take gerhardt with him next day in order that he might be within reach in case they had any suggestions. they went to new york next morning, and called at the grant home during the afternoon. from the note-book: friday, march , . gerhardt and i arrived at general grant's about . p.m. and i asked if the family would look at a small clay bust of the general which gerhardt had made from a photograph. colonel fred and jesse were absent to receive their sister, mrs. sartoris, who would arrive from europe about . ; but the three mrs. grants examined the work and expressed strong approval of it, and also great gratification that mr. gerhardt had undertaken it. mrs. jesse grant had lately dreamed that she was inquiring where the maker of my bust could be found (she had seen a picture of it in huck finn, which was published four weeks ago), for she wanted the same artist to make one of general grant. the ladies examined the bust critically and pointed out defects, while gerhardt made the necessary corrections. presently mrs. general grant suggested that gerhardt step in and look at the general. i had been in there talking with the general, but had never thought of asking him to let a stranger come in. so gerhardt went in with the ladies and me, and the inspection and cross-fire began: "there, i was sure his nose was so and so," and, "i was sure his forehead was so and so," and, "don't you think his head is so and so?" and so everybody walked around and about the old hero, who lay half reclining in his easy chair, but well muffled up, and submitting to all this as serenely as if he were used to being served so. one marked feature of general grant's character is his exceeding gentleness, goodness, sweetness. every time i have been in his presence--lately and formerly--my mind was drawn to that feature. i wonder it has not been more spoken of. presently he said, let gerhardt bring in his clay and work there, if gerhardt would not mind his reclining attitude. of course we were glad. a table for the bust was moved up in front of him; the ladies left the room; i got a book; gerhardt went to work; and for an hour there was perfect stillness, and for the first time during the day the general got a good, sound, peaceful nap. general badeau came in, and probably interrupted that nap. he spoke out as strongly as the others concerning the great excellence of the likeness. he had some sheets of ms. in his hand, and said, "i've been reading what you wrote this morning, general, and it is of the utmost value; it solves a riddle that has puzzled men's brains all these years and makes the thing clear and rational." i asked what the puzzle was, and he said, "it was why grant did not immediately lay siege to vicksburg after capturing port hudson" (at least that is my recollection, now toward midnight, of general badeau's answer). the little bust of grant which gerhardt worked on that day was widely reproduced in terra-cotta, and is still regarded by many as the most nearly correct likeness of grant. the original is in possession of the family. general grant worked industriously on his book. he had a superb memory and worked rapidly. webster & co. offered to supply him with a stenographer, and this proved a great relief. sometimes he dictated ten thousand words at a sitting. it was reported at the time, and it has been stated since, that grant did not write the memoirs himself, but only made notes, which were expanded by others. but this is not true. general grant wrote or dictated every word of the story himself, then had the manuscript read aloud to him and made his own revisions. he wrote against time, for he knew that his disease was fatal. fortunately the lease of life granted him was longer than he had hoped for, though the last chapters were written when he could no longer speak, and when weakness and suffering made the labor a heavy one indeed; but he never flinched or faltered, never at any time suggested that the work be finished by another hand. early in april general grant's condition became very alarming, and on the night of the d it was believed he could not live until morning. but he was not yet ready to surrender. he rallied and renewed his task; feebly at first, but more perseveringly as each day seemed to bring a little added strength, or perhaps it was only resolution. now and then he appeared depressed as to the quality of his product. once colonel fred grant suggested to clemens that if he could encourage the general a little it might be worth while. clemens had felt always such a reverence and awe for the great soldier that he had never dreamed of complimenting his literature. "i was as much surprised as columbus's cook could have been to learn that columbus wanted his opinion as to how columbus was doing his navigating." he did not hesitate to give it, however, and with a clear conscience. grant wrote as he had fought; with a simple, straightforward dignity, with a style that is not a style at all but the very absence of it, and therefore the best of all literary methods. it happened that clemens had been comparing some of grant's chapters with caesar's commentaries, and was able to say, in all sincerity, that the same high merits distinguished both books: clarity of statement, directness, simplicity, manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice toward friend and foe alike, soldierly candor and frankness, and soldierly avoidance of flowery speech. "i placed the two books side by side upon the same level," he said, "and i still think that they belong there. i learned afterward that general grant was pleased with this verdict. it shows that he was just a man, just a human being, just an author." within two months after the agents had gone to work canvassing for the grant memoirs--which is to say by the st of may, --orders for sixty thousand sets had been received, and on that day mark twain, in his note-book, made a memorandum estimate of the number of books that the country would require, figuring the grand total at three hundred thousand sets of two volumes each. then he says: if these chickens should really hatch according to my account, general grant's royalties will' amount to $ , , and will make the largest single check ever paid an author in the world's history. up to the present time the largest one ever paid was to macaulay on his history of england, l , . if i pay the general in silver coin at $ per pound it will weigh seventeen tons. certainly this has a flavor in it of colonel sellers, but we shall see by and by in how far this calculation was justified. grant found the society of mark twain cheering and comforting, and clemens held himself in readiness to go to the dying man at call. on the th of may he makes this memorandum: it is curious and dreadful to sit up in this way and talk cheerful nonsense to general grant, and he under sentence of death with that cancer. he says he has made the book too large by pages--not a bad fault. a short time ago we were afraid we would lack of being enough. to-day talked with general grant about his and my first great missouri campaign in . he surprised an empty camp near florida, missouri, on salt river, which i had been occupying a day or two before. how near he came to playing the devil with his future publisher. of course clemens would amuse the old commander with the tale of his soldiering, how his company had been chased through the brush and mud by the very announcement that grant was coming. some word of this got to the century editors, who immediately proposed that mark twain contribute to the magazine war series the story of his share in the rebellion, and particularly of his war relations with general grant. so the "private history of a campaign that failed" was prepared as mark twain's side-light on the history of the rebellion; and if it was not important history it was at least amusing, and the telling of that tale in mark twain's inimitable fashion must have gone far toward making cheerful those last sad days of his ancient enemy. during one of their talks general grant spoke of the question as to whether he or sherman had originated the idea of the march to the sea. grant said: "neither of us originated the idea of that march. the enemy did it." reports were circulated of estrangements between general grant and the century company, and between mark twain and the century company, as a result of the book decision. certain newspapers exploited and magnified these rumors--some went so far as to accuse mark twain of duplicity, and to charge him with seeking to obtain a vast fortune for himself at the expense of general grant and his family. all of which was the merest nonsense. the century company, webster & co., general grant, and mark twain individually, were all working harmoniously, and nothing but the most cordial relations and understanding prevailed. as to the charge of unfair dealing on the part of mark twain, this was too absurd, even then, to attract more than momentary attention. webster & co., somewhat later in the year, gave to the press a clear statement of their publishing arrangement, though more particularly denying the report that general grant had been unable to complete his work. clvi the close of a great career the clemens household did not go to elmira that year until the th of june. meantime general grant had been taken to mount mcgregor, near the adirondacks. the day after clemens reached elmira there came a summons saying that the general had asked to see him. he went immediately, and remained several days. the resolute old commander was very feeble by this time. it was three months since he had been believed to be dying, yet he was still alive, still at work, though he could no longer speak. he was adding, here and there, a finishing touch to his manuscript, writing with effort on small slips of paper containing but a few words each. his conversation was carried on in the same way. mark twain brought back a little package of those precious slips, and some of them are still preserved. the writing is perfectly legible, and shows no indication of a trembling hand. on one of these slips is written: there is much more that i could do if i was a well man. i do not write quite as clearly as i could if well. if i could read it over myself many little matters of anecdote and incident would suggest themselves to me. on another: have you seen any portion of the second volume? it is up to the end, or nearly so. as much more work as i have done to-day will finish it. i have worked faster than if i had been well. i have used my three boys and a stenographer. and on still another: if i could have two weeks of strength i could improve it very much. as i am, however, it will have to go about as it is, with verifications by the boys and by suggestions which will enable me to make a point clear here and there. certainly no campaign was ever conducted with a braver heart. as long as his fingers could hold a pencil he continued at his task. once he asked if any estimate could now be made of what portion would accrue to his family from the publication. clemens's prompt reply, that more than one hundred thousand sets had been sold, and that already the amount of his share, secured by safe bonds, exceeded one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, seemed to give him deep comfort. clemens told him that the country was as yet not one-third canvassed, and that without doubt there turns would be twice as much more by the end of the year. grant made no further inquiry, and probably never again mentioned the subject to any one. when clemens left, general grant was sitting, fully dressed, with a shawl about his shoulders, pencil and paper beside him. it was a picture that would never fade from the memory. in a later memorandum he says: i then believed he would live several months. he was still adding little perfecting details to his book, and preface, among other things. he was entirely through a few days later. since then the lack of any strong interest to employ his mind has enabled the tedious weariness to kill him. i think his book kept him alive several months. he was a very great man and superlatively good. this note was made july , , at a.m., on receipt of the news that general grant was dead. to henry ward beecher, clemens wrote: one day he put his pencil aside and said there was nothing more to do. if i had been there i could have foretold the shock that struck the world three days later. it can be truly said that all the nation mourned. general grant had no enemies, political or sectional, in those last days. the old soldier battling with a deadly disease, yet bravely completing his task, was a figure at once so pathetic and so noble that no breath of animosity remained to utter a single word that was not kind. memorial services were held from one end of the country to the other. those who had followed him in peace or war, those who had fought beside him or against him, alike paid tribute to his memory. twichell, from the mountains of vermont, wrote: i suppose i have said to harmony forty times since i got up here, "how i wish i could see mark!" my notion is that between us we could get ourselves expressed. i have never known any one who could help me read my own thoughts in such a case as you can and have done many a time, dear old fellow. i'd give more to sit on a log with you in the woods this afternoon, while we twined a wreath together for launcelot's grave, than to hear any conceivable eulogy of him pronounced by mortal lips. the death of grant so largely and so suddenly augmented the orders for his memoirs that it seemed impossible to get the first volume printed in time for the delivery, which had been promised for december st. j. j. little had the contract of manufacture, and every available press and bindery was running double time to complete the vast contract. in the end more than three hundred thousand sets of two volumes each were sold, and between four hundred and twenty and four hundred and fifty thousand dollars was paid to mrs. grant. the first check of two hundred thousand dollars, drawn february , , remains the largest single royalty check in history. mark twain's prophecy had been almost exactly verified. clvii minor matters of a great year the grant episode, so important in all its phases, naturally overshadowed other events of . mark twain was so deeply absorbed in this great publishing enterprise that he wasted little thought or energy in other directions. yet there are a few minor things that it seems worth while to remember. howells has told something of the authors' reading given for the longfellow memorial, an entertainment managed by george parsons lathrop, though howells justly claims the glory of having fixed the price of admission at five dollars. then he recalls a pleasing anecdote of charles eliot norton, who introduced the attractions. norton presided, and when it came clemens's turn to read he introduced him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give, but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which are the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. he was reminded of darwin's delight in mark twain, and how when he came from his long day's exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a volume of mark twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him, and whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt secure of a good night's rest from it. a sort of blank ensued which clemens filled in the only possible way. he said he should always be glad he had contributed to the repose of that great man, to whom science owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every breast to burst forth, he began to read. howells tells of mark twain's triumph on this occasion, and in a letter at the time he wrote: "you simply straddled down to the footlights and took that house up in the hollow of your hand and tickled it." howells adds that the show netted seventeen hundred dollars. this was early in may. of literary work, beyond the war paper, the "private history of a campaign that failed" (published december, ), clemens appears to have done very little. his thoughts were far too busy with plans for furthering the sale of the great military memoir to follow literary ventures of his own. at one time he was impelled to dictate an autobiography--grant's difficulties in his dying hour suggesting this --and he arranged with redpath, who was no longer a lecture agent and understood stenography, to co-operate with him in the work. he dictated a few chapters, but he was otherwise too much occupied to continue. also, he was unused to dictation, and found it hard and the result unsatisfactory. two open communications from mark twain that year deserve to be remembered. one of these; unsigned, was published in the century magazine, and expressed the need for a "universal tinker," the man who can accept a job in a large household or in a community as master of all trades, with sufficient knowledge of each to be ready to undertake whatever repairs are likely to be required in the ordinary household, such as--"to put in windowpanes, mend gas leaks, jack-plane the edges of doors that won't shut, keep the waste-pipe and other water-pipe joints, glue and otherwise repair havoc done in furniture, etc." the letter was signed x. y. z., and it brought replies from various parts of the world. none of the applicants seemed universally qualified, but in kansas city a business was founded on the idea, adopting "the universal tinker" as its firm name. the other letter mentioned was written to the 'christian union', inspired by a tale entitled, "what ought we to have done?" it was a tale concerning the government of children; especially concerning the government of one child--john junior--a child who, as it would appear from the tale, had a habit of running things pretty much to his own notion. the performance of john junior, and of his parents in trying to manage him, stirred mark twain considerably--it being "enough to make a body's blood boil," as he confesses--and it impelled him to set down surreptitiously his impressions of what would have happened to john junior as a member of the clemens household. he did not dare to show the communication to mrs. clemens before he sent it, for he knew pretty well what its fate would be in that case. so he took chances and printed it without her knowledge. the letter was published july , . it is too long to be included entire, but it is too illuminating to be altogether omitted. after relating, in considerable detail, mrs. clemens's method of dealing with an unruly child--the gentleness yet firmness of her discipline--he concludes: the mother of my children adores them--there is no milder term for it--and they worship her; they even worship anything which the touch of her hand has made sacred. they know her for the best and truest friend they have ever had, or ever shall have; they know her for one who never did them a wrong, and cannot do them a wrong; who never told them a lie, nor the shadow of one; who never deceived them by even an ambiguous gesture; who never gave them an unreasonable command, nor ever contented herself with anything short of a perfect obedience; who has always treated them as politely and considerately as she would the best and oldest in the land, and has always required of them gentle speech and courteous conduct toward all, of whatsoever degree with whom they chanced to come in contact; they know her for one whose promise, whether of reward or punishment, is gold, and always worth its face, to the uttermost farthing. in a word, they know her, and i know her, for the best and dearest mother that lives--and by a long, long way the wisest.... in all my life i have never made a single reference to my wife in print before, as far as i can remember, except once in the dedication of a book; and so, after these fifteen years of silence, perhaps i may unseal my lips this one time without impropriety or indelicacy. i will institute one other novelty: i will send this manuscript to the press without her knowledge and without asking her to edit it. this will save it from getting edited into the stove. susy's biography refers to this incident at considerable length. she states that her father had misgivings after he had sent it to the christian union, and that he tried to recall the manuscript, but found it too late. she sets down some comments of her own on her mother's government, then tells us of the appearance of the article: when the christian union reached the farm and papa's article in it, all ready and waiting to be read to mama, papa hadn't the courage to show it to her (for he knew she wouldn't like it at all) at first, and he didn't, but he might have let it go and never let her see it; but finally he gave his consent to her seeing it, and told clara and i we could take it to her, which we did with tardiness, and we all stood around mama while she read it, all wondering what she would say and think about it. she was too much surprised (and pleased privately too) to say much at first; but, as we all expected, publicly (or rather when she remembered that this article was to be read by every one that took the christian union) she was rather shocked and a little displeased. susy goes on to tell that the article provoked a number of letters, most of them pleasant ones, but some of them of quite another sort. one of the latter fell into her mother's hands, after which there was general regret that the article had been printed, and the subject was no longer discussed at quarry farm. susy's biography is a unique record. it was a sort of combined memoir and journal, charming in its innocent frankness and childish insight. she used to keep it under her pillow, and after she was asleep the parents would steal it out and find a tender amusement and pathos in its quaint entries. it is a faithful record so far as it goes, and the period it covers is an important one; for it presents a picture of mark twain in the fullness of his manhood, in the golden hour of his fortune. susy's beginning has a special value here:--[susy's' spelling and punctuation are preserved.] we are a very happy family! we consist of papa, mama, jean, clara and me. it is papa i am writing about, and i shall have no trouble in not knowing what to say about him, as he is a very striking character. papa's appearance has been described many times, but very incorrectly; he has beautiful curly grey hair, not any too thick, or any too long, just right; a roman nose, which greatly improves the beauty of his features, kind blue eyes, and a small mustache, he has a wonderfully shaped head, and profile, he has a very good figure in short he is an extraordinarily fine looking man. all his features are perfect, except that he hasn't extraordinary teeth. his complexion is very fair, and he doesn't ware a beard: he is a very good man, and a very funny one; he has got a temper but we all of us have in this family. he is the loveliest man i ever saw, or ever hope to see, and oh so absent-minded! that this is a fair statement of the clemens home, and the truest picture of mark twain at fifty that has been preserved, cannot be doubted. his hair was iron-gray, not entirely white at this time, the auburn tints everywhere mingled with the shining white that later would mantle it like a silver crown. he did not look young for his years, but he was still young, always young--indestructibly young in spirit and bodily vigor. susy tells how that summer he blew soap-bubbles for the children, filling the bubbles with tobacco smoke; how he would play with the cats, and come clear down from his study on the hill to see how "sour mash," then a kitten, was getting along; also how he wrote a poem for jean's donkey, cadichon (which they made kiditchin): she quotes the poem: kiditchin o du lieb' kiditchin du bist ganz bewitchin, waw- - - -he! in summer days kiditchin thou'rt dear from nose to britchin waw----he! no dought thoult get a switchin when for mischief thou'rt itchin' waw- - - -he! but when you're good kiditchin you shall feast in james's kitchin waw- - - -he! o now lift up thy song thy noble note prolong thou living chinese gong! waw---he! waw---he waw sweetest donkey man ever saw. clemens undertook to ride kiditchin one day, to show the children how it should be done, but kiditchin resented this interference and promptly flung him over her head. he thought she might have been listening to the poem he had written of her. susy's discovery that the secret of her biography was known is shown by the next entry, and the touch of severity in it was probably not entirely unconscious: papa said the other day, "i am a mugwump and a mugwump is pure from the marrow out." (papa knows that i am writing this biography of him, and he said this for it.) he doesn't like to go to church at all, why i never understood, until just now. he told us the other day that he couldn't bear to hear anyone talk but himself, but that he could listen to himself talk for hours without getting tired, of course he said this in joke, but i've no doubt it was founded on truth. susy's picture of life at quarry farm at this period is realistic and valuable--too valuable to be spared from this biography: there are eleven cats at the farm here now. papa's favorite is a little tortoise-shell kitten he has named "sour mash," and a little spotted one "fannie." it is very pretty to see what papa calls the cat procession; it was formed in this way. old minniecat headed, (the mother of all the cats) next to her came aunt susie, then clara on the donkey, accompanied by a pile of cats, then papa and jean hand in hand and a pile of cats brought up in the rear, mama and i made up the audience. our varius occupations are as follows. papa rises about / past in the morning, breakfasts at eight, writes, plays tennis with clara and me and tries to make the donkey go, in the morning; does varius things in p.m., and in the evening plays tennis with clara and me and amuses jean and the donkey. mama rises about / to eight, breakfasts at eight, teaches jean german reading from - ; reads german with me from - . then she reads studdies or visits with aunt susie for a while, and then she reads to clara and i till lunch time things connected with english history (for we hope to go to england next summer) while we sew. then we have lunch. she studdies for about half an hour or visits with aunt susie, then reads to us an hour or more, then studdies writes reads and rests till supper time. after supper she sits out on the porch and works till eight o'clock, from eight o'clock to bedtime she plays whist with papa and after she has retired she reads and studdies german for a while. clara and i do most everything from practicing to donkey riding and playing tag. while jean's time is spent in asking mama what she can have to eat. it is impossible, at this distance, to convey all that the farm meant to the children during the summers of their infancy and childhood and girlhood which they spent there. it was the paradise, the dreamland they looked forward to during all the rest of the year. through the long, happy months there they grew strong and brown, and drank deeply of the joy of life. their cousins julia, jervis, and ida langdon ranged about their own ages and were almost their daily companions. their games were mainly of the out-of-doors; the woods and meadows and hillside pastures were their playground. susy was thirteen when she began her diary; a gentle, thoughtful, romantic child. one afternoon she discovered a wonderful tangle of vines and bushes between the study and the sunset--a rare hiding-place. she ran breathlessly to her aunt: "can i have it? can clara and i have it all for our own?" the petition was granted, of course, and the place was named helen's bower, for they were reading thaddeus of warsaw and the name appealed to susy's poetic fancy. then mrs. clemens conceived the idea of building a house for the children just beyond the bower. it was a complete little cottage when finished, with a porch and with furnishings contributed by friends and members of the family. there was a stove--a tiny affair, but practical--dishes, table, chairs, shelves, and a broom. the little house was named ellerslie, out of grace aguilar's days of robert bruce, and became one of the children's most beloved possessions. but alas for helen's bower! a workman was sent to clear away the debris after the builders, and being a practical man, he cut away helen's bower--destroyed it utterly. susy first discovered the vandalism, and came rushing to the house in a torrent of sorrow. for her the joy of life seemed ended, and it was long before she could be comforted. but ellerslie in time satisfied her hunger for retreat, became, in fact, the nucleus around which the children's summer happiness centered. to their elders the farm remained always the quiet haven. once to orion's wife clemens wrote: this is a superb sunday . . . . the city in the valley is purple with shade, as seen from up here at the study. the cranes are reading and loafing in the canvas- curtained summer-house, fifty yards away, on a higher (the highest) point; the cats are loafing over at ellerslie, which is the children's estate and dwelling house in their own private grounds (by deed from susie crane), a hundred yards from the study, among the clover and young oaks and willows. livy is down at the house, but i shall now go and bring her up to the cranes to help us occupy the lounges and hammocks, whence a great panorama of distant hills and valley and city is seeable. the children have gone on a lark through the neighboring hills and woods, susie and clara horseback and jean, driving a buggy, with the coachman for comrade and assistant at need. it is a perfect day indeed. the ending of each year's summer brought only regret. clemens would never take away all his things. he had an old superstition that to leave some article insured return. mrs. clemens also left something--her heart's content. the children went around bidding various objects good-by and kissed the gates of ellerslie too. clviii mark twain at fifty mark twain's fiftieth birthday was one of the pleasantly observed events of that year. there was no special celebration, but friends sent kindly messages, and the critic, then conducted by jeannette and joseph gilder, made a feature of it. miss gilder wrote to oliver wendell holmes and invited some verses, which with his never-failing kindliness he sent, though in his accompanying note he said: "i had twenty-three letters spread out on my table for answering, all marked immediate, when your note came." dr. holmes's stanzas are full of his gentle spirit: to mark twain (on his fiftieth birthday) ah, clemens, when i saw thee last, we both of us were younger; how fondly mumbling o'er the past is memory's toothless hunger! so fifty years have fled, they say, since first you took to drinking; i mean in nature's milky way of course no ill i'm thinking. but while on life's uneven road your track you've been pursuing, what fountains from your wit have flowed what drinks you have been brewing! i know whence all your magic came, your secret i've discovered, the source that fed your inward flame, the dreams that round you hovered. before you learned to bite or munch, still kicking in your cradle, the muses mixed a bowl of punch and hebe seized the ladle. dear babe, whose fiftieth year to-day your ripe half-century rounded, your books the precious draught betray the laughing nine compounded. so mixed the sweet, the sharp, the strong, each finds its faults amended, the virtues that to each belong in happiest union blended. and what the flavor can surpass of sugar, spirit, lemons? so while one health fills every glass mark twain for baby clemens! oliver wendell holmes. frank r. stockton, charles dudley warner, and joel chandler harris sent pleasing letters. warner said: you may think it an easy thing to be fifty years old, but you will find it's not so easy to stay there, and your next fifty years will slip away much faster than those just accomplished. many wrote letters privately, of course, and andrew lang, like holmes, sent a poem that has a special charm. for mark twain to brave mark twain, across the sea, the years have brought his jubilee. one hears it, half in pain, that fifty years have passed and gone since danced the merry star that shone above the babe mark twain. we turn his pages and we see the mississippi flowing free; we turn again and grin o'er all tom sawyer did and planned with him of the ensanguined hand, with huckleberry finn! spirit of mirth, whose chime of bells shakes on his cap, and sweetly swells across the atlantic main, grant that mark's laughter never die, that men through many a century may chuckle o'er mark twain! assuredly mark twain was made happy by these attentions; to dr. holmes he wrote: dear dr. holmes,--i shall never be able to tell you the half of how proud you have made me. if i could you would say you were nearly paid for the trouble you took. and then the family: if i could convey the electrical surprise and gratitude and exaltation of the wife and the children last night, when they happened upon that critic where i had, with artful artlessness, spread it open and retired out of view to see what would happen--well, it was great and fine and beautiful to see, and made me feel as the victor feels when the shouting hosts march by: and if you also could have seen it you would have said the account was squared. for i have brought them up in your company, as in the company of a warm and friendly and beneficent but far-distant sun; and so, for you to do this thing was for the sun to send down out of the skies the miracle of a special ray and transfigure me before their faces. i knew what that poem would be to them; i knew it would raise me up to remote and shining heights in their eyes, to very fellowship with the chambered nautilus itself, and that from that fellowship they could never more dissociate me while they should live; and so i made sure to be by when the surprise should come. charles dudley warner is charmed with the poem for its own felicitous sake; and so indeed am i, but more because it has drawn the sting of my fiftieth year; taken away the pain of it, the grief of it, the somehow shame of it, and made me glad and proud it happened. with reverence and affection, sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. so samuel clemens had reached the half-century mark; reached it in what seemed the fullness of success from every viewpoint. if he was not yet the foremost american man of letters, he was at least the most widely known he sat upon the highest mountain-top. furthermore, it seemed to him that fortune was showering her gifts into his lap. his unfortunate investments were now only as the necessary experiments that had led him to larger successes. as a publisher, he was already the most conspicuous in the world, and he contemplated still larger ventures: a type-setting machine patent, in which he had invested, and now largely controlled, he regarded as the chief invention of the age, absolutely certain to yield incalculable wealth. his connection with the grant family had associated him with an enterprise looking to the building of a railway from constantinople to the persian gulf. charles a. dana, of the sun, had put him in the way of obtaining for publication the life of the pope, leo xiii, officially authorized by the pope himself, and this he regarded as a certain fortune. now that the tide had turned he felt no hesitancy in reckoning a fortune from almost any venture. the grant book, even on the liberal terms allowed to the author, would yield a net profit of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to its publishers. huck finn would yield fifty thousand dollars more. the sales of his other books had considerably increased. certainly, at fifty, mark twain's fortunes were at flood-tide; buoyant and jubilant, he was floating on the topmost wave. if there were undercurrents and undertow they were down somewhere out of sight. if there were breakers ahead, they were too far distant to be heard. so sure was he of the triumphant consummation of every venture that to a friend at his home one night he said: "i am frightened at the proportions of my prosperity. it seems to me that whatever i touch turns to gold." clix the life of the pope as mark twain in the earlier days of his marriage had temporarily put aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now again literature had dropped into the background, had become an avocation, while financial interests prevailed. there were two chief ventures--the business of charles l. webster & co. and the promotion of the paige type-setting machine. they were closely identified in fortunes, so closely that in time the very existence of each depended upon the success of the other; yet they were quite distinct, and must be so treated in this story. the success of the grant life had given the webster business an immense prestige. it was no longer necessary to seek desirable features for publication. they came uninvited. other war generals preparing their memoirs naturally hoped to appear with their great commander. mcclellan's own story was arranged for without difficulty. a genesis of the civil war, by gen. samuel wylie crawford, was offered and accepted. general sheridan's memoirs were in preparation, and negotiations with webster & co. for their appearance were not delayed. probably neither webster nor clemens believed that the sale of any of these books would approach those of the grant life, but they expected them to be large, for the grant book had stimulated the public taste for war literature, and anything bearing the stamp of personal battle experience was considered literary legal-tender. moreover, these features, and even the grant book itself, seemed likely to dwindle in importance by the side of the life of pope leo xiii., who in his old and enfeebled age had consented to the preparation of a memoir, to be published with his sanction and blessing.--[by bernard o'reilly, d.d., ll.d. "written with the encouragement, approbation, and blessings of his holiness the pope."]--clemens and webster--every one, in fact, who heard of the project--united in the belief that no book, with the exception of the holy scripture itself or the koran, would have a wider acceptance than the biography of the pope. it was agreed by good judges--and they included howells and twichell and even the shrewd general agents throughout the country--that every good catholic would regard such a book not only as desirable, but as absolutely necessary to his salvation. howells, recalling clemens's emotions of this time, writes: he had no words in which to paint the magnificence of the project or to forecast its colossal success. it would have a currency bounded only by the number of catholics in christendom. it would be translated into every language which was anywhere written or printed; it would be circulated literally in every country of the globe. the formal contract for this great undertaking was signed in rome in april, , and webster immediately prepared to go over to consult with his holiness in person as to certain details, also, no doubt, for the newspaper advertising which must result from such an interview. it was decided to carry a handsome present to the pope in the form of a specially made edition of the grant memoirs in a rich-casket, and it was clemens's idea that the binding of the book should be solid gold--this to be done by tiffany at an estimated cost of about three thousand dollars. in the end, however, the binding was not gold, but the handsomest that could be designed of less precious and more appropriate materials. webster sailed toward the end of june, and was warmly received and highly honored in rome. the great figures of the grant success had astonished europe even more than america, where spectacular achievements were more common. that any single publication should pay a profit to author and publisher of six hundred thousand dollars was a thing which belonged with the wonders of aladdin's garden. it was natural, therefore, that webster, who had rubbed the magic lamp with this result, who was mark twain's partner, and who had now traveled across the seas to confer with the pope himself, should be received with royal honors. in letters written at the time, webster relates how he found it necessary to have an imposing carriage and a footman to maintain the dignity of his mission, and how, after various impressive formalities, he was granted a private audience, a very special honor indeed. webster's letter gives us a picture of his holiness which is worth preserving. we--[mrs. webster, who, the reader will remember, was annie moffett, a daughter of pamela clemens, was included in the invitation to the presence chamber.]--found ourselves in a room perhaps twenty-five by thirty-five feet; the furniture was gilt, upholstered in light-red silk, and the side-walls were hung with the same material. against the wall by which we entered and in the middle space was a large gilt throne chair, upholstered in red plush, and upon it sat a man bowed with age; his hair was silvery white and as pure as the driven snow. his head was partly covered with a white skullcap; he was dressed in a long white cassock which reached to his feet, which rested upon a red-plush cushion and were inclosed in red embroidered slippers with a design of a cross. a golden chain was about his neck and suspended by it in his lap was a gold cross set in precious stones. upon a finger of his right hand was a gold ring with an emerald setting nearly an inch in diameter. his countenance was smiling, and beamed with benevolence. his face at once impressed us as that of a noble, pure man who could not do otherwise than good. this was the pope of rome, and as we advanced, making the three genuflexions prescribed by etiquette, he smiled benignly upon us. we advanced and, kneeling at his feet, kissed the seal upon his ring. he took us each by the hand repeatedly during the audience and made us perfectly at our ease. they remained as much as half an hour in the presence; and the pope conversed on a variety of subjects, including the business failure of general grant, his last hours, and the great success of his book. the figures seemed to him hardly credible, and when webster assured him that already a guaranteed sale of one hundred thousand copies of his own biography had been pledged by the agents he seemed even more astonished. "we in italy cannot comprehend such things," he said. "i know you do great work in america; i know you have done a great and noble work in regard to general grant's book, but that my life should have such a sale seems impossible." he asked about their home, their children, and was in every way the kindly, gentle-hearted man that his pictured face has shown him. then he gave them his final blessing and the audience closed. we each again kissed the seal on his ring. as annie was about to kiss it he suddenly withdrew his hand and said, "and will you, a little protestant, kiss the pope's ring?" as he said this, his face was all smiles, and mischief was clearly delineated upon it. he immediately put back his hand and she kissed the ring. we now withdrew, backing out and making three genuflexions as before. just as we reached the door he called to dr. o'reilly, "now don't praise me too much; tell the truth, tell the truth." clx a great publisher at home men are likely to be spoiled by prosperity, to be made arrogant, even harsh. success made samuel clemens merely elate, more kindly, more humanly generous. every day almost he wrote to webster, suggesting some new book or venture, but always considerately, always deferring to suggestions from other points of view. once, when it seemed to him that matters were not going as well as usual, a visit from webster showed him that it was because of his own continued absence from the business that he did not understand. whereupon he wrote: dear charley,--good--it's all good news. everything is on the pleasantest possible basis now, and is going to stay so. i blame myself in not looking in on you oftener in the past--that would have prevented all trouble. i mean to stand to my duty better now. at another time, realizing the press of responsibility, and that webster was not entirely well, he sent a warning from mrs. clemens against overwork. he added: your letter shows that you need such a warning. so i warn you myself to look after that. overwork killed mr. langdon and it can kill you. clemens found his own cares greatly multiplied. his connection with the firm was widely known, and many authors sent him their manuscripts or wrote him personal letters concerning them. furthermore, he was beset by all the cranks and beggars in christendom. his affairs became so numerous at length that he employed a business agent, f. g. whitmore, to relieve him of a part of his burden. whitmore lived close by, and was a good billiard-player. almost anything from the morning mail served as an excuse to send for whitmore. clemens was fond of affairs when they were going well; he liked the game of business, especially when it was pretentious and showily prosperous. it is probable that he was never more satisfied with his share of fortune than just at this time. certainly his home life was never happier. katie leary, for thirty years in the family service, has set down some impressions of that pleasant period. mr. clemens was a very affectionate father. he seldom left the house at night, but would read to the family, first to the children until bedtime, afterward to mrs. clemens. he usually read browning to her. they were very fond of it. the children played charades a great deal, and he was wonderful at that game and always helped them. they were very fond of private theatricals. every saturday of their lives they had a temporary stage put up in the school-room and we all had to help. gerhardt painted the scenery. they frequently played the balcony scene from "romeo and juliet" and several plays they wrote themselves. now and then we had a big general performance of "the prince and the pauper." that would be in the library and the dining-room with the folding-doors open. the place just held eighty-four chairs, and the stage was placed back against the conservatory. the children were crazy about acting and we all enjoyed it as much as they did, especially mr. clemens, who was the best actor of all. i had a part, too, and george. i have never known a happier household than theirs was during those years. mr. clemens spent most of his time up in the billiard-room, writing or playing billiards. one day when i went in, and he was shooting the balls around the tables, i noticed smoke coming up from the hearth. i called patrick, and john o'neill, the gardener, and we began taking up the hearth to see what was the matter. mr. clemens kept on playing billiards right along and paid no attention to what we were doing. finally, when we got the hearth up, a lot of flame and smoke came out into the room. the house was on fire. mr. clemens noticed then what we were about, and went over to the corner where there were some bottle fire-extinguishers. he took one down and threw it into the flames. this put them out a good deal, and he took up his cue, went back to the table, and began to shoot the balls around again as if nothing had happened. mrs. clemens came in just then and said, "why, the house is afire!" "yes, i know it," he said, but went on playing. we had a telephone and it didn't work very well. it annoyed him a good deal and sometimes he'd say: "i'll tear it out." one day he tried to call up mrs. dr. tafft. he could not hear plainly and thought he was talking to central. "send down and take this d---thing out of here," he said; "i'm tired of it." he was mad, and using a good deal of bad language. all at once he heard mrs. dr. tafft say, "oh, mr. clemens, good morning." he said, "why, mrs. tafft, i have just come to the telephone. george, our butler, was here before me and i heard him swearing as i came up. i shall have to talk to him about it." mrs. tafft often told it on him.--[ mark twain once wrote to the telephone management: "the time is coming very soon when the telephone will be a perfect instrument, when proximity will no longer be a hindrance to its performance, when, in fact, one will hear a man who is in the next block just as easily and comfortably as he would if that man were in san francisco."] mrs. clemens, before i went there, took care of his desk, but little by little i began to look after it when she was busy at other things. finally i took care of it altogether, but he didn't know it for a long time. one morning he caught me at it. "what are you doing here?" he asked. "dusting, mr. clemens," i said. "you have no business here," he said, very mad. "i've been doing it for a year, mr. clemens," i said. "mrs. clemens told me to do it." after that, when he missed anything--and he missed things often--he would ring for me. "katie," he would say, "you have lost that manuscript." "oh, mr. clemens,", i would say, "i am sure i didn't touch it." "yes, you did touch it, katie. you put it in the fire. it is gone." he would scold then, and fume a great deal. then he would go over and mark out with his toe on the carpet a line which i was never to cross. "katie," he would say, "you are never to go nearer to my desk than that line. that is the dead-line." often after he had scolded me in the morning he would come in in the evening where i was dressing mrs. clemens to go out and say, "katie, i found that manuscript." and i would say, "mr. clemens, i felt so bad this morning that i wanted to go away." he had a pipe-cleaner which he kept on a high shelf. it was an awful old dirty one, and i didn't know that he ever used it. i took it to the balcony which was built out into the woods and threw it away as far as i could throw it. next day he asked, "katie, did you see my pipe-cleaner? you did see it; i can tell by your looks." i said, "yes, mr. clemens, i threw it away." "well," he said, "it was worth a thousand dollars," and it seemed so to me, too, before he got done scolding about it. it is hard not to dwell too long on the home life of this period. one would like to make a long chapter out of those play-acting evenings alone. they remained always fresh in mark twain's memory. once he wrote of them: we dined as we could, probably with a neighbor, and by quarter to eight in the evening the hickory fire in the hall was pouring a sheet of flame up the chimney, the house was in a drench of gas- light from the ground floor up, the guests were arriving, and there was a babble of hearty greetings, with not a voice in it that was not old and familiar and affectionate; and when the curtain went up we looked out from the stage upon none but faces that were dear to us, none but faces that were lit up with welcome for us. clxi history: mainly by susy suzy, in her biography, which she continued through this period, writes: mama and i have both been very much troubled of late because papa, since he had been publishing general grant's books, has seemed to forget his own books and works entirely; and the other evening, as papa and i were promonading up and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or, do anything; he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, and the only book that he had been pertickularly anxious to write was one locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published. the book locked in the safe was captain stormfield, and the one he expected to write was a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court. he had already worked at it in a desultory way during the early months of , and once wrote of it to webster: i have begun a book whose scene is laid far back in the twilight of tradition; i have saturated myself with the atmosphere of the day and the subject and got myself into the swing of the work. if i peg away for some weeks without a break i am safe. but he could not peg away. he had too many irons in the fire for that. matthew arnold had criticized general grant's english, and clemens immediately put down other things to rush to his hero's defense. he pointed out that in arnold's criticism there were no less than "two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly english," and said: there is that about the sun which makes us forget his spots, and when we think of general grant our pulses quicken and his grammar vanishes; we only remember that this is the simple soldier, who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools, and put into them a something which will still bring to american ears, as long as america shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts.--[address to army and navy club. for full text see appendix] clemens worked at the yankee now and then, and howells, when some of the chapters were read to him, gave it warm approval and urged its continuance. howells was often in hartford at this time. webster & co. were planning to publish the library of humor, which howells and "charley" clark had edited several years before, and occasional conferences were desirable. howells tells us that, after he and clark had been at great trouble to get the matter logically and chronologically arranged, clemens pulled it all to pieces and threw it together helter-skelter, declaring that there ought to be no sequence in a book of that sort, any more than in the average reader's mind; and howells admits that this was probably the truer method in a book made for the diversion rather than the instruction of the reader. one of the literary diversions of this time was a commentary on a delicious little book by caroline b. le row--english as she is taught --being a compilation of genuine answers given to examination questions by pupils in our public schools. mark twain was amused by such definitions as: "aborigines, system of mountains"; "alias--a good man in the bible"; "ammonia--the food of the gods," and so on down the alphabet. susy, in her biography, mentions that her father at this is time read to them a little article which he had just written, entitled "luck," and that they thought it very good. it was a story which twichell had heard and told to clemens, who set it down about as it came to him. it was supposed to be true, yet clemens seemed to think it too improbable for literature and laid it away for a number of years. we shall hear of it again by and by. from susy's memoranda we gather that humanity at this time was to be healed of all evils and sorrows through "mind cure." papa has been very much interested of late in the "mind-cure" theory. and, in fact, so have we all. a young lady in town has worked wonders by using the "mind cure" upon people; she is constantly busy now curing peoples' diseases in this way--and curing her own, even, which to me seems the most remarkable of all. a little while past papa was delighted with the knowledge of what he thought the best way of curing a cold, which was by starving it. this starving did work beautifully, and freed him from a great many severe colds. now he says it wasn't the starving that helped his colds, but the trust in the starving, the "mind cure" connected with the starving. i shouldn't wonder if we finally became firm believers in "mind cure." the next time papa has a cold i haven't a doubt he will send for miss holden, the young lady who is doctoring in the "mind-cure" theory, to cure him of it. again, a month later, she writes: april , . yes, the "mind cure" does seem to be working wonderfully. papa, who has been using glasses now for more than a year, has laid them off entirely. and my near-sightedness is really getting better. it seems marvelous. when jean has stomack-ache clara and i have tried to divert her by telling her to lie on her side and try "mind cure." the novelty of it has made her willing to try it, and then clara and i would exclaim about how wonderful it was she was getting better. and she would think it realy was finally, and stop crying, to our delight. the other day mama went into the library and found her lying on the sofa with her back toward the door. she said, "why, jean, what's the matter? don't you feel well?" jean said that she had a little stomack-ache, and so thought she would lie down. mama said, "why don't you try 'mind cure'?" "i am," jean answered. howells and twichell were invited to try the "mind cure," as were all other friends who happened along. to the end of his days clemens would always have some panacea to offer to allay human distress. it was a good trait, when all is said, for it had its root in his humanity. the "mind cure" did not provide all the substance of things hoped for, though he always allowed for it a wide efficacy. once, in later years, commenting on susy's record, he said: the mind cannot heal broken bones, and doubtless there are many other physical ills which it cannot heal, but it can greatly help to modify the severities of all of them without exception, and there are mental and nervous ailments which it can wholly heal without the help of physician or surgeon. susy records another burning interest of this time: clara sprained her ankle a little while ago by running into a tree when coasting, and while she was unable to walk with it she played solotaire with cards a great deal. while clara was sick and papa saw her play solotaire so much he got very much interested in the game, and finally began to play it himself a little; then jean took it up, and at last mama even played it occasionally; jean's and papa's love for it rapidly increased, and now jean brings the cards every night to the table and papa and mama help her play, and before dinner is at an end papa has gotten a separate pack of cards and is playing alone, with great interest. mama and clara next are made subject to the contagious solotaire, and there are four solotarireans at the table, while you hear nothing but "fill up the place," etc. it is dreadful! but a little further along susy presents her chief subject more seriously. he is not altogether absorbed with "mind cure" and solitaire, or even with making humorous tales. papa has done a great deal in his life i think that is good and very remarkable, but i think if he had had the advantages with which he could have developed the gifts which he has made no use of in writing his books, or in any other way, for peoples' pleasure and benefit outside of his own family and intimate friends, he could have done more than he has, and a great deal more, even. he is known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in him that is earnest than that is humorous. he has a keen sense of the ludicrous, notices funny stories and incidents, knows how to tell them, to improve upon them, and does not forget them. and again: when we are all alone at home nine times out of ten he talks about some very earnest subject (with an occasional joke thrown in), and he a good deal more often talks upon such subjects than upon the other kind. he is as much of a philosopher as anything, i think. i think he could have done a great deal in this direction if he had studied while young, for he seems to enjoy reasoning out things, no matter what; in a great many such directions he has greater ability than in the gifts which have made him famous. it was with the keen eyes and just mind of childhood that susy estimated, and there is little to add to her valuation. susy's biography came to an end that summer after starting to record a visit which they all made to keokuk to see grandma clemens. they went by way of the lakes and down the mississippi from st. paul. a pleasant incident happened that first evening on the river. soon after nightfall they entered a shoal crossing. clemens, standing alone on the hurricane-deck, heard the big bell forward boom out the call for leads. then came the leadsman's long-drawn chant, once so familiar, the monotonous repeating in river parlance of the depths of water. presently the lead had found that depth of water signified by his nom de plume and the call of "mark twain, mark twain" floated up to him like a summons from the past. all at once a little figure came running down the deck, and clara confronted him, reprovingly: "papa," she said, "i have hunted all over the boat for you. don't you know they are calling for you?" they remained in keokuk a week, and susy starts to tell something of their visit there. she begins: "we have arrived in keokuk after a very pleasant----" the sentence remains unfinished. we cannot know what was the interruption or what new interest kept her from her task. we can only regret that the loving little hand did not continue its pleasant history. years later, when susy had passed from among the things we know, her father, commenting, said: when i look at the arrested sentence that ends the little book it seems as if the hand that traced it cannot be far--it is gone for a moment only, and will come again and finish it. but that is a dream; a creature of the heart, not of the mind--a feeling, a longing, not a mental product; the same that lured aaron burr, old, gray, forlorn, forsaken, to the pier day after day, week after week, there to stand in the gloom and the chill of the dawn, gazing seaward through veiling mists and sleet and snow for the ship which he knew was gone down, the ship that bore all his treasure--his daughter. roughing it by mark twain part . to calvin h. higbie, of california, an honest man, a genial comrade, and a steadfast friend. this book is inscribed by the author, in memory of the curious time when we two were millionaires for ten days. roughing it by mark twain. (samuel l. clemens.) prefatory. this book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. it is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science. still, there is information in the volume; information concerning an interesting episode in the history of the far west, about which no books have been written by persons who were on the ground in person, and saw the happenings of the time with their own eyes. i allude to the rise, growth and culmination of the silver-mining fever in nevada -a curious episode, in some respects; the only one, of its peculiar kind, that has occurred in the land; and the only one, indeed, that is likely to occur in it. yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. i regret this very much; but really it could not be helped: information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter. sometimes it has seemed to me that i would give worlds if i could retain my facts; but it cannot be. the more i calk up the sources, and the tighter i get, the more i leak wisdom. therefore, i can only claim indulgence at the hands of the reader, not justification. the author. contents. chapter i. my brother appointed secretary of nevada--i envy his prospective adventures--am appointed private secretary under him--my contentment complete--packed in one hour--dreams and visions--on the missouri river --a bully boat chapter ii. arrive at st. joseph--only twenty-five pounds baggage allowed--farewell to kid gloves and dress coats--armed to the teeth--the "allen"--a cheerful weapon--persuaded to buy a mule--schedule of luxuries--we leave the "states"--"our coach"--mails for the indians--between a wink and an earthquake--a modern sphynx and how she entertained us--a sociable heifer chapter iii. "the thoroughbrace is broke"--mails delivered properly--sleeping under difficulties--a jackass rabbit meditating, and on business--a modern gulliver--sage-brush--overcoats as an article of diet--sad fate of a camel--warning to experimenters chapter iv. making our bed--assaults by the unabridged--at a station--our driver a great and shining dignitary--strange place for a frontyard --accommodations--double portraits--an heirloom--our worthy landlord --"fixings and things"--an exile--slumgullion--a well furnished table--the landlord astonished--table etiquette--wild mexican mules--stage-coaching and railroading chapter v. new acquaintances--the cayote--a dog's experiences--a disgusted dog--the relatives of the cayote--meals taken away from home chapter vi. the division superintendent--the conductor--the driver--one hundred and fifty miles' drive without sleep--teaching a subordinate--our old friend jack and a pilgrim--ben holliday compared to moses chapter vii. overland city--crossing the platte--bemis's buffalo hunt--assault by a buffalo--bemis's horse goes crazy--an impromptu circus--a new departure --bemis finds refuge in a tree--escapes finally by a wonderful method chapter viii. the pony express--fifty miles without stopping--"here he comes"--alkali water--riding an avalanche--indian massacre chapter ix. among the indians--an unfair advantage--laying on our arms--a midnight murder--wrath of outlaws--a dangerous, yet valuable citizen chapter x. history of slade--a proposed fist-fight--encounter with jules--paradise of outlaws--slade as superintendent--as executioner--a doomed whisky seller--a prisoner--a wife's bravery--an ancient enemy captured--enjoying a luxury--hob-nobbing with slade--too polite--a happy escape chapter xi. slade in montana--"on a spree"--in court--attack on a judge--arrest by the vigilantes--turn out of the miners--execution of slade--lamentations of his wife--was slade a coward? chapter xii. a mormon emigrant train--the heart of the rocky mountains--pure saleratus--a natural ice-house--an entire inhabitant--in sight of "eternal snow"--the south pass--the parting streams--an unreliable letter carrier--meeting of old friends--a spoiled watermelon--down the mountain--a scene of desolation--lost in the dark--unnecessary advice --u.s. troops and indians--sublime spectacle--another delusion dispelled --among the angels chapter xiii. mormons and gentiles--exhilarating drink, and its effect on bemis--salt lake city--a great contrast--a mormon vagrant--talk with a saint--a visit to the "king"--a happy simile chapter xiv. mormon contractors--how mr. street astonished them--the case before brigham young, and how he disposed of it--polygamy viewed from a new position chapter xv. a gentile den--polygamy discussed--favorite wife and d. --hennery for retired wives--children need marking--cost of a gift to no. --a penny-whistle gift and its effects--fathering the foundlings --it resembled him--the family bedstead chapter xvi the mormon bible--proofs of its divinity--plagiarism of its authors --story of nephi--wonderful battle--kilkenny cats outdone chapter xvii. three sides to all questions--everything "a quarter"--shriveled up --emigrants and white shirts at a discount--"forty-niners"--above par--real happiness chapter xviii. alkali desert--romance of crossing dispelled--alkali dust--effect on the mules--universal thanksgiving chapter xix. the digger indians compared with the bushmen of africa--food, life and characteristics--cowardly attack on a stage coach--a brave driver--the noble red man chapter xx. the great american desert--forty miles on bones--lakes without outlets --greely's remarkable ride--hank monk, the renowned driver--fatal effects of "corking" a story--bald-headed anecdote chapter xxi. alkali dust--desolation and contemplation--carson city--our journey ended--we are introduced to several citizens--a strange rebuke--a washoe zephyr at play--its office hours--governor's palace--government offices --our french landlady bridget o'flannigan--shadow secrets--cause for a disturbance at once--the irish brigade--mrs. o'flannigan's boarders--the surveying expedition--escape of the tarantulas chapter xxii. the son of a nabob--start for lake tahoe--splendor of the views--trip on the lake--camping out--reinvigorating climate--clearing a tract of land --securing a title--outhouse and fences chapter xxiii. a happy life--lake tahoe and its moods--transparency of the waters--a catastrophe--fire! fire!--a magnificent spectacle--homeless again--we take to the lake--a storm--return to carson chapter xxiv. resolve to buy a horse--horsemanship in carson--a temptation--advice given me freely--i buy the mexican plug--my first ride--a good bucker--i loan the plug--experience of borrowers--attempts to sell--expense of the experiment--a stranger taken in chapter xxv. the mormons in nevada--how to persuade a loan from them--early history of the territory--silver mines discovered--the new territorial government--a foreign one and a poor one--its funny struggles for existence--no credit, no cash--old abe currey sustains it and its officers--instructions and vouchers--an indian's endorsement--toll-gates chapter xxvi. the silver fever--state of the market--silver bricks--tales told--off for the humboldt mines chapter xxvii. our manner of going--incidents of the trip--a warm but too familiar a bedfellow--mr. ballou objects--sunshine amid clouds--safely arrived chapter xxviii. arrive at the mountains--building our cabin--my first prospecting tour --my first gold mine--pockets filled with treasures--filtering the news to my companions--the bubble pricked--all not gold that glitters chapter xxix. out prospecting--a silver mine at last--making a fortune with sledge and drill--a hard road to travel--we own in claims--a rocky country chapter xxx. disinterested friends--how "feet" were sold--we quit tunnelling--a trip to esmeralda--my companions--an indian prophesy--a flood--our quarters during it chapter xxxi. the guests at "honey lake smith's"--"bully old arkansas"--"our landlord" --determined to fight--the landlord's wife--the bully conquered by her --another start--crossing the carson--a narrow escape--following our own track--a new guide--lost in the snow chapter xxxii. desperate situation--attempts to make a fire--our horses leave us--we find matches--one, two, three and the last--no fire--death seems inevitable--we mourn over our evil lives--discarded vices--we forgive each other--an affectionate farewell--the sleep of oblivion chapter xxxiii. return of consciousness--ridiculous developments--a station house--bitter feelings--fruits of repentance--resurrected vices chapter xxxiv. about carson--general buncombe--hyde vs. morgan--how hyde lost his ranch --the great landslide case--the trial--general buncombe in court--a wonderful decision--a serious afterthought chapter xxxv. a new travelling companion--all full and no accommodations--how captain nye found room--and caused our leaving to be lamented--the uses of tunnelling--a notable example--we go into the "claim" business and fail --at the bottom chapter xxxvi. a quartz mill--amalgamation--"screening tailings"--first quartz mill in nevada--fire assay--a smart assayer--i stake for an advance chapter xxxvii. the whiteman cement mine--story of its discovery--a secret expedition--a nocturnal adventure--a distressing position--a failure and a week's holiday chapter xxxviii. mono lake--shampooing made easy--thoughtless act of our dog and the results--lye water--curiosities of the lake--free hotel--some funny incidents a little overdrawn chapter xxxix. visit to the islands in lake mono--ashes and desolation--life amid death our boat adrift--a jump for life--a storm on the lake--a mass of soap suds--geological curiosities--a week on the sierras--a narrow escape from a funny explosion--"stove heap gone" chapter xl. the "wide west" mine--it is "interviewed" by higbie--a blind lead--worth a million--we are rich at last--plans for the future chapter xli. a rheumatic patient--day dreams--an unfortunate stumble--i leave suddenly--another patient--higbie in the cabin--our balloon bursted --worth nothing--regrets and explanations--our third partner chapter xlii. what to do next?--obstacles i had met with--"jack of all trades"--mining again--target shooting--i turn city editor--i succeed finely chapter xliii. my friend boggs--the school report--boggs pays me an old debt--virginia city chapter xliv. flush times--plenty of stock--editorial puffing--stocks given me--salting mines--a tragedian in a new role chapter xlv. flush times continue--sanitary commission fund--wild enthusiasm of the people--would not wait to contribute--the sanitary flour sack--it is carried to gold hill and dayton--final reception in virginia--results of the sale--a grand total chapter xlvi. the nabobs of those days--john smith as a traveler--sudden wealth--a sixty-thousand-dollar horse--a smart telegraph operator--a nabob in new york city--charters an omnibus--"walk in, it's all free"--"you can't pay a cent"--"hold on, driver, i weaken"--sociability of new yorkers chapter xlvii. buck fanshaw's death--the cause thereof--preparations for his burial --scotty briggs the committee man--he visits the minister--scotty can't play his hand--the minister gets mixed--both begin to see--"all down again but nine"--buck fanshaw as a citizen--how to "shook your mother" --the funeral--scotty briggs as a sunday school teacher chapter xlviii. the first twenty-six graves in nevada--the prominent men of the county --the man who had killed his dozen--trial by jury--specimen jurors--a private grave yard--the desperadoes--who they killed--waking up the weary passenger--satisfaction without fighting chapter xlix. fatal shooting affray--robbery and desperate affray--a specimen city official--a marked man--a street fight--punishment of crime chapter l. captain ned blakely--bill nookes receives desired information--killing of blakely's mate--a walking battery--blakely secures nookes--hang first and be tried afterwards--captain blakely as a chaplain--the first chapter of genesis read at a hanging--nookes hung--blakely's regrets chapter li. the weekly occidental--a ready editor--a novel--a concentration of talent--the heroes and the heroines--the dissolute author engaged --extraordinary havoc with the novel--a highly romantic chapter--the lovers separated--jonah out-done--a lost poem--the aged pilot man--storm on the erie canal--dollinger the pilot man--terrific gale--danger increases--a crisis arrived--saved as if by a miracle chapter lii. freights to california--silver bricks--under ground mines--timber supports--a visit to the mines--the caved mines--total of shipments in chapter liii. jim blaine and his grandfather's ram--filkin's mistake--old miss wagner and her glass eye--jacobs, the coffin dealer--waiting for a customer--his bargain with old robbins--robbins sues for damage and collects--a new use for missionaries--the effect--his uncle lem. and the use providence made of him--sad fate of wheeler--devotion of his wife--a model monument--what about the ram? chapter liv. chinese in virginia city--washing bills--habit of imitation--chinese immigration--a visit to chinatown--messrs. ah sing, hong wo, see yup, &c. chapter lv. tired of virginia city--an old schoolmate--a two years' loan--acting as an editor--almost receive an offer--an accident--three drunken anecdotes --last look at mt. davidson--a beautiful incident chapter lvi. off for san francisco--western and eastern landscapes--the hottest place on earth--summer and winter chapter lvii. california--novelty of seeing a woman--"well if it ain't a child!"--one hundred and fifty dollars for a kiss--waiting for a turn chapter lviii. life in san francisco--worthless stocks--my first earthquake--reportorial instincts--effects of the shocks--incidents and curiosities--sabbath breakers--the lodger and the chambermaid--a sensible fashion to follow --effects of the earthquake on the ministers chapter lix. poor again--slinking as a business--a model collector--misery loves company--comparing notes for comfort--a streak of luck--finding a dime --wealthy by comparison--two sumptuous dinners chapter lx. an old friend--an educated miner--pocket mining--freaks of fortune chapter lxi. dick baker and his cat--tom quartz's peculiarities--on an excursion --appearance on his return--a prejudiced cat--empty pockets and a roving life chapter lxii. bound for the sandwich islands--the three captains--the old admiral--his daily habits--his well fought fields--an unexpected opponent--the admiral overpowered--the victor declared a hero chapter lxiii. arrival at the islands--honolulu--what i saw there--dress and habits of the inhabitants--the animal kingdom--fruits and delightful effects chapter lxiv. an excursion--captain phillips and his turn-out--a horseback ride--a vicious animal--nature and art--interesting ruins--all praise to the missionaries chapter lxv. interesting mementoes and relics--an old legend of a frightful leap--an appreciative horse--horse jockeys and their brothers--a new trick--a hay merchant--good country for horse lovers chapter lxvi. a saturday afternoon--sandwich island girls on a frolic--the poi merchant--grand gala day--a native dance--church membership--cats and officials--an overwhelming discovery chapter lxvii. the legislature of the island--what its president has seen--praying for an enemy--women's rights--romantic fashions--worship of the shark--desire for dress--full dress--not paris style--playing empire--officials and foreign ambassadors--overwhelming magnificence chapter lxviii. a royal funeral--order of procession--pomp and ceremony--a striking contrast--a sick monarch--human sacrifices at his death--burial orgies chapter lxix. "once more upon the waters."--a noisy passenger--several silent ones--a moonlight scene--fruits and plantations chapter lxx. a droll character--mrs. beazely and her son--meditations on turnips--a letter from horace greeley--an indignant rejoinder--the letter translated but too late chapter lxxi. kealakekua bay--death of captain cook--his monument--its construction--on board the schooner chapter lxxii. young kanakas in new england--a temple built by ghosts--female bathers--i stood guard--women and whiskey--a fight for religion--arrival of missionaries chapter lxxiii. native canoes--surf bathing--a sanctuary--how built--the queen's rock --curiosities--petrified lava chapter lxxiv. visit to the volcano--the crater--pillar of fire--magnificent spectacle --a lake of fire chapter lxxv. the north lake--fountains of fire--streams of burning lava--tidal waves chapter lxxvi. a reminiscence--another horse story--my ride with the retired milk horse --a picnicing excursion--dead volcano of holeakala--comparison with vesuvius--an inside view chapter lxxvii. a curious character--a series of stories--sad fate of a liar--evidence of insanity chapter lxxviii. return to san francisco--ship amusements--preparing for lecturing --valuable assistance secured--my first attempt--the audience carried --"all's well that ends well." chapter lxxix. highwaymen--a predicament--a huge joke--farewell to california--at home again--great changes. moral. appendix. a.--brief sketch of mormon history b.--the mountain meadows massacre c.--concerning a frightful assassination that was never consummated chapter i. my brother had just been appointed secretary of nevada territory--an office of such majesty that it concentrated in itself the duties and dignities of treasurer, comptroller, secretary of state, and acting governor in the governor's absence. a salary of eighteen hundred dollars a year and the title of "mr. secretary," gave to the great position an air of wild and imposing grandeur. i was young and ignorant, and i envied my brother. i coveted his distinction and his financial splendor, but particularly and especially the long, strange journey he was going to make, and the curious new world he was going to explore. he was going to travel! i never had been away from home, and that word "travel" had a seductive charm for me. pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the far west, and would see buffaloes and indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and may be get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero. and he would see the gold mines and the silver mines, and maybe go about of an afternoon when his work was done, and pick up two or three pailfuls of shining slugs, and nuggets of gold and silver on the hillside. and by and by he would become very rich, and return home by sea, and be able to talk as calmly about san francisco and the ocean, and "the isthmus" as if it was nothing of any consequence to have seen those marvels face to face. what i suffered in contemplating his happiness, pen cannot describe. and so, when he offered me, in cold blood, the sublime position of private secretary under him, it appeared to me that the heavens and the earth passed away, and the firmament was rolled together as a scroll! i had nothing more to desire. my contentment was complete. at the end of an hour or two i was ready for the journey. not much packing up was necessary, because we were going in the overland stage from the missouri frontier to nevada, and passengers were only allowed a small quantity of baggage apiece. there was no pacific railroad in those fine times of ten or twelve years ago--not a single rail of it. i only proposed to stay in nevada three months--i had no thought of staying longer than that. i meant to see all i could that was new and strange, and then hurry home to business. i little thought that i would not see the end of that three-month pleasure excursion for six or seven uncommonly long years! i dreamed all night about indians, deserts, and silver bars, and in due time, next day, we took shipping at the st. louis wharf on board a steamboat bound up the missouri river. we were six days going from st. louis to "st. jo."--a trip that was so dull, and sleepy, and eventless that it has left no more impression on my memory than if its duration had been six minutes instead of that many days. no record is left in my mind, now, concerning it, but a confused jumble of savage-looking snags, which we deliberately walked over with one wheel or the other; and of reefs which we butted and butted, and then retired from and climbed over in some softer place; and of sand-bars which we roosted on occasionally, and rested, and then got out our crutches and sparred over. in fact, the boat might almost as well have gone to st. jo. by land, for she was walking most of the time, anyhow--climbing over reefs and clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all day long. the captain said she was a "bully" boat, and all she wanted was more "shear" and a bigger wheel. i thought she wanted a pair of stilts, but i had the deep sagacity not to say so. chapter ii. the first thing we did on that glad evening that landed us at st. joseph was to hunt up the stage-office, and pay a hundred and fifty dollars apiece for tickets per overland coach to carson city, nevada. the next morning, bright and early, we took a hasty breakfast, and hurried to the starting-place. then an inconvenience presented itself which we had not properly appreciated before, namely, that one cannot make a heavy traveling trunk stand for twenty-five pounds of baggage --because it weighs a good deal more. but that was all we could take --twenty-five pounds each. so we had to snatch our trunks open, and make a selection in a good deal of a hurry. we put our lawful twenty-five pounds apiece all in one valise, and shipped the trunks back to st. louis again. it was a sad parting, for now we had no swallow-tail coats and white kid gloves to wear at pawnee receptions in the rocky mountains, and no stove-pipe hats nor patent-leather boots, nor anything else necessary to make life calm and peaceful. we were reduced to a war-footing. each of us put on a rough, heavy suit of clothing, woolen army shirt and "stogy" boots included; and into the valise we crowded a few white shirts, some under-clothing and such things. my brother, the secretary, took along about four pounds of united states statutes and six pounds of unabridged dictionary; for we did not know--poor innocents--that such things could be bought in san francisco on one day and received in carson city the next. i was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little smith & wesson's seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homoeopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult. but i thought it was grand. it appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon. it only had one fault--you could not hit anything with it. one of our "conductors" practiced awhile on a cow with it, and as long as she stood still and behaved herself she was safe; but as soon as she went to moving about, and he got to shooting at other things, she came to grief. the secretary had a small-sized colt's revolver strapped around him for protection against the indians, and to guard against accidents he carried it uncapped. mr. george bemis was dismally formidable. george bemis was our fellow-traveler. we had never seen him before. he wore in his belt an old original "allen" revolver, such as irreverent people called a "pepper-box." simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol. as the trigger came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over, and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the ball. to aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was probably never done with an "allen" in the world. but george's was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the stage-drivers afterward said, "if she didn't get what she went after, she would fetch something else." and so she did. she went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it. bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow. it was a cheerful weapon--the "allen." sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind it. we took two or three blankets for protection against frosty weather in the mountains. in the matter of luxuries we were modest--we took none along but some pipes and five pounds of smoking tobacco. we had two large canteens to carry water in, between stations on the plains, and we also took with us a little shot-bag of silver coin for daily expenses in the way of breakfasts and dinners. by eight o'clock everything was ready, and we were on the other side of the river. we jumped into the stage, the driver cracked his whip, and we bowled away and left "the states" behind us. it was a superb summer morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine. there was a freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost made us feel that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving, had been wasted and thrown away. we were spinning along through kansas, and in the course of an hour and a half we were fairly abroad on the great plains. just here the land was rolling--a grand sweep of regular elevations and depressions as far as the eye could reach--like the stately heave and swell of the ocean's bosom after a storm. and everywhere were cornfields, accenting with squares of deeper green, this limitless expanse of grassy land. but presently this sea upon dry ground was to lose its "rolling" character and stretch away for seven hundred miles as level as a floor! our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous description--an imposing cradle on wheels. it was drawn by six handsome horses, and by the side of the driver sat the "conductor," the legitimate captain of the craft; for it was his business to take charge and care of the mails, baggage, express matter, and passengers. we three were the only passengers, this trip. we sat on the back seat, inside. about all the rest of the coach was full of mail bags--for we had three days' delayed mails with us. almost touching our knees, a perpendicular wall of mail matter rose up to the roof. there was a great pile of it strapped on top of the stage, and both the fore and hind boots were full. we had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard, the driver said--"a little for brigham, and carson, and 'frisco, but the heft of it for the injuns, which is powerful troublesome 'thout they get plenty of truck to read." but as he just then got up a fearful convulsion of his countenance which was suggestive of a wink being swallowed by an earthquake, we guessed that his remark was intended to be facetious, and to mean that we would unload the most of our mail matter somewhere on the plains and leave it to the indians, or whosoever wanted it. we changed horses every ten miles, all day long, and fairly flew over the hard, level road. we jumped out and stretched our legs every time the coach stopped, and so the night found us still vivacious and unfatigued. after supper a woman got in, who lived about fifty miles further on, and we three had to take turns at sitting outside with the driver and conductor. apparently she was not a talkative woman. she would sit there in the gathering twilight and fasten her steadfast eyes on a mosquito rooting into her arm, and slowly she would raise her other hand till she had got his range, and then she would launch a slap at him that would have jolted a cow; and after that she would sit and contemplate the corpse with tranquil satisfaction--for she never missed her mosquito; she was a dead shot at short range. she never removed a carcase, but left them there for bait. i sat by this grim sphynx and watched her kill thirty or forty mosquitoes--watched her, and waited for her to say something, but she never did. so i finally opened the conversation myself. i said: "the mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam." "you bet!" "what did i understand you to say, madam?" "you bet!" then she cheered up, and faced around and said: "danged if i didn't begin to think you fellers was deef and dumb. i did, b'gosh. here i've sot, and sot, and sot, a-bust'n muskeeters and wonderin' what was ailin' ye. fust i thot you was deef and dumb, then i thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin', and then by and by i begin to reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that couldn't think of nothing to say. wher'd ye come from?" the sphynx was a sphynx no more! the fountains of her great deep were broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech forty days and forty nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried us under a desolating deluge of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder projecting above the tossing waste of dislocated grammar and decomposed pronunciation! how we suffered, suffered, suffered! she went on, hour after hour, till i was sorry i ever opened the mosquito question and gave her a start. she never did stop again until she got to her journey's end toward daylight; and then she stirred us up as she was leaving the stage (for we were nodding, by that time), and said: "now you git out at cottonwood, you fellers, and lay over a couple o' days, and i'll be along some time to-night, and if i can do ye any good by edgin' in a word now and then, i'm right thar. folks'll tell you't i've always ben kind o' offish and partic'lar for a gal that's raised in the woods, and i am, with the rag-tag and bob-tail, and a gal has to be, if she wants to be anything, but when people comes along which is my equals, i reckon i'm a pretty sociable heifer after all." we resolved not to "lay by at cottonwood." chapter iii. about an hour and a half before daylight we were bowling along smoothly over the road--so smoothly that our cradle only rocked in a gentle, lulling way, that was gradually soothing us to sleep, and dulling our consciousness--when something gave away under us! we were dimly aware of it, but indifferent to it. the coach stopped. we heard the driver and conductor talking together outside, and rummaging for a lantern, and swearing because they could not find it--but we had no interest in whatever had happened, and it only added to our comfort to think of those people out there at work in the murky night, and we snug in our nest with the curtains drawn. but presently, by the sounds, there seemed to be an examination going on, and then the driver's voice said: "by george, the thoroughbrace is broke!" this startled me broad awake--as an undefined sense of calamity is always apt to do. i said to myself: "now, a thoroughbrace is probably part of a horse; and doubtless a vital part, too, from the dismay in the driver's voice. leg, maybe--and yet how could he break his leg waltzing along such a road as this? no, it can't be his leg. that is impossible, unless he was reaching for the driver. now, what can be the thoroughbrace of a horse, i wonder? well, whatever comes, i shall not air my ignorance in this crowd, anyway." just then the conductor's face appeared at a lifted curtain, and his lantern glared in on us and our wall of mail matter. he said: "gents, you'll have to turn out a spell. thoroughbrace is broke." we climbed out into a chill drizzle, and felt ever so homeless and dreary. when i found that the thing they called a "thoroughbrace" was the massive combination of belts and springs which the coach rocks itself in, i said to the driver: "i never saw a thoroughbrace used up like that, before, that i can remember. how did it happen?" "why, it happened by trying to make one coach carry three days' mail --that's how it happened," said he. "and right here is the very direction which is wrote on all the newspaper-bags which was to be put out for the injuns for to keep 'em quiet. it's most uncommon lucky, becuz it's so nation dark i should 'a' gone by unbeknowns if that air thoroughbrace hadn't broke." i knew that he was in labor with another of those winks of his, though i could not see his face, because he was bent down at work; and wishing him a safe delivery, i turned to and helped the rest get out the mail-sacks. it made a great pyramid by the roadside when it was all out. when they had mended the thoroughbrace we filled the two boots again, but put no mail on top, and only half as much inside as there was before. the conductor bent all the seat-backs down, and then filled the coach just half full of mail-bags from end to end. we objected loudly to this, for it left us no seats. but the conductor was wiser than we, and said a bed was better than seats, and moreover, this plan would protect his thoroughbraces. we never wanted any seats after that. the lazy bed was infinitely preferable. i had many an exciting day, subsequently, lying on it reading the statutes and the dictionary, and wondering how the characters would turn out. the conductor said he would send back a guard from the next station to take charge of the abandoned mail-bags, and we drove on. it was now just dawn; and as we stretched our cramped legs full length on the mail sacks, and gazed out through the windows across the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist, to where there was an expectant look in the eastern horizon, our perfect enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy. the stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses' hoofs, the cracking of the driver's whip, and his "hi-yi! g'lang!" were music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared to give us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us with interest, or envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the pipe of peace and compared all this luxury with the years of tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had found it. after breakfast, at some station whose name i have forgotten, we three climbed up on the seat behind the driver, and let the conductor have our bed for a nap. and by and by, when the sun made me drowsy, i lay down on my face on top of the coach, grasping the slender iron railing, and slept for an hour or more. that will give one an appreciable idea of those matchless roads. instinct will make a sleeping man grip a fast hold of the railing when the stage jolts, but when it only swings and sways, no grip is necessary. overland drivers and conductors used to sit in their places and sleep thirty or forty minutes at a time, on good roads, while spinning along at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour. i saw them do it, often. there was no danger about it; a sleeping man will seize the irons in time when the coach jolts. these men were hard worked, and it was not possible for them to stay awake all the time. by and by we passed through marysville, and over the big blue and little sandy; thence about a mile, and entered nebraska. about a mile further on, we came to the big sandy--one hundred and eighty miles from st. joseph. as the sun was going down, we saw the first specimen of an animal known familiarly over two thousand miles of mountain and desert--from kansas clear to the pacific ocean--as the "jackass rabbit." he is well named. he is just like any other rabbit, except that he is from one third to twice as large, has longer legs in proportion to his size, and has the most preposterous ears that ever were mounted on any creature but a jackass. when he is sitting quiet, thinking about his sins, or is absent-minded or unapprehensive of danger, his majestic ears project above him conspicuously; but the breaking of a twig will scare him nearly to death, and then he tilts his ears back gently and starts for home. all you can see, then, for the next minute, is his long gray form stretched out straight and "streaking it" through the low sage-brush, head erect, eyes right, and ears just canted a little to the rear, but showing you where the animal is, all the time, the same as if he carried a jib. now and then he makes a marvelous spring with his long legs, high over the stunted sage-brush, and scores a leap that would make a horse envious. presently he comes down to a long, graceful "lope," and shortly he mysteriously disappears. he has crouched behind a sage-bush, and will sit there and listen and tremble until you get within six feet of him, when he will get under way again. but one must shoot at this creature once, if he wishes to see him throw his heart into his heels, and do the best he knows how. he is frightened clear through, now, and he lays his long ears down on his back, straightens himself out like a yard-stick every spring he makes, and scatters miles behind him with an easy indifference that is enchanting. our party made this specimen "hump himself," as the conductor said. the secretary started him with a shot from the colt; i commenced spitting at him with my weapon; and all in the same instant the old "allen's" whole broadside let go with a rattling crash, and it is not putting it too strong to say that the rabbit was frantic! he dropped his ears, set up his tail, and left for san francisco at a speed which can only be described as a flash and a vanish! long after he was out of sight we could hear him whiz. i do not remember where we first came across "sage-brush," but as i have been speaking of it i may as well describe it. this is easily done, for if the reader can imagine a gnarled and venerable live oak-tree reduced to a little shrub two feet-high, with its rough bark, its foliage, its twisted boughs, all complete, he can picture the "sage-brush" exactly. often, on lazy afternoons in the mountains, i have lain on the ground with my face under a sage-bush, and entertained myself with fancying that the gnats among its foliage were liliputian birds, and that the ants marching and countermarching about its base were liliputian flocks and herds, and myself some vast loafer from brobdignag waiting to catch a little citizen and eat him. it is an imposing monarch of the forest in exquisite miniature, is the "sage-brush." its foliage is a grayish green, and gives that tint to desert and mountain. it smells like our domestic sage, and "sage-tea" made from it taste like the sage-tea which all boys are so well acquainted with. the sage-brush is a singularly hardy plant, and grows right in the midst of deep sand, and among barren rocks, where nothing else in the vegetable world would try to grow, except "bunch-grass." --["bunch-grass" grows on the bleak mountain-sides of nevada and neighboring territories, and offers excellent feed for stock, even in the dead of winter, wherever the snow is blown aside and exposes it; notwithstanding its unpromising home, bunch-grass is a better and more nutritious diet for cattle and horses than almost any other hay or grass that is known--so stock-men say.]--the sage-bushes grow from three to six or seven feet apart, all over the mountains and deserts of the far west, clear to the borders of california. there is not a tree of any kind in the deserts, for hundreds of miles--there is no vegetation at all in a regular desert, except the sage-brush and its cousin the "greasewood," which is so much like the sage-brush that the difference amounts to little. camp-fires and hot suppers in the deserts would be impossible but for the friendly sage-brush. its trunk is as large as a boy's wrist (and from that up to a man's arm), and its crooked branches are half as large as its trunk--all good, sound, hard wood, very like oak. when a party camps, the first thing to be done is to cut sage-brush; and in a few minutes there is an opulent pile of it ready for use. a hole a foot wide, two feet deep, and two feet long, is dug, and sage-brush chopped up and burned in it till it is full to the brim with glowing coals. then the cooking begins, and there is no smoke, and consequently no swearing. such a fire will keep all night, with very little replenishing; and it makes a very sociable camp-fire, and one around which the most impossible reminiscences sound plausible, instructive, and profoundly entertaining. sage-brush is very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule. but their testimony to its nutritiousness is worth nothing, for they will eat pine knots, or anthracite coal, or brass filings, or lead pipe, or old bottles, or anything that comes handy, and then go off looking as grateful as if they had had oysters for dinner. mules and donkeys and camels have appetites that anything will relieve temporarily, but nothing satisfy. in syria, once, at the head-waters of the jordan, a camel took charge of my overcoat while the tents were being pitched, and examined it with a critical eye, all over, with as much interest as if he had an idea of getting one made like it; and then, after he was done figuring on it as an article of apparel, he began to contemplate it as an article of diet. he put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth, and chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before, in his life. then he smacked his lips once or twice, and reached after the other sleeve. next he tried the velvet collar, and smiled a smile of such contentment that it was plain to see that he regarded that as the daintiest thing about an overcoat. the tails went next, along with some percussion caps and cough candy, and some fig-paste from constantinople. and then my newspaper correspondence dropped out, and he took a chance in that --manuscript letters written for the home papers. but he was treading on dangerous ground, now. he began to come across solid wisdom in those documents that was rather weighty on his stomach; and occasionally he would take a joke that would shake him up till it loosened his teeth; it was getting to be perilous times with him, but he held his grip with good courage and hopefully, till at last he began to stumble on statements that not even a camel could swallow with impunity. he began to gag and gasp, and his eyes to stand out, and his forelegs to spread, and in about a quarter of a minute he fell over as stiff as a carpenter's work-bench, and died a death of indescribable agony. i went and pulled the manuscript out of his mouth, and found that the sensitive creature had choked to death on one of the mildest and gentlest statements of fact that i ever laid before a trusting public. i was about to say, when diverted from my subject, that occasionally one finds sage-bushes five or six feet high, and with a spread of branch and foliage in proportion, but two or two and a half feet is the usual height. chapter iv. as the sun went down and the evening chill came on, we made preparation for bed. we stirred up the hard leather letter-sacks, and the knotty canvas bags of printed matter (knotty and uneven because of projecting ends and corners of magazines, boxes and books). we stirred them up and redisposed them in such a way as to make our bed as level as possible. and we did improve it, too, though after all our work it had an upheaved and billowy look about it, like a little piece of a stormy sea. next we hunted up our boots from odd nooks among the mail-bags where they had settled, and put them on. then we got down our coats, vests, pantaloons and heavy woolen shirts, from the arm-loops where they had been swinging all day, and clothed ourselves in them--for, there being no ladies either at the stations or in the coach, and the weather being hot, we had looked to our comfort by stripping to our underclothing, at nine o'clock in the morning. all things being now ready, we stowed the uneasy dictionary where it would lie as quiet as possible, and placed the water-canteens and pistols where we could find them in the dark. then we smoked a final pipe, and swapped a final yarn; after which, we put the pipes, tobacco and bag of coin in snug holes and caves among the mail-bags, and then fastened down the coach curtains all around, and made the place as "dark as the inside of a cow," as the conductor phrased it in his picturesque way. it was certainly as dark as any place could be--nothing was even dimly visible in it. and finally, we rolled ourselves up like silk-worms, each person in his own blanket, and sank peacefully to sleep. whenever the stage stopped to change horses, we would wake up, and try to recollect where we were--and succeed--and in a minute or two the stage would be off again, and we likewise. we began to get into country, now, threaded here and there with little streams. these had high, steep banks on each side, and every time we flew down one bank and scrambled up the other, our party inside got mixed somewhat. first we would all be down in a pile at the forward end of the stage, nearly in a sitting posture, and in a second we would shoot to the other end, and stand on our heads. and we would sprawl and kick, too, and ward off ends and corners of mail-bags that came lumbering over us and about us; and as the dust rose from the tumult, we would all sneeze in chorus, and the majority of us would grumble, and probably say some hasty thing, like: "take your elbow out of my ribs!--can't you quit crowding?" every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other, the unabridged dictionary would come too; and every time it came it damaged somebody. one trip it "barked" the secretary's elbow; the next trip it hurt me in the stomach, and the third it tilted bemis's nose up till he could look down his nostrils--he said. the pistols and coin soon settled to the bottom, but the pipes, pipe-stems, tobacco and canteens clattered and floundered after the dictionary every time it made an assault on us, and aided and abetted the book by spilling tobacco in our eyes, and water down our backs. still, all things considered, it was a very comfortable night. it wore gradually away, and when at last a cold gray light was visible through the puckers and chinks in the curtains, we yawned and stretched with satisfaction, shed our cocoons, and felt that we had slept as much as was necessary. by and by, as the sun rose up and warmed the world, we pulled off our clothes and got ready for breakfast. we were just pleasantly in time, for five minutes afterward the driver sent the weird music of his bugle winding over the grassy solitudes, and presently we detected a low hut or two in the distance. then the rattling of the coach, the clatter of our six horses' hoofs, and the driver's crisp commands, awoke to a louder and stronger emphasis, and we went sweeping down on the station at our smartest speed. it was fascinating--that old overland stagecoaching. we jumped out in undress uniform. the driver tossed his gathered reins out on the ground, gaped and stretched complacently, drew off his heavy buckskin gloves with great deliberation and insufferable dignity--taking not the slightest notice of a dozen solicitous inquires after his health, and humbly facetious and flattering accostings, and obsequious tenders of service, from five or six hairy and half-civilized station-keepers and hostlers who were nimbly unhitching our steeds and bringing the fresh team out of the stables--for in the eyes of the stage-driver of that day, station-keepers and hostlers were a sort of good enough low creatures, useful in their place, and helping to make up a world, but not the kind of beings which a person of distinction could afford to concern himself with; while, on the contrary, in the eyes of the station-keeper and the hostler, the stage-driver was a hero--a great and shining dignitary, the world's favorite son, the envy of the people, the observed of the nations. when they spoke to him they received his insolent silence meekly, and as being the natural and proper conduct of so great a man; when he opened his lips they all hung on his words with admiration (he never honored a particular individual with a remark, but addressed it with a broad generality to the horses, the stables, the surrounding country and the human underlings); when he discharged a facetious insulting personality at a hostler, that hostler was happy for the day; when he uttered his one jest--old as the hills, coarse, profane, witless, and inflicted on the same audience, in the same language, every time his coach drove up there--the varlets roared, and slapped their thighs, and swore it was the best thing they'd ever heard in all their lives. and how they would fly around when he wanted a basin of water, a gourd of the same, or a light for his pipe!--but they would instantly insult a passenger if he so far forgot himself as to crave a favor at their hands. they could do that sort of insolence as well as the driver they copied it from--for, let it be borne in mind, the overland driver had but little less contempt for his passengers than he had for his hostlers. the hostlers and station-keepers treated the really powerful conductor of the coach merely with the best of what was their idea of civility, but the driver was the only being they bowed down to and worshipped. how admiringly they would gaze up at him in his high seat as he gloved himself with lingering deliberation, while some happy hostler held the bunch of reins aloft, and waited patiently for him to take it! and how they would bombard him with glorifying ejaculations as he cracked his long whip and went careering away. the station buildings were long, low huts, made of sundried, mud-colored bricks, laid up without mortar (adobes, the spaniards call these bricks, and americans shorten it to 'dobies). the roofs, which had no slant to them worth speaking of, were thatched and then sodded or covered with a thick layer of earth, and from this sprung a pretty rank growth of weeds and grass. it was the first time we had ever seen a man's front yard on top of his house. the building consisted of barns, stable-room for twelve or fifteen horses, and a hut for an eating-room for passengers. this latter had bunks in it for the station-keeper and a hostler or two. you could rest your elbow on its eaves, and you had to bend in order to get in at the door. in place of a window there was a square hole about large enough for a man to crawl through, but this had no glass in it. there was no flooring, but the ground was packed hard. there was no stove, but the fire-place served all needful purposes. there were no shelves, no cupboards, no closets. in a corner stood an open sack of flour, and nestling against its base were a couple of black and venerable tin coffee-pots, a tin teapot, a little bag of salt, and a side of bacon. by the door of the station-keeper's den, outside, was a tin wash-basin, on the ground. near it was a pail of water and a piece of yellow bar soap, and from the eaves hung a hoary blue woolen shirt, significantly --but this latter was the station-keeper's private towel, and only two persons in all the party might venture to use it--the stage-driver and the conductor. the latter would not, from a sense of decency; the former would not, because did not choose to encourage the advances of a station-keeper. we had towels--in the valise; they might as well have been in sodom and gomorrah. we (and the conductor) used our handkerchiefs, and the driver his pantaloons and sleeves. by the door, inside, was fastened a small old-fashioned looking-glass frame, with two little fragments of the original mirror lodged down in one corner of it. this arrangement afforded a pleasant double-barreled portrait of you when you looked into it, with one half of your head set up a couple of inches above the other half. from the glass frame hung the half of a comb by a string--but if i had to describe that patriarch or die, i believe i would order some sample coffins. it had come down from esau and samson, and had been accumulating hair ever since--along with certain impurities. in one corner of the room stood three or four rifles and muskets, together with horns and pouches of ammunition. the station-men wore pantaloons of coarse, country-woven stuff, and into the seat and the inside of the legs were sewed ample additions of buckskin, to do duty in place of leggings, when the man rode horseback--so the pants were half dull blue and half yellow, and unspeakably picturesque. the pants were stuffed into the tops of high boots, the heels whereof were armed with great spanish spurs, whose little iron clogs and chains jingled with every step. the man wore a huge beard and mustachios, an old slouch hat, a blue woolen shirt, no suspenders, no vest, no coat--in a leathern sheath in his belt, a great long "navy" revolver (slung on right side, hammer to the front), and projecting from his boot a horn-handled bowie-knife. the furniture of the hut was neither gorgeous nor much in the way. the rocking-chairs and sofas were not present, and never had been, but they were represented by two three-legged stools, a pine-board bench four feet long, and two empty candle-boxes. the table was a greasy board on stilts, and the table-cloth and napkins had not come--and they were not looking for them, either. a battered tin platter, a knife and fork, and a tin pint cup, were at each man's place, and the driver had a queens-ware saucer that had seen better days. of course this duke sat at the head of the table. there was one isolated piece of table furniture that bore about it a touching air of grandeur in misfortune. this was the caster. it was german silver, and crippled and rusty, but it was so preposterously out of place there that it was suggestive of a tattered exiled king among barbarians, and the majesty of its native position compelled respect even in its degradation. there was only one cruet left, and that was a stopperless, fly-specked, broken-necked thing, with two inches of vinegar in it, and a dozen preserved flies with their heels up and looking sorry they had invested there. the station-keeper upended a disk of last week's bread, of the shape and size of an old-time cheese, and carved some slabs from it which were as good as nicholson pavement, and tenderer. he sliced off a piece of bacon for each man, but only the experienced old hands made out to eat it, for it was condemned army bacon which the united states would not feed to its soldiers in the forts, and the stage company had bought it cheap for the sustenance of their passengers and employees. we may have found this condemned army bacon further out on the plains than the section i am locating it in, but we found it--there is no gainsaying that. then he poured for us a beverage which he called "slum gullion," and it is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it. it really pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler. he had no sugar and no milk--not even a spoon to stir the ingredients with. we could not eat the bread or the meat, nor drink the "slumgullion." and when i looked at that melancholy vinegar-cruet, i thought of the anecdote (a very, very old one, even at that day) of the traveler who sat down to a table which had nothing on it but a mackerel and a pot of mustard. he asked the landlord if this was all. the landlord said: "all! why, thunder and lightning, i should think there was mackerel enough there for six." "but i don't like mackerel." "oh--then help yourself to the mustard." in other days i had considered it a good, a very good, anecdote, but there was a dismal plausibility about it, here, that took all the humor out of it. our breakfast was before us, but our teeth were idle. i tasted and smelt, and said i would take coffee, i believed. the station-boss stopped dead still, and glared at me speechless. at last, when he came to, he turned away and said, as one who communes with himself upon a matter too vast to grasp: "coffee! well, if that don't go clean ahead of me, i'm d---d!" we could not eat, and there was no conversation among the hostlers and herdsmen--we all sat at the same board. at least there was no conversation further than a single hurried request, now and then, from one employee to another. it was always in the same form, and always gruffly friendly. its western freshness and novelty startled me, at first, and interested me; but it presently grew monotonous, and lost its charm. it was: "pass the bread, you son of a skunk!" no, i forget--skunk was not the word; it seems to me it was still stronger than that; i know it was, in fact, but it is gone from my memory, apparently. however, it is no matter--probably it was too strong for print, anyway. it is the landmark in my memory which tells me where i first encountered the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains. we gave up the breakfast, and paid our dollar apiece and went back to our mail-bag bed in the coach, and found comfort in our pipes. right here we suffered the first diminution of our princely state. we left our six fine horses and took six mules in their place. but they were wild mexican fellows, and a man had to stand at the head of each of them and hold him fast while the driver gloved and got himself ready. and when at last he grasped the reins and gave the word, the men sprung suddenly away from the mules' heads and the coach shot from the station as if it had issued from a cannon. how the frantic animals did scamper! it was a fierce and furious gallop--and the gait never altered for a moment till we reeled off ten or twelve miles and swept up to the next collection of little station-huts and stables. so we flew along all day. at p.m. the belt of timber that fringes the north platte and marks its windings through the vast level floor of the plains came in sight. at p.m. we crossed a branch of the river, and at p.m. we crossed the platte itself, and landed at fort kearney, fifty-six hours out from st. joe--three hundred miles! now that was stage-coaching on the great overland, ten or twelve years ago, when perhaps not more than ten men in america, all told, expected to live to see a railroad follow that route to the pacific. but the railroad is there, now, and it pictures a thousand odd comparisons and contrasts in my mind to read the following sketch, in the new york times, of a recent trip over almost the very ground i have been describing. i can scarcely comprehend the new state of things: "across the continent. "at . p.m., sunday, we rolled out of the station at omaha, and started westward on our long jaunt. a couple of hours out, dinner was announced--an "event" to those of us who had yet to experience what it is to eat in one of pullman's hotels on wheels; so, stepping into the car next forward of our sleeping palace, we found ourselves in the dining-car. it was a revelation to us, that first dinner on sunday. and though we continued to dine for four days, and had as many breakfasts and suppers, our whole party never ceased to admire the perfection of the arrangements, and the marvelous results achieved. upon tables covered with snowy linen, and garnished with services of solid silver, ethiop waiters, flitting about in spotless white, placed as by magic a repast at which delmonico himself could have had no occasion to blush; and, indeed, in some respects it would be hard for that distinguished chef to match our menu; for, in addition to all that ordinarily makes up a first-chop dinner, had we not our antelope steak (the gormand who has not experienced this --bah! what does he know of the feast of fat things?) our delicious mountain-brook trout, and choice fruits and berries, and (sauce piquant and unpurchasable!) our sweet-scented, appetite-compelling air of the prairies? "you may depend upon it, we all did justice to the good things, and as we washed them down with bumpers of sparkling krug, whilst we sped along at the rate of thirty miles an hour, agreed it was the fastest living we had ever experienced. (we beat that, however, two days afterward when we made twenty-seven miles in twenty-seven minutes, while our champagne glasses filled to the brim spilled not a drop!) after dinner we repaired to our drawing-room car, and, as it was sabbath eve, intoned some of the grand old hymns--"praise god from whom," etc.; "shining shore," "coronation," etc.--the voices of the men singers and of the women singers blending sweetly in the evening air, while our train, with its great, glaring polyphemus eye, lighting up long vistas of prairie, rushed into the night and the wild. then to bed in luxurious couches, where we slept the sleep of the just and only awoke the next morning (monday) at eight o'clock, to find ourselves at the crossing of the north platte, three hundred miles from omaha--fifteen hours and forty minutes out." chapter v. another night of alternate tranquillity and turmoil. but morning came, by and by. it was another glad awakening to fresh breezes, vast expanses of level greensward, bright sunlight, an impressive solitude utterly without visible human beings or human habitations, and an atmosphere of such amazing magnifying properties that trees that seemed close at hand were more than three mile away. we resumed undress uniform, climbed a-top of the flying coach, dangled our legs over the side, shouted occasionally at our frantic mules, merely to see them lay their ears back and scamper faster, tied our hats on to keep our hair from blowing away, and leveled an outlook over the world-wide carpet about us for things new and strange to gaze at. even at this day it thrills me through and through to think of the life, the gladness and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my veins on those fine overland mornings! along about an hour after breakfast we saw the first prairie-dog villages, the first antelope, and the first wolf. if i remember rightly, this latter was the regular cayote (pronounced ky-o-te) of the farther deserts. and if it was, he was not a pretty creature or respectable either, for i got well acquainted with his race afterward, and can speak with confidence. the cayote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. he has a general slinking expression all over. the cayote is a living, breathing allegory of want. he is always hungry. he is always poor, out of luck and friendless. the meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. he is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. and he is so homely!--so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful. when he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depresses his head a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sage-brush, glancing over his shoulder at you, from time to time, till he is about out of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate survey of you; he will trot fifty yards and stop again--another fifty and stop again; and finally the gray of his gliding body blends with the gray of the sage-brush, and he disappears. all this is when you make no demonstration against him; but if you do, he develops a livelier interest in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels and puts such a deal of real estate between himself and your weapon, that by the time you have raised the hammer you see that you need a minie rifle, and by the time you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon, and by the time you have "drawn a bead" on him you see well enough that nothing but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him where he is now. but if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much--especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed. the cayote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake across the level plain! and all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the cayote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the cayote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and that the cayote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him--and then that town-dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the cayote with concentrated and desperate energy. this "spurt" finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends. and then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the cayote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to say: "well, i shall have to tear myself away from you, bub--business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day"--and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude! it makes his head swim. he stops, and looks all around; climbs the nearest sand-mound, and gazes into the distance; shakes his head reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs along back to his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost wagon, and feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at half-mast for a week. and for as much as a year after that, whenever there is a great hue and cry after a cayote, that dog will merely glance in that direction without emotion, and apparently observe to himself, "i believe i do not wish any of the pie." the cayote lives chiefly in the most desolate and forbidding desert, along with the lizard, the jackass-rabbit and the raven, and gets an uncertain and precarious living, and earns it. he seems to subsist almost wholly on the carcases of oxen, mules and horses that have dropped out of emigrant trains and died, and upon windfalls of carrion, and occasional legacies of offal bequeathed to him by white men who have been opulent enough to have something better to butcher than condemned army bacon. he will eat anything in the world that his first cousins, the desert-frequenting tribes of indians will, and they will eat anything they can bite. it is a curious fact that these latter are the only creatures known to history who will eat nitro-glycerine and ask for more if they survive. the cayote of the deserts beyond the rocky mountains has a peculiarly hard time of it, owing to the fact that his relations, the indians, are just as apt to be the first to detect a seductive scent on the desert breeze, and follow the fragrance to the late ox it emanated from, as he is himself; and when this occurs he has to content himself with sitting off at a little distance watching those people strip off and dig out everything edible, and walk off with it. then he and the waiting ravens explore the skeleton and polish the bones. it is considered that the cayote, and the obscene bird, and the indian of the desert, testify their blood kinship with each other in that they live together in the waste places of the earth on terms of perfect confidence and friendship, while hating all other creature and yearning to assist at their funerals. he does not mind going a hundred miles to breakfast, and a hundred and fifty to dinner, because he is sure to have three or four days between meals, and he can just as well be traveling and looking at the scenery as lying around doing nothing and adding to the burdens of his parents. we soon learned to recognize the sharp, vicious bark of the cayote as it came across the murky plain at night to disturb our dreams among the mail-sacks; and remembering his forlorn aspect and his hard fortune, made shift to wish him the blessed novelty of a long day's good luck and a limitless larder the morrow. chapter vi. our new conductor (just shipped) had been without sleep for twenty hours. such a thing was very frequent. from st. joseph, missouri, to sacramento, california, by stage-coach, was nearly nineteen hundred miles, and the trip was often made in fifteen days (the cars do it in four and a half, now), but the time specified in the mail contracts, and required by the schedule, was eighteen or nineteen days, if i remember rightly. this was to make fair allowance for winter storms and snows, and other unavoidable causes of detention. the stage company had everything under strict discipline and good system. over each two hundred and fifty miles of road they placed an agent or superintendent, and invested him with great authority. his beat or jurisdiction of two hundred and fifty miles was called a "division." he purchased horses, mules harness, and food for men and beasts, and distributed these things among his stage stations, from time to time, according to his judgment of what each station needed. he erected station buildings and dug wells. he attended to the paying of the station-keepers, hostlers, drivers and blacksmiths, and discharged them whenever he chose. he was a very, very great man in his "division"--a kind of grand mogul, a sultan of the indies, in whose presence common men were modest of speech and manner, and in the glare of whose greatness even the dazzling stage-driver dwindled to a penny dip. there were about eight of these kings, all told, on the overland route. next in rank and importance to the division-agent came the "conductor." his beat was the same length as the agent's--two hundred and fifty miles. he sat with the driver, and (when necessary) rode that fearful distance, night and day, without other rest or sleep than what he could get perched thus on top of the flying vehicle. think of it! he had absolute charge of the mails, express matter, passengers and stage, coach, until he delivered them to the next conductor, and got his receipt for them. consequently he had to be a man of intelligence, decision and considerable executive ability. he was usually a quiet, pleasant man, who attended closely to his duties, and was a good deal of a gentleman. it was not absolutely necessary that the division-agent should be a gentleman, and occasionally he wasn't. but he was always a general in administrative ability, and a bull-dog in courage and determination --otherwise the chieftainship over the lawless underlings of the overland service would never in any instance have been to him anything but an equivalent for a month of insolence and distress and a bullet and a coffin at the end of it. there were about sixteen or eighteen conductors on the overland, for there was a daily stage each way, and a conductor on every stage. next in real and official rank and importance, after the conductor, came my delight, the driver--next in real but not in apparent importance--for we have seen that in the eyes of the common herd the driver was to the conductor as an admiral is to the captain of the flag-ship. the driver's beat was pretty long, and his sleeping-time at the stations pretty short, sometimes; and so, but for the grandeur of his position his would have been a sorry life, as well as a hard and a wearing one. we took a new driver every day or every night (for they drove backward and forward over the same piece of road all the time), and therefore we never got as well acquainted with them as we did with the conductors; and besides, they would have been above being familiar with such rubbish as passengers, anyhow, as a general thing. still, we were always eager to get a sight of each and every new driver as soon as the watch changed, for each and every day we were either anxious to get rid of an unpleasant one, or loath to part with a driver we had learned to like and had come to be sociable and friendly with. and so the first question we asked the conductor whenever we got to where we were to exchange drivers, was always, "which is him?" the grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go into a book some day. as long as everything went smoothly, the overland driver was well enough situated, but if a fellow driver got sick suddenly it made trouble, for the coach must go on, and so the potentate who was about to climb down and take a luxurious rest after his long night's siege in the midst of wind and rain and darkness, had to stay where he was and do the sick man's work. once, in the rocky mountains, when i found a driver sound asleep on the box, and the mules going at the usual break-neck pace, the conductor said never mind him, there was no danger, and he was doing double duty--had driven seventy-five miles on one coach, and was now going back over it on this without rest or sleep. a hundred and fifty miles of holding back of six vindictive mules and keeping them from climbing the trees! it sounds incredible, but i remember the statement well enough. the station-keepers, hostlers, etc., were low, rough characters, as already described; and from western nebraska to nevada a considerable sprinkling of them might be fairly set down as outlaws--fugitives from justice, criminals whose best security was a section of country which was without law and without even the pretence of it. when the "division-agent" issued an order to one of these parties he did it with the full understanding that he might have to enforce it with a navy six-shooter, and so he always went "fixed" to make things go along smoothly. now and then a division-agent was really obliged to shoot a hostler through the head to teach him some simple matter that he could have taught him with a club if his circumstances and surroundings had been different. but they were snappy, able men, those division-agents, and when they tried to teach a subordinate anything, that subordinate generally "got it through his head." a great portion of this vast machinery--these hundreds of men and coaches, and thousands of mules and horses--was in the hands of mr. ben holliday. all the western half of the business was in his hands. this reminds me of an incident of palestine travel which is pertinent here, so i will transfer it just in the language in which i find it set down in my holy land note-book: no doubt everybody has heard of ben holliday--a man of prodigious energy, who used to send mails and passengers flying across the continent in his overland stage-coaches like a very whirlwind--two thousand long miles in fifteen days and a half, by the watch! but this fragment of history is not about ben holliday, but about a young new york boy by the name of jack, who traveled with our small party of pilgrims in the holy land (and who had traveled to california in mr. holliday's overland coaches three years before, and had by no means forgotten it or lost his gushing admiration of mr. h.) aged nineteen. jack was a good boy--a good-hearted and always well-meaning boy, who had been reared in the city of new york, and although he was bright and knew a great many useful things, his scriptural education had been a good deal neglected--to such a degree, indeed, that all holy land history was fresh and new to him, and all bible names mysteries that had never disturbed his virgin ear. also in our party was an elderly pilgrim who was the reverse of jack, in that he was learned in the scriptures and an enthusiast concerning them. he was our encyclopedia, and we were never tired of listening to his speeches, nor he of making them. he never passed a celebrated locality, from bashan to bethlehem, without illuminating it with an oration. one day, when camped near the ruins of jericho, he burst forth with something like this: "jack, do you see that range of mountains over yonder that bounds the jordan valley? the mountains of moab, jack! think of it, my boy--the actual mountains of moab--renowned in scripture history! we are actually standing face to face with those illustrious crags and peaks--and for all we know" [dropping his voice impressively], "our eyes may be resting at this very moment upon the spot where lies the mysterious grave of moses! think of it, jack!" "moses who?" (falling inflection). "moses who! jack, you ought to be ashamed of yourself--you ought to be ashamed of such criminal ignorance. why, moses, the great guide, soldier, poet, lawgiver of ancient israel! jack, from this spot where we stand, to egypt, stretches a fearful desert three hundred miles in extent--and across that desert that wonderful man brought the children of israel!--guiding them with unfailing sagacity for forty years over the sandy desolation and among the obstructing rocks and hills, and landed them at last, safe and sound, within sight of this very spot; and where we now stand they entered the promised land with anthems of rejoicing! it was a wonderful, wonderful thing to do, jack! think of it!" "forty years? only three hundred miles? humph! ben holliday would have fetched them through in thirty-six hours!" the boy meant no harm. he did not know that he had said anything that was wrong or irreverent. and so no one scolded him or felt offended with him--and nobody could but some ungenerous spirit incapable of excusing the heedless blunders of a boy. at noon on the fifth day out, we arrived at the "crossing of the south platte," alias "julesburg," alias "overland city," four hundred and seventy miles from st. joseph--the strangest, quaintest, funniest frontier town that our untraveled eyes had ever stared at and been astonished with. chapter vii. it did seem strange enough to see a town again after what appeared to us such a long acquaintance with deep, still, almost lifeless and houseless solitude! we tumbled out into the busy street feeling like meteoric people crumbled off the corner of some other world, and wakened up suddenly in this. for an hour we took as much interest in overland city as if we had never seen a town before. the reason we had an hour to spare was because we had to change our stage (for a less sumptuous affair, called a "mud-wagon") and transfer our freight of mails. presently we got under way again. we came to the shallow, yellow, muddy south platte, with its low banks and its scattering flat sand-bars and pigmy islands--a melancholy stream straggling through the centre of the enormous flat plain, and only saved from being impossible to find with the naked eye by its sentinel rank of scattering trees standing on either bank. the platte was "up," they said--which made me wish i could see it when it was down, if it could look any sicker and sorrier. they said it was a dangerous stream to cross, now, because its quicksands were liable to swallow up horses, coach and passengers if an attempt was made to ford it. but the mails had to go, and we made the attempt. once or twice in midstream the wheels sunk into the yielding sands so threateningly that we half believed we had dreaded and avoided the sea all our lives to be shipwrecked in a "mud-wagon" in the middle of a desert at last. but we dragged through and sped away toward the setting sun. next morning, just before dawn, when about five hundred and fifty miles from st. joseph, our mud-wagon broke down. we were to be delayed five or six hours, and therefore we took horses, by invitation, and joined a party who were just starting on a buffalo hunt. it was noble sport galloping over the plain in the dewy freshness of the morning, but our part of the hunt ended in disaster and disgrace, for a wounded buffalo bull chased the passenger bemis nearly two miles, and then he forsook his horse and took to a lone tree. he was very sullen about the matter for some twenty-four hours, but at last he began to soften little by little, and finally he said: "well, it was not funny, and there was no sense in those gawks making themselves so facetious over it. i tell you i was angry in earnest for awhile. i should have shot that long gangly lubber they called hank, if i could have done it without crippling six or seven other people--but of course i couldn't, the old 'allen's' so confounded comprehensive. i wish those loafers had been up in the tree; they wouldn't have wanted to laugh so. if i had had a horse worth a cent--but no, the minute he saw that buffalo bull wheel on him and give a bellow, he raised straight up in the air and stood on his heels. the saddle began to slip, and i took him round the neck and laid close to him, and began to pray. then he came down and stood up on the other end awhile, and the bull actually stopped pawing sand and bellowing to contemplate the inhuman spectacle. "then the bull made a pass at him and uttered a bellow that sounded perfectly frightful, it was so close to me, and that seemed to literally prostrate my horse's reason, and make a raving distracted maniac of him, and i wish i may die if he didn't stand on his head for a quarter of a minute and shed tears. he was absolutely out of his mind--he was, as sure as truth itself, and he really didn't know what he was doing. then the bull came charging at us, and my horse dropped down on all fours and took a fresh start--and then for the next ten minutes he would actually throw one hand-spring after another so fast that the bull began to get unsettled, too, and didn't know where to start in--and so he stood there sneezing, and shovelling dust over his back, and bellowing every now and then, and thinking he had got a fifteen-hundred dollar circus horse for breakfast, certain. well, i was first out on his neck--the horse's, not the bull's--and then underneath, and next on his rump, and sometimes head up, and sometimes heels--but i tell you it seemed solemn and awful to be ripping and tearing and carrying on so in the presence of death, as you might say. pretty soon the bull made a snatch for us and brought away some of my horse's tail (i suppose, but do not know, being pretty busy at the time), but something made him hungry for solitude and suggested to him to get up and hunt for it. "and then you ought to have seen that spider legged old skeleton go! and you ought to have seen the bull cut out after him, too--head down, tongue out, tail up, bellowing like everything, and actually mowing down the weeds, and tearing up the earth, and boosting up the sand like a whirlwind! by george, it was a hot race! i and the saddle were back on the rump, and i had the bridle in my teeth and holding on to the pommel with both hands. first we left the dogs behind; then we passed a jackass rabbit; then we overtook a cayote, and were gaining on an antelope when the rotten girth let go and threw me about thirty yards off to the left, and as the saddle went down over the horse's rump he gave it a lift with his heels that sent it more than four hundred yards up in the air, i wish i may die in a minute if he didn't. i fell at the foot of the only solitary tree there was in nine counties adjacent (as any creature could see with the naked eye), and the next second i had hold of the bark with four sets of nails and my teeth, and the next second after that i was astraddle of the main limb and blaspheming my luck in a way that made my breath smell of brimstone. i had the bull, now, if he did not think of one thing. but that one thing i dreaded. i dreaded it very seriously. there was a possibility that the bull might not think of it, but there were greater chances that he would. i made up my mind what i would do in case he did. it was a little over forty feet to the ground from where i sat. i cautiously unwound the lariat from the pommel of my saddle----" "your saddle? did you take your saddle up in the tree with you?" "take it up in the tree with me? why, how you talk. of course i didn't. no man could do that. it fell in the tree when it came down." "oh--exactly." "certainly. i unwound the lariat, and fastened one end of it to the limb. it was the very best green raw-hide, and capable of sustaining tons. i made a slip-noose in the other end, and then hung it down to see the length. it reached down twenty-two feet--half way to the ground. i then loaded every barrel of the allen with a double charge. i felt satisfied. i said to myself, if he never thinks of that one thing that i dread, all right--but if he does, all right anyhow--i am fixed for him. but don't you know that the very thing a man dreads is the thing that always happens? indeed it is so. i watched the bull, now, with anxiety --anxiety which no one can conceive of who has not been in such a situation and felt that at any moment death might come. presently a thought came into the bull's eye. i knew it! said i--if my nerve fails now, i am lost. sure enough, it was just as i had dreaded, he started in to climb the tree----" "what, the bull?" "of course--who else?" "but a bull can't climb a tree." "he can't, can't he? since you know so much about it, did you ever see a bull try?" "no! i never dreamt of such a thing." "well, then, what is the use of your talking that way, then? because you never saw a thing done, is that any reason why it can't be done?" "well, all right--go on. what did you do?" "the bull started up, and got along well for about ten feet, then slipped and slid back. i breathed easier. he tried it again--got up a little higher--slipped again. but he came at it once more, and this time he was careful. he got gradually higher and higher, and my spirits went down more and more. up he came--an inch at a time--with his eyes hot, and his tongue hanging out. higher and higher--hitched his foot over the stump of a limb, and looked up, as much as to say, 'you are my meat, friend.' up again--higher and higher, and getting more excited the closer he got. he was within ten feet of me! i took a long breath,--and then said i, 'it is now or never.' i had the coil of the lariat all ready; i paid it out slowly, till it hung right over his head; all of a sudden i let go of the slack, and the slipnoose fell fairly round his neck! quicker than lightning i out with the allen and let him have it in the face. it was an awful roar, and must have scared the bull out of his senses. when the smoke cleared away, there he was, dangling in the air, twenty foot from the ground, and going out of one convulsion into another faster than you could count! i didn't stop to count, anyhow--i shinned down the tree and shot for home." "bemis, is all that true, just as you have stated it?" "i wish i may rot in my tracks and die the death of a dog if it isn't." "well, we can't refuse to believe it, and we don't. but if there were some proofs----" "proofs! did i bring back my lariat?" "no." "did i bring back my horse?" "no." "did you ever see the bull again?" "no." "well, then, what more do you want? i never saw anybody as particular as you are about a little thing like that." i made up my mind that if this man was not a liar he only missed it by the skin of his teeth. this episode reminds me of an incident of my brief sojourn in siam, years afterward. the european citizens of a town in the neighborhood of bangkok had a prodigy among them by the name of eckert, an englishman--a person famous for the number, ingenuity and imposing magnitude of his lies. they were always repeating his most celebrated falsehoods, and always trying to "draw him out" before strangers; but they seldom succeeded. twice he was invited to the house where i was visiting, but nothing could seduce him into a specimen lie. one day a planter named bascom, an influential man, and a proud and sometimes irascible one, invited me to ride over with him and call on eckert. as we jogged along, said he: "now, do you know where the fault lies? it lies in putting eckert on his guard. the minute the boys go to pumping at eckert he knows perfectly well what they are after, and of course he shuts up his shell. anybody might know he would. but when we get there, we must play him finer than that. let him shape the conversation to suit himself--let him drop it or change it whenever he wants to. let him see that nobody is trying to draw him out. just let him have his own way. he will soon forget himself and begin to grind out lies like a mill. don't get impatient --just keep quiet, and let me play him. i will make him lie. it does seem to me that the boys must be blind to overlook such an obvious and simple trick as that." eckert received us heartily--a pleasant-spoken, gentle-mannered creature. we sat in the veranda an hour, sipping english ale, and talking about the king, and the sacred white elephant, the sleeping idol, and all manner of things; and i noticed that my comrade never led the conversation himself or shaped it, but simply followed eckert's lead, and betrayed no solicitude and no anxiety about anything. the effect was shortly perceptible. eckert began to grow communicative; he grew more and more at his ease, and more and more talkative and sociable. another hour passed in the same way, and then all of a sudden eckert said: "oh, by the way! i came near forgetting. i have got a thing here to astonish you. such a thing as neither you nor any other man ever heard of--i've got a cat that will eat cocoanut! common green cocoanut--and not only eat the meat, but drink the milk. it is so--i'll swear to it." a quick glance from bascom--a glance that i understood--then: "why, bless my soul, i never heard of such a thing. man, it is impossible." "i knew you would say it. i'll fetch the cat." he went in the house. bascom said: "there--what did i tell you? now, that is the way to handle eckert. you see, i have petted him along patiently, and put his suspicions to sleep. i am glad we came. you tell the boys about it when you go back. cat eat a cocoanut--oh, my! now, that is just his way, exactly--he will tell the absurdest lie, and trust to luck to get out of it again. "cat eat a cocoanut--the innocent fool!" eckert approached with his cat, sure enough. bascom smiled. said he: "i'll hold the cat--you bring a cocoanut." eckert split one open, and chopped up some pieces. bascom smuggled a wink to me, and proffered a slice of the fruit to puss. she snatched it, swallowed it ravenously, and asked for more! we rode our two miles in silence, and wide apart. at least i was silent, though bascom cuffed his horse and cursed him a good deal, notwithstanding the horse was behaving well enough. when i branched off homeward, bascom said: "keep the horse till morning. and--you need not speak of this --foolishness to the boys." chapter viii. in a little while all interest was taken up in stretching our necks and watching for the "pony-rider"--the fleet messenger who sped across the continent from st. joe to sacramento, carrying letters nineteen hundred miles in eight days! think of that for perishable horse and human flesh and blood to do! the pony-rider was usually a little bit of a man, brimful of spirit and endurance. no matter what time of the day or night his watch came on, and no matter whether it was winter or summer, raining, snowing, hailing, or sleeting, or whether his "beat" was a level straight road or a crazy trail over mountain crags and precipices, or whether it led through peaceful regions or regions that swarmed with hostile indians, he must be always ready to leap into the saddle and be off like the wind! there was no idling-time for a pony-rider on duty. he rode fifty miles without stopping, by daylight, moonlight, starlight, or through the blackness of darkness--just as it happened. he rode a splendid horse that was born for a racer and fed and lodged like a gentleman; kept him at his utmost speed for ten miles, and then, as he came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding fast a fresh, impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mail-bag was made in the twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair and were out of sight before the spectator could get hardly the ghost of a look. both rider and horse went "flying light." the rider's dress was thin, and fitted close; he wore a "round-about," and a skull-cap, and tucked his pantaloons into his boot-tops like a race-rider. he carried no arms--he carried nothing that was not absolutely necessary, for even the postage on his literary freight was worth five dollars a letter. he got but little frivolous correspondence to carry--his bag had business letters in it, mostly. his horse was stripped of all unnecessary weight, too. he wore a little wafer of a racing-saddle, and no visible blanket. he wore light shoes, or none at all. the little flat mail-pockets strapped under the rider's thighs would each hold about the bulk of a child's primer. they held many and many an important business chapter and newspaper letter, but these were written on paper as airy and thin as gold-leaf, nearly, and thus bulk and weight were economized. the stage-coach traveled about a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five miles a day (twenty-four hours), the pony-rider about two hundred and fifty. there were about eighty pony-riders in the saddle all the time, night and day, stretching in a long, scattering procession from missouri to california, forty flying eastward, and forty toward the west, and among them making four hundred gallant horses earn a stirring livelihood and see a deal of scenery every single day in the year. we had had a consuming desire, from the beginning, to see a pony-rider, but somehow or other all that passed us and all that met us managed to streak by in the night, and so we heard only a whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of the windows. but now we were expecting one along every moment, and would see him in broad daylight. presently the driver exclaims: "here he comes!" every neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider. away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves. well, i should think so! in a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling--sweeping toward us nearer and nearer--growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined--nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear--another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm! so sudden is it all, and so like a flash of unreal fancy, that but for the flake of white foam left quivering and perishing on a mail-sack after the vision had flashed by and disappeared, we might have doubted whether we had seen any actual horse and man at all, maybe. we rattled through scott's bluffs pass, by and by. it was along here somewhere that we first came across genuine and unmistakable alkali water in the road, and we cordially hailed it as a first-class curiosity, and a thing to be mentioned with eclat in letters to the ignorant at home. this water gave the road a soapy appearance, and in many places the ground looked as if it had been whitewashed. i think the strange alkali water excited us as much as any wonder we had come upon yet, and i know we felt very complacent and conceited, and better satisfied with life after we had added it to our list of things which we had seen and some other people had not. in a small way we were the same sort of simpletons as those who climb unnecessarily the perilous peaks of mont blanc and the matterhorn, and derive no pleasure from it except the reflection that it isn't a common experience. but once in a while one of those parties trips and comes darting down the long mountain-crags in a sitting posture, making the crusted snow smoke behind him, flitting from bench to bench, and from terrace to terrace, jarring the earth where he strikes, and still glancing and flitting on again, sticking an iceberg into himself every now and then, and tearing his clothes, snatching at things to save himself, taking hold of trees and fetching them along with him, roots and all, starting little rocks now and then, then big boulders, then acres of ice and snow and patches of forest, gathering and still gathering as he goes, adding and still adding to his massed and sweeping grandeur as he nears a three thousand-foot precipice, till at last he waves his hat magnificently and rides into eternity on the back of a raging and tossing avalanche! this is all very fine, but let us not be carried away by excitement, but ask calmly, how does this person feel about it in his cooler moments next day, with six or seven thousand feet of snow and stuff on top of him? we crossed the sand hills near the scene of the indian mail robbery and massacre of , wherein the driver and conductor perished, and also all the passengers but one, it was supposed; but this must have been a mistake, for at different times afterward on the pacific coast i was personally acquainted with a hundred and thirty-three or four people who were wounded during that massacre, and barely escaped with their lives. there was no doubt of the truth of it--i had it from their own lips. one of these parties told me that he kept coming across arrow-heads in his system for nearly seven years after the massacre; and another of them told me that he was struck so literally full of arrows that after the indians were gone and he could raise up and examine himself, he could not restrain his tears, for his clothes were completely ruined. the most trustworthy tradition avers, however, that only one man, a person named babbitt, survived the massacre, and he was desperately wounded. he dragged himself on his hands and knee (for one leg was broken) to a station several miles away. he did it during portions of two nights, lying concealed one day and part of another, and for more than forty hours suffering unimaginable anguish from hunger, thirst and bodily pain. the indians robbed the coach of everything it contained, including quite an amount of treasure. chapter ix. we passed fort laramie in the night, and on the seventh morning out we found ourselves in the black hills, with laramie peak at our elbow (apparently) looming vast and solitary--a deep, dark, rich indigo blue in hue, so portentously did the old colossus frown under his beetling brows of storm-cloud. he was thirty or forty miles away, in reality, but he only seemed removed a little beyond the low ridge at our right. we breakfasted at horse-shoe station, six hundred and seventy-six miles out from st. joseph. we had now reached a hostile indian country, and during the afternoon we passed laparelle station, and enjoyed great discomfort all the time we were in the neighborhood, being aware that many of the trees we dashed by at arm's length concealed a lurking indian or two. during the preceding night an ambushed savage had sent a bullet through the pony-rider's jacket, but he had ridden on, just the same, because pony-riders were not allowed to stop and inquire into such things except when killed. as long as they had life enough left in them they had to stick to the horse and ride, even if the indians had been waiting for them a week, and were entirely out of patience. about two hours and a half before we arrived at laparelle station, the keeper in charge of it had fired four times at an indian, but he said with an injured air that the indian had "skipped around so's to spile everything--and ammunition's blamed skurse, too." the most natural inference conveyed by his manner of speaking was, that in "skipping around," the indian had taken an unfair advantage. the coach we were in had a neat hole through its front--a reminiscence of its last trip through this region. the bullet that made it wounded the driver slightly, but he did not mind it much. he said the place to keep a man "huffy" was down on the southern overland, among the apaches, before the company moved the stage line up on the northern route. he said the apaches used to annoy him all the time down there, and that he came as near as anything to starving to death in the midst of abundance, because they kept him so leaky with bullet holes that he "couldn't hold his vittles." this person's statement were not generally believed. we shut the blinds down very tightly that first night in the hostile indian country, and lay on our arms. we slept on them some, but most of the time we only lay on them. we did not talk much, but kept quiet and listened. it was an inky-black night, and occasionally rainy. we were among woods and rocks, hills and gorges--so shut in, in fact, that when we peeped through a chink in a curtain, we could discern nothing. the driver and conductor on top were still, too, or only spoke at long intervals, in low tones, as is the way of men in the midst of invisible dangers. we listened to rain-drops pattering on the roof; and the grinding of the wheels through the muddy gravel; and the low wailing of the wind; and all the time we had that absurd sense upon us, inseparable from travel at night in a close-curtained vehicle, the sense of remaining perfectly still in one place, notwithstanding the jolting and swaying of the vehicle, the trampling of the horses, and the grinding of the wheels. we listened a long time, with intent faculties and bated breath; every time one of us would relax, and draw a long sigh of relief and start to say something, a comrade would be sure to utter a sudden "hark!" and instantly the experimenter was rigid and listening again. so the tiresome minutes and decades of minutes dragged away, until at last our tense forms filmed over with a dulled consciousness, and we slept, if one might call such a condition by so strong a name--for it was a sleep set with a hair-trigger. it was a sleep seething and teeming with a weird and distressful confusion of shreds and fag-ends of dreams--a sleep that was a chaos. presently, dreams and sleep and the sullen hush of the night were startled by a ringing report, and cloven by such a long, wild, agonizing shriek! then we heard--ten steps from the stage-- "help! help! help!" [it was our driver's voice.] "kill him! kill him like a dog!" "i'm being murdered! will no man lend me a pistol?" "look out! head him off! head him off!" [two pistol shots; a confusion of voices and the trampling of many feet, as if a crowd were closing and surging together around some object; several heavy, dull blows, as with a club; a voice that said appealingly, "don't, gentlemen, please don't--i'm a dead man!" then a fainter groan, and another blow, and away sped the stage into the darkness, and left the grisly mystery behind us.] what a startle it was! eight seconds would amply cover the time it occupied--maybe even five would do it. we only had time to plunge at a curtain and unbuckle and unbutton part of it in an awkward and hindering flurry, when our whip cracked sharply overhead, and we went rumbling and thundering away, down a mountain "grade." we fed on that mystery the rest of the night--what was left of it, for it was waning fast. it had to remain a present mystery, for all we could get from the conductor in answer to our hails was something that sounded, through the clatter of the wheels, like "tell you in the morning!" so we lit our pipes and opened the corner of a curtain for a chimney, and lay there in the dark, listening to each other's story of how he first felt and how many thousand indians he first thought had hurled themselves upon us, and what his remembrance of the subsequent sounds was, and the order of their occurrence. and we theorized, too, but there was never a theory that would account for our driver's voice being out there, nor yet account for his indian murderers talking such good english, if they were indians. so we chatted and smoked the rest of the night comfortably away, our boding anxiety being somehow marvelously dissipated by the real presence of something to be anxious about. we never did get much satisfaction about that dark occurrence. all that we could make out of the odds and ends of the information we gathered in the morning, was that the disturbance occurred at a station; that we changed drivers there, and that the driver that got off there had been talking roughly about some of the outlaws that infested the region ("for there wasn't a man around there but had a price on his head and didn't dare show himself in the settlements," the conductor said); he had talked roughly about these characters, and ought to have "drove up there with his pistol cocked and ready on the seat alongside of him, and begun business himself, because any softy would know they would be laying for him." that was all we could gather, and we could see that neither the conductor nor the new driver were much concerned about the matter. they plainly had little respect for a man who would deliver offensive opinions of people and then be so simple as to come into their presence unprepared to "back his judgment," as they pleasantly phrased the killing of any fellow-being who did not like said opinions. and likewise they plainly had a contempt for the man's poor discretion in venturing to rouse the wrath of such utterly reckless wild beasts as those outlaws--and the conductor added: "i tell you it's as much as slade himself want to do!" this remark created an entire revolution in my curiosity. i cared nothing now about the indians, and even lost interest in the murdered driver. there was such magic in that name, slade! day or night, now, i stood always ready to drop any subject in hand, to listen to something new about slade and his ghastly exploits. even before we got to overland city, we had begun to hear about slade and his "division" (for he was a "division-agent") on the overland; and from the hour we had left overland city we had heard drivers and conductors talk about only three things --"californy," the nevada silver mines, and this desperado slade. and a deal the most of the talk was about slade. we had gradually come to have a realizing sense of the fact that slade was a man whose heart and hands and soul were steeped in the blood of offenders against his dignity; a man who awfully avenged all injuries, affront, insults or slights, of whatever kind--on the spot if he could, years afterward if lack of earlier opportunity compelled it; a man whose hate tortured him day and night till vengeance appeased it--and not an ordinary vengeance either, but his enemy's absolute death--nothing less; a man whose face would light up with a terrible joy when he surprised a foe and had him at a disadvantage. a high and efficient servant of the overland, an outlaw among outlaws and yet their relentless scourge, slade was at once the most bloody, the most dangerous and the most valuable citizen that inhabited the savage fastnesses of the mountains. chapter x. really and truly, two thirds of the talk of drivers and conductors had been about this man slade, ever since the day before we reached julesburg. in order that the eastern reader may have a clear conception of what a rocky mountain desperado is, in his highest state of development, i will reduce all this mass of overland gossip to one straightforward narrative, and present it in the following shape: slade was born in illinois, of good parentage. at about twenty-six years of age he killed a man in a quarrel and fled the country. at st. joseph, missouri, he joined one of the early california-bound emigrant trains, and was given the post of train-master. one day on the plains he had an angry dispute with one of his wagon-drivers, and both drew their revolvers. but the driver was the quicker artist, and had his weapon cocked first. so slade said it was a pity to waste life on so small a matter, and proposed that the pistols be thrown on the ground and the quarrel settled by a fist-fight. the unsuspecting driver agreed, and threw down his pistol--whereupon slade laughed at his simplicity, and shot him dead! he made his escape, and lived a wild life for awhile, dividing his time between fighting indians and avoiding an illinois sheriff, who had been sent to arrest him for his first murder. it is said that in one indian battle he killed three savages with his own hand, and afterward cut their ears off and sent them, with his compliments, to the chief of the tribe. slade soon gained a name for fearless resolution, and this was sufficient merit to procure for him the important post of overland division-agent at julesburg, in place of mr. jules, removed. for some time previously, the company's horses had been frequently stolen, and the coaches delayed, by gangs of outlaws, who were wont to laugh at the idea of any man's having the temerity to resent such outrages. slade resented them promptly. the outlaws soon found that the new agent was a man who did not fear anything that breathed the breath of life. he made short work of all offenders. the result was that delays ceased, the company's property was let alone, and no matter what happened or who suffered, slade's coaches went through, every time! true, in order to bring about this wholesome change, slade had to kill several men--some say three, others say four, and others six--but the world was the richer for their loss. the first prominent difficulty he had was with the ex-agent jules, who bore the reputation of being a reckless and desperate man himself. jules hated slade for supplanting him, and a good fair occasion for a fight was all he was waiting for. by and by slade dared to employ a man whom jules had once discharged. next, slade seized a team of stage-horses which he accused jules of having driven off and hidden somewhere for his own use. war was declared, and for a day or two the two men walked warily about the streets, seeking each other, jules armed with a double-barreled shot gun, and slade with his history-creating revolver. finally, as slade stepped into a store jules poured the contents of his gun into him from behind the door. slade was plucky, and jules got several bad pistol wounds in return. then both men fell, and were carried to their respective lodgings, both swearing that better aim should do deadlier work next time. both were bedridden a long time, but jules got to his feet first, and gathering his possessions together, packed them on a couple of mules, and fled to the rocky mountains to gather strength in safety against the day of reckoning. for many months he was not seen or heard of, and was gradually dropped out of the remembrance of all save slade himself. but slade was not the man to forget him. on the contrary, common report said that slade kept a reward standing for his capture, dead or alive! after awhile, seeing that slade's energetic administration had restored peace and order to one of the worst divisions of the road, the overland stage company transferred him to the rocky ridge division in the rocky mountains, to see if he could perform a like miracle there. it was the very paradise of outlaws and desperadoes. there was absolutely no semblance of law there. violence was the rule. force was the only recognized authority. the commonest misunderstandings were settled on the spot with the revolver or the knife. murders were done in open day, and with sparkling frequency, and nobody thought of inquiring into them. it was considered that the parties who did the killing had their private reasons for it; for other people to meddle would have been looked upon as indelicate. after a murder, all that rocky mountain etiquette required of a spectator was, that he should help the gentleman bury his game --otherwise his churlishness would surely be remembered against him the first time he killed a man himself and needed a neighborly turn in interring him. slade took up his residence sweetly and peacefully in the midst of this hive of horse-thieves and assassins, and the very first time one of them aired his insolent swaggerings in his presence he shot him dead! he began a raid on the outlaws, and in a singularly short space of time he had completely stopped their depredations on the stage stock, recovered a large number of stolen horses, killed several of the worst desperadoes of the district, and gained such a dread ascendancy over the rest that they respected him, admired him, feared him, obeyed him! he wrought the same marvelous change in the ways of the community that had marked his administration at overland city. he captured two men who had stolen overland stock, and with his own hands he hanged them. he was supreme judge in his district, and he was jury and executioner likewise--and not only in the case of offences against his employers, but against passing emigrants as well. on one occasion some emigrants had their stock lost or stolen, and told slade, who chanced to visit their camp. with a single companion he rode to a ranch, the owners of which he suspected, and opening the door, commenced firing, killing three, and wounding the fourth. from a bloodthirstily interesting little montana book.--["the vigilantes of montana," by prof. thos. j. dimsdale.]--i take this paragraph: "while on the road, slade held absolute sway. he would ride down to a station, get into a quarrel, turn the house out of windows, and maltreat the occupants most cruelly. the unfortunates had no means of redress, and were compelled to recuperate as best they could." on one of these occasions, it is said he killed the father of the fine little half-breed boy jemmy, whom he adopted, and who lived with his widow after his execution. stories of slade's hanging men, and of innumerable assaults, shootings, stabbings and beatings, in which he was a principal actor, form part of the legends of the stage line. as for minor quarrels and shootings, it is absolutely certain that a minute history of slade's life would be one long record of such practices. slade was a matchless marksman with a navy revolver. the legends say that one morning at rocky ridge, when he was feeling comfortable, he saw a man approaching who had offended him some days before--observe the fine memory he had for matters like that--and, "gentlemen," said slade, drawing, "it is a good twenty-yard shot--i'll clip the third button on his coat!" which he did. the bystanders all admired it. and they all attended the funeral, too. on one occasion a man who kept a little whisky-shelf at the station did something which angered slade--and went and made his will. a day or two afterward slade came in and called for some brandy. the man reached under the counter (ostensibly to get a bottle--possibly to get something else), but slade smiled upon him that peculiarly bland and satisfied smile of his which the neighbors had long ago learned to recognize as a death-warrant in disguise, and told him to "none of that!--pass out the high-priced article." so the poor bar-keeper had to turn his back and get the high-priced brandy from the shelf; and when he faced around again he was looking into the muzzle of slade's pistol. "and the next instant," added my informant, impressively, "he was one of the deadest men that ever lived." the stage-drivers and conductors told us that sometimes slade would leave a hated enemy wholly unmolested, unnoticed and unmentioned, for weeks together--had done it once or twice at any rate. and some said they believed he did it in order to lull the victims into unwatchfulness, so that he could get the advantage of them, and others said they believed he saved up an enemy that way, just as a schoolboy saves up a cake, and made the pleasure go as far as it would by gloating over the anticipation. one of these cases was that of a frenchman who had offended slade. to the surprise of everybody slade did not kill him on the spot, but let him alone for a considerable time. finally, however, he went to the frenchman's house very late one night, knocked, and when his enemy opened the door, shot him dead--pushed the corpse inside the door with his foot, set the house on fire and burned up the dead man, his widow and three children! i heard this story from several different people, and they evidently believed what they were saying. it may be true, and it may not. "give a dog a bad name," etc. slade was captured, once, by a party of men who intended to lynch him. they disarmed him, and shut him up in a strong log-house, and placed a guard over him. he prevailed on his captors to send for his wife, so that he might have a last interview with her. she was a brave, loving, spirited woman. she jumped on a horse and rode for life and death. when she arrived they let her in without searching her, and before the door could be closed she whipped out a couple of revolvers, and she and her lord marched forth defying the party. and then, under a brisk fire, they mounted double and galloped away unharmed! in the fulness of time slade's myrmidons captured his ancient enemy jules, whom they found in a well-chosen hiding-place in the remote fastnesses of the mountains, gaining a precarious livelihood with his rifle. they brought him to rocky ridge, bound hand and foot, and deposited him in the middle of the cattle-yard with his back against a post. it is said that the pleasure that lit slade's face when he heard of it was something fearful to contemplate. he examined his enemy to see that he was securely tied, and then went to bed, content to wait till morning before enjoying the luxury of killing him. jules spent the night in the cattle-yard, and it is a region where warm nights are never known. in the morning slade practised on him with his revolver, nipping the flesh here and there, and occasionally clipping off a finger, while jules begged him to kill him outright and put him out of his misery. finally slade reloaded, and walking up close to his victim, made some characteristic remarks and then dispatched him. the body lay there half a day, nobody venturing to touch it without orders, and then slade detailed a party and assisted at the burial himself. but he first cut off the dead man's ears and put them in his vest pocket, where he carried them for some time with great satisfaction. that is the story as i have frequently heard it told and seen it in print in california newspapers. it is doubtless correct in all essential particulars. in due time we rattled up to a stage-station, and sat down to breakfast with a half-savage, half-civilized company of armed and bearded mountaineers, ranchmen and station employees. the most gentlemanly-appearing, quiet and affable officer we had yet found along the road in the overland company's service was the person who sat at the head of the table, at my elbow. never youth stared and shivered as i did when i heard them call him slade! here was romance, and i sitting face to face with it!--looking upon it --touching it--hobnobbing with it, as it were! here, right by my side, was the actual ogre who, in fights and brawls and various ways, had taken the lives of twenty-six human beings, or all men lied about him! i suppose i was the proudest stripling that ever traveled to see strange lands and wonderful people. he was so friendly and so gentle-spoken that i warmed to him in spite of his awful history. it was hardly possible to realize that this pleasant person was the pitiless scourge of the outlaws, the raw-head-and-bloody-bones the nursing mothers of the mountains terrified their children with. and to this day i can remember nothing remarkable about slade except that his face was rather broad across the cheek bones, and that the cheek bones were low and the lips peculiarly thin and straight. but that was enough to leave something of an effect upon me, for since then i seldom see a face possessing those characteristics without fancying that the owner of it is a dangerous man. the coffee ran out. at least it was reduced to one tin-cupful, and slade was about to take it when he saw that my cup was empty. he politely offered to fill it, but although i wanted it, i politely declined. i was afraid he had not killed anybody that morning, and might be needing diversion. but still with firm politeness he insisted on filling my cup, and said i had traveled all night and better deserved it than he--and while he talked he placidly poured the fluid, to the last drop. i thanked him and drank it, but it gave me no comfort, for i could not feel sure that he would not be sorry, presently, that he had given it away, and proceed to kill me to distract his thoughts from the loss. but nothing of the kind occurred. we left him with only twenty-six dead people to account for, and i felt a tranquil satisfaction in the thought that in so judiciously taking care of no. at that breakfast-table i had pleasantly escaped being no. . slade came out to the coach and saw us off, first ordering certain rearrangements of the mail-bags for our comfort, and then we took leave of him, satisfied that we should hear of him again, some day, and wondering in what connection. following the equator a journey around the world by mark twain samuel l. clemens part chapter lxi. in the first place god made idiots. this was for practice. then he made school boards. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. suppose we applied no more ingenuity to the instruction of deaf and dumb and blind children than we sometimes apply in our american public schools to the instruction of children who are in possession of all their faculties? the result would be that the deaf and dumb and blind would acquire nothing. they would live and die as ignorant as bricks and stones. the methods used in the asylums are rational. the teacher exactly measures the child's capacity, to begin with; and from thence onwards the tasks imposed are nicely gauged to the gradual development of that capacity, the tasks keep pace with the steps of the child's progress, they don't jump miles and leagues ahead of it by irrational caprice and land in vacancy--according to the average public-school plan. in the public school, apparently, they teach the child to spell cat, then ask it to calculate an eclipse; when it can read words of two syllables, they require it to explain the circulation of the blood; when it reaches the head of the infant class they bully it with conundrums that cover the domain of universal knowledge. this sounds extravagant--and is; yet it goes no great way beyond the facts. i received a curious letter one day, from the punjab (you must pronounce it punjawb). the handwriting was excellent, and the wording was english --english, and yet not exactly english. the style was easy and smooth and flowing, yet there was something subtly foreign about it--a something tropically ornate and sentimental and rhetorical. it turned out to be the work of a hindoo youth, the holder of a humble clerical billet in a railway office. he had been educated in one of the numerous colleges of india. upon inquiry i was told that the country was full of young fellows of his like. they had been educated away up to the snow-summits of learning--and the market for all this elaborate cultivation was minutely out of proportion to the vastness of the product. this market consisted of some thousands of small clerical posts under the government --the supply of material for it was multitudinous. if this youth with the flowing style and the blossoming english was occupying a small railway clerkship, it meant that there were hundreds and hundreds as capable as he, or he would be in a high place; and it certainly meant that there were thousands whose education and capacity had fallen a little short, and that they would have to go without places. apparently, then, the colleges of india were doing what our high schools have long been doing --richly over-supplying the market for highly-educated service; and thereby doing a damage to the scholar, and through him to the country. at home i once made a speech deploring the injuries inflicted by the high school in making handicrafts distasteful to boys who would have been willing to make a living at trades and agriculture if they had but had the good luck to stop with the common school. but i made no converts. not one, in a community overrun with educated idlers who were above following their fathers' mechanical trades, yet could find no market for their book-knowledge. the same rail that brought me the letter from the punjab, brought also a little book published by messrs. thacker, spink & co., of calcutta, which interested me, for both its preface and its contents treated of this matter of over-education. in the preface occurs this paragraph from the calcutta review. for "government office" read "drygoods clerkship" and it will fit more than one region of america: "the education that we give makes the boys a little less clownish in their manners, and more intelligent when spoken to by strangers. on the other hand, it has made them less contented with their lot in life, and less willing to work with their hands. the form which discontent takes in this country is not of a healthy kind; for, the natives of india consider that the only occupation worthy of an educated man is that of a writership in some office, and especially in a government office. the village schoolboy goes back to the plow with the greatest reluctance; and the town schoolboy carries the same discontent and inefficiency into his father's workshop. sometimes these ex-students positively refuse at first to work; and more than once parents have openly expressed their regret that they ever allowed their sons to be inveigled to school." the little book which i am quoting from is called "indo-anglian literature," and is well stocked with "baboo" english--clerkly english, hooky english, acquired in the schools. some of it is very funny, --almost as funny, perhaps, as what you and i produce when we try to write in a language not our own; but much of it is surprisingly correct and free. if i were going to quote good english--but i am not. india is well stocked with natives who speak it and write it as well as the best of us. i merely wish to show some of the quaint imperfect attempts at the use of our tongue. there are many letters in the book; poverty imploring help--bread, money, kindness, office generally an office, a clerkship, some way to get food and a rag out of the applicant's unmarketable education; and food not for himself alone, but sometimes for a dozen helpless relations in addition to his own family; for those people are astonishingly unselfish, and admirably faithful to their ties of kinship. among us i think there is nothing approaching it. strange as some of these wailing and supplicating letters are, humble and even groveling as some of them are, and quaintly funny and confused as a goodly number of them are, there is still a pathos about them, as a rule, that checks the rising laugh and reproaches it. in the following letter "father" is not to be read literally. in ceylon a little native beggar-girl embarrassed me by calling me father, although i knew she was mistaken. i was so new that i did not know that she was merely following the custom of the dependent and the supplicant. "sir, "i pray please to give me some action (work) for i am very poor boy i have no one to help me even so father for it so it seemed in thy good sight, you give the telegraph office, and another work what is your wish i am very poor boy, this understand what is your wish you my father i am your son this understand what is your wish. "your sirvent, p. c. b." through ages of debasing oppression suffered by these people at the hands of their native rulers, they come legitimately by the attitude and language of fawning and flattery, and one must remember this in mitigation when passing judgment upon the native character. it is common in these letters to find the petitioner furtively trying to get at the white man's soft religious side; even this poor boy baits his hook with a macerated bible-text in the hope that it may catch something if all else fail. here is an application for the post of instructor in english to some children: "my dear sir or gentleman, that your petitioner has much qualification in the language of english to instruct the young boys; i was given to understand that your of suitable children has to acquire the knowledge of english language." as a sample of the flowery eastern style, i will take a sentence or two from along letter written by a young native to the lieutenant-governor of bengal--an application for employment: "honored and much respected sir, "i hope your honor will condescend to hear the tale of this poor creature. i shall overflow with gratitude at this mark of your royal condescension. the bird-like happiness has flown away from my nest-like heart and has not hitherto returned from the period whence the rose of my father's life suffered the autumnal breath of death, in plain english he passed through the gates of grave, and from that hour the phantom of delight has never danced before me." it is all school-english, book-english, you see; and good enough, too, all things considered. if the native boy had but that one study he would shine, he would dazzle, no doubt. but that is not the case. he is situated as are our public-school children--loaded down with an over-freightage of other studies; and frequently they are as far beyond the actual point of progress reached by him and suited to the stage of development attained, as could be imagined by the insanest fancy. apparently--like our public-school boy--he must work, work, work, in school and out, and play but little. apparently--like our public-school boy--his "education" consists in learning things, not the meaning of them; he is fed upon the husks, not the corn. from several essays written by native schoolboys in answer to the question of how they spend their day, i select one--the one which goes most into detail: " . at the break of day i rises from my own bed and finish my daily duty, then i employ myself till o'clock, after which i employ myself to bathe, then take for my body some sweet meat, and just at / i came to school to attend my class duty, then at / p. m. i return from school and engage myself to do my natural duty, then, i engage for a quarter to take my tithn, then i study till p. m., after which i began to play anything which comes in my head. after / , half pass to eight we are began to sleep, before sleeping i told a constable just o' he came and rose us from half pass eleven we began to read still morning." it is not perfectly clear, now that i come to cipher upon it. he gets up at about in the morning, or along there somewhere, and goes to bed about fifteen or sixteen hours afterward--that much of it seems straight; but why he should rise again three hours later and resume his studies till morning is puzzling. i think it is because he is studying history. history requires a world of time and bitter hard work when your "education" is no further advanced than the cat's; when you are merely stuffing yourself with a mixed-up mess of empty names and random incidents and elusive dates, which no one teaches you how to interpret, and which, uninterpreted, pay you not a farthing's value for your waste of time. yes, i think he had to get up at halfpast p.m. in order to be sure to be perfect with his history lesson by noon. with results as follows--from a calcutta school examination: "q. who was cardinal wolsey? "cardinal wolsey was an editor of a paper named north briton. no. of his publication he charged the king of uttering a lie from the throne. he was arrested and cast into prison; and after releasing went to france. " . as bishop of york but died in disentry in a church on his way to be blockheaded. " . cardinal wolsey was the son of edward iv, after his father's death he himself ascended the throne at the age of ( ) ten only, but when he surpassed or when he was fallen in his twenty years of age at that time he wished to make a journey in his countries under him, but he was opposed by his mother to do journey, and according to his mother's example he remained in the home, and then became king. after many times obstacles and many confusion he become king and afterwards his brother." there is probably not a word of truth in that. "q. what is the meaning of 'ich dien'? " . an honor conferred on the first or eldest sons of english sovereigns. it is nothing more than some feathers. " . ich dien was the word which was written on the feathers of the blind king who came to fight, being interlaced with the bridles of the horse. " . ich dien is a title given to henry vii by the pope of rome, when he forwarded the reformation of cardinal wolsy to rome, and for this reason he was called commander of the faith." a dozen or so of this kind of insane answers are quoted in the book from that examination. each answer is sweeping proof, all by itself, that the person uttering it was pushed ahead of where he belonged when he was put into history; proof that he had been put to the task of acquiring history before he had had a single lesson in the art of acquiring it, which is the equivalent of dumping a pupil into geometry before he has learned the progressive steps which lead up to it and make its acquirement possible. those calcutta novices had no business with history. there was no excuse for examining them in it, no excuse for exposing them and their teachers. they were totally empty; there was nothing to "examine." helen keller has been dumb, stone deaf, and stone blind, ever since she was a little baby a year-and-a-half old; and now at sixteen years of age this miraculous creature, this wonder of all the ages, passes the harvard university examination in latin, german, french history, belles lettres, and such things, and does it brilliantly, too, not in a commonplace fashion. she doesn't know merely things, she is splendidly familiar with the meanings of them. when she writes an essay on a shakespearean character, her english is fine and strong, her grasp of the subject is the grasp of one who knows, and her page is electric with light. has miss sullivan taught her by the methods of india and the american public school? no, oh, no; for then she would be deafer and dumber and blinder than she was before. it is a pity that we can't educate all the children in the asylums. to continue the calcutta exposure: "what is the meaning of a sheriff?" " . sheriff is a post opened in the time of john. the duty of sheriff here in calcutta, to look out and catch those carriages which is rashly driven out by the coachman; but it is a high post in england. " . sheriff was the english bill of common prayer. " . the man with whom the accusative persons are placed is called sheriff. " . sheriff--latin term for 'shrub,' we called broom, worn by the first earl of enjue, as an emblem of humility when they went to the pilgrimage, and from this their hairs took their crest and surname. " . sheriff is a kind of titlous sect of people, as barons, nobles, etc. " . sheriff; a tittle given on those persons who were respective and pious in england." the students were examined in the following bulky matters: geometry, the solar spectrum, the habeas corpus act, the british parliament, and in metaphysics they were asked to trace the progress of skepticism from descartes to hume. it is within bounds to say that some of the results were astonishing. without doubt, there were students present who justified their teacher's wisdom in introducing them to these studies; but the fact is also evident that others had been pushed into these studies to waste their time over them when they could have been profitably employed in hunting smaller game. under the head of geometry, one of the answers is this: " . the whole bd = the whole ca, and so-so-so-so-so-so-so." to me this is cloudy, but i was never well up in geometry. that was the only effort made among the five students who appeared for examination in geometry; the other four wailed and surrendered without a fight. they are piteous wails, too, wails of despair; and one of them is an eloquent reproach; it comes from a poor fellow who has been laden beyond his strength by a stupid teacher, and is eloquent in spite of the poverty of its english. the poor chap finds himself required to explain riddles which even sir isaac newton was not able to understand: " . oh my dear father examiner you my father and you kindly give a number of pass you my great father. " . i am a poor boy and have no means to support my mother and two brothers who are suffering much for want of food. i get four rupees monthly from charity fund of this place, from which i send two rupees for their support, and keep two for my own support. father, if i relate the unlucky circumstance under which we are placed, then, i think, you will not be able to suppress the tender tear. " . sir which sir isaac newton and other experienced mathematicians cannot understand i being third of entrance class can understand these which is too impossible to imagine. and my examiner also has put very tiresome and very heavy propositions to prove." we must remember that these pupils had to do their thinking in one language, and express themselves in another and alien one. it was a heavy handicap. i have by me "english as she is taught"--a collection of american examinations made in the public schools of brooklyn by one of the teachers, miss caroline b. le row. an extract or two from its pages will show that when the american pupil is using but one language, and that one his own, his performance is no whit better than his indian brother's: "on history. "christopher columbus was called the father of his country. queen isabella of spain sold her watch and chain and other millinery so that columbus could discover america. "the indian wars were very desecrating to the country. "the indians pursued their warfare by hiding in the bushes and then scalping them. "captain john smith has been styled the father of his country. his life was saved by his daughter pochahantas. "the puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of america. "the stamp act was to make everybody stamp all materials so they should be null and void. "washington died in spain almost broken-hearted. his remains were taken to the cathedral in havana. "gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas." in brooklyn, as in india, they examine a pupil, and when they find out he doesn't know anything, they put him into literature, or geometry, or astronomy, or government, or something like that, so that he can properly display the assification of the whole system-- "on literature. "'bracebridge hall' was written by henry irving. "edgar a. poe was a very curdling writer. "beowulf wrote the scriptures. "ben johnson survived shakespeare in some respects. "in the 'canterbury tale' it gives account of king alfred on his way to the shrine of thomas bucket. "chaucer was the father of english pottery. "chaucer was succeeded by h. wads. longfellow." we will finish with a couple of samples of "literature," one from america, the other from india. the first is a brooklyn public-school boy's attempt to turn a few verses of the "lady of the lake" into prose. you will have to concede that he did it: "the man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an instrument made of steel alone with strong ardor not diminishing, for, being tired from the time passed with hard labor overworked with anger and ignorant with weariness, while every breath for labor lie drew with cries full of sorrow, the young deer made imperfect who worked hard filtered in sight." the following paragraph is from a little book which is famous in india --the biography of a distinguished hindoo judge, onoocool chunder mookerjee; it was written by his nephew, and is unintentionally funny-in fact, exceedingly so. i offer here the closing scene. if you would like to sample the rest of the book, it can be had by applying to the publishers, messrs. thacker, spink & co., calcutta "and having said these words he hermetically sealed his lips not to open them again. all the well-known doctors of calcutta that could be procured for a man of his position and wealth were brought, --doctors payne, fayrer, and nilmadhub mookerjee and others; they did what they could do, with their puissance and knack of medical knowledge, but it proved after all as if to milk the ram! his wife and children had not the mournful consolation to hear his last words; he remained sotto voce for a few hours, and then was taken from us at . p.m. according to the caprice of god which passeth understanding." chapter lxii. there are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined ones. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. we sailed from calcutta toward the end of march; stopped a day at madras; two or three days in ceylon; then sailed westward on a long flight for mauritius. from my diary: april . we are far abroad upon the smooth waters of the indian ocean, now; it is shady and pleasant and peaceful under the vast spread of the awnings, and life is perfect again--ideal. the difference between a river and the sea is, that the river looks fluid, the sea solid--usually looks as if you could step out and walk on it. the captain has this peculiarity--he cannot tell the truth in a plausible way. in this he is the very opposite of the austere scot who sits midway of the table; he cannot tell a lie in an unplausible way. when the captain finishes a statement the passengers glance at each other privately, as who should say, "do you believe that?" when the scot finishes one, the look says, "how strange and interesting." the whole secret is in the manner and method of the two men. the captain is a little shy and diffident, and he states the simplest fact as if he were a little afraid of it, while the scot delivers himself of the most abandoned lie with such an air of stern veracity that one is forced to believe it although one knows it isn't so. for instance, the scot told about a pet flying-fish he once owned, that lived in a little fountain in his conservatory, and supported itself by catching birds and frogs and rats in the neighboring fields. it was plain that no one at the table doubted this statement. by and by, in the course of some talk about custom-house annoyances, the captain brought out the following simple everyday incident, but through his infirmity of style managed to tell it in such a way that it got no credence. he said: "i went ashore at naples one voyage when i was in that trade, and stood around helping my passengers, for i could speak a little italian. two or three times, at intervals, the officer asked me if i had anything dutiable about me, and seemed more and more put out and disappointed every time i told him no. finally a passenger whom i had helped through asked me to come out and take something. i thanked him, but excused myself, saying i had taken a whisky just before i came ashore. "it was a fatal admission. the officer at once made me pay sixpence import-duty on the whisky-just from ship to shore, you see; and he fined me l for not declaring the goods, another l for falsely denying that i had anything dutiable about me, also l for concealing the goods, and l for smuggling, which is the maximum penalty for unlawfully bringing in goods under the value of sevenpence ha'penny. altogether, sixty-five pounds sixpence for a little thing like that." the scot is always believed, yet he never tells anything but lies; whereas the captain is never believed, although he never tells a lie, so far as i can judge. if he should say his uncle was a male person, he would probably say it in such a way that nobody would believe it; at the same time the scot could claim that he had a female uncle and not stir a doubt in anybody's mind. my own luck has been curious all my literary life; i never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe. lots of pets on board--birds and things. in these far countries the white people do seem to run remarkably to pets. our host in cawnpore had a fine collection of birds--the finest we saw in a private house in india. and in colombo, dr. murray's great compound and commodious bungalow were well populated with domesticated company from the woods: frisky little squirrels; a ceylon mina walking sociably about the house; a small green parrot that whistled a single urgent note of call without motion of its beak; also chuckled; a monkey in a cage on the back veranda, and some more out in the trees; also a number of beautiful macaws in the trees; and various and sundry birds and animals of breeds not known to me. but no cat. yet a cat would have liked that place. april . tea-planting is the great business in ceylon, now. a passenger says it often pays per cent. on the investment. says there is a boom. april . the sea is a mediterranean blue; and i believe that that is about the divinest color known to nature. it is strange and fine--nature's lavish generosities to her creatures. at least to all of them except man. for those that fly she has provided a home that is nobly spacious--a home which is forty miles deep and envelops the whole globe, and has not an obstruction in it. for those that swim she has provided a more than imperial domain--a domain which is miles deep and covers four-fifths of the globe. but as for man, she has cut him off with the mere odds and ends of the creation. she has given him the thin skin, the meagre skin which is stretched over the remaining one-fifth--the naked bones stick up through it in most places. on the one-half of this domain he can raise snow, ice, sand, rocks, and nothing else. so the valuable part of his inheritance really consists of but a single fifth of the family estate; and out of it he has to grub hard to get enough to keep him alive and provide kings and soldiers and powder to extend the blessings of civilization with. yet man, in his simplicity and complacency and inability to cipher, thinks nature regards him as the important member of the family--in fact, her favorite. surely, it must occur to even his dull head, sometimes, that she has a curious way of showing it. afternoon. the captain has been telling how, in one of his arctic voyages, it was so cold that the mate's shadow froze fast to the deck and had to be ripped loose by main strength. and even then he got only about two-thirds of it back. nobody said anything, and the captain went away. i think he is becoming disheartened . . . . also, to be fair, there is another word of praise due to this ship's library: it contains no copy of the vicar of wakefield, that strange menagerie of complacent hypocrites and idiots, of theatrical cheap-john heroes and heroines, who are always showing off, of bad people who are not interesting, and good people who are fatiguing. a singular book. not a sincere line in it, and not a character that invites respect; a book which is one long waste-pipe discharge of goody-goody puerilities and dreary moralities; a book which is full of pathos which revolts, and humor which grieves the heart. there are few things in literature that are more piteous, more pathetic, than the celebrated "humorous" incident of moses and the spectacles. jane austen's books, too, are absent from this library. just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it. customs in tropic seas. at in the morning they pipe to wash down the decks, and at once the ladies who are sleeping there turn out and they and their beds go below. then one after another the men come up from the bath in their pyjamas, and walk the decks an hour or two with bare legs and bare feet. coffee and fruit served. the ship cat and her kitten now appear and get about their toilets; next the barber comes and flays us on the breezy deck. breakfast at . , and the day begins. i do not know how a day could be more reposeful: no motion; a level blue sea; nothing in sight from horizon to horizon; the speed of the ship furnishes a cooling breeze; there is no mail to read and answer; no newspapers to excite you; no telegrams to fret you or fright you--the world is far, far away; it has ceased to exist for you--seemed a fading dream, along in the first days; has dissolved to an unreality now; it is gone from your mind with all its businesses and ambitions, its prosperities and disasters, its exultations and despairs, its joys and griefs and cares and worries. they are no concern of yours any more; they have gone out of your life; they are a storm which has passed and left a deep calm behind. the people group themselves about the decks in their snowy white linen, and read, smoke, sew, play cards, talk, nap, and so on. in other ships the passengers are always ciphering about when they are going to arrive; out in these seas it is rare, very rare, to hear that subject broached. in other ships there is always an eager rush to the bulletin board at noon to find out what the "run" has been; in these seas the bulletin seems to attract no interest; i have seen no one visit it; in thirteen days i have visited it only once. then i happened to notice the figures of the day's run. on that day there happened to be talk, at dinner, about the speed of modern ships. i was the only passenger present who knew this ship's gait. necessarily, the atlantic custom of betting on the ship's run is not a custom here--nobody ever mentions it. i myself am wholly indifferent as to when we are going to "get in"; if any one else feels interested in the matter he has not indicated it in my hearing. if i had my way we should never get in at all. this sort of sea life is charged with an indestructible charm. there is no weariness, no fatigue, no worry, no responsibility, no work, no depression of spirits. there is nothing like this serenity, this comfort, this peace, this deep contentment, to be found anywhere on land. if i had my way i would sail on for ever and never go to live on the solid ground again. one of kipling's ballads has delivered the aspect and sentiment of this bewitching sea correctly: "the injian ocean sets an' smiles so sof', so bright, so bloomin' blue; there aren't a wave for miles an' miles excep' the jiggle from the screw." april . it turns out that the astronomical apprentice worked off a section of the milky way on me for the magellan clouds. a man of more experience in the business showed one of them to me last night. it was small and faint and delicate, and looked like the ghost of a bunch of white smoke left floating in the sky by an exploded bombshell. wednesday, april . mauritius. arrived and anchored off port louis a. m. rugged clusters of crags and peaks, green to their summits; from their bases to the sea a green plain with just tilt enough to it to make the water drain off. i believe it is in e. and s.--a hot tropical country. the green plain has an inviting look; has scattering dwellings nestling among the greenery. scene of the sentimental adventure of paul and virginia. island under french control--which means a community which depends upon quarantines, not sanitation, for its health. thursday, april . went ashore in the forenoon at port louis, a little town, but with the largest variety of nationalities and complexions we have encountered yet. french, english, chinese, arabs, africans with wool, blacks with straight hair, east indians, half-whites, quadroons --and great varieties in costumes and colors. took the train for curepipe at . --two hours' run, gradually uphill. what a contrast, this frantic luxuriance of vegetation, with the arid plains of india; these architecturally picturesque crags and knobs and miniature mountains, with the monotony of the indian dead-levels. a native pointed out a handsome swarthy man of grave and dignified bearing, and said in an awed tone, "that is so-and-so; has held office of one sort or another under this government for years--he is known all over this whole island and in the other countries of the world perhaps --who knows? one thing is certain; you can speak his name anywhere in this whole island, and you will find not one grown person that has not heard it. it is a wonderful thing to be so celebrated; yet look at him; it makes no change in him; he does not even seem to know it." curepipe (means pincushion or pegtown, probably). sixteen miles (two hours) by rail from port louis. at each end of every roof and on the apex of every dormer window a wooden peg two feet high stands up; in some cases its top is blunt, in others the peg is sharp and looks like a toothpick. the passion for this humble ornament is universal. apparently, there has been only one prominent event in the history of mauritius, and that one didn't happen. i refer to the romantic sojourn of paul and virginia here. it was that story that made mauritius known to the world, made the name familiar to everybody, the geographical position of it to nobody. a clergyman was asked to guess what was in a box on a table. it was a vellum fan painted with the shipwreck, and was "one of virginia's wedding gifts." april . this is the only country in the world where the stranger is not asked "how do you like this place?" this is indeed a large distinction. here the citizen does the talking about the country himself; the stranger is not asked to help. you get all sorts of information. from one citizen you gather the idea that mauritius was made first, and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after mauritius. another one tells you that this is an exaggeration; that the two chief villages, port louis and curepipe, fall short of heavenly perfection; that nobody lives in port louis except upon compulsion, and that curepipe is the wettest and rainiest place in the world. an english citizen said: "in the early part of this century mauritius was used by the french as a basis from which to operate against england's indian merchantmen; so england captured the island and also the neighbor, bourbon, to stop that annoyance. england gave bourbon back; the government in london did not want any more possessions in the west indies. if the government had had a better quality of geography in stock it would not have wasted bourbon in that foolish way. a big war will temporarily shut up the suez canal some day and the english ships will have to go to india around the cape of good hope again; then england will have to have bourbon and will take it. "mauritius was a crown colony until years ago, with a governor appointed by the crown and assisted by a council appointed by himself; but pope hennessey came out as governor then, and he worked hard to get a part of the council made elective, and succeeded. so now the whole council is french, and in all ordinary matters of legislation they vote together and in the french interest, not the english. the english population is very slender; it has not votes enough to elect a legislator. half a dozen rich french families elect the legislature. pope hennessey was an irishman, a catholic, a home ruler, m.p., a hater of england and the english, a very troublesome person and a serious incumbrance at westminster; so it was decided to send him out to govern unhealthy countries, in hope that something would happen to him. but nothing did. the first experiment was not merely a failure, it was more than a failure. he proved to be more of a disease himself than any he was sent to encounter. the next experiment was here. the dark scheme failed again. it was an off-season and there was nothing but measles here at the time. pope hennessey's health was not affected. he worked with the french and for the french and against the english, and he made the english very tired and the french very happy, and lived to have the joy of seeing the flag he served publicly hissed. his memory is held in worshipful reverence and affection by the french. "it is a land of extraordinary quarantines. they quarantine a ship for anything or for nothing; quarantine her for and even days. they once quarantined a ship because her captain had had the smallpox when he was a boy. that and because he was english. "the population is very small; small to insignificance. the majority is east indian; then mongrels; then negroes (descendants of the slaves of the french times); then french; then english. there was an american, but he is dead or mislaid. the mongrels are the result of all kinds of mixtures; black and white, mulatto and white, quadroon and white, octoroon and white. and so there is every shade of complexion; ebony, old mahogany, horsechestnut, sorrel, molasses-candy, clouded amber, clear amber, old-ivory white, new-ivory white, fish-belly white--this latter the leprous complexion frequent with the anglo-saxon long resident in tropical climates. "you wouldn't expect a person to be proud of being a mauritian, now would you? but it is so. the most of them have never been out of the island, and haven't read much or studied much, and they think the world consists of three principal countries--judaea, france, and mauritius; so they are very proud of belonging to one of the three grand divisions of the globe. they think that russia and germany are in england, and that england does not amount to much. they have heard vaguely about the united states and the equator, but they think both of them are monarchies. they think mount peter botte is the highest mountain in the world, and if you show one of them a picture of milan cathedral he will swell up with satisfaction and say that the idea of that jungle of spires was stolen from the forest of peg-tops and toothpicks that makes the roofs of curepipe look so fine and prickly. "there is not much trade in books. the newspapers educate and entertain the people. mainly the latter. they have two pages of large-print reading-matter-one of them english, the other french. the english page is a translation of the french one. the typography is super-extra primitive--in this quality it has not its equal anywhere. there is no proof-reader now; he is dead. "where do they get matter to fill up a page in this little island lost in the wastes of the indian ocean? oh, madagascar. they discuss madagascar and france. that is the bulk. then they chock up the rest with advice to the government. also, slurs upon the english administration. the papers are all owned and edited by creoles--french. "the language of the country is french. everybody speaks it--has to. you have to know french particularly mongrel french, the patois spoken by tom, dick, and harry of the multiform complexions--or you can't get along. "this was a flourishing country in former days, for it made then and still makes the best sugar in the world; but first the suez canal severed it from the world and left it out in the cold and next the beetroot sugar helped by bounties, captured the european markets. sugar is the life of mauritius, and it is losing its grip. its downward course was checked by the depreciation of the rupee--for the planter pays wages in rupees but sells his crop for gold--and the insurrection in cuba and paralyzation of the sugar industry there have given our prices here a life-saving lift; but the outlook has nothing permanently favorable about it. it takes a year to mature the canes--on the high ground three and six months longer --and there is always a chance that the annual cyclone will rip the profit out of the crop. in recent times a cyclone took the whole crop, as you may say; and the island never saw a finer one. some of the noblest sugar estates in the island are in deep difficulties. a dozen of them are investments of english capital; and the companies that own them are at work now, trying to settle up and get out with a saving of half the money they put in. you know, in these days, when a country begins to introduce the tea culture, it means that its own specialty has gone back on it. look at bengal; look at ceylon. well, they've begun to introduce the tea culture, here. "many copies of paul and virginia are sold every year in mauritius. no other book is so popular here except the bible. by many it is supposed to be a part of the bible. all the missionaries work up their french on it when they come here to pervert the catholic mongrel. it is the greatest story that was ever written about mauritius, and the only one." chapter lxiii. the principal difference between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. april .--the cyclone of killed and crippled hundreds of people; it was accompanied by a deluge of rain, which drowned port louis and produced a water famine. quite true; for it burst the reservoir and the water-pipes; and for a time after the flood had disappeared there was much distress from want of water. this is the only place in the world where no breed of matches can stand the damp. only one match in will light. the roads are hard and smooth; some of the compounds are spacious, some of the bungalows commodious, and the roadways are walled by tall bamboo hedges, trim and green and beautiful; and there are azalea hedges, too, both the white and the red; i never saw that before. as to healthiness: i translate from to-day's (april ) merchants' and planters' gazette, from the article of a regular contributor, "carminge," concerning the death of the nephew of a prominent citizen: "sad and lugubrious existence, this which we lead in mauritius; i believe there is no other country in the world where one dies more easily than among us. the least indisposition becomes a mortal malady; a simple headache develops into meningitis; a cold into pneumonia, and presently, when we are least expecting it, death is a guest in our home." this daily paper has a meteorological report which tells you what the weather was day before yesterday. one is clever pestered by a beggar or a peddler in this town, so far as i can see. this is pleasantly different from india. april . to such as believe that the quaint product called french civilization would be an improvement upon the civilization of new guinea and the like, the snatching of madagascar and the laying on of french civilization there will be fully justified. but why did the english allow the french to have madagascar? did she respect a theft of a couple of centuries ago? dear me, robbery by european nations of each other's territories has never been a sin, is not a sin to-day. to the several cabinets the several political establishments of the world are clotheslines; and a large part of the official duty of these cabinets is to keep an eye on each other's wash and grab what they can of it as opportunity offers. all the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth--including america, of course--consist of pilferings from other people's wash. no tribe, howsoever insignificant, and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not stolen. when the english, the french, and the spaniards reached america, the indian tribes had been raiding each other's territorial clothes-lines for ages, and every acre of ground in the continent had been stolen and re-stolen times. the english, the french, and the spaniards went to work and stole it all over again; and when that was satisfactorily accomplished they went diligently to work and stole it from each other. in europe and asia and africa every acre of ground has been stolen several millions of times. a crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. this is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law. christian governments are as frank to-day, as open and above-board, in discussing projects for raiding each other's clothes-lines as ever they were before the golden rule came smiling into this inhospitable world and couldn't get a night's lodging anywhere. in years england has beneficently retired garment after garment from the indian lines, until there is hardly a rag of the original wash left dangling anywhere. in years an obscure tribe of muscovite savages has risen to the dazzling position of land-robber-in-chief; she found a quarter of the world hanging out to dry on a hundred parallels of latitude, and she scooped in the whole wash. she keeps a sharp eye on a multitude of little lines that stretch along the northern boundaries of india, and every now and then she snatches a hip-rag or a pair of pyjamas. it is england's prospective property, and russia knows it; but russia cares nothing for that. in fact, in our day land-robbery, claim-jumping, is become a european governmental frenzy. some have been hard at it in the borders of china, in burma, in siam, and the islands of the sea; and all have been at it in africa. africa has been as coolly divided up and portioned out among the gang as if they had bought it and paid for it. and now straightway they are beginning the old game again --to steal each other's grabbings. germany found a vast slice of central africa with the english flag and the english missionary and the english trader scattered all over it, but with certain formalities neglected--no signs up, "keep off the grass," "trespassers-forbidden," etc.--and she stepped in with a cold calm smile and put up the signs herself, and swept those english pioneers promptly out of the country. there is a tremendous point there. it can be put into the form of a maxim: get your formalities right--never mind about the moralities. it was an impudent thing; but england had to put up with it. now, in the case of madagascar, the formalities had originally been observed, but by neglect they had fallen into desuetude ages ago. england should have snatched madagascar from the french clothes-line. without an effort she could have saved those harmless natives from the calamity of french civilization, and she did not do it. now it is too late. the signs of the times show plainly enough what is going to happen. all the savage lands in the world are going to be brought under subjection to the christian governments of europe. i am not sorry, but glad. this coming fate might have been a calamity to those savage peoples two hundred years ago; but now it will in some cases be a benefaction. the sooner the seizure is consummated, the better for the savages. the dreary and dragging ages of bloodshed and disorder and oppression will give place to peace and order and the reign of law. when one considers what india was under her hindoo and mohammedan rulers, and what she is now; when he remembers the miseries of her millions then and the protections and humanities which they enjoy now, he must concede that the most fortunate thing that has ever befallen that empire was the establishment of british supremacy there. the savage lands of the world are to pass to alien possession, their peoples to the mercies of alien rulers. let us hope and believe that they will all benefit by the change. april . "the first year they gather shells; the second year they gather shells and drink; the third year they do not gather shells." (said of immigrants to mauritius.) population , . sugar factories. population , , . the increase is due mainly to the introduction of indian coolies. they now apparently form the great majority of the population. they are admirable breeders; their homes are always hazy with children. great savers of money. a british officer told me that in india he paid his servant rupees a month, and he had cousins, uncles, parents, etc., dependent upon him, and he supported them on his wages. these thrifty coolies are said to be acquiring land a trifle at a time, and cultivating it; and may own the island by and by. the indian women do very hard labor [for wages of ( / rupee) for twelve hours' work.] they carry mats of sugar on their heads ( pounds) all day lading ships, for half a rupee, and work at gardening all day for less. the camaron is a fresh water creature like a cray-fish. it is regarded here as the world's chiefest delicacy--and certainly it is good. guards patrol the streams to prevent poaching it. a fine of rs. or (they say) for poaching. bait is thrown in the water; the camaron goes for it; the fisher drops his loop in and works it around and about the camaron he has selected, till he gets it over its tail; then there's a jerk or something to certify the camaron that it is his turn now; he suddenly backs away, which moves the loop still further up his person and draws it taut, and his days are ended. another dish, called palmiste, is like raw turnip-shavings and tastes like green almonds; is very delicate and good. costs the life of a palm tree to years old--for it is the pith. another dish--looks like greens or a tangle of fine seaweed--is a preparation of the deadly nightshade. good enough. the monkeys live in the dense forests on the flanks of the toy mountains, and they flock down nights and raid the sugar-fields. also on other estates they come down and destroy a sort of bean-crop--just for fun, apparently--tear off the pods and throw them down. the cyclone of tore down two great blocks of stone buildings in the center of port louis--the chief architectural feature-and left the uncomely and apparently frail blocks standing. everywhere in its track it annihilated houses, tore off roofs, destroyed trees and crops. the men were in the towns, the women and children at home in the country getting crippled, killed, frightened to insanity; and the rain deluging them, the wind howling, the thunder crashing, the lightning glaring. this for an hour or so. then a lull and sunshine; many ventured out of safe shelter; then suddenly here it came again from the opposite point and renewed and completed the devastation. it is said the chinese fed the sufferers for days on free rice. whole streets in port louis were laid flat--wrecked. during a minute and a half the wind blew miles an hour; no official record made after that, when it may have reached . it cut down an obelisk. it carried an american ship into the woods after breaking the chains of two anchors. they now use four-two forward, two astern. common report says it killed , in port louis alone, in half an hour. then came the lull of the central calm--people did not know the barometer was still going down --then suddenly all perdition broke loose again while people were rushing around seeking friends and rescuing the wounded. the noise was comparable to nothing; there is nothing resembling it but thunder and cannon, and these are feeble in comparison. what there is of mauritius is beautiful. you have undulating wide expanses of sugar-cane--a fine, fresh green and very pleasant to the eye; and everywhere else you have a ragged luxuriance of tropic vegetation of vivid greens of varying shades, a wild tangle of underbrush, with graceful tall palms lifting their crippled plumes high above it; and you have stretches of shady dense forest with limpid streams frolicking through them, continually glimpsed and lost and glimpsed again in the pleasantest hide-and-seek fashion; and you have some tiny mountains, some quaint and picturesque groups of toy peaks, and a dainty little vest-pocket matterhorn; and here and there and now and then a strip of sea with a white ruffle of surf breaks into the view. that is mauritius; and pretty enough. the details are few, the massed result is charming, but not imposing; not riotous, not exciting; it is a sunday landscape. perspective, and the enchantments wrought by distance, are wanting. there are no distances; there is no perspective, so to speak. fifteen miles as the crow flies is the usual limit of vision. mauritius is a garden and a park combined. it affects one's emotions as parks and gardens affect them. the surfaces of one's spiritual deeps are pleasantly played upon, the deeps themselves are not reached, not stirred. spaciousness, remote altitudes, the sense of mystery which haunts apparently inaccessible mountain domes and summits reposing in the sky--these are the things which exalt the spirit and move it to see visions and dream dreams. the sandwich islands remain my ideal of the perfect thing in the matter of tropical islands. i would add another story to mauna loa's , feet if i could, and make it particularly bold and steep and craggy and forbidding and snowy; and i would make the volcano spout its lava-floods out of its summit instead of its sides; but aside from these non-essentials i have no corrections to suggest. i hope these will be attended to; i do not wish to have to speak of it again. chapter lxiv. when your watch gets out of order you have choice of two things to do: throw it in the fire or take it to the watch-tinker. the former is the quickest. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. the arundel castle is the finest boat i have seen in these seas. she is thoroughly modern, and that statement covers a great deal of ground. she has the usual defect, the common defect, the universal defect, the defect that has never been missing from any ship that ever sailed--she has imperfect beds. many ships have good beds, but no ship has very good ones. in the matter of beds all ships have been badly edited, ignorantly edited, from the beginning. the selection of the beds is given to some hearty, strong-backed, self-made man, when it ought to be given to a frail woman accustomed from girlhood to backaches and insomnia. nothing is so rare, on either side of the ocean, as a perfect bed; nothing is so difficult to make. some of the hotels on both sides provide it, but no ship ever does or ever did. in noah's ark the beds were simply scandalous. noah set the fashion, and it will endure in one degree of modification or another till the next flood. a.m. passing isle de bourbon. broken-up sky-line of volcanic mountains in the middle. surely it would not cost much to repair them, and it seems inexcusable neglect to leave them as they are. it seems stupid to send tired men to europe to rest. it is no proper rest for the mind to clatter from town to town in the dust and cinders, and examine galleries and architecture, and be always meeting people and lunching and teaing and dining, and receiving worrying cables and letters. and a sea voyage on the atlantic is of no use--voyage too short, sea too rough. the peaceful indian and pacific oceans and the long stretches of time are the healing thing. may , am. a fair, great ship in sight, almost the first we have seen in these weeks of lonely voyaging. we are now in the mozambique channel, between madagascar and south africa, sailing straight west for delagoa bay. last night, the burly chief engineer, middle-aged, was standing telling a spirited seafaring tale, and had reached the most exciting place, where a man overboard was washing swiftly astern on the great seas, and uplifting despairing cries, everybody racing aft in a frenzy of excitement and fading hope, when the band, which had been silent a moment, began impressively its closing piece, the english national anthem. as simply as if he was unconscious of what he was doing, he stopped his story, uncovered, laid his laced cap against his breast, and slightly bent his grizzled head. the few bars finished, he put on his cap and took up his tale again, as naturally as if that interjection of music had been a part of it. there was something touching and fine about it, and it was moving to reflect that he was one of a myriad, scattered over every part of the globe, who by turn was doing as he was doing every hour of the twenty-four--those awake doing it while the others slept--those impressive bars forever floating up out of the various climes, never silent and never lacking reverent listeners. all that i remember about madagascar is that thackeray's little billie went up to the top of the mast and there knelt him upon his knee, saying, "i see "jerusalem and madagascar, and north and south amerikee." may . sunday. fifteen or twenty africanders who will end their voyage to-day and strike for their several homes from delagoa bay to-morrow, sat up singing on the afterdeck in the moonlight till a.m. good fun and wholesome. and the songs were clean songs, and some of them were hallowed by tender associations. finally, in a pause, a man asked, "have you heard about the fellow that kept a diary crossing the atlantic?" it was a discord, a wet blanket. the men were not in the mood for humorous dirt. the songs had carried them to their homes, and in spirit they sat by those far hearthstones, and saw faces and heard voices other than those that were about them. and so this disposition to drag in an old indecent anecdote got no welcome; nobody answered. the poor man hadn't wit enough to see that he had blundered, but asked his question again. again there was no response. it was embarrassing for him. in his confusion he chose the wrong course, did the wrong thing--began the anecdote. began it in a deep and hostile stillness, where had been such life and stir and warm comradeship before. he delivered himself of the brief details of the diary's first day, and did it with some confidence and a fair degree of eagerness. it fell flat. there was an awkward pause. the two rows of men sat like statues. there was no movement, no sound. he had to go on; there was no other way, at least none that an animal of his calibre could think of. at the close of each day's diary, the same dismal silence followed. when at last he finished his tale and sprung the indelicate surprise which is wont to fetch a crash of laughter, not a ripple of sound resulted. it was as if the tale had been told to dead men. after what seemed a long, long time, somebody sighed, somebody else stirred in his seat; presently, the men dropped into a low murmur of confidential talk, each with his neighbor, and the incident was closed. there were indications that that man was fond of his anecdote; that it was his pet, his standby, his shot that never missed, his reputation-maker. but he will never tell it again. no doubt he will think of it sometimes, for that cannot well be helped; and then he will see a picture, and always the same picture--the double rank of dead men; the vacant deck stretching away in dimming perspective beyond them, the wide desert of smooth sea all abroad; the rim of the moon spying from behind a rag of black cloud; the remote top of the mizzenmast shearing a zigzag path through the fields of stars in the deeps of space; and this soft picture will remind him of the time that he sat in the midst of it and told his poor little tale and felt so lonesome when he got through. fifty indians and chinamen asleep in a big tent in the waist of the ship forward; they lie side by side with no space between; the former wrapped up, head and all, as in the indian streets, the chinamen uncovered; the lamp and things for opium smoking in the center. a passenger said it was ten -ton truck loads of dynamite that lately exploded at johannesburg. hundreds killed; he doesn't know how many; limbs picked up for miles around. glass shattered, and roofs swept away or collapsed yards off; fragment of iron flung three and a half miles. it occurred at p.m.; at , l , had been subscribed. when this passenger left, l , had been voted by city and state governments and l , by citizens and business corporations. when news of the disaster was telephoned to the exchange l , were subscribed in the first five minutes. subscribing was still going on when he left; the papers had ceased the names, only the amounts--too many names; not enough room. l , subscribed by companies and citizens; if this is true, it must be what they call in australia "a record"--the biggest instance of a spontaneous outpour for charity in history, considering the size of the population it was drawn from, $ or $ for each white resident, babies at the breast included. monday, may . steaming slowly in the stupendous delagoa bay, its dim arms stretching far away and disappearing on both sides. it could furnish plenty of room for all the ships in the world, but it is shoal. the lead has given us / fathoms several times and we are drawing that, lacking inches. a bold headland--precipitous wall, feet high, very strong, red color, stretching a mile or so. a man said it was portuguese blood--battle fought here with the natives last year. i think this doubtful. pretty cluster of houses on the tableland above the red-and rolling stretches of grass and groups of trees, like england. the portuguese have the railroad (one passenger train a day) to the border-- miles--then the netherlands company have it. thousands of tons of freight on the shore--no cover. this is portuguese allover --indolence, piousness, poverty, impotence. crews of small boats and tugs, all jet black woolly heads and very muscular. winter. the south african winter is just beginning now, but nobody but an expert can tell it from summer. however, i am tired of summer; we have had it unbroken for eleven months. we spent the afternoon on shore, delagoa bay. a small town--no sights. no carriages. three 'rickshas, but we couldn't get them--apparently private. these portuguese are a rich brown, like some of the indians. some of the blacks have the long horse beads and very long chins of the negroes of the picture books; but most of them are exactly like the negroes of our southern states round faces, flat noses, good-natured, and easy laughers. flocks of black women passed along, carrying outrageously heavy bags of freight on their heads. the quiver of their leg as the foot was planted and the strain exhibited by their bodies showed what a tax upon their strength the load was. they were stevedores and doing full stevedores work. they were very erect when unladden--from carrying heavy loads on their heads--just like the indian women. it gives them a proud fine carriage. sometimes one saw a woman carrying on her head a laden and top-heavy basket the shape of an inverted pyramid-its top the size of a soup-plate, its base the diameter of a teacup. it required nice balancing--and got it. no bright colors; yet there were a good many hindoos. the second class passenger came over as usual at "lights out" ( ) and we lounged along the spacious vague solitudes of the deck and smoked the peaceful pipe and talked. he told me an incident in mr. barnum's life which was evidently characteristic of that great showman in several ways: this was barnum's purchase of shakespeare's birthplace, a quarter of a century ago. the second class passenger was in jamrach's employ at the time and knew barnum well. he said the thing began in this way. one morning barnum and jamrach were in jamrach's little private snuggery back of the wilderness of caged monkeys and snakes and other commonplaces of jamrach's stock in trade, refreshing themselves after an arduous stroke of business, jamrach with something orthodox, barnum with something heterodox--for barnum was a teetotaler. the stroke of business was in the elephant line. jamrach had contracted to deliver to barnum in new york elephants for $ , in time for the next season's opening. then it occurred to mr. barnum that he needed a "card" he suggested jumbo. jamrach said he would have to think of something else--jumbo couldn't be had; the zoo wouldn't part with that elephant. barnum said he was willing to pay a fortune for jumbo if he could get him. jamrach said it was no use to think about it; that jumbo was as popular as the prince of wales and the zoo wouldn't dare to sell him; all england would be outraged at the idea; jumbo was an english institution; he was part of the national glory; one might as well think of buying the nelson monument. barnum spoke up with vivacity and said: "it's a first-rate idea. i'll buy the monument." jamrach was speechless for a second. then he said, like one ashamed "you caught me. i was napping. for a moment i thought you were in earnest." barnum said pleasantly-- "i was in earnest. i know they won't sell it, but no matter, i will not throw away a good idea for all that. all i want is a big advertisement. i will keep the thing in mind, and if nothing better turns up i will offer to buy it. that will answer every purpose. it will furnish me a couple of columns of gratis advertising in every english and american paper for a couple of months, and give my show the biggest boom a show ever had in this world." jamrach started to deliver a burst of admiration, but was interrupted by barnum, who said: "here is a state of things! england ought to blush." his eye had fallen upon something in the newspaper. he read it through to himself, then read it aloud. it said that the house that shakespeare was born in at stratford-on-avon was falling gradually to ruin through neglect; that the room where the poet first saw the light was now serving as a butcher's shop; that all appeals to england to contribute money (the requisite sum stated) to buy and repair the house and place it in the care of salaried and trustworthy keepers had fallen resultless. then barnum said: "there's my chance. let jumbo and the monument alone for the present --they'll keep. i'll buy shakespeare's house. i'll set it up in my museum in new york and put a glass case around it and make a sacred thing of it; and you'll see all america flock there to worship; yes, and pilgrims from the whole earth; and i'll make them take their hats off, too. in america we know how to value anything that shakespeare's touch has made holy. you'll see." in conclusion the s. c. p. said: "that is the way the thing came about. barnum did buy shakespeare's house. he paid the price asked, and received the properly attested documents of sale. then there was an explosion, i can tell you. england rose! that, the birthplace of the master-genius of all the ages and all the climes--that priceless possession of britain--to be carted out of the country like so much old lumber and set up for sixpenny desecration in a yankee show-shop--the idea was not to be tolerated for a moment. england rose in her indignation; and barnum was glad to relinquish his prize and offer apologies. however, he stood out for a compromise; he claimed a concession--england must let him have jumbo. and england consented, but not cheerfully." it shows how, by help of time, a story can grow--even after barnum has had the first innings in the telling of it. mr. barnum told me the story himself, years ago. he said that the permission to buy jumbo was not a concession; the purchase was made and the animal delivered before the public knew anything about it. also, that the securing of jumbo was all the advertisement he needed. it produced many columns of newspaper talk, free of cost, and he was satisfied. he said that if he had failed to get jumbo he would have caused his notion of buying the nelson monument to be treacherously smuggled into print by some trusty friend, and after he had gotten a few hundred pages of gratuitous advertising out of it, he would have come out with a blundering, obtuse, but warm-hearted letter of apology, and in a postscript to it would have naively proposed to let the monument go, and take stonehenge in place of it at the same price. it was his opinion that such a letter, written with well-simulated asinine innocence and gush would have gotten his ignorance and stupidity an amount of newspaper abuse worth six fortunes to him, and not purchasable for twice the money. i knew mr. barnum well, and i placed every confidence in the account which he gave me of the shakespeare birthplace episode. he said he found the house neglected and going-to decay, and he inquired into the matter and was told that many times earnest efforts had been made to raise money for its proper repair and preservation, but without success. he then proposed to buy it. the proposition was entertained, and a price named --$ , , i think; but whatever it was, barnum paid the money down, without remark, and the papers were drawn up and executed. he said that it had been his purpose to set up the house in his museum, keep it in repair, protect it from name-scribblers and other desecrators, and leave it by bequest to the safe and perpetual guardianship of the smithsonian institute at washington. but as soon as it was found that shakespeare's house had passed into foreign hands and was going to be carried across the ocean, england was stirred as no appeal from the custodians of the relic had ever stirred england before, and protests came flowing in--and money, too, to stop the outrage. offers of repurchase were made--offers of double the money that mr. barnum had paid for the house. he handed the house back, but took only the sum which it had cost him--but on the condition that an endowment sufficient for the future safeguarding and maintenance of the sacred relic should be raised. this condition was fulfilled. that was barnum's account of the episode; and to the end of his days he claimed with pride and satisfaction that not england, but america --represented by him--saved the birthplace of shakespeare from destruction. at p.m., may th, the ship slowed down, off the land, and thoughtfully and cautiously picked her way into the snug harbor of durban, south africa. chapter lxv. in statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the moralities. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. from diary: royal hotel. comfortable, good table, good service of natives and madrasis. curious jumble of modern and ancient city and village, primitiveness and the other thing. electric bells, but they don't ring. asked why they didn't, the watchman in the office said he thought they must be out of order; he thought so because some of them rang, but most of them didn't. wouldn't it be a good idea to put them in order? he hesitated--like one who isn't quite sure--then conceded the point. may . a bang on the door at . did i want my boots cleaned? fifteen minutes later another bang. did we want coffee? fifteen later, bang again, my wife's bath ready; later, my bath ready. two other bangs; i forget what they were about. then lots of shouting back and forth, among the servants just as in an indian hotel. evening. at p.m. it was unpleasantly warm. half-hour after sunset one needed a spring overcoat; by a winter one. durban is a neat and clean town. one notices that without having his attention called to it. rickshaws drawn by splendidly built black zulus, so overflowing with strength, seemingly, that it is a pleasure, not a pain, to see them snatch a rickshaw along. they smile and laugh and show their teeth--a good-natured lot. not allowed to drink; s per hour for one person; s for two; d for a course--one person. the chameleon in the hotel court. he is fat and indolent and contemplative; but is business-like and capable when a fly comes about --reaches out a tongue like a teaspoon and takes him in. he gums his tongue first. he is always pious, in his looks. and pious and thankful both, when providence or one of us sends him a fly. he has a froggy head, and a back like a new grave--for shape; and hands like a bird's toes that have been frostbitten. but his eyes are his exhibition feature. a couple of skinny cones project from the sides of his head, with a wee shiny bead of an eye set in the apex of each; and these cones turn bodily like pivot-guns and point every-which-way, and they are independent of each other; each has its own exclusive machinery. when i am behind him and c. in front of him, he whirls one eye rearwards and the other forwards--which gives him a most congressional expression (one eye on the constituency and one on the swag); and then if something happens above and below him he shoots out one eye upward like a telescope and the other downward--and this changes his expression, but does not improve it. natives must not be out after the curfew bell without a pass. in natal there are ten blacks to one white. sturdy plump creatures are the women. they comb their wool up to a peak and keep it in position by stiffening it with brown-red clay--half of this tower colored, denotes engagement; the whole of it colored denotes marriage. none but heathen zulus on the police; christian ones not allowed. may . a drive yesterday with friends over the berea. very fine roads and lofty, overlooking the whole town, the harbor, and the sea-beautiful views. residences all along, set in the midst of green lawns with shrubs and generally one or two intensely red outbursts of poinsettia--the flaming splotch of blinding red a stunning contrast with the world of surrounding green. the cactus tree--candelabrum-like; and one twisted like gray writhing serpents. the "flat-crown" (should be flat-roof) --half a dozen naked branches full of elbows, slant upward like artificial supports, and fling a roof of delicate foliage out in a horizontal platform as flat as a floor; and you look up through this thin floor as through a green cobweb or veil. the branches are japanesich. all about you is a bewildering variety of unfamiliar and beautiful trees; one sort wonderfully dense foliage and very dark green--so dark that you notice it at once, notwithstanding there are so many orange trees. the "flamboyant"--not in flower, now, but when in flower lives up to its name, we are told. another tree with a lovely upright tassel scattered among its rich greenery, red and glowing as a firecoal. here and there a gum-tree; half a dozen lofty norfolk island pines lifting their fronded arms skyward. groups of tall bamboo. saw one bird. not many birds here, and they have no music--and the flowers not much smell, they grow so fast. everything neat and trim and clean like the town. the loveliest trees and the greatest variety i have ever seen anywhere, except approaching darjeeling. have not heard anyone call natal the garden of south africa, but that is what it probably is. it was when bishop of natal that colenso raised such a storm in the religious world. the concerns of religion are a vital matter here yet. a vigilant eye is kept upon sunday. museums and other dangerous resorts are not allowed to be open. you may sail on the bay, but it is wicked to play cricket. for a while a sunday concert was tolerated, upon condition that it must be admission free and the money taken by collection. but the collection was alarmingly large and that stopped the matter. they are particular about babies. a clergyman would not bury a child according to the sacred rites because it had not been baptized. the hindoo is more liberal. he burns no child under three, holding that it does not need purifying. the king of the zulus, a fine fellow of , was banished six years ago for a term of seven years. he is occupying napoleon's old stand--st. helena. the people are a little nervous about having him come back, and they may well be, for zulu kings have been terrible people sometimes --like tchaka, dingaan, and cetewayo. there is a large trappist monastery two hours from durban, over the country roads, and in company with mr. milligan and mr. hunter, general manager of the natal government railways, who knew the heads of it, we went out to see it. there it all was, just as one reads about it in books and cannot believe that it is so--i mean the rough, hard work, the impossible hours, the scanty food, the coarse raiment, the maryborough beds, the tabu of human speech, of social intercourse, of relaxation, of amusement, of entertainment, of the presence of woman in the men's establishment. there it all was. it was not a dream, it was not a lie. and yet with the fact before one's face it was still incredible. it is such a sweeping suppression of human instincts, such an extinction of the man as an individual. la trappe must have known the human race well. the scheme which he invented hunts out everything that a man wants and values--and withholds it from him. apparently there is no detail that can help make life worth living that has not been carefully ascertained and placed out of the trappist's reach. la trappe must have known that there were men who would enjoy this kind of misery, but how did he find it out? if he had consulted you or me he would have been told that his scheme lacked too many attractions; that it was impossible; that it could never be floated. but there in the monastery was proof that he knew the human race better than it knew itself. he set his foot upon every desire that a man has--yet he floated his project, and it has prospered for two hundred years, and will go on prospering forever, no doubt. man likes personal distinction--there in the monastery it is obliterated. he likes delicious food--there he gets beans and bread and tea, and not enough of it. he likes to lie softly--there he lies on a sand mattress, and has a pillow and a blanket, but no sheet. when he is dining, in a great company of friends, he likes to laugh and chat--there a monk reads a holy book aloud during meals, and nobody speaks or laughs. when a man has a hundred friends about him, evenings, be likes to have a good time and run late--there he and the rest go silently to bed at ; and in the dark, too; there is but a loose brown robe to discard, there are no night-clothes to put on, a light is not needed. man likes to lie abed late there he gets up once or twice in the night to perform some religious office, and gets up finally for the day at two in the morning. man likes light work or none at all--there he labors all day in the field, or in the blacksmith shop or the other shops devoted to the mechanical trades, such as shoemaking, saddlery, carpentry, and so on. man likes the society of girls and women--there he never has it. he likes to have his children about him, and pet them and play with them --there he has none. he likes billiards--there is no table there. he likes outdoor sports and indoor dramatic and musical and social entertainments--there are none there. he likes to bet on things--i was told that betting is forbidden there. when a man's temper is up he likes to pour it out upon somebody there this is not allowed. a man likes animals--pets; there are none there. he likes to smoke--there he cannot do it. he likes to read the news--no papers or magazines come there. a man likes to know how his parents and brothers and sisters are getting along when he is away, and if they miss him--there he cannot know. a man likes a pretty house, and pretty furniture, and pretty things, and pretty colors--there he has nothing but naked aridity and sombre colors. a man likes--name it yourself: whatever it is, it is absent from that place. from what i could learn, all that a man gets for this is merely the saving of his soul. it all seems strange, incredible, impossible. but la trappe knew the race. he knew the powerful attraction of unattractiveness; he knew that no life could be imagined, howsoever comfortless and forbidding, but somebody would want to try it. this parent establishment of germans began its work fifteen years ago, strangers, poor, and unencouraged; it owns , acres of land now, and raises grain and fruit, and makes wines, and manufactures all manner of things, and has native apprentices in its shops, and sends them forth able to read and write, and also well equipped to earn their living by their trades. and this young establishment has set up eleven branches in south africa, and in them they are christianizing and educating and teaching wage-yielding mechanical trades to , boys and girls. protestant missionary work is coldly regarded by the commercial white colonist all over the heathen world, as a rule, and its product is nicknamed "rice-christians" (occupationless incapables who join the church for revenue only), but i think it would be difficult to pick a flaw in the work of these catholic monks, and i believe that the disposition to attempt it has not shown itself. tuesday, may . transvaal politics in a confused condition. first the sentencing of the johannesburg reformers startled england by its severity; on the top of this came kruger's exposure of the cipher correspondence, which showed that the invasion of the transvaal, with the design of seizing that country and adding it to the british empire, was planned by cecil rhodes and beit--which made a revulsion in english feeling, and brought out a storm against rhodes and the chartered company for degrading british honor. for a good while i couldn't seem to get at a clear comprehension of it, it was so tangled. but at last by patient study i have managed it, i believe. as i understand it, the uitlanders and other dutchmen were dissatisfied because the english would not allow them to take any part in the government except to pay taxes. next, as i understand it, dr. kruger and dr. jameson, not having been able to make the medical business pay, made a raid into matabeleland with the intention of capturing the capital, johannesburg, and holding the women and children to ransom until the uitlanders and the other boers should grant to them and the chartered company the political rights which had been withheld from them. they would have succeeded in this great scheme, as i understand it, but for the interference of cecil rhodes and mr. beit, and other chiefs of the matabele, who persuaded their countrymen to revolt and throw off their allegiance to germany. this, in turn, as i understand it, provoked the king of abyssinia to destroy the italian army and fall back upon johannesburg; this at the instigation of rhodes, to bull the stock market. chapter lxvi. every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. when i scribbled in my note-book a year ago the paragraph which ends the preceding chapter, it was meant to indicate, in an extravagant form, two things: the conflicting nature of the information conveyed by the citizen to the stranger concerning south african politics, and the resulting confusion created in the stranger's mind thereby. but it does not seem so very extravagant now. nothing could in that disturbed and excited time make south african politics clear or quite rational to the citizen of the country because his personal interest and his political prejudices were in his way; and nothing could make those politics clear or rational to the stranger, the sources of his information being such as they were. i was in south africa some little time. when i arrived there the political pot was boiling fiercely. four months previously, jameson had plunged over the transvaal border with about armed horsemen at his back, to go to the "relief of the women and children" of johannesburg; on the fourth day of his march the boers had defeated him in battle, and carried him and his men to pretoria, the capital, as prisoners; the boer government had turned jameson and his officers over to the british government for trial, and shipped them to england; next, it had arrested important citizens of johannesburg as raid-conspirators, condemned their four leaders to death, then commuted the sentences, and now the were waiting, in jail, for further results. before midsummer they were all out excepting two, who refused to sign the petitions for release; had been fined $ , each and enlarged, and the four leaders had gotten off with fines of $ , each with permanent exile added, in one case. those were wonderfully interesting days for a stranger, and i was glad. to be in the thick of the excitement. everybody was talking, and i expected to understand the whole of one side of it in a very little while. i was disappointed. there were singularities, perplexities, unaccountabilities about it which i was not able to master. i had no personal access to boers--their side was a secret to me, aside from what i was able to gather of it from published statements. my sympathies were soon with the reformers in the pretoria jail, with their friends, and with their cause. by diligent inquiry in johannesburg i found out --apparently--all the details of their side of the quarrel except one--what they expected to accomplish by an armed rising. nobody seemed to know. the reason why the reformers were discontented and wanted some changes made, seemed quite clear. in johannesburg it was claimed that the uitlanders (strangers, foreigners) paid thirteen-fifteenths of the transvaal taxes, yet got little or nothing for it. their city had no charter; it had no municipal government; it could levy no taxes for drainage, water-supply, paving, cleaning, sanitation, policing. there was a police force, but it was composed of boers, it was furnished by the state government, and the city had no control over it. mining was very costly; the government enormously increased the cost by putting burdensome taxes upon the mines, the output, the machinery, the buildings; by burdensome imposts upon incoming materials; by burdensome railway-freight-charges. hardest of all to bear, the government reserved to itself a monopoly in that essential thing, dynamite, and burdened it with an extravagant price. the detested hollander from over the water held all the public offices. the government was rank with corruption. the uitlander had no vote, and must live in the state ten or twelve years before he could get one. he was not represented in the raad (legislature) that oppressed him and fleeced him. religion was not free. there were no schools where the teaching was in english, yet the great majority of the white population of the state knew no tongue but that. the state would not pass a liquor law; but allowed a great trade in cheap vile brandy among the blacks, with the result that per cent. of the , blacks employed in the mines were usually drunk and incapable of working. there--it was plain enough that the reasons for wanting some changes made were abundant and reasonable, if this statement of the existing grievances was correct. what the uitlanders wanted was reform--under the existing republic. what they proposed to do was to secure these reforms by, prayer, petition, and persuasion. they did petition. also, they issued a manifesto, whose very first note is a bugle-blast of loyalty: "we want the establishment of this republic as a true republic." could anything be clearer than the uitlander's statement of the grievances and oppressions under which they were suffering? could anything be more legal and citizen-like and law-respecting than their attitude as expressed by their manifesto? no. those things were perfectly clear, perfectly comprehensible. but at this point the puzzles and riddles and confusions begin to flock in. you have arrived at a place which you cannot quite understand. for you find that as a preparation for this loyal, lawful, and in every way unexceptionable attempt to persuade the government to right their grievances, the uitlanders had smuggled a maxim gun or two and , muskets into the town, concealed in oil tanks and coal cars, and had begun to form and drill military companies composed of clerks, merchants, and citizens generally. what was their idea? did they suppose that the boers would attack them for petitioning, for redress? that could not be. did they suppose that the boers would attack them even for issuing a manifesto demanding relief under the existing government? yes, they apparently believed so, because the air was full of talk of forcing the government to grant redress if it were not granted peacefully. the reformers were men of high intelligence. if they were in earnest, they were taking extraordinary risks. they had enormously valuable properties to defend; their town was full of women and children; their mines and compounds were packed with thousands upon thousands of sturdy blacks. if the boers attacked, the mines would close, the blacks would swarm out and get drunk; riot and conflagration and the boers together might lose the reformers more in a day, in money, blood, and suffering, than the desired political relief could compensate in ten years if they won the fight and secured the reforms. it is may, , now; a year has gone by, and the confusions of that day have been to a considerable degree cleared away. mr. cecil rhodes, dr. jameson, and others responsible for the raid, have testified before the parliamentary committee of inquiry in london, and so have mr. lionel phillips and other johannesburg reformers, monthly-nurses of the revolution which was born dead. these testimonies have thrown light. three books have added much to this light: "south africa as it is," by mr. statham, an able writer partial to the boers; "the story of an african crisis," by mr. garrett, a brilliant writer partial to rhodes; and "a woman's part in a revolution," by mrs. john hays hammond, a vigorous and vivid diarist, partial to the reformers. by liquifying the evidence of the prejudiced books and of the prejudiced parliamentary witnesses and stirring the whole together and pouring it into my own (prejudiced) moulds, i have got at the truth of that puzzling south african situation, which is this: . the capitalists and other chief men of johannesburg were fretting under various political and financial burdens imposed by the state (the south african republic, sometimes called "the transvaal") and desired to procure by peaceful means a modification of the laws. . mr. cecil rhodes, premier of the british cape colony, millionaire, creator and managing director of the territorially-immense and financially unproductive south africa company; projector of vast schemes for the unification and consolidation of all the south african states, one imposing commonwealth or empire under the shadow and general protection of the british flag, thought he saw an opportunity to make profitable use of the uitlander discontent above mentioned--make the johannesburg cat help pull out one of his consolidation chestnuts for him. with this view he set himself the task of warming the lawful and legitimate petitions and supplications of the uitlanders into seditious talk, and their frettings into threatenings--the final outcome to be revolt and armed rebellion. if he could bring about a bloody collision between those people and the boer government, great britain would have to interfere; her interference would be resisted by the boers; she would chastise them and add the transvaal to her south african possessions. it was not a foolish idea, but a rational and practical one. after a couple of years of judicious plotting, mr. rhodes had his reward; the revolutionary kettle was briskly boiling in johannesburg, and the uitlander leaders were backing their appeals to the government--now hardened into demands--by threats of force and bloodshed. by the middle of december, , the explosion seemed imminent. mr. rhodes was diligently helping, from his distant post in cape town. he was helping to procure arms for johannesburg; he was also arranging to have jameson break over the border and come to johannesburg with mounted men at his back. jameson--as per instructions from rhodes, perhaps--wanted a letter from the reformers requesting him to come to their aid. it was a good idea. it would throw a considerable share of the responsibility of his invasion upon the reformers. he got the letter--that famous one urging him to fly to the rescue of the women and children. he got it two months before he flew. the reformers seem to have thought it over and concluded that they had not done wisely; for the next day after giving jameson the implicating document they wanted to withdraw it and leave the women and children in danger; but they were told that it was too late. the original had gone to mr. rhodes at the cape. jameson had kept a copy, though. from that time until the th of december, a good deal of the reformers' time was taken up with energetic efforts to keep jameson from coming to their assistance. jameson's invasion had been set for the th. the reformers were not ready. the town was not united. some wanted a fight, some wanted peace; some wanted a new government, some wanted the existing one reformed; apparently very few wanted the revolution to take place in the interest and under the ultimate shelter of the imperial flag --british; yet a report began to spread that mr. rhodes's embarrassing assistance had for its end this latter object. jameson was away up on the frontier tugging at his leash, fretting to burst over the border. by hard work the reformers got his starting-date postponed a little, and wanted to get it postponed eleven days. apparently, rhodes's agents were seconding their efforts--in fact wearing out the telegraph wires trying to hold him back. rhodes was himself the only man who could have effectively postponed jameson, but that would have been a disadvantage to his scheme; indeed, it could spoil his whole two years' work. jameson endured postponement three days, then resolved to wait no longer. without any orders--excepting mr. rhodes's significant silence--he cut the telegraph wires on the th, and made his plunge that night, to go to the rescue of the women and children, by urgent request of a letter now nine days old--as per date,--a couple of months old, in fact. he read the letter to his men, and it affected them. it did not affect all of them alike. some saw in it a piece of piracy of doubtful wisdom, and were sorry to find that they had been assembled to violate friendly territory instead of to raid native kraals, as they had supposed. jameson would have to ride miles. he knew that there were suspicions abroad in the transvaal concerning him, but he expected to get through to johannesburg before they should become general and obstructive. but a telegraph wire had been overlooked and not cut. it spread the news of his invasion far and wide, and a few hours after his start the boer farmers were riding hard from every direction to intercept him. as soon as it was known in johannesburg that he was on his way to rescue the women and children, the grateful people put the women and children in a train and rushed them for australia. in fact, the approach of johannesburg's saviour created panic and consternation; there, and a multitude of males of peaceable disposition swept to the trains like a sand-storm. the early ones fared best; they secured seats--by sitting in them--eight hours before the first train was timed to leave. mr. rhodes lost no time. he cabled the renowned johannesburg letter of invitation to the london press--the gray-headedest piece of ancient history that ever went over a cable. the new poet laureate lost no time. he came out with a rousing poem lauding jameson's prompt and splendid heroism in flying to the rescue of the women and children; for the poet could not know that he did not fly until two months after the invitation. he was deceived by the false date of the letter, which was december th. jameson was intercepted by the boers on new year's day, and on the next day he surrendered. he had carried his copy of the letter along, and if his instructions required him--in case of emergency--to see that it fell into the hands of the boers, he loyally carried them out. mrs. hammond gives him a sharp rap for his supposed carelessness, and emphasizes her feeling about it with burning italics: "it was picked up on the battle-field in a leathern pouch, supposed to be dr. jameson's saddle-bag. why, in the name of all that is discreet and honorable, didn't he eat it!" she requires too much. he was not in the service of the reformers --excepting ostensibly; he was in the service of mr. rhodes. it was the only plain english document, undarkened by ciphers and mysteries, and responsibly signed and authenticated, which squarely implicated the reformers in the raid, and it was not to mr. rhodes's interest that it should be eaten. besides, that letter was not the original, it was only a copy. mr. rhodes had the original--and didn't eat it. he cabled it to the london press. it had already been read in england and america and all over europe before, jameson dropped it on the battlefield. if the subordinate's knuckles deserved a rap, the principal's deserved as many as a couple of them. that letter is a juicily dramatic incident and is entitled to all its celebrity, because of the odd and variegated effects which it produced. all within the space of a single week it had made jameson an illustrious hero in england, a pirate in pretoria, and an ass without discretion or honor in johannesburg; also it had produced a poet-laureatic explosion of colored fireworks which filled the world's sky with giddy splendors, and, the knowledge that jameson was coming with it to rescue the women and children emptied johannesburg of that detail of the population. for an old letter, this was much. for a letter two months old, it did marvels; if it had been a year old it would have done miracles. chapter lxvii. first catch your boer, then kick him. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. those latter days were days of bitter worry and trouble for the harassed reformers. from mrs. hammond we learn that on the st (the day after johannesburg heard of the invasion), "the reform committee repudiates dr. jameson's inroad." it also publishes its intention to adhere to the manifesto. it also earnestly desires that the inhabitants shall refrain from overt acts against the boer government. it also "distributes arms" at the court house, and furnishes horses "to the newly-enrolled volunteers." it also brings a transvaal flag into the committee-room, and the entire body swear allegiance to it "with uncovered heads and upraised arms." also "one thousand lee-metford rifles have been given out"--to rebels. also, in a speech, reformer lionel phillips informs the public that the reform committee delegation has "been received with courtesy by the government commission," and "been assured that their proposals shall be earnestly considered." that "while the reform committee regretted jameson's precipitate action, they would stand by him." also the populace are in a state of "wild enthusiasm," and " can scarcely be restrained; they want to go out to meet jameson and bring him in with triumphal outcry." also the british high commissioner has issued a damnifying proclamation against jameson and all british abettors of his game. it arrives january st. it is a difficult position for the reformers, and full of hindrances and perplexities. their duty is hard, but plain: . they have to repudiate the inroad, and stand by the inroader. . they have to swear allegiance to the boer government, and distribute cavalry horses to the rebels. . they have to forbid overt acts against the boer government, and distribute arms to its enemies. . they have to avoid collision with the british government, but still stand by jameson and their new oath of allegiance to the boer government, taken, uncovered, in presence of its flag. they did such of these things as they could; they tried to do them all; in fact, did do them all, but only in turn, not simultaneously. in the nature of things they could not be made to simultane. in preparing for armed revolution and in talking revolution, were the reformers "bluffing," or were they in earnest? if they were in earnest, they were taking great risks--as has been already pointed out. a gentleman of high position told me in johannesburg that he had in his possession a printed document proclaiming a new government and naming its president--one of the reform leaders. he said that this proclamation had been ready for issue, but was suppressed when the raid collapsed. perhaps i misunderstood him. indeed, i must have misunderstood him, for i have not seen mention of this large incident in print anywhere. besides, i hope i am mistaken; for, if i am, then there is argument that the reformers were privately not serious, but were only trying to scare the boer government into granting the desired reforms. the boer government was scared, and it had a right to be. for if mr. rhodes's plan was to provoke a collision that would compel the interference of england, that was a serious matter. if it could be shown that that was also the reformers' plan and purpose, it would prove that they had marked out a feasible project, at any rate, although it was one which could hardly fail to cost them ruinously before england should arrive. but it seems clear that they had no such plan nor desire. if, when the worst should come to the worst, they meant to overthrow the government, they also meant to inherit the assets themselves, no doubt. this scheme could hardly have succeeded. with an army of boers at their gates and , riotous blacks in their midst, the odds against success would have been too heavy--even if the whole town had been armed. with only , rifles in the place, they stood really no chance. to me, the military problems of the situation are of more interest than the political ones, because by disposition i have always been especially fond of war. no, i mean fond of discussing war; and fond of giving military advice. if i had been with jameson the morning after he started, i should have advised him to turn back. that was monday; it was then that he received his first warning from a boer source not to violate the friendly soil of the transvaal. it showed that his invasion was known. if i had been with him on tuesday morning and afternoon, when he received further warnings, i should have repeated my advice. if i had been with him the next morning--new year's--when he received notice that "a few hundred" boers were waiting for him a few miles ahead, i should not have advised, but commanded him to go back. and if i had been with him two or three hours later--a thing not conceivable to me--i should have retired him by force; for at that time he learned that the few hundred had now grown to ; and that meant that the growing would go on growing. for,--by authority of mr. garrett, one knows that jameson's were only at most, when you count out his native drivers, etc.; and that the consisted largely of "green" youths, "raw young fellows," not trained and war-worn british soldiers; and i would have told. jameson that those lads would not be able to shoot effectively from horseback in the scamper and racket of battle, and that there would not be anything for them to shoot at, anyway, but rocks; for the boers would be behind the rocks, not out in the open. i would have told him that boer sharpshooters behind rocks would be an overmatch for his raw young fellows on horseback. if pluck were the only thing essential to battle-winning, the english would lose no battles. but discretion, as well as pluck, is required when one fights boers and red indians. in south africa the briton has always insisted upon standing bravely up, unsheltered, before the hidden boer, and taking the results: jameson's men would follow the custom. jameson would not have listened to me--he would have been intent upon repeating history, according to precedent. americans are not acquainted with the british-boer war of ; but its history is interesting, and could have been instructive to jameson if he had been receptive. i will cull some details of it from trustworthy sources mainly from "russell's natal." mr. russell is not a boer, but a briton. he is inspector of schools, and his history is a text-book whose purpose is the instruction of the natal english youth. after the seizure of the transvaal and the suppression of the boer government by england in , the boers fretted for three years, and made several appeals to england for a restoration of their liberties, but without result. then they gathered themselves together in a great mass-meeting at krugersdorp, talked their troubles over, and resolved to fight for their deliverance from the british yoke. (krugersdorp--the place where the boers interrupted the jameson raid.) the little handful of farmers rose against the strongest empire in the world. they proclaimed martial law and the re-establishment of their republic. they organized their forces and sent them forward to intercept the british battalions. this, although sir garnet wolseley had but lately made proclamation that "so long as the sun shone in the heavens," the transvaal would be and remain english territory. and also in spite of the fact that the commander of the th regiment--already on the march to suppress this rebellion--had been heard to say that "the boers would turn tail at the first beat of the big drum."--["south africa as it is," by f. reginald statham, page . london: t. fisher unwin, .] four days after the flag-raising, the boer force which had been sent forward to forbid the invasion of the english troops met them at bronkhorst spruit-- men of the th regiment, in command of a colonel, the big drum beating, the band playing--and the first battle was fought. it lasted ten minutes. result: british loss, more than officers and men, out of the . surrender of the remnant. boer loss--if any--not stated. they are fine marksmen, the boers. from the cradle up, they live on horseback and hunt wild animals with the rifle. they have a passion for liberty and the bible, and care for nothing else. "general sir george colley, lieutenant-governor and commander-in-chief in natal, felt it his duty to proceed at once to the relief of the loyalists and soldiers beleaguered in the different towns of the transvaal." he moved out with , men and some artillery. he found the boers encamped in a strong and sheltered position on high ground at laing's nek--every boer behind a rock. early in the morning of the th january, , he moved to the attack "with the th regiment, commanded by colonel deane, a mounted squadron of men, the th rifles, the naval brigade with three rocket tubes, and the artillery with six guns." he shelled the boers for twenty minutes, then the assault was delivered, the th marching up the slope in solid column. the battle was soon finished, with this result, according to russell-- british loss in killed and wounded, . boer loss, "trifling." colonel deane was killed, and apparently every officer above the grade of lieutenant was killed or wounded, for the th retreated to its camp in command of a lieutenant. ("africa as it is.") that ended the second battle. on the th of february general colley discovered that the boers were flanking his position. the next morning he left his camp at mount pleasant and marched out and crossed the ingogo river with men, started up the ingogo heights, and there fought a battle which lasted from noon till nightfall. he then retreated, leaving his wounded with his military chaplain, and in recrossing the now swollen river lost some of his men by drowning. that was the third boer victory. result, according to mr. russell-- british loss out of engaged. boer loss, killed, wounded-- . there was a season of quiet, now, but at the end of about three weeks sir george colley conceived the idea of climbing, with an infantry and artillery force, the steep and rugged mountain of amajuba in the night--a bitter hard task, but he accomplished it. on the way he left about men to guard a strategic point, and took about up the mountain with him. when the sun rose in the morning, there was an unpleasant surprise for the boers; yonder were the english troops visible on top of the mountain two or three miles away, and now their own position was at the mercy of the english artillery. the boer chief resolved to retreat--up that mountain. he asked for volunteers, and got them. the storming party crossed the swale and began to creep up the steeps, "and from behind rocks and bushes they shot at the soldiers on the skyline as if they were stalking deer," says mr. russell. there was "continuous musketry fire, steady and fatal on the one side, wild and ineffectual on the other." the boers reached the top, and began to put in their ruinous work. presently the british "broke and fled for their lives down the rugged steep." the boers had won the battle. result in killed and wounded, including among the killed the british general: british loss, , out of engaged. boer loss, killed, wounded. that ended the war. england listened to reason, and recognized the boer republic--a government which has never been in any really awful danger since, until jameson started after it with his "raw young fellows." to recapitulate: the boer farmers and british soldiers fought battles, and the boers won them all. result of the , in killed and wounded: british loss, men. boer loss, so far as known, men. it is interesting, now, to note how loyally jameson and his several trained british military officers tried to make their battles conform to precedent. mr. garrett's account of the raid is much the best one i have met with, and my impressions of the raid are drawn from that. when jameson learned that near krugersdorp he would find boers waiting to dispute his passage, he was not in the least disturbed. he was feeling as he had felt two or three days before, when he had opened his campaign with a historic remark to the same purport as the one with which the commander of the th had opened the boer-british war of fourteen years before. that commander's remark was, that the boers "would turn tail at the first beat of the big drum." jameson's was, that with his "raw young fellows" he could kick the (persons) of the boers "all round the transvaal." he was keeping close to historic precedent. jameson arrived in the presence of the boers. they--according to precedent--were not visible. it was a country of ridges, depressions, rocks, ditches, moraines of mining-tailings--not even as favorable for cavalry work as laing's nek had been in the former disastrous days. jameson shot at the ridges and rocks with his artillery, just as general colley had done at the nek; and did them no damage and persuaded no boer to show himself. then about a hundred of his men formed up to charge the ridge-according to the th's precedent at the nek; but as they dashed forward they opened out in a long line, which was a considerable improvement on the th's tactics; when they had gotten to within yards of the ridge the concealed boers opened out on them and emptied saddles. the unwounded dismounted and fired at the rocks over the backs of their horses; but the return-fire was too hot, and they mounted again, "and galloped back or crawled away into a clump of reeds for cover, where they were shortly afterward taken prisoners as they lay among the reeds. some thirty prisoners were so taken, and during the night which followed the boers carried away another thirty killed and wounded--the wounded to krugersdorp hospital." sixty per cent. of the assaulted force disposed of--according to mr. garrett's estimate. it was according to amajuba precedent, where the british loss was out of about engaged. also, in jameson's camp, that night, "there lay about wounded or otherwise disabled" men. also during the night "some or young fellows got separated from the command and straggled through into johannesburg." altogether a possible men gone, out of his . his lads had fought valorously, but had not been able to get near enough to a boer to kick him around the transvaal. at dawn the next morning the column of something short of whites resumed its march. jameson's grit was stubbornly good; indeed, it was always that. he still had hopes. there was a long and tedious zigzagging march through broken ground, with constant harassment from the boers; and at last the column "walked into a sort of trap," and the boers "closed in upon it." "men and horses dropped on all sides. in the column the feeling grew that unless it could burst through the boer lines at this point it was done for. the maxims were fired until they grew too hot, and, water failing for the cool jacket, five of them jammed and went out of action. the -pounder was fired until only half an hour's ammunition was left to fire with. one last rush was made, and failed, and then the staats artillery came up on the left flank, and the game was up." jameson hoisted a white flag and surrendered. there is a story, which may not be true, about an ignorant boer farmer there who thought that this white flag was the national flag of england. he had been at bronkhorst, and laing's nek, and ingogo and amajuba, and supposed that the english did not run up their flag excepting at the end of a fight. the following is (as i understand it) mr. garrett's estimate of jameson's total loss in killed and wounded for the two days: "when they gave in they were minus some per cent. of combatants. there were casualties. there were men hurt or sick in the wagons. there were killed on the spot or mortally wounded." total, , out of the original . it is just per cent.--[however, i judge that the total was really ; for the number of wounded carried to krugersdorp hospital was ; not , as mr. garrett reports it. the lady whose guest i was in krugerdorp gave me the figures. she was head nurse from the beginning of hostilities (jan. ) until the professional nurses arrived, jan. th. of the , "three or four were boers"; i quote her words.]--this is a large improvement upon the precedents established at bronkhorst, laing's nek, ingogo, and amajuba, and seems to indicate that boer marksmanship is not so good now as it was in those days. but there is one detail in which the raid-episode exactly repeats history. by surrender at bronkhorst, the whole british force disappeared from the theater of war; this was the case with jameson's force. in the boer loss, also, historical precedent is followed with sufficient fidelity. in the battles named above, the boer loss, so far as known, was an average of men per battle, to the british average loss of . in jameson's battles, as per boer official report, the boer loss in killed was . two of these were killed by the boers themselves, by accident, the other by jameson's army--one of them intentionally, the other by a pathetic mischance. "a young boer named jacobz was moving forward to give a drink to one of the wounded troopers (jameson's) after the first charge, when another wounded man, mistaking his intention; shot him." there were three or four wounded boers in the krugersdorp hospital, and apparently no others have been reported. mr. garrett, "on a balance of probabilities, fully accepts the official version, and thanks heaven the killed was not larger." as a military man, i wish to point out what seems to me to be military errors in the conduct of the campaign which we have just been considering. i have seen active service in the field, and it was in the actualities of war that i acquired my training and my right to speak. i served two weeks in the beginning of our civil war, and during all that tune commanded a battery of infantry composed of twelve men. general grant knew the history of my campaign, for i told it him. i also told him the principle upon which i had conducted it; which was, to tire the enemy. i tired out and disqualified many battalions, yet never had a casualty myself nor lost a man. general grant was not given to paying compliments, yet he said frankly that if i had conducted the whole war much bloodshed would have been spared, and that what the army might have lost through the inspiriting results of collision in the field would have been amply made up by the liberalizing influences of travel. further endorsement does not seem to me to be necessary. let us now examine history, and see what it teaches. in the battles fought in and the two fought by jameson, the british loss in killed, wounded, and prisoners, was substantially , men; the boer loss, as far as is ascertainable, eras about men. these figures show that there was a defect somewhere. it was not in the absence of courage. i think it lay in the absence of discretion. the briton should have done one thing or the other: discarded british methods and fought the boer with boer methods, or augmented his own force until--using british methods--it should be large enough to equalize results with the boer. to retain the british method requires certain things, determinable by arithmetic. if, for argument's sake, we allow that the aggregate of , british soldiers engaged in the early battles was opposed by the same aggregate of boers, we have this result: the british loss of and the boer loss of argues that in order to equalize results in future battles you must make the british force thirty times as strong as the boer force. mr. garrett shows that the boer force immediately opposed to jameson was , , and that there were , more on hand by the evening of the second day. arithmetic shows that in order to make himself the equal of the , boers, jameson should have had , men, whereas he merely had boys. from a military point of view, backed by the facts of history, i conceive that jameson's military judgment was at fault. another thing.--jameson was encumbered by artillery, ammunition, and rifles. the facts of the battle show that he should have had none of those things along. they were heavy, they were in his way, they impeded his march. there was nothing to shoot at but rocks--he knew quite well that there would be nothing to shoot at but rocks--and he knew that artillery and rifles have no effect upon rocks. he was badly overloaded with unessentials. he had maxims--a maxim is a kind of gatling, i believe, and shoots about bullets per minute; he had one / -pounder cannon and two -pounders; also, , rounds of ammunition. he worked the maxims so hard upon the rocks that five of them became disabled--five of the maxims, not the rocks. it is believed that upwards of , rounds of ammunition of the various kinds were fired during the hours that the battles lasted. one man killed. he must have been much mutilated. it was a pity to bring those futile maxims along. jameson should have furnished himself with a battery of pudd'nhead wilson maxims instead, they are much more deadly than those others, and they are easily carried, because they have no weight. mr. garrett--not very carefully concealing a smile--excuses the presence of the maxims by saying that they were of very substantial use because their sputtering disordered the aim of the boers, and in that way saved lives. three cannon, eight maxims, and five hundred rifles yielded a result which emphasized a fact which had already been established--that the british system of standing out in the open to fight boers who are behind rocks is not wise, not excusable, and ought to be abandoned for something more efficacious. for the purpose of war is to kill, not merely to waste ammunition. if i could get the management of one of those campaigns, i would know what to do, for i have studied the boer. he values the bible above every other thing. the most delicious edible in south africa is "biltong." you will have seen it mentioned in olive schreiner's books. it is what our plainsmen call "jerked beef." it is the boer's main standby. he has a passion for it, and he is right. if i had the command of the campaign i would go with rifles only, no cumbersome maxims and cannon to spoil good rocks with. i would move surreptitiously by night to a point about a quarter of a mile from the boer camp, and there i would build up a pyramid of biltong and bibles fifty feet high, and then conceal my men all about. in the morning the boers would send out spies, and then the rest would come with a rush. i would surround them, and they would have to fight my men on equal terms, in the open. there wouldn't be any amajuba results. --[just as i am finishing this book an unfortunate dispute has sprung up between dr. jameson and his officers, on the one hand, and colonel rhodes on the other, concerning the wording of a note which colonel rhodes sent from johannesburg by a cyclist to jameson just before hostilities began on the memorable new year's day. some of the fragments of this note were found on the battlefield after the fight, and these have been pieced together; the dispute is as to what words the lacking fragments contained. jameson says the note promised him a reinforcement of men from johannesburg. colonel rhodes denies this, and says he merely promised to send out "some" men "to meet you."] [it seems a pity that these friends should fall out over so little a thing. if the had been sent, what good would it have done? in hours of industrious fighting, jameson's men, with maxims, cannon, and , rounds of ammunition, killed an aggregate of . boer. these statistics show that a reinforcement of johannesburgers, armed merely with muskets, would have killed, at the outside, only a little over a half of another boer. this would not have saved the day. it would not even have seriously affected the general result. the figures show clearly, and with mathematical violence, that the only way to save jameson, or even give him a fair and equal chance with the enemy, was for johannesburg to send him maxims, cannon, carloads of ammunition, and , men. johannesburg was not in a position to do this. johannesburg has been called very hard names for not reinforcing jameson. but in every instance this has been done by two classes of persons--people who do not read history, and people, like jameson, who do not understand what it means, after they have read it.] chapter lxviii. none of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness; but we can try. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. the duke of fife has borne testimony that mr. rhodes deceived him. that is also what mr. rhodes did with the reformers. he got them into trouble, and then stayed out himself. a judicious man. he has always been that. as to this there was a moment of doubt, once. it was when he was out on his last pirating expedition in the matabele country. the cable shouted out that he had gone unarmed, to visit a party of hostile chiefs. it was true, too; and this dare-devil thing came near fetching another indiscretion out of the poet laureate. it would have been too bad, for when the facts were all in, it turned out that there was a lady along, too, and she also was unarmed. in the opinion of many people mr. rhodes is south africa; others think he is only a large part of it. these latter consider that south africa consists of table mountain, the diamond mines, the johannesburg gold fields, and cecil rhodes. the gold fields are wonderful in every way. in seven or eight years they built up, in a desert, a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, counting white and black together; and not the ordinary mining city of wooden shanties, but a city made out of lasting material. nowhere in the world is there such a concentration of rich mines as at johannesburg. mr. bonamici, my manager there, gave me a small gold brick with some statistics engraved upon it which record the output of gold from the early days to july, , and exhibit the strides which have been made in the development of the industry; in the output was $ , , ; the output of the next five and a half years was (total: $ , , ); for the single year ending with june, , it was $ , , . the capital which has developed the mines came from england, the mining engineers from america. this is the case with the diamond mines also. south africa seems to be the heaven of the american scientific mining engineer. he gets the choicest places, and keeps them. his salary is not based upon what he would get in america, but apparently upon what a whole family of him would get there. the successful mines pay great dividends, yet the rock is not rich, from a californian point of view. rock which yields ten or twelve dollars a ton is considered plenty rich enough. it is troubled with base metals to such a degree that twenty years ago it would have been only about half as valuable as it is now; for at that time there was no paying way of getting anything out of such rock but the coarser-grained "free" gold; but the new cyanide process has changed all that, and the gold fields of the world now deliver up fifty million dollars' worth of gold per year which would have gone into the tailing-pile under the former conditions. the cyanide process was new to me, and full of interest; and among the costly and elaborate mining machinery there were fine things which were new to me, but i was already familiar with the rest of the details of the gold-mining industry. i had been a gold miner myself, in my day, and knew substantially everything that those people knew about it, except how to make money at it. but i learned a good deal about the boers there, and that was a fresh subject. what i heard there was afterwards repeated to me in other parts of south africa. summed up--according to the information thus gained--this is the boer: he is deeply religious, profoundly ignorant, dull, obstinate, bigoted, uncleanly in his habits, hospitable, honest in his dealings with the whites, a hard master to his black servant, lazy, a good shot, good horseman, addicted to the chase, a lover of political independence, a good husband and father, not fond of herding together in towns, but liking the seclusion and remoteness and solitude and empty vastness and silence of the veldt; a man of a mighty appetite, and not delicate about what he appeases it with--well-satisfied with pork and indian corn and biltong, requiring only that the quantity shall not be stinted; willing to ride a long journey to take a hand in a rude all-night dance interspersed with vigorous feeding and boisterous jollity, but ready to ride twice as far for a prayer-meeting; proud of his dutch and huguenot origin and its religious and military history; proud of his race's achievements in south africa, its bold plunges into hostile and uncharted deserts in search of free solitudes unvexed by the pestering and detested english, also its victories over the natives and the british; proudest of all, of the direct and effusive personal interest which the deity has always taken in its affairs. he cannot read, he cannot write; he has one or two newspapers, but he is, apparently, not aware of it; until latterly he had no schools, and taught his children nothing, news is a term which has no meaning to him, and the thing itself he cares nothing about. he hates to be taxed and resents it. he has stood stock still in south africa for two centuries and a half, and would like to stand still till the end of time, for he has no sympathy with uitlander notions of progress. he is hungry to be rich, for he is human; but his preference has been for riches in cattle, not in fine clothes and fine houses and gold and diamonds. the gold and the diamonds have brought the godless stranger within his gates, also contamination and broken repose, and he wishes that they had never been discovered. i think that the bulk of those details can be found in olive schreiner's books, and she would not be accused of sketching the boer's portrait with an unfair hand. now what would you expect from that unpromising material? what ought you to expect from it? laws inimical to religious liberty? yes. laws denying, representation and suffrage to the intruder? yes. laws unfriendly to educational institutions? yes. laws obstructive of gold production? yes. discouragement of railway expansion? yes. laws heavily taxing the intruder and overlooking the boer? yes. the uitlander seems to have expected something very different from all that. i do not know why. nothing different from it was rationally to be expected. a round man cannot be expected to fit a square hole right away. he must have time to modify his shape. the modification had begun in a detail or two, before the raid, and was making some progress. it has made further progress since. there are wise men in the boer government, and that accounts for the modification; the modification of the boer mass has probably not begun yet. if the heads of the boer government had not been wise men they would have hanged jameson, and thus turned a very commonplace pirate into a holy martyr. but even their wisdom has its limits, and they will hang mr. rhodes if they ever catch him. that will round him and complete him and make him a saint. he has already been called by all other titles that symbolize human grandeur, and he ought to rise to this one, the grandest of all. it will be a dizzy jump from where he is now, but that is nothing, it will land him in good company and be a pleasant change for him. some of the things demanded by the johannesburgers' manifesto have been conceded since the days of the raid, and the others will follow in time, no doubt. it was most fortunate for the miners of johannesburg that the taxes which distressed them so much were levied by the boer government, instead of by their friend rhodes and his chartered company of highwaymen, for these latter take half of whatever their mining victims find, they do not stop at a mere percentage. if the johannesburg miners were under their jurisdiction they would be in the poorhouse in twelve months. i have been under the impression all along that i had an unpleasant paragraph about the boers somewhere in my notebook, and also a pleasant one. i have found them now. the unpleasant one is dated at an interior village, and says-- "mr. z. called. he is an english afrikander; is an old resident, and has a boer wife. he speaks the language, and his professional business is with the boers exclusively. he told me that the ancient boer families in the great region of which this village is the commercial center are falling victims to their inherited indolence and dullness in the materialistic latter-day race and struggle, and are dropping one by one into the grip of the usurer--getting hopelessly in debt--and are losing their high place and retiring to second and lower. the boer's farm does not go to another boer when he loses it, but to a foreigner. some have fallen so low that they sell their daughters to the blacks." under date of another south african town i find the note which is creditable to the boers: "dr. x. told me that in the kafir war , kafirs took refuge in a great cave in the mountains about miles north of johannesburg, and the boers blocked up the entrance and smoked them to death. dr. x. has been in there and seen the great array of bleached skeletons--one a woman with the skeleton of a child hugged to her breast." the great bulk of the savages must go. the white man wants their lands, and all must go excepting such percentage of them as he will need to do his work for him upon terms to be determined by himself. since history has removed the element of guesswork from this matter and made it certainty, the humanest way of diminishing the black population should be adopted, not the old cruel ways of the past. mr. rhodes and his gang have been following the old ways.--they are chartered to rob and slay, and they lawfully do it, but not in a compassionate and christian spirit. they rob the mashonas and the matabeles of a portion of their territories in the hallowed old style of "purchase!" for a song, and then they force a quarrel and take the rest by the strong hand. they rob the natives of their cattle under the pretext that all the cattle in the country belonged to the king whom they have tricked and assassinated. they issue "regulations" requiring the incensed and harassed natives to work for the white settlers, and neglect their own affairs to do it. this is slavery, and is several times worse than was the american slavery which used to pain england so much; for when this rhodesian slave is sick, super-annuated, or otherwise disabled, he must support himself or starve--his master is under no obligation to support him. the reduction of the population by rhodesian methods to the desired limit is a return to the old-time slow-misery and lingering-death system of a discredited time and a crude "civilization." we humanely reduce an overplus of dogs by swift chloroform; the boer humanely reduced an overplus of blacks by swift suffocation; the nameless but right-hearted australian pioneer humanely reduced his overplus of aboriginal neighbors by a sweetened swift death concealed in a poisoned pudding. all these are admirable, and worthy of praise; you and i would rather suffer either of these deaths thirty times over in thirty successive days than linger out one of the rhodesian twenty-year deaths, with its daily burden of insult, humiliation, and forced labor for a man whose entire race the victim hates. rhodesia is a happy name for that land of piracy and pillage, and puts the right stain upon it. several long journeys--gave us experience of the cape colony railways; easy-riding, fine cars; all the conveniences; thorough cleanliness; comfortable beds furnished for the night trains. it was in the first days of june, and winter; the daytime was pleasant, the nighttime nice and cold. spinning along all day in the cars it was ecstasy to breathe the bracing air and gaze out over the vast brown solitudes of the velvet plains, soft and lovely near by, still softer and lovelier further away, softest and loveliest of all in the remote distances, where dim island-hills seemed afloat, as in a sea--a sea made of dream-stuff and flushed with colors faint and rich; and dear me, the depth of the sky, and the beauty of the strange new cloud-forms, and the glory of the sunshine, the lavishness, the wastefulness of it! the vigor and freshness and inspiration of the air and the sunwell, it was all just as olive schreiner had made it in her books. to me the veldt, in its sober winter garb, was surpassingly beautiful. there were unlevel stretches where it was rolling and swelling, and rising and subsiding, and sweeping superbly on and on, and still on and on like an ocean, toward the faraway horizon, its pale brown deepening by delicately graduated shades to rich orange, and finally to purple and crimson where it washed against the wooded hills and naked red crags at the base of the sky. everywhere, from cape town to kimberley and from kimberley to port elizabeth and east london, the towns were well populated with tamed blacks; tamed and christianized too, i suppose, for they wore the dowdy clothes of our christian civilization. but for that, many of them would have been remarkably handsome. these fiendish clothes, together with the proper lounging gait, good-natured face, happy air, and easy laugh, made them precise counterparts of our american blacks; often where all the other aspects were strikingly and harmoniously and thrillingly african, a flock of these natives would intrude, looking wholly out of place, and spoil it all, making the thing a grating discord, half african and half american. one sunday in king william's town a score of colored women came mincing across the great barren square dressed--oh, in the last perfection of fashion, and newness, and expensiveness, and showy mixture of unrelated colors,--all just as i had seen it so often at home; and in their faces and their gait was that languishing, aristocratic, divine delight in their finery which was so familiar to me, and had always been such a satisfaction to my eye and my heart. i seemed among old, old friends; friends of fifty years, and i stopped and cordially greeted them. they broke into a good-fellowship laugh, flashing their white teeth upon me, and all answered at once. i did not understand a word they said. i was astonished; i was not dreaming that they would answer in anything but american. the voices, too, of the african women, were familiar to me sweet and musical, just like those of the slave women of my early days. i followed a couple of them all over the orange free state--no, over its capital --bloemfontein, to hear their liquid voices and the happy ripple of their laughter. their language was a large improvement upon american. also upon the zulu. it had no zulu clicks in it; and it seemed to have no angles or corners, no roughness, no vile s's or other hissing sounds, but was very, very mellow and rounded and flowing. in moving about the country in the trains, i had opportunity to see a good many boers of the veldt. one day at a village station a hundred of them got out of the third-class cars to feed. their clothes were very interesting. for ugliness of shapes, and for miracles of ugly colors inharmoniously associated, they were a record. the effect was nearly as exciting and interesting as that produced by the brilliant and beautiful clothes and perfect taste always on view at the indian railway stations. one man had corduroy trousers of a faded chewing gum tint. and they were new--showing that this tint did not come by calamity, but was intentional; the very ugliest color i have ever seen. a gaunt, shackly country lout six feet high, in battered gray slouched hat with wide brim, and old resin-colored breeches, had on a hideous brand-new woolen coat which was imitation tiger skin wavy broad stripes of dazzling yellow and deep brown. i thought he ought to be hanged, and asked the station-master if it could be arranged. he said no; and not only that, but said it rudely; said it with a quite unnecessary show of feeling. then he muttered something about my being a jackass, and walked away and pointed me out to people, and did everything he could to turn public sentiment against me. it is what one gets for trying to do good. in the train that day a passenger told me some more about boer life out in the lonely veldt. he said the boer gets up early and sets his "niggers" at their tasks (pasturing the cattle, and watching them); eats, smokes, drowses, sleeps; toward evening superintends the milking, etc.; eats, smokes, drowses; goes to bed at early candlelight in the fragrant clothes he (and she) have worn all day and every week-day for years. i remember that last detail, in olive schreiner's "story of an african farm." and the passenger told me that the boers were justly noted for their hospitality. he told me a story about it. he said that his grace the bishop of a certain see was once making a business-progress through the tavernless veldt, and one night he stopped with a boer; after supper was shown to bed; he undressed, weary and worn out, and was soon sound asleep; in the night he woke up feeling crowded and suffocated, and found the old boer and his fat wife in bed with him, one on each side, with all their clothes on, and snoring. he had to stay there and stand it--awake and suffering--until toward dawn, when sleep again fell upon him for an hour. then he woke again. the boer was gone, but the wife was still at his side. those reformers detested that boer prison; they were not used to cramped quarters and tedious hours, and weary idleness, and early to bed, and limited movement, and arbitrary and irritating rules, and the absence of the luxuries which wealth comforts the day and the night with. the confinement told upon their bodies and their spirits; still, they were superior men, and they made the best that was to be made of the circumstances. their wives smuggled delicacies to them, which helped to smooth the way down for the prison fare. in the train mr. b. told me that the boer jail-guards treated the black prisoners--even political ones--mercilessly. an african chief and his following had been kept there nine months without trial, and during all that time they had been without shelter from rain and sun. he said that one day the guards put a big black in the stocks for dashing his soup on the ground; they stretched his legs painfully wide apart, and set him with his back down hill; he could not endure it, and put back his hands upon the slope for a support. the guard ordered him to withdraw the support and kicked him in the back. "then," said mr. b., "'the powerful black wrenched the stocks asunder and went for the guard; a reform prisoner pulled him off, and thrashed the guard himself." chapter lxix. the very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice. --pudd'nhead wilsons's new calendar. there isn't a parallel of latitude but thinks it would have been the equator if it had had its rights. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. next to mr. rhodes, to me the most interesting convulsion of nature in south africa was the diamond-crater. the rand gold fields are a stupendous marvel, and they make all other gold fields small, but i was not a stranger to gold-mining; the veldt was a noble thing to see, but it was only another and lovelier variety of our great plains; the natives were very far from being uninteresting, but they were not new; and as for the towns, i could find my way without a guide through the most of them because i had learned the streets, under other names, in towns just like them in other lands; but the diamond mine was a wholly fresh thing, a splendid and absorbing novelty. very few people in the world have seen the diamond in its home. it has but three or four homes in the world, whereas gold has a million. it is worth while to journey around the globe to see anything which can truthfully be called a novelty, and the diamond mine is the greatest and most select and restricted novelty which the globe has in stock. the kimberley diamond deposits were discovered about , i think. when everything is taken into consideration, the wonder is that they were not discovered five thousand years ago and made familiar to the african world for the rest of time. for this reason the first diamonds were found on the surface of the ground. they were smooth and limpid, and in the sunlight they vomited fire. they were the very things which an african savage of any era would value above every other thing in the world excepting a glass bead. for two or three centuries we have been buying his lands, his cattle, his neighbor, and any other thing he had for sale, for glass beads and so it is strange that he was indifferent to the diamonds--for he must have pickets them up many and many a time. it would not occur to him to try to sell them to whites, of course, since the whites already had plenty of glass beads, and more fashionably shaped, too, than these; but one would think that the poorer sort of black, who could not afford real glass, would have been humbly content to decorate himself with the imitation, and that presently the white trader would notice the things, and dimly suspect, and carry some of them home, and find out what they were, and at once empty a multitude of fortune-hunters into africa. there are many strange things in human history; one of the strangest is that the sparkling diamonds laid there so long without exciting any one's interest. the revelation came at last by accident. in a boer's hut out in the wide solitude of the plains, a traveling stranger noticed a child playing with a bright object, and was told it was a piece of glass which had been found in the veldt. the stranger bought it for a trifle and carried it away; and being without honor, made another stranger believe it was a diamond, and so got $ out of him for it, and was as pleased with himself as if he had done a righteous thing. in paris the wronged stranger sold it to a pawnshop for $ , , who sold it to a countess for $ , , who sold it to a brewer for $ ; , who traded it to a king for a dukedom and a pedigree, and the king "put it up the spout." --[handwritten note: "from the greek meaning 'pawned it.'" m.t.]--i know these particulars to be correct. the news flew around, and the south african diamond-boom began. the original traveler--the dishonest one--now remembered that he had once seen a boer teamster chocking his wagon-wheel on a steep grade with a diamond as large as a football, and he laid aside his occupations and started out to hunt for it, but not with the intention of cheating anybody out of $ with it, for he had reformed. we now come to matters more didactic. diamonds are not imbedded in rock ledges fifty miles long, like the johannesburg gold, but are distributed through the rubbish of a filled-up well, so to speak. the well is rich, its walls are sharply defined; outside of the walls are no diamonds. the well is a crater, and a large one. before it had been meddled with, its surface was even with the level plain, and there was no sign to suggest that it was there. the pasturage covering the surface of the kimberley crater was sufficient for the support of a cow, and the pasturage underneath was sufficient for the support of a kingdom; but the cow did not know it, and lost her chance. the kimberley crater is roomy enough to admit the roman coliseum; the bottom of the crater has not been reached, and no one can tell how far down in the bowels of the earth it goes. originally, it was a perpendicular hole packed solidly full of blue rock or cement, and scattered through that blue mass, like raisins in a pudding, were the diamonds. as deep down in the earth as the blue stuff extends, so deep will the diamonds be found. there are three or four other celebrated craters near by a circle three miles in diameter would enclose them all. they are owned by the de beers company, a consolidation of diamond properties arranged by mr. rhodes twelve or fourteen years ago. the de beers owns other craters; they are under the grass, but the de beers knows where they are, and will open them some day, if the market should require it. originally, the diamond deposits were the property of the orange free state; but a judicious "rectification" of the boundary line shifted them over into the british territory of cape colony. a high official of the free state told me that the sum of $ , , was handed to his commonwealth as a compromise, or indemnity, or something of the sort, and that he thought his commonwealth did wisely to take the money and keep out of a dispute, since the power was all on the one side and the weakness all on the other. the de beers company dig out $ , worth of diamonds per week, now. the cape got the territory, but no profit; for mr. rhodes and the rothschilds and the other de beers people own the mines, and they pay no taxes. in our day the mines are worked upon scientific principles, under the guidance of the ablest mining-engineering talent procurable in america. there are elaborate works for reducing the blue rock and passing it through one process after another until every diamond it contains has been hunted down and secured. i watched the "concentrators" at work big tanks containing mud and water and invisible diamonds--and was told that each could stir and churn and properly treat car-loads of mud per day , pounds to the car-load--and reduce it to car-loads of slush. i saw the carloads of slush taken to the "pulsators" and there reduced to quarter of a load of nice clean dark-colored sand. then i followed it to the sorting tables and saw the men deftly and swiftly spread it out and brush it about and seize the diamonds as they showed up. i assisted, and once i found a diamond half as large as an almond. it is an exciting kind of fishing, and you feel a fine thrill of pleasure every time you detect the glow of one of those limpid pebbles through the veil of dark sand. i would like to spend my saturday holidays in that charming sport every now and then. of course there are disappointments. sometimes you find a diamond which is not a diamond; it is only a quartz crystal or some such worthless thing. the expert can generally distinguish it from the precious stone which it is counterfeiting; but if he is in doubt he lays it on a flatiron and hits it with a sledgehammer. if it is a diamond it holds its own; if it is anything else, it is reduced to powder. i liked that experiment very much, and did not tire of repetitions of it. it was full of enjoyable apprehensions, unmarred by any personal sense of risk. the de beers concern treats ; carloads --about , tons--of blue rock per day, and the result is three pounds of diamonds. value, uncut, $ , to $ , . after cutting, they will weigh considerably less than a pound, but will be worth four or five times as much as they were before. all the plain around that region is spread over, a foot deep, with blue rock, placed there by the company, and looks like a plowed field. exposure for a length of time make the rock easier to work than it is when it comes out of the mine. if mining should cease now, the supply of rock spread over those fields would furnish the usual , car-loads per day to the separating works during three years. the fields are fenced and watched; and at night they are under the constant inspection of lofty electric searchlight. they contain fifty or sixty million dollars' worth' of diamonds, and there is an abundance of enterprising thieves around. in the dirt of the kimberley streets there is much hidden wealth. some time ago the people were granted the privilege of a free wash-up. there was a general rush, the work was done with thoroughness, and a good harvest of diamonds was gathered. the deep mining is done by natives. there are many hundreds of them. they live in quarters built around the inside of a great compound. they are a jolly and good-natured lot, and accommodating. they performed a war-dance for us, which was the wildest exhibition i have ever seen. they are not allowed outside of the compound during their term of service three months, i think it, is, as a rule. they go down the shaft, stand their watch, come up again, are searched, and go to bed or to their amusements in the compound; and this routine they repeat, day in and day out. it is thought that they do not now steal many diamonds successfully. they used to swallow them, and find other ways of concealing them, but the white man found ways of beating their various games. one man cut his leg and shoved a diamond into the wound, but even that project did not succeed. when they find a fine large diamond they are more likely to report it than to steal it, for in the former case they get a reward, and in the latter they are quite apt to merely get into trouble. some years ago, in a mine not owned by the de beers, a black found what has been claimed to be the largest diamond known to the world's history; and, as a reward he was released from service and given a blanket, a horse, and five hundred dollars. it made him a vanderbilt. he could buy four wives, and have money left. four wives are an ample support for a native. with four wives he is wholly independent, and need never do a stroke of work again. that great diamond weighs l carats. some say it is as big as a piece of alum, others say it is as large as a bite of rock candy, but the best authorities agree that it is almost exactly the size of a chunk of ice. but those details are not important; and in my opinion not trustworthy. it has a flaw in it, otherwise it would be of incredible value. as it is, it is held to be worth $ , , . after cutting it ought to be worth from $ , , to $ , , , therefore persons desiring to save money should buy it now. it is owned by a syndicate, and apparently there is no satisfactory market for it. it is earning nothing; it is eating its head off. up to this time it has made nobody rich but the native who found it. he found it in a mine which was being worked by contract. that is to say, a company had bought the privilege of taking from the mine , , carloads of blue-rock, for a sum down and a royalty. their speculation had not paid; but on the very day that their privilege ran out that native found the $ , , -diamond and handed it over to them. even the diamond culture is not without its romantic episodes. the koh-i-noor is a large diamond, and valuable; but it cannot compete in these matters with three which--according to legend--are among the crown trinkets of portugal and russia. one of these is held to be worth $ , , ; another, $ , , , and the third something over $ , , . those are truly wonderful diamonds, whether they exist or not; and yet they are of but little importance by comparison with the one wherewith the boer wagoner chocked his wheel on that steep grade as heretofore referred to. in kimberley i had some conversation with the man who saw the boer do that--an incident which had occurred twenty-seven or twenty-eight years before i had my talk with him. he assured me that that diamond's value could have been over a billion dollars, but not under it. i believed him, because he had devoted twenty-seven years to hunting for it, and was, in a position to know. a fitting and interesting finish to an examination of the tedious and laborious and costly processes whereby the diamonds are gotten out of the deeps of the earth and freed from the base stuffs which imprison them is the visit to the de beers offices in the town of kimberley, where the result of each day's mining is brought every day, and, weighed, assorted, valued, and deposited in safes against shipping-day. an unknown and unaccredited person cannot, get into that place; and it seemed apparent from the generous supply of warning and protective and prohibitory signs that were posted all about, that not even the known and accredited can steal diamonds there without inconvenience. we saw the day's output--shining little nests of diamonds, distributed a foot apart, along a counter, each nest reposing upon a sheet of white paper. that day's catch was about $ , worth. in the course of a year half a ton of diamonds pass under the scales there and sleep on that counter; the resulting money is $ , , or $ , , . profit, about $ , , . young girls were doing the sorting--a nice, clean, dainty, and probably distressing employment. every day ducal incomes sift and sparkle through the fingers of those young girls; yet they go to bed at night as poor as they were when they got up in the morning. the same thing next day, and all the days. they are beautiful things, those diamonds, in their native state. they are of various shapes; they have flat surfaces, rounded borders, and never a sharp edge. they are of all colors and shades of color, from dewdrop white to actual black; and their smooth and rounded surfaces and contours, variety of color, and transparent limpidity make them look like piles of assorted candies. a very light straw color is their commonest tint. it seemed to me that these uncut gems must be more beautiful than any cut ones could be; but when a collection of cut ones was brought out, i saw my mistake. nothing is so beautiful as a rose diamond with the light playing through it, except that uncostly thing which is just like it--wavy sea-water with the sunlight playing through it and striking a white-sand bottom. before the middle of july we reached cape town, and the end of our african journeyings. and well satisfied; for, towering above us was table mountain--a reminder that we had now seen each and all of the great features of south africa except mr. cecil rhodes. i realize that that is a large exception. i know quite well that whether mr. rhodes is the lofty and worshipful patriot and statesman that multitudes believe him to be, or satan come again, as the rest of the world account him, he is still the most imposing figure in the british empire outside of england. when he stands on the cape of good hope, his shadow falls to the zambesi. he is the only colonial in the british dominions whose goings and comings are chronicled and discussed under all the globe's meridians, and whose speeches, unclipped, are cabled from the ends of the earth; and he is the only unroyal outsider whose arrival in london can compete for attention with an eclipse. that he is an extraordinary man, and not an accident of fortune, not even his dearest south african enemies were willing to deny, so far as i heard them testify. the whole south african world seemed to stand in a kind of shuddering awe of him, friend and enemy alike. it was as if he were deputy-god on the one side, deputy-satan on the other, proprietor of the people, able to make them or ruin them by his breath, worshiped by many, hated by many, but blasphemed by none among the judicious, and even by the indiscreet in guarded whispers only. what is the secret of his formidable supremacy? one says it is his prodigious wealth--a wealth whose drippings in salaries and in other ways support multitudes and make them his interested and loyal vassals; another says it is his personal magnetism and his persuasive tongue, and that these hypnotize and make happy slaves of all that drift within the circle of their influence; another says it is his majestic ideas, his vast schemes for the territorial aggrandizement of england, his patriotic and unselfish ambition to spread her beneficent protection and her just rule over the pagan wastes of africa and make luminous the african darkness with the glory of her name; and another says he wants the earth and wants it for his own, and that the belief that he will get it and let his friends in on the ground floor is the secret that rivets so many eyes upon him and keeps him in the zenith where the view is unobstructed. one may take his choice. they are all the same price. one fact is sure: he keeps his prominence and a vast following, no matter what he does. he "deceives" the duke of fife--it is the duke's word--but that does not destroy the duke's loyalty to him. he tricks the reformers into immense trouble with his raid, but the most of them believe he meant well. he weeps over the harshly--taxed johannesburgers and makes them his friends; at the same time he taxes his charter-settlers per cent., and so wins their affection and their confidence that they are squelched with despair at every rumor that the charter is to be annulled. he raids and robs and slays and enslaves the matabele and gets worlds of charter-christian applause for it. he has beguiled england into buying charter waste paper for bank of england notes, ton for ton, and the ravished still burn incense to him as the eventual god of plenty. he has done everything he could think of to pull himself down to the ground; he has done more than enough to pull sixteen common-run great men down; yet there he stands, to this day, upon his dizzy summit under the dome of the sky, an apparent permanency, the marvel of the time, the mystery of the age, an archangel with wings to half the world, satan with a tail to the other half. i admire him, i frankly confess it; and when his time comes i shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake. conclusion. i have traveled more than anyone else, and i have noticed that even the angels speak english with an accent. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. i saw table rock, anyway--a majestic pile. it is , feet high. it is also , feet high. these figures may be relied upon. i got them in cape town from the two best-informed citizens, men who had made table rock the study of their lives. and i saw table bay, so named for its levelness. i saw the castle--built by the dutch east india company three hundred years ago--where the commanding general lives; i saw st. simon's bay, where the admiral lives. i saw the government, also the parliament, where they quarreled in two languages when i was there, and agreed in none. i saw the club. i saw and explored the beautiful sea-girt drives that wind about the mountains and through the paradise where the villas are: also i saw some of the fine old dutch mansions, pleasant homes of the early times, pleasant homes to-day, and enjoyed the privilege of their hospitalities. and just before i sailed i saw in one of them a quaint old picture which was a link in a curious romance--a picture of a pale, intellectual young man in a pink coat with a high black collar. it was a portrait of dr. james barry, a military surgeon who came out to the cape fifty years ago with his regiment. he was a wild young fellow, and was guilty of various kinds of misbehavior. he was several times reported to headquarters in england, and it was in each case expected that orders would come out to deal with him promptly and severely, but for some mysterious reason no orders of any kind ever came back--nothing came but just an impressive silence. this made him an imposing and uncanny wonder to the town. next, he was promoted-away up. he was made medical superintendent general, and transferred to india. presently he was back at the cape again and at his escapades once more. there were plenty of pretty girls, but none of them caught him, none of them could get hold of his heart; evidently he was not a marrying man. and that was another marvel, another puzzle, and made no end of perplexed talk. once he was called in the night, an obstetric service, to do what he could for a woman who was believed to be dying. he was prompt and scientific, and saved both mother and child. there are other instances of record which testify to his mastership of his profession; and many which testify to his love of it and his devotion to it. among other adventures of his was a duel of a desperate sort, fought with swords, at the castle. he killed his man. the child heretofore mentioned as having been saved by dr. barry so long ago, was named for him, and still lives in cape town. he had dr. barry's portrait painted, and gave it to the gentleman in whose old dutch house i saw it--the quaint figure in pink coat and high black collar. the story seems to be arriving nowhere. but that is because i have not finished. dr. barry died in cape town years ago. it was then discovered that he was a woman. the legend goes that enquiries--soon silenced--developed the fact that she was a daughter of a great english house, and that that was why her cape wildnesses brought no punishment and got no notice when reported to the government at home. her name was an alias. she had disgraced herself with her people; so she chose to change her name and her sex and take a new start in the world. we sailed on the th of july in the norman, a beautiful ship, perfectly appointed. the voyage to england occupied a short fortnight, without a stop except at madeira. a good and restful voyage for tired people, and there were several of us. i seemed to have been lecturing a thousand years, though it was only a twelvemonth, and a considerable number of the others were reformers who were fagged out with their five months of seclusion in the pretoria prison. our trip around the earth ended at the southampton pier, where we embarked thirteen months before. it seemed a fine and large thing to have accomplished--the circumnavigation of this great globe in that little time, and i was privately proud of it. for a moment. then came one of those vanity-snubbing astronomical reports from the observatory-people, whereby it appeared that another great body of light had lately flamed up in the remotenesses of space which was traveling at a gait which would enable it to do all that i had done in a minute and a half. human pride is not worth while; there is always something lying in wait to take the wind out of it. following the equator a journey around the world by mark twain samuel l. clemens part chapter xxxix. by trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. another man's, i mean. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. you soon find your long-ago dreams of india rising in a sort of vague and luscious moonlight above the horizon-rim of your opaque consciousness, and softly lighting up a thousand forgotten details which were parts of a vision that had once been vivid to you when you were a boy, and steeped your spirit in tales of the east. the barbaric gorgeousnesses, for instance; and the princely titles, the sumptuous titles, the sounding titles,--how good they taste in the mouth! the nizam of hyderabad; the maharajah of travancore; the nabob of jubbelpore; the begum of bhopal; the nawab of mysore; the rance of gulnare; the ahkoond of swat's; the rao of rohilkund; the gaikwar of baroda. indeed, it is a country that runs richly to name. the great god vishnu has -- special ones-- peculiarly holy ones--names just for sunday use only. i learned the whole of vishnu's by heart once, but they wouldn't stay; i don't remember any of them now but john w. and the romances connected with, those princely native houses--to this day they are always turning up, just as in the old, old times. they were sweating out a romance in an english court in bombay a while before we were there. in this case a native prince, / years old, who has been enjoying his titles and dignities and estates unmolested for fourteen years, is suddenly haled into court on the charge that he is rightfully no prince at all, but a pauper peasant; that the real prince died when two and one-half years old; that the death was concealed, and a peasant child smuggled into the royal cradle, and that this present incumbent was that smuggled substitute. this is the very material that so many oriental tales have been made of. the case of that great prince, the gaikwar of baroda, is a reversal of the theme. when that throne fell vacant, no heir could be found for some time, but at last one was found in the person of a peasant child who was making mud pies in a village street, and having an innocent good time. but his pedigree was straight; he was the true prince, and he has reigned ever since, with none to dispute his right. lately there was another hunt for an heir to another princely house, and one was found who was circumstanced about as the gaikwar had been. his fathers were traced back, in humble life, along a branch of the ancestral tree to the point where it joined the stem fourteen generations ago, and his heirship was thereby squarely established. the tracing was done by means of the records of one of the great hindoo shrines, where princes on pilgrimage record their names and the date of their visit. this is to keep the prince's religious account straight, and his spiritual person safe; but the record has the added value of keeping the pedigree authentic, too. when i think of bombay now, at this distance of time, i seem to have a kaleidoscope at my eye; and i hear the clash of the glass bits as the splendid figures change, and fall apart, and flash into new forms, figure after figure, and with the birth of each new form i feel my skin crinkle and my nerve-web tingle with a new thrill of wonder and delight. these remembered pictures float past me in a sequence of contracts; following the same order always, and always whirling by and disappearing with the swiftness of a dream, leaving me with the sense that the actuality was the experience of an hour, at most, whereas it really covered days, i think. the series begins with the hiring of a "bearer"--native man-servant--a person who should be selected with some care, because as long as he is in your employ he will be about as near to you as your clothes. in india your day may be said to begin with the "bearer's" knock on the bedroom door, accompanied by a formula of, words--a formula which is intended to mean that the bath is ready. it doesn't really seem to mean anything at all. but that is because you are not used to "bearer" english. you will presently understand. where he gets his english is his own secret. there is nothing like it elsewhere in the earth; or even in paradise, perhaps, but the other place is probably full of it. you hire him as soon as you touch indian soil; for no matter what your sex is, you cannot do without him. he is messenger, valet, chambermaid, table-waiter, lady's maid, courier--he is everything. he carries a coarse linen clothes-bag and a quilt; he sleeps on the stone floor outside your chamber door, and gets his meals you do not know where nor when; you only know that he is not fed on the premises, either when you are in a hotel or when you are a guest in a, private house. his wages are large--from an indian point of view--and he feeds and clothes himself out of them. we had three of him in two and a half months. the first one's rate was thirty rupees a month that is to say, twenty-seven cents a day; the rate of the others, rs. ( rupees) a month. a princely sum; for the native switchman on a railway and the native servant in a private family get only rs. per month, and the farm-hand only . the two former feed and clothe themselves and their families on their $ . per month; but i cannot believe that the farmhand has to feed himself on his $ . . i think the farm probably feeds him, and that the whole of his wages, except a trifle for the priest, go to the support of his family. that is, to the feeding of his family; for they live in a mud hut, hand-made, and, doubtless, rent-free, and they wear no clothes; at least, nothing more than a rag. and not much of a rag at that, in the case of the males. however, these are handsome times for the farm-hand; he was not always the child of luxury that he is now. the chief commissioner of the central provinces, in a recent official utterance wherein he was rebuking a native deputation for complaining of hard times, reminded them that they could easily remember when a farm-hand's wages were only half a rupee (former value) a month--that is to say, less than a cent a day; nearly $ . a year. if such a wage-earner had a good deal of a family--and they all have that, for god is very good to these poor natives in some ways--he would save a profit of fifteen cents, clean and clear, out of his year's toil; i mean a frugal, thrifty person would, not one given to display and ostentation. and if he owed $ . and took good care of his health, he could pay it off in ninety years. then he could hold up his head, and look his creditors in the face again. think of these facts and what they mean. india does not consist of cities. there are no cities in india--to speak of. its stupendous population consists of farm-laborers. india is one vast farm--one almost interminable stretch of fields with mud fences between. . . think of the above facts; and consider what an incredible aggregate of poverty they place before you. the first bearer that applied, waited below and sent up his recommendations. that was the first morning in bombay. we read them over; carefully, cautiously, thoughtfully. there was not a fault to find with them--except one; they were all from americans. is that a slur? if it is, it is a deserved one. in my experience, an american's recommendation of a servant is not usually valuable. we are too good-natured a race; we hate to say the unpleasant thing; we shrink from speaking the unkind truth about a poor fellow whose bread depends upon our verdict; so we speak of his good points only, thus not scrupling to tell a lie--a silent lie--for in not mentioning his bad ones we as good as say he hasn't any. the only difference that i know of between a silent lie and a spoken one is, that the silent lie is a less respectable one than the other. and it can deceive, whereas the other can't--as a rule. we not only tell the silent lie as to a servant's faults, but we sin in another way: we overpraise his merits; for when it comes to writing recommendations of servants we are a nation of gushers. and we have not the frenchman's excuse. in france you must give the departing servant a good recommendation; and you must conceal his faults; you have no choice. if you mention his faults for the protection of the next candidate for his services, he can sue you for damages; and the court will award them, too; and, moreover, the judge will give you a sharp dressing-down from the bench for trying to destroy a poor man's character, and rob him of his bread. i do not state this on my own authority, i got it from a french physician of fame and repute--a man who was born in paris, and had practiced there all his life. and he said that he spoke not merely from common knowledge, but from exasperating personal experience. as i was saying, the bearer's recommendations were all from american tourists; and st. peter would have admitted him to the fields of the blest on them--i mean if he is as unfamiliar with our people and our ways as i suppose he is. according to these recommendations, manuel x. was supreme in all the arts connected with his complex trade; and these manifold arts were mentioned--and praised-in detail. his english was spoken of in terms of warm admiration--admiration verging upon rapture. i took pleased note of that, and hoped that some of it might be true. we had to have some one right away; so the family went down stairs and took him a week on trial; then sent him up to me and departed on their affairs. i was shut up in my quarters with a bronchial cough, and glad to have something fresh to look at, something new to play with. manuel filled the bill; manuel was very welcome. he was toward fifty years old, tall, slender, with a slight stoop--an artificial stoop, a deferential stoop, a stoop rigidified by long habit--with face of european mould; short hair intensely black; gentle black eyes, timid black eyes, indeed; complexion very dark, nearly black in fact; face smooth-shaven. he was bareheaded and barefooted, and was never otherwise while his week with us lasted; his clothing was european, cheap, flimsy, and showed much wear. he stood before me and inclined his head (and body) in the pathetic indian way, touching his forehead with the finger--ends of his right hand, in salute. i said: "manuel, you are evidently indian, but you seem to have a spanish name when you put it all together. how is that?" a perplexed look gathered in his face; it was plain that he had not understood--but he didn't let on. he spoke back placidly. "name, manuel. yes, master." "i know; but how did you get the name?" "oh, yes, i suppose. think happen so. father same name, not mother." i saw that i must simplify my language and spread my words apart, if i would be understood by this english scholar. "well--then--how--did--your--father--get--his name?" "oh, he,"--brightening a little--"he christian--portygee; live in goa; i born goa; mother not portygee, mother native-high-caste brahmin--coolin brahmin; highest caste; no other so high caste. i high-caste brahmin, too. christian, too, same like father; high-caste christian brahmin, master--salvation army." all this haltingly, and with difficulty. then he had an inspiration, and began to pour out a flood of words that i could make nothing of; so i said: "there--don't do that. i can't understand hindostani." "not hindostani, master--english. always i speaking english sometimes when i talking every day all the time at you." "very well, stick to that; that is intelligible. it is not up to my hopes, it is not up to the promise of the recommendations, still it is english, and i understand it. don't elaborate it; i don't like elaborations when they are crippled by uncertainty of touch." "master?" "oh, never mind; it was only a random thought; i didn't expect you to understand it. how did you get your english; is it an acquirement, or just a gift of god?" after some hesitation--piously: "yes, he very good. christian god very good, hindoo god very good, too. two million hindoo god, one christian god--make two million and one. all mine; two million and one god. i got a plenty. sometime i pray all time at those, keep it up, go all time every day; give something at shrine, all good for me, make me better man; good for me, good for my family, dam good." then he had another inspiration, and went rambling off into fervent confusions and incoherencies, and i had to stop him again. i thought we had talked enough, so i told him to go to the bathroom and clean it up and remove the slops--this to get rid of him. he went away, seeming to understand, and got out some of my clothes and began to brush them. i repeated my desire several times, simplifying and re-simplifying it, and at last he got the idea. then he went away and put a coolie at the work, and explained that he would lose caste if he did it himself; it would be pollution, by the law of his caste, and it would cost him a deal of fuss and trouble to purify himself and accomplish his rehabilitation. he said that that kind of work was strictly forbidden to persons of caste, and as strictly restricted to the very bottom layer of hindoo society--the despised 'sudra' (the toiler, the laborer). he was right; and apparently the poor sudra has been content with his strange lot, his insulting distinction, for ages and ages--clear back to the beginning of things, so to speak. buckle says that his name--laborer--is a term of contempt; that it is ordained by the institutes of menu ( b.c.) that if a sudra sit on a level with his superior he shall be exiled or branded--[without going into particulars i will remark that as a rule they wear no clothing that would conceal the brand.--m. t.]. . . ; if he speak contemptuously of his superior or insult him he shall suffer death; if he listen to the reading of the sacred books he shall have burning oil poured in his ears; if he memorize passages from them he shall be killed; if he marry his daughter to a brahmin the husband shall go to hell for defiling himself by contact with a woman so infinitely his inferior; and that it is forbidden to a sudra to acquire wealth. "the bulk of the population of india," says bucklet--[population to-day, , , .] --"is the sudras--the workers, the farmers, the creators of wealth." manuel was a failure, poor old fellow. his age was against him. he was desperately slow and phenomenally forgetful. when he went three blocks on an errand he would be gone two hours, and then forget what it was he went for. when he packed a trunk it took him forever, and the trunk's contents were an unimaginable chaos when he got done. he couldn't wait satisfactorily at table--a prime defect, for if you haven't your own servant in an indian hotel you are likely to have a slow time of it and go away hungry. we couldn't understand his english; he couldn't understand ours; and when we found that he couldn't understand his own, it seemed time for us to part. i had to discharge him; there was no help for it. but i did it as kindly as i could, and as gently. we must part, said i, but i hoped we should meet again in a better world. it was not true, but it was only a little thing to say, and saved his feelings and cost me nothing. but now that he was gone, and was off my mind and heart, my spirits began to rise at once, and i was soon feeling brisk and ready to go out and have adventures. then his newly-hired successor flitted in, touched his forehead, and began to fly around here, there, and everywhere, on his velvet feet, and in five minutes he had everything in the room "ship-shape and bristol fashion," as the sailors say, and was standing at the salute, waiting for orders. dear me, what a rustler he was after the slumbrous way of manuel, poor old slug! all my heart, all my affection, all my admiration, went out spontaneously to this frisky little forked black thing, this compact and compressed incarnation of energy and force and promptness and celerity and confidence, this smart, smily, engaging, shiney-eyed little devil, feruled on his upper end by a gleaming fire-coal of a fez with a red-hot tassel dangling from it. i said, with deep satisfaction-- "you'll suit. what is your name?" he reeled it mellowly off. "let me see if i can make a selection out of it--for business uses, i mean; we will keep the rest for sundays. give it to me in installments." he did it. but there did not seem to be any short ones, except mousawhich suggested mouse. it was out of character; it was too soft, too quiet, too conservative; it didn't fit his splendid style. i considered, and said-- "mousa is short enough, but i don't quite like it. it seems colorless --inharmonious--inadequate; and i am sensitive to such things. how do you think satan would do?" "yes, master. satan do wair good." it was his way of saying "very good." there was a rap at the door. satan covered the ground with a single skip; there was a word or two of hindostani, then he disappeared. three minutes later he was before me again, militarily erect, and waiting for me to speak first. "what is it, satan?" "god want to see you." "who?" "god. i show him up, master?" "why, this is so unusual, that--that--well, you see indeed i am so unprepared--i don't quite know what i do mean. dear me, can't you explain? don't you see that this is a most ex----" "here his card, master." wasn't it curious--and amazing, and tremendous, and all that? such a personage going around calling on such as i, and sending up his card, like a mortal--sending it up by satan. it was a bewildering collision of the impossibles. but this was the land of the arabian nights, this was india! and what is it that cannot happen in india? we had the interview. satan was right--the visitor was indeed a god in the conviction of his multitudinous followers, and was worshiped by them in sincerity and humble adoration. they are troubled by no doubts as to his divine origin and office. they believe in him, they pray to him, they make offerings to him, they beg of him remission of sins; to them his person, together with everything connected with it, is sacred; from his barber they buy the parings of his nails and set them in gold, and wear them as precious amulets. i tried to seem tranquilly conversational and at rest, but i was not. would you have been? i was in a suppressed frenzy of excitement and curiosity and glad wonder. i could not keep my eyes off him. i was looking upon a god, an actual god, a recognized and accepted god; and every detail of his person and his dress had a consuming interest for me. and the thought went floating through my head, "he is worshiped--think of it--he is not a recipient of the pale homage called compliment, wherewith the highest human clay must make shift to be satisfied, but of an infinitely richer spiritual food: adoration, worship!--men and women lay their cares and their griefs and their broken hearts at his feet; and he gives them his peace; and they go away healed." and just then the awful visitor said, in the simplest way--"there is a feature of the philosophy of huck finn which"--and went luminously on with the construction of a compact and nicely-discriminated literary verdict. it is a land of surprises--india! i had had my ambitions--i had hoped, and almost expected, to be read by kings and presidents and emperors--but i had never looked so high as that. it would be false modesty to pretend that i was not inordinately pleased. i was. i was much more pleased than i should have been with a compliment from a man. he remained half an hour, and i found him a most courteous and charming gentleman. the godship has been in his family a good while, but i do not know how long. he is a mohammedan deity; by earthly rank he is a prince; not an indian but a persian prince. he is a direct descendant of the prophet's line. he is comely; also young--for a god; not forty, perhaps not above thirty-five years old. he wears his immense honors with tranquil brace, and with a dignity proper to his awful calling. he speaks english with the ease and purity of a person born to it. i think i am not overstating this. he was the only god i had ever seen, and i was very favorably impressed. when he rose to say good-bye, the door swung open and i caught the flash of a red fez, and heard these words, reverently said-- "satan see god out?" "yes." and these mis-mated beings passed from view satan in the lead and the other following after. chapter xl. few of us can stand prosperity. another man's, i mean. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. the next picture in my mind is government house, on malabar point, with the wide sea-view from the windows and broad balconies; abode of his excellency the governor of the bombay presidency--a residence which is european in everything but the native guards and servants, and is a home and a palace of state harmoniously combined. that was england, the english power, the english civilization, the modern civilization--with the quiet elegancies and quiet colors and quiet tastes and quiet dignity that are the outcome of the modern cultivation. and following it came a picture of the ancient civilization of india--an hour in the mansion of a native prince: kumar schri samatsinhji bahadur of the palitana state. the young lad, his heir, was with the prince; also, the lad's sister, a wee brown sprite, very pretty, very serious, very winning, delicately moulded, costumed like the daintiest butterfly, a dear little fairyland princess, gravely willing to be friendly with the strangers, but in the beginning preferring to hold her father's hand until she could take stock of them and determine how far they were to be trusted. she must have been eight years old; so in the natural (indian) order of things she would be a bride in three or four years from now, and then this free contact with the sun and the air and the other belongings of out-door nature and comradeship with visiting male folk would end, and she would shut herself up in the zenana for life, like her mother, and by inherited habit of mind would be happy in that seclusion and not look upon it as an irksome restraint and a weary captivity. the game which the prince amuses his leisure with--however, never mind it, i should never be able to describe it intelligibly. i tried to get an idea of it while my wife and daughter visited the princess in the zenana, a lady of charming graces and a fluent speaker of english, but i did not make it out. it is a complicated game, and i believe it is said that nobody can learn to play it well--but an indian. and i was not able to learn how to wind a turban. it seemed a simple art and easy; but that was a deception. it is a piece of thin, delicate stuff a foot wide or more, and forty or fifty feet long; and the exhibitor of the art takes one end of it in his hands, and winds it in and out intricately about his head, twisting it as he goes, and in a minute or two the thing is finished, and is neat and symmetrical and fits as snugly as a mould. we were interested in the wardrobe and the jewels, and in the silverware, and its grace of shape and beauty and delicacy of ornamentation. the silverware is kept locked up, except at meal-times, and none but the chief butler and the prince have keys to the safe. i did not clearly understand why, but it was not for the protection of the silver. it was either to protect the prince from the contamination which his caste would suffer if the vessels were touched by low-caste hands, or it was to protect his highness from poison. possibly it was both. i believe a salaried taster has to taste everything before the prince ventures it--an ancient and judicious custom in the east, and has thinned out the tasters a good deal, for of course it is the cook that puts the poison in. if i were an indian prince i would not go to the expense of a taster, i would eat with the cook. ceremonials are always interesting; and i noted that the indian good-morning is a ceremonial, whereas ours doesn't amount to that. in salutation the son reverently touches the father's forehead with a small silver implement tipped with vermillion paste which leaves a red spot there, and in return the son receives the father's blessing. our good morning is well enough for the rowdy west, perhaps, but would be too brusque for the soft and ceremonious east. after being properly necklaced, according to custom, with great garlands made of yellow flowers, and provided with betel-nut to chew, this pleasant visit closed, and we passed thence to a scene of a different sort: from this glow of color and this sunny life to those grim receptacles of the parsee dead, the towers of silence. there is something stately about that name, and an impressiveness which sinks deep; the hush of death is in it. we have the grave, the tomb, the mausoleum, god's acre, the cemetery; and association has made them eloquent with solemn meaning; but we have no name that is so majestic as that one, or lingers upon the ear with such deep and haunting pathos. on lofty ground, in the midst of a paradise of tropical foliage and flowers, remote from the world and its turmoil and noise, they stood--the towers of silence; and away below was spread the wide groves of cocoa palms, then the city, mile on mile, then the ocean with its fleets of creeping ships all steeped in a stillness as deep as the hush that hallowed this high place of the dead. the vultures were there. they stood close together in a great circle all around the rim of a massive low tower--waiting; stood as motionless as sculptured ornaments, and indeed almost deceived one into the belief that that was what they were. presently there was a slight stir among the score of persons present, and all moved reverently out of the path and ceased from talking. a funeral procession entered the great gate, marching two and two, and moved silently by, toward the tower. the corpse lay in a shallow shell, and was under cover of a white cloth, but was otherwise naked. the bearers of the body were separated by an interval of thirty feet from the mourners. they, and also the mourners, were draped all in pure white, and each couple of mourners was figuratively bound together by a piece of white rope or a handkerchief--though they merely held the ends of it in their hands. behind the procession followed a dog, which was led in a leash. when the mourners had reached the neighborhood of the tower --neither they nor any other human being but the bearers of the dead must approach within thirty feet of it--they turned and went back to one of the prayer-houses within the gates, to pray for the spirit of their dead. the bearers unlocked the tower's sole door and disappeared from view within. in a little while they came out bringing the bier and the white covering-cloth, and locked the door again. then the ring of vultures rose, flapping their wings, and swooped down into the tower to devour the body. nothing was left of it but a clean-picked skeleton when they flocked-out again a few minutes afterward. the principle which underlies and orders everything connected with a parsee funeral is purity. by the tenets of the zoroastrian religion, the elements, earth, fire, and water, are sacred, and must not be contaminated by contact with a dead body. hence corpses must not be burned, neither must they be buried. none may touch the dead or enter the towers where they repose except certain men who are officially appointed for that purpose. they receive high pay, but theirs is a dismal life, for they must live apart from their species, because their commerce with the dead defiles them, and any who should associate with them would share their defilement. when they come out of the tower the clothes they are wearing are exchanged for others, in a building within the grounds, and the ones which they have taken off are left behind, for they are contaminated, and must never be used again or suffered to go outside the grounds. these bearers come to every funeral in new garments. so far as is known, no human being, other than an official corpse-bearer--save one--has ever entered a tower of silence after its consecration. just a hundred years ago a european rushed in behind the bearers and fed his brutal curiosity with a glimpse of the forbidden mysteries of the place. this shabby savage's name is not given; his quality is also concealed. these two details, taken in connection with the fact that for his extraordinary offense the only punishment he got from the east india company's government was a solemn official "reprimand"--suggest the suspicion that he was a european of consequence. the same public document which contained the reprimand gave warning that future offenders of his sort, if in the company's service, would be dismissed; and if merchants, suffer revocation of license and exile to england. the towers are not tall, but are low in proportion to their circumference, like a gasometer. if you should fill a gasometer half way up with solid granite masonry, then drive a wide and deep well down through the center of this mass of masonry, you would have the idea of a tower of silence. on the masonry surrounding the well the bodies lie, in shallow trenches which radiate like wheel-spokes from the well. the trenches slant toward the well and carry into it the rainfall. underground drains, with charcoal filters in them, carry off this water from the bottom of the well. when a skeleton has lain in the tower exposed to the rain and the flaming sun a month it is perfectly dry and clean. then the same bearers that brought it there come gloved and take it up with tongs and throw it into the well. there it turns to dust. it is never seen again, never touched again, in the world. other peoples separate their dead, and preserve and continue social distinctions in the grave--the skeletons of kings and statesmen and generals in temples and pantheons proper to skeletons of their degree, and the skeletons of the commonplace and the poor in places suited to their meaner estate; but the parsees hold that all men rank alike in death--all are humble, all poor, all destitute. in sign of their poverty they are sent to their grave naked, in sign of their equality the bones of the rich, the poor, the illustrious and the obscure are flung into the common well together. at a parsee funeral there are no vehicles; all concerned must walk, both rich and poor, howsoever great the distance to be traversed may be. in the wells of the five towers of silence is mingled the dust of all the parsee men and women and children who have died in bombay and its vicinity during the two centuries which have elapsed since the mohammedan conquerors drove the parsees out of persia, and into that region of india. the earliest of the five towers was built by the modi family something more than years ago, and it is now reserved to the heirs of that house; none but the dead of that blood are carried thither. the origin of at least one of the details of a parsee funeral is not now known--the presence of the dog. before a corpse is borne from the house of mourning it must be uncovered and exposed to the gaze of a dog; a dog must also be led in the rear of the funeral. mr. nusserwanjee byranijee, secretary to the parsee punchayet, said that these formalities had once had a meaning and a reason for their institution, but that they were survivals whose origin none could now account for. custom and tradition continue them in force, antiquity hallows them. it is thought that in ancient times in persia the dog was a sacred animal and could guide souls to heaven; also that his eye had the power of purifying objects which had been contaminated by the touch of the dead; and that hence his presence with the funeral cortege provides an ever-applicable remedy in case of need. the parsees claim that their method of disposing of the dead is an effective protection of the living; that it disseminates no corruption, no impurities of any sort, no disease-germs; that no wrap, no garment which has touched the dead is allowed to touch the living afterward; that from the towers of silence nothing proceeds which can carry harm to the outside world. these are just claims, i think. as a sanitary measure, their system seems to be about the equivalent of cremation, and as sure. we are drifting slowly--but hopefully--toward cremation in these days. it could not be expected that this progress should be swift, but if it be steady and continuous, even if slow, that will suffice. when cremation becomes the rule we shall cease to shudder at it; we should shudder at burial if we allowed ourselves to think what goes on in the grave. the dog was an impressive figure to me, representing as he did a mystery whose key is lost. he was humble, and apparently depressed; and he let his head droop pensively, and looked as if he might be trying to call back to his mind what it was that he had used to symbolize ages ago when he began his function. there was another impressive thing close at hand, but i was not privileged to see it. that was the sacred fire--a fire which is supposed to have been burning without interruption for more than two centuries; and so, living by the same heat that was imparted to it so long ago. the parsees are a remarkable community. there are only about , in bombay, and only about half as many as that in the rest of india; but they make up in importance what they lack in numbers. they are highly educated, energetic, enterprising, progressive, rich, and the jew himself is not more lavish or catholic in his charities and benevolences. the parsees build and endow hospitals, for both men and animals; and they and their womenkind keep an open purse for all great and good objects. they are a political force, and a valued support to the government. they have a pure and lofty religion, and they preserve it in its integrity and order their lives by it. we took a final sweep of the wonderful view of plain and city and ocean, and so ended our visit to the garden and the towers of silence; and the last thing i noticed was another symbol--a voluntary symbol this one; it was a vulture standing on the sawed-off top of a tall and slender and branchless palm in an open space in the ground; he was perfectly motionless, and looked like a piece of sculpture on a pillar. and he had a mortuary look, too, which was in keeping with the place. chapter xli. there is an old-time toast which is golden for its beauty. "when you ascend the hill of prosperity may you not meet a friend." --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. the next picture that drifts across the field of my memory is one which is connected with religious things. we were taken by friends to see a jain temple. it was small, and had many flags or streamers flying from poles standing above its roof; and its little battlements supported a great many small idols or images. upstairs, inside, a solitary jain was praying or reciting aloud in the middle of the room. our presence did not interrupt him, nor even incommode him or modify his fervor. ten or twelve feet in front of him was the idol, a small figure in a sitting posture. it had the pinkish look of a wax doll, but lacked the doll's roundness of limb and approximation to correctness of form and justness of proportion. mr. gandhi explained every thing to us. he was delegate to the chicago fair congress of religions. it was lucidly done, in masterly english, but in time it faded from me, and now i have nothing left of that episode but an impression: a dim idea of a religious belief clothed in subtle intellectual forms, lofty and clean, barren of fleshly grossnesses; and with this another dim impression which connects that intellectual system somehow with that crude image, that inadequate idol --how, i do not know. properly they do not seem to belong together. apparently the idol symbolized a person who had become a saint or a god through accessions of steadily augmenting holiness acquired through a series of reincarnations and promotions extending over many ages; and was now at last a saint and qualified to vicariously receive worship and transmit it to heaven's chancellery. was that it? and thence we went to mr. premchand roychand's bungalow, in lovelane, byculla, where an indian prince was to receive a deputation of the jain community who desired to congratulate him upon a high honor lately conferred upon him by his sovereign, victoria, empress of india. she had made him a knight of the order of the star of india. it would seem that even the grandest indian prince is glad to add the modest title "sir" to his ancient native grandeurs, and is willing to do valuable service to win it. he will remit taxes liberally, and will spend money freely upon the betterment of the condition of his subjects, if there is a knighthood to be gotten by it. and he will also do good work and a deal of it to get a gun added to the salute allowed him by the british government. every year the empress distributes knighthoods and adds guns for public services done by native princes. the salute of a small prince is three or four guns; princes of greater consequence have salutes that run higher and higher, gun by gun,--oh, clear away up to eleven; possibly more, but i did not hear of any above eleven-gun princes. i was told that when a four-gun prince gets a gun added, he is pretty troublesome for a while, till the novelty wears off, for he likes the music, and keeps hunting up pretexts to get himself saluted. it may be that supremely grand folk, like the nyzam of hyderabad and the gaikwar of baroda, have more than eleven guns, but i don't know. when we arrived at the bungalow, the large hall on the ground floor was already about full, and carriages were still flowing into the grounds. the company present made a fine show, an exhibition of human fireworks, so to speak, in the matters of costume and comminglings of brilliant color. the variety of form noticeable in the display of turbans was remarkable. we were told that the explanation of this was, that this jain delegation was drawn from many parts of india, and that each man wore the turban that was in vogue in his own region. this diversity of turbans made a beautiful effect. i could have wished to start a rival exhibition there, of christian hats and clothes. i would have cleared one side of the room of its indian splendors and repacked the space with christians drawn from america, england, and the colonies, dressed in the hats and habits of now, and of twenty and forty and fifty years ago. it would have been a hideous exhibition, a thoroughly devilish spectacle. then there would have been the added disadvantage of the white complexion. it is not an unbearably unpleasant complexion when it keeps to itself, but when it comes into competition with masses of brown and black the fact is betrayed that it is endurable only because we are used to it. nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare. how rare, one may learn by walking down a street in paris, new york, or london on a week-day particularly an unfashionable street--and keeping count of the satisfactory complexions encountered in the course of a mile. where dark complexions are massed, they make the whites look bleached-out, unwholesome, and sometimes frankly ghastly. i could notice this as a boy, down south in the slavery days before the war. the splendid black satin skin of the south african zulus of durban seemed to me to come very close to perfection. i can see those zulus yet--'ricksha athletes waiting in front of the hotel for custom; handsome and intensely black creatures, moderately clothed in loose summer stuffs whose snowy whiteness made the black all the blacker by contrast. keeping that group in my mind, i can compare those complexions with the white ones which are streaming past this london window now: a lady. complexion, new parchment. another lady. complexion, old parchment. another. pink and white, very fine. man. grayish skin, with purple areas. man. unwholesome fish-belly skin. girl. sallow face, sprinkled with freckles. old woman. face whitey-gray. young butcher. face a general red flush. jaundiced man--mustard yellow. elderly lady. colorless skin, with two conspicuous moles. elderly man--a drinker. boiled-cauliflower nose in a flabby face veined with purple crinklings. healthy young gentleman. fine fresh complexion. sick young man. his face a ghastly white. no end of people whose skins are dull and characterless modifications of the tint which we miscall white. some of these faces are pimply; some exhibit other signs of diseased blood; some show scars of a tint out of a harmony with the surrounding shades of color. the white man's complexion makes no concealments. it can't. it seemed to have been designed as a catch-all for everything that can damage it. ladies have to paint it, and powder it, and cosmetic it, and diet it with arsenic, and enamel it, and be always enticing it, and persuading it, and pestering it, and fussing at it, to make it beautiful; and they do not succeed. but these efforts show what they think of the natural complexion, as distributed. as distributed it needs these helps. the complexion which they try to counterfeit is one which nature restricts to the few--to the very few. to ninety-nine persons she gives a bad complexion, to the hundredth a good one. the hundredth can keep it--how long? ten years, perhaps. the advantage is with the zulu, i think. he starts with a beautiful complexion, and it will last him through. and as for the indian brown --firm, smooth, blemishless, pleasant and restful to the eye, afraid of no color, harmonizing with all colors and adding a grace to them all--i think there is no sort of chance for the average white complexion against that rich and perfect tint. to return to the bungalow. the most gorgeous costume present were worn by some children. they seemed to blaze, so bright were the colors, and so brilliant the jewels strum over the rich materials. these children were professional nautch-dancers, and looked like girls, but they were boys, they got up by ones and twos and fours, and danced and sang to an accompaniment of weird music. their posturings and gesturings were elaborate and graceful, but their voices were stringently raspy and unpleasant, and there was a good deal of monotony about the tune. by and by there was a burst of shouts and cheers outside and the prince with his train entered in fine dramatic style. he was a stately man, he was ideally costumed, and fairly festooned with ropes of gems; some of the ropes were of pearls, some were of uncut great emeralds--emeralds renowned in bombay for their quality and value. their size was marvelous, and enticing to the eye, those rocks. a boy--a princeling --was with the prince, and he also was a radiant exhibition. the ceremonies were not tedious. the prince strode to his throne with the port and majesty--and the sternness--of a julius caesar coming to receive and receipt for a back-country kingdom and have it over and get out, and no fooling. there was a throne for the young prince, too, and the two sat there, side by side, with their officers grouped at either hand and most accurately and creditably reproducing the pictures which one sees in the books--pictures which people in the prince's line of business have been furnishing ever since solomon received the queen of sheba and showed her his things. the chief of the jain delegation read his paper of congratulations, then pushed it into a beautifully engraved silver cylinder, which was delivered with ceremony into the prince's hands and at once delivered by him without ceremony into the hands of an officer. i will copy the address here. it is interesting, as showing what an indian prince's subject may have opportunity to thank him for in these days of modern english rule, as contrasted with what his ancestor would have given them opportunity to thank him for a century and a half ago--the days of freedom unhampered by english interference. a century and a half ago an address of thanks could have been put into small space. it would have thanked the prince-- . for not slaughtering too many of his people upon mere caprice; . for not stripping them bare by sudden and arbitrary tax levies, and bringing famine upon them; . for not upon empty pretext destroying the rich and seizing their property; . for not killing, blinding, imprisoning, or banishing the relatives of the royal house to protect the throne from possible plots; . for not betraying the subject secretly, for a bribe, into the hands of bands of professional thugs, to be murdered and robbed in the prince's back lot. those were rather common princely industries in the old times, but they and some others of a harsh sort ceased long ago under english rule. better industries have taken their place, as this address from the jain community will show: "your highness,--we the undersigned members of the jain community of bombay have the pleasure to approach your highness with the expression of our heartfelt congratulations on the recent conference on your highness of the knighthood of the most exalted order of the star of india. ten years ago we had the pleasure and privilege of welcoming your highness to this city under circumstances which have made a memorable epoch in the history of your state, for had it not been for a generous and reasonable spirit that your highness displayed in the negotiations between the palitana durbar and the jain community, the conciliatory spirit that animated our people could not have borne fruit. that was the first step in your highness's administration, and it fitly elicited the praise of the jain community, and of the bombay government. a decade of your highness's administration, combined with the abilities, training, and acquirements that your highness brought to bear upon it, has justly earned for your highness the unique and honourable distinction--the knighthood of the most exalted order of the star of india, which we understand your highness is the first to enjoy among chiefs of your, highness's rank and standing. and we assure your highness that for this mark of honour that has been conferred on you by her most gracious majesty, the queen-empress, we feel no less proud than your highness. establishment of commercial factories, schools, hospitals, etc., by your highness in your state has marked your highness's career during these ten years, and we trust that your highness will be spared to rule over your people with wisdom and foresight, and foster the many reforms that your highness has been pleased to introduce in your state. we again offer your highness our warmest felicitations for the honour that has been conferred on you. we beg to remain your highness's obedient servants." factories, schools, hospitals, reforms. the prince propagates that kind of things in the modern times, and gets knighthood and guns for it. after the address the prince responded with snap and brevity; spoke a moment with half a dozen guests in english, and with an official or two in a native tongue; then the garlands were distributed as usual, and the function ended. chapter xlii. each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others--his last breath. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. toward midnight, that night, there was another function. this was a hindoo wedding--no, i think it was a betrothal ceremony. always before, we had driven through streets that were multitudinous and tumultuous with picturesque native life, but now there was nothing of that. we seemed to move through a city of the dead. there was hardly a suggestion of life in those still and vacant streets. even the crows were silent. but everywhere on the ground lay sleeping natives-hundreds and hundreds. they lay stretched at full length and tightly wrapped in blankets, beads and all. their attitude and their rigidity counterfeited death. the plague was not in bombay then, but it is devastating the city now. the shops are deserted, now, half of the people have fled, and of the remainder the smitten perish by shoals every day. no doubt the city looks now in the daytime as it looked then at night. when we had pierced deep into the native quarter and were threading its narrow dim lanes, we had to go carefully, for men were stretched asleep all about and there was hardly room to drive between them. and every now and then a swarm of rats would scamper across past the horses' feet in the vague light--the forbears of the rats that are carrying the plague from house to house in bombay now. the shops were but sheds, little booths open to the street; and the goods had been removed, and on the counters families were sleeping, usually with an oil lamp present. recurrent dead watches, it looked like. but at last we turned a corner and saw a great glare of light ahead. it was the home of the bride, wrapped in a perfect conflagration of illuminations,--mainly gas-work designs, gotten up specially for the occasion. within was abundance of brilliancy--flames, costumes, colors, decorations, mirrors--it was another aladdin show. the bride was a trim and comely little thing of twelve years, dressed as we would dress a boy, though more expensively than we should do it, of course. she moved about very much at her ease, and stopped and talked with the guests and allowed her wedding jewelry to be examined. it was very fine. particularly a rope of great diamonds, a lovely thing to look at and handle. it had a great emerald hanging to it. the bridegroom was not present. he was having betrothal festivities of his own at his father's house. as i understood it, he and the bride were to entertain company every night and nearly all night for a week or more, then get married, if alive. both of the children were a little elderly, as brides and grooms go, in india--twelve; they ought to have been married a year or two sooner; still to a, stranger twelve seems quite young enough. a while after midnight a couple of celebrated and high-priced nautch-girls appeared in the gorgeous place, and danced and sang. with them were men who played upon strange instruments which made uncanny noises of a sort to make one's flesh creep. one of these instruments was a pipe, and to its music the girls went through a performance which represented snake charming. it seemed a doubtful sort of music to charm anything with, but a native gentleman assured me that snakes like it and will come out of their holes and listen to it with every evidence of refreshment and gratitude. he said that at an entertainment in his grounds once, the pipe brought out half a dozen snakes, and the music had to be stopped before they would be persuaded to go. nobody wanted their company, for they were bold, familiar, and dangerous; but no one would kill them, of course, for it is sinful for a hindoo to kill any kind of a creature. we withdrew from the festivities at two in the morning. another picture, then--but it has lodged itself in my memory rather as a stage-scene than as a reality. it is of a porch and short flight of steps crowded with dark faces and ghostly-white draperies flooded with the strong glare from the dazzling concentration of illuminations; and midway of the steps one conspicuous figure for accent--a turbaned giant, with a name according to his size: rao bahadur baskirao balinkanje pitale, vakeel to his highness the gaikwar of baroda. without him the picture would not have been complete; and if his name had been merely smith, he wouldn't have answered. close at hand on house-fronts on both sides of the narrow street were illuminations of a kind commonly employed by the natives --scores of glass tumblers (containing tapers) fastened a few in inches apart all over great latticed frames, forming starry constellations which showed out vividly against their black back grounds. as we drew away into the distance down the dim lanes the illuminations gathered together into a single mass, and glowed out of the enveloping darkness like a sun. then again the deep silence, the skurrying rats, the dim forms stretched every-where on the ground; and on either hand those open booths counterfeiting sepulchres, with counterfeit corpses sleeping motionless in the flicker of the counterfeit death lamps. and now, a year later, when i read the cablegrams i seem to be reading of what i myself partly saw--saw before it happened--in a prophetic dream, as it were. one cablegram says, "business in the native town is about suspended. except the wailing and the tramp of the funerals. there is but little life or movement. the closed shops exceed in number those that remain open." another says that , of the people have fled the city and are carrying the plague to the country. three days later comes the news, "the population is reduced by half." the refugees have carried the disease to karachi; " cases, deaths." a day or two later, " fresh cases, all of which proved fatal." the plague carries with it a terror which no other disease can excite; for of all diseases known to men it is the deadliest--by far the deadliest. "fifty-two fresh cases--all fatal." it is the black death alone that slays like that. we can all imagine, after a fashion, the desolation of a plague-stricken city, and the stupor of stillness broken at intervals by distant bursts of wailing, marking the passing of funerals, here and there and yonder, but i suppose it is not possible for us to realize to ourselves the nightmare of dread and fear that possesses the living who are present in such a place and cannot get away. that half million fled from bombay in a wild panic suggests to us something of what they were feeling, but perhaps not even they could realize what the half million were feeling whom they left stranded behind to face the stalking horror without chance of escape. kinglake was in cairo many years ago during an epidemic of the black death, and he has imagined the terrors that creep into a man's heart at such a time and follow him until they themselves breed the fatal sign in the armpit, and then the delirium with confused images, and home-dreams, and reeling billiard-tables, and then the sudden blank of death: "to the contagionist, filled as he is with the dread of final causes, having no faith in destiny, nor in the fixed will of god, and with none of the devil-may-care indifference which might stand him instead of creeds--to such one, every rag that shivers in the breeze of a plague-stricken city has this sort of sublimity. if by any terrible ordinance he be forced to venture forth, be sees death dangling from every sleeve; and, as he creeps forward, he poises his shuddering limbs between the imminent jacket that is stabbing at his right elbow and the murderous pelisse that threatens to mow him clean down as it sweeps along on his left. but most of all he dreads that which most of all he should love--the touch of a woman's dress; for mothers and wives, hurrying forth on kindly errands from the bedsides of the dying, go slouching along through the streets more willfully and less courteously than the men. for a while it may be that the caution of the poor levantine may enable him to avoid contact, but sooner or later, perhaps, the dreaded chance arrives; that bundle of linen, with the dark tearful eyes at the top of it, that labors along with the voluptuous clumsiness of grisi --she has touched the poor levantine with the hem of her sleeve! from that dread moment his peace is gone; his mind for ever hanging upon the fatal touch invites the blow which he fears; he watches for the symptoms of plague so carefully, that sooner or later they come in truth. the parched mouth is a sign--his mouth is parched; the throbbing brain--his brain does throb; the rapid pulse--he touches his own wrist (for he dares not ask counsel of any man lest he be deserted), he touches his wrist, and feels how his frighted blood goes galloping out of his heart. there is nothing but the fatal swelling that is wanting to make his sad conviction complete; immediately, he has an odd feel under the arm--no pain, but a little straining of the skin; he would to god it were his fancy that were strong enough to give him that sensation; this is the worst of all. it now seems to him that he could be happy and contented with his parched mouth, and his throbbing brain, and his rapid pulse, if only he could know that there were no swelling under the left arm; but dares he try?--in a moment of calmness and deliberation he dares not; but when for a while he has writhed under the torture of suspense, a sudden strength of will drives him to seek and know his fate; he touches the gland, and finds the skin sane and sound but under the cuticle there lies a small lump like a pistol-bullet, that moves as he pushes it. oh! but is this for all certainty, is this the sentence of death? feel the gland of the other arm. there is not the same lump exactly, yet something a little like it. have not some people glands naturally enlarged?--would to heaven he were one! so he does for himself the work of the plague, and when the angel of death thus courted does indeed and in truth come, he has only to finish that which has been so well begun; he passes his fiery hand over the brain of the victim, and lets him rave for a season, but all chance-wise, of people and things once dear, or of people and things indifferent. once more the poor fellow is back at his home in fair provence, and sees the sundial that stood in his childhood's garden--sees his mother, and the long-since forgotten face of that little dear sister--(he sees her, he says, on a sunday morning, for all the church bells are ringing); he looks up and down through the universe, and owns it well piled with bales upon bales of cotton, and cotton eternal--so much so that he feels--he knows--he swears he could make that winning hazard, if the billiard-table would not slant upwards, and if the cue were a cue worth playing with; but it is not--it's a cue that won't move--his own arm won't move--in short, there's the devil to pay in the brain of the poor levantine; and perhaps, the next night but one he becomes the 'life and the soul' of some squalling jackal family, who fish him out by the foot from his shallow and sandy grave." chapter xliii. hunger is the handmaid of genius --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. one day during our stay in bombay there was a criminal trial of a most interesting sort, a terribly realistic chapter out of the "arabian nights," a strange mixture of simplicities and pieties and murderous practicalities, which brought back the forgotten days of thuggee and made them live again; in fact, even made them believable. it was a case where a young girl had been assassinated for the sake of her trifling ornaments, things not worth a laborer's day's wages in america. this thing could have been done in many other countries, but hardly with the cold business-like depravity, absence of fear, absence of caution, destitution of the sense of horror, repentance, remorse, exhibited in this case. elsewhere the murderer would have done his crime secretly, by night, and without witnesses; his fears would have allowed him no peace while the dead body was in his neighborhood; he would not have rested until he had gotten it safe out of the way and hidden as effectually as he could hide it. but this indian murderer does his deed in the full light of day, cares nothing for the society of witnesses, is in no way incommoded by the presence of the corpse, takes his own time about disposing of it, and the whole party are so indifferent, so phlegmatic, that they take their regular sleep as if nothing was happening and no halters hanging over them; and these five bland people close the episode with a religious service. the thing reads like a meadows-taylor thug-tale of half a century ago, as may be seen by the official report of the trial: "at the mazagon police court yesterday, superintendent nolan again charged tookaram suntoo savat baya, woman, her daughter krishni, and gopal yithoo bhanayker, before mr. phiroze hoshang dastur, fourth presidency magistrate, under sections and of the code, with having on the night of the th of december last murdered a hindoo girl named cassi, aged , by strangulation, in the room of a chawl at jakaria bunder, on the sewriroad, and also with aiding and abetting each other in the commission of the offense. "mr. f. a. little, public prosecutor, conducted the case on behalf of the crown, the accused being undefended. "mr. little applied under the provisions of the criminal procedure code to tender pardon to one of the accused, krishni, woman, aged , on her undertaking to make a true and full statement of facts under which the deceased girl cassi was murdered. "the magistrate having granted the public prosecutor's application, the accused krishni went into the witness-box, and, on being examined by mr. little, made the following confession:--i am a mill-hand employed at the jubilee mill. i recollect the day (tuesday); on which the body of the deceased cassi was found. previous to that i attended the mill for half a day, and then returned home at in the afternoon, when i saw five persons in the house, viz.: the first accused tookaram, who is my paramour, my mother, the second accused baya, the accused gopal, and two guests named ramji daji and annaji gungaram. tookaram rented the room of the chawl situated at jakaria bunder-road from its owner, girdharilal radhakishan, and in that room i, my paramour, tookaram, and his younger brother, yesso mahadhoo, live. since his arrival in bombay from his native country yesso came and lived with us. when i returned from the mill on the afternoon of that day, i saw the two guests seated on a cot in the veranda, and a few minutes after the accused gopal came and took his seat by their side, while i and my mother were seated inside the room. tookaram, who had gone out to fetch some 'pan' and betelnuts, on his return home had brought the two guests with him. after returning home he gave them 'pan supari'. while they were eating it my mother came out of the room and inquired of one of the guests, ramji, what had happened to his foot, when he replied that he had tried many remedies, but they had done him no good. my mother then took some rice in her hand and prophesied that the disease which ramji was suffering from would not be cured until he returned to his native country. in the meantime the deceased casi came from the direction of an out-house, and stood in front on the threshold of our room with a 'lota' in her hand. tookaram then told his two guests to leave the room, and they then went up the steps towards the quarry. after the guests had gone away, tookaram seized the deceased, who had come into the room, and he afterwards put a waistband around her, and tied her to a post which supports a loft. after doing this, he pressed the girl's throat, and, having tied her mouth with the 'dhotur' (now shown in court), fastened it to the post. having killed the girl, tookaram removed her gold head ornament and a gold 'putlee', and also took charge of her 'lota'. besides these two ornaments cassi had on her person ear-studs a nose-ring, some silver toe-rings, two necklaces, a pair of silver anklets and bracelets. tookaram afterwards tried to remove the silver amulets, the ear-studs, and the nose-ring; but he failed in his attempt. while he was doing so, i, my mother, and gopal were present. after removing the two gold ornaments, he handed them over to gopal, who was at the time standing near me. when he killed cassi, tookaram threatened to strangle me also if i informed any one of this. gopal and myself were then standing at the door of our room, and we both were threatened by tookaram. my mother, baya, had seized the legs of the deceased at the time she was killed, and whilst she was being tied to the post. cassi then made a noise. tookaram and my mother took part in killing the girl. after the murder her body was wrapped up in a mattress and kept on the loft over the door of our room. when cassi was strangled, the door of the room was fastened from the inside by tookaram. this deed was committed shortly after my return home from work in the mill. tookaram put the body of the deceased in the mattress, and, after it was left on the loft, he went to have his head shaved by a barber named sambhoo raghoo, who lives only one door away from me. my mother and myself then remained in the possession of the information. i was slapped and threatened by my paramour, tookaram, and that was the only reason why i did not inform any one at that time. when i told tookaram that i would give information of the occurrence, he slapped me. the accused gopal was asked by tookaram to go back to his room, and he did so, taking away with him the two gold ornaments and the 'lota'. yesso mahadhoo, a brother-in-law of tookaram, came to the house and asked taokaram why he was washing, the water-pipe being just opposite. tookaram replied that he was washing his dhotur, as a fowl had polluted it. about o'clock of the evening of that day my mother gave me three pice and asked me to buy a cocoanut, and i gave the money to yessoo, who went and fetched a cocoanut and some betel leaves. when yessoo and others were in the room i was bathing, and, after i finished my bath, my mother took the cocoanut and the betel leaves from yessoo, and we five went to the sea. the party consisted of tookaram, my mother, yessoo, tookaram's younger brother, and myself. on reaching the seashore, my mother made the offering to the sea, and prayed to be pardoned for what we had done. before we went to the sea, some one came to inquire after the girl cassi. the police and other people came to make these inquiries both before and after we left the house for the seashore. the police questioned my mother about the girl, and she replied that cassi had come to her door, but had left. the next day the police questioned tookaram, and he, too, gave a similar reply. this was said the same night when the search was made for the girl. after the offering was made to the sea, we partook of the cocoanut and returned home, when my mother gave me some food; but tookaram did not partake of any food that night. after dinner i and my mother slept inside the room, and tookaram slept on a cot near his brother-in-law, yessoo mahadhoo, just outside the door. that was not the usual place where tookaram slept. he usually slept inside the room. the body of the deceased remained on the loft when i went to sleep. the room in which we slept was locked, and i heard that my paramour, tookaram, was restless outside. about o'clock the following morning tookaram knocked at the door, when both myself and my mother opened it. he then told me to go to the steps leading to the quarry, and see if any one was about. those steps lead to a stable, through which we go to the quarry at the back of the compound. when i got to the steps i saw no one there. tookaram asked me if any one was there, and i replied that i could see no one about. he then took the body of the deceased from the loft, and having wrapped it up in his saree, asked me to accompany him to the steps of the quarry, and i did so. the 'saree' now produced here was the same. besides the 'saree', there was also a 'cholee' on the body. he then carried the body in his arms, and went up the steps, through the stable, and then to the right hand towards a sahib's bungalow, where tookaram placed the body near a wall. all the time i and my mother were with him. when the body was taken down, yessoo was lying on the cot. after depositing the body under the wall, we all returned home, and soon after a.m. the police again came and took tookaram away. about an hour after they returned and took me and my mother away. we were questioned about it, when i made a statement. two hours later i was taken to the room, and i pointed out this waistband, the 'dhotur', the mattress, and the wooden post to superintendent nolan and inspectors roberts and rashanali, in the presence of my mother and tookaram. tookaram killed the girl cassi for her ornaments, which he wanted for the girl to whom he was shortly going to be married. the body was found in the same place where it was deposited by tookaram." the criminal side of the native has always been picturesque, always readable. the thuggee and one or two other particularly outrageous features of it have been suppressed by the english, but there is enough of it left to keep it darkly interesting. one finds evidence of these survivals in the newspapers. macaulay has a light-throwing passage upon this matter in his great historical sketch of warren hastings, where he is describing some effects which followed the temporary paralysis of hastings' powerful government brought about by sir philip francis and his party: "the natives considered hastings as a fallen man; and they acted after their kind. some of our readers may have seen, in india, a cloud of crows pecking a sick vulture to death--no bad type of what happens in that country as often as fortune deserts one who has been great and dreaded. in an instant all the sycophants, who had lately been ready to lie for him, to forge for him, to pander for him, to poison for him, hasten to purchase the favor of his victorious enemies by accusing him. an indian government has only to let it be understood that it wishes a particular man to be ruined, and in twenty-four hours it will be furnished with grave charges, supported by depositions so full and circumstantial that any person unaccustomed to asiatic mendacity would regard them as decisive. it is well if the signature of the destined victim is not counterfeited at the foot of some illegal compact, and if some treasonable paper is not slipped into a hiding-place in his house." that was nearly a century and a quarter ago. an article in one of the chief journals of india (the pioneer) shows that in some respects the native of to-day is just what his ancestor was then. here are niceties of so subtle and delicate a sort that they lift their breed of rascality to a place among the fine arts, and almost entitle it to respect: "the records of the indian courts might certainly be relied upon to prove that swindlers as a class in the east come very close to, if they do not surpass, in brilliancy of execution and originality of design the most expert of their fraternity in europe and america. india in especial is the home of forgery. there are some particular districts which are noted as marts for the finest specimens of the forger's handiwork. the business is carried on by firms who possess stores of stamped papers to suit every emergency. they habitually lay in a store of fresh stamped papers every year, and some of the older and more thriving houses can supply documents for the past forty years, bearing the proper water-mark and possessing the genuine appearance of age. other districts have earned notoriety for skilled perjury, a pre-eminence that excites a respectful admiration when one thinks of the universal prevalence of the art, and persons desirous of succeeding in false suits are ready to pay handsomely to avail themselves of the services of these local experts as witnesses." various instances illustrative of the methods of these swindlers are given. they exhibit deep cunning and total depravity on the part of the swindler and his pals, and more obtuseness on the part of the victim than one would expect to find in a country where suspicion of your neighbor must surely be one of the earliest things learned. the favorite subject is the young fool who has just come into a fortune and is trying to see how poor a use he can put it to. i will quote one example: "sometimes another form of confidence trick is adopted, which is invariably successful. the particular pigeon is spotted, and, his acquaintance having been made, he is encouraged in every form of vice. when the friendship is thoroughly established, the swindler remarks to the young man that he has a brother who has asked him to lend him rs. , . the swindler says he has the money and would lend it; but, as the borrower is his brother, he cannot charge interest. so he proposes that he should hand the dupe the money, and the latter should lend it to the swindler's brother, exacting a heavy pre-payment of interest which, it is pointed out, they may equally enjoy in dissipation. the dupe sees no objection, and on the appointed day receives rs. , from the swindler, which he hands over to the confederate. the latter is profuse in his thanks, and executes a promissory note for rs. , , payable to bearer. the swindler allows the scheme to remain quiescent for a time, and then suggests that, as the money has not been repaid and as it would be unpleasant to sue his brother, it would be better to sell the note in the bazaar. the dupe hands the note over, for the money he advanced was not his, and, on being informed that it would be necessary to have his signature on the back so as to render the security negotiable, he signs without any hesitation. the swindler passes it on to confederates, and the latter employ a respectable firm of solicitors to ask the dupe if his signature is genuine. he admits it at once, and his fate is sealed. a suit is filed by a confederate against the dupe, two accomplices being made co-defendants. they admit their signatures as indorsers, and the one swears he bought the note for value from the dupe. the latter has no defense, for no court would believe the apparently idle explanation of the manner in which he came to endorse the note." there is only one india! it is the only country that has a monopoly of grand and imposing specialties. when another country has a remarkable thing, it cannot have it all to itself--some other country has a duplicate. but india--that is different. its marvels are its own; the patents cannot be infringed; imitations are not possible. and think of the size of them, the majesty of them, the weird and outlandish character of the most of them! there is the plague, the black death: india invented it; india is the cradle of that mighty birth. the car of juggernaut was india's invention. so was the suttee; and within the time of men still living eight hundred widows willingly, and, in fact, rejoicingly, burned themselves to death on the bodies of their dead husbands in a single year. eight hundred would do it this year if the british government would let them. famine is india's specialty. elsewhere famines are inconsequential incidents--in india they are devastating cataclysms; in one case they annihilate hundreds; in the other, millions. india had , , gods, and worships them all. in religion all other countries are paupers; india is the only millionaire. with her everything is on a giant scale--even her poverty; no other country can show anything to compare with it. and she has been used to wealth on so vast a scale that she has to shorten to single words the expressions describing great sums. she describes , with one word --a 'lahk'; she describes ten millions with one word--a 'crore'. in the bowels of the granite mountains she has patiently carved out dozens of vast temples, and made them glorious with sculptured colonnades and stately groups of statuary, and has adorned the eternal walls with noble paintings. she has built fortresses of such magnitude that the show-strongholds of the rest of the world are but modest little things by comparison; palaces that are wonders for rarity of materials, delicacy and beauty of workmanship, and for cost; and one tomb which men go around the globe to see. it takes eighty nations, speaking eighty languages, to people her, and they number three hundred millions. on top of all this she is the mother and home of that wonder of wonders caste--and of that mystery of mysteries, the satanic brotherhood of the thugs. india had the start of the whole world in the beginning of things. she had the first civilization; she had the first accumulation of material wealth; she was populous with deep thinkers and subtle intellects; she had mines, and woods, and a fruitful soil. it would seem as if she should have kept the lead, and should be to-day not the meek dependent of an alien master, but mistress of the world, and delivering law and command to every tribe and nation in it. but, in truth, there was never any possibility of such supremacy for her. if there had been but one india and one language--but there were eighty of them! where there are eighty nations and several hundred governments, fighting and quarreling must be the common business of life; unity of purpose and policy are impossible; out of such elements supremacy in the world cannot come. even caste itself could have had the defeating effect of a multiplicity of tongues, no doubt; for it separates a people into layers, and layers, and still other layers, that have no community of feeling with each other; and in such a condition of things as that, patriotism can have no healthy growth. it was the division of the country into so many states and nations that made thuggee possible and prosperous. it is difficult to realize the situation. but perhaps one may approximate it by imagining the states of our union peopled by separate nations, speaking separate languages, with guards and custom-houses strung along all frontiers, plenty of interruptions for travelers and traders, interpreters able to handle all the languages very rare or non-existent, and a few wars always going on here and there and yonder as a further embarrassment to commerce and excursioning. it would make intercommunication in a measure ungeneral. india had eighty languages, and more custom-houses than cats. no clever man with the instinct of a highway robber could fail to notice what a chance for business was here offered. india was full of clever men with the highwayman instinct, and so, quite naturally, the brotherhood of the thugs came into being to meet the long-felt want. how long ago that was nobody knows-centuries, it is supposed. one of the chiefest wonders connected with it was the success with which it kept its secret. the english trader did business in india two hundred years and more before he ever heard of it; and yet it was assassinating its thousands all around him every year, the whole time. chapter xliv. the old saw says, "let a sleeping dog lie." right.... still, when there is much at stake it is better to get a newspaper to do it. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. from diary: january . i learned of an official thug-book the other day. i was not aware before that there was such a thing. i am allowed the temporary use of it. we are making preparations for travel. mainly the preparations are purchases of bedding. this is to be used in sleeping berths in the trains; in private houses sometimes; and in nine-tenths of the hotels. it is not realizable; and yet it is true. it is a survival; an apparently unnecessary thing which in some strange way has outlived the conditions which once made it necessary. it comes down from a time when the railway and the hotel did not exist; when the occasional white traveler went horseback or by bullock-cart, and stopped over night in the small dak-bungalow provided at easy distances by the government--a shelter, merely, and nothing more. he had to carry bedding along, or do without. the dwellings of the english residents are spacious and comfortable and commodiously furnished, and surely it must be an odd sight to see half a dozen guests come filing into such a place and dumping blankets and pillows here and there and everywhere. but custom makes incongruous things congruous. one buys the bedding, with waterproof hold-all for it at almost any shop --there is no difficulty about it. january . what a spectacle the railway station was, at train-time! it was a very large station, yet when we arrived it seemed as if the whole world was present--half of it inside, the other half outside, and both halves, bearing mountainous head-loads of bedding and other freight, trying simultaneously to pass each other, in opposing floods, in one narrow door. these opposing floods were patient, gentle, long-suffering natives, with whites scattered among them at rare intervals; and wherever a white man's native servant appeared, that native seemed to have put aside his natural gentleness for the time and invested himself with the white man's privilege of making a way for himself by promptly shoving all intervening black things out of it. in these exhibitions of authority satan was scandalous. he was probably a thug in one of his former incarnations. inside the great station, tides upon tides of rainbow-costumed natives swept along, this way and that, in massed and bewildering confusion, eager, anxious, belated, distressed; and washed up to the long trains and flowed into them with their packs and bundles, and disappeared, followed at once by the next wash, the next wave. and here and there, in the midst of this hurly-burly, and seemingly undisturbed by it, sat great groups of natives on the bare stone floor,--young, slender brown women, old, gray wrinkled women, little soft brown babies, old men, young men, boys; all poor people, but all the females among them, both big and little, bejeweled with cheap and showy nose-rings, toe-rings, leglets, and armlets, these things constituting all their wealth, no doubt. these silent crowds sat there with their humble bundles and baskets and small household gear about them, and patiently waited--for what? a train that was to start at some time or other during the day or night! they hadn't timed themselves well, but that was no matter--the thing had been so ordered from on high, therefore why worry? there was plenty of time, hours and hours of it, and the thing that was to happen would happen --there was no hurrying it. the natives traveled third class, and at marvelously cheap rates. they were packed and crammed into cars that held each about fifty; and it was said that often a brahmin of the highest caste was thus brought into personal touch, and consequent defilement, with persons of the lowest castes--no doubt a very shocking thing if a body could understand it and properly appreciate it. yes, a brahmin who didn't own a rupee and couldn't borrow one, might have to touch elbows with a rich hereditary lord of inferior caste, inheritor of an ancient title a couple of yards long, and he would just have to stand it; for if either of the two was allowed to go in the cars where the sacred white people were, it probably wouldn't be the august poor brahmin. there was an immense string of those third-class cars, for the natives travel by hordes; and a weary hard night of it the occupants would have, no doubt. when we reached our car, satan and barney had already arrived there with their train of porters carrying bedding and parasols and cigar boxes, and were at work. we named him barney for short; we couldn't use his real name, there wasn't time. it was a car that promised comfort; indeed, luxury. yet the cost of it --well, economy could no further go; even in france; not even in italy. it was built of the plainest and cheapest partially-smoothed boards, with a coating of dull paint on them, and there was nowhere a thought of decoration. the floor was bare, but would not long remain so when the dust should begin to fly. across one end of the compartment ran a netting for the accommodation of hand-baggage; at the other end was a door which would shut, upon compulsion, but wouldn't stay shut; it opened into a narrow little closet which had a wash-bowl in one end of it, and a place to put a towel, in case you had one with you--and you would be sure to have towels, because you buy them with the bedding, knowing that the railway doesn't furnish them. on each side of the car, and running fore and aft, was a broad leather-covered sofa to sit on in the day and sleep on at night. over each sofa hung, by straps, a wide, flat, leather-covered shelf--to sleep on. in the daytime you can hitch it up against the wall, out of the way--and then you have a big unencumbered and most comfortable room to spread out in. no car in any country is quite its equal for comfort (and privacy) i think. for usually there are but two persons in it; and even when there are four there is but little sense of impaired privacy. our own cars at home can surpass the railway world in all details but that one: they have no cosiness; there are too many people together. at the foot of each sofa was a side-door, for entrance and exit. along the whole length of the sofa on each side of the car ran a row of large single-plate windows, of a blue tint-blue to soften the bitter glare of the sun and protect one's eyes from torture. these could be let down out of the way when one wanted the breeze. in the roof were two oil lamps which gave a light strong enough to read by; each had a green-cloth attachment by which it could be covered when the light should be no longer needed. while we talked outside with friends, barney and satan placed the hand-baggage, books, fruits, and soda-bottles in the racks, and the hold-alls and heavy baggage in the closet, hung the overcoats and sun-helmets and towels on the hooks, hoisted the two bed-shelves up out of the way, then shouldered their bedding and retired to the third class. now then, you see what a handsome, spacious, light, airy, homelike place it was, wherein to walk up and down, or sit and write, or stretch out and read and smoke. a central door in the forward end of the compartment opened into a similar compartment. it was occupied by my wife and daughter. about nine in the evening, while we halted a while at a station, barney and satan came and undid the clumsy big hold-alls, and spread the bedding on the sofas in both compartments--mattresses, sheets, gay coverlets, pillows, all complete; there are no chambermaids in india --apparently it was an office that was never heard of. then they closed the communicating door, nimbly tidied up our place, put the night-clothing on the beds and the slippers under them, then returned to their own quarters. january . it was novel and pleasant, and i stayed awake as long as i could, to enjoy it, and to read about those strange people the thugs. in my sleep they remained with me, and tried to strangle me. the leader of the gang was that giant hindoo who was such a picture in the strong light when we were leaving those hindoo betrothal festivities at two o'clock in the morning--rao bahadur baskirao balinkanje pitale, vakeel to the gaikwar of baroda. it was he that brought me the invitation from his master to go to baroda and lecture to that prince--and now he was misbehaving in my dreams. but all things can happen in dreams. it is indeed as the sweet singer of michigan says--irrelevantly, of course, for the one and unfailing great quality which distinguishes her poetry from shakespeare's and makes it precious to us is its stern and simple irrelevancy: my heart was gay and happy, this was ever in my mind, there is better times a coming, and i hope some day to find myself capable of composing, it was my heart's delight to compose on a sentimental subject if it came in my mind just right. --["the sentimental song book," p. ; theme, "the author's early life," th stanza.] barroda. arrived at this morning. the dawn was just beginning to show. it was forlorn to have to turn out in a strange place at such a time, and the blinking lights in the station made it seem night still. but the gentlemen who had come to receive us were there with their servants, and they make quick work; there was no lost time. we were soon outside and moving swiftly through the soft gray light, and presently were comfortably housed--with more servants to help than we were used to, and with rather embarassingly important officials to direct them. but it was custom; they spoke ballarat english, their bearing was charming and hospitable, and so all went well. breakfast was a satisfaction. across the lawns was visible in the distance through the open window an indian well, with two oxen tramping leisurely up and down long inclines, drawing water; and out of the stillness came the suffering screech of the machinery--not quite musical, and yet soothingly melancholy and dreamy and reposeful--a wail of lost spirits, one might imagine. and commemorative and reminiscent, perhaps; for of course the thugs used to throw people down that well when they were done with them. after breakfast the day began, a sufficiently busy one. we were driven by winding roads through a vast park, with noble forests of great trees, and with tangles and jungles of lovely growths of a humbler sort; and at one place three large gray apes came out and pranced across the road--a good deal of a surprise and an unpleasant one, for such creatures belong in the menagerie, and they look artificial and out of place in a wilderness. we came to the city, by and by, and drove all through it. intensely indian, it was, and crumbly, and mouldering, and immemorially old, to all appearance. and the houses--oh, indescribably quaint and curious they were, with their fronts an elaborate lace-work of intricate and beautiful wood-carving, and now and then further adorned with rude pictures of elephants and princes and gods done in shouting colors; and all the ground floors along these cramped and narrow lanes occupied as shops --shops unbelievably small and impossibly packed with merchantable rubbish, and with nine-tenths-naked natives squatting at their work of hammering, pounding, brazing, soldering, sewing, designing, cooking, measuring out grain, grinding it, repairing idols--and then the swarm of ragged and noisy humanity under the horses' feet and everywhere, and the pervading reek and fume and smell! it was all wonderful and delightful. imagine a file of elephants marching through such a crevice of a street and scraping the paint off both sides of it with their hides. how big they must look, and how little they must make the houses look; and when the elephants are in their glittering court costume, what a contrast they must make with the humble and sordid surroundings. and when a mad elephant goes raging through, belting right and left with his trunk, how do these swarms of people get out of the way? i suppose it is a thing which happens now and then in the mad season (for elephants have a mad season). i wonder how old the town is. there are patches of building--massive structures, monuments, apparently--that are so battered and worn, and seemingly so tired and so burdened with the weight of age, and so dulled and stupefied with trying to remember things they forgot before history began, that they give one the feeling that they must have been a part of original creation. this is indeed one of the oldest of the princedoms of india, and has always been celebrated for its barbaric pomps and splendors, and for the wealth of its princes. chapter xlv. it takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart; the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. out of the town again; a long drive through open country, by winding roads among secluded villages nestling in the inviting shade of tropic vegetation, a sabbath stillness everywhere, sometimes a pervading sense of solitude, but always barefoot natives gliding by like spirits, without sound of footfall, and others in the distance dissolving away and vanishing like the creatures of dreams. now and then a string of stately camels passed by--always interesting things to look at--and they were velvet-shod by nature, and made no noise. indeed, there were no noises of any sort in this paradise. yes, once there was one, for a moment: a file of native convicts passed along in charge of an officer, and we caught the soft clink of their chains. in a retired spot, resting himself under a tree, was a holy person--a naked black fakeer, thin and skinny, and whitey-gray all over with ashes. by and by to the elephant stables, and i took a ride; but it was by request--i did not ask for it, and didn't want it; but i took it, because otherwise they would have thought i was afraid, which i was. the elephant kneels down, by command--one end of him at a time--and you climb the ladder and get into the howdah, and then he gets up, one end at a time, just as a ship gets up over a wave; and after that, as he strides monstrously about, his motion is much like a ship's motion. the mahout bores into the back of his head with a great iron prod and you wonder at his temerity and at the elephant's patience, and you think that perhaps the patience will not last; but it does, and nothing happens. the mahout talks to the elephant in a low voice all the time, and the elephant seems to understand it all and to be pleased with it; and he obeys every order in the most contented and docile way. among these twenty-five elephants were two which were larger than any i had ever seen before, and if i had thought i could learn to not be afraid, i would have taken one of them while the police were not looking. in the howdah-house there were many howdahs that were made of silver, one of gold, and one of old ivory, and equipped with cushions and canopies of rich and costly stuffs. the wardrobe of the elephants was there, too; vast velvet covers stiff and heavy with gold embroidery; and bells of silver and gold; and ropes of these metals for fastening the things on harness, so to speak; and monster hoops of massive gold for the elephant to wear on his ankles when he is out in procession on business of state. but we did not see the treasury of crown jewels, and that was a disappointment, for in mass and richness it ranks only second in india. by mistake we were taken to see the new palace instead, and we used up the last remnant of our spare time there. it was a pity, too; for the new palace is mixed modern american-european, and has not a merit except costliness. it is wholly foreign to india, and impudent and out of place. the architect has escaped. this comes of overdoing the suppression of the thugs; they had their merits. the old palace is oriental and charming, and in consonance with the country. the old palace would still be great if there were nothing of it but the spacious and lofty hall where the durbars are held. it is not a good place to lecture in, on account of the echoes, but it is a good place to hold durbars in and regulate the affairs of a kingdom, and that is what it is for. if i had it i would have a durbar every day, instead of once or twice a year. the prince is an educated gentleman. his culture is european. he has been in europe five times. people say that this is costly amusement for him, since in crossing the sea he must sometimes be obliged to drink water from vessels that are more or less public, and thus damage his caste. to get it purified again he must make pilgrimage to some renowned hindoo temples and contribute a fortune or two to them. his people are like the other hindoos, profoundly religious; and they could not be content with a master who was impure. we failed to see the jewels, but we saw the gold cannon and the silver one--they seemed to be six-pounders. they were not designed for business, but for salutes upon rare and particularly important state occasions. an ancestor of the present gaikwar had the silver one made, and a subsequent ancestor had the gold one made, in order to outdo him. this sort of artillery is in keeping with the traditions of baroda, which was of old famous for style and show. it used to entertain visiting rajahs and viceroys with tiger-fights, elephant-fights, illuminations, and elephant-processions of the most glittering and gorgeous character. it makes the circus a pale, poor thing. in the train, during a part of the return journey from baroda, we had the company of a gentleman who had with him a remarkable looking dog. i had not seen one of its kind before, as far as i could remember; though of course i might have seen one and not noticed it, for i am not acquainted with dogs, but only with cats. this dog's coat was smooth and shiny and black, and i think it had tan trimmings around the edges of the dog, and perhaps underneath. it was a long, low dog, with very short, strange legs--legs that curved inboard, something like parentheses wrong way (. indeed, it was made on the plan of a bench for length and lowness. it seemed to be satisfied, but i thought the plan poor, and structurally weak, on account of the distance between the forward supports and those abaft. with age the dog's back was likely to sag; and it seemed to me that it would have been a stronger and more practicable dog if it had had some more legs. it had not begun to sag yet, but the shape of the legs showed that the undue weight imposed upon them was beginning to tell. it had a long nose, and floppy ears that hung down, and a resigned expression of countenance. i did not like to ask what kind of a dog it was, or how it came to be deformed, for it was plain that the gentleman was very fond of it, and naturally he could be sensitive about it. from delicacy i thought it best not to seem to notice it too much. no doubt a man with a dog like that feels just as a person does who has a child that is out of true. the gentleman was not merely fond of the dog, he was also proud of it--just the same again, as a mother feels about her child when it is an idiot. i could see that he was proud of it, not-withstanding it was such a long dog and looked so resigned and pious. it had been all over the world with him, and had been pilgriming like that for years and years. it had traveled , miles by sea and rail, and had ridden in front of him on his horse , . it had a silver medal from the geographical society of great britain for its travels, and i saw it. it had won prizes in dog shows, both in india and in england--i saw them. he said its pedigree was on record in the kennel club, and that it was a well-known dog. he said a great many people in london could recognize it the moment they saw it. i did not say anything, but i did not think it anything strange; i should know that dog again, myself, yet i am not careful about noticing dogs. he said that when he walked along in london, people often stopped and looked at the dog. of course i did not say anything, for i did not want to hurt his feelings, but i could have explained to him that if you take a great long low dog like that and waddle it along the street anywhere in the world and not charge anything, people will stop and look. he was gratified because the dog took prizes. but that was nothing; if i were built like that i could take prizes myself. i wished i knew what kind of a dog it was, and what it was for, but i could not very well ask, for that would show that i did not know. not that i want a dog like that, but only to know the secret of its birth. i think he was going to hunt elephants with it, because i know, from remarks dropped by him, that he has hunted large game in india and africa, and likes it. but i think that if he tries to hunt elephants with it, he is going to be disappointed. i do not believe that it is suited for elephants. it lacks energy, it lacks force of character, it lacks bitterness. these things all show in the meekness and resignation of its expression. it would not attack an elephant, i am sure of it. it might not run if it saw one coming, but it looked to me like a dog that would sit down and pray. i wish he had told me what breed it was, if there are others; but i shall know the dog next time, and then if i can bring myself to it i will put delicacy aside and ask. if i seem strangely interested in dogs, i have a reason for it; for a dog saved me from an embarrassing position once, and that has made me grateful to these animals; and if by study i could learn to tell some of the kinds from the others, i should be greatly pleased. i only know one kind apart, yet, and that is the kind that saved me that time. i always know that kind when i meet it, and if it is hungry or lost i take care of it. the matter happened in this way it was years and years ago. i had received a note from mr. augustin daly of the fifth avenue theatre, asking me to call the next time i should be in new york. i was writing plays, in those days, and he was admiring them and trying to get me a chance to get them played in siberia. i took the first train--the early one--the one that leaves hartford at . in the morning. at new haven i bought a paper, and found it filled with glaring display-lines about a "bench-show" there. i had often heard of bench-shows, but had never felt any interest in them, because i supposed they were lectures that were not well attended. it turned out, now, that it was not that, but a dog-show. there was a double-leaded column about the king-feature of this one, which was called a saint bernard, and was worth $ , , and was known to be the largest and finest of his species in the world. i read all this with interest, because out of my school-boy readings i dimly remembered how the priests and pilgrims of st. bernard used to go out in the storms and dig these dogs out of the snowdrifts when lost and exhausted, and give them brandy and save their lives, and drag them to the monastery and restore them with gruel. also, there was a picture of this prize-dog in the paper, a noble great creature with a benignant countenance, standing by a table. he was placed in that way so that one could get a right idea of his great dimensions. you could see that he was just a shade higher than the table--indeed, a huge fellow for a dog. then there was a description which event into the details. it gave his enormous weight-- / pounds, and his length feet inches, from stem to stern-post; and his height-- feet inch, to the top of his back. the pictures and the figures so impressed me, that i could see the beautiful colossus before me, and i kept on thinking about him for the next two hours; then i reached new york, and he dropped out of my mind. in the swirl and tumult of the hotel lobby i ran across mr. daly's comedian, the late james lewis, of beloved memory, and i casually mentioned that i was going to call upon mr. daly in the evening at . he looked surprised, and said he reckoned not. for answer i handed him mr. daly's note. its substance was: "come to my private den, over the theater, where we cannot be interrupted. and come by the back way, not the front. no. sixth avenue is a cigar shop; pass through it and you are in a paved court, with high buildings all around; enter the second door on the left, and come up stairs." "is this all?" "yes," i said. "well, you'll never get in" "why?" "because you won't. or if you do you can draw on me for a hundred dollars; for you will be the first man that has accomplished it in twenty-five years. i can't think what mr. daly can have been absorbed in. he has forgotten a most important detail, and he will feel humiliated in the morning when he finds that you tried to get in and couldn't." "why, what is the trouble?" "i'll tell you. you see----" at that point we were swept apart by the crowd, somebody detained me with a moment's talk, and we did not get together again. but it did not matter; i believed he was joking, anyway. at eight in the evening i passed through the cigar shop and into the court and knocked at the second door. "come in!" i entered. it was a small room, carpetless, dusty, with a naked deal table, and two cheap wooden chairs for furniture. a giant irishman was standing there, with shirt collar and vest unbuttoned, and no coat on. i put my hat on the table, and was about to say something, when the irishman took the innings himself. and not with marked courtesy of tone: "well, sor, what will you have?" i was a little disconcerted, and my easy confidence suffered a shrinkage. the man stood as motionless as gibraltar, and kept his unblinking eye upon me. it was very embarrassing, very humiliating. i stammered at a false start or two; then---- "i have just run down from----" "av ye plaze, ye'll not smoke here, ye understand." i laid my cigar on the window-ledge; chased my flighty thoughts a moment, then said in a placating manner: "i--i have come to see mr. daly." "oh, ye have, have ye?" "yes" "well, ye'll not see him." "but he asked me to come." "oh, he did, did he?" "yes, he sent me this note, and----" "lemme see it." for a moment i fancied there would be a change in the atmosphere, now; but this idea was premature. the big man was examining the note searchingly under the gas-jet. a glance showed me that he had it upside down--disheartening evidence that he could not read. "is ut his own handwrite?" "yes--he wrote it himself." "he did, did he?" "yes." "h'm. well, then, why ud he write it like that?" "how do you mean?" "i mane, why wudn't he put his naime to ut?" "his name is to it. that's not it--you are looking at my name." i thought that that was a home shot, but he did not betray that he had been hit. he said: "it's not an aisy one to spell; how do you pronounce ut?" "mark twain." "h'm. h'm. mike train. h'm. i don't remember ut. what is it ye want to see him about?" "it isn't i that want to see him, he wants to see me." "oh, he does, does he?" "yes." "what does he want to see ye about?" "i don't know." "ye don't know! and ye confess it, becod! well, i can tell ye wan thing--ye'll not see him. are ye in the business?" "what business?" "the show business." a fatal question. i recognized that i was defeated. if i answered no, he would cut the matter short and wave me to the door without the grace of a word--i saw it in his uncompromising eye; if i said i was a lecturer, he would despise me, and dismiss me with opprobrious words; if i said i was a dramatist, he would throw me out of the window. i saw that my case was hopeless, so i chose the course which seemed least humiliating: i would pocket my shame and glide out without answering. the silence was growing lengthy. "i'll ask ye again. are ye in the show business yerself?" "yes!" i said it with splendid confidence; for in that moment the very twin of that grand new haven dog loafed into the room, and i saw that irishman's eye light eloquently with pride and affection. "ye are? and what is it?" "i've got a bench-show in new haven." the weather did change then. "you don't say, sir! and that's your show, sir! oh, it's a grand show, it's a wonderful show, sir, and a proud man i am to see your honor this day. and ye'll be an expert, sir, and ye'll know all about dogs--more than ever they know theirselves, i'll take me oath to ut." i said, with modesty: "i believe i have some reputation that way. in fact, my business requires it." "ye have some reputation, your honor! bedad i believe you! there's not a jintleman in the worrld that can lay over ye in the judgmint of a dog, sir. now i'll vinture that your honor'll know that dog's dimensions there better than he knows them his own self, and just by the casting of your educated eye upon him. would you mind giving a guess, if ye'll be so good?" i knew that upon my answer would depend my fate. if i made this dog bigger than the prize-dog, it would be bad diplomacy, and suspicious; if i fell too far short of the prizedog, that would be equally damaging. the dog was standing by the table, and i believed i knew the difference between him and the one whose picture i had seen in the newspaper to a shade. i spoke promptly up and said: "it's no trouble to guess this noble creature's figures height, three feet; length, four feet and three-quarters of an inch; weight, a hundred and forty-eight and a quarter." the man snatched his hat from its peg and danced on it with joy, shouting: "ye've hardly missed it the hair's breadth, hardly the shade of a shade, your honor! oh, it's the miraculous eye ye've got, for the judgmint of a dog!" and still pouring out his admiration of my capacities, he snatched off his vest and scoured off one of the wooden chairs with it, and scrubbed it and polished it, and said: "there, sit down, your honor, i'm ashamed of meself that i forgot ye were standing all this time; and do put on your hat, ye mustn't take cold, it's a drafty place; and here is your cigar, sir, a getting cold, i'll give ye a light. there. the place is all yours, sir, and if ye'll just put your feet on the table and make yourself at home, i'll stir around and get a candle and light ye up the ould crazy stairs and see that ye don't come to anny harm, for be this time mr. daly'll be that impatient to see your honor that he'll be taking the roof off." he conducted me cautiously and tenderly up the stairs, lighting the way and protecting me with friendly warnings, then pushed the door open and bowed me in and went his way, mumbling hearty things about my wonderful eye for points of a dog. mr. daly was writing and had his back to me. he glanced over his shoulder presently, then jumped up and said-- "oh, dear me, i forgot all about giving instructions. i was just writing you to beg a thousand pardons. but how is it you are here? how did you get by that irishman? you are the first man that's done it in five and twenty years. you didn't bribe him, i know that; there's not money enough in new york to do it. and you didn't persuade him; he is all ice and iron: there isn't a soft place nor a warm one in him anywhere. that is your secret? look here; you owe me a hundred dollars for unintentionally giving you a chance to perform a miracle--for it is a miracle that you've done." "that is all right," i said, "collect it of jimmy lewis." that good dog not only did me that good turn in the time of my need, but he won for me the envious reputation among all the theatrical people from the atlantic to the pacific of being the only man in history who had ever run the blockade of augustin daly's back door. chapter xlvi. if the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. on the train. fifty years ago, when i was a boy in the then remote and sparsely peopled mississippi valley, vague tales and rumors of a mysterious body of professional murderers came wandering in from a country which was constructively as far from us as the constellations blinking in space--india; vague tales and rumors of a sect called thugs, who waylaid travelers in lonely places and killed them for the contentment of a god whom they worshiped; tales which everybody liked to listen to and nobody believed, except with reservations. it was considered that the stories had gathered bulk on their travels. the matter died down and a lull followed. then eugene sue's "wandering jew" appeared, and made great talk for a while. one character in it was a chief of thugs--"feringhea"--a mysterious and terrible indian who was as slippery and sly as a serpent, and as deadly; and he stirred up the thug interest once more. but it did not last. it presently died again this time to stay dead. at first glance it seems strange that this should have happened; but really it was not strange--on the contrary,. it was natural; i mean on our side of the water. for the source whence the thug tales mainly came was a government report, and without doubt was not republished in america; it was probably never even seen there. government reports have no general circulation. they are distributed to the few, and are not always read by those few. i heard of this report for the first time a day or two ago, and borrowed it. it is full of fascinations; and it turns those dim, dark fairy tales of my boyhood days into realities. the report was made in by major sleeman, of the indian service, and was printed in calcutta in . it is a clumsy, great, fat, poor sample of the printer's art, but good enough for a government printing-office in that old day and in that remote region, perhaps. to major sleeman was given the general superintendence of the giant task of ridding india of thuggee, and he and his seventeen assistants accomplished it. it was the augean stables over again. captain vallancey, writing in a madras journal in those old times, makes this remark: "the day that sees this far-spread evil eradicated from india and known only in name, will greatly tend to immortalize british rule in the east." he did not overestimate the magnitude and difficulty of the work, nor the immensity of the credit which would justly be due to british rule in case it was accomplished. thuggee became known to the british authorities in india about , but its wide prevalence was not suspected; it was not regarded as a serious matter, and no systematic measures were taken for its suppression until about . about that time major sleeman captured eugene sue's thug-chief, "feringhea," and got him to turn king's evidence. the revelations were so stupefying that sleeman was not able to believe them. sleeman thought he knew every criminal within his jurisdiction, and that the worst of them were merely thieves; but feringhea told him that he was in reality living in the midst of a swarm of professional murderers; that they had been all about him for many years, and that they buried their dead close by. these seemed insane tales; but feringhea said come and see--and he took him to a grave and dug up a hundred bodies, and told him all the circumstances of the killings, and named the thugs who had done the work. it was a staggering business. sleeman captured some of these thugs and proceeded to examine them separately, and with proper precautions against collusion; for he would not believe any indian's unsupported word. the evidence gathered proved the truth of what feringhea had said, and also revealed the fact that gangs of thugs were plying their trade all over india. the astonished government now took hold of thuggee, and for ten years made systematic and relentless war upon it, and finally destroyed it. gang after gang was captured, tried, and punished. the thugs were harried and hunted from one end of india to the other. the government got all their secrets out of them; and also got the names of the members of the bands, and recorded them in a book, together with their birthplaces and places of residence. the thugs were worshipers of bhowanee; and to this god they sacrificed anybody that came handy; but they kept the dead man's things themselves, for the god cared for nothing but the corpse. men were initiated into the sect with solemn ceremonies. then they were taught how to strangle a person with the sacred choke-cloth, but were not allowed to perform officially with it until after long practice. no half-educated strangler could choke a man to death quickly enough to keep him from uttering a sound--a muffled scream, gurgle, gasp, moan, or something of the sort; but the expert's work was instantaneous: the cloth was whipped around the victim's neck, there was a sudden twist, and the head fell silently forward, the eyes starting from the sockets; and all was over. the thug carefully guarded against resistance. it was usual to to get the victims to sit down, for that was the handiest position for business. if the thug had planned india itself it could not have been more conveniently arranged for the needs of his occupation. there were no public conveyances. there were no conveyances for hire. the traveler went on foot or in a bullock cart or on a horse which he bought for the purpose. as soon as he was out of his own little state or principality he was among strangers; nobody knew him, nobody took note of him, and from that time his movements could no longer be traced. he did not stop in towns or villages, but camped outside of them and sent his servants in to buy provisions. there were no habitations between villages. whenever he was between villages he was an easy prey, particularly as he usually traveled by night, to avoid the heat. he was always being overtaken by strangers who offered him the protection of their company, or asked for the protection of his--and these strangers were often thugs, as he presently found out to his cost. the landholders, the native police, the petty princes, the village officials, the customs officers were in many cases protectors and harborers of the thugs, and betrayed travelers to them for a share of the spoil. at first this condition of things made it next to impossible for the government to catch the marauders; they were spirited away by these watchful friends. all through a vast continent, thus infested, helpless people of every caste and kind moved along the paths and trails in couples and groups silently by night, carrying the commerce of the country--treasure, jewels, money, and petty batches of silks, spices, and all manner of wares. it was a paradise for the thug. when the autumn opened, the thugs began to gather together by pre-concert. other people had to have interpreters at every turn, but not the thugs; they could talk together, no matter how far apart they were born, for they had a language of their own, and they had secret signs by which they knew each other for thugs; and they were always friends. even their diversities of religion and caste were sunk in devotion to their calling, and the moslem and the high-caste and low-caste hindoo were staunch and affectionate brothers in thuggery. when a gang had been assembled, they had religious worship, and waited for an omen. they had definite notions about the omens. the cries of certain animals were good omens, the cries of certain other creatures were bad omens. a bad omen would stop proceedings and send the men home. the sword and the strangling-cloth were sacred emblems. the thugs worshiped the sword at home before going out to the assembling-place; the strangling-cloth was worshiped at the place of assembly. the chiefs of most of the bands performed the religious ceremonies themselves; but the kaets delegated them to certain official stranglers (chaurs). the rites of the kaets were so holy that no one but the chaur was allowed to touch the vessels and other things used in them. thug methods exhibit a curious mixture of caution and the absence of it; cold business calculation and sudden, unreflecting impulse; but there were two details which were constant, and not subject to caprice: patient persistence in following up the prey, and pitilessness when the time came to act. caution was exhibited in the strength of the bands. they never felt comfortable and confident unless their strength exceeded that of any party of travelers they were likely to meet by four or fivefold. yet it was never their purpose to attack openly, but only when the victims were off their guard. when they got hold of a party of travelers they often moved along in their company several days, using all manner of arts to win their friendship and get their confidence. at last, when this was accomplished to their satisfaction, the real business began. a few thugs were privately detached and sent forward in the dark to select a good killing-place and dig the graves. when the rest reached the spot a halt was called, for a rest or a smoke. the travelers were invited to sit. by signs, the chief appointed certain thugs to sit down in front of the travelers as if to wait upon them, others to sit down beside them and engage them in conversation, and certain expert stranglers to stand behind the travelers and be ready when the signal was given. the signal was usually some commonplace remark, like "bring the tobacco." sometimes a considerable wait ensued after all the actors were in their places--the chief was biding his time, in order to make everything sure. meantime, the talk droned on, dim figures moved about in the dull light, peace and tranquility reigned, the travelers resigned themselves to the pleasant reposefulness and comfort of the situation, unconscious of the death-angels standing motionless at their backs. the time was ripe, now, and the signal came: "bring the tobacco." there was a mute swift movement, all in the same instant the men at each victim's sides seized his hands, the man in front seized his feet, and pulled, the man at his back whipped the cloth around his neck and gave it a twist the head sunk forward, the tragedy was over. the bodies were stripped and covered up in the graves, the spoil packed for transportation, then the thugs gave pious thanks to bhowanee, and departed on further holy service. the report shows that the travelers moved in exceedingly small groups --twos, threes, fours, as a rule; a party with a dozen in it was rare. the thugs themselves seem to have been the only people who moved in force. they went about in gangs of , , , , , , , , , and one gang of is mentioned. considering their numbers, their catch was not extraordinary--particularly when you consider that they were not in the least fastidious, but took anybody they could get, whether rich or poor, and sometimes even killed children. now and then they killed women, but it was considered sinful to do it, and unlucky. the "season" was six or eight months long. one season the half dozen bundelkand and gwalior gangs aggregated men, and they murdered people. one season the malwa and kandeish gangs aggregated men, and they murdered . one season the kandeish and berar gangs aggregated men, and they murdered people. here is the tally-sheet of a gang of sixty thugs for a whole season--gang under two noted chiefs, "chotee and sheik nungoo from gwalior": "left poora, in jhansee, and on arrival at sarora murdered a traveler. "on nearly reaching bhopal, met brahmins, and murdered them. "cross the nerbudda; at a village called hutteea, murdered a hindoo. "went through aurungabad to walagow; there met a havildar of the barber caste and sepoys (native soldiers); in the evening came to jokur, and in the morning killed them near the place where the treasure-bearers were killed the year before. "between jokur and dholeea met a sepoy of the shepherd caste; killed him in the jungle. "passed through dholeea and lodged in a village; two miles beyond, on the road to indore, met a byragee (beggar-holy mendicant); murdered him at the thapa. "in the morning, beyond the thapa, fell in with marwarie travelers; murdered them. "near a village on the banks of the taptee met travelers and killed them. "between choupra and dhoreea met a marwarie; murdered him. "at dhoreea met marwaries; took them two miles and murdered them. "two miles further on, overtaken by three treasure-bearers; took them two miles and murdered them in the jungle. "came on to khurgore bateesa in indore, divided spoil, and dispersed. "a total of men murdered on one expedition." chotee (to save his neck) was informer, and furnished these facts. several things are noticeable about his resume. . business brevity; , absence of emotion; , smallness of the parties encountered by the ; , variety in character and quality of the game captured; , hindoo and mohammedan chiefs in business together for bhowanee; , the sacred caste of the brahmins not respected by either; , nor yet the character of that mendicant, that byragee. a beggar is a holy creature, and some of the gangs spared him on that account, no matter how slack business might be; but other gangs slaughtered not only him, but even that sacredest of sacred creatures, the fakeer--that repulsive skin-and-bone thing that goes around naked and mats his bushy hair with dust and dirt, and so beflours his lean body with ashes that he looks like a specter. sometimes a fakeer trusted a shade too far in the protection of his sacredness. in the middle of a tally-sheet of feringhea's, who had been out with forty thugs, i find a case of the kind. after the killing of thirty-nine men and one woman, the fakeer appears on the scene: "approaching doregow, met pundits; also a fakeer, mounted on a pony; he was plastered over with sugar to collect flies, and was covered with them. drove off the fakeer, and killed the other three. "leaving doregow, the fakeer joined again, and went on in company to raojana; met khutries on their way from bombay to nagpore. drove off the fakeer with stones, and killed the men in camp, and buried them in the grove. "next day the fakeer joined again; made him leave at mana. beyond there, fell in with two kahars and a sepoy, and came on towards the place selected for the murder. when near it, the fakeer came again. losing all patience with him, gave mithoo, one of the gang, rupees ($ . ) to murder him, and take the sin upon himself. all four were strangled, including the fakeer. surprised to find among the fakeer's effects pounds of coral, strings of small pearls, strings of large pearls, and a gilt necklace." it it curious, the little effect that time has upon a really interesting circumstance. this one, so old, so long ago gone down into oblivion, reads with the same freshness and charm that attach to the news in the morning paper; one's spirits go up, then down, then up again, following the chances which the fakeer is running; now you hope, now you despair, now you hope again; and at last everything comes out right, and you feel a great wave of personal satisfaction go weltering through you, and without thinking, you put out your hand to pat mithoo on the back, when --puff! the whole thing has vanished away, there is nothing there; mithoo and all the crowd have been dust and ashes and forgotten, oh, so many, many, many lagging years! and then comes a sense of injury: you don't know whether mithoo got the swag, along with the sin, or had to divide up the swag and keep all the sin himself. there is no literary art about a government report. it stops a story right in the most interesting place. these reports of thug expeditions run along interminably in one monotonous tune: "met a sepoy--killed him; met pundits--killed them; met rajpoots and a woman--killed them"--and so on, till the statistics get to be pretty dry. but this small trip of feringhea's forty had some little variety about it. once they came across a man hiding in a grave --a thief; he had stolen , rupees from dhunroj seith of parowtee. they strangled him and took the money. they had no patience with thieves. they killed two treasure-bearers, and got , rupees. they came across two bullocks "laden with copper pice," and killed the four drivers and took the money. there must have been half a ton of it. i think it takes a double handful of pice to make an anna, and annas to make a rupee; and even in those days the rupee was worth only half a dollar. coming back over their tracks from baroda, they had another picturesque stroke of luck: "'the lohars of oodeypore' put a traveler in their charge for safety." dear, dear, across this abyssmal gulf of time we still see feringhea's lips uncover his teeth, and through the dim haze we catch the incandescent glimmer of his smile. he accepted that trust, good man; and so we know what went with the traveler. even rajahs had no terrors for feringhea; he came across an elephant-driver belonging to the rajah of oodeypore and promptly strangled him. "a total of men and women murdered on this expedition." among the reports of expeditions we find mention of victims of almost every quality and estate. also a prince's cook; and even the water-carrier of that sublime lord of lords and king of kings, the governor-general of india! how broad they were in their tastes! they also murdered actors--poor wandering barnstormers. there are two instances recorded; the first one by a gang of thugs under a chief who soils a great name borne by a better man --kipling's deathless "gungadin": "after murdering sepoys, going on toward indore, met strolling players, and persuaded them to come with us, on the pretense that we would see their performance at the next stage. murdered them at a temple near bhopal." second instance: "at deohuttee, joined by comedians. murdered them eastward of that place." but this gang was a particularly bad crew. on that expedition they murdered a fakeer and twelve beggars. and yet bhowanee protected them; for once when they were strangling a man in a wood when a crowd was going by close at hand and the noose slipped and the man screamed, bhowanee made a camel burst out at the same moment with a roar that drowned the scream; and before the man could repeat it the breath was choked out of his body. the cow is so sacred in india that to kill her keeper is an awful sacrilege, and even the thugs recognized this; yet now and then the lust for blood was too strong, and so they did kill a few cow-keepers. in one of these instances the witness who killed the cowherd said, "in thuggee this is strictly forbidden, and is an act from which no good can come. i was ill of a fever for ten days afterward. i do believe that evil will follow the murder of a man with a cow. if there be no cow it does not signify." another thug said he held the cowherd's feet while this witness did the strangling. he felt no concern, "because the bad fortune of such a deed is upon the strangler and not upon the assistants; even if there should be a hundred of them." there were thousands of thugs roving over india constantly, during many generations. they made thug gee a hereditary vocation and taught it to their sons and to their son's sons. boys were in full membership as early as years of age; veterans were still at work at . what was the fascination, what was the impulse? apparently, it was partly piety, largely gain, and there is reason to suspect that the sport afforded was the chiefest fascination of all. meadows taylor makes a thug in one of his books claim that the pleasure of killing men was the white man's beast-hunting instinct enlarged, refined, ennobled. i will quote the passage: chapter xlvii. simple rules for saving money: to save half, when you are fired by an eager impulse to contribute to a charity, wait, and count forty. to save three-quarters, count sixty. to save it all, count sixty-five. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. the thug said: "how many of you english are passionately devoted to sporting! your days and months are passed in its excitement. a tiger, a panther, a buffalo or a hog rouses your utmost energies for its destruction--you even risk your lives in its pursuit. how much higher game is a thug's!" that must really be the secret of the rise and development of thuggee. the joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done--these are traits of the human race at large. we white people are merely modified thugs; thugs fretting under the restraints of a not very thick skin of civilization; thugs who long ago enjoyed the slaughter of the roman arena, and later the burning of doubtful christians by authentic christians in the public squares, and who now, with the thugs of spain and nimes, flock to enjoy the blood and misery of the bullring. we have no tourists of either sex or any religion who are able to resist the delights of the bull-ring when opportunity offers; and we are gentle thugs in the hunting-season, and love to chase a tame rabbit and kill it. still, we have made some progress-microscopic, and in truth scarcely worth mentioning, and certainly nothing to be proud of--still, it is progress: we no longer take pleasure in slaughtering or burning helpless men. we have reached a little altitude where we may look down upon the indian thugs with a complacent shudder; and we may even hope for a day, many centuries hence, when our posterity will look down upon us in the same way. there are many indications that the thug often hunted men for the mere sport of it; that the fright and pain of the quarry were no more to him than are the fright and pain of the rabbit or the stag to us; and that he was no more ashamed of beguiling his game with deceits and abusing its trust than are we when we have imitated a wild animal's call and shot it when it honored us with its confidence and came to see what we wanted: "madara, son of nihal, and i, ramzam, set out from kotdee in the cold weather and followed the high road for about twenty days in search of travelers, until we came to selempore, where we met a very old man going to the east. we won his confidence in this manner: he carried a load which was too heavy for his old age; i said to him, 'you are an old man, i will aid you in carrying your load, as you are from my part of the country.' he said, 'very well, take me with you.' so we took him with us to selempore, where we slept that night. we woke him next morning before dawn and set out, and at the distance of three miles we seated him to rest while it was still very dark. madara was ready behind him, and strangled him. he never spoke a word. he was about or years of age." another gang fell in with a couple of barbers and persuaded them to come along in their company by promising them the job of shaving the whole crew-- thugs. at the place appointed for the murder got shaved, and actually paid the barbers for their work. then killed them and took back the money. a gang of forty-two thugs came across two brahmins and a shopkeeper on the road, beguiled them into a grove and got up a concert for their entertainment. while these poor fellows were listening to the music the stranglers were standing behind them; and at the proper moment for dramatic effect they applied the noose. the most devoted fisherman must have a bite at least as often as once a week or his passion will cool and he will put up his tackle. the tiger-sportsman must find a tiger at least once a fortnight or he will get tired and quit. the elephant-hunter's enthusiasm will waste away little by little, and his zeal will perish at last if he plod around a month without finding a member of that noble family to assassinate. but when the lust in the hunter's heart is for the noblest of all quarries, man, how different is the case! and how watery and poor is the zeal and how childish the endurance of those other hunters by comparison. then, neither hunger, nor thirst, nor fatigue, nor deferred hope, nor monotonous disappointment, nor leaden-footed lapse of time can conquer the hunter's patience or weaken the joy of his quest or cool the splendid rage of his desire. of all the hunting-passions that burn in the breast of man, there is none that can lift him superior to discouragements like these but the one--the royal sport, the supreme sport, whose quarry is his brother. by comparison, tiger-hunting is a colorless poor thing, for all it has been so bragged about. why, the thug was content to tramp patiently along, afoot, in the wasting heat of india, week after week, at an average of nine or ten miles a day, if he might but hope to find game some time or other and refresh his longing soul with blood. here is an instance: "i (ramzam) and hyder set out, for the purpose of strangling travelers, from guddapore, and proceeded via the fort of julalabad, newulgunge, bangermow, on the banks of the ganges (upwards of miles), from whence we returned by another route. still no travelers! till we reached bowaneegunge, where we fell in with a traveler, a boatman; we inveigled him and about two miles east of there hyder strangled him as he stood--for he was troubled and afraid, and would not sit. we then made a long journey (about miles) and reached hussunpore bundwa, where at the tank we fell in with a traveler--he slept there that night; next morning we followed him and tried to win his confidence; at the distance of two miles we endeavored to induce him to sit down--but he would not, having become aware of us. i attempted to strangle him as he walked along, but did not succeed; both of us then fell upon him, he made a great outcry, 'they are murdering me!' at length we strangled him and flung his body into a well. after this we returned to our homes, having been out a month and traveled about miles. a total of two men murdered on the expedition." and here is another case-related by the terrible futty khan, a man with a tremendous record, to be re-mentioned by and by: "i, with three others, traveled for about days a distance of about miles in search of victims along the highway to bundwa and returned by davodpore (another miles) during which journey we had only one murder, which happened in this manner. four miles to the east of noubustaghat we fell in with a traveler, an old man. i, with koshal and hyder, inveigled him and accompanied him that day within miles of rampoor, where, after dark, in a lonely place, we got him to sit down and rest; and while i kept him in talk, seated before him, hyder behind strangled him: he made no resistance. koshal stabbed him under the arms and in the throat, and we flung the body into a running stream. we got about or rupees each ($ or $ . ). we then proceeded homewards. a total of one man murdered on this expedition." there. they tramped miles, were gone about three months, and harvested two dollars and a half apiece. but the mere pleasure of the hunt was sufficient. that was pay enough. they did no grumbling. every now and then in this big book one comes across that pathetic remark: "we tried to get him to sit down but he would not." it tells the whole story. some accident had awakened the suspicion in him that these smooth friends who had been petting and coddling him and making him feel so safe and so fortunate after his forlorn and lonely wanderings were the dreaded thugs; and now their ghastly invitation to "sit and rest" had confirmed its truth. he knew there was no help for him, and that he was looking his last upon earthly things, but "he would not sit." no, not that--it was too awful to think of! there are a number of instances which indicate that when a man had once tasted the regal joys of man-hunting he could not be content with the dull monotony of a crimeless life after ward. example, from a thug's testimony: "we passed through to kurnaul, where we found a former thug named junooa, an old comrade of ours, who had turned religious mendicant and become a disciple and holy. he came to us in the serai and weeping with joy returned to his old trade." neither wealth nor honors nor dignities could satisfy a reformed thug for long. he would throw them all away, someday, and go back to the lurid pleasures of hunting men, and being hunted himself by the british. ramzam was taken into a great native grandee's service and given authority over five villages. "my authority extended over these people to summons them to my presence, to make them stand or sit. i dressed well, rode my pony, and had two sepoys, a scribe and a village guard to attend me. during three years i used to pay each village a monthly visit, and no one suspected that i was a thug! the chief man used to wait on me to transact business, and as i passed along, old and young made their salaam to me." and yet during that very three years he got leave of absence "to attend a wedding," and instead went off on a thugging lark with six other thugs and hunted the highway for fifteen days!--with satisfactory results. afterwards he held a great office under a rajah. there he had ten miles of country under his command and a military guard of fifteen men, with authority to call out , more upon occasion. but the british got on his track, and they crowded him so that he had to give himself up. see what a figure he was when he was gotten up for style and had all his things on: "i was fully armed--a sword, shield, pistols, a matchlock musket and a flint gun, for i was fond of being thus arrayed, and when so armed feared not though forty men stood before me." he gave himself up and proudly proclaimed himself a thug. then by request he agreed to betray his friend and pal, buhram, a thug with the most tremendous record in india. "i went to the house where buhram slept (often has he led our gangs!) i woke him, he knew me well, and came outside to me. it was a cold night, so under pretence of warming myself, but in reality to have light for his seizure by the guards, i lighted some straw and made a blaze. we were warming our hands. the guards drew around us. i said to them, 'this is buhram,' and he was seized just as a cat seizes a mouse. then buhram said, 'i am a thug! my father was a thug, my grandfather was a thug, and i have thugged with many!'" so spoke the mighty hunter, the mightiest of the mighty, the gordon cumming of his day. not much regret noticeable in it.--["having planted a bullet in the shoulder-bone of an elephant, and caused the agonized creature to lean for support against a tree, i proceeded to brew some coffee. having refreshed myself, taking observations of the elephant's spasms and writhings between the sips, i resolved to make experiments on vulnerable points, and, approaching very near, i fired several bullets at different parts of his enormous skull. he only acknowledged the shots by a salaam-like movement of his trunk, with the point of which he gently touched the wounds with a striking and peculiar action. surprised and shocked to find that i was only prolonging the suffering of the noble beast, which bore its trials with such dignified composure, i resolved to finish the proceeding with all possible despatch, and accordingly opened fire upon him from the left side. aiming at the shoulder, i fired six shots with the two-grooved rifle, which must have eventually proved mortal, after which i fired six shots at the same part with the dutch six-founder. large tears now trickled down from his eyes, which he slowly shut and opened, his colossal frame shivered convulsively, and falling on his side he expired."--gordon cumming.] so many many times this official report leaves one's curiosity unsatisfied. for instance, here is a little paragraph out of the record of a certain band of thugs, which has that defect: "fell in with lall sing subahdar and his family, consisting of nine persons. traveled with them two days, and the third put them all to death except the two children, little boys of one and a half years old." there it stops. what did they do with those poor little fellows? what was their subsequent history? did they purpose training them up as thugs? how could they take care of such little creatures on a march which stretched over several months? no one seems to have cared to ask any questions about the babies. but i do wish i knew. one would be apt to imagine that the thugs were utterly callous, utterly destitute of human feelings, heartless toward their own families as well as toward other people's; but this was not so. like all other indians, they had a passionate love for their kin. a shrewd british officer who knew the indian character, took that characteristic into account in laying his plans for the capture of eugene sue's famous feringhea. he found out feringhea's hiding-place, and sent a guard by night to seize him, but the squad was awkward and he got away. however, they got the rest of the family--the mother, wife, child, and brother--and brought them to the officer, at jubbulpore; the officer did not fret, but bided his time: "i knew feringhea would not go far while links so dear to him were in my hands." he was right. feringhea knew all the danger he was running by staying in the neighborhood, still he could not tear himself away. the officer found that he divided his time between five villages where be had relatives and friends who could get news for him from his family in jubbulpore jail; and that he never slept two consecutive nights in the same village. the officer traced out his several haunts, then pounced upon all the five villages on the one night and at the same hour, and got his man. another example of family affection. a little while previously to the capture of feringhea's family, the british officer had captured feringhea's foster-brother, leader of a gang of ten, and had tried the eleven and condemned them to be hanged. feringhea's captured family arrived at the jail the day before the execution was to take place. the foster-brother, jhurhoo, entreated to be allowed to see the aged mother and the others. the prayer was granted, and this is what took place--it is the british officer who speaks: "in the morning, just before going to the scaffold, the interview took place before me. he fell at the old woman's feet and begged that she would relieve him from the obligations of the milk with which she had nourished him from infancy, as he was about to die before he could fulfill any of them. she placed her hands on his head, and he knelt, and she said she forgave him all, and bid him die like a man." if a capable artist should make a picture of it, it would be full of dignity and solemnity and pathos; and it could touch you. you would imagine it to be anything but what it was. there is reverence there, and tenderness, and gratefulness, and compassion, and resignation, and fortitude, and self-respect--and no sense of disgrace, no thought of dishonor. everything is there that goes to make a noble parting, and give it a moving grace and beauty and dignity. and yet one of these people is a thug and the other a mother of thugs! the incongruities of our human nature seem to reach their limit here. i wish to make note of one curious thing while i think of it. one of the very commonest remarks to be found in this bewildering array of thug confessions is this: "strangled him and threw him an a well!" in one case they threw sixteen into a well--and they had thrown others in the same well before. it makes a body thirsty to read about it. and there is another very curious thing. the bands of thugs had private graveyards. they did not like to kill and bury at random, here and there and everywhere. they preferred to wait, and toll the victims along, and get to one of their regular burying-places ('bheels') if they could. in the little kingdom of oude, which was about half as big as ireland and about as big as the state of maine, they had two hundred and seventy-four 'bheels'. they were scattered along fourteen hundred miles of road, at an average of only five miles apart, and the british government traced out and located each and every one of them and set them down on the map. the oude bands seldom went out of their own country, but they did a thriving business within its borders. so did outside bands who came in and helped. some of the thug leaders of oude were noted for their successful careers. each of four of them confessed to above murders; another to nearly ; our friend ramzam to --he is the one who got leave of absence to attend a wedding and went thugging instead; and he is also the one who betrayed buhram to the british. but the biggest records of all were the murder-lists of futty khan and buhram. futty khan's number is smaller than ramzam's, but he is placed at the head because his average is the best in oude-thug history per year of service. his slaughter was men in twenty years, and he was still a young man when the british stopped his industry. buhram's list was murders, but it took him forty years. his average was one man and nearly all of another man per month for forty years, but futty khan's average was two men and a little of another man per month during his twenty years of usefulness. there is one very striking thing which i wish to call attention to. you have surmised from the listed callings followed by the victims of the thugs that nobody could travel the indian roads unprotected and live to get through; that the thugs respected no quality, no vocation, no religion, nobody; that they killed every unarmed man that came in their way. that is wholly true--with one reservation. in all the long file of thug confessions an english traveler is mentioned but once--and this is what the thug says of the circumstance: "he was on his way from mhow to bombay. we studiously avoided him. he proceeded next morning with a number of travelers who had sought his protection, and they took the road to baroda." we do not know who he was; he flits across the page of this rusty old book and disappears in the obscurity beyond; but he is an impressive figure, moving through that valley of death serene and unafraid, clothed in the might of the english name. we have now followed the big official book through, and we understand what thuggee was, what a bloody terror it was, what a desolating scourge it was. in the english found this cancerous organization imbedded in the vitals of the empire, doing its devastating work in secrecy, and assisted, protected, sheltered, and hidden by innumerable confederates --big and little native chiefs, customs officers, village officials, and native police, all ready to lie for it, and the mass of the people, through fear, persistently pretending to know nothing about its doings; and this condition of things had existed for generations, and was formidable with the sanctions of age and old custom. if ever there was an unpromising task, if ever there was a hopeless task in the world, surely it was offered here--the task of conquering thuggee. but that little handful of english officials in india set their sturdy and confident grip upon it, and ripped it out, root and branch! how modest do captain vallancey's words sound now, when we read them again, knowing what we know: "the day that sees this far-spread evil completely eradicated from india, and known only in name, will greatly tend to immortalize british rule in the east." it would be hard to word a claim more modestly than that for this most noble work. chapter xlviii. grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. we left bombay for allahabad by a night train. it is the custom of the country to avoid day travel when it can conveniently be done. but there is one trouble: while you can seemingly "secure" the two lower berths by making early application, there is no ticket as witness of it, and no other producible evidence in case your proprietorship shall chance to be challenged. the word "engaged" appears on the window, but it doesn't state who the compartment is engaged, for. if your satan and your barney arrive before somebody else's servants, and spread the bedding on the two sofas and then stand guard till you come, all will be well; but if they step aside on an errand, they may find the beds promoted to the two shelves, and somebody else's demons standing guard over their master's beds, which in the meantime have been spread upon your sofas. you do not pay anything extra for your sleeping place; that is where the trouble lies. if you buy a fare-ticket and fail to use it, there is room thus made available for someone else; but if the place were secured to you it would remain vacant, and yet your ticket would secure you another place when you were presently ready to travel. however, no explanation of such a system can make it seem quite rational to a person who has been used to a more rational system. if our people had the arranging of it, we should charge extra for securing the place, and then the road would suffer no loss if the purchaser did not occupy it. the present system encourages good manners--and also discourages them. if a young girl has a lower berth and an elderly lady comes in, it is usual for the girl to offer her place to this late comer; and it is usual for the late comer to thank her courteously and take it. but the thing happens differently sometimes. when we were ready to leave bombay my daughter's satchels were holding possession of her berth--a lower one. at the last moment, a middle-aged american lady swarmed into the compartment, followed by native porters laden with her baggage. she was growling and snarling and scolding, and trying to make herself phenomenally disagreeable; and succeeding. without a word, she hoisted the satchels into the hanging shelf, and took possession of that lower berth. on one of our trips mr. smythe and i got out at a station to walk up and down, and when we came back smythe's bed was in the hanging shelf and an english cavalry officer was in bed on the sofa which he had lately been occupying. it was mean to be glad about it, but it is the way we are made; i could not have been gladder if it had been my enemy that had suffered this misfortune. we all like to see people in trouble, if it doesn't cost us anything. i was so happy over mr. smythe's chagrin that i couldn't go to sleep for thinking of it and enjoying it. i knew he supposed the officer had committed the robbery himself, whereas without a doubt the officer's servant had done it without his knowledge. mr. smythe kept this incident warm in his heart, and longed for a chance to get even with somebody for it. sometime afterward the opportunity came, in calcutta. we were leaving on a -hour journey to darjeeling. mr. barclay, the general superintendent, has made special provision for our accommodation, mr. smythe said; so there was no need to hurry about getting to the train; consequently, we were a little late. when we arrived, the usual immense turmoil and confusion of a great indian station were in full blast. it was an immoderately long train, for all the natives of india were going by it somewhither, and the native officials were being pestered to frenzy by belated and anxious people. they didn't know where our car was, and couldn't remember having received any orders about it. it was a deep disappointment; moreover, it looked as if our half of our party would be left behind altogether. then satan came running and said he had found a compartment with one shelf and one sofa unoccupied, and had made our beds and had stowed our baggage. we rushed to the place, and just as the train was ready to pull out and the porters were slamming the doors to, all down the line, an officer of the indian civil service, a good friend of ours, put his head in and said:-- "i have been hunting for you everywhere. what are you doing here? don't you know----" the train started before he could finish. mr. smythe's opportunity was come. his bedding, on the shelf, at once changed places with the bedding--a stranger's--that was occupying the sofa that was opposite to mine. about ten o'clock we stopped somewhere, and a large englishman of official military bearing stepped in. we pretended to be asleep. the lamps were covered, but there was light enough for us to note his look of surprise. he stood there, grand and fine, peering down at smythe, and wondering in silence at the situation. after a bit be said:-- "well!" and that was all. but that was enough. it was easy to understand. it meant: "this is extraordinary. this is high-handed. i haven't had an experience like this before." he sat down on his baggage, and for twenty minutes we watched him through our eyelashes, rocking and swaying there to the motion of the train. then we came to a station, and he got up and went out, muttering: "i must find a lower berth, or wait over." his servant came presently and carried away his things. mr. smythe's sore place was healed, his hunger for revenge was satisfied. but he couldn't sleep, and neither could i; for this was a venerable old. car, and nothing about it was taut. the closet door slammed all night, and defied every fastening we could invent. we got up very much jaded, at dawn, and stepped out at a way station; and, while we were taking a cup of coffee, that englishman ranged up alongside, and somebody said to him: "so you didn't stop off, after all?" "no. the guard found a place for me that had been, engaged and not occupied. i had a whole saloon car all to myself--oh, quite palatial! i never had such luck in my life." that was our car, you see. we moved into it, straight off, the family and all. but i asked the english gentleman to remain, and he did. a pleasant man, an infantry colonel; and doesn't know, yet, that smythe robbed him of his berth, but thinks it was done by smythe's servant without smythe's knowledge. he was assisted in gathering this impression. the indian trains are manned by natives exclusively. the indian stations except very large and important ones--are manned entirely by natives, and so are the posts and telegraphs. the rank and file of the police are natives. all these people are pleasant and accommodating. one day i left an express train to lounge about in that perennially ravishing show, the ebb and flow and whirl of gaudy natives, that is always surging up and down the spacious platform of a great indian station; and i lost myself in the ecstasy of it, and when i turned, the train was moving swiftly away. i was going to sit down and wait for another train, as i would have done at home; i had no thought of any other course. but a native official, who had a green flag in his hand, saw me, and said politely: "don't you belong in the train, sir?" "yes." i said. he waved his flag, and the train came back! and he put me aboard with as much ceremony as if i had been the general superintendent. they are kindly people, the natives. the face and the bearing that indicate a surly spirit and a bad heart seemed to me to be so rare among indians--so nearly non-existent, in fact--that i sometimes wondered if thuggee wasn't a dream, and not a reality. the bad hearts are there, but i believe that they are in a small, poor minority. one thing is sure: they are much the most interesting people in the world--and the nearest to being incomprehensible. at any rate, the hardest to account for. their character and their history, their customs and their religion, confront you with riddles at every turn-riddles which are a trifle more perplexing after they are explained than they were before. you can get the facts of a custom--like caste, and suttee, and thuggee, and so on--and with the facts a theory which tries to explain, but never quite does it to your satisfaction. you can never quite understand how so strange a thing could have been born, nor why. for instance--the suttee. this is the explanation of it: a woman who throws away her life when her husband dies is instantly joined to him again, and is forever afterward happy with him in heaven; her family will build a little monument to her, or a temple, and will hold her in honor, and, indeed, worship her memory always; they will themselves be held in honor by the public; the woman's self-sacrifice has conferred a noble and lasting distinction upon her posterity. and, besides, see what she has escaped: if she had elected to live, she would be a disgraced person; she could not remarry; her family would despise her and disown her; she would be a friendless outcast, and miserable all her days. very well, you say, but the explanation is not complete yet. how did people come to drift into such a strange custom? what was the origin of the idea? "well, nobody knows; it was probably a revelation sent down by the gods." one more thing: why was such a cruel death chosen--why wouldn't a gentle one have answered? "nobody knows; maybe that was a revelation, too." no--you can never understand it. it all seems impossible. you resolve to believe that a widow never burnt herself willingly, but went to her death because she was afraid to defy public opinion. but you are not able to keep that position. history drives you from it. major sleeman has a convincing case in one of his books. in his government on the nerbudda he made a brave attempt on the th of march, , to put down suttee on his own hook and without warrant from the supreme government of india. he could not foresee that the government would put it down itself eight months later. the only backing he had was a bold nature and a compassionate heart. he issued his proclamation abolishing the suttee in his district. on the morning of tuesday--note the day of the week--the th of the following november, ummed singh upadhya, head of the most respectable and most extensive brahmin family in the district, died, and presently came a deputation of his sons and grandsons to beg that his old widow might be allowed to burn herself upon his pyre. sleeman threatened to enforce his order, and punish severely any man who assisted; and he placed a police guard to see that no one did so. from the early morning the old widow of sixty-five had been sitting on the bank of the sacred river by her dead, waiting through the long hours for the permission; and at last the refusal came instead. in one little sentence sleeman gives you a pathetic picture of this lonely old gray figure: all day and all night "she remained sitting by the edge of the water without eating or drinking." the next morning the body of the husband was burned to ashes in a pit eight feet square and three or four feet deep, in the view of several thousand spectators. then the widow waded out to a bare rock in the river, and everybody went away but her sons and other relations. all day she sat there on her rock in the blazing sun without food or drink, and with no clothing but a sheet over her shoulders. the relatives remained with her and all tried to persuade her to desist from her purpose, for they deeply loved her. she steadily refused. then a part of the family went to sleeman's house, ten miles away, and tried again to get him to let her burn herself. he refused, hoping to save her yet. all that day she scorched in her sheet on the rock, and all that night she kept her vigil there in the bitter cold. thursday morning, in the sight of her relatives, she went through a ceremonial which said more to them than any words could have done; she put on the dhaja (a coarse red turban) and broke her bracelets in pieces. by these acts she became a dead person in the eye of the law, and excluded from her caste forever. by the iron rule of ancient custom, if she should now choose to live she could never return to her family. sleeman was in deep trouble. if she starved herself to death her family would be disgraced; and, moreover, starving would be a more lingering misery than the death by fire. he went back in the evening thoroughly worried. the old woman remained on her rock, and there in the morning he found her with her dhaja still on her head. "she talked very collectedly, telling me that she had determined to mix her ashes with those of her departed husband, and should patiently wait my permission to do so, assured that god would enable her to sustain life till that was given, though she dared not eat or drink. looking at the sun, then rising before her over a long and beautiful reach of the river, she said calmly, 'my soul has been for five days with my husband's near that sun; nothing but my earthly frame is left; and this, i know, you will in time suffer to be mixed with his ashes in yonder pit, because it is not in your nature or usage wantonly to prolong the miseries of a poor old woman.'" he assured her that it was his desire and duty to save her, and to urge her to live, and to keep her family from the disgrace of being thought her murderers. but she said she "was not afraid of their being thought so; that they had all, like good children, done everything in their power to induce her to live, and to abide with them; and if i should consent i know they would love and honor me, but my duties to them have now ended. i commit them all to your care, and i go to attend my husband, ummed singh upadhya, with whose ashes on the funeral pile mine have been already three times mixed." she believed that she and he had been upon the earth three several times as wife and husband, and that she had burned herself to death three times upon his pyre. that is why she said that strange thing. since she had broken her bracelets and put on the red turban she regarded herself as a corpse; otherwise she would not have allowed herself to do her husband the irreverence of pronouncing his name. "this was the first time in her long life that she had ever uttered her husband's name, for in india no woman, high or low, ever pronounces the name of her husband." major sleeman still tried to shake her purpose. he promised to build her a fine house among the temples of her ancestors upon the bank of the river and make handsome provision for her out of rent-free lands if she would consent to live; and if she wouldn't he would allow no stone or brick to ever mark the place where she died. but she only smiled and said, "my pulse has long ceased to beat, my spirit has departed; i shall suffer nothing in the burning; and if you wish proof, order some fire and you shall see this arm consumed without giving me any pain." sleeman was now satisfied that he could not alter her purpose. he sent for all the chief members of the family and said he would suffer her to burn herself if they would enter into a written engagement to abandon the suttee in their family thenceforth. they agreed; the papers were drawn out and signed, and at noon, saturday, word was sent to the poor old woman. she seemed greatly pleased. the ceremonies of bathing were gone through with, and by three o'clock she was ready and the fire was briskly burning in the pit. she had now gone without food or drink during more than four days and a half. she came ashore from her rock, first wetting her sheet in the waters of the sacred river, for without that safeguard any shadow which might fall upon her would convey impurity to her; then she walked to the pit, leaning upon one of her sons and a nephew--the distance was a hundred and fifty yards. "i had sentries placed all around, and no other person was allowed to approach within five paces. she came on with a calm and cheerful countenance, stopped once, and casting her eyes upwards, said, 'why have they kept me five days from thee, my husband?' on coming to the sentries her supporters stopped and remained standing; she moved on, and walked once around the pit, paused a moment, and while muttering a prayer, threw some flowers into the fire. she then walked up deliberately and steadily to the brink, stepped into the centre of the flame, sat down, and leaning back in the midst as if reposing upon a couch, was consumed without uttering a shriek or betraying one sign of agony." it is fine and beautiful. it compels one's reverence and respect--no, has it freely, and without compulsion. we see how the custom, once started, could continue, for the soul of it is that stupendous power, faith; faith brought to the pitch of effectiveness by the cumulative force of example and long use and custom; but we cannot understand how the first widows came to take to it. that is a perplexing detail. sleeman says that it was usual to play music at the suttee, but that the white man's notion that this was to drown the screams of the martyr is not correct; that it had a quite different purpose. it was believed that the martyr died prophecying; that the prophecies sometimes foretold disaster, and it was considered a kindness to those upon whom it was to fall to drown the voice and keep them in ignorance of the misfortune that was to come. chapter xlix. he had had much experience of physicians, and said "the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what; you don't like, and do what you'd druther not." --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. it was a long journey--two nights, one day, and part of another day, from bombay eastward to allahabad; but it was always interesting, and it was not fatiguing. at first the, night travel promised to be fatiguing, but that was on account of pyjamas. this foolish night-dress consists of jacket and drawers. sometimes they are made of silk, sometimes of a raspy, scratchy, slazy woolen material with a sandpaper surface. the drawers are loose elephant-legged and elephant-waisted things, and instead of buttoning around the body there is a drawstring to produce the required shrinkage. the jacket is roomy, and one buttons it in front. pyjamas are hot on a hot night and cold on a cold night--defects which a nightshirt is free from. i tried the pyjamas in order to be in the fashion; but i was obliged to give them up, i couldn't stand them. there was no sufficient change from day-gear to night-gear. i missed the refreshing and luxurious sense, induced by the night-gown, of being undressed, emancipated, set free from restraints and trammels. in place of that, i had the worried, confined, oppressed, suffocated sense of being abed with my clothes on. all through the warm half of the night the coarse surfaces irritated my skin and made it feel baked and feverish, and the dreams which came in the fitful flurries of slumber were such as distress the sleep of the damned, or ought to; and all through the cold other half of the night i could get no time for sleep because i had to employ it all in stealing blankets. but blankets are of no value at such a time; the higher they are piled the more effectively they cork the cold in and keep it from getting out. the result is that your legs are ice, and you know how you will feel by and by when you are buried. in a sane interval i discarded the pyjamas, and led a rational and comfortable life thenceforth. out in the country in india, the day begins early. one sees a plain, perfectly flat, dust-colored and brick-yardy, stretching limitlessly away on every side in the dim gray light, striped everywhere with hard-beaten narrow paths, the vast flatness broken at wide intervals by bunches of spectral trees that mark where villages are; and along all the paths are slender women and the black forms of lanky naked men moving, to their work, the women with brass water-jars on their heads, the men carrying hoes. the man is not entirely naked; always there is a bit of white rag, a loin-cloth; it amounts to a bandage, and is a white accent on his black person, like the silver band around the middle of a pipe-stem. sometimes he also wears a fluffy and voluminous white turban, and this adds a second accent. he then answers properly to miss gordon cumming's flash-light picture of him--as a person who is dressed in "a turban and a pocket handkerchief." all day long one has this monotony of dust-colored dead levels and scattering bunches of trees and mud villages. you soon realize that india is not beautiful; still there is an enchantment about it that is beguiling, and which does not pall. you cannot tell just what it is that makes the spell, perhaps, but you feel it and confess it, nevertheless. of course, at bottom, you know in a vague way that it is history; it is that that affects you, a haunting sense of the myriads of human lives that have blossomed, and withered, and perished here, repeating and repeating and repeating, century after century, and age after age, the barren and meaningless process; it is this sense that gives to this forlorn, uncomely land power to speak to the spirit and make friends with it; to, speak to it with a voice bitter with satire, but eloquent with melancholy. the deserts of australia and the ice-barrens of greenland have no speech, for they have no venerable history; with nothing to tell of man and his vanities, his fleeting glories and his miseries, they have nothing wherewith to spiritualize their ugliness and veil it with a charm. there is nothing pretty about an indian village--a mud one--and i do not remember that we saw any but mud ones on that long flight to allahabad. it is a little bunch of dirt-colored mud hovels jammed together within a mud wall. as a rule, the rains had beaten down parts of some of the houses, and this gave the village the aspect of a mouldering and hoary ruin. i believe the cattle and the vermin live inside the wall; for i saw cattle coming out and cattle going in; and whenever i saw a villager, he was scratching. this last is only circumstantial evidence, but i think it has value. the village has a battered little temple or two, big enough to hold an idol, and with custom enough to fat-up a priest and keep him comfortable. where there are mohammedans there are generally a few sorry tombs outside the village that have a decayed and neglected look. the villages interested me because of things which major sleeman says about them in his books--particularly what he says about the division of labor in them. he says that the whole face of india is parceled out into estates of villages; that nine-tenths of the vast population of the land consist of cultivators of the soil; that it is these cultivators who inhabit the villages; that there are certain "established" village servants--mechanics and others who are apparently paid a wage by the village at large, and whose callings remain in certain families and are handed down from father to son, like an estate. he gives a list of these established servants: priest, blacksmith, carpenter, accountant, washerman, basketmaker, potter, watchman, barber, shoemaker, brazier, confectioner, weaver, dyer, etc. in his day witches abounded, and it was not thought good business wisdom for a man to marry his daughter into a family that hadn't a witch in it, for she would need a witch on the premises to protect her children from the evil spells which would certainly be cast upon them by the witches connected with the neighboring families. the office of midwife was hereditary in the family of the basket-maker. it belonged to his wife. she might not be competent, but the office was hers, anyway. her pay was not high-- cents for a boy, and half as much for a girl. the girl was not desired, because she would be a disastrous expense by and by. as soon as she should be old enough to begin to wear clothes for propriety's sake, it would be a disgrace to the family if she were not married; and to marry her meant financial ruin; for by custom the father must spend upon feasting and wedding-display everything he had and all he could borrow--in fact, reduce himself to a condition of poverty which he might never more recover from. it was the dread of this prospective ruin which made the killing of girl-babies so prevalent in india in the old days before england laid the iron hand of her prohibitions upon the piteous slaughter. one may judge of how prevalent the custom was, by one of sleeman's casual electrical remarks, when he speaks of children at play in villages--where girl-voices were never heard! the wedding-display folly is still in full force in india, and by consequence the destruction of girl-babies is still furtively practiced; but not largely, because of the vigilance of the government and the sternness of the penalties it levies. in some parts of india the village keeps in its pay three other servants: an astrologer to tell the villager when he may plant his crop, or make a journey, or marry a wife, or strangle a child, or borrow a dog, or climb a tree, or catch a rat, or swindle a neighbor, without offending the alert and solicitous heavens; and what his dream means, if he has had one and was not bright enough to interpret it himself by the details of his dinner; the two other established servants were the tiger-persuader and the hailstorm discourager. the one kept away the tigers if he could, and collected the wages anyway, and the other kept off the hailstorms, or explained why he failed. he charged the same for explaining a failure that he did for scoring a success. a man is an idiot who can't earn a living in india. major sleeman reveals the fact that the trade union and the boycott are antiquities in india. india seems to have originated everything. the "sweeper" belongs to the bottom caste; he is the lowest of the low--all other castes despise him and scorn his office. but that does not trouble him. his caste is a caste, and that is sufficient for him, and so he is proud of it, not ashamed. sleeman says: "it is perhaps not known to many of my countrymen, even in india, that in every town and city in the country the right of sweeping the houses and streets is a monopoly, and is supported entirely by the pride of castes among the scavengers, who are all of the lowest class. the right of sweeping within a certain range is recognized by the caste to belong to a certain member; and if any other member presumes to sweep within that range, he is excommunicated--no other member will smoke out of his pipe or drink out of his jug; and he can get restored to caste only by a feast to the whole body of sweepers. if any housekeeper within a particular circle happens to offend the sweeper of that range, none of his filth will be removed till he pacifies him, because no other sweeper will dare to touch it; and the people of a town are often more tyrannized over by these people than by any other." a footnote by major sleeman's editor, mr. vincent arthur smith, says that in our day this tyranny of the sweepers' guild is one of the many difficulties which bar the progress of indian sanitary reform. think of this: "the sweepers cannot be readily coerced, because no hindoo or mussulman would do their work to save his life, nor will he pollute himself by beating the refractory scavenger." they certainly do seem to have the whip-hand; it would be difficult to imagine a more impregnable position. "the vested rights described in the text are so fully recognized in practice that they are frequently the subject of sale or mortgage." just like a milk-route; or like a london crossing-sweepership. it is said that the london crossing-sweeper's right to his crossing is recognized by the rest of the guild; that they protect him in its possession; that certain choice crossings are valuable property, and are saleable at high figures. i have noticed that the man who sweeps in front of the army and navy stores has a wealthy south african aristocratic style about him; and when he is off his guard, he has exactly that look on his face which you always see in the face of a man who has is saving up his daughter to marry her to a duke. it appears from sleeman that in india the occupation of elephant-driver is confined to mohammedans. i wonder why that is. the water-carrier ('bheestie') is a mohammedan, but it is said that the reason of that is, that the hindoo's religion does not allow him to touch the skin of dead kine, and that is what the water-sack is made of; it would defile him. and it doesn't allow him to eat meat; the animal that furnished the meat was murdered, and to take any creature's life is a sin. it is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient. a great indian river, at low water, suggests the familiar anatomical picture of a skinned human body, the intricate mesh of interwoven muscles and tendons to stand for water-channels, and the archipelagoes of fat and flesh inclosed by them to stand for the sandbars. somewhere on this journey we passed such a river, and on a later journey we saw in the sutlej the duplicate of that river. curious rivers they are; low shores a dizzy distance apart, with nothing between but an enormous acreage of sand-flats with sluggish little veins of water dribbling around amongst them; saharas of sand, smallpox-pitted with footprints punctured in belts as straight as the equator clear from the one shore to the other (barring the channel-interruptions)--a dry-shod ferry, you see. long railway bridges are required for this sort of rivers, and india has them. you approach allahabad by a very long one. it was now carrying us across the bed of the jumna, a bed which did not seem to have been slept in for one while or more. it wasn't all river-bed--most of it was overflow ground. allahabad means "city of god." i get this from the books. from a printed curiosity--a letter written by one of those brave and confident hindoo strugglers with the english tongue, called a "babu"--i got a more compressed translation: "godville." it is perfectly correct, but that is the most that can be said for it. we arrived in the forenoon, and short-handed; for satan got left behind somewhere that morning, and did not overtake us until after nightfall. it seemed very peaceful without him. the world seemed asleep and dreaming. i did not see the native town, i think. i do not remember why; for an incident connects it with the great mutiny, and that is enough to make any place interesting. but i saw the english part of the city. it is a town of wide avenues and noble distances, and is comely and alluring, and full of suggestions of comfort and leisure, and of the serenity which a good conscience buttressed by a sufficient bank account gives. the bungalows (dwellings) stand well back in the seclusion and privacy of large enclosed compounds (private grounds, as we should say) and in the shade and shelter of trees. even the photographer and the prosperous merchant ply their industries in the elegant reserve of big compounds, and the citizens drive in thereupon their business occasions. and not in cabs--no; in the indian cities cabs are for the drifting stranger; all the white citizens have private carriages; and each carriage has a flock of white-turbaned black footmen and drivers all over it. the vicinity of a lecture-hall looks like a snowstorm,--and makes the lecturer feel like an opera. india has many names, and they are correctly descriptive. it is the land of contradictions, the land of subtlety and superstition, the land of wealth and poverty, the land of splendor and desolation, the land of plague and famine, the land of the thug and the poisoner, and of the meek and the patient, the land of the suttee, the land of the unreinstatable widow, the land where all life is holy, the land of cremation, the land where the vulture is a grave and a monument, the land of the multitudinous gods; and if signs go for anything, it is the land of the private carriage. in bombay the forewoman of a millinery shop came to the hotel in her private carriage to take the measure for a gown--not for me, but for another. she had come out to india to make a temporary stay, but was extending it indefinitely; indeed, she was purposing to end her days there. in london, she said, her work had been hard, her hours long; for economy's sake she had had to live in shabby rooms and far away from the shop, watch the pennies, deny herself many of the common comforts of life, restrict herself in effect to its bare necessities, eschew cabs, travel third-class by underground train to and from her work, swallowing coal-smoke and cinders all the way, and sometimes troubled with the society of men and women who were less desirable than the smoke and the cinders. but in bombay, on almost any kind of wages, she could live in comfort, and keep her carriage, and have six servants in place of the woman-of-all-work she had had in her english home. later, in calcutta, i found that the standard oil clerks had small one-horse vehicles, and did no walking; and i was told that the clerks of the other large concerns there had the like equipment. but to return to allahabad. i was up at dawn, the next morning. in india the tourist's servant does not sleep in a room in the hotel, but rolls himself up head and ears in his blanket and stretches himself on the veranda, across the front of his master's door, and spends the night there. i don't believe anybody's servant occupies a room. apparently, the bungalow servants sleep on the veranda; it is roomy, and goes all around the house. i speak of menservants; i saw none of the other sex. i think there are none, except child-nurses. i was up at dawn, and walked around the veranda, past the rows of sleepers. in front of one door a hindoo servant was squatting, waiting for his master to call him. he had polished the yellow shoes and placed them by the door, and now he had nothing to do but wait. it was freezing cold, but there he was, as motionless as a sculptured image, and as patient. it troubled me. i wanted to say to him, "don't crouch there like that and freeze; nobody requires it of you; stir around and get warm." but i hadn't the words. i thought of saying 'jeldy jow', but i couldn't remember what it meant, so i didn't say it. i knew another phrase, but it wouldn't come to my mind. i moved on, purposing to dismiss him from my thoughts, but his bare legs and bare feet kept him there. they kept drawing me back from the sunny side to a point whence i could see him. at the end of an hour he had not changed his attitude in the least degree. it was a curious and impressive exhibition of meekness and patience, or fortitude or indifference, i did not know which. but it worried me, and it was spoiling my morning. in fact, it spoiled two hours of it quite thoroughly. i quitted this vicinity, then, and left him to punish himself as much as he might want to. but up to that time the man had not changed his attitude a hair. he will always remain with me, i suppose; his figure never grows vague in my memory. whenever i read of indian resignation, indian patience under wrongs, hardships, and misfortunes, he comes before me. he becomes a personification, and stands for india in trouble. and for untold ages india in trouble has been pursued with the very remark which i was going to utter but didn't, because its meaning had slipped me: "jeddy jow!" ("come, shove along!") why, it was the very thing. in the early brightness we made a long drive out to the fort. part of the way was beautiful. it led under stately trees and through groups of native houses and by the usual village well, where the picturesque gangs are always flocking to and fro and laughing and chattering; and this time brawny men were deluging their bronze bodies with the limpid water, and making a refreshing and enticing show of it; enticing, for the sun was already transacting business, firing india up for the day. there was plenty of this early bathing going on, for it was getting toward breakfast time, and with an unpurified body the hindoo must not eat. then we struck into the hot plain, and found the roads crowded with pilgrims of both sexes, for one of the great religious fairs of india was being held, just beyond the fort, at the junction of the sacred rivers, the ganges and the jumna. three sacred rivers, i should have said, for there is a subterranean one. nobody has seen it, but that doesn't signify. the fact that it is there is enough. these pilgrims had come from all over india; some of them had been months on the way, plodding patiently along in the heat and dust, worn, poor, hungry, but supported and sustained by an unwavering faith and belief; they were supremely happy and content, now; their full and sufficient reward was at hand; they were going to be cleansed from every vestige of sin and corruption by these holy waters which make utterly pure whatsoever thing they touch, even the dead and rotten. it is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining. it is done in love, or it is done in fear; i do not know which it is. no matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites. there are choice great natures among us that could exhibit the equivalent of this prodigious self-sacrifice, but the rest of us know that we should not be equal to anything approaching it. still, we all talk self-sacrifice, and this makes me hope that we are large enough to honor it in the hindoo. two millions of natives arrive at this fair every year. how many start, and die on the road, from age and fatigue and disease and scanty nourishment, and how many die on the return, from the same causes, no one knows; but the tale is great, one may say enormous. every twelfth year is held to be a year of peculiar grace; a greatly augmented volume of pilgrims results then. the twelfth year has held this distinction since the remotest times, it is said. it is said also that there is to be but one more twelfth year--for the ganges. after that, that holiest of all sacred rivers will cease to be holy, and will be abandoned by the pilgrim for many centuries; how many, the wise men have not stated. at the end of that interval it will become holy again. meantime, the data will be arranged by those people who have charge of all such matters, the great chief brahmins. it will be like shutting down a mint. at a first glance it looks most unbrahminically uncommercial, but i am not disturbed, being soothed and tranquilized by their reputation. "brer fox he lay low," as uncle remus says; and at the judicious time he will spring something on the indian public which will show that he was not financially asleep when he took the ganges out of the market. great numbers of the natives along the roads were bringing away holy water from the rivers. they would carry it far and wide in india and sell it. tavernier, the french traveler ( th century), notes that ganges water is often given at weddings, "each guest receiving a cup or two, according to the liberality of the host; sometimes , or , rupees' worth of it is consumed at a wedding." the fort is a huge old structure, and has had a large experience in religions. in its great court stands a monolith which was placed there more than , years ago to preach (budhism) by its pious inscription; the fort was built three centuries ago by a mohammedan emperor--a resanctification of the place in the interest of that religion. there is a hindoo temple, too, with subterranean ramifications stocked with shrines and idols; and now the fort belongs to the english, it contains a christian church. insured in all the companies. from the lofty ramparts one has a fine view of the sacred rivers. they join at that point--the pale blue jumna, apparently clean and clear, and the muddy ganges, dull yellow and not clean. on a long curved spit between the rivers, towns of tents were visible, with a multitude of fluttering pennons, and a mighty swarm of pilgrims. it was a troublesome place to get down to, and not a quiet place when you arrived; but it was interesting. there was a world of activity and turmoil and noise, partly religious, partly commercial; for the mohammedans were there to curse and sell, and the hindoos to buy and pray. it is a fair as well as a religious festival. crowds were bathing, praying, and drinking the purifying waters, and many sick pilgrims had come long journeys in palanquins to be healed of their maladies by a bath; or if that might not be, then to die on the blessed banks and so make sure of heaven. there were fakeers in plenty, with their bodies dusted over with ashes and their long hair caked together with cow-dung; for the cow is holy and so is the rest of it; so holy that the good hindoo peasant frescoes the walls of his hut with this refuse, and also constructs ornamental figures out of it for the gracing of his dirt floor. there were seated families, fearfully and wonderfully painted, who by attitude and grouping represented the families of certain great gods. there was a holy man who sat naked by the day and by the week on a cluster of iron spikes, and did not seem to mind it; and another holy man, who stood all day holding his withered arms motionless aloft, and was said to have been doing it for years. all of these performers have a cloth on the ground beside them for the reception of contributions, and even the poorest of the people give a trifle and hope that the sacrifice will be blessed to him. at last came a procession of naked holy people marching by and chanting, and i wrenched myself away. chapter l. the man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf. --pudd'nhead wilson's new calendar. the journey to benares was all in daylight, and occupied but a few hours. it was admirably dusty. the dust settled upon you in a thick ashy layer and turned you into a fakeer, with nothing lacking to the role but the cow manure and the sense of holiness. there was a change of cars about mid-afternoon at moghul-serai--if that was the name--and a wait of two hours there for the benares train. we could have found a carriage and driven to the sacred city, but we should have lost the wait. in other countries a long wait at a station is a dull thing and tedious, but one has no right to have that feeling in india. you have the monster crowd of bejeweled natives, the stir, the bustle, the confusion, the shifting splendors of the costumes--dear me, the delight of it, the charm of it are beyond speech. the two-hour wait was over too soon. among other satisfying things to look at was a minor native prince from the backwoods somewhere, with his guard of honor, a ragged but wonderfully gaudy gang of fifty dark barbarians armed with rusty flint-lock muskets. the general show came so near to exhausting variety that one would have said that no addition to it could be conspicuous, but when this falstaff and his motleys marched through it one saw that that seeming impossibility had happened. we got away by and by, and soon reached the outer edge of benares; then there was another wait; but, as usual, with something to look at. this was a cluster of little canvas-boxes--palanquins. a canvas-box is not much of a sight--when empty; but when there is a lady in it, it is an object of interest. these boxes were grouped apart, in the full blaze of the terrible sun during the three-quarters of an hour that we tarried there. they contained zenana ladies. they had to sit up; there was not room enough to stretch out. they probably did not mind it. they are used to the close captivity of the dwellings all their lives; when they go a journey they are carried to the train in these boxes; in the train they have to be secluded from inspection. many people pity them, and i always did it myself and never charged anything; but it is doubtful if this compassion is valued. while we were in india some good-hearted europeans in one of the cities proposed to restrict a large park to the use of zenana ladies, so that they could go there and in assured privacy go about unveiled and enjoy the sunshine and air as they had never enjoyed them before. the good intentions back of the proposition were recognized, and sincere thanks returned for it, but the proposition itself met with a prompt declination at the hands of those who were authorized to speak for the zenana ladies. apparently, the idea was shocking to the ladies--indeed, it was quite manifestly shocking. was that proposition the equivalent of inviting european ladies to assemble scantily and scandalously clothed in the seclusion of a private park? it seemed to be about that. without doubt modesty is nothing less than a holy feeling; and without doubt the person whose rule of modesty has been transgressed feels the same sort of wound that he would feel if something made holy to him by his religion had suffered a desecration. i say "rule of modesty" because there are about a million rules in the world, and this makes a million standards to be looked out for. major sleeman mentions the case of some high-caste veiled ladies who were profoundly scandalized when some english young ladies passed by with faces bare to the world; so scandalized that they spoke out with strong indignation and wondered that people could be so shameless as to expose their persons like that. and yet "the legs of the objectors were naked to mid-thigh." both parties were clean-minded and irreproachably modest, while abiding by their separate rules, but they couldn't have traded rules for a change without suffering considerable discomfort. all human rules are more or less idiotic, i suppose. it is best so, no doubt. the way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials. you have a long drive through the outskirts of benares before you get to the hotel. and all the aspects are melancholy. it is a vision of dusty sterility, decaying temples, crumbling tombs, broken mud walls, shabby huts. the whole region seems to ache with age and penury. it must take ten thousand years of want to produce such an aspect. we were still outside of the great native city when we reached the hotel. it was a quiet and homelike house, inviting, and manifestly comfortable. but we liked its annex better, and went thither. it was a mile away, perhaps, and stood in the midst of a large compound, and was built bungalow fashion, everything on the ground floor, and a veranda all around. they have doors in india, but i don't know why. they don't fasten, and they stand open, as a rule, with a curtain hanging in the doorspace to keep out the glare of the sun. still, there is plenty of privacy, for no white person will come in without notice, of course. the native men servants will, but they don't seem to count. they glide in, barefoot and noiseless, and are in the midst before one knows it. at first this is a shock, and sometimes it is an embarrassment; but one has to get used to it, and does. there was one tree in the compound, and a monkey lived in it. at first i was strongly interested in the tree, for i was told that it was the renowned peepul--the tree in whose shadow you cannot tell a lie. this one failed to stand the test, and i went away from it disappointed. there was a softly creaking well close by, and a couple of oxen drew water from it by the hour, superintended by two natives dressed in the usual "turban and pocket-handkerchief." the tree and the well were the only scenery, and so the compound was a soothing and lonesome and satisfying place; and very restful after so many activities. there was nobody in our bungalow but ourselves; the other guests were in the next one, where the table d'hote was furnished. a body could not be more pleasantly situated. each room had the customary bath attached--a room ten or twelve feet square, with a roomy stone-paved pit in it and abundance of water. one could not easily improve upon this arrangement, except by furnishing it with cold water and excluding the hot, in deference to the fervency of the climate; but that is forbidden. it would damage the bather's health. the stranger is warned against taking cold baths in india, but even the most intelligent strangers are fools, and they do not obey, and so they presently get laid up. i was the most intelligent fool that passed through, that year. but i am still more intelligent now. now that it is too late. i wonder if the 'dorian', if that is the name of it, is another superstition, like the peepul tree. there was a great abundance and variety of tropical fruits, but the dorian was never in evidence. it was never the season for the dorian. it was always going to arrive from burma sometime or other, but it never did. by all accounts it was a most strange fruit, and incomparably delicious to the taste, but not to the smell. its rind was said to exude a stench of so atrocious a nature that when a dorian was in the room even the presence of a polecat was a refreshment. we found many who had eaten the dorian, and they all spoke of it with a sort of rapture. they said that if you could hold your nose until the fruit was in your mouth a sacred joy would suffuse you from head to foot that would make you oblivious to the smell of the rind, but that if your grip slipped and you caught the smell of the rind before the fruit was in your mouth, you would faint. there is a fortune in that rind. some day somebody will import it into europe and sell it for cheese. benares was not a disappointment. it justified its reputation as a curiosity. it is on high ground, and overhangs a grand curve of the ganges. it is a vast mass of building, compactly crusting a hill, and is cloven in all directions by an intricate confusion of cracks which stand for streets. tall, slim minarets and beflagged temple-spires rise out of it and give it picturesqueness, viewed from the river. the city is as busy as an ant-hill, and the hurly-burly of human life swarming along the web of narrow streets reminds one of the ants. the sacred cow swarms along, too, and goes whither she pleases, and takes toll of the grain-shops, and is very much in the way, and is a good deal of a nuisance, since she must not be molested. benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together. from a hindoo statement quoted in rev. mr. parker's compact and lucid guide to benares, i find that the site of the town was the beginning-place of the creation. it was merely an upright "lingam," at first, no larger than a stove-pipe, and stood in the midst of a shoreless ocean. this was the work of the god vishnu. later he spread the lingam out till its surface was ten miles across. still it was not large enough for the business; therefore he presently built the globe around it. benares is thus the center of the earth. this is considered an advantage. it has had a tumultuous history, both materially and spiritually. it started brahminically, many ages ago; then by and by buddha came in recent times , years ago, and after that it was buddhist during many centuries--twelve, perhaps--but the brahmins got the upper hand again, then, and have held it ever since. it is unspeakably sacred in hindoo eyes, and is as unsanitary as it is sacred, and smells like the rind of the dorian. it is the headquarters of the brahmin faith, and one-eighth of the population are priests of that church. but it is not an overstock, for they have all india as a prey. all india flocks thither on pilgrimage, and pours its savings into the pockets of the priests in a generous stream, which never fails. a priest with a good stand on the shore of the ganges is much better off than the sweeper of the best crossing in london. a good stand is worth a world of money. the holy proprietor of it sits under his grand spectacular umbrella and blesses people all his life, and collects his commission, and grows fat and rich; and the stand passes from father to son, down and down and down through the ages, and remains a permanent and lucrative estate in the family. as mr. parker suggests, it can become a subject of dispute, at one time or another, and then the matter will be settled, not by prayer and fasting and consultations with vishnu, but by the intervention of a much more puissant power--an english court. in bombay i was told by an american missionary that in india there are protestant missionaries at work. at first it seemed an immense force, but of course that was a thoughtless idea. one missionary to , natives--no, that is not a force; it is the reverse of it; marching against an intrenched camp of , , --the odds are too great. a force of in benares alone would have its hands over-full with , brahmin priests for adversary. missionaries need to be well equipped with hope and confidence, and this equipment they seem to have always had in all parts of the world. mr. parker has it. it enables him to get a favorable outlook out of statistics which might add up differently with other mathematicians. for instance: "during the past few years competent observers declare that the number of pilgrims to benares has increased." and then he adds up this fact and gets this conclusion: "but the revival, if so it may be called, has in it the marks of death. it is a spasmodic struggle before dissolution." in this world we have seen the roman catholic power dying, upon these same terms, for many centuries. many a time we have gotten all ready for the funeral and found it postponed again, on account of the weather or something. taught by experience, we ought not to put on our things for this brahminical one till we see the procession move. apparently one of the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion. i should have been glad to acquire some sort of idea of hindoo theology, but the difficulties were too great, the matter was too intricate. even the mere a, b, c of it is baffling. there is a trinity--brahma, shiva, and vishnu--independent powers, apparently, though one cannot feel quite sure of that, because in one of the temples there is an image where an attempt has been made to concentrate the three in one person. the three have other names and plenty of them, and this makes confusion in one's mind. the three have wives and the wives have several names, and this increases the confusion. there are children, the children have many names, and thus the confusion goes on and on. it is not worth while to try to get any grip upon the cloud of minor gods, there are too many of them. it is even a justifiable economy to leave brahma, the chiefest god of all, out of your studies, for he seems to cut no great figure in india. the vast bulk of the national worship is lavished upon shiva and vishnu and their families. shiva's symbol--the "lingam" with which vishnu began the creation--is worshiped by everybody, apparently. it is the commonest object in benares. it is on view everywhere, it is garlanded with flowers, offerings are made to it, it suffers no neglect. commonly it is an upright stone, shaped like a thimble-sometimes like an elongated thimble. this priapus-worship, then, is older than history. mr. parker says that the lingams in benares "outnumber the inhabitants." in benares there are many mohammedan mosques. there are hindoo temples without number--these quaintly shaped and elaborately sculptured little stone jugs crowd all the lanes. the ganges itself and every individual drop of water in it are temples. religion, then, is the business of benares, just as gold-production is the business of johannesburg. other industries count for nothing as compared with the vast and all-absorbing rush and drive and boom of the town's specialty. benares is the sacredest of sacred cities. the moment you step across the sharply-defined line which separates it from the rest of the globe, you stand upon ineffably and unspeakably holy ground. mr. parker says: "it is impossible to convey any adequate idea of the intense feelings of veneration and affection with which the pious hindoo regards 'holy kashi' (benares)." and then he gives you this vivid and moving picture: "let a hindoo regiment be marched through the district, and as soon as they cross the line and enter the limits of the holy place they rend the air with cries of 'kashi ji ki jai--jai--jai! (holy kashi! hail to thee! hail! hail! hail)'. the weary pilgrim scarcely able to stand, with age and weakness, blinded by the dust and heat, and almost dead with fatigue, crawls out of the oven-like railway carriage and as soon as his feet touch the ground he lifts up his withered hands and utters the same pious exclamation. let a european in some distant city in casual talk in the bazar mention the fact that he has lived at benares, and at once voices will be raised to call down blessings on his head, for a dweller in benares is of all men most blessed." it makes our own religious enthusiasm seem pale and cold. inasmuch as the life of religion is in the heart, not the head, mr. parker's touching picture seems to promise a sort of indefinite postponement of that funeral. mark twain a biography the personal and literary life of samuel langhorne clemens by albert bigelow paine volume i, part : - to clara clemens gabrilowitsch who steadily upheld the author's purpose to write history rather than eulogy as the story of her father's life an acknowledgment dear william dean howells, joseph hopkins twichell, joseph t. goodman, and other old friends of mark twain: i cannot let these volumes go to press without some grateful word to you who have helped me during the six years and more that have gone to their making. first, i want to confess how i have envied you your association with mark twain in those days when you and he "went gipsying, a long time ago." next, i want to express my wonder at your willingness to give me so unstintedly from your precious letters and memories, when it is in the nature of man to hoard such treasures, for himself and for those who follow him. and, lastly, i want to tell you that i do not envy you so much, any more, for in these chapters, one after another, through your grace, i have gone gipsying with you all. neither do i wonder now, for i have come to know that out of your love for him grew that greater unselfishness (or divine selfishness, as he himself might have termed it), and that nothing short of the fullest you could do for his memory would have contented your hearts. my gratitude is measureless; and it is world-wide, for there is no land so distant that it does not contain some one who has eagerly contributed to the story. only, i seem so poorly able to put my thanks into words. albert bigelow paine. prefatory note certain happenings as recorded in this work will be found to differ materially from the same incidents and episodes as set down in the writings of mr. clemens himself. mark twain's spirit was built of the very fabric of truth, so far as moral intent was concerned, but in his earlier autobiographical writings--and most of his earlier writings were autobiographical--he made no real pretense to accuracy of time, place, or circumstance--seeking, as he said, "only to tell a good story"--while in later years an ever-vivid imagination and a capricious memory made history difficult, even when, as in his so-called "autobiography," his effort was in the direction of fact. "when i was younger i could remember anything, whether it happened or not," he once said, quaintly, "but i am getting old, and soon i shall remember only the latter." the reader may be assured, where discrepancies occur, that the writer of this memoir has obtained his data from direct and positive sources: letters, diaries, account-books, or other immediate memoranda; also from the concurring testimony of eye-witnesses, supported by a unity of circumstance and conditions, and not from hearsay or vagrant printed items. mark twain a biography i ancestors on page of the old volume of suetonius, which mark twain read until his very last day, there is a reference to one flavius clemens, a man of wide repute "for his want of energy," and in a marginal note he has written: "i guess this is where our line starts." it was like him to write that. it spoke in his whimsical fashion the attitude of humility, the ready acknowledgment of shortcoming, which was his chief characteristic and made him lovable--in his personality and in his work. historically, we need not accept this identity of the clemens ancestry. the name itself has a kindly meaning, and was not an uncommon one in rome. there was an early pope by that name, and it appears now and again in the annals of the middle ages. more lately there was a gregory clemens, an english landowner who became a member of parliament under cromwell and signed the death-warrant of charles i. afterward he was tried as a regicide, his estates were confiscated, and his head was exposed on a pole on the top of westminster hall. tradition says that the family of gregory clemens did not remain in england, but emigrated to virginia (or new jersey), and from them, in direct line, descended the virginia clemenses, including john marshall clemens, the father of mark twain. perhaps the line could be traced, and its various steps identified, but, after all, an ancestor more or less need not matter when it is the story of a descendant that is to be written. of mark twain's immediate forebears, however, there is something to be said. his paternal grandfather, whose name also was samuel, was a man of culture and literary taste. in he married a virginia girl, pamela goggin; and of their five children john marshall clemens, born august , , was the eldest--becoming male head of the family at the age of seven, when his father was accidentally killed at a house-raising. the family was not a poor one, but the boy grew up with a taste for work. as a youth he became a clerk in an iron manufactory, at lynchburg, and doubtless studied at night. at all events, he acquired an education, but injured his health in the mean time, and somewhat later, with his mother and the younger children, removed to adair county, kentucky, where the widow presently married a sweetheart of her girlhood, one simon hancock, a good man. in due course, john clemens was sent to columbia, the countyseat, to study law. when the living heirs became of age he administered his father's estate, receiving as his own share three negro slaves; also a mahogany sideboard, which remains among the clemens effects to this day. this was in . john clemens was now a young man of twenty-three, never very robust, but with a good profession, plenty of resolution, and a heart full of hope and dreams. sober, industrious, and unswervingly upright, it seemed certain that he must make his mark. that he was likely to be somewhat too optimistic, even visionary, was not then regarded as a misfortune. it was two years later that he met jane lampton; whose mother was a casey --a montgomery-casey whose father was of the lamptons (lambtons) of durham, england, and who on her own account was reputed to be the handsomest girl and the wittiest, as well as the best dancer, in all kentucky. the montgomeries and the caseys of kentucky had been indian fighters in the daniel boone period, and grandmother casey, who had been jane montgomery, had worn moccasins in her girlhood, and once saved her life by jumping a fence and out-running a redskin pursuer. the montgomery and casey annals were full of blood-curdling adventures, and there is to-day a casey county next to adair, with a montgomery county somewhat farther east. as for the lamptons, there is an earldom in the english family, and there were claimants even then in the american branch. all these things were worth while in kentucky, but it was rare jane lampton herself--gay, buoyant, celebrated for her beauty and her grace; able to dance all night, and all day too, for that matter--that won the heart of john marshall clemens, swept him off his feet almost at the moment of their meeting. many of the characteristics that made mark twain famous were inherited from his mother. his sense of humor, his prompt, quaintly spoken philosophy, these were distinctly her contribution to his fame. speaking of her in a later day, he once said: "she had a sort of ability which is rare in man and hardly existent in woman--the ability to say a humorous thing with the perfect air of not knowing it to be humorous." she bequeathed him this, without doubt; also her delicate complexion; her wonderful wealth of hair; her small, shapely hands and feet, and the pleasant drawling speech which gave her wit, and his, a serene and perfect setting. it was a one-sided love affair, the brief courtship of jane lampton and john marshall clemens. all her life, jane clemens honored her husband, and while he lived served him loyally; but the choice of her heart had been a young physician of lexington with whom she had quarreled, and her prompt engagement with john clemens was a matter of temper rather than tenderness. she stipulated that the wedding take place at once, and on may , , they were married. she was then twenty; her husband twenty-five. more than sixty years later, when john clemens had long been dead, she took a railway journey to a city where there was an old settlers' convention, because among the names of those attending she had noticed the name of the lover of her youth. she meant to humble herself to him and ask forgiveness after all the years. she arrived too late; the convention was over, and he was gone. mark twain once spoke of this, and added: "it is as pathetic a romance as any that has crossed the field of my personal experience in a long lifetime." ii the fortunes of john and jane clemens with all his ability and industry, and with the-best of intentions, john clemens would seem to have had an unerring faculty for making business mistakes. it was his optimistic outlook, no doubt--his absolute confidence in the prosperity that lay just ahead--which led him from one unfortunate locality or enterprise to another, as long as he lived. about a year after his marriage he settled with his young wife in gainsborough, tennessee, a mountain town on the cumberland river, and here, in , their first child, a boy, was born. they named him orion--after the constellation, perhaps--though they changed the accent to the first syllable, calling it orion. gainsborough was a small place with few enough law cases; but it could hardly have been as small, or furnished as few cases; as the next one selected, which was jamestown, fentress county, still farther toward the eastward mountains. yet jamestown had the advantage of being brand new, and in the eye of his fancy john clemens doubtless saw it the future metropolis of east tennessee, with himself its foremost jurist and citizen. he took an immediate and active interest in the development of the place, established the county-seat there, built the first court house, and was promptly elected as circuit clerk of the court. it was then that he decided to lay the foundation of a fortune for himself and his children by acquiring fentress county land. grants could be obtained in those days at the expense of less than a cent an acre, and john clemens believed that the years lay not far distant when the land would increase in value ten thousand, twenty, perhaps even a hundred thousandfold. there was no wrong estimate in that. land covered with the finest primeval timber, and filled with precious minerals, could hardly fail to become worth millions, even though his entire purchase of , acres probably did not cost him more than $ . the great tract lay about twenty nines to the southward of jamestown. standing in the door of the court house he had built, looking out over the "knob" of the cumberland mountains toward his vast possessions, he said: "whatever befalls me now, my heirs are secure. i may not live to see these acres turn into silver and gold, but my children will." such was the creation of that mirage of wealth, the "tennessee land," which all his days and for long afterward would lie just ahead--a golden vision, its name the single watchword of the family fortunes--the dream fading with years, only materializing at last as a theme in a story of phantom riches, the gilded age. yet for once john clemens saw clearly, and if his dream did not come true he was in no wise to blame. the land is priceless now, and a corporation of the clemens heirs is to-day contesting the title of a thin fragment of it--about one thousand acres--overlooked in some survey. believing the future provided for, clemens turned his attention to present needs. he built himself a house, unusual in its style and elegance. it had two windows in each room, and its walls were covered with plastering, something which no one in jamestown had ever seen before. he was regarded as an aristocrat. he wore a swallow-tail coat of fine blue jeans, instead of the coarse brown native-made cloth. the blue-jeans coat was ornamented with brass buttons and cost one dollar and twenty-five cents a yard, a high price for that locality and time. his wife wore a calico dress for company, while the neighbor wives wore homespun linsey-woolsey. the new house was referred to as the crystal palace. when john and jane clemens attended balls--there were continuous balls during the holidays--they were considered the most graceful dancers. jamestown did not become the metropolis he had dreamed. it attained almost immediately to a growth of twenty-five houses--mainly log houses --and stopped there. the country, too, was sparsely settled; law practice was slender and unprofitable, the circuit-riding from court to court was very bad for one of his physique. john clemens saw his reserve of health and funds dwindling, and decided to embark in merchandise. he built himself a store and put in a small country stock of goods. these he exchanged for ginseng, chestnuts, lampblack, turpentine, rosin, and other produce of the country, which he took to louisville every spring and fall in six-horse wagons. in the mean time he would seem to have sold one or more of his slaves, doubtless to provide capital. there was a second baby now--a little girl, pamela,--born in september, . three years later, may , another little girl, margaret, came. by this time the store and home were in one building, the store occupying one room, the household requiring two--clearly the family fortunes were declining. about a year after little margaret was born, john clemens gave up jamestown and moved his family and stock of goods to a point nine miles distant, known as the three forks of wolf. the tennessee land was safe, of course, and would be worth millions some day, but in the mean time the struggle for daily substance was becoming hard. he could not have remained at the three forks long, for in we find him at still another place, on the right bank of wolf river, where a post-office called pall mall was established, with john clemens as postmaster, usually addressed as "squire" or "judge." a store was run in connection with the postoffice. at pall mall, in june, , another boy, benjamin, was born. the family at this time occupied a log house built by john clemens himself, the store being kept in another log house on the opposite bank of the river. he no longer practised law. in the gilded age we have mark twain's picture of squire hawkins and obedstown, written from descriptions supplied in later years by his mother and his brother orion; and, while not exact in detail, it is not regarded as an exaggerated presentation of east tennessee conditions at that time. the chapter is too long and too depressing to be set down here. the reader may look it up for himself, if he chooses. if he does he will not wonder that jane clemens's handsome features had become somewhat sharper, and her manner a shade graver, with the years and burdens of marriage, or that john clemens at thirty-six-out of health, out of tune with his environment --was rapidly getting out of heart. after all the bright promise of the beginning, things had somehow gone wrong, and hope seemed dwindling away. a tall man, he had become thin and unusually pale; he looked older than his years. every spring he was prostrated with what was called "sunpain," an acute form of headache, nerve-racking and destroying to all persistent effort. yet he did not retreat from his moral and intellectual standards, or lose the respect of that shiftless community. he was never intimidated by the rougher element, and his eyes were of a kind that would disconcert nine men out of ten. gray and deep-set under bushy brows, they literally looked you through. absolutely fearless, he permitted none to trample on his rights. it is told of john clemens, at jamestown, that once when he had lost a cow he handed the minister on sunday morning a notice of the loss to be read from the pulpit, according to the custom of that community. for some reason, the minister put the document aside and neglected it. at the close of the service clemens rose and, going to the pulpit, read his announcement himself to the congregation. those who knew mark twain best will not fail to recall in him certain of his father's legacies. the arrival of a letter from "colonel sellers" inviting the hawkins family to come to missouri is told in the gilded age. in reality the letter was from john quarles, who had married jane clemens's sister, patsey lampton, and settled in florida, monroe county, missouri. it was a momentous letter in the gilded age, and no less so in reality, for it shifted the entire scene of the clemens family fortunes, and it had to do with the birthplace and the shaping of the career of one whose memory is likely to last as long as american history. iii a humble birthplace florida, missouri, was a small village in the early thirties--smaller than it is now, perhaps, though in that day it had more promise, even if less celebrity. the west was unassembled then, undigested, comparatively unknown. two states, louisiana and missouri, with less than half a million white persons, were all that lay beyond the great river. st. louis, with its boasted ten thousand inhabitants and its river trade with the south, was the single metropolis in all that vast uncharted region. there was no telegraph; there were no railroads, no stage lines of any consequence--scarcely any maps. for all that one could see or guess, one place was as promising as another, especially a settlement like florida, located at the forks of a pretty stream, salt river, which those early settlers believed might one day become navigable and carry the merchandise of that region down to the mighty mississippi, thence to the world outside. in those days came john a. quarles, of kentucky, with his wife, who had been patsey ann lampton; also, later, benjamin lampton, her father, and others of the lampton race. it was natural that they should want jane clemens and her husband to give up that disheartening east tennessee venture and join them in this new and promising land. it was natural, too, for john quarles--happy-hearted, generous, and optimistic--to write the letter. there were only twenty-one houses in florida, but quarles counted stables, out-buildings--everything with a roof on it--and set down the number at fifty-four. florida, with its iridescent promise and negligible future, was just the kind of a place that john clemens with unerring instinct would be certain to select, and the quarles letter could have but one answer. yet there would be the longing for companionship, too, and jane clemens must have hungered for her people. in the gilded age, the sellers letter ends: "come!--rush!--hurry!--don't wait for anything!" the clemens family began immediately its preparation for getting away. the store was sold, and the farm; the last two wagon-loads of produce were sent to louisville; and with the aid of the money realized, a few hundred dollars, john clemens and his family "flitted out into the great mysterious blank that lay beyond the knobs of tennessee." they had a two-horse barouche, which would seem to have been preserved out of their earlier fortunes. the barouche held the parents and the three younger children, pamela, margaret, anal the little boy, benjamin. there were also two extra horses, which orion, now ten, and jennie, the house-girl, a slave, rode. this was early in the spring of . they traveled by the way of their old home at columbia, and paid a visit to relatives. at louisville they embarked on a steamer bound for st. louis; thence overland once more through wilderness and solitude into what was then the far west, the promised land. they arrived one evening, and if florida was not quite all in appearance that john clemens had dreamed, it was at least a haven--with john quarles, jovial, hospitable, and full of plans. the great mississippi was less than fifty miles away. salt river, with a system of locks and dams, would certainly become navigable to the forks, with florida as its head of navigation. it was a sellers fancy, though perhaps it should be said here that john quarles was not the chief original of that lovely character in the gilded age. that was another relative--james lampton, a cousin--quite as lovable, and a builder of even more insubstantial dreams. john quarles was already established in merchandise in florida, and was prospering in a small way. he had also acquired a good farm, which he worked with thirty slaves, and was probably the rich man and leading citizen of the community. he offered john clemens a partnership in his store, and agreed to aid him in the selection of some land. furthermore, he encouraged him to renew his practice of the law. thus far, at least, the florida venture was not a mistake, for, whatever came, matters could not be worse than they had been in tennessee. in a small frame building near the center of the village, john and jane clemens established their household. it was a humble one-story affair, with two main rooms and a lean-to kitchen, though comfortable enough for its size, and comparatively new. it is still standing and occupied when these lines are written, and it should be preserved and guarded as a shrine for the american people; for it was here that the foremost american-born author--the man most characteristically american in every thought and word and action of his life--drew his first fluttering breath, caught blinkingly the light of a world that in the years to come would rise up and in its wide realm of letters hail him as a king. it was on a bleak day, november , , that he entered feebly the domain he was to conquer. long, afterward, one of those who knew him best said: "he always seemed to me like some great being from another planet--never quite of this race or kind." he may have been, for a great comet was in the sky that year, and it would return no more until the day when he should be borne back into the far spaces of silence and undiscovered suns. but nobody thought of this, then. he was a seven-months child, and there was no fanfare of welcome at his coming. perhaps it was even suggested that, in a house so small and so sufficiently filled, there was no real need of his coming at all. one polly ann buchanan, who is said to have put the first garment of any sort on him, lived to boast of the fact,--[this honor has been claimed also for mrs. millie upton and a mrs. damrell. probably all were present and assisted.]--but she had no particular pride in that matter then. it was only a puny baby with a wavering promise of life. still, john clemens must have regarded with favor this first gift of fortune in a new land, for he named the little boy samuel, after his father, and added the name of an old and dear virginia friend, langhorne. the family fortunes would seem to have been improving at this time, and he may have regarded the arrival of another son as a good omen. with a family of eight, now, including jennie, the slavegirl, more room was badly needed, and he began building without delay. the result was not a mansion, by any means, being still of the one-story pattern, but it was more commodious than the tiny two-room affair. the rooms were larger, and there was at least one ell, or extension, for kitchen and dining-room uses. this house, completed in , occupied by the clemens family during the remainder of the years spent in florida, was often in later days pointed out as mark twain's birthplace. it missed that distinction by a few months, though its honor was sufficient in having sheltered his early childhood.--[this house is no longer standing. when it was torn down several years ago, portions of it were carried off and manufactured into souvenirs. mark twain himself disclaimed it as his birthplace, and once wrote on a photograph of it: "no, it is too stylish, it is not my birthplace."] iv beginning a long journey it was not a robust childhood. the new baby managed to go through the winter--a matter of comment among the family and neighbors. added strength came, but slowly; "little sam," as they called him, was always delicate during those early years. it was a curious childhood, full of weird, fantastic impressions and contradictory influences, stimulating alike to the imagination and that embryo philosophy of life which begins almost with infancy. john clemens seldom devoted any time to the company of his children. he looked after their comfort and mental development as well as he could, and gave advice on occasion. he bought a book now and then--sometimes a picture-book --and subscribed for peter parley's magazine, a marvel of delight to the older children, but he did not join in their amusements, and he rarely, or never, laughed. mark twain did not remember ever having seen or heard his father laugh. the problem of supplying food was a somber one to john clemens; also, he was working on a perpetual-motion machine at this period, which absorbed his spare time, and, to the inventor at least, was not a mirthful occupation. jane clemens was busy, too. her sense of humor did not die, but with added cares and years her temper as well as her features became sharper, and it was just as well to be fairly out of range when she was busy with her employments. little sam's companions were his brothers and sisters, all older than himself: orion, ten years his senior, followed by pamela and margaret at intervals of two and three years, then by benjamin, a kindly little lad whose gentle life was chiefly devoted to looking after the baby brother, three years his junior. but in addition to these associations, there were the still more potent influences of that day and section, the intimate, enveloping institution of slavery, the daily companionship of the slaves. all the children of that time were fond of the negroes and confided in them. they would, in fact, have been lost without such protection and company. it was jennie, the house-girl, and uncle ned, a man of all work --apparently acquired with the improved prospects--who were in real charge of the children and supplied them with entertainment. wonderful entertainment it was. that was a time of visions and dreams, small. gossip and superstitions. old tales were repeated over and over, with adornments and improvements suggested by immediate events. at evening the clemens children, big and little, gathered about the great open fireplace while jennie and uncle ned told tales and hair-lifting legends. even a baby of two or three years could follow the drift of this primitive telling and would shiver and cling close with the horror and delight of its curdling thrill. the tales always began with "once 'pon a time," and one of them was the story of the "golden arm" which the smallest listener would one day repeat more elaborately to wider audiences in many lands. briefly it ran as follows: "once 'pon a time there was a man, and he had a wife, and she had a' arm of pure gold; and she died, and they buried her in the graveyard; and one night her husband went and dug her up and cut off her golden arm and tuck it home; and one night a ghost all in white come to him; and she was his wife; and she says: "w-h-a-r-r's my golden arm? w-h-a-r-r's my golden arm? w-h-a-r-r's my g-o-l-den arm?" as uncle ned repeated these blood-curdling questions he would look first one and then another of his listeners in the eyes, with his bands drawn up in front of his breast, his fingers turned out and crooked like claws, while he bent with each question closer to the shrinking forms before him. the tone was sepulchral, with awful pause as if waiting each time for a reply. the culmination came with a pounce on one of the group, a shake of the shoulders, and a shout of: "you've got it!' and she tore him all to pieces!" and the children would shout "lordy!" and look furtively over their shoulders, fearing to see a woman in white against the black wall; but, instead, only gloomy, shapeless shadows darted across it as the flickering flames in the fireplace went out on one brand and flared up on another. then there was a story of a great ball of fire that used to follow lonely travelers along dark roads through the woods. "once 'pon a time there was a man, and he was riding along de road and he come to a ha'nted house, and he heard de chains'a-rattlin' and a-rattlin' and a-rattlin', and a ball of fire come rollin' up and got under his stirrup, and it didn't make no difference if his horse galloped or went slow or stood still, de ball of fire staid under his stirrup till he got plum to de front do', and his wife come out and say: 'my gord, dat's devil fire!' and she had to work a witch spell to drive it away." "how big was it, uncle ned?" "oh, 'bout as big as your head, and i 'spect it's likely to come down dis yere chimney 'most any time." certainly an atmosphere like this meant a tropic development for the imagination of a delicate child. all the games and daily talk concerned fanciful semi-african conditions and strange primal possibilities. the children of that day believed in spells and charms and bad-luck signs, all learned of their negro guardians. but if the negroes were the chief companions and protectors of the children, they were likewise one of their discomforts. the greatest real dread children knew was the fear of meeting runaway slaves. a runaway slave was regarded as worse than a wild beast, and treated worse when caught. once the children saw one brought into florida by six men who took him to an empty cabin, where they threw him on the floor and bound him with ropes. his groans were loud and frequent. such things made an impression that would last a lifetime. slave punishment, too, was not unknown, even in the household. jennie especially was often saucy and obstreperous. jane clemens, with more strength of character than of body, once undertook to punish her for insolence, whereupon jennie snatched the whip from her hand. john clemens was sent for in haste. he came at once, tied jennie's wrists together with a bridle rein, and administered chastisement across the shoulders with a cowhide. these were things all calculated to impress a sensitive child. in pleasant weather the children roamed over the country, hunting berries and nuts, drinking sugar-water, tying knots in love-vine, picking the petals from daisies to the formula "love me-love me not," always accompanied by one or more, sometimes by half a dozen, of their small darky followers. shoes were taken off the first of april. for a time a pair of old woolen stockings were worn, but these soon disappeared, leaving the feet bare for the summer. one of their dreads was the possibility of sticking a rusty nail into the foot, as this was liable to cause lockjaw, a malady regarded with awe and terror. they knew what lockjaw was--uncle john quarles's black man, dan, was subject to it. sometimes when he opened his mouth to its utmost capacity he felt the joints slip and was compelled to put down the cornbread, or jole and greens, or the piece of 'possum he was eating, while his mouth remained a fixed abyss until the doctor came and restored it to a natural position by an exertion of muscular power that would have well-nigh lifted an ox. uncle john quarles, his home, his farm, his slaves, all were sources of never-ending delight. perhaps the farm was just an ordinary missouri farm and the slaves just average negroes, but to those children these things were never apparent. there was a halo about anything that belonged to uncle john quarles, and that halo was the jovial, hilarious kindness of that gentle-hearted, humane man. to visit at his house was for a child to be in a heaven of mirth and pranks continually. when the children came for eggs he would say: "your hens won't lay, eh? tell your maw to feed 'em parched corn and drive 'em uphill," and this was always a splendid stroke of humor to his small hearers. also, he knew how to mimic with his empty hands the peculiar patting and tossing of a pone of corn-bread before placing it in the oven. he would make the most fearful threats to his own children, for disobedience, but never executed any of them. when they were out fishing and returned late he would say: "you--if i have to hunt you again after dark, i will make you smell like a burnt horn!" nothing could exceed the ferocity of this threat, and all the children, with delightful terror and curiosity, wondered what would happen--if it ever did happen--that would result in giving a child that peculiar savor. altogether it was a curious early childhood that little sam had--at least it seems so to us now. doubtless it was commonplace enough for that time and locality. v the way of fortune perhaps john quarles's jocular, happy-go-lucky nature and general conduct did not altogether harmonize with john clemens's more taciturn business methods. notwithstanding the fact that he was a builder of dreams, clemens was neat and methodical, with his papers always in order. he had a hearty dislike for anything resembling frivolity and confusion, which very likely were the chief features of john quarles's storekeeping. at all events, they dissolved partnership at the end of two or three years, and clemens opened business for himself across the street. he also practised law whenever there were cases, and was elected justice of the peace, acquiring the permanent title of "judge." he needed some one to assist in the store, and took in orion, who was by this time twelve or thirteen years old; but, besides his youth, orion--all his days a visionary--was a studious, pensive lad with no taste for commerce. then a partnership was formed with a man who developed neither capital nor business ability, and proved a disaster in the end. the modest tide of success which had come with john clemens's establishment at florida had begun to wane. another boy, henry, born in july, , added one more responsibility to his burdens. there still remained a promise of better things. there seemed at least a good prospect that the scheme for making salt river navigable was likely to become operative. with even small boats (bateaux) running as high as the lower branch of the south fork, florida would become an emporium of trade, and merchants and property-owners of that village would reap a harvest. an act of the legislature was passed incorporating the navigation company, with judge clemens as its president. congress was petitioned to aid this work of internal improvement. so confident was the company of success that the hamlet was thrown into a fever of excitement by the establishment of a boatyard and, the actual construction of a bateau; but a democratic congress turned its back on the proposed improvement. no boat bigger than a skiff ever ascended salt river, though there was a wild report, evidently a hoax, that a party of picnickers had seen one night a ghostly steamer, loaded and manned, puffing up the stream. an old scotchman, hugh robinson, when he heard of it, said: "i don't doubt a word they say. in scotland, it often happens that when people have been killed, or are troubled, they send their spirits abroad and they are seen as much like themselves as a reflection in a looking-glass. that was a ghost of some wrecked steamboat." but john quarles, who was present, laughed: "if ever anybody was in trouble, the men on that steamboat were," he said. "they were the democratic candidates at the last election. they killed salt river improvements, and salt river has killed them. their ghosts went up the river on a ghostly steamboat." it is possible that this comment, which was widely repeated and traveled far, was the origin of the term "going up salt river," as applied to defeated political candidates.--[the dictionaries give this phrase as probably traceable to a small, difficult stream in kentucky; but it seems more reasonable to believe that it originated in quarles's witty comment.] no other attempt was ever made to establish navigation on salt river. rumors of railroads already running in the east put an end to any such thought. railroads could run anywhere and were probably cheaper and easier to maintain than the difficult navigation requiring locks and dams. salt river lost its prestige as a possible water highway and became mere scenery. railroads have ruined greater rivers than the little salt, and greater villages than florida, though neither florida nor salt river has been touched by a railroad to this day. perhaps such close detail of early history may be thought unnecessary in a work of this kind, but all these things were definite influences in the career of the little lad whom the world would one day know as mark twain. vi a new home the death of little margaret was the final misfortune that came to the clemens family in florida. doubtless it hastened their departure. there was a superstition in those days that to refer to health as good luck, rather than to ascribe it to the kindness of providence, was to bring about a judgment. jane clemens one day spoke to a neighbor of their good luck in thus far having lost no member of their family. that same day, when the sisters, pamela and margaret, returned from school, margaret laid her books on the table, looked in the glass at her flushed cheeks, pulled out the trundle-bed, and lay down. she was never in her right mind again. the doctor was sent for and diagnosed the case "bilious fever." one evening, about nine o'clock, orion was sitting on the edge of the trundle-bed by the patient, when the door opened and little sam, then about four years old, walked in from his bedroom, fast asleep. he came to the side of the trundle-bed and pulled at the bedding near margaret's shoulder for some time before he woke. next day the little girl was "picking at the coverlet," and it was known that she could not live. about a week later she died. she was nine years old, a beautiful child, plump in form, with rosy cheeks, black hair, and bright eyes. this was in august, . it was little sam's first sight of death--the first break in the clemens family: it left a sad household. the shoemaker who lived next door claimed to have seen several weeks previous, in a vision, the coffin and the funeral-procession pass the gate by the winding road, to the cemetery, exactly as it happened. matters were now going badly enough with john clemens. yet he never was without one great comforting thought--the future of the tennessee land. it underlaid every plan; it was an anodyne for every ill. "when we sell the tennessee land everything will be all right," was the refrain that brought solace in the darkest hours. a blessing for him that this was so, for he had little else to brighten his days. negotiations looking to the sale of the land were usually in progress. when the pressure became very hard and finances were at their lowest ebb, it was offered at any price--at five cents an acre, sometimes. when conditions improved, however little, the price suddenly advanced even to its maximum of one thousand dollars an acre. now and then a genuine offer came along, but, though eagerly welcomed at the moment, it was always refused after a little consideration. "we will struggle along somehow, jane," he would say. "we will not throw away the children's fortune." there was one other who believed in the tennessee land--jane clemens's favorite cousin, james lampton, the courtliest, gentlest, most prodigal optimist of all that guileless race. to james lampton the land always had "millions in it"--everything had. he made stupendous fortunes daily, in new ways. the bare mention of the tennessee land sent him off into figures that ended with the purchase of estates in england adjoining those of the durham lamptons, whom he always referred to as "our kindred," casually mentioning the whereabouts and health of the "present earl." mark twain merely put james lampton on paper when he created colonel sellers, and the story of the hawkins family as told in the gilded age reflects clearly the struggle of those days. the words "tennessee land," with their golden promise, became his earliest remembered syllables. he grew to detest them in time, for they came to mean mockery. one of the offers received was the trifling sum of two hundred and fifty dollars, and such was the moment's need that even this was considered. then, of course, it was scornfully refused. in some autobiographical chapters which orion clemens left behind he said: "if we had received that two hundred and fifty dollars, it would have been more than we ever made, clear of expenses, out of the whole of the tennessee land, after forty years of worry to three generations." what a less speculative and more logical reasoner would have done in the beginning, john clemens did now; he selected a place which, though little more than a village, was on a river already navigable--a steamboat town with at least the beginnings of manufacturing and trade already established--that is to say, hannibal, missouri--a point well chosen, as shown by its prosperity to-day. he did not delay matters. when he came to a decision, he acted quickly. he disposed of a portion of his goods and shipped the remainder overland; then, with his family and chattels loaded in a wagon, he was ready to set out for the new home. orion records that, for some reason, his father did not invite him to get into the wagon, and how, being always sensitive to slight, he had regarded this in the light of deliberate desertion. "the sense of abandonment caused my heart to ache. the wagon had gone a few feet when i was discovered and invited to enter. how i wished they had not missed me until they had arrived at hannibal. then the world would have seen how i was treated and would have cried 'shame!'" this incident, noted and remembered, long after became curiously confused with another, in mark twain's mind. in an autobiographical chapter published in the north american review he tells of the move to hannibal and relates that he himself was left behind by his absentminded family. the incident of his own abandonment did not happen then, but later, and somewhat differently. it would indeed be an absent-minded family if the parents, and the sister and brothers ranging up to fourteen years of age, should drive off leaving little sam, age four, behind. --[as mentioned in the prefatory note, mark twain's memory played him many tricks in later life. incidents were filtered through his vivid imagination until many of them bore little relation to the actual occurrence. some of these lapses were only amusing, but occasionally they worked an unintentional injustice. it is the author's purpose in every instance, so far as is possible, to keep the record straight.] vii the little town of hannibal hannibal in was already a corporate community and had an atmosphere of its own. it was a town with a distinct southern flavor, though rather more astir than the true southern community of that period; more western in that it planned, though without excitement, certain new enterprises and made a show, at least, of manufacturing. it was somnolent (a slave town could not be less than that), but it was not wholly asleep--that is to say, dead--and it was tranquilly content. mark twain remembered it as "the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer morning, . . . the great mississippi, the magnificent mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along; . . . the dense forest away on the other side." the little city was proud of its scenery, and justly so: circled with bluffs, with holliday's hill on the north, lover's leap on the south, the shining river in the foreground, there was little to be desired in the way of setting. the river, of course, was the great highway. rafts drifted by; steamboats passed up and down and gave communication to the outside world; st. louis, the metropolis, was only one hundred miles away. hannibal was inclined to rank itself as of next importance, and took on airs accordingly. it had society, too--all kinds--from the negroes and the town drunkards ("general" gaines and jimmy finn; later, old ben blankenship) up through several nondescript grades of mechanics and tradesmen to the professional men of the community, who wore tall hats, ruffled shirt-fronts, and swallow-tail coats, usually of some positive color-blue, snuff-brown, and green. these and their families constituted the true aristocracy of the southern town. most of them had pleasant homes--brick or large frame mansions, with colonnaded entrances, after the manner of all southern architecture of that period, which had an undoubted greek root, because of certain drawing-books, it is said, accessible to the builders of those days. most of them, also, had means --slaves and land which yielded an income in addition to their professional earnings. they lived in such style as was considered fitting to their rank, and had such comforts as were then obtainable. it was to this grade of society that judge clemens and his family belonged, but his means no longer enabled him to provide either the comforts or the ostentation of his class. he settled his family and belongings in a portion of a house on hill street--the pavey hotel; his merchandise he established modestly on main street, with orion, in a new suit of clothes, as clerk. possibly the clothes gave orion a renewed ambition for mercantile life, but this waned. business did not begin actively, and he was presently dreaming and reading away the time. a little later he became a printer's apprentice, in the office of the hannibal journal, at his father's suggestion. orion clemens perhaps deserves a special word here. he was to be much associated with his more famous brother for many years, and his personality as boy and man is worth at least a casual consideration. he was fifteen now, and had developed characteristics which in a greater or less degree were to go with him through life. of a kindly, loving disposition, like all of the clemens children, quick of temper, but always contrite, or forgiving, he was never without the fond regard of those who knew him best. his weaknesses were manifold, but, on the whole, of a negative kind. honorable and truthful, he had no tendency to bad habits or unworthy pursuits; indeed, he had no positive traits of any sort. that was his chief misfortune. full of whims and fancies, unstable, indeterminate, he was swayed by every passing emotion and influence. daily he laid out a new course of study and achievement, only to fling it aside because of some chance remark or printed paragraph or bit of advice that ran contrary to his purpose. such a life is bound to be a succession of extremes--alternate periods of supreme exaltation and despair. in his autobiographical chapters, already mentioned, orion sets down every impulse and emotion and failure with that faithful humility which won him always the respect, if not always the approval, of men. printing was a step downward, for it was a trade, and orion felt it keenly. a gentleman's son and a prospective heir of the tennessee land, he was entitled to a profession. to him it was punishment, and the disgrace weighed upon him. then he remembered that benjamin franklin had been a printer and had eaten only an apple and a bunch of grapes for his dinner. orion decided to emulate franklin, and for a time he took only a biscuit and a glass of water at a meal, foreseeing the day when he should electrify the world with his eloquence. he was surprised to find how clear his mind was on this low diet and how rapidly he learned his trade. of the other children pamela, now twelve, and benjamin, seven, were put to school. they were pretty, attractive children, and henry, the baby, was a sturdy toddler, the pride of the household. little sam was the least promising of the flock. he remained delicate, and developed little beyond a tendency to pranks. he was a queer, fanciful, uncommunicative child that detested indoors and would run away if not watched--always in the direction of the river. he walked in his sleep, too, and often the rest of the household got up in the middle of the night to find him fretting with cold in some dark corner. the doctor was summoned for him oftener than was good for the family purse--or for him, perhaps, if we may credit the story of heavy dosings of those stern allopathic days. yet he would appear not to have been satisfied with his heritage of ailments, and was ambitious for more. an epidemic of measles--the black, deadly kind--was ravaging hannibal, and he yearned for the complaint. he yearned so much that when he heard of a playmate, one of the bowen boys, who had it, he ran away and, slipping into the house, crept into bed with the infection. the success of this venture was complete. some days later, the clemens family gathered tearfully around little sam's bed to see him die. according to his own after-confession, this gratified him, and he was willing to die for the glory of that touching scene. however, he disappointed them, and was presently up and about in search of fresh laurels.--[in later life mr. clemens did not recollect the precise period of this illness. with habitual indifference he assigned it to various years, as his mood or the exigencies of his theme required. without doubt the "measles" incident occurred when he was very young.]--he must have been a wearing child, and we may believe that jane clemens, with her varied cares and labors, did not always find him a comfort. "you gave me more uneasiness than any child i had," she said to him once, in her old age. "i suppose you were afraid i wouldn't live," he suggested, in his tranquil fashion. she looked at him with that keen humor that had not dulled in eighty years. "no; afraid you would," she said. but that was only her joke, for she was the most tenderhearted creature in the world, and, like mothers in general, had a weakness for the child that demanded most of her mother's care. it was mainly on his account that she spent her summers on john quarles's farm near florida, and it was during the first summer that an incident already mentioned occurred. it was decided that the whole family should go for a brief visit, and one saturday morning in june mrs. clemens, with the three elder children and the baby, accompanied by jennie, the slave-girl, set out in a light wagon for the day's drive, leaving judge clemens to bring little sam on horseback sunday morning. the hour was early when judge clemens got up to saddle his horse, and little sam was still asleep. the horse being ready, clemens, his mind far away, mounted and rode off without once remembering the little boy, and in the course of the afternoon arrived at his brother-in-law's farm. then he was confronted by jane clemens, who demanded little sam. "why," said the judge, aghast, "i never once thought of him after i left him asleep." wharton lampton, a brother of jane clemens and patsey quarles, hastily saddled a horse and set out, helter-skelter, for hannibal. he arrived in the early dusk. the child was safe enough, but he was crying with loneliness and hunger. he had spent most of the day in the locked, deserted house playing with a hole in the meal-sack where the meal ran out, when properly encouraged, in a tiny stream. he was fed and comforted, and next day was safe on the farm, which during that summer and those that followed it, became so large a part of his boyhood and lent a coloring to his later years. viii the farm we have already mentioned the delight of the clemens children in uncle john quarles's farm. to little sam it was probably a life-saver. with his small cousin, tabitha,--[tabitha quarles, now mrs. greening, of palmyra, missouri, has supplied most of the material for this chapter.] --just his own age (they called her puss), he wandered over that magic domain, fording new marvels at every step, new delights everywhere. a slave-girl, mary, usually attended them, but she was only six years older, and not older at all in reality, so she was just a playmate, and not a guardian to be feared or evaded. sometimes, indeed, it was necessary for her to threaten to tell "miss patsey" or "miss jane," when her little charges insisted on going farther or staying later than she thought wise from the viewpoint of her own personal safety; but this was seldom, and on the whole a stay at the farm was just one long idyllic dream of summer-time and freedom. the farm-house stood in the middle of a large yard entered by a stile made of sawed-off logs of graduated heights. in the corner of the yard were hickory trees, and black walnut, and beyond the fence the hill fell away past the barns, the corn-cribs, and the tobacco-house to a brook--a divine place to wade, with deep, dark, forbidden pools. down in the pasture there were swings under the big trees, and mary swung the children and ran under them until their feet touched the branches, and then took her turn and "balanced" herself so high that their one wish was to be as old as mary and swing in that splendid way. all the woods were full of squirrels--gray squirrels and the red-fox species--and many birds and flowers; all the meadows were gay with clover and butterflies, and musical with singing grasshoppers and calling larks; there were blackberries in the fence rows, apples and peaches in the orchard, and watermelons in the corn. they were not always ripe, those watermelons, and once, when little sam had eaten several pieces of a green one, he was seized with cramps so severe that most of the household expected him to die forthwith. jane clemens was not heavily concerned. "sammy will pull through," she said; "he wasn't born to die that way." it is the slender constitution that bears the strain. "sammy" did pull through, and in a brief time was ready for fresh adventure. there were plenty of these: there were the horses to ride to and from the fields; the ox-wagons to ride in when they had dumped their heavy loads; the circular horsepower to ride on when they threshed the wheat. this last was a dangerous and forbidden pleasure, but the children would dart between the teams and climb on, and the slave who was driving would pretend not to see. then in the evening when the black woman came along, going after the cows, the children would race ahead and set the cows running and jingling their bells--especially little sam, for he was a wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies that sent him capering and swinging his arms, venting his emotions in a series of leaps and shrieks and somersaults, and spasms of laughter as he lay rolling in the grass. his tendency to mischief grew with this wide liberty, improved health, and the encouragement of john quarles's good-natured, fun-loving slaves. the negro quarters beyond the orchard were especially attractive. in one cabin lived a bed-ridden, white-headed old woman whom the children visited daily and looked upon with awe; for she was said to be a thousand years old and to have talked with moses. the negroes believed this; the children, too, of course, and that she had lost her health in the desert, coming out of egypt. the bald spot on her head was caused by fright at seeing pharaoh drowned. she also knew how to avert spells and ward off witches, which added greatly to her prestige. uncle dan'l was a favorite, too-kind-hearted and dependable, while his occasional lockjaw gave him an unusual distinction. long afterward he would become nigger jim in the tom sawyer and huckleberry finn tales, and so in his gentle guilelessness win immortality and the love of many men. certainly this was a heavenly place for a little boy, the farm of uncle john quarles, and the house was as wonderful as its surroundings. it was a two-story double log building, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting the two divisions. in the summer the table was set in the middle of that shady, breezy pavilion, and sumptuous meals were served in the lavish southern style, brought to the table in vast dishes that left only room for rows of plates around the edge. fried chicken, roast pig, turkeys, ducks, geese, venison just killed, squirrels, rabbits, partridges, pheasants, prairie-chickens--the list is too long to be served here. if a little boy could not improve on that bill of fare and in that atmosphere, his case was hopeless indeed. his mother kept him there until the late fall, when the chilly evenings made them gather around the wide, blazing fireplace. sixty years later he wrote of that scene: i can see the room yet with perfect clearness. i can see all its buildings, all its details: the family-room of the house, with the trundle-bed in one corner and the spinning-wheel in another a wheel whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the mournfulest of all sounds to me, and made me homesick and low- spirited, and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the dead; the vast fireplace, piled high with flaming logs, from whose ends a sugary sap bubbled out, but did not go to waste, for we scraped it off and ate it; . . . the lazy cat spread out on the rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs, blinking; my aunt in one chimney-corner and my uncle in the other smoking his corn-cob pipe; the slick and carpetless oak floor faintly mirroring the flame tongues, and freckled with black indentations where fire-coals had popped out and died a leisurely death; half a dozen children romping in the background twilight; splint-bottom chairs here and there--some with rockers; a cradle --out of service, but waiting with confidence. one is tempted to dwell on this period, to quote prodigally from these vivid memories--the thousand minute impressions which the child's sensitive mind acquired in that long-ago time and would reveal everywhere in his work in the years to come. for him it was education of a more valuable and lasting sort than any he would ever acquire from books. ix school-days nevertheless, on his return to hannibal, it was decided that little sam was now ready to go to school. he was about five years old, and the months on the farm had left him wiry and lively, even if not very robust. his mother declared that he gave her more trouble than all the other children put together. "he drives me crazy with his didoes, when he is in the house," she used to say; "and when he is out of it i am expecting every minute that some one will bring him home half dead." he did, in fact, achieve the first of his "nine narrow escapes from drowning" about this time, and was pulled out of the river one afternoon and brought home in a limp and unpromising condition. when with mullein tea and castor-oil she had restored him to activity, she said: "i guess there wasn't much danger. people born to be hanged are safe in water." she declared she was willing to pay somebody to take him off her hands for a part of each day and try to teach him manners. perhaps this is a good place to say that jane clemens was the original of tom sawyer's "aunt polly," and her portrait as presented in that book is considered perfect. kind-hearted, fearless, looking and acting ten years older than her age, as women did in that time, always outspoken and sometimes severe, she was regarded as a "character" by her friends, and beloved by them as, a charitable, sympathetic woman whom it was good to know. her sense of pity was abnormal. she refused to kill even flies, and punished the cat for catching mice. she, would drown the young kittens, when necessary, but warmed the water for the purpose. on coming to hannibal, she joined the presbyterian church, and her religion was of that clean-cut, strenuous kind which regards as necessary institutions hell and satan, though she had been known to express pity for the latter for being obliged to surround himself with such poor society. her children she directed with considerable firmness, and all were tractable and growing in grace except little sam. even baby henry at two was lisping the prayers that sam would let go by default unless carefully guarded. his sister pamela, who was eight years older and always loved him dearly, usually supervised these spiritual exercises, and in her gentle care earned immortality as the cousin mary of tom sawyer. he would say his prayers willingly enough when encouraged by sister pamela, but he much preferred to sit up in bed and tell astonishing tales of the day's adventure--tales which made prayer seem a futile corrective and caused his listeners to wonder why the lightning was restrained so long. they did not know they were glimpsing the first outcroppings of a genius that would one day amaze and entertain the nations. neighbors hearing of these things (also certain of his narrations) remonstrated with mrs. clemens. "you don't believe anything that child says, i hope." "oh yes, i know his average. i discount him ninety per cent. the rest is pure gold." at another time she said: "sammy is a well of truth, but you can't bring it all up in one bucket." this, however, is digression; the incidents may have happened somewhat later. a certain miss e. horr was selected to receive the payment for taking charge of little sam during several hours each day, directing him mentally and morally in the mean time. her school was then in a log house on main street (later it was removed to third street), and was of the primitive old-fashioned kind, with pupils of all ages, ranging in advancement from the primer to the third reader, from the tables to long division, with a little geography and grammar and a good deal of spelling. long division and the third reader completed the curriculum in that school. pupils who decided to take a post-graduate course went to a mr. cross, who taught in a frame house on the hill facing what is now the public square. miss horr received twenty-five cents a week for each pupil, and opened her school with prayer; after which came a chapter of the bible, with explanations, and the rules of conduct. then the a b c class was called, because their recital was a hand-to-hand struggle, requiring no preparation. the rules of conduct that first day interested little sam. he calculated how much he would need to trim in, to sail close to the danger-line and still avoid disaster. he made a miscalculation during the forenoon and received warning; a second offense would mean punishment. he did not mean to be caught the second time, but he had not learned miss horr yet, and was presently startled by being commanded to go out and bring a stick for his own correction. this was certainly disturbing. it was sudden, and then he did not know much about the selection of sticks. jane clemens had usually used her hand. it required a second command to get him headed in the right direction, and he was a trifle dazed when he got outside. he had the forests of missouri to select from, but choice was difficult. everything looked too big and competent. even the smallest switch had a wiry, discouraging look. across the way was a cooper-shop with a good many shavings outside. one had blown across and lay just in front of him. it was an inspiration. he picked it up and, solemnly entering the school-room, meekly handed it to miss herr. perhaps miss horr's sense of humor prompted forgiveness, but discipline must be maintained. "samuel langhorne clemens," she said (he had never heard it all strung together in that ominous way), "i am ashamed of you! jimmy dunlap, go and bring a switch for sammy." and jimmy dunlap went, and the switch was of a sort to give the little boy an immediate and permanent distaste for school. he informed his mother when he went home at noon that he did not care for school; that he had no desire to be a great man; that he preferred to be a pirate or an indian and scalp or drown such people as miss horr. down in her heart his mother was sorry for him, but what she said was that she was glad there was somebody at last who could take him in hand. he returned to school, but he never learned to like it. each morning he went with reluctance and remained with loathing--the loathing which he always had for anything resembling bondage and tyranny or even the smallest curtailment of liberty. a school was ruled with a rod in those days, a busy and efficient rod, as the scripture recommended. of the smaller boys little sam's back was sore as often as the next, and he dreamed mainly of a day when, grown big and fierce, he would descend with his band and capture miss horr and probably drag her by the hair, as he had seen indians and pirates do in the pictures. when the days of early summer came again; when from his desk he could see the sunshine lighting the soft green of holliday's hill, with the purple distance beyond, and the glint of the river, it seemed to him that to be shut up with a webster's spelling-book and a cross old maid was more than human nature could bear. among the records preserved from that far-off day there remains a yellow slip, whereon in neat old-fashioned penmanship is inscribed: miss pamela clemens has won the love of her teacher and schoolmates by her amiable deportment and faithful application to her various studies. e. horr, teacher. if any such testimonial was ever awarded to little sam, diligent search has failed to reveal it. if he won the love of his teacher and playmates it was probably for other reasons. yet he must have learned, somehow, for he could read presently and was soon regarded as a good speller for his years. his spelling came as a natural gift, as did most of his attainments, then and later. it has already been mentioned that miss horr opened her school with prayer and scriptural readings. little sam did not especially delight in these things, but he respected them. not to do so was dangerous. flames were being kept brisk for little boys who were heedless of sacred matters; his home teaching convinced him of that. he also respected miss horr as an example of orthodox faith, and when she read the text "ask and ye shall receive" and assured them that whoever prayed for a thing earnestly, his prayer would be answered, he believed it. a small schoolmate, the balker's daughter, brought gingerbread to school every morning, and little sam was just "honing" for some of it. he wanted a piece of that baker's gingerbread more than anything else in the world, and he decided to pray for it. the little girl sat in front of him, but always until that morning had kept the gingerbread out of sight. now, however, when he finished his prayer and looked up, a small morsel of the precious food lay in front of him. perhaps the little girl could no longer stand that hungry look in his eyes. possibly she had heard his petition; at all events his prayer bore fruit and his faith at that moment would have moved holliday's hill. he decided to pray for everything he wanted, but when he tried the gingerbread supplication next morning it had no result. grieved, but still unshaken, he tried next morning again; still no gingerbread; and when a third and fourth effort left him hungry he grew despairing and silent, and wore the haggard face of doubt. his mother said: "what's the matter, sammy; are you sick?" "no," he said, "but i don't believe in saying prayers any more, and i'm never going to do it again." "why, sammy, what in the world has happened?" she asked, anxiously. then he broke down and cried on her lap and told her, for it was a serious thing in that day openly to repudiate faith. jane clemens gathered him to her heart and comforted him. "i'll make you a whole pan of gingerbread, better than that," she said, "and school will soon be out, too, and you can go back to uncle john's farm." and so passed and ended little sam's first school-days. x early vicissitude and sorrow prosperity came laggingly enough to the clemens household. the year brought hard times: the business venture paid little or no return; law practice was not much more remunerative. judge clemens ran for the office of justice of the peace and was elected, but fees were neither large nor frequent. by the end of the year it became necessary to part with jennie, the slave-girl--a grief to all of them, for they were fond of her in spite of her wilfulness, and she regarded them as "her family." she was tall, well formed, nearly black, and brought a good price. a methodist minister in hannibal sold a negro child at the same time to another minister who took it to his home farther south. as the steamboat moved away from the landing the child's mother stood at the water's edge, shrieking her anguish. we are prone to consider these things harshly now, when slavery has been dead for nearly half a century, but it was a sacred institution then, and to sell a child from its mother was little more than to sell to-day a calf from its lowing dam. one could be sorry, of course, in both instances, but necessity or convenience are matters usually considered before sentiment. mark twain once said of his mother: "kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, i think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted usurpation. she had never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand. as far as her experience went, the wise, the good, and the holy were unanimous in the belief that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for." yet jane clemens must have had qualms at times--vague, unassembled doubts that troubled her spirit. after jennie was gone a little black chore-boy was hired from his owner, who had bought him on the east shore of maryland and brought him to that remote western village, far from family and friends. he was a cheery spirit in spite of that, and gentle, but very noisy. all day he went about singing, whistling, and whooping until his noise became monotonous, maddening. one day little sam said: "ma--[that was the southern term]--make sandy stop singing all the time. it's awful." tears suddenly came into his mother's eyes. "poor thing! he is sold away from his home. when he sings it shows maybe he is not remembering. when he's still i am afraid he is thinking, and i can't bear it." yet any one in that day who advanced the idea of freeing the slaves was held in abhorrence. an abolitionist was something to despise, to stone out of the community. the children held the name in horror, as belonging to something less than human; something with claws, perhaps, and a tail. the money received for the sale of jennie made judge clemens easier for a time. business appears to have improved, too, and he was tided through another year during which he seems to have made payments on an expensive piece of real estate on hill and main streets. this property, acquired in november, , meant the payment of some seven thousand dollars, and was a credit purchase, beyond doubt. it was well rented, but the tenants did not always pay; and presently a crisis came--a descent of creditors --and john: clemens at forty-four found himself without business and without means. he offered everything--his cow, his household furniture, even his forks and spoons--to his creditors, who protested that he must not strip himself. they assured him that they admired his integrity so much they would aid him to resume business; but when he went to st. louis to lay in a stock of goods he was coldly met, and the venture came to nothing. he now made a trip to tennessee in the hope of collecting some old debts and to raise money on the tennessee land. he took along a negro man named charlie, whom he probably picked up for a small sum, hoping to make something through his disposal in a better market. the trip was another failure. the man who owed him a considerable sum of money was solvent, but pleaded hard times: it seems so very hard upon him--[john clemens wrote home]--to pay such a sum that i could not have the conscience to hold him to it. . . i still have charlie. the highest price i had offered for him in new orleans was $ , in vicksburg $ . after performing the journey to tennessee, i expect to sell him for whatever he will bring. i do not know what i can commence for a business in the spring. my brain is constantly on the rack with the study, and i can't relieve myself of it. the future, taking its completion from the state of my health or mind, is alternately beaming in sunshine or over- shadowed with clouds; but mostly cloudy, as you may suppose. i want bodily exercise--some constant and active employment, in the first place; and, in the next place, i want to be paid for it, if possible. this letter is dated january , . he returned without any financial success, and obtained employment for a time in a commission-house on the levee. the proprietor found some fault one day, and judge clemens walked out of the premises. on his way home he stopped in a general store, kept by a man named sehns, to make some purchases. when he asked that these be placed on account, selms hesitated. judge clemens laid down a five-dollar gold piece, the last money he possessed in the world, took the goods, and never entered the place again. when jane clemens reproached him for having made the trip to tennessee, at a cost of two hundred dollars, so badly needed at this time, he only replied gently that he had gone for what he believed to be the best. "i am not able to dig in the streets," he added, and orion, who records this, adds: "i can see yet the hopeless expression of his face." during a former period of depression, such as this, death had come into the clemens home. it came again now. little benjamin, a sensitive, amiable boy of ten, one day sickened, and died within a week, may , . he was a favorite child and his death was a terrible blow. little sam long remembered the picture of his parents' grief; and orion recalls that they kissed each other, something hitherto unknown. judge clemens went back to his law and judicial practice. mrs. clemens decided to take a few boarders. orion, by this time seventeen and a very good journeyman printer, obtained a place in st. louis to aid in the family support. the tide of fortune having touched low-water mark, the usual gentle stage of improvement set in. times grew better in hannibal after those first two or three years; legal fees became larger and more frequent. within another two years judge clemens appears to have been in fairly hopeful circumstances again--able at least to invest some money in silkworm culture and lose it, also to buy a piano for pamela, and to build a modest house on the hill street property, which a rich st. louis cousin, james clemens, had preserved for him. it was the house which is known today as the "mark twain home."--['this house, in , was bought by mr. and mrs. george a. mahan, and presented to hannibal for a memorial museum.]--near it, toward the corner of main street, was his office, and here he dispensed law and justice in a manner which, if it did not bring him affluence, at least won for him the respect of the entire community. one example will serve: next to his office was a stone-cutter's shop. one day the proprietor, dave atkinson, got into a muss with one "fighting" macdonald, and there was a tremendous racket. judge clemens ran out and found the men down, punishing each other on the pavement. "i command the peace!" he shouted, as he came up to them. no one paid the least attention. "i command the peace!" he shouted again, still louder, but with no result. a stone-cutter's mallet lay there, handy. judge clemens seized it and, leaning over the combatants, gave the upper one, macdonald, a smart blow on the head. "i command the peace!" he said, for the third time, and struck a considerably smarter blow. that settled it. the second blow was of the sort that made macdonald roll over, and peace ensued. judge clemens haled both men into his court, fined them, and collected his fee. such enterprise in the cause of justice deserved prompt reward. xi days of education the clemens family had made one or two moves since its arrival in hannibal, but the identity of these temporary residences and the period of occupation of each can no longer be established. mark twain once said: "in my father caught me in a lie. it is not this fact that gives me the date, but the house we lived in. we were there only a year." we may believe it was the active result of that lie that fixed his memory of the place, for his father seldom punished him. when he did, it was a thorough and satisfactory performance. it was about the period of moving into the new house ( ) that the tom sawyer days--that is to say, the boyhood of samuel clemens--may be said to have begun. up to that time he was just little sam, a child--wild, and mischievous, often exasperating, but still a child--a delicate little lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and put to bed. now, at nine, he had acquired health, with a sturdy ability to look out for himself, as boys will, in a community like that, especially where the family is rather larger than the income and there is still a younger child to claim a mother's protecting care. so "sam," as they now called him, "grew up" at nine, and was full of knowledge for his years. not that he was old in spirit or manner--he was never that, even to his death--but he had learned a great number of things, mostly of a kind not acquired at school. they were not always of a pleasant kind; they were likely to be of a kind startling to a boy, even terrifying. once little sam--he was still little sam, then--saw an old man shot down on the main street, at noonday. he saw them carry him home, lay him on the bed, and spread on his breast an open family bible which looked as heavy as an anvil. he though, if he could only drag that great burden away, the poor, old dying man would not breathe so heavily. he saw a young emigrant stabbed with a bowie-knife by a drunken comrade, and noted the spurt of life-blood that followed; he saw two young men try to kill their uncle, one holding him while the other snapped repeatedly an allen revolver which failed to go off. then there was the drunken rowdy who proposed to raid the "welshman's" house one dark threatening night--he saw that, too. a widow and her one daughter lived there, and the ruffian woke the whole village with his coarse challenges and obscenities. sam clemens and a boon companion, john briggs, went up there to look and listen. the man was at the gate, and the warren were invisible in the shadow of the dark porch. the boys heard the elder woman's voice warning the man that she had a loaded gun, and that she would kill him if he stayed where he was. he replied with a ribald tirade, and she warned that she would count ten-that if he remained a second longer she would fire. she began slowly and counted up to five, with him laughing and jeering. at six he grew silent, but he did not go. she counted on: seven--eight--nine--the boys watching from the dark roadside felt their hearts stop. there was a long pause, then the final count, followed a second later by a gush of flame. the man dropped, his breast riddled. at the same instant the thunderstorm that had been gathering broke loose. the boys fled wildly, believing that satan himself had arrived to claim the lost soul. many such instances happened in a town like that in those days. and there were events incident to slavery. he saw a slave struck down and killed with a piece of slag for a trifling offense. he saw an abolitionist attacked by a mob, and they would have lynched him had not a methodist minister defended him on a plea that he must be crazy. he did not remember, in later years, that he had ever seen a slave auction, but he added: "i am suspicious that it is because the thing was a commonplace spectacle, and not an uncommon or impressive one. i do vividly remember seeing a dozen black men and women chained together lying in a group on the pavement, waiting shipment to a southern slave-market. they had the saddest faces i ever saw." it is not surprising that a boy would gather a store of human knowledge amid such happenings as these. they were wild, disturbing things. they got into his dreams and made him fearful when he woke in the middle of the night. he did not then regard them as an education. in some vague way he set them down as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him a taste for a better life. he felt that it was his own conscience that made these things torture him. that was his mother's idea, and he had a high respect for her moral opinions, also for her courage. among other things, he had seen her one day defy a vicious devil of a corsican--a common terror in the town-who was chasing his grown daughter with a heavy rope in his hand, declaring he would wear it out on her. cautious citizens got out of her way, but jane clemens opened her door wide to the refugee, and then, instead of rushing in and closing it, spread her arms across it, barring the way. the man swore and threatened her with the rope, but she did not flinch or show any sign of fear. she stood there and shamed him and derided him and defied him until he gave up the rope and slunk off, crestfallen and conquered. any one who could do that must have a perfect conscience, sam thought. in the fearsome darkness he would say his prayers, especially when a thunderstorm was coming, and vow to begin a better life in the morning. he detested sunday-school as much as day-school, and once orion, who was moral and religious, had threatened to drag him there by the collar; but as the thunder got louder sam decided that he loved sunday-school and would go the next sunday without being invited. fortunately there were pleasanter things than these. there were picnics sometimes, and ferry-boat excursions. once there was a great fourth-of-july celebration at which it was said a real revolutionary soldier was to be present. some one had discovered him living alone seven or eight miles in the country. but this feature proved a disappointment; for when the day came and he was triumphantly brought in he turned out to be a hessian, and was allowed to walk home. the hills and woods around hannibal where, with his playmates, he roamed almost at will were never disappointing. there was the cave with its marvels; there was bear creek, where, after repeated accidents, he had learned to swim. it had cost him heavily to learn to swim. he had seen two playmates drown; also, time and again he had, himself, been dragged ashore more dead than alive, once by a slave-girl, another time by a slaveman--neal champ, of the pavey hotel. in the end he had conquered; he could swim better than any boy in town of his age. it was the river that meant more to him than all the rest. its charm was permanent. it was the path of adventure, the gateway to the world. the river with its islands, its great slow-moving rafts, its marvelous steamboats that were like fairyland, its stately current swinging to the sea! he would sit by it for hours and dream. he would venture out on it in a surreptitiously borrowed boat when he was barely strong enough to lift an oar out of the water. he learned to know all its moods and phases. he felt its kinship. in some occult way he may have known it as his prototype--that resistless tide of life with its ever-changing sweep, its shifting shores, its depths, its shadows, its gorgeous sunset hues, its solemn and tranquil entrance to the sea. his hunger for the life aboard the steamers became a passion. to be even the humblest employee of one of those floating enchantments would be enough; to be an officer would be to enter heaven; to be a pilot was to be a god. "you can hardly imagine what it meant," he reflected once, "to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, to see those steamboats pass up and down, and never to take a trip on them." he had reached the mature age of nine when he could endure this no longer. one day, when the big packet came down and stopped at hannibal, he slipped aboard and crept under one of the boats on the upper deck. presently the signal-bells rang, the steamboat backed away and swung into midstream; he was really going at last. he crept from beneath the boat and sat looking out over the water and enjoying the scenery. then it began to rain--a terrific downpour. he crept back under the boat, but his legs were outside, and one of the crew saw him. so he was taken down into the cabin and at the next stop set ashore. it was the town of louisiana, and there were lampton relatives there who took him home. jane clemens declared that his father had got to take him in hand; which he did, doubtless impressing the adventure on him in the usual way. these were all educational things; then there was always the farm, where entertainment was no longer a matter of girl-plays and swings, with a colored nurse following about, but of manlier sports with his older boy cousins, who had a gun and went hunting with the men for squirrels and partridges by day, for coons and possums by night. sometimes the little boy had followed the hunters all night long and returned with them through the sparkling and fragrant morning fresh, hungry, and triumphant just in time for breakfast. so it is no wonder that at nine he was no longer "little sam," but sam clemens, quite mature and self-dependent, with a wide knowledge of men and things and a variety of accomplishments. he had even learned to smoke--a little--out there on the farm, and had tried tobacco-chewing, though that was a failure. he had been stung to this effort by a big girl at a school which, with his cousin puss, he sometimes briefly attended. "do you use terbacker?" the big girl had asked, meaning did he chew it. "no," he said, abashed at the confession. "haw!" she cried to the other scholars; "here's a boy that can't chaw terbacker." degraded and ashamed, he tried to correct his fault, but it only made him very ill; and he did not try again. he had also acquired the use of certain strong, expressive words, and used them, sometimes, when his mother was safely distant. he had an impression that she would "skin him alive" if she heard him swear. his education had doubtful spots in it, but it had provided wisdom. he was not a particularly attractive lad. he was not tall for his years, and his head was somewhat too large for his body. he had a "great ruck" of light, sandy hair which he plastered down to keep it from curling; keen blue-gray eyes, and rather large features. still, he had a fair, delicate complexion, when it was not blackened by grime or tan; a gentle, winning manner; a smile that, with his slow, measured way of speaking, made him a favorite with his companions. he did not speak much, and his mental attainments were not highly regarded; but, for some reason, whenever he did speak every playmate in hearing stopped whatever he was doing and listened. perhaps it would be a plan for a new game or lark; perhaps it was something droll; perhaps it was just a commonplace remark that his peculiar drawl made amusing. whatever it was, they considered it worth while. his mother always referred to his slow fashion of speaking as "sammy's long talk." her own speech was still more deliberate, but she seemed not to notice it. henry--a much handsomer lad and regarded as far more promising--did not have it. he was a lovable, obedient little fellow whom the mischievous sam took delight in teasing. for this and other reasons the latter's punishments were frequent enough, perhaps not always deserved. sometimes he charged his mother with partiality. he would say: "yes, no matter what it is, i am always the one to get punished"; and his mother would answer: "well, sam, if you didn't deserve it for that, you did for something else." henry clemens became the sid of tom sawyer, though henry was in every way a finer character than sid. his brother sam always loved him, and fought for him oftener than with him. with the death of benjamin clemens, henry and sam were naturally drawn much closer together, though sam could seldom resist the temptation of tormenting henry. a schoolmate, george butler (he was a nephew of general butler and afterward fought bravely in the civil war), had a little blue suit with a leather belt to match, and was the envy of all. mrs. clemens finally made sam and henry suits of blue cotton velvet, and the next sunday, after various services were over, the two sauntered about, shedding glory for a time, finally going for a stroll in the woods. they walked along properly enough, at first, then just ahead sam spied the stump of a newly cut tree, and with a wild whooping impulse took a running leap over it. there were splinters on the stump where the tree had broken away, but he cleared them neatly. henry wanted to match the performance, but was afraid to try, so sam dared him. he kept daring him until henry was goaded to the attempt. he cleared the stump, but the highest splinters caught the slack of his little blue trousers, and the cloth gave way. he escaped injury, but the precious trousers were damaged almost beyond repair. sam, with a boy's heartlessness, was fairly rolling on the ground with laughter at henry's appearance. "cotton-tail rabbit!" he shouted. "cotton-tail rabbit!" while henry, weeping, set out for home by a circuitous and unfrequented road. let us hope, if there was punishment for this mishap, that it fell in the proper locality. these two brothers were of widely different temperament. henry, even as a little boy, was sturdy, industrious, and dependable. sam was volatile and elusive; his industry of an erratic kind. once his father set him to work with a hatchet to remove some plaster. he hacked at it for a time well enough, then lay down on the floor of the room and threw his hatchet at such areas of the plaster as were not in easy reach. henry would have worked steadily at a task like that until the last bit was removed and the room swept clean. the home incidents in 'tom sawyer', most of them, really happened. sam clemens did clod henry for getting him into trouble about the colored thread with which he sewed his shirt when he came home from swimming; he did inveigle a lot of boys into whitewashing, a fence for him; he did give pain-killer to peter, the cat. there was a cholera scare that year, and pain-killer was regarded as a preventive. sam had been ordered to take it liberally, and perhaps thought peter too should be safeguarded. as for escaping punishment for his misdeeds in the manner described in that book, this was a daily matter, and the methods adapted themselves to the conditions. in the introduction to tom sawyer mark twain confesses to the general truth of the history, and to the reality of its characters. "huck finn was drawn from life," he tells us. "tom sawyer also, but not from an individual--he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom i knew." the three boys were--himself, chiefly, and in a lesser degree john briggs and will bowen. john briggs was also the original of joe harper in that book. as for huck finn, his original was tom blankenship, neither elaborated nor qualified. there were several of the blankenships: there was old ben, the father, who had succeeded "general" gains as the town drunkard; young ben, the eldest son--a hard case with certain good traits; and tom--that is to say, huck--who was just as he is described in tom sawyer: a ruin of rags, a river-rat, an irresponsible bit of human drift, kind of heart and possessing that priceless boon, absolute unaccountability of conduct to any living soul. he could came and go as he chose; he never had to work or go to school; he could do all things, good or bad, that the other boys longed to do and were forbidden. he represented to them the very embodiment of liberty, and his general knowledge of important matters, such as fishing, hunting, trapping, and all manner of signs and spells and hoodoos and incantations, made him immensely valuable as a companion. the fact that his society was prohibited gave it a vastly added charm. the blankenships picked up a precarious living fishing and hunting, and lived at first in a miserable house of bark, under a tree, but later moved into quite a pretentious building back of the new clemens home on hill street. it was really an old barn of a place--poor and ramshackle even then; but now, more than sixty years later, a part of it is still standing. the siding of the part that stands is of black walnut, which must have been very plentiful in that long-ago time. old drunken ben blankenship never dreamed that pieces of his house would be carried off as relics because of the literary fame of his son tom--a fame founded on irresponsibility and inconsequence. orion clemens, who was concerned with missionary work about this time, undertook to improve the blankenships spiritually. sam adopted them, outright, and took them to his heart. he was likely to be there at any hour of the day, and he and tom had cat-call signals at night which would bring him out on the back single-story roof, and down a little arbor and flight of steps, to the group of boon companions which, besides tom, included john briggs, the bowen boys, will pitts, and one or two other congenial spirits. they were not vicious boys; they were not really bad boys; they were only mischievous, fun-loving boys-thoughtless, and rather disregardful of the comforts and the rights of others. xii tom sawyer's band they ranged from holliday's hill on the north to the cave on the south, and over the fields and through all the woods about. they navigated the river from turtle island to glasscock's island (now pearl, or tom sawyer's island), and far below; they penetrated the wilderness of the illinois shore. they could run like wild turkeys and swim like ducks; they could handle a boat as if born in one. no orchard or melon patch was entirely safe from them; no dog or slave patrol so vigilant that they did not sooner or later elude it. they borrowed boats when their owners were not present. once when they found this too much trouble, they decided to own a boat, and one sunday gave a certain borrowed craft a coat of red paint (formerly it had been green), and secluded it for a season up bear creek. they borrowed the paint also, and the brush, though they carefully returned these the same evening about nightfall, so the painter could have them monday morning. tom blankenship rigged up a sail for the new craft, and sam clemens named it cecilia, after which they didn't need to borrow boats any more, though the owner of it did; and he sometimes used to observe as he saw it pass that, if it had been any other color but red, he would have sworn it was his. some of their expeditions were innocent enough. they often cruised up to turtle island, about two miles above hannibal, and spent the day feasting. you could have loaded a car with turtles and their eggs up there, and there were quantities of mussels and plenty of fish. fishing and swimming were their chief pastimes, with general marauding for adventure. where the railroad-bridge now ends on the missouri side was their favorite swimming-hole--that and along bear creek, a secluded limpid water with special interests of its own. sometimes at evening they swam across to glasscock's island--the rendezvous of tom sawyer's "black avengers" and the hiding-place of huck and nigger jim; then, when they had frolicked on the sand-bar at the head of the island for an hour or more, they would swim back in the dusk, a distance of half a mile, breasting the strong, steady mississippi current without exhaustion or fear. they could swim all day, likely enough, those graceless young scamps. once--though this was considerably later, when he was sixteen --sam clemens swam across to the illinois side, and then turned and swam back again without landing, a distance of at least two miles, as he had to go. he was seized with a cramp on the return trip. his legs became useless, and he was obliged to make the remaining distance with his arms. it was a hardy life they led, and it is not recorded that they ever did any serious damage, though they narrowly missed it sometimes. one of their sunday pastimes was to climb holliday's hill and roll down big stones, to frighten the people who were driving to church. holliday's hill above the road was steep; a stone once started would go plunging and leaping down and bound across the road with the deadly swiftness of a twelve-inch shell. the boys would get a stone poised, then wait until they saw a team approaching, and, calculating the distance, would give it a start. dropping down behind the bushes, they would watch the dramatic effect upon the church-goers as the great missile shot across the road a few yards before them. this was homeric sport, but they carried it too far. stones that had a habit of getting loose so numerously on sundays and so rarely on other days invited suspicion, and the "patterollers" (river patrol--a kind of police of those days) were put on the watch. so the boys found other diversions until the patterollers did not watch any more; then they planned a grand coup that would eclipse anything before attempted in the stone-rolling line. a rock about the size of an omnibus was lying up there, in a good position to go down hill, once, started. they decided it would be a glorious thing to see that great boulder go smashing down, a hundred yards or so in front of some unsuspecting and peaceful-minded church-goer. quarrymen were getting out rock not far away, and left their picks and shovels over sundays. the boys borrowed these, and went to work to undermine the big stone. it was a heavier job than they had counted on, but they worked faithfully, sunday after sunday. if their parents had wanted them to work like that, they would have thought they were being killed. finally one sunday, while they were digging, it suddenly got loose and started down. they were not quite ready for it. nobody was coming but an old colored man in a cart, so it was going to be wasted. it was not quite wasted, however. they had planned for a thrilling result; and there was thrill enough while it lasted. in the first place, the stone nearly caught will bowen when it started. john briggs had just that moment quit digging and handed will the pick. will was about to step into the excavation when sam clemens, who was already there, leaped out with a yell: "look out, boys, she's coming!" she came. the huge stone kept to the ground at first, then, gathering a wild momentum, it went bounding into the air. about half-way down the hill it struck a tree several inches through and cut it clean off. this turned its course a little, and the negro in the cart, who heard the noise, saw it come crashing in his direction and made a wild effort to whip up his horse. it was also headed toward a cooper-shop across the road. the boys watched it with growing interest. it made longer leaps with every bound, and whenever it struck the fragments the dust would fly. they were certain it would demolish the negro and destroy the cooper-shop. the shop was empty, it being sunday, but the rest of the catastrophe would invite close investigation, with results. they wanted to fly, but they could not move until they saw the rock land. it was making mighty leaps now, and the terrified negro had managed to get directly in its path. they stood holding their breath, their mouths open. then suddenly they could hardly believe their eyes; the boulder struck a projection a distance above the road, and with a mighty bound sailed clear over the negro and his mule and landed in the soft dirt beyond-only a fragment striking the shop, damaging but not wrecking it. half buried in the ground, that boulder lay there for nearly forty years; then it was blasted up for milling purposes. it was the last rock the boys ever rolled down. they began to suspect that the sport was not altogether safe. sometimes the boys needed money, which was not easy to get in those days. on one occasion of this sort, tom blankenship had the skin of a coon he had captured, which represented the only capital in the crowd. at selms's store on wild cat corner the coonskin would bring ten cents, but that was not enough. they arranged a plan which would make it pay a good deal more than that. selins's window was open, it being summer-time, and his pile of pelts was pretty handy. huck--that is to say, tom--went in the front door and sold the skin for ten cents to selms, who tossed it back on the pile. tom came back with the money and after a reasonable period went around to the open window, crawled in, got the coonskin, and sold it to selms again. he did this several times that afternoon; then john pierce, selins's clerk, said: "look here, selms, there is something wrong about this. that boy has been selling us coonskins all the afternoon." selms went to his pile of pelts. there were several sheepskins and some cowhides, but only one coonskin--the one he had that moment bought. selms himself used to tell this story as a great joke. perhaps it is not adding to mark twain's reputation to say that the boy sam clemens--a pretty small boy, a good deal less than twelve at this time--was the leader of this unhallowed band; yet any other record would be less than historic. if the band had a leader, it was he. they were always ready to listen to him--they would even stop fishing to do that --and to follow his projects. they looked to him for ideas and organization, whether the undertaking was to be real or make-believe. when they played "bandit" or "pirate" or "indian," sam clemens was always chief; when they became real raiders it is recorded that he was no less distinguished. like tom sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings of leadership. when the christian sons of temperance came along with a regalia, and a red sash that carried with it rank and the privilege of inventing pass-words, the gaud of these things got into his eyes, and he gave up smoking (which he did rather gingerly) and swearing (which he did only under heavy excitement), also liquor (though he had never tasted it yet), and marched with the newly washed and pure in heart for a full month--a month of splendid leadership and servitude. then even the red sash could not hold him in bondage. he looked up tom blankenship and said: "say, tom, i'm blamed tired of this! let's go somewhere and smoke!" which must have been a good deal of a sacrifice, for the uniform was a precious thing. limelight and the center of the stage was a passion of sam clemens's boyhood, a love of the spectacular that never wholly died. it seems almost a pity that in those far-off barefoot old days he could not have looked down the years to a time when, with the world at his feet, venerable oxford should clothe him in a scarlet gown. he could not by any chance have dreamed of that stately honor. his ambitions did not lie in the direction of mental achievement. it is true that now and then, on friday at school, he read a composition, one of which--a personal burlesque on certain older boys--came near resulting in bodily damage. but any literary ambition he may have had in those days was a fleeting thing. his permanent dream was to be a pirate, or a pilot, or a bandit, or a trapper-scout; something gorgeous and active, where his word--his nod, even--constituted sufficient law. the river kept the pilot ambition always fresh, and the cave supplied a background for those other things. the cave was an enduring and substantial joy. it was a real cave, not merely a hole, but a subterranean marvel of deep passages and vaulted chambers that led away into bluffs and far down into the earth's black silences, even below the river, some said. for sam clemens the cave had a fascination that never faded. other localities and diversions might pall, but any mention of the cave found him always eager and ready for the three-mile walk or pull that brought them to its mystic door. with its long corridors, its royal chambers hung with stalactites, its remote hiding-places, its possibilities as the home of a gallant outlaw band, it contained everything that a romantic boy could love or long for. in tom sawyer indian joe dies in the cave. he did not die there in real life, but was lost there once, and was living on bats when they found him. he was a dissolute reprobate, and when, one night, he did die there came up a thunder-storm so terrific that sam clemens at home and in bed was certain that satan had come in person for the half-breed's wicked soul. he covered his head and said his prayers industriously, in the fear that the evil one might conclude to save another trip by taking him along, too. the treasure-digging adventure in the book had a foundation in fact. there was a tradition concerning some french trappers who long before had established a trading-post two miles above hannibal, on what is called the "bay." it is said that, while one of these trappers was out hunting, indians made a raid on the post and massacred the others. the hunter on returning found his comrades killed and scalped, but the indians had failed to find the treasure which was buried in a chest. he left it there, swam across to illinois, and made his way to st. louis, where he told of the massacre and the burial of the chest of gold. then he started to raise a party to go back for it, but was taken sick and died. later some men came up from st. louis looking for the chest. they did not find it, but they told the circumstances, and afterward a good many people tried to find the gold. tom blankenship one morning came to sam clemens and john briggs and said he was going to dig up the treasure. he said he had dreamed just where it was, and said if they would go with him and dig he would divide up. the boys had great faith in dreams, especially tom's dreams. tom's unlimited freedom gave him a large importance in their eyes. the dreams of a boy like that were pretty sure to mean something. they followed tom to the place with some shovels and a pick, and he showed them where to dig. then he sat down under the shade of a papaw-tree and gave orders. they dug nearly all day. now and then they stopped to rest, and maybe to wonder a little why tom didn't dig some himself; but, of course, he had done the dreaming, which entitled him to an equal share. they did not find it that day, and when they went back next morning they took two long iron rods; these they would push and drive into the ground until they struck something hard. then they would dig down to see what it was, but it never turned out to be money. that night the boys declared they would not dig any more. but tom had another dream. he dreamed the gold was exactly under the little papaw-tree. this sounded so circumstantial that they went back and dug another day. it was hot weather too, august, and that night they were nearly dead. even tom gave it up, then. he said there was something about the way they dug, but he never offered to do any digging himself. this differs considerably from the digging incident in the book, but it gives us an idea of the respect the boys had for the ragamuffin original of huckleberry finn.--[much of the detail in this chapter was furnished to the writer by john briggs shortly before his death in .]--tom blankenship's brother, ben, was also drawn upon for that creation, at least so far as one important phase of huck's character is concerned. he was considerably older, as well as more disreputable, than tom. he was inclined to torment the boys by tying knots in their clothes when they went swimming, or by throwing mud at them when they wanted to come out, and they had no deep love for him. but somewhere in ben blankenship there was a fine generous strain of humanity that provided mark twain with that immortal episode in the story of huck finn--in sheltering the nigger jim. this is the real story: a slave ran off from monroe county, missouri, and got across the river into illinois. ben used to fish and hunt over there in the swamps, and one day found him. it was considered a most worthy act in those days to return a runaway slave; in fact, it was a crime not to do it. besides, there was for this one a reward of fifty dollars, a fortune to ragged outcast ben blankenship. that money and the honor he could acquire must have been tempting to the waif, but it did not outweigh his human sympathy. instead of giving him up and claiming the reward, ben kept the runaway over there in the marshes all summer. the negro would fish and ben would carry him scraps of other food. then, by and by, it leaked out. some wood-choppers went on a hunt for the fugitive, and chased him to what was called "bird slough." there trying to cross a drift he was drowned. in the book, the author makes huck's struggle a psychological one between conscience and the law, on one side, and sympathy on the other. with ben blankenship the struggle--if there was a struggle--was probably between sympathy and cupidity. he would care very little for conscience and still less for law. his sympathy with the runaway, however, would be large and elemental, and it must have been very large to offset the lure of that reward. there was a gruesome sequel to this incident. some days following the drowning of the runaway, sam clemens, john briggs, and the bowen boys went to the spot and were pushing the drift about, when suddenly the negro rose before them, straight and terrible, about half his length out of the water. he had gone down feet foremost, and the loosened drift had released him. the boys did not stop to investigate. they thought he was after them and flew in wild terror, never stopping until they reached human habitation. how many gruesome experiences there appear to have been in those early days! in 'the innocents abroad' mark twain tells of the murdered man he saw one night in his father's office. the man's name was mcfarlane. he had been stabbed that day in the old hudson-mcfarlane feud and carried in there to die. sam clemens and john briggs had run away from school and had been sky larking all that day, and knew nothing of the affair. sam decided that his father's office was safer for him than to face his mother, who was probably sitting up, waiting. he tells us how he lay on the lounge, and how a shape on the floor gradually resolved itself into the outlines of a man; how a square of moonlight from the window approached it and gradually revealed the dead face and the ghastly stabbed breast. "i went out of there," he says. "i do not say that i went away in any sort of a hurry, but i simply went; that is sufficient. i went out of the window, and i carried the sash along with me. i did not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than to, leave it, and so i took it. i was not scared, but i was considerably agitated." he was not yet twelve, for his father was no longer alive when the boy reached that age. certainly these were disturbing, haunting things. then there was the case of the drunken tramp in the calaboose to whom the boys kind-heartedly enough carried food and tobacco. sam clemens spent some of his precious money to buy the tramp a box of lucifer matches--a brand new invention then, scarce and high. the tramp started a fire with the matches and burned down the calaboose, himself in it. for weeks the boy was tortured, awake and in his dreams, by the thought that if he had not carried the man the matches the tragedy could not have happened. remorse was always samuel clemens's surest punishment. to his last days on earth he never outgrew its pangs. what a number of things crowded themselves into a few brief years! it is not easy to curtail these boyhood adventures of sam clemens and his scapegrace friends, but one might go on indefinitely with their mad doings. they were an unpromising lot. ministers and other sober-minded citizens freely prophesied sudden and violent ends for them, and considered them hardly worth praying for. they must have proven a disappointing lot to those prophets. the bowen boys became fine river-pilots; will pitts was in due time a leading merchant and bank director; john briggs grew into a well-to-do and highly respected farmer; even huck finn--that is to say, tom blankenship--is reputed to have ranked as an honored citizen and justice of the peace in a western town. but in those days they were a riotous, fun-loving band with little respect for order and even less for ordinance. xiii the gentler side his associations were not all of that lawless breed. at his school (he had sampled several places of learning, and was now at mr. cross's on the square) were a number of less adventurous, even if not intrinsically better playmates. there was george robards, the latin scholar, and john, his brother, a handsome boy, who rode away at last with his father into the sunset, to california, his golden curls flying in the wind. and there was jimmy mcdaniel, a kind-hearted boy whose company was worth while, because his father was a confectioner, and he used to bring candy and cake to school. also there was buck brown, a rival speller, and john meredith, the doctor's son, and john garth, who was one day to marry little helen kercheval, and in the end would be remembered and honored with a beautiful memorial building not far from the site of the old school. furthermore, there were a good many girls. tom sawyer had an impressionable heart, and sam clemens no less so. there was bettie ormsley, and artemisia briggs, and jennie brady; also mary miller, who was nearly twice his age and gave him his first broken heart. "i believe i was as miserable as a grown man could be," he said once, remembering. tom sawyer had heart sorrows too, and we may imagine that his emotions at such times were the emotions of sam clemens, say at the age of ten. but, as tom sawyer had one faithful sweetheart, so did he. they were one and the same. becky thatcher in the book was laura hawkins in reality. the acquaintance of these two had begun when the hawkins family moved into the virginia house on the corner of hill and main streets.--[the hawkins family in real life bore no resemblance to the family of that name in the gilded age. judge hawkins of the gilded age, as already noted, was john clemens. mark twain used the name hawkins, also the name of his boyhood sweetheart, laura, merely for old times' sake, and because in portraying the childhood of laura hawkins he had a picture of the real laura in his mind.]--the clemens family was then in the new home across the way, and the children were soon acquainted. the boy could be tender and kind, and was always gentle in his treatment of the other sex. they visited back and forth, especially around the new house, where there were nice pieces of boards and bricks for play-houses. so they played "keeping house," and if they did not always agree well, since the beginning of the world sweethearts have not always agreed, even in arcady. once when they were building a house--and there may have been some difference of opinion as to its architecture--the boy happened to let a brick fall on the little girl's finger. if there had been any disagreement it vanished instantly with that misfortune. he tried to comfort her and soothe the pain; then he wept with her and suffered most of the two, no doubt. so, you see, he was just a little boy, after all, even though he was already chief of a red-handed band, the "black avengers of the spanish main." he was always a tender-hearted lad. he would never abuse an animal, unless, as in the pain-killer incident, his tendency to pranking ran away with him. he had indeed a genuine passion for cats; summers when he went to the farm he never failed to take his cat in a basket. when he ate, it sat in a chair beside him at the table. his sympathy included inanimate things as well. he loved flowers--not as the embryo botanist or gardener, but as a personal friend. he pitied the dead leaf and the murmuring dried weed of november because their brief lives were ended, and they would never know the summer again, or grow glad with another spring. his heart went out to them; to the river and the sky, the sunlit meadow and the drifted hill. that his observation of all nature was minute and accurate is shown everywhere in his writing; but it was never the observation of a young naturalist it was the subconscious observation of sympathetic love. we are wandering away from his school-days. they were brief enough and came rapidly to an end. they will not hold us long. undoubtedly tom sawyer's distaste for school and his excuses for staying at home--usually some pretended illness--have ample foundation in the boyhood of sam clemens. his mother punished him and pleaded with him, alternately. he detested school as he detested nothing else on earth, even going to church. "church ain't worth shucks," said tom sawyer, but it was better than school. as already noted, the school of mr. cross stood in or near what is now the square in hannibal. the square was only a grove then, grown up with plum, hazel, and vine--a rare place for children. at recess and the noon hour the children climbed trees, gathered flowers, and swung in grape-vine swings. there was a spelling-bee every friday afternoon, for sam the only endurable event of the school exercises. he could hold the floor at spelling longer than buck brown. this was spectacular and showy; it invited compliments even from mr. cross, whose name must have been handed down by angels, it fitted him so well. one day sam clemens wrote on his slate: cross by name and cross by nature cross jumped over an irish potato. he showed this to john briggs, who considered it a stroke of genius. he urged the author to write it on the board at noon, but the poet's ambition did not go so far. "oh, pshaw!" said john. "i wouldn't be afraid to do it. "i dare you to do it," said sam. john briggs never took a dare, and at noon, when mr. cross was at home at dinner, he wrote flamingly the descriptive couplet. when the teacher returned and "books" were called he looked steadily at john briggs. he had recognized the penmanship. "did you do that?" he asked, ominously. it was a time for truth. "yes, sir," said john. "come here!" and john came, and paid for his exploitation of genius heavily. sam clemens expected that the next call would be for "author," but for some reason the investigation ended there. it was unusual for him to escape. his back generally kept fairly warm from one "frailing" to the next. his rewards were not all of a punitive nature. there were two medals in the school, one for spelling, the other for amiability. they were awarded once a week, and the holders wore them about the neck conspicuously, and were envied accordingly. john robards--he of the golden curls--wore almost continuously the medal for amiability, while sam clemens had a mortgage on the medal for spelling. sometimes they traded, to see how it would seem, but the master discouraged this practice by taking the medals away from them for the remainder of the week. once sam clemens lost the medal by leaving the first "r" out of february. he could have spelled it backward, if necessary; but laura hawkins was the only one on the floor against him, and he was a gallant boy. the picture of that school as presented in the book written thirty years later is faithful, we may believe, and the central figure is a tender-hearted, romantic, devil-may-care lad, loathing application and longing only for freedom. it was a boon which would come to him sooner even than he had dreamed. xiv the passing of john clemens judge clemens, who time and again had wrecked or crippled his fortune by devices more or less unusual, now adopted the one unfailing method of achieving disaster. he endorsed a large note, for a man of good repute, and the payment of it swept him clean: home, property, everything vanished again. the st. louis cousin took over the home and agreed to let the family occupy it on payment of a small interest; but after an attempt at housekeeping with a few scanty furnishings and pamela's piano --all that had been saved from the wreck--they moved across the street into a portion of the virginia house, then occupied by a dr. grant. the grants proposed that the clemens family move over and board them, a welcome arrangement enough at this time. judge clemens had still a hope left. the clerkship of the surrogate court was soon to be filled by election. it was an important remunerative office, and he was regarded as the favorite candidate for the position. his disaster had aroused general sympathy, and his nomination and election were considered sure. he took no chances; he made a canvass on horseback from house to house, often riding through rain and the chill of fall, acquiring a cough which was hard to overcome. he was elected by a heavy majority, and it was believed he could hold the office as long as he chose. there seemed no further need of worry. as soon as he was installed in office they would live in style becoming their social position. about the end of february he rode to palmyra to be sworn in. returning he was drenched by a storm of rain and sleet, arriving at last half frozen. his system was in no condition to resist such a shock. pneumonia followed; physicians came with torments of plasters and allopathic dosings that brought no relief. orion returned from st. louis to assist in caring for him, and sat by his bed, encouraging him and reading to him, but it was evident that he grew daily weaker. now and then he became cheerful and spoke of the tennessee land as the seed of a vast fortune that must surely flower at last. he uttered no regrets, no complaints. once only he said: "i believe if i had stayed in tennessee i might have been worth twenty thousand dollars to-day." on the morning of the th of march, , it was evident that he could not live many hours. he was very weak. when he spoke, now and then, it was of the land. he said it would soon make them all rich and happy. "cling to the land," he whispered. "cling to the land, and wait. let nothing beguile it away from you." a little later he beckoned to pamela, now a lovely girl of nineteen, and, putting his arm about her neck, kissed her for the first time in years. "let me die," he said. he never spoke after that. a little more, and the sad, weary life that had lasted less than forty-nine years was ended: a dreamer and a moralist, an upright man honored by all, he had never been a financier. he ended life with less than he had begun. xv a young ben franklin for a third time death had entered the clemens home: not only had it brought grief now, but it had banished the light of new fortune from the very threshold. the disaster seemed complete. the children were dazed. judge clemens had been a distant, reserved man, but they had loved him, each in his own way, and they had honored his uprightness and nobility of purpose. mrs. clemens confided to a neighbor that, in spite of his manner, her husband had been always warm-hearted, with a deep affection for his family. they remembered that he had never returned from a journey without bringing each one some present, however trifling. orion, looking out of his window next morning, saw old abram kurtz, and heard him laugh. he wondered how anybody could still laugh. the boy sam was fairly broken down. remorse, which always dealt with him unsparingly, laid a heavy hand on him now. wildness, disobedience, indifference to his father's wishes, all were remembered; a hundred things, in themselves trifling, became ghastly and heart-wringing in the knowledge that they could never be undone. seeing his grief, his mother took him by the hand and led him into the room where his father lay. "it is all right, sammy," she said. "what's done is done, and it does not matter to him any more; but here by the side of him now i want you to promise me----" he turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung himself into her arms. "i will promise anything," he sobbed, "if you won't make me go to school! anything!" his mother held him for a moment, thinking, then she said: "no, sammy; you need not go to school any more. only promise me to be a better boy. promise not to break my heart." so he promised her to be a faithful and industrious man, and upright, like his father. his mother was satisfied with that. the sense of honor and justice was already strong within him. to him a promise was a serious matter at any time; made under conditions like these it would be held sacred. that night--it was after the funeral--his tendency to somnambulism manifested itself. his mother and sister, who were sleeping together, saw the door open and a form in white enter. naturally nervous at such a time, and living in a day of almost universal superstition, they were terrified and covered their heads. presently a hand was laid on the coverlet, first at the foot, then at the head of the bed. a thought struck mrs. clemens: "sam!" she said. he answered, but he was sound asleep and fell to the floor. he had risen and thrown a sheet around him in his dreams. he walked in his sleep several nights in succession after that. then he slept more soundly. orion returned to st. louis. he was a very good book and job printer by this time and received a salary of ten dollars a week (high wages in those frugal days), of which he sent three dollars weekly to the family. pamela, who had acquired a considerable knowledge of the piano and guitar, went to the town of paris, in monroe county, about fifty miles away, and taught a class of music pupils, contributing whatever remained after paying for her board and clothing to the family fund. it was a hard task for the girl, for she was timid and not over-strong; but she was resolute and patient, and won success. pamela clemens was a noble character and deserves a fuller history than can be afforded in this work. mrs. clemens and her son samuel now had a sober talk, and, realizing that the printing trade offered opportunity for acquiring further education as well as a livelihood, they agreed that he should be apprenticed to joseph p. ament, who had lately moved from palmyra to hannibal and bought a weekly democrat paper, the missouri courier. the apprentice terms were not over-liberal. they were the usual thing for that time: board and clothes--"more board than clothes, and not much of either," mark twain used to say. "i was supposed to get two suits of clothes a year, like a nigger, but i didn't get them. i got one suit and took the rest out in ament's old garments, which didn't fit me in any noticeable way. i was only about half as big as he was, and when i had on one of his shirts i felt as if i had on a circus tent. i had to turn the trousers up to my ears to make them short enough." there was another apprentice, a young fellow of about eighteen, named wales mccormick, a devilish fellow and a giant. ament's clothes were too small for wales, but he had to wear them, and sam clemens and wales mccormick together, fitted out with ament's clothes, must have been a picturesque pair. there was also, for a time, a boy named ralph; but he appears to have presented no features of a striking sort, and the memory of him has become dim. the apprentices ate in the kitchen at first, served by the old slave-cook and her handsome mulatto daughter; but those printer's "devils" made it so lively there that in due time they were promoted to the family table, where they sat with mr. and mrs. ament and the one journeyman, pet mcmurry--a name that in itself was an inspiration. what those young scamps did not already know pet mcmurry could teach them. sam clemens had promised to be a good boy, and he was, by the standards of boyhood. he was industrious, regular at his work, quick to learn, kind, and truthful. angels could hardly be more than that in a printing-office; but when food was scarce even an angel--a young printer angel--could hardly resist slipping down the cellar stairs at night for raw potatoes, onions, and apples which they carried into the office, where the boys slept on a pallet on the floor, and this forage they cooked on the office stove. wales especially had a way of cooking a potato that his associate never forgot. it is unfortunate that no photographic portrait has been preserved of sam clemens at this period. but we may imagine him from a letter which, long years after, pet mcmurry wrote to mark twain. he said: if your memory extends so far back, you will recall a little sandy- haired boy--[the color of mark twain's hair in early life has been variously referred to as red, black, and brown. it was, in fact, as stated by mcmurry, "sandy" in boyhood, deepening later to that rich, mahogany tone known as auburn.]--of nearly a quarter of a century ago, in the printing-office at hannibal, over the brittingham drugstore, mounted upon a little box at the case, pulling away at a huge cigar or a diminutive pipe, who used to love to sing so well the expression of the poor drunken man who was supposed to have fallen by the wayside: "if ever i get up again, i'll stay up--if i kin." . . . do you recollect any of the serious conflicts that mirth-loving brain of yours used to get you into with that diminutive creature wales mccormick--how you used to call upon me to hold your cigar or pipe, whilst you went entirely through him? this is good testimony, without doubt. when he had been with ament little more than a year sam had become office favorite and chief standby. whatever required intelligence and care and imagination was given to sam clemens. he could set type as accurately and almost as rapidly as pet mcmurry; he could wash up the forms a good deal better than pet; and he could run the job-press to the tune of "annie laurie" or "along the beach at rockaway," without missing a stroke or losing a finger. sometimes, at odd moments, he would "set up" one of the popular songs or some favorite poem like "the blackberry girl," and of these he sent copies printed on cotton, even on scraps of silk, to favorite girl friends; also to puss quarles, on his uncle's farm, where he seldom went now, because he was really grown up, associating with men and doing a man's work. he had charge of the circulation--which is to say, he carried the papers. during the last year of the mexican war, when a telegraph-wire found its way across the mississippi to hannibal--a long sagging span, that for some reason did not break of its own weight--he was given charge of the extras with news from the front; and the burning importance of his mission, the bringing of news hot from the field of battle, spurred him to endeavors that won plaudits and success. he became a sort of subeditor. when the forms of the paper were ready to close and ament was needed to supply more matter, it was sam who was delegated to find that rather uncertain and elusive person and labor with him until the required copy was produced. thus it was he saw literature in the making. it is not believed that sam had any writing ambitions of his own. his chief desire was to be an all-round journeyman printer like pet mcmurry; to drift up and down the world in pet's untrammeled fashion; to see all that pet had seen and a number of things which pet appeared to have overlooked. he varied on occasion from this ambition. when the first negro minstrel show visited hannibal and had gone, he yearned for a brief period to be a magnificent "middle man" or even the "end-man" of that combination; when the circus came and went, he dreamed of the day when, a capering frescoed clown, he would set crowded tiers of spectators guffawing at his humor; when the traveling hypnotist arrived, he volunteered as a subject, and amazed the audience by the marvel of his performance. in later life he claimed that he had not been hypnotized in any degree, but had been pretending throughout--a statement always denied by his mother and his brother orion. this dispute was never settled, and never could be. sam clemens's tendency to somnambulism would seem to suggest that he really might have taken on a hypnotic condition, while his consummate skill as an actor, then and always, and his early fondness of exhibition and a joke, would make it not unlikely that he was merely "showing off" and having his fun. he could follow the dictates of a vivid imagination and could be as outrageous as he chose without incurring responsibility of any sort. but there was a penalty: he must allow pins and needles to be thrust into his flesh and suffer these tortures without showing discomfort to the spectators. it is difficult to believe that any boy, however great his exhibitory passion, could permit, in the full possession of his sensibilities, a needle to be thrust deeply into his flesh without manifestations of a most unmesmeric sort. the conclusion seems warranted that he began by pretending, but that at times he was at least under semi-mesmeric control. at all events, he enjoyed a week of dazzling triumph, though in the end he concluded to stick to printing as a trade. we have said that he was a rapid learner and a neat workman. at ament's he generally had a daily task, either of composition or press-work, after which he was free. when he had got the hang of his work he was usually done by three in the afternoon; then away to the river or the cave, as in the old days, sometimes with his boy friends, sometimes with laura hawkins gathering wild columbine on that high cliff overlooking the river, lover's leap. he was becoming quite a beau, attending parties on occasion, where old-fashioned games--forfeits, ring-around-a-rosy, dusty miller, and the like--were regarded as rare amusements. he was a favorite with girls of his own age. he was always good-natured, though he played jokes on them, too, and was often a severe trial. he was with laura hawkins more than the others, usually her escort. on saturday afternoons in winter he carried her skates to bear creek and helped her to put them on. after which they skated "partners," holding hands tightly, and were a likely pair of children, no doubt. in the gilded age laura hawkins at twelve is pictured "with her dainty hands propped into the ribbon-bordered pockets of her apron . . . a vision to warm the coldest heart and bless and cheer the saddest." the author had the real laura of his childhood in his mind when he wrote that, though the story itself bears no resemblance to her life. they were never really sweethearts, those two. they were good friends and comrades. sometimes he brought her magazines--exchanges from the printing--office--godey's and others. these were a treat, for such things were scarce enough. he cared little for reading, himself, beyond a few exciting tales, though the putting into type of a good deal of miscellaneous matter had beyond doubt developed in him a taste for general knowledge. it needed only to be awakened. xvi the turning-point there came into his life just at this period one of those seemingly trifling incidents which, viewed in retrospect, assume pivotal proportions. he was on his way from the office to his home one afternoon when he saw flying along the pavement a square of paper, a leaf from a book. at an earlier time he would not have bothered with it at all, but any printed page had acquired a professional interest for him now. he caught the flying scrap and examined it. it was a leaf from some history of joan of arc. the "maid" was described in the cage at rouen, in the fortress, and the two ruffian english soldiers had stolen her clothes. there was a brief description and a good deal of dialogue--her reproaches and their ribald replies. he had never heard of the subject before. he had never read any history. when he wanted to know any fact he asked henry, who read everything obtainable. now, however, there arose within him a deep compassion for the gentle maid of orleans, a burning resentment toward her captors, a powerful and indestructible interest in her sad history. it was an interest that would grow steadily for more than half a lifetime and culminate at last in that crowning work, the recollections, the loveliest story ever told of the martyred girl. the incident meant even more than that: it meant the awakening of his interest in all history--the world's story in its many phases--a passion which became the largest feature of his intellectual life and remained with him until his very last day on earth. from the moment when that fluttering leaf was blown into his hands his career as one of the world's mentally elect was assured. it gave him his cue--the first word of a part in the human drama. it crystallized suddenly within him sympathy with the oppressed, rebellion against tyranny and treachery, scorn for the divine rights of kings. a few months before he died he wrote a paper on "the turning-point of my life." for some reason he did not mention this incident. yet if there was a turning-point in his life, he reached it that bleak afternoon on the streets of hannibal when a stray leaf from another life was blown into his hands. he read hungrily now everything he could find relating to the french wars, and to joan in particular. he acquired an appetite for history in general, the record of any nation or period; he seemed likely to become a student. presently he began to feel the need of languages, french and german. there was no opportunity to acquire french, that he could discover, but there was a german shoemaker in hannibal who agreed to teach his native tongue. sam clemens got a friend--very likely it was john briggs--to form a class with him, and together they arranged for lessons. the shoemaker had little or no english. they had no german. it would seem, however, that their teacher had some sort of a "word-book," and when they assembled in his little cubby-hole of a retreat he began reading aloud from it this puzzling sentence: "de hain eet flee whoop in de hayer." "dere!" he said, triumphantly; "you know dose vord?" the students looked at each other helplessly. the teacher repeated the sentence, and again they were helpless when he asked if they recognized it. then in despair he showed them the book. it was an english primer, and the sentence was: "the hen, it flies up in the air." they explained to him gently that it was german they wished to learn, not english--not under the circumstances. later, sam made an attempt at latin, and got a book for that purpose, but gave it up, saying: "no, that language is not for me. i'll do well enough to learn english." a boy who took it up with him became a latin scholar. his prejudice against oppression he put into practice. boys who were being imposed upon found in him a ready protector. sometimes, watching a game of marbles or tops, he would remark in his slow, impressive way: "you mustn't cheat that boy." and the cheating stopped. when it didn't, there was a combat, with consequences. xvii the hannibal "journal" orion returned from st. louis. he felt that he was needed in hannibal and, while wages there were lower, his expenses at home were slight; there was more real return for the family fund. his sister pamela was teaching a class in hannibal at this time. orion was surprised when his mother and sister greeted him with kisses and tears. any outward display of affection was new to him. the family had moved back across the street by this time. with sam supporting himself, the earnings of orion and pamela provided at least a semblance of comfort. but orion was not satisfied. then, as always, he had a variety of vague ambitions. oratory appealed to him, and he delivered a temperance lecture with an accompaniment of music, supplied chiefly by pamela. he aspired to the study of law, a recurring inclination throughout his career. he also thought of the ministry, an ambition which sam shared with him for a time. every mischievous boy has it, sooner or later, though not all for the same reasons. "it was the most earnest ambition i ever had," mark twain once remarked, thoughtfully. "not that i ever really wanted to be a preacher, but because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. it looked like a safe job." a periodical ambition of orion's was to own and conduct a paper in hannibal. he felt that in such a position he might become a power in western journalism. once his father had considered buying the hannibal journal to give orion a chance, and possibly to further his own political ambitions. now orion considered it for himself. the paper was for sale under a mortgage, and he was enabled to borrow the $ which would secure ownership. sam's two years at ament's were now complete, and orion induced him to take employment on the journal. henry at eleven was taken out of school to learn typesetting. orion was a gentle, accommodating soul, but he lacked force and independence. "i followed all the advice i received," he says in his record. "if two or more persons conflicted with each other, i adopted the views of the last." he started full of enthusiasm. he worked like a slave to save help: wrote his own editorials, and made his literary selections at night. the others worked too. orion gave them hard tasks and long hours. he had the feeling that the paper meant fortune or failure to them all; that all must labor without stint. in his usual self-accusing way he wrote afterward: i was tyrannical and unjust to sam. he was as swift and as clean as a good journeyman. i gave him tasks, and if he got through well i begrudged him the time and made him work more. he set a clean proof, and henry a very dirty one. the correcting was left to be done in the form the day before publication. once we were kept late, and sam complained with tears of bitterness that he was held till midnight on henry's dirty proofs. orion did not realize any injustice at the time. the game was too desperate to be played tenderly. his first editorials were so brilliant that it was not believed he could have written them. the paper throughout was excellent, and seemed on the high road to success. but the pace was too hard to maintain. overwork brought weariness, and orion's enthusiasm, never a very stable quantity, grew feeble. he became still more exacting. it is not to be supposed that sam clemens had given up all amusements to become merely a toiling drudge or had conquered in any large degree his natural taste for amusement. he had become more studious; but after the long, hard days in the office it was not to be expected that a boy of fifteen would employ the evening--at least not every evening--in reading beneficial books. the river was always near at hand--for swimming in the summer and skating in the winter--and once even at this late period it came near claiming a heavy tribute. that was one winter's night when with another boy he had skated until nearly midnight. they were about in the middle of the river when they heard a terrific and grinding noise near the shore. they knew what it was. the ice was breaking up, and they set out for home forthwith. it was moonlight, and they could tell the ice from the water, which was a good thing, for there were wide cracks toward the shore, and they had to wait for these to close. they were an hour making the trip, and just before they reached the bank they came to a broad space of water. the ice was lifting and falling and crunching all around them. they waited as long as they dared and decided to leap from cake to cake. sam made the crossing without accident, but his companion slipped in when a few feet from shore. he was a good swimmer and landed safely, but the bath probably cost him his hearing. he was taken very ill. one disease followed another, ending with scarlet fever and deafness. there was also entertainment in the office itself. a country boy named jim wolfe had come to learn the trade--a green, good-natured, bashful boy. in every trade tricks are played on the new apprentice, and sam felt that it was his turn to play them. with john briggs to help him, tortures for jim wolfe were invented and applied. they taught him to paddle a canoe, and upset him. they took him sniping at night and left him "holding the bag" in the old traditional fashion while they slipped off home and went to bed. but jim wolfe's masterpiece of entertainment was one which he undertook on his own account. pamela was having a candy-pull down-stairs one night--a grown-up candy-pull to which the boys were not expected. jim would not have gone, anyway, for he was bashful beyond belief, and always dumb, and even pale with fear, in the presence of pretty pamela clemens. up in their room the boys could hear the merriment from below and could look out in the moonlight on the snowy sloping roof that began just beneath their window. down at the eaves was the small arbor, green in summer, but covered now with dead vines and snow. they could hear the candymakers come out, now and then, doubtless setting out pans of candy to cool. by and by the whole party seemed to come out into the little arbor, to try the candy, perhaps the joking and laughter came plainly to the boys up-stairs. about this time there appeared on the roof from somewhere two disreputable cats, who set up a most disturbing duel of charge and recrimination. jim detested the noise, and perhaps was gallant enough to think it would disturb the party. he had nothing to throw at them, but he said: "for two cents i'd get out there and knock their heads off." "you wouldn't dare to do it," sam said, purringly. this was wormwood to jim. he was really a brave spirit. "i would too," he said, "and i will if you say that again." "why, jim, of course you wouldn't dare to go out there. you might catch cold." "you wait and see," said jim wolfe. he grabbed a pair of yarn stockings for his feet, raised the window, and crept out on the snowy roof. there was a crust of ice on the snow, but jim jabbed his heels through it and stood up in the moonlight, his legs bare, his single garment flapping gently in the light winter breeze. then he started slowly toward the cats, sinking his heels in the snow each time for a footing, a piece of lath in his hand. the cats were on the corner of the roof above the arbor, and jim cautiously worked his way in that direction. the roof was not very steep. he was doing well enough until he came to a place where the snow had melted until it was nearly solid ice. he was so intent on the cats that he did not notice this, and when he struck his heel down to break the crust nothing yielded. a second later jim's feet had shot out from under him, and he vaulted like an avalanche down the icy roof out on the little vine-clad arbor, and went crashing through among those candypullers, gathered there with their pans of cooling taffy. there were wild shrieks and a general flight. neither jim nor sam ever knew how he got back to their room, but jim was overcome with the enormity of his offense, while sam was in an agony of laughter. "you did it splendidly, jim," he drawled, when he could speak. "nobody could have done it better; and did you see how those cats got out of there? i never had any idea when you started that you meant to do it that way. and it was such a surprise to the folks down-stairs. how did you ever think of it?" it was a fearful ordeal for a boy like jim wolfe, but he stuck to his place in spite of what he must have suffered. the boys made him one of them soon after that. his initiation was thought to be complete. an account of jim wolfe and the cats was the first original story mark twain ever told. he told it next day, which was sunday, to jimmy mcdaniel, the baker's son, as they sat looking out over the river, eating gingerbread. his hearer laughed immoderately, and the story-teller was proud and happy in his success. xviii the beginning of a literary life orion's paper continued to go downhill. following some random counsel, he changed the name of it and advanced the price--two blunders. then he was compelled to reduce the subscription, also the advertising rates. he was obliged to adopt a descending scale of charges and expenditures to keep pace with his declining circulation--a fatal sign. a publisher must lead his subscription list, not follow it. "i was walking backward," he said, "not seeing where i stepped." in desperation he broke away and made a trip to tennessee to see if something could not be realized on the land, leaving his brother sam in charge of the office. it was a journey without financial results; yet it bore fruit, for it marked the beginning of mark twain's literary career. sam, in his brother's absence, concluded to edit the paper in a way that would liven up the circulation. he had never done any writing--not for print--but he had the courage of his inclinations. his local items were of a kind known as "spicy"; his personals brought prompt demand for satisfaction. the editor of a rival paper had been in love, and was said to have gone to the river one night to drown himself. sam gave a picturesque account of this, with all the names connected with the affair. then he took a couple of big wooden block letters, turned them upside down, and engraved illustrations for it, showing the victim wading out into the river with a stick to test the depth of the water. when this issue of the paper came out the demand for it was very large. the press had to be kept running steadily to supply copies. the satirized editor at first swore that he would thrash the whole journal office, then he left town and did not come back any more. the embryo mark twain also wrote a poem. it was addressed "to mary in hannibal," but the title was too long to be set in one column, so he left out all the letters in hannibal, except the first and the last, and supplied their place with a dash, with a startling result. such were the early flickerings of a smoldering genius. orion returned, remonstrated, and apologized. he reduced sam to the ranks. in later years he saw his mistake. "i could have distanced all competitors even then," he said, "if i had recognized sam's ability and let him go ahead, merely keeping him from offending worthy persons." sam was subdued, but not done for. he never would be, now. he had got his first taste of print, and he liked it. he promptly wrote two anecdotes which he thought humorous and sent them to the philadelphia saturday evening post. they were accepted--without payment, of course, in those days; and when the papers containing them appeared he felt suddenly lifted to a lofty plane of literature. this was in . "seeing them in print was a joy which rather exceeded anything in that line i have ever experienced since," he said, nearly sixty years later. yet he did not feel inspired to write anything further for the post. twice during the next two years he contributed to the journal; once something about jim wolfe, though it was not the story of the cats, and another burlesque on a rival editor whom he pictured as hunting snipe with a cannon, the explosion of which was said to have blown the snipe out of the country. no contributions of this time have been preserved. high prices have been offered for copies of the hannibal journal containing them, but without success. the post sketches were unsigned and have not been identified. it is likely they were trivial enough. his earliest work showed no special individuality or merit, being mainly crude and imitative, as the work of a boy--even a precocious boy--is likely to be. he was not especially precocious--not in literature. his literary career would halt and hesitate and trifle along for many years yet, gathering impetus and equipment for the fuller, statelier swing which would bring a greater joy to the world at large, even if not to himself, than that first, far-off triumph.--[in mark twain's sketch "my first literary venture" he has set down with characteristic embroideries some account of this early authorship.] those were hard financial days. orion could pay nothing on his mortgage --barely the interest. he had promised sam three dollars and a half a week, but he could do no more than supply him with board and clothes --"poor, shabby clothes," he says in his record. "my mother and sister did the housekeeping. my mother was cook. she used the provisions i supplied her. we therefore had a regular diet of bacon, butter, bread, and coffee." mrs. clemens again took a few boarders; pamela, who had given up teaching for a time, organized another music class. orion became despondent. one night a cow got into the office, upset a typecase, and ate up two composition rollers. orion felt that fate was dealing with a heavy hand. another disaster quickly followed. fire broke out in the office, and the loss was considerable. an insurance company paid one hundred and fifty dollars. with it orion replaced such articles as were absolutely needed for work, and removed his plant into the front room of the clemens dwelling. he raised the one-story part of the building to give them an added room up-stairs; and there for another two years, by hard work and pinching economies, the dying paper managed to drag along. it was the fire that furnished sam clemens with his jim wolfe sketch. in it he stated that jim in his excitement had carried the office broom half a mile and had then come back after the wash-pan. in the meantime pamela clemens married. her husband was a well-to-do merchant, william a. moffett, formerly of hannibal, but then of st. louis, where he had provided her with the comforts of a substantial home. orion tried the experiment of a serial story. he wrote to a number of well-known authors in the east, but was unable to find one who would supply a serial for the price he was willing to pay. finally he obtained a translation of a french novel for the sum offered, which was five dollars. it did not save the sinking ship, however. he made the experiment of a tri-weekly, without success. he noticed that even his mother no longer read his editorials, but turned to the general news. this was a final blow. "i sat down in the dark," he says, "the moon glinting in at the open door. i sat with one leg over the chair and let my mind float." he had received an offer of five hundred dollars for his office--the amount of the mortgage--and in his moonlight reverie he decided to dispose of it on those terms. this was in . his brother samuel was no longer with him. several months before, in june, sam decided he would go out into the world. he was in his eighteenth year now, a good workman, faithful and industrious, but he had grown restless in unrewarded service. beyond his mastery of the trade he had little to show for six years of hard labor. once when he had asked orion for a few dollars to buy a second-hand gun, orion, exasperated by desperate circumstances, fell into a passion and rated him for thinking of such extravagance. soon afterward sam confided to his mother that he was going away; that he believed orion hated him; that there was no longer a place for him at home. he said he would go to st. louis, where pamela was. there would be work for him in st. louis, and he could send money home. his intention was to go farther than st. louis, but he dared not tell her. his mother put together sadly enough the few belongings of what she regarded as her one wayward boy; then she held up a little testament: "i want you to take hold of the other end of this, sam," she said, "and make me a promise." if one might have a true picture of that scene: the shin, wiry woman of forty-nine, her figure as straight as her deportment, gray-eyed, tender, and resolute, facing the fair-cheeked, auburn-haired youth of seventeen, his eyes as piercing and unwavering as her own. mother and son, they were of the same metal and the same mold. "i want you to repeat after me, sam, these words," jane clemens said. "i do solemnly swear that i will not throw a card or drink a drop of liquor while i am gone." he repeated the oath after her, and she kissed him. "remember that, sam, and write to us," she said. "and so," orion records, "he went wandering in search of that comfort and that advancement and those rewards of industry which he had failed to find where i was--gloomy, taciturn, and selfish. i not only missed his labor; we all missed his bounding activity and merriment." xix in the footsteps of franklin he went to st. louis by the night boat, visited his sister pamela, and found a job in the composing-room of the evening news. he remained on the paper only long enough to earn money with which to see the world. the "world" was new york city, where the crystal palace fair was then going on. the railway had been completed by this time, but he had not traveled on it. it had not many comforts; several days and nights were required for the new york trip; yet it was a wonderful and beautiful experience. he felt that even pet mcmurry could hardly have done anything to surpass it. he arrived in new york with two or three dollars in his pocket and a ten-dollar bill concealed in the lining of his coat. new york was a great and amazing city. it almost frightened him. it covered the entire lower end of manhattan island; visionary citizens boasted that one day it would cover it all. the world's fair building, the crystal palace, stood a good way out. it was where bryant park is now, on forty-second street and sixth avenue. young clemens classed it as one of the wonders of the world and wrote lavishly of its marvels. a portion of a letter to his sister pamela has been preserved and is given here not only for what it contains, but as the earliest existing specimen of his composition. the fragment concludes what was doubtless an exhaustive description. from the gallery (second floor) you have a glorious sight--the flags of the different countries represented, the lofty dome, glittering jewelry, gaudy tapestry, etc., with the busy crowd passing to and fro 'tis a perfect fairy palace--beautiful beyond description. the machinery department is on the main floor, but i cannot enumerate any of it on account of the lateness of the hour (past o'clock). it would take more than a week to examine everything on exhibition; and i was only in a little over two hours to-night. i only glanced at about one-third of the articles; and, having a poor memory, i have enumerated scarcely any of even the principal objects. the visitors to the palace average , daily--double the population of hannibal. the price of admission being cents, they take in about $ , . the latting observatory (height about feet) is near the palace --from it you can obtain a grand view of the city and the country around. the croton aqueduct, to supply the city with water, is the greatest wonder yet. immense sewers are laid across the bed of the hudson river, and pass through the country to westchester county, where a whole river is turned from its course and brought to new york. from the reservoir in the city to the westchester county reservoir the distance is thirty-eight miles and, if necessary, they could easily supply every family in new york with one hundred barrels of water per day! i am very sorry to learn that henry has been sick. he ought to go to the country and take exercise, for he is not half so healthy as ma thinks he is. if he had my walking to do, he would be another boy entirely. four times every day i walk a little over a mile; and working hard all day and walking four miles is exercise. i am used to it now, though, and it is no trouble. where is it orion's going to? tell ma my promises are faithfully kept; and if i have my health i will take her to ky. in the spring--i shall save money for this. tell jim (wolfe) and all the rest of them to write, and give me all the news .... (it has just struck a.m., and i always get up at , and am at work at .) you ask where i spend my evenings. where would you suppose, with a free printer's library containing more than , volumes within a quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to? write soon. truly your brother, sam p.s.-i have written this by a light so dim that you nor ma could not read by it. write, and let me know how henry is. it is a good letter; it is direct and clear in its descriptive quality, and it gives us a scale of things. double the population of hannibal visited the crystal palace in one day! and the water to supply the city came a distance of thirty-eight miles! doubtless these were amazing statistics. then there was the interest in family affairs--always strong--his concern for henry, whom he loved tenderly; his memory of the promise to his mother; his understanding of her craving to visit her old home. he did not write to her direct, for the reason that orion's plans were then uncertain, and it was not unlikely that he had already found a new location. from this letter, too, we learn that the boy who detested school was reveling in a library of four thousand books--more than he had ever seen together before. we have somehow the feeling that he had all at once stepped from boyhood to manhood, and that the separation was marked by a very definite line. the work he had secured was in cliff street in the printing establishment of john a. gray & green, who agreed to pay him four dollars a week, and did pay that amount in wildcat money, which saved them about twenty-five per cent. of the sum. he lodged at a mechanics' boarding-house in duane street, and when he had paid his board and washing he sometimes had as much as fifty cents to lay away. he did not like the board. he had been accustomed to the southern mode of cooking, and wrote home complaining that new-yorkers did not have "hot-bread" or biscuits, but ate "light-bread," which they allowed to get stale, seeming to prefer it in that way. on the whole, there was not much inducement to remain in new york after he had satisfied himself with its wonders. he lingered, however, through the hot months of , and found it not easy to go. in october he wrote to pamela, suggesting plans for orion; also for henry and jim wolfe, whom he seems never to have overlooked. among other things he says: i have not written to any of the family for some time, from the fact, firstly, that i didn't know where they were, and, secondly, because i have been fooling myself with the idea that i was going to leave new york every day for the last two weeks. i have taken a liking to the abominable place, and every time i get ready to leave i put it off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause. i think i shall get off tuesday, though. edwin forrest has been playing for the last sixteen days at the broadway theater, but i never went to see him till last night. the play was the "gladiator." i did not like parts of it much, but other portions were really splendid. in the latter part of the last act, where the "gladiator" (forrest) dies at his brother's feet (in all the fierce pleasure of gratified revenge), the man's whole soul seems absorbed in the part he is playing; and it is really startling to see him. i am sorry i did not see him play "damon and pythias" --the former character being the greatest. he appears in philadelphia on monday night. i have not received a letter from home lately, but got a "journal" the other day, in which i see the office has been sold . . . . if my letters do not come often, you need not bother yourself about me; for if you have a brother nearly eighteen years of age who is not able to take care of himself a few miles from home, such a brother is not worth one's thoughts; and if i don't manage to take care of no. , be assured you will never know it. i am not afraid, however; i shall ask favors of no one and endeavor to be (and shall be) as "independent as a wood-sawyer's clerk.". . . passage to albany ( miles) on the finest steamers that ply the hudson is now cents--cheap enough, but is generally cheaper than that in the summer. "i have been fooling myself with the idea that i was going to leave new york" is distinctly a mark twain phrase. he might have said that fifty years later. he did go to philadelphia presently and found work "subbing" on a daily paper,'the inquirer.' he was a fairly swift compositor. he could set ten thousand ems a day, and he received pay according to the amount of work done. days or evenings when there was no vacant place for him to fill he visited historic sites, the art-galleries, and the libraries. he was still acquiring education, you see. sometimes at night when he returned to his boardinghouse his room-mate, an englishman named sumner, grilled a herring, and this was regarded as a feast. he tried his hand at writing in philadelphia, though this time without success. for some reason he did not again attempt to get into the post, but offered his contributions to the philadelphia 'ledger'--mainly poetry of an obituary kind. perhaps it was burlesque; he never confessed that, but it seems unlikely that any other obituary poetry would have failed of print. "my efforts were not received with approval," was all he ever said of it afterward. there were two or three characters in the 'inquirer' office whom he did not forget. one of these was an old compositor who had "held a case" in that office for many years. his name was frog, and sometimes when he went away the "office devils" would hang a line over his case, with a hook on it baited with a piece of red flannel. they never got tired of this joke, and frog was always able to get as mad over it as he had been in the beginning. another old fellow there furnished amusement. he owned a house in the distant part of the city and had an abnormal fear of fire. now and then, when everything was quiet except the clicking of the types, some one would step to the window and say with a concerned air: "doesn't that smoke--[or that light, if it was evening]--seem to be in the northwestern part of the city?" or "there go the fire-bells again!" and away the old man would tramp up to the roof to investigate. it was not the most considerate sport, and it is to be feared that sam clemens had his share in it. he found that he liked philadelphia. he could save a little money there, for one thing, and now and then sent something to his mother--small amounts, but welcome and gratifying, no doubt. in a letter to orion --whom he seems to have forgiven with absence--written october th, he incloses a gold dollar to buy her a handkerchief, and "to serve as a specimen of the kind of stuff we are paid with in philadelphia." further along he adds: unlike new york, i like this philadelphia amazingly, and the people in it. there is only one thing that gets my "dander" up--and that is the hands are always encouraging me: telling me "it's no use to get discouraged--no use to be downhearted, for there is more work here than you can do!" "downhearted," the devil! i have not had a particle of such a feeling since i left hannibal, more than four months ago. i fancy they'll have to wait some time till they see me downhearted or afraid of starving while i have strength to work and am in a city of , inhabitants. when i was in hannibal, before i had scarcely stepped out of the town limits, nothing could have convinced me that i would starve as soon as i got a little way from home. he mentions the grave of franklin in christ churchyard with its inscription "benjamin and deborah franklin," and one is sharply reminded of the similarity between the early careers of benjamin franklin and samuel clemens. each learned the printer's trade; each worked in his brother's printing-office and wrote for the paper; each left quietly and went to new york, and from new york to philadelphia, as a journeyman printer; each in due season became a world figure, many-sided, human, and of incredible popularity. the foregoing letter ends with a long description of a trip made on the fairmount stage. it is a good, vivid description--impressions of a fresh, sensitive mind, set down with little effort at fine writing; a letter to convey literal rather than literary enjoyment. the wire bridge, fairmount park and reservoir, new buildings--all these passed in review. a fine residence about completed impressed him: it was built entirely of great blocks of red granite. the pillars in front were all finished but one. these pillars were beautiful, ornamental fluted columns, considerably larger than a hogshead at the base, and about as high as clapinger's second-story front windows . . . . to see some of them finished and standing, and then the huge blocks lying about, looks so massy, and carries one, in imagination, to the ruined piles of ancient babylon. i despise the infernal bogus brick columns plastered over with mortar. marble is the cheapest building-stone about philadelphia. there is a flavor of the 'innocents' about it; then a little further along: i saw small steamboats, with their signs up--"for wissahickon and manayunk cents." geo. lippard, in his legends of washington and his generals, has rendered the wissahickon sacred in my eyes, and i shall make that trip, as well as one to germantown, soon . . . . there is one fine custom observed in phila. a gentleman is always expected to hand up a lady's money for her. yesterday i sat in the front end of the bus, directly under the driver's box--a lady sat opposite me. she handed me her money, which was right. but, lord! a st. louis lady would think herself ruined if she should be so familiar with a stranger. in st. louis a man will sit in the front end of the stage, and see a lady stagger from the far end to pay her fare. there are two more letters from philadelphia: one of november, th, to orion, who by this time had bought a paper in muscatine, iowa, and located the family there; and one to pamela dated december th. evidently orion had realized that his brother might be of value as a contributor, for the latter says: i will try to write for the paper occasionally, but i fear my letters will be very uninteresting, for this incessant night work dulls one's ideas amazingly.... i believe i am the only person in the inquirer office that does not drink. one young fellow makes $ for a few weeks, and gets on a grand "bender" and spends every cent of it. how do you like "free soil"?--i would like amazingly to see a good old-fashioned negro. my love to all. truly your brother, sam in the letter to pamela he is clearly homesick. "i only want to return to avoid night work, which is injuring my eyes," is the excuse, but in the next sentence he complains of the scarcity of letters from home and those "not written as they should be." "one only has to leave home to learn how to write interesting letters to an absent friend," he says, and in conclusion, "i don't like our present prospect for cold weather at all." he had been gone half a year, and the first attack of home-longing, for a boy of his age, was due. the novelty of things had worn off; it was coming on winter; changes had taken place among his home people and friends; the life he had known best and longest was going on and he had no part in it. leaning over his case, he sometimes hummed: "an exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain." he weathered the attack and stuck it out for more than half a year longer. in january, when the days were dark and he grew depressed, he made a trip to washington to see the sights of the capital. his stay was comparatively brief, and he did not work there. he returned to philadelphia, working for a time on the ledger and north american. finally he went back to new york. there are no letters of this period. his second experience in new york appears not to have been recorded, and in later years was only vaguely remembered. it was late in the summer of when he finally set out on his return to the west. his 'wanderjahr' had lasted nearly fifteen months. he went directly to st. louis, sitting up three days and nights in a smoking-car to make the journey. he was worn out when he arrived, but stopped there only a few hours to see pamela. it was his mother he was anxious for. he took the keokuk packet that night, and, flinging himself on his berth, slept the clock three times around, scarcely rousing or turning over, only waking at last at muscatine. for a long time that missing day confused his calculations. when he reached orion's house the family sat at breakfast. he came in carrying a gun. they had not been expecting him, and there was a general outcry, and a rush in his direction. he warded them off, holding the butt of the gun in front of him. "you wouldn't let me buy a gun," he said, "so i bought one myself, and i am going to use it, now, in self-defense." "you, sam! you, sam!" cried jane clemens. "behave yourself," for she was wary of a gun. then he had had his joke and gave himself into his mother's arms. xx keokuk days orion wished his brother to remain with him in the muscatine office, but the young man declared he must go to st. louis and earn some money before he would be able to afford that luxury: he returned to his place on the st. louis evening news, where he remained until late winter or early spring of the following year. he lived at this time with a pavey family, probably one of the hannibal paveys, rooming with a youth named frank e. burrough, a journeyman chair-maker with a taste for dickens, thackeray, scott, and disraeli. burrough had really a fine literary appreciation for his years, and the boys were comrades and close friends. twenty-two years later mark twain exchanged with burrough some impressions of himself at that earlier time. clemens wrote: my dear burrough,--as you describe me i can picture myself as i was years ago. the portrait is correct. you think i have grown some; upon my word there was room for it. you have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern in air, heaving at his bit of dung, imagining that he is remodeling the world and is entirely capable of doing it right.... that is what i was at - . orion clemens in the mean time had married and removed to keokuk. he had married during a visit to that city, in the casual, impulsive way so characteristic of him, and the fact that he had acquired a wife in the operation seemed at first to have escaped his inner consciousness. he tells it himself; he says: at sunrise on the next morning after the wedding we left in a stage for muscatine. we halted for dinner at burlington. after despatching that meal we stood on the pavement when the stage drove up, ready for departure. i climbed in, gathered the buffalo robe around me, and leaned back unconscious that i had anything further to do. a gentleman standing on the pavement said to my wife, "miss, do you go by this stage?" i said, "oh, i forgot!" and sprang out and helped her in. a wife was a new kind of possession to which i had not yet become accustomed; i had forgotten her. orion's wife had been mary stotts; her mother a friend of jane clemens's girlhood. she proved a faithful helpmate to orion; but in those early days of marriage she may have found life with him rather trying, and it was her homesickness that brought them to keokuk. brother sam came up from st. louis, by and by, to visit them, and orion offered him five dollars a week and board to remain. he accepted. the office at this time, or soon after, was located on the third floor of main street, in the building at present occupied by the paterson shoe company. henry clemens, now seventeen, was also in orion's employ, and a lad by the name of dick hingham. henry and sam slept in the office, and dick came in for social evenings. also a young man named edward brownell, who clerked in the book-store on the ground floor. these were likely to be lively evenings. a music dealer and teacher, professor isbell, occupied the floor just below, and did not care for their diversions. he objected, but hardly in the right way. had he gone to samuel clemens gently, he undoubtedly would have found him willing to make any concessions. instead, he assailed him roughly, and the next evening the boys set up a lot of empty wine-bottles, which they had found in a barrel in a closet, and, with stones for balls, played tenpins on the office floor. this was dick and sam; henry declined to join the game. isbell rushed up-stairs and battered on the door, but they paid no attention. next morning he waited for the young men and denounced them wildly. they merely ignored him, and that night organized a military company, made up of themselves and a new german apprentice-boy, and drilled up and down over the singing-class. dick hingham led these military manoeuvers. he was a girlish sort of a fellow, but he had a natural taste for soldiering. the others used to laugh at him. they called him a disguised girl, and declared he would run if a gun were really pointed in his direction. they were mistaken; seven years later dick died at fort donelson with a bullet in his forehead: this, by the way. isbell now adopted new tactics. he came up very pleasantly and said: "i like your military practice better than your tenpin exercise, but on the whole it seems to disturb the young ladies. you see how it is yourself. you couldn't possibly teach music with a company of raw recruits drilling overhead--now, could you? won't you please stop it? it bothers my pupils." sam clemens regarded him with mild surprise. "does it?" he said, very deliberately. "why didn't you mention it before? to be sure we don't want to disturb the young ladies." they gave up the horse-play, and not only stopped the disturbance, but joined one of the singing--classes. samuel clemens had a pretty good voice in those days and could drum fairly well on a piano and guitar. he did not become a brilliant musician, but he was easily the most popular member of the singing-class. they liked his frank nature, his jokes, and his humor; his slow, quaint fashion of speech. the young ladies called him openly and fondly a "fool"--a term of endearment, as they applied it meaning only that he kept them in a more or less constant state of wonder and merriment; and indeed it would have been hard for them to say whether he was really light-minded and frivolous or the wisest of them all. he was twenty now and at the age for love-making; yet he remained, as in hannibal, a beau rather than a suitor, good friend and comrade to all, wooer of none. ella creel, a cousin on the lampton side, a great belle; also ella patterson (related through orion's wife and generally known as "ick"), and belle stotts were perhaps his favorite companions, but there were many more. he was always ready to stop and be merry with them, full of his pranks and pleasantries; though they noticed that he quite often carried a book under his arm--a history or a volume of dickens or the tales of edgar allan poe. he read at odd moments; at night voluminously--until very late, sometimes. already in that early day it was his habit to smoke in bed, and he had made him an oriental pipe of the hubble-bubble variety, because it would hold more and was more comfortable than the regular short pipe of daytime use. but it had its disadvantages. sometimes it would go out, and that would mean sitting up and reaching for a match and leaning over to light the bowl which stood on the floor. young brownell from below was passing upstairs to his room on the fourth floor one night when he heard sam clemens call. the two were great chums by this time, and brownell poked his head in at the door. "what will you have, sam?" he asked. "come in, ed; henry's asleep, and i am in trouble. i want somebody to light my pipe." "why don't you get up and light it yourself?" brownell asked. "i would, only i knew you'd be along in a few minutes and would do it for me." brownell scratched the necessary match, stooped down, and applied it. "what are you reading, sam?" he asked. "oh, nothing much--a so-called funny book--one of these days i'll write a funnier book than that, myself." brownell laughed. "no, you won't, sam," he said. "you are too lazy ever to write a book." a good many years later when the name "mark twain" had begun to stand for american humor the owner of it gave his "sandwich island" lecture in keokuk. speaking of the unreliability of the islanders, he said: "the king is, i believe, one of the greatest liars on the face of the earth, except one; and i am very sorry to locate that one right here in the city of keokuk, in the person of ed brownell." the keokuk episode in mark twain's life was neither very long nor very actively important. it extended over a period of less than two years --two vital years, no doubt, if all the bearings could be known--but they were not years of startling occurrence. yet he made at least one beginning there: at a printers' banquet he delivered his first after-dinner speech; a hilarious speech--its humor of a primitive kind. whatever its shortcomings, it delighted his audience, and raised him many points in the public regard. he had entered a field of entertainment in which he would one day have no rival. they impressed him into a debating society after that, and there was generally a stir of attention when sam clemens was about to take the floor. orion clemens records how his brother undertook to teach the german apprentice music. "there was an old guitar in the office and sam taught fritz a song beginning: "grasshopper sitting on a sweet-potato vine, turkey came along and yanked him from behind." the main point in the lesson was in giving to the word "yanked" the proper expression and emphasis, accompanied by a sweep of the fingers across the strings. with serious face and deep earnestness fritz in his broken english would attempt these lines, while his teacher would bend over and hold his sides with laughter at each ridiculous effort. without intending it, fritz had his revenge. one day his tormentor's hand was caught in the press when the german boy was turning the wheel. sam called to him to stop, but the boy's mind was slow to grasp the situation. the hand was badly wounded, though no bones were broken. in due time it recovered, its power and dexterity, but the trace of the scars remained. orion's printing-office was not a prosperous one; he had not the gift of prosperity in any form. when he found it difficult to pay his brother's wages, he took him into partnership, which meant that sam got no wages at all, barely a living, for the office could not keep its head above water. the junior partner was not disturbed, however. he cared little for money in those days, beyond his actual needs, and these were modest enough. his mother, now with pamela, was amply provided for. orion himself tells how his business dwindled away. he printed a keokuk directory, but it did not pay largely. he was always too eager for the work; too low in his bid for it. samuel clemens in this directory is set down as "an antiquarian" a joke, of course, though the point of it is now lost. only two of his keokuk letters have been preserved. the first indicates the general disorder of the office and a growing dissatisfaction. it is addressed to his mother and sister and bears date of june , . i don't like to work at too many things at once. they take henry and dick away from me, too. before we commenced the directory, --[orion printed two editions of the directory. this was probably the second one.]--i could tell before breakfast just how much work could be done during the day, and manage accordingly--but now, they throw all my plans into disorder by taking my hands away from their work.... i am not getting along well with the job-work. i can't work blindly--without system. i gave dick a job yesterday, which i calculated he could set in two hours and i could work off on the press in three, and therefore just finish it by supper-time, but he was transferred to the directory, and the job, promised this morning, remains untouched. through all the great pressure of job- work lately, i never before failed in a promise of the kind . . . the other letter is dated two months later, august th. it was written to henry, who was visiting in st. louis or hannibal at the time, and introduces the first mention of the south american fever, which now possessed the writer. lynch and herndon had completed their survey of the upper amazon, and lieutenant herndon's account of the exploration was being widely read. poring over the book nights, young clemens had been seized with a desire to go to the headwaters of the south american river, there to collect coca and make a fortune. all his life he was subject to such impulses as that, and ways and means were not always considered. it did not occur to him that it would be difficult to get to the amazon and still more difficult to ascend the river. it was his nature to see results with a dazzling largeness that blinded him to the detail of their achievement. in the "turning-point" article already mentioned he refers to this. he says: that was more than fifty years ago. in all that time my temperament has not changed by even a shade. i have been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me; i still do the thing commanded by circumstance and temperament, and reflect afterward. always violently. when i am reflecting on these occasions, even deaf persons can hear me think. in the letter to henry we see that his resolve was already made, his plans matured; also that orion had not as yet been taken into full confidence. ma knows my determination, but even she counsels me to keep it from orion. she says i can treat him as i did her when i started to st. louis and went to new york--i can start for new york and go to south america. he adds that orion had promised him fifty or one hundred dollars, but that he does not depend upon it, and will make other arrangements. he fears obstacles may be put in his way, and he will bring various influences to bear. i shall take care that ma and orion are plentifully supplied with south american books: they have herndon's report now. ward and the dr. and myself will hold a grand consultation to-night at the office. we have agreed that no more shall be admitted into our company. he had enlisted those two adventurers in his enterprise: a doctor martin and the young man, ward. they were very much in earnest, but the start was not made as planned, most likely for want of means. young clemens, however, did not give up the idea. he made up his mind to work in the direction of his desire, following his trade and laying by money for the venture. but fate or providence or accident--whatever we may choose to call the unaccountable--stepped in just then, and laid before him the means of turning another sharp corner in his career. one of those things happened which we refuse to accept in fiction as possible; but fact has a smaller regard for the credibilities. as in the case of the joan of arc episode (and this adds to its marvel), it was the wind that brought the talismanic gift. it was a day in early november--bleak, bitter, and gusty, with curling snow; most persons were indoors. samuel clemens, going down main street, saw a flying bit of paper pass him and lodge against the side of a building. something about it attracted him and he captured it. it was a fifty-dollar bill. he had never seen one before, but he recognized it. he thought he must be having a pleasant dream. the temptation came to pocket his good-fortune and say nothing. his need of money was urgent, but he had also an urgent and troublesome conscience; in the end he advertised his find. "i didn't describe it very particularly, and i waited in daily fear that the owner would turn up and take away my fortune. by and by i couldn't stand it any longer. my conscience had gotten all that was coming to it. i felt that i must take that money out of danger." in the "turning-point" article he says: "i advertised the find and left for the amazon the same day," a statement which we may accept with a literary discount. as a matter of fact, he remained ample time and nobody ever came for the money. it may have been swept out of a bank or caught up by the wind from some counting-room table. it may have materialized out of the unseen--who knows? at all events it carried him the first stage of a journey, the end of which he little dreamed. xxi scotchman named macfarlane he concluded to go to cincinnati, which would be on the way either to new york or new orleans (he expected to sail from one of these points), but first paid a brief visit to his mother in st. louis, for he had a far journey and along absence in view. jane clemens made him renew his promise as to cards and liquor, and gave him her blessing. he had expected to go from st. louis to cincinnati, but a new idea--a literary idea--came to him, and he returned to keokuk. the saturday post, a keokuk weekly, was a prosperous sheet giving itself certain literary airs. he was in favor with the management, of which george rees was the head, and it had occurred to him that he could send letters of his travels to the post--for, a consideration. he may have had a still larger ambition; at least, the possibility of a book seems to have been in his consciousness. rees agreed to take letters from him at five dollars each--good payment for that time and place. the young traveler, jubilant in the prospect of receiving money for literature, now made another start, this time by way of quincy, chicago, and indianapolis according to his first letter in the post.--[supplied by thomas rees, of the springfield (illinois) register, son of george rees named.] this letter is dated cincinnati, november , , and it is not a promising literary production. it was written in the exaggerated dialect then regarded as humorous, and while here and there are flashes of the undoubted mark twain type, they are few and far between. the genius that a little more than ten years later would delight the world flickered feebly enough at twenty-one. the letter is a burlesque account of the trip to cincinnati. a brief extract from it, as characteristic as any, will serve. i went down one night to the railroad office there, purty close onto the laclede house, and bought about a quire o' yaller paper, cut up into tickets--one for each railroad in the united states, i thought, but i found out afterwards that the alexandria and boston air-line was left out--and then got a baggage feller to take my trunk down to the boat, where he spilled it out on the levee, bustin' it open and shakin' out the contents, consisting of "guides" to chicago, and "guides" to cincinnati, and travelers' guides, and all kinds of sich books, not excepting a "guide to heaven," which last aint much use to a teller in chicago, i kin tell you. finally, that fast packet quit ringing her bell, and started down the river--but she hadn't gone morn a mile, till she ran clean up on top of a sand-bar, whar she stuck till plum one o'clock, spite of the captain's swearin' --and they had to set the whole crew to cussin' at last afore they got her off. this is humor, we may concede, of that early american type which a little later would have its flower in nasby and artemus ward. only careful examination reveals in it a hint of the later mark twain. the letters were signed "snodgrass," and there are but two of them. the second, dated exactly four months after the first, is in the same assassinating dialect, and recounts among other things the scarcity of coal in cincinnati and an absurd adventure in which snodgrass has a baby left on his hands. from the fewness of the letters we may assume that snodgrass found them hard work, and it is said he raised on the price. at all events, the second concluded the series. they are mainly important in that they are the first of his contributions that have been preserved; also the first for which he received a cash return. he secured work at his trade in cincinnati at the printing-office of wrightson & co., and remained there until april, . that winter in cincinnati was eventless enough, but it was marked by one notable association--one that beyond doubt forwarded samuel clemens's general interest in books, influenced his taste, and inspired in him certain views and philosophies which he never forgot. he lodged at a cheap boarding-house filled with the usual commonplace people, with one exception. this exception was a long, lank, unsmiling scotchman named macfarlane, who was twice as old as clemens and wholly unlike him--without humor or any comprehension of it. yet meeting on the common plane of intellect, the two became friends. clemens spent his evenings in macfarlane's room until the clock struck ten; then macfarlane grilled a herring, just as the englishman sumner in philadelphia had done two years before, and the evening ended. macfarlane had books, serious books: histories, philosophies, and scientific works; also a bible and a dictionary. he had studied these and knew them by heart; he was a direct and diligent talker. he never talked of himself, and beyond the statement that he had acquired his knowledge from reading, and not at school, his personality was a mystery. he left the house at six in the morning and returned at the same hour in the evening. his hands were hardened from some sort of toil-mechanical labor, his companion thought, but he never knew. he would have liked to know, and he watched for some reference to slip out that would betray macfarlane's trade; but this never happened. what he did learn was that macfarlane was a veritable storehouse of abstruse knowledge; a living dictionary, and a thinker and philosopher besides. he had at least one vanity: the claim that he knew every word in the english dictionary, and he made it good. the younger man tried repeatedly to discover a word that macfarlane could not define. perhaps macfarlane was vain of his other mental attainments, for he never tired of discoursing upon deep and grave matters, and his companion never tired of listening. this scotch philosopher did not always reflect the conclusions of others; he had speculated deeply and strikingly on his own account. that was a good while before darwin and wallace gave out--their conclusions on the descent of man; yet macfarlane was already advancing a similar philosophy. he went even further: life, he said, had been developed in the course of ages from a few microscopic seed-germs--from one, perhaps, planted by the creator in the dawn of time, and that from this beginning development on an ascending scale had finally produced man. macfarlane said that the scheme had stopped there, and failed; that man had retrograded; that man's heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom: that man was the only animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness--almost the only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness. he said that man's intellect was a depraving addition to him which, in the end, placed him in a rank far below the other beasts, though it enabled him to keep them in servitude and captivity, along with many members of his own race. they were long, fermenting discourses that young samuel clemens listened to that winter in macfarlane's room, and those who knew the real mark twain and his philosophies will recognize that those evenings left their impress upon him for life. xxii the old call of the river when spring came, with budding life and quickening impulses; when the trees in the parks began to show a hint of green, the amazonian idea developed afresh, and the would-be coca-hunter prepared for his expedition. he had saved a little money--enough to take him to new orleans--and he decided to begin his long trip with a peaceful journey down the mississippi, for once, at least, to give himself up to that indolent luxury of the majestic stream that had been so large a part of his early dreams. the ohio river steamers were not the most sumptuous craft afloat, but they were slow and hospitable. the winter had been bleak and hard. "spring fever" and a large love of indolence had combined in that drowsy condition which makes one willing to take his time. mark twain tells us in life on the mississippi that he "ran away," vowing never to return until he could come home a pilot, shedding glory. this is a literary statement. the pilot ambition had never entirely died; but it was coca and the amazon that were uppermost in his head when he engaged passage on the paul jones for new orleans, and so conferred immortality on that ancient little craft. he bade good-by to macfarlane, put his traps aboard, the bell rang, the whistle blew, the gang-plank was hauled in, and he had set out on a voyage that was to continue not for a week or a fortnight, but for four years--four marvelous, sunlit years, the glory of which would color all that followed them. in the mississippi book the author conveys the impression of being then a boy of perhaps seventeen. writing from that standpoint he records incidents that were more or less inventions or that happened to others. he was, in reality, considerably more than twenty-one years old, for it was in april, , that he went aboard the paul jones; and he was fairly familiar with steamboats and the general requirements of piloting. he had been brought up in a town that turned out pilots; he had heard the talk of their trade. one at least of the bowen boys was already on the river while sam clemens was still a boy in hannibal, and had often been home to air his grandeur and dilate on the marvel of his work. that learning the river was no light task sam clemens very well knew. nevertheless, as the little boat made its drowsy way down the river into lands that grew ever pleasanter with advancing spring, the old "permanent ambition" of boyhood stirred again, and the call of the far-away amazon, with its coca and its variegated zoology, grew faint. horace bixby, pilot of the paul jones, then a man of thirty-two, still living ( ) and at the wheel,--[the writer of this memoir interviewed mr. bixby personally, and has followed his phrasing throughout.]--was looking out over the bow at the head of island no. when he heard a slow, pleasant voice say: "good morning." bixby was a clean-cut, direct, courteous man. "good morning, sir," he said, briskly, without looking around. as a rule mr. bixby did not care for visitors in the pilot-house. this one presently came up and stood a little behind him. "how would you like a young man to learn the river?" he said. the pilot glanced over his shoulder and saw a rather slender, loose-limbed young fellow with a fair, girlish complexion and a great tangle of auburn hair. "i wouldn't like it. cub pilots are more trouble than they're worth. a great deal more trouble than profit." the applicant was not discouraged. "i am a printer by trade," he went on, in his easy, deliberate way. "it doesn't agree with me. i thought i'd go to south america." bixby kept his eye on the river; but a note of interest crept into his voice. "what makes you pull your words that way?" ("pulling" being the river term for drawling), he asked. the young man had taken a seat on the visitors' bench. "you'll have to ask my mother," he said, more slowly than ever. "she pulls hers, too." pilot bixby woke up and laughed; he had a keen sense of humor, and the manner of the reply amused him. his guest made another advance. "do you know the bowen boys?" he asked--"pilots in the st. louis and new orleans trade?" "i know them well--all three of them. william bowen did his first steering for me; a mighty good boy, too. had a testament in his pocket when he came aboard; in a week's time he had swapped it for a pack of cards. i know sam, too, and bart." "old schoolmates of mine in hannibal. sam and will especially were my chums." "come over and stand by the side of me," he said. "what is your name?" the applicant told him, and the two stood looking at the sunlit water. "do you drink?" "no." "do you gamble?" "no, sir." "do you swear?" "not for amusement; only under pressure." "do you chew?" "no, sir, never; but i must smoke." "did you ever do any steering?" was bixby's next question. "i have steered everything on the river but a steamboat, i guess." "very well; take the wheel and see what you can do with a steamboat. keep her as she is--toward that lower cottonwood, snag." bixby had a sore foot and was glad of a little relief. he sat down on the bench and kept a careful eye on the course. by and by he said: "there is just one way that i would take a young man to learn the river: that is, for money." "what do you charge?" "five hundred dollars, and i to be at no expense whatever." in those days pilots were allowed to carry a learner, or "cub," board free. mr. bixby meant that he was to be at no expense in port, or for incidentals. his terms looked rather discouraging. "i haven't got five hundred dollars in money," sam said; "i've got a lot of tennessee land worth twenty-five cents an acre; i'll give you two thousand acres of that." bixby dissented. "no; i don't want any unimproved real estate. i have too much already." sam reflected upon the amount he could probably borrow from pamela's husband without straining his credit. "well, then, i'll give you one hundred dollars cash and the rest when i earn it." something about this young man had won horace bixby's heart. his slow, pleasant speech; his unhurried, quiet manner with the wheel, his evident sincerity of purpose--these were externals, but beneath them the pilot felt something of that quality of mind or heart which later made the world love mark twain. the terms proposed were agreed upon. the deferred payments were to begin when the pupil had learned the river and was receiving pilot's wages. during mr. bixby's daylight watches his pupil was often at the wheel, that trip, while the pilot sat directing him and nursing his sore foot. any literary ambitions samuel clemens may have had grew dim; by the time they had reached new orleans he had almost forgotten he had been a printer, and when he learned that no ship would be sailing to the amazon for an indefinite period the feeling grew that a directing hand had taken charge of his affairs. from new orleans his chief did not return to cincinnati, but went to st. louis, taking with him his new cub, who thought it fine, indeed, to come steaming up to that great city with its thronging water-front; its levee fairly packed with trucks, drays, and piles of freight, the whole flanked with a solid mile of steamboats lying side by side, bow a little up-stream, their belching stacks reared high against the blue--a towering front of trade. it was glorious to nose one's way to a place in that stately line, to become a unit, however small, of that imposing fleet. at st. louis sam borrowed from mr. moffett the funds necessary to make up his first payment, and so concluded his contract. then, when he suddenly found himself on a fine big boat, in a pilot-house so far above the water that he seemed perched on a mountain--a "sumptuous temple"--his happiness seemed complete. xxiii the supreme science in his mississippi book mark twain has given us a marvelous exposition of the science of river-piloting, and of the colossal task of acquiring and keeping a knowledge requisite for that work. he has not exaggerated this part of the story of developments in any detail; he has set down a simple confession. serenely enough he undertook the task of learning twelve hundred miles of the great changing, shifting river as exactly and as surely by daylight or darkness as one knows the way to his own features. as already suggested, he had at least an inkling of what that undertaking meant. his statement that he "supposed all that a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river" is not to be accepted literally. still he could hardly have realized the full majesty of his task; nobody could do that --not until afterward. horace bixby was a "lightning" pilot with a method of instruction as direct and forcible as it was effective. he was a small man, hot and quick-firing, though kindly, too, and gentle when he had blown off. after one rather pyrotechnic misunderstanding as to the manner of imparting and acquiring information he said: "my boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time i tell you a thing put it down right away. there's only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. you have to know it just like a b c." so sam clemens got the little book, and presently it "fairly bristled" with the names of towns, points, bars, islands, bends, and reaches, but it made his heart ache to think that he had only half of the river set down; for, as the "watches" were four hours off and four hours on, there were long gaps during which he had slept. the little note-book still exists--thin and faded, with black water-proof covers--its neat, tiny, penciled notes still, telling, the story of that first trip. most of them are cryptographic abbreviations, not readily deciphered now. here and there is an easier line: meriweather's bend / less --[depth of water. one-quarter less than three fathoms.]----run shape of upper bar and go into the low place in willows about (ft.) lower down than last year. one simple little note out of hundreds far more complicated. it would take days for the average mind to remember even a single page of such statistics. and those long four-hour gaps where he had been asleep, they are still there, and somehow, after more than fifty years, the old heart-ache is still in them. he got a new book, maybe, for the next trip, and laid this one away. there is but one way to account for the fact that the man whom the world knew as mark twain--dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to details--ever persisted in acquiring knowledge like that--in the vast, the absolutely limitless quantity necessary to mississippi piloting. it lies in the fact that he loved the river in its every mood and aspect and detail, and not only the river, but a steam boat; and still more, perhaps, the freedom of the pilot's life and its prestige. wherever he has written of the river--and in one way or another he was always writing of it we feel the claim of the old captivity and that it still holds him. in the huckleberry finn book, during those nights and days with huck and nigger jim on the raft--whether in stormlit blackness, still noontide, or the lifting mists of morning--we can fairly "smell" the river, as huck himself would say, and we know that it is because the writer loved it with his heart of hearts and literally drank in its environment and atmosphere during those halcyon pilot days. so, in his love lay the secret of his marvelous learning, and it is recorded (not by himself, but by his teacher) that he was an apt pupil. horace bixby has more than once declared: "sam was always good-natured, and he had a natural taste for the river. he had a fine memory and never forgot anything i told him." mark twain himself records a different opinion of his memory, with the size of its appalling task. it can only be presented in his own words. in the pages quoted he had mastered somewhat of the problem, and had begun to take on airs. his chief was a constant menace at such moments: one day he turned on me suddenly with this settler: "what is the shape of walnut bend?" he might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm. i reflected respectfully, and then said i didn't know it had any particular shape. my gun-powdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives.... i waited. by and by he said: "my boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly. it is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. everything is blotted out and gone. but mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the night that it has in the daytime." "how on earth am i ever going to learn it, then?" "how do you follow a hall at home in the dark? because you know the shape of it. you can't see it." "do you mean to say that i've got to know all the million trifling variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as i know the shape of the front hall at home?" "on my honor, you've got to know them better than any man ever did know the shapes of the halls in his own house." "i wish i was dead!" "now, i don't want to discourage you, but----" "well, pile it on me; i might as well have it now as another time." "you see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting around it. a clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that, if you didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly, you would claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and, you see, you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. you would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. you can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. all shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd run them for straight lines, only you know better. you boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you know very well that in reality there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for you. then there's your gray mist. you take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore. a gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. well, then, different kinds of moonlight change the shape of the river in different ways. you see----" "oh, don't say any more, please! have i got to learn the shape of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? if i tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop-shouldered." "no! you only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's in your head, and never mind the one that's before your eyes." "very well, i'll try it; but, after i have learned it, can i depend on it? will it keep the same form, and not go fooling around?" before mr. bixby could answer, mr. w. came in to take the watch, and he said: "bixby, you'll have to look out for president's island, and all that country clear away up above the old hen and chickens. the banks are caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. why, you wouldn't know the point about . you can go up inside the old sycamore snag now." so that question was answered. here were leagues of shore changing shape. my spirits were down in the mud again. two things seemed pretty apparent to me. one was that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours. i went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding and ungraspable objects that ever i tried to get mind or hands on, that was the chief. i would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of me and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as i was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction we would draw up to it, and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank! it was plain that i had got to learn the shape of the river in all the different ways that could be thought of--upside down, wrong end first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and "thort-ships,"--and then know what to do on gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all. so i set about it. in the course of time i began to get the best of this knotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more. mr. bixby was all fixed and ready to start it to the rear again. he opened on me after this fashion: "how much water did we have in the middle crossing at hole-in-the- wall, trip before last?" i considered this an outrage. i said: "every trip down and up the leadsmen are singing through that tangled place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch. how do you reckon i can remember such a mess as that?" "my boy, you've got to remember it. you've got to remember the exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the shoalest water, in every one of the five hundred shoal places between st. louis and new orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings and marks of another, either, for they're not often twice alike. you must keep them separate." when i came to myself again, i said: "when i get so that i can do that, i'll be able to raise the dead, and then i won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. i want to retire from this business. i want a slush-bucket and a brush; i'm only fit for a roustabout. i haven't got brains enough to be a pilot; and if i had i wouldn't have strength enough to carry them around, unless i went on crutches." "now drop that! when i say i'll learn a man the river i mean it. and you can depend on it, i'll learn him or kill him." we have quoted at length from this chapter because it seems of very positive importance here. it is one of the most luminous in the book so far as the mastery of the science of piloting is concerned, and shows better than could any other combination of words something of what is required of the learner. it does not cover the whole problem, by any means--mark twain himself could not present that; and even considering his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade, it is still incredible that a man of his temperament could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles. xxiv the river curriculum he acquired other kinds of knowledge. as the streets of hannibal in those early days, and the printing-offices of several cities, had taught him human nature in various unvarnished aspects, so the river furnished an added course to that vigorous education. morally, its atmosphere could not be said to be an improvement on the others. navigation in the west had begun with crafts of the flat-boat type--their navigators rude, hardy men, heavy drinkers, reckless fighters, barbaric in their sports, coarse in their wit, profane in everything. steam-boatmen were the natural successors of these pioneers--a shade less coarse, a thought less profane, a veneer less barbaric. but these things were mainly "above stairs." you had but to scratch lightly a mate or a deck-hand to find the old keel-boatman savagery. captains were overlords, and pilots kings in this estate; but they were not angels. in life on the mississippi clemens refers to his chief's explosive vocabulary and tells us how he envied the mate's manner of giving an order. it was easier to acquire those things than piloting, and, on the whole, quicker. one could improve upon them, too, with imagination and wit and a natural gift for terms. that samuel clemens maintained his promise as to drink and cards during those apprentice days is something worth remembering; and if he did not always restrict his profanity to moments of severe pressure or sift the quality of his wit, we may also remember that he was an extreme example of a human being, in that formative stage which gathers all as grist, later to refine it for the uses and delights of men. he acquired a vast knowledge of human character. he says: in that brief, sharp schooling i got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. when i find a well- drawn character in fiction or biography, i generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that i have, known him before--met him on the river. undoubtedly the river was a great school for the study of life's broader philosophies and humors: philosophies that avoid vague circumlocution and aim at direct and sure results; humors of the rugged and vigorous sort that in europe are known as "american" and in america are known as "western." let us be thankful that mark twain's school was no less than it was--and no more. the demands of the missouri river trade took horace bixby away from the mississippi, somewhat later, and he consigned his pupil, according to custom, to another pilot--it is not certain, now, to just which pilot, but probably to zeb leavenworth or beck jolly, of the john j. roe. the roe was a freight-boat, "as slow as an island and as comfortable as a farm." in fact, the roe was owned and conducted by farmers, and sam clemens thought if john quarles's farm could be set afloat it would greatly resemble that craft in the matter of good-fellowship, hospitality, and speed. it was said of her that up-stream she could even beat an island, though down-stream she could never quite overtake the current, but was a "love of a steamboat" nevertheless. the roe was not licensed to carry passengers, but she always had a dozen "family guests" aboard, and there was a big boiler-deck for dancing and moonlight frolics, also a piano in the cabin. the young pilot sometimes played on the piano and sang to his music songs relating to the "grasshopper on the sweet-potato vine," or to an old horse by the name of methusalem: took him down and sold him in jerusalem, a long time ago. there were forty-eight stanzas about this ancient horse, all pretty much alike; but the assembled company was not likely to be critical, and his efforts won him laurels. he had a heavenly time on the john j. roe, and then came what seemed inferno by contrast. bixby returned, made a trip or two, then left and transferred him again, this time to a man named brown. brown had a berth on the fine new steamer pennsylvania, one of the handsomest boats on the river, and young clemens had become a fine steersman, so it is not unlikely that both men at first were gratified by the arrangement. but brown was a fault-finding, tyrannical chief, ignorant, vulgar, and malicious. in the mississippi book the author gives his first interview with brown, also his last one. for good reasons these occasions were burned into his memory, and they may be accepted as substantially correct. brown had an offensive manner. his first greeting was a surly question. "are you horace bigsby's cub?" "bixby" was usually pronounced "bigsby" on the river, but brown made it especially obnoxious and followed it up with questions and comments and orders still more odious. his subordinate soon learned to detest him thoroughly. it was necessary, however, to maintain a respectable deportment--custom, discipline, even the law, required that--but it must have been a hard winter and spring the young steersman put in during those early months of , restraining himself from the gratification of slaying brown. time would bring revenge--a tragic revenge and at a fearful cost; but he could not guess that, and he put in his spare time planning punishments of his own. i could imagine myself killing brown; there was no law against that, and that was the thing i always used to do the moment i was abed. instead of going over my river in my mind, as was my duty, i threw business aside for pleasure and killed brown. i killed brown every night for a month; not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new and picturesque ones--ways that were sometimes surprising for freshness of design and ghastly for situation and environment. once when brown had been more insulting than usual his subordinate went to bed and killed him in "seventeen different ways--all of them new." he had made an effort at first to please brown, but it was no use. brown was the sort of a man that refused to be pleased; no matter how carefully his subordinate steered, he as always at him. "here," he would shout, "where are you going now? pull her down! pull her down! don't you hear me? dod-derned mud-cat!" his assistant lost all desire to be obliging to such a person and even took occasion now and then to stir him up. one day they were steaming up the river when brown noticed that the boat seemed to be heading toward some unusual point. "here, where are you heading for now?" he yelled. "what in nation are you steerin' at, anyway? deyned numskull!" "why," said sam, in unruffled deliberation, "i didn't see much else i could steer for, and i was heading for that white heifer on the bank." "get away from that wheel! and get outen this pilothouse!" yelled brown. "you ain't fit to become no pilot!" which was what sam wanted. any temporary relief from the carping tyranny of brown was welcome. he had been on the river nearly a year now, and, though universally liked and accounted a fine steersman, he was receiving no wages. there had been small need of money for a while, for he had no board to pay; but clothes wear out at last, and there were certain incidentals. the pennsylvania made a round trip in about thirty-five days, with a day or two of idle time at either end. the young pilot found that he could get night employment, watching freight on the new orleans levee, and thus earn from two and a half to three dollars for each night's watch. sometimes there would be two nights, and with a capital of five or six dollars he accounted himself rich. "it was a desolate experience," he said, long afterward, "watching there in the dark among those piles of freight; not a sound, not a living creature astir. but it was not a profitless one: i used to have inspirations as i sat there alone those nights. i used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. those things got into my books by and by and furnished me with many a chapter. i can trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and another." many of the curious tales in the latter half of the mississippi book came out of those long night-watches. it was a good time to think of such things. xxv love-making and adventure of course, life with brown was not all sorrow. at either end of the trip there was respite and recreation. in st. louis, at pamela's there was likely to be company: hannibal friends mostly, schoolmates--girls, of course. at new orleans he visited friendly boats, especially the john j. roe, where he was generously welcomed. one such visit on the roe he never forgot. a young girl was among the boat's guests that trip --another laura, fifteen, winning, delightful. they met, and were mutually attracted; in the life of each it was one of those bright spots which are likely to come in youth: one of those sudden, brief periods of romance, love--call it what you will the thing that leads to marriage, if pursued. "i was not four inches from that girl's elbow during our waking hours for the next three days." then came a sudden interruption: zeb leavenworth came flying aft shouting: "the pennsylvania is backing out." a flutter of emotion, a fleeting good-by, a flight across the decks, a flying leap from romance back to reality, and it was all over. he wrote her, but received no reply. he never saw her again, never heard from her for forty-eight years, when both were married, widowed, and old. she had not received his letter. even on the pennsylvania life had its interests. a letter dated march , , recounts a delightfully dangerous night-adventure in the steamer's yawl, hunting for soundings in the running ice. then the fun commenced. we made fast a line fathoms long, to the bow of the yawl, and put the men (both crews) to it like horses on the shore. brown, the pilot, stood in the bow, with an oar, to keep her head out, and i took the tiller. we would start the men, and all would go well till the yawl would bring up on a heavy cake of ice, and then the men would drop like so many tenpins, while brown assumed the horizontal in the bottom of the boat. after an hour's hard work we got back, with ice half an inch thick on the oars. sent back and warped up the other yawl, and then george (george ealer, the other pilot) and myself took a double crew of fresh men and tried it again. this time we found the channel in less than half an hour, and landed on an island till the pennsylvania came along and took us off. the next day was colder still. i was out in the yawl twice, and then we got through, but the infernal steamboat came near running over us.... we sounded hat island, warped up around a bar, and sounded again--but in order to understand our situation you will have to read dr. kane. it would have been impossible to get back to the boat. but the maria denning was aground at the head of the island--they hailed us--we ran alongside, and they hoisted us in and thawed us out. we had then been out in the yawl from four o'clock in the morning till half past nine without being near a fire. there was a thick coating of ice over men, and yawl, ropes and everything else, and we looked like rock- candy statuary. this was the sort of thing he loved in those days. we feel the writer's evident joy and pride in it. in the same letter he says: "i can't correspond with the paper, because when one is learning the river he is not allowed to do or think about anything else." then he mentions his brother henry, and we get the beginning of that tragic episode for which, though blameless, samuel clemens always held himself responsible. henry was doing little or nothing here (st. louis), and i sent him to our clerk to work his way for a trip, measuring wood-piles, counting coal-boxes, and doing other clerkly duties, which he performed satisfactorily. he may go down with us again. henry clemens was about twenty at this time, a handsome, attractive boy of whom his brother was lavishly fond and proud. he did go on the next trip and continued to go regularly after that, as third clerk in line of promotion. it was a bright spot in those hard days with brown to have henry along. the boys spent a good deal of their leisure with the other pilot, george ealer, who "was as kindhearted as brown wasn't," and quoted shakespeare and goldsmith, and played the flute to his fascinated and inspiring audience. these were things worth while. the young steersman could not guess that the shadow of a long sorrow was even then stretching across the path ahead. yet in due time he received a warning, a remarkable and impressive warning, though of a kind seldom heeded. one night, when the pennsylvania lay in st. louis, he slept at his sister's house and had this vivid dream: he saw henry, a corpse, lying in a metallic burial case in the sitting-room, supported on two chairs. on his breast lay a bouquet of flowers, white, with a single crimson bloom in the center. when he awoke, it was morning, but the dream was so vivid that he believed it real. perhaps something of the old hypnotic condition was upon him, for he rose and dressed, thinking he would go in and look at his dead brother. instead, he went out on the street in the early morning and had walked to the middle of the block before it suddenly flashed upon him that it was only a dream. he bounded back, rushed to the sitting-room, and felt a great trembling revulsion of joy when he found it really empty. he told pamela the dream, then put it out of his mind as quickly as he could. the pennsylvania sailed from st. louis as usual, and made a safe trip to new orleans. a safe trip, but an eventful one; on it occurred that last interview with brown, already mentioned. it is recorded in the mississippi book, but cannot be omitted here. somewhere down the river (it was in eagle bend) henry appeared on the hurricane deck to bring an order from the captain for a landing to be made a little lower down. brown was somewhat deaf, but would never confess it. he may not have understood the order; at all events he gave no sign of having heard it, and went straight ahead. he disliked henry as he disliked everybody of finer grain than himself, and in any case was too arrogant to ask for a repetition. they were passing the landing when captain klinefelter appeared on deck and called to him to let the boat come around, adding: "didn't henry tell you to land here?" "no, sir." captain. klinefelter turned to sam: "didn't you hear him?" "yes, sir." brown said: "shut your mouth! you never heard anything of the kind." by and by henry came into the pilot-house, unaware of any trouble. brown set upon him in his ugliest manner. "here, why didn't you tell me we had got to land at that plantation?" he demanded. henry was always polite, always gentle. "i did tell you, mr. brown." "it's a lie." sam clemens could stand brown's abuse of himself, but not of henry. he said: "you lie yourself. he did tell you." brown was dazed for a moment and then he shouted: "i'll attend to your case in half a minute!" and ordered henry out of the pilot-house. the boy had started, when brown suddenly seized him by the collar and struck him in the face.--[in the mississippi book the writer states that brown started to strike henry with a large piece of coal; but, in a letter written soon after the occurrence to mrs. orion clemens, he says: "henry started out of the pilot-house-brown jumped up and collared him --turned him half-way around and struck him in the face!-and him nearly six feet high-struck my little brother. i was wild from that moment. i left the boat to steer herself, and avenged the insult--and the captain said i was right."]--instantly sam was upon brown, with a heavy stool, and stretched him on the floor. then all the bitterness and indignation that had been smoldering for months flamed up, and, leaping upon brown and holding him with his knees, he pounded him with his fists until strength and fury gave out. brown struggled free, then, and with pilot instinct sprang to the wheel, for the vessel had been drifting and might have got into trouble. seeing there was no further danger, he seized a spy-glass as a weapon. "get out of this here pilot-house," he raged. but his subordinate was not afraid of him now. "you should leave out the 'here,'" he drawled, critically. "it is understood, and not considered good english form." "don't you give me none of your airs," yelled brown. "i ain't going to stand nothing more from you." "you should say, 'don't give me any of your airs,'" sam said, sweetly, "and the last half of your sentence almost defies correction." a group of passengers and white-aproned servants, assembled on the deck forward, applauded the victor. brown turned to the wheel, raging and growling. clemens went below, where he expected captain klinefelter to put him in irons, perhaps, for it was thought to be felony to strike a pilot. the officer took him into his private room and closed the door. at first he looked at the culprit thoughtfully, then he made some inquiries: "did you strike him first?" captain klinefelter asked. "yes, sir." "what with?" "a stool, sir." "hard?" "middling, sir." "did it knock him down?" "he--he fell, sir." "did you follow it up? did you do anything further?" "yes, sir." "what did you do?" "pounded him, sir." "pounded him?" "yes, sir." "did you pound him much--that is, severely?" "one might call it that, sir, maybe." "i am deuced glad of it! hark ye, never mention that i said that. you have been guilty of a great crime; and don't ever be guilty of it again on this boat, but--lay for him ashore! give him a good sound thrashing; do you hear? i'll pay the expenses."--["life on the mississippi."] captain klinefelter told him to clear out, then, and the culprit heard him enjoying himself as the door closed behind him. brown, of course, forbade him the pilothouse after that, and he spent the rest of the trip "an emancipated slave" listening to george ealer's flute and his readings from goldsmith and shakespeare; playing chess with him sometimes, and learning a trick which he would use himself in the long after-years--that of taking back the last move and running out the game differently when he saw defeat. brown swore that he would leave the boat at new orleans if sam clemens remained on it, and captain klinefelter told brown to go. then when another pilot could not be obtained to fill his place, the captain offered to let clemens himself run the daylight watches, thus showing his confidence in the knowledge of the young steersman, who had been only a little more than a year at the wheel. but clemens himself had less confidence and advised the captain to keep brown back to st. louis. he would follow up the river by another boat and resume his place as steersman when brown was gone. without knowing it, he may have saved his life by that decision. it is doubtful if he remembered his recent disturbing dream, though some foreboding would seem to have hung over him the night before the pennsylvania sailed. henry liked to join in the night-watches on the levee when he had finished his duties, and the brothers often walked the round chatting together. on this particular night the elder spoke of disaster on the river. finally he said: "in case of accident, whatever you do, don't lose your head--the passengers will do that. rush for the hurricane deck and to the life-boat, and obey the mate's orders. when the boat is launched, help the women and children into it. don't get in yourself. the river is only a mile wide. you can swim ashore easily enough." it was good manly advice, but it yielded a long harvest of sorrow. xxvi the tragedy of the "pennsylvania" captain klinefelter obtained his steersman a pass on the a. t. lacey, which left two days behind the pennsylvania. this was pleasant, for bart bowen had become captain of that fine boat. the lacey touched at greenville, mississippi, and a voice from the landing shouted: "the pennsylvania is blown up just below memphis, at ship island! one hundred and fifty lives lost!" nothing further could be learned there, but that evening at napoleon a memphis extra reported some of the particulars. henry clemens's name was mentioned as one of those, who had escaped injury. still farther up the river they got a later extra. henry was again mentioned; this time as being scalded beyond recovery. by the time they reached memphis they knew most of the details: at six o'clock that warm mid-june morning, while loading wood from a large flat-boat sixty miles below memphis, four out of eight of the pennsylvania's boilers had suddenly exploded with fearful results. all the forward end of the boat had been blown out. many persons had been killed outright; many more had been scalded and crippled and would die. it was one of those hopeless, wholesale steamboat slaughters which for more than a generation had made the mississippi a river of death and tears. samuel clemens found his brother stretched upon a mattress on the floor of an improvised hospital--a public hall--surrounded by more than thirty others more or less desperately injured. he was told that henry had inhaled steam and that his body was badly scalded. his case was considered hopeless. henry was one of those who had been blown into the river by the explosion. he had started to swim for the shore, only a few hundred yards away, but presently, feeling no pain and believing himself unhurt, he had turned back to assist in the rescue of the others. what he did after that could not be clearly learned. the vessel had taken fire; the rescued were being carried aboard the big wood-boat still attached to the wreck. the fire soon raged so that the rescuers and all who could be saved were driven into the wood-flat, which was then cut adrift and landed. there the sufferers had to lie in the burning sun many hours until help could come. henry was among those who were insensible by that time. perhaps he had really been uninjured at first and had been scalded in his work of rescue; it will never be known. his brother, hearing these things, was thrown into the deepest agony and remorse. he held himself to blame for everything; for henry's presence on the boat; for his advice concerning safety of others; for his own absence when he might have been there to help and protect the boy. he wanted to telegraph at once to his mother and sister to come, but the doctors persuaded him to wait--just why, he never knew. he sent word of the disaster to orion, who by this time had sold out in keokuk and was in east tennessee studying law; then he set himself to the all but hopeless task of trying to bring henry back to life. many memphis ladies were acting as nurses, and one, a miss wood, attracted by the boy's youth and striking features, joined in the desperate effort. some medical students had come to assist the doctors, and one of these also took special interest in henry's case. dr. peyton, an old memphis practitioner, declared that with such care the boy might pull through. but on the fourth night he was considered to be dying. half delirious with grief and the strain of watching, samuel clemens wrote to his mother and to his sister-in-law in tennessee. the letter to orion clemens's wife has been preserved. memphis, tenn., friday, june , . dear sister mollie,--long before this reaches you my poor henry--my darling, my pride, my glory, my all will have finished his blameless career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness. the horrors of three days have swept over me--they have blasted my youth and left me an old man before my time. mollie, there are gray hairs in my head to-night. for forty-eight hours i labored at the bedside of my poor burned and bruised but uncomplaining brother, and then the star of my hope went out and left me in the gloom of despair. men take me by the hand and congratulate me, and call me "lucky" because i was not on the pennsylvania when she blew up! may god forgive them, for they know not what they say. i was on the pennsylvania five minutes before she left n. orleans, and i must tell you the truth, mollie--three hundred human beings perished by that fearful disaster. but may god bless memphis, the noblest city on the face of the earth. she has done her duty by these poor afflicted creatures--especially henry, for he has had five--aye, ten, fifteen, twenty times the care and attention that any one else has had. dr. peyton, the best physician in memphis (he is exactly like the portraits of webster), sat by him for hours. there are scalded men in that room, and you would know dr. peyton better than i can describe him if you could follow him around and hear each man murmur as he passes, "may the god of heaven bless you, doctor!" the ladies have done well, too. our second mate, a handsome, noble-hearted young fellow, will die. yesterday a beautiful girl of stooped timidly down by his side and handed him a pretty bouquet. the poor suffering boy's eyes kindled, his lips quivered out a gentle "god bless you, miss," and he burst into tears. he made them write her name on a card for him, that he might not forget it. pray for me, mollie, and pray for my poor sinless brother. your unfortunate brother, saml. l. clemens. p. s.--i got here two days after henry. but, alas, this was not all, nor the worst. it would seem that samuel clemens's cup of remorse must be always overfull. the final draft that would embitter his years was added the sixth night after the accident --the night that henry died. he could never bring himself to write it. he was never known to speak of it but twice. henry had rallied soon after the foregoing letter had been mailed, and improved slowly that day and the next: dr. peyton came around about eleven o'clock on the sixth night and made careful examination. he said: "i believe he is out of danger and will get well. he is likely to be restless during the night; the groans and fretting of the others will disturb him. if he cannot rest without it, tell the physician in charge to give him one-eighth of a grain of morphine." the boy did wake during the night, and was disturbed by the complaining of the other sufferers. his brother told the young medical student in charge what the doctor had said about the morphine. but morphine was a new drug then; the student hesitated, saying: "i have no way of measuring. i don't know how much an eighth of a grain would be." henry grew rapidly worse--more and more restless. his brother was half beside himself with the torture of it. he went to the medical student. "if you have studied drugs," he said, "you ought to be able to judge an eighth of a grain of morphine." the young man's courage was over-swayed. he yielded and ladled out in the old-fashioned way, on the point of a knife-blade, what he believed to be the right amount. henry immediately sank into a heavy sleep. he died before morning. his chance of life had been infinitesimal, and his death was not necessarily due to the drug, but samuel clemens, unsparing in his self-blame, all his days carried the burden of it. he saw the boy taken to the dead room, then the long strain of grief, the days and nights without sleep, the ghastly realization of the end overcame him. a citizen of memphis took him away in a kind of daze and gave him a bed in his house, where he fell into a stupor of fatigue and surrender. it was many hours before he woke; when he did, at last, he dressed and went to where henry lay. the coffin provided for the dead were of unpainted wood, but the youth and striking face of henry clemens had aroused a special interest. the ladies of memphis had made up a fund of sixty dollars and bought for him a metallic case. samuel clemens entering, saw his brother lying exactly as he had seen him in his dream, lacking only the bouquet of white flowers with its crimson center--a detail made complete while he stood there, for at that moment an elderly lady came in with a large white bouquet, and in the center of it was a single red rose. orion arrived from tennessee, and the brothers took their sorrowful burden to st. louis, subsequently to hannibal, his old home. the death of this lovely boy was a heavy sorrow to the community where he was known, for he had been a favorite with all.--[for a fine characterization of henry clemens the reader is referred to a letter written by orion clemens to miss wood. see appendix a, at the end of the last volume.] from hannibal the family returned to pamela's home in st. louis. there one night orion heard his brother moaning and grieving and walking the floor of his room. by and by sam came in to where orion was. he could endure it no longer, he said; he must, "tell somebody." then he poured all the story of that last tragic night. it has been set down here because it accounts for much in his after-life. it magnified his natural compassion for the weakness and blunders of humanity, while it increased the poor opinion implanted by the scotchman macfarlane of the human being as a divine invention. two of mark twain's chief characteristics were--consideration for the human species, and contempt for it. in many ways he never overcame the tragedy of henry's death. he never really looked young again. gray hairs had come, as he said, and they did not disappear. his face took on the serious, pathetic look which from that time it always had in repose. at twenty-three he looked thirty. at thirty he looked nearer forty. after that the discrepancy in age and looks became less notable. in vigor, complexion, and temperament he was regarded in later life as young for his years, but never in looks. xxvii the pilot the young pilot returned to the river as steersman for george ealer, whom he loved, and in september of that year obtained a full license as mississippi river pilot.--[in life on the mississippi he gives his period of learning at from two to two and a half years; but documentary evidence as well as mr. bixby's testimony places the apprenticeship at eighteen months]--bixby had returned by this time, and they were again together, first on the crescent city, later on a fine new boat called the new falls city. clemens was still a steersman when bixby returned; but as soon as his license was granted (september , ) his old chief took him as full partner. he was a pilot at last. in eighteen months he had packed away in his head all the multitude of volatile statistics and acquired that confidence and courage which made him one of the elect, a river sovereign. he knew every snag and bank and dead tree and reef in all those endless miles between st. louis and new orleans, every cut-off and current, every depth of water--the whole story--by night and by day. he could smell danger in the dark; he could read the surface of the water as an open page. at twenty-three he had acquired a profession which surpassed all others for absolute sovereignty and yielded an income equal to that then earned by the vice-president of the united states. boys generally finish college at about that age, but it is not likely that any boy ever finished college with the mass of practical information and training that was stored away in samuel clemens's head, or with his knowledge of human nature, his preparation for battle with the world. "not only was he a pilot, but a good one." these are horace bixby's words, and he added: "it is the fashion to-day to disparage sam's piloting. men who were born since he was on the river and never saw him will tell you that sam was never much of a pilot. most of them will tell you that he was never a pilot at all. as a matter of fact, sam was a fine pilot, and in a day when piloting on the mississippi required a great deal more brains and skill and application than it does now. there were no signal-lights along the shore in those days, and no search-lights on the vessels; everything was blind, and on a dark, misty night in a river full of snags and shifting sand--bars and changing shores, a pilot's judgment had to be founded on absolute certainty." he had plenty of money now. he could help his mother with a liberal hand, and he did it. he helped orion, too, with money and with advice. from a letter written toward the end of the year, we gather the new conditions. orion would seem to have been lamenting over prospects, and the young pilot, strong and exalted in his new estate, urges him to renewed consistent effort: what is a government without energy?--[he says]--. and what is a man without energy? nothing--nothing at all. what is the grandest thing in "paradise lost"--the arch-fiend's terrible energy! what was the greatest feature in napoleon's character? his unconquerable energy! sum all the gifts that man is endowed with, and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. and to-day, if i were a heathen, i would rear a statue to energy, and fall down and worship it! i want a man to--i want you to--take up a line of action, and follow it out, in spite of the very devil. orion and his wife had returned to keokuk by this time, waiting for something in the way of a business opportunity. his pilot brother, wrote him more than once letters of encouragement and council. here and there he refers to the tragedy of henry's death, and the shadow it has cast upon his life; but he was young, he was successful, his spirits were naturally exuberant. in the exhilaration of youth and health and success he finds vent at times in that natural human outlet, self-approval. he not only exhibits this weakness, but confesses it with characteristic freedom. putting all things together, i begin to think i am rather lucky than otherwise--a notion which i was slow to take up. the other night i was about to "round to" for a storm, but concluded that i could find a smoother bank somewhere. i landed five miles below. the storm came, passed away and did not injure us. coming up, day before yesterday, i looked at the spot i first chose, and half the trees on the bank were torn to shreds. we couldn't have lived minutes in such a tornado. and i am also lucky in having a berth, while all the other young pilots are idle. this is the luckiest circumstance that ever befell me. not on account of the wages--for that is a secondary consideration-but from the fact that the city of memphis is the largest boat in the trade, and the hardest to pilot, and consequently i can get a reputation on her, which is a thing i never could accomplish on a transient boat. i can "bank" in the neighborhood of $ a month on her, and that will satisfy me for the present (principally because the other youngsters are sucking their fingers). bless me! what a pleasure there is in revenge!--and what vast respect prosperity commands! why, six months ago, i could enter the "rooms," and receive only the customary fraternal greeting now they say, "why, how are you, old fellow--when did you get in?" and the young pilots who use to tell me, patronizingly, that i could never learn the river cannot keep from showing a little of their chagrin at seeing me so far ahead of them. permit me to "blow my horn," for i derive a living pleasure from these things, and i must confess that when i go to pay my dues, i rather like to let the d---d rascals get a glimpse of a hundred-dollar bill peeping out from amongst notes of smaller dimensions whose face i do not exhibit! you will despise this egotism, but i tell you there is a "stern joy" in it. we are dwelling on this period of mark twain's life, for it was a period that perhaps more than any other influenced his future years. he became completely saturated with the river its terms, its memories, its influence remained a definite factor in his personality to the end of his days. moreover, it was his first period of great triumph. where before he had been a subaltern not always even a wage-earner--now all in a moment he had been transformed into a high chief. the fullest ambition of his childhood had been realized--more than realized, for in that day he had never dreamed of a boat or of an income of such stately proportions. of great personal popularity, and regarded as a safe pilot, he had been given one of the largest, most difficult of boats. single-handed and alone he had fought his way into the company of kings. and we may pardon his vanity. he could hardly fail to feel his glory and revel in it and wear it as a halo, perhaps, a little now and then in the association rooms. to this day he is remembered as a figure there, though we may believe, regardless of his own statement, that it was not entirely because of his success. as the boys of hannibal had gathered around to listen when sam clemens began to speak, so we may be certain that the pilots at st. louis and new orleans laid aside other things when he had an observation to make or a tale to tell. he was much given to spinning yarns--[writes one associate of those days]--so funny that his hearers were convulsed, and yet all the time his own face was perfectly sober. if he laughed at all, it must have been inside. it would have killed his hearers to do that. occasionally some of his droll yarns would get into the papers. he may have written them himself. another riverman of those days has recalled a story he heard sam clemens tell: we were speaking of presence of mind in accidents--we were always talking of such things; then he said: "boys, i had great presence of mind once. it was at a fire. an old man leaned out of a four-story building calling for help. everybody in the crowd below looked up, but nobody did anything. the ladders weren't long enough. nobody had any presence of mind--nobody but me. i came to the rescue. i yelled for a rope. when it came i threw the old man the end of it. he caught it and i told him to tie it around his waist. he did so, and i pulled him down." this was one of the stories that got into print and traveled far. perhaps, as the old pilot suggests, he wrote some of them himself, for horace bixby remembers that "sam was always scribbling when not at the wheel." but if he published any work in those river-days he did not acknowledge it later--with one exception. the exception was not intended for publication, either. it was a burlesque written for the amusement of his immediate friends. he has told the story himself, more than once, but it belongs here for the reason that some where out of the general circumstance of it there originated a pseudonym, one day to become the best-known in the hemispheres the name mark twain. that terse, positive, peremptory, dynamic pen-name was first used by an old pilot named isaiah sellers--a sort of "oldest inhabitant" of the river, who made the other pilots weary with the scope and antiquity of his reminiscent knowledge. he contributed paragraphs of general information and nestorian opinions to the new orleans picayune, and signed them "mark twain." they were quaintly egotistical in tone, usually beginning: "my opinion for the benefit of the citizens of new orleans," and reciting incidents and comparisons dating as far back as . captain sellers naturally was regarded as fair game by the young pilots, who amused themselves by imitating his manner and general attitude of speech. but clemens went further; he wrote at considerable length a broadly burlesque imitation signed "sergeant fathom," with an introduction which referred to the said fathom as "one of the oldest cub pilots on the river." the letter that followed related a perfectly impossible trip, supposed to have been made in by the steamer "the old first jubilee" with a "chinese captain and a choctaw crew." it is a gem of its kind, and will bear reprint in full today.--[see appendix b, at the end of the last volume.] the burlesque delighted bart bowen, who was clemens's pilot partner on the edward j. gay at the time. he insisted on showing it to others and finally upon printing it. clemens was reluctant, but consented. it appeared in the true delta (may or , ), and was widely and boisterously enjoyed. it broke captain sellers's literary heart. he never contributed another paragraph. mark twain always regretted the whole matter deeply, and his own revival of the name was a sort of tribute to the old man he had thoughtlessly wounded. if captain sellers has knowledge of material matters now, he is probably satisfied; for these things brought to him, and to the name he had chosen, what he could never himself have achieved --immortality. xxviii piloting and prophecy those who knew samuel clemens best in those days say that he was a slender, fine-looking man, well dressed--even dandified--given to patent leathers, blue serge, white duck, and fancy striped shirts. old for his years, he heightened his appearance at times by wearing his beard in the atrocious mutton-chop fashion, then popular, but becoming to no one, least of all to him. the pilots regarded him as a great reader--a student of history, travels, literature, and the sciences--a young man whom it was an education as well as an entertainment to know. when not at the wheel, he was likely to be reading or telling yarns in the association rooms. he began the study of french one day when he passed a school of languages, where three tongues, french, german, and italian, were taught, one in each of three rooms. the price was twenty-five dollars for one language, or three for fifty dollars. the student was provided with a set of cards for each room and supposed to walk from one apartment to another, changing tongues at each threshold. with his unusual enthusiasm and prodigality, the young pilot decided to take all three languages, but after the first two or three round trips concluded that for the present french would do. he did not return to the school, but kept his cards and bought text-books. he must have studied pretty faithfully when he was off watch and in port, for his river note-book contains a french exercise, all neatly written, and it is from the dialogues of voltaire. this old note-book is interesting for other things. the notes are no longer timid, hesitating memoranda, but vigorous records made with the dash of assurance that comes from confidence and knowledge, and with the authority of one in supreme command. under the head of " d high-water trip--jan., --alonzo child," we have the story of a rising river with its overflowing banks, its blind passages and cut-offs--all the circumstance and uncertainty of change. good deal of water all over coles creek chute, or ft. bank --could have gone up shore above general taylor's--too much drift.... night--didn't run either or towheads-- ft. bank on main shore ozark chute.... and so on page after page of cryptographic memoranda. it means little enough to the lay reader, yet one gets an impression somehow of the swirling, turbulent water and a lonely figure in that high glassed-in place peering into the dark for blind land-marks and possible dangers, picking his way up the dim, hungry river of which he must know every foot as well as a man knows the hall of his own home. all the qualifications must come into play, then memory, judgment, courage, and the high art of steering. "steering is a very high, art," he says; "one must not keep a rudder dragging across a boat's stern if he wants to get up the river fast." he had an example of the perfection of this art one misty night on the alonzo child. nearly fifty years later, sitting on his veranda in the dark, he recalled it. he said: "there was a pilot in those days by the name of jack leonard who was a perfectly wonderful creature. i do not know that jack knew anymore about the river than most of us and perhaps could not read the water any better, but he had a knack of steering away ahead of our ability, and i think he must have had an eye that could see farther into the darkness. "i had never seen leonard steer, but i had heard a good deal about it. i had heard it said that the crankiest old tub afloat--one that would kill any other man to handle--would obey and be as docile as a child when jack leonard took the wheel. i had a chance one night to verify that for myself. we were going up the river, and it was one of the nastiest nights i ever saw. besides that, the boat was loaded in such a way that she steered very hard, and i was half blind and crazy trying to locate the safe channel, and was pulling my arms out to keep her in it. it was one of those nights when everything looks the same whichever way you look: just two long lines where the sky comes down to the trees and where the trees meet the water with all the trees precisely the same height --all planted on the same day, as one of the boys used to put it--and not a thing to steer by except the knowledge in your head of the real shape of the river. some of the boats had what they call a 'night hawk' on the jackstaff, a thing which you could see when it was in the right position against the sky or the water, though it seldom was in the right position and was generally pretty useless. "i was in a bad way that night and wondering how i could ever get through it, when the pilot-house door opened, and jack leonard walked in. he was a passenger that trip, and i had forgotten he was aboard. i was just about in the worst place and was pulling the boat first one way, then another, running the wheel backward and forward, and climbing it like a squirrel. "'sam,' he said, 'let me take the wheel. maybe i have been over this place since you have.' "i didn't argue the question. jack took the wheel, gave it a little turn one way, then a little turn the other; that old boat settled down as quietly as a lamb--went right along as if it had been broad daylight in a river without snags, bars, bottom, or banks, or anything that one could possibly hit. i never saw anything so beautiful. he stayed my watch out for me, and i hope i was decently grateful. i have never forgotten it." the old note-book contained the record of many such nights as that; but there were other nights, too, when the stars were blazing out, or when the moon on the water made the river a wide mysterious way of speculative dreams. he was always speculating; the planets and the remote suns were always a marvel to him. a love of astronomy--the romance of it, its vast distances, and its possibilities--began with those lonely river-watches and never waned to his last day. for a time a great comet blazed in the heavens, a "wonderful sheaf of light" that glorified his lonely watch. night after night he watched it as it developed and then grew dim, and he read eagerly all the comet literature that came to his hand, then or afterward. he speculated of many things: of life, death, the reason of existence, of creation, the ways of providence and destiny. it was a fruitful time for such meditation; out of such vigils grew those larger philosophies that would find expression later, when the years had conferred the magic gift of phrase. life lay all ahead of him then, and during those still watches he must have revolved many theories of how the future should be met and mastered. in the old notebook there still remains a well-worn clipping, the words of some unknown writer, which he had preserved and may have consulted as a sort of creed. it is an interesting little document--a prophetic one, the reader may concede: how to take life.--take it just as though it was--as it is--an earnest, vital, and important affair. take it as though you were born to the task of performing a merry part in it--as though the world had awaited for your coming. take it as though it was a grand opportunity to do and achieve, to carry forward great and good schemes; to help and cheer a suffering, weary, it may be heartbroken, brother. now and then a man stands aside from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of some sort. the world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. the miracle, or the power that elevates the few, is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the promptings of a brave, determined spirit. the old note-book contains no record of disasters. horace bixby, who should know, has declared: "sam clemens never had an accident either as a steersman or as a pilot, except once when he got aground for a few hours in the bagasse (cane) smoke, with no damage to anybody though of course there was some good luck in that too, for the best pilots do not escape trouble, now and then." bixby and clemens were together that winter on the alonzo child, and a letter to orion contains an account of great feasting which the two enjoyed at a "french restaurant" in new orleans--"dissipating on a ten-dollar dinner--tell it not to ma!"--where they had sheepshead fish, oysters, birds, mushrooms, and what not, "after which the day was too far gone to do anything." so it appears that he was not always reading macaulay or studying french and astronomy, but sometimes went frivoling with his old chief, now his chum, always his dear friend. another letter records a visit with pamela to a picture-gallery in st. louis where was being exhibited church's "heart of the andes." he describes the picture in detail and with vast enthusiasm. "i have seen it several times," he concludes, "but it is always a new picture--totally new--you seem to see nothing the second time that you saw the first." further along he tells of having taken his mother and the girls--his cousin ella creel and another--for a trip down the river to new orleans. ma was delighted with her trip, but she was disgusted with the girls for allowing me to embrace and kiss them--and she was horrified at the 'schottische' as performed by miss castle and myself. she was perfectly willing for me to dance until o'clock at the imminent peril of my going to sleep on the after-watch--but then she would top off with a very inconsistent sermon on dancing in general; ending with a terrific broadside aimed at that heresy of heresies, the 'schottische'. i took ma and the girls in a carriage round that portion of new orleans where the finest gardens and residences are to be seen, and, although it was a blazing hot, dusty day, they seemed hugely delighted. to use an expression which is commonly ignored in polite society, they were "hell-bent" on stealing some of the luscious- looking oranges from branches which overhung the fence, but i restrained them. in another letter of this period we get a hint of the future mark twain. it was written to john t. moore, a young clerk on the john j. roe. what a fool old adam was. had everything his own way; had succeeded in gaining the love of the best-looking girl in the neighborhood, but yet, unsatisfied with his conquest, he had to eat a miserable little apple. ah, john, if you had been in his place you would not have eaten a mouthful of the apple--that is, if it had required any exertion. i have noticed that you shun exertion. there comes in the difference between us. i court exertion. i love work. why, sir, when i have a piece of work to perform, i go away to myself, sit down in the shade, and muse over the coming enjoyment. sometimes i am so industrious that i muse too long. there remains another letter of this period--a sufficiently curious document. there was in those days a famous new orleans clairvoyant known as madame caprell. some of the young pilot's friends had visited her and obtained what seemed to be satisfying results. from time to time they had urged him to visit the fortune-teller, and one idle day he concluded to make the experiment. as soon as he came away he wrote to orion in detail. she's a very pleasant little lady--rather pretty--about --say feet / --would weigh --has black eyes and hair--is polite and intelligent--used good language, and talks much faster than i do. she invited me into the little back parlor, closed the door; and we were alone. we sat down facing each other. then she asked my age. then she put her hands before her eyes a moment, and commenced talking as if she had a good deal to say and not much time to say it in. something after this style: 'madame.' yours is a watery planet; you gain your livelihood on the water; but you should have been a lawyer--there is where your talents lie; you might have distinguished yourself as an orator, or as an editor--, you have written a great deal; you write well--but you are rather out of practice; no matter--you will be in practice some day; you have a superb constitution, and as excellent health as any man in the world; you have great powers of endurance; in your profession your strength holds out against the longest sieges without flagging; still, the upper part of your lungs, the top of them, is slightly affected--you must take care of yourself; you do not drink, but you use entirely too much tobacco; and you must stop it; mind, not moderate, but stop the use of it, totally; then i can almost promise you , when you will surely die; otherwise, look out for , , , , and ; be careful--for you are not of a long- lived race, that is, on your father's side; you are the only healthy member of your family, and the only one in it who has anything like the certainty of attaining to a great age--so, stop using tobacco, and be careful of yourself.... in some respects you take after your father, but you are much more like your mother, who belongs to the long-lived, energetic side of the house.... you never brought all your energies to bear upon any subject but what you accomplished it --for instance, you are self-made, self-educated. 's. l. c.' which proves nothing. 'madame.' don't interrupt. when you sought your present occupation, you found a thousand obstacles in your way--obstacles unknown--not even suspected by any save you and me, since you keep such matter to yourself--but you fought your way, and hid the long struggle under a mask of cheerfulness, which saved your friends anxiety on your account. to do all this requires the qualities which i have named. 's. l. c.' you flatter well, madame. 'madame.' don't interrupt. up to within a short time you had always lived from hand to mouth--now you are in easy circumstances --for which you need give credit to no one but yourself. the turning-point in your life occurred in - - . 's. l. c.' which was? 'madame.' a death, perhaps, and this threw you upon the world and made you what you are; it was always intended that you should make yourself; therefore, it was well that this calamity occurred as early as it did. you will never die of water, although your career upon it in the future seems well sprinkled with misfortune. you will continue upon the water for some time yet; you will not retire finally until ten years from now.... what is your brother's age? --and a lawyer? and in pursuit of an office? well, he stands a better chance than the other two, and he may get it; he is too visionary--is always flying off on a new hobby; this will never do --tell him i said so. he is a good lawyer--a very good lawyer--and a fine speaker--is very popular and much respected, and makes many friends; but although he retains their friendship, he loses their confidence by displaying his instability of character.... the land he has now will be very valuable after a while---- 's. l. c.' say years hence, or thereabouts, madame---- 'madame.' no--less time--but never mind the land, that is a secondary consideration--let him drop that for the present, and devote himself to his business and politics with all his might, for he must hold offices under government.... after a while you will possess a good deal of property--retire at the end of ten years--after which your pursuits will be literary --try the law--you will certainly succeed. i am done now. if you have any questions to ask--ask them freely--and if it be in my power, i will answer without reserve--without reserve. i asked a few questions of minor importance-paid her and left-under the decided impression that going to the fortune-teller's was just as good as going to the opera, and cost scarcely a trifle more --ergo, i will disguise myself and go again, one of these days, when other amusements fail. now isn't she the devil? that is to say, isn't she a right smart little woman? when you want money, let ma know, and she will send it. she and pamela are always fussing about change, so i sent them a hundred and twenty quarters yesterday--fiddler's change enough to last till i get back, i reckon. sam. in the light of preceding and subsequent events, we must confess that madame caprell was "indeed a right smart little woman." she made mistakes enough (the letter is not quoted in full), but when we remember that she not only gave his profession at the moment, but at least suggested his career for the future; that she approximated the year of his father's death as the time when he was thrown upon the world; that she admonished him against his besetting habit, tobacco; that she read. minutely not only his characteristics, but his brother orion's; that she outlined the struggle in his conquest of the river; that she seemingly had knowledge of orion's legal bent and his connection with the tennessee land, all seems remarkable enough, supposing, of course, she had no material means of acquiring knowledge--one can never know certainly about such things. xxix the end of piloting it is curious, however, that madame caprell, with clairvoyant vision, should not have seen an important event then scarcely more than two months distant: the breaking-out of the civil war, with the closing of the river and the end of mark twain's career as a pilot. perhaps these things were so near as to be "this side" the range of second sight. there had been plenty of war-talk, but few of the pilots believed that war was really coming. traveling that great commercial highway, the river, with intercourse both of north and south, they did not believe that any political differences would be allowed to interfere with the nation's trade, or would be settled otherwise than on the street corners, in the halls of legislation, and at the polls. true, several states, including louisiana, had declared the union a failure and seceded; but the majority of opinions were not clear as to how far a state had rights in such a matter, or as to what the real meaning of secession might be. comparatively few believed it meant war. samuel clemens had no such belief. his madame caprell letter bears date of february , , yet contains no mention of war or of any special excitement in new orleans --no forebodings as to national conditions. such things came soon enough: president lincoln was inaugurated on the th of march, and six weeks later fort sumter was fired upon. men began to speak out then and to take sides. it was a momentous time in the association rooms. there were pilots who would go with the union; there were others who would go with the confederacy. horace bixby was one of the former, and in due time became chief of the union river service. another pilot named montgomery (samuel clemens had once steered for him) declared for the south, and later commanded the confederate mississippi fleet. they were all good friends, and their discussions, though warm, were not always acrimonious; but they took sides. a good many were not very clear as to their opinions. living both north and south as they did, they saw various phases of the question and divided their sympathies. some were of one conviction one day and of another the next. samuel clemens was of the less radical element. he knew there was a good deal to be said for either cause; furthermore, he was not then bloodthirsty. a pilot-house with its elevated position and transparency seemed a poor place to be in when fighting was going on. "i'll think about it," he said. "i'm not very anxious to get up into a glass perch and be shot at by either side. i'll go home and reflect on the matter." he did not realize it, but he had made his last trip as a pilot. it is rather curious that his final brief note-book entry should begin with his future nom de plume--a memorandum of soundings--"mark twain," and should end with the words "no lead." he went up the river as a passenger on a steamer named the uncle sam. zeb leavenworth was one of the pilots, and sam clemens usually stood watch with him. they heard war-talk all the way and saw preparations, but they were not molested, though at memphis they basely escaped the blockade. at cairo, illinois, they saw soldiers drilling--troops later commanded by grant. the uncle sam came steaming up toward st. louis, those on board congratulating themselves on having come through unscathed. they were not quite through, however. abreast of jefferson barracks they suddenly heard the boom of a cannon and saw a great whorl of smoke drifting in their direction. they did not realize that it was a signal--a thunderous halt--and kept straight on. less than a minute later there was another boom, and a shell exploded directly in front of the pilot-house, breaking a lot of glass and destroying a good deal of the upper decoration. zeb leavenworth fell back into a corner with a yell. "good lord almighty! sam;" he said, "what do they mean by that?" clemens stepped to the wheel and brought the boat around. "i guess they want us to wait a minute, zeb," he said. they were examined and passed. it was the last steamboat to make the trip from new orleans to st. louis. mark twain's pilot-days were over. he would have grieved had he known this fact. "i loved the profession far better than any i have followed since," he long afterward declared, "and i took a measureless pride in it." the dreamy, easy, romantic existence suited him exactly. a sovereign and an autocrat, the pilot's word was law; he wore his responsibilities as a crown. as long as he lived samuel clemens would return to those old days with fondness and affection, and with regret that they were no more. xxx the soldier clemens spent a few days in st. louis (in retirement, for there was a pressing war demand for mississippi pilots), then went up to hannibal to visit old friends. they were glad enough to see him, and invited him to join a company of gay military enthusiasts who were organizing to "help gov. 'claib' jackson repel the invader." a good many companies were forming in and about hannibal, and sometimes purposes were conflicting and badly mixed. some of the volunteers did not know for a time which invader they intended to drive from missouri soil, and more than one company in the beginning was made up of young fellows whose chief ambition was to have a lark regardless as to which cause they might eventually espouse. --[the military organizations of hannibal and palmyra, in , were as follows: the marion artillery; the silver grays; palmyra guards; the w. e. dennis company, and one or two others. most of them were small private affairs, usually composed of about half-and-half union and confederate men, who knew almost nothing of the questions or conditions, and disbanded in a brief time, to attach themselves to the regular service according as they developed convictions. the general idea of these companies was a little camping-out expedition and a good time. one such company one morning received unexpected reinforcements. they saw the approach of the recruits, and, remarking how well drilled the new arrivals seemed to be, mistook them for the enemy and fled.] samuel clemens had by this time decided, like lee, that he would go with his state and lead battalions to victory. the "battalion" in this instance consisted of a little squad of young fellows of his own age, mostly pilots and schoolmates, including sam bowen, ed stevens, and ab grimes, about a dozen, all told. they organized secretly, for the union militia was likely to come over from illinois any time and look up any suspicious armies that made an open demonstration. an army might lose enthusiasm and prestige if it spent a night or two in the calaboose. so they met in a secret place above bear creek hill, just as tom sawyer's red-handed bandits had gathered so long before (a good many of them were of the same lawless lot), and they planned how they would sell their lives on the field of glory, just as tom sawyer's band might have done if it had thought about playing "war," instead of "indian" and "pirate" and "bandit" with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon patches. then, on the evening before marching away, they stealthily called on their sweethearts--those who had them did, and the others pretended sweethearts for the occasion--and when it was dark and mysterious they said good-by and suggested that maybe those girls would never see them again. and as always happens in such a case, some of them were in earnest, and two or three of the little group that slipped away that night never did come back, and somewhere sleep in unmarked graves. the "two sams"--sam bowen and sam clemens--called on patty gore and julia willis for their good-by visit, and, when they left, invited the girls to "walk through the pickets" with them, which they did as far as bear creek hill. the girls didn't notice any pickets, because the pickets were away calling on girls, too, and probably wouldn't be back to begin picketing for some time. so the girls stood there and watched the soldiers march up bear creek hill and disappear among the trees. the army had a good enough time that night, marching through the brush and vines toward new london, though this sort of thing grew rather monotonous by morning. when they took a look at themselves by daylight, with their nondescript dress and accoutrements, there was some thing about it all which appealed to one's sense of humor rather than to his patriotism. colonel ralls, of ralls county, however, received them cordially and made life happier for them with a good breakfast and some encouraging words. he was authorized to administer the oath of office, he said, and he proceeded to do it, and made them a speech besides; also he sent out notice to some of the neighbors--to col. bill splawn, farmer nuck matson, and others--that the community had an army on its hands and perhaps ought to do something for it. this brought in a number of contributions, provisions, paraphernalia, and certain superfluous horses and mules, which converted the battalion into a cavalry, and made it possible for it to move on to the front without further delay. samuel clemens, mounted on a small yellow mule whose tail had been trimmed down to a tassel at the end in a style that suggested his name, paint brush, upholstered and supplemented with an extra pair of cowskin boots, a pair of gray blankets, a home-made quilt, frying-pan, a carpet sack, a small valise, an overcoat, an old-fashioned kentucky rifle, twenty yards of rope, and an umbrella, was a representative unit of the brigade. the proper thing for an army loaded like that was to go into camp, and they did it. they went over on salt river, near florida, and camped not far from a farm-house with a big log stable; the latter they used as headquarters. somebody suggested that when they went into battle they ought to have short hair, so that in a hand-to-hand conflict the enemy could not get hold of it. tom lyon found a pair of sheep-shears in the stable and acted as barber. they were not very sharp shears, but the army stood the torture for glory in the field, and a group of little darkies collected from the farm-house to enjoy the performance. the army then elected its officers. william ely was chosen captain, with asa glasscock as first lieutenant. samuel clemens was then voted second lieutenant, and there were sergeants and orderlies. there were only three privates when the election was over, and these could not be distinguished by their deportment. there was scarcely any discipline in this army. then it set in to rain. it rained by day and it rained by night. salt river rose until it was bank full and overflowed the bottoms. twice there was a false night alarm of the enemy approaching, and the battalion went slopping through the mud and brush into the dark, picking out the best way to retreat, plodding miserably back to camp when the alarm was over. once they fired a volley at a row of mullen stalks, waving on the brow of a hill, and once a picket shot at his own horse that had got loose and had wandered toward him in the dusk. the rank and file did not care for picket duty. sam bowen--ordered by lieutenant clemens to go on guard one afternoon--denounced his superior and had to be threatened with court-martial and death. sam went finally, but he sat in a hot open place and swore at the battalion and the war in general, and finally went to sleep in the broiling sun. these things began to tell on patriotism. presently lieutenant clemens developed a boil, and was obliged to make himself comfortable with some hay in a horse-trough, where he lay most of the day, violently denouncing the war and the fools that invented it. then word came that "general" tom harris, who was in command of the district, was stopping at a farmhouse two miles away, living on the fat of the land. that settled it. most of them knew tom harris, and they regarded his neglect of them as perfidy. they broke camp without further ceremony. lieutenant clemens needed assistance to mount paint brush, and the little mule refused to cross the river; so ab grimes took the coil of rope, hitched one end of it to his own saddle and the other end to paint brush's neck. grimes was mounted on a big horse, and when he started it was necessary for paint brush to follow. arriving at the farther bank, grimes looked around, and was horrified to see that the end of the rope led down in the water with no horse and rider in view. he spurred up the bank, and the hat of lieutenant clemens and the ears of paint brush appeared. "ah," said clemens, as he mopped his face, "do you know that little devil waded all the way across?" a little beyond the river they met general harris, who ordered them back to camp. they admonished him to "go there himself." they said they had been in that camp and knew all about it. they were going now where there was food--real food and plenty of it. then he begged them, but it was no use. by and by they stopped at a farm-house for supplies. a tall, bony woman came to the door: "you're secesh, ain't you?" they acknowledged that they were defenders of the cause and that they wanted to buy provisions. the request seemed to inflame her. "provisions!" she screamed. "provisions for secesh, and my husband a colonel in the union army. you get out of here!" she reached for a hickory hoop-pole that stood by the door, and the army moved on. when they arrived at col. bill splawn's that night colonel splawn and his family had gone to bed, and it seemed unwise to disturb them. the hungry army camped in the barnyard and crept into the hay-loft to sleep. presently somebody yelled "fire!" one of the boys had been smoking and started the hay. lieutenant clemens suddenly wakened, made a quick rolling movement from the blaze, and rolled out of a big hay-window into the barnyard below. the rest of the army, startled into action, seized the burning hay and pitched it out of the same window. the lieutenant had sprained his ankle when he struck the ground, and his boil was far from well, but when the burning hay descended he forgot his disabilities. literally and figuratively this was the final straw. with a voice and vigor suited to the urgencies of the case, he made a spring from under the burning stuff, flung off the remnants, and with them his last vestige of interest in the war. the others, now that the fire was, out, seemed to think the incident boisterously amusing. whereupon the lieutenant rose up and told them, collectively and individually, what he thought of them; also he spoke of the war and the confederacy, and of the human race at large. they helped him in, then, for his ankle was swelling badly. next morning, when colonel splawn had given them a good breakfast, the army set out for new london. but lieutenant clemens never got any farther than nuck matson's farm-house. his ankle was so painful by that time that mrs. matson had him put to bed, where he stayed for several weeks, recovering from the injury and stress of war. a little negro boy was kept on watch for union detachments--they were passing pretty frequently now--and when one came in sight the lieutenant was secluded until the danger passed. when he was able to travel, he had had enough of war and the confederacy. he decided to visit orion in keokuk. orion was a union abolitionist and might lead him to mend his doctrines. as for the rest of the army, it was no longer a unit in the field. its members had drifted this way and that, some to return to their occupations, some to continue in the trade of war. sam bowen is said to have been caught by the federal troops and put to sawing wood in the stockade at hannibal. ab (a. c.) grimes became a noted confederate spy and is still among those who have lived to furnish the details here set down. properly officered and disciplined, that detachment would have made as brave soldiers as any. military effectiveness is a matter of leaders and tactics. mark twain's own private history of a 'campaign that failed' is, of course, built on this episode. he gives us a delicious account, even if it does not strikingly resemble the occurrence. the story might have been still better if he had not introduced the shooting of the soldier in the dark. the incident was invented, of course, to present the real horror of war, but it seems incongruous in this burlesque campaign, and, to some extent at least, it missed fire in its intention. --[in a book recently published, mark twain's "nephew" is quoted as authority for the statement that mark twain was detailed for river duty, captured, and paroled, captured again, and confined in a tobacco-warehouse in st. louis, etc. mark twain had but one nephew: samuel e. moffett, whose biographical sketch (vol. xxii, mark twain's works) contains no such statement; and nothing of the sort occurred.] xxxi over the hills and far away when madame caprell prophesied that orion clemens would hold office under government, she must have seen with true clairvoyant vision. the inauguration of abraham lincoln brought edward bates into his cabinet, and bates was orion's friend. orion applied for something, and got it. james w. nye had been appointed territorial governor of nevada, and orion was made territorial secretary. you could strain a point and refer to the office as "secretary of state," which was an imposing title. furthermore, the secretary would be acting governor in the governor's absence, and there would be various subsidiary honors. when lieutenant clemens arrived in keokuk, orion was in the first flush of his triumph and needed only money to carry him to the scene of new endeavor. the late lieutenant c. s. a. had accumulated money out of his pilot salary, and there was no comfortable place just then in the active middle west for an officer of either army who had voluntarily retired from the service. he agreed that if orion would overlook his recent brief defection from the union and appoint him now as his (orion's) secretary, he would supply the funds for both overland passages, and they would start with no unnecessary delay for a country so new that all human beings, regardless of previous affiliations and convictions, were flung into the common fusing-pot and recast in the general mold of pioneer. the offer was a boon to orion. he was always eager to forgive, and the money was vitally necessary. in the briefest possible time he had packed his belongings, which included a large unabridged dictionary, and the brothers were on their way to st. louis for final leave-taking before setting out for the great mysterious land of promise--the pacific west. from st. louis they took the boat for st. jo, whence the overland stage started, and for six days "plodded" up the shallow, muddy, snaggy missouri, a new experience for the pilot of the father of waters. in fact, the boat might almost as well have gone to st. jo by land, for she was walking most of the time, anyhow--climbing over reefs and clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all day long. the captain said she was a "bully" boat, and all she wanted was some "shear" and a bigger wheel. i thought she wanted a pair of stilts, but i had the deep sagacity not to say so.'--['roughing it'.]-- at st. jo they paid one hundred and fifty dollars apiece for their stage fare (with something extra for the dictionary), and on the twenty-sixth of july, , set out on that long, delightful trip behind sixteen galloping horses--or mules--never stopping except for meals or to change teams, heading steadily into the sunset, following it from horizon to horizon over the billowy plains, across the snow-clad rockies, covering the seventeen hundred miles between st. jo and carson city (including a two-day halt in salt lake city) in nineteen glorious days. what an inspiration in such a trip! in 'roughing it' he tells it all, and says: "even at this day it thrills me through and through to think of the life, the gladness, and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my face on those fine overland mornings." the nights, with the uneven mail-bags for a bed and the bounding dictionary for company, were less exhilarating; but then youth does not mind. all things being now ready, stowed the uneasy dictionary where it would lie as quiet as possible, and placed the water-canteen and pistols where we could find them in the dark. then we smoked a final pipe and swapped a final yarn; after which we put the pipes, tobacco, and bag of coin in snug holes and caves among the mail- bags, and made the place as dark as the inside of a cow, as the conductor phrased it in his picturesque way. it was certainly as dark as any place could be--nothing was even dimly visible in it. and finally we rolled ourselves up like silkworms, each person in his own blanket, and sank peacefully to sleep. youth loves that sort of thing, despite its inconvenience. and sometimes the clatter of the pony-rider swept by in the night, carrying letters at five dollars apiece and making the overland trip in eight days; just a quick beat of hoofs in the distance, a dash, and a hail from the darkness, the beat of hoofs again, then only the rumble of the stage and the even, swinging gallop of the mules. sometimes they got a glimpse of the ponyrider by day--a flash, as it were, as he sped by. and every morning brought new scenery, new phases of frontier life, including, at last, what was to them the strangest phase of all, mormonism. they spent two wonderful days at salt lake city, that mysterious and remote capital of the great american monarchy, who still flaunts her lawless, orthodox creed the religion of david and solomon--and thrives. an obliging official made it his business to show them the city and the life there, the result of which would be those amusing chapters in 'roughing it' by and by. the overland travelers set out refreshed from salt lake city, and with a new supply of delicacies--ham, eggs, and tobacco--things that make such a trip worth while. the author of 'roughing it' assures us of this: nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. ham and eggs, and after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and scenery, a "down-grade," a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a contented heart--these make happiness. it is what all the ages have struggled for. but one must read all the story of that long-ago trip. it was a trip so well worth taking, so well worth recording, so well worth reading and rereading to-day. we can only read of it now. the overland stage long ago made its last trip, and will not start any more. even if it did, the life and conditions, the very scenery itself, would not be the same. xxxii the pioneer it was a hot, dusty august th that the stage reached carson city and drew up before the ormsby hotel. it was known that the territorial secretary was due to arrive; and something in the nature of a reception, with refreshments and frontier hospitality, had been planned. governor nye, formerly police commissioner in new york city, had arrived a short time before, and with his party of retainers ("heelers" we would call them now), had made an imposing entrance. perhaps something of the sort was expected with the advent of the secretary of state. instead, the committee saw two way-worn individuals climb down from the stage, unkempt, unshorn--clothed in the roughest of frontier costume, the same they had put on at st. jo--dusty, grimy, slouchy, and weather-beaten with long days of sun and storm and alkali desert dust. it is not likely there were two more unprepossessing officials on the pacific coast at that moment than the newly arrived territorial secretary and his brother: somebody identified them, and the committee melted away; the half-formed plan of a banquet faded out and was not heard of again. soap and water and fresh garments worked a transformation; but that first impression had been fatal to festivities of welcome. carson city, the capital of nevada, was a "wooden town," with a population of two thousand souls. its main street consisted of a few blocks of small frame stores, some of which are still standing. in 'roughing it' the author writes: in the middle of the town, opposite the stores, was a "plaza," which is native to all towns beyond the rocky mountains, a large, unfenced, level vacancy with a liberty pole in it, and very useful as a place for public auctions, horse trades, and mass-meetings, and likewise for teamsters to camp in. two other sides of the plaza were faced by stores, offices, and stables. the rest of carson city was pretty scattering. one sees the place pretty clearly from this brief picture of his, but it requires an extract from a letter written to his mother somewhat later to populate it. the mineral excitement was at its height in those days of the early sixties, and had brought together such a congress of nations as only the greed for precious metal can assemble. the sidewalks and streets of carson, and the plaza, thronged all day with a motley aggregation--a museum of races, which it was an education merely to gaze upon. jane clemens had required him to write everything just as it was --"no better and no worse." well--[he says]--, "gold hill" sells at $ , per foot, cash down; "wild cat" isn't worth ten cents. the country is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of paris (gypsum), thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, christians, indians, chinamen, spaniards, gamblers, sharpens; coyotes (pronounced ki-yo- ties), poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits. i overheard a gentleman say, the other day, that it was "the d---dest country under the sun," and that comprehensive conception i fully subscribe to. it never rains here, and the dew never falls. no flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. the birds that fly over the land carry their provisions with them. only the crow and the raven tarry with us. our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest, most unadulterated and uncompromising sand, in which infernal soil nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation, "sage- brush," ventures to grow. . . . i said we are situated in a flat, sandy desert--true. and surrounded on all sides by such prodigious mountains that when you look disdainfully down (from them) upon the insignificant village of carson, in that instant you are seized with a burning desire to stretch forth your hand, put the city in your pocket, and walk off with it. as to churches, i believe they have got a catholic one here, but, like that one the new york fireman spoke of, i believe "they don't run her now." carson has been through several phases of change since this was written --for better and for worse. it is a thriving place in these later days, and new farming conditions have improved the country roundabout. but it was a desert outpost then, a catch-all for the human drift which every whirlwind of discovery sweeps along. gold and silver hunting and mine speculations were the industries--gambling, drinking, and murder were the diversions--of the nevada capital. politics developed in due course, though whether as a business or a diversion is not clear at this time. the clemens brothers took lodging with a genial irishwoman, mrs. murphy, a new york retainer of governor nye, who boarded the camp-followers. --[the mrs. o'flannigan of 'roughing it'.]--this retinue had come in the hope of territorial pickings and mine adventure--soldiers of fortune they were, and a good-natured lot all together. one of them, bob howland, a nephew of the governor, attracted samuel clemens by his clean-cut manner and commanding eye. "the man who has that eye doesn't need to go armed," he wrote later. "he can move upon an armed desperado and quell him and take him a prisoner without saying a single word." it was the same bob howland who would be known by and by as the most fearless man in the territory; who, as city marshal of aurora, kept that lawless camp in subjection, and, when the friends of a lot of condemned outlaws were threatening an attack with general massacre, sent the famous message to governor nye: "all quiet in aurora. five men will be hung in an hour." and it was quiet, and the programme was carried out. but this is a digression and somewhat premature. orion clemens, anxious for laurels, established himself in the meager fashion which he thought the government would approve; and his brother, finding neither duties nor salary attached to his secondary position, devoted himself mainly to the study of human nature as exhibited under frontier conditions. sometimes, when the nights were cool, he would build a fire in the office stove, and, with bob howland and a few other choice members of the "brigade" gathered around, would tell river yarns in that inimitable fashion which would win him devoted audiences all his days. his river life had increased his natural languor of habit, and his slow speech heightened the lazy impression which he was never unwilling to convey. his hearers generally regarded him as an easygoing, indolent good fellow with a love of humor--with talent, perhaps--but as one not likely ever to set the world afire. they did not happen to think that the same inclination which made them crowd about to listen and applaud would one day win for him the attention of all mankind. within a brief time sam clemens (he was never known as otherwise than "sam" among those pioneers) was about the most conspicuous figure on the carson streets. his great bushy head of auburn hair, his piercing, twinkling eyes, his loose, lounging walk, his careless disorder of dress, drew the immediate attention even of strangers; made them turn to look a second time and then inquire as to his identity. he had quickly adapted himself to the frontier mode. lately a river sovereign and dandy, in fancy percales and patent leathers, he had become the roughest of rough-clad pioneers, in rusty slouch hat, flannel shirt, coarse trousers slopping half in and half out of the heavy cowskin boots always something of a barbarian in love with the loose habit of unconvention, he went even further than others and became a sort of paragon of disarray. the more energetic citizens of carson did not prophesy much for his future among them. orion clemens, with the stir and bustle of the official new broom, earned their quick respect; but his brother--well, they often saw him leaning for an hour or more at a time against an awning support at the corner of king and carson streets, smoking a short clay pipe and staring drowsily at the human kaleidoscope of the plaza, scarcely changing his position, just watching, studying, lost in contemplation--all of which was harmless enough, of course, but how could any one ever get a return out of employment like that? samuel clemens did not catch the mining fever immediately; there was too much to see at first to consider any special undertaking. the mere coming to the frontier was for the present enough; he had no plans. his chief purpose was to see the world beyond the rockies, to derive from it such amusement and profit as might fall in his way. the war would end, by and by, and he would go back to the river, no doubt. he was already not far from homesick for the "states" and his associations there. he closed one letter: i heard a military band play "what are the wild waves saying" the other night, and it brought ella creel and belle (stotts) across the desert in an instant, for they sang the song in orion's yard the first time i ever heard it. it was like meeting an old friend. i tell you i could have swallowed that whole band, trombone and all, if such a compliment would have been any gratification to them. his friends contracted the mining mania; bob howland and raish phillips went down to aurora and acquired "feet" in mini-claims and wrote him enthusiastic letters. with captain nye, the governor's brother, he visited them and was presented with an interest which permitted him to contribute an assessment every now and then toward the development of the mine; but his enthusiasm still languished. he was interested more in the native riches above ground than in those concealed under it. he had heard that the timber around lake bigler (tahoe) promised vast wealth which could be had for the asking. the lake itself and the adjacent mountains were said to be beautiful beyond the dream of art. he decided to locate a timber claim on its shores. he made the trip afoot with a young ohio lad, john kinney, and the account of this trip as set down in 'roughing it' is one of the best things in the book. the lake proved all they had expected--more than they expected; it was a veritable habitation of the gods, with its delicious, winy atmosphere, its vast colonnades of pines, its measureless depths of water, so clear that to drift on it was like floating high aloft in mid-nothingness. they staked out a timber claim and made a semblance of fencing it and of building a habitation, to comply with the law; but their chief employment was a complete abandonment to the quiet luxury of that dim solitude: wandering among the trees, lounging along the shore, or drifting on that transparent, insubstantial sea. they did not sleep in their house, he says: "it never occurred to us, for one thing; and, besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough. we did not wish to strain it." they lived by their camp-fire on the borders of the lake, and one day--it was just at nightfall--it got away from them, fired the forest, and destroyed their fence and habitation. his picture in 'roughing it' of the superb night spectacle, the mighty mountain conflagration reflected in the waters of the lake, is splendidly vivid. the reader may wish to compare it with this extract from a letter written to pamela at the time. the level ranks of flame were relieved at intervals by the standard- bearers, as we called the tall, dead trees, wrapped in fire, and waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air. then we could turn from the scene to the lake, and see every branch and leaf and cataract of flame upon its banks perfectly reflected, as in a gleaming, fiery mirror. the mighty roaring of the conflagration, together with our solitary and somewhat unsafe position (for there was no one within six miles of us), rendered the scene very impressive. occasionally one of us would remove his pipe from his mouth and say, "superb, magnificent!--beautifull--but--by the lord god almighty, if we attempt to sleep in this little patch to-night, we'll never live till morning!" this is good writing too, but it lacks the fancy and the choice of phrasing which would develop later. the fire ended their first excursion to tahoe, but they made others and located other claims--claims in which the "folks at home," mr. moffett, james lampton, and others, were included. it was the same james lampton who would one day serve as a model for colonel sellers. evidently samuel clemens had a good opinion of his business capacity in that earlier day, for he writes: this is just the country for cousin jim to live in. i don't believe it would take him six months to make $ , here if he had $ , to commence with. i suppose he can't leave his family, though. further along in the same letter his own overflowing seller's optimism develops. orion and i have confidence enough in this country to think that if the war lets us alone we can make mr. moffett rich without its ever costing him a cent or a particle of trouble. this letter bears date of october th, and from it we gather that a certain interest in mining claims had by this time developed. we have got about , feet of mining ground, and, if it proves good, mr. moffett's name will go in, and if not i can get "feet" for him in the spring. you see, pamela, the trouble does not consist in getting mining ground--for there is plenty enough--but the money to work it with after you get it. he refers to pamela's two little children, his niece annie and baby sam, --[samuel e. moffett, in later life a well-known journalist and editor.] --and promises to enter claims for them--timber claims probably--for he was by no means sanguine as yet concerning the mines. that was a long time ago. tahoe land is sold by the lot, now, to summer residents. those claims would have been riches to-day, but they were all abandoned presently, forgotten in the delirium which goes only with the pursuit of precious ores. xxxiii the prospector it was not until early winter that samuel clemens got the real mining infection. everybody had it by that time; the miracle is that he had not fallen an earlier victim. the wildest stories of sudden fortune were in the air, some of them undoubtedly true. men had gone to bed paupers, on the verge of starvation, and awakened to find themselves millionaires. others had sold for a song claims that had been suddenly found to be fairly stuffed with precious ores. cart-loads of bricks--silver and gold--daily drove through the streets. in the midst of these things reports came from the newly opened humboldt region--flamed up with a radiance that was fairly blinding. the papers declared that humboldt county "was the richest mineral region on god's footstool." the mountains were said to be literally bursting with gold and silver. a correspondent of the daily territorial enterprise fairly wallowed in rhetoric, yet found words inadequate to paint the measureless wealth of the humboldt mines. no wonder those not already mad speedily became so. no wonder samuel clemens, with his natural tendency to speculative optimism, yielded to the epidemic and became as "frenzied as the craziest." the air to him suddenly began to shimmer; all his thoughts were of "leads" and "ledges" and "veins"; all his clouds had silver linings; all his dreams were of gold. he joined an expedition at once; he reproached himself bitterly for not having started earlier. hurry was the word! we wasted no time. our party consisted of four persons--a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and myself. we bought a wagon and two miserable old horses. we put , pounds of provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove out of carson on a chilly december afternoon. in a letter to his mother he states that besides provisions and mining tools, their load consisted of certain luxuries viz., ten pounds of killikinick, watts's hymns, fourteen decks of cards, dombey and son, a cribbage-board, one small keg of lager-beer, and the "carmina sacra." the two young lawyers were a. w.(gus) oliver (oliphant in 'roughing it'), and w. h. clagget. sam clemens had known billy clagget as a law student in keokuk, and they were brought together now by this association. both clagget and oliver were promising young men, and would be heard from in time. the blacksmith's name was tillou (ballou), a sturdy, honest soul with a useful knowledge of mining and the repair of tools. there were also two dogs in the party--a small curly-tailed mongrel, curney, the property of mr. tillou, and a young hound. the combination seemed a strong one. it proved a weak one in the matter of horses. oliver and clemens had furnished the team, and their selection had not been of the best. it was two hundred miles to humboldt, mostly across sand. the horses could not drag their load and the miners too, so the miners got out. then they found it necessary to push. not because we were fond of it, ma--oh, no! but on bunker's account. bunker was the "near" horse on the larboard side, named after the attorney-general of this territory. my horse--and i am sorry you do not know him personally, ma, for i feel toward him, sometimes, as if he were a blood relation of our family--he is so lazy, you know--my horse--i was going to say, was the "off" horse on the starboard side. but it was on bunker's account, principally, that we pushed behind the wagon. in fact, ma, that horse had something on his mind all the way to humboldt.--[s. l. c. to his mother. published in the keokuk (iowa) gate city.]-- so they had to push, and most of that two hundred miles through snow and sand storm they continued to push and swear and groan, sustained only by the thought that they must arrive at last, when their troubles would all be at an end, for they would be millionaires in a brief time and never know want or fatigue any more. there were compensations: the camp-fire at night was cheerful, the food satisfying. they bundled close under the blankets and, when it was too cold to sleep, looked up at the stars, while the future entertainer of kings would spin yarn after yarn that made his hearers forget their discomforts. judge oliver, the last one of the party alive, in a recent letter to the writer of this history, says: he was the life of the camp; but sometimes there would come a reaction and he could hardly speak for a day or two. one day a pack of wolves chased us, and the hound sam speaks of never stopped to look back till he reached the next station, many miles ahead. judge oliver adds that an indian war had just ended, and that they occasionally passed the charred ruin of a shack, and new graves: this was disturbing enough. then they came to that desolation of desolations, the alkali desert, where the sand is of unknown depth, where the road is strewn thickly with the carcasses of dead beasts of burden, the charred remains of wagons, chains, bolts, and screws, which thirsty emigrants, grown desperate, have thrown away in the grand hope of being able, when less encumbered, to reach water. they traveled all day and night, pushing through that fierce, waterless waste to reach camp on the other side. it was three o'clock in the morning when they got across and dropped down utterly exhausted. judge oliver in his letter tells what happened then: the sun was high in the heavens when we were aroused from our sleep by a yelling band of piute warriors. we were upon our feet in an instant. the pictures of burning cabins and the lonely graves we had passed were in our minds. our scalps were still our own, and not dangling from the belts of our visitors. sam pulled himself together, put his hand on his head as if to make sure he had not been scalped, and then with his inimitable drawl said: "boys, they have left us our scalps. let's give them all the flour and sugar they ask for." and we did give them a good supply, for we were grateful. they were eleven weary days pushing their wagon and team the two hundred miles to unionville, humboldt county, arriving at last in a driving snow-storm. unionville consisted of eleven poor cabins built in the bottom of a canon, five on one side and six facing them on the other. they were poor, three-sided, one-room huts, the fourth side formed by the hill; the roof, a spread of white cotton. stones used to roll down on them sometimes, and mark twain tells of live stock--specifically of a mule and cow--that interrupted the patient, long-suffering oliver, who was trying to write poetry, and only complained when at last "an entire cow came rolling down the hill, crashed through on the table, and made a shapeless wreck of everything."--['the innocents abroad.'] judge oliver still does not complain; but he denies the cow. he says there were no cows in humboldt in those days, so perhaps it was only a literary cow, though in any case it will long survive. judge oliver's name will go down with it to posterity. in the letter which samuel clemens wrote home he tells of what they found in unionville. "national" there was selling at $ per foot and assayed $ , per ton at the mint in san francisco. and the "alda nueva," "peru," "delirio," "congress," "independent," and others were immensely rich leads. and moreover, having winning ways with us, we could get "feet" enough to make us all rich one of these days. "i confess with shame," says the author of 'roughing it', "that i expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground." and he adds that he slipped away from the cabin to find a claim on his own account, and tells how he came staggering back under a load of golden specimens; also how his specimens proved to be only worthless mica; and how he learned that in mining nothing that glitters is gold. his account in 'roughing it' of the humboldt mining experience is sufficiently good history to make detail here unnecessary. tillou instructed them in prospecting, and in time they located a fairly promising claim. they went to work on it with pick and shovel, then with drill and blasting-powder. then they gave it up. "one week of this satisfied me. i resigned." they tried to tunnel, but soon resigned again. it was pleasanter to prospect and locate and trade claims and acquire feet in every new ledge than it was to dig-and about as profitable. the golden reports of humboldt had been based on assays of selected rich specimens, and were mainly delirium and insanity. the clemens-clagget-oliver-tillou combination never touched their claims again with pick and shovel, though their faith, or at least their hope, in them did not immediately die. billy clagget put out his shingle as notary public, and gus oliver put out his as probate judge. sam clemens and tillou, with a fat-witted, arrogant prussian named pfersdoff (ollendorf) set out for carson city. it is not certain what became of the wagon and team, or of the two dogs. the carson travelers were water-bound at a tavern on the carson river (the scene of the "arkansas" sketch), with a fighting, drinking lot. pfersdoff got them nearly drowned getting away, and finally succeeded in getting them absolutely lost in the snow. the author of 'roughing it' tells us how they gave themselves up to die, and how each swore off whatever he had in the way of an evil habit, how they cast their tempters-tobacco, cards, and whisky-into the snow. he further tells us how next morning, when they woke to find themselves alive, within a few rods of a hostelry, they surreptitiously dug up those things again and, deep in shame and luxury, resumed their fallen ways: it was the th of january when they reached carson city. they had been gone not quite two months, one of which had been spent in travel. it was a brief period, but it contained an episode, and it seemed like years. xxxiv territorial characteristics meantime, the territorial secretary had found difficulties in launching the ship of state. there was no legislative hall in carson city; and if abram curry, one of the original owners of the celebrated gould and curry mine--"curry--old curry--old abe curry," as he called himself--had not tendered the use of a hall rent free, the first legislature would have been obliged to "sit in the desert." furthermore, orion had met with certain acute troubles of his own. the government at washington had not appreciated his economies in the matter of cheap office rental, and it had stipulated the price which he was to pay for public printing and various other services-prices fixed according to eastern standards. these prices did not obtain in nevada, and when orion, confident that because of his other economies the comptroller would stretch a point and allow the increased frontier tariff, he was met with the usual thick-headed official lack of imagination, with the result that the excess paid was deducted from his slender salary. with a man of less conscience this condition would easily have been offset by another wherein other rates, less arbitrary, would have been adjusted to negotiate the official deficit. with orion clemens such a remedy was not even considered; yielding, unstable, blown by every wind of influence though he was, orion's integrity was a rock. governor nye was among those who presently made this discovery. old politician that he was--former police commissioner of new york city--nye took care of his own problems in the customary manner. to him, politics was simply a game--to be played to win. he was a popular, jovial man, well liked and thought of, but he did not lie awake, as orion did, planning economies for the government, or how to make up excess charges out of his salary. to him nevada was simply a doorway to the united states senate, and in the mean time his brigade required official recognition and perquisites. the governor found orion clemens an impediment to this policy. orion could not be brought to a proper political understanding of "special bills and accounts," and relations between the secretary of state and the governor were becoming strained. it was about this time that the man who had been potentate of the pilot-house of a mississippi river steamer returned from humboldt. he was fond of the governor, but he had still higher regard for the family integrity. when he had heard orion's troubled story, he called on governor nye and delivered himself in his own fashion. in his former employments he had acquired a vocabulary and moral backbone sufficient to his needs. we may regret that no stenographic report was made of the interview. it would be priceless now. but it is lost; we only know that orion's rectitude was not again assailed, and that curiously enough governor nye apparently conceived a strong admiration and respect for his brother. samuel clemens, miner, remained but a brief time in carson city--only long enough to arrange for a new and more persistent venture. he did not confess his humboldt failure to his people; in fact, he had not as yet confessed it to himself; his avowed purpose was to return to humboldt after a brief investigation of the esmeralda mines. he had been paying heavy assessments on his holdings there; and, with a knowledge of mining gained at unionville, he felt that his personal attention at aurora might be important. as a matter of fact, he was by this time fairly daft on the subject of mines and mining, with the rest of the community for company. his earlier praises of the wonders and climate of tahoe had inspired his sister pamela, always frail, with a desire to visit that health-giving land. perhaps he felt that he recommended the country somewhat too highly. "by george, pamela," he said, "i begin to fear that i have invoked a spirit of some kind or other, which i will find more than difficult to allay." he proceeds to recommend california as a residence for any or all of them, but he is clearly doubtful concerning nevada. some people are malicious enough to think that if the devil were set at liberty and told to confine himself to nevada territory, he would come here and look sadly around awhile, and then get homesick and go back to hell again .... why, i have had my whiskers and mustaches so full of alkali dust that you'd have thought i worked in a starch factory and boarded in a flour barrel. but then he can no longer restrain his youth and optimism. how could he, with a fortune so plainly in view? it was already in his grasp in imagination; he was on the way home with it. i expect to return to st. louis in july--per steamer. i don't say that i will return then, or that i shall be able to do it--but i expect to--you bet. i came down here from humboldt, in order to look after our esmeralda interests. yesterday, bob howland arrived here, and i have had a talk with him. he owns with me in the "horatio and derby" ledge. he says our tunnel is in feet, and a small stream of water has been struck, which bids fair to become a "big thing" by the time the ledge is reached--sufficient to supply a mill. now, if you knew anything of the value of water here, you would perceive at a glance that if the water should amount to or inches, we wouldn't care whether school kept or not. if the ledge should prove to be worthless, we'd sell the water for money enough to give us quite a lift. but, you see, the ledge will not prove to be worthless. we have located, near by, a fine site for a mill, and when we strike the ledge, you know, we'll have a mill- site, water-power, and payrock, all handy. then we sha'n't care whether we have capital or not. mill folks will build us a mill, and wait for their pay. if nothing goes wrong, we'll strike the ledge in june--and if we do, i'll be home in july, you know. he pauses at this point for a paragraph of self-analysis--characteristic and crystal-clear. so, just keep your clothes on, pamela, until i come. don't you know that undemonstrated human calculations won't do to bet on? don't you know that i have only talked, as yet, but proved nothing? don't you know that i have expended money in this country but have made none myself? don't you know that i have never held in my hands a gold or silver bar that belonged to me? don't you know that it's all talk and no cider so far? don't you know that people who always feel jolly, no matter where they are or what happens to them--who have the organ of hope preposterously developed--who are endowed with an unconcealable sanguine temperament--who never feel concerned about the price of corn--and who cannot, by any possibility, discover any but the bright side of a picture--are very apt to go to extremes and exaggerate with -horse microscopic power? but-but in the bright lexicon of youth, there is no such word as fail-- and i'll prove it! whereupon, he lets himself go again, full-tilt: by george, if i just had a thousand dollars i'd be all right! now there's the "horatio," for instance. there are five or six shareholders in it, and i know i could buy half of their interests at, say $ per foot, now that flour is worth $ per barrel and they are pressed for money, but i am hard up myself, and can't buy --and in june they'll strike the ledge, and then "good-by canary." i can't get it for love or money. twenty dollars a foot! think of it! for ground that is proven to be rich. twenty dollars, madam- and we wouldn't part with a foot of our for five times the sum. so it will be in humboldt next summer. the boys will get pushed and sell ground for a song that is worth a fortune. but i am at the helm now. i have convinced orion that he hasn't business talent enough to carry on a peanut-stand, and he has solemnly promised me that he will meddle no more with mining or other matters not connected with the secretary's office. so, you see, if mines are to be bought or sold, or tunnels run or shafts sunk, parties have to come to me--and me only. i'm the "firm," you know. there are pages of this, all glowing with golden expectations and plans. ah, well! we have all written such letters home at one time and another-of gold-mines of one form or another. he closes at last with a bit of pleasantry for his mother. ma says: "it looks like a man can't hold public office and be honest." why, certainly not, madam. a man can't hold public office and be honest. lord bless you, it is a common practice with orion to go about town stealing little things that happen to be lying around loose. and i don't remember having heard him speak the truth since we have been in nevada. he even tries to prevail upon me to do these things, ma, but i wasn't brought up in that way, you know. you showed the public what you could do in that line when you raised me, madam. but then you ought to have raised me first, so that orion could have had the benefit of my example. do you know that he stole all the stamps out of an -stamp quartz-mill one night, and brought them home under his overcoat and hid them in the back room? xxxv the miner he had about exhausted his own funds by this time, and it was necessary that orion should become the financier. the brothers owned their esmeralda claims in partnership, and it was agreed that orion, out of his modest depleted pay, should furnish the means, while the other would go actively into the field and develop their riches. neither had the slightest doubt but that they would be millionaires presently, and both were willing to struggle and starve for the few intervening weeks. it was february when the printer-pilot-miner arrived in aurora, that rough, turbulent camp of the esmeralda district lying about one hundred miles south of carson city, on the edge of california, in the sierra slopes. everything was frozen and covered with snow; but there was no lack of excitement and prospecting and grabbing for "feet" in this ledge and that, buried deep under the ice and drift. the new arrival camped with horatio phillips (raish), in a tiny cabin with a domestic roof (the ruin of it still stands), and they cooked and bunked together and combined their resources in a common fund. bob howland joined them presently, and later an experienced miner, calvin h. higbie (cal), one day to be immortalized in the story of 'roughing it' and in the dedication of that book. around the cabin stove they would gather, and paw over their specimens, or test them with blow-pipe and "horn" spoon, after which they would plan tunnels and figure estimates of prospective wealth. never mind if the food was poor and scanty, and the chill wind came in everywhere, and the roof leaked like a filter; they were living in a land where all the mountains were banked with nuggets, where all the rivers ran gold. bob howland declared later that they used to go out at night and gather up empty champagne-bottles and fruit-tins and pile them in the rear of their cabin to convey to others the appearance of affluence and high living. when they lacked for other employment and were likely to be discouraged, the ex-pilot would "ride the bunk" and smoke and, without money and without price, distribute riches more valuable than any they would ever dig out of those esmeralda hills. at other times he talked little or not at all, but sat in one corner and wrote, wholly oblivious of his surroundings. they thought he was writing letters, though letters were not many and only to orion during this period. it was the old literary impulse stirring again, the desire to set things down for their own sake, the natural hunger for print. one or two of his earlier letters home had found their way into a keokuk paper --the 'gate city'. copies containing them had gone back to orion, who had shown them to a representative of the territorial enterprise, a young man named barstow, who thought them amusing. the enterprise reprinted at least one of these letters, or portions of it, and with this encouragement the author of it sent an occasional contribution direct to that paper over the pen-name "josh." he did not care to sign his own name. he was a miner who was soon to be a magnate; he had no desire to be known as a camp scribbler. he received no pay for these offerings, and expected none. they were sketches of a broadly burlesque sort, the robust horse-play kind of humor that belongs to the frontier. they were not especially promising efforts. one of them was about an old rackabones of a horse, a sort of preliminary study for "oahu," of the sandwich islands, or "baalbec" and "jericho," of syria. if any one had told him, or had told any reader of this sketch, that the author of it was knocking at the door of the house of fame such a person's judgment or sincerity would have been open to doubt. nevertheless, it was true, though the knock was timid and halting and the summons to cross the threshold long delayed. a winter mining-camp is the most bleak and comfortless of places. the saloon and gambling-house furnished the only real warmth and cheer. our aurora miners would have been less than human, or more, if they had not found diversion now and then in the happy harbors of sin. once there was a great ball given at a newly opened pavilion, and sam clemens is said to have distinguished himself by his unrestrained and spontaneous enjoyment of the tripping harmony. cal higbie, who was present, writes: in changing partners, whenever he saw a hand raised he would grasp it with great pleasure and sail off into another set, oblivious to his surroundings. sometimes he would act as though there was no use in trying to go right or to dance like other people, and with his eyes closed he would do a hoe-down or a double-shuffle all alone, talking to himself and saying that he never dreamed there was so much pleasure to be obtained at a ball. it was all as natural as a child's play. by the second set, all the ladies were falling over themselves to get him for a partner, and most of the crowd, too full of mirth to dance, were standing or sitting around, dying with laughter. what a child he always was--always, to the very end? with the first break of winter the excitement that had been fermenting and stewing around camp stoves overflowed into the streets, washed up the gullies, and assailed the hills. there came then a period of madness, beside which the humboldt excitement had been mere intoxication. higbie says: it was amazing how wild the people became all over the pacific coast. in san francisco and other large cities barbers, hack- drivers, servant-girls, merchants, and nearly every class of people would club together and send agents representing all the way from $ , to $ , or more to buy mines. they would buy anything. in the shape of quartz, whether it contained any mineral value or not. the letters which went from the aurora miner to orion are humanly documentary. they are likely to be staccato in their movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and suppressed excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom humorous, except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are likely to be violent. even the handwriting has a terse look; the flourish of youth has gone out of it. altogether they reveal the tense anxiety of the gambling mania of which mining is the ultimate form. an extract from a letter of april is a fair exhibit: work not yet begun on the "horatio and derby"--haven't seen it yet. it is still in the snow. shall begin on it within or weeks --strike the ledge in july: guess it is good--worth from $ to $ a foot in california.... man named gebhart shot here yesterday while trying to defend a claim on last chance hill. expect he will die. these mills here are not worth a d--n--except clayton's--and it is not in full working trim yet. send me $ or $ --by mail-immediately. i go to work to-morrow with pick and shovel. something's got to come, by g--, before i let go here. by the end of april work had become active in the mines, though the snow in places was still deep and the ground stony with frost. on the th he writes: i have been at work all day blasting and digging, and d--ning one of our new claims--"dashaway"--which i don't think a great deal of, but which i am willing to try. we are down, now, or a feet. we are following down under the ledge, but not taking it out. if we get up a windlass to-morrow we shall take out the ledge, and see whether it is worth anything or not. it must have been hard work picking away at the flinty ledges in the cold; and the "dashaway" would seem to have proven a disappointment, for there is no promising mention of it again. instead, we hear of the "flyaway;" and "annipolitan" and the "live yankee" and of a dozen others, each of which holds out the beacon of hope for a little while and then passes from notice forever. in may it is the "monitor" that is sure to bring affluence, though realization is no longer regarded as immediate. to use a french expression, i have "got my d---d satisfy" at last. two years' time will make us capitalists, in spite of anything. therefore we need fret and fume and worry and doubt no more, but just lie still and put up with privation for six months. perhaps months will "let us out." then, if government refuses to pay the rent on your new office we can do it ourselves. we have got to wait six weeks, anyhow, for a dividend--maybe longer--but that it will come there is no shadow of a doubt. i have got the thing sifted down to a dead moral certainty. i own one-eighth of the new "monitor ledge, clemens company," and money can't buy a foot of it; because i know it to contain our fortune. the ledge is six feet wide, and one needs no glass to see gold and silver in it.... when you and i came out here we did not expect ' or ' to find us rich men--and if that proposition had been made we would have accepted it gladly. now, it is made. i am willing, now, that "neary's tunnel" or anybody else's tunnel shall succeed. some of them may beat us a few months, but we shall be on hand in the fullness of time, as sure as fate. i would hate to swap chances with any member of the tribe . . . . it is the same man who twenty-five years later would fasten his faith and capital to a type-setting machine and refuse to exchange stock in it, share for share, with the mergenthaler linotype. he adds: but i have struck my tent in esmeralda, and i care for no mines but those which i can superintend myself. i am a citizen here now, and i am satisfied, although ratio and i are "strapped" and we haven't three days' rations in the house.... i shall work the "monitor" and the other claims with my own hands. i prospected / of a pound of "monitor" yesterday, and raish reduced it with the blow-pipe, and got about or cents in gold and silver, besides the other half of it which we spilt on the floor and didn't get.... i tried to break a handsome chunk from a huge piece of my darling "monitor" which we brought from the croppings yesterday, but it all splintered up, and i send you the scraps. i call that "choice"--any d---d fool would. don't ask if it has been assayed, for it hasn't. it don't need it. it is simply able to speak for itself. it is six feet wide on top, and traversed through with veins whose color proclaims their worth. what the devil does a man want with any more feet when he owns in the invincible bomb-proof "monitor"? there is much more of this, and other such letters, most of them ending with demands for money. the living, the tools, the blasting-powder, and the help eat it up faster than orion's salary can grow. "send me $ or $ , all you can spare; put away $ subject to my call--we shall need it soon for the tunnel." the letters are full of such admonition, and orion, more insane, if anything, than his brother, is scraping his dollars and pennies together to keep the mines going. he is constantly warned to buy no claims on his own account and promises faithfully, but cannot resist now and then when luring baits are laid before him, though such ventures invariably result in violent and profane protests from aurora. "the pick and shovel are the only claims i have any confidence in now," the miner concludes, after one fierce outburst. "my back is sore, and my hands are blistered with handling them to-day." but even the pick and shovel did not inspire confidence a little later. he writes that the work goes slowly, very slowly, but that they still hope to strike it some day. "but--if we strike it rich--i've lost my guess, that's all." then he adds: "couldn't go on the hill to-day. it snowed. it always snows here, i expect"; and the final heart-sick line, "don't you suppose they have pretty much quit writing at home?" this is midsummer, and snow still interferes with the work. one feels the dreary uselessness of the quest. yet resolution did not wholly die, or even enthusiasm. these things were as recurrent as new prospects, which were plentiful enough. in a still subsequent letter he declares that he will never look upon his mother's face again, or his sister's, or get married, or revisit the "banner state," until he is a rich man, though there is less assurance than desperation in the words. in 'roughing it' the author tells us that, when flour had reached one dollar a pound and he could no longer get the dollar, he abandoned mining and went to milling "as a common laborer in a quartz-mill at ten dollars a week." this statement requires modification. it was not entirely for the money that he undertook the laborious task of washing "riffles" and "screening tailings." the money was welcome enough, no doubt, but the greater purpose was to learn refining, so that when his mines developed he could establish his own mill and personally superintend the work. it is like him to wish us to believe that he was obliged to give up being a mining magnate to become a laborer in a quartz-mill, for there is a grim humor in the confession. that he abandoned the milling experiment at the end of a week is a true statement. he got a violent cold in the damp place, and came near getting salivated, he says in a letter, "working in the quicksilver and chemicals. i hardly think i shall try the experiment again. it is a confining business, and i will not be confined for love or money." as recreation after this trying experience, higbie took him on a tour, prospecting for the traditional "cement mine," a lost claim where, in a deposit of cement rock, gold nuggets were said to be as thick as raisins in a fruitcake. they did not find the mine, but they visited mono lake --that ghastly, lifeless alkali sea among the hills, which in 'roughing it' he has so vividly pictured. it was good to get away from the stress of things; and they repeated the experiment. they made a walking trip to yosemite, carrying their packs, camping and fishing in that far, tremendous isolation, which in those days few human beings had ever visited at all. such trips furnished a delicious respite from the fevered struggle around tunnel and shaft. amid mountain-peaks and giant forests and by tumbling falls the quest for gold hardly seemed worth while. more than once that summer he went alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get away entirely from humankind. xxxvi last mining days it was late in july when he wrote: if i do not forget it, i will send you, per next mail, a pinch of decom. (decomposed rock) which i pinched with thumb and finger from wide west ledge a while ago. raish and i have secured out of a company with ft. in it, which perhaps (the ledge, i mean) is a spur from the w. w.--our shaft is about ft. from the w. w. shaft. in order to get in, we agreed to sink ft. we have sublet to another man for ft., and we pay for powder and sharpening tools. this was the "blind lead" claim of roughing it, but the episode as set down in that book is somewhat dramatized. it is quite true that he visited and nursed captain nye while higbie was off following the "cement" 'ignus fatuus' and that the "wide west" holdings were forfeited through neglect. but if the loss was regarded as a heavy one, the letters fail to show it. it is a matter of dispute to-day whether or not the claim was ever of any value. a well-known california author--[ella sterling cummins, author of the story of the files, etc]--declares: no one need to fear that he ran any chance of being a millionaire through the "wide west" mine, for the writer, as a child, played over that historic spot and saw only a shut-down mill and desolate hole in the ground to mark the spot where over-hopeful men had sunk thousands and thousands, that they never recovered. the "blind lead" episode, as related, is presumably a tale of what might have happened--a possibility rather than an actuality. it is vividly true in atmosphere, however, and forms a strong and natural climax for closing the mining episode, while the literary privilege warrants any liberties he may have taken for art's sake. in reality the close of his mining career was not sudden and spectacular; it was a lingering close, a reluctant and gradual surrender. the "josh" letters to the enterprise had awakened at least a measure of interest, and orion had not failed to identify their author when any promising occasion offered; as a result certain tentative overtures had been made for similar material. orion eagerly communicated such chances, for the money situation was becoming a desperate one. a letter from the aurora miner written near the end of july presents the situation very fully. an extract or two will be sufficient: my debts are greater than i thought for--i bought $ worth of clothing and sent $ to higbie, in the cement diggings. i owe about $ or $ , and have got about $ in my pocket. but how in the h--l i am going to live on something over $ until october or november is singular. the fact is, i must have something to do, and that shortly, too.... now write to the sacramento union folks, or to marsh, and tell them i'll write as many letters a week as they want for $ a week. my board must be paid. tell them i have corresponded with the n. orleans crescent and other papers--and the enterprise. if they want letters from here--who'll run from morning till night collecting material cheaper? i'll write a short letter twice a week, for the present for the 'age', for $ per week. now it has been a long time since i couldn't make my own living, and it shall be a long time before i loaf another year. nothing came of these possibilities, but about this time barstow, of the enterprise, conferred with joseph t. goodman, editor and owner of the paper, as to the advisability of adding the author of the "josh" letters to their local staff. joe goodman, who had as keen a literary perception as any man that ever pitched a journalistic tent on the pacific coast (and there could be no higher praise than that), looked over the letters and agreed with barstow that the man who wrote them had "something in him." two of the sketches in particular he thought promising. one of them was a burlesque report of an egotistical lecturer who was referred to as "professor personal pronoun." it closed by stating that it was "impossible to print his lecture in full, as the type-cases had run out of capital i's." but it was the other sketch which settled goodman's decision. it was also a burlesque report, this time of a fourth-of-july oration. it opened, "i was sired by the great american eagle and foaled by a continental dam." this was followed by a string of stock patriotic phrases absurdly arranged. but it was the opening itself that won goodman's heart. "that is the sort of thing we want," he said. "write to him, barstow, and ask him if he wants to come up here." barstow wrote, offering twenty-five dollars a week, a tempting sum. this was at the end of july, . in 'roughing it' we are led to believe that the author regarded this as a gift from heaven and accepted it straightaway. as a matter of fact, he fasted and prayed a good while over the "call." to orion he wrote barstow has offered me the post as local reporter for the enterprise at $ a week, and i have written him that i will let him know next mail, if possible. there was no desperate eagerness, you see, to break into literature, even under those urgent conditions. it meant the surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure. on august th he wrote again to orion. he had written to barstow, he said, asking when they thought he might be needed. he was playing for time to consider. now, i shall leave at midnight to-night, alone and on foot, for a walk of or miles through a totally uninhabited country, and it is barely possible that mail facilities may prove infernally "slow." but do you write barstow that i have left here for a week or so, and in case he should want me, he must write me here, or let me know through you. so he had gone into the wilderness to fight out his battle alone. but eight days later, when he had returned, there was still no decision. in a letter to pamela of this date he refers playfully to the discomforts of his cabin and mentions a hope that he will spend the winter in san francisco; but there is no reference in it to any newspaper prospects --nor to the mines, for that matter. phillips, howland, and higbie would seem to have given up by this time, and he was camping with dan twing and a dog, a combination amusingly described. it is a pleasant enough letter, but the note of discouragement creeps in: i did think for a while of going home this fall--but when i found that that was, and had been, the cherished intention and the darling aspiration every year of these old care-worn californians for twelve weary years, i felt a little uncomfortable, so i stole a march on disappointment and said i would not go home this fall. this country suits me, and it shall suit me whether or no. he was dying hard, desperately hard; how could he know, to paraphrase the old form of christian comfort, that his end as a miner would mean, in another sphere, "a brighter resurrection" than even his rainbow imagination could paint? xxxvii the new estate it was the afternoon of a hot, dusty august day when a worn, travel-stained pilgrim drifted laggingly into the office of the virginia city enterprise, then in its new building on c street, and, loosening a heavy roll of blankets from his shoulders, dropped wearily into a chair. he wore a rusty slouch hat, no coat, a faded blue flannel shirt, a navy revolver; his trousers were hanging on his boot tops. a tangle of reddish-brown hair fell on his shoulders, and a mass of tawny beard, dingy with alkali dust, dropped half-way to his waist. aurora lay one hundred and thirty miles from virginia. he had walked that distance, carrying his heavy load. editor goodman was absent at the moment, but the other proprietor, denis e. mccarthy, signified that the caller might state his errand. the wanderer regarded him with a far-away look and said, absently and with deliberation: "my starboard leg seems to be unshipped. i'd like about one hundred yards of line; i think i am falling to pieces." then he added: "i want to see mr. barstow, or mr. goodman. my name is clemens, and i've come to write for the paper." it was the master of the world's widest estate come to claim his kingdom: william wright, who had won a wide celebrity on the coast as dan de quille, was in the editorial chair and took charge of the new arrival. he was going on a trip to the states soon; it was mainly on this account that the new man had been engaged. the "josh" letters were very good, in dan's opinion; he gave their author a cordial welcome, and took him around to his boarding-place. it was the beginning of an association that continued during samuel clemens's stay in virginia city and of a friendship that lasted many years. the territorial enterprise was one of the most remarkable frontier papers ever published. its editor-in-chief, joseph goodman, was a man with rare appreciation, wide human understanding, and a comprehensive newspaper policy. being a young man, he had no policy, in fact, beyond the general purpose that his paper should be a forum for absolutely free speech, provided any serious statement it contained was based upon knowledge. his instructions to the new reporter were about as follows: "never say we learn so and so, or it is rumored, or we understand so and so; but go to headquarters and get the absolute facts; then speak out and say it is so and so. in the one case you are likely to be shot, and in the other you are pretty certain to be; but you will preserve the public confidence." goodman was not new to the west. he had come to california as a boy and had been a miner, explorer, printer, and contributor by turns. early in ' , when the comstock lode--[named for its discoverer, henry t. p. comstock, a half-crazy miner, who realized very little from his stupendous find.]--was new and virginia in the first flush of its monster boom, he and denis mccarthy had scraped together a few dollars and bought the paper. it had been a hand-to-hand struggle for a while, but in a brief two years, from a starving sheet in a shanty the enterprise, with new building, new presses, and a corps of swift compositors brought up from san francisco, had become altogether metropolitan, as well as the most widely considered paper on the coast. it had been borne upward by the comstock tide, though its fearless, picturesque utterance would have given it distinction anywhere. goodman himself was a fine, forceful writer, and dan de quille and r. m. daggett (afterward united states minister to hawaii) were representative of enterprise men.--[the comstock of that day became famous for its journalism. associated with the virginia papers then or soon afterward were such men as tom fitch (the silver-tongued orator), alf doten, w. j. forbes, c. c. goodwin, h. r. mighels, clement t. rice, arthur mcewen, and sam davis--a great array indeed for a new territory.]--samuel clemens fitted precisely into this group. he added the fresh, rugged vigor of thought and expression that was the very essence of the comstock, which was like every other frontier mining-camp, only on a more lavish, more overwhelming scale. there was no uncertainty about the comstock; the silver and gold were there. flanking the foot of mount davidson, the towns of gold hill and virginia and the long street between were fairly underburrowed and underpinned by the gigantic mining construction of that opulent lode whose treasures were actually glutting the mineral markets of the world. the streets overhead seethed and swarmed with miners, mine owners, and adventurers--riotous, rollicking children of fortune, always ready to drink and make merry, as eager in their pursuit of pleasure as of gold. comstockers would always laugh at a joke; the rougher the better. the town of virginia itself was just a huge joke to most of them. everybody had, money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a good time. the enterprise, "comstock to the backbone," did what it could to help things along. it was a sort of free ring, with every one for himself. goodman let the boys write and print in accordance with their own ideas and upon any subject. often they wrote of each other--squibs and burlesques, which gratified the comstock far more than mere news.--[the indifference to 'news' was noble--none the less so because it was so blissfully unconscious. editors mark or dan would dismiss a murder with a couple of inches and sit down and fill up a column with a fancy sketch: "arthur mcewen"]--it was the proper class-room for mark twain, an encouraging audience and free utterance: fortune could have devised nothing better for him than that. he was peculiarly fitted for the position. unspoiled humanity appealed to him, and the comstock presented human nature in its earliest landscape forms. furthermore, the comstock was essentially optimistic--so was he; any hole in the ground to him held a possible, even a probable, fortune. his pilot memory became a valuable asset in news-gathering. remembering marks, banks, sounding, and other river detail belonged apparently in the same category of attainments as remembering items and localities of news. he could travel all day without a note-book and at night reproduce the day's budget or at least the picturesqueness of it, without error. he was presently accounted a good reporter, except where statistics --measurements and figures--were concerned. these he gave "a lick and a promise," according to de quille, who wrote afterward of their associations. de quille says further: mark and i agreed well in our work, which we divided when there was a rush of events; but we often cruised in company, he taking the items of news he could handle best, and i such as i felt competent to work up. however, we wrote at the same table and frequently helped each other with such suggestions as occurred to us during the brief consultations we held in regard to the handling of any matters of importance. never was there an angry word between us in all the time we worked together. de quille tells how clemens clipped items with a knife when there were no scissors handy, and slashed through on the top of his desk, which in time took on the semblance "of a huge polar star, spiritedly dashing forth a thousand rays." the author of 'roughing it' has given us a better picture of the virginia city of those days and his work there than any one else will ever write. he has made us feel the general spirit of affluence that prevailed; how the problem was not to get money, but to spend it; how "feet" in any one of a hundred mines could be had for the asking; how such shares were offered like apples or cigars or bonbons, as a natural matter of courtesy when one happened to have his supply in view; how any one connected with a newspaper would have stocks thrust upon him, and how in a brief time he had acquired a trunk ful of such riches and usually had something to sell when any of the claims made a stir on the market. he has told us of the desperadoes and their trifling regard for human life, and preserved other elemental characters of these prodigal days. the funeral of buck fanshaw that amazing masterpiece--is a complete epitome of the social frontier. it would not be the part of wisdom to attempt another inclusive presentation of comstock conditions. we may only hope to add a few details of history, justified now by time and circumstances, to supplement the picture with certain data of personality preserved from the drift of years. xxxviii one of the "staff" the new reporter found acquaintance easy. the office force was like one family among which there was no line of caste. proprietors, editors, and printers were social equals; there was little ceremony among them--none at all outside of the office.--["the paper went to press at two in the morning, then all the staff and all the compositors gathered themselves together in the composing-room and drank beer and sang the popular war-songs of the day until dawn."--s. l. c., in .]--samuel clemens immediately became "sam," or "josh," to his associates, just as de quille was "dan" and goodman "joe." he found that he disliked the name of josh, and, as he did not sign it again, it was presently dropped. the office, and virginia city generally, quickly grew fond of him, delighting in his originality and measured speech. enterprise readers began to identify his work, then unsigned, and to enjoy its fresh phrasing, even when it was only the usual local item or mining notice. true to its name and reputation, the paper had added a new attraction. it was only a brief time after his arrival in virginia city that clemens began the series of hoaxes which would carry his reputation, not always in an enviable fashion, across the sierras and down the pacific coast. with one exception these are lost to-day, for so far as known there is not a single file of the enterprise in existence. only a few stray copies and clippings are preserved, but we know the story of some of these literary pranks and of their results. they were usually intended as a special punishment of some particular individual or paper or locality; but victims were gathered by the wholesale in their seductive web. mark twain himself, in his book of sketches, has set down something concerning the first of these, "the petrified man," and of another, "my bloody massacre," but in neither case has he told it all. "the petrified man" hoax was directed at an official named sewall, a coroner and justice of the peace at humboldt, who had been pompously indifferent in the matter of supplying news. the story, told with great circumstance and apparent care as to detail, related the finding of a petrified prehistoric man, partially imbedded in a rock, in a cave in the desert more than one hundred miles from humboldt, and how sewall had made the perilous five-day journey in the alkali waste to hold an inquest over a man that had been dead three hundred years; also how, "with that delicacy so characteristic of him," sewall had forbidden the miners from blasting him from his position. the account further stated that the hands of the deceased were arranged in a peculiar fashion; and the description of the arrangement was so skilfully woven in with other matters that at first, or even second, reading one might not see that the position indicated was the ancient one which begins with the thumb at the nose and in many ages has been used impolitely to express ridicule and the word "sold." but the description was a shade too ingenious. the author expected that the exchanges would see the jolt and perhaps assist in the fun he would have with sewall. he did not contemplate a joke on the papers themselves. as a matter of fact, no one saw the "sell" and most of the papers printed his story of the petrified man as a genuine discovery. this was a surprise, and a momentary disappointment; then he realized that he had builded better than he knew. he gathered up a bundle of the exchanges and sent them to sewall; also he sent marked copies to scientific men in various parts of the united states. the papers had taken it seriously; perhaps the scientists would. some of them did, and sewall's days became unhappy because of letters received asking further information. as literature, the effort did not rank high, and as a trick on an obscure official it was hardly worth while; but, as a joke on the coast exchanges and press generally, it was greatly regarded and its author, though as yet unnamed, acquired prestige. inquiries began to be made as to who was the smart chap in virginia that did these things. the papers became wary and read enterprise items twice before clipping them. clemens turned his attention to other matters to lull suspicion. the great "dutch nick massacre" did not follow until a year later. reference has already been made to the comstock's delight in humor of a positive sort. the practical joke was legal tender in virginia. one might protest and swear, but he must take it. an example of comstock humor, regarded as the finest assay, is an incident still told of leslie blackburn and pat holland, two gay men about town. they were coming down c street one morning when they saw some fine watermelons on a fruit-stand at the international hotel corner. watermelons were rare and costly in that day and locality, and these were worth three dollars apiece. blackburn said: "pat, let's get one of those watermelons. you engage that fellow in conversation while i stand at the corner, where i can step around out of sight easily. when you have got him interested, point to something on the back shelf and pitch me a melon." this appealed to holland, and he carried out his part of the plan perfectly; but when he pitched the watermelon blackburn simply put his hands in his pockets, and stepped around the corner, leaving the melon a fearful disaster on the pavement. it was almost impossible for pat to explain to the fruit-man why he pitched away a three-dollar melon like that even after paying for it, and it was still more trying, also more expensive, to explain to the boys facing the various bars along c street. sam clemens, himself a practical joker in his youth, found a healthy delight in this knock-down humor of the comstock. it appealed to his vigorous, elemental nature. he seldom indulged physically in such things; but his printed squibs and hoaxes and his keen love of the ridiculous placed him in the joker class, while his prompt temper, droll manner, and rare gift of invective made him an enticing victim. among the enterprise compositors was one by the name of stephen e. gillis (steve, of course--one of the "fighting gillises"), a small, fearless young fellow, handsome, quick of wit, with eyes like needle-points. "steve weighed only ninety-five pounds," mark twain once wrote of him, "but it was well known throughout the territory that with his fists he could whip anybody that walked on two legs, let his weight and science be what they might." clemens was fond of steve gillis from the first. the two became closely associated in time, and were always bosom friends; but steve was a merciless joker, and never as long as they were together could he "resist the temptation of making sam swear," claiming that his profanity was grander than any music. a word hereabout mark twain's profanity. born with a matchless gift of phrase, the printing-office, the river, and the mines had developed it in a rare perfection. to hear him denounce a thing was to give one the fierce, searching delight of galvanic waves. every characterization seemed the most perfect fit possible until he applied the next. and somehow his profanity was seldom an offense. it was not mere idle swearing; it seemed always genuine and serious. his selection of epithet was always dignified and stately, from whatever source--and it might be from the bible or the gutter. some one has defined dirt as misplaced matter. it is perhaps the greatest definition ever uttered. it is absolutely universal in its application, and it recurs now, remembering mark twain's profanity. for it was rarely misplaced; hence it did not often offend. it seemed, in fact, the safety-valve of his high-pressure intellectual engine. when he had blown off he was always calm, gentle; forgiving, and even tender. once following an outburst he said, placidly: "in certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer." it seems proper to add that it is not the purpose of this work to magnify or modify or excuse that extreme example of humankind which forms its chief subject; but to set him down as he was inadequately, of course, but with good conscience and clear intent. led by steve gillis, the enterprise force used to devise tricks to set him going. one of these was to hide articles from his desk. he detested the work necessary to the care of a lamp, and wrote by the light of a candle. to hide "sam's candle" was a sure way to get prompt and vigorous return. he would look for it a little; then he would begin a slow, circular walk--a habit acquired in the limitations of the pilot-house --and his denunciation of the thieves was like a great orchestration of wrong. by and by the office boy, supposedly innocent, would find another for him, and all would be forgotten. he made a placard, labeled with fearful threats and anathemas, warning any one against touching his candle; but one night both the placard and the candle were gone. now, amoung his virginia acquaintances was a young minister, a mr. rising, "the fragile, gentle new fledgling" of the buck fanshaw episode. clemens greatly admired mr. rising's evident sincerity, and the young minister had quickly recognized the new reporter's superiority of mind. now and then he came to the office to call on him. unfortunately, he happened to step in just at that moment when, infuriated by the latest theft of his property, samuel clemens was engaged in his rotary denunciation of the criminals, oblivious of every other circumstance. mr. rising stood spellbound by this, to him, new phase of genius, and at last his friend became dimly aware of him. he did not halt in his scathing treadmill and continued in the slow monotone of speech: "i know, mr. rising, i know it's wicked to talk like this; i know it is wrong. i know i shall certainly go to hell for it. but if you had a candle, mr. rising, and those thieves should carry it off every night, i know that you would say, just as i say, mr. rising, g-d d--n their impenitent souls, may they roast in hell for a million years." the little clergyman caught his breath. "maybe i should, mr. clemens," he replied, "but i should try to say, 'forgive them, father, they know not what they do.'" "oh, well! if you put it on the ground that they are just fools, that alters the case, as i am one of that class myself. come in and we'll try to forgive them and forget about it." mark twain had a good many experiences with young ministers. he was always fond of them, and they often sought him out. once, long afterward, at a hotel, he wanted a boy to polish his shoes, and had rung a number of times without getting any response. presently, he thought he heard somebody approaching in the hall outside. he flung open the door, and a small, youngish-looking person, who seemed to have been hesitating at the door, made a movement as though to depart hastily. clemens grabbed him by the collar. "look here," he said, "i've been waiting and ringing here for half an hour. now i want you to take those shoes, and polish them, quick. do you hear?" the slim, youthful person trembled a good deal, and said: "i would, mr. clemens, i would indeed, sir, if i could. but i'm a minister of the gospel, and i'm not prepared for such work." xxxix philosophy and poetry there was a side to samuel clemens that in those days few of his associates saw. this was the poetic, the philosophic, the contemplative side. joseph goodman recognized this phase of his character, and, while he perhaps did not regard it as a future literary asset, he delighted in it, and in their hours of quiet association together encouraged its exhibition. it is rather curious that with all his literary penetration goodman did not dream of a future celebrity for clemens. he afterward said: "if i had been asked to prophesy which of the two men, dan de quille or sam, would become distinguished, i should have said de quille. dan was talented, industrious, and, for that time and place, brilliant. of course, i recognized the unusualness of sam's gifts, but he was eccentric and seemed to lack industry; it is not likely that i should have prophesied fame for him then." goodman, like macfarlane in cincinnati, half a dozen years before, though by a different method, discovered and developed the deeper vein. often the two, dining together in a french restaurant, discussed life, subtler philosophies, recalled various phases of human history, remembered and recited the poems that gave them especial enjoyment. "the burial of moses," with its noble phrasing and majestic imagery, appealed strongly to clemens, and he recited it with great power. the first stanza in particular always stirred him, and it stirred his hearer as well. with eyes half closed and chin lifted, a lighted cigar between his fingers, he would lose himself in the music of the stately lines. by nebo's lonely mountain, on this side jordan's wave, in a vale in the land of moab, there lies a lonely grave. and no man knows that sepulchre, and no man saw it e'er, for the angels of god, upturned the sod, and laid the dead man there. another stanza that he cared for almost as much was the one beginning: and had he not high honor --the hill-side for a pall, to lie in state while angels wait with stars for tapers tall, and the dark rock-pines, like tossing plumes, over his bier to wave, and god's own hand in that lonely land, to lay him in the grave? without doubt he was moved to emulate the simple grandeur of that poem, for he often repeated it in those days, and somewhat later we find it copied into his notebook in full. it would seem to have become to him a sort of literary touchstone; and in some measure it may be regarded as accountable for the fact that in the fullness of time "he made use of the purest english of any modern writer." these are goodman's words, though william dean howells has said them, also, in substance, and brander matthews, and many others who know about such things. goodman adds, "the simplicity and beauty of his style are almost without a parallel, except in the common version of the bible," which is also true. one is reminded of what macaulay said of milton: "there would seem at first sight to be no more in his words than in other words. but they are words of enchantment. no sooner are they pronounced than the past is present and the distance near. new forms of beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial-places of the memory give up their dead." one drifts ahead, remembering these things. the triumph of words, the mastery of phrases, lay all before him at the time of which we are writing now. he was twenty-seven. at that age rudyard kipling had reached his meridian. samuel clemens was still in the classroom. everything came as a lesson-phrase, form, aspect, and combination; nothing escaped unvalued. the poetic phase of things particularly impressed him. once at a dinner with goodman, when the lamp-light from the chandelier struck down through the claret on the tablecloth in a great red stain, he pointed to it dramatically "look, joe," he said, "the angry tint of wine." it was at one of these private sessions, late in ' , that clemens proposed to report the coming meeting of the carson legislature. he knew nothing of such work and had small knowledge of parliamentary proceedings. formerly it had been done by a man named gillespie, but gillespie was now clerk of the house. goodman hesitated; then, remembering that whether clemens got the reports right or not, he would at least make them readable, agreed to let him undertake the work. xl "mark twain" the early nevada legislature was an interesting assembly. all state legislatures are that, and this was a mining frontier. no attempt can be made to describe it. it was chiefly distinguished for a large ignorance of procedure, a wide latitude of speech, a noble appreciation of humor, and plenty of brains. how fortunate mask twain was in his schooling, to be kept away from institutional training, to be placed in one after another of those universities of life where the sole curriculum is the study of the native inclinations and activities of mankind! sometimes, in after-years, he used to regret the lack of systematic training. well for him--and for us--that he escaped that blight. for the study of human nature the nevada assembly was a veritable lecture-room. in it his understanding, his wit, his phrasing, his self-assuredness grew like jack's bean-stalk, which in time was ready to break through into a land above the sky. he made some curious blunders in his reports, in the beginning; but he was so frank in his ignorance and in his confession of it that the very unsophistication of his early letters became their chief charm. gillespie coached him on parliamentary matters, and in time the reports became technically as well as artistically good. clemens in return christened gillespie "young, jefferson's manual," a title which he bore, rather proudly indeed, for many years. another "entitlement" growing out of those early reports, and possibly less satisfactory to its owner, was the one accorded to clement t. rice, of the virginia city union. rice knew the legislative work perfectly and concluded to poke fun at the enterprise letters. but this was a mistake. clemens in his next letter declared that rice's reports might be parliamentary enough, but that they covered with glittering technicalities the most festering mass of misstatement, and even crime. he avowed that they were wholly untrustworthy; dubbed the author of them "the unreliable," and in future letters never referred to him by any other term. carson and the comstock and the papers of the coast delighted in this burlesque journalistic warfare, and rice was "the unreliable" for life. rice and clemens, it should be said, though rivals, were the best of friends, and there was never any real animosity between them. clemens quickly became a favorite with the members; his sharp letters, with their amusing turn of phrase and their sincerity, won general friendship. jack simmons, speaker of the house, and billy clagget, the humboldt delegation, were his special cronies and kept him on the inside of the political machine. clagget had remained in unionville after the mining venture, warned his keokuk sweetheart, and settled down into politics and law. in due time he would become a leading light and go to congress. he was already a notable figure of forceful eloquence and tousled, unkempt hair. simmons, clagget, and clemens were easily the three conspicuous figures of the session. it must have been gratifying to the former prospector and miner to come back to carson city a person of consequence, where less than a year before he had been regarded as no more than an amusing indolent fellow, a figure to smile at, but unimportant. there is a photograph extant of clemens and his friends clagget and simmons in a group, and we gather from it that he now arrayed himself in a long broadcloth cloak, a starched shirt, and polished boots. once more he had become the glass of fashion that he had been on the river. he made his residence with orion, whose wife and little daughter jennie had by this time come out from the states. "sister mollie," as wife of the acting governor, was presently social leader of the little capital; her brilliant brother-in-law its chief ornament. his merriment and songs and good nature made him a favorite guest. his lines had fallen in pleasant places; he could afford to smile at the hard esmeralda days. he was not altogether satisfied. his letters, copied and quoted all along the coast, were unsigned. they were easily identified with one another, but not with a personality. he realized that to build a reputation it was necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name. he gave the matter a good deal of thought. he did not consider the use of his own name; the 'nom de plume' was the fashion of the time. he wanted something brief, crisp, definite, unforgettable. he tried over a good many combinations in his mind, but none seemed convincing. just then--this was early in --news came to him that the old pilot he had wounded by his satire, isaiah sellers, was dead. at once the pen-name of captain sellers recurred to him. that was it; that was the sort of name he wanted. it was not trivial; it had all the qualities--sellers would never need it again. clemens decided he would give it a new meaning and new association in this far-away land. he went up to virginia city. "joe," he said, to goodman, "i want to sign my articles. i want to be identified to a wider audience." "all right, sam. what name do you want to use 'josh'?" "no, i want to sign them 'mark twain.' it is an old river term, a leads-man's call, signifying two fathoms--twelve feet. it has a richness about it; it was always a pleasant sound for a pilot to hear on a dark night; it meant safe water." he did not then mention that captain isaiah sellers had used and dropped the name. he was ashamed of his part in that episode, and the offense was still too recent for confession. goodman considered a moment: "very well, sam," he said, "that sounds like a good name." it was indeed a good name. in all the nomenclature of the world no more forceful combination of words could have been selected to express the man for whom they stood. the name mark twain is as infinite, as fundamental as that of john smith, without the latter's wasting distribution of strength. if all the prestige in the name of john smith were combined in a single individual, its dynamic energy might give it the carrying power of mark twain. let this be as it may, it has proven the greatest 'nom de plume' ever chosen--a name exactly in accord with the man, his work, and his career. it is not surprising that goodman did not recognize this at the moment. we should not guess the force that lies in a twelve-inch shell if we had never seen one before or heard of its seismic destruction. we should have to wait and see it fired, and take account of the result. it was first signed to a carson letter bearing date of february , , and from that time was attached to all samuel clemens's work. the work was neither better nor worse than before, but it had suddenly acquired identification and special interest. members of the legislature and friends in virginia and carson immediately began to address him as "mark." the papers of the coast took it up, and within a period to be measured by weeks he was no longer "sam" or "clemens" or "that bright chap on the enterprise," but "mark"--"mark twain." no 'nom de plume' was ever so quickly and generally accepted as that. de quille, returning from the east after an absence of several months, found his room and deskmate with the distinction of a new name and fame. it is curious that in the letters to the home folks preserved from that period there is no mention of his new title and its success. in fact, the writer rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined to tell of the mining shares he has accumulated, their present and prospective values. however, many of the letters are undoubtedly missing. such as have been preserved are rather airy epistles full of his abounding joy of life and good nature. also they bear evidence of the renewal of his old river habit of sending money home--twenty dollars in each letter, with intervals of a week or so between. xli the cream of comstock humor with the adjournment of the legislature, samuel clemens returned to virginia city distinctly a notability--mark twain. he was regarded as leading man on the enterprise--which in itself was high distinction on the comstock--while his improved dress and increased prosperity commanded additional respect. when visitors of note came along--well-known actors, lecturers, politicians--he was introduced as one of the comstock features which it was proper to see, along with the ophir and gould and curry mines, and the new hundred-stamp quartz-mill. he was rather grieved and hurt, therefore, when, after several collections had been taken up in the enterprise office to present various members of the staff with meerschaum pipes, none had come to him. he mentioned this apparent slight to steve gillis: "nobody ever gives me a meerschaum pipe," he said, plaintively. "don't i deserve one yet?" unhappy day! to that remorseless creature, steve gillis, this was a golden opportunity for deviltry of a kind that delighted his soul. this is the story, precisely as gillis himself told it to the writer of these annals more than a generation later: "there was a german kept a cigar store in virginia city and always had a fine assortment of meerschaum pipes. these pipes usually cost anywhere from forty to seventy-five dollars. "one day denis mccarthy and i were walking by the old german's place, and stopped to look in at the display in the window. among other things there was one large imitation meerschaum with a high bowl and a long stem, marked a dollar and a half. "i decided that that would be just the pipe for sam. we went in and bought it, also a very much longer stem. i think the stem alone cost three dollars. then we had a little german-silver plate engraved with mark's name on it and by whom presented, and made preparations for the presentation. charlie pope--[afterward proprietor of pope's theater, st. louis]--was playing at the opera house at the time, and we engaged him to make the presentation speech. "then we let in dan de quille, mark's closest friend, to act the part of judas--to tell mark privately that he, was going to be presented with a fine pipe, so that he could have a speech prepared in reply to pope's. it was awful low-down in dan. we arranged to have the affair come off in the saloon beneath the opera house after the play was over. "everything went off handsomely; but it was a pretty remorseful occasion, and some of us had a hang-dog look; for sam took it in such sincerity, and had prepared one of the most beautiful speeches i ever heard him make. pope's presentation, too, was beautifully done. he told sam how his friends all loved him, and that this pipe, purchased at so great an expense, was but a small token of their affection. but sam's reply, which was supposed to be impromptu, actually brought the tears to the eyes of some of us, and he was interrupted every other minute with applause. i never felt so sorry for anybody. "still, we were bent on seeing the thing through. after sam's speech was finished, he ordered expensive wines--champagne and sparkling moselle. then we went out to do the town, and kept things going until morning to drown our sorrow. "well, next day, of course, he started in to color the pipe. it wouldn't color any more than a piece of chalk, which was about all it was. sam would smoke and smoke, and complain that it didn't seem to taste right, and that it wouldn't color. finally denis said to him one day: "'oh, sam, don't you know that's just a damned old egg-shell, and that the boys bought it for a dollar and a half and presented you with it for a joke?' "then sam was furious, and we laid the whole thing on dan de quille. he had a thunder-cloud on his face when he started up for the local room, where dan was. he went in and closed the door behind him, and locked it, and put the key in his pocket--an awful sign. dan was there alone, writing at his table. "sam said, 'dan, did you know, when you invited me to make that speech, that those fellows were going to give me a bogus pipe?' "there was no way for dan to escape, and he confessed. sam walked up and down the floor, as if trying to decide which way to slay dan. finally he said: "'oh, dan, to think that you, my dearest friend, who knew how little money i had, and how hard i would work to prepare a speech that would show my gratitude to my friends, should be the traitor, the judas, to betray me with a kiss! dan, i never want to look on your face again. you knew i would spend every dollar i had on those pirates when i couldn't afford to spend anything; and yet you let me do it; you aided and abetted their diabolical plan, and you even got me to get up that damned speech to make the thing still more ridiculous.' "of course dan felt terribly, and tried to defend himself by saying that they were really going to present him with a fine pipe--a genuine one, this time. but sam at first refused to be comforted; and when, a few days later, i went in with the pipe and said, 'sam, here's the pipe the boys meant to give you all the time,' and tried to apologize, he looked around a little coldly, and said: "'is that another of those bogus old pipes?' "he accepted it, though, and general peace was restored. one day, soon after, he said to me: "'steve, do you know that i think that that bogus pipe smokes about as well as the good one?'" many years later (this was in his home at hartford, and joe goodman was present) mark twain one day came upon the old imitation pipe. "joe," he said, "that was a cruel, cruel trick the boys played on me; but, for the feeling i had during the moment when they presented me with that pipe and when charlie pope was making his speech and i was making my reply to it--for the memory of that feeling, now, that pipe is more precious to me than any pipe in the world!" eighteen hundred and sixty-three was flood-tide on the comstock. every mine was working full blast. every mill was roaring and crunching, turning out streams of silver and gold. a little while ago an old resident wrote: when i close my eyes i hear again the respirations of hoisting- engines and the roar of stamps; i can see the "camels" after midnight packing in salt; i can see again the jam of teams on c street and hear the anathemas of the drivers--all the mighty work that went on in order to lure the treasures from the deep chambers of the great lode and to bring enlightenment to the desert. those were lively times. in the midst of one of his letters home mark twain interrupts himself to say: "i have just heard five pistol-shots down the street--as such things are in my line, i will go and see about it," and in a postscript added a few hours later: a.m. the pistol-shot did its work well. one man, a jackson county missourian, shot two of my friends (police officers) through the heart--both died within three minutes. the murderer's name is john campbell. "mark and i had our hands full," says de quille, "and no grass grew under our feet." in answer to some stray criticism of their policy, they printed a sort of editorial manifesto: our duty is to keep the universe thoroughly posted concerning murders and street fights, and balls, and theaters, and pack-trains, and churches, and lectures, and school-houses, and city military affairs, and highway robberies, and bible societies, and hay-wagons, and the thousand other things which it is in the province of local reporters to keep track of and magnify into undue importance for the instruction of the readers of a great daily newspaper. it is easy to recognize mark twain's hand in that compendium of labor, which, in spite of its amusing apposition, was literally true, and so intended, probably with no special thought of humor in its construction. it may be said, as well here as anywhere, that it was not mark twain's habit to strive for humor. he saw facts at curious angles and phrased them accordingly. in virginia city he mingled with the turmoil of the comstock and set down what he saw and thought, in his native speech. the comstock, ready to laugh, found delight in his expression and discovered a vast humor in his most earnest statements. on the other hand, there were times when the humor was intended and missed its purpose. we have already recalled the instance of the "petrified man" hoax, which was taken seriously; but the "empire city massacre" burlesque found an acceptance that even its author considered serious for a time. it is remembered to-day in virginia city as the chief incident of mark twain's comstock career. this literary bomb really had two objects, one of which was to punish the san francisco bulletin for its persistent attacks on washoe interests; the other, though this was merely incidental, to direct an unpleasant attention to a certain carson saloon, the magnolia, which was supposed to dispense whisky of the "forty rod" brand--that is, a liquor warranted to kill at that range. it was the bulletin that was to be made especially. ridiculous. this paper had been particularly disagreeable concerning the "dividend-cooking" system of certain of the comstock mines, at the same time calling invidious attention to safer investments in california stocks. samuel clemens, with "half a trunkful" of comstock shares, had cultivated a distaste for california things in general: in a letter of that time he says: "how i hate everything that looks or tastes or smells like california!" with his customary fickleness of soul, he was glorifying california less than a year later, but for the moment he could see no good in that nazareth. to his great satisfaction, one of the leading california corporations, the spring valley water company, "cooked" a dividend of its own about this time, resulting in disaster to a number of guileless investors who were on the wrong side of the subsequent crash. this afforded an inviting opportunity for reprisal. with goodman's consent he planned for the california papers, and the bulletin in particular, a punishment which he determined to make sufficiently severe. he believed the papers of that state had forgotten his earlier offenses, and the result would show he was not mistaken. there was a point on the carson river, four miles from carson city, known as "dutch nick's," and also as empire city, the two being identical. there was no forest there of any sort nothing but sage-brush. in the one cabin there lived a bachelor with no household. everybody in virginia and carson, of course, knew these things. mark twain now prepared a most lurid and graphic account of how one phillip hopkins, living "just at the edge of the great pine forest which lies between empire city and 'dutch nick's'," had suddenly gone insane and murderously assaulted his entire family consisting of his wife and their nine children, ranging in ages from one to nineteen years. the wife had been slain outright, also seven of the children; the other two might recover. the murder had been committed in the most brutal and ghastly fashion, after which hopkins had scalped his wife, leaped on a horse, cut his own throat from ear to ear, and ridden four miles into carson city, dropping dead at last in front of the magnolia saloon, the red-haired scalp of his wife still clutched in his gory hand. the article further stated that the cause of mr. hopkins's insanity was pecuniary loss, he having withdrawn his savings from safe comstock investments and, through the advice of a relative, one of the editors of the san francisco bulletin, invested them in the spring valley water company. this absurd tale with startling head-lines appeared in the enterprise, in its issue of october , . it was not expected that any one in virginia city or carson city would for a moment take any stock in the wild invention, yet so graphic was it that nine out of ten on first reading never stopped to consider the entire impossibility of the locality and circumstance. even when these things were pointed out many readers at first refused to confess themselves sold. as for the bulletin and other california papers, they were taken-in completely, and were furious. many of them wrote and demanded the immediate discharge of its author, announcing that they would never copy another line from the enterprise, or exchange with it, or have further relations with a paper that had mark twain on its staff. citizens were mad, too, and cut off their subscriptions. the joker was in despair. "oh, joe," he said, "i have ruined your business, and the only reparation i can make is to resign. you can never recover from this blow while i am on the paper." "nonsense," replied goodman. "we can furnish the people with news, but we can't supply them with sense. only time can do that. the flurry will pass. you just go ahead. we'll win out in the long run." but the offender was in torture; he could not sleep. "dan, dan," he said, "i am being burned alive on both sides of the mountains." "mark," said dan. "it will all blow over. this item of yours will be remembered and talked about when the rest of your enterprise work is forgotten." both goodman and de quille were right. in a month papers and people had forgotten their humiliation and laughed. "the dutch nick massacre" gave to its perpetrator and to the enterprise an added vogue. --[for full text of the "dutch nick" hoax see appendix c, at the end of last volume: also, for an anecdote concerning a reporting excursion made by alf. doten and mark twain.]-- xlii reportorial days. reference has already been made to the fashion among virginia city papers of permitting reporters to use the editorial columns for ridicule of one another. this custom was especially in vogue during the period when dan de quille and mark twain and the unreliable were the shining journalistic lights of the comstock. scarcely a week went by that some apparently venomous squib or fling or long burlesque assault did not appear either in the union or the enterprise, with one of those jokers as its author and another as its target. in one of his "home" letters of that year mark twain says: i have just finished writing up my report for the morning paper and giving the unreliable a column of advice about how to conduct himself in church. the advice was such as to call for a reprisal, but it apparently made no difference in personal relations, for a few weeks later he is with the unreliable in san francisco, seeing life in the metropolis, fairly swimming in its delights, unable to resist reporting them to his mother. we fag ourselves completely out every day and go to sleep without rocking every night. when i go down montgomery street shaking hands with tom, dick, and harry, it is just like being on main street in hannibal and meeting the old familiar faces. i do hate to go back to washoe. we take trips across the bay to oakland, and down to san leandro and alameda, and we go out to the willows and hayes park and fort point, and up to benicia; and yesterday we were invited out on a yachting excursion, and had a sail in the fastest yacht on the pacific coast. rice says: "oh no--we are not having any fun, mark --oh no--i reckon it's somebody else--it's probably the gentleman in the wagon" (popular slang phrase), and when i invite rice to the lick house to dinner the proprietor sends us champagne and claret, and then we do put on the most disgusting airs. the unreliable says our caliber is too light--we can't stand it to be noticed. three days later he adds that he is going sorrowfully "to the snows and the deserts of washoe," but that he has "lived like a lord to make up for two years of privation." twenty dollars is inclosed in each of these letters, probably as a bribe to jane clemens to be lenient with his prodigalities, which in his youthful love of display he could not bring himself to conceal. but apparently the salve was futile, for in another letter, a month later, he complains that his mother is "slinging insinuations" at him again, such as "where did you get that money" and "the company i kept in san francisco." he explains: why, i sold wild cat mining ground that was given me, and my credit was always good at the bank for $ , or $ , , and i never gamble in any shape or manner, and never drink anything stronger than claret and lager beer, which conduct is regarded as miraculously temperate in this place. as for company, i went in the very best company to be found in san francisco. i always move in the best society in virginia and have a reputation to preserve. he closes by assuring her that he will be more careful in future and that she need never fear but that he will keep her expenses paid. then he cannot refrain from adding one more item of his lavish life: "put in my washing, and it costs me one hundred dollars a month to live." de quille had not missed the opportunity of his comrade's absence to payoff some old scores. at the end of the editorial column of the enterprise on the day following his departure he denounced the absent one and his "protege," the unreliable, after the intemperate fashion of the day. it is to be regretted that such scrubs are ever permitted to visit the bay, as the inevitable effect will be to destroy that exalted opinion of the manners and morality of our people which was inspired by the conduct of our senior editor--[which is to say, dan himself]--. the diatribe closed with a really graceful poem, and the whole was no doubt highly regarded by the enterprise readers. what revenge mark twain took on his return has not been recorded, but it was probably prompt and adequate; or he may have left it to the unreliable. it was clearly a mistake, however, to leave his own local work in the hands of that properly named person a little later. clemens was laid up with a cold, and rice assured him on his sacred honor that he would attend faithfully to the enterprise locals, along with his own union items. he did this, but he had been nursing old injuries too long. what was mark twain's amazement on looking over the enterprise next morning to find under the heading "apologetic" a statement over his own nom de plume, purporting to be an apology for all the sins of ridicule to the various injured ones. to mayor arick, hon. wm. stewart, marshal perry, hon. j. b. winters, mr. olin, and samuel wetherill, besides a host of others whom we have ridiculed from behind the shelter of our reportorial position, we say to these gentlemen we acknowledge our faults, and, in all weakness and humility upon our bended marrow bones, we ask their forgiveness, promising that in future we will give them no cause for anything but the best of feeling toward us. to "young wilson" and the unreliable (as we have wickedly termed them), we feel that no apology we can make begins to atone for the many insults we have given them. toward these gentlemen we have been as mean as a man could be--and we have always prided ourselves on this base quality. we feel that we are the least of all humanity, as it were. we will now go in sack-cloth and ashes for the next forty days. this in his own paper over his own signature was a body blow; but it had the effect of curing his cold. he was back in the office forthwith, and in the next morning's issue denounced his betrayer. we are to blame for giving the unreliable an opportunity to misrepresent us, and therefore refrain from repining to any great extent at the result. we simply claim the right to deny the truth of every statement made by him in yesterday's paper, to annul all apologies he coined as coming from us, and to hold him up to public commiseration as a reptile endowed with no more intellect, no more cultivation, no more christian principle than animates and adorns the sportive jackass-rabbit of the sierras. we have done. these were the things that enlivened comstock journalism. once in a boxing bout mark twain got a blow on the nose which caused it to swell to an unusual size and shape. he went out of town for a few days, during which de quille published an extravagant account of his misfortune, describing the nose and dwelling on the absurdity of mark twain's ever supposing himself to be a boxer. de quille scored heavily with this item but his own doom was written. soon afterward he was out riding and was thrown from his horse and bruised considerably. this was mark's opportunity. he gave an account of dan's disaster; then, commenting, he said: the idea of a plebeian like dan supposing he could ever ride a horse! he! why, even the cats and the chickens laughed when they saw him go by. of course, he would be thrown off. of course, any well-bred horse wouldn't let a common, underbred person like dan stay on his back! when they gathered him up he was just a bag of scraps, but they put him together, and you'll find him at his old place in the enterprise office next week, still laboring under the delusion that he's a newspaper man. the author of 'roughing it' tells of a literary periodical called the occidental, started in virginia city by a mr. f. this was the silver-tongued tom fitch, of the union, an able speaker and writer, vastly popular on the coast. fitch came to clemens one day and said he was thinking of starting such a periodical and asked him what he thought of the venture. clemens said: "you would succeed if any one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of sahara; set up hoisting-works on mount vesuvius for mining sulphur; start a literary paper in virginia city; h--l!" which was a correct estimate of the situation, and the paper perished with the third issue. it was of no consequence except that it contained what was probably the first attempt at that modern literary abortion, the composite novel. also, it died too soon to publish mark twain's first verses of any pretension, though still of modest merit--"the aged pilot man"--which were thereby saved for 'roughing it.' visiting virginia now, it seems curious that any of these things could have happened there. the comstock has become little more than a memory; virginia and gold hill are so quiet, so voiceless, as to constitute scarcely an echo of the past. the international hotel, that once so splendid edifice, through whose portals the tide of opulent life then ebbed and flowed, is all but deserted now. one may wander at will through its dingy corridors and among its faded fripperies, seeking in vain for attendance or hospitality, the lavish welcome of a vanished day. those things were not lacking once, and the stream of wealth tossed up and down the stair and billowed up c street, an ebullient tide of metals and men from which millionaires would be struck out, and individuals known in national affairs. william m. stewart who would one day become a united states senator, was there, an unnoticed unit; and john mackay and james g. fair, one a senator by and by, and both millionaires, but poor enough then--fair with a pick on his shoulder and mackay, too, at first, though he presently became a mine superintendent. once in those days mark twain banteringly offered to trade businesses with mackay. "no," mackay said, "i can't trade. my business is not worth as much as yours. i have never swindled anybody, and i don't intend to begin now." neither of those men could dream that within ten years their names would be international property; that in due course nevada would propose statues to their memory. such things came out of the comstock; such things spring out of every turbulent frontier. xliii artemus ward madame caprell's warning concerning mark twain's health at twenty-eight would seem to have been justified. high-strung and neurotic, the strain of newspaper work and the tumult of the comstock had told on him. as in later life, he was subject to bronchial colds, and more than once that year he found it necessary to drop all work and rest for a time at steamboat springs, a place near virginia city, where there were boiling springs and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable hotel. he contributed from there sketches somewhat more literary in form than any of his previous work. "curing a cold" is a more or less exaggerated account of his ills. [included in sketches new and old. "information for the million," and "advice to good little girls," included in the "jumping frog" collection, , but omitted from the sketches, are also believed to belong to this period.] a portion of a playful letter to his mother, written from the springs, still exists. you have given my vanity a deadly thrust. behold, i am prone to boast of having the widest reputation as a local editor of any man on the pacific coast, and you gravely come forward and tell me "if i work hard and attend closely to my business, i may aspire to a place on a big san francisco daily some day." there's a comment on human vanity for you! why, blast it, i was under the impression that i could get such a situation as that any time i asked for it. but i don't want it. no paper in the united states can afford to pay me what my place on the enterprise is worth. if i were not naturally a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing vagabond, i could make it pay me $ , a year. but i don't suppose i shall ever be any account. i lead an easy life, though, and i don't care a cent whether school keeps or not. everybody knows me, and i fare like a prince wherever i go, be it on this side of the mountain or the other. and i am proud to say i am the most conceited ass in the territory. you think that picture looks old? well, i can't help it--in reality i'm not as old as i was when i was eighteen. which was a true statement, so far as his general attitude was concerned. at eighteen, in new york and philadelphia, his letters had been grave, reflective, advisory. now they were mostly banter and froth, lightly indifferent to the serious side of things, though perhaps only pretendedly so, for the picture did look old. from the shock and circumstance of his brother's death he--had never recovered. he was barely twenty-eight. from the picture he might have been a man of forty. it was that year that artemus ward (charles f. browne) came to virginia city. there was a fine opera-house in virginia, and any attraction that billed san francisco did not fail to play to the comstock. ward intended staying only a few days to deliver his lectures, but the whirl of the comstock caught him like a maelstrom, and he remained three weeks. he made the enterprise office his headquarters, and fairly reveled in the company he found there. he and mark twain became boon companions. each recognized in the other a kindred spirit. with goodman, de quille, and mccarthy, also e. e. hingston--ward's agent, a companionable fellow--they usually dined at chaumond's, virginia's high-toned french restaurant. those were three memorable weeks in mark twain's life. artemus ward was in the height of his fame, and he encouraged his new-found brother-humorist and prophesied great things of him. clemens, on his side, measured himself by this man who had achieved fame, and perhaps with good reason concluded that ward's estimate was correct, that he too could win fame and honor, once he got a start. if he had lacked ambition before ward's visit, the latter's unqualified approval inspired him with that priceless article of equipment. he put his soul into entertaining the visitor during those three weeks; and it was apparent to their associates that he was at least ward's equal in mental stature and originality. goodman and the others began to realize that for mark twain the rewards of the future were to be measured only by his resolution and ability to hold out. on christmas eve artemus lectured in silver city and afterward came to the enterprise office to give the boys a farewell dinner. the enterprise always published a christmas carol, and goodman sat at his desk writing it. he was just finishing as ward came in: "slave, slave," said artemus. "come out and let me banish care from you." they got the boys and all went over to chaumond's, where ward commanded goodman to order the dinner. when the cocktails came on, artemus lifted his glass and said: "i give you upper canada." the company rose, drank the toast in serious silence; then goodman said: "of course, artemus, it's all right, but why did you give us upper canada?" "because i don't want it myself," said ward, gravely. then began a rising tide of humor that could hardly be matched in the world to-day. mark twain had awakened to a fuller power; artemus ward was in his prime. they were giants of a race that became extinct when mark twain died. the youth, the wine, the whirl of lights and life, the tumult of the shouting street-it was as if an electric stream of inspiration poured into those two human dynamos and sent them into a dazzling, scintillating whirl. all gone--as evanescent, as forgotten, as the lightnings of that vanished time; out of that vast feasting and entertainment only a trifling morsel remains. ward now and then asked goodman why he did not join in the banter. goodman said: "i'm preparing a joke, artemus, but i'm keeping it for the present." it was near daybreak when ward at last called for the bill. it was two hundred and thirty-seven dollars. "what"' exclaimed artemus. "that's my joke." said goodman. "but i was only exclaiming because it was not twice as much," returned ward. he paid it amid laughter, and they went out into the early morning air. it was fresh and fine outside, not yet light enough to see clearly. artemus threw his face up to the sky and said: "i feel glorious. i feel like walking on the roofs." virginia was built on the steep hillside, and the eaves of some of the houses almost touched the ground behind them. "there is your chance, artemus," goodman said, pointing to a row of these houses all about of a height. artemus grabbed mark twain, and they stepped out upon the long string of roofs and walked their full length, arm in arm. presently the others noticed a lonely policeman cocking his revolver and getting ready to aim in their direction. goodman called to him: "wait a minute. what are you going to do?" "i'm going to shoot those burglars," he said. "don't for your life. those are not burglars. that's mark twain and artemus ward." the roof-walkers returned, and the party went down the street to a corner across from the international hotel. a saloon was there with a barrel lying in front, used, perhaps for a sort of sign. artemus climbed astride the barrel, and somebody brought a beer-glass and put it in his hand. virginia city looks out over the eastward desert. morning was just breaking upon the distant range-the scene as beautiful as when the sunrise beams across the plain of memnon. the city was not yet awake. the only living creatures in sight were the group of belated diners, with artemus ward, as king gambrinus, pouring a libation to the sunrise. that was the beginning of a week of glory. the farewell dinner became a series. at the close of one convivial session artemus went to a concert-hall, the "melodeon," blacked his face, and delivered a speech. he got away from virginia about the close of the year. a day or two later he wrote from austin, nevada, to his new-found comrade as "my dearest love," recalling the happiness of his stay: "i shall always remember virginia as a bright spot in my existence, as all others must or rather cannot be, as it were." then reflectively he adds: "some of the finest intellects in the world have been blunted by liquor." rare artemus ward and rare mark twain! if there lies somewhere a place of meeting and remembrance, they have not failed to recall there those closing days of ' . xliv governor of the "third house" with artemus ward's encouragement, clemens began to think of extending his audience eastward. the new york sunday mercury published literary matter. ward had urged him to try this market, and promised to write a special letter to the editors, introducing mark twain and his work. clemens prepared a sketch of the comstock variety, scarcely refined in character and full of personal allusion, a humor not suited to the present-day reader. its general subject was children; it contained some absurd remedies, supposedly sent to his old pilot friend zeb leavenworth, and was written as much for a joke on that good-natured soul as for profit or reputation. "i wrote it especially for beck jolly's use," the author declares, in a letter to his mother, "so he could pester zeb with it." we cannot know to-day whether zeb was pestered or not. a faded clipping is all that remains of the incident. as literature the article, properly enough, is lost to the world at large. it is only worth remembering as his metropolitan beginning. yet he must have thought rather highly of it (his estimation of his own work was always unsafe), for in the letter above quoted he adds: i cannot write regularly for the mercury, of course, i sha'n't have time. but sometimes i throw off a pearl (there is no self-conceit about that, i beg you to observe) which ought for the eternal welfare of my race to have a more extensive circulation than is afforded by a local daily paper. and if fitzhugh ludlow (author of the 'hasheesh eater') comes your way, treat him well. he published a high encomium upon mark twain (the same being eminently just and truthful, i beseech you to believe) in a san francisco paper. artemus ward said that when my gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority i ought to appreciate them myself, leave sage-brush obscurity, and journey to new york with him, as he wanted me to do. but i preferred not to burst upon the new york public too suddenly and brilliantly, so i concluded to remain here. he was in carson city when this was written, preparing for the opening of the next legislature. he was beyond question now the most conspicuous figure of the capital; also the most wholesomely respected, for his influence had become very large. it was said that he could control more votes than any legislative member, and with his friends, simmons and clagget, could pass or defeat any bill offered. the enterprise was a powerful organ--to be courted and dreaded--and mark twain had become its chief tribune. that he was fearless, merciless, and incorruptible, without doubt had a salutary influence on that legislative session. he reveled in his power; but it is not recorded that he ever abused it. he got a bill passed, largely increasing orion's official fees, but this was a crying need and was so recognized. he made no secret promises, none at all that he did not intend to fulfill. "sam's word was as fixed as fate," orion records, and it may be added that he was morally as fearless. the two houses of the last territorial legislature of nevada assembled january , .--[nevada became a state october , .]--a few days later a "third house" was organized--an institution quite in keeping with the happy atmosphere of that day and locality, for it was a burlesque organization, and mark twain was selected as its "governor." the new house prepared to make a public occasion of this first session, and its governor was required to furnish a message. then it was decided to make it a church benefit. the letters exchanged concerning this proposition still exist; they explain themselves: carson city, january , . gov. mark twain, understanding from certain members of the third house of the territorial legislature that that body will have effected a permanent organization within a day or two, and be ready for the reception of your third annual message,--[ there had been no former message. this was regarded as a great joke.]--we desire to ask your permission, and that of the third house, to turn the affair to the benefit of the church by charging toll-roads, franchises, and other persons a dollar apiece for the privilege of listening to your communication. s. pixley, g. a. sears, trustees. carson city, january , . gentlemen,--certainly. if the public can find anything in a grave state paper worth paying a dollar for, i am willing they should pay that amount, or any other; and although i am not a very dusty christian myself, i take an absorbing interest in religious affairs, and would willingly inflict my annual message upon the church itself if it might derive benefit thereby. you can charge what you please; i promise the public no amusement, but i do promise a reasonable amount of instruction. i am responsible to the third house only, and i hope to be permitted to make it exceedingly warm for that body, without caring whether the sympathies of the public and the church be enlisted in their favor, and against myself, or not. respectfully, mark twain. mark twain's reply is closely related to his later style in phrase and thought. it might have been written by him at almost any subsequent period. perhaps his association with artemus ward had awakened a new perception of the humorous idea--a humor of repression, of understatement. he forgot this often enough, then and afterward, and gave his riotous fancy free rein; but on the whole the simpler, less florid form seemingly began to attract him more and more. his address as governor of the third house has not been preserved, but those who attended always afterward referred to it as the "greatest effort of his life." perhaps for that audience and that time this verdict was justified. it was his first great public opportunity. on the stage about him sat the membership of the third house; the building itself was packed, the aisles full. he knew he could let himself go in burlesque and satire, and he did. he was unsparing in his ridicule of the governor, the officials in general, the legislative members, and of individual citizens. from the beginning to the end of his address the audience was in a storm of laughter and applause. with the exception of the dinner speech made to the printers in keokuk, it was his first public utterance --the beginning of a lifelong series of triumphs. only one thing marred his success. little carrie pixley, daughter of one of the "trustees," had promised to be present and sit in a box next the stage. it was like him to be fond of the child, and he had promised to send a carriage for her. often during his address he glanced toward the box; but it remained empty. when the affair was ended, he drove home with her father to inquire the reason. they found the little girl, in all her finery, weeping on the bed. then he remembered he had forgotten to send the carriage; and that was like him, too. for his third house address judge a. w. (sandy) baldwin and theodore winters presented him with a gold watch inscribed to "governor mark twain." he was more in demand now than ever; no social occasion was regarded as complete without him. his doings were related daily and his sayings repeated on the streets. most of these things have passed away now, but a few are still recalled with smiles. once, when conundrums were being asked at a party, he was urged to make one. "well," he sand, "why am i like the pacific ocean?" several guesses were made, but none satisfied him. finally all gave it up. "tell us, mark, why are you like the pacific ocean?" "i don't know," he drawled. "i was just asking for information." at another time, when a young man insisted on singing a song of eternal length, the chorus of which was, "i'm going home, i'm going home, i'm going home tomorrow," mark twain put his head in the window and said, pleadingly: "for god's sake go to-night." but he was also fond of quieter society. sometimes, after the turmoil of a legislative morning, he would drop in to miss keziah clapp's school and listen to the exercises, or would call on colonel curry--"old curry, old abe curry"--and if the colonel happened to be away, he would talk with mrs. curry, a motherly soul (still alive at ninety-three, in ), and tell her of his hannibal boyhood or his river and his mining adventures, and keep her laughing until the tears ran. he was a great pedestrian in those days. sometimes he walked from virginia to carson, stopping at colonel curry's as he came in for rest and refreshment. "mrs. curry," he said once, "i have seen tireder men than i am, and lazier men, but they were dead men." he liked the home feeling there --the peace and motherly interest. deep down, he was lonely and homesick; he was always so away from his own kindred. clemens returned now to virginia city, and, like all other men who ever met her, became briefly fascinated by the charms of adah isaacs menken, who was playing mazeppa at the virginia opera house. all men--kings, poets, priests, prize-fighters--fell under menken's spell. dan de quille and mark twain entered into a daily contest as to who could lavish the most fervid praise on her in the enterprise. the latter carried her his literary work to criticize. he confesses this in one of his home letters, perhaps with a sort of pride. i took it over to show to miss menken the actress, orpheus c. ken's wife. she is a literary cuss herself. she has a beautiful white hand, but her handwriting is infamous; she writes fast and her chirography is of the door-plate order--her letters are immense. i gave her a conundrum, thus: "my dear madam, why ought your hand to retain its present grace and beauty always? because you fool away devilish little of it on your manuscript." but menken was gone presently, and when he saw her again, somewhat later, in san francisco, his "madness" would have seemed to have been allayed. xlv a comstock duel the success--such as it was--of his occasional contributions to the new york sunday mercury stirred mark twain's ambition for a wider field of labor. circumstance, always ready to meet his wishes, offered assistance, though in an unexpected form. goodman, temporarily absent, had left clemens in editorial charge. as in that earlier day, when orion had visited tennessee and returned to find his paper in a hot personal warfare with certain injured citizens, so the enterprise, under the same management, had stirred up trouble. it was just at the time of the "flour sack sanitary fund," the story of which is related at length in 'roughing it'. in the general hilarity of this occasion, certain enterprise paragraphs of criticism or ridicule had incurred the displeasure of various individuals whose cause naturally enough had been espoused by a rival paper, the chronicle. very soon the original grievance, whatever it was, was lost sight of in the fireworks and vitriol-throwing of personal recrimination between mark twain and the chronicle editor, then a mr. laird. a point had been reached at length when only a call for bloodshed--a challenge--could satisfy either the staff or the readers of the two papers. men were killed every week for milder things than the editors had spoken each of the other. joe goodman himself, not so long before, had fought a duel with a union editor--tom fitch--and shot him in the leg, so making of him a friend, and a lame man, for life. in joe's absence the prestige of the paper must be maintained. mark twain himself has told in burlesque the story of his duel, keeping somewhat nearer to the fact than was his custom in such writing, as may be seen by comparing it with the account of his abettor and second--of course, steve gillis. the account is from mr. gillis's own hand: when joe went away, he left sam in editorial charge of the paper. that was a dangerous thing to do. nobody could ever tell what sam was going to write. something he said stirred up mr. laird, of the chronicle, who wrote a reply of a very severe kind. he said some things that we told mark could only be wiped out with blood. those were the days when almost every man in virginia city had fought with pistols either impromptu or premeditated duels. i had been in several, but then mine didn't count. most of them were of the impromptu kind. mark hadn't had any yet, and we thought it about time that his baptism took place. he was not eager for it; he was averse to violence, but we finally prevailed upon him to send laird a challenge, and when laird did not send a reply at once we insisted on mark sending him another challenge, by which time he had made himself believe that he really wanted to fight, as much as we wanted him to do. laird concluded to fight, at last. i helped mark get up some of the letters, and a man who would not fight after such letters did not belong in virginia city--in those days. laird's acceptance of mark's challenge came along about midnight, i think, after the papers had gone to press. the meeting was to take place next morning at sunrise. of course i was selected as mark's second, and at daybreak i had him up and out for some lessons in pistol practice before meeting laird. i didn't have to wake him. he had not been asleep. we had been talking since midnight over the duel that was coming. i had been telling him of the different duels in which i had taken part, either as principal or second, and how many men i had helped to kill and bury, and how it was a good plan to make a will, even if one had not much to leave. it always looked well, i told him, and seemed to be a proper thing to do before going into a duel. so mark made a will with a sort of gloomy satisfaction, and as soon as it was light enough to see, we went out to a little ravine near the meeting- place, and i set up a board for him to shoot at. he would step out, raise that big pistol, and when i would count three he would shut his eyes and pull the trigger. of course he didn't hit anything; he did not come anywhere near hitting anything. just then we heard somebody shooting over in the next ravine. sam said: "what's that, steve?" "why," i said, "that's laud. his seconds are practising him over there." it didn't make my principal any more cheerful to hear that pistol go off every few seconds over there. just then i saw a little mud-hen light on some sage-brush about thirty yards away. "mark," i said, "let me have that pistol. i'll show you how to shoot." he handed it to me, and i let go at the bird and shot its head off, clean. about that time laird and his second came over the ridge to meet us. i saw them coming and handed mark back the pistol. we were looking at the bird when they came up. "who did that?" asked laird's second. "sam," i said. "how far off was it?" "oh, about thirty yards." "can he do it again?" "of course," i said; "every time. he could do it twice that far." laud's second turned to his principal. "laird," he said, "you don't want to fight that man. it's just like suicide. you'd better settle this thing, now." so there was a settlement. laird took back all he had said; mark said he really had nothing against laird--the discussion had been purely journalistic and did not need to be settled in blood. he said that both he and laird were probably the victims of their friends. i remember one of the things laird said when his second told him he had better not fight. "fight! h--l, no! i am not going to be murdered by that d--d desperado." sam had sent another challenge to a man named cutler, who had been somehow mixed up with the muss and had written sam an insulting letter; but cutler was out of town at the time, and before he got back we had received word from jerry driscoll, foreman of the grand jury, that the law just passed, making a duel a penitentiary offense for both principal and second, was to be strictly enforced, and unless we got out of town in a limited number of hours we would be the first examples to test the new law. we concluded to go, and when the stage left next morning for san francisco we were on the outside seat. joe goodman had returned by this time and agreed to accompany us as far as henness pass. we were all in good spirits and glad we were alive, so joe did not stop when he got to henness pass, but kept on. now and then he would say, "well, i had better be going back pretty soon," but he didn't go, and in the end he did not go back at all, but went with us clear to san francisco, and we had a royal good time all the way. i never knew any series of duels to close so happily. so ended mark twain's career on the comstock. he had come to it a weary pilgrim, discouraged and unknown; he was leaving it with a new name and fame--elate, triumphant, even if a fugitive. xlvi getting settled in san francisco this was near the end of may, . the intention of both gillis and clemens was to return to the states; but once in san francisco both presently accepted places, clemens as reporter and gillis as compositor, on the 'morning call'. from 'roughing it' the reader gathers that mark twain now entered into a life of butterfly idleness on the strength of prospective riches to be derived from the "half a trunkful of mining stocks," and that presently, when the mining bubble exploded, he was a pauper. but a good many liberties have been taken with the history of this period. undoubtedly he expected opulent returns from his mining stocks, and was disappointed, particularly in an investment in hale and norcross shares, held too long for the large profit which could have been made by selling at the proper time. the fact is, he spent not more than a few days--a fortnight at most--in "butterfly idleness," at the lick house before he was hard at work on the 'call', living modestly with steve gillis in the quietest place they could find, never quiet enough, but as far as possible from dogs and cats and chickens and pianos, which seemed determined to make the mornings hideous, when a weary night reporter and compositor wanted to rest. they went out socially, on occasion, arrayed in considerable elegance; but their recreations were more likely to consist of private midnight orgies, after the paper had gone to press--mild dissipations in whatever they could find to eat at that hour, with a few glasses of beer, and perhaps a game of billiards or pool in some all-night resort. a printer by the name of ward--"little ward,"--[l. p. ward; well known as an athlete in san francisco. he lost his mind and fatally shot himself in .] --they called him--often went with them for these refreshments. ward and gillis were both bantam game-cocks, and sometimes would stir up trouble for the very joy of combat. clemens never cared for that sort of thing and discouraged it, but ward and gillis were for war. "they never assisted each other. if one had offered to assist the other against some overgrown person, it would have been an affront, and a battle would have followed between that pair of little friends."--[s. l. c., .]--steve gillis in particular, was fond of incidental encounters, a characteristic which would prove an important factor somewhat later in shaping mark twain's career. of course, the more strenuous nights were not frequent. their home-going was usually tame enough and they were glad enough to get there. clemens, however, was never quite ready for sleep. then, as ever, he would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and lose himself in english or french history until sleep conquered. his room-mate did not approve of this habit; it interfered with his own rest, and with his fiendish tendency to mischief he found reprisal in his own fashion. knowing his companion's highly organized nervous system he devised means of torture which would induce him to put out the light. once he tied a nail to a string; an arrangement which he kept on the floor behind the bed. pretending to be asleep, he would hold the end of the string, and lift it gently up and down, making a slight ticking sound on the floor, maddening to a nervous man. clemens would listen a moment and say: "what in the nation is that noise" gillis's pretended sleep and the ticking would continue. clemens would sit up in bed, fling aside his book, and swear violently. "steve, what is that d--d noise?" he would say. steve would pretend to rouse sleepily. "what's the matter, sam? what noise? oh, i guess that is one of those death-ticks; they don't like the light. maybe it will stop in a minute." it usually did stop about that time, and the reading would be apt to continue. but no sooner was there stillness than it began again--tick, tick, tick. with a wild explosion of blasphemy, the book would go across the floor and the light would disappear. sometimes, when he couldn't sleep, he would dress and walk out in the street for an hour, while the cruel steve slept like the criminal that he was. at last, one night, he overdid the thing and was caught. his tortured room-mate at first reviled him, then threatened to kill him, finally put him to shame. it was curious, but they always loved each other, those two; there was never anything resembling an estrangement, and to his last days mark twain never could speak of steve gillis without tenderness. they moved a great many times in san francisco. their most satisfactory residence was on a bluff on california street. their windows looked down on a lot of chinese houses--"tin-can houses," they were called--small wooden shanties covered with beaten-out cans. steve and mark would look down on these houses, waiting until all the chinamen were inside; then one of them would grab an empty beer-bottle, throw it down on those tin can roofs, and dodge behind the blinds. the chinamen would swarm out and look up at the row of houses on the edge of the bluff, shake their fists, and pour out chinese vituperation. by and by, when they had retired and everything was quiet again, their tormentors would throw another bottle. this was their sunday amusement. at a place on minna street they lived with a private family. at first clemens was delighted. "just look at it, steve," he said. "what a nice, quiet place. not a thing to disturb us." but next morning a dog began to howl. gillis woke this time, to find his room-mate standing in the door that opened out into a back garden, holding a big revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement. "came here, steve," he said. "come here and kill him. i'm so chilled through i can't get a bead on him." "sam," said steve, "don't shoot him. just swear at him. you can easily kill him at that range with your profanity." steve gillis declares that mark twain then let go such a scorching, singeing blast that the brute's owner sold him next day for a mexican hairless dog. we gather that they moved, on an average, about once a month. a home letter of september , , says: we have been here only four months, yet we have changed our lodging five times. we are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have no fault to find with the rooms or the people. we are the only lodgers-in a well-to-do private family . . . . but i need change and must move again. this was the minna street place--the place of the dog. in the same letter he mentions having made a new arrangement with the call, by which he is to receive twenty-five dollars a week, with no more night-work; he says further that he has closed with the californian for weekly articles at twelve dollars each. xlvii bohemian days mark twain's position on the 'call' was uncongenial from the start. san francisco was a larger city than virginia; the work there was necessarily more impersonal, more a routine of news-gathering and drudgery. he once set down his own memories of it: at nine in the morning i had to be at the police court for an hour and make a brief history of the squabbles of the night before. they were usually between irishmen and irishmen, and chinamen and chinamen, with now and then a squabble between the two races, for a change. during the rest of the day we raked the town from end to end, gathering such material as we might, wherewith to fill our required columns; and if there were no fires to report, we started some. at night we visited the six theaters, one after the other, seven nights in the week. we remained in each of those places five minutes, got the merest passing glimpse of play and opera, and with that for a text we "wrote up" those plays and operas, as the phrase goes, torturing our souls every night in the effort to find something to say about those performances which we had not said a couple of hundred times before. it was fearful drudgery-soulless drudgery--and almost destitute of interest. it was an awful slavery for a lazy man. on the enterprise he had been free, with a liberty that amounted to license. he could write what he wished, and was personally responsible to the readers. on the call he was simply a part of a news-machine; restricted by a policy, the whole a part of a still greater machine --politics. once he saw some butchers set their dogs on an unoffending chinaman, a policeman looking on with amused interest. he wrote an indignant article criticizing the city government and raking the police. in virginia city this would have been a welcome delight; in san francisco it did not appear. at another time he found a policeman asleep on his beat. going to a near-by vegetable stall he borrowed a large cabbage-leaf, came back and stood over the sleeper, gently fanning him. it would be wasted effort to make an item of this incident; but he could publish it in his own fashion. he stood there fanning the sleeping official until a large crowd collected. when he thought it was large enough he went away. next day the joke was all over the city. only one of the several severe articles he wrote criticizing officials and institutions seems to have appeared--an attack on an undertaker whose establishment formed a branch of the coroner's office. the management of this place one day refused information to a call reporter, and the next morning its proprietor was terrified by a scathing denunciation of his firm. it began, "those body-snatchers" and continued through half a column of such scorching strictures as only mark twain could devise. the call's policy of suppression evidently did not include criticisms of deputy coroners. such liberty, however, was too rare for mark twain, and he lost interest. he confessed afterward that he became indifferent and lazy, and that george e. barnes, one of the publishers of the call, at last allowed him an assistant. he selected from the counting-room a big, hulking youth by the name of mcglooral, with the acquired prefix of "smiggy." clemens had taken a fancy to smiggy mcglooral--on account of his name and size perhaps--and smiggy, devoted to his patron, worked like a slave gathering news nights--daytimes, too, if necessary--all of which was demoralizing to a man who had small appetite for his place anyway. it was only a question of time when smiggy alone would be sufficient for the job. there were other and pleasanter things in san francisco. the personal and literary associations were worth while. at his right hand in the call office sat frank soule--a gentle spirit--a graceful versifier who believed himself a poet. mark twain deferred to frank soule in those days. he thought his verses exquisite in their workmanship; a word of praise from soule gave him happiness. in a luxurious office up-stairs was another congenial spirit--a gifted, handsome fellow of twenty-four, who was secretary of the mint, and who presently became editor of a new literary weekly, the californian, which charles henry webb had founded. this young man's name was francis bret harte, originally from albany, later a miner and school-teacher on the stanislaus, still later a compositor, finally a contributor, on the golden era. his fame scarcely reached beyond san francisco as yet; but among the little coterie of writing folk that clustered about the era office his rank was high. mark twain fraternized with bret harte and the era group generally. he felt that he had reached the land--or at least the borderland--of bohemia, that ultima thule of every young literary dream. san francisco did, in fact, have a very definite literary atmosphere and a literature of its own. its coterie of writers had drifted from here and there, but they had merged themselves into a california body-poetic, quite as individual as that of cambridge, even if less famous, less fortunate in emoluments than the boston group. joseph e. lawrence, familiarly known as "joe" lawrence, was editor of the golden era,--[the golden era, california's first literary publication, was founded by rollin m. daggett and j. mcdonough foard in .]--and his kindness and hospitality were accounted sufficient rewards even when his pecuniary acknowledgments were modest enough. he had a handsome office, and the literati, local and visiting, used to gather there. names that would be well known later were included in that little band. joaquin miller recalls from an old diary, kept by him then, having seen adah isaacs menken, prentice mulford, bret harte, charles warren stoddard, fitzhugh ludlow, mark twain, orpheus c. kerr, artemus ward, gilbert densmore, w. s. kendall, and mrs. hitchcock assembled there at one time. the era office would seem to have been a sort of mount olympus, or parnassus, perhaps; for these were mainly poets, who had scarcely yet attained to the dignity of gods. miller was hardly more than a youth then, and this grand assemblage impressed him, as did the imposing appointments of the place. the era rooms were elegant--[he says]--the most grandly carpeted and most gorgeously furnished that i have ever seen. even now in my memory they seem to have been simply palatial. i have seen the world well since then--all of its splendors worth seeing--yet those carpeted parlors, with joe lawrence and his brilliant satellites, outshine all things else, as i turn to look back. more than any other city west of the alleghanies, san francisco has always been a literary center; and certainly that was a remarkable group to be out there under the sunset, dropped down there behind the sierras, which the transcontinental railway would not climb yet, for several years. they were a happy-hearted, aspiring lot, and they got as much as five dollars sometimes for an era article, and were as proud of it as if it had been a great deal more. they felt that they were creating literature, as they were, in fact; a new school of american letters mustered there. mark twain and bret harte were distinctive features of this group. they were already recognized by their associates as belonging in a class by themselves, though as yet neither had done any of the work for which he would be remembered later. they were a good deal together, and it was when harte was made editor of the californian that mark twain was put on the weekly staff at the then unexampled twelve-dollar rate. the californian made larger pretensions than the era, and perhaps had a heavier financial backing. with mark twain on the staff and bret harte in the chair, himself a frequent contributor, it easily ranked as first of san francisco periodicals. a number of the sketches collected by webb later, in mark twain's first little volume, the celebrated jumping frog, etc., appeared in the era or californian in and . they were smart, bright, direct, not always refined, but probably the best humor of the day. some of them are still preserved in this volume of sketches. they are interesting in what they promise, rather than in what they present, though some of them are still delightful enough. "the killing of julius caesar localized" is an excellent forerunner of his burlesque report of a gladiatorial combat in the innocents abroad. the answers to correspondents, with his vigorous admonition of the statistical moralist, could hardly have been better done at any later period. the jumping frog itself was not originally of this harvest. it has a history of its own, as we shall see a little further along. the reportorial arrangement was of brief duration. even the great san francisco earthquake of that day did not awaken in mark twain any permanent enthusiasm for the drudgery of the 'call'. he had lost interest, and when mark twain lost interest in a subject or an undertaking that subject or that undertaking were better dead, so far as he was concerned. his conclusion of service with the call was certain, and he wondered daily why it was delayed so long. the connection had become equally unsatisfactory to proprietor and employee. they had a heart-to-heart talk presently, with the result that mark twain was free. he used to claim, in after-years, with his usual tendency to confess the worst of himself, that he was discharged, and the incident has been variously told. george barnes himself has declared that clemens resigned with great willingness. it is very likely that the paragraph at the end of chapter lviii in 'roughing it' presents the situation with fair accuracy, though, as always, the author makes it as unpleasant for himself as possible: "at last one of the proprietors took me aside, with a charity i still remember with considerable respect, and gave me an opportunity to resign my berth, and so save myself the disgrace of a dismissal." as an extreme contrast with the supposititious "butterfly idleness" of his beginning in san francisco, and for no other discoverable reason, he doubtless thought it necessary, in the next chapter of that book, to depict himself as having reached the depths of hard luck, debt, and poverty. "i became an adept at slinking," he says. "i slunk from back street to back street.... i slunk to my bed. i had pawned everything but the clothes i had on." this is pure fiction. that he occasionally found himself short of funds is likely enough--a literary life invites that sort of thing--but that he ever clung to a single "silver ten-cent piece," as he tells us, and became the familiar of mendicancy, was a condition supplied altogether by his later imagination to satisfy what he must have regarded as an artistic need. almost immediately following his separation from the 'call' he arranged with goodman to write a daily letter for the enterprise, reporting san francisco matters after his own notion with a free hand. his payment for this work was thirty dollars a week, and he had an additional return from his literary sketches. the arrangement was an improvement both as to labor and income. real affluence appeared on the horizon just then, in the form of a liberal offer for the tennessee land. but alas! it was from a wine-grower who wished to turn the tract into great vineyards, and orion had a prohibition seizure at the moment, so the trade was not made. orion further argued that the prospective purchaser would necessarily be obliged to import horticultural labor from europe, and that those people might be homesick, badly treated, and consequently unhappy in those far eastern tennessee mountains. such was orion's way. xlviii the refuge of the hills those who remember mark twain's enterprise letters (they are no longer obtainable)--[many of these are indeed now obtainable by a simple web search. d.w.]--declare them to have been the greatest series of daily philippics ever written. however this may be, it is certain that they made a stir. goodman permitted him to say absolutely what he pleased upon any subject. san francisco was fairly weltering in corruption, official and private. he assailed whatever came first to hand with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation long restrained. quite naturally he attacked the police, and with such ferocity and penetration that as soon as copies of the enterprise came from virginia the city hall began to boil and smoke and threaten trouble. martin g. burke, then chief of police, entered libel suit against the enterprise, prodigiously advertising that paper, copies of which were snatched as soon as the stage brought them. mark twain really let himself go then. he wrote a letter that on the outside was marked, "be sure and let joe see this before it goes in." he even doubted himself whether goodman would dare to print it, after reading. it was a letter describing the city's corrupt morals under the existing police government. it began, "the air is full of lechery, and rumors of lechery," and continued in a strain which made even the enterprise printers aghast. "you can never afford to publish that," the foreman said to, goodman. "let it all go in, every word," goodman answered. "if mark can stand it, i can!" it seemed unfortunate (at the time) that steve gillis should select this particular moment to stir up trouble that would involve both himself and clemens with the very officials which the latter had undertaken to punish. passing a saloon one night alone, gillis heard an altercation going on inside, and very naturally stepped in to enjoy it. including the barkeeper, there were three against two. steve ranged himself on the weaker side, and selected the barkeeper, a big bruiser, who, when the fight was over, was ready for the hospital. it turned out that he was one of chief burke's minions, and gillis was presently indicted on a charge of assault with intent to kill. he knew some of the officials in a friendly way, and was advised to give a straw bond and go into temporary retirement. clemens, of course, went his bail, and steve set out for virginia city, until the storm blew over. this was burke's opportunity. when the case was called and gillis did not appear, burke promptly instituted an action against his bondsman, with an execution against his loose property. the watch that had been given him as governor of the third house came near being thus sacrificed in the cause of friendship, and was only saved by skilful manipulation. now, it was down in the chain of circumstances that steve gillis's brother, james n. gillis, a gentle-hearted hermit, a pocket-miner of the halcyon tuolumne district--the truthful james of bret harte--happened to be in san francisco at this time, and invited clemens to return with him to the far seclusion of his cabin on jackass hill. in that peaceful retreat were always rest and refreshment for the wayfarer, and more than one weary writer besides bret harte had found shelter there. james gillis himself had fine literary instincts, but he remained a pocket-miner because he loved that quiet pursuit of gold, the arcadian life, the companionship of his books, the occasional bohemian pilgrim who found refuge in his retreat. it is said that the sick were made well, and the well made better, in jim gillis's cabin on the hilltop, where the air was nectar and the stillness like enchantment. one could mine there if he wished to do so; jim would always furnish him a promising claim, and teach him the art of following the little fan-like drift of gold specks to the nested deposit of nuggets somewhere up the hillside. he regularly shared his cabin with one dick stoker (dick baker, of 'roughing it'), another genial soul who long ago had retired from the world to this forgotten land, also with dick's cat, tom quartz; but there was always room for guests. in 'roughing it', and in a later story, "the californian's tale," mark twain has made us acquainted with the verdant solitude of the tuolumne hills, that dreamy, delicious paradise where once a vast population had gathered when placer-mining had been in its bloom, a dozen years before. the human swarm had scattered when the washings failed to pay, leaving only a quiet emptiness and the few pocket-miners along the stanislaus and among the hills. vast areas of that section present a strange appearance to-day. long stretches there are, crowded and jammed and drifted with ghostly white stones that stand up like fossils of a prehistoric life --the earth deposit which once covered them entirely washed away, every particle of it removed by the greedy hordes, leaving only this vast bleaching drift, literally the "picked bones of the land." at one place stands columbia, regarded once as a rival to sacramento, a possible state capital--a few tumbling shanties now--and a ruined church. it was the th of december, , when mark twain arrived at jim gillis's cabin. he found it a humble habitation made of logs and slabs, partly sheltered by a great live-oak tree, surrounded by a stretch of grass. it had not much in the way of pretentious furniture, but there was a large fireplace, and a library which included the standard authors. a younger gillis boy, william, was there at this time, so that the family numbered five in all, including tom quartz, the cat. on rainy days they would gather about the big, open fire and jim gillis, with his back to the warmth, would relate diverting yarns, creations of his own, turned out hot from the anvil, forged as he went along. he had a startling imagination, and he had fostered it in that secluded place. his stories usually consisted of wonderful adventures of his companion, dick stoker, portrayed with humor and that serene and vagrant fancy which builds as it goes, careless as to whither it is proceeding and whether the story shall end well or ill, soon or late, if ever. he always pretended that these extravagant tales of stoker were strictly true; and stoker--"forty-six and gray as a rat"--earnest, thoughtful, and tranquilly serene, would smoke and look into the fire and listen to those astonishing things of himself, smiling a little now and then but saying never a word. what did it matter to him? he had no world outside of the cabin and the hills, no affairs; he would live and die there; his affairs all had ended long ago. a number of the stories used in mark twain's books were first told by jim gillis, standing with his hands crossed behind him, back to the fire, in the cabin on jackass hill. the story of dick baker's cat was one of these; the jaybird and acorn story of 'a tramp abroad' was another; also the story of the "burning shame," and there are others. mark twain had little to add to these stories; in fact, he never could get them to sound as well, he said, as when jim gillis had told them. james gillis's imagination sometimes led him into difficulties. once a feeble old squaw came along selling some fruit that looked like green plums. stoker, who knew the fruit well enough, carelessly ventured the remark that it might be all right, but he had never heard of anybody eating it, which set gillis off into eloquent praises of its delights, all of which he knew to be purely imaginary; whereupon stoker told him if he liked the fruit so well, to buy some of it. there was no escape after that; jim had to buy some of those plums, whose acid was of the hair-lifting aqua-fortis variety, and all the rest of the day he stewed them, adding sugar, trying to make them palatable, tasting them now and then, boasting meanwhile of their nectar-like deliciousness. he gave the others a taste by and by--a withering, corroding sup--and they derided him and rode him down. but jim never weakened. he ate that fearful brew, and though for days his mouth was like fire he still referred to the luscious health-giving joys of the "californian plums." jackass hill was not altogether a solitude; here and there were neighbors. another pocket-miner; named carrington, had a cabin not far away, and a mile or two distant lived an old couple with a pair of pretty daughters, so plump and trim and innocent, that they were called the "chapparal quails." young men from far and near paid court to them, and on sunday afternoons so many horses would be tied to their front fence as to suggest an afternoon service there. young "billy" gillis knew them, and one sunday morning took his brother's friend, sam clemens, over for a call. they went early, with forethought, and promptly took the girls for a walk. they took a long walk, and went wandering over the hills, toward sandy bar and the stanislaus--through that reposeful land which bret harte would one day light with idyllic romance--and toward evening found themselves a long way from home. they must return by the nearest way to arrive before dark. one of the young ladies suggested a short cut through the chemisal, and they started. but they were lost, presently, and it was late, very late, when at last they reached the ranch. the mother of the "quails" was sitting up for them, and she had something to say. she let go a perfect storm of general denunciation, then narrowed the attack to samuel clemens as the oldest of the party. he remained mildly serene. "it wasn't my fault," he ventured at last; "it was billy gillis's fault." "no such thing. you know better. mr. gillis has been here often. it was you." "but do you realize, ma'am, how tired and hungry we are? haven't you got a bite for us to eat?" "no, sir, not a bite--for such as you." the offender's eyes, wandering about the room, spied something in a corner. "isn't that a guitar over there?" he asked. "yes, sir, it is; what of it?" the culprit walked over, and taking it up, tuned the strings a little and struck the chords. then he began to sing. he began very softly and sang "fly away, pretty moth," then "araby's daughter." he could sing very well in those days, following with the simpler chords. perhaps the mother "quail" had known those songs herself back in the states, for her manner grew kindlier, almost with the first notes. when he had finished she was the first to ask him to go on. "i suppose you are just like all young folks," she said. "i was young myself once. while you sing i'll get some supper." she left the door to the kitchen open so that she could hear, and cooked whatever she could find for the belated party. xlix the jumping frog it was the rainy season, the winter of and , but there were many pleasant days, when they could go pocket-hunting, and samuel clemens soon added a knowledge of this fascinating science to his other acquirements. sometimes he worked with dick stoker, sometimes with one of the gillis boys. he did not make his fortune at pocket-mining; he only laid its corner-stone. in the old note-book he kept of that sojourn we find that, with jim gillis, he made a trip over into calaveras county soon after christmas and remained there until after new year's, probably prospecting; and he records that on new year's night, at vallecito, he saw a magnificent lunar rainbow in a very light, drizzling rain. a lunax rainbow is one of the things people seldom see. he thought it an omen of good-fortune. they returned to the cabin on the hill; but later in the month, on the they crossed over into calaveras again, and began pocket-hunting not far from angel's camp. the note-book records that the bill of fare at the camp hotel consisted wholly of beans and something which bore the name of coffee; also that the rains were frequent and heavy. january . same old diet--same old weather--went out to the pocket-claim--had to rush back. they had what they believed to be a good claim. jim gillis declared the indications promising, and if they could only have good weather to work it, they were sure of rich returns. for himself, he would have been willing to work, rain or shine. clemens, however, had different views on the subject. his part was carrying water for washing out the pans of dirt, and carrying pails of water through the cold rain and mud was not very fascinating work. dick stoker came over before long to help. things went a little better then; but most of their days were spent in the bar-room of the dilapidated tavern at angel's camp, enjoying the company of a former illinois river pilot, ben coon,--[this name has been variously given as "ros coon," "coon drayton," etc. it is given here as set down in mark twain's notes, made on the spot. coon was not (as has been stated) the proprietor of the hotel (which was kept by a frenchman), but a frequenter of it.]--a solemn, fat-witted person, who dozed by the stove, or old slow, endless stories, without point or application. listeners were a boon to him, for few came and not many would stay. to mark twain and jim gillis, however, ben coon was a delight. it was soothing and comfortable to listen to his endless narratives, told in that solemn way, with no suspicion of humor. even when his yarns had point, he did not recognize it. one dreary afternoon, in his slow, monotonous fashion, he told them about a frog--a frog that had belonged to a man named coleman, who trained it to jump, but that failed to win a wager because the owner of a rival frog had surreptitiously loaded the trained jumper with shot. the story had circulated among the camps, and a well-known journalist, named samuel seabough, had already made a squib of it, but neither clemens nor gillis had ever happened to hear it before. they thought the tale in itself amusing, and the "spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling was exquisitely absurd." when coon had talked himself out, his hearers played billiards on the frowsy table, and now and then one would remark to the other: "i don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog," and perhaps the other would answer: "i ain't got no frog, but if i had a frog i'd bet you." out on the claim, between pails of water, clemens, as he watched jim gillis or dick stoker "washing," would be apt to say, "i don't see no p'ints about that pan o' dirt that's any better'n any other pan o' dirt," and so they kept it up. then the rain would come again and interfere with their work. one afternoon, when clemens and gillis were following certain tiny-sprayed specks of gold that were leading them to pocket--somewhere up the long slope, the chill downpour set in. gillis, as usual, was washing, and clemens carrying water. the "color" was getting better with every pan, and jim gillis believed that now, after their long waiting, they were to be rewarded. possessed with the miner's passion, he would have gone on washing and climbing toward the precious pocket, regardless of everything. clemens, however, shivering and disgusted, swore that each pail of water was his last. his teeth were chattering and he was wet through. finally he said, in his deliberate way: "jim, i won't carry any more water. this work is too disagreeable." gillis had just taken out a panful of dirt. "bring one more pail, sam," he pleaded. "oh, hell, jim, i won't do it; i'm freezing!" "just one more pail, sam," he pleaded. "no, sir, not a drop, not if i knew there were a million dollars in that pan." gillis tore a page out of his note-book, and hastily posted a thirty-day claim notice by the pan of dirt, and they set out for angel's camp. it kept on raining and storming, and they did not go back. a few days later a letter from steve gillis made clemens decide to return to san francisco. with jim gillis and dick stoker he left angel's and walked across the mountains to jackass hill in the snow-storm--"the first i ever saw in california," he says in his notes. in the mean time the rain had washed away the top of the pan of earth they had left standing on the hillside, and exposed a handful of nuggets-pure gold. two strangers, austrians, had come along and, observing it, had sat down to wait until the thirty-day claim notice posted by jim gillis should expire. they did not mind the rain--not with all that gold in sight--and the minute the thirty days were up they followed the lead a few pans farther and took out--some say ten, some say twenty, thousand dollars. in either case it was a good pocket. mark twain missed it by one pail of water. still, it is just as well, perhaps, when one remembers that vaster nugget of angel's camp--the jumping frog. jim gillis always declared, "if sam had got that pocket he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of his days, like me." in mark twain's old note-book occurs a memorandum of the frog story--a mere casual entry of its main features: coleman with his jumping frog--bet stranger $ --stranger had no frog, and c. got him one:--in the mean time stranger filled c.'s frog full of shot and he couldn't jump. the stranger's frog won. it seemed unimportant enough, no doubt, at the time; but it was the nucleus around which was built a surpassing fame. the hills along the stanislaus have turned out some wonderful nuggets in their time, but no other of such size as that. l back to the tumult from the note-book: february . arrived in stockton p.m. home again home again at the occidental hotel, san francisco--find letters from artemus ward asking me to write a sketch for his new book of nevada territory travels which is soon to come out. too late--ought to have got the letters three months ago. they are dated early in november. he was sorry not to oblige ward, sorry also not to have representation in his book. he wrote explaining the circumstance, and telling the story of his absence. steve gillis, meantime, had returned to san francisco, and settled his difficulties there. the friends again took up residence together. mark twain resumed his daily letters to the enterprise, without further annoyance from official sources. perhaps there was a temporary truce in that direction, though he continued to attack various abuses--civic, private, and artistic--becoming a sort of general censor, establishing for himself the title of the "moralist of the main." the letters were reprinted in san francisco and widely read. now and then some one had the temerity to answer them, but most of his victims maintained a discreet silence. in one of these letters he told of the mexican oyster, a rather tough, unsatisfactory article of diet, which could not stand criticism, and presently disappeared from the market. it was a mistake, however, for him to attack an alta journalist by the name of evans. evans was a poet, and once composed an elegy with a refrain which ended: gone, gone, gone --gone to his endeavor; gone, gone, gone, forever and forever. in the enterprise letter following its publication mark twain referred to this poem. he parodied the refrain and added, "if there is any criticism to make on it i should say there is a little too much 'gone' and not enough 'forever.'" it was a more or less pointless witticism, but it had a humorous quotable flavor, and it made evans mad. in a squib in the alta he retaliated: mark twain has killed the mexican oyster. we only regret that the act was not inspired by a worthier motive. mark twain's sole reason for attacking the mexican oyster was because the restaurant that sold them refused him credit. a deadly thrust like that could not be parried in print. to deny or recriminate would be to appear ridiculous. one could only sweat and breathe vengeance. "joe," he said to goodman, who had come over for a visit, "my one object in life now is to make enough money to stand trial and then go and murder evans." he wrote verses himself sometimes, and lightened his enterprise letters with jingles. one of these concerned tom maguire, the autocrat manager of san francisco theaters. it details maguire's assault on one of his actors. tom maguire, roused to ire, lighted on mcdougal; tore his coat, clutched his throat, and split him in the bugle. for shame! oh, fie! maguire, why will you thus skyugle? why curse and swear, and rip and tear the innocent mcdougal? of bones bereft, almost, you've left vestvali, gentle jew gal; and now you've smashed and almost hashed the form of poor mcdougall goodman remembers that clemens and gillis were together again on california street at this time, and of hearing them sing, "the doleful ballad of the rejected lover," another of mark twain's compositions. it was a wild, blasphemous outburst, and the furious fervor with which mark and steve delivered it, standing side by side and waving their fists, did not render it less objectionable. such memories as these are set down here, for they exhibit a phase of that robust personality, built of the same primeval material from which the world was created--built of every variety of material, in fact, ever incorporated in a human being--equally capable of writing unprintable coarseness and that rarest and most tender of all characterizations, the 'recollections of joan of arc'. li the corner-stone along with his enterprise work, clemens continued to write occasionally for the californian, but for some reason he did not offer the story of the jumping frog. for one thing, he did not regard it highly as literary material. he knew that he had enjoyed it himself, but the humor and fashion of its telling seemed to him of too simple and mild a variety in that day of boisterous incident and exaggerated form. by and by artemus ward turned up in san francisco, and one night mark twain told him his experiences with jim gillis, and in angel's camp; also of ben coon and his tale of the calaveras frog. ward was delighted. "write it," he said. "there is still time to get it into my volume of sketches. send it to carleton, my publisher in new york."--[this is in accordance with mr. clemens's recollection of the matter. the author can find no positive evidence that ward was on the pacific coast again in . it seems likely, therefore, that the telling of the frog story and his approval of it were accomplished by exchange of letters.]--clemens promised to do this, but delayed fulfilment somewhat, and by the time the sketch reached carleton, ward's book was about ready for the press. it did not seem worth while to carleton to make any change of plans that would include the frog story. the publisher handed it over to henry clapp, editor of the saturday press, a perishing sheet, saying: "here, clapp, here's something you can use in your paper." clapp took it thankfully enough, we may believe. "jim smiley and his jumping frog"--[this was the original title.] --appeared in the saturday press of november , , and was immediately copied and quoted far and near. it brought the name of mark twain across the mountains, bore it up and down the atlantic coast, and out over the prairies of the middle west. away from the pacific slope only a reader here and there had known the name before. now every one who took a newspaper was treated to the tale of the wonderful calaveras frog, and received a mental impress of the author's signature. the name mark twain became hardly an institution, as yet, but it made a strong bid for national acceptance. as for its owner, he had no suspicion of these momentous happenings for a considerable time. the telegraph did not carry such news in those days, and it took a good while for the echo of his victory to travel to the coast. when at last a lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author. even artemus ward's opinion of the story had not increased mark twain's regard for it as literature. that it had struck the popular note meant, as he believed, failure for his more highly regarded work. in a letter written january , , he says these things for himself: i do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful. i wish i was back there piloting up and down the river again. verily, all is vanity and little worth--save piloting. to think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those new york people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on! "jim smiley and his jumping frog"--a squib which would never have been written but to please artemus ward, and then it reached new york too late to appear in his book. but no matter. his book was a wretchedly poor one, generally speaking, and it could be no credit to either of us to appear between its covers. this paragraph is from the new york correspondence of the san francisco alta: "mark twain's story in the saturday press of november th, called 'jim smiley and his jumping frog,' has set all new york in a roar, and he may be said to have made his mark. i have been asked fifty times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and near. it is voted the best thing of the day. cannot the 'californian' afford to keep mark all to itself? it should not let him scintillate so widely without first being filtered through the california press." the new york publishing house of carleton & co. gave the sketch to the saturday press when they found it was too late for the book. it is difficult to judge the jumping frog story to-day. it has the intrinsic fundamental value of one of aesop's fables.--[the resemblance of the frog story to the early greek tales must have been noted by prof. henry sidgwick, who synopsized it in greek form and phrase for his book, greek prose composition. through this originated the impression that the story was of athenian root. mark twain himself was deceived, until in , when he met professor sidgwick, who explained that the greek version was the translation and mark twain's the original; that he had thought it unnecessary to give credit for a story so well known. see the jumping frog, harper & bros., , p. .]--it contains a basic idea which is essentially ludicrous, and the quaint simplicity of its telling is convincing and full of charm. it appeared in print at a time when american humor was chaotic, the public taste unformed. we had a vast appreciation for what was comic, with no great number of opportunities for showing it. we were so ready to laugh that when a real opportunity came along we improved it and kept on laughing and repeating the cause of our merriment, directing the attention of our friends to it. whether the story of "jim smiley's frog," offered for the first time today, would capture the public, and become the initial block of a towering fame, is another matter. that the author himself underrated it is certain. that the public, receiving it at what we now term the psychological moment, may have overrated it is by no means impossible. in any case, it does not matter now. the stone rejected by the builder was made the corner-stone of his literary edifice. as such it is immortal. in the letter already quoted, clemens speaks of both bret harte and himself as having quit the 'californian' in future expecting to write for eastern papers. he adds: though i am generally placed at the head of my breed of scribblers in this part of the country, the place properly belongs to bret harte, i think, though he denies it, along with the rest. he wants me to club a lot of old sketches together with a lot of his, and publish a book. i wouldn't do it, only he agrees to take all the trouble. but i want to know whether we are going to make anything out of it, first. however, he has written to a new york publisher, and if we are offered a bargain that will pay for a month's labor we will go to work and prepare the volume for the press. nothing came of the proposed volume, or of other joint literary schemes these two had then in mind. neither of them would seem to have been optimistic as to their future place in american literature; certainly in their most exalted moments they could hardly have dreamed that within half a dozen years they would be the head and front of a new school of letters--the two most talked-of men in america. lii a commission to the sandwich islands whatever his first emotions concerning the success of "jim smiley's frog" may have been, the sudden astonishing leap of that batrachian into american literature gave the author an added prestige at home as well as in distant parts. those about him were inclined to regard him, in some degree at least, as a national literary figure and to pay tribute accordingly. special honors began to be shown to him. a fine new steamer, the ajax, built for the sandwich island trade, carried on its initial trip a select party of guests of which he was invited to make one. he did not go, and reproached himself sorrowfully afterward. if the ajax were back i would go quick, and throw up my correspondence. she had fifty-two invited guests aboard--the cream of the town--gentlemen and ladies, and a splendid brass band. i could not accept because there would be no one to write my correspondence while i was gone. in fact, the daily letter had grown monotonous. he was restless, and the ajax excursion, which he had been obliged to forego, made him still more dissatisfied. an idea occurred to him: the sugar industry of the islands was a matter of great commercial interest to california, while the life and scenery there, picturesquely treated, would appeal to the general reader. he was on excellent terms with james anthony and paul morrill, of the sacramento union; he proposed to them that they send him as their special correspondent to report to their readers, in a series of letters, life, trade, agriculture, and general aspect of the islands. to his vast delight, they gave him the commission. he wrote home joyously now: i am to remain there a month and ransack the islands, the cataracts and volcanoes completely, and write twenty or thirty letters, for which they pay as much money as i would get if i stayed at home. he adds that on his return he expects to start straight across the continent by way of the columbia river, the pend oreille lakes, through montana and down the missouri river. "only two hundred miles of land travel from san francisco to new orleans." so it is: man proposes, while fate, undisturbed, spins serenely on. he sailed by the ajax on her next trip, march ( ), beginning his first sea voyage--a brand-new experience, during which he acquired the names of the sails and parts of the ship, with considerable knowledge of navigation, and of the islands he was to visit--whatever information passengers and sailors could furnish. it was a happy, stormy voyage altogether. in 'roughing it' he has given us some account of it. it was the th of march when he arrived at honolulu, and his first impression of that tranquil harbor remained with him always. in fact, his whole visit there became one of those memory-pictures, full of golden sunlight and peace, to be found somewhere in every human past. the letters of introduction he had brought, and the reputation which had preceded him, guaranteed him welcome and hospitality. officials and private citizens were alike ready to show him their pleasant land, and he fairly reveled in its delicious air, its summer warmth, its soft repose. oh, islands there are on the face of the deep where the leaves never fade and the skies never weep, he quotes in his note-book, and adds: went with mr. damon to his cool, vine-shaded home; no careworn or eager, anxious faces in this land of happy contentment. god, what a contrast with california and the washoe! and in another place: they live in the s. i.--no rush, no worry--merchant goes down to his store like a gentleman at nine--goes home at four and thinks no more of business till next day. d--n san f. style of wearing out life. he fitted in with the languorous island existence, but he had come for business, and he lost not much time. he found there a number of friends from washoe, including the rev. mr. rising, whose health had failed from overwork. by their direction, and under official guidance, he set out on oahu, one of the several curious horses he has immortalized in print, and, accompanied by a pleasant party of ladies and gentlemen, encircled the island of that name, crossed it and recrossed it, visited its various battle-fields, returning to honolulu, lame, sore, sunburnt, but triumphant. his letters home, better even than his union correspondence, reveal his personal interest and enthusiasms. i have got a lot of human bones which i took from one of these battle-fields. i guess i will bring you some of them. i went with the american minister and took dinner this evening with the king's grand chamberlain, who is related to the royal family, and though darker than a mulatto he has an excellent english education, and in manners is an accomplished gentleman. he is to call for me in the morning; we will visit the king in the palace, after dinner they called in the "singing girls," and we had some beautiful music, sung in the native tongue. it was his first association with royalty, and it was human that he should air it a little. in the same letter he states: "i will sail in a day or two on a tour of the other islands, to be gone two months." 'in roughing it' he has given us a picture of his visits to the islands, their plantations, their volcanoes, their natural and historic wonders. he was an insatiable sight-seer then, and a persevering one. the very name of a new point of interest filled him with an eager enthusiasm to be off. no discomfort or risk or distance discouraged him. with a single daring companion--a man who said he could find the way--he crossed the burning floor of the mighty crater of kilauea (then in almost constant eruption), racing across the burning lava floor, jumping wide and bottomless crevices, when a misstep would have meant death. by and by marlette shouted "stop!" i never stopped quicker in my life. i asked what the matter was. he said we were out of the path. he said we must not try to go on until we found it again, for we were surrounded with beds of rotten lava, through which we could easily break and plunge down , feet. i thought boo would answer for me, and was about to say so, when marlette partly proved his statement, crushing through and disappearing to his arm-pits. they made their way across at last, and stood the rest of the night gazing down upon a spectacle of a crater in quivering action, a veritable lake of fire. they had risked their lives for that scene, but it seemed worth while. his open-air life on the river, and the mining camps, had prepared samuel clemens for adventurous hardships. he was thirty years old, with his full account of mental and physical capital. his growth had been slow, but he was entering now upon his golden age; he was fitted for conquest of whatever sort, and he was beginning to realize his power. liii anson burlingame and the "hornet" disaster it was near the end of june when he returned to honolulu from a tour of all the islands, fairly worn out and prostrated with saddle boils. he expected only to rest and be quiet for a season, but all unknown to him startling and historic things were taking place in which he was to have a part--events that would mark another forward stride in his career. the ajax had just come in, bringing his excellency anson burlingame, then returning to his post as minister to china; also general van valkenburg, minister to japan; colonel rumsey and minister burlingame's son, edward, --[edward l. burlingame, now for many years editor of scribner's magazine.]--then a lively boy of eighteen. young burlingame had read "the jumping frog," and was enthusiastic about mark twain and his work. learning that he was in honolulu, laid up at his hotel, the party sent word that they would call on him next morning. clemens felt that he must not accept this honor, sick or well. he crawled out of bed, dressed and shaved himself as quickly as possible, and drove to the american minister's, where the party was staying. they had a hilariously good time. when he returned to his hotel he sent them, by request, whatever he had on hand of his work. general van valkenburg had said to him: "california is proud of mark twain, and some day the american people will be, too, no doubt." there has seldom been a more accurate prophecy. but a still greater event was imminent. on that very day (june , ) there came word of the arrival at sanpahoe, on the island of hawaii, of an open boat containing fifteen starving wretches, who on short, ten-day rations had been buffeting a stormy sea for forty-three days! a vessel, the hornet, from new york, had taken fire and burned "on the line," and since early in may, on that meager sustenance, they had been battling with hundreds of leagues of adverse billows, seeking for land. a few days following the first report, eleven of the rescued men were brought to honolulu and placed in the hospital. mark twain recognized the great news importance of the event. it would be a splendid beat if he could interview the castaways and be the first to get their story to his paper. there was no cable in those days; a vessel for san francisco would sail next morning. it was the opportunity of a lifetime, and he must not miss it. bedridden as he was, the undertaking seemed beyond his strength. but just at this time the burlingame party descended on him, and almost before he knew it he was on the way to the hospital on a cot, escorted by the heads of the joint legations of china and japan. once there, anson burlingame, with his splendid human sympathy and handsome, courtly presence, drew from those enfeebled castaways all the story of their long privation and struggle, that had stretched across forty-three distempered days and four thousand miles of sea. all that mark twain had to do was to listen and make the notes. he put in the night-writing against time. next morning, just as the vessel for the states was drifting away from her dock, a strong hand flung his bulky envelope of manuscript aboard, and if the vessel arrived his great beat was sure. it did arrive, and the three-column story on the front page of the sacramento union, in its issue of july th, gave the public the first detailed history of the terrible hornet disaster and the rescue of those starving men. such a story occupied a wider place in the public interest than it would in these crowded days. the telegraph carried it everywhere, and it was featured as a sensation. mark twain always adored the name and memory of anson burlingame. in his letter home he tells of burlingame's magnanimity in "throwing away an invitation to dine with princes and foreign dignitaries" to help him. "you know i appreciate that kind of thing," he says; which was a true statement, and in future years he never missed an opportunity of paying an instalment on his debt of gratitude. it was proper that he should do so, for the obligation was a far greater one than that contracted in obtaining the tale of the hornet disaster. it was the debt which one owes to a man who, from the deep measure of his understanding, gives encouragement and exactly needed and convincing advice. anson burlingame said to samuel clemens: "you have great ability; i believe you have genius. what you need now is the refinement of association. seek companionship among men of superior intellect and character. refine yourself and your work. never affiliate with inferiors; always climb." clemens never forgot that advice. he did not always observe it, but he rarely failed to realize its gospel. burlingame urged him to travel. "come to pekin next winter," he said, "and visit me. make my house your home. i will give you letters and introduce you. you will have facilities for acquiring information about china." it is not surprising then that mark twain never felt his debt to anson burlingame entirely paid. burlingame came more than once to the hotel, for clemens was really ill now, and they discussed plans for his future betterment. he promised, of course, to visit china, and when he was alone put in a good deal of time planning a trip around the world which would include the great capitals. when not otherwise employed he read; though there was only one book in the hotel, a "blue and gold" edition of dr. holmes's songs in many keys, and this he soon knew almost by heart, from title-page to finis. he was soon up and about. no one could remain ill long in those happy islands. young burlingame came, and suggested walks. once, when clemens hesitated, the young man said: "but there is a scriptural command for you to go." "if you can quote one i'll obey it," said clemens. "very well. the bible says, 'if any man require thee to walk a mile, go with him, twain.'" the command was regarded as sufficient. clemens quoted the witticism later (in his first lecture), and it was often repeated in after-years, ascribed to warner, ward, and a dozen others. its origin was as here set down. under date of july ( ), mark twain's sandwich island note-book says: went to a ball . p.m.--danced till . ; stopped at general van valkenburg's room and talked with him and mr. burlingame and ed burlingame until a.m. from which we may conclude that he had altogether recovered. a few days later the legation party had sailed for china and japan, and on the th clemens himself set out by a slow sailing-vessel to san francisco. they were becalmed and were twenty-five days making the voyage. captain mitchell and others of the wrecked hornet were aboard, and he put in a good deal of time copying their diaries and preparing a magazine article which, he believed, would prove his real entrance to the literary world. the vessel lay almost perfectly still, day after day, and became a regular playground at sea. sundays they had services and mark twain led the choir. "i hope they will have a better opinion of our music in heaven than i have down here," he says in his notes. "if they don't, a thunderbolt will knock this vessel endways." it is perhaps worthy of mention that on the night of the th of july he records having seen another "splendidly colored, lunar rainbow." that he regarded this as an indication of future good-fortune is not surprising, considering the events of the previous year. it was august th when he reached san francisco, and the note-book entry of that day says: home again. no--not home again--in prison again, end all the wild sense of freedom gone. the city seems so cramped and so dreary with toil and care and business anxiety. god help me, i wish i were at sea again! there were compensations, however. he went over to sacramento, and was abundantly welcomed. it was agreed that, in addition to the twenty dollars allowed for each letter, a special bill should be made for the hornet report. "how much do you think it ought to be, mark?" james anthony asked. "oh, i'm a modest man; i don't want the whole union office. call it $ a column." there was a general laugh. the bill was made out at that figure, and he took it to the business office for payment. "the cashier didn't faint," he wrote, many years later, "but he came rather near it. he sent for the proprietors, and they only laughed in their jolly fashion, and said it was a robbery, but 'no matter, pay it. it's all right.' the best men that ever owned a newspaper."--["my debut as a literary person."--collected works.]--though inferior to the descriptive writing which a year later would give him a world-wide fame, the sandwich island letters added greatly to his prestige on the pacific coast. they were convincing, informing; tersely--even eloquently--descriptive, with a vein of humor adapted to their audience. yet to read them now, in the fine nonpareil type in which they were set, is such a wearying task that one can only marvel at their popularity. they were not brilliant literature, by our standards to-day. their humor is usually of a muscular kind, varied with grotesque exaggerations; the literary quality is pretty attenuated. here and there are attempts at verse. he had a fashion in those days of combining two or more poems with distracting, sometimes amusing, effect. examples of these dislocations occur in the union letters; a single stanza will present the general idea: the assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, the turf with their bayonets turning, and his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold, and our lanterns dimly burning. only a trifling portion of the letters found their way into his sandwich island chapters of 'roughing it', five years later. they do, however, reveal a sort of transition stage between the riotous florescence of the comstock and the mellowness of his later style. he was learning to see things with better eyes, from a better point of view. it is not difficult to believe that this literary change of heart was in no small measure due to the influence of anson burlingame. roughing it by mark twain part . chapter xxxi. there were two men in the company who caused me particular discomfort. one was a little swede, about twenty-five years old, who knew only one song, and he was forever singing it. by day we were all crowded into one small, stifling bar-room, and so there was no escaping this person's music. through all the profanity, whisky-guzzling, "old sledge" and quarreling, his monotonous song meandered with never a variation in its tiresome sameness, and it seemed to me, at last, that i would be content to die, in order to be rid of the torture. the other man was a stalwart ruffian called "arkansas," who carried two revolvers in his belt and a bowie knife projecting from his boot, and who was always drunk and always suffering for a fight. but he was so feared, that nobody would accommodate him. he would try all manner of little wary ruses to entrap somebody into an offensive remark, and his face would light up now and then when he fancied he was fairly on the scent of a fight, but invariably his victim would elude his toils and then he would show a disappointment that was almost pathetic. the landlord, johnson, was a meek, well-meaning fellow, and arkansas fastened on him early, as a promising subject, and gave him no rest day or night, for awhile. on the fourth morning, arkansas got drunk and sat himself down to wait for an opportunity. presently johnson came in, just comfortably sociable with whisky, and said: "i reckon the pennsylvania 'lection--" arkansas raised his finger impressively and johnson stopped. arkansas rose unsteadily and confronted him. said he: "wha-what do you know a--about pennsylvania? answer me that. wha--what do you know 'bout pennsylvania?" "i was only goin' to say--" "you was only goin' to say. you was! you was only goin' to say--what was you goin' to say? that's it! that's what i want to know. i want to know wha--what you ('ic) what you know about pennsylvania, since you're makin' yourself so d---d free. answer me that!" "mr. arkansas, if you'd only let me--" "who's a henderin' you? don't you insinuate nothing agin me!--don't you do it. don't you come in here bullyin' around, and cussin' and goin' on like a lunatic--don't you do it. 'coz i won't stand it. if fight's what you want, out with it! i'm your man! out with it!" said johnson, backing into a corner, arkansas following, menacingly: "why, i never said nothing, mr. arkansas. you don't give a man no chance. i was only goin' to say that pennsylvania was goin' to have an election next week--that was all--that was everything i was goin' to say --i wish i may never stir if it wasn't." "well then why d'n't you say it? what did you come swellin' around that way for, and tryin' to raise trouble?" "why i didn't come swellin' around, mr. arkansas--i just--" "i'm a liar am i! ger-reat caesar's ghost--" "oh, please, mr. arkansas, i never meant such a thing as that, i wish i may die if i did. all the boys will tell you that i've always spoke well of you, and respected you more'n any man in the house. ask smith. ain't it so, smith? didn't i say, no longer ago than last night, that for a man that was a gentleman all the time and every way you took him, give me arkansas? i'll leave it to any gentleman here if them warn't the very words i used. come, now, mr. arkansas, le's take a drink--le's shake hands and take a drink. come up--everybody! it's my treat. come up, bill, tom, bob, scotty--come up. i want you all to take a drink with me and arkansas--old arkansas, i call him--bully old arkansas. gimme your hand agin. look at him, boys--just take a look at him. thar stands the whitest man in america!--and the man that denies it has got to fight me, that's all. gimme that old flipper agin!" they embraced, with drunken affection on the landlord's part and unresponsive toleration on the part of arkansas, who, bribed by a drink, was disappointed of his prey once more. but the foolish landlord was so happy to have escaped butchery, that he went on talking when he ought to have marched himself out of danger. the consequence was that arkansas shortly began to glower upon him dangerously, and presently said: "lan'lord, will you p-please make that remark over agin if you please?" "i was a-sayin' to scotty that my father was up'ards of eighty year old when he died." "was that all that you said?" "yes, that was all." "didn't say nothing but that?" "no--nothing." then an uncomfortable silence. arkansas played with his glass a moment, lolling on his elbows on the counter. then he meditatively scratched his left shin with his right boot, while the awkward silence continued. but presently he loafed away toward the stove, looking dissatisfied; roughly shouldered two or three men out of a comfortable position; occupied it himself, gave a sleeping dog a kick that sent him howling under a bench, then spread his long legs and his blanket-coat tails apart and proceeded to warm his back. in a little while he fell to grumbling to himself, and soon he slouched back to the bar and said: "lan'lord, what's your idea for rakin' up old personalities and blowin' about your father? ain't this company agreeable to you? ain't it? if this company ain't agreeable to you, p'r'aps we'd better leave. is that your idea? is that what you're coming at?" "why bless your soul, arkansas, i warn't thinking of such a thing. my father and my mother--" "lan'lord, don't crowd a man! don't do it. if nothing'll do you but a disturbance, out with it like a man ('ic)--but don't rake up old bygones and fling'em in the teeth of a passel of people that wants to be peaceable if they could git a chance. what's the matter with you this mornin', anyway? i never see a man carry on so." "arkansas, i reely didn't mean no harm, and i won't go on with it if it's onpleasant to you. i reckon my licker's got into my head, and what with the flood, and havin' so many to feed and look out for--" "so that's what's a-ranklin' in your heart, is it? you want us to leave do you? there's too many on us. you want us to pack up and swim. is that it? come!" "please be reasonable, arkansas. now you know that i ain't the man to--" "are you a threatenin' me? are you? by george, the man don't live that can skeer me! don't you try to come that game, my chicken--'cuz i can stand a good deal, but i won't stand that. come out from behind that bar till i clean you! you want to drive us out, do you, you sneakin' underhanded hound! come out from behind that bar! i'll learn you to bully and badger and browbeat a gentleman that's forever trying to befriend you and keep you out of trouble!" "please, arkansas, please don't shoot! if there's got to be bloodshed--" "do you hear that, gentlemen? do you hear him talk about bloodshed? so it's blood you want, is it, you ravin' desperado! you'd made up your mind to murder somebody this mornin'--i knowed it perfectly well. i'm the man, am i? it's me you're goin' to murder, is it? but you can't do it 'thout i get one chance first, you thievin' black-hearted, white-livered son of a nigger! draw your weepon!" with that, arkansas began to shoot, and the landlord to clamber over benches, men and every sort of obstacle in a frantic desire to escape. in the midst of the wild hubbub the landlord crashed through a glass door, and as arkansas charged after him the landlord's wife suddenly appeared in the doorway and confronted the desperado with a pair of scissors! her fury was magnificent. with head erect and flashing eye she stood a moment and then advanced, with her weapon raised. the astonished ruffian hesitated, and then fell back a step. she followed. she backed him step by step into the middle of the bar-room, and then, while the wondering crowd closed up and gazed, she gave him such another tongue-lashing as never a cowed and shamefaced braggart got before, perhaps! as she finished and retired victorious, a roar of applause shook the house, and every man ordered "drinks for the crowd" in one and the same breath. the lesson was entirely sufficient. the reign of terror was over, and the arkansas domination broken for good. during the rest of the season of island captivity, there was one man who sat apart in a state of permanent humiliation, never mixing in any quarrel or uttering a boast, and never resenting the insults the once cringing crew now constantly leveled at him, and that man was "arkansas." by the fifth or sixth morning the waters had subsided from the land, but the stream in the old river bed was still high and swift and there was no possibility of crossing it. on the eighth it was still too high for an entirely safe passage, but life in the inn had become next to insupportable by reason of the dirt, drunkenness, fighting, etc., and so we made an effort to get away. in the midst of a heavy snow-storm we embarked in a canoe, taking our saddles aboard and towing our horses after us by their halters. the prussian, ollendorff, was in the bow, with a paddle, ballou paddled in the middle, and i sat in the stern holding the halters. when the horses lost their footing and began to swim, ollendorff got frightened, for there was great danger that the horses would make our aim uncertain, and it was plain that if we failed to land at a certain spot the current would throw us off and almost surely cast us into the main carson, which was a boiling torrent, now. such a catastrophe would be death, in all probability, for we would be swept to sea in the "sink" or overturned and drowned. we warned ollendorff to keep his wits about him and handle himself carefully, but it was useless; the moment the bow touched the bank, he made a spring and the canoe whirled upside down in ten-foot water. ollendorff seized some brush and dragged himself ashore, but ballou and i had to swim for it, encumbered with our overcoats. but we held on to the canoe, and although we were washed down nearly to the carson, we managed to push the boat ashore and make a safe landing. we were cold and water-soaked, but safe. the horses made a landing, too, but our saddles were gone, of course. we tied the animals in the sage-brush and there they had to stay for twenty-four hours. we baled out the canoe and ferried over some food and blankets for them, but we slept one more night in the inn before making another venture on our journey. the next morning it was still snowing furiously when we got away with our new stock of saddles and accoutrements. we mounted and started. the snow lay so deep on the ground that there was no sign of a road perceptible, and the snow-fall was so thick that we could not see more than a hundred yards ahead, else we could have guided our course by the mountain ranges. the case looked dubious, but ollendorff said his instinct was as sensitive as any compass, and that he could "strike a bee-line" for carson city and never diverge from it. he said that if he were to straggle a single point out of the true line his instinct would assail him like an outraged conscience. consequently we dropped into his wake happy and content. for half an hour we poked along warily enough, but at the end of that time we came upon a fresh trail, and ollendorff shouted proudly: "i knew i was as dead certain as a compass, boys! here we are, right in somebody's tracks that will hunt the way for us without any trouble. let's hurry up and join company with the party." so we put the horses into as much of a trot as the deep snow would allow, and before long it was evident that we were gaining on our predecessors, for the tracks grew more distinct. we hurried along, and at the end of an hour the tracks looked still newer and fresher--but what surprised us was, that the number of travelers in advance of us seemed to steadily increase. we wondered how so large a party came to be traveling at such a time and in such a solitude. somebody suggested that it must be a company of soldiers from the fort, and so we accepted that solution and jogged along a little faster still, for they could not be far off now. but the tracks still multiplied, and we began to think the platoon of soldiers was miraculously expanding into a regiment--ballou said they had already increased to five hundred! presently he stopped his horse and said: "boys, these are our own tracks, and we've actually been circussing round and round in a circle for more than two hours, out here in this blind desert! by george this is perfectly hydraulic!" then the old man waxed wroth and abusive. he called ollendorff all manner of hard names--said he never saw such a lurid fool as he was, and ended with the peculiarly venomous opinion that he "did not know as much as a logarythm!" we certainly had been following our own tracks. ollendorff and his "mental compass" were in disgrace from that moment. after all our hard travel, here we were on the bank of the stream again, with the inn beyond dimly outlined through the driving snow-fall. while we were considering what to do, the young swede landed from the canoe and took his pedestrian way carson-wards, singing his same tiresome song about his "sister and his brother" and "the child in the grave with its mother," and in a short minute faded and disappeared in the white oblivion. he was never heard of again. he no doubt got bewildered and lost, and fatigue delivered him over to sleep and sleep betrayed him to death. possibly he followed our treacherous tracks till he became exhausted and dropped. presently the overland stage forded the now fast receding stream and started toward carson on its first trip since the flood came. we hesitated no longer, now, but took up our march in its wake, and trotted merrily along, for we had good confidence in the driver's bump of locality. but our horses were no match for the fresh stage team. we were soon left out of sight; but it was no matter, for we had the deep ruts the wheels made for a guide. by this time it was three in the afternoon, and consequently it was not very long before night came--and not with a lingering twilight, but with a sudden shutting down like a cellar door, as is its habit in that country. the snowfall was still as thick as ever, and of course we could not see fifteen steps before us; but all about us the white glare of the snow-bed enabled us to discern the smooth sugar-loaf mounds made by the covered sage-bushes, and just in front of us the two faint grooves which we knew were the steadily filling and slowly disappearing wheel-tracks. now those sage-bushes were all about the same height--three or four feet; they stood just about seven feet apart, all over the vast desert; each of them was a mere snow-mound, now; in any direction that you proceeded (the same as in a well laid out orchard) you would find yourself moving down a distinctly defined avenue, with a row of these snow-mounds an either side of it--an avenue the customary width of a road, nice and level in its breadth, and rising at the sides in the most natural way, by reason of the mounds. but we had not thought of this. then imagine the chilly thrill that shot through us when it finally occurred to us, far in the night, that since the last faint trace of the wheel-tracks had long ago been buried from sight, we might now be wandering down a mere sage-brush avenue, miles away from the road and diverging further and further away from it all the time. having a cake of ice slipped down one's back is placid comfort compared to it. there was a sudden leap and stir of blood that had been asleep for an hour, and as sudden a rousing of all the drowsing activities in our minds and bodies. we were alive and awake at once--and shaking and quaking with consternation, too. there was an instant halting and dismounting, a bending low and an anxious scanning of the road-bed. useless, of course; for if a faint depression could not be discerned from an altitude of four or five feet above it, it certainly could not with one's nose nearly against it. chapter xxxii. we seemed to be in a road, but that was no proof. we tested this by walking off in various directions--the regular snow-mounds and the regular avenues between them convinced each man that he had found the true road, and that the others had found only false ones. plainly the situation was desperate. we were cold and stiff and the horses were tired. we decided to build a sage-brush fire and camp out till morning. this was wise, because if we were wandering from the right road and the snow-storm continued another day our case would be the next thing to hopeless if we kept on. all agreed that a camp fire was what would come nearest to saving us, now, and so we set about building it. we could find no matches, and so we tried to make shift with the pistols. not a man in the party had ever tried to do such a thing before, but not a man in the party doubted that it could be done, and without any trouble--because every man in the party had read about it in books many a time and had naturally come to believe it, with trusting simplicity, just as he had long ago accepted and believed that other common book-fraud about indians and lost hunters making a fire by rubbing two dry sticks together. we huddled together on our knees in the deep snow, and the horses put their noses together and bowed their patient heads over us; and while the feathery flakes eddied down and turned us into a group of white statuary, we proceeded with the momentous experiment. we broke twigs from a sage bush and piled them on a little cleared place in the shelter of our bodies. in the course of ten or fifteen minutes all was ready, and then, while conversation ceased and our pulses beat low with anxious suspense, ollendorff applied his revolver, pulled the trigger and blew the pile clear out of the county! it was the flattest failure that ever was. this was distressing, but it paled before a greater horror--the horses were gone! i had been appointed to hold the bridles, but in my absorbing anxiety over the pistol experiment i had unconsciously dropped them and the released animals had walked off in the storm. it was useless to try to follow them, for their footfalls could make no sound, and one could pass within two yards of the creatures and never see them. we gave them up without an effort at recovering them, and cursed the lying books that said horses would stay by their masters for protection and companionship in a distressful time like ours. we were miserable enough, before; we felt still more forlorn, now. patiently, but with blighted hope, we broke more sticks and piled them, and once more the prussian shot them into annihilation. plainly, to light a fire with a pistol was an art requiring practice and experience, and the middle of a desert at midnight in a snow-storm was not a good place or time for the acquiring of the accomplishment. we gave it up and tried the other. each man took a couple of sticks and fell to chafing them together. at the end of half an hour we were thoroughly chilled, and so were the sticks. we bitterly execrated the indians, the hunters and the books that had betrayed us with the silly device, and wondered dismally what was next to be done. at this critical moment mr. ballou fished out four matches from the rubbish of an overlooked pocket. to have found four gold bars would have seemed poor and cheap good luck compared to this. one cannot think how good a match looks under such circumstances--or how lovable and precious, and sacredly beautiful to the eye. this time we gathered sticks with high hopes; and when mr. ballou prepared to light the first match, there was an amount of interest centred upon him that pages of writing could not describe. the match burned hopefully a moment, and then went out. it could not have carried more regret with it if it had been a human life. the next match simply flashed and died. the wind puffed the third one out just as it was on the imminent verge of success. we gathered together closer than ever, and developed a solicitude that was rapt and painful, as mr. ballou scratched our last hope on his leg. it lit, burned blue and sickly, and then budded into a robust flame. shading it with his hands, the old gentleman bent gradually down and every heart went with him--everybody, too, for that matter--and blood and breath stood still. the flame touched the sticks at last, took gradual hold upon them--hesitated--took a stronger hold --hesitated again--held its breath five heart-breaking seconds, then gave a sort of human gasp and went out. nobody said a word for several minutes. it was a solemn sort of silence; even the wind put on a stealthy, sinister quiet, and made no more noise than the falling flakes of snow. finally a sad-voiced conversation began, and it was soon apparent that in each of our hearts lay the conviction that this was our last night with the living. i had so hoped that i was the only one who felt so. when the others calmly acknowledged their conviction, it sounded like the summons itself. ollendorff said: "brothers, let us die together. and let us go without one hard feeling towards each other. let us forget and forgive bygones. i know that you have felt hard towards me for turning over the canoe, and for knowing too much and leading you round and round in the snow--but i meant well; forgive me. i acknowledge freely that i have had hard feelings against mr. ballou for abusing me and calling me a logarythm, which is a thing i do not know what, but no doubt a thing considered disgraceful and unbecoming in america, and it has scarcely been out of my mind and has hurt me a great deal--but let it go; i forgive mr. ballou with all my heart, and--" poor ollendorff broke down and the tears came. he was not alone, for i was crying too, and so was mr. ballou. ollendorff got his voice again and forgave me for things i had done and said. then he got out his bottle of whisky and said that whether he lived or died he would never touch another drop. he said he had given up all hope of life, and although ill-prepared, was ready to submit humbly to his fate; that he wished he could be spared a little longer, not for any selfish reason, but to make a thorough reform in his character, and by devoting himself to helping the poor, nursing the sick, and pleading with the people to guard themselves against the evils of intemperance, make his life a beneficent example to the young, and lay it down at last with the precious reflection that it had not been lived in vain. he ended by saying that his reform should begin at this moment, even here in the presence of death, since no longer time was to be vouchsafed wherein to prosecute it to men's help and benefit--and with that he threw away the bottle of whisky. mr. ballou made remarks of similar purport, and began the reform he could not live to continue, by throwing away the ancient pack of cards that had solaced our captivity during the flood and made it bearable. he said he never gambled, but still was satisfied that the meddling with cards in any way was immoral and injurious, and no man could be wholly pure and blemishless without eschewing them. "and therefore," continued he, "in doing this act i already feel more in sympathy with that spiritual saturnalia necessary to entire and obsolete reform." these rolling syllables touched him as no intelligible eloquence could have done, and the old man sobbed with a mournfulness not unmingled with satisfaction. my own remarks were of the same tenor as those of my comrades, and i know that the feelings that prompted them were heartfelt and sincere. we were all sincere, and all deeply moved and earnest, for we were in the presence of death and without hope. i threw away my pipe, and in doing it felt that at last i was free of a hated vice and one that had ridden me like a tyrant all my days. while i yet talked, the thought of the good i might have done in the world and the still greater good i might now do, with these new incentives and higher and better aims to guide me if i could only be spared a few years longer, overcame me and the tears came again. we put our arms about each other's necks and awaited the warning drowsiness that precedes death by freezing. it came stealing over us presently, and then we bade each other a last farewell. a delicious dreaminess wrought its web about my yielding senses, while the snow-flakes wove a winding sheet about my conquered body. oblivion came. the battle of life was done. chapter xxxiii. i do not know how long i was in a state of forgetfulness, but it seemed an age. a vague consciousness grew upon me by degrees, and then came a gathering anguish of pain in my limbs and through all my body. i shuddered. the thought flitted through my brain, "this is death--this is the hereafter." then came a white upheaval at my side, and a voice said, with bitterness: "will some gentleman be so good as to kick me behind?" it was ballou--at least it was a towzled snow image in a sitting posture, with ballou's voice. i rose up, and there in the gray dawn, not fifteen steps from us, were the frame buildings of a stage station, and under a shed stood our still saddled and bridled horses! an arched snow-drift broke up, now, and ollendorff emerged from it, and the three of us sat and stared at the houses without speaking a word. we really had nothing to say. we were like the profane man who could not "do the subject justice," the whole situation was so painfully ridiculous and humiliating that words were tame and we did not know where to commence anyhow. the joy in our hearts at our deliverance was poisoned; well-nigh dissipated, indeed. we presently began to grow pettish by degrees, and sullen; and then, angry at each other, angry at ourselves, angry at everything in general, we moodily dusted the snow from our clothing and in unsociable single file plowed our way to the horses, unsaddled them, and sought shelter in the station. i have scarcely exaggerated a detail of this curious and absurd adventure. it occurred almost exactly as i have stated it. we actually went into camp in a snow-drift in a desert, at midnight in a storm, forlorn and hopeless, within fifteen steps of a comfortable inn. for two hours we sat apart in the station and ruminated in disgust. the mystery was gone, now, and it was plain enough why the horses had deserted us. without a doubt they were under that shed a quarter of a minute after they had left us, and they must have overheard and enjoyed all our confessions and lamentations. after breakfast we felt better, and the zest of life soon came back. the world looked bright again, and existence was as dear to us as ever. presently an uneasiness came over me--grew upon me--assailed me without ceasing. alas, my regeneration was not complete--i wanted to smoke! i resisted with all my strength, but the flesh was weak. i wandered away alone and wrestled with myself an hour. i recalled my promises of reform and preached to myself persuasively, upbraidingly, exhaustively. but it was all vain, i shortly found myself sneaking among the snow-drifts hunting for my pipe. i discovered it after a considerable search, and crept away to hide myself and enjoy it. i remained behind the barn a good while, asking myself how i would feel if my braver, stronger, truer comrades should catch me in my degradation. at last i lit the pipe, and no human being can feel meaner and baser than i did then. i was ashamed of being in my own pitiful company. still dreading discovery, i felt that perhaps the further side of the barn would be somewhat safer, and so i turned the corner. as i turned the one corner, smoking, ollendorff turned the other with his bottle to his lips, and between us sat unconscious ballou deep in a game of "solitaire" with the old greasy cards! absurdity could go no farther. we shook hands and agreed to say no more about "reform" and "examples to the rising generation." the station we were at was at the verge of the twenty-six-mile desert. if we had approached it half an hour earlier the night before, we must have heard men shouting there and firing pistols; for they were expecting some sheep drovers and their flocks and knew that they would infallibly get lost and wander out of reach of help unless guided by sounds. while we remained at the station, three of the drovers arrived, nearly exhausted with their wanderings, but two others of their party were never heard of afterward. we reached carson in due time, and took a rest. this rest, together with preparations for the journey to esmeralda, kept us there a week, and the delay gave us the opportunity to be present at the trial of the great land-slide case of hyde vs. morgan--an episode which is famous in nevada to this day. after a word or two of necessary explanation, i will set down the history of this singular affair just as it transpired. chapter xxxiv. the mountains are very high and steep about carson, eagle and washoe valleys--very high and very steep, and so when the snow gets to melting off fast in the spring and the warm surface-earth begins to moisten and soften, the disastrous land-slides commence. the reader cannot know what a land-slide is, unless he has lived in that country and seen the whole side of a mountain taken off some fine morning and deposited down in the valley, leaving a vast, treeless, unsightly scar upon the mountain's front to keep the circumstance fresh in his memory all the years that he may go on living within seventy miles of that place. general buncombe was shipped out to nevada in the invoice of territorial officers, to be united states attorney. he considered himself a lawyer of parts, and he very much wanted an opportunity to manifest it--partly for the pure gratification of it and partly because his salary was territorially meagre (which is a strong expression). now the older citizens of a new territory look down upon the rest of the world with a calm, benevolent compassion, as long as it keeps out of the way--when it gets in the way they snub it. sometimes this latter takes the shape of a practical joke. one morning dick hyde rode furiously up to general buncombe's door in carson city and rushed into his presence without stopping to tie his horse. he seemed much excited. he told the general that he wanted him to conduct a suit for him and would pay him five hundred dollars if he achieved a victory. and then, with violent gestures and a world of profanity, he poured out his grief. he said it was pretty well known that for some years he had been farming (or ranching as the more customary term is) in washoe district, and making a successful thing of it, and furthermore it was known that his ranch was situated just in the edge of the valley, and that tom morgan owned a ranch immediately above it on the mountain side. and now the trouble was, that one of those hated and dreaded land-slides had come and slid morgan's ranch, fences, cabins, cattle, barns and everything down on top of his ranch and exactly covered up every single vestige of his property, to a depth of about thirty-eight feet. morgan was in possession and refused to vacate the premises--said he was occupying his own cabin and not interfering with anybody else's--and said the cabin was standing on the same dirt and same ranch it had always stood on, and he would like to see anybody make him vacate. "and when i reminded him," said hyde, weeping, "that it was on top of my ranch and that he was trespassing, he had the infernal meanness to ask me why didn't i stay on my ranch and hold possession when i see him a-coming! why didn't i stay on it, the blathering lunatic--by george, when i heard that racket and looked up that hill it was just like the whole world was a-ripping and a-tearing down that mountain side --splinters, and cord-wood, thunder and lightning, hail and snow, odds and ends of hay stacks, and awful clouds of dust!--trees going end over end in the air, rocks as big as a house jumping 'bout a thousand feet high and busting into ten million pieces, cattle turned inside out and a-coming head on with their tails hanging out between their teeth!--and in the midst of all that wrack and destruction sot that cussed morgan on his gate-post, a-wondering why i didn't stay and hold possession! laws bless me, i just took one glimpse, general, and lit out'n the county in three jumps exactly. "but what grinds me is that that morgan hangs on there and won't move off'n that ranch--says it's his'n and he's going to keep it--likes it better'n he did when it was higher up the hill. mad! well, i've been so mad for two days i couldn't find my way to town--been wandering around in the brush in a starving condition--got anything here to drink, general? but i'm here now, and i'm a-going to law. you hear me!" never in all the world, perhaps, were a man's feelings so outraged as were the general's. he said he had never heard of such high-handed conduct in all his life as this morgan's. and he said there was no use in going to law--morgan had no shadow of right to remain where he was --nobody in the wide world would uphold him in it, and no lawyer would take his case and no judge listen to it. hyde said that right there was where he was mistaken--everybody in town sustained morgan; hal brayton, a very smart lawyer, had taken his case; the courts being in vacation, it was to be tried before a referee, and ex-governor roop had already been appointed to that office and would open his court in a large public hall near the hotel at two that afternoon. the general was amazed. he said he had suspected before that the people of that territory were fools, and now he knew it. but he said rest easy, rest easy and collect the witnesses, for the victory was just as certain as if the conflict were already over. hyde wiped away his tears and left. at two in the afternoon referee roop's court opened and roop appeared throned among his sheriffs, the witnesses, and spectators, and wearing upon his face a solemnity so awe-inspiring that some of his fellow-conspirators had misgivings that maybe he had not comprehended, after all, that this was merely a joke. an unearthly stillness prevailed, for at the slightest noise the judge uttered sternly the command: "order in the court!" and the sheriffs promptly echoed it. presently the general elbowed his way through the crowd of spectators, with his arms full of law-books, and on his ears fell an order from the judge which was the first respectful recognition of his high official dignity that had ever saluted them, and it trickled pleasantly through his whole system: "way for the united states attorney!" the witnesses were called--legislators, high government officers, ranchmen, miners, indians, chinamen, negroes. three fourths of them were called by the defendant morgan, but no matter, their testimony invariably went in favor of the plaintiff hyde. each new witness only added new testimony to the absurdity of a man's claiming to own another man's property because his farm had slid down on top of it. then the morgan lawyers made their speeches, and seemed to make singularly weak ones --they did really nothing to help the morgan cause. and now the general, with exultation in his face, got up and made an impassioned effort; he pounded the table, he banged the law-books, he shouted, and roared, and howled, he quoted from everything and everybody, poetry, sarcasm, statistics, history, pathos, bathos, blasphemy, and wound up with a grand war-whoop for free speech, freedom of the press, free schools, the glorious bird of america and the principles of eternal justice! [applause.] when the general sat down, he did it with the conviction that if there was anything in good strong testimony, a great speech and believing and admiring countenances all around, mr. morgan's case was killed. ex-governor roop leant his head upon his hand for some minutes, thinking, and the still audience waited for his decision. then he got up and stood erect, with bended head, and thought again. then he walked the floor with long, deliberate strides, his chin in his hand, and still the audience waited. at last he returned to his throne, seated himself, and began impressively: "gentlemen, i feel the great responsibility that rests upon me this day. this is no ordinary case. on the contrary it is plain that it is the most solemn and awful that ever man was called upon to decide. gentlemen, i have listened attentively to the evidence, and have perceived that the weight of it, the overwhelming weight of it, is in favor of the plaintiff hyde. i have listened also to the remarks of counsel, with high interest--and especially will i commend the masterly and irrefutable logic of the distinguished gentleman who represents the plaintiff. but gentlemen, let us beware how we allow mere human testimony, human ingenuity in argument and human ideas of equity, to influence us at a moment so solemn as this. gentlemen, it ill becomes us, worms as we are, to meddle with the decrees of heaven. it is plain to me that heaven, in its inscrutable wisdom, has seen fit to move this defendant's ranch for a purpose. we are but creatures, and we must submit. if heaven has chosen to favor the defendant morgan in this marked and wonderful manner; and if heaven, dissatisfied with the position of the morgan ranch upon the mountain side, has chosen to remove it to a position more eligible and more advantageous for its owner, it ill becomes us, insects as we are, to question the legality of the act or inquire into the reasons that prompted it. no--heaven created the ranches and it is heaven's prerogative to rearrange them, to experiment with them around at its pleasure. it is for us to submit, without repining. "i warn you that this thing which has happened is a thing with which the sacrilegious hands and brains and tongues of men must not meddle. gentlemen, it is the verdict of this court that the plaintiff, richard hyde, has been deprived of his ranch by the visitation of god! and from this decision there is no appeal." buncombe seized his cargo of law-books and plunged out of the court-room frantic with indignation. he pronounced roop to be a miraculous fool, an inspired idiot. in all good faith he returned at night and remonstrated with roop upon his extravagant decision, and implored him to walk the floor and think for half an hour, and see if he could not figure out some sort of modification of the verdict. roop yielded at last and got up to walk. he walked two hours and a half, and at last his face lit up happily and he told buncombe it had occurred to him that the ranch underneath the new morgan ranch still belonged to hyde, that his title to the ground was just as good as it had ever been, and therefore he was of opinion that hyde had a right to dig it out from under there and-- the general never waited to hear the end of it. he was always an impatient and irascible man, that way. at the end of two months the fact that he had been played upon with a joke had managed to bore itself, like another hoosac tunnel, through the solid adamant of his understanding. chapter xxxv. when we finally left for esmeralda, horseback, we had an addition to the company in the person of capt. john nye, the governor's brother. he had a good memory, and a tongue hung in the middle. this is a combination which gives immortality to conversation. capt. john never suffered the talk to flag or falter once during the hundred and twenty miles of the journey. in addition to his conversational powers, he had one or two other endowments of a marked character. one was a singular "handiness" about doing anything and everything, from laying out a railroad or organizing a political party, down to sewing on buttons, shoeing a horse, or setting a broken leg, or a hen. another was a spirit of accommodation that prompted him to take the needs, difficulties and perplexities of anybody and everybody upon his own shoulders at any and all times, and dispose of them with admirable facility and alacrity--hence he always managed to find vacant beds in crowded inns, and plenty to eat in the emptiest larders. and finally, wherever he met a man, woman or child, in camp, inn or desert, he either knew such parties personally or had been acquainted with a relative of the same. such another traveling comrade was never seen before. i cannot forbear giving a specimen of the way in which he overcame difficulties. on the second day out, we arrived, very tired and hungry, at a poor little inn in the desert, and were told that the house was full, no provisions on hand, and neither hay nor barley to spare for the horses--must move on. the rest of us wanted to hurry on while it was yet light, but capt. john insisted on stopping awhile. we dismounted and entered. there was no welcome for us on any face. capt. john began his blandishments, and within twenty minutes he had accomplished the following things, viz.: found old acquaintances in three teamsters; discovered that he used to go to school with the landlord's mother; recognized his wife as a lady whose life he had saved once in california, by stopping her runaway horse; mended a child's broken toy and won the favor of its mother, a guest of the inn; helped the hostler bleed a horse, and prescribed for another horse that had the "heaves"; treated the entire party three times at the landlord's bar; produced a later paper than anybody had seen for a week and sat himself down to read the news to a deeply interested audience. the result, summed up, was as follows: the hostler found plenty of feed for our horses; we had a trout supper, an exceedingly sociable time after it, good beds to sleep in, and a surprising breakfast in the morning--and when we left, we left lamented by all! capt. john had some bad traits, but he had some uncommonly valuable ones to offset them with. esmeralda was in many respects another humboldt, but in a little more forward state. the claims we had been paying assessments on were entirely worthless, and we threw them away. the principal one cropped out of the top of a knoll that was fourteen feet high, and the inspired board of directors were running a tunnel under that knoll to strike the ledge. the tunnel would have to be seventy feet long, and would then strike the ledge at the same dept that a shaft twelve feet deep would have reached! the board were living on the "assessments." [n.b.--this hint comes too late for the enlightenment of new york silver miners; they have already learned all about this neat trick by experience.] the board had no desire to strike the ledge, knowing that it was as barren of silver as a curbstone. this reminiscence calls to mind jim townsend's tunnel. he had paid assessments on a mine called the "daley" till he was well-nigh penniless. finally an assessment was levied to run a tunnel two hundred and fifty feet on the daley, and townsend went up on the hill to look into matters. he found the daley cropping out of the apex of an exceedingly sharp-pointed peak, and a couple of men up there "facing" the proposed tunnel. townsend made a calculation. then he said to the men: "so you have taken a contract to run a tunnel into this hill two hundred and fifty feet to strike this ledge?" "yes, sir." "well, do you know that you have got one of the most expensive and arduous undertakings before you that was ever conceived by man?" "why no--how is that?" "because this hill is only twenty-five feet through from side to side; and so you have got to build two hundred and twenty-five feet of your tunnel on trestle-work!" the ways of silver mining boards are exceedingly dark and sinuous. we took up various claims, and commenced shafts and tunnels on them, but never finished any of them. we had to do a certain amount of work on each to "hold" it, else other parties could seize our property after the expiration of ten days. we were always hunting up new claims and doing a little work on them and then waiting for a buyer--who never came. we never found any ore that would yield more than fifty dollars a ton; and as the mills charged fifty dollars a ton for working ore and extracting the silver, our pocket-money melted steadily away and none returned to take its place. we lived in a little cabin and cooked for ourselves; and altogether it was a hard life, though a hopeful one--for we never ceased to expect fortune and a customer to burst upon us some day. at last, when flour reached a dollar a pound, and money could not be borrowed on the best security at less than eight per cent a month (i being without the security, too), i abandoned mining and went to milling. that is to say, i went to work as a common laborer in a quartz mill, at ten dollars a week and board. chapter xxxvi. i had already learned how hard and long and dismal a task it is to burrow down into the bowels of the earth and get out the coveted ore; and now i learned that the burrowing was only half the work; and that to get the silver out of the ore was the dreary and laborious other half of it. we had to turn out at six in the morning and keep at it till dark. this mill was a six-stamp affair, driven by steam. six tall, upright rods of iron, as large as a man's ankle, and heavily shod with a mass of iron and steel at their lower ends, were framed together like a gate, and these rose and fell, one after the other, in a ponderous dance, in an iron box called a "battery." each of these rods or stamps weighed six hundred pounds. one of us stood by the battery all day long, breaking up masses of silver-bearing rock with a sledge and shoveling it into the battery. the ceaseless dance of the stamps pulverized the rock to powder, and a stream of water that trickled into the battery turned it to a creamy paste. the minutest particles were driven through a fine wire screen which fitted close around the battery, and were washed into great tubs warmed by super-heated steam--amalgamating pans, they are called. the mass of pulp in the pans was kept constantly stirred up by revolving "mullers." a quantity of quicksilver was kept always in the battery, and this seized some of the liberated gold and silver particles and held on to them; quicksilver was shaken in a fine shower into the pans, also, about every half hour, through a buckskin sack. quantities of coarse salt and sulphate of copper were added, from time to time to assist the amalgamation by destroying base metals which coated the gold and silver and would not let it unite with the quicksilver. all these tiresome things we had to attend to constantly. streams of dirty water flowed always from the pans and were carried off in broad wooden troughs to the ravine. one would not suppose that atoms of gold and silver would float on top of six inches of water, but they did; and in order to catch them, coarse blankets were laid in the troughs, and little obstructing "riffles" charged with quicksilver were placed here and there across the troughs also. these riffles had to be cleaned and the blankets washed out every evening, to get their precious accumulations--and after all this eternity of trouble one third of the silver and gold in a ton of rock would find its way to the end of the troughs in the ravine at last and have to be worked over again some day. there is nothing so aggravating as silver milling. there never was any idle time in that mill. there was always something to do. it is a pity that adam could not have gone straight out of eden into a quartz mill, in order to understand the full force of his doom to "earn his bread by the sweat of his brow." every now and then, during the day, we had to scoop some pulp out of the pans, and tediously "wash" it in a horn spoon--wash it little by little over the edge till at last nothing was left but some little dull globules of quicksilver in the bottom. if they were soft and yielding, the pan needed some salt or some sulphate of copper or some other chemical rubbish to assist digestion; if they were crisp to the touch and would retain a dint, they were freighted with all the silver and gold they could seize and hold, and consequently the pan needed a fresh charge of quicksilver. when there was nothing else to do, one could always "screen tailings." that is to say, he could shovel up the dried sand that had washed down to the ravine through the troughs and dash it against an upright wire screen to free it from pebbles and prepare it for working over. the process of amalgamation differed in the various mills, and this included changes in style of pans and other machinery, and a great diversity of opinion existed as to the best in use, but none of the methods employed, involved the principle of milling ore without "screening the tailings." of all recreations in the world, screening tailings on a hot day, with a long-handled shovel, is the most undesirable. at the end of the week the machinery was stopped and we "cleaned up." that is to say, we got the pulp out of the pans and batteries, and washed the mud patiently away till nothing was left but the long accumulating mass of quicksilver, with its imprisoned treasures. this we made into heavy, compact snow-balls, and piled them up in a bright, luxurious heap for inspection. making these snow-balls cost me a fine gold ring--that and ignorance together; for the quicksilver invaded the ring with the same facility with which water saturates a sponge--separated its particles and the ring crumbled to pieces. we put our pile of quicksilver balls into an iron retort that had a pipe leading from it to a pail of water, and then applied a roasting heat. the quicksilver turned to vapor, escaped through the pipe into the pail, and the water turned it into good wholesome quicksilver again. quicksilver is very costly, and they never waste it. on opening the retort, there was our week's work--a lump of pure white, frosty looking silver, twice as large as a man's head. perhaps a fifth of the mass was gold, but the color of it did not show--would not have shown if two thirds of it had been gold. we melted it up and made a solid brick of it by pouring it into an iron brick-mould. by such a tedious and laborious process were silver bricks obtained. this mill was but one of many others in operation at the time. the first one in nevada was built at egan canyon and was a small insignificant affair and compared most unfavorably with some of the immense establishments afterwards located at virginia city and elsewhere. from our bricks a little corner was chipped off for the "fire-assay"--a method used to determine the proportions of gold, silver and base metals in the mass. this is an interesting process. the chip is hammered out as thin as paper and weighed on scales so fine and sensitive that if you weigh a two-inch scrap of paper on them and then write your name on the paper with a course, soft pencil and weigh it again, the scales will take marked notice of the addition. then a little lead (also weighed) is rolled up with the flake of silver and the two are melted at a great heat in a small vessel called a cupel, made by compressing bone ashes into a cup-shape in a steel mold. the base metals oxydize and are absorbed with the lead into the pores of the cupel. a button or globule of perfectly pure gold and silver is left behind, and by weighing it and noting the loss, the assayer knows the proportion of base metal the brick contains. he has to separate the gold from the silver now. the button is hammered out flat and thin, put in the furnace and kept some time at a red heat; after cooling it off it is rolled up like a quill and heated in a glass vessel containing nitric acid; the acid dissolves the silver and leaves the gold pure and ready to be weighed on its own merits. then salt water is poured into the vessel containing the dissolved silver and the silver returns to palpable form again and sinks to the bottom. nothing now remains but to weigh it; then the proportions of the several metals contained in the brick are known, and the assayer stamps the value of the brick upon its surface. the sagacious reader will know now, without being told, that the speculative miner, in getting a "fire-assay" made of a piece of rock from his mine (to help him sell the same), was not in the habit of picking out the least valuable fragment of rock on his dump-pile, but quite the contrary. i have seen men hunt over a pile of nearly worthless quartz for an hour, and at last find a little piece as large as a filbert, which was rich in gold and silver--and this was reserved for a fire-assay! of course the fire-assay would demonstrate that a ton of such rock would yield hundreds of dollars--and on such assays many an utterly worthless mine was sold. assaying was a good business, and so some men engaged in it, occasionally, who were not strictly scientific and capable. one assayer got such rich results out of all specimens brought to him that in time he acquired almost a monopoly of the business. but like all men who achieve success, he became an object of envy and suspicion. the other assayers entered into a conspiracy against him, and let some prominent citizens into the secret in order to show that they meant fairly. then they broke a little fragment off a carpenter's grindstone and got a stranger to take it to the popular scientist and get it assayed. in the course of an hour the result came--whereby it appeared that a ton of that rock would yield $ , . in silver and $ . in gold! due publication of the whole matter was made in the paper, and the popular assayer left town "between two days." i will remark, in passing, that i only remained in the milling business one week. i told my employer i could not stay longer without an advance in my wages; that i liked quartz milling, indeed was infatuated with it; that i had never before grown so tenderly attached to an occupation in so short a time; that nothing, it seemed to me, gave such scope to intellectual activity as feeding a battery and screening tailings, and nothing so stimulated the moral attributes as retorting bullion and washing blankets--still, i felt constrained to ask an increase of salary. he said he was paying me ten dollars a week, and thought it a good round sum. how much did i want? i said about four hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was about all i could reasonably ask, considering the hard times. i was ordered off the premises! and yet, when i look back to those days and call to mind the exceeding hardness of the labor i performed in that mill, i only regret that i did not ask him seven hundred thousand. shortly after this i began to grow crazy, along with the rest of the population, about the mysterious and wonderful "cement mine," and to make preparations to take advantage of any opportunity that might offer to go and help hunt for it. chapter xxxvii. it was somewhere in the neighborhood of mono lake that the marvellous whiteman cement mine was supposed to lie. every now and then it would be reported that mr. w. had passed stealthily through esmeralda at dead of night, in disguise, and then we would have a wild excitement--because he must be steering for his secret mine, and now was the time to follow him. in less than three hours after daylight all the horses and mules and donkeys in the vicinity would be bought, hired or stolen, and half the community would be off for the mountains, following in the wake of whiteman. but w. would drift about through the mountain gorges for days together, in a purposeless sort of way, until the provisions of the miners ran out, and they would have to go back home. i have known it reported at eleven at night, in a large mining camp, that whiteman had just passed through, and in two hours the streets, so quiet before, would be swarming with men and animals. every individual would be trying to be very secret, but yet venturing to whisper to just one neighbor that w. had passed through. and long before daylight--this in the dead of winter--the stampede would be complete, the camp deserted, and the whole population gone chasing after w. the tradition was that in the early immigration, more than twenty years ago, three young germans, brothers, who had survived an indian massacre on the plains, wandered on foot through the deserts, avoiding all trails and roads, and simply holding a westerly direction and hoping to find california before they starved, or died of fatigue. and in a gorge in the mountains they sat down to rest one day, when one of them noticed a curious vein of cement running along the ground, shot full of lumps of dull yellow metal. they saw that it was gold, and that here was a fortune to be acquired in a single day. the vein was about as wide as a curbstone, and fully two thirds of it was pure gold. every pound of the wonderful cement was worth well-nigh $ . each of the brothers loaded himself with about twenty-five pounds of it, and then they covered up all traces of the vein, made a rude drawing of the locality and the principal landmarks in the vicinity, and started westward again. but troubles thickened about them. in their wanderings one brother fell and broke his leg, and the others were obliged to go on and leave him to die in the wilderness. another, worn out and starving, gave up by and by, and laid down to die, but after two or three weeks of incredible hardships, the third reached the settlements of california exhausted, sick, and his mind deranged by his sufferings. he had thrown away all his cement but a few fragments, but these were sufficient to set everybody wild with excitement. however, he had had enough of the cement country, and nothing could induce him to lead a party thither. he was entirely content to work on a farm for wages. but he gave whiteman his map, and described the cement region as well as he could and thus transferred the curse to that gentleman--for when i had my one accidental glimpse of mr. w. in esmeralda he had been hunting for the lost mine, in hunger and thirst, poverty and sickness, for twelve or thirteen years. some people believed he had found it, but most people believed he had not. i saw a piece of cement as large as my fist which was said to have been given to whiteman by the young german, and it was of a seductive nature. lumps of virgin gold were as thick in it as raisins in a slice of fruit cake. the privilege of working such a mine one week would be sufficient for a man of reasonable desires. a new partner of ours, a mr. higbie, knew whiteman well by sight, and a friend of ours, a mr. van dorn, was well acquainted with him, and not only that, but had whiteman's promise that he should have a private hint in time to enable him to join the next cement expedition. van dorn had promised to extend the hint to us. one evening higbie came in greatly excited, and said he felt certain he had recognized whiteman, up town, disguised and in a pretended state of intoxication. in a little while van dorn arrived and confirmed the news; and so we gathered in our cabin and with heads close together arranged our plans in impressive whispers. we were to leave town quietly, after midnight, in two or three small parties, so as not to attract attention, and meet at dawn on the "divide" overlooking mono lake, eight or nine miles distant. we were to make no noise after starting, and not speak above a whisper under any circumstances. it was believed that for once whiteman's presence was unknown in the town and his expedition unsuspected. our conclave broke up at nine o'clock, and we set about our preparation diligently and with profound secrecy. at eleven o'clock we saddled our horses, hitched them with their long riatas (or lassos), and then brought out a side of bacon, a sack of beans, a small sack of coffee, some sugar, a hundred pounds of flour in sacks, some tin cups and a coffee pot, frying pan and some few other necessary articles. all these things were "packed" on the back of a led horse--and whoever has not been taught, by a spanish adept, to pack an animal, let him never hope to do the thing by natural smartness. that is impossible. higbie had had some experience, but was not perfect. he put on the pack saddle (a thing like a saw-buck), piled the property on it and then wound a rope all over and about it and under it, "every which way," taking a hitch in it every now and then, and occasionally surging back on it till the horse's sides sunk in and he gasped for breath--but every time the lashings grew tight in one place they loosened in another. we never did get the load tight all over, but we got it so that it would do, after a fashion, and then we started, in single file, close order, and without a word. it was a dark night. we kept the middle of the road, and proceeded in a slow walk past the rows of cabins, and whenever a miner came to his door i trembled for fear the light would shine on us an excite curiosity. but nothing happened. we began the long winding ascent of the canyon, toward the "divide," and presently the cabins began to grow infrequent, and the intervals between them wider and wider, and then i began to breathe tolerably freely and feel less like a thief and a murderer. i was in the rear, leading the pack horse. as the ascent grew steeper he grew proportionately less satisfied with his cargo, and began to pull back on his riata occasionally and delay progress. my comrades were passing out of sight in the gloom. i was getting anxious. i coaxed and bullied the pack horse till i presently got him into a trot, and then the tin cups and pans strung about his person frightened him and he ran. his riata was wound around the pummel of my saddle, and so, as he went by he dragged me from my horse and the two animals traveled briskly on without me. but i was not alone--the loosened cargo tumbled overboard from the pack horse and fell close to me. it was abreast of almost the last cabin. a miner came out and said: "hello!" i was thirty steps from him, and knew he could not see me, it was so very dark in the shadow of the mountain. so i lay still. another head appeared in the light of the cabin door, and presently the two men walked toward me. they stopped within ten steps of me, and one said: "sh! listen." i could not have been in a more distressed state if i had been escaping justice with a price on my head. then the miners appeared to sit down on a boulder, though i could not see them distinctly enough to be very sure what they did. one said: "i heard a noise, as plain as i ever heard anything. it seemed to be about there--" a stone whizzed by my head. i flattened myself out in the dust like a postage stamp, and thought to myself if he mended his aim ever so little he would probably hear another noise. in my heart, now, i execrated secret expeditions. i promised myself that this should be my last, though the sierras were ribbed with cement veins. then one of the men said: "i'll tell you what! welch knew what he was talking about when he said he saw whiteman to-day. i heard horses--that was the noise. i am going down to welch's, right away." they left and i was glad. i did not care whither they went, so they went. i was willing they should visit welch, and the sooner the better. as soon as they closed their cabin door my comrades emerged from the gloom; they had caught the horses and were waiting for a clear coast again. we remounted the cargo on the pack horse and got under way, and as day broke we reached the "divide" and joined van dorn. then we journeyed down into the valley of the lake, and feeling secure, we halted to cook breakfast, for we were tired and sleepy and hungry. three hours later the rest of the population filed over the "divide" in a long procession, and drifted off out of sight around the borders of the lake! whether or not my accident had produced this result we never knew, but at least one thing was certain--the secret was out and whiteman would not enter upon a search for the cement mine this time. we were filled with chagrin. we held a council and decided to make the best of our misfortune and enjoy a week's holiday on the borders of the curious lake. mono, it is sometimes called, and sometimes the "dead sea of california." it is one of the strangest freaks of nature to be found in any land, but it is hardly ever mentioned in print and very seldom visited, because it lies away off the usual routes of travel and besides is so difficult to get at that only men content to endure the roughest life will consent to take upon themselves the discomforts of such a trip. on the morning of our second day, we traveled around to a remote and particularly wild spot on the borders of the lake, where a stream of fresh, ice-cold water entered it from the mountain side, and then we went regularly into camp. we hired a large boat and two shot-guns from a lonely ranchman who lived some ten miles further on, and made ready for comfort and recreation. we soon got thoroughly acquainted with the lake and all its peculiarities. chapter xxxviii. mono lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, and is guarded by mountains two thousand feet higher, whose summits are always clothed in clouds. this solemn, silent, sail-less sea--this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth --is little graced with the picturesque. it is an unpretending expanse of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in its centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied. the lake is two hundred feet deep, and its sluggish waters are so strong with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment into them once or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it had been through the ablest of washerwomen's hands. while we camped there our laundry work was easy. we tied the week's washing astern of our boat, and sailed a quarter of a mile, and the job was complete, all to the wringing out. if we threw the water on our heads and gave them a rub or so, the white lather would pile up three inches high. this water is not good for bruised places and abrasions of the skin. we had a valuable dog. he had raw places on him. he had more raw places on him than sound ones. he was the rawest dog i almost ever saw. he jumped overboard one day to get away from the flies. but it was bad judgment. in his condition, it would have been just as comfortable to jump into the fire. the alkali water nipped him in all the raw places simultaneously, and he struck out for the shore with considerable interest. he yelped and barked and howled as he went--and by the time he got to the shore there was no bark to him--for he had barked the bark all out of his inside, and the alkali water had cleaned the bark all off his outside, and he probably wished he had never embarked in any such enterprise. he ran round and round in a circle, and pawed the earth and clawed the air, and threw double somersaults, sometimes backward and sometimes forward, in the most extraordinary manner. he was not a demonstrative dog, as a general thing, but rather of a grave and serious turn of mind, and i never saw him take so much interest in anything before. he finally struck out over the mountains, at a gait which we estimated at about two hundred and fifty miles an hour, and he is going yet. this was about nine years ago. we look for what is left of him along here every day. a white man cannot drink the water of mono lake, for it is nearly pure lye. it is said that the indians in the vicinity drink it sometimes, though. it is not improbable, for they are among the purest liars i ever saw. [there will be no additional charge for this joke, except to parties requiring an explanation of it. this joke has received high commendation from some of the ablest minds of the age.] there are no fish in mono lake--no frogs, no snakes, no polliwigs --nothing, in fact, that goes to make life desirable. millions of wild ducks and sea-gulls swim about the surface, but no living thing exists under the surface, except a white feathery sort of worm, one half an inch long, which looks like a bit of white thread frayed out at the sides. if you dip up a gallon of water, you will get about fifteen thousand of these. they give to the water a sort of grayish-white appearance. then there is a fly, which looks something like our house fly. these settle on the beach to eat the worms that wash ashore--and any time, you can see there a belt of flies an inch deep and six feet wide, and this belt extends clear around the lake--a belt of flies one hundred miles long. if you throw a stone among them, they swarm up so thick that they look dense, like a cloud. you can hold them under water as long as you please--they do not mind it--they are only proud of it. when you let them go, they pop up to the surface as dry as a patent office report, and walk off as unconcernedly as if they had been educated especially with a view to affording instructive entertainment to man in that particular way. providence leaves nothing to go by chance. all things have their uses and their part and proper place in nature's economy: the ducks eat the flies--the flies eat the worms--the indians eat all three--the wild cats eat the indians--the white folks eat the wild cats--and thus all things are lovely. mono lake is a hundred miles in a straight line from the ocean--and between it and the ocean are one or two ranges of mountains--yet thousands of sea-gulls go there every season to lay their eggs and rear their young. one would as soon expect to find sea-gulls in kansas. and in this connection let us observe another instance of nature's wisdom. the islands in the lake being merely huge masses of lava, coated over with ashes and pumice-stone, and utterly innocent of vegetation or anything that would burn; and sea-gull's eggs being entirely useless to anybody unless they be cooked, nature has provided an unfailing spring of boiling water on the largest island, and you can put your eggs in there, and in four minutes you can boil them as hard as any statement i have made during the past fifteen years. within ten feet of the boiling spring is a spring of pure cold water, sweet and wholesome. so, in that island you get your board and washing free of charge--and if nature had gone further and furnished a nice american hotel clerk who was crusty and disobliging, and didn't know anything about the time tables, or the railroad routes--or--anything--and was proud of it--i would not wish for a more desirable boarding-house. half a dozen little mountain brooks flow into mono lake, but not a stream of any kind flows out of it. it neither rises nor falls, apparently, and what it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody mystery. there are only two seasons in the region round about mono lake--and these are, the breaking up of one winter and the beginning of the next. more than once (in esmeralda) i have seen a perfectly blistering morning open up with the thermometer at ninety degrees at eight o'clock, and seen the snow fall fourteen inches deep and that same identical thermometer go down to forty-four degrees under shelter, before nine o'clock at night. under favorable circumstances it snows at least once in every single month in the year, in the little town of mono. so uncertain is the climate in summer that a lady who goes out visiting cannot hope to be prepared for all emergencies unless she takes her fan under one arm and her snow shoes under the other. when they have a fourth of july procession it generally snows on them, and they do say that as a general thing when a man calls for a brandy toddy there, the bar keeper chops it off with a hatchet and wraps it up in a paper, like maple sugar. and it is further reported that the old soakers haven't any teeth--wore them out eating gin cocktails and brandy punches. i do not endorse that statement--i simply give it for what it is worth--and it is worth--well, i should say, millions, to any man who can believe it without straining himself. but i do endorse the snow on the fourth of july--because i know that to be true. chapter xxxix. about seven o'clock one blistering hot morning--for it was now dead summer time--higbie and i took the boat and started on a voyage of discovery to the two islands. we had often longed to do this, but had been deterred by the fear of storms; for they were frequent, and severe enough to capsize an ordinary row-boat like ours without great difficulty--and once capsized, death would ensue in spite of the bravest swimming, for that venomous water would eat a man's eyes out like fire, and burn him out inside, too, if he shipped a sea. it was called twelve miles, straight out to the islands--a long pull and a warm one--but the morning was so quiet and sunny, and the lake so smooth and glassy and dead, that we could not resist the temptation. so we filled two large tin canteens with water (since we were not acquainted with the locality of the spring said to exist on the large island), and started. higbie's brawny muscles gave the boat good speed, but by the time we reached our destination we judged that we had pulled nearer fifteen miles than twelve. we landed on the big island and went ashore. we tried the water in the canteens, now, and found that the sun had spoiled it; it was so brackish that we could not drink it; so we poured it out and began a search for the spring--for thirst augments fast as soon as it is apparent that one has no means at hand of quenching it. the island was a long, moderately high hill of ashes--nothing but gray ashes and pumice-stone, in which we sunk to our knees at every step--and all around the top was a forbidding wall of scorched and blasted rocks. when we reached the top and got within the wall, we found simply a shallow, far-reaching basin, carpeted with ashes, and here and there a patch of fine sand. in places, picturesque jets of steam shot up out of crevices, giving evidence that although this ancient crater had gone out of active business, there was still some fire left in its furnaces. close to one of these jets of steam stood the only tree on the island--a small pine of most graceful shape and most faultless symmetry; its color was a brilliant green, for the steam drifted unceasingly through its branches and kept them always moist. it contrasted strangely enough, did this vigorous and beautiful outcast, with its dead and dismal surroundings. it was like a cheerful spirit in a mourning household. we hunted for the spring everywhere, traversing the full length of the island (two or three miles), and crossing it twice--climbing ash-hills patiently, and then sliding down the other side in a sitting posture, plowing up smothering volumes of gray dust. but we found nothing but solitude, ashes and a heart-breaking silence. finally we noticed that the wind had risen, and we forgot our thirst in a solicitude of greater importance; for, the lake being quiet, we had not taken pains about securing the boat. we hurried back to a point overlooking our landing place, and then--but mere words cannot describe our dismay--the boat was gone! the chances were that there was not another boat on the entire lake. the situation was not comfortable--in truth, to speak plainly, it was frightful. we were prisoners on a desolate island, in aggravating proximity to friends who were for the present helpless to aid us; and what was still more uncomfortable was the reflection that we had neither food nor water. but presently we sighted the boat. it was drifting along, leisurely, about fifty yards from shore, tossing in a foamy sea. it drifted, and continued to drift, but at the same safe distance from land, and we walked along abreast it and waited for fortune to favor us. at the end of an hour it approached a jutting cape, and higbie ran ahead and posted himself on the utmost verge and prepared for the assault. if we failed there, there was no hope for us. it was driving gradually shoreward all the time, now; but whether it was driving fast enough to make the connection or not was the momentous question. when it got within thirty steps of higbie i was so excited that i fancied i could hear my own heart beat. when, a little later, it dragged slowly along and seemed about to go by, only one little yard out of reach, it seemed as if my heart stood still; and when it was exactly abreast him and began to widen away, and he still standing like a watching statue, i knew my heart did stop. but when he gave a great spring, the next instant, and lit fairly in the stern, i discharged a war-whoop that woke the solitudes! but it dulled my enthusiasm, presently, when he told me he had not been caring whether the boat came within jumping distance or not, so that it passed within eight or ten yards of him, for he had made up his mind to shut his eyes and mouth and swim that trifling distance. imbecile that i was, i had not thought of that. it was only a long swim that could be fatal. the sea was running high and the storm increasing. it was growing late, too--three or four in the afternoon. whether to venture toward the mainland or not, was a question of some moment. but we were so distressed by thirst that we decide to try it, and so higbie fell to work and i took the steering-oar. when we had pulled a mile, laboriously, we were evidently in serious peril, for the storm had greatly augmented; the billows ran very high and were capped with foaming crests, the heavens were hung with black, and the wind blew with great fury. we would have gone back, now, but we did not dare to turn the boat around, because as soon as she got in the trough of the sea she would upset, of course. our only hope lay in keeping her head-on to the seas. it was hard work to do this, she plunged so, and so beat and belabored the billows with her rising and falling bows. now and then one of higbie's oars would trip on the top of a wave, and the other one would snatch the boat half around in spite of my cumbersome steering apparatus. we were drenched by the sprays constantly, and the boat occasionally shipped water. by and by, powerful as my comrade was, his great exertions began to tell on him, and he was anxious that i should change places with him till he could rest a little. but i told him this was impossible; for if the steering oar were dropped a moment while we changed, the boat would slue around into the trough of the sea, capsize, and in less than five minutes we would have a hundred gallons of soap-suds in us and be eaten up so quickly that we could not even be present at our own inquest. but things cannot last always. just as the darkness shut down we came booming into port, head on. higbie dropped his oars to hurrah--i dropped mine to help--the sea gave the boat a twist, and over she went! the agony that alkali water inflicts on bruises, chafes and blistered hands, is unspeakable, and nothing but greasing all over will modify it --but we ate, drank and slept well, that night, notwithstanding. in speaking of the peculiarities of mono lake, i ought to have mentioned that at intervals all around its shores stand picturesque turret-looking masses and clusters of a whitish, coarse-grained rock that resembles inferior mortar dried hard; and if one breaks off fragments of this rock he will find perfectly shaped and thoroughly petrified gulls' eggs deeply imbedded in the mass. how did they get there? i simply state the fact --for it is a fact--and leave the geological reader to crack the nut at his leisure and solve the problem after his own fashion. at the end of a week we adjourned to the sierras on a fishing excursion, and spent several days in camp under snowy castle peak, and fished successfully for trout in a bright, miniature lake whose surface was between ten and eleven thousand feet above the level of the sea; cooling ourselves during the hot august noons by sitting on snow banks ten feet deep, under whose sheltering edges fine grass and dainty flowers flourished luxuriously; and at night entertaining ourselves by almost freezing to death. then we returned to mono lake, and finding that the cement excitement was over for the present, packed up and went back to esmeralda. mr. ballou reconnoitred awhile, and not liking the prospect, set out alone for humboldt. about this time occurred a little incident which has always had a sort of interest to me, from the fact that it came so near "instigating" my funeral. at a time when an indian attack had been expected, the citizens hid their gunpowder where it would be safe and yet convenient to hand when wanted. a neighbor of ours hid six cans of rifle powder in the bake-oven of an old discarded cooking stove which stood on the open ground near a frame out-house or shed, and from and after that day never thought of it again. we hired a half-tamed indian to do some washing for us, and he took up quarters under the shed with his tub. the ancient stove reposed within six feet of him, and before his face. finally it occurred to him that hot water would be better than cold, and he went out and fired up under that forgotten powder magazine and set on a kettle of water. then he returned to his tub. i entered the shed presently and threw down some more clothes, and was about to speak to him when the stove blew up with a prodigious crash, and disappeared, leaving not a splinter behind. fragments of it fell in the streets full two hundred yards away. nearly a third of the shed roof over our heads was destroyed, and one of the stove lids, after cutting a small stanchion half in two in front of the indian, whizzed between us and drove partly through the weather-boarding beyond. i was as white as a sheet and as weak as a kitten and speechless. but the indian betrayed no trepidation, no distress, not even discomfort. he simply stopped washing, leaned forward and surveyed the clean, blank ground a moment, and then remarked: "mph! dam stove heap gone!"--and resumed his scrubbing as placidly as if it were an entirely customary thing for a stove to do. i will explain, that "heap" is "injun-english" for "very much." the reader will perceive the exhaustive expressiveness of it in the present instance. chapter xl. i now come to a curious episode--the most curious, i think, that had yet accented my slothful, valueless, heedless career. out of a hillside toward the upper end of the town, projected a wall of reddish looking quartz-croppings, the exposed comb of a silver-bearing ledge that extended deep down into the earth, of course. it was owned by a company entitled the "wide west." there was a shaft sixty or seventy feet deep on the under side of the croppings, and everybody was acquainted with the rock that came from it--and tolerably rich rock it was, too, but nothing extraordinary. i will remark here, that although to the inexperienced stranger all the quartz of a particular "district" looks about alike, an old resident of the camp can take a glance at a mixed pile of rock, separate the fragments and tell you which mine each came from, as easily as a confectioner can separate and classify the various kinds and qualities of candy in a mixed heap of the article. all at once the town was thrown into a state of extraordinary excitement. in mining parlance the wide west had "struck it rich!" everybody went to see the new developments, and for some days there was such a crowd of people about the wide west shaft that a stranger would have supposed there was a mass meeting in session there. no other topic was discussed but the rich strike, and nobody thought or dreamed about anything else. every man brought away a specimen, ground it up in a hand mortar, washed it out in his horn spoon, and glared speechless upon the marvelous result. it was not hard rock, but black, decomposed stuff which could be crumbled in the hand like a baked potato, and when spread out on a paper exhibited a thick sprinkling of gold and particles of "native" silver. higbie brought a handful to the cabin, and when he had washed it out his amazement was beyond description. wide west stock soared skywards. it was said that repeated offers had been made for it at a thousand dollars a foot, and promptly refused. we have all had the "blues"--the mere sky-blues--but mine were indigo, now--because i did not own in the wide west. the world seemed hollow to me, and existence a grief. i lost my appetite, and ceased to take an interest in anything. still i had to stay, and listen to other people's rejoicings, because i had no money to get out of the camp with. the wide west company put a stop to the carrying away of "specimens," and well they might, for every handful of the ore was worth a sun of some consequence. to show the exceeding value of the ore, i will remark that a sixteen-hundred-pounds parcel of it was sold, just as it lay, at the mouth of the shaft, at one dollar a pound; and the man who bought it "packed" it on mules a hundred and fifty or two hundred miles, over the mountains, to san francisco, satisfied that it would yield at a rate that would richly compensate him for his trouble. the wide west people also commanded their foreman to refuse any but their own operatives permission to enter the mine at any time or for any purpose. i kept up my "blue" meditations and higbie kept up a deal of thinking, too, but of a different sort. he puzzled over the "rock," examined it with a glass, inspected it in different lights and from different points of view, and after each experiment delivered himself, in soliloquy, of one and the same unvarying opinion in the same unvarying formula: "it is not wide west rock!" he said once or twice that he meant to have a look into the wide west shaft if he got shot for it. i was wretched, and did not care whether he got a look into it or not. he failed that day, and tried again at night; failed again; got up at dawn and tried, and failed again. then he lay in ambush in the sage brush hour after hour, waiting for the two or three hands to adjourn to the shade of a boulder for dinner; made a start once, but was premature--one of the men came back for something; tried it again, but when almost at the mouth of the shaft, another of the men rose up from behind the boulder as if to reconnoitre, and he dropped on the ground and lay quiet; presently he crawled on his hands and knees to the mouth of the shaft, gave a quick glance around, then seized the rope and slid down the shaft. he disappeared in the gloom of a "side drift" just as a head appeared in the mouth of the shaft and somebody shouted "hello!"--which he did not answer. he was not disturbed any more. an hour later he entered the cabin, hot, red, and ready to burst with smothered excitement, and exclaimed in a stage whisper: "i knew it! we are rich! it's a blind lead!" i thought the very earth reeled under me. doubt--conviction--doubt again--exultation--hope, amazement, belief, unbelief--every emotion imaginable swept in wild procession through my heart and brain, and i could not speak a word. after a moment or two of this mental fury, i shook myself to rights, and said: "say it again!" "it's blind lead!" "cal, let's--let's burn the house--or kill somebody! let's get out where there's room to hurrah! but what is the use? it is a hundred times too good to be true." "it's a blind lead, for a million!--hanging wall--foot wall--clay casings--everything complete!" he swung his hat and gave three cheers, and i cast doubt to the winds and chimed in with a will. for i was worth a million dollars, and did not care "whether school kept or not!" but perhaps i ought to explain. a "blind lead" is a lead or ledge that does not "crop out" above the surface. a miner does not know where to look for such leads, but they are often stumbled upon by accident in the course of driving a tunnel or sinking a shaft. higbie knew the wide west rock perfectly well, and the more he had examined the new developments the more he was satisfied that the ore could not have come from the wide west vein. and so had it occurred to him alone, of all the camp, that there was a blind lead down in the shaft, and that even the wide west people themselves did not suspect it. he was right. when he went down the shaft, he found that the blind lead held its independent way through the wide west vein, cutting it diagonally, and that it was enclosed in its own well-defined casing-rocks and clay. hence it was public property. both leads being perfectly well defined, it was easy for any miner to see which one belonged to the wide west and which did not. we thought it well to have a strong friend, and therefore we brought the foreman of the wide west to our cabin that night and revealed the great surprise to him. higbie said: "we are going to take possession of this blind lead, record it and establish ownership, and then forbid the wide west company to take out any more of the rock. you cannot help your company in this matter --nobody can help them. i will go into the shaft with you and prove to your entire satisfaction that it is a blind lead. now we propose to take you in with us, and claim the blind lead in our three names. what do you say?" what could a man say who had an opportunity to simply stretch forth his hand and take possession of a fortune without risk of any kind and without wronging any one or attaching the least taint of dishonor to his name? he could only say, "agreed." the notice was put up that night, and duly spread upon the recorder's books before ten o'clock. we claimed two hundred feet each--six hundred feet in all--the smallest and compactest organization in the district, and the easiest to manage. no one can be so thoughtless as to suppose that we slept, that night. higbie and i went to bed at midnight, but it was only to lie broad awake and think, dream, scheme. the floorless, tumble-down cabin was a palace, the ragged gray blankets silk, the furniture rosewood and mahogany. each new splendor that burst out of my visions of the future whirled me bodily over in bed or jerked me to a sitting posture just as if an electric battery had been applied to me. we shot fragments of conversation back and forth at each other. once higbie said: "when are you going home--to the states?" "to-morrow!"--with an evolution or two, ending with a sitting position. "well--no--but next month, at furthest." "we'll go in the same steamer." "agreed." a pause. "steamer of the th?" "yes. no, the st." "all right." another pause. "where are you going to live?" said higbie. "san francisco." "that's me!" pause. "too high--too much climbing"--from higbie. "what is?" "i was thinking of russian hill--building a house up there." "too much climbing? shan't you keep a carriage?" "of course. i forgot that." pause. "cal., what kind of a house are you going to build?" "i was thinking about that. three-story and an attic." "but what kind?" "well, i don't hardly know. brick, i suppose." "brick--bosh." "why? what is your idea?" "brown stone front--french plate glass--billiard-room off the dining-room--statuary and paintings--shrubbery and two-acre grass plat --greenhouse--iron dog on the front stoop--gray horses--landau, and a coachman with a bug on his hat!" "by george!" a long pause. "cal., when are you going to europe?" "well--i hadn't thought of that. when are you?" "in the spring." "going to be gone all summer?" "all summer! i shall remain there three years." "no--but are you in earnest?" "indeed i am." "i will go along too." "why of course you will." "what part of europe shall you go to?" "all parts. france, england, germany--spain, italy, switzerland, syria, greece, palestine, arabia, persia, egypt--all over--everywhere." "i'm agreed." "all right." "won't it be a swell trip!" "we'll spend forty or fifty thousand dollars trying to make it one, anyway." another long pause. "higbie, we owe the butcher six dollars, and he has been threatening to stop our--" "hang the butcher!" "amen." and so it went on. by three o'clock we found it was no use, and so we got up and played cribbage and smoked pipes till sunrise. it was my week to cook. i always hated cooking--now, i abhorred it. the news was all over town. the former excitement was great--this one was greater still. i walked the streets serene and happy. higbie said the foreman had been offered two hundred thousand dollars for his third of the mine. i said i would like to see myself selling for any such price. my ideas were lofty. my figure was a million. still, i honestly believe that if i had been offered it, it would have had no other effect than to make me hold off for more. i found abundant enjoyment in being rich. a man offered me a three-hundred-dollar horse, and wanted to take my simple, unendorsed note for it. that brought the most realizing sense i had yet had that i was actually rich, beyond shadow of doubt. it was followed by numerous other evidences of a similar nature--among which i may mention the fact of the butcher leaving us a double supply of meat and saying nothing about money. by the laws of the district, the "locators" or claimants of a ledge were obliged to do a fair and reasonable amount of work on their new property within ten days after the date of the location, or the property was forfeited, and anybody could go and seize it that chose. so we determined to go to work the next day. about the middle of the afternoon, as i was coming out of the post office, i met a mr. gardiner, who told me that capt. john nye was lying dangerously ill at his place (the "nine-mile ranch"), and that he and his wife were not able to give him nearly as much care and attention as his case demanded. i said if he would wait for me a moment, i would go down and help in the sick room. i ran to the cabin to tell higbie. he was not there, but i left a note on the table for him, and a few minutes later i left town in gardiner's wagon. life on the mississippi by mark twain part . chapter the river rises during this big rise these small-fry craft were an intolerable nuisance. we were running chute after chute,--a new world to me,--and if there was a particularly cramped place in a chute, we would be pretty sure to meet a broad-horn there; and if he failed to be there, we would find him in a still worse locality, namely, the head of the chute, on the shoal water. and then there would be no end of profane cordialities exchanged. sometimes, in the big river, when we would be feeling our way cautiously along through a fog, the deep hush would suddenly be broken by yells and a clamor of tin pans, and all in instant a log raft would appear vaguely through the webby veil, close upon us; and then we did not wait to swap knives, but snatched our engine bells out by the roots and piled on all the steam we had, to scramble out of the way! one doesn't hit a rock or a solid log craft with a steamboat when he can get excused. you will hardly believe it, but many steamboat clerks always carried a large assortment of religious tracts with them in those old departed steamboating days. indeed they did. twenty times a day we would be cramping up around a bar, while a string of these small-fry rascals were drifting down into the head of the bend away above and beyond us a couple of miles. now a skiff would dart away from one of them, and come fighting its laborious way across the desert of water. it would 'ease all,' in the shadow of our forecastle, and the panting oarsmen would shout, 'gimme a pa-a-per!' as the skiff drifted swiftly astern. the clerk would throw over a file of new orleans journals. if these were picked up without comment, you might notice that now a dozen other skiffs had been drifting down upon us without saying anything. you understand, they had been waiting to see how no. was going to fare. no. making no comment, all the rest would bend to their oars and come on, now; and as fast as they came the clerk would heave over neat bundles of religious tracts, tied to shingles. the amount of hard swearing which twelve packages of religious literature will command when impartially divided up among twelve raftsmen's crews, who have pulled a heavy skiff two miles on a hot day to get them, is simply incredible. as i have said, the big rise brought a new world under my vision. by the time the river was over its banks we had forsaken our old paths and were hourly climbing over bars that had stood ten feet out of water before; we were shaving stumpy shores, like that at the foot of madrid bend, which i had always seen avoided before; we were clattering through chutes like that of , where the opening at the foot was an unbroken wall of timber till our nose was almost at the very spot. some of these chutes were utter solitudes. the dense, untouched forest overhung both banks of the crooked little crack, and one could believe that human creatures had never intruded there before. the swinging grape-vines, the grassy nooks and vistas glimpsed as we swept by, the flowering creepers waving their red blossoms from the tops of dead trunks, and all the spendthrift richness of the forest foliage, were wasted and thrown away there. the chutes were lovely places to steer in; they were deep, except at the head; the current was gentle; under the 'points' the water was absolutely dead, and the invisible banks so bluff that where the tender willow thickets projected you could bury your boat's broadside in them as you tore along, and then you seemed fairly to fly. behind other islands we found wretched little farms, and wretcheder little log-cabins; there were crazy rail fences sticking a foot or two above the water, with one or two jeans-clad, chills-racked, yellow-faced male miserables roosting on the top-rail, elbows on knees, jaws in hands, grinding tobacco and discharging the result at floating chips through crevices left by lost teeth; while the rest of the family and the few farm-animals were huddled together in an empty wood-flat riding at her moorings close at hand. in this flat-boat the family would have to cook and eat and sleep for a lesser or greater number of days (or possibly weeks), until the river should fall two or three feet and let them get back to their log-cabin and their chills again--chills being a merciful provision of an all-wise providence to enable them to take exercise without exertion. and this sort of watery camping out was a thing which these people were rather liable to be treated to a couple of times a year: by the december rise out of the ohio, and the june rise out of the mississippi. and yet these were kindly dispensations, for they at least enabled the poor things to rise from the dead now and then, and look upon life when a steamboat went by. they appreciated the blessing, too, for they spread their mouths and eyes wide open and made the most of these occasions. now what could these banished creatures find to do to keep from dying of the blues during the low-water season! once, in one of these lovely island chutes, we found our course completely bridged by a great fallen tree. this will serve to show how narrow some of the chutes were. the passengers had an hour's recreation in a virgin wilderness, while the boat-hands chopped the bridge away; for there was no such thing as turning back, you comprehend. from cairo to baton rouge, when the river is over its banks, you have no particular trouble in the night, for the thousand-mile wall of dense forest that guards the two banks all the way is only gapped with a farm or wood-yard opening at intervals, and so you can't 'get out of the river' much easier than you could get out of a fenced lane; but from baton rouge to new orleans it is a different matter. the river is more than a mile wide, and very deep--as much as two hundred feet, in places. both banks, for a good deal over a hundred miles, are shorn of their timber and bordered by continuous sugar plantations, with only here and there a scattering sapling or row of ornamental china-trees. the timber is shorn off clear to the rear of the plantations, from two to four miles. when the first frost threatens to come, the planters snatch off their crops in a hurry. when they have finished grinding the cane, they form the refuse of the stalks (which they call bagasse) into great piles and set fire to them, though in other sugar countries the bagasse is used for fuel in the furnaces of the sugar mills. now the piles of damp bagasse burn slowly, and smoke like satan's own kitchen. an embankment ten or fifteen feet high guards both banks of the mississippi all the way down that lower end of the river, and this embankment is set back from the edge of the shore from ten to perhaps a hundred feet, according to circumstances; say thirty or forty feet, as a general thing. fill that whole region with an impenetrable gloom of smoke from a hundred miles of burning bagasse piles, when the river is over the banks, and turn a steamboat loose along there at midnight and see how she will feel. and see how you will feel, too! you find yourself away out in the midst of a vague dim sea that is shoreless, that fades out and loses itself in the murky distances; for you cannot discern the thin rib of embankment, and you are always imagining you see a straggling tree when you don't. the plantations themselves are transformed by the smoke, and look like a part of the sea. all through your watch you are tortured with the exquisite misery of uncertainty. you hope you are keeping in the river, but you do not know. all that you are sure about is that you are likely to be within six feet of the bank and destruction, when you think you are a good half-mile from shore. and you are sure, also, that if you chance suddenly to fetch up against the embankment and topple your chimneys overboard, you will have the small comfort of knowing that it is about what you were expecting to do. one of the great vicksburg packets darted out into a sugar plantation one night, at such a time, and had to stay there a week. but there was no novelty about it; it had often been done before. i thought i had finished this chapter, but i wish to add a curious thing, while it is in my mind. it is only relevant in that it is connected with piloting. there used to be an excellent pilot on the river, a mr. x., who was a somnambulist. it was said that if his mind was troubled about a bad piece of river, he was pretty sure to get up and walk in his sleep and do strange things. he was once fellow-pilot for a trip or two with george ealer, on a great new orleans passenger packet. during a considerable part of the first trip george was uneasy, but got over it by and by, as x. seemed content to stay in his bed when asleep. late one night the boat was approaching helena, arkansas; the water was low, and the crossing above the town in a very blind and tangled condition. x. had seen the crossing since ealer had, and as the night was particularly drizzly, sullen, and dark, ealer was considering whether he had not better have x. called to assist in running the place, when the door opened and x. walked in. now on very dark nights, light is a deadly enemy to piloting; you are aware that if you stand in a lighted room, on such a night, you cannot see things in the street to any purpose; but if you put out the lights and stand in the gloom you can make out objects in the street pretty well. so, on very dark nights, pilots do not smoke; they allow no fire in the pilot-house stove if there is a crack which can allow the least ray to escape; they order the furnaces to be curtained with huge tarpaulins and the sky-lights to be closely blinded. then no light whatever issues from the boat. the undefinable shape that now entered the pilot-house had mr. x.'s voice. this said-- 'let me take her, george; i've seen this place since you have, and it is so crooked that i reckon i can run it myself easier than i could tell you how to do it.' 'it is kind of you, and i swear _i_ am willing. i haven't got another drop of perspiration left in me. i have been spinning around and around the wheel like a squirrel. it is so dark i can't tell which way she is swinging till she is coming around like a whirligig.' so ealer took a seat on the bench, panting and breathless. the black phantom assumed the wheel without saying anything, steadied the waltzing steamer with a turn or two, and then stood at ease, coaxing her a little to this side and then to that, as gently and as sweetly as if the time had been noonday. when ealer observed this marvel of steering, he wished he had not confessed! he stared, and wondered, and finally said-- 'well, i thought i knew how to steer a steamboat, but that was another mistake of mine.' x. said nothing, but went serenely on with his work. he rang for the leads; he rang to slow down the steam; he worked the boat carefully and neatly into invisible marks, then stood at the center of the wheel and peered blandly out into the blackness, fore and aft, to verify his position; as the leads shoaled more and more, he stopped the engines entirely, and the dead silence and suspense of 'drifting' followed when the shoalest water was struck, he cracked on the steam, carried her handsomely over, and then began to work her warily into the next system of shoal marks; the same patient, heedful use of leads and engines followed, the boat slipped through without touching bottom, and entered upon the third and last intricacy of the crossing; imperceptibly she moved through the gloom, crept by inches into her marks, drifted tediously till the shoalest water was cried, and then, under a tremendous head of steam, went swinging over the reef and away into deep water and safety! ealer let his long-pent breath pour out in a great, relieving sigh, and said-- 'that's the sweetest piece of piloting that was ever done on the mississippi river! i wouldn't believed it could be done, if i hadn't seen it.' there was no reply, and he added-- 'just hold her five minutes longer, partner, and let me run down and get a cup of coffee.' a minute later ealer was biting into a pie, down in the 'texas,' and comforting himself with coffee. just then the night watchman happened in, and was about to happen out again, when he noticed ealer and exclaimed-- 'who is at the wheel, sir?' 'x.' 'dart for the pilot-house, quicker than lightning!' the next moment both men were flying up the pilot-house companion way, three steps at a jump! nobody there! the great steamer was whistling down the middle of the river at her own sweet will! the watchman shot out of the place again; ealer seized the wheel, set an engine back with power, and held his breath while the boat reluctantly swung away from a 'towhead' which she was about to knock into the middle of the gulf of mexico! by and by the watchman came back and said-- 'didn't that lunatic tell you he was asleep, when he first came up here?' 'no.' 'well, he was. i found him walking along on top of the railings just as unconcerned as another man would walk a pavement; and i put him to bed; now just this minute there he was again, away astern, going through that sort of tight-rope deviltry the same as before.' 'well, i think i'll stay by, next time he has one of those fits. but i hope he'll have them often. you just ought to have seen him take this boat through helena crossing. i never saw anything so gaudy before. and if he can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond-breastpin piloting when he is sound asleep, what couldn't he do if he was dead!' chapter sounding when the river is very low, and one's steamboat is 'drawing all the water' there is in the channel,--or a few inches more, as was often the case in the old times,--one must be painfully circumspect in his piloting. we used to have to 'sound' a number of particularly bad places almost every trip when the river was at a very low stage. sounding is done in this way. the boat ties up at the shore, just above the shoal crossing; the pilot not on watch takes his 'cub' or steersman and a picked crew of men (sometimes an officer also), and goes out in the yawl--provided the boat has not that rare and sumptuous luxury, a regularly-devised 'sounding-boat'--and proceeds to hunt for the best water, the pilot on duty watching his movements through a spy-glass, meantime, and in some instances assisting by signals of the boat's whistle, signifying 'try higher up' or 'try lower down;' for the surface of the water, like an oil-painting, is more expressive and intelligible when inspected from a little distance than very close at hand. the whistle signals are seldom necessary, however; never, perhaps, except when the wind confuses the significant ripples upon the water's surface. when the yawl has reached the shoal place, the speed is slackened, the pilot begins to sound the depth with a pole ten or twelve feet long, and the steersman at the tiller obeys the order to 'hold her up to starboard;' or, 'let her fall off to larboard;'{footnote [the term 'larboard' is never used at sea now, to signify the left hand; but was always used on the river in my time]} or 'steady--steady as you go.' when the measurements indicate that the yawl is approaching the shoalest part of the reef, the command is given to 'ease all!' then the men stop rowing and the yawl drifts with the current. the next order is, 'stand by with the buoy!' the moment the shallowest point is reached, the pilot delivers the order, 'let go the buoy!' and over she goes. if the pilot is not satisfied, he sounds the place again; if he finds better water higher up or lower down, he removes the buoy to that place. being finally satisfied, he gives the order, and all the men stand their oars straight up in the air, in line; a blast from the boat's whistle indicates that the signal has been seen; then the men 'give way' on their oars and lay the yawl alongside the buoy; the steamer comes creeping carefully down, is pointed straight at the buoy, husbands her power for the coming struggle, and presently, at the critical moment, turns on all her steam and goes grinding and wallowing over the buoy and the sand, and gains the deep water beyond. or maybe she doesn't; maybe she 'strikes and swings.' then she has to while away several hours (or days) sparring herself off. sometimes a buoy is not laid at all, but the yawl goes ahead, hunting the best water, and the steamer follows along in its wake. often there is a deal of fun and excitement about sounding, especially if it is a glorious summer day, or a blustering night. but in winter the cold and the peril take most of the fun out of it. a buoy is nothing but a board four or five feet long, with one end turned up; it is a reversed school-house bench, with one of the supports left and the other removed. it is anchored on the shoalest part of the reef by a rope with a heavy stone made fast to the end of it. but for the resistance of the turned-up end of the reversed bench, the current would pull the buoy under water. at night, a paper lantern with a candle in it is fastened on top of the buoy, and this can be seen a mile or more, a little glimmering spark in the waste of blackness. nothing delights a cub so much as an opportunity to go out sounding. there is such an air of adventure about it; often there is danger; it is so gaudy and man-of-war-like to sit up in the stern-sheets and steer a swift yawl; there is something fine about the exultant spring of the boat when an experienced old sailor crew throw their souls into the oars; it is lovely to see the white foam stream away from the bows; there is music in the rush of the water; it is deliciously exhilarating, in summer, to go speeding over the breezy expanses of the river when the world of wavelets is dancing in the sun. it is such grandeur, too, to the cub, to get a chance to give an order; for often the pilot will simply say, 'let her go about!' and leave the rest to the cub, who instantly cries, in his sternest tone of command, 'ease starboard! strong on the larboard! starboard give way! with a will, men!' the cub enjoys sounding for the further reason that the eyes of the passengers are watching all the yawl's movements with absorbing interest if the time be daylight; and if it be night he knows that those same wondering eyes are fastened upon the yawl's lantern as it glides out into the gloom and dims away in the remote distance. one trip a pretty girl of sixteen spent her time in our pilot-house with her uncle and aunt, every day and all day long. i fell in love with her. so did mr. thornburg's cub, tom g----. tom and i had been bosom friends until this time; but now a coolness began to arise. i told the girl a good many of my river adventures, and made myself out a good deal of a hero; tom tried to make himself appear to be a hero, too, and succeeded to some extent, but then he always had a way of embroidering. however, virtue is its own reward, so i was a barely perceptible trifle ahead in the contest. about this time something happened which promised handsomely for me: the pilots decided to sound the crossing at the head of . this would occur about nine or ten o'clock at night, when the passengers would be still up; it would be mr. thornburg's watch, therefore my chief would have to do the sounding. we had a perfect love of a sounding-boat--long, trim, graceful, and as fleet as a greyhound; her thwarts were cushioned; she carried twelve oarsmen; one of the mates was always sent in her to transmit orders to her crew, for ours was a steamer where no end of 'style' was put on. we tied up at the shore above , and got ready. it was a foul night, and the river was so wide, there, that a landsman's uneducated eyes could discern no opposite shore through such a gloom. the passengers were alert and interested; everything was satisfactory. as i hurried through the engine-room, picturesquely gotten up in storm toggery, i met tom, and could not forbear delivering myself of a mean speech-- 'ain't you glad you don't have to go out sounding?' tom was passing on, but he quickly turned, and said-- 'now just for that, you can go and get the sounding-pole yourself. i was going after it, but i'd see you in halifax, now, before i'd do it.' 'who wants you to get it? i don't. it's in the sounding-boat.' 'it ain't, either. it's been new-painted; and it's been up on the ladies' cabin guards two days, drying.' i flew back, and shortly arrived among the crowd of watching and wondering ladies just in time to hear the command: 'give way, men!' i looked over, and there was the gallant sounding-boat booming away, the unprincipled tom presiding at the tiller, and my chief sitting by him with the sounding-pole which i had been sent on a fool's errand to fetch. then that young girl said to me-- 'oh, how awful to have to go out in that little boat on such a night! do you think there is any danger?' i would rather have been stabbed. i went off, full of venom, to help in the pilot-house. by and by the boat's lantern disappeared, and after an interval a wee spark glimmered upon the face of the water a mile away. mr. thornburg blew the whistle, in acknowledgment, backed the steamer out, and made for it. we flew along for a while, then slackened steam and went cautiously gliding toward the spark. presently mr. thornburg exclaimed-- 'hello, the buoy-lantern's out!' he stopped the engines. a moment or two later he said-- 'why, there it is again!' so he came ahead on the engines once more, and rang for the leads. gradually the water shoaled up, and then began to deepen again! mr. thornburg muttered-- 'well, i don't understand this. i believe that buoy has drifted off the reef. seems to be a little too far to the left. no matter, it is safest to run over it anyhow.' so, in that solid world of darkness we went creeping down on the light. just as our bows were in the act of plowing over it, mr. thornburg seized the bell-ropes, rang a startling peal, and exclaimed-- 'my soul, it's the sounding-boat!' a sudden chorus of wild alarms burst out far below--a pause--and then the sound of grinding and crashing followed. mr. thornburg exclaimed-- 'there! the paddle-wheel has ground the sounding-boat to lucifer matches! run! see who is killed!' i was on the main deck in the twinkling of an eye. my chief and the third mate and nearly all the men were safe. they had discovered their danger when it was too late to pull out of the way; then, when the great guards overshadowed them a moment later, they were prepared and knew what to do; at my chiefs order they sprang at the right instant, seized the guard, and were hauled aboard. the next moment the sounding-yawl swept aft to the wheel and was struck and splintered to atoms. two of the men and the cub tom, were missing--a fact which spread like wildfire over the boat. the passengers came flocking to the forward gangway, ladies and all, anxious-eyed, white-faced, and talked in awed voices of the dreadful thing. and often and again i heard them say, 'poor fellows! poor boy, poor boy!' by this time the boat's yawl was manned and away, to search for the missing. now a faint call was heard, off to the left. the yawl had disappeared in the other direction. half the people rushed to one side to encourage the swimmer with their shouts; the other half rushed the other way to shriek to the yawl to turn about. by the callings, the swimmer was approaching, but some said the sound showed failing strength. the crowd massed themselves against the boiler-deck railings, leaning over and staring into the gloom; and every faint and fainter cry wrung from them such words as, 'ah, poor fellow, poor fellow! is there no way to save him?' but still the cries held out, and drew nearer, and presently the voice said pluckily-- 'i can make it! stand by with a rope!' what a rousing cheer they gave him! the chief mate took his stand in the glare of a torch-basket, a coil of rope in his hand, and his men grouped about him. the next moment the swimmer's face appeared in the circle of light, and in another one the owner of it was hauled aboard, limp and drenched, while cheer on cheer went up. it was that devil tom. the yawl crew searched everywhere, but found no sign of the two men. they probably failed to catch the guard, tumbled back, and were struck by the wheel and killed. tom had never jumped for the guard at all, but had plunged head-first into the river and dived under the wheel. it was nothing; i could have done it easy enough, and i said so; but everybody went on just the same, making a wonderful to do over that ass, as if he had done something great. that girl couldn't seem to have enough of that pitiful 'hero' the rest of the trip; but little i cared; i loathed her, any way. the way we came to mistake the sounding-boat's lantern for the buoy- light was this. my chief said that after laying the buoy he fell away and watched it till it seemed to be secure; then he took up a position a hundred yards below it and a little to one side of the steamer's course, headed the sounding-boat up-stream, and waited. having to wait some time, he and the officer got to talking; he looked up when he judged that the steamer was about on the reef; saw that the buoy was gone, but supposed that the steamer had already run over it; he went on with his talk; he noticed that the steamer was getting very close on him, but that was the correct thing; it was her business to shave him closely, for convenience in taking him aboard; he was expecting her to sheer off, until the last moment; then it flashed upon him that she was trying to run him down, mistaking his lantern for the buoy-light; so he sang out, 'stand by to spring for the guard, men!' and the next instant the jump was made. chapter a pilot's needs but i am wandering from what i was intending to do, that is, make plainer than perhaps appears in the previous chapters, some of the peculiar requirements of the science of piloting. first of all, there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection. nothing short of perfection will do. that faculty is memory. he cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so; he must know it; for this is eminently one of the 'exact' sciences. with what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times, if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase 'i think,' instead of the vigorous one 'i know!' one cannot easily realize what a tremendous thing it is to know every trivial detail of twelve hundred miles of river and know it with absolute exactness. if you will take the longest street in new york, and travel up and down it, conning its features patiently until you know every house and window and door and lamp-post and big and little sign by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random in that street in the middle of an inky black night, you will then have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a pilot's knowledge who carries the mississippi river in his head. and then if you will go on until you know every street crossing, the character, size, and position of the crossing-stones, and the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places, you will have some idea of what the pilot must know in order to keep a mississippi steamer out of trouble. next, if you will take half of the signs in that long street, and change their places once a month, and still manage to know their new positions accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changes without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required of a pilot's peerless memory by the fickle mississippi. i think a pilot's memory is about the most wonderful thing in the world. to know the old and new testaments by heart, and be able to recite them glibly, forward or backward, or begin at random anywhere in the book and recite both ways and never trip or make a mistake, is no extravagant mass of knowledge, and no marvelous facility, compared to a pilot's massed knowledge of the mississippi and his marvelous facility in the handling of it. i make this comparison deliberately, and believe i am not expanding the truth when i do it. many will think my figure too strong, but pilots will not. and how easily and comfortably the pilot's memory does its work; how placidly effortless is its way; how unconsciously it lays up its vast stores, hour by hour, day by day, and never loses or mislays a single valuable package of them all! take an instance. let a leadsman cry, 'half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain!' until it become as monotonous as the ticking of a clock; let conversation be going on all the time, and the pilot be doing his share of the talking, and no longer consciously listening to the leadsman; and in the midst of this endless string of half twains let a single 'quarter twain!' be interjected, without emphasis, and then the half twain cry go on again, just as before: two or three weeks later that pilot can describe with precision the boat's position in the river when that quarter twain was uttered, and give you such a lot of head-marks, stern-marks, and side- marks to guide you, that you ought to be able to take the boat there and put her in that same spot again yourself! the cry of 'quarter twain' did not really take his mind from his talk, but his trained faculties instantly photographed the bearings, noted the change of depth, and laid up the important details for future reference without requiring any assistance from him in the matter. if you were walking and talking with a friend, and another friend at your side kept up a monotonous repetition of the vowel sound a, for a couple of blocks, and then in the midst interjected an r, thus, a, a, a, a, a, r, a, a, a, etc., and gave the r no emphasis, you would not be able to state, two or three weeks afterward, that the r had been put in, nor be able to tell what objects you were passing at the moment it was done. but you could if your memory had been patiently and laboriously trained to do that sort of thing mechanically. give a man a tolerably fair memory to start with, and piloting will develop it into a very colossus of capability. but only in the matters it is daily drilled in. a time would come when the man's faculties could not help noticing landmarks and soundings, and his memory could not help holding on to them with the grip of a vise; but if you asked that same man at noon what he had had for breakfast, it would be ten chances to one that he could not tell you. astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business. at the time that wages soared so high on the missouri river, my chief, mr. bixby, went up there and learned more than a thousand miles of that stream with an ease and rapidity that were astonishing. when he had seen each division once in the daytime and once at night, his education was so nearly complete that he took out a 'daylight' license; a few trips later he took out a full license, and went to piloting day and night-- and he ranked a , too. mr. bixby placed me as steersman for a while under a pilot whose feats of memory were a constant marvel to me. however, his memory was born in him, i think, not built. for instance, somebody would mention a name. instantly mr. brown would break in-- 'oh, i knew him. sallow-faced, red-headed fellow, with a little scar on the side of his throat, like a splinter under the flesh. he was only in the southern trade six months. that was thirteen years ago. i made a trip with him. there was five feet in the upper river then; the "henry blake" grounded at the foot of tower island drawing four and a half; the "george elliott" unshipped her rudder on the wreck of the "sunflower"--' 'why, the "sunflower" didn't sink until--' 'i know when she sunk; it was three years before that, on the nd of december; asa hardy was captain of her, and his brother john was first clerk; and it was his first trip in her, too; tom jones told me these things a week afterward in new orleans; he was first mate of the "sunflower." captain hardy stuck a nail in his foot the th of july of the next year, and died of the lockjaw on the th. his brother died two years after rd of march,--erysipelas. i never saw either of the hardys,--they were alleghany river men,--but people who knew them told me all these things. and they said captain hardy wore yarn socks winter and summer just the same, and his first wife's name was jane shook--she was from new england--and his second one died in a lunatic asylum. it was in the blood. she was from lexington, kentucky. name was horton before she was married.' and so on, by the hour, the man's tongue would go. he could not forget any thing. it was simply impossible. the most trivial details remained as distinct and luminous in his head, after they had lain there for years, as the most memorable events. his was not simply a pilot's memory; its grasp was universal. if he were talking about a trifling letter he had received seven years before, he was pretty sure to deliver you the entire screed from memory. and then without observing that he was departing from the true line of his talk, he was more than likely to hurl in a long-drawn parenthetical biography of the writer of that letter; and you were lucky indeed if he did not take up that writer's relatives, one by one, and give you their biographies, too. such a memory as that is a great misfortune. to it, all occurrences are of the same size. its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting circumstance from an uninteresting one. as a talker, he is bound to clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himself an insufferable bore. moreover, he cannot stick to his subject. he picks up every little grain of memory he discerns in his way, and so is led aside. mr. brown would start out with the honest intention of telling you a vastly funny anecdote about a dog. he would be 'so full of laugh' that he could hardly begin; then his memory would start with the dog's breed and personal appearance; drift into a history of his owner; of his owner's family, with descriptions of weddings and burials that had occurred in it, together with recitals of congratulatory verses and obituary poetry provoked by the same: then this memory would recollect that one of these events occurred during the celebrated 'hard winter' of such and such a year, and a minute description of that winter would follow, along with the names of people who were frozen to death, and statistics showing the high figures which pork and hay went up to. pork and hay would suggest corn and fodder; corn and fodder would suggest cows and horses; cows and horses would suggest the circus and certain celebrated bare-back riders; the transition from the circus to the menagerie was easy and natural; from the elephant to equatorial africa was but a step; then of course the heathen savages would suggest religion; and at the end of three or four hours' tedious jaw, the watch would change, and brown would go out of the pilot-house muttering extracts from sermons he had heard years before about the efficacy of prayer as a means of grace. and the original first mention would be all you had learned about that dog, after all this waiting and hungering. a pilot must have a memory; but there are two higher qualities which he must also have. he must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake. give a man the merest trifle of pluck to start with, and by the time he has become a pilot he cannot be unmanned by any danger a steamboat can get into; but one cannot quite say the same for judgment. judgment is a matter of brains, and a man must start with a good stock of that article or he will never succeed as a pilot. the growth of courage in the pilot-house is steady all the time, but it does not reach a high and satisfactory condition until some time after the young pilot has been 'standing his own watch,' alone and under the staggering weight of all the responsibilities connected with the position. when an apprentice has become pretty thoroughly acquainted with the river, he goes clattering along so fearlessly with his steamboat, night or day, that he presently begins to imagine that it is his courage that animates him; but the first time the pilot steps out and leaves him to his own devices he finds out it was the other man's. he discovers that the article has been left out of his own cargo altogether. the whole river is bristling with exigencies in a moment; he is not prepared for them; he does not know how to meet them; all his knowledge forsakes him; and within fifteen minutes he is as white as a sheet and scared almost to death. therefore pilots wisely train these cubs by various strategic tricks to look danger in the face a little more calmly. a favorite way of theirs is to play a friendly swindle upon the candidate. mr. bixby served me in this fashion once, and for years afterward i used to blush even in my sleep when i thought of it. i had become a good steersman; so good, indeed, that i had all the work to do on our watch, night and day; mr. bixby seldom made a suggestion to me; all he ever did was to take the wheel on particularly bad nights or in particularly bad crossings, land the boat when she needed to be landed, play gentleman of leisure nine-tenths of the watch, and collect the wages. the lower river was about bank-full, and if anybody had questioned my ability to run any crossing between cairo and new orleans without help or instruction, i should have felt irreparably hurt. the idea of being afraid of any crossing in the lot, in the day-time, was a thing too preposterous for contemplation. well, one matchless summer's day i was bowling down the bend above island , brimful of self-conceit and carrying my nose as high as a giraffe's, when mr. bixby said-- 'i am going below a while. i suppose you know the next crossing?' this was almost an affront. it was about the plainest and simplest crossing in the whole river. one couldn't come to any harm, whether he ran it right or not; and as for depth, there never had been any bottom there. i knew all this, perfectly well. 'know how to run it? why, i can run it with my eyes shut.' 'how much water is there in it?' 'well, that is an odd question. i couldn't get bottom there with a church steeple.' 'you think so, do you?' the very tone of the question shook my confidence. that was what mr. bixby was expecting. he left, without saying anything more. i began to imagine all sorts of things. mr. bixby, unknown to me, of course, sent somebody down to the forecastle with some mysterious instructions to the leadsmen, another messenger was sent to whisper among the officers, and then mr. bixby went into hiding behind a smoke-stack where he could observe results. presently the captain stepped out on the hurricane deck; next the chief mate appeared; then a clerk. every moment or two a straggler was added to my audience; and before i got to the head of the island i had fifteen or twenty people assembled down there under my nose. i began to wonder what the trouble was. as i started across, the captain glanced aloft at me and said, with a sham uneasiness in his voice-- 'where is mr. bixby?' 'gone below, sir.' but that did the business for me. my imagination began to construct dangers out of nothing, and they multiplied faster than i could keep the run of them. all at once i imagined i saw shoal water ahead! the wave of coward agony that surged through me then came near dislocating every joint in me. all my confidence in that crossing vanished. i seized the bell-rope; dropped it, ashamed; seized it again; dropped it once more; clutched it tremblingly one again, and pulled it so feebly that i could hardly hear the stroke myself. captain and mate sang out instantly, and both together-- 'starboard lead there! and quick about it!' this was another shock. i began to climb the wheel like a squirrel; but i would hardly get the boat started to port before i would see new dangers on that side, and away i would spin to the other; only to find perils accumulating to starboard, and be crazy to get to port again. then came the leadsman's sepulchral cry-- 'd-e-e-p four!' deep four in a bottomless crossing! the terror of it took my breath away. 'm-a-r-k three!... m-a-r-k three... quarter less three!... half twain!' this was frightful! i seized the bell-ropes and stopped the engines. 'quarter twain! quarter twain! mark twain!' i was helpless. i did not know what in the world to do. i was quaking from head to foot, and i could have hung my hat on my eyes, they stuck out so far. 'quarter less twain! nine and a half!' we were drawing nine! my hands were in a nerveless flutter. i could not ring a bell intelligibly with them. i flew to the speaking-tube and shouted to the engineer-- 'oh, ben, if you love me, back her! quick, ben! oh, back the immortal soul out of her!' i heard the door close gently. i looked around, and there stood mr. bixby, smiling a bland, sweet smile. then the audience on the hurricane deck sent up a thundergust of humiliating laughter. i saw it all, now, and i felt meaner than the meanest man in human history. i laid in the lead, set the boat in her marks, came ahead on the engines, and said-- 'it was a fine trick to play on an orphan, wasn't it? i suppose i'll never hear the last of how i was ass enough to heave the lead at the head of .' 'well, no, you won't, maybe. in fact i hope you won't; for i want you to learn something by that experience. didn't you know there was no bottom in that crossing?' 'yes, sir, i did.' 'very well, then. you shouldn't have allowed me or anybody else to shake your confidence in that knowledge. try to remember that. and another thing: when you get into a dangerous place, don't turn coward. that isn't going to help matters any.' it was a good enough lesson, but pretty hardly learned. yet about the hardest part of it was that for months i so often had to hear a phrase which i had conceived a particular distaste for. it was, 'oh, ben, if you love me, back her!' chapter rank and dignity of piloting in my preceding chapters i have tried, by going into the minutiae of the science of piloting, to carry the reader step by step to a comprehension of what the science consists of; and at the same time i have tried to show him that it is a very curious and wonderful science, too, and very worthy of his attention. if i have seemed to love my subject, it is no surprising thing, for i loved the profession far better than any i have followed since, and i took a measureless pride in it. the reason is plain: a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth. kings are but the hampered servants of parliament and people; parliaments sit in chains forged by their constituency; the editor of a newspaper cannot be independent, but must work with one hand tied behind him by party and patrons, and be content to utter only half or two-thirds of his mind; no clergyman is a free man and may speak the whole truth, regardless of his parish's opinions; writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. we write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print. in truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day i write of, the mississippi pilot had none. the captain could stand upon the hurricane deck, in the pomp of a very brief authority, and give him five or six orders while the vessel backed into the stream, and then that skipper's reign was over. the moment that the boat was under way in the river, she was under the sole and unquestioned control of the pilot. he could do with her exactly as he pleased, run her when and whither he chose, and tie her up to the bank whenever his judgment said that that course was best. his movements were entirely free; he consulted no one, he received commands from nobody, he promptly resented even the merest suggestions. indeed, the law of the united states forbade him to listen to commands or suggestions, rightly considering that the pilot necessarily knew better how to handle the boat than anybody could tell him. so here was the novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute in sober truth and not by a fiction of words. i have seen a boy of eighteen taking a great steamer serenely into what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain standing mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere. his interference, in that particular instance, might have been an excellent thing, but to permit it would have been to establish a most pernicious precedent. it will easily be guessed, considering the pilot's boundless authority, that he was a great personage in the old steamboating days. he was treated with marked courtesy by the captain and with marked deference by all the officers and servants; and this deferential spirit was quickly communicated to the passengers, too. i think pilots were about the only people i ever knew who failed to show, in some degree, embarrassment in the presence of traveling foreign princes. but then, people in one's own grade of life are not usually embarrassing objects. by long habit, pilots came to put all their wishes in the form of commands. it 'gravels' me, to this day, to put my will in the weak shape of a request, instead of launching it in the crisp language of an order. in those old days, to load a steamboat at st. louis, take her to new orleans and back, and discharge cargo, consumed about twenty-five days, on an average. seven or eight of these days the boat spent at the wharves of st. louis and new orleans, and every soul on board was hard at work, except the two pilots; they did nothing but play gentleman up town, and receive the same wages for it as if they had been on duty. the moment the boat touched the wharf at either city, they were ashore; and they were not likely to be seen again till the last bell was ringing and everything in readiness for another voyage. when a captain got hold of a pilot of particularly high reputation, he took pains to keep him. when wages were four hundred dollars a month on the upper mississippi, i have known a captain to keep such a pilot in idleness, under full pay, three months at a time, while the river was frozen up. and one must remember that in those cheap times four hundred dollars was a salary of almost inconceivable splendor. few men on shore got such pay as that, and when they did they were mightily looked up to. when pilots from either end of the river wandered into our small missouri village, they were sought by the best and the fairest, and treated with exalted respect. lying in port under wages was a thing which many pilots greatly enjoyed and appreciated; especially if they belonged in the missouri river in the heyday of that trade (kansas times), and got nine hundred dollars a trip, which was equivalent to about eighteen hundred dollars a month. here is a conversation of that day. a chap out of the illinois river, with a little stern-wheel tub, accosts a couple of ornate and gilded missouri river pilots-- 'gentlemen, i've got a pretty good trip for the upcountry, and shall want you about a month. how much will it be?' 'eighteen hundred dollars apiece.' 'heavens and earth! you take my boat, let me have your wages, and i'll divide!' i will remark, in passing, that mississippi steamboatmen were important in landsmen's eyes (and in their own, too, in a degree) according to the dignity of the boat they were on. for instance, it was a proud thing to be of the crew of such stately craft as the 'aleck scott' or the 'grand turk.' negro firemen, deck hands, and barbers belonging to those boats were distinguished personages in their grade of life, and they were well aware of that fact too. a stalwart darkey once gave offense at a negro ball in new orleans by putting on a good many airs. finally one of the managers bustled up to him and said-- 'who is you, any way? who is you? dat's what i wants to know!' the offender was not disconcerted in the least, but swelled himself up and threw that into his voice which showed that he knew he was not putting on all those airs on a stinted capital. 'who is i? who is i? i let you know mighty quick who i is! i want you niggers to understan' dat i fires de middle do'{footnote [door]} on de "aleck scott!"' that was sufficient. the barber of the 'grand turk' was a spruce young negro, who aired his importance with balmy complacency, and was greatly courted by the circle in which he moved. the young colored population of new orleans were much given to flirting, at twilight, on the banquettes of the back streets. somebody saw and heard something like the following, one evening, in one of those localities. a middle-aged negro woman projected her head through a broken pane and shouted (very willing that the neighbors should hear and envy), 'you mary ann, come in de house dis minute! stannin' out dah foolin' 'long wid dat low trash, an' heah's de barber offn de "gran' turk" wants to conwerse wid you!' my reference, a moment ago, to the fact that a pilot's peculiar official position placed him out of the reach of criticism or command, brings stephen w---- naturally to my mind. he was a gifted pilot, a good fellow, a tireless talker, and had both wit and humor in him. he had a most irreverent independence, too, and was deliciously easy-going and comfortable in the presence of age, official dignity, and even the most august wealth. he always had work, he never saved a penny, he was a most persuasive borrower, he was in debt to every pilot on the river, and to the majority of the captains. he could throw a sort of splendor around a bit of harum-scarum, devil-may-care piloting, that made it almost fascinating--but not to everybody. he made a trip with good old captain y----once, and was 'relieved' from duty when the boat got to new orleans. somebody expressed surprise at the discharge. captain y---- shuddered at the mere mention of stephen. then his poor, thin old voice piped out something like this:-- 'why, bless me! i wouldn't have such a wild creature on my boat for the world--not for the whole world! he swears, he sings, he whistles, he yells--i never saw such an injun to yell. all times of the night--it never made any difference to him. he would just yell that way, not for anything in particular, but merely on account of a kind of devilish comfort he got out of it. i never could get into a sound sleep but he would fetch me out of bed, all in a cold sweat, with one of those dreadful war-whoops. a queer being--very queer being; no respect for anything or anybody. sometimes he called me "johnny." and he kept a fiddle, and a cat. he played execrably. this seemed to distress the cat, and so the cat would howl. nobody could sleep where that man--and his family--was. and reckless. there never was anything like it. now you may believe it or not, but as sure as i am sitting here, he brought my boat a-tilting down through those awful snags at chicot under a rattling head of steam, and the wind a-blowing like the very nation, at that! my officers will tell you so. they saw it. and, sir, while he was a-tearing right down through those snags, and i a-shaking in my shoes and praying, i wish i may never speak again if he didn't pucker up his mouth and go to whistling! yes, sir; whistling "buffalo gals, can't you come out tonight, can't you come out to-night, can't you come out to-night;" and doing it as calmly as if we were attending a funeral and weren't related to the corpse. and when i remonstrated with him about it, he smiled down on me as if i was his child, and told me to run in the house and try to be good, and not be meddling with my superiors!' once a pretty mean captain caught stephen in new orleans out of work and as usual out of money. he laid steady siege to stephen, who was in a very 'close place,' and finally persuaded him to hire with him at one hundred and twenty-five dollars per month, just half wages, the captain agreeing not to divulge the secret and so bring down the contempt of all the guild upon the poor fellow. but the boat was not more than a day out of new orleans before stephen discovered that the captain was boasting of his exploit, and that all the officers had been told. stephen winced, but said nothing. about the middle of the afternoon the captain stepped out on the hurricane deck, cast his eye around, and looked a good deal surprised. he glanced inquiringly aloft at stephen, but stephen was whistling placidly, and attending to business. the captain stood around a while in evident discomfort, and once or twice seemed about to make a suggestion; but the etiquette of the river taught him to avoid that sort of rashness, and so he managed to hold his peace. he chafed and puzzled a few minutes longer, then retired to his apartments. but soon he was out again, and apparently more perplexed than ever. presently he ventured to remark, with deference-- 'pretty good stage of the river now, ain't it, sir?' 'well, i should say so! bank-full is a pretty liberal stage.' 'seems to be a good deal of current here.' 'good deal don't describe it! it's worse than a mill-race.' 'isn't it easier in toward shore than it is out here in the middle?' 'yes, i reckon it is; but a body can't be too careful with a steamboat. it's pretty safe out here; can't strike any bottom here, you can depend on that.' the captain departed, looking rueful enough. at this rate, he would probably die of old age before his boat got to st. louis. next day he appeared on deck and again found stephen faithfully standing up the middle of the river, fighting the whole vast force of the mississippi, and whistling the same placid tune. this thing was becoming serious. in by the shore was a slower boat clipping along in the easy water and gaining steadily; she began to make for an island chute; stephen stuck to the middle of the river. speech was wrung from the captain. he said-- 'mr. w----, don't that chute cut off a good deal of distance?' 'i think it does, but i don't know.' 'don't know! well, isn't there water enough in it now to go through?' 'i expect there is, but i am not certain.' 'upon my word this is odd! why, those pilots on that boat yonder are going to try it. do you mean to say that you don't know as much as they do?' 'they! why, they are two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pilots! but don't you be uneasy; i know as much as any man can afford to know for a hundred and twenty-five!' the captain surrendered. five minutes later stephen was bowling through the chute and showing the rival boat a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pair of heels. chapter the pilots' monopoly one day, on board the 'aleck scott,' my chief, mr. bixby, was crawling carefully through a close place at cat island, both leads going, and everybody holding his breath. the captain, a nervous, apprehensive man, kept still as long as he could, but finally broke down and shouted from the hurricane deck-- 'for gracious' sake, give her steam, mr. bixby! give her steam! she'll never raise the reef on this headway!' for all the effect that was produced upon mr. bixby, one would have supposed that no remark had been made. but five minutes later, when the danger was past and the leads laid in, he burst instantly into a consuming fury, and gave the captain the most admirable cursing i ever listened to. no bloodshed ensued; but that was because the captain's cause was weak; for ordinarily he was not a man to take correction quietly. having now set forth in detail the nature of the science of piloting, and likewise described the rank which the pilot held among the fraternity of steamboatmen, this seems a fitting place to say a few words about an organization which the pilots once formed for the protection of their guild. it was curious and noteworthy in this, that it was perhaps the compactest, the completest, and the strongest commercial organization ever formed among men. for a long time wages had been two hundred and fifty dollars a month; but curiously enough, as steamboats multiplied and business increased, the wages began to fall little by little. it was easy to discover the reason of this. too many pilots were being 'made.' it was nice to have a 'cub,' a steersman, to do all the hard work for a couple of years, gratis, while his master sat on a high bench and smoked; all pilots and captains had sons or nephews who wanted to be pilots. by and by it came to pass that nearly every pilot on the river had a steersman. when a steersman had made an amount of progress that was satisfactory to any two pilots in the trade, they could get a pilot's license for him by signing an application directed to the united states inspector. nothing further was needed; usually no questions were asked, no proofs of capacity required. very well, this growing swarm of new pilots presently began to undermine the wages, in order to get berths. too late--apparently--the knights of the tiller perceived their mistake. plainly, something had to be done, and quickly; but what was to be the needful thing. a close organization. nothing else would answer. to compass this seemed an impossibility; so it was talked, and talked, and then dropped. it was too likely to ruin whoever ventured to move in the matter. but at last about a dozen of the boldest--and some of them the best--pilots on the river launched themselves into the enterprise and took all the chances. they got a special charter from the legislature, with large powers, under the name of the pilots' benevolent association; elected their officers, completed their organization, contributed capital, put 'association' wages up to two hundred and fifty dollars at once--and then retired to their homes, for they were promptly discharged from employment. but there were two or three unnoticed trifles in their by- laws which had the seeds of propagation in them. for instance, all idle members of the association, in good standing, were entitled to a pension of twenty-five dollars per month. this began to bring in one straggler after another from the ranks of the new-fledged pilots, in the dull (summer) season. better have twenty-five dollars than starve; the initiation fee was only twelve dollars, and no dues required from the unemployed. also, the widows of deceased members in good standing could draw twenty- five dollars per month, and a certain sum for each of their children. also, the said deceased would be buried at the association's expense. these things resurrected all the superannuated and forgotten pilots in the mississippi valley. they came from farms, they came from interior villages, they came from everywhere. they came on crutches, on drays, in ambulances,--any way, so they got there. they paid in their twelve dollars, and straightway began to draw out twenty-five dollars a month, and calculate their burial bills. by and by, all the useless, helpless pilots, and a dozen first-class ones, were in the association, and nine-tenths of the best pilots out of it and laughing at it. it was the laughing-stock of the whole river. everybody joked about the by-law requiring members to pay ten per cent. of their wages, every month, into the treasury for the support of the association, whereas all the members were outcast and tabooed, and no one would employ them. everybody was derisively grateful to the association for taking all the worthless pilots out of the way and leaving the whole field to the excellent and the deserving; and everybody was not only jocularly grateful for that, but for a result which naturally followed, namely, the gradual advance of wages as the busy season approached. wages had gone up from the low figure of one hundred dollars a month to one hundred and twenty-five, and in some cases to one hundred and fifty; and it was great fun to enlarge upon the fact that this charming thing had been accomplished by a body of men not one of whom received a particle of benefit from it. some of the jokers used to call at the association rooms and have a good time chaffing the members and offering them the charity of taking them as steersmen for a trip, so that they could see what the forgotten river looked like. however, the association was content; or at least it gave no sign to the contrary. now and then it captured a pilot who was 'out of luck,' and added him to its list; and these later additions were very valuable, for they were good pilots; the incompetent ones had all been absorbed before. as business freshened, wages climbed gradually up to two hundred and fifty dollars--the association figure--and became firmly fixed there; and still without benefiting a member of that body, for no member was hired. the hilarity at the association's expense burst all bounds, now. there was no end to the fun which that poor martyr had to put up with. however, it is a long lane that has no turning. winter approached, business doubled and trebled, and an avalanche of missouri, illinois and upper mississippi river boats came pouring down to take a chance in the new orleans trade. all of a sudden pilots were in great demand, and were correspondingly scarce. the time for revenge was come. it was a bitter pill to have to accept association pilots at last, yet captains and owners agreed that there was no other way. but none of these outcasts offered! so there was a still bitterer pill to be swallowed: they must be sought out and asked for their services. captain ---- was the first man who found it necessary to take the dose, and he had been the loudest derider of the organization. he hunted up one of the best of the association pilots and said-- 'well, you boys have rather got the best of us for a little while, so i'll give in with as good a grace as i can. i've come to hire you; get your trunk aboard right away. i want to leave at twelve o'clock.' 'i don't know about that. who is your other pilot?' 'i've got i. s----. why?' 'i can't go with him. he don't belong to the association.' 'what!' 'it's so.' 'do you mean to tell me that you won't turn a wheel with one of the very best and oldest pilots on the river because he don't belong to your association?' 'yes, i do.' 'well, if this isn't putting on airs! i supposed i was doing you a benevolence; but i begin to think that i am the party that wants a favor done. are you acting under a law of the concern?' 'yes.' 'show it to me.' so they stepped into the association rooms, and the secretary soon satisfied the captain, who said-- 'well, what am i to do? i have hired mr. s---- for the entire season.' 'i will provide for you,' said the secretary. 'i will detail a pilot to go with you, and he shall be on board at twelve o'clock.' 'but if i discharge s----, he will come on me for the whole season's wages.' 'of course that is a matter between you and mr. s----, captain. we cannot meddle in your private affairs.' the captain stormed, but to no purpose. in the end he had to discharge s----, pay him about a thousand dollars, and take an association pilot in his place. the laugh was beginning to turn the other way now. every day, thenceforward, a new victim fell; every day some outraged captain discharged a non-association pet, with tears and profanity, and installed a hated association man in his berth. in a very little while, idle non-associationists began to be pretty plenty, brisk as business was, and much as their services were desired. the laugh was shifting to the other side of their mouths most palpably. these victims, together with the captains and owners, presently ceased to laugh altogether, and began to rage about the revenge they would take when the passing business 'spurt' was over. soon all the laughers that were left were the owners and crews of boats that had two non-association pilots. but their triumph was not very long-lived. for this reason: it was a rigid rule of the association that its members should never, under any circumstances whatever, give information about the channel to any 'outsider.' by this time about half the boats had none but association pilots, and the other half had none but outsiders. at the first glance one would suppose that when it came to forbidding information about the river these two parties could play equally at that game; but this was not so. at every good-sized town from one end of the river to the other, there was a 'wharf-boat' to land at, instead of a wharf or a pier. freight was stored in it for transportation; waiting passengers slept in its cabins. upon each of these wharf-boats the association's officers placed a strong box fastened with a peculiar lock which was used in no other service but one--the united states mail service. it was the letter-bag lock, a sacred governmental thing. by dint of much beseeching the government had been persuaded to allow the association to use this lock. every association man carried a key which would open these boxes. that key, or rather a peculiar way of holding it in the hand when its owner was asked for river information by a stranger--for the success of the st. louis and new orleans association had now bred tolerably thriving branches in a dozen neighboring steamboat trades--was the association man's sign and diploma of membership; and if the stranger did not respond by producing a similar key and holding it in a certain manner duly prescribed, his question was politely ignored. from the association's secretary each member received a package of more or less gorgeous blanks, printed like a billhead, on handsome paper, properly ruled in columns; a bill-head worded something like this-- steamer great republic. john smith master pilots, john jones and thomas brown. + ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- + | crossings. | soundings. | marks. | remarks. | + ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- + these blanks were filled up, day by day, as the voyage progressed, and deposited in the several wharf-boat boxes. for instance, as soon as the first crossing, out from st. louis, was completed, the items would be entered upon the blank, under the appropriate headings, thus-- 'st. louis. nine and a half (feet). stern on court-house, head on dead cottonwood above wood-yard, until you raise the first reef, then pull up square.' then under head of remarks: 'go just outside the wrecks; this is important. new snag just where you straighten down; go above it.' the pilot who deposited that blank in the cairo box (after adding to it the details of every crossing all the way down from st. louis) took out and read half a dozen fresh reports (from upward-bound steamers) concerning the river between cairo and memphis, posted himself thoroughly, returned them to the box, and went back aboard his boat again so armed against accident that he could not possibly get his boat into trouble without bringing the most ingenious carelessness to his aid. imagine the benefits of so admirable a system in a piece of river twelve or thirteen hundred miles long, whose channel was shifting every day! the pilot who had formerly been obliged to put up with seeing a shoal place once or possibly twice a month, had a hundred sharp eyes to watch it for him, now, and bushels of intelligent brains to tell him how to run it. his information about it was seldom twenty-four hours old. if the reports in the last box chanced to leave any misgivings on his mind concerning a treacherous crossing, he had his remedy; he blew his steam- whistle in a peculiar way as soon as he saw a boat approaching; the signal was answered in a peculiar way if that boat's pilots were association men; and then the two steamers ranged alongside and all uncertainties were swept away by fresh information furnished to the inquirer by word of mouth and in minute detail. the first thing a pilot did when he reached new orleans or st. louis was to take his final and elaborate report to the association parlors and hang it up there,--after which he was free to visit his family. in these parlors a crowd was always gathered together, discussing changes in the channel, and the moment there was a fresh arrival, everybody stopped talking till this witness had told the newest news and settled the latest uncertainty. other craftsmen can 'sink the shop,' sometimes, and interest themselves in other matters. not so with a pilot; he must devote himself wholly to his profession and talk of nothing else; for it would be small gain to be perfect one day and imperfect the next. he has no time or words to waste if he would keep 'posted.' but the outsiders had a hard time of it. no particular place to meet and exchange information, no wharf-boat reports, none but chance and unsatisfactory ways of getting news. the consequence was that a man sometimes had to run five hundred miles of river on information that was a week or ten days old. at a fair stage of the river that might have answered; but when the dead low water came it was destructive. now came another perfectly logical result. the outsiders began to ground steamboats, sink them, and get into all sorts of trouble, whereas accidents seemed to keep entirely away from the association men. wherefore even the owners and captains of boats furnished exclusively with outsiders, and previously considered to be wholly independent of the association and free to comfort themselves with brag and laughter, began to feel pretty uncomfortable. still, they made a show of keeping up the brag, until one black day when every captain of the lot was formally ordered to immediately discharge his outsiders and take association pilots in their stead. and who was it that had the dashing presumption to do that? alas, it came from a power behind the throne that was greater than the throne itself. it was the underwriters! it was no time to 'swap knives.' every outsider had to take his trunk ashore at once. of course it was supposed that there was collusion between the association and the underwriters, but this was not so. the latter had come to comprehend the excellence of the 'report' system of the association and the safety it secured, and so they had made their decision among themselves and upon plain business principles. there was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in the camp of the outsiders now. but no matter, there was but one course for them to pursue, and they pursued it. they came forward in couples and groups, and proffered their twelve dollars and asked for membership. they were surprised to learn that several new by-laws had been long ago added. for instance, the initiation fee had been raised to fifty dollars; that sum must be tendered, and also ten per cent. of the wages which the applicant had received each and every month since the founding of the association. in many cases this amounted to three or four hundred dollars. still, the association would not entertain the application until the money was present. even then a single adverse vote killed the application. every member had to vote 'yes' or 'no' in person and before witnesses; so it took weeks to decide a candidacy, because many pilots were so long absent on voyages. however, the repentant sinners scraped their savings together, and one by one, by our tedious voting process, they were added to the fold. a time came, at last, when only about ten remained outside. they said they would starve before they would apply. they remained idle a long while, because of course nobody could venture to employ them. by and by the association published the fact that upon a certain date the wages would be raised to five hundred dollars per month. all the branch associations had grown strong, now, and the red river one had advanced wages to seven hundred dollars a month. reluctantly the ten outsiders yielded, in view of these things, and made application. there was another new by-law, by this time, which required them to pay dues not only on all the wages they had received since the association was born, but also on what they would have received if they had continued at work up to the time of their application, instead of going off to pout in idleness. it turned out to be a difficult matter to elect them, but it was accomplished at last. the most virulent sinner of this batch had stayed out and allowed 'dues' to accumulate against him so long that he had to send in six hundred and twenty-five dollars with his application. the association had a good bank account now, and was very strong. there was no longer an outsider. a by-law was added forbidding the reception of any more cubs or apprentices for five years; after which time a limited number would be taken, not by individuals, but by the association, upon these terms: the applicant must not be less than eighteen years old, and of respectable family and good character; he must pass an examination as to education, pay a thousand dollars in advance for the privilege of becoming an apprentice, and must remain under the commands of the association until a great part of the membership (more than half, i think) should be willing to sign his application for a pilot's license. all previously-articled apprentices were now taken away from their masters and adopted by the association. the president and secretary detailed them for service on one boat or another, as they chose, and changed them from boat to boat according to certain rules. if a pilot could show that he was in infirm health and needed assistance, one of the cubs would be ordered to go with him. the widow and orphan list grew, but so did the association's financial resources. the association attended its own funerals in state, and paid for them. when occasion demanded, it sent members down the river upon searches for the bodies of brethren lost by steamboat accidents; a search of this kind sometimes cost a thousand dollars. the association procured a charter and went into the insurance business, also. it not only insured the lives of its members, but took risks on steamboats. the organization seemed indestructible. it was the tightest monopoly in the world. by the united states law, no man could become a pilot unless two duly licensed pilots signed his application; and now there was nobody outside of the association competent to sign. consequently the making of pilots was at an end. every year some would die and others become incapacitated by age and infirmity; there would be no new ones to take their places. in time, the association could put wages up to any figure it chose; and as long as it should be wise enough not to carry the thing too far and provoke the national government into amending the licensing system, steamboat owners would have to submit, since there would be no help for it. the owners and captains were the only obstruction that lay between the association and absolute power; and at last this one was removed. incredible as it may seem, the owners and captains deliberately did it themselves. when the pilots' association announced, months beforehand, that on the first day of september, , wages would be advanced to five hundred dollars per month, the owners and captains instantly put freights up a few cents, and explained to the farmers along the river the necessity of it, by calling their attention to the burdensome rate of wages about to be established. it was a rather slender argument, but the farmers did not seem to detect it. it looked reasonable to them that to add five cents freight on a bushel of corn was justifiable under the circumstances, overlooking the fact that this advance on a cargo of forty thousand sacks was a good deal more than necessary to cover the new wages. so, straightway the captains and owners got up an association of their own, and proposed to put captains' wages up to five hundred dollars, too, and move for another advance in freights. it was a novel idea, but of course an effect which had been produced once could be produced again. the new association decreed (for this was before all the outsiders had been taken into the pilots' association) that if any captain employed a non-association pilot, he should be forced to discharge him, and also pay a fine of five hundred dollars. several of these heavy fines were paid before the captains' organization grew strong enough to exercise full authority over its membership; but that all ceased, presently. the captains tried to get the pilots to decree that no member of their corporation should serve under a non-association captain; but this proposition was declined. the pilots saw that they would be backed up by the captains and the underwriters anyhow, and so they wisely refrained from entering into entangling alliances. as i have remarked, the pilots' association was now the compactest monopoly in the world, perhaps, and seemed simply indestructible. and yet the days of its glory were numbered. first, the new railroad stretching up through mississippi, tennessee, and kentucky, to northern railway centers, began to divert the passenger travel from the steamers; next the war came and almost entirely annihilated the steamboating industry during several years, leaving most of the pilots idle, and the cost of living advancing all the time; then the treasurer of the st. louis association put his hand into the till and walked off with every dollar of the ample fund; and finally, the railroads intruding everywhere, there was little for steamers to do, when the war was over, but carry freights; so straightway some genius from the atlantic coast introduced the plan of towing a dozen steamer cargoes down to new orleans at the tail of a vulgar little tug-boat; and behold, in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, the association and the noble science of piloting were things of the dead and pathetic past! life on the mississippi by mark twain part . chapter a question of law the slaughter-house is gone from the mouth of bear creek and so is the small jail (or 'calaboose') which once stood in its neighborhood. a citizen asked, 'do you remember when jimmy finn, the town drunkard, was burned to death in the calaboose?' observe, now, how history becomes defiled, through lapse of time and the help of the bad memories of men. jimmy finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. when i say natural death, i mean it was a natural death for jimmy finn to die. the calaboose victim was not a citizen; he was a poor stranger, a harmless whiskey-sodden tramp. i know more about his case than anybody else; i knew too much of it, in that bygone day, to relish speaking of it. that tramp was wandering about the streets one chilly evening, with a pipe in his mouth, and begging for a match; he got neither matches nor courtesy; on the contrary, a troop of bad little boys followed him around and amused themselves with nagging and annoying him. i assisted; but at last, some appeal which the wayfarer made for forbearance, accompanying it with a pathetic reference to his forlorn and friendless condition, touched such sense of shame and remnant of right feeling as were left in me, and i went away and got him some matches, and then hied me home and to bed, heavily weighted as to conscience, and unbuoyant in spirit. an hour or two afterward, the man was arrested and locked up in the calaboose by the marshal--large name for a constable, but that was his title. at two in the morning, the church bells rang for fire, and everybody turned out, of course--i with the rest. the tramp had used his matches disastrously: he had set his straw bed on fire, and the oaken sheathing of the room had caught. when i reached the ground, two hundred men, women, and children stood massed together, transfixed with horror, and staring at the grated windows of the jail. behind the iron bars, and tugging frantically at them, and screaming for help, stood the tramp; he seemed like a black object set against a sun, so white and intense was the light at his back. that marshal could not be found, and he had the only key. a battering-ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder of its blows upon the door had so encouraging a sound that the spectators broke into wild cheering, and believed the merciful battle won. but it was not so. the timbers were too strong; they did not yield. it was said that the man's death-grip still held fast to the bars after he was dead; and that in this position the fires wrapped him about and consumed him. as to this, i do not know. what was seen after i recognized the face that was pleading through the bars was seen by others, not by me. i saw that face, so situated, every night for a long time afterward; and i believed myself as guilty of the man's death as if i had given him the matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them. i had not a doubt that i should be hanged if my connection with this tragedy were found out. the happenings and the impressions of that time are burnt into my memory, and the study of them entertains me as much now as they themselves distressed me then. if anybody spoke of that grisly matter, i was all ears in a moment, and alert to hear what might be said, for i was always dreading and expecting to find out that i was suspected; and so fine and so delicate was the perception of my guilty conscience, that it often detected suspicion in the most purposeless remarks, and in looks, gestures, glances of the eye which had no significance, but which sent me shivering away in a panic of fright, just the same. and how sick it made me when somebody dropped, howsoever carelessly and barren of intent, the remark that 'murder will out!' for a boy of ten years, i was carrying a pretty weighty cargo. all this time i was blessedly forgetting one thing--the fact that i was an inveterate talker in my sleep. but one night i awoke and found my bed-mate--my younger brother--sitting up in bed and contemplating me by the light of the moon. i said-- 'what is the matter?' 'you talk so much i can't sleep.' i came to a sitting posture in an instant, with my kidneys in my throat and my hair on end. 'what did i say. quick--out with it--what did i say?' 'nothing much.' 'it's a lie--you know everything.' 'everything about what?' 'you know well enough. about that.' 'about what?--i don't know what you are talking about. i think you are sick or crazy or something. but anyway, you're awake, and i'll get to sleep while i've got a chance.' he fell asleep and i lay there in a cold sweat, turning this new terror over in the whirling chaos which did duty as my mind. the burden of my thought was, how much did i divulge? how much does he know?--what a distress is this uncertainty! but by and by i evolved an idea--i would wake my brother and probe him with a supposititious case. i shook him up, and said-- 'suppose a man should come to you drunk--' 'this is foolish--i never get drunk.' 'i don't mean you, idiot--i mean the man. suppose a man should come to you drunk, and borrow a knife, or a tomahawk, or a pistol, and you forgot to tell him it was loaded, and--' 'how could you load a tomahawk?' 'i don't mean the tomahawk, and i didn't say the tomahawk; i said the pistol. now don't you keep breaking in that way, because this is serious. there's been a man killed.' 'what! in this town?' 'yes, in this town.' 'well, go on--i won't say a single word.' 'well, then, suppose you forgot to tell him to be careful with it, because it was loaded, and he went off and shot himself with that pistol--fooling with it, you know, and probably doing it by accident, being drunk. well, would it be murder?' 'no--suicide.' 'no, no. i don't mean his act, i mean yours: would you be a murderer for letting him have that pistol?' after deep thought came this answer-- 'well, i should think i was guilty of something--maybe murder--yes, probably murder, but i don't quite know.' this made me very uncomfortable. however, it was not a decisive verdict. i should have to set out the real case--there seemed to be no other way. but i would do it cautiously, and keep a watch out for suspicious effects. i said-- 'i was supposing a case, but i am coming to the real one now. do you know how the man came to be burned up in the calaboose?' 'no.' 'haven't you the least idea?' 'not the least.' 'wish you may die in your tracks if you have?' 'yes, wish i may die in my tracks.' 'well, the way of it was this. the man wanted some matches to light his pipe. a boy got him some. the man set fire to the calaboose with those very matches, and burnt himself up.' 'is that so?' 'yes, it is. now, is that boy a murderer, do you think?' 'let me see. the man was drunk?' 'yes, he was drunk.' 'very drunk?' 'yes.' 'and the boy knew it?' 'yes, he knew it.' there was a long pause. then came this heavy verdict-- 'if the man was drunk, and the boy knew it, the boy murdered that man. this is certain.' faint, sickening sensations crept along all the fibers of my body, and i seemed to know how a person feels who hears his death sentence pronounced from the bench. i waited to hear what my brother would say next. i believed i knew what it would be, and i was right. he said-- 'i know the boy.' i had nothing to say; so i said nothing. i simply shuddered. then he added-- 'yes, before you got half through telling about the thing, i knew perfectly well who the boy was; it was ben coontz!' i came out of my collapse as one who rises from the dead. i said, with admiration-- 'why, how in the world did you ever guess it?' 'you told it in your sleep.' i said to myself, 'how splendid that is! this is a habit which must be cultivated.' my brother rattled innocently on-- 'when you were talking in your sleep, you kept mumbling something about "matches," which i couldn't make anything out of; but just now, when you began to tell me about the man and the calaboose and the matches, i remembered that in your sleep you mentioned ben coontz two or three times; so i put this and that together, you see, and right away i knew it was ben that burnt that man up.' i praised his sagacity effusively. presently he asked-- 'are you going to give him up to the law?' 'no,' i said; 'i believe that this will be a lesson to him. i shall keep an eye on him, of course, for that is but right; but if he stops where he is and reforms, it shall never be said that i betrayed him.' 'how good you are!' 'well, i try to be. it is all a person can do in a world like this.' and now, my burden being shifted to other shoulders, my terrors soon faded away. the day before we left hannibal, a curious thing fell under my notice-- the surprising spread which longitudinal time undergoes there. i learned it from one of the most unostentatious of men--the colored coachman of a friend of mine, who lives three miles from town. he was to call for me at the park hotel at . p.m., and drive me out. but he missed it considerably--did not arrive till ten. he excused himself by saying-- 'de time is mos' an hour en a half slower in de country en what it is in de town; you'll be in plenty time, boss. sometimes we shoves out early for church, sunday, en fetches up dah right plum in de middle er de sermon. diffunce in de time. a body can't make no calculations 'bout it.' i had lost two hours and a half; but i had learned a fact worth four. chapter an archangel from st. louis northward there are all the enlivening signs of the presence of active, energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practical nineteenth-century populations. the people don't dream, they work. the happy result is manifest all around in the substantial outside aspect of things, and the suggestions of wholesome life and comfort that everywhere appear. quincy is a notable example--a brisk, handsome, well-ordered city; and now, as formerly, interested in art, letters, and other high things. but marion city is an exception. marion city has gone backwards in a most unaccountable way. this metropolis promised so well that the projectors tacked 'city' to its name in the very beginning, with full confidence; but it was bad prophecy. when i first saw marion city, thirty-five years ago, it contained one street, and nearly or quite six houses. it contains but one house now, and this one, in a state of ruin, is getting ready to follow the former five into the river. doubtless marion city was too near to quincy. it had another disadvantage: it was situated in a flat mud bottom, below high-water mark, whereas quincy stands high up on the slope of a hill. in the beginning quincy had the aspect and ways of a model new england town: and these she has yet: broad, clean streets, trim, neat dwellings and lawns, fine mansions, stately blocks of commercial buildings. and there are ample fair-grounds, a well kept park, and many attractive drives; library, reading-rooms, a couple of colleges, some handsome and costly churches, and a grand court-house, with grounds which occupy a square. the population of the city is thirty thousand. there are some large factories here, and manufacturing, of many sorts, is done on a great scale. la grange and canton are growing towns, but i missed alexandria; was told it was under water, but would come up to blow in the summer. keokuk was easily recognizable. i lived there in --an extraordinary year there in real-estate matters. the 'boom' was something wonderful. everybody bought, everybody sold--except widows and preachers; they always hold on; and when the tide ebbs, they get left. anything in the semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated, was salable, and at a figure which would still have been high if the ground had been sodded with greenbacks. the town has a population of fifteen thousand now, and is progressing with a healthy growth. it was night, and we could not see details, for which we were sorry, for keokuk has the reputation of being a beautiful city. it was a pleasant one to live in long ago, and doubtless has advanced, not retrograded, in that respect. a mighty work which was in progress there in my day is finished now. this is the canal over the rapids. it is eight miles long, three hundred feet wide, and is in no place less than six feet deep. its masonry is of the majestic kind which the war department usually deals in, and will endure like a roman aqueduct. the work cost four or five millions. after an hour or two spent with former friends, we started up the river again. keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasional loafing-place of that erratic genius, henry clay dean. i believe i never saw him but once; but he was much talked of when i lived there. this is what was said of him-- he began life poor and without education. but he educated himself--on the curbstones of keokuk. he would sit down on a curbstone with his book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce and the tramp of the passing crowds, and bury himself in his studies by the hour, never changing his position except to draw in his knees now and then to let a dray pass unobstructed; and when his book was finished, its contents, however abstruse, had been burnt into his memory, and were his permanent possession. in this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning, and had it pigeon-holed in his head where he could put his intellectual hand on it whenever it was wanted. his clothes differed in no respect from a 'wharf-rat's,' except that they were raggeder, more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and therefore more extravagantly picturesque), and several layers dirtier. nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself. he was an orator--by nature in the first place, and later by the training of experience and practice. when he was out on a canvass, his name was a lodestone which drew the farmers to his stump from fifty miles around. his theme was always politics. he used no notes, for a volcano does not need notes. in , a son of keokuk's late distinguished citizen, mr. claggett, gave me this incident concerning dean-- the war feeling was running high in keokuk (in ' ), and a great mass meeting was to be held on a certain day in the new athenaeum. a distinguished stranger was to address the house. after the building had been packed to its utmost capacity with sweltering folk of both sexes, the stage still remained vacant--the distinguished stranger had failed to connect. the crowd grew impatient, and by and by indignant and rebellious. about this time a distressed manager discovered dean on a curb-stone, explained the dilemma to him, took his book away from him, rushed him into the building the back way, and told him to make for the stage and save his country. presently a sudden silence fell upon the grumbling audience, and everybody's eyes sought a single point--the wide, empty, carpetless stage. a figure appeared there whose aspect was familiar to hardly a dozen persons present. it was the scarecrow dean--in foxy shoes, down at the heels; socks of odd colors, also 'down;' damaged trousers, relics of antiquity, and a world too short, exposing some inches of naked ankle; an unbuttoned vest, also too short, and exposing a zone of soiled and wrinkled linen between it and the waistband; shirt bosom open; long black handkerchief, wound round and round the neck like a bandage; bob- tailed blue coat, reaching down to the small of the back, with sleeves which left four inches of forearm unprotected; small, stiff-brimmed soldier-cap hung on a corner of the bump of--whichever bump it was. this figure moved gravely out upon the stage and, with sedate and measured step, down to the front, where it paused, and dreamily inspected the house, saying no word. the silence of surprise held its own for a moment, then was broken by a just audible ripple of merriment which swept the sea of faces like the wash of a wave. the figure remained as before, thoughtfully inspecting. another wave started-- laughter, this time. it was followed by another, then a third--this last one boisterous. and now the stranger stepped back one pace, took off his soldier-cap, tossed it into the wing, and began to speak, with deliberation, nobody listening, everybody laughing and whispering. the speaker talked on unembarrassed, and presently delivered a shot which went home, and silence and attention resulted. he followed it quick and fast, with other telling things; warmed to his work and began to pour his words out, instead of dripping them; grew hotter and hotter, and fell to discharging lightnings and thunder--and now the house began to break into applause, to which the speaker gave no heed, but went hammering straight on; unwound his black bandage and cast it away, still thundering; presently discarded the bob tailed coat and flung it aside, firing up higher and higher all the time; finally flung the vest after the coat; and then for an untimed period stood there, like another vesuvius, spouting smoke and flame, lava and ashes, raining pumice-stone and cinders, shaking the moral earth with intellectual crash upon crash, explosion upon explosion, while the mad multitude stood upon their feet in a solid body, answering back with a ceaseless hurricane of cheers, through a thrashing snowstorm of waving handkerchiefs. 'when dean came,' said claggett, 'the people thought he was an escaped lunatic; but when he went, they thought he was an escaped archangel.' burlington, home of the sparkling burdette, is another hill city; and also a beautiful one; unquestionably so; a fine and flourishing city, with a population of twenty-five thousand, and belted with busy factories of nearly every imaginable description. it was a very sober city, too--for the moment--for a most sobering bill was pending; a bill to forbid the manufacture, exportation, importation, purchase, sale, borrowing, lending, stealing, drinking, smelling, or possession, by conquest, inheritance, intent, accident, or otherwise, in the state of iowa, of each and every deleterious beverage known to the human race, except water. this measure was approved by all the rational people in the state; but not by the bench of judges. burlington has the progressive modern city's full equipment of devices for right and intelligent government; including a paid fire department, a thing which the great city of new orleans is without, but still employs that relic of antiquity, the independent system. in burlington, as in all these upper-river towns, one breathes a go-ahead atmosphere which tastes good in the nostrils. an opera-house has lately been built there which is in strong contrast with the shabby dens which usually do duty as theaters in cities of burlington's size. we had not time to go ashore in muscatine, but had a daylight view of it from the boat. i lived there awhile, many years ago, but the place, now, had a rather unfamiliar look; so i suppose it has clear outgrown the town which i used to know. in fact, i know it has; for i remember it as a small place--which it isn't now. but i remember it best for a lunatic who caught me out in the fields, one sunday, and extracted a butcher-knife from his boot and proposed to carve me up with it, unless i acknowledged him to be the only son of the devil. i tried to compromise on an acknowledgment that he was the only member of the family i had met; but that did not satisfy him; he wouldn't have any half-measures; i must say he was the sole and only son of the devil--he whetted his knife on his boot. it did not seem worth while to make trouble about a little thing like that; so i swung round to his view of the matter and saved my skin whole. shortly afterward, he went to visit his father; and as he has not turned up since, i trust he is there yet. and i remember muscatine--still more pleasantly--for its summer sunsets. i have never seen any, on either side of the ocean, that equaled them. they used the broad smooth river as a canvas, and painted on it every imaginable dream of color, from the mottled daintinesses and delicacies of the opal, all the way up, through cumulative intensities, to blinding purple and crimson conflagrations which were enchanting to the eye, but sharply tried it at the same time. all the upper mississippi region has these extraordinary sunsets as a familiar spectacle. it is the true sunset land: i am sure no other country can show so good a right to the name. the sunrises are also said to be exceedingly fine. i do not know. chapter on the upper river the big towns drop in, thick and fast, now: and between stretch processions of thrifty farms, not desolate solitude. hour by hour, the boat plows deeper and deeper into the great and populous north-west; and with each successive section of it which is revealed, one's surprise and respect gather emphasis and increase. such a people, and such achievements as theirs, compel homage. this is an independent race who think for themselves, and who are competent to do it, because they are educated and enlightened; they read, they keep abreast of the best and newest thought, they fortify every weak place in their land with a school, a college, a library, and a newspaper; and they live under law. solicitude for the future of a race like this is not in order. this region is new; so new that it may be said to be still in its babyhood. by what it has accomplished while still teething, one may forecast what marvels it will do in the strength of its maturity. it is so new that the foreign tourist has not heard of it yet; and has not visited it. for sixty years, the foreign tourist has steamed up and down the river between st. louis and new orleans, and then gone home and written his book, believing he had seen all of the river that was worth seeing or that had anything to see. in not six of all these books is there mention of these upper river towns--for the reason that the five or six tourists who penetrated this region did it before these towns were projected. the latest tourist of them all ( ) made the same old regulation trip--he had not heard that there was anything north of st. louis. yet there was. there was this amazing region, bristling with great towns, projected day before yesterday, so to speak, and built next morning. a score of them number from fifteen hundred to five thousand people. then we have muscatine, ten thousand; winona, ten thousand; moline, ten thousand; rock island, twelve thousand; la crosse, twelve thousand; burlington, twenty-five thousand; dubuque, twenty-five thousand; davenport, thirty thousand; st. paul, fifty-eight thousand, minneapolis, sixty thousand and upward. the foreign tourist has never heard of these; there is no note of them in his books. they have sprung up in the night, while he slept. so new is this region, that i, who am comparatively young, am yet older than it is. when i was born, st. paul had a population of three persons, minneapolis had just a third as many. the then population of minneapolis died two years ago; and when he died he had seen himself undergo an increase, in forty years, of fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine persons. he had a frog's fertility. i must explain that the figures set down above, as the population of st. paul and minneapolis, are several months old. these towns are far larger now. in fact, i have just seen a newspaper estimate which gives the former seventy-one thousand, and the latter seventy-eight thousand. this book will not reach the public for six or seven months yet; none of the figures will be worth much then. we had a glimpse of davenport, which is another beautiful city, crowning a hill--a phrase which applies to all these towns; for they are all comely, all well built, clean, orderly, pleasant to the eye, and cheering to the spirit; and they are all situated upon hills. therefore we will give that phrase a rest. the indians have a tradition that marquette and joliet camped where davenport now stands, in . the next white man who camped there, did it about a hundred and seventy years later--in . davenport has gathered its thirty thousand people within the past thirty years. she sends more children to her schools now, than her whole population numbered twenty-three years ago. she has the usual upper river quota of factories, newspapers, and institutions of learning; she has telephones, local telegraphs, an electric alarm, and an admirable paid fire department, consisting of six hook and ladder companies, four steam fire engines, and thirty churches. davenport is the official residence of two bishops--episcopal and catholic. opposite davenport is the flourishing town of rock island, which lies at the foot of the upper rapids. a great railroad bridge connects the two towns--one of the thirteen which fret the mississippi and the pilots, between st. louis and st. paul. the charming island of rock island, three miles long and half a mile wide, belongs to the united states, and the government has turned it into a wonderful park, enhancing its natural attractions by art, and threading its fine forests with many miles of drives. near the center of the island one catches glimpses, through the trees, of ten vast stone four-story buildings, each of which covers an acre of ground. these are the government workshops; for the rock island establishment is a national armory and arsenal. we move up the river--always through enchanting scenery, there being no other kind on the upper mississippi--and pass moline, a center of vast manufacturing industries; and clinton and lyons, great lumber centers; and presently reach dubuque, which is situated in a rich mineral region. the lead mines are very productive, and of wide extent. dubuque has a great number of manufacturing establishments; among them a plow factory which has for customers all christendom in general. at least so i was told by an agent of the concern who was on the boat. he said-- 'you show me any country under the sun where they really know how to plow, and if i don't show you our mark on the plow they use, i'll eat that plow; and i won't ask for any woostershyre sauce to flavor it up with, either.' all this part of the river is rich in indian history and traditions. black hawk's was once a puissant name hereabouts; as was keokuk's, further down. a few miles below dubuque is the tete de mort--death's- head rock, or bluff--to the top of which the french drove a band of indians, in early times, and cooped them up there, with death for a certainty, and only the manner of it matter of choice--to starve, or jump off and kill themselves. black hawk adopted the ways of the white people, toward the end of his life; and when he died he was buried, near des moines, in christian fashion, modified by indian custom; that is to say, clothed in a christian military uniform, and with a christian cane in his hand, but deposited in the grave in a sitting posture. formerly, a horse had always been buried with a chief. the substitution of the cane shows that black hawk's haughty nature was really humbled, and he expected to walk when he got over. we noticed that above dubuque the water of the mississippi was olive- green--rich and beautiful and semi-transparent, with the sun on it. of course the water was nowhere as clear or of as fine a complexion as it is in some other seasons of the year; for now it was at flood stage, and therefore dimmed and blurred by the mud manufactured from caving banks. the majestic bluffs that overlook the river, along through this region, charm one with the grace and variety of their forms, and the soft beauty of their adornment. the steep verdant slope, whose base is at the water's edge is topped by a lofty rampart of broken, turreted rocks, which are exquisitely rich and mellow in color--mainly dark browns and dull greens, but splashed with other tints. and then you have the shining river, winding here and there and yonder, its sweep interrupted at intervals by clusters of wooded islands threaded by silver channels; and you have glimpses of distant villages, asleep upon capes; and of stealthy rafts slipping along in the shade of the forest walls; and of white steamers vanishing around remote points. and it is all as tranquil and reposeful as dreamland, and has nothing this-worldly about it-- nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon. until the unholy train comes tearing along--which it presently does, ripping the sacred solitude to rags and tatters with its devil's warwhoop and the roar and thunder of its rushing wheels--and straightway you are back in this world, and with one of its frets ready to hand for your entertainment: for you remember that this is the very road whose stock always goes down after you buy it, and always goes up again as soon as you sell it. it makes me shudder to this day, to remember that i once came near not getting rid of my stock at all. it must be an awful thing to have a railroad left on your hands. the locomotive is in sight from the deck of the steamboat almost the whole way from st. louis to st. paul--eight hundred miles. these railroads have made havoc with the steamboat commerce. the clerk of our boat was a steamboat clerk before these roads were built. in that day the influx of population was so great, and the freight business so heavy, that the boats were not able to keep up with the demands made upon their carrying capacity; consequently the captains were very independent and airy--pretty 'biggity,' as uncle remus would say. the clerk nut-shelled the contrast between the former time and the present, thus-- 'boat used to land--captain on hurricane roof--mighty stiff and straight--iron ramrod for a spine--kid gloves, plug tile, hair parted behind--man on shore takes off hat and says-- '"got twenty-eight tons of wheat, cap'n--be great favor if you can take them." 'captain says-- '"'ll take two of them"--and don't even condescend to look at him. 'but nowadays the captain takes off his old slouch, and smiles all the way around to the back of his ears, and gets off a bow which he hasn't got any ramrod to interfere with, and says-- '"glad to see you, smith, glad to see you--you're looking well--haven't seen you looking so well for years--what you got for us?" '"nuth'n", says smith; and keeps his hat on, and just turns his back and goes to talking with somebody else. 'oh, yes, eight years ago, the captain was on top; but it's smith's turn now. eight years ago a boat used to go up the river with every stateroom full, and people piled five and six deep on the cabin floor; and a solid deck-load of immigrants and harvesters down below, into the bargain. to get a first-class stateroom, you'd got to prove sixteen quarterings of nobility and four hundred years of descent, or be personally acquainted with the nigger that blacked the captain's boots. but it's all changed now; plenty staterooms above, no harvesters below--there's a patent self-binder now, and they don't have harvesters any more; they've gone where the woodbine twineth--and they didn't go by steamboat, either; went by the train.' up in this region we met massed acres of lumber rafts coming down--but not floating leisurely along, in the old-fashioned way, manned with joyous and reckless crews of fiddling, song-singing, whiskey-drinking, breakdown-dancing rapscallions; no, the whole thing was shoved swiftly along by a powerful stern-wheeler, modern fashion, and the small crews were quiet, orderly men, of a sedate business aspect, with not a suggestion of romance about them anywhere. along here, somewhere, on a black night, we ran some exceedingly narrow and intricate island-chutes by aid of the electric light. behind was solid blackness--a crackless bank of it; ahead, a narrow elbow of water, curving between dense walls of foliage that almost touched our bows on both sides; and here every individual leaf, and every individual ripple stood out in its natural color, and flooded with a glare as of noonday intensified. the effect was strange, and fine, and very striking. we passed prairie du chien, another of father marquette's camping- places; and after some hours of progress through varied and beautiful scenery, reached la crosse. here is a town of twelve or thirteen thousand population, with electric lighted streets, and with blocks of buildings which are stately enough, and also architecturally fine enough, to command respect in any city. it is a choice town, and we made satisfactory use of the hour allowed us, in roaming it over, though the weather was rainier than necessary. chapter legends and scenery we added several passengers to our list, at la crosse; among others an old gentleman who had come to this north-western region with the early settlers, and was familiar with every part of it. pardonably proud of it, too. he said-- 'you'll find scenery between here and st. paul that can give the hudson points. you'll have the queen's bluff--seven hundred feet high, and just as imposing a spectacle as you can find anywheres; and trempeleau island, which isn't like any other island in america, i believe, for it is a gigantic mountain, with precipitous sides, and is full of indian traditions, and used to be full of rattlesnakes; if you catch the sun just right there, you will have a picture that will stay with you. and above winona you'll have lovely prairies; and then come the thousand islands, too beautiful for anything; green? why you never saw foliage so green, nor packed so thick; it's like a thousand plush cushions afloat on a looking-glass--when the water 's still; and then the monstrous bluffs on both sides of the river--ragged, rugged, dark-complected--just the frame that's wanted; you always want a strong frame, you know, to throw up the nice points of a delicate picture and make them stand out.' the old gentleman also told us a touching indian legend or two--but not very powerful ones. after this excursion into history, he came back to the scenery, and described it, detail by detail, from the thousand islands to st. paul; naming its names with such facility, tripping along his theme with such nimble and confident ease, slamming in a three-ton word, here and there, with such a complacent air of 't isn't-anything,-i-can-do-it-any-time-i- want-to, and letting off fine surprises of lurid eloquence at such judicious intervals, that i presently began to suspect-- but no matter what i began to suspect. hear him-- 'ten miles above winona we come to fountain city, nestling sweetly at the feet of cliffs that lift their awful fronts, jovelike, toward the blue depths of heaven, bathing them in virgin atmospheres that have known no other contact save that of angels' wings. 'and next we glide through silver waters, amid lovely and stupendous aspects of nature that attune our hearts to adoring admiration, about twelve miles, and strike mount vernon, six hundred feet high, with romantic ruins of a once first-class hotel perched far among the cloud shadows that mottle its dizzy heights--sole remnant of once-flourishing mount vernon, town of early days, now desolate and utterly deserted. 'and so we move on. past chimney rock we fly--noble shaft of six hundred feet; then just before landing at minnieska our attention is attracted by a most striking promontory rising over five hundred feet-- the ideal mountain pyramid. its conic shape--thickly-wooded surface girding its sides, and its apex like that of a cone, cause the spectator to wonder at nature's workings. from its dizzy heights superb views of the forests, streams, bluffs, hills and dales below and beyond for miles are brought within its focus. what grander river scenery can be conceived, as we gaze upon this enchanting landscape, from the uppermost point of these bluffs upon the valleys below? the primeval wildness and awful loneliness of these sublime creations of nature and nature's god, excite feelings of unbounded admiration, and the recollection of which can never be effaced from the memory, as we view them in any direction. 'next we have the lion's head and the lioness's head, carved by nature's hand, to adorn and dominate the beauteous stream; and then anon the river widens, and a most charming and magnificent view of the valley before us suddenly bursts upon our vision; rugged hills, clad with verdant forests from summit to base, level prairie lands, holding in their lap the beautiful wabasha, city of the healing waters, puissant foe of bright's disease, and that grandest conception of nature's works, incomparable lake pepin--these constitute a picture whereon the tourist's eye may gaze uncounted hours, with rapture unappeased and unappeasable. 'and so we glide along; in due time encountering those majestic domes, the mighty sugar loaf, and the sublime maiden's rock--which latter, romantic superstition has invested with a voice; and oft-times as the birch canoe glides near, at twilight, the dusky paddler fancies he hears the soft sweet music of the long-departed winona, darling of indian song and story. 'then frontenac looms upon our vision, delightful resort of jaded summer tourists; then progressive red wing; and diamond bluff, impressive and preponderous in its lone sublimity; then prescott and the st. croix; and anon we see bursting upon us the domes and steeples of st. paul, giant young chief of the north, marching with seven-league stride in the van of progress, banner-bearer of the highest and newest civilization, carving his beneficent way with the tomahawk of commercial enterprise, sounding the warwhoop of christian culture, tearing off the reeking scalp of sloth and superstition to plant there the steam-plow and the school-house--ever in his front stretch arid lawlessness, ignorance, crime, despair; ever in his wake bloom the jail, the gallows, and the pulpit; and ever--' 'have you ever traveled with a panorama?' 'i have formerly served in that capacity.' my suspicion was confirmed. 'do you still travel with it?' 'no, she is laid up till the fall season opens. i am helping now to work up the materials for a tourist's guide which the st. louis and st. paul packet company are going to issue this summer for the benefit of travelers who go by that line.' 'when you were talking of maiden's rock, you spoke of the long-departed winona, darling of indian song and story. is she the maiden of the rock?--and are the two connected by legend?' 'yes, and a very tragic and painful one. perhaps the most celebrated, as well as the most pathetic, of all the legends of the mississippi.' we asked him to tell it. he dropped out of his conversational vein and back into his lecture-gait without an effort, and rolled on as follows-- 'a little distance above lake city is a famous point known as maiden's rock, which is not only a picturesque spot, but is full of romantic interest from the event which gave it its name, not many years ago this locality was a favorite resort for the sioux indians on account of the fine fishing and hunting to be had there, and large numbers of them were always to be found in this locality. among the families which used to resort here, was one belonging to the tribe of wabasha. we-no-na (first-born) was the name of a maiden who had plighted her troth to a lover belonging to the same band. but her stern parents had promised her hand to another, a famous warrior, and insisted on her wedding him. the day was fixed by her parents, to her great grief. she appeared to accede to the proposal and accompany them to the rock, for the purpose of gathering flowers for the feast. on reaching the rock, we-no-na ran to its summit and standing on its edge upbraided her parents who were below, for their cruelty, and then singing a death-dirge, threw herself from the precipice and dashed them in pieces on the rock below.' 'dashed who in pieces--her parents?' 'yes.' 'well, it certainly was a tragic business, as you say. and moreover, there is a startling kind of dramatic surprise about it which i was not looking for. it is a distinct improvement upon the threadbare form of indian legend. there are fifty lover's leaps along the mississippi from whose summit disappointed indian girls have jumped, but this is the only jump in the lot hat turned out in the right and satisfactory way. what became of winona?' 'she was a good deal jarred up and jolted: but she got herself together and disappeared before the coroner reached the fatal spot; and 'tis said she sought and married her true love, and wandered with him to some distant clime, where she lived happy ever after, her gentle spirit mellowed and chastened by the romantic incident which had so early deprived her of the sweet guidance of a mother's love and a father's protecting arm, and thrown her, all unfriended, upon the cold charity of a censorious world.' i was glad to hear the lecturer's description of the scenery, for it assisted my appreciation of what i saw of it, and enabled me to imagine such of it as we lost by the intrusion of night. as the lecturer remarked, this whole region is blanketed with indian tales and traditions. but i reminded him that people usually merely mention this fact--doing it in a way to make a body's mouth water--and judiciously stopped there. why? because the impression left, was that these tales were full of incident and imagination--a pleasant impression which would be promptly dissipated if the tales were told. i showed him a lot of this sort of literature which i had been collecting, and he confessed that it was poor stuff, exceedingly sorry rubbish; and i ventured to add that the legends which he had himself told us were of this character, with the single exception of the admirable story of winona. he granted these facts, but said that if i would hunt up mr. schoolcraft's book, published near fifty years ago, and now doubtless out of print, i would find some indian inventions in it that were very far from being barren of incident and imagination; that the tales in hiawatha were of this sort, and they came from schoolcraft's book; and that there were others in the same book which mr. longfellow could have turned into verse with good effect. for instance, there was the legend of 'the undying head.' he could not tell it, for many of the details had grown dim in his memory; but he would recommend me to find it and enlarge my respect for the indian imagination. he said that this tale, and most of the others in the book, were current among the indians along this part of the mississippi when he first came here; and that the contributors to schoolcraft's book had got them directly from indian lips, and had written them down with strict exactness, and without embellishments of their own. i have found the book. the lecturer was right. there are several legends in it which confirm what he said. i will offer two of them-- 'the undying head,' and 'peboan and seegwun, an allegory of the seasons.' the latter is used in hiawatha; but it is worth reading in the original form, if only that one may see how effective a genuine poem can be without the helps and graces of poetic measure and rhythm-- peboan and seegwun. an old man was sitting alone in his lodge, by the side of a frozen stream. it was the close of winter, and his fire was almost out, he appeared very old and very desolate. his locks were white with age, and he trembled in every joint. day after day passed in solitude, and he heard nothing but the sound of the tempest, sweeping before it the new- fallen snow. one day, as his fire was just dying, a handsome young man approached and entered his dwelling. his cheeks were red with the blood of youth, his eyes sparkled with animation, and a smile played upon his lips. he walked with a light and quick step. his forehead was bound with a wreath of sweet grass, in place of a warrior's frontlet, and he carried a bunch of flowers in his hand. 'ah, my son,' said the old man, 'i am happy to see you. come in. come and tell me of your adventures, and what strange lands you have been to see. let us pass the night together. i will tell you of my prowess and exploits, and what i can perform. you shall do the same, and we will amuse ourselves.' he then drew from his sack a curiously wrought antique pipe, and having filled it with tobacco, rendered mild by a mixture of certain leaves, handed it to his guest. when this ceremony was concluded they began to speak. 'i blow my breath,' said the old man, 'and the stream stands still. the water becomes stiff and hard as clear stone.' 'i breathe,' said the young man, 'and flowers spring up over the plain.' 'i shake my locks,' retorted the old man, 'and snow covers the land. the leaves fall from the trees at my command, and my breath blows them away. the birds get up from the water, and fly to a distant land. the animals hide themselves from my breath, and the very ground becomes as hard as flint.' 'i shake my ringlets,' rejoined the young man, 'and warm showers of soft rain fall upon the earth. the plants lift up their heads out of the earth, like the eyes of children glistening with delight. my voice recalls the birds. the warmth of my breath unlocks the streams. music fills the groves wherever i walk, and all nature rejoices.' at length the sun began to rise. a gentle warmth came over the place. the tongue of the old man became silent. the robin and bluebird began to sing on the top of the lodge. the stream began to murmur by the door, and the fragrance of growing herbs and flowers came softly on the vernal breeze. daylight fully revealed to the young man the character of his entertainer. when he looked upon him, he had the icy visage of peboan.{footnote [winter.]} streams began to flow from his eyes. as the sun increased, he grew less and less in stature, and anon had melted completely away. nothing remained on the place of his lodge-fire but the miskodeed,{footnote [the trailing arbutus.]} a small white flower, with a pink border, which is one of the earliest species of northern plants. 'the undying head' is a rather long tale, but it makes up in weird conceits, fairy-tale prodigies, variety of incident, and energy of movement, for what it lacks in brevity.{footnote [see appendix d.]} chapter speculations and conclusions we reached st. paul, at the head of navigation of the mississippi, and there our voyage of two thousand miles from new orleans ended. it is about a ten-day trip by steamer. it can probably be done quicker by rail. i judge so because i know that one may go by rail from st. louis to hannibal--a distance of at least a hundred and twenty miles--in seven hours. this is better than walking; unless one is in a hurry. the season being far advanced when we were in new orleans, the roses and magnolia blossoms were falling; but here in st. paul it was the snow, in new orleans we had caught an occasional withering breath from over a crater, apparently; here in st. paul we caught a frequent benumbing one from over a glacier, apparently. but i wander from my theme. st. paul is a wonderful town. it is put together in solid blocks of honest brick and stone, and has the air of intending to stay. its post-office was established thirty-six years ago; and by and by, when the postmaster received a letter, he carried it to washington, horseback, to inquire what was to be done with it. such is the legend. two frame houses were built that year, and several persons were added to the population. a recent number of the leading st. paul paper, the 'pioneer press,' gives some statistics which furnish a vivid contrast to that old state of things, to wit: population, autumn of the present year ( ), , ; number of letters handled, first half of the year, , , ; number of houses built during three- quarters of the year, ; their cost, $ , , . the increase of letters over the corresponding six months of last year was fifty per cent. last year the new buildings added to the city cost above $ , , . st. paul's strength lies in her commerce--i mean his commerce. he is a manufacturing city, of course--all the cities of that region are--but he is peculiarly strong in the matter of commerce. last year his jobbing trade amounted to upwards of $ , , . he has a custom-house, and is building a costly capitol to replace the one recently burned--for he is the capital of the state. he has churches without end; and not the cheap poor kind, but the kind that the rich protestant puts up, the kind that the poor irish 'hired-girl' delights to erect. what a passion for building majestic churches the irish hired-girl has. it is a fine thing for our architecture but too often we enjoy her stately fanes without giving her a grateful thought. in fact, instead of reflecting that 'every brick and every stone in this beautiful edifice represents an ache or a pain, and a handful of sweat, and hours of heavy fatigue, contributed by the back and forehead and bones of poverty,' it is our habit to forget these things entirely, and merely glorify the mighty temple itself, without vouchsafing one praiseful thought to its humble builder, whose rich heart and withered purse it symbolizes. this is a land of libraries and schools. st. paul has three public libraries, and they contain, in the aggregate, some forty thousand books. he has one hundred and sixteen school-houses, and pays out more than seventy thousand dollars a year in teachers' salaries. there is an unusually fine railway station; so large is it, in fact, that it seemed somewhat overdone, in the matter of size, at first; but at the end of a few months it was perceived that the mistake was distinctly the other way. the error is to be corrected. the town stands on high ground; it is about seven hundred feet above the sea level. it is so high that a wide view of river and lowland is offered from its streets. it is a very wonderful town indeed, and is not finished yet. all the streets are obstructed with building material, and this is being compacted into houses as fast as possible, to make room for more--for other people are anxious to build, as soon as they can get the use of the streets to pile up their bricks and stuff in. how solemn and beautiful is the thought, that the earliest pioneer of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the sabbath-school, never the missionary--but always whiskey! such is the case. look history over; you will see. the missionary comes after the whiskey--i mean he arrives after the whiskey has arrived; next comes the poor immigrant, with ax and hoe and rifle; next, the trader; next, the miscellaneous rush; next, the gambler, the desperado, the highwayman, and all their kindred in sin of both sexes; and next, the smart chap who has bought up an old grant that covers all the land; this brings the lawyer tribe; the vigilance committee brings the undertaker. all these interests bring the newspaper; the newspaper starts up politics and a railroad; all hands turn to and build a church and a jail--and behold, civilization is established for ever in the land. but whiskey, you see, was the van- leader in this beneficent work. it always is. it was like a foreigner-- and excusable in a foreigner--to be ignorant of this great truth, and wander off into astronomy to borrow a symbol. but if he had been conversant with the facts, he would have said-- westward the jug of empire takes its way. this great van-leader arrived upon the ground which st. paul now occupies, in june . yes, at that date, pierre parrant, a canadian, built the first cabin, uncorked his jug, and began to sell whiskey to the indians. the result is before us. all that i have said of the newness, briskness, swift progress, wealth, intelligence, fine and substantial architecture, and general slash and go, and energy of st. paul, will apply to his near neighbor, minneapolis--with the addition that the latter is the bigger of the two cities. these extraordinary towns were ten miles apart, a few months ago, but were growing so fast that they may possibly be joined now, and getting along under a single mayor. at any rate, within five years from now there will be at least such a substantial ligament of buildings stretching between them and uniting them that a stranger will not be able to tell where the one siamese twin leaves off and the other begins. combined, they will then number a population of two hundred and fifty thousand, if they continue to grow as they are now growing. thus, this center of population at the head of mississippi navigation, will then begin a rivalry as to numbers, with that center of population at the foot of it--new orleans. minneapolis is situated at the falls of st. anthony, which stretch across the river, fifteen hundred feet, and have a fall of eighty-two feet--a waterpower which, by art, has been made of inestimable value, business-wise, though somewhat to the damage of the falls as a spectacle, or as a background against which to get your photograph taken. thirty flouring-mills turn out two million barrels of the very choicest of flour every year; twenty sawmills produce two hundred million feet of lumber annually; then there are woolen mills, cotton mills, paper and oil mills; and sash, nail, furniture, barrel, and other factories, without number, so to speak. the great flouring-mills here and at st. paul use the 'new process' and mash the wheat by rolling, instead of grinding it. sixteen railroads meet in minneapolis, and sixty-five passenger trains arrive and depart daily. in this place, as in st. paul, journalism thrives. here there are three great dailies, ten weeklies, and three monthlies. there is a university, with four hundred students--and, better still, its good efforts are not confined to enlightening the one sex. there are sixteen public schools, with buildings which cost $ , ; there are six thousand pupils and one hundred and twenty-eight teachers. there are also seventy churches existing, and a lot more projected. the banks aggregate a capital of $ , , , and the wholesale jobbing trade of the town amounts to $ , , a year. near st. paul and minneapolis are several points of interest--fort snelling, a fortress occupying a river-bluff a hundred feet high; the falls of minnehaha, white-bear lake, and so forth. the beautiful falls of minnehaha are sufficiently celebrated--they do not need a lift from me, in that direction. the white-bear lake is less known. it is a lovely sheet of water, and is being utilized as a summer resort by the wealth and fashion of the state. it has its club-house, and its hotel, with the modern improvements and conveniences; its fine summer residences; and plenty of fishing, hunting, and pleasant drives. there are a dozen minor summer resorts around about st. paul and minneapolis, but the white-bear lake is the resort. connected with white-bear lake is a most idiotic indian legend. i would resist the temptation to print it here, if i could, but the task is beyond my strength. the guide-book names the preserver of the legend, and compliments his 'facile pen.' without further comment or delay then, let us turn the said facile pen loose upon the reader-- a legend of white-bear lake. every spring, for perhaps a century, or as long as there has been a nation of red men, an island in the middle of white-bear lake has been visited by a band of indians for the purpose of making maple sugar. tradition says that many springs ago, while upon this island, a young warrior loved and wooed the daughter of his chief, and it is said, also, the maiden loved the warrior. he had again and again been refused her hand by her parents, the old chief alleging that he was no brave, and his old consort called him a woman! the sun had again set upon the 'sugar-bush,' and the bright moon rose high in the bright blue heavens, when the young warrior took down his flute and went out alone, once more to sing the story of his love, the mild breeze gently moved the two gay feathers in his head-dress, and as he mounted on the trunk of a leaning tree, the damp snow fell from his feet heavily. as he raised his flute to his lips, his blanket slipped from his well-formed shoulders, and lay partly on the snow beneath. he began his weird, wild love-song, but soon felt that he was cold, and as he reached back for his blanket, some unseen hand laid it gently on his shoulders; it was the hand of his love, his guardian angel. she took her place beside him, and for the present they were happy; for the indian has a heart to love, and in this pride he is as noble as in his own freedom, which makes him the child of the forest. as the legend runs, a large white-bear, thinking, perhaps, that polar snows and dismal winter weather extended everywhere, took up his journey southward. he at length approached the northern shore of the lake which now bears his name, walked down the bank and made his way noiselessly through the deep heavy snow toward the island. it was the same spring ensuing that the lovers met. they had left their first retreat, and were now seated among the branches of a large elm which hung far over the lake. (the same tree is still standing, and excites universal curiosity and interest.) for fear of being detected, they talked almost in a whisper, and now, that they might get back to camp in good time and thereby avoid suspicion, they were just rising to return, when the maiden uttered a shriek which was heard at the camp, and bounding toward the young brave, she caught his blanket, but missed the direction of her foot and fell, bearing the blanket with her into the great arms of the ferocious monster. instantly every man, woman, and child of the band were upon the bank, but all unarmed. cries and wailings went up from every mouth. what was to be done'? in the meantime this white and savage beast held the breathless maiden in his huge grasp, and fondled with his precious prey as if he were used to scenes like this. one deafening yell from the lover warrior is heard above the cries of hundreds of his tribe, and dashing away to his wigwam he grasps his faithful knife, returns almost at a single bound to the scene of fear and fright, rushes out along the leaning tree to the spot where his treasure fell, and springing with the fury of a mad panther, pounced upon his prey. the animal turned, and with one stroke of his huge paw brought the lovers heart to heart, but the next moment the warrior, with one plunge of the blade of his knife, opened the crimson sluices of death, and the dying bear relaxed his hold. that night there was no more sleep for the band or the lovers, and as the young and the old danced about the carcass of the dead monster, the gallant warrior was presented with another plume, and ere another moon had set he had a living treasure added to his heart. their children for many years played upon the skin of the white-bear--from which the lake derives its name--and the maiden and the brave remembered long the fearful scene and rescue that made them one, for kis-se-me-pa and ka-go- ka could never forget their fearful encounter with the huge monster that came so near sending them to the happy hunting-ground. it is a perplexing business. first, she fell down out of the tree--she and the blanket; and the bear caught her and fondled her--her and the blanket; then she fell up into the tree again--leaving the blanket; meantime the lover goes war-whooping home and comes back 'heeled,' climbs the tree, jumps down on the bear, the girl jumps down after him-- apparently, for she was up the tree--resumes her place in the bear's arms along with the blanket, the lover rams his knife into the bear, and saves--whom, the blanket? no--nothing of the sort. you get yourself all worked up and excited about that blanket, and then all of a sudden, just when a happy climax seems imminent you are let down flat--nothing saved but the girl. whereas, one is not interested in the girl; she is not the prominent feature of the legend. nevertheless, there you are left, and there you must remain; for if you live a thousand years you will never know who got the blanket. a dead man could get up a better legend than this one. i don't mean a fresh dead man either; i mean a man that's been dead weeks and weeks. we struck the home-trail now, and in a few hours were in that astonishing chicago--a city where they are always rubbing the lamp, and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities. it is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with chicago--she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. she is always a novelty; for she is never the chicago you saw when you passed through the last time. the pennsylvania road rushed us to new york without missing schedule time ten minutes anywhere on the route; and there ended one of the most enjoyable five-thousand-mile journeys i have ever had the good fortune to make. appendix a (from the new orleans times democrat of march , .) voyage of the times-democrat's relief boat through the inundated regions it was nine o'clock thursday morning when the 'susie' left the mississippi and entered old river, or what is now called the mouth of the red. ascending on the left, a flood was pouring in through and over the levees on the chandler plantation, the most northern point in pointe coupee parish. the water completely covered the place, although the levees had given way but a short time before. the stock had been gathered in a large flat-boat, where, without food, as we passed, the animals were huddled together, waiting for a boat to tow them off. on the right-hand side of the river is turnbull's island, and on it is a large plantation which formerly was pronounced one of the most fertile in the state. the water has hitherto allowed it to go scot-free in usual floods, but now broad sheets of water told only where fields were. the top of the protecting levee could be seen here and there, but nearly all of it was submerged. the trees have put on a greener foliage since the water has poured in, and the woods look bright and fresh, but this pleasant aspect to the eye is neutralized by the interminable waste of water. we pass mile after mile, and it is nothing but trees standing up to their branches in water. a water-turkey now and again rises and flies ahead into the long avenue of silence. a pirogue sometimes flits from the bushes and crosses the red river on its way out to the mississippi, but the sad- faced paddlers never turn their heads to look at our boat. the puffing of the boat is music in this gloom, which affects one most curiously. it is not the gloom of deep forests or dark caverns, but a peculiar kind of solemn silence and impressive awe that holds one perforce to its recognition. we passed two negro families on a raft tied up in the willows this morning. they were evidently of the well-to-do class, as they had a supply of meal and three or four hogs with them. their rafts were about twenty feet square, and in front of an improvised shelter earth had been placed, on which they built their fire. the current running down the atchafalaya was very swift, the mississippi showing a predilection in that direction, which needs only to be seen to enforce the opinion of that river's desperate endeavors to find a short way to the gulf. small boats, skiffs, pirogues, etc., are in great demand, and many have been stolen by piratical negroes, who take them where they will bring the greatest price. from what was told me by mr. c. p. ferguson, a planter near red river landing, whose place has just gone under, there is much suffering in the rear of that place. the negroes had given up all thoughts of a crevasse there, as the upper levee had stood so long, and when it did come they were at its mercy. on thursday a number were taken out of trees and off of cabin roofs and brought in, many yet remaining. one does not appreciate the sight of earth until he has traveled through a flood. at sea one does not expect or look for it, but here, with fluttering leaves, shadowy forest aisles, house-tops barely visible, it is expected. in fact a grave-yard, if the mounds were above water, would be appreciated. the river here is known only because there is an opening in the trees, and that is all. it is in width, from fort adams on the left bank of the mississippi to the bank of rapides parish, a distance of about sixty miles. a large portion of this was under cultivation, particularly along the mississippi and back of the red. when red river proper was entered, a strong current was running directly across it, pursuing the same direction as that of the mississippi. after a run of some hours, black river was reached. hardly was it entered before signs of suffering became visible. all the willows along the banks were stripped of their leaves. one man, whom your correspondent spoke to, said that he had had one hundred and fifty head of cattle and one hundred head of hogs. at the first appearance of water he had started to drive them to the high lands of avoyelles, thirty-five miles off, but he lost fifty head of the beef cattle and sixty hogs. black river is quite picturesque, even if its shores are under water. a dense growth of ash, oak, gum, and hickory make the shores almost impenetrable, and where one can get a view down some avenue in the trees, only the dim outlines of distant trunks can be barely distinguished in the gloom. a few miles up this river, the depth of water on the banks was fully eight feet, and on all sides could be seen, still holding against the strong current, the tops of cabins. here and there one overturned was surrounded by drift-wood, forming the nucleus of possibly some future island. in order to save coal, as it was impossible to get that fuel at any point to be touched during the expedition, a look-out was kept for a wood-pile. on rounding a point a pirogue, skilfully paddled by a youth, shot out, and in its bow was a girl of fifteen, of fair face, beautiful black eyes, and demure manners. the boy asked for a paper, which was thrown to him, and the couple pushed their tiny craft out into the swell of the boat. presently a little girl, not certainly over twelve years, paddled out in the smallest little canoe and handled it with all the deftness of an old voyageur. the little one looked more like an indian than a white child, and laughed when asked if she were afraid. she had been raised in a pirogue and could go anywhere. she was bound out to pick willow leaves for the stock, and she pointed to a house near by with water three inches deep on the floors. at its back door was moored a raft about thirty feet square, with a sort of fence built upon it, and inside of this some sixteen cows and twenty hogs were standing. the family did not complain, except on account of losing their stock, and promptly brought a supply of wood in a flat. from this point to the mississippi river, fifteen miles, there is not a spot of earth above water, and to the westward for thirty-five miles there is nothing but the river's flood. black river had risen during thursday, the rd, {three-quarters} inches, and was going up at night still. as we progress up the river habitations become more frequent, but are yet still miles apart. nearly all of them are deserted, and the out-houses floated off. to add to the gloom, almost every living thing seems to have departed, and not a whistle of a bird nor the bark of the squirrel can be heard in this solitude. sometimes a morose gar will throw his tail aloft and disappear in the river, but beyond this everything is quiet--the quiet of dissolution. down the river floats now a neatly whitewashed hen-house, then a cluster of neatly split fence- rails, or a door and a bloated carcass, solemnly guarded by a pair of buzzards, the only bird to be seen, which feast on the carcass as it bears them along. a picture-frame in which there was a cheap lithograph of a soldier on horseback, as it floated on told of some hearth invaded by the water and despoiled of this ornament. at dark, as it was not prudent to run, a place alongside the woods was hunted and to a tall gum-tree the boat was made fast for the night. a pretty quarter of the moon threw a pleasant light over forest and river, making a picture that would be a delightful piece of landscape study, could an artist only hold it down to his canvas. the motion of the engines had ceased, the puffing of the escaping steam was stilled, and the enveloping silence closed upon us, and such silence it was! usually in a forest at night one can hear the piping of frogs, the hum of insects, or the dropping of limbs; but here nature was dumb. the dark recesses, those aisles into this cathedral, gave forth no sound, and even the ripplings of the current die away. at daylight friday morning all hands were up, and up the black we started. the morning was a beautiful one, and the river, which is remarkably straight, put on its loveliest garb. the blossoms of the haw perfumed the air deliciously, and a few birds whistled blithely along the banks. the trees were larger, and the forest seemed of older growth than below. more fields were passed than nearer the mouth, but the same scene presented itself--smoke-houses drifting out in the pastures, negro quarters anchored in confusion against some oak, and the modest residence just showing its eaves above water. the sun came up in a glory of carmine, and the trees were brilliant in their varied shades of green. not a foot of soil is to be seen anywhere, and the water is apparently growing deeper and deeper, for it reaches up to the branches of the largest trees. all along, the bordering willows have been denuded of leaves, showing how long the people have been at work gathering this fodder for their animals. an old man in a pirogue was asked how the willow leaves agreed with his cattle. he stopped in his work, and with an ominous shake of his head replied: 'well, sir, it 's enough to keep warmth in their bodies and that's all we expect, but it's hard on the hogs, particularly the small ones. they is dropping off powerful fast. but what can you do? it 's all we've got.' at thirty miles above the mouth of black river the water extends from natchez on the mississippi across to the pine hills of louisiana, a distance of seventy-three miles, and there is hardly a spot that is not ten feet under it. the tendency of the current up the black is toward the west. in fact, so much is this the case, the waters of red river have been driven down from toward the calcasieu country, and the waters of the black enter the red some fifteen miles above the mouth of the former, a thing never before seen by even the oldest steamboatmen. the water now in sight of us is entirely from the mississippi. up to trinity, or rather troy, which is but a short distance below, the people have nearly all moved out, those remaining having enough for their present personal needs. their cattle, though, are suffering and dying off quite fast, as the confinement on rafts and the food they get breeds disease. after a short stop we started, and soon came to a section where there were many open fields and cabins thickly scattered about. here were seen more pictures of distress. on the inside of the houses the inmates had built on boxes a scaffold on which they placed the furniture. the bed- posts were sawed off on top, as the ceiling was not more than four feet from the improvised floor. the buildings looked very insecure, and threatened every moment to float off. near the houses were cattle standing breast high in the water, perfectly impassive. they did not move in their places, but stood patiently waiting for help to come. the sight was a distressing one, and the poor creatures will be sure to die unless speedily rescued. cattle differ from horses in this peculiar quality. a horse, after finding no relief comes, will swim off in search of food, whereas a beef will stand in its tracks until with exhaustion it drops in the water and drowns. at half-past twelve o'clock a hail was given from a flat-boat inside the line of the bank. rounding to we ran alongside, and general york stepped aboard. he was just then engaged in getting off stock, and welcomed the 'times-democrat' boat heartily, as he said there was much need for her. he said that the distress was not exaggerated in the least. people were in a condition it was difficult even for one to imagine. the water was so high there was great danger of their houses being swept away. it had already risen so high that it was approaching the eaves, and when it reaches this point there is always imminent risk of their being swept away. if this occurs, there will be great loss of life. the general spoke of the gallant work of many of the people in their attempts to save their stock, but thought that fully twenty-five per cent. had perished. already twenty-five hundred people had received rations from troy, on black river, and he had towed out a great many cattle, but a very great quantity remained and were in dire need. the water was now eighteen inches higher than in , and there was no land between vidalia and the hills of catahoula. at two o'clock the 'susie' reached troy, sixty-five miles above the mouth of black river. here on the left comes in little river; just beyond that the ouachita, and on the right the tensas. these three rivers form the black river. troy, or a portion of it, is situated on and around three large indian mounds, circular in shape, which rise above the present water about twelve feet. they are about one hundred and fifty feet in diameter, and are about two hundred yards apart. the houses are all built between these mounds, and hence are all flooded to a depth of eighteen inches on their floors. these elevations, built by the aborigines, hundreds of years ago, are the only points of refuge for miles. when we arrived we found them crowded with stock, all of which was thin and hardly able to stand up. they were mixed together, sheep, hogs, horses, mules, and cattle. one of these mounds has been used for many years as the grave-yard, and to-day we saw attenuated cows lying against the marble tomb-stones, chewing their cud in contentment, after a meal of corn furnished by general york. here, as below, the remarkable skill of the women and girls in the management of the smaller pirogues was noticed. children were paddling about in these most ticklish crafts with all the nonchalance of adepts. general york has put into operation a perfect system in regard to furnishing relief. he makes a personal inspection of the place where it is asked, sees what is necessary to be done, and then, having two boats chartered, with flats, sends them promptly to the place, when the cattle are loaded and towed to the pine hills and uplands of catahoula. he has made troy his headquarters, and to this point boats come for their supply of feed for cattle. on the opposite side of little river, which branches to the left out of black, and between it and the ouachita, is situated the town of trinity, which is hourly threatened with destruction. it is much lower than troy, and the water is eight and nine feet deep in the houses. a strong current sweeps through it, and it is remarkable that all of its houses have not gone before. the residents of both troy and trinity have been cared for, yet some of their stock have to be furnished with food. as soon as the 'susie' reached troy, she was turned over to general york, and placed at his disposition to carry out the work of relief more rapidly. nearly all her supplies were landed on one of the mounds to lighten her, and she was headed down stream to relieve those below. at tom hooper's place, a few miles from troy, a large flat, with about fifty head of stock on board, was taken in tow. the animals were fed, and soon regained some strength. to-day we go on little river, where the suffering is greatest. down black river saturday evening, march . we started down black river quite early, under the direction of general york, to bring out what stock could be reached. going down river a flat in tow was left in a central locality, and from there men poled her back in the rear of plantations, picking up the animals wherever found. in the loft of a gin-house there were seventeen head found, and after a gangway was built they were led down into the flat without difficulty. taking a skiff with the general, your reporter was pulled up to a little house of two rooms, in which the water was standing two feet on the floors. in one of the large rooms were huddled the horses and cows of the place, while in the other the widow taylor and her son were seated on a scaffold raised on the floor. one or two dug-outs were drifting about in the roam ready to be put in service at any time. when the flat was brought up, the side of the house was cut away as the only means of getting the animals out, and the cattle were driven on board the boat. general york, in this as in every case, inquired if the family desired to leave, informing them that major burke, of 'the times-democrat,' has sent the 'susie' up for that purpose. mrs. taylor said she thanked major burke, but she would try and hold out. the remarkable tenacity of the people here to their homes is beyond all comprehension. just below, at a point sixteen miles from troy, information was received that the house of mr. tom ellis was in danger, and his family were all in it. we steamed there immediately, and a sad picture was presented. looking out of the half of the window left above water, was mrs. ellis, who is in feeble health, whilst at the door were her seven children, the oldest not fourteen years. one side of the house was given up to the work animals, some twelve head, besides hogs. in the next room the family lived, the water coming within two inches of the bed-rail. the stove was below water, and the cooking was done on a fire on top of it. the house threatened to give way at any moment: one end of it was sinking, and, in fact, the building looked a mere shell. as the boat rounded to, mr. ellis came out in a dug-out, and general york told him that he had come to his relief; that 'the times-democrat' boat was at his service, and would remove his family at once to the hills, and on monday a flat would take out his stock, as, until that time, they would be busy. notwithstanding the deplorable situation himself and family were in, mr. ellis did not want to leave. he said he thought he would wait until monday, and take the risk of his house falling. the children around the door looked perfectly contented, seeming to care little for the danger they were in. these are but two instances of the many. after weeks of privation and suffering, people still cling to their houses and leave only when there is not room between the water and the ceiling to build a scaffold on which to stand. it seemed to be incomprehensible, yet the love for the old place was stronger than that for safety. after leaving the ellis place, the next spot touched at was the oswald place. here the flat was towed alongside the gin-house where there were fifteen head standing in water; and yet, as they stood on scaffolds, their heads were above the top of the entrance. it was found impossible to get them out without cutting away a portion of the front; and so axes were brought into requisition and a gap made. after much labor the horses and mules were securely placed on the flat. at each place we stop there are always three, four, or more dug-outs arriving, bringing information of stock in other places in need. notwithstanding the fact that a great many had driven a part of their stock to the hills some time ago, there yet remains a large quantity, which general york, who is working with indomitable energy, will get landed in the pine hills by tuesday. all along black river the 'susie' has been visited by scores of planters, whose tales are the repetition of those already heard of suffering and loss. an old planter, who has lived on the river since , said there never was such a rise, and he was satisfied more than one quarter of the stock has been lost. luckily the people cared first for their work stock, and when they could find it horses and mules were housed in a place of safety. the rise which still continues, and was two inches last night, compels them to get them out to the hills; hence it is that the work of general york is of such a great value. from daylight to late at night he is going this way and that, cheering by his kindly words and directing with calm judgment what is to be done. one unpleasant story, of a certain merchant in new orleans, is told all along the river. it appears for some years past the planters have been dealing with this individual, and many of them had balances in his hands. when the overflow came they wrote for coffee, for meal, and, in fact, for such little necessities as were required. no response to these letters came, and others were written, and yet these old customers, with plantations under water, were refused even what was necessary to sustain life. it is needless to say he is not popular now on back river. the hills spoken of as the place of refuge for the people and stock on black river are in catahoula parish, twenty-four miles from black river. after filling the flat with cattle we took on board the family of t. s. hooper, seven in number, who could not longer remain in their dwelling, and we are now taking them up little river to the hills. the flood still rising troy: march , , noon. the flood here is rising about three and a half inches every twenty-four hours, and rains have set in which will increase this. general york feels now that our efforts ought to be directed towards saving life, as the increase of the water has jeopardized many houses. we intend to go up the tensas in a few minutes, and then we will return and go down black river to take off families. there is a lack of steam transportation here to meet the emergency. the general has three boats chartered, with flats in tow, but the demand for these to tow out stock is greater than they can meet with promptness. all are working night and day, and the 'susie' hardly stops for more than an hour anywhere. the rise has placed trinity in a dangerous plight, and momentarily it is expected that some of the houses will float off. troy is a little higher, yet all are in the water. reports have come in that a woman and child have been washed away below here, and two cabins floated off. their occupants are the same who refused to come off day before yesterday. one would not believe the utter passiveness of the people. as yet no news has been received of the steamer 'delia,' which is supposed to be the one sunk in yesterday's storm on lake catahoula. she is due here now, but has not arrived. even the mail here is most uncertain, and this i send by skiff to natchez to get it to you. it is impossible to get accurate data as to past crops, etc., as those who know much about the matter have gone, and those who remain are not well versed in the production of this section. general york desires me to say that the amount of rations formerly sent should be duplicated and sent at once. it is impossible to make any estimate, for the people are fleeing to the hills, so rapid is the rise. the residents here are in a state of commotion that can only be appreciated when seen, and complete demoralization has set in, if rations are drawn for any particular section hereabouts, they would not be certain to be distributed, so everything should be sent to troy as a center, and the general will have it properly disposed of. he has sent for one hundred tents, and, if all go to the hills who are in motion now, two hundred will be required. appendix b the mississippi river commission the condition of this rich valley of the lower mississippi, immediately after and since the war, constituted one of the disastrous effects of war most to be deplored. fictitious property in slaves was not only righteously destroyed, but very much of the work which had depended upon the slave labor was also destroyed or greatly impaired, especially the levee system. it might have been expected by those who have not investigated the subject, that such important improvements as the construction and maintenance of the levees would have been assumed at once by the several states. but what can the state do where the people are under subjection to rates of interest ranging from to per cent., and are also under the necessity of pledging their crops in advance even of planting, at these rates, for the privilege of purchasing all of their supplies at per cent. profit? it has needed but little attention to make it perfectly obvious that the control of the mississippi river, if undertaken at all, must be undertaken by the national government, and cannot be compassed by states. the river must be treated as a unit; its control cannot be compassed under a divided or separate system of administration. neither are the states especially interested competent to combine among themselves for the necessary operations. the work must begin far up the river; at least as far as cairo, if not beyond; and must be conducted upon a consistent general plan throughout the course of the river. it does not need technical or scientific knowledge to comprehend the elements of the case if one will give a little time and attention to the subject, and when a mississippi river commission has been constituted, as the existing commission is, of thoroughly able men of different walks in life, may it not be suggested that their verdict in the case should be accepted as conclusive, so far as any a priori theory of construction or control can be considered conclusive? it should be remembered that upon this board are general gilmore, general comstock, and general suter, of the united states engineers; professor henry mitchell (the most competent authority on the question of hydrography), of the united states coast survey; b. b. harrod, the state engineer of louisiana; jas. b. eads, whose success with the jetties at new orleans is a warrant of his competency, and judge taylor, of indiana. it would be presumption on the part of any single man, however skilled, to contest the judgment of such a board as this. the method of improvement proposed by the commission is at once in accord with the results of engineering experience and with observations of nature where meeting our wants. as in nature the growth of trees and their proneness where undermined to fall across the slope and support the bank secures at some points a fair depth of channel and some degree of permanence, so in the project of the engineer the use of timber and brush and the encouragement of forest growth are the main features. it is proposed to reduce the width where excessive by brushwood dykes, at first low, but raised higher and higher as the mud of the river settles under their shelter, and finally slope them back at the angle upon which willows will grow freely. in this work there are many details connected with the forms of these shelter dykes, their arrangements so as to present a series of settling basins, etc., a description of which would only complicate the conception. through the larger part of the river works of contraction will not be required, but nearly all the banks on the concave side of the beds must be held against the wear of the stream, and much of the opposite banks defended at critical points. the works having in view this conservative object may be generally designated works of revetment; and these also will be largely of brushwood, woven in continuous carpets, or twined into wire-netting. this veneering process has been successfully employed on the missouri river; and in some cases they have so covered themselves with sediments, and have become so overgrown with willows, that they may be regarded as permanent. in securing these mats rubble-stone is to be used in small quantities, and in some instances the dressed slope between high and low river will have to be more or less paved with stone. any one who has been on the rhine will have observed operations not unlike those to which we have just referred; and, indeed, most of the rivers of europe flowing among their own alluvia have required similar treatment in the interest of navigation and agriculture. the levee is the crowning work of bank revetment, although not necessarily in immediate connection. it may be set back a short distance from the revetted bank; but it is, in effect, the requisite parapet. the flood river and the low river cannot be brought into register, and compelled to unite in the excavation of a single permanent channel, without a complete control of all the stages; and even the abnormal rise must be provided against, because this would endanger the levee, and once in force behind the works of revetment would tear them also away. under the general principle that the local slope of a river is the result and measure of the resistance of its bed, it is evident that a narrow and deep stream should have less slope, because it has less frictional surface in proportion to capacity; i.e., less perimeter in proportion to area of cross section. the ultimate effect of levees and revetments confining the floods and bringing all the stages of the river into register is to deepen the channel and let down the slope. the first effect of the levees is to raise the surface; but this, by inducing greater velocity of flow, inevitably causes an enlargement of section, and if this enlargement is prevented from being made at the expense of the banks, the bottom must give way and the form of the waterway be so improved as to admit this flow with less rise. the actual experience with levees upon the mississippi river, with no attempt to hold the banks, has been favorable, and no one can doubt, upon the evidence furnished in the reports of the commission, that if the earliest levees had been accompanied by revetment of banks, and made complete, we should have to-day a river navigable at low water, and an adjacent country safe from inundation. of course it would be illogical to conclude that the constrained river can ever lower its flood slope so as to make levees unnecessary, but it is believed that, by this lateral constraint, the river as a conduit may be so improved in form that even those rare floods which result from the coincident rising of many tributaries will find vent without destroying levees of ordinary height. that the actual capacity of a channel through alluvium depends upon its service during floods has been often shown, but this capacity does not include anomalous, but recurrent, floods. it is hardly worth while to consider the projects for relieving the mississippi river floods by creating new outlets, since these sensational propositions have commended themselves only to unthinking minds, and have no support among engineers. were the river bed cast- iron, a resort to openings for surplus waters might be a necessity; but as the bottom is yielding, and the best form of outlet is a single deep channel, as realizing the least ratio of perimeter to area of cross section, there could not well be a more unphilosophical method of treatment than the multiplication of avenues of escape. in the foregoing statement the attempt has been made to condense in as limited a space as the importance of the subject would permit, the general elements of the problem, and the general features of the proposed method of improvement which has been adopted by the mississippi river commission. the writer cannot help feeling that it is somewhat presumptuous on his part to attempt to present the facts relating to an enterprise which calls for the highest scientific skill; but it is a matter which interests every citizen of the united states, and is one of the methods of reconstruction which ought to be approved. it is a war claim which implies no private gain, and no compensation except for one of the cases of destruction incident to war, which may well be repaired by the people of the whole country. edward atkinson. boston: april , . appendix c reception of captain basil hall's book in the united states having now arrived nearly at the end of our travels, i am induced, ere i conclude, again to mention what i consider as one of the most remarkable traits in the national character of the americans; namely, their exquisite sensitiveness and soreness respecting everything said or written concerning them. of this, perhaps, the most remarkable example i can give is the effect produced on nearly every class of readers by the appearance of captain basil hall's 'travels in north america.' in fact, it was a sort of moral earthquake, and the vibration it occasioned through the nerves of the republic, from one corner of the union to the other, was by no means over when i left the country in july , a couple of years after the shock. i was in cincinnati when these volumes came out, but it was not till july , that i procured a copy of them. one bookseller to whom i applied told me that he had had a few copies before he understood the nature of the work, but that, after becoming acquainted with it, nothing should induce him to sell another. other persons of his profession must, however, have been less scrupulous; for the book was read in city, town, village, and hamlet, steamboat, and stage-coach, and a sort of war-whoop was sent forth perfectly unprecedented in my recollection upon any occasion whatever. an ardent desire for approbation, and a delicate sensitiveness under censure, have always, i believe, been considered as amiable traits of character; but the condition into which the appearance of captain hall's work threw the republic shows plainly that these feelings, if carried to excess, produce a weakness which amounts to imbecility. it was perfectly astonishing to hear men who, on other subjects, were of some judgment, utter their opinions upon this. i never heard of any instance in which the commonsense generally found in national criticism was so overthrown by passion. i do not speak of the want of justice, and of fair and liberal interpretation: these, perhaps, were hardly to be expected. other nations have been called thin-skinned, but the citizens of the union have, apparently, no skins at all; they wince if a breeze blows over them, unless it be tempered with adulation. it was not, therefore, very surprising that the acute and forcible observations of a traveler they knew would be listened to should be received testily. the extraordinary features of the business were, first, the excess of the rage into which they lashed themselves; and, secondly, the puerility of the inventions by which they attempted to account for the severity with which they fancied they had been treated. not content with declaring that the volumes contained no word of truth, from beginning to end (which is an assertion i heard made very nearly as often as they were mentioned), the whole country set to work to discover the causes why captain hall had visited the united states, and why he had published his book. i have heard it said with as much precision and gravity as if the statement had been conveyed by an official report, that captain hall had been sent out by the british government expressly for the purpose of checking the growing admiration of england for the government of the united states,--that it was by a commission from the treasury he had come, and that it was only in obedience to orders that he had found anything to object to. i do not give this as the gossip of a coterie; i am persuaded that it is the belief of a very considerable portion of the country. so deep is the conviction of this singular people that they cannot be seen without being admired, that they will not admit the possibility that any one should honestly and sincerely find aught to disapprove in them or their country. the american reviews are, many of them, i believe, well known in england; i need not, therefore, quote them here, but i sometimes wondered that they, none of them, ever thought of translating obadiah's curse into classic american; if they had done so, on placing (he, basil hall) between brackets, instead of (he, obadiah) it would have saved them a world of trouble. i can hardly describe the curiosity with which i sat down at length to peruse these tremendous volumes; still less can i do justice to my surprise at their contents. to say that i found not one exaggerated statement throughout the work is by no means saying enough. it is impossible for any one who knows the country not to see that captain hall earnestly sought out things to admire and commend. when he praises, it is with evident pleasure; and when he finds fault, it is with evident reluctance and restraint, excepting where motives purely patriotic urge him to state roundly what it is for the benefit of his country should be known. in fact, captain hall saw the country to the greatest possible advantage. furnished, of course, with letters of introduction to the most distinguished individuals, and with the still more influential recommendation of his own reputation, he was received in full drawing- room style and state from one end of the union to the other. he saw the country in full dress, and had little or no opportunity of judging of it unhouselled, unanointed, unannealed, with all its imperfections on its head, as i and my family too often had. captain hall had certainly excellent opportunities of making himself acquainted with the form of the government and the laws; and of receiving, moreover, the best oral commentary upon them, in conversation with the most distinguished citizens. of these opportunities he made excellent use; nothing important met his eye which did not receive that sort of analytical attention which an experienced and philosophical traveler alone can give. this has made his volumes highly interesting and valuable; but i am deeply persuaded, that were a man of equal penetration to visit the united states with no other means of becoming acquainted with the national character than the ordinary working-day intercourse of life, he would conceive an infinitely lower idea of the moral atmosphere of the country than captain hall appears to have done; and the internal conviction on my mind is strong, that if captain hall had not placed a firm restraint on himself, he must have given expression to far deeper indignation than any he has uttered against many points in the american character, with which he shows from other circumstances that he was well acquainted. his rule appears to have been to state just so much of the truth as would leave on the mind of his readers a correct impression, at the least cost of pain to the sensitive folks he was writing about. he states his own opinions and feelings, and leaves it to be inferred that he has good grounds for adopting them; but he spares the americans the bitterness which a detail of the circumstances would have produced. if any one chooses to say that some wicked antipathy to twelve millions of strangers is the origin of my opinion, i must bear it; and were the question one of mere idle speculation, i certainly would not court the abuse i must meet for stating it. but it is not so. . . . . . . . the candor which he expresses, and evidently feels, they mistake for irony, or totally distrust; his unwillingness to give pain to persons from whom he has received kindness, they scornfully reject as affectation, and although they must know right well, in their own secret hearts, how infinitely more they lay at his mercy than he has chosen to betray; they pretend, even to themselves, that he has exaggerated the bad points of their character and institutions; whereas, the truth is, that he has let them off with a degree of tenderness which may be quite suitable for him to exercise, however little merited; while, at the same time, he has most industriously magnified their merits, whenever he could possibly find anything favorable. appendix d the undying head in a remote part of the north lived a man and his sister, who had never seen a human being. seldom, if ever, had the man any cause to go from home; for, as his wants demanded food, he had only to go a little distance from the lodge, and there, in some particular spot, place his arrows, with their barbs in the ground. telling his sister where they had been placed, every morning she would go in search, and never fail of finding each stuck through the heart of a deer. she had then only to drag them into the lodge and prepare their food. thus she lived till she attained womanhood, when one day her brother, whose name was iamo, said to her: 'sister, the time is at hand when you will be ill. listen to my advice. if you do not, it will probably be the cause of my death. take the implements with which we kindle our fires. go some distance from our lodge and build a separate fire. when you are in want of food, i will tell you where to find it. you must cook for yourself, and i will for myself. when you are ill, do not attempt to come near the lodge, or bring any of the utensils you use. be sure always to fasten to your belt the implements you need, for you do not know when the time will come. as for myself, i must do the best i can.' his sister promised to obey him in all he had said. shortly after, her brother had cause to go from home. she was alone in her lodge, combing her hair. she had just untied the belt to which the implements were fastened, when suddenly the event, to which her brother had alluded, occurred. she ran out of the lodge, but in her haste forgot the belt. afraid to return, she stood for some time thinking. finally, she decided to enter the lodge and get it. for, thought she, my brother is not at home, and i will stay but a moment to catch hold of it. she went back. running in suddenly, she caught hold of it, and was coming out when her brother came in sight. he knew what was the matter. 'oh,' he said, 'did i not tell you to take care. but now you have killed me.' she was going on her way, but her brother said to her, 'what can you do there now. the accident has happened. go in, and stay where you have always stayed. and what will become of you? you have killed me.' he then laid aside his hunting-dress and accoutrements, and soon after both his feet began to turn black, so that he could not move. still he directed his sister where to place the arrows, that she might always have food. the inflammation continued to increase, and had now reached his first rib; and he said: 'sister, my end is near. you must do as i tell you. you see my medicine-sack, and my war-club tied to it. it contains all my medicines, and my war-plumes, and my paints of all colors. as soon as the inflammation reaches my breast, you will take my war-club. it has a sharp point, and you will cut off my head. when it is free from my body, take it, place its neck in the sack, which you must open at one end. then hang it up in its former place. do not forget my bow and arrows. one of the last you will take to procure food. the remainder, tie in my sack, and then hang it up, so that i can look towards the door. now and then i will speak to you, but not often.' his sister again promised to obey. in a little time his breast was affected. 'now,' said he, 'take the club and strike off my head.' she was afraid, but he told her to muster courage. 'strike,' said he, and a smile was on his face. mustering all her courage, she gave the blow and cut off the head. 'now,' said the head, 'place me where i told you.' and fearfully she obeyed it in all its commands. retaining its animation, it looked around the lodge as usual, and it would command its sister to go in such places as it thought would procure for her the flesh of different animals she needed. one day the head said: 'the time is not distant when i shall be freed from this situation, and i shall have to undergo many sore evils. so the superior manito decrees, and i must bear all patiently.' in this situation we must leave the head. in a certain part of the country was a village inhabited by a numerous and warlike band of indians. in this village was a family of ten young men--brothers. it was in the spring of the year that the youngest of these blackened his face and fasted. his dreams were propitious. having ended his fast, he went secretly for his brothers at night, so that none in the village could overhear or find out the direction they intended to go. though their drum was heard, yet that was a common occurrence. having ended the usual formalities, he told how favorable his dreams were, and that he had called them together to know if they would accompany him in a war excursion. they all answered they would. the third brother from the eldest, noted for his oddities, coming up with his war-club when his brother had ceased speaking, jumped up. 'yes,' said he, 'i will go, and this will be the way i will treat those i am going to fight;' and he struck the post in the center of the lodge, and gave a yell. the others spoke to him, saying: 'slow, slow, mudjikewis, when you are in other people's lodges.' so he sat down. then, in turn, they took the drum, and sang their songs, and closed with a feast. the youngest told them not to whisper their intention to their wives, but secretly to prepare for their journey. they all promised obedience, and mudjikewis was the first to say so. the time for their departure drew near. word was given to assemble on a certain night, when they would depart immediately. mudjikewis was loud in his demands for his moccasins. several times his wife asked him the reason. 'besides,' said she, 'you have a good pair on.' 'quick, quick,' said he, 'since you must know, we are going on a war excursion; so be quick.' he thus revealed the secret. that night they met and started. the snow was on the ground, and they traveled all night, lest others should follow them. when it was daylight, the leader took snow and made a ball of it, then tossing it into the air, he said: 'it was in this way i saw snow fall in a dream, so that i could not be tracked.' and he told them to keep close to each other for fear of losing themselves, as the snow began to fall in very large flakes. near as they walked, it was with difficulty they could see each other. the snow continued falling all that day and the following night, so it was impossible to track them. they had now walked for several days, and mudjikewis was always in the rear. one day, running suddenly forward, he gave the saw-saw- quan,{footnote [war-whoop.]} and struck a tree with his war-club, and it broke into pieces as if struck with lightning. 'brothers,' said he, 'this will be the way i will serve those we are going to fight.' the leader answered, 'slow, slow, mudjikewis, the one i lead you to is not to be thought of so lightly.' again he fell back and thought to himself: 'what! what! who can this be he is leading us to?' he felt fearful and was silent. day after day they traveled on, till they came to an extensive plain, on the borders of which human bones were bleaching in the sun. the leader spoke: 'they are the bones of those who have gone before us. none has ever yet returned to tell the sad tale of their fate.' again mudjikewis became restless, and, running forward, gave the accustomed yell. advancing to a large rock which stood above the ground, he struck it, and it fell to pieces. 'see, brothers,' said he, 'thus will i treat those whom we are going to fight.' 'still, still,' once more said the leader; 'he to whom i am leading you is not to be compared to the rock.' mudjikewis fell back thoughtful, saying to himself: 'i wonder who this can be that he is going to attack;' and he was afraid. still they continued to see the remains of former warriors, who had been to the place where they were now going, some of whom had retreated as far back as the place where they first saw the bones, beyond which no one had ever escaped. at last they came to a piece of rising ground, from which they plainly distinguished, sleeping on a distant mountain, a mammoth bear. the distance between them was very great, but the size of the animal caused him to be plainly seen. 'there,' said the leader, 'it is he to whom i am leading you; here our troubles will commence, for he is a mishemokwa and a manito. it is he who has that we prize so dearly (i.e. wampum), to obtain which, the warriors whose bones we saw, sacrificed their lives. you must not be fearful: be manly. we shall find him asleep.' then the leader went forward and touched the belt around the animal's neck. 'this,' said he, 'is what we must get. it contains the wampum.' then they requested the eldest to try and slip the belt over the bear's head, who appeared to be fast asleep, as he was not in the least disturbed by the attempt to obtain the belt. all their efforts were in vain, till it came to the one next the youngest. he tried, and the belt moved nearly over the monster's head, but he could get it no farther. then the youngest one, and the leader, made his attempt, and succeeded. placing it on the back of the oldest, he said, 'now we must run,' and off they started. when one became fatigued with its weight, another would relieve him. thus they ran till they had passed the bones of all former warriors, and were some distance beyond, when looking back, they saw the monster slowly rising. he stood some time before he missed his wampum. soon they heard his tremendous howl, like distant thunder, slowly filling all the sky; and then they heard him speak and say, 'who can it be that has dared to steal my wampum? earth is not so large but that i can find them;' and he descended from the hill in pursuit. as if convulsed, the earth shook with every jump he made. very soon he approached the party. they, however, kept the belt, exchanging it from one to another, and encouraging each other; but he gained on them fast. 'brothers,' said the leader, 'has never any one of you, when fasting, dreamed of some friendly spirit who would aid you as a guardian?' a dead silence followed. 'well,' said he, 'fasting, i dreamed of being in danger of instant death, when i saw a small lodge, with smoke curling from its top. an old man lived in it, and i dreamed he helped me; and may it be verified soon,' he said, running forward and giving the peculiar yell, and a howl as if the sounds came from the depths of his stomach, and what is called checaudum. getting upon a piece of rising ground, behold! a lodge, with smoke curling from its top, appeared. this gave them all new strength, and they ran forward and entered it. the leader spoke to the old man who sat in the lodge, saying, 'nemesho, help us; we claim your protection, for the great bear will kill us.' 'sit down and eat, my grandchildren,' said the old man. 'who is a great manito?' said he. 'there is none but me; but let me look,' and he opened the door of the lodge, when, lo! at a little distance he saw the enraged animal coming on, with slow but powerful leaps. he closed the door. 'yes,' said he, 'he is indeed a great manito: my grandchildren, you will be the cause of my losing my life; you asked my protection, and i granted it; so now, come what may, i will protect you. when the bear arrives at the door, you must run out of the other door of the lodge.' then putting his hand to the side of the lodge where he sat, he brought out a bag which he opened. taking out two small black dogs, he placed them before him. 'these are the ones i use when i fight,' said he; and he commenced patting with both hands the sides of one of them, and he began to swell out, so that he soon filled the lodge by his bulk; and he had great strong teeth. when he attained his full size he growled, and from that moment, as from instinct, he jumped out at the door and met the bear, who in another leap would have reached the lodge. a terrible combat ensued. the skies rang with the howls of the fierce monsters. the remaining dog soon took the field. the brothers, at the onset, took the advice of the old man, and escaped through the opposite side of the lodge. they had not proceeded far before they heard the dying cry of one of the dogs, and soon after of the other. 'well,' said the leader, 'the old man will share their fate: so run; he will soon be after us.' they started with fresh vigor, for they had received food from the old man: but very soon the bear came in sight, and again was fast gaining upon them. again the leader asked the brothers if they could do nothing for their safety. all were silent. the leader, running forward, did as before. 'i dreamed,' he cried, 'that, being in great trouble, an old man helped me who was a manito; we shall soon see his lodge.' taking courage, they still went on. after going a short distance they saw the lodge of the old manito. they entered immediately and claimed his protection, telling him a manito was after them. the old man, setting meat before them, said: 'eat! who is a manito? there is no manito but me; there is none whom i fear;' and the earth trembled as the monster advanced. the old man opened the door and saw him coming. he shut it slowly, and said: 'yes, my grandchildren, you have brought trouble upon me.' procuring his medicine-sack, he took out his small war-clubs of black stone, and told the young men to run through the other side of the lodge. as he handled the clubs, they became very large, and the old man stepped out just as the bear reached the door. then striking him with one of the clubs, it broke in pieces; the bear stumbled. renewing the attempt with the other war-club, that also was broken, but the bear fell senseless. each blow the old man gave him sounded like a clap of thunder, and the howls of the bear ran along till they filled the heavens. the young men had now run some distance, when they looked back. they could see that the bear was recovering from the blows. first he moved his paws, and soon they saw him rise on his feet. the old man shared the fate of the first, for they now heard his cries as he was torn in pieces. again the monster was in pursuit, and fast overtaking them. not yet discouraged, the young men kept on their way; but the bear was now so close, that the leader once more applied to his brothers, but they could do nothing. 'well,' said he, 'my dreams will soon be exhausted; after this i have but one more.' he advanced, invoking his guardian spirit to aid him. 'once,' said he, 'i dreamed that, being sorely pressed, i came to a large lake, on the shore of which was a canoe, partly out of water, having ten paddles all in readiness. do not fear,' he cried, 'we shall soon get it.' and so it was, even as he had said. coming to the lake, they saw the canoe with ten paddles, and immediately they embarked. scarcely had they reached the center of the lake, when they saw the bear arrive at its borders. lifting himself on his hind legs, he looked all around. then he waded into the water; then losing his footing he turned back, and commenced making the circuit of the lake. meantime the party remained stationary in the center to watch his movements. he traveled all around, till at last he came to the place from whence he started. then he commenced drinking up the water, and they saw the current fast setting in towards his open mouth. the leader encouraged them to paddle hard for the opposite shore. when only a short distance from land, the current had increased so much, that they were drawn back by it, and all their efforts to reach it were in vain. then the leader again spoke, telling them to meet their fates manfully. 'now is the time, mudjikewis,' said he, 'to show your prowess. take courage and sit at the bow of the canoe; and when it approaches his mouth, try what effect your club will have on his head.' he obeyed, and stood ready to give the blow; while the leader, who steered, directed the canoe for the open mouth of the monster. rapidly advancing, they were just about to enter his mouth, when mudjikewis struck him a tremendous blow on the head, and gave the saw- saw-quan. the bear's limbs doubled under him, and he fell, stunned by the blow. but before mudjikewis could renew it, the monster disgorged all the water he had drank, with a force which sent the canoe with great velocity to the opposite shore. instantly leaving the canoe, again they fled, and on they went till they were completely exhausted. the earth again shook, and soon they saw the monster hard after them. their spirits drooped, and they felt discouraged. the leader exerted himself, by actions and words, to cheer them up; and once more he asked them if they thought of nothing, or could do nothing for their rescue; and, as before, all were silent. 'then,' he said, 'this is the last time i can apply to my guardian spirit. now, if we do not succeed, our fates are decided.' he ran forward, invoking his spirit with great earnestness, and gave the yell. 'we shall soon arrive,' said he to his brothers, 'at the place where my last guardian spirit dwells. in him i place great confidence. do not, do not be afraid, or your limbs will be fear-bound. we shall soon reach his lodge. run, run,' he cried. returning now to iamo, he had passed all the time in the same condition we had left him, the head directing his sister, in order to procure food, where to place the magic arrows, and speaking at long intervals. one day the sister saw the eyes of the head brighten, as if with pleasure. at last it spoke. 'oh, sister,' it said, 'in what a pitiful situation you have been the cause of placing me! soon, very soon, a party of young men will arrive and apply to me for aid; but alas! how can i give what i would have done with so much pleasure? nevertheless, take two arrows, and place them where you have been in the habit of placing the others, and have meat prepared and cooked before they arrive. when you hear them coming and calling on my name, go out and say, "alas! it is long ago that an accident befell him. i was the cause of it." if they still come near, ask them in, and set meat before them. and now you must follow my directions strictly. when the bear is near, go out and meet him. you will take my medicine-sack, bows and arrows, and my head. you must then untie the sack, and spread out before you my paints of all colors, my war-eagle feathers, my tufts of dried hair, and whatever else it contains. as the bear approaches, you will take all these articles, one by one, and say to him, "this is my deceased brother's paint," and so on with all the other articles, throwing each of them as far as you can. the virtues contained in them will cause him to totter; and, to complete his destruction, you will take my head, and that too you will cast as far off as you can, crying aloud, "see, this is my deceased brother's head." he will then fall senseless. by this time the young men will have eaten, and you will call them to your assistance. you must then cut the carcass into pieces, yes, into small pieces, and scatter them to the four winds; for, unless you do this, he will again revive.' she promised that all should be done as he said. she had only time to prepare the meat, when the voice of the leader was heard calling upon iamo for aid. the woman went out and said as her brother had directed. but the war party being closely pursued, came up to the lodge. she invited them in, and placed the meat before them. while they were eating, they heard the bear approaching. untying the medicine-sack and taking the head, she had all in readiness for his approach. when he came up she did as she had been told; and, before she had expended the paints and feathers, the bear began to totter, but, still advancing, came close to the woman. saying as she was commanded, she then took the head, and cast it as far from her as she could. as it rolled along the ground, the blood, excited by the feelings of the head in this terrible scene, gushed from the nose and mouth. the bear, tottering, soon fell with a tremendous noise. then she cried for help, and the young men came rushing out, having partially regained their strength and spirits. mudjikewis, stepping up, gave a yell and struck him a blow upon the head. this he repeated, till it seemed like a mass of brains, while the others, as quick as possible, cut him into very small pieces, which they then scattered in every direction. while thus employed, happening to look around where they had thrown the meat, wonderful to behold, they saw starting up and turning off in every direction small black bears, such as are seen at the present day. the country was soon overspread with these black animals. and it was from this monster that the present race of bears derived their origin. having thus overcome their pursuer, they returned to the lodge. in the meantime, the woman, gathering the implements she had used, and the head, placed them again in the sack. but the head did not speak again, probably from its great exertion to overcome the monster. having spent so much time and traversed so vast a country in their flight, the young men gave up the idea of ever returning to their own country, and game being plenty, they determined to remain where they now were. one day they moved off some distance from the lodge for the purpose of hunting, having left the wampum with the woman. they were very successful, and amused themselves, as all young men do when alone, by talking and jesting with each other. one of them spoke and said, 'we have all this sport to ourselves; let us go and ask our sister if she will not let us bring the head to this place, as it is still alive. it may be pleased to hear us talk, and be in our company. in the meantime take food to our sister.' they went and requested the head. she told them to take it, and they took it to their hunting-grounds, and tried to amuse it, but only at times did they see its eyes beam with pleasure. one day, while busy in their encampment, they were unexpectedly attacked by unknown indians. the skirmish was long contested and bloody; many of their foes were slain, but still they were thirty to one. the young men fought desperately till they were all killed. the attacking party then retreated to a height of ground, to muster their men, and to count the number of missing and slain. one of their young men had stayed away, and, in endeavoring to overtake them, came to the place where the head was hung up. seeing that alone retain animation, he eyed it for some time with fear and surprise. however, he took it down and opened the sack, and was much pleased to see the beautiful feathers, one of which he placed on his head. starting off, it waved gracefully over him till he reached his party, when he threw down the head and sack, and told them how he had found it, and that the sack was full of paints and feathers. they all looked at the head and made sport of it. numbers of the young men took the paint and painted themselves, and one of the party took the head by the hair and said-- 'look, you ugly thing, and see your paints on the faces of warriors.' but the feathers were so beautiful, that numbers of them also placed them on their heads. then again they used all kinds of indignity to the head, for which they were in turn repaid by the death of those who had used the feathers. then the chief commanded them to throw away all except the head. 'we will see,' said he, 'when we get home, what we can do with it. we will try to make it shut its eyes.' when they reached their homes they took it to the council-lodge, and hung it up before the fire, fastening it with raw hide soaked, which would shrink and become tightened by the action of the fire. 'we will then see,' they said, 'if we cannot make it shut its eyes.' meantime, for several days, the sister had been waiting for the young men to bring back the head; till, at last, getting impatient, she went in search of it. the young men she found lying within short distances of each other, dead, and covered with wounds. various other bodies lay scattered in different directions around them. she searched for the head and sack, but they were nowhere to be found. she raised her voice and wept, and blackened her face. then she walked in different directions, till she came to the place from whence the head had been taken. then she found the magic bow and arrows, where the young men, ignorant of their qualities, had left them. she thought to herself that she would find her brother's head, and came to a piece of rising ground, and there saw some of his paints and feathers. these she carefully put up, and hung upon the branch of a tree till her return. at dusk she arrived at the first lodge of a very extensive village. here she used a charm, common among indians when they wish to meet with a kind reception. on applying to the old man and woman of the lodge, she was kindly received. she made known her errand. the old man promised to aid her, and told her the head was hung up before the council-fire, and that the chiefs of the village, with their young men, kept watch over it continually. the former are considered as manitoes. she said she only wished to see it, and would be satisfied if she could only get to the door of the lodge. she knew she had not sufficient power to take it by force. 'come with me,' said the indian, 'i will take you there.' they went, and they took their seats near the door. the council-lodge was filled with warriors, amusing themselves with games, and constantly keeping up a fire to smoke the head, as they said, to make dry meat. they saw the head move, and not knowing what to make of it, one spoke and said: 'ha! ha! it is beginning to feel the effects of the smoke.' the sister looked up from the door, and her eyes met those of her brother, and tears rolled down the cheeks of the head. 'well,' said the chief, 'i thought we would make you do something at last. look! look at it--shedding tears,' said he to those around him; and they all laughed and passed their jokes upon it. the chief, looking around, and observing the woman, after some time said to the man who came with her: 'who have you got there? i have never seen that woman before in our village.' 'yes,' replied the man, 'you have seen her; she is a relation of mine, and seldom goes out. she stays at my lodge, and asked me to allow her to come with me to this place.' in the center of the lodge sat one of those young men who are always forward, and fond of boasting and displaying themselves before others. 'why,' said he, 'i have seen her often, and it is to this lodge i go almost every night to court her.' all the others laughed and continued their games. the young man did not know he was telling a lie to the woman's advantage, who by that means escaped. she returned to the man's lodge, and immediately set out for her own country. coming to the spot where the bodies of her adopted brothers lay, she placed them together, their feet toward the east. then taking an ax which she had, she cast it up into the air, crying out, 'brothers, get up from under it, or it will fall on you.' this she repeated three times, and the third time the brothers all arose and stood on their feet. mudjikewis commenced rubbing his eyes and stretching himself. 'why,' said he, 'i have overslept myself.' 'no, indeed,' said one of the others, 'do you not know we were all killed, and that it is our sister who has brought us to life?' the young men took the bodies of their enemies and burned them. soon after, the woman went to procure wives for them, in a distant country, they knew not where; but she returned with ten young women, which she gave to the ten young men, beginning with the eldest. mudjikewis stepped to and fro, uneasy lest he should not get the one he liked. but he was not disappointed, for she fell to his lot. and they were well matched, for she was a female magician. they then all moved into a very large lodge, and their sister told them that the women must now take turns in going to her brother's head every night, trying to untie it. they all said they would do so with pleasure. the eldest made the first attempt, and with a rushing noise she fled through the air. toward daylight she returned. she had been unsuccessful, as she succeeded in untying only one of the knots. all took their turns regularly, and each one succeeded in untying only one knot each time. but when the youngest went, she commenced the work as soon as she reached the lodge; although it had always been occupied, still the indians never could see any one. for ten nights now, the smoke had not ascended, but filled the lodge and drove them out. this last night they were all driven out, and the young woman carried off the head. the young people and the sister heard the young woman coming high through the air, and they heard her saying: 'prepare the body of our brother.' and as soon as they heard it, they went to a small lodge where the black body of iamo lay. his sister commenced cutting the neck part, from which the neck had been severed. she cut so deep as to cause it to bleed; and the others who were present, by rubbing the body and applying medicines, expelled the blackness. in the meantime, the one who brought it, by cutting the neck of the head, caused that also to bleed. as soon as she arrived, they placed that close to the body, and, by aid of medicines and various other means, succeeded in restoring iamo to all his former beauty and manliness. all rejoiced in the happy termination of their troubles, and they had spent some time joyfully together, when iamo said: 'now i will divide the wampum,' and getting the belt which contained it, he commenced with the eldest, giving it in equal portions. but the youngest got the most splendid and beautiful, as the bottom of the belt held the richest and rarest. they were told that, since they had all once died, and were restored to life, they were no longer mortal, but spirits, and they were assigned different stations in the invisible world. only mudjikewis's place was, however, named. he was to direct the west wind, hence generally called kebeyun, there to remain for ever. they were commanded, as they had it in their power, to do good to the inhabitants of the earth, and, forgetting their sufferings in procuring the wampum, to give all things with a liberal hand. and they were also commanded that it should also be held by them sacred; those grains or shells of the pale hue to be emblematic of peace, while those of the darker hue would lead to evil and war. the spirits then, amid songs and shouts, took their flight to their respective abodes on high; while iamo, with his sister iamoqua, descended into the depths below. the boys' life of mark twain by albert bigelow paine contents preface i. the family of john clemens ii. the new home, and uncle john quarles's farm iii. school iv. education out of school v. tom sawyer and his band vi. closing school-days vii. the apprentice viii. orion's paper ix. the open road x. a wind of chance xi. the long way to the amazon xii. renewing an old ambition xiii. learning the river xiv. river days xv. the wreck of the "pennsylvania" xvi. the pilot xvii. the end of piloting xviii. the soldier xix. the pioneer xx. the miner xxi. the territorial enterprise xxii. "mark twain" xxiii. artemus ward and literary san francisco xxiv. the discovery of "the jumping frog" xxv. hawaii and anson burlingame xxvi. mark twain, lecturer xxvii. an innocent abroad, and home again xxviii. olivia langdon. work on the "innocents" xxix. the visit to elmira and its consequences xxx. the new book and a wedding xxxi. mark twain in buffalo xxxii. at work on "roughing it" xxxiii. in england xxxiv. a new book and new english triumphs xxxv. beginning "tom sawyer" xxxvi. the new home xxxvii. "old times, "sketches," and "tom sawyer" xxxviii. home pictures xxxix. tramping abroad xl. "the prince and the pauper" xli. general grant at hartford xlii. many investments xliii. back to the river, with bixby xliv. a reading-tour with cable xlv. "the adventures of huckleberry finn" xlvi. publisher to general grant xlvii. the high-tide of fortune xlviii. business difficulties. pleasanter things xlix. kipling at elmira. elsie leslie. the "yankee" l. the machine. good-by to hartford. "joan" is begun li. the failure of webster & co. around the world. sorrow lii. european economies liii. mark twain pays his debts liv. return after exile lv. a prophet at home lvi. honored by missouri lvii. the close of a beautiful life lviii. mark twain at seventy lix. mark twain arranges for his biography lx. working with mark twain lxi. dictations at dublin, n. h. lxii. a new era of billiards lxiii. living with mark twain lxiv. a degree from oxford lxv. the removal to redding lxvi. life at stormfield lxvii. the death of jean lxviii. days in bermuda lxix. the return to redding lxx. the close of a great life preface this is the story of a boy, born in the humblest surroundings, reared almost without schooling, and amid benighted conditions such as to-day have no existence, yet who lived to achieve a world-wide fame; to attain honorary degrees from the greatest universities of america and europe; to be sought by statesmen and kings; to be loved and honored by all men in all lands, and mourned by them when he died. it is the story of one of the world's very great men--the story of mark twain. i. the family of john clemens a long time ago, back in the early years of another century, a family named clemens moved from eastern tennessee to eastern missouri--from a small, unheard-of place called pall mall, on wolf river, to an equally small and unknown place called florida, on a tiny river named the salt. that was a far journey, in those days, for railway trains in had not reached the south and west, and john clemens and his family traveled in an old two-horse barouche, with two extra riding-horses, on one of which rode the eldest child, orion clemens, a boy of ten, and on the other jennie, a slave girl. in the carriage with the parents were three other children--pamela and margaret, aged eight and five, and little benjamin, three years old. the time was spring, the period of the old south, and, while these youngsters did not realize that they were passing through a sort of golden age, they must have enjoyed the weeks of leisurely journeying toward what was then the far west--the promised land. the clemens fortunes had been poor in tennessee. john marshall clemens, the father, was a lawyer, a man of education; but he was a dreamer, too, full of schemes that usually failed. born in virginia, he had grown up in kentucky, and married there jane lampton, of columbia, a descendant of the english lamptons and the belle of her region. they had left kentucky for tennessee, drifting from one small town to another that was always smaller, and with dwindling law-practice john clemens in time had been obliged to open a poor little store, which in the end had failed to pay. jennie was the last of several slaves he had inherited from his virginia ancestors. besides jennie, his fortune now consisted of the horses and barouche, a very limited supply of money, and a large, unsalable tract of east tennessee land, which john clemens dreamed would one day bring his children fortune. readers of the "gilded age" will remember the journey of the hawkins family from the "knobs" of tennessee to missouri and the important part in that story played by the tennessee land. mark twain wrote those chapters, and while they are not history, but fiction, they are based upon fact, and the picture they present of family hardship and struggle is not overdrawn. the character of colonel sellers, who gave the hawkinses a grand welcome to the new home, was also real. in life he was james lampton, cousin to mrs. clemens, a gentle and radiant merchant of dreams, who believed himself heir to an english earldom and was always on the verge of colossal fortune. with others of the lampton kin, he was already settled in missouri and had written back glowing accounts; though perhaps not more glowing than those which had come from another relative, john quarles, brother-in-law to mrs. clemens, a jovial, whole-hearted optimist, well-loved by all who knew him. it was a june evening when the clemens family, with the barouche and the two outriders, finally arrived in florida, and the place, no doubt, seemed attractive enough then, however it may have appeared later. it was the end of a long journey; relatives gathered with fond welcome; prospects seemed bright. already john quarles had opened a general store in the little town. florida, he said, was certain to become a city. salt river would be made navigable with a series of locks and dams. he offered john clemens a partnership in his business. quarles, for that time and place, was a rich man. besides his store he had a farm and thirty slaves. his brother-in-law's funds, or lack of them, did not matter. the two had married sisters. that was capital enough for his hearty nature. so, almost on the moment of arrival in the new land, john clemens once more found himself established in trade. the next thing was to find a home. there were twenty-one houses in florida, and none of them large. the one selected by john and jane clemens had two main rooms and a lean-to kitchen--a small place and lowly--the kind of a place that so often has seen the beginning of exalted lives. christianity began with a babe in a manger; shakespeare first saw the light in a cottage at stratford; lincoln entered the world by way of a leaky cabin in kentucky, and into the narrow limits of the clemens home in florida, on a bleak autumn day--november , --there was born one who under the name of mark twain would live to cheer and comfort a tired world. the name mark twain had not been thought of then, and probably no one prophesied favorably for the new-comer, who was small and feeble, and not over-welcome in that crowded household. they named him samuel, after his paternal grandfather, and added langhorne for an old friend--a goodly burden for so frail a wayfarer. but more appropriately they called him "little sam," or "sammy," which clung to him through the years of his delicate childhood. it seems a curious childhood, as we think of it now. missouri was a slave state--little sam's companions were as often black as white. all the children of that time and locality had negroes for playmates, and were cared for by them. they were fond of their black companions and would have felt lost without them. the negro children knew all the best ways of doing things--how to work charms and spells, the best way to cure warts and heal stone-bruises, and to make it rain, and to find lost money. they knew what signs meant, and dreams, and how to keep off hoodoo; and all negroes, old and young, knew any number of weird tales. john clemens must have prospered during the early years of his florida residence, for he added another slave to his household--uncle ned, a man of all work--and he built a somewhat larger house, in one room of which, the kitchen, was a big fireplace. there was a wide hearth and always plenty of wood, and here after supper the children would gather, with jennie and uncle ned, and the latter would tell hair-lifting tales of "ha'nts," and lonely roads, and witch-work that would make his hearers shiver with terror and delight, and look furtively over their shoulders toward the dark window-panes and the hovering shadows on the walls. perhaps it was not the healthiest entertainment, but it was the kind to cultivate an imagination that would one day produce "tom sawyer" and "huck finn." true, little sam was very young at this period, but even a little chap of two or three would understand most of that fireside talk, and get impressions more vivid than if the understanding were complete. he was barely four when this earliest chapter of his life came to a close. john clemens had not remained satisfied with florida and his undertakings there. the town had not kept its promises. it failed to grow, and the lock-and-dam scheme that would make salt river navigable fell through. then one of the children, margaret, a black-eyed, rosy little girl of nine, suddenly died. this was in august, . a month or two later the saddened family abandoned their florida home and moved in wagons, with their household furnishings, to hannibal, a mississippi river town, thirty miles away. there was only one girl left now, pamela, twelve years old, but there was another boy, baby henry, three years younger than little sam--four boys in all. ii. the new home, and uncle john quarles's farm hannibal was a town with prospects and considerable trade. it was slumbrous, being a slave town, but it was not dead. john clemens believed it a promising place for business, and opened a small general store with orion clemens, now fifteen, a studious, dreamy lad, for clerk. the little city was also an attractive place of residence. mark twain remembered it as "the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer morning, . . . the great mississippi, the magnificent mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, .... the dense forest away on the other side." the "white town" was built against green hills, and abutting the river were bluffs--holliday's hill and lover's leap. a distance below the town was a cave--a wonderful cave, as every reader of tom sawyer knows--while out in the river, toward the illinois shore, was the delectable island that was one day to be the meeting-place of tom's pirate band, and later to become the hiding-place of huck and nigger jim. the river itself was full of interest. it was the highway to the outside world. rafts drifted by; smartly painted steamboats panted up and down, touching to exchange traffic and travelers, a never-ceasing wonder to those simple shut-in dwellers whom the telegraph and railway had not yet reached. that hannibal was a pleasant place of residence we may believe, and what an attractive place for a boy to grow up in! little sam, however, was not yet ready to enjoy the island and the cave. he was still delicate--the least promising of the family. he was queer and fanciful, and rather silent. he walked in his sleep and was often found in the middle of the night, fretting with the cold, in some dark corner. once he heard that a neighbor's children had the measles, and, being very anxious to catch the complaint, slipped over to the house and crept into bed with an infected playmate. some days later, little sam's relatives gathered about his bed to see him die. he confessed, long after, that the scene gratified him. however, he survived, and fell into the habit of running away, usually in the direction of the river. "you gave me more uneasiness than any child i had," his mother once said to him, in her old age. "i suppose you were afraid i wouldn't live," he suggested. she looked at him with the keen humor which had been her legacy to him. "no, afraid you would," she said. which was only her joke, for she had the tenderest of hearts, and, like all mothers, had a weakness for the child that demanded most of her mother's care. it was chiefly on his account that she returned each year to florida to spend the summer on john quarles's farm. if uncle john quarles's farm was just an ordinary missouri farm, and his slaves just average negroes, they certainly never seemed so to little sam. there was a kind of glory about everything that belonged to uncle john, and it was not all imagination, for some of the spirit of that jovial, kindly hearted man could hardly fail to radiate from his belongings. the farm was a large one for that locality, and the farm-house was a big double log building--that is, two buildings with a roofed-over passage between, where in summer the lavish southern meals were served, brought in on huge dishes by the negroes, and left for each one to help himself. fried chicken, roast pig, turkeys, ducks, geese, venison just killed, squirrels, rabbits, partridges, pheasants, prairie-chickens, green corn, watermelon--a little boy who did not die on that bill of fare would be likely to get well on it, and to little sam the farm proved a life-saver. it was, in fact, a heavenly place for a little boy. in the corner of the yard there were hickory and black-walnut trees, and just over the fence the hill sloped past barns and cribs to a brook, a rare place to wade, though there were forbidden pools. cousin tabitha quarles, called "puss," his own age, was little sam's playmate, and a slave girl, mary, who, being six years older, was supposed to keep them out of mischief. there were swings in the big, shady pasture, where mary swung her charges and ran under them until their feet touched the branches. all the woods were full of squirrels and birds and blooming flowers; all the meadows were gay with clover and butterflies, and musical with singing grasshoppers and calling larks; the fence-rows were full of wild blackberries; there were apples and peaches in the orchard, and plenty of melons ripening in the corn. certainly it was a glorious place! little sam got into trouble once with the watermelons. one of them had not ripened quite enough when he ate several slices of it. very soon after he was seized with such terrible cramps that some of the household did not think he could live. but his mother said: "sammy will pull through. he was not born to die that way." which was a true prophecy. sammy's slender constitution withstood the strain. it was similarly tested more than once during those early years. he was regarded as a curious child. at times dreamy and silent, again wild-headed and noisy, with sudden impulses that sent him capering and swinging his arms into the wind until he would fall with shrieks and spasms of laughter and madly roll over and over in the grass. it is not remembered that any one prophesied very well for his future at such times. the negro quarters on uncle john's farm were especially fascinating. in one cabin lived a bedridden old woman whom the children looked upon with awe. she was said to be a thousand years old, and to have talked with moses. she had lost her health in the desert, coming out of egypt. she had seen pharaoh drown, and the fright had caused the bald spot on her head. she could ward off witches and dissolve spells. uncle dan'l was another favorite, a kind-hearted, gentle soul, who long after, as nigger jim in the tom sawyer and huckleberry finn tales, would win world-wide love and sympathy. through that far-off, warm, golden summer-time little sam romped and dreamed and grew. he would return each summer to the farm during those early years. it would become a beautiful memory. his mother generally kept him there until the late fall, when the chilly evenings made them gather around the wide, blazing fireplace. sixty years later he wrote: "i can see the room yet with perfect clearness. i can see all its belongings, all its details; the family-room of the house, with the trundle-bed in one corner and the spinning-wheel in another--a wheel whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the mournfulest of all sounds to me and made me homesick and low- spirited and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the dead; the vast fireplace, piled high with flaming logs from whose ends a sugary sap bubbled out but did not go to waste, for we scraped it off and ate it; . . . the lazy cat spread out on the rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs, blinking; my aunt in one chimney-corner, and my uncle in the other, smoking his corn-cob pipe." it is hard not to tell more of the farm, for the boy who was one day going to write of tom and huck and the rest learned there so many things that tom and huck would need to know. but he must have "book-learning," too, jane clemens said. on his return to hannibal that first summer, she decided that little sam was ready for school. he was five years old and regarded as a "stirring child." "he drives me crazy with his didoes when he's in the house," his mother declared, "and when he's out of it i'm expecting every minute that some one will bring him home half dead." mark twain used to say that he had had nine narrow escapes from drowning, and it was at this early age that he was brought home one afternoon in a limp state, having been pulled from a deep hole in bear creek by a slave girl. when he was restored, his mother said: "i guess there wasn't much danger. people born to be hanged are safe in water." mark twain's mother was the original of aunt polly in the story of tom sawyer, an outspoken, keen-witted, charitable woman, whom it was good to know. she had a heart full of pity, especially for dumb creatures. she refused to kill even flies, and punished the cat for catching mice. she would drown young kittens when necessary, but warmed the water for the purpose. she could be strict, however, with her children, if occasion required, and recognized their faults. little sam was inclined to elaborate largely on fact. a neighbor once said to her: "you don't believe anything that child says, i hope." "oh yes, i know his average. i discount him ninety per cent. the rest is pure gold." she declared she was willing to pay somebody to take him off her hands for a part of each day and try to teach him "manners." a certain mrs. e. horr was selected for the purpose. mrs. horr's school on main street, hannibal, was of the old-fashioned kind. there were pupils of all ages, and everything was taught up to the third reader and long division. pupils who cared to go beyond those studies went to a mr. cross, on the hill, facing what is now the public square. mrs. horr received twenty-five cents a week for each pupil, and the rules of conduct were read daily. after the rules came the a-b-c class, whose recitation was a hand-to-hand struggle, requiring no study-time. the rules of conduct that first day interested little sam. he wondered how nearly he could come to breaking them and escape. he experimented during the forenoon, and received a warning. another experiment would mean correction. he did not expect to be caught again; but when he least expected it he was startled by a command to go out and bring a stick for his own punishment. this was rather dazing. it was sudden, and, then, he did not know much about choosing sticks for such a purpose. jane clemens had commonly used her hand. a second command was needed to start him in the right direction, and he was still dazed when he got outside. he had the forests of missouri to select from, but choice was not easy. everything looked too big and competent. even the smallest switch had a wiry look. across the way was a cooper's shop. there were shavings outside, and one had blown across just in front of him. he picked it up, and, gravely entering the room, handed it to mrs. horr. so far as known, it is the first example of that humor which would one day make little sam famous before all the world. it was a failure in this instance. mrs. horr's comic side may have prompted forgiveness, but discipline must be maintained. "samuel langhorne clemens," she said (he had never heard it all strung together in that ominous way), "i am ashamed of you! jimmy dunlap, go and bring a switch for sammy." and the switch that jimmy dunlap brought was of a kind to give little sam a permanent distaste for school. he told his mother at noon that he did not care for education; that he did not wish to be a great man; that his desire was to be an indian and scalp such persons as mrs. horr. in her heart jane clemens was sorry for him, but she openly said she was glad there was somebody who could take him in hand. little sam went back to school, but he never learned to like it. a school was ruled with a rod in those days, and of the smaller boys little sam's back was sore as often as the next. when the days of early summer came again, when from his desk he could see the sunshine lighting the soft green of holliday's hill, with the glint of the river and the purple distance beyond, it seemed to him that to be shut up with a webster spelling-book and a cross teacher was more than human nature could bear. there still exists a yellow slip of paper upon which, in neat, old-fashioned penmanship is written: miss pamela clemens has won the love of her teacher and schoolmates by her amiable deportment and faithful application to her various studies. e. horr, teacher. thus we learn that little sam's sister, eight years older than himself, attended the same school, and that she was a good pupil. if any such reward of merit was ever conferred on little sam, it has failed to come to light. if he won the love of his teacher and playmates, it was probably for other reasons. yet he must have learned somehow, for he could read, presently, and was a good speller for his age. iv. education out of school on their arrival in hannibal, the clemens family had moved into a part of what was then the pavey hotel. they could not have remained there long, for they moved twice within the next few years, and again in into a new house which judge clemens, as he was generally called, had built on hill street--a house still standing, and known to-day as the mark twain home. john clemens had met varying fortunes in hannibal. neither commerce nor the practice of law had paid. the office of justice of the peace, to which he was elected, returned a fair income, but his business losses finally obliged him to sell jennie, the slave girl. somewhat later his business failure was complete. he surrendered everything to his creditors, even to his cow and household furniture, and relied upon his law practice and justice fees. however, he seems to have kept the tennessee land, possibly because no one thought it worth taking. there had been offers for it earlier, but none that its owner would accept. it appears to have been not even considered by his creditors, though his own faith in it never died. the struggle for a time was very bitter. orion clemens, now seventeen, had learned the printer's trade and assisted the family with his wages. mrs. clemens took a few boarders. in the midst of this time of hardship little benjamin clemens died. he was ten years old. it was the darkest hour. then conditions slowly improved. there was more law practice and better justice fees. by judge clemens was able to build the house mentioned above--a plain, cheap house, but a shelter and a home. sam clemens--he was hardly "little sam" any more--was at this time nine years old. his boyhood had begun. heretofore he had been just a child--wild and mischievous, often exasperating, but still a child--a delicate little lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and put to bed. now at nine he had acquired health, with a sturdy ability to look out for himself, as boys in such a community will. "sam," as they now called him, was "grown up" at nine and wise for his years. not that he was old in spirit or manner--he was never that, even to his death--but he had learned a great number of things, many of them of a kind not taught at school. he had learned a good deal of natural history and botany--the habits of plants, insects, and animals. mark twain's books bear evidence of this early study. his plants, bugs, and animals never do the wrong things. he was learning a good deal about men, and this was often less pleasant knowledge. once little sam--he was still little sam then--saw an old man shot down on main street at noon day. he saw them carry him home, lay him on the bed, and spread on his breast an open family bible, which looked as heavy as an anvil. he thought if he could only drag that great burden away the poor old dying man would not breathe so heavily. he saw a young emigrant stabbed with a bowie-knife by a drunken comrade, and two young men try to kill their uncle, one holding him while the other snapped repeatedly an allen revolver, which failed to go off. then there was the drunken rowdy who proposed to raid the "welshman's" house, one sultry, threatening evening--he saw that, too. with a boon companion, john briggs, he followed at a safe distance behind. a widow with her one daughter lived there. they stood in the shadow of the dark porch; the man had paused at the gate to revile them. the boys heard the mother's voice warning the intruder that she had a loaded gun and would kill him if he stayed where he was. he replied with a tirade, and she warned him that she would count ten--that if he remained a second longer she would fire. she began slowly and counted up to five, the man laughing and jeering. at six he grew silent, but he did not go. she counted on: seven, eight, nine-- the boys, watching from the dark roadside, felt their hearts stop. there was a long pause, then the final count, followed a second later by a gush of flame. the man dropped, his breast riddled. at the same instant the thunder-storm that had been gathering broke loose. the boys fled wildly, believing that satan himself had arrived to claim the lost soul. that was a day and locality of violent impulse and sudden action. happenings such as these were not infrequent in a town like hannibal. and there were events connected with slavery. sam once saw a slave struck down and killed with a piece of slag, for a trifling offense. he saw an abolitionist attacked by a mob that would have lynched him had not a methodist minister defended him on a plea that he must be crazy. he did not remember in later years that he had ever seen a slave auction, but he added: "i am suspicious that it was because the thing was a commonplace spectacle and not an uncommon or impressive one. i do vividly remember seeing a dozen black men and women, chained together, lying in a group on the pavement, waiting shipment to a southern slave- market. they had the saddest faces i ever saw." readers of mark twain's books--especially the stories of huck and tom, will hardly be surprised to hear of these early happenings that formed so large a portion of the author's early education. sam, however, did not regard them as education--not at the time. they got into his dreams. he set them down as warnings, or punishments, intended to give him a taste for a better life. he felt that it was his conscience that made such things torture him. that was his mother's idea, and he had a high respect for her opinion in such matters. among other things, he had seen her one day defy a vicious and fierce corsican--a common terror in the town--who had chased his grown daughter with a heavy rope in his hand, declaring he would wear it out on her. cautious citizens got out of the way, but jane clemens opened her door to the fugitive; then, instead of rushing in and closing it, spread her arms across it, barring the way. the man raved, and threatened her with the rope, but she did not flinch or show any sign of fear. she stood there and shamed and defied him until he slunk off, crestfallen and conquered. any one as brave as his mother must have a perfect conscience, sam thought, and would know how to take care of it. in the darkness he would say his prayers, especially when a thunderstorm was coming, and vow to begin a better life. he detested sunday-school as much as he did day-school, and once his brother orion, who was moral and religious, had threatened to drag him there by the collar, but, as the thunder got louder, sam decided that he loved sunday-school and would go the next sunday without being invited. sam's days were not all disturbed by fierce events. they were mostly filled with pleasanter things. there were picnics sometimes, and ferryboat excursions, and any day one could roam the woods, or fish, alone or in company. the hills and woods around hannibal were never disappointing. there was the cave with its marvels. there was bear creek, where he had learned to swim. he had seen two playmates drown; twice, himself, he had been dragged ashore, more dead than alive; once by a slave girl, another time by a slave man--neal champ, of the pavey hotel. but he had persevered, and with success. he could swim better than any playmate of his age. it was the river that he cared for most. it was the pathway that led to the great world outside. he would sit by it for hours and dream. he would venture out on it in a quietly borrowed boat, when he was barely strong enough to lift an oar. he learned to know all its moods and phases. more than anything in the world he hungered to make a trip on one of the big, smart steamers that were always passing. "you can hardly imagine what it meant," he reflected, once, "to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, to see those steamboats pass up and down, and never take a trip on them." it was at the mature age of nine that he found he could endure this no longer. one day when the big packet came down and stopped at hannibal, he slipped aboard and crept under one of the boats on the upper deck. then the signal-bells rang, the steamer backed away and swung into midstream; he was really going at last. he crept from beneath the boat and sat looking out over the water and enjoying the scenery. then it began to rain--a regular downpour. he crept back under the boat, but his legs were outside, and one of the crew saw him. he was dragged out and at the next stop set ashore. it was the town of louisiana, where there were lampton relatives, who took him home. very likely the home-coming was not entirely pleasant, though a "lesson," too, in his general education. and always, each summer, there was the farm, where his recreation was no longer mere girl plays and swings, with a colored nurse following about, but sports with his older boy cousins, who went hunting with the men, for partridges by day and for 'coons and 'possums by night. sometimes the little boy followed the hunters all night long, and returned with them through the sparkling and fragrant morning, fresh, hungry, and triumphant, just in time for breakfast. so it is no wonder that little sam, at nine, was no longer little sam, but plain sam clemens, and grown up. if there were doubtful spots in his education--matters related to smoking and strong words--it is also no wonder, and experience even in these lines was worth something in a book like tom sawyer. the boy sam clemens was not a particularly attractive lad. he was rather undersized, and his head seemed too large for his body. he had a mass of light sandy hair, which he plastered down to keep from curling. his eyes were keen and blue and his features rather large. still, he had a fair, delicate complexion when it was not blackened by grime and tan; a gentle, winning manner; a smile and a slow way of speaking that made him a favorite with his companions. he did not talk much, and was thought to be rather dull--was certainly so in most of his lessons--but, for some reason, he never spoke that every playmate in hearing did not stop, whatever he was doing, to listen. perhaps it would be a plan for a new game or lark; perhaps it was something droll; perhaps it was just a casual remark that his peculiar drawl made amusing. his mother always referred to his slow fashion of speech as "sammy's long talk." her own speech was even more deliberate, though she seemed not to notice it. sam was more like his mother than the others. his brother, henry clemens, three years younger, was as unlike sam as possible. he did not have the "long talk," and was a handsome, obedient little fellow whom the mischievous sam loved to tease. henry was to become the sid of tom sawyer, though he was in every way a finer character than sid. with the death of little benjamin, sam and henry had been drawn much closer together, and, in spite of sam's pranks, loved each other dearly. for the pranks were only occasional, and sam's love for henry was constant. he fought for him oftener than with him. many of the home incidents in the tom sawyer book really happened. sam did clod henry for getting him into trouble about the colored thread with which he sewed his shirt when he came home from swimming; he did inveigle a lot of boys into whitewashing a fence for him; he did give painkiller to peter, the cat. as for escaping punishment for his misdeeds, as described in the book, this was a daily matter, and his methods suited the occasions. for, of course, tom sawyer was sam clemens himself, almost entirely, as most readers of that book have imagined. however, we must have another chapter for tom sawyer and his doings--the real tom and his real doings with those graceless, lovable associates, joe harper and huckleberry finn. v. tom sawyer and his band in beginning "the adventures of tom sawyer" the author says, "most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred," and he tells us that huck finn is drawn from life; tom sawyer also, though not from a single individual, being a composite of three boys whom mark twain had known. the three boys were himself, almost entirely, with traces of two schoolmates, john briggs and will bowen. john briggs was also the original of joe harper, the "terror of the seas." as for huck finn, the "red-handed," his original was a village waif named tom blankenship, who needed no change for his part in the story. the blankenship family picked up an uncertain livelihood, fishing and hunting, and lived at first under a tree in a bark shanty, but later moved into a large, barn-like building, back of the clemens home on hill street. there were three male members of the household: old ben, the father, shiftless and dissolute; young ben, the eldest son--a doubtful character, with certain good traits; and tom--that is to say, huck, who was just as he is described in the book--a ruin of rags, a river-rat, kind of heart, and accountable for his conduct to nobody in the world. he could come and go as he chose; he never had to work or go to school; he could do all the things, good and bad, that other boys longed to do and were forbidden. to them he was the symbol of liberty; his knowledge of fishing, trapping, signs, and of the woods and river gave value to his society, while the fact that it was forbidden made it necessary to sam clemens's happiness. the blankenships being handy to the back gate of the hill street house, he adopted them at sight. their free mode of life suited him. he was likely to be there at any hour of the day, and tom made cat-call signals at night that would bring sam out on the shed roof at the back and down a little trellis and flight of steps to the group of boon companions, which, besides tom, usually included john briggs, will pitts, and the two younger bowen boys. they were not malicious boys, but just mischievous, fun-loving boys--little boys of ten or twelve--rather thoughtless, being mainly bent on having a good time. they had a wide field of action: they ranged from holliday's hill on the north to the cave on the south, and over the fields and through all the woods between. they explored both banks of the river, the islands, and the deep wilderness of the illinois shore. they could run like turkeys and swim like ducks; they could handle a boat as if born in one. no orchard or melon-patch was entirely safe from them. no dog or slave patrol was so watchful that they did not sooner or later elude it. they borrowed boats with or without the owner's consent--it did not matter. most of their expeditions were harmless enough. they often cruised up to turtle island, about two miles above hannibal, and spent the day feasting. there were quantities of turtles and their eggs there, and mussels, and plenty of fish. fishing and swimming were their chief pastimes, with incidental raiding, for adventure. bear creek was their swimming-place by day, and the river-front at night-fall--a favorite spot being where the railroad bridge now ends. it was a good distance across to the island where, in the book, tom sawyer musters his pirate band, and where later huck found nigger jim, but quite often in the evening they swam across to it, and when they had frolicked for an hour or more on the sandbar at the head of the island, they would swim back in the dusk, breasting the strong, steady mississippi current without exhaustion or dread. they could swim all day, those little scamps, and seemed to have no fear. once, during his boyhood, sam clemens swam across to the illinois side, then turned and swam back again without landing, a distance of at least two miles as he had to go. he was seized with a cramp on the return trip. his legs became useless and he was obliged to make the remaining distance with his arms. the adventures of sam clemens and his comrades would fill several books of the size of tom sawyer. many of them are, of course, forgotten now, but those still remembered show that mark twain had plenty of real material. it was not easy to get money in those days, and the boys were often without it. once "huck" blankenship had the skin of a 'coon he had captured, and offered to sell it to raise capital. at selms's store, on wild cat corner, the 'coon-skin would bring ten cents. but this was not enough. the boys thought of a plan to make it bring more. selms's back window was open, and the place where he kept his pelts was pretty handy. huck went around to the front door and sold the skin for ten cents to selms, who tossed it back on the pile. then huck came back and, after waiting a reasonable time, crawled in the open window, got the 'coon-skin, and sold it to selms again. he did this several times that afternoon, and the capital of the band grew. but at last john pierce, selms's clerk, said: "look here, mr. selms, there's something wrong about this. that boy has been selling us 'coonskins all the afternoon." selms went back to his pile of pelts. there were several sheep-skins and some cow-hides, but only one 'coon-skin--the one he had that moment bought. selms himself, in after years, used to tell this story as a great joke. one of the boys' occasional pastimes was to climb holliday's hill and roll down big stones, to frighten the people who were driving by. holliday's hill above the road was steep; a stone once started would go plunging downward and bound across the road with the deadly momentum of a shell. the boys would get a stone poised, then wait until they saw a team approaching, and, calculating the distance, would give the boulder a start. dropping behind the bushes, they would watch the sudden effect upon the party below as the great missile shot across the road a few yards before them. this was huge sport, but they carried it too far. for at last they planned a grand climax that would surpass anything before attempted in the stone-rolling line. a monstrous boulder was lying up there in the right position to go down-hill, once started. it would be a glorious thing to see that great stone go smashing down a hundred yards or so in front of some peaceful-minded countryman jogging along the road. quarrymen had been getting out rock not far away and had left their picks and shovels handy. the boys borrowed the tools and went to work to undermine the big stone. they worked at it several hours. if their parents had asked them to work like that, they would have thought they were being killed. finally, while they were still digging, the big stone suddenly got loose and started down. they were not ready for it at all. nobody was coming but an old colored man in a cart; their splendid stone was going to be wasted. one could hardly call it wasted, however; they had planned for a thrilling result, and there was certainly thrill enough while it lasted. in the first place the stone nearly caught will bowen when it started. john briggs had that moment quit digging and handed will the pick. will was about to take his turn when sam clemens leaped aside with a yell: "lookout, boys; she's coming!" she came. the huge boulder kept to the ground at first, then, gathering momentum, it went bounding into the air. about half-way down the hill it struck a sapling and cut it clean off. this turned its course a little, and the negro in the cart, hearing the noise and seeing the great mass come crashing in his direction, made a wild effort to whip up his mule. the boys watched their bomb with growing interest. it was headed straight for the negro, also for a cooper-shop across the road. it made longer leaps with every bound, and, wherever it struck, fragments and dust would fly. the shop happened to be empty, but the rest of the catastrophe would call for close investigation. they wanted to fly, but they could not move until they saw the rock land. it was making mighty leaps now, and the terrified negro had managed to get exactly in its path. the boys stood holding their breath, their mouths open. then, suddenly, they could hardly believe their eyes; a little way above the road the boulder struck a projection, made one mighty leap into the air, sailed clear over the negro and his mule, and landed in the soft dirt beyond the road, only a fragment striking the shop, damaging, but not wrecking it. half buried in the ground, the great stone lay there for nearly forty years; then it was broken up. it was the last rock the boys ever rolled down. nearly sixty years later john briggs and mark twain walked across holliday's hill and looked down toward the river road. mark twain said: "it was a mighty good thing, john, that stone acted the way it did. we might have had to pay a fancy price for that old darky i can see him yet."[ ] it can be no harm now, to confess that the boy sam clemens--a pretty small boy, a good deal less than twelve at the time, and by no means large for his years--was the leader of this unhallowed band. in any case, truth requires this admission. if the band had a leader, it was sam, just as it was tom sawyer in the book. they were always ready to listen to him--they would even stop fishing to do that--and to follow his plans. they looked to him for ideas and directions, and he gloried in being a leader and showing off, just as tom did in the book. it seems almost a pity that in those far-off barefoot days he could not have looked down the years and caught a glimpse of his splendid destiny. but of literary fame he could never have dreamed. the chief ambition --the "permanent ambition"--of every hannibal boy was to be a pilot. the pilot in his splendid glass perch with his supreme power and princely salary was to them the noblest of all human creatures. an elder bowen boy was already a pilot, and when he came home, as he did now and then, his person seemed almost too sacred to touch. next to being a pilot, sam thought he would like to be a pirate or a bandit or a trapper-scout--something gorgeous and awe-inspiring, where his word, his nod, would still be law. the river kept his river ambition always fresh, and with the cave and the forest round about helped him to imagine those other things. the cave was the joy of his heart. it was a real cave, not merely a hole, but a marvel of deep passages and vaulted chambers that led back into the bluffs and far down into the earth, even below the river, some said. sam clemens never tired of the cave. he was willing any time to quit fishing or swimming or melon-hunting for the three-mile walk, or pull, that brought them to its mystic door. with its long corridors, its royal chambers hung with stalactites, its remote hiding-places, it was exactly suitable, sam thought, to be the lair of an outlaw, and in it he imagined and carried out adventures which his faithful followers may not always have understood, though enjoying them none the less for that reason. in tom sawyer, indian joe dies in the cave. he did not die there in real life, but was lost there once and was very weak when they found him. he was not as bad as painted in the book, though he was dissolute and accounted dangerous; and when one night he died in reality, there came a thunder-storm so terrific that sam clemens at home, in bed, was certain that satan had come in person for the half-breed's soul. he covered his head and said his prayers with fearful anxiety lest the evil one might decide to save another trip by taking him along then. the treasure-digging adventure in the book had this foundation in fact: it was said that two french trappers had once buried a chest of gold about two miles above hannibal, and that it was still there. tom blankenship (huck) one morning said he had dreamed just where the treasure was, and that if the boys--sam clemens and john briggs--would go with him and help dig, he would divide. the boys had great faith in dreams, especially in huck's dreams. they followed him to a place with some shovels and picks, and he showed them just where to dig. then he sat down under the shade of a pawpaw-bush and gave orders. they dug nearly all day. huck didn't dig any himself, because he had done the dreaming, which was his share. they didn't find the treasure that day, and next morning they took two long iron rods to push and drive into the ground until they should strike something. they struck a number of things, but when they dug down it was never the money they found. that night the boys said they wouldn't dig any more. but huck had another dream. he dreamed the gold was exactly under the little pawpaw-tree. this sounded so circumstantial that they went back and dug another day. it was hot weather, too--august--and that night they were nearly dead. even huck gave it up then. he said there was something wrong about the way they dug. this differs a good deal from the treasure incident in the book, but it shows us what respect the boys had for the gifts of the ragamuffin original of huck finn. tom blankenship's brother ben was also used, and very importantly, in the creation of our beloved huck. ben was considerably older, but certainly no more reputable, than tom. he tormented the smaller boys, and they had little love for him. yet somewhere in ben blankenship's nature there was a fine, generous strain of humanity that provided mark twain with that immortal episode--the sheltering of nigger jim. this is the real story: a slave ran off from monroe county, missouri, and got across the river into illinois. ben used to fish and hunt over there in the swamps, and one day found him. it was considered a most worthy act in those days to return a runaway slave; in fact, it was a crime not to do it. besides, there was for this one a reward of fifty dollars--a fortune to ragged, out-cast ben blankenship. that money, and the honor he could acquire, must have been tempting to the waif, but it did not outweigh his human sympathy. instead of giving him up and claiming the reward, ben kept the runaway over there in the marshes all summer. the negro fished, and ben carried him scraps of other food. then, by and by, the facts leaked out. some wood- choppers went on a hunt for the fugitive and chased him to what was called bird slough. there, trying to cross a drift, he was drowned. huck's struggle in the book is between conscience and the law, on one side, and deep human sympathy on the other. ben blankenship's struggle, supposing there was one, would be between sympathy and the offered reward. neither conscience nor law would trouble him. it was his native humanity that made him shelter the runaway, and it must have been strong and genuine to make him resist the lure of the fifty-dollar prize. there was another chapter to this incident. a few days after the drowning of the runaway, sam clemens and his band made their way to the place and were pushing the drift about, when, all at once, the negro shot up out of the water, straight and terrible, a full half-length in the air. he had gone down foremost and had been caught in the drift. the boys did not stop to investigate, but flew in terror to report their tale. those early days seem to have been full of gruesome things. in "the innocents abroad," the author tells how he once spent a night in his father's office and discovered there a murdered man. this was a true incident. the man had been stabbed that afternoon and carried into the house to die. sam and john briggs had been playing truant all day and knew nothing of the matter. sam thought the office safer than his home, where his mother was probably sitting up for him. he climbed in by a window and lay down on the lounge, but did not sleep. presently he noticed what appeared to be an unusual shape on the floor. he tried to turn his face to the wall and forget it, but that would not do. in agony he watched the thing until at last a square of moonlight gradually revealed a sight that he never forgot. in the book he says: "i went away from there. i do not say that i went in any sort of hurry, but i simply went--that is sufficient. i went out of the window, and i carried the sash along with me. i did not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than to leave it, and so i took it. i was not scared, but i was considerable agitated." sam was not yet twelve, for his father was no longer living when the boy had reached that age. and how many things had crowded themselves into his few brief years! we must be content here with only a few of them. our chapter is already too long. ministers and deacons did not prophesy well for sam clemens and his mad companions. they spoke feelingly of state prison and the gallows. but the boys were a disappointing lot. will bowen became a fine river-pilot. will pitts was in due time a leading merchant and bank president. john briggs grew into a well-to-do and highly respected farmer. huck finn --which is to say, tom blankenship--died an honored citizen and justice of the peace in a western town. as for sam clemens, we shall see what he became as the chapters pass. [ ] john briggs died in ; earlier in the same year the writer of this memoir spent an afternoon with him and obtained from him most of the material for this chapter. vi. closing school-days sam was at mr. cross's school on the square in due time, and among the pupils were companions that appealed to his gentler side. there were the robards boys--george, the best latin scholar, and john, who always won the good-conduct medal, and would one day make all the other boys envious by riding away with his father to california, his curls of gold blowing in the wind. there was buck brown, a rival speller, and john garth, who would marry little helen kercheval, and jimmy macdaniel, whom it was well to know because his father kept a pastry-shop and he used to bring cakes and candy to school. there were also a number of girls. bettie ormsley, artemisia briggs, and jennie brady were among the girls he remembered in later years, and mary miller, who was nearly double his age and broke his heart by getting married one day, a thing he had not expected at all. yet through it all he appears, like tom sawyer, to have had one faithful sweetheart. in the book it is becky thatcher--in real life she was laura hawkins. the clemens and hawkins families lived opposite, and the children were early acquainted. the "black avenger of the spanish main" was very gentle when he was playing at house-building with little laura, and once, when he dropped a brick on her finger, he cried the louder and longer of the two. for he was a tender-hearted boy. he would never abuse an animal, except when his tendency to mischief ran away with him, as in the "pain-killer" incident. he had a real passion for cats. each summer he carried his cat to the farm in a basket, and it always had a place by him at the table. he loved flowers--not as a boy botanist or gardener, but as a companion who understood their thoughts. he pitied dead leaves and dry weeds because their lives were ended and they would never know summer again or grow glad with another spring. even in that early time he had that deeper sympathy which one day would offer comfort to humanity and make every man his friend. but we are drifting away from sam clemens's school-days. they will not trouble us much longer now. more than anything in the world sam detested school, and he made any excuse to get out of going. it is hard to say just why, unless it was the restraint and the long hours of confinement. the square in hannibal, where stood the school of mr. cross, was a grove in those days, with plum-trees and hazel-bushes and grape-vines. when spring came, the children gathered flowers at recess, climbed trees, and swung in the vines. it was a happy place enough, only--it was school. to sam clemens, the spelling-bee every friday afternoon was the one thing that made it worth while. sam was a leader at spelling--it was one of his gifts--he could earn compliments even from mr. cross, whose name, it would seem, was regarded as descriptive. once in a moment of inspiration sam wrote on his late: "cross by name and cross by nature, cross jumped over an irish potato." john briggs thought this a great effort, and urged the author to write it on the blackboard at noon. sam hesitated. "oh, pshaw!" said john, "i wouldn't be afraid to do it." "i dare you to do it," said sam. this was enough. while mr. cross was at dinner john wrote in a large hand the fine couplet. the teacher returned and called the school to order. he looked at the blackboard, then, searchingly, at john briggs. the handwriting was familiar. "did you do that?" he asked, ominously. it was a time for truth. "yes, sir," said john. "come here!" and john came and paid handsomely for his publishing venture. sam clemens expected that the author would be called for next; but perhaps mr. cross had exhausted himself on john. sam did not often escape. his back kept fairly warm from one "flailing" to the next. yet he usually wore one of the two medals offered in that school--the medal for spelling. once he lost it by leaving the first "r" out of february. laura hawkins was on the floor against him, and he was a gallant boy. if it had only been huck brown he would have spelled that and all the other months backward, to show off. there were moments of triumph that almost made school worth while; the rest of the time it was prison and servitude. but then one day came freedom. judge clemens, who, in spite of misfortune, had never lost faith in humanity, indorsed a large note for a neighbor, and was obliged to pay it. once more all his property was taken away. only a few scanty furnishings were rescued from the wreck. a st. louis cousin saved the home, but the clemens family could not afford to live in it. they moved across the street and joined housekeeping with another family. judge clemens had one hope left. he was a candidate for the clerkship of the surrogate court, a good office, and believed his election sure. his business misfortunes had aroused wide sympathy. he took no chances, however, and made a house-to house canvas of the district, regardless of the weather, probably undermining his health. he was elected by a large majority, and rejoiced that his worries were now at an end. they were, indeed, over. at the end of february he rode to the county seat to take the oath of office. he returned through a drenching storm and reached home nearly frozen. pneumonia set in, and a few days later he was dying. his one comfort now was the tennessee land. he said it would make them all rich and happy. once he whispered: "cling to the land; cling to the land and wait. let nothing beguile it away from you." he was a man who had rarely displayed affection for his children. but presently he beckoned to pamela, now a lovely girl of nineteen, and, putting his arm around her neck, kissed her for the first time in years. "let me die," he said. he did not speak again. a little more, and his worries had indeed ended. the hard struggle of an upright, impractical man had come to a close. this was in march, . john clemens had lived less than forty-nine years. the children were dazed. they had loved their father and honored his nobility of purpose. the boy sam was overcome with remorse. he recalled his wildness and disobedience--a thousand things trifling enough at the time, but heartbreaking now. boy and man, samuel clemens was never spared by remorse. leading him into the room where his father lay, his mother said some comforting words and asked him to make her a promise. he flung himself into her arms, sobbing: "i will promise anything, if you won't make me go to school! anything!" after a moment his mother said: "no, sammy, you need not go to school any more. only promise me to be a better boy. promise not to break my heart!" he gave his promise to be faithful and industrious and upright, like his father. such a promise was a serious matter, and sam clemens, underneath all, was a serious lad. he would not be twelve until november, but his mother felt that he would keep his word. orion clemens returned to st. louis, where he was receiving a salary of ten dollars a week--high wage for those days--out of which he could send three dollars weekly to the family. pamela, who played the guitar and piano very well, gave music lessons, and so helped the family fund. pamela clemens, the original of cousin mary, in "tom sawyer," was a sweet and noble girl. henry was too young to work, but sam was apprenticed to a printer named ament, who had recently moved to hannibal and bought a weekly paper, "the courier." sam agreed with his mother that the printing trade offered a chance for further education without attending school, and then, some day, there might be wages. vii. the apprentice the terms of samuel clemens's apprenticeship were the usual thing for that day: board and clothes--"more board than clothes, and not much of either," mark twain used to say. "i was supposed to get two suits of clothes a year, but i didn't get them. i got one suit and took the rest out in ament's old garments, which didn't fit me in any noticeable way. i was only about half as big as he was, and when i had on one of his shirts i felt as if i had on a circus-tent. i had to turn the trousers up to my ears to make them short enough." another apprentice, a huge creature, named wales mccormick, was so large that ament's clothes were much too small for him. the two apprentices, fitted out with their employer's cast-off garments, were amusing enough, no doubt. sam and wales ate in the kitchen at first, but later at the family table with mr. and mrs. ament and pet mcmurry, a journeyman printer. mcmurry was a happy soul, as one could almost guess from his name. he had traveled far and learned much. what the two apprentices did not already know, pet mcmurry could teach them. sam clemens had promised to be a good boy, and he was so, by the standards of boyhood. he was industrious, regular at his work, quick to learn, kind, and truthful. angels could hardly be more than that in a printing-office. but when food was scarce, even an angel--a young printer-angel--could hardly resist slipping down the cellar stairs at night, for raw potatoes, onions, and apples, which they cooked in the office, where the boys slept on a pallet on the floor. wales had a wonderful way of cooking a potato which his fellow apprentice never forgot. how one wishes for a photograph of sam clemens at that period! but in those days there were only daguerreotypes, and they were expensive things. there is a letter, though, written long afterward, by pet mcmurry to mark twain, which contains this paragraph: "if your memory extends so far back, you will recall a little sandy- haired boy of nearly a quarter of a century ago, in the printing- office at hannibal, over the brittingham drug-store, mounted upon a little box at the case, who used to love to sing so well the expression of the poor drunken man who was supposed to have fallen by the wayside, 'if ever i get up again, i'll stay up--if i kin.'" and with this portrait we must be content--we cannot doubt its truth. sam was soon office favorite and in time became chief stand-by. when he had been at work a year, he could set type accurately, run the job press to the tune of "annie laurie," and he had charge of the circulation. that is to say, he carried the papers--a mission of real importance, for a long, sagging span of telegraph-wire had reached across the river to hannibal, and mexican-war news delivered hot from the front gave the messenger a fine prestige. he even did editing, of a kind. that is to say, when ament was not in the office and copy was needed, sam hunted him up, explained the situation, and saw that the necessary matter was produced. he was not ambitious to write--not then. he wanted to be a journeyman printer, like pet, and travel and see the world. sometimes he thought he would like to be a clown, or "end man" in a minstrel troupe. once for a week he served as subject for a traveling hypnotist-and was dazzled by his success. but he stuck to printing, and rapidly became a neat, capable workman. ament gave him a daily task, after which he was free. by three in the afternoon he was likely to finish his stint. then he was off for the river or the cave, joining his old comrades. or perhaps he would go with laura hawkins to gather wild columbine on the high cliff above the river, known as lover's leap. when winter came these two sometimes went to bear creek, skating; or together they attended parties, where the old-fashioned games "ring-around-rosy" and "dusty miller" were the chief amusements. in "the gilded age," laura hawkins at twelve is pictured "with her dainty hands propped into the ribbon-bordered pockets of her apron . . . a vision to warm the coldest heart and bless and cheer the saddest." that was the real laura, though her story in that book in no way resembles the reality. it was just at this time that an incident occurred which may be looked back upon now as a turning-point in samuel clemens's life. coming home from the office one afternoon, he noticed a square of paper being swept along by the wind. he saw that it was printed--was interested professionally in seeing what it was like. he chased the flying scrap and overtook it. it was a leaf from some old history of joan of arc, and pictured the hard lot of the "maid" in the tower at rouen, reviled and mistreated by her ruffian captors. there were some paragraphs of description, but the rest was pitiful dialogue. sam had never heard of joan before--he knew nothing of history. he was no reader. orion was fond of books, and pamela; even little henry had read more than sam. but now, as he read, there awoke in him a deep feeling of pity and indignation, and with it a longing to know more of the tragic story. it was an interest that would last his life through, and in the course of time find expression in one of the rarest books ever written. the first result was that sam began to read. he hunted up everything he could find on the subject of joan, and from that went into french history in general--indeed, into history of every kind. samuel clemens had suddenly become a reader--almost a student. he even began the study of languages, german and latin, but was not able to go on for lack of time and teachers. he became a hater of tyranny, a champion of the weak. watching a game of marbles or tops, he would remark to some offender, in his slow drawling way, "you mustn't cheat that boy." and the cheating stopped, or trouble followed. viii. orion's paper a hannibal paper, the "journal," was for sale under a mortgage of five hundred dollars, and orion clemens, returning from st. louis, borrowed the money and bought it. sam's two years' apprenticeship with ament had been completed, and orion felt that together they could carry on the paper and win success. henry clemens, now eleven, was also taken out of school to learn type-setting. orion was a better printer than proprietor. like so many of his family, he was a visionary, gentle and credulous, ready to follow any new idea. much advice was offered him, and he tried to follow it all. he began with great hopes and energy. he worked like a slave and did not spare the others. the paper was their hope of success. sam, especially, was driven. there were no more free afternoons. in some chapters written by orion clemens in later life, he said: "i was tyrannical and unjust to sam. he was swift and clean as a good journeyman. i gave him 'takes,' and, if he got through well, i begrudged him the time and made him work more." orion did not mean to be unjust. the struggle against opposition and debt was bitter. he could not be considerate. the paper for a time seemed on the road to success, but orion worked too hard and tried too many schemes. his enthusiasm waned and most of his schemes turned out poorly. by the end of the year the "journal" was on the down grade. in time when the need of money became great, orion made a trip to tennessee to try to raise something on the land which they still held there. he left sam in charge of the paper, and, though its proprietor returned empty-handed, his journey was worth while, for it was during his absence that samuel clemens began the career that would one day make him mark twain. sam had concluded to edit the paper in a way that would liven up the circulation. he had never written anything for print, but he believed he knew what the subscribers wanted. the editor of a rival paper had been crossed in love, and was said to have tried to drown himself. sam wrote an article telling all the history of the affair, giving names and details. then on the back of two big wooden letters, used for bill-printing, he engraved illustrations of the victim wading out into the river, testing the depth of the water with a stick. the paper came out, and the demand for it kept the washington hand-press busy. the injured editor sent word that he was coming over to thrash the whole journal staff, but he left town, instead, for the laugh was too general. sam also wrote a poem which startled orthodox readers. then orion returned and reduced him to the ranks. in later years orion saw his mistake. "i could have distanced all competitors, even then," he wrote, "if i had recognized sam's ability and let him go ahead, merely keeping him from offending worthy persons." sam was not discouraged. he liked the taste of print. he sent two anecdotes to the philadelphia saturday evening post. both were accepted --without payment, of course, in those days--and when they appeared he walked on air. this was in . nearly sixty years later he said: "seeing them in print was a joy which rather exceeded anything in that line i have ever experienced since." however, he wrote nothing further for the "post." orion printed two of his sketches in the "journal," which was the extent of his efforts at this time. none of this early work has been preserved. files of the "post" exist, but the sketches were unsigned and could hardly be identified. the hannibal paper dragged along from year to year. orion could pay nothing on the mortgage--financial matters becoming always worse. he could barely supply the plainest food and clothing for the family. sam and henry got no wages, of course. then real disaster came. a cow got into the office one night, upset a type-case, and ate up two composition rollers. somewhat later a fire broke out and did considerable damage. there was partial insurance, with which orion replaced a few necessary articles; then, to save rent, he moved the office into the front room of the home on hill street, where they were living again at this time. samuel clemens, however, now in his eighteenth year, felt that he was no longer needed in hannibal. he was a capable workman, with little to do and no reward. orion, made irritable by his misfortunes, was not always kind. pamela, who, meantime, had married well, was settled in st. louis. sam told his mother that he would visit pamela and look about the city. there would be work in st. louis at good wages. he was going farther than st. louis, but he dared not tell her. jane clemens, consenting, sighed as she put together his scanty belongings. sam was going away. he had been a good boy of late years, but her faith in his resisting powers was not strong. presently she held up a little testament. "i want you to take hold of the other end of this, sam," she said, "and make me a promise." the slim, wiry woman of forty-nine, gray-eyed, tender, and resolute, faced the fair-cheeked youth of seventeen, his eyes as piercing and unwavering as her own. how much alike they were! "i want you," jane clemens said, "to repeat after me, sam, these words: i do solemnly swear that i will not throw a card or drink a drop of liquor while i am gone." he repeated the vow after her, and she kissed him. "remember that, sam, and write to us," she said. "and so," writes orion, "he went wandering in search of that comfort and advancement, and those rewards of industry, which he had failed to find where i was--gloomy, taciturn, and selfish. i not only missed his labor; we all missed his abounding activity and merriment." ix. the open road samuel clemens went to visit his sister pamela in st. louis and was presently at work, setting type on the "evening news." he had no intention, however, of staying there. his purpose was to earn money enough to take him to new york city. the railroad had by this time reached st. louis, and he meant to have the grand experience of a long journey "on the cars." also, there was a crystal palace in new york, where a world's exposition was going on. trains were slow in , and it required several days and nights to go from st. louis to new york city, but to sam clemens it was a wonderful journey. all day he sat looking out of the window, eating when he chose from the food he carried, curling up in his seat at night to sleep. he arrived at last with a few dollars in his pocket and a ten-dollar bill sewed into the lining of his coat. new york was rather larger than he expected. all of the lower end of manhattan island was covered by it. the crystal palace--some distance out--stood at forty-second street and sixth avenue--the present site of bryant park. all the world's newest wonders were to be seen there--a dazzling exhibition. a fragment of the letter which sam clemens wrote to his sister pamela--the earliest piece of mark twain's writing that has been preserved--expresses his appreciation of the big fair: "from the gallery (second floor) you have a glorious sight--the flags of the different countries represented, the lofty dome, glittering jewelry, gaudy tapestry, etc., with the busy crowd passing to and fro--'tis a perfect fairy palace--beautiful beyond description. "the machinery department is on the main floor, but i cannot enumerate any of it on account of the lateness of the hour (past one o'clock). it would take more than a week to examine everything on exhibition, and i was only in a little over two hours to-night. i only glanced at about one-third of the articles; and, having a poor memory, i have enumerated scarcely any of even the principal objects. the visitors to the palace average , daily--double the population of hannibal. the price of admission being fifty cents, they take in about $ , . "the latting observatory (height about feet) is near the palace. from it you can obtain a grand view of the city and the country around. the croton aqueduct, to supply the city with water, is the greatest wonder yet. immense pipes are laid across the bed of the harlem river, and pass through the country to westchester county, where a whole river is turned from its course and brought to new york. from the reservoir in the city to westchester county reservoir the distance is thirty-eight miles, and, if necessary, they could easily supply every family in new york with one hundred barrels of water a day! "i am very sorry to learn that henry has been sick. he ought to go to the country and take exercise, for he is not half so healthy as ma thinks he is. if he had my walking to do, he would be another boy entirely. four times every day i walk a little over a mile; and working hard all day and walking four miles is exercise. i am used to it now, though, and it is no trouble. where is it orion's going to? tell ma my promises are faithfully kept; and if i have my health i will take her to ky. in the spring. i shall save money for this. "(it has just struck a.m., and i always get up at six and am at work at .) you ask where i spend my evenings. where would you suppose, with a free printers' library containing more than , volumes within a quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to?" "i shall write to ella soon. write soon. "truly your brother, "samy. "p.s.--i have written this by a light so dim that you nor ma could not read by it." we get a fair idea of samuel clemens at seventeen from this letter. for one thing, he could write good, clear english, full of interesting facts. he is enthusiastic, but not lavish of words. he impresses us with his statement that the visitors to the palace each day are in number double the population of hannibal; a whole river is turned from its course to supply new york city with water; the water comes thirty-eight miles, and each family could use a hundred barrels a day! the letter reveals his personal side--his kindly interest in those left behind, his anxiety for henry, his assurance that the promise to his mother was being kept, his memory of her longing to visit her old home. and the boy who hated school has become a reader--he is reveling in a printers' library of thousands of volumes. we feel, somehow, that samuel clemens has suddenly become quite a serious-minded person, that he has left tom sawyer and joe harper and huck finn somewhere in a beautiful country a long way behind. he found work with the firm of john a. gray & green, general printers, in cliff street. his pay was four dollars a week, in wild-cat money--that is, money issued by private banks--rather poor money, being generally at a discount and sometimes worth less. but if wages were low, living was cheap in those days, and sam clemens, lodging in a mechanics' boarding-house in duane street, sometimes had fifty cents left on saturday night when his board and washing were paid. luckily, he had not set out to seek his fortune, but only to see something of the world. he lingered in new york through the summer of , never expecting to remain long. his letters of that period were few. in october he said, in a letter to pamela, that he did not write to the family because he did not know their whereabouts, orion having sold the paper and left hannibal. "i have been fooling myself with the idea that i was going to leave new york every day for the last two weeks," he adds, which sounds like the mark twain of fifty years later. farther along, he tells of going to see edwin forrest, then playing at the broadway theater: "the play was the 'gladiator.' i did not like part of it much, but other portions were really splendid. in the latter part of the last act. . . the man's whole soul seems absorbed in the part he is playing; and it is real startling to see him. i am sorry i did not see him play 'damon and pythias,' the former character being the greatest. he appears in philadelphia on monday night." a little farther along he says: "if my letters do not come often, you need not bother yourself about me; for if you have a brother nearly eighteen years old who is not able to take care of himself a few miles from home, such a brother is not worth one's thoughts." sam clemens may have followed forrest to philadelphia. at any rate, he was there presently, "subbing" in the composing-rooms of the "inquirer," setting ten thousand ems a day, and receiving pay accordingly. when there was no vacancy for him to fill, he put in the time visiting the philadelphia libraries, art galleries, and historic landmarks. after all, his chief business was sight-seeing. work was only a means to this end. chilly evenings, when he returned to his boarding-house, his room-mate, an englishman named sumner, grilled a herring over their small open fire, and this was a great feast. he tried writing--obituary poetry, for the "philadelphia ledger"--but it was not accepted. "my efforts were not received with approval" was his comment long after. in the "inquirer" office there was a printer named frog, and sometimes, when he went out, the office "devils" would hang over his case a line with a hook on it baited with a piece of red flannel. they never got tired of this joke, and frog never failed to get fighting mad when he saw that dangling string with the bit of red flannel at the end. no doubt sam clemens had his share in this mischief. sam found that he liked philadelphia. he could save a little money and send something to his mother--small amounts, but welcome. once he inclosed a gold dollar, "to serve as a specimen of the kind of stuff we are paid with in philadelphia." better than doubtful "wild-cat," certainly. of his work he writes: "one man has engaged me to work for him every sunday till the first of next april, when i shall return home to take ma to ky . . . . if i want to, i can get subbing every night of the week. i go to work at seven in the evening and work till three the next morning. . . . the type is mostly agate and minion, with some bourgeois, and when one gets a good agate 'take,' he is sure to make money. i made $ . last sunday." there is a long description of a trip on the fairmount stage in this letter, well-written and interesting, but too long to have place here. in the same letter he speaks of the graves of benjamin franklin and his wife, which he had looked at through the iron railing of the locked inclosure. probably it did not occur to him that there might be points of similarity between franklin's career and his own. yet in time these would be rather striking: each learned the printer's trade; each worked in his brother's office and wrote for the paper; each left quietly and went to new york, and from new york to philadelphia, as a journeyman printer; each in due season became a world figure, many-sided, human, and of incredible popularity. orion clemens, meantime, had bought a paper in muscatine, iowa, and located the family there. evidently by this time he had realized the value of his brother as a contributor, for sam, in a letter to orion, says, "i will try to write for the paper occasionally, but i fear my letters will be very uninteresting, for this incessant night work dulls one's ideas amazingly." meantime, he had passed his eighteenth birthday, winter was coming on, he had been away from home half a year, and the first attack of homesickness was due. "one only has to leave home to learn how to write interesting letters to an absent friend," he wrote; and again. "i don't like our present prospect for cold weather at all." he declared he only wanted to get back to avoid night work, which was injuring his eyes, but we may guess there was a stronger reason, which perhaps he did not entirely realize. the novelty of wandering had worn off, and he yearned for familiar faces, the comfort of those he loved. but he did not go. he made a trip to washington in january--a sight-seeing trip--returning to philadelphia, where he worked for the "ledger" and "north american." eventually he went back to new york, and from there took ticket to st. louis. this was in the late summer of ; he had been fifteen months away from his people when he stepped aboard the train to return. sam was worn out when he reached st. louis; but the keokuk packet was leaving, and he stopped only long enough to see pamela, then went aboard and, flinging himself into his berth, did not waken until the boat reached muscatine, iowa, thirty-six hours later. it was very early when he arrived, too early to rouse the family. he sat down in the office of a little hotel to wait for morning, and picked up a small book that lay on the writing-table. it contained pictures of the english rulers with the brief facts of their reigns. sam clemens entertained himself learning these data by heart. he had a fine memory for such things, and in an hour or two had those details so perfectly committed that he never forgot one of them as long as he lived. the knowledge acquired in this stray fashion he found invaluable in later life. it was his groundwork for all english history. x. a wind of chance orion could not persuade his brother to remain in muscatine. sam returned to his old place on the "evening news," in st. louis, where he remained until the following year, rooming with a youth named burrough, a journeyman chair-maker with literary taste, a reader of the english classics, a companionable lad, and for samuel clemens a good influence. by spring, orion clemens had married and had sold out in muscatine. he was now located in keokuk, iowa. when presently brother sam came visiting to keokuk, orion offered him five dollars a week and his board to remain. he accepted. henry clemens, now seventeen, was also in orion's employ, and a lad named dick hingham. henry and sam slept in the office; dick and a young fellow named brownell, who roomed above, came in for social evenings. they were pretty lively evenings. a music-teacher on the floor below did not care for them--they disturbed his class. he was furious, in fact, and assailed the boys roughly at first, with no result but to make matters worse. then he tried gentleness, and succeeded. the boys stopped their capers and joined his class. sam, especially, became a distinguished member of that body. he was never a great musician, but with his good nature, his humor, his slow, quaint speech and originality, he had no rival in popularity. he was twenty now, and much with young ladies, yet he was always a beau rather than a suitor, a good comrade to all, full of pranks and pleasantries, ready to stop and be merry with any that came along. if they prophesied concerning his future, it is not likely that they spoke of literary fame. they thought him just easy-going and light-minded. true, they noticed that he often carried a book under his arm--a history, a volume of dickens, or the tales of poe. he read more than any one guessed. at night, propped up in bed--a habit continued until his death--he was likely to read until a late hour. he enjoyed smoking at such times, and had made himself a pipe with a large bowl which stood on the floor and had a long rubber stem, something like the turkish hubble-bubble. he liked to fill the big bowl and smoke at ease through the entire evening. but sometimes the pipe went out, which meant that he must strike a match and lean far over to apply it, just when he was most comfortable. sam clemens never liked unnecessary exertion. one night, when the pipe had gone out for the second time, he happened to hear the young book-clerk, brownell, passing up to his room on the top floor. sam called to him: "ed, come here!" brownell poked his head in the door. the two were great chums. "what will you have, sam?" he asked. "come in, ed; henry's asleep, and i'm in trouble. i want somebody to light my pipe." "why don't you light it yourself?" brownell asked. "i would, only i knew you'd be along in a few minutes and would do it for me." brownell scratched a match, stooped down, and applied it. "what are you reading, sam?" "oh, nothing much--a so-called funny book. one of these days i'll write a funnier book myself." brownell laughed. "no, you won't, sam," he said. "you're too lazy ever to write a book." years later, in the course of a lecture which he delivered in keokuk, mark twain said that he supposed the most untruthful man in the world lived right there in keokuk, and that his name was ed brownell. orion clemens did not have the gift of prosperity, and his printing-office did not flourish. when he could no longer pay sam's wages he took him into partnership, which meant that sam got no wages at all, though this was of less consequence, since his mother, now living with pamela, was well provided for. the disorder of the office, however, distressed him. he wrote home that he could not work without system, and, a little later, that he was going to leave keokuk, that, in fact, he was planning a great adventure--a trip to the upper amazon! his interest in the amazon had been awakened by a book. lynch and herndon had surveyed the upper river, and lieutenant herndon's book was widely read. sam clemens, propped up in bed, pored over it through long evenings, and nightly made fabulous fortunes collecting cocoa and other rare things--resolving, meantime, to start in person for the upper amazon with no unnecessary delay. boy and man, samuel clemens was the same. his vision of grand possibilities ahead blinded him to the ways and means of arrival. it was an inheritance from both sides of his parentage. once, in old age, he wrote: "i have been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward . . . . when i am reflecting on these occasions, even deaf persons can hear me think." he believed, however, that he had reflected carefully concerning the amazon, and that in a brief time he should be there at the head of an expedition, piling up untold wealth. he even stirred the imaginations of two other adventurers, a dr. martin and a young man named ward. to henry, then in st. louis, he wrote, august , : "ward and i held a long consultation sunday morning, and the result was that we two have determined to start to brazil, if possible, in six weeks from now, in order to look carefully into matters there and report to dr. martin in time for him to follow on the first of march." the matter of finance troubled him. orion could not be depended on for any specified sum, and the fare to the upper amazon would probably be considerable. sam planned different methods of raising it. one of them was to go to new york or cincinnati and work at his trade until he saved the amount. he would then sail from new york direct, or take boat for new orleans and sail from there. of course there would always be vessels clearing for the upper amazon. after lieutenant herndon's book the ocean would probably be full of them. he did not make the start with ward, as planned, and ward and martin seem to have given up the amazon idea. not so with samuel clemens. he went on reading herndon, trying meantime to raise money enough to get him out of keokuk. was it fate or providence that suddenly placed it in his hands? whatever it was, the circumstance is so curious that it must be classed as one of those strange facts that have no place in fiction. the reader will remember how, one day in hannibal, the wind had brought to sam clemens, then printer's apprentice, a stray leaf from a book about "joan of arc," and how that incident marked a turning-point in his mental life. now, seven years later, it was the wind again that directed his fortune. it was a day in early november--bleak, bitter, and gusty, with whirling snow; most persons were indoors. samuel clemens, going down main street, keokuk, saw a flying bit of paper pass him and lodge against a building. something about it attracted him and he captured it. it was a fifty-dollar bill! he had never seen one before, but he recognized it. he thought he must be having a pleasant dream. he was tempted to pocket his good fortune and keep still. but he had always a troublesome conscience. he went to a newspaper office and advertised that he had found a sum of money, a large bill. once, long after, he said: "i didn't describe it very particularly, and i waited in daily fear that the owner would turn up and take away my fortune. by and by i couldn't stand it any longer. my conscience had gotten all that was coming to it. i felt that i must take that money out of danger." another time he said, "i advertised the find and left for the amazon the same day." all of which we may take with his usual literary discount --the one assigned to him by his mother in childhood. as a matter of fact, he remained for an ample time, and nobody came for the money. what was its origin? was it swept out of a bank, or caught up by the wind from some counting-room table? perhaps it materialized out of the unseen. who knows? xi. the long way to the amazon sam decided on cincinnati as his base. from there he could go either to new york or new orleans to catch the amazon boat. he paid a visit to st. louis, where his mother made him renew his promise as to drink and cards. then he was seized with a literary idea, and returned to keokuk, where he proposed to a thriving weekly paper, the "saturday post," to send letters of travel, which might even be made into a book later on. george reese, owner of the "post," agreed to pay five dollars each for the letters, which speaks well for his faith in samuel clemens's talent, five dollars being good pay for that time and place--more than the letters were worth, judged by present standards. the first was dated cincinnati, november , , and was certainly not promising literature. it was written in the ridiculous dialect which was once thought to be the dress of humor; and while here and there is a comic flash, there is in it little promise of the future mark twain. one extract is enough: "when we got to the depo', i went around to git a look at the iron hoss. thunderation! it wasn't no more like a hoss than a meetin'- house. if i was goin' to describe the animule, i'd say it looked like--well, it looked like--blamed if i know what it looked like, snorting fire and brimstone out of his nostrils, and puffin' out black smoke all 'round, and pantin', and heavin', and swellin', and chawin' up red-hot coals like they was good. a feller stood in a little house like, feedin' him all the time; but the more he got, the more he wanted and the more he blowed and snorted. after a spell the feller ketched him by the tail, and great jericho! he set up a yell that split the ground for more'n a mile and a half, and the next minit i felt my legs a-waggin', and found myself at t'other end of the string o' vehickles. i wasn't skeered, but i had three chills and a stroke of palsy in less than five minits, and my face had a cur'us brownish-yaller-greenbluish color in it, which was perfectly unaccountable. 'well,' say i, 'comment is super-flu-ous.'" how samuel clemens could have written that, and worse, at twenty-one, and a little more than ten years later have written "the innocents abroad," is one of the mysteries of literature. the letters were signed "snodgrass," and there are but two of them. snodgrass seems to have found them hard work, for it is said he raised on the price, which, fortunately, brought the series to a close. their value to-day lies in the fact that they are the earliest of mark twain's newspaper contributions that have been preserved--the first for which he received a cash return. sam remained in cincinnati until april of the following year, , working for wrightson & co., general printers, lodging in a cheap boarding-house, saving every possible penny for his great adventure. he had one associate at the boarding-house, a lank, unsmiling scotchman named macfarlane, twice young clemens's age, and a good deal of a mystery. sam never could find out what macfarlane did. his hands were hardened by some sort of heavy labor; he left at six in the morning and returned in the evening at the same hour. he never mentioned his work, and young clemens had the delicacy not to inquire. for macfarlane was no ordinary person. he was a man of deep knowledge, a reader of many books, a thinker; he was versed in history and philosophy, he knew the dictionary by heart. he made but two statements concerning himself: one, that he had acquired his knowledge from reading, and not at school; the other, that he knew every word in the english dictionary. he was willing to give proof of the last, and sam clemens tested him more than once, but found no word that macfarlane could not define. macfarlane was not silent--he would discuss readily enough the deeper problems of life and had many startling theories of his own. darwin had not yet published his "descent of man," yet macfarlane was already advancing ideas similar to those in that book. he went further than darwin. he had startling ideas of the moral evolution of man, and these he would pour into the ears of his young listener until ten o'clock, after which, like the english sumner in philadelphia, he would grill a herring, and the evening would end. those were fermenting discourses that young samuel clemens listened to that winter in macfarlane's room, and they did not fail to influence his later thought. it was the high-tide of spring, late in april, when the prospective cocoa-hunter decided that it was time to set out for the upper amazon. he had saved money enough to carry him at least as far as new orleans, where he would take ship, it being farther south and therefore nearer his destination. furthermore, he could begin with a lazy trip down the mississippi, which, next to being a pilot, had been one of his most cherished dreams. the ohio river steamers were less grand than those of the mississippi, but they had a homelike atmosphere and did not hurry. samuel clemens had the spring fever and was willing to take his time. in "life on the mississippi" we read that the author ran away, vowing never to return until he could come home a pilot, shedding glory. but this is the fiction touch. he had always loved the river, and his boyhood dream of piloting had time and again returned, but it was not uppermost when he bade good-by to macfarlane and stepped aboard the "paul jones," bound for new orleans, and thus conferred immortality on that ancient little craft. now he had really started on his voyage. but it was a voyage that would continue not for a week or a fortnight, but for four years--four marvelous, sunlit years, the glory of which would color all that followed them. xii. renewing an old ambition a reader of mark twain's mississippi book gets the impression that the author was a boy of about seventeen when he started to learn the river, and that he was painfully ignorant of the great task ahead. but this also is the fiction side of the story. samuel clemens was more than twenty-one when he set out on the "paul jones," and in a way was familiar with the trade of piloting. hannibal had turned out many pilots. an older brother of the bowen boys was already on the river when sam clemens was rolling rocks down holliday's hill. often he came home to air his grandeur and hold forth on the wonder of his work. that learning the river was no light task sam clemens would know as well as any one who had not tried it. nevertheless, as the drowsy little steamer went puffing down into softer, sunnier lands, the old dream, the "permanent ambition" of boyhood, returned, while the call of the far-off amazon and cocoa drew faint. horace bixby,[ ] pilot of the "paul jones," a man of thirty-two, was looking out over the bow at the head of island no. when he heard a slow, pleasant voice say, "good morning." bixby was a small, clean-cut man. "good morning, sir," he said, rather briskly, without looking around. he did not much care for visitors in the pilothouse. this one entered and stood a little behind him. "how would you like a young man to learn the river?" came to him in that serene, deliberate speech. the pilot glanced over his shoulder and saw a rather slender, loose-limbed youth with a fair, girlish complexion and a great mass of curly auburn hair. "i wouldn't like it. cub pilots are more trouble than they're worth. a great deal more trouble than profit." "i am a printer by trade," the easy voice went on. "it doesn't agree with me. i thought i'd go to south america." bixby kept his eye on the river, but there was interest in his voice when he spoke. "what makes you pull your words that way?" he asked--"pulling" being the river term for drawling. the young man, now seated comfortably on the visitors' bench, said more slowly than ever: "you'll have to ask my mother--she pulls hers, too." pilot bixby laughed. the manner of the reply amused him. his guest was encouraged. "do you know the bowen boys?" he asked, "pilots in the st. louis and new orleans trade?" "i know them well--all three of them. william bowen did his first steering for me; a mighty good boy. i know sam, too, and bart." "old schoolmates of mine in hannibal. sam and will, especially, were my chums." bixby's tone became friendly. "come over and stand by me," he said. "what is your name?" the applicant told him, and the two stood looking out on the sunlit water. "do you drink?" "no." "do you gamble?" "no, sir." "do you swear?" "n-not for amusement; only under pressure." "do you chew?" "no, sir, never; but i must--smoke." "did you ever do any steering?" "i have steered everything on the river but a steamboat, i guess." "very well. take the wheel and see what you can do with a steamboat. keep her as she is--toward that lower cottonwood snag." bixby had a sore foot and was glad of a little relief. he sat on the bench where he could keep a careful eye on the course. by and by he said "there is just one way i would take a young man to learn the river--that is, for money." "what--do you--charge?" "five hundred dollars, and i to be at no expense whatever." in those days pilots were allowed to carry a learner, or "cub," board free. mr. bixby meant that he was to be at no expense in port or for incidentals. his terms seemed discouraging. "i haven't got five hundred dollars in money," sam said. "i've got a lot of tennessee land worth two bits an acre. i'll give you two thousand acres of that." bixby shook his head. "no," he said, "i don't want any unimproved real estate. i have too much already." sam reflected. he thought he might be able to borrow one hundred dollars from william moffett, pamela's husband, without straining his credit. "well, then," he proposed, "i'll give you one hundred dollars cash, and the rest when i earn it." something about this young man had won horace bixby's heart. his slow, pleasant speech, his unhurried, quiet manner at the wheel, his evident simplicity and sincerity--the inner qualities of mind and heart which would make the world love mark twain. the terms proposed were accepted. the first payment was to be in cash; the others were to begin when the pupil had learned the river and was earning wages. during the rest of the trip to new orleans the new pupil was often at the wheel, while mr. bixby nursed his sore foot and gave directions. any literary ambitions that samuel clemens still nourished waned rapidly. by the time he had reached new orleans he had almost forgotten he had ever been a printer. as for the amazon and cocoa, why, there had been no ship sailing in that direction for years, and it was unlikely that any would ever sail again, a fact that rather amused the would-be adventurer now, since providence had regulated his affairs in accordance with his oldest and longest cherished dream. at new orleans bixby left the "paul jones" for a fine st. louis boat, taking his cub with him. this was a sudden and happy change, and sam was a good deal impressed with his own importance in belonging to so imposing a structure, especially when, after a few days' stay in new orleans, he stood by bixby's side in the big glass turret while they backed out of the line of wedged-in boats and headed up the great river. this was glory, but there was sorrow ahead. he had not really begun learning the river as yet he had only steered under directions. he had known that to learn the river would be hard, but he had never realized quite how hard. serenely he had undertaken the task of mastering twelve hundred miles of the great, changing, shifting river as exactly and as surely by daylight or darkness as one knows the way to his own features. nobody could realize the full size of that task--not till afterward. [ ] horace bixby lived until and remained at the wheel until within a short time of his death, in his eighty-seventh year. the writer of this memoir visited him in and took down from his dictation the dialogue that follows. xiii. learning the river in that early day, to be a pilot was to be "greater than a king." the mississippi river pilot was a law unto himself--there was none above him. his direction of the boat was absolute; he could start or lay up when he chose; he could pass a landing regardless of business there, consulting nobody, not even the captain; he could take the boat into what seemed certain destruction, if he had that mind, and the captain was obliged to stand by, helpless and silent, for the law was with the pilot in everything. furthermore, the pilot was a gentleman. his work was clean and physically light. it ended the instant the boat was tied to the landing, and did not begin again until it was ready to back into the stream. also, for those days his salary was princely--the vice-president of the united states did not receive more. as for prestige, the mississippi pilot, perched high in his glass inclosure, fashionably dressed, and commanding all below him, was the most conspicuous and showy, the most observed and envied creature in the world. no wonder sam clemens, with his love of the river and his boyish fondness for honors, should aspire to that stately rank. even at twenty-one he was still just a boy--as, indeed, he was till his death--and we may imagine how elated he was, starting up the great river as a real apprentice pilot, who in a year or two would stand at the wheel, as his chief was now standing, a monarch with a splendid income and all the great river packed away in his head. in that last item lay the trouble. in the mississippi book he tells of it in a way that no one may hope to equal, and if the details are not exact, the truth is there--at least in substance. for a distance above new orleans mr. bixby had volunteered information about the river, naming the points and crossings, in what seemed a casual way, all through his watch of four hours. their next watch began in the middle of the night, and mark twain tells how surprised and disgusted he was to learn that pilots must get up in the night to run their boats, and his amazement to find mr. bixby plunging into the blackness ahead as if it had been daylight. very likely this is mainly fiction, but hardly the following: presently he turned to me and said: "what's the name of the first point above new orleans?" i was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and i did. i said i didn't know. "don't know!" his manner jolted me. i was down at the foot again, in a moment. but i had to say just what i had said before. "well, you're a smart one," said mr. bixby. "what's the name of the next point?" once more i didn't know. "well, this beats anything! tell me the name of any point or place i told you." i studied awhile and decided that i couldn't. "look here! what do you start from, above twelve mile point, to cross over?" "i--i--don't know." "'you--you don't know,"' mimicking my drawling manner of speech. "what do you know?" "i--i--nothing, for certain." bixby was a small, nervous man, hot and quick-firing. he went off now, and said a number of severe things. then: "look here, what do you suppose i told you the names of those points for?" i tremblingly considered a moment--then the devil of temptation provoked me to say: "well--to--to--be entertaining, i thought." this was a red flag to the bull. he raged and stormed so (he was crossing the river at the time) that i judged it made him blind, because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. of course the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. never was a man so grateful as mr. bixby was, because he was brimful, and here were subjects who would talk back. he threw open a window, thrust his head out, and such an irruption followed as i had never heard before . . . . when he closed the window he was empty. presently he said to me, in the gentlest way: "my boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time i tell you a thing, put it down right away. there's only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. you have to know it just like a-b-c." the little memorandum-book which sam clemens bought, probably at the next daylight landing, still exists--the same that he says "fairly bristled with the names of towns, points, bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc."; but it made his heart ache to think he had only half the river set down, for, as the watches were four hours off and four hours on, there were the long gaps where he had slept. it is not easy to make out the penciled notes today. the small, neat writing is faded, and many of them are in an abbreviation made only for himself. it is hard even to find these examples to quote: meriwether's bend one-fourth less [ ]--run shape of upper bar and go into the low place in the willows about (ft.) lower down than last year. outside of montezuma six or eight feet more water. shape bar till high timber on towhead gets nearly even with low willows. then hold a little open on right of low willows--run 'em close if you want to, but come out yards when you get nearly to head of towhead. the average mind would not hold a single one of these notes ten seconds, yet by the time he reached st. louis he had set down pages that to-day make one's head weary even to contemplate. and those long four-hour gaps where he had been asleep--they are still there; and now, after nearly sixty years, the old heartache is still in them. he must have bought a new book for the next trip and laid this one away. to the new "cub" it seemed a long way to st. louis that first trip, but in the end it was rather grand to come steaming up to the big, busy city, with its thronging waterfront flanked with a solid mile of steamboats, and to nose one's way to a place in that stately line. at st. louis, sam borrowed from his brother-in-law the one hundred dollars he had agreed to pay, and so closed his contract with bixby. a few days later his chief was engaged to go on a very grand boat indeed--a "sumptuous temple," he tells us, all brass and inlay, with a pilot-house so far above the water that he seemed perched on a mountain. this part of learning the river was worth while; and when he found that the regiment of natty servants respectfully "sir'd" him, his happiness was complete. but he was in the depths again, presently, for when they started down the river and he began to take account of his knowledge, he found that he had none. everything had changed--that is, he was seeing it all from the other direction. what with the four-hour gaps and this transformation, he was lost completely. how could the easy-going, dreamy, unpractical man whom the world knew as mark twain ever have persisted against discouragement like that to acquire the vast, the absolute, limitless store of information necessary to mississippi piloting? the answer is that he loved the river, the picturesqueness and poetry of a steamboat, the ease and glory of a pilot's life; and then, in spite of his own later claims to the contrary, samuel clemens, boy and man, in the work suited to his tastes and gifts, was the most industrious of persons. work of the other sort he avoided, overlooked, refused to recognize, but never any labor for which he was qualified by his talents or training. piloting suited him exactly, and he proved an apt pupil. horace bixby said to the writer of this memoir: "sam was always good-natured, and he had a natural taste for the river. he had a fine memory and never forgot what i told him." yet there must have been hard places all along, for to learn every crook and turn and stump and snag and bluff and bar and sounding of that twelve hundred miles of mighty, shifting water was a gigantic task. mark twain tells us how, when he was getting along pretty well, his chief one day turned on him suddenly with this "settler": "what is the shape of walnut bend?" he might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm. i replied respectfully and said i didn't know it had any particular shape. my gun-powdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives ....i waited. by and by he said: "my boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly. it is all that is left to steer by on a very dark night. everything else is blotted out and gone. but mind you, it hasn't got the same shape in the night that it has in the daytime." "how on earth am i going to learn it, then?" "how do you follow a hall at home in the dark? because you know the shape of it. you can't see it." "do you mean to say that i've got to know all the million trifling variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as i know the shape of the front hall at home?" "on my honor, you've got to know them better than any man ever did know the shapes of the halls in his own house." "i wish i was dead!" but the reader must turn to chapter viii of "life on the mississippi" and read, or reread, the pages which follow this extract--nothing can better convey the difficulties of piloting. that samuel clemens had the courage to continue is the best proof, not only of his great love of the river, but of that splendid gift of resolution that one rarely fails to find in men of the foremost rank. [ ] depth of water. one-quarter less than three fathoms. xiv. river days piloting was only a part of sam clemens's education on the mississippi. he learned as much of the reefs and shallows of human nature as of the river-bed. in one place he writes: in that brief, sharp schooling i got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. all the different types, but most of them in the rough. that samuel clemens kept the promise made to his mother as to drink and cards during those apprentice days is well worth remembering. horace bixby, answering a call for pilots from the missouri river, consigned his pupil, as was customary, tonne of the pilots of the "john j. roe," a freight-boat, owned and conducted by some retired farmers, and in its hospitality reminding sam of his uncle john quarles's farm. the "roe" was a very deliberate boat. it was said that she could beat an island to st. louis, but never quite overtake the current going down-stream. sam loved the "roe." she was not licensed to carry passengers, but she always had a family party of the owners' relations aboard, and there was a big deck for dancing and a piano in the cabin. the young pilot could play the chords, and sing, in his own fashion, about a grasshopper that; sat on a sweet-potato vine, and about-- an old, old horse whose name was methusalem, took him down and sold him in jerusalem, a long time ago. the "roe" was a heavenly place, but sam's stay there did not last. bixby came down from the missouri, and perhaps thought he was doing a fine thing for his pupil by transferring him to a pilot named brown, then on a large passenger-steamer, the "pennsylvania." the "pennsylvania" was new and one of the finest boats on the river. sam clemens, by this time, was accounted a good steersman, so it seemed fortunate and a good arrangement for all parties. but brown was a tyrant. he was illiterate and coarse, and took a dislike to sam from the start. his first greeting was a question, harmless enough in form but offensive in manner. "are you horace bigsby's cub?"--bixby being usually pronounced "bigsby" in river parlance. sam answered politely enough that he was, and brown proceeded to comment on the "style" of his clothes and other personal matters. he had made an effort to please brown, but it was no use. brown was never satisfied. at a moment when sam was steering, brown, sitting on the bench, would shout: "here! where are you going now? pull her down! pull her down! do you hear me? blamed mud-cat!" the young pilot soon learned to detest his chief, and presently was putting in a good deal of his time inventing punishments for him. i could imagine myself killing brown; there was no law against that, and that was the thing i always used to do the moment i was abed. instead of going over the river in my mind, as was my duty, i threw business aside for pleasure, and killed brown. he gave up trying to please brown, and was even willing to stir him up upon occasion. one day when the cub was at the wheel his chief noticed that the course seemed peculiar. "here! where you headin' for now?" he yelled. "what in the nation you steerin' at, anyway? blamed numskull!" "why," said sam in his calm, slow way, "i didn't see much else i could steer for, so i was heading for that white heifer on the bank." "get away from that wheel! and get outen this pilot-house!" yelled brown. "you ain't fitten to become no pilot!" an order that sam found welcome enough. the other pilot, george ealer, was a lovable soul who played the flute and chess during his off watch, and read aloud to sam from "goldsmith" and "shakespeare." to be with george ealer was to forget the persecutions of brown. young clemens had been on the river nearly a year at this time, and, though he had learned a good deal and was really a fine steersman, he received no wages. he had no board to pay, but there were things he must buy, and his money supply had become limited. each trip of the "pennsylvania" she remained about two days and nights in new orleans, during which time the young man was free. he found he could earn two and a half to three dollars a night watching freight on the levee, and, as this opportunity came around about once a month, the amount was useful. nor was this the only return; many years afterward he said: "it was a desolate experience, watching there in the dark, among those piles of freight; not a sound, not a living creature astir. but it was not a profitless one. i used to have inspirations as i sat there alone those nights. i used to imagine all sots of situations and possibilities. these things got into my books by and by, and furnished me with many a chapter. i can trace the effects of those nights through most of my books, in one way and another." piloting, even with brown, had its pleasant side. in st. louis, young clemens stopped with his sister, and often friends were there from hannibal. at both ends of the line he visited friendly boats, especially the "roe," where a grand welcome was always waiting. once among the guests of that boat a young girl named laura so attracted him that he forgot time and space until one of the "roe" pilots, zeb leavenworth, came flying aft, shouting: "the 'pennsylvania' is backing out!" a hasty good-by, a wild flight across the decks of several boats, and a leap across several feet of open water closed the episode. he wrote to laura, but there was no reply. he never saw her again, never heard from her for nearly fifty years, when both were widowed and old. she had not received his letter. occasionally there were stirring adventures aboard the "pennsylvania." in a letter written in march, , the young pilot tells of an exciting night search in the running ice for hat island soundings: brown, the pilot, stood in the bow with an oar, to keep her head out, and i took the tiller. we would start the men, and all would go well until the yawl would bring us on a heavy cake of ice, and then the men would drop like so many tenpins, while brown assumed the horizontal in the bottom of the boat. after an hour's hard work we got back, with ice half an inch thick on the oars . . . . the next day was colder still. i was out in the yawl twice, and then we got through, but the infernal steamboat came near running over us . . . . the "maria denning" was aground at the head of the island; they hailed us; we ran alongside, and they hoisted us in and thawed us out. we had been out in the yawl from four in the morning until half-past nine without being near a fire. there was a thick coating of ice over men and yawl, ropes, and everything, and we looked like rock-candy statuary. he was at the right age to enjoy such adventures, and to feel a pride in them. in the same letter he tells how he found on the "pennsylvania" a small clerkship for his brother henry, who was now nearly twenty, a handsome, gentle boy of whom sam was lavishly fond and proud. the young pilot was eager to have henry with him--to see him started in life. how little he dreamed what sorrow would come of his well-meant efforts in the lad's behalf! yet he always believed, later, that he had a warning, for one night at the end of may, in st. louis, he had a vivid dream, which time would presently fulfil. an incident now occurred on the "pennsylvania" that closed samuel clemens's career on that boat. it was the down trip, and the boat was in eagle bend when henry clemens appeared on the hurricane deck with an announcement from the captain of a landing a little lower down. brown, who would never own that he was rather deaf, probably misunderstood the order. they were passing the landing when the captain appeared on the deck. "didn't henry tell you to land here?" he called to brown. "no, sir." captain klinefelter turned to sam. "didn't you hear him?" "yes, sir!" brown said: "shut your mouth! you never heard anything of the kind!" henry appeared, not suspecting any trouble. brown said, fiercely, "here, why didn't you tell me we had got to land at that plantation?" "i did tell you, mr. brown," henry said, politely. "it's a lie!" sam clemens could stand brown's abuse of himself, but not of henry. he said: "you lie yourself. he did tell you!" for a cub pilot to defy his chief was unheard of. brown was dazed, then he shouted: "i'll attend to your case in half a minute!" and to henry, "get out of here!" henry had started when brown seized him by the collar and struck him in the face. an instant later sam was upon brown with a heavy stool and stretched him on the floor. then all the repressed fury of months broke loose; and, leaping upon brown and holding him down with his knees, samuel clemens pounded the tyrant with his fists till his strength gave out. he let brown go then, and the latter, with pilot instinct, sprang to the wheel, for the boat was drifting. seeing she was safe, he seized a spy-glass as a weapon and ordered his chastiser out of the pilot-house. but sam lingered. he had become very calm, and he openly corrected brown's english. "don't give me none of your airs!" yelled brown. "i ain't goin' to stand nothin' more from you!" "you should say, `don't give me any of your airs,'" sam said, sweetly, "and the last half of your sentence almost defies correction." a group of passengers and white-aproned servants, assembled on the deck forward, applauded the victor. sam went down to find captain klinefelter. he expected to be put in irons, for it was thought to be mutiny to strike a pilot. the captain took sam into his private room and made some inquiries. mark twain, in the "mississippi" boot remembers them as follows: "did you strike him first?" captain klinefelter asked. "yes, sir." "what with?" "a stool, sir." "hard?" "middling, sir." "did it knock him down?" "he--he fell, sir." "did you follow it up? did you do anything further?" "yes, sir." "what did you do?" "pounded him, sir." "pounded him?" "yes, sir." "did you pound him much--that is, severely?" "one might call it that, sir, maybe." "i am mighty glad of it! hark ye--never mention that i said that! you have been guilty of a great crime; and don't ever be guilty of it again on this boat, but--lay for him ashore! give him a good, sound thrashing, do you hear? i'll pay the expenses." in a letter which samuel clemens wrote to orion's wife, immediately after this incident, he gives the details of the encounter with brown and speaks of captain klinefelter's approval.[ ] brown declared he would leave the boat at new orleans if sam clemens remained on it, and the captain told him to go, offering to let sam himself run the daylight watches back to st. louis, thus showing his faith in the young steersman. the "cub," however, had less confidence, and advised that brown be kept for the up trip, saying he would follow by the next boat. it was a decision that probably saved his life. that night, watching on the levee, henry joined him, when his own duties were finished, and the brothers made the round together. it may have been some memory of his dream that made samuel clemens say: "henry, in case of accident, whatever you do, don't lose your head--the passengers will do that. rush for the hurricane-deck and to the life-boat, and obey the mate's orders. when the boat is launched, help the women and children into it. don't get in yourself. the river is only a mile wide. you can swim ashore easily enough." it was good, manly advice, but a long grief lay behind it. [ ] in the mississippi book the author says that brown was about to strike henry with a lump of coal, but in the letter above mentioned the details are as here given. xv. the wreck of the "pennsylvania" the "a. t. lacy," that brought samuel clemens up the river, was two days behind the "pennsylvania." at greenville, mississippi, a voice from the landing shouted "the 'pennsylvania' is blown up just below memphis, at ship island. one hundred and fifty lives lost!" it proved a true report. at six o'clock that warm mid-june morning, while loading wood, sixty miles below memphis, four out of eight of the pennsylvania's boilers had suddenly exploded, with fearful results. henry clemens had been one of the victims. he had started to swim for the shore, only a few hundred yards away, but had turned back to assist in the rescue of others. what followed could not be clearly learned. he was terribly injured, and died on the fourth night after the catastrophe. his brother was with him by that time, and believed he recognized the exact fulfilment of his dream. the young pilot's grief was very great. in a letter home he spoke of the dying boy as "my darling, my pride, my glory, my all." his heavy sorrow, and the fact that with unsparing self-blame he held himself in a measure responsible for his brother's tragic death, saddened his early life. his early gaiety came back, but his face had taken on the serious, pathetic look which from that time it always wore in repose. less than twenty-three, he had suddenly the look of thirty, and while samuel clemens in spirit, temperament, and features never would become really old, neither would he ever look really young again. he returned to the river as steersman for george ealer, whom he loved, and in september of that year obtained a full license as mississippi river pilot from st. louis to new orleans. in eighteen months he had packed away in his head all those wearisome details and acquired that confidence that made him one of the elect. he knew every snag and bank and dead tree and depth in all those endless miles of shifting current, every cut-off and crossing. he could read the surface of the water by day, he could smell danger in the dark. to the writer of these chapters, horace bixby said: "in a year and a half from the time he came to the river, sam was not only a pilot, but a good one. sam was a fine pilot, and in a day when piloting on the mississippi required a great deal more brains and skill and application than it does now. there were no signal-lights along the shore in those days, and no search-lights on the vessels; everything was blind; and on a dark, misty night, in a river full of snags and shifting sandbars and changing shores, a pilot's judgment had to be founded on absolute certainty." bixby had returned from the missouri by the time his pupil's license was issued, and promptly took him as full partner on the "crescent city," and later on a fine new boat, the "new falls city." still later, they appear to have been together on a very large boat, the "city of memphis," and again on the "alonzo child." xvi. the pilot for samuel clemens these were happy days--the happiest, in some respects, he would ever know. he had plenty of money now. he could help his mother with a liberal hand, and could put away fully a hundred dollars a month for himself. he had few cares, and he loved the ease and romance and independence of his work as he would never quite love anything again. his popularity on the river was very great. his humorous stories and quaint speech made a crowd collect wherever he appeared. there were pilot-association rooms in st. louis and new orleans, and his appearance at one of these places was a signal for the members to gather. a friend of those days writes: "he was much given to spinning yarns so funny that his hearers were convulsed, and yet all the time his own face was perfectly sober. occasionally some of his droll yarns got into the papers. he may have written them himself." another old river-man remembers how, one day, at the association, they were talking of presence of mind in an accident, when pilot clemens said: "boys, i had great presence of mind once. it was at a fire. an old man leaned out of a four-story building, calling for help. everybody in the crowd below looked up, but nobody did anything. the ladders weren't long enough. nobody had any presence of mind--nobody but me. i came to the rescue. i yelled for a rope. when it came i threw the old man the end of it. he caught it, and i told him to tie it around his waist. he did so, and i pulled him down." this was a story that found its way into print, probably his own contribution. "sam was always scribbling when not at the wheel," said bixby, "but the best thing he ever did was the burlesque of old isaiah sellers. he didn't write it for print, but only for his own amusement and to show to a few of the boys. bart bowen, who was with him on the "edward j. gay" at the time, got hold of it, and gave it to one of the new orleans papers." the burlesque on captain sellers would be of little importance if it were not for its association with the origin, or, at least, with the originator, of what is probably the best known of literary names--the name mark twain. this strong, happy title--a river term indicating a depth of two fathoms on the sounding-line--was first used by the old pilot, isaiah sellers, who was a sort of "oldest inhabitant" of the river, with a passion for airing his ancient knowledge before the younger men. sellers used to send paragraphs to the papers, quaint and rather egotistical in tone, usually beginning, "my opinion for the citizens of new orleans," etc., prophesying river conditions and recalling memories as far back as . these he generally signed "mark twain." naturally, the younger pilots amused themselves by imitating sellers, and when sam clemens wrote abroad burlesque of the old man's contributions, relating a perfectly impossible trip, supposed to have been made in with a chinese captain and a choctaw crew, it was regarded as a masterpiece of wit. it appeared in the "true delta" in may, , and broke captain sellers's literary heart. he never wrote another paragraph. clemens always regretted the whole matter deeply, and his own revival of the name afterward was a sort of tribute to the old man he had thoughtlessly and unintentionally wounded. old pilots of that day remembered samuel clemens as a slender, fine-looking man, well dressed, even dandified, generally wearing blue serge, with fancy shirts, white duck trousers, and patent-leather shoes. a pilot could do that, for his surroundings were speckless. the pilots regarded him as a great reader--a student of history, travels, and the sciences. in the association rooms they often saw him poring over serious books. he began the study of french one day in new orleans, when he had passed a school of languages where french, german, and italian were taught, one in each of three rooms. the price was twenty-five dollars for one language, or three for fifty. the student was provided with a set of conversation cards for each, and was supposed to walk from one apartment to another, changing his nationality at each threshold. the young pilot, with his usual enthusiasm, invested in all three languages, but after a few round trips decided that french would do. he did not return to the school, but kept the cards and added text-books. he studied faithfully when off watch and in port, and his old river note-book, still preserved, contains a number of advanced exercises, neatly written out. still more interesting are the river notes themselves. they are not the timid, hesitating memoranda of the "little book" which, by bixby's advice, he bought for his first trip. they are quick, vigorous records that show confidence and knowledge. under the head of "second high-water trip--jan., 'alonzo child,'" the notes tell the story of a rising river, with overflowing banks, blind passages, and cut-offs--a new river, in fact, that must be judged by a perfect knowledge of the old--guessed, but guessed right. good deal of water all over cole's creek chute, or ft. bank--could have gone up above general taylor's--too much drift . . . . night--didn't run either or towheads-- -ft. bank on main shore ozark chute. to the reader to-day it means little enough, but one may imagine, perhaps, a mile-wide sweep of boiling water, full of drift, shifting currents with newly forming bars, and a lone figure in the dark pilot-house, peering into the night for blind and disappearing landmarks. but such nights were not all there was of piloting. there were glorious nights when the stars were blazing out, and the moon was on the water, and the young pilot could follow a clear channel and dream long dreams. he was very serious at such times--he reviewed the world's history he had read, he speculated on the future, he considered philosophies, he lost himself in a study of the stars. mark twain's love of astronomy, which never waned until his last day, began with those lonely river watches. once a great comet blazed in the sky, a "wonderful sheaf of light," and glorified his long hours at the wheel. samuel clemens was now twenty-five, full of health and strong in his courage. in the old notebook there remains a well-worn clipping, the words of some unknown writer, which he may have kept as a sort of creed: how to take life.--take it just as though it was--as it is--an earnest, vital, and important affair. take it as though you were born to the task of performing a merry part in it--as though the world had awaited for your coming. take it as though it was a grand opportunity to do and achieve, to carry forward great and good schemes to help and cheer a suffering, weary, it may be heartbroken, brother. now and then a man stands aside from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of some sort. the world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. the miracle, or the power that elevates the few, is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the promptings of a brave, determined spirit. bixby and clemens were together that winter on the "child," and were the closest friends. once the young pilot invited his mother to make the trip to new orleans, and the river journey and a long drive about the beautiful southern city filled jane clemens with wonder and delight. she no longer shad any doubts of sam. he had long since become the head of the family. she felt called upon to lecture him, now and then, but down in her heart she believed that he could really do no wrong. they joked each other unmercifully, and her wit, never at a loss, was quite as keen as his. xvii. the end of piloting when one remembers how much samuel clemens loved the river, and how perfectly he seemed suited to the ease and romance of the pilot-life, one is almost tempted to regret that it should so soon have come to an end. those trips of early ' , which the old note-book records, were the last he would ever make. the golden days of mississippi steam-boating were growing few. nobody, however, seemed to suspect it. even a celebrated fortune-teller in new orleans, whom the young pilot one day consulted as to his future, did not mention the great upheaval then close at hand. she told him quite remarkable things, and gave him some excellent advice, but though this was february, , she failed to make any mention of the civil war! yet, a month later, abraham lincoln was inaugurated and trouble was in the air. then in april fort sumter was fired upon and the war had come. it was a feverish time among the pilots. some were for the union--others would go with the confederacy. horace bixby stood for the north, and in time was chief of the union river-service. a pilot named montgomery (clemens had once steered for him) went with the south and by and by commanded the confederate mississippi fleet. in the beginning a good many were not clear as to their opinions. living both north and south, as they did, they divided their sympathies. samuel clemens was thoughtful, and far from bloodthirsty. a pilothouse, so fine and showy in times of peace, seemed a poor place to be in when fighting was going on. he would consider the matter. "i am not anxious to get up into a glass perch and be shot at by either side," he said. "i'll go home and reflect." he went up the river as a passenger on a steamer named the "uncle sam." zeb leavenworth, formerly of the "john j. roe," was one of the pilots, and clemens usually stood the watch with him. at memphis they barely escaped the blockade. at cairo they saw soldiers drilling--troops later commanded by grant. the "uncle sam" came steaming up to st. louis, glad to have slipped through safely. they were not quite through, however. abreast of jefferson barracks they heard the boom of a cannon, and a great ring of smoke drifted in their direction. they did not recognize it as a thunderous "halt!" and kept on. less than a minute later, a shell exploded directly in front of the pilot-house, breaking a lot of glass and damaging the decoration. zeb leavenworth tumbled into a corner. "gee-mighty, sam!" he said. "what do they mean by that?" clemens stepped from the visitors' bench to the wheel and brought the boat around. "i guess--they want us--to wait a minute--zeb," he said. they were examined and passed. it was the last steamboat to make the trip through from new orleans to st. louis. mark twain's pilot days were over. he would have grieved had he known this fact. "i loved the profession far better than any i have followed since," he long afterward declared, "and i took a measureless pride in it." at the time, like many others, he expected the war to be brief, and his life to be only temporarily interrupted. within a year, certainly, he would be back in the pilot-house. meantime the war must be settled; he would go up to hannibal to see about it. xviii. the soldier when he reached hannibal, samuel clemens found a very mixed condition of affairs. the country was in an uproar of war preparation; in a border state there was a confusion of sympathies, with much ignorance as to what it was all about. any number of young men were eager to enlist for a brief camping-out expedition, and small private companies were formed, composed about half-and-half of union and confederate men, as it turned out later. missouri, meantime, had allied herself with the south, and samuel clemens, on his arrival in hannibal, decided that, like lee, he would go with his state. old friends, who were getting up a company "to help governor `claib' jackson repel the invader," offered him a lieutenancy if he would join. it was not a big company; it had only about a dozen members, most of whom had been schoolmates, some of them fellow-pilots, and sam clemens was needed to make it complete. it was just another tom sawyer band, and they met in a secret place above bear creek hill and planned how they would sell their lives on the field of glory, just as years before fierce raids had been arranged on peach-orchards and melon-patches. secrecy was necessary, for the union militia had a habit of coming over from illinois and arresting suspicious armies on sight. it would humiliate the finest army in the world to spend a night or two in the calaboose. so they met secretly at night, and one mysterious evening they called on girls who either were their sweethearts or were pretending to be for the occasion, and when the time came for good-by the girls were invited to "walk through the pickets" with them, though the girls didn't notice any pickets, because the pickets were calling on their girls, too, and were a little late getting to their posts. that night they marched, through brush and vines, because the highroad was thought to be dangerous, and next morning arrived at the home of colonel ralls, of ralls county, who had the army form in dress parade and made it a speech and gave it a hot breakfast in good southern style. then he sent out to col. bill splawn and farmer nuck matson a requisition for supplies that would convert this body of infantry into cavalry --rough-riders of that early day. the community did not wish to keep an army on its hands, and were willing to send it along by such means as they could spare handily. when the outfitting was complete, lieutenant samuel clemens, mounted on a small yellow mule whose tail had been trimmed in the paint-brush pattern then much worn by mules, and surrounded by variously attached articles--such as an extra pair of cowhide boots, a pair of gray blankets, a home-made quilt, a frying-pan, a carpet-sack, a small valise, an overcoat, an old-fashioned kentucky rifle, twenty yards of rope, and an umbrella--was a fair sample of the brigade. an army like that, to enjoy itself, ought to go into camp; so it went over to salt river, near the town of florida, and took up headquarters in a big log stable. somebody suggested that an army ought to have its hair cut, so that in a hand-to-hand conflict the enemy could not get hold of it. there was a pair of sheep-shears in the stable, and private tom lyons acted as barber. they were not sharp shears, and a group of little darkies gathered from the farm to enjoy the torture. regular elections were now held--all officers, down to sergeants and orderlies, being officially chosen. there were only three privates, and you couldn't tell them from officers. the discipline in that army was very bad. it became worse soon. pouring rain set in. salt river rose and overflowed the bottoms. men ordered on picket duty climbed up into the stable-loft and went to bed. twice, on black, drenching nights, word came from the farmhouse that the enemy, commanded by a certain col. ulysses grant, was in the neighborhood, and the hannibal division went hastily slopping through mud and brush in the other direction, dragging wearily back when the alarm was over. military ardor was bound to cool under such treatment. then lieutenant clemens developed a very severe boil, and was obliged to lie most of the day on some hay in a horse-trough, where he spent his time denouncing the war and the mistaken souls who had invented it. when word that "general" tom harris, commander of the district--formerly telegraph-operator in hannibal--was at a near-by farm-house, living on the fat of the land, the army broke camp without further ceremony. halfway there they met general harris, who ordered them back to quarters. they called him familiarly "tom," and told him they were through with that camp forever. he begged them, but it was no use. a little farther on they stopped at a farm-house for supplies. a tall, bony woman came to the door. "you're secesh, ain't you?" lieutenant clemens said: "we are, madam, defenders of the noble cause, and we should like to buy a few provisions." the request seemed to inflame her. "provisions!" she screamed. "provisions for secesh, and my husband a colonel in the union army. you get out of here!" she reached for a hickory hoop-pole [ ] that stood by the door, and the army moved on. when they reached the home of col. bill splawn it was night and the family had gone to bed. so the hungry army camped in the barn-yard and crept into the hay-loft to sleep. presently somebody yelled "fire!" one of the boys had been smoking and had ignited the hay. lieutenant clemens, suddenly wakened, made a quick rotary movement away from the blaze, and rolled out of a big hay-window into the barn-yard below. the rest of the brigade seized the burning hay and pitched it out of the same window. the lieutenant had sprained his ankle when he struck, and his boil was still painful, but the burning hay cured him --for the moment. he made a spring from under it; then, noticing that the rest of the army, now that the fire was out, seemed to think his performance amusing, he rose up and expressed himself concerning the war, and military life, and the human race in general. they helped him in, then, for his ankle was swelling badly. in the morning, colonel splawn gave the army a good breakfast, and it moved on. lieutenant clemens, however, did not get farther than farmer nuck matson's. he was in a high fever by that time from his injured ankle, and mrs. matson put him to bed. so the army left him, and presently disbanded. some enlisted in the regular service, north or south, according to preference. properly officered and disciplined, that "tom sawyer" band would have made as good soldiers as any. lieutenant clemens did not enlist again. when he was able to walk, he went to visit orion in keokuk. orion was a union abolitionist, but there would be no unpleasantness on that account. samuel clemens was beginning to have leanings in that direction himself. [ ] in an earlier day, barrel hoops were made of small hickory trees, split and shaved. the hoop-pole was a very familiar article of commerce, and of household defense. xix. the pioneer he arrived in keokuk at what seemed a lucky moment. through edward bates, a member of lincoln's cabinet, orion clemens had received an appointment as territorial secretary of nevada, and only needed the money to carry him to the seat of his office at carson city. out of his pilot's salary his brother had saved more than enough for the journey, and was willing to pay both their fares and go along as private secretary to orion, whose position promised something in the way of adventure and a possible opportunity for making a fortune. the brothers went at once to st. louis for final leave-taking, and there took boat for "st. jo," missouri, terminus of the great overland stage route. they paid one hundred and fifty dollars each for their passage, and about the end of july, , set out on that long, delightful trip, behind sixteen galloping horses, never stopping except for meals or to change teams, heading steadily into the sunset over the billowy plains and snow-clad rockies, covering the seventeen hundred miles between st. jo and carson city in nineteen glorious days. but one must read mark twain's "roughing it" for the story of that long-ago trip--the joy and wonder of it, and the inspiration. "even at this day," he writes, "it thrills me through and through to think of the life, the gladness, and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my face on those fine overland mornings." it was a hot dusty, august day when they arrived, dusty, unshaven, and weather-beaten, and samuel clemens's life as a frontiersman began. carson city, the capital of nevada, was a wooden town with an assorted population of two thousand souls. the mining excitement was at its height and had brought together the drift of every race. the clemens brothers took up lodgings with a genial irishwoman, the mrs. o'flannigan of "roughing it," and orion established himself in a modest office, for there was no capitol building as yet, no government headquarters. orion could do all the work, and samuel clemens, finding neither duties nor salary attached to his position, gave himself up to the study of the life about him, and to the enjoyment of the freedom of the frontier. presently he had a following of friends who loved his quaint manner of speech and his yarns. on cool nights they would collect about orion's office-stove, and he would tell stories in the wonderful way that one day would delight the world. within a brief time sam clemens (he was always "sam" to the pioneers) was the most notable figure on the carson streets. his great, bushy head of auburn hair, has piercing, twinkling eyes, his loose, lounging walk, his careless disorder of dress invited a second look, even from strangers. from a river dandy he had become the roughest-clad of pioneers--rusty slouch hat, flannel shirt, coarse trousers slopping half in and half out of heavy cowhide boots, this was his make-up. energetic citizens did not prophesy success for him. often they saw him leaning against an awning support, staring drowsily at the motley human procession, for as much as an hour at a time. certainly that could not be profitable. but they did like to hear him talk. he did not catch the mining fever at once. he was interested first in the riches that he could see. among these was the timber-land around lake bigler (now tahoe)--splendid acres, to be had for the asking. the lake itself was beautifully situated. with an ohio boy, john kinney, he made an excursion afoot to tahoe, a trip described in one of the best chapters of "roughing it." they staked out a timber claim and pretended to fence it and to build a house, but their chief employment was loafing in the quiet luxury of the great woods or drifting in a boat on the transparent water. they did not sleep in the house. in "roughing it" he says: "it never occurred to us, for one thing; and, besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough. we did not wish to strain it." they made their camp-fires on the borders of the lake, and one evening it got away from them, fired the forest, and destroyed their fences and habitation. in a letter home he describes this fire in a fine, vivid way. at one place he says: "the level ranks of flame were relieved at intervals by the standard- bearers, as we called the tall dead trees, wrapped in fire, and waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air. then we could turn from the scene to the lake, and see every branch and leaf and cataract of flame upon its banks perfectly reflected, as in a gleaming, fiery mirror." he was acquiring the literary vision and touch. the description of this same fire in "roughing it," written ten years later, is scarcely more vivid. most of his letters home at this time tell of glowing prospects--the certainty of fortune ahead. the fever of the frontier is in them. once, to pamela moffett, he wrote: "orion and i have enough confidence in this country to think that, if the war lets us alone, we can make mr. moffett rich without its ever costing him a cent or a particle of trouble." from the same letter we gather that the brothers are now somewhat interested in mining claims: "we have about , feet of mining-ground, and, if it proves good, mr. moffett's name will go in; and if not, i can get 'feet' for him in the spring." this was written about the end of october. two months later, in midwinter, the mining fever came upon him with full force. xx. the miner the wonder is that samuel clemens, always speculative and visionary, had not fallen an earlier victim. everywhere one heard stories of sudden fortune--of men who had gone to bed paupers and awakened millionaires. new and fabulous finds were reported daily. cart-loads of bricks--silver and gold bricks--drove through the carson streets. then suddenly from the newly opened humboldt region came the wildest reports. the mountains there were said to be stuffed with gold. a correspondent of the "territorial enterprise" was unable to find words to picture the riches of the humboldt mines. the air for samuel clemens began to shimmer. fortune was waiting to be gathered in a basket. he joined the first expedition for humboldt--in fact, helped to organize it. in "roughing it" he says: "hurry was the word! we wasted no time. our party consisted of four persons--a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and myself. we bought a wagon and two miserable old horses. we put eighteen hundred pounds of provisions and mining-tools in the wagon and drove out of carson on a chilly december afternoon.." the two young lawyers were w. h. clagget, whom clemens had known in keokuk, and a. w. oliver, called oliphant in "roughing it." the blacksmith was named tillou (ballou in "roughing it"), a sturdy, honest man with a knowledge of mining and the repair of tools. there were also two dogs in the party--a curly-tailed mongrel and a young hound. the horses were the weak feature of the expedition. it was two hundred miles to humboldt, mostly across sand. the miners rode only a little way, then got out to lighten the load. later they pushed. then it began to snow, also to blow, and the air became filled with whirling clouds of snow and sand. on and on they pushed and groaned, sustained by the knowledge that they must arrive some time, when right away they would be millionaires and all their troubles would be over. the nights were better. the wind went down and they made a camp-fire in the shelter of the wagon, cooked their bacon, crept under blankets with the dogs to warm them, and sam clemens spun yarns till they fell asleep. there had been an indian war, and occasionally they passed the charred ruin of a cabin and new graves. by and by they came to that deadly waste known as the alkali desert, strewn with the carcasses of dead beasts and with the heavy articles discarded by emigrants in their eagerness to reach water. all day and night they pushed through that choking, waterless plain to reach camp on the other side. when they arrived at three in the morning, they dropped down exhausted. judge oliver, the last survivor of the party, in a letter to the writer of these chapters, said: "the sun was high in the heavens when we were aroused from our sleep by a yelling band of piute warriors. we were upon our feet in an instant. the picture of burning cabins and the lonely graves we had passed was in our minds. our scalps were still our own, and not dangling from the belts of our visitors. sam pulled himself together, put his hand on his head, as if to make sure he had not been scalped, and, with his inimitable drawl, said 'boys, they have left us our scalps. let us give them all the flour and sugar they ask for.' and we did give them a good supply, for we were grateful." the indians left them unharmed, and the prospective millionaires moved on. across that two hundred miles to the humboldt country they pushed, arriving at the little camp of unionville at the end of eleven weary days. in "roughing it" mark twain has told us of unionville and the mining experience there. their cabin was a three-sided affair with a cotton roof. stones rolled down the mountainside on them; also, the author says, a mule and a cow. the author could not gather fortune in a basket, as he had dreamed. masses of gold and silver were not lying about. he gathered a back-load of yellow, glittering specimens, but they proved worthless. gold in the rough did not glitter, and was not yellow. tillou instructed the others in prospecting, and they went to work with pick and shovel--then with drill and blasting-powder. the prospect of immediately becoming millionaires vanished. "one week of this satisfied me. i resigned," is mark twain's brief comment. the humboldt reports had been exaggerated. the clemens-clagget-oliver- tillou millionaire combination soon surrendered its claims. clemens and tillou set out for carson city with a prussian named pfersdorff, who nearly got them drowned and got them completely lost in the snow before they arrived there. oliver and clagget remained in unionville, began law practice, and were elected to office. it is not known what became of the wagon and horses and the two dogs. it was the end of january when our miner returned to carson. he was not discouraged--far from it. he believed he had learned something that would be useful to him in a camp where mines were a reality. within a few weeks from his return we find him at aurora, in the esmeralda region, on the edge of california. it was here that the clemens brothers owned the , feet formerly mentioned. he had came down to work it. it was the dead of winter, but he was full of enthusiasm, confident of a fortune by early summer. to pamela he wrote: "i expect to return to st. louis in july--per steamer. i don't say that i will return then, or that i shall be able to do it--but i expect to--you bet . . . . if nothing goes wrong, we'll strike the ledge in june." he was trying to be conservative, and further along he cautions his sister not to get excited. "don't you know i have only talked as yet, but proved nothing? don't you know i have never held in my hands a gold or silver bar that belonged to me? don't you know that people who always feel jolly, no matter where they are or what happens to them--who have the organ of hope preposterously developed--who are endowed with an uncongealable, sanguine temperament--who never feel concerned about the price of corn--and who cannot, by any possibility, discover any but the bright side of a picture--are very apt to go to extremes and exaggerate with a -horse microscopic power? "but--but-- in the bright lexicon of youth, there is no such word as fail, and i'll prove it." whereupon he soars again, adding page after page full of glowing expectations and plans such as belong only with speculation in treasures buried in the ground--a very difficult place, indeed, to find them. his money was about exhausted by this time, and funds to work the mining claims must come out of orion's rather modest salary. the brothers owned all claims in partnership, and it was now the part of "brother sam" to do the active work. he hated the hard picking and prying and blasting into the flinty ledges, but the fever drove him on. he camped with a young man named phillips at first, and, later on, with an experienced miner, calvin h. higbie, to whom "roughing it" would one day be dedicated. they lived in a tiny cabin with a cotton roof, and around their rusty stove they would paw over their specimens and figure the fortune that their mines would be worth in the spring. food ran low, money gave out almost entirely, but they did not give up. when it was stormy and they could not dig, and the ex-pilot was in a talkative vein, he would sit astride the bunk and distribute to his hearers riches more valuable than any they would dig from the esmeralda hills. at other times he did not talk at all, but sat in a corner and wrote. they thought he was writing home; they did not know that he was "literary." some of his home letters had found their way into a keokuk paper and had come back to orion, who had shown them to an assistant on the "territorial enterprise," of virginia city. the "enterprise" man had caused one of them to be reprinted, and this had encouraged its author to send something to the paper direct. he signed these contributions "josh," and one told of: "an old, old horse whose name was methusalem, took him down and sold him in jerusalem, a long time ago." he received no pay for these offerings and expected none. he considered them of no value. if any one had told him that he was knocking at the door of the house of fame, however feebly, he would have doubted that person's judgment or sincerity. his letters to orion, in carson city, were hasty compositions, reporting progress and progress, or calling for remittances to keep the work going. on april , he wrote: "work not begun on the horatio and derby--haven't seen it yet. it is still in the snow. shall begin on it within three or four weeks --strike the ledge in july." again, later in the month: "i have been at work all day, blasting and digging in one of our new claims, 'dashaway,' which i don't think a great deal of, but which i am willing to try. we are down now ten or twelve feet." it must have been disheartening work, picking away at the flinty ledges. there is no further mention of the "dashaway," but we hear of the "flyaway," the "annipolitan," the "live yankee," and of many another, each of which holds out a beacon of hope for a brief moment, then passes from notice forever. still, he was not discouraged. once he wrote: "i am a citizen here and i am satisfied, though 'ratio and i are 'strapped' and we haven't three days' rations in the house. i shall work the "monitor" and the other claims with my own hands. "the pick and shovel are the only claims i have confidence in now," he wrote, later; "my back is sore and my hands are blistered with handling them to-day." his letters began to take on a weary tone. once in midsummer he wrote that it was still snowing up there in the hills, and added, "it always snows here i expect. if we strike it rich, i've lost my guess, that's all." and the final heartsick line, "don't you suppose they have pretty much quit writing at home?" in time he went to work in a quartz-mill at ten dollars a week, though it was not entirely for the money, as in "roughing it" he would have us believe. samuel clemens learned thoroughly what he undertook, and he proposed to master the science of mining. from phillips and higbie he had learned what there was to know about prospecting. he went to the mill to learn refining, so that, when his claims developed, he could establish a mill and personally superintend the work. his stay was brief. he contracted a severe cold and came near getting poisoned by the chemicals. recovering, he went with higbie for an outing to mono lake, a ghastly, lifeless alkali sea among the hills, vividly described in "roughing it." at another time he went with higbie on a walking trip to the yosemite, where they camped and fished undisturbed, for in those days few human beings came to that far isolation. discouragement did not reach them there--amid that vast grandeur and quiet the quest for gold hardly seemed worth while. now and again that summer he went alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get entirely away from humankind. in "roughing it" mark twain tells the story of how he and higbie finally located a "blind lead," which made them really millionaires, until they forfeited their claim through the sharp practice of some rival miners and their own neglect. it is true that the "wide west" claim was forfeited in some such manner, but the size of the loss was magnified in "roughing it," to make a good story. there was never a fortune in "wide west," except the one sunk in it by its final owners. the story as told in "roughing it" is a tale of what might have happened, and ends the author's days in the mines with a good story-book touch. the mining career of samuel clemens really came to a close gradually, and with no showy climax. he fought hard and surrendered little by little, without owning, even to the end, that he was surrendering at all. it was the gift of resolution that all his life would make his defeats long and costly--his victories supreme. by the end of july the money situation in the aurora camp was getting desperate. orion's depleted salary would no longer pay for food, tools, and blasting-powder, and the miner began to cast about far means to earn an additional sum, however small. the "josh" letters to the "enterprise" had awakened interest as to their author, and orion had not failed to let "josh's" identity be known. the result had been that here and there a coast paper had invited contributions and even suggested payment. a letter written by the aurora miner at the end of july tells this part of the story: "my debts are greater than i thought for . . . . the fact is, i must have something to do, and that shortly, too . . . . now write to the "sacramento union" folks, or to marsh, and tell them that i will write as many letters a week as they want, for $ a week. my board must be paid. "tell them i have corresponded with the "new orleans crescent" and other papers--and the "enterprise." "if they want letters from here--who'll run from morning till night collecting material cheaper? i'll write a short letter twice a week, for the present, for the "age," for $ per week. now it has been a long time since i couldn't make my own living, and it shall be a long time before i loaf another year." this all led to nothing, but about the same time the "enterprise" assistant already mentioned spoke to joseph t. goodman, owner and editor of the paper, about adding "josh" to their regular staff. "joe" goodman, a man of keen humor and literary perception, agreed that the author of the "josh" letters might be useful to them. one of the sketches particularly appealed to him--a burlesque report of a fourth of july oration. "that is the kind of thing we want," he said. "write to him, barstow, and ask him if he wants to come up here." barstow wrote, offering twenty-five dollars a week--a tempting sum. this was at the end of july, . yet the hard-pressed miner made no haste to accept the offer. to leave aurora meant the surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure. he wrote barstow, asking when he thought he might be needed. and at the same time, in a letter to orion, he said: "i shall leave at midnight to-night, alone and on foot, for a walk of sixty or seventy miles through a totally uninhabited country. but do you write barstow that i have left here for a week or so, and, in case he should want me, he must write me here, or let me know through you." he had gone into the wilderness to fight out his battle alone, postponing the final moment of surrender--surrender that, had he known, only meant the beginning of victory. he was still undecided when he returned eight days later and wrote to his sister pamela a letter in which there is no mention of newspaper prospects. just how and when the end came at last cannot be known; but one hot, dusty august afternoon, in virginia city, a worn, travel-stained pilgrim dragged himself into the office of the "territorial enterprise," then in its new building on c street, and, loosening a heavy roll of blankets from his shoulder, dropped wearily into a chair. he wore a rusty slouch hat, no coat, a faded blue-flannel shirt, a navy revolver; his trousers were tucked into his boot-tops; a tangle of reddish-brown hair fell on his shoulders; a mass of tawny beard, dingy with alkali dust, dropped half-way to his waist. aurora lay one hundred and thirty miles from virginia city. he had walked that distance, carrying his heavy load. editor goodman was absent at the moment, but the other proprietor, dennis e. mccarthy, asked the caller to state his errand. the wanderer regarded him with a far-away look and said, absently, and with deliberation: "my starboard leg seems to be unshipped. i'd like about one hundred yards of line; i think i'm falling to pieces." then he added: "i want to see mr. barstow or mr. goodman. my name is clemens, and i've come to write for the paper." it was the master of the world's widest estate come to claim his kingdom! xxi. the territorial enterprise in virginia city, nevada, was the most flourishing of mining towns. a half-crazy miner, named comstock, had discovered there a vein of such richness that the "comstock lode" was presently glutting the mineral markets of the world. comstock himself got very little out of it, but those who followed him made millions. miners, speculators, adventurers swarmed in. every one seemed to have money. the streets seethed with an eager, affluent, boisterous throng whose chief business seemed to be to spend the wealth that the earth was yielding in such a mighty stream. business of every kind boomed. less than two years earlier, j. t. goodman, a miner who was also a printer and a man of literary taste, had joined with another printer, dennis mccarthy, and the two had managed to buy a struggling virginia city paper, the "territorial enterprise." but then came the hightide of fortune. a year later the "enterprise," from a starving sheet in a leaky shanty, had become a large, handsome paper in a new building, and of such brilliant editorial management that it was the most widely considered journal on the pacific coast. goodman was a fine, forceful writer, and he surrounded himself with able men. he was a young man, full of health and vigor, overflowing with the fresh spirit and humor of the west. comstockers would always laugh at a joke, and goodman was always willing to give it to them. the "enterprise" was a newspaper, but it was willing to furnish entertainment even at the cost of news. william wright, editorially next to goodman, was a humorist of ability. his articles, signed dan de quille, were widely copied. r. m. daggett (afterward united states minister to hawaii) was also an "enterprise" man, and there were others of their sort. samuel clemens fitted precisely into this group. he brought with him a new turn of thought and expression; he saw things with open eyes, and wrote of them in a fresh, wild way that comstockers loved. he was allowed full freedom. goodman suppressed nothing; his men could write as they chose. they were all young together--if they pleased themselves, they were pretty sure to please their readers. often they wrote of one another--squibs and burlesques, which gratified the comstock far more than mere news. it was just the school to produce mark twain. the new arrival found acquaintance easy. the whole "enterprise" force was like one family; proprietors, editor, and printers were social equals. samuel clemens immediately became "sam" to his associates, just as de quille was "dan," and goodman "joe." clemens was supposed to report city items, and did, in fact, do such work, which he found easy, for his pilot-memory made notes unnecessary. he could gather items all day, and at night put down the day's budget well enough, at least, to delight his readers. when he was tired of facts, he would write amusing paragraphs, as often as not something about dan, or a reporter on a rival paper. dan and the others would reply, and the comstock would laugh. those were good old days. sometimes he wrote hoaxes. once he told with great circumstance and detail of a petrified prehistoric man that had been found embedded in a rock in the desert, and how the coroner from humboldt had traveled more than a hundred miles to hold an inquest over a man dead for centuries, and had refused to allow miners to blast the discovery from its position. the sketch was really intended as a joke on the humboldt coroner, but it was so convincingly written that most of the coast papers took it seriously and reprinted it as the story of a genuine discovery. in time they awoke, and began to inquire as to who was the smart writer on the "enterprise." mark twain did a number of such things, some of which are famous on the coast to this day. clemens himself did not escape. lamps were used in the "enterprise" office, but he hated the care of a lamp, and worked evenings by the light of a candle. it was considered a great joke in the office to "hide sam's candle" and hear him fume and rage, walking in a circle meantime--a habit acquired in the pilothouse--and scathingly denouncing the culprits. eventually the office-boy, supposedly innocent, would bring another candle, and quiet would follow. once the office force, including de quille, mccarthy, and a printer named stephen gillis, of whom clemens was very fond, bought a large imitation meerschaum pipe, had a german-silver plate set on it, properly engraved, and presented it to samuel clemens as genuine, in testimony of their great esteem. his reply to the presentation speech was so fine and full of feeling that the jokers felt ashamed of their trick. a few days later, when he discovered the deception, he was ready to destroy the lot of them. then, in atonement, they gave him a real meerschaum. such things kept the comstock entertained. there was a side to samuel clemens that, in those days, few of his associates saw. this was the poetic, the reflective side. joseph goodman, like macfarlane in cincinnati several years earlier, recognized this phase of his character and developed it. often these two, dining or walking together, discussed the books and history they had read, quoted from poems that gave them pleasure. clemens sometimes recited with great power the "burial of moses," whose noble phrasing and majestic imagery seemed to move him deeply. with eyes half closed and chin lifted, a lighted cigar between his fingers, he would lose himself in the music of the stately lines: by nebo's lonely mountain, on this side jordan's wave, in a vale in the land of moab there lies a lonely grave. and no man knows that sepulcher, and no man saw it e'er, for the angels of god upturned the sod, and laid the dead man there. that his own writing would be influenced by the simple grandeur of this poem we can hardly doubt. indeed, it may have been to him a sort of literary touchstone, that in time would lead him to produce, as has been said, some of the purest english written by any modern author. xxii. "mark twain" it was once when goodman and clemens were dining together that the latter asked to be allowed to report the proceedings of the coming legislature at carson city. he knew nothing of such work, and goodman hesitated. then, remembering that clemens would, at least, make his reports readable, whether they were parliamentary or not, he consented. so, at the beginning of the year ( ), samuel clemens undertook a new and interesting course in the study of human nature--the political human nature of the frontier. there could have been no better school for him. his wit, his satire, his phrasing had full swing--his letters, almost from the beginning, were copied as choice reading up and down the coast. he made curious blunders, at first, as to the proceedings, but his open confession of ignorance in the early letters made these blunders their chief charm. a young man named gillespie, clerk of the house, coached him, and in return was christened "young jefferson's manual," a title which he bore for many years. a reporter named rice, on a rival virginia city paper, the "union," also earned for himself a title through those early letters. rice concluded to poke fun at the "enterprise" reports, pointing out their mistakes. but this was not wise. clemens, in his next contribution, admitted that rice's reports might be parliamentary enough, but declared his glittering technicalities were only to cover misstatements of fact. he vowed they were wholly untrustworthy, dubbed the author of them "the unreliable," and never thereafter referred to him by any other term. carson and the comstock papers delighted in this foolery, and rice became "the unreliable" for life. there was no real feeling between rice and clemens. they were always the best of friends. but now we arrive at the story of still another name, one of vastly greater importance than either of those mentioned, for it is the name chosen by samuel clemens for himself. in those days it was the fashion for a writer to have a pen-name, especially for his journalistic and humorous work. clemens felt that his "enterprise" letters, copied up and down the coast, needed a mark of identity. he gave the matter a good deal of thought. he wanted something brief and strong--something that would stick in the mind. it was just at this time that news came of the death of capt. isaiah sellers, the old pilot who had signed himself "mark twain." mark twain! that was the name he wanted. it was not trivial. it had all the desired qualities. captain sellers would never need it again. it would do no harm to keep it alive --to give it a new meaning in a new land. clemens took a trip from carson up to virginia city. "joe," he said to goodman, "i want to sign my articles. i want to be identified to a wider audience." "all right, sam. what name do you want to use josh?" "no, i want to sign them mark twain. it is an old river term, a leadsman's call, signifying two fathoms--twelve feet. it has a richness about it; it was always a pleasant sound for a pilot to hear on a dark night; it meant safe waters." he did not mention that captain sellers had used and dropped the name. he was not proud of his part in that episode, and it was too recent for confession. goodman considered a moment. "very well, sam," he said, "that sounds like a good name." a good name, indeed! probably, if he had considered every combination of words in the language, he could not have found a better one. to-day we recognize it as the greatest nom de plume ever chosen, and, somehow, we cannot believe that the writer of "tom sawyer" and "huck finn" and "roughing it" could have selected any other had he tried. the name mark twain was first signed to a carson letter, february , , and after that to all of samuel clemens's work. the letters that had amused so many readers had taken on a new interest--the interest that goes with a name. it became immediately more than a pen-name. clemens found he had attached a name to himself as well as to his letters. everybody began to address him as mark. within a few weeks he was no longer "sam" or "clemens," but mark--mark twain. the coast papers liked the sound of it. it began to mean something to their readers. by the end of that legislative session samuel clemens, as mark twain, had acquired out there on that breezy western slope something resembling fame. curiously, he fails to mention any of this success in his letters home of that period. indeed, he seldom refers to his work, but more often speaks of mining shares which he has accumulated, and their possible values. his letters are airy, full of the joy of life and of the wild doings of the frontier. closing one of them, he says: "i have just heard five pistolshots down the street. as such things are in my line, i will go and see about it." and in a postscript, later, he adds: " a.m.--the pistol-shots did their work well. one man, a jackson county missourian, shot two of my friends (police officers) through the heart--both died within three minutes. the murderer's name is john campbell." the comstock was a great school for mark twain, and in "roughing it" he has left us a faithful picture of its long-vanished glory. more than one national character came out of the comstock school. senator james g. fair was one of them, and john mackay, both miners with pick and shovel at first, though mackay presently became a superintendent. mark twain one day laughingly offered to trade jobs with mackay. "no," mackay said, "i can't trade. my business is not worth as much as yours. i have never swindled anybody, and i don't intend to begin now." for both these men the future held splendid gifts: for mackay vast wealth, for mark twain the world's applause, and neither would have long to wait. xxiii. artemus ward and literary san francisco it was about the end of that a new literary impulse came into mark twain's life. the gentle and lovable humorist artemus ward (charles f. browne) was that year lecturing in the west, and came to virginia city. ward had intended to stay only a few days, but the whirl of the comstock fascinated him. he made the "enterprise" office his headquarters and remained three weeks. he and mark twain became boon companions. their humor was not unlike; they were kindred spirits, together almost constantly. ward was then at the summit of his fame, and gave the younger man the highest encouragement, prophesying great things for ha work. clemens, on his side, was stirred, perhaps for the first time, with a real literary ambition, and the thought that he, too, might win a place of honor. he promised ward that he would send work to the eastern papers. on christmas eve, ward gave a dinner to the "enterprise" staff, at chaumond's, a fine french restaurant of that day. when refreshments came, artemus lifted his glass, and said: "i give you upper canada." the company rose and drank the toast in serious silence. then mr. goodman said: "of course, artemus, it's all right, but why did you give us upper canada?" "because i don't want it myself," said ward, gravely. what would one not give to have listened to the talk of that evening! mark twain's power had awakened; artemus ward was in his prime. they were giants of a race that became extinct when mark twain died. goodman remained rather quiet during the evening. ward had appointed him to order the dinner, and he had attended to this duty without mingling much in the conversation. when ward asked him why he did not join the banter, he said: "i am preparing a joke, artemus, but i am keeping it for the present." at a late hour ward finally called for the bill. it was two hundred and thirty-seven dollars. "what!" exclaimed artemus. "that's my joke," said goodman. "but i was only exclaiming because it was not twice as much," laughed ward, laying the money on the table. ward remained through the holidays, and later wrote back an affectionate letter to mark twain. "i shall always remember virginia as a bright spot in my existence," he said, "as all others must, or rather, cannot be, as it were." with artemus ward's encouragement, mark twain now began sending work eastward. the "new york sunday mercury" published one, possibly more, of his sketches, but they were not in his best vein, and made little impression. he may have been too busy for outside work, for the legislative session of was just beginning. furthermore, he had been chosen governor of the "third house," a mock legislature, organized for one session, to be held as a church benefit. the "governor" was to deliver a message, which meant that he was to burlesque from the platform all public officials and personages, from the real governor down. with the exception of a short talk he had once given at a printer's dinner in keokuk, it was mark twain's first appearance as a speaker, and the beginning of a lifelong series of triumphs on the platform. the building was packed--the aisles full. the audience was ready for fun, and he gave it to them. nobody escaped ridicule; from beginning to end the house was a storm of laughter and applause. not a word of this first address of mark twain's has been preserved, but those who heard it always spoke of it as the greatest effort of his life, as to them it seemed, no doubt. for his third house address, clemens was presented with a gold watch, inscribed "to governor mark twain." everywhere, now, he was pointed out as a distinguished figure, and his quaint remarks were quoted. few of these sayings are remembered to-day, though occasionally one is still unforgotten. at a party one night, being urged to make a conundrum, he said: "well, why am i like the pacific ocean?" several guesses were made, but he shook his head. some one said: "we give it up. tell us, mark, why are you like the pacific ocean?" "i--don't--know," he drawled. "i was just--asking for information." the governor of nevada was generally absent, and orion clemens was executive head of the territory. his wife, who had joined him in carson city, was social head of the little capital, and brother sam, with his new distinction and now once more something of a dandy in dress, was society's chief ornament--a great change, certainly, from the early months of his arrival less than three years before. it was near the end of may, , when mark twain left nevada for san francisco. the immediate cause of his going was a duel--a duel elaborately arranged between mark twain and the editor of a rival paper, but never fought. in fact, it was mainly a burlesque affair throughout, chiefly concocted by that inveterate joker, steve gillis, already mentioned in connection with the pipe incident. the new dueling law, however, did not distinguish between real and mock affrays, and the prospect of being served with a summons made a good excuse for clemens and gillis to go to san francisco, which had long attracted them. they were great friends, these two, and presently were living together and working on the same paper, the "morning call," clemens as a reporter and gillis as a compositor. gillis, with his tendency to mischief, was a constant exasperation to his room-mate, who, goaded by some new torture, would sometimes denounce him in feverish terms. yet they were never anything but the closest friends. mark twain did not find happiness in his new position on the "call." there was less freedom and more drudgery than he had known on the "enterprise." his day was spent around the police court, attending fires, weddings, and funerals, with brief glimpses of the theaters at night. once he wrote: "it was fearful drudgery--soulless drudgery--and almost destitute of interest. it was an awful slavery for a lazy man." it must have been so. there was little chance for original work. he had become just a part of a news machine. he saw many public abuses that he wished to expose, but the policy of the paper opposed him. once, however, he found a policeman asleep on his beat. going to a near-by vegetable stall, he borrowed a large cabbage-leaf, came back, and stood over the sleeper, gently fanning him. he knew the paper would not publish the policeman's negligence, but he could advertise it in his own way. a large crowd soon collected, much amused. when he thought the audience large enough, he went away. next day the joke was all over the city. he grew indifferent to the "call" work, and, when an assistant was allowed him to do part of the running for items, it was clear to everybody that presently the assistant would be able to do it all. but there was a pleasant and profitable side to the san francisco life. there were real literary people there--among them a young man, with rooms upstairs in the "call" office, francis bret harte, editor of the "californian," a new literary weekly which charles henry webb had recently founded. bret harte was not yet famous, but his gifts were recognized on the pacific slope, especially by the "era" group of writers, the "golden era" being a literary monthly of considerable distinction. joaquin miller recalls, from his diary of that period, having seen prentice mulford, bret harte, charles warren stoddard, mark twain, artemus ward, and others, all assembled there at one time--a remarkable group, certainly, to be dropped down behind the sierras so long ago. they were a hopeful, happy lot, and sometimes received five dollars for an article, which, of course, seemed a good deal more precious than a much larger sum earned in another way. mark twain had contributed to the "era" while still in virginia city, and now, with bret harte, was ranked as a leader of the group. the two were much together, and when harte became editor of the "californian" he engaged clemens as a regular contributor at the very fancy rate of twelve dollars an article. some of the brief chapters included to-day in "sketches new and old" were done at this time. they have humor, but are not equal to his later work, and beyond the pacific slope they seem to have attracted little attention. in "roughing it" the author tells us how he finally was dismissed from the "call" for general incompetency, and presently found himself in the depths of hard luck, debt, and poverty. but this is only his old habit of making a story on himself sound as uncomplimentary as possible. the true version is that the "call" publisher and mark twain had a friendly talk and decided that it was better for both to break off the connection. almost immediately he arranged to write a daily san francisco letter for the "enterprise," for which he received thirty dollars a week. this, with his earnings from the "californian," made his total return larger than before. very likely he was hard up from time to time--literary men are often that--but that he was ever in abject poverty, as he would have us believe, is just a good story and not history. xxiv. the discovery of "the jumping frog" mark twain's daily letters to the "enterprise" stirred up trouble for him in san francisco. he was free, now, to write what he chose, and he attacked the corrupt police management with such fierceness that, when copies of the "enterprise" got back to san francisco, they started a commotion at the city hall. then mark twain let himself go more vigorously than ever. he sent letters to the "enterprise" that made even the printers afraid. goodman, however, was fearless, and let them go in, word for word. the libel suit which the san francisco chief of police brought against the enterprise advertised the paper amazingly. but now came what at the time seemed an unfortunate circumstance. steve gillis, always a fearless defender of the weak, one night rushed to the assistance of two young fellows who had been set upon by three roughs. gillis, though small of stature, was a terrific combatant, and he presently put two of the assailants to flight and had the other ready for the hospital. next day it turned out that the roughs were henchmen of the police, and gillis was arrested. clemens went his bail, and advised steve to go down to virginia city until the storm blew over. but it did not blow over for mark twain. the police department was only too glad to have a chance at the author of the fierce "enterprise" letters, and promptly issued a summons for him, with an execution against his personal effects. if james n. gillis, brother of steve, had not happened along just then and spirited mark twain away to his mining-camp in the tuolumne hills, the beautiful gold watch given to the governor of the third house might have been sacrificed in the cause of friendship. as it was, he found himself presently in the far and peaceful seclusion of that land which bret harte would one day make famous with his tales of "roaring camp" and "sandy bar." jim gillis was, in fact, the truthful james of bret harte, and his cabin on jackass hill had been the retreat of harte and many another literary wayfarer who had wandered there for rest and refreshment and peace. it was said the sick were made well, and the well made better, in jim gillis's cabin. there were plenty of books and a variety of out-of-door recreation. one could mine there if he chose. jim would furnish the visiting author with a promising claim, and teach him to follow the little fan-like drift of gold specks to the pocket of treasure somewhere up the hillside. gillis himself had literary ability, though he never wrote. he told his stories, and with his back to the open fire would weave the most amazing tales, invented as he went along. his stories were generally wonderful adventures that had happened to his faithful companion, stoker; and stoker never denied them, but would smoke and look into the fire, smiling a little sometimes, but never saying a word. a number of the tales later used by mark twain were first told by jim gillis in the cabin on jackass hill. "dick baker's cat" was one of these, the jay-bird and acorn story in "a tramp abroad" was another. mark twain had little to add to these stories. "they are not mine, they are jim's," he said, once; "but i never could get them to sound like jim--they were never as good as his." it was early in december, , when mark twain arrived at the humble retreat, built of logs under a great live-oak tree, and surrounded by a stretch of blue-grass. a younger gillis boy was there at the time, and also, of course, dick stoker and his cat, tom quartz, which every reader of "roughing it" knows. it was the rainy season, but on pleasant days they all went pocket-mining, and, in january, mark twain, gillis, and stoker crossed over into calaveras county and began work near angel's camp, a place well known to readers of bret harte. they put up at a poor hotel in angel's, and on good days worked pretty faithfully. but it was generally raining, and the food was poor. in his note-book, still preserved, mark twain wrote: "january ( ). --same old diet--same old weather--went out to the pocket-claim--had to rush back." so they spent a good deal of their time around the rusty stove in the dilapidated tavern at angel's camp. it seemed a profitless thing to do, but few experiences were profitless to mark twain, and certainly this one was not. at this barren mining hotel there happened to be a former illinois river pilot named ben coon, a solemn, sleepy person, who dozed by the stove or told slow, pointless stories to any one who would listen. not many would stay to hear him, but jim gillis and mark twain found him a delight. they would let him wander on in his dull way for hours, and saw a vast humor in a man to whom all tales, however trivial or absurd, were serious history. at last, one dreary afternoon, he told them about a frog--a frog that had belonged to a man named coleman, who had trained it to jump, and how the trained frog had failed to win a wager because the owner of the rival frog had slyly loaded the trained jumper with shot. it was not a new story in the camps, but ben coon made a long tale of it, and it happened that neither clemens nor gillis had heard it before. they thought it amusing, and his solemn way of telling it still more so. "i don't see no p'ints about that frog that's better than any other frog," became a catch phrase among the mining partners; and, "i 'ain't got no frog, but if i had a frog, i'd bet you." out on the claim, clemens, watching gillis and stoker anxiously washing, would say, "i don't see no pints about that pan o' dirt that's any better than any other pan o' dirt." and so they kept the tale going. in his note-book mark twain made a brief memorandum of the story for possible use. the mining was rather hopeless work. the constant and heavy rains were disheartening. clemens hated it, and even when, one afternoon, traces of a pocket began to appear, he rebelled as the usual chill downpour set in. "jim," he said, "let's go home; we'll freeze here." gillis, as usual, was washing, and clemens carrying the water. gillis, seeing the gold "color" improving with every pan, wanted to go on washing and climbing toward the precious pocket, regardless of wet and cold. clemens, shivering and disgusted, vowed that each pail of water would be his last. his teeth were chattering, and he was wet through. finally he said: "jim, i won't carry any more water. this work too disagreeable." gillis had just taken out a panful of dirt. "bring one more pail, sam," he begged. "jim i won't do it. i'm-freezing." "just one more pail, sam!" jim pleaded. "no, sir; not a drop--not if i knew there was a million dollars in that pan." gillis tore out a page of his note-book and hastily posted a thirty-day-claim notice by the pan of dirt. then they set out for angel's camp, never to return. it kept on raining, and a letter came from steve gillis, saying he had settled all the trouble in san francisco. clemens decided to return, and the miners left angel's without visiting their claim again. meantime the rain had washed away the top of the pan of dirt they had left standing on the hillside, exposing a handful of nuggets, pure gold. two strangers, austrians, happening along, gathered it up and, seeing the claim notice posted by jim gillis, sat down to wait until it expired. they did not mind the rain--not under the circumstances--and the moment the thirty days were up they followed the lead a few pans farther and took out, some say ten, some say twenty, thousand dollars. in either case it was a good pocket that mark twain missed by one pail of water. still, without knowing it, he had carried away in his note-book a single nugget of far greater value the story of "the jumping frog." he did not write it, however, immediately upon his return to san francisco. he went back to his "enterprise" letters and contributed some sketches to the californian. perhaps he thought the frog story too mild in humor for the slope. by and by he wrote it, and by request sent it to artemus ward to be used in a book that ward was about to issue. it arrived too late, and the publisher handed it to the editor of the "saturday press," henry clapp, saying: "here, clapp, is something you can use in your paper." the "press" was struggling, and was glad to get a story so easily. "jim smiley and his jumping frog" appeared in the issue of november , , and was at once copied and quoted far and near. it carried the name of mark twain across the mountains and the prairies of the middle west; it bore it up and down the atlantic slope. some one said, then or later, that mark twain leaped into fame on the back of a jumping frog. curiously, this did not at first please the author. he thought the tale poor. to his mother he wrote: i do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful. i wish i was back there piloting up and down the river again. verily, all is vanity and little worth--save piloting. to think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those new york people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!--"jim smiley and his jumping frog"--a squib which would never have been written but to please artemus ward. however, somewhat later he changed his mind considerably, especially when he heard that james russell lowell had pronounced the story the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in america. xxv. hawaii and anson burlingame mark twain remained about a year in san francisco after his return from the gillis cabin and angel's camp, adding to his prestige along the coast rather than to his national reputation. then, in the spring of he was commissioned by the "sacramento union" to write a series of letters that would report the life, trade, agriculture, and general aspects of the hawaiian group. he sailed in march, and his four months in those delectable islands remained always to him a golden memory--an experience which he hoped some day to repeat. he was young and eager for adventure then, and he went everywhere--horseback and afoot--saw everything, did everything, and wrote of it all for his paper. his letters to the "union" were widely read and quoted, and, though not especially literary, added much to his journalistic standing. he was a great sight-seer in those days, and a persevering one. no discomfort or risk discouraged him. once, with a single daring companion, he crossed the burning floor of the mighty crater of kilauea, racing across the burning lava, leaping wide and bottomless crevices where a misstep would have meant death. his open-air life on the river and in the mining-camps had nerved and hardened him for adventure. he was thirty years old and in his physical prime. his mental growth had been slower, but it was sure, and it would seem always to have had the right guidance at the right time. clemens had been in the islands three months when one day anson burlingame arrived there, en route to his post as minister to china. with him was his son edward, a boy of eighteen, and general van valkenburg, minister to japan. young burlingame had read about jim smiley's jumping frog and, learning that the author was in honolulu, but ill after a long trip inland, sent word that the party would call on him next morning. but mark twain felt that he could not accept this honor, and, crawling out of bed, shaved himself and drove to the home of the american minister, where the party was staying. he made a great impression with the diplomats. it was an occasion of good stories and much laughter. on leaving, general van valkenburg said to him: "california is proud of mark twain, and some day the american people will be, too, no doubt." which was certainly a good prophecy. it was only a few days later that the diplomats rendered him a great service. report had come of the arrival at sanpahoe of an open boat containing fifteen starving men, who had been buffeting a stormy sea for forty-three days--sailors from the missing ship hornet of new york, which, it appeared, had been burned at sea. presently eleven of the rescued men were brought to honolulu and placed in the hospital. mark twain recognized the great importance as news of this event. it would be a splendid beat if he could interview the castaways and be the first to get their story in his paper. there was no cable, but a vessel was sailing for san francisco next morning. it seemed the opportunity of a lifetime, but he was now bedridden and could scarcely move. then suddenly appeared in his room anson burlingame and his party, and, almost before mark twain realized what was happening, he was on a cot and, escorted by the heads of two legations, was on his way to the hospital to get the precious interview. once there, anson burlingame, with his gentle manner and courtly presence, drew from those enfeebled castaways all the story of the burning of the vessel, followed by the long privation and struggle that had lasted through forty-three fearful days and across four thousand miles of stormy sea. all that mark twain had to do was to listen and make notes. that night he wrote against time, and next morning, just as the vessel was drifting from the dock, a strong hand flung his bulky manuscript aboard and his great beat was sure. the three-column story, published in the "sacramento union" of july , gave the public the first detailed history of the great disaster. the telegraph carried it everywhere, and it was featured as a sensation. mark twain and the burlingame party were much together during the rest of their stay in hawaii, and samuel clemens never ceased to love and honor the memory of anson burlingame. it was proper that he should do so, for he owed him much--far more than has already been told. anson burlingame one day said to him: "you have great ability; i believe you have genius. what you need now is the refinement of association. seek companionship among men of superior intellect and character. refine yourself and your work. never affiliate with inferiors; always climb." this, coming to him from a man of burlingame's character and position, was like a gospel from some divine source. clemens never forgot the advice. it gave him courage, new hope, new resolve, new ideals. burlingame came often to the hotel, and they discussed plans for mark twain's future. the diplomat invited the journalist to visit him in china: "come to pekin," he said, "and make my house your home." young burlingame also came, when the patient became convalescent, and suggested walks. once, when clemens hesitated, the young man said: "but there is a scriptural command for you to go." "if you can quote one, i'll obey," said clemens. "very well; the bible says: `if any man require thee to walk a mile, go with him twain.'" the walk was taken. mark twain returned to california at the end of july, and went down to sacramento. it was agreed that a special bill should be made for the "hornet" report. "how much do you think it ought to be, mark?" asked one of the proprietors. clemens said: "oh, i'm a modest man; i don't want the whole 'union' office; call it a hundred dollars a column." there was a general laugh. the bill was made out at that figure, and he took it to the office for payment. "the cashier didn't faint," he wrote many years later, "but he came rather near it. he sent for the proprietors, and they only laughed in their jolly fashion, and said it was robbery, but `no matter, pay it. it's all right.' the best men that ever owned a paper." [ ] [ ] "my debut as a literary person." xxvi. mark twain, lecturer in spite of the success of his sandwich island letters, samuel clemens felt, on his return to san francisco, that his future was not bright. he was not a good, all-round newspaper man--he was special correspondent and sketch-writer, out of a job. he had a number of plans, but they did not promise much. one idea was to make a book from his hawaiian material. another was to write magazine articles, beginning with one on the hornet disaster. he did, in fact, write the hornet article, and its prompt acceptance by "harper's magazine" delighted him, for it seemed a start in the right direction. a third plan was to lecture on the islands. this prospect frightened him. he had succeeded in his "third house" address of two years before, but then he had lectured without charge and for a church benefit. this would be a different matter. one of the proprietors of a san francisco paper, col. john mccomb, of the "alta california," was strong in his approval of the lecture idea. "do it, by all means," he said. "take the largest house in the city, and charge a dollar a ticket." without waiting until his fright came back, mark twain hurried to the manager of the academy of music, and engaged it for a lecture to be given october d ( ), and sat down and wrote his announcement. he began by stating what he would speak upon, and ended with a few absurdities, such as: a splendid orchestra is in town, but has not been engaged. also a den of ferocious wild beasts will be on exhibition in the next block. a grand torchlight procession may be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever they please. doors open at o'clock. the trouble to begin at o'clock. mark twain was well known in san francisco, and was pretty sure to have a good house. but he did not realize this, and, as the evening approached, his dread of failure increased. arriving at the theater, he entered by the stage door, half expecting to find the place empty. then, suddenly, he became more frightened than ever; peering from the wings, he saw that the house was jammed--packed from the footlights to the walls! terrified, his knees shaking, his tongue dry, he managed to emerge, and was greeted with a roar, a crash of applause that nearly finished him. only for an instant--reaction followed; these people were his friends, and he was talking to them. he forgot to be afraid, and, as the applause came in great billows that rose ever higher, he felt himself borne with it as on a tide of happiness and success. his evening, from beginning to end, was a complete triumph. friends declared that for descriptive eloquence, humor, and real entertainment nothing like his address had ever been delivered. the morning papers were enthusiastic. mark twain no longer hesitated as to what he should do now. he would lecture. the book idea no longer attracted him; the appearance of the "hornet" article, signed, through a printer's error, "mark swain," cooled his desire to be a magazine contributor. no matter--lecturing was the thing. dennis mccarthy, who had sold his interest in the "enterprise," was in san francisco. clemens engaged this honest, happy-hearted irishman as manager, and the two toured california and nevada with continuous success. those who remember mark twain as a lecturer in that early day say that on entering he would lounge loosely across the platform, his manuscript --written on wrapping-paper and carried under his arm--looking like a ruffled hen. his delivery they recall as being even more quaint and drawling than in later life. once, when his lecture was over, an old man came up to him and said: "be them your natural tones of eloquence?" in those days it was thought proper that a lecturer should be introduced, and clemens himself used to tell of being presented by an old miner, who said: "ladies and gentlemen, i know only two things about this man: the first is that he's never been in jail, and the second is, i don't know why." when he reached virginia, his old friend goodman said, "sam, you don't need anybody to introduce you," and he suggested a novel plan. that night, when the curtain rose, it showed mark twain seated at a piano, playing and singing, as if still cub pilot on the "john j. roe:" "had an old horse whose name was methusalem, took him down and sold him in jerusalem, a long time ago." pretending to be surprised and startled at the burst of applause, he sprang up and began to talk. how the audience enjoyed it! mark twain continued his lecture tour into december, and then, on the th of that month, sailed by way of the isthmus of panama for new york. he had made some money, and was going home to see his people. he had planned to make a trip around the world later, contributing a series of letters to the "alta california," lecturing where opportunity afforded. he had been on the coast five and a half years, and to his professions of printing and piloting had added three others--mining, journalism, and lecturing. also, he had acquired a measure of fame. he could come back to his people with a good account of his absence and a good heart for the future. but it seems now only a chance that he arrived at all. crossing the isthmus, he embarked for new york on what proved to be a cholera ship. for a time there were one or more funerals daily. an entry in his diary says: "since the last two hours all laughter, all levity, has ceased on the ship--a settled gloom is upon the faces of the passengers. "but the winter air of the north checked the contagion, and there were no new cases when new york city was reached." clemens remained but a short time in new york, and was presently in st. louis with his mother and sister. they thought he looked old, but he had not changed in manner, and the gay banter between mother and son was soon as lively as ever. he was thirty-one now, and she sixty-four, but the years had made little difference. she petted him, joked with him, and scolded him. in turn, he petted and comforted and teased her. she decided he was the same sam and always would be--a true prophecy. he visited hannibal and lectured there, receiving an ovation that would have satisfied even tom sawyer. in keokuk he lectured again, then returned to st. louis to plan his trip around the world. he was not to make a trip around the world, however--not then. in st. louis he saw the notice of the great "quaker city" holy land excursion --the first excursion of the kind ever planned--and was greatly taken with the idea. impulsive as always, he wrote at once to the "alta california," proposing that they send him as their correspondent on this grand ocean picnic. the cost of passage was $ . , and the "alta" hesitated, but colonel mccomb, already mentioned, assured his associates that the investment would be sound. the "alta" wrote, accepting mark twain's proposal, and agreed to pay twenty dollars each for letters. clemens hurried to new york to secure a berth, fearing the passenger-list might be full. furthermore, with no one of distinction to vouch for him, according to advertised requirements, he was not sure of being accepted. arriving in new york, he learned from an "alta" representative that passage had already been reserved for him, but he still doubted his acceptance as one of the distinguished advertised company. his mind was presently relieved on this point. waiting his turn at the booking-desk, he heard a newspaper man inquire: "what notables are going?" a clerk, with evident pride, rattled off the names: "lieutenant-general sherman, henry ward beecher, and mark twain; also, probably, general banks." it was very pleasant to hear the clerk say that. not only was he accepted, but billed as an attraction. the "quaker city" would not sail for two months yet, and during the period of waiting mark twain was far from idle. he wrote new york letters to the "alta," and he embarked in two rather important ventures --he published his first book and he delivered a lecture in new york city. both these undertakings were planned and carried out by friends from the coast. charles henry webb, who had given up his magazine to come east, had collected "the celebrated jumping frog of calaveras county, and other sketches," and, after trying in vain to find a publisher for them, brought them out himself, on the st of may, .[ ] it seems curious now that any publisher should have declined the little volume, for the sketches, especially the frog story, had been successful, and there was little enough good american humor in print. however, publishing was a matter not lightly undertaken in those days. mark twain seems to have been rather pleased with the appearance of his first book. to bret harte he wrote: the book is out and is handsome. it is full of . . . errors....but be a friend and say nothing about those things. when my hurry is over, i will send you a copy to pizen the children with. the little cloth-and-gold volume, so valued by book-collectors to-day, contained the frog story and twenty-six other sketches, some of which are still preserved in mark twain's collected works. most of them were not mark twain's best literature, but they were fresh and readable and suited the taste of that period. the book sold very well, and, while it did not bring either great fame or fortune to its author, it was by no means a failure. the "hurry" mentioned in mark twain's letter to bret harte related to his second venture--that is to say, his new york lecture, an enterprise managed by an old comstock friend, frank fuller, ex-governor of utah. fuller, always a sanguine and energetic person, had proposed the lecture idea as soon as mark twain arrived in new york. clemens shook his head. "i have no reputation with the general public here," he said. "we couldn't get a baker's dozen to hear me." but fuller insisted, and eventually engaged the largest hall in new york, the cooper union. full of enthusiasm and excitement, he plunged into the business of announcing and advertising his attraction, and inventing schemes for the sale of seats. clemens caught fuller's enthusiasm by spells, but between times he was deeply depressed. fuller had got up a lot of tiny hand-bills, and had arranged to hang bunches of these in the horse-cars. the little dangling clusters fascinated clemens, and he rode about to see if anybody else noticed them. finally, after a long time, a passenger pulled off one of the bills and glanced at it. a man with him asked: "who's mark twain?" "goodness knows! i don't." the lecturer could not ride any farther. he hunted up his patron. "fuller," he groaned, "there isn't a sign--a ripple of interest." fuller assured him that things were "working underneath," and would be all right. but clemens wrote home: "everything looks shady, at least, if not dark." and he added that, after hiring the largest house in new york, he must play against schuyler colfax, ristori, and a double troupe of japanese jugglers, at other places of amusement. when the evening of the lecture approached and only a few tickets had been sold, the lecturer was desperate. "fuller," he said, "there'll be nobody in cooper union that night but you and me. i am on the verge of suicide. i would commit suicide if i had the pluck and the outfit. you must paper the house, fuller. you must send out a flood of complimentaries!" "very well," said fuller. "what we want this time is reputation, anyway --money is secondary. i'll put you before the choicest and most intelligent audience that was ever gathered in new york city." fuller immediately sent out complimentary tickets to the school-teachers of new york and brooklyn---a general invitation to come and hear mark twain's great lecture on the sandwich islands. there was nothing to do after that but wait results. mark twain had lost faith--he did not believe anybody in new york would come to hear him even on a free ticket. when the night arrived, he drove with fuller to the cooper union half an hour before the lecture was to begin. forty years later he said: "i couldn't keep away. i wanted to see that vast mammoth cave, and die. but when we got near the building, i saw all the streets were blocked with people and that traffic had stopped. i couldn't believe that these people were trying to get to the cooper institute--but they were; and when i got to the stage, at last, the house was jammed full--packed; there wasn't room enough left for a child. "i was happy and i was excited beyond expression. i poured the sandwich islands out on those people, and they laughed and shouted to my entire content. for an hour and fifteen minutes i was in paradise." so in its way this venture was a success. it brought mark twain a good deal of a reputation in new york, even if no financial profit, though, in spite of the flood of complimentaries, there was a cash return of something like three hundred dollars. this went a good way toward paying the expenses, while fuller, in his royal way, insisted on making up the deficit, declaring he had been paid for everything in the fun and joy of the game. "mark," he said, "it's all right. the fortune didn't come, but it will. the fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book just out, you are going to be the most-talked-of man in the country. your letters to the 'alta' and the 'tribune' will get the widest reception of any letters of travel ever written." xxvii. an innocent abroad, and home again it was early in may--the th--that mark twain had delivered his cooper union lecture, and a month later, june , , he sailed on the "quaker city," with some sixty-six other "pilgrims," on the great holy land excursion, the story of which has been so fully and faithfully told in "the innocent abroad." what a wonderful thing it must have seemed in that time for a party of excursionists to have a ship all to themselves to go a-gipsying in from port to port of antiquity and romance! the advertised celebrities did not go, none of them but mark twain, but no one minded, presently, for mark twain's sayings and stories kept the company sufficiently entertained, and sometimes he would read aloud to his fellow-passengers from the newspaper letters he was writing, and invite comment and criticism. that was entertainment for them, and it was good for him, for it gave him an immediate audience, always inspiring to an author. furthermore, the comments offered were often of the greatest value, especially suggestions from one mrs. fairbanks, of cleveland, a middle-aged, cultured woman, herself a correspondent for her husband's paper, the "herald". it requires not many days for acquaintances to form on shipboard, and in due time a little group gathered regularly each afternoon to hear mark twain read what he had written of their day's doings, though some of it he destroyed later because mrs. fairbanks thought it not his best. all of the "pilgrims" mentioned in "the innocents abroad" were real persons. "dan" was dan slote, mark twain's room-mate; the doctor who confused the guides was dr. a. reeves jackson, of chicago; the poet lariat was bloodgood h. cutter, an eccentric from long island; "jack" was jack van nostrand, of new jersey; and "moult" and "blucher" and "charlie" were likewise real, the last named being charles j. langdon, of elmira, n. y., a boy of eighteen, whose sister would one day become mark twain's wife. it has been said that mark twain first met olivia langdon on the "quaker city," but this is not quite true; he met only her picture--the original was not on that ship. charlie langdon, boy fashion, made a sort of hero of the brilliant man called mark twain, and one day in the bay of smyrna invited him to his cabin and exhibited his treasures, among them a dainty miniature of a sister at home, olivia, a sweet, delicate creature whom the boy worshiped. samuel clemens gazed long at the exquisite portrait and spoke of it reverently, for in the sweet face he seemed to find something spiritual. often after that he came to young langdon's cabin to look at the pictured countenance, in his heart dreaming of a day when he might learn to know its owner. we need not follow in detail here the travels of the "pilgrims" and their adventures. most of them have been fully set down in "the innocents abroad," and with not much elaboration, for plenty of amusing things were happening on a trip of that kind, and mark twain's old note-books are full of the real incidents that we find changed but little in the book. if the adventures of jack, dan, and the doctor are embroidered here and there, the truth is always there, too. yet the old note-books have a very intimate interest of their own. it is curious to be looking through them to-day, trying to realize that those penciled memoranda were the fresh first impressions that would presently grow into the world's most delightful book of travel; that they were set down in the very midst of that historic little company that frolicked through italy and climbed wearily the arid syrian hills. it required five months for the "quaker city" to make the circuit of the mediterranean and return to new york. mark twain in that time contributed fifty two or three letters to the "alta california" and six to the "new york tribune," or an average of nearly three a week--a vast amount of labor to be done in the midst of sight-seeing. and what letters of travel they were! the most remarkable that had been written up to that time. vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry, they came as a revelation to a public weary of the tiresome descriptive drivel of that day. they preached a new gospel in travel literature--the gospel of seeing honestly and speaking frankly--a gospel that mark twain would continue to preach during the rest of his career. furthermore, the letters showed a great literary growth in their author. no doubt the cultivated associations of the ship, the afternoon reading aloud of his work, and mrs. fairbanks's advice had much to do with this. but we may believe, also, that the author's close study of the king james version of the old testament during the weeks of travel through palestine exerted a powerful influence upon his style. the man who had recited "the burial of moses" to joe goodman, with so much feeling, could not fail to be mastered by the simple yet stately bible phrase and imagery. many of the fine descriptive passages in "the innocents abroad" have something almost biblical in their phrasing. the writer of this memoir heard in childhood "the innocents abroad" read aloud, and has never forgotten the poetic spell that fell upon him as he listened to a paragraph written of tangier: "here is a crumbled wall that was old when columbus discovered america; old when peter the hermit roused the knightly men of the middle ages to arm for the first crusade; old when charlemagne and his paladins beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the fabled days of the olden time; old when christ and his disciples walked the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of memnon were vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient thebes." mark twain returned to america to find himself, if not famous, at least in very high repute. the "alta" and "tribune" letters had carried his name to every corner of his native land. he was in demand now. to his mother he wrote: "i have eighteen offers to lecture, at $ each, in various parts of the union--have declined them all . . . . belong on the "tribune" staff and shall write occasionally. am offered the same berth to-day on the 'herald,' by letter." he was in washington at this time, having remained in new york but one day. he had accepted a secretaryship from senator stewart of nevada, but this arrangement was a brief one. he required fuller freedom for his washington correspondence and general literary undertakings. he had been in washington but a few days when he received a letter that meant more to him than he could possibly have dreamed at the moment. it was from elisha bliss, jr., manager of the american publishing company, of hartford, connecticut, and it suggested gathering the mediterranean travel-letters into a book. bliss was a capable, energetic man, with a taste for humor, and believed there was money for author and publisher in the travel-book. the proposition pleased mark twain, who replied at once, asking for further details as to bliss's plan. somewhat later he made a trip to hartford, and the terms for the publication of "the innocents abroad" were agreed upon. it was to be a large illustrated book for subscription sale, and the author was to receive five per cent of the selling price. bliss had offered him the choice between this royalty and ten thousand dollars cash. though much tempted by the large sum to be paid in hand, mark twain decided in favor of the royalty plan--"the best business judgment i ever displayed," he used to say afterward. he agreed to arrange the letters for book publication, revising and rewriting where necessary, and went back to washington well pleased. he did not realize that his agreement with bliss marked the beginning of one of the most notable publishing connections in american literary history. xxviii. olivia langdon. work on the "innocents" certainly this was a momentous period in mark twain's life. it was a time of great events, and among them was one which presently would come to mean more to him than all the rest--the beginning of his acquaintance with olivia langdon. one evening in late december when samuel clemens had come to new york to visit his old "quaker city" room-mate, dan slote, he found there other ship comrades, including jack van nostrand and charlie langdon. it was a joyful occasion, but one still happier followed it. young langdon's father and sister olivia were in new york, and an evening or two later the boy invited his distinguished "quaker city" shipmate to dine with them at the old st. nicholas hotel. we may believe that samuel clemens went willingly enough. he had never forgotten the september day in the bay of smyrna when he had first seen the sweet-faced miniature--now, at last he looked upon the reality. long afterward he said: "it was forty years ago. from that day to this she has never been out of my mind." charles dickens gave a reading that night at steinway hall. the langdons attended, and samuel clemens with them. he recalled long after that dickens wore a black velvet coat with a fiery-red flower in his buttonhole, and that he read the storm scene from "david copperfield" --the death of james steerforth; but he remembered still more clearly the face and dress and the slender, girlish figure of olivia langdon at his side. olivia langdon was twenty-two years old at this time, delicate as the miniature he had seen, though no longer in the fragile health of her girlhood. gentle, winning, lovable, she was the family idol, and samuel clemens was no less her worshiper from the first moment of their meeting. miss langdon, on her part, was at first rather dazed by the strange, brilliant, handsome man, so unlike anything she had known before. when he had gone, she had the feeling that something like a great meteor had crossed her sky. to her brother, who was eager for her good opinion of his celebrity, she admitted her admiration, if not her entire approval. her father had no doubts. with a keen sense of humor and a deep knowledge of men, jervis langdon was from that first evening the devoted champion of mark twain. clemens saw miss langdon again during the holidays, and by the week's end he had planned to visit elmira--soon. but fate managed differently. he was not to see elmira for the better part of a year. he returned to his work in washington--the preparation of the book and his newspaper correspondence. it was in connection with the latter that he first met general grant, then not yet president. the incident, characteristic of both men, is worth remembering. mark twain had called by permission, elated with the prospect of an interview. but when he looked into the square, smileless face of the soldier he found himself, for the first time in his life, without anything particular to say. grant nodded slightly and waited. his caller wished something would happen. it did. his inspiration returned. "general," he said, "i seem to be slightly embarrassed. are you?" grant's severity broke up in laughter. there were no further difficulties. work on the book did not go so well. there were many distractions in washington, and clemens did not like the climate there. then he found the "alta" had copyrighted his letters and were reluctant to allow him to use them. he decided to sail at once for san francisco. if he could arrange the "alta" matter, he would finish his work there. he did, in fact, carry out this plan, and all difficulties vanished on his arrival. his old friend colonel mccomb obtained for him free use of the "alta" letters. the way was now clear for his book. his immediate need of funds, however, induced him to lecture. in may he wrote bliss: "i lectured here on the trip (the quaker city excursion) the other night; $ , in gold in the house; every seat taken and paid for before night." he settled down to work now with his usual energy, editing and rewriting, and in two months had the big manuscript ready for delivery. mark twain's friends urged him to delay his return to "the states" long enough to make a lecture tour through california and nevada. he must give his new lecture, they told him, to his old friends. he agreed, and was received at virginia city, carson, and elsewhere like a returning conqueror. he lectured again in san francisco just before sailing. the announcement of his lecture was highly original. it was a hand-bill supposed to have been issued by the foremost citizens of san francisco, a mock protest against his lecture, urging him to return to new york without inflicting himself on them again. on the same bill was printed his reply. in it he said: "i will torment the people if i want to. it only costs them $ apiece, and, if they can't stand it, what do they stay here for?" he promised positively to sail on july th if they would let him talk just this once. there was a good deal more of this drollery on the bill, which ended with the announcement that he would appear at the mercantile library on july d. it is unnecessary to say that the place was jammed on that evening. it was probably the greatest lecture event san francisco has ever known. four days later, july , , mark twain sailed, via aspinwall, for new york, and on the th delivered the manuscript of "the innocents abroad, or the new pilgrim's progress," to his hartford publisher. xxix the visit to elmira and its consequences samuel clemens now decided to pay his long-deferred visit to the langdon home in elmira. through charlie langdon he got the invitation renewed, and for a glorious week enjoyed the generous hospitality of the beautiful langdon home and the society of fair olivia langdon--livy, as they called her--realizing more and more that for him there could never be any other woman in the world. he spoke no word of this to her, but on the morning of the day when his visit would end he relieved himself to charlie langdon, much to the young man's alarm. greatly as he admired mark twain himself, he did not think him, or, indeed, any man, good enough for "livy," whom he considered little short of a saint. clemens was to take a train that evening, but young langdon said, when he recovered: "look here, clemens, there's a train in half an hour. i'll help you catch it. don't wait until tonight; go now!" mark twain shook his head. "no, charlie," he said, in his gentle drawl. "i want to enjoy your hospitality a little longer. i promise to be circumspect, and i'll go to-night." that night after dinner, when it was time to take the train, a light two-seated wagon was at the gate. young langdon and his guest took the back seat, which, for some reason, had not been locked in its place. the horse started with a quick forward spring, and the seat with its two occupants described a circle and landed with force on the cobbled street. neither passenger was seriously hurt--only dazed a little for the moment. but to mark twain there came a sudden inspiration. here was a chance to prolong his visit. when the langdon household gathered with restoratives, he did not recover at once, and allowed himself to be supported to an arm-chair for further remedies. livy langdon showed especial anxiety. he was not allowed to go, now, of course; he must stay until it was certain that his recovery was complete. perhaps he had been internally injured. his visit was prolonged two weeks, two weeks of pure happiness, and when he went away he had fully resolved to win livy langdon for his wife. mark twain now went to hartford to look after his book proofs, and there for the first time met the rev. joseph h. twichell, who would become his closest friend. the two men, so different in many ways, always had the fondest admiration for each other; each recognized in the other great courage, humanity, and sympathy. clemens would gladly have remained in hartford that winter. twichell presented him to many congenial people, including charles dudley warner, harriet beecher stowe, and other writing folk. but flattering lecture offers were made him, and he could no longer refuse. he called his new lecture "the vandal abroad," it being chapters from the forthcoming book, and it was a great success everywhere. his houses were crowded; the newspapers were enthusiastic. his delivery was described as a "long, monotonous drawl, with fun invariably coming in at the end of a sentence--after a pause." he began to be recognized everywhere--to have great popularity. people came out on the street to see him pass. many of his lecture engagements were in central new york, no great distance from elmira. he had a standing invitation to visit the langdon home, and went when he could. his courtship, however, was not entirely smooth. much as mr. langdon honored his gifts and admired him personally, he feared that his daughter, who had known so little of life and the outside world, and the brilliant traveler, lecturer, author, might not find happiness in marriage. many absurd stories have been told of mark twain's first interview with jervis langdon on this subject, but these are without foundation. it was an earnest discussion on both sides, and left samuel clemens rather crestfallen, though not without hope. more than once the subject was discussed between the two men that winter as the lecturer came and went, his fame always growing. in time the langdon household had grown to feel that he belonged to them. it would be only a step further to make him really one of the family. there was no positive engagement at first, for it was agreed between clemens and jervis langdon that letters should be sent by mr. langdon to those who had known his would-be son-in-law earlier, with inquiries as to his past conduct and general character. it was a good while till answers to these came, and when they arrived samuel clemens was on hand to learn the result. mr. langdon had a rather solemn look when they were alone together. clemens asked, "you've heard from those gentlemen out there?" "yes, and from another gentlemen i wrote to concerning you." "they don't appear to have been very enthusiastic, from your manner." "well, yes, some of them were." "i suppose i may ask what particular form their emotion took." "oh, yes, yes; they agree unanimously that you are a brilliant, able man --a man with a future, and that you would make about the worst husband on record." the applicant had a forlorn look. "there is nothing very evasive about that," he said. langdon reflected. "haven't you any other friend that you could suggest?" "apparently none whose testimony would be valuable." jervis langdon held out his hand. "you have at least one," he said. "i believe in you. i know you better then they do." the engagement of samuel langhorne clemens and olivia lewis langdon was ratified next day, february , . to jane clemens her son wrote: "she is a little body, but she hasn't her peer in christendom." xxx. the new book and a wedding clemens closed his lecture tour in march with a profit of something more than eight thousand dollars. he had intended to make a spring tour of california, but went to elmira instead. the revised proofs of his book were coming now, and he and gentle livy langdon read them together. samuel clemens realized presently that the girl he had chosen had a delicate literary judgment. she became all at once his editor, a position she held until her death. her refining influence had much to do with mark twain's success, then and later, and the world owes her a debt of gratitude. through that first pleasant summer these two worked at the proofs and planned for their future, and were very happy indeed. it was about the end of july when the big book appeared at last, and its success was startling. nothing like it had ever been known before. mark twain's name seemed suddenly to be on every tongue--his book in everybody's hands. from one end of the country to the other, readers were hailing him as the greatest humorist and descriptive writer of modern times. by the first of the year more than thirty thousand volumes had been sold. it was a book of travel; its lowest price was three and a half dollars; the record has not been equaled since. in england also large editions had been issued, and translations into foreign languages were under way. it was and is a great book, because it is a human book --a book written straight from the heart. if mark twain had not been famous before, he was so now. indeed, it is doubtful if any other american author was so widely known and read as the author of "the innocents abroad" during that first half-year after its publication. yet for some reason he still did not regard himself as a literary man. he was a journalist, and began to look about for a paper which he could buy-his idea being to establish a business and a home. through mr. langdon's assistance, he finally obtained an interest in the "buffalo express," and the end of the year found him established as its associate editor, though still lecturing here and there, because his wedding-day was near at hand and there must be no lack of funds. it was the d of february, , that samuel clemens and olivia langdon were married. a few days before, he sat down one night and wrote to jim gillis, away out in the tuolumne hills, and told him of all his good fortune, recalling their days at angel's camp, and the absurd frog story, which he said had been the beginning of his happiness. in the five years since then he had traveled a long way, but he had not forgotten. on the morning of his wedding-day mark twain received from his publisher a check for four thousand dollars, his profit from three months' sales of the book, a handsome sum. the wedding was mainly a family affair. twichell and his wife came over from hartford--twichell to assist thomas k. beecher in performing the ceremony. jane clemens could not come, nor orion and his wife; but pamela, a widow now, and her daughter annie, grown to a young lady, arrived from st. louis. not more than one hundred guests gathered in the stately langdon parlors that in future would hold so much history for samuel clemens and olivia langdon--so much of the story of life and death that thus made its beginning there. then, at seven in the evening, they were married, and the bride danced with her father, and the rev. thomas beecher declared she wore the longest gloves he had ever seen. it was the next afternoon that the wedding-party set out for buffalo. through a mr. slee, an agent of mr. langdon's, clemens had engaged, as he supposed, a boarding-house, quiet and unpretentious, for he meant to start his married life modestly. jervis langdon had a plan of his own for his daughter, but clemens had received no inkling of it, and had full faith in the letter which slee had written, saying that a choice and inexpensive boarding-house had been secured. when, about nine o'clock that night, the party reached buffalo, they found mr. slee waiting at the station. there was snow, and sleighs had been ordered. soon after starting, the sleigh of the bride and groom fell behind and drove about rather aimlessly, apparently going nowhere in particular. this disturbed the groom, who thought they should arrive first and receive their guests. he criticized slee for selecting a house that was so hard to find, and when they turned at last into delaware avenue, buffalo's finest street, and stopped before a handsome house, he was troubled concerning the richness of the locality. they were on the steps when the door opened and a perfect fairyland of lights and decoration was revealed within. the friends who had gone ahead came out with greetings to lead in the bride and groom. servants hurried forward to take bags and wraps. they were ushered inside; they were led through beautiful rooms, all newly appointed and garnished. the bridegroom was dazed, unable to understand the meaning of it all--the completeness of their possession. at last his young wife put her hand upon his arm. "don't you understand, youth?" she said--that was always her name for him. "don't you understand? it is ours, all ours--everything--a gift from father." but still he could not quite grasp it, and mr. langdon brought a little box and, opening it, handed them the deeds. nobody quite remembers what was the first remark that samuel clemens made, but either then or a little later he said: "mr. langdon, whenever you are in buffalo, if it's twice a year, come right here. bring your bag and stay overnight if you want to. it sha'n't cost you a cent." xxxi. mark twain in buffalo mark twain remained less than two years in buffalo--a period of much affliction. in the beginning, prospects could hardly have been brighter. his beautiful home seemed perfect. at the office he found work to his hand, and enjoyed it. his co-editor, j. w. larned, who sat across the table from him, used to tell later how mark enjoyed his work as he went along --the humor of it--frequently laughing as some new absurdity came into his mind. he was not very regular in his arrivals, but he worked long hours and turned in a vast amount of "copy"--skits, sketches, editorials, and comments of a varied sort. not all of it was humorous; he would stop work any time on an amusing sketch to attack some abuse or denounce an injustice, and he did it in scorching words that made offenders pause. once, when two practical jokers had sent in a marriage notice of persons not even contemplating matrimony, he wrote: "this deceit has been practised maliciously by a couple of men whose small souls will escape through their pores some day if they do not varnish their hides." in may he considerably increased his income by undertaking a department called "memoranda" for the new "galaxy" magazine. the outlook was now so promising that to his lecture agent, james redpath, he wrote: "dear red: i'm not going to lecture any more forever. i've got things ciphered down to a fraction now. i know just about what it will cost to live, and i can make the money without lecturing. therefore, old man, count me out." and in a second letter: "i guess i'm out of the field permanently. have got a lovely wife, a lovely house bewitchingly furnished, a lovely carriage, and a coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-inspiring, nothing less; and i'm making more money than necessary, by considerable, and therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform! the subscriber will have to be excused, for the present season, at least." the little household on delaware avenue was indeed a happy place during those early months. neither clemens nor his wife in those days cared much for society, preferring the comfort of their own home. once when a new family moved into a house across the way they postponed calling until they felt ashamed. clemens himself called first. one sunday morning he noticed smoke pouring from an upper window of their neighbor's house. the occupants, seated on the veranda, evidently did not suspect their danger. clemens stepped across to the gate and, bowing politely, said: "my name is clemens; we ought to have called on you before, and i beg your pardon for intruding now in this informal way, but your house is on fire." it was at the moment when life seemed at its best that shadows gathered. jervis langdon had never accepted his son-in-law's playful invitation to "bring his bag and stay overnight," and now the time for it was past. in the spring his health gave way. mrs. clemens, who adored him, went to elmira to be at his bedside. three months of lingering illness brought the end. his death was a great blow to mrs. clemens, and the strain of watching had been very hard. her own health, never robust, became poor. a girlhood friend, who came to cheer her with a visit, was taken down with typhoid fever. another long period of anxiety and nursing ended with the young woman's death in the clemens home. to mark twain and his wife it seemed that their bright days were over. the arrival of little langdon clemens, in november, brought happiness, but his delicate hold on life was so uncertain that the burden of anxiety grew. amid so many distractions clemens found his work hard. his "memoranda" department in the "galaxy" must be filled and be bright and readable. his work at the office could not be neglected. then, too, he had made a contract with bliss for another book "roughing it"--and he was trying to get started on that. he began to chafe under the relentless demands of the magazine and newspaper. finally he could stand it no longer. he sold his interest in the "express," at a loss, and gave up the "memoranda." in the closing number (april, ) he said: "for the last eight months, with hardly an interval, i have had for my fellows and comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick! during these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and malignantly threatened two others. all this i have experienced, yet all the time have been under contract to furnish humorous matter, once a month, for this magazine .... to be a pirate on a low salary and with no share of the profits in the business used to be my idea of an uncomfortable occupation, but i have other views now. to be a monthly humorist in a cheerless time is drearier." xxxii. at work on "roughing it" the clemens family now went to elmira, to quarry farm--a beautiful hilltop place, overlooking the river and the town--the home of mrs. clemens's sister, mrs. theodore crane. they did not expect to return to buffalo, and the house there was offered for sale. for them the sunlight had gone out of it. matters went better at quarry farm. the invalids gained strength; work on the book progressed. the clemenses that year fell in love with the place that was to mean so much to them in the many summers to come. mark twain was not altogether satisfied, however, with his writing. he was afraid it was not up to his literary standard. his spirits were at low ebb when his old first editor, joe goodman, came east and stopped off at elmira. clemens hurried him out to the farm, and, eagerly putting the chapters of "roughing it" into his hands, asked him to read them. goodman seated himself comfortably by a window, while the author went over to a table and pretended to write, but was really watching goodman, who read page after page solemnly and with great deliberation. presently mark twain could stand it no longer. he threw down his pen, exclaiming: "i knew it! i knew it! i've been writing nothing but rot. you have sat there all this time reading without a smile--but i am not wholly to blame. i have been trying to write a funny book with dead people and sickness everywhere. oh, joe, i wish i could die myself!" "mark," said goodman, "i was reading critically, not for amusement, and so far as i have read, and can judge, this is one of the best things you have ever written. i have found it perfectly absorbing. you are doing a great book!" that was enough. clemens knew that goodman never spoke idly of such matters. the author of "roughing it" was a changed man--full of enthusiasm, eager to go on. he offered to pay goodman a salary to stay and furnish inspiration. goodman declined the salary, but remained for several weeks, and during long walks which the two friends took over the hills gave advice, recalled good material, and was a great help and comfort. in may, clemens wrote to bliss that he had twelve hundred manuscript pages of the new book written and was turning out from thirty to sixty-five per day. he was in high spirits. the family health had improved--once more prospects were bright. he even allowed redpath to persuade him to lecture again during the coming season. selling his share of the "express" at a loss had left mark twain considerably in debt and lecture profits would furnish the quickest means of payment. when the summer ended the clemens family took up residence in hartford, connecticut, in the fine old hooker house, on forest street. hartford held many attractions for mark twain. his publishers were located there, also it was the home of a distinguished group of writers, and of the rev. "joe" twichell. neither clemens nor his wife had felt that they could return to buffalo. the home there was sold--its contents packed and shipped. they did not see it again. his book finished, mark twain lectured pretty steadily that winter, often in the neighborhood of boston, which was lecture headquarters. mark twain enjoyed boston. in redpath's office one could often meet and "swap stories" with josh billings (henry w. shaw) and petroleum v. nasby (david r. locke)--well-known humorists of that day--while in the strictly literary circle there were william dean howells, thomas bailey aldrich, bret harte (who by this time had become famous and journeyed eastward), and others of their sort. they were all young and eager and merry, then, and they gathered at luncheons in snug corners and talked gaily far into the dimness of winter afternoons. harte had been immediately accorded a high place in the boston group. mark twain as a strictly literary man was still regarded rather doubtfully by members of the older set--the brahmins, as they were called--but the young men already hailed him joyfully, reveling in the fine, fearless humor of his writing, his wonderful talk, his boundless humanity. xxxiii. in england mark twain closed his lecture season in february ( ), and during the same month his new book, "roughing it," came from the press. he disliked the lecture platform, and he felt that he could now abandon it. he had made up his loss in buffalo and something besides. furthermore, the advance sales on his book had been large. "roughing it," in fact, proved a very successful book. like "the innocents abroad," it was the first of its kind, fresh in its humor and description, true in its picture of the frontier life he had known. in three months forty thousand copies had been sold, and now, after more than forty years, it is still a popular book. the life it describes is all gone-the scenes are changed. it is a record of a vanished time--a delightful history--as delightful to-day as ever. eighteen hundred and seventy-two was an eventful year for mark twain. in march his second child, a little girl whom they named susy, was born, and three months later the boy, langdon, died. he had never been really strong, and a heavy cold and diphtheria brought the end. clemens did little work that summer. he took his family to saybrook, connecticut, for the sea air, and near the end of august, when mrs. clemens had regained strength and courage, he sailed for england to gather material for a book on english life and customs. he felt very friendly toward the english, who had been highly appreciative of his writings, and he wished their better acquaintance. he gave out no word of the book idea, and it seems unlikely that any one in england ever suspected it. he was there three months, and beyond some notebook memoranda made during the early weeks of his stay he wrote not a line. he was too delighted with everything to write a book--a book of his kind. in letters home he declared the country to be as beautiful as fairyland. by all classes attentions were showered upon him--honors such as he had never received even in america. w. d. howells writes:[ ] "in england rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. lord mayors, lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the favor of periodicals, that spurned the rest of our nation." he could not make a book--a humorous book--out of these people and their country; he was too fond of them. england fairly reveled in mark twain. at one of the great banquets, a roll of the distinguished guests was called, and the names properly applauded. mark twain, busily engaged in low conversation with his neighbor, applauded without listening, vigorously or mildly, as the others led. finally a name was followed by a great burst of long and vehement clapping. this must be some very great person indeed, and mark twain, not to be outdone in his approval, stoutly kept his hands going when all others had finished. "whose name was that we were just applauding?" he asked of his neighbor. "mark twain's." but it was no matter; they took it all as one of his jokes. he was a wonder and a delight to them. whatever he did or said was to them supremely amusing. when, on one occasion, a speaker humorously referred to his american habit of carrying a cotton umbrella, his reply that he did so "because it was the only kind of an umbrella that an englishman wouldn't steal," was repeated all over england next day as one of the finest examples of wit since the days of swift. he returned to america at the end of november; promising to come back and lecture to them the following year. [ ] from "my mark twain," by w. d. howells. xxxiv. a new book and new english triumphs but if mark twain could find nothing to write of in england, he found no lack of material in america. that winter in hartford, with charles dudley warner, he wrote "the gilded age." the warners were neighbors, and the families visited back and forth. one night at dinner, when the two husbands were criticizing the novels their wives were reading, the wives suggested that their author husbands write a better one. the challenge was accepted. on the spur of the moment warner and clemens agreed that they would write a book together, and began it immediately. clemens had an idea already in mind. it was to build a romance around that lovable dreamer, his mother's cousin, james lampton, whom the reader will recall from an earlier chapter. without delay he set to work and soon completed the first three hundred and ninety-nine pages of the new story. warner came over and, after listening to its reading, went home and took up the story. in two months the novel was complete, warner doing most of the romance, mark twain the character parts. warner's portion was probably pure fiction, but mark twain's chapters were full of history. judge hawkins and wife were mark twain's father and mother; washington hawkins, his brother orion. their doings, with those of james lampton as colonel sellers, were, of course, elaborated, but the story of the tennessee land, as told in that book, is very good history indeed. laura hawkins, however, was only real in the fact that she bore the name of samuel clemens's old playmate. "the gilded age," published later in the year, was well received and sold largely. the character of colonel sellers at once took a place among the great fiction characters of the world, and is probably the best known of any american creation. his watchword, "there's millions in it!" became a byword. the clemenses decided to build in hartford. they bought a plot of land on farmington avenue, in the literary neighborhood, and engaged an architect and builder. by spring, the new house was well under way, and, matters progressing so favorably, the owners decided to take a holiday while the work was going on. clemens had been eager to show england to his wife; so, taking little sissy, now a year old, they sailed in may, to be gone half a year. they remained for a time in london--a period of honors and entertainment. if mark twain had been a lion on his first visit, he was hardly less than royalty now. his rooms at the langham hotel were like a court. the nation's most distinguished men--among them robert browning, sir john millais, lord houghton, and sir charles dilke--came to pay their respects. authors were calling constantly. charles reade and wilkie collins could not get enough of mark twain. reade proposed to join with him in writing a novel, as warner had done. lewis carroll did not call, being too timid, but they met the author of "alice in wonderland" one night at a dinner, "the shyest full-grown man, except uncle remiss, i ever saw," mark twain once declared. little sissy and her father thrived on london life, but it wore on mrs. clemens. at the end of july they went quietly to edinburgh, and settled at veitch's hotel, on george street. the strain of london life had been too much for mrs. clemens, and her health became poor. unacquainted in edinburgh, clemens only remembered that dr. john brown, author of "rab and his friends," lived there. learning the address, he walked around to rutland street, and made himself known. doctor brown came forthwith, and mrs. clemens seemed better from the moment of his arrival. the acquaintance did not end there. for a month the author of "rab" and the little clemens family were together daily. often they went with him to make his round of visits. he was always leaning out of the carriage to look at dogs. it was told of him that once when he suddenly put his head from a carriage window he dropped back with a disappointed look. "who was it?" asked his companion. "some one you know?" "no, a dog i don't know." dr. john was beloved by everybody in scotland, and his story of "rab" had won him a world-wide following. children adored him. little susy and he were playmates, and he named her "megalopis," a greek term, suggested by her great, dark eyes. mark twain kept his promise to lecture to a london audience. on the th of october, in the queen's concert rooms, hanover square, he gave "our fellow savages of the sandwich islands." the house was packed. clemens was not introduced. he appeared on the platform in evening dress, assuming the character of a manager, announcing a disappointment. mr. clemens, he said, had fully expected to be present. he paused, and loud murmurs arose from the audience. he lifted his hand and the noise subsided. then he added, "i am happy to say that mark twain is present and will now give his lecture." the audience roared its approval. he continued his lectures at hanover square through the week, and at no time in his own country had he won such a complete triumph. he was the talk of the streets. the papers were full of him. the "london times" declared his lectures had only whetted the public appetite for more. his manager, george dolby (formerly manager for charles dickens), urged him to remain and continue the course through the winter. clemens finally agreed that he would take his family back to america and come back himself within the month. this plan he carried out. returning to london, he lectured steadily for two months in the big hanover square rooms, giving his "roughing it" address, and it was only toward the end that his audience showed any sign of diminishing. there is probably no other such a lecture triumph on record. mark twain was at the pinnacle of his first glory: thirty-six, in full health, prosperous, sought by the world's greatest, hailed in the highest places almost as a king. tom sawyer's dreams of greatness had been all too modest. in its most dazzling moments his imagination had never led him so far. xxxv. beginning "tom sawyer" it was at the end of january, , when mark twain returned to america. his reception abroad had increased his prestige at home. howells and aldrich came over from boston to tell him what a great man he had become --to renew those boston days of three years before--to talk and talk of all the things between the earth and sky. and twichell came in, of course, and warner, and no one took account of time, or hurried, or worried about anything at all. "we had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round," wrote howells, long after, and he tells how he and aldrich were so carried away with clemens's success in subscription publication that on the way back to boston they planned a book to sell in that way. it was to be called "twelve memorable murders," and they had made two or three fortunes from it by the time they reached boston. "but the project ended there. we never killed a single soul," howells once confessed to the writer of this memoir. at quarry farm that summer mark twain began the writing of "the adventures of tom sawyer." he had been planning for some time to set down the story of those far-off days along the river-front at hannibal, with john briggs, tom blankenship, and the rest of that graceless band, and now in the cool luxury of a little study which mrs. crane had built for him on the hillside he set himself to spin the fabric of his youth. the study was a delightful place to work. it was octagonal in shape, with windows on all sides, something like a pilot-house. from any direction the breeze could come, and there were fine views. to twichell he wrote: "it is a cozy nest, and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and when the storm sweeps down the remote valley and the lightning flashes behind the hills beyond, and the rain beats on the roof over my head, imagine the luxury of it!" he worked steadily there that summer. he would begin mornings, soon after breakfast, keeping at it until nearly dinner-time, say until five or after, for it was not his habit to eat the midday meal. other members of the family did not venture near the place; if he was wanted urgently, a horn was blown. his work finished, he would light a cigar and, stepping lightly down the stone flight that led to the house-level, he would find where the family had assembled and read to them his day's work. certainly those were golden days, and the tale of tom and huck and joe harper progressed. to dr. john brown, in scotland, he wrote: "i have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average, for some time now, .. . . and consequently have been so wrapped up in it and dead to everything else that i have fallen mighty short in letter-writing." but the inspiration of tom and huck gave out when the tale was half finished, or perhaps it gave way to a new interest. news came one day that a writer in san francisco, without permission, had dramatized "the gilded age," and that it was being played by john t. raymond, an actor of much power. mark twain had himself planned to dramatize the character of colonel sellers and had taken out dramatic copyright. he promptly stopped the california production, then wrote the dramatist a friendly letter, and presently bought the play of him, and set in to rewrite it. it proved a great success. raymond played it for several years. colonel sellers on the stage became fully as popular as in the book, and very profitable indeed. xxxvi. the new home the new home in hartford was ready that autumn--the beautiful house finished, or nearly finished, the handsome furnishings in place. it was a lovely spot. there were trees and grass--a green, shady slope that fell away to a quiet stream. the house itself, quite different from the most of the houses of that day, had many wings and balconies, and toward the back a great veranda that looked down the shaded slope. the kitchen was not at the back. as mark twain was unlike any other man that ever lived, so his house was not like other houses. when asked why he built the kitchen toward the street, he said: "so the servants can see the circus go by without running into the front yard." but this was probably his afterthought. the kitchen wing extended toward farmington avenue, but it was a harmonious detail of the general plan. many frequenters have tried to express the charm of mark twain's household. few have succeeded, for it lay not in the house itself, nor in its furnishings, beautiful as these things were, but in the personality of its occupants--the daily round of their lives--the atmosphere which they unconsciously created. from its wide entrance-hall and tiny, jewel like conservatory below to the billiard-room at the top of the house, it seemed perfectly appointed, serenely ordered, and full of welcome. the home of one of the most unusual and unaccountable personalities in the world was filled with gentleness and peace. it was mrs. clemens who was chiefly responsible. she was no longer the half-timid, inexperienced girl he had married. association, study, and travel had brought her knowledge and confidence. when the great ones of the world came to visit america's most picturesque literary figure, she gave welcome to them, and filled her place at his side with such sweet grace that those who came to pay their dues to him often returned to pay still greater devotion to his companion. william dean howells, so often a visitor there, once said to the writer: "words cannot express mrs. clemens--her fineness, her delicate, wonderful tact." and again, "she was not only a beautiful soul, but a woman of singular intellectual power." there were always visitors in the clemens home. above the mantel in the library was written: "the ornament of a house is the friends that frequent it," and the clemens home never lacked of those ornaments, and they were of the world's best. no distinguished person came to america that did not pay a visit to hartford and mark twain. generally it was not merely a call, but a stay of days. the welcome was always genuine, the entertainment unstinted. george warner, a close neighbor, once said: "the clemens house was the only one i have ever known where there was never any preoccupation in the evenings and where visitors were always welcome. clemens was the best kind of a host; his evenings after dinner were an unending flow of stories." as for friends living near, they usually came and went at will, often without the ceremony of knocking or formal leave-taking. the two warner famines were among these, the home of charles dudley warner being only a step away. dr. and mrs. harriet beecher stowe were also close neighbors, while the twichell parsonage was not far. they were all like one great family, of which mark twain's home was the central gathering-place. xxxvii. "old times," "sketches," and "tom sawyer" the rev. joseph h. twichell and mark twain used to take many long walks together, and once they decided to walk from hartford to boston--about one hundred miles. they decided to allow three days for the trip, and really started one morning, with some luncheon in a basket, and a little bag of useful articles. it was a bright, brisk november day, and they succeeded in getting to westford, a distance of twenty-eight miles, that evening. but they were lame and foot-sore, and next morning, when they had limped six miles or so farther, clemens telegraphed to redpath: "we have made thirty-five miles in less than five days. this shows the thing can be done. shall finish now by rail. did you have any bets on us?" he also telegraphed howells that they were about to arrive in boston, and they did, in fact, reach the howells home about nine o'clock, and found excellent company--the cambridge set--and a most welcome supper waiting. clemens and twichell were ravenous. clemens demanded food immediately. howells writes: "i can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his head thrown back, and in his hands a dish of those scalloped oysters without which no party in cambridge was really a party, exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of their progress." the pedestrians returned to hartford a day or two later--by train. it was during another, though less extended, tour which twichell and clemens made that fall, that the latter got his idea for a mississippi book. howells had been pleading for something for the january "atlantic," of which he was now chief editor, but thus far mark twain's inspiration had failed. he wrote at last, "my head won't go," but later, the same day, he sent another hasty line. "i take back the remark that i can't write for the january number, for twichell and i have had a long walk in the woods, and i got to telling him about old mississippi days of steam-boating glory and grandeur as i saw them (during four years) from the pilot-house. he said, 'what a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!' i hadn't thought of that before. would you like a series of papers to run through three months, or six, or nine--or about four months, say?" howells wrote at once, welcoming the idea. clemens forthwith sent the first instalment of that marvelous series of river chapters which rank to-day among the very best of his work. as pictures of the vanished mississippi life they are so real, so convincing, so full of charm that they can never grow old. as long as any one reads of the mississippi they will look up those chapters of mark twain's piloting days. when the first number appeared, john hay wrote: "it is perfect; no more, no less. i don't see how you do it." the "old times" chapter ran through seven numbers of the "atlantic," and show mark twain at his very best. they form now most of the early chapters of "life on the mississippi." the remainder of that book was added about seven years later. those were busy literary days for mark twain. writing the river chapters carried him back, and hardly had he finished them when he took up the neglected story of "tom and huck," and finished that under full steam. he at first thought of publishing it in the "atlantic", but decided against this plan. he sent howells the manuscript to read, and received the fullest praise. howells wrote: "it is altogether the best boy's story i ever read. it will be an immense success." clemens, however, delayed publication. he had another volume in press--a collection of his sketches--among them the "jumping frog," and others of his california days. the "jumping frog" had been translated into french, and in this book mark twain published the french version and then a literal retranslation of his own, which is one of the most amusing features in the volume. as an example, the stranger's remark, "i don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better than any other frog," in the literal retranslation becomes, "i no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each frog," and mark twain parenthetically adds, "if that isn't grammar gone to seed, then i count myself no judge." "sketches new and old" went very well, but the book had no such sale as "the adventures of tom sawyer," which appeared a year later, december, . from the date of its issue it took its place as foremost of american stories of boy life, a place that to this day it shares only with "huck finn." mark twain's own boy life in the little drowsy town of hannibal, with john briggs and tom blankenship--their adventures in and about the cave and river--made perfect material. the story is full of pure delight. the camp on the island is a picture of boy heaven. no boy that reads it but longs for the woods and a camp-fire and some bacon strips in the frying-pan. it is all so thrillingly told and so vivid. we know certainly that it must all have happened. "the adventures of tom sawyer" has taken a place side by side with "treasure island." xxxviii. home pictures mark twain was now regarded by many as the foremost american author. certainly he was the most widely known. as a national feature he rivaled niagara falls. no civilized spot on earth that his name had not reached. letters merely addressed "mark twain" found their way to him. "mark twain, united states," was a common superscription. "mark twain, the world," also reached him without delay, while "mark twain, somewhere," and "mark twain, anywhere," in due time came to hartford. "mark twain, god knows where," likewise arrived promptly, and in his reply he said, "he did." then a letter addressed "the devil knows where" also reached him, and he answered, "he did, too." surely these were the farthermost limits of fame. countless anecdotes went the rounds of the press. among them was one which happened to be true: their near neighbor, mrs. harriet beecher stowe, was leaving for florida one morning, and clemens ran over early to say good-by. on his return mrs. clemens looked at him severely. "why, youth," she said, "you haven't on any collar and tie." he said nothing, but went to his room, wrapped up those items in a neat package, which he sent over by a servant to mrs. stowe, with the line: "herewith receive a call from the rest of me." mrs. stowe returned a witty note, in which she said he had discovered a new principle--that of making calls by instalments, and asked whether in extreme cases a man might not send his clothes and be himself excused. most of his work mark twain did at quarry farm. each summer the family --there were two little girls now, susy and clara--went to that lovely place on the hilltop above elmira, where there were plenty of green fields and cows and horses and apple-trees, a spot as wonderful to them as john quarles's farm had been to their father, so long ago. all the family loved quarry farm, and mark twain's work went more easily there. his winters were not suited to literary creation--there were too many social events, though once--it was the winter of ' --he wrote a play with bret harte, who came to hartford and stayed at the clemens home while the work was in progress. it was a chinese play, "ah sin," and the two had a hilarious time writing it, though the result did not prove much of a success with the public. mark twain often tried plays--one with howells, among others--but the colonel sellers play was his only success. grand dinners, trips to boston and new york, guests in his own home, occupied much of mark twain's winter season. his leisure he gave to his children and to billiards. he had a passion for the game, and at any hour of the day or night was likely to be found in the room at the top of the house, knocking the balls about alone or with any visitor that he had enticed to that den. he mostly received his callers there, and impressed them into the game. if they could play, well and good. if not, so much the better; he could beat them extravagantly, and he took huge delight in such contests. every friday evening a party of billiard lovers--hartford men--gathered and played, and told stories, and smoked, until the room was blue. clemens never tired of the game. he could play all night. he would stay until the last man dropped from sheer weariness, and then go on knocking the balls about alone. but many evenings at home--early evenings--he gave to susy and clara. they had learned his gift as a romancer and demanded the most startling inventions. they would bring him a picture requiring him to fit a story to it without a moment's delay. once he was suddenly ordered by clara to make a story out of a plumber and a "bawgunstictor," which, on the whole, was easier than some of their requirements. along the book-shelves were ornaments and pictures. a picture of a girl whom they called "emeline" was at one end, and at the other a cat. every little while they compelled him to make a story beginning with the cat and ending with emeline. always a new story, and never the other way about. the literary path from the cat to emeline was a perilous one, but in time he could have traveled it in his dreams. xxxix. tramping abroad it was now going on ten years since the publication of "the innocents abroad," and there was a demand for another mark twain book of travel. clemens considered the matter, and decided that a walking-tour in europe might furnish the material he wanted. he spoke to his good friend, the rev. "joe" twichell, and invited him to become his guest on such an excursion, because, as he explained, he thought he could "dig material enough out of joe to make it a sound investment." as a matter of fact, he loved twichell's companionship, and was always inviting him to share his journeys--to boston, to bermuda, to washington--wherever interest or fancy led him. his plan now was to take the family to germany in the spring, and let twichell join them later for a summer tramp down through the black forest and switzerland. meantime the clemens household took up the study of german. the children had a german nurse--others a german teacher. the household atmosphere became teutonic. of course it all amused mark twain, as everything amused him, but he was a good student. in a brief time he had a fair knowledge of every-day german and a really surprising vocabulary. the little family sailed in april ( ), and a few weeks later were settled in the schloss hotel, on a hill above heidelberg, overlooking the beautiful old castle, the ancient town, with the neckar winding down the hazy valley--as fair a view as there is in all germany. clemens found a room for his work in a small house not far from the hotel. on the day of his arrival he had pointed out this house and said he had decided to work there--that his room would be the middle one on the third floor. mrs. clemens laughed, and thought the occupants of the house might be surprised when he came over to take possession. they amused themselves by watching "his people" and trying to make out what they were like. one day he went over that way, and, sure enough, there was a sign, "furnished rooms," and the one he had pointed out from the hotel was vacant. it became his study forthwith. the travelers were delighted with their location. to howells, clemens wrote: "our bedroom has two great glass bird-cages (inclosed balconies), one looking toward the rhine valley and sunset, the other looking up the neckar cul de sac, and, naturally, we spent nearly all our time in these. we have tables and chairs in them . . . . it must have been a noble genius who devised this hotel. lord! how blessed is the repose, the tranquillity of this place! only two sounds: the happy clamor of the birds in the groves and the muffled music of the neckar tumbling over the opposing dikes. it is no hardship to lie awake awhile nights, for thin subdued roar has exactly the sound of a steady rain beating upon a roof. it is so healing to the spirit; and it bears up the thread of one's imaginings as the accompaniment bears up a song." twichell was summoned for august, and wrote back eagerly at the prospect: "oh, my! do you realize, mark, what a symposium it is to be? i do. to begin with, i am thoroughly tired, and the rest will be worth everything. to walk with you and talk with you for weeks together --why, it's my dream of luxury!" meantime the struggle with the "awful german language" went on. rosa, the maid, was required to speak to the children only in german, though little clara at first would have none of it. susy, two years older, tried, and really made progress, but one day she said, pathetically: "mama, i wish rosa was made in english." but presently she was writing to "aunt sue" (mrs. crane) at quarry farm: "i know a lot of german; everybody says i know a lot. i give you a million dollars to see you, and you would give two hundred dollars to see the lovely woods we see." twichell arrived august st. clemens met him at baden-baden, and they immediately set forth on a tramp through the black forest, excursioning as they pleased and having a blissful time. they did not always walk. they were likely to take a carriage or a donkey-cart, or even a train, when one conveniently happened along. they did not hurry, but idled and talked and gathered flowers, or gossiped with wayside natives --picturesque peasants in the black forest costume. in due time they crossed into switzerland and prepared to conquer the alps. the name mark twain had become about as well known in europe as it was in america. his face, however, was less familiar. he was not often recognized in these wanderings, and his pen-name was carefully concealed. it was a relief to him not to be an object of curiosity and lavish attention. twichell's conscience now and then prompted him to reveal the truth. in one of his letters home he wrote how a young man at a hotel had especially delighted in mark's table conversation, and how he (twichell) had later taken the young man aside and divulged the speaker's identity. "i could not forbear telling him who mark was, and the mingled surprise and pleasure his face exhibited made me glad i had done so." they did not climb many of the alps on foot. they did scale the rigi, after which mark twain was not in the best walking trim; though later they conquered gemmi pass--no small undertaking--that trail that winds up and up until the traveler has only the glaciers and white peaks and the little high-blooming flowers for company. all day long the friends would tramp and walk together, and when they did not walk they would hire a diligence or any vehicle that came handy, but, whatever their means of travel the joy of comradeship amid those superb surroundings was the same. in twichell's letters home we get pleasant pictures of the mark twain of that day: "mark, to-day, was immensely absorbed in flowers. he scrambled around and gathered a great variety, and manifested the intensest pleasure in them . . . . mark is splendid to walk with amid such grand scenery, for he talks so well about it, has such a power of strong, picturesque expression. i wish you might have heard him today. his vigorous speech nearly did justice to the things we saw." and in another place: "he can't bear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull hard. to-day when the driver clucked up his horse and quickened his pace a little, mark said, 'the fellow's got the notion that we were in a hurry.'" another extract refers to an incident which mark twain also mentions in "a tramp abroad:" [ ] "mark is a queer fellow. there is nothing so delights him as a swift, strong stream. you can hardly get him to leave one when once he is in the influence of its fascinations. to throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture." twichell goes on to tell how he threw some driftwood into a racing torrent and how mark went running down-stream after it, waving and shouting in a sort of mad ecstasy. when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below, he would jump up and down and yell. he acted just like a boy. boy he was, then and always. like peter pan, he never really grew up --that is, if growing up means to grow solemn and uninterested in play. climbing the gorner grat with twichell, they sat down to rest, and a lamb from a near-by flock ventured toward them. clemens held out his hand and called softly. the lamb ventured nearer, curious but timid. it was a scene for a painter: the great american humorist on one side of the game, and the silly little creature on the other, with the matterhorn for a background. mark was reminded that the time he was consuming was valuable, but to no purpose. the gorner grat could wait. he held on with undiscouraged perseverance till he carried his point; the lamb finally put its nose in mark's hand, and he was happy all the rest of the day. "in a tramp abroad" mark twain burlesques most of the walking-tour with harris (twichell), feeling, perhaps, that he must make humor at whatever cost. but to-day the other side of the picture seems more worth while. that it seemed so to him, also, even at the time, we may gather from a letter he sent after twichell when it was all over and twichell was on his way home: "dear old joe,--it is actually all over! i was so low-spirited at the station yesterday, and this morning, when i woke, i couldn't seem to accept the dismal truth that you were really gone and the pleasant tramping and talking at an end. ah, my boy! it has been such a rich holiday for me, and i feel under such deep and honest obligations to you for coming. i am putting out of my mind all memory of the time when i misbehaved toward you and hurt you; i am resolved to consider it forgiven, and to store up and remember only the charming hours of the journey and the times when i was not unworthy to be with you and share a companionship which to me stands first after livy's." clemens had joined his family at lausanne, and presently they journeyed down into italy, returning later to germany--to munich, where they lived quietly with fraulein dahlweiner at no. a karlstrasse, while he worked on his new book of travel. when spring came they went to paris, and later to london, where the usual round of entertainment briefly claimed them. it was the d of september, , when they finally reached new york. the papers said that mark twain had changed in his year and a half of absence. he had, somehow, taken on a traveled look. one paper remarked that he looked older than when he went to germany, and that his hair had turned quite gray. [ ] chapter xxxiii. xl. "the prince and the pauper" they went directly to quarry farm, where clemens again took up work on his book, which he hoped to have ready for early publication. but his writing did not go as well as he had hoped, and it was long after they had returned to hartford that the book was finally in the printer's hands. meantime he had renewed work on a story begun two years before at quarry farm. browsing among the books there one summer day, he happened to pick up "the prince and the page," by charlotte m. yonge. it was a story of a prince disguised as a blind beggar, and, as mark twain read, an idea came to him for an altogether different story, or play, of his own. he would have a prince and a pauper change places, and through a series of adventures learn each the trials and burdens of the other life. he presently gave up the play idea, and began it as a story. his first intention had been to make the story quite modern, using the late king edward vii. (then prince of wales) as his prince, but it seemed to him that it would not do to lose a prince among the slums of modern london --he could not make it seem real; so he followed back through history until he came to the little son of henry viii., edward tudor, and decided that he would do. it was the kind of a story that mark twain loved to read and to write. by the end of that first summer he had finished a good portion of the exciting adventures of "the prince and the pauper," and then, as was likely to happen, the inspiration waned and the manuscript was laid aside. but with the completion of "a tramp abroad"--a task which had grown wearisome--he turned to the luxury of romance with a glad heart. to howells he wrote that he was taking so much pleasure in the writing that he wanted to make it last. "did i ever tell you the plot of it? it begins at a.m., january , . . . . my idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the king himself, and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them applied to others." susy and clara clemens were old enough now to understand the story, and as he finished the chapters he read them aloud to his small home audience--a most valuable audience, indeed, for he could judge from its eager interest, or lack of attention, just the measure of his success. these little creatures knew all about the writing of books. susy's earliest recollection was "tom sawyer" read aloud from the manuscript. also they knew about plays. they could not remember a time when they did not take part in evening charades--a favorite amusement in the clemens home. mark twain, who always loved his home and played with his children, invented the charades and their parts for them, at first, but as they grew older they did not need much help. with the twichell and warner children they organized a little company for their productions, and entertained the assembled households. they did not make any preparation for their parts. a word was selected and the syllables of it whispered to the little actors. then they withdrew to the hall, where all sorts of costumes had been laid out for the evening, dressed their parts, and each group marched into the library, performed its syllable, and retired, leaving the audience of parents to guess the answer. now and then, even at this early day, they gave little plays, and of course mark twain could not resist joining them. in time the plays took the place of the charades and became quite elaborate, with a stage and scenery, but we shall hear of this later on. "the prince and the pauper" came to an end in due season, in spite of the wish of both author and audience for it to go on forever. it was not published at once, for several reasons, the main one being that "a tramp abroad" had just been issued from the press, and a second book might interfere with its sale. as it was, the "tramp" proved a successful book--never as successful as the "innocents," for neither its humor nor its description had quite the fresh quality of the earlier work. in the beginning, however, the sales were large, the advance orders amounting to twenty-five thousand copies, and the return to the author forty thousand dollars for the first year. xli. general grant at hartford a third little girl came to the clemens household during the summer of . they were then at quarry farm, and clemens wrote to his friend twichell: "dear old joe,--concerning jean clemens, if anybody said he 'didn't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better than any other frog,' i should think he was convicting himself of being a pretty poor sort of an observer. . . it is curious to note the change in the stock-quotations of the affection board. four weeks ago the children put mama at the head of the list right along, where she has always been, but now: jean mama motley }cat fraulein }cat papa "that is the way it stands now. mama is become no. ; i have dropped from and become no. . some time ago it used to be nip and tuck between me and the cats, but after the cats 'developed' i didn't stand any more show." those were happy days at quarry farm. the little new baby thrived on that summer hilltop. also, it may be said, the cats. mark twain's children had inherited his love for cats, and at the farm were always cats of all ages and varieties. many of the bed-time stories were about these pets--stories invented by mark twain as he went along--stories that began anywhere and ended nowhere, and continued indefinitely from evening to evening, trailing off into dreamland. the great humorist cared less for dogs, though he was never unkind to them, and once at the farm a gentle hound named bones won his affection. when the end of the summer came and clemens, as was his habit, started down the drive ahead of the carriage, bones, half-way to the entrance, was waiting for him. clemens stooped down, put his arms about him, and bade him an affectionate good-by. eighteen hundred and eighty was a presidential year. mark twain was for general garfield, and made a number of remarkable speeches in his favor. general grant came to hartford during the campaign, and mark twain was chosen to make the address of welcome. perhaps no such address of welcome was ever made before. he began: "i am among those deputed to welcome you to the sincere and cordial hospitalities of hartford, the city of the historic and revered charter oak, of which most of the town is built." he seemed to be at a loss what to say next, and, leaning over, pretended to whisper to grant. then, as if he had been prompted by the great soldier, he straightened up and poured out a fervid eulogy on grant's victories, adding, in an aside, as he finished, "i nearly forgot that part of my speech," to the roaring delight of his hearers, while grant himself grimly smiled. he then spoke of the general being now out of public employment, and how grateful his country was to him, and how it stood ready to reward him in every conceivable--inexpensive--way. grant had smiled more than once during the speech, and when this sentence came out at the end his composure broke up altogether, while the throng shouted approval. clemens made another speech that night at the opera-house--a speech long remembered in hartford as one of the great efforts of his life. a very warm friendship had grown up between mark twain and general grant. a year earlier, on the famous soldier's return from his trip around the world, a great birthday banquet had been given him in chicago, at which mark twain's speech had been the event of the evening. the colonel who long before had chased the young pilot-soldier through the mississippi bottoms had become his conquering hero, and grant's admiration for america's foremost humorist was most hearty. now and again clemens urged general grant to write his memoirs for publication, but the hero of many battles was afraid to venture into the field of letters. he had no confidence in his ability to write. he did not realize that the man who had written "i will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer," and, later, "let us have peace," was capable of english as terse and forceful as the latin of caesar's commentaries. xlii many investments the "prince and the pauper," delayed for one reason and another, did not make its public appearance until the end of . it was issued by osgood, of boston, and was a different book in every way from any that mark twain had published before. mrs. clemens, who loved the story, had insisted that no expense should be spared in its making, and it was, indeed, a handsome volume. it was filled with beautiful pen-and-ink drawings, and the binding was rich. the dedication to its two earliest critics read: "to those good-mannered and agreeable children, susy and clara clemens." the story itself was unlike anything in mark twain's former work. it was pure romance, a beautiful, idyllic tale, though not without his touch of humor and humanity on every page. and how breathlessly interesting it is! we may imagine that first little audience--the "two good-mannered and agreeable children," drawing up in their little chairs by the fireside, hanging on every paragraph of the adventures of the wandering prince and tom canty, the pauper king, eager always for more. the story, at first, was not entirely understood by the reviewers. they did not believe it could be serious. they expected a joke in it somewhere. some even thought they had found it. but it was not a joke, it was just a simple tale--a beautiful picture of a long-vanished time. one critic, wiser than the rest, said: "the characters of those two boys, twin in spirit, will rank with the purest and loveliest creations of child-life in the realm of fiction." mark twain was now approaching the fullness of his fame and prosperity. the income from his writing was large; mrs. clemens possessed a considerable fortune of her own; they had no debts. their home was as perfectly appointed as a home could well be, their family life was ideal. they lived in the large, hospitable way which mrs. clemens had known in her youth, and which her husband, with his southern temperament, loved. their friends were of the world's chosen, and they were legion in number. there were always guests in the clemens home--so many, indeed, were constantly coming and going that mark twain said he was going to set up a private 'bus to save carriage hire. yet he loved it all dearly, and for the most part realized his happiness. unfortunately, there were moments when he forgot that his lot was satisfactory, and tried to improve it. his colonel sellers imagination, inherited from both sides of his family, led him into financial adventures which were generally unprofitable. there were no silver-mines in the east into which to empty money and effort, as in the old nevada days, but there were plenty of other things--inventions, stock companies, and the like. when a man came along with a patent steam-generator which would save ninety per cent. of the usual coal-supply, mark twain invested whatever bank surplus he had at the moment, and saw that money no more forever. after the steam-generator came a steam-pulley, a small affair, but powerful enough to relieve him of thirty-two thousand dollars in a brief time. a new method of marine telegraphy was offered him by the time his balance had grown again, a promising contrivance, but it failed to return the twenty-five thousand dollars invested in it by mark twain. the list of such adventures is too long to set down here. they differ somewhat, but there is one feature common to all--none of them paid. at last came a chance in which there was really a fortune. a certain alexander graham bell, an inventor, one day appeared, offering stock in an invention for carrying the human voice on an electric wire. but mark twain had grown wise, he thought. long after he wrote: "i declined. i said i did not want any more to do with wildcat speculation .... i said i didn't want it at any price. he (bell) became eager; and insisted i take five hundred dollars' worth. he said he would sell me as much as i wanted for five hundred dollars; offered to let me gather it up in my hands and measure it in a plug- hat; said i could have a whole hatful for five hundred dollars. but i was a burnt child, and resisted all these temptations--resisted them easily; went off with my money, and next day lent five thousand of it to a friend who was going to go bankrupt three days later." it was the chance of fortune thus thrown away which, perhaps, led him to take up later with an engraving process--an adventure which lasted through several years and ate up a heavy sum. altogether, these experiences in finance cost mark twain a fair-sized fortune, though, after all, they were as nothing compared with the great type-machine calamity which we shall hear of in a later chapter. xliii back to the river, with bixby fortunately, mark twain was not greatly upset by his losses. they exasperated him for the moment, perhaps, but his violence waned presently, and the whole matter was put aside forever. his work went on with slight interference. looking over his mississippi chapters one day, he was taken with a new interest in the river, and decided to make the steamboat trip between st. louis and new orleans, to report the changes that had taken place in his twenty-one years of absence. his boston publisher, osgood, agreed to accompany him, and a stenographer was engaged to take down conversations and comments. at st. louis they took passage on the steamer "gold dust"--clemens under an assumed name, though he was promptly identified. in his book he tells how the pilot recognized him and how they became friends. once, in later years, he said: "i spent most of my time up there with him. when we got down below cairo, where there was a big, full river--for it was high-water season and there was no danger of the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river--i had her most of the time on his watch. he would lie down and sleep and leave me there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that i was still a pilot, happy and care-free as i had been twenty years before." to heighten the illusion he had himself called regularly with the four-o'clock watch, in order not to miss the mornings. the points along the river were nearly all new to him, everything had changed, but during high-water this mattered little. he was a pilot again--a young fellow in his twenties, speculating on the problems of existence and reading his fortunes in the stars. the river had lost none of its charm for him. to bixby he wrote: "i'd rather be a pilot than anything else i've ever been in my life. how do you run plum point?" he met bixby at new orleans. bixby was a captain now, on the splendid new anchor line steamer "city of baton rouge," one of the last of the fine river boats. clemens made the return trip to st. louis with bixby on the "baton rouge"--almost exactly twenty-five years from their first trip together. to bixby it seemed wonderfully like those old days back in the fifties. "sam was making notes in his memorandum-book, just as he always did," said bixby, long after, to the writer of this history. mark twain decided to see the river above st. louis. he went to hannibal to spend a few days with old friends. "delightful days," he wrote home, "loitering around all day long, and talking with grayheads who were boys and girls with me thirty or forty years ago." he took boat for st. paul and saw the upper river, which he had never seen before. he thought the scenery beautiful, but he found a sadness everywhere because of the decay of the river trade. in a note-book entry he said: "the romance of boating is gone now. in hannibal the steamboatman is no longer a god." he worked at the mississippi book that summer at the farm, but did not get on very well, and it was not until the following year ( ) that it came from the press. osgood published it, and charles l. webster, who had married mark twain's niece, annie (daughter of his sister pamela), looked after the agency sales. mark twain, in fact, was preparing to become his own publisher, and this was the beginning. webster was a man of ability, and the book sold well. "life on the mississippi" is one of mark twain's best books--one of those which will live longest. the first twenty chapters are not excelled in quality anywhere in his writings. the remainder of the book has an interest of its own, but it lacks the charm of those memories of his youth--the mellow light of other days which enhances all of his better work. xliv. a reading-tour with cable every little while mark twain had a fever of play-writing, and it was about this time that he collaborated with w. d. howells on a second colonel sellers play. it was a lively combination. once to the writer howells said: "clemens took one scene and i another. we had loads of fun about it. we cracked our sides laughing over it as we went along. we thought it mighty good, and i think to this day it was mighty good." but actors and managers did not agree with them. raymond, who had played the original sellers, declared that in this play the colonel had not become merely a visionary, but a lunatic. the play was offered elsewhere, and finally mark twain produced it at his own expense. but perhaps the public agreed with raymond, for the venture did not pay. it was about a year after this (the winter of - ) that mark twain went back to the lecture platform--or rather, he joined with george w. cable in a reading-tour. cable had been giving readings on his own account from his wonderful creole stories, and had visited mark twain in hartford. while there he had been taken down with the mumps, and it was during his convalescence that the plan for a combined reading-tour had been made. this was early in the year, and the tour was to begin in the autumn. cable, meantime, having quite recovered, conceived a plan to repay mark twain's hospitality. it was to be an april-fool--a great complimentary joke. a few days before the first of the month he had a "private and confidential" circular letter printed, and mailed it to one hundred and fifty of mark twain's friends and admirers in boston, new york, and elsewhere, asking that they send the humorist a letter to arrive april , requesting his autograph. it would seem that each one receiving this letter must have responded to it, for on the morning of april st an immense pile of letters was unloaded on mark twain's table. he did not know what to make of it, and mrs. clemens, who was party to the joke, slyly watched results. they were the most absurd requests for autographs ever written. he was fooled and mystified at first, then realizing the nature and magnitude of the joke, he entered into it fully-delighted, of course, for it was really a fine compliment. some of the letters asked for autographs by the yard, some by the pound. some commanded him to sit down and copy a few chapters from "the innocents abroad." others asked that his autograph be attached to a check. john hay requested that he copy a hymn, a few hundred lines of young's "night thoughts," etc., and added: "i want my boy to form a taste for serious and elevated poetry, and it will add considerable commercial value to have it in your handwriting." altogether, the reading of the letters gave mark twain a delightful day. the platform tour of clemens and cable that fall was a success. they had good houses, and the work of these two favorites read by the authors of it made a fascinating program. they continued their tour westward as far as chicago and gave readings in hannibal and keokuk. orion clemens and his wife once more lived in keokuk, and with them jane clemens, brisk and active for her eighty-one years. she had visited hartford more than once and enjoyed "sam's fine house," but she chose the west for home. orion clemens, honest, earnest, and industrious, had somehow missed success in life. the more prosperous brother, however, made an allowance ample for all. mark twain's mother attended the keokuk reading. later, at home, when her children asked her if she could still dance (she had been a great dancer in her youth), she rose, and in spite of her fourscore, tripped as lightly as a girl. it was the last time that mark twain would see her in full health. at christmas-time cable and clemens took a fortnight's holiday, and clemens went home to hartford. there a grand surprise awaited him. mrs. clemens had made an adaptation of "the prince and the pauper" for the stage, and his children, with those of the neighborhood, had learned the parts. a good stage had been set up in george warner's home, with a pretty drop-curtain and very good scenery indeed. clemens arrived in the late afternoon, and felt an air of mystery in the house, but did not guess what it meant. by and by he was led across the grounds to george warner's home, into a large room, and placed in a seat directly fronting the stage. then presently the curtain went up, the play began, and he knew. as he watched the little performers playing so eagerly the parts of his story, he was deeply moved and gratified. it was only the beginning of "the prince and the pauper" production. the play was soon repeated, clemens himself taking the part of miles hendon. in a "biography" of her father which susy began a little later, she wrote: "papa had only three days to learn the part in, but still we were all sure he could do it . . . . i was the prince, and papa and i rehearsed two or three times a day for the three days before the appointed evening. papa acted his part beautifully, and he added to the scene, making it a good deal longer. he was inexpressibly funny, with his great slouch hat and gait--oh, such a gait!" susy's sister, clara, took the part of lady jane gray, while little jean, aged four, in the part of a court official, sat at a small table and constantly signed state papers and death-warrants. xlv. "the adventures of huckleberry finn" meantime, mark twain had really become a publisher. his nephew by marriage, charles l. webster, who, with osgood, had handled the "mississippi" book, was now established under the firm name of charles l. webster & co., samuel l. clemens being the company. clemens had another book ready, and the new firm were to handle it throughout. the new book was a story which mark twain had begun one day at quarry farm, nearly eight years before. it was to be a continuation of the adventures of tom sawyer and huck finn, especially of the latter as told by himself. but the author had no great opinion of the tale and presently laid it aside. then some seven years later, after his trip down the river, he felt again the inspiration of the old days, and the story of huck's adventures had been continued and brought to a close. the author believed in it by this time, and the firm of webster & co. was really formed for the purpose of publishing it. mark twain took an active interest in the process. from the pages of "life" he selected an artist--a young man named e. w. kemble, who would later become one of our foremost illustrators of southern character. he also gave attention to the selection of the paper and the binding--even to the method of canvassing for the sales. in a note to webster, he wrote: "get at your canvassing early and drive it with all your might . . . . if we haven't , subscriptions we simply postpone publication till we've got them." mark twain was making himself believe that he was a business man, and in this instance, at least, he seems to have made no mistake. some advanced chapters of "huck" appeared serially in the "century magazine," and the public was eager for more. by the time the "century" chapters were finished the forty thousand advance subscriptions for the book had been taken, and huck finn's own story, so long pushed aside and delayed, came grandly into its own. many grown-up readers and most critics declared that it was greater than the "tom sawyer" book, though the younger readers generally like the first book the best, it being rather more in the juvenile vein. huck's story, in fact, was soon causing quite grown-up discussions--discussions as to its psychology and moral phases, matters which do not interest small people, who are always on huck's side in everything, and quite willing that he should take any risk of body or soul for the sake of nigger jim. poor, vagrant ben blankenship, hiding his runaway negro in an illinois swamp, could not dream that his humanity would one day supply the moral episode for an immortal book! as literature, the story of "huck finn" holds a higher place than that of "tom sawyer." as stories, they stand side by side, neither complete without the other, and both certain to live as long as there are real boys and girls to read them. xlvi. publisher to general grant mark twain was now a successful publisher, but his success thus far was nothing to what lay just ahead. one evening he learned that general grant, after heavy financial disaster, had begun writing the memoirs which he (clemens) had urged him to undertake some years before. next morning he called on the general to learn the particulars. grant had contributed some articles to the "century" war series, and felt in a mood to continue the work. he had discussed with the "century" publishers the matter of a book. clemens suggested that such a book should be sold only by subscription and prophesied its enormous success. general grant was less sure. his need of money was very great and he was anxious to get as much return as possible, but his faith was not large. he was inclined to make no special efforts in the matter of publication. but mark twain prevailed. like his own colonel sellers, he talked glowingly and eloquently of millions. he first offered to direct the general to his own former subscription publisher, at hartford, then finally proposed to publish it himself, offering grant seventy per cent. of the net returns, and to pay all office expenses out of his own share. of course there could be nothing for any publisher in such an arrangement unless the sales were enormous. general grant realized this, and at first refused to consent. here was a friend offering to bankrupt himself out of pure philanthropy, a thing he could not permit. but mark twain came again and again, and finally persuaded him that purely as business proposition the offer was warranted by the certainty of great sales. so the firm of charles l. webster & co. undertook the grant book, and the old soldier, broken in health and fortune, was liberally provided with means that would enable him to finish his task with his mind at peace. he devoted himself steadily to the work--at first writing by hand, then dictating to a stenographer that webster & co. provided. his disease, cancer, made fierce ravages, but he "fought it out on that line," and wrote the last pages of his memoirs by hand when he could no longer speak aloud. mark twain was much with him, and cheered him with anecdotes and news of the advance sale of his book. in one of his memoranda of that time clemens wrote: "to-day (may ) talked with general grant about his and my first great missouri campaign, in . he surprised an empty camp near florida, missouri, on salt river, which i had been occupying a day or two before. how near he came to playing the d-- with his future publisher." at mount mcgregor, a few weeks before the end, general grant asked if any estimate could now be made of the sum which his family would obtain from his work, and was deeply comforted by clemens's prompt reply that more than one hundred thousand sets had already been sold, the author's share of which would exceed one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. clemens added that the gross return would probably be twice as much more. the last notes came from grant's hands soon after that, and a few days later, july , , his task completed, he died. to henry ward beecher clemens wrote: "one day he put his pencil aside and said there was nothing more to do. if i had been there i could have foretold the shock that struck the world three days later." in a memorandum estimate made by mark twain soon after the canvass for the grant memoirs had begun, he had prophesied that three hundred thousand sets of the book would be sold, and that he would pay general grant in royalties $ , . this prophecy was more than fulfilled. the first check paid to mrs. grant--the largest single royalty check in history--was for $ , . later payments brought her royalty return up to nearly $ . . for once, at least, mark twain's business vision had been clear. a fortune had been realized for the grant family. even his own share was considerable, for out of that great sale more than a hundred thousand dollars' profit was realized by webster & co. xlvii the high-tide of fortune that summer at quarry farm was one of the happiest they had ever known. mark twain, nearing fifty, was in the fullness of his manhood and in the brightest hour of his fortune. susy, in her childish "biography," begun at this time, gives us a picture of him. she begins: "we are a happy family! we consist of papa, mama, jean, clara, and me. it is papa i am writing about, and i shall have no trouble in not knowing what to say about him, as he is a very striking character. papa's appearance has been described many times, but very incorrectly; he has beautiful, curly, gray hair, not any too thick or any too long, just right; a roman nose, which greatly improves the beauty of his features, kind blue eyes, and a small mustache; he has a wonderfully shaped head and profile; he has a very good figure--in short, is an extraordinarily fine-looking man." "he is a very good man, and a very funny one; he has got a temper, but we all have in this family. he is the loveliest man i ever saw, or ever hope to see, and oh, so absent-minded!" we may believe this is a true picture of mark twain at fifty. he did not look young for his years, but he was still young in spirit and body. susy tells how he blew bubbles for the children, filling them with tobacco smoke. also, how he would play with the cats and come clear down from his study to see how a certain kitten was getting along. susy adds that "there are eleven cats at the farm now," and tells of the day's occupations, but the description is too long to quote. it reveals a beautiful, busy life. susy herself was a gentle, thoughtful, romantic child. one afternoon she discovered a wonderful tangle of vines and bushes, a still, shut-in corner not far from the study. she ran breathlessly to her aunt. "can i have it--can clara and i have it all for our own?" the petition was granted and the place was called helen's bower, for they were reading "thaddeus of warsaw", and the name appealed to susy's poetic fancy. something happened to the "bower"--an unromantic workman mowed it down--but by this time there was a little house there which mrs. clemens had built, just for the children. it was a complete little cottage, when furnished. there was a porch in front, with comfortable chairs. inside were also chairs, a table, dishes, shelves, a broom, even a stove--small, but practical. they called the little house "ellerslie," out of grace aguilar's "days of robert bruce." there alone, or with their langdon cousins, how many happy summers they played and dreamed away. secluded by a hillside and happy trees, overlooking the hazy, distant town, it was a world apart--a corner of story-book land. when the end of the summer came its little owners went about bidding their treasures good-by, closing and kissing the gates of ellerslie. looking back now, mark twain at fifty would seem to have been in his golden prime. his family was ideal--his surroundings idyllic. favored by fortune, beloved by millions, honored now even in the highest places, what more had life to give? when november th brought his birthday, one of the great brahmins, dr. oliver wendell holmes, wrote him a beautiful poem. andrew lang, england's foremost critic, also sent verses, while letters poured in from all sides. and mark twain realized his fortune and was disturbed by it. to a friend he said: "i am frightened at the proportions of my prosperity. it seems to me that whatever i touch turns to gold." xlviii. business difficulties. pleasanter things for the time it would seem that mark twain had given up authorship for business. the success of the grant book had filled his head with plans for others of a like nature. the memoirs of general mcclellan and general sheridan were arranged for. almost any war-book was considered a good venture. and there was another plan afoot. pope leo xiii., in his old age, had given sanction to the preparation of his memoirs, and it was to be published, with his blessing, by webster & co., of hartford. it was generally believed that such a book would have a tremendous sale, and colonel sellers himself could not have piled the figures higher than did his creator in counting his prospective returns. every catholic in the world must have a copy of the pope's book, and in america alone there were millions. webster went to rome to consult with the pope in person, and was received in private audience. mark twain's publishing firm seemed on the top wave of success. the mcclellan and sheridan books were issued, and, in due time, the life of pope leo xiii.--published simultaneously in six languages--issued from the press. a large advance sale had been guaranteed by the general canvassing agents--a fortunate thing, as it proved. for, strange as it may seem, the book did not prove a great success. it is hard to explain just why. perhaps catholics felt that there had been so many popes that the life of any particular one was no great matter. the book paid, but not largely. the mcclellan and sheridan books, likewise, were only partially successful. perhaps the public was getting tired of war memoirs. webster & co. undertook books of a general sort--travel, fiction, poetry. many of them did not pay. their business from a march of triumph had become a battle. they undertook a "library of american literature," a work of many volumes, costly to make and even more so to sell. to float this venture they were obliged to borrow large sums. it seems unfortunate that mark twain should have been disturbed by these distracting things during what should have been his literary high-tide. as it was, his business interests and cares absorbed the energy that might otherwise have gone into books. he was not entirely idle. he did an occasional magazine article or story, and he began a book which he worked at from time to time the story of a connecticut yankee who suddenly finds himself back in the days of king arthur's reign. webster was eager to publish another book by his great literary partner, but the work on it went slowly. then webster broke down from two years of overwork, and the business management fell into other hands. though still recognized as a great publishing-house, those within the firm of charles l. webster & co. knew that its prospects were not bright. furthermore, mark twain had finally invested in another patent, the type-setting machine mentioned in a former chapter, and the demands for cash to promote this venture were heavy. to his sister pamela, about the end of , he wrote: "the type-setter goes on forever at $ , a month.... we'll be through with it in three or four months, i reckon" --a false hope, for the three or four months would lengthen into as many years. but if there were clouds gathering in the business sky, they were not often allowed to cast a shadow in mark twain's home. the beautiful house in hartford was a place of welcome and merriment, of many guests and of happy children. especially of happy children: during these years--the latter half of the 'eighties--when mark twain's fortunes were on the decline, his children were at the age to have a good time, and certainly they had it. the dramatic stage which had been first set up at george warner's for the christmas "prince and pauper" performance was brought over and set up in the clemens schoolroom, and every saturday there were plays or rehearsals, and every little while there would be a grand general performance in the great library downstairs, which would accommodate just eighty-four chairs, filled by parents of the performers and invited guests. in notes dictated many years later, mark twain said: "we dined as we could, probably with a neighbor, and by quarter to eight in the evening the hickory fire in the hall was pouring a sheet of flame up the chimney, the house was in a drench of gas- light from the ground floor up, the guests were arriving, and there was a babble of hearty greetings, with not a voice in it that was not old and familiar and affectionate; and when the curtain went up, we looked out from the stage upon none but faces dear to us, none but faces that were lit up with welcome for us." he was one of the children himself, you see, and therefore on the stage with the others. katy leary, for thirty years in the family service, once said to the author: "the children were crazy about acting, and we all enjoyed it as much as they did, especially mr. clemens, who was the best actor of all. i have never known a happier household than theirs was during those years." the plays were not all given by the children. mark twain had kept up his german study, and a class met regularly in his home to struggle with the problems of der, die, and das. by and by he wrote a play for the class, "meisterschaft," a picturesque mixture of german and english, which they gave twice, with great success. it was unlike anything attempted before or since. no one but mark twain could have written it. later (january, ), in modified form, it was published in the "century magazine." it is his best work of this period. many pleasant and amusing things could be recalled from these days if one only had room. a visit with robert louis stevenson was one of them. stevenson was stopping at a small hotel near washington square, and he and clemens sat on a bench in the sunshine and talked through at least one golden afternoon. what marvelous talk that must have been! "huck finn" was one of stevenson's favorites, and once he told how he had insisted on reading the book aloud to an artist who was painting his portrait. the painter had protested at first, but presently had fallen a complete victim to huck's story. once, in a letter, stevenson wrote: "my father, an old man, has been prevailed upon to read 'roughing it' (his usual amusement being found in theology), and after one evening spent with the book he declared: 'i am frightened. it cannot be safe for a man at my time of life to laugh so much.'" mark twain had been a "mugwump" during the blame-cleveland campaign in , which means that he had supported the independent democratic candidate, grover cleveland. he was, therefore, in high favor at the white house during both cleveland administrations, and called there informally whenever business took him to washington. but on one occasion (it was his first visit after the president's marriage) there was to be a party, and mrs. clemens, who could not attend, slipped a little note into the pocket of his evening waistcoat, where he would be sure to find it when dressing, warning him as to his deportment. being presented to young mrs. cleveland, he handed her a card on which he had written, "he didn't," and asked her to sign her name below those words. mrs. cleveland protested that she must know first what it was that he hadn't done, finally agreeing to sign if he would tell her immediately all about it, which he promised to do. she signed, and he handed her mrs. clemens's note. it was very brief. it said, "don't wear your arctics in the white house." mrs. cleveland summoned a messenger and had the card mailed immediately to mrs. clemens. absent-mindedness was characteristic of mark twain. he lived so much in the world within that to him the material outer world was often vague and shadowy. once when he was knocking the balls about in the billiard-room, george, the colored butler, a favorite and privileged household character, brought up a card. so many canvassers came to sell him one thing and another that clemens promptly assumed this to be one of them. george insisted mildly, but firmly, that, though a stranger, the caller was certainly a gentleman, and clemens grumblingly descended the stairs. as he entered the parlor the caller arose and extended his hand. clemens took it rather limply, for he had noticed some water-colors and engravings leaning against the furniture as if for exhibition, and he was instantly convinced that the caller was a picture-canvasser. inquiries by the stranger as to mrs. clemens and the children did not change mark twain's conclusion. he was polite, but unresponsive, and gradually worked the visitor toward the front door. his inquiry as to the home of charles dudley warner caused him to be shown eagerly in that direction. clemens, on his way back to the billiard-room, heard mrs. clemens call him--she was ill that day: "youth!" "yes, livy." he went in for a word. "george brought me mr. b.'s card. i hope you were nice to him; the b's were so nice to us, once, in europe, while you were gone." "the b's! why, livy!" "yes, of course; and i asked him to be sure to call when he came to hartford." "well, he's been here." "oh youth, have you done anything?" "yes, of course i have. he seemed to have some pictures to sell, so i sent him over to warner's. i noticed he didn't take them with him. land sakes! livy, what can i do?" "go right after him--go quick! tell him what you have done." he went without further delay, bareheaded and in his slippers, as usual. warner and b. were in cheerful conversation. they had met before. clemens entered gaily. "oh, yes, i see! you found him all right. charlie, we met mr. b. and his wife in europe, and they made things pleasant for us. i wanted to come over here with him, but i was a good deal occupied just then. livy isn't very well, but she seems now a good deal better; so i just followed along to have a good talk, all together." he stayed an hour, and whatever bad impression had formed in b.'s mind faded long before the hour ended. returning home, clemens noticed the pictures still on the parlor floor. "george," he said, "what pictures are these that gentleman left?" "why, mr. clemens, those are our own pictures! mrs. clemens had me set them around to see how they would look in new places. the gentleman was only looking at them while he waited for you to come down." it was in june, , that yale college conferred upon mark twain the degree of master of arts. he was proud of the honor, for it was recognition of a kind that had not come to him before--remarkable recognition, when we remember how as a child he had hated all schools and study, having ended his class-room days before he was twelve years old. he could not go to new haven at the time, but later in the year made the students a delightful address. in his capacity of master of arts, he said, he had come down to new haven to institute certain college reforms. by advice, i turned my earliest attention to the greek department. i told the greek professor i had concluded to drop the use of the greek-written character, because it is so hard to spell with and so impossible to read after you get it spelt. let us draw the curtain there. i saw by what followed that nothing but early neglect saved him from being a very profane man. he said he had given advice to the mathematical department with about the same result. the astronomy department he had found in a bad way. he had decided to transfer the professor to the law department and to put a law-student in his place. a boy will be more biddable, more tractable--also cheaper. it is true he cannot be entrusted with important work at first, but he can comb the skies for nebula till he gets his hand in. it was hardly the sort of an address that the holder of a college degree is expected to make, but doctors and students alike welcomed it hilariously from mark twain. not many great things happened to mark twain during this long period of semi-literary inaction, but many interesting ones. when bill nye, the humorist, and james whitcomb riley joined themselves in an entertainment combination, mark twain introduced them to their first boston audience--a great event to them, and to boston. clemens himself gave a reading now and then, but not for money. once, when col. richard malcolm johnston and thomas nelson page were to give a reading in baltimore, page's wife fell ill, and colonel johnston wired to charles dudley warner, asking him to come in page's stead. warner, unable to go, handed the telegram to clemens, who promptly answered that he would come. they read to a packed house, and when the audience had gone and the returns were counted, an equal amount was handed to each of the authors. clemens pushed his share over to johnston, saying: "that's yours, colonel. i'm not reading for money these days." colonel johnston, to whom the sum was important, tried to thank him, but clemens only said: "never mind, colonel; it only gives me pleasure to do you that little favor. you can pass it along some day." as a matter of fact, mark twain himself was beginning to be hard pressed for funds at this time, but was strong in the faith that he would presently be a multi-millionaire. the typesetting machine was still costing a vast sum, but each week its inventor promised that a few more weeks or months would see it finished, and then a tide of wealth would come rolling in. mark twain felt that a man with ship-loads of money almost in port could not properly entertain the public for pay. he read for institutions, schools, benefits, and the like, without charge. xlix. kipling at elmira. elsie leslie. the "yankee" one day during the summer of a notable meeting took place in elmira. on a blazing forenoon a rather small and very hot young man, in a slow, sizzling hack made his way up east hill to quarry faun. he inquired for mark twain, only to be told that he was at the langdon home, down in the town which the young man had just left. so he sat for a little time on the pleasant veranda, and mrs. crane and susy clemens, who were there, brought him some cool milk and listened to him talk in a way which seemed to them very entertaining and wonderful. when he went away he left his card with a name on it strange to them--strange to the world at that time. the name was rudyard kipling. also on the card was the address allahabad, and sissy kept it, because, to her, india was fairyland. kipling went down into elmira and found mark twain. in his book "american notes" he has left an account of that visit. he claimed that he had traveled around the world to see mark twain, and his article begins: "you are a contemptible lot over yonder. some of you are commissioners, and some are lieutenant-governors, and some have the v. c., and a few are privileged to walk about the mall arm in arm with the viceroy; but i have seen mark twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand, and smoked a cigar--no, two cigars--with him, and talked with him for more than two hours!" but one should read the article entire--it is so worth while. clemens also, long after, dictated an account of the meeting. kipling came down and spent a couple of hours with me, and at the end of that time i had surprised him as much as he had surprised me--and the honors were easy. i believed that he knew more than any person i had met before, and i knew that he knew that i knew less than any person he had met before. . . when he had gone, mrs. langdon wanted to know about my visitor. i said: "he is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man--and i am the other one. between us we cover all knowledge. he knows all that can be known, and i know the rest." he was a stranger to me and all the world, and remained so for twelve months, but then he became suddenly known and universally known. . . george warner came into our library one morning, in hartford, with a small book in his hand, and asked me if i had ever heard of rudyard kipling. i said "no." he said i would hear of him very soon, and that the noise he made would be loud and continuous. . . a day or two later he brought a copy of the london "world" which had a sketch of kipling in it and a mention of the fact that he had traveled in the united states. according to the sketch he had passed through elmira. this remark, with the additional fact that he hailed from india, attracted my attention--also susy's. she went to her room and brought his card from its place in the frame of her mirror, and the quarry farm visitor stood identified. a theatrical production of "the prince and the pauper," dramatized by mrs. a. s. richardson, was one of the events of this period. it was a charming performance, even if not a great financial success, and little elsie leslie, who played the double part of the prince and tom canty, became a great favorite in the clemens home. she was also a favorite of the actor and playwright, william gillette, [ ] and once when clemens and gillette were together they decided to give the little girl a surprise--a pair of slippers, in fact, embroidered by themselves. in his presentation letter to her, mark twain wrote: "either of us could have thought of a single slipper, but it took both of us to think of two slippers. in fact, one of us did think of one slipper, and then, quick as a flash, the other thought of the other one." he apologized for his delay: "you see, it was my first attempt at art, and i couldn't rightly get the hang of it, along at first. and then i was so busy i couldn't get a chance to work at home, and they wouldn't let me embroider on the cars; they said it made the other passengers afraid. . . take the slippers and wear them next your heart, elsie dear, for every stitch in them is a testimony of the affection which two of your loyalest friends bear you. every single stitch cost us blood. i've got twice as many pores in me now as i used to have . . . . do not wear these slippers in public, dear; it would only excite envy; and, as like as not, somebody would try to shoot you." for five years mark twain had not published a book. since the appearance of "huck finn" at the end of he had given the public only an occasional magazine story or article. his business struggle and the type-setter had consumed not only his fortune, but his time and energy. now, at last, however, a book was ready. "a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court" came from the press of webster & co. at the end of , a handsome book, elaborately and strikingly illustrated by dan beard--a pretentious volume which mark twain really considered his last. "it's my swan-song, my retirement from literature permanently," he wrote howells, though certainly he was young, fifty-four, to have reached this conclusion. the story of the "yankee"--a fanciful narrative of a skilled yankee mechanic swept backward through the centuries to the dim day of arthur and his round table--is often grotesque enough in its humor, but under it all is mark twain's great humanity in fierce and noble protest against unjust laws, the tyranny of an individual or of a ruling class --oppression of any sort. as in "the prince and the pauper," the wandering heir to the throne is brought in contact with cruel injustice and misery, so in the "yankee" the king himself becomes one of a band of fettered slaves, and through degradation and horror of soul acquires mercy and humility. the "yankee in king arthur's court" is a splendidly imagined tale. edmund clarence stedman and william dean howells have ranked it very high. howells once wrote: "of all the fanciful schemes in fiction, it pleases me most." the "yankee" has not held its place in public favor with mark twain's earlier books, but it is a wonderful tale, and we cannot afford to leave it unread. when the summer came again, mark twain and his family decided for once to forego quarry farm for a season in the catskills, and presently found themselves located in a cottage at onteora in the midst of a most delightful colony. mrs. mary mapes dodge, then editor of st. nicholas, was there, and mrs. custer and brander matthews and lawrence hutton and a score of other congenial spirits. there was constant visiting from one cottage to another, with frequent gatherings at the inn, which was general headquarters. susy clemens, now eighteen, was a central figure, brilliant, eager, intense, ambitious for achievement--lacking only in physical strength. she was so flower-like, it seemed always that her fragile body must be consumed by the flame of her spirit. it was a happy summer, but it closed sadly. clemens was called to keokuk in august, to his mother's bedside. a few weeks later came the end, and jane clemens had closed her long and useful life. she was in her eighty-eighth year. a little later, at elmira, followed the death of mrs. clemens's mother, a sweet and gentle woman. [ ] gillette was originally a hartford boy. mark twain had recognized his ability, advanced him funds with which to complete his dramatic education, and gillette's first engagement seems to have been with the colonel sellers company. mark twain often advanced money in the interest of education. a young sculptor he sent to paris for two years' study. among others, he paid the way of two colored students through college. l. the machine. good-by to hartford. "joan" is begun it was hoped that the profits from the yankee would provide for all needs until the great sums which were to come from the type-setter should come rolling in. the book did yield a large return, but, alas! the hope of the type-setter, deferred year after year and month after month, never reached fulfilment. its inventor, james w. paige, whom mark twain once called "a poet, a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel," during ten years of persistent experiment had created one of the most marvelous machines ever constructed. it would set and distribute type, adjust the spaces, detect flaws--would perform, in fact, anything that a human being could do, with more exactness and far more swiftness. mark twain, himself a practical printer, seeing it in its earlier stages of development, and realizing what a fortune must come from a perfect type-setting machine, was willing to furnish his last dollar to complete the invention. but there the trouble lay. it could never be complete. it was too intricate, too much like a human being, too easy to get out of order, too hard to set right. paige, fully confident, always believed he was just on the verge of perfecting some appliance that would overcome all difficulties, and the machine finally consisted of twenty thousand minutely exact parts, each of which required expert workmanship and had to be fitted by hand. mark twain once wrote: "all other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful, mechanical miracle." this was true, and it conveys the secret of its failure. it was too much of a miracle to be reliable. sometimes it would run steadily for hours, but then some part of its delicate mechanism would fail, and days, even weeks, were required to repair it. it is all too long a story to be given here. it has been fully told elsewhere.[ ] by the end of mark twain had put in all his available capital, and was heavily in debt. he had spent one hundred and ninety thousand dollars on the machine, no penny of which would ever be returned. outside capital to carry on the enterprise was promised, but it failed him. still believing that there were "millions in it," he realized that for the present, at least, he could do no more. two things were clear: he must fall back on authorship for revenue, and he must retrench. in the present low stage of his fortunes he could no longer afford to live in the hartford house. he decided to take the family abroad, where living was cheaper, and where he might be able to work with fewer distractions. he began writing at a great rate articles and stories for the magazines. he hunted out the old play he had written with howells long before, and made a book of it, "the american claimant." then, in june, , they closed the beautiful hartford house, where for seventeen years they had found an ideal home; where the children had grown through their sweet, early life; where the world's wisest had come and gone, pausing a little to laugh with the world's greatest merrymaker. the furniture was shrouded, the curtains drawn, the light shut away. while the carriage was waiting, mrs. clemens went back and took a last look into each of the rooms, as if bidding a kind of good-by to the past. then she entered the carriage, and patrick mcaleer, who had been with mark twain and his wife since their wedding-day, drove them to the station for the last time. mark twain had a contract for six newspaper letters at one thousand dollars each. he was troubled with rheumatism in his arm, and wrote his first letter from aix-les-bains, a watering-place--a "health-factory," as he called it--and another from marienbad. they were in germany in august, and one day came to heidelberg, where they occupied their old apartment of thirteen years before, room forty, in the schloss hotel, with its far prospect of wood and hill, the winding neckar, and the blue, distant valley of the rhine. then, presently, they came to switzerland, to ouchy-lausanne, by lovely lake geneva, and here clemens left the family and, with a guide and a boatman, went drifting down the rhone in a curious, flat-bottomed craft, thinking to find material for one or more articles, possibly for a book. but drifting down that fair river through still september days, past ancient, drowsy villages, among sloping vineyards, where grapes were ripening in the tranquil sunlight, was too restful and soothing for work. in a letter home, he wrote: "it's too delicious, floating with the swift current under the awning these superb, sunshiny days, in peace and quietness. some of the curious old historical towns strangely persuade me, but it's so lovely afloat that i don't stop, but view them from the outside and sail on. . . i want to do all the rivers of europe in an open boat in summer weather." one afternoon, about fifteen miles below the city of valence, he made a discovery. dreamily observing the eastward horizon, he noticed that a distant blue mountain presented a striking profile outline of napoleon bonaparte. it seemed really a great natural wonder, and he stopped that night at the village just below, beauchastel, a hoary huddle of houses with the roofs all run together, and took a room at the little hotel, with a window looking to the eastward, from which, next morning, he saw the profile of the great stone face, wonderfully outlined against the sunrise. he was excited over his discovery, and made a descriptive note of it and an outline sketch. then, drifting farther down the river, he characteristically forgot all about it and did not remember it again for ten years, by which time he had forgotten the point on the river where the napoleon could be seen, forgotten even that he had made a note and sketch giving full details. he wished the napoleon to be found again, believing, as he declared, that it would become one of the natural wonders of the world. to travelers going to france he attempted to describe it, and some of these tried to find it; but, as he located it too far down the rhone, no one reported success, and in time he spoke of his discovery as the "lost napoleon." it was not until after mark twain's death that it was rediscovered, and then by the writer of this memoir, who, having mark twain's note-book,[ ] with its exact memoranda, on another september day, motoring up the rhone, located the blue profile of the reclining napoleon opposite the gray village of beauchastel. it is a really remarkable effigy, and deserves to be visited. clemens finished his trip at arles--a beautiful trip from beginning to end, but without literary result. when he undertook to write of it, he found that it lacked incident, and, what was worse, it lacked humor. to undertake to create both was too much. after a few chapters he put the manuscript aside, unfinished, and so it remains to this day. the clemens family spent the winter in berlin, a gay winter, with mark twain as one of the distinguished figures of the german capital. he was received everywhere and made much of. once a small, choice dinner was given him by kaiser william ii., and, later, a breakfast by the empress. his books were great favorites in the german royal family. the kaiser particularly enjoyed the "mississippi" book, while the essay on "the awful german language," in the "tramp abroad," he pronounced one of the finest pieces of humor ever written. mark twain's books were favorites, in fact, throughout germany. the door-man in his hotel had them all in his little room, and, discovering one day that their guest, samuel l. clemens, and mark twain were one, he nearly exploded with excitement. dragging the author to his small room, he pointed to the shelf: "there," he said, "you wrote them! i've found it out. ach! i did not know it before, and i ask a million pardons." affairs were not going well in america, and in june clemens made a trip over to see what could be done. probably he did very little, and he was back presently at nauheim, a watering-place, where he was able to work rather quietly. he began two stories--one of them, "the extraordinary twins," which was the first form of "pudd'nhead wilson;" the other, "tom sawyer abroad," for "st. nicholas." twichell came to nauheim during the summer, and one day he and clemens ran over to homburg, not far away. the prince of wales (later king edward vii.) was there, and clemens and twichell, walking in the park, met the prince with the british ambassador, and were presented. twichell, in an account of the meeting, said: "the meeting between the prince and mark was a most cordial one on both sides, and presently the prince took mark twain's arm and the two marched up and down, talking earnestly together, the prince solid, erect, and soldier-like; clemens weaving along in his curious, swinging gait, in full tide of talk, and brandishing a sun umbrella of the most scandalous description." at villa viviani, an old, old mansion outside of florence, on the hill toward settignano, mark twain finished "tom sawyer abroad," also "pudd'nhead wilson", and wrote the first half of a book that really had its beginning on the day when, an apprentice-boy in hannibal, he had found a stray leaf from the pathetic story of "joan of arc." all his life she had been his idol, and he had meant some day to write of her. now, in this weather-stained old palace, looking down on florence, medieval and hazy, and across to the villa-dotted hills, he began one of the most beautiful stories ever written, "the personal recollections of joan of arc." he wrote in the first person, assuming the character of joan's secretary, sieur louis de conte, who in his old age is telling the great tale of the maid of orleans. it was mark twain's purpose, this time, to publish anonymously. walking the floor one day at viviani, and smoking vigorously, he said to mrs. clemens and susy: "i shall never be accepted seriously over my own signature. people always want to laugh over what i write, and are disappointed if they don't find a joke in it. this is to be a serious book. it means more to me than anything else i have ever undertaken. i shall write it anonymously." so it was that the gentle sieur de conte took up the pen, and the tale of joan was begun in the ancient garden of viviani, a setting appropriate to its lovely form. he wrote rapidly when once his plan was perfected and his material arranged. the reading of his youth and manhood was now recalled, not merely as reading, but as remembered reality. it was as if he were truly the old sieur de conte, saturated with memories, pouring out the tender, tragic tale. in six weeks he had written one hundred thousand words --remarkable progress at any time, the more so when we consider that some of the authorities he consulted were in a foreign tongue. he had always more or less kept up his study of french, begun so long ago on the river, and it stood him now in good stead. still, it was never easy for him, and the multitude of notes that still exist along the margin of his french authorities show the magnitude of his work. others of the family went down into the city almost daily, but he stayed in the still garden with joan. florence and its suburbs were full of delightful people, some of them old friends. there were luncheons, dinners, teas, dances, and the like always in progress, but he resisted most of these things, preferring to remain the quaint old sieur de conte, following again the banner of the maid of orleans marshaling her twilight armies across his illumined page. but the next spring, march, , he was obliged to put aside the manuscript and hurry to america again, fruitlessly, of course, for a financial stress was on the land; the business of webster & co. was on the down-grade--nothing could save it. there was new hope in the old type-setting machine, but his faith in the resurrection was not strong. the strain of his affairs was telling on him. the business owed a great sum, with no prospect of relief. back in europe again, mark twain wrote f. d. hall, his business manager in new york: "i am terribly tired of business. i am by nature and disposition unfit for it, and i want to get out of it. i am standing on a volcano. get me out of business." tantalizing letters continued to come, holding out hope in the business --the machine--in any straw that promised a little support through the financial storm. again he wrote hall: "great scott, but it's a long year for you and me! i never knew the almanac to drag so. . . i watch for your letters hungrily--just as i used to watch for the telegram saying the machine was finished --but when "next week certainly" suddenly swelled into 'three weeks sure,' i recognized the old familiar tune i used to hear so much. w. don't know what sick-heartedness is, but he is in a fair way to find out." they closed viviani in june and returned to germany. by the end of august clemens could stand no longer the strain of his american affairs, and, leaving the family at some german baths, he once more sailed for new york. [ ] at mark twain's death his various literary effects passed into the hands of his biographer and literary executor, the present writer. li. the failure of webster & co. around the world. sorrow in a room at the players club--"a cheap room," he wrote home, "at $ . per day"--mark twain spent the winter, hoping against hope to weather the financial storm. his fortunes were at a lower ebb than ever before; lower even than during those bleak mining days among the esmeralda hills. then there had been no one but himself, and he was young. now, at fifty-eight, he had precious lives dependent upon him, and he was weighed down by debt. the liabilities of his firm were fully two hundred thousand dollars--sixty thousand of which were owing to mrs. clemens for money advanced--but the large remaining sum was due to banks, printers, binders, and the manufacturers of paper. a panic was on the land and there was no business. what he was to do clemens did not know. he spent most of his days in his room, trying to write, and succeeded in finishing several magazine articles. outwardly cheerful, he hid the bitterness of his situation. a few, however, knew the true state of his affairs. one of these one night introduced him to henry h. rogers, the standard oil millionaire. "mr. clemens," said mr. rogers, "i was one of your early admirers. i heard you lecture a long time ago, on the sandwich islands." they sat down at a table, and mark twain told amusing stories. rogers was in a perpetual gale of laughter. they became friends from that evening, and in due time the author had confessed to the financier all his business worries. "you had better let me look into things a little," rogers said, and he advised clemens to "stop walking the floor." it was characteristic of mark twain to be willing to unload his affairs upon any one that he thought able to bear the burden. he became a new man overnight. with henry rogers in charge, life was once more worth while. he accepted invitations from the rogers family and from many others, and was presently so gay, so widely sought, and seen in so many places that one of his acquaintances, "jamie" dodge, dubbed him the "belle of new york." henry rogers, meanwhile, was "looking into things." he had reasonable faith in the type-machine, and advanced a large sum on the chance of its proving a success. this, of course, lifted mark twain quite into the clouds. daily he wrote and cabled all sorts of glowing hopes to his family, then in paris. once he wrote: "the ship is in sight now .... when the anchor is down, then i shall say: farewell--a long farewell--to business! i will never touch it again! i will live in literature, i will wallow in it, revel in it; i will swim in ink!" once he cabled, "expect good news in ten days"; and a little later, "look out for good news"; and in a few days, "nearing success." those sellers-like messages could not but appeal, mrs. clemens's sense of humor, even in those dark days. to her sister she wrote, "they make me laugh, for they are so like my beloved colonel." the affairs of webster & co. mr. rogers found a bad way. when, at last, in april, , the crisis came--a demand by the chief creditors for payment--he advised immediate assignment as the only course. so the firm of webster & co. closed its doors. the business which less than ten years before had begun so prosperously had ended in failure. mark twain, nearing fifty-nine, was bankrupt. when all the firm's effects had been sold and applied on the counts, he was still more than seventy thousand dollars in debt. friends stepped in and offered to lend him money, but he declined these offers. through mr. rogers a basis of settlement at fifty cents on the dollar was arranged, and mark twain said, "give me time, and i will pay the other fifty." no one but his wife and mr. rogers, however, believed that at his age he would be able to make good the promise. many advised him not to attempt it, but to settle once and for all on the legal basis as arranged. sometimes, in moments of despondency, he almost surrendered. once he said: "i need not dream of paying it. i never could manage it." but these were only the hard moments. for the most part he kept up good heart and confidence. it is true that he now believed again in the future of the type-setter, and that returns from it would pay him out of bankruptcy. but later in the year this final hope was taken away. mr. rogers wrote to him that in the final test the machine had failed to prove itself practical and that the whole project had been finally and permanently abandoned. the shock of disappointment was heavy for the moment, but then it was over--completely over--for that old mechanical demon, that vampire of invention that had sapped his fortune so long, was laid at last. the worst had happened; there was nothing more to dread. within a week mark twain (he was now back in paris with the family) had settled down to work once more on the "recollections of joan," and all mention and memory of the type-setter was forever put away. the machine stands to-day in the sibley college of engineering, where it is exhibited as the costliest piece of mechanism for its size ever constructed. mark twain once received a letter from an author who had written a book to assist inventors and patentees, asking for his indorsement. he replied: "dear sir,--i have, as you say, been interested in patents and patentees. if your book tells how to exterminate inventors, send me nine editions. send them by express. "very truly yours, "s. l. clemens." those were economical days. there was no income except from the old books, and at the time this was not large. the clemens family, however, was cheerful, and mark twain was once more in splendid working form. the story of joan hurried to its tragic conclusion. each night he read to the family what he had written that day, and susy, who was easily moved, would say, "wait--wait till i get my handkerchief," and one night when the last pages had been written and read, and the fearful scene at rouen had been depicted, susy wrote in her diary, "to-night joan of arc was burned at the stake!" meaning that the book was finished. susy herself had fine literary taste, and might have written had not her greater purpose been to sing. there are fragments of her writing that show the true literary touch. both susy and her father cared more for joan than for any of the former books. to mr. rogers clemens wrote, "possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing--it was mitten for love." it was placed serially with "harper's magazine" and appeared anonymously, but the public soon identified the inimitable touch of mark twain. it was now the spring of , and mark twain had decided upon a new plan to restore his fortunes. platform work had always paid him well, and though he disliked it now more than ever, he had resolved upon something unheard of in that line--nothing less, in fact, than a platform tour around the world. in may, with the family, he sailed for america, and after a month or two of rest at quarry farm he set out with mrs. clemens and clara and with his american agent, j. b. pond, for the pacific coast. susy and jean remained behind with their aunt at the farm. the travelers left elmira at night, and they always remembered the picture of susy, standing under the electric light of the railway platform, waving them good-by. mark twain's tour of the world was a success from the beginning. everywhere he was received with splendid honors--in america, in australia, in new zealand, in india, in ceylon, in south africa--wherever he went his welcome was a grand ovation, his theaters and halls were never large enough to hold his audiences. with the possible exception of general grant's long tour in - there had hardly been a more gorgeous progress than mark twain's trip around the world. everywhere they were overwhelmed with attention and gifts. we cannot begin to tell the story of that journey here. in "following the equator" the author himself tells it in his own delightful fashion. from time to time along the way mark twain forwarded his accumulated profits to mr. rogers to apply against his debts, and by the time they sailed from south africa the sum was large enough to encourage him to believe that, with the royalties to be derived from the book he would write of his travels, he might be able to pay in full and so face the world once more a free man. their long trip--it had lasted a full year --was nearing its end. they would spend the winter in london--susy and jean were notified to join them there. they would all be reunited again. the outlook seemed bright once more. they reached england the last of july. susy and jean, with katy leary, were to arrive on the th of august. but the th did not bring them --it brought, instead, a letter. susy was not well, the letter said; the sailing had been postponed. the letter added that it was nothing serious, but her parents cabled at once for later news. receiving no satisfactory answer, mrs. clemens, full of forebodings, prepared to sail with clara for america. clemens would remain in london to arrange for the winter residence. a cable came, saying susy's recovery would be slow but certain. mrs. clemens and clara sailed immediately. in some notes he once dictated, mark twain said: "that was the th of august, . three days later, when my wife and clara were about half-way across the ocean, i was standing in our dining-room, thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. it said, 'susy was peacefully released to-day.'" mark twain's life had contained other tragedies, but no other that equaled this one. the dead girl had been his heart's pride; it was a year since they parted, and now he knew he would never see her again. the blow had found him alone and among strangers. in that day he could not even reach out to those upon the ocean, drawing daily nearer to the heartbreak. susy clemens had died in the old hartford home. she had been well far a time at the farm, but then her health had declined. she worked continuously at her singing lessons and over-tried her strength. then she went on a visit to mrs. charles dudley warner, in hartford; but she did not rest, working harder than ever at her singing. finally she was told that she must consult a physician. the doctor came and prescribed soothing remedies, and advised that she have the rest and quiet of her own home. mrs. crane came from elmira, also her uncle charles langdon. but susy became worse, and a few days later her malady was pronounced meningitis. this was the th of august, the day that her mother and clara sailed from england. she was delirious and burning with fever, but at last sank into unconsciousness. she died three days later, and on the night that mrs. clemens and clara arrived was taken to elmira for burial. they laid her beside the little brother that had died so long before, and ordered a headstone with some lines which they had found in australia, written by robert richardson: warm summer sun, shine kindly here; warm southern wind, blow softly here; green sod above, lie light, lie light! --good night, dear heart, good night, good night. lii. european economies with clara and jean, mrs. clemens returned to england, and in a modest house on tedworth square, a secluded corner of london, the stricken family hid themselves away for the winter. few, even of their closest friends, knew of their whereabouts. in time the report was circulated that mask twain, old, sick, and deserted by his family, was living in poverty, toiling to pay his debts. through the london publishers a distant cousin, dr. james clemens, of st. louis, located the house on tedworth square, and wrote, offering assistance. he was invited to call, and found a quiet place--the life there simple--but not poverty. by and by there was another report--this time that mark twain was dead. a reporter found his way to tedworth square, and, being received by mark twain himself, asked what he should say. clemens regarded him gravely, then, in his slow, nasal drawl, "say--that the report of my death--has been grossly--exaggerated, "a remark that a day later was amusing both hemispheres. he could not help his humor; it was his natural form of utterance--the medium for conveying fact, fiction, satire, philosophy. whatever his depth of despair, the quaint surprise of speech would come, and it would be so until his last day. by november he was at work on his book of travel, which he first thought of calling "around the world." he went out not at all that winter, and the work progressed steadily, and was complete by the following may ( ). meantime, during his trip around the world, mark twain's publishers had issued two volumes of his work--the "joan of arc" book, and another "tom sawyer" book, the latter volume combining two rather short stories, "tom sawyer abroad," published serially in st. nicholas, and "tom sawyer, detective." the "joan of arc" book, the tenderest and most exquisite of all mark twain's work--a tale told with the deepest sympathy and the rarest delicacy--was dedicated by the author to his wife, as being the only piece of his writing which he considered worthy of this honor. he regarded it as his best book, and this was an opinion that did not change. twelve years later--it was on his seventy-third birthday--he wrote as his final verdict, november , : "i like the joan of arc best of all my books; and it is the best; i know it perfectly well, and, besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation and two years of writing. the others needed no preparation and got none. mark twain." the public at first did not agree with the author's estimate, and the demand for the book was not large. but the public amended its opinion. the demand for "joan" increased with each year until its sales ranked with the most popular of mark twain's books. the new stories of tom and huck have never been as popular as the earlier adventures of this pair of heroes. the shorter stories are less important and perhaps less alive, but they are certainly very readable tales, and nobody but mark twain could have written them. clemens began some new stories when his travel book was out of the way, but presently with the family was on the way to switzerland for the summer. they lived at weggis, on lake lucerne, in the villa buhlegg--a very modest five-franc-a-day pension, for they were economizing and putting away money for the debts. mark twain was not in a mood for work, and, besides, proofs of the new book "following the equator," as it is now called--were coming steadily. but on the anniversary of susy's death (august th) he wrote a poem, "in memoriam," in which he touched a literary height never before attained. it was published in "harper's magazine," and now appears in his collected works. across from villa buhlegg on the lake-front there was a small shaded inclosure where he loved to sit and look out on the blue water and lofty mountains, one of which, rigi, he and twichell had climbed nineteen years before. the little retreat is still there, and to-day one of the trees bears a tablet (in german), "mark twain's rest." autumn found the family in vienna, located for the winter at the hotel metropole. mrs. clemens realized that her daughters must no longer be deprived of social and artistic advantages. for herself, she longed only for retirement. vienna is always a gay city, a center of art and culture and splendid social functions. from the moment of his arrival, mark twain and his family were in the midst of affairs. their room at the metropole became an assembling-place for distinguished members of the several circles that go to make up the dazzling viennese life. mrs. clemens, to her sister in america, once wrote: "such funny combinations are here sometimes: one duke, several counts, several writers, several barons, two princes, newspaper women, etc." mark twain found himself the literary lion of the austrian capital. every club entertained him and roared with delight at his german speeches. wherever he appeared on the streets he was recognized. "let him pass! don't you see it is herr mark twain!" commanded an officer to a guard who, in the midst of a great assemblage, had presumed to bar the way. liii. mark twain pays his debts mark twain wrote much and well during this period, in spite of his social life. his article "concerning the jews" was written that first winter in vienna--a fine piece of special pleading; also the greatest of his short stories--one of the greatest of all short stories--"the man that corrupted hadleyburg." but there were good reasons why he should write better now; his mind was free of a mighty load--he had paid his debts! soon after his arrival in vienna he had written to mr. rogers: "let us begin on those debts. i cannot bear the weight any longer. it totally unfits me for work." he had accumulated a large sum for the purpose, and the royalties from the new book were beginning to roll in. payment of the debts was begun. at the end of december he wrote again: "land, we are glad to see those debts diminishing. for the first time in my life i am getting more pleasure from paying money out than from pulling it in." a few days later he wrote to howells that he had "turned the corner"; and again: "we've lived close to the bone and saved every cent we could, and there's no undisputed claim now that we can't cash . . . . i hope you will never get the like of the load saddled on to you that was saddled on to me, three years ago. and yet there is such a solid pleasure in paying the things that i reckon it is worth while to get into that kind of a hobble, after all. mrs. clemens gets millions of delight out of it, and the children have never uttered one complaint about the scrimping from the beginning." by the end of january, , clemens had accumulated enough money to make the final payments to his creditors. at the time of his failure he had given himself five years to achieve this result. but he had needed less than four. a report from mr. rogers showed that a balance of thirteen thousand dollars would remain to his credit after the last accounts were wiped away. clemens had tried to keep his money affairs out of the newspapers, but the payment of the final claims could not be concealed, and the press made the most of it. head-lines shouted it. editorials heralded mark twain as a second walter scott, because scott, too, had labored to lift a great burden of debt. never had mark twain been so beloved by his fellow-men. one might suppose now that he had had enough of invention and commercial enterprises of every sort--that is, one who did not know mark twain might suppose this--but it would not be true. within a month after his debts were paid he was negotiating with the austrian inventor szczepanik for the american rights in a wonderful carpet-pattern machine, and, sellers-like, was planning to organize a company with a capital of fifteen hundred million dollars to control the carpet-weaving industries of the world. he wrote to mr. rogers about the great scheme, inviting the standard oil to "come in"; but the plan failed to bear the test of mr. rogers's investigation and was heard of no more. samuel clemens's obligation to henry rogers was very great, but it was not quite the obligation that many supposed it to be. it was often asserted that the financier lent, even gave, the humorist large sums, and pointed out opportunities for speculation. no part of this statement is true. mr. rogers neither lent nor gave mark twain money, and never allowed him to speculate when he could prevent it. he sometimes invested mark twain's own funds for him, but he never bought for him a share of stock without money in hand to pay for it in full--money belonging to, and earned by, clemens himself. what henry rogers did give to mark twain was his priceless counsel and time--gifts more precious than any mere sum of money--favors that mark twain could accept without humiliation. he did accept them, and never ceased to be grateful. he rarely wrote without expressing his gratitude, and we get the size of mark twain's obligation when in one letter we read: "i have abundant peace of mind again--no sense of burden. work is become a pleasure--it is not labor any longer." he wrote much and well, mainly magazine articles, including some of those chapters later gathered it his book on "christian science." he reveled like a boy in his new freedom and fortunes, in the lavish honors paid him, in the rich circumstance of viennese life. but always just beneath the surface were unforgetable sorrows. his face in repose was always sad. once, after writing to howells of his successes, he added: "all those things might move and interest one. but how desperately more i have been moved to-night by the thought of a little old copy in the nursery of 'at the back of the north wind.' oh, what happy days they were when that book was read, and how susy loved it!" liv. return after exile news came to vienna of the death of orion clemens, at the age of seventy-two. orion had died as he had lived--a gentle dreamer, always with a new plan. he had not been sick at all. one morning early he had seated himself at a table, with pencil and paper, and was putting down the details of his latest project, when death came--kindly, in the moment of new hope. he was a generous, upright man, beloved by all who understood him. the clemenses remained two winters in vienna, spending the second at the hotel krantz, where their rooms were larger and finer than at the metropole, and even more crowded with notabilities. their salon acquired the name of the "second embassy," and mark twain was, in fact, the most representative american in the austrian capital. it became the fashion to consult him on every question of public interest, his comments, whether serious or otherwise, being always worth printing. when european disarmament was proposed, editor william t. stead, of the "review of reviews," wrote for his opinion. he replied: "dear mr. stead,--the tsar is ready to disarm. i am ready to disarm. collect the others; it should not be much of a task now. mark twain." he refused offers of many sorts. he declined ten thousand dollars for a tobacco endorsement, though he liked the tobacco well enough. he declined ten thousand dollars a year for five years to lend his name as editor of a humorous periodical. he declined another ten thousand for ten lectures, and another offer for fifty lectures at the same rates --that is, one thousand dollars per night. he could get along without these sums, he said, and still preserve some remnants of his self-respect. it was may, , when clemens and his family left vienna. they spent a summer in sweden on account of the health of jean clemens, and located in london apartments-- wellington court--for the winter. then followed a summer at beautiful dollis hill, an old house where gladstone had often visited, on a shady hilltop just outside of london. the city had not quite enclosed the place then, and there were spreading oaks, a pond with lily-pads, and wide spaces of grassy lawn. the place to-day is converted into a public garden called gladstone park. writing to twichell in mid-summer, clemens said: "i am the only person who is ever in the house in the daytime, but i am working, and deep in the luxury of it. but there is one tremendous defect. levy is all so enchanted with the place and so in love with it that she doesn't know how she is going to tear herself away from it." however, there was one still greater attraction than dollis hill, and that was america--home. mark twain at sixty-five and a free man once more had decided to return to his native land. they closed dollis hill at the end of september, and october , , sailed on the minnehaha for new york, bidding good-by, as mark twain believed, and hoped, to foreign travel. nine days later, to a reporter who greeted him on the ship, he said: "if i ever get ashore i am going to break both of my legs so i can't get away again." lv. a prophet at home new york tried to outdo vienna and london in honoring mark twain. every newspaper was filled with the story of his great fight against debt, and his triumph. "he had behaved like walter scott," writes howells, "as millions rejoiced to know who had not known how walter scott behaved till they knew it was like clemens." clubs and societies vied with one another in offering him grand entertainments. literary and lecture proposals poured in. he was offered at the rate of a dollar a word for his writing--he could name his own terms for lectures. these sensational offers did not tempt him. he was sick of the platform. he made a dinner speech here and there--always an event--but he gave no lectures or readings for profit. his literary work he confined to a few magazines, and presently concluded an arrangement with "harper & brothers" for whatever he might write, the payment to be twenty (later thirty) cents per word. he arranged with the same firm for the publication of all his books, by this time collected in uniform edition. he wished his affairs to be settled as nearly as might be. his desire was freedom from care. also he would have liked a period of quiet and rest, but that was impossible. he realized that the multitude of honors tendered him was in a sense a vast compliment which he could not entirely refuse. howells writes that mark twain's countrymen "kept it up past all precedent," and in return mark twain tried to do his part. "his friends saw that he was wearing himself out," adds howells, and certain it is that he grew thin and pale and had a hacking cough. once to richard watson gilder he wrote: "in bed with a chest cold and other company. "dear gilder,--i can't. if i were a well man i could explain with this pencil, but in the cir--ces i will leave it all to your imagination. "was it grady that killed himself trying to do all the dining and speeching? no, old man, no, no! "ever yours, mark." in the various dinner speeches and other utterances made by mark twain at this time, his hearers recognized a new and great seriousness of purpose. it was not really new, only, perhaps, more emphasized. he still made them laugh, but he insisted on making them think, too. he preached a new gospel of patriotism--not the patriotism that means a boisterous cheering of the stars and stripes wherever unfurled, but the patriotism that proposes to keep the stars and stripes clean and worth shouting for. in one place he said: "we teach the boys to atrophy their independence. we teach them to take their patriotism at second hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter --exactly as boys under monarchies are taught, and have always been taught." he protested against the blind allegiance of monarchies. he was seldom "with the largest crowd" himself. writing much of our foreign affairs, then in a good deal of a muddle, he assailed so fearlessly and fiercely measures which he held to be unjust that he was caricatured as an armed knight on a charger and as huck finn with a gun. but he was not always warlike. one of the speeches he made that winter was with col. henry watterson, a former confederate soldier, at a lincoln birthday memorial at carnegie hall. "think of it!" he wrote twichell, "two old rebels functioning there; i as president and watterson as orator of the day. things have changed somewhat in these forty years, thank god!" the clemens household did not go back to hartford. during their early years abroad it had been mrs. clemens's dream to return and open the beautiful home, with everything the same as before. the death of susy had changed all this. the mother had grown more and more to feel that she could not bear the sorrow of susy's absence in the familiar rooms. after a trip which clemens himself made to hartford, he wrote, "i realize that if we ever enter the house again to live, our hearts will break." so they did not go back. mrs. clemens had seen it for the last time on that day when the carriage waited while she went back to take a last look into the vacant rooms. they had taken a house at west tenth street for the winter, and when summer came they went to a log cabin on saranac lake, which they called "the lair." here mark twain wrote "a double-barreled detective story," a not very successful burlesque of sherlock holmes. but most of the time that summer he loafed and rested, as was his right. once during the summer he went on a cruise with h. h. rogers, speaker "tom" reed, and others on mr. rogers's yacht. lvi. honored by missouri the family did not return to new york. they took a beautiful house at riverdale on the hudson--the old appleton homestead. here they established themselves and settled down for american residence. they would have bought the appleton place, but the price was beyond their reach. it was in the autumn of that mark twain settled in riverdale. in june of the following year he was summoned west to receive the degree of ll.d. from the university of his native state. he made the journey a sort of last general visit to old associations and friends. in st. louis he saw horace bixby, fresh, wiry, and capable as he had been forty-five years before. clemens said: "i have become an old man. you are still thirty-five." they went over to the rooms of the pilots' association, where the river-men gathered in force to celebrate his return. then he took train for hannibal. he spent several days in hannibal and saw laura hawkins--mrs. frazer, and a widow now--and john briggs, an old man, and john robards, who had worn the golden curls and the medal for good conduct. they drove him to the old house on hill street, where once he had lived and set type; photographers were there and photographed him standing at the front door. "it all seems so small to me," he said, as he looked through the house. "a boy's home is a big place to him. i suppose if i should come back again ten years from now it would be the size of a bird-house." he did not see "huck"--torn blankenship had not lived in hannibal for many years. but he was driven to all the familiar haunts--to lover's leap, the cave, and the rest; and sunday afternoon, with john briggs, he walked over holliday's hill--the "cardiff hill" of "tom sawyer." it was just such a day, as the one when they had damaged a cooper shop and so nearly finished the old negro driver. a good deal more than fifty years had passed since then, and now here they were once more--tom sawyer and joe harper--two old men, the hills still fresh and green, the river rippling in the sun. looking across to the illinois shore and the green islands where they had played, and to lover's leap on the south, the man who had been sam clemens said: "john, that is one of the loveliest sights i ever saw. down there is the place we used to swim, and yonder is where a man was drowned, and there's where the steamboat sank. down there on lover's leap is where the millerites put on their robes one night to go to heaven. none of them went that night, but i suppose most of them have gone now." john briggs said, "sam, do you remember the day we stole peaches from old man price, and one of his bow-legged niggers came after us with dogs, and how we made up our minds we'd catch that nigger and drown him?" and so they talked on of this thing and that, and by and by drove along the river, and sam clemens pointed out the place where he swam it and was taken with a cramp on the return. "once near the shore i thought i would let down," he said, "but was afraid to, knowing that if the water was deep i was a goner, but finally my knee struck the sand and i crawled out. that was the closest call i ever had." they drove by a place where a haunted house had stood. they drank from a well they had always known--from the bucket, as they had always drunk --talking, always talking, touching with lingering fondness that most beautiful and safest of all our possessions--the past. "sam," said john, when they parted, "this is probably the last time we shall meet on earth. god bless you. perhaps somewhere we shall renew our friendship." "john," was the answer, "this day has been worth a thousand dollars to me. we were like brothers once, and i feel that we are the same now. good-by, john. i'll try to meet you somewhere." clemens left next day for columbia, where the university is located. at each station a crowd had gathered to cheer and wave as the train pulled in and to offer him flowers. sometimes he tried to say a few words, but his voice would not come. this was more than even tom sawyer had dreamed. certainly there is something deeply touching in the recognition of one's native state; the return of the boy who has set out unknown to battle with life and who is called back to be crowned is unlike any other home-coming--more dramatic, more moving. next day at the university mark twain, summoned before the crowded assembly-hall to receive his degree, stepped out to the center of the stage and paused. he seemed in doubt as to whether he should make a speech or only express his thanks for the honor received. suddenly and without signal the great audience rose and stood in silence at his feet. he bowed but he could not speak. then the vast assembly began a peculiar chant, spelling out slowly the word m-i-s-s-o-u-r-i, with a pause between each letter. it was tremendously impressive. mark twain was not left in doubt as to what was required of him when the chant ended. the audience demanded a speech--a speech, and he made them one--such a speech as no one there would forget to his dying day. back in st. louis, he attended the rechristening of the st. louis harbor boat; it had been previously called the "st. louis," but it was now to be called the "mark twain." lvii. the close of a beautiful life life which had begun very cheerfully at riverdale ended sadly enough. in august, at york harbor, maine, mrs. clemens's health failed and she was brought home an invalid, confined almost entirely to her room. she had been always the life, the center, the mainspring of the household. now she must not even be consulted--hardly visited. on her bad days--and they were many--clemens, sad and anxious, spent most of his time lingering about her door, waiting for news, or until he was permitted to see her for a brief moment. in his memorandum-book of that period he wrote: "our dear prisoner is where she is through overwork--day and night devotion to the children and me. we did not know how to value it. we know now." and on the margin of a letter praising him for what he had done for the world's enjoyment, and for his triumph over debt, he wrote: "livy never gets her share of those applauses, but it is because the people do not know. yet she is entitled to the lion's share." she improved during the winter, but very slowly. her husband wrote in his diary: "feb. , --thirty-third wedding anniversary. i was allowed to see livy five minutes this morning, in honor of the day." mrs. clemens had always remembered affectionately their winter in florence of ten years before, and she now expressed the feeling that if she were in florence again she would be better. the doctors approved, and it was decided that she should be taken there as soon as she was strong enough to travel. she had so far improved by june that they journeyed to elmira, where in the quiet rest of quarry farm her strength returned somewhat and the hope of her recovery was strong. mark twain wrote a story that summer in elmira, in the little octagonal study, shut in now by trees and overgrown with vines. "a dog's tale," a pathetic plea against vivisection, was the last story written in the little retreat that had seen the beginning of "tom sawyer" twenty-nine years before. there was a feeling that the stay in europe was this time to be permanent. on one of the first days of october clemens wrote in his note-book: "to-day i place flowers on susy's grave--for the last time, probably --and read the words, 'good night, dear heart, good night, good night.'" they sailed on the th, by way of naples and genoa, and were presently installed in the villa reale di quarto, a fine old italian palace, in an ancient garden looking out over florence toward vallombrosa and the chianti hills. it was a beautiful spot, though its aging walls and cypresses and matted vines gave it a rather mournful look. mrs. clemens's health improved there for a time, in spite of dull, rainy, depressing weather; so much so that in may, when the warmth and sun came back, clemens was driving about the country, seeking a villa that he might buy for a home. on one of these days--it was a sunday in early june, the th--when he had been out with jean, and had found a villa which he believed would fill all their requirements, he came home full of enthusiasm and hope, eager to tell the patient about the discovery. certainly she seemed better. a day or two before she had been wheeled out on the terrace to enjoy the wonder of early italian summer. he found her bright and cheerful, anxious to hear all their plans for the new home. he stayed with her alone through the dinner hour, and their talk was as in the old days. summoned to go at last, he chided himself for staying so long; but she said there was no harm and kissed him, saying, "you will come back?" and he answered "yes, to say good night," meaning at half-past nine, as was the permitted custom. he stood a moment at the door, throwing kisses to her, and she returned them, her face bright with smiles. he was so full of hope--they were going to be happy again. long ago he had been in the habit of singing jubilee songs to the children. he went upstairs now to the piano and played the chorus and sang "swing low, sweet chariot," and "my lord he calls me." he stopped then, but jean, who had come in, asked him to go on. mrs. clemens, from her room, heard the music and said to katy leary: "he is singing a good-night carol to me." the music ceased presently. a moment later she asked to be lifted up. almost in that instant life slipped away without a sound. clemens, just then coming to say good-night, saw a little group gathered about her bed, and heard clara ask: "katy, is it true? oh, katy, is it true?" in his note-book that night he wrote: "at a quarter-past nine this evening she that was the life of my life passed to the relief and the peace of death, after twenty-two months of unjust and unearned suffering. i first saw her thirty-seven years ago, and now i have looked upon her face for the last time.... i was full of remorse for things done and said in these thirty- four years of married life that have hurt livy's heart." and to howells a few days later: "to-day, treasured in her worn, old testament, i found a dear and gentle letter from you dated far rockaway, september , , about our poor susy's death. i am tired and old; i wish i were with livy." they brought her to america; and from the house, and the rooms, where she had been made a bride bore her to a grave beside susy and little langdon. lviii. mark twain at seventy in a small cottage belonging to richard watson gilder, at tyringham, massachusetts, samuel clemens and his daughters tried to plan for the future. mrs. clemens had always been the directing force--they were lost without her. they finally took a house in new york city, no. fifth avenue, at the corner of ninth street, installed the familiar furnishings, and tried once more to establish a home. the house was handsome within and without--a proper residence for a venerable author and sage--a suitable setting for mark twain. but it was lonely for him. it lacked soul--comfort that would reach the heart. he added presently a great aeolian orchestrelle, with a variety of music for his different moods. sometimes he played it himself, though oftener his secretary played to him. he went out little that winter--seeing only a few old and intimate friends. his writing, such as it was, was of a serious nature, protests against oppression and injustice in a variety of forms. once he wrote a "war prayer," supposed to have been made by a mysterious, white-robed stranger who enters a church during those ceremonies that precede the marching of the nation's armies to battle. the minister had prayed for victory, a prayer which the stranger interprets as a petition that the enemy's country be laid waste, its soldiers be torn by shells, its people turned out roofless, to wander through their desolated land in rags and hunger. it was a scathing arraignment of war, a prophecy, indeed, which to-day has been literally fulfilled. he did not print it, because then it would have been regarded as sacrilege. when summer came again, in a beautiful house at dublin, new hampshire, on the monadnock slope, he seemed to get back into the old swing of work, and wrote that pathetic story, "a horse's tale." also "eve's diary," which, under its humor, is filled with tenderness, and he began a wildly fantastic tale entitled "three thousand years among the microbes," a satire in which gulliver is outdone. he never finished it. he never could finish it, for it ran off into amazing by-paths that led nowhere, and the tale was lost. yet he always meant to get at it again some day and make order out of chaos. old friends were dying, and mark twain grew more and more lonely. "my section of the procession has but a little way to go," he wrote when the great english actor henry irving died. charles henry webb, his first publisher, john hay, bret harte, thomas b. reed, and, indeed, most of his earlier associates were gone. when an invitation came from san francisco to attend a california reunion he replied that his wandering days were over and that it was his purpose to sit by the fire for the rest of his life. and in another letter: "i have done more for san francisco than any other of its old residents. since i left there, it has increased in population fully , . i could have done more--i could have gone earlier--it was suggested." a choice example, by the way, of mark twain's best humor, with its perfectly timed pause, and the afterthought. most humorists would have been content to end with the statement, "i could have gone earlier." only mark twain could have added that final exquisite touch--"it was suggested." mark twain was nearing seventy. with the th of november ( ) he would complete the scriptural limitation, and the president of his publishing-house, col. george harvey, of harper's, proposed a great dinner for him in celebration of his grand maturity. clemens would have preferred a small assembly in some snug place, with only his oldest and closest friends. colonel harvey had a different view. he had given a small, choice dinner to mark twain on his sixty-seventh birthday; now it must be something really worth while--something to outrank any former literary gathering. in order not to conflict with thanksgiving holidays, the th of december was selected as the date. on that evening, two hundred american and english men and women of letters assembled in delmonico's great banquet-hall to do honor to their chief. what an occasion it was! the tables of gay diners and among them mark twain, his snow-white hair a gleaming beacon for every eye. then, by and by, presented by william dean howells, he rose to speak. instantly the brilliant throng was on its feet, a shouting billow of life, the white handkerchiefs flying foam-like on its crest. it was a supreme moment! the greatest one of them all hailed by their applause as he scaled the mountaintop. never did mark twain deliver a more perfect address than he gave that night. he began with the beginning, the meagerness of that little hamlet that had seen his birth, and sketched it all so quaintly and delightfully that his hearers laughed and shouted, though there was tenderness under it, and often the tears were just beneath the surface. he told of his habits of life, how he had reached seventy by following a plan of living that would probably kill anybody else; how, in fact, he believed he had no valuable habits at all. then, at last, came that unforgetable close: "threescore years and ten! "it is the scriptural statute of limitations. after that you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. you are a time- expired man, to use kipling's military phrase: you have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. you are become an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not for you, nor any bugle-call but 'lights out.' you pay the time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline, if you prefer--and without prejudice--for they are not legally collectable. "the previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so many twinges, you can lay aside forever; on this side of the grave you will never need it again. if you shrink at thought of night, and winter, and the late homecomings from the banquet and the lights and laughter, through the deserted streets--a desolation which would not remind you now, as for a generation it did, that your friends are sleeping and you must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them, but would only remind you that you need not tiptoe, you can never disturb them more--if you shrink at the thought of these things you need only reply, 'your invitation honors me and pleases me because you still keep me in your remembrance, but i am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke my pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection, and that when you, in your turn, shall arrive at pier you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart.'" the tears that had been lying in wait were no longer kept back. if there were any present who did not let them flow without shame, who did not shout their applause from throats choked with sobs, they failed to mention the fact later. many of his old friends, one after another, rose to tell their love for him--cable, carnegie, gilder, and the rest. mr. rogers did not speak, nor the reverend twichell, but they sat at his special table. aldrich could not be there, but wrote a letter. a group of english authors, including alfred austin, barrie, chesterton, dobson, doyle, hardy, kipling, lang, and others, joined in a cable. helen keller wrote: "and you are seventy years old? or is the report exaggerated, like that of your death? i remember, when i saw you last, at the house of dear mr. hutton, in princeton, you said: "'if a man is a pessimist before he is forty-eight, he knows too much. if he is an optimist after he is forty-eight, he knows too little.' "now we know you are an optimist, and nobody would dare to accuse one on the 'seven-terraced summit' of knowing little. so probably you are not seventy, after all, but only forty-seven!" helen keller was right. mark twain was never a pessimist in his heart. lix. mark twain arranges for his biography it was at the beginning of --a little more than a month after the seventieth-birthday dinner--that the writer of these chapters became personally associated with mark twain. i had met him before, and from time to time he had returned a kindly word about some book i had written and inconsiderately sent him, for he had been my literary hero from childhood. once, indeed, he had allowed me to use some of his letters in a biography i was writing of thomas nast; he had been always an admirer of the great cartoonist, and the permission was kindness itself. before the seating at the birthday dinner i happened to find myself for a moment alone with mark twain and remembered to thank him in person for the use of the letters; a day or two later i sent him a copy of the book. i did not expect to hear from it again. it was a little while after this that i was asked to join in a small private dinner to be given to mark twain at the players, in celebration of his being made an honorary member of that club--there being at the time only one other member of this class, sir henry irving. i was in the players a day or two before the event, and david munro, of "the north american review," a man whose gentle and kindly nature made him "david" to all who knew him, greeted me joyfully, his face full of something he knew i would wish to hear. he had been chosen, he said, to propose the players' dinner to mark twain, and had found him propped up in bed, and beside him a copy of the nast book. i suspect now that david's generous heart prompted mark twain to speak of the book, and that his comment had lost nothing in david's eager retelling. but i was too proud and happy to question any feature of the precious compliment, and munro--always most happy in making others happy--found opportunity to repeat it, and even to improve upon it --usually in the presence of others--several times during the evening. the players' dinner to mark twain was given on the evening of january , , and the picture of it still remains clear to me. the guests, assembled around a single table in the private dining-room, did not exceed twenty-five in number. brander matthews presided, and the knightly frank millet, who would one day go down on the "titanic," was there, and gilder and munro and david bispham and robert reid, and others of their kind. it so happened that my seat was nearly facing the guest of the evening, who by a custom of the players is placed at the side and not at the distant end of the long table. regarding him at leisure, i saw that he seemed to be in full health. he had an alert, rested look; his complexion had the tints of a miniature painting. lit by the soft glow of the shaded candles, outlined against the richness of the shadowed walls, he made a figure of striking beauty. i could not take my eyes from it, for it stirred in me the farthest memories. i saw the interior of a farm-house sitting-room in the middle west where i had first heard the name of mark twain, and where night after night a group had gathered around the evening lamp to hear read aloud the story of the innocents on their holy land pilgrimage, which to a boy of eight had seemed only a wonderful poem and fairy-tale. to charles harvey genung, who sat next to me, i whispered something of this, and how during the thirty-six years since then no one had meant to me quite what mark twain had meant--in literature and, indeed, in life. now here he was just across the table. it was a fairy-tale come true. genung said: "you should write his life." it seemed to me no more than a pleasant remark, but he came back to it again and again, trying to encourage me with the word that munro had brought back concerning the biography of nast. however, nothing of what he said had kindled any spark of hope. i put him off by saying that certainly some one of longer and closer friendship and larger experience had been selected for the work. then the speaking began, and the matter went out of my mind. later in the evening, when we had left our seats and were drifting about the table, i found a chance to say a word to our guest concerning his "joan of arc," which i had recently re-read. to my happiness, he told me that long-ago incident--the stray leaf from joan's life, blown to him by the wind--which had led to his interest in all literature. then presently i was with genung again and he was still insisting that i write the life of mark twain. it may have been his faithful urging, it may have been the quick sympathy kindled by the name of "joan of arc"; whatever it was, in the instant of bidding good-by to our guest i was prompted to add: "may i call to see you, mr. clemens, some day?" and something--to this day i do not know what--prompted him to answer: "yes, come soon." two days later, by appointment with his secretary, i arrived at fifth avenue, and waited in the library to be summoned to his room. a few moments later i was ascending the long stairs, wondering why i had come on so useless an errand, trying to think up an excuse for having come at all. he was propped up in bed--a regal bed, from a dismantled italian palace --delving through a copy of "huckleberry finn," in search of a paragraph concerning which some unknown correspondent had inquired. he pushed the cigars toward me, commenting amusingly on this correspondent and on letter-writing in general. by and by, when there came a lull, i told him what so many thousands had told him before--what his work had meant to me, so long ago, and recalled my childish impressions of that large black-and-gilt book with its wonderful pictures and adventures "the innocents abroad." very likely he was willing enough to let me change the subject presently and thank him for the kindly word which david munro had brought. i do not remember what was his comment, but i suddenly found myself saying that out of his encouragement had grown a hope (though certainly it was less), that i might some day undertake a book about himself. i expected my errand to end at this point, and his silence seemed long and ominous. he said at last that from time to time he had himself written chapters of his life, but that he had always tired of the work and put it aside. he added that he hoped his daughters would one day collect his letters, but that a biography--a detailed story of a man's life and effort--was another matter. i think he added one or two other remarks, then all at once, turning upon me those piercing agate-blue eyes, he said: "when would you like to begin?" there was a dresser, with a large mirror, at the end of the room. i happened to catch my reflection in it, and i vividly recollect saying to it, mentally "this is not true; it is only one of many similar dreams." but even in a dream one must answer, and i said: "whenever you like. i can begin now." he was always eager in any new undertaking. "very good," he said, "the sooner, then, the better. let's begin while we are in the humor. the longer you postpone a thing of this kind, the less likely you are ever to get at it." this was on saturday; i asked if tuesday, january , would be too soon to start. he agreed that tuesday would do, and inquired as to my plan of work. i suggested bringing a stenographer to make notes of his life-story as he could recall it, this record to be supplemented by other material--letters, journals, and what not. he said: "i think i should enjoy dictating to a stenographer with some one to prompt me and act as audience. the room adjoining this was fitted up for my study. my manuscript and notes and private books and many of my letters are there, and there are a trunkful or two of such things in the attic. i seldom use the room myself. i do my writing and reading in bed. i will turn that room over to you for this work. whatever you need will be brought to you. we can have the dictations here in the morning, and you can put in the rest of the day to suit yourself. you can have a key and come and go as you please." that was always his way. he did nothing by halves. he got up and showed me the warm luxury of the study, with its mass of material--disordered, but priceless. i have no distinct recollections of how i came away, but presently, back at the players, i was confiding the matter to charles harvey genung, who said he was not surprised; but i think he was. lx. working with mark twain it was true, after all; and on tuesday morning, january , , i was on hand with a capable stenographer, ready to begin. clemens, meantime, had developed a new idea: he would like to add, he said, the new dictations to his former beginnings, completing an autobiography which was to be laid away and remain unpublished for a hundred years. he would pay the stenographer himself, and own the notes, allowing me, of course, free use of them as material for my book. he did not believe that he could follow the story of his life in its order of dates, but would find it necessary to wander around, picking up the thread as memory or fancy prompted. i could suggest subjects and ask questions. i assented to everything, and we set to work immediately. as on my former visit, he was in bed when we arrived, though clad now in a rich persian dressing gown, and propped against great, snowy pillows. a small table beside him held his pipes, cigars, papers, also a reading-lamp, the soft light of which brought out his brilliant coloring and the gleam of his snowy hair. there was daylight, too, but it was dull winter daylight, from the north, while the walls of the room were a deep, unreflecting red. he began that morning with some memories of the comstock mine; then he dropped back to his childhood, closing at last with some comment on matters quite recent. how delightful it was--his quaint, unhurried fashion of speech, the unconscious habits of his delicate hands, the play of his features as his fancies and phrases passed through his mind and were accepted or put aside. we were watching one of the great literary creators of his time in the very process of his architecture. time did not count. when he finished, at last, we were all amazed to find that more than two hours had slipped away. "and how much i have enjoyed it," he said. "it is the ideal plan for this kind of work. narrative writing is always disappointing. the moment you pick up a pen you begin to lose the spontaneity of the personal relation, which contains the very essence of interest. with short-hand dictation one can talk as if he were at his own dinner-table always an inspiring place. i expect to dictate all the rest of my life, if you good people are willing to come and listen to it." the dictations thus begun continued steadily from week to week, with increasing charm. we never knew what he was going to talk about, and it was seldom that he knew until the moment of beginning. but it was always fascinating, and i felt myself the most fortunate biographer in the world, as indeed i was. it was not all smooth sailing, however. in the course of time i began to realize that these marvelous dictated chapters were not altogether history, but were often partly, or even entirely, imaginary. the creator of tom sawyer and huck finn had been embroidering old incidents or inventing new ones too long to stick to history now, to be able to separate the romance in his mind from the reality of the past. also, his memory of personal events had become inaccurate. he realized this, and once said, in his whimsical, gentle way: "when i was younger i could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but i am getting old, and soon i shall remember only the latter." yet it was his constant purpose to stick to fact, and especially did he make no effort to put himself in a good light. indeed, if you wanted to know the worst of mark twain you had only to ask him for it. he would give it to the last syllable, and he would improve upon it and pile up his sins, and sometimes the sins of others, without stint. certainly the dictations were precious, for they revealed character as nothing else could; but as material for history they often failed to stand the test of the documents in the next room--the letters, notebooks, agreements, and the like--from which i was gradually rebuilding the structure of the years. in the talks that we usually had when the dictations were ended and the stenographer had gone i got much that was of great value. it was then that i usually made those inquiries which we had planned in the beginning, and his answers, coming quickly and without reflection, gave imagination less play. sometimes he would touch some point of special interest and walk up and down, philosophizing, or commenting upon things in general, in a manner not always complimentary to humanity and its progress. i seldom asked him a question during the dictation--or interrupted in any way, though he had asked me to stop him when i found him repeating or contradicting himself, or misstating some fact known to me. at first i lacked the courage to point out a mistake at the moment, and cautiously mentioned the matter when he had finished. then he would be likely to say: "why didn't you stop me? why did you let me go on making a donkey of myself when you could have saved me?" so then i used to take the risk of getting struck by lightning, and nearly always stopped him in time. but if it happened that i upset his thought, the thunderbolt was apt to fly. he would say: "now you've knocked everything out of my head." then, of course, i was sorry and apologized, and in a moment the sky was clear again. there was generally a humorous complexion to the dictations, whatever the subject. humor was his natural breath of life, and rarely absent. perhaps i should have said sooner that he smoked continuously during the dictations. his cigars were of that delicious fragrance which belongs to domestic tobacco. they were strong and inexpensive, and it was only his early training that made him prefer them. admiring friends used to send him costly, imported cigars, but he rarely touched them, and they were smoked by visitors. he often smoked a pipe, and preferred it to be old and violent. once when he had bought a new, expensive briar-root, he handed it to me, saying: "i'd like to have you smoke that a year or two, and when it gets so you can't stand it, maybe it will suit me." lxi. dictations at dublin, n. h. following his birthday dinner, mark twain had become once more the "belle of new york," and in a larger way than ever before. an editorial in the "evening mail" referred to him as a kind of joint aristides, solon, and themistocles of the american metropolis, and added: "things have reached a point where, if mark twain is not at a public meeting or banquet, he is expected to console it with one of his inimitable letters of advice and encouragement." he loved the excitement of it, and it no longer seemed to wear upon him. scarcely an evening passed that he did not go out to some dinner or gathering where he had promised to speak. in april, for the benefit of the robert fulton society, he delivered his farewell lecture--the last lecture, he said, where any one would have to pay to hear him. it was at carnegie hall, and the great place was jammed. as he stood before that vast, shouting audience, i wondered if he was remembering that night, forty years before in san francisco, when his lecture career had begun. we hoped he might speak of it, but he did not do so. in may the dictations were transferred to dublin, new hampshire, to the long veranda of the upton house, on the monadnock slope. he wished to continue our work, he said; so the stenographer and myself were presently located in the village, and drove out each morning, to sit facing one of the rarest views in all new england, while he talked of everything and anything that memory or fancy suggested. we had begun in his bedroom, but the glorious outside was too compelling. the long veranda was ideal. he was generally ready when we arrived, a luminous figure in white flannels, pacing up and down before a background of sky and forest, blue lake, and distant hills. when it stormed we would go inside to a bright fire. the dictation ended, he would ask his secretary to play the orchestrelle, which at great expense had been freighted up from new york. in that high situation, the fire and the music and the stormbeat seemed to lift us very far indeed from reality. certain symphonies by beethoven, an impromptu by schubert, and a nocturne by chopin were the selections he cared for most,[ ] though in certain moods he asked, for the scotch melodies. there was a good deal of social life in dublin, but, the dictations were seldom interrupted. he became lonely, now and then, and paid a brief visit to new york, or to mr. rogers in fairhaven, but he always returned gladly, for he liked the rest and quiet, and the dictations gave him employment. a part of his entertainment was a trio of kittens which he had rented for the summer--rented because then they would not lose ownership and would find home and protection in the fall. he named the kittens sackcloth and ashes--sackcloth being a black-and-white kit, and ashes a joint name owned by the two others, who were gray and exactly alike. all summer long these merry little creatures played up and down the wide veranda, or chased butterflies and grasshoppers down the clover slope, offering mark twain never-ending amusement. he loved to see them spring into the air after some insect, miss it, tumble back, and quickly jump up again with a surprised and disappointed expression. in spite of his resolve not to print any of his autobiography until he had been dead a hundred years, he was persuaded during the summer to allow certain chapters of it to be published in "the north american review." with the price received, thirty thousand dollars, he announced he was going to build himself a country home at redding, connecticut, on land already purchased there, near a small country place of my own. he wished to have a fixed place to go each summer, he said, and his thought was to call it "autobiography house." [ ] his special favorites were schubert's op. , part , and chopin's op. , part . lxii a new era of billiards with the return to new york i began a period of closer association with mark twain. up to that time our relations had been chiefly of a literary nature. they now became personal as well. it happened in this way: mark twain had never outgrown his love for the game of billiards, though he had not owned a table since the closing of the hartford house, fifteen years before. mrs. henry rogers had proposed to present him with a table for christmas, but when he heard of the plan, boylike, he could not wait, and hinted that if he had the table "right now" he could begin to use it sooner. so the table came--a handsome combination affair, suitable to all games--and was set in place. that morning when the dictation ended he said: "have you any special place to lunch, to-day?" i replied that i had not. "lunch here," he said, "and we'll try the new billiard-table." i acknowledged that i had never played more than a few games of pool, and those very long ago. "no matter," he said "the poorer you play the better i shall like it." so i remained for luncheon, and when it was over we began the first game ever played on the "christmas" table. he taught me a game in which caroms and pockets both counted, and he gave me heavy odds. he beat me, but it was a riotous, rollicking game, the beginning of a closer relation between us. we played most of the afternoon, and he suggested that i "come back in the evening and play some more." i did so, and the game lasted till after midnight. i had beginner's luck--"nigger luck," as he called it--and it kept him working feverishly to win. once when i had made a great fluke--a carom followed by most of the balls falling into the pockets, he said: "when you pick up that cue this table drips at every pore." the morning dictations became a secondary interest. like a boy, he was looking forward to the afternoon of play, and it seemed never to come quickly enough to suit him. i remained regularly for luncheon, and he was inclined to cut the courses short that we might the sooner get up-stairs for billiards. he did not eat the midday meal himself, but he would come down and walk about the dining-room, talking steadily that marvelous, marvelous talk which little by little i trained myself to remember, though never with complete success. he was only killing time, and i remember once, when he had been earnestly discussing some deep question, he suddenly noticed that the luncheon was ending. "now," he said, "we will proceed to more serious matters--it's your --shot." my game improved with practice, and he reduced my odds. he was willing to be beaten, but not too often. we kept a record of the games, and he went to bed happier if the tally-sheet showed a balance in his favor. he was not an even-tempered player. when the game went steadily against him he was likely to become critical, even fault-finding, in his remarks. then presently he would be seized with remorse and become over-gentle and attentive, placing the balls as i knocked them into the pockets, hurrying to render this service. i wished he would not do it. it distressed me that he should humble himself. i was willing that he should lose his temper, that he should be even harsh if he felt so inclined--his age, his position, his genius gave him special privileges. yet i am glad, as i remember it now, that the other side revealed itself, for it completes the sum of his humanity. once in a burst of exasperation he made such an onslaught on the balls that he landed a couple of them on the floor. i gathered them up and we went on playing as if nothing had happened, only he was very gentle and sweet, like a summer meadow when the storm has passed by. presently he said: "this is a most amusing game. when you play badly it amuses me, and when i play badly and lose my temper it certainly must amuse you." it was but natural that friendship should grow under such conditions. the disparity of our ages and gifts no longer mattered. the pleasant land of play is a democracy where such things do not count. we celebrated his seventy-first birthday by playing billiards all day. he invented a new game for the occasion, and added a new rule for it with almost every shot. it happened that no other member of the family was at home--ill-health had banished every one, even the secretary. flowers, telegrams, and congratulations came, and a string of callers. he saw no one but a few intimate friends. we were entirely alone for dinner, and i felt the great honor of being his only guest on such an occasion. on that night, a year before, the flower of his profession had assembled to do him honor. once between the courses, when he rose, as was his habit, to walk about, he wandered into the drawing-room, and, seating himself at the orchestrelle, began to play the beautiful "flower song" from faust. it was a thing i had not seen him do before, and i never saw him do it again. he was in his loveliest humor all that day and evening, and at night when we stopped playing he said: "i have never had a pleasanter day at this game." i answered: "i hope ten years from to-night we shall be playing it." "yes," he said, "still playing the best game on earth." lxiii. living with mark twain i accompanied him on a trip he made to washington in the interest of copyright. speaker "uncle joe" cannon lent us his private room in the capitol, and there all one afternoon mark twain received congressmen, and in an atmosphere blue with cigar-smoke preached the gospel of copyright. it was a historic trip, and for me an eventful one, for it was on the way back to new york that mark twain suggested that i take up residence in his home. there was a room going to waste, he said, and i would be handier for the early and late billiard sessions. i accepted, of course. looking back, now, i see pretty vividly three quite distinct pictures. one of them, the rich, red interior of the billiard-room, with the brilliant green square in the center on which the gay balls are rolling, and bent over it his luminous white figure in the instant of play. then there is the long lighted drawing-room, with the same figure stretched on a couch in the corner, drowsily smoking while the rich organ tones summon for him scenes and faces which the others do not see. sometimes he rose, pacing the length of the parlors, but oftener he lay among the cushions, the light flooding his white hair and dress, heightening his brilliant coloring. he had taken up the fashion of wearing white altogether at this time. black, he said, reminded him of his funerals. the third picture is that of the dinner-table--always beautifully laid, and always a shrine of wisdom when he was there. he did not always talk, but he often did, and i see him clearest, his face alive with interest, presenting some new angle of thought in his vivid, inimitable speech. these are pictures that will not fade from my memory. how i wish the marvelous things he said were like them! i preserved as much of them as i could, and in time trained myself to recall portions of his exact phrasing. but even so they seemed never quite as he had said them. they lacked the breath of his personality. his dinner-table talk was likely to be political, scientific, philosophic. he often discussed aspects of astronomy, which was a passion with him. i could succeed better with the billiard-room talk--that was likely to be reminiscent, full of anecdotes. i kept a pad on the window-sill, and made notes while he was playing. at one time he told me of his dreams. "there is never a month passes," he said, "that i do not dream of being in reduced circumstances and obliged to go back to the river to earn a living. usually in my dream i am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell whether it is selma bluff, or hat island, or only a black wall of night. another dream i have is being compelled to go back to the lecture platform. in it i am always getting up before an audience, with nothing to say, trying to be funny, trying to make the audience laugh, realizing i am only making silly jokes. then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they commence to get up and leave. that dream always ends by my standing there in the semi-darkness talking to an empty house." he did not return to dublin the next summer, but took a house at tuxedo, nearer new york. i did not go there with him, for in the spring it was agreed that i should make a pilgrimage to the mississippi and the pacific coast to see those few still remaining who had known mark twain in his youth. john briggs was alive, also horace bixby, "joe" goodman, steve and jim gillis, and there were a few others. it was a trip taken none too soon. john briggs, a gentle-hearted old man who sat by his fire and through one afternoon told me of the happy days along the river-front from the cave to holliday's hill, did not reach the end of the year. horace bixby, at eighty-one, was still young, and piloting a government snag-boat. neither was joseph goodman old, by any means, but jim gillis was near his end, and steve gillis was an invalid, who said: "tell sam i'm going to die pretty soon, but that i love him; that i've loved him all my life, and i'll love him till i die." lxiv. a degree from oxford on my return i found mark twain elated: he had been invited to england to receive the degree of literary doctor from the oxford university. it is the highest scholastic honorary degree; and to come back, as i had, from following the early wanderings of the barefoot truant of hannibal, only to find him about to be officially knighted by the world's most venerable institution of learning, seemed rather the most surprising chapter even of his marvelous fairy-tale. if tom sawyer had owned the magic wand, he hardly could have produced anything as startling as that. he sailed on the th of june, , exactly forty years from the day he had sailed on the "quaker city" to win his greater fame. i did not accompany him. he took with him a secretary to make notes, and my affairs held me in america. he was absent six weeks, and no attentions that england had ever paid him before could compare with her lavish welcome during this visit. his reception was really national. he was banqueted by the greatest clubs of london, he was received with special favor at the king's garden party, he traveled by a royal train, crowds gathering everywhere to see him pass. at oxford when he appeared on the street the name mark twain ran up and down like a cry of fire, and the people came running. when he appeared on the stage at the sheldonian theater to receive his degree, clad in his doctor's robe of scarlet and gray, there arose a great tumult--the shouting of the undergraduates for the boy who had been tom sawyer and had played with huckleberry finn. the papers next day spoke of his reception as a "cyclone," surpassing any other welcome, though rudyard kipling was one of those who received degrees on that occasion, and general booth and whitelaw reid, and other famous men. perhaps the most distinguished social honor paid to mark twain at this time was the dinner given him by the staff of london "punch," in the historic "punch" editorial rooms on bouverie street. no other foreigner had ever been invited to that sacred board, where thackeray had sat, and douglas jerrold and others of the great departed. "punch" had already saluted him with a front-page cartoon, and at this dinner the original drawing was presented to him by the editor's little daughter, joy agnew. the oxford degree, and the splendid homage paid him by england at large, became, as it were, the crowning episode of mark twain's career. i think he realized this, although he did not speak of it--indeed, he had very little to say of the whole matter. i telephoned a greeting when i knew that he had arrived in new york, and was summoned to "come down and play billiards." i confess i went with a good deal of awe, prepared to sit in silence and listen to the tale of the returning hero. but when i arrived he was already in the billiard-room, knocking the balls about--his coat off, for it was a hot night. as i entered, he said: "get your cue--i've been inventing a new game." that was all. the pageant was over, the curtain was rung down. business was resumed at the old stand. lxv. the removal to redding there followed another winter during which i was much with mark twain, though a part of it he spent with mr. rogers in bermuda, that pretty island resort which both men loved. then came spring again, and june, and with it mark twain's removal to his newly built home, "stormfield," at redding, connecticut. the house had been under construction for a year. he had never seen it --never even seen the land i had bought for him. he even preferred not to look at any plans or ideas for decoration. "when the house is finished and furnished, and the cat is purring on the hearth, it will be time enough for me to see it," he had said more than once. he had only specified that the rooms should be large and that the billiard-room should be red. his billiard-rooms thus far had been of that color, and their memory was associated in his mind with enjoyment and comfort. he detested details of preparation, and then, too, he looked forward to the dramatic surprise of walking into a home that had been conjured into existence as with a word. it was the th of june, , that he finally took possession. the fifth avenue house was not dismantled, for it was the plan then to use stormfield only as a summer place. the servants, however, with one exception, had been transferred to redding, and mark twain and i remained alone, though not lonely, in the city house; playing billiards most of the time, and being as hilarious as we pleased, for there was nobody to disturb. i think he hardly mentioned the new home during that time. he had never seen even a photograph of the place, and i confess i had moments of anxiety, for i had selected the site and had been more or less concerned otherwise, though john howells was wholly responsible for the building. i did not really worry, for i knew how beautiful and peaceful it all was. the morning of the th was bright and sunny and cool. mark twain was up and shaved by six o'clock in order to be in time. the train did not leave until four in the afternoon, but our last billiards in town must begin early and suffer no interruption. we were still playing when, about three, word was brought up that the cab was waiting. arrived at the station, a group collected, reporters and others, to speed him to his new home. some of the reporters came along. the scenery was at its best that day, and he spoke of it approvingly. the hour and a half required to cover the sixty miles' distance seemed short. the train porters came to carry out the bags. he drew from his pocket a great handful of silver. "give them something," he said; "give everybody liberally that does any service." there was a sort of open-air reception in waiting--a varied assemblage of vehicles festooned with flowers had gathered to offer gallant country welcome. it was a perfect june evening, still and dream-like; there seemed a spell of silence on everything. the people did not cheer--they smiled and waved to the white figure, and he smiled and waved reply, but there was no noise. it was like a scene in a cinema. his carriage led the way on the three-mile drive to the house on the hilltop, and the floral procession fell in behind. hillsides were green, fields were white with daisies, dogwood and laurel shone among the trees. he was very quiet as we drove along. once, with gentle humor, looking out over a white daisy-field, he said: "that is buckwheat. i always recognize buckwheat when i see it. i wish i knew as much about other things as i know about buckwheat." the clear-running brooks, a swift-flowing river, a tumbling cascade where we climbed a hill, all came in for his approval--then we were at the lane that led to his new home, and the procession behind dropped away. the carriage ascended still higher, and a view opened across the saugatuck valley, with its nestling village and church-spire and farmhouses, and beyond them the distant hills. then came the house--simple in design, but beautiful--an italian villa, such as he had known in florence, adapted here to american climate and needs. at the entrance his domestic staff waited to greet him, and presently he stepped across the threshold and stood in his own home for the first time in seventeen years. nothing was lacking--it was as finished, as completely furnished, as if he had occupied it a lifetime. no one spoke immediately, but when his eyes had taken in the harmony of the place, with its restful, home-like comfort, and followed through the open french windows to the distant vista of treetops and farmsides and blue hills, he said, very gently: "how beautiful it all is! i did not think it could be as beautiful as this." and later, when he had seen all of the apartments: "it is a perfect house--perfect, so far as i can see, in every detail. it might have been here always." there were guests that first evening--a small home dinner-party--and a little later at the foot of the garden some fireworks were set off by neighbors inspired by dan beard, who had recently located in redding. mark twain, watching the rockets that announced his arrival, said, gently: "i wonder why they go to so much trouble for me. i never go to any trouble for anybody." the evening closed with billiards, hilarious games, and when at midnight the cues were set in the rack no one could say that mark twain's first day in his new home had not been a happy one. lxvi life at stormfield mark twain loved stormfield. almost immediately he gave up the idea of going back to new york for the winter, and i think he never entered the fifth avenue house again. the quiet and undisturbed comfort of stormfield came to him at the right time of life. his day of being the "belle of new york" was over. now and then he attended some great dinner, but always under protest. finally he refused to go at all. he had much company during that first summer--old friends, and now and again young people, of whom he was always fond. the billiard-room he called "the aquarium," and a frieze of bermuda fishes, in gay prints, ran around the walls. each young lady visitor was allowed to select one of these as her patron fish and attach her name to it. thus, as a member of the "aquarium club," she was represented in absence. of course there were several cats at stormfield, and these really owned the premises. the kittens scampered about the billiard-table after the balls, even when the game was in progress, giving all sorts of new angles to the shots. this delighted him, and he would not for anything have discommoded or removed one of those furry hazards. my own house was a little more than half a mile away, our lands joining, and daily i went up to visit him--to play billiards or to take a walk across the fields. there was a stenographer in the neighborhood, and he continued his dictations, but not regularly. he wrote, too, now and then, and finished the little book called "is shakespeare dead?" winter came. the walks were fewer, and there was even more company; the house was gay and the billiard games protracted. in february i made a trip to europe and the mediterranean, to go over some of his ground there. returning in april, i found him somewhat changed. it was not that he had grown older, or less full of life, but only less active, less eager for gay company, and he no longer dictated, or very rarely. his daughter jean, who had been in a health resort, was coming home to act as his secretary, and this made him very happy. we resumed our games, our talks, and our long walks across the fields. there were few guests, and we were together most of the day and evening. how beautiful the memory of it all is now! to me, of course, nothing can ever be like it again in this world. mark twain walked slowly these days. early in the summer there appeared indications of the heart trouble that less than a year later would bring the end. his doctor advised diminished smoking, and forbade the old habit of lightly skipping up and down stairs. the trouble was with the heart muscles, and at times there came severe deadly pains in his breast, but for the most part he did not suffer. he was allowed the walk, however, and once i showed him a part of his estate he had not seen before--a remote cedar hillside. on the way i pointed out a little corner of land which earlier he had given me to straighten our division line. i told him i was going to build a study on it and call it "markland." i think the name pleased him. later he said: "if you had a place for that extra billiard-table of mine" (the rogers table, which had been left in storage in new york), "i would turn it over to you." i replied that i could adapt the size of my proposed study to fit the table, and he said: "now that will be very good. then when i want exercise i can walk down and play billiards with you, and when you want exercise you can walk up and play billiards with me. you must build that study." so it was planned, and the work was presently under way. how many things we talked of! life, death, the future--all the things of which we know so little and love so much to talk about. astronomy, as i have said, was one of his favorite subjects. neither of us had any real knowledge of the matter, which made its great facts all the more awesome. the thought that the nearest fixed star was twenty-five trillions of miles away--two hundred and fifty thousand times the distance to our own remote sun--gave him a sort of splendid thrill. he would figure out those appalling measurements of space, covering sheets of paper with his sums, but he was not a good mathematician, and the answers were generally wrong. comets in particular interested him, and one day he said: "i came in with halley's comet in . it is coming again next year, and i expect to go out with it. it will be the greatest disappointment of my life if i don't go out with halley's comet." he looked so strong, and full of color and vitality. one could not believe that his words held a prophecy. yet the pains recurred with increasing frequency and severity; his malady, angina pectoris, was making progress. and how bravely he bore it all! he never complained, never bewailed. i have seen the fierce attack crumple him when we were at billiards, but he would insist on playing in his turn, bowed, his face white, his hand digging at his breast. lxvii the death of jean clara clemens was married that autumn to ossip gabrilowitsch, the russian pianist, and presently sailed for europe, where they would make their home. jean clemens was now head of the house, and what with her various duties and poor health, her burden was too heavy. she had a passion for animal life of every kind, and in some farm-buildings at one corner of the estate had set up quite an establishment of chickens and domestic animals. she was fond of giving these her personal attention, and this, with her house direction and secretarial work, gave her little time for rest. i tried to relieve her of a share of the secretarial work, but she was ambitious and faithful. still, her condition did not seem critical. i stayed at stormfield, now, most of the time--nights as well as days --for the dull weather had come and mark twain found the house rather lonely. in november he had an impulse to go to bermuda, and we spent a month in the warm light of that summer island, returning a week before the christmas holidays. and just then came mark twain's last great tragedy--the death of his daughter jean. the holidays had added heavily to jean's labors. out of her generous heart she had planned gifts for everybody--had hurried to and from the city for her purchases, and in the loggia set up a beautiful christmas tree. meantime she had contracted a heavy cold. her trouble was epilepsy, and all this was bad for her. on the morning of december , she died, suddenly, from the shock of a cold bath. below, in the loggia, drenched with tinsel, stood the tree, and heaped about it the packages of gifts which that day she had meant to open and put in place. nobody had been overlooked. jean was taken to elmira for burial. her father, unable to make the winter journey, remained behind. her cousin, jervis langdon, came for her. it was six in the evening when she went away. a soft, heavy snow was falling, and the gloom of the short day was closing in. there was not the least noise, the whole world was muffled. the lanterns shone out the open door, and at an upper window, the light gleaming on his white hair, her father watched her going away from him for the last time. later he wrote: "from my window i saw the hearse and the carriages wind along the road and gradually grow vague and spectral in the falling snow, and presently disappear. jean was gone out of my life, and would not come back any more. the cousin she had played with when they were babies together--he and her beloved old katy--were conducting her to her distant childhood home, where she will lie by her mother's side once more, in the company of susy and langdon." lxviii days in bermuda ten days later mark twain returned to bermuda, accompanied only by a valet. he had asked me if we would be willing to close our home for the winter and come to stormfield, so that the place might be ready any time for his return. we came, of course, for there was no thought other than for his comfort. he did not go to a hotel in bermuda, but to the home of vice-consul allen, where he had visited before. the allens were devoted to him and gave him such care as no hotel could offer. bermuda agreed with mark twain, and for a time there he gained in strength and spirits and recovered much of his old manner. he wrote me almost daily, generally with good reports of his health and doings, and with playful counsel and suggestions. then, by and by, he did not write with his own hand, but through his newly appointed "secretary," mr. allen's young daughter, helen, of whom he was very fond. the letters, however, were still gay. once he said: "while the matter is in my mind i will remark that if you ever send me another letter which is not paged at the top i will write you with my own hand, so that i may use in utter freedom and without embarrassment the kind of words which alone can describe such a criminal." he had made no mention so far of the pains in his breast, but near the end of march he wrote that he was coming home, if the breast pains did not "mend their ways pretty considerable. i do not want to die here," he said. "i am growing more and more particular about the place." a week later brought another alarming letter, also one from mr. allen, who frankly stated that matters had become very serious indeed. i went to new york and sailed the next morning, cabling the gabrilowitsches to come without delay. i sent no word to bermuda that i was coming, and when i arrived he was not expecting me. "why," he said, holding out his hand, "you did not tell us you were coming?" "no," i said, "it is rather sudden. i didn't quite like the sound of your last letters." "but those were not serious. you shouldn't have come on my account." i said then that i had come on my own account, that i had felt the need of recreation, and had decided to run down and come home with him. "that's--very--good," he said, in his slow, gentle fashion. "wow i'm glad to see you." his breakfast came in and he ate with appetite. i had thought him thin and pale, at first sight, but his color had come back now, and his eyes were bright. he told me of the fierce attacks of the pain, and how he had been given hypodermic injections which he amusingly termed "hypnotic injunctions" and "the sub-cutaneous." from mr. and mrs. allen i learned how slender had been his chances, and how uncertain were the days ahead. mr. allen had already engaged passage home for april th. he seemed so little like a man whose days were numbered. on the afternoon of my arrival we drove out, as we had done on our former visit, and he discussed some of the old subjects in quite the old way. i had sold for him, for six thousand dollars, the farm where jean had kept her animals, and he wished to use the money in erecting for her some sort of memorial. he agreed that a building to hold the library which he had already donated to the town of redding would be appropriate and useful. he asked me to write at once to his lawyer and have the matter arranged. we did not drive out again. the pains held off for several days, and he was gay and went out on the lawn, but most of the time he sat propped up in bed, reading and smoking. when i looked at him there, so full of vigor and the joy of life, i could not persuade myself that he would not outlive us all. he had written very little in bermuda--his last work being a chapter of amusing "advice"--for me, as he confessed--what i was to do upon reaching the gate of which st. peter is said to keep the key. as it is the last writing he ever did, and because it is characteristic, one or two paragraphs may be admitted here: "upon arrival do not speak to st. peter until spoken to. it is not your place to begin. "do not begin any remark with 'say.'" "when applying for a ticket avoid trying to make conversation. if you must talk, let the weather alone. . . "you can ask him for his autograph--there is no harm in that--but be careful and don't remark that it is one of the penalties of greatness. he has heard that before." there were several pages of this counsel. lxix. the return to redding i spent most of each day with him, merely sitting by the bed and reading. i noticed when he slept that his breathing was difficult, and i could see that he did not improve, but often he was gay and liked the entire family to gather about and be merry. it was only a few days before we sailed that the severe attacks returned. then followed bad nights; but respite came, and we sailed on the th, as arranged. the allen home stands on the water, and mr. allen had chartered a tug to take us to the ship. we were obliged to start early, and the fresh morning breeze was stimulating. mark twain seemed in good spirits when we reached the "oceana," which was to take him home. as long as i remember anything i shall remember the forty-eight hours of that homeward voyage. he was comfortable at first, and then we ran into the humid, oppressive air of the gulf stream, and he could not breathe. it seemed to me that the end might come at any moment, and this thought was in his own mind, but he had no dread, and his sense of humor did not fail. once when the ship rolled and his hat fell from the hook and made the circuit of the cabin floor, he said: "the ship is passing the hat." i had been instructed in the use of the hypodermic needle, and from time to time gave him the "hypnotic injunction," as he still called it. but it did not afford him entire relief. he could remain in no position for any length of time. yet he never complained and thought only of the trouble he might be making. once he said: "i am sorry for you, paine, but i can't help it--i can't hurry this dying business." and a little later: "oh, it is such a mystery, and it takes so long!" relatives, physicians, and news-gatherers were at the dock to welcome him. revived by the cool, fresh air of the north, he had slept for several hours and was seemingly much better. a special compartment on the same train that had taken us first to redding took us there now, his physicians in attendance. he did not seem to mind the trip or the drive home. as we turned into the lane that led to stormfield he said: "can we see where you have built your billiard-room?" the gable of the new study showed among the trees, and i pointed it out to him. "it looks quite imposing," he said. arriving at stormfield, he stepped, unassisted, from the carriage to greet the members of the household, and with all his old courtliness offered each his hand. then in a canvas chair we had brought we carried him up-stairs to his room--the big, beautiful room that looked out to the sunset hills. this was thursday evening, april , . lxx. the close of a great life mark twain lived just a week from that day and hour. for a time he seemed full of life, talking freely, and suffering little. clara and ossip gabrilowitsch arrived on saturday and found him cheerful, quite like himself. at intervals he read. "suetonius" and "carlyle" lay on the bed beside him, and he would pick them up and read a page or a paragraph. sometimes when i saw him thus--the high color still in his face, the clear light in his eyes'--i said: "it is not reality. he is not going to die." but by wednesday of the following week it was evident that the end was near. we did not know it then, but the mysterious messenger of his birth year, halley's comet, became visible that night in the sky.[ ] on thursday morning, the st, his mind was still fairly clear, and he read a little from one of the volumes on his bed. by clara he sent word that he wished to see me, and when i came in he spoke of two unfinished manuscripts which he wished me to "throw away," as he briefly expressed it, for his words were few, now, and uncertain. i assured him that i would attend to the matter and he pressed my hand. it was his last word to me. during the afternoon, while clara stood by him, he sank into a doze, and from it passed into a deeper slumber and did not heed us any more. through that peaceful spring afternoon the life-wave ebbed lower and lower. it was about half-past six, and the sun lay just on the horizon, when dr. quintard noticed that the breathing, which had gradually become more subdued, broke a little. there was no suggestion of any struggle. the noble head turned a little to one side, there was a fluttering sigh, and the breath that had been unceasing for seventy-four tumultuous years had stopped forever. in the brick church, new york, mark twain--dressed in the white he loved so well--lay, with the nobility of death upon him, while a multitude of those who loved him passed by and looked at his face for the last time. flowers in profusion were banked about him, but on the casket lay a single wreath which dan beard and his wife had woven from the laurel which grows on stormfield hill. he was never more beautiful than as he lay there, and it was an impressive scene to see those thousands file by, regard him for a moment, gravely, thoughtfully, and pass on. all sorts were there, rich and poor; some crossed themselves, some saluted, some paused a little to take a closer look. that night we went with him to elmira, and next day he lay in those stately parlors that had seen his wedding-day, and where little langdon and susy had lain, and mrs. clemens, and then jean, only a little while before. the worn-out body had reached its journey's end; but his spirit had never grown old, and to-day, still young, it continues to cheer and comfort a tired world. roughing it by mark twain part . chapter li. vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey-day of our "flush times." the saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the gambling dens, the brothels and the jails--unfailing signs of high prosperity in a mining region--in any region for that matter. is it not so? a crowded police court docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty. still, there is one other sign; it comes last, but when it does come it establishes beyond cavil that the "flush times" are at the flood. this is the birth of the "literary" paper. the weekly occidental, "devoted to literature," made its appearance in virginia. all the literary people were engaged to write for it. mr. f. was to edit it. he was a felicitous skirmisher with a pen, and a man who could say happy things in a crisp, neat way. once, while editor of the union, he had disposed of a labored, incoherent, two-column attack made upon him by a contemporary, with a single line, which, at first glance, seemed to contain a solemn and tremendous compliment--viz.: "the logic of our adversary resembles the peace of god,"--and left it to the reader's memory and after-thought to invest the remark with another and "more different" meaning by supplying for himself and at his own leisure the rest of the scripture--"in that it passeth understanding." he once said of a little, half-starved, wayside community that had no subsistence except what they could get by preying upon chance passengers who stopped over with them a day when traveling by the overland stage, that in their church service they had altered the lord's prayer to read: "give us this day our daily stranger!" we expected great things of the occidental. of course it could not get along without an original novel, and so we made arrangements to hurl into the work the full strength of the company. mrs. f. was an able romancist of the ineffable school--i know no other name to apply to a school whose heroes are all dainty and all perfect. she wrote the opening chapter, and introduced a lovely blonde simpleton who talked nothing but pearls and poetry and who was virtuous to the verge of eccentricity. she also introduced a young french duke of aggravated refinement, in love with the blonde. mr. f. followed next week, with a brilliant lawyer who set about getting the duke's estates into trouble, and a sparkling young lady of high society who fell to fascinating the duke and impairing the appetite of the blonde. mr. d., a dark and bloody editor of one of the dailies, followed mr. f., the third week, introducing a mysterious roscicrucian who transmuted metals, held consultations with the devil in a cave at dead of night, and cast the horoscope of the several heroes and heroines in such a way as to provide plenty of trouble for their future careers and breed a solemn and awful public interest in the novel. he also introduced a cloaked and masked melodramatic miscreant, put him on a salary and set him on the midnight track of the duke with a poisoned dagger. he also created an irish coachman with a rich brogue and placed him in the service of the society-young-lady with an ulterior mission to carry billet-doux to the duke. about this time there arrived in virginia a dissolute stranger with a literary turn of mind--rather seedy he was, but very quiet and unassuming; almost diffident, indeed. he was so gentle, and his manners were so pleasing and kindly, whether he was sober or intoxicated, that he made friends of all who came in contact with him. he applied for literary work, offered conclusive evidence that he wielded an easy and practiced pen, and so mr. f. engaged him at once to help write the novel. his chapter was to follow mr. d.'s, and mine was to come next. now what does this fellow do but go off and get drunk and then proceed to his quarters and set to work with his imagination in a state of chaos, and that chaos in a condition of extravagant activity. the result may be guessed. he scanned the chapters of his predecessors, found plenty of heroes and heroines already created, and was satisfied with them; he decided to introduce no more; with all the confidence that whisky inspires and all the easy complacency it gives to its servant, he then launched himself lovingly into his work: he married the coachman to the society-young-lady for the sake of the scandal; married the duke to the blonde's stepmother, for the sake of the sensation; stopped the desperado's salary; created a misunderstanding between the devil and the roscicrucian; threw the duke's property into the wicked lawyer's hands; made the lawyer's upbraiding conscience drive him to drink, thence to delirium tremens, thence to suicide; broke the coachman's neck; let his widow succumb to contumely, neglect, poverty and consumption; caused the blonde to drown herself, leaving her clothes on the bank with the customary note pinned to them forgiving the duke and hoping he would be happy; revealed to the duke, by means of the usual strawberry mark on left arm, that he had married his own long-lost mother and destroyed his long-lost sister; instituted the proper and necessary suicide of the duke and the duchess in order to compass poetical justice; opened the earth and let the roscicrucian through, accompanied with the accustomed smoke and thunder and smell of brimstone, and finished with the promise that in the next chapter, after holding a general inquest, he would take up the surviving character of the novel and tell what became of the devil! it read with singular smoothness, and with a "dead" earnestness that was funny enough to suffocate a body. but there was war when it came in. the other novelists were furious. the mild stranger, not yet more than half sober, stood there, under a scathing fire of vituperation, meek and bewildered, looking from one to another of his assailants, and wondering what he could have done to invoke such a storm. when a lull came at last, he said his say gently and appealingly--said he did not rightly remember what he had written, but was sure he had tried to do the best he could, and knew his object had been to make the novel not only pleasant and plausible but instructive and---- the bombardment began again. the novelists assailed his ill-chosen adjectives and demolished them with a storm of denunciation and ridicule. and so the siege went on. every time the stranger tried to appease the enemy he only made matters worse. finally he offered to rewrite the chapter. this arrested hostilities. the indignation gradually quieted down, peace reigned again and the sufferer retired in safety and got him to his own citadel. but on the way thither the evil angel tempted him and he got drunk again. and again his imagination went mad. he led the heroes and heroines a wilder dance than ever; and yet all through it ran that same convincing air of honesty and earnestness that had marked his first work. he got the characters into the most extraordinary situations, put them through the most surprising performances, and made them talk the strangest talk! but the chapter cannot be described. it was symmetrically crazy; it was artistically absurd; and it had explanatory footnotes that were fully as curious as the text. i remember one of the "situations," and will offer it as an example of the whole. he altered the character of the brilliant lawyer, and made him a great-hearted, splendid fellow; gave him fame and riches, and set his age at thirty-three years. then he made the blonde discover, through the help of the roscicrucian and the melodramatic miscreant, that while the duke loved her money ardently and wanted it, he secretly felt a sort of leaning toward the society-young-lady. stung to the quick, she tore her affections from him and bestowed them with tenfold power upon the lawyer, who responded with consuming zeal. but the parents would none of it. what they wanted in the family was a duke; and a duke they were determined to have; though they confessed that next to the duke the lawyer had their preference. necessarily the blonde now went into a decline. the parents were alarmed. they pleaded with her to marry the duke, but she steadfastly refused, and pined on. then they laid a plan. they told her to wait a year and a day, and if at the end of that time she still felt that she could not marry the duke, she might marry the lawyer with their full consent. the result was as they had foreseen: gladness came again, and the flush of returning health. then the parents took the next step in their scheme. they had the family physician recommend a long sea voyage and much land travel for the thorough restoration of the blonde's strength; and they invited the duke to be of the party. they judged that the duke's constant presence and the lawyer's protracted absence would do the rest--for they did not invite the lawyer. so they set sail in a steamer for america--and the third day out, when their sea-sickness called truce and permitted them to take their first meal at the public table, behold there sat the lawyer! the duke and party made the best of an awkward situation; the voyage progressed, and the vessel neared america. but, by and by, two hundred miles off new bedford, the ship took fire; she burned to the water's edge; of all her crew and passengers, only thirty were saved. they floated about the sea half an afternoon and all night long. among them were our friends. the lawyer, by superhuman exertions, had saved the blonde and her parents, swimming back and forth two hundred yards and bringing one each time--(the girl first). the duke had saved himself. in the morning two whale ships arrived on the scene and sent their boats. the weather was stormy and the embarkation was attended with much confusion and excitement. the lawyer did his duty like a man; helped his exhausted and insensible blonde, her parents and some others into a boat (the duke helped himself in); then a child fell overboard at the other end of the raft and the lawyer rushed thither and helped half a dozen people fish it out, under the stimulus of its mother's screams. then he ran back--a few seconds too late--the blonde's boat was under way. so he had to take the other boat, and go to the other ship. the storm increased and drove the vessels out of sight of each other--drove them whither it would. when it calmed, at the end of three days, the blonde's ship was seven hundred miles north of boston and the other about seven hundred south of that port. the blonde's captain was bound on a whaling cruise in the north atlantic and could not go back such a distance or make a port without orders; such being nautical law. the lawyer's captain was to cruise in the north pacific, and he could not go back or make a port without orders. all the lawyer's money and baggage were in the blonde's boat and went to the blonde's ship--so his captain made him work his passage as a common sailor. when both ships had been cruising nearly a year, the one was off the coast of greenland and the other in behring's strait. the blonde had long ago been well-nigh persuaded that her lawyer had been washed overboard and lost just before the whale ships reached the raft, and now, under the pleadings of her parents and the duke she was at last beginning to nerve herself for the doom of the covenant, and prepare for the hated marriage. but she would not yield a day before the date set. the weeks dragged on, the time narrowed, orders were given to deck the ship for the wedding--a wedding at sea among icebergs and walruses. five days more and all would be over. so the blonde reflected, with a sigh and a tear. oh where was her true love--and why, why did he not come and save her? at that moment he was lifting his harpoon to strike a whale in behring's strait, five thousand miles away, by the way of the arctic ocean, or twenty thousand by the way of the horn--that was the reason. he struck, but not with perfect aim--his foot slipped and he fell in the whale's mouth and went down his throat. he was insensible five days. then he came to himself and heard voices; daylight was streaming through a hole cut in the whale's roof. he climbed out and astonished the sailors who were hoisting blubber up a ship's side. he recognized the vessel, flew aboard, surprised the wedding party at the altar and exclaimed: "stop the proceedings--i'm here! come to my arms, my own!" there were foot-notes to this extravagant piece of literature wherein the author endeavored to show that the whole thing was within the possibilities; he said he got the incident of the whale traveling from behring's strait to the coast of greenland, five thousand miles in five days, through the arctic ocean, from charles reade's "love me little love me long," and considered that that established the fact that the thing could be done; and he instanced jonah's adventure as proof that a man could live in a whale's belly, and added that if a preacher could stand it three days a lawyer could surely stand it five! there was a fiercer storm than ever in the editorial sanctum now, and the stranger was peremptorily discharged, and his manuscript flung at his head. but he had already delayed things so much that there was not time for some one else to rewrite the chapter, and so the paper came out without any novel in it. it was but a feeble, struggling, stupid journal, and the absence of the novel probably shook public confidence; at any rate, before the first side of the next issue went to press, the weekly occidental died as peacefully as an infant. an effort was made to resurrect it, with the proposed advantage of a telling new title, and mr. f. said that the phenix would be just the name for it, because it would give the idea of a resurrection from its dead ashes in a new and undreamed of condition of splendor; but some low-priced smarty on one of the dailies suggested that we call it the lazarus; and inasmuch as the people were not profound in scriptural matters but thought the resurrected lazarus and the dilapidated mendicant that begged in the rich man's gateway were one and the same person, the name became the laughing stock of the town, and killed the paper for good and all. i was sorry enough, for i was very proud of being connected with a literary paper--prouder than i have ever been of anything since, perhaps. i had written some rhymes for it--poetry i considered it--and it was a great grief to me that the production was on the "first side" of the issue that was not completed, and hence did not see the light. but time brings its revenges--i can put it in here; it will answer in place of a tear dropped to the memory of the lost occidental. the idea (not the chief idea, but the vehicle that bears it) was probably suggested by the old song called "the raging canal," but i cannot remember now. i do remember, though, that at that time i thought my doggerel was one of the ablest poems of the age: the aged pilot man. on the erie canal, it was, all on a summer's day, i sailed forth with my parents far away to albany. from out the clouds at noon that day there came a dreadful storm, that piled the billows high about, and filled us with alarm. a man came rushing from a house, saying, "snub up your boat i pray, [the customary canal technicality for "tie up."] snub up your boat, snub up, alas, snub up while yet you may." our captain cast one glance astern, then forward glanced he, and said, "my wife and little ones i never more shall see." said dollinger the pilot man, in noble words, but few, --"fear not, but lean on dollinger, and he will fetch you through." the boat drove on, the frightened mules tore through the rain and wind, and bravely still, in danger's post, the whip-boy strode behind. "come 'board, come 'board," the captain cried, "nor tempt so wild a storm;" but still the raging mules advanced, and still the boy strode on. then said the captain to us all, "alas, 'tis plain to me, the greater danger is not there, but here upon the sea. "so let us strive, while life remains, to save all souls on board, and then if die at last we must, let . . . . i cannot speak the word!" said dollinger the pilot man, tow'ring above the crew, "fear not, but trust in dollinger, and he will fetch you through." "low bridge! low bridge!" all heads went down, the laboring bark sped on; a mill we passed, we passed church, hamlets, and fields of corn; and all the world came out to see, and chased along the shore crying, "alas, alas, the sheeted rain, the wind, the tempest's roar! alas, the gallant ship and crew, can nothing help them more?" and from our deck sad eyes looked out across the stormy scene: the tossing wake of billows aft, the bending forests green, the chickens sheltered under carts in lee of barn the cows, the skurrying swine with straw in mouth, the wild spray from our bows! "she balances! she wavers! now let her go about! if she misses stays and broaches to, we're all"--then with a shout, "huray! huray! avast! belay! take in more sail! lord, what a gale! ho, boy, haul taut on the hind mule's tail!" "ho! lighten ship! ho! man the pump! ho, hostler, heave the lead!" "a quarter-three!--'tis shoaling fast! three feet large!--t-h-r-e-e feet! --three feet scant!" i cried in fright "oh, is there no retreat?" said dollinger, the pilot man, as on the vessel flew, "fear not, but trust in dollinger, and he will fetch you through." a panic struck the bravest hearts, the boldest cheek turned pale; for plain to all, this shoaling said a leak had burst the ditch's bed! and, straight as bolt from crossbow sped, our ship swept on, with shoaling lead, before the fearful gale! "sever the tow-line! cripple the mules!" too late! there comes a shock! another length, and the fated craft would have swum in the saving lock! then gathered together the shipwrecked crew and took one last embrace, while sorrowful tears from despairing eyes ran down each hopeless face; and some did think of their little ones whom they never more might see, and others of waiting wives at home, and mothers that grieved would be. but of all the children of misery there on that poor sinking frame, but one spake words of hope and faith, and i worshipped as they came: said dollinger the pilot man, --(o brave heart, strong and true!) --"fear not, but trust in dollinger, for he will fetch you through." lo! scarce the words have passed his lips the dauntless prophet say'th, when every soul about him seeth a wonder crown his faith! "and count ye all, both great and small, as numbered with the dead: for mariner for forty year, on erie, boy and man, i never yet saw such a storm, or one't with it began!" so overboard a keg of nails and anvils three we threw, likewise four bales of gunny-sacks, two hundred pounds of glue, two sacks of corn, four ditto wheat, a box of books, a cow, a violin, lord byron's works, a rip-saw and a sow. a curve! a curve! the dangers grow! "labbord!--stabbord!--s-t-e-a-d-y!--so! --hard-a-port, dol!--hellum-a-lee! haw the head mule!--the aft one gee! luff!--bring her to the wind!" for straight a farmer brought a plank, --(mysteriously inspired) --and laying it unto the ship, in silent awe retired. then every sufferer stood amazed that pilot man before; a moment stood. then wondering turned, and speechless walked ashore. chapter lii. since i desire, in this chapter, to say an instructive word or two about the silver mines, the reader may take this fair warning and skip, if he chooses. the year was perhaps the very top blossom and culmination of the "flush times." virginia swarmed with men and vehicles to that degree that the place looked like a very hive--that is when one's vision could pierce through the thick fog of alkali dust that was generally blowing in summer. i will say, concerning this dust, that if you drove ten miles through it, you and your horses would be coated with it a sixteenth of an inch thick and present an outside appearance that was a uniform pale yellow color, and your buggy would have three inches of dust in it, thrown there by the wheels. the delicate scales used by the assayers were inclosed in glass cases intended to be air-tight, and yet some of this dust was so impalpable and so invisibly fine that it would get in, somehow, and impair the accuracy of those scales. speculation ran riot, and yet there was a world of substantial business going on, too. all freights were brought over the mountains from california ( miles) by pack-train partly, and partly in huge wagons drawn by such long mule teams that each team amounted to a procession, and it did seem, sometimes, that the grand combined procession of animals stretched unbroken from virginia to california. its long route was traceable clear across the deserts of the territory by the writhing serpent of dust it lifted up. by these wagons, freights over that hundred and fifty miles were $ a ton for small lots (same price for all express matter brought by stage), and $ a ton for full loads. one virginia firm received one hundred tons of freight a month, and paid $ , a month freightage. in the winter the freights were much higher. all the bullion was shipped in bars by stage to san francisco (a bar was usually about twice the size of a pig of lead and contained from $ , to $ , according to the amount of gold mixed with the silver), and the freight on it (when the shipment was large) was one and a quarter per cent. of its intrinsic value. so, the freight on these bars probably averaged something more than $ each. small shippers paid two per cent. there were three stages a day, each way, and i have seen the out-going stages carry away a third of a ton of bullion each, and more than once i saw them divide a two-ton lot and take it off. however, these were extraordinary events. [mr. valentine, wells fargo's agent, has handled all the bullion shipped through the virginia office for many a month. to his memory--which is excellent--we are indebted for the following exhibit of the company's business in the virginia office since the first of january, : from january st to april st, about $ , worth of bullion passed through that office, during the next quarter, $ , ; next quarter, $ , ; next quarter, $ , ; next quarter, $ , , ; and for the quarter ending on the th of last june, about $ , , . thus in a year and a half, the virginia office only shipped $ , , in bullion. during the year they shipped $ , , , so we perceive the average shipments have more than doubled in the last six months. this gives us room to promise for the virginia office $ , a month for the year (though perhaps, judging by the steady increase in the business, we are under estimating, somewhat). this gives us $ , , for the year. gold hill and silver city together can beat us--we will give them $ , , . to dayton, empire city, ophir and carson city, we will allow an aggregate of $ , , , which is not over the mark, perhaps, and may possibly be a little under it. to esmeralda we give $ , , . to reese river and humboldt $ , , , which is liberal now, but may not be before the year is out. so we prognosticate that the yield of bullion this year will be about $ , , . placing the number of mills in the territory at one hundred, this gives to each the labor of producing $ , in bullion during the twelve months. allowing them to run three hundred days in the year (which none of them more than do), this makes their work average $ , a day. say the mills average twenty tons of rock a day and this rock worth $ as a general thing, and you have the actual work of our one hundred mills figured down "to a spot"--$ , a day each, and $ , , a year in the aggregate.--enterprise. [a considerable over estimate--m. t.]] two tons of silver bullion would be in the neighborhood of forty bars, and the freight on it over $ , . each coach always carried a deal of ordinary express matter beside, and also from fifteen to twenty passengers at from $ to $ a head. with six stages going all the time, wells, fargo and co.'s virginia city business was important and lucrative. all along under the centre of virginia and gold hill, for a couple of miles, ran the great comstock silver lode--a vein of ore from fifty to eighty feet thick between its solid walls of rock--a vein as wide as some of new york's streets. i will remind the reader that in pennsylvania a coal vein only eight feet wide is considered ample. virginia was a busy city of streets and houses above ground. under it was another busy city, down in the bowels of the earth, where a great population of men thronged in and out among an intricate maze of tunnels and drifts, flitting hither and thither under a winking sparkle of lights, and over their heads towered a vast web of interlocking timbers that held the walls of the gutted comstock apart. these timbers were as large as a man's body, and the framework stretched upward so far that no eye could pierce to its top through the closing gloom. it was like peering up through the clean-picked ribs and bones of some colossal skeleton. imagine such a framework two miles long, sixty feet wide, and higher than any church spire in america. imagine this stately lattice-work stretching down broadway, from the st. nicholas to wall street, and a fourth of july procession, reduced to pigmies, parading on top of it and flaunting their flags, high above the pinnacle of trinity steeple. one can imagine that, but he cannot well imagine what that forest of timbers cost, from the time they were felled in the pineries beyond washoe lake, hauled up and around mount davidson at atrocious rates of freightage, then squared, let down into the deep maw of the mine and built up there. twenty ample fortunes would not timber one of the greatest of those silver mines. the spanish proverb says it requires a gold mine to "run" a silver one, and it is true. a beggar with a silver mine is a pitiable pauper indeed if he cannot sell. i spoke of the underground virginia as a city. the gould and curry is only one single mine under there, among a great many others; yet the gould and curry's streets of dismal drifts and tunnels were five miles in extent, altogether, and its population five hundred miners. taken as a whole, the underground city had some thirty miles of streets and a population of five or six thousand. in this present day some of those populations are at work from twelve to sixteen hundred feet under virginia and gold hill, and the signal-bells that tell them what the superintendent above ground desires them to do are struck by telegraph as we strike a fire alarm. sometimes men fall down a shaft, there, a thousand feet deep. in such cases, the usual plan is to hold an inquest. if you wish to visit one of those mines, you may walk through a tunnel about half a mile long if you prefer it, or you may take the quicker plan of shooting like a dart down a shaft, on a small platform. it is like tumbling down through an empty steeple, feet first. when you reach the bottom, you take a candle and tramp through drifts and tunnels where throngs of men are digging and blasting; you watch them send up tubs full of great lumps of stone--silver ore; you select choice specimens from the mass, as souvenirs; you admire the world of skeleton timbering; you reflect frequently that you are buried under a mountain, a thousand feet below daylight; being in the bottom of the mine you climb from "gallery" to "gallery," up endless ladders that stand straight up and down; when your legs fail you at last, you lie down in a small box-car in a cramped "incline" like a half-up-ended sewer and are dragged up to daylight feeling as if you are crawling through a coffin that has no end to it. arrived at the top, you find a busy crowd of men receiving the ascending cars and tubs and dumping the ore from an elevation into long rows of bins capable of holding half a dozen tons each; under the bins are rows of wagons loading from chutes and trap-doors in the bins, and down the long street is a procession of these wagons wending toward the silver mills with their rich freight. it is all "done," now, and there you are. you need never go down again, for you have seen it all. if you have forgotten the process of reducing the ore in the mill and making the silver bars, you can go back and find it again in my esmeralda chapters if so disposed. of course these mines cave in, in places, occasionally, and then it is worth one's while to take the risk of descending into them and observing the crushing power exerted by the pressing weight of a settling mountain. i published such an experience in the enterprise, once, and from it i will take an extract: an hour in the caved mines.--we journeyed down into the ophir mine, yesterday, to see the earthquake. we could not go down the deep incline, because it still has a propensity to cave in places. therefore we traveled through the long tunnel which enters the hill above the ophir office, and then by means of a series of long ladders, climbed away down from the first to the fourth gallery. traversing a drift, we came to the spanish line, passed five sets of timbers still uninjured, and found the earthquake. here was as complete a chaos as ever was seen--vast masses of earth and splintered and broken timbers piled confusedly together, with scarcely an aperture left large enough for a cat to creep through. rubbish was still falling at intervals from above, and one timber which had braced others earlier in the day, was now crushed down out of its former position, showing that the caving and settling of the tremendous mass was still going on. we were in that portion of the ophir known as the "north mines." returning to the surface, we entered a tunnel leading into the central, for the purpose of getting into the main ophir. descending a long incline in this tunnel, we traversed a drift or so, and then went down a deep shaft from whence we proceeded into the fifth gallery of the ophir. from a side-drift we crawled through a small hole and got into the midst of the earthquake again--earth and broken timbers mingled together without regard to grace or symmetry. a large portion of the second, third and fourth galleries had caved in and gone to destruction--the two latter at seven o'clock on the previous evening. at the turn-table, near the northern extremity of the fifth gallery, two big piles of rubbish had forced their way through from the fifth gallery, and from the looks of the timbers, more was about to come. these beams are solid--eighteen inches square; first, a great beam is laid on the floor, then upright ones, five feet high, stand on it, supporting another horizontal beam, and so on, square above square, like the framework of a window. the superincumbent weight was sufficient to mash the ends of those great upright beams fairly into the solid wood of the horizontal ones three inches, compressing and bending the upright beam till it curved like a bow. before the spanish caved in, some of their twelve-inch horizontal timbers were compressed in this way until they were only five inches thick! imagine the power it must take to squeeze a solid log together in that way. here, also, was a range of timbers, for a distance of twenty feet, tilted six inches out of the perpendicular by the weight resting upon them from the caved galleries above. you could hear things cracking and giving way, and it was not pleasant to know that the world overhead was slowly and silently sinking down upon you. the men down in the mine do not mind it, however. returning along the fifth gallery, we struck the safe part of the ophir incline, and went down it to the sixth; but we found ten inches of water there, and had to come back. in repairing the damage done to the incline, the pump had to be stopped for two hours, and in the meantime the water gained about a foot. however, the pump was at work again, and the flood-water was decreasing. we climbed up to the fifth gallery again and sought a deep shaft, whereby we might descend to another part of the sixth, out of reach of the water, but suffered disappointment, as the men had gone to dinner, and there was no one to man the windlass. so, having seen the earthquake, we climbed out at the union incline and tunnel, and adjourned, all dripping with candle grease and perspiration, to lunch at the ophir office. during the great flush year of , nevada [claims to have] produced $ , , in bullion--almost, if not quite, a round million to each thousand inhabitants, which is very well, considering that she was without agriculture and manufactures. silver mining was her sole productive industry. [since the above was in type, i learn from an official source that the above figure is too high, and that the yield for did not exceed $ , , .] however, the day for large figures is approaching; the sutro tunnel is to plow through the comstock lode from end to end, at a depth of two thousand feet, and then mining will be easy and comparatively inexpensive; and the momentous matters of drainage, and hoisting and hauling of ore will cease to be burdensome. this vast work will absorb many years, and millions of dollars, in its completion; but it will early yield money, for that desirable epoch will begin as soon as it strikes the first end of the vein. the tunnel will be some eight miles long, and will develop astonishing riches. cars will carry the ore through the tunnel and dump it in the mills and thus do away with the present costly system of double handling and transportation by mule teams. the water from the tunnel will furnish the motive power for the mills. mr. sutro, the originator of this prodigious enterprise, is one of the few men in the world who is gifted with the pluck and perseverance necessary to follow up and hound such an undertaking to its completion. he has converted several obstinate congresses to a deserved friendliness toward his important work, and has gone up and down and to and fro in europe until he has enlisted a great moneyed interest in it there. chapter liii. every now and then, in these days, the boys used to tell me i ought to get one jim blaine to tell me the stirring story of his grandfather's old ram--but they always added that i must not mention the matter unless jim was drunk at the time--just comfortably and sociably drunk. they kept this up until my curiosity was on the rack to hear the story. i got to haunting blaine; but it was of no use, the boys always found fault with his condition; he was often moderately but never satisfactorily drunk. i never watched a man's condition with such absorbing interest, such anxious solicitude; i never so pined to see a man uncompromisingly drunk before. at last, one evening i hurried to his cabin, for i learned that this time his situation was such that even the most fastidious could find no fault with it--he was tranquilly, serenely, symmetrically drunk--not a hiccup to mar his voice, not a cloud upon his brain thick enough to obscure his memory. as i entered, he was sitting upon an empty powder-keg, with a clay pipe in one hand and the other raised to command silence. his face was round, red, and very serious; his throat was bare and his hair tumbled; in general appearance and costume he was a stalwart miner of the period. on the pine table stood a candle, and its dim light revealed "the boys" sitting here and there on bunks, candle-boxes, powder-kegs, etc. they said: "sh--! don't speak--he's going to commence." the story of the old ram. i found a seat at once, and blaine said: 'i don't reckon them times will ever come again. there never was a more bullier old ram than what he was. grandfather fetched him from illinois --got him of a man by the name of yates--bill yates--maybe you might have heard of him; his father was a deacon--baptist--and he was a rustler, too; a man had to get up ruther early to get the start of old thankful yates; it was him that put the greens up to jining teams with my grandfather when he moved west. 'seth green was prob'ly the pick of the flock; he married a wilkerson --sarah wilkerson--good cretur, she was--one of the likeliest heifers that was ever raised in old stoddard, everybody said that knowed her. she could heft a bar'l of flour as easy as i can flirt a flapjack. and spin? don't mention it! independent? humph! when sile hawkins come a browsing around her, she let him know that for all his tin he couldn't trot in harness alongside of her. you see, sile hawkins was--no, it warn't sile hawkins, after all--it was a galoot by the name of filkins --i disremember his first name; but he was a stump--come into pra'r meeting drunk, one night, hooraying for nixon, becuz he thought it was a primary; and old deacon ferguson up and scooted him through the window and he lit on old miss jefferson's head, poor old filly. she was a good soul--had a glass eye and used to lend it to old miss wagner, that hadn't any, to receive company in; it warn't big enough, and when miss wagner warn't noticing, it would get twisted around in the socket, and look up, maybe, or out to one side, and every which way, while t' other one was looking as straight ahead as a spy-glass. 'grown people didn't mind it, but it most always made the children cry, it was so sort of scary. she tried packing it in raw cotton, but it wouldn't work, somehow--the cotton would get loose and stick out and look so kind of awful that the children couldn't stand it no way. she was always dropping it out, and turning up her old dead-light on the company empty, and making them oncomfortable, becuz she never could tell when it hopped out, being blind on that side, you see. so somebody would have to hunch her and say, "your game eye has fetched loose. miss wagner dear" --and then all of them would have to sit and wait till she jammed it in again--wrong side before, as a general thing, and green as a bird's egg, being a bashful cretur and easy sot back before company. but being wrong side before warn't much difference, anyway; becuz her own eye was sky-blue and the glass one was yaller on the front side, so whichever way she turned it it didn't match nohow. 'old miss wagner was considerable on the borrow, she was. when she had a quilting, or dorcas s'iety at her house she gen'ally borrowed miss higgins's wooden leg to stump around on; it was considerable shorter than her other pin, but much she minded that. she said she couldn't abide crutches when she had company, becuz they were so slow; said when she had company and things had to be done, she wanted to get up and hump herself. she was as bald as a jug, and so she used to borrow miss jacops's wig --miss jacops was the coffin-peddler's wife--a ratty old buzzard, he was, that used to go roosting around where people was sick, waiting for 'em; and there that old rip would sit all day, in the shade, on a coffin that he judged would fit the can'idate; and if it was a slow customer and kind of uncertain, he'd fetch his rations and a blanket along and sleep in the coffin nights. he was anchored out that way, in frosty weather, for about three weeks, once, before old robbins's place, waiting for him; and after that, for as much as two years, jacops was not on speaking terms with the old man, on account of his disapp'inting him. he got one of his feet froze, and lost money, too, becuz old robbins took a favorable turn and got well. the next time robbins got sick, jacops tried to make up with him, and varnished up the same old coffin and fetched it along; but old robbins was too many for him; he had him in, and 'peared to be powerful weak; he bought the coffin for ten dollars and jacops was to pay it back and twenty-five more besides if robbins didn't like the coffin after he'd tried it. and then robbins died, and at the funeral he bursted off the lid and riz up in his shroud and told the parson to let up on the performances, becuz he could not stand such a coffin as that. you see he had been in a trance once before, when he was young, and he took the chances on another, cal'lating that if he made the trip it was money in his pocket, and if he missed fire he couldn't lose a cent. and by george he sued jacops for the rhino and got jedgment; and he set up the coffin in his back parlor and said he 'lowed to take his time, now. it was always an aggravation to jacops, the way that miserable old thing acted. he moved back to indiany pretty soon--went to wellsville --wellsville was the place the hogadorns was from. mighty fine family. old maryland stock. old squire hogadorn could carry around more mixed licker, and cuss better than most any man i ever see. his second wife was the widder billings--she that was becky martin; her dam was deacon dunlap's first wife. her oldest child, maria, married a missionary and died in grace--et up by the savages. they et him, too, poor feller --biled him. it warn't the custom, so they say, but they explained to friends of his'n that went down there to bring away his things, that they'd tried missionaries every other way and never could get any good out of 'em--and so it annoyed all his relations to find out that that man's life was fooled away just out of a dern'd experiment, so to speak. but mind you, there ain't anything ever reely lost; everything that people can't understand and don't see the reason of does good if you only hold on and give it a fair shake; prov'dence don't fire no blank ca'tridges, boys. that there missionary's substance, unbeknowns to himself, actu'ly converted every last one of them heathens that took a chance at the barbacue. nothing ever fetched them but that. don't tell me it was an accident that he was biled. there ain't no such a thing as an accident. 'when my uncle lem was leaning up agin a scaffolding once, sick, or drunk, or suthin, an irishman with a hod full of bricks fell on him out of the third story and broke the old man's back in two places. people said it was an accident. much accident there was about that. he didn't know what he was there for, but he was there for a good object. if he hadn't been there the irishman would have been killed. nobody can ever make me believe anything different from that. uncle lem's dog was there. why didn't the irishman fall on the dog? becuz the dog would a seen him a coming and stood from under. that's the reason the dog warn't appinted. a dog can't be depended on to carry out a special providence. mark my words it was a put-up thing. accidents don't happen, boys. uncle lem's dog--i wish you could a seen that dog. he was a reglar shepherd--or ruther he was part bull and part shepherd--splendid animal; belonged to parson hagar before uncle lem got him. parson hagar belonged to the western reserve hagars; prime family; his mother was a watson; one of his sisters married a wheeler; they settled in morgan county, and he got nipped by the machinery in a carpet factory and went through in less than a quarter of a minute; his widder bought the piece of carpet that had his remains wove in, and people come a hundred mile to 'tend the funeral. there was fourteen yards in the piece. 'she wouldn't let them roll him up, but planted him just so--full length. the church was middling small where they preached the funeral, and they had to let one end of the coffin stick out of the window. they didn't bury him--they planted one end, and let him stand up, same as a monument. and they nailed a sign on it and put--put on--put on it--sacred to--the m-e-m-o-r-y--of fourteen y-a-r-d-s--of three-ply--car---pet--containing all that was--m-o-r-t-a-l--of--of--w-i-l-l-i-a-m--w-h-e--' jim blaine had been growing gradually drowsy and drowsier--his head nodded, once, twice, three times--dropped peacefully upon his breast, and he fell tranquilly asleep. the tears were running down the boys' cheeks --they were suffocating with suppressed laughter--and had been from the start, though i had never noticed it. i perceived that i was "sold." i learned then that jim blaine's peculiarity was that whenever he reached a certain stage of intoxication, no human power could keep him from setting out, with impressive unction, to tell about a wonderful adventure which he had once had with his grandfather's old ram--and the mention of the ram in the first sentence was as far as any man had ever heard him get, concerning it. he always maundered off, interminably, from one thing to another, till his whisky got the best of him and he fell asleep. what the thing was that happened to him and his grandfather's old ram is a dark mystery to this day, for nobody has ever yet found out. chapter liv. of course there was a large chinese population in virginia--it is the case with every town and city on the pacific coast. they are a harmless race when white men either let them alone or treat them no worse than dogs; in fact they are almost entirely harmless anyhow, for they seldom think of resenting the vilest insults or the cruelest injuries. they are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as industrious as the day is long. a disorderly chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist. so long as a chinaman has strength to use his hands he needs no support from anybody; white men often complain of want of work, but a chinaman offers no such complaint; he always manages to find something to do. he is a great convenience to everybody--even to the worst class of white men, for he bears the most of their sins, suffering fines for their petty thefts, imprisonment for their robberies, and death for their murders. any white man can swear a chinaman's life away in the courts, but no chinaman can testify against a white man. ours is the "land of the free"--nobody denies that--nobody challenges it. [maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.] as i write, news comes that in broad daylight in san francisco, some boys have stoned an inoffensive chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no one interfered. there are seventy thousand (and possibly one hundred thousand) chinamen on the pacific coast. there were about a thousand in virginia. they were penned into a "chinese quarter"--a thing which they do not particularly object to, as they are fond of herding together. their buildings were of wood; usually only one story high, and set thickly together along streets scarcely wide enough for a wagon to pass through. their quarter was a little removed from the rest of the town. the chief employment of chinamen in towns is to wash clothing. they always send a bill, like this below, pinned to the clothes. it is mere ceremony, for it does not enlighten the customer much. their price for washing was $ . per dozen--rather cheaper than white people could afford to wash for at that time. a very common sign on the chinese houses was: "see yup, washer and ironer"; "hong wo, washer"; "sam sing & ah hop, washing." the house servants, cooks, etc., in california and nevada, were chiefly chinamen. there were few white servants and no chinawomen so employed. chinamen make good house servants, being quick, obedient, patient, quick to learn and tirelessly industrious. they do not need to be taught a thing twice, as a general thing. they are imitative. if a chinaman were to see his master break up a centre table, in a passion, and kindle a fire with it, that chinaman would be likely to resort to the furniture for fuel forever afterward. all chinamen can read, write and cipher with easy facility--pity but all our petted voters could. in california they rent little patches of ground and do a deal of gardening. they will raise surprising crops of vegetables on a sand pile. they waste nothing. what is rubbish to a christian, a chinaman carefully preserves and makes useful in one way or another. he gathers up all the old oyster and sardine cans that white people throw away, and procures marketable tin and solder from them by melting. he gathers up old bones and turns them into manure. in california he gets a living out of old mining claims that white men have abandoned as exhausted and worthless--and then the officers come down on him once a month with an exorbitant swindle to which the legislature has given the broad, general name of "foreign" mining tax, but it is usually inflicted on no foreigners but chinamen. this swindle has in some cases been repeated once or twice on the same victim in the course of the same month--but the public treasury was no additionally enriched by it, probably. chinamen hold their dead in great reverence--they worship their departed ancestors, in fact. hence, in china, a man's front yard, back yard, or any other part of his premises, is made his family burying ground, in order that he may visit the graves at any and all times. therefore that huge empire is one mighty cemetery; it is ridged and wringled from its centre to its circumference with graves--and inasmuch as every foot of ground must be made to do its utmost, in china, lest the swarming population suffer for food, the very graves are cultivated and yield a harvest, custom holding this to be no dishonor to the dead. since the departed are held in such worshipful reverence, a chinaman cannot bear that any indignity be offered the places where they sleep. mr. burlingame said that herein lay china's bitter opposition to railroads; a road could not be built anywhere in the empire without disturbing the graves of their ancestors or friends. a chinaman hardly believes he could enjoy the hereafter except his body lay in his beloved china; also, he desires to receive, himself, after death, that worship with which he has honored his dead that preceded him. therefore, if he visits a foreign country, he makes arrangements to have his bones returned to china in case he dies; if he hires to go to a foreign country on a labor contract, there is always a stipulation that his body shall be taken back to china if he dies; if the government sells a gang of coolies to a foreigner for the usual five-year term, it is specified in the contract that their bodies shall be restored to china in case of death. on the pacific coast the chinamen all belong to one or another of several great companies or organizations, and these companies keep track of their members, register their names, and ship their bodies home when they die. the see yup company is held to be the largest of these. the ning yeong company is next, and numbers eighteen thousand members on the coast. its headquarters are at san francisco, where it has a costly temple, several great officers (one of whom keeps regal state in seclusion and cannot be approached by common humanity), and a numerous priesthood. in it i was shown a register of its members, with the dead and the date of their shipment to china duly marked. every ship that sails from san francisco carries away a heavy freight of chinese corpses--or did, at least, until the legislature, with an ingenious refinement of christian cruelty, forbade the shipments, as a neat underhanded way of deterring chinese immigration. the bill was offered, whether it passed or not. it is my impression that it passed. there was another bill--it became a law--compelling every incoming chinaman to be vaccinated on the wharf and pay a duly appointed quack (no decent doctor would defile himself with such legalized robbery) ten dollars for it. as few importers of chinese would want to go to an expense like that, the law-makers thought this would be another heavy blow to chinese immigration. what the chinese quarter of virginia was like--or, indeed, what the chinese quarter of any pacific coast town was and is like--may be gathered from this item which i printed in the enterprise while reporting for that paper: chinatown.--accompanied by a fellow reporter, we made a trip through our chinese quarter the other night. the chinese have built their portion of the city to suit themselves; and as they keep neither carriages nor wagons, their streets are not wide enough, as a general thing, to admit of the passage of vehicles. at ten o'clock at night the chinaman may be seen in all his glory. in every little cooped-up, dingy cavern of a hut, faint with the odor of burning josh-lights and with nothing to see the gloom by save the sickly, guttering tallow candle, were two or three yellow, long-tailed vagabonds, coiled up on a sort of short truckle-bed, smoking opium, motionless and with their lustreless eyes turned inward from excess of satisfaction--or rather the recent smoker looks thus, immediately after having passed the pipe to his neighbor--for opium-smoking is a comfortless operation, and requires constant attention. a lamp sits on the bed, the length of the long pipe-stem from the smoker's mouth; he puts a pellet of opium on the end of a wire, sets it on fire, and plasters it into the pipe much as a christian would fill a hole with putty; then he applies the bowl to the lamp and proceeds to smoke--and the stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of the juices in the stem would well-nigh turn the stomach of a statue. john likes it, though; it soothes him, he takes about two dozen whiffs, and then rolls over to dream, heaven only knows what, for we could not imagine by looking at the soggy creature. possibly in his visions he travels far away from the gross world and his regular washing, and feast on succulent rats and birds'-nests in paradise. mr. ah sing keeps a general grocery and provision store at no. wang street. he lavished his hospitality upon our party in the friendliest way. he had various kinds of colored and colorless wines and brandies, with unpronouncable names, imported from china in little crockery jugs, and which he offered to us in dainty little miniature wash-basins of porcelain. he offered us a mess of birds'-nests; also, small, neat sausages, of which we could have swallowed several yards if we had chosen to try, but we suspected that each link contained the corpse of a mouse, and therefore refrained. mr. sing had in his store a thousand articles of merchandise, curious to behold, impossible to imagine the uses of, and beyond our ability to describe. his ducks, however, and his eggs, we could understand; the former were split open and flattened out like codfish, and came from china in that shape, and the latter were plastered over with some kind of paste which kept them fresh and palatable through the long voyage. we found mr. hong wo, no. chow-chow street, making up a lottery scheme--in fact we found a dozen others occupied in the same way in various parts of the quarter, for about every third chinaman runs a lottery, and the balance of the tribe "buck" at it. "tom," who speaks faultless english, and used to be chief and only cook to the territorial enterprise, when the establishment kept bachelor's hall two years ago, said that "sometime chinaman buy ticket one dollar hap, ketch um two tree hundred, sometime no ketch um anything; lottery like one man fight um seventy--may-be he whip, may-be he get whip heself, welly good." however, the percentage being sixty-nine against him, the chances are, as a general thing, that "he get whip heself." we could not see that these lotteries differed in any respect from our own, save that the figures being chinese, no ignorant white man might ever hope to succeed in telling "t'other from which;" the manner of drawing is similar to ours. mr. see yup keeps a fancy store on live fox street. he sold us fans of white feathers, gorgeously ornamented; perfumery that smelled like limburger cheese, chinese pens, and watch-charms made of a stone unscratchable with steel instruments, yet polished and tinted like the inner coat of a sea-shell. as tokens of his esteem, see yup presented the party with gaudy plumes made of gold tinsel and trimmed with peacocks' feathers. we ate chow-chow with chop-sticks in the celestial restaurants; our comrade chided the moon-eyed damsels in front of the houses for their want of feminine reserve; we received protecting josh-lights from our hosts and "dickered" for a pagan god or two. finally, we were impressed with the genius of a chinese book-keeper; he figured up his accounts on a machine like a gridiron with buttons strung on its bars; the different rows represented units, tens, hundreds and thousands. he fingered them with incredible rapidity--in fact, he pushed them from place to place as fast as a musical professor's fingers travel over the keys of a piano. they are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and well treated by the upper classes, all over the pacific coast. no californian gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a chinaman, under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the east. only the scum of the population do it--they and their children; they, and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as well as elsewhere in america. chapter lv. i began to get tired of staying in one place so long. there was no longer satisfying variety in going down to carson to report the proceedings of the legislature once a year, and horse-races and pumpkin-shows once in three months; (they had got to raising pumpkins and potatoes in washoe valley, and of course one of the first achievements of the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar agricultural fair to show off forty dollars' worth of those pumpkins in--however, the territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the "asylum"). i wanted to see san francisco. i wanted to go somewhere. i wanted--i did not know what i wanted. i had the "spring fever" and wanted a change, principally, no doubt. besides, a convention had framed a state constitution; nine men out of every ten wanted an office; i believed that these gentlemen would "treat" the moneyless and the irresponsible among the population into adopting the constitution and thus well-nigh killing the country (it could not well carry such a load as a state government, since it had nothing to tax that could stand a tax, for undeveloped mines could not, and there were not fifty developed ones in the land, there was but little realty to tax, and it did seem as if nobody was ever going to think of the simple salvation of inflicting a money penalty on murder). i believed that a state government would destroy the "flush times," and i wanted to get away. i believed that the mining stocks i had on hand would soon be worth $ , , and thought if they reached that before the constitution was adopted, i would sell out and make myself secure from the crash the change of government was going to bring. i considered $ , sufficient to go home with decently, though it was but a small amount compared to what i had been expecting to return with. i felt rather down-hearted about it, but i tried to comfort myself with the reflection that with such a sum i could not fall into want. about this time a schoolmate of mine whom i had not seen since boyhood, came tramping in on foot from reese river, a very allegory of poverty. the son of wealthy parents, here he was, in a strange land, hungry, bootless, mantled in an ancient horse-blanket, roofed with a brimless hat, and so generally and so extravagantly dilapidated that he could have "taken the shine out of the prodigal son himself," as he pleasantly remarked. he wanted to borrow forty-six dollars--twenty-six to take him to san francisco, and twenty for something else; to buy some soap with, maybe, for he needed it. i found i had but little more than the amount wanted, in my pocket; so i stepped in and borrowed forty-six dollars of a banker (on twenty days' time, without the formality of a note), and gave it him, rather than walk half a block to the office, where i had some specie laid up. if anybody had told me that it would take me two years to pay back that forty-six dollars to the banker (for i did not expect it of the prodigal, and was not disappointed), i would have felt injured. and so would the banker. i wanted a change. i wanted variety of some kind. it came. mr. goodman went away for a week and left me the post of chief editor. it destroyed me. the first day, i wrote my "leader" in the forenoon. the second day, i had no subject and put it off till the afternoon. the third day i put it off till evening, and then copied an elaborate editorial out of the "american cyclopedia," that steadfast friend of the editor, all over this land. the fourth day i "fooled around" till midnight, and then fell back on the cyclopedia again. the fifth day i cudgeled my brain till midnight, and then kept the press waiting while i penned some bitter personalities on six different people. the sixth day i labored in anguish till far into the night and brought forth--nothing. the paper went to press without an editorial. the seventh day i resigned. on the eighth, mr. goodman returned and found six duels on his hands--my personalities had borne fruit. nobody, except he has tried it, knows what it is to be an editor. it is easy to scribble local rubbish, with the facts all before you; it is easy to clip selections from other papers; it is easy to string out a correspondence from any locality; but it is unspeakable hardship to write editorials. subjects are the trouble--the dreary lack of them, i mean. every day, it is drag, drag, drag--think, and worry and suffer--all the world is a dull blank, and yet the editorial columns must be filled. only give the editor a subject, and his work is done--it is no trouble to write it up; but fancy how you would feel if you had to pump your brains dry every day in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year. it makes one low spirited simply to think of it. the matter that each editor of a daily paper in america writes in the course of a year would fill from four to eight bulky volumes like this book! fancy what a library an editor's work would make, after twenty or thirty years' service. yet people often marvel that dickens, scott, bulwer, dumas, etc., have been able to produce so many books. if these authors had wrought as voluminously as newspaper editors do, the result would be something to marvel at, indeed. how editors can continue this tremendous labor, this exhausting consumption of brain fibre (for their work is creative, and not a mere mechanical laying-up of facts, like reporting), day after day and year after year, is incomprehensible. preachers take two months' holiday in midsummer, for they find that to produce two sermons a week is wearing, in the long run. in truth it must be so, and is so; and therefore, how an editor can take from ten to twenty texts and build upon them from ten to twenty painstaking editorials a week and keep it up all the year round, is farther beyond comprehension than ever. ever since i survived my week as editor, i have found at least one pleasure in any newspaper that comes to my hand; it is in admiring the long columns of editorial, and wondering to myself how in the mischief he did it! mr. goodman's return relieved me of employment, unless i chose to become a reporter again. i could not do that; i could not serve in the ranks after being general of the army. so i thought i would depart and go abroad into the world somewhere. just at this juncture, dan, my associate in the reportorial department, told me, casually, that two citizens had been trying to persuade him to go with them to new york and aid in selling a rich silver mine which they had discovered and secured in a new mining district in our neighborhood. he said they offered to pay his expenses and give him one third of the proceeds of the sale. he had refused to go. it was the very opportunity i wanted. i abused him for keeping so quiet about it, and not mentioning it sooner. he said it had not occurred to him that i would like to go, and so he had recommended them to apply to marshall, the reporter of the other paper. i asked dan if it was a good, honest mine, and no swindle. he said the men had shown him nine tons of the rock, which they had got out to take to new york, and he could cheerfully say that he had seen but little rock in nevada that was richer; and moreover, he said that they had secured a tract of valuable timber and a mill-site, near the mine. my first idea was to kill dan. but i changed my mind, notwithstanding i was so angry, for i thought maybe the chance was not yet lost. dan said it was by no means lost; that the men were absent at the mine again, and would not be in virginia to leave for the east for some ten days; that they had requested him to do the talking to marshall, and he had promised that he would either secure marshall or somebody else for them by the time they got back; he would now say nothing to anybody till they returned, and then fulfil his promise by furnishing me to them. it was splendid. i went to bed all on fire with excitement; for nobody had yet gone east to sell a nevada silver mine, and the field was white for the sickle. i felt that such a mine as the one described by dan would bring a princely sum in new york, and sell without delay or difficulty. i could not sleep, my fancy so rioted through its castles in the air. it was the "blind lead" come again. next day i got away, on the coach, with the usual eclat attending departures of old citizens,--for if you have only half a dozen friends out there they will make noise for a hundred rather than let you seem to go away neglected and unregretted--and dan promised to keep strict watch for the men that had the mine to sell. the trip was signalized but by one little incident, and that occurred just as we were about to start. a very seedy looking vagabond passenger got out of the stage a moment to wait till the usual ballast of silver bricks was thrown in. he was standing on the pavement, when an awkward express employee, carrying a brick weighing a hundred pounds, stumbled and let it fall on the bummer's foot. he instantly dropped on the ground and began to howl in the most heart-breaking way. a sympathizing crowd gathered around and were going to pull his boot off; but he screamed louder than ever and they desisted; then he fell to gasping, and between the gasps ejaculated "brandy! for heaven's sake, brandy!" they poured half a pint down him, and it wonderfully restored and comforted him. then he begged the people to assist him to the stage, which was done. the express people urged him to have a doctor at their expense, but he declined, and said that if he only had a little brandy to take along with him, to soothe his paroxyms of pain when they came on, he would be grateful and content. he was quickly supplied with two bottles, and we drove off. he was so smiling and happy after that, that i could not refrain from asking him how he could possibly be so comfortable with a crushed foot. "well," said he, "i hadn't had a drink for twelve hours, and hadn't a cent to my name. i was most perishing--and so, when that duffer dropped that hundred-pounder on my foot, i see my chance. got a cork leg, you know!" and he pulled up his pantaloons and proved it. he was as drunk as a lord all day long, and full of chucklings over his timely ingenuity. one drunken man necessarily reminds one of another. i once heard a gentleman tell about an incident which he witnessed in a californian bar-room. he entitled it "ye modest man taketh a drink." it was nothing but a bit of acting, but it seemed to me a perfect rendering, and worthy of toodles himself. the modest man, tolerably far gone with beer and other matters, enters a saloon (twenty-five cents is the price for anything and everything, and specie the only money used) and lays down a half dollar; calls for whiskey and drinks it; the bar-keeper makes change and lays the quarter in a wet place on the counter; the modest man fumbles at it with nerveless fingers, but it slips and the water holds it; he contemplates it, and tries again; same result; observes that people are interested in what he is at, blushes; fumbles at the quarter again--blushes--puts his forefinger carefully, slowly down, to make sure of his aim--pushes the coin toward the bar-keeper, and says with a sigh: "gimme a cigar!" naturally, another gentleman present told about another drunken man. he said he reeled toward home late at night; made a mistake and entered the wrong gate; thought he saw a dog on the stoop; and it was--an iron one. he stopped and considered; wondered if it was a dangerous dog; ventured to say "be (hic) begone!" no effect. then he approached warily, and adopted conciliation; pursed up his lips and tried to whistle, but failed; still approached, saying, "poor dog!--doggy, doggy, doggy!--poor doggy-dog!" got up on the stoop, still petting with fond names; till master of the advantages; then exclaimed, "leave, you thief!"--planted a vindictive kick in his ribs, and went head-over-heels overboard, of course. a pause; a sigh or two of pain, and then a remark in a reflective voice: "awful solid dog. what could he ben eating? ('ic!) rocks, p'raps. such animals is dangerous.--' at's what i say--they're dangerous. if a man--('ic!)--if a man wants to feed a dog on rocks, let him feed him on rocks; 'at's all right; but let him keep him at home--not have him layin' round promiscuous, where ('ic!) where people's liable to stumble over him when they ain't noticin'!" it was not without regret that i took a last look at the tiny flag (it was thirty-five feet long and ten feet wide) fluttering like a lady's handkerchief from the topmost peak of mount davidson, two thousand feet above virginia's roofs, and felt that doubtless i was bidding a permanent farewell to a city which had afforded me the most vigorous enjoyment of life i had ever experienced. and this reminds me of an incident which the dullest memory virginia could boast at the time it happened must vividly recall, at times, till its possessor dies. late one summer afternoon we had a rain shower. that was astonishing enough, in itself, to set the whole town buzzing, for it only rains (during a week or two weeks) in the winter in nevada, and even then not enough at a time to make it worth while for any merchant to keep umbrellas for sale. but the rain was not the chief wonder. it only lasted five or ten minutes; while the people were still talking about it all the heavens gathered to themselves a dense blackness as of midnight. all the vast eastern front of mount davidson, over-looking the city, put on such a funereal gloom that only the nearness and solidity of the mountain made its outlines even faintly distinguishable from the dead blackness of the heavens they rested against. this unaccustomed sight turned all eyes toward the mountain; and as they looked, a little tongue of rich golden flame was seen waving and quivering in the heart of the midnight, away up on the extreme summit! in a few minutes the streets were packed with people, gazing with hardly an uttered word, at the one brilliant mote in the brooding world of darkness. it flicked like a candle-flame, and looked no larger; but with such a background it was wonderfully bright, small as it was. it was the flag!--though no one suspected it at first, it seemed so like a supernatural visitor of some kind--a mysterious messenger of good tidings, some were fain to believe. it was the nation's emblem transfigured by the departing rays of a sun that was entirely palled from view; and on no other object did the glory fall, in all the broad panorama of mountain ranges and deserts. not even upon the staff of the flag--for that, a needle in the distance at any time, was now untouched by the light and undistinguishable in the gloom. for a whole hour the weird visitor winked and burned in its lofty solitude, and still the thousands of uplifted eyes watched it with fascinated interest. how the people were wrought up! the superstition grew apace that this was a mystic courier come with great news from the war--the poetry of the idea excusing and commending it--and on it spread, from heart to heart, from lip to lip and from street to street, till there was a general impulse to have out the military and welcome the bright waif with a salvo of artillery! and all that time one sorely tried man, the telegraph operator sworn to official secrecy, had to lock his lips and chain his tongue with a silence that was like to rend them; for he, and he only, of all the speculating multitude, knew the great things this sinking sun had seen that day in the east--vicksburg fallen, and the union arms victorious at gettysburg! but for the journalistic monopoly that forbade the slightest revealment of eastern news till a day after its publication in the california papers, the glorified flag on mount davidson would have been saluted and re-saluted, that memorable evening, as long as there was a charge of powder to thunder with; the city would have been illuminated, and every man that had any respect for himself would have got drunk,--as was the custom of the country on all occasions of public moment. even at this distant day i cannot think of this needlessly marred supreme opportunity without regret. what a time we might have had! chapter lvi. we rumbled over the plains and valleys, climbed the sierras to the clouds, and looked down upon summer-clad california. and i will remark here, in passing, that all scenery in california requires distance to give it its highest charm. the mountains are imposing in their sublimity and their majesty of form and altitude, from any point of view--but one must have distance to soften their ruggedness and enrich their tintings; a californian forest is best at a little distance, for there is a sad poverty of variety in species, the trees being chiefly of one monotonous family--redwood, pine, spruce, fir--and so, at a near view there is a wearisome sameness of attitude in their rigid arms, stretched down ward and outward in one continued and reiterated appeal to all men to "sh! --don't say a word!--you might disturb somebody!" close at hand, too, there is a reliefless and relentless smell of pitch and turpentine; there is a ceaseless melancholy in their sighing and complaining foliage; one walks over a soundless carpet of beaten yellow bark and dead spines of the foliage till he feels like a wandering spirit bereft of a footfall; he tires of the endless tufts of needles and yearns for substantial, shapely leaves; he looks for moss and grass to loll upon, and finds none, for where there is no bark there is naked clay and dirt, enemies to pensive musing and clean apparel. often a grassy plain in california, is what it should be, but often, too, it is best contemplated at a distance, because although its grass blades are tall, they stand up vindictively straight and self-sufficient, and are unsociably wide apart, with uncomely spots of barren sand between. one of the queerest things i know of, is to hear tourists from "the states" go into ecstasies over the loveliness of "ever-blooming california." and they always do go into that sort of ecstasies. but perhaps they would modify them if they knew how old californians, with the memory full upon them of the dust-covered and questionable summer greens of californian "verdure," stand astonished, and filled with worshipping admiration, in the presence of the lavish richness, the brilliant green, the infinite freshness, the spend-thrift variety of form and species and foliage that make an eastern landscape a vision of paradise itself. the idea of a man falling into raptures over grave and sombre california, when that man has seen new england's meadow-expanses and her maples, oaks and cathedral-windowed elms decked in summer attire, or the opaline splendors of autumn descending upon her forests, comes very near being funny--would be, in fact, but that it is so pathetic. no land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful. the tropics are not, for all the sentiment that is wasted on them. they seem beautiful at first, but sameness impairs the charm by and by. change is the handmaiden nature requires to do her miracles with. the land that has four well-defined seasons, cannot lack beauty, or pall with monotony. each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the watching of its unfolding, its gradual, harmonious development, its culminating graces--and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its train. and i think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its turn, seems the loveliest. san francisco, a truly fascinating city to live in, is stately and handsome at a fair distance, but close at hand one notes that the architecture is mostly old-fashioned, many streets are made up of decaying, smoke-grimed, wooden houses, and the barren sand-hills toward the outskirts obtrude themselves too prominently. even the kindly climate is sometimes pleasanter when read about than personally experienced, for a lovely, cloudless sky wears out its welcome by and by, and then when the longed for rain does come it stays. even the playful earthquake is better contemplated at a dis---- however there are varying opinions about that. the climate of san francisco is mild and singularly equable. the thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round. it hardly changes at all. you sleep under one or two light blankets summer and winter, and never use a mosquito bar. nobody ever wears summer clothing. you wear black broadcloth--if you have it--in august and january, just the same. it is no colder, and no warmer, in the one month than the other. you do not use overcoats and you do not use fans. it is as pleasant a climate as could well be contrived, take it all around, and is doubtless the most unvarying in the whole world. the wind blows there a good deal in the summer months, but then you can go over to oakland, if you choose--three or four miles away--it does not blow there. it has only snowed twice in san francisco in nineteen years, and then it only remained on the ground long enough to astonish the children, and set them to wondering what the feathery stuff was. during eight months of the year, straight along, the skies are bright and cloudless, and never a drop of rain falls. but when the other four months come along, you will need to go and steal an umbrella. because you will require it. not just one day, but one hundred and twenty days in hardly varying succession. when you want to go visiting, or attend church, or the theatre, you never look up at the clouds to see whether it is likely to rain or not--you look at the almanac. if it is winter, it will rain--and if it is summer, it won't rain, and you cannot help it. you never need a lightning-rod, because it never thunders and it never lightens. and after you have listened for six or eight weeks, every night, to the dismal monotony of those quiet rains, you will wish in your heart the thunder would leap and crash and roar along those drowsy skies once, and make everything alive--you will wish the prisoned lightnings would cleave the dull firmament asunder and light it with a blinding glare for one little instant. you would give anything to hear the old familiar thunder again and see the lightning strike somebody. and along in the summer, when you have suffered about four months of lustrous, pitiless sunshine, you are ready to go down on your knees and plead for rain--hail--snow--thunder and lightning--anything to break the monotony --you will take an earthquake, if you cannot do any better. and the chances are that you'll get it, too. san francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific sand hills. they yield a generous vegetation. all the rare flowers which people in "the states" rear with such patient care in parlor flower-pots and green-houses, flourish luxuriantly in the open air there all the year round. calla lilies, all sorts of geraniums, passion flowers, moss roses--i do not know the names of a tenth part of them. i only know that while new yorkers are burdened with banks and drifts of snow, californians are burdened with banks and drifts of flowers, if they only keep their hands off and let them grow. and i have heard that they have also that rarest and most curious of all the flowers, the beautiful espiritu santo, as the spaniards call it--or flower of the holy spirit --though i thought it grew only in central america--down on the isthmus. in its cup is the daintiest little facsimile of a dove, as pure as snow. the spaniards have a superstitious reverence for it. the blossom has been conveyed to the states, submerged in ether; and the bulb has been taken thither also, but every attempt to make it bloom after it arrived, has failed. i have elsewhere spoken of the endless winter of mono, california, and but this moment of the eternal spring of san francisco. now if we travel a hundred miles in a straight line, we come to the eternal summer of sacramento. one never sees summer-clothing or mosquitoes in san francisco--but they can be found in sacramento. not always and unvaryingly, but about one hundred and forty-three months out of twelve years, perhaps. flowers bloom there, always, the reader can easily believe--people suffer and sweat, and swear, morning, noon and night, and wear out their stanchest energies fanning themselves. it gets hot there, but if you go down to fort yuma you will find it hotter. fort yuma is probably the hottest place on earth. the thermometer stays at one hundred and twenty in the shade there all the time--except when it varies and goes higher. it is a u.s. military post, and its occupants get so used to the terrific heat that they suffer without it. there is a tradition (attributed to john phenix [it has been purloined by fifty different scribblers who were too poor to invent a fancy but not ashamed to steal one.--m. t.]) that a very, very wicked soldier died there, once, and of course, went straight to the hottest corner of perdition, --and the next day he telegraphed back for his blankets. there is no doubt about the truth of this statement--there can be no doubt about it. i have seen the place where that soldier used to board. in sacramento it is fiery summer always, and you can gather roses, and eat strawberries and ice-cream, and wear white linen clothes, and pant and perspire, at eight or nine o'clock in the morning, and then take the cars, and at noon put on your furs and your skates, and go skimming over frozen donner lake, seven thousand feet above the valley, among snow banks fifteen feet deep, and in the shadow of grand mountain peaks that lift their frosty crags ten thousand feet above the level of the sea. there is a transition for you! where will you find another like it in the western hemisphere? and some of us have swept around snow-walled curves of the pacific railroad in that vicinity, six thousand feet above the sea, and looked down as the birds do, upon the deathless summer of the sacramento valley, with its fruitful fields, its feathery foliage, its silver streams, all slumbering in the mellow haze of its enchanted atmosphere, and all infinitely softened and spiritualized by distance--a dreamy, exquisite glimpse of fairyland, made all the more charming and striking that it was caught through a forbidden gateway of ice and snow, and savage crags and precipices. chapter lvii. it was in this sacramento valley, just referred to, that a deal of the most lucrative of the early gold mining was done, and you may still see, in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered and disfigured by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and twenty years ago. you may see such disfigurements far and wide over california--and in some such places, where only meadows and forests are visible--not a living creature, not a house, no stick or stone or remnant of a ruin, and not a sound, not even a whisper to disturb the sabbath stillness--you will find it hard to believe that there stood at one time a fiercely-flourishing little city, of two thousand or three thousand souls, with its newspaper, fire company, brass band, volunteer militia, bank, hotels, noisy fourth of july processions and speeches, gambling hells crammed with tobacco smoke, profanity, and rough-bearded men of all nations and colors, with tables heaped with gold dust sufficient for the revenues of a german principality--streets crowded and rife with business--town lots worth four hundred dollars a front foot--labor, laughter, music, dancing, swearing, fighting, shooting, stabbing--a bloody inquest and a man for breakfast every morning--everything that delights and adorns existence --all the appointments and appurtenances of a thriving and prosperous and promising young city,--and now nothing is left of it all but a lifeless, homeless solitude. the men are gone, the houses have vanished, even the name of the place is forgotten. in no other land, in modern times, have towns so absolutely died and disappeared, as in the old mining regions of california. it was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days. it was a curious population. it was the only population of the kind that the world has ever seen gathered together, and it is not likely that the world will ever see its like again. for observe, it was an assemblage of two hundred thousand young men--not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and magnificent manhood--the very pick and choice of the world's glorious ones. no women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans,--none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants--the strangest population, the finest population, the most gallant host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land. and where are they now? scattered to the ends of the earth--or prematurely aged and decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays--or dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all --victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf--the noblest holocaust that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward. it is pitiful to think upon. it was a splendid population--for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths staid at home--you never find that sort of people among pioneers --you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. it was that population that gave to california a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day--and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as usual, and says "well, that is california all over." but they were rough in those times! they fairly reveled in gold, whisky, fights, and fandangoes, and were unspeakably happy. the honest miner raked from a hundred to a thousand dollars out of his claim a day, and what with the gambling dens and the other entertainments, he hadn't a cent the next morning, if he had any sort of luck. they cooked their own bacon and beans, sewed on their own buttons, washed their own shirts --blue woollen ones; and if a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was to appear in public in a white shirt or a stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated. for those people hated aristocrats. they had a particular and malignant animosity toward what they called a "biled shirt." it was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society! men--only swarming hosts of stalwart men--nothing juvenile, nothing feminine, visible anywhere! in those days miners would flock in crowds to catch a glimpse of that rare and blessed spectacle, a woman! old inhabitants tell how, in a certain camp, the news went abroad early in the morning that a woman was come! they had seen a calico dress hanging out of a wagon down at the camping-ground--sign of emigrants from over the great plains. everybody went down there, and a shout went up when an actual, bona fide dress was discovered fluttering in the wind! the male emigrant was visible. the miners said: "fetch her out!" he said: "it is my wife, gentlemen--she is sick--we have been robbed of money, provisions, everything, by the indians--we want to rest." "fetch her out! we've got to see her!" "but, gentlemen, the poor thing, she--" "fetch her out!" he "fetched her out," and they swung their hats and sent up three rousing cheers and a tiger; and they crowded around and gazed at her, and touched her dress, and listened to her voice with the look of men who listened to a memory rather than a present reality--and then they collected twenty-five hundred dollars in gold and gave it to the man, and swung their hats again and gave three more cheers, and went home satisfied. once i dined in san francisco with the family of a pioneer, and talked with his daughter, a young lady whose first experience in san francisco was an adventure, though she herself did not remember it, as she was only two or three years old at the time. her father said that, after landing from the ship, they were walking up the street, a servant leading the party with the little girl in her arms. and presently a huge miner, bearded, belted, spurred, and bristling with deadly weapons--just down from a long campaign in the mountains, evidently-barred the way, stopped the servant, and stood gazing, with a face all alive with gratification and astonishment. then he said, reverently: "well, if it ain't a child!" and then he snatched a little leather sack out of his pocket and said to the servant: "there's a hundred and fifty dollars in dust, there, and i'll give it to you to let me kiss the child!" that anecdote is true. but see how things change. sitting at that dinner-table, listening to that anecdote, if i had offered double the money for the privilege of kissing the same child, i would have been refused. seventeen added years have far more than doubled the price. and while upon this subject i will remark that once in star city, in the humboldt mountains, i took my place in a sort of long, post-office single file of miners, to patiently await my chance to peep through a crack in the cabin and get a sight of the splendid new sensation--a genuine, live woman! and at the end of half of an hour my turn came, and i put my eye to the crack, and there she was, with one arm akimbo, and tossing flap-jacks in a frying-pan with the other. and she was one hundred and sixty-five [being in calmer mood, now, i voluntarily knock off a hundred from that.--m.t.] years old, and hadn't a tooth in her head. chapter lviii. for a few months i enjoyed what to me was an entirely new phase of existence--a butterfly idleness; nothing to do, nobody to be responsible to, and untroubled with financial uneasiness. i fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the union. after the sage-brush and alkali deserts of washoe, san francisco was paradise to me. i lived at the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places, infested the opera, and learned to seem enraptured with music which oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it, if i had had the vulgar honesty to confess it. however, i suppose i was not greatly worse than the most of my countrymen in that. i had longed to be a butterfly, and i was one at last. i attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkad and schottisched with a step peculiar to myself--and the kangaroo. in a word, i kept the due state of a man worth a hundred thousand dollars (prospectively,) and likely to reach absolute affluence when that silver-mine sale should be ultimately achieved in the east. i spent money with a free hand, and meantime watched the stock sales with an interested eye and looked to see what might happen in nevada. something very important happened. the property holders of nevada voted against the state constitution; but the folks who had nothing to lose were in the majority, and carried the measure over their heads. but after all it did not immediately look like a disaster, though unquestionably it was one i hesitated, calculated the chances, and then concluded not to sell. stocks went on rising; speculation went mad; bankers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, laborers, even the very washerwomen and servant girls, were putting up their earnings on silver stocks, and every sun that rose in the morning went down on paupers enriched and rich men beggared. what a gambling carnival it was! gould and curry soared to six thousand three hundred dollars a foot! and then --all of a sudden, out went the bottom and everything and everybody went to ruin and destruction! the wreck was complete. the bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it. i was an early beggar and a thorough one. my hoarded stocks were not worth the paper they were printed on. i threw them all away. i, the cheerful idiot that had been squandering money like water, and thought myself beyond the reach of misfortune, had not now as much as fifty dollars when i gathered together my various debts and paid them. i removed from the hotel to a very private boarding house. i took a reporter's berth and went to work. i was not entirely broken in spirit, for i was building confidently on the sale of the silver mine in the east. but i could not hear from dan. my letters miscarried or were not answered. one day i did not feel vigorous and remained away from the office. the next day i went down toward noon as usual, and found a note on my desk which had been there twenty-four hours. it was signed "marshall"--the virginia reporter--and contained a request that i should call at the hotel and see him and a friend or two that night, as they would sail for the east in the morning. a postscript added that their errand was a big mining speculation! i was hardly ever so sick in my life. i abused myself for leaving virginia and entrusting to another man a matter i ought to have attended to myself; i abused myself for remaining away from the office on the one day of all the year that i should have been there. and thus berating myself i trotted a mile to the steamer wharf and arrived just in time to be too late. the ship was in the stream and under way. i comforted myself with the thought that may be the speculation would amount to nothing--poor comfort at best--and then went back to my slavery, resolved to put up with my thirty-five dollars a week and forget all about it. a month afterward i enjoyed my first earthquake. it was one which was long called the "great" earthquake, and is doubtless so distinguished till this day. it was just after noon, on a bright october day. i was coming down third street. the only objects in motion anywhere in sight in that thickly built and populous quarter, were a man in a buggy behind me, and a street car wending slowly up the cross street. otherwise, all was solitude and a sabbath stillness. as i turned the corner, around a frame house, there was a great rattle and jar, and it occurred to me that here was an item!--no doubt a fight in that house. before i could turn and seek the door, there came a really terrific shock; the ground seemed to roll under me in waves, interrupted by a violent joggling up and down, and there was a heavy grinding noise as of brick houses rubbing together. i fell up against the frame house and hurt my elbow. i knew what it was, now, and from mere reportorial instinct, nothing else, took out my watch and noted the time of day; at that moment a third and still severer shock came, and as i reeled about on the pavement trying to keep my footing, i saw a sight! the entire front of a tall four-story brick building in third street sprung outward like a door and fell sprawling across the street, raising a dust like a great volume of smoke! and here came the buggy--overboard went the man, and in less time than i can tell it the vehicle was distributed in small fragments along three hundred yards of street. one could have fancied that somebody had fired a charge of chair-rounds and rags down the thoroughfare. the street car had stopped, the horses were rearing and plunging, the passengers were pouring out at both ends, and one fat man had crashed half way through a glass window on one side of the car, got wedged fast and was squirming and screaming like an impaled madman. every door, of every house, as far as the eye could reach, was vomiting a stream of human beings; and almost before one could execute a wink and begin another, there was a massed multitude of people stretching in endless procession down every street my position commanded. never was solemn solitude turned into teeming life quicker. of the wonders wrought by "the great earthquake," these were all that came under my eye; but the tricks it did, elsewhere, and far and wide over the town, made toothsome gossip for nine days. the destruction of property was trifling--the injury to it was wide-spread and somewhat serious. the "curiosities" of the earthquake were simply endless. gentlemen and ladies who were sick, or were taking a siesta, or had dissipated till a late hour and were making up lost sleep, thronged into the public streets in all sorts of queer apparel, and some without any at all. one woman who had been washing a naked child, ran down the street holding it by the ankles as if it were a dressed turkey. prominent citizens who were supposed to keep the sabbath strictly, rushed out of saloons in their shirt-sleeves, with billiard cues in their hands. dozens of men with necks swathed in napkins, rushed from barber-shops, lathered to the eyes or with one cheek clean shaved and the other still bearing a hairy stubble. horses broke from stables, and a frightened dog rushed up a short attic ladder and out on to a roof, and when his scare was over had not the nerve to go down again the same way he had gone up. a prominent editor flew down stairs, in the principal hotel, with nothing on but one brief undergarment--met a chambermaid, and exclaimed: "oh, what shall i do! where shall i go!" she responded with naive serenity: "if you have no choice, you might try a clothing-store!" a certain foreign consul's lady was the acknowledged leader of fashion, and every time she appeared in anything new or extraordinary, the ladies in the vicinity made a raid on their husbands' purses and arrayed themselves similarly. one man who had suffered considerably and growled accordingly, was standing at the window when the shocks came, and the next instant the consul's wife, just out of the bath, fled by with no other apology for clothing than--a bath-towel! the sufferer rose superior to the terrors of the earthquake, and said to his wife: "now that is something like! get out your towel my dear!" the plastering that fell from ceilings in san francisco that day, would have covered several acres of ground. for some days afterward, groups of eyeing and pointing men stood about many a building, looking at long zig-zag cracks that extended from the eaves to the ground. four feet of the tops of three chimneys on one house were broken square off and turned around in such a way as to completely stop the draft. a crack a hundred feet long gaped open six inches wide in the middle of one street and then shut together again with such force, as to ridge up the meeting earth like a slender grave. a lady sitting in her rocking and quaking parlor, saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut twice, like a mouth, and then-drop the end of a brick on the floor like a tooth. she was a woman easily disgusted with foolishness, and she arose and went out of there. one lady who was coming down stairs was astonished to see a bronze hercules lean forward on its pedestal as if to strike her with its club. they both reached the bottom of the flight at the same time,--the woman insensible from the fright. her child, born some little time afterward, was club-footed. however--on second thought,--if the reader sees any coincidence in this, he must do it at his own risk. the first shock brought down two or three huge organ-pipes in one of the churches. the minister, with uplifted hands, was just closing the services. he glanced up, hesitated, and said: "however, we will omit the benediction!"--and the next instant there was a vacancy in the atmosphere where he had stood. after the first shock, an oakland minister said: "keep your seats! there is no better place to die than this"-- and added, after the third: "but outside is good enough!" he then skipped out at the back door. such another destruction of mantel ornaments and toilet bottles as the earthquake created, san francisco never saw before. there was hardly a girl or a matron in the city but suffered losses of this kind. suspended pictures were thrown down, but oftener still, by a curious freak of the earthquake's humor, they were whirled completely around with their faces to the wall! there was great difference of opinion, at first, as to the course or direction the earthquake traveled, but water that splashed out of various tanks and buckets settled that. thousands of people were made so sea-sick by the rolling and pitching of floors and streets that they were weak and bed-ridden for hours, and some few for even days afterward.--hardly an individual escaped nausea entirely. the queer earthquake--episodes that formed the staple of san francisco gossip for the next week would fill a much larger book than this, and so i will diverge from the subject. by and by, in the due course of things, i picked up a copy of the enterprise one day, and fell under this cruel blow: nevada mines in new york.--g. m. marshall, sheba hurs and amos h. rose, who left san francisco last july for new york city, with ores from mines in pine wood district, humboldt county, and on the reese river range, have disposed of a mine containing six thousand feet and called the pine mountains consolidated, for the sum of $ , , . the stamps on the deed, which is now on its way to humboldt county, from new york, for record, amounted to $ , , which is said to be the largest amount of stamps ever placed on one document. a working capital of $ , , has been paid into the treasury, and machinery has already been purchased for a large quartz mill, which will be put up as soon as possible. the stock in this company is all full paid and entirely unassessable. the ores of the mines in this district somewhat resemble those of the sheba mine in humboldt. sheba hurst, the discoverer of the mines, with his friends corralled all the best leads and all the land and timber they desired before making public their whereabouts. ores from there, assayed in this city, showed them to be exceedingly rich in silver and gold--silver predominating. there is an abundance of wood and water in the district. we are glad to know that new york capital has been enlisted in the development of the mines of this region. having seen the ores and assays, we are satisfied that the mines of the district are very valuable--anything but wild-cat. once more native imbecility had carried the day, and i had lost a million! it was the "blind lead" over again. let us not dwell on this miserable matter. if i were inventing these things, i could be wonderfully humorous over them; but they are too true to be talked of with hearty levity, even at this distant day. [true, and yet not exactly as given in the above figures, possibly. i saw marshall, months afterward, and although he had plenty of money he did not claim to have captured an entire million. in fact i gathered that he had not then received $ , . beyond that figure his fortune appeared to consist of uncertain vast expectations rather than prodigious certainties. however, when the above item appeared in print i put full faith in it, and incontinently wilted and went to seed under it.] suffice it that i so lost heart, and so yielded myself up to repinings and sighings and foolish regrets, that i neglected my duties and became about worthless, as a reporter for a brisk newspaper. and at last one of the proprietors took me aside, with a charity i still remember with considerable respect, and gave me an opportunity to resign my berth and so save myself the disgrace of a dismissal. chapter lix. for a time i wrote literary screeds for the golden era. c. h. webb had established a very excellent literary weekly called the californian, but high merit was no guaranty of success; it languished, and he sold out to three printers, and bret harte became editor at $ a week, and i was employed to contribute an article a week at $ . but the journal still languished, and the printers sold out to captain ogden, a rich man and a pleasant gentleman who chose to amuse himself with such an expensive luxury without much caring about the cost of it. when he grew tired of the novelty, he re-sold to the printers, the paper presently died a peaceful death, and i was out of work again. i would not mention these things but for the fact that they so aptly illustrate the ups and downs that characterize life on the pacific coast. a man could hardly stumble into such a variety of queer vicissitudes in any other country. for two months my sole occupation was avoiding acquaintances; for during that time i did not earn a penny, or buy an article of any kind, or pay my board. i became a very adept at "slinking." i slunk from back street to back street, i slunk away from approaching faces that looked familiar, i slunk to my meals, ate them humbly and with a mute apology for every mouthful i robbed my generous landlady of, and at midnight, after wanderings that were but slinkings away from cheerfulness and light, i slunk to my bed. i felt meaner, and lowlier and more despicable than the worms. during all this time i had but one piece of money--a silver ten cent piece--and i held to it and would not spend it on any account, lest the consciousness coming strong upon me that i was entirely penniless, might suggest suicide. i had pawned every thing but the clothes i had on; so i clung to my dime desperately, till it was smooth with handling. however, i am forgetting. i did have one other occupation beside that of "slinking." it was the entertaining of a collector (and being entertained by him,) who had in his hands the virginia banker's bill for forty-six dollars which i had loaned my schoolmate, the "prodigal." this man used to call regularly once a week and dun me, and sometimes oftener. he did it from sheer force of habit, for he knew he could get nothing. he would get out his bill, calculate the interest for me, at five per cent a month, and show me clearly that there was no attempt at fraud in it and no mistakes; and then plead, and argue and dun with all his might for any sum--any little trifle--even a dollar--even half a dollar, on account. then his duty was accomplished and his conscience free. he immediately dropped the subject there always; got out a couple of cigars and divided, put his feet in the window, and then we would have a long, luxurious talk about everything and everybody, and he would furnish me a world of curious dunning adventures out of the ample store in his memory. by and by he would clap his hat on his head, shake hands and say briskly: "well, business is business--can't stay with you always!"--and was off in a second. the idea of pining for a dun! and yet i used to long for him to come, and would get as uneasy as any mother if the day went by without his visit, when i was expecting him. but he never collected that bill, at last nor any part of it. i lived to pay it to the banker myself. misery loves company. now and then at night, in out-of-the way, dimly lighted places, i found myself happening on another child of misfortune. he looked so seedy and forlorn, so homeless and friendless and forsaken, that i yearned toward him as a brother. i wanted to claim kinship with him and go about and enjoy our wretchedness together. the drawing toward each other must have been mutual; at any rate we got to falling together oftener, though still seemingly by accident; and although we did not speak or evince any recognition, i think the dull anxiety passed out of both of us when we saw each other, and then for several hours we would idle along contentedly, wide apart, and glancing furtively in at home lights and fireside gatherings, out of the night shadows, and very much enjoying our dumb companionship. finally we spoke, and were inseparable after that. for our woes were identical, almost. he had been a reporter too, and lost his berth, and this was his experience, as nearly as i can recollect it. after losing his berth he had gone down, down, down, with never a halt: from a boarding house on russian hill to a boarding house in kearney street; from thence to dupont; from thence to a low sailor den; and from thence to lodgings in goods boxes and empty hogsheads near the wharves. then; for a while, he had gained a meagre living by sewing up bursted sacks of grain on the piers; when that failed he had found food here and there as chance threw it in his way. he had ceased to show his face in daylight, now, for a reporter knows everybody, rich and poor, high and low, and cannot well avoid familiar faces in the broad light of day. this mendicant blucher--i call him that for convenience--was a splendid creature. he was full of hope, pluck and philosophy; he was well read and a man of cultivated taste; he had a bright wit and was a master of satire; his kindliness and his generous spirit made him royal in my eyes and changed his curb-stone seat to a throne and his damaged hat to a crown. he had an adventure, once, which sticks fast in my memory as the most pleasantly grotesque that ever touched my sympathies. he had been without a penny for two months. he had shirked about obscure streets, among friendly dim lights, till the thing had become second nature to him. but at last he was driven abroad in daylight. the cause was sufficient; he had not tasted food for forty-eight hours, and he could not endure the misery of his hunger in idle hiding. he came along a back street, glowering at the loaves in bake-shop windows, and feeling that he could trade his life away for a morsel to eat. the sight of the bread doubled his hunger; but it was good to look at it, any how, and imagine what one might do if one only had it. presently, in the middle of the street he saw a shining spot--looked again--did not, and could not, believe his eyes--turned away, to try them, then looked again. it was a verity--no vain, hunger-inspired delusion--it was a silver dime! he snatched it--gloated over it; doubted it--bit it--found it genuine --choked his heart down, and smothered a halleluiah. then he looked around--saw that nobody was looking at him--threw the dime down where it was before--walked away a few steps, and approached again, pretending he did not know it was there, so that he could re-enjoy the luxury of finding it. he walked around it, viewing it from different points; then sauntered about with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the signs and now and then glancing at it and feeling the old thrill again. finally he took it up, and went away, fondling it in his pocket. he idled through unfrequented streets, stopping in doorways and corners to take it out and look at it. by and by he went home to his lodgings--an empty queens-ware hogshead,--and employed himself till night trying to make up his mind what to buy with it. but it was hard to do. to get the most for it was the idea. he knew that at the miner's restaurant he could get a plate of beans and a piece of bread for ten cents; or a fish-ball and some few trifles, but they gave "no bread with one fish-ball" there. at french pete's he could get a veal cutlet, plain, and some radishes and bread, for ten cents; or a cup of coffee--a pint at least--and a slice of bread; but the slice was not thick enough by the eighth of an inch, and sometimes they were still more criminal than that in the cutting of it. at seven o'clock his hunger was wolfish; and still his mind was not made up. he turned out and went up merchant street, still ciphering; and chewing a bit of stick, as is the way of starving men. he passed before the lights of martin's restaurant, the most aristocratic in the city, and stopped. it was a place where he had often dined, in better days, and martin knew him well. standing aside, just out of the range of the light, he worshiped the quails and steaks in the show window, and imagined that may be the fairy times were not gone yet and some prince in disguise would come along presently and tell him to go in there and take whatever he wanted. he chewed his stick with a hungry interest as he warmed to his subject. just at this juncture he was conscious of some one at his side, sure enough; and then a finger touched his arm. he looked up, over his shoulder, and saw an apparition--a very allegory of hunger! it was a man six feet high, gaunt, unshaven, hung with rags; with a haggard face and sunken cheeks, and eyes that pleaded piteously. this phantom said: "come with me--please." he locked his arm in blucher's and walked up the street to where the passengers were few and the light not strong, and then facing about, put out his hands in a beseeching way, and said: "friend--stranger--look at me! life is easy to you--you go about, placid and content, as i did once, in my day--you have been in there, and eaten your sumptuous supper, and picked your teeth, and hummed your tune, and thought your pleasant thoughts, and said to yourself it is a good world --but you've never suffered! you don't know what trouble is--you don't know what misery is--nor hunger! look at me! stranger have pity on a poor friendless, homeless dog! as god is my judge, i have not tasted food for eight and forty hours!--look in my eyes and see if i lie! give me the least trifle in the world to keep me from starving--anything --twenty-five cents! do it, stranger--do it, please. it will be nothing to you, but life to me. do it, and i will go down on my knees and lick the dust before you! i will kiss your footprints--i will worship the very ground you walk on! only twenty-five cents! i am famishing --perishing--starving by inches! for god's sake don't desert me!" blucher was bewildered--and touched, too--stirred to the depths. he reflected. thought again. then an idea struck him, and he said: "come with me." he took the outcast's arm, walked him down to martin's restaurant, seated him at a marble table, placed the bill of fare before him, and said: "order what you want, friend. charge it to me, mr. martin." "all right, mr. blucher," said martin. then blucher stepped back and leaned against the counter and watched the man stow away cargo after cargo of buckwheat cakes at seventy-five cents a plate; cup after cup of coffee, and porter house steaks worth two dollars apiece; and when six dollars and a half's worth of destruction had been accomplished, and the stranger's hunger appeased, blucher went down to french pete's, bought a veal cutlet plain, a slice of bread, and three radishes, with his dime, and set to and feasted like a king! take the episode all around, it was as odd as any that can be culled from the myriad curiosities of californian life, perhaps. chapter lx. by and by, an old friend of mine, a miner, came down from one of the decayed mining camps of tuolumne, california, and i went back with him. we lived in a small cabin on a verdant hillside, and there were not five other cabins in view over the wide expanse of hill and forest. yet a flourishing city of two or three thousand population had occupied this grassy dead solitude during the flush times of twelve or fifteen years before, and where our cabin stood had once been the heart of the teeming hive, the centre of the city. when the mines gave out the town fell into decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared--streets, dwellings, shops, everything--and left no sign. the grassy slopes were as green and smooth and desolate of life as if they had never been disturbed. the mere handful of miners still remaining, had seen the town spring up spread, grow and flourish in its pride; and they had seen it sicken and die, and pass away like a dream. with it their hopes had died, and their zest of life. they had long ago resigned themselves to their exile, and ceased to correspond with their distant friends or turn longing eyes toward their early homes. they had accepted banishment, forgotten the world and been forgotten of the world. they were far from telegraphs and railroads, and they stood, as it were, in a living grave, dead to the events that stirred the globe's great populations, dead to the common interests of men, isolated and outcast from brotherhood with their kind. it was the most singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy exile that fancy can imagine.--one of my associates in this locality, for two or three months, was a man who had had a university education; but now for eighteen years he had decayed there by inches, a bearded, rough-clad, clay-stained miner, and at times, among his sighings and soliloquizings, he unconsciously interjected vaguely remembered latin and greek sentences--dead and musty tongues, meet vehicles for the thoughts of one whose dreams were all of the past, whose life was a failure; a tired man, burdened with the present, and indifferent to the future; a man without ties, hopes, interests, waiting for rest and the end. in that one little corner of california is found a species of mining which is seldom or never mentioned in print. it is called "pocket mining" and i am not aware that any of it is done outside of that little corner. the gold is not evenly distributed through the surface dirt, as in ordinary placer mines, but is collected in little spots, and they are very wide apart and exceedingly hard to find, but when you do find one you reap a rich and sudden harvest. there are not now more than twenty pocket miners in that entire little region. i think i know every one of them personally. i have known one of them to hunt patiently about the hill-sides every day for eight months without finding gold enough to make a snuff-box--his grocery bill running up relentlessly all the time--and then find a pocket and take out of it two thousand dollars in two dips of his shovel. i have known him to take out three thousand dollars in two hours, and go and pay up every cent of his indebtedness, then enter on a dazzling spree that finished the last of his treasure before the night was gone. and the next day he bought his groceries on credit as usual, and shouldered his pan and shovel and went off to the hills hunting pockets again happy and content. this is the most fascinating of all the different kinds of mining, and furnishes a very handsome percentage of victims to the lunatic asylum. pocket hunting is an ingenious process. you take a spadeful of earth from the hill-side and put it in a large tin pan and dissolve and wash it gradually away till nothing is left but a teaspoonful of fine sediment. whatever gold was in that earth has remained, because, being the heaviest, it has sought the bottom. among the sediment you will find half a dozen yellow particles no larger than pin-heads. you are delighted. you move off to one side and wash another pan. if you find gold again, you move to one side further, and wash a third pan. if you find no gold this time, you are delighted again, because you know you are on the right scent. you lay an imaginary plan, shaped like a fan, with its handle up the hill--for just where the end of the handle is, you argue that the rich deposit lies hidden, whose vagrant grains of gold have escaped and been washed down the hill, spreading farther and farther apart as they wandered. and so you proceed up the hill, washing the earth and narrowing your lines every time the absence of gold in the pan shows that you are outside the spread of the fan; and at last, twenty yards up the hill your lines have converged to a point--a single foot from that point you cannot find any gold. your breath comes short and quick, you are feverish with excitement; the dinner-bell may ring its clapper off, you pay no attention; friends may die, weddings transpire, houses burn down, they are nothing to you; you sweat and dig and delve with a frantic interest--and all at once you strike it! up comes a spadeful of earth and quartz that is all lovely with soiled lumps and leaves and sprays of gold. sometimes that one spadeful is all--$ . sometimes the nest contains $ , , and it takes you three or four days to get it all out. the pocket-miners tell of one nest that yielded $ , and two men exhausted it in two weeks, and then sold the ground for $ , to a party who never got $ out of it afterward. the hogs are good pocket hunters. all the summer they root around the bushes, and turn up a thousand little piles of dirt, and then the miners long for the rains; for the rains beat upon these little piles and wash them down and expose the gold, possibly right over a pocket. two pockets were found in this way by the same man in one day. one had $ , in it and the other $ , . that man could appreciate it, for he hadn't had a cent for about a year. in tuolumne lived two miners who used to go to the neighboring village in the afternoon and return every night with household supplies. part of the distance they traversed a trail, and nearly always sat down to rest on a great boulder that lay beside the path. in the course of thirteen years they had worn that boulder tolerably smooth, sitting on it. by and by two vagrant mexicans came along and occupied the seat. they began to amuse themselves by chipping off flakes from the boulder with a sledge-hammer. they examined one of these flakes and found it rich with gold. that boulder paid them $ afterward. but the aggravating circumstance was that these "greasers" knew that there must be more gold where that boulder came from, and so they went panning up the hill and found what was probably the richest pocket that region has yet produced. it took three months to exhaust it, and it yielded $ , . the two american miners who used to sit on the boulder are poor yet, and they take turn about in getting up early in the morning to curse those mexicans--and when it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native american is gifted above the sons of men. i have dwelt at some length upon this matter of pocket mining because it is a subject that is seldom referred to in print, and therefore i judged that it would have for the reader that interest which naturally attaches to novelty. life on the mississippi by mark twain part . chapter a section in my biography in due course i got my license. i was a pilot now, full fledged. i dropped into casual employments; no misfortunes resulting, intermittent work gave place to steady and protracted engagements. time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and i supposed--and hoped--that i was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended. but by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone. i had to seek another livelihood. so i became a silver miner in nevada; next, a newspaper reporter; next, a gold miner, in california; next, a reporter in san francisco; next, a special correspondent in the sandwich islands; next, a roving correspondent in europe and the east; next, an instructional torch-bearer on the lecture platform; and, finally, i became a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of new england. in so few words have i disposed of the twenty-one slow-drifting years that have come and gone since i last looked from the windows of a pilot- house. let us resume, now. chapter i return to my muttons after twenty-one years' absence, i felt a very strong desire to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left; so i resolved to go out there. i enlisted a poet for company, and a stenographer to 'take him down,' and started westward about the middle of april. as i proposed to make notes, with a view to printing, i took some thought as to methods of procedure. i reflected that if i were recognized, on the river, i should not be as free to go and come, talk, inquire, and spy around, as i should be if unknown; i remembered that it was the custom of steamboatmen in the old times to load up the confiding stranger with the most picturesque and admirable lies, and put the sophisticated friend off with dull and ineffectual facts: so i concluded, that, from a business point of view, it would be an advantage to disguise our party with fictitious names. the idea was certainly good, but it bred infinite bother; for although smith, jones, and johnson are easy names to remember when there is no occasion to remember them, it is next to impossible to recollect them when they are wanted. how do criminals manage to keep a brand-new alias in mind? this is a great mystery. i was innocent; and yet was seldom able to lay my hand on my new name when it was needed; and it seemed to me that if i had had a crime on my conscience to further confuse me, i could never have kept the name by me at all. we left per pennsylvania railroad, at a.m. april . 'evening. speaking of dress. grace and picturesqueness drop gradually out of it as one travels away from new york.' i find that among my notes. it makes no difference which direction you take, the fact remains the same. whether you move north, south, east, or west, no matter: you can get up in the morning and guess how far you have come, by noting what degree of grace and picturesqueness is by that time lacking in the costumes of the new passengers,--i do not mean of the women alone, but of both sexes. it may be that carriage is at the bottom of this thing; and i think it is; for there are plenty of ladies and gentlemen in the provincial cities whose garments are all made by the best tailors and dressmakers of new york; yet this has no perceptible effect upon the grand fact: the educated eye never mistakes those people for new-yorkers. no, there is a godless grace, and snap, and style about a born and bred new-yorker which mere clothing cannot effect. 'april . this morning, struck into the region of full goatees-- sometimes accompanied by a mustache, but only occasionally.' it was odd to come upon this thick crop of an obsolete and uncomely fashion; it was like running suddenly across a forgotten acquaintance whom you had supposed dead for a generation. the goatee extends over a wide extent of country; and is accompanied by an iron-clad belief in adam and the biblical history of creation, which has not suffered from the assaults of the scientists. 'afternoon. at the railway stations the loafers carry both hands in their breeches pockets; it was observable, heretofore, that one hand was sometimes out of doors,--here, never. this is an important fact in geography.' if the loafers determined the character of a country, it would be still more important, of course. 'heretofore, all along, the station-loafer has been often observed to scratch one shin with the other foot; here, these remains of activity are wanting. this has an ominous look.' by and by, we entered the tobacco-chewing region. fifty years ago, the tobacco-chewing region covered the union. it is greatly restricted now. next, boots began to appear. not in strong force, however. later--away down the mississippi--they became the rule. they disappeared from other sections of the union with the mud; no doubt they will disappear from the river villages, also, when proper pavements come in. we reached st. louis at ten o'clock at night. at the counter of the hotel i tendered a hurriedly-invented fictitious name, with a miserable attempt at careless ease. the clerk paused, and inspected me in the compassionate way in which one inspects a respectable person who is found in doubtful circumstances; then he said-- 'it's all right; i know what sort of a room you want. used to clerk at the st. james, in new york.' an unpromising beginning for a fraudulent career. we started to the supper room, and met two other men whom i had known elsewhere. how odd and unfair it is: wicked impostors go around lecturing under my nom de guerre and nobody suspects them; but when an honest man attempts an imposture, he is exposed at once. one thing seemed plain: we must start down the river the next day, if people who could not be deceived were going to crop up at this rate: an unpalatable disappointment, for we had hoped to have a week in st. louis. the southern was a good hotel, and we could have had a comfortable time there. it is large, and well conducted, and its decorations do not make one cry, as do those of the vast palmer house, in chicago. true, the billiard-tables were of the old silurian period, and the cues and balls of the post-pliocene; but there was refreshment in this, not discomfort; for there is rest and healing in the contemplation of antiquities. the most notable absence observable in the billiard-room, was the absence of the river man. if he was there he had taken in his sign, he was in disguise. i saw there none of the swell airs and graces, and ostentatious displays of money, and pompous squanderings of it, which used to distinguish the steamboat crowd from the dry-land crowd in the bygone days, in the thronged billiard-rooms of st. louis. in those times, the principal saloons were always populous with river men; given fifty players present, thirty or thirty-five were likely to be from the river. but i suspected that the ranks were thin now, and the steamboatmen no longer an aristocracy. why, in my time they used to call the 'barkeep' bill, or joe, or tom, and slap him on the shoulder; i watched for that. but none of these people did it. manifestly a glory that once was had dissolved and vanished away in these twenty-one years. when i went up to my room, i found there the young man called rogers, crying. rogers was not his name; neither was jones, brown, dexter, ferguson, bascom, nor thompson; but he answered to either of these that a body found handy in an emergency; or to any other name, in fact, if he perceived that you meant him. he said-- 'what is a person to do here when he wants a drink of water?--drink this slush?' 'can't you drink it?' 'i could if i had some other water to wash it with.' here was a thing which had not changed; a score of years had not affected this water's mulatto complexion in the least; a score of centuries would succeed no better, perhaps. it comes out of the turbulent, bank-caving missouri, and every tumblerful of it holds nearly an acre of land in solution. i got this fact from the bishop of the diocese. if you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate the land from the water as easy as genesis; and then you will find them both good: the one good to eat, the other good to drink. the land is very nourishing, the water is thoroughly wholesome. the one appeases hunger; the other, thirst. but the natives do not take them separately, but together, as nature mixed them. when they find an inch of mud in the bottom of a glass, they stir it up, and then take the draught as they would gruel. it is difficult for a stranger to get used to this batter, but once used to it he will prefer it to water. this is really the case. it is good for steamboating, and good to drink; but it is worthless for all other purposes, except baptizing. next morning, we drove around town in the rain. the city seemed but little changed. it was greatly changed, but it did not seem so; because in st. louis, as in london and pittsburgh, you can't persuade a new thing to look new; the coal smoke turns it into an antiquity the moment you take your hand off it. the place had just about doubled its size, since i was a resident of it, and was now become a city of , inhabitants; still, in the solid business parts, it looked about as it had looked formerly. yet i am sure there is not as much smoke in st. louis now as there used to be. the smoke used to bank itself in a dense billowy black canopy over the town, and hide the sky from view. this shelter is very much thinner now; still, there is a sufficiency of smoke there, i think. i heard no complaint. however, on the outskirts changes were apparent enough; notably in dwelling-house architecture. the fine new homes are noble and beautiful and modern. they stand by themselves, too, with green lawns around them; whereas the dwellings of a former day are packed together in blocks, and are all of one pattern, with windows all alike, set in an arched frame-work of twisted stone; a sort of house which was handsome enough when it was rarer. there was another change--the forest park. this was new to me. it is beautiful and very extensive, and has the excellent merit of having been made mainly by nature. there are other parks, and fine ones, notably tower grove and the botanical gardens; for st. louis interested herself in such improvements at an earlier day than did the most of our cities. the first time i ever saw st. louis, i could have bought it for six million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that i did not do it. it was bitter now to look abroad over this domed and steepled metropolis, this solid expanse of bricks and mortar stretching away on every hand into dim, measure-defying distances, and remember that i had allowed that opportunity to go by. why i should have allowed it to go by seems, of course, foolish and inexplicable to-day, at a first glance; yet there were reasons at the time to justify this course. a scotchman, hon. charles augustus murray, writing some forty-five or fifty years ago, said--'the streets are narrow, ill paved and ill lighted.' those streets are narrow still, of course; many of them are ill paved yet; but the reproach of ill lighting cannot be repeated, now. the 'catholic new church' was the only notable building then, and mr. murray was confidently called upon to admire it, with its 'species of grecian portico, surmounted by a kind of steeple, much too diminutive in its proportions, and surmounted by sundry ornaments' which the unimaginative scotchman found himself 'quite unable to describe;' and therefore was grateful when a german tourist helped him out with the exclamation--'by ---, they look exactly like bed-posts!' st. louis is well equipped with stately and noble public buildings now, and the little church, which the people used to be so proud of, lost its importance a long time ago. still, this would not surprise mr. murray, if he could come back; for he prophesied the coming greatness of st. louis with strong confidence. the further we drove in our inspection-tour, the more sensibly i realized how the city had grown since i had seen it last; changes in detail became steadily more apparent and frequent than at first, too: changes uniformly evidencing progress, energy, prosperity. but the change of changes was on the 'levee.' this time, a departure from the rule. half a dozen sound-asleep steamboats where i used to see a solid mile of wide-awake ones! this was melancholy, this was woeful. the absence of the pervading and jocund steamboatman from the billiard- saloon was explained. he was absent because he is no more. his occupation is gone, his power has passed away, he is absorbed into the common herd, he grinds at the mill, a shorn samson and inconspicuous. half a dozen lifeless steamboats, a mile of empty wharves, a negro fatigued with whiskey stretched asleep, in a wide and soundless vacancy, where the serried hosts of commerce used to contend!{footnote [capt. marryat, writing forty-five years ago says: 'st. louis has , inhabitants. the river abreast of the town is crowded with steamboats, lying in two or three tiers.']} here was desolation, indeed. 'the old, old sea, as one in tears, comes murmuring, with foamy lips, and knocking at the vacant piers, calls for his long-lost multitude of ships.' the towboat and the railroad had done their work, and done it well and completely. the mighty bridge, stretching along over our heads, had done its share in the slaughter and spoliation. remains of former steamboatmen told me, with wan satisfaction, that the bridge doesn't pay. still, it can be no sufficient compensation to a corpse, to know that the dynamite that laid him out was not of as good quality as it had been supposed to be. the pavements along the river front were bad: the sidewalks were rather out of repair; there was a rich abundance of mud. all this was familiar and satisfying; but the ancient armies of drays, and struggling throngs of men, and mountains of freight, were gone; and sabbath reigned in their stead. the immemorial mile of cheap foul doggeries remained, but business was dull with them; the multitudes of poison-swilling irishmen had departed, and in their places were a few scattering handfuls of ragged negroes, some drinking, some drunk, some nodding, others asleep. st. louis is a great and prosperous and advancing city; but the river- edge of it seems dead past resurrection. mississippi steamboating was born about ; at the end of thirty years, it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more, it was dead! a strangely short life for so majestic a creature. of course it is not absolutely dead, neither is a crippled octogenarian who could once jump twenty-two feet on level ground; but as contrasted with what it was in its prime vigor, mississippi steamboating may be called dead. it killed the old-fashioned keel-boating, by reducing the freight-trip to new orleans to less than a week. the railroads have killed the steamboat passenger traffic by doing in two or three days what the steamboats consumed a week in doing; and the towing-fleets have killed the through-freight traffic by dragging six or seven steamer-loads of stuff down the river at a time, at an expense so trivial that steamboat competition was out of the question. freight and passenger way-traffic remains to the steamers. this is in the hands--along the two thousand miles of river between st. paul and new orleans---of two or three close corporations well fortified with capital; and by able and thoroughly business-like management and system, these make a sufficiency of money out of what is left of the once prodigious steamboating industry. i suppose that st. louis and new orleans have not suffered materially by the change, but alas for the wood-yard man! he used to fringe the river all the way; his close-ranked merchandise stretched from the one city to the other, along the banks, and he sold uncountable cords of it every year for cash on the nail; but all the scattering boats that are left burn coal now, and the seldomest spectacle on the mississippi to-day is a wood-pile. where now is the once wood-yard man? chapter traveling incognito my idea was, to tarry a while in every town between st. louis and new orleans. to do this, it would be necessary to go from place to place by the short packet lines. it was an easy plan to make, and would have been an easy one to follow, twenty years ago--but not now. there are wide intervals between boats, these days. i wanted to begin with the interesting old french settlements of st. genevieve and kaskaskia, sixty miles below st. louis. there was only one boat advertised for that section--a grand tower packet. still, one boat was enough; so we went down to look at her. she was a venerable rack- heap, and a fraud to boot; for she was playing herself for personal property, whereas the good honest dirt was so thickly caked all over her that she was righteously taxable as real estate. there are places in new england where her hurricane deck would be worth a hundred and fifty dollars an acre. the soil on her forecastle was quite good--the new crop of wheat was already springing from the cracks in protected places. the companionway was of a dry sandy character, and would have been well suited for grapes, with a southern exposure and a little subsoiling. the soil of the boiler deck was thin and rocky, but good enough for grazing purposes. a colored boy was on watch here--nobody else visible. we gathered from him that this calm craft would go, as advertised, 'if she got her trip;' if she didn't get it, she would wait for it. 'has she got any of her trip?' 'bless you, no, boss. she ain't unloadened, yit. she only come in dis mawnin'.' he was uncertain as to when she might get her trip, but thought it might be to-morrow or maybe next day. this would not answer at all; so we had to give up the novelty of sailing down the river on a farm. we had one more arrow in our quiver: a vicksburg packet, the 'gold dust,' was to leave at p.m. we took passage in her for memphis, and gave up the idea of stopping off here and there, as being impracticable. she was neat, clean, and comfortable. we camped on the boiler deck, and bought some cheap literature to kill time with. the vender was a venerable irishman with a benevolent face and a tongue that worked easily in the socket, and from him we learned that he had lived in st. louis thirty-four years and had never been across the river during that period. then he wandered into a very flowing lecture, filled with classic names and allusions, which was quite wonderful for fluency until the fact became rather apparent that this was not the first time, nor perhaps the fiftieth, that the speech had been delivered. he was a good deal of a character, and much better company than the sappy literature he was selling. a random remark, connecting irishmen and beer, brought this nugget of information out of him-- they don't drink it, sir. they can't drink it, sir. give an irishman lager for a month, and he's a dead man. an irishman is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. but whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him, sir.' at eight o'clock, promptly, we backed out and crossed the river. as we crept toward the shore, in the thick darkness, a blinding glory of white electric light burst suddenly from our forecastle, and lit up the water and the warehouses as with a noon-day glare. another big change, this-- no more flickering, smoky, pitch-dripping, ineffectual torch-baskets, now: their day is past. next, instead of calling out a score of hands to man the stage, a couple of men and a hatful of steam lowered it from the derrick where it was suspended, launched it, deposited it in just the right spot, and the whole thing was over and done with before a mate in the olden time could have got his profanity-mill adjusted to begin the preparatory services. why this new and simple method of handling the stages was not thought of when the first steamboat was built, is a mystery which helps one to realize what a dull-witted slug the average human being is. we finally got away at two in the morning, and when i turned out at six, we were rounding to at a rocky point where there was an old stone warehouse--at any rate, the ruins of it; two or three decayed dwelling- houses were near by, in the shelter of the leafy hills; but there were no evidences of human or other animal life to be seen. i wondered if i had forgotten the river; for i had no recollection whatever of this place; the shape of the river, too, was unfamiliar; there was nothing in sight, anywhere, that i could remember ever having seen before. i was surprised, disappointed, and annoyed. we put ashore a well-dressed lady and gentleman, and two well-dressed, lady-like young girls, together with sundry russia-leather bags. a strange place for such folk! no carriage was waiting. the party moved off as if they had not expected any, and struck down a winding country road afoot. but the mystery was explained when we got under way again; for these people were evidently bound for a large town which lay shut in behind a tow-head (i.e., new island) a couple of miles below this landing. i couldn't remember that town; i couldn't place it, couldn't call its name. so i lost part of my temper. i suspected that it might be st. genevieve--and so it proved to be. observe what this eccentric river had been about: it had built up this huge useless tow-head directly in front of this town, cut off its river communications, fenced it away completely, and made a 'country' town of it. it is a fine old place, too, and deserved a better fate. it was settled by the french, and is a relic of a time when one could travel from the mouths of the mississippi to quebec and be on french territory and under french rule all the way. presently i ascended to the hurricane deck and cast a longing glance toward the pilot-house. chapter my incognito is exploded after a close study of the face of the pilot on watch, i was satisfied that i had never seen him before; so i went up there. the pilot inspected me; i re-inspected the pilot. these customary preliminaries over, i sat down on the high bench, and he faced about and went on with his work. every detail of the pilot-house was familiar to me, with one exception,--a large-mouthed tube under the breast-board. i puzzled over that thing a considerable time; then gave up and asked what it was for. 'to hear the engine-bells through.' it was another good contrivance which ought to have been invented half a century sooner. so i was thinking, when the pilot asked-- 'do you know what this rope is for?' i managed to get around this question, without committing myself. 'is this the first time you were ever in a pilot-house?' i crept under that one. 'where are you from?' 'new england.' 'first time you have ever been west?' i climbed over this one. 'if you take an interest in such things, i can tell you what all these things are for.' i said i should like it. 'this,' putting his hand on a backing-bell rope, 'is to sound the fire- alarm; this,' putting his hand on a go-ahead bell, 'is to call the texas-tender; this one,' indicating the whistle-lever, 'is to call the captain'--and so he went on, touching one object after another, and reeling off his tranquil spool of lies. i had never felt so like a passenger before. i thanked him, with emotion, for each new fact, and wrote it down in my note-book. the pilot warmed to his opportunity, and proceeded to load me up in the good old- fashioned way. at times i was afraid he was going to rupture his invention; but it always stood the strain, and he pulled through all right. he drifted, by easy stages, into revealments of the river's marvelous eccentricities of one sort and another, and backed them up with some pretty gigantic illustrations. for instance-- 'do you see that little boulder sticking out of the water yonder? well, when i first came on the river, that was a solid ridge of rock, over sixty feet high and two miles long. all washed away but that.' [this with a sigh.] i had a mighty impulse to destroy him, but it seemed to me that killing, in any ordinary way, would be too good for him. once, when an odd-looking craft, with a vast coal-scuttle slanting aloft on the end of a beam, was steaming by in the distance, he indifferently drew attention to it, as one might to an object grown wearisome through familiarity, and observed that it was an 'alligator boat.' 'an alligator boat? what's it for?' 'to dredge out alligators with.' 'are they so thick as to be troublesome?' 'well, not now, because the government keeps them down. but they used to be. not everywhere; but in favorite places, here and there, where the river is wide and shoal-like plum point, and stack island, and so on-- places they call alligator beds.' 'did they actually impede navigation?' 'years ago, yes, in very low water; there was hardly a trip, then, that we didn't get aground on alligators.' it seemed to me that i should certainly have to get out my tomahawk. however, i restrained myself and said-- 'it must have been dreadful.' 'yes, it was one of the main difficulties about piloting. it was so hard to tell anything about the water; the damned things shift around so-- never lie still five minutes at a time. you can tell a wind-reef, straight off, by the look of it; you can tell a break; you can tell a sand-reef--that's all easy; but an alligator reef doesn't show up, worth anything. nine times in ten you can't tell where the water is; and when you do see where it is, like as not it ain't there when you get there, the devils have swapped around so, meantime. of course there were some few pilots that could judge of alligator water nearly as well as they could of any other kind, but they had to have natural talent for it; it wasn't a thing a body could learn, you had to be born with it. let me see: there was ben thornburg, and beck jolly, and squire bell, and horace bixby, and major downing, and john stevenson, and billy gordon, and jim brady, and george ealer, and billy youngblood--all a alligator pilots. they could tell alligator water as far as another christian could tell whiskey. read it?--ah, couldn't they, though! i only wish i had as many dollars as they could read alligator water a mile and a half off. yes, and it paid them to do it, too. a good alligator pilot could always get fifteen hundred dollars a month. nights, other people had to lay up for alligators, but those fellows never laid up for alligators; they never laid up for anything but fog. they could smell the best alligator water it was said; i don't know whether it was so or not, and i think a body's got his hands full enough if he sticks to just what he knows himself, without going around backing up other people's say-so's, though there's a plenty that ain't backward about doing it, as long as they can roust out something wonderful to tell. which is not the style of robert styles, by as much as three fathom--maybe quarter-less.' [my! was this rob styles?--this mustached and stately figure?-a slim enough cub, in my time. how he has improved in comeliness in five-and- twenty year and in the noble art of inflating his facts.] after these musings, i said aloud-- 'i should think that dredging out the alligators wouldn't have done much good, because they could come back again right away.' 'if you had had as much experience of alligators as i have, you wouldn't talk like that. you dredge an alligator once and he's convinced. it's the last you hear of him. he wouldn't come back for pie. if there's one thing that an alligator is more down on than another, it's being dredged. besides, they were not simply shoved out of the way; the most of the scoopful were scooped aboard; they emptied them into the hold; and when they had got a trip, they took them to orleans to the government works.' 'what for?' 'why, to make soldier-shoes out of their hides. all the government shoes are made of alligator hide. it makes the best shoes in the world. they last five years, and they won't absorb water. the alligator fishery is a government monopoly. all the alligators are government property--just like the live-oaks. you cut down a live-oak, and government fines you fifty dollars; you kill an alligator, and up you go for misprision of treason--lucky duck if they don't hang you, too. and they will, if you're a democrat. the buzzard is the sacred bird of the south, and you can't touch him; the alligator is the sacred bird of the government, and you've got to let him alone.' 'do you ever get aground on the alligators now?' 'oh, no! it hasn't happened for years.' 'well, then, why do they still keep the alligator boats in service?' 'just for police duty--nothing more. they merely go up and down now and then. the present generation of alligators know them as easy as a burglar knows a roundsman; when they see one coming, they break camp and go for the woods.' after rounding-out and finishing-up and polishing-off the alligator business, he dropped easily and comfortably into the historical vein, and told of some tremendous feats of half-a-dozen old-time steamboats of his acquaintance, dwelling at special length upon a certain extraordinary performance of his chief favorite among this distinguished fleet--and then adding-- 'that boat was the "cyclone,"--last trip she ever made--she sunk, that very trip--captain was tom ballou, the most immortal liar that ever i struck. he couldn't ever seem to tell the truth, in any kind of weather. why, he would make you fairly shudder. he was the most scandalous liar! i left him, finally; i couldn't stand it. the proverb says, "like master, like man;" and if you stay with that kind of a man, you'll come under suspicion by and by, just as sure as you live. he paid first-class wages; but said i, what's wages when your reputation's in danger? so i let the wages go, and froze to my reputation. and i've never regretted it. reputation's worth everything, ain't it? that's the way i look at it. he had more selfish organs than any seven men in the world--all packed in the stern-sheets of his skull, of course, where they belonged. they weighed down the back of his head so that it made his nose tilt up in the air. people thought it was vanity, but it wasn't, it was malice. if you only saw his foot, you'd take him to be nineteen feet high, but he wasn't; it was because his foot was out of drawing. he was intended to be nineteen feet high, no doubt, if his foot was made first, but he didn't get there; he was only five feet ten. that's what he was, and that's what he is. you take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear. that "cyclone" was a rattler to go, and the sweetest thing to steer that ever walked the waters. set her amidships, in a big river, and just let her go; it was all you had to do. she would hold herself on a star all night, if you let her alone. you couldn't ever feel her rudder. it wasn't any more labor to steer her than it is to count the republican vote in a south carolina election. one morning, just at daybreak, the last trip she ever made, they took her rudder aboard to mend it; i didn't know anything about it; i backed her out from the wood-yard and went a-weaving down the river all serene. when i had gone about twenty-three miles, and made four horribly crooked crossings--' 'without any rudder?' 'yes--old capt. tom appeared on the roof and began to find fault with me for running such a dark night--' 'such a dark night ?--why, you said--' 'never mind what i said,--'twas as dark as egypt now, though pretty soon the moon began to rise, and--' 'you mean the sun--because you started out just at break of--look here! was this before you quitted the captain on account of his lying, or--' 'it was before--oh, a long time before. and as i was saying, he--' 'but was this the trip she sunk, or was--' 'oh, no!--months afterward. and so the old man, he--' 'then she made two last trips, because you said--' he stepped back from the wheel, swabbing away his perspiration, and said-- 'here!' (calling me by name), 'you take her and lie a while--you're handier at it than i am. trying to play yourself for a stranger and an innocent!--why, i knew you before you had spoken seven words; and i made up my mind to find out what was your little game. it was to draw me out. well, i let you, didn't i? now take the wheel and finish the watch; and next time play fair, and you won't have to work your passage.' thus ended the fictitious-name business. and not six hours out from st. louis! but i had gained a privilege, any way, for i had been itching to get my hands on the wheel, from the beginning. i seemed to have forgotten the river, but i hadn't forgotten how to steer a steamboat, nor how to enjoy it, either. chapter from cairo to hickman the scenery, from st. louis to cairo--two hundred miles--is varied and beautiful. the hills were clothed in the fresh foliage of spring now, and were a gracious and worthy setting for the broad river flowing between. our trip began auspiciously, with a perfect day, as to breeze and sunshine, and our boat threw the miles out behind her with satisfactory despatch. we found a railway intruding at chester, illinois; chester has also a penitentiary now, and is otherwise marching on. at grand tower, too, there was a railway; and another at cape girardeau. the former town gets its name from a huge, squat pillar of rock, which stands up out of the water on the missouri side of the river--a piece of nature's fanciful handiwork--and is one of the most picturesque features of the scenery of that region. for nearer or remoter neighbors, the tower has the devil's bake oven--so called, perhaps, because it does not powerfully resemble anybody else's bake oven; and the devil's tea table--this latter a great smooth-surfaced mass of rock, with diminishing wine-glass stem, perched some fifty or sixty feet above the river, beside a beflowered and garlanded precipice, and sufficiently like a tea-table to answer for anybody, devil or christian. away down the river we have the devil's elbow and the devil's race-course, and lots of other property of his which i cannot now call to mind. the town of grand tower was evidently a busier place than it had been in old times, but it seemed to need some repairs here and there, and a new coat of whitewash all over. still, it was pleasant to me to see the old coat once more. 'uncle' mumford, our second officer, said the place had been suffering from high water, and consequently was not looking its best now. but he said it was not strange that it didn't waste white- wash on itself, for more lime was made there, and of a better quality, than anywhere in the west; and added--'on a dairy farm you never can get any milk for your coffee, nor any sugar for it on a sugar plantation; and it is against sense to go to a lime town to hunt for white-wash.' in my own experience i knew the first two items to be true; and also that people who sell candy don't care for candy; therefore there was plausibility in uncle mumford's final observation that 'people who make lime run more to religion than whitewash.' uncle mumford said, further, that grand tower was a great coaling center and a prospering place. cape girardeau is situated on a hillside, and makes a handsome appearance. there is a great jesuit school for boys at the foot of the town by the river. uncle mumford said it had as high a reputation for thoroughness as any similar institution in missouri! there was another college higher up on an airy summit--a bright new edifice, picturesquely and peculiarly towered and pinnacled--a sort of gigantic casters, with the cruets all complete. uncle mumford said that cape girardeau was the athens of missouri, and contained several colleges besides those already mentioned; and all of them on a religious basis of one kind or another. he directed my attention to what he called the 'strong and pervasive religious look of the town,' but i could not see that it looked more religious than the other hill towns with the same slope and built of the same kind of bricks. partialities often make people see more than really exists. uncle mumford has been thirty years a mate on the river. he is a man of practical sense and a level head; has observed; has had much experience of one sort and another; has opinions; has, also, just a perceptible dash of poetry in his composition, an easy gift of speech, a thick growl in his voice, and an oath or two where he can get at them when the exigencies of his office require a spiritual lift. he is a mate of the blessed old-time kind; and goes gravely damning around, when there is work to the fore, in a way to mellow the ex-steamboatman's heart with sweet soft longings for the vanished days that shall come no more. 'git up there you! going to be all day? why d'n't you say you was petrified in your hind legs, before you shipped!' he is a steady man with his crew; kind and just, but firm; so they like him, and stay with him. he is still in the slouchy garb of the old generation of mates; but next trip the anchor line will have him in uniform--a natty blue naval uniform, with brass buttons, along with all the officers of the line--and then he will be a totally different style of scenery from what he is now. uniforms on the mississippi! it beats all the other changes put together, for surprise. still, there is another surprise--that it was not made fifty years ago. it is so manifestly sensible, that it might have been thought of earlier, one would suppose. during fifty years, out there, the innocent passenger in need of help and information, has been mistaking the mate for the cook, and the captain for the barber--and being roughly entertained for it, too. but his troubles are ended now. and the greatly improved aspect of the boat's staff is another advantage achieved by the dress-reform period. steered down the bend below cape girardeau. they used to call it 'steersman's bend;' plain sailing and plenty of water in it, always; about the only place in the upper river that a new cub was allowed to take a boat through, in low water. thebes, at the head of the grand chain, and commerce at the foot of it, were towns easily rememberable, as they had not undergone conspicuous alteration. nor the chain, either--in the nature of things; for it is a chain of sunken rocks admirably arranged to capture and kill steamboats on bad nights. a good many steamboat corpses lie buried there, out of sight; among the rest my first friend the 'paul jones;' she knocked her bottom out, and went down like a pot, so the historian told me--uncle mumford. he said she had a gray mare aboard, and a preacher. to me, this sufficiently accounted for the disaster; as it did, of course, to mumford, who added-- 'but there are many ignorant people who would scoff at such a matter, and call it superstition. but you will always notice that they are people who have never traveled with a gray mare and a preacher. i went down the river once in such company. we grounded at bloody island; we grounded at hanging dog; we grounded just below this same commerce; we jolted beaver dam rock; we hit one of the worst breaks in the 'graveyard' behind goose island; we had a roustabout killed in a fight; we burnt a boiler; broke a shaft; collapsed a flue; and went into cairo with nine feet of water in the hold--may have been more, may have been less. i remember it as if it were yesterday. the men lost their heads with terror. they painted the mare blue, in sight of town, and threw the preacher overboard, or we should not have arrived at all. the preacher was fished out and saved. he acknowledged, himself, that he had been to blame. i remember it all, as if it were yesterday.' that this combination--of preacher and gray mare--should breed calamity, seems strange, and at first glance unbelievable; but the fact is fortified by so much unassailable proof that to doubt is to dishonor reason. i myself remember a case where a captain was warned by numerous friends against taking a gray mare and a preacher with him, but persisted in his purpose in spite of all that could be said; and the same day--it may have been the next, and some say it was, though i think it was the same day--he got drunk and fell down the hatchway, and was borne to his home a corpse. this is literally true. no vestige of hat island is left now; every shred of it is washed away. i do not even remember what part of the river it used to be in, except that it was between st. louis and cairo somewhere. it was a bad region-- all around and about hat island, in early days. a farmer who lived on the illinois shore there, said that twenty-nine steamboats had left their bones strung along within sight from his house. between st. louis and cairo the steamboat wrecks average one to the mile;--two hundred wrecks, altogether. i could recognize big changes from commerce down. beaver dam rock was out in the middle of the river now, and throwing a prodigious 'break;' it used to be close to the shore, and boats went down outside of it. a big island that used to be away out in mid-river, has retired to the missouri shore, and boats do not go near it any more. the island called jacket pattern is whittled down to a wedge now, and is booked for early destruction. goose island is all gone but a little dab the size of a steamboat. the perilous 'graveyard,' among whose numberless wrecks we used to pick our way so slowly and gingerly, is far away from the channel now, and a terror to nobody. one of the islands formerly called the two sisters is gone entirely; the other, which used to lie close to the illinois shore, is now on the missouri side, a mile away; it is joined solidly to the shore, and it takes a sharp eye to see where the seam is--but it is illinois ground yet, and the people who live on it have to ferry themselves over and work the illinois roads and pay illinois taxes: singular state of things! near the mouth of the river several islands were missing--washed away. cairo was still there--easily visible across the long, flat point upon whose further verge it stands; but we had to steam a long way around to get to it. night fell as we were going out of the 'upper river' and meeting the floods of the ohio. we dashed along without anxiety; for the hidden rock which used to lie right in the way has moved up stream a long distance out of the channel; or rather, about one county has gone into the river from the missouri point, and the cairo point has 'made down' and added to its long tongue of territory correspondingly. the mississippi is a just and equitable river; it never tumbles one man's farm overboard without building a new farm just like it for that man's neighbor. this keeps down hard feelings. going into cairo, we came near killing a steamboat which paid no attention to our whistle and then tried to cross our bows. by doing some strong backing, we saved him; which was a great loss, for he would have made good literature. cairo is a brisk town now; and is substantially built, and has a city look about it which is in noticeable contrast to its former estate, as per mr. dickens's portrait of it. however, it was already building with bricks when i had seen it last--which was when colonel (now general) grant was drilling his first command there. uncle mumford says the libraries and sunday-schools have done a good work in cairo, as well as the brick masons. cairo has a heavy railroad and river trade, and her situation at the junction of the two great rivers is so advantageous that she cannot well help prospering. when i turned out, in the morning, we had passed columbus, kentucky, and were approaching hickman, a pretty town, perched on a handsome hill. hickman is in a rich tobacco region, and formerly enjoyed a great and lucrative trade in that staple, collecting it there in her warehouses from a large area of country and shipping it by boat; but uncle mumford says she built a railway to facilitate this commerce a little more, and he thinks it facilitated it the wrong way--took the bulk of the trade out of her hands by 'collaring it along the line without gathering it at her doors.' roughing it by mark twain part . chapter lxi. one of my comrades there--another of those victims of eighteen years of unrequited toil and blighted hopes--was one of the gentlest spirits that ever bore its patient cross in a weary exile: grave and simple dick baker, pocket-miner of dead-house gulch.--he was forty-six, gray as a rat, earnest, thoughtful, slenderly educated, slouchily dressed and clay-soiled, but his heart was finer metal than any gold his shovel ever brought to light--than any, indeed, that ever was mined or minted. whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted, he would fall to mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they must love something). and he always spoke of the strange sagacity of that cat with the air of a man who believed in his secret heart that there was something human about it--may be even supernatural. i heard him talking about this animal once. he said: "gentlemen, i used to have a cat here, by the name of tom quartz, which you'd a took an interest in i reckon--most any body would. i had him here eight year--and he was the remarkablest cat i ever see. he was a large gray one of the tom specie, an' he had more hard, natchral sense than any man in this camp--'n' a power of dignity--he wouldn't let the gov'ner of californy be familiar with him. he never ketched a rat in his life--'peared to be above it. he never cared for nothing but mining. he knowed more about mining, that cat did, than any man i ever, ever see. you couldn't tell him noth'n 'bout placer diggin's--'n' as for pocket mining, why he was just born for it. "he would dig out after me an' jim when we went over the hills prospect'n', and he would trot along behind us for as much as five mile, if we went so fur. an' he had the best judgment about mining ground--why you never see anything like it. when we went to work, he'd scatter a glance around, 'n' if he didn't think much of the indications, he would give a look as much as to say, 'well, i'll have to get you to excuse me,' 'n' without another word he'd hyste his nose into the air 'n' shove for home. but if the ground suited him, he would lay low 'n' keep dark till the first pan was washed, 'n' then he would sidle up 'n' take a look, an' if there was about six or seven grains of gold he was satisfied--he didn't want no better prospect 'n' that--'n' then he would lay down on our coats and snore like a steamboat till we'd struck the pocket, an' then get up 'n' superintend. he was nearly lightnin' on superintending. "well, bye an' bye, up comes this yer quartz excitement. every body was into it--every body was pick'n' 'n' blast'n' instead of shovelin' dirt on the hill side--every body was put'n' down a shaft instead of scrapin' the surface. noth'n' would do jim, but we must tackle the ledges, too, 'n' so we did. we commenced put'n' down a shaft, 'n' tom quartz he begin to wonder what in the dickens it was all about. he hadn't ever seen any mining like that before, 'n' he was all upset, as you may say--he couldn't come to a right understanding of it no way--it was too many for him. he was down on it, too, you bet you--he was down on it powerful --'n' always appeared to consider it the cussedest foolishness out. but that cat, you know, was always agin new fangled arrangements--somehow he never could abide'em. you know how it is with old habits. but by an' by tom quartz begin to git sort of reconciled a little, though he never could altogether understand that eternal sinkin' of a shaft an' never pannin' out any thing. at last he got to comin' down in the shaft, hisself, to try to cipher it out. an' when he'd git the blues, 'n' feel kind o'scruffy, 'n' aggravated 'n' disgusted--knowin' as he did, that the bills was runnin' up all the time an' we warn't makin' a cent--he would curl up on a gunny sack in the corner an' go to sleep. well, one day when the shaft was down about eight foot, the rock got so hard that we had to put in a blast--the first blast'n' we'd ever done since tom quartz was born. an' then we lit the fuse 'n' clumb out 'n' got off 'bout fifty yards--'n' forgot 'n' left tom quartz sound asleep on the gunny sack. "in 'bout a minute we seen a puff of smoke bust up out of the hole, 'n' then everything let go with an awful crash, 'n' about four million ton of rocks 'n' dirt 'n' smoke 'n; splinters shot up 'bout a mile an' a half into the air, an' by george, right in the dead centre of it was old tom quartz a goin' end over end, an' a snortin' an' a sneez'n', an' a clawin' an' a reachin' for things like all possessed. but it warn't no use, you know, it warn't no use. an' that was the last we see of him for about two minutes 'n' a half, an' then all of a sudden it begin to rain rocks and rubbage, an' directly he come down ker-whop about ten foot off f'm where we stood well, i reckon he was p'raps the orneriest lookin' beast you ever see. one ear was sot back on his neck, 'n' his tail was stove up, 'n' his eye-winkers was swinged off, 'n' he was all blacked up with powder an' smoke, an' all sloppy with mud 'n' slush f'm one end to the other. "well sir, it warn't no use to try to apologize--we couldn't say a word. he took a sort of a disgusted look at hisself, 'n' then he looked at us --an' it was just exactly the same as if he had said--'gents, may be you think it's smart to take advantage of a cat that 'ain't had no experience of quartz minin', but i think different'--an' then he turned on his heel 'n' marched off home without ever saying another word. "that was jest his style. an' may be you won't believe it, but after that you never see a cat so prejudiced agin quartz mining as what he was. an' by an' bye when he did get to goin' down in the shaft agin, you'd 'a been astonished at his sagacity. the minute we'd tetch off a blast 'n' the fuse'd begin to sizzle, he'd give a look as much as to say: 'well, i'll have to git you to excuse me,' an' it was surpris'n' the way he'd shin out of that hole 'n' go f'r a tree. sagacity? it ain't no name for it. 'twas inspiration!" i said, "well, mr. baker, his prejudice against quartz-mining was remarkable, considering how he came by it. couldn't you ever cure him of it?" "cure him! no! when tom quartz was sot once, he was always sot--and you might a blowed him up as much as three million times 'n' you'd never a broken him of his cussed prejudice agin quartz mining." the affection and the pride that lit up baker's face when he delivered this tribute to the firmness of his humble friend of other days, will always be a vivid memory with me. at the end of two months we had never "struck" a pocket. we had panned up and down the hillsides till they looked plowed like a field; we could have put in a crop of grain, then, but there would have been no way to get it to market. we got many good "prospects," but when the gold gave out in the pan and we dug down, hoping and longing, we found only emptiness--the pocket that should have been there was as barren as our own.--at last we shouldered our pans and shovels and struck out over the hills to try new localities. we prospected around angel's camp, in calaveras county, during three weeks, but had no success. then we wandered on foot among the mountains, sleeping under the trees at night, for the weather was mild, but still we remained as centless as the last rose of summer. that is a poor joke, but it is in pathetic harmony with the circumstances, since we were so poor ourselves. in accordance with the custom of the country, our door had always stood open and our board welcome to tramping miners--they drifted along nearly every day, dumped their paust shovels by the threshold and took "pot luck" with us--and now on our own tramp we never found cold hospitality. our wanderings were wide and in many directions; and now i could give the reader a vivid description of the big trees and the marvels of the yo semite--but what has this reader done to me that i should persecute him? i will deliver him into the hands of less conscientious tourists and take his blessing. let me be charitable, though i fail in all virtues else. note: some of the phrases in the above are mining technicalities, purely, and may be a little obscure to the general reader. in "placer diggings" the gold is scattered all through the surface dirt; in "pocket" diggings it is concentrated in one little spot; in "quartz" the gold is in a solid, continuous vein of rock, enclosed between distinct walls of some other kind of stone--and this is the most laborious and expensive of all the different kinds of mining. "prospecting" is hunting for a "placer"; "indications" are signs of its presence; "panning out" refers to the washing process by which the grains of gold are separated from the dirt; a "prospect" is what one finds in the first panful of dirt--and its value determines whether it is a good or a bad prospect, and whether it is worth while to tarry there or seek further. chapter lxii. after a three months' absence, i found myself in san francisco again, without a cent. when my credit was about exhausted, (for i had become too mean and lazy, now, to work on a morning paper, and there were no vacancies on the evening journals,) i was created san francisco correspondent of the enterprise, and at the end of five months i was out of debt, but my interest in my work was gone; for my correspondence being a daily one, without rest or respite, i got unspeakably tired of it. i wanted another change. the vagabond instinct was strong upon me. fortune favored and i got a new berth and a delightful one. it was to go down to the sandwich islands and write some letters for the sacramento union, an excellent journal and liberal with employees. we sailed in the propeller ajax, in the middle of winter. the almanac called it winter, distinctly enough, but the weather was a compromise between spring and summer. six days out of port, it became summer altogether. we had some thirty passengers; among them a cheerful soul by the name of williams, and three sea-worn old whaleship captains going down to join their vessels. these latter played euchre in the smoking room day and night, drank astonishing quantities of raw whisky without being in the least affected by it, and were the happiest people i think i ever saw. and then there was "the old admiral--" a retired whaleman. he was a roaring, terrific combination of wind and lightning and thunder, and earnest, whole-souled profanity. but nevertheless he was tender-hearted as a girl. he was a raving, deafening, devastating typhoon, laying waste the cowering seas but with an unvexed refuge in the centre where all comers were safe and at rest. nobody could know the "admiral" without liking him; and in a sudden and dire emergency i think no friend of his would know which to choose--to be cursed by him or prayed for by a less efficient person. his title of "admiral" was more strictly "official" than any ever worn by a naval officer before or since, perhaps--for it was the voluntary offering of a whole nation, and came direct from the people themselves without any intermediate red tape--the people of the sandwich islands. it was a title that came to him freighted with affection, and honor, and appreciation of his unpretending merit. and in testimony of the genuineness of the title it was publicly ordained that an exclusive flag should be devised for him and used solely to welcome his coming and wave him god-speed in his going. from that time forth, whenever his ship was signaled in the offing, or he catted his anchor and stood out to sea, that ensign streamed from the royal halliards on the parliament house and the nation lifted their hats to it with spontaneous accord. yet he had never fired a gun or fought a battle in his life. when i knew him on board the ajax, he was seventy-two years old and had plowed the salt water sixty-one of them. for sixteen years he had gone in and out of the harbor of honolulu in command of a whaleship, and for sixteen more had been captain of a san francisco and sandwich island passenger packet and had never had an accident or lost a vessel. the simple natives knew him for a friend who never failed them, and regarded him as children regard a father. it was a dangerous thing to oppress them when the roaring admiral was around. two years before i knew the admiral, he had retired from the sea on a competence, and had sworn a colossal nine-jointed oath that he would "never go within smelling distance of the salt water again as long as he lived." and he had conscientiously kept it. that is to say, he considered he had kept it, and it would have been more than dangerous to suggest to him, even in the gentlest way, that making eleven long sea voyages, as a passenger, during the two years that had transpired since he "retired," was only keeping the general spirit of it and not the strict letter. the admiral knew only one narrow line of conduct to pursue in any and all cases where there was a fight, and that was to shoulder his way straight in without an inquiry as to the rights or the merits of it, and take the part of the weaker side.--and this was the reason why he was always sure to be present at the trial of any universally execrated criminal to oppress and intimidate the jury with a vindictive pantomime of what he would do to them if he ever caught them out of the box. and this was why harried cats and outlawed dogs that knew him confidently took sanctuary under his chair in time of trouble. in the beginning he was the most frantic and bloodthirsty union man that drew breath in the shadow of the flag; but the instant the southerners began to go down before the sweep of the northern armies, he ran up the confederate colors and from that time till the end was a rampant and inexorable secessionist. he hated intemperance with a more uncompromising animosity than any individual i have ever met, of either sex; and he was never tired of storming against it and beseeching friends and strangers alike to be wary and drink with moderation. and yet if any creature had been guileless enough to intimate that his absorbing nine gallons of "straight" whiskey during our voyage was any fraction short of rigid or inflexible abstemiousness, in that self-same moment the old man would have spun him to the uttermost parts of the earth in the whirlwind of his wrath. mind, i am not saying his whisky ever affected his head or his legs, for it did not, in even the slightest degree. he was a capacious container, but he did not hold enough for that. he took a level tumblerful of whisky every morning before he put his clothes on--"to sweeten his bilgewater," he said.--he took another after he got the most of his clothes on, "to settle his mind and give him his bearings." he then shaved, and put on a clean shirt; after which he recited the lord's prayer in a fervent, thundering bass that shook the ship to her kelson and suspended all conversation in the main cabin. then, at this stage, being invariably "by the head," or "by the stern," or "listed to port or starboard," he took one more to "put him on an even keel so that he would mind his hellum and not miss stays and go about, every time he came up in the wind."--and now, his state-room door swung open and the sun of his benignant face beamed redly out upon men and women and children, and he roared his "shipmets a'hoy!" in a way that was calculated to wake the dead and precipitate the final resurrection; and forth he strode, a picture to look at and a presence to enforce attention. stalwart and portly; not a gray hair; broadbrimmed slouch hat; semi-sailor toggery of blue navy flannel--roomy and ample; a stately expanse of shirt-front and a liberal amount of black silk neck-cloth tied with a sailor knot; large chain and imposing seals impending from his fob; awe-inspiring feet, and "a hand like the hand of providence," as his whaling brethren expressed it; wrist-bands and sleeves pushed back half way to the elbow, out of respect for the warm weather, and exposing hairy arms, gaudy with red and blue anchors, ships, and goddesses of liberty tattooed in india ink. but these details were only secondary matters--his face was the lodestone that chained the eye. it was a sultry disk, glowing determinedly out through a weather beaten mask of mahogany, and studded with warts, seamed with scars, "blazed" all over with unfailing fresh slips of the razor; and with cheery eyes, under shaggy brows, contemplating the world from over the back of a gnarled crag of a nose that loomed vast and lonely out of the undulating immensity that spread away from its foundations. at his heels frisked the darling of his bachelor estate, his terrier "fan," a creature no larger than a squirrel. the main part of his daily life was occupied in looking after "fan," in a motherly way, and doctoring her for a hundred ailments which existed only in his imagination. the admiral seldom read newspapers; and when he did he never believed anything they said. he read nothing, and believed in nothing, but "the old guard," a secession periodical published in new york. he carried a dozen copies of it with him, always, and referred to them for all required information. if it was not there, he supplied it himself, out of a bountiful fancy, inventing history, names, dates, and every thing else necessary to make his point good in an argument. consequently he was a formidable antagonist in a dispute. whenever he swung clear of the record and began to create history, the enemy was helpless and had to surrender. indeed, the enemy could not keep from betraying some little spark of indignation at his manufactured history--and when it came to indignation, that was the admiral's very "best hold." he was always ready for a political argument, and if nobody started one he would do it himself. with his third retort his temper would begin to rise, and within five minutes he would be blowing a gale, and within fifteen his smoking-room audience would be utterly stormed away and the old man left solitary and alone, banging the table with his fist, kicking the chairs, and roaring a hurricane of profanity. it got so, after a while, that whenever the admiral approached, with politics in his eye, the passengers would drop out with quiet accord, afraid to meet him; and he would camp on a deserted field. but he found his match at last, and before a full company. at one time or another, everybody had entered the lists against him and been routed, except the quiet passenger williams. he had never been able to get an expression of opinion out of him on politics. but now, just as the admiral drew near the door and the company were about to slip out, williams said: "admiral, are you certain about that circumstance concerning the clergymen you mentioned the other day?"--referring to a piece of the admiral's manufactured history. every one was amazed at the man's rashness. the idea of deliberately inviting annihilation was a thing incomprehensible. the retreat came to a halt; then everybody sat down again wondering, to await the upshot of it. the admiral himself was as surprised as any one. he paused in the door, with his red handkerchief half raised to his sweating face, and contemplated the daring reptile in the corner. "certain of it? am i certain of it? do you think i've been lying about it? what do you take me for? anybody that don't know that circumstance, don't know anything; a child ought to know it. read up your history! read it up-----, and don't come asking a man if he's certain about a bit of abc stuff that the very southern niggers know all about." here the admiral's fires began to wax hot, the atmosphere thickened, the coming earthquake rumbled, he began to thunder and lighten. within three minutes his volcano was in full irruption and he was discharging flames and ashes of indignation, belching black volumes of foul history aloft, and vomiting red-hot torrents of profanity from his crater. meantime williams sat silent, and apparently deeply and earnestly interested in what the old man was saying. by and by, when the lull came, he said in the most deferential way, and with the gratified air of a man who has had a mystery cleared up which had been puzzling him uncomfortably: "now i understand it. i always thought i knew that piece of history well enough, but was still afraid to trust it, because there was not that convincing particularity about it that one likes to have in history; but when you mentioned every name, the other day, and every date, and every little circumstance, in their just order and sequence, i said to myself, this sounds something like--this is history--this is putting it in a shape that gives a man confidence; and i said to myself afterward, i will just ask the admiral if he is perfectly certain about the details, and if he is i will come out and thank him for clearing this matter up for me. and that is what i want to do now--for until you set that matter right it was nothing but just a confusion in my mind, without head or tail to it." nobody ever saw the admiral look so mollified before, and so pleased. nobody had ever received his bogus history as gospel before; its genuineness had always been called in question either by words or looks; but here was a man that not only swallowed it all down, but was grateful for the dose. he was taken a back; he hardly knew what to say; even his profanity failed him. now, williams continued, modestly and earnestly: "but admiral, in saying that this was the first stone thrown, and that this precipitated the war, you have overlooked a circumstance which you are perfectly familiar with, but which has escaped your memory. now i grant you that what you have stated is correct in every detail--to wit: that on the th of october, , two massachusetts clergymen, named waite and granger, went in disguise to the house of john moody, in rockport, at dead of night, and dragged forth two southern women and their two little children, and after tarring and feathering them conveyed them to boston and burned them alive in the state house square; and i also grant your proposition that this deed is what led to the secession of south carolina on the th of december following. very well." [here the company were pleasantly surprised to hear williams proceed to come back at the admiral with his own invincible weapon--clean, pure, manufactured history, without a word of truth in it.] "very well, i say. but admiral, why overlook the willis and morgan case in south carolina? you are too well informed a man not to know all about that circumstance. your arguments and your conversations have shown you to be intimately conversant with every detail of this national quarrel. you develop matters of history every day that show plainly that you are no smatterer in it, content to nibble about the surface, but a man who has searched the depths and possessed yourself of everything that has a bearing upon the great question. therefore, let me just recall to your mind that willis and morgan case--though i see by your face that the whole thing is already passing through your memory at this moment. on the th of august, , two months before the waite and granger affair, two south carolina clergymen, named john h. morgan and winthrop l. willis, one a methodist and the other an old school baptist, disguised themselves, and went at midnight to the house of a planter named thompson--archibald f. thompson, vice president under thomas jefferson,--and took thence, at midnight, his widowed aunt, (a northern woman,) and her adopted child, an orphan--named mortimer highie, afflicted with epilepsy and suffering at the time from white swelling on one of his legs, and compelled to walk on crutches in consequence; and the two ministers, in spite of the pleadings of the victims, dragged them to the bush, tarred and feathered them, and afterward burned them at the stake in the city of charleston. you remember perfectly well what a stir it made; you remember perfectly well that even the charleston courier stigmatized the act as being unpleasant, of questionable propriety, and scarcely justifiable, and likewise that it would not be matter of surprise if retaliation ensued. and you remember also, that this thing was the cause of the massachusetts outrage. who, indeed, were the two massachusetts ministers? and who were the two southern women they burned? i do not need to remind you, admiral, with your intimate knowledge of history, that waite was the nephew of the woman burned in charleston; that granger was her cousin in the second degree, and that the woman they burned in boston was the wife of john h. morgan, and the still loved but divorced wife of winthrop l. willis. now, admiral, it is only fair that you should acknowledge that the first provocation came from the southern preachers and that the northern ones were justified in retaliating. in your arguments you never yet have shown the least disposition to withhold a just verdict or be in anywise unfair, when authoritative history condemned your position, and therefore i have no hesitation in asking you to take the original blame from the massachusetts ministers, in this matter, and transfer it to the south carolina clergymen where it justly belongs." the admiral was conquered. this sweet spoken creature who swallowed his fraudulent history as if it were the bread of life; basked in his furious blasphemy as if it were generous sunshine; found only calm, even-handed justice in his rampart partisanship; and flooded him with invented history so sugarcoated with flattery and deference that there was no rejecting it, was "too many" for him. he stammered some awkward, profane sentences about the-----willis and morgan business having escaped his memory, but that he "remembered it now," and then, under pretence of giving fan some medicine for an imaginary cough, drew out of the battle and went away, a vanquished man. then cheers and laughter went up, and williams, the ship's benefactor was a hero. the news went about the vessel, champagne was ordered, and enthusiastic reception instituted in the smoking room, and everybody flocked thither to shake hands with the conqueror. the wheelman said afterward, that the admiral stood up behind the pilot house and "ripped and cursed all to himself" till he loosened the smokestack guys and becalmed the mainsail. the admiral's power was broken. after that, if he began argument, somebody would bring williams, and the old man would grow weak and begin to quiet down at once. and as soon as he was done, williams in his dulcet, insinuating way, would invent some history (referring for proof, to the old man's own excellent memory and to copies of "the old guard" known not to be in his possession) that would turn the tables completely and leave the admiral all abroad and helpless. by and by he came to so dread williams and his gilded tongue that he would stop talking when he saw him approach, and finally ceased to mention politics altogether, and from that time forward there was entire peace and serenity in the ship. chapter lxiii. on a certain bright morning the islands hove in sight, lying low on the lonely sea, and everybody climbed to the upper deck to look. after two thousand miles of watery solitude the vision was a welcome one. as we approached, the imposing promontory of diamond head rose up out of the ocean its rugged front softened by the hazy distance, and presently the details of the land began to make themselves manifest: first the line of beach; then the plumed coacoanut trees of the tropics; then cabins of the natives; then the white town of honolulu, said to contain between twelve and fifteen thousand inhabitants spread over a dead level; with streets from twenty to thirty feet wide, solid and level as a floor, most of them straight as a line and few as crooked as a corkscrew. the further i traveled through the town the better i liked it. every step revealed a new contrast--disclosed something i was unaccustomed to. in place of the grand mud-colored brown fronts of san francisco, i saw dwellings built of straw, adobies, and cream-colored pebble-and-shell-conglomerated coral, cut into oblong blocks and laid in cement; also a great number of neat white cottages, with green window-shutters; in place of front yards like billiard-tables with iron fences around them, i saw these homes surrounded by ample yards, thickly clad with green grass, and shaded by tall trees, through whose dense foliage the sun could scarcely penetrate; in place of the customary geranium, calla lily, etc., languishing in dust and general debility, i saw luxurious banks and thickets of flowers, fresh as a meadow after a rain, and glowing with the richest dyes; in place of the dingy horrors of san francisco's pleasure grove, the "willows," i saw huge-bodied, wide-spreading forest trees, with strange names and stranger appearance --trees that cast a shadow like a thunder-cloud, and were able to stand alone without being tied to green poles; in place of gold fish, wiggling around in glass globes, assuming countless shades and degrees of distortion through the magnifying and diminishing qualities of their transparent prison houses, i saw cats--tom-cats, mary ann cats, long-tailed cats, bob-tailed cats, blind cats, one-eyed cats, wall-eyed cats, cross-eyed cats, gray cats, black cats, white cats, yellow cats, striped cats, spotted cats, tame cats, wild cats, singed cats, individual cats, groups of cats, platoons of cats, companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats, millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat, lazy and sound asleep. i looked on a multitude of people, some white, in white coats, vests, pantaloons, even white cloth shoes, made snowy with chalk duly laid on every morning; but the majority of the people were almost as dark as negroes--women with comely features, fine black eyes, rounded forms, inclining to the voluptuous, clad in a single bright red or white garment that fell free and unconfined from shoulder to heel, long black hair falling loose, gypsy hats, encircled with wreaths of natural flowers of a brilliant carmine tint; plenty of dark men in various costumes, and some with nothing on but a battered stove-pipe hat tilted on the nose, and a very scant breech-clout; --certain smoke-dried children were clothed in nothing but sunshine --a very neat fitting and picturesque apparel indeed. in place of roughs and rowdies staring and blackguarding on the corners, i saw long-haired, saddle-colored sandwich island maidens sitting on the ground in the shade of corner houses, gazing indolently at whatever or whoever happened along; instead of wretched cobble-stone pavements, i walked on a firm foundation of coral, built up from the bottom of the sea by the absurd but persevering insect of that name, with a light layer of lava and cinders overlying the coral, belched up out of fathomless perdition long ago through the seared and blackened crater that stands dead and harmless in the distance now; instead of cramped and crowded street-cars, i met dusky native women sweeping by, free as the wind, on fleet horses and astride, with gaudy riding-sashes, streaming like banners behind them; instead of the combined stenches of chinadom and brannan street slaughter-houses, i breathed the balmy fragrance of jessamine, oleander, and the pride of india; in place of the hurry and bustle and noisy confusion of san francisco, i moved in the midst of a summer calm as tranquil as dawn in the garden of eden; in place of the golden city's skirting sand hills and the placid bay, i saw on the one side a frame-work of tall, precipitous mountains close at hand, clad in refreshing green, and cleft by deep, cool, chasm-like valleys--and in front the grand sweep of the ocean; a brilliant, transparent green near the shore, bound and bordered by a long white line of foamy spray dashing against the reef, and further out the dead blue water of the deep sea, flecked with "white caps," and in the far horizon a single, lonely sail --a mere accent-mark to emphasize a slumberous calm and a solitude that were without sound or limit. when the sun sunk down--the one intruder from other realms and persistent in suggestions of them--it was tranced luxury to sit in the perfumed air and forget that there was any world but these enchanted islands. it was such ecstacy to dream, and dream--till you got a bite. a scorpion bite. then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and kill the scorpion; and the next to bathe the bitten place with alcohol or brandy; and the next to resolve to keep out of the grass in future. then came an adjournment to the bed-chamber and the pastime of writing up the day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the other--a whole community of them at a slap. then, observing an enemy approaching,--a hairy tarantula on stilts--why not set the spittoon on him? it is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous idea of the magnitude of his reach. then to bed and become a promenade for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough to burn a hole through a raw-hide. more soaking with alcohol, and a resolution to examine the bed before entering it, in future. then wait, and suffer, till all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood have crawled in under the bar, then slip out quickly, shut them in and sleep peacefully on the floor till morning. meantime it is comforting to curse the tropics in occasional wakeful intervals. we had an abundance of fruit in honolulu, of course. oranges, pine-apples, bananas, strawberries, lemons, limes, mangoes, guavas, melons, and a rare and curious luxury called the chirimoya, which is deliciousness itself. then there is the tamarind. i thought tamarinds were made to eat, but that was probably not the idea. i ate several, and it seemed to me that they were rather sour that year. they pursed up my lips, till they resembled the stem-end of a tomato, and i had to take my sustenance through a quill for twenty-four hours. they sharpened my teeth till i could have shaved with them, and gave them a "wire edge" that i was afraid would stay; but a citizen said "no, it will come off when the enamel does"--which was comforting, at any rate. i found, afterward, that only strangers eat tamarinds--but they only eat them once. chapter lxiv. in my diary of our third day in honolulu, i find this: i am probably the most sensitive man in hawaii to-night--especially about sitting down in the presence of my betters. i have ridden fifteen or twenty miles on horse-back since p.m. and to tell the honest truth, i have a delicacy about sitting down at all. an excursion to diamond head and the king's coacoanut grove was planned to-day--time, : p.m.--the party to consist of half a dozen gentlemen and three ladies. they all started at the appointed hour except myself. i was at the government prison, (with captain fish and another whaleship-skipper, captain phillips,) and got so interested in its examination that i did not notice how quickly the time was passing. somebody remarked that it was twenty minutes past five o'clock, and that woke me up. it was a fortunate circumstance that captain phillips was along with his "turn out," as he calls a top-buggy that captain cook brought here in , and a horse that was here when captain cook came. captain phillips takes a just pride in his driving and in the speed of his horse, and to his passion for displaying them i owe it that we were only sixteen minutes coming from the prison to the american hotel--a distance which has been estimated to be over half a mile. but it took some fearful driving. the captain's whip came down fast, and the blows started so much dust out of the horse's hide that during the last half of the journey we rode through an impenetrable fog, and ran by a pocket compass in the hands of captain fish, a whaler of twenty-six years experience, who sat there through the perilous voyage as self-possessed as if he had been on the euchre-deck of his own ship, and calmly said, "port your helm--port," from time to time, and "hold her a little free --steady--so--so," and "luff--hard down to starboard!" and never once lost his presence of mind or betrayed the least anxiety by voice or manner. when we came to anchor at last, and captain phillips looked at his watch and said, "sixteen minutes--i told you it was in her! that's over three miles an hour!" i could see he felt entitled to a compliment, and so i said i had never seen lightning go like that horse. and i never had. the landlord of the american said the party had been gone nearly an hour, but that he could give me my choice of several horses that could overtake them. i said, never mind--i preferred a safe horse to a fast one--i would like to have an excessively gentle horse--a horse with no spirit whatever--a lame one, if he had such a thing. inside of five minutes i was mounted, and perfectly satisfied with my outfit. i had no time to label him "this is a horse," and so if the public took him for a sheep i cannot help it. i was satisfied, and that was the main thing. i could see that he had as many fine points as any man's horse, and so i hung my hat on one of them, behind the saddle, and swabbed the perspiration from my face and started. i named him after this island, "oahu" (pronounced o-waw-hee). the first gate he came to he started in; i had neither whip nor spur, and so i simply argued the case with him. he resisted argument, but ultimately yielded to insult and abuse. he backed out of that gate and steered for another one on the other side of the street. i triumphed by my former process. within the next six hundred yards he crossed the street fourteen times and attempted thirteen gates, and in the meantime the tropical sun was beating down and threatening to cave the top of my head in, and i was literally dripping with perspiration. he abandoned the gate business after that and went along peaceably enough, but absorbed in meditation. i noticed this latter circumstance, and it soon began to fill me with apprehension. i said to my self, this creature is planning some new outrage, some fresh deviltry or other--no horse ever thought over a subject so profoundly as this one is doing just for nothing. the more this thing preyed upon my mind the more uneasy i became, until the suspense became almost unbearable and i dismounted to see if there was anything wild in his eye--for i had heard that the eye of this noblest of our domestic animals is very expressive. i cannot describe what a load of anxiety was lifted from my mind when i found that he was only asleep. i woke him up and started him into a faster walk, and then the villainy of his nature came out again. he tried to climb over a stone wall, five or six feet high. i saw that i must apply force to this horse, and that i might as well begin first as last. i plucked a stout switch from a tamarind tree, and the moment he saw it, he surrendered. he broke into a convulsive sort of a canter, which had three short steps in it and one long one, and reminded me alternately of the clattering shake of the great earthquake, and the sweeping plunging of the ajax in a storm. and now there can be no fitter occasion than the present to pronounce a left-handed blessing upon the man who invented the american saddle. there is no seat to speak of about it--one might as well sit in a shovel --and the stirrups are nothing but an ornamental nuisance. if i were to write down here all the abuse i expended on those stirrups, it would make a large book, even without pictures. sometimes i got one foot so far through, that the stirrup partook of the nature of an anklet; sometimes both feet were through, and i was handcuffed by the legs; and sometimes my feet got clear out and left the stirrups wildly dangling about my shins. even when i was in proper position and carefully balanced upon the balls of my feet, there was no comfort in it, on account of my nervous dread that they were going to slip one way or the other in a moment. but the subject is too exasperating to write about. a mile and a half from town, i came to a grove of tall cocoanut trees, with clean, branchless stems reaching straight up sixty or seventy feet and topped with a spray of green foliage sheltering clusters of cocoa-nuts--not more picturesque than a forest of collossal ragged parasols, with bunches of magnified grapes under them, would be. i once heard a gouty northern invalid say that a cocoanut tree might be poetical, possibly it was; but it looked like a feather-duster struck by lightning. i think that describes it better than a picture--and yet, without any question, there is something fascinating about a cocoa-nut tree--and graceful, too. about a dozen cottages, some frame and the others of native grass, nestled sleepily in the shade here and there. the grass cabins are of a grayish color, are shaped much like our own cottages, only with higher and steeper roofs usually, and are made of some kind of weed strongly bound together in bundles. the roofs are very thick, and so are the walls; the latter have square holes in them for windows. at a little distance these cabins have a furry appearance, as if they might be made of bear skins. they are very cool and pleasant inside. the king's flag was flying from the roof of one of the cottages, and his majesty was probably within. he owns the whole concern thereabouts, and passes his time there frequently, on sultry days "laying off." the spot is called "the king's grove." near by is an interesting ruin--the meagre remains of an ancient heathen temple--a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old bygone days when the simple child of nature, yielding momentarily to sin when sorely tempted, acknowledged his error when calm reflection had shown it him, and came forward with noble frankness and offered up his grandmother as an atoning sacrifice--in those old days when the luckless sinner could keep on cleansing his conscience and achieving periodical happiness as long as his relations held out; long, long before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there; and showed the poor native how dreary a place perdition is and what unnecessarily liberal facilities there are for going to it; showed him how, in his ignorance he had gone and fooled away all his kinfolks to no purpose; showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but nature. how sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell! this ancient temple was built of rough blocks of lava, and was simply a roofless inclosure a hundred and thirty feet long and seventy wide --nothing but naked walls, very thick, but not much higher than a man's head. they will last for ages no doubt, if left unmolested. its three altars and other sacred appurtenances have crumbled and passed away years ago. it is said that in the old times thousands of human beings were slaughtered here, in the presence of naked and howling savages. if these mute stones could speak, what tales they could tell, what pictures they could describe, of fettered victims writhing under the knife; of massed forms straining forward out of the gloom, with ferocious faces lit up by the sacrificial fires; of the background of ghostly trees; of the dark pyramid of diamond head standing sentinel over the uncanny scene, and the peaceful moon looking down upon it through rifts in the cloud-rack! when kamehameha (pronounced ka-may-ha-may-ah) the great--who was a sort of a napoleon in military genius and uniform success--invaded this island of oahu three quarters of a century ago, and exterminated the army sent to oppose him, and took full and final possession of the country, he searched out the dead body of the king of oahu, and those of the principal chiefs, and impaled their heads on the walls of this temple. those were savage times when this old slaughter-house was in its prime. the king and the chiefs ruled the common herd with a rod of iron; made them gather all the provisions the masters needed; build all the houses and temples; stand all the expenses, of whatever kind; take kicks and cuffs for thanks; drag out lives well flavored with misery, and then suffer death for trifling offences or yield up their lives on the sacrificial altars to purchase favors from the gods for their hard rulers. the missionaries have clothed them, educated them, broken up the tyrannous authority of their chiefs, and given them freedom and the right to enjoy whatever their hands and brains produce with equal laws for all, and punishment for all alike who transgress them. the contrast is so strong--the benefit conferred upon this people by the missionaries is so prominent, so palpable and so unquestionable, that the frankest compliment i can pay them, and the best, is simply to point to the condition of the sandwich islanders of captain cook's time, and their condition to-day. their work speaks for itself. chapter lxv. by and by, after a rugged climb, we halted on the summit of a hill which commanded a far-reaching view. the moon rose and flooded mountain and valley and ocean with a mellow radiance, and out of the shadows of the foliage the distant lights of honolulu glinted like an encampment of fireflies. the air was heavy with the fragrance of flowers. the halt was brief.--gayly laughing and talking, the party galloped on, and i clung to the pommel and cantered after. presently we came to a place where no grass grew--a wide expanse of deep sand. they said it was an old battle ground. all around everywhere, not three feet apart, the bleached bones of men gleamed white in the moonlight. we picked up a lot of them for mementoes. i got quite a number of arm bones and leg bones --of great chiefs, may be, who had fought savagely in that fearful battle in the old days, when blood flowed like wine where we now stood--and wore the choicest of them out on oahu afterward, trying to make him go. all sorts of bones could be found except skulls; but a citizen said, irreverently, that there had been an unusual number of "skull-hunters" there lately--a species of sportsmen i had never heard of before. nothing whatever is known about this place--its story is a secret that will never be revealed. the oldest natives make no pretense of being possessed of its history. they say these bones were here when they were children. they were here when their grandfathers were children--but how they came here, they can only conjecture. many people believe this spot to be an ancient battle-ground, and it is usual to call it so; and they believe that these skeletons have lain for ages just where their proprietors fell in the great fight. other people believe that kamehameha i. fought his first battle here. on this point, i have heard a story, which may have been taken from one of the numerous books which have been written concerning these islands--i do not know where the narrator got it. he said that when kamehameha (who was at first merely a subordinate chief on the island of hawaii), landed here, he brought a large army with him, and encamped at waikiki. the oahuans marched against him, and so confident were they of success that they readily acceded to a demand of their priests that they should draw a line where these bones now lie, and take an oath that, if forced to retreat at all, they would never retreat beyond this boundary. the priests told them that death and everlasting punishment would overtake any who violated the oath, and the march was resumed. kamehameha drove them back step by step; the priests fought in the front rank and exhorted them both by voice and inspiriting example to remember their oath--to die, if need be, but never cross the fatal line. the struggle was manfully maintained, but at last the chief priest fell, pierced to the heart with a spear, and the unlucky omen fell like a blight upon the brave souls at his back; with a triumphant shout the invaders pressed forward--the line was crossed--the offended gods deserted the despairing army, and, accepting the doom their perjury had brought upon them, they broke and fled over the plain where honolulu stands now--up the beautiful nuuanu valley --paused a moment, hemmed in by precipitous mountains on either hand and the frightful precipice of the pari in front, and then were driven over --a sheer plunge of six hundred feet! the story is pretty enough, but mr. jarves' excellent history says the oahuans were intrenched in nuuanu valley; that kamehameha ousted them, routed them, pursued them up the valley and drove them over the precipice. he makes no mention of our bone-yard at all in his book. impressed by the profound silence and repose that rested over the beautiful landscape, and being, as usual, in the rear, i gave voice to my thoughts. i said: "what a picture is here slumbering in the solemn glory of the moon! how strong the rugged outlines of the dead volcano stand out against the clear sky! what a snowy fringe marks the bursting of the surf over the long, curved reef! how calmly the dim city sleeps yonder in the plain! how soft the shadows lie upon the stately mountains that border the dream-haunted mauoa valley! what a grand pyramid of billowy clouds towers above the storied pari! how the grim warriors of the past seem flocking in ghostly squadrons to their ancient battlefield again--how the wails of the dying well up from the--" at this point the horse called oahu sat down in the sand. sat down to listen, i suppose. never mind what he heard, i stopped apostrophising and convinced him that i was not a man to allow contempt of court on the part of a horse. i broke the back-bone of a chief over his rump and set out to join the cavalcade again. very considerably fagged out we arrived in town at o'clock at night, myself in the lead--for when my horse finally came to understand that he was homeward bound and hadn't far to go, he turned his attention strictly to business. this is a good time to drop in a paragraph of information. there is no regular livery stable in honolulu, or, indeed, in any part of the kingdom of hawaii; therefore unless you are acquainted with wealthy residents (who all have good horses), you must hire animals of the wretchedest description from the kanakas. (i.e. natives.) any horse you hire, even though it be from a white man, is not often of much account, because it will be brought in for you from some ranch, and has necessarily been leading a hard life. if the kanakas who have been caring for him (inveterate riders they are) have not ridden him half to death every day themselves, you can depend upon it they have been doing the same thing by proxy, by clandestinely hiring him out. at least, so i am informed. the result is, that no horse has a chance to eat, drink, rest, recuperate, or look well or feel well, and so strangers go about the islands mounted as i was to-day. in hiring a horse from a kanaka, you must have all your eyes about you, because you can rest satisfied that you are dealing with a shrewd unprincipled rascal. you may leave your door open and your trunk unlocked as long as you please, and he will not meddle with your property; he has no important vices and no inclination to commit robbery on a large scale; but if he can get ahead of you in the horse business, he will take a genuine delight in doing it. this traits is characteristic of horse jockeys, the world over, is it not? he will overcharge you if he can; he will hire you a fine-looking horse at night (anybody's--may be the king's, if the royal steed be in convenient view), and bring you the mate to my oahu in the morning, and contend that it is the same animal. if you make trouble, he will get out by saying it was not himself who made the bargain with you, but his brother, "who went out in the country this morning." they have always got a "brother" to shift the responsibility upon. a victim said to one of these fellows one day: "but i know i hired the horse of you, because i noticed that scar on your cheek." the reply was not bad: "oh, yes--yes--my brother all same--we twins!" a friend of mine, j. smith, hired a horse yesterday, the kanaka warranting him to be in excellent condition. smith had a saddle and blanket of his own, and he ordered the kanaka to put these on the horse. the kanaka protested that he was perfectly willing to trust the gentleman with the saddle that was already on the animal, but smith refused to use it. the change was made; then smith noticed that the kanaka had only changed the saddles, and had left the original blanket on the horse; he said he forgot to change the blankets, and so, to cut the bother short, smith mounted and rode away. the horse went lame a mile from town, and afterward got to cutting up some extraordinary capers. smith got down and took off the saddle, but the blanket stuck fast to the horse--glued to a procession of raw places. the kanaka's mysterious conduct stood explained. another friend of mine bought a pretty good horse from a native, a day or two ago, after a tolerably thorough examination of the animal. he discovered today that the horse was as blind as a bat, in one eye. he meant to have examined that eye, and came home with a general notion that he had done it; but he remembers now that every time he made the attempt his attention was called to something else by his victimizer. one more instance, and then i will pass to something else. i am informed that when a certain mr. l., a visiting stranger, was here, he bought a pair of very respectable-looking match horses from a native. they were in a little stable with a partition through the middle of it--one horse in each apartment. mr. l. examined one of them critically through a window (the kanaka's "brother" having gone to the country with the key), and then went around the house and examined the other through a window on the other side. he said it was the neatest match he had ever seen, and paid for the horses on the spot. whereupon the kanaka departed to join his brother in the country. the fellow had shamefully swindled l. there was only one "match" horse, and he had examined his starboard side through one window and his port side through another! i decline to believe this story, but i give it because it is worth something as a fanciful illustration of a fixed fact--namely, that the kanaka horse-jockey is fertile in invention and elastic in conscience. you can buy a pretty good horse for forty or fifty dollars, and a good enough horse for all practical purposes for two dollars and a half. i estimate "oahu" to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-five cents. a good deal better animal than he is was sold here day before yesterday for a dollar and seventy-five cents, and sold again to-day for two dollars and twenty-five cents; williams bought a handsome and lively little pony yesterday for ten dollars; and about the best common horse on the island (and he is a really good one) sold yesterday, with mexican saddle and bridle, for seventy dollars--a horse which is well and widely known, and greatly respected for his speed, good disposition and everlasting bottom. you give your horse a little grain once a day; it comes from san francisco, and is worth about two cents a pound; and you give him as much hay as he wants; it is cut and brought to the market by natives, and is not very good it is baled into long, round bundles, about the size of a large man; one of them is stuck by the middle on each end of a six foot pole, and the kanaka shoulders the pole and walks about the streets between the upright bales in search of customers. these hay bales, thus carried, have a general resemblance to a colossal capital 'h.' the hay-bundles cost twenty-five cents apiece, and one will last a horse about a day. you can get a horse for a song, a week's hay for another song, and you can turn your animal loose among the luxuriant grass in your neighbor's broad front yard without a song at all--you do it at midnight, and stable the beast again before morning. you have been at no expense thus far, but when you come to buy a saddle and bridle they will cost you from twenty to thirty-five dollars. you can hire a horse, saddle and bridle at from seven to ten dollars a week, and the owner will take care of them at his own expense. it is time to close this day's record--bed time. as i prepare for sleep, a rich voice rises out of the still night, and, far as this ocean rock is toward the ends of the earth, i recognize a familiar home air. but the words seem somewhat out of joint: "waikiki lantoni oe kaa hooly hooly wawhoo." translated, that means "when we were marching through georgia." chapter lxvi. passing through the market place we saw that feature of honolulu under its most favorable auspices--that is, in the full glory of saturday afternoon, which is a festive day with the natives. the native girls by twos and threes and parties of a dozen, and sometimes in whole platoons and companies, went cantering up and down the neighboring streets astride of fleet but homely horses, and with their gaudy riding habits streaming like banners behind them. such a troop of free and easy riders, in their natural home, the saddle, makes a gay and graceful spectacle. the riding habit i speak of is simply a long, broad scarf, like a tavern table cloth brilliantly colored, wrapped around the loins once, then apparently passed between the limbs and each end thrown backward over the same, and floating and flapping behind on both sides beyond the horse's tail like a couple of fancy flags; then, slipping the stirrup-irons between her toes, the girl throws her chest for ward, sits up like a major general and goes sweeping by like the wind. the girls put on all the finery they can on saturday afternoon--fine black silk robes; flowing red ones that nearly put your eyes out; others as white as snow; still others that discount the rainbow; and they wear their hair in nets, and trim their jaunty hats with fresh flowers, and encircle their dusky throats with home-made necklaces of the brilliant vermillion-tinted blossom of the ohia; and they fill the markets and the adjacent street with their bright presences, and smell like a rag factory on fire with their offensive cocoanut oil. occasionally you see a heathen from the sunny isles away down in the south seas, with his face and neck tatooed till he looks like the customary mendicant from washoe who has been blown up in a mine. some are tattooed a dead blue color down to the upper lip--masked, as it were --leaving the natural light yellow skin of micronesia unstained from thence down; some with broad marks drawn down from hair to neck, on both sides of the face, and a strip of the original yellow skin, two inches wide, down the center--a gridiron with a spoke broken out; and some with the entire face discolored with the popular mortification tint, relieved only by one or two thin, wavy threads of natural yellow running across the face from ear to ear, and eyes twinkling out of this darkness, from under shadowing hat-brims, like stars in the dark of the moon. moving among the stirring crowds, you come to the poi merchants, squatting in the shade on their hams, in true native fashion, and surrounded by purchasers. (the sandwich islanders always squat on their hams, and who knows but they may be the old original "ham sandwiches?" the thought is pregnant with interest.) the poi looks like common flour paste, and is kept in large bowls formed of a species of gourd, and capable of holding from one to three or four gallons. poi is the chief article of food among the natives, and is prepared from the taro plant. the taro root looks like a thick, or, if you please, a corpulent sweet potato, in shape, but is of a light purple color when boiled. when boiled it answers as a passable substitute for bread. the buck kanakas bake it under ground, then mash it up well with a heavy lava pestle, mix water with it until it becomes a paste, set it aside and let if ferment, and then it is poi--and an unseductive mixture it is, almost tasteless before it ferments and too sour for a luxury afterward. but nothing is more nutritious. when solely used, however, it produces acrid humors, a fact which sufficiently accounts for the humorous character of the kanakas. i think there must be as much of a knack in handling poi as there is in eating with chopsticks. the forefinger is thrust into the mess and stirred quickly round several times and drawn as quickly out, thickly coated, just as it it were poulticed; the head is thrown back, the finger inserted in the mouth and the delicacy stripped off and swallowed--the eye closing gently, meanwhile, in a languid sort of ecstasy. many a different finger goes into the same bowl and many a different kind of dirt and shade and quality of flavor is added to the virtues of its contents. around a small shanty was collected a crowd of natives buying the awa root. it is said that but for the use of this root the destruction of the people in former times by certain imported diseases would have been far greater than it was, and by others it is said that this is merely a fancy. all agree that poi will rejuvenate a man who is used up and his vitality almost annihilated by hard drinking, and that in some kinds of diseases it will restore health after all medicines have failed; but all are not willing to allow to the awa the virtues claimed for it. the natives manufacture an intoxicating drink from it which is fearful in its effects when persistently indulged in. it covers the body with dry, white scales, inflames the eyes, and causes premature decripitude. although the man before whose establishment we stopped has to pay a government license of eight hundred dollars a year for the exclusive right to sell awa root, it is said that he makes a small fortune every twelve-month; while saloon keepers, who pay a thousand dollars a year for the privilege of retailing whiskey, etc., only make a bare living. we found the fish market crowded; for the native is very fond of fish, and eats the article raw and alive! let us change the subject. in old times here saturday was a grand gala day indeed. all the native population of the town forsook their labors, and those of the surrounding country journeyed to the city. then the white folks had to stay indoors, for every street was so packed with charging cavaliers and cavalieresses that it was next to impossible to thread one's way through the cavalcades without getting crippled. at night they feasted and the girls danced the lascivious hula hula--a dance that is said to exhibit the very perfection of educated notion of limb and arm, hand, head and body, and the exactest uniformity of movement and accuracy of "time." it was performed by a circle of girls with no raiment on them to speak of, who went through an infinite variety of motions and figures without prompting, and yet so true was their "time," and in such perfect concert did they move that when they were placed in a straight line, hands, arms, bodies, limbs and heads waved, swayed, gesticulated, bowed, stooped, whirled, squirmed, twisted and undulated as if they were part and parcel of a single individual; and it was difficult to believe they were not moved in a body by some exquisite piece of mechanism. of late years, however, saturday has lost most of its quondam gala features. this weekly stampede of the natives interfered too much with labor and the interests of the white folks, and by sticking in a law here, and preaching a sermon there, and by various other means, they gradually broke it up. the demoralizing hula hula was forbidden to be performed, save at night, with closed doors, in presence of few spectators, and only by permission duly procured from the authorities and the payment of ten dollars for the same. there are few girls now-a-days able to dance this ancient national dance in the highest perfection of the art. the missionaries have christianized and educated all the natives. they all belong to the church, and there is not one of them, above the age of eight years, but can read and write with facility in the native tongue. it is the most universally educated race of people outside of china. they have any quantity of books, printed in the kanaka language, and all the natives are fond of reading. they are inveterate church-goers --nothing can keep them away. all this ameliorating cultivation has at last built up in the native women a profound respect for chastity--in other people. perhaps that is enough to say on that head. the national sin will die out when the race does, but perhaps not earlier.--but doubtless this purifying is not far off, when we reflect that contact with civilization and the whites has reduced the native population from four hundred thousand (captain cook's estimate,) to fifty-five thousand in something over eighty years! society is a queer medley in this notable missionary, whaling and governmental centre. if you get into conversation with a stranger and experience that natural desire to know what sort of ground you are treading on by finding out what manner of man your stranger is, strike out boldly and address him as "captain." watch him narrowly, and if you see by his countenance that you are on the wrong tack, ask him where he preaches. it is a safe bet that he is either a missionary or captain of a whaler. i am now personally acquainted with seventy-two captains and ninety-six missionaries. the captains and ministers form one-half of the population; the third fourth is composed of common kanakas and mercantile foreigners and their families, and the final fourth is made up of high officers of the hawaiian government. and there are just about cats enough for three apiece all around. a solemn stranger met me in the suburbs the other day, and said: "good morning, your reverence. preach in the stone church yonder, no doubt?" "no, i don't. i'm not a preacher." "really, i beg your pardon, captain. i trust you had a good season. how much oil"-- "oil? what do you take me for? i'm not a whaler." "oh, i beg a thousand pardons, your excellency. "major general in the household troops, no doubt? minister of the interior, likely? secretary of war? first gentleman of the bed-chamber? commissioner of the royal"-- "stuff! i'm no official. i'm not connected in any way with the government." "bless my life! then, who the mischief are you? what the mischief are you? and how the mischief did you get here, and where in thunder did you come from?" "i'm only a private personage--an unassuming stranger--lately arrived from america." "no? not a missionary! not a whaler! not a member of his majesty's government! not even secretary of the navy! ah, heaven! it is too blissful to be true; alas, i do but dream. and yet that noble, honest countenance--those oblique, ingenuous eyes--that massive head, incapable of--of--anything; your hand; give me your hand, bright waif. excuse these tears. for sixteen weary years i have yearned for a moment like this, and"-- here his feelings were too much for him, and he swooned away. i pitied this poor creature from the bottom of my heart. i was deeply moved. i shed a few tears on him and kissed him for his mother. i then took what small change he had and "shoved". chapter lxvii. i still quote from my journal: i found the national legislature to consist of half a dozen white men and some thirty or forty natives. it was a dark assemblage. the nobles and ministers (about a dozen of them altogether) occupied the extreme left of the hall, with david kalakaua (the king's chamberlain) and prince william at the head. the president of the assembly, his royal highness m. kekuanaoa, [kekuanaoa is not of the blood royal. he derives his princely rank from his wife, who was a daughter of kamehameha the great. under other monarchies the male line takes precedence of the female in tracing genealogies, but here the opposite is the case--the female line takes precedence. their reason for this is exceedingly sensible, and i recommend it to the aristocracy of europe: they say it is easy to know who a man's mother was, but, etc., etc.] and the vice president (the latter a white man,) sat in the pulpit, if i may so term it. the president is the king's father. he is an erect, strongly built, massive featured, white-haired, tawny old gentleman of eighty years of age or thereabouts. he was simply but well dressed, in a blue cloth coat and white vest, and white pantaloons, without spot, dust or blemish upon them. he bears himself with a calm, stately dignity, and is a man of noble presence. he was a young man and a distinguished warrior under that terrific fighter, kamehameha i., more than half a century ago. a knowledge of his career suggested some such thought as this: "this man, naked as the day he was born, and war-club and spear in hand, has charged at the head of a horde of savages against other hordes of savages more than a generation and a half ago, and reveled in slaughter and carnage; has worshipped wooden images on his devout knees; has seen hundreds of his race offered up in heathen temples as sacrifices to wooden idols, at a time when no missionary's foot had ever pressed this soil, and he had never heard of the white man's god; has believed his enemy could secretly pray him to death; has seen the day, in his childhood, when it was a crime punishable by death for a man to eat with his wife, or for a plebeian to let his shadow fall upon the king--and now look at him; an educated christian; neatly and handsomely dressed; a high-minded, elegant gentleman; a traveler, in some degree, and one who has been the honored guest of royalty in europe; a man practiced in holding the reins of an enlightened government, and well versed in the politics of his country and in general, practical information. look at him, sitting there presiding over the deliberations of a legislative body, among whom are white men--a grave, dignified, statesmanlike personage, and as seemingly natural and fitted to the place as if he had been born in it and had never been out of it in his life time. how the experiences of this old man's eventful life shame the cheap inventions of romance!" the christianizing of the natives has hardly even weakened some of their barbarian superstitions, much less destroyed them. i have just referred to one of these. it is still a popular belief that if your enemy can get hold of any article belonging to you he can get down on his knees over it and pray you to death. therefore many a native gives up and dies merely because he imagines that some enemy is putting him through a course of damaging prayer. this praying an individual to death seems absurd enough at a first glance, but then when we call to mind some of the pulpit efforts of certain of our own ministers the thing looks plausible. in former times, among the islanders, not only a plurality of wives was customary, but a plurality of husbands likewise. some native women of noble rank had as many as six husbands. a woman thus supplied did not reside with all her husbands at once, but lived several months with each in turn. an understood sign hung at her door during these months. when the sign was taken down, it meant "next." in those days woman was rigidly taught to "know her place." her place was to do all the work, take all the cuffs, provide all the food, and content herself with what was left after her lord had finished his dinner. she was not only forbidden, by ancient law, and under penalty of death, to eat with her husband or enter a canoe, but was debarred, under the same penalty, from eating bananas, pine-apples, oranges and other choice fruits at any time or in any place. she had to confine herself pretty strictly to "poi" and hard work. these poor ignorant heathen seem to have had a sort of groping idea of what came of woman eating fruit in the garden of eden, and they did not choose to take any more chances. but the missionaries broke up this satisfactory arrangement of things. they liberated woman and made her the equal of man. the natives had a romantic fashion of burying some of their children alive when the family became larger than necessary. the missionaries interfered in this matter too, and stopped it. to this day the natives are able to lie down and die whenever they want to, whether there is anything the matter with them or not. if a kanaka takes a notion to die, that is the end of him; nobody can persuade him to hold on; all the doctors in the world could not save him. a luxury which they enjoy more than anything else, is a large funeral. if a person wants to get rid of a troublesome native, it is only necessary to promise him a fine funeral and name the hour and he will be on hand to the minute--at least his remains will. all the natives are christians, now, but many of them still desert to the great shark god for temporary succor in time of trouble. an irruption of the great volcano of kilauea, or an earthquake, always brings a deal of latent loyalty to the great shark god to the surface. it is common report that the king, educated, cultivated and refined christian gentleman as he undoubtedly is, still turns to the idols of his fathers for help when disaster threatens. a planter caught a shark, and one of his christianized natives testified his emancipation from the thrall of ancient superstition by assisting to dissect the shark after a fashion forbidden by his abandoned creed. but remorse shortly began to torture him. he grew moody and sought solitude; brooded over his sin, refused food, and finally said he must die and ought to die, for he had sinned against the great shark god and could never know peace any more. he was proof against persuasion and ridicule, and in the course of a day or two took to his bed and died, although he showed no symptom of disease. his young daughter followed his lead and suffered a like fate within the week. superstition is ingrained in the native blood and bone and it is only natural that it should crop out in time of distress. wherever one goes in the islands, he will find small piles of stones by the wayside, covered with leafy offerings, placed there by the natives to appease evil spirits or honor local deities belonging to the mythology of former days. in the rural districts of any of the islands, the traveler hourly comes upon parties of dusky maidens bathing in the streams or in the sea without any clothing on and exhibiting no very intemperate zeal in the matter of hiding their nakedness. when the missionaries first took up their residence in honolulu, the native women would pay their families frequent friendly visits, day by day, not even clothed with a blush. it was found a hard matter to convince them that this was rather indelicate. finally the missionaries provided them with long, loose calico robes, and that ended the difficulty--for the women would troop through the town, stark naked, with their robes folded under their arms, march to the missionary houses and then proceed to dress!--the natives soon manifested a strong proclivity for clothing, but it was shortly apparent that they only wanted it for grandeur. the missionaries imported a quantity of hats, bonnets, and other male and female wearing apparel, instituted a general distribution, and begged the people not to come to church naked, next sunday, as usual. and they did not; but the national spirit of unselfishness led them to divide up with neighbors who were not at the distribution, and next sabbath the poor preachers could hardly keep countenance before their vast congregations. in the midst of the reading of a hymn a brown, stately dame would sweep up the aisle with a world of airs, with nothing in the world on but a "stovepipe" hat and a pair of cheap gloves; another dame would follow, tricked out in a man's shirt, and nothing else; another one would enter with a flourish, with simply the sleeves of a bright calico dress tied around her waist and the rest of the garment dragging behind like a peacock's tail off duty; a stately "buck" kanaka would stalk in with a woman's bonnet on, wrong side before--only this, and nothing more; after him would stride his fellow, with the legs of a pair of pantaloons tied around his neck, the rest of his person untrammeled; in his rear would come another gentleman simply gotten up in a fiery neck-tie and a striped vest. the poor creatures were beaming with complacency and wholly unconscious of any absurdity in their appearance. they gazed at each other with happy admiration, and it was plain to see that the young girls were taking note of what each other had on, as naturally as if they had always lived in a land of bibles and knew what churches were made for; here was the evidence of a dawning civilization. the spectacle which the congregation presented was so extraordinary and withal so moving, that the missionaries found it difficult to keep to the text and go on with the services; and by and by when the simple children of the sun began a general swapping of garments in open meeting and produced some irresistibly grotesque effects in the course of re-dressing, there was nothing for it but to cut the thing short with the benediction and dismiss the fantastic assemblage. in our country, children play "keep house;" and in the same high-sounding but miniature way the grown folk here, with the poor little material of slender territory and meagre population, play "empire." there is his royal majesty the king, with a new york detective's income of thirty or thirty-five thousand dollars a year from the "royal civil list" and the "royal domain." he lives in a two-story frame "palace." and there is the "royal family"--the customary hive of royal brothers, sisters, cousins and other noble drones and vagrants usual to monarchy, --all with a spoon in the national pap-dish, and all bearing such titles as his or her royal highness the prince or princess so-and-so. few of them can carry their royal splendors far enough to ride in carriages, however; they sport the economical kanaka horse or "hoof it" with the plebeians. then there is his excellency the "royal chamberlain"--a sinecure, for his majesty dresses himself with his own hands, except when he is ruralizing at waikiki and then he requires no dressing. next we have his excellency the commander-in-chief of the household troops, whose forces consist of about the number of soldiers usually placed under a corporal in other lands. next comes the royal steward and the grand equerry in waiting--high dignitaries with modest salaries and little to do. then we have his excellency the first gentleman of the bed-chamber--an office as easy as it is magnificent. next we come to his excellency the prime minister, a renegade american from new hampshire, all jaw, vanity, bombast and ignorance, a lawyer of "shyster" calibre, a fraud by nature, a humble worshipper of the sceptre above him, a reptile never tired of sneering at the land of his birth or glorifying the ten-acre kingdom that has adopted him--salary, $ , a year, vast consequence, and no perquisites. then we have his excellency the imperial minister of finance, who handles a million dollars of public money a year, sends in his annual "budget" with great ceremony, talks prodigiously of "finance," suggests imposing schemes for paying off the "national debt" (of $ , ,) and does it all for $ , a year and unimaginable glory. next we have his excellency the minister of war, who holds sway over the royal armies--they consist of two hundred and thirty uniformed kanakas, mostly brigadier generals, and if the country ever gets into trouble with a foreign power we shall probably hear from them. i knew an american whose copper-plate visiting card bore this impressive legend: "lieutenant-colonel in the royal infantry." to say that he was proud of this distinction is stating it but tamely. the minister of war has also in his charge some venerable swivels on punch-bowl hill wherewith royal salutes are fired when foreign vessels of war enter the port. next comes his excellency the minister of the navy--a nabob who rules the "royal fleet," (a steam-tug and a sixty-ton schooner.) and next comes his grace the lord bishop of honolulu, the chief dignitary of the "established church"--for when the american presbyterian missionaries had completed the reduction of the nation to a compact condition of christianity, native royalty stepped in and erected the grand dignity of an "established (episcopal) church" over it, and imported a cheap ready-made bishop from england to take charge. the chagrin of the missionaries has never been comprehensively expressed, to this day, profanity not being admissible. next comes his excellency the minister of public instruction. next, their excellencies the governors of oahu, hawaii, etc., and after them a string of high sheriffs and other small fry too numerous for computation. then there are their excellencies the envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of his imperial majesty the emperor of the french; her british majesty's minister; the minister resident, of the united states; and some six or eight representatives of other foreign nations, all with sounding titles, imposing dignity and prodigious but economical state. imagine all this grandeur in a play-house "kingdom" whose population falls absolutely short of sixty thousand souls! the people are so accustomed to nine-jointed titles and colossal magnates that a foreign prince makes very little more stir in honolulu than a western congressman does in new york. and let it be borne in mind that there is a strictly defined "court costume" of so "stunning" a nature that it would make the clown in a circus look tame and commonplace by comparison; and each hawaiian official dignitary has a gorgeous vari-colored, gold-laced uniform peculiar to his office--no two of them are alike, and it is hard to tell which one is the "loudest." the king had a "drawing-room" at stated intervals, like other monarchs, and when these varied uniforms congregate there--weak-eyed people have to contemplate the spectacle through smoked glass. is there not a gratifying contrast between this latter-day exhibition and the one the ancestors of some of these magnates afforded the missionaries the sunday after the old-time distribution of clothing? behold what religion and civilization have wrought! chapter lxviii. while i was in honolulu i witnessed the ceremonious funeral of the king's sister, her royal highness the princess victoria. according to the royal custom, the remains had lain in state at the palace thirty days, watched day and night by a guard of honor. and during all that time a great multitude of natives from the several islands had kept the palace grounds well crowded and had made the place a pandemonium every night with their howlings and wailings, beating of tom-toms and dancing of the (at other times) forbidden "hula-hula" by half-clad maidens to the music of songs of questionable decency chanted in honor of the deceased. the printed programme of the funeral procession interested me at the time; and after what i have just said of hawaiian grandiloquence in the matter of "playing empire," i am persuaded that a perusal of it may interest the reader: after reading the long list of dignitaries, etc., and remembering the sparseness of the population, one is almost inclined to wonder where the material for that portion of the procession devoted to "hawaiian population generally" is going to be procured: undertaker. royal school. kawaiahao school. roman catholic school. maemae school. honolulu fire department. mechanics' benefit union. attending physicians. knonohikis (superintendents) of the crown lands, konohikis of the private lands of his majesty konohikis of the private lands of her late royal highness. governor of oahu and staff. hulumanu (military company). household troops. the prince of hawaii's own (military company). the king's household servants. servants of her late royal highness. protestant clergy. the clergy of the roman catholic church. his lordship louis maigret, the right rev. bishop of arathea, vicar-apostolic of the hawaiian islands. the clergy of the hawaiian reformed catholic church. his lordship the right rev. bishop of honolulu. her majesty queen emma's carriage. his majesty's staff. carriage of her late royal highness. carriage of her majesty the queen dowager. the king's chancellor. cabinet ministers. his excellency the minister resident of the united states. h. b. m's commissioner. h. b. m's acting commissioner. judges of supreme court. privy councillors. members of legislative assembly. consular corps. circuit judges. clerks of government departments. members of the bar. collector general, custom-house officers and officers of the customs. marshal and sheriffs of the different islands. king's yeomanry. foreign residents. ahahui kaahumanu. hawaiian population generally. hawaiian cavalry. police force. i resume my journal at the point where the procession arrived at the royal mausoleum: as the procession filed through the gate, the military deployed handsomely to the right and left and formed an avenue through which the long column of mourners passed to the tomb. the coffin was borne through the door of the mausoleum, followed by the king and his chiefs, the great officers of the kingdom, foreign consuls, embassadors and distinguished guests (burlingame and general van valkenburgh). several of the kahilis were then fastened to a frame-work in front of the tomb, there to remain until they decay and fall to pieces, or, forestalling this, until another scion of royalty dies. at this point of the proceedings the multitude set up such a heart-broken wailing as i hope never to hear again. the soldiers fired three volleys of musketry--the wailing being previously silenced to permit of the guns being heard. his highness prince william, in a showy military uniform (the "true prince," this --scion of the house over-thrown by the present dynasty--he was formerly betrothed to the princess but was not allowed to marry her), stood guard and paced back and forth within the door. the privileged few who followed the coffin into the mausoleum remained sometime, but the king soon came out and stood in the door and near one side of it. a stranger could have guessed his rank (although he was so simply and unpretentiously dressed) by the profound deference paid him by all persons in his vicinity; by seeing his high officers receive his quiet orders and suggestions with bowed and uncovered heads; and by observing how careful those persons who came out of the mausoleum were to avoid "crowding" him (although there was room enough in the doorway for a wagon to pass, for that matter); how respectfully they edged out sideways, scraping their backs against the wall and always presenting a front view of their persons to his majesty, and never putting their hats on until they were well out of the royal presence. he was dressed entirely in black--dress-coat and silk hat--and looked rather democratic in the midst of the showy uniforms about him. on his breast he wore a large gold star, which was half hidden by the lapel of his coat. he remained at the door a half hour, and occasionally gave an order to the men who were erecting the kahilis [ranks of long-handled mops made of gaudy feathers--sacred to royalty. they are stuck in the ground around the tomb and left there.] before the tomb. he had the good taste to make one of them substitute black crape for the ordinary hempen rope he was about to tie one of them to the frame-work with. finally he entered his carriage and drove away, and the populace shortly began to drop into his wake. while he was in view there was but one man who attracted more attention than himself, and that was harris (the yankee prime minister). this feeble personage had crape enough around his hat to express the grief of an entire nation, and as usual he neglected no opportunity of making himself conspicuous and exciting the admiration of the simple kanakas. oh! noble ambition of this modern richelieu! it is interesting to contrast the funeral ceremonies of the princess victoria with those of her noted ancestor kamehameha the conqueror, who died fifty years ago--in , the year before the first missionaries came. "on the th of may, , at the age of sixty-six, he died, as he had lived, in the faith of his country. it was his misfortune not to have come in contact with men who could have rightly influenced his religious aspirations. judged by his advantages and compared with the most eminent of his countrymen he may be justly styled not only great, but good. to this day his memory warms the heart and elevates the national feelings of hawaiians. they are proud of their old warrior king; they love his name; his deeds form their historical age; and an enthusiasm everywhere prevails, shared even by foreigners who knew his worth, that constitutes the firmest pillar of the throne of his dynasty. "in lieu of human victims (the custom of that age), a sacrifice of three hundred dogs attended his obsequies--no mean holocaust when their national value and the estimation in which they were held are considered. the bones of kamehameha, after being kept for a while, were so carefully concealed that all knowledge of their final resting place is now lost. there was a proverb current among the common people that the bones of a cruel king could not be hid; they made fish-hooks and arrows of them, upon which, in using them, they vented their abhorrence of his memory in bitter execrations." the account of the circumstances of his death, as written by the native historians, is full of minute detail, but there is scarcely a line of it which does not mention or illustrate some by-gone custom of the country. in this respect it is the most comprehensive document i have yet met with. i will quote it entire: "when kamehameha was dangerously sick, and the priests were unable to cure him, they said: 'be of good courage and build a house for the god' (his own private god or idol), that thou mayest recover.' the chiefs corroborated this advice of the priests, and a place of worship was prepared for kukailimoku, and consecrated in the evening. they proposed also to the king, with a view to prolong his life, that human victims should be sacrificed to his deity; upon which the greater part of the people absconded through fear of death, and concealed themselves in hiding places till the tabu [tabu (pronounced tah-boo,) means prohibition (we have borrowed it,) or sacred. the tabu was sometimes permanent, sometimes temporary; and the person or thing placed under tabu was for the time being sacred to the purpose for which it was set apart. in the above case the victims selected under the tabu would be sacred to the sacrifice] in which destruction impended, was past. it is doubtful whether kamehameha approved of the plan of the chiefs and priests to sacrifice men, as he was known to say, 'the men are sacred for the king;' meaning that they were for the service of his successor. this information was derived from liholiho, his son. "after this, his sickness increased to such a degree that he had not strength to turn himself in his bed. when another season, consecrated for worship at the new temple (heiau) arrived, he said to his son, liholiho, 'go thou and make supplication to thy god; i am not able to go, and will offer my prayers at home.' when his devotions to his feathered god, kukailimoku, were concluded, a certain religiously disposed individual, who had a bird god, suggested to the king that through its influence his sickness might be removed. the name of this god was pua; its body was made of a bird, now eaten by the hawaiians, and called in their language alae. kamehameha was willing that a trial should be made, and two houses were constructed to facilitate the experiment; but while dwelling in them he became so very weak as not to receive food. after lying there three days, his wives, children and chiefs, perceiving that he was very low, returned him to his own house. in the evening he was carried to the eating house, where he took a little food in his mouth which he did not swallow; also a cup of water. the chiefs requested him to give them his counsel; but he made no reply, and was carried back to the dwelling house; but when near midnight--ten o'clock, perhaps--he was carried again to the place to eat; but, as before, he merely tasted of what was presented to him. then kaikioewa addressed him thus: 'here we all are, your younger brethren, your son liholiho and your foreigner; impart to us your dying charge, that liholiho and kaahumanu may hear.' then kamehameha inquired, 'what do you say?' kaikioewa repeated, 'your counsels for us.' "he then said, 'move on in my good way and--.' he could proceed no further. the foreigner, mr. young, embraced and kissed him. hoapili also embraced him, whispering something in his ear, after which he was taken back to the house. about twelve he was carried once more to the house for eating, into which his head entered, while his body was in the dwelling house immediately adjoining. it should be remarked that this frequent carrying of a sick chief from one house to another resulted from the tabu system, then in force. there were at that time six houses (huts) connected with an establishment--one was for worship, one for the men to eat in, an eating house for the women, a house to sleep in, a house in which to manufacture kapa (native cloth) and one where, at certain intervals, the women might dwell in seclusion. "the sick was once more taken to his house, when he expired; this was at two o'clock, a circumstance from which leleiohoku derived his name. as he breathed his last, kalaimoku came to the eating house to order those in it to go out. there were two aged persons thus directed to depart; one went, the other remained on account of love to the king, by whom he had formerly been kindly sustained. the children also were sent away. then kalaimoku came to the house, and the chiefs had a consultation. one of them spoke thus: 'this is my thought--we will eat him raw. [this sounds suspicious, in view of the fact that all sandwich island historians, white and black, protest that cannibalism never existed in the islands. however, since they only proposed to "eat him raw" we "won't count that". but it would certainly have been cannibalism if they had cooked him.--m. t.] kaahumanu (one of the dead king's widows) replied, 'perhaps his body is not at our disposal; that is more properly with his successor. our part in him--his breath--has departed; his remains will be disposed of by liholiho.' "after this conversation the body was taken into the consecrated house for the performance of the proper rites by the priest and the new king. the name of this ceremony is uko; and when the sacred hog was baked the priest offered it to the dead body, and it became a god, the king at the same time repeating the customary prayers. "then the priest, addressing himself to the king and chiefs, said: 'i will now make known to you the rules to be observed respecting persons to be sacrificed on the burial of this body. if you obtain one man before the corpse is removed, one will be sufficient; but after it leaves this house four will be required. if delayed until we carry the corpse to the grave there must be ten; but after it is deposited in the grave there must be fifteen. to-morrow morning there will be a tabu, and, if the sacrifice be delayed until that time, forty men must die.' "then the high priest, hewahewa, inquired of the chiefs, 'where shall be the residence of king liholiho?' they replied, 'where, indeed? you, of all men, ought to know.' then the priest observed, 'there are two suitable places; one is kau, the other is kohala.' the chiefs preferred the latter, as it was more thickly inhabited. the priest added, 'these are proper places for the king's residence; but he must not remain in kona, for it is polluted.' this was agreed to. it was now break of day. as he was being carried to the place of burial the people perceived that their king was dead, and they wailed. when the corpse was removed from the house to the tomb, a distance of one chain, the procession was met by a certain man who was ardently attached to the deceased. he leaped upon the chiefs who were carrying the king's body; he desired to die with him on account of his love. the chiefs drove him away. he persisted in making numerous attempts, which were unavailing. kalaimoka also had it in his heart to die with him, but was prevented by hookio. "the morning following kamehameha's death, liholiho and his train departed for kohala, according to the suggestions of the priest, to avoid the defilement occasioned by the dead. at this time if a chief died the land was polluted, and the heirs sought a residence in another part of the country until the corpse was dissected and the bones tied in a bundle, which being done, the season of defilement terminated. if the deceased were not a chief, the house only was defiled which became pure again on the burial of the body. such were the laws on this subject. "on the morning on which liholiho sailed in his canoe for kohala, the chiefs and people mourned after their manner on occasion of a chief's death, conducting themselves like madmen and like beasts. their conduct was such as to forbid description; the priests, also, put into action the sorcery apparatus, that the person who had prayed the king to death might die; for it was not believed that kamehameha's departure was the effect either of sickness or old age. when the sorcerers set up by their fire-places sticks with a strip of kapa flying at the top, the chief keeaumoku, kaahumaun's brother, came in a state of intoxication and broke the flag-staff of the sorcerers, from which it was inferred that kaahumanu and her friends had been instrumental in the king's death. on this account they were subjected to abuse." you have the contrast, now, and a strange one it is. this great queen, kaahumanu, who was "subjected to abuse" during the frightful orgies that followed the king's death, in accordance with ancient custom, afterward became a devout christian and a steadfast and powerful friend of the missionaries. dogs were, and still are, reared and fattened for food, by the natives --hence the reference to their value in one of the above paragraphs. forty years ago it was the custom in the islands to suspend all law for a certain number of days after the death of a royal personage; and then a saturnalia ensued which one may picture to himself after a fashion, but not in the full horror of the reality. the people shaved their heads, knocked out a tooth or two, plucked out an eye sometimes, cut, bruised, mutilated or burned their flesh, got drunk, burned each other's huts, maimed or murdered one another according to the caprice of the moment, and both sexes gave themselves up to brutal and unbridled licentiousness. and after it all, came a torpor from which the nation slowly emerged bewildered and dazed, as if from a hideous half-remembered nightmare. they were not the salt of the earth, those "gentle children of the sun." the natives still keep up an old custom of theirs which cannot be comforting to an invalid. when they think a sick friend is going to die, a couple of dozen neighbors surround his hut and keep up a deafening wailing night and day till he either dies or gets well. no doubt this arrangement has helped many a subject to a shroud before his appointed time. they surround a hut and wail in the same heart-broken way when its occupant returns from a journey. this is their dismal idea of a welcome. a very little of it would go a great way with most of us. chapter lxix. bound for hawaii (a hundred and fifty miles distant,) to visit the great volcano and behold the other notable things which distinguish that island above the remainder of the group, we sailed from honolulu on a certain saturday afternoon, in the good schooner boomerang. the boomerang was about as long as two street cars, and about as wide as one. she was so small (though she was larger than the majority of the inter-island coasters) that when i stood on her deck i felt but little smaller than the colossus of rhodes must have felt when he had a man-of-war under him. i could reach the water when she lay over under a strong breeze. when the captain and my comrade (a mr. billings), myself and four other persons were all assembled on the little after portion of the deck which is sacred to the cabin passengers, it was full--there was not room for any more quality folks. another section of the deck, twice as large as ours, was full of natives of both sexes, with their customary dogs, mats, blankets, pipes, calabashes of poi, fleas, and other luxuries and baggage of minor importance. as soon as we set sail the natives all lay down on the deck as thick as negroes in a slave-pen, and smoked, conversed, and spit on each other, and were truly sociable. the little low-ceiled cabin below was rather larger than a hearse, and as dark as a vault. it had two coffins on each side--i mean two bunks. a small table, capable of accommodating three persons at dinner, stood against the forward bulkhead, and over it hung the dingiest whale oil lantern that ever peopled the obscurity of a dungeon with ghostly shapes. the floor room unoccupied was not extensive. one might swing a cat in it, perhaps, but not a long cat. the hold forward of the bulkhead had but little freight in it, and from morning till night a portly old rooster, with a voice like baalam's ass, and the same disposition to use it, strutted up and down in that part of the vessel and crowed. he usually took dinner at six o'clock, and then, after an hour devoted to meditation, he mounted a barrel and crowed a good part of the night. he got hoarser all the time, but he scorned to allow any personal consideration to interfere with his duty, and kept up his labors in defiance of threatened diphtheria. sleeping was out of the question when he was on watch. he was a source of genuine aggravation and annoyance. it was worse than useless to shout at him or apply offensive epithets to him--he only took these things for applause, and strained himself to make more noise. occasionally, during the day, i threw potatoes at him through an aperture in the bulkhead, but he only dodged and went on crowing. the first night, as i lay in my coffin, idly watching the dim lamp swinging to the rolling of the ship, and snuffing the nauseous odors of bilge water, i felt something gallop over me. i turned out promptly. however, i turned in again when i found it was only a rat. presently something galloped over me once more. i knew it was not a rat this time, and i thought it might be a centipede, because the captain had killed one on deck in the afternoon. i turned out. the first glance at the pillow showed me repulsive sentinel perched upon each end of it--cockroaches as large as peach leaves--fellows with long, quivering antennae and fiery, malignant eyes. they were grating their teeth like tobacco worms, and appeared to be dissatisfied about something. i had often heard that these reptiles were in the habit of eating off sleeping sailors' toe nails down to the quick, and i would not get in the bunk any more. i lay down on the floor. but a rat came and bothered me, and shortly afterward a procession of cockroaches arrived and camped in my hair. in a few moments the rooster was crowing with uncommon spirit and a party of fleas were throwing double somersaults about my person in the wildest disorder, and taking a bite every time they struck. i was beginning to feel really annoyed. i got up and put my clothes on and went on deck. the above is not overdrawn; it is a truthful sketch of inter-island schooner life. there is no such thing as keeping a vessel in elegant condition, when she carries molasses and kanakas. it was compensation for my sufferings to come unexpectedly upon so beautiful a scene as met my eye--to step suddenly out of the sepulchral gloom of the cabin and stand under the strong light of the moon--in the centre, as it were, of a glittering sea of liquid silver--to see the broad sails straining in the gale, the ship heeled over on her side, the angry foam hissing past her lee bulwarks, and sparkling sheets of spray dashing high over her bows and raining upon her decks; to brace myself and hang fast to the first object that presented itself, with hat jammed down and coat tails whipping in the breeze, and feel that exhilaration that thrills in one's hair and quivers down his back bone when he knows that every inch of canvas is drawing and the vessel cleaving through the waves at her utmost speed. there was no darkness, no dimness, no obscurity there. all was brightness, every object was vividly defined. every prostrate kanaka; every coil of rope; every calabash of poi; every puppy; every seam in the flooring; every bolthead; every object; however minute, showed sharp and distinct in its every outline; and the shadow of the broad mainsail lay black as a pall upon the deck, leaving billings's white upturned face glorified and his body in a total eclipse. monday morning we were close to the island of hawaii. two of its high mountains were in view--mauna loa and hualaiai. the latter is an imposing peak, but being only ten thousand feet high is seldom mentioned or heard of. mauna loa is said to be sixteen thousand feet high. the rays of glittering snow and ice, that clasped its summit like a claw, looked refreshing when viewed from the blistering climate we were in. one could stand on that mountain (wrapped up in blankets and furs to keep warm), and while he nibbled a snowball or an icicle to quench his thirst he could look down the long sweep of its sides and see spots where plants are growing that grow only where the bitter cold of winter prevails; lower down he could see sections devoted to production that thrive in the temperate zone alone; and at the bottom of the mountain he could see the home of the tufted cocoa-palms and other species of vegetation that grow only in the sultry atmosphere of eternal summer. he could see all the climes of the world at a single glance of the eye, and that glance would only pass over a distance of four or five miles as the bird flies! by and by we took boat and went ashore at kailua, designing to ride horseback through the pleasant orange and coffee region of kona, and rejoin the vessel at a point some leagues distant. this journey is well worth taking. the trail passes along on high ground--say a thousand feet above sea level--and usually about a mile distant from the ocean, which is always in sight, save that occasionally you find yourself buried in the forest in the midst of a rank tropical vegetation and a dense growth of trees, whose great bows overarch the road and shut out sun and sea and everything, and leave you in a dim, shady tunnel, haunted with invisible singing birds and fragrant with the odor of flowers. it was pleasant to ride occasionally in the warm sun, and feast the eye upon the ever-changing panorama of the forest (beyond and below us), with its many tints, its softened lights and shadows, its billowy undulations sweeping gently down from the mountain to the sea. it was pleasant also, at intervals, to leave the sultry sun and pass into the cool, green depths of this forest and indulge in sentimental reflections under the inspiration of its brooding twilight and its whispering foliage. we rode through one orange grove that had ten thousand tree in it! they were all laden with fruit. at one farmhouse we got some large peaches of excellent flavor. this fruit, as a general thing, does not do well in the sandwich islands. it takes a sort of almond shape, and is small and bitter. it needs frost, they say, and perhaps it does; if this be so, it will have a good opportunity to go on needing it, as it will not be likely to get it. the trees from which the fine fruit i have spoken of, came, had been planted and replanted sixteen times, and to this treatment the proprietor of the orchard attributed his-success. we passed several sugar plantations--new ones and not very extensive. the crops were, in most cases, third rattoons. [note.--the first crop is called "plant cane;" subsequent crops which spring from the original roots, without replanting, are called "rattoons."] almost everywhere on the island of hawaii sugar-cane matures in twelve months, both rattoons and plant, and although it ought to be taken off as soon as it tassels, no doubt, it is not absolutely necessary to do it until about four months afterward. in kona, the average yield of an acre of ground is two tons of sugar, they say. this is only a moderate yield for these islands, but would be astounding for louisiana and most other sugar growing countries. the plantations in kona being on pretty high ground--up among the light and frequent rains--no irrigation whatever is required. chapter lxx. we stopped some time at one of the plantations, to rest ourselves and refresh the horses. we had a chatty conversation with several gentlemen present; but there was one person, a middle aged man, with an absent look in his face, who simply glanced up, gave us good-day and lapsed again into the meditations which our coming had interrupted. the planters whispered us not to mind him--crazy. they said he was in the islands for his health; was a preacher; his home, michigan. they said that if he woke up presently and fell to talking about a correspondence which he had some time held with mr. greeley about a trifle of some kind, we must humor him and listen with interest; and we must humor his fancy that this correspondence was the talk of the world. it was easy to see that he was a gentle creature and that his madness had nothing vicious in it. he looked pale, and a little worn, as if with perplexing thought and anxiety of mind. he sat a long time, looking at the floor, and at intervals muttering to himself and nodding his head acquiescingly or shaking it in mild protest. he was lost in his thought, or in his memories. we continued our talk with the planters, branching from subject to subject. but at last the word "circumstance," casually dropped, in the course of conversation, attracted his attention and brought an eager look into his countenance. he faced about in his chair and said: "circumstance? what circumstance? ah, i know--i know too well. so you have heard of it too." [with a sigh.] "well, no matter--all the world has heard of it. all the world. the whole world. it is a large world, too, for a thing to travel so far in--now isn't it? yes, yes--the greeley correspondence with erickson has created the saddest and bitterest controversy on both sides of the ocean--and still they keep it up! it makes us famous, but at what a sorrowful sacrifice! i was so sorry when i heard that it had caused that bloody and distressful war over there in italy. it was little comfort to me, after so much bloodshed, to know that the victors sided with me, and the vanquished with greeley.--it is little comfort to know that horace greeley is responsible for the battle of sadowa, and not me. "queen victoria wrote me that she felt just as i did about it--she said that as much as she was opposed to greeley and the spirit he showed in the correspondence with me, she would not have had sadowa happen for hundreds of dollars. i can show you her letter, if you would like to see it. but gentlemen, much as you may think you know about that unhappy correspondence, you cannot know the straight of it till you hear it from my lips. it has always been garbled in the journals, and even in history. yes, even in history--think of it! let me--please let me, give you the matter, exactly as it occurred. i truly will not abuse your confidence." then he leaned forward, all interest, all earnestness, and told his story--and told it appealingly, too, and yet in the simplest and most unpretentious way; indeed, in such a way as to suggest to one, all the time, that this was a faithful, honorable witness, giving evidence in the sacred interest of justice, and under oath. he said: "mrs. beazeley--mrs. jackson beazeley, widow, of the village of campbellton, kansas,--wrote me about a matter which was near her heart --a matter which many might think trivial, but to her it was a thing of deep concern. i was living in michigan, then--serving in the ministry. she was, and is, an estimable woman--a woman to whom poverty and hardship have proven incentives to industry, in place of discouragements. her only treasure was her son william, a youth just verging upon manhood; religious, amiable, and sincerely attached to agriculture. he was the widow's comfort and her pride. and so, moved by her love for him, she wrote me about a matter, as i have said before, which lay near her heart --because it lay near her boy's. she desired me to confer with mr. greeley about turnips. turnips were the dream of her child's young ambition. while other youths were frittering away in frivolous amusements the precious years of budding vigor which god had given them for useful preparation, this boy was patiently enriching his mind with information concerning turnips. the sentiment which he felt toward the turnip was akin to adoration. he could not think of the turnip without emotion; he could not speak of it calmly; he could not contemplate it without exaltation. he could not eat it without shedding tears. all the poetry in his sensitive nature was in sympathy with the gracious vegetable. with the earliest pipe of dawn he sought his patch, and when the curtaining night drove him from it he shut himself up with his books and garnered statistics till sleep overcame him. on rainy days he sat and talked hours together with his mother about turnips. when company came, he made it his loving duty to put aside everything else and converse with them all the day long of his great joy in the turnip. "and yet, was this joy rounded and complete? was there no secret alloy of unhappiness in it? alas, there was. there was a canker gnawing at his heart; the noblest inspiration of his soul eluded his endeavor--viz: he could not make of the turnip a climbing vine. months went by; the bloom forsook his cheek, the fire faded out of his eye; sighings and abstraction usurped the place of smiles and cheerful converse. but a watchful eye noted these things and in time a motherly sympathy unsealed the secret. hence the letter to me. she pleaded for attention--she said her boy was dying by inches. "i was a stranger to mr. greeley, but what of that? the matter was urgent. i wrote and begged him to solve the difficult problem if possible and save the student's life. my interest grew, until it partook of the anxiety of the mother. i waited in much suspense.--at last the answer came. "i found that i could not read it readily, the handwriting being unfamiliar and my emotions somewhat wrought up. it seemed to refer in part to the boy's case, but chiefly to other and irrelevant matters--such as paving-stones, electricity, oysters, and something which i took to be 'absolution' or 'agrarianism,' i could not be certain which; still, these appeared to be simply casual mentions, nothing more; friendly in spirit, without doubt, but lacking the connection or coherence necessary to make them useful.--i judged that my understanding was affected by my feelings, and so laid the letter away till morning. "in the morning i read it again, but with difficulty and uncertainty still, for i had lost some little rest and my mental vision seemed clouded. the note was more connected, now, but did not meet the emergency it was expected to meet. it was too discursive. it appeared to read as follows, though i was not certain of some of the words: "polygamy dissembles majesty; extracts redeem polarity; causes hitherto exist. ovations pursue wisdom, or warts inherit and condemn. boston, botany, cakes, folony undertakes, but who shall allay? we fear not. yrxwly, hevace eveeloj.' "but there did not seem to be a word about turnips. there seemed to be no suggestion as to how they might be made to grow like vines. there was not even a reference to the beazeleys. i slept upon the matter; i ate no supper, neither any breakfast next morning. so i resumed my work with a brain refreshed, and was very hopeful. now the letter took a different aspect-all save the signature, which latter i judged to be only a harmless affectation of hebrew. the epistle was necessarily from mr. greeley, for it bore the printed heading of the tribune, and i had written to no one else there. the letter, i say, had taken a different aspect, but still its language was eccentric and avoided the issue. it now appeared to say: "bolivia extemporizes mackerel; borax esteems polygamy; sausages wither in the east. creation perdu, is done; for woes inherent one can damn. buttons, buttons, corks, geology underrates but we shall allay. my beer's out. yrxwly, hevace eveeloj.' "i was evidently overworked. my comprehension was impaired. therefore i gave two days to recreation, and then returned to my task greatly refreshed. the letter now took this form: "poultices do sometimes choke swine; tulips reduce posterity; causes leather to resist. our notions empower wisdom, her let's afford while we can. butter but any cakes, fill any undertaker, we'll wean him from his filly. we feel hot. yrxwly, hevace eveeloj.' "i was still not satisfied. these generalities did not meet the question. they were crisp, and vigorous, and delivered with a confidence that almost compelled conviction; but at such a time as this, with a human life at stake, they seemed inappropriate, worldly, and in bad taste. at any other time i would have been not only glad, but proud, to receive from a man like mr. greeley a letter of this kind, and would have studied it earnestly and tried to improve myself all i could; but now, with that poor boy in his far home languishing for relief, i had no heart for learning. "three days passed by, and i read the note again. again its tenor had changed. it now appeared to say: "potations do sometimes wake wines; turnips restrain passion; causes necessary to state. infest the poor widow; her lord's effects will be void. but dirt, bathing, etc., etc., followed unfairly, will worm him from his folly--so swear not. yrxwly, hevace eveeloj.' "this was more like it. but i was unable to proceed. i was too much worn. the word 'turnips' brought temporary joy and encouragement, but my strength was so much impaired, and the delay might be so perilous for the boy, that i relinquished the idea of pursuing the translation further, and resolved to do what i ought to have done at first. i sat down and wrote mr. greeley as follows: "dear sir: i fear i do not entirely comprehend your kind note. it cannot be possible, sir, that 'turnips restrain passion'--at least the study or contemplation of turnips cannot--for it is this very employment that has scorched our poor friend's mind and sapped his bodily strength.--but if they do restrain it, will you bear with us a little further and explain how they should be prepared? i observe that you say 'causes necessary to state,' but you have omitted to state them. "under a misapprehension, you seem to attribute to me interested motives in this matter--to call it by no harsher term. but i assure you, dear sir, that if i seem to be 'infesting the widow,' it is all seeming, and void of reality. it is from no seeking of mine that i am in this position. she asked me, herself, to write you. i never have infested her--indeed i scarcely know her. i do not infest anybody. i try to go along, in my humble way, doing as near right as i can, never harming anybody, and never throwing out insinuations. as for 'her lord and his effects,' they are of no interest to me. i trust i have effects enough of my own--shall endeavor to get along with them, at any rate, and not go mousing around to get hold of somebody's that are 'void.' but do you not see?--this woman is a widow--she has no 'lord.' he is dead--or pretended to be, when they buried him. therefore, no amount of 'dirt, bathing,' etc., etc., howsoever 'unfairly followed' will be likely to 'worm him from his folly'--if being dead and a ghost is 'folly.' your closing remark is as unkind as it was uncalled for; and if report says true you might have applied it to yourself, sir, with more point and less impropriety. very truly yours, simon erickson. "in the course of a few days, mr. greely did what would have saved a world of trouble, and much mental and bodily suffering and misunderstanding, if he had done it sooner. to wit, he sent an intelligible rescript or translation of his original note, made in a plain hand by his clerk. then the mystery cleared, and i saw that his heart had been right, all the time. i will recite the note in its clarified form: [translation.] 'potatoes do sometimes make vines; turnips remain passive: cause unnecessary to state. inform the poor widow her lad's efforts will be vain. but diet, bathing, etc. etc., followed uniformly, will wean him from his folly--so fear not. yours, horace greeley.' "but alas, it was too late, gentlemen--too late. the criminal delay had done its work--young beazely was no more. his spirit had taken its flight to a land where all anxieties shall be charmed away, all desires gratified, all ambitions realized. poor lad, they laid him to his rest with a turnip in each hand." so ended erickson, and lapsed again into nodding, mumbling, and abstraction. the company broke up, and left him so.... but they did not say what drove him crazy. in the momentary confusion, i forgot to ask. mark twain a biography the personal and literary life of samuel langhorne clemens by albert bigelow paine volume i. part : - to clara clemens gabrilowitsch who steadily upheld the author's purpose to write history rather than eulogy as the story of her father's life an acknowledgment dear william dean howells, joseph hopkins twichell, joseph t. goodman, and other old friends of mark twain: i cannot let these volumes go to press without some grateful word to you who have helped me during the six years and more that have gone to their making. first, i want to confess how i have envied you your association with mark twain in those days when you and he “went gipsying, a long time ago.” next, i want to express my wonder at your willingness to give me so unstintedly from your precious letters and memories, when it is in the nature of man to hoard such treasures, for himself and for those who follow him. and, lastly, i want to tell you that i do not envy you so much, any more, for in these chapters, one after another, through your grace, i have gone gipsying with you all. neither do i wonder now, for i have come to know that out of your love for him grew that greater unselfishness (or divine selfishness, as he himself might have termed it), and that nothing short of the fullest you could do for his memory would have contented your hearts. my gratitude is measureless; and it is world-wide, for there is no land so distant that it does not contain some one who has eagerly contributed to the story. only, i seem so poorly able to put my thanks into words. albert bigelow paine. prefatory note certain happenings as recorded in this work will be found to differ materially from the same incidents and episodes as set down in the writings of mr. clemens himself. mark twain's spirit was built of the very fabric of truth, so far as moral intent was concerned, but in his earlier autobiographical writings--and most of his earlier writings were autobiographical--he made no real pretense to accuracy of time, place, or circumstance--seeking, as he said, “only to tell a good story”--while in later years an ever-vivid imagination and a capricious memory made history difficult, even when, as in his so-called “autobiography,” his effort was in the direction of fact. “when i was younger i could remember anything, whether it happened or not,” he once said, quaintly, “but i am getting old, and soon i shall remember only the latter.” the reader may be assured, where discrepancies occur, that the writer of this memoir has obtained his data from direct and positive sources: letters, diaries, account-books, or other immediate memoranda; also from the concurring testimony of eye-witnesses, supported by a unity of circumstance and conditions, and not from hearsay or vagrant printed items. mark twain--a biography i. ancestors on page of the old volume of suetonius, which mark twain read until his very last day, there is a reference to one flavius clemens, a man of wide repute “for his want of energy,” and in a marginal note he has written: “i guess this is where our line starts.” it was like him to write that. it spoke in his whimsical fashion the attitude of humility, the ready acknowledgment of shortcoming, which was his chief characteristic and made him lovable--in his personality and in his work. historically, we need not accept this identity of the clemens ancestry. the name itself has a kindly meaning, and was not an uncommon one in rome. there was an early pope by that name, and it appears now and again in the annals of the middle ages. more lately there was a gregory clemens, an english landowner who became a member of parliament under cromwell and signed the death-warrant of charles i. afterward he was tried as a regicide, his estates were confiscated, and his head was exposed on a pole on the top of westminster hall. tradition says that the family of gregory clemens did not remain in england, but emigrated to virginia (or new jersey), and from them, in direct line, descended the virginia clemenses, including john marshall clemens, the father of mark twain. perhaps the line could be traced, and its various steps identified, but, after all, an ancestor more or less need not matter when it is the story of a descendant that is to be written. of mark twain's immediate forebears, however, there is something to be said. his paternal grandfather, whose name also was samuel, was a man of culture and literary taste. in he married a virginia girl, pamela goggin; and of their five children john marshall clemens, born august , , was the eldest--becoming male head of the family at the age of seven, when his father was accidentally killed at a house-raising. the family was not a poor one, but the boy grew up with a taste for work. as a youth he became a clerk in an iron manufactory, at lynchburg, and doubtless studied at night. at all events, he acquired an education, but injured his health in the mean time, and somewhat later, with his mother and the younger children, removed to adair county, kentucky, where the widow presently married a sweetheart of her girlhood, one simon hancock, a good man. in due course, john clemens was sent to columbia, the countyseat, to study law. when the living heirs became of age he administered his father's estate, receiving as his own share three negro slaves; also a mahogany sideboard, which remains among the clemens effects to this day. this was in . john clemens was now a young man of twenty-three, never very robust, but with a good profession, plenty of resolution, and a heart full of hope and dreams. sober, industrious, and unswervingly upright, it seemed certain that he must make his mark. that he was likely to be somewhat too optimistic, even visionary, was not then regarded as a misfortune. it was two years later that he met jane lampton; whose mother was a casey--a montgomery-casey whose father was of the lamptons (lambtons) of durham, england, and who on her own account was reputed to be the handsomest girl and the wittiest, as well as the best dancer, in all kentucky. the montgomeries and the caseys of kentucky had been indian fighters in the daniel boone period, and grandmother casey, who had been jane montgomery, had worn moccasins in her girlhood, and once saved her life by jumping a fence and out-running a redskin pursuer. the montgomery and casey annals were full of blood-curdling adventures, and there is to-day a casey county next to adair, with a montgomery county somewhat farther east. as for the lamptons, there is an earldom in the english family, and there were claimants even then in the american branch. all these things were worth while in kentucky, but it was rare jane lampton herself--gay, buoyant, celebrated for her beauty and her grace; able to dance all night, and all day too, for that matter--that won the heart of john marshall clemens, swept him off his feet almost at the moment of their meeting. many of the characteristics that made mark twain famous were inherited from his mother. his sense of humor, his prompt, quaintly spoken philosophy, these were distinctly her contribution to his fame. speaking of her in a later day, he once said: “she had a sort of ability which is rare in man and hardly existent in woman--the ability to say a humorous thing with the perfect air of not knowing it to be humorous.” she bequeathed him this, without doubt; also her delicate complexion; her wonderful wealth of hair; her small, shapely hands and feet, and the pleasant drawling speech which gave her wit, and his, a serene and perfect setting. it was a one-sided love affair, the brief courtship of jane lampton and john marshall clemens. all her life, jane clemens honored her husband, and while he lived served him loyally; but the choice of her heart had been a young physician of lexington with whom she had quarreled, and her prompt engagement with john clemens was a matter of temper rather than tenderness. she stipulated that the wedding take place at once, and on may , , they were married. she was then twenty; her husband twenty-five. more than sixty years later, when john clemens had long been dead, she took a railway journey to a city where there was an old settlers' convention, because among the names of those attending she had noticed the name of the lover of her youth. she meant to humble herself to him and ask forgiveness after all the years. she arrived too late; the convention was over, and he was gone. mark twain once spoke of this, and added: “it is as pathetic a romance as any that has crossed the field of my personal experience in a long lifetime.” ii. the fortunes of john and jane clemens with all his ability and industry, and with the-best of intentions, john clemens would seem to have had an unerring faculty for making business mistakes. it was his optimistic outlook, no doubt--his absolute confidence in the prosperity that lay just ahead--which led him from one unfortunate locality or enterprise to another, as long as he lived. about a year after his marriage he settled with his young wife in gainsborough, tennessee, a mountain town on the cumberland river, and here, in , their first child, a boy, was born. they named him orion--after the constellation, perhaps--though they changed the accent to the first syllable, calling it orion. gainsborough was a small place with few enough law cases; but it could hardly have been as small, or furnished as few cases; as the next one selected, which was jamestown, fentress county, still farther toward the eastward mountains. yet jamestown had the advantage of being brand new, and in the eye of his fancy john clemens doubtless saw it the future metropolis of east tennessee, with himself its foremost jurist and citizen. he took an immediate and active interest in the development of the place, established the county-seat there, built the first court house, and was promptly elected as circuit clerk of the court. it was then that he decided to lay the foundation of a fortune for himself and his children by acquiring fentress county land. grants could be obtained in those days at the expense of less than a cent an acre, and john clemens believed that the years lay not far distant when the land would increase in value ten thousand, twenty, perhaps even a hundred thousandfold. there was no wrong estimate in that. land covered with the finest primeval timber, and filled with precious minerals, could hardly fail to become worth millions, even though his entire purchase of , acres probably did not cost him more than $ . the great tract lay about twenty nines to the southward of jamestown. standing in the door of the court house he had built, looking out over the “knob” of the cumberland mountains toward his vast possessions, he said: “whatever befalls me now, my heirs are secure. i may not live to see these acres turn into silver and gold, but my children will.” such was the creation of that mirage of wealth, the “tennessee land,” which all his days and for long afterward would lie just ahead--a golden vision, its name the single watchword of the family fortunes--the dream fading with years, only materializing at last as a theme in a story of phantom riches, the gilded age. yet for once john clemens saw clearly, and if his dream did not come true he was in no wise to blame. the land is priceless now, and a corporation of the clemens heirs is to-day contesting the title of a thin fragment of it--about one thousand acres--overlooked in some survey. believing the future provided for, clemens turned his attention to present needs. he built himself a house, unusual in its style and elegance. it had two windows in each room, and its walls were covered with plastering, something which no one in jamestown had ever seen before. he was regarded as an aristocrat. he wore a swallow-tail coat of fine blue jeans, instead of the coarse brown native-made cloth. the blue-jeans coat was ornamented with brass buttons and cost one dollar and twenty-five cents a yard, a high price for that locality and time. his wife wore a calico dress for company, while the neighbor wives wore homespun linsey-woolsey. the new house was referred to as the crystal palace. when john and jane clemens attended balls--there were continuous balls during the holidays--they were considered the most graceful dancers. jamestown did not become the metropolis he had dreamed. it attained almost immediately to a growth of twenty-five houses--mainly log houses--and stopped there. the country, too, was sparsely settled; law practice was slender and unprofitable, the circuit-riding from court to court was very bad for one of his physique. john clemens saw his reserve of health and funds dwindling, and decided to embark in merchandise. he built himself a store and put in a small country stock of goods. these he exchanged for ginseng, chestnuts, lampblack, turpentine, rosin, and other produce of the country, which he took to louisville every spring and fall in six-horse wagons. in the mean time he would seem to have sold one or more of his slaves, doubtless to provide capital. there was a second baby now--a little girl, pamela,--born in september, . three years later, may , another little girl, margaret, came. by this time the store and home were in one building, the store occupying one room, the household requiring two--clearly the family fortunes were declining. about a year after little margaret was born, john clemens gave up jamestown and moved his family and stock of goods to a point nine miles distant, known as the three forks of wolf. the tennessee land was safe, of course, and would be worth millions some day, but in the mean time the struggle for daily substance was becoming hard. he could not have remained at the three forks long, for in we find him at still another place, on the right bank of wolf river, where a post-office called pall mall was established, with john clemens as postmaster, usually addressed as “squire” or “judge.” a store was run in connection with the postoffice. at pall mall, in june, , another boy, benjamin, was born. the family at this time occupied a log house built by john clemens himself, the store being kept in another log house on the opposite bank of the river. he no longer practised law. in the gilded age we have mark twain's picture of squire hawkins and obedstown, written from descriptions supplied in later years by his mother and his brother orion; and, while not exact in detail, it is not regarded as an exaggerated presentation of east tennessee conditions at that time. the chapter is too long and too depressing to be set down here. the reader may look it up for himself, if he chooses. if he does he will not wonder that jane clemens's handsome features had become somewhat sharper, and her manner a shade graver, with the years and burdens of marriage, or that john clemens at thirty-six-out of health, out of tune with his environment--was rapidly getting out of heart. after all the bright promise of the beginning, things had somehow gone wrong, and hope seemed dwindling away. a tall man, he had become thin and unusually pale; he looked older than his years. every spring he was prostrated with what was called “sunpain,” an acute form of headache, nerve-racking and destroying to all persistent effort. yet he did not retreat from his moral and intellectual standards, or lose the respect of that shiftless community. he was never intimidated by the rougher element, and his eyes were of a kind that would disconcert nine men out of ten. gray and deep-set under bushy brows, they literally looked you through. absolutely fearless, he permitted none to trample on his rights. it is told of john clemens, at jamestown, that once when he had lost a cow he handed the minister on sunday morning a notice of the loss to be read from the pulpit, according to the custom of that community. for some reason, the minister put the document aside and neglected it. at the close of the service clemens rose and, going to the pulpit, read his announcement himself to the congregation. those who knew mark twain best will not fail to recall in him certain of his father's legacies. the arrival of a letter from “colonel sellers” inviting the hawkins family to come to missouri is told in the gilded age. in reality the letter was from john quarles, who had married jane clemens's sister, patsey lampton, and settled in florida, monroe county, missouri. it was a momentous letter in the gilded age, and no less so in reality, for it shifted the entire scene of the clemens family fortunes, and it had to do with the birthplace and the shaping of the career of one whose memory is likely to last as long as american history. iii. a humble birthplace florida, missouri, was a small village in the early thirties--smaller than it is now, perhaps, though in that day it had more promise, even if less celebrity. the west was unassembled then, undigested, comparatively unknown. two states, louisiana and missouri, with less than half a million white persons, were all that lay beyond the great river. st. louis, with its boasted ten thousand inhabitants and its river trade with the south, was the single metropolis in all that vast uncharted region. there was no telegraph; there were no railroads, no stage lines of any consequence--scarcely any maps. for all that one could see or guess, one place was as promising as another, especially a settlement like florida, located at the forks of a pretty stream, salt river, which those early settlers believed might one day become navigable and carry the merchandise of that region down to the mighty mississippi, thence to the world outside. in those days came john a. quarles, of kentucky, with his wife, who had been patsey ann lampton; also, later, benjamin lampton, her father, and others of the lampton race. it was natural that they should want jane clemens and her husband to give up that disheartening east tennessee venture and join them in this new and promising land. it was natural, too, for john quarles--happy-hearted, generous, and optimistic--to write the letter. there were only twenty-one houses in florida, but quarles counted stables, out-buildings--everything with a roof on it--and set down the number at fifty-four. florida, with its iridescent promise and negligible future, was just the kind of a place that john clemens with unerring instinct would be certain to select, and the quarles letter could have but one answer. yet there would be the longing for companionship, too, and jane clemens must have hungered for her people. in the gilded age, the sellers letter ends: “come!--rush!--hurry!--don't wait for anything!” the clemens family began immediately its preparation for getting away. the store was sold, and the farm; the last two wagon-loads of produce were sent to louisville; and with the aid of the money realized, a few hundred dollars, john clemens and his family “flitted out into the great mysterious blank that lay beyond the knobs of tennessee.” they had a two-horse barouche, which would seem to have been preserved out of their earlier fortunes. the barouche held the parents and the three younger children, pamela, margaret, anal the little boy, benjamin. there were also two extra horses, which orion, now ten, and jennie, the house-girl, a slave, rode. this was early in the spring of . they traveled by the way of their old home at columbia, and paid a visit to relatives. at louisville they embarked on a steamer bound for st. louis; thence overland once more through wilderness and solitude into what was then the far west, the promised land. they arrived one evening, and if florida was not quite all in appearance that john clemens had dreamed, it was at least a haven--with john quarles, jovial, hospitable, and full of plans. the great mississippi was less than fifty miles away. salt river, with a system of locks and dams, would certainly become navigable to the forks, with florida as its head of navigation. it was a sellers fancy, though perhaps it should be said here that john quarles was not the chief original of that lovely character in the gilded age. that was another relative--james lampton, a cousin--quite as lovable, and a builder of even more insubstantial dreams. john quarles was already established in merchandise in florida, and was prospering in a small way. he had also acquired a good farm, which he worked with thirty slaves, and was probably the rich man and leading citizen of the community. he offered john clemens a partnership in his store, and agreed to aid him in the selection of some land. furthermore, he encouraged him to renew his practice of the law. thus far, at least, the florida venture was not a mistake, for, whatever came, matters could not be worse than they had been in tennessee. in a small frame building near the center of the village, john and jane clemens established their household. it was a humble one-story affair, with two main rooms and a lean-to kitchen, though comfortable enough for its size, and comparatively new. it is still standing and occupied when these lines are written, and it should be preserved and guarded as a shrine for the american people; for it was here that the foremost american-born author--the man most characteristically american in every thought and word and action of his life--drew his first fluttering breath, caught blinkingly the light of a world that in the years to come would rise up and in its wide realm of letters hail him as a king. it was on a bleak day, november , , that he entered feebly the domain he was to conquer. long, afterward, one of those who knew him best said: “he always seemed to me like some great being from another planet--never quite of this race or kind.” he may have been, for a great comet was in the sky that year, and it would return no more until the day when he should be borne back into the far spaces of silence and undiscovered suns. but nobody thought of this, then. he was a seven-months child, and there was no fanfare of welcome at his coming. perhaps it was even suggested that, in a house so small and so sufficiently filled, there was no real need of his coming at all. one polly ann buchanan, who is said to have put the first garment of any sort on him, lived to boast of the fact,--[this honor has been claimed also for mrs. millie upton and a mrs. damrell. probably all were present and assisted.]--but she had no particular pride in that matter then. it was only a puny baby with a wavering promise of life. still, john clemens must have regarded with favor this first gift of fortune in a new land, for he named the little boy samuel, after his father, and added the name of an old and dear virginia friend, langhorne. the family fortunes would seem to have been improving at this time, and he may have regarded the arrival of another son as a good omen. with a family of eight, now, including jennie, the slavegirl, more room was badly needed, and he began building without delay. the result was not a mansion, by any means, being still of the one-story pattern, but it was more commodious than the tiny two-room affair. the rooms were larger, and there was at least one ell, or extension, for kitchen and dining-room uses. this house, completed in , occupied by the clemens family during the remainder of the years spent in florida, was often in later days pointed out as mark twain's birthplace. it missed that distinction by a few months, though its honor was sufficient in having sheltered his early childhood.--[this house is no longer standing. when it was torn down several years ago, portions of it were carried off and manufactured into souvenirs. mark twain himself disclaimed it as his birthplace, and once wrote on a photograph of it: “no, it is too stylish, it is not my birthplace.”] iv. beginning a long journey it was not a robust childhood. the new baby managed to go through the winter--a matter of comment among the family and neighbors. added strength came, but slowly; “little sam,” as they called him, was always delicate during those early years. it was a curious childhood, full of weird, fantastic impressions and contradictory influences, stimulating alike to the imagination and that embryo philosophy of life which begins almost with infancy. john clemens seldom devoted any time to the company of his children. he looked after their comfort and mental development as well as he could, and gave advice on occasion. he bought a book now and then--sometimes a picture-book--and subscribed for peter parley's magazine, a marvel of delight to the older children, but he did not join in their amusements, and he rarely, or never, laughed. mark twain did not remember ever having seen or heard his father laugh. the problem of supplying food was a somber one to john clemens; also, he was working on a perpetual-motion machine at this period, which absorbed his spare time, and, to the inventor at least, was not a mirthful occupation. jane clemens was busy, too. her sense of humor did not die, but with added cares and years her temper as well as her features became sharper, and it was just as well to be fairly out of range when she was busy with her employments. little sam's companions were his brothers and sisters, all older than himself: orion, ten years his senior, followed by pamela and margaret at intervals of two and three years, then by benjamin, a kindly little lad whose gentle life was chiefly devoted to looking after the baby brother, three years his junior. but in addition to these associations, there were the still more potent influences of that day and section, the intimate, enveloping institution of slavery, the daily companionship of the slaves. all the children of that time were fond of the negroes and confided in them. they would, in fact, have been lost without such protection and company. it was jennie, the house-girl, and uncle ned, a man of all work--apparently acquired with the improved prospects--who were in real charge of the children and supplied them with entertainment. wonderful entertainment it was. that was a time of visions and dreams, small. gossip and superstitions. old tales were repeated over and over, with adornments and improvements suggested by immediate events. at evening the clemens children, big and little, gathered about the great open fireplace while jennie and uncle ned told tales and hair-lifting legends. even a baby of two or three years could follow the drift of this primitive telling and would shiver and cling close with the horror and delight of its curdling thrill. the tales always began with “once 'pon a time,” and one of them was the story of the “golden arm” which the smallest listener would one day repeat more elaborately to wider audiences in many lands. briefly it ran as follows: “once 'pon a time there was a man, and he had a wife, and she had a' arm of pure gold; and she died, and they buried her in the graveyard; and one night her husband went and dug her up and cut off her golden arm and tuck it home; and one night a ghost all in white come to him; and she was his wife; and she says: “w-h-a-r-r's my golden arm? w-h-a-r-r's my golden arm? w-h-a-r-r's my g-o-l-den arm?” as uncle ned repeated these blood-curdling questions he would look first one and then another of his listeners in the eyes, with his bands drawn up in front of his breast, his fingers turned out and crooked like claws, while he bent with each question closer to the shrinking forms before him. the tone was sepulchral, with awful pause as if waiting each time for a reply. the culmination came with a pounce on one of the group, a shake of the shoulders, and a shout of: “you've got it!' and she tore him all to pieces!” and the children would shout “lordy!” and look furtively over their shoulders, fearing to see a woman in white against the black wall; but, instead, only gloomy, shapeless shadows darted across it as the flickering flames in the fireplace went out on one brand and flared up on another. then there was a story of a great ball of fire that used to follow lonely travelers along dark roads through the woods. “once 'pon a time there was a man, and he was riding along de road and he come to a ha'nted house, and he heard de chains'a-rattlin' and a-rattlin' and a-rattlin', and a ball of fire come rollin' up and got under his stirrup, and it didn't make no difference if his horse galloped or went slow or stood still, de ball of fire staid under his stirrup till he got plum to de front do', and his wife come out and say: 'my gord, dat's devil fire!' and she had to work a witch spell to drive it away.” “how big was it, uncle ned?” “oh, 'bout as big as your head, and i 'spect it's likely to come down dis yere chimney 'most any time.” certainly an atmosphere like this meant a tropic development for the imagination of a delicate child. all the games and daily talk concerned fanciful semi-african conditions and strange primal possibilities. the children of that day believed in spells and charms and bad-luck signs, all learned of their negro guardians. but if the negroes were the chief companions and protectors of the children, they were likewise one of their discomforts. the greatest real dread children knew was the fear of meeting runaway slaves. a runaway slave was regarded as worse than a wild beast, and treated worse when caught. once the children saw one brought into florida by six men who took him to an empty cabin, where they threw him on the floor and bound him with ropes. his groans were loud and frequent. such things made an impression that would last a lifetime. slave punishment, too, was not unknown, even in the household. jennie especially was often saucy and obstreperous. jane clemens, with more strength of character than of body, once undertook to punish her for insolence, whereupon jennie snatched the whip from her hand. john clemens was sent for in haste. he came at once, tied jennie's wrists together with a bridle rein, and administered chastisement across the shoulders with a cowhide. these were things all calculated to impress a sensitive child. in pleasant weather the children roamed over the country, hunting berries and nuts, drinking sugar-water, tying knots in love-vine, picking the petals from daisies to the formula “love me-love me not,” always accompanied by one or more, sometimes by half a dozen, of their small darky followers. shoes were taken off the first of april. for a time a pair of old woolen stockings were worn, but these soon disappeared, leaving the feet bare for the summer. one of their dreads was the possibility of sticking a rusty nail into the foot, as this was liable to cause lockjaw, a malady regarded with awe and terror. they knew what lockjaw was--uncle john quarles's black man, dan, was subject to it. sometimes when he opened his mouth to its utmost capacity he felt the joints slip and was compelled to put down the cornbread, or jole and greens, or the piece of 'possum he was eating, while his mouth remained a fixed abyss until the doctor came and restored it to a natural position by an exertion of muscular power that would have well-nigh lifted an ox. uncle john quarles, his home, his farm, his slaves, all were sources of never-ending delight. perhaps the farm was just an ordinary missouri farm and the slaves just average negroes, but to those children these things were never apparent. there was a halo about anything that belonged to uncle john quarles, and that halo was the jovial, hilarious kindness of that gentle-hearted, humane man. to visit at his house was for a child to be in a heaven of mirth and pranks continually. when the children came for eggs he would say: “your hens won't lay, eh? tell your maw to feed 'em parched corn and drive 'em uphill,” and this was always a splendid stroke of humor to his small hearers. also, he knew how to mimic with his empty hands the peculiar patting and tossing of a pone of corn-bread before placing it in the oven. he would make the most fearful threats to his own children, for disobedience, but never executed any of them. when they were out fishing and returned late he would say: “you--if i have to hunt you again after dark, i will make you smell like a burnt horn!” nothing could exceed the ferocity of this threat, and all the children, with delightful terror and curiosity, wondered what would happen--if it ever did happen--that would result in giving a child that peculiar savor. altogether it was a curious early childhood that little sam had--at least it seems so to us now. doubtless it was commonplace enough for that time and locality. v. the way of fortune perhaps john quarles's jocular, happy-go-lucky nature and general conduct did not altogether harmonize with john clemens's more taciturn business methods. notwithstanding the fact that he was a builder of dreams, clemens was neat and methodical, with his papers always in order. he had a hearty dislike for anything resembling frivolity and confusion, which very likely were the chief features of john quarles's storekeeping. at all events, they dissolved partnership at the end of two or three years, and clemens opened business for himself across the street. he also practised law whenever there were cases, and was elected justice of the peace, acquiring the permanent title of “judge.” he needed some one to assist in the store, and took in orion, who was by this time twelve or thirteen years old; but, besides his youth, orion--all his days a visionary--was a studious, pensive lad with no taste for commerce. then a partnership was formed with a man who developed neither capital nor business ability, and proved a disaster in the end. the modest tide of success which had come with john clemens's establishment at florida had begun to wane. another boy, henry, born in july, , added one more responsibility to his burdens. there still remained a promise of better things. there seemed at least a good prospect that the scheme for making salt river navigable was likely to become operative. with even small boats (bateaux) running as high as the lower branch of the south fork, florida would become an emporium of trade, and merchants and property-owners of that village would reap a harvest. an act of the legislature was passed incorporating the navigation company, with judge clemens as its president. congress was petitioned to aid this work of internal improvement. so confident was the company of success that the hamlet was thrown into a fever of excitement by the establishment of a boatyard and, the actual construction of a bateau; but a democratic congress turned its back on the proposed improvement. no boat bigger than a skiff ever ascended salt river, though there was a wild report, evidently a hoax, that a party of picnickers had seen one night a ghostly steamer, loaded and manned, puffing up the stream. an old scotchman, hugh robinson, when he heard of it, said: “i don't doubt a word they say. in scotland, it often happens that when people have been killed, or are troubled, they send their spirits abroad and they are seen as much like themselves as a reflection in a looking-glass. that was a ghost of some wrecked steamboat.” but john quarles, who was present, laughed: “if ever anybody was in trouble, the men on that steamboat were,” he said. “they were the democratic candidates at the last election. they killed salt river improvements, and salt river has killed them. their ghosts went up the river on a ghostly steamboat.” it is possible that this comment, which was widely repeated and traveled far, was the origin of the term “going up salt river,” as applied to defeated political candidates.--[the dictionaries give this phrase as probably traceable to a small, difficult stream in kentucky; but it seems more reasonable to believe that it originated in quarles's witty comment.] no other attempt was ever made to establish navigation on salt river. rumors of railroads already running in the east put an end to any such thought. railroads could run anywhere and were probably cheaper and easier to maintain than the difficult navigation requiring locks and dams. salt river lost its prestige as a possible water highway and became mere scenery. railroads have ruined greater rivers than the little salt, and greater villages than florida, though neither florida nor salt river has been touched by a railroad to this day. perhaps such close detail of early history may be thought unnecessary in a work of this kind, but all these things were definite influences in the career of the little lad whom the world would one day know as mark twain. vi. a new home the death of little margaret was the final misfortune that came to the clemens family in florida. doubtless it hastened their departure. there was a superstition in those days that to refer to health as good luck, rather than to ascribe it to the kindness of providence, was to bring about a judgment. jane clemens one day spoke to a neighbor of their good luck in thus far having lost no member of their family. that same day, when the sisters, pamela and margaret, returned from school, margaret laid her books on the table, looked in the glass at her flushed cheeks, pulled out the trundle-bed, and lay down. she was never in her right mind again. the doctor was sent for and diagnosed the case “bilious fever.” one evening, about nine o'clock, orion was sitting on the edge of the trundle-bed by the patient, when the door opened and little sam, then about four years old, walked in from his bedroom, fast asleep. he came to the side of the trundle-bed and pulled at the bedding near margaret's shoulder for some time before he woke. next day the little girl was “picking at the coverlet,” and it was known that she could not live. about a week later she died. she was nine years old, a beautiful child, plump in form, with rosy cheeks, black hair, and bright eyes. this was in august, . it was little sam's first sight of death--the first break in the clemens family: it left a sad household. the shoemaker who lived next door claimed to have seen several weeks previous, in a vision, the coffin and the funeral-procession pass the gate by the winding road, to the cemetery, exactly as it happened. matters were now going badly enough with john clemens. yet he never was without one great comforting thought--the future of the tennessee land. it underlaid every plan; it was an anodyne for every ill. “when we sell the tennessee land everything will be all right,” was the refrain that brought solace in the darkest hours. a blessing for him that this was so, for he had little else to brighten his days. negotiations looking to the sale of the land were usually in progress. when the pressure became very hard and finances were at their lowest ebb, it was offered at any price--at five cents an acre, sometimes. when conditions improved, however little, the price suddenly advanced even to its maximum of one thousand dollars an acre. now and then a genuine offer came along, but, though eagerly welcomed at the moment, it was always refused after a little consideration. “we will struggle along somehow, jane,” he would say. “we will not throw away the children's fortune.” there was one other who believed in the tennessee land--jane clemens's favorite cousin, james lampton, the courtliest, gentlest, most prodigal optimist of all that guileless race. to james lampton the land always had “millions in it”--everything had. he made stupendous fortunes daily, in new ways. the bare mention of the tennessee land sent him off into figures that ended with the purchase of estates in england adjoining those of the durham lamptons, whom he always referred to as “our kindred,” casually mentioning the whereabouts and health of the “present earl.” mark twain merely put james lampton on paper when he created colonel sellers, and the story of the hawkins family as told in the gilded age reflects clearly the struggle of those days. the words “tennessee land,” with their golden promise, became his earliest remembered syllables. he grew to detest them in time, for they came to mean mockery. one of the offers received was the trifling sum of two hundred and fifty dollars, and such was the moment's need that even this was considered. then, of course, it was scornfully refused. in some autobiographical chapters which orion clemens left behind he said: “if we had received that two hundred and fifty dollars, it would have been more than we ever made, clear of expenses, out of the whole of the tennessee land, after forty years of worry to three generations.” what a less speculative and more logical reasoner would have done in the beginning, john clemens did now; he selected a place which, though little more than a village, was on a river already navigable--a steamboat town with at least the beginnings of manufacturing and trade already established--that is to say, hannibal, missouri--a point well chosen, as shown by its prosperity to-day. he did not delay matters. when he came to a decision, he acted quickly. he disposed of a portion of his goods and shipped the remainder overland; then, with his family and chattels loaded in a wagon, he was ready to set out for the new home. orion records that, for some reason, his father did not invite him to get into the wagon, and how, being always sensitive to slight, he had regarded this in the light of deliberate desertion. “the sense of abandonment caused my heart to ache. the wagon had gone a few feet when i was discovered and invited to enter. how i wished they had not missed me until they had arrived at hannibal. then the world would have seen how i was treated and would have cried 'shame!'” this incident, noted and remembered, long after became curiously confused with another, in mark twain's mind. in an autobiographical chapter published in the north american review he tells of the move to hannibal and relates that he himself was left behind by his absentminded family. the incident of his own abandonment did not happen then, but later, and somewhat differently. it would indeed be an absent-minded family if the parents, and the sister and brothers ranging up to fourteen years of age, should drive off leaving little sam, age four, behind. --[as mentioned in the prefatory note, mark twain's memory played him many tricks in later life. incidents were filtered through his vivid imagination until many of them bore little relation to the actual occurrence. some of these lapses were only amusing, but occasionally they worked an unintentional injustice. it is the author's purpose in every instance, so far as is possible, to keep the record straight.] vii. the little town of hannibal. hannibal in was already a corporate community and had an atmosphere of its own. it was a town with a distinct southern flavor, though rather more astir than the true southern community of that period; more western in that it planned, though without excitement, certain new enterprises and made a show, at least, of manufacturing. it was somnolent (a slave town could not be less than that), but it was not wholly asleep--that is to say, dead--and it was tranquilly content. mark twain remembered it as “the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer morning,... the great mississippi, the magnificent mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along;... the dense forest away on the other side.” the little city was proud of its scenery, and justly so: circled with bluffs, with holliday's hill on the north, lover's leap on the south, the shining river in the foreground, there was little to be desired in the way of setting. the river, of course, was the great highway. rafts drifted by; steamboats passed up and down and gave communication to the outside world; st. louis, the metropolis, was only one hundred miles away. hannibal was inclined to rank itself as of next importance, and took on airs accordingly. it had society, too--all kinds--from the negroes and the town drunkards (“general” gaines and jimmy finn; later, old ben blankenship) up through several nondescript grades of mechanics and tradesmen to the professional men of the community, who wore tall hats, ruffled shirt-fronts, and swallow-tail coats, usually of some positive color-blue, snuff-brown, and green. these and their families constituted the true aristocracy of the southern town. most of them had pleasant homes--brick or large frame mansions, with colonnaded entrances, after the manner of all southern architecture of that period, which had an undoubted greek root, because of certain drawing-books, it is said, accessible to the builders of those days. most of them, also, had means--slaves and land which yielded an income in addition to their professional earnings. they lived in such style as was considered fitting to their rank, and had such comforts as were then obtainable. it was to this grade of society that judge clemens and his family belonged, but his means no longer enabled him to provide either the comforts or the ostentation of his class. he settled his family and belongings in a portion of a house on hill street--the pavey hotel; his merchandise he established modestly on main street, with orion, in a new suit of clothes, as clerk. possibly the clothes gave orion a renewed ambition for mercantile life, but this waned. business did not begin actively, and he was presently dreaming and reading away the time. a little later he became a printer's apprentice, in the office of the hannibal journal, at his father's suggestion. orion clemens perhaps deserves a special word here. he was to be much associated with his more famous brother for many years, and his personality as boy and man is worth at least a casual consideration. he was fifteen now, and had developed characteristics which in a greater or less degree were to go with him through life. of a kindly, loving disposition, like all of the clemens children, quick of temper, but always contrite, or forgiving, he was never without the fond regard of those who knew him best. his weaknesses were manifold, but, on the whole, of a negative kind. honorable and truthful, he had no tendency to bad habits or unworthy pursuits; indeed, he had no positive traits of any sort. that was his chief misfortune. full of whims and fancies, unstable, indeterminate, he was swayed by every passing emotion and influence. daily he laid out a new course of study and achievement, only to fling it aside because of some chance remark or printed paragraph or bit of advice that ran contrary to his purpose. such a life is bound to be a succession of extremes--alternate periods of supreme exaltation and despair. in his autobiographical chapters, already mentioned, orion sets down every impulse and emotion and failure with that faithful humility which won him always the respect, if not always the approval, of men. printing was a step downward, for it was a trade, and orion felt it keenly. a gentleman's son and a prospective heir of the tennessee land, he was entitled to a profession. to him it was punishment, and the disgrace weighed upon him. then he remembered that benjamin franklin had been a printer and had eaten only an apple and a bunch of grapes for his dinner. orion decided to emulate franklin, and for a time he took only a biscuit and a glass of water at a meal, foreseeing the day when he should electrify the world with his eloquence. he was surprised to find how clear his mind was on this low diet and how rapidly he learned his trade. of the other children pamela, now twelve, and benjamin, seven, were put to school. they were pretty, attractive children, and henry, the baby, was a sturdy toddler, the pride of the household. little sam was the least promising of the flock. he remained delicate, and developed little beyond a tendency to pranks. he was a queer, fanciful, uncommunicative child that detested indoors and would run away if not watched--always in the direction of the river. he walked in his sleep, too, and often the rest of the household got up in the middle of the night to find him fretting with cold in some dark corner. the doctor was summoned for him oftener than was good for the family purse--or for him, perhaps, if we may credit the story of heavy dosings of those stern allopathic days. yet he would appear not to have been satisfied with his heritage of ailments, and was ambitious for more. an epidemic of measles--the black, deadly kind--was ravaging hannibal, and he yearned for the complaint. he yearned so much that when he heard of a playmate, one of the bowen boys, who had it, he ran away and, slipping into the house, crept into bed with the infection. the success of this venture was complete. some days later, the clemens family gathered tearfully around little sam's bed to see him die. according to his own after-confession, this gratified him, and he was willing to die for the glory of that touching scene. however, he disappointed them, and was presently up and about in search of fresh laurels.--[in later life mr. clemens did not recollect the precise period of this illness. with habitual indifference he assigned it to various years, as his mood or the exigencies of his theme required. without doubt the “measles” incident occurred when he was very young.]--he must have been a wearing child, and we may believe that jane clemens, with her varied cares and labors, did not always find him a comfort. “you gave me more uneasiness than any child i had,” she said to him once, in her old age. “i suppose you were afraid i wouldn't live,” he suggested, in his tranquil fashion. she looked at him with that keen humor that had not dulled in eighty years. “no; afraid you would,” she said. but that was only her joke, for she was the most tenderhearted creature in the world, and, like mothers in general, had a weakness for the child that demanded most of her mother's care. it was mainly on his account that she spent her summers on john quarles's farm near florida, and it was during the first summer that an incident already mentioned occurred. it was decided that the whole family should go for a brief visit, and one saturday morning in june mrs. clemens, with the three elder children and the baby, accompanied by jennie, the slave-girl, set out in a light wagon for the day's drive, leaving judge clemens to bring little sam on horseback sunday morning. the hour was early when judge clemens got up to saddle his horse, and little sam was still asleep. the horse being ready, clemens, his mind far away, mounted and rode off without once remembering the little boy, and in the course of the afternoon arrived at his brother-in-law's farm. then he was confronted by jane clemens, who demanded little sam. “why,” said the judge, aghast, “i never once thought of him after i left him asleep.” wharton lampton, a brother of jane clemens and patsey quarles, hastily saddled a horse and set out, helter-skelter, for hannibal. he arrived in the early dusk. the child was safe enough, but he was crying with loneliness and hunger. he had spent most of the day in the locked, deserted house playing with a hole in the meal-sack where the meal ran out, when properly encouraged, in a tiny stream. he was fed and comforted, and next day was safe on the farm, which during that summer and those that followed it, became so large a part of his boyhood and lent a coloring to his later years. viii. the farm we have already mentioned the delight of the clemens children in uncle john quarles's farm. to little sam it was probably a life-saver. with his small cousin, tabitha,--[tabitha quarles, now mrs. greening, of palmyra, missouri, has supplied most of the material for this chapter.]--just his own age (they called her puss), he wandered over that magic domain, fording new marvels at every step, new delights everywhere. a slave-girl, mary, usually attended them, but she was only six years older, and not older at all in reality, so she was just a playmate, and not a guardian to be feared or evaded. sometimes, indeed, it was necessary for her to threaten to tell “miss patsey” or “miss jane,” when her little charges insisted on going farther or staying later than she thought wise from the viewpoint of her own personal safety; but this was seldom, and on the whole a stay at the farm was just one long idyllic dream of summer-time and freedom. the farm-house stood in the middle of a large yard entered by a stile made of sawed-off logs of graduated heights. in the corner of the yard were hickory trees, and black walnut, and beyond the fence the hill fell away past the barns, the corn-cribs, and the tobacco-house to a brook--a divine place to wade, with deep, dark, forbidden pools. down in the pasture there were swings under the big trees, and mary swung the children and ran under them until their feet touched the branches, and then took her turn and “balanced” herself so high that their one wish was to be as old as mary and swing in that splendid way. all the woods were full of squirrels--gray squirrels and the red-fox species--and many birds and flowers; all the meadows were gay with clover and butterflies, and musical with singing grasshoppers and calling larks; there were blackberries in the fence rows, apples and peaches in the orchard, and watermelons in the corn. they were not always ripe, those watermelons, and once, when little sam had eaten several pieces of a green one, he was seized with cramps so severe that most of the household expected him to die forthwith. jane clemens was not heavily concerned. “sammy will pull through,” she said; “he wasn't born to die that way.” it is the slender constitution that bears the strain. “sammy” did pull through, and in a brief time was ready for fresh adventure. there were plenty of these: there were the horses to ride to and from the fields; the ox-wagons to ride in when they had dumped their heavy loads; the circular horsepower to ride on when they threshed the wheat. this last was a dangerous and forbidden pleasure, but the children would dart between the teams and climb on, and the slave who was driving would pretend not to see. then in the evening when the black woman came along, going after the cows, the children would race ahead and set the cows running and jingling their bells--especially little sam, for he was a wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies that sent him capering and swinging his arms, venting his emotions in a series of leaps and shrieks and somersaults, and spasms of laughter as he lay rolling in the grass. his tendency to mischief grew with this wide liberty, improved health, and the encouragement of john quarles's good-natured, fun-loving slaves. the negro quarters beyond the orchard were especially attractive. in one cabin lived a bed-ridden, white-headed old woman whom the children visited daily and looked upon with awe; for she was said to be a thousand years old and to have talked with moses. the negroes believed this; the children, too, of course, and that she had lost her health in the desert, coming out of egypt. the bald spot on her head was caused by fright at seeing pharaoh drowned. she also knew how to avert spells and ward off witches, which added greatly to her prestige. uncle dan'l was a favorite, too-kind-hearted and dependable, while his occasional lockjaw gave him an unusual distinction. long afterward he would become nigger jim in the tom sawyer and huckleberry finn tales, and so in his gentle guilelessness win immortality and the love of many men. certainly this was a heavenly place for a little boy, the farm of uncle john quarles, and the house was as wonderful as its surroundings. it was a two-story double log building, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting the two divisions. in the summer the table was set in the middle of that shady, breezy pavilion, and sumptuous meals were served in the lavish southern style, brought to the table in vast dishes that left only room for rows of plates around the edge. fried chicken, roast pig, turkeys, ducks, geese, venison just killed, squirrels, rabbits, partridges, pheasants, prairie-chickens--the list is too long to be served here. if a little boy could not improve on that bill of fare and in that atmosphere, his case was hopeless indeed. his mother kept him there until the late fall, when the chilly evenings made them gather around the wide, blazing fireplace. sixty years later he wrote of that scene: i can see the room yet with perfect clearness. i can see all its buildings, all its details: the family-room of the house, with the trundle-bed in one corner and the spinning-wheel in another a wheel whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the mournfulest of all sounds to me, and made me homesick and low- spirited, and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the dead; the vast fireplace, piled high with flaming logs, from whose ends a sugary sap bubbled out, but did not go to waste, for we scraped it off and ate it;... the lazy cat spread out on the rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs, blinking; my aunt in one chimney-corner and my uncle in the other smoking his corn-cob pipe; the slick and carpetless oak floor faintly mirroring the flame tongues, and freckled with black indentations where fire-coals had popped out and died a leisurely death; half a dozen children romping in the background twilight; splint-bottom chairs here and there--some with rockers; a cradle --out of service, but waiting with confidence. one is tempted to dwell on this period, to quote prodigally from these vivid memories--the thousand minute impressions which the child's sensitive mind acquired in that long-ago time and would reveal everywhere in his work in the years to come. for him it was education of a more valuable and lasting sort than any he would ever acquire from books. ix. school-days nevertheless, on his return to hannibal, it was decided that little sam was now ready to go to school. he was about five years old, and the months on the farm had left him wiry and lively, even if not very robust. his mother declared that he gave her more trouble than all the other children put together. “he drives me crazy with his didoes, when he is in the house,” she used to say; “and when he is out of it i am expecting every minute that some one will bring him home half dead.” he did, in fact, achieve the first of his “nine narrow escapes from drowning” about this time, and was pulled out of the river one afternoon and brought home in a limp and unpromising condition. when with mullein tea and castor-oil she had restored him to activity, she said: “i guess there wasn't much danger. people born to be hanged are safe in water.” she declared she was willing to pay somebody to take him off her hands for a part of each day and try to teach him manners. perhaps this is a good place to say that jane clemens was the original of tom sawyer's “aunt polly,” and her portrait as presented in that book is considered perfect. kind-hearted, fearless, looking and acting ten years older than her age, as women did in that time, always outspoken and sometimes severe, she was regarded as a “character” by her friends, and beloved by them as, a charitable, sympathetic woman whom it was good to know. her sense of pity was abnormal. she refused to kill even flies, and punished the cat for catching mice. she, would drown the young kittens, when necessary, but warmed the water for the purpose. on coming to hannibal, she joined the presbyterian church, and her religion was of that clean-cut, strenuous kind which regards as necessary institutions hell and satan, though she had been known to express pity for the latter for being obliged to surround himself with such poor society. her children she directed with considerable firmness, and all were tractable and growing in grace except little sam. even baby henry at two was lisping the prayers that sam would let go by default unless carefully guarded. his sister pamela, who was eight years older and always loved him dearly, usually supervised these spiritual exercises, and in her gentle care earned immortality as the cousin mary of tom sawyer. he would say his prayers willingly enough when encouraged by sister pamela, but he much preferred to sit up in bed and tell astonishing tales of the day's adventure--tales which made prayer seem a futile corrective and caused his listeners to wonder why the lightning was restrained so long. they did not know they were glimpsing the first outcroppings of a genius that would one day amaze and entertain the nations. neighbors hearing of these things (also certain of his narrations) remonstrated with mrs. clemens. “you don't believe anything that child says, i hope.” “oh yes, i know his average. i discount him ninety per cent. the rest is pure gold.” at another time she said: “sammy is a well of truth, but you can't bring it all up in one bucket.” this, however, is digression; the incidents may have happened somewhat later. a certain miss e. horr was selected to receive the payment for taking charge of little sam during several hours each day, directing him mentally and morally in the mean time. her school was then in a log house on main street (later it was removed to third street), and was of the primitive old-fashioned kind, with pupils of all ages, ranging in advancement from the primer to the third reader, from the tables to long division, with a little geography and grammar and a good deal of spelling. long division and the third reader completed the curriculum in that school. pupils who decided to take a post-graduate course went to a mr. cross, who taught in a frame house on the hill facing what is now the public square. miss horr received twenty-five cents a week for each pupil, and opened her school with prayer; after which came a chapter of the bible, with explanations, and the rules of conduct. then the a b c class was called, because their recital was a hand-to-hand struggle, requiring no preparation. the rules of conduct that first day interested little sam. he calculated how much he would need to trim in, to sail close to the danger-line and still avoid disaster. he made a miscalculation during the forenoon and received warning; a second offense would mean punishment. he did not mean to be caught the second time, but he had not learned miss horr yet, and was presently startled by being commanded to go out and bring a stick for his own correction. this was certainly disturbing. it was sudden, and then he did not know much about the selection of sticks. jane clemens had usually used her hand. it required a second command to get him headed in the right direction, and he was a trifle dazed when he got outside. he had the forests of missouri to select from, but choice was difficult. everything looked too big and competent. even the smallest switch had a wiry, discouraging look. across the way was a cooper-shop with a good many shavings outside. one had blown across and lay just in front of him. it was an inspiration. he picked it up and, solemnly entering the school-room, meekly handed it to miss herr. perhaps miss horr's sense of humor prompted forgiveness, but discipline must be maintained. “samuel langhorne clemens,” she said (he had never heard it all strung together in that ominous way), “i am ashamed of you! jimmy dunlap, go and bring a switch for sammy.” and jimmy dunlap went, and the switch was of a sort to give the little boy an immediate and permanent distaste for school. he informed his mother when he went home at noon that he did not care for school; that he had no desire to be a great man; that he preferred to be a pirate or an indian and scalp or drown such people as miss horr. down in her heart his mother was sorry for him, but what she said was that she was glad there was somebody at last who could take him in hand. he returned to school, but he never learned to like it. each morning he went with reluctance and remained with loathing--the loathing which he always had for anything resembling bondage and tyranny or even the smallest curtailment of liberty. a school was ruled with a rod in those days, a busy and efficient rod, as the scripture recommended. of the smaller boys little sam's back was sore as often as the next, and he dreamed mainly of a day when, grown big and fierce, he would descend with his band and capture miss horr and probably drag her by the hair, as he had seen indians and pirates do in the pictures. when the days of early summer came again; when from his desk he could see the sunshine lighting the soft green of holliday's hill, with the purple distance beyond, and the glint of the river, it seemed to him that to be shut up with a webster's spelling-book and a cross old maid was more than human nature could bear. among the records preserved from that far-off day there remains a yellow slip, whereon in neat old-fashioned penmanship is inscribed: miss pamela clemens has won the love of her teacher and schoolmates by her amiable deportment and faithful application to her various studies. e. horr, teacher. if any such testimonial was ever awarded to little sam, diligent search has failed to reveal it. if he won the love of his teacher and playmates it was probably for other reasons. yet he must have learned, somehow, for he could read presently and was soon regarded as a good speller for his years. his spelling came as a natural gift, as did most of his attainments, then and later. it has already been mentioned that miss horr opened her school with prayer and scriptural readings. little sam did not especially delight in these things, but he respected them. not to do so was dangerous. flames were being kept brisk for little boys who were heedless of sacred matters; his home teaching convinced him of that. he also respected miss horr as an example of orthodox faith, and when she read the text “ask and ye shall receive” and assured them that whoever prayed for a thing earnestly, his prayer would be answered, he believed it. a small schoolmate, the balker's daughter, brought gingerbread to school every morning, and little sam was just “honing” for some of it. he wanted a piece of that baker's gingerbread more than anything else in the world, and he decided to pray for it. the little girl sat in front of him, but always until that morning had kept the gingerbread out of sight. now, however, when he finished his prayer and looked up, a small morsel of the precious food lay in front of him. perhaps the little girl could no longer stand that hungry look in his eyes. possibly she had heard his petition; at all events his prayer bore fruit and his faith at that moment would have moved holliday's hill. he decided to pray for everything he wanted, but when he tried the gingerbread supplication next morning it had no result. grieved, but still unshaken, he tried next morning again; still no gingerbread; and when a third and fourth effort left him hungry he grew despairing and silent, and wore the haggard face of doubt. his mother said: “what's the matter, sammy; are you sick?” “no,” he said, “but i don't believe in saying prayers any more, and i'm never going to do it again.” “why, sammy, what in the world has happened?” she asked, anxiously. then he broke down and cried on her lap and told her, for it was a serious thing in that day openly to repudiate faith. jane clemens gathered him to her heart and comforted him. “i'll make you a whole pan of gingerbread, better than that,” she said, “and school will soon be out, too, and you can go back to uncle john's farm.” and so passed and ended little sam's first school-days. x. early vicissitude and sorrow prosperity came laggingly enough to the clemens household. the year brought hard times: the business venture paid little or no return; law practice was not much more remunerative. judge clemens ran for the office of justice of the peace and was elected, but fees were neither large nor frequent. by the end of the year it became necessary to part with jennie, the slave-girl--a grief to all of them, for they were fond of her in spite of her wilfulness, and she regarded them as “her family.” she was tall, well formed, nearly black, and brought a good price. a methodist minister in hannibal sold a negro child at the same time to another minister who took it to his home farther south. as the steamboat moved away from the landing the child's mother stood at the water's edge, shrieking her anguish. we are prone to consider these things harshly now, when slavery has been dead for nearly half a century, but it was a sacred institution then, and to sell a child from its mother was little more than to sell to-day a calf from its lowing dam. one could be sorry, of course, in both instances, but necessity or convenience are matters usually considered before sentiment. mark twain once said of his mother: “kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, i think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted usurpation. she had never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand. as far as her experience went, the wise, the good, and the holy were unanimous in the belief that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for.” yet jane clemens must have had qualms at times--vague, unassembled doubts that troubled her spirit. after jennie was gone a little black chore-boy was hired from his owner, who had bought him on the east shore of maryland and brought him to that remote western village, far from family and friends. he was a cheery spirit in spite of that, and gentle, but very noisy. all day he went about singing, whistling, and whooping until his noise became monotonous, maddening. one day little sam said: “ma--[that was the southern term]--make sandy stop singing all the time. it's awful.” tears suddenly came into his mother's eyes. “poor thing! he is sold away from his home. when he sings it shows maybe he is not remembering. when he's still i am afraid he is thinking, and i can't bear it.” yet any one in that day who advanced the idea of freeing the slaves was held in abhorrence. an abolitionist was something to despise, to stone out of the community. the children held the name in horror, as belonging to something less than human; something with claws, perhaps, and a tail. the money received for the sale of jennie made judge clemens easier for a time. business appears to have improved, too, and he was tided through another year during which he seems to have made payments on an expensive piece of real estate on hill and main streets. this property, acquired in november, , meant the payment of some seven thousand dollars, and was a credit purchase, beyond doubt. it was well rented, but the tenants did not always pay; and presently a crisis came--a descent of creditors--and john: clemens at forty-four found himself without business and without means. he offered everything--his cow, his household furniture, even his forks and spoons--to his creditors, who protested that he must not strip himself. they assured him that they admired his integrity so much they would aid him to resume business; but when he went to st. louis to lay in a stock of goods he was coldly met, and the venture came to nothing. he now made a trip to tennessee in the hope of collecting some old debts and to raise money on the tennessee land. he took along a negro man named charlie, whom he probably picked up for a small sum, hoping to make something through his disposal in a better market. the trip was another failure. the man who owed him a considerable sum of money was solvent, but pleaded hard times: it seems so very hard upon him--[john clemens wrote home]--to pay such a sum that i could not have the conscience to hold him to it. .. i still have charlie. the highest price i had offered for him in new orleans was $ , in vicksburg $ . after performing the journey to tennessee, i expect to sell him for whatever he will bring. i do not know what i can commence for a business in the spring. my brain is constantly on the rack with the study, and i can't relieve myself of it. the future, taking its completion from the state of my health or mind, is alternately beaming in sunshine or over- shadowed with clouds; but mostly cloudy, as you may suppose. i want bodily exercise--some constant and active employment, in the first place; and, in the next place, i want to be paid for it, if possible. this letter is dated january , . he returned without any financial success, and obtained employment for a time in a commission-house on the levee. the proprietor found some fault one day, and judge clemens walked out of the premises. on his way home he stopped in a general store, kept by a man named sehns, to make some purchases. when he asked that these be placed on account, selms hesitated. judge clemens laid down a five-dollar gold piece, the last money he possessed in the world, took the goods, and never entered the place again. when jane clemens reproached him for having made the trip to tennessee, at a cost of two hundred dollars, so badly needed at this time, he only replied gently that he had gone for what he believed to be the best. “i am not able to dig in the streets,” he added, and orion, who records this, adds: “i can see yet the hopeless expression of his face.” during a former period of depression, such as this, death had come into the clemens home. it came again now. little benjamin, a sensitive, amiable boy of ten, one day sickened, and died within a week, may , . he was a favorite child and his death was a terrible blow. little sam long remembered the picture of his parents' grief; and orion recalls that they kissed each other, something hitherto unknown. judge clemens went back to his law and judicial practice. mrs. clemens decided to take a few boarders. orion, by this time seventeen and a very good journeyman printer, obtained a place in st. louis to aid in the family support. the tide of fortune having touched low-water mark, the usual gentle stage of improvement set in. times grew better in hannibal after those first two or three years; legal fees became larger and more frequent. within another two years judge clemens appears to have been in fairly hopeful circumstances again--able at least to invest some money in silkworm culture and lose it, also to buy a piano for pamela, and to build a modest house on the hill street property, which a rich st. louis cousin, james clemens, had preserved for him. it was the house which is known today as the “mark twain home.”--[this house, in , was bought by mr. and mrs. george a. mahan, and presented to hannibal for a memorial museum.]--near it, toward the corner of main street, was his office, and here he dispensed law and justice in a manner which, if it did not bring him affluence, at least won for him the respect of the entire community. one example will serve: next to his office was a stone-cutter's shop. one day the proprietor, dave atkinson, got into a muss with one “fighting” macdonald, and there was a tremendous racket. judge clemens ran out and found the men down, punishing each other on the pavement. “i command the peace!” he shouted, as he came up to them. no one paid the least attention. “i command the peace!” he shouted again, still louder, but with no result. a stone-cutter's mallet lay there, handy. judge clemens seized it and, leaning over the combatants, gave the upper one, macdonald, a smart blow on the head. “i command the peace!” he said, for the third time, and struck a considerably smarter blow. that settled it. the second blow was of the sort that made macdonald roll over, and peace ensued. judge clemens haled both men into his court, fined them, and collected his fee. such enterprise in the cause of justice deserved prompt reward. xi. days of education the clemens family had made one or two moves since its arrival in hannibal, but the identity of these temporary residences and the period of occupation of each can no longer be established. mark twain once said: “in my father caught me in a lie. it is not this fact that gives me the date, but the house we lived in. we were there only a year.” we may believe it was the active result of that lie that fixed his memory of the place, for his father seldom punished him. when he did, it was a thorough and satisfactory performance. it was about the period of moving into the new house ( ) that the tom sawyer days--that is to say, the boyhood of samuel clemens--may be said to have begun. up to that time he was just little sam, a child--wild, and mischievous, often exasperating, but still a child--a delicate little lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and put to bed. now, at nine, he had acquired health, with a sturdy ability to look out for himself, as boys will, in a community like that, especially where the family is rather larger than the income and there is still a younger child to claim a mother's protecting care. so “sam,” as they now called him, “grew up” at nine, and was full of knowledge for his years. not that he was old in spirit or manner--he was never that, even to his death--but he had learned a great number of things, mostly of a kind not acquired at school. they were not always of a pleasant kind; they were likely to be of a kind startling to a boy, even terrifying. once little sam--he was still little sam, then--saw an old man shot down on the main street, at noonday. he saw them carry him home, lay him on the bed, and spread on his breast an open family bible which looked as heavy as an anvil. he though, if he could only drag that great burden away, the poor, old dying man would not breathe so heavily. he saw a young emigrant stabbed with a bowie-knife by a drunken comrade, and noted the spurt of life-blood that followed; he saw two young men try to kill their uncle, one holding him while the other snapped repeatedly an allen revolver which failed to go off. then there was the drunken rowdy who proposed to raid the “welshman's” house one dark threatening night--he saw that, too. a widow and her one daughter lived there, and the ruffian woke the whole village with his coarse challenges and obscenities. sam clemens and a boon companion, john briggs, went up there to look and listen. the man was at the gate, and the warren were invisible in the shadow of the dark porch. the boys heard the elder woman's voice warning the man that she had a loaded gun, and that she would kill him if he stayed where he was. he replied with a ribald tirade, and she warned that she would count ten-that if he remained a second longer she would fire. she began slowly and counted up to five, with him laughing and jeering. at six he grew silent, but he did not go. she counted on: seven--eight--nine--the boys watching from the dark roadside felt their hearts stop. there was a long pause, then the final count, followed a second later by a gush of flame. the man dropped, his breast riddled. at the same instant the thunderstorm that had been gathering broke loose. the boys fled wildly, believing that satan himself had arrived to claim the lost soul. many such instances happened in a town like that in those days. and there were events incident to slavery. he saw a slave struck down and killed with a piece of slag for a trifling offense. he saw an abolitionist attacked by a mob, and they would have lynched him had not a methodist minister defended him on a plea that he must be crazy. he did not remember, in later years, that he had ever seen a slave auction, but he added: “i am suspicious that it is because the thing was a commonplace spectacle, and not an uncommon or impressive one. i do vividly remember seeing a dozen black men and women chained together lying in a group on the pavement, waiting shipment to a southern slave-market. they had the saddest faces i ever saw.” it is not surprising that a boy would gather a store of human knowledge amid such happenings as these. they were wild, disturbing things. they got into his dreams and made him fearful when he woke in the middle of the night. he did not then regard them as an education. in some vague way he set them down as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him a taste for a better life. he felt that it was his own conscience that made these things torture him. that was his mother's idea, and he had a high respect for her moral opinions, also for her courage. among other things, he had seen her one day defy a vicious devil of a corsican--a common terror in the town-who was chasing his grown daughter with a heavy rope in his hand, declaring he would wear it out on her. cautious citizens got out of her way, but jane clemens opened her door wide to the refugee, and then, instead of rushing in and closing it, spread her arms across it, barring the way. the man swore and threatened her with the rope, but she did not flinch or show any sign of fear. she stood there and shamed him and derided him and defied him until he gave up the rope and slunk off, crestfallen and conquered. any one who could do that must have a perfect conscience, sam thought. in the fearsome darkness he would say his prayers, especially when a thunderstorm was coming, and vow to begin a better life in the morning. he detested sunday-school as much as day-school, and once orion, who was moral and religious, had threatened to drag him there by the collar; but as the thunder got louder sam decided that he loved sunday-school and would go the next sunday without being invited. fortunately there were pleasanter things than these. there were picnics sometimes, and ferry-boat excursions. once there was a great fourth-of-july celebration at which it was said a real revolutionary soldier was to be present. some one had discovered him living alone seven or eight miles in the country. but this feature proved a disappointment; for when the day came and he was triumphantly brought in he turned out to be a hessian, and was allowed to walk home. the hills and woods around hannibal where, with his playmates, he roamed almost at will were never disappointing. there was the cave with its marvels; there was bear creek, where, after repeated accidents, he had learned to swim. it had cost him heavily to learn to swim. he had seen two playmates drown; also, time and again he had, himself, been dragged ashore more dead than alive, once by a slave-girl, another time by a slaveman--neal champ, of the pavey hotel. in the end he had conquered; he could swim better than any boy in town of his age. it was the river that meant more to him than all the rest. its charm was permanent. it was the path of adventure, the gateway to the world. the river with its islands, its great slow-moving rafts, its marvelous steamboats that were like fairyland, its stately current swinging to the sea! he would sit by it for hours and dream. he would venture out on it in a surreptitiously borrowed boat when he was barely strong enough to lift an oar out of the water. he learned to know all its moods and phases. he felt its kinship. in some occult way he may have known it as his prototype--that resistless tide of life with its ever-changing sweep, its shifting shores, its depths, its shadows, its gorgeous sunset hues, its solemn and tranquil entrance to the sea. his hunger for the life aboard the steamers became a passion. to be even the humblest employee of one of those floating enchantments would be enough; to be an officer would be to enter heaven; to be a pilot was to be a god. “you can hardly imagine what it meant,” he reflected once, “to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, to see those steamboats pass up and down, and never to take a trip on them.” he had reached the mature age of nine when he could endure this no longer. one day, when the big packet came down and stopped at hannibal, he slipped aboard and crept under one of the boats on the upper deck. presently the signal-bells rang, the steamboat backed away and swung into midstream; he was really going at last. he crept from beneath the boat and sat looking out over the water and enjoying the scenery. then it began to rain--a terrific downpour. he crept back under the boat, but his legs were outside, and one of the crew saw him. so he was taken down into the cabin and at the next stop set ashore. it was the town of louisiana, and there were lampton relatives there who took him home. jane clemens declared that his father had got to take him in hand; which he did, doubtless impressing the adventure on him in the usual way. these were all educational things; then there was always the farm, where entertainment was no longer a matter of girl-plays and swings, with a colored nurse following about, but of manlier sports with his older boy cousins, who had a gun and went hunting with the men for squirrels and partridges by day, for coons and possums by night. sometimes the little boy had followed the hunters all night long and returned with them through the sparkling and fragrant morning fresh, hungry, and triumphant just in time for breakfast. so it is no wonder that at nine he was no longer “little sam,” but sam clemens, quite mature and self-dependent, with a wide knowledge of men and things and a variety of accomplishments. he had even learned to smoke--a little--out there on the farm, and had tried tobacco-chewing, though that was a failure. he had been stung to this effort by a big girl at a school which, with his cousin puss, he sometimes briefly attended. “do you use terbacker?” the big girl had asked, meaning did he chew it. “no,” he said, abashed at the confession. “haw!” she cried to the other scholars; “here's a boy that can't chaw terbacker.” degraded and ashamed, he tried to correct his fault, but it only made him very ill; and he did not try again. he had also acquired the use of certain strong, expressive words, and used them, sometimes, when his mother was safely distant. he had an impression that she would “skin him alive” if she heard him swear. his education had doubtful spots in it, but it had provided wisdom. he was not a particularly attractive lad. he was not tall for his years, and his head was somewhat too large for his body. he had a “great ruck” of light, sandy hair which he plastered down to keep it from curling; keen blue-gray eyes, and rather large features. still, he had a fair, delicate complexion, when it was not blackened by grime or tan; a gentle, winning manner; a smile that, with his slow, measured way of speaking, made him a favorite with his companions. he did not speak much, and his mental attainments were not highly regarded; but, for some reason, whenever he did speak every playmate in hearing stopped whatever he was doing and listened. perhaps it would be a plan for a new game or lark; perhaps it was something droll; perhaps it was just a commonplace remark that his peculiar drawl made amusing. whatever it was, they considered it worth while. his mother always referred to his slow fashion of speaking as “sammy's long talk.” her own speech was still more deliberate, but she seemed not to notice it. henry--a much handsomer lad and regarded as far more promising--did not have it. he was a lovable, obedient little fellow whom the mischievous sam took delight in teasing. for this and other reasons the latter's punishments were frequent enough, perhaps not always deserved. sometimes he charged his mother with partiality. he would say: “yes, no matter what it is, i am always the one to get punished”; and his mother would answer: “well, sam, if you didn't deserve it for that, you did for something else.” henry clemens became the sid of tom sawyer, though henry was in every way a finer character than sid. his brother sam always loved him, and fought for him oftener than with him. with the death of benjamin clemens, henry and sam were naturally drawn much closer together, though sam could seldom resist the temptation of tormenting henry. a schoolmate, george butler (he was a nephew of general butler and afterward fought bravely in the civil war), had a little blue suit with a leather belt to match, and was the envy of all. mrs. clemens finally made sam and henry suits of blue cotton velvet, and the next sunday, after various services were over, the two sauntered about, shedding glory for a time, finally going for a stroll in the woods. they walked along properly enough, at first, then just ahead sam spied the stump of a newly cut tree, and with a wild whooping impulse took a running leap over it. there were splinters on the stump where the tree had broken away, but he cleared them neatly. henry wanted to match the performance, but was afraid to try, so sam dared him. he kept daring him until henry was goaded to the attempt. he cleared the stump, but the highest splinters caught the slack of his little blue trousers, and the cloth gave way. he escaped injury, but the precious trousers were damaged almost beyond repair. sam, with a boy's heartlessness, was fairly rolling on the ground with laughter at henry's appearance. “cotton-tail rabbit!” he shouted. “cotton-tail rabbit!” while henry, weeping, set out for home by a circuitous and unfrequented road. let us hope, if there was punishment for this mishap, that it fell in the proper locality. these two brothers were of widely different temperament. henry, even as a little boy, was sturdy, industrious, and dependable. sam was volatile and elusive; his industry of an erratic kind. once his father set him to work with a hatchet to remove some plaster. he hacked at it for a time well enough, then lay down on the floor of the room and threw his hatchet at such areas of the plaster as were not in easy reach. henry would have worked steadily at a task like that until the last bit was removed and the room swept clean. the home incidents in 'tom sawyer', most of them, really happened. sam clemens did clod henry for getting him into trouble about the colored thread with which he sewed his shirt when he came home from swimming; he did inveigle a lot of boys into whitewashing, a fence for him; he did give pain-killer to peter, the cat. there was a cholera scare that year, and pain-killer was regarded as a preventive. sam had been ordered to take it liberally, and perhaps thought peter too should be safeguarded. as for escaping punishment for his misdeeds in the manner described in that book, this was a daily matter, and the methods adapted themselves to the conditions. in the introduction to tom sawyer mark twain confesses to the general truth of the history, and to the reality of its characters. “huck finn was drawn from life,” he tells us. “tom sawyer also, but not from an individual--he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom i knew.” the three boys were--himself, chiefly, and in a lesser degree john briggs and will bowen. john briggs was also the original of joe harper in that book. as for huck finn, his original was tom blankenship, neither elaborated nor qualified. there were several of the blankenships: there was old ben, the father, who had succeeded “general” gains as the town drunkard; young ben, the eldest son--a hard case with certain good traits; and tom--that is to say, huck--who was just as he is described in tom sawyer: a ruin of rags, a river-rat, an irresponsible bit of human drift, kind of heart and possessing that priceless boon, absolute unaccountability of conduct to any living soul. he could came and go as he chose; he never had to work or go to school; he could do all things, good or bad, that the other boys longed to do and were forbidden. he represented to them the very embodiment of liberty, and his general knowledge of important matters, such as fishing, hunting, trapping, and all manner of signs and spells and hoodoos and incantations, made him immensely valuable as a companion. the fact that his society was prohibited gave it a vastly added charm. the blankenships picked up a precarious living fishing and hunting, and lived at first in a miserable house of bark, under a tree, but later moved into quite a pretentious building back of the new clemens home on hill street. it was really an old barn of a place--poor and ramshackle even then; but now, more than sixty years later, a part of it is still standing. the siding of the part that stands is of black walnut, which must have been very plentiful in that long-ago time. old drunken ben blankenship never dreamed that pieces of his house would be carried off as relics because of the literary fame of his son tom--a fame founded on irresponsibility and inconsequence. orion clemens, who was concerned with missionary work about this time, undertook to improve the blankenships spiritually. sam adopted them, outright, and took them to his heart. he was likely to be there at any hour of the day, and he and tom had cat-call signals at night which would bring him out on the back single-story roof, and down a little arbor and flight of steps, to the group of boon companions which, besides tom, included john briggs, the bowen boys, will pitts, and one or two other congenial spirits. they were not vicious boys; they were not really bad boys; they were only mischievous, fun-loving boys-thoughtless, and rather disregardful of the comforts and the rights of others. xii. tom sawyer's band they ranged from holliday's hill on the north to the cave on the south, and over the fields and through all the woods about. they navigated the river from turtle island to glasscock's island (now pearl, or tom sawyer's island), and far below; they penetrated the wilderness of the illinois shore. they could run like wild turkeys and swim like ducks; they could handle a boat as if born in one. no orchard or melon patch was entirely safe from them; no dog or slave patrol so vigilant that they did not sooner or later elude it. they borrowed boats when their owners were not present. once when they found this too much trouble, they decided to own a boat, and one sunday gave a certain borrowed craft a coat of red paint (formerly it had been green), and secluded it for a season up bear creek. they borrowed the paint also, and the brush, though they carefully returned these the same evening about nightfall, so the painter could have them monday morning. tom blankenship rigged up a sail for the new craft, and sam clemens named it cecilia, after which they didn't need to borrow boats any more, though the owner of it did; and he sometimes used to observe as he saw it pass that, if it had been any other color but red, he would have sworn it was his. some of their expeditions were innocent enough. they often cruised up to turtle island, about two miles above hannibal, and spent the day feasting. you could have loaded a car with turtles and their eggs up there, and there were quantities of mussels and plenty of fish. fishing and swimming were their chief pastimes, with general marauding for adventure. where the railroad-bridge now ends on the missouri side was their favorite swimming-hole--that and along bear creek, a secluded limpid water with special interests of its own. sometimes at evening they swam across to glasscock's island--the rendezvous of tom sawyer's “black avengers” and the hiding-place of huck and nigger jim; then, when they had frolicked on the sand-bar at the head of the island for an hour or more, they would swim back in the dusk, a distance of half a mile, breasting the strong, steady mississippi current without exhaustion or fear. they could swim all day, likely enough, those graceless young scamps. once--though this was considerably later, when he was sixteen--sam clemens swam across to the illinois side, and then turned and swam back again without landing, a distance of at least two miles, as he had to go. he was seized with a cramp on the return trip. his legs became useless, and he was obliged to make the remaining distance with his arms. it was a hardy life they led, and it is not recorded that they ever did any serious damage, though they narrowly missed it sometimes. one of their sunday pastimes was to climb holliday's hill and roll down big stones, to frighten the people who were driving to church. holliday's hill above the road was steep; a stone once started would go plunging and leaping down and bound across the road with the deadly swiftness of a twelve-inch shell. the boys would get a stone poised, then wait until they saw a team approaching, and, calculating the distance, would give it a start. dropping down behind the bushes, they would watch the dramatic effect upon the church-goers as the great missile shot across the road a few yards before them. this was homeric sport, but they carried it too far. stones that had a habit of getting loose so numerously on sundays and so rarely on other days invited suspicion, and the “patterollers” (river patrol--a kind of police of those days) were put on the watch. so the boys found other diversions until the patterollers did not watch any more; then they planned a grand coup that would eclipse anything before attempted in the stone-rolling line. a rock about the size of an omnibus was lying up there, in a good position to go down hill, once, started. they decided it would be a glorious thing to see that great boulder go smashing down, a hundred yards or so in front of some unsuspecting and peaceful-minded church-goer. quarrymen were getting out rock not far away, and left their picks and shovels over sundays. the boys borrowed these, and went to work to undermine the big stone. it was a heavier job than they had counted on, but they worked faithfully, sunday after sunday. if their parents had wanted them to work like that, they would have thought they were being killed. finally one sunday, while they were digging, it suddenly got loose and started down. they were not quite ready for it. nobody was coming but an old colored man in a cart, so it was going to be wasted. it was not quite wasted, however. they had planned for a thrilling result; and there was thrill enough while it lasted. in the first place, the stone nearly caught will bowen when it started. john briggs had just that moment quit digging and handed will the pick. will was about to step into the excavation when sam clemens, who was already there, leaped out with a yell: “look out, boys, she's coming!” she came. the huge stone kept to the ground at first, then, gathering a wild momentum, it went bounding into the air. about half-way down the hill it struck a tree several inches through and cut it clean off. this turned its course a little, and the negro in the cart, who heard the noise, saw it come crashing in his direction and made a wild effort to whip up his horse. it was also headed toward a cooper-shop across the road. the boys watched it with growing interest. it made longer leaps with every bound, and whenever it struck the fragments the dust would fly. they were certain it would demolish the negro and destroy the cooper-shop. the shop was empty, it being sunday, but the rest of the catastrophe would invite close investigation, with results. they wanted to fly, but they could not move until they saw the rock land. it was making mighty leaps now, and the terrified negro had managed to get directly in its path. they stood holding their breath, their mouths open. then suddenly they could hardly believe their eyes; the boulder struck a projection a distance above the road, and with a mighty bound sailed clear over the negro and his mule and landed in the soft dirt beyond-only a fragment striking the shop, damaging but not wrecking it. half buried in the ground, that boulder lay there for nearly forty years; then it was blasted up for milling purposes. it was the last rock the boys ever rolled down. they began to suspect that the sport was not altogether safe. sometimes the boys needed money, which was not easy to get in those days. on one occasion of this sort, tom blankenship had the skin of a coon he had captured, which represented the only capital in the crowd. at selms's store on wild cat corner the coonskin would bring ten cents, but that was not enough. they arranged a plan which would make it pay a good deal more than that. selins's window was open, it being summer-time, and his pile of pelts was pretty handy. huck--that is to say, tom--went in the front door and sold the skin for ten cents to selms, who tossed it back on the pile. tom came back with the money and after a reasonable period went around to the open window, crawled in, got the coonskin, and sold it to selms again. he did this several times that afternoon; then john pierce, selins's clerk, said: “look here, selms, there is something wrong about this. that boy has been selling us coonskins all the afternoon.” selms went to his pile of pelts. there were several sheepskins and some cowhides, but only one coonskin--the one he had that moment bought. selms himself used to tell this story as a great joke. perhaps it is not adding to mark twain's reputation to say that the boy sam clemens--a pretty small boy, a good deal less than twelve at this time--was the leader of this unhallowed band; yet any other record would be less than historic. if the band had a leader, it was he. they were always ready to listen to him--they would even stop fishing to do that--and to follow his projects. they looked to him for ideas and organization, whether the undertaking was to be real or make-believe. when they played “bandit” or “pirate” or “indian,” sam clemens was always chief; when they became real raiders it is recorded that he was no less distinguished. like tom sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings of leadership. when the christian sons of temperance came along with a regalia, and a red sash that carried with it rank and the privilege of inventing pass-words, the gaud of these things got into his eyes, and he gave up smoking (which he did rather gingerly) and swearing (which he did only under heavy excitement), also liquor (though he had never tasted it yet), and marched with the newly washed and pure in heart for a full month--a month of splendid leadership and servitude. then even the red sash could not hold him in bondage. he looked up tom blankenship and said: “say, tom, i'm blamed tired of this! let's go somewhere and smoke!” which must have been a good deal of a sacrifice, for the uniform was a precious thing. limelight and the center of the stage was a passion of sam clemens's boyhood, a love of the spectacular that never wholly died. it seems almost a pity that in those far-off barefoot old days he could not have looked down the years to a time when, with the world at his feet, venerable oxford should clothe him in a scarlet gown. he could not by any chance have dreamed of that stately honor. his ambitions did not lie in the direction of mental achievement. it is true that now and then, on friday at school, he read a composition, one of which--a personal burlesque on certain older boys--came near resulting in bodily damage. but any literary ambition he may have had in those days was a fleeting thing. his permanent dream was to be a pirate, or a pilot, or a bandit, or a trapper-scout; something gorgeous and active, where his word--his nod, even--constituted sufficient law. the river kept the pilot ambition always fresh, and the cave supplied a background for those other things. the cave was an enduring and substantial joy. it was a real cave, not merely a hole, but a subterranean marvel of deep passages and vaulted chambers that led away into bluffs and far down into the earth's black silences, even below the river, some said. for sam clemens the cave had a fascination that never faded. other localities and diversions might pall, but any mention of the cave found him always eager and ready for the three-mile walk or pull that brought them to its mystic door. with its long corridors, its royal chambers hung with stalactites, its remote hiding-places, its possibilities as the home of a gallant outlaw band, it contained everything that a romantic boy could love or long for. in tom sawyer indian joe dies in the cave. he did not die there in real life, but was lost there once, and was living on bats when they found him. he was a dissolute reprobate, and when, one night, he did die there came up a thunder-storm so terrific that sam clemens at home and in bed was certain that satan had come in person for the half-breed's wicked soul. he covered his head and said his prayers industriously, in the fear that the evil one might conclude to save another trip by taking him along, too. the treasure-digging adventure in the book had a foundation in fact. there was a tradition concerning some french trappers who long before had established a trading-post two miles above hannibal, on what is called the “bay.” it is said that, while one of these trappers was out hunting, indians made a raid on the post and massacred the others. the hunter on returning found his comrades killed and scalped, but the indians had failed to find the treasure which was buried in a chest. he left it there, swam across to illinois, and made his way to st. louis, where he told of the massacre and the burial of the chest of gold. then he started to raise a party to go back for it, but was taken sick and died. later some men came up from st. louis looking for the chest. they did not find it, but they told the circumstances, and afterward a good many people tried to find the gold. tom blankenship one morning came to sam clemens and john briggs and said he was going to dig up the treasure. he said he had dreamed just where it was, and said if they would go with him and dig he would divide up. the boys had great faith in dreams, especially tom's dreams. tom's unlimited freedom gave him a large importance in their eyes. the dreams of a boy like that were pretty sure to mean something. they followed tom to the place with some shovels and a pick, and he showed them where to dig. then he sat down under the shade of a papaw-tree and gave orders. they dug nearly all day. now and then they stopped to rest, and maybe to wonder a little why tom didn't dig some himself; but, of course, he had done the dreaming, which entitled him to an equal share. they did not find it that day, and when they went back next morning they took two long iron rods; these they would push and drive into the ground until they struck something hard. then they would dig down to see what it was, but it never turned out to be money. that night the boys declared they would not dig any more. but tom had another dream. he dreamed the gold was exactly under the little papaw-tree. this sounded so circumstantial that they went back and dug another day. it was hot weather too, august, and that night they were nearly dead. even tom gave it up, then. he said there was something about the way they dug, but he never offered to do any digging himself. this differs considerably from the digging incident in the book, but it gives us an idea of the respect the boys had for the ragamuffin original of huckleberry finn.--[much of the detail in this chapter was furnished to the writer by john briggs shortly before his death in .]--tom blankenship's brother, ben, was also drawn upon for that creation, at least so far as one important phase of huck's character is concerned. he was considerably older, as well as more disreputable, than tom. he was inclined to torment the boys by tying knots in their clothes when they went swimming, or by throwing mud at them when they wanted to come out, and they had no deep love for him. but somewhere in ben blankenship there was a fine generous strain of humanity that provided mark twain with that immortal episode in the story of huck finn--in sheltering the nigger jim. this is the real story: a slave ran off from monroe county, missouri, and got across the river into illinois. ben used to fish and hunt over there in the swamps, and one day found him. it was considered a most worthy act in those days to return a runaway slave; in fact, it was a crime not to do it. besides, there was for this one a reward of fifty dollars, a fortune to ragged outcast ben blankenship. that money and the honor he could acquire must have been tempting to the waif, but it did not outweigh his human sympathy. instead of giving him up and claiming the reward, ben kept the runaway over there in the marshes all summer. the negro would fish and ben would carry him scraps of other food. then, by and by, it leaked out. some wood-choppers went on a hunt for the fugitive, and chased him to what was called “bird slough.” there trying to cross a drift he was drowned. in the book, the author makes huck's struggle a psychological one between conscience and the law, on one side, and sympathy on the other. with ben blankenship the struggle--if there was a struggle--was probably between sympathy and cupidity. he would care very little for conscience and still less for law. his sympathy with the runaway, however, would be large and elemental, and it must have been very large to offset the lure of that reward. there was a gruesome sequel to this incident. some days following the drowning of the runaway, sam clemens, john briggs, and the bowen boys went to the spot and were pushing the drift about, when suddenly the negro rose before them, straight and terrible, about half his length out of the water. he had gone down feet foremost, and the loosened drift had released him. the boys did not stop to investigate. they thought he was after them and flew in wild terror, never stopping until they reached human habitation. how many gruesome experiences there appear to have been in those early days! in 'the innocents abroad' mark twain tells of the murdered man he saw one night in his father's office. the man's name was mcfarlane. he had been stabbed that day in the old hudson-mcfarlane feud and carried in there to die. sam clemens and john briggs had run away from school and had been sky larking all that day, and knew nothing of the affair. sam decided that his father's office was safer for him than to face his mother, who was probably sitting up, waiting. he tells us how he lay on the lounge, and how a shape on the floor gradually resolved itself into the outlines of a man; how a square of moonlight from the window approached it and gradually revealed the dead face and the ghastly stabbed breast. “i went out of there,” he says. “i do not say that i went away in any sort of a hurry, but i simply went; that is sufficient. i went out of the window, and i carried the sash along with me. i did not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than to, leave it, and so i took it. i was not scared, but i was considerably agitated.” he was not yet twelve, for his father was no longer alive when the boy reached that age. certainly these were disturbing, haunting things. then there was the case of the drunken tramp in the calaboose to whom the boys kind-heartedly enough carried food and tobacco. sam clemens spent some of his precious money to buy the tramp a box of lucifer matches--a brand new invention then, scarce and high. the tramp started a fire with the matches and burned down the calaboose, himself in it. for weeks the boy was tortured, awake and in his dreams, by the thought that if he had not carried the man the matches the tragedy could not have happened. remorse was always samuel clemens's surest punishment. to his last days on earth he never outgrew its pangs. what a number of things crowded themselves into a few brief years! it is not easy to curtail these boyhood adventures of sam clemens and his scapegrace friends, but one might go on indefinitely with their mad doings. they were an unpromising lot. ministers and other sober-minded citizens freely prophesied sudden and violent ends for them, and considered them hardly worth praying for. they must have proven a disappointing lot to those prophets. the bowen boys became fine river-pilots; will pitts was in due time a leading merchant and bank director; john briggs grew into a well-to-do and highly respected farmer; even huck finn--that is to say, tom blankenship--is reputed to have ranked as an honored citizen and justice of the peace in a western town. but in those days they were a riotous, fun-loving band with little respect for order and even less for ordinance. xiii. the gentler side his associations were not all of that lawless breed. at his school (he had sampled several places of learning, and was now at mr. cross's on the square) were a number of less adventurous, even if not intrinsically better playmates. there was george robards, the latin scholar, and john, his brother, a handsome boy, who rode away at last with his father into the sunset, to california, his golden curls flying in the wind. and there was jimmy mcdaniel, a kind-hearted boy whose company was worth while, because his father was a confectioner, and he used to bring candy and cake to school. also there was buck brown, a rival speller, and john meredith, the doctor's son, and john garth, who was one day to marry little helen kercheval, and in the end would be remembered and honored with a beautiful memorial building not far from the site of the old school. furthermore, there were a good many girls. tom sawyer had an impressionable heart, and sam clemens no less so. there was bettie ormsley, and artemisia briggs, and jennie brady; also mary miller, who was nearly twice his age and gave him his first broken heart. “i believe i was as miserable as a grown man could be,” he said once, remembering. tom sawyer had heart sorrows too, and we may imagine that his emotions at such times were the emotions of sam clemens, say at the age of ten. but, as tom sawyer had one faithful sweetheart, so did he. they were one and the same. becky thatcher in the book was laura hawkins in reality. the acquaintance of these two had begun when the hawkins family moved into the virginia house on the corner of hill and main streets.--[the hawkins family in real life bore no resemblance to the family of that name in the gilded age. judge hawkins of the gilded age, as already noted, was john clemens. mark twain used the name hawkins, also the name of his boyhood sweetheart, laura, merely for old times' sake, and because in portraying the childhood of laura hawkins he had a picture of the real laura in his mind.]--the clemens family was then in the new home across the way, and the children were soon acquainted. the boy could be tender and kind, and was always gentle in his treatment of the other sex. they visited back and forth, especially around the new house, where there were nice pieces of boards and bricks for play-houses. so they played “keeping house,” and if they did not always agree well, since the beginning of the world sweethearts have not always agreed, even in arcady. once when they were building a house--and there may have been some difference of opinion as to its architecture--the boy happened to let a brick fall on the little girl's finger. if there had been any disagreement it vanished instantly with that misfortune. he tried to comfort her and soothe the pain; then he wept with her and suffered most of the two, no doubt. so, you see, he was just a little boy, after all, even though he was already chief of a red-handed band, the “black avengers of the spanish main.” he was always a tender-hearted lad. he would never abuse an animal, unless, as in the pain-killer incident, his tendency to pranking ran away with him. he had indeed a genuine passion for cats; summers when he went to the farm he never failed to take his cat in a basket. when he ate, it sat in a chair beside him at the table. his sympathy included inanimate things as well. he loved flowers--not as the embryo botanist or gardener, but as a personal friend. he pitied the dead leaf and the murmuring dried weed of november because their brief lives were ended, and they would never know the summer again, or grow glad with another spring. his heart went out to them; to the river and the sky, the sunlit meadow and the drifted hill. that his observation of all nature was minute and accurate is shown everywhere in his writing; but it was never the observation of a young naturalist it was the subconscious observation of sympathetic love. we are wandering away from his school-days. they were brief enough and came rapidly to an end. they will not hold us long. undoubtedly tom sawyer's distaste for school and his excuses for staying at home--usually some pretended illness--have ample foundation in the boyhood of sam clemens. his mother punished him and pleaded with him, alternately. he detested school as he detested nothing else on earth, even going to church. “church ain't worth shucks,” said tom sawyer, but it was better than school. as already noted, the school of mr. cross stood in or near what is now the square in hannibal. the square was only a grove then, grown up with plum, hazel, and vine--a rare place for children. at recess and the noon hour the children climbed trees, gathered flowers, and swung in grape-vine swings. there was a spelling-bee every friday afternoon, for sam the only endurable event of the school exercises. he could hold the floor at spelling longer than buck brown. this was spectacular and showy; it invited compliments even from mr. cross, whose name must have been handed down by angels, it fitted him so well. one day sam clemens wrote on his slate: cross by name and cross by nature cross jumped over an irish potato. he showed this to john briggs, who considered it a stroke of genius. he urged the author to write it on the board at noon, but the poet's ambition did not go so far. “oh, pshaw!” said john. “i wouldn't be afraid to do it. “i dare you to do it,” said sam. john briggs never took a dare, and at noon, when mr. cross was at home at dinner, he wrote flamingly the descriptive couplet. when the teacher returned and “books” were called he looked steadily at john briggs. he had recognized the penmanship. “did you do that?” he asked, ominously. it was a time for truth. “yes, sir,” said john. “come here!” and john came, and paid for his exploitation of genius heavily. sam clemens expected that the next call would be for “author,” but for some reason the investigation ended there. it was unusual for him to escape. his back generally kept fairly warm from one “frailing” to the next. his rewards were not all of a punitive nature. there were two medals in the school, one for spelling, the other for amiability. they were awarded once a week, and the holders wore them about the neck conspicuously, and were envied accordingly. john robards--he of the golden curls--wore almost continuously the medal for amiability, while sam clemens had a mortgage on the medal for spelling. sometimes they traded, to see how it would seem, but the master discouraged this practice by taking the medals away from them for the remainder of the week. once sam clemens lost the medal by leaving the first “r” out of february. he could have spelled it backward, if necessary; but laura hawkins was the only one on the floor against him, and he was a gallant boy. the picture of that school as presented in the book written thirty years later is faithful, we may believe, and the central figure is a tender-hearted, romantic, devil-may-care lad, loathing application and longing only for freedom. it was a boon which would come to him sooner even than he had dreamed. xiv. the passing of john clemens judge clemens, who time and again had wrecked or crippled his fortune by devices more or less unusual, now adopted the one unfailing method of achieving disaster. he endorsed a large note, for a man of good repute, and the payment of it swept him clean: home, property, everything vanished again. the st. louis cousin took over the home and agreed to let the family occupy it on payment of a small interest; but after an attempt at housekeeping with a few scanty furnishings and pamela's piano--all that had been saved from the wreck--they moved across the street into a portion of the virginia house, then occupied by a dr. grant. the grants proposed that the clemens family move over and board them, a welcome arrangement enough at this time. judge clemens had still a hope left. the clerkship of the surrogate court was soon to be filled by election. it was an important remunerative office, and he was regarded as the favorite candidate for the position. his disaster had aroused general sympathy, and his nomination and election were considered sure. he took no chances; he made a canvass on horseback from house to house, often riding through rain and the chill of fall, acquiring a cough which was hard to overcome. he was elected by a heavy majority, and it was believed he could hold the office as long as he chose. there seemed no further need of worry. as soon as he was installed in office they would live in style becoming their social position. about the end of february he rode to palmyra to be sworn in. returning he was drenched by a storm of rain and sleet, arriving at last half frozen. his system was in no condition to resist such a shock. pneumonia followed; physicians came with torments of plasters and allopathic dosings that brought no relief. orion returned from st. louis to assist in caring for him, and sat by his bed, encouraging him and reading to him, but it was evident that he grew daily weaker. now and then he became cheerful and spoke of the tennessee land as the seed of a vast fortune that must surely flower at last. he uttered no regrets, no complaints. once only he said: “i believe if i had stayed in tennessee i might have been worth twenty thousand dollars to-day.” on the morning of the th of march, , it was evident that he could not live many hours. he was very weak. when he spoke, now and then, it was of the land. he said it would soon make them all rich and happy. “cling to the land,” he whispered. “cling to the land, and wait. let nothing beguile it away from you.” a little later he beckoned to pamela, now a lovely girl of nineteen, and, putting his arm about her neck, kissed her for the first time in years. “let me die,” he said. he never spoke after that. a little more, and the sad, weary life that had lasted less than forty-nine years was ended: a dreamer and a moralist, an upright man honored by all, he had never been a financier. he ended life with less than he had begun. xv. a young ben franklin for a third time death had entered the clemens home: not only had it brought grief now, but it had banished the light of new fortune from the very threshold. the disaster seemed complete. the children were dazed. judge clemens had been a distant, reserved man, but they had loved him, each in his own way, and they had honored his uprightness and nobility of purpose. mrs. clemens confided to a neighbor that, in spite of his manner, her husband had been always warm-hearted, with a deep affection for his family. they remembered that he had never returned from a journey without bringing each one some present, however trifling. orion, looking out of his window next morning, saw old abram kurtz, and heard him laugh. he wondered how anybody could still laugh. the boy sam was fairly broken down. remorse, which always dealt with him unsparingly, laid a heavy hand on him now. wildness, disobedience, indifference to his father's wishes, all were remembered; a hundred things, in themselves trifling, became ghastly and heart-wringing in the knowledge that they could never be undone. seeing his grief, his mother took him by the hand and led him into the room where his father lay. “it is all right, sammy,” she said. “what's done is done, and it does not matter to him any more; but here by the side of him now i want you to promise me----” he turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung himself into her arms. “i will promise anything,” he sobbed, “if you won't make me go to school! anything!” his mother held him for a moment, thinking, then she said: “no, sammy; you need not go to school any more. only promise me to be a better boy. promise not to break my heart.” so he promised her to be a faithful and industrious man, and upright, like his father. his mother was satisfied with that. the sense of honor and justice was already strong within him. to him a promise was a serious matter at any time; made under conditions like these it would be held sacred. that night--it was after the funeral--his tendency to somnambulism manifested itself. his mother and sister, who were sleeping together, saw the door open and a form in white enter. naturally nervous at such a time, and living in a day of almost universal superstition, they were terrified and covered their heads. presently a hand was laid on the coverlet, first at the foot, then at the head of the bed. a thought struck mrs. clemens: “sam!” she said. he answered, but he was sound asleep and fell to the floor. he had risen and thrown a sheet around him in his dreams. he walked in his sleep several nights in succession after that. then he slept more soundly. orion returned to st. louis. he was a very good book and job printer by this time and received a salary of ten dollars a week (high wages in those frugal days), of which he sent three dollars weekly to the family. pamela, who had acquired a considerable knowledge of the piano and guitar, went to the town of paris, in monroe county, about fifty miles away, and taught a class of music pupils, contributing whatever remained after paying for her board and clothing to the family fund. it was a hard task for the girl, for she was timid and not over-strong; but she was resolute and patient, and won success. pamela clemens was a noble character and deserves a fuller history than can be afforded in this work. mrs. clemens and her son samuel now had a sober talk, and, realizing that the printing trade offered opportunity for acquiring further education as well as a livelihood, they agreed that he should be apprenticed to joseph p. ament, who had lately moved from palmyra to hannibal and bought a weekly democrat paper, the missouri courier. the apprentice terms were not over-liberal. they were the usual thing for that time: board and clothes--“more board than clothes, and not much of either,” mark twain used to say. “i was supposed to get two suits of clothes a year, like a nigger, but i didn't get them. i got one suit and took the rest out in ament's old garments, which didn't fit me in any noticeable way. i was only about half as big as he was, and when i had on one of his shirts i felt as if i had on a circus tent. i had to turn the trousers up to my ears to make them short enough.” there was another apprentice, a young fellow of about eighteen, named wales mccormick, a devilish fellow and a giant. ament's clothes were too small for wales, but he had to wear them, and sam clemens and wales mccormick together, fitted out with ament's clothes, must have been a picturesque pair. there was also, for a time, a boy named ralph; but he appears to have presented no features of a striking sort, and the memory of him has become dim. the apprentices ate in the kitchen at first, served by the old slave-cook and her handsome mulatto daughter; but those printer's “devils” made it so lively there that in due time they were promoted to the family table, where they sat with mr. and mrs. ament and the one journeyman, pet mcmurry--a name that in itself was an inspiration. what those young scamps did not already know pet mcmurry could teach them. sam clemens had promised to be a good boy, and he was, by the standards of boyhood. he was industrious, regular at his work, quick to learn, kind, and truthful. angels could hardly be more than that in a printing-office; but when food was scarce even an angel--a young printer angel--could hardly resist slipping down the cellar stairs at night for raw potatoes, onions, and apples which they carried into the office, where the boys slept on a pallet on the floor, and this forage they cooked on the office stove. wales especially had a way of cooking a potato that his associate never forgot. it is unfortunate that no photographic portrait has been preserved of sam clemens at this period. but we may imagine him from a letter which, long years after, pet mcmurry wrote to mark twain. he said: if your memory extends so far back, you will recall a little sandy- haired boy--[the color of mark twain's hair in early life has been variously referred to as red, black, and brown. it was, in fact, as stated by mcmurry, “sandy” in boyhood, deepening later to that rich, mahogany tone known as auburn.]--of nearly a quarter of a century ago, in the printing-office at hannibal, over the brittingham drugstore, mounted upon a little box at the case, pulling away at a huge cigar or a diminutive pipe, who used to love to sing so well the expression of the poor drunken man who was supposed to have fallen by the wayside: “if ever i get up again, i'll stay up--if i kin.”... do you recollect any of the serious conflicts that mirth-loving brain of yours used to get you into with that diminutive creature wales mccormick--how you used to call upon me to hold your cigar or pipe, whilst you went entirely through him? this is good testimony, without doubt. when he had been with ament little more than a year sam had become office favorite and chief standby. whatever required intelligence and care and imagination was given to sam clemens. he could set type as accurately and almost as rapidly as pet mcmurry; he could wash up the forms a good deal better than pet; and he could run the job-press to the tune of “annie laurie” or “along the beach at rockaway,” without missing a stroke or losing a finger. sometimes, at odd moments, he would “set up” one of the popular songs or some favorite poem like “the blackberry girl,” and of these he sent copies printed on cotton, even on scraps of silk, to favorite girl friends; also to puss quarles, on his uncle's farm, where he seldom went now, because he was really grown up, associating with men and doing a man's work. he had charge of the circulation--which is to say, he carried the papers. during the last year of the mexican war, when a telegraph-wire found its way across the mississippi to hannibal--a long sagging span, that for some reason did not break of its own weight--he was given charge of the extras with news from the front; and the burning importance of his mission, the bringing of news hot from the field of battle, spurred him to endeavors that won plaudits and success. he became a sort of subeditor. when the forms of the paper were ready to close and ament was needed to supply more matter, it was sam who was delegated to find that rather uncertain and elusive person and labor with him until the required copy was produced. thus it was he saw literature in the making. it is not believed that sam had any writing ambitions of his own. his chief desire was to be an all-round journeyman printer like pet mcmurry; to drift up and down the world in pet's untrammeled fashion; to see all that pet had seen and a number of things which pet appeared to have overlooked. he varied on occasion from this ambition. when the first negro minstrel show visited hannibal and had gone, he yearned for a brief period to be a magnificent “middle man” or even the “end-man” of that combination; when the circus came and went, he dreamed of the day when, a capering frescoed clown, he would set crowded tiers of spectators guffawing at his humor; when the traveling hypnotist arrived, he volunteered as a subject, and amazed the audience by the marvel of his performance. in later life he claimed that he had not been hypnotized in any degree, but had been pretending throughout--a statement always denied by his mother and his brother orion. this dispute was never settled, and never could be. sam clemens's tendency to somnambulism would seem to suggest that he really might have taken on a hypnotic condition, while his consummate skill as an actor, then and always, and his early fondness of exhibition and a joke, would make it not unlikely that he was merely “showing off” and having his fun. he could follow the dictates of a vivid imagination and could be as outrageous as he chose without incurring responsibility of any sort. but there was a penalty: he must allow pins and needles to be thrust into his flesh and suffer these tortures without showing discomfort to the spectators. it is difficult to believe that any boy, however great his exhibitory passion, could permit, in the full possession of his sensibilities, a needle to be thrust deeply into his flesh without manifestations of a most unmesmeric sort. the conclusion seems warranted that he began by pretending, but that at times he was at least under semi-mesmeric control. at all events, he enjoyed a week of dazzling triumph, though in the end he concluded to stick to printing as a trade. we have said that he was a rapid learner and a neat workman. at ament's he generally had a daily task, either of composition or press-work, after which he was free. when he had got the hang of his work he was usually done by three in the afternoon; then away to the river or the cave, as in the old days, sometimes with his boy friends, sometimes with laura hawkins gathering wild columbine on that high cliff overlooking the river, lover's leap. he was becoming quite a beau, attending parties on occasion, where old-fashioned games--forfeits, ring-around-a-rosy, dusty miller, and the like--were regarded as rare amusements. he was a favorite with girls of his own age. he was always good-natured, though he played jokes on them, too, and was often a severe trial. he was with laura hawkins more than the others, usually her escort. on saturday afternoons in winter he carried her skates to bear creek and helped her to put them on. after which they skated “partners,” holding hands tightly, and were a likely pair of children, no doubt. in the gilded age laura hawkins at twelve is pictured “with her dainty hands propped into the ribbon-bordered pockets of her apron... a vision to warm the coldest heart and bless and cheer the saddest.” the author had the real laura of his childhood in his mind when he wrote that, though the story itself bears no resemblance to her life. they were never really sweethearts, those two. they were good friends and comrades. sometimes he brought her magazines--exchanges from the printing--office--godey's and others. these were a treat, for such things were scarce enough. he cared little for reading, himself, beyond a few exciting tales, though the putting into type of a good deal of miscellaneous matter had beyond doubt developed in him a taste for general knowledge. it needed only to be awakened. xvi. the turning-point there came into his life just at this period one of those seemingly trifling incidents which, viewed in retrospect, assume pivotal proportions. he was on his way from the office to his home one afternoon when he saw flying along the pavement a square of paper, a leaf from a book. at an earlier time he would not have bothered with it at all, but any printed page had acquired a professional interest for him now. he caught the flying scrap and examined it. it was a leaf from some history of joan of arc. the “maid” was described in the cage at rouen, in the fortress, and the two ruffian english soldiers had stolen her clothes. there was a brief description and a good deal of dialogue--her reproaches and their ribald replies. he had never heard of the subject before. he had never read any history. when he wanted to know any fact he asked henry, who read everything obtainable. now, however, there arose within him a deep compassion for the gentle maid of orleans, a burning resentment toward her captors, a powerful and indestructible interest in her sad history. it was an interest that would grow steadily for more than half a lifetime and culminate at last in that crowning work, the recollections, the loveliest story ever told of the martyred girl. the incident meant even more than that: it meant the awakening of his interest in all history--the world's story in its many phases--a passion which became the largest feature of his intellectual life and remained with him until his very last day on earth. from the moment when that fluttering leaf was blown into his hands his career as one of the world's mentally elect was assured. it gave him his cue--the first word of a part in the human drama. it crystallized suddenly within him sympathy with the oppressed, rebellion against tyranny and treachery, scorn for the divine rights of kings. a few months before he died he wrote a paper on “the turning-point of my life.” for some reason he did not mention this incident. yet if there was a turning-point in his life, he reached it that bleak afternoon on the streets of hannibal when a stray leaf from another life was blown into his hands. he read hungrily now everything he could find relating to the french wars, and to joan in particular. he acquired an appetite for history in general, the record of any nation or period; he seemed likely to become a student. presently he began to feel the need of languages, french and german. there was no opportunity to acquire french, that he could discover, but there was a german shoemaker in hannibal who agreed to teach his native tongue. sam clemens got a friend--very likely it was john briggs--to form a class with him, and together they arranged for lessons. the shoemaker had little or no english. they had no german. it would seem, however, that their teacher had some sort of a “word-book,” and when they assembled in his little cubby-hole of a retreat he began reading aloud from it this puzzling sentence: “de hain eet flee whoop in de hayer.” “dere!” he said, triumphantly; “you know dose vord?” the students looked at each other helplessly. the teacher repeated the sentence, and again they were helpless when he asked if they recognized it. then in despair he showed them the book. it was an english primer, and the sentence was: “the hen, it flies up in the air.” they explained to him gently that it was german they wished to learn, not english--not under the circumstances. later, sam made an attempt at latin, and got a book for that purpose, but gave it up, saying: “no, that language is not for me. i'll do well enough to learn english.” a boy who took it up with him became a latin scholar. his prejudice against oppression he put into practice. boys who were being imposed upon found in him a ready protector. sometimes, watching a game of marbles or tops, he would remark in his slow, impressive way: “you mustn't cheat that boy.” and the cheating stopped. when it didn't, there was a combat, with consequences. xvii. the hannibal “journal” orion returned from st. louis. he felt that he was needed in hannibal and, while wages there were lower, his expenses at home were slight; there was more real return for the family fund. his sister pamela was teaching a class in hannibal at this time. orion was surprised when his mother and sister greeted him with kisses and tears. any outward display of affection was new to him. the family had moved back across the street by this time. with sam supporting himself, the earnings of orion and pamela provided at least a semblance of comfort. but orion was not satisfied. then, as always, he had a variety of vague ambitions. oratory appealed to him, and he delivered a temperance lecture with an accompaniment of music, supplied chiefly by pamela. he aspired to the study of law, a recurring inclination throughout his career. he also thought of the ministry, an ambition which sam shared with him for a time. every mischievous boy has it, sooner or later, though not all for the same reasons. “it was the most earnest ambition i ever had,” mark twain once remarked, thoughtfully. “not that i ever really wanted to be a preacher, but because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. it looked like a safe job.” a periodical ambition of orion's was to own and conduct a paper in hannibal. he felt that in such a position he might become a power in western journalism. once his father had considered buying the hannibal journal to give orion a chance, and possibly to further his own political ambitions. now orion considered it for himself. the paper was for sale under a mortgage, and he was enabled to borrow the $ which would secure ownership. sam's two years at ament's were now complete, and orion induced him to take employment on the journal. henry at eleven was taken out of school to learn typesetting. orion was a gentle, accommodating soul, but he lacked force and independence. “i followed all the advice i received,” he says in his record. “if two or more persons conflicted with each other, i adopted the views of the last.” he started full of enthusiasm. he worked like a slave to save help: wrote his own editorials, and made his literary selections at night. the others worked too. orion gave them hard tasks and long hours. he had the feeling that the paper meant fortune or failure to them all; that all must labor without stint. in his usual self-accusing way he wrote afterward: i was tyrannical and unjust to sam. he was as swift and as clean as a good journeyman. i gave him tasks, and if he got through well i begrudged him the time and made him work more. he set a clean proof, and henry a very dirty one. the correcting was left to be done in the form the day before publication. once we were kept late, and sam complained with tears of bitterness that he was held till midnight on henry's dirty proofs. orion did not realize any injustice at the time. the game was too desperate to be played tenderly. his first editorials were so brilliant that it was not believed he could have written them. the paper throughout was excellent, and seemed on the high road to success. but the pace was too hard to maintain. overwork brought weariness, and orion's enthusiasm, never a very stable quantity, grew feeble. he became still more exacting. it is not to be supposed that sam clemens had given up all amusements to become merely a toiling drudge or had conquered in any large degree his natural taste for amusement. he had become more studious; but after the long, hard days in the office it was not to be expected that a boy of fifteen would employ the evening--at least not every evening--in reading beneficial books. the river was always near at hand--for swimming in the summer and skating in the winter--and once even at this late period it came near claiming a heavy tribute. that was one winter's night when with another boy he had skated until nearly midnight. they were about in the middle of the river when they heard a terrific and grinding noise near the shore. they knew what it was. the ice was breaking up, and they set out for home forthwith. it was moonlight, and they could tell the ice from the water, which was a good thing, for there were wide cracks toward the shore, and they had to wait for these to close. they were an hour making the trip, and just before they reached the bank they came to a broad space of water. the ice was lifting and falling and crunching all around them. they waited as long as they dared and decided to leap from cake to cake. sam made the crossing without accident, but his companion slipped in when a few feet from shore. he was a good swimmer and landed safely, but the bath probably cost him his hearing. he was taken very ill. one disease followed another, ending with scarlet fever and deafness. there was also entertainment in the office itself. a country boy named jim wolfe had come to learn the trade--a green, good-natured, bashful boy. in every trade tricks are played on the new apprentice, and sam felt that it was his turn to play them. with john briggs to help him, tortures for jim wolfe were invented and applied. they taught him to paddle a canoe, and upset him. they took him sniping at night and left him “holding the bag” in the old traditional fashion while they slipped off home and went to bed. but jim wolfe's masterpiece of entertainment was one which he undertook on his own account. pamela was having a candy-pull down-stairs one night--a grown-up candy-pull to which the boys were not expected. jim would not have gone, anyway, for he was bashful beyond belief, and always dumb, and even pale with fear, in the presence of pretty pamela clemens. up in their room the boys could hear the merriment from below and could look out in the moonlight on the snowy sloping roof that began just beneath their window. down at the eaves was the small arbor, green in summer, but covered now with dead vines and snow. they could hear the candymakers come out, now and then, doubtless setting out pans of candy to cool. by and by the whole party seemed to come out into the little arbor, to try the candy, perhaps the joking and laughter came plainly to the boys up-stairs. about this time there appeared on the roof from somewhere two disreputable cats, who set up a most disturbing duel of charge and recrimination. jim detested the noise, and perhaps was gallant enough to think it would disturb the party. he had nothing to throw at them, but he said: “for two cents i'd get out there and knock their heads off.” “you wouldn't dare to do it,” sam said, purringly. this was wormwood to jim. he was really a brave spirit. “i would too,” he said, “and i will if you say that again.” “why, jim, of course you wouldn't dare to go out there. you might catch cold.” “you wait and see,” said jim wolfe. he grabbed a pair of yarn stockings for his feet, raised the window, and crept out on the snowy roof. there was a crust of ice on the snow, but jim jabbed his heels through it and stood up in the moonlight, his legs bare, his single garment flapping gently in the light winter breeze. then he started slowly toward the cats, sinking his heels in the snow each time for a footing, a piece of lath in his hand. the cats were on the corner of the roof above the arbor, and jim cautiously worked his way in that direction. the roof was not very steep. he was doing well enough until he came to a place where the snow had melted until it was nearly solid ice. he was so intent on the cats that he did not notice this, and when he struck his heel down to break the crust nothing yielded. a second later jim's feet had shot out from under him, and he vaulted like an avalanche down the icy roof out on the little vine-clad arbor, and went crashing through among those candypullers, gathered there with their pans of cooling taffy. there were wild shrieks and a general flight. neither jim nor sam ever knew how he got back to their room, but jim was overcome with the enormity of his offense, while sam was in an agony of laughter. “you did it splendidly, jim,” he drawled, when he could speak. “nobody could have done it better; and did you see how those cats got out of there? i never had any idea when you started that you meant to do it that way. and it was such a surprise to the folks down-stairs. how did you ever think of it?” it was a fearful ordeal for a boy like jim wolfe, but he stuck to his place in spite of what he must have suffered. the boys made him one of them soon after that. his initiation was thought to be complete. an account of jim wolfe and the cats was the first original story mark twain ever told. he told it next day, which was sunday, to jimmy mcdaniel, the baker's son, as they sat looking out over the river, eating gingerbread. his hearer laughed immoderately, and the story-teller was proud and happy in his success. xviii. the beginning of a literary life orion's paper continued to go downhill. following some random counsel, he changed the name of it and advanced the price--two blunders. then he was compelled to reduce the subscription, also the advertising rates. he was obliged to adopt a descending scale of charges and expenditures to keep pace with his declining circulation--a fatal sign. a publisher must lead his subscription list, not follow it. “i was walking backward,” he said, “not seeing where i stepped.” in desperation he broke away and made a trip to tennessee to see if something could not be realized on the land, leaving his brother sam in charge of the office. it was a journey without financial results; yet it bore fruit, for it marked the beginning of mark twain's literary career. sam, in his brother's absence, concluded to edit the paper in a way that would liven up the circulation. he had never done any writing--not for print--but he had the courage of his inclinations. his local items were of a kind known as “spicy”; his personals brought prompt demand for satisfaction. the editor of a rival paper had been in love, and was said to have gone to the river one night to drown himself. sam gave a picturesque account of this, with all the names connected with the affair. then he took a couple of big wooden block letters, turned them upside down, and engraved illustrations for it, showing the victim wading out into the river with a stick to test the depth of the water. when this issue of the paper came out the demand for it was very large. the press had to be kept running steadily to supply copies. the satirized editor at first swore that he would thrash the whole journal office, then he left town and did not come back any more. the embryo mark twain also wrote a poem. it was addressed “to mary in hannibal,” but the title was too long to be set in one column, so he left out all the letters in hannibal, except the first and the last, and supplied their place with a dash, with a startling result. such were the early flickerings of a smoldering genius. orion returned, remonstrated, and apologized. he reduced sam to the ranks. in later years he saw his mistake. “i could have distanced all competitors even then,” he said, “if i had recognized sam's ability and let him go ahead, merely keeping him from offending worthy persons.” sam was subdued, but not done for. he never would be, now. he had got his first taste of print, and he liked it. he promptly wrote two anecdotes which he thought humorous and sent them to the philadelphia saturday evening post. they were accepted--without payment, of course, in those days; and when the papers containing them appeared he felt suddenly lifted to a lofty plane of literature. this was in . “seeing them in print was a joy which rather exceeded anything in that line i have ever experienced since,” he said, nearly sixty years later. yet he did not feel inspired to write anything further for the post. twice during the next two years he contributed to the journal; once something about jim wolfe, though it was not the story of the cats, and another burlesque on a rival editor whom he pictured as hunting snipe with a cannon, the explosion of which was said to have blown the snipe out of the country. no contributions of this time have been preserved. high prices have been offered for copies of the hannibal journal containing them, but without success. the post sketches were unsigned and have not been identified. it is likely they were trivial enough. his earliest work showed no special individuality or merit, being mainly crude and imitative, as the work of a boy--even a precocious boy--is likely to be. he was not especially precocious--not in literature. his literary career would halt and hesitate and trifle along for many years yet, gathering impetus and equipment for the fuller, statelier swing which would bring a greater joy to the world at large, even if not to himself, than that first, far-off triumph.--[in mark twain's sketch “my first literary venture” he has set down with characteristic embroideries some account of this early authorship.] those were hard financial days. orion could pay nothing on his mortgage--barely the interest. he had promised sam three dollars and a half a week, but he could do no more than supply him with board and clothes--“poor, shabby clothes,” he says in his record. “my mother and sister did the housekeeping. my mother was cook. she used the provisions i supplied her. we therefore had a regular diet of bacon, butter, bread, and coffee.” mrs. clemens again took a few boarders; pamela, who had given up teaching for a time, organized another music class. orion became despondent. one night a cow got into the office, upset a typecase, and ate up two composition rollers. orion felt that fate was dealing with a heavy hand. another disaster quickly followed. fire broke out in the office, and the loss was considerable. an insurance company paid one hundred and fifty dollars. with it orion replaced such articles as were absolutely needed for work, and removed his plant into the front room of the clemens dwelling. he raised the one-story part of the building to give them an added room up-stairs; and there for another two years, by hard work and pinching economies, the dying paper managed to drag along. it was the fire that furnished sam clemens with his jim wolfe sketch. in it he stated that jim in his excitement had carried the office broom half a mile and had then come back after the wash-pan. in the meantime pamela clemens married. her husband was a well-to-do merchant, william a. moffett, formerly of hannibal, but then of st. louis, where he had provided her with the comforts of a substantial home. orion tried the experiment of a serial story. he wrote to a number of well-known authors in the east, but was unable to find one who would supply a serial for the price he was willing to pay. finally he obtained a translation of a french novel for the sum offered, which was five dollars. it did not save the sinking ship, however. he made the experiment of a tri-weekly, without success. he noticed that even his mother no longer read his editorials, but turned to the general news. this was a final blow. “i sat down in the dark,” he says, “the moon glinting in at the open door. i sat with one leg over the chair and let my mind float.” he had received an offer of five hundred dollars for his office--the amount of the mortgage--and in his moonlight reverie he decided to dispose of it on those terms. this was in . his brother samuel was no longer with him. several months before, in june, sam decided he would go out into the world. he was in his eighteenth year now, a good workman, faithful and industrious, but he had grown restless in unrewarded service. beyond his mastery of the trade he had little to show for six years of hard labor. once when he had asked orion for a few dollars to buy a second-hand gun, orion, exasperated by desperate circumstances, fell into a passion and rated him for thinking of such extravagance. soon afterward sam confided to his mother that he was going away; that he believed orion hated him; that there was no longer a place for him at home. he said he would go to st. louis, where pamela was. there would be work for him in st. louis, and he could send money home. his intention was to go farther than st. louis, but he dared not tell her. his mother put together sadly enough the few belongings of what she regarded as her one wayward boy; then she held up a little testament: “i want you to take hold of the other end of this, sam,” she said, “and make me a promise.” if one might have a true picture of that scene: the shin, wiry woman of forty-nine, her figure as straight as her deportment, gray-eyed, tender, and resolute, facing the fair-cheeked, auburn-haired youth of seventeen, his eyes as piercing and unwavering as her own. mother and son, they were of the same metal and the same mold. “i want you to repeat after me, sam, these words,” jane clemens said. “i do solemnly swear that i will not throw a card or drink a drop of liquor while i am gone.” he repeated the oath after her, and she kissed him. “remember that, sam, and write to us,” she said. “and so,” orion records, “he went wandering in search of that comfort and that advancement and those rewards of industry which he had failed to find where i was--gloomy, taciturn, and selfish. i not only missed his labor; we all missed his bounding activity and merriment.” xix. in the footsteps of franklin he went to st. louis by the night boat, visited his sister pamela, and found a job in the composing-room of the evening news. he remained on the paper only long enough to earn money with which to see the world. the “world” was new york city, where the crystal palace fair was then going on. the railway had been completed by this time, but he had not traveled on it. it had not many comforts; several days and nights were required for the new york trip; yet it was a wonderful and beautiful experience. he felt that even pet mcmurry could hardly have done anything to surpass it. he arrived in new york with two or three dollars in his pocket and a ten-dollar bill concealed in the lining of his coat. new york was a great and amazing city. it almost frightened him. it covered the entire lower end of manhattan island; visionary citizens boasted that one day it would cover it all. the world's fair building, the crystal palace, stood a good way out. it was where bryant park is now, on forty-second street and sixth avenue. young clemens classed it as one of the wonders of the world and wrote lavishly of its marvels. a portion of a letter to his sister pamela has been preserved and is given here not only for what it contains, but as the earliest existing specimen of his composition. the fragment concludes what was doubtless an exhaustive description. from the gallery (second floor) you have a glorious sight--the flags of the different countries represented, the lofty dome, glittering jewelry, gaudy tapestry, etc., with the busy crowd passing to and fro 'tis a perfect fairy palace--beautiful beyond description. the machinery department is on the main floor, but i cannot enumerate any of it on account of the lateness of the hour (past o'clock). it would take more than a week to examine everything on exhibition; and i was only in a little over two hours to-night. i only glanced at about one-third of the articles; and, having a poor memory, i have enumerated scarcely any of even the principal objects. the visitors to the palace average , daily--double the population of hannibal. the price of admission being cents, they take in about $ , . the latting observatory (height about feet) is near the palace --from it you can obtain a grand view of the city and the country around. the croton aqueduct, to supply the city with water, is the greatest wonder yet. immense sewers are laid across the bed of the hudson river, and pass through the country to westchester county, where a whole river is turned from its course and brought to new york. from the reservoir in the city to the westchester county reservoir the distance is thirty-eight miles and, if necessary, they could easily supply every family in new york with one hundred barrels of water per day! i am very sorry to learn that henry has been sick. he ought to go to the country and take exercise, for he is not half so healthy as ma thinks he is. if he had my walking to do, he would be another boy entirely. four times every day i walk a little over a mile; and working hard all day and walking four miles is exercise. i am used to it now, though, and it is no trouble. where is it orion's going to? tell ma my promises are faithfully kept; and if i have my health i will take her to ky. in the spring--i shall save money for this. tell jim (wolfe) and all the rest of them to write, and give me all the news.... (it has just struck a.m., and i always get up at , and am at work at .) you ask where i spend my evenings. where would you suppose, with a free printer's library containing more than , volumes within a quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to? write soon. truly your brother, sam p.s.-i have written this by a light so dim that you nor ma could not read by it. write, and let me know how henry is. it is a good letter; it is direct and clear in its descriptive quality, and it gives us a scale of things. double the population of hannibal visited the crystal palace in one day! and the water to supply the city came a distance of thirty-eight miles! doubtless these were amazing statistics. then there was the interest in family affairs--always strong--his concern for henry, whom he loved tenderly; his memory of the promise to his mother; his understanding of her craving to visit her old home. he did not write to her direct, for the reason that orion's plans were then uncertain, and it was not unlikely that he had already found a new location. from this letter, too, we learn that the boy who detested school was reveling in a library of four thousand books--more than he had ever seen together before. we have somehow the feeling that he had all at once stepped from boyhood to manhood, and that the separation was marked by a very definite line. the work he had secured was in cliff street in the printing establishment of john a. gray & green, who agreed to pay him four dollars a week, and did pay that amount in wildcat money, which saved them about twenty-five per cent. of the sum. he lodged at a mechanics' boarding-house in duane street, and when he had paid his board and washing he sometimes had as much as fifty cents to lay away. he did not like the board. he had been accustomed to the southern mode of cooking, and wrote home complaining that new-yorkers did not have “hot-bread” or biscuits, but ate “light-bread,” which they allowed to get stale, seeming to prefer it in that way. on the whole, there was not much inducement to remain in new york after he had satisfied himself with its wonders. he lingered, however, through the hot months of , and found it not easy to go. in october he wrote to pamela, suggesting plans for orion; also for henry and jim wolfe, whom he seems never to have overlooked. among other things he says: i have not written to any of the family for some time, from the fact, firstly, that i didn't know where they were, and, secondly, because i have been fooling myself with the idea that i was going to leave new york every day for the last two weeks. i have taken a liking to the abominable place, and every time i get ready to leave i put it off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause. i think i shall get off tuesday, though. edwin forrest has been playing for the last sixteen days at the broadway theater, but i never went to see him till last night. the play was the “gladiator.” i did not like parts of it much, but other portions were really splendid. in the latter part of the last act, where the “gladiator” (forrest) dies at his brother's feet (in all the fierce pleasure of gratified revenge), the man's whole soul seems absorbed in the part he is playing; and it is really startling to see him. i am sorry i did not see him play “damon and pythias” --the former character being the greatest. he appears in philadelphia on monday night. i have not received a letter from home lately, but got a “journal” the other day, in which i see the office has been sold.... if my letters do not come often, you need not bother yourself about me; for if you have a brother nearly eighteen years of age who is not able to take care of himself a few miles from home, such a brother is not worth one's thoughts; and if i don't manage to take care of no. , be assured you will never know it. i am not afraid, however; i shall ask favors of no one and endeavor to be (and shall be) as “independent as a wood-sawyer's clerk.”... passage to albany ( miles) on the finest steamers that ply the hudson is now cents--cheap enough, but is generally cheaper than that in the summer. “i have been fooling myself with the idea that i was going to leave new york” is distinctly a mark twain phrase. he might have said that fifty years later. he did go to philadelphia presently and found work “subbing” on a daily paper, 'the inquirer.' he was a fairly swift compositor. he could set ten thousand ems a day, and he received pay according to the amount of work done. days or evenings when there was no vacant place for him to fill he visited historic sites, the art-galleries, and the libraries. he was still acquiring education, you see. sometimes at night when he returned to his boardinghouse his room-mate, an englishman named sumner, grilled a herring, and this was regarded as a feast. he tried his hand at writing in philadelphia, though this time without success. for some reason he did not again attempt to get into the post, but offered his contributions to the philadelphia 'ledger'--mainly poetry of an obituary kind. perhaps it was burlesque; he never confessed that, but it seems unlikely that any other obituary poetry would have failed of print. “my efforts were not received with approval,” was all he ever said of it afterward. there were two or three characters in the 'inquirer' office whom he did not forget. one of these was an old compositor who had “held a case” in that office for many years. his name was frog, and sometimes when he went away the “office devils” would hang a line over his case, with a hook on it baited with a piece of red flannel. they never got tired of this joke, and frog was always able to get as mad over it as he had been in the beginning. another old fellow there furnished amusement. he owned a house in the distant part of the city and had an abnormal fear of fire. now and then, when everything was quiet except the clicking of the types, some one would step to the window and say with a concerned air: “doesn't that smoke--[or that light, if it was evening]--seem to be in the northwestern part of the city?” or “there go the fire-bells again!” and away the old man would tramp up to the roof to investigate. it was not the most considerate sport, and it is to be feared that sam clemens had his share in it. he found that he liked philadelphia. he could save a little money there, for one thing, and now and then sent something to his mother--small amounts, but welcome and gratifying, no doubt. in a letter to orion--whom he seems to have forgiven with absence--written october th, he incloses a gold dollar to buy her a handkerchief, and “to serve as a specimen of the kind of stuff we are paid with in philadelphia.” further along he adds: unlike new york, i like this philadelphia amazingly, and the people in it. there is only one thing that gets my “dander” up--and that is the hands are always encouraging me: telling me “it's no use to get discouraged--no use to be downhearted, for there is more work here than you can do!” “downhearted,” the devil! i have not had a particle of such a feeling since i left hannibal, more than four months ago. i fancy they'll have to wait some time till they see me downhearted or afraid of starving while i have strength to work and am in a city of , inhabitants. when i was in hannibal, before i had scarcely stepped out of the town limits, nothing could have convinced me that i would starve as soon as i got a little way from home. he mentions the grave of franklin in christ churchyard with its inscription “benjamin and deborah franklin,” and one is sharply reminded of the similarity between the early careers of benjamin franklin and samuel clemens. each learned the printer's trade; each worked in his brother's printing-office and wrote for the paper; each left quietly and went to new york, and from new york to philadelphia, as a journeyman printer; each in due season became a world figure, many-sided, human, and of incredible popularity. the foregoing letter ends with a long description of a trip made on the fairmount stage. it is a good, vivid description--impressions of a fresh, sensitive mind, set down with little effort at fine writing; a letter to convey literal rather than literary enjoyment. the wire bridge, fairmount park and reservoir, new buildings--all these passed in review. a fine residence about completed impressed him: it was built entirely of great blocks of red granite. the pillars in front were all finished but one. these pillars were beautiful, ornamental fluted columns, considerably larger than a hogshead at the base, and about as high as clapinger's second-story front windows.... to see some of them finished and standing, and then the huge blocks lying about, looks so massy, and carries one, in imagination, to the ruined piles of ancient babylon. i despise the infernal bogus brick columns plastered over with mortar. marble is the cheapest building-stone about philadelphia. there is a flavor of the 'innocents' about it; then a little further along: i saw small steamboats, with their signs up--“for wissahickon and manayunk cents.” geo. lippard, in his legends of washington and his generals, has rendered the wissahickon sacred in my eyes, and i shall make that trip, as well as one to germantown, soon.... there is one fine custom observed in phila. a gentleman is always expected to hand up a lady's money for her. yesterday i sat in the front end of the bus, directly under the driver's box--a lady sat opposite me. she handed me her money, which was right. but, lord! a st. louis lady would think herself ruined if she should be so familiar with a stranger. in st. louis a man will sit in the front end of the stage, and see a lady stagger from the far end to pay her fare. there are two more letters from philadelphia: one of november, th, to orion, who by this time had bought a paper in muscatine, iowa, and located the family there; and one to pamela dated december th. evidently orion had realized that his brother might be of value as a contributor, for the latter says: i will try to write for the paper occasionally, but i fear my letters will be very uninteresting, for this incessant night work dulls one's ideas amazingly.... i believe i am the only person in the inquirer office that does not drink. one young fellow makes $ for a few weeks, and gets on a grand “bender” and spends every cent of it. how do you like “free soil”?--i would like amazingly to see a good old-fashioned negro. my love to all. truly your brother, sam in the letter to pamela he is clearly homesick. “i only want to return to avoid night work, which is injuring my eyes,” is the excuse, but in the next sentence he complains of the scarcity of letters from home and those “not written as they should be.” “one only has to leave home to learn how to write interesting letters to an absent friend,” he says, and in conclusion, “i don't like our present prospect for cold weather at all.” he had been gone half a year, and the first attack of home-longing, for a boy of his age, was due. the novelty of things had worn off; it was coming on winter; changes had taken place among his home people and friends; the life he had known best and longest was going on and he had no part in it. leaning over his case, he sometimes hummed: “an exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain.” he weathered the attack and stuck it out for more than half a year longer. in january, when the days were dark and he grew depressed, he made a trip to washington to see the sights of the capital. his stay was comparatively brief, and he did not work there. he returned to philadelphia, working for a time on the ledger and north american. finally he went back to new york. there are no letters of this period. his second experience in new york appears not to have been recorded, and in later years was only vaguely remembered. it was late in the summer of when he finally set out on his return to the west. his 'wanderjahr' had lasted nearly fifteen months. he went directly to st. louis, sitting up three days and nights in a smoking-car to make the journey. he was worn out when he arrived, but stopped there only a few hours to see pamela. it was his mother he was anxious for. he took the keokuk packet that night, and, flinging himself on his berth, slept the clock three times around, scarcely rousing or turning over, only waking at last at muscatine. for a long time that missing day confused his calculations. when he reached orion's house the family sat at breakfast. he came in carrying a gun. they had not been expecting him, and there was a general outcry, and a rush in his direction. he warded them off, holding the butt of the gun in front of him. “you wouldn't let me buy a gun,” he said, “so i bought one myself, and i am going to use it, now, in self-defense.” “you, sam! you, sam!” cried jane clemens. “behave yourself,” for she was wary of a gun. then he had had his joke and gave himself into his mother's arms. xx. keokuk days orion wished his brother to remain with him in the muscatine office, but the young man declared he must go to st. louis and earn some money before he would be able to afford that luxury: he returned to his place on the st. louis evening news, where he remained until late winter or early spring of the following year. he lived at this time with a pavey family, probably one of the hannibal paveys, rooming with a youth named frank e. burrough, a journeyman chair-maker with a taste for dickens, thackeray, scott, and disraeli. burrough had really a fine literary appreciation for his years, and the boys were comrades and close friends. twenty-two years later mark twain exchanged with burrough some impressions of himself at that earlier time. clemens wrote: my dear burrough,--as you describe me i can picture myself as i was years ago. the portrait is correct. you think i have grown some; upon my word there was room for it. you have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern in air, heaving at his bit of dung, imagining that he is remodeling the world and is entirely capable of doing it right.... that is what i was at - . orion clemens in the mean time had married and removed to keokuk. he had married during a visit to that city, in the casual, impulsive way so characteristic of him, and the fact that he had acquired a wife in the operation seemed at first to have escaped his inner consciousness. he tells it himself; he says: at sunrise on the next morning after the wedding we left in a stage for muscatine. we halted for dinner at burlington. after despatching that meal we stood on the pavement when the stage drove up, ready for departure. i climbed in, gathered the buffalo robe around me, and leaned back unconscious that i had anything further to do. a gentleman standing on the pavement said to my wife, “miss, do you go by this stage?” i said, “oh, i forgot!” and sprang out and helped her in. a wife was a new kind of possession to which i had not yet become accustomed; i had forgotten her. orion's wife had been mary stotts; her mother a friend of jane clemens's girlhood. she proved a faithful helpmate to orion; but in those early days of marriage she may have found life with him rather trying, and it was her homesickness that brought them to keokuk. brother sam came up from st. louis, by and by, to visit them, and orion offered him five dollars a week and board to remain. he accepted. the office at this time, or soon after, was located on the third floor of main street, in the building at present occupied by the paterson shoe company. henry clemens, now seventeen, was also in orion's employ, and a lad by the name of dick hingham. henry and sam slept in the office, and dick came in for social evenings. also a young man named edward brownell, who clerked in the book-store on the ground floor. these were likely to be lively evenings. a music dealer and teacher, professor isbell, occupied the floor just below, and did not care for their diversions. he objected, but hardly in the right way. had he gone to samuel clemens gently, he undoubtedly would have found him willing to make any concessions. instead, he assailed him roughly, and the next evening the boys set up a lot of empty wine-bottles, which they had found in a barrel in a closet, and, with stones for balls, played tenpins on the office floor. this was dick and sam; henry declined to join the game. isbell rushed up-stairs and battered on the door, but they paid no attention. next morning he waited for the young men and denounced them wildly. they merely ignored him, and that night organized a military company, made up of themselves and a new german apprentice-boy, and drilled up and down over the singing-class. dick hingham led these military manoeuvers. he was a girlish sort of a fellow, but he had a natural taste for soldiering. the others used to laugh at him. they called him a disguised girl, and declared he would run if a gun were really pointed in his direction. they were mistaken; seven years later dick died at fort donelson with a bullet in his forehead: this, by the way. isbell now adopted new tactics. he came up very pleasantly and said: “i like your military practice better than your tenpin exercise, but on the whole it seems to disturb the young ladies. you see how it is yourself. you couldn't possibly teach music with a company of raw recruits drilling overhead--now, could you? won't you please stop it? it bothers my pupils.” sam clemens regarded him with mild surprise. “does it?” he said, very deliberately. “why didn't you mention it before? to be sure we don't want to disturb the young ladies.” they gave up the horse-play, and not only stopped the disturbance, but joined one of the singing--classes. samuel clemens had a pretty good voice in those days and could drum fairly well on a piano and guitar. he did not become a brilliant musician, but he was easily the most popular member of the singing-class. they liked his frank nature, his jokes, and his humor; his slow, quaint fashion of speech. the young ladies called him openly and fondly a “fool”--a term of endearment, as they applied it meaning only that he kept them in a more or less constant state of wonder and merriment; and indeed it would have been hard for them to say whether he was really light-minded and frivolous or the wisest of them all. he was twenty now and at the age for love-making; yet he remained, as in hannibal, a beau rather than a suitor, good friend and comrade to all, wooer of none. ella creel, a cousin on the lampton side, a great belle; also ella patterson (related through orion's wife and generally known as “ick”), and belle stotts were perhaps his favorite companions, but there were many more. he was always ready to stop and be merry with them, full of his pranks and pleasantries; though they noticed that he quite often carried a book under his arm--a history or a volume of dickens or the tales of edgar allan poe. he read at odd moments; at night voluminously--until very late, sometimes. already in that early day it was his habit to smoke in bed, and he had made him an oriental pipe of the hubble-bubble variety, because it would hold more and was more comfortable than the regular short pipe of daytime use. but it had its disadvantages. sometimes it would go out, and that would mean sitting up and reaching for a match and leaning over to light the bowl which stood on the floor. young brownell from below was passing upstairs to his room on the fourth floor one night when he heard sam clemens call. the two were great chums by this time, and brownell poked his head in at the door. “what will you have, sam?” he asked. “come in, ed; henry's asleep, and i am in trouble. i want somebody to light my pipe.” “why don't you get up and light it yourself?” brownell asked. “i would, only i knew you'd be along in a few minutes and would do it for me.” brownell scratched the necessary match, stooped down, and applied it. “what are you reading, sam?” he asked. “oh, nothing much--a so-called funny book--one of these days i'll write a funnier book than that, myself.” brownell laughed. “no, you won't, sam,” he said. “you are too lazy ever to write a book.” a good many years later when the name “mark twain” had begun to stand for american humor the owner of it gave his “sandwich island” lecture in keokuk. speaking of the unreliability of the islanders, he said: “the king is, i believe, one of the greatest liars on the face of the earth, except one; and i am very sorry to locate that one right here in the city of keokuk, in the person of ed brownell.” the keokuk episode in mark twain's life was neither very long nor very actively important. it extended over a period of less than two years--two vital years, no doubt, if all the bearings could be known--but they were not years of startling occurrence. yet he made at least one beginning there: at a printers' banquet he delivered his first after-dinner speech; a hilarious speech--its humor of a primitive kind. whatever its shortcomings, it delighted his audience, and raised him many points in the public regard. he had entered a field of entertainment in which he would one day have no rival. they impressed him into a debating society after that, and there was generally a stir of attention when sam clemens was about to take the floor. orion clemens records how his brother undertook to teach the german apprentice music. “there was an old guitar in the office and sam taught fritz a song beginning: “grasshopper sitting on a sweet-potato vine, turkey came along and yanked him from behind.” the main point in the lesson was in giving to the word “yanked” the proper expression and emphasis, accompanied by a sweep of the fingers across the strings. with serious face and deep earnestness fritz in his broken english would attempt these lines, while his teacher would bend over and hold his sides with laughter at each ridiculous effort. without intending it, fritz had his revenge. one day his tormentor's hand was caught in the press when the german boy was turning the wheel. sam called to him to stop, but the boy's mind was slow to grasp the situation. the hand was badly wounded, though no bones were broken. in due time it recovered, its power and dexterity, but the trace of the scars remained. orion's printing-office was not a prosperous one; he had not the gift of prosperity in any form. when he found it difficult to pay his brother's wages, he took him into partnership, which meant that sam got no wages at all, barely a living, for the office could not keep its head above water. the junior partner was not disturbed, however. he cared little for money in those days, beyond his actual needs, and these were modest enough. his mother, now with pamela, was amply provided for. orion himself tells how his business dwindled away. he printed a keokuk directory, but it did not pay largely. he was always too eager for the work; too low in his bid for it. samuel clemens in this directory is set down as “an antiquarian” a joke, of course, though the point of it is now lost. only two of his keokuk letters have been preserved. the first indicates the general disorder of the office and a growing dissatisfaction. it is addressed to his mother and sister and bears date of june , . i don't like to work at too many things at once. they take henry and dick away from me, too. before we commenced the directory, --[orion printed two editions of the directory. this was probably the second one.]--i could tell before breakfast just how much work could be done during the day, and manage accordingly--but now, they throw all my plans into disorder by taking my hands away from their work.... i am not getting along well with the job-work. i can't work blindly--without system. i gave dick a job yesterday, which i calculated he could set in two hours and i could work off on the press in three, and therefore just finish it by supper-time, but he was transferred to the directory, and the job, promised this morning, remains untouched. through all the great pressure of job- work lately, i never before failed in a promise of the kind... the other letter is dated two months later, august th. it was written to henry, who was visiting in st. louis or hannibal at the time, and introduces the first mention of the south american fever, which now possessed the writer. lynch and herndon had completed their survey of the upper amazon, and lieutenant herndon's account of the exploration was being widely read. poring over the book nights, young clemens had been seized with a desire to go to the headwaters of the south american river, there to collect coca and make a fortune. all his life he was subject to such impulses as that, and ways and means were not always considered. it did not occur to him that it would be difficult to get to the amazon and still more difficult to ascend the river. it was his nature to see results with a dazzling largeness that blinded him to the detail of their achievement. in the “turning-point” article already mentioned he refers to this. he says: that was more than fifty years ago. in all that time my temperament has not changed by even a shade. i have been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me; i still do the thing commanded by circumstance and temperament, and reflect afterward. always violently. when i am reflecting on these occasions, even deaf persons can hear me think. in the letter to henry we see that his resolve was already made, his plans matured; also that orion had not as yet been taken into full confidence. ma knows my determination, but even she counsels me to keep it from orion. she says i can treat him as i did her when i started to st. louis and went to new york--i can start for new york and go to south america. he adds that orion had promised him fifty or one hundred dollars, but that he does not depend upon it, and will make other arrangements. he fears obstacles may be put in his way, and he will bring various influences to bear. i shall take care that ma and orion are plentifully supplied with south american books: they have herndon's report now. ward and the dr. and myself will hold a grand consultation to-night at the office. we have agreed that no more shall be admitted into our company. he had enlisted those two adventurers in his enterprise: a doctor martin and the young man, ward. they were very much in earnest, but the start was not made as planned, most likely for want of means. young clemens, however, did not give up the idea. he made up his mind to work in the direction of his desire, following his trade and laying by money for the venture. but fate or providence or accident--whatever we may choose to call the unaccountable--stepped in just then, and laid before him the means of turning another sharp corner in his career. one of those things happened which we refuse to accept in fiction as possible; but fact has a smaller regard for the credibilities. as in the case of the joan of arc episode (and this adds to its marvel), it was the wind that brought the talismanic gift. it was a day in early november--bleak, bitter, and gusty, with curling snow; most persons were indoors. samuel clemens, going down main street, saw a flying bit of paper pass him and lodge against the side of a building. something about it attracted him and he captured it. it was a fifty-dollar bill. he had never seen one before, but he recognized it. he thought he must be having a pleasant dream. the temptation came to pocket his good-fortune and say nothing. his need of money was urgent, but he had also an urgent and troublesome conscience; in the end he advertised his find. “i didn't describe it very particularly, and i waited in daily fear that the owner would turn up and take away my fortune. by and by i couldn't stand it any longer. my conscience had gotten all that was coming to it. i felt that i must take that money out of danger.” in the “turning-point” article he says: “i advertised the find and left for the amazon the same day,” a statement which we may accept with a literary discount. as a matter of fact, he remained ample time and nobody ever came for the money. it may have been swept out of a bank or caught up by the wind from some counting-room table. it may have materialized out of the unseen--who knows? at all events it carried him the first stage of a journey, the end of which he little dreamed. xxi. scotchman named macfarlane he concluded to go to cincinnati, which would be on the way either to new york or new orleans (he expected to sail from one of these points), but first paid a brief visit to his mother in st. louis, for he had a far journey and along absence in view. jane clemens made him renew his promise as to cards and liquor, and gave him her blessing. he had expected to go from st. louis to cincinnati, but a new idea--a literary idea--came to him, and he returned to keokuk. the saturday post, a keokuk weekly, was a prosperous sheet giving itself certain literary airs. he was in favor with the management, of which george rees was the head, and it had occurred to him that he could send letters of his travels to the post--for, a consideration. he may have had a still larger ambition; at least, the possibility of a book seems to have been in his consciousness. rees agreed to take letters from him at five dollars each--good payment for that time and place. the young traveler, jubilant in the prospect of receiving money for literature, now made another start, this time by way of quincy, chicago, and indianapolis according to his first letter in the post.--[supplied by thomas rees, of the springfield (illinois) register, son of george rees named.] this letter is dated cincinnati, november , , and it is not a promising literary production. it was written in the exaggerated dialect then regarded as humorous, and while here and there are flashes of the undoubted mark twain type, they are few and far between. the genius that a little more than ten years later would delight the world flickered feebly enough at twenty-one. the letter is a burlesque account of the trip to cincinnati. a brief extract from it, as characteristic as any, will serve. i went down one night to the railroad office there, purty close onto the laclede house, and bought about a quire o' yaller paper, cut up into tickets--one for each railroad in the united states, i thought, but i found out afterwards that the alexandria and boston air-line was left out--and then got a baggage feller to take my trunk down to the boat, where he spilled it out on the levee, bustin' it open and shakin' out the contents, consisting of “guides” to chicago, and “guides” to cincinnati, and travelers' guides, and all kinds of sich books, not excepting a “guide to heaven,” which last aint much use to a teller in chicago, i kin tell you. finally, that fast packet quit ringing her bell, and started down the river--but she hadn't gone morn a mile, till she ran clean up on top of a sand-bar, whar she stuck till plum one o'clock, spite of the captain's swearin' --and they had to set the whole crew to cussin' at last afore they got her off. this is humor, we may concede, of that early american type which a little later would have its flower in nasby and artemus ward. only careful examination reveals in it a hint of the later mark twain. the letters were signed “snodgrass,” and there are but two of them. the second, dated exactly four months after the first, is in the same assassinating dialect, and recounts among other things the scarcity of coal in cincinnati and an absurd adventure in which snodgrass has a baby left on his hands. from the fewness of the letters we may assume that snodgrass found them hard work, and it is said he raised on the price. at all events, the second concluded the series. they are mainly important in that they are the first of his contributions that have been preserved; also the first for which he received a cash return. he secured work at his trade in cincinnati at the printing-office of wrightson & co., and remained there until april, . that winter in cincinnati was eventless enough, but it was marked by one notable association--one that beyond doubt forwarded samuel clemens's general interest in books, influenced his taste, and inspired in him certain views and philosophies which he never forgot. he lodged at a cheap boarding-house filled with the usual commonplace people, with one exception. this exception was a long, lank, unsmiling scotchman named macfarlane, who was twice as old as clemens and wholly unlike him--without humor or any comprehension of it. yet meeting on the common plane of intellect, the two became friends. clemens spent his evenings in macfarlane's room until the clock struck ten; then macfarlane grilled a herring, just as the englishman sumner in philadelphia had done two years before, and the evening ended. macfarlane had books, serious books: histories, philosophies, and scientific works; also a bible and a dictionary. he had studied these and knew them by heart; he was a direct and diligent talker. he never talked of himself, and beyond the statement that he had acquired his knowledge from reading, and not at school, his personality was a mystery. he left the house at six in the morning and returned at the same hour in the evening. his hands were hardened from some sort of toil-mechanical labor, his companion thought, but he never knew. he would have liked to know, and he watched for some reference to slip out that would betray macfarlane's trade; but this never happened. what he did learn was that macfarlane was a veritable storehouse of abstruse knowledge; a living dictionary, and a thinker and philosopher besides. he had at least one vanity: the claim that he knew every word in the english dictionary, and he made it good. the younger man tried repeatedly to discover a word that macfarlane could not define. perhaps macfarlane was vain of his other mental attainments, for he never tired of discoursing upon deep and grave matters, and his companion never tired of listening. this scotch philosopher did not always reflect the conclusions of others; he had speculated deeply and strikingly on his own account. that was a good while before darwin and wallace gave out--their conclusions on the descent of man; yet macfarlane was already advancing a similar philosophy. he went even further: life, he said, had been developed in the course of ages from a few microscopic seed-germs--from one, perhaps, planted by the creator in the dawn of time, and that from this beginning development on an ascending scale had finally produced man. macfarlane said that the scheme had stopped there, and failed; that man had retrograded; that man's heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom: that man was the only animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness--almost the only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness. he said that man's intellect was a depraving addition to him which, in the end, placed him in a rank far below the other beasts, though it enabled him to keep them in servitude and captivity, along with many members of his own race. they were long, fermenting discourses that young samuel clemens listened to that winter in macfarlane's room, and those who knew the real mark twain and his philosophies will recognize that those evenings left their impress upon him for life. xxii. the old call of the river when spring came, with budding life and quickening impulses; when the trees in the parks began to show a hint of green, the amazonian idea developed afresh, and the would-be coca-hunter prepared for his expedition. he had saved a little money--enough to take him to new orleans--and he decided to begin his long trip with a peaceful journey down the mississippi, for once, at least, to give himself up to that indolent luxury of the majestic stream that had been so large a part of his early dreams. the ohio river steamers were not the most sumptuous craft afloat, but they were slow and hospitable. the winter had been bleak and hard. “spring fever” and a large love of indolence had combined in that drowsy condition which makes one willing to take his time. mark twain tells us in life on the mississippi that he “ran away,” vowing never to return until he could come home a pilot, shedding glory. this is a literary statement. the pilot ambition had never entirely died; but it was coca and the amazon that were uppermost in his head when he engaged passage on the paul jones for new orleans, and so conferred immortality on that ancient little craft. he bade good-by to macfarlane, put his traps aboard, the bell rang, the whistle blew, the gang-plank was hauled in, and he had set out on a voyage that was to continue not for a week or a fortnight, but for four years--four marvelous, sunlit years, the glory of which would color all that followed them. in the mississippi book the author conveys the impression of being then a boy of perhaps seventeen. writing from that standpoint he records incidents that were more or less inventions or that happened to others. he was, in reality, considerably more than twenty-one years old, for it was in april, , that he went aboard the paul jones; and he was fairly familiar with steamboats and the general requirements of piloting. he had been brought up in a town that turned out pilots; he had heard the talk of their trade. one at least of the bowen boys was already on the river while sam clemens was still a boy in hannibal, and had often been home to air his grandeur and dilate on the marvel of his work. that learning the river was no light task sam clemens very well knew. nevertheless, as the little boat made its drowsy way down the river into lands that grew ever pleasanter with advancing spring, the old “permanent ambition” of boyhood stirred again, and the call of the far-away amazon, with its coca and its variegated zoology, grew faint. horace bixby, pilot of the paul jones, then a man of thirty-two, still living ( ) and at the wheel,--[the writer of this memoir interviewed mr. bixby personally, and has followed his phrasing throughout.]--was looking out over the bow at the head of island no. when he heard a slow, pleasant voice say: “good morning.” bixby was a clean-cut, direct, courteous man. “good morning, sir,” he said, briskly, without looking around. as a rule mr. bixby did not care for visitors in the pilot-house. this one presently came up and stood a little behind him. “how would you like a young man to learn the river?” he said. the pilot glanced over his shoulder and saw a rather slender, loose-limbed young fellow with a fair, girlish complexion and a great tangle of auburn hair. “i wouldn't like it. cub pilots are more trouble than they're worth. a great deal more trouble than profit.” the applicant was not discouraged. “i am a printer by trade,” he went on, in his easy, deliberate way. “it doesn't agree with me. i thought i'd go to south america.” bixby kept his eye on the river; but a note of interest crept into his voice. “what makes you pull your words that way?” (“pulling” being the river term for drawling), he asked. the young man had taken a seat on the visitors' bench. “you'll have to ask my mother,” he said, more slowly than ever. “she pulls hers, too.” pilot bixby woke up and laughed; he had a keen sense of humor, and the manner of the reply amused him. his guest made another advance. “do you know the bowen boys?” he asked--“pilots in the st. louis and new orleans trade?” “i know them well--all three of them. william bowen did his first steering for me; a mighty good boy, too. had a testament in his pocket when he came aboard; in a week's time he had swapped it for a pack of cards. i know sam, too, and bart.” “old schoolmates of mine in hannibal. sam and will especially were my chums.” “come over and stand by the side of me,” he said. “what is your name?” the applicant told him, and the two stood looking at the sunlit water. “do you drink?” “no.” “do you gamble?” “no, sir.” “do you swear?” “not for amusement; only under pressure.” “do you chew?” “no, sir, never; but i must smoke.” “did you ever do any steering?” was bixby's next question. “i have steered everything on the river but a steamboat, i guess.” “very well; take the wheel and see what you can do with a steamboat. keep her as she is--toward that lower cottonwood, snag.” bixby had a sore foot and was glad of a little relief. he sat down on the bench and kept a careful eye on the course. by and by he said: “there is just one way that i would take a young man to learn the river: that is, for money.” “what do you charge?” “five hundred dollars, and i to be at no expense whatever.” in those days pilots were allowed to carry a learner, or “cub,” board free. mr. bixby meant that he was to be at no expense in port, or for incidentals. his terms looked rather discouraging. “i haven't got five hundred dollars in money,” sam said; “i've got a lot of tennessee land worth twenty-five cents an acre; i'll give you two thousand acres of that.” bixby dissented. “no; i don't want any unimproved real estate. i have too much already.” sam reflected upon the amount he could probably borrow from pamela's husband without straining his credit. “well, then, i'll give you one hundred dollars cash and the rest when i earn it.” something about this young man had won horace bixby's heart. his slow, pleasant speech; his unhurried, quiet manner with the wheel, his evident sincerity of purpose--these were externals, but beneath them the pilot felt something of that quality of mind or heart which later made the world love mark twain. the terms proposed were agreed upon. the deferred payments were to begin when the pupil had learned the river and was receiving pilot's wages. during mr. bixby's daylight watches his pupil was often at the wheel, that trip, while the pilot sat directing him and nursing his sore foot. any literary ambitions samuel clemens may have had grew dim; by the time they had reached new orleans he had almost forgotten he had been a printer, and when he learned that no ship would be sailing to the amazon for an indefinite period the feeling grew that a directing hand had taken charge of his affairs. from new orleans his chief did not return to cincinnati, but went to st. louis, taking with him his new cub, who thought it fine, indeed, to come steaming up to that great city with its thronging water-front; its levee fairly packed with trucks, drays, and piles of freight, the whole flanked with a solid mile of steamboats lying side by side, bow a little up-stream, their belching stacks reared high against the blue--a towering front of trade. it was glorious to nose one's way to a place in that stately line, to become a unit, however small, of that imposing fleet. at st. louis sam borrowed from mr. moffett the funds necessary to make up his first payment, and so concluded his contract. then, when he suddenly found himself on a fine big boat, in a pilot-house so far above the water that he seemed perched on a mountain--a “sumptuous temple”--his happiness seemed complete. xxiii. the supreme science in his mississippi book mark twain has given us a marvelous exposition of the science of river-piloting, and of the colossal task of acquiring and keeping a knowledge requisite for that work. he has not exaggerated this part of the story of developments in any detail; he has set down a simple confession. serenely enough he undertook the task of learning twelve hundred miles of the great changing, shifting river as exactly and as surely by daylight or darkness as one knows the way to his own features. as already suggested, he had at least an inkling of what that undertaking meant. his statement that he “supposed all that a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river” is not to be accepted literally. still he could hardly have realized the full majesty of his task; nobody could do that--not until afterward. horace bixby was a “lightning” pilot with a method of instruction as direct and forcible as it was effective. he was a small man, hot and quick-firing, though kindly, too, and gentle when he had blown off. after one rather pyrotechnic misunderstanding as to the manner of imparting and acquiring information he said: “my boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time i tell you a thing put it down right away. there's only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. you have to know it just like a b c.” so sam clemens got the little book, and presently it “fairly bristled” with the names of towns, points, bars, islands, bends, and reaches, but it made his heart ache to think that he had only half of the river set down; for, as the “watches” were four hours off and four hours on, there were long gaps during which he had slept. the little note-book still exists--thin and faded, with black water-proof covers--its neat, tiny, penciled notes still, telling, the story of that first trip. most of them are cryptographic abbreviations, not readily deciphered now. here and there is an easier line: meriweather's bend / less --[depth of water. one-quarter less than three fathoms.]----run shape of upper bar and go into the low place in willows about (ft.) lower down than last year. one simple little note out of hundreds far more complicated. it would take days for the average mind to remember even a single page of such statistics. and those long four-hour gaps where he had been asleep, they are still there, and somehow, after more than fifty years, the old heart-ache is still in them. he got a new book, maybe, for the next trip, and laid this one away. there is but one way to account for the fact that the man whom the world knew as mark twain--dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to details--ever persisted in acquiring knowledge like that--in the vast, the absolutely limitless quantity necessary to mississippi piloting. it lies in the fact that he loved the river in its every mood and aspect and detail, and not only the river, but a steam boat; and still more, perhaps, the freedom of the pilot's life and its prestige. wherever he has written of the river--and in one way or another he was always writing of it we feel the claim of the old captivity and that it still holds him. in the huckleberry finn book, during those nights and days with huck and nigger jim on the raft--whether in stormlit blackness, still noontide, or the lifting mists of morning--we can fairly “smell” the river, as huck himself would say, and we know that it is because the writer loved it with his heart of hearts and literally drank in its environment and atmosphere during those halcyon pilot days. so, in his love lay the secret of his marvelous learning, and it is recorded (not by himself, but by his teacher) that he was an apt pupil. horace bixby has more than once declared: “sam was always good-natured, and he had a natural taste for the river. he had a fine memory and never forgot anything i told him.” mark twain himself records a different opinion of his memory, with the size of its appalling task. it can only be presented in his own words. in the pages quoted he had mastered somewhat of the problem, and had begun to take on airs. his chief was a constant menace at such moments: one day he turned on me suddenly with this settler: “what is the shape of walnut bend?” he might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm. i reflected respectfully, and then said i didn't know it had any particular shape. my gun-powdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives.... i waited. by and by he said: “my boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly. it is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. everything is blotted out and gone. but mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the night that it has in the daytime.” “how on earth am i ever going to learn it, then?” “how do you follow a hall at home in the dark? because you know the shape of it. you can't see it.” “do you mean to say that i've got to know all the million trifling variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as i know the shape of the front hall at home?” “on my honor, you've got to know them better than any man ever did know the shapes of the halls in his own house.” “i wish i was dead!” “now, i don't want to discourage you, but----” “well, pile it on me; i might as well have it now as another time.” “you see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting around it. a clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that, if you didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly, you would claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and, you see, you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. you would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. you can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. all shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd run them for straight lines, only you know better. you boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you know very well that in reality there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for you. then there's your gray mist. you take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore. a gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. well, then, different kinds of moonlight change the shape of the river in different ways. you see----” “oh, don't say any more, please! have i got to learn the shape of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? if i tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop-shouldered.” “no! you only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's in your head, and never mind the one that's before your eyes.” “very well, i'll try it; but, after i have learned it, can i depend on it? will it keep the same form, and not go fooling around?” before mr. bixby could answer, mr. w. came in to take the watch, and he said: “bixby, you'll have to look out for president's island, and all that country clear away up above the old hen and chickens. the banks are caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. why, you wouldn't know the point about . you can go up inside the old sycamore snag now.” so that question was answered. here were leagues of shore changing shape. my spirits were down in the mud again. two things seemed pretty apparent to me. one was that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours. i went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding and ungraspable objects that ever i tried to get mind or hands on, that was the chief. i would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of me and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as i was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction we would draw up to it, and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank! it was plain that i had got to learn the shape of the river in all the different ways that could be thought of--upside down, wrong end first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and “thort-ships,”--and then know what to do on gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all. so i set about it. in the course of time i began to get the best of this knotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more. mr. bixby was all fixed and ready to start it to the rear again. he opened on me after this fashion: “how much water did we have in the middle crossing at hole-in-the- wall, trip before last?” i considered this an outrage. i said: “every trip down and up the leadsmen are singing through that tangled place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch. how do you reckon i can remember such a mess as that?” “my boy, you've got to remember it. you've got to remember the exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the shoalest water, in every one of the five hundred shoal places between st. louis and new orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings and marks of another, either, for they're not often twice alike. you must keep them separate.” when i came to myself again, i said: “when i get so that i can do that, i'll be able to raise the dead, and then i won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. i want to retire from this business. i want a slush-bucket and a brush; i'm only fit for a roustabout. i haven't got brains enough to be a pilot; and if i had i wouldn't have strength enough to carry them around, unless i went on crutches.” “now drop that! when i say i'll learn a man the river i mean it. and you can depend on it, i'll learn him or kill him.” we have quoted at length from this chapter because it seems of very positive importance here. it is one of the most luminous in the book so far as the mastery of the science of piloting is concerned, and shows better than could any other combination of words something of what is required of the learner. it does not cover the whole problem, by any means--mark twain himself could not present that; and even considering his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade, it is still incredible that a man of his temperament could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles. xxiv. the river curriculum he acquired other kinds of knowledge. as the streets of hannibal in those early days, and the printing-offices of several cities, had taught him human nature in various unvarnished aspects, so the river furnished an added course to that vigorous education. morally, its atmosphere could not be said to be an improvement on the others. navigation in the west had begun with crafts of the flat-boat type--their navigators rude, hardy men, heavy drinkers, reckless fighters, barbaric in their sports, coarse in their wit, profane in everything. steam-boatmen were the natural successors of these pioneers--a shade less coarse, a thought less profane, a veneer less barbaric. but these things were mainly “above stairs.” you had but to scratch lightly a mate or a deck-hand to find the old keel-boatman savagery. captains were overlords, and pilots kings in this estate; but they were not angels. in life on the mississippi clemens refers to his chief's explosive vocabulary and tells us how he envied the mate's manner of giving an order. it was easier to acquire those things than piloting, and, on the whole, quicker. one could improve upon them, too, with imagination and wit and a natural gift for terms. that samuel clemens maintained his promise as to drink and cards during those apprentice days is something worth remembering; and if he did not always restrict his profanity to moments of severe pressure or sift the quality of his wit, we may also remember that he was an extreme example of a human being, in that formative stage which gathers all as grist, later to refine it for the uses and delights of men. he acquired a vast knowledge of human character. he says: in that brief, sharp schooling i got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. when i find a well- drawn character in fiction or biography, i generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that i have, known him before--met him on the river. undoubtedly the river was a great school for the study of life's broader philosophies and humors: philosophies that avoid vague circumlocution and aim at direct and sure results; humors of the rugged and vigorous sort that in europe are known as “american” and in america are known as “western.” let us be thankful that mark twain's school was no less than it was--and no more. the demands of the missouri river trade took horace bixby away from the mississippi, somewhat later, and he consigned his pupil, according to custom, to another pilot--it is not certain, now, to just which pilot, but probably to zeb leavenworth or beck jolly, of the john j. roe. the roe was a freight-boat, “as slow as an island and as comfortable as a farm.” in fact, the roe was owned and conducted by farmers, and sam clemens thought if john quarles's farm could be set afloat it would greatly resemble that craft in the matter of good-fellowship, hospitality, and speed. it was said of her that up-stream she could even beat an island, though down-stream she could never quite overtake the current, but was a “love of a steamboat” nevertheless. the roe was not licensed to carry passengers, but she always had a dozen “family guests” aboard, and there was a big boiler-deck for dancing and moonlight frolics, also a piano in the cabin. the young pilot sometimes played on the piano and sang to his music songs relating to the “grasshopper on the sweet-potato vine,” or to an old horse by the name of methusalem: took him down and sold him in jerusalem, a long time ago. there were forty-eight stanzas about this ancient horse, all pretty much alike; but the assembled company was not likely to be critical, and his efforts won him laurels. he had a heavenly time on the john j. roe, and then came what seemed inferno by contrast. bixby returned, made a trip or two, then left and transferred him again, this time to a man named brown. brown had a berth on the fine new steamer pennsylvania, one of the handsomest boats on the river, and young clemens had become a fine steersman, so it is not unlikely that both men at first were gratified by the arrangement. but brown was a fault-finding, tyrannical chief, ignorant, vulgar, and malicious. in the mississippi book the author gives his first interview with brown, also his last one. for good reasons these occasions were burned into his memory, and they may be accepted as substantially correct. brown had an offensive manner. his first greeting was a surly question. “are you horace bigsby's cub?” “bixby” was usually pronounced “bigsby” on the river, but brown made it especially obnoxious and followed it up with questions and comments and orders still more odious. his subordinate soon learned to detest him thoroughly. it was necessary, however, to maintain a respectable deportment--custom, discipline, even the law, required that--but it must have been a hard winter and spring the young steersman put in during those early months of , restraining himself from the gratification of slaying brown. time would bring revenge--a tragic revenge and at a fearful cost; but he could not guess that, and he put in his spare time planning punishments of his own. i could imagine myself killing brown; there was no law against that, and that was the thing i always used to do the moment i was abed. instead of going over my river in my mind, as was my duty, i threw business aside for pleasure and killed brown. i killed brown every night for a month; not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new and picturesque ones--ways that were sometimes surprising for freshness of design and ghastly for situation and environment. once when brown had been more insulting than usual his subordinate went to bed and killed him in “seventeen different ways--all of them new.” he had made an effort at first to please brown, but it was no use. brown was the sort of a man that refused to be pleased; no matter how carefully his subordinate steered, he as always at him. “here,” he would shout, “where are you going now? pull her down! pull her down! don't you hear me? dod-derned mud-cat!” his assistant lost all desire to be obliging to such a person and even took occasion now and then to stir him up. one day they were steaming up the river when brown noticed that the boat seemed to be heading toward some unusual point. “here, where are you heading for now?” he yelled. “what in nation are you steerin' at, anyway? deyned numskull!” “why,” said sam, in unruffled deliberation, “i didn't see much else i could steer for, and i was heading for that white heifer on the bank.” “get away from that wheel! and get outen this pilothouse!” yelled brown. “you ain't fit to become no pilot!” which was what sam wanted. any temporary relief from the carping tyranny of brown was welcome. he had been on the river nearly a year now, and, though universally liked and accounted a fine steersman, he was receiving no wages. there had been small need of money for a while, for he had no board to pay; but clothes wear out at last, and there were certain incidentals. the pennsylvania made a round trip in about thirty-five days, with a day or two of idle time at either end. the young pilot found that he could get night employment, watching freight on the new orleans levee, and thus earn from two and a half to three dollars for each night's watch. sometimes there would be two nights, and with a capital of five or six dollars he accounted himself rich. “it was a desolate experience,” he said, long afterward, “watching there in the dark among those piles of freight; not a sound, not a living creature astir. but it was not a profitless one: i used to have inspirations as i sat there alone those nights. i used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. those things got into my books by and by and furnished me with many a chapter. i can trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and another.” many of the curious tales in the latter half of the mississippi book came out of those long night-watches. it was a good time to think of such things. xxv. love-making and adventure of course, life with brown was not all sorrow. at either end of the trip there was respite and recreation. in st. louis, at pamela's there was likely to be company: hannibal friends mostly, schoolmates--girls, of course. at new orleans he visited friendly boats, especially the john j. roe, where he was generously welcomed. one such visit on the roe he never forgot. a young girl was among the boat's guests that trip--another laura, fifteen, winning, delightful. they met, and were mutually attracted; in the life of each it was one of those bright spots which are likely to come in youth: one of those sudden, brief periods of romance, love--call it what you will the thing that leads to marriage, if pursued. “i was not four inches from that girl's elbow during our waking hours for the next three days.” then came a sudden interruption: zeb leavenworth came flying aft shouting: “the pennsylvania is backing out.” a flutter of emotion, a fleeting good-by, a flight across the decks, a flying leap from romance back to reality, and it was all over. he wrote her, but received no reply. he never saw her again, never heard from her for forty-eight years, when both were married, widowed, and old. she had not received his letter. even on the pennsylvania life had its interests. a letter dated march , , recounts a delightfully dangerous night-adventure in the steamer's yawl, hunting for soundings in the running ice. then the fun commenced. we made fast a line fathoms long, to the bow of the yawl, and put the men (both crews) to it like horses on the shore. brown, the pilot, stood in the bow, with an oar, to keep her head out, and i took the tiller. we would start the men, and all would go well till the yawl would bring up on a heavy cake of ice, and then the men would drop like so many tenpins, while brown assumed the horizontal in the bottom of the boat. after an hour's hard work we got back, with ice half an inch thick on the oars. sent back and warped up the other yawl, and then george (george ealer, the other pilot) and myself took a double crew of fresh men and tried it again. this time we found the channel in less than half an hour, and landed on an island till the pennsylvania came along and took us off. the next day was colder still. i was out in the yawl twice, and then we got through, but the infernal steamboat came near running over us.... we sounded hat island, warped up around a bar, and sounded again--but in order to understand our situation you will have to read dr. kane. it would have been impossible to get back to the boat. but the maria denning was aground at the head of the island--they hailed us--we ran alongside, and they hoisted us in and thawed us out. we had then been out in the yawl from four o'clock in the morning till half past nine without being near a fire. there was a thick coating of ice over men, and yawl, ropes and everything else, and we looked like rock- candy statuary. this was the sort of thing he loved in those days. we feel the writer's evident joy and pride in it. in the same letter he says: “i can't correspond with the paper, because when one is learning the river he is not allowed to do or think about anything else.” then he mentions his brother henry, and we get the beginning of that tragic episode for which, though blameless, samuel clemens always held himself responsible. henry was doing little or nothing here (st. louis), and i sent him to our clerk to work his way for a trip, measuring wood-piles, counting coal-boxes, and doing other clerkly duties, which he performed satisfactorily. he may go down with us again. henry clemens was about twenty at this time, a handsome, attractive boy of whom his brother was lavishly fond and proud. he did go on the next trip and continued to go regularly after that, as third clerk in line of promotion. it was a bright spot in those hard days with brown to have henry along. the boys spent a good deal of their leisure with the other pilot, george ealer, who “was as kindhearted as brown wasn't,” and quoted shakespeare and goldsmith, and played the flute to his fascinated and inspiring audience. these were things worth while. the young steersman could not guess that the shadow of a long sorrow was even then stretching across the path ahead. yet in due time he received a warning, a remarkable and impressive warning, though of a kind seldom heeded. one night, when the pennsylvania lay in st. louis, he slept at his sister's house and had this vivid dream: he saw henry, a corpse, lying in a metallic burial case in the sitting-room, supported on two chairs. on his breast lay a bouquet of flowers, white, with a single crimson bloom in the center. when he awoke, it was morning, but the dream was so vivid that he believed it real. perhaps something of the old hypnotic condition was upon him, for he rose and dressed, thinking he would go in and look at his dead brother. instead, he went out on the street in the early morning and had walked to the middle of the block before it suddenly flashed upon him that it was only a dream. he bounded back, rushed to the sitting-room, and felt a great trembling revulsion of joy when he found it really empty. he told pamela the dream, then put it out of his mind as quickly as he could. the pennsylvania sailed from st. louis as usual, and made a safe trip to new orleans. a safe trip, but an eventful one; on it occurred that last interview with brown, already mentioned. it is recorded in the mississippi book, but cannot be omitted here. somewhere down the river (it was in eagle bend) henry appeared on the hurricane deck to bring an order from the captain for a landing to be made a little lower down. brown was somewhat deaf, but would never confess it. he may not have understood the order; at all events he gave no sign of having heard it, and went straight ahead. he disliked henry as he disliked everybody of finer grain than himself, and in any case was too arrogant to ask for a repetition. they were passing the landing when captain klinefelter appeared on deck and called to him to let the boat come around, adding: “didn't henry tell you to land here?” “no, sir.” captain. klinefelter turned to sam: “didn't you hear him?” “yes, sir.” brown said: “shut your mouth! you never heard anything of the kind.” by and by henry came into the pilot-house, unaware of any trouble. brown set upon him in his ugliest manner. “here, why didn't you tell me we had got to land at that plantation?” he demanded. henry was always polite, always gentle. “i did tell you, mr. brown.” “it's a lie.” sam clemens could stand brown's abuse of himself, but not of henry. he said: “you lie yourself. he did tell you.” brown was dazed for a moment and then he shouted: “i'll attend to your case in half a minute!” and ordered henry out of the pilot-house. the boy had started, when brown suddenly seized him by the collar and struck him in the face.--[in the mississippi book the writer states that brown started to strike henry with a large piece of coal; but, in a letter written soon after the occurrence to mrs. orion clemens, he says: “henry started out of the pilot-house-brown jumped up and collared him--turned him half-way around and struck him in the face!-and him nearly six feet high-struck my little brother. i was wild from that moment. i left the boat to steer herself, and avenged the insult--and the captain said i was right.”]--instantly sam was upon brown, with a heavy stool, and stretched him on the floor. then all the bitterness and indignation that had been smoldering for months flamed up, and, leaping upon brown and holding him with his knees, he pounded him with his fists until strength and fury gave out. brown struggled free, then, and with pilot instinct sprang to the wheel, for the vessel had been drifting and might have got into trouble. seeing there was no further danger, he seized a spy-glass as a weapon. “get out of this here pilot-house,” he raged. but his subordinate was not afraid of him now. “you should leave out the 'here,'” he drawled, critically. “it is understood, and not considered good english form.” “don't you give me none of your airs,” yelled brown. “i ain't going to stand nothing more from you.” “you should say, 'don't give me any of your airs,'” sam said, sweetly, “and the last half of your sentence almost defies correction.” a group of passengers and white-aproned servants, assembled on the deck forward, applauded the victor. brown turned to the wheel, raging and growling. clemens went below, where he expected captain klinefelter to put him in irons, perhaps, for it was thought to be felony to strike a pilot. the officer took him into his private room and closed the door. at first he looked at the culprit thoughtfully, then he made some inquiries: “did you strike him first?” captain klinefelter asked. “yes, sir.” “what with?” “a stool, sir.” “hard?” “middling, sir.” “did it knock him down?” “he--he fell, sir.” “did you follow it up? did you do anything further?” “yes, sir.” “what did you do?” “pounded him, sir.” “pounded him?” “yes, sir.” “did you pound him much--that is, severely?” “one might call it that, sir, maybe.” “i am deuced glad of it! hark ye, never mention that i said that. you have been guilty of a great crime; and don't ever be guilty of it again on this boat, but--lay for him ashore! give him a good sound thrashing; do you hear? i'll pay the expenses.”--[“life on the mississippi.”] captain klinefelter told him to clear out, then, and the culprit heard him enjoying himself as the door closed behind him. brown, of course, forbade him the pilothouse after that, and he spent the rest of the trip “an emancipated slave” listening to george ealer's flute and his readings from goldsmith and shakespeare; playing chess with him sometimes, and learning a trick which he would use himself in the long after-years--that of taking back the last move and running out the game differently when he saw defeat. brown swore that he would leave the boat at new orleans if sam clemens remained on it, and captain klinefelter told brown to go. then when another pilot could not be obtained to fill his place, the captain offered to let clemens himself run the daylight watches, thus showing his confidence in the knowledge of the young steersman, who had been only a little more than a year at the wheel. but clemens himself had less confidence and advised the captain to keep brown back to st. louis. he would follow up the river by another boat and resume his place as steersman when brown was gone. without knowing it, he may have saved his life by that decision. it is doubtful if he remembered his recent disturbing dream, though some foreboding would seem to have hung over him the night before the pennsylvania sailed. henry liked to join in the night-watches on the levee when he had finished his duties, and the brothers often walked the round chatting together. on this particular night the elder spoke of disaster on the river. finally he said: “in case of accident, whatever you do, don't lose your head--the passengers will do that. rush for the hurricane deck and to the life-boat, and obey the mate's orders. when the boat is launched, help the women and children into it. don't get in yourself. the river is only a mile wide. you can swim ashore easily enough.” it was good manly advice, but it yielded a long harvest of sorrow. xxvi. the tragedy of the “pennsylvania” captain klinefelter obtained his steersman a pass on the a. t. lacey, which left two days behind the pennsylvania. this was pleasant, for bart bowen had become captain of that fine boat. the lacey touched at greenville, mississippi, and a voice from the landing shouted: “the pennsylvania is blown up just below memphis, at ship island! one hundred and fifty lives lost!” nothing further could be learned there, but that evening at napoleon a memphis extra reported some of the particulars. henry clemens's name was mentioned as one of those, who had escaped injury. still farther up the river they got a later extra. henry was again mentioned; this time as being scalded beyond recovery. by the time they reached memphis they knew most of the details: at six o'clock that warm mid-june morning, while loading wood from a large flat-boat sixty miles below memphis, four out of eight of the pennsylvania's boilers had suddenly exploded with fearful results. all the forward end of the boat had been blown out. many persons had been killed outright; many more had been scalded and crippled and would die. it was one of those hopeless, wholesale steamboat slaughters which for more than a generation had made the mississippi a river of death and tears. samuel clemens found his brother stretched upon a mattress on the floor of an improvised hospital--a public hall--surrounded by more than thirty others more or less desperately injured. he was told that henry had inhaled steam and that his body was badly scalded. his case was considered hopeless. henry was one of those who had been blown into the river by the explosion. he had started to swim for the shore, only a few hundred yards away, but presently, feeling no pain and believing himself unhurt, he had turned back to assist in the rescue of the others. what he did after that could not be clearly learned. the vessel had taken fire; the rescued were being carried aboard the big wood-boat still attached to the wreck. the fire soon raged so that the rescuers and all who could be saved were driven into the wood-flat, which was then cut adrift and landed. there the sufferers had to lie in the burning sun many hours until help could come. henry was among those who were insensible by that time. perhaps he had really been uninjured at first and had been scalded in his work of rescue; it will never be known. his brother, hearing these things, was thrown into the deepest agony and remorse. he held himself to blame for everything; for henry's presence on the boat; for his advice concerning safety of others; for his own absence when he might have been there to help and protect the boy. he wanted to telegraph at once to his mother and sister to come, but the doctors persuaded him to wait--just why, he never knew. he sent word of the disaster to orion, who by this time had sold out in keokuk and was in east tennessee studying law; then he set himself to the all but hopeless task of trying to bring henry back to life. many memphis ladies were acting as nurses, and one, a miss wood, attracted by the boy's youth and striking features, joined in the desperate effort. some medical students had come to assist the doctors, and one of these also took special interest in henry's case. dr. peyton, an old memphis practitioner, declared that with such care the boy might pull through. but on the fourth night he was considered to be dying. half delirious with grief and the strain of watching, samuel clemens wrote to his mother and to his sister-in-law in tennessee. the letter to orion clemens's wife has been preserved. memphis, tenn., friday, june , . dear sister mollie,--long before this reaches you my poor henry--my darling, my pride, my glory, my all will have finished his blameless career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness. the horrors of three days have swept over me--they have blasted my youth and left me an old man before my time. mollie, there are gray hairs in my head to-night. for forty-eight hours i labored at the bedside of my poor burned and bruised but uncomplaining brother, and then the star of my hope went out and left me in the gloom of despair. men take me by the hand and congratulate me, and call me “lucky” because i was not on the pennsylvania when she blew up! may god forgive them, for they know not what they say. i was on the pennsylvania five minutes before she left n. orleans, and i must tell you the truth, mollie--three hundred human beings perished by that fearful disaster. but may god bless memphis, the noblest city on the face of the earth. she has done her duty by these poor afflicted creatures--especially henry, for he has had five--aye, ten, fifteen, twenty times the care and attention that any one else has had. dr. peyton, the best physician in memphis (he is exactly like the portraits of webster), sat by him for hours. there are scalded men in that room, and you would know dr. peyton better than i can describe him if you could follow him around and hear each man murmur as he passes, “may the god of heaven bless you, doctor!” the ladies have done well, too. our second mate, a handsome, noble-hearted young fellow, will die. yesterday a beautiful girl of stooped timidly down by his side and handed him a pretty bouquet. the poor suffering boy's eyes kindled, his lips quivered out a gentle “god bless you, miss,” and he burst into tears. he made them write her name on a card for him, that he might not forget it. pray for me, mollie, and pray for my poor sinless brother. your unfortunate brother, saml. l. clemens. p. s.--i got here two days after henry. but, alas, this was not all, nor the worst. it would seem that samuel clemens's cup of remorse must be always overfull. the final draft that would embitter his years was added the sixth night after the accident--the night that henry died. he could never bring himself to write it. he was never known to speak of it but twice. henry had rallied soon after the foregoing letter had been mailed, and improved slowly that day and the next: dr. peyton came around about eleven o'clock on the sixth night and made careful examination. he said: “i believe he is out of danger and will get well. he is likely to be restless during the night; the groans and fretting of the others will disturb him. if he cannot rest without it, tell the physician in charge to give him one-eighth of a grain of morphine.” the boy did wake during the night, and was disturbed by the complaining of the other sufferers. his brother told the young medical student in charge what the doctor had said about the morphine. but morphine was a new drug then; the student hesitated, saying: “i have no way of measuring. i don't know how much an eighth of a grain would be.” henry grew rapidly worse--more and more restless. his brother was half beside himself with the torture of it. he went to the medical student. “if you have studied drugs,” he said, “you ought to be able to judge an eighth of a grain of morphine.” the young man's courage was over-swayed. he yielded and ladled out in the old-fashioned way, on the point of a knife-blade, what he believed to be the right amount. henry immediately sank into a heavy sleep. he died before morning. his chance of life had been infinitesimal, and his death was not necessarily due to the drug, but samuel clemens, unsparing in his self-blame, all his days carried the burden of it. he saw the boy taken to the dead room, then the long strain of grief, the days and nights without sleep, the ghastly realization of the end overcame him. a citizen of memphis took him away in a kind of daze and gave him a bed in his house, where he fell into a stupor of fatigue and surrender. it was many hours before he woke; when he did, at last, he dressed and went to where henry lay. the coffin provided for the dead were of unpainted wood, but the youth and striking face of henry clemens had aroused a special interest. the ladies of memphis had made up a fund of sixty dollars and bought for him a metallic case. samuel clemens entering, saw his brother lying exactly as he had seen him in his dream, lacking only the bouquet of white flowers with its crimson center--a detail made complete while he stood there, for at that moment an elderly lady came in with a large white bouquet, and in the center of it was a single red rose. orion arrived from tennessee, and the brothers took their sorrowful burden to st. louis, subsequently to hannibal, his old home. the death of this lovely boy was a heavy sorrow to the community where he was known, for he had been a favorite with all.--[for a fine characterization of henry clemens the reader is referred to a letter written by orion clemens to miss wood. see appendix a, at the end of the last volume.] from hannibal the family returned to pamela's home in st. louis. there one night orion heard his brother moaning and grieving and walking the floor of his room. by and by sam came in to where orion was. he could endure it no longer, he said; he must, “tell somebody.” then he poured all the story of that last tragic night. it has been set down here because it accounts for much in his after-life. it magnified his natural compassion for the weakness and blunders of humanity, while it increased the poor opinion implanted by the scotchman macfarlane of the human being as a divine invention. two of mark twain's chief characteristics were--consideration for the human species, and contempt for it. in many ways he never overcame the tragedy of henry's death. he never really looked young again. gray hairs had come, as he said, and they did not disappear. his face took on the serious, pathetic look which from that time it always had in repose. at twenty-three he looked thirty. at thirty he looked nearer forty. after that the discrepancy in age and looks became less notable. in vigor, complexion, and temperament he was regarded in later life as young for his years, but never in looks. xxvii. the pilot the young pilot returned to the river as steersman for george ealer, whom he loved, and in september of that year obtained a full license as mississippi river pilot.--[in life on the mississippi he gives his period of learning at from two to two and a half years; but documentary evidence as well as mr. bixby's testimony places the apprenticeship at eighteen months]--bixby had returned by this time, and they were again together, first on the crescent city, later on a fine new boat called the new falls city. clemens was still a steersman when bixby returned; but as soon as his license was granted (september , ) his old chief took him as full partner. he was a pilot at last. in eighteen months he had packed away in his head all the multitude of volatile statistics and acquired that confidence and courage which made him one of the elect, a river sovereign. he knew every snag and bank and dead tree and reef in all those endless miles between st. louis and new orleans, every cut-off and current, every depth of water--the whole story--by night and by day. he could smell danger in the dark; he could read the surface of the water as an open page. at twenty-three he had acquired a profession which surpassed all others for absolute sovereignty and yielded an income equal to that then earned by the vice-president of the united states. boys generally finish college at about that age, but it is not likely that any boy ever finished college with the mass of practical information and training that was stored away in samuel clemens's head, or with his knowledge of human nature, his preparation for battle with the world. “not only was he a pilot, but a good one.” these are horace bixby's words, and he added: “it is the fashion to-day to disparage sam's piloting. men who were born since he was on the river and never saw him will tell you that sam was never much of a pilot. most of them will tell you that he was never a pilot at all. as a matter of fact, sam was a fine pilot, and in a day when piloting on the mississippi required a great deal more brains and skill and application than it does now. there were no signal-lights along the shore in those days, and no search-lights on the vessels; everything was blind, and on a dark, misty night in a river full of snags and shifting sand--bars and changing shores, a pilot's judgment had to be founded on absolute certainty.” he had plenty of money now. he could help his mother with a liberal hand, and he did it. he helped orion, too, with money and with advice. from a letter written toward the end of the year, we gather the new conditions. orion would seem to have been lamenting over prospects, and the young pilot, strong and exalted in his new estate, urges him to renewed consistent effort: what is a government without energy?--[he says]--. and what is a man without energy? nothing--nothing at all. what is the grandest thing in “paradise lost”--the arch-fiend's terrible energy! what was the greatest feature in napoleon's character? his unconquerable energy! sum all the gifts that man is endowed with, and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. and to-day, if i were a heathen, i would rear a statue to energy, and fall down and worship it! i want a man to--i want you to--take up a line of action, and follow it out, in spite of the very devil. orion and his wife had returned to keokuk by this time, waiting for something in the way of a business opportunity. his pilot brother, wrote him more than once letters of encouragement and council. here and there he refers to the tragedy of henry's death, and the shadow it has cast upon his life; but he was young, he was successful, his spirits were naturally exuberant. in the exhilaration of youth and health and success he finds vent at times in that natural human outlet, self-approval. he not only exhibits this weakness, but confesses it with characteristic freedom. putting all things together, i begin to think i am rather lucky than otherwise--a notion which i was slow to take up. the other night i was about to “round to” for a storm, but concluded that i could find a smoother bank somewhere. i landed five miles below. the storm came, passed away and did not injure us. coming up, day before yesterday, i looked at the spot i first chose, and half the trees on the bank were torn to shreds. we couldn't have lived minutes in such a tornado. and i am also lucky in having a berth, while all the other young pilots are idle. this is the luckiest circumstance that ever befell me. not on account of the wages--for that is a secondary consideration-but from the fact that the city of memphis is the largest boat in the trade, and the hardest to pilot, and consequently i can get a reputation on her, which is a thing i never could accomplish on a transient boat. i can “bank” in the neighborhood of $ a month on her, and that will satisfy me for the present (principally because the other youngsters are sucking their fingers). bless me! what a pleasure there is in revenge!--and what vast respect prosperity commands! why, six months ago, i could enter the “rooms,” and receive only the customary fraternal greeting now they say, “why, how are you, old fellow--when did you get in?” and the young pilots who use to tell me, patronizingly, that i could never learn the river cannot keep from showing a little of their chagrin at seeing me so far ahead of them. permit me to “blow my horn,” for i derive a living pleasure from these things, and i must confess that when i go to pay my dues, i rather like to let the d---d rascals get a glimpse of a hundred-dollar bill peeping out from amongst notes of smaller dimensions whose face i do not exhibit! you will despise this egotism, but i tell you there is a “stern joy” in it. we are dwelling on this period of mark twain's life, for it was a period that perhaps more than any other influenced his future years. he became completely saturated with the river its terms, its memories, its influence remained a definite factor in his personality to the end of his days. moreover, it was his first period of great triumph. where before he had been a subaltern not always even a wage-earner--now all in a moment he had been transformed into a high chief. the fullest ambition of his childhood had been realized--more than realized, for in that day he had never dreamed of a boat or of an income of such stately proportions. of great personal popularity, and regarded as a safe pilot, he had been given one of the largest, most difficult of boats. single-handed and alone he had fought his way into the company of kings. and we may pardon his vanity. he could hardly fail to feel his glory and revel in it and wear it as a halo, perhaps, a little now and then in the association rooms. to this day he is remembered as a figure there, though we may believe, regardless of his own statement, that it was not entirely because of his success. as the boys of hannibal had gathered around to listen when sam clemens began to speak, so we may be certain that the pilots at st. louis and new orleans laid aside other things when he had an observation to make or a tale to tell. he was much given to spinning yarns--[writes one associate of those days]--so funny that his hearers were convulsed, and yet all the time his own face was perfectly sober. if he laughed at all, it must have been inside. it would have killed his hearers to do that. occasionally some of his droll yarns would get into the papers. he may have written them himself. another riverman of those days has recalled a story he heard sam clemens tell: we were speaking of presence of mind in accidents--we were always talking of such things; then he said: “boys, i had great presence of mind once. it was at a fire. an old man leaned out of a four-story building calling for help. everybody in the crowd below looked up, but nobody did anything. the ladders weren't long enough. nobody had any presence of mind--nobody but me. i came to the rescue. i yelled for a rope. when it came i threw the old man the end of it. he caught it and i told him to tie it around his waist. he did so, and i pulled him down.” this was one of the stories that got into print and traveled far. perhaps, as the old pilot suggests, he wrote some of them himself, for horace bixby remembers that “sam was always scribbling when not at the wheel.” but if he published any work in those river-days he did not acknowledge it later--with one exception. the exception was not intended for publication, either. it was a burlesque written for the amusement of his immediate friends. he has told the story himself, more than once, but it belongs here for the reason that some where out of the general circumstance of it there originated a pseudonym, one day to become the best-known in the hemispheres the name mark twain. that terse, positive, peremptory, dynamic pen-name was first used by an old pilot named isaiah sellers--a sort of “oldest inhabitant” of the river, who made the other pilots weary with the scope and antiquity of his reminiscent knowledge. he contributed paragraphs of general information and nestorian opinions to the new orleans picayune, and signed them “mark twain.” they were quaintly egotistical in tone, usually beginning: “my opinion for the benefit of the citizens of new orleans,” and reciting incidents and comparisons dating as far back as . captain sellers naturally was regarded as fair game by the young pilots, who amused themselves by imitating his manner and general attitude of speech. but clemens went further; he wrote at considerable length a broadly burlesque imitation signed “sergeant fathom,” with an introduction which referred to the said fathom as “one of the oldest cub pilots on the river.” the letter that followed related a perfectly impossible trip, supposed to have been made in by the steamer “the old first jubilee” with a “chinese captain and a choctaw crew.” it is a gem of its kind, and will bear reprint in full today.--[see appendix b, at the end of the last volume.] the burlesque delighted bart bowen, who was clemens's pilot partner on the edward j. gay at the time. he insisted on showing it to others and finally upon printing it. clemens was reluctant, but consented. it appeared in the true delta (may or , ), and was widely and boisterously enjoyed. it broke captain sellers's literary heart. he never contributed another paragraph. mark twain always regretted the whole matter deeply, and his own revival of the name was a sort of tribute to the old man he had thoughtlessly wounded. if captain sellers has knowledge of material matters now, he is probably satisfied; for these things brought to him, and to the name he had chosen, what he could never himself have achieved--immortality. xxviii. piloting and prophecy those who knew samuel clemens best in those days say that he was a slender, fine-looking man, well dressed--even dandified--given to patent leathers, blue serge, white duck, and fancy striped shirts. old for his years, he heightened his appearance at times by wearing his beard in the atrocious mutton-chop fashion, then popular, but becoming to no one, least of all to him. the pilots regarded him as a great reader--a student of history, travels, literature, and the sciences--a young man whom it was an education as well as an entertainment to know. when not at the wheel, he was likely to be reading or telling yarns in the association rooms. he began the study of french one day when he passed a school of languages, where three tongues, french, german, and italian, were taught, one in each of three rooms. the price was twenty-five dollars for one language, or three for fifty dollars. the student was provided with a set of cards for each room and supposed to walk from one apartment to another, changing tongues at each threshold. with his unusual enthusiasm and prodigality, the young pilot decided to take all three languages, but after the first two or three round trips concluded that for the present french would do. he did not return to the school, but kept his cards and bought text-books. he must have studied pretty faithfully when he was off watch and in port, for his river note-book contains a french exercise, all neatly written, and it is from the dialogues of voltaire. this old note-book is interesting for other things. the notes are no longer timid, hesitating memoranda, but vigorous records made with the dash of assurance that comes from confidence and knowledge, and with the authority of one in supreme command. under the head of “ d high-water trip--jan., --alonzo child,” we have the story of a rising river with its overflowing banks, its blind passages and cut-offs--all the circumstance and uncertainty of change. good deal of water all over coles creek chute, or ft. bank --could have gone up shore above general taylor's--too much drift.... night--didn't run either or towheads-- ft. bank on main shore ozark chute.... and so on page after page of cryptographic memoranda. it means little enough to the lay reader, yet one gets an impression somehow of the swirling, turbulent water and a lonely figure in that high glassed-in place peering into the dark for blind land-marks and possible dangers, picking his way up the dim, hungry river of which he must know every foot as well as a man knows the hall of his own home. all the qualifications must come into play, then memory, judgment, courage, and the high art of steering. “steering is a very high, art,” he says; “one must not keep a rudder dragging across a boat's stern if he wants to get up the river fast.” he had an example of the perfection of this art one misty night on the alonzo child. nearly fifty years later, sitting on his veranda in the dark, he recalled it. he said: “there was a pilot in those days by the name of jack leonard who was a perfectly wonderful creature. i do not know that jack knew anymore about the river than most of us and perhaps could not read the water any better, but he had a knack of steering away ahead of our ability, and i think he must have had an eye that could see farther into the darkness. “i had never seen leonard steer, but i had heard a good deal about it. i had heard it said that the crankiest old tub afloat--one that would kill any other man to handle--would obey and be as docile as a child when jack leonard took the wheel. i had a chance one night to verify that for myself. we were going up the river, and it was one of the nastiest nights i ever saw. besides that, the boat was loaded in such a way that she steered very hard, and i was half blind and crazy trying to locate the safe channel, and was pulling my arms out to keep her in it. it was one of those nights when everything looks the same whichever way you look: just two long lines where the sky comes down to the trees and where the trees meet the water with all the trees precisely the same height--all planted on the same day, as one of the boys used to put it--and not a thing to steer by except the knowledge in your head of the real shape of the river. some of the boats had what they call a 'night hawk' on the jackstaff, a thing which you could see when it was in the right position against the sky or the water, though it seldom was in the right position and was generally pretty useless. “i was in a bad way that night and wondering how i could ever get through it, when the pilot-house door opened, and jack leonard walked in. he was a passenger that trip, and i had forgotten he was aboard. i was just about in the worst place and was pulling the boat first one way, then another, running the wheel backward and forward, and climbing it like a squirrel. “'sam,' he said, 'let me take the wheel. maybe i have been over this place since you have.' “i didn't argue the question. jack took the wheel, gave it a little turn one way, then a little turn the other; that old boat settled down as quietly as a lamb--went right along as if it had been broad daylight in a river without snags, bars, bottom, or banks, or anything that one could possibly hit. i never saw anything so beautiful. he stayed my watch out for me, and i hope i was decently grateful. i have never forgotten it.” the old note-book contained the record of many such nights as that; but there were other nights, too, when the stars were blazing out, or when the moon on the water made the river a wide mysterious way of speculative dreams. he was always speculating; the planets and the remote suns were always a marvel to him. a love of astronomy--the romance of it, its vast distances, and its possibilities--began with those lonely river-watches and never waned to his last day. for a time a great comet blazed in the heavens, a “wonderful sheaf of light” that glorified his lonely watch. night after night he watched it as it developed and then grew dim, and he read eagerly all the comet literature that came to his hand, then or afterward. he speculated of many things: of life, death, the reason of existence, of creation, the ways of providence and destiny. it was a fruitful time for such meditation; out of such vigils grew those larger philosophies that would find expression later, when the years had conferred the magic gift of phrase. life lay all ahead of him then, and during those still watches he must have revolved many theories of how the future should be met and mastered. in the old notebook there still remains a well-worn clipping, the words of some unknown writer, which he had preserved and may have consulted as a sort of creed. it is an interesting little document--a prophetic one, the reader may concede: how to take life.--take it just as though it was--as it is--an earnest, vital, and important affair. take it as though you were born to the task of performing a merry part in it--as though the world had awaited for your coming. take it as though it was a grand opportunity to do and achieve, to carry forward great and good schemes; to help and cheer a suffering, weary, it may be heartbroken, brother. now and then a man stands aside from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of some sort. the world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. the miracle, or the power that elevates the few, is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the promptings of a brave, determined spirit. the old note-book contains no record of disasters. horace bixby, who should know, has declared: “sam clemens never had an accident either as a steersman or as a pilot, except once when he got aground for a few hours in the bagasse (cane) smoke, with no damage to anybody though of course there was some good luck in that too, for the best pilots do not escape trouble, now and then.” bixby and clemens were together that winter on the alonzo child, and a letter to orion contains an account of great feasting which the two enjoyed at a “french restaurant” in new orleans--“dissipating on a ten-dollar dinner--tell it not to ma!”--where they had sheepshead fish, oysters, birds, mushrooms, and what not, “after which the day was too far gone to do anything.” so it appears that he was not always reading macaulay or studying french and astronomy, but sometimes went frivoling with his old chief, now his chum, always his dear friend. another letter records a visit with pamela to a picture-gallery in st. louis where was being exhibited church's “heart of the andes.” he describes the picture in detail and with vast enthusiasm. “i have seen it several times,” he concludes, “but it is always a new picture--totally new--you seem to see nothing the second time that you saw the first.” further along he tells of having taken his mother and the girls--his cousin ella creel and another--for a trip down the river to new orleans. ma was delighted with her trip, but she was disgusted with the girls for allowing me to embrace and kiss them--and she was horrified at the 'schottische' as performed by miss castle and myself. she was perfectly willing for me to dance until o'clock at the imminent peril of my going to sleep on the after-watch--but then she would top off with a very inconsistent sermon on dancing in general; ending with a terrific broadside aimed at that heresy of heresies, the 'schottische'. i took ma and the girls in a carriage round that portion of new orleans where the finest gardens and residences are to be seen, and, although it was a blazing hot, dusty day, they seemed hugely delighted. to use an expression which is commonly ignored in polite society, they were “hell-bent” on stealing some of the luscious- looking oranges from branches which overhung the fence, but i restrained them. in another letter of this period we get a hint of the future mark twain. it was written to john t. moore, a young clerk on the john j. roe. what a fool old adam was. had everything his own way; had succeeded in gaining the love of the best-looking girl in the neighborhood, but yet, unsatisfied with his conquest, he had to eat a miserable little apple. ah, john, if you had been in his place you would not have eaten a mouthful of the apple--that is, if it had required any exertion. i have noticed that you shun exertion. there comes in the difference between us. i court exertion. i love work. why, sir, when i have a piece of work to perform, i go away to myself, sit down in the shade, and muse over the coming enjoyment. sometimes i am so industrious that i muse too long. there remains another letter of this period--a sufficiently curious document. there was in those days a famous new orleans clairvoyant known as madame caprell. some of the young pilot's friends had visited her and obtained what seemed to be satisfying results. from time to time they had urged him to visit the fortune-teller, and one idle day he concluded to make the experiment. as soon as he came away he wrote to orion in detail. she's a very pleasant little lady--rather pretty--about --say feet / --would weigh --has black eyes and hair--is polite and intelligent--used good language, and talks much faster than i do. she invited me into the little back parlor, closed the door; and we were alone. we sat down facing each other. then she asked my age. then she put her hands before her eyes a moment, and commenced talking as if she had a good deal to say and not much time to say it in. something after this style: 'madame.' yours is a watery planet; you gain your livelihood on the water; but you should have been a lawyer--there is where your talents lie; you might have distinguished yourself as an orator, or as an editor--, you have written a great deal; you write well--but you are rather out of practice; no matter--you will be in practice some day; you have a superb constitution, and as excellent health as any man in the world; you have great powers of endurance; in your profession your strength holds out against the longest sieges without flagging; still, the upper part of your lungs, the top of them, is slightly affected--you must take care of yourself; you do not drink, but you use entirely too much tobacco; and you must stop it; mind, not moderate, but stop the use of it, totally; then i can almost promise you , when you will surely die; otherwise, look out for , , , , and ; be careful--for you are not of a long- lived race, that is, on your father's side; you are the only healthy member of your family, and the only one in it who has anything like the certainty of attaining to a great age--so, stop using tobacco, and be careful of yourself.... in some respects you take after your father, but you are much more like your mother, who belongs to the long-lived, energetic side of the house.... you never brought all your energies to bear upon any subject but what you accomplished it --for instance, you are self-made, self-educated. 's. l. c.' which proves nothing. 'madame.' don't interrupt. when you sought your present occupation, you found a thousand obstacles in your way--obstacles unknown--not even suspected by any save you and me, since you keep such matter to yourself--but you fought your way, and hid the long struggle under a mask of cheerfulness, which saved your friends anxiety on your account. to do all this requires the qualities which i have named. 's. l. c.' you flatter well, madame. 'madame.' don't interrupt. up to within a short time you had always lived from hand to mouth--now you are in easy circumstances --for which you need give credit to no one but yourself. the turning-point in your life occurred in - - . 's. l. c.' which was? 'madame.' a death, perhaps, and this threw you upon the world and made you what you are; it was always intended that you should make yourself; therefore, it was well that this calamity occurred as early as it did. you will never die of water, although your career upon it in the future seems well sprinkled with misfortune. you will continue upon the water for some time yet; you will not retire finally until ten years from now.... what is your brother's age? --and a lawyer? and in pursuit of an office? well, he stands a better chance than the other two, and he may get it; he is too visionary--is always flying off on a new hobby; this will never do --tell him i said so. he is a good lawyer--a very good lawyer--and a fine speaker--is very popular and much respected, and makes many friends; but although he retains their friendship, he loses their confidence by displaying his instability of character.... the land he has now will be very valuable after a while---- 's. l. c.' say years hence, or thereabouts, madame---- 'madame.' no--less time--but never mind the land, that is a secondary consideration--let him drop that for the present, and devote himself to his business and politics with all his might, for he must hold offices under government.... after a while you will possess a good deal of property--retire at the end of ten years--after which your pursuits will be literary --try the law--you will certainly succeed. i am done now. if you have any questions to ask--ask them freely--and if it be in my power, i will answer without reserve--without reserve. i asked a few questions of minor importance-paid her and left-under the decided impression that going to the fortune-teller's was just as good as going to the opera, and cost scarcely a trifle more --ergo, i will disguise myself and go again, one of these days, when other amusements fail. now isn't she the devil? that is to say, isn't she a right smart little woman? when you want money, let ma know, and she will send it. she and pamela are always fussing about change, so i sent them a hundred and twenty quarters yesterday--fiddler's change enough to last till i get back, i reckon. sam. in the light of preceding and subsequent events, we must confess that madame caprell was “indeed a right smart little woman.” she made mistakes enough (the letter is not quoted in full), but when we remember that she not only gave his profession at the moment, but at least suggested his career for the future; that she approximated the year of his father's death as the time when he was thrown upon the world; that she admonished him against his besetting habit, tobacco; that she read. minutely not only his characteristics, but his brother orion's; that she outlined the struggle in his conquest of the river; that she seemingly had knowledge of orion's legal bent and his connection with the tennessee land, all seems remarkable enough, supposing, of course, she had no material means of acquiring knowledge--one can never know certainly about such things. xxix. the end of piloting it is curious, however, that madame caprell, with clairvoyant vision, should not have seen an important event then scarcely more than two months distant: the breaking-out of the civil war, with the closing of the river and the end of mark twain's career as a pilot. perhaps these things were so near as to be “this side” the range of second sight. there had been plenty of war-talk, but few of the pilots believed that war was really coming. traveling that great commercial highway, the river, with intercourse both of north and south, they did not believe that any political differences would be allowed to interfere with the nation's trade, or would be settled otherwise than on the street corners, in the halls of legislation, and at the polls. true, several states, including louisiana, had declared the union a failure and seceded; but the majority of opinions were not clear as to how far a state had rights in such a matter, or as to what the real meaning of secession might be. comparatively few believed it meant war. samuel clemens had no such belief. his madame caprell letter bears date of february , , yet contains no mention of war or of any special excitement in new orleans--no forebodings as to national conditions. such things came soon enough: president lincoln was inaugurated on the th of march, and six weeks later fort sumter was fired upon. men began to speak out then and to take sides. it was a momentous time in the association rooms. there were pilots who would go with the union; there were others who would go with the confederacy. horace bixby was one of the former, and in due time became chief of the union river service. another pilot named montgomery (samuel clemens had once steered for him) declared for the south, and later commanded the confederate mississippi fleet. they were all good friends, and their discussions, though warm, were not always acrimonious; but they took sides. a good many were not very clear as to their opinions. living both north and south as they did, they saw various phases of the question and divided their sympathies. some were of one conviction one day and of another the next. samuel clemens was of the less radical element. he knew there was a good deal to be said for either cause; furthermore, he was not then bloodthirsty. a pilot-house with its elevated position and transparency seemed a poor place to be in when fighting was going on. “i'll think about it,” he said. “i'm not very anxious to get up into a glass perch and be shot at by either side. i'll go home and reflect on the matter.” he did not realize it, but he had made his last trip as a pilot. it is rather curious that his final brief note-book entry should begin with his future nom de plume--a memorandum of soundings--“mark twain,” and should end with the words “no lead.” he went up the river as a passenger on a steamer named the uncle sam. zeb leavenworth was one of the pilots, and sam clemens usually stood watch with him. they heard war-talk all the way and saw preparations, but they were not molested, though at memphis they basely escaped the blockade. at cairo, illinois, they saw soldiers drilling--troops later commanded by grant. the uncle sam came steaming up toward st. louis, those on board congratulating themselves on having come through unscathed. they were not quite through, however. abreast of jefferson barracks they suddenly heard the boom of a cannon and saw a great whorl of smoke drifting in their direction. they did not realize that it was a signal--a thunderous halt--and kept straight on. less than a minute later there was another boom, and a shell exploded directly in front of the pilot-house, breaking a lot of glass and destroying a good deal of the upper decoration. zeb leavenworth fell back into a corner with a yell. “good lord almighty! sam;” he said, “what do they mean by that?” clemens stepped to the wheel and brought the boat around. “i guess they want us to wait a minute, zeb,” he said. they were examined and passed. it was the last steamboat to make the trip from new orleans to st. louis. mark twain's pilot-days were over. he would have grieved had he known this fact. “i loved the profession far better than any i have followed since,” he long afterward declared, “and i took a measureless pride in it.” the dreamy, easy, romantic existence suited him exactly. a sovereign and an autocrat, the pilot's word was law; he wore his responsibilities as a crown. as long as he lived samuel clemens would return to those old days with fondness and affection, and with regret that they were no more. xxx. the soldier clemens spent a few days in st. louis (in retirement, for there was a pressing war demand for mississippi pilots), then went up to hannibal to visit old friends. they were glad enough to see him, and invited him to join a company of gay military enthusiasts who were organizing to “help gov. 'claib' jackson repel the invader.” a good many companies were forming in and about hannibal, and sometimes purposes were conflicting and badly mixed. some of the volunteers did not know for a time which invader they intended to drive from missouri soil, and more than one company in the beginning was made up of young fellows whose chief ambition was to have a lark regardless as to which cause they might eventually espouse. --[the military organizations of hannibal and palmyra, in , were as follows: the marion artillery; the silver grays; palmyra guards; the w. e. dennis company, and one or two others. most of them were small private affairs, usually composed of about half-and-half union and confederate men, who knew almost nothing of the questions or conditions, and disbanded in a brief time, to attach themselves to the regular service according as they developed convictions. the general idea of these companies was a little camping-out expedition and a good time. one such company one morning received unexpected reinforcements. they saw the approach of the recruits, and, remarking how well drilled the new arrivals seemed to be, mistook them for the enemy and fled.] samuel clemens had by this time decided, like lee, that he would go with his state and lead battalions to victory. the “battalion” in this instance consisted of a little squad of young fellows of his own age, mostly pilots and schoolmates, including sam bowen, ed stevens, and ab grimes, about a dozen, all told. they organized secretly, for the union militia was likely to come over from illinois any time and look up any suspicious armies that made an open demonstration. an army might lose enthusiasm and prestige if it spent a night or two in the calaboose. so they met in a secret place above bear creek hill, just as tom sawyer's red-handed bandits had gathered so long before (a good many of them were of the same lawless lot), and they planned how they would sell their lives on the field of glory, just as tom sawyer's band might have done if it had thought about playing “war,” instead of “indian” and “pirate” and “bandit” with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon patches. then, on the evening before marching away, they stealthily called on their sweethearts--those who had them did, and the others pretended sweethearts for the occasion--and when it was dark and mysterious they said good-by and suggested that maybe those girls would never see them again. and as always happens in such a case, some of them were in earnest, and two or three of the little group that slipped away that night never did come back, and somewhere sleep in unmarked graves. the “two sams”--sam bowen and sam clemens--called on patty gore and julia willis for their good-by visit, and, when they left, invited the girls to “walk through the pickets” with them, which they did as far as bear creek hill. the girls didn't notice any pickets, because the pickets were away calling on girls, too, and probably wouldn't be back to begin picketing for some time. so the girls stood there and watched the soldiers march up bear creek hill and disappear among the trees. the army had a good enough time that night, marching through the brush and vines toward new london, though this sort of thing grew rather monotonous by morning. when they took a look at themselves by daylight, with their nondescript dress and accoutrements, there was some thing about it all which appealed to one's sense of humor rather than to his patriotism. colonel ralls, of ralls county, however, received them cordially and made life happier for them with a good breakfast and some encouraging words. he was authorized to administer the oath of office, he said, and he proceeded to do it, and made them a speech besides; also he sent out notice to some of the neighbors--to col. bill splawn, farmer nuck matson, and others--that the community had an army on its hands and perhaps ought to do something for it. this brought in a number of contributions, provisions, paraphernalia, and certain superfluous horses and mules, which converted the battalion into a cavalry, and made it possible for it to move on to the front without further delay. samuel clemens, mounted on a small yellow mule whose tail had been trimmed down to a tassel at the end in a style that suggested his name, paint brush, upholstered and supplemented with an extra pair of cowskin boots, a pair of gray blankets, a home-made quilt, frying-pan, a carpet sack, a small valise, an overcoat, an old-fashioned kentucky rifle, twenty yards of rope, and an umbrella, was a representative unit of the brigade. the proper thing for an army loaded like that was to go into camp, and they did it. they went over on salt river, near florida, and camped not far from a farm-house with a big log stable; the latter they used as headquarters. somebody suggested that when they went into battle they ought to have short hair, so that in a hand-to-hand conflict the enemy could not get hold of it. tom lyon found a pair of sheep-shears in the stable and acted as barber. they were not very sharp shears, but the army stood the torture for glory in the field, and a group of little darkies collected from the farm-house to enjoy the performance. the army then elected its officers. william ely was chosen captain, with asa glasscock as first lieutenant. samuel clemens was then voted second lieutenant, and there were sergeants and orderlies. there were only three privates when the election was over, and these could not be distinguished by their deportment. there was scarcely any discipline in this army. then it set in to rain. it rained by day and it rained by night. salt river rose until it was bank full and overflowed the bottoms. twice there was a false night alarm of the enemy approaching, and the battalion went slopping through the mud and brush into the dark, picking out the best way to retreat, plodding miserably back to camp when the alarm was over. once they fired a volley at a row of mullen stalks, waving on the brow of a hill, and once a picket shot at his own horse that had got loose and had wandered toward him in the dusk. the rank and file did not care for picket duty. sam bowen--ordered by lieutenant clemens to go on guard one afternoon--denounced his superior and had to be threatened with court-martial and death. sam went finally, but he sat in a hot open place and swore at the battalion and the war in general, and finally went to sleep in the broiling sun. these things began to tell on patriotism. presently lieutenant clemens developed a boil, and was obliged to make himself comfortable with some hay in a horse-trough, where he lay most of the day, violently denouncing the war and the fools that invented it. then word came that “general” tom harris, who was in command of the district, was stopping at a farmhouse two miles away, living on the fat of the land. that settled it. most of them knew tom harris, and they regarded his neglect of them as perfidy. they broke camp without further ceremony. lieutenant clemens needed assistance to mount paint brush, and the little mule refused to cross the river; so ab grimes took the coil of rope, hitched one end of it to his own saddle and the other end to paint brush's neck. grimes was mounted on a big horse, and when he started it was necessary for paint brush to follow. arriving at the farther bank, grimes looked around, and was horrified to see that the end of the rope led down in the water with no horse and rider in view. he spurred up the bank, and the hat of lieutenant clemens and the ears of paint brush appeared. “ah,” said clemens, as he mopped his face, “do you know that little devil waded all the way across?” a little beyond the river they met general harris, who ordered them back to camp. they admonished him to “go there himself.” they said they had been in that camp and knew all about it. they were going now where there was food--real food and plenty of it. then he begged them, but it was no use. by and by they stopped at a farm-house for supplies. a tall, bony woman came to the door: “you're secesh, ain't you?” they acknowledged that they were defenders of the cause and that they wanted to buy provisions. the request seemed to inflame her. “provisions!” she screamed. “provisions for secesh, and my husband a colonel in the union army. you get out of here!” she reached for a hickory hoop-pole that stood by the door, and the army moved on. when they arrived at col. bill splawn's that night colonel splawn and his family had gone to bed, and it seemed unwise to disturb them. the hungry army camped in the barnyard and crept into the hay-loft to sleep. presently somebody yelled “fire!” one of the boys had been smoking and started the hay. lieutenant clemens suddenly wakened, made a quick rolling movement from the blaze, and rolled out of a big hay-window into the barnyard below. the rest of the army, startled into action, seized the burning hay and pitched it out of the same window. the lieutenant had sprained his ankle when he struck the ground, and his boil was far from well, but when the burning hay descended he forgot his disabilities. literally and figuratively this was the final straw. with a voice and vigor suited to the urgencies of the case, he made a spring from under the burning stuff, flung off the remnants, and with them his last vestige of interest in the war. the others, now that the fire was, out, seemed to think the incident boisterously amusing. whereupon the lieutenant rose up and told them, collectively and individually, what he thought of them; also he spoke of the war and the confederacy, and of the human race at large. they helped him in, then, for his ankle was swelling badly. next morning, when colonel splawn had given them a good breakfast, the army set out for new london. but lieutenant clemens never got any farther than nuck matson's farm-house. his ankle was so painful by that time that mrs. matson had him put to bed, where he stayed for several weeks, recovering from the injury and stress of war. a little negro boy was kept on watch for union detachments--they were passing pretty frequently now--and when one came in sight the lieutenant was secluded until the danger passed. when he was able to travel, he had had enough of war and the confederacy. he decided to visit orion in keokuk. orion was a union abolitionist and might lead him to mend his doctrines. as for the rest of the army, it was no longer a unit in the field. its members had drifted this way and that, some to return to their occupations, some to continue in the trade of war. sam bowen is said to have been caught by the federal troops and put to sawing wood in the stockade at hannibal. ab (a. c.) grimes became a noted confederate spy and is still among those who have lived to furnish the details here set down. properly officered and disciplined, that detachment would have made as brave soldiers as any. military effectiveness is a matter of leaders and tactics. mark twain's own private history of a 'campaign that failed' is, of course, built on this episode. he gives us a delicious account, even if it does not strikingly resemble the occurrence. the story might have been still better if he had not introduced the shooting of the soldier in the dark. the incident was invented, of course, to present the real horror of war, but it seems incongruous in this burlesque campaign, and, to some extent at least, it missed fire in its intention. --[in a book recently published, mark twain's “nephew” is quoted as authority for the statement that mark twain was detailed for river duty, captured, and paroled, captured again, and confined in a tobacco-warehouse in st. louis, etc. mark twain had but one nephew: samuel e. moffett, whose biographical sketch (vol. xxii, mark twain's works) contains no such statement; and nothing of the sort occurred.] xxxi. over the hills and far away when madame caprell prophesied that orion clemens would hold office under government, she must have seen with true clairvoyant vision. the inauguration of abraham lincoln brought edward bates into his cabinet, and bates was orion's friend. orion applied for something, and got it. james w. nye had been appointed territorial governor of nevada, and orion was made territorial secretary. you could strain a point and refer to the office as “secretary of state,” which was an imposing title. furthermore, the secretary would be acting governor in the governor's absence, and there would be various subsidiary honors. when lieutenant clemens arrived in keokuk, orion was in the first flush of his triumph and needed only money to carry him to the scene of new endeavor. the late lieutenant c. s. a. had accumulated money out of his pilot salary, and there was no comfortable place just then in the active middle west for an officer of either army who had voluntarily retired from the service. he agreed that if orion would overlook his recent brief defection from the union and appoint him now as his (orion's) secretary, he would supply the funds for both overland passages, and they would start with no unnecessary delay for a country so new that all human beings, regardless of previous affiliations and convictions, were flung into the common fusing-pot and recast in the general mold of pioneer. the offer was a boon to orion. he was always eager to forgive, and the money was vitally necessary. in the briefest possible time he had packed his belongings, which included a large unabridged dictionary, and the brothers were on their way to st. louis for final leave-taking before setting out for the great mysterious land of promise--the pacific west. from st. louis they took the boat for st. jo, whence the overland stage started, and for six days “plodded” up the shallow, muddy, snaggy missouri, a new experience for the pilot of the father of waters. in fact, the boat might almost as well have gone to st. jo by land, for she was walking most of the time, anyhow--climbing over reefs and clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all day long. the captain said she was a “bully” boat, and all she wanted was some “shear” and a bigger wheel. i thought she wanted a pair of stilts, but i had the deep sagacity not to say so.'--['roughing it'.]-- at st. jo they paid one hundred and fifty dollars apiece for their stage fare (with something extra for the dictionary), and on the twenty-sixth of july, , set out on that long, delightful trip behind sixteen galloping horses--or mules--never stopping except for meals or to change teams, heading steadily into the sunset, following it from horizon to horizon over the billowy plains, across the snow-clad rockies, covering the seventeen hundred miles between st. jo and carson city (including a two-day halt in salt lake city) in nineteen glorious days. what an inspiration in such a trip! in 'roughing it' he tells it all, and says: “even at this day it thrills me through and through to think of the life, the gladness, and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my face on those fine overland mornings.” the nights, with the uneven mail-bags for a bed and the bounding dictionary for company, were less exhilarating; but then youth does not mind. all things being now ready, stowed the uneasy dictionary where it would lie as quiet as possible, and placed the water-canteen and pistols where we could find them in the dark. then we smoked a final pipe and swapped a final yarn; after which we put the pipes, tobacco, and bag of coin in snug holes and caves among the mail- bags, and made the place as dark as the inside of a cow, as the conductor phrased it in his picturesque way. it was certainly as dark as any place could be--nothing was even dimly visible in it. and finally we rolled ourselves up like silkworms, each person in his own blanket, and sank peacefully to sleep. youth loves that sort of thing, despite its inconvenience. and sometimes the clatter of the pony-rider swept by in the night, carrying letters at five dollars apiece and making the overland trip in eight days; just a quick beat of hoofs in the distance, a dash, and a hail from the darkness, the beat of hoofs again, then only the rumble of the stage and the even, swinging gallop of the mules. sometimes they got a glimpse of the ponyrider by day--a flash, as it were, as he sped by. and every morning brought new scenery, new phases of frontier life, including, at last, what was to them the strangest phase of all, mormonism. they spent two wonderful days at salt lake city, that mysterious and remote capital of the great american monarchy, who still flaunts her lawless, orthodox creed the religion of david and solomon--and thrives. an obliging official made it his business to show them the city and the life there, the result of which would be those amusing chapters in 'roughing it' by and by. the overland travelers set out refreshed from salt lake city, and with a new supply of delicacies--ham, eggs, and tobacco--things that make such a trip worth while. the author of 'roughing it' assures us of this: nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. ham and eggs, and after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and scenery, a “down-grade,” a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a contented heart--these make happiness. it is what all the ages have struggled for. but one must read all the story of that long-ago trip. it was a trip so well worth taking, so well worth recording, so well worth reading and rereading to-day. we can only read of it now. the overland stage long ago made its last trip, and will not start any more. even if it did, the life and conditions, the very scenery itself, would not be the same. xxxii. the pioneer it was a hot, dusty august th that the stage reached carson city and drew up before the ormsby hotel. it was known that the territorial secretary was due to arrive; and something in the nature of a reception, with refreshments and frontier hospitality, had been planned. governor nye, formerly police commissioner in new york city, had arrived a short time before, and with his party of retainers (“heelers” we would call them now), had made an imposing entrance. perhaps something of the sort was expected with the advent of the secretary of state. instead, the committee saw two way-worn individuals climb down from the stage, unkempt, unshorn--clothed in the roughest of frontier costume, the same they had put on at st. jo--dusty, grimy, slouchy, and weather-beaten with long days of sun and storm and alkali desert dust. it is not likely there were two more unprepossessing officials on the pacific coast at that moment than the newly arrived territorial secretary and his brother: somebody identified them, and the committee melted away; the half-formed plan of a banquet faded out and was not heard of again. soap and water and fresh garments worked a transformation; but that first impression had been fatal to festivities of welcome. carson city, the capital of nevada, was a “wooden town,” with a population of two thousand souls. its main street consisted of a few blocks of small frame stores, some of which are still standing. in 'roughing it' the author writes: in the middle of the town, opposite the stores, was a “plaza,” which is native to all towns beyond the rocky mountains, a large, unfenced, level vacancy with a liberty pole in it, and very useful as a place for public auctions, horse trades, and mass-meetings, and likewise for teamsters to camp in. two other sides of the plaza were faced by stores, offices, and stables. the rest of carson city was pretty scattering. one sees the place pretty clearly from this brief picture of his, but it requires an extract from a letter written to his mother somewhat later to populate it. the mineral excitement was at its height in those days of the early sixties, and had brought together such a congress of nations as only the greed for precious metal can assemble. the sidewalks and streets of carson, and the plaza, thronged all day with a motley aggregation--a museum of races, which it was an education merely to gaze upon. jane clemens had required him to write everything just as it was--“no better and no worse.” well--[he says]--, “gold hill” sells at $ , per foot, cash down; “wild cat” isn't worth ten cents. the country is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of paris (gypsum), thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, christians, indians, chinamen, spaniards, gamblers, sharpens; coyotes (pronounced ki-yo- ties), poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits. i overheard a gentleman say, the other day, that it was “the d---dest country under the sun,” and that comprehensive conception i fully subscribe to. it never rains here, and the dew never falls. no flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. the birds that fly over the land carry their provisions with them. only the crow and the raven tarry with us. our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest, most unadulterated and uncompromising sand, in which infernal soil nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation, “sage- brush,” ventures to grow.... i said we are situated in a flat, sandy desert--true. and surrounded on all sides by such prodigious mountains that when you look disdainfully down (from them) upon the insignificant village of carson, in that instant you are seized with a burning desire to stretch forth your hand, put the city in your pocket, and walk off with it. as to churches, i believe they have got a catholic one here, but, like that one the new york fireman spoke of, i believe “they don't run her now.” carson has been through several phases of change since this was written--for better and for worse. it is a thriving place in these later days, and new farming conditions have improved the country roundabout. but it was a desert outpost then, a catch-all for the human drift which every whirlwind of discovery sweeps along. gold and silver hunting and mine speculations were the industries--gambling, drinking, and murder were the diversions--of the nevada capital. politics developed in due course, though whether as a business or a diversion is not clear at this time. the clemens brothers took lodging with a genial irishwoman, mrs. murphy, a new york retainer of governor nye, who boarded the camp-followers.--[the mrs. o'flannigan of 'roughing it'.]--this retinue had come in the hope of territorial pickings and mine adventure--soldiers of fortune they were, and a good-natured lot all together. one of them, bob howland, a nephew of the governor, attracted samuel clemens by his clean-cut manner and commanding eye. “the man who has that eye doesn't need to go armed,” he wrote later. “he can move upon an armed desperado and quell him and take him a prisoner without saying a single word.” it was the same bob howland who would be known by and by as the most fearless man in the territory; who, as city marshal of aurora, kept that lawless camp in subjection, and, when the friends of a lot of condemned outlaws were threatening an attack with general massacre, sent the famous message to governor nye: “all quiet in aurora. five men will be hung in an hour.” and it was quiet, and the programme was carried out. but this is a digression and somewhat premature. orion clemens, anxious for laurels, established himself in the meager fashion which he thought the government would approve; and his brother, finding neither duties nor salary attached to his secondary position, devoted himself mainly to the study of human nature as exhibited under frontier conditions. sometimes, when the nights were cool, he would build a fire in the office stove, and, with bob howland and a few other choice members of the “brigade” gathered around, would tell river yarns in that inimitable fashion which would win him devoted audiences all his days. his river life had increased his natural languor of habit, and his slow speech heightened the lazy impression which he was never unwilling to convey. his hearers generally regarded him as an easygoing, indolent good fellow with a love of humor--with talent, perhaps--but as one not likely ever to set the world afire. they did not happen to think that the same inclination which made them crowd about to listen and applaud would one day win for him the attention of all mankind. within a brief time sam clemens (he was never known as otherwise than “sam” among those pioneers) was about the most conspicuous figure on the carson streets. his great bushy head of auburn hair, his piercing, twinkling eyes, his loose, lounging walk, his careless disorder of dress, drew the immediate attention even of strangers; made them turn to look a second time and then inquire as to his identity. he had quickly adapted himself to the frontier mode. lately a river sovereign and dandy, in fancy percales and patent leathers, he had become the roughest of rough-clad pioneers, in rusty slouch hat, flannel shirt, coarse trousers slopping half in and half out of the heavy cowskin boots always something of a barbarian in love with the loose habit of unconvention, he went even further than others and became a sort of paragon of disarray. the more energetic citizens of carson did not prophesy much for his future among them. orion clemens, with the stir and bustle of the official new broom, earned their quick respect; but his brother--well, they often saw him leaning for an hour or more at a time against an awning support at the corner of king and carson streets, smoking a short clay pipe and staring drowsily at the human kaleidoscope of the plaza, scarcely changing his position, just watching, studying, lost in contemplation--all of which was harmless enough, of course, but how could any one ever get a return out of employment like that? samuel clemens did not catch the mining fever immediately; there was too much to see at first to consider any special undertaking. the mere coming to the frontier was for the present enough; he had no plans. his chief purpose was to see the world beyond the rockies, to derive from it such amusement and profit as might fall in his way. the war would end, by and by, and he would go back to the river, no doubt. he was already not far from homesick for the “states” and his associations there. he closed one letter: i heard a military band play “what are the wild waves saying” the other night, and it brought ella creel and belle (stotts) across the desert in an instant, for they sang the song in orion's yard the first time i ever heard it. it was like meeting an old friend. i tell you i could have swallowed that whole band, trombone and all, if such a compliment would have been any gratification to them. his friends contracted the mining mania; bob howland and raish phillips went down to aurora and acquired “feet” in mini-claims and wrote him enthusiastic letters. with captain nye, the governor's brother, he visited them and was presented with an interest which permitted him to contribute an assessment every now and then toward the development of the mine; but his enthusiasm still languished. he was interested more in the native riches above ground than in those concealed under it. he had heard that the timber around lake bigler (tahoe) promised vast wealth which could be had for the asking. the lake itself and the adjacent mountains were said to be beautiful beyond the dream of art. he decided to locate a timber claim on its shores. he made the trip afoot with a young ohio lad, john kinney, and the account of this trip as set down in 'roughing it' is one of the best things in the book. the lake proved all they had expected--more than they expected; it was a veritable habitation of the gods, with its delicious, winy atmosphere, its vast colonnades of pines, its measureless depths of water, so clear that to drift on it was like floating high aloft in mid-nothingness. they staked out a timber claim and made a semblance of fencing it and of building a habitation, to comply with the law; but their chief employment was a complete abandonment to the quiet luxury of that dim solitude: wandering among the trees, lounging along the shore, or drifting on that transparent, insubstantial sea. they did not sleep in their house, he says: “it never occurred to us, for one thing; and, besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough. we did not wish to strain it.” they lived by their camp-fire on the borders of the lake, and one day--it was just at nightfall--it got away from them, fired the forest, and destroyed their fence and habitation. his picture in 'roughing it' of the superb night spectacle, the mighty mountain conflagration reflected in the waters of the lake, is splendidly vivid. the reader may wish to compare it with this extract from a letter written to pamela at the time. the level ranks of flame were relieved at intervals by the standard- bearers, as we called the tall, dead trees, wrapped in fire, and waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air. then we could turn from the scene to the lake, and see every branch and leaf and cataract of flame upon its banks perfectly reflected, as in a gleaming, fiery mirror. the mighty roaring of the conflagration, together with our solitary and somewhat unsafe position (for there was no one within six miles of us), rendered the scene very impressive. occasionally one of us would remove his pipe from his mouth and say, “superb, magnificent!--beautifull--but--by the lord god almighty, if we attempt to sleep in this little patch to-night, we'll never live till morning!” this is good writing too, but it lacks the fancy and the choice of phrasing which would develop later. the fire ended their first excursion to tahoe, but they made others and located other claims--claims in which the “folks at home,” mr. moffett, james lampton, and others, were included. it was the same james lampton who would one day serve as a model for colonel sellers. evidently samuel clemens had a good opinion of his business capacity in that earlier day, for he writes: this is just the country for cousin jim to live in. i don't believe it would take him six months to make $ , here if he had $ , to commence with. i suppose he can't leave his family, though. further along in the same letter his own overflowing seller's optimism develops. orion and i have confidence enough in this country to think that if the war lets us alone we can make mr. moffett rich without its ever costing him a cent or a particle of trouble. this letter bears date of october th, and from it we gather that a certain interest in mining claims had by this time developed. we have got about , feet of mining ground, and, if it proves good, mr. moffett's name will go in, and if not i can get “feet” for him in the spring. you see, pamela, the trouble does not consist in getting mining ground--for there is plenty enough--but the money to work it with after you get it. he refers to pamela's two little children, his niece annie and baby sam,--[samuel e. moffett, in later life a well-known journalist and editor.]--and promises to enter claims for them--timber claims probably--for he was by no means sanguine as yet concerning the mines. that was a long time ago. tahoe land is sold by the lot, now, to summer residents. those claims would have been riches to-day, but they were all abandoned presently, forgotten in the delirium which goes only with the pursuit of precious ores. xxxiii. the prospector it was not until early winter that samuel clemens got the real mining infection. everybody had it by that time; the miracle is that he had not fallen an earlier victim. the wildest stories of sudden fortune were in the air, some of them undoubtedly true. men had gone to bed paupers, on the verge of starvation, and awakened to find themselves millionaires. others had sold for a song claims that had been suddenly found to be fairly stuffed with precious ores. cart-loads of bricks--silver and gold--daily drove through the streets. in the midst of these things reports came from the newly opened humboldt region--flamed up with a radiance that was fairly blinding. the papers declared that humboldt county “was the richest mineral region on god's footstool.” the mountains were said to be literally bursting with gold and silver. a correspondent of the daily territorial enterprise fairly wallowed in rhetoric, yet found words inadequate to paint the measureless wealth of the humboldt mines. no wonder those not already mad speedily became so. no wonder samuel clemens, with his natural tendency to speculative optimism, yielded to the epidemic and became as “frenzied as the craziest.” the air to him suddenly began to shimmer; all his thoughts were of “leads” and “ledges” and “veins”; all his clouds had silver linings; all his dreams were of gold. he joined an expedition at once; he reproached himself bitterly for not having started earlier. hurry was the word! we wasted no time. our party consisted of four persons--a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and myself. we bought a wagon and two miserable old horses. we put , pounds of provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove out of carson on a chilly december afternoon. in a letter to his mother he states that besides provisions and mining tools, their load consisted of certain luxuries viz., ten pounds of killikinick, watts's hymns, fourteen decks of cards, dombey and son, a cribbage-board, one small keg of lager-beer, and the “carmina sacra.” the two young lawyers were a. w.(gus) oliver (oliphant in 'roughing it'), and w. h. clagget. sam clemens had known billy clagget as a law student in keokuk, and they were brought together now by this association. both clagget and oliver were promising young men, and would be heard from in time. the blacksmith's name was tillou (ballou), a sturdy, honest soul with a useful knowledge of mining and the repair of tools. there were also two dogs in the party--a small curly-tailed mongrel, curney, the property of mr. tillou, and a young hound. the combination seemed a strong one. it proved a weak one in the matter of horses. oliver and clemens had furnished the team, and their selection had not been of the best. it was two hundred miles to humboldt, mostly across sand. the horses could not drag their load and the miners too, so the miners got out. then they found it necessary to push. not because we were fond of it, ma--oh, no! but on bunker's account. bunker was the “near” horse on the larboard side, named after the attorney-general of this territory. my horse--and i am sorry you do not know him personally, ma, for i feel toward him, sometimes, as if he were a blood relation of our family--he is so lazy, you know--my horse--i was going to say, was the “off” horse on the starboard side. but it was on bunker's account, principally, that we pushed behind the wagon. in fact, ma, that horse had something on his mind all the way to humboldt.--[s. l. c. to his mother. published in the keokuk (iowa) gate city.]-- so they had to push, and most of that two hundred miles through snow and sand storm they continued to push and swear and groan, sustained only by the thought that they must arrive at last, when their troubles would all be at an end, for they would be millionaires in a brief time and never know want or fatigue any more. there were compensations: the camp-fire at night was cheerful, the food satisfying. they bundled close under the blankets and, when it was too cold to sleep, looked up at the stars, while the future entertainer of kings would spin yarn after yarn that made his hearers forget their discomforts. judge oliver, the last one of the party alive, in a recent letter to the writer of this history, says: he was the life of the camp; but sometimes there would come a reaction and he could hardly speak for a day or two. one day a pack of wolves chased us, and the hound sam speaks of never stopped to look back till he reached the next station, many miles ahead. judge oliver adds that an indian war had just ended, and that they occasionally passed the charred ruin of a shack, and new graves: this was disturbing enough. then they came to that desolation of desolations, the alkali desert, where the sand is of unknown depth, where the road is strewn thickly with the carcasses of dead beasts of burden, the charred remains of wagons, chains, bolts, and screws, which thirsty emigrants, grown desperate, have thrown away in the grand hope of being able, when less encumbered, to reach water. they traveled all day and night, pushing through that fierce, waterless waste to reach camp on the other side. it was three o'clock in the morning when they got across and dropped down utterly exhausted. judge oliver in his letter tells what happened then: the sun was high in the heavens when we were aroused from our sleep by a yelling band of piute warriors. we were upon our feet in an instant. the pictures of burning cabins and the lonely graves we had passed were in our minds. our scalps were still our own, and not dangling from the belts of our visitors. sam pulled himself together, put his hand on his head as if to make sure he had not been scalped, and then with his inimitable drawl said: “boys, they have left us our scalps. let's give them all the flour and sugar they ask for.” and we did give them a good supply, for we were grateful. they were eleven weary days pushing their wagon and team the two hundred miles to unionville, humboldt county, arriving at last in a driving snow-storm. unionville consisted of eleven poor cabins built in the bottom of a canon, five on one side and six facing them on the other. they were poor, three-sided, one-room huts, the fourth side formed by the hill; the roof, a spread of white cotton. stones used to roll down on them sometimes, and mark twain tells of live stock--specifically of a mule and cow--that interrupted the patient, long-suffering oliver, who was trying to write poetry, and only complained when at last “an entire cow came rolling down the hill, crashed through on the table, and made a shapeless wreck of everything.”--['the innocents abroad.'] judge oliver still does not complain; but he denies the cow. he says there were no cows in humboldt in those days, so perhaps it was only a literary cow, though in any case it will long survive. judge oliver's name will go down with it to posterity. in the letter which samuel clemens wrote home he tells of what they found in unionville. “national” there was selling at $ per foot and assayed $ , per ton at the mint in san francisco. and the “alda nueva,” “peru,” “delirio,” “congress,” “independent,” and others were immensely rich leads. and moreover, having winning ways with us, we could get “feet” enough to make us all rich one of these days. “i confess with shame,” says the author of 'roughing it', “that i expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground.” and he adds that he slipped away from the cabin to find a claim on his own account, and tells how he came staggering back under a load of golden specimens; also how his specimens proved to be only worthless mica; and how he learned that in mining nothing that glitters is gold. his account in 'roughing it' of the humboldt mining experience is sufficiently good history to make detail here unnecessary. tillou instructed them in prospecting, and in time they located a fairly promising claim. they went to work on it with pick and shovel, then with drill and blasting-powder. then they gave it up. “one week of this satisfied me. i resigned.” they tried to tunnel, but soon resigned again. it was pleasanter to prospect and locate and trade claims and acquire feet in every new ledge than it was to dig-and about as profitable. the golden reports of humboldt had been based on assays of selected rich specimens, and were mainly delirium and insanity. the clemens-clagget-oliver-tillou combination never touched their claims again with pick and shovel, though their faith, or at least their hope, in them did not immediately die. billy clagget put out his shingle as notary public, and gus oliver put out his as probate judge. sam clemens and tillou, with a fat-witted, arrogant prussian named pfersdoff (ollendorf) set out for carson city. it is not certain what became of the wagon and team, or of the two dogs. the carson travelers were water-bound at a tavern on the carson river (the scene of the “arkansas” sketch), with a fighting, drinking lot. pfersdoff got them nearly drowned getting away, and finally succeeded in getting them absolutely lost in the snow. the author of 'roughing it' tells us how they gave themselves up to die, and how each swore off whatever he had in the way of an evil habit, how they cast their tempters-tobacco, cards, and whisky-into the snow. he further tells us how next morning, when they woke to find themselves alive, within a few rods of a hostelry, they surreptitiously dug up those things again and, deep in shame and luxury, resumed their fallen ways: it was the th of january when they reached carson city. they had been gone not quite two months, one of which had been spent in travel. it was a brief period, but it contained an episode, and it seemed like years. xxxiv. territorial characteristics meantime, the territorial secretary had found difficulties in launching the ship of state. there was no legislative hall in carson city; and if abram curry, one of the original owners of the celebrated gould and curry mine--“curry--old curry--old abe curry,” as he called himself--had not tendered the use of a hall rent free, the first legislature would have been obliged to “sit in the desert.” furthermore, orion had met with certain acute troubles of his own. the government at washington had not appreciated his economies in the matter of cheap office rental, and it had stipulated the price which he was to pay for public printing and various other services-prices fixed according to eastern standards. these prices did not obtain in nevada, and when orion, confident that because of his other economies the comptroller would stretch a point and allow the increased frontier tariff, he was met with the usual thick-headed official lack of imagination, with the result that the excess paid was deducted from his slender salary. with a man of less conscience this condition would easily have been offset by another wherein other rates, less arbitrary, would have been adjusted to negotiate the official deficit. with orion clemens such a remedy was not even considered; yielding, unstable, blown by every wind of influence though he was, orion's integrity was a rock. governor nye was among those who presently made this discovery. old politician that he was--former police commissioner of new york city--nye took care of his own problems in the customary manner. to him, politics was simply a game--to be played to win. he was a popular, jovial man, well liked and thought of, but he did not lie awake, as orion did, planning economies for the government, or how to make up excess charges out of his salary. to him nevada was simply a doorway to the united states senate, and in the mean time his brigade required official recognition and perquisites. the governor found orion clemens an impediment to this policy. orion could not be brought to a proper political understanding of “special bills and accounts,” and relations between the secretary of state and the governor were becoming strained. it was about this time that the man who had been potentate of the pilot-house of a mississippi river steamer returned from humboldt. he was fond of the governor, but he had still higher regard for the family integrity. when he had heard orion's troubled story, he called on governor nye and delivered himself in his own fashion. in his former employments he had acquired a vocabulary and moral backbone sufficient to his needs. we may regret that no stenographic report was made of the interview. it would be priceless now. but it is lost; we only know that orion's rectitude was not again assailed, and that curiously enough governor nye apparently conceived a strong admiration and respect for his brother. samuel clemens, miner, remained but a brief time in carson city--only long enough to arrange for a new and more persistent venture. he did not confess his humboldt failure to his people; in fact, he had not as yet confessed it to himself; his avowed purpose was to return to humboldt after a brief investigation of the esmeralda mines. he had been paying heavy assessments on his holdings there; and, with a knowledge of mining gained at unionville, he felt that his personal attention at aurora might be important. as a matter of fact, he was by this time fairly daft on the subject of mines and mining, with the rest of the community for company. his earlier praises of the wonders and climate of tahoe had inspired his sister pamela, always frail, with a desire to visit that health-giving land. perhaps he felt that he recommended the country somewhat too highly. “by george, pamela,” he said, “i begin to fear that i have invoked a spirit of some kind or other, which i will find more than difficult to allay.” he proceeds to recommend california as a residence for any or all of them, but he is clearly doubtful concerning nevada. some people are malicious enough to think that if the devil were set at liberty and told to confine himself to nevada territory, he would come here and look sadly around awhile, and then get homesick and go back to hell again.... why, i have had my whiskers and mustaches so full of alkali dust that you'd have thought i worked in a starch factory and boarded in a flour barrel. but then he can no longer restrain his youth and optimism. how could he, with a fortune so plainly in view? it was already in his grasp in imagination; he was on the way home with it. i expect to return to st. louis in july--per steamer. i don't say that i will return then, or that i shall be able to do it--but i expect to--you bet. i came down here from humboldt, in order to look after our esmeralda interests. yesterday, bob howland arrived here, and i have had a talk with him. he owns with me in the “horatio and derby” ledge. he says our tunnel is in feet, and a small stream of water has been struck, which bids fair to become a “big thing” by the time the ledge is reached--sufficient to supply a mill. now, if you knew anything of the value of water here, you would perceive at a glance that if the water should amount to or inches, we wouldn't care whether school kept or not. if the ledge should prove to be worthless, we'd sell the water for money enough to give us quite a lift. but, you see, the ledge will not prove to be worthless. we have located, near by, a fine site for a mill, and when we strike the ledge, you know, we'll have a mill- site, water-power, and payrock, all handy. then we sha'n't care whether we have capital or not. mill folks will build us a mill, and wait for their pay. if nothing goes wrong, we'll strike the ledge in june--and if we do, i'll be home in july, you know. he pauses at this point for a paragraph of self-analysis--characteristic and crystal-clear. so, just keep your clothes on, pamela, until i come. don't you know that undemonstrated human calculations won't do to bet on? don't you know that i have only talked, as yet, but proved nothing? don't you know that i have expended money in this country but have made none myself? don't you know that i have never held in my hands a gold or silver bar that belonged to me? don't you know that it's all talk and no cider so far? don't you know that people who always feel jolly, no matter where they are or what happens to them--who have the organ of hope preposterously developed--who are endowed with an unconcealable sanguine temperament--who never feel concerned about the price of corn--and who cannot, by any possibility, discover any but the bright side of a picture--are very apt to go to extremes and exaggerate with -horse microscopic power? but-but in the bright lexicon of youth, there is no such word as fail-- and i'll prove it! whereupon, he lets himself go again, full-tilt: by george, if i just had a thousand dollars i'd be all right! now there's the “horatio,” for instance. there are five or six shareholders in it, and i know i could buy half of their interests at, say $ per foot, now that flour is worth $ per barrel and they are pressed for money, but i am hard up myself, and can't buy --and in june they'll strike the ledge, and then “good-by canary.” i can't get it for love or money. twenty dollars a foot! think of it! for ground that is proven to be rich. twenty dollars, madam- and we wouldn't part with a foot of our for five times the sum. so it will be in humboldt next summer. the boys will get pushed and sell ground for a song that is worth a fortune. but i am at the helm now. i have convinced orion that he hasn't business talent enough to carry on a peanut-stand, and he has solemnly promised me that he will meddle no more with mining or other matters not connected with the secretary's office. so, you see, if mines are to be bought or sold, or tunnels run or shafts sunk, parties have to come to me--and me only. i'm the “firm,” you know. there are pages of this, all glowing with golden expectations and plans. ah, well! we have all written such letters home at one time and another-of gold-mines of one form or another. he closes at last with a bit of pleasantry for his mother. ma says: “it looks like a man can't hold public office and be honest.” why, certainly not, madam. a man can't hold public office and be honest. lord bless you, it is a common practice with orion to go about town stealing little things that happen to be lying around loose. and i don't remember having heard him speak the truth since we have been in nevada. he even tries to prevail upon me to do these things, ma, but i wasn't brought up in that way, you know. you showed the public what you could do in that line when you raised me, madam. but then you ought to have raised me first, so that orion could have had the benefit of my example. do you know that he stole all the stamps out of an -stamp quartz-mill one night, and brought them home under his overcoat and hid them in the back room? xxxv. the miner he had about exhausted his own funds by this time, and it was necessary that orion should become the financier. the brothers owned their esmeralda claims in partnership, and it was agreed that orion, out of his modest depleted pay, should furnish the means, while the other would go actively into the field and develop their riches. neither had the slightest doubt but that they would be millionaires presently, and both were willing to struggle and starve for the few intervening weeks. it was february when the printer-pilot-miner arrived in aurora, that rough, turbulent camp of the esmeralda district lying about one hundred miles south of carson city, on the edge of california, in the sierra slopes. everything was frozen and covered with snow; but there was no lack of excitement and prospecting and grabbing for “feet” in this ledge and that, buried deep under the ice and drift. the new arrival camped with horatio phillips (raish), in a tiny cabin with a domestic roof (the ruin of it still stands), and they cooked and bunked together and combined their resources in a common fund. bob howland joined them presently, and later an experienced miner, calvin h. higbie (cal), one day to be immortalized in the story of 'roughing it' and in the dedication of that book. around the cabin stove they would gather, and paw over their specimens, or test them with blow-pipe and “horn” spoon, after which they would plan tunnels and figure estimates of prospective wealth. never mind if the food was poor and scanty, and the chill wind came in everywhere, and the roof leaked like a filter; they were living in a land where all the mountains were banked with nuggets, where all the rivers ran gold. bob howland declared later that they used to go out at night and gather up empty champagne-bottles and fruit-tins and pile them in the rear of their cabin to convey to others the appearance of affluence and high living. when they lacked for other employment and were likely to be discouraged, the ex-pilot would “ride the bunk” and smoke and, without money and without price, distribute riches more valuable than any they would ever dig out of those esmeralda hills. at other times he talked little or not at all, but sat in one corner and wrote, wholly oblivious of his surroundings. they thought he was writing letters, though letters were not many and only to orion during this period. it was the old literary impulse stirring again, the desire to set things down for their own sake, the natural hunger for print. one or two of his earlier letters home had found their way into a keokuk paper--the 'gate city'. copies containing them had gone back to orion, who had shown them to a representative of the territorial enterprise, a young man named barstow, who thought them amusing. the enterprise reprinted at least one of these letters, or portions of it, and with this encouragement the author of it sent an occasional contribution direct to that paper over the pen-name “josh.” he did not care to sign his own name. he was a miner who was soon to be a magnate; he had no desire to be known as a camp scribbler. he received no pay for these offerings, and expected none. they were sketches of a broadly burlesque sort, the robust horse-play kind of humor that belongs to the frontier. they were not especially promising efforts. one of them was about an old rackabones of a horse, a sort of preliminary study for “oahu,” of the sandwich islands, or “baalbec” and “jericho,” of syria. if any one had told him, or had told any reader of this sketch, that the author of it was knocking at the door of the house of fame such a person's judgment or sincerity would have been open to doubt. nevertheless, it was true, though the knock was timid and halting and the summons to cross the threshold long delayed. a winter mining-camp is the most bleak and comfortless of places. the saloon and gambling-house furnished the only real warmth and cheer. our aurora miners would have been less than human, or more, if they had not found diversion now and then in the happy harbors of sin. once there was a great ball given at a newly opened pavilion, and sam clemens is said to have distinguished himself by his unrestrained and spontaneous enjoyment of the tripping harmony. cal higbie, who was present, writes: in changing partners, whenever he saw a hand raised he would grasp it with great pleasure and sail off into another set, oblivious to his surroundings. sometimes he would act as though there was no use in trying to go right or to dance like other people, and with his eyes closed he would do a hoe-down or a double-shuffle all alone, talking to himself and saying that he never dreamed there was so much pleasure to be obtained at a ball. it was all as natural as a child's play. by the second set, all the ladies were falling over themselves to get him for a partner, and most of the crowd, too full of mirth to dance, were standing or sitting around, dying with laughter. what a child he always was--always, to the very end? with the first break of winter the excitement that had been fermenting and stewing around camp stoves overflowed into the streets, washed up the gullies, and assailed the hills. there came then a period of madness, beside which the humboldt excitement had been mere intoxication. higbie says: it was amazing how wild the people became all over the pacific coast. in san francisco and other large cities barbers, hack- drivers, servant-girls, merchants, and nearly every class of people would club together and send agents representing all the way from $ , to $ , or more to buy mines. they would buy anything. in the shape of quartz, whether it contained any mineral value or not. the letters which went from the aurora miner to orion are humanly documentary. they are likely to be staccato in their movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and suppressed excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom humorous, except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are likely to be violent. even the handwriting has a terse look; the flourish of youth has gone out of it. altogether they reveal the tense anxiety of the gambling mania of which mining is the ultimate form. an extract from a letter of april is a fair exhibit: work not yet begun on the “horatio and derby”--haven't seen it yet. it is still in the snow. shall begin on it within or weeks --strike the ledge in july: guess it is good--worth from $ to $ a foot in california.... man named gebhart shot here yesterday while trying to defend a claim on last chance hill. expect he will die. these mills here are not worth a d--n--except clayton's--and it is not in full working trim yet. send me $ or $ --by mail-immediately. i go to work to-morrow with pick and shovel. something's got to come, by g--, before i let go here. by the end of april work had become active in the mines, though the snow in places was still deep and the ground stony with frost. on the th he writes: i have been at work all day blasting and digging, and d--ning one of our new claims--“dashaway”--which i don't think a great deal of, but which i am willing to try. we are down, now, or a feet. we are following down under the ledge, but not taking it out. if we get up a windlass to-morrow we shall take out the ledge, and see whether it is worth anything or not. it must have been hard work picking away at the flinty ledges in the cold; and the “dashaway” would seem to have proven a disappointment, for there is no promising mention of it again. instead, we hear of the “flyaway;” and “annipolitan” and the “live yankee” and of a dozen others, each of which holds out the beacon of hope for a little while and then passes from notice forever. in may it is the “monitor” that is sure to bring affluence, though realization is no longer regarded as immediate. to use a french expression, i have “got my d---d satisfy” at last. two years' time will make us capitalists, in spite of anything. therefore we need fret and fume and worry and doubt no more, but just lie still and put up with privation for six months. perhaps months will “let us out.” then, if government refuses to pay the rent on your new office we can do it ourselves. we have got to wait six weeks, anyhow, for a dividend--maybe longer--but that it will come there is no shadow of a doubt. i have got the thing sifted down to a dead moral certainty. i own one-eighth of the new “monitor ledge, clemens company,” and money can't buy a foot of it; because i know it to contain our fortune. the ledge is six feet wide, and one needs no glass to see gold and silver in it.... when you and i came out here we did not expect ' or ' to find us rich men--and if that proposition had been made we would have accepted it gladly. now, it is made. i am willing, now, that “neary's tunnel” or anybody else's tunnel shall succeed. some of them may beat us a few months, but we shall be on hand in the fullness of time, as sure as fate. i would hate to swap chances with any member of the tribe.... it is the same man who twenty-five years later would fasten his faith and capital to a type-setting machine and refuse to exchange stock in it, share for share, with the mergenthaler linotype. he adds: but i have struck my tent in esmeralda, and i care for no mines but those which i can superintend myself. i am a citizen here now, and i am satisfied, although ratio and i are “strapped” and we haven't three days' rations in the house.... i shall work the “monitor” and the other claims with my own hands. i prospected / of a pound of “monitor” yesterday, and raish reduced it with the blow-pipe, and got about or cents in gold and silver, besides the other half of it which we spilt on the floor and didn't get.... i tried to break a handsome chunk from a huge piece of my darling “monitor” which we brought from the croppings yesterday, but it all splintered up, and i send you the scraps. i call that “choice”--any d---d fool would. don't ask if it has been assayed, for it hasn't. it don't need it. it is simply able to speak for itself. it is six feet wide on top, and traversed through with veins whose color proclaims their worth. what the devil does a man want with any more feet when he owns in the invincible bomb-proof “monitor”? there is much more of this, and other such letters, most of them ending with demands for money. the living, the tools, the blasting-powder, and the help eat it up faster than orion's salary can grow. “send me $ or $ , all you can spare; put away $ subject to my call--we shall need it soon for the tunnel.” the letters are full of such admonition, and orion, more insane, if anything, than his brother, is scraping his dollars and pennies together to keep the mines going. he is constantly warned to buy no claims on his own account and promises faithfully, but cannot resist now and then when luring baits are laid before him, though such ventures invariably result in violent and profane protests from aurora. “the pick and shovel are the only claims i have any confidence in now,” the miner concludes, after one fierce outburst. “my back is sore, and my hands are blistered with handling them to-day.” but even the pick and shovel did not inspire confidence a little later. he writes that the work goes slowly, very slowly, but that they still hope to strike it some day. “but--if we strike it rich--i've lost my guess, that's all.” then he adds: “couldn't go on the hill to-day. it snowed. it always snows here, i expect”; and the final heart-sick line, “don't you suppose they have pretty much quit writing at home?” this is midsummer, and snow still interferes with the work. one feels the dreary uselessness of the quest. yet resolution did not wholly die, or even enthusiasm. these things were as recurrent as new prospects, which were plentiful enough. in a still subsequent letter he declares that he will never look upon his mother's face again, or his sister's, or get married, or revisit the “banner state,” until he is a rich man, though there is less assurance than desperation in the words. in 'roughing it' the author tells us that, when flour had reached one dollar a pound and he could no longer get the dollar, he abandoned mining and went to milling “as a common laborer in a quartz-mill at ten dollars a week.” this statement requires modification. it was not entirely for the money that he undertook the laborious task of washing “riffles” and “screening tailings.” the money was welcome enough, no doubt, but the greater purpose was to learn refining, so that when his mines developed he could establish his own mill and personally superintend the work. it is like him to wish us to believe that he was obliged to give up being a mining magnate to become a laborer in a quartz-mill, for there is a grim humor in the confession. that he abandoned the milling experiment at the end of a week is a true statement. he got a violent cold in the damp place, and came near getting salivated, he says in a letter, “working in the quicksilver and chemicals. i hardly think i shall try the experiment again. it is a confining business, and i will not be confined for love or money.” as recreation after this trying experience, higbie took him on a tour, prospecting for the traditional “cement mine,” a lost claim where, in a deposit of cement rock, gold nuggets were said to be as thick as raisins in a fruitcake. they did not find the mine, but they visited mono lake--that ghastly, lifeless alkali sea among the hills, which in 'roughing it' he has so vividly pictured. it was good to get away from the stress of things; and they repeated the experiment. they made a walking trip to yosemite, carrying their packs, camping and fishing in that far, tremendous isolation, which in those days few human beings had ever visited at all. such trips furnished a delicious respite from the fevered struggle around tunnel and shaft. amid mountain-peaks and giant forests and by tumbling falls the quest for gold hardly seemed worth while. more than once that summer he went alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get away entirely from humankind. xxxvi. last mining days it was late in july when he wrote: if i do not forget it, i will send you, per next mail, a pinch of decom. (decomposed rock) which i pinched with thumb and finger from wide west ledge a while ago. raish and i have secured out of a company with ft. in it, which perhaps (the ledge, i mean) is a spur from the w. w.--our shaft is about ft. from the w. w. shaft. in order to get in, we agreed to sink ft. we have sublet to another man for ft., and we pay for powder and sharpening tools. this was the “blind lead” claim of roughing it, but the episode as set down in that book is somewhat dramatized. it is quite true that he visited and nursed captain nye while higbie was off following the “cement” 'ignus fatuus' and that the “wide west” holdings were forfeited through neglect. but if the loss was regarded as a heavy one, the letters fail to show it. it is a matter of dispute to-day whether or not the claim was ever of any value. a well-known california author--[ella sterling cummins, author of the story of the files, etc]--declares: no one need to fear that he ran any chance of being a millionaire through the “wide west” mine, for the writer, as a child, played over that historic spot and saw only a shut-down mill and desolate hole in the ground to mark the spot where over-hopeful men had sunk thousands and thousands, that they never recovered. the “blind lead” episode, as related, is presumably a tale of what might have happened--a possibility rather than an actuality. it is vividly true in atmosphere, however, and forms a strong and natural climax for closing the mining episode, while the literary privilege warrants any liberties he may have taken for art's sake. in reality the close of his mining career was not sudden and spectacular; it was a lingering close, a reluctant and gradual surrender. the “josh” letters to the enterprise had awakened at least a measure of interest, and orion had not failed to identify their author when any promising occasion offered; as a result certain tentative overtures had been made for similar material. orion eagerly communicated such chances, for the money situation was becoming a desperate one. a letter from the aurora miner written near the end of july presents the situation very fully. an extract or two will be sufficient: my debts are greater than i thought for--i bought $ worth of clothing and sent $ to higbie, in the cement diggings. i owe about $ or $ , and have got about $ in my pocket. but how in the h--l i am going to live on something over $ until october or november is singular. the fact is, i must have something to do, and that shortly, too.... now write to the sacramento union folks, or to marsh, and tell them i'll write as many letters a week as they want for $ a week. my board must be paid. tell them i have corresponded with the n. orleans crescent and other papers--and the enterprise. if they want letters from here--who'll run from morning till night collecting material cheaper? i'll write a short letter twice a week, for the present for the 'age', for $ per week. now it has been a long time since i couldn't make my own living, and it shall be a long time before i loaf another year. nothing came of these possibilities, but about this time barstow, of the enterprise, conferred with joseph t. goodman, editor and owner of the paper, as to the advisability of adding the author of the “josh” letters to their local staff. joe goodman, who had as keen a literary perception as any man that ever pitched a journalistic tent on the pacific coast (and there could be no higher praise than that), looked over the letters and agreed with barstow that the man who wrote them had “something in him.” two of the sketches in particular he thought promising. one of them was a burlesque report of an egotistical lecturer who was referred to as “professor personal pronoun.” it closed by stating that it was “impossible to print his lecture in full, as the type-cases had run out of capital i's.” but it was the other sketch which settled goodman's decision. it was also a burlesque report, this time of a fourth-of-july oration. it opened, “i was sired by the great american eagle and foaled by a continental dam.” this was followed by a string of stock patriotic phrases absurdly arranged. but it was the opening itself that won goodman's heart. “that is the sort of thing we want,” he said. “write to him, barstow, and ask him if he wants to come up here.” barstow wrote, offering twenty-five dollars a week, a tempting sum. this was at the end of july, . in 'roughing it' we are led to believe that the author regarded this as a gift from heaven and accepted it straightaway. as a matter of fact, he fasted and prayed a good while over the “call.” to orion he wrote barstow has offered me the post as local reporter for the enterprise at $ a week, and i have written him that i will let him know next mail, if possible. there was no desperate eagerness, you see, to break into literature, even under those urgent conditions. it meant the surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure. on august th he wrote again to orion. he had written to barstow, he said, asking when they thought he might be needed. he was playing for time to consider. now, i shall leave at midnight to-night, alone and on foot, for a walk of or miles through a totally uninhabited country, and it is barely possible that mail facilities may prove infernally “slow.” but do you write barstow that i have left here for a week or so, and in case he should want me, he must write me here, or let me know through you. so he had gone into the wilderness to fight out his battle alone. but eight days later, when he had returned, there was still no decision. in a letter to pamela of this date he refers playfully to the discomforts of his cabin and mentions a hope that he will spend the winter in san francisco; but there is no reference in it to any newspaper prospects--nor to the mines, for that matter. phillips, howland, and higbie would seem to have given up by this time, and he was camping with dan twing and a dog, a combination amusingly described. it is a pleasant enough letter, but the note of discouragement creeps in: i did think for a while of going home this fall--but when i found that that was, and had been, the cherished intention and the darling aspiration every year of these old care-worn californians for twelve weary years, i felt a little uncomfortable, so i stole a march on disappointment and said i would not go home this fall. this country suits me, and it shall suit me whether or no. he was dying hard, desperately hard; how could he know, to paraphrase the old form of christian comfort, that his end as a miner would mean, in another sphere, “a brighter resurrection” than even his rainbow imagination could paint? xxxvii. the new estate it was the afternoon of a hot, dusty august day when a worn, travel-stained pilgrim drifted laggingly into the office of the virginia city enterprise, then in its new building on c street, and, loosening a heavy roll of blankets from his shoulders, dropped wearily into a chair. he wore a rusty slouch hat, no coat, a faded blue flannel shirt, a navy revolver; his trousers were hanging on his boot tops. a tangle of reddish-brown hair fell on his shoulders, and a mass of tawny beard, dingy with alkali dust, dropped half-way to his waist. aurora lay one hundred and thirty miles from virginia. he had walked that distance, carrying his heavy load. editor goodman was absent at the moment, but the other proprietor, denis e. mccarthy, signified that the caller might state his errand. the wanderer regarded him with a far-away look and said, absently and with deliberation: “my starboard leg seems to be unshipped. i'd like about one hundred yards of line; i think i am falling to pieces.” then he added: “i want to see mr. barstow, or mr. goodman. my name is clemens, and i've come to write for the paper.” it was the master of the world's widest estate come to claim his kingdom: william wright, who had won a wide celebrity on the coast as dan de quille, was in the editorial chair and took charge of the new arrival. he was going on a trip to the states soon; it was mainly on this account that the new man had been engaged. the “josh” letters were very good, in dan's opinion; he gave their author a cordial welcome, and took him around to his boarding-place. it was the beginning of an association that continued during samuel clemens's stay in virginia city and of a friendship that lasted many years. the territorial enterprise was one of the most remarkable frontier papers ever published. its editor-in-chief, joseph goodman, was a man with rare appreciation, wide human understanding, and a comprehensive newspaper policy. being a young man, he had no policy, in fact, beyond the general purpose that his paper should be a forum for absolutely free speech, provided any serious statement it contained was based upon knowledge. his instructions to the new reporter were about as follows: “never say we learn so and so, or it is rumored, or we understand so and so; but go to headquarters and get the absolute facts; then speak out and say it is so and so. in the one case you are likely to be shot, and in the other you are pretty certain to be; but you will preserve the public confidence.” goodman was not new to the west. he had come to california as a boy and had been a miner, explorer, printer, and contributor by turns. early in ' , when the comstock lode--[named for its discoverer, henry t. p. comstock, a half-crazy miner, who realized very little from his stupendous find.]--was new and virginia in the first flush of its monster boom, he and denis mccarthy had scraped together a few dollars and bought the paper. it had been a hand-to-hand struggle for a while, but in a brief two years, from a starving sheet in a shanty the enterprise, with new building, new presses, and a corps of swift compositors brought up from san francisco, had become altogether metropolitan, as well as the most widely considered paper on the coast. it had been borne upward by the comstock tide, though its fearless, picturesque utterance would have given it distinction anywhere. goodman himself was a fine, forceful writer, and dan de quille and r. m. daggett (afterward united states minister to hawaii) were representative of enterprise men.--[the comstock of that day became famous for its journalism. associated with the virginia papers then or soon afterward were such men as tom fitch (the silver-tongued orator), alf doten, w. j. forbes, c. c. goodwin, h. r. mighels, clement t. rice, arthur mcewen, and sam davis--a great array indeed for a new territory.]--samuel clemens fitted precisely into this group. he added the fresh, rugged vigor of thought and expression that was the very essence of the comstock, which was like every other frontier mining-camp, only on a more lavish, more overwhelming scale. there was no uncertainty about the comstock; the silver and gold were there. flanking the foot of mount davidson, the towns of gold hill and virginia and the long street between were fairly underburrowed and underpinned by the gigantic mining construction of that opulent lode whose treasures were actually glutting the mineral markets of the world. the streets overhead seethed and swarmed with miners, mine owners, and adventurers--riotous, rollicking children of fortune, always ready to drink and make merry, as eager in their pursuit of pleasure as of gold. comstockers would always laugh at a joke; the rougher the better. the town of virginia itself was just a huge joke to most of them. everybody had, money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a good time. the enterprise, “comstock to the backbone,” did what it could to help things along. it was a sort of free ring, with every one for himself. goodman let the boys write and print in accordance with their own ideas and upon any subject. often they wrote of each other--squibs and burlesques, which gratified the comstock far more than mere news.--[the indifference to 'news' was noble--none the less so because it was so blissfully unconscious. editors mark or dan would dismiss a murder with a couple of inches and sit down and fill up a column with a fancy sketch: “arthur mcewen”]--it was the proper class-room for mark twain, an encouraging audience and free utterance: fortune could have devised nothing better for him than that. he was peculiarly fitted for the position. unspoiled humanity appealed to him, and the comstock presented human nature in its earliest landscape forms. furthermore, the comstock was essentially optimistic--so was he; any hole in the ground to him held a possible, even a probable, fortune. his pilot memory became a valuable asset in news-gathering. remembering marks, banks, sounding, and other river detail belonged apparently in the same category of attainments as remembering items and localities of news. he could travel all day without a note-book and at night reproduce the day's budget or at least the picturesqueness of it, without error. he was presently accounted a good reporter, except where statistics--measurements and figures--were concerned. these he gave “a lick and a promise,” according to de quille, who wrote afterward of their associations. de quille says further: mark and i agreed well in our work, which we divided when there was a rush of events; but we often cruised in company, he taking the items of news he could handle best, and i such as i felt competent to work up. however, we wrote at the same table and frequently helped each other with such suggestions as occurred to us during the brief consultations we held in regard to the handling of any matters of importance. never was there an angry word between us in all the time we worked together. de quille tells how clemens clipped items with a knife when there were no scissors handy, and slashed through on the top of his desk, which in time took on the semblance “of a huge polar star, spiritedly dashing forth a thousand rays.” the author of 'roughing it' has given us a better picture of the virginia city of those days and his work there than any one else will ever write. he has made us feel the general spirit of affluence that prevailed; how the problem was not to get money, but to spend it; how “feet” in any one of a hundred mines could be had for the asking; how such shares were offered like apples or cigars or bonbons, as a natural matter of courtesy when one happened to have his supply in view; how any one connected with a newspaper would have stocks thrust upon him, and how in a brief time he had acquired a trunk ful of such riches and usually had something to sell when any of the claims made a stir on the market. he has told us of the desperadoes and their trifling regard for human life, and preserved other elemental characters of these prodigal days. the funeral of buck fanshaw that amazing masterpiece--is a complete epitome of the social frontier. it would not be the part of wisdom to attempt another inclusive presentation of comstock conditions. we may only hope to add a few details of history, justified now by time and circumstances, to supplement the picture with certain data of personality preserved from the drift of years. xxxviii. one of the “staff” the new reporter found acquaintance easy. the office force was like one family among which there was no line of caste. proprietors, editors, and printers were social equals; there was little ceremony among them--none at all outside of the office.--[“the paper went to press at two in the morning, then all the staff and all the compositors gathered themselves together in the composing-room and drank beer and sang the popular war-songs of the day until dawn.”--s. l. c., in .]--samuel clemens immediately became “sam,” or “josh,” to his associates, just as de quille was “dan” and goodman “joe.” he found that he disliked the name of josh, and, as he did not sign it again, it was presently dropped. the office, and virginia city generally, quickly grew fond of him, delighting in his originality and measured speech. enterprise readers began to identify his work, then unsigned, and to enjoy its fresh phrasing, even when it was only the usual local item or mining notice. true to its name and reputation, the paper had added a new attraction. it was only a brief time after his arrival in virginia city that clemens began the series of hoaxes which would carry his reputation, not always in an enviable fashion, across the sierras and down the pacific coast. with one exception these are lost to-day, for so far as known there is not a single file of the enterprise in existence. only a few stray copies and clippings are preserved, but we know the story of some of these literary pranks and of their results. they were usually intended as a special punishment of some particular individual or paper or locality; but victims were gathered by the wholesale in their seductive web. mark twain himself, in his book of sketches, has set down something concerning the first of these, “the petrified man,” and of another, “my bloody massacre,” but in neither case has he told it all. “the petrified man” hoax was directed at an official named sewall, a coroner and justice of the peace at humboldt, who had been pompously indifferent in the matter of supplying news. the story, told with great circumstance and apparent care as to detail, related the finding of a petrified prehistoric man, partially imbedded in a rock, in a cave in the desert more than one hundred miles from humboldt, and how sewall had made the perilous five-day journey in the alkali waste to hold an inquest over a man that had been dead three hundred years; also how, “with that delicacy so characteristic of him,” sewall had forbidden the miners from blasting him from his position. the account further stated that the hands of the deceased were arranged in a peculiar fashion; and the description of the arrangement was so skilfully woven in with other matters that at first, or even second, reading one might not see that the position indicated was the ancient one which begins with the thumb at the nose and in many ages has been used impolitely to express ridicule and the word “sold.” but the description was a shade too ingenious. the author expected that the exchanges would see the jolt and perhaps assist in the fun he would have with sewall. he did not contemplate a joke on the papers themselves. as a matter of fact, no one saw the “sell” and most of the papers printed his story of the petrified man as a genuine discovery. this was a surprise, and a momentary disappointment; then he realized that he had builded better than he knew. he gathered up a bundle of the exchanges and sent them to sewall; also he sent marked copies to scientific men in various parts of the united states. the papers had taken it seriously; perhaps the scientists would. some of them did, and sewall's days became unhappy because of letters received asking further information. as literature, the effort did not rank high, and as a trick on an obscure official it was hardly worth while; but, as a joke on the coast exchanges and press generally, it was greatly regarded and its author, though as yet unnamed, acquired prestige. inquiries began to be made as to who was the smart chap in virginia that did these things. the papers became wary and read enterprise items twice before clipping them. clemens turned his attention to other matters to lull suspicion. the great “dutch nick massacre” did not follow until a year later. reference has already been made to the comstock's delight in humor of a positive sort. the practical joke was legal tender in virginia. one might protest and swear, but he must take it. an example of comstock humor, regarded as the finest assay, is an incident still told of leslie blackburn and pat holland, two gay men about town. they were coming down c street one morning when they saw some fine watermelons on a fruit-stand at the international hotel corner. watermelons were rare and costly in that day and locality, and these were worth three dollars apiece. blackburn said: “pat, let's get one of those watermelons. you engage that fellow in conversation while i stand at the corner, where i can step around out of sight easily. when you have got him interested, point to something on the back shelf and pitch me a melon.” this appealed to holland, and he carried out his part of the plan perfectly; but when he pitched the watermelon blackburn simply put his hands in his pockets, and stepped around the corner, leaving the melon a fearful disaster on the pavement. it was almost impossible for pat to explain to the fruit-man why he pitched away a three-dollar melon like that even after paying for it, and it was still more trying, also more expensive, to explain to the boys facing the various bars along c street. sam clemens, himself a practical joker in his youth, found a healthy delight in this knock-down humor of the comstock. it appealed to his vigorous, elemental nature. he seldom indulged physically in such things; but his printed squibs and hoaxes and his keen love of the ridiculous placed him in the joker class, while his prompt temper, droll manner, and rare gift of invective made him an enticing victim. among the enterprise compositors was one by the name of stephen e. gillis (steve, of course--one of the “fighting gillises”), a small, fearless young fellow, handsome, quick of wit, with eyes like needle-points. “steve weighed only ninety-five pounds,” mark twain once wrote of him, “but it was well known throughout the territory that with his fists he could whip anybody that walked on two legs, let his weight and science be what they might.” clemens was fond of steve gillis from the first. the two became closely associated in time, and were always bosom friends; but steve was a merciless joker, and never as long as they were together could he “resist the temptation of making sam swear,” claiming that his profanity was grander than any music. a word hereabout mark twain's profanity. born with a matchless gift of phrase, the printing-office, the river, and the mines had developed it in a rare perfection. to hear him denounce a thing was to give one the fierce, searching delight of galvanic waves. every characterization seemed the most perfect fit possible until he applied the next. and somehow his profanity was seldom an offense. it was not mere idle swearing; it seemed always genuine and serious. his selection of epithet was always dignified and stately, from whatever source--and it might be from the bible or the gutter. some one has defined dirt as misplaced matter. it is perhaps the greatest definition ever uttered. it is absolutely universal in its application, and it recurs now, remembering mark twain's profanity. for it was rarely misplaced; hence it did not often offend. it seemed, in fact, the safety-valve of his high-pressure intellectual engine. when he had blown off he was always calm, gentle; forgiving, and even tender. once following an outburst he said, placidly: “in certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.” it seems proper to add that it is not the purpose of this work to magnify or modify or excuse that extreme example of humankind which forms its chief subject; but to set him down as he was inadequately, of course, but with good conscience and clear intent. led by steve gillis, the enterprise force used to devise tricks to set him going. one of these was to hide articles from his desk. he detested the work necessary to the care of a lamp, and wrote by the light of a candle. to hide “sam's candle” was a sure way to get prompt and vigorous return. he would look for it a little; then he would begin a slow, circular walk--a habit acquired in the limitations of the pilot-house--and his denunciation of the thieves was like a great orchestration of wrong. by and by the office boy, supposedly innocent, would find another for him, and all would be forgotten. he made a placard, labeled with fearful threats and anathemas, warning any one against touching his candle; but one night both the placard and the candle were gone. now, among his virginia acquaintances was a young minister, a mr. rising, “the fragile, gentle new fledgling” of the buck fanshaw episode. clemens greatly admired mr. rising's evident sincerity, and the young minister had quickly recognized the new reporter's superiority of mind. now and then he came to the office to call on him. unfortunately, he happened to step in just at that moment when, infuriated by the latest theft of his property, samuel clemens was engaged in his rotary denunciation of the criminals, oblivious of every other circumstance. mr. rising stood spellbound by this, to him, new phase of genius, and at last his friend became dimly aware of him. he did not halt in his scathing treadmill and continued in the slow monotone of speech: “i know, mr. rising, i know it's wicked to talk like this; i know it is wrong. i know i shall certainly go to hell for it. but if you had a candle, mr. rising, and those thieves should carry it off every night, i know that you would say, just as i say, mr. rising, g-d d--n their impenitent souls, may they roast in hell for a million years.” the little clergyman caught his breath. “maybe i should, mr. clemens,” he replied, “but i should try to say, 'forgive them, father, they know not what they do.'” “oh, well! if you put it on the ground that they are just fools, that alters the case, as i am one of that class myself. come in and we'll try to forgive them and forget about it.” mark twain had a good many experiences with young ministers. he was always fond of them, and they often sought him out. once, long afterward, at a hotel, he wanted a boy to polish his shoes, and had rung a number of times without getting any response. presently, he thought he heard somebody approaching in the hall outside. he flung open the door, and a small, youngish-looking person, who seemed to have been hesitating at the door, made a movement as though to depart hastily. clemens grabbed him by the collar. “look here,” he said, “i've been waiting and ringing here for half an hour. now i want you to take those shoes, and polish them, quick. do you hear?” the slim, youthful person trembled a good deal, and said: “i would, mr. clemens, i would indeed, sir, if i could. but i'm a minister of the gospel, and i'm not prepared for such work.” xxxix. philosophy and poetry there was a side to samuel clemens that in those days few of his associates saw. this was the poetic, the philosophic, the contemplative side. joseph goodman recognized this phase of his character, and, while he perhaps did not regard it as a future literary asset, he delighted in it, and in their hours of quiet association together encouraged its exhibition. it is rather curious that with all his literary penetration goodman did not dream of a future celebrity for clemens. he afterward said: “if i had been asked to prophesy which of the two men, dan de quille or sam, would become distinguished, i should have said de quille. dan was talented, industrious, and, for that time and place, brilliant. of course, i recognized the unusualness of sam's gifts, but he was eccentric and seemed to lack industry; it is not likely that i should have prophesied fame for him then.” goodman, like macfarlane in cincinnati, half a dozen years before, though by a different method, discovered and developed the deeper vein. often the two, dining together in a french restaurant, discussed life, subtler philosophies, recalled various phases of human history, remembered and recited the poems that gave them especial enjoyment. “the burial of moses,” with its noble phrasing and majestic imagery, appealed strongly to clemens, and he recited it with great power. the first stanza in particular always stirred him, and it stirred his hearer as well. with eyes half closed and chin lifted, a lighted cigar between his fingers, he would lose himself in the music of the stately lines. by nebo's lonely mountain, on this side jordan's wave, in a vale in the land of moab, there lies a lonely grave. and no man knows that sepulchre, and no man saw it e'er, for the angels of god, upturned the sod, and laid the dead man there. another stanza that he cared for almost as much was the one beginning: and had he not high honor --the hill-side for a pall, to lie in state while angels wait with stars for tapers tall, and the dark rock-pines, like tossing plumes, over his bier to wave, and god's own hand in that lonely land, to lay him in the grave? without doubt he was moved to emulate the simple grandeur of that poem, for he often repeated it in those days, and somewhat later we find it copied into his notebook in full. it would seem to have become to him a sort of literary touchstone; and in some measure it may be regarded as accountable for the fact that in the fullness of time “he made use of the purest english of any modern writer.” these are goodman's words, though william dean howells has said them, also, in substance, and brander matthews, and many others who know about such things. goodman adds, “the simplicity and beauty of his style are almost without a parallel, except in the common version of the bible,” which is also true. one is reminded of what macaulay said of milton: “there would seem at first sight to be no more in his words than in other words. but they are words of enchantment. no sooner are they pronounced than the past is present and the distance near. new forms of beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial-places of the memory give up their dead.” one drifts ahead, remembering these things. the triumph of words, the mastery of phrases, lay all before him at the time of which we are writing now. he was twenty-seven. at that age rudyard kipling had reached his meridian. samuel clemens was still in the classroom. everything came as a lesson-phrase, form, aspect, and combination; nothing escaped unvalued. the poetic phase of things particularly impressed him. once at a dinner with goodman, when the lamp-light from the chandelier struck down through the claret on the tablecloth in a great red stain, he pointed to it dramatically “look, joe,” he said, “the angry tint of wine.” it was at one of these private sessions, late in ' , that clemens proposed to report the coming meeting of the carson legislature. he knew nothing of such work and had small knowledge of parliamentary proceedings. formerly it had been done by a man named gillespie, but gillespie was now clerk of the house. goodman hesitated; then, remembering that whether clemens got the reports right or not, he would at least make them readable, agreed to let him undertake the work. xl. “mark twain” the early nevada legislature was an interesting assembly. all state legislatures are that, and this was a mining frontier. no attempt can be made to describe it. it was chiefly distinguished for a large ignorance of procedure, a wide latitude of speech, a noble appreciation of humor, and plenty of brains. how fortunate mask twain was in his schooling, to be kept away from institutional training, to be placed in one after another of those universities of life where the sole curriculum is the study of the native inclinations and activities of mankind! sometimes, in after-years, he used to regret the lack of systematic training. well for him--and for us--that he escaped that blight. for the study of human nature the nevada assembly was a veritable lecture-room. in it his understanding, his wit, his phrasing, his self-assuredness grew like jack's bean-stalk, which in time was ready to break through into a land above the sky. he made some curious blunders in his reports, in the beginning; but he was so frank in his ignorance and in his confession of it that the very unsophistication of his early letters became their chief charm. gillespie coached him on parliamentary matters, and in time the reports became technically as well as artistically good. clemens in return christened gillespie “young, jefferson's manual,” a title which he bore, rather proudly indeed, for many years. another “entitlement” growing out of those early reports, and possibly less satisfactory to its owner, was the one accorded to clement t. rice, of the virginia city union. rice knew the legislative work perfectly and concluded to poke fun at the enterprise letters. but this was a mistake. clemens in his next letter declared that rice's reports might be parliamentary enough, but that they covered with glittering technicalities the most festering mass of misstatement, and even crime. he avowed that they were wholly untrustworthy; dubbed the author of them “the unreliable,” and in future letters never referred to him by any other term. carson and the comstock and the papers of the coast delighted in this burlesque journalistic warfare, and rice was “the unreliable” for life. rice and clemens, it should be said, though rivals, were the best of friends, and there was never any real animosity between them. clemens quickly became a favorite with the members; his sharp letters, with their amusing turn of phrase and their sincerity, won general friendship. jack simmons, speaker of the house, and billy clagget, the humboldt delegation, were his special cronies and kept him on the inside of the political machine. clagget had remained in unionville after the mining venture, warned his keokuk sweetheart, and settled down into politics and law. in due time he would become a leading light and go to congress. he was already a notable figure of forceful eloquence and tousled, unkempt hair. simmons, clagget, and clemens were easily the three conspicuous figures of the session. it must have been gratifying to the former prospector and miner to come back to carson city a person of consequence, where less than a year before he had been regarded as no more than an amusing indolent fellow, a figure to smile at, but unimportant. there is a photograph extant of clemens and his friends clagget and simmons in a group, and we gather from it that he now arrayed himself in a long broadcloth cloak, a starched shirt, and polished boots. once more he had become the glass of fashion that he had been on the river. he made his residence with orion, whose wife and little daughter jennie had by this time come out from the states. “sister mollie,” as wife of the acting governor, was presently social leader of the little capital; her brilliant brother-in-law its chief ornament. his merriment and songs and good nature made him a favorite guest. his lines had fallen in pleasant places; he could afford to smile at the hard esmeralda days. he was not altogether satisfied. his letters, copied and quoted all along the coast, were unsigned. they were easily identified with one another, but not with a personality. he realized that to build a reputation it was necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name. he gave the matter a good deal of thought. he did not consider the use of his own name; the 'nom de plume' was the fashion of the time. he wanted something brief, crisp, definite, unforgettable. he tried over a good many combinations in his mind, but none seemed convincing. just then--this was early in --news came to him that the old pilot he had wounded by his satire, isaiah sellers, was dead. at once the pen-name of captain sellers recurred to him. that was it; that was the sort of name he wanted. it was not trivial; it had all the qualities--sellers would never need it again. clemens decided he would give it a new meaning and new association in this far-away land. he went up to virginia city. “joe,” he said, to goodman, “i want to sign my articles. i want to be identified to a wider audience.” “all right, sam. what name do you want to use 'josh'?” “no, i want to sign them 'mark twain.' it is an old river term, a leads-man's call, signifying two fathoms--twelve feet. it has a richness about it; it was always a pleasant sound for a pilot to hear on a dark night; it meant safe water.” he did not then mention that captain isaiah sellers had used and dropped the name. he was ashamed of his part in that episode, and the offense was still too recent for confession. goodman considered a moment: “very well, sam,” he said, “that sounds like a good name.” it was indeed a good name. in all the nomenclature of the world no more forceful combination of words could have been selected to express the man for whom they stood. the name mark twain is as infinite, as fundamental as that of john smith, without the latter's wasting distribution of strength. if all the prestige in the name of john smith were combined in a single individual, its dynamic energy might give it the carrying power of mark twain. let this be as it may, it has proven the greatest 'nom de plume' ever chosen--a name exactly in accord with the man, his work, and his career. it is not surprising that goodman did not recognize this at the moment. we should not guess the force that lies in a twelve-inch shell if we had never seen one before or heard of its seismic destruction. we should have to wait and see it fired, and take account of the result. it was first signed to a carson letter bearing date of february , , and from that time was attached to all samuel clemens's work. the work was neither better nor worse than before, but it had suddenly acquired identification and special interest. members of the legislature and friends in virginia and carson immediately began to address him as “mark.” the papers of the coast took it up, and within a period to be measured by weeks he was no longer “sam” or “clemens” or “that bright chap on the enterprise,” but “mark”--“mark twain.” no 'nom de plume' was ever so quickly and generally accepted as that. de quille, returning from the east after an absence of several months, found his room and deskmate with the distinction of a new name and fame. it is curious that in the letters to the home folks preserved from that period there is no mention of his new title and its success. in fact, the writer rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined to tell of the mining shares he has accumulated, their present and prospective values. however, many of the letters are undoubtedly missing. such as have been preserved are rather airy epistles full of his abounding joy of life and good nature. also they bear evidence of the renewal of his old river habit of sending money home--twenty dollars in each letter, with intervals of a week or so between. xli. the cream of comstock humor with the adjournment of the legislature, samuel clemens returned to virginia city distinctly a notability--mark twain. he was regarded as leading man on the enterprise--which in itself was high distinction on the comstock--while his improved dress and increased prosperity commanded additional respect. when visitors of note came along--well-known actors, lecturers, politicians--he was introduced as one of the comstock features which it was proper to see, along with the ophir and gould and curry mines, and the new hundred-stamp quartz-mill. he was rather grieved and hurt, therefore, when, after several collections had been taken up in the enterprise office to present various members of the staff with meerschaum pipes, none had come to him. he mentioned this apparent slight to steve gillis: “nobody ever gives me a meerschaum pipe,” he said, plaintively. “don't i deserve one yet?” unhappy day! to that remorseless creature, steve gillis, this was a golden opportunity for deviltry of a kind that delighted his soul. this is the story, precisely as gillis himself told it to the writer of these annals more than a generation later: “there was a german kept a cigar store in virginia city and always had a fine assortment of meerschaum pipes. these pipes usually cost anywhere from forty to seventy-five dollars. “one day denis mccarthy and i were walking by the old german's place, and stopped to look in at the display in the window. among other things there was one large imitation meerschaum with a high bowl and a long stem, marked a dollar and a half. “i decided that that would be just the pipe for sam. we went in and bought it, also a very much longer stem. i think the stem alone cost three dollars. then we had a little german-silver plate engraved with mark's name on it and by whom presented, and made preparations for the presentation. charlie pope--[afterward proprietor of pope's theater, st. louis]--was playing at the opera house at the time, and we engaged him to make the presentation speech. “then we let in dan de quille, mark's closest friend, to act the part of judas--to tell mark privately that he, was going to be presented with a fine pipe, so that he could have a speech prepared in reply to pope's. it was awful low-down in dan. we arranged to have the affair come off in the saloon beneath the opera house after the play was over. “everything went off handsomely; but it was a pretty remorseful occasion, and some of us had a hang-dog look; for sam took it in such sincerity, and had prepared one of the most beautiful speeches i ever heard him make. pope's presentation, too, was beautifully done. he told sam how his friends all loved him, and that this pipe, purchased at so great an expense, was but a small token of their affection. but sam's reply, which was supposed to be impromptu, actually brought the tears to the eyes of some of us, and he was interrupted every other minute with applause. i never felt so sorry for anybody. “still, we were bent on seeing the thing through. after sam's speech was finished, he ordered expensive wines--champagne and sparkling moselle. then we went out to do the town, and kept things going until morning to drown our sorrow. “well, next day, of course, he started in to color the pipe. it wouldn't color any more than a piece of chalk, which was about all it was. sam would smoke and smoke, and complain that it didn't seem to taste right, and that it wouldn't color. finally denis said to him one day: “'oh, sam, don't you know that's just a damned old egg-shell, and that the boys bought it for a dollar and a half and presented you with it for a joke?' “then sam was furious, and we laid the whole thing on dan de quille. he had a thunder-cloud on his face when he started up for the local room, where dan was. he went in and closed the door behind him, and locked it, and put the key in his pocket--an awful sign. dan was there alone, writing at his table. “sam said, 'dan, did you know, when you invited me to make that speech, that those fellows were going to give me a bogus pipe?' “there was no way for dan to escape, and he confessed. sam walked up and down the floor, as if trying to decide which way to slay dan. finally he said: “'oh, dan, to think that you, my dearest friend, who knew how little money i had, and how hard i would work to prepare a speech that would show my gratitude to my friends, should be the traitor, the judas, to betray me with a kiss! dan, i never want to look on your face again. you knew i would spend every dollar i had on those pirates when i couldn't afford to spend anything; and yet you let me do it; you aided and abetted their diabolical plan, and you even got me to get up that damned speech to make the thing still more ridiculous.' “of course dan felt terribly, and tried to defend himself by saying that they were really going to present him with a fine pipe--a genuine one, this time. but sam at first refused to be comforted; and when, a few days later, i went in with the pipe and said, 'sam, here's the pipe the boys meant to give you all the time,' and tried to apologize, he looked around a little coldly, and said: “'is that another of those bogus old pipes?' “he accepted it, though, and general peace was restored. one day, soon after, he said to me: “'steve, do you know that i think that that bogus pipe smokes about as well as the good one?'” many years later (this was in his home at hartford, and joe goodman was present) mark twain one day came upon the old imitation pipe. “joe,” he said, “that was a cruel, cruel trick the boys played on me; but, for the feeling i had during the moment when they presented me with that pipe and when charlie pope was making his speech and i was making my reply to it--for the memory of that feeling, now, that pipe is more precious to me than any pipe in the world!” eighteen hundred and sixty-three was flood-tide on the comstock. every mine was working full blast. every mill was roaring and crunching, turning out streams of silver and gold. a little while ago an old resident wrote: when i close my eyes i hear again the respirations of hoisting- engines and the roar of stamps; i can see the “camels” after midnight packing in salt; i can see again the jam of teams on c street and hear the anathemas of the drivers--all the mighty work that went on in order to lure the treasures from the deep chambers of the great lode and to bring enlightenment to the desert. those were lively times. in the midst of one of his letters home mark twain interrupts himself to say: “i have just heard five pistol-shots down the street--as such things are in my line, i will go and see about it,” and in a postscript added a few hours later: a.m. the pistol-shot did its work well. one man, a jackson county missourian, shot two of my friends (police officers) through the heart--both died within three minutes. the murderer's name is john campbell. “mark and i had our hands full,” says de quille, “and no grass grew under our feet.” in answer to some stray criticism of their policy, they printed a sort of editorial manifesto: our duty is to keep the universe thoroughly posted concerning murders and street fights, and balls, and theaters, and pack-trains, and churches, and lectures, and school-houses, and city military affairs, and highway robberies, and bible societies, and hay-wagons, and the thousand other things which it is in the province of local reporters to keep track of and magnify into undue importance for the instruction of the readers of a great daily newspaper. it is easy to recognize mark twain's hand in that compendium of labor, which, in spite of its amusing apposition, was literally true, and so intended, probably with no special thought of humor in its construction. it may be said, as well here as anywhere, that it was not mark twain's habit to strive for humor. he saw facts at curious angles and phrased them accordingly. in virginia city he mingled with the turmoil of the comstock and set down what he saw and thought, in his native speech. the comstock, ready to laugh, found delight in his expression and discovered a vast humor in his most earnest statements. on the other hand, there were times when the humor was intended and missed its purpose. we have already recalled the instance of the “petrified man” hoax, which was taken seriously; but the “empire city massacre” burlesque found an acceptance that even its author considered serious for a time. it is remembered to-day in virginia city as the chief incident of mark twain's comstock career. this literary bomb really had two objects, one of which was to punish the san francisco bulletin for its persistent attacks on washoe interests; the other, though this was merely incidental, to direct an unpleasant attention to a certain carson saloon, the magnolia, which was supposed to dispense whisky of the “forty rod” brand--that is, a liquor warranted to kill at that range. it was the bulletin that was to be made especially ridiculous. this paper had been particularly disagreeable concerning the “dividend-cooking” system of certain of the comstock mines, at the same time calling invidious attention to safer investments in california stocks. samuel clemens, with “half a trunkful” of comstock shares, had cultivated a distaste for california things in general: in a letter of that time he says: “how i hate everything that looks or tastes or smells like california!” with his customary fickleness of soul, he was glorifying california less than a year later, but for the moment he could see no good in that nazareth. to his great satisfaction, one of the leading california corporations, the spring valley water company, “cooked” a dividend of its own about this time, resulting in disaster to a number of guileless investors who were on the wrong side of the subsequent crash. this afforded an inviting opportunity for reprisal. with goodman's consent he planned for the california papers, and the bulletin in particular, a punishment which he determined to make sufficiently severe. he believed the papers of that state had forgotten his earlier offenses, and the result would show he was not mistaken. there was a point on the carson river, four miles from carson city, known as “dutch nick's,” and also as empire city, the two being identical. there was no forest there of any sort nothing but sage-brush. in the one cabin there lived a bachelor with no household. everybody in virginia and carson, of course, knew these things. mark twain now prepared a most lurid and graphic account of how one phillip hopkins, living “just at the edge of the great pine forest which lies between empire city and 'dutch nick's',” had suddenly gone insane and murderously assaulted his entire family consisting of his wife and their nine children, ranging in ages from one to nineteen years. the wife had been slain outright, also seven of the children; the other two might recover. the murder had been committed in the most brutal and ghastly fashion, after which hopkins had scalped his wife, leaped on a horse, cut his own throat from ear to ear, and ridden four miles into carson city, dropping dead at last in front of the magnolia saloon, the red-haired scalp of his wife still clutched in his gory hand. the article further stated that the cause of mr. hopkins's insanity was pecuniary loss, he having withdrawn his savings from safe comstock investments and, through the advice of a relative, one of the editors of the san francisco bulletin, invested them in the spring valley water company. this absurd tale with startling head-lines appeared in the enterprise, in its issue of october , . it was not expected that any one in virginia city or carson city would for a moment take any stock in the wild invention, yet so graphic was it that nine out of ten on first reading never stopped to consider the entire impossibility of the locality and circumstance. even when these things were pointed out many readers at first refused to confess themselves sold. as for the bulletin and other california papers, they were taken-in completely, and were furious. many of them wrote and demanded the immediate discharge of its author, announcing that they would never copy another line from the enterprise, or exchange with it, or have further relations with a paper that had mark twain on its staff. citizens were mad, too, and cut off their subscriptions. the joker was in despair. “oh, joe,” he said, “i have ruined your business, and the only reparation i can make is to resign. you can never recover from this blow while i am on the paper.” “nonsense,” replied goodman. “we can furnish the people with news, but we can't supply them with sense. only time can do that. the flurry will pass. you just go ahead. we'll win out in the long run.” but the offender was in torture; he could not sleep. “dan, dan,” he said, “i am being burned alive on both sides of the mountains.” “mark,” said dan. “it will all blow over. this item of yours will be remembered and talked about when the rest of your enterprise work is forgotten.” both goodman and de quille were right. in a month papers and people had forgotten their humiliation and laughed. “the dutch nick massacre” gave to its perpetrator and to the enterprise an added vogue. --[for full text of the “dutch nick” hoax see appendix c, at the end of last volume: also, for an anecdote concerning a reporting excursion made by alf. doten and mark twain.]-- xlii reportorial days. reference has already been made to the fashion among virginia city papers of permitting reporters to use the editorial columns for ridicule of one another. this custom was especially in vogue during the period when dan de quille and mark twain and the unreliable were the shining journalistic lights of the comstock. scarcely a week went by that some apparently venomous squib or fling or long burlesque assault did not appear either in the union or the enterprise, with one of those jokers as its author and another as its target. in one of his “home” letters of that year mark twain says: i have just finished writing up my report for the morning paper and giving the unreliable a column of advice about how to conduct himself in church. the advice was such as to call for a reprisal, but it apparently made no difference in personal relations, for a few weeks later he is with the unreliable in san francisco, seeing life in the metropolis, fairly swimming in its delights, unable to resist reporting them to his mother. we fag ourselves completely out every day and go to sleep without rocking every night. when i go down montgomery street shaking hands with tom, dick, and harry, it is just like being on main street in hannibal and meeting the old familiar faces. i do hate to go back to washoe. we take trips across the bay to oakland, and down to san leandro and alameda, and we go out to the willows and hayes park and fort point, and up to benicia; and yesterday we were invited out on a yachting excursion, and had a sail in the fastest yacht on the pacific coast. rice says: “oh no--we are not having any fun, mark --oh no--i reckon it's somebody else--it's probably the gentleman in the wagon” (popular slang phrase), and when i invite rice to the lick house to dinner the proprietor sends us champagne and claret, and then we do put on the most disgusting airs. the unreliable says our caliber is too light--we can't stand it to be noticed. three days later he adds that he is going sorrowfully “to the snows and the deserts of washoe,” but that he has “lived like a lord to make up for two years of privation.” twenty dollars is inclosed in each of these letters, probably as a bribe to jane clemens to be lenient with his prodigalities, which in his youthful love of display he could not bring himself to conceal. but apparently the salve was futile, for in another letter, a month later, he complains that his mother is “slinging insinuations” at him again, such as “where did you get that money” and “the company i kept in san francisco.” he explains: why, i sold wild cat mining ground that was given me, and my credit was always good at the bank for $ , or $ , , and i never gamble in any shape or manner, and never drink anything stronger than claret and lager beer, which conduct is regarded as miraculously temperate in this place. as for company, i went in the very best company to be found in san francisco. i always move in the best society in virginia and have a reputation to preserve. he closes by assuring her that he will be more careful in future and that she need never fear but that he will keep her expenses paid. then he cannot refrain from adding one more item of his lavish life: “put in my washing, and it costs me one hundred dollars a month to live.” de quille had not missed the opportunity of his comrade's absence to payoff some old scores. at the end of the editorial column of the enterprise on the day following his departure he denounced the absent one and his “protege,” the unreliable, after the intemperate fashion of the day. it is to be regretted that such scrubs are ever permitted to visit the bay, as the inevitable effect will be to destroy that exalted opinion of the manners and morality of our people which was inspired by the conduct of our senior editor--[which is to say, dan himself]--. the diatribe closed with a really graceful poem, and the whole was no doubt highly regarded by the enterprise readers. what revenge mark twain took on his return has not been recorded, but it was probably prompt and adequate; or he may have left it to the unreliable. it was clearly a mistake, however, to leave his own local work in the hands of that properly named person a little later. clemens was laid up with a cold, and rice assured him on his sacred honor that he would attend faithfully to the enterprise locals, along with his own union items. he did this, but he had been nursing old injuries too long. what was mark twain's amazement on looking over the enterprise next morning to find under the heading “apologetic” a statement over his own nom de plume, purporting to be an apology for all the sins of ridicule to the various injured ones. to mayor arick, hon. wm. stewart, marshal perry, hon. j. b. winters, mr. olin, and samuel wetherill, besides a host of others whom we have ridiculed from behind the shelter of our reportorial position, we say to these gentlemen we acknowledge our faults, and, in all weakness and humility upon our bended marrow bones, we ask their forgiveness, promising that in future we will give them no cause for anything but the best of feeling toward us. to “young wilson” and the unreliable (as we have wickedly termed them), we feel that no apology we can make begins to atone for the many insults we have given them. toward these gentlemen we have been as mean as a man could be--and we have always prided ourselves on this base quality. we feel that we are the least of all humanity, as it were. we will now go in sack-cloth and ashes for the next forty days. this in his own paper over his own signature was a body blow; but it had the effect of curing his cold. he was back in the office forthwith, and in the next morning's issue denounced his betrayer. we are to blame for giving the unreliable an opportunity to misrepresent us, and therefore refrain from repining to any great extent at the result. we simply claim the right to deny the truth of every statement made by him in yesterday's paper, to annul all apologies he coined as coming from us, and to hold him up to public commiseration as a reptile endowed with no more intellect, no more cultivation, no more christian principle than animates and adorns the sportive jackass-rabbit of the sierras. we have done. these were the things that enlivened comstock journalism. once in a boxing bout mark twain got a blow on the nose which caused it to swell to an unusual size and shape. he went out of town for a few days, during which de quille published an extravagant account of his misfortune, describing the nose and dwelling on the absurdity of mark twain's ever supposing himself to be a boxer. de quille scored heavily with this item but his own doom was written. soon afterward he was out riding and was thrown from his horse and bruised considerably. this was mark's opportunity. he gave an account of dan's disaster; then, commenting, he said: the idea of a plebeian like dan supposing he could ever ride a horse! he! why, even the cats and the chickens laughed when they saw him go by. of course, he would be thrown off. of course, any well-bred horse wouldn't let a common, underbred person like dan stay on his back! when they gathered him up he was just a bag of scraps, but they put him together, and you'll find him at his old place in the enterprise office next week, still laboring under the delusion that he's a newspaper man. the author of 'roughing it' tells of a literary periodical called the occidental, started in virginia city by a mr. f. this was the silver-tongued tom fitch, of the union, an able speaker and writer, vastly popular on the coast. fitch came to clemens one day and said he was thinking of starting such a periodical and asked him what he thought of the venture. clemens said: “you would succeed if any one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of sahara; set up hoisting-works on mount vesuvius for mining sulphur; start a literary paper in virginia city; h--l!” which was a correct estimate of the situation, and the paper perished with the third issue. it was of no consequence except that it contained what was probably the first attempt at that modern literary abortion, the composite novel. also, it died too soon to publish mark twain's first verses of any pretension, though still of modest merit--“the aged pilot man”--which were thereby saved for 'roughing it.' visiting virginia now, it seems curious that any of these things could have happened there. the comstock has become little more than a memory; virginia and gold hill are so quiet, so voiceless, as to constitute scarcely an echo of the past. the international hotel, that once so splendid edifice, through whose portals the tide of opulent life then ebbed and flowed, is all but deserted now. one may wander at will through its dingy corridors and among its faded fripperies, seeking in vain for attendance or hospitality, the lavish welcome of a vanished day. those things were not lacking once, and the stream of wealth tossed up and down the stair and billowed up c street, an ebullient tide of metals and men from which millionaires would be struck out, and individuals known in national affairs. william m. stewart who would one day become a united states senator, was there, an unnoticed unit; and john mackay and james g. fair, one a senator by and by, and both millionaires, but poor enough then--fair with a pick on his shoulder and mackay, too, at first, though he presently became a mine superintendent. once in those days mark twain banteringly offered to trade businesses with mackay. “no,” mackay said, “i can't trade. my business is not worth as much as yours. i have never swindled anybody, and i don't intend to begin now.” neither of those men could dream that within ten years their names would be international property; that in due course nevada would propose statues to their memory. such things came out of the comstock; such things spring out of every turbulent frontier. xliii. artemus ward madame caprell's warning concerning mark twain's health at twenty-eight would seem to have been justified. high-strung and neurotic, the strain of newspaper work and the tumult of the comstock had told on him. as in later life, he was subject to bronchial colds, and more than once that year he found it necessary to drop all work and rest for a time at steamboat springs, a place near virginia city, where there were boiling springs and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable hotel. he contributed from there sketches somewhat more literary in form than any of his previous work. “curing a cold” is a more or less exaggerated account of his ills. [included in sketches new and old. “information for the million,” and “advice to good little girls,” included in the “jumping frog” collection, , but omitted from the sketches, are also believed to belong to this period.] a portion of a playful letter to his mother, written from the springs, still exists. you have given my vanity a deadly thrust. behold, i am prone to boast of having the widest reputation as a local editor of any man on the pacific coast, and you gravely come forward and tell me “if i work hard and attend closely to my business, i may aspire to a place on a big san francisco daily some day.” there's a comment on human vanity for you! why, blast it, i was under the impression that i could get such a situation as that any time i asked for it. but i don't want it. no paper in the united states can afford to pay me what my place on the enterprise is worth. if i were not naturally a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing vagabond, i could make it pay me $ , a year. but i don't suppose i shall ever be any account. i lead an easy life, though, and i don't care a cent whether school keeps or not. everybody knows me, and i fare like a prince wherever i go, be it on this side of the mountain or the other. and i am proud to say i am the most conceited ass in the territory. you think that picture looks old? well, i can't help it--in reality i'm not as old as i was when i was eighteen. which was a true statement, so far as his general attitude was concerned. at eighteen, in new york and philadelphia, his letters had been grave, reflective, advisory. now they were mostly banter and froth, lightly indifferent to the serious side of things, though perhaps only pretendedly so, for the picture did look old. from the shock and circumstance of his brother's death he--had never recovered. he was barely twenty-eight. from the picture he might have been a man of forty. it was that year that artemus ward (charles f. browne) came to virginia city. there was a fine opera-house in virginia, and any attraction that billed san francisco did not fail to play to the comstock. ward intended staying only a few days to deliver his lectures, but the whirl of the comstock caught him like a maelstrom, and he remained three weeks. he made the enterprise office his headquarters, and fairly reveled in the company he found there. he and mark twain became boon companions. each recognized in the other a kindred spirit. with goodman, de quille, and mccarthy, also e. e. hingston--ward's agent, a companionable fellow--they usually dined at chaumond's, virginia's high-toned french restaurant. those were three memorable weeks in mark twain's life. artemus ward was in the height of his fame, and he encouraged his new-found brother-humorist and prophesied great things of him. clemens, on his side, measured himself by this man who had achieved fame, and perhaps with good reason concluded that ward's estimate was correct, that he too could win fame and honor, once he got a start. if he had lacked ambition before ward's visit, the latter's unqualified approval inspired him with that priceless article of equipment. he put his soul into entertaining the visitor during those three weeks; and it was apparent to their associates that he was at least ward's equal in mental stature and originality. goodman and the others began to realize that for mark twain the rewards of the future were to be measured only by his resolution and ability to hold out. on christmas eve artemus lectured in silver city and afterward came to the enterprise office to give the boys a farewell dinner. the enterprise always published a christmas carol, and goodman sat at his desk writing it. he was just finishing as ward came in: “slave, slave,” said artemus. “come out and let me banish care from you.” they got the boys and all went over to chaumond's, where ward commanded goodman to order the dinner. when the cocktails came on, artemus lifted his glass and said: “i give you upper canada.” the company rose, drank the toast in serious silence; then goodman said: “of course, artemus, it's all right, but why did you give us upper canada?” “because i don't want it myself,” said ward, gravely. then began a rising tide of humor that could hardly be matched in the world to-day. mark twain had awakened to a fuller power; artemus ward was in his prime. they were giants of a race that became extinct when mark twain died. the youth, the wine, the whirl of lights and life, the tumult of the shouting street-it was as if an electric stream of inspiration poured into those two human dynamos and sent them into a dazzling, scintillating whirl. all gone--as evanescent, as forgotten, as the lightnings of that vanished time; out of that vast feasting and entertainment only a trifling morsel remains. ward now and then asked goodman why he did not join in the banter. goodman said: “i'm preparing a joke, artemus, but i'm keeping it for the present.” it was near daybreak when ward at last called for the bill. it was two hundred and thirty-seven dollars. “what”' exclaimed artemus. “that's my joke.” said goodman. “but i was only exclaiming because it was not twice as much,” returned ward. he paid it amid laughter, and they went out into the early morning air. it was fresh and fine outside, not yet light enough to see clearly. artemus threw his face up to the sky and said: “i feel glorious. i feel like walking on the roofs.” virginia was built on the steep hillside, and the eaves of some of the houses almost touched the ground behind them. “there is your chance, artemus,” goodman said, pointing to a row of these houses all about of a height. artemus grabbed mark twain, and they stepped out upon the long string of roofs and walked their full length, arm in arm. presently the others noticed a lonely policeman cocking his revolver and getting ready to aim in their direction. goodman called to him: “wait a minute. what are you going to do?” “i'm going to shoot those burglars,” he said. “don't for your life. those are not burglars. that's mark twain and artemus ward.” the roof-walkers returned, and the party went down the street to a corner across from the international hotel. a saloon was there with a barrel lying in front, used, perhaps for a sort of sign. artemus climbed astride the barrel, and somebody brought a beer-glass and put it in his hand. virginia city looks out over the eastward desert. morning was just breaking upon the distant range-the scene as beautiful as when the sunrise beams across the plain of memnon. the city was not yet awake. the only living creatures in sight were the group of belated diners, with artemus ward, as king gambrinus, pouring a libation to the sunrise. that was the beginning of a week of glory. the farewell dinner became a series. at the close of one convivial session artemus went to a concert-hall, the “melodeon,” blacked his face, and delivered a speech. he got away from virginia about the close of the year. a day or two later he wrote from austin, nevada, to his new-found comrade as “my dearest love,” recalling the happiness of his stay: “i shall always remember virginia as a bright spot in my existence, as all others must or rather cannot be, as it were.” then reflectively he adds: “some of the finest intellects in the world have been blunted by liquor.” rare artemus ward and rare mark twain! if there lies somewhere a place of meeting and remembrance, they have not failed to recall there those closing days of ' . xliv. governor of the “third house” with artemus ward's encouragement, clemens began to think of extending his audience eastward. the new york sunday mercury published literary matter. ward had urged him to try this market, and promised to write a special letter to the editors, introducing mark twain and his work. clemens prepared a sketch of the comstock variety, scarcely refined in character and full of personal allusion, a humor not suited to the present-day reader. its general subject was children; it contained some absurd remedies, supposedly sent to his old pilot friend zeb leavenworth, and was written as much for a joke on that good-natured soul as for profit or reputation. “i wrote it especially for beck jolly's use,” the author declares, in a letter to his mother, “so he could pester zeb with it.” we cannot know to-day whether zeb was pestered or not. a faded clipping is all that remains of the incident. as literature the article, properly enough, is lost to the world at large. it is only worth remembering as his metropolitan beginning. yet he must have thought rather highly of it (his estimation of his own work was always unsafe), for in the letter above quoted he adds: i cannot write regularly for the mercury, of course, i sha'n't have time. but sometimes i throw off a pearl (there is no self-conceit about that, i beg you to observe) which ought for the eternal welfare of my race to have a more extensive circulation than is afforded by a local daily paper. and if fitzhugh ludlow (author of the 'hasheesh eater') comes your way, treat him well. he published a high encomium upon mark twain (the same being eminently just and truthful, i beseech you to believe) in a san francisco paper. artemus ward said that when my gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority i ought to appreciate them myself, leave sage-brush obscurity, and journey to new york with him, as he wanted me to do. but i preferred not to burst upon the new york public too suddenly and brilliantly, so i concluded to remain here. he was in carson city when this was written, preparing for the opening of the next legislature. he was beyond question now the most conspicuous figure of the capital; also the most wholesomely respected, for his influence had become very large. it was said that he could control more votes than any legislative member, and with his friends, simmons and clagget, could pass or defeat any bill offered. the enterprise was a powerful organ--to be courted and dreaded--and mark twain had become its chief tribune. that he was fearless, merciless, and incorruptible, without doubt had a salutary influence on that legislative session. he reveled in his power; but it is not recorded that he ever abused it. he got a bill passed, largely increasing orion's official fees, but this was a crying need and was so recognized. he made no secret promises, none at all that he did not intend to fulfill. “sam's word was as fixed as fate,” orion records, and it may be added that he was morally as fearless. the two houses of the last territorial legislature of nevada assembled january , .--[nevada became a state october , .]--a few days later a “third house” was organized--an institution quite in keeping with the happy atmosphere of that day and locality, for it was a burlesque organization, and mark twain was selected as its “governor.” the new house prepared to make a public occasion of this first session, and its governor was required to furnish a message. then it was decided to make it a church benefit. the letters exchanged concerning this proposition still exist; they explain themselves: carson city, january , . gov. mark twain, understanding from certain members of the third house of the territorial legislature that that body will have effected a permanent organization within a day or two, and be ready for the reception of your third annual message,--[ there had been no former message. this was regarded as a great joke.]--we desire to ask your permission, and that of the third house, to turn the affair to the benefit of the church by charging toll-roads, franchises, and other persons a dollar apiece for the privilege of listening to your communication. s. pixley, g. a. sears, trustees. carson city, january , . gentlemen,--certainly. if the public can find anything in a grave state paper worth paying a dollar for, i am willing they should pay that amount, or any other; and although i am not a very dusty christian myself, i take an absorbing interest in religious affairs, and would willingly inflict my annual message upon the church itself if it might derive benefit thereby. you can charge what you please; i promise the public no amusement, but i do promise a reasonable amount of instruction. i am responsible to the third house only, and i hope to be permitted to make it exceedingly warm for that body, without caring whether the sympathies of the public and the church be enlisted in their favor, and against myself, or not. respectfully, mark twain. mark twain's reply is closely related to his later style in phrase and thought. it might have been written by him at almost any subsequent period. perhaps his association with artemus ward had awakened a new perception of the humorous idea--a humor of repression, of understatement. he forgot this often enough, then and afterward, and gave his riotous fancy free rein; but on the whole the simpler, less florid form seemingly began to attract him more and more. his address as governor of the third house has not been preserved, but those who attended always afterward referred to it as the “greatest effort of his life.” perhaps for that audience and that time this verdict was justified. it was his first great public opportunity. on the stage about him sat the membership of the third house; the building itself was packed, the aisles full. he knew he could let himself go in burlesque and satire, and he did. he was unsparing in his ridicule of the governor, the officials in general, the legislative members, and of individual citizens. from the beginning to the end of his address the audience was in a storm of laughter and applause. with the exception of the dinner speech made to the printers in keokuk, it was his first public utterance--the beginning of a lifelong series of triumphs. only one thing marred his success. little carrie pixley, daughter of one of the “trustees,” had promised to be present and sit in a box next the stage. it was like him to be fond of the child, and he had promised to send a carriage for her. often during his address he glanced toward the box; but it remained empty. when the affair was ended, he drove home with her father to inquire the reason. they found the little girl, in all her finery, weeping on the bed. then he remembered he had forgotten to send the carriage; and that was like him, too. for his third house address judge a. w. (sandy) baldwin and theodore winters presented him with a gold watch inscribed to “governor mark twain.” he was more in demand now than ever; no social occasion was regarded as complete without him. his doings were related daily and his sayings repeated on the streets. most of these things have passed away now, but a few are still recalled with smiles. once, when conundrums were being asked at a party, he was urged to make one. “well,” he sand, “why am i like the pacific ocean?” several guesses were made, but none satisfied him. finally all gave it up. “tell us, mark, why are you like the pacific ocean?” “i don't know,” he drawled. “i was just asking for information.” at another time, when a young man insisted on singing a song of eternal length, the chorus of which was, “i'm going home, i'm going home, i'm going home tomorrow,” mark twain put his head in the window and said, pleadingly: “for god's sake go to-night.” but he was also fond of quieter society. sometimes, after the turmoil of a legislative morning, he would drop in to miss keziah clapp's school and listen to the exercises, or would call on colonel curry--“old curry, old abe curry”--and if the colonel happened to be away, he would talk with mrs. curry, a motherly soul (still alive at ninety-three, in ), and tell her of his hannibal boyhood or his river and his mining adventures, and keep her laughing until the tears ran. he was a great pedestrian in those days. sometimes he walked from virginia to carson, stopping at colonel curry's as he came in for rest and refreshment. “mrs. curry,” he said once, “i have seen tireder men than i am, and lazier men, but they were dead men.” he liked the home feeling there--the peace and motherly interest. deep down, he was lonely and homesick; he was always so away from his own kindred. clemens returned now to virginia city, and, like all other men who ever met her, became briefly fascinated by the charms of adah isaacs menken, who was playing mazeppa at the virginia opera house. all men--kings, poets, priests, prize-fighters--fell under menken's spell. dan de quille and mark twain entered into a daily contest as to who could lavish the most fervid praise on her in the enterprise. the latter carried her his literary work to criticize. he confesses this in one of his home letters, perhaps with a sort of pride. i took it over to show to miss menken the actress, orpheus c. ken's wife. she is a literary cuss herself. she has a beautiful white hand, but her handwriting is infamous; she writes fast and her chirography is of the door-plate order--her letters are immense. i gave her a conundrum, thus: “my dear madam, why ought your hand to retain its present grace and beauty always? because you fool away devilish little of it on your manuscript.” but menken was gone presently, and when he saw her again, somewhat later, in san francisco, his “madness” would have seemed to have been allayed. xlv. a comstock duel. the success--such as it was--of his occasional contributions to the new york sunday mercury stirred mark twain's ambition for a wider field of labor. circumstance, always ready to meet his wishes, offered assistance, though in an unexpected form. goodman, temporarily absent, had left clemens in editorial charge. as in that earlier day, when orion had visited tennessee and returned to find his paper in a hot personal warfare with certain injured citizens, so the enterprise, under the same management, had stirred up trouble. it was just at the time of the “flour sack sanitary fund,” the story of which is related at length in 'roughing it'. in the general hilarity of this occasion, certain enterprise paragraphs of criticism or ridicule had incurred the displeasure of various individuals whose cause naturally enough had been espoused by a rival paper, the chronicle. very soon the original grievance, whatever it was, was lost sight of in the fireworks and vitriol-throwing of personal recrimination between mark twain and the chronicle editor, then a mr. laird. a point had been reached at length when only a call for bloodshed--a challenge--could satisfy either the staff or the readers of the two papers. men were killed every week for milder things than the editors had spoken each of the other. joe goodman himself, not so long before, had fought a duel with a union editor--tom fitch--and shot him in the leg, so making of him a friend, and a lame man, for life. in joe's absence the prestige of the paper must be maintained. mark twain himself has told in burlesque the story of his duel, keeping somewhat nearer to the fact than was his custom in such writing, as may be seen by comparing it with the account of his abettor and second--of course, steve gillis. the account is from mr. gillis's own hand: when joe went away, he left sam in editorial charge of the paper. that was a dangerous thing to do. nobody could ever tell what sam was going to write. something he said stirred up mr. laird, of the chronicle, who wrote a reply of a very severe kind. he said some things that we told mark could only be wiped out with blood. those were the days when almost every man in virginia city had fought with pistols either impromptu or premeditated duels. i had been in several, but then mine didn't count. most of them were of the impromptu kind. mark hadn't had any yet, and we thought it about time that his baptism took place. he was not eager for it; he was averse to violence, but we finally prevailed upon him to send laird a challenge, and when laird did not send a reply at once we insisted on mark sending him another challenge, by which time he had made himself believe that he really wanted to fight, as much as we wanted him to do. laird concluded to fight, at last. i helped mark get up some of the letters, and a man who would not fight after such letters did not belong in virginia city--in those days. laird's acceptance of mark's challenge came along about midnight, i think, after the papers had gone to press. the meeting was to take place next morning at sunrise. of course i was selected as mark's second, and at daybreak i had him up and out for some lessons in pistol practice before meeting laird. i didn't have to wake him. he had not been asleep. we had been talking since midnight over the duel that was coming. i had been telling him of the different duels in which i had taken part, either as principal or second, and how many men i had helped to kill and bury, and how it was a good plan to make a will, even if one had not much to leave. it always looked well, i told him, and seemed to be a proper thing to do before going into a duel. so mark made a will with a sort of gloomy satisfaction, and as soon as it was light enough to see, we went out to a little ravine near the meeting- place, and i set up a board for him to shoot at. he would step out, raise that big pistol, and when i would count three he would shut his eyes and pull the trigger. of course he didn't hit anything; he did not come anywhere near hitting anything. just then we heard somebody shooting over in the next ravine. sam said: “what's that, steve?” “why,” i said, “that's laud. his seconds are practising him over there.” it didn't make my principal any more cheerful to hear that pistol go off every few seconds over there. just then i saw a little mud-hen light on some sage-brush about thirty yards away. “mark,” i said, “let me have that pistol. i'll show you how to shoot.” he handed it to me, and i let go at the bird and shot its head off, clean. about that time laird and his second came over the ridge to meet us. i saw them coming and handed mark back the pistol. we were looking at the bird when they came up. “who did that?” asked laird's second. “sam,” i said. “how far off was it?” “oh, about thirty yards.” “can he do it again?” “of course,” i said; “every time. he could do it twice that far.” laud's second turned to his principal. “laird,” he said, “you don't want to fight that man. it's just like suicide. you'd better settle this thing, now.” so there was a settlement. laird took back all he had said; mark said he really had nothing against laird--the discussion had been purely journalistic and did not need to be settled in blood. he said that both he and laird were probably the victims of their friends. i remember one of the things laird said when his second told him he had better not fight. “fight! h--l, no! i am not going to be murdered by that d--d desperado.” sam had sent another challenge to a man named cutler, who had been somehow mixed up with the muss and had written sam an insulting letter; but cutler was out of town at the time, and before he got back we had received word from jerry driscoll, foreman of the grand jury, that the law just passed, making a duel a penitentiary offense for both principal and second, was to be strictly enforced, and unless we got out of town in a limited number of hours we would be the first examples to test the new law. we concluded to go, and when the stage left next morning for san francisco we were on the outside seat. joe goodman had returned by this time and agreed to accompany us as far as henness pass. we were all in good spirits and glad we were alive, so joe did not stop when he got to henness pass, but kept on. now and then he would say, “well, i had better be going back pretty soon,” but he didn't go, and in the end he did not go back at all, but went with us clear to san francisco, and we had a royal good time all the way. i never knew any series of duels to close so happily. so ended mark twain's career on the comstock. he had come to it a weary pilgrim, discouraged and unknown; he was leaving it with a new name and fame--elate, triumphant, even if a fugitive. xlvi. getting settled in san francisco this was near the end of may, . the intention of both gillis and clemens was to return to the states; but once in san francisco both presently accepted places, clemens as reporter and gillis as compositor, on the 'morning call'. from 'roughing it' the reader gathers that mark twain now entered into a life of butterfly idleness on the strength of prospective riches to be derived from the “half a trunkful of mining stocks,” and that presently, when the mining bubble exploded, he was a pauper. but a good many liberties have been taken with the history of this period. undoubtedly he expected opulent returns from his mining stocks, and was disappointed, particularly in an investment in hale and norcross shares, held too long for the large profit which could have been made by selling at the proper time. the fact is, he spent not more than a few days--a fortnight at most--in “butterfly idleness,” at the lick house before he was hard at work on the 'call', living modestly with steve gillis in the quietest place they could find, never quiet enough, but as far as possible from dogs and cats and chickens and pianos, which seemed determined to make the mornings hideous, when a weary night reporter and compositor wanted to rest. they went out socially, on occasion, arrayed in considerable elegance; but their recreations were more likely to consist of private midnight orgies, after the paper had gone to press--mild dissipations in whatever they could find to eat at that hour, with a few glasses of beer, and perhaps a game of billiards or pool in some all-night resort. a printer by the name of ward--“little ward,”--[l. p. ward; well known as an athlete in san francisco. he lost his mind and fatally shot himself in .]--they called him--often went with them for these refreshments. ward and gillis were both bantam game-cocks, and sometimes would stir up trouble for the very joy of combat. clemens never cared for that sort of thing and discouraged it, but ward and gillis were for war. “they never assisted each other. if one had offered to assist the other against some overgrown person, it would have been an affront, and a battle would have followed between that pair of little friends.”--[s. l. c., .]--steve gillis in particular, was fond of incidental encounters, a characteristic which would prove an important factor somewhat later in shaping mark twain's career. of course, the more strenuous nights were not frequent. their home-going was usually tame enough and they were glad enough to get there. clemens, however, was never quite ready for sleep. then, as ever, he would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and lose himself in english or french history until sleep conquered. his room-mate did not approve of this habit; it interfered with his own rest, and with his fiendish tendency to mischief he found reprisal in his own fashion. knowing his companion's highly organized nervous system he devised means of torture which would induce him to put out the light. once he tied a nail to a string; an arrangement which he kept on the floor behind the bed. pretending to be asleep, he would hold the end of the string, and lift it gently up and down, making a slight ticking sound on the floor, maddening to a nervous man. clemens would listen a moment and say: “what in the nation is that noise” gillis's pretended sleep and the ticking would continue. clemens would sit up in bed, fling aside his book, and swear violently. “steve, what is that d--d noise?” he would say. steve would pretend to rouse sleepily. “what's the matter, sam? what noise? oh, i guess that is one of those death-ticks; they don't like the light. maybe it will stop in a minute.” it usually did stop about that time, and the reading would be apt to continue. but no sooner was there stillness than it began again--tick, tick, tick. with a wild explosion of blasphemy, the book would go across the floor and the light would disappear. sometimes, when he couldn't sleep, he would dress and walk out in the street for an hour, while the cruel steve slept like the criminal that he was. at last, one night, he overdid the thing and was caught. his tortured room-mate at first reviled him, then threatened to kill him, finally put him to shame. it was curious, but they always loved each other, those two; there was never anything resembling an estrangement, and to his last days mark twain never could speak of steve gillis without tenderness. they moved a great many times in san francisco. their most satisfactory residence was on a bluff on california street. their windows looked down on a lot of chinese houses--“tin-can houses,” they were called--small wooden shanties covered with beaten-out cans. steve and mark would look down on these houses, waiting until all the chinamen were inside; then one of them would grab an empty beer-bottle, throw it down on those tin can roofs, and dodge behind the blinds. the chinamen would swarm out and look up at the row of houses on the edge of the bluff, shake their fists, and pour out chinese vituperation. by and by, when they had retired and everything was quiet again, their tormentors would throw another bottle. this was their sunday amusement. at a place on minna street they lived with a private family. at first clemens was delighted. “just look at it, steve,” he said. “what a nice, quiet place. not a thing to disturb us.” but next morning a dog began to howl. gillis woke this time, to find his room-mate standing in the door that opened out into a back garden, holding a big revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement. “came here, steve,” he said. “come here and kill him. i'm so chilled through i can't get a bead on him.” “sam,” said steve, “don't shoot him. just swear at him. you can easily kill him at that range with your profanity.” steve gillis declares that mark twain then let go such a scorching, singeing blast that the brute's owner sold him next day for a mexican hairless dog. we gather that they moved, on an average, about once a month. a home letter of september , , says: we have been here only four months, yet we have changed our lodging five times. we are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have no fault to find with the rooms or the people. we are the only lodgers-in a well-to-do private family.... but i need change and must move again. this was the minna street place--the place of the dog. in the same letter he mentions having made a new arrangement with the call, by which he is to receive twenty-five dollars a week, with no more night-work; he says further that he has closed with the californian for weekly articles at twelve dollars each. xlvii. bohemian days mark twain's position on the 'call' was uncongenial from the start. san francisco was a larger city than virginia; the work there was necessarily more impersonal, more a routine of news-gathering and drudgery. he once set down his own memories of it: at nine in the morning i had to be at the police court for an hour and make a brief history of the squabbles of the night before. they were usually between irishmen and irishmen, and chinamen and chinamen, with now and then a squabble between the two races, for a change. during the rest of the day we raked the town from end to end, gathering such material as we might, wherewith to fill our required columns; and if there were no fires to report, we started some. at night we visited the six theaters, one after the other, seven nights in the week. we remained in each of those places five minutes, got the merest passing glimpse of play and opera, and with that for a text we “wrote up” those plays and operas, as the phrase goes, torturing our souls every night in the effort to find something to say about those performances which we had not said a couple of hundred times before. it was fearful drudgery-soulless drudgery--and almost destitute of interest. it was an awful slavery for a lazy man. on the enterprise he had been free, with a liberty that amounted to license. he could write what he wished, and was personally responsible to the readers. on the call he was simply a part of a news-machine; restricted by a policy, the whole a part of a still greater machine--politics. once he saw some butchers set their dogs on an unoffending chinaman, a policeman looking on with amused interest. he wrote an indignant article criticizing the city government and raking the police. in virginia city this would have been a welcome delight; in san francisco it did not appear. at another time he found a policeman asleep on his beat. going to a near-by vegetable stall he borrowed a large cabbage-leaf, came back and stood over the sleeper, gently fanning him. it would be wasted effort to make an item of this incident; but he could publish it in his own fashion. he stood there fanning the sleeping official until a large crowd collected. when he thought it was large enough he went away. next day the joke was all over the city. only one of the several severe articles he wrote criticizing officials and institutions seems to have appeared--an attack on an undertaker whose establishment formed a branch of the coroner's office. the management of this place one day refused information to a call reporter, and the next morning its proprietor was terrified by a scathing denunciation of his firm. it began, “those body-snatchers” and continued through half a column of such scorching strictures as only mark twain could devise. the call's policy of suppression evidently did not include criticisms of deputy coroners. such liberty, however, was too rare for mark twain, and he lost interest. he confessed afterward that he became indifferent and lazy, and that george e. barnes, one of the publishers of the call, at last allowed him an assistant. he selected from the counting-room a big, hulking youth by the name of mcglooral, with the acquired prefix of “smiggy.” clemens had taken a fancy to smiggy mcglooral--on account of his name and size perhaps--and smiggy, devoted to his patron, worked like a slave gathering news nights--daytimes, too, if necessary--all of which was demoralizing to a man who had small appetite for his place anyway. it was only a question of time when smiggy alone would be sufficient for the job. there were other and pleasanter things in san francisco. the personal and literary associations were worth while. at his right hand in the call office sat frank soule--a gentle spirit--a graceful versifier who believed himself a poet. mark twain deferred to frank soule in those days. he thought his verses exquisite in their workmanship; a word of praise from soule gave him happiness. in a luxurious office up-stairs was another congenial spirit--a gifted, handsome fellow of twenty-four, who was secretary of the mint, and who presently became editor of a new literary weekly, the californian, which charles henry webb had founded. this young man's name was francis bret harte, originally from albany, later a miner and school-teacher on the stanislaus, still later a compositor, finally a contributor, on the golden era. his fame scarcely reached beyond san francisco as yet; but among the little coterie of writing folk that clustered about the era office his rank was high. mark twain fraternized with bret harte and the era group generally. he felt that he had reached the land--or at least the borderland--of bohemia, that ultima thule of every young literary dream. san francisco did, in fact, have a very definite literary atmosphere and a literature of its own. its coterie of writers had drifted from here and there, but they had merged themselves into a california body-poetic, quite as individual as that of cambridge, even if less famous, less fortunate in emoluments than the boston group. joseph e. lawrence, familiarly known as “joe” lawrence, was editor of the golden era,--[the golden era, california's first literary publication, was founded by rollin m. daggett and j. mcdonough foard in .]--and his kindness and hospitality were accounted sufficient rewards even when his pecuniary acknowledgments were modest enough. he had a handsome office, and the literati, local and visiting, used to gather there. names that would be well known later were included in that little band. joaquin miller recalls from an old diary, kept by him then, having seen adah isaacs menken, prentice mulford, bret harte, charles warren stoddard, fitzhugh ludlow, mark twain, orpheus c. kerr, artemus ward, gilbert densmore, w. s. kendall, and mrs. hitchcock assembled there at one time. the era office would seem to have been a sort of mount olympus, or parnassus, perhaps; for these were mainly poets, who had scarcely yet attained to the dignity of gods. miller was hardly more than a youth then, and this grand assemblage impressed him, as did the imposing appointments of the place. the era rooms were elegant--[he says]--the most grandly carpeted and most gorgeously furnished that i have ever seen. even now in my memory they seem to have been simply palatial. i have seen the world well since then--all of its splendors worth seeing--yet those carpeted parlors, with joe lawrence and his brilliant satellites, outshine all things else, as i turn to look back. more than any other city west of the alleghanies, san francisco has always been a literary center; and certainly that was a remarkable group to be out there under the sunset, dropped down there behind the sierras, which the transcontinental railway would not climb yet, for several years. they were a happy-hearted, aspiring lot, and they got as much as five dollars sometimes for an era article, and were as proud of it as if it had been a great deal more. they felt that they were creating literature, as they were, in fact; a new school of american letters mustered there. mark twain and bret harte were distinctive features of this group. they were already recognized by their associates as belonging in a class by themselves, though as yet neither had done any of the work for which he would be remembered later. they were a good deal together, and it was when harte was made editor of the californian that mark twain was put on the weekly staff at the then unexampled twelve-dollar rate. the californian made larger pretensions than the era, and perhaps had a heavier financial backing. with mark twain on the staff and bret harte in the chair, himself a frequent contributor, it easily ranked as first of san francisco periodicals. a number of the sketches collected by webb later, in mark twain's first little volume, the celebrated jumping frog, etc., appeared in the era or californian in and . they were smart, bright, direct, not always refined, but probably the best humor of the day. some of them are still preserved in this volume of sketches. they are interesting in what they promise, rather than in what they present, though some of them are still delightful enough. “the killing of julius caesar localized” is an excellent forerunner of his burlesque report of a gladiatorial combat in the innocents abroad. the answers to correspondents, with his vigorous admonition of the statistical moralist, could hardly have been better done at any later period. the jumping frog itself was not originally of this harvest. it has a history of its own, as we shall see a little further along. the reportorial arrangement was of brief duration. even the great san francisco earthquake of that day did not awaken in mark twain any permanent enthusiasm for the drudgery of the 'call'. he had lost interest, and when mark twain lost interest in a subject or an undertaking that subject or that undertaking were better dead, so far as he was concerned. his conclusion of service with the call was certain, and he wondered daily why it was delayed so long. the connection had become equally unsatisfactory to proprietor and employee. they had a heart-to-heart talk presently, with the result that mark twain was free. he used to claim, in after-years, with his usual tendency to confess the worst of himself, that he was discharged, and the incident has been variously told. george barnes himself has declared that clemens resigned with great willingness. it is very likely that the paragraph at the end of chapter lviii in 'roughing it' presents the situation with fair accuracy, though, as always, the author makes it as unpleasant for himself as possible: “at last one of the proprietors took me aside, with a charity i still remember with considerable respect, and gave me an opportunity to resign my berth, and so save myself the disgrace of a dismissal.” as an extreme contrast with the supposititious “butterfly idleness” of his beginning in san francisco, and for no other discoverable reason, he doubtless thought it necessary, in the next chapter of that book, to depict himself as having reached the depths of hard luck, debt, and poverty. “i became an adept at slinking,” he says. “i slunk from back street to back street.... i slunk to my bed. i had pawned everything but the clothes i had on.” this is pure fiction. that he occasionally found himself short of funds is likely enough--a literary life invites that sort of thing--but that he ever clung to a single “silver ten-cent piece,” as he tells us, and became the familiar of mendicancy, was a condition supplied altogether by his later imagination to satisfy what he must have regarded as an artistic need. almost immediately following his separation from the 'call' he arranged with goodman to write a daily letter for the enterprise, reporting san francisco matters after his own notion with a free hand. his payment for this work was thirty dollars a week, and he had an additional return from his literary sketches. the arrangement was an improvement both as to labor and income. real affluence appeared on the horizon just then, in the form of a liberal offer for the tennessee land. but alas! it was from a wine-grower who wished to turn the tract into great vineyards, and orion had a prohibition seizure at the moment, so the trade was not made. orion further argued that the prospective purchaser would necessarily be obliged to import horticultural labor from europe, and that those people might be homesick, badly treated, and consequently unhappy in those far eastern tennessee mountains. such was orion's way. xlviii. the refuge of the hills those who remember mark twain's enterprise letters (they are no longer obtainable)--[many of these are indeed now obtainable by a simple web search. d.w.]--declare them to have been the greatest series of daily philippics ever written. however this may be, it is certain that they made a stir. goodman permitted him to say absolutely what he pleased upon any subject. san francisco was fairly weltering in corruption, official and private. he assailed whatever came first to hand with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation long restrained. quite naturally he attacked the police, and with such ferocity and penetration that as soon as copies of the enterprise came from virginia the city hall began to boil and smoke and threaten trouble. martin g. burke, then chief of police, entered libel suit against the enterprise, prodigiously advertising that paper, copies of which were snatched as soon as the stage brought them. mark twain really let himself go then. he wrote a letter that on the outside was marked, “be sure and let joe see this before it goes in.” he even doubted himself whether goodman would dare to print it, after reading. it was a letter describing the city's corrupt morals under the existing police government. it began, “the air is full of lechery, and rumors of lechery,” and continued in a strain which made even the enterprise printers aghast. “you can never afford to publish that,” the foreman said to, goodman. “let it all go in, every word,” goodman answered. “if mark can stand it, i can!” it seemed unfortunate (at the time) that steve gillis should select this particular moment to stir up trouble that would involve both himself and clemens with the very officials which the latter had undertaken to punish. passing a saloon one night alone, gillis heard an altercation going on inside, and very naturally stepped in to enjoy it. including the barkeeper, there were three against two. steve ranged himself on the weaker side, and selected the barkeeper, a big bruiser, who, when the fight was over, was ready for the hospital. it turned out that he was one of chief burke's minions, and gillis was presently indicted on a charge of assault with intent to kill. he knew some of the officials in a friendly way, and was advised to give a straw bond and go into temporary retirement. clemens, of course, went his bail, and steve set out for virginia city, until the storm blew over. this was burke's opportunity. when the case was called and gillis did not appear, burke promptly instituted an action against his bondsman, with an execution against his loose property. the watch that had been given him as governor of the third house came near being thus sacrificed in the cause of friendship, and was only saved by skilful manipulation. now, it was down in the chain of circumstances that steve gillis's brother, james n. gillis, a gentle-hearted hermit, a pocket-miner of the halcyon tuolumne district--the truthful james of bret harte--happened to be in san francisco at this time, and invited clemens to return with him to the far seclusion of his cabin on jackass hill. in that peaceful retreat were always rest and refreshment for the wayfarer, and more than one weary writer besides bret harte had found shelter there. james gillis himself had fine literary instincts, but he remained a pocket-miner because he loved that quiet pursuit of gold, the arcadian life, the companionship of his books, the occasional bohemian pilgrim who found refuge in his retreat. it is said that the sick were made well, and the well made better, in jim gillis's cabin on the hilltop, where the air was nectar and the stillness like enchantment. one could mine there if he wished to do so; jim would always furnish him a promising claim, and teach him the art of following the little fan-like drift of gold specks to the nested deposit of nuggets somewhere up the hillside. he regularly shared his cabin with one dick stoker (dick baker, of 'roughing it'), another genial soul who long ago had retired from the world to this forgotten land, also with dick's cat, tom quartz; but there was always room for guests. in 'roughing it', and in a later story, “the californian's tale,” mark twain has made us acquainted with the verdant solitude of the tuolumne hills, that dreamy, delicious paradise where once a vast population had gathered when placer-mining had been in its bloom, a dozen years before. the human swarm had scattered when the washings failed to pay, leaving only a quiet emptiness and the few pocket-miners along the stanislaus and among the hills. vast areas of that section present a strange appearance to-day. long stretches there are, crowded and jammed and drifted with ghostly white stones that stand up like fossils of a prehistoric life--the earth deposit which once covered them entirely washed away, every particle of it removed by the greedy hordes, leaving only this vast bleaching drift, literally the “picked bones of the land.” at one place stands columbia, regarded once as a rival to sacramento, a possible state capital--a few tumbling shanties now--and a ruined church. it was the th of december, , when mark twain arrived at jim gillis's cabin. he found it a humble habitation made of logs and slabs, partly sheltered by a great live-oak tree, surrounded by a stretch of grass. it had not much in the way of pretentious furniture, but there was a large fireplace, and a library which included the standard authors. a younger gillis boy, william, was there at this time, so that the family numbered five in all, including tom quartz, the cat. on rainy days they would gather about the big, open fire and jim gillis, with his back to the warmth, would relate diverting yarns, creations of his own, turned out hot from the anvil, forged as he went along. he had a startling imagination, and he had fostered it in that secluded place. his stories usually consisted of wonderful adventures of his companion, dick stoker, portrayed with humor and that serene and vagrant fancy which builds as it goes, careless as to whither it is proceeding and whether the story shall end well or ill, soon or late, if ever. he always pretended that these extravagant tales of stoker were strictly true; and stoker--“forty-six and gray as a rat”--earnest, thoughtful, and tranquilly serene, would smoke and look into the fire and listen to those astonishing things of himself, smiling a little now and then but saying never a word. what did it matter to him? he had no world outside of the cabin and the hills, no affairs; he would live and die there; his affairs all had ended long ago. a number of the stories used in mark twain's books were first told by jim gillis, standing with his hands crossed behind him, back to the fire, in the cabin on jackass hill. the story of dick baker's cat was one of these; the jaybird and acorn story of 'a tramp abroad' was another; also the story of the “burning shame,” and there are others. mark twain had little to add to these stories; in fact, he never could get them to sound as well, he said, as when jim gillis had told them. james gillis's imagination sometimes led him into difficulties. once a feeble old squaw came along selling some fruit that looked like green plums. stoker, who knew the fruit well enough, carelessly ventured the remark that it might be all right, but he had never heard of anybody eating it, which set gillis off into eloquent praises of its delights, all of which he knew to be purely imaginary; whereupon stoker told him if he liked the fruit so well, to buy some of it. there was no escape after that; jim had to buy some of those plums, whose acid was of the hair-lifting aqua-fortis variety, and all the rest of the day he stewed them, adding sugar, trying to make them palatable, tasting them now and then, boasting meanwhile of their nectar-like deliciousness. he gave the others a taste by and by--a withering, corroding sup--and they derided him and rode him down. but jim never weakened. he ate that fearful brew, and though for days his mouth was like fire he still referred to the luscious health-giving joys of the “californian plums.” jackass hill was not altogether a solitude; here and there were neighbors. another pocket-miner; named carrington, had a cabin not far away, and a mile or two distant lived an old couple with a pair of pretty daughters, so plump and trim and innocent, that they were called the “chapparal quails.” young men from far and near paid court to them, and on sunday afternoons so many horses would be tied to their front fence as to suggest an afternoon service there. young “billy” gillis knew them, and one sunday morning took his brother's friend, sam clemens, over for a call. they went early, with forethought, and promptly took the girls for a walk. they took a long walk, and went wandering over the hills, toward sandy bar and the stanislaus--through that reposeful land which bret harte would one day light with idyllic romance--and toward evening found themselves a long way from home. they must return by the nearest way to arrive before dark. one of the young ladies suggested a short cut through the chemisal, and they started. but they were lost, presently, and it was late, very late, when at last they reached the ranch. the mother of the “quails” was sitting up for them, and she had something to say. she let go a perfect storm of general denunciation, then narrowed the attack to samuel clemens as the oldest of the party. he remained mildly serene. “it wasn't my fault,” he ventured at last; “it was billy gillis's fault.” “no such thing. you know better. mr. gillis has been here often. it was you.” “but do you realize, ma'am, how tired and hungry we are? haven't you got a bite for us to eat?” “no, sir, not a bite--for such as you.” the offender's eyes, wandering about the room, spied something in a corner. “isn't that a guitar over there?” he asked. “yes, sir, it is; what of it?” the culprit walked over, and taking it up, tuned the strings a little and struck the chords. then he began to sing. he began very softly and sang “fly away, pretty moth,” then “araby's daughter.” he could sing very well in those days, following with the simpler chords. perhaps the mother “quail” had known those songs herself back in the states, for her manner grew kindlier, almost with the first notes. when he had finished she was the first to ask him to go on. “i suppose you are just like all young folks,” she said. “i was young myself once. while you sing i'll get some supper.” she left the door to the kitchen open so that she could hear, and cooked whatever she could find for the belated party. xlix. the jumping frog it was the rainy season, the winter of and , but there were many pleasant days, when they could go pocket-hunting, and samuel clemens soon added a knowledge of this fascinating science to his other acquirements. sometimes he worked with dick stoker, sometimes with one of the gillis boys. he did not make his fortune at pocket-mining; he only laid its corner-stone. in the old note-book he kept of that sojourn we find that, with jim gillis, he made a trip over into calaveras county soon after christmas and remained there until after new year's, probably prospecting; and he records that on new year's night, at vallecito, he saw a magnificent lunar rainbow in a very light, drizzling rain. a lunax rainbow is one of the things people seldom see. he thought it an omen of good-fortune. they returned to the cabin on the hill; but later in the month, on the they crossed over into calaveras again, and began pocket-hunting not far from angel's camp. the note-book records that the bill of fare at the camp hotel consisted wholly of beans and something which bore the name of coffee; also that the rains were frequent and heavy. january . same old diet--same old weather--went out to the pocket-claim--had to rush back. they had what they believed to be a good claim. jim gillis declared the indications promising, and if they could only have good weather to work it, they were sure of rich returns. for himself, he would have been willing to work, rain or shine. clemens, however, had different views on the subject. his part was carrying water for washing out the pans of dirt, and carrying pails of water through the cold rain and mud was not very fascinating work. dick stoker came over before long to help. things went a little better then; but most of their days were spent in the bar-room of the dilapidated tavern at angel's camp, enjoying the company of a former illinois river pilot, ben coon,--[this name has been variously given as “ros coon,” “coon drayton,” etc. it is given here as set down in mark twain's notes, made on the spot. coon was not (as has been stated) the proprietor of the hotel (which was kept by a frenchman), but a frequenter of it.]--a solemn, fat-witted person, who dozed by the stove, or old slow, endless stories, without point or application. listeners were a boon to him, for few came and not many would stay. to mark twain and jim gillis, however, ben coon was a delight. it was soothing and comfortable to listen to his endless narratives, told in that solemn way, with no suspicion of humor. even when his yarns had point, he did not recognize it. one dreary afternoon, in his slow, monotonous fashion, he told them about a frog--a frog that had belonged to a man named coleman, who trained it to jump, but that failed to win a wager because the owner of a rival frog had surreptitiously loaded the trained jumper with shot. the story had circulated among the camps, and a well-known journalist, named samuel seabough, had already made a squib of it, but neither clemens nor gillis had ever happened to hear it before. they thought the tale in itself amusing, and the “spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling was exquisitely absurd.” when coon had talked himself out, his hearers played billiards on the frowsy table, and now and then one would remark to the other: “i don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog,” and perhaps the other would answer: “i ain't got no frog, but if i had a frog i'd bet you.” out on the claim, between pails of water, clemens, as he watched jim gillis or dick stoker “washing,” would be apt to say, “i don't see no p'ints about that pan o' dirt that's any better'n any other pan o' dirt,” and so they kept it up. then the rain would come again and interfere with their work. one afternoon, when clemens and gillis were following certain tiny-sprayed specks of gold that were leading them to pocket--somewhere up the long slope, the chill downpour set in. gillis, as usual, was washing, and clemens carrying water. the “color” was getting better with every pan, and jim gillis believed that now, after their long waiting, they were to be rewarded. possessed with the miner's passion, he would have gone on washing and climbing toward the precious pocket, regardless of everything. clemens, however, shivering and disgusted, swore that each pail of water was his last. his teeth were chattering and he was wet through. finally he said, in his deliberate way: “jim, i won't carry any more water. this work is too disagreeable.” gillis had just taken out a panful of dirt. “bring one more pail, sam,” he pleaded. “oh, hell, jim, i won't do it; i'm freezing!” “just one more pail, sam,” he pleaded. “no, sir, not a drop, not if i knew there were a million dollars in that pan.” gillis tore a page out of his note-book, and hastily posted a thirty-day claim notice by the pan of dirt, and they set out for angel's camp. it kept on raining and storming, and they did not go back. a few days later a letter from steve gillis made clemens decide to return to san francisco. with jim gillis and dick stoker he left angel's and walked across the mountains to jackass hill in the snow-storm--“the first i ever saw in california,” he says in his notes. in the mean time the rain had washed away the top of the pan of earth they had left standing on the hillside, and exposed a handful of nuggets-pure gold. two strangers, austrians, had come along and, observing it, had sat down to wait until the thirty-day claim notice posted by jim gillis should expire. they did not mind the rain--not with all that gold in sight--and the minute the thirty days were up they followed the lead a few pans farther and took out--some say ten, some say twenty, thousand dollars. in either case it was a good pocket. mark twain missed it by one pail of water. still, it is just as well, perhaps, when one remembers that vaster nugget of angel's camp--the jumping frog. jim gillis always declared, “if sam had got that pocket he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of his days, like me.” in mark twain's old note-book occurs a memorandum of the frog story--a mere casual entry of its main features: coleman with his jumping frog--bet stranger $ --stranger had no frog, and c. got him one:--in the mean time stranger filled c.'s frog full of shot and he couldn't jump. the stranger's frog won. it seemed unimportant enough, no doubt, at the time; but it was the nucleus around which was built a surpassing fame. the hills along the stanislaus have turned out some wonderful nuggets in their time, but no other of such size as that. l. back to the tumult from the note-book: february . arrived in stockton p.m. home again home again at the occidental hotel, san francisco--find letters from artemus ward asking me to write a sketch for his new book of nevada territory travels which is soon to come out. too late--ought to have got the letters three months ago. they are dated early in november. he was sorry not to oblige ward, sorry also not to have representation in his book. he wrote explaining the circumstance, and telling the story of his absence. steve gillis, meantime, had returned to san francisco, and settled his difficulties there. the friends again took up residence together. mark twain resumed his daily letters to the enterprise, without further annoyance from official sources. perhaps there was a temporary truce in that direction, though he continued to attack various abuses--civic, private, and artistic--becoming a sort of general censor, establishing for himself the title of the “moralist of the main.” the letters were reprinted in san francisco and widely read. now and then some one had the temerity to answer them, but most of his victims maintained a discreet silence. in one of these letters he told of the mexican oyster, a rather tough, unsatisfactory article of diet, which could not stand criticism, and presently disappeared from the market. it was a mistake, however, for him to attack an alta journalist by the name of evans. evans was a poet, and once composed an elegy with a refrain which ended: gone, gone, gone --gone to his endeavor; gone, gone, gone, forever and forever. in the enterprise letter following its publication mark twain referred to this poem. he parodied the refrain and added, “if there is any criticism to make on it i should say there is a little too much 'gone' and not enough 'forever.'” it was a more or less pointless witticism, but it had a humorous quotable flavor, and it made evans mad. in a squib in the alta he retaliated: mark twain has killed the mexican oyster. we only regret that the act was not inspired by a worthier motive. mark twain's sole reason for attacking the mexican oyster was because the restaurant that sold them refused him credit. a deadly thrust like that could not be parried in print. to deny or recriminate would be to appear ridiculous. one could only sweat and breathe vengeance. “joe,” he said to goodman, who had come over for a visit, “my one object in life now is to make enough money to stand trial and then go and murder evans.” he wrote verses himself sometimes, and lightened his enterprise letters with jingles. one of these concerned tom maguire, the autocrat manager of san francisco theaters. it details maguire's assault on one of his actors. tom maguire, roused to ire, lighted on mcdougal; tore his coat, clutched his throat, and split him in the bugle. for shame! oh, fie! maguire, why will you thus skyugle? why curse and swear, and rip and tear the innocent mcdougal? of bones bereft, almost, you've left vestvali, gentle jew gal; and now you've smashed and almost hashed the form of poor mcdougall goodman remembers that clemens and gillis were together again on california street at this time, and of hearing them sing, “the doleful ballad of the rejected lover,” another of mark twain's compositions. it was a wild, blasphemous outburst, and the furious fervor with which mark and steve delivered it, standing side by side and waving their fists, did not render it less objectionable. such memories as these are set down here, for they exhibit a phase of that robust personality, built of the same primeval material from which the world was created--built of every variety of material, in fact, ever incorporated in a human being--equally capable of writing unprintable coarseness and that rarest and most tender of all characterizations, the 'recollections of joan of arc'. li. the corner-stone along with his enterprise work, clemens continued to write occasionally for the californian, but for some reason he did not offer the story of the jumping frog. for one thing, he did not regard it highly as literary material. he knew that he had enjoyed it himself, but the humor and fashion of its telling seemed to him of too simple and mild a variety in that day of boisterous incident and exaggerated form. by and by artemus ward turned up in san francisco, and one night mark twain told him his experiences with jim gillis, and in angel's camp; also of ben coon and his tale of the calaveras frog. ward was delighted. “write it,” he said. “there is still time to get it into my volume of sketches. send it to carleton, my publisher in new york.”--[this is in accordance with mr. clemens's recollection of the matter. the author can find no positive evidence that ward was on the pacific coast again in . it seems likely, therefore, that the telling of the frog story and his approval of it were accomplished by exchange of letters.]--clemens promised to do this, but delayed fulfilment somewhat, and by the time the sketch reached carleton, ward's book was about ready for the press. it did not seem worth while to carleton to make any change of plans that would include the frog story. the publisher handed it over to henry clapp, editor of the saturday press, a perishing sheet, saying: “here, clapp, here's something you can use in your paper.” clapp took it thankfully enough, we may believe. “jim smiley and his jumping frog”--[this was the original title.]--appeared in the saturday press of november , , and was immediately copied and quoted far and near. it brought the name of mark twain across the mountains, bore it up and down the atlantic coast, and out over the prairies of the middle west. away from the pacific slope only a reader here and there had known the name before. now every one who took a newspaper was treated to the tale of the wonderful calaveras frog, and received a mental impress of the author's signature. the name mark twain became hardly an institution, as yet, but it made a strong bid for national acceptance. as for its owner, he had no suspicion of these momentous happenings for a considerable time. the telegraph did not carry such news in those days, and it took a good while for the echo of his victory to travel to the coast. when at last a lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author. even artemus ward's opinion of the story had not increased mark twain's regard for it as literature. that it had struck the popular note meant, as he believed, failure for his more highly regarded work. in a letter written january , , he says these things for himself: i do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful. i wish i was back there piloting up and down the river again. verily, all is vanity and little worth--save piloting. to think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those new york people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on! “jim smiley and his jumping frog”--a squib which would never have been written but to please artemus ward, and then it reached new york too late to appear in his book. but no matter. his book was a wretchedly poor one, generally speaking, and it could be no credit to either of us to appear between its covers. this paragraph is from the new york correspondence of the san francisco alta: “mark twain's story in the saturday press of november th, called 'jim smiley and his jumping frog,' has set all new york in a roar, and he may be said to have made his mark. i have been asked fifty times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and near. it is voted the best thing of the day. cannot the 'californian' afford to keep mark all to itself? it should not let him scintillate so widely without first being filtered through the california press.” the new york publishing house of carleton & co. gave the sketch to the saturday press when they found it was too late for the book. it is difficult to judge the jumping frog story to-day. it has the intrinsic fundamental value of one of aesop's fables.--[the resemblance of the frog story to the early greek tales must have been noted by prof. henry sidgwick, who synopsized it in greek form and phrase for his book, greek prose composition. through this originated the impression that the story was of athenian root. mark twain himself was deceived, until in , when he met professor sidgwick, who explained that the greek version was the translation and mark twain's the original; that he had thought it unnecessary to give credit for a story so well known. see the jumping frog, harper & bros., , p. .]--it contains a basic idea which is essentially ludicrous, and the quaint simplicity of its telling is convincing and full of charm. it appeared in print at a time when american humor was chaotic, the public taste unformed. we had a vast appreciation for what was comic, with no great number of opportunities for showing it. we were so ready to laugh that when a real opportunity came along we improved it and kept on laughing and repeating the cause of our merriment, directing the attention of our friends to it. whether the story of “jim smiley's frog,” offered for the first time today, would capture the public, and become the initial block of a towering fame, is another matter. that the author himself underrated it is certain. that the public, receiving it at what we now term the psychological moment, may have overrated it is by no means impossible. in any case, it does not matter now. the stone rejected by the builder was made the corner-stone of his literary edifice. as such it is immortal. in the letter already quoted, clemens speaks of both bret harte and himself as having quit the 'californian' in future expecting to write for eastern papers. he adds: though i am generally placed at the head of my breed of scribblers in this part of the country, the place properly belongs to bret harte, i think, though he denies it, along with the rest. he wants me to club a lot of old sketches together with a lot of his, and publish a book. i wouldn't do it, only he agrees to take all the trouble. but i want to know whether we are going to make anything out of it, first. however, he has written to a new york publisher, and if we are offered a bargain that will pay for a month's labor we will go to work and prepare the volume for the press. nothing came of the proposed volume, or of other joint literary schemes these two had then in mind. neither of them would seem to have been optimistic as to their future place in american literature; certainly in their most exalted moments they could hardly have dreamed that within half a dozen years they would be the head and front of a new school of letters--the two most talked-of men in america. lii. a commission to the sandwich islands whatever his first emotions concerning the success of “jim smiley's frog” may have been, the sudden astonishing leap of that batrachian into american literature gave the author an added prestige at home as well as in distant parts. those about him were inclined to regard him, in some degree at least, as a national literary figure and to pay tribute accordingly. special honors began to be shown to him. a fine new steamer, the ajax, built for the sandwich island trade, carried on its initial trip a select party of guests of which he was invited to make one. he did not go, and reproached himself sorrowfully afterward. if the ajax were back i would go quick, and throw up my correspondence. she had fifty-two invited guests aboard--the cream of the town--gentlemen and ladies, and a splendid brass band. i could not accept because there would be no one to write my correspondence while i was gone. in fact, the daily letter had grown monotonous. he was restless, and the ajax excursion, which he had been obliged to forego, made him still more dissatisfied. an idea occurred to him: the sugar industry of the islands was a matter of great commercial interest to california, while the life and scenery there, picturesquely treated, would appeal to the general reader. he was on excellent terms with james anthony and paul morrill, of the sacramento union; he proposed to them that they send him as their special correspondent to report to their readers, in a series of letters, life, trade, agriculture, and general aspect of the islands. to his vast delight, they gave him the commission. he wrote home joyously now: i am to remain there a month and ransack the islands, the cataracts and volcanoes completely, and write twenty or thirty letters, for which they pay as much money as i would get if i stayed at home. he adds that on his return he expects to start straight across the continent by way of the columbia river, the pend oreille lakes, through montana and down the missouri river. “only two hundred miles of land travel from san francisco to new orleans.” so it is: man proposes, while fate, undisturbed, spins serenely on. he sailed by the ajax on her next trip, march ( ), beginning his first sea voyage--a brand-new experience, during which he acquired the names of the sails and parts of the ship, with considerable knowledge of navigation, and of the islands he was to visit--whatever information passengers and sailors could furnish. it was a happy, stormy voyage altogether. in 'roughing it' he has given us some account of it. it was the th of march when he arrived at honolulu, and his first impression of that tranquil harbor remained with him always. in fact, his whole visit there became one of those memory-pictures, full of golden sunlight and peace, to be found somewhere in every human past. the letters of introduction he had brought, and the reputation which had preceded him, guaranteed him welcome and hospitality. officials and private citizens were alike ready to show him their pleasant land, and he fairly reveled in its delicious air, its summer warmth, its soft repose. oh, islands there are on the face of the deep where the leaves never fade and the skies never weep, he quotes in his note-book, and adds: went with mr. damon to his cool, vine-shaded home; no careworn or eager, anxious faces in this land of happy contentment. god, what a contrast with california and the washoe! and in another place: they live in the s. i.--no rush, no worry--merchant goes down to his store like a gentleman at nine--goes home at four and thinks no more of business till next day. d--n san f. style of wearing out life. he fitted in with the languorous island existence, but he had come for business, and he lost not much time. he found there a number of friends from washoe, including the rev. mr. rising, whose health had failed from overwork. by their direction, and under official guidance, he set out on oahu, one of the several curious horses he has immortalized in print, and, accompanied by a pleasant party of ladies and gentlemen, encircled the island of that name, crossed it and recrossed it, visited its various battle-fields, returning to honolulu, lame, sore, sunburnt, but triumphant. his letters home, better even than his union correspondence, reveal his personal interest and enthusiasms. i have got a lot of human bones which i took from one of these battle-fields. i guess i will bring you some of them. i went with the american minister and took dinner this evening with the king's grand chamberlain, who is related to the royal family, and though darker than a mulatto he has an excellent english education, and in manners is an accomplished gentleman. he is to call for me in the morning; we will visit the king in the palace, after dinner they called in the “singing girls,” and we had some beautiful music, sung in the native tongue. it was his first association with royalty, and it was human that he should air it a little. in the same letter he states: “i will sail in a day or two on a tour of the other islands, to be gone two months.” 'in roughing it' he has given us a picture of his visits to the islands, their plantations, their volcanoes, their natural and historic wonders. he was an insatiable sight-seer then, and a persevering one. the very name of a new point of interest filled him with an eager enthusiasm to be off. no discomfort or risk or distance discouraged him. with a single daring companion--a man who said he could find the way--he crossed the burning floor of the mighty crater of kilauea (then in almost constant eruption), racing across the burning lava floor, jumping wide and bottomless crevices, when a misstep would have meant death. by and by marlette shouted “stop!” i never stopped quicker in my life. i asked what the matter was. he said we were out of the path. he said we must not try to go on until we found it again, for we were surrounded with beds of rotten lava, through which we could easily break and plunge down , feet. i thought boo would answer for me, and was about to say so, when marlette partly proved his statement, crushing through and disappearing to his arm-pits. they made their way across at last, and stood the rest of the night gazing down upon a spectacle of a crater in quivering action, a veritable lake of fire. they had risked their lives for that scene, but it seemed worth while. his open-air life on the river, and the mining camps, had prepared samuel clemens for adventurous hardships. he was thirty years old, with his full account of mental and physical capital. his growth had been slow, but he was entering now upon his golden age; he was fitted for conquest of whatever sort, and he was beginning to realize his power. liii. anson burlingame and the “hornet” disaster it was near the end of june when he returned to honolulu from a tour of all the islands, fairly worn out and prostrated with saddle boils. he expected only to rest and be quiet for a season, but all unknown to him startling and historic things were taking place in which he was to have a part--events that would mark another forward stride in his career. the ajax had just come in, bringing his excellency anson burlingame, then returning to his post as minister to china; also general van valkenburg, minister to japan; colonel rumsey and minister burlingame's son, edward,--[edward l. burlingame, now for many years editor of scribner's magazine.]--then a lively boy of eighteen. young burlingame had read “the jumping frog,” and was enthusiastic about mark twain and his work. learning that he was in honolulu, laid up at his hotel, the party sent word that they would call on him next morning. clemens felt that he must not accept this honor, sick or well. he crawled out of bed, dressed and shaved himself as quickly as possible, and drove to the american minister's, where the party was staying. they had a hilariously good time. when he returned to his hotel he sent them, by request, whatever he had on hand of his work. general van valkenburg had said to him: “california is proud of mark twain, and some day the american people will be, too, no doubt.” there has seldom been a more accurate prophecy. but a still greater event was imminent. on that very day (june , ) there came word of the arrival at sanpahoe, on the island of hawaii, of an open boat containing fifteen starving wretches, who on short, ten-day rations had been buffeting a stormy sea for forty-three days! a vessel, the hornet, from new york, had taken fire and burned “on the line,” and since early in may, on that meager sustenance, they had been battling with hundreds of leagues of adverse billows, seeking for land. a few days following the first report, eleven of the rescued men were brought to honolulu and placed in the hospital. mark twain recognized the great news importance of the event. it would be a splendid beat if he could interview the castaways and be the first to get their story to his paper. there was no cable in those days; a vessel for san francisco would sail next morning. it was the opportunity of a lifetime, and he must not miss it. bedridden as he was, the undertaking seemed beyond his strength. but just at this time the burlingame party descended on him, and almost before he knew it he was on the way to the hospital on a cot, escorted by the heads of the joint legations of china and japan. once there, anson burlingame, with his splendid human sympathy and handsome, courtly presence, drew from those enfeebled castaways all the story of their long privation and struggle, that had stretched across forty-three distempered days and four thousand miles of sea. all that mark twain had to do was to listen and make the notes. he put in the night-writing against time. next morning, just as the vessel for the states was drifting away from her dock, a strong hand flung his bulky envelope of manuscript aboard, and if the vessel arrived his great beat was sure. it did arrive, and the three-column story on the front page of the sacramento union, in its issue of july th, gave the public the first detailed history of the terrible hornet disaster and the rescue of those starving men. such a story occupied a wider place in the public interest than it would in these crowded days. the telegraph carried it everywhere, and it was featured as a sensation. mark twain always adored the name and memory of anson burlingame. in his letter home he tells of burlingame's magnanimity in “throwing away an invitation to dine with princes and foreign dignitaries” to help him. “you know i appreciate that kind of thing,” he says; which was a true statement, and in future years he never missed an opportunity of paying an instalment on his debt of gratitude. it was proper that he should do so, for the obligation was a far greater one than that contracted in obtaining the tale of the hornet disaster. it was the debt which one owes to a man who, from the deep measure of his understanding, gives encouragement and exactly needed and convincing advice. anson burlingame said to samuel clemens: “you have great ability; i believe you have genius. what you need now is the refinement of association. seek companionship among men of superior intellect and character. refine yourself and your work. never affiliate with inferiors; always climb.” clemens never forgot that advice. he did not always observe it, but he rarely failed to realize its gospel. burlingame urged him to travel. “come to pekin next winter,” he said, “and visit me. make my house your home. i will give you letters and introduce you. you will have facilities for acquiring information about china.” it is not surprising then that mark twain never felt his debt to anson burlingame entirely paid. burlingame came more than once to the hotel, for clemens was really ill now, and they discussed plans for his future betterment. he promised, of course, to visit china, and when he was alone put in a good deal of time planning a trip around the world which would include the great capitals. when not otherwise employed he read; though there was only one book in the hotel, a “blue and gold” edition of dr. holmes's songs in many keys, and this he soon knew almost by heart, from title-page to finis. he was soon up and about. no one could remain ill long in those happy islands. young burlingame came, and suggested walks. once, when clemens hesitated, the young man said: “but there is a scriptural command for you to go.” “if you can quote one i'll obey it,” said clemens. “very well. the bible says, 'if any man require thee to walk a mile, go with him, twain.'” the command was regarded as sufficient. clemens quoted the witticism later (in his first lecture), and it was often repeated in after-years, ascribed to warner, ward, and a dozen others. its origin was as here set down. under date of july ( ), mark twain's sandwich island note-book says: went to a ball . p.m.--danced till . ; stopped at general van valkenburg's room and talked with him and mr. burlingame and ed burlingame until a.m. from which we may conclude that he had altogether recovered. a few days later the legation party had sailed for china and japan, and on the th clemens himself set out by a slow sailing-vessel to san francisco. they were becalmed and were twenty-five days making the voyage. captain mitchell and others of the wrecked hornet were aboard, and he put in a good deal of time copying their diaries and preparing a magazine article which, he believed, would prove his real entrance to the literary world. the vessel lay almost perfectly still, day after day, and became a regular playground at sea. sundays they had services and mark twain led the choir. “i hope they will have a better opinion of our music in heaven than i have down here,” he says in his notes. “if they don't, a thunderbolt will knock this vessel endways.” it is perhaps worthy of mention that on the night of the th of july he records having seen another “splendidly colored, lunar rainbow.” that he regarded this as an indication of future good-fortune is not surprising, considering the events of the previous year. it was august th when he reached san francisco, and the note-book entry of that day says: home again. no--not home again--in prison again, end all the wild sense of freedom gone. the city seems so cramped and so dreary with toil and care and business anxiety. god help me, i wish i were at sea again! there were compensations, however. he went over to sacramento, and was abundantly welcomed. it was agreed that, in addition to the twenty dollars allowed for each letter, a special bill should be made for the hornet report. “how much do you think it ought to be, mark?” james anthony asked. “oh, i'm a modest man; i don't want the whole union office. call it $ a column.” there was a general laugh. the bill was made out at that figure, and he took it to the business office for payment. “the cashier didn't faint,” he wrote, many years later, “but he came rather near it. he sent for the proprietors, and they only laughed in their jolly fashion, and said it was a robbery, but 'no matter, pay it. it's all right.' the best men that ever owned a newspaper.”--[“my debut as a literary person.”--collected works.]--though inferior to the descriptive writing which a year later would give him a world-wide fame, the sandwich island letters added greatly to his prestige on the pacific coast. they were convincing, informing; tersely--even eloquently--descriptive, with a vein of humor adapted to their audience. yet to read them now, in the fine nonpareil type in which they were set, is such a wearying task that one can only marvel at their popularity. they were not brilliant literature, by our standards to-day. their humor is usually of a muscular kind, varied with grotesque exaggerations; the literary quality is pretty attenuated. here and there are attempts at verse. he had a fashion in those days of combining two or more poems with distracting, sometimes amusing, effect. examples of these dislocations occur in the union letters; a single stanza will present the general idea: the assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, the turf with their bayonets turning, and his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold, and our lanterns dimly burning. only a trifling portion of the letters found their way into his sandwich island chapters of 'roughing it', five years later. they do, however, reveal a sort of transition stage between the riotous florescence of the comstock and the mellowness of his later style. he was learning to see things with better eyes, from a better point of view. it is not difficult to believe that this literary change of heart was in no small measure due to the influence of anson burlingame. volume i, part : - liv. the lecturer it was not easy to take up the daily struggle again, but it was necessary.--[clemens once declared he had been so blue at this period that one morning he put a loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked courage to pull the trigger.]--out of the ruck of possibilities (his brain always thronged with plans) he constructed three or four resolves. the chief of these was the trip around the world; but that lay months ahead, and in the mean time ways and means must be provided. another intention was to finish the hornet article, and forward it to harper's magazine--a purpose carried immediately into effect. to his delight the article found acceptance, and he looked forward to the day of its publication as the beginning of a real career. he intended to follow it up with a series on the islands, which in due time might result in a book and an income. he had gone so far as to experiment with a dedication for the book--an inscription to his mother, modified later for use in 'the innocents abroad'. a third plan of action was to take advantage of the popularity of the hawaiian letters, and deliver a lecture on the same subject. but this was a fearsome prospect--he trembled when he thought of it. as governor of the third house he had been extravagantly received and applauded, but in that case the position of public entertainer had been thrust upon him. to come forward now, offering himself in the same capacity, was a different matter. he believed he could entertain, but he lacked the courage to declare himself; besides, it meant a risk of his slender capital. he confided his situation to col. john mccomb, of the alta california, and was startled by mccomb's vigorous endorsement. “do it, by all means!” urged mccomb. “it will be a grand success--i know it! take the largest house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket.” frightened but resolute, he went to the leading theater manager the same tom maguire of his verses--and was offered the new opera-house at half rates. the next day this advertisement appeared: maguire's academy of music pine street, near montgomery the sandwich islands mark twain (honolulu correspondent of the sacramento union) will deliver a lecture on the sandwich islands at the academy of music on tuesday evening, oct. d ( ) in which passing mention will be made of harris, bishop staley, the american missionaries, etc., and the absurd customs and characteristics of the natives duly discussed and described. the great volcano of kilauea will also receive proper attention. a splendid orchestra is in town, but has not been engaged also a den of ferocious wild beasts will be on exhibition in the next block magnificent fireworks were in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned a grand torchlight procession may be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever they please. dress circle, $ . family circle, c doors open at o'clock the trouble to begin at o'clock the story of that first lecture, as told in roughing it, is a faithful one, and need only be summarized here. expecting to find the house empty, he found it packed from the footlights to the walls. sidling out from the wings--wobbly-kneed and dry of tongue--he was greeted by a murmur, a roar, a very crash of applause that frightened away his remaining vestiges of courage. then, came reaction--these were his friends, and he began to talk to them. fear melted away, and as tide after tide of applause rose and billowed and came breaking at his feet, he knew something of the exaltation of monte cristo when he declared “the world is mine!” it was a vast satisfaction to have succeeded. it was particularly gratifying at this time, for he dreaded going back into newspaper harness. also; it softened later the disappointment resulting from another venture; for when the december harper appeared, with his article, the printer and proof-reader had somehow converted mark twain into “mark swain,” and his literary dream perished. as to the literary value of his lecture, it was much higher than had, been any portion of his letters, if we may judge from its few remaining fragments. one of these--a part of the description of the great volcano haleakala, on the island of maui--is a fair example of his eloquence. it is somewhat more florid than his later description of the same scene in roughing it, which it otherwise resembles; and we may imagine that its poetry, with the added charm of its delivery, held breathless his hearers, many of whom believed that no purer eloquence had ever been uttered or written. it is worth remembering, too, that in this lecture, delivered so long ago, he advocated the idea of american ownership of these islands, dwelling at considerable length on his reasons for this ideal. --[for fragmentary extracts from this first lecture of mark twain and news comment, see appendix d, end of last volume.]--there was a gross return from his venture of more than $ , , but with his usual business insight, which was never foresight, he had made an arrangement by which, after paying bills and dividing with his manager, he had only about one-third of, this sum left. still, even this was prosperity and triumph. he had acquired a new and lucrative profession at a bound. the papers lauded him as the “most piquant and humorous writer and lecturer on the coast since the days of the lamented john phoenix.” he felt that he was on the highroad at last. denis mccarthy, late of the enterprise, was in san francisco, and was willing to become his manager. denis was capable and honest, and clemens was fond of him. they planned a tour of the near-by towns, beginning with sacramento, extending it later even to the mining camps, such as red dog and grass valley; also across into nevada, with engagements at carson city, virginia, and gold hill. it was an exultant and hilarious excursion--that first lecture tour made by denis mccarthy and mark twain. success traveled with them everywhere, whether the lecturer looked across the footlights of some pretentious “opera-house” or between the two tallow candles of some camp “academy.” whatever the building, it was packed, and the returns were maximum. those who remember him as a lecturer in that long-ago time say that his delivery was more quaint, his drawl more exaggerated, even than in later life; that his appearance and movements on the stage were natural, rather than graceful; that his manuscript, which he carried under his arm, looked like a ruffled hen. it was, in fact, originally written on sheets of manila paper, in large characters, so that it could be read easily by dim light, and it was doubtless often disordered. there was plenty of amusing experience on this tour. at one place, when the lecture was over, an old man came to him and said: “be them your natural tones of eloquence?” at grass valley there was a rival show, consisting of a lady tight-rope walker and her husband. it was a small place, and the tight-rope attraction seemed likely to fail. the lady's husband had formerly been a compositor on the enterprise, so that he felt there was a bond of brotherhood between him and mark twain. “look here,” he said. “let's combine our shows. i'll let my wife do the tight-rope act outside and draw a crowd, and you go inside and lecture.” the arrangement was not made. following custom, the lecturer at first thought it necessary to be introduced, and at each place mccarthy had to skirmish around and find the proper person. at red dog, on the stanislaus, the man selected failed to appear, and denis had to provide another on short notice. he went down into the audience and captured an old fellow, who ducked and dodged but could not escape. denis led him to the stage, a good deal frightened. “ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “this is the celebrated mark twain from the celebrated city of san francisco, with his celebrated lecture about the celebrated sandwich islands.” that was as far as he could go; but it was far enough. mark twain never had a better introduction. the audience was in a shouting humor from the start. clemens himself used to tell of an introduction at another camp, where his sponsor said: “ladies and gentlemen, i know only two things about this man: the first is that he's never been in jail, and the second is i don't know why.” but this is probably apocryphal; there is too much “mark twain” in it. when he reached virginia, goodman said to him: “sam, you do not need anybody to introduce you. there's a piano on the stage in the theater. have it brought out in sight, and when the curtain rises you be seated at the piano, playing and singing that song of yours, 'i had an old horse whose name was methusalem,' and don't seem to notice that the curtain is up at first; then be surprised when you suddenly find out that it is up, and begin talking, without any further preliminaries.” this proved good advice, and the lecture, thus opened, started off with general hilarity and applause. lv. highway robbery his nevada, lectures were bound to be immensely successful. the people regarded him as their property over there, and at carson and virginia the houses overflowed. at virginia especially his friends urged and begged him to repeat the entertainment, but he resolutely declined. “i have only one lecture yet,” he said. “i cannot bring myself to give it twice in the same town.” but that irresponsible imp, steve gillis, who was again in virginia, conceived a plan which would make it not only necessary for him to lecture again, but would supply him with a subject. steve's plan was very simple: it was to relieve the lecturer of his funds by a friendly highway robbery, and let an account of the adventure furnish the new lecture. in 'roughing it' mark twain has given a version of this mock robbery which is correct enough as far as it goes; but important details are lacking. only a few years ago (it was april, ), in his cabin on jackass hill, with joseph goodman and the writer of this history present, steve gillis made his “death-bed” confession as is here set down: “mark's lecture was given in piper's opera house, october , . the virginia city people had heard many famous lectures before, but they were mere sideshows compared with mark's. it could have been run to crowded houses for a week. we begged him to give the common people a chance; but he refused to repeat himself. he was going down to carson, and was coming back to talk in gold hill about a week later, and his agent, denis mccarthy, and i laid a plan to have him robbed on the divide between gold hill and virginia, after the gold hill lecture was over and he and denis would be coming home with the money. the divide was a good lonely place, and was famous for its hold-ups. we got city marshal george birdsall into it with us, and took in leslie blackburn, pat holland, jimmy eddington, and one or two more of sam's old friends. we all loved him, and would have fought for him in a moment. that's the kind of friends mark had in nevada. if he had any enemies i never heard of them. “we didn't take in dan de quille, or joe here, because sam was joe's guest, and we were afraid he would tell him. we didn't take in dan because we wanted him to write it up as a genuine robbery and make a big sensation. that would pack the opera-house at two dollars a seat to hear mark tell the story. “well, everything went off pretty well. about the time mark was finishing his lecture in gold hill the robbers all went up on the divide to wait, but mark's audience gave him a kind of reception after his lecture, and we nearly froze to death up there before he came along. by and by i went back to see what was the matter. sam and denis were coming, and carrying a carpet-sack about half full of silver between them. i shadowed them and blew a policeman's whistle as a signal to the boys when the lecturers were within about a hundred yards of the place. i heard sam say to denis: “'i'm glad they've got a policeman on the divide. they never had one in my day.' “just about that time the boys, all with black masks on and silver dollars at the sides of their tongues to disguise their voices, stepped out and stuck six-shooters at sam and denis and told them to put up their hands. the robbers called each other 'beauregard' and 'stonewall jackson.' of course denis's hands went up, and mark's, too, though mark wasn't a bit scared or excited. he talked to the robbers in his regular fashion. he said: “'don't flourish those pistols so promiscuously. they might go off by accident.' “they told him to hand over his watch and money; but when he started to take his hands down they made him put them up again. then he asked how they expected him to give them his valuables with his hands up in the sky. he said his treasures didn't lie in heaven. he told them not to take his watch, which was the one sandy baldwin and theodore winters had given him as governor of the third house, but we took it all the same. “whenever he started to put his hands down we made him put them up again. once he said: “'don't you fellows be so rough. i was tenderly reared.' “then we told him and denis to keep their hands up for fifteen minutes after we were gone--this was to give us time to get back to virginia and be settled when they came along. as we were going away mark called: “'say, you forgot something.' “'what is it?' “why, the carpet-bag.' “he was cool all the time. senator bill stewart, in his autobiography, tells a great story of how scared mark was, and how he ran; but stewart was three thousand miles from virginia by that time, and later got mad at mark because he made a joke about him in 'roughing it'. “denis wanted to take his hands down pretty soon after we were gone, but mark said: “'no, denis, i'm used to obeying orders when they are given in that convincing way; we'll just keep our hands up another fifteen minutes or so for good measure.' “we were waiting in a big saloon on c street when mark and denis came along. we knew they would come in, and we expected mark would be excited; but he was as unruffled as a mountain lake. he told us they had been robbed, and asked me if i had any money. i gave him a hundred dollars of his own money, and he ordered refreshments for everybody. then we adjourned to the enterprise office, where he offered a reward, and dan de quille wrote up the story and telegraphed it to the other newspapers. then somebody suggested that mark would have to give another lecture now, and that the robbery would make a great subject. he entered right into the thing, and next day we engaged piper's opera house, and people were offering five dollars apiece for front seats. it would have been the biggest thing that ever came to virginia if it had come off. but we made a mistake, then, by taking sandy baldwin into the joke. we took in joe here, too, and gave him the watch and money to keep, which made it hard for joe afterward. but it was sandy baldwin that ruined us. he had mark out to dinner the night before the show was to come off, and after he got well warmed up with champagne he thought it would be a smart thing to let mark into what was really going on. “mark didn't see it our way. he was mad clear through.” at this point joseph goodman took up the story. he said: “those devils put sam's money, watch, keys, pencils, and all his things into my hands. i felt particularly mean at being made accessory to the crime, especially as sam was my guest, and i had grave doubts as to how he would take it when he found out the robbery was not genuine. “i felt terribly guilty when he said: “'joe, those d--n thieves took my keys, and i can't get into my trunk. do you suppose you could get me a key that would fit my trunk?' “i said i thought i could during the day, and after sam had gone i took his own key, put it in the fire and burnt it to make it look black. then i took a file and scratched it here and there, to make it look as if i had been fitting it to the lock, feeling guilty all the time, like a man who is trying to hide a murder. sam did not ask for his key that day, and that evening he was invited to judge baldwin's to dinner. i thought he looked pretty silent and solemn when he came home; but he only said: “'joe, let's play cards; i don't feel sleepy.' “steve here, and two or three of the other boys who had been active in the robbery, were present, and they did not like sam's manner, so they excused themselves and left him alone with me. we played a good while; then he said: “'joe, these cards are greasy. i have got some new ones in my trunk. did you get that key to-day?' “i fished out that burnt, scratched-up key with fear and trembling. but he didn't seem to notice it at all, and presently returned with the cards. then we played, and played, and played--till one o'clock--two o'clock--sam hardly saying a word, and i wondering what was going to happen. by and by he laid down his cards and looked at me, and said: “'joe, sandy baldwin told me all about that robbery to-night. now, joe, i have found out that the law doesn't recognize a joke, and i am going to send every one of those fellows to the penitentiary.' “he said it with such solemn gravity, and such vindictiveness, that i believed he was in dead earnest. “i know that i put in two hours of the hardest work i ever did, trying to talk him out of that resolution. i used all the arguments about the boys being his oldest friends; how they all loved him, and how the joke had been entirely for his own good; i pleaded with him, begged him to reconsider; i went and got his money and his watch and laid them on the table; but for a time it seemed hopeless. and i could imagine those fellows going behind the bars, and the sensation it would make in california; and just as i was about to give it up he said: “'well, joe, i'll let it pass--this time; i'll forgive them again; i've had to do it so many times; but if i should see denis mccarthy and steve gillis mounting the scaffold to-morrow, and i could save them by turning over my hand, i wouldn't do it!' “he canceled the lecture engagement, however, next morning, and the day after left on the pioneer stage, by the way of donner lake, for california. the boys came rather sheepishly to see him off; but he would make no show of relenting. when they introduced themselves as beauregard, stonewall jackson, etc., he merely said: “'yes, and you'll all be behind the bars some day. there's been a good deal of robbery around here lately, and it's pretty clear now who did it.' they handed him a package containing the masks which the robbers had worn. he received it in gloomy silence; but as the stage drove away he put his head out of the window, and after some pretty vigorous admonition resumed his old smile, and called out: 'good-by, friends; good-by, thieves; i bear you no malice.' so the heaviest joke was on his tormentors after all.” this is the story of the famous mark twain robbery direct from headquarters. it has been garbled in so many ways that it seems worth setting down in full. denis mccarthy, who joined him presently in san francisco, received a little more punishment there. “what kind of a trip did you boys have?” a friend asked of them. clemens, just recovering from a cold which the exposure on the divide had given him, smiled grimly: “oh, pretty good, only denis here mistook it for a spree.” he lectured again in san francisco, this time telling the story of his overland trip in , and he did the daring thing of repeating three times the worn-out story of horace greeley's ride with hank monk, as given later in 'roughing it'. people were deadly tired of that story out there, and when he told it the first time, with great seriousness, they thought he must be failing mentally. they did not laugh--they only felt sorry. he waited a little, as if expecting a laugh, and presently led around to it and told it again. the audience was astonished still more, and pitied him thoroughly. he seemed to be waiting pathetically in the dead silence for their applause, then went on with his lecture; but presently, with labored effort, struggled around to the old story again, and told it for the third time. the audience suddenly saw the joke then, and became vociferous and hysterical in their applause; but it was a narrow escape. he would have been hysterical himself if the relief had not came when it did. --[a side-light on the horace greeley story and on mr. greeley's eccentricities is furnished by mr. goodman: when i was going east in i happened to see hank monk just before i started. “mr. goodman,” he said, “you tell horace greeley that i want to come east, and ask him to send me a pass.” “all right, hank,” i said, “i will.” it happened that when i got to new york city one of the first men i met was greeley. “mr. greeley,” said, “i have a message for you from hank monk.” greeley bristled and glared at me. “that--rascal?” he said, “he has done me more injury than any other man in america.”] lvi. back to the states in the mean time clemens had completed his plan for sailing, and had arranged with general mccomb, of the alta california, for letters during his proposed trip around the world. however, he meant to visit his people first, and his old home. he could go back with means now, and with the prestige of success. “i sail to-morrow per opposition--telegraphed you to-day,” he wrote on december th, and a day later his note-book entry says: sailed from san francisco in opposition (line) steamer america, capt. wakeman, at noon, th dec., . pleasant sunny day, hills brightly clad with green grass and shrubbery. so he was really going home at last! he had been gone five and a half years--eventful, adventurous years that had made him over completely, at least so far as ambitions and equipment were concerned. he had came away, in his early manhood, a printer and a pilot, unknown outside of his class. he was returning a man of thirty-one, with a fund of hard experience, three added professions--mining, journalism, and lecturing--also with a new name, already famous on the sunset slopes of its adoption, and beginning to be heard over the hills and far away. in some degree, at least, he resembled the prince of a fairy tale who, starting out humble and unnoticed, wins his way through a hundred adventures and returns with gifts and honors. the homeward voyage was a notable one. it began with a tempest a little way out of san francisco--a storm terrible but brief, that brought the passengers from their berths to the deck, and for a time set them praying. then there was captain ned wakeman, a big, burly, fearless sailor, who had visited the edges of all continents and archipelagos; who had been born at sea, and never had a day's schooling in his life, but knew the bible by heart; who was full of human nature and profanity, and believed he was the only man on the globe who knew the secret of the bible miracles. he became a distinct personality in mark twain's work--the memory of him was an unfailing delight. captain “ned blakely,” in 'roughing it', who with his own hands hanged bill noakes, after reading him promiscuous chapters from the bible, was captain wakeman. captain “stormfield,” who had the marvelous visit to heaven, was likewise captain wakeman; and he appears in the “idle excursion” and elsewhere. another event of the voyage was crossing the nicaragua isthmus--the trip across the lake and down the san juan river--a brand-new experience, between shores of splendid tropic tangle, gleaming with vivid life. the luxuriance got into his note-book. dark grottos, fairy festoons, tunnels, temples, columns, pillars, towers, pilasters, terraces, pyramids, mounds, domes, walls, in endless confusion of vine-work--no shape known to architecture unimitated--and all so webbed together that short distances within are only gained by glimpses. monkeys here and there; birds warbling; gorgeous plumaged birds on the wing; paradise itself, the imperial realm of beauty-nothing to wish for to make it perfect. but it was beyond the isthmus that the voyage loomed into proportions somber and terrible. the vessel they took there, the san francisco, sailed from greytown january , , the beginning of a memorable year in mark twain's life. next day two cases of asiatic cholera were reported in the steerage. there had been a rumor of it in nicaragua, but no one expected it on the ship. the nature of the disease was not hinted at until evening, when one of the men died. soon after midnight, the other followed. a minister making the voyage home, rev. j. g. fackler, read the burial service. the gaiety of the passengers, who had become well acquainted during the pacific voyage, was subdued. when the word “cholera” went among them, faces grew grave and frightened. on the morning of january th reverend fackler's services were again required. the dead man was put overboard within half an hour after he had ceased to breathe. gloom settled upon the ship. all steam was made to put into key west. then some of the machinery gave way and the ship lay rolling, helplessly becalmed in the fierce heat of the gulf, while repairs were being made. the work was done at a disadvantage, and the parts did not hold. time and again they were obliged to lie to, in the deadly tropic heat, listening to the hopeless hammering, wondering who would be the next to be sewed up hastily in a blanket and slipped over the ship's side. on the th seven new cases of illness were reported. one of the crew, a man called “shape,” was said to be dying. a few hours later he was dead. by this time the reverend fackler himself had been taken. “so they are burying poor 'shape' without benefit of clergy,” says the note-book. general consternation now began to prevail. then it was learned that the ship's doctor had run out of medicines. the passengers became demoralized. they believed their vessel was to become a charnel ship. strict sanitary orders were issued, and a hospital was improvised. verily the ship is becoming a floating hospital herself--not an hour passes but brings its fresh sensation, its new disaster, its melancholy tidings. when i think of poor “shape” and the preacher, both so well when i saw them yesterday evening, i realize that i myself may be dead to-morrow. since the last two hours all laughter, all levity, has ceased on the ship--a settled gloom is upon the faces of the passengers. by noon it was evident that the minister could not survive. he died at two o'clock next morning; the fifth victim in less than five days. the machinery continued to break and the vessel to drag. the ship's doctor confessed to clemens that he was helpless. there were eight patients in the hospital. but on january th they managed to make key west, and for some reason were not quarantined. twenty-one passengers immediately deserted the ship and were heard of no more. “i am glad they are gone. d--n them,” says the notebook. apparently he had never considered leaving, and a number of others remained. the doctor restocked his medicine-locker, and the next day they put to sea again. certainly they were a daring lot of voyagers. on the th another of the patients died. then the cooler weather seemed to check the contagion, and it was not until the night of the th, when the new york harbor lights were in view, that the final death occurred. there were no new cases by this time, and the other patients were convalescent. a certificate was made out that the last man had died of “dropsy.” there would seem to have been no serious difficulty in docking the vessel and landing the passengers. the matter would probably be handled differently to-day. lvii. old friends and new plans it had been more than thirteen years since his first arrival in new york. then he had been a youth, green, untraveled, eager to get away from home. now a veteran, he was as eager to return. he stopped only long enough in new york to see charles henry webb, late of california, who had put together a number of the mark twain sketches, including “the jumping frog,” for book publication. clemens himself decided to take the book to carleton, thinking that, having missed the fame of the “frog” once, he might welcome a chance to stand sponsor for it now. but carleton was wary; the “frog” had won favor, and even fame, in its fugitive, vagrant way, but a book was another matter. books were undertaken very seriously and with plenty of consideration in those days. twenty-one years later, in switzerland, carleton said to mark twain: “my chief claim to immortality is the distinction of having declined your first book.” clemens was ready enough to give up the book when carleton declined it, but webb said he would publish it himself, and he set about it forthwith. the author waited no longer now, but started for st. louis, and was soon with his mother and sister, whom he had not seen since that eventful first year of the war. they thought he looked old, which was true enough, but they found him unchanged in his manner: buoyant, full of banter and gravely quaint remarks--he was always the same. jane clemens had grown older, too. she was nearly sixty-four, but as keen and vigorous as ever-proud (even if somewhat critical) of this handsome, brilliant man of new name and fame who had been her mischievous, wayward boy. she petted him, joked with him, scolded him, and inquired searchingly into his morals and habits. in turn he petted, comforted, and teased her. she decided that he was the same sam, and always would be--a true prophecy. he went up to hannibal to see old friends. many were married; some had moved away; some were dead--the old story. he delivered his lecture there, and was the center of interest and admiration--his welcome might have satisfied even tom sawyer. from hannibal he journeyed to keokuk, where he lectured again to a crowd of old friends and new, then returned to st. louis for a more extended visit. it was while he was in st. louis that he first saw the announcement of the quaker city holy land excursion, and was promptly fascinated by what was then a brand-new idea in ocean travel--a splendid picnic--a choice and refined party that would sail away for a long summer's journeying to the most romantic of all lands and seas, the shores of the mediterranean. no such argosy had ever set out before in pursuit of the golden fleece of happiness. his projected trip around the world lost its charm in the light of this idyllic dream. henry ward beecher was advertised as one of the party; general sherman as another; also ministers, high-class journalists--the best minds of the nation. anson burlingame had told him to associate with persons of refinement and intellect. he lost no time in writing to the alta, proposing that they send him in this select company. noah brooks, who was then on the alta, states--[in an article published in the century magazine.]--that the management was staggered by the proposition, but that col. john mccomb insisted that the investment in mark twain would be sound. a letter was accordingly sent, stating that a check for his passage would be forwarded in due season, and that meantime he could contribute letters from new york city. the rate for all letters was to be twenty dollars each. the arrangement was a godsend, in the fullest sense of the word, to mark twain. it was now april, and he was eager to get back to new york to arrange his passage. the quaker city would not sail for two months yet (two eventful months), but the advertisement said that passages must be secured by the th, and he was there on that day. almost the first man he met was the chief of the new york alta bureau with a check for twelve hundred and fifty dollars (the amount of his ticket) and a telegram saying, “ship mark twain in the holy land excursion and pay his passage.” --[the following letter, which bears no date, was probably handed to him later in the new york alta office as a sort of credential: alta california office, john street, new york. sam'l clemens, esq., new york. dear sir,--i have the honor to inform you that fred'k. maccrellish & co., proprietors of alta california, san francisco, cal., desire to engage your services as special correspondent on the pleasure excursion now about to proceed from this city to the holy land. in obedience to their instructions i have secured a passage for you on the vessel about to convey the excursion party referred to, and made such arrangements as i hope will secure your comfort and convenience. your only instructions are that you will continue to write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and in the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers of the alta california. i have the honor to remain, with high respect and esteem, your ob'dt. servant, john j. murphy.] the alta, it appears, had already applied for his berth; but, not having been vouched for by mr. beecher or some other eminent divine, clemens was fearful he might not be accepted. quite casually he was enlightened on this point. while waiting for attention in the shipping-office, with the alta agent, he heard a newspaper man inquire what notables were going. a clerk, with evident pride, rattled off the names: “lieutenant-general sherman, henry ward beecher, and mask twain; also probably general banks.” so he was billed as an attraction. it was his first surreptitious taste of fame on the atlantic coast, and not without its delight. the story often told of his being introduced by ned house, of the tribune, as a minister, though often repeated by mark twain himself, was in the nature of a joke, and mainly apocryphal. clemens was a good deal in house's company at the time, for he had made an arrangement to contribute occasional letters to the tribune, and house no doubt introduced him jokingly as one of the quaker city ministers. lviii. a new book and a lecture webb, meantime, had pushed the frog book along. the proofs had been read and the volume was about ready for issue. clemens wrote to his mother april th: my book will probably be in the bookseller's hands in about two weeks. after that i shall lecture. since i have been gone, the boys have gotten up a “call” on me signed by two hundred californians. the lecture plan was the idea of frank fuller, who as acting governor of utah had known mark twain on the comstock, and prophesied favorably of his future career. clemens had hunted up fuller on landing in new york in january, and fuller had encouraged the lecture then; but clemens was doubtful. “i have no reputation with the general public here,” he said. “we couldn't get a baker's dozen to hear me.” but fuller was a sanguine person, with an energy and enthusiasm that were infectious. he insisted that the idea was sound. it would solidify mark twain's reputation on the atlantic coast, he declared, insisting that the largest house in new york, cooper union, should be taken. clemens had partially consented, and fuller had arranged with all the pacific slope people who had come east, headed by ex-governor james w. nye (by this time senator at washington), to sign a call for the “inimitable mark twain” to appear before a new york audience. fuller made nye agree to be there and introduce the lecturer, and he was burningly busy and happy in the prospect. but mark twain was not happy. he looked at that spacious hall and imagined the little crowd of faithful californian stragglers that might gather in to hear him, and the ridicule of the papers next day. he begged fuller to take a smaller hall, the smallest he could get. but only the biggest hall in new york would satisfy fuller. he would have taken a larger one if he could have found it. the lecture was announced for may th. its subject was “kanakadom, or the sandwich islands”--tickets fifty cents. fuller timed it to follow a few days after webb's book should appear, so that one event might help the other. mark twain's first book, 'the celebrated jumping frog of calaveyas county, and other sketches', was scheduled for may st, and did, in fact, appear on that date; but to the author it was no longer an important event. jim smiley's frog as standard-bearer of his literary procession was not an interesting object, so far as he was concerned--not with that vast, empty hall in the background and the insane undertaking of trying to fill it. the san francisco venture had been as nothing compared with this. fuller was working night and day with abounding joy, while the subject of his labor felt as if he were on the brink of a fearful precipice, preparing to try a pair of wings without first learning to fly. at one instant he was cold with fright, the next glowing with an infection of fuller's faith. he devised a hundred schemes for the sale of seats. once he came rushing to fuller, saying: “send a lot of tickets down to the chickering piano company. i have promised to put on my programme, 'the piano used at this entertainment is manufactured by chickering.”' “but you don't want a piano, mark,” said fuller, “do you?” “no, of course not; but they will distribute the tickets for the sake of the advertisement, whether we have the piano or not.” fuller got out a lot of handbills and hung bunches of them in the stages, omnibuses, and horse-cars. clemens at first haunted these vehicles to see if anybody noticed the bills. the little dangling bunches seemed untouched. finally two men came in; one of them pulled off a bill and glanced at it. his friend asked: “who's mark twain?” “god knows; i don't!” the lecturer could not ride any more. he was desperate. “fuller,” he groaned, “there isn't a sign--a ripple of interest.” fuller assured him that everything was working all right “working underneath,” fuller said--but the lecturer was hopeless. he reported his impressions to the folks at home: everything looks shady, at least, if not dark; i have a good agent; but now, after we have hired the cooper institute, and gone to an expense in one way or another of $ , it comes out that i have got to play against speaker colfax at irving hall, ristori, and also the double troop of japanese jugglers, the latter opening at the great academy of music--and with all this against me i have taken the largest house in new york and cannot back water. he might have added that there were other rival entertainments: “the flying scud” was at wallack's, the “black crook” was at niblo's, john brougham at the olympic; and there were at least a dozen lesser attractions. new york was not the inexhaustible city in those days; these things could gather in the public to the last man. when the day drew near, and only a few tickets had been sold, clemens was desperate. “fuller,” he said, “there'll be nobody in the cooper union that night but you and me. i am on the verge of suicide. i would commit suicide if i had the pluck and the outfit. you must paper the house, fuller. you must send out a flood of complementaries.” “very well,” said fuller; “what we want this time is reputation anyway--money is secondary. i'll put you before the choicest, most intelligent audience that ever was gathered in new york city. i will bring in the school-instructors--the finest body of men and women in the world.” fuller immediately sent out a deluge of complimentary tickets, inviting the school-teachers of new york and brooklyn, and all the adjacent country, to come free and hear mark twain's great lecture on kanakadom. this was within forty-eight hours of the time he was to appear. senator nye was to have joined clemens and fuller at the westminster, where clemens was stopping, and they waited for him there with a carriage, fuming and swearing, until it was evident that he was not coming. at last clemens said: “fuller, you've got to introduce me.” “no,” suggested fuller; “i've got a better scheme than that. you get up and begin by bemeaning nye for not being there. that will be better anyway.” clemens said: “well, fuller, i can do that. i feel that way. i'll try to think up something fresh and happy to say about that horse-thief.” they drove to cooper union with trepidation. suppose, after all, the school-teachers had declined to come? they went half an hour before the lecture was to begin. forty years later mark twain said: “i couldn't keep away. i wanted to see that vast mammoth cave and die. but when we got near the building i saw that all the streets were blocked with people, and that traffic had stopped. i couldn't believe that these people were trying to get into cooper institute; but they were, and when i got to the stage at last the house was jammed full-packed; there wasn't room enough left for a child. “i was happy and i was excited beyond expression. i poured the sandwich islands out on those people, and they laughed and shouted to my entire content. for an hour and fifteen minutes i was in paradise.” and fuller to-day, alive and young, when so many others of that ancient time and event have vanished, has added: “when mark appeared the californians gave a regular yell of welcome. when that was over he walked to the edge of the platform, looked carefully down in the pit, round the edges as if he were hunting for something. then he said: 'there was to have been a piano here, and a senator to introduce me. i don't seem to discover them anywhere. the piano was a good one, but we will have to get along with such music as i can make with your help. as for the senator--then mark let himself go and did as he promised about senator nye. he said things that made men from the pacific coast, who had known nye, scream with delight. after that came his lecture. the first sentence captured the audience. from that moment to the end it was either in a roar of laughter or half breathless by his beautiful descriptive passages. people were positively ill for days, laughing at that lecture.” so it was a success: everybody was glad to have been there; the papers were kind, congratulations numerous. --[kind but not extravagant; those were burning political times, and the doings of mere literary people did not excite the press to the extent of headlines. a jam around cooper union to-day, followed by such an artistic triumph, would be a news event. on the other hand, schuyler colfax, then speaker of the house, was reported to the extent of a column, nonpareil. his lecture was of no literary importance, and no echo of it now remains. but those were political, not artistic, days. of mark twain's lecture the times notice said: “nearly every one present came prepared for considerable provocation for enjoyable laughter, and from the appearance of their mirthful faces leaving the hall at the conclusion of the lecture but few were disappointed, and it is not too much to say that seldom has so large an audience been so uniformly pleased as the one that listened to mark twain's quaint remarks last evening. the large hall of the union was filled to its utmost capacity by fully two thousand persons, which fact spoke well for the reputation of the lecturer and his future success. mark twain's style is a quaint one both in manner and method, and through his discourse he managed to keep on the right side of the audience, and frequently convulsed it with hearty laughter.... during a description of the topography of the sandwich islands the lecturer surprised his hearers by a graphic and eloquent description of the eruption of the great volcano, which occurred in , and his language was loudly applauded. “judging from the success achieved by the lecturer last evening, he should repeat his experiment at an early date.”] cooper institute by invitation of s large number of prominent californians and citizens of new york, mark twain will deliver a serio-humerous lecture conerning kanakdom or the sandwich islands, cooper institute, on monday evening, may , . tickets fifty gents. for sale at chickering and sons, broadway, and at the principal hotel doors open at o'clock. the wisdom will begin to flow at . mark twain always felt grateful to the school-teachers for that night. many years later, when they wanted him to read to them in steinway hall, he gladly gave his services without charge. nor was the lecture a complete financial failure. in spite of the flood of complementaries, there was a cash return of some three hundred dollars from the sale of tickets--a substantial aid in defraying the expenses which fuller assumed and insisted on making good on his own account. that was fuller's regal way; his return lay in the joy of the game, and in the winning of the larger stake for a friend. “mark,” he said, “it is all right. the fortune didn't come, but it will. the fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book just out you are going to be the most talked-of man in the country. your letters for the alta and the tribune will get the widest reception of any letters of travel ever written.” lix. the first book with the shadow of the cooper institute so happily dispelled, the celebrated jumping frog of calaveras county, and his following of other sketches, became a matter of more interest. the book was a neat blue-and-gold volume printed by john a. gray & green, the old firm for which the boy, sam clemens, had set type thirteen years before. the title-page bore webb's name as publisher, with the american news company as selling agents. it further stated that the book was edited by “john paul,” that is to say by webb himself. the dedication was in keeping with the general irresponsible character of the venture. it was as follows: to john smith whom i have known in divers and sundry places about the world, and whose many and manifold virtues did always command my esteem, i dedicate this book it is said that the man to whom a volume is dedicated always buys a copy. if this prove true in the present instance, a princely affluence is about to burst upon the author. the “advertisement” stated that the author had “scaled the heights of popularity at a single jump, and won for himself the sobriquet of the 'wild humorist of the pacific slope'; furthermore, that he was known to fame as the 'moralist of the main,'” and that as such he would be likely to go down to posterity, adding that it was in his secondary character, as humorist, rather than in his primal one of moralist, that the volume aimed to present him.--[the advertisement complete, with extracts from the book, may be found under appendix e, at the end of last volume.] every little while, during the forty years or more that have elapsed since then, some one has come forward announcing mark twain to be as much a philosopher as a humorist, as if this were a new discovery. but it was a discovery chiefly to the person making the announcement. every one who ever knew mark twain at any period of his life made the same discovery. every one who ever took the trouble to familiarize himself with his work made it. those who did not make it have known his work only by hearsay and quotation, or they have read it very casually, or have been very dull. it would be much more of a discovery to find a book in which he has not been serious--a philosopher, a moralist, and a poet. even in the jumping frog sketches, selected particularly for their inconsequence, the under-vein of reflection and purpose is not lacking. the answer to moral statistician--[in “answers to correspondents,” included now in sketches new and old. an extract from it, and from “a strange dream,” will be found in appendix e.]--is fairly alive with human wisdom and righteous wrath. the “strange dream,” though ending in a joke, is aglow with poetry. webb's “advertisement” was playfully written, but it was earnestly intended, and he writes mark twain down a moralist--not as a discovery, but as a matter of course. the discoveries came along later, when the author's fame as a humorist had dazzled the nations. it is as well to say it here as anywhere, perhaps, that one reason why mark twain found it difficult to be accepted seriously was the fact that his personality was in itself so essentially humorous. his physiognomy, his manner of speech, this movement, his mental attitude toward events--all these were distinctly diverting. when we add to this that his medium of expression was nearly always full of the quaint phrasing and those surprising appositions which we recognize as amusing, it is not so astonishing that his deeper, wiser, more serious purpose should be overlooked. on the whole these unabated discoverers serve a purpose, if only to make the rest of their species look somewhat deeper than the comic phrase. the little blue-and-gold volume which presented the frog story and twenty-six other sketches in covers is chiefly important to-day as being mark twain's first book. the selections in it were made for a public that had been too busy with a great war to learn discrimination, and most of them have properly found oblivion. fewer than a dozen of them were included in his collected sketches issued eight years later, and some even of those might have been spared; also some that were added, for that matter; but detailed literary criticism is not the province of this work. the reader may investigate and judge for himself. clemens was pleased with the appearance of his book. to bret harte he wrote: the book is out and it is handsome. it is full of damnable errors of grammar and deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the frog sketch, because i was away and did not read proofs; but be a friend and say nothing about these things. when my hurry is over, i will send you a copy to pisen the children with. that he had no exaggerated opinion of the book's contents or prospects we may gather from his letter home: as for the frog book, i don't believe it will ever pay anything worth a cent. i published it simply to advertise myself, and not with the hope of making anything out of it. he had grown more lenient in his opinion of the merits of the frog story itself since it had made friends in high places, especially since james russell lowell had pronounced it “the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in america”; but compared with his lecture triumph, and his prospective journey to foreign seas, his book venture, at best, claimed no more than a casual regard. a sandwich island book (he had collected his union letters with the idea of a volume) he gave up altogether after one unsuccessful offer of it to dick & fitzgerald. frank fuller's statement, that the fame had arrived, had in it some measure of truth. lecture propositions came from various directions. thomas nast, then in the early day of his great popularity, proposed a joint tour, in which clemens would lecture, while he, nast, illustrated the remarks with lightning caricatures. but the time was too short; the quaker city would sail on the th of june, and in the mean time the alta correspondent was far behind with his new york letters. on may th he wrote: i am alta letters behind, and i must catch up or bust. i have refused all invitations to lecture. don't know how my book is coming on. he worked like a slave for a week or so, almost night and day, to clean up matters before his departure. then came days of idleness and reaction-days of waiting, during which his natural restlessness and the old-time regret for things done and undone, beset him. my passage is paid, and if the ship sails i sail on her; but i make no calculations, have bought no cigars, no sea-going clothing--have made no preparations whatever--shall not pack my trunk till the morning we sail. all i do know or feel is that i am wild with impatience to move --move--move! curse the endless delays! they always kill me--they make me neglect every duty, and then i have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast. i wish i never had to stop anywhere a month. i do more mean things the moment i get a chance to fold my hands and sit down than ever i get forgiveness for. yes, we are to meet at mr. beach's next thursday night, and i suppose we shall have to be gotten up regardless of expense, in swallow-tails, white kids and everything 'en regle'. i am resigned to rev. mr. hutchinson's or anybody else's supervision. i don't mind it. i am fixed. i have got a splendid, immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless roommate who is as good and true and right-minded a man as ever lived--a man whose blameless conduct and example will always be an eloquent sermon to all who shall come within their influence. but send on the professional preachers--there are none i like better to converse with; if they're not narrowminded and bigoted they make good companions. the “splendid immoral room-mate” was dan slote--“dan,” of the innocents, a lovable character--all as set down. samuel clemens wrote one more letter to his mother and sister--a conscience-stricken, pessimistic letter of good-by written the night before sailing. referring to the alta letters he says: i think they are the stupidest letters ever written from new york. corresponding has been a perfect drag ever since i got to the states. if it continues abroad, i don't know what the tribune and alta folk will think. he remembers orion, who had been officially eliminated when nevada had received statehood. i often wonder if his law business is going satisfactorily. i wish i had gone to washington in the winter instead of going west. i could have gouged an office out of bill stewart for him, and that would have atoned for the loss of my home visit. but i am so worthless that it seems to me i never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. my mind is stored full of unworthy conduct toward orion and toward you all, and an accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and restless moving from place to place. if i could only say i had done one thing for any of you that entitled me to your good opinions (i say nothing of your love, for i am sure of that, no matter how unworthy of it i may make myself--from orion down, you have always given me that; all the days of my life, when god almighty knows i have seldom deserved it), i believe i could go home and stay there --and i know i would care little for the world's praise or blame. there is no satisfaction in the world's praise anyhow, and it has no worth to me save in the way of business. i tried to gather up its compliments to send you, but the work was distasteful and i dropped it. you observe that under a cheerful exterior i have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt. i can get away from that at sea, and be tranquil and satisfied; and so, with my parting love and benediction for orion and all of you, i say good-by and god bless you all-and welcome the wind that wafts a weary soul to the sunny lands of the mediterranean! yrs. forever, sam lx. the innocents at sea holy land pleasure excursion steamer: quaker city. captain c. c. duncan. left new york at p.m., june , . rough weather--anchored within the harbor to lay all night. that first note recorded an event momentous in mark twain's career--an event of supreme importance; if we concede that any link in a chain regardless of size is of more importance than any other link. undoubtedly it remains the most conspicuous event, as the world views it now, in retrospect. the note further heads a new chapter of history in sea-voyaging. no such thing as the sailing of an ocean steamship with a pleasure-party on a long transatlantic cruise had ever occurred before. a similar project had been undertaken the previous year, but owing to a cholera scare in the east it had been abandoned. now the dream had become a fact--a stupendous fact when we consider it. such an important beginning as that now would in all likelihood furnish the chief news story of the day. but they had different ideas of news in those days. there were no headlines announcing the departure of the quaker city--only the barest mention of the ship's sailing, though a prominent position was given to an account of a senatorial excursion-party which set out that same morning over the union pacific railway, then under construction. every name in that political party was set dawn, and not one of them except general hancock will ever be heard of again. the new york times, however, had some one on its editorial staff who thought it worth while to comment a little on the history-making quaker city excursion. the writer was pleasantly complimentary to officers and passengers. he referred to moses s. beach, of the sun, who was taking with him type and press, whereby he would “skilfully utilize the brains of the company for their mutual edification.” mr. beecher and general sherman would find talent enough aboard to make the hours go pleasantly (evidently the writer had not interested himself sufficiently to know that these gentlemen were not along), and the paragraph closed by prophesying other such excursions, and wishing the travelers “good speed, a happy voyage, and a safe return.” that was handsome, especially for those days; only now, some fine day, when an airship shall start with a band of happy argonauts to land beyond the sunrise for the first time in history, we shall feature it and emblazon it with pictures in the sunday papers, and weeklies, and in the magazines.--[the quaker city idea was so unheard-of that in some of the foreign ports visited, the officials could not believe that the vessel was simply a pleasure-craft, and were suspicious of some dark, ulterior purpose.] that henry ward beecher and general sherman had concluded not to go was a heavy disappointment at first; but it proved only a temporary disaster. the inevitable amalgamation of all ship companies took place. the sixty-seven travelers fell into congenial groups, or they mingled and devised amusements, and gossiped and became a big family, as happy and as free from contention as families of that size are likely to be. the quaker city was a good enough ship and sizable for her time. she was registered eighteen hundred tons--about one-tenth the size of mediterranean excursion-steamers today--and when conditions were favorable she could make ten knots an hour under steam--or, at least, she could do it with the help of her auxiliary sails. altogether she was a cozy, satisfactory ship, and they were a fortunate company who had her all to themselves and went out on her on that long-ago ocean gipsying. she has grown since then, even to the proportions of the mayflower. it was necessary for her to grow to hold all of those who in later times claimed to have sailed in her on that voyage with mark twain.--[the quaker city passenger list will be found under appendix f, at the end of last volume.] they were not all ministers and deacons aboard the quaker city. clemens found other congenial spirits be sides his room-mate dan slote--among them the ship's surgeon, dr. a. reeve jackson (the guide-destroying “doctor” of the innocents); jack van nostrand, of new jersey (“jack”); julius moulton, of st. louis (“moult”), and other care-free fellows, the smoking-room crowd which is likely to make comradeship its chief watchword. there were companionable people in the cabin crowd also--fine, intelligent men and women, especially one of the latter, a middle-aged, intellectual, motherly soul--mrs. a. w. fairbanks, of cleveland, ohio. mrs. fairbanks--herself a newspaper correspondent for her husband's paper, the cleveland herald had a large influence on the character and general tone of those quaker city letters which established mark twain's larger fame. she was an able writer herself; her judgment was thoughtful, refined, unbiased--altogether of a superior sort. she understood samuel clemens, counseled him, encouraged him to read his letters aloud to her, became in reality “mother fairbanks,” as they termed her, to him and to others of that ship who needed her kindly offices. in one of his home letters, later, he said of her: she was the most refined, intelligent, cultivated lady in the ship, and altogether the kindest and best. she sewed my buttons on, kept my clothing in presentable trim, fed me on egyptian jam (when i behaved), lectured me awfully on the quarter-deck on moonlit promenading evenings, and cured me of several bad habits. i am under lasting obligations to her. she looks young because she is so good, but she has a grown son and daughter at home. in one of the early letters which mrs. fairbanks wrote to her paper she is scarcely less complimentary to him, even if in a different way. we have d.d.'s and m.d.'s--we have men of wisdom and men of wit. there is one table from which is sure to come a peal of laughter, and all eyes are turned toward mark twain, whose face is, perfectly mirth-provoking. sitting lazily at the table, scarcely genteel in his appearance, there is something, i know not what, that interests and attracts. i saw to-day at dinner venerable divines and sage- looking men convulsed with laughter at his drolleries and quaint, odd manners. it requires only a few days on shipboard for acquaintances to form, and presently a little afternoon group was gathering to hear mark twain read his letters. mrs. fairbanks was there, of course, also mr. and mrs. s. l. severance, likewise of cleveland, and moses s. beach, of the sun, with his daughter emma, a girl of seventeen. dan slote was likely to be there, too, and jack, and the doctor, and charles j. langdon, of elmira, new york, a boy of eighteen, who had conceived a deep admiration for the brilliant writer. they were fortunate ones who first gathered to hear those daring, wonderful letters. but the benefit was a mutual one. he furnished a priceless entertainment, and he derived something equally priceless in return--the test of immediate audience and the boon of criticism. mrs. fairbanks especially was frankly sincere. mr. severance wrote afterward: one afternoon i saw him tearing up a bunch of the soft, white paper- copy paper, i guess the newspapers call it-on which he had written something, and throwing the fragments into the mediterranean. i inquired of him why he cast away the fruits of his labors in that manner. “well,” he drawled, “mrs. fairbanks thinks it oughtn't to be printed, and, like as not, she is right.” and emma beach (mrs. abbott thayer) remembers hearing him say: “well, mrs. fairbanks has just destroyed another four hours' work for me.” sometimes he played chess with emma beach, who thought him a great hero because, once when a crowd of men were tormenting a young lad, a passenger, mark twain took the boy's part and made them desist. “i am sure i was right, too,” she declares; “heroism came natural to him.” mr. severance recalls another incident which, as he says, was trivial enough, but not easy to forget: we were having a little celebration over the birthday anniversary of mrs. duncan, wife of our captain. mark twain got up and made a little speech, in which he said mrs. duncan was really older than methuselah because she knew a lot of things that methuselah never heard of. then he mentioned a number of more or less modern inventions, and wound up by saying, “what did methuselah know about a barbed-wire fence?” except following the equator, the innocents abroad comes nearer to being history than any other of mark twain's travel-books. the notes for it were made on the spot, and there was plenty of fact, plenty of fresh, new experience, plenty of incident to set down. his idea of descriptive travel in those days was to tell the story as it happened; also, perhaps, he had not then acquired the courage of his inventions. we may believe that the adventures with jack, dan, and the doctor are elaborated here and there; but even those happened substantially as recorded. there is little to add, then, to the story of that halcyon trip, and not much to elucidate. the old note-books give a light here and there that is interesting. it is curious to be looking through them now, trying to realize that these penciled memoranda were the fresh, first impressions that would presently grow into the world's most delightful book of travel; that they were set down in the very midst of that care-free little company that frolicked through italy, climbed wearily the arid syrian hills. they are all dead now; but to us they are as alive and young to-day as when they followed the footprints of the son of man through palestine, and stood at last before the sphinx, impressed and awed by its “five thousand slow-revolving years.” some of the items consist of no more than a few terse, suggestive words--serious, humorous, sometimes profane. others are statistical, descriptive, elaborated. also there are drawings--“not copied,” he marks them, with a pride not always justified by the result. the earlier notes are mainly comments on the “pilgrims,” the freak pilgrims: “the frenchy-looking woman who owns a dog and keeps up an interminable biography of him to the passengers”; the “long-legged, simple, wide-mouthed, horse-laughing young fellow who once made a sea voyage to fortress monroe, and quotes eternally from his experiences”; also, there is reference to another young man, “good, accommodating, pleasant but fearfully green.” this young person would become the “interrogation point,” in due time, and have his picture on page (old edition), while opposite him, on page , would appear the “oracle,” identified as one doctor andrews, who (the note-book says) had the habit of “smelling in guide-books for knowledge and then trying to play it for old information that has been festering in his brain.” sometimes there are abstract notes such as: how lucky adam was. he knew when he said a good thing that no one had ever said it before. of the “character” notes, the most important and elaborated is that which presents the “poet lariat.” this is the entry, somewhat epitomized: bloodgood h. cutter he is fifty years old, and small of his age. he dresses in homespun, and is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, with a strange proclivity for writing rhymes. he writes them on all possible subjects, and gets them printed on slips of paper, with his portrait at the head. these he will give to any man who comes along, whether he has anything against him or not.... dan said: “it must be a great happiness to you to sit down at the close of day and put its events all down in rhymes and poetry, like byron and shakespeare and those fellows.” “oh yes, it is--it is--why, many's the time i've had to get up in the night when it comes on me: whether we're on the sea or the land we've all got to go at the word of command-- “hey! how's that?” a curious character was cutter--a long island farmer with the obsession of rhyme. in his old age, in an interview, he said: “mark was generally writing and he was glum. he would write what we were doing, and i would write poetry, and mark would say: “'for heaven's sake, cutter, keep your poems to yourself.' “yes, mark was pretty glum, and he was generally writing.” poor old poet lariat--dead now with so many others of that happy crew. we may believe that mark learned to be “glum” when he saw the lariat approaching with his sheaf of rhymes. we may believe, too, that he was “generally writing.” he contributed fifty-three letters to the alta during that five months and six to the tribune. they would average about two columns nonpareil each, which is to say four thousand words, or something like two hundred and fifty thousand words in all. to turn out an average of fifteen hundred words a day, with continuous sight-seeing besides, one must be generally writing during any odd intervals; those who are wont to regard mark twain as lazy may consider these statistics. that he detested manual labor is true enough, but at the work for which he was fitted and intended it may be set down here upon authority (and despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that to his last year he was the most industrious of men. lxi. the innocents abroad it was dan, jack, and the doctor who with mark twain wandered down through italy and left moral footprints that remain to this day. the italian guides are wary about showing pieces of the true cross, fragments of the crown of thorns, and the bones of saints since then. they show them, it is true, but with a smile; the name of mark twain is a touch-stone to test their statements. not a guide in italy but has heard the tale of that iconoclastic crew, and of the book which turned their marvels into myths, their relics into bywords. it was doctor jackson, colonel denny, doctor birch, and samuel clemens who evaded the quarantine and made the perilous night trip to athens and looked upon the parthenon and the sleeping city by moonlight. it is all set down in the notes, and the account varies little from that given in the book; only he does not tell us that captain duncan and the quartermaster, pratt, connived at the escapade, or how the latter watched the shore in anxious suspense until he heard the whistle which was their signal to be taken aboard. it would have meant six months' imprisonment if they had been captured, for there was no discretion in the greek law. it was t. d. crocker, a. n. sanford, col. peter kinney, and william gibson who were delegated to draft the address to the emperor of russia at yalta, with samuel l. clemens as chairman of that committee. the chairman wrote the address, the opening sentence of which he grew so weary of hearing: we are a handful of private citizens of america, traveling simply for recreation, and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial state. the address is all set down in the notes, and there also exists the first rough draft, with the emendations in his own hand. he deplores the time it required: that job is over. writing addresses to emperors is not my strong suit. however, if it is not as good as it might be it doesn't signify--the other committeemen ought to have helped me write it; they had nothing to do, and i had my hands full. but for bothering with this i would have caught up entirely with my new york tribune correspondence and nearly up with the san francisco. they wanted him also to read the address to the emperor, but he pointed out that the american consul was the proper person for that office. he tells how the address was presented: august th. the imperial carriages were in waiting at eleven, and at twelve we were at the palace.... the consul for odessa read the address and the czar said frequently, “good--very good; indeed”--and at the close, “i am very, very grateful.” it was not improper for him to set down all this, and much more, in his own note-book--not then for publication. it was in fact a very proper record--for today. one incident of the imperial audience mark twain omitted from his book, perhaps because the humor of it had not yet become sufficiently evident. “the humorous perception of a thing is a pretty slow growth sometimes,” he once remarked. it was about seventeen years before he could laugh enjoyably at a slight mistake he made at the emperor's reception. he set down a memorandum of it, then, for fear it might be lost: there were a number of great dignitaries of the empire there, and although, as a general thing, they were dressed in citizen's clothing, i observed that the most of them wore a very small piece of ribbon in the lapels of their coats. that little touch of color struck my fancy, and it seemed to me a good idea to add it to my own attractions; not imagining that it had any special significance. so i stepped aside, hunted up a bit of red ribbon, and ornamented my lapel with it. presently, count festetics, the grand master of ceremonies, and the only man there who was gorgeously arrayed, in full official costume, began to show me a great many attentions. he was particularly polite, and pleasant, and anxious to be of service to me. presently, he asked me what order of nobility i belonged to? i said, “i didn't belong to any.” then he asked me what order of knighthood i belonged to? i said, “none.” then he asked me what the red ribbon in my buttonhole stood for? i saw, at once, what an ass i had been making of myself, and was accordingly confused and embarrassed. i said the first thing that came into my mind, and that was that the ribbon was merely the symbol of a club of journalists to which i belonged, and i was not pursued with any more of count festetic's attentions. later, i got on very familiar terms with an old gentleman, whom i took to be the head gardener, and walked him all about the gardens, slipping my arm into his without invitation, yet without demur on his part, and by and by was confused again when i found that he was not a gardener at all, but the lord high admiral of russia! i almost made up my mind that i would never call on an emperor again. like all mediterranean excursionists, those first pilgrims were insatiable collectors of curios, costumes, and all manner of outlandish things. dan slote had the stateroom hung and piled with such gleanings. at constantinople his room-mate writes: i thought dan had got the state-room pretty full of rubbish at last, but awhile ago his dragoman arrived with a brand-new ghastly tombstone of the oriental pattern, with his name handsomely carved and gilted on it in turkish characters. that fellow will buy a circassian slave next. it was church, denny, jack, davis, dan, moult, and mark twain who made the “long trip” through syria from beirut to jerusalem with their elaborate camping outfit and decrepit nags “jericho,” “baalbec,” and the rest. it was better camping than that humboldt journey of six years before, though the horses were not so dissimilar, and altogether it was a hard, nerve-racking experience, climbing the arid hills of palestine in that torrid summer heat. nobody makes that trip in summer-time now. tourists hurry out of syria before the first of april, and they do not go back before november. one brief quotation from mark twain's book gives us an idea of what that early party of pilgrims had to undergo: we left damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of hours, and then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig- trees to give me a chance to rest. it was the hottest day we had seen yet--the sun-flames shot down like the shafts of fire that stream out before a blow-pipe; the rays seemed to fall in a deluge on the head and pass downward like rain from a roof. i imagined i could distinguish between the floods of rays. i thought i could tell when each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders, and when the next one came. it was terrible. he had been ill with cholera at damascus, a light attack; but any attack of that dread disease is serious enough. he tells of this in the book, but he does not mention, either in the book or in his notes, the attack which dan slote had some days later. it remained for william f. church, of the party, to relate that incident, for it was the kind of thing that mark twain was not likely to record, or even to remember. doctor church was a deacon with orthodox views and did not approve of mark twain; he thought him sinful, irreverent, profane. “he was the worst man i ever knew,” church said; then he added, “and the best.” what happened was this: at the end of a terrible day of heat, when the party had camped on the edge of a squalid syrian village, dan was taken suddenly ill. it was cholera, beyond doubt. dan could not go on--he might never go on. the chances were that way. it was a serious matter all around. to wait with dan meant to upset their travel schedule--it might mean to miss the ship. consultation was held and a resolution passed (the pilgrims were always passing resolutions) to provide for dan as well as possible, and leave him behind. clemens, who had remained with dan, suddenly appeared and said: “gentlemen, i understand that you are going to leave dan slote here alone. i'll be d---d if i do!” and he didn't. he stayed there and brought dan into jerusalem, a few days late, but convalescent. perhaps most of them were not always reverent during that holy land trip. it was a trying journey, and after fierce days of desert hills the reaction might not always spare even the holiest memories. jack was particularly sinful. when they learned the price for a boat on galilee, and the deacons who had traveled nearly half around the world to sail on that sacred water were confounded by the charge, jack said: “well, denny, do you wonder now that christ walked?” it was the irreverent jack who one morning (they had camped the night before by the ruins of jericho) refused to get up to see the sun rise across the jordan. deacon church went to his tent. “jack, my boy, get up. here is the place where the israelites crossed over into the promised land, and beyond are the mountains of moab, where moses lies buried.” “moses who!” said jack. “oh, jack, my boy, moses, the great lawgiver--who led the israelites out of egypt-forty years through the wilderness--to the promised land.” “forty years!” said jack. “how far was it?” “it was three hundred miles, jack; a great wilderness, and he brought them through in safety.” jack regarded him with scorn. “huh, moses--three hundred miles forty years--why, ben holiday would have brought them through in thirty-six hours!”--[ben holiday, owner of the overland stages, and a man of great executive ability. this incident, a true one, is more elaborately told in roughing it, but it seems pertinent here.] jack probably learned more about the bible during that trip-its history and its heroes-than during all his former years. nor was jack the only one of that group thus benefited. the sacred landmarks of palestine inspire a burning interest in the scriptures, and mark twain probably did not now regret those early sunday-school lessons; certainly he did not fail to review them exhaustively on that journey. his note-books fairly overflow with bible references; the syrian chapters in the innocents abroad are permeated with the poetry and legendary beauty of the bible story. the little bible he carried on that trip, bought in constantinople, was well worn by the time they reached the ship again at jaffa. he must have read it with a large and persistent interest; also with a double benefit. for, besides the knowledge acquired, he was harvesting a profit--probably unsuspected at the time---viz., the influence of the most direct and beautiful english--the english of the king james version--which could not fail to affect his own literary method at that impressionable age. we have already noted his earlier admiration for that noble and simple poem, “the burial of moses,” which in the palestine note-book is copied in full. all the tendency of his expression lay that way, and the intense consideration of stately bible phrase and imagery could hardly fail to influence his mental processes. the very distinct difference of style, as shown in the innocents abroad and in his earlier writings, we may believe was in no small measure due to his study of the king james version during those weeks in palestine. he bought another bible at jerusalem; but it was not for himself. it was a little souvenir volume bound in olive and balsam wood, and on the fly-leaf is inscribed: mrs. jane clemens from her son. jerusalem, sept. , . there is one more circumstance of that long cruise-recorded neither in the book nor the notes--an incident brief, but of more importance in the life of samuel clemens than any heretofore set down. it occurred in the beautiful bay of smyrna, on the fifth or sixth of september, while the vessel lay there for the ephesus trip. reference has been made to young charles langdon, of elmira (the “charley” once mentioned in the innocents), as an admirer of mark twain. there was a good deal of difference in their ages, and they were seldom of the same party; but sometimes the boy invited the journalist to his cabin and, boy-like, exhibited his treasures. he had two sisters at home; and of olivia, the youngest, he had brought a dainty miniature done on ivory in delicate tints--a sweet-pictured countenance, fine and spiritual. on that fateful day in the day of smyrna, samuel clemens, visiting in young langdon's cabin, was shown this portrait. he looked at it with long admiration, and spoke of it reverently, for the delicate face seemed to him to be something more than a mere human likeness. each time he came, after that, he asked to see the picture, and once even begged to be allowed to take it away with him. the boy would not agree to this, and the elder man looked long and steadily at the miniature, resolving in his mind that some day he would meet the owner of that lovely face--a purpose for once in accord with that which the fates had arranged for him, in the day when all things were arranged, the day of the first beginning. lxii. the return of the pilgrims the last note-book entry bears date of october th: at sea, somewhere in the neighborhood of malta. very stormy. terrible death to be talked to death. the storm has blown two small land birds and a hawk to sea and they came on board. sea full of flying-fish. that is all. there is no record of the week's travel in spain, which a little group of four made under the picturesque gibraltar guide, benunes, still living and quite as picturesque at last accounts. this side-trip is covered in a single brief paragraph in the innocents, and the only account we have of it is in a home letter, from cadiz, of october th: we left gibraltar at noon and rode to algeciras ( hours), thus dodging the quarantine--took dinner, and then rode horseback all night in a swinging trot, and at daylight took a caleche (a-wheeled vehicle), and rode hours--then took cars and traveled till twelve at night. that landed us at seville, and we were over the hard part of our trip and somewhat tired. since then we have taken things comparatively easy, drifting around from one town to another and attracting a good deal of attention--for i guess strangers do not wander through andalusia and the other southern provinces of spain often. the country is precisely what it was when don quixote and sancho panza were possible characters. but i see now what the glory of spain must have been when it was under moorish domination. no, i will not say that--but then when one is carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the alhambra and the supernatural beauty of the alcazar, he is apt to overflow with admiration for the splendid intellects that created them. we may wish that he had left us a chapter of that idyllic journey, but it will never be written now. a night or two before the vessel reached new york there was the usual good-by assembly, and for this occasion, at mrs. severance's request, mark twain wrote some verses. they were not especially notable, for meter and rhyme did not come easy to him, but one prophetic stanza is worth remembering. in the opening lines the passengers are referred to as a fleet of vessels, then follows: lo! other ships of that parted fleet shall suffer this fate or that: one shall be wrecked, another shall sink, or ground on treacherous flat. some shall be famed in many lands as good ships, fast and fair, and some shall strangely disappear, men know not when or where. the quaker city returned to america on november , , and mark twain found himself, if not famous, at least in very wide repute. the fifty-three letters to the alta and the half-dozen to the new york tribune had carried his celebrity into every corner of the states and territories. vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry, they came as a revelation to a public weary of the driveling, tiresome travel-letters of that period. they preached a new gospel in travel-literature: the gospel of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a gospel of sincerity in according praises to whatever seemed genuine, and ridicule to the things considered sham. it was the gospel that mark twain would continue to preach during his whole career. it became his chief literary message to the world-a world waiting for that message. moreover, the letters were literature. he had received, from whatever source, a large and very positive literary impulse, a loftier conception and expression. it was at tangier that he first struck the grander chord, the throbbing cadence of human story. here is a crumbling wall that was old when columbus discovered america; old when peter the hermit roused the knightly men of the middle ages to arm for the first crusade; old when charlemagne and his paladins beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the fabled days of the olden time; old when christ and his disciples walked the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of memnon were vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient thebes. this is pure poetry. he had never touched so high a strain before, but he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing mastery and confidence. in venice, in rome, in athens, through the holy land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain, the ageless contemplation of the sphinx. we cannot forego a paragraph or two of that word-picture: after years of waiting it was before me at last. the great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. there was a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never anything human wore. it was stone, but it seemed sentient. if ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. it was looking toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing--nothing but distance and vacancy. it was looking over and beyond everything of the present, and far into the past.... it was thinking of the wars of the departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five thousand slow-revolving years.... the sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its story. and there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of all ages, which reveals to one something of what we shall feel when we shall stand at last in the awful presence of god. then that closing word of egypt. he elaborated it for the book, and did not improve it. let us preserve here its original form. we are glad to have seen egypt. we are glad to have seen that old land which taught greece her letters--and through greece, rome--and through rome, the world--that venerable cradle of culture and refinement which could have humanized and civilized the children of israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders savages--those children whom we still revere, still love, and whose sad shortcomings we still excuse--not because they were savages, but because they were the chosen savages of god. the holy land letters alone would have brought him fame. they presented the most graphic and sympathetic picture of syrian travel ever written--one that will never become antiquated or obsolete so long as human nature remains unchanged. from beginning to end the tale is rarely, reverently told. its closing paragraph has not been surpassed in the voluminous literature of that solemn land: palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies. where sodom and gomorrah reared their domes and towers that solemn sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing exists--over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs motionless and dead--about whose borders nothing grows but weeds and scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch. nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of jordan where the hosts of israel entered the promised land with songs of rejoicing one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic bedouins of the desert; jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as joshua's miracle left it more than three thousand years ago; bethlehem and bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the saviour's presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang peace on earth, goodwill to men, is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature that is pleasant to the eye. renowned jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a pauper village; the riches of solomon are no longer there to compel the admiration of visiting oriental queens; the wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of israel is gone, and the ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the holy cross. the noted sea of galilee, where roman fleets once rode at anchor and the disciples of the saviour sailed in their ships, was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its borders are a silent wilderness; capernaum is a shapeless ruin; magdala is the home of beggared arabs; bethsaida and chorazin have vanished from the earth, and the “desert places” round about them where thousands of men once listened to the saviour's voice and ate the miraculous bread sleep in the hush of a solitude that is inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes. palestine is desolate and unlovely. and why should it be otherwise? can the curse of the deity beautify a land? it would be easy to quote pages here--a pictorial sequence from gibraltar to athens, from athens to egypt, a radiant panoramic march. in time he would write technically better. he would avoid solecism, he would become a greater master of vocabulary and phrase, but in all the years ahead he would never match the lambent bloom and spontaneity of those fresh, first impressions of mediterranean lands and seas. no need to mention the humor, the burlesque, the fearless, unrestrained ridicule of old masters and of sacred relics, so called. these we have kept familiar with much repetition. only, the humor had grown more subtle, more restrained; the burlesque had become impersonal and harmless, the ridicule so frank and good-natured, that even the old masters themselves might have enjoyed it, while the most devoted churchman, unless blinded by bigotry, would find in it satisfaction, rather than sacrilege. the final letter was written for the new york herald after the arrival, and was altogether unlike those that preceded it. gaily satirical and personal--inclusively so--it might better have been left unwritten, for it would seem to have given needless offense to a number of goodly people, whose chief sin was the sedateness of years. however, it is all past now, and those who were old then, and perhaps queer and pious and stingy, do not mind any more, and those who were young and frivolous have all grown old too, and most of them have set out on the still farther voyage. somewhere, it may be, they gather, now; and then, and lightly, tenderly recall their old-time journeying. lxiii. in washington--a publishing proposition clemens remained but one day in new york. senator stewart had written, about the time of the departure of the quaker city, offering him the position of private secretary--a position which was to give him leisure for literary work, with a supporting salary as well. stewart no doubt thought it would be considerably to his advantage to have the brilliant writer and lecturer attached to his political establishment, and clemens likewise saw possibilities in the arrangement. from naples, in august, he had written accepting stewart's offer; he lost no time now in discussing the matter in person.--[in a letter home, august th, he referred to the arrangement: “i wrote to bill stewart to-day accepting his private secretaryship in washington, next winter.”] there seems to have been little difficulty in concluding the arrangement. when clemens had been in washington a week we find him writing: dear folks, tired and sleepy--been in congress all day and making newspaper acquaintances. stewart is to look up a clerkship in the patent office for orion. things necessarily move slowly where there is so much business and such armies of office-seekers to be attended to. i guess it will be all right. i intend it shall be all right. i have invitations to lecture, at $ each, in various parts of the union--have declined them all. i am for business now. belong on the tribune staff, and shall write occasionally. am offered the same berth to-day on the herald by letter. shall write mr. bennett and accept, as soon as i hear from tribune that it will not interfere. am pretty well known now--intend to be better known. am hobnobbing with these old generals and senators and other humbugs for no good purpose. don't have any more trouble making friends than i did in california. all serene. good-by. shall continue on the alta. yours affectionately, sam. p.s.--i room with bill stewart and board at willard's hotel. but the secretary arrangement was a brief matter. it is impossible to conceive of mark twain as anybody's secretary, especially as the secretary of senator stewart. --[in senator stewart's memoirs he refers unpleasantly to mark twain, and after relating several incidents that bear only strained relations to the truth, states that when the writer returned from the holy land he (stewart) offered him a secretaryship as a sort of charity. he adds that mark twain's behavior on his premises was such that a threat of a thrashing was necessary. the reason for such statements becomes apparent, however, when he adds that in 'roughing it' the author accuses him of cheating, prints a picture of him with a hatch over his eye, and claims to have given him a sound thrashing, none of which statements, save only the one concerning the picture (an apparently unforgivable offense to his dignity), is true, as the reader may easily ascertain for himself.] within a few weeks he was writing humorous accounts of “my late senatorial secretaryship,” “facts concerning the recent resignation,” etc., all good-natured burlesque, but inspired, we may believe, by the change: these articles appeared in the new york tribune, the new york citizen, and the galaxy magazine. there appears to have been no ill-feeling at this time between clemens and stewart. if so, it is not discoverable in any of the former's personal or newspaper correspondence. in fact, in his article relating to his “late senatorial secretaryship” he puts the joke, so far as it is a joke, on senator james w. nye, probably as an additional punishment for nye's failure to appear on the night of his lecture. he established headquarters with a brilliant newspaper correspondent named riley. “one of the best men in washington--or elsewhere,” he tells us in a brief sketch of that person.--[see riley, newspaper correspondent. sketches new and old.]--he had known riley in san francisco; the two were congenial, and settled down to their several undertakings. clemens was chiefly concerned over two things: he wished to make money and he wished to secure a government appointment for orion. he had used up the most of his lecture accumulations, and was moderately in debt. his work was in demand at good rates, for those days, and with working opportunity he could presently dispose of his financial problem. the tribune was anxious for letters; the enterprise and alta were waiting for them; the herald, the chicago tribune, the magazines--all had solicited contributions; the lecture bureaus pursued him. personally his outlook was bright. the appointment for orion was a different matter. the powers were not especially interested in a brother; there were too many brothers and assorted relatives on the official waiting-list already. clemens was offered appointments for himself--a consulship, a post-mastership; even that of san francisco. from the cabinet down, the washington political contingent had read his travel-letters, and was ready to recognize officially the author of them in his own person and personality. also, socially: mark twain found himself all at once in the midst of receptions, dinners, and speech-making; all very exciting for a time at least, but not profitable, not conducive to work. at a dinner of the washington correspondents club his response to the toast, “women,” was pronounced by schuyler colfax to be “the best after dinner speech ever made.” certainly it was a refreshing departure from the prosy or clumsy-witted efforts common to that period. he was coming altogether into his own.--[this is the first of mark twain's after-dinner speeches to be preserved. the reader will find it complete, as reported next day, in appendix g, at the end of last volume.] he was not immediately interested in the matter of book publication. the jumping frog book was popular, and in england had been issued by routledge; but the royalty returns were modest enough and slow in arrival. his desire was for prompter results. his interest in book publication had never been an eager one, and related mainly to the advertising it would furnish, which he did not now need; or to the money return, in which he had no great faith. yet at this very moment a letter for him was lying in the tribune office in new york which would bring the book idea into first prominence and spell the beginning of his fortune. among those who had read and found delight in the tribune letters was elisha bliss, jr., of the american publishing company, of hartford. bliss was a shrewd and energetic man, with a keen appreciation for humor and the american fondness for that literary quality. he had recently undertaken the management of a hartford concern, and had somewhat alarmed its conservative directorate by publishing books that furnished entertainment to the reader as well as moral instruction. only his success in paying dividends justified this heresy and averted his downfall. two days after the arrival of the quaker city bliss wrote the letter above mentioned. it ran as follows: office of the american publishing co. hartford, conn., november , . samuel l. clemens, esq., tribune office, new york. dear sir,--we take the liberty to address you this, in place of a letter which we had recently written and were about to forward to you, not knowing your arrival home was expected so soon. we are desirous of obtaining from you a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your letters from the past, etc., with such interesting additions as may be proper. we are the publishers of a. d. richardson's works, and flatter ourselves that we can give an author a favorable term and do as full justice to his productions as any other house in the country. we are perhaps the oldest subscription house in the country, and have never failed to give a book an immense circulation. we sold about , copies of richardson's f. d. and e. ['field, dungeon and escape'), and are now printing , of 'beyond the mississippi', and large orders ahead. if you have any thought of writing a book, or could be induced to do so, we should be pleased to see you, and will do so. will you do us the favor of reply at once, at your earliest convenience. very truly etc., e. bliss, jr., secretary. after ten days' delay this letter was forwarded to the tribune bureau in washington, where clemens received it. he replied promptly. washington, december , . e. bliss, jr., esq., secretary american publishing co. dear sir,--i only received your favor of november st last night, at the rooms of the tribune bureau here. it was forwarded from the tribune office, new york where it had lain eight or ten days. this will be a sufficient apology for the seeming discourtesy of my silence. i wrote fifty-two letters for the san francisco alta california during the quaker city excursion, about half of which number have been printed thus far. the alta has few exchanges in the east, and i suppose scarcely any of these letters have been copied on this side of the rocky mountains. i could weed them of their chief faults of construction and inelegancies of expression, and make a volume that would be more acceptable in many respects than any i could now write. when those letters were written my impressions were fresh, but now they have lost that freshness; they were warm then, they are cold now. i could strike out certain letters, and write new ones wherewith to supply their places. if you think such a book would suit your purpose, please drop me a line, specifying the size and general style of the volume--when the matter ought to be ready; whether it should have pictures in it or not; and particularly what your terms with me would be, and what amount of money i might possibly make out of it. the latter clause has a degree of importance for me which is almost beyond my own comprehension. but you understand that, of course. i have other propositions for a book, but have doubted the propriety of interfering with good newspaper engagements, except my way as an author could be demonstrated to be plain before me. but i know richardson, and learned from him some months ago something of an idea of the subscription plan of publishing. if that is your plan invariably it looks safe. i am on the new york tribune staff here as an “occasional,” among other things, and a note from you addressed to very truly, etc., sam. l. clemens, new york tribune bureau, washington will find me, without fail. the exchange of those two letters marked the beginning of one of the most notable publishing connections in american literary history. consummation, however, was somewhat delayed. bliss was ill when the reply came, and could not write again in detail until nearly a month later. in this letter he recited the profits made by richardson and others through subscription publication, and named the royalties paid. richardson had received four per cent. of the sale price, a small enough rate for these later days; but the cost of manufacture was larger then, and the sale and delivery of books through agents has ever been an expensive process. even horace greeley had received but a fraction more on his great american conflict. bliss especially suggested and emphasized a “humorous work--that is to say, a work humorously inclined.” he added that they had two arrangements for paying authors: outright purchase, and royalty. he invited a meeting in new york to arrange terms. lxiv. olivia langdon clemens did in fact go to new york that same evening, to spend christmas with dan slote, and missed bliss's second letter. it was no matter. fate had his affairs properly in hand, and had prepared an event of still larger moment than the publication even of innocents abroad. there was a pleasant reunion at dan slote's. he wrote home about it: charley langdon, jack van nostrand, dan and i (all quaker city night-hawks) had a blow-out at dan's house and a lively talk over old times. i just laughed till my sides ached at some of our reminiscences. it was the unholiest gang that ever cavorted through palestine, but those are the best boys in the world. this, however, was not the event; it was only preliminary to it. we are coming to that now. at the old st. nicholas hotel, which stood on the west of broadway between spring and broome streets, there were stopping at this time jervis langdon, a wealty coal-dealer and mine-owner of elmira, his son charles and his daughter olivia, whose pictured face samuel clemens had first seen in the bay of smyrna one september day. young langdon had been especially anxious to bring his distinguished quaker city friend and his own people together, and two days before christmas samuel clemens was invited to dine at the hotel. he went very willingly. the lovely face of that miniature had been often a part of his waking dreams. for the first time now he looked upon its reality. long afterward he said: “it is forty years ago. from that day to this she has never been out of my mind.” charles dickens was in new york then, and gave a reading that night in steinway hall. the langdons went, and samuel clemens accompanied them. he remembered afterward that dickens wore a black velvet coat with a fiery red flower in his buttonhole, and that he read the storm scene from copperfield--the death of james steerforth. but he remembered still more clearly the face and dress of that slender girlish figure at his side. olivia langdon was twenty-two years old at this time, delicate as the miniature he had seen, fragile to look upon, though no longer with the shattered health of her girlhood. at sixteen, through a fall upon the ice, she had become a complete invalid, confined to her bed for two years, unable to sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position except upon her back. great physicians and surgeons, one after another, had done their best for her but she had failed steadily until every hope had died. then, when nothing else was left to try, a certain doctor newton, of spectacular celebrity, who cured by “laying on of hands,” was brought to elmira to see her. doctor newton came into the darkened room and said: “open the windows--we must have light!” they protested that she could not bear the light, but the windows were opened. doctor newton came to the bedside of the helpless girl, delivered a short, fervent prayer, put his arm under her shoulders, and bade her sit up. she had not moved for two years, and the family were alarmed, but she obeyed, and he assisted her into a chair. sensation came back to her limbs. with his assistance she even made a feeble attempt to walk. he left then, saying that she would gradually improve, and in time be well, though probably never very strong. on the same day he healed a boy, crippled and drawn with fever. it turned out as he had said. olivia langdon improved steadily, and now at twenty-two, though not robust--she was never that--she was comparatively well. gentle, winning, lovable, she was the family idol, and samuel clemens joined in their worship from the moment of that first meeting. olivia langdon, on her part, was at first dazed and fascinated, rather than attracted, by this astonishing creature, so unlike any one she had ever known. her life had been circumscribed, her experiences of a simple sort. she had never seen anything resembling him before. indeed, nobody had. somewhat carelessly, even if correctly, attired; eagerly, rather than observantly, attentive; brilliant and startling, rather than cultured, of speech--a blazing human solitaire, unfashioned, unset, tossed by the drift of fortune at her feet. he disturbed rather than gratified her. she sensed his heresy toward the conventions and forms which had been her gospel; his bantering, indifferent attitude toward life--to her always so serious and sacred; she suspected that he even might have unorthodox views on matters of religion. when he had gone she somehow had the feeling that a great fiery meteor of unknown portent had swept across her sky. to her brother, who was eager for her approval of his celebrity, miss langdon conceded admiration. as for her father, he did not qualify his opinion. with hearty sense of humor, and a keen perception of verity and capability in men, jervis langdon accepted samuel clemens from the start, and remained his stanch admirer and friend. clemens left that night with an invitation to visit elmira by and by, and with the full intention of going--soon. fate, however, had another plan. he did not see elmira for the better part of a year. he saw miss langdon again within the week. on new-year's day he set forth to pay calls, after the fashion of the time--more lavish then than now. miss langdon was receiving with miss alice hooker, a niece of henry ward beecher, at the home of a mrs. berry; he decided to go there first. with young langdon he arrived at eleven o'clock in the morning, and they did not leave until midnight. if his first impression upon olivia langdon had been meteoric, it would seem that he must now have become to her as a streaming comet that swept from zenith to horizon. one thing is certain: she had become to him the single, unvarying beacon of his future years. he visited henry ward beecher on that trip and dined with him by invitation. harriet beecher stowe was present, and others of that eminent family. likewise his old quaker city comrades, moses s. and emma beach. it was a brilliant gathering, a conclave of intellectual gods--a triumph to be there for one who had been a printer-boy on the banks of the mississippi, and only a little while before a miner with pick and shovel. it was gratifying to be so honored; it would be pleasant to write home; but the occasion lacked something too--everything, in fact--for when he ran his eye around the board the face of the minature was not there. still there were compensations; inadequate, of course, but pleasant enough to remember. it was sunday evening and the party adjourned to plymouth church. after services mr. beecher invited him to return home with him for a quiet talk. evidently they had a good time, for in the letter telling of these things samuel clemens said: “henry ward beecher is a brick.” lxv. a contract with elisha bliss, jr. he returned to washington without seeing miss langdon again, though he would seem to have had permission to write--friendly letters. a little later (it was on the evening of january th) he lectured in washington--on very brief notice indeed. the arrangement for his appearance had been made by a friend during his absence--“a friend,” clemens declared afterward, “not entirely sober at the time.” to his mother he wrote: i scared up a doorkeeper and was ready at the proper time, and by pure good luck a tolerably good house assembled and i was saved. i hardly knew what i was going to talk about, but it went off in splendid style. the title of the lecture delivered was “the frozen truth”--“more truth in the title than in the lecture,” according to his own statement. what it dealt with is not remembered now. it had to do with the quaker city trip, perhaps, and it seems to have brought a financial return which was welcome enough. subsequently he delivered it elsewhere; though just how far the tour extended cannot be learned from the letters, and he had but little memory of it in later years. there was some further correspondence with bliss, then about the st of january ( ) clemens made a trip to hartford to settle the matter. bliss had been particularly anxious to meet him, personally and was a trifle disappointed with his appearance. mark twain's traveling costume was neither new nor neat, and he was smoking steadily a pipe of power. his general make-up was hardly impressive. bliss's disturbance was momentary. once he began to talk the rest did not matter. he was the author of those letters, and bliss decided that personally he was even greater than they. the publisher, confined to his home with illness, offered him the hospitality of his household. also, he made him two propositions: he would pay him ten thousand dollars cash for his copyright, or he would pay five per cent. royalty, which was a fourth more than richardson had received. he advised the latter arrangement. clemens had already taken advice and had discussed the project a good deal with richardson. the ten thousand dollars was a heavy temptation, but he withstood it and closed on the royalty basis--“the best business judgment i ever displayed,” he was wont to declare. a letter written to his mother and sister near the end of this hartford stay is worth quoting pretty fully here, for the information and “character” it contains. it bears date of january th. this is a good week for me. i stopped in the herald office, as i came through new york, to see the boys on the staff, and young james gordon bennett asked me to write twice a week, impersonally, for the herald, and said if i would i might have full swing, and about anybody and everything i wanted to. i said i must have the very fullest possible swing, and he said, “all right.” i said, “it's a contract--” and that settled that matter. i'll make it a point to write one letter a week anyhow. but the best thing that has happened is here. this great american publishing company kept on trying to bargain with me for a book till i thought i would cut the matter short by coming up for a talk. i met henry ward beecher in brooklyn, and with his usual whole-souled way of dropping his own work to give other people a lift when he gets a chance, he said: “now, here, you are one of the talented men of the age--nobody is going to deny that--but in matters of business i don't suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains. i'll tell you what to do and how to do it.” and he did. and i listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid contract for a quaker city book of or large pages, with illustrations, the manuscript to be placed in the publisher's hands by the middle of july.--[the contract was not a formal one. there was an exchange of letters agreeing to the terms, but no joint document was drawn until october ( ).]--my percentage is to be a fourth more than they have ever paid any author except greeley. beecher will be surprised, i guess, when he hears this. these publishers get off the most tremendous editions of their books you can imagine. i shall write to the enterprise and alta every week, as usual, i guess, and to the herald twice a week, occasionally to the tribune and the magazines (i have a stupid article in the galaxy, just issued), but i am not going to write to this and that and the other paper any more. i have had a tiptop time here for a few days (guest of mr. jno. hooker's family--beecher's relatives--in a general way of mr. bliss also, who is head of the publishing firm). puritans are mighty straight-laced, and they won't let me smoke in the parlor, but the almighty don't make any better people. i have to make a speech at the annual herald dinner on the th of may. so the book, which would establish his claim to a peerage in the literary land, was arranged for, and it remained only to prepare the manuscript, a task which he regarded as not difficult. he had only to collate the alta and tribune letters, edit them, and write such new matter as would be required for completeness. returning to washington, he plunged into work with his usual terrific energy, preparing the copy--in the mean time writing newspaper correspondence and sketches that would bring immediate return. in addition to his regular contributions, he entered into a syndicate arrangement with john swinton (brother of william swinton, the historian) to supply letters to a list of newspapers. “i have written seven long newspaper letters and a short magazine article in less than two days,” he wrote home, and by the end of january he had also prepared several chapters of his book. the san francisco post-mastership was suggested to him again, but he put the temptation behind him. he refers to this more than once in his home letters, and it is clear that he wavered. judge field said if i wanted the place he could pledge me the president's appointment, and senator corners said he would guarantee me the senate's confirmation. it was a great temptation, but it would render it impossible to fill my book contract, and i had to drop the idea.... and besides i did not want the office. he made this final decision when he heard that the chief editor of the alta wanted the place, and he now threw his influence in that quarter. “i would not take ten thousand dollars out of a friend's pocket,” he said. but then suddenly came the news from goodman that the alta publishers had copyrighted his quaker city letters and proposed getting them out in a book, to reimburse themselves still further on their investment. this was sharper than a serpent's tooth. clemens got confirmation of the report by telegraph. by the same medium he protested, but to no purpose. then he wrote a letter and sat down to wait. he reported his troubles to orion: i have made a superb contract for a book, and have prepared the first ten chapters of the sixty or eighty, but i will bet it never sees the light. don't you let the folks at home hear that. that thieving alta copyrighted the letters, and now shows no disposition to let me use them. i have done all i can by telegraph, and now await the final result by mail. i only charged them for letters what (even in) greenbacks would amount to less than two thousand dollars, intending to write a good deal for high-priced eastern papers, and now they want to publish my letters in book form themselves to get back that pitiful sum. orion was by this time back from nevada, setting type in st. louis. he was full of schemes, as usual, and his brother counsels him freely. then he says: we chase phantoms half the days of our lives. it is well if we learn wisdom even then, and save the other half. i am in for it. i must go on chasing them, until i marry, then i am done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature wherewith to please the general public. i shall write to please myself then. he closes by saying that he rather expects to go with anson burlingame on the chinese embassy. clearly he was pretty hopeless as to his book prospects. his first meeting with general grant occurred just at this time. in one of his home letters he mentions, rather airily, that he will drop in someday on the general for an interview; and at last, through mrs. grant, an appointment was made for a sunday evening when the general would be at home. he was elated with the prospect of an interview; but when he looked into the imperturbable, square, smileless face of the soldier he found himself, for the first time in his life, without anything particular to say. grant nodded slightly and waited. his caller wished something would happen. it did. his inspiration returned. “general,” he said, “i seem to be a little embarrassed. are you?” that broke the ice. there were no further difficulties.--[mark twain has variously related this incident. it is given here in accordance with the letters of the period.] lxvi. back to san francisco reply came from the alta, but it was not promising. it spoke rather vaguely of prior arrangements and future possibilities. clemens gathered that under certain conditions he might share in the profits of the venture. there was but one thing to do; he knew those people--some of them--colonel mccomb and a mr. mccrellish intimately. he must confer with them in person. he was weary of washington, anyway. the whole pitiful machinery of politics disgusted him. in his notebook he wrote: whiskey is taken into the committee rooms in demijohns and carried out in demagogues. and in a letter: this is a place to get a poor opinion of everybody in. there are some pitiful intellects in this congress! there isn't one man in washington in civil office who has the brains of anson burlingame, and i suppose if china had not seized and saved his great talents to the world this government would have discarded him when his time was up.--[anson burlingame had by this time become china's special ambassador to the nations.] furthermore, he was down on the climate of washington. he decided to go to san francisco and see “those alta thieves face to face.” then, if a book resulted, he could prepare it there among friends. also, he could lecture. he had been anxious to visit his people before sailing, but matters were too urgent to permit delay. he obtained from bliss an advance of royalty and took passage, by way of aspinwall, on the sidewheel steamer henry chauncey, a fine vessel for those days. the name of mark twain was already known on the isthmus, and when it was learned he had arrived on the chauncey a delegation welcomed him on the wharf, and provided him with refreshments and entertainment. mr. tracy robinson, a poet, long a resident of that southern land, was one of the group. beyond the isthmus clemens fell in again with his old captain, ned wakeman, who during the trip told him the amazing dream that in due time would become captain stormfield's visit to heaven. he made the first draft of this story soon after his arrival in san francisco, as a sort of travesty of elizabeth stuart phelps's gates ajar, then very popular. clemens, then and later, had a high opinion of capt. ned wakeman's dream, but his story of it would pass through several stages before finally reaching the light of publication.--[mr. john p. vollmer, now of lewiston, idaho, a companion of that voyage, writes of a card game which took place beyond the isthmus. the notorious crippled gambler, “smithy,” figured in it, and it would seem to have furnished the inspiration for the exciting story in chapter xxxvi of the mississippi book.] in san francisco matters turned out as he had hoped. colonel mccomb was his stanch friend; mccrellish and woodward, the proprietors, presently conceded that they had already received good value for the money paid. the author agreed to make proper acknowledgments to the alta in his preface, and the matter was settled with friendliness all around. the way was now clear, the book assured. first, however, he must provide himself with funds. he delivered a lecture, with the quaker city excursion as his subject. on the th of may he wrote to bliss: i lectured here on the trip the other night; over $ , in gold in the house; every seat taken and paid for before night. he reports that he is steadily at work, and expects to start east with the completed manuscript about the middle of june. but this was a miscalculation. clemens found that the letters needed more preparation than he had thought. his literary vision and equipment had vastly altered since the beginning of that correspondence. some of the chapters he rewrote; others he eliminated entirely. it required two months of fairly steady work to put the big manuscript together. some of the new chapters he gave to bret harte for the overland monthly, then recently established. harte himself was becoming a celebrity about this time. his “luck of roaring camp” and “the outcasts of poker flat,” published in early numbers of the overland, were making a great stir in the east, arousing there a good deal more enthusiasm than in the magazine office or the city of their publication. that these two friends, each supreme in his own field, should have entered into their heritage so nearly at the same moment, is one of the many seemingly curious coincidences of literary history. clemens now concluded to cover his lecture circuit of two years before. he was assured that it would be throwing away a precious opportunity not to give his new lecture to his old friends. the result justified that opinion. at virginia, at carson, and elsewhere he was received like a returned conqueror. he might have been accorded a roman triumph had there been time and paraphernalia. even the robbers had reformed, and entire safety was guaranteed him on the divide between virginia and gold hill. at carson he called on mrs. curry, as in the old days, and among other things told her how snow from the lebanon mountains is brought to damascus on the backs of camels. “sam,” she said, “that's just one of your yarns, and if you tell it in your lecture to-night i'll get right up and say so.” but he did tell it, for it was a fact; and though mrs. curry did not rise to deny it she shook her finger at him in a way he knew. he returned to san francisco and gave one more lecture, the last he would ever give in california. his preparatory advertising for that occasion was wholly unique, characteristic of him to the last degree. it assumed the form of a handbill of protest, supposed to have been issued by the foremost citizens of san francisco, urging him to return to the states without inflicting himself further upon them. as signatures he made free with the names of prominent individuals, followed by those of organizations, institutions, “various benevolent societies, citizens on foot and horseback, and fifteen hundred in the steerage.” following this (on the same bill) was his reply, “to the fifteen hundred and others,” in which he insisted on another hearing: i will torment the people if i want to.... it only costs the people $ apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here for?... my last lecture was not as fine as i thought it was, but i have submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have pronounced it good. now, therefore, why should i withhold it? he promised positively to sail on the th of july if they would let him talk just this once. continuing, the handbill presented a second protest, signed by the various clubs and business firms; also others bearing variously the signatures of the newspapers, and the clergy, ending with the brief word: you had better go. yours, chief of police. all of which drollery concluded with his announcement of place and date of his lecture, with still further gaiety at the end. nothing short of a seismic cataclysm--an earthquake, in fact--could deter a san francisco audience after that. mark twain's farewell address, given at the mercantile library july ( ), doubtless remains today the leading literary event in san francisco's history.--[copy of the lecture announcement, complete, will be found in appendix h, at the end of last volume.] he sailed july th by the pacific mail steamer montana to acapulco, caught the henry chauncey at aspinwall, reached new york on the th, and a day or two later had delivered his manuscript at hartford. but a further difficulty had arisen. bliss was having troubles himself, this time, with his directors. many reports of mark twain's new book had been traveling the rounds of the press, some of which declared it was to be irreverent, even blasphemous, in tone. the title selected, the new pilgrim's progress, was in itself a sacrilege. hartford was a conservative place; the american publishing company directors were of orthodox persuasion. they urged bliss to relieve the company of this impending disaster of heresy. when the author arrived one or more of them labored with him in person, without avail. as for bliss, he was stanch; he believed in the book thoroughly, from every standpoint. he declared if the company refused to print it he would resign the management and publish the book himself. this was an alarming suggestion to the stockholders. bliss had returned dividends--a boon altogether too rare in the company's former history. the objectors retired and were heard of no more. the manuscript was placed in the hands of fay and cox, illustrators, with an order for about two hundred and fifty pictures. fay and cox turned it over to true williams, one of the well-known illustrators of that day. williams was a man of great talent--of fine imagination and sweetness of spirit--but it was necessary to lock him in a room when industry was required, with nothing more exciting than cold water as a beverage. clemens himself aided in the illustrating by obtaining of moses s. beach photographs from the large collection he had brought home. lxvii. a visit to elmira meantime he had skilfully obtained a renewal of the invitation to spend a week in the langdon home. he meant to go by a fast train, but, with his natural gift for misunderstanding time-tables, of course took a slow one, telegraphing his approach from different stations along the road. young langdon concluded to go down the line as far as waverly to meet him. when the new york train reached there the young man found his guest in the smoking-car, travel-stained and distressingly clad. mark twain was always scrupulously neat and correct of dress in later years, but in that earlier day neatness and style had not become habitual and did not give him comfort. langdon greeted him warmly but with doubt. finally he summoned courage to say, hesitatingly--“you've got some other clothes, haven't you?” the arriving guest was not in the least disturbed. “oh yes,” he said with enthusiasm, “i've got a fine brand-new outfit in this bag, all but a hat. it will be late when we get in, and i won't see any one to-night. you won't know me in the morning. we'll go out early and get a hat.” this was a large relief to the younger man, and the rest of the journey was happy enough. true to promise, the guest appeared at daylight correctly, even elegantly clad, and an early trip to the shops secured the hat. a gay and happy week followed--a week during which samuel clemens realized more fully than ever that in his heart there was room for only one woman in all the world: olivia langdon--“livy,” as they all called her--and as the day of departure drew near it may be that the gentle girl had made some discoveries, too. no word had passed between them. samuel clemens had the old-fashioned southern respect for courtship conventions, and for what, in that day at least, was regarded as honor. on the morning of the final day he said to young langdon: “charley, my week is up, and i must go home.” the young man expressed a regret which was genuine enough, though not wholly unqualified. his older sister, mrs. crane, leaving just then for a trip to the white mountains, had said: “charley, i am sure mr. clemens is after our livy. you mustn't let him carry her off before our return.” the idea was a disturbing one. the young man did not urge his guest to prolong his-visit. he said: “we'll have to stand it, i guess, but you mustn't leave before to-night.” “i ought to go by the first train,” clemens said, gloomily. “i am in love.” “in what!” “in love-with your sister, and i ought to get away from here.” the young man was now very genuinely alarmed. to him mark twain was a highly gifted, fearless, robust man--a man's man--and as such altogether admirable--lovable. but olivia--livy--she was to him little short of a saint. no man was good enough for her, certainly not this adventurous soldier of letters from the west. delightful he was beyond doubt, adorable as a companion, but not a companion for livy. “look here, clemens,” he said, when he could get his voice. “there's a train in half an hour. i'll help you catch it. don't wait till to-night. go now.” clemens shook his head. “no, charley,” he said, in his gentle drawl, “i want to enjoy your hospitality a little longer. i promise to be circumspect, and i'll go to-night.” that night, after dinner, when it was time to take the new york train, a light two-seated wagon was at the gate. the coachman was in front, and young langdon and his guest took the back seat. for some reason the seat had not been locked in its place, and when, after the good-bys, the coachman touched the horse it made a quick spring forward, and the back seat, with both passengers, described a half-circle and came down with force on the cobbled street. neither passenger was seriously hurt; clemens not at all--only dazed a little for a moment. then came an inspiration; here was a chance to prolong his visit. evidently it was not intended that he should take that train. when the langdon household gathered around with restoratives he did not recover too quickly. he allowed them to support or carry him into the house and place him in an arm-chair and apply remedies. the young daughter of the house especially showed anxiety and attention. this was pure happiness. he was perjuring himself, of course, but they say jove laughs at such things. he recovered in a day or two, but the wide hospitality of the handsome langdon home was not only offered now; it was enforced. he was still there two weeks later, after which he made a trip to cleveland to confide in mrs. fairbanks how he intended to win livy langdon for his wife. lxviii. the rev. “joe” twichell. he returned to hartford to look after the progress of his book. some of it was being put into type, and with his mechanical knowledge of such things he was naturally interested in the process. he made his headquarters with the blisses, then living at asylum avenue, and read proof in a little upper room, where the lamp was likely to be burning most of the time, where the atmosphere was nearly always blue with smoke, and the window-sill full of cigar butts. mrs. bliss took him into the quiet social life of the neighborhood--to small church receptions, society gatherings and the like--all of which he seemed to enjoy. most of the dwellers in that neighborhood were members of the asylum hill congregational church, then recently completed; all but the spire. it was a cultured circle, well-off in the world's goods, its male members, for the most part, concerned in various commercial ventures. the church stood almost across the way from the bliss home, and mark twain, with his picturesque phrasing, referred to it as the “stub-tailed church,” on account of its abbreviated spire; also, later, with a knowledge of its prosperous membership, as the “church of the holy speculators.” he was at an evening reception in the home of one of its members when he noticed a photograph of the unfinished building framed and hanging on the wall. “why, yes,” he commented, in his slow fashion, “this is the 'church of the holy speculators.'” “sh,” cautioned mrs. bliss. “its pastor is just behind you. he knows your work and wants to meet you.” turning, she said: “mr. twichell, this is mr. clemens. most people know him as mark twain.” and so, in this casual fashion, he met the man who was presently to become his closest personal friend and counselor, and would remain so for more than forty years. joseph hopkins twichell was a man about his own age, athletic and handsome, a student and a devout christian, yet a man familiar with the world, fond of sports, with an exuberant sense of humor and a wide understanding of the frailties of humankind. he had been “port waist oar” at yale, and had left college to serve with general “dan” sickles as a chaplain who had followed his duties not only in the camp, but on the field. mention has already been made of mark twain's natural leaning toward ministers of the gospel, and the explanation of it is easier to realize than to convey. he was hopelessly unorthodox--rankly rebellious as to creeds. anything resembling cant or the curtailment of mental liberty roused only his resentment and irony. yet something in his heart always warmed toward any laborer in the vineyard, and if we could put the explanation into a single sentence, perhaps we might say it was because he could meet them on that wide, common ground sympathy with mankind. mark twain's creed, then and always, may be put into three words, “liberty, justice, humanity.” it may be put into one word, “humanity.” ministers always loved mark twain. they did not always approve of him, but they adored him: the rev. mr. rising, of the comstock, was an early example of his ministerial friendships, and we have seen that henry ward beecher cultivated his company. in a san francisco letter of two years before, mark twain wrote his mother, thinking it would please her: i am as thick as thieves with the reverend stebbins. i am laying for the reverend scudder and the reverend doctor stone. i am running on preachers now altogether, and i find them gay. so it may be that his first impulse toward joseph twichell was due to the fact that he was a young member of that army whose mission is to comfort and uplift mankind. but it was only a little time till the impulse had grown into a friendship that went beyond any profession or doctrine, a friendship that ripened into a permanent admiration and love for “joe” twichell himself, as one of the noblest specimens of his race. he was invited to the twichell home, where he met the young wife and got a glimpse of the happiness of that sweet and peaceful household. he had a neglected, lonely look, and he loved to gather with them at their fireside. he expressed his envy of their happiness, and mrs. twichell asked him why, since his affairs were growing prosperous, he did not establish a household of his own. long afterward mr. twichell wrote: mark made no answer for a little, but, with his eyes bent on the floor, appeared to be deeply pondering. then he looked up, and said slowly, in a voice tremulous with earnestness (with what sympathy he was heard may be imagined): “i am taking thought of it. i am in love beyond all telling with the dearest and best girl in the whole world. i don't suppose she will marry me. i can't think it possible. she ought not to. but if she doesn't i shall be sure that the best thing i ever did was to fall in love with her, and proud to have it known that i tried to win her!” it was only a brief time until the twichell fireside was home to him. he came and went, and presently it was “mark” and “joe,” as by and by it would be “livy” and “harmony,” and in a few years “uncle joe” and “uncle mark,” “aunt livy” and “aunt harmony,” and so would remain until the end. lxix. a lecture tour james redpath, proprietor of the boston lyceum bureau, was the leading lecture agent of those days, and controlled all, or nearly all, of the platform celebrities. mark twain's success at the cooper union the year before had interested redpath. he had offered engagements then and later, but clemens had not been free for the regular circuit. now there was no longer a reason for postponement of a contract. redpath was eager for the new celebrity, and clemens closed with him for the season of - . with his new lecture, “the vandal abroad,” he was presently earning a hundred dollars and more a night, and making most of the nights count. this was affluence indeed. he had become suddenly a person of substance-an associate of men of consequence, with a commensurate income. he could help his mother lavishly now, and he did. his new lecture was immensely popular. it was a resume of the 'quaker city' letters--a foretaste of the book which would presently follow. wherever he went, he was hailed with eager greetings. he caught such drifting exclamations as, “there he is! there goes mark twain!” people came out on the street to see him pass. that marvelous miracle which we variously call “notoriety,” “popularity,” “fame,” had come to him. in his notebook he wrote, “fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only, earthly certainty oblivion.” the newspapers were filled with enthusiasm both as to his matter and method. his delivery was described as a “long, monotonous drawl, with the fun invariably coming in at the end of a sentence--after a pause.” his appearance at this time is thus set down: mark twain is a man of medium height, about five feet ten, sparsely built, with dark reddish-brown hair and mustache. his features are fair, his eyes keen and twinkling. he dresses in scrupulous evening attire. in lecturing he hangs about the desk, leaning on it or flirting around the corners of it, then marching and countermarching in the rear of it. he seldom casts a glance at his manuscript. no doubt this fairly presents mark twain, the lecturer of that day. it was a new figure on the platform, a man with a new method. as to his manuscript, the item might have said that he never consulted it at all. he learned his lecture; what he consulted was merely a series of hieroglyphics, a set of crude pictures drawn by himself, suggestive of the subject-matter underneath new head. certain columns represented the parthenon; the sphinx meant egypt, and so on. his manuscript lay there in case of accident, but the accident did not happen. a number of his engagements were in the central part of new york, at points not far distant from elmira. he had a standing invitation to visit the langdon home, and he made it convenient to avail himself of that happiness. his was not an unruffled courtship. when at last he reached the point of proposing for the daughter of the house, neither the daughter nor the household offered any noticeable encouragement to his suit. many absurd anecdotes have been told of his first interview with mr. langdon on the subject, but they are altogether without foundation. it was a proper and dignified discussion of a very serious matter. mr. langdon expressed deep regard for him and friendship but he was not inclined to add him to the family; the young lady herself, in a general way, accorded with these views. the applicant for favor left sadly enough, but he could not remain discouraged or sad. he lectured at cleveland with vast success, and the news of it traveled quickly to elmira. he was referred to by cleveland papers as a “lion” and “the coming man of the age.” two days later, in pittsburgh (november th), he “played” against fanny kemble, the favorite actress of that time, with the result that miss kemble had an audience of two hundred against nearly ten times the number who gathered to hear mark twain. the news of this went to elmira, too. it was in the papers there next morning; surely this was a conquering hero--a gay lochinvar from out of the west--and the daughter of the house must be guarded closely, that he did not bear her away. it was on the second morning following the pittsburgh triumph, when the langdon family were gathered at breakfast, that a bushy auburn head poked fearfully in at the door, and a low, humble voice said: “the calf has returned; may the prodigal have some breakfast?” no one could be reserved or reprovingly distant, or any of those unfriendly things with a person like that; certainly not jervis langdon, who delighted in the humor and the tricks and turns and oddities of this eccentric visitor. giving his daughter to him was another matter, but even that thought was less disturbing than it had been at the start. in truth, the langdon household had somehow grown to feel that he belonged to them. the elder sister's husband, theodore crane, endorsed him fully. he had long before read some of the mark twain sketches that had traveled eastward in advance of their author, and had recognized, even in the crudest of them, a classic charm. as for olivia langdon's mother and sister, their happiness lay in hers. where her heart went theirs went also, and it would appear that her heart, in spite of herself, had found its rightful keeper. only young langdon was irreconciled, and eventually set out for a voyage around the world to escape the situation. there was only a provisional engagement at first. jervis langdon suggested, and samuel clemens agreed with him, that it was proper to know something of his past, as well as of his present, before the official parental sanction should be given. when mr. langdon inquired as to the names of persons of standing to whom he might write for credentials, clemens pretty confidently gave him the name of the reverend stebbins and others of san francisco, adding that he might write also to joe goodman if he wanted to, but that he had lied for goodman a hundred times and goodman would lie for him if necessary, so his testimony would be of no value. the letters to the clergy were written, and mr. langdon also wrote one on his own account. it was a long mail-trip to the coast and back in those days. it might be two months before replies would come from those ministers. the lecturer set out again on his travels, and was radiantly and happily busy. he went as far west as illinois, had crowded houses in chicago, visited friends and kindred in hannibal, st. louis, and keokuk, carrying the great news, and lecturing in old familiar haunts. lxx. innocents at home--and “the innocents abroad” he was in jacksonville, illinois, at the end of january ( ), and in a letter to bliss states that he will be in elmira two days later, and asks that proofs of the book be sent there. he arrived at the langdon home, anxious to hear the reports that would make him, as the novels might say, “the happiest or the most miserable of men.” jervis langdon had a rather solemn look when they were alone together. clemens asked: “you've heard from those gentlemen out there?” “yes, and from another gentleman i wrote concerning you.” “they don't appear to have been very enthusiastic, from your manner.” “well, yes, some of them were.” “i suppose i may ask what particular form their emotion took?” “oh yes, yes; they agree unanimously that you are a brilliant, able man, a man with a future, and that you would make about the worst husband on record.” the applicant for favor had a forlorn look. “there's nothing very evasive about that,” he said: there was a period of reflective silence. it was probably no more than a few seconds, but it seemed longer. “haven't you any other friend that you could suggest?” langdon said. “apparently none whose testimony would be valuable.” jervis langdon held out his hand. “you have at least one,” he said. “i believe in you. i know you better than they do.” and so came the crown of happiness. the engagement of samuel langhorne clemens and olivia lewis langdon was ratified next day, february , . but if the friends of mark twain viewed the idea of the marriage with scant favor, the friends of miss langdon regarded it with genuine alarm. elmira was a conservative place--a place of pedigree and family tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, pilot, miner, wandering journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not to be lightly permitted. the fact that he had achieved a national fame did not count against other considerations. the social protest amounted almost to insurrection, but it was not availing. the langdon family had their doubts too, though of a different sort. their doubts lay in the fear that one, reared as their daughter had been, might be unable to hold a place as the wife of this intellectual giant, whom they felt that the world was preparing to honor. that this delicate, sheltered girl could have the strength of mind and body for her position seemed hard to believe. their faith overbore such questionings, and the future years proved how fully it was justified. to his mother samuel clemens wrote: she is only a little body, but she hasn't her peer in christendom. i gave her only a plain gold engagement ring, when fashion imperatively demands a two-hundred-dollar diamond one, and told her it was typical of her future life-namely, that she would have to flourish on substance, rather than luxuries (but you see i know the girl--she don't care anything about luxuries).... she spends no money but her astral year's allowance, and spends nearly every cent of that on other people. she will be a good, sensible little wife, without any airs about her. i don't make intercession for her beforehand, and ask you to love her, for there isn't any use in that--you couldn't help it if you were to try. i warn you that whoever comes within the fatal influence of her beautiful nature is her willing slave forevermore. to mrs. crane, absent in march, her father wrote: dear sue,--i received your letter yesterday with a great deal of pleasure, but the letter has gone in pursuit of one s. l. clemens, who has been giving us a great deal of trouble lately. we cannot have a joy in our family without a feeling, on the part of the little incorrigible in our family, that this wanderer must share it, so, as soon as read, into her pocket and off upstairs goes your letter, and in the next two minutes into the mail, so it is impossible for me now to refer to it, or by reading it over gain an inspiration in writing you... clemens closed his lecture tour in march, acid went immediately to elmira. he had lectured between fifty and sixty times, with a return of something more than $ , , not a bad aggregate for a first season on the circuit. he had planned to make a spring tour to california, but the attraction at elmira was of a sort that discouraged distant travel. furthermore, he disliked the platform, then and always. it was always a temptation to him because of its quick and abundant return, but it was none the less distasteful. in a letter of that spring he wrote: i most cordially hate the lecture field. and after all, i shudder to think i may never get out of it. in all conversation with gough, and anna dickinson, nasby, oliver wendell holmes, wendell phillips, and the other old stagers, i could not observe that they ever expected or hoped to get out of the business. i don't want to get wedded to it as they are. he declined further engagements on the excuse that he must attend to getting out his book. the revised proofs were coming now, and he and gentle livy langdon read them together. he realized presently that with her sensitive nature she had also a keen literary perception. what he lacked in delicacy--and his lack was likely to be large enough in that direction--she detected, and together they pruned it away. she became his editor during those happy courtship days--a position which she held to her death. the world owed a large debt of gratitude to mark twain's wife, who from the very beginning--and always, so far as in her strength she was able--inspired him to give only his worthiest to the world, whether in written or spoken word, in counsel or in deed. those early days of their close companionship, spiritual and mental, were full of revelation to samuel clemens, a revelation that continued from day to day, and from year to year, even to the very end. the letter to bliss and the proofs were full of suggested changes that would refine and beautify the text. in one of them he settles the question of title, which he says is to be: the innocents abroad or the new pilgrim's progress and we may be sure that it was olivia langdon's voice that gave the deciding vote for the newly adopted chief title, which would take any suggestion of irreverence out of the remaining words. the book was to have been issued in the spring, but during his wanderings proofs had been delayed, and there was now considerable anxiety about it, as the agencies had become impatient for the canvass. at the end of april clemens wrote: “your printers are doing well. i will hurry the proofs”; but it was not until the early part of june that the last chapters were revised and returned. then the big book, at last completed, went to press on an edition of twenty thousand, a large number for any new book, even to-day. in later years, through some confusion of circumstance, mark twain was led to believe that the publication of the innocents abroad was long and unnecessarily delayed. but this was manifestly a mistake. the book went to press in june. it was a big book and a large edition. the first copy was delivered july ( ), and four hundred and seventeen bound volumes were shipped that month. even with the quicker mechanical processes of to-day a month or more is allowed for a large book between the final return of proofs and the date of publication. so it is only another instance of his remembering, as he once quaintly put it, “the thing that didn't happen.”--[in an article in the north american review (september , ) mr. clemens stated that he found it necessary to telegraph notice that he would bring suit if the book was not immediately issued. in none of the letters covering this period is there any suggestion of delay on the part of the publishers, and the date of the final return of proofs, together with the date of publication, preclude the possibility of such a circumstance. at some period of his life he doubtless sent, or contemplated sending, such a message, and this fact, through some curious psychology, became confused in his mind with the first edition of the innocents abroad.] lxxi. the great book of travel. 'the innocents abroad' was a success from the start. the machinery for its sale and delivery was in full swing by august , and five thousand one hundred and seventy copies were disposed of that month--a number that had increased to more than thirty-one thousand by the first of the year. it was a book of travel; its lowest price was three and a half dollars. no such record had been made by a book of that description; none has equaled it since.--[one must recall that this was the record only up to . d.w.] if mark twain was not already famous, he was unquestionably famous now. as the author of the new pilgrim's progress he was swept into the domain of letters as one riding at the head of a cavalcade--doors and windows wide with welcome and jubilant with applause. newspapers chorused their enthusiasm; the public voiced universal approval; only a few of the more cultured critics seemed hesitant and doubtful. they applauded--most of them--but with reservation. doctor holland regarded mark twain as a mere fun maker of ephemeral popularity, and was not altogether pleasant in his dictum. doctor holmes, in a letter to the author, speaks of the “frequently quaint and amusing conceits,” but does not find it in his heart to refer to the book as literature. it was naturally difficult for the east to concede a serious value to one who approached his subject with such militant aboriginality, and occasionally wrote “those kind.” william dean howells reviewed the book in the atlantic, which was of itself a distinction, whether the review was favorable or otherwise. it was favorable on the whole, favorable to the humor of the book, its “delicious impudence,” the charm of its good-natured irony. the review closed: it is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists california has given us, but we think he is, in an entirely different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company of the best. this is praise, but not of an intemperate sort, nor very inclusive. the descriptive, the poetic, the more pretentious phases of the book did not receive attention. mr. howells was perhaps the first critic of eminence to recognize in mark twain not only the humorist, but the supreme genius-the “lincoln of our literature.” this was later. the public--the silent public--with what howells calls “the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude,” reached a similar verdict forthwith. and on sufficient evidence: let the average unprejudiced person of to-day take up the old volume and read a few chapters anywhere and decide whether it is the work of a mere humorist, or also of a philosopher, a poet, and a seer. the writer well remembers a little group of “the simple-hearted multitude” who during the winter of ' and ' gathered each evening to hear the innocents read aloud, and their unanimous verdict that it was the “best book of modern times.” it was the most daring book of its day. passages of it were calculated to take the breath of the orthodox reader; only, somehow, it made him smile, too. it was all so good-natured, so openly sincere. without doubt it preached heresy--the heresy of viewing revered landmarks and relics joyously, rather than lugubriously; reverentially, when they inspired reverence; satirically, when they invited ridicule, and with kindliness always. the innocents abroad is mark twain's greatest book of travel. the critical and the pure in speech may object to this verdict. brander matthews regards it second to a tramp abroad, the natural viewpoint of the literary technician. the 'tramp' contains better usage without doubt, but it lacks the “color” which gives the innocents its perennial charm. in the innocents there is a glow, a fragrance, a romance of touch, a subtle something which is idyllic, something which is not quite of reality, in the tale of that little company that so long ago sailed away to the harbors of their illusions beyond the sea, and, wandered together through old palaces and galleries, and among the tombs of the saints, and down through ancient lands. there is an atmosphere about it all, a dream-like quality that lies somewhere in the telling, maybe, or in the tale; at all events it is there, and the world has felt it ever since. perhaps it could be defined in a single word, perhaps that word would be “youth.” that the artist, poor true williams, felt its inspiration is certain. we may believe that williams was not a great draftsman, but no artist ever caught more perfectly the light and spirit of the author's text. crude some of the pictures are, no doubt, but they convey the very essence of the story; they belong to it, they are a part of it, and they ought never to perish. 'a tramp abroad' is a rare book, but it cannot rank with its great predecessor in human charm. the public, which in the long run makes mistakes, has rendered that verdict. the innocents by far outsells the tramp, and, for that matter, any other book of travel. lxxii.the purchase of a paper. it is curious to reflect that mark twain still did not regard himself as a literary man. he had no literary plans for the future; he scarcely looked forward to the publication of another book. he considered himself a journalist; his ambition lay in the direction of retirement in some prosperous newspaper enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a home. during his travels he had already been casting about for a congenial and substantial association in newspaperdom, and had at one time considered the purchase of an interest in the cleveland herald. but buffalo was nearer elmira, and when an opportunity offered, by which he could acquire a third interest in the buffalo express for $ , , the purchase was decided upon. his lack of funds prompted a new plan for a lecture tour to the pacific coast, this time with d. r. locke (nasby), then immensely popular, in his lecture “cussed be canaan.” clemens had met nasby on the circuit, and was very fond of him. the two had visited boston together, and while there had called on doctor holmes; this by the way. nasby was fond of clemens too, but doubtful about the trip-doubtful about his lecture: your proposition takes my breath away. if i had my new lecture completed i wouldn't hesitate a moment, but really isn't “cussed be canaan” too old? you know that lemon, our african brother, juicy as he was in his day, has been squeezed dry. why howl about his wrongs after said wrongs have been redressed? why screech about the “damnable spirit of cahst” when the victim thereof sits at the first table, and his oppressor mildly takes, in hash, what he leaves? you see, friend twain, the fifteenth amendment busted “cussed be canaan.” i howled feelingly on the subject while it was a living issue, for i felt all that i said and a great deal more; but now that we have won our fight why dance frantically on the dead corpse of our enemy? the reliable contraband is contraband no more, but a citizen of the united states, and i speak of him no more. give me a week to think of your proposition. if i can jerk a lecture in time i will go with you. the lord knows i would like to. --[nasby's lecture, “cussed be canaan,” opened, “we are all descended from grandfathers!” he had a powerful voice, and always just on the stroke of eight he rose and vigorously delivered this sentence. once, after lecturing an entire season--two hundred and twenty-five nights--he went home to rest. that evening he sat, musingly drowsing by the fire, when the clock struck eight. without a moment's thought nasby sprang to his feet and thundered out, “we are all descended from grandfathers!”] nasby did not go, and clemens's enthusiasm cooled at the prospect of setting out alone on that long tour. furthermore, jervis langdon promptly insisted on advancing the money required to complete the purchase of the express, and the trade was closed.--[mr. langdon is just as good for $ , for me, and has already advanced half of it in cash. i wrote and asked whether i had better send him my note, or a due bill, or how he would prefer to have the indebtedness made of record, and he answered every other topic in the letter pleasantly, but never replied to that at all. still, i shall give my note into a hands of his business agent here, and pay him the interest as it falls due.--s. l. c. to his mother.] the buffalo express was at this time in the hands of three men--col. george f. selkirk, j. l. lamed, and thomas a. kennett. colonel selkirk was business manager, lamed was political editor. with the purchase of kennett's share clemens became a sort of general and contributing editor, with a more or less “roving commission”--his hours and duties not very clearly defined. it was believed by his associates, and by clemens himself, that his known connection with the paper would give it prestige and circulation, as nasby's connection had popularized the toledo blade. the new editor entered upon his duties august ( ). the members of the buffalo press gave him a dinner that evening, and after the manner of newspaper men the world over, were handsomely cordial to the “new enemy in their midst.” there is an anecdote which relates that next morning, when mark twain arrived in the express office (it was then at swan street), there happened to be no one present who knew him. a young man rose very bruskly and asked if there was any one he would like to see. it is reported that he replied, with gentle deliberation: “well, yes, i should like to see some young man offer the new editor a chair.” it is so like mark twain that we are inclined to accept it, though it seems of doubtful circumstance. in any case it deserves to be true. his “salutatory” (august th) is sufficiently genuine: being a stranger, it would be immodest for me to suddenly and violently assume the associate editorship of the buffalo express without a single word of comfort or encouragement to the unoffending patrons of the paper, who are about to be exposed to constant attacks of my wisdom and learning. but the word shall be as brief as possible. i only want to assure parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that i am not going to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. i am not going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make trouble.... i shall not make use of slang and vulgarity upon any occasion or under any circumstances, and shall never use profanity except when discussing house rent and taxes. indeed, upon a second thought, i shall not use it even then, for it is unchristian, inelegant, and degrading; though, to speak truly, i do not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a cent without it. i shall not often meddle with politics, because we have a political editor who is already excellent and only needs to serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect. i shall not write any poetry unless i conceive a spite against the subscribers. such is my platform. i do not see any use in it, but custom is law and must be obeyed. john harrison mills, who was connected with the express in those days, has written: i cannot remember that there was any delay in getting down to his work. i think within five minutes the new editor had assumed the easy look of one entirely at home, pencil in hand and a clutch of paper before him, with an air of preoccupation, as of one intent on a task delayed. it was impossible to be conscious of the man sitting there, and not feel his identity with all that he had enjoyed, and the reminiscence of it he that seemed to radiate; for the personality was so absolutely in accord with all the record of himself and his work. i cannot say he seemed to be that vague thing they call a type in race or blood, though the word, if used in his case for temperament, would decidedly mean what they used to call the “sanguine.” i thought that, pictorially, the noble costume of the albanian would have well become him. or he might have been a goth, and worn the horned bull-pate helmet of alaric's warriors; or stood at the prow of one of the swift craft of the vikings. his eyes, which have been variously described, were, it seemed to me, of an indescribable depth of the bluish moss-agate, with a capacity of pupil dilation that in certain lights had the effect of a deep black.... mr. mills adds that in dress he was now “well groomed,” and that consequently they were obliged to revise their notions as to the careless negligee which gossip had reported.--[from unpublished reminiscences kindly lent to the author by mr. mills] lxxiii. the first meeting with howells clemens' first period of editorial work was a brief one, though he made frequent contributions to the paper: sketches, squibs, travel-notes, and experiences, usually humorous in character. his wedding-day had been set for early in the year, and it was necessary to accumulate a bank account for that occasion. before october he was out on the lecture circuit, billed now for the first time for new england, nervous and apprehensive in consequence, though with good hope. to pamela he wrote (november th): to-morrow night i appear for the first time before a boston audience-- , critics--and on the success of this matter depends my future success in new england. but i am not distressed. nasby is in the same boat. tonight decides the fate of his brand-new lecture. he has just left my room--been reading his lecture to me--was greatly depressed. i have convinced him that he has little to fear. whatever alarm mark twain may have felt was not warranted. his success with the new england public was immediate and complete. he made his headquarters in boston, at redpath's office, where there was pretty sure to be a congenial company, of which he was presently the center. it was during one of these boston sojourns that he first met william dean howells, his future friend and literary counselor. howells was assistant editor of the atlantic at this time; james t. fields, its editor. clemens had been gratified by the atlantic review, and had called to express his thanks for it. he sat talking to fields, when howells entered the editorial rooms, and on being presented to the author of the review, delivered his appreciation in the form of a story, sufficiently appropriate, but not qualified for the larger types.--[he said: “when i read that review of yours, i felt like the woman who was so glad her baby had come white.”] his manner, his humor, his quaint colloquial forms all delighted howells--more, in fact, than the opulent sealskin overcoat which he affected at this period--a garment astonishing rather than esthetic, as mark twain's clothes in those days of his first regeneration were likely to be startling enough, we may believe; in the conservative atmosphere of the atlantic rooms. and howells--gentle, genial, sincere--filled with the early happiness of his calling, won the heart of mark twain and never lost it, and, what is still more notable, won his absolute and unvarying confidence in all literary affairs. it was always mark twain's habit to rely on somebody, and in matters pertaining to literature and to literary people in general he laid his burden on william dean howells from that day. only a few weeks after that first visit we find him telegraphing to howells, asking him to look after a californian poet, then ill and friendless in brooklyn. clemens states that he does not know the poet, but will contribute fifty dollars if howells will petition the steamboat company for a pass; and no doubt howells complied, and spent a good deal more than fifty dollars' worth of time to get the poet relieved and started; it would be like him. lxxiv. the wedding-day the wedding was planned, at first, either for christmas or new-year's day; but as the lecture engagements continued into january it was decided to wait until these were filled. february d, a date near the anniversary of the engagement, was agreed upon, also a quiet wedding with no “tour.” the young people would go immediately to buffalo, and take up a modest residence, in a boardinghouse as comfortable, even as luxurious, as the husband's financial situation justified. at least that was samuel clemens's understanding of the matter. he felt that he was heavily in debt--that his first duty was to relieve himself of that obligation. there were other plans in elmira, but in the daily and happy letters he received there was no inkling of any new purpose. he wrote to j. d. f. slee, of buffalo, who was associated in business with mr. langdon, and asked him to find a suitable boarding-place, one that would be sufficiently refined for the woman who was to be his wife, and sufficiently reasonable to insure prosperity. in due time slee replied that, while boarding was a “miserable business anyhow,” he had been particularly fortunate in securing a place on one of the most pleasant streets--“the family a small one and choice spirits, with no predilection for taking boarders, and consenting to the present arrangement only because of the anticipated pleasure of your company.” the price, slee added, would be reasonable. as a matter of fact a house on delaware avenue--still the fine residence street of buffalo--had been bought and furnished throughout as a present to the bride and groom. it stands to-day practically unchanged--brick and mansard without, eastlake within, a type then much in vogue--spacious and handsome for that period. it was completely appointed. diagrams of the rooms had been sent to elmira and miss langdon herself had selected the furnishings. everything was put in readiness, including linen, cutlery, and utensils. even the servants had been engaged and the pantry and cellar had been stocked. it must have been hard for olivia langdon to keep this wonderful surprise out of those daily letters. a surprise like that is always watching a chance to slip out unawares, especially when one is eagerly impatient to reveal it. however, the traveler remained completely in the dark. he may have wondered vaguely at the lack of enthusiasm in the boarding idea, and could he have been certain that the sales of the book would continue, or that his newspaper venture would yield an abundant harvest, he might have planned his domestic beginning on a more elaborate scale. if only the tennessee land would yield the long-expected fortune now! but these were all incalculable things. all that he could be sure of was the coming of his great happiness, in whatever environment, and of the dragging weeks between. at last the night of the final lecture came, and he was off for elmira with the smallest possible delay. once there, the intervening days did not matter. he could join in the busy preparations; he could write exuberantly to his friends. to laura hawkins, long since laura frazer he sent a playful line; to jim gillis, still digging and washing on the slopes of the old tuolumne hills, he wrote a letter which eminently belongs here: elmira, n. y., january , . dear jim,--i remember that old night just as well! and somewhere among my relics i have your remembrance stored away. it makes my heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days. still it shouldn't, for right in the depths of their poverty and their pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune. you remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal sojourn in the rain and mud of angel's camp--i mean that day we sat around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell about the frog and how they filled him with shot. and you remember how we quoted from the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and dear old stoker panned and washed. i jotted the story down in my note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars for it--i was just that blind. but then we were so hard up. i published that story, and it became widely known in america, india, china, england, and the reputation it made for me has paid me thousands and thousands of dollars since. four or five months ago i bought into the express (i have ordered it sent to you as long as you live, and if the bookkeeper sends you any bills you let me hear of it). i went heavily in debt--never could have dared to do that, jim, if we hadn't heard the jumping frog story that day. and wouldn't i love to take old stoker by the hand, and wouldn't i love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of rinalds in the “burning shame!” where is dick and what is he doing? give him my fervent love and warm old remembrances. a week from to-day i shall be married-to a girl even better and lovelier than the peerless “chapparal quails.” you can't come so far, jim, but still i cordially invite you to come anyhow, and i invite dick too. and if you two boys were to land here on that pleasant occasion we would make you right royally welcome. truly your friend, saml. l. clemens. p.s.---california plums are good. jim, particularly when they are stewed. it had been only five years before--that day in angel's camp--but how long ago and how far away it seemed to him now! so much had happened since then, so much of which that was the beginning--so little compared with the marvel of the years ahead, whose threshold he was now about to cross, and not alone. a day or two before the wedding he was asked to lecture on the night of february d. he replied that he was sorry to disappoint the applicant, but that he could not lecture on the night of february d, for the reason that he was going to marry a young lady on that evening, and that he would rather marry that young lady than deliver all the lectures in the world. and so came the wedding-day. it began pleasantly; the postman brought a royalty check that morning of $ , , the accumulation of three months' sales, and the rev. joseph twichell and harmony, his wife, came from hartford--twichell to join with the rev. thomas k. beecher in solemnizing the marriage. pamela moffett, a widow now, with her daughter annie, grown to a young lady, had come all the way from st. louis, and mrs. fairbanks from cleveland. yet the guests were not numerous, not more than a hundred at most, so it was a quiet wedding there in the langdon parlors, those dim, stately rooms that in the future would hold so much of his history--so much of the story of life and death that made its beginning there. the wedding-service was about seven o'clock, for mr. beecher had a meeting at the church soon after that hour. afterward followed the wedding-supper and dancing, and the bride's father danced with the bride. to the interested crowd awaiting him at the church mr. beecher reported that the bride was very beautiful, and had on the longest white gloves he had ever seen; he declared they reached to her shoulders.--[perhaps for a younger generation it should be said that thomas k. beecher was a brother of henry ward beecher. he lived and died in elmira, the almost worshiped pastor of the park congregational church. he was a noble, unorthodox teacher. samuel clemens at the time of his marriage already strongly admired him, and had espoused his cause in an article signed “s'cat!” in the elmira advertiser, when he (beecher) had been assailed by the more orthodox elmira clergy. for the “s'cat” article see appendix i, at the end of last volume.] it was the next afternoon when they set out for buffalo, accompanied by the bride's parents, the groom's relatives, the beechers, and perhaps one or two others of that happy company. it was nine o'clock at night when they arrived, and found mr. slee waiting at the station with sleighs to convey the party to the “boarding-house” he had selected. they drove and drove, and the sleigh containing the bride and groom got behind and apparently was bound nowhere in particular, which disturbed the groom a good deal, for he thought it proper that they should arrive first, to receive their guests. he commented on slee's poor judgment in selecting a house that was so hard to find, and when at length they turned into fashionable delaware avenue, and stopped before one of the most attractive places in the neighborhood, he was beset with fear concerning the richness of the locality. they were on the steps when the doors opened, and a perfect fairyland of lights and decoration was revealed within. the friends who had gone ahead came out with greetings, to lead in the bride and groom. servants hurried forward to take bags and wraps. they were ushered inside; they were led through beautiful rooms, all newly appointed and garnished. the bridegroom was dazed, unable to understand the meaning of things, the apparent ownership and completeness of possession. at last the young wife put her hand upon his arm: “don't you understand, youth,” she said; that was always her name for him. “don't you understand? it is ours, all ours--everything--a gift from father!” but even then he could not grasp it; not at first, not until mr. langdon brought a little box and, opening it, handed them the deeds. nobody quite remembers what was the first remark that samuel clemens made then; but either then or a little later he said: “mr. langdon, whenever you are in buffalo, if it's twice a year, come right here. bring your bag and stay overnight if you want to. it sha'n't cost you a cent!” they went in to supper then, and by and by the guests were gone and the young wedded pair were alone. patrick mcaleer, the young coachman, who would grow old in their employ, and ellen, the cook, came in for their morning orders, and were full of irish delight at the inexperience and novelty of it all. then they were gone, and only the lovers in their new house and their new happiness remained. and so it was they entered the enchanted land. lxxv. as to destiny if any reader has followed these chapters thus far, he may have wondered, even if vaguely, at the seeming fatality of events. mark twain had but to review his own life for justification of his doctrine of inevitability--an unbroken and immutable sequence of cause and effect from the beginning. once he said: “when the first living atom found itself afloat on the great laurentian sea the first act of that first atom led to the second act of that first atom, and so on down through the succeeding ages of all life, until, if the steps could be traced, it would be shown that the first act of that first atom has led inevitably to the act of my standing here in my dressing-gown at this instant talking to you.” it seemed the clearest presentment ever offered in the matter of predestined circumstance--predestined from the instant when that primal atom felt the vital thrill. mark twain's early life, however imperfectly recorded, exemplifies this postulate. if through the years still ahead of us the course of destiny seems less clearly defined, it is only because thronging events make the threads less easy to trace. the web becomes richer, the pattern more intricate and confusing, but the line of fate neither breaks nor falters, to the end. lxxvi. on the buffalo “express” with the beginning of life in buffalo, mark twain had become already a world character--a man of large consequence and events. he had no proper realization of this, no real sense of the size of his conquest; he still regarded himself merely as a lecturer and journalist, temporarily popular, but with no warrant to a permanent seat in the world's literary congress. he thought his success something of an accident. the fact that he was prepared to settle down as an editorial contributor to a newspaper in what was then only a big village is the best evidence of a modest estimate of his talents. he “worked like a horse,” is the verdict of those who were closely associated with him on the express. his hours were not regular, but they were long. often he was at his desk at eight in the morning, and remained there until ten or eleven at night. his working costume was suited to comfort rather than show. with coat, vest, collar, and tie usually removed (sometimes even his shoes), he lounged in his chair, in any attitude that afforded the larger ease, pulling over the exchanges; scribbling paragraphs, editorials, humorous skits, and what not, as the notion came upon him. j. l. lamed, his co-worker (he sat on the opposite side of the same table), remembers that mark twain enjoyed his work as he went along--the humor of it--and that he frequently laughed as some whimsicality or new absurdity came into his mind. “i doubt,” writes lamed, “if he ever enjoyed anything more than the jackknife engraving that he did on a piece of board of a military map of the siege of paris, which was printed in the express from his original plate, with accompanying explanations and comments. his half-day of whittling and laughter that went with it are something that i find pleasant to remember. indeed, my whole experience of association with him is a happy memory, which i am fortunate in having.... what one saw of him was always the actual mark twain, acting out of his own nature simply, frankly, without pretense, and almost without reserve. it was that simplicity and naturalness in the man which carried his greatest charm.” lamed, like many others, likens mark twain to lincoln in various of his characteristics. the two worked harmoniously together: lamed attending to the political direction of the journal, clemens to the literary, and what might be termed the sentimental side. there was no friction in the division of labor, never anything but good feeling between them. clemens had a poor opinion of his own comprehension of politics, and perhaps as little regard for lamed's conception of humor. once when the latter attempted something in the way of pleasantry his associate said: “better leave the humor on this paper to me, lamed”; and once when lamed was away attending the republican state convention at saratoga, and some editorial comment seemed necessary, clemens thought it best to sign the utterance, and to make humor of his shortcomings. i do not know much about politics, and am not sitting up nights to learn.... i am satisfied that these nominations are all right and sound, and that they are the only ones that can bring peace to our distracted country (the only political phrase i am perfectly familiar with and competent to hurl at the public with fearless confidence--the other editor is full of them), but being merely satisfied is not enough. i always like to know before i shout. but i go for mr. curtis with all my strength! being certain of him, i hereby shout all i know how. but the others may be a split ticket, or a scratched ticket, or whatever you call it. i will let it alone for the present. it will keep. the other young man will be back to-morrow, and he will shout for it, split or no split, rest assured of that. he will prance into this political ring with his tomahawk and his war-whoop, and then you will hear a crash and see the scalps fly. he has none of my diffidence. he knows all about these nominees, and if he don't he will let on to in such a natural way as to deceive the most critical. he knows everything--he knows more than webster's unabridged and the american encyclopedia--but whether he knows anything about a subject or not he is perfectly willing to discuss it. when he gets back he will tell you all about these candidates as serenely as if he had been acquainted with them a hundred years, though, speaking confidentially, i doubt if he ever heard of any of them till to-day. i am right well satisfied it is a good, sound, sensible ticket, and a ticket to win; but wait till he comes. in the mean time i go for george william curtis and take the chances. mark twain. he had become what mr. howells calls entirely “desouthernized” by this time. from having been of slaveholding stock, and a confederate soldier, he had become a most positive republican, a rampant abolitionist--had there been anything left to abolish. his sympathy had been always with the oppressed, and he had now become their defender. his work on the paper revealed this more and more. he wrote fewer sketches and more editorials, and the editorials were likely to be either savage assaults upon some human abuse, or fierce espousals of the weak. they were fearless, scathing, terrific. of some farmers of cohocton, who had taken the law into their own hands to punish a couple whom they believed to be a detriment to the community, he wrote: “the men who did that deed are capable of doing any low, sneaking, cowardly villainy that could be invented in perdition. they are the very bastards of the devil.” he appended a full list of their names, and added: “if the farmers of cohocton are of this complexion, what on earth must a cohocton rough be like?” but all this happened a long time ago, and we need not detail those various old interests and labors here. it is enough to say that mark twain on the express was what he had been from the beginning, and would be to the end--the zealous champion of justice and liberty; violent and sometimes wrong in his viewpoint, but never less than fearless and sincere. invariably he was for the oppressed. he had a natural instinct for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the under dog. among the best of his editorial contributions is a tribute to anson burlingame, who died february , , at st. petersburg, on his trip around the world as special ambassador for the chinese empire. in this editorial clemens endeavored to pay something of his debt to the noble statesman. he reviewed burlingame's astonishing career--the career which had closed at forty-seven, and read like a fairy-tale-and he dwelt lovingly on his hero's nobility of character. at the close he said: “he was a good man, and a very, very great man. america, lost a son, and all the world a servant, when he died.” among those early contributions to the express is a series called “around the world,” an attempt at collaboration with prof. d. r. ford, who did the actual traveling, while mark twain, writing in the first person, gave the letters his literary stamp. at least some of the contributions were written in this way, such as “adventures in hayti,” “the pacific,” and “japan.” these letters exist to-day only in the old files of the express, and indeed this is the case with most of clemens's work for that paper. it was mainly ephemeral or timely work, and its larger value has disappeared. here and there is a sentence worth remembering. of two practical jokers who sent in a marriage notice of persons not even contemplating matrimony, he said: “this deceit has been practised maliciously by a couple of men whose small souls will escape through their pores some day if they do not varnish their hides.” some of the sketches have been preserved. “journalism in tennessee,” one of the best of his wilder burlesques, is as enjoyable to-day as when written. “a curious dream” made a lasting impression on his buffalo readers, and you are pretty certain to hear of it when you mention mark twain in that city to-day. it vividly called attention to the neglect of the old north street graveyard. the gruesome vision of the ancestors deserting with their coffins on their backs was even more humiliating than amusing, and inspired a movement for reform. it has been effective elsewhere since then, and may still be read with profit--or satisfaction--for in a note at the end the reader is assured that if the cemeteries of his town are kept in good order the dream is not leveled at his town at all, but “particularly and venomously at the next town.” lxxvii. the “galaxy” mark twain's work on the express represented only a portion of his literary activities during his buffalo residence. the galaxy, an ambitious new york magazine of that day--[published by sheldon & co. at and broadway]--proposed to him that he conduct for them a humorous department. they would pay $ , a year for the work, and allow him a free hand. there was some discussion as to book rights, but the arrangement was concluded, and his first instalment, under the general title of “memoranda,” appeared in the may number, . in his introductory he outlined what the reader might expect, such as “exhaustive statistical tables,” “patent office reports,” and “complete instructions about farming, even from the grafting of the seed to the harrowing of the matured crops.” he declared that he would throw a pathos into the subject of agriculture that would surprise and delight the world. he added that the “memoranda” was not necessarily a humorous department. i would not conduct an exclusively and professedly humorous department for any one. i would always prefer to have the privilege of printing a serious and sensible remark, in case one occurred to me, without the reader's feeling obliged to consider himself outraged.... puns cannot be allowed a place in this department.... no circumstance, however dismal, will ever be considered a sufficient excuse for the admission of that last and saddest evidence of intellectual poverty, the pun. the galaxy was really a fine magazine, with the best contributors obtainable; among them justin mccarthy, s. m. b. piatt, richard grant white, and many others well known in that day, with names that still flicker here and there in its literary twilight. the new department appealed to clemens, and very soon he was writing most of his sketches for it. they were better literature, as a rule, than those published in his own paper. the first number of the “memoranda” was fairly representative of those that followed it. “the facts in the case of the great beef contract,” a manuscript which he had undertaken three years before and mislaid, was its initial contribution. besides the “beef contract,” there was a tribute to george wakeman, a well-known journalist of those days; a stricture on the rev. t. dewitt talmage, who had delivered from the pulpit an argument against workingmen occupying pews in fashionable churches; a presentment of the chinese situation in san francisco, depicting the cruel treatment of the celestial immigrant; a burlesque of the sunday-school “good little boy” story,--[“the story of the good little boy who did not prosper” and the “beef contract” are included in sketches new and old; also the chinese sketch, under the title, “disgraceful persecution of a boy.”]--and several shorter skits--and anecdotes, ten pages in all; a rather generous contract. mark twain's comment on talmage was prompted by an article in which talmage had assumed the premise that if workingmen attended the churches it would drive the better class of worshipers away. among other things he said: i have a good christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in church, and a workingman should enter the door at the other end, would smell him instantly. my friend is not to blame for the sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer for being keener on the scent than a stupid watch-dog. the fact is, if you had all the churches free, by reason of the mixing of the common people with the uncommon, you would keep one-half of christendom sick at their stomach. if you are going to kill the church thus with bad smells i will have nothing to do with this work of evangelization. commenting on this mark twain said--well, he said a good deal more than we have room for here, but a portion of his closing paragraphs is worth preserving. he compares the reverend mr. talmage with the early disciples of christ--paul and peter and the others; or, rather, he contrasts him with them. they healed the very beggars, and held intercourse with people of a villainous odor every day. if the subject of these remarks had been chosen among the original twelve apostles he would not have associated with the rest, because he could not have stood the fishy smell of some of his comrades who came from around the sea of galilee. he would have resigned his commission with some such remark as he makes in the extract quoted above: “master, if thou art going to kill the church thus with bad smells i will have nothing to do with this work of evangelization.” he is a disciple, and makes that remark to the master; the only difference is that he makes it in the nineteenth instead of the first century. talmage was immensely popular at this time, and mark twain's open attack on him must have shocked a good many galaxy readers, as perhaps his article on the chinese cruelties offended the citizens of san francisco. it did not matter. he was not likely to worry over the friends he would lose because of any stand taken for human justice. lamed said of him: “he was very far from being one who tried in any way to make himself popular.” certainly he never made any such attempt at the expense of his convictions. the first galaxy instalment was a sort of platform of principles for the campaign that was to follow. not that each month's contribution contained personal criticism, or a defense of the chinese (of whom he was always the champion as long as he lived), but a good many of them did. in the october number he began a series of letters under the general title of “goldsmith's friend abroad again,” supposed to have been written by a chinese immigrant in san francisco, detailing his experience there. in a note the author says: “no experience is set down in the following letters which had to be invented. fancy is not needed to give variety to the history of the chinaman's sojourn in america. plain fact is amply sufficient.” the letters show how the supposed chinese writer of them had set out for america, believing it to be a land whose government was based on the principle that all men are created equal, and treated accordingly; how, upon arriving in san francisco, he was kicked and bruised and beaten, and set upon by dogs, flung into jail, tried and condemned without witnesses, his own race not being allowed to testify against americans--irish-americans--in the san francisco court. they are scathing, powerful letters, and one cannot read them, even in this day of improved conditions, without feeling the hot waves of resentment and indignation which mark twain must have felt when he penned them. reverend mr. talmage was not the only divine to receive attention in the “memoranda.” the reverend mr. sabine, of new york, who had declined to hold a church burial service for the old actor, george holland, came in for the most caustic as well as the most artistic stricture of the entire series. it deserves preservation to-day, not only for its literary value, but because no finer defense of the drama, no more searching sermon on self-righteousness, has ever been put into concrete form.--[“the indignity put upon the remains of gorge holland by the rev. mr. sabine”; galaxy for february, . the reader will find it complete under appendix j, at the end of last volume.] the “little church around the corner” on twenty-ninth street received that happy title from this incident. “there is a little church around the corner that will, perhaps, permit the service,” mr. sabine had said to holland's friends. the little church did permit the service, and there was conferred upon it the new name, which it still bears. it has sheltered a long line of actor folk and their friends since then, earning thereby reverence, gratitude, and immortal memory.--[church of the transfiguration. memorial services were held there for joseph jefferson; and a memorial window, by john la farge, has been placed there in memory of edwin booth.] of the galaxy contributions a number are preserved in sketches new and old. “how i edited an agricultural paper” is one of the best of these--an excellent example of mark twain's more extravagant style of humor. it is perennially delightful; in france it has been dramatized, and is still played. a successful galaxy feature, also preserved in the sketches, was the “burlesque map of paris,” reprinted from the express. the franco-prussian war was in progress, and this travesty was particularly timely. it creates only a smile of amusement to-day, but it was all fresh and delightful then. schuyler colfax, by this time vice-president, wrote to him: “i have had the heartiest possible laugh over it, and so have all my family. you are a wicked, conscienceless wag, who ought to be punished severely.” the “official commendations,” which accompany the map, are its chief charm. they are from grant, bismarck, brigham young, and others, the best one coming from one j. smith, who says: my wife was for years afflicted with freckles, and though everything was done for her relief that could be done, all was in vain. but, sir, since her first glance at your map they have entirely left her. she has nothing but convulsions now. it is said that the “map of paris” found its way to berlin, where the american students in the beer-halls used to pretend to quarrel over it until they attracted the attention of the german soldiers that might be present. then they would wander away and leave it on the table and watch results. the soldiers would pounce upon it and lose their tempers over it; then finally abuse it and revile its author, to the satisfaction of everybody. the larger number of “memoranda” sketches have properly found oblivion to-day. they were all, or nearly all, collected by a canadian pirate, c. a. backas, in a volume bearing the title of memoranda,--[also by a harpy named john camden hotten (of london), of whom we shall hear again. hotten had already pirated the innocents, and had it on the market before routledge could bring out the authorized edition. routledge later published the “memoranda” under the title of sketches, including the contents of the jumping frog book.]--a book long ago suppressed. only about twenty of the galaxy contributions found place in sketches new and old, five years later, and some of these might have been spared as literature. “to raise poultry,” “john chinaman in new york,” and “history repeats itself” are valuable only as examples of his work at that period. the reader may consult them for himself. lxxviii. the primrose path but we are losing sight of more important things. from the very beginning mark twain's home meant always more to him than his work. the life at delaware avenue had begun with as fair a promise as any matrimonial journey ever undertaken: there seemed nothing lacking: a beautiful home, sufficient income, bright prospects--these things, with health and love; constitute married happiness. mrs. clemens wrote to her sister, mrs. crane, at the end of february: “sue, we are two as happy people as you ever saw. our days seem to be made up of only bright sunlight, with no shadow in them.” in the same letter the husband added: “livy pines and pines every day for you, and i pine and pine every day for you, and when we both of us are pining at once you would think it was a whole pine forest let loose.” to redpath, who was urging lecture engagements for the coming season, he wrote: dear red,--i am not going to lecture any more forever. i have got things ciphered down to a fraction now. i know just about what it will cost to live, and i can make the money without lecturing. therefore, old man, count me out. and still later, in may: i guess i am out of the field permanently. have got a lovely wife, a lovely house, bewitchingly furnished, a lovely carriage, and a coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-in-spiring, nothing less; and i am making more money than necessary, by considerable, and therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform? the subscriber will have to be excused for the present season at least. so they were very happy during those early months, acquiring pleasantly the education which any matrimonial experience is sure to furnish, accustoming themselves to the uses of housekeeping, to life in partnership, with all the discoveries and mental and spiritual adaptations that belong to the close association of marriage. they were far, very far, apart on many subjects. he was unpolished, untrained, impulsive, sometimes violent. twichell remembers that in the earlier days of their acquaintance he wore a slouch hat pulled down in front, and smoked a cigar that sometimes tilted up and touched the brim of it. the atmosphere and customs of frontier life, the westernisms of that day, still clung to him. mrs. clemens, on the other hand, was conservative, dainty, cultured, spiritual. he adored her as little less than a saint, and she became, indeed, his saving grace. she had all the personal refinement which he lacked, and she undertook the work of polishing and purifying her life companion. she had no wish to destroy his personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she set about it in the right way--gently, and with a tender gratitude in each achievement. she did not entirely approve of certain lines of his reading; or, rather, she did not understand them in those days. that he should be fond of history and the sciences was natural enough, but when the life of p. t. barnum, written by himself, appeared, and he sat up nights to absorb it, and woke early and lighted the lamp to follow the career of the great showman, she was at a loss to comprehend this particular literary passion, and indeed was rather jealous of it. she did not realize then his vast interest in the study of human nature, or that such a book contained what mr. howells calls “the root of the human matter,” the inner revelation of the human being at first hand. concerning his religious observances her task in the beginning was easy enough. clemens had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines of his own. his natural kindness of heart, and especially his love for his wife, inclined him toward the teachings and customs of her christian faith--unorthodox but sincere, as christianity in the langdon family was likely to be. it took very little persuasion on his wife's part to establish family prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the morning reading of a bible chapter. joe goodman, who made a trip east, and visited them during the early days of their married life, was dumfounded to see mark twain ask a blessing and join in family worship. just how long these forms continued cannot be known to-day; the time of their abandonment has perished from the recollection of any one now living. it would seem to have been the bible-reading that wrought the change. the prayer and the blessing were to him sincere and gracious; but as the readings continued he realized that he had never before considered the bible from a doctrinal point of view, as a guide to spiritual salvation. to his logical reasoning mind, a large portion of it seemed absurd: a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology. from such material humanity had built its mightiest edifice of hope, the doctrines of its faith. after a little while he could stand it no longer. “livy,” he said one day, “you may keep this up if you want to, but i must ask you to excuse me from it. it is making me a hypocrite. i don't believe in this bible. it contradicts my reason. i can't sit here and listen to it, letting you believe that i regard it, as you do, in the light of gospel, the word of god.” he was moved to write an article on the human idea of god, ancient and modern. it contained these paragraphs: the difference in importance, between the god of the bible and the god of the present day, cannot be described, it can only be vaguely and inadequately figured to the mind.... if you make figures to represent the earth and moon, and allow a space of one inch between them, to represent the four hundred thousand miles of distance which lies between the two bodies, the map will have to be eleven miles long in order to bring in the nearest fixed star. --[his figures were far too small. a map drawn on the scale of , miles to the inch would need to be , miles long to take in both the earth and the nearest fixed star. on such a map the earth would be one-fiftieth of an inch in diameter--the size of a small grain of sand.]--so one cannot put the modern heavens on a map, nor the modern god; but the bible god and the bible heavens can be set down on a slate and yet not be discommoded.... the difference between that universe and the modern one revealed by science is as the difference between a dust-flecked ray in a barn and the sublime arch of the milky way in the skies. its god was strictly proportioned to its dimensions. his sole solicitude was about a handful of truculent nomads. he worried and fretted over them in a peculiarly and distractingly human way. one day he coaxed and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried and lashed them beyond their deserts. he sulked, he cursed, he raged, he grieved, according to his mood and the circumstances, but all to no purpose; his efforts were all vain, he could not govern them. when the fury was on him he was blind to all reason--he not only slaughtered the offender, but even his harmless little children and dumb cattle.... to trust the god of the bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master; to trust the true god is to trust a being who has uttered no promises, but whose beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of his colossal universe is proof that he is at least steadfast to his purposes; whose unwritten laws, so far as they affect man, being equal and impartial, show that he is just and fair; these things, taken together, suggest that if he shall ordain us to live hereafter, he will still be steadfast, just, and fair toward us. we shall not need to require anything more. it seems mild enough, obvious, even orthodox, now--so far have we traveled in forty years. but such a declaration then would have shocked a great number of sincerely devout persons. his wife prevailed upon him not to print it. she respected his honesty--even his reasoning, but his doubts were a long grief to her, nevertheless. in time she saw more clearly with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more with the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the proportions of created things. they did not mingle much or long with the social life of buffalo. they received and returned calls, attended an occasional reception; but neither of them found such things especially attractive in those days, so they remained more and more in their own environment. there is an anecdote which seems to belong here. one sunday morning clemens noticed smoke pouring from the upper window of the house across the street. the owner and his wife, comparatively newcomers, were seated upon the veranda, evidently not aware of impending danger. the clemens household thus far had delayed calling on them, but clemens himself now stepped briskly across the street. bowing with leisurely politeness, he said: “my name is clemens; we ought to have called on you before, and i beg your pardon for intruding now in this informal way, but your house is on fire.” almost the only intimate friends they had in buffalo were in the family of david gray, the poet-editor of the courier. gray was a gentle, lovable man. “the gentlest spirit and the loveliest that ever went clothed in clay, since sir galahad laid him to rest,” mark twain once said of him. both gray and clemens were friends of john hay, and their families soon became intimate. perhaps, in time, the clemens household would have found other as good friends in the buffalo circles; but heavy clouds that had lain unseen just beyond the horizon during those earlier months of marriage rose suddenly into view, and the social life, whatever it might have become, was no longer a consideration. lxxix. the old human story jervis langdon was never able to accept his son-in-law's invitation to the new home. his health began to fail that spring, and at the end of march, with his physician and mrs. langdon, he made a trip to the south. in a letter written at richmond he said, “i have thrown off all care,” and named a list of the four great interests in which he was involved. under “number ,” he included “everything,” adding, “so you see how good i am to follow the counsel of my children.” he closed: “samuel, i love your wife and she loves me. i think it is only fair that you should know it, but you need not flare up. i loved her before you did, and she loved me before she did you, and has not ceased since. i see no way but for you to make the most of it.” he was already a very ill man, and this cheerful letter was among the last he ever wrote. he was absent six weeks and seemed to improve, but suffered an attack early in may; in june his condition became critical. clemens and his wife were summoned to elmira, and joined in the nursing, day and night. clemens surprised every one by his ability as a nurse. his delicacy and thoughtfulness were unfailing; his original ways of doing things always amused and interested the patient. in later years mark twain once said: “how much of the nursing did i do? my main watch was from midnight to four in the morning, nearly four hours. my other watch was a midday watch, and i think it was nearly three hours. the two sisters divided the remaining seventeen hours of the twenty-four hours between them, and each of them tried generously and persistently to swindle the other out of a part of her watch. i went to bed early every night, and tried to get sleep enough by midnight to fit me for my work, but it was always a failure. i went on watch sleepy and remained miserable, sleepy, and wretched, straight along through the four hours. i can still see myself sitting by that bed in the melancholy stillness of the sweltering night, mechanically waving a palm-leaf fan over the drawn, white face of the patient. i can still recall my noddings, my fleeting unconsciousness, when the fan would come to a standstill in my hand, and i woke up with a start and a hideous shock. during all that dreary time i began to watch for the dawn long before it came. when the first faint gray showed through the window-blinds i felt as no doubt a castaway feels when the dim threads of the looked-for ship appear against the sky. i was well and strong, but i was a man, afflicted with a man's infirmity--lack of endurance.” he always dealt with himself in this unsparing way; but those who were about him then have left a different story. it was all without avail. mr. langdon rallied, and early in july there was hope for his recovery. he failed again, and on the afternoon of the th of august he died. to mrs. clemens, delicate and greatly worn with the anxiety and strain of watching, the blow was a crushing one. it was the beginning of a series of disasters which would mark the entire remaining period of their buffalo residence. there had been a partial plan for spending the summer in england, and a more definite one for joining the twichells in the adirondacks. both of these projects were now abandoned. mrs. clemens concluded that she would be better at home than anywhere else, and invited an old school friend, a miss emma nye, to visit her. but the shadow of death had not been lifted from the clemens household. miss nye presently fell ill with typhoid fever. there followed another long period of anxiety and nursing, ending with the death of the visitor in the new home, september th. the young wife was now in very delicate health; genuinely ill, in fact. the happy home had become a place of sorrow-of troubled nights and days. another friend came to cheer them, and on this friend's departure mrs. clemens drove to the railway station. it was a hurried trip over rough streets to catch the train. she was prostrated on her return, and a little later, november , , her first child, langdon, was prematurely born. a dangerous illness followed, and complete recovery was long delayed. but on the th the crisis seemed passed, and the new father wrote a playful letter to the twichells, as coming from the late arrival: dear uncle and aunt,--i came into the world on the th inst., and consequently am about five days old now. i have had wretched health ever since i made my appearance... i am not corpulent, nor am i robust in any way. at birth i only weighed four and one-half pounds with my clothes on--and the clothes were the chief feature of the weight, too, i am obliged to confess, but i am doing finely, all things considered.... my little mother is very bright and cheery, and i guess she is pretty happy, but i don't know what about. she laughs a great deal, notwithstanding she is sick abed. p. s.--father says i had better write because you will be more interested in me, just now, than in the rest of the family. a week later clemens, as himself, wrote: livy is up and the prince keeps her busy and anxious these latter days and nights, but i am a bachelor up-stairs and don't have to jump up and get the soothing sirup, though i would as soon do it as not, i assure you. (livy will be certain to read this letter.) tell harmony that i do hold the baby, and do it pretty handily too, though with occasional apprehensions that his loose head will fall off. i don't have to quiet him; he hardly ever utters a cry. he is always thinking about something. he is a patient, good little baby. further along he refers to one of his reforms: smoke? i always smoke from three till five on sunday afternoons, and in new york, the other day, i smoked a week, day and night. but when livy is well i smoke only those two hours on sunday. i'm boss of the habit now, and shall never let it boss me any more. originally i quit solely on livy's account (not that i believed there was the faintest reason in the matter, but just as i would deprive myself of sugar in my coffee if she wished it, or quit wearing socks if she thought them immoral), and i stick to it yet on livy's account, and shall always continue to do so without a pang. but somehow it seems a pity that you quit, for mrs. t. didn't mind it, if i remember rightly. ah, it is turning one's back upon a kindly providence to spurn away from us the good creature he sent to make the breath of life a luxury as well as a necessity, enjoyable as well as useful. to go quit smoking, when there ain't any sufficient excuse for it!--why, my old boy, when they used to tell me i would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile words upon; they little knew how trivial and valueless i would regard a decade that had no smoking in it! but i won't persuade you, twichell--i won't until i see you again--but then we'll smoke for a week together, and then shut off again. lxxx. literary projects the success of the innocents naturally made a thrifty publisher like bliss anxious for a second experiment. he had begun early in the year to talk about another book, but nothing had come of it beyond a project or two, more or less hazy and unpursued. clemens at one time developed a plan for a noah's ark book, which was to detail the cruise of the ark in diaries kept by various members of it-shem, ham, and the others. he really wrote some of it at the time, and it was an idea he never entirely lost track of. all along among his manuscripts appear fragments from those ancient voyagers. one of the earlier entries will show the style and purpose of the undertaking. it is from shem's record: friday: papa's birthday. he is years old. we celebrated it in a big, black tent. principal men of the tribe present. afterward they were shown over the ark, which was looking desolate and empty and dreary on account of a misunderstanding with the workmen about wages. methuselah was as free with his criticisms as usual, and as voluble and familiar, which i and my brothers do not like; for we are past our one hundredth year and married. he still calls me shemmy, just as he did when i was a child of sixty. i am still but a youth, it is true, but youth has its feelings, and i do not like this.... saturday: keeping the sabbath. sunday: papa has yielded the advance and everybody is hard at work. the shipyard is so crowded that the men hinder each other; everybody hurrying or being hurried; the rush and confusion and shouting and wrangling are astonishing to our family, who have always been used to a quiet, country life. it was from this germ that in a later day grew the diaries of adam and eve, though nothing very satisfactory ever came of this preliminary attempt. the author had faith in it, however. to bliss he wrote: i mean to take plenty of time and pains with the noah's ark book; maybe it will be several years before it is all written, but it will be a perfect lightning striker when it is done. you can have the first say (that is plain enough) on that or any other book i may prepare for the press, as long as you deal in a fair, open, and honorable way with me. i do not think you will ever find me doing otherwise with you. i can get a book ready for you any time you want it; but you can't want one before this time next year, so i have plenty of time. bliss was only temporarily appeased. he realized that to get a book ready by the time he wanted it-a book of sufficient size and importance to maintain the pace set by the innocents meant rather more immediate action than his author seemed to contemplate. futhermore, he knew that other publishers were besieging the author of the innocents; a disquieting thought. in early july, when mr. langdon's condition had temporarily improved, bliss had come to elmira and proposed a book which should relate the author's travels and experiences in the far west. it was an inviting subject, and clemens, by this time more attracted by the idea of authorship and its rewards, readily enough agreed to undertake the volume. he had been offered half profits, and suggested that the new contract be arranged upon these terms. bliss, figuring on a sale of , copies, proposed seven and one-half per cent. royalty as an equivalent, and the contract was so arranged. in after-years, when the cost of manufacture and paper had become greatly reduced, clemens, with but a confused notion of business details, believed he had been misled by bliss in this contract, and was bitter and resentful accordingly. the figures remain, however, to show that bliss dealt fairly. seven and one-half per cent. of a subscription book did represent half profits up to , copies when the contract was drawn; but it required ten years to sell that quantity, and in that time conditions had changed. bliss could hardly foresee that these things would be so, and as he was dead when the book touched the , mark he could not explain or readjust matters, whatever might have been his inclination. clemens was pleased enough with the contract when it was made. to orion he wrote july ( ): per contract i must have another six-hundred-page book ready for my publisher january st, and i only began it to-day. the subject of it is a secret, because i may possibly change it. but as it stands i propose to do up nevada and california, beginning with the trip across the country in the stage. have you a memorandum of the route we took, or the names of any of the stations we stopped at? do you remember any of the scenes, names, incidents, or adventures of the coach trip?--for i remember next to nothing about the matter. jot down a foolscap page of items for me. i wish i could have two days' talk with you. i suppose i am to get the biggest copyright this time ever paid on a subscription book in this country. the work so promptly begun made little progress. hard days of illness and sorrow followed, and it was not until september that it was really under way. his natural enthusiasm over any new undertaking possessed him. on the th he wrote bliss: during the past week i have written the first four chapters of the book, and i tell you 'the innocents abroad' will have to get up early to beat it. it will be a book that will jump straight into continental celebrity the first month it is issued. he prophesied a sale of , copies during the first twelve months and declared, “i see the capabilities of the subject.” but further disasters, even then impending, made continued effort impossible; the prospect of the new book for a time became gloomy, the idea of it less inspiring. other plans presented themselves, and at one time he thought of letting the galaxy publishers get out a volume of his sketches. in october he wrote bliss that he was “driveling along tolerably fair on the book, getting off from twelve to twenty pages of manuscript a day.” bliss naturally discouraged the galaxy idea, and realizing that the new book might be long delayed, agreed to get out a volume of miscellany sufficiently large and important for subscription sales. he was doubtful of the wisdom of this plan, and when clemens suddenly proposed a brand-new scheme his publisher very readily agreed to hold back the publication of sketches indefinitely. the new book was to be adventures in the diamond mines of south africa, then newly opened and of wide public interest. clemens did not propose to visit the mines himself, but to let another man do the traveling, make the notes, and write or tell him the story, after which clemens would enlarge and elaborate it in his own fashion. his adaptation of the letters of professor ford, a year earlier, had convinced him that his plan would work out successfully on a larger scale; he fixed upon his old friend, j. h. riley, of washington--[“riley-newspaper correspondent.” see sketches.]--(earlier of san francisco), as the proper person to do the traveling. at the end of november he wrote bliss: i have put my greedy hands upon the best man in america for my purpose, and shall start him to the diamond field in south africa within a fortnight at my expense... that the book will have a perfectly beautiful sale. he suggested that bliss advance riley's expense money, the amount to be deducted from the first royalty returns; also he proposed an increased royalty, probably in view of the startling splendor of the new idea. bliss was duly impressed, and the agreement was finally made on a basis of eight and one-half per cent., with an advance of royalty sufficient to see riley to south africa and return. clemens had not yet heard from riley definitely when he wrote his glowing letter to bliss. he took it for granted that riley, always an adventurous sort, would go. when riley wrote him that he felt morally bound to the alta, of which he was then washington correspondent, also in certain other directions till the end of the session, clemens wrote him at great length, detailing his scheme in full and urging him to write instantly to the alta and others, asking a release on the ground of being offered a rare opportunity to improve his fortunes. you know right well that i would not have you depart a hair from any obligation for any money. the boundless confidence that i have in you is born of a conviction of your integrity in small as well as in great things. i know plenty of men whose integrity i would trust to here, but not off yonder in africa. his proposal, in brief, to riley was that the latter should make the trip to africa without expense to himself, collect memoranda, and such diamond mines as might be found lying about handy. upon his return he was to take up temporary residence in the clemens household until the book was finished, after which large benefits were to accrue to everybody concerned. in the end riley obtained a release from his obligations and was off for the diamond mines and fortune. poor fellow! he was faithful in his mission, and it is said that he really located a mining claim that would have made him and his independent for all time to come; but returning home with his precious memoranda and the news of good fortune, he accidentally wounded himself with a fork while eating; blood-poisoning set in (they called it cancer then), and he was only able to get home to die. his memoranda were never used, his mining claim was never identified. certainly, death was closely associated with mark twain's fortunes during those earlier days of his married life. on the whole the buffalo residence was mainly a gloomy one; its ventures were attended by ill-fortune. for some reason mark twain's connection with the express, while it had given the paper a wide reputation, had not largely increased its subscription. perhaps his work on it was too varied and erratic. nasby, who had popularized the toledo blade, kept steadily to one line. his farmer public knew always just what to expect when their weekly edition arrived. clemens and his wife dreamed of a new habitation, and new faces and surroundings. they agreed to offer their home and his interests in the express for sale. they began to talk of hartford, where twichell lived, and where orion clemens and his wife had recently located. mark twain's new fortunes had wrought changes in the affairs of his relatives. already, before his marriage, he had prospected towns here and there with a view to finding an eastern residence for his mother and sister, and he had kept orion's welfare always in mind. when pamela and her daughter came to his wedding he told them of a little city by the name of fredonia (new york), not far from buffalo, where he thought they might find a pleasant home. “i went in there by night and out by night,” he said, “so i saw none of it, but i had an intelligent, attractive audience. prospect fredonia and let me know what it is like. try to select a place where a good many funerals pass. ma likes funerals. if you can pick a good funeral corner she will be happy.” it was in her later life that jane clemens had developed this particular passion. she would consult the morning paper for any notice of obsequies and attend those that were easy of access. watching the processions go by gave her a peculiar joy. mrs. moffett and her daughter did go to fredonia immediately following the wedding. they found it residentially attractive, and rented a house before returning to st. louis, a promptness that somewhat alarmed the old lady, who did not altogether fancy the idea of being suddenly set down in a strange house, in a strange land, even though it would be within hailing distance of sam and his new wife. perhaps the fredonia funerals were sufficiently numerous and attractive, for she soon became attached to the place, and entered into the spirit of the life there, joining its temperance crusades, and the like, with zest and enjoyment. onion remained in st. louis, but when bliss established a paper called the publisher, and wanted an editor, he was chosen for the place, originally offered to his brother; the latter, writing to onion, said: if you take the place with an air of perfect confidence in yourself, never once letting anything show in your bearing but a quiet, modest, entire, and perfect confidence in your ability to do pretty much anything in the world, bliss will think you are the very man he needs; but don't show any shadow of timidity or unsoldierly diffidence, for that sort of thing is fatal to advancement. i warn you thus because you are naturally given to knocking your pot over in this way, when a little judicious conduct would make it boil. lxxxi. some further literary matters meantime the innocents abroad had continued to prosper. its author ranked mainly as a humorist, but of such colossal proportions that his contemporaries had seemed to dwindle; the mighty note of the “frog of calaveras” had dwarfed a score of smaller peepers. at the end of a year from its date of publication the book had sold up to , and was continuing at the rate of several thousand monthly. “you are running it in staving, tiptop, first-class style,” clemens wrote to bliss. “on the average ten people a day come and hunt me up to tell me i am a benefactor! i guess that is a part of the program we didn't expect, in the first place.” apparently the book appealed to readers of every grade. one hundred and fifteen copies were in constant circulation at the mercantile library, in new york, while in the most remote cabins of america it was read and quoted. jack van nostrand, making a long horseback tour of colorado, wrote: i stopped a week ago in a ranch but a hundred miles from nowhere. the occupant had just two books: the bible and the innocents abroad--the former in good repair. across the ocean the book had found no less favor, and was being translated into many and strange tongues. by what seems now some veritable magic its author's fame had become literally universal. the consul at hongkong, discussing english literature with a chinese acquaintance, a mandarin, mentioned the pilgrim's progress. “yes, indeed, i have read it!” the mandarin said, eagerly. “we are enjoying it in china, and shall have it soon in our own language. it is by mark twain.” in england the book had an amazing vogue from the beginning, and english readers were endeavoring to outdo the americans in appreciation. indeed, as a rule, english readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an understanding of mark twain's literary value with greater promptness than did the same class of readers at home. there were exceptions, of course. there were english critics who did not take mark twain seriously, there were american critics who did. among the latter was a certain william ward, an editor of a paper down in macon, georgia--the beacon. ward did not hold a place with the great magazine arbiters of literary rank. he was only an obscure country editor, but he wrote like a prophet. his article--too long to quote in full--concerned american humorists in general, from washington irving, through john phoenix, philander doesticks, sut lovingwood, artemus ward, josh billings and petroleum v. nasby, down to mark twain. with the exception of the first and last named he says of them: they have all had, or will have, their day. some of them are resting beneath the sod, and others still live whose work will scarcely survive them. since irving no humorist in prose has held the foundation of a permanent fame except it be mark twain, and this, as in the case of irving, is because he is a pure writer. aside from any subtle mirth that lurks through his composition, the grace and finish of his more didactic and descriptive sentences indicate more than mediocrity. the writer then refers to mark twain's description of the sphinx, comparing it with bulwer's, which he thinks may have influenced it. he was mistaken in this, for clemens had not read bulwer--never could read him at any length. of the english opinions, that of the saturday review was perhaps most doubtful. it came along late in , and would hardly be worth recalling if it were not for a resulting, or collateral, interest. clemens saw notice of this review before he saw the review itself. a paragraph in the boston advertiser spoke of the saturday review as treating the absurdities of the innocents from a serious standpoint. the paragraph closed: we can imagine the delight of the humorist in reading this tribute to his power; and indeed it is so amusing in itself that he can hardly do better than reproduce the article in full in his next monthly “memoranda.” the old temptation to hoax his readers prompted mark twain to “reproduce” in the galaxy, not the review article, which he had not yet seen, but an imaginary review article, an article in which the imaginary reviewer would be utterly devoid of any sense of humor and treat the most absurd incidents of the new pilgrim's progress as if set down by the author in solemn and serious earnest. the pretended review began: lord macaulay died too soon. we never felt this so deeply as when we finished the last chapter of the above-named extravagant work. macaulay died too soon; for none but he could mete out complete and comprehensive justice to the insolence, the impudence, the presumption, the mendacity, and, above all, the majestic ignorance of this author. the review goes on to cite cases of the author's gross deception. it says: let the cultivated english student of human nature picture to himself this mark twain as a person capable of doing the following described things; and not only doing them, but, with incredible innocence, printing them tranquilly and calmly in a book. for instance: he states that he entered a hair-dresser's in paris to get a shave, and the first “rake” the barber gave him with his razor it loosened his “hide,” and lifted him out of the chair. this is unquestionably extravagant. in florence he was so annoyed by beggars that he pretends to have seized and eaten one in a frantic spirit of revenge. there is, of course, no truth in this. he gives at full length the theatrical program, seventeen or eighteen hundred years old, which he professes to have found in the ruins of the colosseum, among the dirt-and mold and rubbish. it is a sufficient comment upon this subject to remark that even a cast- iron program would not have lasted so long under the circumstances. there were two and one-half pages of this really delightful burlesque which the author had written with huge-enjoyment, partly as a joke on the review, partly to trick american editors, who he believed would accept it as a fresh and startling proof of the traditional english lack of humor. but, as in the early sage-brush hoaxes, he rather overdid the thing. readers and editors readily enough accepted it as genuine, so far as having come from the saturday review; but most of them, regarded it as a delicious bit of humor which mark twain himself had taken seriously, and was therefore the one sold. this was certainly startling, and by no means gratifying. in the next issue he undertook that saddest of all performances with tongue or pen: he explained his joke, and insisted on the truth of the explanation. then he said: if any man doubts my word now i will kill him. no, i will not kill him; i will win his money. i will bet him twenty to one, and let any new york publisher hold the stakes, that the statements i have above made as to the authorship of the article in question are entirely true. but the cincinnati enquirer persisted in continuing the joke--in “rubbing it in,” as we say now. the enquirer declared that mark twain had been intensely mortified at having been so badly taken in; that his explanation in the galaxy was “ingenious, but unfortunately not true.” the enquirer maintained that the saturday review of october , , did contain the article exactly as printed in the “memoranda,” and advised mark twain to admit that he was sold, and say no more about it. this was enraging. mark twain had his own ideas as to how far a joke might be carried without violence, and this was a good way beyond the limits. he denounced the enquirer's statement as a “pitiful, deliberate falsehood,” in his anger falling into the old-time phrasing of newspaper editorial abuse. he offered to bet them a thousand dollars in cash that they could not prove their assertions, and asked pointedly, in conclusion: “will they swallow that falsehood ignominiously, or will they send an agent to the galaxy office? i think the cincinnati enquirer must be edited by children.” he promised that if they did not accept his financial proposition he would expose them in the next issue. the incident closed there. he was prevented, by illness in his household, from contributing to the next issue, and the second issue following was his final “memoranda” installment. so the matter perished and was forgotten. it was his last editorial hoax. perhaps he concluded that hoaxes in any form were dangerous playthings; they were too likely to go off at the wrong end. it was with the april number ( ) that he concluded his relations with the galaxy. in a brief valedictory he gave his reasons: i have now written for the galaxy a year. for the last eight months, with hardly an interval, i have had for my fellows and comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick! during these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and malignantly threatened two others. all this i have experienced, yet all the time have been under contract to furnish “humorous” matter, once a month, for this magazine. i am speaking the exact truth in the above details. please to put yourself in my place and contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation. i think that some of the “humor” i have written during this period could have been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the solemnity of the occasion. the “memoranda” will cease permanently with this issue of the magazine. to be a pirate on a low salary, and with no share in the profits of the business, used to be my idea of an uncomfortable occupation, but i have other views now. to be a monthly humorist in a cheerless time is drearier. without doubt he felt a glad relief in being rid of this recurrent, imperative demand. he wrote to orion that he had told the galaxy people he would not write another article, long or short, for less than $ , and preferred not to do it at all. the galaxy department and the work on the express were mark twain's farewell to journalism; for the “memoranda” was essentially journalistic, almost as much so, and as liberally, as his old-time enterprise position. apparently he wrote with absolute freedom, unhampered by editorial policy or restriction. the result was not always pleasant, and it was not always refined. we may be certain that it was because of mrs. clemens's heavy burdens that year, and her consequent inability to exert a beneficent censorship, that more than one--more than a dozen--of the “memoranda” contributions were permitted to see the light of print. as a whole, the literary result of mark twain's buffalo period does not reach the high standard of the innocents abroad. it was a retrogression--in some measure a return to his earlier form. it had been done under pressure, under heavy stress of mind, as he said. also there was another reason; neither the subject treated nor the environment of labor had afforded that lofty inspiration which glorified every step of the quaker city journey. buffalo was a progressive city--a beautiful city, as american cities go--but it was hardly an inspiring city for literature, and a dull, dingy newspaper office was far, very far, from the pleasant decks of the quaker city, the camp-fires of syria, the blue sky and sea of the mediterranean. lxxxii. the writing of “roughing it” the third book published by mark twa in was not the western book he was preparing for bliss. it was a small volume, issued by sheldon & co., entitled mark twain's autobiography (burlesque) and first romance. the romance was the “awful, terrible medieval romance” which had appeared in the express at the beginning of . the burlesque autobiography had not previously appeared. the two made a thin little book, which, in addition to its literary features, had running through it a series of full-page, irrelevant pictures---cartoons of the erie railroad ring, presented as illustrations of a slightly modified version of “the house that jack built.” the “house” was the erie headquarters, the purpose being to illustrate the swindling methods of the ring. the faces of jay gould, james fisk, jr., john t. hoffman, and others of the combination, are chiefly conspicuous. the publication was not important, from any standpoint. literary burlesque is rarely important, and it was far from mark twain's best form of expression. a year or two later he realized the mistake of this book, bought in the plates and destroyed them. meantime the new western book was at a standstill. to orion, in march, he wrote: i am still nursing livy night and day. i am nearly worn out. we shall go to elmira ten days hence (if livy can travel on a mattress then), and stay there until i finish the california book, say three months. but i can't begin work right away when i get there; must have a week's rest, for i have been through thirty days' terrific siege. he promised to forward some of the manuscript soon. hold on four or five days and i will see if i can get a few chapters fixed to send to bliss.... i have offered this house and the express for sale, and when we go to elmira we leave here for good. i shall not select a new home till the book is finished, but we have little doubt that hartford will be the place. he disposed of his interest in the express in april, at a sacrifice of $ , on the purchase price. mrs. clemens and the baby were able to travel, and without further delay he took them to elmira, to quarry farm. quarry farm, the home of mrs. clemens's sister, mrs. theodore crane, is a beautiful hilltop, with a wide green slope, overlooking the hazy city and the chemung river, beyond which are the distant hills. it was bought quite incidentally by mr. and mrs. langdon, who, driving by one evening, stopped to water the horses and decided that it would make a happy summer retreat, where the families could combine their housekeeping arrangements during vacation days. when the place had first been purchased, they had debated on a name for it. they had tried several, among them “go-as-you-please hall,” “crane's nest,” and had finally agreed upon “rest and be thankful.” but this was only its official name. there was an abandoned quarry up the hill, a little way from the house, and the title suggested by thomas k. beecher came more naturally to the tongue. the place became quarry farm, and so remains. clemens and his wife had fully made up their minds to live in hartford. they had both conceived an affection for the place, clemens mainly because of twichell, while both of them yearned for the congenial literary and social atmosphere, and the welcome which they felt awaited them. hartford was precisely what buffalo in that day was not--a home for the literary man. it held a distinguished group of writers, most of whom the clemenses already knew. furthermore, with bliss as publisher of the mark twain books, it held their chief business interests. their plans for going were not very definite as to time. clemens found that his work went better at the farm, and that mrs. clemens and the delicate baby daily improved. they decided to remain at quarry farm for the summer, their first summer in that beautiful place which would mean so much to them in the years to come. it was really joe goodman, as much as anything, that stirred a fresh enthusiasm in the new book. goodman arrived just when the author's spirits were at low ebb. “joe,” he said, “i guess i'm done for. i don't appear to be able to get along at all with my work, and what i do write does not seem valuable. i'm afraid i'll never be able to reach the standard of 'the innocents abroad' again. here is what i have written, joe. read it, and see if that is your opinion.” goodman took the manuscript and seated himself in a chair, while clemens went over to a table and pretended to work. goodman read page after page, critically, and was presently absorbed in it. clemens watched him furtively, till he could stand it no longer. then he threw down his pen, exclaiming: “i knew it! i knew it! i am writing nothing but rot. you have sat there all this time reading without a smile, and pitying the ass i am making of myself. but i am not wholly to blame. i am not strong enough to fight against fate. i have been trying to write a funny book, with dead people and sickness everywhere. mr. langdon died first, then a young lady in our house, and now mrs. clemens and the baby have been at the point of death all winter! oh, joe, i wish to god i could die myself!” “mark,” said joe, “i was reading critically, not for amusement, and so far as i have read, and can judge, this is one of the best things you have ever written. i have found it perfectly absorbing. you are doing a great book!” clemens knew that goodman never spoke except from conviction, and the verdict was to him like a message of life handed down by an archangel. he was a changed man instantly. he was all enthusiasm, full of his subject, eager to go on. he proposed to pay goodman a salary to stay there and keep him company and furnish him with inspiration--the pacific coast atmosphere and vernacular, which he feared had slipped away from him. goodman declined the salary, but extended his visit as long as his plans would permit, and the two had a happy time together, recalling old comstock days. every morning, for a month or more, they used to tramp over the farm. they fell into the habit of visiting the old quarry and pawing over the fragments in search of fossil specimens. both of them had a poetic interest in geology, its infinite remotenesses and its testimonies. without scientific knowledge, they took a deep pleasure in accumulating a collection, which they arranged on boards torn from an old fence, until they had enough specimens to fill a small museum. they imagined they could distinguish certain geological relations and families, and would talk about trilobites, the old red sandstone period, and the azoic age, or follow random speculation to far-lying conclusions, developing vague humors of phrase and fancy, having altogether a joyful good time. another interest that developed during goodman's stay was in one ruloff, who was under death sentence for a particularly atrocious murder. the papers were full of ruloff's prodigious learning. it was said that he had in preparation a work showing the unity of all languages. goodman and clemens agreed that ruloff's death would be a great loss to mankind, even though he was clearly a villain and deserved his sentence. they decided that justice would be served just as well if some stupid person were hung in his place, and following out this fancy clemens one morning put aside his regular work and wrote an article to the tribune, offering to supply a substitute for ruloff. he signed it simply “samuel langhorne,” and it was published as a serious communication, without comment, so far as the tribune was concerned. other papers, however, took it up and it was widely copied and commented upon. apparently no one ever identified, mark twain with the authorship of the letter, which, by the way, does not appear to have prolonged ruloff's earthly usefulness.--[the reader will find the ruloff letter in full under appendix k, at the end of last volume.] life at the farm may have furnished agricultural inspiration, for clemens wrote something about horace greeley's farming, also a skit concerning henry ward beecher's efforts in that direction. of mr. beecher's farming he said: “his strawberries would be a comfortable success if robins would eat turnips.” the article amused beecher, and perhaps greeley was amused too, for he wrote: mark,--you are mistaken as to my criticisms on your farming. i never publicly made any, while you have undertaken to tell the exact cost per pint of my potatoes and cabbages, truly enough the inspiration of genius. if you will really betake yourself to farming, or even to telling what you know about it, rather than what you don't know about mine, i will not only refrain from disparaging criticism, but will give you my blessing. yours, horace greeley. the letter is in mr. greeley's characteristic scrawl, and no doubt furnished inspiration for the turnip story in 'roughing it', also the model for the pretended facsimile of greeley's writing. altogether that was a busy, enterprising summer at quarry farm. by the middle of may, clemens wrote to bliss that he had twelve hundred manuscript pages of the new book already written, and that he was turning out the remainder at the rate of from thirty to sixty-five per day. he was in high spirits by this time. the family health had improved, and prospects were bright. i have enough manuscript on hand now to make (allowing for engravings) about four hundred pages of the book, consequently am two-thirds done. i intended to run up to hartford about the middle of the week and take it along, but i find myself so thoroughly interested in my work now (a thing i have not experienced for months) that i can't bear to lose a single moment of the inspiration. so i will stay here and peg away as long as it lasts. my present idea is to write as much more as i have already written, and then collect from the mass the very best chapters and discard the rest. when i get it done i want to see the man who will begin to read it and not finish it. nothing grieves me now; nothing troubles me, nothing bothers me or gets my attention. i don't think of anything but the book, and don't have an hour's unhappiness about anything, and don't care two cents whether school keeps or not. the book will be done soon now. it will be a starchy book; the dedication will be worth the price of the volume. thus: to the late cain this book is dedicated not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little respect; not on account of sympathy for him, for his bloody deed places him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking, but out of a mere humane commiseration for him, in that it was his misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent insanity plea. probably mrs. clemens diverted this picturesque dedication in favor of the higbie inscription, or perhaps the author never really intended the literary tribute to cain. the impulse that inspired it, however, was characteristic. in a postscript to this letter he adds: my stock is looking up. i am getting the bulliest offers for books and almanacs; am flooded with lecture invitations, and one periodical offers me $ , cash for twelve articles of any length, and on any subject, treated humorously or otherwise. he set in to make hay while the sun was shining. in addition to the california book, which was now fast nearing completion, he discussed a scheme with goodman for a six-hundred-page work which they were to do jointly; he planned and wrote one or two scenes from a western play, to be built from episodes in the new book (one of them was the “arkansas” incident, related in chapter xxxi); he perfected one of his several inventions--an automatically adjusting vest-strap; he wrote a number of sketches, made an occasional business trip to new york and hartford; prospected the latter place for a new home. the shadow which had hung over the sojourn in buffalo seemed to have lifted. he had promised bliss some contributions for his new paper, and in june he sent three sketches. in an accompanying letter he says: here are three articles which you may have if you will pay $ for the lot. if you don't want them i'll sell them to the galaxy, but not for a cent less than three times the money.... if you take them pay one-tenth of the $ in weekly instalments to orion till he has received it all. he reconsidered his resolution not to lecture again, and closed with redpath for the coming season. he found himself in a lecture-writing fever. he wrote three of them in succession: one on artemus ward, another on “reminiscences of some pleasant characters i have met,” and a third one based on chapters from the new book. of the “reminiscence” lecture he wrote redpath: “it covers my whole acquaintance; kings, lunatics, idiots, and all.” immediately afterward he wrote that he had prepared still another lecture, “title to be announced later.” “during july i'll decide which one i like best,” he said. he instructed redpath not to make engagements for him to lecture in churches. “i never made a success of a lecture in a church yet. people are afraid to laugh in a church.” redpath was having difficulties in arranging a circuit to suit him. clemens had prejudices against certain towns and localities, prejudices that were likely to change overnight. in august he wrote: dear red,--i am different from other women; my mind changes oftener. people who have no mind can easily be stead fast and firm, but when a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as i am, every heavy sea of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo. see? therefore, if you will notice, one week i am likely to give rigid instructions to confine me to new england; the next week send me to arizona; the next week withdraw my name; the next week give you full, untrammeled swing; and the week following modify it. you must try to keep the run of my mind, redpath that is your business, being the agent, and it always was too many for me.... now about the west this week, i am willing that you shall retain all the western engagements. but what i shall want next week is still with god. yours, mark. he was in hartford when this letter was written, arranging for residence there and the removal of his belongings. he finally leased the fine hooker house on ford street, in that pleasant seclusion known as nook farm--the literary part of hartford, which included the residence of charles dudley warner and harriet beecher stowe. he arranged for possession of the premises october st. so the new home was settled upon; then learning that nasby was to be in boston, he ran over to that city for a few days of recreation after his season's labors. preparations for removal to hartford were not delayed. the buffalo property was disposed of, the furnishings were packed and shipped away. the house which as bride and groom they had entered so happily was left empty and deserted, never to be entered by them again. in the year and a half of their occupancy it had seen well-nigh all the human round, all that goes to make up the happiness and the sorrow of life. lxxxiii. lecturing days life in hartford, in the autumn of , began in the letter, rather than in the spirit. the newcomers were received with a wide, neighborly welcome, but the disorder of establishment and the almost immediate departure of the head of the household on a protracted lecturing tour were disquieting things; the atmosphere of the clemens home during those early hartford days gave only a faint promise of its future loveliness. as in a far later period, mark twain had resorted to lecturing to pay off debt. he still owed a portion of his share in the express; also he had been obliged to obtain an advance from the lecture bureau. he dreaded, as always, the tedium of travel, the clatter of hotel life, the monotony of entertainment, while, more than most men, he loved the tender luxury of home. it was only that he could not afford to lose the profit offered on the platform. his season opened at bethlehem, pennsylvania, october th, and his schedule carried him hither and thither, to and fro, over distances that lie between boston and chicago. there were opportunities to run into hartford now and then, when he was not too far away, and in november he lectured there on artemus ward. he changed his entertainment at least twice that season. he began with the “reminiscences,” the lecture which he said would treat of all those whom he had met, “idiots, lunatics, and kings,” but he did not like it, or it did not go well. he wrote redpath of the artemus ward address: “it suits me, and i'll never deliver the nasty, nauseous 'reminiscences' any more.” but the ward lecture was good for little more than a month, for on december th he wrote again: notify all hands that from this time i shall talk nothing but selections from my forthcoming book, 'roughing it'. tried it twice last night; suits me tiptop. and somewhat later: had a splendid time with a splendid audience in indianapolis last night; a perfectly jammed house, just as i have all the time out here.... i don't care now to have any appointments canceled. i'll even “fetch” those dutch pennsylvanians with this lecture. have paid up $ , indebtedness. you are the last on my list. shall begin to pay you in a few days, and then i shall be a free man again. undoubtedly he reveled in the triumphs of a platform tour, though at no time did he regard it as a pleasure excursion. during those early weeks the proofs of his new book, chasing him from place to place, did not add to his comfort. still, with large, substantial rewards in hand and in prospect, one could endure much. in the neighborhood of boston there were other compensations. he could spend a good part of his days at the lyceum headquarters, in school street, where there was always congenial fellowship--nasby, josh billings, and the rest of the peripatetic group that about the end of the year collected there. their lectures were never tried immediately in boston, but in the outlying towns; tried and perfected--or discarded. when the provincial audiences were finally satisfied, then the final. test in the boston music hall was made, and if this proved successful the rest of the season was safe. redpath's lecturers put up at young's hotel, and spent their days at the bureau, smoking and spinning yarns, or talking shop. early in the evening they scattered to the outlying towns, lowell, lexington, concord, new bedford. there is no such a condition to-day: lecturers are few, lecture bureaus obscure; there are no great reputations made on the platform. neither is there any such distinct group of humorists as the one just mentioned. humor has become universal since then. few writers of this age would confess to taking their work so seriously as to be at all times unsmiling in it; only about as many, in fact, as in that day would confess to taking their work so lightly that they could regard life's sterner phases and philosophies with a smile. josh billings was one of the gentlest and loveliest of our pioneers of laughter. the present generation is not overfamiliar even with his name, but both the name and sayings of that quaint soul were on everybody's lips at the time of which we are writing. his true name was henry w. shaw, and he was a genuine, smiling philosopher, who might have built up a more permanent and serious reputation had he not been induced to disfigure his maxims with ridiculous spelling in order to popularize them and make them bring a living price. it did not matter much with nasby's work. an assumed illiteracy belonged with the side of life which he presented; but it is pathetic now to consider some of the really masterly sayings of josh billings presented in that uncouth form which was regarded as a part of humor a generation ago. even the aphorisms that were essentially humorous lose value in that degraded spelling. “when a man starts down hill everything is greased for the occasion,” could hardly be improved upon by distorted orthography, and here are a few more gems which have survived that deadly blight. “some folks mistake vivacity for wit; whereas the difference between vivacity and wit is the same as the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” “don't take the bull by the horns-take him by the tail; then you can let go when you want to.” “the difficulty is not that we know so much, but that we know so much that isn't so.” josh billings, nasby, and mark twain were close friends. they had themselves photographed in a group, and there was always some pleasantry going on among them. josh billings once wrote on “lekturing,” and under the head of “rule seven,” which treated of unwisdom of inviting a lecturer to a private house, he said: think of asking mark twain home with yu, for instance. yure good wife has put her house in apple-pie order for the ockashun; everything is just in the right place. yu don't smoke in yure house, never. yu don't put yure feet on the center-table, yu don't skatter the nuzepapers all over the room, in utter confushion: order and ekonemy governs yure premises. but if yu expeckt mark twain to be happy, or even kumfortable yu hav got to buy a box of cigars worth at least seventeen dollars and yu hav got to move all the tender things out ov yure parlor. yu hav got to skatter all the latest papers around the room careless, you hav got to hav a pitcher ov icewater handy, for mark is a dry humorist. yu hav got to ketch and tie all yure yung ones, hed and foot, for mark luvs babys only in theory; yu hav got to send yure favorite kat over to the nabors and hide yure poodle. these are things that hav to be done, or mark will pak hiz valise with hiz extry shirt collar and hiz lektur on the sandwich islands, and travel around yure streets, smoking and reading the sighns over the store doorways untill lektur time begins. as we-are not likely to touch upon mark twain's lecturing, save only lightly, hereafter, it may be as well to say something of his method at this period. at all places visited by lecturers there was a committee, and it was the place of the chairman to introduce the lecturer, a privilege which he valued, because it gave him a momentary association with distinction and fame. clemens was a great disappointment to these officials. he had learned long ago that he could introduce himself more effectively than any one else. his usual formula was to present himself as the chairman of the committee, introducing the lecturer of the evening; then, with what was in effect a complete change of personality, to begin his lecture. it was always startling and amusing, always a success; but the papers finally printed this formula, which took the freshness out of it, so that he had to invent others. sometimes he got up with the frank statement that he was introducing himself because he had never met any one who could pay a proper tribute to his talents; but the newspapers printed that too, and he often rose and began with no introduction at all. whatever his method of beginning, mark twain's procedure probably was the purest exemplification of the platform entertainer's art which this country has ever seen. it was the art that makes you forget the artisanship, the art that made each hearer forget that he was not being personally entertained by a new and marvelous friend, who had traveled a long way for his particular benefit. one listener has written that he sat “simmering with laughter” through what he supposed was the continuation of the introduction, waiting for the traditional lecture to begin, when presently the lecturer, with a bow, disappeared, and it was over. the listener looked at his watch; he had been there more than an hour. he thought it could be no more than ten minutes, at most. many have tried to set down something of the effect his art produced on them, but one may not clearly convey the story of a vanished presence and a silent voice. there were other pleasant associations in boston. howells was there, and aldrich; also bret harte, who had finished his triumphal progress across the continent to join the atlantic group. clemens appears not to have met aldrich before, though their acquaintance had begun a year earlier, when aldrich, as editor of every saturday, had commented on a poem entitled, “the three aces,” which had appeared in the buffalo express. aldrich had assumed the poem to be the work of mark twain, and had characterized it as “a feeble imitation of bret harte's 'heathen chinee.'” clemens, in a letter, had mildly protested as to the charge of authorship, and aldrich had promptly printed the letter with apologetic explanation. a playful exchange of personal letters followed, and the beginning of a lifelong friendship. one of the letters has a special interest here. clemens had followed his protest with an apology for it, asking that no further notice be taken of the matter. aldrich replied that it was too late to prevent “doing him justice,” as his explanation was already on the press, but that if clemens insisted he would withdraw it in the next issue. clemens then wrote that he did not want it withdrawn, and explained that he hated to be accused of plagiarizing bret harte, to whom he was deeply indebted for literary schooling in the california days. continuing he said: do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot through harte's brain? it was this. when they were trying to decide upon a vignette cover for the overland a grizzly bear (of the arms of the state of california) was chosen. nahl bros. carved him and the page was printed with him in it. as a bear he was a success. he was a good bear, but then, it was objected, he was an objectless bear--a bear that meant nothing, signified nothing, simply stood there, snarling over his shoulder at nothing, and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured intruder upon the fair page. all hands said that none were satisfied; they hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as much to have him there when there was no point to him. but presently harte took a pencil and drew two simple lines under his feet, and behold he was a magnificent success!--the ancient symbol of california savagery, snarling at the approaching type of high and progressive civilization, the first overland locomotive! i just think that was nothing less than an inspiration.--[the “bear” was that which has always appeared on the overland cover; the “two lines” formed a railway track under his feet. clemens's original letter contained crude sketches illustrating these things.] among the boston group was another californian, ralph keeler, an eccentric, gifted, and altogether charming fellow, whom clemens had known on the pacific slope. keeler had been adopted by the boston writers, and was grateful and happy accordingly. he was poor of purse, but inexhaustibly rich in the happier gifts of fortune. he was unfailingly buoyant, light-hearted, and hopeful. on an infinitesimal capital he had made a tour of many lands, and had written of it for the atlantic. in that charmed circle he was as overflowingly happy as if he had been admitted to the company of the gods. keeler was affectionately regarded by all who knew him, and he offered a sort of worship in return. he often accompanied mark twain on his lecture engagements to the various outlying towns, and clemens brought him back to his hotel for breakfast, where they had good, enjoyable talks together. once keeler came eagerly to the hotel and made his way up to clemens's room. “come with me,” he said. “quick!” “what is it? what's happened?” “don't wait to talk. come with me.” they tramped briskly through the streets till they reached the public library, entered, keeler leading the way, not stopping till he faced a row of shelves filled with books. he pointed at one of them, his face radiant with joy. “look,” he said. “do you see it?” clemens looked carefully now and identified one of the books as a still-born novel which keeler had published. “this is a library,” said keeler, eagerly, “and they've got it!” his whole being was aglow with the wonder of it. he had been investigating; the library records showed that in the two years the book had been there it had been taken out and read three times! it never occurred to clemens even to smile. knowing mark twain, one would guess that his eyes were likely to be filled with tears. in his book about mark twain, howells tells of a luncheon which keeler gave to his more famous associates--aldrich, fields, harte, clemens, and howells himself--a merry informal occasion. says howells: nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless and joyful talk--play, beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless good stories from fields, of a heat- lightning shimmer of wit from aldrich, of an occasional concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full of good-fellowship, bret harte's leering dramatization of clemens's mental attitude toward a symposium of boston illuminates. “why, fellows,” he spluttered, “this is the dream of mark's life,” and i remember the glance from under clemens's feathery eyebrows which betrayed his enjoyment of the fun. very likely keeler gave that luncheon in celebration of his book's triumph; it would be like him. keeler's end was a mystery. the new york tribune commissioned him to go to cuba to report the facts of some spanish outrages. he sailed from new york in the steamer, and was last seen alive the night before the vessel reached havana. he had made no secret of his mission, but had discussed it in his frank, innocent way. there were some spanish military men on the ship. clemens, commenting on the matter, once said: “it may be that he was not flung into the sea, still the belief was general that that was what had happened.” in his book howells refers to the doubt with which mark twain was then received by the polite culture of boston; which, on the other hand, accepted bret harte as one of its own, forgiving even social shortcomings. the reason is not difficult to understand. harte had made his appeal with legitimate fiction of the kind which, however fresh in flavor and environment, was of a sort to be measured and classified. harte spoke a language they could understand; his humor, his pathos, his point of view were all recognizable. it was an art already standardized by a master. it is no reflection on the genius of bret harte to liken his splendid achievements to those of charles dickens. much of harte's work is in no way inferior to that of his great english prototype. dickens never wrote a better short story than “the outcasts of poker flats.” he never wrote as good a short story as “the luck of roaring camp.” boston critics promptly realized these things and gave harte his correct rating. that they failed to do this with mark twain, lay chiefly in the fact that he spoke to them in new and startling tongues. his gospels were likely to be heresies; his literary eccentricities were all unclassified. of the ultrafastidious set howells tells us that charles eliot norton and prof. francis j. child were about the only ones who accorded him unqualified approval. the others smiled and enjoyed him, but with that condescension which the courtier is likely to accord to motley and the cap and bells. only the great, simple-hearted, unbiased multitude, the public, which had no standards but the direct appeal from one human heart to another, could recognize immediately his mightier heritage, could exalt and place him on the throne. lxxxiv. “roughing it”. telegram to redpath: how in the name of god does a man find his way from here to amherst, and when must he start? give me full particulars, and send a man with me. if i had another engagement i would rot before i would fill it. s. l. clemens. this was at the end of february, and he believed that he was standing on the platform for the last time. he loathed the drudgery of the work, and he considered there was no further need. he was no longer in debt, and his income he accounted ample. his new book, 'roughing it',--[it was bliss who had given the new book the title of roughing it. innocents at home had been its provision title, certainly a misleading one, though it has been retained in england for the second volume; for what reason it would be difficult to explain.]--had had a large advance sale, and its earnings promised to rival those of the 'innocents'. he resolved in the future to confine himself to the trade and profits of authorship. the new book had advantages in its favor. issued early in the year, it was offered at the best canvassing season; particularly so, as the author's lectures had prepared the public for its reception. furthermore, it dealt with the most picturesque phases of american life, scenes and episodes vastly interesting at that time, and peculiarly adapted to mark twain's literary expression. in a different way 'roughing it' is quite as remarkable as 'the innocents abroad.' if it has less charm, it has greater interest, and it is by no means without charm. there is something delicious, for instance, in this bit of pure enjoyment of the first day's overland travel: it was now just dawn, and as we stretched our cramped legs full length on the mail-sacks, and gazed out through the windows across the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist to where there was an expectant look in the eastern horizon, our perfect enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy. the stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping the curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses' hoofs, the cracking of the driver's whip, and his “hi-yi! g'lang!” were music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared to give us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us with interest and envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the pipe of peace, and compared all this luxury with the years of tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had found it. also, there is that lofty presentation of south pass, and a picture of the alkali desert, so parching, so withering in its choking realism, that it makes the throat ache and the tongue dry to read it. just a bit of the desert in passing: the sun beats down with a dead, blistering, relentless malignity; the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface--it is absorbed before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound, not a sigh, not a whisper, not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of bird; not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that dead air. as for the humor of the book, it has been chiefly famous for that. “buck fanshaw's funeral” has become a classic, and the purchase of the “mexican plug.” but it is to no purpose to review the book here in detail. we have already reviewed the life and environment out of which it grew. without doubt the story would have contained more of the poetic and contemplative, in which he was always at his best, if the subject itself, as in the innocents, had lent itself oftener to this form of writing. it was the lack of that halo perhaps which caused the new book never quite to rank with its great forerunner in public favor. there could hardly be any other reason. it presented a fresher theme; it abounded in humor; technically, it was better written; seemingly it had all the elements of popularity and of permanence. it did, in fact, possess these qualities, but its sales, except during the earlier months of its canvass, never quite equaled those of the innocents abroad. 'roughing it' was accepted by the public for just what it was and is, a great picture of the overland pioneer days--a marvelous picture of frontier aspects at a time when the frontier itself, even with its hardships and its tragedies, was little more than a vast primal joke; when all frontiersmen were obliged to be laughing philosophers in order to survive the stress of its warfares. a word here about this western humor: it is a distinct product. it grew out of a distinct condition--the battle with the frontier. the fight was so desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender. women laughed that they might not weep; men, when they could no longer swear. “western humor” was the result. it is the freshest, wildest humor in the world, but there is tragedy behind it. 'roughing it' presented the picture of those early conditions with the startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it was. it was not accurate history, even of the author's own adventures. it was true in its aspects, rather than in its details. the greater artist disregards the truth of detail to render more strikingly a phase or a condition, to produce an atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished time. this was what mark twain did in 'roughing it'. he told the story of overland travel and the frontier, for his own and future generations, in what is essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing fiction, founded on fact. the sales of 'roughing it' during the first three months aggregated nearly forty thousand copies, and the author was lavishly elate accordingly. to orion (who had already closed his career with bliss, by exercise of those hereditary eccentricities through which he so often came to grief) he gave $ , out of the first royalty check, in acknowledgment of the memorandum book and other data which orion had supplied. clemens believed the new book would sell one hundred thousand copies within the year; but the sale diminished presently, and at the end of the first year it was considerably behind the innocents for the same period. as already stated, it required ten years for roughing it to reach the one-hundred-thousand mark, which the innocents reached in three. lxxxv. a birth, a death, and a voyage the year was an eventful one in mark twain's life. at elmira, on march th, his second child, a little girl, whom they named susan olivia, was born. on june d, in the new home in hartford, to which they had recently moved, his first child, a little boy, langdon, died. he had never been strong, his wavering life had often been uncertain, always more of the spirit than the body, and in elmira he contracted a heavy cold, or perhaps it was diphtheria from the beginning. in later years, whenever clemens spoke of the little fellow, he never failed to accuse himself of having been the cause of the child's death. it was mrs. clemens's custom to drive out each morning with langdon, and once when she was unable to go clemens himself went instead. “i should not have been permitted to do it,” he said, remembering. “i was not qualified for any such responsibility as that. some one should have gone who had at least the rudiments of a mind. necessarily i would lose myself dreaming. after a while the coachman looked around and noticed that the carriage-robes had dropped away from the little fellow, and that he was exposed to the chilly air. he called my attention to it, but it was too late. tonsilitis or something of the sort set in, and he did not get any better, so we took him to hartford. there it was pronounced diphtheria, and of course he died.” so, with or without reason, he added the blame of another tragedy to the heavy burden of remorse which he would go on piling up while he lived. the blow was a terrible one to mrs. clemens; even the comfort of the little new baby on her arm could not ease the ache in her breast. it seemed to her that death was pursuing her. in one of her letters she says: “i feel so often as if my path is to be lined with graves,” and she expresses the wish that she may drop out of life herself before her sister and her husband--a wish which the years would grant. they did not return to elmira, for it was thought that the air of the shore would be better for the little girl; so they spent the summer at saybrook, connecticut, at fenwick hall, leaving orion and his wife in charge of the house at hartford. beyond a few sketches, clemens did very little literary work that summer, but he planned a trip to europe, and he invented what is still known and sold as the “mark twain scrap-book.” he wrote to orion of his proposed trip to england, and dilated upon his scrap-book with considerable enthusiasm. the idea had grown out of the inconvenience of finding a paste-jar, and the general mussiness of scrap-book keeping. his new plan was a self-pasting scrap-book with the gum laid on in narrow strips, requiring only to be dampened with a sponge or other moist substance to be ready for the clipping. he states that he intends to put the invention into the hands of slote, woodman & co., of whom dan slote, his old quaker city room-mate, was the senior partner, and have it manufactured for the trade. about this time began mark twain's long and active interest in copyright. previously he had not much considered the subject; he had taken it for granted there was no step that he could take, while international piracy was a recognized institution. on both sides of the water books were appropriated, often without profit, sometimes even without credit, to the author. to tell the truth, clemens had at first regarded it rather in the nature of a compliment that his books should be thought worth pirating in england, but as time passed he realized that he was paying heavily for this recognition. furthermore, he decided that he was forfeiting a right; rather that he was being deprived of it: something which it was in his nature to resent. when 'roughing it' had been ready for issue he agreed with bliss that they should try the experiment of copyrighting it in england, and see how far the law would protect them against the voracious little publisher, who thus far had not only snapped up everything bearing mark twain's signature, but had included in a volume of mark twain sketches certain examples of very weak humor with which mark twain had been previously unfamiliar. whatever the english pirate's opinion of the copyright protection of 'roughing it' may have been, he did not attempt to violate it. this was gratifying. clemens came to regard england as a friendly power. he decided to visit it and spy out the land. he would make the acquaintance of its people and institutions and write a book, which would do these things justice. he gave out no word of his real purpose. he merely said that he was going over to see his english publishers, and perhaps to arrange for a few lectures. he provided himself with some stylographic note-books, by which he could produce two copies of his daily memoranda--one for himself and one to mail to mrs. clemens--and sailed on the scotia august , . arriving in liverpool he took train for london, and presently the wonderful charm of that old, finished country broke upon him. his “first hour in england was an hour of delight,” he records; “of rapture and ecstasy. these are the best words i can find, but they are not adequate; they are not strong enough to convey the feeling which this first vision of rural england brought me.” then he noticed that the gentleman opposite in his compartment paid no attention to the scenery, but was absorbed in a green-covered volume. he was so absorbed in it that, by and by, clemens's curiosity was aroused. he shifted his position a little and his eye caught the title. it was the first volume of the english edition of the innocents abroad. this was gratifying for a moment; then he remembered that the man had never laughed, never even smiled during the hour of his steady reading. clemens recalled what he had heard of the english lack of humor. he wondered if this was a fair example of it, and if the man could be really taking seriously every word he was reading. clemens could not look at the scenery any more for watching his fellow-passenger, waiting with a fascinated interest for the paragraph that would break up that iron-clad solemnity. it did not come. during all the rest of the trip to london the atmosphere of the compartment remained heavy with gloom. he drove to the langham hotel, always popular with americans, established himself, and went to look up his publishers. he found the routledges about to sit down to luncheon in a private room, up-stairs, in their publishing house. he joined them, and not a soul stirred from that table again until evening. the routledges had never heard mark twain talk before, never heard any one talk who in the least resembled him. various refreshments were served during the afternoon, came and went, while this marvelous creature talked on and they listened, reveling, and wondering if america had any more of that sort at home. by and by dinner was served; then after a long time, when there was no further excuse for keeping him there, they took him to the savage club, where there were yet other refreshments and a gathering of the clans to welcome this new arrival as a being from some remote and unfamiliar star. tom hood, the younger, was there, and harry lee, and stanley the explorer, who had but just returned from finding livingstone, and henry irving, and many another whose name remains, though the owners of those names are all dead now, and their laughter and their good-fellowship are only a part of that intangible fabric which we call the past.'--[clemens had first known stanley as a newspaper man. “i first met him when he reported a lecture of mine in st. louis,” he said once in a conversation where the name of stanley was mentioned.] lxxxvi. england from that night mark twain's stay in england could not properly be called a gloomy one. routledge, hood, lee, and, in fact, all literary london, set themselves the task of giving him a good time. whatever place of interest they could think of he was taken there; whatever there was to see he saw it. dinners, receptions, and assemblies were not complete without him. the white friars' club and others gave banquets in his honor. he was the sensation of the day. when he rose to speak on these occasions he was greeted with wild cheers. whatever he said they eagerly applauded--too eagerly sometimes, in the fear that they might be regarded as insensible to american humor. other speakers delighted in chaffing him in order to provoke his retorts. when a speaker humorously referred to his american habit of carrying a cotton umbrella, his reply that he followed this custom because a cotton umbrella was the only kind of an umbrella that an englishman wouldn't steal, was all over england next day, and regarded as one of the finest examples of wit since the days of swift. the suddenness and completeness of his acceptance by the great ones of london rather overwhelmed and frightened him made him timid. joaquin miller writes: he was shy as a girl, although time was already coyly flirting white flowers at his temples, and could hardly be coaxed to meet the learned and great who wanted to take him by the hand. many came to call on him at his hotel, among them charles reade and canon kingsley. kingsley came twice without finding him; then wrote, asking for an appointment. reade invited his assistance on a novel. indeed, it was in england that mark twain was first made to feel that he had come into his rightful heritage. whatever may have been the doubts concerning him in america, there was no question in england. howells says: in england rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. lord mayors, lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation. after that first visit of mark twain's, when americans in england, referring to their great statesmen, authors, and the like, naturally mentioned the names of seward, webster, lowell, or holmes, the english comment was likely to be: “never mind those. we can turn out academic sewards by the dozen, and cultured humorists like lowell and holmes by the score. tell us of lincoln, artemus ward, and mark twain. we cannot match these; they interest us.” and it was true. history could not match them, for they were unique. clemens would have been more than human if in time he had not realized the fuller meaning of this triumph, and exulted in it a little to the folks at home. there never lived a more modest, less pretentious, less aggressive man than mark twain, but there never lived a man who took a more childlike delight in genuine appreciation; and, being childlike, it was only human that he should wish those nearest to him to share his happiness. after one memorable affair he wrote: i have been received in a sort of tremendous way to-night by the brains of london, assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of london; mine being (between you and me) a name which was received with a thundering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long list of guests was called. i might have perished on the spot but for the friendly support and assistance of my excellent friend, sir john bennett. this letter does not tell all of the incident or the real reason why he might have perished on the spot. during the long roll-call of guests he had lost interest a little, and was conversing in whispers with his “excellent friend,” sir john bennett, stopping to applaud now and then when the applause of the others indicated that some distinguished name had been pronounced. all at once the applause broke out with great vehemence. this must be some very distinguished person indeed. he joined in it with great enthusiasm. when it was over he whispered to sir john: “whose name was that we were just applauding?” “mark twain's.” whereupon the support was needed. poor little pirate hotten did not have a happy time during this visit. he had reveled in the prospect at first, for he anticipated a large increase to be derived from his purloined property; but suddenly, one morning, he was aghast to find in the spectator a signed letter from mark twain, in which he was repudiated, referred to as “john camden hottentot,” an unsavory person generally. hotten also sent a letter to the spectator, in which he attempted to justify himself, but it was a feeble performance. clemens prepared two other communications, each worse than the other and both more destructive than the first one. but these were only to relieve his mind. he did not print them. in one of them he pursued the fancy of john camden hottentot, whom he offers as a specimen to the zoological gardens. it is not a bird. it is not a man. it is not a fish. it does not seem to be in all respects a reptile. it has the body and features of a man, but scarcely any of the instincts that belong to such a structure.... i am sure that this singular little creature is the missing link between the man and the hyena. hotten had preyed upon explorer stanley and libeled him in a so-called. biography to a degree that had really aroused some feeling against stanley in england. only for the moment--the queen invited stanley to luncheon, and newspaper criticism ceased. hotten was in general disrepute, therefore, so it was not worth while throwing a second brick at him. in fact, now that clemens had expended his venom, on paper, hotten seemed to him rather an amusing figure than otherwise. an incident grew out of it all, however, that was not amusing. e. p. hingston, whom the reader may remember as having been with artemus ward in virginia city, and one of that happy group that wined and dined the year away, had been engaged by hotten to write the introductory to his edition of the innocents abroad. it was a well-written, highly complimentary appreciation. hingston did not dream that he was committing an offense, nor did clemens himself regard it as such in the beginning. but mark twain's views had undergone a radical change, and with characteristic dismissal of previous conditions he had forgotten that he had ever had any other views than those he now held. hingston was in london, and one evening, at a gathering, approached clemens with outstretched hand. but clemens failed to see hingston's hand or to recognize him. in after-years his conscience hurt him terribly for this. he remembered it only with remorse and shame. once, in his old age, he spoke of it with deep sorrow. lxxxvii. the book that was never written the book on england, which he had prepared for so carefully, was never written. hundreds of the stylographic pages were filled, and the duplicates sent home for the entertainment of olivia clemens, but the notes were not completed, and the actual writing was never begun. there was too much sociability in london for one thing, and then he found that he could not write entertainingly of england without introducing too many personalities, and running the risk of offending those who had taken him into their hearts and homes. in a word, he would have to write too seriously or not at all. he began his memoranda industriously enough, and the volume might have been as charming and as valuable as any he has left behind. the reader will hardly fail to find a few of the entries interesting. they are offered here as examples of his daily observation during those early weeks of his stay, and to show somewhat of his purpose: an expatriate there was once an american thief who fled his country and took refuge in england. he dressed himself after the fashion of the londoners, and taught his tongue the peculiarities of the london pronunciation and did his best in all ways to pass himself for a native. but he did two fatal things: he stopped at the langham hotel, and the first trip he took was to visit stratford-on-avon and the grave of shakespeare. these things betrayed his nationality. stanley and the queen see the power a monarch wields! when i arrived here, two weeks ago, the papers and geographers were in a fair way to eat poor stanley up without salt or sauce. the queen says, “come four hundred miles up into scotland and sit at my luncheon-table fifteen minutes”; which, being translated, means, “gentlemen, i believe in this man and take him under my protection”; and not another yelp is heard. at the british museum what a place it is! mention some very rare curiosity of a peculiar nature--a something which you have read about somewhere but never seen--they show you a dozen! they show you all the possible varieties of that thing! they show you curiously wrought jeweled necklaces of beaten gold, worn by the ancient egyptians, assyrians, etruscans, greeks, britons--every people of the forgotten ages, indeed. they show you the ornaments of all the tribes and peoples that live or ever did live. then they show you a cast taken from cromwell's face in death; then the venerable vase that once contained the ashes of xerxes. i am wonderfully thankful for the british museum. nobody comes bothering around me--nobody elbows me--all the room and all the light i want, under this huge dome--no disturbing noises--and people standing ready to bring me a copy of pretty much any book that ever was printed under the sun--and if i choose to go wandering about the long corridors and galleries of the great building the secrets of all the earth and all the ages axe laid open to me. i am not capable of expressing my gratitude for the british museum--it seems as if i do not know any but little words and weak ones. westminster abbey by night it was past eleven o'clock and i was just going to bed. but this friend of mine was as reliable as he was eccentric, and so there was not a doubt in my mind that his “expedition” had merit in it. i put on my coat and boots again, and we drove away. “where is it? where are we going?” “don't worry. you'll see.” he was not inclined to talk. so i thought this must be a weighty matter. my curiosity grew with the minutes, but i kept it manfully under the surface. i watched the lamps, the signs, the numbers as we thundered down the long street. i am always lost in london, day or night. it was very chilly, almost bleak. people leaned against the gusty blasts as if it were the dead of winter. the crowds grew thinner and thinner, and the noises waxed faint and seemed far away. the sky was overcast and threatening. we drove on, and still on, till i wondered if we were ever going to stop. at last we passed by a spacious bridge and a vast building, and presently entered a gateway, passed through a sort of tunnel, and stopped in a court surrounded by the black outlines of a great edifice. then we alighted, walked a dozen steps or so, and waited. in a little while footsteps were heard, a man emerged from the darkness, and we dropped into his wake without saying anything. he led us under an archway of masonry, and from that into a roomy tunnel, through a tall iron gate, which he locked behind us. we followed him down this tunnel, guided more by his footsteps on the stone flagging than by anything we could very distinctly see. at the end of it we came to another iron gate, and our conductor stopped there and lit a bull's-eye lantern. then he unlocked the gate; and i wished he had oiled it first, it grated so dismally. the gate swung open and we stood on the threshold of what seemed a limitless domed and pillared cavern, carved out of the solid darkness. the conductor and my friend took off their hats reverently, and i did likewise. for the moment that we stood thus there was not a sound, and the stillness seemed to add to the solemnity of the gloom. i looked my inquiry! “it is the tomb of the great dead of england-westminster abbey.”... we were among the tombs; on every hand dull shapes of men, sitting, standing, or stooping, inspected us curiously out of the darkness --reached out their hands toward us--some appealing, some beckoning, some warning us away. effigies they were--statues over the graves; but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows. now a little half-grown black and white cat squeezed herself through the bars of the iron gate and came purring lovingly about us, unawed by the time or the place, unimpressed by the marble pomp that sepulchers a line of mighty dead that ends with a great author of yesterday and began with a sceptered monarch away back in the dawn of history, more than twelve hundred years ago.... mr. wright flashed his lantern first upon this object and then upon that, and kept up a running commentary that showed there was nothing about the venerable abbey that was trivial in his eyes or void of interest. he is a man in authority, being superintendent, and his daily business keeps him familiar with every nook and corner of the great pile. casting a luminous ray now here, now yonder, he would say: “observe the height of the abbey--one hundred and three feet to the base of the roof; i measured it myself the other day. notice the base of this column--old, very old--hundreds and hundreds of years --and how well they knew how to build in those old days! notice it --every stone is laid horizontally; that is to say, just as nature laid it originally in the quarry not set up edgewise; in our day some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and flake. architects cannot teach nature anything. let me remove this matting--it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before time and sacrilegious idlers marred it. now there, in the border, was an inscription, once see, follow the circle-you can trace it by the ornaments that have been pulled out--here is an a and there is an o, and yonder another a--all beautiful old english capitals; there is no telling what the inscription was--no record left now. now move along in this direction, if you please. yonder is where old king sebert the saxon lies his monument is the oldest one in the abbey; sebert died in ,--[clemens probably misunderstood the name. it was ethelbert who died in . the name sebert does not appear in any saxon annals accessible to the author.]--and that's as much, as twelve hundred and fifty years ago think of it! twelve hundred and fifty years! now yonder is the last one--charles dickens--there on the floor, with the brass letters on the slab--and to this day the people come and put flowers on it.... there is garrick's monument; and addison's, and thackeray's bust--and macaulay lies there. and close to dickens and garrick lie sheridan and dr. johnson--and here is old parr.... “that stone there covers campbell the poet. here are names you know pretty well--milton, and gray who wrote the elegy, and butler who wrote hudibras; and edmund spenser, and ben jonson--there are three tablets to him scattered about the abbey, and all got 'o, rare ben jonson' cut on them. you were standing on one of them just now he is buried standing up. there used to be a tradition here that explains it. the story goes that he did not dare ask to be buried in the abbey, so he asked king james if he would make him a present of eighteen inches of english ground, and the king said 'yes,' and asked him where he would have it, and he said in westminster abbey. well, the king wouldn't go back on his word, and so there he is, sure enough-stood up on end.” the reader may regret that there are not more of these entries, and that the book itself was never written. just when he gave up the project is not recorded. he was urged to lecture in london, but declined. to mrs. clemens, in september, he wrote: everybody says lecture, lecture, lecture, but i have not the least idea of doing it; certainly not at present. mr. dolby, who took dickens to america, is coming to talk business tomorrow, though i have sent him word once before that i can't be hired to talk here; because i have no time to spare. there is too much sociability; i do not get along fast enough with work. in october he declared that he was very homesick, and proposed that mrs. clemens and susie join him at once in london, unless she would prefer to have him come home for the winter and all of them return to london in the spring. so it is likely that the book was not then abandoned. he felt that his visit was by no means ended; that it was, in fact, only just begun, but he wanted the ones he loved most to share it with him. to his mother and sister, in november, he wrote: i came here to take notes for a book, but i haven't done much but attend dinners and make speeches. i have had a jolly good time, and i do hate to go away from these english folks; they make a stranger feel entirely at home, and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to make after-dinner speeches here. i have made hundreds of friends; and last night, in the crush at the opening of the new guild hall library and museum, i was surprised to meet a familiar face every other step. all his impressions of england had been happy ones. he could deliver a gentle satire now and then at certain british institutions--certain london localities and features--as in his speech at the savage club,--[september , . this is probably the most characteristic speech made by mark twain during his first london visit; the reader will find it in full in appendix l, at the end of last volume.]--but taking the snug island as a whole, its people, its institutions, its fair, rural aspects, he had found in it only delight. to mrs. crane he wrote: if you and theodore will come over in the spring with livy and me, and spend the summer, you shall see a country that is so beautiful that you will be obliged to believe in fairy-land. there is nothing like it elsewhere on the globe. you should have a season ticket and travel up and down every day between london and oxford and worship nature. and theodore can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now as they looked five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the british museum that were made before christ was born; and in the customs of their public dinners, and the ceremonies of every official act, and the dresses of a thousand dignitaries, trace the speech and manners of all the centuries that have dragged their lagging decades over england since the heptarchy fell asunder. i would a good deal rather live here if i could get the rest of you over. he sailed november th, on the batavia, loaded with christmas presents for everybody; jewelry, furs, laces; also a practical steam-engine for his namesake, sam moffett. half-way across the atlantic the batavia ran into a hurricane and was badly damaged by heavy seas, and driven far out of her course. it was a lucky event on the whole, for she fell in with a water-logged lumber bark, a complete wreck, with nine surviving sailors clinging to her rigging. in the midst of the wild gale a lifeboat was launched and the perishing men were rescued. clemens prepared a graphic report of the matter for the royal humane society, asking that medals be conferred upon the brave rescuers, a document that was signed by his fellow-passengers and obtained for the men complete recognition and wide celebrity. closing, the writer said: as might have been anticipated, if i have been of any service toward rescuing these nine shipwrecked human beings by standing around the deck in a furious storm, without an umbrella, keeping an eye on things and seeing that they were done right, and yelling whenever a cheer seemed to be the important thing, i am glad and i am satisfied. i ask no reward. i would do it again under the same circumstances. but what i do plead for, earnestly and sincerely, is that the royal humane society will remember our captain and our life-boat crew, and in so remembering them increase the high honor and esteem in which the society is held all over the civilized world. the batavia reached new york november , . mark twain had been absent three months, during which he had been brought to at least a partial realization of what his work meant to him and to mankind. an election had taken place during his absence--an election which gratified him deeply, for it had resulted in the second presidency of general grant and in the defeat of horace greeley, whom he admired perhaps, but not as presidential material. to thomas nast, who had aided very effectually in mr. greeley's overwhelming defeat, clemens wrote: nast, you more than any other man have won a prodigious victory for grant--i mean, rather, for civilization and progress. those pictures were simply marvelous, and if any man in the land has a right to hold his head up and be honestly proud of his share in this year's vast events that man is unquestionably yourself. we all do sincerely honor you, and are proud of you. horace greeley's peculiar abilities and eccentricities won celebrity for him, rather than voters. mark twain once said of him: “he was a great man, an honest man, and served his, country well and was an honor to it. also, he was a good-natured man, but abrupt with strangers if they annoyed him when he was busy. he was profane, but that is nothing; the best of us is that. i did not know him well, but only just casually, and by accident. i never met him but once. i called on him in the tribune office, but i was not intending to. i was looking for whitelaw reid, and got into the wrong den. he was alone at his desk, writing, and we conversed--not long, but just a little. i asked him if he was well, and he said, 'what the hell do you want?' well, i couldn't remember what i wanted, so i said i would call again. but i didn't.” clemens did not always tell the incident just in this way. sometimes it was john hay he was looking for instead of reid, and the conversation with greeley varied; but perhaps there was a germ of history under it somewhere, and at any rate it could have happened well enough, and not have been out of character with either of the men. lxxxviii. “the gilded age” mark twain did not go on the lecture circuit that winter. redpath had besought him as usual, and even in midsummer had written: “will you? won't you? we have seven thousand to eight thousand dollars in engagements recorded for you,” and he named a list of towns ranging geographically from boston to st. paul. but clemens had no intention then of ever lecturing any more, and again in november, from london, he announced (to redpath): “when i yell again for less than $ i'll be pretty hungry, but i haven't any intention of yelling at any price.” redpath pursued him, and in january proposed $ for a single night in philadelphia, but without result. he did lecture two nights in steinway hall for the mercantile library association, on the basis of half profits, netting $ , for the two nights as his share; and he lectured one night in hartford, at a profit of $ , , for charity. father hawley, of hartford, had announced that his missionary work was suffering for lack of funds. some of his people were actually without food, he said, their children crying with hunger. no one ever responded to an appeal like that quicker than samuel clemens. he offered to deliver a lecture free, and to bear an equal proportion of whatever expenses were incurred by the committee of eight who agreed to join in forwarding the project. he gave the sandwich island lecture, and at the close of it a large card was handed him with the figures of the receipts printed upon it. it was held up to view, and the house broke into a storm of cheers. he did very little writing during the early weeks following his return. early in the year (january and , ) he contributed two sandwich island letters to the tribune, in which, in his own peculiar fashion, he urged annexation. “we must annex those people,” he declared, and proceeded to specify the blessings we could give them, such as “leather-headed juries, the insanity law, and the tweed ring.” we can confer woodhull and clafin on them, and george francis train. we can give them lecturers! i will go myself. we can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. annexation is what the poor islanders need! “shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?” his success in england became an incentive to certain american institutions to recognize his gifts at home. early in the year he was dined as the guest of the lotos club of new york, and a week or two later elected to its membership. this was but a beginning. some new membership or honor was offered every little while, and so many banquets that he finally invented a set form for declining them. he was not yet recognized as the foremost american man of letters, but undoubtedly he had become the most popular; and edwin whipple, writing at this time, or but little later, said: “mark twain is regarded chiefly as a humorist, but the exercise of his real talents would rank him with the ablest of our authors in the past fifty years.” so he was beginning to be “discovered” in high places. it was during this winter that the clemens household enjoyed its first real home life in hartford, its first real home life anywhere since those earliest days of marriage. the hooker mansion was a comfortable place. the little family had comparatively good health. their old friends were stanch and lavishly warm-hearted, and they had added many new ones. their fireside was a delightful nucleus around which gathered those they cared for most, the twichells, the warner families, the trumbulls--all certain of a welcome there. george warner, only a little while ago, remembering, said: “the clemens house was the only one i have ever known where there was never any preoccupation in the evenings, and where visitors were always welcome. clemens was the best kind of a host; his evenings after dinner were an unending flow of stories.” friends living near by usually came and went at will, often without the ceremony of knocking or formal leave-taking. they were more like one great family in that neighborhood, with a community of interests, a unity of ideals. the warner families and the clemenses were particularly intimate, and out of their association grew mark twain's next important literary undertaking, his collaboration with charles dudley warner in 'the gilded age'. a number of more or less absurd stories have been printed about the origin of this book. it was a very simple matter, a perfectly natural development. at the dinner-table one night, with the warners present, criticisms of recent novels were offered, with the usual freedom and severity of dinner-table talk. the husbands were inclined to treat rather lightly the novels in which their wives were finding entertainment. the wives naturally retorted that the proper thing for the husbands to do was to furnish the american people with better ones. this was regarded in the nature of a challenge, and as such was accepted--mutually accepted: that is to say, in partnership. on the spur of the moment clemens and warner agreed that they would do a novel together, that they would begin it immediately. this is the whole story of the book's origin; so far, at least, as the collaboration is concerned. clemens, in fact, had the beginning of a story in his mind, but had been unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction alone. he welcomed only too eagerly, therefore, the proposition of joint authorship. his purpose was to write a tale around that lovable character of his youth, his mother's cousin, james lampton--to let that gentle visionary stand as the central figure against a proper background. the idea appealed to warner, and there was no delay in the beginning. clemens immediately set to work and completed pages of the manuscript, the first eleven chapters of the book, before the early flush of enthusiasm waned. warner came over then, and clemens read it aloud to him. warner had some plans for the story, and took it up at this point, and continued it through the next twelve chapters; and so they worked alternately, “in the superstition,” as mark twain long afterward declared, “that we were writing one coherent yarn, when i suppose, as a matter of fact, we were writing two incoherent ones.”--[the reader may be interested in the division of labor. clemens wrote chapters i to xi; also chapters xxiv, xxv, xxvii, xxviii, xxx, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxvi, xxxvii, xlii, xliii, xlv, li, lii, liii, lvii, lix, lx, lxi, lxii, and portions of chapters xxxv, xlix, lvi. warner wrote chapters xii to xxiii; also chapters xxvi, xxix, xxxi, xxxviii, xxxix, xl, xli, xliv, xlvi, xlvii, xlviii, l, liv, lv, lviii, lxiii, and portions of chapters xxxv, xlix, and lvi. the work was therefore very evenly divided. there was another co-worker on the gilded age before the book was finally completed. this was j. hammond trumbull, who prepared the variegated, marvelous cryptographic chapter headings: trumbull was the most learned man that ever lived in hartford. he was familiar with all literary and scientific data, and according to clemens could swear in twenty-seven languages. it was thought to be a choice idea to get trumbull to supply a lingual medley of quotations to precede the chapters in the new book, the purpose being to excite interest and possibly to amuse the reader--a purpose which to some extent appears to have miscarried.] the book was begun in february and finished in april, so the work did not lag. the result, if not highly artistic, made astonishingly good reading. warner had the touch of romance, clemens, the gift of creating, or at least of portraying, human realities. most of his characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life. besides the apotheosis of james lampton into the immortal sellers, orion became washington hawkins, squire clemens the judge, while mark twain's own personality, in a greater or lesser degree, is reflected in most of his creations. as for the tennessee land, so long a will-o'the-wisp and a bugbear, it became tangible property at last. only a year or two before clemens had written to orion: oh, here! i don't want to be consulted at all about tennessee. i don't want it even mentioned to me. when i make a suggestion it is for you to act upon it or throw it aside, but i beseech you never to ask my advice, opinion, or consent about that hated property. but it came in good play now. it is the important theme of the story. mark twain was well qualified to construct his share of the tale. he knew his characters, their lives, and their atmospheres perfectly. senator dilworthy (otherwise senator pomeroy, of kansas, then notorious for attempted vote-buying) was familiar enough. that winter in washington had acquainted clemens with the life there, its political intrigues, and the disrepute of congress. warner was equally well qualified for his share of the undertaking, and the chief criticism that one may offer is the one stated by clemens himself--that the divisions of the tale remain divisions rather than unity. as for the story itself--the romance and tragedy of it--the character of laura in the hands of either author is one not easy to forget. whether this means that the work is well done, or only strikingly done, the reader himself must judge. morally, the character is not justified. laura was a victim of circumstance from the beginning. there could be no poetic justice in her doom. to drag her out of a steamer wreck, only to make her the victim of a scoundrel, later an adventuress, and finally a murderess, all may be good art, but of a very bad kind. laura is a sort of american becky sharp; but there is retributive justice in becky's fate, whereas laura's doom is warranted only by the author's whim. as for her end, whatever the virtuous public of that day might have done, a present-day audience would not have pelted her from the stage, destroyed her future, taken away her life. the authors regarded their work highly when it was finished, but that is nothing. any author regards his work highly at the moment of its completion. in later years neither of them thought very well of their production; but that also is nothing. the author seldom cares very deeply for his offspring once it is turned over to the public charge. the fact that the story is still popular, still delights thousands of readers, when a myriad of novels that have been written since it was completed have lived their little day and died so utterly that even their names have passed out of memory, is the best verdict as to its worth. lxxxix. planning a new home clemens and his wife bought a lot for the new home that winter, a fine, sightly piece of land on farmington avenue--table-land, sloping down to a pretty stream that wound through the willows and among the trees. they were as delighted as children with their new purchase and the prospect of building. to her sister mrs. clemens wrote: mr. clemens seems to glory in his sense of possession; he goes daily into the lot, has had several falls trying to lay off the land by sliding around on his feet.... for three days the ice has covered the trees, and they have been glorious. we could do nothing but watch the beauty outside; if you looked at the trees as the sun struck them, with your back toward the sun, they were covered with jewels. if you looked toward the sun it was all crystal whiteness, a perfect fairy-land. then the nights were moonlight, and that was a great beauty, the moon giving us the same prismatic effect. this was the storm of which mark twain wrote his matchless description, given first in his speech on new england weather, and later preserved in 'following the equator', in more extended form. in that book he likens an ice-storm to his impressions derived from reading descriptions of the taj mahal, that wonderful tomb of a fair east indian queen. it is a marvelous bit of word-painting--his description of that majestic vision: “when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the shah of persia's diamond plume.” it will pay any one to look up that description and read it all, though it has been said, by the fortunate one or two who heard him first give it utterance as an impromptu outburst, that in the subsequent process of writing the bloom of its original magnificence was lost. the plans for the new house were drawn forthwith by that gentle architect edward potter, whose art to-day may be considered open to criticism, but not because of any lack of originality. hartford houses of that period were mainly of the goods-box form of architecture, perfectly square, typifying the commercial pursuits of many of their owners. potter agreed to get away from this idea, and a radical and even frenzied departure was the result. certainly his plans presented beautiful pictures, and all who saw them were filled with wonder and delight. architecture has lavished itself in many florescent forms since then, but we may imagine that potter's “english violet” order of design, as he himself designated it, startled, dazzled, and captivated in a day, when most houses were mere habitations, built with a view to economy and the largest possible amount of room. workmen were put on the ground without delay, to prepare for the builders, and work was rapidly pushed along. then in may the whole matter was left in the hands of the architect and the carpenters (with lawyer charles e. perkins to stand between potter and the violent builder, who roared at potter and frightened him when he wanted changes), while the clemens household, with clara spaulding, a girlhood friend of mrs. clemens, sailed away to england for a half-year holiday. xc. a long english holiday they sailed on the batavia, and with them went a young man named thompson, a theological student whom clemens had consented to take as an amanuensis. there is a pathetic incident connected with this young man, and it may as well be set down here. clemens found, a few weeks after his arrival in england, that so great was the tax upon his time that he could make no use of thompson's services. he gave thompson fifty dollars, and upon the possibility of the young man's desiring to return to america, advanced him another fifty dollars, saying that he could return it some day, and never thought of it again. but the young man remembered it, and one day, thirty-six years later, after a life of hardship and struggle, such as the life of a country minister is apt to be, he wrote and inclosed a money-order, a payment on his debt. that letter and its inclosure brought only sorrow to mark twain. he felt that it laid upon him the accumulated burden of the weary thirty-six years' struggle with ill-fortune. he returned the money, of course, and in a biographical note commented: how pale painted heroisms of romance look beside it! thompson's heroism, which is real, which is colossal, which is sublime, and which is costly beyond all estimate, is achieved in profound obscurity, and its hero walks in rags to the end of his days. i had forgotten thompson completely, but he flashes before me as vividly as lightning. i can see him now. it was on the deck of the batavia, in the dock. the ship was casting off, with that hubbub and confusion and rushing of sailors, and shouting of orders and shrieking of boatswain whistles, which marked the departure preparations in those days--an impressive contrast with the solemn silence which marks the departure preparations of the giant ships of the present day. mrs. clemens, clara spaulding, little susy, and the nurse-maid were all properly garbed for the occasion. we all had on our storm-rig, heavy clothes of somber hue, but new and designed and constructed for the purpose, strictly in accordance with sea-going etiquette; anything wearable on land being distinctly and odiously out of the question. very well. on that deck, and gliding placidly among those honorable and properly upholstered groups, appeared thompson, young, grave, long, slim, with an aged fuzzy plug hat towering high on the upper end of him and followed by a gray duster, which flowed down, without break or wrinkle, to his ankles. he came straight to us, and shook hands and compromised us. everybody could see that we knew him. a nigger in heaven could not have created a profounder astonishment. however, thompson didn't know that anything was happening. he had no prejudices about clothes. i can still see him as he looked when we passed sandy hook and the winds of the big ocean smote us. erect, lofty, and grand he stood facing the blast, holding his plug on with both hands and his generous duster blowing out behind, level with his neck. there were scoffers observing, but he didn't know it; he wasn't disturbed. in my mind, i see him once afterward, clothed as before, taking me down in shorthand. the shah of persia had come to england and dr. hosmer, of the herald, had sent me to ostend, to view his majesty's progress across the channel and write an account of it. i can't recall thompson after that, and i wish his memory had been as poor as mine. they had been a month in london, when the final incident referred to took place--the arrival of the shah of persia--and were comfortably quartered at the langham hotel. to twichell clemens wrote: we have a luxuriously ample suite of apartments on the third floor, our bedroom looking straight up portland place, our parlor having a noble array of great windows looking out upon both streets (portland place and the crook that joins it onto regent street). nine p.m. full twilight, rich sunset tints lingering in the west. i am not going to write anything; rather tell it when i get back. i love you and harmony, and that is all the fresh news i've got anyway. and i mean to keep that fresh all the time. mrs. clemens, in a letter to her sister, declared: “it is perfectly discouraging to try to write you. there is so much to write about that it makes me feel as if it was no use to begin.” it was a period of continuous honor and entertainment. if mark twain had been a lion on his first visit, he was little less than royalty now. his rooms at the langham were like a court. miss spaulding (now mrs. john b. stanchfield) remembers that robert browning, turgenieff, sir john millais, lord houghton, and sir charles dilke (then at the height of his fame) were among those that called to pay their respects. in a recent letter she says: i remember a delightful luncheon that charles kingsley gave for mr. clemens; also an evening when lord dunraven brought mr. home, the medium, lord dunraven telling many of the remarkable things he had seen mr. home do. i remember i wanted so much to see him float out of a seven or eight story window, and enter another, which lord dunraven said he had seen him do many times. but mr. home had been very ill, and said his power had left him. my great regret was that we did not see carlyle, who was too sad and ill for visits. among others they met lewis carroll, the author of alice in wonderland, and found him so shy that it was almost impossible to get him to say a word on any subject. “the shyest full-grown man, except uncle remus, i ever met,” clemens once wrote. “dr. macdonald and several other lively talkers were present, and the talk went briskly on for a couple of hours, but carroll sat still all the while, except now and then when he answered a question.” at a dinner given by george smalley they met herbert spencer, and at a luncheon-party at lord houghton's, sir arthur helps, then a world-wide celebrity. lord elcho, a large, vigorous man, sat at some distance down the table. he was talking earnestly about the town of godalming. it was a deep, flowing, and inarticulate rumble, but i caught the godalming pretty nearly every time it broke free of the rumbling, and as all the strength was on the first end of the word, it startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing. in the middle of the luncheon lady houghton rose, remarked to the guests on her right and on her left, in a matter-of-fact way, “excuse me, i have an engagement,” and without further ceremony, she went off to meet it. this would have been doubtful etiquette in america. lord houghton told a number of delightful stories. he told them in french, and i lost nothing of them but the nubs. little susy and her father thrived on london life, but after a time it wore on mrs. clemens. she delighted in the english cordiality and culture, but the demands were heavy, the social forms sometimes trying. life in london was interesting, and in its way charming, but she did not enter into it with quite her husband's enthusiasm and heartiness. in the end they canceled all london engagements and quietly set out for scotland. on the way they rested a few days in york, a venerable place such as mark twain always loved to describe. in a letter to mrs. langdon he wrote: for the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with its crooked, narrow lanes, that tell us of their old day that knew no wheeled vehicles; its plaster-and-timber dwellings, with upper stories far overhanging the street, and thus marking their date, say three hundred years ago; the stately city walls, the castellated gates, the ivy-grown, foliage-sheltered, most noble and picturesque ruin of st. mary's abbey, suggesting their date, say five hundred years ago, in the heart of crusading times and the glory of english chivalry and romance; the vast cathedral of york, with its worn carvings and quaintly pictured windows, preaching of still remoter days; the outlandish names of streets and courts and byways that stand as a record and a memorial, all these centuries, of danish dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here and there of king arthur and his knights and their bloody fights with saxon oppressors round about this old city more than thirteen hundred years gone by; and, last of all, the melancholy old stone coffins and sculptured inscriptions, a venerable arch and a hoary tower of stone that still remain and are kissed by the sun and caressed by the shadows every day, just as the sun and the shadows have kissed and, caressed them every lagging day since the roman emperor's soldiers placed them here in the times when jesus the son of mary walked the streets of nazareth a youth, with no more name or fame than the yorkshire boy who is loitering down this street this moment. they reached edinburgh at the end of july and secluded themselves in veitch's family hotel in george street, intending to see no one. but this plan was not a success; the social stress of london had been too much for mrs. clemens, and she collapsed immediately after their arrival. clemens was unacquainted in edinburgh, but remembered that dr. john brown, who had written rab and his friend, lived there. he learned his address, and that he was still a practising physician. he walked around to rutland street, and made himself known. dr. brown came forthwith, and mrs. clemens speedily recovered under his able and inspiring treatment. the association did not end there. for nearly a month dr. brown was their daily companion, either at the hotel, or in his own home, or on protracted drives when he made his round of visits, taking these new friends along. dr. john was beloved by everybody in edinburgh, everybody in scotland, for that matter, and his story of rab had won him a following throughout christendom. he was an unpretentious sovereign. clemens once wrote of him: his was a sweet and winning face, as beautiful a face as i have ever known. reposeful, gentle, benignant; the face of a saint at peace with all the world and placidly beaming upon it the sunshine of love that filled his heart. he was the friend of all dogs, and of all people. it has been told of him that once, when driving, he thrust his head suddenly out of the carriage window, then resumed his place with a disappointed look. “who was it?” asked his companion. “some one you know?” “no,” he said. “a dog i don't know.” he became the boon companion and playmate of little susy, then not quite a year and a half old. he called her megalopis, a greek term, suggested by her eyes; those deep, burning eyes that seemed always so full of life's sadder philosophies, and impending tragedy. in a collection of dr. brown's letters he refers to this period. in one place he says: had the author of the innocents abroad not come to edinburgh at that time we in all human probability might never have met, and what a deprivation that would have been to me during the last quarter of a century! and in another place: i am attending the wife of mark twain. his real name is clemens. she is a quite lovely little woman, modest and clever, and she has a girlie eighteen months old, her ludicrous miniature--and such eyes! those playmates, the good doctor and megalopis, romped together through the hotel rooms with that complete abandon which few grown persons can assume in their play with children, and not all children can assume in their play with grown-ups. they played “bear,” and the “bear” (which was a very little one, so little that when it stood up behind the sofa you could just get a glimpse of yellow hair) would lie in wait for her victim, and spring out and surprise him and throw him into frenzies of fear. almost every day they made his professional rounds with him. he always carried a basket of grapes for his patients. his guests brought along books to read while they waited. when he stopped for a call he would say: “entertain yourselves while i go in and reduce the population.” there was much sight-seeing to do in edinburgh, and they could not quite escape social affairs. there were teas and luncheons and dinners with the dunfermlines and the abercrombies, and the macdonalds, and with others of those brave clans that no longer slew one another among the grim northern crags and glens, but were as sociable and entertaining lords and ladies as ever the southland could produce. they were very gentle folk indeed, and mrs. clemens, in future years, found her heart going back oftener to edinburgh than to any other haven of those first wanderings. august th she wrote to her sister: we leave edinburgh to-morrow with sincere regret; we have had such a delightful stay here--we do so regret leaving dr. brown and his sister, thinking that we shall probably never see them again [as indeed they never did]. they spent a day or two at glasgow and sailed for ireland, where they put in a fortnight, and early in september were back in england again, at chester, that queer old city where; from a tower on the wall, charles i. read the story of his doom. reginald cholmondeley had invited them to visit his country seat, beautiful condover hall, near shrewsbury, and in that lovely retreat they spent some happy, restful days. then they were in the whirl of london once more, but escaped for a fortnight to paris, sight-seeing and making purchases for the new home. mrs. clemens was quite ready to return to america, by this time. i am blue and cross and homesick [she wrote]. i suppose what makes me feel the latter is because we are contemplating to stay in london another month. there has not one sheet of mr. clemens's proof come yet, and if he goes home before the book is published here he will lose his copyright. and then his friends feel that it will be better for him to lecture in london before his book is published, not only that it will give him a larger but a more enviable reputation. i would not hesitate one moment if it were simply for the money that his copyright will bring him, but if his reputation will be better for his staying and lecturing, of course he ought to stay.... the truth is, i can't bear the thought of postponing going home. it is rather gratifying to find olivia clemens human, like that, now and then. otherwise, on general testimony, one might well be tempted to regard her as altogether of another race and kind. xci. a london lecture clemens concluded to hasten the homeward journey, but to lecture a few nights in london before starting. he would then accompany his little family home, and return at once to continue the lecture series and protect his copyright. this plan was carried out. in a communication to the standard, october th, he said: sir,--in view of the prevailing frenzy concerning the sandwich islands, and the inflamed desire of the public to acquire information concerning them, i have thought it well to tarry yet another week in england and deliver a lecture upon this absorbing subject. and lest it should be thought unbecoming in me, a stranger, to come to the public rescue at such a time, instead of leaving to abler hands a matter of so much moment, i desire to explain that i do it with the best motives and the most honorable intentions. i do it because i am convinced that no one can allay this unwholesome excitement as effectually as i can, and to allay it, and allay it as quickly as possible, is surely one thing that is absolutely necessary at this juncture. i feel and know that i am equal to this task, for i can allay any kind of an excitement by lecturing upon it. i have saved many communities in this way. i have always been able to paralyze the public interest in any topic that i chose to take hold of and elucidate with all my strength. hoping that this explanation will show that if i am seeming to intrude i am at least doing it from a high impulse, i am, sir, your obedient servant, mark twain. a day later the following announcement appeared: queen's concert rooms, hanover square. mr. george dolby begs to announce that mr. mark twain will deliver a lecture of a humorous character, as above, on monday evening next, october th, , and repeat it in the same place, on tuesday evening, october th, wednesday “ “ th, thursday “ “ th, friday “ “ th, at eight o'clock, and saturday afternoon, october th, at three o'clock. subject: “our fellow savages of the sandwich islands.” as mr. twain has spent several months in these islands, and is well acquainted with his subject, the lecture may be expected to furnish matter of interest. stalls, s. unreserved seats, s. the prospect of a lecture from mark twain interested the london public. those who had not seen him were willing to pay even for that privilege. the papers were encouraging; punch sounded a characteristic note: welcome to a lecturer “'tis time we twain did show ourselves.” 'twas said by caesar, when one mark had lost his head: by mark, whose head's quite bright, 'tis said again: therefore, “go with me, friends, to bless this twain.” --punch. dolby had managed the dickens lectures, and he proved his sound business judgment and experience by taking the largest available hall in london for mark twain. on the evening of october th, in the spacious queen's concert rooms, hanover square, mark twain delivered his first public address in england. the subject was “our fellow savages of the sandwich islands,” the old lecture with which he had made his first great successes. he was not introduced. he appeared on the platform in evening dress, assuming the character of a manager announcing a disappointment. mr. clemens, he said, had fully expected to be present. he paused and loud murmurs arose from the audience. he lifted his hand and they subsided. then he added, “i am happy to say that mark twain is present, and will now give his lecture.” whereupon the audience roared its approval. it would be hardly an exaggeration to say that his triumph that week was a regal one. for five successive nights and a saturday matinee the culture and fashion of london thronged to hear him discourse of their “fellow savages.” it was a lecture event wholly without precedent. the lectures of artemus ward,--[“artemus the delicious,” as charles reade called him, came to london in june, , and gave his “piece” in egyptian hall. the refined, delicate, intellectual countenance, the sweet, gave, mouth, from which one might have expected philosophical lectures retained their seriousness while listeners were convulsed with laughter. there was something magical about it. every sentence was a surprise. he played on his audience as liszt did on a piano most easily when most effectively. who can ever forget his attempt to stop his italian pianist--“a count in his own country, but not much account in this”--who went on playing loudly while he was trying to tell us an “affecting incident” that occurred near a small clump of trees shown on his panorama of the far west. the music stormed on-we could see only lips and arms pathetically moving till the piano suddenly ceased, and we heard-it was all we heard “and, she fainted in reginald's arms.” his tricks have been at tempted in many theaters, but artemus ward was inimitable. and all the time the man was dying. (moneure d. conway, autobiography.)]--who had quickly become a favorite in london, had prepared the public for american platform humor, while the daily doings of this new american product, as reported by the press, had aroused interest, or curiosity, to a high pitch. on no occasion in his own country had he won such a complete triumph. the papers for a week devoted columns of space to appreciation and editorial comment. the daily news of october th published a column-and-a-half editorial on american humor, with mark twain's public appearance as the general text. the times referred to the continued popularity of the lectures: they can't be said to have more than whetted the public appetite, if we are to take the fact which has been imparted to us, that the holding capacity of the hanover square rooms has been inadequate to the demand made upon it every night by twain's lecturing, as a criterion. the last lecture of this too brief course was delivered yesterday before an audience which crammed to discomfort every part of the principal apartment of the hanover square rooms.... at the close of yesterday's lecture mark twain was so loudly applauded that he returned to the stage, and, as soon as the audience gave him a chance of being heard, he said, with much apparent emotion: “ladies and gentlemen,--i won't keep you one single moment in this suffocating atmosphere. i simply wish to say that this is the last lecture i shall have the honor to deliver in london until i return from america, four weeks from now. i only wish to say (here mr. clemens faltered as if too much affected to proceed) i am very grateful. i do not wish to appear pathetic, but it is something magnificent for a stranger to come to the metropolis of the world and be received so handsomely as i have been. i simply thank you.” the saturday review devoted a page, and once a week, under the head of “cracking jokes,” gave three pages, to praise of the literary and lecture methods of the new american humorist. with the promise of speedy return, he left london, gave the lecture once in liverpool, and with his party (october st) set sail for home. in mid-atlantic he remembered dr. brown, and wrote him: we have plowed a long way over the sea, and there's twenty-two hundred miles of restless water between us now, besides the railway stretch. and yet you are so present with us, so close to us, that a span and a whisper would bridge the distance. so it would seem that of all the many memories of that eventful half-year, that of dr. brown was the most present, the most tender. xcii. further london lecture triumphs orion clemens records that he met “sam and livy” on their arrival from england, november d, and that the president of the mercantile library association sent up his card “four times,” in the hope of getting a chance to propose a lecture engagement--an incident which impressed orion deeply in its evidence of his brother's towering importance. orion himself was by this time engaged in various projects. he was inventing a flying-machine, for one thing, writing a jules verne story, reading proof on a new york daily, and contemplating the lecture field. this great blaze of international appreciation which had come to the little boy who used to set type for him in hannibal, and wash up the forms and cry over the dirty proof, made him gasp. they went to see booth in hamlet [he says], and booth sent for sam to come behind the scenes, and when sam proposed to add a part to hamlet, the part of a bystander who makes humorous modern comment on the situations in the play, booth laughed immoderately. proposing a sacrilege like that to booth! to what heights had this printer-pilot, miner-brother not attained!--[this idea of introducing a new character in hamlet was really attempted later by mark twain, with the connivance of joe goodman [of all men], sad to relate. so far as is known it is the one stain on goodman's literary record.] clemens returned immediately to england--the following saturday, in fact--and was back in london lecturing again after barely a month's absence. he gave the “roughing it” address, this time under the title of “roughing it on the silver frontier,” and if his audiences were any less enthusiastic, or his houses less crowded than before, the newspapers of that day have left no record of it. it was the height of the season now, and being free to do so, he threw himself into the whirl of it, and for two months, beyond doubt, was the most talked-of figure in london. the athenaeum club made him a visiting member (an honor considered next to knighthood); punch quoted him; societies banqueted him; his apartments, as before; were besieged by callers. afternoons one was likely to find him in “poets' corner” of the langham smoking-room, with a group of london and american authors--reade, collins, miller, and the others--frankly rioting in his bold fancies. charles warren stoddard was in london at the time, and acted as his secretary. stoddard was a gentle poet, a delightful fellow, and clemens was very fond of him. his only complaint of stoddard was that he did not laugh enough at his humorous yarns. clemens once said: “dolby and i used to come in after the lecture, or perhaps after being out to some dinner, and we liked to sit down and talk it over and tell yarns, and we expected stoddard to laugh at them, but stoddard would lie there on the couch and snore. otherwise, as a secretary, he was perfect.” the great tichborne trial was in progress then, and the spectacle of an illiterate impostor trying to establish his claim as the rightful heir to a great estate was highly diverting to mark twain.--[in a letter of this period he speaks of having attended one of the claimant's “evenings.”]--he wanted to preserve the evidence as future literary material, and stoddard day after day patiently collected the news reports and neatly pasted them into scrap-books, where they still rest, a complete record of that now forgotten farce. the tichborne trial recalled to mark twain the claimant in the lampton family, who from time to time wrote him long letters, urging him to join in the effort to establish his rights to the earldom of durham. this american claimant was a distant cousin, who had “somehow gotten hold of, or had fabricated a full set of documents.” colonel henry watterson, just quoted (also a lampton connection), adds: during the tichborne trial mark and i were in london, and one day he said to me: “i have investigated this durham business down at the herald's office. there is nothing to it. the lamptons passed out of the earldom of durham a hundred years ago. there were never any estates; the title lapsed; the present earldom is a new creation, not in the same family at all. but i'll tell you what: if you'll put up $ , i'll put up $ more; we'll bring our chap over here and set him in as claimant, and, my word for it, kenealy's fat boy won't be a marker to him.” it was a characteristic mark twain project, one of the sort he never earned out in reality, but loved to follow in fancy, and with the pen sometimes. the “rightful earl of durham” continued to send letters for a long time after that (some of them still exist), but he did not establish his claim. no one but mark twain ever really got anything out of it. like the tennessee land, it furnished material by and by for a book. colonel watterson goes on to say that clemens was only joking about having looked up the matter in the peerage; that he hadn't really looked it up at all, and that the earldom lies still in the lampton family. another of clemens's friends in london at this time was prentice mulford, of california. in later years mulford acquired a wide reputation for his optimistic and practical psychologies. through them he lifted himself out of the slough of despond, and he sought to extend a helping hand to others. his “white cross library” had a wide reading and a wide influence; perhaps has to this day. but in mulford had not found the tangibility of thought, the secret of strength; he was only finding it, maybe, in his frank acknowledgment of shortcoming: now, mark, i am down-very much down at present; you are up-where you deserve to be. i can't ask this on the score of any past favors, for there have been none. i have not always spoken of you in terms of extravagant praise; have sometimes criticized you, which was due, i suppose, in part to an envious spirit. i am simply human. some people in the same profession say they entertain no jealousy of those more successful. i can't. they are divine; i am not. it was only that he wished clemens to speak a word for him to routledge, to get him a hearing for his work. he adds: i shall be up myself some day, although my line is far apart from yours. whether you can do anything that i ask of you or not, i shall be happy then, as i would be now, to do you any just and right service.... perhaps i have mistaken my vocation. certainly, if i was back with my rocker on the tuolumne, i'd make it rattle livelier than ever i did before. i have occasionally thought of london bridge, but the thames is now so d---d cold and dirty, and besides i can swim, and any attempt at drowning would, through the mere instinct of self-preservation, only result in my swimming ashore and ruining my best clothes; wherefore i should be worse off than ever. of course mark twain granted the favor mulford asked, and a great deal more, no doubt, for that was his way. mulford came up, as he had prophesied, but the sea in due time claimed him, though not in the way he had contemplated. years after he was one day found drifting off the shores of long island in an open boat, dead. clemens made a number of notable dinner speeches during this second london lecture period. his response to the toast of the “ladies,” delivered at the annual dinner of the scottish corporation of london, was the sensational event of the evening. he was obliged to decline an invitation to the lord mayor's dinner, whereupon his lordship wrote to urge him to be present at least at the finale, when the welcome would be “none the less hearty,” and bespoke his attendance for any future dinners. clemens lectured steadily at the hanover square rooms during the two months of his stay in london, and it was only toward the end of this astonishing engagement that the audience began to show any sign of diminishing. early in january he wrote to twichell: i am not going to the provinces because i cannot get halls that are large enough. i always felt cramped in the hanover square rooms, but i find that everybody here speaks with awe and respect of that prodigious hall and wonders that i could fill it so long. i am hoping to be back in twenty days, but i have so much to go home to and enjoy with a jubilant joy that it hardly seems possible that it can come to pass in so uncertain a world as this. in the same letter he speaks of attending an exhibition of landseer's paintings at the royal academy: ah, they are wonderfully beautiful! there are such rich moonlights and dusks in the “challenge” and the “combat,” and in that long flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or sunrise, for no man can ever tell t'other from which in a picture, except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the water), and there is such a grave analytical profundity in the face of the connoisseurs; and such pathos in the picture of a fawn suckling its dead mother on a snowy waste, with only the blood in the footprints to hint that she is not asleep. and the way that he makes animals' flesh and blood, insomuch that if the room were darkened ever so little, and a motionless living animal placed beside the painted one, no man could tell which was which. i interrupted myself here, to drop a line to shirley brooks and suggest a cartoon for punch. it was this: in one of the academy saloons (in a suite where these pictures are) a fine bust of landseer stands on a pedestal in the center of the room. i suggested that some of landseer's best known animals be represented as having come down out of their frames in the moonlight and grouped themselves about the bust in mourning attitudes. he sailed january ( .), on the paythia, and two weeks later was at home, where all was going well. the gilded age had been issued a day or two before christmas, and was already in its third edition. by the end of january , copies had been sold, a sale that had increased to , a month later. the new house was progressing, though it was by no means finished. mrs. clemens was in good health. little susy was full of such american activities as to earn the name of “the modoc.” the promise of the year was bright. xciii. the real colonel sellers-golden days there are bound to be vexations, flies in the ointment, as we say. it was warner who conferred the name of eschol sellers on the chief figure of the collaborated novel. warner had known it as the name of an obscure person, or perhaps he had only heard of it. at all events, it seemed a good one for the character and had been adopted. but behold, the book had been issued but a little while when there rose “out of the vasty deeps” a genuine eschol sellers, who was a very respectable person. he was a stout, prosperous-looking man, gray and about fifty-five years old. he came into the american publishing company offices and asked permission to look at the book. mr. bliss was out at the moment, but presently arrived. the visitor rose and introduced himself. “my name is eschol sellers,” he said. “you have used it in one of your publications. it has brought upon me a lot of ridicule. my people wish me to sue you for $ , damages.” he had documents to prove his identity, and there was only one thing to be done; he must be satisfied. bliss agreed to recall as many of the offending volumes as possible and change the name on the plates. he contacted the authors, and the name beriah was substituted for the offending eschol. it turned out that the real sellers family was a large one, and that the given name eschol was not uncommon in its several branches. this particular eschol sellers, curiously enough, was an inventor and a promoter, though of a much more substantial sort than his fiction namesake. he was also a painter of considerable merit, a writer and an antiquarian. he was said to have been a grandson of the famous painter, rembrandt peale. clemens vowed that he would not lecture in america that winter. the irrepressible redpath besieged him as usual, and at the end of january clemens telegraphed him, as he thought, finally. following it with a letter of explanation, he added: “i said to her, 'there isn't money enough in america to hire me to leave you for one day.'” but redpath was a persistent devil. he used arguments and held out inducements which even mrs. clemens thought should not be resisted, and clemens yielded from time to time, and gave a lecture here and there during february. finally, on the d of march ( .) he telegraphed his tormentor: “why don't you congratulate me? i never expect to stand on a lecture platform again after thursday night.” howells tells delightfully of a visit which he and aldrich paid to hartford just at this period. aldrich went to visit clemens and howells to visit charles dudley warner, clemens coming as far as springfield to welcome them. in the good-fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round. there was constant running in and out of friendly houses where the lively hosts and guests called one another by their christian names or nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at doors. clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance. howells tells how clemens dilated on the advantages of subscription sale over the usual methods of publication, and urged the two boston authors to prepare something which canvassers could handle. “why, any other means of bringing out a book is privately printing it,” he declared, and added that his subscription books in bliss's hands sold right along, “just like the bible.” on the way back to boston howells and aldrich planned a subscription book which would sell straight along, like the bible. it was to be called “twelve memorable murders.” they had dreamed two or three fortunes by the time they had reached boston, but the project ended there. “we never killed a single soul,” howells said once to the writer of this memoir. clemens was always urging howells to visit him after that. he offered all sorts of inducements. you will find us the most reasonable people in the world. we had thought of precipitating upon you, george warner and his wife one day, twichell and his jewel of a wife another day, and charles perkins and wife another. only those--simply members of our family they are. but i'll close the door against them all, which will “fix” all of the lot except twichell, who will no more hesitate to climb in the back window than nothing. and you shall go to bed when you please, get up when you please, talk when you please, read when you please. a little later he was urging howells or aldrich, or both of them; to come to hartford to live. mr. hall, who lives in the house next to mrs. stowe's (just where we drive in to go to our new house), will sell for $ , or $ , . you can do your work just as well here as in cambridge, can't you? come! will one of you boys buy that house? now, say yes. certainly those were golden, blessed days, and perhaps, as howells says, the sun does not shine on their like any more--not in hartford, at least, for the old group that made them no longer assembles there. hartford about this time became a sort of shrine for all literary visitors, and for other notables as well, whether of america or from overseas. it was the half-way place between boston and new york, and pilgrims going in either direction rested there. it is said that travelers arriving in america, were apt to remember two things they wished to see: niagara falls and mark twain. but the falls had no such recent advertising advantage as that spectacular success in london. visitors were apt to begin in hartford. howells went with considerable frequency after that, or rather with regularity, twice a year, or oftener, and his coming was always hailed with great rejoicing. they visited and ate around at one place and another among that pleasant circle of friends. but they were happiest afterward together, clemens smoking continually, “soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot scotch,” says howells, “while we both talked, and talked, and tasked of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the waters under the earth. after two days of this talk i would come away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer.” sometimes clemens told the story of his early life, “the inexhaustible, the fairy, the arabian nights story, which i could never tire of even when it began to be told over again.” xciv. beginning “tom sawyer” the clemens household went to quarry farm in april, leaving the new house once more in the hands of the architect and builders. it was costing a vast sum of money, and there was a financial stress upon land. mrs. clemens, always prudent, became a little uneasy at times, though without warrant in those days, for her business statement showed that her holdings were only a little less than a quarter of a million in her own right, while her husband's books and lectures had been highly remunerative, and would be more so. they were justified in living in ample, even luxurious comfort, and how free from financial worries they could have lived for the rest of their days! clemens, realizing his happiness, wrote dr. brown: indeed i am thankful for the wifey and the child, and if there is one individual creature on all this footstool who is more thoroughly and uniformly and, unceasingly happy than i am i defy the world to produce him and prove him. in my opinion he don't exist. i was a mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject when livy took charge of me, four years ago, and i may still be to the rest of the world, but not to her. she has made a very creditable job of me. truly fortune not only smiled, but laughed. every mail brought great bundles of letters that sang his praises. robert watt, who had translated his books into danish, wrote of their wide popularity among his people. madame blanc (th. bentzon), who as early as had translated the jumping frog into french, and published it, with extended comment on the author and his work, in the 'revue des deux mondes', was said to be preparing a review of 'the gilded age'. all the world seemed ready to do him honor. of course, one must always pay the price, usually a vexatious one. bores stopped him on the street to repeat ancient and witless stories. invented anecdotes, some of them exasperating ones, went the rounds of the press. impostors in distant localities personated him, or claimed to be near relatives, and obtained favors, sometimes money, in his name. trivial letters, seeking benefactions of every kind, took the savor from his daily mail. letters from literary aspirants were so numerous that he prepared a “form” letter of reply: dear sir or madam,--experience has not taught me very much, still it has taught me that it is not wise to criticize a piece of literature, except to an enemy of the person who wrote it; then if you praise it that enemy admires--you for your honest manliness, and if you dispraise it he admires you for your sound judgment. yours truly, s. l. c. even orion, now in keokuk on a chicken farm, pursued him with manuscripts and proposals of schemes. clemens had bought this farm for orion, who had counted on large and quick returns, but was planning new enterprises before the first eggs were hatched. orion clemens was as delightful a character as was ever created in fiction, but he must have been a trial now and then to mark twain. we may gather something of this from a letter written by the latter to his mother and sister at this period: i can't “encourage” orion. nobody can do that conscientiously, for the reason that before one's letter has time to reach him he is off on some new wild-goose chase. would you encourage in literature a man who the older he grows the worse he writes? i cannot encourage him to try the ministry, because he would change his religion so fast that he would have to keep a traveling agent under wages to go ahead of him to engage pulpits and board for him. i cannot conscientiously encourage him to do anything but potter around his little farm and put in his odd hours contriving new and impossible projects at the rate of a year which is his customary average. he says he did well in hannibal! now there is a man who ought to be entirely satisfied with the grandeurs, emoluments, and activities of a hen farm. if you ask me to pity orion i can do that. i can do it every day and all day long. but one can't “encourage” quicksilver; because the instant you put your finger on it, it isn't there. no, i am saying too much. he does stick to his literary and legal aspirations, and he naturally would elect the very two things which he is wholly and preposterously unfitted for. if i ever become able, i mean to put orion on a regular pension without revealing the fact that it is a pension. he did presently allow the pension, a liberal one, which continued until neither orion clemens nor his wife had further earthly need of it. mark twain for some time had contemplated one of the books that will longest preserve his memory, 'the adventures of tom sawyer'. the success of 'roughing it' naturally made him cast about for other autobiographical material, and he remembered those days along the river-front in hannibal--his skylarking with tom blankenship, the bowen boys, john briggs, and the rest. he had recognized these things as material--inviting material it was--and now in the cool luxury of quarry farm he set himself to spin the fabric of youth. he found summer-time always his best period for literary effort, and on a hillside just by the old quarry, mrs. crane had built for him that spring a study--a little room of windows, somewhat suggestive of a pilot-house--overlooking the long sweep of grass and the dreamlike city below. vines were planted that in the course of time would cover and embower it; there was a tiny fireplace for chilly days. to twichell, of his new retreat, clemens wrote: it is the loveliest study you ever saw. it is octagonal, with a peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious window, and it sits perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills. it is a cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the lightning flashes behind the hills beyond, and the rain beats upon the roof over my head, imagine the luxury of it. he worked steadily there that summer. he would go up mornings, after breakfast, remaining until nearly dinner-time, say until five o'clock or after, for it was not his habit to eat luncheon. other members of the family did not venture near the place, and if he was urgently wanted they blew a horn. each evening he brought down his day's performance to read to the assembled family. he felt the need of audience and approval. usually he earned the latter, but not always. once, when for a day he put aside other matters to record a young undertaker's love-affair, and brought down the result in the evening, fairly bubbling with the joy of it, he met with a surprise. the tale was a ghastly burlesque, its humor of the most disheartening, unsavory sort. no one spoke during the reading, nobody laughed: the air was thick with disapproval. his voice lagged and faltered toward the end. when he finished there was heavy silence. mrs. clemens was the only one who could speak: “youth, let's walk a little,” she said. the “undertaker's love story” is still among the manuscripts of that period, but it is unlikely that it will ever see the light of print.--[this tale bears no relation to “the undertaker's story” in sketches new and old.] the tom sawyer tale progressed steadily and satisfactorily. clemens wrote dr. brown: i have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average, for some time now, on a book (a story), and consequently have been so wrapped up in it, and dead to everything else, that i have fallen mighty short in letter-writing.... on hot days i spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the same thin linen we make shirts of. he incloses some photographs in this letter. the group [he says] represents the vine-clad carriageway in front of the farm-house. on the left is megalopis sitting in the lap of her german nurse-maid. i am sitting behind them. mrs. crane is in the center. mr. crane next to her. then mrs. clemens and the new baby. her irish nurse stands at her back. then comes the table waitress, a young negro girl, born free. next to her is auntie cord (a fragment of whose history i have just sent to a magazine). she is the cook; was in slavery more than forty years; and the self- satisfied wench, the last of the group, is the little baby's american nurse-maid. in the middle distance my mother-in-law's coachman (up on errand) has taken a position unsolicited to help out the picture. no, that is not true. he was waiting there a minute or two before the photographer came. in the extreme background, under the archway, you glimpse my study. the “new baby,” “bay,” as they came to call her, was another little daughter, born in june, a happy, healthy addition to the household. in a letter written to twichell we get a sweet summer picture of this period, particularly of little sunny-haired, two-year-old susy. there is nothing selfish about the modoc. she is fascinated with the new baby. the modoc rips and tears around outdoors most of the time, and consequently is as hard as a pineknot and as brown as an indian. she is bosom friend to all the chickens, ducks, turkeys, and guinea-hens on the place. yesterday, as she marched along the winding path that leads up the hill through the red-clover beds to the summer-house, there was a long procession of these fowls stringing contentedly after her, led by a stately rooster, who can look over the modoc's head. the devotion of these vassals has been purchased with daily largess of indian meal, and so the modoc, attended by her body-guard, moves in state wherever she goes. there were days, mainly sundays, when he did not work at all; peaceful days of lying fallow, dreaming in shady places, drowsily watching little susy, or reading with mrs. clemens. howells's “foregone conclusion” was running in the atlantic that year, and they delighted in it. clemens wrote the author: i should think that this must be the daintiest, truest, most admirable workmanship that was ever put on a story. the creatures of god do not act out their natures more unerringly than yours do. if your genuine stories can die i wonder by what right old walter scott's artificialities shall continue to live. at other times he found comfort in the society of theodore crane. these two were always fond of each other, and often read together the books in which they were mutually interested. they had portable-hammock arrangements, which they placed side by side on the lawn, and read and discussed through summer afternoons. the 'mutineers of the bounty' was one of the books they liked best, and there was a story of an iceland farmer, a human document, that had an unfading interest. also there were certain articles in old numbers of the atlantic that they read and reread. 'pepys' diary', 'two years before the mast', and a book on the andes were reliable favorites. mark twain read not so many books, but read a few books often. those named were among the literature he asked for each year of his return to quarry farm. without them, the farm and the summer would not be the same. then there was 'lecky's history of european morals'; there were periods when they read lecky avidly and discussed it in original and unorthodox ways. mark twain found an echo of his own philosophies in lecky. he made frequent marginal notes along the pages of the world's moral history--notes not always quotable in the family circle. mainly, however, they were short, crisp interjections of assent or disapproval. in one place lecky refers to those who have undertaken to prove that all our morality is a product of experience, holding that a desire to obtain happiness and to avoid pain is the only possible motive to action; the reason, and the only reason, why we should perform virtuous actions being “that on the whole such a course will bring us the greatest amount of happiness.” clemens has indorsed these philosophies by writing on the margin, “sound and true.” it was the philosophy which he himself would always hold (though, apparently, never live by), and in the end would embody a volume of his own.--[what is man? privately printed in .]--in another place lecky, himself speaking, says: fortunately we are all dependent for many of our pleasures on others. co-operation and organization are essential to our happiness, and these are impossible without some restraint being placed upon our appetites. laws are made to secure this restraint, and being sustained by rewards, and punishments they make it the interest of the individual to regard that of the community. “correct!” comments clemens. “he has proceeded from unreasoned selfishness to reasoned selfishness. all our acts, reasoned and unreasoned, are selfish.” it was a conclusion he logically never departed from; not the happiest one, it would seem, at first glance, but one easier to deny than to disprove. on the back of an old envelope mark twain set down his literary declaration of this period. “i like history, biography, travels, curious facts and strange happenings, and science. and i detest novels, poetry, and theology.” but of course the novels of howells would be excepted; lecky was not theology, but the history of it; his taste for poetry would develop later, though it would never become a fixed quantity, as was his devotion to history and science. his interest in these amounted to a passion. xcv. an “atlantic” story and a play the reference to “auntie cord” in the letter to dr. brown brings us to mark twain's first contribution to the atlantic monthly. howells in his recollections of his atlantic editorship, after referring to certain western contributors, says: later came mark twain, originally of missouri, but then provisionally of hartford, and now ultimately of the solar system, not to say the universe. he came first with “a true story,” one of those noble pieces of humanity with which the south has atoned chiefly, if not solely, through him for all its despite to the negro. clemens had long aspired to appear in the atlantic, but such was his own rating of his literature that he hardly hoped to qualify for its pages. twichell remembers his “mingled astonishment and triumph” when he was invited to send something to the magazine. he was obliged to “send something” once or twice before the acceptance of “a true story,” the narrative of auntie cord, and even this acceptance brought with it the return of a fable which had accompanied it, with the explanation that a fable like that would disqualify the magazine for every denominational reader, though howells hastened to express his own joy in it, having been particularly touched by the author's reference to sisyphus and atlas as ancestors of the tumble-bug. the “true story,” he said, with its “realest king of black talk,” won him, and a few days later he wrote again: “this little story delights me more and more. i wish you had about forty of 'em.” and so, modestly enough, as became him, for the story was of the simplest, most unpretentious sort, mark twain entered into the school of the elect. in his letter to howells, accompanying the ms., the author said: i inclose also “a true story,” which has no humor in it. you can pay as lightly as you choose for that if you want it, for it is rather out of my line. i have not altered the old colored woman's story, except to begin it at the beginning, instead of the middle, as she did--and traveled both ways. howells in his recollections tells of the business anxiety in the atlantic office in the effort to estimate the story's pecuniary value. clemens and harte had raised literary rates enormously; the latter was reputed to have received as much as five cents a word from affluent newspapers! but the atlantic was poor, and when sixty dollars was finally decided upon for the three pages (about two and a half cents a word) the rate was regarded as handsome--without precedent in atlantic history. howells adds that as much as forty times this amount was sometimes offered to mark twain in later years. even in ' he had received a much higher rate than that offered by the atlantic,--but no acceptance, then, or later, ever made him happier, or seemed more richly rewarded. “a true story, repeated word for word as i heard it” was precisely what it claimed to be.--[atlantic monthly for november, ; also included in sketches new and old.]--auntie cord, the auntie rachel of that tale, cook at quarry farm, was a virginia negress who had been twice sold as a slave, and was proud of the fact; particularly proud that she had brought $ , on the block. all her children had been sold away from her, but it was a long time ago, and now at sixty she was fat and seemingly without care. she had told her story to mrs. crane, who had more than once tried to persuade her to tell it to clemens; but auntie cord was reluctant. one evening, however, when the family sat on the front veranda in the moonlight, looking down on the picture city, as was their habit, auntie cord came around to say good night, and clemens engaged her in conversation. he led up to her story, and almost before she knew it she was seated at his feet telling the strange tale in almost the exact words in which it was set down by him next morning. it gave mark twain a chance to exercise two of his chief gifts--transcription and portrayal. he was always greater at these things than at invention. auntie cord's story is a little masterpiece. he wished to do more with auntie cord and her associates of the farm, for they were extraordinarily interesting. two other negroes on the place, john lewis and his wife (we shall hear notably of lewis later), were not always on terms of amity with auntie cord. they disagreed on religion, and there were frequent battles in the kitchen. these depressed the mistress of the house, but they gave only joy to mark twain. his southern raising had given him an understanding of their humors, their native emotions which made these riots a spiritual gratification. he would slip around among the shrubbery and listen to the noise and strife of battle, and hug himself with delight. sometimes they resorted to missiles--stones, tinware--even dressed poultry which auntie cord was preparing for the oven. lewis was very black, auntie cord was a bright mulatto, lewis's' wife several shades lighter. wherever the discussion began it promptly shaded off toward the color-line and insult. auntie cord was a methodist; lewis was a dunkard. auntie cord was ignorant and dogmatic; lewis could read and was intelligent. theology invariably led to personality, and eventually to epithets, crockery, geology, and victuals. how the greatest joker of the age did enjoy that summer warfare! the fun was not all one-sided. an incident of that summer probably furnished more enjoyment for the colored members of the household than it did for mark twain. lewis had some fowls, and among them was a particularly pestiferous guinea-hen that used to get up at three in the morning and go around making the kind of a noise that a guinea-hen must like and is willing to get up early to hear. mark twain did not care for it. he stood it as long as he could one morning, then crept softly from the house to stop it. it was a clear, bright night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped up stealthily with a stout stick. the bird was pouring out its heart, tearing the moonlight to tatters. stealing up close, clemens made a vicious swing with his bludgeon, but just then the guinea stepped forward a little, and he missed. the stroke and his explosion frightened the fowl, and it started to run. clemens, with his mind now on the single purpose of revenge, started after it. around the trees, along the paths, up and down the lawn, through gates and across the garden, out over the fields, they raced, “pursuer and pursued.” the guinea nor longer sang, and clemens was presently too exhausted to swear. hour after hour the silent, deadly hunt continued, both stopping to rest at intervals; then up again and away. it was like something in a dream. it was nearly breakfast-time when he dragged himself into the house at last, and the guinea was resting and panting under a currant-bush. later in the day clemens gave orders to lewis to “kill and eat that guinea-hen,” which lewis did. clemens himself had then never eaten a guinea, but some years later, in paris, when the delicious breast of one of those fowls was served him, he remembered and said: “and to think, after chasing that creature all night, john lewis got to eat him instead of me.” the interest in tom and huck, or the inspiration for their adventures, gave out at last, or was superseded by a more immediate demand. as early as may, goodman, in san francisco, had seen a play announced there, presenting the character of colonel sellers, dramatized by gilbert s. densmore and played by john t. raymond. goodman immediately wrote clemens; also a letter came from warner, in hartford, who had noticed in san francisco papers announcements of the play. of course clemens would take action immediately; he telegraphed, enjoining the performance. then began a correspondence with the dramatist and actor. this in time resulted in an amicable arrangement, by which the dramatist agreed to dispose of his version to clemens. clemens did not wait for it to arrive, but began immediately a version of his own. just how much or how little of densmore's work found its way into the completed play, as presented by raymond later, cannot be known now. howells conveys the impression that clemens had no hand in its authorship beyond the character of sellers as taken from the book. but in a letter still extant, which clemens wrote to howells at the time, he says: i worked a month on my play, and launched it in new york last wednesday. i believe it will go. the newspapers have been complimentary. it is simply a setting for one character, colonel sellers. as a play i guess it will not bear critical assault in force. the warners are as charming as ever. they go shortly to the devil for a year--that is, to egypt. raymond, in a letter which he wrote to the sun, november , , declared that “not one line” of densmore's dramatization was used, “except that which was taken bodily from the gilded age.” during the newspaper discussion of the matter, clemens himself prepared a letter for the hartford post. this letter was suppressed, but it still exists. in it he says: i entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times. i had expected to use little of his [densmore's] language and but little of his plot. i do not think there are now twenty sentences of mr. densmore's in the play, but i used so much of his plot that i wrote and told him that i should pay him about as much more as i had already paid him in case the play proved a success. i shall keep my word. this letter, written while the matter was fresh in his mind, is undoubtedly in accordance with the facts. that densmore was fully satisfied may be gathered from an acknowledgment, in which he says: “your letter reached me on the ad, with check. in this place permit me to thank you for the very handsome manner in which you have acted in this matter.” warner, meantime, realizing that the play was constructed almost entirely of the mark twain chapters of the book, agreed that his collaborator should undertake the work and financial responsibilities of the dramatic venture and reap such rewards as might result. various stories have been told of this matter, most of them untrue. there was no bitterness between the friends, no semblance of an estrangement of any sort. warner very generously and promptly admitted that he was not concerned with the play, its authorship, or its profits, whatever the latter might amount to. moreover, warner was going to egypt very soon, and his labors and responsibilities were doubly sufficient as they stood. clemens's estimate of the play as a dramatic composition was correct enough, but the public liked it, and it was a financial success from the start. he employed a representative to travel with raymond, to assist in the management and in the division of spoil. the agent had instructions to mail a card every day, stating the amount of his share in the profits. howells once arrived in hartford just when this postal tide of fortune was at its flood: one hundred and fifty dollars--two hundred dollars--three hundred dollars were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air, before he sat down at the table, or rose from it to brandish, and then, flinging his napkin in the chair, walked up and down to exult in. once, in later years, referring to the matter, howells said “he was never a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and he wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream.” which was a true word. mark twain with money was like a child with a heap of bright pebbles, ready to pile up more and still more, then presently to throw them all away and begin gathering anew. xcvi. the new home the clemenses returned to hartford to find their new house “ready,” though still full of workmen, decorators, plumbers, and such other minions of labor as make life miserable to those with ambitions for new or improved habitations. the carpenters were still on the lower floor, but the family moved in and camped about in rooms up-stairs that were more or less free from the invader. they had stopped in new york ten days to buy carpets and furnishings, and these began to arrive, with no particular place to put them; but the owners were excited and happy with it all, for it was the pleasant season of the year, and all the new features of the house were fascinating, while the daily progress of the decorators furnished a fresh surprise when they roamed through the rooms at evening. mrs. clemens wrote home: we are perfectly delighted with everything here and do so want you all to see it. her husband, as he was likely to do, picked up the letter and finished it: livy appoints me to finish this; but how can a headless man perform an intelligent function? i have been bully-ragged all day by the builder, by his foreman, by the architect, by the tapestry devil who is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down the carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard-table (and has left the balls in new york), by the wildcat who is sodding the ground and finishing the driveway (after the sun went down), by a book agent, whose body is in the back yard and the coroner notified. just think of this thing going on the whole day long, and i a man who loathes details with all his heart! but i haven't lost my temper, and i've made livy lie down most of the time; could anybody make her lie down all the time? warner wrote from egypt expressing sympathy for their unfurnished state of affairs, but added, “i would rather fit out three houses and fill them with furniture than to fit out one 'dahabiyeh'.” warner was at that moment undertaking his charmingly remembered trip up the nile. the new home was not entirely done for a long time. one never knows when a big house like that--or a little house, for that matters done. but they were settled at last, with all their beautiful things in place; and perhaps there have been richer homes, possibly more artistic ones, but there has never been a more charming home, within or without, than that one. so many frequenters have tried to express the charm of that household. none of them has quite succeeded, for it lay not so much in its arrangement of rooms or their decorations or their outlook, though these were all beautiful enough, but rather in the personality, the atmosphere; and these are elusive things to convey in words. we can only see and feel and recognize; we cannot translate them. even howells, with his subtle touch, can present only an aspect here and there; an essence, as it were, from a happy garden, rather than the fullness of its bloom. as mark twain was unlike any other man that ever lived, so his house was unlike any other house ever built. people asked him why he built the kitchen toward the street, and he said: “so the servants can see the circus go by without running out into the front yard.” but this was probably an after-thought. the kitchen end of the house extended toward farmington avenue, but it was by no means unbeautiful. it was a pleasing detail of the general scheme. the main entrance faced at right angles with the street and opened to a spacious hall. in turn, the hall opened to a parlor, where there was a grand piano, and to the dining-room and library, and the library opened to a little conservatory, semicircular in form, of a design invented by harriet beecher stowe. says howells: the plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of the fountain companied by callas and other waterloving lilies. there, while we breakfasted, patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled the pretty bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the delicate accents of its varied blossoms. in the library was an old carved mantel which clemens and his wife had bought in scotland, salvage from a dismantled castle, and across the top of the fireplace a plate of brass with the motto, “the ornament of a house is the friends that frequent it,” surely never more appropriately inscribed. there was the mahogany room, a large bedroom on the ground floor, and upstairs were other spacious bedrooms and many baths, while everywhere were oriental rugs and draperies, and statuary and paintings. there was a fireplace under a window, after the english pattern, so that in winter-time one could at the same moment watch the blaze and the falling snow. the library windows looked out over the valley with the little stream in it, and through and across the tree-tops. at the top of the house was what became clemens's favorite retreat, the billiard-room, and here and there were unexpected little balconies, which one could step out upon for the view. below was a wide, covered veranda, the “ombra,” as they called it, secluded from the public eye--a favorite family gathering-place on pleasant days. but a house might easily have all these things without being more than usually attractive, and a house with a great deal less might have been as full of charm; only it seemed just the proper setting for that particular household, and undoubtedly it acquired the personality of its occupants. howells assures us that there never was another home like it, and we may accept his statement. it was unique. it was the home of one of the most unusual and unaccountable personalities in the world, yet was perfectly and serenely ordered. mark twain was not responsible for this blissful condition. he was its beacon-light; it was around mrs. clemens that its affairs steadily revolved. if in the four years and more of marriage clemens had made advancement in culture and capabilities, olivia clemens also had become something more than the half-timid, inexperienced girl he had first known. in a way her education had been no less notable than his. she had worked and studied, and her half-year of travel and entertainment abroad had given her opportunity for acquiring knowledge and confidence. her vision of life had vastly enlarged; her intellect had flowered; her grasp of practicalities had become firm and sure. in spite of her delicate physical structure, her continued uncertainty of health, she capably undertook the management of their large new house, and supervised its economies. any one of her undertakings was sufficient for one woman, but she compassed them all. no children had more careful direction than hers. no husband had more devoted attendance and companionship. no household was ever directed with a sweeter and gentler grace, or with greater perfection of detail. when the great ones of the world came to visit america's most picturesque literary figure she gave welcome to them all, and filled her place at his side with such sweet and capable dignity that those who came to pay their duties to him often returned to pay even greater devotion to his companion. says howells: she was, in a way, the loveliest person i have ever seen--the gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and clemens not only accepted her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it. and once, in an interview with the writer of these chapters, howells declared: “she was not only a beautiful soul, but a woman of singular intellectual power. i never knew any one quite like her.” then he added: “words cannot express mrs. clemens--her fineness, her delicate, her wonderful tact with a man who was in some respects, and wished to be, the most outrageous creature that ever breathed.” howells meant a good many things by that, no doubt: clemens's violent methods, for one thing, his sudden, savage impulses, which sometimes worked injustice and hardship for others, though he was first to discover the wrong and to repair it only too fully. then, too, howells may have meant his boyish teasing tendency to disturb mrs. clemens's exquisite sense of decorum. once i remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at hartford in a pair of white cowskin slippers with the hair out, and do a crippled colored uncle, to the joy of all beholders. i must not say all, for i remember also the dismay of mrs. clemens, and her low, despairing cry of “oh, youth!” he was continually doing such things as the “crippled colored uncle,”; partly for the very joy of the performance, but partly, too, to disturb her serenity, to incur her reproof, to shiver her a little--“shock” would be too strong a word. and he liked to fancy her in a spirit and attitude of belligerence, to present that fancy to those who knew the measure of her gentle nature. writing to mrs. howells of a picture of herself in a group, he said: you look exactly as mrs. clemens does after she has said: “indeed, i do not wonder that you can frame no reply; for you know only too well that your conduct admits of no excuse, palliation, or argument --none!” clemens would pretend to a visitor that she had been violently indignant over some offense of his; perhaps he would say: “well i contradicted her just now, and the crockery will begin to fly pretty soon.” she could never quite get used to this pleasantry, and a faint glow would steal over her face. he liked to produce that glow. yet always his manner toward her was tenderness itself. he regarded her as some dainty bit of porcelain, and it was said that he was always following her about with a chair. their union has been regarded as ideal. that is twichell's opinion and howells's. the latter sums up: marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be, but from the outside i should say that this marriage was one of the most perfect. xcvii. the walk to boston the new home became more beautiful to them as things found their places, as the year deepened; and the wonder of autumn foliage lit up their landscape. sitting on one of the little upper balconies mrs. clemens wrote: the atmosphere is very hazy, and it makes the autumn tints even more soft and beautiful than usual. mr. twichell came for mr. clemens to go walking with him; they returned at dinner-time, heavily laden with autumn leaves. and as usual clemens, finding the letter unfinished, took up the story. twichell came up here with me to luncheon after services, and i went back home with him and took susy along in her little carriage. we have just got home again, middle of afternoon, and livy has gone to rest and left the west balcony to me. there is a shining and most marvelous miracle of cloud-effects mirrored in the brook; a picture which began with perfection, and has momently surpassed it ever since, until at last it is almost unendurably beautiful.... there is a cloud-picture in the stream now whose hues are as manifold as those in an opal and as delicate as the tintings of a sea-shell. but now a muskrat is swimming through it and obliterating it with the turmoil of wavelets he casts abroad from his shoulders. the customary sunday assemblage of strangers is gathered together in the grounds discussing the house. twichell and clemens took a good many walks these days; long walks, for twichell was an athlete and clemens had not then outgrown the nevada habit of pedestrian wandering. talcott's tower, a wooden structure about five miles from hartford, was one of their favorite objective points; and often they walked out and back, talking so continuously, and so absorbed in the themes of their discussions, that time and distance slipped away almost unnoticed. how many things they talked of in those long walks! they discussed philosophies and religions and creeds, and all the range of human possibility and shortcoming, and all the phases of literature and history and politics. unorthodox discussions they were, illuminating, marvelously enchanting, and vanished now forever. sometimes they took the train as far as bloomfield, a little station on the way, and walked the rest of the distance, or they took the train from bloomfield home. it seems a strange association, perhaps, the fellowship of that violent dissenter with that fervent soul dedicated to church and creed, but the root of their friendship lay in the frankness with which each man delivered his dogmas and respected those of his companion. it was during one of their walks to the tower that they planned a far more extraordinary undertaking--nothing less, in fact, than a walk from hartford to boston. this was early in november. they did not delay the matter, for the weather was getting too uncertain. clemens wrote redpath: dear redpath,--rev. j. h. twichell and i expect to start at o'clock thursday morning to walk to boston in twenty four hours--or more. we shall telegraph young's hotel for rooms saturday night, in order to allow for a low average of pedestrianism. it was half past eight on thursday morning, november , , that they left twichell's house in a carriage, drove to the east hartford bridge, and there took to the road, twichell carrying a little bag and clemens a basket of lunch. the papers had got hold of it by this time, and were watching the result. they did well enough that first day, following the old boston stage road, arriving at westford about seven o'clock in the evening, twenty-eight miles from the starting-point. there was no real hotel at westford, only a sort of tavern, but it afforded the luxury of rest. “also,” says twichell, in a memoranda of the trip, “a sublimely profane hostler whom you couldn't jostle with any sort of mild remark without bringing down upon yourself a perfect avalanche of oaths.” this was a joy to clemens, who sat behind the stove, rubbing his lame knees and fairly reveling in twichell's discomfiture in his efforts to divert the hostler's blasphemy. there was also a mellow inebriate there who recommended kerosene for clemens's lameness, and offered as testimony the fact that he himself had frequently used it for stiffness in his joints after lying out all night in cold weather, drunk: altogether it was a notable evening. westford was about as far as they continued the journey afoot. clemens was exceedingly lame next morning, and had had a rather bad night; but he swore and limped along six miles farther, to north ashford, then gave it up. they drove from north ashford to the railway, where clemens telegraphed redpath and howells of their approach. to redpath: we have made thirty-five miles in less than five days. this demonstrates that the thing can be done. shall now finish by rail. did you have any bets on us? to howells: arrive by rail at seven o'clock, the first of a series of grand annual pedestrian tours from hartford to boston to be performed by us. the next will take place next year. redpath read his despatch to a lecture audience, with effect. howells made immediate preparation for receiving two way-worn, hungry men. he telegraphed to young's hotel: “you and twichell come right up to concord avenue, cambridge, near observatory. party waiting for you.” they got to howells's about nine o'clock, and the refreshments were waiting. miss longfellow was there, rose hawthorne, john fiske, larkin g. mead, the sculptor, and others of their kind. howells tells in his book how clemens, with twichell, “suddenly stormed in,” and immediately began to eat and drink: i can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped oysters without which no party in cambridge was really a party, exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of their progress. clemens gave a dinner, next night, to howells, aldrich, osgood, and the rest. the papers were full of jokes concerning the boston expedition; some even had illustrations, and it was all amusing enough at the time. next morning, sitting in the writing-room of young's hotel, he wrote a curious letter to mrs. clemens, though intended as much for howells and aldrich as for her. it was dated sixty-one years ahead, and was a sort of looking backwards, though that notable book had not yet been written. it presupposed a monarchy in which the name of boston has been changed to “limerick,” and hartford to “dublin.” in it, twichell has become the “archbishop of dublin,” howells “duke of cambridge,” aldrich “marquis of ponkapog,” clemens the “earl of hartford.” it was too whimsical and delightful a fancy to be forgotten.--[this remarkable and amusing document will be found under appendix m, at the end of last volume.] a long time afterward, thirty-four year, he came across this letter. he said: “it seems curious now that i should have been dreaming dreams of a future monarchy and never suspect that the monarchy was already present and the republic a thing of the past.” what he meant, was the political succession that had fostered those commercial trusts which, in turn, had established party dominion. to howells, on his return, clemens wrote his acknowledgments, and added: mrs. clemens gets upon the verge of swearing, and goes tearing around in an unseemly fury when i enlarge upon the delightful time we had in boston, and she not there to have her share. i have tried hard to reproduce mrs. howells to her, and have probably not made a shining success of it. xcviii. “old times on the mississippi” howells had been urging clemens to do something more for the atlantic, specifically something for the january number. clemens cudgeled his brains, but finally declared he must give it up: mrs. clemens has diligently persecuted me day by day with urgings to go to work and do that something, but it's no use. i find i can't. we are in such a state of worry and endless confusion that my head won't go. two hours later he sent another hasty line: i take back the remark that i can't write for the january number, for twichell and i have had a long walk in the woods, and i got to telling him about old mississippi days of steam-boating glory and grandeur as i saw them (during four years) from the pilot-house. he said, “what a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!” i hadn't thought of that before. would you like a series of papers to run through three months or six or nine--or about four months, say? howells welcomed this offer as an echo of his own thought. he had come from a piloting family himself, and knew the interest that mark twain could put into such a series. acting promptly under the new inspiration, clemens forthwith sent the first chapter of that monumental, that absolutely unique, series of papers on mississippi river life, which to-day constitutes one of his chief claims to immortality. his first number was in the nature of an experiment. perhaps, after all, the idea would not suit the atlantic readers. “cut it, scarify it, reject it, handle it with entire freedom,” he wrote, and awaited the result. the “result” was that howells expressed his delight: the piece about the mississippi is capital. it almost made the water in our ice-pitcher muddy as i read it. i don't think i shall meddle much with it, even in the way of suggestion. the sketch of the low-lived little town was so good that i could have wished there was more of it. i want the sketches, if you can make them, every month. mark twain was now really interested in this new literary venture. he was fairly saturated with memories. he was writing on the theme that lay nearest to his heart. within ten days he reported that he had finished three of the papers, and had begun the fourth. and yet i have spoken of nothing but piloting as a science so far, and i doubt if i ever get beyond that portion of my subject. and i don't care to. any muggins can write about old days on the mississippi of five hundred different kinds, but i am the only man alive that can scribble about the piloting of that day, and no man has ever tried to scribble about it yet. its newness pleases me all the time, and it is about the only new subject i know of. he became so enthusiastic presently that he wanted to take howells with him on a trip down the mississippi, with their wives for company, to go over the old ground again and obtain added material enough for a book. howells was willing enough--agreed to go, in fact--but found it hard to get away. he began to temporize and finally backed out. clemens tried to inveigle osgood into the trip, but without success; also john hay, but hay had a new baby at his house just then--“three days old, and with a voice beyond price,” he said, offering it as an excuse for non-acceptance. so the plan for revisiting the river and the conclusion of the book were held in abeyance for nearly seven years. those early piloting chapters, as they appeared in the atlantic, constituted mark twain's best literary exhibit up to that time. in some respects they are his best literature of any time. as pictures of an intensely interesting phase of life, they are so convincing, so real, and at the same time of such extraordinary charm and interest, that if the english language should survive a thousand years, or ten times as long, they would be as fresh and vivid at the end of that period as the day they were penned. in them the atmosphere of, the river and its environment--its pictures, its thousand aspects of life--are reproduced with what is no less than literary necromancy. not only does he make you smell the river you can fairly hear it breathe. on the appearance of the first number john hay wrote: “it is perfect; no more nor less. i don't see how you do it,” and added, “you know what my opinion is of time not spent with you.” howells wrote: you are doing the science of piloting splendidly. every word interesting, and don't you drop the series till you've got every bit of anecdote and reminiscence into it. he let clemens write the articles to suit himself. once he said: if i might put in my jaw at this point i should say, stick to actual fact and character in the thing and give things in detail. all that belongs to the old river life is novel, and is now mostly historical. don't write at any supposed atlantic audience, but yarn it off as if into my sympathetic ear. clemens replied that he had no dread of the atlantic audience; he declared it was the only audience that did not require a humorist to “paint himself striped and stand on his head to amuse it.” the “old times” papers ran through seven numbers of the atlantic. they were reprinted everywhere by the newspapers, who in that day had little respect for magazine copyrights, and were promptly pirated in book form in canada. they added vastly to mark twain's literary capital, though howells informs us that the atlantic circulation did not thrive proportionately, for the reason that the newspapers gave the articles to their readers from advanced sheets of the magazine, even before the latter could be placed on sale. it so happened that in the january atlantic, which contained the first of the mississippi papers, there appeared robert dale owen's article on “spiritualism,” which brought such humility both to author and publisher because of the exposure of the medium katie king, which came along while the magazine was in press. clemens has written this marginal note on the opening page of the copy at quarry farm: while this number of the atlantic was being printed the katie king manifestations were discovered to be the cheapest, wretchedest shams and frauds, and were exposed in the newspapers. the awful humiliation of it unseated robert dale owen's reason, and he died in the madhouse. xcix. a typewriter, and a joke on aldrich it was during the trip to boston with twichell that mark twain saw for the first time what was then--a brand-new invention, a typewriter; or it may have been during a subsequent visit, a week or two later. at all events, he had the machine and was practising on it december , , for he wrote two letters on it that day, one to howells and the other to orion clemens. in the latter he says: i am trying to get the hang of this new-fangled writing-machine, but am not making a shining success of it. however, this is the first attempt i ever have made, and yet i perceive that i shall soon easily acquire a fine facility in its use. i saw the thing in boston the other day and was greatly taken with it. he goes on to explain the new wonder, and on the whole his first attempt is a very creditable performance. with his usual enthusiasm over an innovation, he believes it is going to be a great help to him, and proclaims its advantages. this is the letter to howells, with the errors preserved: you needn't answer this; i am only practicing to get three; anothe slip-up there; only practici?ng ti get the hang of the thing. i notice i miss fire & get in a good many unnecessary letters & punctuation marks. i am simply using you for a target to bang at. blame my cats, but this thing requires genius in order to work it just right. in an article written long after he tells how he was with nasby when he first saw the machine in boston through a window, and how they went in to see it perform. in the same article he states that he was the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature, and that he thinks the story of tom sawyer was the first type-copied manuscript.--[tom sawyer was not then complete, and had been laid aside. the first type-copied manuscript was probably early chapters of the mississippi story, two discarded typewritten pages of which still exist.] the new enthusiasm ran its course and died. three months later, when the remington makers wrote him for a recommendation of the machine, he replied that he had entirely stopped using it. the typewriter was not perfect in those days, and the keys did not always respond readily. he declared it was ruining his morals--that it made him “want to swear.” he offered it to howells because, he said, howells had no morals anyway. howells hesitated, so clemens traded the machine to bliss for a side-saddle. but perhaps bliss also became afraid of its influence, for in due time he brought it back. howells, again tempted, hesitated, and this time was lost. what eventually became of the machine is not history. one of those, happy atlantic dinners which howells tells of came about the end of that year. it was at the parker house, and emerson was there; and aldrich, and the rest of that group. “don't you dare to refuse the invitation,” said howells, and naturally clemens didn't, and wrote back: i want you to ask mrs. howells to let you stay all night at the parker house and tell lies and have an improving time, and take breakfast with me in the morning. i will have a good room for you and a fire. can't you tell her it always makes you sick to go home late at night or something like that? that sort of thing arouses mrs. clemens's sympathies easily. two memories of that old dinner remain to-day. aldrich and howells were not satisfied with the kind of neckties that mark twain wore (the old-fashioned black “string” tie, a western survival), so they made him a present of two cravats when he set out on his return for hartford. next day he wrote: you and aldrich have made one woman deeply and sincerely grateful --mrs. clemens. for months--i may even say years--she has shown an unaccountable animosity toward my necktie, even getting up in the night to take it with the tongs and blackguard it, sometimes also getting so far as to threaten it. when i said you and aldrich had given me two new neckties, and that they were in a paper in my overcoat pocket, she was in a fever of happiness until she found i was going to frame them; then all the venom in her nature gathered itself together; insomuch that i, being near to a door, went without, perceiving danger. it is recorded that eventually he wore the neckties, and returned no more to the earlier mode. another memory of that dinner is linked to a demand that aldrich made of clemens that night, for his photograph. clemens, returning to hartford, put up fifty-two different specimens in as many envelopes, with the idea of sending one a week for a year. then he concluded that this was too slow a process, and for a week sent one every morning to “his grace of ponkapog.” aldrich stood it for a few days, then protested. “the police,” he said, “are in the habit of swooping down upon a publication of that sort.” on new-year's no less than twenty pictures came at once--photographs and prints of mark twain, his house, his family, his various belongings. aldrich sent a warning then that the perpetrator of this outrage was known to the police as mark twain, alias “the jumping frog,” a well-known california desperado, who would be speedily arrested and brought to ponkapog to face his victim. this letter was signed “t. bayleigh, chief of police,” and on the outside of the envelope there was a statement that it would be useless for that person to send any more mail-matter, as the post-office had been blown up. the jolly farce closed there. it was the sort of thing that both men enjoyed. aldrich was writing a story at this time which contained some western mining incident and environment. he sent the manuscript to clemens for “expert” consideration and advice. clemens wrote him at great length and in careful detail. he was fond of aldrich, regarding him as one of the most brilliant of men. once, to robert louis stevenson, he said: “aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and humorous sayings. none has equaled him, certainly none has surpassed him, in the felicity of phrasing with which he clothed these children of his fancy. aldrich is always brilliant; he can't help it; he is a fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is not speaking you know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and glimmering around in him; when he speaks the diamonds flash. yes, he is always brilliant, he will always be brilliant; he will be brilliant in hell-you will see.” stevenson, smiling a chuckly smile, said, “i hope not.” “well, you will, and he will dim even those ruddy fires and look like a transfigured adonis backed against a pink sunset.”--[north american review, september, .] c. raymond, mental telegraphy, etc. the sellers play was given in hartford, in january ( ), to as many people as could crowd into the opera house. raymond had reached the perfection of his art by that time, and the townsmen of mark twain saw the play and the actor at their best. kate field played the part of laura hawkins, and there was a hartford girl in the company; also a hartford young man, who would one day be about as well known to playgoers as any playwright or actor that america has produced. his name was william gillette, and it was largely due to mark twain that the author of secret service and of the dramatic “sherlock holmes” got a fair public start. clemens and his wife loaned gillette the three thousand dollars which tided him through his period of dramatic education. their faith in his ability was justified. hartford would naturally be enthusiastic on a first “sellers-raymond” night. at the end of the fourth act there was an urgent demand for the author of the play, who was supposed to be present. he was not there in person, but had sent a letter, which raymond read: my dear raymond,--i am aware that you are going to be welcomed to our town by great audiences on both nights of your stay there, and i beg to add my hearty welcome also, through this note. i cannot come to the theater on either evening, raymond, because there is something so touching about your acting that i can't stand it. (i do not mention a couple of colds in my head, because i hardly mind them as much as i would the erysipelas, but between you and me i would prefer it if they were rights and lefts.) and then there is another thing. i have always taken a pride in earning my living in outside places and spending it in hartford; i have said that no good citizen would live on his own people, but go forth and make it sultry for other communities and fetch home the result; and now at this late day i find myself in the crushed and bleeding position of fattening myself upon the spoils of my brethren! can i support such grief as this? (this is literary emotion, you understand. take the money at the door just the same.) once more i welcome you to hartford, raymond, but as for me let me stay at home and blush. yours truly, mark. the play was equally successful wherever it went. it made what in that day was regarded as a fortune. one hundred thousand dollars is hardly too large an estimate of the amount divided between author and actor. raymond was a great actor in that part, as he interpreted it, though he did not interpret it fully, or always in its best way. the finer side, the subtle, tender side of colonel sellers, he was likely to overlook. yet, with a natural human self-estimate, raymond believed he had created a much greater part than mark twain had written. doubtless from the point of view of a number of people this was so, though the idea, was naturally obnoxious to clemens. in course of time their personal relations ceased. clemens that winter gave another benefit for father hawley. in reply to an invitation to appear in behalf of the poor, he wrote that he had quit the lecture field, and would not return to the platform unless driven there by lack of bread. but he added: by the spirit of that remark i am debarred from delivering this proposed lecture, and so i fall back upon the letter of it, and emerge upon the platform for this last and final time because i am confronted by a lack of bread-among father hawley's flock. he made an introductory speech at an old-fashioned spelling-bee, given at the asylum hill church; a breezy, charming talk of which the following is a sample: i don't see any use in spelling a word right--and never did. i mean i don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. we might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. i have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me; there is such a breezy, unfettered originality about his orthography. he always spells “kow” with a large “k.” now that is just as good as to spell it with a small one. it is better. it gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope. it suggests to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow. he took part in the contest, and in spite of his early reputation, was spelled down on the word “chaldron,” which he spelled “cauldron,” as he had been taught, while the dictionary used as authority gave that form as second choice. another time that winter, clemens read before the monday evening club a paper on “universal suffrage,” which is still remembered by the surviving members of that time. a paragraph or two will convey its purport: our marvelous latter-day statesmanship has invented universal suffrage. that is the finest feather in our cap. all that we require of a voter is that he shall be forked, wear pantaloons instead of petticoats, and bear a more or less humorous resemblance to the reported image of god. he need not know anything whatever; he may be wholly useless and a cumberer of the earth; he may even be known to be a consummate scoundrel. no matter. while he can steer clear of the penitentiary his vote is as weighty as the vote of a president, a bishop, a college professor, a merchant prince. we brag of our universal, unrestricted suffrage; but we are shams after all, for we restrict when we come to the women. the monday evening club was an organization which included the best minds of hartford. dr. horace bushnell, prof. calvin e. stowe, and j. hammond trumbull founded it back in the sixties, and it included such men as rev. dr. parker, rev. dr. burton, charles h. clark, of the courant, warner, and twichell, with others of their kind. clemens had been elected after his first sojourn in england (february, ), and had then read a paper on the “license of the press.” the club met alternate mondays, from october to may. there was one paper for each evening, and, after the usual fashion of such clubs, the reading was followed by discussion. members of that time agree that mark twain's association with the club had a tendency to give it a life, or at least an exhilaration, which it had not previously known. his papers were serious in their purpose he always preferred to be serious--but they evidenced the magic gift which made whatever he touched turn to literary jewelry. psychic theories and phenomena always attracted mark twain. in thought-transference, especially, he had a frank interest--an interest awakened and kept alive by certain phenomena--psychic manifestations we call them now. in his association with mrs. clemens it not infrequently happened that one spoke the other's thought, or perhaps a long-procrastinated letter to a friend would bring an answer as quickly as mailed; but these are things familiar to us all. a more startling example of thought-communication developed at the time of which we are writing, an example which raised to a fever-point whatever interest he may have had in the subject before. (he was always having these vehement interests--rages we may call them, for it would be inadequate to speak of them as fads, inasmuch as they tended in the direction of human enlightenment, or progress, or reform.) clemens one morning was lying in bed when, as he says, “suddenly a red-hot new idea came whistling down into my camp.” the idea was that the time was ripe for a book that would tell the story of the comstock-of the nevada silver mines. it seemed to him that the person best qualified for the work was his old friend william wright--dan de quille. he had not heard from dan, or of him, for a long time, but decided to write and urge him to take up the idea. he prepared the letter, going fully into the details of his plan, as was natural for him to do, then laid it aside until he could see bliss and secure his approval of the scheme from a publishing standpoint. just a week later, it was the th of march, a letter came--a thick letter bearing a nevada postmark, and addressed in a handwriting which he presently recognized as de quille's. to a visitor who was present he said: “now i will do a miracle. i will tell you everything this letter contains--date, signature, and all without breaking the seal.” he stated what he believed was in the letter. then he opened it and showed that he had correctly given its contents, which were the same in all essential details as those of his own letter, not yet mailed. in an article on “mental telegraphy” (he invented the name) he relates this instance, with others, and in 'following the equator' and elsewhere he records other such happenings. it was one of the “mysteries” in which he never lost interest, though his concern in it in time became a passive one. the result of the de quille manifestation, however, he has not recorded. clemens immediately wrote, urging dan to come to hartford for an extended visit. de quille came, and put in a happy spring in his old comrade's luxurious home, writing 'the big bonanza', which bliss successfully published a year later. mark twain was continually inviting old friends to share his success with him. any comrade of former days found welcome in his home as often as he would come, and for as long as he would stay. clemens dropped his own affairs to advise in their undertakings; and if their undertakings were literary he found them a publisher. he did this for joaquin miller and for bret harte, and he was always urging goodman to make his house a home. the beecher-tilton trial was the sensation of the spring of , and clemens, in common with many others, was greatly worked up over it. the printed testimony had left him decidedly in doubt as to beecher's innocence, though his blame would seem to have been less for the possible offense than because of the great leader's attitude in the matter. to twichell he said: “his quibbling was fatal. innocent or guilty, he should have made an unqualified statement in the beginning.” together they attended one of the sessions, on a day when beecher himself was on the witness-stand. the tension was very great; the excitement was painful. twichell thought that beecher appeared well under the stress of examination and was deeply sorry for him; clemens was far from convinced. the feeling was especially strong in hartford, where henry ward beecher's relatives were prominent, and animosities grew out of it. they are all forgotten now; most of those who cherished bitterness are dead. any feeling that clemens had in the matter lasted but a little while. howells tells us that when he met him some months after the trial ended, and was tempted to mention it, clemens discouraged any discussion of the event. says howells: he would only say the man had suffered enough; as if the man had expiated his wrong, and he was not going to do anything to renew his penalty. i found that very curious, very delicate. his continued blame could not come to the sufferer's knowledge, but he felt it his duty to forbear it. it was one hundred years, that th of april, since the battles of lexington and concord, and there was to be a great celebration. the howellses had visited hartford in march, and the clemenses were invited to cambridge for the celebration. only clemens could go, which in the event proved a good thing perhaps; for when clemens and howells set out for concord they did not go over to boston to take the train, but decided to wait for it at cambridge. apparently it did not occur to them that the train would be jammed the moment the doors were opened at the boston station; but when it came along they saw how hopeless was their chance. they had special invitations and passage from boston, but these were only mockeries now. it yeas cold and chilly, and they forlornly set out in search of some sort of a conveyance. they tramped around in the mud and raw wind, but vehicles were either filled or engaged, and drivers and occupants were inclined to jeer at them. clemens was taken with an acute attack of indigestion, which made him rather dismal and savage. their effort finally ended with his trying to run down a tally-ho which was empty inside and had a party of harvard students riding atop. the students, who did not recognize their would-be fare, enjoyed the race. they encouraged their pursuer, and perhaps their driver, with merriment and cheers. clemens was handicapped by having to run in the slippery mud, and soon “dropped by the wayside.” “i am glad,” says howells, “i cannot recall what he said when he came back to me.” they hung about a little longer, then dragged themselves home, slipped into the house, and built up a fine, cheerful fire on the hearth. they proposed to practise a deception on mrs. howells by pretending they had been to concord and returned. but it was no use. their statements were flimsy, and guilt was plainly written on their faces. howells recalls this incident delightfully, and expresses the belief that the humor of the situation was finally a greater pleasure to clemens than the actual visit to concord would have been. twichell did not have any such trouble in attending the celebration. he had adventures (he was always having adventures), but they were of a more successful kind. clemens heard the tale of them when he returned to hartford. he wrote it to howells: joe twichell preached morning and evening here last sunday; took midnight train for boston; got an early breakfast and started by rail at . a.m. for concord; swelled around there until p.m., seeing everything; then traveled on top of a train to lexington; saw everything there; traveled on top of a train to boston (with hundreds in company), deluged with dust, smoke, and cinders; yelled and hurrahed all the way like a school-boy; lay flat down, to dodge numerous bridges, and sailed into the depot howling with excitement and as black as a chimneysweep; got to young's hotel at p.m.; sat down in the reading-room and immediately fell asleep; was promptly awakened by a porter, who supposed he was drunk; wandered around an hour and a half; then took p.m. train, sat down in a smoking-car, and remembered nothing more until awakened by conductor as the train came into hartford at . a.m. thinks he had simply a glorious time, and wouldn't have missed the centennial for the world. he would have run out to see us a moment at cambridge but he was too dirty. i wouldn't have wanted him there; his appalling energy would have been an insufferable reproach to mild adventurers like you and me. ci. concluding “tom sawyer”--mark twain's “editors” meantime the “inspiration tank,” as clemens sometimes called it, had filled up again. he had received from somewhere new afflatus for the story of tom and huck, and was working on it steadily. the family remained in hartford, and early in july, under full head of steam, he brought the story to a close. on the th he wrote howells: i have finished the story and didn't take the chap beyond boyhood. i believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but autobiographically, like gil blas. i perhaps made a mistake in not writing it in the first person. if i went on now, and took him into manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him. it is not a boy's book at all. it will only be read by adults. it is only written for adults. he would like to see the story in the atlantic, he said, but doubted the wisdom of serialization. “by and by i shall take a boy of twelve and run him through life (in the first person), but not tam sawyer, he would not make a good character for it.” from which we get the first glimpse of huck's later adventures. of course he wanted howells to look at the story. it was a tremendous favor to ask, he said, and added, “but i know of no other person whose judgment i could venture to take, fully and entirely. don't hesitate to say no, for i know how your time is taxed, and i would have honest need to blush if you said yes.” “send on your ms.,” wrote howells. “you've no idea what i may ask you to do for me some day.” but clemens, conscience-stricken, “blushed and weakened,” as he said. when howells insisted, he wrote: but i will gladly send it to you if you will do as follows: dramatize it, if you perceive that you can, and take, for your remuneration, half of the first $ , which i receive for its representation on the stage. you could alter the plot entirely if you chose. i could help in the work most cheerfully after you had arranged the plot. i have my eye upon two young girls who can play tom and huck. howells in his reply urged. clemens to do the playwriting himself. he could never find time, he said, and he doubted whether he could enter into the spirit of another man's story. clemens did begin a dramatization then or a little later, but it was not completed. mrs. clemens, to whom he had read the story as it proceeded, was as anxious as her husband for howells's opinion, for it was the first extended piece of fiction mark twain had undertaken alone. he carried the manuscript over to boston himself, and whatever their doubts may have been, howells's subsequent letter set them at rest. he wrote that he had sat up till one in the morning to get to the end of it, simply because it was impossible to leave off. it is altogether the best boy story i ever read. it will be an immense success, but i think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy's story; grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do, and if you should put it forth as a story of boys' character from the grown-up point of view you give the wrong key to it. viewed in the light of later events, there has never been any better literary opinion than that--none that has been more fully justified. clemens was delighted. he wrote concerning a point here and there, one inquiry referring to the use of a certain strong word. howells's reply left no doubt: i'd have that swearing out in an instant. i suppose i didn't notice it because the location was so familiar to my western sense, and so exactly the thing huck would say, but it won't do for children. it was in the last chapter, where huck relates to tom the sorrows of reform and tells how they comb him “all to thunder.” in the original, “they comb me all to hell,” says huck; which statement, one must agree, is more effective, more the thing huck would be likely to say. clemens's acknowledgment of the correction was characteristic: mrs. clemens received the mail this morning, and the next minute she lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her tongue, “where is the profanity mr. howells speaks of?” then i had to miserably confess that i had left it out when reading the ms. to her. nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape with my scalp. does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go a little one-sided? the clemens family did not, go to elmira that year. the children's health seemed to require the sea-shore, and in august they went to bateman's point, rhode island, where clemens most of the time played tenpins in an alley that had gone to ruin. the balls would not stay on the track; the pins stood at inebriate angles. it reminded him of the old billiard-tables of western mining-camps, and furnished the same uncertainty of play. it was his delight, after he had become accustomed to the eccentricities of the alley, to invite in a stranger and watch his suffering and his frantic effort to score. cii. “sketches new and old” the long-delayed book of sketches, contracted for five years before, was issued that autumn. “the jumping frog,” which he had bought from webb, was included in the volume, also the french translation which madame blanc (th. bentzon) had made for the revue des deux mondes, with mark twain's retranslation back into english, a most astonishing performance in its literal rendition of the french idiom. one example will suffice here. it is where the stranger says to smiley, “i don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.” says the french, retranslated: “eh bien! i no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each frog” (je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait mieux qu'aucune grenouille). (if that isn't grammar gone to seed then i count myself no judge.--m. t.) “possible that you not it saw not,” said smiley; “possible that you you comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there comprehend nothing; possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you not be but an amateur. of all manner (de toute maniere) i bet forty dollars that she batter in jumping, no matter which frog of the county of calaveras.” he included a number of sketches originally published with the frog, also a selection from the “memoranda” and buffalo express contributions, and he put in the story of auntie cord, with some matter which had never hitherto appeared. true williams illustrated the book, but either it furnished him no inspiration or he was allowed too much of another sort, for the pictures do not compare with his earlier work. among the new matter in the book were-“some fables for good old boys and girls,” in which certain wood creatures are supposed to make a scientific excursion into a place at some time occupied by men. it is the most pretentious feature of the book, and in its way about as good as any. like gulliver's travels, its object was satire, but its result is also interest. clemens was very anxious that howells should be first to review this volume. he had a superstition that howells's verdicts were echoed by the lesser reviewers, and that a book was made or damned accordingly; a belief hardly warranted, for the review has seldom been written that meant to any book the difference between success and failure. howells's review of sketches may be offered as a case in point. it was highly commendatory, much more so than the notice of the 'innocents' had been, or even that of 'roughing it', also more extensive than the latter. yet after the initial sale of some twenty thousand copies, mainly on the strength of the author's reputation, the book made a comparatively poor showing, and soon lagged far behind its predecessors. we cannot judge, of course, the taste of that day, but it appears now an unattractive, incoherent volume. the pictures were absurdly bad, the sketches were of unequal merit. many of them are amusing, some of them delightful, but most of them seem ephemeral. if we except “the jumping frog,” and possibly “a true story” (and the latter was altogether out of place in the collection), there is no reason to suppose that any of its contents will escape oblivion. the greater number of the sketches, as mark twain himself presently realized and declared, would better have been allowed to die. howells did, however, take occasion to point out in his review, or at least to suggest, the more serious side of mark twain. he particularly called attention to “a true story,” which the reviewers, at the time of its publication in the atlantic, had treated lightly, fearing a lurking joke in it; or it may be they had not read it, for reviewers are busy people. howells spoke of it as the choicest piece of work in the volume, and of its “perfect fidelity to the tragic fact.” he urged the reader to turn to it again, and to read it as a “simple dramatic report of reality,” such as had been equaled by no other american writer. it was in this volume of sketches that mark twain first spoke in print concerning copyright, showing the absurd injustice of discriminating against literary ownership by statute of limitation. he did this in the form of an open petition to congress, asking that all property, real and personal, should be put on the copyright basis, its period of ownership limited to a “beneficent term of forty-two years.” generally this was regarded as a joke, as in a sense it was; but like most of mark twain's jokes it was founded on reason and justice. the approval with which it was received by his literary associates led him to still further flights. he began a determined crusade for international copyright laws. it was a transcendental beginning, but it contained the germ of what, in the course of time, he would be largely instrumental in bringing to a ripe and magnificent conclusion. in this first effort he framed a petition to enact laws by which the united states would declare itself to be for right and justice, regardless of other nations, and become a good example to the world by refusing to pirate the books of any foreign author. he wrote to howells, urging him to get lowell, longfellow, holmes, whittier, and others to sign this petition. i will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages, and send him personally to every author of distinction in the country and corral the rest of the signatures. then i'll have the whole thing lithographed (about one thousand copies), and move upon the president and congress in person, but in the subordinate capacity of the party who is merely the agent of better and wiser men, or men whom the country cannot venture to laugh at. i will ask the president to recommend the thing in his message (and if he should ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him i should blush, but still i would frame it). and then if europe chooses to go on stealing from us we would say, with noble enthusiasm, “american lawmakers do steal, but not from foreign authors--not from foreign authors,”.... if we only had some god in the country's laws, instead of being in such a sweat to get him into the constitution, it would be better all around. the petition never reached congress. holmes agreed to sign it with a smile, and the comment that governments were not in the habit of setting themselves up as high moral examples, except for revenue. longfellow also pledged himself, as did a few others; but if there was any general concurrence in the effort there is no memory of it now. clemens abandoned the original idea, but remained one of the most persistent and influential advocates of copyright betterment, and lived to see most of his dream fulfilled.--[for the petition concerning copyright term in the united states, see sketches new and old. for the petition concerning international copyright and related matters, see appendix n, at the end of last volume.] ciii. “atlantic” days it was about this period that mark twain began to exhibit openly his more serious side; that is to say his advocacy of public reforms. his paper on “universal suffrage” had sounded a first note, and his copyright petitions were of the same spirit. in later years he used to say that he had always felt it was his mission to teach, to carry the banner of moral reconstruction, and here at forty we find him furnishing evidences of this inclination. in the atlantic for october, , there was published an unsigned three-page article entitled, “the curious republic of gondour.” in this article was developed the idea that the voting privilege should be estimated not by the individuals, but by their intellectual qualifications. the republic of gondour was a utopia, where this plan had been established: it was an odd idea and ingenious. you must understand the constitution gave every man a vote; therefore that vote was a vested right, and could not be taken away. but the constitution did not say that certain individuals might not be given two votes or ten. so an amendatory clause was inserted in a quiet way, a clause which authorized the enlargement of the suffrage in certain cases to be specified by statute.... the victory was complete. the new law was framed and passed. under it every citizen, howsoever poor or ignorant, possessed one vote, so universal suffrage still reigned; but if a man possessed a good common-school education and no money he had two votes, a high-school education gave him four; if he had property, likewise, to the value of three thousand sacos he wielded one more vote; for every fifty thousand sacos a man added to his property, he was entitled to another vote; a university education entitled a man to nine votes, even though he owned no property. the author goes on to show the beneficent results of this enaction; how the country was benefited and glorified by this stimulus toward enlightenment and industry. no one ever suspected that mark twain was the author of this fable. it contained almost no trace of his usual literary manner. nevertheless he wrote it, and only withheld his name, as he did in a few other instances, in the fear that the world might refuse to take him seriously over his own signature or nom de plume. howells urged him to follow up the “gondour” paper; to send some more reports from that model land. but clemens was engaged in other things by that time, and was not pledged altogether to national reforms. he was writing a skit about a bit of doggerel which was then making nights and days unhappy for many undeserving persons who in an evil moment had fallen upon it in some stray newspaper corner. a certain car line had recently adopted the “punch system,” and posted in its cars, for the information of passengers and conductor, this placard: a blue trip slip for an cents fare, a buff trip slip for a cents fare, a pink trip slip for a cents fare, for coupon and transfer, punch the tickets. noah brooks and isaac bromley were riding down-town one evening on the fourth avenue line, when bromley said: “brooks, it's poetry. by george, it's poetry!” brooks followed the direction of bromley's finger and read the card of instructions. they began perfecting the poetic character of the notice, giving it still more of a rhythmic twist and jingle; arrived at the tribune office, w. c. wyckoff, scientific editor, and moses p. handy lent intellectual and poetic assistance, with this result: conductor, when you receive a fare, punch in the presence of the passenjare! a blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare, a buff trip slip for a six-cent fare, a pink trip slip for a three-cent fare. punch in the presence of the passenjare! chorus punch, brothers! punch with care! punch in the presence of the passenjare! it was printed, and street-car poetry became popular. different papers had a turn at it, and each usually preceded its own effort with all other examples, as far as perpetrated. clemens discovered the lines, and on one of their walks recited them to twichell. “a literary nightmare” was written a few days later. in it the author tells how the jingle took instant and entire possession of him and went waltzing through his brain; how, when he had finished his breakfast, he couldn't tell whether he had eaten anything or not; and how, when he went to finish the novel he was writing, and took up his pen, he could only get it to say: punch in the presence of the passenjare. he found relief at last in telling it to his reverend friend, that is, twichell, upon whom he unloaded it with sad results. it was an amusing and timely skit, and is worth reading to-day. its publication in the atlantic had the effect of waking up horse-car poetry all over the world. howells, going to dine at ernest longfellow's the day following its appearance, heard his host and tom appleton urging each other to “punch with care.” the longfellow ladies had it by heart. boston was devastated by it. at home, howells's children recited it to him in chorus. the streets were full of it; in harvard it became an epidemic. it was transformed into other tongues. even swinburne, the musical, is said to have done a french version for the 'revue des deux mondes'. * a st. louis magazine, the western, found relief in a latin anthem with this chorus: pungite, fratres, pungite, pungite cum amore, pungite pro vectore, diligentissime pungite. * le chant du conducteur ayant ete paye, le conducteur percera en pleine vue du voyageur, quand il regoit trois sous un coupon vert, un coupon jaune pour six sous c'est l'affaire, et pour huit sous c'est un coupon couleur de rose, en pleine vue du voyageur. choeur donc, percez soigneusement, mes freres tout en pleine vue des voyageurs, etc. civ. mark twain and his wife clemens and his wife traveled to boston for one of those happy fore-gatherings with the howellses, which continued, at one end of the journey or another, for so many years. there was a luncheon with longfellow at craigie house, and, on the return to hartford, clemens reported to howells how mrs. clemens had thrived on the happiness of the visit. also he confesses his punishment for the usual crimes: i “caught it” for letting mrs. howells bother and bother about her coffee, when it was a “good deal better than we get at home.” i “caught it” for interrupting mrs. c. at the last moment and losing her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that ms. when the printers are done with it. i “caught it” once more for personating that drunken colonel james. i “caught it” for mentioning that mr. longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and when, after a lull in the storm, i confessed, shamefacedly, that i had privately suggested to you that we hadn't any frames, and that if you wouldn't mind hinting to mr. houghton, etc., etc., etc., the madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute. then she said: “how could you, youth! the idea of sending mr. howells, with his sensitive nature, upon such a repulsive er--” “oh, howells won't mind it! you don't know howells. howells is a man who--” she was gone. but george was the first person she stumbled on in the hall, so she took it out of george. i am glad of that, because it saved the babies. clemens used to admit, at a later day, that his education did not advance by leaps and bounds, but gradually, very gradually; and it used to give him a pathetic relief in those after-years, when that sweet presence had gone out of his life, to tell the way of it, to confess over-fully, perhaps, what a responsibility he had been to her. he used to tell how, for a long time, he concealed his profanity from her; how one morning, when he thought the door was shut between their bedroom and the bathroom, he was in there dressing and shaving, accompanying these trying things with language intended only for the strictest privacy; how presently, when he discovered a button off the shirt he intended to put on, he hurled it through the window into the yard with appropriate remarks, followed it with another shirt that was in the same condition, and added certain collars and neckties and bath-room requisites, decorating the shrubbery outside, where the people were going by to church; how in this extreme moment he heard a slight cough and turned to find that the door was open! there was only one door to the bath-room, and he knew he had to pass her. he felt pale and sick, and sat down for a few moments to consider. he decided to assume that she was asleep, and to walk out and through the room, head up, as if he had nothing on his conscience. he attempted it, but without success. half-way across the room he heard a voice suddenly repeat his last terrific remark. he turned to see her sitting up in bed, regarding him with a look as withering as she could find in her gentle soul. the humor of it struck him. “livy,” he said, “did it sound like that?” “of course it did,” she said, “only worse. i wanted you to hear just how it sounded.” “livy,” he said, “it would pain me to think that when i swear it sounds like that. you got the words right, livy, but you don't know the tune.” yet he never willingly gave her pain, and he adored her and gloried in her dominion, his life long. howells speaks of his beautiful and tender loyalty to her as the “most moving quality of his most faithful soul.” it was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives, and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character. she guarded his work sacredly; and reviewing the manuscripts which he was induced to discard, and certain edited manuscripts, one gets a partial idea of what the reading world owes to olivia clemens. of the discarded manuscripts (he seems seldom to have destroyed them) there are a multitude, and among them all scarcely one that is not a proof of her sanity and high regard for his literary honor. they are amusing--some of them; they are interesting--some of them; they are strong and virile--some of them; but they are unworthy--most of them, though a number remain unfinished because theme or interest failed. mark twain was likely to write not wisely but too much, piling up hundreds of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging as with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas demanding release. as often as not he began writing with only a nebulous idea of what he proposed to do. he would start with a few characters and situations, trusting in providence to supply material as needed. so he was likely to run ashore any time. as for those other attempts--stories “unavailable” for one reason or another--he was just as apt to begin those as the better sort, for somehow he could never tell the difference. that is one of the hall-marks of genius--the thing which sharply differentiates genius from talent. genius is likely to rate a literary disaster as its best work. talent rarely makes that mistake. among the abandoned literary undertakings of these early years of authorship there is the beginning of what was doubtless intended to become a book, “the second advent,” a story which opens with a very doubtful miraculous conception in arkansas, and leads only to grotesquery and literary disorder. there is another, “the autobiography of a damn fool,” a burlesque on family history, hopelessly impossible; yet he began it with vast enthusiasm and, until he allowed her to see the manuscript, thought it especially good. “livy wouldn't have it,” he said, “so i gave it up.” there is another, “the mysterious chamber,” strong and fine in conception, vividly and intensely interesting; the story of a young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old castle and cannot announce himself. he wanders at last down into subterranean passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation for twenty years. the question of sustenance was the weak point in the story. clemens could invent no way of providing it, except by means of a waste or conduit from the kitchen into which scraps of meat, bread, and other items of garbage were thrown. this he thought sufficient, but mrs. clemens did not highly regard such a literary device. clemens could think of no good way to improve upon it, so this effort too was consigned to the penal colony, a set of pigeonholes kept in his study. to howells and others, when they came along, he would read the discarded yarns, and they were delightful enough for such a purpose, as delightful as the sketches which every artist has, turned face to the wall. “captain stormfield” lay under the ban for many a year, though never entirely abandoned. this manuscript was even recommended for publication by howells, who has since admitted that it would not have done then; and indeed, in its original, primitive nakedness it would hardly have done even in this day of wider toleration. it should be said here that there is not the least evidence (and the manuscripts are full of evidence) that mrs. clemens was ever super-sensitive, or narrow, or unliterary in her restraints. she became his public, as it were, and no man ever had a more open-minded, clear-headed public than that. for mark twain's reputation it would have been better had she exercised her editorial prerogative even more actively--if, in her love for him and her jealousy of his reputation, she had been even more severe. she did all that lay in her strength, from the beginning to the end, and if we dwell upon this phase of their life together it is because it is so large a part of mark twain's literary story. on her birthday in the year we are now closing ( ) he wrote her a letter which conveys an acknowledgment of his debt. livy darling,--six years have gone by since i made my first great success in life and won you, and thirty years have passed since providence made preparation for that happy success by sending you into the world. every day we live together adds to the security of my confidence that we can never any more wish to be separated than we can imagine a regret that we were ever joined. you are dearer to me to-day, my child, than you were upon the last anniversary of this birthday; you were dearer then than you were a year before; you have grown more and more dear from the first of those anniversaries, and i do not doubt that this precious progression will continue on to the end. let us look forward to the coming anniversaries, with their age and their gray hairs, without fear and without depression, trusting and believing that the love we bear each other will be sufficient to make them blessed. so, with abounding affection for you and our babies i hail this day that brings you the matronly grace and dignity of three decades! volume ii, part : - cv. mark twain at forty in conversation with john hay, hay said to clemens: “a man reaches the zenith at forty, the top of the hill. from that time forward he begins to descend. if you have any great undertaking ahead, begin it now. you will never be so capable again.” of course this was only a theory of hay's, a rule where rules do not apply, where in the end the problem resolves itself into a question of individualities. john hay did as great work after forty as ever before, so did mark twain, and both of them gained in intellectual strength and public honor to the very end. yet it must have seemed to many who knew him, and to himself, like enough, that mark twain at forty had reached the pinnacle of his fame and achievement. his name was on every lip; in whatever environment observation and argument were likely to be pointed with some saying or anecdote attributed, rightly or otherwise, to mark twain. “as mark twain says,” or, “you know that story of mark twain's,” were universal and daily commonplaces. it was dazzling, towering fame, not of the best or most enduring kind as yet, but holding somewhere within it the structure of immortality. he was in a constant state of siege, besought by all varieties and conditions of humanity for favors such as only human need and abnormal ingenuity can invent. his ever-increasing mail presented a marvelous exhibition of the human species on undress parade. true, there were hundreds of appreciative tributes from readers who spoke only out of a heart's gratitude; but there were nearly as great a number who came with a compliment, and added a petition, or a demand, or a suggestion, usually unwarranted, often impertinent. politicians, public speakers, aspiring writers, actors, elocutionists, singers, inventors (most of them he had never seen or heard of) cheerfully asked him for a recommendation as to their abilities and projects. young men wrote requesting verses or sentiments to be inscribed in young ladies' autograph albums; young girls wrote asking him to write the story of his life, to be used as a school composition; men starting obscure papers coolly invited him to lend them his name as editor, assuring him that he would be put to no trouble, and that it would help advertise his books; a fruitful humorist wrote that he had invented some five thousand puns, and invited mark twain to father this terrific progeny in book form for a share of the returns. but the list is endless. he said once: “the symbol of the race ought to be a human being carrying an ax, for every human being has one concealed about him somewhere, and is always seeking the opportunity to grind it.” even p. t. barnum had an ax, the large ax of advertising, and he was perpetually trying to grind it on mark twain's reputation; in other words, trying to get him to write something that would help to popularize “the greatest show on earth.” there were a good many curious letters-letters from humorists, would-be and genuine. a bright man in duluth sent him an old allen “pepper-box” revolver with the statement that it had been found among a pile of bones under a tree, from the limb of which was suspended a lasso and a buffalo skull; this as evidence that the weapon was the genuine allen which bemis had lost on that memorable overland buffalo-hunt. mark twain enjoyed that, and kept the old pepper-box as long as he lived. there were letters from people with fads; letters from cranks of every description; curious letters even from friends. reginald cholmondeley, that lovely eccentric of condover hall, where mr. and mrs. clemens had spent some halcyon days in , wrote him invitations to be at his castle on a certain day, naming the hour, and adding that he had asked friends to meet him. cholmondeley had a fancy for birds, and spared nothing to improve his collection. once he wrote clemens asking him to collect for him two hundred and five american specimens, naming the varieties and the amount which he was to pay for each. clemens was to catch these birds and bring them over to england, arriving at condover on a certain day, when there would be friends to meet him, of course. then there was a report which came now and then from another english castle--the minutes of a certain “mark twain club,” all neatly and elaborately written out, with the speech of each member and the discussions which had followed--the work, he found out later, of another eccentric; for there was no mark twain club, the reports being just the mental diversion of a rich young man, with nothing else to do.--[in following the equator clemens combined these two pleasant characters in one story, with elaborations.] letters came queerly addressed. there is one envelope still in existence which bears clemens's name in elaborate design and a very good silhouette likeness, the work of some talented artist. “mark twain, united states,” was a common address; “mark twain, the world,” was also used; “mark twain, somewhere,” mailed in a foreign country, reached him promptly, and “mark twain, anywhere,” found its way to hartford in due season. then there was a letter (though this was later; he was abroad at the time), mailed by brander matthews and francis wilson, addressed, “mark twain, god knows where.” it found him after traveling half around the world on its errand, and in his answer he said, “he did.” then some one sent a letter addressed, “the devil knows where.” which also reached him, and he answered, “he did, too.” surely this was the farthest horizon of fame. countless mark twain anecdotes are told of this period, of every period, and will be told and personally vouched for so long as the last soul of his generation remains alive. for seventy years longer, perhaps, there will be those who will relate “personal recollections” of mark twain. many of them will be interesting; some of them will be true; most of them will become history at last. it is too soon to make history of much of this drift now. it is only safe to admit a few authenticated examples. it happens that one of the oftenest-told anecdotes has been the least elaborated. it is the one about his call on mrs. stowe. twichell's journal entry, set down at the time, verifies it: mrs. stowe was leaving for florida one morning, and clemens ran over early to say good-by. on his return mrs. clemens regarded him disapprovingly: “why, youth,” she said, “you haven't on any collar and tie.” he said nothing, but went up to his room, did up these items in a neat package, and sent it over by a servant, with a line: “herewith receive a call from the rest of me.” mrs. stowe returned a witty note, in which she said that he had discovered a new principle, the principle of making calls by instalments, and asked whether, in extreme cases, a man might not send his hat, coat, and boots and be otherwise excused. col. henry watterson tells the story of an after-theater supper at the brevoort house, where murat halstead, mark twain, and himself were present. a reporter sent in a card for colonel watterson, who was about to deny himself when clemens said: “give it to me; i'll fix it.” and left the table. he came back in a moment and beckoned to watterson. “he is young and as innocent as a lamb,” he said. “i represented myself as your secretary. i said that you were not here, but if mr. halstead would do as well i would fetch him out. i'll introduce you as halstead, and we'll have some fun.” now, while watterson and halstead were always good friends, they were political enemies. it was a political season and the reporter wanted that kind of an interview. watterson gave it to him, repudiating every principle that halstead stood for, reversing him in every expressed opinion. halstead was for hard money and given to flying the “bloody shirt” of sectional prejudice; watterson lowered the bloody shirt and declared for greenbacks in halstead's name. then he and clemens returned to the table and told frankly what they had done. of course, nobody believed it. the report passed the world night-editor, and appeared, next morning. halstead woke up, then, and wrote a note to the world, denying the interview throughout. the world printed his note with the added line: “when mr. halstead saw our reporter he had dined.” it required john hay (then on the tribune) to place the joke where it belonged. there is a lotos club anecdote of mark twain that carries the internal evidence of truth. saturday evening at the lotos always brought a gathering of the “wits,” and on certain evenings--“hens and chickens” nights--each man had to tell a story, make a speech, or sing a song. on one evening a young man, an invited guest, was called upon and recited a very long poem. one by one those who sat within easy reach of the various exits melted away, until no one remained but mark twain. perhaps he saw the earnestness of the young man, and sympathized with it. he may have remembered a time when he would have been grateful for one such attentive auditor. at all events, he sat perfectly still, never taking his eyes from the reader, never showing the least inclination toward discomfort or impatience, but listening, as with rapt attention, to the very last line. douglas taylor, one of the faithful saturday-night members, said to him later: “mark, how did you manage to sit through that dreary, interminable poem?” “well,” he said, “that young man thought he had a divine message to deliver, and i thought he was entitled to at least one auditor, so i stayed with him.” we may believe that for that one auditor the young author was willing to sacrifice all the others. one might continue these anecdotes for as long as the young man's poem lasted, and perhaps hold as large an audience. but anecdotes are not all of history. these are set down because they reflect a phase of the man and an aspect of his life at this period. for at the most we can only present an angle here and there, and tell a little of the story, letting each reader from his fancy construct the rest. cvi. his first stage appearance once that winter the monday evening club met at mark twain's home, and instead of the usual essay he read them a story: “the facts concerning the recent carnival of crime in connecticut.” it was the story of a man's warfare with a personified conscience--a sort of “william wilson” idea, though less weird, less somber, and with more actuality, more verisimilitude. it was, in fact, autobiographical, a setting-down of the author's daily self-chidings. the climax, where conscience is slain, is a startling picture which appeals to most of humanity. so vivid is it all, that it is difficult in places not to believe in the reality of the tale, though the allegory is always present. the club was deeply impressed by the little fictional sermon. one of its ministerial members offered his pulpit for the next sunday if mark twain would deliver it to his congregation. howells welcomed it for the atlantic, and published it in june. it was immensely successful at the time, though for some reason it seems to be little known or remembered to-day. now and then a reader mentions it, always with enthusiasm. howells referred to it repeatedly in his letters, and finally persuaded clemens to let osgood bring it out, with “a true story,” in dainty, booklet form. if the reader does not already know the tale, it will pay him to look it up and read it, and then to read it again. meantime tom sawyer remained unpublished. “get bliss to hurry it up!” wrote howells. “that boy is going to make a prodigious hit.” but clemens delayed the book, to find some means to outwit the canadian pirates, who thus far had laid hands on everything, and now were clamoring at the atlantic because there was no more to steal. moncure d. conway was in america, and agreed to take the manuscript of sawyer to london and arrange for its publication and copyright. in conway's memoirs he speaks of mark twain's beautiful home, comparing it and its surroundings with the homes of surrey, england. he tells of an entertainment given to harriet beecher stowe, a sort of animated jarley wax-works. clemens and conway went over as if to pay a call, when presently the old lady was rather startled by an invasion of costumed. figures. clemens rose and began introducing them in his gay, fanciful fashion. he began with a knight in full armor, saying, as if in an aside, “bring along that tinshop,” and went on to tell the romance of the knight's achievements. conway read tom sawyer on the ship and was greatly excited over it. later, in london, he lectured on it, arranging meantime for its publication with chatto & windus, thus establishing a friendly business relation with that firm which mark twain continued during his lifetime. clemens lent himself to a number of institutional amusements that year, and on the th of april, , made his first public appearance on the dramatic stage. it was an amateur performance, but not of the usual kind. there was genuine dramatic talent in hartford, and the old play of the “loan of the lover,” with mark twain as peter spuyk and miss helen smith--[now mrs. william w. ellsworth.]--as gertrude, with a support sufficient for their needs, gave a performance that probably furnished as much entertainment as that pleasant old play is capable of providing. mark twain had in him the making of a great actor. henry irving once said to him: “you made a mistake by not adopting the stage as a profession. you would have made even a greater actor than a writer.” yet it is unlikely that he would ever have been satisfied with the stage. he had too many original literary ideas. he would never have been satisfied to repeat the same part over and over again, night after night from week to month, and from month to year. he could not stick to the author's lines even for one night. in his performance of the easy-going, thick-headed peter spuyk his impromptu additions to the lines made it hard on the company, who found their cues all at sixes and sevens, but it delighted the audience beyond measure. no such impersonation of that. character was ever given before, or ever will be given again. it was repeated with new and astonishing variations on the part of peter, and it could have been put on for a long run. augustin daly wrote immediately, offering the fifth avenue theater for a “benefit” performance, and again, a few days later, urging acceptance. “not for one night, but for many.” clemens was tempted, no doubt. perhaps, if he had yielded, he would today have had one more claim on immortality. cvii. howells, clemens, and “george” howells and clemens were visiting back and forth rather oftener just then. clemens was particularly fond of the boston crowd--aldrich, fields, osgood, and the rest--delighting in those luncheons or dinners which osgood, that hospitable publisher, was always giving on one pretext or another. no man ever loved company more than osgood, or to play the part of host and pay for the enjoyment of others. his dinners were elaborate affairs, where the sages and poets and wits of that day (and sometimes their wives) gathered. they were happy reunions, those fore-gatherings, though perhaps a more intimate enjoyment was found at the luncheons, where only two or three were invited, usually aldrich, howells, and clemens, and the talk continued through the afternoon and into the deepening twilight, such company and such twilight as somehow one seems never to find any more. on one of the visits which howells made to hartford that year he took his son john, then a small boy, with him. john was about six years old at the time, with his head full of stories of aladdin, and of other arabian fancies. on the way over his father said to him: “now, john, you will see a perfect palace.” they arrived, and john was awed into silence by the magnificence and splendors of his surroundings until they went to the bath-room to wash off the dust of travel. there he happened to notice a cake of pink soap. “why,” he said, “they've even got their soap painted!” next morning he woke early--they were occupying the mahogany room on the ground floor--and slipping out through the library, and to the door of the dining-room, he saw the colored butler, george--the immortal george--setting the breakfast-table. he hurriedly tiptoed back and whispered to his father: “come quick! the slave is setting the table!” this being the second mention of george, it seems proper here that he should be formally presented. clemens used to say that george came one day to wash windows and remained eighteen years. he was precisely the sort of character that mark twain loved. he had formerly been the body-servant of an army general and was typically racially southern, with those delightful attributes of wit and policy and gentleness which go with the best type of negro character. the children loved him no less than did their father. mrs. clemens likewise had a weakness for george, though she did not approve of him. george's morals were defective. he was an inveterate gambler. he would bet on anything, though prudently and with knowledge. he would investigate before he invested. if he placed his money on a horse, he knew the horse's pedigree and the pedigree of the horses against it, also of their riders. if he invested in an election, he knew all about the candidates. he had agents among his own race, and among the whites as well, to supply him with information. he kept them faithful to him by lending them money--at ruinous interest. he buttonholed mark twain's callers while he was removing their coats concerning the political situation, much to the chagrin of mrs. clemens, who protested, though vainly, for the men liked george and his ways, and upheld him in his iniquities. mrs. clemens's disapproval of george reached the point, now and then, where she declared he could not remain. she even discharged him once, but next morning george was at the breakfast-table, in attendance, as usual. mrs. clemens looked at him gravely: “george,” she said, “didn't i discharge you yesterday?” “yes, mis' clemens, but i knew you couldn't get along without me, so i thought i'd better stay a while.” in one of the letters to howells, clemens wrote: when george first came he was one of the most religious of men. he had but one fault--young george washington's. but i have trained him; and now it fairly breaks mrs. clemens's heart to hear him stand at that front door and lie to an unwelcome visitor. george was a fine diplomat. he would come up to the billiard-room with a card or message from some one waiting below, and clemens would fling his soul into a sultry denial which became a soothing and balmy subterfuge before it reached the front door. the “slave” must have been setting the table in good season, for the clemens breakfasts were likely to be late. they usually came along about nine o'clock, by which time howells and john were fairly clawing with hunger. clemens did not have an early appetite, but when it came it was a good one. breakfast and dinner were his important meals. he seldom ate at all during the middle of the day, though if guests were present he would join them at luncheon-time and walk up and down while they were eating, talking and gesticulating in his fervent, fascinating way. sometimes mrs. clemens would say: “oh, youth, do come and sit down with us. we can listen so much better.” but he seldom did. at dinner, too, it was his habit, between the courses, to rise from the table and walk up and down the room, waving his napkin and talking!--talking in a strain and with a charm that he could never quite equal with his pen. it's the opinion of most people who knew mark twain personally that his impromptu utterances, delivered with that ineffable quality of speech, manifested the culmination of his genius. when clemens came to boston the howells household was regulated, or rather unregulated, without regard to former routine. mark twain's personality was of a sort that unconsciously compelled the general attendance of any household. the reader may recall josh billings's remark on the subject. howells tells how they kept their guest to themselves when he visited their home in cambridge, permitting him to indulge in as many unconventions as he chose; how clemens would take a room at the parker house, leaving the gas burning day and night, and perhaps arrive at cambridge, after a dinner or a reading, in evening dress and slippers, and joyously remain with them for a day or more in that guise, slipping on an overcoat and a pair of rubbers when they went for a walk. also, how he smoked continuously in every room of the house, smoked during every waking moment, and how howells, mindful of his insurance, sometimes slipped in and removed the still-burning cigar after he was asleep. clemens had difficulty in getting to sleep in that earlier day, and for a time found it soothing to drink a little champagne on retiring. once, when he arrived in boston, howells said: “clemens, we've laid in a bottle of champagne for you.” but he answered: “oh, that's no good any more. beer's the thing.” so howells provided the beer, and always afterward had a vision of his guest going up-stairs that night with a pint bottle under each arm. he invented other methods of inducing slumber as the years went by, and at one time found that this precious boon came more easily when he stretched himself on the bath-room floor. he was a perpetual joy to the howells family when he was there, even though the household required a general reorganization when he was gone. mildred howells remembers how, as a very little girl, her mother cautioned her not to ask for anything she wanted at the table when company was present, but to speak privately of it to her. miss howells declares that while mark twain was their guest she nearly starved because it was impossible to get her mother's attention; and mrs. howells, after one of those visits of hilarity and disorder, said: “well, it 'most kills me, but it pays,” a remark which clemens vastly enjoyed. howells himself once wrote: your visit was a perfect ovation for us; we never enjoy anything so much as those visits of yours. the smoke and the scotch and the late hours almost kill us; but we look each other in the eyes when you are gone, and say what a glorious time it was, and air the library, and begin sleeping and longing to have you back again.... cviii. summer labors at quarry farm they went to elmira, that summer of ' , to be “hermits and eschew caves and live in the sun,” as clemens wrote in a letter to dr. brown. they returned to the place as to paradise: clemens to his study and the books which he always called for, mrs. clemens to a blessed relief from social obligations, the children to the shady play-places, the green, sloping hill, where they could race and tumble, and to all their animal friends. susy was really growing up. she had had several birthdays, quite grand affairs, when she had been brought down in the morning, decked, and with proper ceremonies, with subsequent celebration. she was a strange, thoughtful child, much given to reflecting on the power and presence of infinity, for she was religiously taught. down in the city, one night, there was a grand display of fireworks, and the hilltop was a good place from which to enjoy it; but it grew late after a little, and susy was ordered to bed. she said, thoughtfully: “i wish i could sit up all night, as god does.” the baby, whom they still called “bay,” was a tiny, brown creature who liked to romp in the sun and be rocked to sleep at night with a song. clemens often took them for extended' walks, pushing bay in her carriage. once, in a preoccupied moment, he let go of the little vehicle and it started downhill, gaining speed rapidly. he awoke then, and set off in wild pursuit. before he could overtake the runaway carriage it had turned to the roadside and upset. bay was lying among the stones and her head was bleeding. hastily binding the wound with a handkerchief he started full speed with her up the hill toward the house, calling for restoratives as he came. it was no serious matter. the little girl was strong and did not readily give way to affliction. the children were unlike: susy was all contemplation and nerves; bay serene and practical. it was said, when a pet cat died--this was some years later--that susy deeply reflected as to its life here and hereafter, while bay was concerned only as to the style of its funeral. susy showed early her father's quaintness of remark. once they bought her a heavier pair of shoes than she approved of. she was not in the best of humors during the day, and that night, when at prayer-time her mother said, “now, susy, put your thoughts on god,” she answered, “mama, i can't with those shoes.” clemens worked steadily that summer and did a variety of things. he had given up a novel, begun with much enthusiasm, but he had undertaken another long manuscript. by the middle of august he had written several hundred pages of a story which was to be a continuation of tam sawyer--the adventures of huckleberry finn. now, here is a curious phase of genius. the novel which for a time had filled him with enthusiasm and faith had no important literary value, whereas, concerning this new tale, he says: “i like it only tolerably well, as far as i have gone, and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the manuscript when it is done”--this of the story which, of his books of pure fiction, will perhaps longest survive. he did, in fact, give the story up, and without much regret, when it was about half completed, and let it lie unfinished for years. he wrote one short tale, “the canvasser's story,” a burlesque of no special distinction, and he projected for the atlantic a scheme of “blindfold novelettes,” a series of stories to be written by well-known authors and others, each to be constructed on the same plot. one can easily imagine clemens's enthusiasm over a banal project like that; his impulses were always rainbow-hued, whether valuable or not; but it is curious that howells should welcome and even encourage an enterprise so far removed from all the traditions of art. it fell to pieces, at last, of inherent misconstruction. the title was to be, “a murder and a marriage.” clemens could not arrive at a logical climax that did not bring the marriage and the hanging on the same day. the atlantic started its “contributors' club,” and howells wrote to clemens for a paragraph or more of personal opinion on any subject, assuring him that he could “spit his spite” out at somebody or something as if it were a passage from a letter. that was a fairly large permission to give mark twain. the paragraph he sent was the sort of thing he would write with glee, and hug himself over in the thought of howells's necessity of rejecting it. in the accompanying note he said: say, boss, do you want this to lighten up your old freight-train with? i suppose you won't, but then it won't take long to say, so. he was always sending impossible offerings to the magazines; innocently enough sometimes, but often out of pure mischievousness. yet they were constantly after him, for they knew they were likely to get a first-water gem. mary mopes dodge, of st. nicholas, wrote time and again, and finally said: “i know a man who was persecuted by an editor till he went distracted.” in his reading that year at the farm he gave more than customary attention to one of his favorite books, pepys' diary, that captivating old record which no one can follow continuously without catching the infection of its manner and the desire of imitation. he had been reading diligently one day, when he determined to try his hand on an imaginary record of conversation and court manners of a bygone day, written in the phrase of the period. the result was fireside conversation in the time of queen elizabeth, or, as he later called it, . the “conversation,” recorded by a supposed pepys of that period, was written with all the outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day, when fireside sociabilities were limited only by the range of loosened fancy, vocabulary, and physical performance, and not by any bounds of convention. howells has spoken of mark twain's “elizabethan breadth of parlance,” and how he, howells, was always hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which clemens had “loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion.” “i could not bear to burn them,” he declares, “and i could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them.” in the mark twain outdid himself in the elizabethan field. it was written as a letter to that robust divine, rev. joseph twichell, who had no special scruples concerning shakespearian parlance and customs. before it was mailed it was shown to david gray, who was spending a sunday at elmira. gray said: “print it and put your name to it, mark. you have never done a greater piece of work than that.” john hay, whom it also reached in due time, pronounce it a classic--a “most exquisite bit of old english morality.” hay surreptitiously permitted some proofs to be made of it, and it has been circulated privately, though sparingly, ever since. at one time a special font of antique type was made for it and one hundred copies were taken on hand-made paper. they would easily bring a hundred dollars each to-day. is a genuine classic, as classics of that sort go. it is better than the gross obscenities of rabelais, and perhaps, in some day to come, the taste that justified gargantua and the decameron will give this literary refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writings of mark twain. human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is purely a matter of environment and point of view.--[in a note-book of a later period clemens himself wrote: “it depends on who writes a thing whether it is coarse or not. i once wrote a conversation between elizabeth, shakespeare, ben jonson, beaumont, sir w. raleigh, lord bacon, sir nicholas throckmorton, and a stupid old nobleman--this latter being cup-bearer to the queen and ostensible reporter of the talk. “there were four maids of honor present and a sweet young girl two years younger than the boy beaumont. i built a conversation which could have happened--i used words such as were used at that time-- . i sent it anonymously to a magazine, and how the editor abused it and the sender! but that man was a praiser of rabelais, and had been saying, 'o that we had a rabelais!' i judged that i could furnish him one.”] eighteen hundred and seventy-six was a presidential year--the year of the hayes-tilden campaign. clemens and howells were both warm republicans and actively interested in the outcome, clemens, as he confessed, for the first time in his life. before his return to hartford he announced himself publicly as a hayes man, made so by governor hayes's letter of acceptance, which, he said, “expresses my own political convictions.” his politics had not been generally known up to that time, and a tilden and hendricks club in jersey city had invited him to be present and give them some political counsel, at a flag-raising. he wrote, declining pleasantly enough, then added: “you have asked me for some political counsel or advice: in view of mr. tilden's civil war record my advice is not to raise the flag.” he wrote howells: “if tilden is elected i think the entire country will go pretty straight to--mrs. howells's bad place.” howells was writing a campaign biography of hayes, which he hoped would have a large sale, and clemens urged him to get it out quickly and save the country. howells, working like a beaver, in turn urged clemens to take the field in the cause. returning to hartford, clemens presided at a political rally and made a speech, the most widely quoted of the campaign. all papers, without distinction as to party, quoted it, and all readers, regardless of politics, read it with joy. yet conditions did not improve. when howells's book had been out a reasonable length of time he wrote that it had sold only two thousand copies. “there's success for you,” he said. “it makes me despair of the republic, i can tell you.” clemens, however, did not lose faith, and went on shouting for hayes and damning tilden till the final vote was cast. in later life he changed his mind about tilden (as did many others) through sympathy. sympathy could make--mark twain change his mind any time. he stood for the right, but, above all, for justice. he stood for the wronged, regardless of all other things. cix. the public appearance of “tom sawyer” clemens gave a few readings in boston and philadelphia, but when urged to go elsewhere made the excuse that he was having his portrait painted and could not leave home. as a matter of fact, he was enjoying himself with frank millet, who had been invited to the house to do the portrait and had captured the fervent admiration of the whole family. millet was young, handsome, and lively; clemens couldn't see enough of him, the children adored him and added his name to the prayer which included each member of the household--the “holy family,” clemens called it. millet had brought with him but one piece of canvas for the portrait, and when the first sketch was finished mrs. clemens was so delighted with it that she did not wish him to touch it again. she was afraid of losing some particular feeling in it which she valued. millet went to the city for another canvas and clemens accompanied him. while millet was doing his shopping it happened to occur to clemens that it would be well to fill in the time by having his hair cut. he left word with a clerk to tell millet that he had gone across the street. by and by the artist came over, and nearly wept with despair when he saw his subject sheared of the auburn, gray-sprinkled aureola that had made his first sketch a success. he tried it again, and the result was an excellent likeness, but it never satisfied millet. the 'adventures of tom sawyer' appeared late in december ( ), and immediately took its place as foremost of american stories of boy life, a place which it unquestionably holds to this day. we have already considered the personal details of this story, for they were essentially nothing more than the various aspects of mark twain's own boyhood. it is only necessary to add a word concerning the elaboration of this period in literary form. from every point it is a masterpiece, this picture of boy life in a little lazy, drowsy town, with all the irresponsibility and general disreputability of boy character coupled with that indefinable, formless, elusive something we call boy conscience, which is more likely to be boy terror and a latent instinct of manliness. these things are so truly portrayed that every boy and man reader finds the tale fitting into his own remembered years, as if it had grown there. every boy has played off sick to escape school; every boy has reflected in his heart tom's picture of himself being brought home dead, and gloated over the stricken consciences of those who had blighted his young life; every boy--of that day, at least--every normal, respectable boy, grew up to “fear god and dread the sunday-school,” as howells puts it in his review. as for the story itself, the narrative of it, it is pure delight. the pirate camp on the island is simply boy heaven. what boy, for instance, would not change any other glory or boon that the world holds for this: they built a fire against the side of a great log twenty or thirty steps within the somber depths of the forest, and then cooked some bacon in the frying-pan for supper, and used up half of the corn “pone” stock they had brought. it seemed glorious sport to be feasting in that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and they said they never would return to civilization. the climbing fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the pillared tree-trunks of their forest-temple, and upon the varnished foliage and the festooning vines. there is a magic in it. mark twain, when he wrote it, felt renewed in him all the old fascination of those days and nights with tom blankenship, john briggs, and the bowen boys on glasscock's island. everywhere in tom sawyer there is a quality, entirely apart from the humor and the narrative, which the younger reader is likely to overlook. no one forgets the whitewashing scene, but not many of us, from our early reading, recall this delicious bit of description which introduces it: the locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. cardiff hill, beyond the village and above it, was green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a delectable land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting. tom's night visit home; the graveyard scene, with the murder of dr. robinson; the adventures of tom and becky in the cave--these are all marvelously invented. literary thrill touches the ultimate in one incident of the cave episode. brander matthews has written: nor is there any situation quite as thrilling as that awful moment in the cave when the boy and girl are lost in the darkness, and when tom suddenly sees a human hand bearing a light, and then finds that the hand is the hand of indian joe, his one mortal enemy. i have always thought that the vision of the hand in the cave in tom sawyer was one of the very finest things in the literature of adventure since robinson crusoe first saw a single footprint in the sand of the sea-shore. mark twain's invention was not always a reliable quantity, but with that eccentricity which goes with any attribute of genius, it was likely at any moment to rise supreme. if to the critical, hardened reader the tale seems a shade overdone here and there, a trifle extravagant in its delineations, let him go back to his first long-ago reading of it and see if he recalls anything but his pure delight in it then. as a boy's story it has not been equaled. tom sawyer has ranked in popularity with roughing it. its sales go steadily on from year to year, and are likely to continue so long as boys and girls do not change, and men and women remember. --[col. henry watterson, when he finished tom sawyer, wrote: “i have just laid down tom sawyer, and cannot resist the pressure. it is immense! i read every word of it, didn't skip a line, and nearly disgraced myself several times in the presence of a sleeping-car full of honorable and pious people. once i had to get to one side and have a cry, and as for an internal compound of laughter and tears there was no end to it.... the 'funeral' of the boys, the cave business, and the hunt for the hidden treasure are as dramatic as anything i know of in fiction, while the pathos--particularly everything relating to huck and aunt polly--makes a cross between dickens's skill and thackeray's nature, which, resembling neither, is thoroughly impressive and original.”] cx. mark twain and bret harte write a play it was the fall and winter of ' that bret harte came to hartford and collaborated with mark twain on the play “ah sin,” a comedy-drama, or melodrama, written for charles t. parsloe, the great impersonator of chinese character. harte had written a successful play which unfortunately he had sold outright for no great sum, and was eager for another venture. harte had the dramatic sense and constructive invention. he also had humor, but he felt the need of the sort of humor that mark twain could furnish. furthermore, he believed that a play backed by both their reputations must start with great advantages. clemens also realized these things, and the arrangement was made. speaking of their method of working, clemens once said: “well, bret came down to hartford and we talked it over, and then bret wrote it while i played billiards, but of course i had to go over it to get the dialect right. bret never did know anything about dialect.” which is hardly a fair statement of the case. they both worked on the play, and worked hard. during the period of its construction harte had an order for a story which he said he must finish at once, as he needed the money. it must be delivered by the following night, and he insisted that he must be getting at it without a moment's delay. still he seemed in no haste to begin. the evening passed; bedtime came. then he asked that an open fire might be made in his room and a bottle of whisky sent up, in case he needed something to keep him awake. george attended to these matters, and nothing more was heard of harte until very early next morning, when he rang for george and asked for a fresh fire and an additional supply of whisky. at breakfast-time he appeared, fresh, rosy, and elate, with the announcement that his story was complete. that forenoon the saturday morning club met at the clemens home. it was a young women's club, of which mark twain was a sort of honorary member--a club for the purpose of intellectual advancement, somewhat on the order of the monday evening club of men, except that the papers read before it were not prepared by members, but by men and women prominent in some field of intellectual progress. bret harte had agreed to read to them on this particular occasion, and he gaily appeared and gave them the story just finished, “thankful blossom,” a tale which mark twain always regarded as one of harte's very best. the new play, “ah sin,” by mark twain and bret harte, was put on at washington, at the national theater, on the evening of may , . it had been widely exploited in the newspapers, and the fame of the authors insured a crowded opening. clemens was unable to go over on account of a sudden attack of bronchitis. parsloe was nervous accordingly, and the presence of harte does not seem to have added to his happiness. “i am not very well myself,” he wrote to clemens. “the excitement of the first night is bad enough, but to have the annoyance with harte that i have is too much for a new beginner.” nevertheless, the play seems to have gone well, with parsloe as ah sin--a chinese laundryman who was also a great number of other diverting things--with a fair support and a happy-go-lucky presentation of frontier life, which included a supposed murder, a false accusation, and a general clearing-up of mystery by the pleasant and wily and useful and entertaining ah sin. it was not a great play. it was neither very coherent nor convincing, but it had a lot of good fun in it, with character parts which, if not faithful to life, were faithful enough to the public conception of it to be amusing and exciting. at the end of each act not only parsloe, but also the principal members of the company, were called before the curtain for special acknowledgments. when it was over there was a general call for ah sin, who came before the curtain and read a telegram. charles t. parsloe,--i am on the sick-list, and therefore cannot come to washington; but i have prepared two speeches--one to deliver in event of failure of the play, and the other if successful. please tell me which i shall send. may be better to put it to vote. mark twain. the house cheered the letter, and when it was put to vote decided unanimously that the play had been a success--a verdict more kindly than true. j. i. ford, of the theater management, wrote to clemens, next morning after the first performance, urging him to come to washington in person and “wet nurse” the play until “it could do for itself.” ford expressed satisfaction with the play and its prospects, and concludes: i inclose notices. come if you can. “your presence will be worth ten thousand men. the king's name is a tower of strength.” i have urged the president to come to-night. the play made no money in washington, but augustin daly decided to put it on in new york at the fifth avenue theater, with a company which included, besides parsloe, edmund collier, p. a. anderson, dora goldthwaite, henry crisp, and mrs. wells, a very worthy group of players indeed. clemens was present at the opening, dressed in white, which he affected only for warm-weather use in those days, and made a speech at the end of the third act. “ah sin” did not excite much enthusiasm among new york dramatic critics. the houses were promising for a time, but for some reason the performance as a whole did not contain the elements of prosperity. it set out on its provincial travels with no particular prestige beyond the reputation of its authors; and it would seem that this was not enough, for it failed to pay, and all parties concerned presently abandoned it to its fate and it was heard of no more. just why “ah sin” did not prosper it would not become us to decide at this far remove of time and taste. poorer plays have succeeded and better plays have failed since then, and no one has ever been able to demonstrate the mystery. a touch somewhere, a pulling-about and a readjustment, might have saved “ali sin,” but the pullings and haulings which they gave it did not. perhaps it still lies in some managerial vault, and some day may be dragged to light and reconstructed and recast, and come into its reward. who knows? or it may have drifted to that harbor of forgotten plays, whence there is no returning. as between harte and clemens, the whole matter was unfortunate. in the course of their association there arose a friction and the long-time friendship disappeared. cxi. a bermuda holiday on the th of may, , mark twain set out on what, in his note-book, he declared to be “the first actual pleasure-trip” he had ever taken, meaning that on every previous trip he had started with a purpose other than that of mere enjoyment. he took with him his, friend and pastor, the rev. joseph h. twichell, and they sailed for bermuda, an island resort not so well known or so fashionable as to-day. they did not go to a hotel. under assumed names they took up quarters in a boarding-house, with a mrs. kirkham, and were unmolested and altogether happy in their wanderings through four golden days. mark twain could not resist keeping a note-book, setting down bits of scenery and character and incident, just as he had always done. he was impressed with the cheapness of property and living in the bermuda of that period. he makes special mention of some cottages constructed of coral blocks: “all as beautiful and as neat as a pin, at the cost of four hundred and eighty dollars each.” to twichell he remarked: “joe, this place is like heaven, and i'm going to make the most of it.” “mark,” said twichell, “that's right; make the most of a place that is like heaven while you have a chance.” in one of the entries--the final one--clemens says: “bermuda is free (at present) from the triple curse of railways, telegraphs, and newspapers, but this will not last the year. i propose to spend next year here and no more.” when they were ready to leave, and started for the steamer, twichell made an excuse to go back, his purpose being to tell their landlady and her daughter that, without knowing it, they had been entertaining mark twain. “did you ever hear of mark twain?” asked twichell. the daughter answered. “yes,” she said, “until i'm tired of the name. i know a young man who never talks of anything else.” “well,” said twichell, “that gentleman with me is mark twain.” the kirkhams declined to believe it at first, and then were in deep sorrow that they had not known it earlier. twichell promised that he and clemens would come back the next year; and they meant to go back--we always mean to go back to places--but it was thirty years before they returned at last, and then their pleasant landlady was dead. on the home trip they sighted a wandering vessel, manned by blacks, trying to get to new york. she had no cargo and was pretty helpless. later, when she was reported again, clemens wrote about it in a hartford paper, telling the story as he knew it. the vessel had shipped the crew, on a basis of passage to new york, in exchange for labor. so it was a “pleasure-excursion!” clemens dwelt on this fancy: i have heard of a good many pleasure-excursions, but this heads the list. it is monumental, and if ever the tired old tramp is found i should like to be there and see him in his sorrowful rags and his venerable head of grass and seaweed, and hear the ancient mariners tell the story of their mysterious wanderings through the solemn solitudes of the ocean. long afterward this vagrant craft was reported again, still drifting with the relentless gulf stream. perhaps she reached new york in time; one would like to know, but there seems no good way to find out. that first bermuda voyage was always a happy memory to mark twain. to twichell he wrote that it was the “joyousest trip” he had ever made: not a heartache anywhere, not a twinge of conscience. i often come to myself out of a reverie and detect an undertone of thought that had been thinking itself without volition of mind--viz., that if we had only had ten days of those walks and talks instead of four. there was but one regret: howells had not been with them. clemens denounced him for his absence: if you had gone with us and let me pay the fifty dollars, which the trip and the board and the various knick-knacks and mementos would cost, i would have picked up enough droppings from your conversation to pay me five hundred per cent. profit in the way of the several magazine articles which i could have written; whereas i can now write only one or two, and am therefore largely out of pocket by your proud ways. clemens would not fail to write about his trip. he could not help doing that, and he began “some rambling notes of an idle excursion” as soon as he landed in hartford. they were quite what the name would signify--leisurely, pleasant commentaries on a loafing, peaceful vacation. they are not startling in their humor or description, but are gently amusing and summery, reflecting, bubble-like, evanescent fancies of bermuda. howells, shut up in a boston editorial office, found them delightful enough, and very likely his atlantic readers agreed with him. the story of “isaac and the prophets of baal” was one that capt. ned wakeman had told to twichell during a voyage which the latter had made to aspinwall with that vigorous old seafarer; so in the “rambling notes” wakeman appears as captain hurricane jones, probably a step in the evolution of the later name of stormfield. the best feature of the series (there were four papers in all) is a story of a rescue in mid-ocean; but surely the brightest ripple of humor is the reference to bermuda's mahogany-tree: there was exactly one mahogany-tree on the island. i know this to be reliable because i saw a man who said he had counted it many a time and could not be mistaken. he was a man with a haze lip and a pure heart, and everybody said he was as true as steel. such men are all too few. clemens cared less for these papers than did howells. he had serious doubts about the first two and suggested their destruction, but with howells's appreciation his own confidence in them returned and he let them all go in. they did not especially advance his reputation, but perhaps they did it no harm. cxii. a new play and a new tale he wrote a short story that year which is notable mainly for the fact that in it the telephone becomes a literary property, probably for the first time. “the loves of alonzo fitz-clarence and rosannah ethelton” employed in the consummation what was then a prospect, rather than a reality--long-distance communication. his work that summer consisted mainly of two extensive undertakings, one of which he completed without delay. he still had the dramatic ambition, and he believed that he was capable now of constructing a play entirely from his own resources. to howells, in june, he wrote: to-day i am deep in a comedy which i began this morning--principal character an old detective. i skeletoned the first act and wrote the second to-day, and am dog-tired now. fifty-four pages of ms. in seven hours. seven days later, the fourth of july, he said: i have piled up one hundred and fifty-one pages on my comedy. the first, second and fourth acts are done, and done to my satisfaction, too. to-morrow and next day will finish the third act, and the play. never had so much fun over anything in my life never such consuming interest and delight. and just think! i had sol smith russell in my mind's eye for the old detective's part, and bang it! he has gone off pottering with oliver optic, or else the papers lie. he was working with enthusiasm, you see, believing in it with a faith which, alas, was no warrant for its quality. even howells caught his enthusiasm and became eager to see the play, and to have the story it contained told for the atlantic. but in the end it proved a mistake. dion boucicault, when he read the manuscript, pronounced it better than “ah sin,” but that was only qualified praise. actors who considered the play, anxious enough to have mark twain's name on their posters and small bills, were obliged to admit that, while it contained marvelous lines, it wouldn't “go.” john brougham wrote: there is an absolute “embarrassment of riches” in your “detective” most assuredly, but the difficulty is to put it into profitable form. the quartz is there in abundance, only requiring the necessary manipulation to extract the gold. in narrative structure the story would be full of life, character, and the most exuberant fun, but it is altogether too diffuse in its present condition for dramatic representation, and i confess i do not feel sufficient confidence in my own experience (even if i had the time, which on reflection i find i have not) to undertake what, under different circumstances, would be a “labor of love.” yours sincerely, john brougham. that was frank, manly, and to the point; it covered the ground exactly. “simon wheeler, the amateur detective,” had plenty of good material in it--plenty of dialogue and situations; but the dialogue wouldn't play, and the situations wouldn't act. clemens realized that perhaps the drama was not, after all, his forte; he dropped “simon wheeler,” lost his interest in “ah sin,” even leased “colonel sellers” for the coming season, and so, in a sort of fury, put theatrical matters out of his mind. he had entered upon what, for him, was a truer domain. one day he picked up from among the books at the farm a little juvenile volume, an english story of the thirteenth century by charlotte m. yonge, entitled, the prince and the page. it was a story of edward i. and his cousins, richard and henry de montfort; in part it told of the submerged personality of the latter, picturing him as having dwelt in disguise as a blind beggar for a period of years. it was a story of a sort and with a setting that mark twain loved, and as he read there came a correlative idea. not only would he disguise a prince as a beggar, but a beggar as a prince. he would have them change places in the world, and each learn the burdens of the other's life.--[there is no point of resemblance between the prince and the pauper and the tale that inspired it. no one would ever guess that the one had grown out of the readings of the other, and no comparison of any sort is possible between them.] the plot presented physical difficulties. he still had some lurking thought of stage performance, and saw in his mind a spectacular presentation, with all the costumery of an early period as background for a young and beautiful creature who would play the part of prince. the old device of changelings in the cradle (later used in pudd'nhead wilson) presented itself to him, but it could not provide the situations he had in mind. finally came the thought of a playful interchange of raiment and state (with startling and unlooked-for consequence)--the guise and personality of tom canty, of offal court, for those of the son of henry viii., little edward tudor, more lately sixth english king of that name. this little prince was not his first selection for the part. his original idea had been to use the late king edward vii. (then prince of wales) at about fifteen, but he found that it would never answer to lose a prince among the slums of modern london, and have his proud estate denied and jeered at by a modern mob. he felt that he could not make it seem real; so he followed back through history, looking along for the proper time and prince, till he came to little edward, who was too young--but no matter, he would do. he decided to begin his new venture in story form. he could dramatize it later. the situation appealed to him immensely. the idea seemed a brand-new one; it was delightful, it was fascinating, and he was saturated with the atmosphere and literature and history--the data and detail of that delightful old time. he put away all thought of cheap, modern play-acting and writing, to begin one of the loveliest and most entertaining and instructive tales of old english life. he decided to be quite accurate in his picture of the period, and he posted himself on old london very carefully. he bought a pocket-map which he studied in the minutest detail. he wrote about four hundred manuscript pages of the tale that summer; then, as the inspiration seemed to lag a little, put it aside, as was his habit, to wait until the ambition for it should be renewed. it was a long wait, as usual. he did not touch it again for more than three years. cxiii. two domestic dramas some unusual happenings took place that summer of . john t. lewis (colored), already referred to as the religious antagonist of auntie cord, by great presence of mind and bravery saved the lives of mrs. clemens's sister-in-law, mrs. charles (“charley”) langdon, her little daughter julia, and her nurse-maid. they were in a buggy, and their runaway horse was flying down east hill toward elmira to certain destruction, when lewis, laboring slowly homeward with a loaded wagon, saw them coming and turned his team across the road, after which he leaped out and with extraordinary strength and quickness grabbed the horse's bridle and brought him to a standstill. the clemens and crane families, who had seen the runaway start at the farm gate, arrived half wild with fear, only to find the supposed victims entirely safe. everybody contributed in rewarding lewis. he received money ($ , ) and various other presents, including inscribed books and trinkets, also, what he perhaps valued more than anything, a marvelous stem-winding gold watch. clemens, writing a full account to dr. brown of the watch, says: and if any scoffer shall say, “behold this thing is out of character,” there is an inscription within which will silence him; for it will teach him that this wearer aggrandizes the watch, not the watch the wearer. in another paragraph he says: when lewis arrived the other evening, after having saved those lives by a feat which i think is the most marvelous i can call to mind, when he arrived hunched up on his manure-wagon and as grotesquely picturesque as usual, everybody wanted to go and see how he looked. they came back and said he was beautiful. it was so, too, and yet he would have photographed exactly as he would have done any day these past seven years that he has occupied this farm. lewis acknowledged his gifts in a letter which closed with a paragraph of rare native loftiness: but i beg to say, humbly, that inasmuch as divine providence saw fit to use me as an instrument for the saving of those preshious lives, the honner conferd upon me was greater than the feat performed. lewis lived to enjoy his prosperity, and the honor of the clemens and langdon households, for twenty-nine years. when he was too old to work there was a pension, to which clemens contributed; also henry h. rogers. so the simple-hearted, noble old negro closed his days in peace. mrs. crane, in a letter, late in july, , told of his death: he was always cheerful, and seemed not to suffer much pain, told stories, and was able to eat almost everything. three days ago a new difficulty appeared, on account of which his doctor said he must go to the hospital for care such as it was quite impossible to give in his home. he died on his way there. thus it happened that he died on the road where he had performed his great deed. a second unusual incident of that summer occurred in hartford. there had been a report of a strange man seen about the clemens place, thought to be a prospecting burglar, and clemens went over to investigate. a little searching inquiry revealed that the man was not a burglar, but a mechanic out of employment, a lover of one of the house-maids, who had given him food and shelter on the premises, intending no real harm. when the girl found that her secret was discovered, she protested that he was her fiance, though she said he appeared lately to have changed his mind and no longer wished to marry her. the girl seemed heartbroken, and sympathy for her was naturally the first and about the only feeling which clemens developed, for the time being. he reasoned with the young man, but without making much headway. finally his dramatic instinct prompted him to a plan of a sort which would have satisfied even tom sawyer. he asked twichell to procure a license for the couple, and to conceal himself in a ground floor bath-room. he arranged with the chief of police to be on hand in another room; with the rest of the servants quietly to prepare a wedding-feast, and finally with lizzie herself to be dressed for the ceremony. he had already made an appointment with the young man to come to, see him at a certain hour on a “matter of business,” and the young man arrived in the belief, no doubt, that it was something which would lead to profitable employment. when he came in clemens gently and quietly reviewed the situation, told him of the young girl's love for him; how he had been sheltered and fed by her; how through her kindness to him she had compromised her reputation for honesty and brought upon her all the suspicion of having sheltered a burglar; how she was ready and willing to marry him, and how he (clemens) was ready to assist them to obtain work and a start in life. but the young man was not enthusiastic. he was a swede and slow of action. he resolutely declared that he was not ready to marry yet, and in the end refused to do so. then came the dramatic moment. clemens quietly but firmly informed him that the wedding ceremony must take place; that by infesting his premises he had broken the law, not only against trespass, but most likely against house-breaking. there was a brief discussion of this point. finally clemens gave him five minutes to make up his mind, with the statement that he had an officer in waiting, and unless he would consent to the wedding he would be taken in charge. the young man began to temporize, saying that it would be necessary for him to get a license and a preacher. but clemens stepped to the door of the bath-room, opened it, and let out twichell, who had been sweltering there in that fearful place for more than an hour, it being august. the delinquent lover found himself confronted with all the requisites of matrimony except the bride, and just then this detail appeared on the scene, dressed for the occasion. behind her ranged the rest of the servants and a few invited guests. before the young man knew it he had a wife, and on the whole did not seem displeased. it ended with a gay supper and festivities. then clemens started them handsomely by giving each of them a check for one hundred dollars; and in truth (which in this case, at least, is stranger than fiction) they lived happily and prosperously ever after. some years later mark twain based a story on this episode, but it was never entirely satisfactory and remains unpublished. cxiv. the whittier birthday speech it was the night of december , , that mark twain made his unfortunate speech at the dinner given by the atlantic staff to john g. whittier on his seventieth birthday. clemens had attended a number of the dinners which the atlantic gave on one occasion or another, and had provided a part of the entertainment. it is only fair to say that his after-dinner speeches at such times had been regarded as very special events, genuine triumphs of humor and delivery. but on this particular occasion he determined to outdo himself, to prepare something unusual, startling, something altogether unheard of. when mark twain had an impulse like that it was possible for it to result in something dangerous, especially in those earlier days. this time it produced a bombshell; not just an ordinary bombshell, or even a twelve-inch projectile, but a shell of planetary size. it was a sort of hoax-always a doubtful plaything--and in this case it brought even quicker and more terrible retribution than usual. it was an imaginary presentation of three disreputable frontier tramps who at some time had imposed themselves on a lonely miner as longfellow, emerson, and holmes, quoting apposite selections from their verses to the accompaniment of cards and drink, and altogether conducting themselves in a most unsavory fashion. at the end came the enlightenment that these were not what they pretended to be, but only impostors--disgusting frauds. a feature like that would be a doubtful thing to try in any cultured atmosphere. the thought of associating, ever so remotely, those three old bummers which he had conjured up with the venerable and venerated emerson, longfellow, and holmes, the olympian trinity, seems ghastly enough to-day, and must have seemed even more so then. but clemens, dazzled by the rainbow splendor of his conception, saw in it only a rare colossal humor, which would fairly lift and bear his hearers along on a tide of mirth. he did not show his effort to any one beforehand. he wanted its full beauty to burst upon the entire company as a surprise. it did that. howells was toastmaster, and when he came to present clemens he took particular pains to introduce him as one of his foremost contributors and dearest friends. here, he said, was “a humorist who never left you hanging you head for having enjoyed his joke.” thirty years later clemens himself wrote of his impressions as he rose to deliver his speech. i vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering: dimly i can see a hundred people--no, perhaps fifty--shadowy figures, sitting at tables feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless forevermore. i don't know who they were, but i can very distinctly see, seated at the grand table and facing the rest of us, mr. emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; mr. whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face; mr. longfellow, with his silken-white hair and his benignant face; dr. oliver wendell holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good- fellowship everywhere, like a rose-diamond whose facets are being turned toward the light, first one way and then another--a charming man, and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he was sitting still (what he would call still, but what would be more or less motion to other people). i can see those figures with entire distinctness across this abyss of time. william winter, the poet, had just preceded him, and it seemed a moment aptly chosen for his so-different theme. “and then,” to quote howells, “the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe was upon us.” after the first two or three hundred words, when the general plan and purpose of the burlesque had developed, when the names of longfellow, emerson, and holmes began to be flung about by those bleary outcasts, and their verses given that sorry association, those atlantic diners became petrified with amazement and horror. too late, then, the speaker realized his mistake. he could not stop, he must go on to the ghastly end. and somehow he did it, while “there fell a silence weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened from moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy.” howells can remember little more than that, but clemens recalls that one speaker made an effort to follow him--bishop, the novelist, and that bishop didn't last long. it was not many sentences after his first before he began to hesitate and break, and lose his grip, and totter and wobble, and at last he slumped down in a limp and mushy pile. the next man had not strength to rise, and somehow the company broke up. howells's next recollection is of being in a room of the hotel, and of hearing charles dudley warner saying in the gloom: “well, mark, you're a funny fellow.” he remembers how, after a sleepless night, clemens went out to buy some bric-a-brac, with a soul far from bric-a-brac, and returned to hartford in a writhing agony of spirit. he believed that he was ruined forever, so far as his boston associations were concerned; and when he confessed all the tragedy to mrs. clemens it seemed to her also that the mistake could never be wholly repaired. the fact that certain papers quoted the speech and spoke well of it, and certain readers who had not listened to it thought it enormously funny, gave very little comfort. but perhaps his chief concern was the ruin which he believed he had brought upon howells. he put his heart into a brief letter: my dear howells,--my sense of disgrace does not abate. it grows. i see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies, a list of humiliations that extends back to when i was seven years old, and which keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentances. i feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country; therefore it will be best that i retire from before the public at present. it will hurt the atlantic for me to appear in its pages now. so it is my opinion, and my wife's, that the telephone story had better be suppressed. will you return those proofs or revises to me, so that i can use the same on some future occasion? it seems as if i must have been insane when i wrote that speech and saw no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom i reverenced so much. and what shame i brought upon you, after what you said in introducing me! it burns me like fire to think of it. the whole matter is a dreadful subject. let me drop it here--at least on paper. penitently yours, mark so, all in a moment, his world had come to an end--as it seemed. but howells's letter, which came rushing back by first mail, brought hope. “it was a fatality,” howells said. “one of those sorrows into which a man walks with his eyes wide open, no one knows why.” howells assured him that longfellow, emerson, and holmes would so consider it, beyond doubt; that charles eliot norton had already expressed himself exactly in the right spirit concerning it. howells declared that there was no intention of dropping mark twain's work from the atlantic. you are not going to be floored by it; there is more justice than that even in this world. especially as regards me, just call the sore spot well. i can say more, and with better heart, in praise of your good feeling (which was what i always liked in you), since this thing happened than i could before. it was agreed that he should at once write a letter to longfellow, emerson, and holmes, and he did write, laying his heart bare to them. longfellow and holmes answered in a fine spirit of kindliness, and miss emerson wrote for her father in the same tone. emerson had not been offended, for he had not heard the speech, having arrived even then at that stage of semi-oblivion as to immediate things which eventually so completely shut him away. longfellow's letter made light of the whole matter. the newspapers, he said, had caused all the mischief. a bit of humor at a dinner-table talk is one thing; a report of it in the morning papers is another. one needs the lamplight and the scenery. these failing, what was meant in jest assumes a serious aspect. i do not believe that anybody was much hurt. certainly i was not, and holmes tells me that he was not. so i think you may dismiss the matter from your mind, without further remorse. it was a very pleasant dinner, and i think whittier enjoyed it very much. holmes likewise referred to it as a trifle. it never occurred to me for a moment to take offense, or to feel wounded by your playful use of my name. i have heard some mild questioning as to whether, even in fun, it was good taste to associate the names of the authors with the absurdly unlike personalities attributed to them, but it seems to be an open question. two of my friends, gentlemen of education and the highest social standing, were infinitely amused by your speech, and stoutly defended it against the charge of impropriety. more than this, one of the cleverest and best-known ladies we have among us was highly delighted with it. miss emerson's letter was to mrs. clemens and its homelike new england fashion did much to lift the gloom. dear mrs. clemens,--at new year's our family always meets, to spend two days together. to-day my father came last, and brought with him mr. clemens's letter, so that i read it to the assembled family, and i have come right up-stairs to write to you about it. my sister said, “oh, let father write!” but my mother said, “no, don't wait for him. go now; don't stop to pick that up. go this minute and write. i think that is a noble letter. tell them so.” first let me say that no shadow of indignation has ever been in any of our minds. the night of the dinner, my father says, he did not hear mr. clemens's speech. he was too far off, and my mother says that when she read it to him the next day it amused him. but what you will want is to know, without any softening, how we did feel. we were disappointed. we have liked almost everything we have ever seen over mark twain's signature. it has made us like the man, and we have delighted in the fun. father has often asked us to repeat certain passages of the innocents abroad, and of a speech at a london dinner in , and we all expect both to approve and to enjoy when we see his name. therefore, when we read this speech it was a real disappointment. i said to my brother that it didn't seem good or funny, and he said, “no, it was unfortunate. still some of those quotations were very good”; and he gave them with relish and my father laughed, though never having seen a card in his life, he couldn't understand them like his children. my mother read it lightly and had hardly any second thoughts about it. to my father it is as if it had not been; he never quite heard, never quite understood it, and he forgets easily and entirely. i think it doubtful whether he writes to mr. clemens, for he is old and long ago gave up answering letters, i think you can see just how bad, and how little bad, it was as far as we are concerned, and this lovely heartbreaking letter makes up for our disappointment in our much- liked author, and restores our former feeling about him. ellen t. emerson. the sorrow dulled a little as the days passed. just after christmas clemens wrote to howells: i haven't done a stroke of work since the atlantic dinner. but i'm going to try to-morrow. how could i ever---- ah, well, i am a great and sublime fool. but then i am god's fool, and all his work must be contemplated with respect. so long as that unfortunate speech is remembered there will be differences of opinion as to its merits and propriety. clemens himself, reading it for the first time in nearly thirty years, said: “i find it gross, coarse--well, i needn't go on with particulars. i don't like any part of it, from the beginning to the end. i find it always offensive and detestable. how do i account for this change of view? i don't know.” but almost immediately afterward he gave it another consideration and reversed his opinion completely. all the spirit and delight of his old first conception returned, and preparing it for publication, he wrote: --[north american review, december, , now with comment included in the volume of “speeches.” (also see appendix o, at the end of last volume.)--i have read it twice, and unless i am an idiot it hasn't a single defect in it, from the first word to the last. it is just as good as good can be. it is smart; it is saturated with humor. there isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere.] it was altogether like mark twain to have those two absolutely opposing opinions in that brief time; for, after all, it was only a question of the human point of view, and mark twain's points of view were likely to be as extremely human as they were varied. of course the first of these impressions, the verdict of the fresh mind uninfluenced by the old conception, was the more correct one. the speech was decidedly out of place in that company. the skit was harmless enough, but it was of the comstock grain. it lacked refinement, and, what was still worse, it lacked humor, at least the humor of a kind suited to that long-ago company of listeners. it was another of those grievous mistakes which genius (and not talent) can make, for genius is a sort of possession. the individual is pervaded, dominated for a time by an angel or an imp, and he seldom, of himself, is able to discriminate between his controls. a literary imp was always lying in wait for mark twain; the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the 'outre', the outlandish, the shocking thing. it was this that olivia clemens had to labor hardest against: the cheapening of his own high purpose with an extravagant false note, at which sincerity, conviction, and artistic harmony took wings and fled away. notably he did a good burlesque now and then, but his fame would not have suffered if he had been delivered altogether from his besetting temptation. cxv. hartford and billiards clemens was never much inclined to work, away from his elmira study. “magnanimous incident literature” (for the atlantic) was about his only completed work of the winter of - . he was always tinkering with the “visit to heaven,” and after one reconstruction howells suggested that he bring it out as a book, in england, with dean stanley's indorsement, though this may have been only semi-serious counsel. the story continued to lie in seclusion. clemens had one new book in the field--a small book, but profitable. dan slote's firm issued for him the mark twain scrap-book, and at the end of the first royalty period rendered a statement of twenty-five thousand copies sold, which was well enough for a book that did not contain a single word that critics could praise or condemn. slote issued another little book for him soon after punch, brothers, punch!--which, besides that lively sketch, contained the “random notes” and seven other selections. mark twain was tempted to go into the lecture field that winter, not by any of the offers, though these were numerous enough, but by the idea of a combination which he thought night be not only profitable but pleasant. thomas nast had made a great success of his caricature lectures, and clemens, recalling nast's long-ago proposal, found it newly attractive. he wrote characteristically: my dear nast,--i did not think i should ever stand on a platform again until the time was come for me to say, “i die innocent.” but the same old offers keep arriving. i have declined them all, just as usual, though sorely tempted, as usual. now, i do not decline because i mind talking to an audience, but because ( ) traveling alone is so heartbreakingly dreary, and ( ) shouldering the whole show is such a cheer-killing responsibility. therefore, i now propose to you what you proposed to me in , ten years ago (when i was unknown)--viz., that you stand on the platform and make pictures, and i stand by you and blackguard the audience. i should enormously enjoy meandering around (to big towns--don't want to go to the little ones), with you for company. my idea is not to fatten the lecture agents and lyceums on the spoils, but to put all the ducats religiously into two equal piles, and say to the artist and lecturer, “absorb these.” for instance, [here follows a plan and a possible list of the cities to be visited]. the letter continues: call the gross receipts $ , for four months and a half, and the profit from $ , to $ , (i try to make the figures large enough, and leave it to the public to reduce them). i did not put in philadelphia because pugh owns that town, and last winter, when i made a little reading-trip, he only paid me $ , and pretended his concert (i read fifteen minutes in the midst of a concert) cost him a vast sum, and so he couldn't afford any more. i could get up a better concert with a barrel of cats. i have imagined two or three pictures and concocted the accompanying remarks, to see how the thing would go. i was charmed. well, you think it over, nast, and drop me a line. we should have some fun. undoubtedly this would have been a profitable combination, but nast had a distaste for platforming--had given it up, as he thought, for life. so clemens settled down to the fireside days, that afforded him always the larger comfort. the children were at an age “to be entertaining, and to be entertained.” in either case they furnished him plenty of diversion when he did not care to write. they had learned his gift as a romancer, and with this audience he might be as extravagant as he liked. they sometimes assisted by furnishing subjects. they would bring him a picture, requiring him to invent a story for it without a moment's delay. sometimes they suggested the names of certain animals or objects, and demanded that these be made into a fairy tale. if they heard the name of any new creature or occupation they were likely to offer them as impromptu inspiration. once he was suddenly required to make a story out of a plumber and a “bawgunstrictor,” but he was equal to it. on one side of the library, along the book-shelves that joined the mantelpiece, were numerous ornaments and pictures. at one end was the head of a girl, that they called “emeline,” and at the other was an oil-painting of a cat. when other subjects failed, the romancer was obliged to build a story impromptu, and without preparation, beginning with the cat, working along through the bric-a-brac, and ending with “emeline.” this was the unvarying program. he was not allowed to begin with “emeline” and end with the cat, and he was not permitted to introduce an ornament from any other portion of the room. he could vary the story as much as he liked. in fact, he was required to do that. the trend of its chapters, from the cat to “emeline,” was a well-trodden and ever-entertaining way. he gave up his luxurious study to the children as a sort of nursery and playroom, and took up his writing-quarters, first in a room over the stables, then in the billiard-room, which, on the whole, he preferred to any other place, for it was a third-story remoteness, and he could knock the balls about for inspiration. the billiard-room became his headquarters. he received his callers there and impressed them into the game. if they could play, well and good; if they could not play, so much the better--he could beat them extravagantly, and he took a huge delight in such conquests. every friday evening, or oftener, a small party of billiard-lovers gathered, and played until a late hour, told stories, and smoked till the room was blue, comforting themselves with hot scotch and general good-fellowship. mark twain always had a genuine passion for billiards. he was never tired of the game. he could play all night. he would stay till the last man gave out from sheer weariness; then he would go on knocking the balls about alone. he liked to invent new games and new rules for old games, often inventing a rule on the spur of the moment to fit some particular shot or position on the table. it amused him highly to do this, to make the rule advantage his own play, and to pretend a deep indignation when his opponents disqualified his rulings and rode him down. s. c. dunham was among those who belonged to the “friday evening club,” as they called it, and henry c. robinson, long dead, and rare ned bunce, and f. g. whitmore; and the old room there at the top of the house, with its little outside balcony, rang with their voices and their laughter in that day when life and the world for them was young. clemens quoted to them sometimes: come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring your winter garment of repentance fling; the bird of time has but a little way to flutter, and the bird is on the wing. omar was new then on this side of the atlantic, and to his serene “eat, drink, and be merry” philosophy, in fitzgerald's rhyme, these were early converts. mark twain had an impressive, musical delivery of verse; the players were willing at any moment to listen as he recited: for some we loved, the loveliest and best that from his vintage rolling time has prest, have drunk their cup a round or two before, and one by one crept silently to rest. ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, before we too into the dust descend; dust unto dust, and under dust to lie, sans wine, sans song, sans singer, and--sans end.' --[the 'rubaiyat' had made its first appearance, in hartford, a little before in a column of extracts published in the courant.] twichell immediately wrote clemens a card: “read (if you haven't) the extracts from oman khayyam, on the first page of this morning's courant. i think we'll have to get the book. i never yet came across anything that uttered certain thoughts of mine so. adequately. and it's only a translation. read it, and we'll talk it over. there is something in it very like the passage of emerson you read me last night, in fact identical with it in thought. “surely this omar was a great poet. anyhow, he has given me an immense revelation this morning. “hoping that you are better, j. h. t.” twichell's “only a translation” has acquired a certain humor with time. cxvi. off for germany the german language became one of the interests of the clemens home during the early months of . the clemenses had long looked forward to a sojourn in europe, and the demand for another mark twain book of travel furnished an added reason for their going. they planned for the spring sailing, and to spend a year or more on the continent, making their headquarters in germany. so they entered into the study of the language with an enthusiasm and perseverance that insured progress. there was a german nurse for the children, and the whole atmosphere of the household presently became lingually teutonic. it amused mark twain, as everything amused him, but he was a good student; he acquired a working knowledge of the language in an extraordinarily brief time, just as in an earlier day he had picked up piloting. he would never become a german scholar, but his vocabulary and use of picturesque phrases, particularly those that combined english and german words, were often really startling, not only for their humor, but for their expressiveness. necessarily the new study would infect his literature. he conceived a plan for making captain wakeman (stormfield) come across a copy of ollendorf in heaven, and proceed to learn the language of a near-lying district. they arranged to sail early in april, and, as on their former trip, persuaded miss clara spaulding, of elmira, to accompany them. they wrote to the howellses, breaking the news of the journey, urging them to come to hartford for a good-by visit. howells and his wife came. the twichells, warners, and other hartford friends paid repeated farewell calls. the furniture was packed, the rooms desolated, the beautiful home made ready for closing. they were to have pleasant company on the ship. bayard taylor, then recently appointed minister to germany, wrote that he had planned to sail on the same vessel; murat halstead's wife and daughter were listed among the passengers. clemens made a brief speech at taylor's “farewell dinner.” the “mark twain” party, consisting of mr. and mrs. clemens, miss spaulding, little susy and clara (“bay”), and a nurse-maid, rosa, sailed on the holsatia, april , . bayard taylor and the halstead ladies also sailed, as per program; likewise murat halstead himself, for whom no program had been made. there was a storm outside, and the holsatia anchored down the bay to wait until the worst was over. as the weather began to moderate halstead and others came down in a tug for a final word of good-by. when the tug left, halstead somehow managed to get overlooked, and was presently on his way across the ocean with only such wardrobe as he had on, and what bayard taylor, a large man like himself, was willing to lend him. halstead was accused of having intentionally allowed himself to be left behind, and his case did have a suspicious look; but in any event they were glad to have him along. in a written word of good-by to howells, clemens remembered a debt of gratitude, and paid it in the full measure that was his habit. and that reminds me, ungrateful dog that i am, that i owe as much to your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city boss who takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art. i was talking to mrs. clemens about this the other day, and grieving because i never mentioned it to you, thereby seeming to ignore it or to be unaware of it. nothing that has passed under your eye needs any revision before going into a volume, while all my other stuff does need so much. in that ancient day, before the wireless telegraph, the voyager, when the land fell away behind him, felt a mighty sense of relief and rest, which to some extent has gone now forever. he cannot entirely escape the world in this new day; but then he had a complete sense of dismissal from all encumbering cares of life. among the first note-book entries mark twain wrote: to go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings--“i am no longer of ye; what ye say of me is now of no consequence--but of how much consequence when i am with ye and of ye. i know you will refrain from saying harsh things because they cannot hurt me, since i am out of reach and cannot hear them. this is why we say no harsh things of the dead.” it was a rough voyage outside, but the company made it pleasant within. halstead and taylor were good smoking-room companions. taylor had a large capacity for languages and a memory that was always a marvel. he would repeat for them arabian, hungarian, and russian poetry, and show them the music and construction of it. he sang german folk-lore songs for them, and the “lorelei,” then comparatively unknown in america. such was his knowledge of the language that even educated germans on board submitted questions of construction to him and accepted his decisions. he was wisely chosen for the mission he had to fill, but unfortunately he did not fill it long. both halstead and taylor were said to have heart trouble. halstead, however, survived many years. taylor died december , . cxvii. germany and german from the note-book: it is a marvel that never loses its surprise by repetition, this aiming a ship at a mark three thousand miles away and hitting the bull's-eye in a fog--as we did. when the fog fell on us the captain said we ought to be at such and such a spot (it had been eighteen hours since an observation was had), with the scilly islands bearing so and so, and about so many miles away. hove the lead and got forty-eight fathoms; looked on the chart, and sure enough this depth of water showed that we were right where the captain said we were. another idea. for ages man probably did not know why god carpeted the ocean bottom with sand in one place, shells in another, and so on. but we see now; the kind of bottom the lead brings up shows where a ship is when the soundings don't, and also it confirms the soundings. they reached hamburg after two weeks' stormy sailing. they rested a few days there, then went to hanover and frankfort, arriving at heidelberg early in may. they had no lodgings selected in heidelberg, and leaving the others at an inn, clemens set out immediately to find apartments. chance or direction, or both, led him to the beautiful schloss hotel, on a hill overlooking the city, and as fair a view as one may find in all germany. he did not go back after his party. he sent a message telling them to take carriage and drive at once to the schloss, then he sat down to enjoy the view. coming up the hill they saw him standing on the veranda, waving his hat in welcome. he led them to their rooms--spacious apartments--and pointed to the view. they were looking down on beautiful heidelberg castle, densely wooded hills, the far-flowing neckar, and the haze-empurpled valley of the rhine. by and by, pointing to a small cottage on the hilltop, he said: “i have been picking out my little house to work in; there it is over there; the one with the gable in the roof. mine is the middle room on the third floor.” mrs. clemens thought the occupants of the house might be surprised if he should suddenly knock and tell them he had come to take possession of his room. nevertheless, they often looked over in that direction and referred to it as his office. they amused themselves by watching his “people” and trying to make out what they were like. one day he went over there, and sure enough there was a sign out, “moblirte wohnung zu vermiethen.” a day or two later he was established in the very room he had selected, it being the only room but one vacant. in a tramp abroad mark twain tells of the beauty of their heidelberg environment. to howells he wrote: our bedroom has two great glass bird-cages (inclosed balconies), one looking toward the rhine valley and sunset, the other looking up the neckar cul-de-sac, and naturally we spend pearly all our time in these. we have tables and chairs in them; we do our reading, writing, studying, smoking, and suppering in them.... it must have been a noble genius who devised this hotel. lord, how blessed is the repose, the tranquillity of this place! only two sounds: the happy clamor of the birds in the groves and the muffled music of the neckar tumbling over the opposing dikes. it is no hardship to lie awake awhile nights, for this subdued roar has exactly the sound of a steady rain beating upon a roof. it is so healing to the spirit; and it bears up the thread of one's imaginings as the accompaniment bears up a song.... i have waited for a “call” to go to work--i knew it would come. well, it began to come a week ago; my note-book comes out more and more frequently every day since; three days ago i concluded to move my manuscripts over to my den. now the call is loud and decided at last. so to-morrow i shall begin regular, steady work, and stick to it till the middle of july or august st, when i look for twichell; we will then walk about germany two or three weeks, and then i'll go to work again (perhaps in munich). the walking tour with twichell had been contemplated in the scheme for gathering book material, but the plan for it had not been completed when he left hartford. now he was anxious that they should start as soon as possible. twichell, receiving the news in hartford, wrote that it was a great day for him: that his third son had been happily born early that morning, and now the arrival of this glorious gift of a tramp through germany and switzerland completed his blessings. i am almost too joyful for pleasure [he wrote]. i labor with my felicities. how i shall get to sleep to-night i don't know, though i have had a good start, in not having slept much last night. oh, my! do you realize, mark, what a symposium it is to be? i do. to begin with, i am thoroughly tired and the rest will be worth everything. to walk with you and talk with you for weeks together --why, it's my dream of luxury. harmony, who at sunrise this morning deemed herself the happiest woman on the continent when i read your letter to her, widened her smile perceptibly, and revived another degree of strength in a minute. she refused to consider her being left alone; but: only the great chance opened to me. shoes--mark, remember that ever so much of our pleasure depends upon your shoes. don't fail to have adequate preparation made in that department. meantime, the struggle with the “awful german language” went on. it was a general hand-to-hand contest. from the head of the household down to little clara not one was exempt. to clemens it became a sort of nightmare. once in his note-book he says: “dreamed all bad foreigners went to german heaven; couldn't talk, and wished they had gone to the other place”; and a little farther along, “i wish i could hear myself talk german.” to mrs. crane, in elmira, he reported their troubles: clara spaulding is working herself to death with her german; never loses an instant while she is awake--or asleep, either, for that matter; dreams of enormous serpents, who poke their heads up under her arms and glare upon her with red-hot eyes, and inquire about the genitive case and the declensions of the definite article. livy is bully-ragging herself about as hard; pesters over her grammar and her reader and her dictionary all day; then in the evening these two students stretch themselves out on sofas and sigh and say, “oh, there's no use! we never can learn it in the world!” then livy takes a sentence to go to bed on: goes gaping and stretching to her pillow murmuring, “ich bin ihnen sehr verbunden--ich bin ihnen sehr verbunden--ich bin ihnen sehr verbunden--i wonder if i can get that packed away so it will stay till morning”--and about an hour after midnight she wakes me up and says, “i do so hate to disturb you, but is it 'ich ben jonson sehr befinden'?” and mrs. clemens wrote: oh, sue dear, strive to enter in at the straight gate, for many shall seek to enter it and shall not be able. i am not striving these days. i am just interested in german. rosa, the maid, was required to speak to the children only in german, though bay at first would have none of it. the nurse and governess tried to blandish her, in vain. she maintained a calm and persistent attitude of scorn. little susy tried, and really made progress; but one, day she said, pathetically: “mama, i wish rosa was made in english.” yet a little later susy herself wrote her aunt sue: i know a lot of german; everybody says i know a lot. i give you a million dollars to see you, and you would give two hundred dollars to see the lovely woods that we see. even howells, in far-off america, caught the infection and began a letter in german, though he hastened to add, “or do you prefer english by this time? really i could imagine the german going hard with you, for you always seemed to me a man who liked to be understood with the least possible personal inconvenience.” clemens declared more than once that he scorned the “outrageous and impossible german grammar,” and abandoned it altogether. in his note-book he records how two germans, strangers in heidelberg, asked him a direction, and that when he gave it, in the most elaborate and correct german he could muster, one of them only lifted his eyes and murmured: “gott im himmel!” he was daily impressed with the lingual attainments of foreigners and his own lack of them. in the notes he comments: am addressed in german, and when i can't speak it immediately the person tackles me in french, and plainly shows astonishment when i stop him. they naturally despise such an ignoramus. our doctor here speaks as pure english, as i. on the fourth of july he addressed the american students in heidelberg in one of those mixtures of tongues for which he had a peculiar gift. the room he had rented for a study was let by a typical german family, and he was a great delight to them. he practised his german on them, and interested himself in their daily affairs. howells wrote insistently for some assurance of contributions to the atlantic. “i must begin printing your private letters to satisfy the popular demand,” he said. “people are constantly asking when you are going to begin.” clemens replied that he would be only too glad to write for the atlantic if his contributions could be copyrighted in canada, where pirates were persistently enterprising. i do not know that i have any printable stuff just now--separatable stuff, that is--but i shall have by and by. it is very gratifying to hear that it is wanted by anybody. i stand always prepared to hear the reverse, and am constantly surprised that it is delayed so long. consequently it is not going to astonish me when it comes. the clemens party enjoyed heidelberg, though in different ways. the children romped and picnicked in the castle grounds, which adjoined the hotel; mrs. clemens and miss spaulding were devoted to bric-a-brac hunting, picture-galleries, and music. clemens took long walks, or made excursions by rail and diligence to farther points. art and opera did not appeal to him. the note-book says: i have attended operas, whenever i could not help it, for fourteen years now; i am sure i know of no agony comparable to the listening to an unfamiliar opera. i am enchanted with the airs of “trovatore” and other old operas which the hand-organ and the music-box have made entirely familiar to my ear. i am carried away with delighted enthusiasm when they are sung at the opera. but oh, how far between they are! and what long, arid, heartbreaking and headaching “between-times” of that sort of intense but incoherent noise which always so reminds me of the time the orphan asylum burned down. sunday night, th. huge crowd out to-night to hear the band play the “fremersberg.” i suppose it is very low-grade music--i know it must be low-grade music--because it so delighted me, it so warmed me, moved me, stirred me, uplifted me, enraptured me, that at times i could have cried, and at others split my throat with shouting. the great crowd was another evidence that it was low-grade music, for only the few are educated up to a point where high-class music gives pleasure. i have never heard enough classic music to be able to enjoy it, and the simple truth is i detest it. not mildly, but with all my heart. what a poor lot we human beings are anyway! if base music gives me wings, why should i want any other? but i do. i want to like the higher music because the higher and better like it. but you see i want to like it without taking the necessary trouble, and giving the thing the necessary amount of time and attention. the natural suggestion is, to get into that upper tier, that dress-circle, by a lie--we will pretend we like it. this lie, this pretense, gives to opera what support it has in america. and then there is painting. what a red rag is to a bull turner's “slave ship” is to me. mr. ruskin is educated in art up to a point where that picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure as it throws me into one of rage. his cultivation enables him to see water in that yellow mud; his cultivation reconciles the floating of unfloatable things to him--chains etc.; it reconciles him to fishes swimming on top of the water. the most of the picture is a manifest impossibility, that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can enable a man to find truth in a lie. a boston critic said the “slave ship” reminded him of a cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes. that went home to my non-cultivation, and i thought, here is a man with an unobstructed eye. mark twain has dwelt somewhat upon these matters in 'a tramp abroad'. he confesses in that book that later he became a great admirer of turner, though perhaps never of the “slave ship” picture. in fact, mark twain was never artistic, in the common acceptance of that term; neither his art nor his tastes were of an “artistic” kind. cxviii. tramping with twichell. twichell arrived on time, august st. clemens met him at baden-baden, and they immediately set out on a tramp through the black forest, excursioning as pleased them, and having an idyllic good time. they did not always walk, but they often did. at least they did sometimes, when the weather was just right and clemens's rheumatism did not trouble him. but they were likely to take a carriage, or a donkey-cart, or a train, or any convenient thing that happened along. they did not hurry, but idled and talked and gathered flowers, or gossiped with wayside natives and tourists, though always preferring to wander along together, beguiling the way with discussion and speculation and entertaining tales. they crossed on into switzerland in due time and considered the conquest of the alps. the family followed by rail or diligence, and greeted them here and there when they rested from their wanderings. mark twain found an immunity from attention in switzerland, which for years he had not known elsewhere. his face was not so well known and his pen-name was carefully concealed. it was a large relief to be no longer an object of public curiosity; but twichell, as in the bermuda trip, did not feel quite honest, perhaps, in altogether preserving the mask of unrecognition. in one of his letters home he tells how; when a young man at their table was especially delighted with mark twain's conversation, he could not resist taking the young man aside and divulging to him the speaker's identity. “i could not forbear telling him who mark was,” he says, “and the mingled surprise and pleasure his face exhibited made me glad i had done so.” they climbed the rigi, after which clemens was not in good walking trim for some time; so twichell went on a trip on his own account, to give his comrade a chance to rest. then away again to interlaken, where the jungfrau rises, cold and white; on over the loneliness of gemini pass, with glaciers for neighbors and the unfading white peaks against the blue; to visp and to zermatt, where the matterhorn points like a finger that directs mankind to god. this was true alpine wandering--sweet vagabondage. the association of the wanderers was a very intimate one. their minds were closely attuned, and there were numerous instances of thought--echo-mind answering to mind--without the employment of words. clemens records in his notes: sunday a.m., august th. been reading romola yesterday afternoon, last night, and this morning; at last i came upon the only passage which has thus far hit me with force--tito compromising with his conscience, and resolving to do; not a bad thing, but not the best thing. joe entered the room five minutes--no, three minutes later --and without prelude said, “i read that book you've got there six years ago, and got a mighty good text for a sermon out of it the passage where the young fellow compromises with his conscience, and resolves to do, not a bad thing, but not the best thing.” this is joe's first reference to this book since he saw me buy it twenty- four hours ago. so my mind operated on his in this instance. he said he was sitting yonder in the reading-room, three minutes ago (i have not got up yet), thinking of nothing in particular, and didn't know what brought romola into his head; but into his head it came and that particular passage. now i, forty feet away, in another room, was reading that particular passage at that particular moment. couldn't suggest romola to him earlier, because nothing in the book had taken hold of me till i came to that one passage on page , tauchnitz edition. and again: the instances of mind-telegraphing are simply innumerable. this evening joe and i sat long at the edge of the village looking at the matterhorn. then joe said, “we ought to go to the cervin hotel and inquire for livy's telegram.” if he had been but one instant later i should have said those words instead of him. such entries are frequent, and one day there came along a kind of object-lesson. they were toiling up a mountainside, when twichell began telling a very interesting story which had happened in connection with a friend still living, though twichell had no knowledge of his whereabouts at this time. the story finished just as they rounded a turn in, the cliff, and twichell, looking up, ended his last sentence, “and there's the man!” which was true, for they were face to face with the very man of whom he had been telling. another subject that entered into their discussion was the law of accidents. clemens held that there was no such thing an accident: that it was all forewritten in the day of the beginning; that every event, however slight, was embryonic in that first instant of created life, and immutably timed to its appearance in the web of destiny. once on their travels, when they were on a high bank above a brawling stream, a little girl, who started to run toward them, slipped and rolled under the bottom rail of the protecting fence, her feet momentarily hanging out over the precipice and the tearing torrent below. it seemed a miraculous escape from death, and furnished an illustration for their discussion. the condition of the ground, the force of her fall, the nearness of the fatal edge, all these had grown inevitably out of the first great projection of thought, and the child's fall and its escape had been invested in life's primal atom. the author of a tramp abroad tells us of the rushing stream that flows out of the arcadian sky valley, the gasternthal, and goes plunging down to kandersteg, and how he took exercise by making “harris” (twichell) set stranded logs adrift while he lounged comfortably on a boulder, and watched them go tearing by; also how he made harris run a race with one of those logs. but that is literature. twichell, in a letter home, has preserved a likelier and lovelier story: mark is a queer fellow. there is nothing that he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. you can hardly get him to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations. to throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. tonight, as we were on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood caught by the torrent side below the path, i climbed down and threw it in. when i got back to the path mark was running down-stream after it as hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstasy, and when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell. he said afterward that he hadn't been so excited in three months. he acted just like a boy; another feature of his extreme sensitiveness in certain directions. then generalizing, twichell adds: he has coarse spots in him. but i never knew a person so finely regardful of the feelings of others in some ways. he hates to pass another person walking, and will practise some subterfuge to take off what he feels is the discourtesy of it. and he is exceedingly timid, tremblingly timid, about approaching strangers; hates to ask a question. his sensitive regard for others extends to animals. when we are driving his concern is all about the horse. he can't bear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull hard. to-day, when the driver clucked up his horse and quickened his pace a little, mark said, “the fellow's got the notion that we are in a hurry.” he is exceedingly considerate toward me in regard of everything--or most things. the days were not all sunshine. sometimes it rained and they took shelter by the wayside, or, if there was no shelter, they plodded along under their umbrellas, still talking away, and if something occurred that clemens wanted to put down they would stand stock still in the rain, and twichell would hold the umbrella while clemens wrote--a good while sometimes--oblivious to storm and discomfort and the long way yet ahead. after the day on gemmi pass twichell wrote home: mark, to-day, was immensely absorbed in the flowers. he scrambled around and gathered a great variety, and manifested the intensest pleasure in them. he crowded a pocket of his note-book with his specimens and wanted more room. so i stopped the guide and got out my needle and thread, and out of a stiff paper, a hotel advertisement, i had about me made a paper bag, a cornucopia like, and tied it to his vest in front, and it answered the purpose admirably. he filled it full with a beautiful collection, and as soon as we got here to-night he transferred it to a cardboard box and sent it by mail to livy. a strange mark he is, full of contradictions. i spoke last night of his sensitive to others' feelings. to-day the guide got behind, and came up as if he would like to go by, yet hesitated to do so. mark paused, went aside and busied himself a minute picking a flower. in the halt the guide got by and resumed his place in front. mark threw the flower away, saying, “i didn't want that. i only wanted to give the old man a chance to go on without seeming to pass us.” mark is splendid to walk with amid such grand scenery, for he talks so well about it, has such a power of strong, picturesque expression. i wish you might have heard him to-day. his vigorous speech nearly did justice to the things we saw. in an address which twichell gave many years later he recalls another pretty incident of their travels. they had been toiling up the gorner grat. as we paused for a rest, a lamb from a flock of sheep near by ventured inquisitively toward us, whereupon mark seated himself on a rock, and with beckoning hand and soft words tried to get it to come to him. on the lamb's part it was a struggle between curiosity and timidity, but in a succession of advances and retreats it gained confidence, though at a very gradual rate. it was a scene for a painter: the great american humorist on one side of the game and that silly little creature on the other, with the matterhorn for a background. mark was reminded that the time he was consuming was valuable--but to no purpose. the gorner grat could wait. he held on with undiscouraged perseverance till he carried his point: the lamb finally put its nose in his hand, and he was happy over it all the rest of the day. the matter of religion came up now and again in the drift of their discussions. it was twichell's habit to have prayers in their room every night at the hotels, and clemens was willing to join in the observances. once twichell, finding him in a responsive mood--a remorseful mood--gave his sympathy, and spoke of the larger sympathy of divinity. clemens listened and seemed soothed and impressed, but his philosophies were too wide and too deep for creeds and doctrines. a day or two later, as they were tramping along in the hot sun, his honesty had to speak out. “joe,” he said, “i'm going to make a confession. i don't believe in your religion at all. i've been living a lie right straight along whenever i pretended to. for a moment, sometimes, i have been almost a believer, but it immediately drifts away from me again. i don't believe one word of your bible was inspired by god any more than any other book. i believe it is entirely the work of man from beginning to end--atonement and all. the problem of life and death and eternity and the true conception of god is a bigger thing than is contained in that book.” so the personal side of religious discussion closed between them, and was never afterward reopened. they joined mrs. clemens and the others at lausanne at last, and their swiss holiday was over. twichell set out for home by way of england, and clemens gave himself up to reflection and rest after his wanderings. then, as the days of their companionship passed in review, quickly and characteristically he sent a letter after his comrade: dear old joe, it is actually all over! i was so low-spirited at the station yesterday, and this morning, when i woke, i couldn't seem to accept the dismal truth that you were really gone, and the pleasant tramping and talking at an end. ah, my boy! it has been such a rich holiday to me, and i feel under such deep and honest obligations to you for coming. i am putting out of my mind all memory of the times when i misbehaved toward you and hurt you; i am resolved to consider it forgiven, and to store up and remember only the charming hours of the journeys and the times when i was not unworthy to be with you and share a companionship which to me stands first after livy's. it is justifiable to do this; for why should i let my small infirmities of disposition live and grovel among my mental pictures of the eternal sublimities of the alps? livy can't accept or endure the fact that you are gone. but you are, and we cannot get around it. so take our love with you, and bear it also over the sea to harmony, and god bless you both. mark. cxix. italian days the clemens party wandered down into italy--to the lakes, venice, florence, rome--loitering through the galleries, gathering here and there beautiful furnishings--pictures, marbles, and the like--for the hartford home. in venice they bought an old careen bed, a massive regal affair with serpentine columns surmounted by singularly graceful cupids, and with other cupids sporting on the headboard: the work of some artist who had been dust three centuries maybe, for this bed had come out of an old venetian palace, dismantled and abandoned. it was a furniture with a long story, and the years would add mightily to its memories. it would become a stately institution in the clemens household. the cupids on the posts were removable, and one of the highest privileges of childhood would be to occupy that bed and have down one of the cupids to play with. it was necessary to be ill to acquire that privilege--not violently and dangerously ill, but interestingly so--ill enough to be propped up with pillows and have one's meals served on a tray, with dolls and picture-books handy, and among them a beautiful rosewood cupid who had kept dimpled and dainty for so many, many years. they spent three weeks in venice: a dreamlike experience, especially for the children, who were on the water most of the time, and became fast friends with their gondolier, who taught them some italian words; then a week in florence and a fortnight in rome. --[from the note-book: “bay--when the waiter brought my breakfast this morning i spoke to him in italian. “mama--what did you say? “b.--i said, 'polly-vo fransay.' “m.--what does it mean? “b.--i don't know. what does it mean, susy? “s.--it means, 'polly wants a cracker.'”] clemens discovered that in twelve years his attitude had changed somewhat concerning the old masters. he no longer found the bright, new copies an improvement on the originals, though the originals still failed to wake his enthusiasm. mrs. clemens and miss spaulding spent long hours wandering down avenues of art, accompanied by him on occasion, though not always willingly. he wrote his sorrow to twichell: i do wish you were in rome to do my sight-seeing for me. rome interests me as much as east hartford could, and no more; that is, the rome which the average tourist feels an interest in. there are other things here which stir me enough to make life worth living. livy and clara are having a royal time worshiping the old masters, and i as good a time gritting my ineffectual teeth over them. once when sarah orne jewett was with the party he remarked that if the old masters had labeled their fruit one wouldn't be so likely to mistake pears for turnips. “youth,” said mrs. clemens, gravely, “if you do not care for these masterpieces yourself, you might at least consider the feelings of others”; and miss jewett, regarding him severely, added, in her quaint yankee fashion: “now, you've been spoke to!” he felt duly reprimanded, but his taste did not materially reform. he realized that he was no longer in a proper frame of mind to write of general sight-seeing. one must be eager, verdant, to write happily the story of travel. replying to a letter from howells on the subject he said: i wish i could give those sharp satires on european life which you mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas i hate travel, and i hate hotels, and i hate the opera, and i hate the old masters. in truth i don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with anything to satirize it. no, i want to stand up before it and curse it and foam at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. i have got in two or three chapters about wagner's operas, and managed to do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort would burst me. clemens became his own courier for a time in italy, and would seem to have made more of a success of it than he did a good many years afterward, if we may believe the story he has left us of his later attempt: “am a shining success as a courier,” he records, “by the use of francs. have learned how to handle the railway guide intelligently and with confidence.” he declares that he will have no more couriers; but possibly he could have employed one to advantage on the trip out of italy, for it was a desperately hard one, with bad connections and delayed telegrams. when, after thirty-six hours weary, continuous traveling, they arrived at last in munich in a drizzle and fog, and were domiciled in their winter quarters, at no. a, karlstrasse, they felt that they had reached the home of desolation itself, the very throne of human misery. and the rooms were so small, the conveniences so meager, and the porcelain stove was grim, ghastly, dismal, intolerable! so livy and clara spaulding sat down forlorn and cried, and i retired to a private place to pray. by and by we all retired to our narrow german beds, and when livy and i had finished talking across the room it was all decided that we should rest twenty-four hours, then pay whatever damages were required and straightway fly to the south of france. the rooms had been engaged by letter, months before, of their proprietress, fraulein dahlweiner, who had met them at the door with a lantern in her hand, full of joy in their arrival and faith in her ability to make them happy. it was a faith that was justified. next morning, when they all woke, rested, the weather had cleared, there were bright fires in the rooms, the world had taken on a new aspect. fraulein dahlweiner, the pathetic, hard-working little figure, became almost beautiful in their eyes in her efforts for their comfort. she arranged larger rooms and better conveniences for them. their location was central and there was a near-by park. they had no wish to change. clemens, in his letter to howells, boasts that he brought the party through from rome himself, and that they never had so little trouble before; but in looking over this letter, thirty years later, he commented, “probably a lie.” he secured a room some distance away for his work, but then could not find his swiss note-book. he wrote twichell that he had lost it, and that after all he might not be obliged to write a volume of travels. but the notebook turned up and the work on the new book proceeded. for a time it went badly. he wrote many chapters, only to throw them aside. he had the feeling that he had somehow lost the knack of descriptive narrative. he had become, as it seemed, too didactic. he thought his description was inclined to be too literal, his humor manufactured. these impressions passed, by and by; interest developed, and with it enthusiasm and confidence. in a letter to twichell he reported his progress: i was about to write to my publisher and propose some other book, when the confounded thing [the note-book] turned up, and down went my heart into my boots. but there was now no excuse, so i went solidly to work, tore up a great part of the ms. written in heidelberg--wrote and tore up, continued to write and tear up--and at last, reward of patient and noble persistence, my pen got the old swing again! since then i'm glad that providence knew better what to do with the swiss notebook than i did. further along in the same letter there breaks forth a true heart-answer to that voice of the alps which, once heard, is never wholly silent: o switzerland! the further it recedes into the enriching haze of time, the more intolerably delicious the charm of it and the cheer of it and the glory and majesty, and solemnity and pathos of it grow. those mountains had a soul: they thought, they spoke. and what a voice it was! and how real! deep down in my memory it is sounding yet. alp calleth unto alp! that stately old scriptural wording is the right one for god's alps and god's ocean. how puny we were in that awful presence, and how painless it was to be so! how fitting and right it seemed, and how stingless was the sense of our unspeakable insignificance! and lord, how pervading were the repose and peace and blessedness that poured out of the heart of the invisible great spirit of the mountains! now what is it? there are mountains and mountains and mountains in this world, but only these take you by the heartstrings. i wonder what the secret of it is. well, time and time and again it has seemed to me that i must drop everything and flee to switzerland once more. it is a longings deep, strong, tugging longing. that is the word. we must go again, joe. cxx. in munich that winter in munich was not recalled as an unpleasant one in after-years. his work went well enough--always a chief source of gratification. mrs. clemens and miss spaulding found interest in the galleries, in quaint shops, in the music and picturesque life of that beautiful old bavarian town. the children also liked munich. it was easy for them to adopt any new environment or custom. the german christmas, with its lavish tree and toys and cakes, was an especial delight. the german language they seemed fairly to absorb. writing to his mother clemens said: i cannot see but that the children speak german as well as they do english. susy often translates livy's orders to the servants. i cannot work and study german at the same time; so i have dropped the latter and do not even read the language, except in the morning paper to get the news. in munich--as was the case wherever they were known--there were many callers. most americans and many foreigners felt it proper to call on mark twain. it was complimentary, but it was wearying sometimes. mrs. clemens, in a letter written from venice, where they had received even more than usual attention, declared there were moments when she almost wished she might never see a visitor again. originally there was a good deal about munich in the new book, and some of the discarded chapters might have been retained with advantage. they were ruled out in the final weeding as being too serious, along with the french chapters. only a few italian memories were left to follow the switzerland wanderings. the book does record one munich event, though transferring it to heilsbronn. it is the incident of the finding of the lost sock in the vast bedroom. it may interest the reader to compare what really happened, as set down in a letter to twichell, with the story as written for publication: last night i awoke at three this morning, and after raging to myself for two interminable hours i gave it up. i rose, assumed a catlike stealthiness, to keep from waking livy, and proceeded to dress in the pitch-dark. slowly but surely i got on garment after garment --all down to one sock; i had one slipper on and the other in my hand. well, on my hands and knees i crept softly around, pawing and feeling and scooping along the carpet, and among chair-legs, for that missing sock, i kept that up, and still kept it up, and kept it up. at first i only said to myself, “blame that sock,” but that soon ceased to answer. my expletives grew steadily stronger and stronger, and at last, when i found i was lost, i had to sit flat down on the floor and take hold of something to keep from lifting the roof off with the profane explosion that was trying to get out of me. i could see the dim blur of the window, but of course it was in the wrong place and could give me no information as to where i was. but i had one comfort--i had not waked livy; i believed i could find that sock in silence if the night lasted long enough. so i started again and softly pawed all over the place, and sure enough, at the end of half an hour i laid my hand on the missing article. i rose joyfully up and butted the washbowl and pitcher off the stand, and simply raised----so to speak. livy screamed, then said, “who is it? what is the matter?” i said, “there ain't anything the matter. i'm hunting for my sock.” she said, “are you hunting for it with a club?” i went in the parlor and lit the lamp, and gradually the fury subsided and the ridiculous features of the thing began to suggest themselves. so i lay on the sofa with note-book and pencil, and transferred the adventure to our big room in the hotel at heilsbronn, and got it on paper a good deal to my satisfaction. he wrote with frequency to howells, and sent him something for the magazine now and then: the “gambetta duel” burlesque, which would make a chapter in the book later, and the story of “the great revolution in pitcairn.”--[included in the stolen white elephant volume. the “pitcairn” and “elephant” tales were originally chapters in 'a tramp abroad'; also the unpleasant “coffin-box” yarn, which howells rejected for the atlantic and generally condemned, though for a time it remained a favorite with its author.] howells's novel, 'the lady of the aroostook', was then running through the 'atlantic', and in one of his letters clemens expresses the general deep satisfaction of his household in that tale: if your literature has not struck perfection now we are not able to see what is lacking. it is all such truth--truth to the life; everywhere your pen falls it leaves a photograph.... possibly you will not be a fully accepted classic until you have been dead one hundred years--it is the fate of the shakespeares of all genuine professions--but then your books will be as common as bibles, i believe. in that day i shall be in the encyclopedias too, thus: “mark twain, history and occupation unknown; but he was personally acquainted with howells.” though in humorous form, this was a sincere tribute. clemens always regarded with awe william dean howells's ability to dissect and photograph with such delicacy the minutiae of human nature; just as howells always stood in awe of mark twain's ability to light, with a single flashing sentence, the whole human horizon. cxxi. paris, england, and homeward bound they decided to spend the spring months in paris, so they gave up their pleasant quarters with fraulein dahlweiner, and journeyed across europe, arriving at the french capital february , . here they met another discouraging prospect, for the weather was cold and damp, the cabmen seemed brutally ill-mannered, their first hotel was chilly, dingy, uninviting. clemens, in his note-book, set down his impressions of their rooms. a paragraph will serve: ten squatty, ugly arm-chairs, upholstered in the ugliest and coarsest conceivable scarlet plush; two hideous sofas of the same --uncounted armless chairs ditto. five ornamental chairs, seats covered with a coarse rag, embroidered in flat expanse with a confusion of leaves such as no tree ever bore, six or seven a dirty white and the rest a faded red. how those hideous chairs do swear at the hideous sofa near them! this is the very hatefulest room i have seen in europe. oh, how cold and raw and unwarmable it is! it was better than that when the sun came out, and they found happier quarters presently at the hotel normandy, rue de l'echelle. but, alas, the sun did not come out often enough. it was one of those french springs and summers when it rains nearly every day, and is distressingly foggy and chill between times. clemens received a bad impression of france and the french during that parisian-sojourn, from which he never entirely recovered. in his note-book he wrote: “france has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.” the weather may not have been entirely accountable for his prejudice, but from whatever cause mark twain, to the day of his death, had no great love for the french as a nation. conversely, the french as a nation did not care greatly for mark twain. there were many individual frenchmen that mark twain admired, as there were many frenchmen who admired the work and personality of mark twain; but on neither side was there the warm, fond, general affection which elsewhere throughout europe he invited and returned. his book was not yet finished. in paris he worked on it daily, but without enthusiasm. the city was too noisy, the weather too dismal. his note-book says: may th. i wish this terrible winter would come to an end. have had rain almost without intermission for two months and one week. may th. this is one of the coldest days of this most damnable and interminable winter. it was not all gloom and discomfort. there was congenial company in paris, and dinner-parties, and a world of callers. aldrich the scintillating--[ of aldrich clemens used to say: “when aldrich speaks it seems to me he is the bright face of the moon, and i feel like the other side.” aldrich, unlike clemens, was not given to swearing. the parisian note-book has this memorandum: “aldrich gives his seat in the horse-car to a crutched cripple, and discovers that what he took for a crutch is only a length of walnut beading and the man not lame; whereupon aldrich uses the only profanity that ever escaped his lips: 'damn a dam'd man who would carry a dam'd piece of beading under his dam'd arm!'”]--was there, also gedney bunce, of hartford, frank millet and his wife, hjalinar hjorth boyesen and his wife, and a mr. and mrs. chamberlain, artist people whom the clemenses had met pleasantly in italy. turgenieff, as in london, came to call; also baron tauchnitz, that nobly born philanthropist of german publishers, who devoted his life, often at his personal cost, to making the literature of other nations familiar to his own. tauchnitz had early published the 'innocents', following it with other mark twain volumes as they appeared, paying always, of his own will and accord, all that he could afford to pay for this privilege; which was not really a privilege, for the law did not require him to pay at all. he traveled down to paris now to see the author, and to pay his respects to him. “a mighty nice old gentleman,” clemens found him. richard whiteing was in paris that winter, and there were always plenty of young american painters whom it was good to know. they had what they called the stomach club, a jolly organization, whose purpose was indicated by its name. mark twain occasionally attended its sessions, and on one memorable evening, when edwin a. abbey was there, speeches were made which never appeared in any printed proceedings. mark twain's address that night has obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs of the world, though no line of it, or even its title has ever found its way into published literature. clemens had a better time in paris than the rest of his party. he could go and come, and mingle with the sociabilities when the abnormal weather kept the others housed in. he did a good deal of sight-seeing of his own kind, and once went up in a captive balloon. they were all studying french, more or less, and they read histories and other books relating to france. clemens renewed his old interest in joan of arc, and for the first time appears to have conceived the notion of writing the story of that lovely character. the reign of terror interested him. he reread carlyle's revolution, a book which he was never long without reading, and they all read 'a tale of two cities'. when the weather permitted they visited the scenes of that grim period. in his note-book he comments: “the reign of terror shows that, without distinction or rank, the people were savages. marquises, dukes, lawyers, blacksmiths, they each figure in due proportion to their crafts.” and again: “for , years this savage nation indulged itself in massacre; every now and then a big massacre or a little one. the spirit is peculiar to france--i mean in christendom--no other state has had it. in this france has always walked abreast, kept her end up with her brethren, the turks and the burmese. their chief traits--love of glory and massacre.” yet it was his sense of fairness that made him write, as a sort of quittance: “you perceive i generalize with intrepidity from single instances. it is the tourists' custom. when i see a man jump from the vendome column i say, 'they like to do that in paris.'” following this implied atonement, he records a few conclusions, drawn doubtless from parisian reading and observation: “childish race and great.” “i'm for cremation.” “i disfavor capital punishment.” “samson was a jew, therefore not a fool. the jews have the best average brain of any people in the world. the jews are the only race in the world who work wholly with their brains, and never with their hands. there are no jew beggars, no jew tramps, no jew ditchers, hod-carriers, day-laborers, or followers of toilsome mechanical trade. “they are peculiarly and conspicuously the world's intellectual aristocracy.” “communism is idiocy. they want to divide up the property. suppose they did it. it requires brains to keep money as well as to make it. in a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again. the division would have to be remade every three years or it would do the communist no good.” a curious thing happened one day in paris. boyesen; in great excitement, came to the normandy and was shown to the clemens apartments. he was pale and could hardly speak, for his emotion. he asked immediately if his wife had come to their rooms. on learning that she had not, he declared that she was lost or had met with an accident. she had been gone several hours, he said, and had sent no word, a thing which she had never done before. he besought clemens to aid him in his search for her, to do something to help him find her. clemens, without showing the least emotion or special concentration of interest, said quietly: “i will.” “where will you go first,” boyesen demanded. still in the same even voice clemens said: “to the elevator.” he passed out of the room, with boyesen behind him, into the hall. the elevator was just coming up, and as they reached it, it stopped at their landing, and mrs. boyesen stepped out. she had been delayed by a breakdown and a blockade. clemens said afterward that he had a positive conviction that she would be on the elevator when they reached it. it was one of those curious psychic evidences which we find all along during his life; or, if the skeptics prefer to call them coincidences, they are privileged to do so. paris, june , . still this vindictive winter continues. had a raw, cold rain to-day. to-night we sit around a rousing wood fire. they stood it for another month, and then on the th of july, when it was still chilly and disagreeable, they gave it up and left for brussels, which he calls “a dirty, beautiful (architecturally), interesting town.” two days in brussels, then to antwerp, where they dined on the trenton with admiral roan, then to rotterdam, dresden, amsterdam, and london, arriving there the th of july, which was rainy and cold, in keeping with all europe that year. had to keep a rousing big cannel-coal fire blazing in the grate all day. a remarkable summer, truly! london meant a throng of dinners, as always: brilliant, notable affairs, too far away to recall. a letter written by mrs. clemens at the time preserves one charming, fresh bit of that departed bloom. clara [spaulding] went in to dinner with mr. henry james; she enjoyed him very much. i had a little chat with him before dinner, and he was exceedingly pleasant and easy to talk with. i had expected just the reverse, thinking one would feel looked over by him and criticized. mr. whistler, the artist, was at the dinner, but he did not attract me. then there was a lady, over eighty years old, a mrs. stuart, who was washington irving's love, and she is said to have been his only love, and because of her he went unmarried to his grave. --[mrs. clemens was misinformed. irving's only “love” was a miss hoffman.]--she was also an intimate friend of madame bonaparte. you would judge mrs. stuart to be about fifty, and she was the life of the drawing-room after dinner, while the ladies were alone, before the gentlemen came up. it was lovely to see such a sweet old age; every one was so fond of her, every one deferred to her, yet every one was joking her, making fun of her, but she was always equal to the occasion, giving back as bright replies as possible; you had not the least sense that she was aged. she quoted french in her stories with perfect ease and fluency, and had all the time such a kindly, lovely way. when she entered the room, before dinner, mr. james, who was then talking with me, shook hands with her and said, “good evening, you wonderful lady.” after she had passed... he said, “she is the youngest person in london. she has the youngest feelings and the youngest interests.... she is always interested.” it was a perfect delight to hear her and see her. for more than two years they had had an invitation from reginald cholmondeley to pay him another visit. so they went for a week to condover, where many friends were gathered, including millais, the painter, and his wife (who had been the wife of ruskin), numerous relatives, and other delightful company. it was one of the happiest chapters of their foreign sojourn.--[moncure d. conway, who was in london at the time, recalls, in his autobiography, a visit which he made with mr. and mrs. clemens to stratford-on-avon. “mrs. clemens was an ardent shakespearian, and mark twain determined to give her a surprise. he told her that we were going on a journey to epworth, and persuaded me to connive with the joke by writing to charles flower not to meet us himself, but send his carriage. on arrival at the station we directed the driver to take us straight to the church. when we entered, and mrs. clemens read on shakespeare's grave, 'good friend, for jesus' sake, forbear,' she started back, exclaiming, 'where am i?' mark received her reproaches with an affluence of guilt, but never did lady enjoy a visit more than that to avonbank. mrs. charles flower (nee martineau) took mrs. clemens to her heart, and contrived that every social or other attraction of that region should surround her.”] from the note-book: sunday, august ,' . raw and cold, and a drenching rain. went to hear mr. spurgeon. house three-quarters full-say three thousand people. first hour, lacking one minute, taken up with two prayers, two ugly hymns, and scripture-reading. sermon three-quarters of an hour long. a fluent talker, good, sonorous voice. topic treated in the unpleasant, old fashion: man a mighty bad child, god working at him in forty ways and having a world of trouble with him. a wooden-faced congregation; just the sort to see no incongruity in the majesty of heaven stooping to plead and sentimentalize over such, and see in their salvation an important matter. tuesday, august th. went up windermere lake in the steamer. talked with the great darwin. they had planned to visit dr. brown in scotland. mrs. clemens, in particular, longed to go, for his health had not been of the best, and she felt that they would never have a chance to see him again. clemens in after years blamed himself harshly for not making the trip, declaring that their whole reason for not going was an irritable reluctance on his part to take the troublesome journey and a perversity of spirit for which there was no real excuse. there is documentary evidence against this harsh conclusion. they were, in fact, delayed here and there by misconnections and the continued terrific weather, barely reaching liverpool in time for their sailing date, august d. unquestionably he was weary of railway travel, far he always detested it. time would magnify his remembered reluctance, until, in the end, he would load his conscience with the entire burden of blame. their ship was the gallia, and one night, when they were nearing the opposite side of the atlantic, mark twain, standing on deck, saw for the third time in his experience a magnificent lunar rainbow: a complete arch, the colors part of the time very brilliant, but little different from a day rainbow. it is not given to many persons in this world to see even one of these phenomena. after each previous vision there had come to him a period of good-fortune. perhaps this also boded well for him. cxxii. an interlude the gallia reached new york september , . a report of his arrival, in the new york sun, stated that mark twain had changed in his absence; that only his drawl seemed natural. his hat, as he stood on the deck of the incoming cunarder, gallia, was of the pattern that english officers wear in india, and his suit of clothes was such as a merchant might wear in his store. he looked older than when he went to germany, and his hair has turned quite gray. it was a late hour when they were finally up to the dock, and clemens, anxious to get through the custom house, urged the inspector to accept his carefully prepared list of dutiable articles, without opening the baggage. but the official was dubious. clemens argued eloquently, and a higher authority was consulted. again clemens stated his case and presented his arguments. a still higher chief of inspection was summoned, evidently from his bed. he listened sleepily to the preamble, then suddenly said: “oh, chalk his baggage, of course! don't you know it's mark twain and that he'll talk all night?” they went directly to the farm, for whose high sunlit loveliness they had been longing through all their days of absence. mrs. clemens, in her letters, had never failed to dwell on her hunger for that fair hilltop. from his accustomed study-table clemens wrote to twichell: “you have run about a good deal, joe, but you have never seen any place that was so divine as the farm. why don't you come here and take a foretaste of heaven?” clemens declared he would roam no more forever, and settled down to the happy farm routine. he took up his work, which had not gone well in paris, and found his interest in it renewed. in the letter to twichell he said: i am revising my ms. i did not expect to like it, but i do. i have been knocking out early chapters for more than a year now, not because they had not merit, but merely because they hindered the flow of the narrative; it was a dredging process. day before yesterday my shovel fetched up three more chapters and laid them, reeking, on the festering shore-pile of their predecessors, and now i think the yarn swims right along, without hitch or halt. i believe it will be a readable book of travels. i cannot see that it lacks anything but information. mrs. clemens was no less weary of travel than her husband. yet she had enjoyed their roaming, and her gain from it had been greater than his. her knowledge of art and literature, and of the personal geography of nations, had vastly increased; her philosophy of life had grown beyond all counting. she had lost something, too; she had outstripped her traditions. one day, when she and her sister had walked across the fields, and had stopped to rest in a little grove by a pretty pond, she confessed, timidly enough and not without sorrow, how she had drifted away from her orthodox views. she had ceased to believe, she said, in the orthodox bible god, who exercised a personal supervision over every human soul. the hordes of people she had seen in many lands, the philosophies she had listened to from her husband and those wise ones about him, the life away from the restricted round of home, all had contributed to this change. her god had become a larger god; the greater mind which exerts its care of the individual through immutable laws of time and change and environment--the supreme good which comprehends the individual flower, dumb creature, or human being only as a unit in the larger scheme of life and love. her sister was not shocked or grieved; she too had grown with the years, and though perhaps less positively directed, had by a path of her own reached a wider prospect of conclusions. it was a sweet day there in the little grove by the water, and would linger in the memory of both so long as life lasted. certainly it was the larger faith; though the moment must always come when the narrower, nearer, more humanly protecting arm of orthodoxy lends closer comfort. long afterward, in the years that followed the sorrow of heavy bereavement, clemens once said to his wife, “livy, if it comforts you to lean on the christian faith do so,” and she answered, “i can't, youth. i haven't any.” and the thought that he had destroyed her illusion, without affording a compensating solace, was one that would come back to him, now and then, all his days. cxxiii. the grant speech of if the lunar rainbow had any fortuitous significance, perhaps we may find it in the two speeches which mark twain made in november and december of that year. the first of these was delivered at chicago, on the occasion of the reception of general grant by the army of the tennessee, on the evening of november , . grant had just returned from his splendid tour of the world. his progress from san francisco eastward had been such an ovation as is only accorded to sovereignty. clemens received an invitation to the reunion, but, dreading the long railway journey, was at first moved to decline. he prepared a letter in which he made “business” his excuse, and expressed his regret that he would not be present to see and hear the veterans of the army of the tennessee at the moment when their old commander entered the room and rose in his place to speak. “besides,” he said, “i wanted to see the general again anyway and renew the acquaintance. he would remember me, because i was the person who did not ask him for an office.” he did not send the letter. reconsidering, it seemed to him that there was something strikingly picturesque in the idea of a confederate soldier who had been chased for a fortnight in the rain through ralls and monroe counties, missouri, now being invited to come and give welcome home to his old imaginary pursuer. it was in the nature of an imperative command, which he could not refuse to obey. he accepted and agreed to speak. they had asked him to respond to the toast of “the ladies,” but for him the subject was worn out. he had already responded to that toast at least twice. he telegraphed that there was one class of the community that had always been overlooked upon such occasions, and that if they would allow him to do so he would take that class for a toast: the babies. necessarily they agreed, and he prepared himself accordingly. he arrived in chicago in time for the prodigious procession of welcome. grant was to witness the march from a grand reviewing stand, which had been built out from the second story of the palmer house. clemens had not seen the general since the “embarrassing” introduction in washington, twelve years before. their meeting was characteristic enough. carter harrison, mayor of chicago, arriving with grant, stepped over to clemens, and asked him if he wouldn't like to be presented. grant also came forward, and a moment later harrison was saying: “general, let me present mr. clemens, a man almost as great as yourself.” they shook hands; there was a pause of a moment, then grant said, looking at him gravely: “mr. clemens, i am not embarrassed, are you?” so he remembered that first, long-ago meeting. it was a conspicuous performance. the crowd could not hear the words, but they saw the greeting and the laugh, and cheered both men. following the procession, there were certain imposing ceremonies of welcome at haverly's theater where long, laudatory eloquence was poured out upon the returning hero, who sat unmoved while the storm of music and cheers and oratory swept about him. clemens, writing of it that evening to mrs. clemens, said: i never sat elbow to elbow with so many historic names before. grant, sherman, sheridan, schofield, pope, logan, and so on. what an iron man grant is! he sat facing the house, with his right leg crossed over his left, his right boot sole tilted up at an angle, and his left hand and arm reposing on the arm of his chair. you note that position? well, when glowing references were made to other grandees on the stage, those grandees always showed a trifle of nervous consciousness, and as these references came frequently the nervous changes of position and attitude were also frequent. but grant! he was under a tremendous and ceaseless bombardment of praise and congratulation; but as true as i'm sitting here he never moved a muscle of his body for a single instant during thirty minutes! you could have played him on a stranger for an effigy. perhaps he never would have moved, but at last a speaker made such a particularly ripping and blood-stirring remark about him that the audience rose and roared and yelled and stamped and clapped an entire minute--grant sitting as serene as ever-when general sherman stepped up to him, laid his hand affectionately on his shoulder, bent respectfully down, and whispered in his ear. then grant got up and bowed, and the storm of applause swelled into a hurricane. but it was the next evening that the celebration rose to a climax. this was at the grand banquet at the palmer house, where six hundred guests sat down to dinner and grant himself spoke, and logan and hurlbut, and vilas and woodford and pope, fifteen in all, including robert g. ingersoll and mark twain. chicago has never known a greater event than that dinner, for there has never been a time since when those great soldiers and citizens could have been gathered there. to howells clemens wrote: imagine what it was like to see a bullet-shredded old battle-flag reverently unfolded to the gaze of a thousand middle-aged soldiers, most of whom hadn't seen it since they saw it advancing over victorious fields when they were in their prime. and imagine what it was like when grant, their first commander, stepped into view while they were still going mad over the flag, and then right in the midst of it all somebody struck up “when we were marching through georgia.” well, you should have heard the thousand voices lift that chorus and seen the tears stream down. if i live a hundred years i sha'n't ever forget these things, nor be able to talk about them. i sha'n't ever forget that i saw phil sheridan, with martial cloak and plumed chapeau, riding his big black horse in the midst of his own cannon; by all odds the superbest figure of a soldier. i ever looked upon! grand times, my boy, grand times! mark twain declared afterward that he listened to four speeches that night which he would remember as long as he lived. one of them was by emory storrs, another by general vilas, another by logan, and the last and greatest by robert ingersoll, whose eloquence swept the house like a flame. the howells letter continues: i doubt if america has ever seen anything quite equal to it; i am well satisfied i shall not live to see its equal again. how pale those speeches are in print, but how radiant, how full of color, how blinding they were in the delivery! bob ingersoll's music will sing through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my ears. and i shall always see him, as he stood that night on a dinner-table, under the flash of lights and banners, in the midst of seven hundred frantic shouters, the most beautiful human creature that ever lived. “they fought, that a mother might own her child.” the words look like any other print, but, lord bless me! he borrowed the very accent of the angel of mercy to say them in, and you should have seen that vast house rise to its feet; and you should have heard the hurricane that followed. that's the only test! people may shout, clap their hands, stamp, wave their napkins, but none but the master can make them get up on their feet. clemens's own speech came last. he had been placed at the end to hold the house. he was preceded by a dull speaker, and his heart sank, for it was two o'clock and the diners were weary and sleepy, and the dreary speech had made them unresponsive. they gave him a round of applause when he stepped up upon the table in front of him--a tribute to his name. then he began the opening words of that memorable, delightful fancy. “we haven't all had the good-fortune to be ladies; we haven't all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies--we stand on common ground--” the tired audience had listened in respectful silence through the first half of the sentence. he made one of his effective pauses on the word “babies,” and when he added, in that slow, rich measure of his, “we stand on common ground,” they let go a storm of applause. there was no weariness and inattention after that. at the end of each sentence, he had to stop to let the tornado roar itself out and sweep by. when he reached the beginning of the final paragraph, “among the three or four million cradles now rocking in the land are some which this nation would preserve for ages as sacred things if we could know which ones they are,” the vast audience waited breathless for his conclusion. step by step he led toward some unseen climax--some surprise, of course, for that would be his way. then steadily, and almost without emphasis, he delivered the opening of his final sentence: “and now in his cradle, somewhere under the flag, the future illustrious commander-in-chief of the american armies is so little burdened with his approaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole strategic mind, at this moment, to trying to find out some way to get his own big toe into his mouth, an achievement which (meaning no disrespect) the illustrious guest of this evening also turned his attention to some fifty-six years ago.” he paused, and the vast crowd had a chill of fear. after all, he seemed likely to overdo it to spoil everything with a cheap joke at the end. no one ever knew better than mark twain the value of a pause. he waited now long enough to let the silence become absolute, until the tension was painful, then wheeling to grant himself he said, with all the dramatic power of which he was master: “and if the child is but the father of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded!” the house came down with a crash. the linking of their hero's great military triumphs with that earliest of all conquests seemed to them so grand a figure that they went mad with the joy of it. even grant's iron serenity broke; he rocked and laughed while the tears streamed down his cheeks. they swept around the speaker with their congratulations, in their efforts to seize his hand. he was borne up and down the great dining-hall. grant himself pressed up to make acknowledgments. “it tore me all to pieces,” he said; and sherman exclaimed, “lord bless you, my boy! i don't know how you do it!” the little speech has been in “cold type” so many years since then that the reader of it to-day may find it hard to understand the flame of response it kindled so long ago. but that was another day--and another nation--and mark twain, like robert ingersoll, knew always his period and his people. cxxiv. another “atlantic” speech the december good-fortune was an opportunity clemens had to redeem himself with the atlantic contingent, at a breakfast given to dr. holmes. howells had written concerning it as early as october, and the first impulse had been to decline. it would be something of an ordeal; for though two years had passed since the fatal whittier dinner, clemens had not been in that company since, and the lapse of time did not signify. both howells and warner urged him to accept, and he agreed to do so on condition that he be allowed to speak. if anybody talks there i shall claim the right to say a word myself, and be heard among the very earliest, else it would be confoundedly awkward for me--and for the rest, too. but you may read what i say beforehand, and strike out whatever you choose. howells advised against any sort of explanation. clemens accepted this as wise counsel, and prepared an address relevant only to the guest of honor. it was a noble gathering. most of the guests of the whittier dinner were present, and this time there were ladies. emerson, longfellow, and whittier were there, harriet beecher stowe and julia ward howe; also the knightly colonel waring, and stedman, and parkman, and grand old john bigelow, old even then.--[he died in in his th year.] howells was conservative in his introduction this time. it was better taste to be so. he said simply: “we will now listen to a few words of truth and soberness from mark twain.” clemens is said to have risen diffidently, but that was his natural manner. it probably did not indicate anything of the inner tumult he really felt. outwardly he was calm enough, and what he said was delicate and beautiful, the kind of thing that he could say so well. it seems fitting that it should be included here, the more so that it tells a story not elsewhere recorded. this is the speech in full: mr. chairman, ladies, and gentlemen,--i would have traveled a much greater distance than i have come to witness the paying of honors to dr. holmes, for my feeling toward him has always been one of peculiar warmth. when one receives a letter from a great man for the first time in his life it is a large event to him, as all of you know by your own experience. you never can receive letters enough from famous men afterward to obliterate that one or dim the memory of the pleasant surprise it was and the gratification it gave you. lapse of time cannot make it commonplace or cheap. well, the first great man who ever wrote me a letter was our guest, oliver wendell holmes. he was also the first great literary man i ever stole anything from, and that is how i came to write to him and he to me. when my first book was new a friend of mine said, “the dedication is very neat.” yes, i said, i thought it was. my friend said, “i always admired it, even before i saw it in the innocents abroad.” i naturally said, “what do you mean? where did you ever see it before?” “well, i saw it first, some years ago, as dr. holmes's dedication to his songs in many keys.” of course my first impulse was to prepare this man's remains for burial, but upon reflection i said i would reprieve him for a moment or two, and give him a chance to prove his assertion if he could. we stepped into a book-store. and he did prove it. i had stolen that dedication almost word for word. i could not imagine how this curious thing happened; for i knew one thing, for a dead certainty--that a certain amount of pride always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that this pride protects a man from deliberately stealing other people's ideas. that is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man, and admirers had often told me i had nearly a basketful, though they were rather reserved as to the size of the basket. however, i thought the thing out and solved the mystery. some years before i had been laid up a couple of weeks in the sandwich islands, and had read and reread dr. holmes's poems till my mental reservoir was filled with them to the brim. the dedication lay on top and handy, so by and by i unconsciously took it. well, of course, i wrote to dr. holmes and told him i hadn't meant to steal, and he wrote back and said, in the kindest way, that it was all right, and no harm done, and added that he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves. he stated a truth and did it in such a pleasant way, and salved over my sore spot so gently and so healingly, that i was rather glad i had committed the crime, for the sake of the letter. i afterward called on him and told him to make perfectly free with any ideas of mine that struck him as good protoplasm for poetry. he could see by that time that there wasn't anything mean about me; so we got along, right from the start.--[holmes in his letter had said: “i rather think the innocents abroad will have many more readers than songs in many keys... you will be stolen from a great deal oftener than you will borrow from other people.”] i have met dr. holmes many times since; and lately he said--however, i am wandering wildly away from the one thing which i got on my feet to do; that is, to make my compliments to you, my fellow-teachers of the great public, and likewise to say i am right glad to see that dr. holmes is still in his prime and full of generous life, and as age is not determined by years but by trouble, and by infirmities of mind and body, i hope it may be a very long time yet before any can truthfully say, “he is growing old.” whatever mark twain may have lost on that former occasion, came back to him multiplied when he had finished this happy tribute. so the year for him closed prosperously. the rainbow of promise was justified. cxxv. the quieter things of home upset and disturbed as mark twain often was, he seldom permitted his distractions to interfere with the program of his fireside. his days and his nights might be fevered, but the evenings belonged to another world. the long european wandering left him more than ever enamoured of his home; to him it had never been so sweet before, so beautiful, so full of peace. company came: distinguished guests and the old neighborhood circles. dinner-parties were more frequent than ever, and they were likely to be brilliant affairs. the best minds, the brightest wits, gathered around mark twain's table. booth, barrett, irving, sheridan, sherman, howells, aldrich: they all assembled, and many more. there was always some one on the way to boston or new york who addressed himself for the day or the night, or for a brief call, to the mark twain fireside. certain visitors from foreign lands were surprised at his environment, possibly expecting to find him among less substantial, more bohemian surroundings. henry drummond, the author of natural law in the spiritual world, in a letter of this time, said: i had a delightful day at hartford last wednesday.... called on mark twain, mrs. harriet beecher stowe, and the widow of horace bushnell. i was wishing a----had been at the mark twain interview. he is funnier than any of his books, and to my surprise a most respected citizen, devoted to things esthetic, and the friend of the poor and struggling.--[life of henry drummond, by george adam smith.] the quieter evenings were no less delightful. clemens did not often go out. he loved his own home best. the children were old enough now to take part in a form of entertainment that gave him and them especial pleasure-acting charades. these he invented for them, and costumed the little performers, and joined in the acting as enthusiastically and as unrestrainedly as if he were back in that frolicsome boyhood on john quarles's farm. the warner and twichell children were often there and took part in the gay amusements. the children of that neighborhood played their impromptu parts well and naturally. they were in a dramatic atmosphere, and had been from infancy. there was never any preparation for the charades. a word was selected and the parts of it were whispered to the little actors. then they withdrew to the hall, where all sorts of costumes had been laid out for the evening, dressed their parts, and each detachment marched into the library, performed its syllable and retired, leaving the audience, mainly composed of parents, to guess the answer. often they invented their own words, did their own costuming, and conducted the entire performance independent of grown-up assistance or interference. now and then, even at this early period, they conceived and produced little plays, and of course their father could not resist joining in these. at other times, evenings, after dinner, he would sit at the piano and recall the old darky songs-spirituals and jubilee choruses-singing them with fine spirit, if not with perfect technic, the children joining in these moving melodies. he loved to read aloud to them. it was his habit to read his manuscript to mrs. clemens, and, now that the children were older, he was likely to include them in his critical audience. it would seem to have been the winter after their return from europe that this custom was inaugurated, for 'the prince and the pauper' manuscript was the first one so read, and it was just then he was resuming work on this tale. each afternoon or evening, when he had finished his chapter, he assembled his little audience and read them the result. the children were old enough to delight in that half real, half fairy tale of the wandering prince and the royal pauper: and the charm and simplicity of the story are measurably due to those two small listeners, to whom it was adapted in that early day of its creation. clemens found the prince a blessed relief from 'a tramp abroad', which had become a veritable nightmare. he had thought it finished when he left the farm, but discovered that he must add several hundred pages to complete its bulk. it seemed to him that he had been given a life-sentence. he wrote six hundred pages and tore up all but two hundred and eighty-eight. he was about to destroy these and begin again, when mrs. clemens's health became poor and he was advised to take her to elmira, though it was then midwinter. to howells he wrote: i said, “if there is one death that is painfuler than another, may i get it if i don't do that thing.” so i took the pages to bliss and told him that was the very last line i should ever write on this book (a book which required pages of ms., and i have written nearly four thousand, first and last). i am as soary (and flighty) as a rocket to-day, with the unutterable joy of getting that old man of the sea off my back, where he has been roosting more than a year and a half. they remained a month at elmira, and on their return clemens renewed work on 'the prince and the pauper'. he reported to howells that if he never sold a copy his jubilant delight in writing it would suffer no diminution. a week later his enthusiasm had still further increased: i take so much pleasure in my story that i am loath to hurry, not wanting to get it done. did i ever tell you the plot of it? it begins at a.m., january , . he follows with a detailed synopsis of his plot, which in this instance he had worked out with unusual completeness--a fact which largely accounts for the unity of the tale. then he adds: my idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the king himself, and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them applied to others; all of which is to account for certain mildnesses which distinguished edward vi.'s reign from those that precede it and follow it. imagine this fact: i have even fascinated mrs. clemens with this yarn for youth. my stuff generally gets considerable damning with faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other way. she is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill doesn't grind fast enough to suit her. this is no mean triumph, my dear sir. he forgot, perhaps, to mention his smaller auditors, but we may believe they were no less eager in their demands for the tale's continuance. cxxvi. “a tramp abroad” 'a tramp abroad' came from the presses on the th of march, . it had been widely heralded, and there was an advance sale of twenty-five thousand copies. it was of the same general size and outward character as the innocents, numerously illustrated, and was regarded by its publishers as a satisfactory book. it bore no very striking resemblance to the innocents on close examination. its pictures-drawn, for the most part, by a young art student named brown, whom clemens had met in paris--were extraordinarily bad, while the crude engraving process by which they had been reproduced; tended to bring them still further into disrepute. a few drawings by true williams were better, and those drawn by clemens himself had a value of their own. the book would have profited had there been more of what the author calls his “works of art.” mark twain himself had dubious anticipations as to the book's reception. but howells wrote: well, you are a blessing. you ought to believe in god's goodness, since he has bestowed upon the world such a delightful genius as yours to lighten its troubles. clemens replied: your praises have been the greatest uplift i ever had. when a body is not even remotely expecting such things, how the surprise takes the breath away! we had been interpreting your stillness to melancholy and depression, caused by that book. this is honest. why, everything looks brighter now. a check for untold cash could not have made our hearts sing as your letter has done. a letter from tauchnitz, proposing to issue an illustrated edition in germany, besides putting it into his regular series, was an added satisfaction. to be in a tauchnitz series was of itself a recognition of the book's merit. to twichell, clemens presented a special copy of the tramp with a personal inscription, which must not be omitted here: my dear “harris”--no, i mean my dear joe,--just imagine it for a moment: i was collecting material in europe during fourteen months for a book, and now that the thing is printed i find that you, who were with me only a month and a half of the fourteen, are in actual presence (not imaginary) in of the pages the book contains! hang it, if you had stayed at home it would have taken me fourteen years to get the material. you have saved me an intolerable whole world of hated labor, and i'll not forget it, my boy. you'll find reminders of things, all along, that happened to us, and of others that didn't happen; but you'll remember the spot where they were invented. you will see how the imaginary perilous trip up the riffelberg is preposterously expanded. that horse-student is on page . the “fremersberg” is neighboring. the black forest novel is on page . i remember when and where we projected that: in the leafy glades with the mountain sublimities dozing in the blue haze beyond the gorge of allerheiligen. there's the “new member,” page ; the dentist yarn, ; the true chamois, ; at page is a pretty long yarn, spun from a mighty brief text meeting, for a moment, that pretty girl who knew me and whom i had forgotten; at is “harris,” and should have been so entitled, but bliss has made a mistake and turned you into some other character; brings back the whole rigi tramp to me at a glance; at and are specimens of my art; and the frontispiece is the combination which i made by pasting one familiar picture over the lower half of an equally familiar one. this fine work being worthy of titian, i have shed the credit of it upon him. well, you'll find more reminders of things scattered through here than are printed, or could have been printed, in many books. all the “legends of the neckar,” which i invented for that unstoried region, are here; one is in the appendix. the steel portrait of me is just about perfect. we had a mighty good time, joe, and the six weeks i would dearly like to repeat any time; but the rest of the fourteen months-never. with love, yours, mark. hartford, march , . possibly twichell had vague doubts concerning a book of which he was so large a part, and its favorable reception by the critics and the public generally was a great comfort. when the howells letter was read to him he is reported as having sat with his hands on his knees, his head bent forward--a favorite attitude--repeating at intervals: “howells said that, did he? old howells said that!” there have been many and varying opinions since then as to the literary merits of 'a tramp abroad'. human tastes differ, and a “mixed” book of this kind invites as many opinions as it has chapters. the word “uneven” pretty safely describes any book of size, but it has a special application to this one. written under great stress and uncertainty of mind, it could hardly be uniform. it presents mark twain at his best, and at his worst. almost any american writer was better than mark twain at his worst: mark twain at his best was unapproachable. it is inevitable that 'a tramp abroad' and 'the innocents abroad' should be compared, though with hardly the warrant of similarity. the books are as different as was their author at the periods when they were written. 'a tramp abroad' is the work of a man who was traveling and observing for the purpose of writing a book, and for no other reason. the innocents abroad was written by a man who was reveling in every scene and experience, every new phase and prospect; whose soul was alive to every historic association, and to every humor that a gay party of young sight-seers could find along the way. the note-books of that trip fairly glow with the inspiration of it; those of the later wanderings are mainly filled with brief, terse records, interspersed with satire and denunciation. in the 'innocents' the writer is the enthusiast with a sense of humor. in the 'tramp' he has still the sense of humor, but he has become a cynic; restrained, but a cynic none the less. in the 'innocents' he laughs at delusions and fallacies--and enjoys them. in the 'tramp' he laughs at human foibles and affectations--and wants to smash them. very often he does not laugh heartily and sincerely at all, but finds his humor in extravagant burlesque. in later life his gentler laughter, his old, untroubled enjoyment of human weakness, would return, but just now he was in that middle period, when the “damned human race” amused him indeed, though less tenderly. (it seems proper to explain that in applying this term to mankind he did not mean that the race was foredoomed, but rather that it ought to be.) reading the 'innocents', the conviction grows that, with all its faults, it is literature from beginning to end. reading the 'tramp', the suspicion arises that, regardless of technical improvement, its percentage of literature is not large. yet, as noted in an earlier volume, so eminent a critic as brander matthews has pronounced in its favor, and he undoubtedly had a numerous following; howells expressed. his delight in the book at the time of its issue, though one wonders how far the personal element entered into his enjoyment, and what would be his final decision if he read the two books side by side to-day. he reviewed 'a tramp abroad' adequately and finely in the atlantic, and justly; for on the whole it is a vastly entertaining book, and he did not overpraise it. 'a tramp abroad' had an “introduction” in the manuscript, a pleasant word to the reader but not a necessary one, and eventually it was omitted. fortunately the appendix remained. beyond question it contains some of the very best things in the book. the descriptions of the german portier and the german newspaper are happy enough, and the essay on the awful german language is one of mark twain's supreme bits of humor. it is mark twain at his best; mark twain in a field where he had no rival, the field of good-natured, sincere fun-making-ridicule of the manifest absurdities of some national custom or institution which the nation itself could enjoy, while the individual suffered no wound. the present emperor of germany is said to find comfort in this essay on his national speech when all other amusements fail. it is delicious beyond words to express; it is unique. in the body of the book there are also many delights. the description of the ant might rank next to the german language almost in its humor, and the meeting with the unrecognized girl at lucerne has a lively charm. of the serious matter, some of the word-pictures are flawless in their beauty; this, for instance, suggested by the view of the jungfrau from interlaken: there was something subduing in the influence of that silent and solemn and awful presence; one seemed to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast. one had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice--a spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of ages, upon a million vanished races of men and judged them; and would judge a million more--and still be there, watching unchanged and unchangeable, after all life should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation while i was feeling these things, i was groping, without knowing it, toward an understanding of what the spell is which people find in the alps, and in no other mountains; that strange, deep, nameless influence which, once felt, cannot be forgotten; once felt, leaves always behind it a restless longing to feel it again--a longing which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning, which will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will. i met dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative, cultivated and uncultivated, who had come from far countries and roamed through the swiss alps year after year--they could not explain why. they had come first, they said, out of idle curiosity, because everybody talked about it; they had come since because they could not help it, and they should keep on coming, while they lived, for the same reason; they had tried to break their chains and stay away, but it was futile; now they had no desire to break them. others came nearer formulating what they felt; they said they could find perfect rest and peace nowhere else when they were troubled: all frets and worries and chafings sank to sleep in the presence of the benignant serenity of the alps; the great spirit of the mountain breathed his own peace upon their hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them; they could not think base thoughts or do mean and sordid things here, before the visible throne of god. indeed, all the serious matter in the book is good. the reader's chief regret is likely to be that there is not more of it. the main difficulty with the humor is that it seems overdone. it is likely to be carried too far, and continued too long. the ascent of riffelberg is an example. though spotted with delights it seems, to one reader at least, less admirable than other of the book's important features, striking, as it does, more emphatically the chief note of the book's humor--that is to say, exaggeration. without doubt there must be many--very many--who agree in finding a fuller enjoyment in 'a tramp abroad' than in the 'innocents'; only, the burden of the world's opinion lies the other way. the world has a weakness for its illusions: the splendor that falls on castle walls, the glory of the hills at evening, the pathos of the days that are no more. it answers to tenderness, even on the page of humor, and to genuine enthusiasm, sharply sensing the lack of these things; instinctively resenting, even when most amused by it, extravagance and burlesque. the innocents abroad is more soul-satisfying than its successor, more poetic; more sentimental, if you will. the tramp contains better english usage, without doubt, but it is less full of happiness and bloom and the halo of romance. the heart of the world has felt this, and has demanded the book in fewer numbers.--[the sales of the innocents during the earlier years more than doubled those of the tramp during a similar period. the later ratio of popularity is more nearly three to one. it has been repeatedly stated that in england the tramp has the greater popularity, an assertion not sustained by the publisher's accountings.] cxxvii. letters, tales, and plans the reader has not failed to remark the great number of letters which samuel clemens wrote to his friend william dean howells; yet comparatively few can even be mentioned. he was always writing to howells, on every subject under the sun; whatever came into his mind--business, literature, personal affairs--he must write about it to howells. once, when nothing better occurred, he sent him a series of telegrams, each a stanza from an old hymn, possibly thinking they might carry comfort.--[“clemens had then and for many years the habit of writing to me about what he was doing, and still more of what he was experiencing. nothing struck his imagination, in or out of the daily routine, but he wished to write me of it, and he wrote with the greatest fullness and a lavish dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or forty pages:” (my mark twain, by w. d. howells.)] whatever of picturesque happened in the household he immediately set it down for howells's entertainment. some of these domestic incidents carry the flavor of his best humor. once he wrote: last night, when i went to bed, mrs. clemens said, “george didn't take the cat down to the cellar; rosa says he has left it shut up in the conservatory.” so i went down to attend to abner (the cat). about three in the morning mrs. c. woke me and said, “i do believe i hear that cat in the drawing-room. what did you do with him?” i answered with the confidence of a man who has managed to do the right thing for once, and said, “i opened the conservatory doors, took the library off the alarm, and spread everything open, so that there wasn't any obstruction between him and the cellar.” language wasn't capable of conveying this woman's disgust. but the sense of what she said was, “he couldn't have done any harm in the conservatory; so you must go and make the entire house free to him and the burglars, imagining that he will prefer the coal-bins to the drawing-room. if you had had mr. howells to help you i should have admired, but not have been astonished, because i should know that together you would be equal to it; but how you managed to contrive such a stately blunder all by yourself is what i cannot understand.” so, you see, even she knows how to appreciate our gifts.... i knocked off during these stirring hours, and don't intend to go to work again till we go away for the summer, four or six weeks hence. so i am writing to you, not because i have anything to say, but because you don't have to answer and i need something to do this afternoon. the rightful earl has---- friday, th. well, never mind about the rightful earl; he merely wanted to-borrow money. i never knew an american earl that didn't. after a trip to boston, during which mrs. clemens did some bric-a-brac shopping, he wrote: mrs. clemens has two imperishable topics now: the museum of andirons which she collected and your dinner. it is hard to tell which she admires the most. sometimes she leans one way and sometimes the other; but i lean pretty steadily toward the dinner because i can appreciate that, whereas i am no prophet in andirons. there has been a procession of adams express wagons filing before the door all day delivering andirons. in a more serious vein he refers to the aged violinist ole bull and his wife, whom they had met during their visit, and their enjoyment of that gentle-hearted pair. clemens did some shorter work that spring, most of which found its way into the atlantic. “edward mills and george benton,” one of the contributions of this time, is a moral sermon in its presentation of a pitiful human spectacle and misdirected human zeal. it brought a pack of letters of approval, not only from laity, but the church, and in some measure may have helped to destroy the silly sentimentalism which manifested itself in making heroes of spectacular criminals. that fashion has gone out, largely. mark twain wrote frequently on the subject, though never more effectively than in this particular instance. “mrs. mcwilliams and the lightning” was another atlantic story, a companion piece to “mrs. mcwilliams's experience with the membranous croup,” and in the same delightful vein--a vein in which mark twain was likely to be at his best--the transcription of a scene not so far removed in character from that in the “cat” letter just quoted: something which may or may not have happened, but might have happened, approximately as set down. rose terry cooke wrote: horrid man, how did you know the way i behave in a thunderstorm? have you been secreted in the closet or lurking on the shed roof? i hope you got thoroughly rained on; and worst of all is that you made me laugh at myself; my real terrors turned round and grimaced at me: they were sublime, and you have made them ridiculous just come out here another year and have four houses within a few rods of you struck and then see if you write an article of such exasperating levity. i really hate you, but you are funny. in addition to his own work, he conceived a plan for orion. clemens himself had been attempting, from time to time, an absolutely faithful autobiography; a document in which his deeds and misdeeds, even his moods and inmost thoughts, should be truly set down. he had found it an impossible task. he confessed freely that he lacked the courage, even the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his soul bare, but he believed orion equal to the task. he knew how rigidly honest he was, how ready to confess his shortcomings, how eager to be employed at some literary occupation. it was mark twain's belief that if orion would record in detail his long, weary struggle, his succession of attempts and failures, his past dreams and disappointments, along with his sins of omission and commission, it would make one of those priceless human documents such as have been left by benvenuto cellini, cazenova, and rousseau. “simply tell your story to yourself,” he wrote, “laying all hideousness utterly bare, reserving nothing. banish the idea of the audience and all hampering things.” orion, out in keokuk, had long since abandoned the chicken farm and a variety of other enterprises. he had prospected insurance, mining, journalism, his old trade of printing, and had taken down and hung up his law shingle between each of these seizures. aside from business, too, he had been having a rather spectacular experience. he had changed his politics three times (twice in one day), and his religion as many more. once when he was delivering a political harangue in the street, at night, a parade of the opposition (he had but just abandoned them) marched by carrying certain flaming transparencies, which he himself had made for them the day before. finally, after delivering a series of infidel lectures; he had been excommunicated and condemned to eternal flames by the presbyterian church. he was therefore ripe for any new diversion, and the autobiography appealed to him. he set about it with splendid enthusiasm, wrote a hundred pages or so of his childhood with a startling minutia of detail and frankness, and mailed them to his brother for inspection. they were all that mark twain had expected; more than he had expected. he forwarded them to howells with great satisfaction, suggesting, with certain excisions, they be offered anonymously to the atlantic readers. but howells's taste for realism had its limitations. he found the story interesting--indeed, torturingly, heart-wringingly so--and, advising strongly against its publication, returned it. onion was steaming along at the rate of ten to twenty pages a day now, forwarding them as fast as written, while his courage was good and the fires warm. clemens, receiving a package by every morning mail, soon lost interest, then developed a hunted feeling, becoming finally desperate. he wrote wildly to shut orion off, urging him to let his manuscript accumulate, and to send it in one large consignment at the end. this orion did, and it is fair to say that in this instance at least he stuck to his work faithfully to the bitter, disheartening end. and it would have been all that mark twain had dreamed it would be, had orion maintained the simple narrative spirit of its early pages. but he drifted off into theological byways; into discussions of his excommunication and infidelities, which were frank enough, but lacked human interest. in old age mark twain once referred to orion's autobiography in print and his own disappointment in it, which he attributed to orion's having departed from the idea of frank and unrestricted confession to exalt himself as a hero-a statement altogether unwarranted, and due to one of those curious confusions of memory and imagination that more than once resulted in a complete reversal of the facts. a quantity of orion's manuscript has been lost and destroyed, but enough fragments of it remain to show its fidelity to the original plan. it is just one long record of fleeting hope, futile effort, and humiliation. it is the story of a life of disappointment; of a man who has been defeated and beaten down and crushed by the world until he has nothing but confession left to surrender.--[howells, in his letter concerning the opening chapters, said that they would some day make good material. fortunately the earliest of these chapters were preserved, and, as the reader may remember, furnished much of the childhood details for this biography.] whatever may have been mark twain's later impression of his brother's manuscript, its story of failure and disappointment moved him to definite action at the time. several years before, in hartford, orion had urged him to make his publishing contracts on a basis of half profits, instead of on the royalty plan. clemens, remembering this, had insisted on such an arrangement for the publication of 'a tramp abroad', and when his first statement came in he realized that the new contract was very largely to his advantage. he remembered orion's anxiety in the matter, and made it now a valid excuse for placing his brother on a firm financial footing. out of the suspicions which you bred in me years ago has grown this result, to wit: that i shall within the twelve months get $ , out of this tramp, instead of $ , . $ , , after taxes and other expenses are stripped away, is worth to the investor about $ a month, so i shall tell mr. perkins [his lawyer and financial agent] to make your check that amount per month hereafter.... this ends the loan business, and hereafter you can reflect that you are living not on borrowed money, but on money which you have squarely earned, and which has no taint or savor of charity about it, and you can also reflect that the money which you have been receiving of me is charged against the heavy bill which the next publisher will have to stand who gets a book of mine. from that time forward orion clemens was worth substantially twenty thousand dollars--till the day of his death, and, after him, his widow. far better was it for him that the endowment be conferred in the form of an income, than had the capital amount been placed in his hands. cxxviii. mark twain's absent-mindedness. a number of amusing incidents have been more or less accurately reported concerning mark twain's dim perception of certain physical surroundings, and his vague resulting memories--his absent-mindedness, as we say. it was not that he was inattentive--no man was ever less so if the subject interested him--but only that the casual, incidental thing seemed not to find a fixed place in his deeper consciousness. by no means was mark twain's absent-mindedness a development of old age. on the two occasions following he was in the very heyday of his mental strength. especially was it, when he was engaged upon some absorbing or difficult piece of literature, that his mind seemed to fold up and shut most of the world away. soon after his return from europe, when he was still struggling with 'a tramp abroad', he wearily put the manuscript aside, one day, and set out to invite f. g. whitmore over for a game of billiards. whitmore lived only a little way down the street, and clemens had been there time and again. it was such a brief distance that he started out in his slippers and with no hat. but when he reached the corner where the house, a stone's-throw away, was in plain view he stopped. he did not recognize it. it was unchanged, but its outlines had left no impress upon his mind. he stood there uncertainly a little while, then returned and got the coachman, patrick mcaleer, to show him the way. the second, and still more picturesque instance, belongs also to this period. one day, when he was playing billiards with whitmore, george, the butler, came up with a card. “who is he, george?” clemens asked, without looking at the card. “i don't know, suh, but he's a gentleman, mr. clemens.” “now, george, how many times have i told you i don't want to see strangers when i'm playing billiards! this is just some book agent, or insurance man, or somebody with something to sell. i don't want to see him, and i'm not going to.” “oh, but this is a gentleman, i'm sure, mr. clemens. just look at his card, suh.” “yes, of course, i see--nice engraved card--but i don't know him, and if it was st. peter himself i wouldn't buy the key of salvation! you tell him so--tell him--oh, well, i suppose i've got to go and get rid of him myself. i'll be back in a minute, whitmore.” he ran down the stairs, and as he got near the parlor door, which stood open, he saw a man sitting on a couch with what seemed to be some framed water-color pictures on the floor near his feet. “ah, ha!” he thought, “i see. a picture agent. i'll soon get rid of him.” he went in with his best, “well, what can i do for you?” air, which he, as well as any man living, knew how to assume; a friendly air enough, but not encouraging. the gentleman rose and extended his hand. “how are you, mr. clemens?” he said. of course this was the usual thing with men who had axes to grind or goods to sell. clemens did not extend a very cordial hand. he merely raised a loose, indifferent hand--a discouraging hand. “and how is mrs. clemens?” asked the uninvited guest. so this was his game. he would show an interest in the family and ingratiate himself in that way; he would be asking after the children next. “well--mrs. clemens is about as usual--i believe.” “and the children--miss susie and little clara?” this was a bit startling. he knew their names! still, that was easy to find out. he was a smart agent, wonderfully smart. he must be got rid of. “the children are well, quite well,” and (pointing down at the pictures)--“we've got plenty like these. we don't want any more. no, we don't care for any more,” skilfully working his visitor toward the door as he talked. the man, looking non-plussed--a good deal puzzled--allowed himself to be talked into the hall and toward the front door. here he paused a moment: “mr. clemens, will you tell me where mr. charles dudley warner lives?” this was the chance! he would work him off on charlie warner. perhaps warner needed pictures. “oh, certainly, certainly! right across the yard. i'll show you. there's a walk right through. you don't need to go around the front way at all. you'll find him at home, too, i'm pretty sure”; all the time working his caller out and down the step and in the right direction. the visitor again extended his hand. “please remember me to mrs. clemens and the children.” “oh, certainly, certainly, with pleasure. good day. yes, that's the house good-by.” on the way back to the billiard-room mrs. clemens called to him. she was ill that day. “youth!” “yes, livy.” he went in for a word. “george brought me mr. b----'s card. i hope you were very nice to him; the b----s were so nice to us, once last year, when you were gone.”, “the b----s--why, livy----” “yes, of course, and i asked him to be sure to call when he came to hartford.” he gazed at her helplessly. “well, he's been here.” “oh, youth, have you done anything?” “yes, of course i have. he seemed to have some pictures to sell, so i sent him over to warner's. i noticed he didn't take them with him. land sakes, livy, what can i do?” “which way did he go, youth?” “why, i sent him to charlie warner's. i thought----” “go right after him. go quick! tell him what you have done.” he went without further delay, bareheaded and in his slippers, as usual. warner and b----were in cheerful and friendly converse. they had met before. clemens entered gaily: “oh yes, i see! you found him all right. charlie, we met mr. b----and his wife in europe last summer and they made things pleasant for us. i wanted to come over here with him, but was a good deal occupied just then. livy isn't very well, but she seems a good deal better, so i just followed along to have a good talk, all together.” he stayed an hour, and whatever bad impression had formed in b----'s mind faded long before the hour ended. returning home clemens noticed the pictures still on the parlor floor. “george,” he said, “what pictures are those that gentleman left?” “why, mr. clemens, those are our own pictures. i've been straightening up the room a little, and mrs. clemens had me set them around to see how they would look in new places. the gentleman was looking at them while he was waiting for you to come down.” cxxix. further affairs at the farm it was at elmira, in july ( ), that the third little girl came--jane lampton, for her grandmother, but always called jean. she was a large, lovely baby, robust and happy. when she had been with them a little more than a month clemens, writing to twichell, said: dear old joe,--concerning jean clemens, if anybody said he “didn't see no pints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog,” i should think he was convicting himself of being a pretty poor sort of observer. she is the comeliest and daintiest and perfectest little creature the continents and archipelagos have seen since the bay and susy were her size. i will not go into details; it is not necessary; you will soon be in hartford, where i have already hired a hall; the admission fee will be but a trifle. it is curious to note the change in the stock-quotations of the affection board brought about by throwing this new security on the market. four weeks ago the children still put mama at the head of the list right along, where she had always been. but now: jean mama motley |cats fraulein | papa that is the way it stands now. mama is become no. ; i have dropped from no. , and am become no. . some time ago it used to be nip and tuck between me and the cats, but after the cats “developed” i didn't stand any more show. been reading daniel webster's private correspondence. have read a hundred of his diffuse, conceited, “eloquent,” bathotic (or bathostic) letters, written in that dim (no, vanished) past, when he was a student. and lord! to think that this boy, who is so real to me now, and so booming with fresh young blood and bountiful life, and sappy cynicisms about girls, has since climbed the alps of fame and stood against the sun one brief, tremendous moment with the world's eyes on him, and then----fzt! where is he? why, the only long thing, the only real thing about the whole shadowy business, is the sense of the lagging dull and hoary lapse of time that has drifted by since then; a vast, empty level, it seems, with a formless specter glimpsed fitfully through the smoke and mist that lie along its remote verge. well, we are all getting along here first-rate. livy gains strength daily and sits up a deal; the baby is five weeks old and----but no more of this. somebody may be reading this letter eighty years hence. and so, my friend (you pitying snob, i mean, who are holding this yellow paper in your hand in ), save yourself the trouble of looking further. i know how pathetically trivial our small concerns would seem to you, and i will not let your eye profane them. no, i keep my news; you keep your compassion. suffice it you to know, scoffer and ribald, that the little child is old and blind now, and once more tooth less; and the rest of us are shadows these many, many years. yes, and your time cometh! mark. it is the ageless story. he too had written his youthful letters, and later had climbed the alps of fame and was still outlined against the sun. happily, the little child was to evade that harsher penalty--the unwarranted bitterness and affront of a lingering, palsied age. mrs. clemens, in a letter somewhat later, set down a thought similar to his: “we are all going so fast. pretty soon we shall have been dead a hundred years.” clemens varied his work that summer, writing alternately on 'the prince and the pauper' and on the story about 'huck finn', which he had begun four years earlier. he read the latter over and found in it a new interest. it did not fascinate him, as did the story of the wandering prince. he persevered only as the spirit moved him, piling up pages on both the tales. he always took a boy's pride in the number of pages he could complete at a sitting, and if the day had gone well he would count them triumphantly, and, lighting a fresh cigar, would come tripping down the long stair that led to the level of the farm-house, and, gathering his audience, would read to them the result of his industry; that is to say, he proceeded with the story of the prince. apparently he had not yet acquired confidence or pride enough in poor huck to exhibit him, even to friends. the reference (in the letter to twichell) to the cats at the farm introduces one of the most important features of that idyllic resort. there were always cats at the farm. mark twain himself dearly loved cats, and the children inherited this passion. susy once said: “the difference between papa and mama is, that mama loves morals and papa loves cats.” the cats did not always remain the same, but some of the same ones remained a good while, and were there from season to season, always welcomed and adored. they were commendable cats, with such names as fraulein, blatherskite, sour mash, stray kit, sin, and satan, and when, as happened now and then, a vacancy occurred in the cat census there followed deep sorrow and elaborate ceremonies. naturally, there would be stories about cats: impromptu bedtime stories, which began anywhere and ended nowhere, and continued indefinitely through a land inhabited only by cats and dreams. one of these stories, as remembered and set down later, began: once upon a time there was a noble, big cat whose christian name was catasaqua, because she lived in that region; but she didn't have any surname, because she was a short-tailed cat, being a manx, and didn't need one. it is very just and becoming in a long-tailed cat to have a surname, but it would be very ostentatious, and even dishonorable, in a manx. well, catasaqua had a beautiful family of cattings; and they were of different colors, to harmonize with their characters. cattaraugus, the eldest, was white, and he had high impulses and a pure heart; catiline, the youngest, was black, and he had a self-seeking nature, his motives were nearly always base, he was truculent and insincere. he was vain and foolish, and often said that he would rather be what he was, and live like a bandit, yet have none above him, than be a cat-o'-nine-tails and eat with the king. and so on without end, for the audience was asleep presently and the end could wait. there was less enthusiasm over dogs at quarry farm. mark twain himself had no great love for the canine breed. to a woman who wrote, asking for his opinion on dogs, he said, in part: by what right has the dog come to be regarded as a “noble” animal? the more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward you can never get her full confidence again. he was not harsh to dogs; occasionally he made friends with them. there was once at the farm a gentle hound, named bones, that for some reason even won his way into his affections. bones was always a welcome companion, and when the end of summer came, and clemens, as was his habit, started down the drive ahead of the carriage, bones, half-way to the entrance, was waiting for him. clemens stooped down, put his arms around him, and bade him an affectionate good-by. he always recalled bones tenderly, and mentioned him in letters to the farm. cxxx. copyright and other fancies the continued assault of canadian pirates on his books kept mark twain's interest sharply alive on the subject of copyright reform. he invented one scheme after another, but the public-mind was hazy on the subject, and legislators were concerned with purposes that interested a larger number of voters. there were too few authors to be of much value at the polls, and even of those few only a small percentage were vitally concerned. for the others, foreign publishers rarely paid them the compliment of piracy, while at home the copyright limit of forty-two years was about forty-two times as long as they needed protection. bliss suggested a law making the selling of pirated books a penal offense, a plan with a promising look, but which came to nothing. clemens wrote to his old friend rollin m. daggett, who by this time was a congressman. daggett replied that he would be glad to introduce any bill that the authors might agree upon, and clemens made at least one trip to washington to discuss the matter, but it came to nothing in the end. it was a presidential year, and it would do just as well to keep the authors quiet by promising to do something next year. any legislative stir is never a good thing for a campaign. clemens's idea for copyright betterment was not a fixed one. somewhat later, when an international treaty which would include protection for authors was being discussed, his views had undergone a change. he wrote, asking howells: will the proposed treaty protect us (and effectually) against canadian piracy? because, if it doesn't, there is not a single argument in favor of international copyright which a rational american senate could entertain for a moment. my notions have mightily changed lately. i can buy macaulay's history, three vols.; bound, for $ . ; chambers's cyclopaedia, ten vols., cloth, for $ . (we paid $ ), and other english copyrights in proportion; i can buy a lot of the great copyright classics, in paper, at from three cents to thirty cents apiece. these things must find their way into the very kitchens and hovels of the country. a generation of this sort of thing ought to make this the most intelligent and the best-read nation in the world. international copyright must becloud this sun and bring on the former darkness and dime novel reading. morally this is all wrong; governmentally it is all right. for it is the duty of governments and families to be selfish, and look out simply for their own. international copyright would benefit a few english authors and a lot of american publishers, and be a profound detriment to twenty million americans; it would benefit a dozen american authors a few dollars a year, and there an end. the real advantages all go to english authors and american publishers. and even if the treaty will kill canadian piracy, and thus save me an average of $ , a year, i'm down on it anyway, and i'd like cussed well to write an article opposing the treaty. it is a characteristic expression. mark twain might be first to grab for the life-preserver, but he would also be first to hand it to a humanity in greater need. he could damn the human race competently, but in the final reckoning it was the interest of that race that lay closest to his heart. mention has been made in an earlier chapter of clemens's enthusiasms or “rages” for this thing and that which should benefit humankind. he was seldom entirely without them. whether it was copyright legislation, the latest invention, or a new empiric practice, he rarely failed to have a burning interest in some anodyne that would provide physical or mental easement for his species. howells tells how once he was going to save the human race with accordion letter-files--the system of order which would grow out of this useful device being of such nerve and labor saving proportions as to insure long life and happiness to all. the fountain-pen, in its first imperfect form, must have come along about the same time, and clemens was one of the very earliest authors to own one. for a while it seemed that the world had known no greater boon since the invention of printing; but when it clogged and balked, or suddenly deluged his paper and spilled in his pocket, he flung it to the outer darkness. after which, the stylo-graphic pen. he tried one, and wrote severally to dr. brown, to howells, and to twichell, urging its adoption. even in a letter to mrs. howells he could not forget his new possession: and speaking of howells, he ought to use the stylographic pen, the best fountain-pen yet invented; he ought to, but of course he won't --a blamed old sodden-headed conservative--but you see yourself what a nice, clean, uniform ms. it makes. and at the same time to twichell: i am writing with a stylographic pen. it takes a royal amount of cussing to make the thing go the first few days or a week, but by that time the dullest ass gets the hang of the thing, and after that no enrichments of expression are required, and said ass finds the stylographic a genuine god's blessing. i carry one in each breeches pocket, and both loaded. i'd give you one of them if i had you where i could teach you how to use it--not otherwise. for the average ass flings the thing out of the window in disgust the second day, believing it hath no virtue, no merit of any sort; whereas the lack lieth in himself, god of his mercy damn him. it was not easy to withstand mark twain's enthusiasm. howells, twichell, and dr. brown were all presently struggling and swearing (figuratively) over their stylographic pens, trying to believe that salvation lay in their conquest. but in the midst of one letter, at last, howells broke down, seized his old steel weapon, and wrote savagely: “no white man ought to use a stylographic pen, anyhow!” then, with the more ancient implement, continued in a calmer spirit. it was only a little later that clemens himself wrote: you see i am trying a new pen. i stood the stylograph as long as i could, and then retired to the pencil. the thing i am trying now is that fountain-pen which is advertised to employ and accommodate itself to any kind of pen. so i selected an ordinary gold pen--a limber one--and sent it to new york and had it cut and fitted to this thing. it goes very well indeed--thus far; but doubtless the devil will be in it by tomorrow. mark twain's schemes were not all in the line of human advancement; some of them were projected, primarily at least, for diversion. he was likely at any moment to organize a club, a sort of private club, and at the time of which we are writing he proposed what was called the “modest” club. he wrote to howells, about it: at present i am the only member, and as the modesty required must be of a quite aggravated type the enterprise did seem for a time doomed to stop dead still with myself, for lack of further material; but on reflection i have come to the conclusion that you are eligible. therefore, i have held a meeting and voted to offer you the distinction of membership. i do not know that we can find any others, though i have had some thought of hay, warner, twichell, aldrich, osgood, fields, higginson, and a few more, together with mrs. howells, mrs. clemens, and certain others of the sex. i have long felt there ought to be an organized gang of our kind. he appends the by-laws, the main ones being: the object of the club shall be to eat and talk. qualification for membership shall be aggravated modesty, unobtrusiveness, native humility, learning, talent, intelligence, unassailable character. there shall be no officers except a president, and any member who has anything to eat and talk about may constitute himself president for the time being. any brother or sister of the order finding a brother or a sister in imminently deadly peril shall forsake his own concerns, no matter at what cost, and call the police. any member knowing anything scandalous about himself shall immediately inform the club, so that they shall call a meeting and have the first chance to talk about it. it was one of his whimsical fancies, and howells replied that he would like to join it, only that he was too modest--that is, too modest to confess that he was modest enough for membership. he added that he had sent a letter, with the rules, to hay, but doubted his modesty. he said: “he will think he has a right to belong as much as you or i.” howells agreed that his own name might be put down, but the idea seems never to have gone any further. perhaps the requirements of membership were too severe. cxxxi. working for garfield eighteen hundred and eighty was a presidential year. general garfield was nominated on the republican ticket (against general hancock), and clemens found him satisfactory. garfield suits me thoroughly and exactly [he wrote howells]. i prefer him to grant's friends. the presidency can't add anything to grant; he will shine on without it. it is ephemeral; he is eternal. that was the year when the republican party became panicky over the disaffection in its ranks, due to the defeat of grant in the convention, and at last, by pleadings and promises, conciliated platt and conkling and brought them into the field. general grant also was induced to save the party from defeat, and made a personal tour of oratory for that purpose. he arrived in hartford with his family on the th of october, and while his reception was more or less partizan, it was a momentous event. a vast procession passed in review before him, and everywhere houses and grounds were decorated. to mrs. clemens, still in elmira, clemens wrote: i found mr. beals hard at work in the rain with his decorations. with a ladder he had strung flags around our bedroom balcony, and thence around to the porte-cochere, which was elaborately flagged; thence the flags of all nations were suspended from a line which stretched past the greenhouse to the limit of our grounds. against each of the two trees on the mound, half-way down to our gate, stands a knight in complete armor. piles of still-bundled flags clutter up the ombra (to be put up), also gaudy shields of various shapes (arms of this and other countries), also some huge glittering arches and things done in gold and silver paper, containing mottoes in big letters. i broke mr. beals's heart by persistently and inflexibly annulling and forbidding the biggest and gorgeousest of the arches--it had on it, in all the fires of the rainbow, “the home of mark twain,” in letters as big as your head. oh, we're going to be decorated sufficient, don't you worry about that, madam. clemens was one of those delegated to receive grant and to make a speech of welcome. it was a short speech but an effective one, for it made grant laugh. he began: “i am among those deputed to welcome you to the sincere and cordial hospitalities of hartford, the city of the historic and revered charter oak, of which most of the town is built.” he seemed to be at loss what to say next, and, leaning over, pretended to whisper to grant; then, as if he had obtained the information he wanted, he suddenly straightened up and poured out the old-fashioned eulogy on grant's achievements, adding, in an aside, as he finished: “i nearly forgot that part of my speech,” which evoked roars of laughter from the assembly and a grim smile from grant. he spoke of grant as being out of public employment, with private opportunities closed against him, and added, “but your country will reward you, never fear.” then he closed: when wellington won waterloo, a battle about on a level with any one of a dozen of your victories, sordid england tried to pay him for that service with wealth and grandeurs. she made him a duke and gave him $ , , . if you had done and suffered for any other country what you have done and suffered for your own you would have been affronted in the same sordid way. but, thank god! this vast and rich and mighty republic is imbued to the core with a delicacy which will forever preserve her from so degrading you. your country loves you--your country's proud of you--your country is grateful to you. her applauses, which have been many, thundering in your ears all these weeks and months, will never cease while the flag you saved continues to wave. your country stands ready from this day forth to testify her measureless love and pride and gratitude toward you in every conceivable--inexpensive way. welcome to hartford, great soldier, honored statesman, unselfish citizen. grant's grim smile showed itself more than once during the speech, and when clemens reached the sentence that spoke of his country rewarding him in “every conceivable--inexpensive way” his composure broke up completely and he “nearly laughed his entire head off,” according to later testimony, while the spectators shouted their approval. grant's son, col. fred grant,--[maj.-gen'l, u. s. army, . died april, .]--dined at the clemens home that night, and rev. joseph twichell and henry c. robinson. twichell's invitation was in the form of a telegram. it said: i want you to dine with us saturday half past five and meet col. fred grant. no ceremony. wear the same shirt you always wear. the campaign was at its height now, and on the evening of october th there was a grand republican rally at the opera-house with addresses by charles dudley warner, henry c. robinson, and mark twain. it was an unpleasant, drizzly evening, but the weather had no effect on their audience. the place was jammed and packed, the aisles, the windows, and the gallery railings full. hundreds who came as late as the hour announced for the opening were obliged to turn back, for the building had been thronged long before. mark twain's speech that night is still remembered in hartford as the greatest effort of his life. it was hardly that, except to those who were caught in the psychology of the moment, the tumult and the shouting of patriotism, the surge and sweep of the political tide. the roaring delight of the audience showed that to them at least it was convincing. howells wrote that he had read it twice, and that he could not put it out of his mind. whatever its general effect was need not now be considered. garfield was elected, and perhaps grant's visit to hartford and the great mass-meeting that followed contributed their mite to that result. clemens saw general grant again that year, but not on political business. the educational mission, which china had established in hartford--a thriving institution for eight years or more--was threatened now by certain chinese authorities with abolishment. yung wing (a yale graduate), the official by whom it had been projected and under whose management it had prospered, was deeply concerned, as was the rev. joseph twichell, whose interest in the mission was a large and personal one. yung wing declared that if influence could be brought upon li hung chang, then the most influential of chinese counselors, the mission might be saved. twichell, remembering the great honors which li hung chang had paid to general grant in china, also grant's admiration of mark twain, went to the latter without delay. necessarily clemens would be enthusiastic, and act promptly. he wrote to grant, and grant replied by telegraph, naming a day when he would see them in new york. they met at the fifth avenue hotel. grant was in fine spirits, and by no means the “silent man” of his repute. he launched at once into as free and flowing talk as i have ever heard [says twichell], marked by broad and intelligent views on the subject of china, her wants, disadvantages, etc. now and then he asked a question, but kept the lead of the conversation. at last he proposed, of his own accord, to write a letter to li hung chang, advising the continuance of the mission, asking only that i would prepare him some notes, giving him points to go by. thus we succeeded easily beyond our expectations, thanks, very largely, to clemens's assistance. clemens wrote howells of the interview, detailing at some length twichell's comical mixture of delight and chagrin at not being given time to air the fund of prepared statistics with which he had come loaded. it was as if he had come to borrow a dollar and had been offered a thousand before he could unfold his case. cxxxii. a new publisher it was near the end of the year that clemens wrote to his mother: i have two stories, and by the verbal agreement they are both going into the same book; but livy says they're not, and by george! she ought to know. she says they're going into separate books, and that one of them is going to be elegantly gotten up, even if the elegance of it eats up the publisher's profits and mine too. i anticipate that publisher's melancholy surprise when he calls here tuesday. however, let him suffer; it is his own fault. people who fix up agreements with me without first finding out what livy's plans are take their fate into their own hands. i said two stories, but one of them is only half done; two or three months' work on it yet. i shall tackle it wednesday or thursday; that is, if livy yields and allows both stories to go in one book, which i hope she won't. the reader may surmise that the finished story--the highly regarded story--was 'the prince and the pauper'. the other tale--the unfinished and less considered one was 'the adventures of huckleberry finn'. nobody appears to have been especially concerned about huck, except, possibly, the publisher. the publisher was not the american company. elisha bliss, after long ill health, had died that fall, and this fact, in connection with a growing dissatisfaction over the earlier contracts, had induced clemens to listen to offers from other makers of books. the revelation made by the “half-profit” returns from a tramp abroad meant to him, simply that the profits had not been fairly apportioned, and he was accordingly hostile. to orion he wrote that, had bliss lived, he would have remained with the company and made it reimburse him for his losses, but that as matters stood he would sever the long connection. it seemed a pity, later, that he did this, but the break was bound to come. clemens was not a business man, and bliss was not a philanthropist. he was, in fact, a shrewd, capable publisher, who made as good a contract as he could; yet he was square in his dealings, and the contract which clemens held most bitterly against him--that of 'roughing it'--had been made in good faith and in accordance with the conditions, of that period. in most of the later contracts clemens himself had named his royalties, and it was not in human nature--business human nature--for bliss to encourage the size of these percentages. if one wished to draw a strictly moral conclusion from the situation, one might say that it would have been better for the american publishing company, knowing mark twain, voluntarily to have allowed him half profits, which was the spirit of his old understanding even if not the letter of it, rather than to have waited till he demanded it and then to lose him by the result. perhaps that would be also a proper business deduction; only, as a rule, business morals are regulated by the contract, and the contract is regulated by the necessities and the urgency of demand. never mind. mark twain revised 'the prince and the pauper', sent it to howells, who approved of it mightily (though with reservations as to certain chapters), and gave it to james r. osgood, who was grateful and agreed to make it into a book upon which no expense for illustration or manufacture should be spared. it was to be a sort of partnership arrangement as between author and publisher, and large returns were anticipated. among the many letters which clemens was just then writing to howells one was dated “xmas eve.” it closes with the customary pleasantries and the final line: “but it is growing dark. merry christmas to all of you!” that last was a line of large significance. it meant that the air was filled with the whisper of hovering events and that he must mingle with the mystery of preparation. christmas was an important season in the clemens home. almost the entire day before, patrick was out with the sleigh, delivering food and other gifts in baskets to the poor, and the home preparations were no less busy. there was always a tree--a large one--and when all the gifts had been gathered in--when elmira and fredonia had delivered their contributions, and orion and his wife in keokuk had sent the annual sack of hickory-nuts (the big river-bottom nuts, big as a silver dollar almost, such nuts as few children of this later generation ever see) when all this happy revenue had been gathered, and the dusk of christmas eve had hurried the children off to bed, it was mrs. clemens who superintended the dressing of the tree, her husband assisting, with a willingness that was greater than his skill, and with a boy's anticipation in the surprise of it next morning. then followed the holidays, with parties and dances and charades, and little plays, with the warner and twichell children. to the clemens home the christmas season brought all the old round of juvenile happiness--the spirit of kindly giving, the brightness and the merrymaking, the gladness and tenderness and mystery that belong to no other season, and have been handed down through all the ages since shepherds watched on the plains of bethlehem. cxxxiii. the three fires--some benefactions the tradition that fires occur in groups of three was justified in the clemens household that winter. on each of three successive days flames started that might have led to ghastly results. the children were croupy, and one morning an alcohol lamp near little clara's bed, blown by the draught, set fire to the canopy. rosa, the nurse, entered just as the blaze was well started. she did not lose her presence of mind,--[rosa was not the kind to lose her head. once, in europe, when bay had crept between the uprights of a high balustrade, and was hanging out over destruction, rosa, discovering her, did not scream but spoke to her playfully and lifted her over into safety.]--but snatched the little girl out of danger, then opened the window and threw the burning bedding on the lawn. the child was only slightly scorched, but the escape was narrow enough. next day little jean was lying asleep in her crib, in front of an open wood fire, carefully protected by a firescreen, when a spark, by some ingenuity, managed to get through the mesh of the screen and land on the crib's lace covering. jean's nurse, julia, arrived to find the lace a gust of flame and the fire spreading. she grabbed the sleeping jean and screamed. rosa, again at hand, heard the scream, and rushing in once more opened a window and flung out the blazing bedclothes. clemens himself also arrived, and together they stamped out the fire. on the third morning, just before breakfast-time, susy was practising at the piano in the school-room, which adjoined the nursery. at one end of the room a fire of large logs was burning. susy was at the other end of the room, her back to the fire. a log burned in two and fell, scattering coals around the woodwork which supported the mantel. just as the blaze was getting fairly started a barber, waiting to trim mr. clemens's hair, chanced to look in and saw what was going on. he stepped into the nursery bath-room, brought a pitcher of water and extinguished the flames. this period was always referred to in the clemens household as the “three days of fire.” clemens would naturally make philosophical deductions from these coincidental dangers and the manner in which they had been averted. he said that all these things were comprehended in the first act of the first atom; that, but for some particular impulse given in that remote time, the alcohol flame would not have blown against the canopy, the spark would not have found its way through the screen, the log would not have broken apart in that dangerous way, and that rosa and julia and the barber would not have been at hand to save precious life and property. he did not go further and draw moral conclusions as to the purpose of these things: he never drew conclusions as to purpose. he was willing to rest with the event. logically he did not believe in reasons for things, but only that things were. nevertheless, he was always trying to change them; to have a hand in their improvement. had you asked him, he would have said that this, too, was all in the primal atom; that his nature, such as it was, had been minutely embodied there. in that charming volume, 'my mark twain', howells tells us of clemens's consideration, and even tenderness, for the negro race and his effort to repair the wrong done by his nation. mark twain's writings are full of similar evidence, and in his daily life he never missed an opportunity to pay tribute to the humbler race. he would go across the street to speak to an old negro, and to take his hand. he would read for a negro church when he would have refused a cathedral. howells mentions the colored student whose way through college clemens paid as a partial reparation “due from every white man to every black man.”--[mark twain paid two colored students through college. one of them, educated in a southern institution, became a minister of the gospel. the other graduated from the yale law school.]--this incident belongs just to the period of which we are now writing, and there is another which, though different enough, indicates the same tendency. garfield was about to be inaugurated, and it was rumored that frederick douglass might lose his position as marshal of the district of columbia. clemens was continually besought by one and another to use his influence with the administration, and in every case had refused. douglass had made no such, application. clemens, learning that the old negro's place was in danger, interceded for him of his own accord. he closed his letter to general garfield: a simple citizen may express a desire, with all propriety, in the matter of recommendation to office, and so i beg permission to hope that you will retain mr. douglass in his present office of marshal of the district of columbia, if such a course will not clash with your own preferences or with the expediencies and interests of your administration. i offer this petition with peculiar pleasure and strong desire, because i so honor this man's high and blemishless character, and so admire his brave, long crusade for the liberties and elevation of his race. he is a personal friend of mine, but that is nothing to the point; his history would move me to say these things without that, and i feel them, too. douglass wrote to clemens, thanking him for his interest; at the end he said: i think if a man is mean enough to want an office he ought to be noble enough to ask for it, and use all honorable means of getting it. i mean to ask, and i will use your letter as a part of my petition. it will put the president-elect in a good humor, in any case, and that is very important. with great respect, gratefully yours, frederick douglass. mark twain's benefactions were not all for the colored race. one morning in february of this same year, while the family were at late breakfast, george came in to announce “a lady waiting to see mr. clemens in the drawing-room.” clemens growled. “george,” he said, “it's a book agent. i won't see her. i'll die, in my tracks first.” he went, fuming and raging inwardly, and began at once to ask the nature of the intruder's business. then he saw that she was very young and modest, with none of the assurance of a canvasser, so he gave her a chance to speak. she told him that a young man employed in pratt & whitney's machine-shops had made a statue in clay, and would like to have mark twain come and look at it and see if it showed any promise of future achievement. his name, she said, was karl gerhardt, and he was her husband. clemens protested that he knew nothing about art, but the young woman's manner and appearance (she seemed scarcely more than a child) won him. he wavered, and finally promised that he would come the first chance he had; that in fact he would come some time during the next week. on her suggestion he agreed to come early in the week; he specified monday, “without fail.” when she was gone, and the door shut behind her, his usual remorse came upon him. he said to himself: “why didn't i go now? why didn't i go with her now?” she went from clemens's over to warner's. warner also resisted, but, tempted beyond his strength by her charm, laid down his work and went at once. when he returned he urged clemens to go without fail, and, true to promise, clemens took patrick, the coachman, and hunted up the place. clemens saw the statue, a seminude, for which the young wife had posed, and was struck by its evident merit. mrs. gerhardt told him the story of her husband's struggles between his daily work and the effort to develop his talent. he had never had a lesson, she said; if he could only have lessons what might he not accomplish? mrs. clemens and miss spaulding called next day, and were equally carried away with karl gerhardt, his young wife, and his effort to win his way in art. clemens and warner made up their minds to interest themselves personally in the matter, and finally persuaded the painter j. wells champney to come over from new york and go with them to the gerhardts' humble habitation, to see his work. champney approved of it. he thought it well worth while, he said, for the people of hartford to go to the expense of gerhardt's art education. he added that it would be better to get the judgment of a sculptor. so they brought over john quincy adams ward, who, like all the others, came away bewitched with these young people and their struggles for the sake of art. ward said: “if any stranger had told me that this 'prentice did not model that thing from plaster-casts i should not have believed it. it's full of crudities, but it's full of genius, too. hartford must send him to paris for two years; then, if the promise holds good, keep him there three more.” when he was gone mrs. clemens said: “youth, we won't wait for hartford to do it. it would take too long. let us send the gerhardts to paris ourselves, and say nothing about it to any one else.” so the gerhardts, provided with funds and an arrangement that would enable them to live for five years in paris if necessary, were started across the sea without further delay. clemens and his wife were often doing something of this sort. there was seldom a time that they were not paying the way of some young man or woman through college, or providing means and opportunity for development in some special field of industry. cxxxiv. literary projects and a monument to adam mark twain's literary work languished during this period. he had a world of plans, as usual, and wrote plentifully, but without direction or conclusion. “a curious experience,” which relates a circumstance told to him by an army officer, is about the most notable of the few completed manuscripts of this period. of the books projected (there were several), a burlesque manual of etiquette would seem to have been the most promising. howells had faith in it, and of the still remaining fragments a few seem worth quoting: at billiards if your ball glides along in the intense and immediate vicinity of the object-ball, and a count seems exquisitely imminent, lift one leg; then one shoulder; then squirm your body around in sympathy with the direction of the moving ball; and at the instant when the ball seems on the point of colliding throw up both of your arms violently. your cue will probably break a chandelier, but no matter; you have done what you could to help the count. at the dog-fight if it occur in your block, courteously give way to strangers desiring a view, particularly ladies. avoid showing partiality toward the one dog, lest you hurt the feelings of the other one. let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight--this is magnanimity; but bet on the other one--this is business. at poker if you draw to a flush and fail to fill, do not continue the conflict. if you hold a pair of trays, and your opponent is blind, and it costs you fifty to see him, let him remain unperceived. if you hold nothing but ace high, and by some means you know that the other man holds the rest of the aces, and he calls, excuse yourself; let him call again another time. wall street if you live in the country, buy at , sell at . avoid all forms of eccentricity. in the restaurant when you wish to get the waiter's attention, do not sing out “say!” simply say “szt!” his old abandoned notion of “hamlet” with an added burlesque character came back to him and stirred his enthusiasm anew, until even howells manifested deep interest in the matter. one reflects how young howells must have been in those days; how full of the joy of existence; also how mournfully he would consider such a sacrilege now. clemens proposed almost as many things to howells as his brother orion proposed to him. there was scarcely a letter that didn't contain some new idea, with a request for advice or co-operation. now it was some book that he meant to write some day, and again it would be a something that he wanted howells to write. once he urged howells to make a play, or at least a novel, out of orion. at another time he suggested as material the “rightful earl of durham.” he is a perfectly stunning literary bonanza, and must be dug up and put on the market. you must get his entire biography out of him and have it ready for osgood's magazine. even if it isn't worth printing, you must have it anyway, and use it one of these days in one of your stories or in a play. it was this notion about 'the american claimant' which somewhat later would lead to a collaboration with howells on a drama, and eventually to a story of that title. but clemens's chief interest at this time lay in publishing, rather than in writing. his association with osgood inspired him to devise new ventures of profit. he planned a 'library of american humor', which howells (soon to leave the atlantic) and “charley” clark--[charles hopkins clark, managing editor of the hartford courant.]--were to edit, and which osgood would publish, for subscription sale. without realizing it, clemens was taking his first step toward becoming his own publisher. his contract with osgood for 'the prince and the pauper' made him essentially that, for by the terms of it he agreed to supply all the money for the making of the book, and to pay osgood a royalty of seven and one-half per cent. for selling it, reversing the usual conditions. the contract for the library of humor was to be a similar one, though in this case osgood was to have a larger royalty return, and to share proportionately in the expense and risk. mark twain was entering into a field where he did not belong; where in the end he would harvest only disaster and regret. one curious project came to an end in --the plan for a monument to adam. in a sketch written a great many years later mark twain tells of the memorial which the rev. thomas k. beecher and himself once proposed to erect to our great common ancestor. the story is based on a real incident. clemens, in elmira one day (it was october, ), heard of a jesting proposal made by f. g. hall to erect a monument in elmira to adam. the idea promptly caught mark twain's fancy. he observed to beecher that the human race really showed a pretty poor regard for its great progenitor, who was about to be deposed by darwin's simian, not to pay him the tribute of a single monument. mankind, he said, would probably accept the monkey ancestor, and in time the very name of adam would be forgotten. he declared mr. hall's suggestion to be a sound idea. beecher agreed that there were many reasons why a monument should be erected to adam, and suggested that a subscription be started for the purpose. certain business men, seeing an opportunity for advertising the city, took the matter semi-seriously, and offered to contribute large sums in the interest of the enterprise. then it was agreed that congress should be petitioned to sanction the idea exclusively to elmira, prohibiting the erection of any such memorial elsewhere. a document to this effect was prepared, headed by f. g. hall, and signed by other leading citizens of elmira, including beecher himself. general joe hawley came along just then on a political speech-making tour. clemens introduced him, and hawley, in turn, agreed to father the petition in congress. what had begun merely as pleasantry began to have a formidable look. but alas! in the end hawley's courage had failed him. he began to hate his undertaking. he was afraid of the national laugh it would arouse, the jeers of the newspapers. it was certain to leak out that mark twain was behind it, in spite of the fact that his name nowhere appeared; that it was one of his colossal jokes. now and then, in the privacy of his own room at night, hawley would hunt up the adam petition and read it and feel the cold sweat breaking out. he postponed the matter from one session to another till the summer of , when he was about to sail for europe. then he gave the document to his wife, to turn over to clemens, and ignominiously fled. [for text of the petition in full, etc., see appendix p, at the end of last volume.] mark twain's introduction of hawley at elmira contained this pleasantry: “general hawley was president of the centennial commission. was a gallant soldier in the war. he has been governor of connecticut, member of congress, and was president of the convention that nominated abraham lincoln.” general hawley: “that nominated grant.” twain: “he says it was grant, but i know better. he is a member of my church at hartford, and the author of 'beautiful snow.' maybe he will deny that. but i am only here to give him a character from his last place. as a pure citizen, i respect him; as a personal friend of years, i have the warmest regard for him; as a neighbor whose vegetable garden joins mine, why--why, i watch him. that's nothing; we all do that with any neighbor. general hawley keeps his promises, not only in private, but in public. he is an editor who believes what he writes in his own paper. as the author of 'beautiful snow' he added a new pang to winter. he is broad-souled, generous, noble, liberal, alive to his moral and religious responsibilities. whenever the contribution-box was passed i never knew him to take out a cent.” cxxxv. a trip with sherman and an interview with grant. the army of the potomac gave a dinner in hartford on the th of june, . but little memory remains of it now beyond mark twain's speech and a bill of fare containing original comments, ascribed to various revered authors, such as johnson, milton, and carlyle. a pleasant incident followed, however, which clemens himself used to relate. general sherman attended the banquet, and secretary of war, robert lincoln. next morning clemens and twichell were leaving for west point, where they were to address the military students, guests on the same special train on which lincoln and sherman had their private car. this car was at the end of the train, and when the two passengers reached the station, sherman and lincoln were out on the rear platform addressing the multitude. clemens and twichell went in and, taking seats, waited for them. as the speakers finished the train started, but they still remained outside, bowing and waving to the assembled citizens, so that it was under good headway before they came in. sherman came up to clemens, who sat smoking unconcernedly. “well,” he said, “who told you you could go in this car?” “nobody,” said clemens. “do you expect to pay extra fare?” asked sherman. “no,” said clemens. “i don't expect to pay any fare.” “oh, you don't. then you'll work your way.” sherman took off his coat and military hat and made clemens put them on. “now,” said he, “whenever the train stops you go out on the platform and represent me and make a speech.” it was not long before the train stopped, and clemens, according to orders, stepped out on the rear platform and bowed to the crowd. there was a cheer at the sight of his military uniform. then the cheer waned, became a murmur of uncertainty, followed by an undertone of discussion. presently somebody said: “say, that ain't sherman, that's mark twain,” which brought another cheer. then sherman had to come out too, and the result was that both spoke. they kept this up at the different stations, and sometimes lincoln came out with them. when there was time all three spoke, much to the satisfaction of their audiences. president garfield was shot that summer--july , .--[on the day that president garfield was shot mrs. clemens received from their friend reginald cholmondeley a letter of condolence on the death of her husband in australia; startling enough, though in reality rather comforting than otherwise, for the reason that the “mark twain” who had died in australia was a very persistent impostor. clemens wrote cholmondeley: “being dead i might be excused from writing letters, but i am not that kind of a corpse. may i never be so dead as to neglect the hail of a friend from a far land.” out of this incident grew a feature of an anecdote related in following the equator the joke played by the man from bendigo.]--he died september th, and arthur came into power. there was a great feeling of uncertainty as to what he would do. he was regarded as “an excellent gentleman with a weakness for his friends.” incumbents holding appointive offices were in a state of dread. howells's father was consul at toronto, and, believing his place to be in danger, he appealed to his son. in his book howells tells how, in turn, he appealed to clemens, remembering his friendship with grant and grant's friendship with arthur. he asked clemens to write to grant, but clemens would hear of nothing less than a call on the general, during which the matter would be presented to him in person. howells relates how the three of them lunched together, in a little room just out of the office, on baked beans and coffee, brought in from some near-by restaurant: the baked beans and coffee were of about the railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with grant was like sitting down to baked beans and coffee with julius caesar, or alexander, or some other great plutarchan captain. clemens, also recalling the interview, once added some interesting details: “i asked grant if he wouldn't write a word on a card which howells could carry to washington and hand to the president. but, as usual, general grant was his natural self--that is to say, ready and determined to do a great deal more for you than you could possibly ask him to do. he said he was going to washington in a couple of days to dine with the president, and he would speak to him himself on the subject and make it a personal matter. grant was in the humor to talk--he was always in a humor to talk when no strangers were present--he forced us to stay and take luncheon in a private room, and continued to talk all the time. it was baked beans, but how 'he sits and towers,' howells said, quoting dame. grant remembered 'squibob' derby (john phoenix) at west point very well. he said that derby was always drawing caricatures of the professors and playing jokes on every body. he told a thing which i had heard before but had never seen in print. a professor questioning a class concerning certain particulars of a possible siege said, 'suppose a thousand men are besieging a fortress whose equipment of provisions is so-and-so; it is a military axiom that at the end of forty-five days the fort will surrender. now, young men, if any of you were in command of such a fortress, how would you proceed?' “derby held up his hand in token that he had an answer for that question. he said, 'i would march out, let the enemy in, and at the end of forty-five days i would change places with him.' “i tried hard, during that interview, to get general grant to agree to write his personal memoirs for publication, but he wouldn't listen to the suggestion. his inborn diffidence made him shrink from voluntarily coming before the public and placing himself under criticism as an author. he had no confidence in his ability to write well; whereas we all know now that he possessed an admirable literary gift and style. he was also sure that the book would have no sale, and of course that would be a humility too. i argued that the book would have an enormous sale, and that out of my experience i could save him from making unwise contracts with publishers, and would have the contract arranged in such a way that they could not swindle him, but he said he had no necessity for any addition to his income. of course he could not foresee that he was camping on a volcano; that as ward's partner he was a ruined man even then, and of course i had no suspicion that in four years from that time i would become his publisher. he would not agree to write his memoirs. he only said that some day he would make very full notes and leave them behind him, and then if his children chose to make them into a book they could do so. we came away then. he fulfilled his promise entirely concerning howells's father, who held his office until he resigned of his own accord.” cxxxvi. “the prince and the pauper” during the summer absence alterations were made in the hartford home, with extensive decorations by tiffany. the work was not completed when the family returned. clemens wrote to charles warren stoddard, then in the sandwich islands, that the place was full of carpenters and decorators, whereas what they really needed was “an incendiary.” if the house would only burn down we would pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes of the crater of haleakala and get a good rest, for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the telegraph; and after resting we would come down the mountain a piece and board with a godly, breech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt, and give thanks to whom all thanks belong for these privileges, and never housekeep any more. they had acquired more ground. one morning in the spring mark twain had looked out of his window just in time to see a man lift an ax to cut down a tree on the lot which lay between his own and that of his neighbor. he had heard that a house was to be built there; altogether too close to him for comfort and privacy. leaning out of the window he called sonorously, “woodman, spare that tree!” then he hurried down, obtained a stay of proceedings, and without delay purchased the lot from the next-door neighbor who owned it, acquiring thereby one hundred feet of extra ground and a greenhouse which occupied it. it was a costly purchase; the owner knew he could demand his own price; he asked and received twelve thousand dollars for the strip. in november, clemens found that he must make another trip to canada. 'the prince and the pauper' was ready for issue, and to insure canadian copyright the author must cross the line in person. he did not enjoy the prospect of a cold-weather trip to the north, and tried to tempt howells to go with him, but only succeeded in persuading osgood, who would do anything or go anywhere that offered the opportunity for pleasant company and junket. it was by no means an unhappy fortnight. clemens took a note-book, and there are plenty of items that give reality to that long-ago excursion. he found the canadian girls so pretty that he records it as a relief now and then to see a plain one. on another page he tells how one night in the hotel a mouse gnawed and kept him awake, and how he got up and hunted for it, hoping to destroy it. he made a rebus picture for the children of this incident in a letter home. we get a glimpse just here of how he was constantly viewing himself as literary material--human material--an example from which some literary aspect or lesson may be drawn. following the mouse adventure we find it thus dramatized: trace father brebeuf all through this trip, and when i am in a rage and can't endure the mouse be reading of brebeuf's marvelous endurances and be shamed. and finally, after chasing the bright-eyed rascal several days, and throwing things and trying to jump on him when in my overshoes, he darts away with those same bright eyes, then straightway i read brebeuf's magnificent martyrdom, and turn in, subdued and wondering. by and by the thought occurs to me, brebeuf, with his good, great heart would spare even that poor humble mousie--and for his sake so will i--i will throw the trap in the fire--jump out of bed, reach under, fetch out the trap, and find him throttled there and not two minutes dead. they gave him a dinner in montreal. louis frechette, the canadian poet, was there and clemens addressed him handsomely in the response he made to the speech of welcome. from that moment frechette never ceased to adore mark twain, and visited him soon after the return to hartford. 'the prince and the pauper' was published in england, canada, germany, and america early in december, . there had been no stint of money, and it was an extremely handsome book. the pen-and-ink drawings were really charming, and they were lavish as to number. it was an attractive volume from every standpoint, and it was properly dedicated “to those good-mannered and agreeable children, susy and clara clemens.” the story itself was totally unlike anything that mark twain had done before. enough of its plan and purpose has been given in former chapters to make a synopsis of it unnecessary here. the story of the wandering prince and the pauper king--an impressive picture of ancient legal and regal cruelty--is as fine and consistent a tale as exists in the realm of pure romance. unlike its great successor, the 'yankee at king arthur's court', it never sacrifices the illusion to the burlesque, while through it all there runs a delicate vein of humor. only here and there is there the slightest disillusion, and this mainly in the use of some ultra-modern phrase or word. mark twain never did any better writing than some of the splendid scenes in 'the prince and the pauper'. the picture of old london bridge; the scene in the vagabond's retreat, with its presentation to the little king of the wrongs inflicted by the laws of his realm; the episode of the jail where his revelation reaches a climax--these are but a few of the splendid pictures which the chapters portray, while the spectacle of england acquiring mercy at the hands of two children, a king and a beggar, is one which only genius could create. one might quote here, but to do so without the context would be to sacrifice atmosphere, half the story's charm. how breathlessly interesting is the tale of it! we may imagine that first little audience at mark twain's fireside hanging expectant on every paragraph, hungry always for more. of all mark twain's longer works of fiction it is perhaps the most coherent as to plot, the most carefully thought out, the most perfect as to workmanship. this is not to say that it is his greatest story. probably time will not give it that rank, but it comes near to being a perfectly constructed story, and it has an imperishable charm. it was well received, though not always understood by the public. the reviewer was so accustomed to looking for the joke in mark twain's work, that he found it hard to estimate this new product. some even went so far as to refer to it as one of mark twain's big jokes, meaning probably that he had created a chapter in english history with no foundation beyond his fancy. of course these things pained the author of the book. at one time, he had been inclined to publish it anonymously, to avert this sort of misunderstanding, and sometimes now he regretted not having done so. yet there were many gratifying notices. the new york herald reviewer gave the new book two columns of finely intelligent appreciation. in part he said: to those who have followed the career of mark twain, his appearance as the author of a charming and noble romance is really no more of a surprise than to see a stately structure risen upon sightly ground owned by an architect of genius, with the resources of abundant building material and ample training at command. of his capacity they have had no doubt, and they rejoice in his taking a step which they felt he was able to take. through all his publications may be traced the marks of the path which half led up to this happy height. his humor has often been the cloak, but not the mask, of a sturdy purpose. his work has been characterized by a manly love of truth, a hatred of humbug, and a scorn for cant. a genial warmth and whole-souledness, a beautiful fancy, a fertile imagination, and a native feeling for the picturesque and a fine eye for color have afforded the basis of a style which has become more and more plastic and finished. and in closing: the characters of these two boys, twins in spirit, will rank with the purest and loveliest creations of child-life in the realm of fiction. cxxxvii. certain attacks and reprisals beyond the publication of the prince and the pauper clemens was sparingly represented in print in ' . a chapter originally intended for the book, the “whipping boy's story,” he gave to the bazaar budget, a little special-edition sheet printed in hartford. it was the story of the 'bull and the bees' which he later adapted for use in joan of arc, the episode in which joan's father rides a bull to a funeral. howells found that it interfered with the action in the story of the prince, and we might have spared it from the story of joan, though hardly without regret. the military story “a curious episode” was published in the century magazine for november. the fact that clemens had heard, and not invented, the story was set forth quite definitely and fully in his opening paragraphs. nevertheless, a “captious reader” thought it necessary to write to a new york publication concerning its origin: i am an admirer of the writings of mr. mark twain, and consequently, when i saw the table of contents of the november number of the century, i bought it and turned at once to the article bearing his name, and entitled, “a curious episode.” when i began to read it, it struck me as strangely familiar, and i soon recognized the story as a true one, told me in the summer of by an officer of the united states artillery. query: did mr. twain expect the public to credit this narrative to his clever brain? the editor, seeing a chance for mark twain “copy,” forwarded a clipping to clemens and asked him if he had anything to say in the matter. clemens happened to know the editor very well, and he did have something to say, not for print, but for the editor's private ear. the newspaper custom of shooting a man in the back and then calling upon him to come out in a card and prove that he was not engaged in any infamy at the time is a good enough custom for those who think it justifiable. your correspondent is not stupid, i judge, but purely and simply malicious. he knew there was not the shadow of a suggestion, from the beginning to the end of “a curious episode,” that the story was an invention; he knew he had no warrant for trying to persuade the public that i had stolen the narrative and was endeavoring to palm it off as a piece of literary invention; he also knew that he was asking his closing question with a base motive, else he would have asked it of me by letter, not spread it before the public. i have never wronged you in any way, and i think you had no right to print that communication; no right, neither any excuse. as to publicly answering that correspondent, i would as soon think of bandying words in public with any other prostitute. the editor replied in a manly, frank acknowledgment of error. he had not looked up the article itself in the century before printing the communication. “your letter has taught me a lesson,” he said. “the blame belongs to me for not hunting up the proofs. please accept my apology.” mark twain was likely to be peculiarly sensitive to printed innuendos. not always. sometimes he would only laugh at them or be wholly indifferent. indeed, in his later years, he seldom cared to read anything about himself, one way or the other, but at the time of which we are now writing--the period of the early eighties--he was alive to any comment of the press. his strong sense of humor, and still stronger sense of human weakness, caused him to overlook many things which another might regard as an affront; but if the thing printed were merely an uncalled-for slur, an inexcusable imputation, he was inclined to rage and plan violence. sometimes he conceived retribution in the form of libel suits with heavy damages. sometimes he wrote blasting answers, which mrs. clemens would not let him print. at one time he planned a biography of a certain editor who seemed to be making a deliberate personal campaign against his happiness. clemens had heard that offending items were being printed in this man's paper; friends, reporting with customary exaggeration, declared that these sneers and brutalities appeared almost daily, so often as to cause general remark. this was enough. he promptly began to collect data--damaging data--relating to that editor's past history. he even set a man to work in england collecting information concerning his victim. one of his notebooks contains the memoranda; a few items will show how terrific was to be the onslaught. when the naturalist finds a new kind of animal, he writes him up in the interest of science. no matter if it is an unpleasant animal. this is a new kind of animal, and in the cause of society must be written up. he is the polecat of our species.... he is purely and simply a guiteau with the courage left out.... steel portraits of him as a sort of idiot, from infancy up--to a dozen scattered through the book--all should resemble him. but never mind the rest. when he had got thoroughly interested in his project mrs. clemens, who had allowed the cyclone to wear itself out a little with its own vehemence, suggested that perhaps it would be well to have some one make an examination of the files of the paper and see just what had been said of him. so he subscribed for the paper himself and set a man to work on the back numbers. we will let him tell the conclusion of the matter himself, in his report of it to howells: the result arrived from my new york man this morning. oh, what a pitiable wreck of high hopes! the “almost daily” assaults for two months consist of ( ) adverse criticism of p. & p. from an enraged idiot in the london athenaeum, ( ) paragraphs from some indignant englishman in the pall mall gazette, who pays me the vast compliment of gravely rebuking some imaginary ass who has set me up in the neighborhood of rabelais, ( ) a remark about the montreal dinner, touched with an almost invisible satire, and, ( ) a remark about refusal of canadian copyright, not complimentary, but not necessarily malicious; and of course adverse criticism which is not malicious is a thing which none but fools irritate themselves about. there, that is the prodigious bugaboo in its entirety! can you conceive of a man's getting himself into a sweat over so diminutive a provocation? i am sure i can't. what the devil can those friends of mine have been thinking about to spread those three or four harmless things out into two months of daily sneers and affronts? boiled down, this vast outpouring of malice amounts to simply this: one jest (one can make nothing more serious than that out of it). one jest, and that is all; for foreign criticisms do not count, they being matters of news, and proper for publication in anybody's newspaper.... well, my mountain has brought forth its mouse, and a sufficiently small mouse it is, god knows. and my three weeks' hard work has got to go into the ignominious pigeonhole. confound it, i could have earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble. howells refers to this episode, and concludes: so the paper was acquitted and the editor's life was spared. the wretch never, never knew how near he was to losing it, with incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a subsequent devotion to lasting infamy. cxxxviii. many undertakings to write a detailed biography of mark twain at this period would be to defy perusal. even to set down all the interesting matters, interesting to the public of his time, would mean not only to exhaust the subject, but the reader. he lived at the top of his bent, and almost anything relating to him was regarded as news. daily and hourly he mingled with important matters or spoke concerning them. a bare list of the interesting events of mark twain's life would fill a large volume. he was so busy, so deeply interested himself, so vitally alive to every human aspect. he read the papers through, and there was always enough to arouse his indignation--the doings of the human race at large could be relied upon to do that--and he would write, and write, to relieve himself. his mental niagara was always pouring away, turning out articles, essays, communications on every conceivable subject, mainly with the idea of reform. there were many public and private abuses, and he wanted to correct them all. he covered reams of paper with lurid heresies--political, religious, civic--for most of which there was no hope of publication. now and then he was allowed to speak out: an order from the past-office department at washington concerning the superscription of envelopes seemed to him unwarranted. he assailed it, and directly the nation was being entertained by a controversy between mark twain and the postmaster-general's private secretary, who subsequently receded from the field. at another time, on the matter of postage rates he wrote a paper which began: “reader, suppose you were an idiot. and suppose you were a member of congress. but i repeat myself.” it is hardly necessary to add that the paper did not appear. on the whole, clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to print, and such of these papers as are preserved to-day form a curious collection of human documents. many of them could be printed to-day, without distress to any one. the conditions that invited them are changed; the heresies are not heresies any more. he may have had some thought of their publication in later years, for once he wrote: sometimes my feelings are so hot that i have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because i can't print the result. i have just finished an article of this kind, and it satisfies me entirely. it does my weather-beaten soul good to read it, and admire the trouble it would make for me and the family. i will leave it behind and utter it from the grave. there is a free speech there, and no harm to the family. it is too late and too soon to print most of these things; too late to print them for their salutary influence, too soon to print them as literature. he was interested in everything: in music, as little as he knew of it. he had an ear for melody, a dramatic vision, and the poetic conception of sound. reading some lilting lyric, he could fancy the words marching to melody, and would cast about among his friends for some one who could supply a tuneful setting. once he wrote to his friend the rev. dr. parker, who was a skilled musician, urging him to write a score for tennyson's “bugle song,” outlining an attractive scheme for it which the order of his fancy had formulated. dr. parker replied that the “bugle song,” often attempted, had been the despair of many musicians. he was interested in business affairs. already, before the european trip, he had embarked in, and disembarked from, a number of pecuniary ventures. he had not been satisfied with a strictly literary income. the old tendency to speculative investment, acquired during those restless mining days, always possessed him. there were no silver mines in the east, no holes in the ground into which to empty money and effort; but there were plenty of equivalents--inventions, stock companies, and the like. he had begun by putting five thousand dollars into the american publishing company; but that was a sound and profitable venture, and deserves to be remembered for that reason. then a man came along with a patent steam generator which would save ninety per cent. of the fuel energy, or some such amount, and mark twain was early persuaded that it would revolutionize the steam manufactures of the world; so he put in whatever bank surplus he had and bade it a permanent good-by. following the steam generator came a steam pulley, a rather small contrivance, but it succeeded in extracting thirty-two thousand dollars from his bank account in a period of sixteen months. by the time he had accumulated a fresh balance, a new method of marine telegraphy was shown him, so he used it up on that, twenty-five thousand dollars being the price of this adventure. a watch company in western new york was ready to sell him a block of shares by the time he was prepared to experiment again, but it did not quite live to declare the first dividend on his investment. senator john p. jones invited him to join in the organization of an accident insurance company, and such was jones's confidence in the venture that he guaranteed clemens against loss. mark twain's only profit from this source was in the delivery of a delicious speech, which he made at a dinner given to cornelius walford, of london, an insurance author of repute. jones was paying back the money presently, and about that time came a young inventor named graham bell, offering stock in a contrivance for carrying the human voice on an electric wire. at almost any other time clemens would eagerly have welcomed this opportunity; but he was so gratified at having got his money out of the insurance venture that he refused to respond to the happy “hello” call of fortune. in some memoranda made thirty years later he said: i declined. i said i didn't want anything more to do with wildcat speculation. then he [bell] offered the stock to me at twenty-five. i said i didn't want it at any price. he became eager; insisted that i take five hundred dollars' worth. he said he would sell me as much as i wanted for five hundred dollars; offered to let me gather it up in my hands and measure it in a plug hat; said i could have a whole hatful for five hundred dollars. but i was the burnt child, and i resisted all these temptations-resisted them easily; went off with my check intact, and next day lent five thousand of it, on an unendorsed note, to a friend who was going to go bankrupt three days later. about the end of the year i put up a telephone wire from my house down to the courant office, the only telephone wire in town, and the first one that was ever used in a private house in the world. that had been only a little while before he sailed for europe. when he returned he would have been willing to accept a very trifling interest in the telephone industry for the amount of his insurance salvage. he had a fresh interest in patents now, and when his old friend dan slote got hold of a new process for engraving--the kaolatype or “chalk-plate” process--which was going to revolutionize the world of illustration, he promptly acquired a third interest, and eventually was satisfied with nothing short of control. it was an ingenious process: a sheet of perfectly smooth steel was coated with a preparation of kaolin (or china clay), and a picture was engraved through the coating down to the steel surface. this formed the matrix into which the molten metal was poured to make the stereotype plate, or die, for printing. it was clemens's notion that he could utilize this process for the casting of brass dies for stamping book covers--that, so applied, the fortunes to be made out of it would be larger and more numerous. howells tells how, at one time, clemens thought the “damned human race” was almost to be redeemed by a process of founding brass without air-bubbles in it. this was the time referred to and the race had to go unredeemed; for, after long, worried, costly experimenting, the brass refused to accommodate its nature to the new idea, while the chalk plate itself, with all its subsidiary and auxiliary possibilities, was infringed upon right and left, and the protecting patent failed to hold. the process was doomed, in any case. it was barely established before the photographic etching processes, superior in all ways, were developed and came quickly into use. the kaolatype enterprise struggled nobly for a considerable period. clemens brought his niece's husband, young charles l. webster, from fredonia to manage it for him, and backed it liberally. webster was vigorous, hard-working, and capable; but the end of each month showed a deficit, until clemens was from forty to fifty thousand dollars out of pocket in his effort to save the race with chalk and brass. the history of these several ventures (and there were others), dismissed here in a few paragraphs, would alone make a volume not without interest, certainly not without humor. following came the type-setting machine, but we are not ready for that. of necessity it is a longer, costlier story. mrs. clemens did not share his enthusiasm in these various enterprises. she did not oppose them, at least not strenuously, but she did not encourage them. she did not see their need. their home was beautiful; they were happy; he could do his work in deliberation and comfort. she knew the value of money better than he, cared more for it in her own way; but she had not his desire to heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in torrential golden showers. she was willing to let well enough alone. clemens could not do this, and suffered accordingly. in the midst of fair home surroundings and honors we find him writing to his mother: life has come to be a very serious matter with me. i have a badgered, harassed feeling a good part of my time. it comes mainly from business responsibilities and annoyances. he had no moral right to be connected with business at all. he had a large perception of business opportunity, but no vision of its requirements--its difficulties and details. he was the soul of honor, but in anything resembling practical direction he was but a child. during any period of business venture he was likely to be in hot water: eagerly excited, worried, impatient; alternately suspicious and over-trusting, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset. yet never, even to the end of his days, would he permanently lose faith in speculative ventures. human traits are sometimes modified, but never eliminated. the man who is born to be a victim of misplaced confidence will continue to be one so long as he lives and there are men willing to victimize him. the man who believes in himself as an investor will uphold that faith against all disaster so long as he draws breath and has money to back his judgments. cxxxix. financial and literary by a statement made on the st of january, , of mark twain's disbursements for the preceding year, it is shown that considerably more than one hundred thousand dollars had been expended during that twelve months. it is a large sum for an author to pay out in one year. it would cramp most authors to do it, and it was not the best financing, even for mark twain. it required all that the books could earn, all the income from the various securities, and a fair sum from their principal. there is a good deal of biography in the statement. of the amount expended forty-six thousand dollars represented investments; but of this comfortable sum less than five thousand dollars would cover the legitimate purchases; the rest had gone in the “ventures” from whose bourne no dollar would ever return. also, a large sum had been spent for the additional land and for improvements on the home--somewhat more than thirty thousand dollars altogether--while the home life had become more lavish, the establishment had grown each year to a larger scale, the guests and entertainments had become more and, more numerous, until the actual household expenditure required about as much as the books and securities could earn. it was with the increased scale of living that clemens had become especially eager for some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. like colonel sellers, he must have something with “millions in it.” almost any proposition that seemed to offer these possible millions appealed to him, and in his imagination he saw the golden freshet pouring in. his natural taste was for a simple, inexpensive life; yet in his large hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur, he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and delight of his guests. there were always guests; they were coming and going constantly. clemens used to say that he proposed to establish a bus line between their house and the station for the accommodation of his company. he had the southern hospitality. much company appealed to a very large element in his strangely compounded nature. for the better portion of the year he was willing to pay the price of it, whether in money or in endurance, and mrs. clemens heroically did her part. she loved these things also, in her own way. she took pride in them, and realized that they were a part of his vast success. yet in her heart she often longed for the simpler life--above all, for the farm life at elmira. her spirit cried out for the rest and comfort there. in one of her letters she says: the house has been full of company, and i have been “whirled around.” how can a body help it? oh, i cannot help sighing for the peace and quiet of the farm. this is my work, and i know that i do very wrong when i feel chafed by it, but how can i be right about it? sometimes it seems as if the simple sight of people would drive me mad. i am all wrong; if i would simply accept the fact that this is my work and let other things go, i know i should not be so fretted; but i want so much to do other things, to study and do things with the children, and i cannot. i have the best french teacher that i ever had, and if i could give any time to it i could not help learning french. when we reflect on the conditions, we are inclined to say how much better it would have been to have remained there among the hills in that quiet, inexpensive environment, to have let the world go. but that was not possible. the game was of far larger proportions than any that could be restricted to the limits of retirement and the simpler round of life. mark twain's realm had become too large for his court to be established in a cottage. it is hard to understand that in spite of a towering fame mark twain was still not regarded by certain american arbiters of reputations as a literary fixture; his work was not yet recognized by them as being of important meaning and serious purport. in boston, at that time still the athens of america, he was enjoyed, delighted in; but he was not honored as being quite one of the elect. howells tells us that: in proportion as people thought themselves refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude. even at the atlantic dinners his place was “below the salt”--a place of honor, but not of the greatest honor. he did not sit on the dais with emerson, longfellow, holmes, whittier, howells, and aldrich. we of a later period, who remember him always as the center of every board--the one supreme figure, his splendid head and crown of silver hair the target of every eye-find it hard to realize the cambridge conservatism that clad him figuratively always in motley, and seated him lower than the throne itself. howells clearly resented this condition, and from random review corners had ventured heresy. now in he seems to have determined to declare himself, in a large, free way, concerning his own personal estimate of mark twain. he prepared for the century magazine a biographical appreciation, in which he served notice to the world that mark twain's work, considered even as literature, was of very considerable importance indeed. whether or not howells then realized the “inspired knowledge of the multitude,” and that most of the nation outside of the counties of suffolk and essex already recognized his claim, is not material. very likely he did; but he also realized the mental dusk of the cultured uninspired and his prerogative to enlighten them. his century article was a kind of manifesto, a declaration of independence, no longer confined to the obscurities of certain book notices, where of course one might be expected to stretch friendly favor a little for a popular atlantic contributor. in the open field of the century magazine howells ventured to declare: mark twain's humor is as simple in form and as direct as the statesmanship of lincoln or the generalship of grant. when i think how purely and wholly american it is i am a little puzzled at its universal acceptance.... why, in fine, should an english chief-justice keep mark twain's books always at hand? why should darwin have gone to them for rest and refreshment at midnight, when spent with scientific research? i suppose that mark twain transcends all other american humorists in the universal qualities. he deals very little with the pathetic, which he nevertheless knows very well how to manage, as he has shown, notably in the true story of the old slave-mother; but there is a poetic lift in his work, even when he permits you to recognize it only as something satirized. there is always the touch of nature, the presence of a sincere and frank manliness in what he says, the companionship of a spirit which is at once delightfully open and deliciously shrewd. elsewhere i have tried to persuade the reader that his humor is, at its best, the foamy break of the strong tide of earnestness in him. but it would be limiting him unjustly to describe him as a satirist, and it is hardly practicable to establish him in people's minds as a moralist; he has made them laugh too long; they will not believe him serious; they think some joke is always intended. this is the penalty, as dr. holmes has pointed out, of making one's first success as a humorist. there was a paper of mark twain's printed in the atlantic monthly some years ago and called, “the facts concerning the late carnival of crime in connecticut,” which ought to have won popular recognition of the ethical intelligence underlying his humor. it was, of course, funny; but under the fun it was an impassioned study of the human conscience. hawthorne or bunyan might have been proud to imagine that powerful allegory, which had a grotesque force far beyond either of them.... yet it quite failed of the response i had hoped for it, and i shall not insist here upon mark twain as a moralist; though i warn the reader that if he leaves out of the account an indignant sense of right and wrong, a scorn of all affectations and pretense, an ardent hate of meanness and injustice, he will come infinitely short of knowing mark twain. howells realized the unwisdom and weakness of dogmatic insistence, and the strength of understatement. to him mark twain was already the moralist, the philosopher, and the statesman; he was willing that the reader should take his time to realize these things. the article, with his subject's portrait as a frontispiece, appeared in the century for september, . if it carried no new message to many of its readers, it at least set the stamp of official approval upon what they had already established in their hearts. cxl. down the river osgood was doing no great things with the prince and the pauper, but clemens gave him another book presently, a collection of sketches--the stolen white elephant. it was not an especially important volume, though some of the features, such as “mrs. mcwilliams and the lightning” and the “carnival of crime,” are among the best of their sort, while the “elephant” story is an amazingly good take-off on what might be called the spectacular detective. the interview between inspector blunt and the owner of the elephant is typical. the inspector asks: “now what does this elephant eat, and how much?” “well, as to what he eats--he will eat anything. he will eat a man, he will eat a bible; he will eat anything between a man and a bible.” “good-very good, indeed, but too general. details are necessary; details are the only valuable thing in our trade. very well, as to men. at one meal--or, if you prefer, during one day--how many men will he eat if fresh?” “he would not care whether they were fresh or not; at a single meal he would eat five ordinary men.” “very good; five men. we will put that down. what nationalities would he prefer?” “he is indifferent about nationalities. he prefers acquaintances, but is not prejudiced against strangers.” “very good. now, as to bibles. how many bibles would he eat at a meal?” “he would eat an entire edition.” clemens and osgood had a more important publishing enterprise on hand. the long-deferred completion of the mississippi book was to be accomplished; the long-deferred trip down the river was to be taken. howells was going abroad, but the charming osgood was willing to make the excursion, and a young man named roswell phelps, of hartford, was engaged as a stenographer to take the notes. clemens made a farewell trip to boston to see howells before his departure, and together they went to concord to call on emerson; a fortunate thing, for he lived but a few weeks longer. they went again in the evening, not to see him, but to stand reverently outside and look at his house. this was in april. longfellow had died in march. the fact that howells was going away indefinitely, made them reminiscent and sad. just what breach clemens committed during this visit is not remembered now, and it does not matter; but his letter to howells, after his return to hartford, makes it pretty clear that it was memorable enough at the time. half-way in it he breaks out: but oh, hell, there is no hope for a person that is built like me, because there is no cure, no cure. if i could only know when i have committed a crime: then i could conceal it, and not go stupidly dribbling it out, circumstance by circumstance, into the ears of a person who will give no sign till the confession is complete; and then the sudden damnation drops on a body like the released pile-driver, and he finds himself in the earth down to his chin. when he merely supposed he was being entertaining. next day he was off with osgood and the stenographer for st. louis, where they took the steamer gold dust down the river. he intended to travel under an assumed name, but was promptly recognized, both at the southern hotel and on the boat. in 'life on the mississippi' he has given us the atmosphere of his trip, with his new impressions of old scenes; also his first interview with the pilot, whom he did not remember, but who easily remembered him. “i did not write that story in the book quite as it happened,” he reflected once, many years later. “we went on board at night. next morning i was up bright and early and out on deck to see if i could recognize any of the old landmarks. i could not remember any. i did not know where we were at all. it was a new river to me entirely. i climbed up in the pilot-house and there was a fellow of about forty at the wheel. i said 'good morning.' he answered pleasantly enough. his face was entirely strange to me. then i sat down on the high seat back of the wheel and looked out at the river and began to ask a few questions, such as a landsman would ask. he began, in the old way, to fill me up with the old lies, and i enjoyed letting him do it. then suddenly he turned round to me and said: “'i want to get a cup of coffee. you hold her, will you, till i come back?' and before i could say a word he was out of the pilot-house door and down the steps. it all came so suddenly that i sprang to the wheel, of course, as i would have done twenty years before. then in a moment i realized my position. here i was with a great big steamboat in the middle of the mississippi river, without any further knowledge than that fact, and the pilot out of sight. i settled my mind on three conclusions: first, that the pilot might be a lunatic; second, that he had recognized me and thought i knew the river; third, that we were in a perfectly safe place, where i could not possibly kill the steamboat. but that last conclusion, though the most comforting, was an extremely doubtful one. i knew perfectly well that no sane pilot would trust his steamboat for a single moment in the hands of a greenhorn unless he were standing by the greenhorn's side. of course, by force of habit, when i grabbed the wheel, i had taken the steering marks ahead and astern, and i made up my mind to hold her on those marks to the hair; but i could feel myself getting old and gray. then all at once i recognized where we were; we were in what is called the grand chain--a succession of hidden rocks, one of the most dangerous places on the river. there were two rocks there only about seventy feet apart, and you've got to go exactly between them or wreck the boat. there was a time when i could have done it without a tremor, but that time wasn't now. i would have given any reasonable sum to have been on the shore just at that moment. i think i was about ready to drop dead when i heard a step on the pilothouse stair; then the door opened and the pilot came in, quietly picking his teeth, and took the wheel, and i crawled weakly back to the seat. he said: “'you thought you were playing a nice joke on me, didn't you? you thought i didn't know who you were. why, i recognized that drawl of yours as soon as you opened your mouth.' “i said, 'who the h--l are you? i don't remember you.' “'well,' he said, 'perhaps you don't, but i was a cub pilot on the river before the war, when you were a licensed pilot, and i couldn't get a license when i was qualified for one, because the pilots' association was so strong at that time that they could keep new pilots out if they wanted to, and the law was that i had to be examined by two licensed pilots, and for a good while i could not get any one to make that examination. but one day you and another pilot offered to do it, and you put me through a good, healthy examination and indorsed my application for a license. i had never seen you before, and i have never seen you since until now, but i recognized you.' “'all right,' i said. 'but if i had gone half a mile farther with that steamboat we might have all been at the bottom of the river.' “we got to be good friends, of course, and i spent most of my time up there with him. when we got down below cairo, and there was a big, full river--for it was highwater season and there was no danger of the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river--i had her most of the time on his watch. he would lie down and sleep, and leave me there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that i was still a pilot, happy and care-free as i had been twenty years before.” from the book we gather that he could not keep out of the pilot-house. he was likely to get up at any hour of the night to stand his watch, and truly enough the years had slipped away. he was the young fellow in his twenties again, speculating on the problems of existence and reading his fortune in the stars. to heighten the illusion, he had himself called regularly with the four-o'clock watch, in order not to miss the mornings.--[it will repay the reader to turn to chap. xxx of life on the mississippi, and consider mark twain's word-picture of the river sunrise.] the majesty and solitude of the river impressed him more than ever before, especially its solitude. it had been so full of life in his time; now it had returned once more to its primal loneliness--the loneliness of god. at one place two steamboats were in sight at once an unusual spectacle. once, in the mouth of a river, he noticed a small boat, which he made out to be the mark twain. there had been varied changes in twenty-one years; only the old fascination of piloting remained unchanged. to bixby afterward he wrote: “i'd rather be a pilot than anything else i've ever done in my life. how do you run plum point?” he met bixby at new orleans. bixby was captain now on a splendid new anchor line steamboat, the city of baton rouge. the anchor line steamers were the acme of mississippi river steamboat-building, and they were about the end of it. they were imposingly magnificent, but they were only as gorgeous clouds that marked the sunset of mississippi steamboat travel. mark twain made his trip down the river just in time. in new orleans he met george w. cable and joel chandler harris, and they had a fraternizing good time together, mousing about the old french quarter or mingling with the social life of the modern city. he made a trip with bixby in a tug to the warmouth plantation, and they reviewed old days together, as friends parted for twenty-one years will. altogether the new orleans sojourn was a pleasant one, saddened only by a newspaper notice of the death, in edinburgh, of the kindly and gentle and beloved dr. brown. clemens arranged to make the trip up the river on the baton rouge. bixby had one pretty inefficient pilot, and stood most of the watches himself, so that with “sam clemens” in the pilot-house with him, it was wonderfully like those old first days of learning the river, back in the fifties. “sam was ever making notes in his memorandum-book, just as he always did,” said bixby to the writer, recalling the time. “i was sorry i had to stay at the wheel so much. i wanted to have more time with sam without thinking of the river at all. sam was sorry, too, from what he wrote after he got home.” bixby produced a letter in the familiar handwriting. it was a tender, heart-spoken letter: i didn't see half enough of you. it was a sore disappointment. osgood could have told you, if he would--discreet old dog--i expected to have you with me all the time. altogether, the most pleasant part of my visit with you was after we arrived in st. louis, and you were your old natural self again. twenty years have not added a month to your age or taken a fraction from your loveliness. said bixby: “when we arrived in st. louis we came to the planters' hotel; to this very table where you and i are sitting now, and we had a couple of hot scotches between us, just as we have now, and we had a good last talk over old times and old acquaintances. after he returned to new york he sent for my picture. he wanted to use it in his book.” at st. louis the travelers changed boats, and proceeded up the mississippi toward st. paul. clemens laid off three days at hannibal. delightful days [he wrote home]. loitering around all day long, examining the old localities, and talking with the gray heads who were boys and girls with me thirty or forty years ago. i spent my nights with john and helen garth, three miles from town, in their spacious and beautiful house. they were children with me, and afterward schoolmates. that world which i knew in its blooming youth is old and bowed and melancholy now; its soft cheeks are leathery and withered, the fire has gone out of its eyes, the spring from its step. it will be dust and ashes when i come again. he had never seen the far upper river, and he found it very satisfying. his note-book says: the bluffs all along up above st. paul are exquisitely beautiful where the rough and broken turreted rocks stand up against the sky above the steep, verdant slopes. they are inexpressibly rich and mellow in color; soft dark browns mingled with dull greens--the very tints to make an artist worship. in a final entry he wrote: the romance of boating is gone now. in hannibal the steamboat man is no longer the god. cxli. literature and philosophy clemens took a further step toward becoming a publisher on his own account. not only did he contract to supply funds for the mississippi book, but, as kaolatype, the chalk-engraving process, which had been lingeringly and expensively dying, was now become merely something to swear at, he had his niece's husband, webster, installed as osgood's new york subscription manager, with charge of the general agencies. there was no delay in this move. webster must get well familiarized with the work before the mississippi book's publication. he had expected to have the manuscript finished pretty promptly, but the fact that he had promised it for a certain time paralyzed his effort. even at the farm he worked without making much headway. at the end of october he wrote howells: the weather turned cold, and we had to rush home, while i still lacked thirty thousand words. i had been sick and got delayed. i am going to write all day and two-thirds of the night until the thing is done or break down at it. the spur and burden of the contract are intolerable to me. i can endure the irritation of it no longer. i went to work at nine o'clock yesterday morning and went to bed an hour after midnight. result of the day (mainly stolen from books though credit given), , words, so i reduced my burden by one-third in one day. it was five days' work in one. i have nothing more to borrow or steal; the rest must all be written. it is ten days' work and unless something breaks it will be finished in five. he had sworn once, when he had finally finished 'a tramp abroad', that he would never limit himself as to time again. but he had forgotten that vow, and was suffering accordingly. howells wrote from london urging him to drop everything and come over to europe for refreshment. we have seen lots of nice people, and have been most pleasantly made of; but i would rather have you smoke in my face and talk for half a day, just for pleasure, than to go to the best house or club in london. clemens answered: yes, it would be more profitable to me to do that because, with your society to help me, i should swiftly finish this now apparently interminable book. but i cannot come, because i am not boss here, and nothing but dynamite can move mrs. clemens away from home in the winter season. this was in november, and he had broken all restrictions as to time. he declared that he had never had such a fight over any book before, and that he had told osgood and everybody concerned that they must wait. i have said with sufficient positiveness that i will finish the book at no particular date; that i will not hurry it; that i will not hurry myself; that i will take things easy and comfortably--write when i choose to write, leave it alone when i do so prefer... i have got everything at a dead standstill, and that is where it ought to be, and that is where it must remain; to follow any other policy would be to make the book worse than it already is. i ought to have finished it before showing it to anybody, and then sent it across the ocean to you to be edited, as usual; for you seem to be a great many shades happier than you deserve to be, and if i had thought of this thing earlier i would have acted upon it and taken the tuck somewhat out of your joyousness. it was a long, heartfelt letter. near the end of it he said: cable has been here, creating worshipers on all hands. he is a marvelous talker on a deep subject. i do not see how even spencer could unwind a thought more smoothly or orderly, and do it in cleaner, clearer, crisper english. he astounded twichell with his faculty. you know that when it comes down to moral honesty, limpid innocence, and utterly blemishless piety, the apostles were mere policemen to cable; so with this in mind you must imagine him at a midnight dinner in boston the other night, where we gathered around the board of the summerset club: osgood full, boyle o'reilly full, fairchild responsively loaded, and aldrich and myself possessing the floor and properly fortified. cable told mrs. clemens, when he returned here, that he seemed to have been entertaining himself with horses, and had a dreamy idea that he must have gone to boston in a cattle-car. it was a very large time. he called it an orgy. and no doubt it was, viewed from his standpoint. osgood wanted mark twain to lecture that fall, as preliminary advertising for the book, with “life on the mississippi” as his subject. osgood was careful to make this proposition by mail, and probably it was just as well; for if there was any single straw that could have broken the back of clemens's endurance and made him violent at this particular time, it was a proposition to go back on the platform. his answer to osgood has not been preserved. clemens spoke little that winter. in february he addressed the monday evening club on “what is happiness?” presenting a theory which in later years he developed as a part of his “gospel,” and promulgated in a privately printed volume, 'what is man'? it is the postulate already mentioned in connection with his reading of lecky, that every human action, bad or good, is the result of a selfish impulse; that is to say, the result of a desire for the greater content of spirit. it is not a new idea; philosophers in all ages have considered it, and accepted or rejected it, according to their temperament and teachings, but it was startling and apparently new to the monday evening club. they scoffed and jeered at it; denounced it as a manifest falsity. they did not quite see then that there may be two sorts of selfishness--brutal and divine; that he who sacrifices others to himself exemplifies the first, whereas he who sacrifices himself for others personifies the second--the divine contenting of his soul by serving the happiness of his fellow-men. mark twain left this admonition in furtherance of that better sort: “diligently train your ideals upward, and still upward, toward a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure, in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and the community.” it is a divine admonition, even if, in its suggested moral freedom, it does seem to conflict with that other theory--the inevitable sequence of cause and effect, descending from the primal atom. there is seeming irrelevance in introducing this matter here; but it has a chronological relation, and it presents a mental aspect of the time. clemens was forty-eight, and becoming more and more the philosopher; also, in logic at least, a good deal of a pessimist. he made a birthday aphorism on the subject: “the man who is a pessimist before he is forty-eight knows too much; the man who is an optimist after he is forty-eight knows too little.” he was never more than a pessimist in theory at any time. in practice he would be a visionary; a builder of dreams and fortunes, a veritable colonel sellers to the end of his days. cxlii. “life on the mississippi” the mississippi book was completed at last and placed in osgood's hands for publication. clemens was immensely fond of osgood. osgood would come down to hartford and spend days discussing plans and playing billiards, which to mark twain's mind was the proper way to conduct business. besides, there was webster, who by this time, or a very little later, had the word “publisher” printed in his letter-heads, and was truly that, so far as the new book was concerned. osgood had become little more than its manufacturer, shipping-agent, and accountant. it should be added that he made the book well, though somewhat expensively. he was unaccustomed to getting out big subscription volumes. his taste ran to the artistic, expensive product. “that book cost me fifty thousand dollars to make,” clemens once declared. “bliss could have built a whole library, for that sum. but osgood was a lovely fellow.” life on the mississippi was issued about the middle of may. it was a handsome book of its kind and a successful book, but not immediately a profitable one, because of the manner of its issue. it was experimental, and experiments are likely to be costly, even when successful in the final result. among other things, it pronounced the final doom of kaolatype. the artists who drew the pictures for it declined to draw them if they were to be reproduced by that process, or indeed unless some one of the lately discovered photographic processes was used. furthermore, the latter were much cheaper, and it was to the advantage of clemens himself to repudiate kaolatype, even for his own work. webster was ordered to wind up the last ends of the engraving business with as little sacrifice as possible, and attend entirely to more profitable affairs--viz., the distribution of books. as literature, the mississippi book will rank with mark twain's best--so far, at least, as the first twenty chapters of it are concerned. earlier in this history these have been sufficiently commented upon. they constitute a literary memorial seemingly as enduring as the river itself. concerning the remaining chapters of the book, they are also literature, but of a different class. the difference is about the same as that between 'a tramp abroad' and the 'innocents'. it is the difference between the labors of love and duty; between art and industry, literature and journalism. but the last is hardly fair. it is journalism, but it is literary journalism, and there are unquestionably areas that are purely literary, and not journalistic at all. there would always be those in any book of travel he might write. the story of the river revisited is an interesting theme; and if the revisiting had been done, let us say eight or ten years earlier, before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and before the river itself had become a background for pessimism, the tale might have had more of the literary glamour and illusion, even if less that is otherwise valuable. 'life on the mississippi' has been always popular in germany. the emperor william of germany once assured mark twain that it was his favorite american book, and on the same evening the portier of the author's lodging in berlin echoed the emperor's opinion. paul lindau, a distinguished german author and critic, in an interview at the time the mississippi book appeared, spoke of the general delight of his countrymen in its author. when he was asked, “but have not the germans been offended by mark twain's strictures on their customs and language in his 'tramp abroad'” he replied, “we know what we are and how we look, and the fanciful picture presented to our eyes gives us only food for laughter, not cause for resentment. the jokes he made on our long words, our inverted sentences, and the position of the verb have really led to a reform in style which will end in making our language as compact and crisp as the french or english. i regard mark twain as the foremost humorist of the age.” howells, traveling through europe, found lindau's final sentiment echoed elsewhere, and he found something more: in europe mark twain was already highly regarded as a serious writer. thomas hardy said to howells one night at dinner: “why don't people understand that mark twain is not merely a great humorist? he is a very remarkable fellow in a very different way.” the rev. dr. parker, returning from england just then, declared that, wherever he went among literary people, the talk was about mark twain; also that on two occasions, when he had ventured diffidently to say that he knew that author personally, he was at once so evidently regarded as lying for effect that he felt guilty, and looked it, and did not venture to say it any more; thus, in a manner, practising untruth to save his reputation for veracity. that the mississippi book throughout did much to solidify this foreign opinion of mark twain's literary importance cannot be doubted, and it is one of his books that will live longest in the memory of men. cxliii. a guest of royalty for purposes of copyright another trip to canada was necessary, and when the newspapers announced (may, ) that mark twain was about to cross the border there came one morning the following telegram: meeting of literary and scientific society at ottawa from d to th. it would give me much pleasure if you could come and be my guest during that time. lorne. the marquis of lorne, then governor-general of canada, was the husband of queen victoria's daughter, the princess louise. the invitation was therefore in the nature of a command. clemens obeyed it graciously enough, and with a feeling of exaltation no doubt. he had been honored by the noble and the great in many lands, but this was royalty--english royalty--paying a tribute to an american writer whom neither the marquis nor the princess, his wife, had ever seen. they had invited him because they had cared enough for his books to make them wish to see him, to have him as a guest in rideau hall, their home. mark twain was democratic. a king to him was no more than any other man; rather less if he were not a good king. but there was something national in this tribute; and, besides, lord lorne and the princess louise were the kind of sovereigns that honored their rank, instead of being honored by it. it is a good deal like a fairy tale when you think of it; the barefooted boy of hannibal, who had become a printer, a pilot, a rough-handed miner, being summoned, not so many years later, by royalty as one of america's foremost men of letters. the honor was no greater than many others he had received, certainly not greater than the calls of canon kingsley and robert browning and turgenieff at his london hotel lodgings, but it was of a less usual kind. clemens enjoyed his visit. princess louise and the marquis of lorne kept him with them almost continually, and were loath to let him go. once they took him tobogganing--an exciting experience. it happened that during his stay with them the opening of the canadian parliament took place. lord lorne and the principal dignitaries of state entered one carriage, and in a carriage behind them followed princess louise with mark twain. as they approached the parliament house the customary salute was fired. clemens pretended to the princess considerable gratification. the temptation was too strong to resist: “your highness,” he said, “i have had other compliments paid to me, but none equal to this one. i have never before had a salute fired in my honor.” returning to hartford, he sent copies of his books to lord lorne, and to the princess a special copy of that absurd manual, the new guide of the conversation in portuguese and english, for which he had written an introduction.--[a serious work, in portugal, though issued by osgood [' ) as a joke. clemens in the introduction says: “its delicious, unconscious ridiculousness and its enchanting naivety are as supreme and unapproachable in their way as shakespeare's sublimities.” an extract, the closing paragraph from the book's preface, will illustrate his meaning: “we expect then, who the little book (for the care that we wrote him, and for her typographical correction), that maybe worth the acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the youth, at which we dedicate him particularly.”] cxliv. a summer literary harvest arriving at the farm in june, clemens had a fresh crop of ideas for stories of many lengths and varieties. his note-book of that time is full of motifs and plots, most of them of that improbable and extravagant kind which tended to defeat any literary purpose, whether humorous or otherwise. it seems worth while setting down one or more of these here, for they are characteristic of the myriad conceptions that came and went, and beyond these written memoranda left no trace behind. here is a fair example of many: two men starving on a raft. the pauper has a boston cracker, resolves to keep it till the multimillionaire is beginning to starve, then make him pay $ , for it. millionaire agrees. pauper's cupidity rises, resolves to wait and get more; twenty-four hours later asks him a million for the cracker. millionaire agrees. pauper has a wild dream of becoming enormously rich off his cracker; backs down; lies all night building castles in the air; next day raises his price higher and higher, till millionaire has offered $ , , , every cent he has in the world. pauper accepts. millionaire: “now give it to me.” pauper: “no; it isn't a trade until you sign documental history of the transaction and make an oath to pay.” while pauper is finishing the document millionaire sees a ship. when pauper says, “sign and take the cracker,” millionaire smiles a smile, declines, and points to the ship. yet this is hardly more extravagant than another idea that is mentioned repeatedly among the notes--that of an otherwise penniless man wandering about london with a single million-pound bank-note in his possession, a motif which developed into a very good story indeed. idea for “stormfield's visit to heaven” in modern times the halls of heaven are warmed by registers connected with hell; and this is greatly applauded by jonathan edwards, calvin, baxter and company, because it adds a new pang to the sinner's sufferings to know that the very fire which tortures him is the means of making the righteous comfortable. then there was to be another story, in which the various characters were to have a weird, pestilential nomenclature; such as “lockjaw harris,” “influenza smith,” “sinapism davis,” and a dozen or two more, a perfect outbreak of disorders. another--probably the inspiration of some very hot afternoon--was to present life in the interior of an iceberg, where a colony would live for a generation or two, drifting about in a vast circular current year after year, subsisting on polar bears and other arctic game. an idea which he followed out and completed was the d arabian night, in which scheherazade continues her stories, until she finally talks the sultan to death. that was a humorous idea, certainly; but when howells came home and read it in the usual way he declared that, while the opening was killingly funny, when he got into the story itself it seemed to him that he was “made a fellow-sufferer with the sultan from scheherazade's prolixity.” “on the whole,” he said, “it is not your best, nor your second best; but all the way it skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't afford to indulge in.” and that was the truth. so the tale, neatly typewritten, retired to seclusion, and there remains to this day. clemens had one inspiration that summer which was not directly literary, but historical, due to his familiarity with english dates. he wrote twichell: day before yesterday, feeling not in condition for writing, i left the study, but i couldn't hold in--had to do something; so i spent eight hours in the sun with a yardstick, measuring off the reigns of the english kings on the roads in these grounds, from william the conqueror to , calculating to invent an open-air game which shall fill the children's heads with dates without study. i give each king's reign one foot of space to the year and drive one stake in the ground to mark the beginning of each reign, and i make the children call the stake by the king's name. you can stand in the door and take a bird's-eye view of english monarchy, from the conqueror to edward iv.; then you can turn and follow the road up the hill to the study and beyond with an opera-glass, and bird's-eye view the rest of it to . you can mark the sharp difference in the length of reigns by the varying distances of the stakes apart. you can see richard ii., two feet; oliver cromwell, two feet; james ii., three feet, and so on --and then big skips; pegs standing forty-five, forty-six, fifty, fifty-six, and sixty feet apart (elizabeth, victoria, edward iii., henry iii., and george iii.). by the way, third's a lucky number for length of days, isn't it? yes, sir; by my scheme you get a realizing notion of the time occupied by reigns. the reason it took me eight hours was because, with little jean's interrupting assistance, i had to measure from the conquest to the end of henry vi. three times over, and besides i had to whittle out all those pegs. i did a full day's work and a third over, yesterday, but was full of my game after i went to bed trying to fit it for indoors. so i didn't get to sleep till pretty late; but when i did go off i had contrived a new way to play my history game with cards and a board. we may be sure the idea of the game would possess him, once it got a fair start like that. he decided to save the human race that year with a history game. when he had got the children fairly going and interested in playing it, he adapted it to a cribbage-board, and spent his days and nights working it out and perfecting it to a degree where the world at large might learn all the facts of all the histories, not only without effort, but with an actual hunger for chronology. he would have a game not only of the english kings, but of the kings of every other nation; likewise of great statesmen, vice-chancellors, churchmen, of celebrities in every line. he would prepare a book to accompany these games. each game would contain one thousand facts, while the book would contain eight thousand; it would be a veritable encyclopedia. he would organize clubs throughout the united states for playing the game; prizes were to be given. experts would take it up. he foresaw a department in every newspaper devoted to the game and its problems, instead of to chess and whist and other useless diversions. he wrote to orion, and set him to work gathering facts and dates by the bushel. he wrote to webster, sent him a plan, and ordered him to apply for the patent without delay. patents must also be applied for abroad. with all nations playing this great game, very likely it would produce millions in royalties; and so, in the true sellers fashion, the iridescent bubble was blown larger and larger, until finally it blew up. the game on paper had become so large, so elaborate, so intricate, that no one could play it. yet the first idea was a good one: the king stakes driven along the driveway and up the hillside of quarry farm. the children enjoyed it, and played it through many sweet summer afternoons. once, in the days when he had grown old, he wrote, remembering: among the principal merits of the games which we played by help of the pegs were these: that they had to be played in the open air, and that they compelled brisk exercise. the peg of william the conqueror stood in front of the house; one could stand near the conqueror and have all english history skeletonized and landmarked and mile-posted under his eye.... the eye has a good memory. many years have gone by and the pegs have disappeared, but i still see them and each in its place; and no king's name falls upon my ear without my seeing his pegs at once, and noticing just how many feet of space he takes up along the road. it turned out an important literary year after all. in the mississippi book he had used a chapter from the story he had been working at from time to time for a number of years, 'the adventures of huckleberry finn'. reading over the manuscript now he found his interest in it sharp and fresh, his inspiration renewed. the trip down the river had revived it. the interest in the game became quiescent, and he set to work to finish the story at a dead heat. to howells, august ( ), he wrote: i have written eight or nine hundred manuscript pages in such a brief space of time that i mustn't name the number of days; i shouldn't believe it myself, and of course couldn't expect you to. i used to restrict myself to four and five hours a day and five days in the week, but this time i have wrought from breakfast till . p.m. six days in the week, and once or twice i smouched a sunday when the boss wasn't looking. nothing is half so good as literature hooked on sunday, on the sly. he refers to the game, though rather indifferently. when i wrote you i thought i had it; whereas i was merely entering upon the initiatory difficulties of it. i might have known it wouldn't be an easy job or somebody would have invented a decent historical game long ago--a thing which nobody has done. notwithstanding the fact that he was working at huck with enthusiasm, he seems to have been in no hurry to revise it for publication, either as a serial or as a book. but the fact that he persevered until huck finn at last found complete utterance was of itself a sufficient matter for congratulation. cxlv. howells and clemens write a play before howells went abroad clemens had written: now i think that the play for you to write would be one entitled, “colonel mulberry sellers in age” ( ), with lafayette hawkins (at ) still sticking to him and believing in him and calling him “my lord.” he [sellers] is a specialist and a scientist in various ways. your refined people and purity of speech would make the best possible background, and when you are done, i could take your manuscript and rewrite the colonel's speeches, and make him properly extravagant, and i would let the play go to raymond, and bind him up with a contract that would give him the bellyache every time he read it. shall we think this over, or drop it as being nonsense? howells, returned and settled in boston once more, had revived an interest in the play idea. he corresponded with clemens concerning it and agreed that the american claimant, leathers, should furnish the initial impulse of the drama. they decided to revive colonel sellers and make him the heir; colonel sellers in old age, more wildly extravagant than ever, with new schemes, new patents, new methods of ameliorating the ills of mankind. howells came down to hartford from boston full of enthusiasm. he found clemens with some ideas of the plan jotted down: certain effects and situations which seemed to him amusing, but there was no general scheme of action. howells, telling of it, says: i felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly nothing as chaos could be. he agreed hilariously with me, and was willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability. howells, in turn, proposed a plan which clemens approved, and they set to work. howells could imitate clemens's literary manner, and they had a riotously jubilant fortnight working out their humors. howells has told about it in his book, and he once related it to the writer of this memoir. he said: “clemens took one scene and i another. we had loads and loads of fun about it. we cracked our sides laughing over it as it went along. we thought it mighty good, and i think to this day that it was mighty good. we called the play 'colonel sellers.' we revived him. clemens had a notion of sellers as a spiritual medium-there was a good deal of excitement about spiritualism then; he also had a notion of sellers leading a women's temperance crusade. we conceived the idea of sellers wanting to try, in the presence of the audience, how a man felt who had fallen, through drink. sellers was to end with a sort of corkscrew performance on the stage. he always wore a marvelous fire extinguisher, one of his inventions, strapped on his back, so in any sudden emergency, he could give proof of its effectiveness.” in connection with the extinguisher, howells provided sellers with a pair of wings, which sellers declared would enable him to float around in any altitude where the flames might break out. the extinguisher, was not to be charged with water or any sort of liquid, but with greek fire, on the principle that like cures like; in other words, the building was to be inoculated with greek fire against the ordinary conflagration. of course the whole thing was as absurd as possible, and, reading the old manuscript to-day, one is impressed with the roaring humor of some of the scenes, and with the wild extravagance of the farce motive, not wholly warranted by the previous character of sellers, unless, indeed, he had gone stark mad. it is, in fact, sellers caricatured. the gentle, tender side of sellers--the best side--the side which clemens and howells themselves cared for most, is not there. chapter iii of mark twain's novel, the american claimant, contains a scene between colonel sellers and washington hawkins which presents the extravagance of the colonel's materialization scheme. it is a modified version of one of the scenes in the play, and is as amusing and unoffending as any. the authors' rollicking joy in their work convinced them that they had produced a masterpiece for which the public in general, and the actors in particular, were waiting. howells went back to boston tired out, but elate in the prospect of imminent fortune. cxlvi. distinguished visitors meantime, while howells had been in hartford working at the play with clemens, matthew arnold had arrived in boston. on inquiring for howells, at his home, the visitor was told that he had gone to see mark twain. arnold was perhaps the only literary englishman left who had not accepted mark twain at his larger value. he seemed surprised and said: “oh, but he doesn't like that sort of thing, does he?” to which mrs. howells replied: “he likes mr. clemens very much, and he thinks him one of the greatest men he ever knew.” arnold proceeded to hartford to lecture, and one night howells and clemens went to meet him at a reception. says howells: while his hand laxly held mine in greeting i saw his eyes fixed intensely on the other side of the room. “who--who in the world is that?” i looked and said, “oh, that is mark twain.” i do not remember just how their instant encounter was contrived by arnold's wish; but i have the impression that they were not parted for long during the evening, and the next night arnold, as if still under the glamour of that potent presence, was at clemens's house. he came there to dine with the twichells and the rev. dr. edwin p. parker. dr. parker and arnold left together, and, walking quietly homeward, discussed the remarkable creature whose presence they had just left. clemens had been at his best that night--at his humorous best. he had kept a perpetual gale of laughter going, with a string of comment and anecdote of a kind which twichell once declared the world had never before seen and would never see again. arnold seemed dazed by it, unable to come out from under its influence. he repeated some of the things mark twain had said; thoughtfully, as if trying to analyze their magic. then he asked solemnly: “and is he never serious?” and dr. parker as solemnly answered: “mr. arnold, he is the most serious man in the world.” dr. parker, recalling this incident, remembered also that protap chunder mazoomdar, a hindoo christian prelate of high rank, visited hartford in , and that his one desire was to meet mark twain. in some memoranda of this visit dr. parker has written: i said that mark twain was a friend of mine, and we would immediately go to his house. he was all eagerness, and i perceived that i had risen greatly in this most refined and cultivated gentleman's estimation. arriving at mr. clemens's residence, i promptly sought a brief private interview with my friend for his enlightenment concerning the distinguished visitor, after which they were introduced and spent a long while together. in due time mazoomdar came forth with mark's likeness and autograph, and as we walked away his whole air and manner seemed to say, with simeon of old, “lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace!” cxlvii. the fortunes of a play howells is of the impression that the “claimant” play had been offered to other actors before raymond was made aware of it; but there are letters (to webster) which indicate that raymond was to see the play first, though clemens declares, in a letter of instruction, that he hopes raymond will not take it. then he says: why do i offer him the play at all? for these reasons: he plays that character well; there are not thirty actors in the country who can do it better; and, too, he has a sort of sentimental right to be offered the piece, though no moral, or legal, or other kind of right. therefore we do offer it to him; but only once, not twice. let us have no hemming and hawing; make short, sharp work of the business. i decline to have any correspondence with r. myself in any way. this was at the end of november, , while the play was still being revised. negotiations with raymond had already begun, though he does not appear to have actually seen the play during that theatrical season, and many and various were the attempts made to place it elsewhere; always with one result--that each actor or manager, in the end, declared it to be strictly a raymond play. the thing was hanging fire for nearly a year, altogether, while they were waiting on raymond, who had a profitable play, and was in no hurry for the recrudescence of sellers. howells tells how he eventually took the manuscript to raymond, whom he found “in a mood of sweet reasonableness” at one of osgood's luncheons. raymond said he could not do the play then, but was sure he would like it for the coming season, and in any case would be glad to read it. in due time raymond reported favorably on the play, at least so far as the first act was concerned, but he objected to the materialization feature and to sellers as claimant for the english earldom. he asked that these features be eliminated, or at least much ameliorated; but as these constituted the backbone and purpose of the whole play, clemens and howells decided that what was left would be hardly worth while. raymond finally agreed to try the play as it was in one of the larger towns--howells thinks in buffalo. a week later the manuscript came back to webster, who had general charge of the business negotiations, as indeed he had of all mark twain's affairs at this time, and with it a brief line: dear sir,--i have just finished rereading the play, and am convinced that in its present form it would not prove successful. i return the manuscript by express to your address. thanking you for your courtesy, i am, yours truly, john t. raymond. p.s.--if the play is altered and made longer i will be pleased to read it again. in his former letter raymond had declared that “sellers, while a very sanguine man, was not a lunatic, and no one but a lunatic could for a moment imagine that he had done such a work” (meaning the materialization). clearly raymond wanted a more serious presentation, something akin to his earlier success, and on the whole we can hardly blame him. but the authors had faith in their performance as it stood, and agreed they would make no change. finally a well-known elocutionist, named burbank, conceived the notion of impersonating raymond as well as sellers, making of it a sort of double burlesque, and agreed to take the play on those terms. burbank came to hartford and showed what he could do. howells and clemens agreed to give him the play, and they hired the old lyceum theater for a week, at seven hundred dollars, for its trial presentation. daniel frohman promoted it. clemens and howells went over the play and made some changes, but they were not as hilarious over it or as full of enthusiasm as they had been in the beginning. howells put in a night of suffering--long, dark hours of hot and cold waves of fear--and rising next morning from a tossing bed, wrote: “here's a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner. we are fools.” clemens hurried over to boston to consult with howells, and in the end they agreed to pay the seven hundred dollars for the theater, take the play off and give burbank his freedom. but clemens's faith in it did not immediately die. howells relinquished all right and title in it, and clemens started it out with burbank and a traveling company, doing one-night stands, and kept it going for a week or more at his own expense. it never reached new york. “and yet,” says howells, “i think now that if it had come it would have been successful. so hard does the faith of the unsuccessful dramatist die.”--[this was as late as the spring of , at which time howells's faith in the play was exceedingly shaky. in one letter he wrote: “it is a lunatic that we have created, and while a lunatic in one act might amuse, i'm afraid that in three he would simply bore.” and again: “as it stands, i believe the thing will fail, and it would be a disgrace to have it succeed.”] cxlviii. cable and his great joke meanwhile, with the completion of the sellers play clemens had flung himself into dramatic writing once more with a new and more violent impetuosity than ever. howells had hardly returned to boston when he wrote: now let's write a tragedy. the inclosed is not fancy, it is history; except that the little girl was a passing stranger, and not kin to any of the parties. i read the incident in carlyle's cromwell a year ago, and made a note in my note-book; stumbled on the note to-day, and wrote up the closing scene of a possible tragedy, to see how it might work. if we made this colonel a grand fellow, and gave him a wife to suit--hey? it's right in the big historical times--war; cromwell in big, picturesque power, and all that. come, let's do this tragedy, and do it well. curious, but didn't florence want a cromwell? but cromwell would not be the chief figure here. it was the closing scene of that pathetic passage in history from which he would later make his story, “the death disc.” howells was too tired and too occupied to undertake immediately a new dramatic labor, so clemens went steaming ahead alone. my billiard-table is stacked up with books relating to the sandwich islands; the walls are upholstered with scraps of paper penciled with notes drawn from them. i have saturated myself with knowledge of that unimaginably beautiful land and that most strange and fascinating people. and i have begun a story. its hidden motive will illustrate a but-little considered fact in human nature: that the religious folly you are born in you will die in, no matter what apparently reasonabler religious folly may seem to have taken its place; meanwhile abolished and obliterated it. i start bill ragsdale at eleven years of age, and the heroine at four, in the midst of the ancient idolatrous system, with its picturesque and amazing customs and superstitions, three months before the arrival of the missionaries and--the erection of a shallow christianity upon the ruins of the old paganism. then these two will become educated christians and highly civilized. and then i will jump fifteen years and do ragsdale's leper business. when we come to dramatize, we can draw a deal of matter from the story, all ready to our hand. he made elaborate preparations for the sandwich islands story, which he and howells would dramatize later, and within the space of a few weeks he actually did dramatize 'the prince and the pauper' and 'tom sawyer', and was prodding webster to find proper actors or managers; stipulating at first severe and arbitrary terms, which were gradually modified, as one after another of the prospective customers found these dramatic wares unsuited to their needs. mark twain was one of the most dramatic creatures that ever lived, but he lacked the faculty of stage arrangement of the dramatic idea. it is one of the commonest defects in the literary make-up; also one of the hardest to realize and to explain. the winter of - was a gay one in the clemens home. henry irving was among those entertained, augustus saint-gaudens, aldrich and his wife, howells of course, and george w. cable. cable had now permanently left the south for the promised land which all authors of the south and west seek eventually, and had in due course made his way to hartford. clemens took cable's fortunes in hand, as he had done with many another, invited him to his home, and undertook to open negotiations with the american publishing company, of which frank bliss was now the manager, for the improvement of his fortunes. cable had been giving readings from his stories and had somewhere picked up the measles. he suddenly came down with the complaint during his visit to clemens, and his case was a violent one. it required the constant attendance of a trained nurse and one or two members of the household to pull him through. in the course of time he was convalescent, and when contagion was no longer to be feared guests were invited in for his entertainment. at one of these gatherings, cable produced a curious book, which he said had been lent to him by prof. francis bacon, of new haven, as a great rarity. it was a little privately printed pamphlet written by a southern youth, named s. watson wolston, a yale student of , and was an absurd romance of the hyperflorid, grandiloquent sort, entitled, “love triumphant, or the enemy conquered.” its heroine's name was ambulinia, and its flowery, half-meaningless periods and impossible situations delighted clemens beyond measure. he begged cable to lend it to him, to read at the saturday morning club, declaring that he certainly must own the book, at whatever cost. henry c. robinson, who was present, remembered having seen a copy in his youth, and twichell thought he recalled such a book on sale in new haven during his college days. twichell said nothing as to any purpose in the matter; but somewhat later, being in new haven, he stepped into the old book-store and found the same proprietor, who remembered very well the book and its author. twichell rather fearfully asked if by any chance a copy of it might still be obtained. “well,” was the answer, “i undertook to put my cellar in order the other day, and found about a cord of them down there. i think i can supply you.” twichell took home six of the books at ten cents each, and on their first spring walk to talcott's tower casually mentioned to clemens the quest for the rare ambulinia. but clemens had given up the pursuit. new york dealers had reported no success in the matter. the book was no longer in existence. “what would you give for a copy?” asked. twichell. clemens became excited. “it isn't a question of price,” he said; “that would be for the owner to set if i could find him.” twichell drew a little package from his pocket. “well, mark,” he said, “here are six copies of that book, to begin with. if that isn't enough, i can get you a wagon-load.” it was enough. but it did not deter clemens in his purpose, which was to immortalize the little book by pointing out its peculiar charms. he did this later, and eventually included the entire story, with comments, in one of his own volumes. clemens and twichell did not always walk that spring. the early form of bicycle, the prehistoric high-wheel, had come into vogue, and they each got one and attempted its conquest. they practised in the early morning hours on farmington avenue, which was wide and smooth, and they had an instructor, a young german, who, after a morning or two, regarded mark twain helplessly and said: “mr. clemens, it's remarkable--you can fall off of a bicycle more different ways than the man that invented it.” they were curious things, those old high-wheel machines. you were perched away up in the air, with the feeling that you were likely at any moment to strike a pebble or something that would fling you forward with damaging results. frequently that is what happened. the word “header” seems to have grown out of that early bicycling period. perhaps mark twain invented it. he had enough experience to do it. he always declared afterward that he invented all the new bicycle profanity that has since come into general use. once he wrote: there was a row of low stepping-stones across one end of the street, a measured yard apart. even after i got so i could steer pretty fairly i was so afraid of those stones that i always hit them. they gave me the worst falls i ever got in that street, except those which i got from dogs. i have seen it stated that no expert is quick enough to run over a dog; that a dog is always able to skip out of his way. i think that that may be true; but i think that the reason he couldn't run over the dog was because he was trying to. i did not try to run over any dog. but i ran over every dog that came along. i think it makes a great deal of difference. if you try to run over the dog he knows how to calculate, but if you are trying to miss him he does not know how to calculate, and is liable to jump the wrong way every time. it was always so in my experience. even when i could not hit a wagon i could hit a dog that came to see me practise. they all liked to see me practise, and they all came, for there was very little going on in our neighborhood to entertain a dog. he conquered, measurably, that old, discouraging thing, and he and twichell would go on excursions, sometimes as far as wethersfield or to the tower. it was a pleasant change, at least it was an interesting one; but bicycling on the high wheel was never a popular diversion with mark twain, and his enthusiasm in the sport had died before the “safety” came along. he had his machine sent out to elmira, but there were too many hills in chemung county, and after one brief excursion he came in, limping and pushing his wheel, and did not try it again. to return to cable. when the st of april ( ) approached he concluded it would be a good time to pay off his debt of gratitude for his recent entertainment in the clemens's home. he went to work at it systematically. he had a “private and confidential” circular letter printed, and he mailed it to one hundred and fifty of mark twain's literary friends in boston, hartford, springfield, new york, brooklyn, washington, and elsewhere, suggesting that they write to him, so that their letters would reach him simultaneously april st, asking for his autograph. no stamps or cards were to be inclosed for reply, and it was requested that “no stranger to mr. clemens and no minor” should take part. mrs. clemens was let into the secret, so that she would see to it that her husband did not reject his mail or commit it to the flames unopened. it would seem that every one receiving the invitation must have responded to it, for on the morning of april st a stupefying mass of letters was unloaded on mark twain's table. he did not know what to make of it, and mrs. clemens stood off to watch the results. the first one he opened was from dean sage, a friend whom he valued highly. sage wrote from brooklyn: dear clemens,--i have recently been asked by a young lady who unfortunately has a mania for autograph-collecting, but otherwise is a charming character, and comely enough to suit your fastidious taste, to secure for her the sign manual of the few distinguished persons fortunate enough to have my acquaintance. in enumerating them to her, after mentioning the names of geo. shepard page, joe michell, capt. isaiah ryndus, mr. willard, dan mace, and j. l. sullivan, i came to yours. “oh!” said she, “i have read all his works--little breeches, the heathen chinee, and the rest--and think them delightful. do oblige me by asking him for his autograph, preceded by any little sentiment that may occur to him, provided it is not too short.” of course i promised, and hope you will oblige me by sending some little thing addressed to miss oakes. we are all pretty well at home just now, though indisposition has been among us for the past fortnight. with regards to mrs. clemens and the children, in which my wife joins, yours truly, dean sage. it amused and rather surprised him, and it fooled him completely; but when he picked up a letter from brander matthews, asking, in some absurd fashion, for his signature, and another from ellen terry, and from irving, and from stedman, and from warner, and waring, and h. c. bunner, and sarony, and laurence hutton, and john hay, and r. u. johnson, and modjeska, the size and quality of the joke began to overawe him. he was delighted, of course; for really it was a fine compliment, in its way, and most of the letters were distinctly amusing. some of them asked for autographs by the yard, some by the pound. henry irving said: i have just got back from a very late rehearsal-five o'clock--very tired--but there will be no rest till i get your autograph. some requested him to sit down and copy a few chapters from the innocents abroad for them or to send an original manuscript. others requested that his autograph be attached to a check of interesting size. john hay suggested that he copy a hymn, a few hundred lines of young's “night thoughts,” and an equal amount of pollak's “course of time.” i want my boy to form a taste for serious and elevated poetry, and it will add considerable commercial value to have them in your handwriting. altogether the reading of the letters gave him a delightful day, and his admiration for cable grew accordingly. cable, too, was pleased with the success of his joke, though he declared he would never risk such a thing again. a newspaper of the time reports him as saying: i never suffered so much agony as for a few days previous to the st of april. i was afraid the letters would reach mark when he was in affliction, in which case all of us would never have ceased flying to make it up to him. when i visited mark we used to open our budgets of letters together at breakfast. we used to sing out whenever we struck an autograph- hunter. i think the idea came from that. the first person i spoke to about it was robert underwood johnson, of the century. my most enthusiastic ally was the rev. henry ward beecher. we never thought it would get into the papers. i never played a practical joke before. i never will again, certainly. mark twain in those days did not encourage the regular autograph-collectors, and seldom paid any attention to their requests for his signature. he changed all this in later years, and kept a supply always on hand to satisfy every request; but in those earlier days he had no patience with collecting fads, and it required a particularly pleasing application to obtain his signature. cxlix. mark twain in business samuel clemens by this time was definitely engaged in the publishing business. webster had a complete office with assistants at broadway, and had acquired a pretty thorough and practical knowledge of subscription publishing. he was a busy, industrious young man, tirelessly energetic, and with a good deal of confidence, by no means unnecessary to commercial success. he placed this mental and physical capital against mark twain's inspiration and financial backing, and the combination of charles l. webster & co. seemed likely to be a strong one. already, in the spring of ., webster had the new mark twain book, 'the adventures of huckleberry finn', well in hand, and was on the watch for promising subscription books by other authors. clemens, with his usual business vision and eye for results, with a generous disregard of detail, was supervising the larger preliminaries, and fulminating at the petty distractions and difficulties as they came along. certain plays he was trying to place were enough to keep him pretty thoroughly upset during this period, and proof-reading never added to his happiness. to howells he wrote: my days are given up to cursings, both loud and deep, for i am reading the 'huck finn' proofs. they don't make a very great many mistakes, but those that do occur are of a nature that make a man swear his teeth loose. whereupon howells promptly wrote him that he would help him out with the huck finn proofs for the pleasure of reading the story. clemens, among other things, was trying to place a patent grape-scissors, invented by howells's father, so that there was, in some degree, an equivalent for the heavy obligation. that it was a heavy one we gather from his fervent acknowledgment: it took my breath away, and i haven't recovered it yet, entirely--i mean the generosity of your proposal to read the proofs of huck finn. now, if you mean it, old man--if you are in earnest-proceed, in god's name, and be by me forever blessed. i can't conceive of a rational man deliberately piling such an atrocious job upon himself. but if there be such a man, and you be that man, pile it on. the proof-reading of 'the prince and the pauper' cost me the last rags of my religion. clemens decided to have the huckleberry finn book illustrated after his own ideas. he looked through the various comic papers to see if he could find the work of some new man that appealed to his fancy. in the pages of life he discovered some comic pictures illustrating the possibility of applying electrical burners to messenger boys, waiters, etc. the style and the spirit of these things amused him. he instructed webster to look up the artist, who proved to be a young man, e. w. kemble by name, later one of our foremost cartoonists. webster engaged kemble and put the manuscript in his hands. through the publication of certain chapters of huck finn in the century magazine, kemble was brought to the notice of its editors, who wrote clemens that they were profoundly indebted to him for unearthing “such a gem of an illustrator.” clemens, encouraged and full of enthusiasm, now endeavored to interest himself in the practical details of manufacture, but his stock of patience was light and the details were many. his early business period resembles, in some of its features, his mining experience in esmeralda, his letters to webster being not unlike those to orion in that former day. they are much oftener gentle, considerate, even apologetic, but they are occasionally terse, arbitrary, and profane. it required effort for him to be entirely calm in his business correspondence. a criticism of one of webster's assistants will serve as an example of his less quiet method: charley, your proof-reader, is an idiot; and not only an idiot, but blind; and not only blind, but partly dead. of course, one must regard many of mark twain's business aspects humorously. to consider them otherwise is to place him in a false light altogether. he wore himself out with his anxieties and irritations; but that even he, in the midst of his furies, saw the humor of it all is sufficiently evidenced by the form of his savage phrasing. there were few things that did not amuse him, and certainly nothing amused more, or oftener, than himself. it is proper to add a detail in evidence of a business soundness which he sometimes manifested. he had observed the methods of bliss and osgood, and had drawn his conclusions. in the beginning of the huck finn canvass he wrote webster: keep it diligently in mind that we don't issue till we have made a big sale. get at your canvassing early and drive it with all your might, with an intent and purpose of issuing on the th or th of next december (the best time in the year to tumble a big pile into the trade); but if we haven't , subscriptions we simply postpone publication till we've got them. it is a plain, simple policy, and would have saved both of my last books if it had been followed. [that is to say, 'the prince and the pauper' and the mississippi book, neither of which had sold up to his expectations on the initial canvass.] cl. farm pictures gerhardt returned from paris that summer, after three years of study, a qualified sculptor. he was prepared to take commissions, and came to elmira to model a bust of his benefactor. the work was finished after four or five weeks of hard effort and pronounced admirable; but gerhardt, attempting to make a cast one morning, ruined it completely. the family gathered round the disaster, which to them seemed final, but the sculptor went immediately to work, and in an amazingly brief time executed a new bust even better than the first, an excellent piece of modeling and a fine likeness. it was decided that a cut of it should be used as a frontispiece for the new book, the adventures of huckleberry finn. clemens was at this time giving the final readings to the huck finn pages, a labor in which mrs. clemens and the children materially assisted. in the childish biography which susy began of her father, a year later, she says: ever since papa and mama were married papa has written his books and then taken them to mama in manuscript, and she has expurgated --[susy's spelling is preserved]--them. papa read huckleberry finn to us in manuscript,--[probably meaning proof.]--just before it came out, and then he would leave parts of it with mama to expurgate, while he went off to the study to work, and sometimes clara and i would be sitting with mama while she was looking the manuscript over, and i remember so well, with what pangs of regret we used to see her turn down the leaves of the pages, which meant that some delightfully terrible part must be scratched out. and i remember one part pertickularly which was perfectly fascinating it was so terrible, that clara and i used to delight in and oh, with what despair we saw mama turn down the leaf on which it was written, we thought the book would almost be ruined without it. but we gradually came to think as mama did. commenting on this phase of huck's evolution mark twain has since written: i remember the special case mentioned by susy, and can see the group yet--two-thirds of it pleading for the life of the culprit sentence that was so fascinatingly dreadful, and the other third of it patiently explaining why the court could not grant the prayer of the pleaders; but i do not remember what the condemned phrase was. it had much company, and they all went to the gallows; but it is possible that that especially dreadful one which gave those little people so much delight was cunningly devised and put into the book for just that function, and not with any hope or expectation that it would get by the “expergator” alive. it is possible, for i had that custom. little jean was probably too youthful yet to take part in that literary arbitration. she was four, and had more interest in cows. in some memoranda which her father kept of that period--the “children's book”--he says: she goes out to the barn with one of us every evening toward six o'clock, to look at the cows--which she adores--no weaker word can express her feeling for them. she sits rapt and contented while david milks the three, making a remark now and then--always about the cows. the time passes slowly and drearily for her attendant, but not for her. she could stand a week of it. when the milking is finished, and “blanche,” “jean,” and “the cross cow” are turned into the adjoining little cow-lot, we have to set jean on a shed in that lot, and stay by her half an hour, till eliza, the german nurse, comes to take her to bed. the cows merely stand there, and do nothing; yet the mere sight of them is all-sufficient for jean. she requires nothing more. the other evening, after contemplating them a long time, as they stood in the muddy muck chewing the cud, she said, with deep and reverent appreciation, “ain't this a sweet little garden?” yesterday evening our cows (after being inspected and worshiped by jean from the shed for an hour) wandered off down into the pasture and left her bereft. i thought i was going to get back home, now, but that was an error. jean knew of some more cows in a field somewhere, and took my hand and led me thitherward. when we turned the corner and took the right-hand road, i saw that we should presently be out of range of call and sight; so i began to argue against continuing the expedition, and jean began to argue in favor of it, she using english for light skirmishing and german for “business.” i kept up my end with vigor, and demolished her arguments in detail, one after the other, till i judged i had her about cornered. she hesitated a moment, then answered up, sharply: “wir werden nichts mehr daruber sprechen!” (we won't talk any more about it.) it nearly took my breath away, though i thought i might possibly have misunderstood. i said: “why, you little rascal! was hast du gesagt?” but she said the same words over again, and in the same decided way. i suppose i ought to have been outraged, but i wasn't; i was charmed. his own note-books of that summer are as full as usual, but there are fewer literary ideas and more philosophies. there was an excitement, just then, about the trichina germ in pork, and one of his memoranda says: i think we are only the microscopic trichina concealed in the blood of some vast creature's veins, and that it is that vast creature whom god concerns himself about and not us. and there is another which says: people, in trying to justify eternity, say we can put it in by learning all the knowledge acquired by the inhabitants of the myriads of stars. we sha'n't need that. we could use up two eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world, and the thousands of nations that have risen, and flourished, and vanished from it. mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years. he records an incident which he related more fully in a letter to howells: before i forget it i must tell you that mrs. clemens has said a bright thing. a drop-letter came to me asking me to lecture here for a church debt. i began to rage over the exceedingly cool wording of the request, when mrs. clemens said: “i think i know that church, and, if so, this preacher is a colored man; he doesn't know how to write a polished letter. how should he?” my manner changed so suddenly and so radically that mrs. c. said: “i will give you a motto, and it will be useful to you if you will adopt it: 'consider every man colored till he is proved white.'” it is dern good, i think. one of the note-books contains these entries: talking last night about home matters, i said, “i wish i had said to george when we were leaving home, 'now, george, i wish you would take advantage of these three or four months' idle time while i am away----'” “to learn to let my matches alone,” interrupted livy. the very words i was going to use. yet george had not been mentioned before, nor his peculiarities. several years ago i said: “suppose i should live to be ninety-two, and just as i was dying a messenger should enter and say----” “you are become earl of durham,” interrupted livy. the very words i was going to utter. yet there had not been a word said about the earl, or any other person, nor had there been any conversation calculated to suggest any such subject. cli. mark twain mugwumps the republican presidential nomination of james g. blaine resulted in a political revolt such as the nation had not known. blaine was immensely popular, but he had many enemies in his own party. there were strong suspicions of his being connected with doubtful financiering-enterprises, more or less sensitive to official influence, and while these scandals had become quieted a very large portion of the republican constituency refused to believe them unjustified. what might be termed the intellectual element of republicanism was against blame: george william curtis, charles dudley warner, james russell lowell, henry ward beecher, thomas nast, the firm of harper & brothers, joseph w. hawley, joseph twichell, mark twain--in fact the majority of thinking men who held principle above party in their choice. on the day of the chicago nomination, henry c. robinson, charles e. perkins, edward m. bunce, f. g. whitmore, and samuel c. dunham were collected with mark twain in his billiard-room, taking turns at the game and discussing the political situation, with george, the colored butler, at the telephone down-stairs to report the returns as they came in. as fast as the ballot was received at the political headquarters down-town, it was telephoned up to the house and george reported it through the speaking-tube. the opposition to blaine in the convention was so strong that no one of the assembled players seriously expected his nomination. what was their amazement, then, when about mid-afternoon george suddenly announced through the speaking-tube that blaine was the nominee. the butts of the billiard cues came down on the floor with a bump, and for a moment the players were speechless. then henry robinson said: “it's hard luck to have to vote for that man.” clemens looked at him under his heavy brows. “but--we don't--have to vote for him,” he said. “do you mean to say that you're not going to vote for him?” “yes, that is what i mean to say. i am not going to vote for him.” there was a general protest. most of those assembled declared that when a party's representatives chose a man one must stand by him. they might choose unwisely, but the party support must be maintained. clemens said: “no party holds the privilege of dictating to me how i shall vote. if loyalty to party is a form of patriotism, i am no patriot. if there is any valuable difference between a monarchist and an american, it lies in the theory that the american can decide for himself what is patriotic and what isn't. i claim that difference. i am the only person in the sixty millions that is privileged to dictate my patriotism.” there was a good deal of talk back and forth, and, in the end, most of those there present remained loyal to blaine. general hawley and his paper stood by blaine. warner withdrew from his editorship of the courant and remained neutral. twichell stood with clemens and came near losing his pulpit by it. open letters were published in the newspapers about him. it was a campaign when politics divided neighbors, families, and congregations. if we except the civil war period, there never had been a more rancorous political warfare than that waged between the parties of james g. blaine and grover cleveland in . that howells remained true to blaine was a grief to clemens. he had gone to the farm with howells on his political conscience and had written fervent and imploring letters on the subject. as late as september th, he said: somehow i can't seem to rest quiet under the idea of your voting for blaine. i believe you said something about the country and the party. certainly allegiance to these is well, but certainly a man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor; the party and country come second to that, and never first. i don't ask you to vote at all. i only urge you not to soil yourself by voting for blaine.... don't be offended; i mean no offense. i am not concerned about the rest of the nation, but well, good-by. yours ever, mark. beyond his prayerful letters to howells, clemens did not greatly concern himself with politics on the farm, but, returning to hartford, he went vigorously into the campaign, presided, as usual, at mass-meetings, and made political speeches which invited the laughter of both parties, and were universally quoted and printed without regard to the paper's convictions. it was during one such speech as this that, in the course of his remarks, a band outside came marching by playing patriotic music so loudly as to drown his voice. he waited till the band got by, but by the time he was well under way again another band passed, and once more he was obliged to wait till the music died away in the distance. then he said, quite serenely: “you will find my speech, without the music, in the morning paper.” in introducing carl schurz at a great mugwump mass-meeting at hartford, october , ., he remarked that he [clemens] was the only legitimately elected officer, and was expected to read a long list of vice-presidents; but he had forgotten all about it, and he would ask all the gentlemen there, of whatever political complexion, to do him a great favor by acting as vice-presidents. then he said: as far as my own political change of heart is concerned, i have not been convinced by any democratic means. the opinion i hold of mr. blaine is due to the comments of the republican press before the nomination. not that they have said bitter or scandalous things, because republican papers are above that, but the things they said did not seem to be complimentary, and seemed to me to imply editorial disapproval of mr. blame and the belief that he was not qualified to be president of the united states. it is just a little indelicate for me to be here on this occasion before an assemblage of voters, for the reason that the ablest newspaper in colorado--the ablest newspaper in the world--has recently nominated me for president. it is hardly fit for me to preside at a discussion of the brother candidate, but the best among us will do the most repulsive things the moment we are smitten with a presidential madness. if i had realized that this canvass was to turn on the candidate's private character i would have started that colorado paper sooner. i know the crimes that can be imputed and proved against me can be told on the fingers of your hands. this cannot be said of any other presidential candidate in the field. inasmuch as the blaine-cleveland campaign was essentially a campaign of scurrility, this touch was loudly applauded. mark twain voted for grover cleveland, though up to the very eve of election he was ready to support a republican nominee in whom he had faith, preferably edmunds, and he tried to inaugurate a movement by which edmunds might be nominated as a surprise candidate and sweep the country. it was probably dr. burchard's ill-advised utterance concerning the three alleged r's of democracy, “rum, romanism, and rebellion,” that defeated blaine, and by some strange, occult means mark twain's butler george got wind of this damning speech before it became news on the streets of hartford. george had gone with his party, and had a considerable sum of money wagered on blaine's election; but he knew it was likely to be very close, and he had an instant and deep conviction that these three fatal words and blaine's failure to repudiate them meant the candidate's downfall. he immediately abandoned everything in the shape of household duties, and within the briefest possible time had changed enough money to make him safe, and leave him a good margin of winnings besides, in the event of blame's defeat. this was evening. a very little later the news of blaine's blunder, announced from the opera-house stage, was like the explosion of a bomb. but it was no news to george, who went home rejoicing with his enemies. clii. platforming with cable the drain of many investments and the establishment of a publishing house had told heavily on clemens's finances. it became desirable to earn a large sum of money with as much expedition as possible. authors' readings had become popular, and clemens had read in philadelphia and boston with satisfactory results. he now conceived the idea of a grand tour of authors as a commercial enterprise. he proposed to aldrich, howells, and cable that he charter a private car for the purpose, and that with their own housekeeping arrangements, cooking, etc., they could go swinging around the circuit, reaping, a golden harvest. he offered to be general manager of the expedition, the impresario as it were, and agreed to guarantee the others not less than seventy-five dollars a day apiece as their net return from the “circus,” as he called it. howells and aldrich liked well enough to consider it as an amusing prospect, but only cable was willing to realize it. he had been scouring the country on his own account, and he was willing enough to join forces with mark twain. clemens detested platforming, but the idea of reading from his books or manuscript for some reason seemed less objectionable, and, as already stated, the need of much money had become important. he arranged with j. b. pond for the business side of the expedition, though in reality he was its proprietor. the private-car idea was given up, but he employed cable at a salary of four hundred and fifty dollars a week and expenses, and he paid pond a commission. perhaps, without going any further, we may say that the tour was a financial success, and yielded a large return of the needed funds. clemens and cable had a pleasant enough time, and had it not been for the absence from home and the disagreeableness of railway travel, there would have been little to regret. they were a curiously associated pair. cable was orthodox in his religion, devoted to sunday-school, bible reading, and church affairs in general. clemens--well, clemens was different. on the first evening of their tour, when the latter was comfortably settled in bed with an entertaining book, cable appeared with his bible, and proceeded to read a chapter aloud. clemens made no comment, and this went on for an evening or two more. then he said: “see here, cable, we'll have to cut this part of the program out. you can read the bible as much as you please so long as you don't read it to me.” cable retired courteously. he had a keen sense of humor, and most things that mark twain did, whether he approved or not, amused him. cable did not smoke, but he seemed always to prefer the smoking compartment when they traveled, to the more respectable portions of the car. one day clemens sand to him: “cable, why do you sit in here? you don't smoke, and you know i always smoke, and sometimes swear.” cable said, “i know, mark, i don't do these things, but i can't help admiring the way you do them.” when sunday came it was mark twain's great happiness to stay in bed all day, resting after his week of labor; but cable would rise, bright and chipper, dress himself in neat and suitable attire, and visit the various churches and sunday-schools in town, usually making a brief address at each, being always invited to do so. it seems worth while to include one of the clemens-cable programs here--a most satisfactory one. they varied it on occasion, and when they were two nights in a place changed it completely, but the program here given was the one they were likely to use after they had proved its worth: program richling's visit to kate riley geo. w. cable king sollermun mark twain (a) kate riley and ristofolo (b) narcisse in mourning for “lady byron” (c) mary's night ride geo. w. cable (a) tragic tale of the fishwife (b) a trying situation (c) a ghost story mark twain at a mark twain memorial meeting (november , ), where the few who were left of his old companions told over quaint and tender memories, george cable recalled their reading days together and told of mark twain's conscientious effort to do his best, to be worthy of himself, regardless of all other concerns. he told how when they had been traveling for a while clemens seemed to realize that he was only giving the audience nonsense; making them laugh at trivialities which they would forget before they had left the entertainment hall. cable said that up to that time he had supposed clemens's chief thought was the entertainment of the moment, and that if the audience laughed he was satisfied. he told how he had sat in the wings, waiting his turn, and heard the tides of laughter gather and roll forward and break against the footlights, time and time again, and how he had believed his colleague to be glorying in that triumph. what was his surprise, then, on the way to the hotel in the carriage, when clemens groaned and seemed writhing in spirit and said: “oh, cable, i am demeaning myself. i am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon. it's ghastly. i can't endure it any longer.” cable added that all that night and the next day mark twain devoted himself to the study and rehearsal of selections which were justified not only as humor, but as literature and art. a good many interesting and amusing things would happen on such a tour. many of these are entirely forgotten, of course, but of others certain memoranda have been preserved. grover cleveland had been elected when they set out on their travels, but was still holding his position in albany as governor of new york. when they reached albany cable and clemens decided to call on him. they drove to the capitol and were shown into the governor's private office. cleveland made them welcome, and, after greetings, said to clemens: “mr. clemens, i was a fellow-citizen of yours in buffalo a good many months some years ago, but you never called on me then. how do you explain this?” clemens said: “oh, that is very simple to answer, your excellency. in buffalo you were a sheriff. i kept away from the sheriff as much as possible, but you're governor now, and on the way to the presidency. it's worth while coming to see you.” clemens meantime had been resting, half sitting, on the corner of the executive desk. he leaned back a little, and suddenly about a dozen young men opened various doors, filed in and stood at attention, as if waiting for orders. no one spoke for a moment; then the governor said to this collection of attendants: “you are dismissed, young gentlemen. your services are not required. mr. clemens is sitting on the bells.” in buffalo, when clemens appeared on the stage, he leisurely considered the audience for a moment; then he said: “i miss a good many faces. they have gone--gone to the tomb, to the gallows, or to the white house. all of us are entitled to at least one of these distinctions, and it behooves us to be wise and prepare for all.” on thanksgiving eve the readers were in morristown, new jersey, where they were entertained by thomas nast. the cartoonist prepared a quiet supper for them and they remained overnight in the nast home. they were to leave next morning by an early train, and mrs. nast had agreed to see that they were up in due season. when she woke next morning there seemed a strange silence in the house and she grew suspicious. going to the servants' room, she found them sleeping soundly. the alarm-clock in the back hall had stopped at about the hour the guests retired. the studio clock was also found stopped; in fact, every timepiece on the premises had retired from business. clemens had found that the clocks interfered with his getting to sleep, and he had quieted them regardless of early trains and reading engagements. on being accused of duplicity he said: “well, those clocks were all overworked, anyway. they will feel much better for a night's rest.” a few days later nast sent him a caricature drawing--a picture which showed mark twain getting rid of the offending clocks. at christmas-time they took a fortnight's holiday and clemens went home to hartford. a surprise was awaiting him there. mrs. clemens had made an adaptation of 'the prince and the pauper' play, and the children of the neighborhood had prepared a presentation of it for his special delectation. he knew, on his arrival home, that something mysterious was in progress, for certain rooms were forbidden him; but he had no inkling of their plan until just before the performance--when he was led across the grounds to george warner's home, into the large room there where it was to be given, and placed in a seat directly in front of the stage. gerhardt had painted the drop-curtain, and assisted in the general construction of scenery and effects. the result was really imposing; but presently, when the curtain rose and the guest of honor realized what it was all about, and what they had undertaken for his pleasure, he was deeply moved and supremely gratified. there was but one hitch in the performance. there is a place where the prince says, “fathers be alike, mayhap; mine hath not a doll's temper.” this was susy's part, and as she said it the audience did not fail to remember its literal appropriateness. there was a moment's silence, then a titter, followed by a roar of laughter, in which everybody but the little actors joined. they did not see the humor and were disturbed and grieved. curiously enough, mrs clemens herself, in arranging and casting the play, had not considered the possibility of this effect. the parts were all daintily played. the children wore their assumed personalities as if native to them. daisy warner played the part of tom canty, clara clemens was lady jane grey. it was only the beginning of the prince and the pauper productions. the play was repeated, clemens assisting, adding to the parts, and himself playing the role of miles hendon. in her childish biography susy says: papa had only three days to learn the part in, but still we were all sure that he could do it. the scene that he acted in was the scene between miles hendon and the prince, the “prithee, pour the water” scene. i was the prince and papa and i rehearsed together two or three times a day for the three days before the appointed evening. papa acted his part beautifully, and he added to the scene, making it a good deal longer. he was inexpressibly funny, with his great slouch hat and gait----oh such a gait! papa made the miles hendon scene a splendid success and every one was delighted with the scene, and papa too. we had great fun with our “prince and pauper,” and i think we none of us shall forget how immensely funny papa was in it. he certainly could have been an actor as well as an author. the holidays over, cable and clemens were off on the circuit again. at rochester an incident happened which led to the writing of one of mark twain's important books, 'a connecticut yankee at king arthur's court'. clemens and cable had wandered into a book-store for the purpose of finding something to read. pulling over some volumes on one of the tables, clemens happened to pick up a little green, cloth-bound book, and after looking at the title turned the pages rather curiously and with increasing interest. “cable,” he said, “do you know anything about this book, the arthurian legends of sir thomas malory, morte arthure?” cable answered: “mark, that is one of the most beautiful books in the world. let me buy it for you. you will love it more than any book you ever read.” so clemens came to know the old chronicler's version of the rare round table legends, and from that first acquaintance with them to the last days of his life seldom let the book go far from him. he read and reread those quaint, stately tales and reverenced their beauty, while fairly reveling in the absurdities of that ancient day. sir ector's lament he regarded as one of the most simply beautiful pieces of writing in the english tongue, and some of the combats and quests as the most ridiculous absurdities in romance. presently he conceived the idea of linking that day, with its customs, costumes, and abuses, with the progress of the present, or carrying back into that age of magicians and armor and superstition and cruelties a brisk american of progressive ideas who would institute reforms. his note-book began to be filled with memoranda of situations and possibilities for the tale he had in mind. these were vague, unformed fancies as yet, and it would be a long time before the story would become a fact. this was the first entry: dream of being a knight-errant in armor in the middle ages. have the notions and habits, though, of the present day mixed with the necessities of that. no pockets in the armor. no way to manage certain requirements of nature. can't scratch. cold in the head and can't blow. can't get a handkerchief; can't use iron sleeve; iron gets red-hot in the sun; leaks in the rain; gets white with frost and freezes me solid in winter; makes disagreeable clatter when i enter church. can't dress or undress myself. always getting struck by lightning. fall down and can't get up. twenty-one years later, discussing the genesis of the story, he said: “as i read those quaint and curious old legends i suppose i naturally contrasted those days with ours, and it made me curious to fancy what might be the picturesque result if we could dump the nineteenth century down into the sixth century and observe the consequences.” the reading tour continued during the first two months of the new year and carried them as far west as chicago. they read in hannibal and keokuk, and clemens spent a day in the latter place with his mother, now living with orion, brisk and active for her years and with her old-time force of character. mark twain, arranging for her keokuk residence, had written: ma wants to board with you, and pay her board. she will pay you $ a month (she wouldn't pay a cent more in heaven; she is obstinate on this point), and as long as she remains with you and is content i will add $ a month to the sum perkins already sends you. jane clemens attended the keokuk reading, and later, at home, when her children asked her if she could still dance, she rose, and at eighty-one tripped as lightly as a girl. it was the last time that mark twain ever saw his mother in the health and vigor which had been always so much a part of her personality. clemens saw another relative on that trip; in st. louis, james lampton, the original of colonel sellers, called. he was become old and white-headed, but he entered to me in the same old breezy way of his earlier life, and he was all there, yet--not a detail wanting: the happy light in his eye, the abounding hope in his heart, the persuasive tongue, the miracle-breeding imagination--they were all there; and before i could turn around he was polishing up his aladdin's lamp and flashing the secret riches of the world before me. i said to myself: “i did not overdraw him by a shade, i set him down as he was; and he is the same man to-day. cable will recognize him.” clemens opened the door into cable's room and allowed the golden dream-talk to float in. it was of a “small venture” which the caller had undertaken through his son. “only a little thing--a mere trifle--a bagatelle. i suppose there's a couple of millions in it, possibly three, but not more, i think; still, for a boy, you know----” it was the same old cousin jim. later, when he had royally accepted some tickets for the reading and bowed his exit, cable put his head in at the door. “that was colonel sellers,” he said. cliii. huck finn comes into his own in the december century ( ) appeared a chapter from 'the adventures of huckleberry finn', “the grangerford-shepherdson feud,” a piece of writing which edmund clarence stederian, brander matthews, and others promptly ranked as among mark twain's very best; when this was followed, in the january number, by “king sollermun,” a chapter which in its way delighted quite as many readers, the success of the new book was accounted certain.--[stedman, writing to clemens of this instalment, said: “to my mind it is not only the most finished and condensed thing you have done but as dramatic and powerful an episode as i know in modern literature.”] 'the adventures of huckleberry finn' was officially published in england and america in december, , but the book was not in the canvassers' hands for delivery until february. by this time the orders were approximately for forty thousand copies, a number which had increased to fifty thousand a few weeks later. webster's first publication venture was in the nature of a triumph. clemens wrote to him march th: “your news is splendid. huck certainly is a success.” he felt that he had demonstrated his capacity as a general director and webster had proved his efficiency as an executive. he had no further need of an outside publisher. the story of huck finn will probably stand as the best of mark twain's purely fictional writings. a sequel to tom sawyer, it is greater than its predecessor; greater artistically, though perhaps with less immediate interest for the juvenile reader. in fact, the books are so different that they are not to be compared--wherein lies the success of the later one. sequels are dangerous things when the story is continuous, but in huckleberry finn the story is a new one, wholly different in environment, atmosphere, purpose, character, everything. the tale of huck and nigger jim drifting down the mighty river on a raft, cross-secting the various primitive aspects of human existence, constitutes one of the most impressive examples of picaresque fiction in any language. it has been ranked greater than gil blas, greater even than don quixote; certainly it is more convincing, more human, than either of these tales. robert louis stevenson once wrote, “it is a book i have read four times, and am quite ready to begin again to-morrow.” it is by no means a flawless book, though its defects are trivial enough. the illusion of huck as narrator fails the least bit here and there; the “four dialects” are not always maintained; the occasional touch of broad burlesque detracts from the tale's reality. we are inclined to resent this. we never wish to feel that huck is anything but a real character. we want him always the huck who was willing to go to hell if necessary, rather than sacrifice nigger jim; the huck who watched the river through long nights, and, without caring to explain why, felt his soul go out to the sunrise. two or three days and nights went by; i reckon i might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. here is the way we put in the time. it was a monstrous big river down there --sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as the night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up--nearly always in the dead water under a towhead; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows and hid the raft with them. then we set out the lines. next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. not a sound anywheres--perfectly still--just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe. the first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line--that was the woods on t'other side, you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn't black anymore, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away--trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks--rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by- and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a wood-yard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers.... and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it! this is the huck we want, and this is the huck we usually have, and that the world has long been thankful for. take the story as a whole, it is a succession of startling and unique pictures. the cabin in the swamp which huck and his father used together in their weird, ghastly relationship; the night adventure with jim on the wrecked steamboat; huck's night among the towheads; the grangerford-shepherdson battle; the killing of boggs--to name a few of the many vivid presentations--these are of no time or literary fashion and will never lose their flavor nor their freshness so long as humanity itself does not change. the terse, unadorned grangerford-shepherdson episode--built out of the darnell--watson feuds--[see life on the mississippi, chap. xxvi. mark twain himself, as a cub pilot, came near witnessing the battle he describes.]--is simply classic in its vivid casualness, and the same may be said of almost every incident on that long river-drift; but this is the strength, the very essence of picaresque narrative. it is the way things happen in reality; and the quiet, unexcited frame of mind in which huck is prompted to set them down would seem to be the last word in literary art. to huck, apparently, the killing of boggs and colonel sherburn's defiance of the mob are of about the same historical importance as any other incidents of the day's travel. when colonel sherburn threw his shotgun across his arm and bade the crowd disperse huck says: the crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all apart and went tearing off every which way, and buck harkness he heeled it after them, looking tolerable cheap. i could a staid if i'd a wanted to, but i didn't want to. i went to the circus, and loafed around the back side till the watchman went by, and then dived in under the tent. that is all. no reflections, no hysterics; a murder and a mob dispersed, all without a single moral comment. and when the shepherdsons had got done killing the grangerfords, and huck had tugged the two bodies ashore and covered buck grangerford's face with a handkerchief, crying a little because buck had been good to him, he spent no time in sentimental reflection or sermonizing, but promptly hunted up jim and the raft and sat down to a meal of corn-dodgers, buttermilk, pork and cabbage, and greens: there ain't nothing in the world so good, when it is cooked right; and while i eat my supper we talked, and had a good time. i was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was jim to get away from the swamp. we said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't; you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft. it was huck finn's morality that caused the book to be excluded from the concord library, and from other libraries here and there at a later day. the orthodox mental attitude of certain directors of juvenile literature could not condone huck's looseness in the matter of statement and property rights, and in spite of new england traditions, massachusetts librarians did not take any too kindly to his uttered principle that, after thinking it over and taking due thought on the deadly sin of abolition, he had decided that he'd go to hell rather than give jim over to slavery. poor vagrant ben blankenship, hiding his runaway negro in an illinois swamp, could not dream that his humanity would one day supply the moral episode of an immortal book. able critics have declared that the psychology of huck finn is the book's large feature: huck's moral point of view--the struggle between his heart and his conscience concerning the sin of jim's concealment, and his final decision of self-sacrifice. time may show that as an epic of the river, the picture of a vanished day, it will rank even greater. the problems of conscience we have always with us, but periods once passed are gone forever. certainly huck's loyalty to that lovely soul nigger jim was beautiful, though after all it may not have been so hard for huck, who could be loyal to anything. huck was loyal to his father, loyal to tom sawyer of course, loyal even to those two river tramps and frauds, the king and the duke, for whom he lied prodigiously, only weakening when a new and livelier loyalty came into view--loyalty to mary wilks. the king and the duke, by the way, are not elsewhere matched in fiction. the duke was patterned after a journeyman-printer clemens had known in virginia city, but the king was created out of refuse from the whole human family--“all tears and flapdoodle,” the very ultimate of disrepute and hypocrisy--so perfect a specimen that one must admire, almost love, him. “hain't we all the fools in town on our side? and ain't that a big enough majority in any town?” he asks in a critical moment--a remark which stamps him as a philosopher of classic rank. we are full of pity at last when this pair of rapscallions ride out of the history on a rail, and feel some of huck's inclusive loyalty and all the sorrowful truth of his comment: “human beings can be awful cruel to one another.” the “poor old king” huck calls him, and confesses how he felt “ornery and humble and to blame, somehow,” for the old scamp's misfortunes. “a person's conscience ain't got no sense,” he says, and huck is never more real to us, or more lovable, than in that moment. huck is what he is because, being made so, he cannot well be otherwise. he is a boy throughout--such a boy as mark twain had known and in some degree had been. one may pettily pick a flaw here and there in the tale's construction if so minded, but the moral character of huck himself is not open to criticism. and indeed any criticism of this the greatest of mark twain's tales of modern life would be as the mere scratching of the granite of an imperishable structure. huck finn is a monument that no puny pecking will destroy. it is built of indestructible blocks of human nature; and if the blocks do not always fit, and the ornaments do not always agree, we need not fear. time will blur the incongruities and moss over the mistakes. the edifice will grow more beautiful with the years. cliv. the memoirs of general grant the success of huck finn, though sufficiently important in itself, prepared the way for a publishing venture by the side of which it dwindled to small proportions. one night (it was early in november, ), when cable and clemens had finished a reading at chickering hall, clemens, coming out into the wet blackness, happened to hear richard watson gilder's voice say to some unseen companion: “do you know general grant has actually determined to write his memoirs and publish them. he has said so to-day, in so many words.” of course clemens was immediately interested. it was the thing he had proposed to grant some three years previously, during his call that day with howells concerning the toronto consulship. with mrs. clemens, he promptly overtook gilder and accompanied him to his house, where they discussed the matter in its various particulars. gilder said that the century editors had endeavored to get grant to contribute to their war series, but that not until his financial disaster, as a member of the firm of grant & ward, had he been willing to consider the matter. he said that grant now welcomed the idea of contributing three papers to the series, and that the promised payment of five hundred dollars each for these articles had gladdened his heart and relieved him of immediate anxiety.--[somewhat later the century company, voluntarily, added liberally to this sum.] gilder added that general grant seemed now determined to continue his work until he had completed a book, though this at present was only a prospect. clemens was in the habit of calling on grant, now and then, to smoke a cigar with him, and he dropped in next morning to find out just how far the book idea had developed, and what were the plans of publication. he found the general and his son, colonel fred grant, discussing some memoranda, which turned out to be a proposition from the century company for the book publication of his memoirs. clemens asked to be allowed to look over the proposed terms, and when he had done so he said: “general, it is clear that the century people do not realize the importance--the commercial magnitude of your book. it is not strange that this is true, for they are comparatively new publishers and have had little or no experience with books of this class. the terms they propose indicate that they expect to sell five, possibly ten thousand copies. a book from your hand, telling the story of your life and battles, should sell not less than a quarter of a million, perhaps twice that sum. it should be sold only by subscription, and you are entitled to double the royalty here proposed. i do not believe it is to your interest to conclude this contract without careful thought and investigation. write to the american publishing company at hartford and see what they will do for you.” but grant demurred. he said that, while no arrangements had been made with the century company, he thought it only fair and right that they should have the book on reasonable terms; certainly on terms no greater than he could obtain elsewhere. he said that, all things being equal, the book ought to go to the man who had first suggested it to him. clemens spoke up: “general, if that is so, it belongs to me.” grant did not understand until clemens recalled to him how he had urged him, in that former time, to write his memoirs; had pleaded with him, agreeing to superintend the book's publication. then he said: “general, i am publishing my own book, and by the time yours is ready it is quite possible that i shall have the best equipped subscription establishment in the country. if you will place your book with my firm--and i feel that i have at least an equal right in the consideration--i will pay you twenty per cent. of the list price, or, if you prefer, i will give you seventy per cent. of the net returns and i will pay all office expenses out of my thirty per cent.” general grant was really grieved at this proposal. it seemed to him that here was a man who was offering to bankrupt himself out of pure philanthropy--a thing not to be permitted. he intimated that he had asked the century company president, roswell smith, a careful-headed business man, if he thought his book would pay as well as sherman's, which the scribners had published at a profit to sherman of twenty-five thousand dollars, and that smith had been unwilling to guarantee that amount to the author.--[mark twain's note-book, under date of march, , contains this memorandum: “roswell smith said to me: 'i'm glad you got the book, mr. clemens; glad there was somebody with courage enough to take it, under the circumstances. what do you think the general wanted to require of me?' “'he wanted me to insure a sale of twenty-five thousand sets of his book. i wouldn't risk such a guarantee on any book that was ever published.'” yet roswell smith, not so many years later, had so far enlarged his views of subscription publishing that he fearlessly and successfully invested a million dollars or more in a dictionary, regardless of the fact that the market was already thought to be supplied.] clemens said: “general, i have my check-book with me. i will draw you a check now for twenty-five thousand dollars for the first volume of your memoirs, and will add a like amount for each volume you may write as an advance royalty payment, and your royalties will continue right along when this amount has been reached.” colonel fred grant now joined in urging that matters be delayed, at least until more careful inquiry concerning the possibilities of publishing could be made. clemens left then, and set out on his trip with cable, turning the whole matter over to webster and colonel fred for settlement. meantime, the word that general grant was writing his memoirs got into the newspapers and various publishing propositions came to him. in the end the general sent over to philadelphia for his old friend, george w. childs, and laid the whole matter before him. childs said later it was plain that general grant, on the score of friendship, if for no other reason, distinctly wished to give the book to mark twain. it seemed not to be a question of how much money he would make, but of personal feeling entirely. webster's complete success with huck finn being now demonstrated, colonel fred grant agreed that he believed clemens and webster could handle the book as profitably as anybody; and after investigation childs was of the same opinion. the decision was that the firm of charles l. webster & co. should have the book, and arrangements for drawing the contract were made. general grant, however, was still somewhat uneasy as to the terms. he thought he was taking an unfair advantage in receiving so large a proportion of the profits. he wrote to clemens, asking him which of his two propositions--the twenty per cent. gross-royalty or the seventy per cent. of the net profit--would be the best all around. clemens sent webster to tell him that he believed the simplest, as well as the most profitable for the author, would be the twenty per cent. arrangement. whereupon grant replied that he would take the alternative; as in that case, if the book were a failure, and there were no profits, clemens would not be obliged to pay him anything. he could not consent to the thought of receiving twenty per cent. on a book published at a loss. meantime, grant had developed a serious illness. the humiliation of his business failure had undermined his health. the papers announced his malady as cancer of the tongue. in a memorandum which clemens made, february , , he states that on the st he called at the grant home, east th street, and was astonished to see how thin and weak the general looked. he was astonished because the newspaper, in a second report, had said the threatening symptoms had disappeared, that the cancer alarm was a false one. i took for granted the report, and said i had been glad to see that news. he smiled and said, “yes--if it had only been true.” one of the physicians was present, and he startled me by saying the general's condition was the opposite of encouraging. then the talk drifted to business, and the general presently said: “i mean you shall have the book--i have about made up my mind to that--but i wish to write to mr. roswell smith first, and tell him i have so decided. i think this is due him.” from the beginning the general has shown a fine delicacy toward those people--a delicacy which was native to the character of the man who put into the appomattox terms of surrender the words, “officers may retain their side-arms,” to save general lee the humiliation of giving up his sword. [note-book.] the physician present was dr. douglas, and upon clemens assuming that the general's trouble was probably due to smoking, also that it was a warning to those who smoked to excess, himself included, dr. douglas said that general grant's affliction could not be attributed altogether to smoking, but far more to his distress of mind, his year-long depression of spirit, the grief of his financial disaster. dr. douglas's remark started general grant upon the subject of his connection with ward, which he discussed with great freedom and apparent relief of mind. never at any time did he betray any resentment toward ward, but characterized him as one might an offending child. he spoke as a man who has been deeply wronged and humiliated and betrayed, but without a venomous expression or one with revengeful nature. clemens confessed in his notes that all the time he himself was “inwardly boiling--scalping ward--flaying him alive--breaking him on the wheel--pounding him to a jelly.” while he was talking colonel grant said: “father is letting you see that the grant family are a pack of fools, mr. clemens.” the general objected to this statement. he said that the facts could be produced which would show that when ward laid siege to a man he was pretty certain to turn out to be a fool; as much of a fool as any of the grant family. he said that nobody could call the president of the erie railroad a fool, yet ward had beguiled him of eight hundred thousand dollars, robbed him of every cent of it. he cited another man that no one could call a fool who had invested in ward to the extent of half a million. he went on to recall many such cases. he told of one man who had come to the office on the eve of departure for europe and handed ward a check for fifty thousand dollars, saying: “i have no use for it at present. see what you can do with it for me.” by and by this investor, returning from europe, dropped in and said: “well, did anything happen?” ward indifferently turned to his private ledger, consulted it, then drew a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and handed it over, with the casual remark: “well, yes, something happened; not much yet--a little too soon.” the man stared at the check, then thrust it back into ward's hand. “that's all right. it's plenty good enough for me. set that hen again,” and left the place. of course ward made no investments. his was the first playing on a colossal scale of the now worn-out “get rich quick” confidence game. such dividends as were made came out of the principal. ward was the napoleon of that game, whether he invented it or not. clemens agreed that, as far as himself or any of his relatives were concerned, they would undoubtedly have trusted ward. colonel grant followed him to the door when he left, and told him that the physicians feared his father might not live more than a few weeks longer, but that meantime he had been writing steadily, and that the first volume was complete and fully half the second. three days later the formal contract was closed, and webster & co. promptly advanced. general grant ten thousand dollars for imminent demands, a welcome arrangement, for grant's debts and expenses were many, and his available resources restricted to the century payments for his articles. immediately the office of webster & co. was warm with affairs. reporters were running hot-foot for news of the great contract by which mark twain was to publish the life of general grant. no publishing enterprise of such vast moment had ever been undertaken, and no publishing event, before or since, ever received the amount of newspaper comment. the names of general grant and mark twain associated would command columns, whatever the event, and that mark twain was to become the publisher of grant's own story of his battles was of unprecedented importance. the partners were sufficiently occupied. estimates and prices for vast quantities of paper were considered, all available presses were contracted for, binderies were pledged exclusively for the grant book. clemens was boiling over with plans and suggestions for distribution. webster was half wild with the tumult of the great campaign. applications for agencies poured in. in those days there were general subscription agencies which divided the country into districts, and the heads of these agencies webster summoned to new york and laid down the law to them concerning the new book. it was not a time for small dealings, and webster rose to the occasion. by the time these men returned to their homes they had practically pledged themselves to a quarter of a million sets of the grant memoirs, and this estimate they believed to be conservative. webster now moved into larger and more pretentious quarters. he took a store-room at east th street, union square, and surrounded himself with a capable force of assistants. he had become, all at once, the most conspicuous publisher in the world. clv. days with a dying hero the contract for the publication of the grant life was officially closed february , . five days later, on the last day and at the last hour of president arthur's administration, and of the congress then sitting, a bill was passed placing grant as full general, with full pay, on the retired army list. the bill providing for this somewhat tardy acknowledgment was rushed through at the last moment, and it is said that the congressional clock was set back so that this enactment might become a law before the administration changed. clemens was with general grant when the news of this action was read to him. grant had greatly desired such recognition, and it meant more to him than to any one present, yet clemens in his notes records: every face there betrayed strong excitement and emotion except one --general grant's. he read the telegram, but not a shade or suggestion of a change exhibited itself in his iron countenance. the volume of his emotion was greater than all the other emotions there present combined, but he was able to suppress all expression of it and make no sign. grant's calmness, endurance, and consideration during these final days astonished even those most familiar with his noble character. one night gerhardt came into the library at hartford with the announcement that he wished to show his patron a small bust he had been making in clay of general grant. clemens did not show much interest in the prospect, but when the work was uncovered he became enthusiastic. he declared it was the first likeness he had ever seen of general grant that approached reality. he agreed that the grant family ought to see it, and that he would take gerhardt with him next day in order that he might be within reach in case they had any suggestions. they went to new york next morning, and called at the grant home during the afternoon. from the note-book: friday, march , . gerhardt and i arrived at general grant's about . p.m. and i asked if the family would look at a small clay bust of the general which gerhardt had made from a photograph. colonel fred and jesse were absent to receive their sister, mrs. sartoris, who would arrive from europe about . ; but the three mrs. grants examined the work and expressed strong approval of it, and also great gratification that mr. gerhardt had undertaken it. mrs. jesse grant had lately dreamed that she was inquiring where the maker of my bust could be found (she had seen a picture of it in huck finn, which was published four weeks ago), for she wanted the same artist to make one of general grant. the ladies examined the bust critically and pointed out defects, while gerhardt made the necessary corrections. presently mrs. general grant suggested that gerhardt step in and look at the general. i had been in there talking with the general, but had never thought of asking him to let a stranger come in. so gerhardt went in with the ladies and me, and the inspection and cross-fire began: “there, i was sure his nose was so and so,” and, “i was sure his forehead was so and so,” and, “don't you think his head is so and so?” and so everybody walked around and about the old hero, who lay half reclining in his easy chair, but well muffled up, and submitting to all this as serenely as if he were used to being served so. one marked feature of general grant's character is his exceeding gentleness, goodness, sweetness. every time i have been in his presence--lately and formerly--my mind was drawn to that feature. i wonder it has not been more spoken of. presently he said, let gerhardt bring in his clay and work there, if gerhardt would not mind his reclining attitude. of course we were glad. a table for the bust was moved up in front of him; the ladies left the room; i got a book; gerhardt went to work; and for an hour there was perfect stillness, and for the first time during the day the general got a good, sound, peaceful nap. general badeau came in, and probably interrupted that nap. he spoke out as strongly as the others concerning the great excellence of the likeness. he had some sheets of ms. in his hand, and said, “i've been reading what you wrote this morning, general, and it is of the utmost value; it solves a riddle that has puzzled men's brains all these years and makes the thing clear and rational.” i asked what the puzzle was, and he said, “it was why grant did not immediately lay siege to vicksburg after capturing port hudson” (at least that is my recollection, now toward midnight, of general badeau's answer). the little bust of grant which gerhardt worked on that day was widely reproduced in terra-cotta, and is still regarded by many as the most nearly correct likeness of grant. the original is in possession of the family. general grant worked industriously on his book. he had a superb memory and worked rapidly. webster & co. offered to supply him with a stenographer, and this proved a great relief. sometimes he dictated ten thousand words at a sitting. it was reported at the time, and it has been stated since, that grant did not write the memoirs himself, but only made notes, which were expanded by others. but this is not true. general grant wrote or dictated every word of the story himself, then had the manuscript read aloud to him and made his own revisions. he wrote against time, for he knew that his disease was fatal. fortunately the lease of life granted him was longer than he had hoped for, though the last chapters were written when he could no longer speak, and when weakness and suffering made the labor a heavy one indeed; but he never flinched or faltered, never at any time suggested that the work be finished by another hand. early in april general grant's condition became very alarming, and on the night of the d it was believed he could not live until morning. but he was not yet ready to surrender. he rallied and renewed his task; feebly at first, but more perseveringly as each day seemed to bring a little added strength, or perhaps it was only resolution. now and then he appeared depressed as to the quality of his product. once colonel fred grant suggested to clemens that if he could encourage the general a little it might be worth while. clemens had felt always such a reverence and awe for the great soldier that he had never dreamed of complimenting his literature. “i was as much surprised as columbus's cook could have been to learn that columbus wanted his opinion as to how columbus was doing his navigating.” he did not hesitate to give it, however, and with a clear conscience. grant wrote as he had fought; with a simple, straightforward dignity, with a style that is not a style at all but the very absence of it, and therefore the best of all literary methods. it happened that clemens had been comparing some of grant's chapters with caesar's commentaries, and was able to say, in all sincerity, that the same high merits distinguished both books: clarity of statement, directness, simplicity, manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice toward friend and foe alike, soldierly candor and frankness, and soldierly avoidance of flowery speech. “i placed the two books side by side upon the same level,” he said, “and i still think that they belong there. i learned afterward that general grant was pleased with this verdict. it shows that he was just a man, just a human being, just an author.” within two months after the agents had gone to work canvassing for the grant memoirs--which is to say by the st of may, --orders for sixty thousand sets had been received, and on that day mark twain, in his note-book, made a memorandum estimate of the number of books that the country would require, figuring the grand total at three hundred thousand sets of two volumes each. then he says: if these chickens should really hatch according to my account, general grant's royalties will' amount to $ , , and will make the largest single check ever paid an author in the world's history. up to the present time the largest one ever paid was to macaulay on his history of england, l , . if i pay the general in silver coin at $ per pound it will weigh seventeen tons. certainly this has a flavor in it of colonel sellers, but we shall see by and by in how far this calculation was justified. grant found the society of mark twain cheering and comforting, and clemens held himself in readiness to go to the dying man at call. on the th of may he makes this memorandum: it is curious and dreadful to sit up in this way and talk cheerful nonsense to general grant, and he under sentence of death with that cancer. he says he has made the book too large by pages--not a bad fault. a short time ago we were afraid we would lack of being enough. to-day talked with general grant about his and my first great missouri campaign in . he surprised an empty camp near florida, missouri, on salt river, which i had been occupying a day or two before. how near he came to playing the devil with his future publisher. of course clemens would amuse the old commander with the tale of his soldiering, how his company had been chased through the brush and mud by the very announcement that grant was coming. some word of this got to the century editors, who immediately proposed that mark twain contribute to the magazine war series the story of his share in the rebellion, and particularly of his war relations with general grant. so the “private history of a campaign that failed” was prepared as mark twain's side-light on the history of the rebellion; and if it was not important history it was at least amusing, and the telling of that tale in mark twain's inimitable fashion must have gone far toward making cheerful those last sad days of his ancient enemy. during one of their talks general grant spoke of the question as to whether he or sherman had originated the idea of the march to the sea. grant said: “neither of us originated the idea of that march. the enemy did it.” reports were circulated of estrangements between general grant and the century company, and between mark twain and the century company, as a result of the book decision. certain newspapers exploited and magnified these rumors--some went so far as to accuse mark twain of duplicity, and to charge him with seeking to obtain a vast fortune for himself at the expense of general grant and his family. all of which was the merest nonsense. the century company, webster & co., general grant, and mark twain individually, were all working harmoniously, and nothing but the most cordial relations and understanding prevailed. as to the charge of unfair dealing on the part of mark twain, this was too absurd, even then, to attract more than momentary attention. webster & co., somewhat later in the year, gave to the press a clear statement of their publishing arrangement, though more particularly denying the report that general grant had been unable to complete his work. clvi. the close of a great career the clemens household did not go to elmira that year until the th of june. meantime general grant had been taken to mount mcgregor, near the adirondacks. the day after clemens reached elmira there came a summons saying that the general had asked to see him. he went immediately, and remained several days. the resolute old commander was very feeble by this time. it was three months since he had been believed to be dying, yet he was still alive, still at work, though he could no longer speak. he was adding, here and there, a finishing touch to his manuscript, writing with effort on small slips of paper containing but a few words each. his conversation was carried on in the same way. mark twain brought back a little package of those precious slips, and some of them are still preserved. the writing is perfectly legible, and shows no indication of a trembling hand. on one of these slips is written: there is much more that i could do if i was a well man. i do not write quite as clearly as i could if well. if i could read it over myself many little matters of anecdote and incident would suggest themselves to me. on another: have you seen any portion of the second volume? it is up to the end, or nearly so. as much more work as i have done to-day will finish it. i have worked faster than if i had been well. i have used my three boys and a stenographer. and on still another: if i could have two weeks of strength i could improve it very much. as i am, however, it will have to go about as it is, with verifications by the boys and by suggestions which will enable me to make a point clear here and there. certainly no campaign was ever conducted with a braver heart. as long as his fingers could hold a pencil he continued at his task. once he asked if any estimate could now be made of what portion would accrue to his family from the publication. clemens's prompt reply, that more than one hundred thousand sets had been sold, and that already the amount of his share, secured by safe bonds, exceeded one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, seemed to give him deep comfort. clemens told him that the country was as yet not one-third canvassed, and that without doubt there turns would be twice as much more by the end of the year. grant made no further inquiry, and probably never again mentioned the subject to any one. when clemens left, general grant was sitting, fully dressed, with a shawl about his shoulders, pencil and paper beside him. it was a picture that would never fade from the memory. in a later memorandum he says: i then believed he would live several months. he was still adding little perfecting details to his book, and preface, among other things. he was entirely through a few days later. since then the lack of any strong interest to employ his mind has enabled the tedious weariness to kill him. i think his book kept him alive several months. he was a very great man and superlatively good. this note was made july , , at a.m., on receipt of the news that general grant was dead. to henry ward beecher, clemens wrote: one day he put his pencil aside and said there was nothing more to do. if i had been there i could have foretold the shock that struck the world three days later. it can be truly said that all the nation mourned. general grant had no enemies, political or sectional, in those last days. the old soldier battling with a deadly disease, yet bravely completing his task, was a figure at once so pathetic and so noble that no breath of animosity remained to utter a single word that was not kind. memorial services were held from one end of the country to the other. those who had followed him in peace or war, those who had fought beside him or against him, alike paid tribute to his memory. twichell, from the mountains of vermont, wrote: i suppose i have said to harmony forty times since i got up here, “how i wish i could see mark!” my notion is that between us we could get ourselves expressed. i have never known any one who could help me read my own thoughts in such a case as you can and have done many a time, dear old fellow. i'd give more to sit on a log with you in the woods this afternoon, while we twined a wreath together for launcelot's grave, than to hear any conceivable eulogy of him pronounced by mortal lips. the death of grant so largely and so suddenly augmented the orders for his memoirs that it seemed impossible to get the first volume printed in time for the delivery, which had been promised for december st. j. j. little had the contract of manufacture, and every available press and bindery was running double time to complete the vast contract. in the end more than three hundred thousand sets of two volumes each were sold, and between four hundred and twenty and four hundred and fifty thousand dollars was paid to mrs. grant. the first check of two hundred thousand dollars, drawn february , , remains the largest single royalty check in history. mark twain's prophecy had been almost exactly verified. clvii. minor matters of a great year the grant episode, so important in all its phases, naturally overshadowed other events of . mark twain was so deeply absorbed in this great publishing enterprise that he wasted little thought or energy in other directions. yet there are a few minor things that it seems worth while to remember. howells has told something of the authors' reading given for the longfellow memorial, an entertainment managed by george parsons lathrop, though howells justly claims the glory of having fixed the price of admission at five dollars. then he recalls a pleasing anecdote of charles eliot norton, who introduced the attractions. norton presided, and when it came clemens's turn to read he introduced him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give, but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which are the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. he was reminded of darwin's delight in mark twain, and how when he came from his long day's exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a volume of mark twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him, and whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt secure of a good night's rest from it. a sort of blank ensued which clemens filled in the only possible way. he said he should always be glad he had contributed to the repose of that great man, to whom science owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every breast to burst forth, he began to read. howells tells of mark twain's triumph on this occasion, and in a letter at the time he wrote: “you simply straddled down to the footlights and took that house up in the hollow of your hand and tickled it.” howells adds that the show netted seventeen hundred dollars. this was early in may. of literary work, beyond the war paper, the “private history of a campaign that failed” (published december, ), clemens appears to have done very little. his thoughts were far too busy with plans for furthering the sale of the great military memoir to follow literary ventures of his own. at one time he was impelled to dictate an autobiography--grant's difficulties in his dying hour suggesting this--and he arranged with redpath, who was no longer a lecture agent and understood stenography, to co-operate with him in the work. he dictated a few chapters, but he was otherwise too much occupied to continue. also, he was unused to dictation, and found it hard and the result unsatisfactory. two open communications from mark twain that year deserve to be remembered. one of these; unsigned, was published in the century magazine, and expressed the need for a “universal tinker,” the man who can accept a job in a large household or in a community as master of all trades, with sufficient knowledge of each to be ready to undertake whatever repairs are likely to be required in the ordinary household, such as--“to put in windowpanes, mend gas leaks, jack-plane the edges of doors that won't shut, keep the waste-pipe and other water-pipe joints, glue and otherwise repair havoc done in furniture, etc.” the letter was signed x. y. z., and it brought replies from various parts of the world. none of the applicants seemed universally qualified, but in kansas city a business was founded on the idea, adopting “the universal tinker” as its firm name. the other letter mentioned was written to the 'christian union', inspired by a tale entitled, “what ought we to have done?” it was a tale concerning the government of children; especially concerning the government of one child--john junior--a child who, as it would appear from the tale, had a habit of running things pretty much to his own notion. the performance of john junior, and of his parents in trying to manage him, stirred mark twain considerably--it being “enough to make a body's blood boil,” as he confesses--and it impelled him to set down surreptitiously his impressions of what would have happened to john junior as a member of the clemens household. he did not dare to show the communication to mrs. clemens before he sent it, for he knew pretty well what its fate would be in that case. so he took chances and printed it without her knowledge. the letter was published july , . it is too long to be included entire, but it is too illuminating to be altogether omitted. after relating, in considerable detail, mrs. clemens's method of dealing with an unruly child--the gentleness yet firmness of her discipline--he concludes: the mother of my children adores them--there is no milder term for it--and they worship her; they even worship anything which the touch of her hand has made sacred. they know her for the best and truest friend they have ever had, or ever shall have; they know her for one who never did them a wrong, and cannot do them a wrong; who never told them a lie, nor the shadow of one; who never deceived them by even an ambiguous gesture; who never gave them an unreasonable command, nor ever contented herself with anything short of a perfect obedience; who has always treated them as politely and considerately as she would the best and oldest in the land, and has always required of them gentle speech and courteous conduct toward all, of whatsoever degree with whom they chanced to come in contact; they know her for one whose promise, whether of reward or punishment, is gold, and always worth its face, to the uttermost farthing. in a word, they know her, and i know her, for the best and dearest mother that lives--and by a long, long way the wisest.... in all my life i have never made a single reference to my wife in print before, as far as i can remember, except once in the dedication of a book; and so, after these fifteen years of silence, perhaps i may unseal my lips this one time without impropriety or indelicacy. i will institute one other novelty: i will send this manuscript to the press without her knowledge and without asking her to edit it. this will save it from getting edited into the stove. susy's biography refers to this incident at considerable length. she states that her father had misgivings after he had sent it to the christian union, and that he tried to recall the manuscript, but found it too late. she sets down some comments of her own on her mother's government, then tells us of the appearance of the article: when the christian union reached the farm and papa's article in it, all ready and waiting to be read to mama, papa hadn't the courage to show it to her (for he knew she wouldn't like it at all) at first, and he didn't, but he might have let it go and never let her see it; but finally he gave his consent to her seeing it, and told clara and i we could take it to her, which we did with tardiness, and we all stood around mama while she read it, all wondering what she would say and think about it. she was too much surprised (and pleased privately too) to say much at first; but, as we all expected, publicly (or rather when she remembered that this article was to be read by every one that took the christian union) she was rather shocked and a little displeased. susy goes on to tell that the article provoked a number of letters, most of them pleasant ones, but some of them of quite another sort. one of the latter fell into her mother's hands, after which there was general regret that the article had been printed, and the subject was no longer discussed at quarry farm. susy's biography is a unique record. it was a sort of combined memoir and journal, charming in its innocent frankness and childish insight. she used to keep it under her pillow, and after she was asleep the parents would steal it out and find a tender amusement and pathos in its quaint entries. it is a faithful record so far as it goes, and the period it covers is an important one; for it presents a picture of mark twain in the fullness of his manhood, in the golden hour of his fortune. susy's beginning has a special value here:--[susy's' spelling and punctuation are preserved.] we are a very happy family! we consist of papa, mama, jean, clara and me. it is papa i am writing about, and i shall have no trouble in not knowing what to say about him, as he is a very striking character. papa's appearance has been described many times, but very incorrectly; he has beautiful curly grey hair, not any too thick, or any too long, just right; a roman nose, which greatly improves the beauty of his features, kind blue eyes, and a small mustache, he has a wonderfully shaped head, and profile, he has a very good figure in short he is an extraordinarily fine looking man. all his features are perfect, except that he hasn't extraordinary teeth. his complexion is very fair, and he doesn't ware a beard: he is a very good man, and a very funny one; he has got a temper but we all of us have in this family. he is the loveliest man i ever saw, or ever hope to see, and oh so absent-minded! that this is a fair statement of the clemens home, and the truest picture of mark twain at fifty that has been preserved, cannot be doubted. his hair was iron-gray, not entirely white at this time, the auburn tints everywhere mingled with the shining white that later would mantle it like a silver crown. he did not look young for his years, but he was still young, always young--indestructibly young in spirit and bodily vigor. susy tells how that summer he blew soap-bubbles for the children, filling the bubbles with tobacco smoke; how he would play with the cats, and come clear down from his study on the hill to see how “sour mash,” then a kitten, was getting along; also how he wrote a poem for jean's donkey, cadichon (which they made kiditchin): she quotes the poem: kiditchin o du lieb' kiditchin du bist ganz bewitchin, waw- - - -he! in summer days kiditchin thou'rt dear from nose to britchin waw----he! no dought thoult get a switchin when for mischief thou'rt itchin' waw- - - -he! but when you're good kiditchin you shall feast in james's kitchin waw- - - -he! o now lift up thy song thy noble note prolong thou living chinese gong! waw---he! waw---he waw sweetest donkey man ever saw. clemens undertook to ride kiditchin one day, to show the children how it should be done, but kiditchin resented this interference and promptly flung him over her head. he thought she might have been listening to the poem he had written of her. susy's discovery that the secret of her biography was known is shown by the next entry, and the touch of severity in it was probably not entirely unconscious: papa said the other day, “i am a mugwump and a mugwump is pure from the marrow out.” (papa knows that i am writing this biography of him, and he said this for it.) he doesn't like to go to church at all, why i never understood, until just now. he told us the other day that he couldn't bear to hear anyone talk but himself, but that he could listen to himself talk for hours without getting tired, of course he said this in joke, but i've no doubt it was founded on truth. susy's picture of life at quarry farm at this period is realistic and valuable--too valuable to be spared from this biography: there are eleven cats at the farm here now. papa's favorite is a little tortoise-shell kitten he has named “sour mash,” and a little spotted one “fannie.” it is very pretty to see what papa calls the cat procession; it was formed in this way. old minniecat headed, (the mother of all the cats) next to her came aunt susie, then clara on the donkey, accompanied by a pile of cats, then papa and jean hand in hand and a pile of cats brought up in the rear, mama and i made up the audience. our varius occupations are as follows. papa rises about / past in the morning, breakfasts at eight, writes, plays tennis with clara and me and tries to make the donkey go, in the morning; does varius things in p.m., and in the evening plays tennis with clara and me and amuses jean and the donkey. mama rises about / to eight, breakfasts at eight, teaches jean german reading from - ; reads german with me from - . then she reads studdies or visits with aunt susie for a while, and then she reads to clara and i till lunch time things connected with english history (for we hope to go to england next summer) while we sew. then we have lunch. she studdies for about half an hour or visits with aunt susie, then reads to us an hour or more, then studdies writes reads and rests till supper time. after supper she sits out on the porch and works till eight o'clock, from eight o'clock to bedtime she plays whist with papa and after she has retired she reads and studdies german for a while. clara and i do most everything from practicing to donkey riding and playing tag. while jean's time is spent in asking mama what she can have to eat. it is impossible, at this distance, to convey all that the farm meant to the children during the summers of their infancy and childhood and girlhood which they spent there. it was the paradise, the dreamland they looked forward to during all the rest of the year. through the long, happy months there they grew strong and brown, and drank deeply of the joy of life. their cousins julia, jervis, and ida langdon ranged about their own ages and were almost their daily companions. their games were mainly of the out-of-doors; the woods and meadows and hillside pastures were their playground. susy was thirteen when she began her diary; a gentle, thoughtful, romantic child. one afternoon she discovered a wonderful tangle of vines and bushes between the study and the sunset--a rare hiding-place. she ran breathlessly to her aunt: “can i have it? can clara and i have it all for our own?” the petition was granted, of course, and the place was named helen's bower, for they were reading thaddeus of warsaw and the name appealed to susy's poetic fancy. then mrs. clemens conceived the idea of building a house for the children just beyond the bower. it was a complete little cottage when finished, with a porch and with furnishings contributed by friends and members of the family. there was a stove--a tiny affair, but practical--dishes, table, chairs, shelves, and a broom. the little house was named ellerslie, out of grace aguilar's days of robert bruce, and became one of the children's most beloved possessions. but alas for helen's bower! a workman was sent to clear away the debris after the builders, and being a practical man, he cut away helen's bower--destroyed it utterly. susy first discovered the vandalism, and came rushing to the house in a torrent of sorrow. for her the joy of life seemed ended, and it was long before she could be comforted. but ellerslie in time satisfied her hunger for retreat, became, in fact, the nucleus around which the children's summer happiness centered. to their elders the farm remained always the quiet haven. once to orion's wife clemens wrote: this is a superb sunday.... the city in the valley is purple with shade, as seen from up here at the study. the cranes are reading and loafing in the canvas- curtained summer-house, fifty yards away, on a higher (the highest) point; the cats are loafing over at ellerslie, which is the children's estate and dwelling house in their own private grounds (by deed from susie crane), a hundred yards from the study, among the clover and young oaks and willows. livy is down at the house, but i shall now go and bring her up to the cranes to help us occupy the lounges and hammocks, whence a great panorama of distant hills and valley and city is seeable. the children have gone on a lark through the neighboring hills and woods, susie and clara horseback and jean, driving a buggy, with the coachman for comrade and assistant at need. it is a perfect day indeed. the ending of each year's summer brought only regret. clemens would never take away all his things. he had an old superstition that to leave some article insured return. mrs. clemens also left something--her heart's content. the children went around bidding various objects good-by and kissed the gates of ellerslie too. clviii. mark twain at fifty mark twain's fiftieth birthday was one of the pleasantly observed events of that year. there was no special celebration, but friends sent kindly messages, and the critic, then conducted by jeannette and joseph gilder, made a feature of it. miss gilder wrote to oliver wendell holmes and invited some verses, which with his never-failing kindliness he sent, though in his accompanying note he said: “i had twenty-three letters spread out on my table for answering, all marked immediate, when your note came.” dr. holmes's stanzas are full of his gentle spirit: to mark twain (on his fiftieth birthday) ah, clemens, when i saw thee last, we both of us were younger; how fondly mumbling o'er the past is memory's toothless hunger! so fifty years have fled, they say, since first you took to drinking; i mean in nature's milky way of course no ill i'm thinking. but while on life's uneven road your track you've been pursuing, what fountains from your wit have flowed what drinks you have been brewing! i know whence all your magic came, your secret i've discovered, the source that fed your inward flame, the dreams that round you hovered. before you learned to bite or munch, still kicking in your cradle, the muses mixed a bowl of punch and hebe seized the ladle. dear babe, whose fiftieth year to-day your ripe half-century rounded, your books the precious draught betray the laughing nine compounded. so mixed the sweet, the sharp, the strong, each finds its faults amended, the virtues that to each belong in happiest union blended. and what the flavor can surpass of sugar, spirit, lemons? so while one health fills every glass mark twain for baby clemens! oliver wendell holmes. frank r. stockton, charles dudley warner, and joel chandler harris sent pleasing letters. warner said: you may think it an easy thing to be fifty years old, but you will find it's not so easy to stay there, and your next fifty years will slip away much faster than those just accomplished. many wrote letters privately, of course, and andrew lang, like holmes, sent a poem that has a special charm. for mark twain to brave mark twain, across the sea, the years have brought his jubilee. one hears it, half in pain, that fifty years have passed and gone since danced the merry star that shone above the babe mark twain. we turn his pages and we see the mississippi flowing free; we turn again and grin o'er all tom sawyer did and planned with him of the ensanguined hand, with huckleberry finn! spirit of mirth, whose chime of bells shakes on his cap, and sweetly swells across the atlantic main, grant that mark's laughter never die, that men through many a century may chuckle o'er mark twain! assuredly mark twain was made happy by these attentions; to dr. holmes he wrote: dear dr. holmes,--i shall never be able to tell you the half of how proud you have made me. if i could you would say you were nearly paid for the trouble you took. and then the family: if i could convey the electrical surprise and gratitude and exaltation of the wife and the children last night, when they happened upon that critic where i had, with artful artlessness, spread it open and retired out of view to see what would happen--well, it was great and fine and beautiful to see, and made me feel as the victor feels when the shouting hosts march by: and if you also could have seen it you would have said the account was squared. for i have brought them up in your company, as in the company of a warm and friendly and beneficent but far-distant sun; and so, for you to do this thing was for the sun to send down out of the skies the miracle of a special ray and transfigure me before their faces. i knew what that poem would be to them; i knew it would raise me up to remote and shining heights in their eyes, to very fellowship with the chambered nautilus itself, and that from that fellowship they could never more dissociate me while they should live; and so i made sure to be by when the surprise should come. charles dudley warner is charmed with the poem for its own felicitous sake; and so indeed am i, but more because it has drawn the sting of my fiftieth year; taken away the pain of it, the grief of it, the somehow shame of it, and made me glad and proud it happened. with reverence and affection, sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. so samuel clemens had reached the half-century mark; reached it in what seemed the fullness of success from every viewpoint. if he was not yet the foremost american man of letters, he was at least the most widely known he sat upon the highest mountain-top. furthermore, it seemed to him that fortune was showering her gifts into his lap. his unfortunate investments were now only as the necessary experiments that had led him to larger successes. as a publisher, he was already the most conspicuous in the world, and he contemplated still larger ventures: a type-setting machine patent, in which he had invested, and now largely controlled, he regarded as the chief invention of the age, absolutely certain to yield incalculable wealth. his connection with the grant family had associated him with an enterprise looking to the building of a railway from constantinople to the persian gulf. charles a. dana, of the sun, had put him in the way of obtaining for publication the life of the pope, leo xiii, officially authorized by the pope himself, and this he regarded as a certain fortune. now that the tide had turned he felt no hesitancy in reckoning a fortune from almost any venture. the grant book, even on the liberal terms allowed to the author, would yield a net profit of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to its publishers. huck finn would yield fifty thousand dollars more. the sales of his other books had considerably increased. certainly, at fifty, mark twain's fortunes were at flood-tide; buoyant and jubilant, he was floating on the topmost wave. if there were undercurrents and undertow they were down somewhere out of sight. if there were breakers ahead, they were too far distant to be heard. so sure was he of the triumphant consummation of every venture that to a friend at his home one night he said: “i am frightened at the proportions of my prosperity. it seems to me that whatever i touch turns to gold.” clix. the life of the pope as mark twain in the earlier days of his marriage had temporarily put aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now again literature had dropped into the background, had become an avocation, while financial interests prevailed. there were two chief ventures--the business of charles l. webster & co. and the promotion of the paige type-setting machine. they were closely identified in fortunes, so closely that in time the very existence of each depended upon the success of the other; yet they were quite distinct, and must be so treated in this story. the success of the grant life had given the webster business an immense prestige. it was no longer necessary to seek desirable features for publication. they came uninvited. other war generals preparing their memoirs naturally hoped to appear with their great commander. mcclellan's own story was arranged for without difficulty. a genesis of the civil war, by gen. samuel wylie crawford, was offered and accepted. general sheridan's memoirs were in preparation, and negotiations with webster & co. for their appearance were not delayed. probably neither webster nor clemens believed that the sale of any of these books would approach those of the grant life, but they expected them to be large, for the grant book had stimulated the public taste for war literature, and anything bearing the stamp of personal battle experience was considered literary legal-tender. moreover, these features, and even the grant book itself, seemed likely to dwindle in importance by the side of the life of pope leo xiii., who in his old and enfeebled age had consented to the preparation of a memoir, to be published with his sanction and blessing.--[by bernard o'reilly, d.d., ll.d. “written with the encouragement, approbation, and blessings of his holiness the pope.”]--clemens and webster--every one, in fact, who heard of the project--united in the belief that no book, with the exception of the holy scripture itself or the koran, would have a wider acceptance than the biography of the pope. it was agreed by good judges--and they included howells and twichell and even the shrewd general agents throughout the country--that every good catholic would regard such a book not only as desirable, but as absolutely necessary to his salvation. howells, recalling clemens's emotions of this time, writes: he had no words in which to paint the magnificence of the project or to forecast its colossal success. it would have a currency bounded only by the number of catholics in christendom. it would be translated into every language which was anywhere written or printed; it would be circulated literally in every country of the globe. the formal contract for this great undertaking was signed in rome in april, , and webster immediately prepared to go over to consult with his holiness in person as to certain details, also, no doubt, for the newspaper advertising which must result from such an interview. it was decided to carry a handsome present to the pope in the form of a specially made edition of the grant memoirs in a rich-casket, and it was clemens's idea that the binding of the book should be solid gold--this to be done by tiffany at an estimated cost of about three thousand dollars. in the end, however, the binding was not gold, but the handsomest that could be designed of less precious and more appropriate materials. webster sailed toward the end of june, and was warmly received and highly honored in rome. the great figures of the grant success had astonished europe even more than america, where spectacular achievements were more common. that any single publication should pay a profit to author and publisher of six hundred thousand dollars was a thing which belonged with the wonders of aladdin's garden. it was natural, therefore, that webster, who had rubbed the magic lamp with this result, who was mark twain's partner, and who had now traveled across the seas to confer with the pope himself, should be received with royal honors. in letters written at the time, webster relates how he found it necessary to have an imposing carriage and a footman to maintain the dignity of his mission, and how, after various impressive formalities, he was granted a private audience, a very special honor indeed. webster's letter gives us a picture of his holiness which is worth preserving. we--[mrs. webster, who, the reader will remember, was annie moffett, a daughter of pamela clemens, was included in the invitation to the presence chamber.]--found ourselves in a room perhaps twenty-five by thirty-five feet; the furniture was gilt, upholstered in light-red silk, and the side-walls were hung with the same material. against the wall by which we entered and in the middle space was a large gilt throne chair, upholstered in red plush, and upon it sat a man bowed with age; his hair was silvery white and as pure as the driven snow. his head was partly covered with a white skullcap; he was dressed in a long white cassock which reached to his feet, which rested upon a red-plush cushion and were inclosed in red embroidered slippers with a design of a cross. a golden chain was about his neck and suspended by it in his lap was a gold cross set in precious stones. upon a finger of his right hand was a gold ring with an emerald setting nearly an inch in diameter. his countenance was smiling, and beamed with benevolence. his face at once impressed us as that of a noble, pure man who could not do otherwise than good. this was the pope of rome, and as we advanced, making the three genuflexions prescribed by etiquette, he smiled benignly upon us. we advanced and, kneeling at his feet, kissed the seal upon his ring. he took us each by the hand repeatedly during the audience and made us perfectly at our ease. they remained as much as half an hour in the presence; and the pope conversed on a variety of subjects, including the business failure of general grant, his last hours, and the great success of his book. the figures seemed to him hardly credible, and when webster assured him that already a guaranteed sale of one hundred thousand copies of his own biography had been pledged by the agents he seemed even more astonished. “we in italy cannot comprehend such things,” he said. “i know you do great work in america; i know you have done a great and noble work in regard to general grant's book, but that my life should have such a sale seems impossible.” he asked about their home, their children, and was in every way the kindly, gentle-hearted man that his pictured face has shown him. then he gave them his final blessing and the audience closed. we each again kissed the seal on his ring. as annie was about to kiss it he suddenly withdrew his hand and said, “and will you, a little protestant, kiss the pope's ring?” as he said this, his face was all smiles, and mischief was clearly delineated upon it. he immediately put back his hand and she kissed the ring. we now withdrew, backing out and making three genuflexions as before. just as we reached the door he called to dr. o'reilly, “now don't praise me too much; tell the truth, tell the truth.” clx. a great publisher at home men are likely to be spoiled by prosperity, to be made arrogant, even harsh. success made samuel clemens merely elate, more kindly, more humanly generous. every day almost he wrote to webster, suggesting some new book or venture, but always considerately, always deferring to suggestions from other points of view. once, when it seemed to him that matters were not going as well as usual, a visit from webster showed him that it was because of his own continued absence from the business that he did not understand. whereupon he wrote: dear charley,--good--it's all good news. everything is on the pleasantest possible basis now, and is going to stay so. i blame myself in not looking in on you oftener in the past--that would have prevented all trouble. i mean to stand to my duty better now. at another time, realizing the press of responsibility, and that webster was not entirely well, he sent a warning from mrs. clemens against overwork. he added: your letter shows that you need such a warning. so i warn you myself to look after that. overwork killed mr. langdon and it can kill you. clemens found his own cares greatly multiplied. his connection with the firm was widely known, and many authors sent him their manuscripts or wrote him personal letters concerning them. furthermore, he was beset by all the cranks and beggars in christendom. his affairs became so numerous at length that he employed a business agent, f. g. whitmore, to relieve him of a part of his burden. whitmore lived close by, and was a good billiard-player. almost anything from the morning mail served as an excuse to send for whitmore. clemens was fond of affairs when they were going well; he liked the game of business, especially when it was pretentious and showily prosperous. it is probable that he was never more satisfied with his share of fortune than just at this time. certainly his home life was never happier. katie leary, for thirty years in the family service, has set down some impressions of that pleasant period. mr. clemens was a very affectionate father. he seldom left the house at night, but would read to the family, first to the children until bedtime, afterward to mrs. clemens. he usually read browning to her. they were very fond of it. the children played charades a great deal, and he was wonderful at that game and always helped them. they were very fond of private theatricals. every saturday of their lives they had a temporary stage put up in the school-room and we all had to help. gerhardt painted the scenery. they frequently played the balcony scene from “romeo and juliet” and several plays they wrote themselves. now and then we had a big general performance of “the prince and the pauper.” that would be in the library and the dining-room with the folding-doors open. the place just held eighty-four chairs, and the stage was placed back against the conservatory. the children were crazy about acting and we all enjoyed it as much as they did, especially mr. clemens, who was the best actor of all. i had a part, too, and george. i have never known a happier household than theirs was during those years. mr. clemens spent most of his time up in the billiard-room, writing or playing billiards. one day when i went in, and he was shooting the balls around the tables, i noticed smoke coming up from the hearth. i called patrick, and john o'neill, the gardener, and we began taking up the hearth to see what was the matter. mr. clemens kept on playing billiards right along and paid no attention to what we were doing. finally, when we got the hearth up, a lot of flame and smoke came out into the room. the house was on fire. mr. clemens noticed then what we were about, and went over to the corner where there were some bottle fire-extinguishers. he took one down and threw it into the flames. this put them out a good deal, and he took up his cue, went back to the table, and began to shoot the balls around again as if nothing had happened. mrs. clemens came in just then and said, “why, the house is afire!” “yes, i know it,” he said, but went on playing. we had a telephone and it didn't work very well. it annoyed him a good deal and sometimes he'd say: “i'll tear it out.” one day he tried to call up mrs. dr. tafft. he could not hear plainly and thought he was talking to central. “send down and take this d---thing out of here,” he said; “i'm tired of it.” he was mad, and using a good deal of bad language. all at once he heard mrs. dr. tafft say, “oh, mr. clemens, good morning.” he said, “why, mrs. tafft, i have just come to the telephone. george, our butler, was here before me and i heard him swearing as i came up. i shall have to talk to him about it.” mrs. tafft often told it on him.--[ mark twain once wrote to the telephone management: “the time is coming very soon when the telephone will be a perfect instrument, when proximity will no longer be a hindrance to its performance, when, in fact, one will hear a man who is in the next block just as easily and comfortably as he would if that man were in san francisco.”] mrs. clemens, before i went there, took care of his desk, but little by little i began to look after it when she was busy at other things. finally i took care of it altogether, but he didn't know it for a long time. one morning he caught me at it. “what are you doing here?” he asked. “dusting, mr. clemens,” i said. “you have no business here,” he said, very mad. “i've been doing it for a year, mr. clemens,” i said. “mrs. clemens told me to do it.” after that, when he missed anything--and he missed things often--he would ring for me. “katie,” he would say, “you have lost that manuscript.” “oh, mr. clemens,”, i would say, “i am sure i didn't touch it.” “yes, you did touch it, katie. you put it in the fire. it is gone.” he would scold then, and fume a great deal. then he would go over and mark out with his toe on the carpet a line which i was never to cross. “katie,” he would say, “you are never to go nearer to my desk than that line. that is the dead-line.” often after he had scolded me in the morning he would come in in the evening where i was dressing mrs. clemens to go out and say, “katie, i found that manuscript.” and i would say, “mr. clemens, i felt so bad this morning that i wanted to go away.” he had a pipe-cleaner which he kept on a high shelf. it was an awful old dirty one, and i didn't know that he ever used it. i took it to the balcony which was built out into the woods and threw it away as far as i could throw it. next day he asked, “katie, did you see my pipe-cleaner? you did see it; i can tell by your looks.” i said, “yes, mr. clemens, i threw it away.” “well,” he said, “it was worth a thousand dollars,” and it seemed so to me, too, before he got done scolding about it. it is hard not to dwell too long on the home life of this period. one would like to make a long chapter out of those play-acting evenings alone. they remained always fresh in mark twain's memory. once he wrote of them: we dined as we could, probably with a neighbor, and by quarter to eight in the evening the hickory fire in the hall was pouring a sheet of flame up the chimney, the house was in a drench of gas- light from the ground floor up, the guests were arriving, and there was a babble of hearty greetings, with not a voice in it that was not old and familiar and affectionate; and when the curtain went up we looked out from the stage upon none but faces that were dear to us, none but faces that were lit up with welcome for us. clxi. history: mainly by susy suzy, in her biography, which she continued through this period, writes: mama and i have both been very much troubled of late because papa, since he had been publishing general grant's books, has seemed to forget his own books and works entirely; and the other evening, as papa and i were promonading up and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or, do anything; he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, and the only book that he had been pertickularly anxious to write was one locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published. the book locked in the safe was captain stormfield, and the one he expected to write was a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court. he had already worked at it in a desultory way during the early months of , and once wrote of it to webster: i have begun a book whose scene is laid far back in the twilight of tradition; i have saturated myself with the atmosphere of the day and the subject and got myself into the swing of the work. if i peg away for some weeks without a break i am safe. but he could not peg away. he had too many irons in the fire for that. matthew arnold had criticized general grant's english, and clemens immediately put down other things to rush to his hero's defense. he pointed out that in arnold's criticism there were no less than “two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly english,” and said: there is that about the sun which makes us forget his spots, and when we think of general grant our pulses quicken and his grammar vanishes; we only remember that this is the simple soldier, who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools, and put into them a something which will still bring to american ears, as long as america shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts.--[address to army and navy club. for full text see appendix] clemens worked at the yankee now and then, and howells, when some of the chapters were read to him, gave it warm approval and urged its continuance. howells was often in hartford at this time. webster & co. were planning to publish the library of humor, which howells and “charley” clark had edited several years before, and occasional conferences were desirable. howells tells us that, after he and clark had been at great trouble to get the matter logically and chronologically arranged, clemens pulled it all to pieces and threw it together helter-skelter, declaring that there ought to be no sequence in a book of that sort, any more than in the average reader's mind; and howells admits that this was probably the truer method in a book made for the diversion rather than the instruction of the reader. one of the literary diversions of this time was a commentary on a delicious little book by caroline b. le row--english as she is taught--being a compilation of genuine answers given to examination questions by pupils in our public schools. mark twain was amused by such definitions as: “aborigines, system of mountains”; “alias--a good man in the bible”; “ammonia--the food of the gods,” and so on down the alphabet. susy, in her biography, mentions that her father at this is time read to them a little article which he had just written, entitled “luck,” and that they thought it very good. it was a story which twichell had heard and told to clemens, who set it down about as it came to him. it was supposed to be true, yet clemens seemed to think it too improbable for literature and laid it away for a number of years. we shall hear of it again by and by. from susy's memoranda we gather that humanity at this time was to be healed of all evils and sorrows through “mind cure.” papa has been very much interested of late in the “mind-cure” theory. and, in fact, so have we all. a young lady in town has worked wonders by using the “mind cure” upon people; she is constantly busy now curing peoples' diseases in this way--and curing her own, even, which to me seems the most remarkable of all. a little while past papa was delighted with the knowledge of what he thought the best way of curing a cold, which was by starving it. this starving did work beautifully, and freed him from a great many severe colds. now he says it wasn't the starving that helped his colds, but the trust in the starving, the “mind cure” connected with the starving. i shouldn't wonder if we finally became firm believers in “mind cure.” the next time papa has a cold i haven't a doubt he will send for miss holden, the young lady who is doctoring in the “mind-cure” theory, to cure him of it. again, a month later, she writes: april , . yes, the “mind cure” does seem to be working wonderfully. papa, who has been using glasses now for more than a year, has laid them off entirely. and my near-sightedness is really getting better. it seems marvelous. when jean has stomack-ache clara and i have tried to divert her by telling her to lie on her side and try “mind cure.” the novelty of it has made her willing to try it, and then clara and i would exclaim about how wonderful it was she was getting better. and she would think it realy was finally, and stop crying, to our delight. the other day mama went into the library and found her lying on the sofa with her back toward the door. she said, “why, jean, what's the matter? don't you feel well?” jean said that she had a little stomack-ache, and so thought she would lie down. mama said, “why don't you try 'mind cure'?” “i am,” jean answered. howells and twichell were invited to try the “mind cure,” as were all other friends who happened along. to the end of his days clemens would always have some panacea to offer to allay human distress. it was a good trait, when all is said, for it had its root in his humanity. the “mind cure” did not provide all the substance of things hoped for, though he always allowed for it a wide efficacy. once, in later years, commenting on susy's record, he said: the mind cannot heal broken bones, and doubtless there are many other physical ills which it cannot heal, but it can greatly help to modify the severities of all of them without exception, and there are mental and nervous ailments which it can wholly heal without the help of physician or surgeon. susy records another burning interest of this time: clara sprained her ankle a little while ago by running into a tree when coasting, and while she was unable to walk with it she played solotaire with cards a great deal. while clara was sick and papa saw her play solotaire so much he got very much interested in the game, and finally began to play it himself a little; then jean took it up, and at last mama even played it occasionally; jean's and papa's love for it rapidly increased, and now jean brings the cards every night to the table and papa and mama help her play, and before dinner is at an end papa has gotten a separate pack of cards and is playing alone, with great interest. mama and clara next are made subject to the contagious solotaire, and there are four solotarireans at the table, while you hear nothing but “fill up the place,” etc. it is dreadful! but a little further along susy presents her chief subject more seriously. he is not altogether absorbed with “mind cure” and solitaire, or even with making humorous tales. papa has done a great deal in his life i think that is good and very remarkable, but i think if he had had the advantages with which he could have developed the gifts which he has made no use of in writing his books, or in any other way, for peoples' pleasure and benefit outside of his own family and intimate friends, he could have done more than he has, and a great deal more, even. he is known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in him that is earnest than that is humorous. he has a keen sense of the ludicrous, notices funny stories and incidents, knows how to tell them, to improve upon them, and does not forget them. and again: when we are all alone at home nine times out of ten he talks about some very earnest subject (with an occasional joke thrown in), and he a good deal more often talks upon such subjects than upon the other kind. he is as much of a philosopher as anything, i think. i think he could have done a great deal in this direction if he had studied while young, for he seems to enjoy reasoning out things, no matter what; in a great many such directions he has greater ability than in the gifts which have made him famous. it was with the keen eyes and just mind of childhood that susy estimated, and there is little to add to her valuation. susy's biography came to an end that summer after starting to record a visit which they all made to keokuk to see grandma clemens. they went by way of the lakes and down the mississippi from st. paul. a pleasant incident happened that first evening on the river. soon after nightfall they entered a shoal crossing. clemens, standing alone on the hurricane-deck, heard the big bell forward boom out the call for leads. then came the leadsman's long-drawn chant, once so familiar, the monotonous repeating in river parlance of the depths of water. presently the lead had found that depth of water signified by his nom de plume and the call of “mark twain, mark twain” floated up to him like a summons from the past. all at once a little figure came running down the deck, and clara confronted him, reprovingly: “papa,” she said, “i have hunted all over the boat for you. don't you know they are calling for you?” they remained in keokuk a week, and susy starts to tell something of their visit there. she begins: “we have arrived in keokuk after a very pleasant----” the sentence remains unfinished. we cannot know what was the interruption or what new interest kept her from her task. we can only regret that the loving little hand did not continue its pleasant history. years later, when susy had passed from among the things we know, her father, commenting, said: when i look at the arrested sentence that ends the little book it seems as if the hand that traced it cannot be far--it is gone for a moment only, and will come again and finish it. but that is a dream; a creature of the heart, not of the mind--a feeling, a longing, not a mental product; the same that lured aaron burr, old, gray, forlorn, forsaken, to the pier day after day, week after week, there to stand in the gloom and the chill of the dawn, gazing seaward through veiling mists and sleet and snow for the ship which he knew was gone down, the ship that bore all his treasure--his daughter. volume ii, part : - clxii. browning, meredith, and meisterschaft the browning readings must have begun about this time. just what kindled mark twain's interest in the poetry of robert browning is not remembered, but very likely his earlier associations with the poet had something to do with it. whatever the beginning, we find him, during the winter of and , studiously, even violently, interested in browning's verses, entertaining a sort of club or class who gathered to hear his rich, sympathetic, and luminous reading of the payleyings--“with bernard de mandeville,” “daniel bartoli,” or “christopher smart.” members of the saturday morning club were among his listeners and others-friends of the family. they were rather remarkable gatherings, and no one of that group but always vividly remembered the marvelously clear insight which mark twain's vocal personality gave to those somewhat obscure measures. they did not all of them realize that before reading a poem he studied it line by line, even word by word; dug out its last syllable of meaning, so far as lay within human possibility, and indicated with pencil every shade of emphasis which would help to reveal the poet's purpose. no student of browning ever more devoutly persisted in trying to compass a master's intent--in such poems as “sordello,” for instance--than mark twain. just what permanent benefit he received from this particular passion it is difficult to know. once, at a class-meeting, after finishing “easter day,” he made a remark which the class requested him to “write down.” it is recorded on the fly-leaf of dramatis personae as follows: one's glimpses & confusions, as one reads browning, remind me of looking through a telescope (the small sort which you must move with your hand, not clock-work). you toil across dark spaces which are (to your lens) empty; but every now & then a splendor of stars & suns bursts upon you and fills the whole field with flame. feb. , . in another note he speaks of the “vague dim flash of splendid hamming-birds through a fog.” whatever mental treasures he may or may not have laid up from browning there was assuredly a deep gratification in the discovery of those splendors of “stars and suns” and the flashing “humming-birds,” as there must also have been in pointing out those wonders to the little circle of devout listeners. it all seemed so worth while. it was at a time when george meredith was a reigning literary favorite. there was a meredith cult as distinct as that of browning. possibly it exists to-day, but, if so, it is less militant. mrs. clemens and her associates were caught in the meredith movement and read diana of the crossways and the egoist with reverential appreciation. the meredith epidemic did not touch mark twain. he read but few novels at most, and, skilful as was the artistry of the english favorite, he found his characters artificialities--ingeniously contrived puppets rather than human beings, and, on the whole, overrated by their creator. diana of the crossways was read aloud, and, listening now and then, he was likely to say: “it doesn't seem to me that diana lives up to her reputation. the author keeps telling us how smart she is, how brilliant, but i never seem to hear her say anything smart or brilliant. read me some of diana's smart utterances.” he was relentless enough in his criticism of a literature he did not care for, and he never learned to care for meredith. he read his favorite books over and over with an ever-changing point of view. he re-read carlyle's french revolution during the summer at the farm, and to howells he wrote: how stunning are the changes which age makes in man while he sleeps! when i finished carlyle's french revolution in i was a girondin; every time i have read it since i have read it differently--being influenced & changed, little by little, by life & environment (& taine & st. simon); & now i lay the book down once more, & recognize that i am a sansculotte!--and not a pale, characterless sansculotte, but a marat. carlyle teaches no such gospel, so the change is in me--in my vision of the evidences. people pretend that the bible means the same to them at that it did at all former milestones in their journey. i wonder how they can lie so. it comes of practice, no doubt. they would not say that of dickens's or scott's books. nothing remains the same. when a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood it has always shrunk; there is no instance of such house being as big as the picture in memory & imagination call for. shrunk how? why, to its correct dimensions; the house hasn't altered; this is the first time it has been in focus. well, that's loss. to have house & bible shrink so, under the disillusioning corrected angle, is loss--for a moment. but there are compensations. you tilt the tube skyward & bring planets & comets & corona flames a hundred & fifty thousand miles high into the field. which i see you have done, & found tolstoi. i haven't got him in focus yet, but i've got browning. in time the browning passion would wane and pass, and the club was succeeded by, or perhaps it blended with, a german class which met at regular intervals at the clemens home to study “der, die, and das” and the “gehabt habens” out of meisterschaft and such other text-books as professor schleutter could provide. they had monthly conversation days, when they discussed in german all sorts of things, real and imaginary. once dr. root, a prominent member, and clemens had a long wrangle over painting a house, in which they impersonated two german neighbors. clemens finally wrote for the class a three-act play “meisterschaft”--a literary achievement for which he was especially qualified, with its picturesque mixture of german and english and its unfailing humor. it seems unlike anything ever attempted before or since. no one but mark twain could have written it. it was given twice by the class with enormous success, and in modified form it was published in the century magazine (january, ). it is included to-day in his “complete works,” but one must have a fair knowledge of german to capture the full delight of it.--[on the original manuscript mark twain wrote: “there is some tolerably rancid german here and there in this piece. it is attributable to the proof-reader.” perhaps the proof-reader resented this and cut it out, for it does not appear as published.] mark twain probably exaggerated his sentiments a good deal when in the carlyle letter he claimed to be the most rabid of sansculottes. it is unlikely that he was ever very bare-kneed and crimson in his anarchy. he believed always that cruelty should be swiftly punished, whether in king or commoner, and that tyrants should be destroyed. he was for the people as against kings, and for the union of labor as opposed to the union of capital, though he wrote of such matters judicially--not radically. the knights of labor organization, then very powerful, seemed to clemens the salvation of oppressed humanity. he wrote a vehement and convincing paper on the subject, which he sent to howells, to whom it appealed very strongly, for howells was socialistic, in a sense, and clemens made his appeal in the best and largest sense, dramatizing his conception in a picture that was to include, in one grand league, labor of whatever form, and, in the end, all mankind in a final millennium. howells wrote that he had read the essay “with thrills amounting to yells of satisfaction,” and declared it to be the best thing yet said on the subject. the essay closed: he [the unionized workman] is here and he will remain. he is the greatest birth of the greatest age the nations of the world have known. you cannot sneer at him--that time has gone by. he has before him the most righteous work that was ever given into the hand of man to do; and he will do it. yes, he is here; and the question is not--as it has been heretofore during a thousand ages--what shall we do with him? for the first time in history we are relieved of the necessity of managing his affairs for him. he is not a broken dam this time--he is the flood! it must have been about this time that clemens developed an intense, even if a less permanent, interest in another matter which was to benefit the species. he was one day walking up fifth avenue when he noticed the sign, professor loisette school of memory the instantaneous art of never forgetting clemens went inside. when he came out he had all of professor loisette's literature on “predicating correlation,” and for the next several days was steeping himself in an infusion of meaningless words and figures and sentences and forms, which he must learn backward and forward and diagonally, so that he could repeat them awake and asleep in order to predicate his correlation to a point where remembering the ordinary facts of life, such as names, addresses, and telephone numbers, would be a mere diversion. it was another case of learning the multitudinous details of the mississippi river in order to do the apparently simple thing of steering a boat from new orleans to st. louis, and it is fair to say that, for the time he gave it, he achieved a like success. he was so enthusiastic over this new remedy for human distress that within a very brief time he was sending out a printed letter recommending loisette to the public at large. here is an extract: ... i had no system--and some sort of rational order of procedure is, of course, necessary to success in any study. well, loisette furnished me a system. i cannot undertake to say it is the best, or the worst, because i don't know what the other systems are. loisette, among other cruelties, requires you to memorize a great long string of words that, haven't any apparent connection or meaning--there are perhaps of these words, arranged in maniacal lines of to or words in each line-- lines in all. of course your first impulse is to resign, but at the end of three or four hours you find to your surprise that you've got them and can deliver them backward or forward without mistake or hesitation. now, don't you see what a world of confidence that must necessarily breed? --confidence in a memory which before you wouldn't even venture to trust with the latin motto of the u. s. lest it mislay it and the country suffer. loisette doesn't make memories, he furnishes confidence in memories that already exist. isn't that valuable? indeed it is to me. whenever hereafter i shall choose to pack away a thing properly in that refrigerator i sha'n't be bothered with the aforetime doubts; i shall know i'm going to find it sound and sweet when i go for it again. loisette naturally made the most of this advertising and flooded the public with mark twain testimonials. but presently clemens decided that after all the system was not sufficiently simple to benefit the race at large. he recalled his printed letters and prevailed upon loisette to suppress his circulars. later he decided that the whole system was a humbug. clxiii. letter to the queen of england it was one day in that clemens received evidence that his reputation as a successful author and publisher--a man of wealth and revenues--had penetrated even the dimness of the british tax offices. a formidable envelope came, inclosing a letter from his london publishers and a very large printed document all about the income tax which the queen's officers had levied upon his english royalties as the result of a report that he had taken buckenham hall, norwich, for a year, and was to become an english resident. the matter amused and interested him. to chatto & windus he wrote: i will explain that all that about buckenham hall was an english newspaper's mistake. i was not in england, and if i had been i wouldn't have been at buckenham hall anyway, but buckingham palace, or i would have endeavored to have found out the reason why... but we won't resist. we'll pay as if i were really a resident. the country that allows me copyright has a right to tax me. reflecting on the matter, clemens decided to make literature of it. he conceived the notion of writing an open letter to the queen in the character of a rambling, garrulous, but well-disposed countryman whose idea was that her majesty conducted all the business of the empire herself. he began: hartford, november , . madam, you will remember that last may mr. edward bright, the clerk of the inland revenue office, wrote me about a tax which he said was due from me to the government on books of mine published in london --that is to say, an income tax on the royalties. i do not know mr. bright, and it is embarrassing to me to correspond with strangers, for i was raised in the country and have always lived there, the early part in marion county, missouri, before the war, and this part in hartford county, connecticut, near bloomfield and about miles this side of farmington, though some call it , which it is impossible to be, for i have walked it many and many a time in considerably under three hours, and general hawley says he has done it in two and a quarter, which is not likely; so it has seemed best that i write your majesty. the letter proceeded to explain that he had never met her majesty personally, but that he once met her son, the prince of wales, in oxford street, at the head of a procession, while he himself was on the top of an omnibus. he thought the prince would probably remember him on account of a gray coat with flap pockets which he wore, he being the only person on the omnibus who had on that kind of a coat. “i remember him,” he said, “as easily as i would a comet.” he explained the difficulty he had in understanding under what heading he was taxed. there was a foot-note on the list which stated that he was taxed under “schedule d, section .” he had turned to that place and found these three things: “trades, offices, gas works.” he did not regard authorship as a trade, and he had no office, so he did not consider that he was taxable under “schedule d, section .” the letter concludes: having thus shown your majesty that i am not taxable, but am the victim of the error of a clerk who mistakes the nature of my commerce, it only remains for me to beg that you will, of your justice, annul my letter that i spoke of, so that my publisher can keep back that tax money which, in the confusion and aberration caused by the document, i ordered him to pay. you will not miss the sum, but this is a hard year for authors, and as for lectures i do not suppose your majesty ever saw such a dull season. with always great and ever-increasing respect, i beg to sign myself your majesty's servant to command, mark twain. her majesty the queen, london. the letter, or “petition,” as it was called, was published in the harper's magazine “drawer” (december, ), and is now included in the “complete works.” taken as a whole it is one of the most exquisite of mark twain's minor humors. what other humorist could have refrained from hinting, at least, the inference suggested by the obvious “gas works”? yet it was a subtler art to let his old, simple-minded countryman ignore that detail. the little skit was widely copied and reached the queen herself in due time, and her son, prince edward, who never forgot its humor. clemens read a notable paper that year before the monday evening club. its subject was “consistency”--political consistency--and in it he took occasion to express himself pretty vigorously regarding the virtue of loyalty to party before principle, as exemplified in the blaine-cleveland campaign. it was in effect a scathing reply to those who, three years, before, had denounced twichell and himself for standing by their convictions.--[ characteristic paragraphs from this paper will be found under appendix r, at the end of last volume.] clxiv. some further account of charles l. webster & co. flood-tide is a temporary condition, and the ebb in the business of charles l. webster & co., though very deliberate, was not delayed in its beginning. most of the books published--the early ones at least-were profitable. mcclellan's memoirs paid, as did others of the war series. even the life of pope leo xiii. paid. what a statement to make, after all their magnificent dreams and preparations! it was published simultaneously in six languages. it was exploited in every conceivable fashion, and its aggregate sales fell far short of the number which the general agents had promised for their first orders. it was amazing, it was incredible, but, alas! it was true. the prospective catholic purchaser had decided that the pope's life was not necessary to his salvation or even to his entertainment. howells explains it, to his own satisfaction at least, when he says: we did not consider how often catholics could not read, how often, when they could, they might not wish to read. the event proved that, whether they could read or not, the immeasurable majority did not wish to read the life of the pope, though it was written by a dignitary of the church and issued to the world with sanction from the vatican. howells, of course, is referring to the laboring catholic of that day. there are no catholics of this day--no american catholics, at least--who do not read, and money among them has become plentiful. perhaps had the pope's life been issued in this new hour of enlightenment the tale of its success might have been less sadly told. a variety of books followed. henry ward beecher agreed to write an autobiography, but he died just when he was beginning the work, and the biography, which his family put together, brought only a moderate return. a book of sandwich islands tales and legends, by his hawaiian majesty king kalakaua, edited by clemens's old friend, rollin m. daggett, who had become united states minister to the islands, barely paid for the cost of manufacture, while a volume of reminiscences by general hancock was still less fortunate. the running expenses of the business were heavy. on the strength of the grant success webster had moved into still larger quarters at no. east fifteenth street, and had a ground floor for a salesroom. the force had become numerous and costly. it was necessary that a book should pay largely to maintain this pretentious establishment. a number of books were published at a heavy loss. never mind their titles; we may forget them, with the name of the bookkeeper who presently embezzled thirty thousand dollars of the firm's money and returned but a trifling sum. by the end of there were three works in prospect on which great hopes were founded--'the library of humor', which howells and clark had edited; a personal memoir of general sheridan's, and a library of american literature in ten volumes, compiled by edmund clarence stedman and ellen mackay hutchinson. it was believed these would restore the fortunes and the prestige of the firm. they were all excellent, attractive features. the library of humor was ably selected and contained two hundred choice drawings by kemble. the sheridan memoir was finely written, and the public interest in it was bound to be general. the library of american literature was a collection of the best american writing, and seemed bound to appeal to every american reading-home. it was necessary to borrow most of the money required to build these books, for the profit made from the grant life and less fortunate ventures was pretty well exhausted. clemens presently found a little drift of his notes accumulating at this bank and that--a disturbing condition, when he remembered it, for he was financing the typesetting machine by this time, and it was costing a pretty sum. meantime, webster was no longer active in the management. in two years he had broken down from overwork, and was now desperately ill with an acute neuralgia that kept him away from the business most of the time. its burdens had fallen upon his assistant, fred j. hall, a willing, capable young man, persevering and hopeful, lacking only years and experience. hall worked like a beaver, and continually looked forward to success. he explained, with each month's report of affairs, just why the business had not prospered more during that particular month, and just why its profits would be greater during the next. webster finally retired from the business altogether, and hall was given a small partnership in the firm. he reduced expenses, worked desperately, pumping out the debts, and managed to keep the craft afloat. the library of humor, the life of sheridan, and the library of american literature all sold very well; not so well as had been hoped, but the sales yielded a fair profit. it was thought that if clemens himself would furnish a new book now and then the business might regain something of its original standing. we may believe that clemens had not been always patient, not always gentle, during this process of decline. he had differed with webster, and occasionally had gone down and reconstructed things after his own notions. once he wrote to orion that he had suddenly awakened to find that there was no more system in the office than in a nursery without a nurse. “but,” he added, “i have spent a good deal of time there since, and reduced everything to exact order and system.” just what were the new features of order instituted it would be interesting to know. that the financial pressure was beginning to be felt even in the clemens home is shown by a christmas letter to mrs. moffett. hartford, december , . dear pamela,--will you take this $ & buy some candy or other trifle for yourself & sam & his wife to remind you that we remember you? if we weren't a little crowded this year by the type-setter i'd send a check large enough to buy a family bible or some other useful thing like that. however, we go on & on, but the type-setter goes on forever--at $ , a month; which is much more satisfactory than was the case the first months, when the bill only averaged $ , , & promised to take a thousand years. we'll be through now in or months, i reckon, & then the strain will let up and we can breathe freely once more, whether success ensues or failure. even with a type-setter on hand we ought not to be in the least scrimped-but it would take a long letter to explain why & who is to blame. all the family send love to all of you, & best christmas wishes for your prosperity. affectionately, sam. clxv. letters, visits, and visitors there were many pleasanter things, to be sure. the farm life never failed with each returning summer; the winters brought gay company and fair occasions. sir henry and lady stanley, visiting. america, were entertained in the clemens home, and clemens went on to boston to introduce stanley to his lecture audience. charles dickens's son, with his wife and daughter, followed a little later. an incident of their visit seems rather amusing now. there is a custom in england which requires the host to give the guest notice of bedtime by handing him a lighted candle. mrs. clemens knew of this custom, but did not have the courage to follow it in her own home, and the guests knew of no other way to relieve the situation; as a result, all sat up much later than usual. eventually clemens himself suggested that possibly the guests would like to retire. robert louis stevenson came down from saranac, and clemens went in to visit him at his new york hotel, the st. stevens, on east eleventh street. stevenson had orders to sit in the sunshine as much as possible, and during the few days of their association he and clemens would walk down to washington square and sit on one of the benches and talk. they discussed many things--philosophies, people, books; it seems a pity their talk could not have been preserved. stevenson was a great admirer of mark twain's work. he said that during a recent painting of his portrait he had insisted on reading huck finn aloud to the artist, a frenchman, who had at first protested, and finally had fallen a complete victim to huck's yarn. in one of stevenson's letters to clemens he wrote: my father, an old man, has been prevailed upon to read roughing it (his usual amusement being found in theology), and after one evening spent with the book he declared: “i am frightened. it cannot be safe for a man at my time of life to laugh so much.” what heaps of letters, by the way, remain from this time, and how curious some of them are! many of them are requests of one sort or another, chiefly for money--one woman asking for a single day's income, conservatively estimated at five thousand dollars. clemens seldom answered an unwarranted letter; but at one time he began a series of unmailed answers--that is to say, answers in which he had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings and to restore his spiritual balance. he prepared an introduction for this series. in it he said: ... you receive a letter. you read it. it will be tolerably sure to produce one of three results: , pleasure; , displeasure; , indifference. i do not need to say anything about nos. & ; everybody knows what to do with those breeds of letters; it is breed no. that i am after. it is the one that is loaded up with trouble. when you get an exasperating letter what happens? if you are young you answer it promptly, instantly--and mail the thing you have written. at forty what do you do? by that time you have found out that a letter written in a passion is a mistake in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred; that it usually wrongs two persons, and always wrongs one--yourself. you have grown weary of wronging yourself and repenting; so you manacle, you fetter, you log-chain the frantic impulse to write a pulverizing answer. you will wait a day or die. but in the mean time what do you do? why, if it is about dinner- time, you sit at table in a deep abstraction all through the meal; you try to throw it off and help do the talking; you get a start three or four times, but conversation dies on your lips every time --your mind isn't on it; your heart isn't in it. you give up, and subside into a bottomless deep of silence, permanently; people must speak to you two or three times to get your attention, and then say it over again to make you understand. this kind of thing goes on all the rest of the evening; nobody can interest you in anything; you are useless, a depressing influence, a burden. you go to bed at last; but at three in the morning you are as wide awake as you were in the beginning. thus we see what you have been doing for nine hours--on the outside. but what were you doing on the inside? you were writing letters--in your mind. and enjoying it, that is quite true; that is not to be denied. you have been flaying your correspondent alive with your incorporeal pen; you have been braining him, disemboweling him, carving him into little bits, and then--doing it all over again. for nine hours. it was wasted time, for you had no intention of putting any of this insanity on paper and mailing it. yes, you know that, and confess it--but what were you to do? where was your remedy? will anybody contend that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, go, and be obeyed? no, he cannot; that is certainly true. well, then, what is he to do? i will explain by the suggestion contained in my opening paragraph. during the nine hours he has written as many as forty- seven furious letters--in his mind. if he had put just one of them on paper it would have brought him relief, saved him eight hours of trouble, and given him an hour's red-hot pleasure besides. he is not to mail this letter; he understands that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no harm. he is only writing it to get the bile out. so to speak, he is a volcano: imaging himself erupting does no good; he must open up his crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he would get relief. before he has filled his first sheet sometimes the relief is there. he degenerates into good-nature from that point. sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one writes as many as three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a very angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot embers in it here and there. he pigeonholes these and then does one of two things--dismisses the whole matter from his mind or writes the proper sort of letter and mails it. to this day i lose my balance and send an overwarm letter--or more frequently telegram--two or three times a year. but that is better than doing it a hundred times a year, as i used to do years ago. perhaps i write about as many as ever, but i pigeonhole them. they ought not to be thrown away. such a letter a year or so old is as good as a sermon to the maw who wrote it. it makes him feel small and shabby, but--well, that wears off. any sermon does; but the sermon does some little good, anyway. an old cold letter like that makes you wonder how you could ever have got into such a rage about nothing. the unmailed answers that were to accompany this introduction were plentiful enough and generally of a fervent sort. one specimen will suffice. it was written to the chairman of a hospital committee. dear sir,--if i were smithfield i would certainly go out and get behind something and blush. according to your report, “the politicians are afraid to tax the people for the support” of so humane and necessary a thing as a hospital. and do your “people” propose to stand that?--at the hands of vermin officials whom the breath of their votes could blow out of official existence in a moment if they had the pluck to band themselves together and blow. oh, come, these are not “people”--they are cowed school-boys with backbones made of boiled macaroni. if you are not misreporting those “people” you are just in the right business passing the mendicant hat for them. dear sir, communities where anything like citizenship exists are accustomed to hide their shames, but here we have one proposing to get up a great “exposition” of its dishonor and advertise it all it can. it has been eleven years since i wrote anything for one of those graveyards called a “fair paper,” and so i have doubtless lost the knack of it somewhat; still i have done the best i could for you. this was from a burning heart and well deserved. one may almost regret that he did not send it. once he received a letter intended for one samuel clements, of elma, new york, announcing that the said clements's pension had been allowed. but this was amusing. when clemens had forwarded the notice to its proper destination he could not resist sending this comment to the commissioner at washington: dear sir,--i have not applied for a pension. i have often wanted a pension--often--ever so often--i may say, but in as much as the only military service i performed during the war was in the confederate army, i have always felt a delicacy about asking you for it. however, since you have suggested the thing yourself, i feel strengthened. i haven't any very pensionable diseases myself, but i can furnish a substitute--a man who is just simply a chaos, a museum of all the different kinds of aches and pains, fractures, dislocations and malformations there are; a man who would regard “rheumatism and sore eyes” as mere recreation and refreshment after the serious occupations of his day. if you grant me the pension, dear sir, please hand it to general jos. hawley, united states senator--i mean hand him the certificate, not the money, and he will forward it to me. you will observe by this postal-card which i inclose that he takes a friendly interest in the matter. he thinks i've already got the pension, whereas i've only got the rheumatism; but didn't want that--i had that before. i wish it were catching. i know a man that i would load up with it pretty early. lord, but we all feel that way sometimes. i've seen the day when but never mind that; you may be busy; just hand it to hawley--the certificate, you understand, is not transferable. clemens was in good standing at washington during the cleveland administration, and many letters came, asking him to use his influence with the president to obtain this or that favor. he always declined, though once--a few years later, in europe--when he learned that frank mason, consul-general at frankfort, was about to be displaced, clemens, of his own accord, wrote to baby ruth cleveland about it. my dear ruth, i belong to the mugwumps, and one of the most sacred rules of our order prevents us from asking favors of officials or recommending men to office, but there is no harm in writing a friendly letter to you and telling you that an infernal outrage is about to be committed by your father in turning out of office the best consul i know (and i know a great many) just because he is a republican and a democrat wants his place. he went on to recall mason's high and honorable record, suggesting that miss ruth take the matter into her own hands. then he said: i can't send any message to the president, but the next time you have a talk with him concerning such matters i wish you would tell him about captain mason and what i think of a government that so treats its efficient officials. just what form of appeal the small agent made is not recorded, but by and by mark twain received a tiny envelope, postmarked washington, inclosing this note in president cleveland's handwriting: miss ruth cleveland begs to acknowledge the receipt of mr. twain's letter and say that she took the liberty of reading it to the president, who desires her to thank mr. twain for her information, and to say to him that captain mason will not be disturbed in the frankfort consulate. the president also desires miss cleveland to say that if mr. twain knows of any other cases of this kind he will be greatly obliged if he will write him concerning them at his earliest convenience. clemens immensely admired grover cleveland, also his young wife, and his visits to washington were not infrequent. mrs. clemens was not always able to accompany him, and he has told us how once (it was his first visit after the president's marriage) she put a little note in the pocket of his evening waistcoat, which he would be sure to find when dressing, warning him about his deportment. being presented to mrs. cleveland, he handed her a card on which he had written “he didn't,” and asked her to sign her name below those words. mrs. cleveland protested that she couldn't sign it unless she knew what it was he hadn't done; but he insisted, and she promised to sign if he would tell her immediately afterward all about it. she signed, and he handed her mrs. clemens's note, which was very brief. it said: “don't wear your arctics in the white house.” mrs. cleveland summoned a messenger and had the card she had signed mailed at once to mrs. clemens at hartford. he was not always so well provided against disaster. once, without consulting his engagements, he agreed to assist mrs. cleveland at a dedication, only to find that he must write an apology later. in his letter he said: i do not know how it is in the white house, but in this house of ours whenever the minor half of the administration tries to run itself without the help of the major half it gets aground. he explained his position, and added: i suppose the president often acts just like that; goes and makes an impossible promise, and you never find it out until it is next to impossible to break it up and set things straight again. well, that is just our way exactly--one-half the administration always busy getting the family into trouble and the other half busy getting it out. clvxi. a “player” and a master of arts one morning early in january clemens received the following note: daly's theater, new york, january , . mr. augustin daly will be very much pleased to have mr. s. l. clemens meet mr. booth, mr. barrett, and mr. palmer and a few friends at lunch on friday next, january th (at one o'clock in delmonico's), to discuss the formation of a new club which it is thought will claim your (sic) interest. r. s. v. p. there were already in new york a variety of literary and artistic societies, such as the kinsmen and tile clubs, with which clemens was more or less associated. it was proposed now to form a more comprehensive and pretentious organization--one that would include the various associated arts. the conception of this new club, which was to be called the players, had grown out of a desire on the part of edwin booth to confer some enduring benefit upon the members of his profession. it had been discussed during a summer cruise on mr. e. c. benedict's steam-yacht by a little party which, besides the owner, consisted of booth himself, aldrich, lawrence barrett, william bispham, and laurence hutton. booth's original idea had been to endow some sort of an actors' home, but after due consideration this did not appear to be the best plan. some one proposed a club, and aldrich, with never-failing inspiration, suggested its name, the players, which immediately impressed booth and the others. it was then decided that members of all the kindred arts should be admitted, and this was the plan discussed and perfected at the daly luncheon. the guests became charter members, and the players became an incorporated fact early in january, .--[besides mr. booth himself, the charter members were: lawrence barrett, william bispham, samuel l. clemens, augustin daly, joseph f. daly, john drew, henry edwards, laurence hutton, joseph jefferson, john a. lane, james lewis, brander matthews, stephen h. olin, a. m. palmer, and william t. sherman.]--booth purchased the fine old brownstone residence at gramercy park, and had expensive alterations made under the directions of stanford white to adapt it for club purposes. he bore the entire cost, furnished it from garret to cellar, gave it his books and pictures, his rare collections of every sort. laurence hutton, writing of it afterward, said: and on the first founder's night, the st of december, , he transferred it all to the association, a munificent gift; absolutely without parallel in its way. the pleasure it gave to booth during the few remaining years of his life was very great. he made it his home. next to his own immediate family it was his chief interest, care, and consolation. he nursed and petted it, as it nursed and petted and honored him. he died in it. and it is certainly his greatest monument. there is no other club quite like the players. the personality of edwin booth pervades it, and there is a spirit in its atmosphere not found in other large clubs--a spirit of unity, and ancient friendship, and mellowness which usually come only of small membership and long establishment. mark twain was always fond of the players, and more than once made it his home. it is a true home, and its members are a genuine brotherhood. it was in june, , that yale college conferred upon samuel clemens the degree of master of arts. it was his first honor of this kind, and he was proud of it. to charles hopkins (“charley”) clark, who had been appointed to apprise him of the honor, he wrote: i felt mighty proud of that degree; in fact i could squeeze the truth a little closer and say vain of it. and why shouldn't i be? i am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has ever been given a degree by any college in any age of the world as far as i know. to which clark answered: my dear friend, you are “the only literary animal of your particular subspecies” in existence, and you've no cause for humility in the fact. yale has done herself at least as much credit as she has done you, and “don't you forget it.” c. h. c. clemens could not attend the alumni dinner, being at elmira and unable to get away, but in an address he made at yale college later in the year he thus freely expressed himself: i was sincerely proud and grateful to be made a master of arts by this great and venerable university, and i would have come last june to testify this feeling, as i do now testify it, but that the sudden and unexpected notice of the honor done me found me at a distance from home and unable to discharge that duty and enjoy that privilege. along at first, say for the first month or so, i, did not quite know hove to proceed because of my not knowing just what authorities and privileges belonged to the title which had been granted me, but after that i consulted some students of trinity--in hartford--and they made everything clear to me. it was through them that i found out that my title made me head of the governing body of the university, and lodged in me very broad and severely responsible powers. i was told that it would be necessary to report to you at this time, and of course i comply, though i would have preferred to put it off till i could make a better showing; for indeed i have been so pertinaciously hindered and obstructed at every turn by the faculty that it would be difficult to prove that the university is really in any better shape now than it was when i first took charge. by advice, i turned my earliest attention to the greek department. i told the greek professor i had concluded to drop the use of greek- written character because it is so hard to spell with, and so impossible to read after you get it spelt. let us draw the curtain there. i saw by what followed that nothing but early neglect saved him from being a very profane man. i ordered the professor of mathematics to simplify the whole system, because the way it was i couldn't understand it, and i didn't want things going on in the college in what was practically a clandestine fashion. i told him to drop the conundrum system; it was not suited to the dignity of a college, which should deal in facts, not guesses and suppositions; we didn't want any more cases of if a and b stand at opposite poles of the earth's surface and c at the equator of jupiter, at what variations of angle will the left limb of the moon appear to these different parties?--i said you just let that thing alone; it's plenty time to get in a sweat about it when it happens; as like as not it ain't going to do any harm, anyway. his reception of these instructions bordered on insubordination, insomuch that i felt obliged to take his number and report him. i found the astronomer of the university gadding around after comets and other such odds and ends--tramps and derelicts of the skies. i told him pretty plainly that we couldn't have that. i told him it was no economy to go on piling up and piling up raw material in the way of new stars and comets and asteroids that we couldn't ever have any use for till we had worked off the old stock. at bottom i don't really mind comets so much, but somehow i have always been down on asteroids. there is nothing mature about them; i wouldn't sit up nights the way that man does if i could get a basketful of them. he said it was the bast line of goods he had; he said he could trade them to rochester for comets, and trade the comets to harvard for nebulae, and trade the nebula to the smithsonian for flint hatchets. i felt obliged to stop this thing on the spot; i said we couldn't have the university turned into an astronomical junk shop. and while i was at it i thought i might as well make the reform complete; the astronomer is extraordinarily mutinous, and so, with your approval, i will transfer him to the law department and put one of the law students in his place. a boy will be more biddable, more tractable, also cheaper. it is true he cannot be intrusted with important work at first, but he can comb the skies for nebulae till he gets his hand in. i have other changes in mind, but as they are in the nature of surprises i judge it politic to leave them unspecified at this time. very likely it was in this new capacity, as the head of the governing body, that he wrote one morning to clark advising him as to the misuse of a word in the courant, though he thought it best to sign the communication with the names of certain learned friends, to give it weight with the public, as he afterward explained. sir,--the word “patricide” in your issue of this morning (telegrams) was an error. you meant it to describe the slayer of a father; you should have used “parricide” instead. patricide merely means the killing of an irishman--any irishman, male or female. respectfully, j. hammond trumbull. n. j. burton. j. h. twichell. clxvii. notes and literary matters clemens' note-books of this time are full of the vexations of his business ventures, figures, suggestions, and a hundred imagined combinations for betterment--these things intermingled with the usual bits of philosophy and reflections, and amusing reminders. aldrich's man who painted the fat toads red, and naturalist chasing and trying to catch them. man who lost his false teeth over brooklyn bridge when he was on his way to propose to a widow. one believes st. simon and benvenuto and partly believes the margravine of bayreuth. there are things in the confession of rousseau which one must believe. what is biography? unadorned romance. what is romance? adorned biography. adorn it less and it will be better than it is. if god is what people say there can be none in the universe so unhappy as he; for he sees unceasingly myriads of his creatures suffering unspeakable miseries, and, besides this, foresees all they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. one might well say “as unhappy as god.” in spite of the financial complexities and the drain of the enterprises already in hand he did not fail to conceive others. he was deeply interested in bunyan's pilgrim's progress at the moment, and from photography and scenic effect he presaged a possibility to-day realized in the moving picture. dress up some good actors as apollyon, greatheart, etc., & the other bunyan characters, take them to a wild gorge and photograph them--valley of the shadow of death; to other effective places & photo them along with the scenery; to paris, in their curious costumes, place them near the arc de l'etoile & photo them with the crowd-vanity fair; to cairo, venice, jerusalem, & other places (twenty interesting cities) & always make them conspicuous in the curious foreign crowds by their costume. take them to zululand. it would take two or three years to do the photographing & cost $ , ; but this stereopticon panorama of bunyan's pilgrim's progress could be exhibited in all countries at the same time & would clear a fortune in a year. by & by i will do this. if in i find myself not rich enough to carry out my scheme of buying christopher columbus's bones & burying them under the statue of liberty enlightening the world i will give the idea to somebody who is rich enough. incidentally he did an occasional piece of literary work. early in the year, with brander matthews, he instructed and entertained the public with a copyright controversy in the princeton review. matthews would appear to have criticized the english copyright protection, or rather the lack of it, comparing it unfavorably with american conditions. clemens, who had been amply protected in great britain, replied that america was in no position to criticize england; that if american authors suffered in england they had themselves to blame for not taking the proper trouble and precautions required by the english law, that is to say, “previous publication” on english soil. he declared that his own books had been as safe in england as at home since he had undertaken to comply with english requirements, and that professor matthews was altogether mistaken, both as to premise and conclusion. “you are the very wrong-headedest person in america,” he said; “and you are injudicious.” and of the article: “i read it to the cat--well, i never saw a cat carry on so before.... the american author can go to canada, spend three days there and come home with an english and american copyright as strong as if it had been built out of railroad iron.” matthews replied that not every one could go to canada, any more than to corinth. he said: “it is not easy for a poor author who may chance to live in florida or texas, those noted homes of literature, to go to canada.” clemens did not reply again; that is to say, he did not publish his reply. it was a capable bomb which he prepared, well furnished with amusing instance, sarcasm, and ridicule, but he did not use it. perhaps he was afraid it would destroy his opponent, which would not do. in his heart he loved matthews. he laid the deadly thing away and maintained a dignified reserve. clemens often felt called upon to criticize american institutions, but he was first to come to their defense, especially when the critic was an alien. when matthew arnold offered some strictures on america. clemens covered a good many quires of paper with caustic replies. he even defended american newspapers, which he had himself more than once violently assailed for misreporting him and for other journalistic shortcomings, and he bitterly denounced every shaky british institution, touched upon every weak spot in hereditary rule. he did not print--not then--[an article on the american press, probably the best of those prepared at this time, was used, in part, in the american claimant, as the paper read before the mechanics' club, by “parker,” assistant editor of the 'democrat'.]--he was writing mainly for relief--without success, however, for he only kindled the fires of his indignation. he was at quarry farm and he plunged into his neglected story--a yankee in king arthur's court--and made his astonishing hero the mouthpiece of his doctrines. he worked with an inspiration and energy born of his ferocity. to whitmore, near the end of the summer, he wrote: i've got working-days left yet, and in that time i will add another , words to my book if i have luck. in his memoranda of this time he says: there was never a throne which did not represent a crime. there is no throne to-day which does not represent a crime.... show me a lord and i will show you a man whom you couldn't tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior; and in the shoemaker i will show you a dull animal, a poor-spirited insect; for there are enough of him to rise and chuck the lords and royalties into the sea where they belong, and he doesn't do it. but his violence waned, maybe, for he did not finish the yankee in the sixteen days as planned. he brought the manuscript back to hartford, but found it hard work there, owing to many interruptions. he went over to twichell's and asked for a room where he might work in seclusion. they gave him a big upper chamber, but some repairs were going on below. from a letter written to theodore crane we gather that it was not altogether quiet. friday, october , . dear theo, i am here in twichell's house at work, with the noise of the children and an army of carpenters to help: of course they don't help, but neither do they hinder. it's like a boiler factory for racket, and in nailing a wooden ceiling on to the room under me the hammering tickles my feet amazingly sometimes and jars my table a good deal, but i never am conscious of the racket at all, and i move my feet into positions of relief without knowing when i do it. i began here monday morning, and have done eighty pages since. i was so tired last night that i thought i would lie abed and rest to-day; but i couldn't resist. i mean to try to knock off tomorrow, but it's doubtful if i do. i want to finish the day the machine finishes, and a week ago the closest calculations for that indicated oct. --but experience teaches me that the calculations will miss fire as usual. the other day the children were projecting a purchase, livy and i to furnish the money--a dollar and a half. jean discouraged the idea. she said, “we haven't got any money. children, if you would think, you would remember the machine isn't done.” it's billiards to-night. i wish you were here. with love to you both, s. l. c. p. s. i got it all wrong. it wasn't the children, it was marie. she wanted a box of blacking for the children's shoes. jean reproved her and said, “why, marie, you mustn't ask for things now. the machine isn't done.” neither the yankee nor the machine was completed that fall, though returns from both were beginning to be badly needed. the financial pinch was not yet severe, but it was noticeable, and it did not relax. a memorandum of this time tells of an anniversary given to charles and susan warner in their own home. the guests assembled at the clemens home, the twichells among them, and slipped across to warner's, entering through a window. dinner was then announced to the warners, who were sitting by their library fire. they came across the hall and opened the dining-room door, to be confronted by a table fully spread and lighted and an array of guests already seated. clxviii. introducing nye and riley and others it was the winter ( - ) that the bill nye and james whitcomb riley entertainment combination set out on its travels. mark twain introduced them to their first boston audience. major j. b. pond was exploiting nye and riley, and clemens went on to boston especially to hear them. pond happened upon him in the lobby of the parker house and insisted that nothing would do but he must introduce them. in his book of memories which he published later pond wrote: he replied that he believed i was his mortal enemy, and determined that he should never have an evening's enjoyment in my presence. he consented, however, and conducted his brother-humorist and the hoosier poet to the platform. mark's presence was a surprise to the audience, and when they recognized him the demonstration was tremendous. the audience rose in a body, and men and women shouted at the very top of their voices. handkerchiefs waved, the organist even opened every forte key and pedal in the great organ, and the noise went on unabated for minutes. it took some time for the crowd to get down to listening, but when they did subside, as mark stepped to the front, the silence was as impressive as the noise had been. he presented the nye-riley pair as the siamese twins. “i saw them first,” he sand, “a great many years ago, when mr. barnum had them, and they were just fresh from siam. the ligature was their best hold then, but literature became their best hold later, when one of them committed an indiscretion, and they had to cut the old bond to accommodate the sheriff.” he continued this comic fancy, and the audience was in a proper frame of mind, when he had finished, to welcome the “twins of genius” who were to entertain them: pond says: it was a carnival of fun in every sense of the word. bostonians will not have another such treat in this generation. pond proposed to clemens a regular tour with nye and riley. he wrote: i will go partners with you, and i will buy nye and riley's time and give an entertainment something like the one we gave in boston. let it be announced that you will introduce the “twins of genius.” ostensibly a pleasure trip for you. i will take one-third of the profits and you two-thirds. i can tell you it will be the biggest thing that can be brought before the american public. but clemens, badly as he was beginning to need the money, put this temptation behind him. his chief diversion these days was in gratuitous appearances. he had made up his mind not to read or lecture again for pay, but he seemed to take a peculiar enjoyment in doing these things as a benefaction. that he was beginning to need the money may have added a zest to the joy of his giving. he did not respond to all invitations; he could have been traveling constantly had he done so. he consulted with mrs. clemens and gave himself to the cause that seemed most worthy. in january col. richard malcolm johnston was billed to give a reading with thomas nelson page in baltimore. page's wife fell ill and died, and colonel johnston, in extremity, wired charles dudley warner to come in page's place. warner, unable to go, handed the invitation to clemens, who promptly wired that he would come. they read to a packed house, and when the audience was gone and the returns had been counted an equal division of the profits was handed to each of the authors. clemens pushed his share over to johnston, saying: “that's yours, colonel. i'm not reading for money these days.” colonel johnston, to whom the sum was important, tried to thank him, but he only said: “never mind, colonel, it only gave me pleasure to do you that little favor. you can pass it on some day.” as a matter of fact, hard put to it as he was for funds, clemens at this time regarded himself as a potential multi-millionaire. the type-setting machine which for years had been sapping his financial strength was believed to be perfected, and ship-loads of money were waiting in the offing. however, we shall come to this later. clemens read for the cadets at west point and for a variety of institutions and on many special occasions. he usually gave chapters from his yankee, now soon to be finished, chapters generally beginning with the yankee's impression of the curious country and its people, ending with the battle of the sun-belt, when the yankee and his fifty-four adherents were masters of england, with twenty-five thousand dead men lying about them. he gave this at west point, including the chapter where the yankee has organized a west point of his own in king arthur's reign. in april, ' , he made an address at a dinner given to a victorious baseball team returning from a tour of the world by way of the sandwich islands. he was on familiar ground there. his heart was in his words. he began: i have been in the sandwich islands-twenty-three years ago--that peaceful land, that beautiful land, that far-off home of solitude, and soft idleness, and repose, and dreams, where life is one long slumberous sabbath, the climate one long summer day, and the good that die experience no change, for they but fall asleep in one heaven and wake up in another. and these boys have played baseball there!--baseball, which is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression, of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the living, tearing, booming nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries! he told of the curious island habits for his hearers' amusement, but at the close the poetry of his memories once more possessed him: ah, well, it is refreshment to the jaded, it is water to the thirsty, to look upon men who have so lately breathed the soft air of those isles of the blest and had before their eyes the inextinguishable vision of their beauty. no alien land in all the earth has any deep, strong charm for me but that one; no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. for me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; i can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; i can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, i hear the plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago. clxix. the coming of kipling it was the summer of that mark twain first met rudyard kipling. kipling was making his tour around the world, a young man wholly unheard of outside of india. he was writing letters home to an indian journal, the pioneer, and he came to elmira especially to see mark twain. it was night when he arrived, and next morning some one at the hotel directed him to quarry farm. in a hired hack he made his way out through the suburbs, among the buzzing planing-mills and sash factories, and toiled up the long, dusty, roasting east hill, only to find that mark twain was at general langdon's, in the city he had just left behind. mrs. crane and susy clemens were the only ones left at the farm, and they gave him a seat on the veranda and brought him glasses of water or cool milk while he refreshed them with his talk-talk which mark twain once said might be likened to footprints, so strong and definite was the impression which it left behind. he gave them his card, on which the address was allahabad, and susy preserved it on that account, because to her india was a fairyland, made up of magic, airy architecture, and dark mysteries. clemens once dictated a memory of kipling's visit. kipling had written upon the card a compliment to me. this gave it an additional value in susy's eyes, since, as a distinction, it was the next thing to being recognized by a denizen of the moon. kipling came down that afternoon and spent a couple of hours with me, and at the end of that time i had surprised him as much as he had surprised me--and the honors were easy. i believed that he knew more than any person i had met before, and i knew that he knew that i knew less than any person he had met before--though he did not say it, and i was not expecting that he would. when he was gone mrs. langdon wanted to know about my visitor. i said: “he is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man--and i am the other one. between us we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and i know the rest.” he was a stranger to me and to all the world, and remained so for twelve months, then he became suddenly known, and universally known. from that day to this he has held this unique distinction--that of being the only living person, not head of a nation, whose voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark; the only such voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail, but always travels first-class--by cable. about a year after kipling's visit in elmira george warner came into our library one morning in hartford with a small book in his hand and asked me if i had ever heard of rudyard kipling. i said, “no.” he said i would hear of him very soon, and that the noise he was going to make would be loud and continuous. the little book was the plain tales, and he left it for me to read, saying it was charged with a new and inspiriting fragrance, and would blow a refreshing breath around the world that would revive the nations. a day or two later he brought a copy of the london world which had a sketch of kipling in it, and a mention of the fact that he had traveled in the united states. according to this sketch he had passed through elmira. this remark, with the additional fact that he hailed from india, attracted my attention--also susy's. she went to her room and brought his card from its place in the frame of her mirror, and the quarry farm visitor stood identified. kipling also has left an account of that visit. in his letter recording it he says: you are a contemptible lot over yonder. some of you are commissioners and some are lieutenant-governors, and some have the v. c., and a few are privileged to walk about the mall arm in arm with the viceroy; but i have seen mark twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand and smoked a cigar--no, two cigars--with him, and talked with him for more than two hours! understand clearly that i do not despise you; indeed, i don't. i am only very sorry for you, from the viceroy downward. a big, darkened drawing-room; a huge chair; a man with eyes, a mane of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a woman's, a strong, square hand shaking mine, and the slowest, calmest, levelest voice in all the world saying: “well, you think you owe me something, and you've come to tell me so. that's what i call squaring a debt handsomely.” “piff!” from a cob-pipe (i always said that a missouri meerschaum was the best smoking in the world), and behold! mark twain had curled himself up in the big arm-chair, and i was smoking reverently, as befits one in the presence of his superior. the thing that struck me first was that he was an elderly man; yet, after a minute's thought, i perceived that it was otherwise, and in five minutes, the eyes looking at me, i saw that the gray hair was an accident of the most trivial. he was quite young. i was shaking his hand. i was smoking his cigar, and i was hearing him talk--this man i had learned to love and admire fourteen thousand miles away. reading his books, i had striven to get an idea of his personality, and all my preconceived notions were wrong and beneath the reality. blessed is the man who finds no disillusion when he is brought face to face with a revered writer. the meeting of those two men made the summer of ' memorable in later years. but it was recalled sadly, too. theodore crane, who had been taken suddenly and dangerously ill the previous autumn, had a recurring attack and died july d. it was the first death in the immediate families for more than seventeen years, mrs. clemens, remembering that earlier period of sorrow, was depressed with forebodings. clxx. “the prince and the pauper” on the stage there was an unusual dramatic interest in the clemens home that autumn. abby sage richardson had dramatized 'the prince and the pauper', and daniel frohman had secured elsie leslie (lyde) to take the double role of the prince and tom canty. the rehearsals were going on, and the clemens children were naturally a good deal excited over the outcome. susy clemens was inspired to write a play of her own--a pretty greek fancy, called “the triumph of music,” and when it was given on thanksgiving night, by herself, with clara and jean and margaret warner, it was really a lovely performance, and carried one back to the days when emotions were personified, and nymphs haunted the seclusions of arcady. clemens was proud of susy's achievement, and deeply moved by it. he insisted on having the play repeated, and it was given again later in the year. pretty elsie leslie became a favorite of the clemens household. she was very young, and when she visited hartford jean and she were companions and romped together in the hay-loft. she was also a favorite of william gillette. one day when clemens and gillette were together they decided to give the little girl a surprise--a unique one. they agreed to embroider a pair of slippers for her--to do the work themselves. writing to her of it, mark twain said: either one of us could have thought of a single slipper, but it took both of us to think of two slippers. in fact, one of us did think of one slipper, and then, quick as a flash, the other of the other one. it shows how wonderful the human mind is.... gillette embroidered his slipper with astonishing facility and splendor, but i have been a long time pulling through with mine. you see, it was my very first attempt at art, and i couldn't rightly get the hang of it along at first. and then i was so busy that i couldn't get a chance to work at it at home, and they wouldn't let me embroider on the cars; they said it made the other passengers afraid. they didn't like the light that flared into my eye when i had an inspiration. and even the most fair-minded people doubted me when i explained what it was i was making--especially brakemen. brakemen always swore at it and carried on, the way ignorant people do about art. they wouldn't take my word that it was a slipper; they said they believed it was a snow-shoe that had some kind of disease. he went on to explain and elucidate the pattern of the slipper, and how dr. root had come in and insisted on taking a hand in it, and how beautiful it was to see him sit there and tell mrs. clemens what had been happening while they were away during the summer, holding the slipper up toward the end of his nose, imagining the canvas was a “subject” with a scalp-wound, working with a “lovely surgical stitch,” never hesitating a moment in his talk except to say “ouch!” when he stuck himself with the needle. take the slippers and wear them next your heart, elsie dear; for every stitch in them is a testimony of the affection which two of your loyalest friends bear you. every single stitch cost us blood. i've got twice as many pores in me now as i used to have; and you would never believe how many places you can stick a needle in yourself until you go into the embroidery line and devote yourself to art. do not wear these slippers in public, dear; it would only excite envy; and, as like as not, somebody would try to shoot you. merely use them to assist you in remembering that among the many, many people who think all the world of you is your friend, mark twain. the play of “the prince and the pauper,” dramatized by mrs. richardson and arranged for the stage by david belasco, was produced at the park theater, philadelphia, on christmas eve. it was a success, but not a lavish one. the play was well written and staged, and elsie leslie was charming enough in her parts, but in the duality lay the difficulty. the strongest scenes in the story had to be omitted when one performer played both tom canty and the little prince. the play came to new york--to the broadway theater--and was well received. on the opening night there mark twain made a speech, in which he said that the presentation of “the prince and the pauper” realized a dream which fifteen years before had possessed him all through a long down-town tramp, amid the crowds and confusion of broadway. in elsie leslie, he said, he had found the embodiment of his dream, and to her he offered homage as the only prince clothed in a divine right which was not rags and sham--the divine right of an inborn supremacy in art. it seems incredible to-day that, realizing the play's possibilities as mark twain did, and as belasco and daniel frohman must have done, they did not complete their partial triumph by finding another child actress to take the part of tom canty. clemens urged and pleaded with them, but perhaps the undertaking seemed too difficult--at all events they did not find the little beggar king. then legal complications developed. edward house, to whom clemens had once given a permission to attempt a dramatization of the play, suddenly appeared with a demand for recognition, backed by a lawsuit against all those who had a proprietary interest in the production. house, with his adopted japanese daughter koto, during a period of rheumatism and financial depression, had made a prolonged visit in the clemens home and originally undertook the dramatization as a sort of return for hospitality. he appears not to have completed it and to have made no arrangement for its production or to have taken any definite step until mrs. richardson's play was profitably put on; whereupon his suit and injunction. by the time a settlement of this claim had been reached the play had run its course, and it was not revived in that form. it was brought out in england, where it was fairly prosperous, though it seems not to have been long continued. variously reconstructed, it has occasionally been played since, and always, when the parts of tom canty and the prince were separate, with great success. why this beautiful drama should ever be absent from the boards is one of the unexplainable things. it is a play for all times and seasons, the difficulty of obtaining suitable “twin” interpreters for the characters of the prince and the pauper being its only drawback. clxxi. “a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court” from every point of view it seemed necessary to make the 'yankee in king arthur's court' an important and pretentious publication. it was mark twain's first book after a silence of five years; it was a book badly needed by his publishing business with which to maintain its prestige and profit; it was a book which was to come out of his maturity and present his deductions, as to humanity at large and kings in particular, to a waiting public. it was determined to spare no expense on the manufacture, also that its illustrations must be of a sort to illuminate and, indeed, to elaborate the text. clemens had admired some pictures made by daniel carter (“dan”) beard for a chinese story in the cosmopolitan, and made up his mind that beard was the man for the yankee. the manuscript was sent to beard, who met clemens a little later in the office of webster & co. to discuss the matter. clemens said: “mr. beard, i do not want to subject you to any undue suffering, but i wish you would read the book before you make the pictures.” beard replied that he had already read it twice. “very good,” clemens said; “but i wasn't led to suppose that that was the usual custom among illustrators, judging from some results i have seen. you know,” he went on, “this yankee of mine has neither the refinement nor the weakness of a college education; he is a perfect ignoramus; he is boss of a machine shop; he can build a locomotive or a colt's revolver, he can put up and run a telegraph line, but he's an ignoramus, nevertheless. i am not going to tell you what to draw. if a man comes to me and says, 'mr. clemens, i want you to write me a story,' i'll write it for him; but if he undertakes to tell me what to write i'll say, 'go hire a typewriter.'” to hall a few days later he wrote: tell beard to obey his own inspirations, and when he sees a picture in his mind put that picture on paper, be it humorous or be it serious. i want his genius to be wholly unhampered. i sha'n't have any fear as to results. without going further it is proper to say here that the pictures in the first edition of a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court justified the author's faith in the artist of his selection. they are far and away dan beard's best work. the socialism of the text strongly appealed to him. beard himself had socialistic tendencies, and the work inspired him to his highest flights of fancy and to the acme of his technic. clemens examined the pictures from time to time, and once was moved to write: my pleasure in them is as strong and as fresh as ever. i do not know of any quality they lack. grace, dignity, poetry, spirit, imagination, these enrich them and make them charming and beautiful; and wherever humor appears it is high and fine--easy, unforced, kept under, masterly, and delicious. he went on to describe his appreciation in detail, and when the drawings were complete he wrote again: hold me under permanent obligations. what luck it was to find you! there are hundreds of artists who could illustrate any other book of mine, but there was only one who could illustrate this one. yes, it was a fortunate hour that i went netting for lightning-bugs and caught a meteor. live forever! this was not too much praise. beard realized the last shade of the author's allegorical intent and portrayed it with a hundred accents which the average reader would otherwise be likely to miss. clemens submitted his manuscript to howells and to stedman, and he read portions of it, at least, to mrs. clemens, whose eyes were troubling her so that she could not read for herself. stedman suggested certain eliminations, but, on the whole, would seem to have approved of the book. howells was enthusiastic. it appealed to him as it had appealed to beard. its sociology and its socialism seemed to him the final word that could be said on those subjects. when he had partly finished it he wrote: it's a mighty great book and it makes my heart, burn with wrath. it seems that god didn't forget to put a soul in you. he shuts most literary men off with a brain, merely. a few days later he wrote again: the book is glorious-simply noble. what masses of virgin truth never touched in print before! and when he had finished it: last night i read your last chapter. as stedman says of the whole book, it's titanic. clemens declared, in one of his replies to howells: i'm not writing for those parties who miscall themselves critics, and i don't care to have them paw the book at all. it's my swan song, my retirement from literature permanently, and i wish to pass to the cemetery unclodded.... well, my book is written--let it go, but if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so many things left out. they burn in me; they keep multiplying and multiplying, but now they can't ever be said; and besides they would require a library--and a pen warmed up in hell. in another letter of this time to sylvester baxter, apropos of the tumbling brazilian throne, he wrote: when our great brethren, the disenslaved brazilians, frame their declaration of independence i hope they will insert this missing link: “we hold these truths to be self-evident--that all monarchs are usurpers and descendants of usurpers, for the reason that no throne was ever set up in this world by the will, freely exercised, of the only body possessing the legitimate right to set it up--the numerical mass of the nation.” he was full of it, as he had been all along, and 'a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court' is nothing less than a brief for human rights and human privileges. that is what it is, and it is a pity that it should be more than that. it is a pity that he should have been beset by his old demon of the burlesque, and that no one should have had the wisdom or the strength to bring it under control. there is nothing more charming in any of mark twain's work than his introductory chapter, nothing more delightful than the armoring of the yankee and the outset and the wandering with alisande. there is nothing more powerful or inspiring than his splendid panoramic picture--of the king learning mercy through his own degradation, his daily intercourse with a band of manacled slaves; nothing more fiercely moving than that fearful incident of the woman burned to warm those freezing chattels, or than the great gallows scene, where the priest speaks for the young mother about to pay the death penalty for having stolen a halfpenny's worth, that her baby might have bread. such things as these must save the book from oblivion; but alas! its greater appeal is marred almost to ruin by coarse and extravagant burlesque, which destroys illusion and antagonizes the reader often at the very moment when the tale should fill him with a holy fire of a righteous wrath against wrong. as an example of mark twain at his literary worst and best the yankee ranks supreme. it is unnecessary to quote examples; one cannot pick up the volume and read ten pages of it, or five pages, without finding them. in the midst of some exalted passage, some towering sublimity, you are brought suddenly to earth with a phrase which wholly destroys the illusion and the diviner purpose. howells must have observed these things, or was he so dazzled by the splendor of its intent, its righteous charge upon the ranks of oppression, that he regarded its offenses against art as unimportant. this is hard to explain, for the very thing that would sustain such a great message and make it permanent would be the care, the restraint, the artistic worthiness of its construction. one must believe in a story like that to be convinced of its logic. to lose faith in it--in its narrative--is absolutely fatal to its purpose. the yankee in king arthur's court not only offended the english nation, but much of it offended the better taste of mark twain's own countrymen, and in time it must have offended even mark twain himself. reading it, one can visualize the author as a careering charger, with a bit in his teeth, trampling the poetry and the tradition of the romantic days, the very things which he himself in his happier moods cared for most. howells likened him to cervantes, laughing spain's chivalry away. the comparison was hardly justified. it was proper enough to laugh chivalry out of court when it was a reality; but mark twain, who loved sir thomas malory to the end of his days, the beauty and poetry of his chronicles; who had written 'the prince and the pauper', and would one day write that divine tale of the 'maid of orleans'; who was himself no more nor less than a knight always ready to redress wrong, would seem to have been the last person to wish to laugh it out of romance. and yet, when all is said, one may still agree with howells in ranking the yankee among mark twain's highest achievements in the way of “a greatly imagined and symmetrically developed tale.” it is of that class, beyond doubt. howells goes further: of all the fanciful schemes in fiction it pleases me most, and i give myself with absolute delight to its notion of a keen east hartford yankee finding himself, by a retroactionary spell, at the court of king arthur of britain, and becoming part of the sixth century with all the customs and ideas of the nineteenth in him and about him. the field for humanizing satire which this scheme opens is illimitable. colossal it certainly is, as howells and stedman agreed: colossal in its grotesqueness as in its sublimity. howells, summarizing mark twain's gifts ( ), has written: he is apt to burlesque the lighter colloquiality, and it is only in the more serious and most tragical junctures that his people utter themselves with veracious simplicity and dignity. that great, burly fancy of his is always tempting him to the exaggeration which is the condition of so much of his personal humor, but which when it invades the drama spoils the illusion. the illusion renews itself in the great moments, but i wish it could be kept intact in the small, and i blame him that he does not rule his fancy better. all of which applies precisely to the writing of the yankee in king arthur's court. intended as a fierce heart-cry against human injustice--man's inhumanity to man--as such it will live and find readers; but, more than any other of mark twain's pretentious works, it needs editing--trimming by a fond but relentless hard. clxxii. the “yankee” in england the london publishers of the yankee were keenly anxious to revise the text for their english readers. clemens wrote that he had already revised the yankee twice, that stedman had critically read it, and that mrs. clemens had made him strike out many passages and soften others. he added that he had read chapters of it in public several times where englishmen were present and had profited by their suggestions. then he said: now, mind you, i have taken all this pains because i wanted to say a yankee mechanic's say against monarchy and its several natural props, and yet make a book which you would be willing to print exactly as it comes to you, without altering a word. we are spoken of (by englishmen) as a thin-skinned people. it is you who are thin-skinned. an englishman may write with the most brutal frankness about any man or institution among us and we republish him without dreaming of altering a line or a word. but england cannot stand that kind of a book written about herself. it is england that is thin-skinned. it causeth me to smile when i read the modifications of my language which have been made in my english editions to fit them for the sensitive english palate. now, as i say, i have taken laborious pains to so trim this book of offense that you'll not lack the nerve to print it just as it stands. i am going to get the proofs to you just as early as i can. i want you to read it carefully. if you can publish it without altering a single word, go ahead. otherwise, please hand it to j. r. osgood in time for him to have it published at my expense. this is important, for the reason that the book was not written for america; it was written for england. so many englishmen have done their sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good intent by trying to pry up the english nation to a little higher level of manhood in turn. so the yankee was published in england just as he had written it,--[the preface was shortened and modified for both the american and english editions. the reader will find it as originally written under appendix s, at the end of last volume.]--and the criticisms were as plentiful as they were frank. it was referred to as a “lamentable failure” and as an “audacious sacrilege” and in terms still less polite. not all of the english critics were violent. the daily telegraph gave it something more than a column of careful review, which did not fail to point out the book's sins with a good deal of justice and dignity; but the majority of english papers joined in a sort of objurgatory chorus which, for a time at least, spared neither the author nor his work. strictures on the yankee extended to his earlier books. after all, mark twain's work was not for the cultivated class. these things must have begun to gravel clemens a good deal at last, for he wrote to andrew lang at considerable length, setting forth his case in general terms--that is to say, his position as an author--inviting lang to stand as his advocate before the english public. in part he said: the critic assumes every time that if a book doesn't meet the cultivated-class standard it isn't valuable... the critic has actually imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by raphael is more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a chromo; and the august opera more than the hurdy-gurdy and the villagers' singing society; and the latin classics than kipling's far-reaching bugle-note; and jonathan edwards than the salvation army.... if a critic should start a religion it would not have any object but to convert angels, and they wouldn't need it. it is not that little minority who are already saved that are best worth lifting up, i should think, but the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are underneath! that mass will never see the old masters--that sight is for the few; but the chromo-maker can lift them all one step upward toward appreciation of art; they cannot have the opera, but the hurdy-gurdy and the singing-class lift them a little way toward that far height; they will never know homer, but the passing rhymester of their day leaves them higher than he found them; they may never even hear of the latin classics, but they will strike step with kipling's drum-beat and they will march; for all jonathan edwards's help they would die in their slums, but the salvation army will beguile some of them to a purer air and a cleaner life. ... i have never tried, in even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. i was not equipped for it either by native gifts or training. and i never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game--the masses. i have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but i have done my best to entertain them, for they can get instruction elsewhere.. .. my audience is dumb; it has no voice in print, and so i cannot know whether i have won its approval or only got its censure. he closed by asking that lang urge the critics to adopt a rule recognizing the masses, and to formulate a standard whereby work done for them might be judged. “no voice can reach further than yours in a case of this kind,” he said, “or carry greater weight of authority.” there was no humor in this letter, and the writer of it was clearly in earnest. lang's response was an article published in the illustrated london news on the art of mark twain. he began by gently ridiculing hyperculture--the new culture--and ended with a eulogy on huck finn. it seems worth while, however, to let andrew lang speak for himself. i have been educated till i nearly dropped; i have lived with the earliest apostles of culture, in the days when chippendale was first a name to conjure with, and japanese art came in like a raging lion, and ronsard was the favorite poet, and mr. william morris was a poet, too, and blue and green were the only wear, and the name of paradise was camelot. to be sure, i cannot say that i took all this quite seriously, but “we, too, have played” at it, and know all about it. generally speaking, i have kept up with culture. i can talk (if desired) about sainte-beuve, and merimee, and felicien rops; i could rhyme “ballades” when they were “in,” and knew what a “pantoom” was.... and yet i have not culture. my works are but tinkling brass because i have not culture. for culture has got into new regions where i cannot enter, and, what is perhaps worse, i find myself delighting in a great many things which are under the ban of culture. he confesses that this is a dreadful position; one that makes a man feel like one of those liberal politicians who are always “sitting on the fence,” and who follow their party, if follow it they do, with the reluctant acquiescence of the prophet's donkey. he further confesses that he has tried hartmann and prefers plato, that he is shaky about blake, though stalwart concerning rudyard kipling. this is not the worst of it. culture has hardly a new idol but i long to hurl things at it. culture can scarcely burn anything, but i am impelled to sacrifice to that same. i am coming to suspect that the majority of culture's modern disciples are a mere crowd of very slimly educated people who have no natural taste or impulses; who do not really know the best things in literature; who have a feverish desire to admire the newest thing, to follow the latest artistic fashion; who prate about “style,” without the faintest acquaintance with the ancient examples of style in greek, french, or english; who talk about the classics and--criticize the classical critics and poets, without being able to read a line of them in the original. nothing of the natural man is left in these people; their intellectual equipment is made up of ignorant vanity and eager desire for novelty, and a yearning to be in the fashion. take, for example--and we have been a long time in coming to him--mark twain. [here follow some observations concerning the yankee, which lang confesses that he has not read, and has abstained from reading because----]. here mark twain is not, and cannot be, at the proper point of view. he has not the knowledge which would enable him to be a sound critic of the ideals of the middle ages. an arthurian knight in new york or in washington would find as much to blame, and justly, as a yankee at camelot. of mark twain's work in general he speaks with another conclusion: mark twain is a benefactor beyond most modern writers, and the cultured who do not laugh are merely to be pitied. but his art is not only that of the maker of the scarce article--mirth. i have no hesitation in saying that mark twain is one among the greatest contemporary makers of fiction.... i can never forget or be ungrateful for the exquisite pleasure with which i read huckleberry finn for the first time years ago. i read it again last night, deserting kenilworth for huck. i never laid it down till i had finished it. i perused several passages more than once, and rose from it with a higher opinion of its merits than ever. what is it that we want in a novel? we want a vivid and original picture of life; we want character naturally displayed in action; and if we get the excitement of adventure into the bargain, and that adventure possible and plausible, i so far differ from the newest school of criticism as to think that we have additional cause for gratitude. if, moreover, there is an unstrained sense of humor in the narrator we have a masterpiece, and huckleberry finn is, nothing less. he reviews huck sympathetically in detail, and closes: there are defects of taste, or passages that to us seem deficient in taste, but the book remains a nearly flawless gem of romance and of humor. the world appreciates it, no doubt, but “cultured critics” are probably unaware of its singular value. the great american novel has escaped the eyes of those who watch to see this new planet swim into their ken. and will mark twain never write such another? one is enough for him to live by, and for our gratitude, but not enough for our desire. in the brief column and a half which it occupies, this comment of andrew lang's constitutes as thoughtful and fair an estimate of mark twain's work as was ever written. w. t. stead, of the review of reviews, was about the only prominent english editor to approve of the yankee and to exploit its merits. stead brought down obloquy upon himself by so doing, and his separation from his business partner would seem to have been at least remotely connected with this heresy. the yankee in king arthur's court was dramatized in america by howard taylor, one of the enterprise compositors, whom clemens had known in the old comstock days. taylor had become a playwright of considerable success, with a number of well-known actors and actresses starring in his plays. the yankee, however, did not find a manager, or at least it seems not to have reached the point of production. clxxiii. a summer at onteora with the exception of one article--“a majestic literary fossil”--[harper's magazine, february, . included in the “complete works.”]--clemens was writing nothing of importance at this time. this article grew out of a curious old medical work containing absurd prescriptions which, with theodore crane, he had often laughed over at the farm. a sequel to huckleberry finn--huck finn and tom sawyer among the indians--was begun, and a number of its chapters were set in type on the new paige compositor, which had cost such a gallant sum, and was then thought to be complete. there seems to have been a plan to syndicate the story, but at the end of chapter ix huck and tom had got themselves into a predicament from which it seemed impossible to extricate them, and the plot was suspended for further inspiration, which apparently never came. clemens, in fact, was troubled with rheumatism in his arm and shoulder, which made writing difficult. mrs. clemens, too, had twinges of the malady. they planned to go abroad for the summer of , to take the waters of some of the german baths, but they were obliged to give up the idea. there were too many business complications; also the health of clemens's mother had become very feeble. they went to tannersville in the catskills, instead--to the onteora club, where mrs. candace wheeler had gathered a congenial colony in a number of picturesque cottages, with a comfortable hotel for the more transient visitor. the clemenses secured a cottage for the season. mrs. mary mapes dodge, laurence hutton, carroll beckwith, the painter; brander matthews, dr. heber newton, mrs. custer, and dora wheeler were among those who welcomed mark twain and his family at a generous home-made banquet. it was the beginning of a happy summer. there was a constant visiting from one cottage to another, with frequent assemblings at the bear and fox inn, their general headquarters. there were pantomimes and charades, in which mark twain and his daughters always had star parts. susy clemens, who was now eighteen, brilliant and charming, was beginning to rival her father as a leader of entertainment. her sister clara gave impersonations of modjeska and ada rehan. when fourth of july came there were burlesque races, of which mark twain was starter, and many of that lighthearted company took part. sometimes, in the evening, they gathered in one of the cottages and told stories by the firelight, and once he told the story of the golden arm, so long remembered, and brought them up with the same old jump at the sudden climax. brander matthews remembers that clemens was obliged frequently to go to new york on business connected with the machine and the publishing, and that during one of these absences a professional entertainer came along, and in the course of his program told a mark twain story, at which mrs. clemens and the girls laughed without recognizing its authorship. matthews also remembers jean, as a little girl of ten, allowed to ride a pony and to go barefoot, to her great delight, full of health and happiness, a favorite of the colony. clemens would seem to have forgiven brander matthews for his copyright articles, for he walked over to the matthews cottage one morning and asked to be taught piquet, the card game most in vogue there that season. at odd times he sat to carroll beckwith for his portrait, and smoked a cob pipe meantime, so beckwith painted him in that way. it was a season that closed sadly. clemens was called to keokuk in august, to his mother's bedside, for it was believed that her end was near. she rallied, and he returned to onteora. but on the th of october came the close of that long, active life, and the woman who two generations before had followed john clemens into the wilderness, and along the path of vicissitude, was borne by her children to hannibal and laid to rest at his side. she was in her eighty-eighth year. the clemens family were back in hartford by this time, and it was only a little later that mrs. clemens was summoned to the death-bed of her own mother, in elmira. clemens accompanied her, but jean being taken suddenly ill he returned to hartford. watching by the little girl's bedside on the night of the th of november, he wrote mrs. clemens a birthday letter, telling of jean's improved condition and sending other good news and as many loving messages as he could devise. but it proved a sad birthday for mrs. clemens, for on that day her mother's gentle and beautiful soul went out from among them. the foreboding she had felt at the passing of theodore crane had been justified. she had a dread that the harvest of death was not yet ended. matters in general were going badly with them, and an anxiety began to grow to get away from america, and so perhaps leave sorrow and ill-luck behind. clemens, near the end of december, writing to his publishing manager, hall, said: merry christmas to you, and i wish to god i could have one myself before i die. the house was emptier that winter than before, for susy was at bryn mawr. clemens planned some literary work, but the beginning, after his long idleness, was hard. a diversion was another portrait of himself, this time undertaken by charles noel flagg. clemens rather enjoyed portrait-sittings. he could talk and smoke, and he could incidentally acquire information. he liked to discuss any man's profession with him, and in his talks with flagg he made a sincere effort to get that insight which would enable him to appreciate the old masters. flagg found him a tractable sitter, and a most interesting one. once he paid him a compliment, then apologized for having said the obvious thing. “never mind the apology,” said clemens. “the compliment that helps us on our way is not the one that is shut up in the mind, but the one that is spoken out.” when flagg's portrait was about completed, mrs. clemens and mrs. crane came to the studio to look at it. mrs. clemens complained only that the necktie was crooked. “but it's always crooked,” said flagg, “and i have a great fancy for the line it makes.” she straightened it on clemens himself, but it immediately became crooked again. clemens said: “if you were to make that necktie straight people would say; 'good portrait, but there is something the matter with it. i don't know where it is.'” the tie was left unchanged. clxxiv. the machine the reader may have realized that by the beginning of mark twain's finances were in a critical condition. the publishing business had managed to weather along. it was still profitable, and could have been made much more so if the capital necessary to its growth had not been continuously and relentlessly absorbed by that gigantic vampire of inventions--that remorseless frankenstein monster--the machine. the beginning of this vast tragedy (for it was no less than that) dated as far back as , when clemens one day had taken a minor and purely speculative interest in patent rights, which was to do away with setting type by hand. in some memoranda which he made more than ten years later, when the catastrophe was still a little longer postponed, he gave some account of the matter. this episode has now spread itself over more than one-fifth of my life, a considerable stretch of time, as i am now years old. ten or eleven years ago dwight buell, a jeweler, called at our house and was shown up to the billiard-room-which was my study; and the game got more study than the other sciences. he wanted me to take some stock in a type-setting machine. he said it was at the colt's arms factory, and was about finished. i took $ , of the stock. i was always taking little chances like that, and almost always losing by it, too. some time afterward i was invited to go down to the factory and see the machine. i went, promising myself nothing, for i knew all about type-setting by practical experience, and held the settled and solidified opinion that a successful type-setting machine was an impossibility, for the reason that a machine cannot be made to think, and the thing that sets movable type must think or retire defeated. so, the performance i witnessed did most thoroughly amaze me. here was a machine that was really setting type, and doing it with swiftness and accuracy, too. moreover, it was distributing its case at the same time. the distribution was automatic; the machine fed itself from a galley of dead matter and without human help or suggestion, for it began its work of its own accord when the type channels needed filling, and stopped of its own accord when they were full enough. the machine was almost a complete compositor; it lacked but one feature--it did not “justify” the lines. this was done by the operator's assistant. i saw the operator set at the rate of , ems an hour, which, counting distribution, was but little short of four casemen's work. william hamersley was there. he said he was already a considerable owner, and was going to take as much more of the stock as he could afford. wherefore, i set down my name for an additional $ , . it is here that the music begins. it was the so-called farnham machine that he saw, invented by james w. paige, and if they had placed it on the market then, without waiting for the inventor to devise improvements, the story might have been a different one. but paige was never content short of absolute perfection--a machine that was not only partly human, but entirely so. clemens' used to say later that the paige type-setter would do everything that a human being could do except drink and swear and go on a strike. he might properly have omitted the last item, but of that later. paige was a small, bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed man, with a crystal-clear mind, but a dreamer and a visionary. clemens says of him: “he is a poet; a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel.” it is easy to see now that mark twain and paige did not make a good business combination. when paige declared that, wonderful as the machine was, he could do vastly greater things with it, make it worth many more and much larger fortunes by adding this attachment and that, clemens was just the man to enter into his dreams and to furnish the money to realize them. paige did not require much money at first, and on the capital already invested he tinkered along with his improvements for something like four or five years; hamersley and clemens meantime capitalizing the company and getting ready to place the perfected invention on the market. by the time the grant episode had ended clemens had no reason to believe but that incalculable wealth lay just ahead, when the newspapers should be apprised of the fact that their types were no longer to be set by hand. several contracts had been made with paige, and several new attachments had been added to the machine. it seemed to require only one thing more, the justifier, which would save the labor of the extra man. paige could be satisfied with nothing short of that, even though the extra man's wage was unimportant. he must have his machine do it all, and meantime five precious years had slipped away. clemens, in his memoranda, says: end of . paige arrives at my house unheralded. i had seen little or nothing of him for a year or two. he said: “what will you complete the machine for?” “what will it cost?” “twenty thousand dollars; certainly not over $ , .” “what will you give?” “i'll give you half.” clemens was “flush” at this time. his reading tour with cable, the great sale of huck finn, the prospect of the grant book, were rosy realities. he said: “i'll do it, but the limit must be $ , .” they agreed to allow hamersley a tenth interest for the money he had already invested and for legal advice. hamersley consented readily enough, and when in february, , the new contract was drawn they believed themselves heir to the millions of the fourth estate. by this time f. g. whitmore had come into clemens's business affairs, and he did not altogether approve of the new contract. among other things, it required that clemens should not only complete the machine, but promote it, capitalize it commercially. whitmore said: “mr. clemens, that clause can bankrupt you.” clemens answered: “never mind that, whitmore; i've considered that. i can get a thousand men worth a million apiece to go in with me if i can get a perfect machine.” he immediately began to calculate the number of millions he would be worth presently when the machine was completed and announced to the waiting world. he covered pages with figures that never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion mark. colonel sellers in his happiest moments never dreamed more lavishly. he obtained a list of all the newspapers in the united states and in europe, and he counted up the machines that would be required by each. to his nephew, sam moffett, visiting him one day, he declared that it would take ten men to count the profits from the typesetter. he realized clearly enough that a machine which would set and distribute type and do the work of half a dozen men or more would revolutionize type composition. the fact that other inventors besides paige were working quite as diligently and perhaps toward more simple conclusions did not disturb him. rumors came of the rogers machine and the thorne machine and the mergenthaler linotype, but mark twain only smiled. when the promoters of the mergenthaler offered to exchange half their interests for a half interest in the paige patent, to obtain thereby a wider insurance of success, it only confirmed his trust, and he let the golden opportunity go by. clemens thinks the thirty thousand dollars lasted about a year. then paige confessed that the machine was still incomplete, but he said that four thousand dollars more would finish it, and that with ten thousand dollars he could finish it and give a big exhibition in new york. he had discarded the old machine altogether, it seems, and at pratt & whitney's shops was building a new one from the ground up--a machine of twenty thousand minutely exact parts, each of which must be made by expert hand workmanship after elaborate drawings and patterns even more expensive. it was an undertaking for a millionaire. paige offered to borrow from clemens the amount needed, offering the machine as security. clemens supplied the four thousand dollars, and continued to advance money from time to time at the rate of three to four thousand dollars a month, until he had something like eighty thousand dollars invested, with the machine still unfinished. this would be early in , by which time other machines had reached a state of completion and were being placed on the market. the mergenthaler, in particular, was attracting wide attention. paige laughed at it, and clemens, too, regarded it as a joke. the moment their machine was complete all other machines would disappear. even the fact that the tribune had ordered twenty-three of the linotypes, and other journals were only waiting to see the paper in its new dress before ordering, did not disturb them. those linotypes would all go into the scrap-heap presently. it was too bad people would waste their money so. in january, , paige promised that the machine would be done by the st of april. on the st of april he promised it for september, but in october he acknowledged there were still eighty-five days' work to be done on it. in november clemens wrote to orion: the machine is apparently almost done--but i take no privileges on that account; it must be done before i spend a cent that can be avoided. i have kept this family on very short commons for two years and they must go on scrimping until the machine is finished, no matter how long that may be. by the end of ' the income from the books and the business and mrs. clemens's elmira investments no longer satisfied the demands of the type-setter, in addition to the household expense, reduced though the latter was; and clemens began by selling and hypothecating his marketable securities. the whole household interest by this time centered in the machine. what the tennessee land had been to john and jane clemens and their children, the machine had now become to samuel clemens and his family. “when the machine is finished everything will be all right again” afforded the comfort of that long-ago sentence, “when the tennessee land is sold.” they would have everything they wanted then. mrs. clemens planned benefactions, as was her wont. once she said to her sister: “how strange it will seem to have unlimited means, to be able to do whatever you want to do, to give whatever you want to give without counting the cost.” straight along through another year the three thousand dollars and more a month continued, and then on the th of january, , there came what seemed the end--the machine and justifier were complete! in his notebook on that day mark twain set down this memorandum: eureka! saturday, january , - . p.m. at this moment i have seen a line of movable type spaced and justified by machinery! this is the first time in the history of the world that this amazing thing has ever been done. present: j. w. paige, the inventor; charles davis, | mathematical assistants earll | & mechanical graham | experts bates, foreman, and s. l. clemens. this record is made immediately after the prodigious event. two days later he made another note: monday, january -- . p.m. the first proper name ever set by this new keyboard was william shakspeare. i set it at the above hour; & i perceive, now that i see the name written, that i either misspelled it then or i've misspelled it now. the space-bar did its duty by the electric connections & steam & separated the two words preparatory to the reception of the space. it seemed to him that his troubles were at an end. he wrote overflowing letters, such as long ago he had written about his first mining claims, to orion and to other members of the family and to friends in america and europe. one of these letters, written to george standring, a london printer and publisher, also an author, will serve as an example. the machine is finished! an hour and forty minutes ago a line of movable type was spaced and justified by machinery for the first time in the history of the world. and i was there to see. that was the final function. i had before seen the machine set type, automatically, and distribute type, and automatically distribute its eleven different thicknesses of spaces. so now i have seen the machine, operated by one individual, do the whole thing, and do it a deal better than any man at the case can do it. this is by far and away the most marvelous invention ever contrived by man. and it is not a thing of rags and patches; it is made of massive steel, and will last a century. she will do the work of six men, and do it better than any six men that ever stood at a case. the death-warrant of all other type-setting machines in this world was signed at . this afternoon, when that first line was shot through this machine and came out perfectly spaced and justified. and automatically, mind you. there was a speck of invisible dirt on one of those nonpareil types. well, the machine allowed for that by inserting of its own accord a space which was the - , of an inch thinner than it would have used if the dirt had been absent. but when i send you the details you will see that that's nothing for this machine to do; you'll see that it knows more and has got more brains than all the printers in the world put together. his letter to orion was more technical, also more jubilant. at the end he said: all the witnesses made written record of the immense historical birth--the first justification of a line of movable type by machinery--& also set down the hour and the minute. nobody had drank anything, & yet everybody seemed drunk. well-dizzy, stupefied, stunned. all the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle. telephones, telegraphs, locomotives, cotton-gins, sewing- machines, babbage calculators, jacquard looms, perfecting presses, all mere toys, simplicities! the paige compositor marches alone and far in the land of human inventions. in one paragraph of orion's letter he refers to the machine as a “cunning devil, knowing more than any man that ever lived.” that was a profound truth, though not as he intended it. that creation of james paige's brain reflected all the ingenuity and elusiveness of its creator, and added something on its own account. it was discovered presently that it had a habit of breaking the types. paige said it was a trifling thing: he could fix it, but it meant taking down the machine, and that deadly expense of three thousand or four thousand dollars a month for the band of workmen and experts in pratt & whitney's machine shops did not cease. in february the machine was again setting and justifying type “to a hair,” and whitmore's son, fred, was running it at a rate of six thousand ems an hour, a rate of composition hitherto unknown in the history of the world. his speed was increased to eight thousand ems an hour by the end of the year, and the machine was believed to have a capacity of eleven thousand. no type-setter invented to this day could match it for accuracy and precision when it was in perfect order, but its point of perfection was apparently a vanishing point. it would be just reached, when it would suddenly disappear, and paige would discover other needed corrections. once, when it was apparently complete as to every detail; and running like a human thing, with such important customers as the new york herald and other great papers ready to place their orders, paige suddenly discovered that it required some kind of an air-blast, and it was all taken down again and the air-blast, which required months to invent and perfect, was added. but what is the use of remembering all these bitter details? the steady expense went on through another year, apparently increasing instead of diminishing, until, by the beginning of , clemens was finding it almost impossible to raise funds to continue the work. still he struggled on. it was the old mining fascination--“a foot farther into the ledge and we shall strike the vein of gold.” he sent for joe goodman to come and help him organize a capital-stock company, in which senator jones and john mackay, old comstock friends, were to be represented. he never for a moment lost faith in the final outcome, and he believed that if they could build their own factory the delays and imperfections of construction would be avoided. pratt & whitney had been obliged to make all the parts by hand. with their own factory the new company would have vast and perfect machinery dedicated entirely to the production of type-setters. nothing short of two million dollars capitalization was considered, and goodman made at least three trips from california to the east and labored with jones and mackay all that winter and at intervals during the following year, through which that “cunning devil,” the machine, consumed its monthly four thousand dollars--money that was the final gleanings and sweepings of every nook and corner of the strong-box and bank-account and savings of the clemens family resources. with all of mark twain's fame and honors his life at this period was far from an enviable one. it was, in fact, a fevered delirium, often a veritable nightmare. reporters who approached him for interviews, little guessing what he was passing through, reported that mark twain's success in life had made him crusty and sour. goodman remembers that when they were in washington, conferring with jones, and had rooms at the arlington, opening together, often in the night he would awaken to see a light burning in the next room and to hear mark twain's voice calling: “joe, are you awake?” “yes, mark, what is it?” “oh, nothing, only i can't sleep. won't you talk awhile? i know it's wrong to disturb you, but i am so d--d miserable that i can't help it.” whereupon he would get up and talk and talk, and pace the floor and curse the delays until he had refreshed himself, and then perhaps wallow in millions until breakfast-time. jones and mackay, deeply interested, were willing to put up a reasonable amount of money, but they were unable to see a profit in investing so large a capital in a plant for constructing the machines. clemens prepared estimates showing that the american business alone would earn thirty-five million dollars a year, and the european business twenty million dollars more. these dazzled, but they did not convince the capitalists. jones was sincerely anxious to see the machine succeed, and made an engagement to come out to see it work, but a day or two before he was to come paige was seized with an inspiration. the type-setter was all in parts when the day came, and jones's visit had to be postponed. goodman wrote that the fatal delay had “sicklied over the bloom” of jones's original enthusiasm. yet clemens seems never to have been openly violent with paige. in the memorandum which he completed about this time he wrote: paige and i always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and yet he knows perfectly well that if i had him in a steel trap i would shut out all human succor and watch that trap until he died. he was grabbing at straws now. he offered a twentieth or a hundredth or a thousandth part of the enterprise for varying sums, ranging from one thousand to one hundred thousand dollars. he tried to capitalize his advance (machine) royalties, and did dispose of a few of these; but when the money came in for them he was beset by doubts as to the final outcome, and though at his wit's ends for further funds, he returned the checks to the friends who had sent them. one five-thousand-dollar check from a friend named arnot, in elmira, went back by the next mail. he was willing to sacrifice his own last penny, but he could not take money from those who were blindly backing his judgment only and not their own. he still had faith in jones, faith which lasted up to the th of february, . then came a final letter, in which jones said that he had canvassed the situation thoroughly with such men as mackay, don cameron, whitney, and others, with the result that they would have nothing to do with the machine. whitney and cameron, he said, were large stockholders in the mergenthaler. jones put it more kindly and more politely than that, and closed by saying that there could be no doubt as to the machine's future an ambiguous statement. a letter from young hall came about the same time, urging a heavy increase of capital in the business. the library of american literature, its leading feature, was handled on the instalment plan. the collections from this source were deferred driblets, while the bills for manufacture and promotion must be paid down in cash. clemens realized that for the present at least the dream was ended. the family securities were exhausted. the book trade was dull; his book royalties were insufficient even to the demands of the household. he signed further notes to keep business going, left the matter of the machine in abeyance, and turned once more to the trade of authorship. he had spent in the neighborhood of one hundred and ninety thousand dollars on the typesetter--money that would better have been thrown into the connecticut river, for then the agony had been more quickly over. as it was, it had shadowed many precious years. clxxv. “the claimant”--leaving hartford for the first time in twenty years mark twain was altogether dependent on literature. he did not feel mentally unequal to the new problem; in fact, with his added store of experience, he may have felt himself more fully equipped for authorship than ever before. it had been his habit to write within his knowledge and observation. to a correspondent of this time he reviewed his stock in trade-- ... i confine myself to life with which i am familiar when pretending to portray life. but i confined myself to the boy-life out on the mississippi because that had a peculiar charm for me, and not because i was not familiar with other phases of life. i was a soldier two weeks once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted like a rat the whole time. familiar? my splendid kipling himself hasn't a more burnt-in, hard-baked, and unforgetable familiarity with that death-on-the-pale-horse-with-hell-following-after, which is a raw soldier's first fortnight in the field--and which, without any doubt, is the most tremendous fortnight and the vividest he is ever going to see. yes, and i have shoveled silver tailings in a quartz-mill a couple of weeks, and acquired the last possibilities of culture in that direction. and i've done “pocket-mining” during three months in the one little patch of ground in the whole globe where nature conceals gold in pockets--or did before we robbed all of those pockets and exhausted, obliterated, annihilated the most curious freak nature ever indulged in. there are not thirty men left alive who, being told there was a pocket hidden on the broad slope of a mountain, would know how to go and find it, or have even the faintest idea of how to set about it; but i am one of the possible or who possess the secret, and i could go and put my hand on that hidden treasure with a most deadly precision. and i've been a prospector, and know pay rock from poor when i find it--just with a touch of the tongue. and i've been a silver miner and know how to dig and shovel and drill and put in a blast. and so i know the mines and the miners interiorly as well as bret harte knows them exteriorly. and i was a newspaper reporter four years in cities, and so saw the inside of many things; and was reporter in a legislature two sessions and the same in congress one session, and thus learned to know personally three sample bodies of the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that god makes. and i was some years a mississippi pilot, and familiarly knew all the different kinds of steamboatmen--a race apart, and not like other folk. and i was for some years a traveling “jour” printer, and wandered from city to city--and so i know that sect familiarly. and i was a lecturer on the public platform a number of seasons and was a responder to toasts at all the different kinds of banquets --and so i know a great many secrets about audiences--secrets not to be got out of books, but only acquirable by experience. and i watched over one dear project of mine for years, spent a fortune on it, and failed to make it go--and the history of that would make a large book in which a million men would see themselves as in a mirror; and they would testify and say, verily, this is not imagination; this fellow has been there--and after would they cast dust upon their heads, cursing and blaspheming. and i am a publisher, and did pay to one author's widow (general grant's) the largest copyright checks this world has seen --aggregating more than l , in the first year. and i have been an author for years and an ass for . now then: as the most valuable capital or culture or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience i ought to be well equipped for that trade. i surely have the equipment, a wide culture, and all of it real, none of it artificial, for i don't know anything about books. this generous bill of literary particulars was fully warranted. mark twain's equipment was equal to his occasions. it is true that he was no longer young, and that his health was not perfect, but his resolution and his energy had not waned. his need was imminent and he lost no time. he dug out from his pigeonholes such materials as he had in stock, selecting a few completed manuscripts for immediate disposal--among them his old article entitled, “mental telegraphy,” written in , when he had hesitated to offer it, in the fear that it would not be accepted by the public otherwise than as a joke. he added to it now a supplement and sent it to mr. alden, of harper's magazine. psychic interest had progressed in twelve years; also mark twain had come to be rather more seriously regarded. the article was accepted promptly!--[the publication of this article created a good deal of a stir and resulted in the first general recognition of what later became known as telepathy. a good many readers insisted on regarding the whole matter as one of mark twain's jokes, but its serious acceptance was much wider.]--the old sketch, “luck,” also found its way to harper's magazine, and other manuscripts were looked over and furbished up with a view to their disposal. even the history game was dragged from the dust of its retirement, and hall was instructed to investigate its chance of profit. then mark twain went to work in earnest. within a week after the collapse of the jones bubble he was hard at work on a new book--the transmigration of the old “claimant” play into a novel. ever since the appearance of the yankee there had been what was evidently a concerted movement to induce him to write a novel with the theories of henry george as the central idea. letters from every direction had urged him to undertake such a story, and these had suggested a more serious purpose for the claimant book. a motif in which there is a young lord who renounces his heritage and class to come to america and labor with his hands; who attends socialistic meetings at which men inspired by readings of 'progress and poverty' and 'looking backward' address their brothers of toil, could have in it something worth while. clemens inserted portions of some of his discarded essays in these addresses, and had he developed this element further, and abandoned colonel sellers's materialization lunacies to the oblivion they had earned, the result might have been more fortunate. but his faith in the new sellers had never died, and the temptation to use scenes from the abandoned play proved to be too strong to be resisted. the result was incongruous enough. the author, however, admired it amazingly at the time. he sent howells stirring reports of his progress. he wrote hall that the book would be ready soon and that there must be seventy-five thousand orders by the date of issue, “not a single one short of that.” then suddenly, at the end of february, the rheumatism came back into his shoulder and right arm and he could hardly hold the pen. he conceived the idea of dictating into a phonograph, and wrote howells to test this invention and find out as to terms for three months, with cylinders enough to carry one hundred and seventy-five thousand words. i don't want to erase any of them. my right arm is nearly disabled by rheumatism, but i am bound to write this book (and sell , copies of it-no, i mean , , --next fall). i feel sure i can dictate the book into a phonograph if i don't have to yell. i write , words a day. i think i can dictate twice as many. but mind, if this is going to be too much trouble to you--go ahead and do it all the same. howells replied encouragingly. he had talked a letter into a phonograph and the phonograph man had talked his answer into it, after which the cylinder had been taken to a typewriter in the-next room and correctly written out. if a man had the “cheek” to dictate his story into a phonograph, howells said, all the rest seemed perfectly easy. clemens ordered a phonograph and gave it a pretty fair trial. it was only a partial success. he said he couldn't write literature with it because it hadn't any ideas or gift for elaboration, but was just as matter-of-fact, compressive and unresponsive, grave and unsmiling as the devil--a poor audience. i filled four dozen cylinders in two sittings, then i found i could have said it about as easy with the pen, and said it a deal better. then i resigned. he did not immediately give it up. to relieve his aching arm he alternated the phonograph with the pen, and the work progressed rapidly. early in may he was arranging for its serial disposition, and it was eventually sold for twelve thousand dollars to the mcclure syndicate, who placed it with a number of papers in america and with the idler magazine in england. w. m. laffan, of the sun, an old and tried friend, combined with mcclure in the arrangement. laffan also proposed to join with mcclure in paying mark twain a thousand dollars each for a series of six european letters. this was toward the end of may, , when clemens had already decided upon a long european sojourn. there were several reasons why this was desirable. neither clemens nor his wife was in good health. both of them were troubled with rheumatism, and a council of physicians had agreed that mrs. clemens had some disturbance of the heart. the death of charles l. webster in april--the fourth death among relatives in two years--had renewed her forebodings. susy, who had been at bryn mawr, had returned far from well. the european baths and the change of travel it was believed would be beneficial to the family health. furthermore, the maintenance of the hartford home was far too costly for their present and prospective income. the house with its associations of seventeen incomparable years must be closed. a great period had ended. they arranged to sail on the th of june by the french line.--[on the gascogne.]--mrs. crane was to accompany them, and came over in april to help in breaking the news to the servants. john and ellen o'neill (the gardener and his wife) were to remain in charge; places were found for george and patrick. katie leary was retained to accompany the family. it was a sad dissolution. the day came for departure and the carriage was at the door. mrs. clemens did not come immediately. she was looking into the rooms, bidding a kind of silent good-by to the home she had made and to all its memories. following the others she entered the carriage, and patrick mcaleer drove them together for the last time. they were going on a long journey. they did not guess how long, or that the place would never be home to them again. clxxvi. a european summer they landed at havre and went directly to paris, where they remained about a week. from paris clemens wrote to hall that a deal by which he had hoped to sell out his interest in the type-setter to the mallorys, of the churchman, had fallen through. “therefore,” he said, “you will have to modify your instalment system to meet the emergency of a constipated purse; for if you should need to borrow any more money i would not know how or where to raise it.” the clemens party went to geneva, then rested for a time at the baths of aix; from aix to bayreuth to attend the wagner festival, and from bayreuth to marienbad for further additions of health. clemens began writing his newspaper letters at aix, the first of which consists of observations at that “paradise of rheumatics.” this letter is really a careful and faithful description of aix-les-bains, with no particular drift of humor in it. he tells how in his own case the baths at first developed plenty of pain, but that the subsequent ones removed almost all of it. “i've got back the use of my arm the last few days, and i am going away now,” he says, and concludes by describing the beautiful drives and scenery about aix--the pleasures to be found paddling on little lake bourget and the happy excursions to annecy. at the end of an hour you come to annecy and rattle through its old crooked lanes, built solidly up with curious old houses that are a dream of the middle ages, and presently you come to the main object of your trip--lake annecy. it is a revelation. it is a miracle. it brings the tears to a body's eyes. it is so enchanting. that is to say, it affects you just as all other things that you instantly recognize as perfect affect you--perfect music, perfect eloquence, perfect art, perfect joy, perfect grief. he was getting back into his old descriptive swing, but his dislike for travel was against him, and he found writing the letters hard. from bayreuth he wrote “at the shrine of st. wagner,” one of the best descriptions of that great musical festival that has been put into words. he paid full tribute to the performance, also to the wagner devotion, confessing its genuineness. this opera of “tristan and isolde” last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and i know of some, and have heard of many, who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. i feel strongly out of place here. sometimes i feel like the one sane person in the community of the mad; sometimes i feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always during service i feel like a heretic in heaven. he tells how he really enjoyed two of the operas, and rejoiced in supposing that his musical regeneration was accomplished and perfected; but alas! he was informed by experts that those particular events were not real music at all. then he says: well, i ought to have recognized the sign the old, sure sign that has never failed me in matters of art. whenever i enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor. the private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo. however, my base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; i was the only man out of , who got his money back on those two operas. his third letter was from marienbad, in bohemia, another “health-factory,” as he calls it, and is of the same general character as those preceding. in his fourth letter he told how he himself took charge of the family fortunes and became courier from aix to bayreuth. it is a very delightful letter, most of it, and probably not greatly burlesqued or exaggerated in its details. it is included now in the “complete works,” as fresh and delightful as ever. they returned to germany at the end of august, to nuremberg, which he notes as the “city of exquisite glimpses,” and to heidelberg, where they had their old apartment of thirteen years before, room at the schloss hotel, with its wonderful prospect of wood and hill, and the haze-haunted valley of the rhine. they remained less than a week in that beautiful place, and then were off for switzerland, lucerne, brienz, interlaken, finally resting at the hotel beau rivage, ouchy, lausanne, on beautiful lake leman. clemens had agreed to write six of the newspaper letters, and he had by this time finished five of them, the fifth being dated from interlaken, its subject, “switzerland, the cradle of liberty.” he wrote to hall that it was his intention to write another book of travel and to take a year or two to collect the material. the century editors were after him for a series after the style of innocents abroad. he considered this suggestion, but declined by cable, explaining to hall that he intended to write for serial publication no more than the six newspaper letters. he said: to write a book of travel would be less trouble than to write six detached chapters. each of these letters requires the same variety of treatment and subject that one puts into a book; but in the book each chapter doesn't have to be rounded and complete in itself. he suggested that the six letters be gathered into a small volume which would contain about thirty-five or forty thousand words, to be sold as low as twenty-five cents, but this idea appears to have been dropped. at ouchy clemens conceived the idea of taking a little trip on his own account, an excursion that would be a rest after the strenuous three months' travel and sightseeing--one that he could turn into literature. he engaged joseph very, a courier used during their earlier european travels, and highly recommended in the tramp abroad. he sent joseph over to lake bourget to engage a boat and a boatman for a ten days' trip down the river rhone. for five dollars joseph bought a safe, flat-bottom craft; also he engaged the owner as pilot. a few days later--september --clemens followed. they stopped overnight on an island in lake bourget, and in his notes clemens tells how he slept in the old castle of chatillon, in the room where a pope was born. they started on their drift next morning. to mrs. clemens, in some good-by memoranda, he said: the lake is as smooth as glass; a brilliant sun is shining. our boat is so comfortable and shady with its awning. . . we have crossed the lake and are entering the canal. shall presently be in the rhone. noon. nearly down to the rhone, passing the village of chanaz. sunday, . p.m. we have been in the rhone three hours. it is unimaginably still & reposeful & cool & soft & breezy. no rowing or work of any kind to do--we merely float with the current we glide noiseless and swift--as fast as a london cab-horse rips along-- miles an hour--the swiftest current i've ever boated in. we have the entire river to ourselves nowhere a boat of any kind. pleasant it must have been in the warm september days to go swinging down that swift, gray stream which comes racing out of switzerland into france, fed from a thousand glaciers. he sent almost daily memoranda of his progress. half-way to arles he wrote: it's too delicious, floating with the swift current under the awning these superb, sunshiny days in deep peace and quietness. some of these curious old historical towns strangely persuade me, but it is so lovely afloat that i don't stop, but view them from the outside and sail on. we get abundance of grapes and peaches for next to nothing. my, but that inn was suffocating with garlic where we stayed last night! i had to hold my nose as we went up-stairs or i believe i should have fainted. little bit of a room, rude board floor unswept, chairs, unpainted white pine table--void the furniture! had a good firm bed, solid as a rock, & you could have brained an ox with the bolster. these six hours have been entirely delightful. i want to do all the rivers of europe in an open boat in summer weather. still further along he described one of their shore accommodations. night caught us yesterday where we had to take quarters in a peasant's house which was occupied by the family and a lot of cows & calves, also several rabbits.--[his word for fleas. neither fleas nor mosquitoes ever bit him--probably because of his steady use of tobacco.]--the latter had a ball & i was the ballroom; but they were very friendly and didn't bite. the peasants were mighty kind and hearty & flew around & did their best to make us comfortable. this morning i breakfasted on the shore in the open air with two sociable dogs & a cat. clean cloth, napkins & table furniture, white sugar, a vast hunk of excellent butter, good bread, first-class coffee with pure milk, fried fish just caught. wonderful that so much cleanliness should come out of such a phenomenally dirty house. an hour ago we saw the falls of the rhone, a prodigiously rough and dangerous-looking place; shipped a little water, but came to no harm. it was one of the most beautiful pieces of piloting & boat management i ever saw. our admiral knew his business. we have had to run ashore for shelter every time it has rained heretofore, but joseph has been putting in his odd time making a waterproof sun-bonnet for the boat, & now we sail along dry, although we have had many heavy showers this morning. here follows a pencil-drawing of the boat and its new awning, and he adds: “i'm on the stern, under the shelter, and out of sight.” the trip down the rhone proved more valuable as an outing than as literary material. clemens covered one hundred and seventy-four pages with his notes of it, then gave it up. traveling alone with no one but joseph and the admiral (former owner of the craft) was reposeful and satisfactory, but it did not inspire literary flights. he tried to rectify the lack of companionship by introducing fictitious characters, such as uncle abner, fargo, and stavely, a young artist; also harris, from the tramp abroad; but harris was not really there this time, and mark twain's genius, given rather to elaboration than to construction, found it too severe a task to imagine a string of adventures without at least the customary ten per cent. of fact to build upon. it was a day above avignon that he had an experience worth while. they were abreast of an old castle, nearing a village, one of the huddled jumble of houses of that locality, when, glancing over his left shoulder toward the distant mountain range, he received what he referred to later as a soul-stirring shock. pointing to the outline of the distant range he said to the courier: “name it. who is it?” the courier said, “napoleon.” clemens assented. the admiral, when questioned, also promptly agreed that the mountain outlined was none other than the reclining figure of the great commander himself. they watched and discussed the phenomenon until they reached the village. next morning clemens was up for a first daybreak glimpse of his discovery. later he reported it to mrs. clemens: i did so long for you and sue yesterday morning--the most superb sunrise--the most marvelous sunrise--& i saw it all, from the very faintest suspicion of the coming dawn, all the way through to the final explosion of glory. but it had an interest private to itself & not to be found elsewhere in the world; for between me & it, in the far-distant eastward, was a silhouetted mountain range, in which i had discovered, the previous afternoon, a most noble face upturned to the sky, & mighty form outstretched, which i had named napoleon dreaming of universal empire--& now this prodigious face, soft, rich, blue, spirituelle, asleep, tranquil, reposeful, lay against that giant conflagration of ruddy and golden splendors, all rayed like a wheel with the up-streaming & far-reaching lances of the sun. it made one want to cry for delight, it was so supreme in its unimaginable majesty & beauty. he made a pencil-sketch of the napoleon head in his note-book, and stated that the apparition could be seen opposite the castle of beauchastel; but in later years his treacherous memory betrayed him, and, forgetting these identifying marks, he told of it as lying a few hours above arles, and named it the “lost napoleon,” because those who set out to find it did not succeed. he even wrote an article upon the subject, in which he urged tourists to take steamer from arles and make a short trip upstream, keeping watch on the right-hand bank, with the purpose of rediscovering the natural wonder. fortunately this sketch was not published. it would have been set down as a practical joke by disappointed travelers. one of mark twain's friends, mr. theodore stanton, made a persistent effort to find the napoleon, but with the wrong directions naturally failed. it required ten days to float to arles. then the current gave out and clemens ended the excursion and returned to lausanne by rail. he said: “it was twenty-eight miles to marseilles, and somebody would have to row. that would not have been pleasure; it would have meant work for the sailor, and i do not like work even when another person does it.” to twichell in america he wrote: you ought to have been along--i could have made room for you easily, & you would have found that a pedestrian tour in europe doesn't begin with a raft voyage for hilarity & mild adventure & intimate contact with the unvisited native of the back settlements & extinction from the world and newspapers & a conscience in a state of coma & lazy comfort & solid happiness. in fact, there's nothing that's so lovely. but it's all over. i gave the raft away yesterday at arles & am loafing along back by short stages on the rail to ouchy, lausanne, where the tribe are staying at the beau rivage and are well and prosperous. clxxvii. kornerstrasse, they had decided to spend the winter in berlin, and in october mrs. clemens and mrs. crane, after some previous correspondence with an agent, went up to that city to engage an apartment. the elevator had not reached the european apartment in those days, and it was necessary, on mrs. clemens's account, to have a ground floor. the sisters searched a good while without success, and at last reached kornerstrasse, a short, secluded street, highly recommended by the agent. the apartment they examined in kornerstrasse was number , and they were so much pleased with the conveniences and comfort of it and so tired that they did not notice closely its, general social environment. the agent supplied an assortment of furniture for a consideration, and they were soon settled in the attractive, roomy place. clemens and the children, arriving somewhat later, expressed themselves as satisfied. their contentment was somewhat premature. when they began to go out socially, which was very soon, and friends inquired as to their location, they noticed that the address produced a curious effect. semi-acquaintances said, “ah, yes, kornerstrasse”; acquaintances said, “dear me, do you like it?” an old friend exclaimed, “good gracious! how in the world did you ever come to locate there?” then they began to notice what they had not at first seen. kornerstrasse was not disreputable, but it certainly was not elegant. there were rag warehouses across the street and women who leaned out the windows to gossip. the street itself was thronged with children. they played on a sand pile and were often noisy and seldom clean. it was eminently not the place for a distinguished man of letters. the family began to be sensitive on the subject of their address. clemens, of course, made humor out of it. he wrote a newspaper letter on the subject, a burlesque, naturally, which the family prevailed upon him not to print. but the humiliation is out of it now, and a bit of its humor may be preserved. he takes upon himself the renting of the place, and pictures the tour of inspection with the agent's assistant. he was greatly moved when they came to the street and said, softly and lovingly: “ah, korner street, korner street, why did i not think of you before! a place fit for the gods, dear sir. quiet?--notice how still it is; and remember this is noonday--noonday. it is but one block long, you see, just a sweet, dear little nest hid away here in the heart of the great metropolis, its presence and its sacred quiet unsuspected by the restless crowds that swarm along the stately thoroughfares yonder at its two extremities. and----” “this building is handsome, but i don't think much of the others. they look pretty commonplace, compared with the rest of berlin.” “dear! dear! have you noticed that? it is just an affectation of the nobility. what they want----” “the nobility? do they live in----” “in this street? that is good! very good, indeed! i wish the duke of sassafras-hagenstein could hear you say that. when the duke first moved in here he----” “does he live in this street?” “him! well, i should say so! do you see the big, plain house over there with the placard in the third floor window? that's his house.” “the placard that says 'furnished rooms to let'? does he keep boarders?” “what an idea! him! with a rent-roll of twelve hundred thousand marks a year? oh, positively this is too good.” “well, what does he have that sign up for?” the assistant took me by the buttonhole & said, with a merry light beaming in his eye: “why, my dear sir, a person would know you are new to berlin just by your innocent questions. our aristocracy, our old, real, genuine aristocracy, are full of the quaintest eccentricities, eccentricities inherited for centuries, eccentricities which they are prouder of than they are of their titles, and that sign-board there is one of them. they all hang them out. and it's regulated by an unwritten law. a baron is entitled to hang out two, a count five, a duke fifteen----” “then they are all dukes over on that side, i sup----” “every one of them. now the old duke of backofenhofenschwartz not the present duke, but the last but one, he----” “does he live over the sausage-shop in the cellar?” “no, the one farther along, where the eighteenth yellow cat is chewing the door-mat----” “but all the yellow cats are chewing the door-mats.” “yes, but i mean the eighteenth one. count. no, never mind; there's a lot more come. i'll get you another mark. let me see---” they could not remain permanently in komerstrasse, but they stuck it out till the end of december--about two months. then they made such settlement with the agent as they could--that is to say, they paid the rest of their year's rent--and established themselves in a handsome apartment at the hotel royal, unter den linden. there was no need to be ashamed of this address, for it was one of the best in berlin. as for komerstrasse, it is cleaner now. it is still not aristocratic, but it is eminently respectable. there is a new post-office that takes in number , where one may post mail and send telegrams and use the fernsprecher--which is to say the telephone--and be politely treated by uniformed officials, who have all heard of mark twain, but have no knowledge of his former occupation of their premises. clxxviii. a winter in berlin clemens, meantime, had been trying to establish himself in his work, but his rheumatism racked him occasionally and was always a menace. closing a letter to hall, he said: “i must stop-my arm is howling.” he put in a good deal of time devising publishing schemes, principal among them being a plan for various cheap editions of his books, pamphlets, and such like, to sell for a few cents. these projects appear never to have been really undertaken, hall very likely fearing that a flood of cheap issues would interfere with the more important trade. it seemed dangerous to trifle with an apparently increasing prosperity, and clemens was willing enough to agree with this view. clemens had still another letter to write for laffan and mcclure, and he made a pretty careful study of berlin with that end in view. but his arm kept him from any regular work. he made notes, however. once he wrote: the first gospel of all monarchies should be rebellion; the second should be rebellion; and the third and all gospels, and the only gospel of any monarchy, should be rebellion--against church and state. and again: i wrote a chapter on this language years ago and tried my level best to improve it and simplify it for these people, and this is the result--a word of thirty-nine letters. it merely concentrates the alphabet with a shovel. it hurts me to know that that chapter is not in any of their text-books and they don't use it in the university. socially, that winter in berlin was eventful enough. william walter phelps, of new jersey (clemens had known him in america), was united states minister at the german capital, while at the emperor's court there was a cousin, frau von versen, nee clemens, one of the st. louis family. she had married a young german officer who had risen to the rank of a full general. mark twain and his family were welcome guests at all the diplomatic events--often brilliant levees, gatherings of distinguished men and women from every circle of achievement. labouchere of 'truth' was there, de blowitz of the 'times', and authors, ambassadors, and scientists of rank. clemens became immediately a distinguished figure at these assemblies. his popularity in germany was openly manifested. at any gathering he was surrounded by a brilliant company, eager to do him honor. he was recognized whenever he appeared on the street, and saluted, though in his notes he says he was sometimes mistaken for the historian mommsen, whom he resembled in hair and features. his books were displayed for sale everywhere, and a special cheap edition of them was issued at a few cents per copy. captain bingham (later general bingham, commissioner of police in new york city) and john jackson were attaches of the legation, both of them popular with the public in general, and especially so with the clemens family. susy clemens, writing to her father during a temporary absence, tells of a party at mrs. jackson's, and especially refers to captain bingham in the most complimentary terms. “he never left me sitting alone, nor in an awkward situation of any kind, but always came cordially to the rescue. my gratitude toward him was absolutely limitless.” she adds that mrs. bingham was very handsome and decidedly the most attractive lady present. berlin was susy's first real taste of society, and she was reveling in it. in her letter she refers to minister phelps by the rather disrespectful nickname of “yaas,” a term conferred because of his pronunciation of that affirmative. the clemens children were not entirely happy in the company of the minister. they were fond of him, but he was a great tease. they were quite young enough, but it seemed always to give him delight to make them appear much younger. in the letter above quoted susy says: when i saw mr. phelps i put out my hand enthusiastically and said, “oh, mr. phelps, good evening,” whereat he drew back and said, so all could hear, “what, you here! why, you're too young. do you think you know how to behave?” as there were two or three young gentlemen near by to whom i hadn't been introduced i wasn't exactly overjoyed at this greeting. we may imagine that the nickname “yaas” had been invented by susy in secret retaliation, though she was ready enough to forgive him, for he was kindness itself at heart. in one of his later dictations clemens related an anecdote concerning a dinner with phelps, when he (clemens) had been invited to meet count s----, a cabinet minister of long and illustrious descent. clemens, and phelps too, it seems, felt overshadowed by this ancestry. of course i wanted to let out the fact that i had some ancestors, too; but i did not want to pull them out of their graves by the ears, and i never could seem to get the chance to work them in, in a way that would look sufficiently casual. i suppose phelps was in the same difficulty. in fact he looked distraught now and then just as a person looks who wants to uncover an ancestor purely by accident and cannot think of a way that will seem accidental enough. but at last, after dinner, he made a try. he took us about his drawing-room, showing us the pictures, and finally stopped before a rude and ancient engraving. it was a picture of the court that tried charles i. there was a pyramid of judges in puritan slouch hats, and below them three bareheaded secretaries seated at a table. mr. phelps put his finger upon one of the three and said, with exulting indifference: “an ancestor of mine.” i put a finger on a judge and retorted with scathing languidness: “ancestor of mine. but it is a small matter. i have others.” clemens was sincerely fond of phelps and spent a good deal of time at the legation headquarters. sometimes he wrote there. an american journalist, henry w. fischer, remembers seeing him there several times scribbling on such scraps of paper as came handy, and recalls that on one occasion he delivered an address to a german and english audience on the “awful german tongue.” this was probably the lecture that brought clemens to bed with pneumonia. with mrs. clemens he had been down to ilsenburg, in the hartz mountains, for a week of change. it was pleasant there, and they would have remained longer but for the berlin lecture engagement. as it was, they found berlin very cold and the lecture-room crowded and hot. when the lecture was over they stopped at general von versen's for a ball, arriving at home about two in the morning. clemens awoke with a heavy cold and lung congestion. he remained in bed, a very sick man indeed, for the better part of a month. it was unpleasant enough at first, though he rather enjoyed the convalescent period. he could sit up in bed and read and receive occasional callers. fischer brought him memoirs of the margravine of bayreuth, always a favorite.--[clemens was deeply interested in the margravine, and at one time began a novel with her absorbing history as its theme. he gave it up, probably feeling that the romantic form could add nothing to the margravine's own story.]--the emperor sent frau von versen with an invitation for him to attend the consecration of some flags in the palace. when she returned, conveying thanks and excuses, his majesty commanded her to prepare a dinner at her home for mark twain and himself and a few special guests, the date to be arranged when clemens's physician should pronounce him well enough to attend. members of the clemens household were impressed by this royal attention. little jean was especially awed. she said: “i wish i could be in papa's clothes”; then, after reflection, “but that wouldn't be any use. i reckon the emperor wouldn't recognize me.” and a little later, when she had been considering all the notables and nobilities of her father's recent association, she added: “why, papa, if it keeps on like this, pretty soon there won't be anybody for you to get acquainted with but god,” which mark twain decided was not quite as much of a compliment as it had at first seemed. it was during the period of his convalescence that clemens prepared his sixth letter for the new york sun and mcclure's syndicate, “the german chicago,” a finely descriptive article on berlin, and german customs and institutions generally. perhaps the best part of it is where he describes the grand and prolonged celebration which had been given in honor of professor virchow's seventieth birthday.--[rudolph virchow, an eminent german pathologist and anthropologist and scholar; then one of the most prominent figures of the german reichstag. he died in .]--he tells how the demonstrations had continued in one form or another day after day, and merged at last into the seventieth birthday of professor helmholtz--[herman von helmholtz, an eminent german physicist, one of the most distinguished scientists of the nineteenth century. he died in .]--also how these great affairs finally culminated in a mighty 'commers', or beer-fest, given in their honor by a thousand german students. this letter has been published in mark twain's “complete works,” and is well worth reading to-day. his place had been at the table of the two heroes of the occasion, virchow and helmholtz, a place where he could see and hear all that went on; and he was immensely impressed at the honor which germany paid to her men of science. the climax came when mommsen unexpectedly entered the room.--[theodor mommsen ( - ), an eminent german historian and archeologist, a powerful factor in all liberal movements. from - permanent secretary of the berlin royal academy of sciences.] there seemed to be some signal whereby the students on the platform were made aware that a professor had arrived at the remote door of entrance, for you would see them suddenly rise to their feet, strike an erect military attitude, then draw their swords; the swords of all their brethren standing guard at the innumerable tables would flash from the scabbard and be held aloft--a handsome spectacle. three clear bugle-notes would ring out, then all these swords would come down with a crash, twice repeated, on the tables and be uplifted and held aloft again; then in the distance you would see the gay uniforms and uplifted swords of a guard of honor clearing the way and conducting the guest down to his place. the songs were stirring, and the immense outpour from young life and young lungs, the crash of swords, and the thunder of the beer-mugs gradually worked a body up to what seemed the last possible summit of excitement. it surely seemed to me that i had reached that summit, that i had reached my limit, and that there was no higher lift devisable for me. when apparently the last eminent guest had long ago taken his place, again those three bugle-blasts rang out, and once more the swords leaped from their scabbards. who might this late comer be? nobody was interested to inquire. still, indolent eyes were turned toward the distant entrance, and we saw the silken gleam and the lifted sword of a guard of honor plowing through the remote crowds. then we saw that end of the house rising to its feet; saw it rise abreast the advancing guard all along like a wave. this supreme honor had been offered to no one before. there was an excited whisper at our table--“mommsen!”--and the whole house rose --rose and shouted and stamped and clapped and banged the beer-mugs. just simply a storm! then the little man with his long hair and emersonian face edged his way past us and took his seat. i could have touched him with my hand--mommsen!--think of it! this was one of those immense surprises that can happen only a few times in one's life. i was not dreaming of him; he was to me only a giant myth, a world-shadowing specter, not a reality. the surprise of it all can be only comparable to a man's suddenly coming upon mont blanc, with its awful form towering into the sky, when he didn't suspect he was in its neighborhood. i would have walked a great many miles to get a sight of him, and here he was, without trouble, or tramp, or cost of any kind. here he was, clothed in a titanic deceptive modesty which made him look like other men. here he was, carrying the roman world and all the caesars in his hospitable skull, and doing it as easily as that other luminous vault, the skull of the universe, carries the milky way and the constellations. during his convalescent days, clemens had plenty of time to reflect and to look out of the window. his notebook preserves some of his reflections. in one place he says: the emperor passes in a modest open carriage. next that happy -year-old butcher-boy, all in white apron and turban, standing up & so proud! how fast they drive-nothing like it but in london. and the horses seem to be of very fine breed, though i am not an expert in horses & do not speak with assurance. i can always tell which is the front end of a horse, but beyond that my art is not above the ordinary. the “court gazette” of a german paper can be covered with a playing- card. in an english paper the movements of titled people take up about three times that room. in the papers of republican france from six to sixteen times as much. there, if a duke's dog should catch cold in the head they would stop the press to announce it and cry about it. in germany they respect titles, in england they revere them, in france they adore them. that is, the french newspapers do. been taken for mommsen twice. we have the same hair, but on examination it was found the brains were different. on february th he records that professor helmholtz called, but unfortunately leaves no further memorandum of that visit. he was quite recovered by this time, but was still cautioned about going out in the severe weather. in the final entry he says: thirty days sick abed--full of interest--read the debates and get excited over them, though don't 'versteh'. by reading keep in a state of excited ignorance, like a blind man in a house afire; flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don't know how i got in and can't find the way out, but i'm having a booming time all to myself. don't know what a 'schelgesetzentwurf' is, but i keep as excited over it and as worried about it as if it was my own child. i simply live on the sch.; it is my daily bread. i wouldn't have the question settled for anything in the world. especially now that i've lost the 'offentliche militargericht circus'. i read all the debates on that question with a never-failing interest, but all at once they sprung a vote on me a couple of days ago & did something by a vote of to , but i couldn't find out what it was. clxxix. a dinner with william ii. the dinner with emperor william ii. at general von versen's was set for the th of february. a few days before, mark twain entered in his note-book: in that day the imperial lion and the democratic lamb shall sit down together, and a little general shall feed them. mark twain was the guest of honor on this occasion, and was seated at the emperor's right hand. the emperor's brother, prince heinrich, sat opposite; prince radolin farther along. rudolf lindau, of the foreign office, was also present. there were fourteen at the table, all told. in his memorandum made at the time, clemens gave no account of the dinner beyond the above details, only adding: after dinner or officers came in, & all hands adjourned to the big room out of the smoking-room and held a “smoking parliament” after the style of the ancient potsdam one, till midnight, when the emperor shook hands and left. it was not until fourteen years later that mark twain related some special matters pertaining to that evening. he may have expanded then somewhat to fill out spaces of his memory, and embroidered them, as was his wont; but that something happened, either in reality or in his imagination, which justified his version of it we may believe. he told it as here given, premising: “this may appear in print after i am dead, but not before. “from until day before yesterday i had never mentioned the matter, nor set it down with a pen, nor ever referred to it in any way--not even to my wife, to whom i was accustomed to tell everything that happened to me. “at the dinner his majesty chatted briskly and entertainingly along in easy and flowing english, and now and then he interrupted himself to address a remark to me or to some other individual of the guests. when the reply had been delivered he resumed his talk. i noticed that the table etiquette tallied with that which was the law of my house at home when we had guests; that is to say, the guests answered when the host favored them with a remark, and then quieted down and behaved themselves until they got another chance. if i had been in the emperor's chair and he in mine i should have felt infinitely comfortable and at home, but i was guest now, and consequently felt less at home. from old experience i was familiar with the rules of the game and familiar with their exercise from the high place of host; but i was not familiar with the trammeled and less satisfactory position of guest, therefore i felt a little strange and out of place. but there was no animosity--no, the emperor was host, therefore, according to my own rule, he had a right to do the talking, and it was my honorable duty to intrude no interruptions or other improvements except upon invitation; and of course it could be my turn some day--some day, on some friendly visit of inspection to america, it might be my pleasure and distinction to have him as guest at my table; then i would give him a rest and a quiet time. “in one way there was a difference between his table and mine-for instance, atmosphere; the guests stood in awe of him, and naturally they conferred that feeling upon me, for, after all, i am only human, although i regret it. when a guest answered a question he did it with a deferential voice and manner; he did not put any emotion into it, and he did not spin it out, but got it out of his system as quickly as he could, and then looked relieved. the emperor was used to this atmosphere, and it did not chill his blood; maybe it was an inspiration to him, for he was alert, brilliant, and full of animation; also he was most gracefully and felicitously complimentary to my books--and i will remark here that the happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts and the happy delivery of it another. i once mentioned the high compliment which he paid to the book 'old times on the mississippi'; but there were others, among them some high praise of my description in 'a tramp abroad' of certain striking phases of german student life. “fifteen or twenty minutes before the dinner ended the emperor made a remark to me in praise of our generous soldier pensions; then, without pausing, he continued the remark, not speaking to me, but across the table to his brother, prince heinrich. the prince replied, endorsing the emperor's view of the matter. then i followed with my own view of it. i said that in the beginning our government's generosity to the soldier was clear in its intent and praiseworthy, since the pensions were conferred upon soldiers who had earned them, soldiers who had been disabled in the war and could no longer earn a livelihood for themselves and their families, but that the pensions decreed and added later lacked the virtue of a clean motive, and had, little by little, degenerated into a wider and wider and more and more offensive system of vote-purchasing, and was now become a source of corruption, which was an unpleasant thing to contemplate and was a danger besides. i think that that was about the substance of my remark; but in any case the remark had a quite definite result, and that is the memorable thing about it --manifestly it made everybody uncomfortable. i seemed to perceive this quite plainly. i had committed an indiscretion. possibly it was in violating etiquette by intruding a remark when i had not been invited to make one; possibly it was in taking issue with an opinion promulgated by his majesty. i do not know which it was, but i quite clearly remember the effect which my act produced--to wit, the emperor refrained from addressing any remarks to me afterward, and not merely during the brief remainder of the dinner, but afterward in the kneip-room, where beer and cigars and hilarious anecdoting prevailed until about midnight. i am sure that the emperor's good night was the only thing he said to me in all that time. “was this rebuke studied and intentional? i don't know, but i regarded it in that way. i can't be absolutely sure of it because of modifying doubts created afterward by one or two circumstances. for example: the empress dowager invited me to her palace, and the reigning empress invited me to breakfast, and also sent for general von versen to come to her palace and read to her and her ladies from my books.” it was a personal message from the emperor that fourteen years later recalled to him this curious circumstance. a gentleman whom clemens knew went on a diplomatic mission to germany. upon being presented to emperor william, the latter had immediately begun to talk of mark twain and his work. he spoke of the description of german student life as the greatest thing of its kind ever written, and of the sketch on the german language as wonderful; then he said: “convey to mr. clemens my kindest regards, ask him if he remembers that dinner at von versen's, and ask him why he didn't do any more talking at that dinner.” it seemed a mysterious message. clemens thought it might have been meant to convey some sort of an imperial apology; but again it might have meant that mark twain's breach and the emperor's coolness on that occasion were purely imaginary, and that the emperor had really expected him to talk far more than he did. returning to the royal hotel after the von versen dinner, mark twain received his second high compliment that day on the mississippi book. the portier, a tow-headed young german, must have been comparatively new at the hotel; for apparently he had just that day learned that his favorite author, whose books he had long been collecting, was actually present in the flesh. clemens, all ready to apologize for asking so late an admission, was greeted by the portier's round face all sunshine and smiles. the young german then poured out a stream of welcome and compliments and dragged the author to a small bedroom near the front door, where he excitedly pointed out a row of books, german translations of mark twain. “there,” he said; “you wrote them. i've found it out. lieber gott! i did not know it before, and i ask a million pardons. that one there, old times on the mississippi, is the best you ever wrote.” the note-book records only one social event following the emperor's dinner--a dinner with the secretary of the legation. the note says: at the emperor's dinner black cravats were ordered. tonight i went in a black cravat and everybody else wore white ones. just my luck. the berlin activities came to an end then. he was still physically far from robust, and his doctors peremptorily ordered him to stay indoors or to go to a warmer climate. this was march st. clemens and his wife took joseph very, and, leaving the others for the time in berlin, set out for mentone, in the south of france. clxxx. many wanderings mentone was warm and quiet, and clemens worked when his arm permitted. he was alone there with mrs. clemens, and they wandered about a good deal, idling and picture-making, enjoying a sort of belated honeymoon. clemens wrote to susy: joseph is gone to nice to educate himself in kodaking--and to get the pictures mounted which mama thinks she took here; but i noticed she didn't take the plug out, as a rule. when she did she took nine pictures on top of each other--composites. they remained a month in mentone, then went over to pisa, and sent joseph to bring the rest of the party to rome. in rome they spent another month--a period of sight-seeing, enjoyable, but to clemens pretty profitless. “i do not expect to be able to write any literature this year,” he said in a letter to hall near the end of april. “the moment i take up my pen my rheumatism returns.” still he struggled along and managed to pile up a good deal of copy in the course of weeks. from rome to florence, at the end of april, and so pleasing was the prospect, and so salubrious the air of that ancient city, that they resolved to engage residence there for the next winter. they inspected accommodations of various kinds, and finally, through prof. willard fiske, were directed to the villa viviani, near settignano, on a hill to the eastward of florence, with vineyard and olive-grove sloping away to the city lying in a haze-a vision of beauty and peace. they closed the arrangement for viviani, and about the middle of may went up to venice for a fortnight of sight-seeing--a break in the travel back to germany. william gedney bunce, the hartford artist, was in venice, and sarah orne jewett and other home friends. from venice, by way of lake como and “a tangled route” (his note-book says) to lucerne, and so northward to berlin and on to bad nauheim, where they had planned to spend the summer. clemens for some weeks had contemplated a trip to america, for matters there seemed to demand his personal attention. summer arrangements for the family being now concluded, he left within the week and set sail on the havel for new york. to jean he wrote a cheerful good-by letter, more cheerful, we may believe, than he felt. bremen, . a.m., june , . dear jean clemens,--i am up & shaved & got my clean shirt on & feel mighty fine, & am going down to show off before i put on the rest of my clothes. perhaps mama & mrs. hague can persuade the hauswirth to do right; but if he don't you go down & kill his dog. i wish you would invite the consul-general and his ladies down to take one of those slim dinners with mama, then he would complain to the government. clemens felt that his presence in america, was demanded by two things. hall's reports continued, as ever, optimistic; but the semi-annual statements were less encouraging. the library of literature and some of the other books were selling well enough; but the continuous increase of capital required by a business conducted on the instalment plan had steadily added to the firm's liabilities, while the prospect of a general tightening in the money-market made the outlook not a particularly happy one. clemens thought he might be able to dispose of the library or an interest in it, or even of his share of the business itself, to some one with means sufficient to put it on an easier financial footing. the uncertainties of trade and the burden of increased debt had become a nightmare which interfered with his sleep. it seemed hard enough to earn a living with a crippled arm, without this heavy business care. the second interest requiring attention was that other old one--the machine. clemens had left the matter in paige's hands, and paige, with persuasive eloquence, had interested chicago capital to a point where a company had been formed to manufacture the type-setter in that city. paige reported that he had got several million dollars subscribed for the construction of a factory, and that he had been placed on a salary as a sort of general “consulting omniscient” at five thousand dollars a month. clemens, who had been negotiating again with the mallorys for the disposal of his machine royalties, thought it proper to find out just what was going on. he remained in america less than two weeks, during which he made a flying trip to chicago and found that paige's company really had a factory started, and proposed to manufacture fifty machines. it was not easy to find out the exact status of this new company, but clemens at least was hopeful enough of its prospects to call off the negotiations with the mallorys which had promised considerable cash in hand. he had been able to accomplish nothing material in the publishing situation, but his heart-to-heart talk with hall for some reason had seemed comforting. the business had been expanding; they would now “concentrate.” he returned on the lahn, and he must have been in better health and spirits, for it is said he kept the ship very merry during the passage. he told many extravagantly amusing yarns; so many that a court was convened to try him on the charge of “inordinate and unscientific lying.” many witnesses testified, and his own testimony was so unconvincing that the jury convicted him without leaving the bench. he was sentenced to read aloud from his own works for a considerable period every day until the steamer should reach port. it is said that he faithfully carried out this part of the program, and that the proceeds from the trial and the various readings amounted to something more than six hundred dollars, which was turned over to the seamen's fund. clemens's arm was really much better, and he put in a good deal of spare time during the trip writing an article on “all sorts and conditions of ships,” from noah's ark down to the fine new havel, then the latest word in ship-construction. it was an article written in a happy vein and is profitable reading to-day. the description of columbus as he appeared on the deck of his flag-ship is particularly rich and flowing: if the weather was chilly he came up clad from plumed helmet to spurred heel in magnificent plate-armor inlaid with arabesques of gold, having previously warmed it at the galley fire. if the weather was warm he came up in the ordinary sailor toggery of the time-great slouch hat of blue velvet, with a flowing brush of snowy ostrich-plumes, fastened on with a flashing cluster of diamonds and emeralds; gold-embroidered doublet of green velvet, with slashed sleeves exposing undersleeves of crimson satin; deep collar and cuff ruffles of rich, limp lace; trunk hose of pink velvet, with big knee-knots of brocaded yellow ribbon; pearl-tinted silk stockings, clocked and daintily embroidered; lemon-colored buskins of unborn kid, funnel-topped, and drooping low to expose the pretty stockings; deep gauntlets of finest white heretic skin, from the factory of the holy inquisition, formerly part of the person of a lady of rank; rapier with sheath crusted with jewels and hanging from a broad baldric upholstered with rubies and sapphires. clxxxi. nauheim and the prince of wales clemens was able to write pretty steadily that summer in nauheim and turned off a quantity of copy. he completed several short articles and stories, and began, or at least continued work on, two books--'tom sawyer abroad' and 'those extraordinary twins'--the latter being the original form of 'pudd'nhead wilson'. as early as august th he wrote to hall that he had finished forty thousand words of the “tom sawyer” story, and that it was to be offered to some young people's magazine, harper's young people or st. nicholas; but then he suddenly decided that his narrative method was altogether wrong. to hall on the th he wrote: i have dropped that novel i wrote you about because i saw a more effective way of using the main episode--to wit, by telling it through the lips of huck finn. so i have started huck finn & tom sawyer (still years old) & their friend the freed slave jim around the world in a stray balloon, with huck as narrator, & somewhere after the end of that great voyage he will work in that original episode & then nobody will suspect that a whole book has been written & the globe circumnavigated merely to get that episode in in an effective (& at the same time apparently unintentional) way. i have written , words of this new narrative, & find that the humor flows as easily as the adventures & surprises--so i shall go along and make a book of from , to , words. it is a story for boys, of course, & i think it will interest any boy between years & . when i was in new york the other day mrs. dodge, editor of st. nicholas, wrote and offered me $ , for (serial right) a story for boys , words long. i wrote back and declined, for i had other matter in my mind then. i conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys, but will also strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. that immensely enlarges the audience. now, this story doesn't need to be restricted to a child's magazine --it is proper enough for any magazine, i should think, or for a syndicate. i don't swear it, but i think so. proposed title--new adventures of huckleberry finn. he was full of his usual enthusiasm in any new undertaking, and writes of the extraordinary twins: by and by i shall have to offer (for grown folks' magazine) a novel entitled, 'those extraordinary twins'. it's the howling farce i told you i had begun awhile back. i laid it aside to ferment while i wrote tom sawyer abroad, but i took it up again on a little different plan lately, and it is swimming along satisfactorily now. i think all sorts of folks will read it. it is clear out of the common order--it is a fresh idea--i don't think it resembles anything in literature. he was quite right; it did not resemble anything in literature, nor did it greatly resemble literature, though something at least related to literature would eventually grow out of it. in a letter written many years afterward by frank mason, then consul-general at frankfort, he refers to “that happy summer at nauheim.” mason was often a visitor there, and we may believe that his memory of the summer was justified. for one thing, clemens himself was in better health and spirits and able to continue his work. but an even greater happiness lay in the fact that two eminent physicians had pronounced mrs. clemens free from any organic ills. to orion, clemens wrote: we are in the clouds because the bath physicians say positively that livy has no heart disease but has only weakness of the heart muscles and will soon be well again. that was worth going to europe to find out. it was enough to change the whole atmosphere of the household, and financial worries were less considered. another letter to orion relates history: the twichells have been here four days & we have had good times with them. joe & i ran over to homburg, the great pleasure-resort, saturday, to dine with friends, & in the morning i went walking in the promenade & met the british ambassador to the court of berlin and he introduced me to the prince of wales. i found him a most unusually comfortable and unembarrassing englishman. twichell has reported mark twain's meeting with the prince (later edward vii) as having come about by special request of the latter, made through the british ambassador. “the meeting,” he says, “was a most cordial one on both sides, and presently the prince took mark twain's arm and the two marched up and down, talking earnestly together, the prince, solid, erect, and soldier-like, clemens weaving along in his curious, swinging gait in a full tide of talk, and brandishing a sun-umbrella of the most scandalous description.” when they parted clemens said: “it has been, indeed, a great pleasure to meet your royal highness.” the prince answered: “and it is a pleasure, mr. clemens, to have met you--again.” clemens was puzzled to reply. “why,” he said, “have we met before?” the prince smiled happily. “oh yes,” he said; “don't you remember that day on the strand when you were on the top of a bus and i was heading a procession and you had on your new overcoat with flap-pockets?”--[see chap. clxiii, “a letter to the queen of england.”] it was the highest compliment he could have paid, for it showed that he had read, and had remembered all those years. clemens expressed to twichell regret that he had forgotten to mention his visit to the prince's sister, louise, in ottawa, but he had his opportunity at a dinner next day. later the prince had him to supper and they passed an entire evening together. there was a certain uneasiness in the nauheim atmosphere that year, for the cholera had broken out at hamburg, and its victims were dying at a terrific rate. it was almost impossible to get authentic news as to the spread of the epidemic, for the german papers were curiously conservative in their reports. clemens wrote an article on the subject but concluded not to print it. a paragraph will convey its tenor. what i am trying to make the reader understand is the strangeness of the situation here--a mighty tragedy being played upon a stage that is close to us, & yet we are as ignorant of its details as we should be if the stage were in china. we sit “in front,” & the audience is in fact the world; but the curtain is down, & from behind it we hear only an inarticulate murmur. the hamburg disaster must go into history as the disaster without a history. he closes with an item from a physician's letter--an item which he says “gives you a sudden and terrific sense of the situation there.” for in a line it flashes before you--this ghastly picture--a thing seen by the physician: a wagon going along the street with five sick people in it, and with them four dead ones. clxxxii. the villa viviani. 'the american claimant', published in may l ( ), did not bring a very satisfactory return. for one thing, the book-trade was light, and then the claimant was not up to his usual standard. it had been written under hard circumstances and by a pen long out of practice; it had not paid, and its author must work all the harder on the new undertakings. the conditions at nauheim seemed favorable, and they lingered there until well into september. to mrs. crane, who had returned to america, clemens wrote on the th, from lucerne, in the midst of their travel to italy: we remained in nauheim a little too long. if we had left four or five days earlier we should have made florence in three days. hard trip because it was one of those trains that gets tired every minutes and stops to rest three-quarters of an hour. it took us / hours to get there instead of the regulation hours. we shall pull through to milan to-morrow if possible. next day we shall start at am and try to make bologna, hours. next day, florence, d. v. next year we will walk. phelps came to frankfort and we had some great times--dinner at his hotel; & the masons, supper at our inn--livy not in it. she was merely allowed a glimpse, no more. of course phelps said she was merely pretending to be ill; was never looking so well & fine. a paris journal has created a happy interest by inoculating one of its correspondents with cholera. a man said yesterday he wished to god they would inoculate all of them. yes, the interest is quite general and strong & much hope is felt. livy says i have said enough bad things, and better send all our loves & shut up. which i do--and shut up. they lingered at lucerne until mrs. clemens was rested and better able to continue the journey, arriving at last in florence, september th. they drove out to the villa viviani in the afternoon and found everything in readiness for their reception, even to the dinner, which was prepared and on the table. clemens, in his notes, speaks of this and adds: it takes but a sentence to state that, but it makes an indolent person tired to think of the planning & work and trouble that lie concealed in it. some further memoranda made at this time have that intimate interest which gives reality and charm. the 'contadino' brought up their trunks from the station, and clemens wrote: the 'contadino' is middle-aged & like the rest of the peasants--that is to say, brown, handsome, good-natured, courteous, & entirely independent without making any offensive show of it. he charged too much for the trunks, i was told. my informer explained that this was customary. september . the rest of the trunks brought up this morning. he charged too much again, but i was told that this was also customary. it's all right, then. i do not wish to violate the customs. hired landau, horses, & coachman. terms, francs a month & a pourboire to the coachman, i to furnish lodging for the man & the horses, but nothing else. the landau has seen better days & weighs tons. the horses are feeble & object to the landau; they stop & turn around every now & then & examine it with surprise & suspicion. this causes delay. but it entertains the people along the road. they came out & stood around with their hands in their pockets & discussed the matter with each other. i was told that they said that a -ton landau was not the thing for horses like those--what they needed was a wheelbarrow. his description of the house pictures it as exactly today as it did then, for it has not changed in these twenty years, nor greatly, perhaps, in the centuries since it was built. it is a plain, square building, like a box, & is painted light yellow & has green window-shutters. it stands in a commanding position on the artificial terrace of liberal dimensions, which is walled around with masonry. from the walls the vineyards & olive orchards of the estate slant away toward the valley. there are several tall trees, stately stone-pines, also fig-trees & trees of breeds not familiar to me. roses overflow the retaining-walls, & the battered & mossy stone urn on the gate-posts, in pink & yellow cataracts exactly as they do on the drop-curtains in the theaters. the house is a very fortress for strength. the main walls--all brick covered with plaster--are about feet thick. i have several times tried to count the rooms of the house, but the irregularities baffle me. there seem to be . there are plenty of windows & worlds of sunlight. the floors are sleek & shiny & full of reflections, for each is a mirror in its way, softly imaging all objects after the subdued fashion of forest lakes. the curious feature of the house is the salon. this is a spacious & lofty vacuum which occupies the center of the house. all the rest of the house is built around it; it extends up through both stories & its roof projects some feet above the rest of the building. the sense of its vastness strikes you the moment you step into it & cast your eyes around it & aloft. there are divans distributed along its walls. they make little or no show, though their aggregate length is feet. a piano in it is a lost object. we have tried to reduce the sense of desert space & emptiness with tables & things, but they have a defeated look, & do not do any good. whatever stands or moves under that soaring painted vault is belittled. he describes the interior of this vast room (they grew to love it), dwelling upon the plaster-relief portraits above its six doors, florentine senators and judges, ancient dwellers there and former owners of the estate. the date of one of them is --middle-aged, then, & a judge--he could have known, as a youth, the very greatest italian artists, & he could have walked & talked with dante, & probably did. the date of another is --he could have known boccaccio & spent his afternoons wandering in fiesole, gazing down on plague-reeking florence & listening to that man's improper tales, & he probably did. the date of another is --he could have met columbus & he knew the magnificent lorenzo, of course. these are all cerretanis --or cerretani-twains, as i may say, for i have adopted myself into their family on account of its antiquity--my origin having been heretofore too recent to suit me. we are considering the details of viviani at some length, for it was in this setting that he began and largely completed what was to be his most important work of this later time--in some respects his most important of any time--the 'personal recollections of joan of arc'. if the reader loves this book, and he must love it if he has read it, he will not begrudge the space here given to the scene of its inspiration. the outdoor picture of viviani is of even more importance, for he wrote oftener out-of-doors than elsewhere. clemens added it to his notes several months later, but it belongs here. the situation of this villa is perfect. it is three miles from florence, on the side of a hill. beyond some hill-spurs is fiesole perched upon its steep terraces; in the immediate foreground is the imposing mass of the ross castle, its walls and turrets rich with the mellow weather-stains of forgotten centuries; in the distant plain lies florence, pink & gray & brown, with the ruddy, huge dome of the cathedral dominating its center like a captive balloon, & flanked on the right by the smaller bulb of the medici chapel & on the left by the airy tower of the palazzo vecchio; all around the horizon is a billowy rim of lofty blue hills, snowed white with innumerable villas. after nine months of familiarity with this panorama i still think, as i thought in the beginning, that this is the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon, the most satisfying to the eye & the spirit. to see the sun sink down, drowned in his pink & purple & golden floods, & overwhelm florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim & faint & turn the solid city into a city of dreams, is a sight to stir the coldest nature & make a sympathetic one drunk with ecstasy. the clemens household at florence consisted of mr. and mrs. clemens, susy, and jean. clara had soon returned to berlin to attend mrs. willard's school and for piano instruction. mrs. clemens improved in the balmy autumn air of florence and in the peaceful life of their well-ordered villa. in a memorandum of october th clemens wrote: the first month is finished. we are wonted now. this carefree life at a florentine villa is an ideal existence. the weather is divine, the outside aspects lovely, the days and nights tranquil and reposeful, the seclusion from the world and its worries as satisfactory as a dream. late in the afternoons friends come out from the city & drink tea in the open air & tell what is happening in the world; & when the great sun sinks down upon florence & the daily miracle begins they hold their breath & look. it is not a time for talk. no wonder he could work in that environment. he finished 'tom sawyer abroad', also a short story, 'the l , , bank-note' (planned many years before), discovered the literary mistake of the 'extraordinary twins' and began converting it into the worthier tale, 'pudd'nhead wilson', soon completed and on its way to america. with this work out of his hands, clemens was ready for his great new undertaking. a seed sown by the wind more than forty years before was ready to bloom. he would write the story of joan of arc. clxxxiii. the sieur de conte and joan in a note which he made many years later mark twain declared that he was fourteen years at work on joan of arc; that he had been twelve years preparing for it, and that he was two years in writing it. there is nothing in any of his earlier notes or letters to indicate that he contemplated the story of joan as early as the eighties; but there is a bibliographical list of various works on the subject, probably compiled for him not much later than , for the latest published work of the list bears that date. he was then too busy with his inventions and publishing schemes to really undertake a work requiring such vast preparation; but without doubt he procured a number of books and renewed that old interest begun so long ago when a stray wind had blown a leaf from that tragic life into his own. joan of arc, by janet tuckey, was apparently the first book he read with the definite idea of study, for this little volume had been recently issued, and his copy, which still exists, is filled with his marginal notes. he did not speak of this volume in discussing the matter in after-years. he may have forgotten it. he dwelt mainly on the old records of the trial which had been dug out and put into modern french by quicherat; the 'jeanne d'arc' of j. michelet, and the splendid 'life of the maid' of lord ronald gower, these being remembered as his chief sources of information.--[the book of janet tuckey, however, and ten others, including those mentioned, are credited as “authorities examined in verification” on a front page of his published book. in a letter written at the conclusion of “joan” in , the author states that in the first two-thirds of the story he used one french and one english authority, while in the last third he had constantly drawn from five french and five english sources.] “i could not get the quicherat and some of the other books in english,” he said, “and i had to dig them out of the french. i began the story five times.” none of these discarded beginnings exists to-day, but we may believe they were wisely put aside, for no story of the maid could begin more charmingly, more rarely, than the one supposedly told in his old age by sieur louis de conte, secretary of joan of arc, and translated by jean francois alden for the world to read. the impulse which had once prompted mark twain to offer the prince and the pauper anonymously now prevailed. he felt that the prince had missed a certain appreciation by being connected with his signature, and he resolved that its companion piece (he so regarded joan) should be accepted on its merits and without prejudice. walking the floor one day at viviani, smoking vigorously, he said to mrs. clemens and susy: “i shall never be accepted seriously over my own signature. people always want to laugh over what i write and are disappointed if they don't find a joke in it. this is to be a serious book. it means more to me than anything i have ever undertaken. i shall write it anonymously.” so it was that that gentle, quaint sieur de conte took up the pen, and the tale of joan was begun in that beautiful spot which of all others seems now the proper environment for its lovely telling. he wrote rapidly once he got his plan perfected and his material arranged. the reading of his youth and manhood, with the vivid impressions of that earlier time, became now something remembered, not merely as reading, but as fact. others of the family went down into the city almost daily, but he remained in that still garden with joan as his companion--the old sieur de conte, saturated with memories, pouring out that marvelous and tragic tale. at the end of each day he would read to the others what he had written, to their enjoyment and wonder. how rapidly he worked may be judged from a letter which he wrote to hall in february, in which he said: i am writing a companion piece to 'the prince and the pauper', which is half done & will make , words. that is to say, he had written one hundred thousand words in a period of perhaps six weeks, marvelous work when one remembers that after all he was writing history, some of which he must dig laboriously from a foreign source. he had always, more or less, kept up his study of the french, begun so long ago on the river and it stood him in good stead now. still, it was never easy for him, and the multitude of notes along the margin of his french authorities bears evidence of his faithfulness and the magnitude of his toil. no previous work had ever required so much of him, such thorough knowledge; none had ever so completely commanded his interest. he would have been willing to remain shut away from visitors, to have been released altogether from social obligations; and he did avoid most of them. not all, for he could not always escape, and perhaps did not always really wish to. florence and its suburbs were full of delightful people--some of them his old friends. there were luncheons, dinners, teas, dances, concerts, operas always in progress somewhere, and not all of these were to be resisted even by an absorbed author who was no longer himself, but sad old sieur de conte, following again the banner of the maid of orleans, marshaling her twilight armies across his illumined page. clxxxiv. new hope in the machine if all human events had not been ordered in the first act of the primal atom, and so become inevitable, it would seem a pity now that he must abandon his work half-way, and make another hard, distracting trip to america. but it was necessary for him to go. even hall was no longer optimistic. his letters provided only the barest shreds of hope. times were hard and there was every reason to believe they would be worse. the world's fair year promised to be what it speedily became--one of the hardest financial periods this country has ever seen. chicago could hardly have selected a more profitless time for her great exposition. clemens wrote urging hall to sell out all, or a portion, of the business--to do anything, indeed, that would avoid the necessity of further liability and increased dread. every payment that could be spared from the sales of his manuscript was left in hall's hands, and such moneys as still came to mrs. clemens from her elmira interests were flung into the general fund. the latter were no longer large, for langdon & co. were suffering heavily in the general depression, barely hoping to weather the financial storm. it is interesting to note that age and misfortune and illness had a tempering influence on mark twain's nature. instead of becoming harsh and severe and bitter, he had become more gentle, more kindly. he wrote often to hall, always considerately, even tenderly. once, when something in hall's letter suggested that he had perhaps been severe, he wrote: mrs. clemens is deeply distressed, for she thinks i have been blaming you or finding fault with you about something. but most assuredly that cannot be. i tell her that although i am prone to write hasty and regrettable things to other people i am not a bit likely to write such things to you. i can't believe i have done anything so ungrateful. if i have, pile coals of fire upon my head for i deserve it. you have done magnificently with the business, & we must raise the money somehow to enable you to reap a reward for all that labor. he was fond of hall. he realized how honest and resolute and industrious he had been. in another letter he wrote him that it was wonderful he had been able to “keep the ship afloat in the storm that has seen fleets and fleets go down”; and he added: “mrs. clemens says i must tell you not to send us any money for a month or two, so that you may be afforded what little relief is in our power.” the type-setter situation seemed to promise something. in fact, the machine once more had become the principal hope of financial salvation. the new company seemed really to begetting ahead in spite of the money stringency, and was said to have fifty machines well under way: about the middle of march clemens packed up two of his shorter manuscripts which he had written at odd times and forwarded them to hall, in the hope that they would be disposed of and the money waiting him on his arrival; and a week later, march , , he sailed from genoa on the kaiser wilhelm ii, a fine, new boat. one of the manuscripts was 'the californian's tale' and the other was 'adam's diary'.--[it seems curious that neither of these tales should have found welcome with the magazines. “the californian's tale” was published in the liber scriptorum, an authors' club book, edited by arthur stedman. the 'diary' was disposed of to the niagara book, a souvenir of niagara falls, which contained sketches by howells, clemens, and others. harper's magazine republished both these stories in later years--the diary especially with great success.] some joke was likely to be played on mark twain during these ocean journeys, and for this particular voyage an original one was planned. they knew how he would fume and swear if he should be discovered with dutiable goods and held up in the custom house, and they planned for this effect. a few days before arriving in new york one passenger after another came to him, each with a box of expensive cigars, and some pleasant speech expressing friendship and appreciation and a hope that they would be remembered in absence, etc., until he had perhaps ten or a dozen very choice boxes of smoking material. he took them all with gratitude and innocence. he had never declared any dutiable baggage, entering new york alone, and it never occurred to him that he would need to do so now. his trunk and bags were full; he had the cigars made into a nice package, to be carried handily, and on his arrival at the north german lloyd docks stood waiting among his things for the formality of customs examination, his friends assembled for the explosion. they had not calculated well; the custom-house official came along presently with the usual “open your baggage, please,” then suddenly recognizing the owner of it he said: “oh, mr. clemens, excuse me. we have orders to extend to you the courtesies of the port. no examination of your effects is necessary.” it was the evening of monday, april d, when he landed in new york and went to the hotel glenham. in his notes he tells of having a two-hour talk with howells on the following night. they had not seen each other for two years, and their correspondence had been broken off. it was a happy, even if somewhat sad, reunion, for they were no longer young, and when they called the roll of friends there were many vacancies. they had reached an age where some one they loved died every year. writing to mrs. crane, clemens speaks of the ghosts of memory; then he says: i dreamed i was born & grew up & was a pilot on the mississippi & a miner & a journalist in nevada & a pilgrim in the quaker city & had a wife & children & went to live in a villa at florence--& this dream goes on & on & sometimes seems so real that i almost believe it is real. i wonder if it is? but there is no way to tell, for if one applies tests they would be part of the dream, too, & so would simply aid the deceit. i wish i knew whether it is a dream or real. he was made handsomely welcome in new york. his note-book says: wednesday. dined with mary mapes dodge, howells, rudyard kipling & wife, clarke,--[ william fayal clarke, now editor of st. nicholas magazine.]--jamie dodge & wife. thursday, th. dined with andrew carnegie, prof. goldwin smith, john cameron, mr. glenn. creation of league for absorbing canada into our union. carnegie also wants to add great britain & ireland. it was on this occasion that carnegie made his celebrated maxim about the basket and the eggs. clemens was suggesting that carnegie take an interest in the typesetter, and quoted the old adage that one should not put all of his eggs into one basket. carnegie regarded him through half-closed lids, as was his custom, and answered: “that's a mistake; put all your eggs into one basket--and watch that basket.” he had not come to america merely for entertainment. he was at the new york office of the type-setter company, acquiring there what seemed to be good news, for he was assured that his interests were being taken care of, and that within a year at most his royalty returns would place him far beyond the fear of want. he forwarded this good news to italy, where it was sorely needed, for mrs. clemens found her courage not easy to sustain in his absence. that he had made his letter glowing enough, we may gather from her answer. it does not seem credible that we are really again to have money to spend. i think i will jump around and spend money just for fun, and give a little away, if we really get some. what should we do and how should we feel if we had no bright prospects before us, and yet how many people are situated in that way? he decided to make another trip to chicago to verify, with his own eyes, the manufacturing reports, and to see paige, who would appear to have become more elusive than ever as to contracts, written and implied. he took hall with him, and wrote orion to meet him at the great northern hotel. this would give him a chance to see orion and would give orion a chance to see the great fair. he was in chicago eleven days, and in bed with a heavy cold almost the whole of that time. paige came to see him at his rooms, and, as always, was rich in prospects and promises; full of protestations that, whatever came, when the tide of millions rolled in, they would share and share alike. the note-book says: paige shed even more tears than usual. what a talker he is! he could persuade a fish to come out and take a walk with him. when he is present i always believe him; i can't help it. clemens returned to new york as soon as he was able to travel. going down in the elevator a man stepped in from one of the floors swearing violently. clemens, leaning over to hall, with his hand to his mouth, and in a whisper audible to every one, said: “bishop of chicago.” the man, with a quick glance, recognized his fellow-passenger and subsided. on may th clemens took the kaiser wilhelm ii. for genoa. he had accomplished little, but he was in better spirits as to the machine. if only the strain of his publishing business had slackened even for a moment! night and day it was always with him. hall presently wrote that the condition of the money-market was “something beyond description. you cannot get money on anything short of government bonds.” the mount morris bank would no longer handle their paper. the clemens household resorted to economies hitherto undreamed of. mrs. clemens wrote to her sister that she really did not see sometimes where their next money would come from. she reported that her husband got up in the night and walked the floor in his distress. he wrote again to hall, urging him to sell and get rid of the debts and responsibilities at whatever sacrifice: i am terribly tired of business. i am by nature and disposition unfit for it, & i want to get out of it. i am standing on the mount morris volcano with help from the machine a long, long way off--& doubtless a long way further off than the connecticut company imagine. get me out of business! he knew something of the delays of completing a typesetting machine, and he had little faith in any near relief from that source. he wrote again go hall, urging him to sell some of his type-setter royalties. they should be worth something now since the manufacturing company was actually in operation; but with the terrible state of the money-market there was no sale for anything. clemens attempted to work, but put in most of his time footing up on the margin of his manuscript the amount of his indebtedness, the expenses of his household, and the possibilities of his income. it was weary, hard, nerve-racking employment. about the muddle of june they closed viviani. susy clemens went to paris to cultivate her voice, a rare soprano, with a view to preparing for the operatic stage. clemens took mrs. clemens, with little jean, to germany for the baths. clara, who had graduated from mrs. willard's school in berlin, joined them in munich, and somewhat later susy also joined them, for madame marchesi, the great master of voice-culture, had told her that she must acquire physique to carry that voice of hers before she would undertake to teach her. in spite of his disturbed state of mind clemens must have completed some literary work during this period, for we find first mention, in a letter to hall, of his immortal defense of harriet shelley, a piece of writing all the more marvelous when we consider the conditions of its performance. characteristically, in the same letter, he suddenly develops a plan for a new enterprise--this time for a magazine which arthur stedman or his father will edit, and the webster company will publish as soon as their present burdens are unloaded. but we hear no more of this project. but by august he was half beside himself with anxiety. on the th he wrote hall: here we never see a newspaper, but even if we did i could not come anywhere near appreciating or correctly estimating the tempest you have been buffeting your way through--only the man who is in it can do that--but i have tried not to burden you thoughtlessly or wantonly. i have been overwrought & unsettled in mind by apprehensions, & that is a thing that is not helpable when one is in a strange land & sees his resources melt down to a two months' supply & can't see any sure daylight beyond. the bloody machine offers but a doubtful outlook--& will still offer nothing much better for a long time to come; for when the “three weeks” are up, there will be three months' tinkering to follow, i guess. that is unquestionably the boss machine of the world, but is the toughest one on prophets when it is in an incomplete state that has ever seen the light. and three days later: great scott, but it's a long year--for you & me! i never knew the almanac to drag so. at least not since i was finishing that other machine. i watch for your letters hungrily--just as i used to watch for the telegram saying the machine's finished--but when “next week certainly” suddenly swelled into “three weeks sure” i recognized the old familiar tune i used to hear so much. w----don't know what sick-heartedness is--but he is in a way to find out. and finally, on the th: i am very glad indeed if you and mr. langdon are able to see any daylight ahead. to me none is visible. i strongly advise that every penny that comes in shall be applied to paying off debts. i may be in error about this, but it seems to me that we have no other course open. we can pay a part of the debts owing to outsiders --none to clemenses. in very prosperous times we might regard our stock & copyrights as assets sufficient, with the money owing to us, to square up & quit even, but i suppose we may not hope for such luck in the present condition of things. what i am mainly hoping for is to save my book royalties. if they come into danger i hope you will cable me so that i can come over & try to save them, for if they go i am a beggar. i would sail to-day if i had anybody to take charge of my family & help them through the difficult journeys commanded by the doctors. a few days later he could stand it no longer, and on august ( ) sailed, the second time that year, for new york. clxxxv. an introduction to h. h. rogers clemens took a room at the players--“a cheap room,” he wrote, “at $ . per day.” it was now the end of september, the beginning of a long half-year, during which mark twain's fortunes were at a lower ebb than ever before; lower, even, than during those mining days among the bleak esmeralda hills. then he had no one but him self and was young. now, at fifty-eight, he had precious lives dependent upon him, and he was weighed down with a vast burden of debt. the liabilities of charles l. webster & co. were fully two hundred thousand dollars. something like sixty thousand dollars of this was money supplied by mrs. clemens, but the vast remaining sum was due to banks, to printers, to binders, and to dealers in various publishing materials. somehow it must be paid. as for their assets, they looked ample enough on paper, but in reality, at a time like this, they were problematical. in fact, their value was very doubtful indeed. what he was to do clemens did not know. he could not even send cheerful reports to europe. there was no longer anything to promise concerning the type-setter. the fifty machines which the company had started to build had dwindled to ten machines; there was a prospect that the ten would dwindle to one, and that one a reconstruction of the original hartford product, which had cost so much money and so many weary years. clemens spent a good part of his days at the players, reading or trying to write or seeking to divert his mind in the company of the congenial souls there, waiting for-he knew not what. yet at this very moment a factor was coming into his life, a human element, a man to whom in his old age mark twain owed more than to any other of his myriad of friends. one night, when he was with dr. clarence c. rice at the murray hill hotel, rice said: “clemens, i want you to know my friend, mr. h. h. rogers. he is an admirer of your books.” clemens turned and was looking into the handsome, clean-cut features of the great financier, whose name was hardly so familiar then as it became at a later period, but whose power was already widely known and felt among his kind. “mr. clemens,” said mr. rogers, “i was one of your early admirers. i heard you lecture a long time ago on the sandwich islands. i was interested in the subject in those days, and i heard that mark twain was a man who had been there. i didn't suppose i'd have any difficulty getting a seat, but i did; the house was jammed. when i came away i realized that mark twain was a great man, and i have read everything of yours since that i could get hold of.” they sat down at a table, and clemens told some of his amusing stories. rogers was in a perpetual gale of laughter. when at last he rose to go the author and the financier were as old friends. mr. rogers urged him to visit him at his home. he must introduce him to mrs. rogers, he said, who was also his warm admirer. it was only a little while after this that dr. rice said to the millionaire: “mr. rogers, i wish you would look into clemens's finances a little: i am afraid they are a good deal confused.” this would be near the end of september, . on october clemens wrote home concerning a possible combination of webster & co. with john brisben walker, of the 'cosmopolitan', and added: i have got the best and wisest man of the whole standard oil group-a multi-millionaire--a good deal interested in looking into the type- setter. he has been searching into that thing for three weeks and yesterday he said to me: “i find the machine to be all you represent it. i have here exhaustive reports from my own experts, and i know every detail of its capacity, its immense construction, its cost, its history, and all about its inventor's character. i know that the new york company and the chicago company are both stupid, and that they are unbusinesslike people, destitute of money and in a hopeless boggle.” then he told me the scheme he had planned and said: “if i can arrange with these people on this basis--it will take several weeks to find out--i will see to it that they get the money they need. in the mean time you 'stop walking the floor'.” of course, with this encouragement, clemens was in the clouds again. furthermore, rogers had suggested to his son-in-law, william evarts benjamin, also a subscription publisher, that he buy from the webster company the library of american literature for fifty thousand dollars, a sum which provided for the more insistent creditors. there was hope that the worst was over. clemens did in reality give up walking the floor, and for the time, at least, found happier diversions. he must not return to europe as yet, for the type-setter matter was still far from conclusion. on the th of november he was gorgeously entertained by the lotos club in its new building. introducing him, president frank lawrence said: “what name is there in literature that can be likened to his? perhaps some of the distinguished gentlemen about this table can tell us, but i know of none. himself his only parallel, it seems to me. he is all our own--a ripe and perfect product of the american soil.” clxxxvi. “the belle of new york” those were feverish weeks of waiting, with days of alternate depression and exaltation as the pendulum swung to and fro between hope and despair. by daylight clemens tried to keep himself strenuously busy; evenings and nights he plunged into social activities--dinners, amusements, suppers, balls, and the like. he was besieged with invitations, sought for by the gayest and the greatest; “jamie” dodge conferred upon him the appropriate title: of “the belle of new york.” in his letters home he describes in detail many of the festivities and the wildness with which he has flung himself into them, dilating on his splendid renewal of health, his absolute immunity from fatigue. he attributes this to his indifference to diet and regularities of meals and sleep; but we may guess that it was due to a reaction from having shifted his burden to stronger financial shoulders. henry rogers had taken his load upon him. “it rests me,” rogers said, “to experiment with the affairs of a friend when i am tired of my own. you enjoy yourself. let me work at the puzzle a little.” and clemens, though his conscience pricked him, obeyed, as was his habit at such times. to mrs. clemens (in paris now, at the hotel brighton) he wrote: he is not common clay, but fine-fine & delicate. i did hate to burden his good heart & overworked head, but he took hold with avidity & said it was no burden to work for his friends, but a pleasure. when i arrived in september, lord! how black the prospect was & how desperate, how incurably desperate! webster & co. had to have a small sum of money or go under at once. i flew to hartford --to my friends--but they were not moved, not strongly interested, & i was ashamed that i went. it was from mr. rogers, a stranger, that i got the money and was by it saved. and then--while still a stranger--he set himself the task of saving my financial life without putting upon me (in his native delicacy) any sense that i was the recipient of a charity, a benevolence. he gave time to me --time, which could not be bought by any man at $ , a month--no, nor for three times the money. he adds that a friend has just offered to webster & co. a book that arraigns the standard oil magnates individual by individual. i wanted to say the only man i care for in the world, the only man i would give a d---n for, the only man who is lavishing his sweat & blood to save me & mine from starvation is a standard oil magnate. if you know me, you know whether i want the book or not. but i didn't say that. i said i didn't want any book; i wanted to get out of this publishing business & out of all business & was here for that purpose & would accomplish it if i could. he tells how he played billiards with rogers, tirelessly as always, until the millionaire had looked at him helplessly and asked: “don't you ever get tired?” and he answered: “i don't know what it is to get tired. i wish i did.” he wrote of going with mr. rogers to the madison square garden to see an exhibition of boxing given by the then splendid star of pugilism, james j. corbett. dr. rice accompanied him, and painters robert reid and edward simmons, from the players. they had five seats in a box, and stanford white came along presently and took clemens into the champion's dressing-room. corbett has a fine face and is modest and diffident, besides being the most perfectly & beautifully constructed human animal in the world. i said: “you have whipped mitchell & maybe you will whip jackson in june --but you are not done then. you will have to tackle me.” he answered, so gravely that one might easily have thought him in earnest: “no, i am not going to meet you in the ring. it is not fair or right to require it. you might chance to knock me out, by no merit of your own, but by a purely accidental blow, & then my reputation would be gone & you would have a double one. you have got fame enough & you ought not to want to take mine away from me.” corbett was for a long time a clerk in the nevada bank, in san francisco. there were lots of little boxing-matches to entertain the crowd; then at last corbett appeared in the ring & the , people present went mad with enthusiasm. my two artists went mad about his form. they said they had never seen anything that came reasonably near equalling its perfection except greek statues, & they didn't surpass it. corbett boxed rounds with the middle-weight australian champion --oh, beautiful to see!--then the show was over and we struggled out through a perfect mash of humanity. when we reached the street i found i had left my arctics in the box. i had to have them, so simmons said he would go back & get them, & i didn't dissuade him. i wouldn't see how he was going to make his way a single yard into that solid incoming wave of people--yet he must plow through it full yards. he was back with the shoes in minutes! how do you reckon he accomplished that miracle? by saying: “way, gentlemen, please--coming to fetch mr. corbett's overshoes.” the word flew from mouth to mouth, the red sea divided, & simmons walked comfortably through & back, dry-shod. this is fire-escape simmons, the inveterate talker, you know: exit--in case of simmons. i had an engagement at a beautiful dwelling close to the players for . ; i was there by . . thirty cultivated & very musical ladies & gentlemen present--all of them acquaintances & many of them personal friends of mine. that wonderful hungarian band was there (they charge $ for an evening). conversation and band until midnight; then a bite of supper; then the company was compactly grouped before me & i told them about dr. b. e. martin & the etchings, & followed it with the scotch-irish christening. my, but the martin is a darling story! next, the head tenor from the opera sang half a dozen great songs that set the company wild, yes, mad with delight, that nobly handsome young damrosch accompanying on the piano. just a little pause, then the band burst out into an explosion of weird and tremendous dance-music, a hungarian celebrity & his wife took the floor; i followed--i couldn't help it; the others drifted in, one by one, & it was onteora over again. by half past . i had danced all those people down--& yet was not tired; merely breathless. i was in bed at & asleep in ten minutes. up at & presently at work on this letter to you. i think i wrote until or half past. then i walked leisurely out to mr. rogers's (it is called miles, but is short of it), arriving at . , but he was out--to return at . --so i didn't stay, but dropped over and chatted with howells until five. --[two mark twain anecdotes are remembered of that winter at the players: just before christmas a member named scott said one day: “mr. clemens, you have an extra overcoat hanging in the coatroom. i've got to attend my uncle's funeral and it's raining very hard. i'd like to wear it.” the coat was an old one, in the pockets of which clemens kept a melancholy assortment of pipes, soiled handkerchiefs, neckties, letters, and what not. “scott,” he said, “if you won't lose anything out of the pockets of that coat you may wear it.” an hour or two later clemens found a notice in his mail-box that a package for him was in the office. he called for it and found a neat bundle, which somehow had a christmas look. he carried it up to the reading-room with a showy, air. “now, boys,” he said, “you may make all the fun of christmas you like, but it's pretty nice, after all, to be remembered.” they gathered around and he undid the package. it was filled with the pipes, soiled handkerchiefs, and other articles from the old overcoat. scott had taken special precautions against losing them. mark twain regarded them a moment in silence, then he drawled: “well--, d---n scott. i hope his uncle's funeral will be a failure!” the second anecdote concerns the player egg-cups. they easily hold two eggs, but not three. one morning a new waiter came to take the breakfast order. clemens said: “boy, put three soft eggs in that cup for me.” by and by the waiter returned, bringing the breakfast. clemens looked at the egg portion and asked: “boy, what was my order?” “three soft eggs broken in the cup, mr. clemens.” “and you've filled that order, have you?” “yes, mr. clemens.” “boy, you are trifling with the truth; i've been trying all winter to get three eggs into that cup.”] in one letter he tells of a dinner with his old comstock friend, john mackay--a dinner without any frills, just soup and raw oysters and corned beef and cabbage, such as they had reveled in sometimes, in prosperous moments, thirty years before. “the guests were old gray pacific coasters,” he said, “whom i knew when they were young and not gray. the talk was of the days when we went gipsying-along time ago--thirty years.” indeed, it was a talk of the dead. mainly that. and of how they looked & the harum-scarum things they did & said. for there were no cares in that life, no aches & pains, & not time enough in the day (& three-fourths of the night) to work off one's surplus vigor & energy. of the midnight highway-robbery joke played upon me with revolvers at my head on the windswept & desolate gold hill divide no witness was left but me, the victim. those old fools last night laughed till they cried over the particulars of that old forgotten crime. in still another letter he told of a very wonderful entertainment at robert reid's studio. there were present, he says: coquelin; richard harding davis; harrison, the great outdoor painter; wm. h. chase, the artist; bettini, inventor of the new phonograph; nikola tesla, the world-wide illustrious electrician; see article about him in jan. or feb. century. john drew, actor; james barnes, a marvelous mimic; my, you should see him! smedley, the artist; zorn, “ ” zogbaum, “ ” reinhart, “ ” metcalf, “ ” ancona, head tenor at the opera; oh, & a great lot of others. everybody there had done something & was in his way famous. somebody welcomed coquelin in a nice little french speech, john drew did the like for me in english, & then the fun began. coquelin did some excellent french monologues--one of them an ungrammatical englishman telling a colorless historiette in french. it nearly killed the fifteen or twenty people who understood it. i told a yarn, ancona sang half a dozen songs, barnes did his darling imitations, handing davis sang the hanging of danny deever, which was of course good, but he followed it with that mast fascinating (for what reason i don't know) of all kipling's poems, “on the road to mandalay,” sang it tenderly, & it searched me deeper & charmed me more than the deever. young gerrit smith played some ravishing dance-music, & we all danced about an hour. there couldn't be a pleasanter night than that one was. some of those people complained of fatigue, but i don't seem to know what the sense of fatigue is. in his reprieve he was like some wild thing that had regained liberty. he refers to susy's recent illness and to mrs. clemens's own poor state of health. dear, dear susy! my strength reproaches me when i think of her and you. it is an unspeakable pity that you should be without any one to go about with the girls, & it troubles me, & grieves me, & makes me curse & swear; but you see, dear heart, i've got to stick right where i am till i find out whether we are rich or whether the poorest person we are acquainted with in anybody's kitchen is better off than we are.. i stand on the land-end of a springboard, with the family clustered on the other end; if i take my foot---- he realized his hopes to her as a vessel trying to make port; once he wrote: the ship is in sight now.... when the anchor is down then i shall say: “farewell--a long farewell--to business! i will never touch it again!” i will live in literature, i will wallow in it, revel in it; i will swim in ink! 'joan of arc'--but all this is premature; the anchor is not down yet. sometimes he sent her impulsive cables calculating to sustain hope. mrs. clemens, writing to her sister in january, said: mr. clemens now for ten days has been hourly expecting to send me word that paige had signed the (new) contract, but as yet no despatch comes.... on the th of this month i received a cable, “expect good news in ten days.” on the th i receive a cable, “look out for good news.” on the th a cable, “nearing success.” it appealed to her sense of humor even in these dark days. she added: they make me laugh, for they are so like my beloved “colonel.” mr. rogers had agreed that he would bring paige to rational terms, and with clemens made a trip to chicago. all agreed now that the machine promised a certain fortune as soon as a contract acceptable to everybody could be concluded--paige and his lawyer being the last to dally and dicker as to terms. finally a telegram came from chicago saying that paige had agreed to terms. on that day clemens wrote in his note-book: this is a great date in my history. yesterday we were paupers with but months' rations of cash left and $ , in debt, my wife & i, but this telegram makes us wealthy. but it was not until a fortnight later that paige did actually sign. this was on the st of february, ' , and clemens that night cabled to paris, so that mrs. clemens would have it on her breakfast-plate the morning of their anniversary: “wedding news. our ship is safe in port. i sail the moment rogers can spare me.” so this painted bubble, this thing of emptiness, had become as substance again--the grand hope. he was as concerned with it as if it had been an actual gold-mine with ore and bullion piled in heaps--that shadow, that farce, that nightmare. one longs to go back through the years and face him to the light and arouse him to the vast sham of it all. clxxxvii. some literary matters clemens might have lectured that winter with profit, and major pond did his best to persuade him; but rogers agreed that his presence in new york was likely to be too important to warrant any schedule of absence. he went once to boston to lecture for charity, though his pleasure in the experience was a sufficient reward. on the evening before the lecture mrs. james t. fields had him to her house to dine with dr. holmes, then not far from the end of his long, beautiful life.--[he died that same year, october, .] clemens wrote to paris of their evening together: dr. oliver wendell holmes never goes out (he is in his th year), but he came out this time--said he wanted to “have a time” once more with me. mrs. fields said aldrich begged to come, & went away crying because she wouldn't let him. she allowed only her family (sarah orne jewett & sister) to be present, because much company would overtax dr. holmes. well, he was just delightful! he did as brilliant and beautiful talking (& listening) as he ever did in his life, i guess. fields and jewett said he hadn't been in such splendid form for years. he had ordered his carriage for . the coachman sent in for him at , but he said, “oh, nonsense!--leave glories & grandeurs like these? tell him to go away & come in an hour!” at he was called for again, & mrs. fields, getting uneasy, rose, but he wouldn't go--& so we rattled ahead the same as ever. twice more mrs. fields rose, but he wouldn't go--& he didn't go till half past --an unwarrantable dissipation for him in these days. he was prodigiously complimentary about some of my books, & is having pudd'nhead read to him. i told him you & i used the autocrat as a courting book & marked it all through, & that you keep it in the sacred green box with the loveletters, & it pleased him. one other address clemens delivered that winter, at fair haven, on the opening of the millicent library, a present to the town from mrs. rogers. mrs. rogers had suggested to her husband that perhaps mr. clemens would be willing to say a few words there. mr. rogers had replied, “oh, clemens is in trouble. i don't like to ask him,” but a day or two later told him of mrs. rogers's wish, adding: “don't feel at all that you need to do it. i know just how you are feeling, how worried you are.” clemens answered, “mr. rogers, do you think there is anything i could do for you that i wouldn't do?” it was on this occasion that he told for the first time the “stolen watermelon” story, so often reprinted since; how once he had stolen a watermelon, and when he found it to be a green one, had returned it to the farmer, with a lecture on honesty, and received a ripe one in its place. in spite of his cares and diversions clemens's literary activities of this time were considerable. he wrote an article for the youth's companion--“how to tell a story”--and another for the north american review on fenimore cooper's “literary offenses.” mark twain had not much respect for cooper as a literary artist. cooper's stilted artificialities and slipshod english exasperated him and made it hard for him to see that in spite of these things the author of the deerslayer was a mighty story-teller. clemens had also promised some stories to walker, of the cosmopolitan, and gave him one for his christmas number, “traveling with a reformer,” which had grown out of some incidents of that long-ago journey with osgood to chicago, supplemented by others that had happened on the more recent visit to that city with hall. this story had already appeared when clemens and rogers had made their chicago trip. rogers had written for passes over the pennsylvania road, and the president, replying, said: “no, i won't give mark twain a pass over our road. i've been reading his 'traveling with a reformer,' in which he abuses our road. i wouldn't let him ride over it again if i could help it. the only way i'll agree to let him go over it at all is in my private car. i have stocked it with everything he can possibly want, and have given orders that if there is anything else he wants the train is to be stopped until they can get it.” “pudd'nhead wilson” was appearing in the century during this period, and “tom sawyer abroad” in the st. nicholas. the century had issued a tiny calendar of the pudd'nhead maxims, and these quaint bits of philosophy, the very gems of mark twain mental riches, were in everybody's mouth. with all this going on, and with his appearance at various social events, he was rather a more spectacular figure that winter than ever before. from the note-book: the haunted looking-glass. the guest (at midnight a dim light burning) wakes up & sees appear & disappear the faces that have looked into the glass during centuries. love seems the swiftest but is the slowest of all growths. no man and woman really know what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century. it is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right. of all god's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash--that one is the cat. truth is stranger than fiction--to some people, but i am measurably familiar with it. clxxxviii. failure it was the first week in march before it was thought to be safe for clemens to return to france, even for a brief visit to his family. he hurried across and remained with them what seemed an infinitesimal time, a bare three weeks, and was back again in new york by the middle of april. the webster company difficulties had now reached an acute stage. mr. rogers had kept a close watch on its financial affairs, hoping to be able to pull it through or to close it without failure, paying all the creditors in full; but on the afternoon of the th of april, , hall arrived at clemens's room at the players in a panic. the mount morris bank had elected a new president and board of directors, and had straightway served notice on him that he must pay his notes--two notes of five thousand dollars each in a few days when due. mr. rogers was immediately notified, of course, and said he would sleep on it and advise them next day. he did not believe that the bank would really push them to the wall. the next day was spent in seeing what could be done, and by evening it was clear that unless a considerable sum of money was raised a voluntary assignment was the proper course. the end of the long struggle had come. clemens hesitated less on his own than on his wife's account. he knew that to her the word failure would be associated with disgrace. she had pinched herself with a hundred economies to keep the business afloat, and was willing to go on economizing to avert this final disaster. mr. rogers said: “mr. clemens, assure her from me that there is not even a tinge of disgrace in making this assignment. by doing it you will relieve yourself of a fearful load of dread, and in time will be able to pay everything and stand clear before the world. if you don't do it you will probably never be free from debt, and it will kill you and mrs. clemens both. if there is any disgrace it would be in not taking the course that will give you and her your freedom and your creditors a better chance for their claims. most of them will be glad enough to help you.” it was on the afternoon of the next day, april , , that the firm of charles l. webster & co. executed assignment papers and closed its doors. a meeting of the creditors was called, at which h. h. rogers was present, representing clemens. for the most part the creditors were liberal and willing to agree to any equitable arrangement. but there were a few who were grumpy and fussy. they declared that mark twain should turn over his copyrights, his hartford home, and whatever other odds and ends could be discovered. mr. rogers, discussing the matter in , said: “they were bent on devouring every pound of flesh in sight and picking the bones afterward, as clemens and his wife were perfectly willing they should do. i was getting a little warm all the time at the highhanded way in which these few men were conducting the thing, and presently i got on my feet and said, 'gentlemen, you are not going to have this thing all your way. i have something to say about mr. clemens's affairs. mrs. clemens is the chief creditor of this firm. out of her own personal fortune she has lent it more than sixty thousand dollars. she will be a preferred creditor, and those copyrights will be assigned to her until her claim is paid in full. as for the home in hartford, it is hers already.' “there was a good deal of complaint, but i refused to budge. i insisted that mrs. clemens had the first claims on the copyrights, though, to tell the truth, these did not promise much then, for in that hard year the sale of books was small enough. besides mrs. clemens's claim the debts amounted to one hundred thousand dollars, and of course there must be a definite basis of settlement, so it was agreed that clemens should pay fifty cents on the dollar, when the assets were finally realized upon, and receive a quittance. clemens himself declared that sooner or later he would pay the other fifty cents, dollar for dollar, though i believe there was no one besides himself and his wife and me who believed he would ever be able to do it. clemens himself got discouraged sometimes, and was about ready to give it up, for he was getting on in years--nearly sixty--and he was in poor health. once when we found the debt, after the webster salvage, was going to be at least seventy thousand dollars, he said, 'i need not dream of paying it. i never could manage it.' but he stuck to it. he was at my house a good deal at first. we gave him a room there and he came and went as he chose. the worry told upon him. he became frail during those weeks, almost ethereal, yet it was strange how brilliant he was, how cheerful.” the business that had begun so promisingly and prosperously a decade before had dwindled to its end. the last book it had in hand was 'tom sawyer abroad', just ready for issue. it curiously happened that on the day of the failure copies of it were filed in washington for copyright. frank bliss came over from hartford, and clemens arranged with him for the publication of 'pudd'nhead wilson', thereby renewing the old relationship with the american publishing company after a break of a dozen years. naturally, the failure of mark twain's publishing firm made a public stir, and it showed how many and sincere were his friends, how ready they were with sympathy and help of a more material kind. those who understood best, congratulated him on being out of the entanglement. poultney bigelow, douglas taylor, andrew carnegie, charles dudley warner, and others extended financial help, bigelow and taylor each inclosing him a check of one thousand dollars for immediate necessities. he was touched by these things, but the checks were returned. many of his creditors sent him personal letters assuring him that he was to forget his obligation to them completely until such time as the remembering would cost him no uneasiness. clemens, in fact, felt relieved, now that the worst had come, and wrote bright letters home. in one he said: mr. rogers is perfectly satisfied that our course was right, absolutely right and wise--cheer up, the best is yet to come. and again: now & then a good and dear joe twichell or susy warner condoles with me & says, “cheer up-don't be downhearted,” and some other friend says, “i'm glad and surprised to see how cheerful you are & how bravely you stand it,” & none of them suspect what a burden has been lifted from me & how blithe i am inside. except when i think of you, dear heart--then i am not blithe; for i seem to see you grieving and ashamed, & dreading to look people in the face. for in the thick of the fight there is cheer, but you are far away & cannot hear the drum nor see the wheeling squadrons. you only seem to see rout, retreat, & dishonored colors dragging in the dirt--whereas none of these things exist. there is temporary defeat, but no dishonor--& we will march again. charley warner said to-day, “sho, livy isn't worrying. so long as she's got you and the children she doesn't care what happens. she knows it isn't her affair.” which didn't convince me. olivia clemens wrote bravely and encouragingly to him, and more cheerfully than she felt, for in a letter to her sister she said: the hideous news of webster & co.'s failure reached me by cable on thursday, and friday morning galignani's messenger had a squib about it. of course i knew it was likely to come, but i had great hope that it would be in some way averted. mr. rogers was so sure there was no way out but failure that i suppose it was true. but i have a perfect horror and heart-sickness over it. i cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace. i suppose it always will mean that to me. we have put a great deal of money into the concern, and perhaps there would have been nothing but to keep putting it in and losing it. we certainly now have not much to lose. we might have mortgaged the house; that was the only thing i could think of to do. mr. clemens felt that there would never be any end, and perhaps he was right. at any rate, i know that he was convinced that it was the only thing, because when he went back he promised me that if it was possible to save the thing he would do so if only on account of my sentiment in the matter. sue, if you were to see me you would see that i have grown old very fast during this last year. i have wrinkled. most of the time i want to lie down and cry. everything seems to me so impossible. i do not make things go very well, and i feel that my life is an absolute and irretrievable failure. perhaps i am thankless, but i so often feel that i should like to give it up and die. however, i presume that if i could have the opportunity i should at once desire to live. clemens now hurried back to paris, arriving about the middle of may, his second trip in two months. scarcely had he got the family settled at la bourboule-les-bains, a quiet watering-place in the southern part of france, when a cable from mr. rogers, stating that the typesetter was perfected, made him decide to hurry back to america to assist in securing the new fortune. he did not go, however. rogers wrote that the machine had been installed in the times-herald office, chicago, for a long and thorough trial. there would be plenty of time, and clemens concluded to rest with his family at la bourboule-les-bains. later in the summer they went to etretat, where he settled down to work. clxxxix. an eventful year ends that summer (july, ' .) the 'north american review' published “in defense of harriet shelley,” a rare piece of literary criticism and probably the most human and convincing plea ever made for that injured, ill-fated woman. an admirer of shelley's works, clemens could not resist taking up the defense of shelley's abandoned wife. it had become the fashion to refer to her slightingly, and to suggest that she had not been without blame for shelley's behavior. a shelley biography by professor dowden, clemens had found particularly irritating. in the midst of his tangle of the previous year he had paused to give it attention. there were times when mark twain wrote without much sequence, digressing this way and that, as his fancy led him, charmingly and entertainingly enough, with no large, logical idea. he pursued no such method in this instance. the paper on harriet shelley is a brief as direct and compact and cumulative as could have been prepared by a trained legal mind of the highest order, and it has the added advantage of being the utterance of a human soul voicing an indignation inspired by human suffering and human wrong. by no means does it lack humor, searching and biting sarcasm. the characterization of professor dowden's life of shelley as a “literary cake-walk” is a touch which only mark twain could have laid on. indeed, the “defense of harriet shelly,” with those early chapters of joan at florence, maybe counted as the beginning for mark twain of a genuine literary renaissance. it was to prove a remarkable period less voluminous than the first, but even more choice, containing, as it would, besides joan and the shelley article, the rest of that remarkable series collected now as literary essays; the hadleyburg story; “was it heaven or hell?”; those masterly articles on our national policies; closing at last with those exquisite memories, in his final days. the summer of found mark twain in the proper frame of mind for literary work. he was no longer in a state of dread. at etretat, a watering-place on the french coast, he returned eagerly to the long-neglected tale of joan--“a book which writes itself,” he wrote mr. rogers”--a tale which tells itself; i merely have to hold the pen.” etretat, originally a fishing-village, was less pretentious than to-day, and the family had taken a small furnished cottage a little way back from the coast--a charming place, and a cheap one--as became their means. clemens worked steadily at etretat for more than a month, finishing the second part of his story, then went over to rouen to visit the hallowed precincts where joan dragged out those weary months that brought her to the stake. susy clemens was taken ill at rouen, and they lingered in that ancient city, wandering about its venerable streets, which have been changed but slowly by the centuries, and are still full of memories. they returned to paris at length--to the brighton; their quarters of the previous winter--but presently engaged for the winter the studio home of the artist pomroy at rue de l'universite, beyond the seine. mark twain wrote of it once: it was a lovely house; large, rambling, quaint, charmingly furnished and decorated, built upon no particular plan, delightfully uncertain and full of surprises. you were always getting lost in it, and finding nooks and corners which you did not know were there and whose presence you had not suspected before. it was built by a rich french artist, and he had also furnished it and decorated it himself. the studio was coziness itself. with us it served as a drawing-room, sitting-room, living-room, dancing-room--we used it for everything. we couldn't get enough of it. it is odd that it should have been so cozy, for it was feet long, feet high, and feet wide, with a vast fireplace on, each side, in the middle, and a musicians' gallery at one end. mrs. clemens had hoped to return to america, to their hartford home. that was her heart's desire--to go back once more to their old life and fireside, to forget all this period of exile and wandering. her letters were full of her home-longing; her three years of absence seemed like an eternity. in its way, the pomroy house was the best substitute for home they had found. its belongings were of the kind she loved. susy had better health, and her husband was happy in his work. they had much delightful and distinguished company. her letters tell of these attractive things, and of their economies to make their income reach. it was near the end of the year that the other great interest--the machine--came finally to a conclusion. reports from the test had been hopeful during the summer. early in october clemens, receiving a copy of the times-herald, partly set by the machine, wrote: “the herald has just arrived, and that column is healing for sore eyes. it affects me like columbus sighting land.” and again on the th: it seems to me that things couldn't well be going better at chicago than they are. there's no other machine that can set type eight hours with only seventeen minutes' stoppage through cussedness. the others do rather more stopping than working. by and by our machines will be perfect; then they won't stop at all. but that was about the end of the good news. the stoppages became worse and worse. the type began to break--the machine had its old trouble: it was too delicately adjusted--too complicated. “great guns, what is the matter with it?” wrote clemens in november when he received a detailed account of its misconduct. mr. rogers and his son-in-law, mr. broughton, went out to chicago to investigate. they went to the times-herald office to watch the type-setter in action. mr. rogers once told of this visit to the writer of these chapters. he said: “certainly it was a marvelous invention. it was the nearest approach to a human being in the wonderful things it could do of any machine i have ever known. but that was just the trouble; it was too much of a human being and not enough of a machine. it had all the complications of the human mechanism, all the liability of getting out of repair, and it could not be replaced with the ease and immediateness of the human being. it was too costly; too difficult of construction; too hard to set up. i took out my watch and timed its work and counted its mistakes. we watched it a long time, for it was most interesting, most fascinating, but it was not practical--that to me was clear.” it had failed to stand the test. the times-herald would have no more of it. mr. rogers himself could see the uselessness of the endeavor. he instructed mr. broughton to close up the matter as best he could and himself undertook the harder task of breaking the news to mark twain. his letters seem not to have been preserved, but the replies to them tell the story. rue de l'universite, paris, december , . dear mr. rogers,--i seemed to be entirely expecting your letter, and also prepared and resigned; but lord, it shows how little we know ourselves and how easily we can deceive ourselves. it hit me like a thunder-clap. it knocked every rag of sense out of my head, and i went flying here and there and yonder, not knowing what i was doing, and only one clearly defined thought standing up visible and substantial out of the crazy storm-drift--that my dream of ten years was in desperate peril and out of the , or , projects for its rescue that came flocking through my skull not one would hold still long enough for me to examine it and size it up. have you ever been like that? not so much, i reckon. there was another clearly defined idea--i must be there and see it die. that is, if it must die; and maybe if i were there we might hatch up some next-to-impossible way to make it take up its bed and take a walk. so, at the end of four hours i started, still whirling, and walked over to the rue scribe-- p.m.--and asked a question or two and was told i should be running a big risk if i took the p.m. train for london and southampton; “better come right along at . per havre special and step aboard the new york all easy and comfortable.” very! and i about two miles from home and no packing done. then it occurred to me that none of these salvation notions that were whirlwinding through my head could be examined or made available unless at least a month's time could be secured. so i cabled you, and said to myself that i would take the french steamer to-morrow (which will be sunday). by bedtime mrs. clemens had reasoned me into a fairly rational and contented state of mind; but of course it didn't last long. so i went on thinking--mixing it with a smoke in the dressing-room once an hour--until dawn this morning. result--a sane resolution; no matter what your answer to my cable might be i would hold still and not sail until i should get an answer to this present letter which i am now writing or a cable answer from you saying “come” or “remain.” i have slept hours, my pond has clarified, and i find the sediment of my , projects to be of this character: he follows with a detailed plan for reconstructing the machine, using brass type, etc., and concludes: don't say i'm wild. for really i'm sane again this morning. i am going right along with joan now, and wait untroubled till i hear from you. if you think i can be of the least use cable me “come.” i can write joan on board ship and lose no time. also i could discuss my plan with the publisher for a de luxe joan, time being an object, for some of the pictures could be made over here, cheaply and quickly, that would cost much more time and money in america. the second letter followed five days later: rue de l'universite, paris, december , . dear mr. rogers,--notwithstanding your heart is “old and hard” you make a body choke up. i know you “mean every word you say” and i do take it “in the same spirit in which you tender it.” i shall keep your regard while we two live--that i know; for i shall always remember what you have done for me, and that will insure me against ever doing anything that could forfeit it or impair it. it is six days or seven days ago that i lived through that despairing day, and then through a night without sleep; then settled down next day into my right mind (or thereabouts) and wrote you. i put in the rest of that day till p.m. plenty comfortably enough writing a long chapter of my book; then went to a masked ball blacked up as uncle remus, taking clara along, and we had a good time. i have lost no day since, and suffered no discomfort to speak of, but drove my troubles out of my mind and had good success in keeping them out--through watchfulness. i have done a good week's work and put the book a good way ahead in the great trial [of joan], which is the difficult part: the part which requires the most thought and carefulness. i cannot see the end of the trial yet, but i am on the road. i am creeping surely toward it. “why not leave them all to me?” my business brothers? i take you by the hand! i jump at the chance! i ought to be ashamed and i am trying my best to be ashamed--and yet i do jump at the chance in spite of it. i don't want to write irving and i don't want to write stoker. it doesn't seem as if i could. but i can suggest something for you to write them; and then if you see that i am unwise you can write them something quite different. now this is my idea: . to return stoker's $ to him and keep his stock. . and tell irving that when luck turns with me i will make good to him what the salvage from the dead co. fails to pay him of his $ . [p. s. madam says no, i must face the music. so i inclose my effort--to be used if you approve, but not otherwise.] we shall try to find a tenant for our hartford house; not an easy matter, for it costs heavily to live in. we can never live in it again; though it would break the family's hearts if they could believe it. nothing daunts mrs. clemens or makes the world look black to her --which is the reason i haven't drowned myself. i got the xmas journals which you sent and i thank you for that xmas remembrance. we all send our deepest and warmest greetings to you and all of yours and a happy new year! s. l. clemens. --[brain stoker and sir henry irving had each taken a small interest in the machine. the inclosure for stoker ran as follows:] my dear stoker,--i am not dating this, because it is not to be mailed at present. when it reaches you it will mean that there is a hitch in my machine enterprise--a hitch so serious as to make it take to itself the aspect of a dissolved dream. this letter, then, will contain cheque for the $ which you have paid. and will you tell irving for me --i can't get up courage enough to talk about this misfortune myself, except to you, whom by good luck i haven't damaged yet--that when the wreckage presently floats ashore he will get a good deal of his $ back; and a dab at a time i will make up to him the rest. i'm not feeling as fine as i was when i saw you there in your home. please remember me kindly to mrs. stoker. i gave up that london lecture-project entirely. had to--there's never been a chance since to find the time. sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. a week later he added what was about his final word on the subject: yours of december has arrived, containing the circular to stockholders, and i guess the co. will really quit--there doesn't seem to be any other wise course. there's one thing which makes it difficult for me to soberly realize that my ten-year dream is actually dissolved; and that is that it reverses my horoscope. the proverb says, “born lucky, always lucky.” it was usual for one or two of our lads (per annum) to get drowned in the mississippi or in bear creek, but i was pulled out in a drowned condition times before i learned to swim, and was considered to be a cat in disguise. when the pennsylvania blew up and the telegraph reported my brother as fatally injured (with others) but made no mention of me, my uncle said to my mother “it means that sam was somewhere else, after being on that boat a year and a half--he was born lucky.” yes, i was somewhere else. i am so superstitious that i have always been afraid to have business dealings with certain relatives and friends of mine because they were unlucky people. all my life i have stumbled upon lucky chances of large size, and whenever they were wasted it was because of my own stupidity and carelessness. and so i have felt entirely certain that the machine would turn up trumps eventually. it disappointed me lots of times, but i couldn't shake off the confidence of a lifetime in my luck. well, whatever i get out of the wreckage will be due to good luck --the good luck of getting you into the scheme--for, but for that there wouldn't be any wreckage; it would be total loss. i wish you had been in at the beginning. then we should have had the good luck to step promptly ashore. so it was that the other great interest died and was put away forever. clemens scarcely ever mentioned it again, even to members of his family. it was a dead issue; it was only a pity that it had ever seemed a live one. a combination known as the regius company took over paige's interest, but accomplished nothing. eventually--irony of fate--the mergenthaler company, so long scorned and derided, for twenty thousand dollars bought out the rights and assets and presented that marvelous work of genius, the mechanical wonder of the age, to the sibley college of engineering, where it is shown as the costliest piece of machinery, for its size, ever constructed. mark twain once received a letter from an author who had written a book calculated to assist inventors and patentees, asking for his indorsement. he replied: dear sir,--i have, as you say, been interested in patents and patentees. if your books tell how to exterminate inventors send me nine editions. send them by express. very truly yours, s. l. clemens. the collapse of the “great hope” meant to the clemens household that their struggle with debt was to continue, that their economies were to become more rigid. in a letter on her wedding anniversary, february a ( ), mrs. clemens wrote to her sister: as i was starting down the stairs for my breakfast this morning mr. clemens called me back and took out a five-franc piece and gave it to me, saying: “it is our silver-wedding day, and so i give you a present.” it was a symbol of their reduced circumstances--of the change that twenty-five years had brought. literary matters, however, prospered. the new book progressed amazingly. the worst had happened; other and distracting interests were dead. he was deep in the third part-the story of joan's trial and condemnation, and he forgot most other things in his determination to make that one a reality. as at viviani, clemens read his chapters to the family circle. the story was drawing near the end now; tragedy was closing in on the frail martyr; the farce of her trial was wringing their hearts. susy would say, “wait, wait till i get a handkerchief,” and one night when the last pages had been written and read, and joan had made the supreme expiation for devotion to a paltry king, susy wrote in her diary, “to-night joan of arc was burned at the stake,” meaning that the book was finished. susy herself had literary taste and might have written had it not been that she desired to sing. there are fragments of her writing that show the true literary touch. her father, in an unpublished article which he once wrote of her, quoted a paragraph, doubtless intended some day to take its place at the end of a story: and now at last when they lie at rest they must go hence. it is always so. completion; perfection, satisfaction attained--a human life has fulfilled its earthly destiny. poor human life! it may not pause and rest, for it must hasten on to other realms and greater consummations. she was a deep reader, and she had that wonderful gift of brilliant, flowing, scintillating speech. from her father she had inherited a rare faculty of oral expression, born of a superior depth of mind, swiftness and clearness of comprehension, combined with rapid, brilliant, and forceful phrasing. her father wrote of her gift: sometimes in those days of swift development her speech was rocket- like for vividness and for the sense it carried of visibility. i seem to see it stream into the sky and burst full in a shower of colored fire. we are dwelling here a moment on susy, for she was at her best that winter. she was more at home than the others. her health did not permit her to go out so freely and her father had more of her companionship. they discussed many things--the problems of life and of those beyond life, philosophies of many kinds, and the subtleties of literary art. he recalled long after how once they lost themselves in trying to solve the mystery of the emotional effect of certain word-combinations--certain phrases and lines of verse--as, for instance, the wild, free breath of the open that one feels in “the days when we went gipsying a long time ago” and the tender, sunlit, grassy slope and mossy headstones suggested by the simple words, “departed this life.” both susy and her father cared more for joan than any of the former books. to mr. rogers, clemens wrote: “possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for love.” a memorandum which he made at the time, apparently for no one but himself, brings us very close to the personality behind it. do you know that shock? i mean when you come at your regular hour into the sick-room where you have watched for months and find the medicine-bottles all gone, the night-table removed, the bed stripped, the furniture set stiffly to rights, the windows up, the room cold, stark, vacant--& you catch your breath & realize what has happened. do you know that shock? the man who has written a long book has that experience the morning after he has revised it for the last time & sent it away to the printer. he steps into his study at the hour established by the habit of months--& he gets that little shock. all the litter & confusion are gone. the piles of dusty reference-books are gone from the chairs, the maps from the floor; the chaos of letters, manuscripts, note-books, paper-knives, pipes, matches, photographs, tobacco-jars, & cigar-boxes is gone from the writing-table, the furniture is back where it used to be in the long-ago. the housemaid, forbidden the place for five months, has been there & tidied it up & scoured it clean & made it repellent & awful. i stand here this morning contemplating this desolation, & i realize that if i would bring back the spirit that made this hospital home- like & pleasant to me i must restore the aids to lingering dissolution to their wonted places & nurse another patient through & send it forth for the last rites, with many or few to assist there, as may happen; & that i will do. cxc. starting on the long trail. the tragedy of 'pudd'nhead wilson', with its splendid illustrations by louis loeb, having finished its course in the century magazine, had been issued by the american publishing company. it proved not one of mark twain's great books, but only one of his good books. from first to last it is interesting, and there are strong situations and chapters finely written. the character of roxy is thoroughly alive, and her weird relationship with her half-breed son is startling enough. there are not many situations in fiction stronger than that where half-breed tom sells his mother down the river into slavery. the negro character is well drawn, of course-mark twain could not write it less than well, but its realism is hardly to be compared with similar matter in his other books--in tom sawyer, for instance, or huck finn. with the exceptions of tom, roxy, and pudd'nhead the characters are slight. the twins are mere bodiless names that might have been eliminated altogether. the character of pudd'nhead wilson is lovable and fine, and his final triumph at the murder trial is thrilling in the extreme. identification by thumb-marks was a new feature in fiction then--in law, too, for that matter. but it is chiefly pudd'nhead wilson's maxims, run at the head of each chapter, that will stick in the memory of men. perhaps the book would live without these, but with them it is certainly immortal. such aphorisms as: “nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits”; “few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example”; “when angry count four, and when very angry swear,” cannot perish; these, with the forty or so others in this volume and the added collection of rare philosophies that head the chapters of following the equator, have insured to philosopher pudd'nhead a respectful hearing for all time.--[the story of pudd'nhead wilson was dramatized by frank mayo, who played it successfully as long as he lived. it is by no means dead, and still pays a royalty to the mayo and clemens estates.] clemens had meant to begin another book, but he decided first to make a trip to america, to give some personal attention to publishing matters there. they were a good deal confused. the harpers had arranged for the serial and book publication of joan, and were negotiating for the webster contracts. mr. rogers was devoting priceless time in an effort to establish amicable relations between the harpers and the american company at hartford so that they could work on some general basis that would be satisfactory and profitable to all concerned. it was time that clemens was on the scene of action. he sailed on the new york on the end of february, and a little more than a month later returned by the paris--that is, at the end of march. by this time he had altogether a new thought. it was necessary to earn a large sum of money as promptly as possible, and he adopted the plan which twice before in his life in and in :--had supplied him with needed funds. loathing the platform as he did, he was going back to it. major pond had proposed a lecture tour soon after his failure. “the loss of a fortune is tough,” wrote pond, “but there are other resources for another fortune. you and i will make the tour together.” now he had resolved to make a tour-one that even pond himself had not contemplated. he would go platforming around the world! he would take pond with him as far as the pacific coast, arranging with some one equally familiar with the lecture circuit on the other side of the pacific. he had heard of r. s. smythe, who had personally conducted henry m. stanley and other great lecturers through australia and the east, and he wrote immediately, asking information and advice concerning such a tour. clemens himself has told us in one of his chapters how his mental message found its way to smythe long before his written one, and how smythe's letter, proposing just such a trip, crossed his own. he sailed for america, with the family on the th of may, and a little more than a week later, after four years of exile, they found themselves once more at beautiful quarry farm. we may imagine how happy they were to reach that peaceful haven. mrs. clemens had written: “it is, in a way, hard to go home and feel that we are not able to open our house. but it is an immense delight to me to think of seeing our friends.” little at the farm was changed. there were more vines on the home--the study was overgrown--that was all. even ellerslie remained as the children had left it, with all the small comforts and utensils in place. most of the old friends were there; only mrs. langdon and theodore crane were missing. the beechers drove up to see them, as formerly, and the old discussions on life and immortality were taken up in the old places. mrs. beecher once came with some curious thin layers of leaves of stone which she had found, knowing mark twain's interest in geology. later, when they had been discussing the usual problems, he said he would write an agreement on those imperishable leaves, to be laid away until the ages should solve their problems. he wrote it in verse: if you prove right and i prove wrong, a million years from now, in language plain and frank and strong my error i'll avow to your dear waking face. if i prove right, by god his grace, full sorry i shall be, for in that solitude no trace there'll be of you and me. a million years, o patient stone, you've waited for this message. deliver it a million hence; (survivor pays expressage.) mark twain contract with mrs. t. k. beecher, july , . pond came to elmira and the route westward was arranged. clemens decided to give selections from his books, as he had done with cable, and to start without much delay. he dreaded the prospect of setting out on that long journey alone, nor could mrs. clemens find it in her heart to consent to such a plan. it was bitterly hard to know what to do, but it was decided at last that she and one of the elder daughters should accompany him, the others remaining with their aunt at quarry farm. susy, who had the choice, dreaded ocean travel, and felt that she would be happier and healthier to rest in the quiet of that peaceful hilltop. she elected to remain with her aunt and jean; and it fell to clara to go. major pond and his wife would accompany them as far as vancouver. they left elmira on the night of the th of july. when the train pulled away their last glimpse was of susy, standing with the others under the electric light of the railway platform, waving them good-by. cxci. clemens had been ill in elmira with a distressing carbuncle, and was still in no condition to undertake steady travel and entertainment in that fierce summer heat. he was fearful of failure. “i sha'n't be able to stand on a platform,” he wrote mr. rogers; but they pushed along steadily with few delays. they began in cleveland, thence by the great lakes, traveling by steamer from one point to another, going constantly, with readings at every important point--duluth, minneapolis, st. paul, winnipeg, butte, and through the great northwest, arriving at vancouver at last on august th, but one day behind schedule time. it had been a hot, blistering journey, but of immense interest, for none of them had traveled through the northwest, and the wonder and grandeur of it all, its scenery, its bigness, its mighty agriculture, impressed them. clemens in his notes refers more than once to the “seas” and “ocean” of wheat. there is the peace of the ocean about it and a deep contentment, a heaven-wide sense of ampleness, spaciousness, where pettiness and all small thoughts and tempers must be out of place, not suited to it, and so not intruding. the scattering, far-off homesteads, with trees about them, were so homelike and remote from the warring world, so reposeful and enticing. the most distant and faintest under the horizon suggested fading ships at sea. the lake travel impressed him; the beauties and cleanliness of the lake steamers, which he compares with those of europe, to the disadvantage of the latter. entering port huron he wrote: the long approach through narrow ways with flat grass and wooded land on both sides, and on the left a continuous row of summer cottages, with small-boat accommodations for visiting across the little canals from family to family, the groups of summer-dressed young people all along waving flags and handkerchiefs and firing cannon, our boat replying with toots of the hoarse whistle and now and then a cannon, and meeting steamers in the narrow way, and once the stately sister-ship of the line crowded with summer-dressed people waving-the rich browns and greens of the rush-grown, far- reaching flat-lands, with little glimpses of water away on their farther edges, the sinking sun throwing a crinkled broad carpet of gold on the water-well, it is the perfection of voyaging. it had seemed a doubtful experiment to start with mrs. clemens on that journey in the summer heat; but, strange to say, her health improved, and she reached vancouver by no means unfit for the long voyage ahead. no doubt the change and continuous interest and their splendid welcome everywhere and their prosperity were accountable. everywhere they were entertained; flowers filled their rooms; carriages and committees were always waiting. it was known that mark twain had set out for the purpose of paying his debts, and no cause would make a deeper appeal to his countrymen than that, or, for that matter, to the world at large. from winnipeg he wrote to mr. rogers: at the end of an hour and a half i offered to let the audience go, but they said “go on,” and i did. he had five thousand dollars to forward to rogers to place against his debt account by the time he reached the coast, a fine return for a month's travel in that deadly season. at no more than two places were the houses less than crowded. one of these was anaconda, then a small place, which they visited only because the manager of the entertainment hall there had known clemens somewhere back in the sixties and was eager to have him. he failed to secure the amount of the guarantee required by pond, and when pond reported to clemens that he had taken “all he had” clemens said: “and you took the last cent that poor fellow had. send him one hundred dollars, and if you can't afford to stand your share charge it all to me. i'm not going around robbing my friends who are disappointed in my commercial value. i don't want to get money that way.” “i sent the money,” said pond afterward, “and was glad of the privilege of standing my share.” clemens himself had not been in the best of health during the trip. he had contracted a heavy cold and did not seem to gain strength. but in a presentation copy of 'roughing it', given to pond as a souvenir, he wrote: “here ends one of the smoothest and pleasantest trips across the continent that any group of five has ever made.” there were heavy forest fires in the northwest that year, and smoke everywhere. the steamer waryimoo, which was to have sailed on the th, went aground in the smoke, and was delayed a week. while they were waiting, clemens lectured in victoria, with the governor-general and lady aberdeen and their little son in the audience. his note-book says: they came in at . , minutes late; wish they would always be present, for it isn't permissible to begin until they come; by that time the late-comers are all in. clemens wrote a number of final letters from vancouver. in one of them to mr. j. henry harper, of harper & brothers, he expressed the wish that his name might now be printed as the author of “joan,” which had begun serially in the april magazine. he thought it might, help his lecturing tour and keep his name alive. but a few days later, with mrs. clemens's help, he had reconsidered, and wrote: my wife is a little troubled by my wanting my nom de plume put to the “joan of arc” so soon. she thinks it might go counter to your plans, and that you ought to be left free and unhampered in the matter. all right-so be it. i wasn't strenuous about it, and wasn't meaning to insist; i only thought my reasons were good, and i really think so yet, though i do confess the weight and fairness of hers. as a matter of fact the authorship of “joan” had been pretty generally guessed by the second or third issue. certain of its phrasing and humor could hardly have come from another pen than mark twain's. the authorship was not openly acknowledged, however, until the publication of the book, the following may. among the letters from vancouver was this one to rudyard kipling dear kipling,--it is reported that you are about to visit india. this has moved me to journey to that far country in order that i may unload from my conscience a debt long due to you. years ago you came from india to elmira to visit me, as you said at the time. it has always been my purpose to return that visit & that great compliment some day. i shall arrive next january & you must be ready. i shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with silver bells & ribbons & escorted by a troop of native howdahs richly clad & mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows; & you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for i shall be thirsty. to the press he gave this parting statement: it has been reported that i sacrificed for the benefit of the creditors the property of the publishing firm whose financial backer i was and that i am now lecturing for my own benefit. this is an error. i intend the lectures as well as the property for the creditors. the law recognizes no mortgage on a man's brain, and a merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the laws of insolvency and start free again for himself. but i am not a business man, and honor is a harder master than the law. it cannot compromise for less than cents on the dollar and its debts never outlaw. from my reception thus far on my lecturing tour i am confident that if i live i can pay off the last debt within four years, after which, at the age of sixty-four, i can make a fresh and unincumbered start in life. i am going to australia, india, and south africa, and next year i hope to make a tour of the great cities of the united states. i meant, when i began, to give my creditors all the benefit of this, but i am beginning to feel that i am gaining something from it, too, and that my dividends, if not available for banking purposes, may be even more satisfactory than theirs. there was one creditor, whose name need, not be “handed down to infamy,” who had refused to consent to any settlement except immediate payment in full, and had pursued with threatened attachment of earnings and belongings, until clemens, exasperated, had been disposed to turn over to his creditors all remaining properties and let that suffice, once and for all. but this was momentary. he had presently instructed mr. rogers to “pay shylock in full,” and to assure any others that he would pay them, too, in the end. but none of the others annoyed him. it was on the afternoon of august , , that they were off at last. major pond and his wife lunched with them on board and waved them good-by as long as they could see the vessel. the far voyage which was to carry them for the better part of the year to the under side of the world had begun. cxcii. “following the equator” mark twain himself has written with great fulness the story of that traveling--setting down what happened, and mainly as it happened, with all the wonderful description, charm, and color of which he was so great a master. we need do little more than summarize then--adding a touch here and there, perhaps, from another point of view. they had expected to stop at the sandwich islands, but when they arrived in the roadstead of honolulu, word came that cholera had broken out and many were dying daily. they could not land. it was a double disappointment; not only were the lectures lost, but clemens had long looked forward to revisiting the islands he had so loved in the days of his youth. there was nothing for them to do but to sit on the decks in the shade of the awnings and look at the distant shore. in his book he says: we lay in luminous blue water; shoreward the water was green-green and brilliant; at the shore itself it broke in a long, white ruffle, and with no crash, no sound that we could hear. the town was buried under a mat of foliage that looked like a cushion of moss. the silky mountains were clothed in soft, rich splendors of melting color, and some of the cliffs were veiled in slanting mists. i recognized it all. it was just as i had seen it long before, with nothing of its beauty lost, nothing of its charm wanting. in his note-book he wrote: “if i might, i would go ashore and never leave.” this was the st of august. two days later they were off again, sailing over the serene pacific, bearing to the southwest for australia. they crossed the equator, which he says was wisely put where it is, because if it had been run through europe all the kings would have tried to grab it. they crossed it september th, and he notes that clara kodaked it. a day or two later the north star disappeared behind them and the constellation of the cross came into view above the southern horizon. then presently they were among the islands of the southern pacific, and landed for a little time on one of the fiji group. they had twenty-four days of halcyon voyaging between vancouver and sydney with only one rough day. a ship's passengers get closely acquainted on a trip of that length and character. they mingle in all sorts of diversions to while away the time; and at the end have become like friends of many years. on the night of september th-a night so dark that from the ship's deck one could not see the water--schools of porpoises surrounded the ship, setting the water alive with phosphorescent splendors: “like glorified serpents thirty to fifty feet long. every curve of the tapering long body perfect. the whole snake dazzlingly illumined. it was a weird sight to see this sparkling ghost come suddenly flashing along out of the solid gloom and stream past like a meteor.” they were in sydney next morning, september , , and landed in a pouring rain, the breaking up of a fierce drought. clemens announced that he had brought australia good-fortune, and should expect something in return. mr. smythe was ready for them and there was no time lost in getting to work. all australia was ready for them, in fact, and nowhere in their own country were they more lavishly and royally received than in that faraway pacific continent. crowded houses, ovations, and gorgeous entertainment--public and private--were the fashion, and a little more than two weeks after arrival clemens was able to send back another two thousand dollars to apply on his debts. but he had hard luck, too, for another carbuncle developed at melbourne and kept him laid up for nearly a week. when he was able to go before an audience again he said: “the doctor says i am on the verge of being a sick man. well, that may be true enough while i am lying abed all day trying to persuade his cantankerous, rebellious medicines to agree with each other; but when i come out at night and get a welcome like this i feel as young and healthy as anybody, and as to being on the verge of being a sick man i don't take any stock in that. i have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it's never happened yet.” in his book clemens has told us his joy in australia, his interest in the perishing native tribes, in the wonderfully governed cities, in the gold-mines, and in the advanced industries. the climate he thought superb; “a darling climate,” he says in a note-book entry. perhaps one ought to give a little idea of the character of his entertainment. his readings were mainly from his earlier books, 'roughing it' and 'innocents abroad'. the story of the dead man which, as a boy, he had discovered in his father's office was one that he often told, and the “mexican plug” and his “meeting with artemus ward” and the story of jim blaine's old ram; now and again he gave chapters from 'huck finn' and 'tom sawyer'. he was likely to finish with that old fireside tale of his early childhood, the “golden arm.” but he sometimes told the watermelon story, written for mrs. rogers, or gave extracts from adam's diary, varying his program a good deal as he went along, and changing it entirely where he appeared twice in one city. mrs. clemens and clara, as often as they had heard him, generally went when the hour of entertainment came: they enjoyed seeing his triumph with the different audiences, watching the effect of his subtle art. one story, the “golden arm,” had in it a pause, an effective, delicate pause which must be timed to the fraction of a second in order to realize its full value. somewhere before we have stated that no one better than mark twain knew the value of a pause. mrs. clemens and clara were willing to go night after night and hear that tale time and again, for its effect on each new, audience. from australia to new zealand--where clemens had his third persistent carbuncle,--[in following the equator the author says: “the dictionary says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel. humor is out of place in a dictionary.”]--and again lost time in consequence. it was while he was in bed with this distressing ailment that he wrote twichell: i think it was a good stroke of luck that knocked me on my back here at napier instead of in some hotel in the center of a noisy city. here we have the smooth & placidly complaining sea at our door, with nothing between us & it but yards of shingle--& hardly a suggestion of life in that space to mar it or to make a noise. away down here fifty-five degrees south of the equator this sea seems to murmur in an unfamiliar tongue--a foreign tongue--a tongue bred among the ice-fields of the antarctic--a murmur with a note of melancholy in it proper to the vast unvisited solitudes it has come from. it was very delicious and solacing to wake in the night & find it still pulsing there. i wish you were here--land, but it would be fine! mrs. clemens and himself both had birthdays in new zealand; clemens turned sixty, and his wife passed the half-century mark. “i do not like it one single bit,” she wrote to her sister. “fifty years old-think of it; that seems very far on.” and clemens wrote: day before yesterday was livy's birthday (underworld time) & tomorrow will be mine. i shall be --no thanks for it! from new zealand back to australia, and then with the new year away to ceylon. here they were in the orient at last, the land of color, enchantment, and gentle races. clemens was ill with a heavy cold when they arrived; and in fact, at no time during this long journeying was his health as good as that of his companions. the papers usually spoke of him as looking frail, and he was continually warned that he must not remain in india until the time of the great heat. he was so determined to work, however, and working was so profitable, that he seldom spared himself. he traveled up and down and back and forth the length and breadth of india--from bombay to allahabad, to benares, to calcutta and darjeeling, to lahore, to lucknow, to delhi--old cities of romance--and to jeypore--through the heat and dust on poor, comfortless railways, fighting his battle and enjoying it too, for he reveled in that amazing land--its gorgeous, swarming life, the patience and gentleness of its servitude, its splendid pageantry, the magic of its architecture, the maze and mystery of its religions, the wonder of its ageless story. one railway trip he enjoyed--a thirty-five-mile flight down the steep mountain of darjeeling in a little canopied hand-car. in his book he says: that was the most enjoyable time i have spent in the earth. for rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that approaches the bird-flight down the himalayas in a handcar. it has no fault, no blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty- five miles of it, instead of five hundred. mark twain found india all that rudyard kipling had painted it and more. “india the marvelous” he printed in his note-book in large capitals, as an effort to picture his thought, and in his book he wrote: so far as i am able to judge nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make india the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. “where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.” marvelous india is, certainly; and he saw it all to the best advantage, for government official and native grandee spared no effort to do honor to his party--to make their visit something to be remembered for a lifetime. it was all very gratifying, and most of it of extraordinary interest. there are not many visitors who get to see the inner household of a native prince of india, and the letter which mark twain wrote to kumar shri samatsinhji, a prince of the palitana state, at bombay, gives us a notion of how his unostentatious, even if lavish, hospitality was appreciated. dear kumar sahib,--it would be hard for me to put into words how much my family & i enjoyed our visit to your hospitable house. it was our first glimpse of the home of an eastern prince, & the charm of it, the grace & beauty & dignity of it realized to us the pictures which we had long ago gathered from books of travel & oriental tales. we shall not forget that happy experience, nor your kind courtesies to us, nor those of her highness to my wife & daughter. we shall keep always the portrait & the beautiful things you gave us; & as long as we live a glance at them will bring your house and its life & its sumptuous belongings & rich harmonies of color instantly across the years & the oceans, & we shall see them again, & how welcome they will be! we make our salutation to your highness & to all members of your family--including, with affectionate regard, that littlest little sprite of a princess--& i beg to sign myself sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. benares, february , . they had been entertained in truly royal fashion by prince kumar, who, after refreshments, had ordered in “bales of rich stuffs” in the true arabian nights fashion, and commanded his servants to open them and allow his guests to select for themselves. with the possible exception of general grant's long trip in ' and ' there has hardly been a more royal progress than mark twain's trip around the world. everywhere they were overwhelmed with honors and invitations, and their gifts became so many that mrs. clemens wrote she did not see how they were going to carry them all. in a sense, it was like the grant trip, for it was a tribute which the nations paid not only to a beloved personality, but to the american character and people. the story of that east indian sojourn alone would fill a large book, and mark twain, in his own way, has written that book, in the second volume of following the equator, an informing, absorbing, and enchanting story of indian travel. clemens lectured everywhere to jammed houses, which were rather less profitable than in australia, because in india the houses were not built for such audiences as he could command. he had to lecture three times in calcutta, and then many people were turned away. at one place, however, his hall was large enough. this was in the great hall of the palace, where durbars are held, at bombay. altogether they were two months in india, and then about the middle of march an english physician at jeypore warned them to fly for calcutta and get out of the country immediately before the real heat set in. they sailed toward the end of march, touched at madras and again at ceylon, remaining a day or two at colombo, and then away to sea again, across the indian ocean on one of those long, peaceful, eventless, tropic voyages, where at night one steeps on deck and in daytime wears the whitest and lightest garments and cares to do little more than sit drowsily in a steamer-chair and read and doze and dream. from the note-book: here in the wastes of the indian ocean just under the equator the sea is blue, the motion gentle, the sunshine brilliant, the broad decks with their grouped companies of talking, reading, or game- playing folk suggestive of a big summer hotel--but outside of the ship is no life visible but the occasional flash of a flying-fish. i would like the voyage, under these conditions, to continue forever. the injian ocean sits and smiles so sof', so bright, so bloomin' blue, there aren't a wave for miles an' miles excep' the jiggle of the screw. --kip. how curiously unanecdotical the colonials and the ship-going english are--i believe i haven't told an anecdote or heard one since i left america, but americans when grouped drop into anecdotes as soon as they get a little acquainted. preserve your illusions. when they are gone you may still exist, but not live. swore off from profanity early this morning--i was on deck in the peaceful dawn, the calm of holy dawn. went down, dressed, bathed, put on white linen, shaved--a long, hot, troublesome job and no profanity. then started to breakfast. remembered my tonic--first time in months without being told--poured it into measuring-glass, held bottle in one hand, it in the other, the cork in my teeth --reached up & got a tumbler--measuring-glass slipped out of my fingers--caught it, poured out another dose, first setting the tumbler on wash-stand--just got it poured, ship lurched, heard a crash behind me--it was the tumbler, broken into millions of fragments, but the bottom hunk whole. picked it up to throw out of the open port, threw out the measuring-glass instead--then i released my voice. mrs. clemens behind me in the door. “don't reform any more. it is not an improvement.” this is a good time to read up on scientific matters and improve the mind, for about us is the peace of the great deep. it invites to dreams, to study, to reflection. seventeen days ago this ship sailed out of calcutta, and ever since, barring a day or two in ceylon, there has been nothing in sight but the tranquil blue sea & a cloudless blue sky. all down the bay of bengal it was so. it is still so in the vast solitudes of the indian ocean-- days of heaven. in more it will end. there will be one passenger who will be sorry. one reads all day long in this delicious air. today i have been storing up knowledge from sir john lubbock about the ant. the thing which has struck me most and most astonished me is the ant's extraordinary powers of identification--memory of his friend's person. i will quote something which he says about formica fusca. formica fusca is not something to eat; it's the name of a breed of ants. he does quote at great length and he transferred most of it later to his book. in another note he says: in the past year have read vicar of wakefield and some of jane austen--thoroughly artificial. have begun children of the abbey. it begins with this “impromptu” from the sentimental heroine: “hail, sweet asylum of my infancy! content and innocence reside beneath your humble roof and charity unboastful of the good it renders.... here unmolested may i wait till the rude storm of sorrow is overblown and my father's arms are again extended to receive me.” has the ear-marks of preparation. they were at the island of mauritius by the middle of april, that curious bit of land mainly known to the world in the romance of paul and virginia, a story supposed by some in mauritius to be “a part of the bible.” they rested there for a fortnight and then set sail for south africa on the ship arundel castle, which he tells us is the finest boat he has seen in those waters. it was the end of the first week in may when they reached durban and felt that they were nearing home. one more voyage and they would be in england, where they had planned for susy and jean to join them. mrs. clemens, eager for letters, writes of her disappointment in not finding one from susy. the reports from quarry farm had been cheerful, and there had been small snap-shot photographs which were comforting, but her mother heart could not be entirely satisfied that susy did not send letters. she had a vague fear that some trouble, some illness, had come to susy which made her loath to write. susy was, in fact, far from well, though no one, not even susy herself, suspected how serious was her condition. mrs. clemens writes of her own hopefulness, but adds that her husband is often depressed. mr. clemens has not as much courage as i wish he had, but, poor old darling, he has been pursued with colds and inabilities of various sorts. then he is so impressed with the fact that he is sixty years old. naturally i combat that thought all i can, trying to make him rejoice that he is not seventy.... he does not believe that any good thing will come, but that we must all our lives live in poverty. he says he never wants to go back to america. i cannot think that things are as black as he paints them, and i trust that if i get him settled down for work in some quiet english village he will get back much of his cheerfulness; in fact, i believe he will because that is what he wants to do, and that is the work that he loves: the platform he likes for the two hours that he is on it, but all the rest of the time it grinds him, and he says he is ashamed of what he is doing. still, in spite of this sad undercurrent, we are having a delightful trip. people are so nice, and with people mr. clemens seems cheerful. then the ocean trips are a great rest to him. mrs. clemens and clara remained at the hotel in durban while clemens made his platform trip to the south african cities. it was just at the time when the transvaal invasion had been put down--when the jameson raid had come to grief and john hares hammond, chief of the reformers, and fifty or more supporters were lying in the jail at pretoria under various sentences, ranging from one to fifteen years, hammond himself having received the latter award. mrs. hammond was a fellow-missourian; clemens had known her in america. he went with her now to see the prisoners, who seemed to be having a pretty good time, expecting to be pardoned presently; pretending to regard their confinement mainly as a joke. clemens, writing of it to twichell, said: a boer guard was at my elbow all the time, but was courteous & polite, only he barred the way in the compound (quadrangle or big open court) & wouldn't let me cross a white mark that was on the ground--the “deathline,” one of the prisoners called it. not in earnest, though, i think. i found that i had met hammond once when he was a yale senior & a guest of general franklin's. i also found that i had known captain mein intimately years ago. one of the english prisoners had heard me lecture in london years ago.... these prisoners are strong men, prominent men, & i believe they are all educated men. they are well off; some of them are wealthy. they have a lot of books to read, they play games & smoke, & for a while they will be able to bear up in their captivity; but not for long, not for very long, i take it. i am told they have times of deadly brooding and depression. i made them a speech--sitting down. it just happened so. i don't prefer that attitude. still, it has one advantage--it is only a talk, it doesn't take the form of a speech.... i advised them at considerable length to stay where they were--they would get used to it & like it presently; if they got out they would only get in again somewhere else, by the look of their countenances; & i promised to go and see the president & do what i could to get him to double their jail terms.... we had a very good sociable time till the permitted time was up &. a little over & we outsiders had to go. i went again to-day, but the rev. mr. gray had just arrived, & the warden, a genial, elderly boer named du plessis, explained that his orders wouldn't allow him to admit saint & sinner at the same time, particularly on a sunday. du plessis descended from the huguenot fugitives, you see, of years ago--but he hasn't any french left in him now--all dutch. clemens did visit president kruger a few days later, but not for the purpose explained. john hayes hammond, in a speech not long ago ( ), told how mark twain was interviewed by a reporter after he left the jail, and when the reporter asked if the prisoners were badly treated clemens had replied that he didn't think so, adding: “as a matter of fact, a great many of these gentlemen have fared far worse in the hotels and mining-camps of the west.” said hammond in his speech: “the result of this was that the interview was reported literally and a leader appeared in the next morning's issue protesting against such lenience. the privations, already severe enough, were considerably augmented by that remark, and it required some three or four days' search on the part of some of our friends who were already outside of jail to get hold of mark twain and have him go and explain to kruger that it was all a joke.” clemens made as good a plea to “oom paul” as he could, and in some degree may have been responsible for the improved treatment and the shortened terms of the unlucky reformers. they did not hurry away from south africa. clemens gave many readings and paid a visit to the kimberley mines. his note-book recalls how poor riley twenty-five years before had made his fatal journey. it was the th of july, , a year to a day since they left elmira, that they sailed by the steamer norman for england, arriving at southampton the st. it was from southampton that they had sailed for america fourteen months before. they had completed the circuit of the globe. cxciii. the passing of susy it had been arranged that katie leary should bring jean and susy to england. it was expected that they would arrive soon, not later than the th, by which time the others would be established. the travelers proceeded immediately to london and engaged for the summer a house in guildford, modest quarters, for they were still economizing, though mark twain had reason to hope that with the money already earned and the profits of the book he would write of his travels he could pay himself free. altogether, the trip had been prosperous. now that it was behind him, his health and spirits had improved. the outlook was brighter. august th came, but it did not bring katie and the children. a letter came instead. clemens long afterward wrote: it explained that susy was slightly ill-nothing of consequence. but we were disquieted and began to cable for later news. this was friday. all day no answer--and the ship to leave southampton next day at noon. clara and her mother began packing, to be ready in case the news should be bad. finally came a cablegram saying, “wait for cablegram in the morning.” this was not satisfactory--not reassuring. i cabled again, asking that the answer be sent to southampton, for the day was now closing. i waited in the post- office that night till the doors were closed, toward midnight, in the hope that good news might still come, but there was no message. we sat silent at home till one in the morning waiting--waiting for we knew not what. then we took the earlier morning train, and when we reached southampton the message was there. it said the recovery would be long but certain. this was a great relief to me, but not to my wife. she was frightened. she and clara went aboard the steamer at once and sailed for america, to nurse susy. i remained behind to search for another and larger house in guildford. that was the th of august, . three days later, when my wife and clara were about half-way across the ocean, i was standing in our dining-room, thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. it said, “susy was peacefully released to-day.” some of those who in later years wondered at mark twain's occasional attitude of pessimism and bitterness toward all creation, when his natural instinct lay all the other way, may find here some reasons in his logic of gloom. for years he and his had been fighting various impending disasters. in the end he had torn his family apart and set out on a weary pilgrimage to pay, for long financial unwisdom, a heavy price--a penance in which all, without complaint, had joined. now, just when it seemed about ended, when they were ready to unite and be happy once more, when he could hold up his head among his fellows--in this moment of supreme triumph had come the message that susy's lovely and blameless life was ended. there are not many greater dramas in fiction or in history than this. the wonder is not that mark twain so often preached the doctrine of despair during his later life, but that he did not exemplify it--that he did not become a misanthrope in fact. mark twain's life had contained other tragedies, but no other that equaled this one. this time none of the elements were lacking--not the smallest detail. the dead girl had been his heart's pride; it was a year since he had seen her face, and now by this word he knew that he would never see it again. the blow had found him alone absolutely alone among strangers--those others--half-way across the ocean, drawing nearer and nearer to it, and he with no way to warn them, to prepare them, to comfort them. clemens sought no comfort for himself. just as nearly forty years before he had writhed in self-accusation for the death of his younger brother, and as later he held himself to blame for the death of his infant son, so now he crucified himself as the slayer of susy. to mrs. clemens he poured himself out in a letter in which he charged himself categorically as being wholly and solely responsible for the tragedy, detailing step by step with fearful reality his mistakes and weaknesses which had led to their downfall, the separation from susy, and this final incredible disaster. only a human being, he said, could have done these things. susy clemens had died in the old hartford home. she had been well for a time at quarry farm, well and happy, but during the summer of ' she had become restless, nervous, and unlike herself in many ways. her health seemed to be gradually failing, and she renewed the old interest in mental science, always with the approval of her parents. clemens had great faith in mind over matter, and mrs. clemens also believed that susy's high-strung nature was especially calculated to receive benefit from a serene and confident mental attitude. from bombay, in january, she wrote mrs. crane: i am very glad indeed that susy has taken up mental science, and i do hope it may do her as much good as she hopes. last winter we were so very anxious to have her get hold of it, and even felt at one time that we must go to america on purpose to have her have the treatment, so it all seems very fortunate that it should have come about as it has this winter. just how much or how little susy was helped by this treatment cannot be known. like stevenson, she had “a soul of flame in a body of gauze,” a body to be guarded through the spirit. she worked continuously at her singing and undoubtedly overdid herself. early in the year she went over to hartford to pay some good-by visit, remaining most of the time in the home of charles dudley warner, working hard at her singing. her health did not improve, and when katie leary went to hartford to arrange for their departure she was startled at the change in her. “miss susy; you are sick,” she said. “you must have the doctor come.” susy refused at first, but she grew worse and the doctor was sent for. he thought her case not very serious--the result, he said, of overwork. he prescribed some soothing remedies, and advised that she be kept very quiet, away from company, and that she be taken to her own home, which was but a step away. it was then that the letter was written and the first cable sent to england. mrs. crane was summoned from elmira, also charles langdon. mr. twichell was notified and came down from his summer place in the adirondacks. susy did not improve. she became rapidly worse, and a few days later the doctor pronounced her ailment meningitis. this was on the th of august--that hot, terrible august of . susy's fever increased and she wandered through the burning rooms in delirium and pain; then her sight left her, an effect of the disease. she lay down at last, and once, when katie leary was near her, she put her hands on katie's face and said, “mama.” she did not speak after that, but sank into unconsciousness, and on the evening of tuesday, august th, the flame went out forever. to twichell clemens wrote of it: ah, well, susy died at home. she had that privilege. her dying eyes rested upon no thing that was strange to them, but only upon things which they had known & loved always & which had made her young years glad; & she had you & sue & katie & & john & ellen. this was happy fortune--i am thankful that it was vouchsafed to her. if she had died in another house--well, i think i could not have borne that. to us our house was not unsentient matter--it had a heart & a soul & eyes to see us with, & approvals & solicitudes & deep sympathies; it was of us, & we were in its confidence, & lived in its grace & in the peace of its benediction. we never came home from an absence that its face did not light up & speak out its eloquent welcome--& we could not enter it unmoved. and could we now? oh, now, in spirit we should enter it unshod. a tugboat with dr. rice, mr. twichell, and other friends of the family went down the bay to meet the arriving vessel with mrs. clemens and clara on board. it was night when the ship arrived, and they did not show themselves until morning; then at first to clara. there had been little need to formulate a message--their presence there was enough--and when a moment later clara returned to the stateroom her mother looked into her face and she also knew. susy already had been taken to elmira, and at half past ten that night mrs. clemens and clara arrived there by the through train--the same train and in the same coach which they had taken one year and one month before on their journey westward around the world. and again susy was there, not waving her welcome in the glare of the lights as she had waved her farewell to us thirteen months before, but lying white and fair in her coffin in the house where she was born. they buried her with the langdon relatives and the little brother, and ordered a headstone with some lines which they had found in australia: warm summer sun shine kindly here; warm southern wind blow softly here; green sod above lie light, lie light good night, dear heart, good night, good night. --[these lines at first were generally attributed to clemens himself. when this was reported to him he ordered the name of the australian poet, robert richardson, cut beneath them. the word “southern” in the original read “northern,” as in australia, the warm wind is from the north. richardson died in england in .] cxciv. winter in tedworth square mrs. clemens, clara, and jean, with katie leary, sailed for england without delay. arriving there, they gave up the house in guildford, and in a secluded corner of chelsea, on the tiny and then almost unknown tedworth square (no. ), they hid themselves away for the winter. they did not wish to be visited; they did not wish their whereabouts known except to a few of their closest friends. they wanted to be alone with their sorrow, and not a target for curious attention. perhaps not a dozen people in london knew their address and the outside world was ignorant of it altogether. it was through this that a wild report started that mark twain's family had deserted him--that ill and in poverty he was laboring alone to pay his debts. this report--exploited in five-column head-lines by a hyper-hysterical paper of that period received wide attention. james ross clemens, of the st. louis branch, a nephew of frau von versen, was in london just then, and wrote at once, through chatto & windus, begging mark twain to command his relative's purse. the reply to this kind offer was an invitation to tea, and “young doctor jim,” as he was called, found his famous relative by no means abandoned or in want, but in pleasant quarters, with his family still loyal. the general impression survived, however, that mark twain was sorely pressed, and the new york herald headed a public benefit fund for the payment of his debts. the herald subscribed one thousand dollars on its own account, and andrew carnegie followed with another thousand, but the enterprise was barely under way when clemens wrote a characteristic letter, in which he declared that while he would have welcomed the help offered, being weary of debt, his family did not wish him to accept and so long as he was able to take care of them through his own efforts. meantime he was back into literary harness; a notebook entry for october , , says: “wrote the fist chapter of the book to-day-'around the world'.” he worked at it uninterruptedly, for in work; there was respite, though his note-books show something of his mental torture, also his spiritual heresies. his series of mistakes and misfortunes, ending with the death of susy, had tended to solidify his attitude of criticism toward things in general and the human race in particular. “man is the only animal that blushes, or that needs to,” was one of his maxims of this period, and in another place he sets down the myriad diseases which human flesh is heir to and his contempt for a creature subject to such afflictions and for a providence that could invent them. even mrs. clemens felt the general sorrow of the race. “poor, poor human nature,” she wrote once during that long, gloomy winter. many of mark twain's notes refer to susy. in one he says: “i did not hear her glorious voice at its supremest--that was in hartford a month or two before the end.” notes of heavy regret most of them are, and self-reproach and the hopelessness of it all. in one place he records her accomplishment of speech, adding: “and i felt like saying 'you marvelous child,' but never said it; to my sorrow i remember it now. but i come of an undemonstrative race.” he wrote to twichell: but i have this consolation: that dull as i was i always knew enough to be proud when she commended me or my work--as proud as if livy had done it herself--& i took it as the accolade from the hand of genius. i see now--as livy always saw--that she had greatness in her, & that she herself was dimly conscious of it. and now she is dead--& i can never tell her. and closing a letter to howells: good-by. will healing ever come, or life have value again? and shall we see susy? without doubt! without a shadow of doubt if it can furnish opportunity to break our hearts again. on november th, thanksgiving, occurs this note: “we did not celebrate it. seven years ago susy gave her play for the first time.” and on christmas: london, . xmas morning. the square & adjacent streets are not merely quiet, they are dead. there is not a sound. at intervals a sunday-looking person passes along. the family have been to breakfast. we three sat & talked as usual, but the name of the day was not mentioned. it was in our minds, but we said nothing. and a little later: since bad luck struck us it is risky for people to have to do with us. our cook's sweetheart was healthy. he is rushing for the grave now. emily, one of the maids, has lost the sight of one eye and the other is in danger. wallace carried up coal & blacked the boots two months--has suddenly gone to the hospital--pleurisy and a bad case. we began to allow ourselves to see a good deal of our friends, the bigelows--straightway their baby sickened & died. next wilson got his skull fractured. january , . i wish the lord would disguise himself in citizen's clothing & make a personal examination of the sufferings of the poor in london. he would be moved & would do something for them himself. cxcv. “personal recollections of joan of arc”. meantime certain publishing events had occurred. during his long voyage a number of mark twain's articles had appeared in the magazines, among them “mental telegraphy again,” in harpers, and in the north american review that scorching reply to paul bourget's reflections upon america. clemens could criticize his own nation freely enough, but he would hardly be patient under the strictures of a frenchman, especially upon american women. there had been book publication also during this period. the harpers had issued an edition of 'tom sawyer abroad', which included another tom and huck story 'tom sawyer, detective', written in paris, and the contents of the old white elephant book. but there had been a much more important book event. the chapters of his story of joan having run their course in harper's magazine had been issued as a volume. as already mentioned, joan had been early recognized as mark twain's work, and it was now formally acknowledged as such on the title-page. it is not certain now that the anonymous beginning had been a good thing. those who began reading it for its lofty charm, with the first hint of mark twain as the author became fearful of some joke or burlesque. some who now promptly hastened to read it as mark twain's, were inclined to be disappointed at the very lack of these features. when the book itself appeared the general public, still doubtful as to its merits, gave it a somewhat dubious reception. the early sales were disappointing. nor were the reviewers enthusiastic, as a rule. perhaps they did not read it over-carefully, or perhaps they were swayed a good deal by a sort of general verdict that, in attempting 'joan of arc', mark twain had gone out of his proper field. furthermore, there were a number of joan books published just then, mainly sober, somber books, in which joan was pictured properly enough as a saint, and never as anything else--never being permitted to smile or enjoy the lighter side of life, to be a human being, in fact, at all. but this is just the very wonder of mark twain's joan. she is a saint; she is rare, she is exquisite, she is all that is lovely, and she is a human being besides. considered from every point of view, joan of arc is mark twain's supreme literary expression, the loftiest, the most delicate, the most luminous example of his work. it is so from the first word of its beginning, that wonderful “translator's preface,” to the last word of the last chapter, where he declares that the figure of joan with the martyr's crown upon her head shall stand for patriotism through all time. the idyllic picture of joan's childhood with her playmates around the fairy tree is so rare in its delicacy and reality that any attempt to recall it here would disturb its bloom. the little poem, “l'arbre fee de bourlemont,” mark twain's own composition, is a perfect note, and that curiously enough, for in versification he was not likely to be strong. joan's girlhood, the picture of her father's humble cottage, the singing there by the wandering soldier of the great song of roland which stirred her deepest soul with the love of france, joan's heroism among her playmates, her wisdom, her spiritual ideals-are not these all reverently and nobly told, and with that touch of tenderness which only mark twain could give? and the story of her voices, and her march, and of her first appearance before the wavering king. and then the great coronation scene at rheims, and the dramatic moment when joan commands the march on paris--the dragging of the hopeless trial, and that last, fearful day of execution, what can surpass these? nor must we forget those charming, brighter moments where joan is shown just as a human being, laughing until the tears run at the absurdities of the paladin or the simple home prattle of her aged father and uncle. only here and there does one find a touch--and it is never more than that--of the forbidden thing, the burlesque note which was so likely to be mark twain's undoing. it seems incredible to-day that any reader, whatever his preconceived notions of the writer might have been, could have followed these chapters without realizing their majesty, and that this tale of joan was a book such as had not before been written. let any one who read it then and doubted, go back and consider it now. a surprise will await him, and it will be worth while. he will know the true personality of joan of arc more truly than ever before, and he will love her as the author loved her, for “the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable child the ages have produced.” the tale is matchless in its workmanship. the quaint phrasing of the old sieur de conte is perfectly adapted to the subject-matter, and the lovely character of the old narrator himself is so perfectly maintained that we find ourselves all the time as in an atmosphere of consecration, and feel that somehow we are helping him to weave a garland to lay on joan's tomb. whatever the tale he tells, he is never more than a step away. we are within sound of his voice, we can touch his presence; we ride with him into battle; we laugh with him in the by-play and humors of warfare; we sit hushed at his side through the long, fearful days of the deadly trial, and when it is all ended it is to him that we turn to weep for joan--with him only would we mingle our tears. it is all bathed in the atmosphere of romance, but it is the ultimate of realism, too; not hard, sordid, ugly realism, but noble, spiritual, divine realism, belonging to no particular class or school--a creation apart. not all of mark twain's tales have been convincing, but there is no chapter of his joan that we doubt. we believe it all happened--we know that it must have happened, for our faith in the sieur de conte never for an instant wavers. aside from the personality of the book--though, in truth, one never is aside from it--the tale is a marvel in its pageantry, its splendid panorama and succession of stirring and stately scenes. the fight before orleans, the taking of the tourelles and of jargeau, all the movement of that splendid march to rheims, there are few better battle-pictures than these. howells, always interested mainly in the realism of to-day, in his review hints at staginess in the action and setting and even in joan herself. but howells himself did not accept his earlier judgment as final. five years later he wrote: “she is indeed realized to the modern sense as few figures of the past have been realized in fiction.” as for the action, suppose we consider a brief bit of joan's warfare. it is from the attack on the tourelles: joan mounted her horse now with her staff about her, and when our people saw us coming they raised a great shout, and were at once eager for another assault on the boulevard. joan rode straight to the foss where she had received her wound, and, standing there in the rain of bolts and arrows, she ordered the paladin to let her long standard blow free, and to note when its fringes should touch the fortress. presently he said: “it touches.” “now, then,” said joan to the waiting battalions, “the place is yours--enter in! bugles, sound the assault! now, then--all together--go!” and go it was. you never saw anything like it. we swarmed up the ladders and over the battlements like a wave--and the place was our property. why, one might live a thousand years and never see so gorgeous a thing as that again.... we were busy and never heard the five cannon-shots fired, but they were fired a moment after joan had ordered the assault; and so, while we were hammering and being hammered in the smaller fortress, the reserve on the orleans side poured across the bridge and attacked the tourelles from that side. a fireboat was brought down and moored under the drawbridge which connected the tourelles with our boulevard; wherefore, when at last we drove our english ahead of us, and they tried to cross that drawbridge and join their friends in the tourelles, the burning timbers gave way under them and emptied them in a mass into the river in their heavy armor--and a pitiful sight it was to see brave men die such a death as that. “god pity them!” said joan, and wept to see that sorrowful spectacle. she said those gentle words and wept those compassionate tears, although one of those perishing men had grossly insulted her with a coarse name three days before when she had sent him a message asking him to surrender. that was their leader, sir william glasdale, a most valorous knight. he was clothed all in steel; so he plunged under the water like a lance, and of course came up no more. we soon patched a sort of bridge together and threw ourselves against the last stronghold of the english power that barred orleans from friends and supplies. before the sun was quite down joan's forever memorable day's work was finished, her banner floated from the fortress of the tourelles, her promise was fulfilled, she had raised the siege of orleans! england had resented the yankee, but it welcomed joan. andrew lang adored it, and some years later contemplated dedicating his own book, 'the maid of france', to mark twain.'--[his letter proposing this dedication, received in , appears to have been put aside and forgotten by mr. clemens, whose memory had not improved with failing health.] brander matthews ranks huck finn before joan of arc, but that is understandable. his literary culture and research enable him, in some measure, to comprehend the production of joan; whereas to him huck is pure magic. huck is not altogether magic to those who know the west--the character of that section and the mississippi river, especially of an older time--it is rather inspiration resulting from these existing things. joan is a truer literary magic--the reconstruction of a far-vanished life and time. to reincarnate, as in a living body of the present, that marvelous child whose life was all that was pure and exalted and holy, is veritable necromancy and something more. it is the apotheosis of history. throughout his life joan of arc had been mark twain's favorite character in the world's history. his love for her was a beautiful and a sacred thing. he adored young maidenhood always and nobility of character, and he was always the champion of the weak and the oppressed. the combination of these characteristics made him the ideal historian of an individuality and of a career like hers. it is fitting that in his old age (he was nearing sixty when it was finished) he should have written this marvelously beautiful thing. he could not have written it at an earlier time. it had taken him all these years to prepare for it; to become softened, to acquire the delicacy of expression, the refinement of feeling, necessary to the achievement. it was the only book of all he had written that mark twain considered worthy of this dedication: to my wife olivia langdon clemens this book is tendered on our wedding anniversary in grateful recognition of her twenty-five years of valued service as my literary adviser and editor. the author the personal recollections of joan of arc was a book not understood in the beginning, but to-day the public, that always renders justice in the end, has reversed its earlier verdict. the demand for joan has multiplied many fold and it continues to multiply with every year. its author lived long enough to see this change and to be comforted by it, for though the creative enthusiasm in his other books soon passed, his glory in the tale of joan never died. on his seventy-third birthday, when all of his important books were far behind him, and he could judge them without prejudice, he wrote as his final verdict: nov. , i like the joan of arc best of all my books; & it is the best; i know it perfectly well. and besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: years of preparation & a years of writing. the others needed no preparation, & got none. mark twain. cxcvi. mr. rogers and helen keller it was during the winter of ' , in london, that clemens took an active interest in the education of helen keller and enlisted the most valuable adherent in that cause, that is to say, henry h. rogers. it was to mrs. rogers that he wrote, heading his letter: for & in behalf of helen keller, stone blind & deaf, & formerly dumb. dear mrs. rogers,--experience has convinced me that when one wished to set a hard-worked man at something which he mightn't prefer to be bothered with it is best to move upon him behind his wife. if she can't convince him it isn't worth while for other people to try. mr. rogers will remember our visit with that astonishing girl at lawrence hutton's house when she was fourteen years old. last july, in boston, when she was she underwent the harvard examination for admission to radcliffe college. she passed without a single condition. she was allowed only the same amount of time that is granted to other applicants, & this was shortened in her case by the fact that the question-papers had to be read to her. yet she scored an average of , as against an average of on the part of the other applicants. it won't do for america to allow this marvelous child to retire from her studies because of poverty. if she can go on with them she will make a fame that will endure in history for centuries. along her special lines she is the most extraordinary product of all the ages. there is danger that she must retire from the struggle for a college degree for lack of support for herself & for miss sullivan (the teacher who has been with her from the start--mr. rogers will remember her). mrs. hutton writes to ask me to interest rich englishmen in her case, & i would gladly try, but my secluded life will not permit it. i see nobody. nobody knows my address. nothing but the strictest hiding can enable me to write my book in time. so i thought of this scheme: beg you to lay siege to your husband & get him to interest himself and messrs. john d. & william rockefeller & the other standard oil chiefs in helen's case; get them to subscribe an annual aggregate of six or seven hundred or a thousand dollars--& agree to continue this for three or four years, until she has completed her college course. i'm not trying to limit their generosity--indeed no; they may pile that standard oil helen keller college fund as high as they please; they have my consent. mrs. hutton's idea is to raise a permanent fund, the interest upon which shall support helen & her teacher & put them out of the fear of want. i sha'n't say a word against it, but she will find it a difficult & disheartening job, & meanwhile what is to become of that miraculous girl? no, for immediate and sound effectiveness, the thing is for you to plead with mr. rogers for this hampered wonder of your sex, & send him clothed with plenary powers to plead with the other chiefs--they have spent mountains of money upon the worthiest benevolences, & i think that the same spirit which moved them to put their hands down through their hearts into their pockets in those cases will answer. “here!” when its name is called in this one. there--i don't need to apologize to you or to h. h. for this appeal that i am making; i know you too well for that: good-by, with love to all of you, s. l. clemens. the result of this letter was that mr. rogers personally took charge of helen keller's fortunes, and out of his own means made it possible for her to continue her education and to achieve for herself the enduring fame which mark twain had foreseen. mr. rogers wrote that, by a curious coincidence, a letter had come to him from mrs. hutton on the same morning that mrs. rogers had received hers from tedworth square. clemens sent grateful acknowledgments to mrs. rogers. dear mrs. rogers,--it is superb! and i am beyond measure grateful to you both. i knew you would be interested in that wonderful girl, & that mr. rogers was already interested in her & touched by her; & i was sure that if nobody else helped her you two would; but you have gone far & away beyond the sum i expected--may your lines fall in pleasant places here, & hereafter for it! the huttons are as glad & grateful as they can be, & i am glad for their sakes as well as for helen's. i want to thank mr. rogers for crucifying himself on the same old cross between bliss & harper; & goodness knows i hope he will come to enjoy it above all other dissipations yet, seeing that it has about it the elements of stability & permanency. however, at any time that he says sign we're going to do it. ever sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. cxcvii. finishing the book of travel. one reading the equator book to-day, and knowing the circumstances under which it was written, might be puzzled to reconcile the secluded household and its atmosphere of sorrow with certain gaieties of the subject matter. the author himself wondered at it, and to howells wrote: i don't mean that i am miserable; no-worse than that--indifferent. indifferent to nearly everything but work. i like that; i enjoy it, & stick to it. i do it without purpose & without ambition; merely for the love of it. indeed, i am a mud-image; & it puzzles me to know what it is in me that writes & has comedy fancies & finds pleasure in phrasing them. it is the law of our nature, of course, or it wouldn't happen; the thing in me forgets the presence of the mud-image, goes its own way wholly unconscious of it & apparently of no kinship with it. he saw little company. now and, then a good friend, j.y.w. macalister, came in for a smoke with him. once clemens sent this line: you speak a language which i understand. i would like to see you. could you come and smoke some manilas; i would, of course, say dine, but my family are hermits & cannot see any one, but i would have a fire in my study, & if you came at any time after your dinner that might be most convenient for you you would find me & a welcome. clemens occasionally went out to dinner, but very privately. he dined with bram stoker, who invited anthony hope and one or two others, and with the chattos and mr. percy spalding; also with andrew lang, who wrote, “your old friend, lord lome, wants to see you again”; with the henry m. stanleys and poultney bigelow, and with francis h. skrine, a government official he had met in india. but in all such affairs he was protected from strangers and his address was kept a secret from the public. finally, the new-found cousin, dr. jim clemens, fell ill, and the newspapers had it presently that mark twain was lying at the point of death. a reporter ferreted him out and appeared at tedworth square with cabled instructions from his paper. he was a young man, and innocently enough exhibited his credentials. his orders read: “if mark twain very ill, five hundred words. if dead, send one thousand.” clemens smiled grimly as he handed back the cable. “you don't need as much as that,” he said. “just say the report of my death has been grossly exaggerated.” the young man went away quite seriously, and it was not until he was nearly to his office that he saw the joke. then, of course, it was flashed all over the world. clemens kept grinding steadily at the book, for it was to be a very large volume--larger than he had ever written before. to macalister, april , , he wrote, replying to some invitation: ah, but i mustn't stir from my desk before night now when the publisher is hurrying me & i am almost through. i am up at work now-- o'clock in the morning-and a few more spurts will pull me through. you come down here & smoke; that is better than tempting a working-man to strike & go to tea. and it would move me too deeply to see miss corelli. when i saw her last it was on the street in homburg, & susy was walking with me. on april th he makes a note-book entry: “i finished my book to-day,” and on the th he wrote macalister, inclosing some bits of manuscript: i finished my book yesterday, and the madam edited this stuff out of it--on the ground that the first part is not delicate & the last part is indelicate. now, there's a nice distinction for you--& correctly stated, too, & perfectly true. it may interest the reader to consider briefly the manner in which mark twain's “editor” dealt with his manuscript, and a few pages of this particular book remain as examples. that he was not always entirely tractable, or at least submissive, but that he did yield, and graciously, is clearly shown. in one of her comments mrs. clemens wrote: page . i hate to say it, but it seems to me that you go too minutely into particulars in describing the feats of the aboriginals. i felt it in the boomerang-throwing. and clemens just below has written: boomerang has been furnished with a special train--that is, i've turned it into “appendix.” will that answer? page . i don't like the “shady-principled cat that has a family in every port.” then i'll modify him just a little. page . th line from the top. i think some other word would be better than “stench.” you have used that pretty often. but can't i get it in anywhere? you've knocked it out every time. out it goes again. and yet “stench” is a noble, good word. page . i hate to have your father pictured as lashing a slave boy. it's out, and my father is whitewashed. page . d line from the bottom. change breech-clout. it's a word that you love and i abominate. i would take that and “offal” out of the language. you are steadily weakening the english tongue, livy. page . perhaps you don't care, but whoever told you that the prince's green stones were rubies told an untruth. they were superb emeralds. those strings of pearls and emeralds were famous all over bombay. all right, i'll make them emeralds, but it loses force. green rubies is a fresh thing. and besides it was one of the prince's own staff liars that told me. that the book was not quite done, even after the triumphant entry of april th, is shown by another note which followed something more than a month later: may , . finished the book again--addition of , words. and to macalister he wrote: i have finished the book at last--and finished it for good this time. now i am ready for dissipation with a good conscience. what night will you come down & smoke? his book finished, clemens went out rather more freely, and one evening allowed macalister to take him around to the savage club. there happened to be a majority of the club committee present, and on motion mark twain was elected an honorary life member. there were but three others on whom this distinction had been conferred--stanley, nansen, and the prince of wales. when they told mark twain this he said: “well, it must make the prince feel mighty fine.”--[in a volume of savage club anecdotes the date of mark twain's election to honorary membership is given as . clemens's notebook gives it in .] he did not intend to rest; in another entry we find: may , . wrote first chapter of above story to-day. the “above story” is a synopsis of a tale which he tried then and later in various forms--a tale based on a scientific idea that one may dream an episode covering a period of years in minute detail in what, by our reckoning, may be no more than a few brief seconds. in this particular form of the story a man sits down to write some memories and falls into a doze. the smell of his cigarette smoke causes him to dream of the burning of his home, the destruction of his family, and of a long period of years following. awakening a few seconds later, and confronted by his wife and children, he refuses to believe in their reality, maintaining that this condition, and not the other, is the dream. clemens tried the psychological literary experiment in as many as three different ways during the next two or three years, and each at considerable length; but he developed none of them to his satisfaction, or at least he brought none of them to conclusion. perhaps the most weird of these attempts, and the most intensely interesting, so long as the verisimilitude is maintained, is a dream adventure in a drop of water which, through an incredible human reduction to microbic, even atomic, proportions, has become a vast tempestuous sea. mark twain had the imagination for these undertakings and the literary workmanship, lacking only a definite plan for development of his tale--a lack which had brought so many of his literary ventures to the rocks. cxcviii. a summer in switzerland the queen's jubilee came along--june , , being the day chosen to celebrate the sixty-year reign. clemens had been asked to write about it for the american papers, and he did so after his own ideas, illustrating some of his material with pictures of his own selection. the selections were made from various fashion-plates, which gave him a chance to pick the kind of a prince or princess or other royal figure that he thought fitted his description without any handicap upon his imagination. under his portrait of henry v. (a very correctly dressed person in top hat and overcoat) he wrote: in the original the king has a crown on. that is no kind of a thing for the king to wear when he has come home on business. he ought to wear something he can collect taxes in. you will find this representation of henry v. active, full of feeling, full of sublimity. i have pictured him looking out over the battle of agincourt and studying up where to begin. mark twain's account of the jubilee probably satisfied most readers; but james tufts, then managing editor of the san francisco examiner, had a rather matter-of-fact englishman on the staff, who, after reading the report, said: “well, jim tufts, i hope you are satisfied with that mark twain cable.” “why, yes,” said tufts; “aren't you?” “i should say not. just look what he says about the number of soldiers. he says, 'i never saw so many soldiers anywhere except on the stage of a theater.' why, tufts, don't you know that the soldiers in the theater are the same old soldiers marching around and around? there aren't more than a hundred soldiers in the biggest army ever put on the stage.” it was decided to vacate the house in tedworth square and go to switzerland for the summer. mrs. crane and charles langdon's daughter, julia, joined them early in july, and they set out for switzerland a few days later. just before leaving, clemens received an offer from pond of fifty thousand dollars for one hundred and twenty-five nights on the platform in america. it was too great a temptation to resist at once, and they took it under advisement. clemens was willing to accept, but mrs. clemens opposed the plan. she thought his health no longer equal to steady travel. she believed that with continued economy they would be able to manage their problem without this sum. in the end the offer was declined. they journeyed to switzerland by way of holland and germany, the general destination being lucerne. they did not remain there, however. they found a pretty little village farther up the lake--weggis, at the foot of the rigi--where, in the villa buhlegg, they arranged for the summer at very moderate rates indeed. weggis is a beautiful spot, looking across the blue water to mount pilatus, the lake shore dotted with white villages. down by the water, but a few yards from the cottage--for it was scarcely a villa except by courtesy--there was a little inclosure, and a bench under a large tree, a quiet spot where clemens often sat to rest and smoke. the fact is remembered there to-day, and recorded. a small tablet has engraved upon it “mark twain ruhe.” farther along the shore he discovered a neat, white cottage were some kindly working-people agreed to rent him an upper room for a study. it was a sunny room with windows looking out upon the lake, and he worked there steadily. to twichell he wrote: this is the charmingest place we have ever lived in for repose and restfulness, superb scenery whose beauty undergoes a perpetual change from one miracle to another, yet never runs short of fresh surprises and new inventions. we shall always come here for the summers if we can. the others have climbed the rigi, he says, and he expects to some day if twichell will come and climb it with him. they had climbed it together during that summer vagabondage, nineteen years before. he was full of enthusiasm over his work. to f. h. skrine, in london, he wrote that he had four or five books all going at once, and his note-book contains two or three pages merely of titles of the stories he proposed to write. but of the books begun that summer at weggis none appears to have been completed. there still exists a bulky, half-finished manuscript about tom and huck, most of which was doubtless written at this time, and there is the tale already mentioned, the “dream” story; and another tale with a plot of intricate psychology and crime; still another with the burning title of “hell-fire hotchkiss”--a story of hannibal life--and some short stories. clemens appeared to be at this time out of tune with fiction. perhaps his long book of travel had disqualified his invention. he realized that these various literary projects were leading nowhere, and one after another he dropped them. the fact that proofs of the big book were coming steadily may also have interfered with his creative faculty. as was his habit, clemens formed the acquaintance of a number of the native residents, and enjoyed talking to them about their business and daily affairs. they were usually proud and glad of these attentions, quick to see the humor of his remarks. but there was an old watchmaker-an 'uhrmacher' who remained indifferent. he would answer only in somber monosyllables, and he never smiled. clemens at last brought the cheapest kind of a watch for repairs. “be very careful of this watch,” he said. “it is a fine one.” the old man merely glared at him. “it is not a valuable watch. it is a worthless watch.” “but i gave six francs for it in paris.” “still, it is a cheap watch,” was the unsmiling answer. defeat waits somewhere for every conqueror. which recalls another instance, though of a different sort. on one of his many voyages to america, he was sitting on deck in a steamer-chair when two little girls stopped before him. one of them said, hesitatingly: “are you mr. mark twain?” “why, yes, dear, they call me that.” “won't you please say something funny?” and for the life of him he couldn't make the required remark. in one of his letters to twichell of that summer, clemens wrote of the arrival there of the colored jubilee singers, always favorites of his, and of his great delight in them. we went down to the village hotel & bought our tickets & entered the beer-hall, where a crowd of german & swiss men & women sat grouped around tables with their beer-mugs in front of them--self-contained & unimpressionable-looking people--an indifferent & unposted & disheartening audience--& up at the far end of the room sat the jubilees in a row. the singers got up & stood--the talking & glass- jingling went on. then rose & swelled out above those common earthly sounds one of those rich chords, the secret of whose make only the jubilees possess, & a spell fell upon that house. it was fine to see the faces light up with the pleased wonder & surprise of it. no one was indifferent any more; & when the singers finished the camp was theirs. it was a triumph. it reminded me of lancelot riding in sir kay's armor, astonishing complacent knights who thought they had struck a soft thing. the jubilees sang a lot of pieces. arduous & painstaking cultivation has not diminished or artificialized their music, but on the contrary--to my surprise--has mightily reinforced its eloquence and beauty. away back in the beginning--to my mind--their music made all other vocal music cheap; & that early notion is emphasized now. it is entirely beautiful to me; & it moves me infinitely more than any other music can. i think that in the jubilees & their songs america has produced the perfectest flower of the ages; & i wish it were a foreign product, so that she would worship it & lavish money on it & go properly crazy over it. now, these countries are different: they would do all that if it were native. it is true they praise god, but that is merely a formality, & nothing in it; they open out their whole hearts to no foreigner. as the first anniversary of susy's death drew near the tension became very great. a gloom settled on the household, a shadow of restraint. on the morning of the th clemens went early to his study. somewhat later mrs. clemens put on her hat and wrap, and taking a small bag left the house. the others saw her go toward the steamer-landing, but made no inquiries as to her destination. they guessed that she would take the little boat that touched at the various points along the lake shore. this she did, in fact, with no particular plan as to where she would leave it. one of the landing-places seemed quiet and inviting, and there she went ashore, and taking a quiet room at a small inn spent the day in reading susy's letters. it was evening when she returned, and her husband, lonely and anxious, was waiting for her at the landing. he had put in the day writing the beautiful poem, “in memoriam,” a strain lofty, tender, and dirge-like-liquidly musical, though irregular in form.--[now included in the uniform edition.] cxcix. winter in vienna they remained two months in weggis--until toward the end of september; thence to vienna, by way of innsbruck, in the tyrol, “where the mountains seem more approachable than in switzerland.” clara clemens wished to study the piano under leschetizky, and this would take them to austria for the winter. arriving at vienna, they settled in the hotel metropole, on the banks of the danube. their rooms, a corner suite, looked out on a pretty green square, the merzimplatz, and down on the franz josef quay. a little bridge crosses the river there, over which all kinds of life are continually passing. on pleasant days clemens liked to stand on this bridge and watch the interesting phases of the austrian capital. the vienna humorist, poetzl, quickly formed his acquaintance, and they sometimes stood there together. once while clemens was making some notes, poetzl interested the various passers by asking each one--the errand-boy, the boot-black, the chestnut-vender, cabmen, and others--to guess who the stranger was and what he wanted. most of them recognized him when their attention was called, for the newspapers had proudly heralded his arrival and his picture was widely circulated. clemens had scarcely arrived in vienna, in fact, before he was pursued by photographers, journalists, and autograph-hunters. the viennese were his fond admirers, and knowing how the world elsewhere had honored him they were determined not to be outdone. the 'neues viener tageblatt', a fortnight after his arrival, said: it is seldom that a foreign author has found such a hearty reception in vienna as that accorded to mark twain, who not only has the reputation of being the foremost humorist in the whole civilized. world, but one whose personality arouses everywhere a peculiar interest on account of the genuine american character which sways it. he was the guest of honor at the concordia club soon after his arrival, and the great ones of vienna assembled to do him honor. charlemagne tower, then american minister, was also one of the guests. writers, diplomats, financiers, municipal officials, everybody in vienna that was worth while, was there. clemens gave them a surprise, for when ferdinand gross, concordia president, introduced him first in english, then in german, mark twain made his reply wholly in the latter language. the paper just quoted gives us a hint of the frolic and wassail of that old 'festkneipe' when it says: at o'clock mark twain appeared in the salon, and amid a storm of applause took his seat at the head of the table. his characteristic shaggy and flowing mane of hair adorning a youthful countenance attracted the attention at once of all present. after a few formal convivial commonplaces the president of the concordia, mr. ferdinand gross, delivered an excellent address in english, which he wound up with a few german sentences. then mr. tower was heard in praise of his august countryman. in the course of his remarks he said he could hardly find words enough to express his delight at the presence of the popular american. then followed the greatest attraction of the evening, an impromptu speech by mark twain in the german language, which it is true he has not fully mastered, but which he nevertheless controls sufficiently well to make it difficult to detect any harsh foreign accent. he had entitled his speech, “die schrecken der deutschen sprache” (the terrors of the german language). at times he would interrupt himself in english and ask, with a stuttering smile, “how do you call this word in german” or “i only know that in mother-tongue.” the festkneipe lasted far into the morning hours. it was not long after their arrival in vienna that the friction among the unamalgamated austrian states flamed into a general outbreak in the austrian reichsrath, or imperial parliament. we need not consider just what the trouble was. any one wishing to know can learn from mark twain's article on the subject, for it is more clearly pictured there than elsewhere. it is enough to say here that the difficulty lay mainly between the hungarian and german wings of the house; and in the midst of it dr. otto lecher made his famous speech, which lasted twelve hours without a break, in order to hold the floor against the opposing forces. clemens was in the gallery most of the time while that speech, with its riotous accompaniment, was in progress.--[“when that house is legislating you can't tell it from artillery practice.” from mark twain's report, “stirring times in austria,” in literary essays,]--he was intensely interested. nothing would appeal to him more than that, unless it should be some great astronomic or geologic change. he was also present somewhat later when a resolution was railroaded through which gave the chair the right to invoke the aid of the military, and he was there when the military arrived and took the insurgents in charge. it was a very great occasion, a “tremendous episode,” he says. the memory of it will outlast all the others that exist to-day. in the whole history of free parliament the like of it had been seen but three times before. it takes imposing place among the world's unforgetable things. i think that in my lifetime i have not twice seen abiding history made before my eyes, but i know that i have seen it once. wild reports were sent to the american press; among them one that mark twain had been hustled out with the others, and that, having waved his handkerchief and shouted “hoch die deutschen!” he had been struck by an officer of the law. of course nothing of the kind happened. the sergeant-at-arms, who came to the gallery where he sat, said to a friend who suggested that clemens be allowed to remain: “oh, i know him very well. i recognize him by his pictures, and i should be very glad to let him stay, but i haven't any choice because of the strictness of the order.” clemens, however, immediately ran across a london times correspondent, who showed him the way into the first gallery, which it seems was not emptied, so he lost none of the exhibit. mark twain's report of the austrian troubles, published in harper's magazine the following march and now included with the literary essays, will keep that episode alive and important as literature when otherwise it would have been merely embalmed, and dimly remembered, as history. it was during these exciting political times in vienna that a representative of a new york paper wrote, asking for a mark twain interview. clemens replied, giving him permission to call. when the reporter arrived clemens was at work writing in bed, as was so much his habit. at the doorway the reporter paused, waiting for a summons to enter. the door was ajar and he heard mrs. clemens say: “youth, don't you think it will be a little embarrassing for him, your being in bed?” and he heard mark twain's easy, gentle, deliberate voice reply: “why, livy, if you think so, we might have the other bed made up for him.” clemens became a privileged character in vienna. official rules were modified for his benefit. everything was made easy for him. once, on a certain grand occasion, when nobody was permitted to pass beyond a prescribed line, he was stopped by a guard, when the officer in charge suddenly rode up: “let him pass,” he commanded. “lieber gott! don't you see it's herr mark twain?” the clemens apartments at the metropole were like a court, where with those of social rank assembled the foremost authors, journalists, diplomats, painters, philosophers, scientists, of europe, and therefore of the world. a sister of the emperor of germany lived at the metropole that winter and was especially cordial. mark twain's daily movements were chronicled as if he had been some visiting potentate, and, as usual, invitations and various special permissions poured in. a vienna paper announced: he has been feted and dined from morn till eve. the homes of the aristocracy are thrown open to him, counts and princes delight to do him honor, and foreign audiences hang upon the words that fall from his lips, ready to burst out any instant into roars of laughter. deaths never came singly in the clemens family. it was on the th of december, , something more than a year after the death of susy, that orion clemens died, at the age of seventy-two. orion had remained the same to the end, sensitively concerned as to all his brother's doings, his fortunes and misfortunes: soaring into the clouds when any good news came; indignant, eager to lend help and advice in the hour of defeat; loyal, upright, and generally beloved by those who knew and understood his gentle nature. he had not been ill, and, in fact, only a few days before he died had written a fine congratulatory letter on his brother's success in accumulating means for the payment of his debts, entering enthusiastically into some literary plans which mark twain then had in prospect, offering himself for caricature if needed. i would fit in as a fool character, believing, what the tennessee mountaineers predicted, that i would grow up to be a great man and go to congress. i did not think it worth the trouble to be a common great man like andy johnson. i wouldn't give a pinch of snuff, little as i needed it, to be anybody, less than napoleon. so when a farmer took my father's offer for some chickens under advisement till the next day i said to myself, “would napoleon bonaparte have taken under advisement till the next day an offer to sell him some chickens?” to his last day and hour orion was the dreamer, always with a new plan. it was one morning early that he died. he had seated himself at a table with pencil and paper and was setting down the details of his latest project when death came to him, kindly enough, in the moment of new hope. there came also, just then, news of the death of their old hartford butler, george. it saddened them as if it had been a member of the household. jean, especially, wept bitterly. cc. mark twain pays his debts 'following the equator'--[in england, more tramps abroad.]--had come from the press in november and had been well received. it was a large, elaborate subscription volume, more elaborate than artistic in appearance. clemens, wishing to make some acknowledgment to his benefactor, tactfully dedicated it to young harry rogers: “with recognition of what he is, and an apprehension of what he may become unless he form himself a little more closely upon the model of the author.” following the equator was mark twain's last book of travel, and it did not greatly resemble its predecessors. it was graver than the innocents abroad; it was less inclined to cynicism and burlesque than the tramp. it was the thoughtful, contemplative observation and philosophizing of the soul-weary, world-weary pilgrim who has by no means lost interest, but only his eager, first enthusiasm. it is a gentler book than the tramp abroad, and for the most part a pleasanter one. it is better history and more informing. its humor, too, is of a worthier sort, less likely to be forced and overdone. the holy hindoo pilgrim's “itinerary of salvation” is one of the richest of all mark twain's fancies, and is about the best thing in the book. the revised philosophies of pudd'nhead wilson, that begin each chapter, have many of them passed into our daily speech. that some of mark twain's admirers were disappointed with the new book is very likely, but there were others who could not praise it enough. james whitcomb riley wrote: dear mr. clemens,--for a solid week-night sessions--i have been glorying in your last book-and if you've ever done anything better, stronger, or of wholesomer uplift i can't recall it. so here's my heart and here's my hand with all the augmented faith and applause of your proudest countryman! it's just a hail i'm sending you across the spaces--not to call you from your blessed work an instant, but simply to join my voice in the universal cheer that is steadfastly going up for you. as gratefully as delightedly, your abiding friend, james whitcomb riley. notwithstanding the belief that the sale of single subscription volumes had about ended, bliss did well with the new book. thirty or forty thousand copies were placed without much delay, and the accumulated royalties paid into mr. rogers's hands. the burden of debt had become a nightmare. clemens wrote: let us begin on those debts. i cannot bear the weight any longer. it totally unfits me for work. this was november , . december th he wrote: land, we are glad to see those debts diminishing. for the first time in my life i am getting more pleasure from paying money out than pulling it in. to howells, january d, clemens wrote that they had “turned the corner,” and a month later: we've lived close to the bone and saved every cent we could, & there's no undisputed claim now that we can't cash. there are only two claims which i dispute & which i mean to look into personally before i pay them. but they are small. both together they amount to only $ , . i hope you will never get the like of the load saddled onto you that was saddled onto me years ago. and yet there is such a solid pleasure in paying the things that i reckon maybe it is worth while to get into that kind of a hobble after all. mrs. clemens gets millions of delight out of it; & the children have never uttered one complaint about the scrimping from the beginning. by the end of january, , mark twain had accumulated enough money to make the final payment to his creditors and stand clear of debt. at the time of his failure he said he had given himself five years in which to clear himself of the heavy obligation. he had achieved that result in less than three. the world heralded it as a splendid triumph. miss katharine i. harrison, henry rogers's secretary, who had been in charge of the details, wrote in her letter announcing his freedom: “i wish i could shout it across the water to you so that you would get it ten days ahead of this letter.” miss harrison's letter shows that something like thirteen thousand dollars would remain to his credit after the last accounts were wiped away. clemens had kept his financial progress from the press, but the payment of the final claims was distinctly a matter of news and the papers made the most of it. head-lines shouted it, there were long editorials in which mark twain was heralded as a second walter scott, though it was hardly necessary that he should be compared with anybody; he had been in that--as in those peculiarities which had invited his disaster--just himself. one might suppose now that he had had enough of inventions and commercial enterprises of every sort that is, one who did not know mark twain might suppose this; but it would not be true. within a month after the debts were paid he had negotiated with the great austrian inventor, szczepanik, and his business manager for the american rights of a wonderful carpet-pattern machine, obtained an option for these rights at fifteen hundred thousand dollars, and, sellers-like, was planning to organize a company with a capital of fifteen hundred million dollars to control carpet-weaving industries of the world. he records in his note-book that a certain mr. wood, representing the american carpet interests, called upon him and, in the course of their conversation, asked him at what price he would sell his option. i declined, and got away from the subject. i was afraid he would offer me $ , for it. i should have been obliged to take it, but i was born with a speculative instinct & i did not want that temptation put in my way. he wrote to mr. rogers about the great scheme, inviting the standard oil to furnish the capital for it--but it appears not to have borne the test of mr. rogers's scrutiny, and is heard of no more. szczepanik had invented the 'fernseher', or telelectroscope, the machine by which one sees at a distance. clemens would have invested heavily in this, too, for he had implicit faith in its future, but the 'fernseher' was already controlled for the paris exposition; so he could only employ szczepanik as literary material, which he did in two instances: “the austrian edison keeping school again” and “from the london times of ”--magazine articles published in the century later in the year. he was fond of szczepanik and szczepanik's backer, mr. kleinburg. in one of his note-book entries he says: szczepanik is not a paige. he is a gentleman; his backer, mr. kleinburg, is a gentleman, too, yet is not a clemens--that is to say, he is not an ass. clemens did not always consult his financial adviser, rogers, any more than he always consulted his spiritual adviser, twichell, or his literary adviser, howells, when he intended to commit heresies in their respective provinces. somewhat later an opportunity came along to buy an interest in a preparation of skimmed milk, an invalid food by which the human race was going to be healed of most of its ills. when clemens heard that virchow had recommended this new restorative, the name of which was plasmon, he promptly provided macalister with five thousand pounds to invest in a company then organizing in london. it should be added that this particular investment was not an entire loss, for it paid very good dividends for several years. we shall hear of it again. for the most part clemens was content to let henry rogers do his financiering, and as the market was low with an upward incline, rogers put the various accumulations into this thing and that, and presently had some fifty thousand dollars to mark twain's credit, a very comfortable balance for a man who had been twice that amount in debt only a few years before. it has been asserted most strenuously, by those in a position to know least about the matter, that henry rogers lent, and even gave, mark twain large sums, and pointed out opportunities whereby he could make heavily by speculation. no one of these statements is true. mr. rogers neither lent nor gave mark twain money for investment, and he never allowed him to speculate when he could prevent it. he invested for him wisely, but he never bought for him a share of stock that he did not have the money in hand to pay for in full-money belonging to and earned by clemens himself. what he did give to mark twain was his priceless counsel and time--gifts more precious than any mere sum of money--boons that mark twain could accept without humiliation. he did accept them and was unceasingly grateful.--[mark twain never lost an opportunity for showing his gratitude to henry rogers. the reader is referred to appendix t, at the end of the last volume, for a brief tribute which clemens prepared in . mr. rogers would not consent to its publication.] cci. social life in vienna clemens, no longer worried about finances and full of ideas and prospects, was writing now at a great rate, mingling with all sorts of social events, lecturing for charities, and always in the lime-light. i have abundant peace of mind again--no sense of burden. work is become a pleasure--it is not labor any longer. he was the lion of the austrian capital, and it was natural that he should revel in his new freedom and in the universal tribute. mrs. clemens wrote that they were besieged with callers of every description: such funny combinations are here sometimes: one duke, several counts, several writers, several barons, two princes, newspaper women, etc. i find so far, without exception, that the high-up aristocracy are simple and cordial and agreeable. when clemens appeared as a public entertainer all society turned out to hear him and introductions were sought by persons of the most exclusive rank. once a royal introduction led to an adventure. he had been giving a charity reading in vienna, and at the end of it was introduced, with mrs. clemens, to her highness, countess bardi, a princess of the portuguese royal house by marriage and sister to the austrian archduchess maria theresa. they realized that something was required after such an introduction; that, in fact, they must go within a day or two and pay their respects by writing their names in the visitors' book, kept in a sort of anteroom of the royal establishment. a few days later, about noon, they drove to the archducal palace, inquired their way to the royal anteroom, and informed the grandly uniformed portier that they wished to write their names in the visitors' book. the portier did not produce the book, but summoned a man in livery and gold lace and directed him to take them up-stairs, remarking that her royal highness was out, but would be in presently. they protested that her royal highness was not looking for them, that they were not calling, but had merely come to sign the visitors' book, but he said: “you are americans, are you not?” “yes, we are americans.” “then you are expected. please go up-stairs.” mrs. clemens said: “oh no, we are not expected; there is some mistake. please let us sign the book and we will go away.” but it was no use. he insisted that her royal highness would be back in a very little while; that she had commanded him to say so and that they must wait. they were shown up-stairs, clemens going willingly enough, for he scented an adventure; but mrs. clemens was far from happy. they were taken to a splendid drawing-room, and at the doorway she made her last stand, refusing to enter. she declared that there was certainly some mistake, and begged them to let her sign her name in the book and go, without parleying. it was no use. their conductor insisted that they remove their wraps and sit down, which they finally did--mrs. clemens miserable, her husband in a delightful state of anticipation. writing of it to twichell that night he said: i was hoping and praying that the princess would come and catch us up there, & that those other americans who were expected would arrive and be taken as impostors by the portier & be shot by the sentinels & then it would all go into the papers & be cabled all over the world & make an immense stir and be perfectly lovely. livy was in a state of mind; she said it was too theatrically ridiculous & that i would never be able to keep my mouth shut; that i would be sure to let it out & it would get into the papers, & she tried to make me promise. “promise what?” i said. “to be quiet about this.” “indeed i won't; it's the best thing ever happened. i'll tell it and add to it & i wish joe & howells were here to make it perfect; i can't make all the rightful blunders by myself--it takes all three of us to do justice to an opportunity like this. i would just like to see howells get down to his work & explain & lie & work his futile & inventionless subterfuges when that princess comes raging in here & wanting to know.” but livy could not hear fun--it was not a time to be trying to be funny. we were in a most miserable & shameful situation, & it --just then the door spread wide & our princess & more & little princes flowed in! our princess & her sister, the archduchess maria theresa (mother to the imperial heir & to the a young girl archduchesses present, & aunt to the little princes), & we shook hands all around & sat down & had a most sociable time for half an hour, & by & by it turned out that we were the right ones & had been sent for by a messenger who started too late to catch us at the hotel. we were invited for a o'clock, but we beat that arrangement by an hour & a half. wasn't it a rattling good comedy situation? seems a kind of pity we were the right ones. it would have been such nuts to see the right ones come and get fired out, & we chatting along comfortably & nobody suspecting us for impostors. mrs. clemens to mrs. crane: of course i know that i should have courtesied to her imperial majesty & not quite so deep to her royal highness, and that mr. clemens should have kissed their hands; but it was all so unexpected that i had no time to prepare, and if i had had i should not have been there; i only went in to help mr. c. with my bad german. when our minister's wife is going to be presented to the archduchess she practises her courtesying beforehand. they had met royalty in simple american fashion and no disaster had followed. we have already made mention of the distinguished visitors who gathered in the clemens apartments at the hotel metropole. they were of many nations and ranks. it was the winter in london of twenty-five years before over again. only mark twain was not the same. then he had been unsophisticated, new, not always at his ease; now he was the polished familiar of courts and embassies--at home equally with poets and princes, authors and ambassadors and kings. such famous ones were there as vereshchagin, leschetizky, mark hambourg, dvorak, lenbach, and jokai, with diplomats of many nations. a list of foreign names may mean little to the american reader, but among them were neigra, of italy; paraty, of portugal; lowenhaupt, of sweden; and ghiki, of rumania. the queen of rumania, carmen sylva, a poetess in her own right, was a friend and warm admirer of mark twain. the princess metternich, and madame de laschowska, of poland, were among those who came, and there were nansen and his wife, and campbell-bannerman, who was afterward british premier. also there was spiridon, the painter, who made portraits of clara clemens and her father, and other artists and potentates--the list is too long. those were brilliant, notable gatherings and are remembered in vienna today. they were not always entirely harmonious, for politics was in the air and differences of opinion were likely to be pretty freely expressed. clemens and his family, as americans, did not always have a happy time of it. it was the eve of the spanish american war and most of continental europe sided with spain. austria, in particular, was friendly to its related nation; and from every side the clemenses heard how america was about to take a brutal and unfair advantage of a weaker nation for the sole purpose of annexing cuba. charles langdon and his son jervis happened to arrive in vienna about this time, bringing straight from america the comforting assurance that the war was not one of conquest or annexation, but a righteous defense of the weak. mrs. clemens gave a dinner for them, at which, besides some american students, were mark hambourg, gabrilowitsch, and the great leschetizky himself. leschetizky, an impetuous and eloquent talker, took this occasion to inform the american visitors that their country was only shamming, that cuba would soon be an american dependency. no one not born to the language could argue with leschetizky. clemens once wrote of him: he is a most capable and felicitous talker-was born for an orator, i think. what life, energy, fire in a man past ! & how he does play! he is easily the greatest pianist in the world. he is just as great & just as capable today as ever he was. last sunday night, at dinner with us, he did all the talking for hours, and everybody was glad to let him. he told his experiences as a revolutionist years ago in ' , & his battle-pictures were magnificently worded. poetzl had never met him before. he is a talker himself & a good one--but he merely sat silent & gazed across the table at this inspired man, & drank in his words, & let his eyes fill & the blood come & go in his face & never said a word. whatever may have been his doubts in the beginning concerning the cuban war, mark twain, by the end of may, had made up his mind as to its justice. when theodore stanton invited him to the decoration day banquet to be held in paris, he replied: i thank you very much for your invitation and i would accept if i were foot-free. for i should value the privilege of helping you do honor to the men who rewelded our broken union and consecrated their great work with their lives; and also i should like to be there to do, homage to our soldiers and sailors of today who are enlisted for another most righteous war, and utter the hope that they may make short and decisive work of it and leave cuba free and fed when they face for home again. and finally i should like to be present and see you interweave those two flags which, more than any others, stand for freedom and progress in the earth-flags which represent two kindred nations, each great and strong by itself, competent sureties for the peace of the world when they stand together. that is to say, the flags of england and america. to an austrian friend he emphasized this thought: the war has brought england and america close together--and to my mind that is the biggest dividend that any war in this world has ever paid. if this feeling is ever to grow cold again i do not wish to live to see it. and to twichell, whose son david had enlisted: you are living your war-days over again in dave & it must be strong pleasure mixed with a sauce of apprehension.... i have never enjoyed a war, even in history, as i am enjoying this one, for this is the worthiest one that was ever fought, so far as my knowledge goes. it is a worthy thing to fight for one's own country. it is another sight finer to fight for another man's. and i think this is the first time it has been done. but it was a sad day for him when he found that the united states really meant to annex the philippines, and his indignation flamed up. he said: “when the united states sent word to spain that the cuban atrocities must end she occupied the highest moral position ever taken by a nation since the almighty made the earth. but when she snatched the philippines she stained the flag.” ccii. literary work in vienna one must wonder, with all the social demands upon him, how clemens could find time to write as much as he did during those vienna days. he piled up a great heap of manuscript of every sort. he wrote twichell: there may be idle people in the world, but i am not one of them. and to howells: i couldn't get along without work now. i bury myself in it up to the ears. long hours-- & on a stretch sometimes. it isn't all for print, by any means, for much of it fails to suit me; , words of it in the past year. it was because of the deadness which invaded me when susy died. he projected articles, stories, critiques, essays, novels, autobiography, even plays; he covered the whole literary round. among these activities are some that represent mark twain's choicest work. “concerning the jews,” which followed the publication of his “stirring times in austria” (grew out of it, in fact), still remains the best presentation of the jewish character and racial situation. mark twain was always an ardent admirer of the jewish race, and its oppression naturally invited his sympathy. once he wrote to twichell: the difference between the brain of the average christian and that of the average jew--certainly in europe--is about the difference between a tadpole's brain & an archbishop's. it is a marvelous race; by long odds the most marvelous race the world has produced, i suppose. yet he did not fail to see its faults and to set them down in his summary of hebrew character. it was a reply to a letter written to him by a lawyer, and he replied as a lawyer might, compactly, logically, categorically, conclusively. the result pleased him. to mr. rogers he wrote: the jew article is my “gem of the ocean.” i have taken a world of pleasure in writing it & doctoring it & fussing at it. neither jew nor christian will approve of it, but people who are neither jews nor christian will, for they are in a condition to know the truth when they see it. clemens was not given to race distinctions. in his article he says: i am quite sure that (bar one) i have no race prejudices, and i think i have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. indeed i know it. i can stand any society. all that i care to know is that a man is a human being, that is enough for me; he can't be any worse. we gather from something that follows that the one race which he bars is the french, and this, just then, mainly because of the dreyfus agitations. he also states in this article: i have no special regard for satan, but i can at least claim that i have no prejudice against him. it may even be that i lean a little his way on account of his not having a fair show. clemens indeed always had a friendly feeling toward satan (at least, as he conceived him), and just at this time addressed a number of letters to him concerning affairs in general--cordial, sympathetic, informing letters enough, though apparently not suited for publication. a good deal of the work done at this period did not find its way into print. an interview with satan; a dream-story concerning a platonic sweetheart, and some further comment on austrian politics, are among the condemned manuscripts. mark twain's interest in satan would seem later to have extended to his relatives, for there are at least three bulky manuscripts in which he has attempted to set down some episodes in the life of one “young satan,” a nephew, who appears to have visited among the planets and promoted some astonishing adventures in austria several centuries ago. the idea of a mysterious, young, and beautiful stranger who would visit the earth and perform mighty wonders, was always one which mark twain loved to play with, and a nephew of satan's seemed to him properly qualified to carry out his intention. his idea was that this celestial visitant was not wicked, but only indifferent to good and evil and suffering, having no personal knowledge of any of these things. clemens tried the experiment in various ways, and portions of the manuscript are absorbingly interesting, lofty in conception, and rarely worked out--other portions being merely grotesque, in which the illusion of reality vanishes. among the published work of the vienna period is an article about a morality play, the “master of palmyra,”--[about play-acting, forum, october, .]--by adolf wilbrandt, an impressive play presenting death, the all-powerful, as the principal part. the cosmopolitan magazine for august published “at the appetite-cure,” in which mark twain, in the guise of humor, set forth a very sound and sensible idea concerning dietetics, and in october the same magazine published his first article on “christian science and the book of mrs. eddy.” as we have seen, clemens had been always deeply interested in mental healing, and in closing this humorous skit he made due acknowledgments to the unseen forces which, properly employed, through the imagination work physical benefits: “within the last quarter of a century,” he says, “in america, several sects of curers have appeared under various names and have done notable things in the way of healing ailments without the use of medicines.” clemens was willing to admit that mrs. eddy and her book had benefited humanity, but he could not resist the fun-making which certain of her formulas and her phrasing invited. the delightful humor of the cosmopolitan article awoke a general laugh, in which even devout christian scientists were inclined to join.--[it was so popular that john brisben walker voluntarily added a check for two hundred dollars to the eight hundred dollars already paid.]--nothing that he ever did exhibits more happily that peculiar literary gift upon which his fame rests. but there is another story of this period that will live when most of those others mentioned are but little remembered. it is the story of “the man that corrupted hadleyburg.” this is a tale that in its own way takes its place with the half-dozen great english short stories of the world-with such stories as “the fall of the house of usher,” by poe; “the luck of roaring camp,” by harte; “the man who would be king,” by kipling; and “the man without a country,” by hale. as a study of the human soul, its flimsy pretensions and its pitiful frailties, it outranks all the rest. in it mark twain's pessimistic philosophy concerning the “human animal” found a free and moral vent. whatever his contempt for a thing, he was always amused at it; and in this tale we can imagine him a gigantic pantagruel dangling a ridiculous manikin, throwing himself back and roaring out his great bursting guffaws at its pitiful antics. the temptation and the downfall of a whole town was a colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally and sardonically worked out. human weakness and rotten moral force were never stripped so bare or so mercilessly jeered at in the marketplace. for once mark twain could hug himself with glee in derision of self-righteousness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and that none would be so bold as to gainsay his mockery. probably no one but mark twain ever conceived the idea of demoralizing a whole community--of making its “nineteen leading citizens” ridiculous by leading them into a cheap, glittering temptation, and having them yield and openly perjure themselves at the very moment when their boasted incorruptibility was to amaze the world. and it is all wonderfully done. the mechanism of the story is perfect, the drama of it is complete. the exposure of the nineteen citizens in the very sanctity of the church itself, and by the man they have discredited, completing the carefully prepared revenge of the injured stranger, is supreme in its artistic triumph. “the man that corrupted hadleyburg” is one of the mightiest sermons against self-righteousness ever preached. its philosophy, that every man is strong until his price is named; the futility of the prayer not to be led into temptation, when it is only by resisting temptation that men grow strong--these things blaze out in a way that makes us fairly blink with the truth of them. it is mark twain's greatest short story. it is fine that it should be that, as well as much more than that; for he was no longer essentially a story-teller. he had become more than ever a moralist and a sage. having seen all of the world, and richly enjoyed and deeply suffered at its hands, he sat now as in a seat of judgment, regarding the passing show and recording his philosophies. cciii. an imperial tragedy for the summer they went to kaltenleutgeben, just out of vienna, where they had the villa paulhof, and it was while they were there, september , , that the empress elizabeth of austria was assassinated at geneva by an italian vagabond, whose motive seemed to have been to gain notoriety. the news was brought to them one evening, just at supper-time, by countess wydenbouck-esterhazy. clemens wrote to twichell: that good & unoffending lady, the empress, is killed by a madman, & i am living in the midst of world-history again. the queen's jubilee last year, the invasion of the reichsrath by the police, & now this murder, which will still be talked of & described & painted a thousand years from now. to have a personal friend of the wearer of two crowns burst in at the gate in the deep dusk of the evening & say, in a voice broken with tears, “my god! the empress is murdered,” & fly toward her home before we can utter a question --why, it brings the giant event home to you, makes you a part of it & personally interested; it is as if your neighbor antony should come flying & say, “caesar is butchered--the head of the world is fallen!” of course there is no talk but of this. the mourning is universal and genuine, the consternation is stupefying. the austrian empire is being draped with black. vienna will be a spectacle to see by next saturday, when the funeral cortege marches. clemens and the others went into vienna for the funeral ceremonies and witnessed them from the windows of the new krantz hotel, which faces the capuchin church where the royal dead lie buried. it was a grandly impressive occasion, a pageant of uniforms of the allied nations that made up the empire of austria. clemens wrote of it at considerable length, and sent the article to mr. rogers to offer to the magazines. later, however, he recalled it just why is not clear. in one place he wrote: twice the empress entered vienna in state; the first time was in , when she was a bride of seventeen, & when she rode in measureless pomp through a world of gay flags & decorations down the streets, walled on both hands with the press of shouting & welcoming subjects; & the second time was last wednesday, when she entered the city in her coffin, & moved down the same streets in the dead of night under waving black flags, between human walls again, but everywhere was a deep stillness now & a stillness emphasized rather than broken by the muffled hoofbeats of the long cavalcade over pavements cushioned with sand, & the low sobbing of gray-headed women who had witnessed the first entrance, forty-four years before, when she & they were young & unaware.... she was so blameless--the empress; & so beautiful in mind & heart, in person & spirit; & whether with the crown upon her head, or without it & nameless, a grace to the human race, almost a justification of its creation; would be, indeed, but that the animal that struck her down re-establishes the doubt. they passed a quiet summer at kaltenleutgeben. clemens wrote some articles, did some translating of german plays, and worked on his “gospel,” an elaboration of his old essay on contenting one's soul through selfishness, later to be published as 'what is man?' a. c. dunham and rev. dr. parker, of hartford, came to vienna, and clemens found them and brought them out to kaltenleutgeben and read them chapters of his doctrines, which, he said, mrs. clemens would not let him print. dr. parker and dunham returned to hartford and reported mark twain more than ever a philosopher; also that he was the “center of notability and his house a court.” cciv. the second winter in vienna the clemens family did not return to the metropole for the winter, but went to the new krantz, already mentioned, where they had a handsome and commodious suite looking down on the neuer markt and on the beautiful facade of the capuchin church, with the great cathedral only a step away. there they passed another brilliant and busy winter. never in europe had they been more comfortably situated; attention had been never more lavishly paid to them. their drawing-room was a salon which acquired the name of the “second embassy.” clemens in his note-book wrote: during years now i have filled the position--with some credit, i trust, of self-appointed ambassador-at-large of the united states of america--without salary. which was a joke; but there was a large grain of truth in it, for mark twain, more than any other american in europe, was regarded as typically representing his nation and received more lavish honors. it had become the fashion to consult him on every question of public interest, for he was certain to say something worth printing, whether seriously or otherwise. when the tsar of russia proposed the disarmament of the nations william t. stead, editor of the review of reviews, wrote for mark twain's opinion. he replied: dear mr. steady,--the tsar is ready to disarm. i am ready to disarm. collect the others; it should not be much of a task now. mark twain. he was on a tide of prosperity once more, one that was to continue now until the end. he no longer had any serious financial qualms. he could afford to be independent. he refused ten thousand dollars for a tobacco indorsement, though he liked the tobacco well enough; and he was aware that even royalty was willing to put a value on its opinions. he declined ten thousand dollars a year for five years to lend his name as editor of a humorous periodical, though there was no reason to suppose that the paper would be otherwise than creditably conducted. he declined lecture propositions from pond at the rate of about one a month. he could get along without these things, he said, and still preserve some remnants of self-respect. in a letter to rogers he said: pond offers me $ , for nights, but i do not feel strongly tempted. mrs. clemens ditto. early in he wrote to howells that mrs. clemens had proved to him that they owned a house and furniture in hartford, that his english and american copyrights paid an income on the equivalent of two hundred thousand dollars, and that they had one hundred and seven thousand dollars' accumulation in the bank. “i have been out and bought a box of c. cigars,” he says; “i was smoking / c. before.” the things that men are most likely to desire had come to mark twain, and no man was better qualified to rejoice in them. that supreme, elusive thing which we call happiness might have been his now but for the tragedy of human bereavement and the torture of human ills. that he did rejoice--reveled indeed like a boy in his new fortunes, the honors paid him, and in all that gay viennese life-there is no doubt. he could wave aside care and grief and remorse, forget their very existence, it seemed; but in the end he had only driven them ahead a little way and they waited by his path. once, after reciting his occupations and successes, he wrote: all these things might move and interest one. but how, desperately more i have been moved to-night by the thought of a little old copy in the nursery of 'at the back of the north wind'. oh, what happy days they were when that book was read, and how susy loved it!... death is so kind, benignant, to whom he loves, but he goes by us others & will not look our way. and to twichell a few days later: a hartford with no susy in it--& no ned bunce!--it is not the city of hartford, it is the city of heartbreak.... it seems only a few weeks since i saw susy last--yet that was & this is .... my work does not go well to-day. it failed yesterday--& the day before & the day before that. and so i have concluded to put the ms. in the waste-basket & meddle with some other subject. i was trying to write an article advocating the quadrupling of the salaries of our ministers & ambassadors, & the devising of an official dress for them to wear. it seems an easy theme, yet i couldn't do the thing to my satisfaction. all i got out of it was an article on monaco & monte carlo--matters not connected with the subject at all. still, that was something--it's better than a total loss. he finished the article--“diplomatic pay and clothes”--in which he shows how absurd it is for america to expect proper representation on the trifling salaries paid to her foreign ministers, as compared with those allowed by other nations. he prepared also a reminiscent article--the old tale of the shipwrecked hornet and the magazine article intended as his literary debut a generation ago. now and again he worked on some one of the several unfinished longer tales, but brought none of them to completion. the german drama interested him. once he wrote to mr. rogers that he had translated “in purgatory” and sent it to charles frohman, who pronounced it “all jabber and no play.” curious, too, for it tears these austrians to pieces with laughter. when i read it, now, it seems entirely silly; but when i see it on the stage it is exceedingly funny. he undertook a play for the burg theater, a collaboration with a vienna journalist, siegmund schlesinger. schlesinger had been successful with several dramas, and agreed with clemens to do some plays dealing with american themes. one of them was to be called “die goldgraeberin,” that is, “the woman gold-miner.” another, “the rival candidates,” was to present the humors of female suffrage. schlesinger spoke very little english, and clemens always had difficulty in comprehending rapid-fire german. so the work did not progress very well. by the time they had completed a few scenes of mining-drama the interest died, and they good-naturedly agreed that it would be necessary to wait until they understood each other's language more perfectly before they could go on with the project. frau kati schratt, later morganatic wife of emperor franz josef, but then leading comedienne of the burg theater, is said to have been cast for the leading part in the mining-play; and director-general herr schlenther, head of the burg theater management, was deeply disappointed. he had never doubted that a play built by schlesinger and mark twain, with frau schratt in the leading role, would have been a great success. clemens continued the subject of christian science that winter. he wrote a number of articles, mainly criticizing mrs. eddy and her financial methods, and for the first time conceived the notion of a book on the subject. the new hierarchy not only amused but impressed him. he realized that it was no ephemeral propaganda, that its appeal to human need was strong, and that its system of organization was masterful and complete. to twichell he wrote: somehow i continue to feel sure of that cult's colossal future.... i am selling my lourdes stock already & buying christian science trust. i regard it as the standard oil of the future. he laid the article away for the time and, as was his custom, put the play quite out of his mind and invented a postal-check which would be far more simple than post-office orders, because one could buy them in any quantity and denomination and keep them on hand for immediate use, making them individually payable merely by writing in the name of the payee. it seems a fine, simple scheme, one that might have been adopted by the government long ago; but the idea has been advanced in one form or another several times since then, and still remains at this writing unadopted. he wrote john hay about it, remarking at the close that the government officials would probably not care to buy it as soon as they found they couldn't kill christians with it. he prepared a lengthy article on the subject, in dialogue form, making it all very clear and convincing, but for some reason none of the magazines would take it. perhaps it seemed too easy, too simple, too obvious. great ideas, once developed, are often like that. ccv. speeches that were not made in a volume of mark twain's collected speeches there is one entitled “german for the hungarians--address at the jubilee celebration of the emancipation of the hungarian press, march , .” an introductory paragraph states that the ministers and members of parliament were present, and that the subject was the “ausgleich”--i.e., the arrangement for the apportionment of the taxes between hungary and austria. the speech as there set down begins: now that we are all here together i think that it will be a good idea to arrange the ausgleich. if you will act for hungary i shall be quite willing to act for austria, and this is the very time for it. it is an excellent speech, full of good-feeling and good-humor, but it was never delivered. it is only a speech that mark twain intended to deliver, and permitted to be copied by a representative of the press before he started for budapest. it was a grand dinner, brilliant and inspiring, and when, mark twain was presented to that distinguished company he took a text from something the introducer had said and became so interested in it that his prepared speech wholly disappeared from his memory. i think i will never embarrass myself with a set speech again [he wrote twichell]. my memory is old and rickety and cannot stand the strain. but i had this luck. what i did was to furnish a text for a part of the splendid speech which was made by the greatest living orator of the european world--a speech which it was a great delight to listen to, although i did not understand any word of it, it being in hungarian. i was glad i came, it was a great night, & i heard all the great men in the german tongue. the family accompanied clemens to budapest, and while there met franz, son of louis kossuth, and dined with him. i assure you [wrote mrs. clemens] that i felt stirred, and i kept saying to myself “this is louis kossuth's son.” he came to our room one day, and we had quite a long and a very pleasant talk together. he is a man one likes immensely. he has a quiet dignity about him that is very winning. he seems to be a man highly esteemed in hungary. if i am not mistaken, the last time i saw the old picture of his father it was hanging in a room that we turned into a music-room for susy at the farm. they were most handsomely treated in budapest. a large delegation greeted them on arrival, and a carriage and attendants were placed continually at their disposal. they remained several days, and clemens showed his appreciation by giving a reading for charity. it was hinted to mark twain that spring, that before leaving vienna, it would be proper for him to pay his respects to emperor franz josef, who had expressed a wish to meet him. clemens promptly complied with the formalities and the meeting was arranged. he had a warm admiration for the austrian emperor, and naturally prepared himself a little for what he wanted to say to him. he claimed afterward that he had compacted a sort of speech into a single german sentence of eighteen words. he did not make use of it, however. when he arrived at the royal palace and was presented, the emperor himself began in such an entirely informal way that it did no occur to his visitor to deliver his prepared german sentence. when he returned from the audience he said: “we got along very well. i proposed to him a plan to exterminate the human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the air for a period of two minutes. i said szczepanik would invent it for him. i think it impressed him. after a while, in the course of our talk i remembered and told the emperor i had prepared and memorized a very good speech but had forgotten it. he was very agreeable about it. he said a speech wasn't necessary. he seemed to be a most kind-hearted emperor, with a great deal of plain, good, attractive human nature about him. necessarily he must have or he couldn't have unbent to me as he did. i couldn't unbend if i were an emperor. i should feel the stiffness of the position. franz josef doesn't feel it. he is just a natural man, although an emperor. i was greatly impressed by him, and i liked him exceedingly. his face is always the face of a pleasant man and he has a fine sense of humor. it is the emperor's personality and the confidence all ranks have in him that preserve the real political serenity in what has an outside appearance of being the opposite. he is a man as well as an emperor--an emperor and a man.” clemens and howells were corresponding with something of the old-time frequency. the work that mark twain was doing--thoughtful work with serious intent--appealed strongly to howells. he wrote: you are the greatest man of your sort that ever lived, and there is no use saying anything else.... you have pervaded your century almost more than any other man of letters, if not more; and it is astonishing how you keep spreading.... you are my “shadow of a great rock in a weary land” more than any other writer. clemens, who was reading howells's serial, “their silver-wedding journey,” then running in harper's magazine, responded: you are old enough to be a weary man with paling interests, but you do not show it; you do your work in the same old, delicate & delicious & forceful & searching & perfect way. i don't know how you can--but i suspect. i suspect that to you there is still dignity in human life, & that man is not a joke--a poor joke--the poorest that was ever contrived. since i wrote my bible--[the “gospel,” what is man?]--(last year), which mrs. clemens loathes & shudders over & will not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it, man is not to me the respect-worthy person he was before, & so i have lost my pride in him & can't write gaily nor praisefully about him any more.... next morning. i have been reading the morning paper. i do it every morning--well knowing that i shall find in it the usual depravities & basenesses & hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization & cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. i cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet i do not despair. he was not greatly changed. perhaps he had fewer illusions and less iridescent ones, and certainly he had more sorrow; but the letters to howells do not vary greatly from those written twenty-five years before. there is even in them a touch of the old pretense as to mrs. clemens's violence. i mustn't stop to play now or i shall never get those helfiard letters answered. (that is not my spelling. it is mrs. clemens's, i have told her the right way a thousand times, but it does no good, she never remembers.) all through this vienna period (as during several years before and after) henry rogers was in full charge of mark twain's american affairs. clemens wrote him almost daily, and upon every matter, small or large, that developed, or seemed likely to develop, in his undertakings. the complications growing out of the type machine and webster failures were endless.--[“i hope to goodness i sha'n't get you into any more jobs such as the type-setter and webster business and the bliss-harper campaigns have been. oh, they were sickeners.” (clemens to rogers, november , .)]--the disposal of the manuscripts alone was work for a literary agent. the consideration of proposed literary, dramatic, and financial schemes must have required not only thought, but time. yet mr. rogers comfortably and genially took care of all these things and his own tremendous affairs besides, and apologized sometimes when he felt, perhaps, that he had wavered a little in his attention. clemens once wrote him: oh, dear me, you don't have to excuse yourself for neglecting me; you are entitled to the highest praise for being so limitlessly patient and good in bothering with my confused affairs, and pulling me out of a hole every little while. it makes me lazy, the way that steel stock is rising. if i were lazier--like rice--nothing could keep me from retiring. but i work right along, like a poor person. i shall figure up the rise, as the figures come in, and push up my literary prices accordingly, till i get my literature up to where nobody can afford it but the family. (n. b.--look here, are you charging storage? i am not going to stand that, you know.) meantime, i note those encouraging illogical words of yours about my not worrying because i am to be rich when i am ; why didn't you have cheiro make it , so that i could have plenty of room? it would be jolly good if some one should succeed in making a play out of “is he dead?”--[clemens himself had attempted to make a play out of his story “is he dead?” and had forwarded the ms. to rogers. later he wrote: “put 'is he dead?' in the fire. god will bless you. i too. i started to convince myself that i could write a play, or couldn't. i'm convinced. nothing can disturb that conviction.”] --from what i gather from dramatists, he will have his hands something more than full--but let him struggle, let him struggle. is there some way, honest or otherwise, by which you can get a copy of mayo's play, “pudd'nhead wilson,” for me? there is a capable young austrian here who saw it in new york and wants to translate it and see if he can stage it here. i don't think these people here would understand it or take to it, but he thinks it will pay us to try. a couple of london dramatists want to bargain with me for the right to make a high comedy out of the “million-pound note.” barkis is willing. this is but one of the briefer letters. most of them were much longer and of more elaborate requirements. also they overflowed with the gaiety of good-fortune and with gratitude. from vienna in clemens wrote: why, it is just splendid! i have nothing to do but sit around and watch you set the hen and hatch out those big broods and make my living for me. don't you wish you had somebody to do the same for you?--a magician who can turn steel add copper and brooklyn gas into gold. i mean to raise your wages again--i begin to feel that i can afford it. i think the hen ought to have a name; she must be called unberufen. that is a german word which is equivalent to it “sh! hush' don't let the spirits hear you!” the superstition is that if you happen to let fall any grateful jubilation over good luck that you've had or are hoping to have you must shut square off and say “unberufen!” and knock wood. the word drives the evil spirits away; otherwise they would divine your joy or your hopes and go to work and spoil your game. set her again--do! oh, look here! you are just like everybody; merely because i am literary you think i'm a commercial somnambulist, and am not watching you with all that money in your hands. bless you, i've got a description of you and a photograph in every police-office in christendom, with the remark appended: “look out for a handsome, tall, slender young man with a gray mustache and courtly manners and an address well calculated to deceive, calling himself by the name of smith.” don't you try to get away--it won't work. from the note-book: midnight. at miss bailie's home for english governesses. two comedies & some songs and ballads. was asked to speak & did it. (and rung in the “mexican plug.”) a voice. “the princess hohenlohe wishes you to write on her fan.” “with pleasure--where is she?” “at your elbow.” i turned & took the fan & said, “your highness's place is in a fairy tale; & by & by i mean to write that tale,” whereat she laughed a happy girlish laugh, & we moved through the crowd to get to a writing-table--& to get in a strong light so that i could see her better. beautiful little creature, with the dearest friendly ways & sincerities & simplicities & sweetnesses--the ideal princess of the fairy tales. she is or , i judge. mental telegraphy. mrs. clemens was pouring out the coffee this morning; i unfolded the neue freie presse, began to read a paragraph & said: “they've found a new way to tell genuine gems from false----” “by the roentgen ray!” she exclaimed. that is what i was going to say. she had not seen the paper, & there had been no talk about the ray or gems by herself or by me. it was a plain case of telegraphy. no man that ever lived has ever done a thing to please god --primarily. it was done to please himself, then god next. the being who to me is the real god is the one who created this majestic universe & rules it. he is the only originator, the only originator of thoughts; thoughts suggested from within, not from without; the originator of colors & of all their possible combinations; of forces & the laws that govern them; of forms & shapes of all forms-man has never invented a new one. he is the only originator. he made the materials of all things; he made the laws by which, & by which only, man may combine them into the machines & other things which outside influences suggest to him. he made character--man can portray it but not “create” it, for he is the only creator. he, is the perfect artisan, the perfect artist. ccvi. a summer in sweden a part of the tragedy of their trip around the world had been the development in jean clemens of a malady which time had identified as epilepsy. the loss of one daughter and the invalidism of another was the burden which this household had now to bear. of course they did not for a moment despair of a cure for the beautiful girl who had been so cruelly stricken, and they employed any agent that promised relief. they decided now to go to london, in the hope of obtaining beneficial treatment. they left vienna at the end of may, followed to the station by a great crowd, who loaded their compartment with flowers and lingered on the platform waving and cheering, some of them in tears, while the train pulled away. leschetizky himself was among them, and wilbrandt, the author of the master of palmyra, and many artists and other notables, “most of whom,” writes mrs. clemens, “we shall probably never see again in this world.” their vienna sojourn had been one of the most brilliant periods of their life, as well as one of the saddest. the memory of susy had been never absent, and the failing health of jean was a gathering cloud. they stopped a day or two at prague, where they were invited by the prince of thurn and taxis to visit his castle. it gave them a glimpse of the country life of the bohemian nobility which was most interesting. the prince's children were entirely familiar with tom sawyer and huckleberry finn, which they had read both in english and in the translation. they journeyed to london by way of cologne, arriving by the end of may. poultney bigelow was there, and had recently been treated with great benefit by osteopathy (then known as the swedish movements), as practised by heinrick kellgren at sanna, sweden. clemens was all interest concerning kellgren's method and eager to try it for his daughter's malady. he believed she could be benefited, and they made preparation to spend some months at least in sanna. they remained several weeks in london, where they were welcomed with hospitality extraordinary. they had hardly arrived when they were invited by lord salisbury to hatfield house, and by james bryce to portland place, and by canon wilberforce to dean's yard. a rather amusing incident happened at one of the luncheon-parties. canon wilberforce was there and left rather early. when clemens was ready to go there was just one hat remaining. it was not his, and he suspected, by the initials on the inside, that it belonged to canon wilberforce. however, it fitted him exactly and he wore it away. that evening he wrote: prince of wales hotel, de vere gardens, july, , . dear canon wilberforce,--it is p.m. during the past four hours i have not been able to take anything that did not belong to me; during all that time i have not been able to stretch a fact beyond the frontiers of truth try as i might, & meantime, not only my morals have moved the astonishment of all who have come in contact with me, but my manners have gained more compliments than they have been accustomed to. this mystery is causing my family much alarm. it is difficult to account for it. i find i haven't my own hat. have you developed any novelties of conduct since you left mr. murray's, & have they been of a character to move the concern of your friends? i think it must be this that has put me under this happy charm; but, oh dear! i tremble for the other man! sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. scarcely was this note on its way to wilberforce when the following one arrived, having crossed it in transit: july , . dear mr. clemens,--i have been conscious of a vivacity and facility of expression this afternoon beyond the normal and i have just discovered the reason!! i have seen the historic signature “mark twain” in my hat!! doubtless you have been suffering from a corresponding dullness & have wondered why. i departed precipitately, the hat stood on my umbrella and was a new lincoln & bennett--it fitted me exactly and i did not discover the mistake till i got in this afternoon. please forgive me. if you should be passing this way to-morrow will you look in and change hats? or shall i send it to the hotel? i am, very sincerely yrs., dean's yard. basil wilberforce. clemens was demanded by all the bohemian clubs, the white friars, the vagabonds, the savage, the beefsteak, and the authors. he spoke to them, and those “mark twain evenings” have become historic occasions in each of the several institutions that gave him welcome. at the vagabonds he told them the watermelon story, and at the white friars he reviewed the old days when he had been elected to that society; “days,” he said, “when all londoners were talking about nothing else than that they had discovered livingstone, and that the lost sir roger tichborne had been found and they were trying him for it.” at the savage club, too, he recalled old times and old friends, and particularly that first london visit, his days in the club twenty-seven years before. “i was feet in those days,” he said. “now i am feet / and daily diminishing in altitude, and the shrinkage of my principles goes on .... irving was here then, is here now. stanley is here, and joe hatton, but charles reade is gone and tom hood and harry lee and canon kingsley. in those days you could have carried kipling around in a lunch-basket; now he fills the world. i was young and foolish then; now i am old and foolisher.” at the authors club he paid a special tribute to rudyard kipling, whose dangerous illness in new york city and whose daughter's death had aroused the anxiety and sympathy of the entire american nation. it had done much to bring england and america closer together, clemens said. then he added that he had been engaged the past eight days compiling a pun and had brought it there to lay at their feet, not to ask for their indulgence, but for their applause. it was this: “since england and america have been joined in kipling, may they not be severed in twain.” hundreds of puns had been made on his pen-name, but this was probably his first and only attempt, and it still remains the best. they arrived in sweden early in july and remained until october. jean was certainly benefited by the kellgren treatment, and they had for a time the greatest hopes of her complete recovery. clemens became enthusiastic over osteopathy, and wrote eloquently to every one, urging each to try the great new curative which was certain to restore universal health. he wrote long articles on kellgren and his science, largely justified, no doubt, for certainly miraculous benefits were recorded; though clemens was not likely to underestimate a thing which appealed to both his imagination and his reason. writing to twichell he concluded, with his customary optimism over any new benefit: ten years hence no sane man will call a doctor except when the knife must be used--& such cases will be rare. the educated physician will himself be an osteopath. dave will become one after he has finished his medical training. young harmony ought to become one now. i do not believe there is any difference between kellgren's science and osteopathy; but i am sending to america to find out. i want osteopathy to prosper; it is common sense & scientific, & cures a wider range of ailments than the doctor's methods can reach. twichell was traveling in europe that summer, and wrote from switzerland: i seemed ever and anon to see you and me swinging along those glorious alpine woods, staring at the new unfoldings of splendor that every turn brought into view-talking, talking, endlessly talking the days through-days forever memorable to me. that was twenty-one years ago; think of it! we were youngsters then, mark, and how keen our relish of everything was! well, i can enjoy myself now; but not with that zest and rapture. oh, a lot of items of our tramp travel in that i had long forgotten came back to me as we sped through that enchanted region, and if i wasn't on duty with venice i'd stop and set down some of them, but venice must be attended to. for one thing, there is howells's book to be read at such intervals as can be snatched from the quick-time march on which our rustling leader keeps us. however, in venice so far we want to be gazing pretty steadily from morning till night, and by the grace of the gondola we can do it without exhaustion. really i am drunk with venice. but clemens was full of sweden. the skies there and the sunsets be thought surpassed any he had ever known. on an evening in september he wrote: dear joe,--i've no business in here-i ought to be outside. i shall never see another sunset to begin with it this side of heaven. venice? land, what a poor interest that is! this is the place to be. i have seen about sunsets here; & a good of them were away & beyond anything i had ever imagined before for dainty & exquisite & marvelous beauty & infinite change & variety. america? italy? the tropics? they have no notion of what a sunset ought to be. and this one--this unspeakable wonder! it discounts all the rest. it brings the tears, it is so unutterably beautiful. clemens read a book during his stay in sweden which interested him deeply. it was the open question, by elizabeth robbins--a fine study of life's sterner aspects. when he had finished he was moved to write the author this encouraging word: dear miss robbins,--a relative of matthew arnold lent us your 'open question' the other day, and mrs. clemens and i are in your debt. i am not able to put in words my feeling about the book--my admiration of its depth and truth and wisdom and courage, and the fine and great literary art and grace of the setting. at your age you cannot have lived the half of the things that are in the book, nor personally penetrated to the deeps it deals in, nor covered its wide horizons with your very own vision--and so, what is your secret? how have you written this miracle? perhaps one must concede that genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience. well, in any case, i am grateful to you. i have not been so enriched by a book for many years, nor so enchanted by one. i seem to be using strong language; still, i have weighed it. sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. ccvii. , wellington court clemens himself took the kellgren treatment and received a good deal of benefit. “i have come back in sound condition and braced for work,” he wrote macalister, upon his return to london. “a long, steady, faithful siege of it, and i begin now in five minutes.” they had settled in a small apartment at , wellington court, albert gate, where they could be near the london branch of the kellgren institution, and he had a workroom with chatto & windus, his publishers. his work, however, was mainly writing speeches, for he was entertained constantly, and it seemed impossible for him to escape. his note-book became a mere jumble of engagements. he did write an article or a story now and then, one of which, “my first lie, and how i got out of it,” was made the important christmas feature of the 'new york sunday world.'--[now included in the hadleyburg volume; “complete works.”] another article of this time was the “st. joan of arc,” which several years later appeared in harper's magazine. this article was originally written as the introduction of the english translation of the official record of the trials and rehabilitation of joan, then about to be elaborately issued. clemens was greatly pleased at being invited to prepare the introduction of this important volume, but a smug person with pedagogic proclivities was in charge of the copy and proceeded to edit mark twain's manuscript; to alter its phrasing to conform to his own ideas of the queen's english. then he had it all nicely typewritten, and returned it to show how much he had improved it, and to receive thanks and compliments. he did not receive any thanks. clemens recorded a few of the remarks that he made when he saw his edited manuscript: i will not deny that my feelings rose to in the shade. “the idea! that this long-eared animal this literary kangaroo this illiterate hostler with his skull full of axle-grease--this.....” but i stopped there, for this was not the christian spirit. his would-be editor received a prompt order to return the manuscript, after which clemens wrote a letter, some of which will go very well here. dear mr. x.,--i have examined the first page of my amended introduction,--& will begin now & jot down some notes upon your corrections. if i find any changes which shall not seem to me to be improvements i will point out my reasons for thinking so. in this way i may chance to be helpful to you, & thus profit you perhaps as much as you have desired to profit me. first paragraph. “jeanne d'arc.” this is rather cheaply pedantic, & is not in very good taste. joan is not known by that name among plain people of our race & tongue. i notice that the name of the deity occurs several times in the brief instalment of the trials which you have favored me with. to be consistent, it will be necessary that you strike out “god” & put in “dieu.” do not neglect this. second paragraph. now you have begun on my punctuation. don't you realize that you ought not to intrude your help in a delicate art like that with your limitations? and do you think that you have added just the right smear of polish to the closing clause of the sentence? third paragraph. ditto. fourth paragraph. your word “directly” is misleading; it could be construed to mean “at once.” plain clarity is better than ornate obscurity. i note your sensitive marginal remark: “rather unkind to french feelings--referring to moscow.” indeed i have not been concerning myself about french feelings, but only about stating the facts. i have said several uncourteous things about the french --calling them a “nation of ingrates” in one place--but you have been so busy editing commas & semicolons that you overlooked them & failed to get scared at them. the next paragraph ends with a slur at the french, but i have reasons for thinking you mistook it for a compliment. it is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. you ought to get it out & dance on it. that would take some of the rigidity out of it. and you ought to use it sometimes; that would help. if you had done this every now & then along through life it would not have petrified. fifth paragraph. thus far i regard this as your masterpiece! you are really perfect in the great art of reducing simple & dignified speech to clumsy & vapid commonplace. sixth paragraph. you have a singularly fine & aristocratic disrespect for homely & unpretending english. every time i use “go back” you get out your polisher & slick it up to “return.” “return” is suited only to the drawing-room--it is ducal, & says itself with a simper & a smirk. seventh paragraph. “permission” is ducal. ducal and affected. “her” great days were not “over,” they were only half over. didn't you know that? haven't you read anything at all about joan of arc? the truth is you do not pay any attention; i told you on my very first page that the public part of her career lasted two years, & you have forgotten it already. you really must get your mind out and have it repaired; you see yourself that it is all caked together. eighth paragraph. she “rode away to assault & capture a stronghold.” very well; but you do not tell us whether she succeeded or not. you should not worry the reader with uncertainties like that. i will remind you once more that clarity is a good thing in literature. an apprentice cannot do better than keep this useful rule in mind. ninth paragraph. “known” history. that word has a polish which is too indelicate for me; there doesn't seem to be any sense in it. this would have surprised me last week. ... “breaking a lance” is a knightly & sumptuous phrase, & i honor it for its hoary age & for the faithful service it has done in the prize-composition of the school-girl, but i have ceased from employing it since i got my puberty, & must solemnly object to fathering it here. and, besides, it makes me hint that i have broken one of those things before in honor of the maid, an intimation not justified by the facts. i did not break any lances or other furniture; i only wrote a book about her. truly yours, mark twain. it cost me something to restrain myself and say these smooth & half- flattering things of this immeasurable idiot, but i did it, & have never regretted it. for it is higher & nobler to be kind to even a shad like him than just.... i could have said hundreds of unpleasant things about this tadpole, but i did not even feel them. yet, in the end, he seems not to have sent the letter. writing it had served every purpose. an important publishing event of was the issue by the american publishing company of mark twain's “complete works in uniform edition.” clemens had looked forward to the day when this should be done, perhaps feeling that an assembling of his literary family in symmetrical dress constituted a sort of official recognition of his authorship. brander matthews was selected to write the introduction and prepared a fine “biographical criticism,” which pleased clemens, though perhaps he did not entirely agree with its views. himself of a different cast of mind, he nevertheless admired matthews. writing to twichell he said: when you say, “i like brander matthews, he impresses me as a man of parts & power,” i back you, right up to the hub--i feel the same way. and when you say he has earned your gratitude for cuffing me for my crimes against the leather-stockings & the vicar i ain't making any objection. dern your gratitude! his article is as sound as a nut. brander knows literature & loves it; he can talk about it & keep his temper; he can state his case so lucidly & so fairly & so forcibly that you have to agree with him even when you don't agree with him; & he can discover & praise such merits as a book has even when they are merely half a dozen diamonds scattered through an acre of mud. and so he has a right to be a critic. to detail just the opposite of the above invoice is to describe me. i haven't any right to criticize books, & i don't do it except when i hate them. i often want to criticize jane austen, but her books madden me so that i can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; & therefore i have to stop every time i begin.'--[once at a dinner given to matthews, mark twain made a speech which consisted almost entirely of intonations of the name “brander matthews” to express various shades of human emotion. it would be hopeless, of course, to attempt to convey in print any idea of this effort, which, by those who heard it, is said to have been a masterpiece of vocalization.] clemens also introduced the “uniform edition” with an author's preface, the jurisdiction of which, he said, was “restricted to furnishing reasons for the publication of the collection as a whole.” this is not easy to do. aside from the ordinary commercial reasons i find none that i can offer with dignity: i cannot say without immodesty that the books have merit; i cannot say without immodesty that the public want a “uniform edition”; i cannot say without immodesty that a “uniform edition” will turn the nation toward high ideals & elevated thought; i cannot say without immodesty that a “uniform edition” will eradicate crime, though i think it will. i find no reason that i can offer without immodesty except the rather poor one that i should like to see a “uniform edition” myself. it is nothing; a cat could say it about her kittens. still, i believe i will stand upon that. i have to have a preface & a reason, by law of custom, & the reason which i am putting forward is at least without offense. ccviii. mark twain and the wars english troubles in south africa came to a head that autumn. on the day when england's ultimatum to the boers expired clemens wrote: london, . p.m., wednesday, october , . the time is up! without a doubt the first shot in the war is being fired to-day in south africa at this moment. some man had to be the first to fall; he has fallen. whose heart is broken by this murder? for, be he boer or be he briton, it is murder, & england committed it by the hand of chamberlain & the cabinet, the lackeys of cecil rhodes & his forty thieves, the south africa company. mark twain would naturally sympathize with the boer--the weaker side, the man defending his home. he knew that for the sake of human progress england must conquer and must be upheld, but his heart was all the other way. in january, , he wrote a characteristic letter to twichell, which conveys pretty conclusively his sentiments concerning the two wars then in progress. dear joe,--apparently we are not proposing to set the filipinos free & give their islands to them; & apparently we are not proposing to hang the priests & confiscate their property. if these things are so the war out there has no interest for me. i have just been examining chapter lxx of following the equator to see if the boer's old military effectiveness is holding out. it reads curiously as if it had been written about the present war. i believe that in the next chapter my notion of the boer was rightly conceived. he is popularly called uncivilized; i do not know why. happiness, food, shelter, clothing, wholesome labor, modest & rational ambitions, honesty, kindliness, hospitality, love of freedom & limitless courage to fight for it, composure & fortitude in time of disaster, patience in time of hardship & privation, absence of noise & brag in time of victory, contentment with humble & peaceful life void of insane excitements--if there is a higher & better form of civilization than this i am not aware of it & do not know where to look for it. i suppose that we have the habit of imagining that a lot of artistic & intellectual & other artificialities must be added or it isn't complete. we & the english have these latter; but as we lack the great bulk of those others i think the boer civilization is the best of the two. my idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing & full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses, & hypocrisies. provided we could get something better in the place of it. but that is not possible perhaps. poor as it is, it is better than real savagery, therefore we must stand by it, extend it, & (in public) praise it. and so we must not utter any hurtful word about england in these days, nor fail to hope that she will win in this war, for her defeat & fall would be an irremediable disaster for the mangy human race. naturally, then, i am for england; but she is profoundly in the wrong, joe, & no (instructed) englishman doubts it. at least that is my belief. writing to howells somewhat later, he calls the conflict in south africa, a “sordid and criminal war,” and says that every day he is writing (in his head) bitter magazine articles against it. but i have to stop with that. even if wrong--& she is wrong england must be upheld. he is an enemy of the human race who shall speak against her now. why was the human race created? or at least why wasn't something creditable created in place of it?... i talk the war with both sides--always waiting until the other man introduces the topic. then i say, “my head is with the briton, but my heart & such rags of morals as i have are with the boer--now we will talk, unembarrassed and without prejudice.” and so we discuss & have no trouble. i notice that god is on both sides in this war; thus history repeats itself. but i am the only person who has noticed this; everybody here thinks he is playing the game for this side, & for this side only. clemens wrote one article for anonymous publication in the times. but when the manuscript was ready to mail in an envelope stamped and addressed to moberly bell--he reconsidered and withheld it. it still lies in the envelope with the accompanying letter, which says: don't give me away, whether you print it or not. but i think you ought to print it and get up a squabble, for the weather is just suitable. ccix. plasmon, and a new magazine clemens was not wholly wedded to osteopathy. the financial interest which he had taken in the new milk albumen, “a food for invalids,” tended to divide his faith and make him uncertain as to which was to be the chief panacea for all ills--osteopathy or plasmon. macalister, who was deeply interested in the plasmon fortunes, was anxious to get the product adopted by the army. he believed, if he could get an interview with the medical director-general, he could convince him of its merits. discussing the matter with clemens, the latter said: “macalister, you are going at it from the wrong end. you can't go direct to that man, a perfect stranger, and convince him of anything. who is his nearest friend?” macalister knew a man on terms of social intimacy with the official. clemens said, “that is the man to speak to the director-general.” “but i don't know him, either,” said macalister. “very good. do you know any one who does know him?” “yes, i know his most intimate friend.” “then he is the man for you to approach. convince him that plasmon is what the army needs, that the military hospitals are suffering for it. let him understand that what you want is to get this to the director-general, and in due time it will get to him in the proper way. you'll see.” this proved to be a true prophecy. it was only a little while until the british army had experimented with plasmon and adopted it. macalister reported the success of the scheme to clemens, and out of it grew the story entitled, “two little tales,” published in november of the following year ( ) in the century magazine. perhaps the reader will remember that in the “two little tales” the emperor is very ill and the lowest of all his subjects knows a certain remedy, but he cannot seek the emperor direct, so he wisely approaches him through a series of progressive stages--finally reaching and curing his stricken majesty. clemens had the courage of his investments. he adopted plasmon as his own daily food, and induced various members of the family to take it in its more palatable forms, one of these being a preparation of chocolate. he kept the reading-table by his bed well stocked with a variety of the products and invited various callers to try a complimentary sample lot. it was really an excellent and harmless diet, and both the company and its patients would seem to have prospered--perhaps are prospering still. there was another business opportunity came along just at this time. s. s. mcclure was in england with a proposition for starting a new magazine whose complexion was to be peculiarly american, with mark twain as its editor. the magazine was to be called 'the universal', and by the proposition clemens was to receive a tenth interest in it for his first year's work, and an added twentieth interest for each of the two succeeding years, with a guarantee that his shares should not earn him less than five thousand dollars the first year, with a proportionate increase as his holdings grew. the scheme appealed to clemens, it being understood in the beginning that he was to give very little time to the work, with the privilege of doing it at his home, wherever that might happen to be. he wrote of the matter to mr. rogers, explaining in detail, and rogers replied, approving the plan. mr. rogers said he knew that he [rogers] would have to do most of the work in editing the magazine, and further added: one thing i shall insist upon, however, if i have anything to do with the matter, and it is this: that when you have made up your mind on the subject you will stick to it. i have not found in your composition that element of stubbornness which is a constant source of embarrassment to me in all friendly and social ways, but which, when applied to certain lines of business, brings in the dollar and fifty-cent pieces. if you accept the position, of course that means that you have to come to this country. if you do, the yachting will be a success. there was considerable correspondence with mcclure over the new periodical. in one letter clemens set forth his general views of the matter quite clearly: let us not deceive any one, nor allow any one to deceive himself, if it can be prevented. this is not to be comic magazine. it is to be simply a good, clean, wholesome collection of well-written & enticing literary products, like the other magazines of its class; not setting itself to please but one of man's moods, but all of them. it will not play but one kind of music, but all kinds. i should not be able to edit a comic periodical satisfactorily, for lack of interest in the work. i value humor highly, & am constitutionally fond of it, but i should not like it as a steady diet. for its own best interests, humor should take its outings in grave company; its cheerful dress gets heightened color from the proximity of sober hues. for me to edit a comic magazine would be an incongruity & out of character, for of the twenty-three books which i have written eighteen do not deal in humor as their chiefs feature, but are half & half admixtures of fun & seriousness. i think i have seldom deliberately set out to be humorous, but have nearly always allowed the humor to drop in or stay out, according to its fancy. although i have many times been asked to write something humorous for an editor or a publisher i have had wisdom enough to decline; a person could hardly be humorous with the other man watching him like that. i have never tried to write a humorous lecture; i have only tried to write serious ones--it is the only way not to succeed. i shall write for this magazine every time the spirit moves me; but i look for my largest entertainment in editing. i have been edited by all kinds of people for more than thirty-eight years; there has always been somebody in authority over my manuscript & privileged to improve it; this has fatigued me a good deal, & i have often longed to move up from the dock to the bench & rest myself and fatigue others. my opportunity is come, but i hope i shall not abuse it overmuch. i mean to do my best to make a good magazine; i mean to do my whole duty, & not shirk any part of it. there are plenty of distinguished artists, novelists, poets, story-tellers, philosophers, scientists, explorers, fighters, hunters, followers of the sea, & seekers of adventure; & with these to do the hard & the valuable part of the work with the pen & the pencil it will be comfort & joy to me to walk the quarter-deck & superintend. meanwhile mcclure's enthusiasm had had time to adjust itself to certain existing facts. something more than a month later he wrote from america at considerable length, setting forth the various editorial duties and laying stress upon the feature of intimate physical contact with the magazine. he went into the matter of the printing schedule, the various kinds of paper used, the advertising pages, illustrations--into all the detail, indeed, which a practical managing editor must compass in his daily rounds. it was pretty evident that clemens would not be able to go sailing about on mr. rogers's yacht or live at will in london or new york or vienna or elmira, but that he would be more or less harnessed to a revolving chair at an editorial desk, the thing which of all fates he would be most likely to dread the scheme appears to have died there--the correspondence to have closed. somewhat of the inducement in the mcclure scheme had been the thought in clemens's mind that it would bring him back to america. in a letter to mr. rogers (january , ) he said, “i am tired to death of this everlasting exile.” mrs. clemens often wrote that he was restlessly impatient to return. they were, in fact, constantly discussing the practicability of returning to their own country now and opening the hartford home. clemens was ready to do that or to fall in with any plan that would bring him across the water and settle him somewhere permanently. he was tired of the wandering life they had been leading. besides the long trip of ' and ' they had moved two or three times a year regularly since leaving hartford, nine years before. it seemed to him that they were always packing and unpacking. “the poor man is willing to live anywhere if we will only let him 'stay put,” wrote mrs. clemens, but he did want to settle in his own land. mrs. clemens, too, was weary with wandering, but the hartford home no longer held any attraction for her. there had been a time when her every letter dwelt on their hope of returning to it. now the thought filled her with dread. to her sister she wrote: do you think we can live through the first going into the house in hartford? i feel if we had gotten through the first three months all might be well, but consider the first night. the thought of the responsibility of that great house--the taking up again of the old life-disheartened her, too. she had added years and she had not gained in health or strength. when i was comparatively young i found the burden of that house very great. i don't think i was ever fitted for housekeeping. i dislike the practical part of it so much. i hate it when the servants don't do well, and i hate the correcting them. yet no one ever had better discipline in her domestic affairs or ever commanded more devoted service. her strength of character and the proportions of her achievement show large when we consider this confession. they planned to return in the spring, but postponed the date for sailing. jean was still under kellgren's treatment, and, though a cure had been promised her, progress was discouragingly slow. they began to look about for summer quarters in or near london. ccx. london social affairs all this time clemens had been tossing on the london social tide. there was a call for him everywhere. no distinguished visitor of whatever profession or rank but must meet mark twain. the king of sweden was among his royal conquests of that season. he was more happy with men of his own kind. he was often with moberly bell, editor of the times; e. a. abbey, the painter; sir henry lucy, of punch (toby, m.p.); james bryce, and herbert gladstone; and there were a number of brilliant irishmen who were his special delight. once with mrs. clemens he dined with the author of his old favorite, 'european morals', william e. h. lecky. lady gregory was there and sir dennis fitz-patrick; who had been governor-general at lahore when they were in india, and a number of other irish ladies and gentlemen. it was a memorable evening. to twichell clemens wrote: joe, do you know the irish gentleman & the irish lady, the scotch gentleman & the scotch lady? these are darlings, every one. night before last it was all irish-- . one would have to travel far to match their ease & sociability & animation & sparkle & absence of shyness & self-consciousness. it was american in these fine qualities. this was at mr. lecky's. he is irish, you know. last night it was irish again, at lady gregory's. lord roberts is irish, & sir william butler, & kitchener, i think, & a disproportion of the other prominent generals are of irish & scotch breed keeping up the traditions of wellington & sir colin campbell, of the mutiny. you will have noticed that in s. a., as in the mutiny, it is usually the irish & scotch that are placed in the forefront of the battle.... sir william butler said, “the celt is the spearhead of the british lance.” he mentions the news from the african war, which had been favorable to england, and what a change had come over everything in consequence. the dinner-parties had been lodges of sorrow and depressing. now everybody was smiling again. in a note-book entry of this time he wrote: relief of mafeking (may , ). the news came at . p.m. before all london was in the streets, gone mad with joy. by then the news was all over the american continent. clemens had been talking copyright a good deal in london, and introducing it into his speeches. finally, one day he was summoned before a committee of the house of lords to explain his views. his old idea that the product of a man's brain is his property in perpetuity and not for any term of years had not changed, and they permitted him to dilate on this (to them) curious doctrine. the committee consisted of lords monkswell, knutsford, avebury, farrar, and thwing. when they asked for his views he said: “in my opinion the copyright laws of england and america need only the removal of the forty-two-year limit and the return to perpetual copyright to be perfect. i consider that at least one of the reasons advanced in justification of limited copyright is fallacious--namely, the one which makes a distinction between an author's property and real estate, and pretends that the two are not created, produced, or acquired in the same way, thus warranting a different treatment of the two by law.” continuing, he dwelt on the ancient doctrine that there was no property in an idea, showing how the far greater proportion of all property consisted of nothing more than elaborated ideas--the steamship, locomotive, telephone, the vast buildings in the world, how all of these had been constructed upon a basic idea precisely as a book is constructed, and were property only as a book is property, and therefore rightly subject to the same laws. he was carefully and searchingly examined by that shrewd committee. he kept them entertained and interested and left them in good-nature, even if not entirely converted. the papers printed his remarks, and london found them amusing. a few days after the copyright session, clemens, responding to the toast, “literature,” at the royal literary fund banquet, made london laugh again, and early in june he was at the savoy hotel welcoming sir henry irving back to england after one of his successful american tours. on the fourth of july ( ) clemens dined with the lord chief-justice, and later attended an american banquet at the hotel cecil. he arrived late, when a number of the guests were already going. they insisted, however, that he make a speech, which he did, and considered the evening ended. it was not quite over. a sequel to his “luck” story, published nine years before, suddenly developed. to go back a little, the reader may recall that “luck” was a story which twichell had told him as being supposedly true. the hero of it was a military officer who had risen to the highest rank through what at least seemed to be sheer luck, including a number of fortunate blunders. clemens thought the story improbable, but wrote it and laid it away for several years, offering it at last in the general house-cleaning which took place after the first collapse of the machine. it was published in harper's magazine for august, , and something less than a year later, in rome, an english gentleman--a new acquaintance--said to him: “mr. clemens, shall you go to england?” “very likely.” “shall you take your tomahawk with you?” “why--yes, if it shall seem best.” “well, it will. be advised. take it with you.” “why?” “because of that sketch of yours entitled 'luck.' that sketch is current in england, and you will surely need your tomahawk.” “what makes you think so?” “i think so because the hero of the sketch will naturally want your scalp, and will probably apply for it. be advised. take your tomahawk along.” “why, even with it i sha'n't stand any chance, because i sha'n't know him when he applies, and he will have my scalp before i know what his errand is.” “come, do you mean to say that you don't know who the hero of that sketch is?” “indeed i haven't any idea who the hero of the sketch is. who is it?” his informant hesitated a moment, then named a name of world-wide military significance. as mask twain finished his fourth of july speech at the cecil and started to sit down a splendidly uniformed and decorated personage at his side said: “mr. clemens, i have been wanting to know you a long time,” and he was looking down into the face of the hero of “luck.” “i was caught unprepared,” he said in his notes of it. “i didn't sit down--i fell down. i didn't have my tomahawk, and i didn't know what would happen. but he was, composed, and pretty soon i got composed and we had a good, friendly time. if he had ever heard of that sketch of mine he did not manifest it in any way, and at twelve, midnight, i took my scalp home intact.” ccxi. dollis hill and home it was early in july, , that they removed to dollis hill house, a beautiful old residence surrounded by trees on a peaceful hilltop, just outside of london. it was literally within a stone's-throw of the city limits, yet it was quite rural, for the city had not overgrown it then, and it retained all its pastoral features--a pond with lily-pads, the spreading oaks, the wide spaces of grassy lawn. gladstone, an intimate friend of the owner, had made it a favorite retreat at one period of his life, and the place to-day is converted into a public garden called gladstone park. the old english diplomat used to drive out and sit in the shade of the trees and read and talk and translate homer, and pace the lawn as he planned diplomacy, and, in effect, govern the english empire from that retired spot. clemens, in some memoranda made at the moment, doubts if gladstone was always at peace in his mind in this retirement. “was he always really tranquil within,” he says, “or was he only externally so--for effect? we cannot know; we only know that his rustic bench under his favorite oak has no bark on its arms. facts like this speak louder than words.” the red-brick residential wave of london was still some distance away in . clemens says: the rolling sea of green grass still stretches away on every hand, splotches with shadows of spreading oaks in whose black coolness flocks of sheep lie peacefully dreaming. dreaming of what? that they are in london, the metropolis of the world, post-office district, n. w.? indeed no. they are not aware of it. i am aware of it, but that is all. it is not possible to realize it. for there is no suggestion of city here; it is country, pure & simple, & as still & reposeful as is the bottom of the sea. they all loved dollis hill. mrs. clemens wrote as if she would like to remain forever in that secluded spot. it is simply divinely beautiful & peaceful;... the great old trees are beyond everything. i believe nowhere in the world do you find such trees as in england.... jean has a hammock swung between two such great trees, & on the other side of a little pond, which is full of white & yellow pond-lilies, there is tall grass & trees & clara & jean go there in the afternoons, spread down a rug on the grass in the shade & read & sleep. they all spent most of their time outdoors at dollis hill under those spreading trees. clemens to twichell in midsummer wrote: i am the only person who is ever in the house in the daytime, but i am working & deep in the luxury of it. but there is one tremendous defect. livy is all so enchanted with the place & so in love with it that she doesn't know how she is going to tear herself away from it. much company came to them at dollis hill. friends drove out from london, and friends from america came often, among them--the sages, prof. willard fiske, and brander matthews with his family. such callers were served with tea and refreshment on the lawn, and lingered, talking and talking, while the sun got lower and the shadows lengthened, reluctant to leave that idyllic spot. “dollis hill comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home i ever occupied,” he wrote when the summer was about over. but there was still a greater attraction than dollis hill. toward the end of summer they willingly left that paradise, for they had decided at last to make that home-returning voyage which had invited them so long. they were all eager enough to go--clemens more eager than the rest, though he felt a certain sadness, too, in leaving the tranquil spot which in a brief summer they had so learned to love. writing to w. h. helm, a london newspaper man who had spent pleasant hours with him chatting in the shade, he said: ... the packing & fussing & arranging have begun, for the removal to america &, by consequence, the peace of life is marred & its contents & satisfactions are departing. there is not much choice between a removal & a funeral; in fact, a removal is a funeral, substantially, & i am tired of attending them. they closed dollis hill, spent a few days at brown's hotel, and sailed for america, on the minnehaha, october , , bidding, as clemens believed, and hoped, a permanent good-by to foreign travel. they reached new york on the th, triumphantly welcomed after their long nine years of wandering. how glad mark twain was to get home may be judged from his remark to one of the many reporters who greeted him. “if i ever get ashore i am going to break both of my legs so i can't, get away again.” volume iii, part : - ccxii. the return of the conqueror it would be hard to exaggerate the stir which the newspapers and the public generally made over the homecoming of mark twain. he had left america, staggering under heavy obligation and set out on a pilgrimage of redemption. at the moment when this mecca, was in view a great sorrow had befallen him and, stirred a world-wide and soul-deep tide of human sympathy. then there had followed such ovation as has seldom been conferred upon a private citizen, and now approaching old age, still in the fullness of his mental vigor, he had returned to his native soil with the prestige of these honors upon him and the vast added glory of having made his financial fight single-handed-and won. he was heralded literally as a conquering hero. every paper in the land had an editorial telling the story of his debts, his sorrow, and his triumphs. “he had behaved like walter scott,” says howells, “as millions rejoiced to know who had not known how walter scott had behaved till they knew it was like clemens.” howells acknowledges that he had some doubts as to the permanency of the vast acclaim of the american public, remembering, or perhaps assuming, a national fickleness. says howells: he had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or more largely imagined in europe, and i suppose it was my sense of this that inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider “the state of polite learning” among us, “you mustn't expect people to keep it up here as they do in england.” but it appeared that his countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of him past all precedent. clemens went to the earlington hotel and began search for a furnished house in new york. they would not return to hartford--at least not yet. the associations there were still too sad, and they immediately became more so. five days after mark twain's return to america, his old friend and co-worker, charles dudley warner, died. clemens went to hartford to act as a pall-bearer and while there looked into the old home. to sylvester baxter, of boston, who had been present, he wrote a few days later: it was a great pleasure to me to renew the other days with you, & there was a pathetic pleasure in seeing hartford & the house again; but i realized that if we ever enter the house again to live our hearts will break. i am not sure that we shall ever be strong enough to endure that strain. even if the surroundings had been less sorrowful it is not likely that clemens would have returned to hartford at this time. he had become a world-character, a dweller in capitals. everywhere he moved a world revolved about him. such a figure in germany would live naturally in berlin; in england london; in france, paris; in austria, vienna; in america his headquarters could only be new york. clemens empowered certain of his friends to find a home for him, and mr. frank n. doubleday discovered an attractive and handsomely furnished residence at west tenth street, which was promptly approved. doubleday, who was going to boston, left orders with the agent to draw the lease and take it up to the new tenant for signature. to clemens he said: “the house is as good as yours. all you've got to do is to sign the lease. you can consider it all settled.” when doubleday returned from boston a few days later the agent called on him and complained that he couldn't find mark twain anywhere. it was reported at his hotel that he had gone and left no address. doubleday was mystified; then, reflecting, he had an inspiration. he walked over to west tenth street and found what he had suspected--mark twain had moved in. he had convinced the caretaker that everything was all right and he was quite at home. doubleday said: “why, you haven't executed the lease yet.” “no,” said clemens, “but you said the house was as good as mine,” to which doubleday agreed, but suggested that they go up to the real-estate office and give the agent notice that he was in possession of the premises. doubleday's troubles were not quite over, however. clemens began to find defects in his new home and assumed to hold doubleday responsible for them. he sent a daily postal card complaining of the windows, furnace, the range, the water-whatever he thought might lend interest to doubleday's life. as a matter of fact, he was pleased with the place. to macalister he wrote: we were very lucky to get this big house furnished. there was not another one in town procurable that would answer us, but this one is all right-space enough in it for several families, the rooms all old-fashioned, great size. the house at west tenth street became suddenly one of the most conspicuous residences in new york. the papers immediately made its appearance familiar. many people passed down that usually quiet street, stopping to observe or point out where mark twain lived. there was a constant procession of callers of every kind. many were friends, old and new, but there was a multitude of strangers. hundreds came merely to express their appreciation of his work, hoping for a personal word or a hand-shake or an autograph; but there were other hundreds who came with this thing and that thing--axes to grind--and there were newspaper reporters to ask his opinion on politics, or polygamy, or woman's suffrage; on heaven and hell and happiness; on the latest novel; on the war in africa, the troubles in china; on anything under the sun, important or unimportant, interesting or inane, concerning which one might possibly hold an opinion. he was unfailing “copy” if they could but get a word with him. anything that he might choose to say upon any subject whatever was seized upon and magnified and printed with head-lines. sometimes opinions were invented for him. if he let fall a few words they were multiplied into a column interview. “that reporter worked a miracle equal to the loaves and fishes,” he said of one such performance. many men would have become annoyed and irritable as these things continued; but mark twain was greater than that. eventually he employed a secretary to stand between him and the wash of the tide, as a sort of breakwater; but he seldom lost his temper no matter what was the request which was laid before him, for he recognized underneath it the great tribute of a great nation. of course his literary valuation would be affected by the noise of the general applause. magazines and syndicates besought him for manuscripts. he was offered fifty cents and even a dollar a word for whatever he might give them. he felt a child-like gratification in these evidences of his market advancement, but he was not demoralized by them. he confined his work to a few magazines, and in november concluded an arrangement with the new management of harper & brothers, by which that firm was to have the exclusive serial privilege of whatever he might write at a fixed rate of twenty cents per word--a rate increased to thirty cents by a later contract, which also provided an increased royalty for the publication of his books. the united states, as a nation, does not confer any special honors upon private citizens. we do not have decorations and titles, even though there are times when it seems that such things might be not inappropriately conferred. certain of the newspapers, more lavish in their enthusiasm than others, were inclined to propose, as one paper phrased it, “some peculiar recognition--something that should appeal to samuel l. clemens, the man, rather than to mark twain, the literate. just what form this recognition should take is doubtful, for the case has no exact precedent.” perhaps the paper thought that mark twain was entitled--as he himself once humorously suggested-to the “thanks of congress” for having come home alive and out of debt, but it is just as well that nothing of the sort was ever seriously considered. the thanks of the public at large contained more substance, and was a tribute much more to his mind. the paper above quoted ended by suggesting a very large dinner and memorial of welcome as being more in keeping with the republican idea and the american expression of good-will. but this was an unneeded suggestion. if he had eaten all the dinners proposed he would not have lived to enjoy his public honors a month. as it was, he accepted many more dinners than he could eat, and presently fell into the habit of arriving when the banqueting was about over and the after-dinner speaking about to begin. even so the strain told on him. “his friends saw that he was wearing himself out,” says howells, and perhaps this was true, for he grew thin and pale and contracted a hacking cough. he did not spare himself as often as he should have done. once to richard watson gilder he sent this line of regrets: in bed with a chest cold and other company--wednesday. dear gilder,--i can't. if i were a well man i could explain with this pencil, but in the cir---ces i will leave it all to your imagination. was it grady who killed himself trying to do all the dining and speeching? no, old man, no, no! ever yours, mark. he became again the guest of honor at the lotos club, which had dined him so lavishly seven years before, just previous to his financial collapse. that former dinner had been a distinguished occasion, but never before had the lotos club been so brimming with eager hospitality as on the second great occasion. in closing his introductory speech president frank lawrence said, “we hail him as one who has borne great burdens with manliness and courage, who has emerged from great struggles victorious,” and the assembled diners roared out their applause. clemens in his reply said: your president has referred to certain burdens which i was weighted with. i am glad he did, as it gives me an opportunity which i wanted--to speak of those debts. you all knew what he meant when he referred to it, & of the poor bankrupt firm of c. l. webster & co. no one has said a word about those creditors. there were ninety-six creditors in all, & not by a finger's weight did ninety-five out of the ninety-six add to the burden of that time. they treated me well; they treated me handsomely. i never knew i owed them anything; not a sign came from them. it was like him to make that public acknowledgment. he could not let an unfair impression remain that any man or any set of men had laid an unnecessary burden upon him-his sense of justice would not consent to it. he also spoke on that occasion of certain national changes. how many things have happened in the seven years i have been away from home! we have fought a righteous war, and a righteous war is a rare thing in history. we have turned aside from our own comfort and seen to it that freedom should exist, not only within our own gates, but in our own neighborhood. we have set cuba free and placed her among the galaxy of free nations of the world. we started out to set those poor filipinos free, but why that righteous plan miscarried perhaps i shall never know. we have also been making a creditable showing in china, and that is more than all the other powers can say. the “yellow terror” is threatening the world, but no matter what happens the united states says that it has had no part in it. since i have been away we have been nursing free silver. we have watched by its cradle, we have done our best to raise that child, but every time it seemed to be getting along nicely along came some pestiferous republican and gave it the measles or something. i fear we will never raise that child. we've done more than that. we elected a president four years ago. we've found fault and criticized him, and here a day or two ago we go and elect him for another four years, with votes enough to spare to do it over again. one club followed another in honoring mark twain--the aldine, the st. nicholas, the press clubs, and other associations and societies. his old friends were at these dinners--howells, aldrich, depew, rogers, ex-speaker reed--and they praised him and gibed him to his and their hearts' content. it was a political year, and he generally had something to say on matters municipal, national, or international; and he spoke out more and more freely, as with each opportunity he warmed more righteously to his subject. at the dinner given to him by the st. nicholas club he said, with deep irony: gentlemen, you have here the best municipal government in the world, and the most fragrant and the purest. the very angels of heaven envy you and wish they had a government like it up there. you got it by your noble fidelity to civic duty; by the stern and ever watchful exercise of the great powers lodged in you as lovers and guardians of your city; by your manly refusal to sit inert when base men would have invaded her high places and possessed them; by your instant retaliation when any insult was offered you in her person, or any assault was made upon her fair fame. it is you who have made this government what it is, it is you who have made it the envy and despair of the other capitals of the world--and god bless you for it, gentlemen, god bless you! and when you get to heaven at last they'll say with joy, “oh, there they come, the representatives of the perfectest citizenship in the universe show them the archangel's box and turn on the limelight!” those hearers who in former years had been indifferent to mark twain's more serious purpose began to realize that, whatever he may have been formerly, he was by no means now a mere fun-maker, but a man of deep and grave convictions, able to give them the fullest and most forcible expression. he still might make them laugh, but he also made them think, and he stirred them to a truer gospel of patriotism. he did not preach a patriotism that meant a boisterous cheering of the stars and stripes right or wrong, but a patriotism that proposed to keep the stars and stripes clean and worth shouting for. in an article, perhaps it was a speech, begun at this time he wrote: we teach the boys to atrophy their independence. we teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter --exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. we teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, & so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it & out of place--the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. this is patriotism on the russian plan. howells tells of discussing these vital matters with him in “an upper room, looking south over a quiet, open space of back yards where,” he says, “we fought our battles in behalf of the filipinos and boers, and he carried on his campaign against the missionaries in china.” howells at the time expressed an amused fear that mark twain's countrymen, who in former years had expected him to be merely a humorist, should now, in the light of his wider acceptance abroad, demand that he be mainly serious. but the american people were quite ready to accept him in any of his phases, fully realizing that whatever his philosophy or doctrine it would have somewhat of the humorous form, and whatever his humor, there would somewhere be wisdom in it. he had in reality changed little; for a generation he had thought the sort of things which he now, with advanced years and a different audience, felt warranted in uttering openly. the man who in ' had written against corruption in san francisco, who a few years later had defended the emigrant chinese against persecution, who at the meetings of the monday evening club had denounced hypocrisy in politics, morals, and national issues, did not need to change to be able to speak out against similar abuses now. and a newer generation as willing to herald mark twain as a sage as well as a humorist, and on occasion to quite overlook the absence of the cap and bells. ccxiii. mark twain--general spokesman clemens did not confine his speeches altogether to matters of reform. at a dinner given by the nineteenth century club in november, , he spoke on the “disappearance of literature,” and at the close of the discussion of that subject, referring to milton and scott, he said: professor winchester also said something about there being no modern epics like “paradise lost.” i guess he's right. he talked as if he was pretty familiar with that piece of literary work, and nobody would suppose that he never had read it. i don't believe any of you have ever read “paradise lost,” and you don't want to. that's something that you just want to take on trust. it's a classic, just as professor winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic--something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. professor trent also had a good deal to say about the disappearance of literature. he said that scott would outlive all his critics. i guess that's true. that fact of the business is you've got to be one of two ages to appreciate scott. when you're eighteen you can read ivanhoe, and you want to wait until you're ninety to read some of the rest. it takes a pretty well-regulated abstemious critic to live ninety years. but a few days later he was back again in the forefront of reform, preaching at the berkeley lyceum against foreign occupation in china. it was there that he declared himself a boxer. why should not china be free from the foreigners, who are only making trouble on her soil? if they would only all go home what a pleasant place china would be for the chinese! we do not allow chinamen to come here, and i say, in all seriousness, that it would be a graceful thing to let china decide who shall go there. china never wanted foreigners any more than foreigners wanted chinamen, and on this question i am with the boxers every time. the boxer is a patriot. he loves his country better than he does the countries of other people. i wish him success. we drive the chinaman out of our country; the boxer believes in driving us out of his country. i am a boxer, too, on those terms. introducing winston churchill, of england, at a dinner some weeks later, he explained how generous england and america had been in not requiring fancy rates for “extinguished missionaries” in china as germany had done. germany had required territory and cash, he said, in payment for her missionaries, while the united states and england had been willing to settle for produce--firecrackers and tea. the churchill introduction would seem to have been his last speech for the year , and he expected it, with one exception, to be the last for a long time. he realized that he was tired and that the strain upon him made any other sort of work out of the question. writing to macalister at the end of the year, he said, “i seem to have made many speeches, but it is not so. it is not more than ten, i think.” still, a respectable number in the space of two months, considering that each was carefully written and committed to memory, and all amid crushing social pressure. again to macalister: i declined banquets yesterday (which is double the daily average) & answered letters. i have slaved at my mail every day since we arrived in mid-october, but jean is learning to typewrite & presently i'll dictate & thereby save some scraps of time. he added that after january th he did not intend to speak again for a year--that he would not speak then only that the matter concerned the reform of city government. the occasion of january , , was a rather important one. it was a meeting of the city club, then engaged in the crusade for municipal reform. wheeler h. peckham presided, and bishop potter made the opening address. it all seems like ancient history now, and perhaps is not very vital any more; but the movement was making a great stir then, and mark twain's declaration that he believed forty-nine men out of fifty were honest, and that the forty-nine only needed to organize to disqualify the fiftieth man (always organized for crime), was quoted as a sort of slogan for reform. clemens was not permitted to keep his resolution that he wouldn't speak again that year. he had become a sort of general spokesman on public matters, and demands were made upon him which could not be denied. he declined a yale alumni dinner, but he could not refuse to preside at the lincoln birthday celebration at carnegie hall, february th, where he must introduce watterson as the speaker of the evening. “think of it!” he wrote twichell. “two old rebels functioning there: i as president and watterson as orator of the day! things have changed somewhat in these forty years, thank god!” the watterson introduction is one of the choicest of mark twain's speeches--a pure and perfect example of simple eloquence, worthy of the occasion which gave it utterance, worthy in spite of its playful paragraphs (or even because of them, for lincoln would have loved them), to become the matrix of that imperishable gettysburg phrase with which he makes his climax. he opened by dwelling for a moment on colonel watterson as a soldier, journalist, orator, statesman, and patriot; then he said: it is a curious circumstance that without collusion of any kind, but merely in obedience to a strange and pleasant and dramatic freak of destiny, he and i, kinsmen by blood--[colonel watterson's forebears had intermarried with the lamptons.]--for we are that--and one-time rebels--for we were that--should be chosen out of a million surviving quondam rebels to come here and bare our heads in reverence and love of that noble soul whom years ago we tried with all our hearts and all our strength to defeat and dispossess --abraham lincoln! is the rebellion ended and forgotten? are the blue and the gray one to-day? by authority of this sign we may answer yes; there was a rebellion--that incident is closed. i was born and reared in a slave state, my father was a slaveowner; and in the civil war i was a second lieutenant in the confederate service. for a while. this second cousin of mine, colonel watterson, the orator of this present occasion, was born and reared in a slave state, was a colonel in the confederate service, and rendered me such assistance as he could in my self-appointed great task of annihilating the federal armies and breaking up the union. i laid my plans with wisdom and foresight, and if colonel watterson had obeyed my orders i should have succeeded in my giant undertaking. it was my intention to drive general grant into the pacific--if i could get transportation--and i told colonel watterson to surround the eastern armies and wait till i came. but he was insubordinate, and stood upon a punctilio of military etiquette; he refused to take orders from a second lieutenant--and the union was saved. this is the first time that this secret has been revealed. until now no one outside the family has known the facts. but there they stand: watterson saved the union. yet to this day that man gets no pension. those were great days, splendid days. what an uprising it was! for the hearts of the whole nation, north and south, were in the war. we of the south were not ashamed; for, like the men of the north, we were fighting for 'flags we loved; and when men fight for these things, and under these convictions, with nothing sordid to tarnish their cause, that cause is holy, the blood spilt for it is sacred, the life that is laid down for it is consecrated. to-day we no longer regret the result, to-day we are glad it came out as it did, but we are not ashamed that we did our endeavor; we did our bravest best, against despairing odds, for the cause which was precious to us and which our consciences approved; and we are proud--and you are proud--the kindred blood in your veins answers when i say it--you are proud of the record we made in those mighty collisions in the fields. what an uprising it was! we did not have to supplicate for soldiers on either side. “we are coming, father abraham, three hundred thousand strong!” that was the music north and south. the very choicest young blood and brawn and brain rose up from maine to the gulf and flocked to the standards--just as men always do when in their eyes their cause is great and fine and their hearts are in it; just as men flocked to the crusades, sacrificing all they possessed to the cause, and entering cheerfully upon hardships which we cannot even imagine in this age, and upon toilsome and wasting journeys which in our time would be the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe five times over. north and south we put our hearts into that colossal struggle, and out of it came the blessed fulfilment of the prophecy of the immortal gettysburg speech which said: “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under god, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” we are here to honor the birthday of the greatest citizen, and the noblest and the best, after washington, that this land or any other has yet produced. the old wounds are healed, you and we are brothers again; you testify it by honoring two of us, once soldiers of the lost cause, and foes of your great and good leader--with the privilege of assisting here; and we testify it by laying our honest homage at the feet of abraham lincoln, and in forgetting that you of the north and we of the south were ever enemies, and remembering only that we are now indistinguishably fused together and nameable by one common great name--americans! ccxiv. mark twain and the missionaries mark twain had really begun his crusade for reform soon after his arrival in america in a practical hand-to-hand manner. his housekeeper, katie leary, one night employed a cabman to drive her from the grand central station to the house at west tenth street. no contract had been made as to price, and when she arrived there the cabman's extortionate charge was refused. he persisted in it, and she sent into the house for her employer. of all men, mark twain was the last one to countenance an extortion. he reasoned with the man kindly enough at first; when the driver at last became abusive clemens demanded his number, which was at first refused. in the end he paid the legal fare, and in the morning entered a formal complaint, something altogether unexpected, for the american public is accustomed to suffering almost any sort of imposition to avoid trouble and publicity. in some notes which clemens had made in london four years earlier he wrote: if you call a policeman to settle the dispute you can depend on one thing--he will decide it against you every time. and so will the new york policeman. in london if you carry your case into court the man that is entitled to win it will win it. in new york--but no one carries a cab case into court there. it is my impression that it is now more than thirty years since any one has carried a cab case into court there. nevertheless, he was promptly on hand when the case was called to sustain the charge and to read the cabdrivers' union and the public in general a lesson in good-citizenship. at the end of the hearing, to a representative of the union he said: “this is not a matter of sentiment, my dear sir. it is simply practical business. you cannot imagine that i am making money wasting an hour or two of my time prosecuting a case in which i can have no personal interest whatever. i am doing this just as any citizen should do. he has no choice. he has a distinct duty. he is a non-classified policeman. every citizen is, a policeman, and it is his duty to assist the police and the magistracy in every way he can, and give his time, if necessary, to do so. here is a man who is a perfectly natural product of an infamous system in this city--a charge upon the lax patriotism in this city of new york that this thing can exist. you have encouraged him, in every way you know how to overcharge. he is not the criminal here at all. the criminal is the citizen of new york and the absence of patriotism. i am not here to avenge myself on him. i have no quarrel with him. my quarrel is with the citizens of new york, who have encouraged him, and who created him by encouraging him to overcharge in this way.” the driver's license was suspended. the case made a stir in the newspapers, and it is not likely that any one incident ever contributed more to cab-driving morals in new york city. but clemens had larger matters than this in prospect. his many speeches on municipal and national abuses he felt were more or less ephemeral. he proposed now to write himself down more substantially and for a wider hearing. the human race was behaving very badly: unspeakable corruption was rampant in the city; the boers were being oppressed in south africa; the natives were being murdered in the philippines; leopold of belgium was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the congo, and the allied powers, in the cause of christ, were slaughtering the chinese. in his letters he had more than once boiled over touching these matters, and for new-year's eve, , had written: a greeting from the nineteenth to the twentieth century i bring you the stately nation named christendom, returning, bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in kiao- chou, manchuria, south africa, and the philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. give her soap and towel, but hide the looking- glass.--[prepared for red cross society watch-meeting, which was postponed until march. clemens recalled his “greeting” for that reason and for one other, which he expressed thus: “the list of greeters thus far issued by you contains only vague generalities and one definite name--mine: 'some kings and queens and mark twain.' now i am not enjoying this sparkling solitude and distinction. it makes me feel like a circus-poster in a graveyard.”] this was a sort of preliminary. then, restraining himself no longer, he embodied his sentiments in an article for the north american review entitled, “to the person sitting in darkness.” there was crying need for some one to speak the right word. he was about the only one who could do it and be certain of a universal audience. he took as his text some christmas eve clippings from the new york tribune and sun which he had been saving for this purpose. the tribune clipping said: christmas will dawn in the united states over a people full of hope and aspiration and good cheer. such a condition means contentment and happiness. the carping grumbler who may here and there go forth will find few to listen to him. the majority will wonder what is the matter with him, and pass on. a sun clipping depicted the “terrible offenses against humanity committed in the name of politics in some of the most notorious east side districts “--the unmissionaried, unpoliced darker new york. the sun declared that they could not be pictured even verbally. but it suggested enough to make the reader shudder at the hideous depths of vice in the sections named. another clipping from the same paper reported the “rev. mr. ament, of the american board of foreign missions,” as having collected indemnities for boxer damages in china at the rate of three hundred taels for each murder, “full payment for all destroyed property belonging to christians, and national fines amounting to thirteen times the indemnity.” it quoted mr. ament as saying that the money so obtained was used for the propagation of the gospel, and that the amount so collected was moderate when compared with the amount secured by the catholics, who had demanded, in addition to money, life for life, that is to say, “head for head”--in one district six hundred and eighty heads having been so collected. the despatch made mr. ament say a great deal more than this, but the gist here is enough. mark twain, of course, was fiercely stirred. the missionary idea had seldom appealed to him, and coupled with this business of bloodshed, it was less attractive than usual. he printed the clippings in full, one following the other; then he said: by happy luck we get all these glad tidings on christmas eve--just the time to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gaiety and enthusiasm. our spirits soar and we find we can even make jokes; taels i win, heads you lose. he went on to score ament, to compare the missionary policy in china to that of the pawnee indians, and to propose for him a monument--subscriptions to be sent to the american board. he denounced the national policies in africa, china, and the philippines, and showed by the reports and by the private letters of soldiers home, how cruel and barbarous and fiendish had been the warfare made by those whose avowed purpose was to carry the blessed light of civilization and gospel “to the benighted native”--how in very truth these priceless blessings had been handed on the point of a bayonet to the “person sitting in darkness.” mark twain never wrote anything more scorching, more penetrating in its sarcasm, more fearful in its revelation of injustice and hypocrisy, than his article “to the person sitting in darkness.” he put aquafortis on all the raw places, and when it was finished he himself doubted the wisdom of printing it. howells, however, agreed that it should be published, and “it ought to be illustrated by dan beard,” he added, “with such pictures as he made for the yankee in king arthur's court, but you'd better hang yourself afterward.” meeting beard a few days later, clemens mentioned the matter and said: “so if you make the pictures, you hang with me.” but pictures were not required. it was published in the north american review for february, , as the opening article; after which the cyclone. two storms moving in opposite directions produce a cyclone, and the storms immediately developed; one all for mark twain and his principles, the other all against him. every paper in england and america commented on it editorially, with bitter denunciations or with eager praise, according to their lights and convictions. at west tenth street letters, newspaper clippings, documents poured in by the bushel--laudations, vituperations, denunciations, vindications; no such tumult ever occurred in a peaceful literary home. it was really as if he had thrown a great missile into the human hive, one-half of which regarded it as a ball of honey and the remainder as a cobblestone. whatever other effect it may have had, it left no thinking person unawakened. clemens reveled in it. w. a. rogers, in harper's weekly, caricatured him as tom sawyer in a snow fort, assailed by the shower of snowballs, “having the time of his life.” another artist, fred lewis, pictured him as huck finn with a gun. the american board was naturally disturbed. the ament clipping which clemens had used had been public property for more than a month--its authenticity never denied; but it was immediately denied now, and the cable kept hot with inquiries. the rev. judson smith, one of the board, took up the defense of dr. ament, declaring him to be one who had suffered for the cause, and asked mark twain, whose “brilliant article,” he said, “would produce an effect quite beyond the reach of plain argument,” not to do an innocent man an injustice. clemens in the same paper replied that such was not his intent, that mr. ament in his report had simply arraigned himself. then it suddenly developed that the cable report had “grossly exaggerated” the amount of mr. ament's collections. instead of thirteen times the indemnity it should have read “one and a third times” the indemnity; whereupon, in another open letter, the board demanded retraction and apology. clemens would not fail to make the apology--at least he would explain. it was precisely the kind of thing that would appeal to him--the delicate moral difference between a demand thirteen times as great as it should be and a demand that was only one and a third times the correct amount. “to my missionary critics,” in the north american review for april ( ), was his formal and somewhat lengthy reply. “i have no prejudice against apologies,” he wrote. “i trust i shall never withhold one when it is due.” he then proceeded to make out his case categorically. touching the exaggerated indemnity, he said: to dr. smith the “thirteen-fold-extra” clearly stood for “theft and extortion,” and he was right, distinctly right, indisputably right. he manifestly thinks that when it got scaled away down to a mere “one-third” a little thing like that was some other than “theft and extortion.” why, only the board knows! i will try to explain this difficult problem so that the board can get an idea of it. if a pauper owes me a dollar and i catch him unprotected and make him pay me fourteen dollars thirteen of it is “theft and extortion.” if i make him pay only one dollar thirty-three and a third cents the thirty-three and a third cents are “theft and extortion,” just the same. i will put it in another way still simpler. if a man owes me one dog--any kind of a dog, the breed is of no consequence--and i--but let it go; the board would never understand it. it can't understand these involved and difficult things. he offered some further illustrations, including the “tale of a king and his treasure” and another tale entitled “the watermelons.” i have it now. many years ago, when i was studying for the gallows, i had a dear comrade, a youth who was not in my line, but still a scrupulously good fellow though devious. he was preparing to qualify for a place on the board, for there was going to be a vacancy by superannuation in about five years. this was down south, in the slavery days. it was the nature of the negro then, as now, to steal watermelons. they stole three of the melons of an adoptive brother of mine, the only good ones he had. i suspected three of a neighbor's negroes, but there was no proof, and, besides, the watermelons in those negroes' private patches were all green and small and not up to indemnity standard. but in the private patches of three other negroes there was a number of competent melons. i consulted with my comrade, the understudy of the board. he said that if i would approve his arrangements he would arrange. i said, “consider me the board; i approve; arrange.” so he took a gun and went and collected three large melons for my brother-on-the- halfshell, and one over. i was greatly pleased and asked: “who gets the extra one?” “widows and orphans.” “a good idea, too. why didn't you take thirteen?” “it would have been wrong; a crime, in fact-theft and extortion.” “what is the one-third extra--the odd melon--the same?” it caused him to reflect. but there was no result. the justice of the peace was a stern man. on the trial he found fault with the scheme and required us to explain upon what we based our strange conduct--as he called it. the understudy said: “on the custom of the niggers. they all do it.”--[the point had been made by the board that it was the chinese custom to make the inhabitants of a village responsible for individual crimes; and custom, likewise, to collect a third in excess of the damage, such surplus having been applied to the support of widows and orphans of the slain converts.] the justice forgot his dignity and descended to sarcasm. “custom of the niggers! are our morals so inadequate that we have to borrow of niggers?” then he said to the jury: “three melons were owing; they were collected from persons not proven to owe them: this is theft; they were collected by compulsion: this is extortion. a melon was added for the widows and orphans. it was owed by no one. it is another theft, another extortion. return it whence it came, with the others. it is not permissible here to apply to any purpose goods dishonestly obtained; not even to the feeding of widows and orphans, for this would be to put a shame upon charity and dishonor it.” he said it in open court, before everybody, and to me it did not seem very kind. it was in the midst of the tumult that clemens, perhaps feeling the need of sacred melody, wrote to andrew carnegie: dear sir & friend,--you seem to be in prosperity. could you lend an admirer $ . to buy a hymn-book with? god will bless you. i feel it; i know it. n. b.--if there should be other applications, this one not to count. yours, mark. p. s.-don't send the hymn-book; send the money; i want to make the selection myself. carnegie answered: nothing less than a two-dollar & a half hymn-book gilt will do for you. your place in the choir (celestial) demands that & you shall have it. there's a new gospel of saint mark in the north american which i like better than anything i've read for many a day. i am willing to borrow a thousand dollars to distribute that sacred message in proper form, & if the author don't object may i send that sum, when i can raise it, to the anti-imperialist league, boston, to which i am a contributor, the only missionary work i am responsible for. just tell me you are willing & many thousands of the holy little missals will go forth. this inimitable satire is to become a classic. i count among my privileges in life that i know you, the author. perhaps a few more of the letters invited by mark twain's criticism of missionary work in china may still be of interest to the reader: frederick t. cook, of the hospital saturday and sunday association, wrote: “i hail you as the voltaire of america. it is a noble distinction. god bless you and see that you weary not in well-doing in this noblest, sublimest of crusades.” ministers were by no means all against him. the associate pastor of the every-day church, in boston, sent this line: “i want to thank you for your matchless article in the current north american. it must make converts of well-nigh all who read it.” but a boston school-teacher was angry. “i have been reading the north american,” she wrote, “and i am filled with shame and remorse that i have dreamed of asking you to come to boston to talk to the teachers.” on the outside of the envelope clemens made this pencil note: “now, i suppose i offended that young lady by having an opinion of my own, instead of waiting and copying hers. i never thought. i suppose she must be as much as twenty-five, and probably the only patriot in the country.” a critic with a sense of humor asked: “please excuse seeming impertinence, but were you ever adjudged insane? be honest. how much money does the devil give you for arraigning christianity and missionary causes?” but there were more of the better sort. edward s. martin, in a grateful letter, said: “how gratifying it is to feel that we have a man among us who understands the rarity of the plain truth, and who delights to utter it, and has the gift of doing so without cant and with not too much seriousness.” sir hiram maxim wrote: “i give you my candid opinion that what you have done is of very great value to the civilization of the world. there is no man living whose words carry greater weight than your own, as no one's writings are so eagerly sought after by all classes.” clemens himself in his note-book set down this aphorism: “do right and you will be conspicuous.” ccxv. summer at “the lair” in june clemens took the family to saranac lake, to ampersand. they occupied a log cabin which he called “the lair,” on the south shore, near the water's edge, a remote and beautiful place where, as had happened before, they were so comfortable and satisfied that they hoped to return another summer. there were swimming and boating and long walks in the woods; the worry and noise of the world were far away. they gave little enough attention to the mails. they took only a weekly paper, and were likely to allow it to lie in the postoffice uncalled for. clemens, especially, loved the place, and wrote to twichell: i am on the front porch (lower one-main deck) of our little bijou of a dwelling-house. the lake edge (lower saranac) is so nearly under me that i can't see the shore, but only the water, small-poxed with rain splashes--for there is a heavy down pour. it is charmingly like sitting snuggled up on a ship's deck with the stretching sea all around but very much more satisfactory, for at sea a rainstorm is depressing, while here of course the effect engendered is just a deep sense of comfort & contentment. the heavy forest shuts us solidly in on three sides--there are no neighbors. there are beautiful little tan-colored impudent squirrels about. they take tea p.m. (not invited) at the table in the woods where jean does my typewriting, & one of them has been brave enough to sit upon jean's knee with his tail curved over his back & munch his food. they come to dinner p.m. on the front porch (not invited), but clara drives them away. it is an occupation which requires some industry & attention to business. they all have the one name --blennerhasset, from burr's friend--& none of them answers to it except when hungry. clemens could work at “the lair,” often writing in shady seclusions along the shore, and he finished there the two-part serial,--[ published in harper's magazine for january and february, .]--“the double-barrelled detective story,” intended originally as a burlesque on sherlock holmes. it did not altogether fulfil its purpose, and is hardly to be ranked as one of mark twain's successes. it contains, however, one paragraph at least by which it is likely to be remembered, a hoax--his last one--on the reader. it runs as follows: it was a crisp and spicy morning in early october. the lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of god. the warm light and luxury of this paragraph are factitious. the careful reader will, note that its various accessories are ridiculously associated, and only the most careless reader will accept the oesophagus as a bird. but it disturbed a great many admirers, and numerous letters of inquiry came wanting to know what it was all about. some suspected the joke and taunted him with it; one such correspondent wrote: my dear mark twain,--reading your “double-barrelled detective story” in the january harper's late one night i came to the paragraph where you so beautifully describe “a crisp and spicy morning in early october.” i read along down the paragraph, conscious only of its woozy sound, until i brought up with a start against your oesophagus in the empty sky. then i read the paragraph again. oh, mark twain! mark twain! how could you do it? put a trap like that into the midst of a tragical story? do serenity and peace brood over you after you have done such a thing? who lit the lilacs, and which end up do they hang? when did larches begin to flame, and who set out the pomegranates in that canyon? what are deciduous flowers, and do they always “bloom in the fall, tra la”? i have been making myself obnoxious to various people by demanding their opinion of that paragraph without telling them the name of the author. they say, “very well done.” “the alliteration is so pretty.” “what's an oesophagus, a bird?” “what's it all mean, anyway?” i tell them it means mark twain, and that an oesophagus is a kind of swallow. am i right? or is it a gull? or a gullet? hereafter if you must write such things won't you please be so kind as to label them? very sincerely yours, alletta f. dean. mark twain to miss dean: don't you give that oesophagus away again or i'll never trust you with another privacy! so many wrote, that clemens finally felt called upon to make public confession, and as one searching letter had been mailed from springfield, massachusetts, he made his reply through the republican of that city. after some opening comment he said: i published a short story lately & it was in that that i put the oesophagus. i will say privately that i expected it to bother some people--in fact, that was the intention--but the harvest has been larger than i was calculating upon. the oesophagus has gathered in the guilty and the innocent alike, whereas i was only fishing for the innocent--the innocent and confiding. he quoted a letter from a schoolmaster in the philippines who thought the passage beautiful with the exception of the curious creature which “slept upon motionless wings.” said clemens: do you notice? nothing in the paragraph disturbed him but that one word. it shows that that paragraph was most ably constructed for the deception it was intended to put upon the reader. it was my intention that it should read plausibly, and it is now plain that it does; it was my intention that it should be emotional and touching, and you see yourself that it fetched this public instructor. alas! if i had but left that one treacherous word out i should have scored, scored everywhere, and the paragraph would have slidden through every reader's sensibilities like oil and left not a suspicion behind. the other sample inquiry is from a professor in a new england university. it contains one naughty word (which i cannot bear to suppress), but he is not in the theological department, so it is no harm: “dear mr. clemens,--'far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing.' “it is not often i get a chance to read much periodical literature, but i have just gone through at this belated period, with much gratification and edification, your 'double-barrelled detective story.' “but what in hell is an oesophagus? i keep one myself, but it never sleeps in the air or anywhere else. my profession is to deal with words, and oesophagus interested me the moment i lighted upon it. but, as a companion of my youth used to say, 'i'll be eternally, co-eternally cussed' if i can make it out. is it a joke or am i an ignoramus?” between you and me, i was almost ashamed of having fooled that man, but for pride's sake i was not going to say so. i wrote and told him it was a joke--and that is what i am now saying to my springfield inquirer. and i told him to carefully read the whole paragraph and he would find not a vestige of sense in any detail of it. this also i recommend to my springfield inquirer. i have confessed. i am sorry--partially. i will not do so any more--for the present. don't ask me any more questions; let the oesophagus have a rest--on his same old motionless wing. he wrote twichell that the story had been a six-day 'tour de force', twenty-five thousand words, and he adds: how long it takes a literary seed to sprout sometimes! this seed was planted in your house many years ago when you sent me to bed with a book not heard of by me until then--sherlock holmes.... i've done a grist of writing here this summer, but not for publication soon, if ever. i did write two satisfactory articles for early print, but i've burned one of them & have buried the other in my large box of posthumous stuff. i've got stacks of literary remains piled up there. early in august clemens went with h. h. rogers in his yacht kanawha on a cruise to new brunswick and nova scotia. rogers had made up a party, including ex-speaker reed, dr. rice, and col. a. g. paine. young harry rogers also made one of the party. clemens kept a log of the cruise, certain entries of which convey something of its spirit. on the th, at yarmouth, he wrote: fog-bound. the garrison went ashore. officers visited the yacht in the evening & said an anvil had been missed. mr. rogers paid for the anvil. august th. there is a fine picture-gallery here; the sheriff photographed the garrison, with the exception of harry (rogers) and mr. clemens. august th. upon complaint of mr. reed another dog was procured. he said he had been a sailor all his life, and considered it dangerous to trust a ship to a dog-watch with only one dog in it. poker, for a change. august th. to rockland, maine, in the afternoon, arriving about p.m. in the night dr. rice baited the anchor with his winnings & caught a whale feet long. he said so himself. it is thought that if there had been another witness like dr. rice the whale would have been longer. august th. we could have had a happy time in bath but for the interruptions caused by people who wanted mr. reed to explain votes of the olden time or give back the money. mr. rogers recouped them. another anvil missed. the descendant of captain kidd is the only person who does not blush for these incidents. harry and mr. clemens blush continually. it is believed that if the rest of the garrison were like these two the yacht would be welcome everywhere instead of being quarantined by the police in all the ports. mr. clemens & harry have attracted a great deal of attention, & men have expressed a resolve to turn over a new leaf & copy after them from this out. evening. judge cohen came over from another yacht to pay his respects to harry and mr. clemens, he having heard of their reputation from the clergy of these coasts. he was invited by the gang to play poker apparently as a courtesy & in a spirit of seeming hospitality, he not knowing them & taking it all at par. mr. rogers lent him clothes to go home in. august th. the reformed statesman growling and complaining again --not in a frank, straightforward way, but talking at the commodore, while letting on to be talking to himself. this time he was dissatisfied about the anchor watch; said it was out of date, untrustworthy, & for real efficiency didn't begin with the waterbury, & was going on to reiterate, as usual, that he had been a pilot all his life & blamed if he ever saw, etc., etc., etc. but he was not allowed to finish. we put him ashore at portland. that is to say, reed landed at portland, the rest of the party returning with the yacht. “we had a noble good time in the yacht,” clemens wrote twichell on their return. “we caught a chinee missionary and drowned him.” twichell had been invited to make one of the party, and this letter was to make him feel sorry he had not accepted. ccxvi. riverdale--a yale degree the clemens household did not return to west tenth street. they spent a week in elmira at the end of september, and after a brief stop in new york took up their residence on the northern metropolitan boundary, at riverdale-on-the-hudson, in the old appleton home. they had permanently concluded not to return to hartford. they had put the property there into an agent's hands for sale. mrs. clemens never felt that she had the strength to enter the house again. they had selected the riverdale place with due consideration. they decided that they must have easy access to the new york center, but they wished also to have the advantage of space and spreading lawn and trees, large rooms, and light. the appleton homestead provided these things. it was a house built in the first third of the last century by one of the morris family, so long prominent in new york history. on passing into the appleton ownership it had been enlarged and beautified and named “holbrook hall.” it overlooked the hudson and the palisades. it had associations: the roosevelt family had once lived there, huxley, darwin, tyndall, and others of their intellectual rank had been entertained there during its occupation by the first appleton, the founder of the publishing firm. the great hall of the added wing was its chief feature. clemens once remembered: “we drifted from room to room on our tour of inspection, always with a growing doubt as to whether we wanted that house or not; but at last, when we arrived in a dining-room that was feet long, feet wide, and had two great fireplaces in it, that settled it.” there were pleasant neighbors at riverdale, and had it not been for the illnesses that seemed always ready to seize upon that household the home there might have been ideal. they loved the place presently, so much so that they contemplated buying it, but decided that it was too costly. they began to prospect for other places along the hudson shore. they were anxious to have a home again--one that they could call their own. among the many pleasant neighbors at riverdale were the dodges, the quincy adamses, and the rev. mr. carstensen, a liberal-minded minister with whom clemens easily affiliated. clemens and carstensen visited back and forth and exchanged views. once mr. carstensen told him that he was going to town to dine with a party which included the reverend gottheil, a catholic bishop, an indian buddhist, and a chinese scholar of the confucian faith, after which they were all going to a yiddish theater. clemens said: “well, there's only one more thing you need to make the party complete--that is, either satan or me.” howells often came to riverdale. he was living in a new york apartment, and it was handy and made an easy and pleasant outing for him. he says: “i began to see them again on something like the sweet old terms. they lived far more unpretentiously than they used, and i think with a notion of economy, which they had never very successfully practised. i recall that at the end of a certain year in hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash for everything, clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed experiment, and asking me to guess how many bills they had at new-year's; he hastened to say that a horse-car would not have held them. at riverdale they kept no carriage, and there was a snowy night when i drove up to their handsome old mansion in the station carryall, which was crusted with mud, as from the going down of the deluge after transporting noah and his family from the ark to whatever point they decided to settle provisionally. but the good talk, the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer poverty of mind or soul was there, and we jubilantly found ourselves again in our middle youth.” both howells and clemens were made doctors of letters by yale that year and went over in october to receive their degrees. it was mark twain's second yale degree, and it was the highest rank that an american institution of learning could confer. twichell wrote: i want you to understand, old fellow, that it will be in its intention the highest public compliment, and emphatically so in your case, for it will be tendered you by a corporation of gentlemen, the majority of whom do not at all agree with the views on important questions which you have lately promulgated in speech and in writing, and with which you are identified to the public mind. they grant, of course, your right to hold and express those views, though for themselves they don't like 'em; but in awarding you the proposed laurel they will make no count of that whatever. their action will appropriately signify simply and solely their estimate of your merit and rank as a man of letters, and so, as i say, the compliment of it will be of the pure, unadulterated quality. howells was not especially eager to go, and tried to conspire with clemens to arrange some excuse which would keep them at home. i remember with satisfaction [he wrote] our joint success in keeping away from the concord centennial in , and i have been thinking we might help each other in this matter of the yale anniversary. what are your plans for getting left, or shall you trust to inspiration? their plans did not avail. both howells and clemens went to new haven to receive their honors. when they had returned, howells wrote formally, as became the new rank: dear sir,--i have long been an admirer of your complete works, several of which i have read, and i am with you shoulder to shoulder in the cause of foreign missions. i would respectfully request a personal interview, and if you will appoint some day and hour most inconvenient to you i will call at your baronial hall. i cannot doubt, from the account of your courtesy given me by the twelve apostles, who once visited you in your hartford home and were mistaken for a syndicate of lightning-rod men, that our meeting will be mutually agreeable. yours truly, w. d. howells. dr. clemens. ccxvii. mark twain in politics there was a campaign for the mayoralty of new york city that fall, with seth low on the fusion ticket against edward m. shepard as the tammany candidate. mark twain entered the arena to try to defeat tammany hall. he wrote and he spoke in favor of clean city government and police reform. he was savagely in earnest and openly denounced the clan of croker, individually and collectively. he joined a society called 'the acorns'; and on the th of october, at a dinner given by the order at the waldorf-astoria, delivered a fierce arraignment, in which he characterized croker as the warren hastings of new york. his speech was really a set of extracts from edmund burke's great impeachment of hastings, substituting always the name of croker, and paralleling his career with that of the ancient boss of the east india company. it was not a humorous speech. it was too denunciatory for that. it probably contained less comic phrasing than any former effort. there is hardly even a suggestion of humor from beginning to end. it concluded with this paraphrase of burke's impeachment: i impeach richard croker of high crimes and misdemeanors. i impeach him in the name of the people, whose trust he has betrayed. i impeach him in the name of all the people of america, whose national character he has dishonored. i impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated. i impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition of life. the acorn speech was greatly relied upon for damage to the tammany ranks, and hundreds of thousands of copies of it were printed and circulated.--[the “edmund burke on croker and tammany” speech had originally been written as an article for the north american review.] clemens was really heart and soul in the campaign. he even joined a procession that marched up broadway, and he made a speech to a great assemblage at broadway and leonard street, when, as he said, he had been sick abed two days and, according to the doctor, should be in bed then. but i would not stay at home for a nursery disease, and that's what i've got. now, don't let this leak out all over town, but i've been doing some indiscreet eating--that's all. it wasn't drinking. if it had been i shouldn't have said anything about it. i ate a banana. i bought it just to clinch the italian vote for fusion, but i got hold of a tammany banana by mistake. just one little nub of it on the end was nice and white. that was the shepard end. the other nine-tenths were rotten. now that little white end won't make the rest of the banana good. the nine-tenths will make that little nub rotten, too. we must get rid of the whole banana, and our acorn society is going to do its share, for it is pledged to nothing but the support of good government all over the united states. we will elect the president next time. it won't be i, for i have ruined my chances by joining the acorns, and there can be no office-holders among us. there was a movement which clemens early nipped in the bud--to name a political party after him. “i should be far from willing to have a political party named after me,” he wrote, “and i would not be willing to belong to a party which allowed its members to have political aspirations or push friends forward for political preferment.” in other words, he was a knight-errant; his sole purpose for being in politics at all--something he always detested--was to do what he could for the betterment of his people. he had his reward, for when election day came, and the returns were in, the fusion ticket had triumphed and tammany had fallen. clemens received his share of the credit. one paper celebrated him in verse: who killed croker? i, said mark twain, i killed croker, i, the jolly joker! among samuel clemens's literary remains there is an outline plan for a “casting-vote party,” whose main object was “to compel the two great parties to nominate their best man always.” it was to be an organization of an infinite number of clubs throughout the nation, no member of which should seek or accept a nomination for office in any political appointment, but in each case should cast its vote as a unit for the candidate of one of the two great political parties, requiring that the man be of clean record and honest purpose. from constable up to president [runs his final clause] there is no office for which the two great parties cannot furnish able, clean, and acceptable men. whenever the balance of power shall be lodged in a permanent third party, with no candidate of its own and no function but to cast its whole vote for the best man put forward by the republicans and democrats, these two parties will select the best man they have in their ranks. good and clean government will follow, let its party complexion be what it may, and the country will be quite content. it was a utopian idea, very likely, as human nature is made; full of that native optimism which was always overflowing and drowning his gloomier logic. clearly he forgot his despair of humanity when he formulated that document, and there is a world of unselfish hope in these closing lines: if in the hands of men who regard their citizenship as a high trust this scheme shall fail upon trial a better must be sought, a better must be invented; for it cannot be well or safe to let the present political conditions continue indefinitely. they can be improved, and american citizenship should arouse up from its disheartenment and see that it is done. had this document been put into type and circulated it might have founded a true mark twain party. clemens made not many more speeches that autumn, closing the year at last with the “founder's night” speech at the players, the short address which, ending on the stroke of midnight, dedicates each passing year to the memory of edwin booth, and pledges each new year in a loving-cup passed in his honor. ccxviii. new interests and investments the spirit which a year earlier had prompted mark twain to prepare his “salutation from the nineteenth to the twentieth century” inspired him now to conceive the “stupendous international procession,” a gruesome pageant described in a document (unpublished) of twenty-two typewritten pages which begin: the stupendous procession at the appointed hour it moved across the world in following order: the twentieth century a fair young creature, drunk and disorderly, borne in the arms of satan. banner with motto, “get what you can, keep what you get.” guard of honor--monarchs, presidents, tammany bosses, burglars, land thieves, convicts, etc., appropriately clothed and bearing the symbols of their several trades. christendom a majestic matron in flowing robes drenched with blood. on her head a golden crown of thorns; impaled on its spines the bleeding heads of patriots who died for their countries boers, boxers, filipinos; in one hand a slung-shot, in the other a bible, open at the text “do unto others,” etc. protruding from pocket bottle labeled “we bring you the blessings of civilization.” necklace-handcuffs and a burglar's jimmy. supporters--at one elbow slaughter, at the other hypocrisy. banner with motto--“love your neighbor's goods as yourself.” ensign--the black flag. guard of honor--missionaries and german, french, russian, and british soldiers laden with loot. and so on, with a section for each nation of the earth, headed each by the black flag, each bearing horrid emblems, instruments of torture, mutilated prisoners, broken hearts, floats piled with bloody corpses. at the end of all, banners inscribed: “all white men are born free and equal.” “christ died to make men holy, christ died to make men free.” with the american flag furled and draped in crepe, and the shade of lincoln towering vast and dim toward the sky, brooding with sorrowful aspect over the far-reaching pageant. with much more of the same sort. it is a fearful document, too fearful, we may believe, for mrs. clemens ever to consent to its publication. advancing years did little toward destroying mark twain's interest in human affairs. at no time in his life was he more variously concerned and employed than in his sixty-seventh year--matters social, literary, political, religious, financial, scientific. he was always alive, young, actively cultivating or devising interests--valuable and otherwise, though never less than important to him. he had plenty of money again, for one thing, and he liked to find dazzlingly new ways for investing it. as in the old days, he was always putting “twenty-five or forty thousand dollars,” as he said, into something that promised multiplied returns. howells tells how he found him looking wonderfully well, and when he asked the name of his elixir he learned that it was plasmon. i did not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the investments which he had made from “the substance of things hoped for,” and in the destiny of a disastrous disappointment. but after paying off the creditors of his late publishing firm he had to do something with his money, and it was not his fault if he did not make a fortune out of plasmon. it was just at this period (the beginning of ) that he was promoting with his capital and enthusiasm the plasmon interests in america, investing in it one of the “usual amounts,” promising to make howells over again body and soul with the life-giving albuminate. once he wrote him explicit instructions: yes--take it as a medicine--there is nothing better, nothing surer of desired results. if you wish to be elaborate--which isn't necessary--put a couple of heaping teaspoonfuls of the powder in an inch of milk & stir until it is a paste; put in some more milk and stir the paste to a thin gruel; then fill up the glass and drink. or, stir it into your soup. or, into your oatmeal. or, use any method you like, so's you get it down--that is the only essential. he put another “usual sum” about this time in a patent cash register which was acknowledged to be “a promise rather than a performance,” and remains so until this day. he capitalized a patent spiral hat-pin, warranted to hold the hat on in any weather, and he had a number of the pins handsomely made to present to visitors of the sex naturally requiring that sort of adornment and protection. it was a pretty and ingenious device and apparently effective enough, though it failed to secure his invested thousands. he invested a lesser sum in shares of the booklover's library, which was going to revolutionize the reading world, and which at least paid a few dividends. even the old tennessee land will-o'-the-wisp-long since repudiated and forgotten--when it appeared again in the form of a possible equity in some overlooked fragment, kindled a gentle interest, and was added to his list of ventures. he made one substantial investment at this period. they became more and more in love with the hudson environment, its beauty and its easy access to new york. their house was what they liked it to be--a gathering--place for friends and the world's notables, who could reach it easily and quickly from new york. they had a steady procession of company when mrs. clemens's health would permit, and during a single week in the early part of this year entertained guests at no less than seventeen out of their twenty-one meals, and for three out of the seven nights--not an unusual week. their plan for buying a home on the hudson ended with the purchase of what was known as hillcrest, or the casey place, at tarrytown, overlooking that beautiful stretch of river, the tappan zee, close to the washington irving home. the beauty of its outlook and surroundings appealed to them all. the house was handsome and finely placed, and they planned to make certain changes that would adapt it to their needs. the price, which was less than fifty thousand dollars, made it an attractive purchase; and without doubt it would have made them a suitable and happy home had it been written in the future that they should so inherit it. clemens was writing pretty steadily these days. the human race was furnishing him with ever so many inspiring subjects, and he found time to touch more or less on most of them. he wreaked his indignation upon the things which exasperated him often--even usually--without the expectation of print; and he delivered himself even more inclusively at such times as he walked the floor between the luncheon or dinner courses, amplifying on the poverty of an invention that had produced mankind as a supreme handiwork. in a letter to howells he wrote: your comments on that idiot's “ideals” letter reminds me that i preached a good sermon to my family yesterday on his particular layer of the human race, that grotesquest of all the inventions of the creator. it was a good sermon, but coldly received, & it seemed best not to try to take up a collection. he once told howells, with the wild joy of his boyish heart, how mrs. clemens found some compensation, when kept to her room by illness, in the reflection that now she would not hear so much about the “damned human race.” yet he was always the first man to champion that race, and the more unpromising the specimen the surer it was of his protection, and he never invited, never expected gratitude. one wonders how he found time to do all the things that he did. besides his legitimate literary labors and his preachments, he was always writing letters to this one and that, long letters on a variety of subjects, carefully and picturesquely phrased, and to people of every sort. he even formed a curious society, whose members were young girls--one in each country of the earth. they were supposed to write to him at intervals on some subject likely to be of mutual interest, to which letters he agreed to reply. he furnished each member with a typewritten copy of the constitution and by-laws of the juggernaut club, as he called it, and he apprised each of her election, usually after this fashion: i have a club--a private club, which is all my own. i appoint the members myself, & they can't help themselves, because i don't allow them to vote on their own appointment & i don't allow them to resign! they are all friends whom i have never seen (save one), but who have written friendly letters to me. by the laws of my club there can be only one member in each country, & there can be no male member but myself. some day i may admit males, but i don't know --they are capricious & inharmonious, & their ways provoke me a good deal. it is a matter, which the club shall decide. i have made four appointments in the past three or four months: you as a member for scotland--oh, this good while! a young citizeness of joan of arc's home region as a member for france; a mohammedan girl as member for bengal; & a dear & bright young niece of mine as member for the united states--for i do not represent a country myself, but am merely member-at-large for the human race. you must not try to resign, for the laws of the club do not allow that. you must console yourself by remembering that you are in the best company; that nobody knows of your membership except yourself; that no member knows another's name, but only her country; that no taxes are levied and no meetings held (but how dearly i should like to attend one!). one of my members is a princess of a royal house, another is the daughter of a village bookseller on the continent of europe, for the only qualification for membership is intellect & the spirit of good- will; other distinctions, hereditary or acquired, do not count. may i send you the constitution & laws of the club? i shall be so glad if i may. it was just one of his many fancies, and most of the active memberships would not long be maintained; though some continued faithful in their reports, as he did in his replies, to the end. one of the more fantastic of his conceptions was a plan to advertise for ante-mortem obituaries of himself--in order, as he said, that he might look them over and enjoy them and make certain corrections in the matter of detail. some of them he thought might be appropriate to read from the platform. i will correct them--not the facts, but the verdicts--striking out such clauses as could have a deleterious influence on the other side, and replacing them with clauses of a more judicious character. he was much taken with the new idea, and his request for such obituaries, with an offer of a prize for the best--a portrait of himself drawn by his own hand--really appeared in harper's weekly later in the year. naturally he got a shower of responses--serious, playful, burlesque. some of them were quite worth while. the obvious “death loves a shining mark” was of course numerously duplicated, and some varied it “death loves an easy mark,” and there was “mark, the perfect man.” the two that follow gave him especial pleasure. obituary for “mark twain” worthy of his portrait, a place on his monument, as well as a place among his “perennial-consolation heirlooms”: “got up; washed; went to bed.” the subject's own words (see innocents abroad). can't go back on your own words, mark twain. there's nothing “to strike out”; nothing “to replace.” what more could be said of any one? “got up!”--think of the fullness of meaning! the possibilities of life, its achievements--physical, intellectual, spiritual. got up to the top!--the climax of human aspiration on earth! “washed”--every whit clean; purified--body, soul, thoughts, purposes. “went to bed”--work all done--to rest, to sleep. the culmination of the day well spent! god looks after the awakening. mrs. s. a. oren-haynes. mark twain was the only man who ever lived, so far as we know, whose lies were so innocent, and withal so helpful, as to make them worth more than a whole lot of fossilized priests' eternal truths. d. h. kenner. ccxix. yachting and theology clemens made fewer speeches during the riverdale period. he was as frequently demanded, but he had a better excuse for refusing, especially the evening functions. he attended a good many luncheons with friendly spirits like howells, matthews, james l. ford, and hamlin garland. at the end of february he came down to the mayor's dinner given to prince henry of prussia, but he did not speak. clemens used to say afterward that he had not been asked to speak, and that it was probably because of his supposed breach of etiquette at the kaiser's dinner in berlin; but the fact that prince henry sought him out, and was most cordially and humanly attentive during a considerable portion of the evening, is against the supposition. clemens attended a yale alumni dinner that winter and incidentally visited twichell in hartford. the old question of moral responsibility came up and twichell lent his visitor a copy of jonathan edwards's 'freedom of the will' for train perusal. clemens found it absorbing. later he wrote twichell his views. dear joe,--(after compliments.)--[meaning “what a good time you gave me; what a happiness it was to be under your roof again,” etc. see opening sentence of all translations of letters passing between lord roberts and indian princes and rulers.]--from bridgeport to new york, thence to home, & continuously until near midnight i wallowed & reeked with jonathan in his insane debauch; rose immensely refreshed & fine at ten this morning, but with a strange & haunting sense of having been on a three days' tear with a drunken lunatic. it is years since i have known these sensations. all through the book is the glare of a resplendent intellect gone mad--a marvelous spectacle. no, not all through the book--the drunk does not come on till the last third, where what i take to be calvinism & its god begins to show up & shine red & hideous in the glow from the fires of hell, their only right and proper adornment. jonathan seems to hold (as against the armenian position) that the man (or his soul or his will) never creates an impulse itself, but is moved to action by an impulse back of it. that's sound! also, that of two or more things offered it, it infallibly chooses the one which for the moment is most pleasing to itself. perfectly correct! an immense admission for a man not otherwise sane. up to that point he could have written chapters iii & iv of my suppressed gospel. but there we seem to separate. he seems to concede the indisputable & unshaken dominion of motive & necessity (call them what he may, these are exterior forces & not under the man's authority, guidance, or even suggestion); then he suddenly flies the logical track & (to all seeming) makes the man & not those exterior forces responsible to god for the man's thoughts, words, & acts. it is frank insanity. i think that when he concedes the autocratic dominion of motive and necessity he grants a third position of mine--that a man's mind is a mere machine--an automatic machine--which is handled entirely from the outside, the man himself furnishing it absolutely nothing; not an ounce of its fuel, & not so much as a bare suggestion to that exterior engineer as to what the machine shall do nor how it shall do it nor when. after that concession it was time for him to get alarmed & shirk --for he was pointed straight for the only rational & possible next station on that piece of road--the irresponsibility of man to god. and so he shirked. shirked, and arrived at this handsome result: man is commanded to do so & so. it has been ordained from the beginning of time that some men sha'n't & others can't. these are to blame: let them be damned. i enjoy the colonel very much, & shall enjoy the rest of him with an obscene delight. joe, the whole tribe shout love to you & yours! mark. clemens was moved to set down some theology of his own, and did so in a manuscript which he entitled, “if i could be there.” it is in the dialogue form he often adopted for polemic writing. it is a colloquy between the master of the universe and a stranger. it begins: i. if i could be there, hidden under the steps of the throne, i should hear conversations like this: a stranger. lord, there is one who needs to be punished, and has been overlooked. it is in the record. i have found it. lord. by searching? s. yes, lord. l. who is it? what is it? s. a man. l. proceed. s. he died in sin. sin committed by his great-grandfather. l. when was this? s. eleven million years ago. l. do you know what a microbe is? s. yes, lord. it is a creature too small to be detected by my eye. l. he commits depredations upon your blood? s. yes, lord. l. i give you leave to subject him to a billion years of misery for this offense. go! work your will upon him. s. but, lord, i have nothing against him; i am indifferent to him. l. why? s. he is so infinitely small and contemptible. i am to him as is a mountain-range to a grain of sand. l. what am i to man? s. (silent.) l. am i not, to a man, as is a billion solar systems to a grain of sand? s. it is true, lord. l. some microbes are larger than others. does man regard the difference? s. no, lord. to him there is no difference of consequence. to him they are all microbes, all infinitely little and equally inconsequential. l. to me there is no difference of consequence between a man & a microbe. man looks down upon the speck at his feet called a microbe from an altitude of a thousand miles, so to speak, and regards him with indifference; i look down upon the specks called a man and a microbe from an altitude of a billion leagues, so to speak, and to me they are of a size. to me both are inconsequential. man kills the microbes when he can? s. yes, lord. l. then what? does he keep him in mind years and years and go on contriving miseries for him? s. no, lord. l. does he forget him? s. yes, lord. l. why? s. he cares nothing more about him. l. employs himself with more important matters? s. yes, lord. l. apparently man is quite a rational and dignified person, and can divorce his mind from uninteresting trivialities. why does he affront me with the fancy that i interest myself in trivialities--like men and microbes? ii. l. is it true the human race thinks the universe was created for its convenience? s. yes, lord. l. the human race is modest. speaking as a member of it, what do you think the other animals are for? s. to furnish food and labor for man. l. what is the sea for? s. to furnish food for man. fishes. l. and the air? s. to furnish sustenance for man. birds and breath. l. how many men are there? s. fifteen hundred millions. l. (referring to notes.) take your pencil and set down some statistics. in a healthy man's lower intestine , , microbes are born daily and die daily. in the rest of a man's body , , microbes are born daily and die daily. the two sums aggregate-what? s. about , , . l. in ten days the aggregate reaches what? s. fifteen hundred millions. l. it is for one person. what would it be for the whole human population? s. alas, lord, it is beyond the power of figures to set down that multitude. it is billions of billions multiplied by billions of billions, and these multiplied again and again by billions of billions. the figures would stretch across the universe and hang over into space on both sides. l. to what intent are these uncountable microbes introduced into the human race? s. that they may eat. l. now then, according to man's own reasoning, what is man for? s. alas-alas! l. what is he for? s. to-to-furnish food for microbes. l. manifestly. a child could see it. now then, with this common-sense light to aid your perceptions, what are the air, the land, and the ocean for? s. to furnish food for man so that he may nourish, support, and multiply and replenish the microbes. l. manifestly. does one build a boarding-house for the sake of the boarding-house itself or for the sake of the boarders? s. certainly for the sake of the boarders. l. man's a boarding-house. s. i perceive it, lord. l. he is a boarding-house. he was never intended for anything else. if he had had less vanity and a clearer insight into the great truths that lie embedded in statistics he would have found it out early. as concerns the man who has gone unpunished eleven million years, is it your belief that in life he did his duty by his microbes? s. undoubtedly, lord. he could not help it. l. then why punish him? he had no other duty to perform. whatever else may be said of this kind of doctrine, it is at least original and has a conclusive sound. mark twain had very little use for orthodoxy and conservatism. when it was announced that dr. jacques loeb, of the university of california, had demonstrated the creation of life by chemical agencies he was deeply interested. when a newspaper writer commented that a “consensus of opinion among biologists” would probably rate dr. loeb as a man of lively imagination rather than an inerrant investigator of natural phenomena, he felt called to chaff the consensus idea. i wish i could be as young as that again. although i seem so old now i was once as young as that. i remember, as if it were but thirty or forty years ago, how a paralyzing consensus of opinion accumulated from experts a-setting around about brother experts who had patiently and laboriously cold-chiseled their way into one or another of nature's safe-deposit vaults and were reporting that they had found something valuable was plenty for me. it settled it. but it isn't so now-no. because in the drift of the years i by and by found out that a consensus examines a new thing with its feelings rather oftener than with its mind. there was that primitive steam-engine-ages back, in greek times: a consensus made fun of it. there was the marquis of worcester's steam-engine years ago: a consensus made fun of it. there was fulton's steamboat of a century ago: a french consensus, including the great napoleon, made fun of it. there was priestley, with his oxygen: a consensus scoffed at him, mobbed him, burned him out, banished him. while a consensus was proving, by statistics and things, that a steamship could not cross the atlantic, a steamship did it. and so on through a dozen pages or more of lively satire, ending with an extract from adam's diary. then there was a consensus about it. it was the very first one. it sat six days and nights. it was then delivered of the verdict that a world could not be made out of nothing; that such small things as sun and moon and stars might, maybe, but it would take years and years if there was considerable many of them. then the consensus got up and looked out of the window, and there was the whole outfit, spinning and sparkling in space! you never saw such a disappointed lot. adam. he was writing much at this time, mainly for his own amusement, though now and then he offered one of his reflections for print. that beautiful fairy tale, “the five boons of life,” of which the most precious is “death,” was written at this period. maeterlinck's lovely story of the bee interested him; he wrote about that. somebody proposed a martyrs' day; he wrote a paper ridiculing the suggestion. in his note-book, too, there is a memorandum for a love-story of the quarternary epoch which would begin, “on a soft october afternoon , , years ago.” john fiske's discovery of america, volume i, he said, was to furnish the animals and scenery, civilization and conversation to be the same as to-day; but apparently this idea was carried no further. he ranged through every subject from protoplasm to infinity, exalting, condemning, ridiculing, explaining; his brain was always busy--a dynamo that rested neither night nor day. in april clemens received notice of another yachting trip on the kanawha, which this time would sail for the bahama and west india islands. the guests were to be about the same.--[the invited ones of the party were hon. t. b. reed, a. g. paine, laurence hutton, dr. c. c. rice, w. t. foote, and s. l. clemens. “owners of the yacht,” mr. rogers called them, signing himself as “their guest.”] he sent this telegram: h. h. rogers, fairhaven, mass. can't get away this week. i have company here from tonight till middle of next week. will kanawha be sailing after that & can i go as sunday-school superintendent at half rate? answer and prepay. dr. clemens. the sailing date was conveniently arranged and there followed a happy cruise among those balmy islands. mark twain was particularly fond of “tom” reed, who had been known as “czar” reed in congress, but was delightfully human in his personal life. they argued politics a good deal, and reed, with all his training and intimate practical knowledge of the subject, confessed that he “couldn't argue with a man like that.” “do you believe the things you say?” he asked once, in his thin, falsetto voice. “yes,” said clemens. “some of them.” “well, you want to look out. if you go on this way, by and by you'll get to believing nearly everything you say.” draw poker appears to have been their favorite diversion. clemens in his notes reports that off the coast of florida reed won twenty-three pots in succession. it was said afterward that they made no stops at any harbor; that when the chief officer approached the poker-table and told them they were about to enter some important port he received peremptory orders to “sail on and not interrupt the game.” this, however, may be regarded as more or less founded on fiction. ccxx. mark twain and the philippines among the completed manuscripts of the early part of was a north american review article (published in april)--“does the race of man love a lord?”--a most interesting treatise on snobbery as a universal weakness. there were also some papers on the philippine situation. in one of these clemens wrote: we have bought some islands from a party who did not own them; with real smartness and a good counterfeit of disinterested friendliness we coaxed a confiding weak nation into a trap and closed it upon them; we went back on an honored guest of the stars and stripes when we had no further use for him and chased him to the mountains; we are as indisputably in possession of a wide-spreading archipelago as if it were our property; we have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by benevolent assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the sultan of sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. and so, by these providences of god--the phrase is the government's, not mine--we are a world power; and are glad and proud, and have a back seat in the family. with tacks in it. at least we are letting on to be glad and proud; it is the best way. indeed, it is the only way. we must maintain our dignity, for people are looking. we are a world power; we cannot get out of it now, and we must make the best of it. and again he wrote: i am not finding fault with this use of our flag, for in order not to seem eccentric i have swung around now and joined the nation in the conviction that nothing can sully a flag. i was not properly reared, and had the illusion that a flag was a thing which must be sacredly guarded against shameful uses and unclean contacts lest it suffer pollution; and so when it was sent out to the philippines to float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition i supposed it was polluted, and in an ignorant moment i said so. but i stand corrected. i concede and acknowledge that it was only the government that sent it on such an errand that was polluted. let us compromise on that. i am glad to have it that way. for our flag could not well stand pollution, never having been used to it, but it is different with the administration. but a much more conspicuous comment on the philippine policy was the so-called “defense of general funston” for what funston himself referred to as a “dirty irish trick”; that is to say, deception in the capture of aguinaldo. clemens, who found it hard enough to reconcile himself to-any form of warfare, was especially bitter concerning this particular campaign. the article appeared in the north american review for may, , and stirred up a good deal of a storm. he wrote much more on the subject--very much more--but it is still unpublished. ccxxi. the return of the native one day in april, , samuel clemens received the following letter from the president of the university of missouri: my dear mr. clemens, although you received the degree of doctor of literature last fall from yale, and have had other honors conferred upon you by other great universities, we want to adopt you here as a son of the university of missouri. in asking your permission to confer upon you the degree of ll.d. the university of missouri does not aim to confer an honor upon you so much as to show her appreciation of you. the rules of the university forbid us to confer the degree upon any one in absentia. i hope very much that you can so arrange your plans as to be with us on the fourth day of next june, when we shall hold our annual commencement. very truly yours, r. h. jesse. clemens had not expected to make another trip to the west, but a proffered honor such as this from one's native state was not a thing to be declined. it was at the end of may when he arrived in st. louis, and he was met at the train there by his old river instructor and friend, horace bixby--as fresh, wiry, and capable as he had been forty-five years before. “i have become an old man. you are still thirty-five,” clemens said. they went to the planters hotel, and the news presently got around that mark twain was there. there followed a sort of reception in the hotel lobby, after which bixby took him across to the rooms of the pilots association, where the rivermen gathered in force to celebrate his return. a few of his old comrades were still alive, among them beck jolly. the same afternoon he took the train for hannibal. it was a busy five days that he had in hannibal. high-school commencement day came first. he attended, and willingly, or at least patiently, sat through the various recitals and orations and orchestrations, dreaming and remembering, no doubt, other high-school commencements of more than half a century before, seeing in some of those young people the boys and girls he had known in that vanished time. a few friends of his youth were still there, but they were among the audience now, and no longer fresh and looking into the future. their heads were white, and, like him, they were looking down the recorded years. laura hawkins was there and helen kercheval (mrs. frazer and mrs. garth now), and there were others, but they were few and scattering. he was added to the program, and he made himself as one of the graduates, and told them some things of the young people of that earlier time that brought their laughter and their tears. he was asked to distribute the diplomas, and he undertook the work in his own way. he took an armful of them and said to the graduates: “take one. pick out a good one. don't take two, but be sure you get a good one.” so each took one “unsight and unseen” aid made the more exact distributions among themselves later. next morning it was saturday--he visited the old home on hill street, and stood in the doorway all dressed in white while a battalion of photographers made pictures of “this return of the native” to the threshold of his youth. “it all seems so small to me,” he said, as he looked through the house; “a boy's home is a big place to him. i suppose if i should come back again ten years from now it would be the size of a birdhouse.” he went through the rooms and up-stairs where he had slept and looked out the window down in the back yard where, nearly sixty years before, tom sawyer, huck finn, joe harper, and the rest--that is to say, tom blankenship, john briggs, will pitts, and the bowen boys--set out on their nightly escapades. of that lightsome band will pitts and john briggs still remained, with half a dozen others--schoolmates of the less adventurous sort. buck brown, who had been his rival in the spelling contests, was still there, and john robards, who had worn golden curls and the medal for good conduct, and ed pierce. and while these were assembled in a little group on the pavement outside the home a small old man came up and put out his hand, and it was jimmy macdaniel, to whom so long before, sitting on the river-bank and eating gingerbread, he had first told the story of jim wolfe and the cats. they put him into a carriage, drove him far and wide, and showed the hills and resorts and rendezvous of tom sawyer and his marauding band. he was entertained that evening by the labinnah club (whose name was achieved by a backward spelling of hannibal), where he found most of the survivors of his youth. the news report of that occasion states that he was introduced by father mcloughlin, and that he “responded in a very humorous and touchingly pathetic way, breaking down in tears at the conclusion. commenting on his boyhood days and referring to his mother was too much for the great humorist. before him as he spoke were sitting seven of his boyhood friends.” on sunday morning col. john robards escorted him to the various churches and sunday-schools. they were all new churches to samuel clemens, but he pretended not to recognize this fact. in each one he was asked to speak a few words, and he began by saying how good it was to be back in the old home sunday-school again, which as a boy he had always so loved, and he would go on and point out the very place he had sat, and his escort hardly knew whether or not to enjoy the proceedings. at one place he told a moral story. he said: little boys and girls, i want to tell you a story which illustrates the value of perseverance--of sticking to your work, as it were. it is a story very proper for a sunday-school. when i was a little boy in hannibal i used to play a good deal up here on holliday's hill, which of course you all know. john briggs and i played up there. i don't suppose there are any little boys as good as we were then, but of course that is not to be expected. little boys in those days were 'most always good little boys, because those were the good old times when everything was better than it is now, but never mind that. well, once upon a time, on holliday's hill, they were blasting out rock, and a man was drilling for a blast. he sat there and drilled and drilled and drilled perseveringly until he had a hole down deep enough for the blast. then he put in the powder and tamped and tamped it down, but maybe he tamped it a little too hard, for the blast went off and he went up into the air, and we watched him. he went up higher and higher and got smaller and smaller. first he looked as big as a child, then as big as a dog, then as big as a kitten, then as big as a bird, and finally he went out of sight. john briggs was with me, and we watched the place where he went out of sight, and by and by we saw him coming down first as big as a bird, then as big as a kitten, then as big as a dog, then as big as a child, and then he was a man again, and landed right in his seat and went to drilling just persevering, you see, and sticking to his work. little boys and girls, that's the secret of success, just like that poor but honest workman on holliday's hill. of course you won't always be appreciated. he wasn't. his employer was a hard man, and on saturday night when he paid him he docked him fifteen minutes for the time he was up in the air--but never mind, he had his reward. he told all this in his solemn, grave way, though the sunday-school was in a storm of enjoyment when he finished. there still remains a doubt in hannibal as to its perfect suitability, but there is no doubt as to its acceptability. that sunday afternoon, with john briggs, he walked over holliday's hill--the cardiff hill of tom sawyer. it was jest such a sunday as that one when they had so nearly demolished the negro driver and had damaged a cooper-shop. they calculated that nearly three thousand sundays had passed since then, and now here they were once more, two old men with the hills still fresh and green, the river still sweeping by and rippling in the sun. standing there together and looking across to the low-lying illinois shore, and to the green islands where they had played, and to lover's leap on the south, the man who had been sam clemens said: “john, that is one of the loveliest sights i ever saw. down there by the island is the place we used to swim, and yonder is where a man was drowned, and there's where the steamboat sank. down there on lover's leap is where the millerites put on their robes one night to go to heaven. none of them went that night, but i suppose most of them have gone now.” john briggs said: “sam, do you remember the day we stole the peaches from old man price and one of his bow-legged niggers came after us with the dogs, and how we made up our minds that we'd catch that nigger and drown him?” they came to the place where they had pried out the great rock that had so nearly brought them to grief. sam clemens said: “john, if we had killed that man we'd have had a dead nigger on our hands without a cent to pay for him.” and so they talked on of this thing and that, and by and by they drove along the river, and sam clemens pointed out the place where he swam it and was taken with a cramp on the return swim, and believed for a while that his career was about to close. “once, near the shore, i thought i would let down,” he said, “but was afraid to, knowing that if the water was deep i was a goner, but finally my knees struck the sand and i crawled out. that was the closest call i ever had.” they drove by the place where the haunted house had stood. they drank from a well they had always known, and from the bucket as they had always drunk, talking and always talking, fondling lovingly and lingeringly that most beautiful of all our possessions, the past. “sam,” said john, when they parted, “this is probably the last time we shall meet on this earth. god bless you. perhaps somewhere we shall renew our friendship.” “john,” was the answer, “this day has been worth thousands of dollars to me. we were like brothers once, and i feel that we are the same now. good-by, john. i'll try to meet you--somewhere.” ccxxii. a prophet honored in his country clemens left next day for columbia. committees met him at rensselaer, monroe city, clapper, stoutsville, paris, madison, moberly--at every station along the line of his travel. at each place crowds were gathered when the train pulled in, to cheer and wave and to present him with flowers. sometimes he spoke a few words; but oftener his eyes were full of tears--his voice would not come. there is something essentially dramatic in official recognition by one's native state--the return of the lad who has set out unknown to battle with life, and who, having conquered, is invited back to be crowned. no other honor, however great and spectacular, is quite like that, for there is in it a pathos and a completeness that are elemental and stir emotions as old as life itself. it was on the th of june, , that mark twain received his doctor of laws degree from the state university at columbia, missouri. james wilson, secretary of agriculture, and ethan allen hitchcock, secretary of the interior, were among those similarly honored. mark twain was naturally the chief attraction. dressed in his yale scholastic gown he led the procession of graduating students, and, as in hannibal, awarded them their diplomas. the regular exercises were made purposely brief in order that some time might be allowed for the conferring of the degrees. this ceremony was a peculiarly impressive one. gardner lathrop read a brief statement introducing “america's foremost author and best-loved citizen, samuel langhorne clemens--mark twain.” clemens rose, stepped out to the center of the stage, and paused. he seemed to be in doubt as to whether he should make a speech or simply express his thanks and retire. suddenly, and without a signal, the great audience rose as one man and stood in silence at his feet. he bowed, but he could not speak. then that vast assembly began a peculiar chant, spelling out slowly the word missouri, with a pause between each letter. it was dramatic; it was tremendous in its impressiveness. he had recovered himself when they finished. he said he didn't know whether he was expected to make a speech or not. they did not leave him in doubt. they cheered and demanded a speech, a speech, and he made them one--one of the speeches he could make best, full of quaint phrasing, happy humor, gentle and dramatic pathos. he closed by telling the watermelon story for its “moral effect.” he was the guest of e. w. stevens in columbia, and a dinner was given in his honor. they would have liked to keep him longer, but he was due in st. louis again to join in the dedication of the grounds, where was to be held a world's fair, to celebrate the louisiana purchase. another ceremony he attended was the christening of the st. louis harbor-boat, or rather the rechristening, for it had been decided to change its name from the st. louis--[originally the elon g. smith, built in .]--to the mark twain. a short trip was made on it for the ceremony. governor francis and mayor wells were of the party, and count and countess rochambeau and marquis de lafayette, with the rest of the french group that had come over for the dedication of the world's fair grounds. mark twain himself was invited to pilot the harbor boat, and so returned for the last time to his old place at the wheel. they all collected in the pilot-house behind him, feeling that it was a memorable occasion. they were going along well enough when he saw a little ripple running out from the shore across the bow. in the old days he could have told whether it indicated a bar there or was only caused by the wind, but he could not be sure any more. turning to the pilot languidly, he said: “i feel a little tired. i guess you had better take the wheel.” luncheon was served aboard, and mayor wells made the christening speech; then the countess rochambeau took a bottle of champagne from the hand of governor francis and smashed it on the deck, saying, “i christen thee, good boat, mark twain.” so it was, the mississippi joined in according him honors. in his speech of reply he paid tribute to those illustrious visitors from france and recounted something of the story of french exploration along that great river. “the name of la salle will last as long as the river itself,” he said; “will last until commerce is dead. we have allowed the commerce of the river to die, but it was to accommodate the railroads, and we must be grateful.” carriages were waiting for them when the boat landed in the afternoon, and the party got in and were driven to a house which had been identified as eugene field's birthplace. a bronze tablet recording this fact had been installed, and this was to be the unveiling. the place was not in an inviting quarter of the town. it stood in what is known as walsh's row--was fashionable enough once, perhaps, but long since fallen into disrepute. ragged children played in the doorways, and thirsty lodgers were making trips with tin pails to convenient bar-rooms. a curious nondescript audience assembled around the little group of dedicators, wondering what it was all about. the tablet was concealed by the american flag, which could be easily pulled away by an attached cord. governor francis spoke a few words, to the effect that they had gathered here to unveil a tablet to an american poet, and that it was fitting that mark twain should do this. they removed their hats, and clemens, his white hair blowing in the wind, said: “my friends; we are here with reverence and respect to commemorate and enshrine in memory the house where was born a man who, by his life, made bright the lives of all who knew him, and by his literary efforts cheered the thoughts of thousands who never knew him. i take pleasure in unveiling the tablet of eugene field.” the flag fell and the bronze inscription was revealed. by this time the crowd, generally, had recognized who it was that was speaking. a working-man proposed three cheers for mark twain, and they were heartily given. then the little party drove away, while the neighborhood collected to regard the old house with a new interest. it was reported to clemens later that there was some dispute as to the identity of the field birthplace. he said: “never mind. it is of no real consequence whether it is his birthplace or not. a rose in any other garden will bloom as sweet.” ccxxiii. at york harbor they decided to spend the summer at york harbor, maine. they engaged a cottage, there, and about the end of june mr. rogers brought his yacht kanawha to their water-front at riverdale, and in perfect weather took them to maine by sea. they landed at york harbor and took possession of their cottage, the pines, one of their many attractive summer lodges. howells, at kittery point, was not far away, and everything promised a happy summer. mrs. clemens wrote to mrs. crane: we are in the midst of pines. they come up right about us, and the house is so high and the roots of the trees are so far below the veranda that we are right in the branches. we drove over to call on mr. and mrs. howells. the drive was most beautiful, and never in my life have i seen such a variety of wild flowers in so short a space. howells tells us of the wide, low cottage in a pine grove overlooking york river, and how he used to sit with clemens that summer at a corner of the veranda farthest away from mrs. clemens's window, where they could read their manuscripts to each other, and tell their stories and laugh their hearts out without disturbing her. clemens, as was his habit, had taken a work-room in a separate cottage “in the house of a friend and neighbor, a fisherman and a boatman”: there was a table where he could write, and a bed where he could lie down and read; and there, unless my memory has played me one of those constructive tricks that people's memories indulge in, he read me the first chapters of an admirable story. the scene was laid in a missouri town, and the characters such as he had known in boyhood; but often as i tried to make him own it, he denied having written any such story; it is possible that i dreamed it, but i hope the ms. will yet be found. howells did not dream it; but in one way his memory misled him. the story was one which clemens had heard in hannibal, and he doubtless related it in his vivid way. howells, writing at a later time, quite naturally included it among the several manuscripts which clemens read aloud to him. clemens may have intended to write the tale, may even have begun it, though this is unlikely. the incidents were too well known and too notorious in his old home for fiction. among the stories that clemens did show, or read, to howells that summer was “the belated passport,” a strong, intensely interesting story with what howells in a letter calls a “goat's tail ending,” perhaps meaning that it stopped with a brief and sudden shake--with a joke, in fact, altogether unimportant, and on the whole disappointing to the reader. a far more notable literary work of that summer grew out of a true incident which howells related to clemens as they sat chatting together on the veranda overlooking the river one summer afternoon. it was a pathetic episode in the life of some former occupants of the pines--the tale of a double illness in the household, where a righteous deception was carried on during several weeks for the benefit of a life that was about to slip away. out of this grew the story, “was it heaven? or hell?” a heartbreaking history which probes the very depths of the human soul. next to “hadleyburg,” it is mark twain's greatest fictional sermon. clemens that summer wrote, or rather finished, his most pretentious poem. one day at riverdale, when mrs. clemens had been with him on the lawn, they had remembered together the time when their family of little folks had filled their lives so full, conjuring up dream-like glimpses of them in the years of play and short frocks and hair-plaits down their backs. it was pathetic, heart-wringing fancying; and later in the day clemens conceived and began the poem which now he brought to conclusion. it was built on the idea of a mother who imagines her dead child still living, and describes to any listener the pictures of her fancy. it is an impressive piece of work; but the author, for some reason, did not offer it for publication.--[this poem was completed on the anniversary of susy's death and is of considerable length. some selections from it will be found under appendix u, at the end of this work.] mrs. clemens, whose health earlier in the year had been delicate, became very seriously ill at york harbor. howells writes: at first she had been about the house, and there was one gentle afternoon when she made tea for us in the parlor, but that was the last time i spoke with her. after that it was really a question of how soonest and easiest she could be got back to riverdale. she had seemed to be in fairly good health and spirits for several weeks after the arrival at york. then, early in august, there came a great celebration of some municipal anniversary, and for two or three days there were processions, mass-meetings, and so on by day, with fireworks at night. mrs. clemens, always young in spirit, was greatly interested. she went about more than her strength warranted, seeing and hearing and enjoying all that was going on. she was finally persuaded to forego the remaining ceremonies and rest quietly on the pleasant veranda at home; but she had overtaxed herself and a collapse was inevitable. howells and two friends called one afternoon, and a friend of the queen of rumania, a madame hartwig, who had brought from that gracious sovereign a letter which closed in this simple and modest fashion: i beg your pardon for being a bore to one i so deeply love and admire, to whom i owe days and days of forgetfulness of self and troubles, and the intensest of all joys-hero-worship! people don't always realize what a happiness that is! god bless you for every beautiful thought you poured into my tired heart, and for every smile on a weary way. carmen sylva. this was the occasion mentioned by howells when mrs. clemens made tea for them in the parlor for the last time. her social life may be said to have ended that afternoon. next morning the break came. clemens, in his notebook for that day, writes: tuesday, august , . at a.m. livy taken violently ill. telephoned and dr. lambert was here in / hour. she could not breathe-was likely to stifle. also she had severe palpitation. she believed she was dying. i also believed it. nurses were summoned, and mrs. crane and others came from elmira. clara clemens took charge of the household and matters generally, and the patient was secluded and guarded from every disturbing influence. clemens slipped about with warnings of silence. a visitor found notices in mark twain's writing pinned to the trees near mrs. clemens's window warning the birds not to sing too loudly. the patient rallied, but she remained very much debilitated. on september d the note-book says: always mr. rogers keeps his yacht kanawha in commission & ready to fly here and take us to riverdale on telegraphic notice. but mrs. clemens was unable to return by sea. when it was decided at last, in october, that she could be removed to riverdale, clemens and howells went to boston and engaged an invalid car to make the journey from york harbor to riverdale without change. howells tells us that clemens gave his strictest personal attention to the arrangement of these details, and that they absorbed him. there was no particular of the business which he did not scrutinize and master.... with the inertness that grows upon an aging man he had been used to delegate more and more things, but of that thing i perceived that he would not delegate the least detail. they made the journey on the th, in nine and a half hours. with the exception of the natural weariness due to such a trip, the invalid was apparently no worse on their arrival. the stout english butler carried her to her room. it would be many months before she would leave it again. in one of his memoranda clemens wrote: our dear prisoner is where she is through overwork-day & night devotion to the children & me. we did not know how to value it. we know now. and in a notation, on a letter praising him for what he had done for the world's enjoyment, and for his splendid triumph over debt, he said: livy never gets her share of these applauses, but it is because the people do not know. yet she is entitled to the lion's share. he wrote twichell at the end of october: livy drags along drearily. it must be hard times for that turbulent spirit. it will be a long time before she is on her feet again. it is a most pathetic case. i wish i could transfer it to myself. between ripping & raging & smoking & reading i could get a good deal of holiday out of it. clara runs the house smoothly & capitally. heavy as was the cloud of illness, he could not help pestering twichell a little about a recent mishap--a sprained shoulder: i should like to know how & where it happened. in the pulpit, as like as not, otherwise you would not be taking so much pains to conceal it. this is not a malicious suggestion, & not a personally invented one: you told me yourself once that you threw artificial power & impressiveness in your sermons where needed by “banging the bible”--(your own words). you have reached a time of life when it is not wise to take these risks. you would better jump around. we all have to change our methods as the infirmities of age creep upon us. jumping around will be impressive now, whereas before you were gray it would have excited remark. mrs. clemens seemed to improve as the weeks passed, and they had great hopes of her complete recovery. clemens took up some work--a new huck finn story, inspired by his trip to hannibal. it was to have two parts--huck and tom in youth, and then their return in old age. he did some chapters quite in the old vein, and wrote to howells of his plan. howells answered: it is a great lay-out: what i shall enjoy most will be the return of the old fellows to the scene and their tall lying. there is a matchless chance there. i suppose you will put in plenty of pegs in this prefatory part. but the new story did not reach completion. huck and tom would not come back, even to go over the old scenes. ccxxiv. the sixty-seventh birthday dinner it was on the evening of the th of november, , i at the metropolitan club, new york city, that col. george harvey, president of the harper company, gave mark twain a dinner in celebration of his sixty-seventh birthday. the actual date fell three days later; but that would bring it on sunday, and to give it on saturday night would be more than likely to carry it into sabbath morning, and so the th was chosen. colonel harvey himself presided, and howells led the speakers with a poem, “a double-barreled sonnet to mark twain,” which closed: still, to have everything beyond cavil right, we will dine with you here till sunday night. thomas brackett reed followed with what proved to be the last speech he would ever make, as it was also one of his best. all the speakers did well that night, and they included some of the country's foremost in oratory: chauncey depew, st. clair mckelway, hamilton mabie, and wayne macveagh. dr. henry van dyke and john kendrick bangs read poems. the chairman constantly kept the occasion from becoming too serious by maintaining an attitude of “thinking ambassador” for the guest of the evening, gently pushing clemens back in his seat when he attempted to rise and expressing for him an opinion of each of the various tributes. “the limit has been reached,” he announced at the close of dr. van dyke's poem. “more that is better could not be said. gentlemen, mr. clemens.” it is seldom that mark twain has made a better after-dinner speech than he delivered then. he was surrounded by some of the best minds of the nation, men assembled to do him honor. they expected much of him--to mark twain always an inspiring circumstance. he was greeted with cheers and hand-clapping that came volley after volley, and seemed never ready to end. when it had died away at last he stood waiting a little in the stillness for his voice; then he said, “i think i ought to be allowed to talk as long as i want to,” and again the storm broke. it is a speech not easy to abridge--a finished and perfect piece of after-dinner eloquence,--[the “sixty-seventh birthday speech” entire is included in the volume mark twain's speeches.]--full of humorous stories and moving references to old friends--to hay; and reed, and twichell, and howells, and rogers, the friends he had known so long and loved so well. he told of his recent trip to his boyhood home, and how he had stood with john briggs on holliday's hill and they had pointed out the haunts of their youth. then at the end he paid a tribute to the companion of his home, who could not be there to share his evening's triumph. this peroration--a beautiful heart-offering to her and to those that had shared in long friendship--demands admission: now, there is one invisible guest here. a part of me is not present; the larger part, the better part, is yonder at her home; that is my wife, and she has a good many personal friends here, and i think it won't distress any one of them to know that, although she is going to be confined to her bed for many months to come from that nervous prostration, there is not any danger and she is coming along very well--and i think it quite appropriate that i should speak of her. i knew her for the first time just in the same year that i first knew john hay and tom reed and mr. twichell--thirty-six years ago--and she has been the best friend i have ever had, and that is saying a good deal--she has reared me--she and twichell together --and what i am i owe to them. twichell--why, it is such a pleasure to look upon twichell's face! for five and twenty years i was under the rev. mr. twichell's tuition, i was in his pastorate occupying a pew in his church and held him in due reverence. that man is full of all the graces that go to make a person companionable and beloved; and wherever twichell goes to start a church the people flock there to buy the land; they find real estate goes up all around the spot, and the envious and the thoughtful always try to get twichell to move to their neighborhood and start a church; and wherever you see him go you can go and buy land there with confidence, feeling sure that there will be a double price for you before very long. i have tried to do good in this world, and it is marvelous in how many different ways i have done good, and it is comfortable to reflect--now, there's mr. rogers--just out of the affection i bear that man many a time i have given him points in finance that he had never thought of--and if he could lay aside envy, prejudice, and superstition, and utilize those ideas in his business, it would make a difference in his bank-account. well, i liked the poetry. i liked all the speeches and the poetry, too. i liked dr. van dyke's poem. i wish i could return thanks in proper measure to you, gentlemen, who have spoken and violated your feelings to pay me compliments; some were merited and some you overlooked, it is true; and colonel harvey did slander every one of you, and put things into my mouth that i never said, never thought of at all. and now my wife and i, out of our single heart, return you our deepest and most grateful thanks, and--yesterday was her birthday. the sixty-seventh birthday dinner was widely celebrated by the press, and newspaper men generally took occasion to pay brilliant compliments to mark twain. arthur brisbane wrote editorially: for more than a generation he has been the messiah of a genuine gladness and joy to the millions of three continents. it was little more than a week later that one of the old friends he had mentioned, thomas brackett reed, apparently well and strong that birthday evening, passed from the things of this world. clemens felt his death keenly, and in a “good-by” which he wrote for harper's weekly he said: his was a nature which invited affection--compelled it, in fact--and met it half-way. hence, he was “tom” to the most of his friends and to half of the nation.... i cannot remember back to a time when he was not “tom” reed to me, nor to a time when he could have been offended at being so addressed by me. i cannot remember back to a time when i could let him alone in an after-dinner speech if he was present, nor to a time when he did not take my extravagance concerning him and misstatements about him in good part, nor yet to a time when he did not pay them back with usury when his turn came. the last speech he made was at my birthday dinner at the end of november, when naturally i was his text; my last word to him was in a letter the next day; a day later i was illustrating a fantastic article on art with his portrait among others--a portrait now to be laid reverently away among the jests that begin in humor and end in pathos. these things happened only eight days ago, and now he is gone from us, and the nation is speaking of him as one who was. it seems incredible, impossible. such a man, such a friend, seems to us a permanent possession; his vanishing from our midst is unthinkable, as was the vanishing of the campanile, that had stood for a thousand years and was turned to dust in a moment. the appreciation closes: i have only wished to say how fine and beautiful was his life and character, and to take him by the hand and say good-by, as to a fortunate friend who has done well his work and gees a pleasant journey. ccxxv. christian science controversies the north american review for december ( ) contained an instalment of the christian science series which mark twain had written in vienna several years before. he had renewed his interest in the doctrine, and his admiration for mrs. eddy's peculiar abilities and his antagonism toward her had augmented in the mean time. howells refers to the “mighty moment when clemens was building his engines of war for the destruction of christian science, which superstition nobody, and he least of all, expected to destroy”: he believed that as a religious machine the christian science church was as perfect as the roman church, and destined to be more formidable in its control of the minds of men.... an interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not. only his admiration for the masterly policy of the christian science hierarchy, but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be tried on his friends and family if they wished it. he had a tender heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scienticians, but he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the failure of the regulars, rather than upon their own successes, which also he believed in. he was recurrently, but not insistently, desirous that you should try their strange magics when you were going to try the familiar medicines. clemens never had any quarrel with the theory of christian science or mental healing, or with any of the empiric practices. he acknowledged good in all of them, and he welcomed most of them in preference to materia medica. it is true that his animosity for the founder of the christian science cult sometimes seems to lap over and fringe the religion itself; but this is apparent rather than real. furthermore, he frequently expressed a deep obligation which humanity owed to the founder of the faith, in that she had organized a healing element ignorantly and indifferently employed hitherto. his quarrel with mrs. eddy lay in the belief that she herself, as he expressed it, was “a very unsound christian scientist.” i believe she has a serious malady--self-edification--and that it will be well to have one of the experts demonstrate over her. [but he added]: closely examined, painstakingly studied, she is easily the most interesting person on the planet, and in several ways as easily the most extraordinary woman that was ever born upon it. necessarily, the forces of christian science were aroused by these articles, and there were various replies, among them, one by the founder herself, a moderate rejoinder in her usual literary form. “mrs. eddy in error,” in the north american review for april, , completed what clemens had to say on the matter for this time. he was putting together a book on the subject, comprised of his various published papers and some added chapters. it would not be a large volume, and he offered to let his christian science opponents share it with him, stating their side of the case. mr. william d. mccrackan, one of the church's chief advocates, was among those invited to participate. mccrackan and clemens, from having begun as enemies, had become quite friendly, and had discussed their differences face to face at considerable length. early in the controversy clemens one night wrote mccrackan a pretty savage letter. he threw it on the hall table for mailing, but later got out of bed and slipped down-stairs to get it. it was too late--the letters had been gathered up and mailed. next evening a truly christian note came from mccrackan, returning the hasty letter, which he said he was sure the writer would wish to recall. their friendship began there. for some reason, however, the collaborated volume did not materialize. in the end, publication was delayed a number of years, by which time clemens's active interest was a good deal modified, though the practice itself never failed to invite his attention. howells refers to his anti-christian science rages, which began with the postponement of the book, and these clemens vented at the time in another manuscript entitled, “eddypus,” an imaginary history of a thousand years hence, when eddyism should rule the world. by that day its founder would have become a deity, and the calendar would be changed to accord with her birth. it was not publishable matter, and really never intended as such. it was just one of the things which mark twain wrote to relieve mental pressure. ccxxvi. “was it heaven? or hell?” the christmas number of harper's magazine for contained the story, “was it heaven? or hell?” and it immediately brought a flood of letters to its author from grateful readers on both sides of the ocean. an englishman wrote: “i want to thank you for writing so pathetic and so profoundly true a story”; and an american declared it to be the best short story ever written. another letter said: i have learned to love those maiden liars--love and weep over them --then put them beside dante's beatrice in paradise. there were plenty of such letters; but there was one of a different sort. it was a letter from a man who had but recently gone through almost precisely the experience narrated in the tale. his dead daughter had even borne the same name--helen. she had died of typhus while her mother was prostrated with the same malady, and the deception had been maintained in precisely the same way, even to the fictitiously written letters. clemens replied to this letter, acknowledging the striking nature of the coincidence it related, and added that, had he invented the story, he would have believed it a case of mental telegraphy. i was merely telling a true story just as it had been told to me by one who well knew the mother and the daughter & all the beautiful & pathetic details. i was living in the house where it had happened, three years before, & i put it on paper at once while it was fresh in my mind, & its pathos still straining at my heartstrings. clemens did not guess that the coincidences were not yet complete, that within a month the drama of the tale would be enacted in his own home. in his note-book, under the date of december ( ), he wrote: jean was hit with a chill: clara was completing her watch in her mother's room and there was no one able to force jean to go to bed. as a result she is pretty ill to-day-fever & high temperature. three days later he added: it was pneumonia. for days jean's temperature ranged between & / , till this morning, when it got down to . she looks like an escaped survivor of a forest fire. for days now my story in the christmas harper's “was it heaven? or hell?”--has been enacted in this household. every day clara & the nurses have lied about jean to her mother, describing the fine times she is having outdoors in the winter sports. that proved a hard, trying winter in the clemens home, and the burden of it fell chiefly, indeed almost entirely, upon clara clemens. mrs. clemens became still more frail, and no other member of the family, not even her husband, was allowed to see her for longer than the briefest interval. yet the patient was all the more anxious to know the news, and daily it had to be prepared--chiefly invented--for her comfort. in an account which clemens once set down of the “siege and season of unveracity,” as he called it, he said: clara stood a daily watch of three or four hours, and hers was a hard office indeed. daily she sealed up in her heart a dozen dangerous truths, and thus saved her mother's life and hope and happiness with holy lies. she had never told her mother a lie in her life before, and i may almost say that she never told her a truth afterward. it was fortunate for us all that clara's reputation for truthfulness was so well established in her mother's mind. it was our daily protection from disaster. the mother never doubted clara's word. clara could tell her large improbabilities without exciting any suspicion, whereas if i tried to market even a small and simple one the case would have been different. i was never able to get a reputation like clara's. mrs. clemens questioned clara every day concerning jean's health, spirits, clothes, employments, and amusements, and how she was enjoying herself; and clara furnished the information right along in minute detail--every word of it false, of course. every day she had to tell how jean dressed, and in time she got so tired of using jean's existing clothes over and over again, and trying to get new effects out of them, that finally, as a relief to her hard-worked invention, she got to adding imaginary clothes to jean's wardrobe, and probably would have doubled it and trebled it if a warning note in her mother's comments had not admonished her that she was spending more money on these spectral gowns and things than the family income justified. some portions of detailed accounts of clara's busy days of this period, as written at the time by clemens to twichell and to mrs. crane, are eminently worth preserving. to mrs. crane: clara does not go to her monday lesson in new york today [her mother having seemed not so well through the night], but forgets that fact and enters her mother's room (where she has no business to be) toward train-time dressed in a wrapper. livy. why, clara, aren't you going to your lesson? clara (almost caught). yes. l. in that costume? cl. oh no. l. well, you can't make your train; it's impossible. cl. i know, but i'm going to take the other one. l. indeed that won't do--you'll be ever so much too late for your lesson. cl. no, the lesson-time has been put an hour later. l. (satisfied, then suddenly). but, clara, that train and the late lesson together will make you late to mrs. hapgood's luncheon. cl. no, the train leaves fifteen minutes earlier than it used to. l. (satisfied). tell mrs. hapgood, etc., etc., etc. (which clara promises to do). clara, dear, after the luncheon--i hate to put this on you--but could you do two or three little shopping-errands for me? cl. oh, it won't trouble me a bit-i can do it. (takes a list of the things she is to buy-a list which she will presently hand to another.) at or p.m. clara takes the things brought from new york, studies over her part a little, then goes to her mother's room. livy. it's very good of you, dear. of course, if i had known it was going to be so snowy and drizzly and sloppy i wouldn't have asked you to buy them. did you get wet? cl. oh, nothing to hurt. l. you took a cab both ways? cl. not from the station to the lesson-the weather was good enough till that was over. l. well, now, tell me everything mrs. hapgood said. clara tells her a long yarn-avoiding novelties and surprises and anything likely to inspire questions difficult to answer; and of course detailing the menu, for if it had been the feeding of the , livy would have insisted on knowing what kind of bread it was and how the fishes were served. by and by, while talking of something else: livy. clams!--in the end of december. are you sure it was clams? cl. i didn't say cl---i meant blue points. l. (tranquilized). it seemed odd. what is jean doing? cl. she said she was going to do a little typewriting. l. has she been out to-day? cl. only a moment, right after luncheon. she was determined to go out again, but---- l. how did you know she was out? cl. (saving herself in time). katie told me. she was determined to go out again in the rain and snow, but i persuaded her to stay in. l. (with moving and grateful admiration). clara, you are wonderful! the wise watch you keep over jean, and the influence you have over her; it's so lovely of you, and i tied here and can't take care of her myself. (and she goes on with these undeserved praises till clara is expiring with shame.) to twichell: i am to see livy a moment every afternoon until she has another bad night; and i stand in dread, for with all my practice i realize that in a sudden emergency i am but a poor, clumsy liar, whereas a fine alert and capable emergency liar is the only sort that is worth anything in a sick-chamber. now, joe, just see what reputation can do. all clara's life she has told livy the truth and now the reward comes; clara lies to her three and a half hours every day, and livy takes it all at par, whereas even when i tell her a truth it isn't worth much without corroboration.... soon my brief visit is due. i've just been up listening at livy's door. p.m. a great disappointment. i was sitting outside livy's door waiting. clara came out a minute ago and said l ivy is not so well, and the nurse can't let me see her to-day. that pathetic drama was to continue in some degree for many a long month. all that winter and spring mrs. clemens kept but a frail hold on life. clemens wrote little, and refused invitations everywhere he could. he spent his time largely in waiting for the two-minute period each day when he could stand at the bed-foot and say a few words to the invalid, and he confined his writing mainly to the comforting, affectionate messages which he was allowed to push under her door. he was always waiting there long before the moment he was permitted to enter. her illness and her helplessness made manifest what howells has fittingly characterized as his “beautiful and tender loyalty to her, which was the most moving quality of his most faithful soul.” ccxxvii. the second riverdale winter most of mark twain's stories have been dramatized at one time or another, and with more or less success. he had two plays going that winter, one of them the little “death disk,” which--in story form had appeared a year before in harper's magazine. it was put on at the carnegie lyceum with considerable effect, but it was not of sufficient importance to warrant a long continuance. another play of that year was a dramatization of huckleberry finn, by lee arthur. this was played with a good deal of success in baltimore, philadelphia, and elsewhere, the receipts ranging from three hundred to twenty-one hundred dollars per night, according to the weather and locality. why the play was discontinued is not altogether apparent; certainly many a dramatic enterprise has gone further, faring worse. huck in book form also had been having adventures a little earlier, in being tabooed on account of his morals by certain librarians of denver and omaha. it was years since huck had been in trouble of that sort, and he acquired a good deal of newspaper notoriety in consequence. certain entries in mark twain's note-book reveal somewhat of his life and thought at this period. we find such entries as this: saturday, january , . the offspring of riches: pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny. sunday, january , . the offspring of poverty: greed, sordidness, envy, hate, malice, cruelty, meanness, lying, shirking, cheating, stealing, murder. monday, february , . d wedding anniversary. i was allowed to see livy minutes this morning in honor of the day. she makes but little progress toward recovery, still there is certainly some, we are sure. sunday, march , . we may not doubt that society in heaven consists mainly of undesirable persons. thursday, march , . susy's birthday. she would be now. the family illnesses, which presently included an allotment for himself, his old bronchitis, made him rage more than ever at the imperfections of the species which could be subject to such a variety of ills. once he wrote: man was made at the end of the week's work when god was tired. and again: adam, man's benefactor--he gave him all that he has ever received that was worth having--death. the riverdale home was in reality little more than a hospital that spring. jean had scarcely recovered her physical strength when she was attacked by measles, and clara also fell a victim to the infection. fortunately mrs. clemens's health had somewhat improved. it was during this period that clemens formulated his eclectic therapeutic doctrine. writing to twichell april , , he said: livy does make a little progress these past or days, progress which is visible to even the untrained eye. the physicians are doing good work for her, but my notion is, that no art of healing is the best for all ills. i should distribute the ailments around: surgery cases to the surgeon; lupus to the actinic-ray specialist; nervous prostration to the christian scientist; most ills to the allopath & the homeopath; & (in my own particular case) rheumatism, gout, & bronchial attack to the osteopathist. he had plenty of time to think and to read during those weeks of confinement, and to rage, and to write when he felt the need of that expression, though he appears to have completed not much for print beyond his reply to mrs. eddy, already mentioned, and his burlesque, “instructions in art,” with pictures by himself, published in the metropolitan for april and may. howells called his attention to some military outrages in the philippines, citing a case where a certain lieutenant had tortured one of his men, a mild offender, to death out of pure deviltry, and had been tried but not punished for his fiendish crime.--[the torture to death of private edward c. richter, an american soldier, by orders of a commissioned officer of the united states army on the night of february , . private richter was bound and gagged and the gag held in his mouth by means of a club while ice-water was slowly poured into his face, a dipper full at a time, for two hours and a half, until life became extinct.] clemens undertook to give expression to his feelings on this subject, but he boiled so when he touched pen to paper to write of it that it was simply impossible for him to say anything within the bounds of print. then his only relief was to rise and walk the floor, and curse out his fury at the race that had produced such a specimen. mrs. clemens, who perhaps got some drift or the echo of these tempests, now and then sent him a little admonitory, affectionate note. among the books that clemens read, or tried to read, during his confinement were certain of the novels of sir walter scott. he had never been able to admire scott, and determined now to try to understand this author's popularity and his standing with the critics; but after wading through the first volume of one novel, and beginning another one, he concluded to apply to one who could speak as having authority. he wrote to brander matthews: dear brander,--i haven't been out of my bed for weeks, but-well, i have been reading a good deal, & it occurs to me to ask you to sit down, some time or other when you have or months to spare, & jot me down a certain few literary particulars for my help & elevation. your time need not be thrown away, for at your further leisure you can make columbian lectures out of the results & do your students a good turn. . are there in sir walter's novels passages done in good english --english which is neither slovenly nor involved? . are there passages whose english is not poor & thin & commonplace, but is of a quality above that? . are there passages which burn with real fire--not punk, fox- fire, make-believe? . has he heroes & heroines who are not cads and cadesses? . has he personages whose acts & talk correspond with their characters as described by him? . has he heroes & heroines whom the reader admires--admires and knows why? . has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages that are humorous? . does he ever chain the reader's interest & make him reluctant to lay the book down? . are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from admiring the placid flood & flow of his own dilution, ceases from being artificial, & is for a time, long or short, recognizably sincere & in earnest? . did he know how to write english, & didn't do it because he didn't want to? . did he use the right word only when he couldn't think of another one, or did he run so much to wrong words because he didn't know the right one when he saw it? . can you read him and keep your respect for him? of course a person could in his day--an era of sentimentality & sloppy romantics--but land! can a body do it to-day? brander, i lie here dying; slowly dying, under the blight of sir walter. i have read the first volume of rob roy, & as far as chapter xix of guy mannering, & i can no longer hold my head up or take my nourishment. lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy; & such wax figures & skeletons & specters. interest? why, it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these milk-&-water humbugs. and oh, the poverty of invention! not poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons for them. sir walter usually gives himself away when he arranges for a situation--elaborates & elaborates & elaborates till, if you live to get to it, you don't believe in it when it happens. i can't find the rest of rob roy, i, can't stand any more mannering --i do not know just what to do, but i will reflect, & not quit this great study rashly.... my, i wish i could see you & leigh hunt! sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. but a few days later he experienced a revelation. it came when he perseveringly attacked still a third work of scott--quentin durward. hastily he wrote to matthews again: i'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dullness since i broke into sir walter & lost my temper. i finished guy mannering that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows gibbering around a single flesh-&-blood being--dinmont; a book crazily put together out of the very refuse of the romance artist's stage properties--finished it & took up quentin durward & finished that. it was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living; it was like withdrawing from the infant class in the college of journalism to sit under the lectures in english literature in columbia university. i wonder who wrote quentin durward?--[this letter, enveloped, addressed, and stamped, was evidently mislaid. it was found and mailed seven years later, june, message from the dead.] among other books which he read that winter and spring was helen keller's 'the story of my life', then recently published. that he finished it in a mood of sweet gentleness we gather from a long, lovely letter which he wrote her--a letter in which he said: i am charmed with your book--enchanted. you are a wonderful creature, the most wonderful in the world--you and your other half together--miss sullivan, i mean--for it took the pair of you to make a complete & perfect whole. how she stands out in her letters! her brilliancy, penetration, originality, wisdom, character, & the fine literary competencies of her pen--they are all there. when reading and writing failed as diversion, mark twain often turned to mathematics. with no special talent for accuracy in the matter of figures, he had a curious fondness for calculations, scientific and financial, and he used to cover pages, ciphering at one thing and another, arriving pretty inevitably at the wrong results. when the problem was financial, and had to do with his own fortunes, his figures were as likely as not to leave him in a state of panic. the expenditures were naturally heavy that spring; and one night, when he had nothing better to do, he figured the relative proportion to his income. the result showed that they were headed straight for financial ruin. he put in the rest of the night fearfully rolling and tossing, and reconstructing his figures that grew always worse, and next morning summoned jean and clara and petrified them with the announcement that the cost of living was one hundred and twenty-five per cent. more than the money-supply. writing to macalister three days later he said: it was a mistake. when i came down in the morning, a gray and aged wreck, i found that in some unaccountable way (unaccountable to a business man, but not to me) i had multiplied the totals by two. by god, i dropped seventy-five years on the floor where i stood! do you know it affected me as one is affected when one wakes out of a hideous dream & finds it was only a dream. it was a great comfort & satisfaction to me to call the daughters to a private meeting of the board again. certainly there is a blistering & awful reality about a well-arranged unreality. it is quite within the possibilities that two or three nights like that of mine would drive a man to suicide. he would refuse to examine the figures, they would revolt him so, & he would go to his death unaware that there was nothing serious about them. i cannot get that night out of my head, it was so vivid, so real, so ghastly: in any other year of these thirty-three the relief would have been simple: go where you can, cut your cloth to fit your income. you can't do that when your wife can't be moved, even from one room to the next. the doctor & a specialist met in conspiracy five days ago, & in their belief she will by and by come out of this as good as new, substantially. they ordered her to italy for next winter--which seems to indicate that by autumn she will be able to undertake the voyage. so clara is writing to a florence friend to take a look around among the villas for us in the regions near that city. ccxxviii. proffered honors mark twain had been at home well on toward three years; but his popularity showed no signs of diminishing. so far from having waned, it had surged to a higher point than ever before. his crusade against public and private abuses had stirred readers, and had set them to thinking; the news of illness in his household; a report that he was contemplating another residence abroad--these things moved deeply the public heart, and a tide of letters flowed in, letters of every sort--of sympathy, of love, or hearty endorsement, whatever his attitude of reform. when a writer in a new york newspaper said, “let us go outside the realm of practical politics next time in choosing our candidates for the presidency,” and asked, “who is our ablest and most conspicuous private citizen?” another editorial writer, joseph hollister, replied that mark twain was “the greatest man of his day in private life, and entitled to the fullest measure of recognition.” but clemens was without political ambitions. he knew the way of such things too well. when hollister sent him the editorial he replied only with a word of thanks, and did not, even in jest, encourage that tiny seed of a presidential boom. one would like to publish many of the beautiful letters received during this period, for they are beautiful, most of them, however illiterate in form, however discouraging in length--beautiful in that they overflow with the writers' sincerity and gratitude. so many of them came from children, usually without the hope of a reply, some signed only with initials, that the writers might not be open to the suspicion of being seekers for his autograph. almost more than any other reward, mark twain valued this love of the children. a department in the st. nicholas magazine offered a prize for a caricature drawing of some well-known man. there were one or two of certain prominent politicians and capitalists, and there was literally a wheelbarrow load of mark twain. when he was informed of this he wrote: “no tribute could have pleased me more than that--the friendship of the children.” tributes came to him in many forms. in his native state it was proposed to form a mark twain association, with headquarters at hannibal, with the immediate purpose of having a week set apart at the st. louis world's fair, to be called the mark twain week, with a special mark twain day, on which a national literary convention would be held. but when his consent was asked, and his co-operation invited, he wrote characteristically: it is indeed a high compliment which you offer me, in naming an association after me and in proposing the setting apart of a mark twain day at the great st. louis fair, but such compliments are not proper for the living; they are proper and safe for the dead only. i value the impulse which moves you to tender me these honors. i value it as highly as any one can, and am grateful for it, but i should stand in a sort of terror of the honors themselves. so long as we remain alive we are not safe from doing things which, however righteously and honorably intended, can wreck our repute and extinguish our friendships. i hope that no society will be named for me while i am still alive, for i might at some time or other do something which would cause its members to regret having done me that honor. after i shall have joined the dead i shall follow the custom of those people, and be guilty of no conduct that can wound any friend; but until that time shall come i shall be a doubtful quantity, like the rest of our race. the committee, still hoping for his consent, again appealed to him. but again he wrote: while i am deeply touched by the desire of my friends of hannibal to confer these great honors upon me i must still forbear to accept them. spontaneous and unpremeditated honors, like those which came to me at hannibal, columbia, st. louis, and at the village stations all down the line, are beyond all price and are a treasure for life in the memory, for they are a free gift out of the heart and they come without solicitation; but i am a missourian, and so i shrink from distinctions which have to be arranged beforehand and with my privity, for i then become a party to my own exalting. i am humanly fond of honors that happen, but chary of those that come by canvass and intention. somewhat later he suggested a different feature for the fair; one that was not practical, perhaps, but which certainly would have aroused interest--that is to say, an old-fashioned six-day steamboat-race from new orleans to st. louis, with the old-fashioned accessories, such as torch-baskets, forecastle crowds of negro singers, with a negro on the safety-valve. in his letter to president francis he said: as to particulars, i think that the race should be a genuine reproduction of the old-time race, not just an imitation of it, and that it should cover the whole course. i think the boats should begin the trip at new orleans, and side by side (not an interval between), and end it at north st. louis, a mile or two above the big mound. in a subsequent letter to governor francis he wrote: it has been a dear wish of mine to exhibit myself at the great fair & get a prize, but circumstances beyond my control have interfered.... i suppose you will get a prize, because you have created the most prodigious fair the planet has ever seen. very well, you have indeed earned it, and with it the gratitude of the state and the nation. newspaper men used every inducement to get interviews from him. they invited him to name a price for any time he could give them, long or short. one reporter offered him five hundred dollars for a two-hour talk. another proposed to pay him one hundred dollars a week for a quarter of a day each week, allowing him to discuss any subject he pleased. one wrote asking him two questions: the first, “your favorite method of escaping from indians”; the second, “your favorite method of escaping capture by the indians when they were in pursuit of you.” they inquired as to his favorite copy-book maxim; as to what he considered most important to a young man's success; his definition of a gentleman. they wished to know his plan for the settlement of labor troubles. but they did not awaken his interest, or his cupidity. to one applicant he wrote: no, there are temptations against which we are fire-proof. your proposition is one which comes to me with considerable frequency, but it never tempts me. the price isn't the objection; you offer plenty. it is the nature of the work that is the objection--a kind of work which i could not do well enough to satisfy me. to multiply the price by twenty would not enable me to do the work to my satisfaction, & by consequence would make no impression upon me. once he allowed himself to be interviewed for the herald, when from mr. rogers's yacht he had watched sir thomas lipton's shamrock go down to defeat; but this was a subject which appealed to him--a kind of hotweather subject--and he could be as light-minded about it as he chose. ccxxxix. the last summer at elmira the clemenses were preparing to take up residence in florence, italy. the hartford house had been sold in may, ending forever the association with the city that had so long been a part of their lives. the tarrytown place, which they had never occupied, they also agreed to sell, for it was the belief now that mrs. clemens's health would never greatly prosper there. howells says, or at least implies, that they expected their removal to florence to be final. he tells us, too, of one sunny afternoon when he and clemens sat on the grass before the mansion at riverdale, after mrs. clemens had somewhat improved, and how they “looked up toward a balcony where by and by that lovely presence made itself visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud. a hand frailly waved a handkerchief; clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling tenderly.” it was a greeting to howells the last he would ever receive from her. mrs. clemens was able to make a trip to elmira by the end of june, and on the st of july mr. rogers brought clemens and his wife down the river on his yacht to the lackawanna pier, and they reached quarry farm that evening. she improved in the quietude and restfulness of that beloved place. three weeks later clemens wrote to twichell: livy is coming along: eats well, sleeps some, is mostly very gay, not very often depressed; spends all day on the porch, sleeps there a part of the night; makes excursions in carriage & in wheel-chair; &, in the matter of superintending everything & everybody, has resumed business at the old stand. during three peaceful months she spent most of her days reclining on the wide veranda, surrounded by those dearest to her, and looking out on the dreamlike landscape--the long, grassy slope, the drowsy city, and the distant hills--getting strength for the far journey by sea. clemens did some writing, occupying the old octagonal study--shut in now and overgrown with vines--where during the thirty years since it was built so many of his stories had been written. 'a dog's tale'--that pathetic anti-vivisection story--appears to have been the last manuscript ever completed in the spot consecrated by huck and tom, and by tom canty the pauper and the little wandering prince. it was october th when they left elmira. two days earlier clemens had written in his note-book: today i placed flowers on susy's grave--for the last time probably --& read words: “good-night, dear heart, good-night.” they did not return to riverdale, but went to the hotel grosvenor for the intervening weeks. they had engaged passage for italy on the princess irene, which would sail on the th. it was during the period of their waiting that clemens concluded his final harper contract. on that day, in his note-book, he wrote: the prophecy in cheiro the palmist examined my hand & said that in my th year ( ) i would become suddenly rich. i was a bankrupt & $ , in debt at the time through the failure of charles l. webster & co. two years later--in london--cheiro repeated this long-distance prediction, & added that the riches would come from a quite unexpected source. i am superstitious. i kept the prediction in mind & often thought of it. when at last it came true, october , , there was but a month & days to spare. the contract signed that day concentrates all my books in harper's hands & now at last they are valuable; in fact they are a fortune. they guarantee me $ , a year for years, and they will yield twice as much as that.--[in earlier note-books and letters clemens more than once refers to this prophecy and wonders if it is to be realized. the harper contract, which brought all of his books into the hands of one publisher (negotiated for him by mr. rogers), proved, in fact, a fortune. the books yielded always more than the guarantee; sometimes twice that amount, as he had foreseen.] during the conclusion of this contract clemens made frequent visits to fairhaven on the kanawha. joe goodman came from the pacific to pay him a good-by visit during this period. goodman had translated the mayan inscriptions, and his work had received official recognition and publication by the british museum. it was a fine achievement for a man in later life and clemens admired it immensely. goodman and clemens enjoyed each other in the old way at quiet resorts where they could talk over the old tales. another visitor of that summer was the son of an old friend, a hannibal printer named daulton. young daulton came with manuscripts seeking a hearing of the magazine editors, so clemens wrote a letter which would insure that favor: introducing mr. geo. daulton: to gilder, alden, harvey, mcclure, walker, page, bok, collier, and such other members of the sacred guild as privilege me to call them friends-these: although i have no personal knowledge of the bearer of this, i have what is better: he comes recommended to me by his own father--a thing not likely to happen in any of your families, i reckon. i ask you, as a favor to me, to waive prejudice & superstition for this once & examine his work with an eye to its literary merit, instead of to the chastity of its spelling. i wish to god you cared less for that particular. i set (or sat) type alongside of his father, in hannibal, more than years ago, when none but the pure in heart were in that business. a true man he was; and if i can be of any service to his son--and to you at the same time, let me hope--i am here heartily to try. yours by the sanctions of time & deserving, sincerely, s. l. clemens. among the kindly words which came to mark twain before leaving america was this one which rudyard kipling had written to his publisher, frank doubleday: i love to think of the great and godlike clemens. he is the biggest man you have on your side of the water by a damn sight, and don't you forget it. cervantes was a relation of his. it curiously happened that clemens at the same moment was writing to doubleday about kipling: i have been reading “the bell buoy” and “the old man” over and over again-my custom with kipling's work--and saving up the rest for other leisurely and luxurious meals. a bell-buoy is a deeply impressive fellow-being. in these many recent trips up and down the sound in the kanawha he has talked to me nightly sometimes in his pathetic and melancholy way, sometimes with his strenuous and urgent note, and i got his meaning--now i have his words! no one but kipling could do this strong and vivid thing. some day i hope to hear the poem chanted or sung-with the bell-buoy breaking in out of the distance. p. s.--your letter has arrived. it makes me proud and glad--what kipling says. i hope fate will fetch him to florence while we are there. i would rather see him than any other man. ccxxx. the return to florence from the note-book: saturday, october , . sailed in the princess irene for genoa at . flowers & fruit from mrs. rogers & mrs. coe. we have with us katie leary (in our domestic service years) & miss margaret sherry (trained nurse). two days later he wrote: heavy storm all night. only stewardesses. ours served meals in rooms this morning. on the th: livy is enduring the voyage marvelously well. as well as clara & jean, i think, & far better than the trained nurse. she has been out on deck an hour. november . due at gibraltar days from new york. days to naples, then day to genoa. at supper the band played “cavalleria rusticana,” which is forever associated in my mind with susy. i love it better than any other, but it breaks my heart. it was the “intermezzo” he referred to, which had been susy's favorite music, and whenever he heard it he remembered always one particular opera-night long ago, and susy's face rose before him. they were in naples on the th; thence to genoa, and to florence, where presently they were installed in the villa reale di quarto, a fine old italian palace built by cosimo more than four centuries ago. in later times it has been occupied and altered by royal families of wurtemberg and russia. now it was the property of the countess massiglia, from whom clemens had leased it. they had hoped to secure the villa papiniano, under fiesole, near professor fiske, but negotiations for it had fallen through. the villa quarto, as it is usually called, was a more pretentious place and as beautifully located, standing as it does in an ancient garden looking out over florence toward vallombrosa and the chianti hills. yet now in the retrospect, it seems hardly to have been the retreat for an invalid. its garden was supernaturally beautiful, all that one expects that a garden of italy should be--such a garden as maxfield parrish might dream; but its beauty was that which comes of antiquity--the accumulation of dead years. its funereal cypresses, its crumbling walls and arches, its clinging ivy and moldering marbles, and a clock that long ago forgot the hours, gave it a mortuary look. in a way it suggested arnold bocklin's “todteninsel,” and it might well have served as the allegorical setting for a gateway to the bourne of silence. the house itself, one of the most picturesque of the old florentine suburban palaces, was historically interesting, rather than cheerful. the rooms, in number more than sixty, though richly furnished, were vast and barnlike, and there were numbers of them wholly unused and never entered. there was a dearth of the modern improvements which americans have learned to regard as a necessity, and the plumbing, such as it was, was not always in order. the place was approached by narrow streets, along which the more uninviting aspects of italy were not infrequent. youth and health and romance might easily have reveled in the place; but it seems now not to have been the best choice for that frail invalid, to whom cheer and brightness and freshness and the lovelier things of hope meant always so much.--[villa quarto has recently been purchased by signor p. de ritter lahony, and thoroughly restored and refreshed and beautified without the sacrifice of any of its romantic features.]--neither was the climate of florence all that they had hoped for. their former sunny winter had misled them. tradition to the contrary, italy--or at least tuscany--is not one perpetual dream of sunlight. it is apt to be damp and cloudy; it is likely to be cold. writing to macalister, clemens said: florentine sunshine? bless you, there isn't any. we have heavy fogs every morning & rain all day. this house is not merely large, it is vast--therefore i think it must always lack the home feeling. his dissatisfaction in it began thus early, and it grew as one thing after another went wrong. with it all, however, mrs. clemens seemed to gain a little, and was glad to see company--a reasonable amount of company--to brighten her surroundings. clemens began to work and wrote a story or two, and those lively articles about the italian language. to twichell he reported progress: i have a handsome success in one way here. i left new york under a sort of half-promise to furnish to the harper magazines , words this year. magazining is difficult work because every third page represents two pages that you have put in the fire (you are nearly sure to start wrong twice), & so when you have finished an article & are willing to let it go to print it represents only cents a word instead of . but this time i had the curious (& unprecedented) luck to start right in each case. i turned out , words in working days; & the reason i think i started right every time is, that not only have i approved and accepted the several articles, but the court of last resort (livy) has done the same. on many of the between-days i did some work, but only of an idle & not necessarily necessary sort, since it will not see print until i am dead. i shall continue this (an hour per day), but the rest of the year i expect to put in on a couple of long books (half- completed ones). no more magazine work hanging over my head. this secluded & silent solitude, this clean, soft air, & this enchanting view of florence, the great valley & snow-mountains that frame it, are the right conditions for work. they are a persistent inspiration. to-day is very lovely; when the afternoon arrives there will be a new picture every hour till dark, & each of them divine--or progressing from divine to diviner & divinest. on this (second) floor clara's room commands the finest; she keeps a window ten feet high wide open all the time & frames it in that. i go in from time to time every day & trade sass for a look. the central detail is a distant & stately snow-hump that rises above & behind black-forested hills, & its sloping vast buttresses, velvety & sun- polished, with purple shadows between, make the sort of picture we knew that time we walked in switzerland in the days of our youth. from this letter, which is of january , , we gather that the weather had greatly improved, and with it mrs. clemens's health, notwithstanding she had an alarming attack in december. one of the stories he had finished was “the $ , bequest.” the work mentioned, which would not see print until after his death, was a continuation of those autobiographical chapters which for years he had been setting down as the mood seized him. he experimented with dictation, which he had tried long before with redpath, and for a time now found it quite to his liking. he dictated some of his copyright memories, and some anecdotes and episodes; but his amanuensis wrote only longhand, which perhaps hampered him, for he tired of it by and by and the dictations were discontinued. among these notes there is one elaborate description of the villa di quarto, dictated at the end of the winter, by which time we are not surprised to find he had become much attached to the place. the italian spring was in the air, and it was his habit to grow fond of his surroundings. some atmospheric paragraphs of these impressions invite us here: we are in the extreme south end of the house, if there is any such thing as a south end to a house, whose orientation cannot be determined by me, because i am incompetent in all cases where an object does not point directly north & south. this one slants across between, & is therefore a confusion. this little private parlor is in one of the two corners of what i call the south end of the house. the sun rises in such a way that all the morning it is pouring its light through the glass doors or windows which pierce the side of the house which looks upon the terrace & garden; the rest of the day the light floods this south end of the house, as i call it; at noon the sun is directly above florence yonder in the distance in the plain, directly across those architectural features which have been so familiar to the world in pictures for some centuries, the duomo, the campanile, the tomb of the medici, & the beautiful tower of the palazzo vecchio; in this position it begins to reveal the secrets of the delicious blue mountains that circle around into the west, for its light discovers, uncovers, & exposes a white snowstorm of villas & cities that you cannot train yourself to have confidence in, they appear & disappear so mysteriously, as if they might not be villas & cities at all, but the ghosts of perished ones of the remote & dim etruscan times; & late in the afternoon the sun sets down behind those mountains somewhere, at no particular time & at no particular place, so far as i can see. again at the end of march he wrote: now that we have lived in this house four and a half months my prejudices have fallen away one by one & the place has become very homelike to me. under certain conditions i should like to go on living in it indefinitely. i should wish the countess to move out of italy, out of europe, out of the planet. i should want her bonded to retire to her place in the next world & inform me which of the two it was, so that i could arrange for my own hereafter. complications with their landlady had begun early, and in time, next to mrs. clemens's health, to which it bore such an intimate and vital relation, the indifference of the countess massiglia to their needs became the supreme and absorbing concern of life at the villa, and led to continued and almost continuous house-hunting. days when the weather permitted, clemens drove over the hills looking for a villa which he could lease or buy--one with conveniences and just the right elevation and surroundings. there were plenty of villas; but some of them were badly situated as to altitude or view; some were falling to decay, and the search was rather a discouraging one. still it was not abandoned, and the reports of these excursions furnished new interest and new hope always to the invalid at home. “even if we find it,” he wrote howells, “i am afraid it will be months before we can move mrs. clemens. of course it will. but it comforts us to let on that we think otherwise, and these pretensions help to keep hope alive in her.” she had her bad days and her good days, days when it was believed she had passed the turning-point and was traveling the way to recovery; but the good days were always a little less hopeful, the bad days a little more discouraging. on february d clemens wrote in his note-book: at midnight livy's pulse went to & there was a collapse. great alarm. subcutaneous injection of brandy saved her. and to macalister toward the end of march: we are having quite perfect weather now & are hoping that it will bring effects for mrs. clemens. but a few days later he added that he was watching the driving rain through the windows, and that it was bad weather for the invalid. “but it will not last,” he said. the invalid improved then, and there was a concert in florence at which clara clemens sang. clemens in his note-book says: april . clara's concert was a triumph. livy woke up & sent for her to tell her all about it, near midnight. but a day or two later she was worse again--then better. the hearts in that household were as pendulums, swinging always between hope and despair. one familiar with the clemens history might well have been filled with forebodings. already in january a member of the family, mollie clemens, orion's wife, died, news which was kept from mrs. clemens, as was the death of aldrich's son, and that of sir henry m. stanley, both of which occurred that spring. indeed, death harvested freely that year among the clemens friendships. clemens wrote twichell: yours has just this moment arrived-just as i was finishing a note to poor lady stanley. i believe the last country-house visit we paid in england was to stanley's. lord! how my friends & acquaintances fall about me now in my gray-headed days! vereshchagin, mommsen, dvorak, lenbach, & jokai, all so recently, & now stanley. i have known stanley years. goodness, who is there i haven't known? ccxxxi. the close of a beautiful life in one of his notes near the end of april clemens writes that once more, as at riverdale, he has been excluded from mrs. clemens's room except for the briefest moment at a time. but on may th, to r. w. gilder, he reported: for two days now we have not been anxious about mrs. clemens (unberufen). after months of bedridden solitude & bodily misery she all of a sudden ceases to be a pallid, shrunken shadow, & looks bright & young & pretty. she remains what she always was, the most wonderful creature of fortitude, patience, endurance, and recuperative power that ever was. but ah, dear! it won't last; this fiendish malady will play new treacheries upon her, and i shall go back to my prayers again--unutterable from any pulpit! may , a.m. i have just paid one of my pair of permitted -minute visits per day to the sick-room. and found what i have learned to expect--retrogression. there was a day when she was brought out on the terrace in a wheel-chair to see the wonder of the early italian summer. she had been a prisoner so long that she was almost overcome with the delight of it all--the more so, perhaps, in the feeling that she might so soon be leaving it. it was on sunday, the th of june, that the end came. clemens and jean had driven out to make some calls, and had stopped at a villa, which promised to fulfil most of the requirements. they came home full of enthusiasm concerning it, and clemens, in his mind, had decided on the purchase. in the corridor clara said: “she is better to-day than she has been for three months.” then quickly, under her breath, “unberufen,” which the others, too, added hastily--superstitiously. mrs. clemens was, in fact, bright and cheerful, and anxious to hear all about the new property which was to become their home. she urged him to sit by her during the dinner-hour and tell her the details; but once, when the sense of her frailties came upon her, she said they must not mind if she could not go very soon, but be content where they were. he remained from half past seven until eight--a forbidden privilege, but permitted because she was so animated, feeling so well. their talk was as it had been in the old days, and once during it he reproached himself, as he had so often done, and asked forgiveness for the tears he had brought into her life. when he was summoned to go at last he chided himself for remaining so long; but she said there was no harm, and kissed him, saying: “you will come back,” and he answered, “yes, to say good night,” meaning at half past nine, as was the permitted custom. he stood a moment at the door throwing kisses to her, and she returning them, her face bright with smiles. he was so hopeful and happy that it amounted to exaltation. he went to his room at first, then he was moved to do a thing which he had seldom done since susy died. he went to the piano up-stairs and sang the old jubilee songs that susy had liked to hear him sing. jean came in presently, listening. she had not done this before, that he could remember. he sang “swing low, sweet chariot,” and “my lord he calls me.” he noticed jean then and stopped, but she asked him to go on. mrs. clemens, in her room, heard the distant music, and said to her attendant: “he is singing a good-night carol to me.” the music ceased presently, and then a moment later she asked to be lifted up. almost in that instant life slipped away without a sound. clemens, coming to say good night, saw a little group about her bed, clara and jean standing as if dazed. he went and bent over and looked into her face, surprised that she did not greet him. he did not suspect what had happened until he heard one of the daughters ask: “katie, is it true? oh, katie, is it true?” he realized then that she was gone. in his note-book that night he wrote: at a quarter past this evening she that was the life of my life passed to the relief & the peace of death after as months of unjust & unearned suffering. i first saw her near years ago, & now i have looked upon her face for the last time. oh, so unexpected!... i was full of remorse for things done & said in these years of married life that hurt livy's heart. he envied her lying there, so free from it all, with the great peace upon her face. he wrote to howells and to twichell, and to mrs. crane, those nearest and dearest ones. to twichell he said: how sweet she was in death, how young, how beautiful, how like her dear girlish self of thirty years ago, not a gray hair showing! this rejuvenescence was noticeable within two hours after her death; & when i went down again ( . ) it was complete. in all that night & all that day she never noticed my caressing hand--it seemed strange. to howells he recalled the closing scene: i bent over her & looked in her face & i think i spoke--i was surprised & troubled that she did not notice me. then we understood & our hearts broke. how poor we are to-day! but how thankful i am that her persecutions are ended! i would not call her back if i could. to-day, treasured in her worn, old testament, i found a dear & gentle letter from you dated far rockaway, september , , about our poor susy's death. i am tired & old; i wish i were with livy. and in a few days: it would break livy's heart to see clara. we excuse ourself from all the friends that call--though, of course, only intimates come. intimates--but they are not the old, old friends, the friends of the old, old times when we laughed. shall we ever laugh again? if i could only see a dog that i knew in the old times & could put my arms around his neck and tell him all, everything, & ease my heart! ccxxxii. the sad journey home a tidal wave of sympathy poured in. noble and commoner, friend and stranger--humanity of every station--sent their messages of condolence to the friend of mankind. the cablegrams came first--bundles of them from every corner of the world--then the letters, a steady inflow. howells, twichell, aldrich--those oldest friends who had themselves learned the meaning of grief--spoke such few and futile words as the language can supply to allay a heart's mourning, each recalling the rarity and beauty of the life that had slipped away. twichell and his wife wrote: dear, dear mark,--there is nothing we can say. what is there to say? but here we are--with you all every hour and every minute--filled with unutterable thoughts; unutterable affection for the dead and for the living. harmony and joe. howells in his letter said: she hallowed what she touched far beyond priests.... what are you going to do, you poor soul? a hundred letters crowd in for expression here, but must be denied--not, however, the beam of hope out of helen keller's illumined night: do try to reach through grief and feel the pressure of her hand, as i reach through darkness and feel the smile on my friends' lips and the light in their eyes though mine are closed. they were adrift again without plans for the future. they would return to america to lay mrs. clemens to rest by susy and little langdon, but beyond that they could not see. then they remembered a quiet spot in massachusetts, tyringham, near lee, where the gilders lived, and so, on june th, he wrote: dear gilder family,--i have been worrying and worrying to know what to do; at last i went to the girls with an idea--to ask the gilders to get us shelter near their summer home. it was the first time they have not shaken their heads. so to-morrow i will cable to you and shall hope to be in time. an hour ago the best heart that ever beat for me and mine was carried silent out of this house, and i am as one who wanders and has lost his way. she who is gone was our head, she was our hands. we are now trying to make plans--we: we who have never made a plan before, nor ever needed to. if she could speak to us she would make it all simple and easy with a word, & our perplexities would vanish away. if she had known she was near to death she would have told us where to go and what to do, but she was not suspecting, neither were we. she was all our riches and she is gone; she was our breath, she was our life, and now we are nothing. we send you our love-and with it the love of you that was in her heart when she died. s. l. clemens. they arranged to sail on the prince oscar on the th of june. there was an earlier steamer, but it was the princess irene, which had brought them, and they felt they would not make the return voyage on that vessel. during the period of waiting a curious thing happened. clemens one day got up in a chair in his room on the second floor to pull down the high window-sash. it did not move easily and his hand slipped. it was only by the merest chance that he saved himself from falling to the ground far below. he mentions this in his note-book, and once, speaking of it to frederick duneka, he said: “had i fallen it would probably have killed me, and in my bereaved circumstances the world would have been convinced that it was suicide. it was one of those curious coincidences which are always happening and being misunderstood.” the homeward voyage and its sorrowful conclusion are pathetically conveyed in his notes: june , . sailed last night at . the bugle-call to breakfast. i recognized the notes and was distressed. when i heard them last livy heard them with me; now they fall upon her ear unheeded. in my life there have been junes--but how vague & colorless of them are contrasted with the deep blackness of this one! july , . i cannot reproduce livy's face in my mind's eye--i was never in my life able to reproduce a face. it is a curious infirmity--& now at last i realize it is a calamity. july , . in these years we have made many voyages together, livy dear--& now we are making our last; you down below & lonely; i above with the crowd & lonely. july , . ship-time, a.m. in hours & a quarter it will be weeks since livy died. thirty-one years ago we made our first voyage together--& this is our last one in company. susy was a year old then. she died at & had been in her grave years. july , . to-night it will be weeks. but to me it remains yesterday--as it has from the first. but this funeral march--how sad & long it is! two days more will end the second stage of it. july , (elmira). funeral private in the house of livy's young maidenhood. where she stood as a bride years ago there her coffin rested; & over it the same voice that had made her a wife then committed her departed spirit to god now. it was joseph twichell who rendered that last service. mr. beecher was long since dead. it was a simple, touching utterance, closing with this tender word of farewell: robert browning, when he was nearing the end of his earthly days, said that death was the thing that we did not believe in. nor do we believe in it. we who journeyed through the bygone years in companionship with the bright spirit now withdrawn are growing old. the way behind is long; the way before is short. the end cannot be far off. but what of that? can we not say, each one: “so long that power hath blessed me, sure it still will lead me on; o'er moor and fen; o'er crag and torrent, till the night is gone; and with the morn, their angel faces smile, which i have loved long since, and lost awhile!” and so good-by. good-by, dear heart! strong, tender, and true. good-by until for us the morning break and these shadows fly away. dr. eastman, who had succeeded mr. beecher, closed the service with a prayer, and so the last office we can render in this life for those we love was finished. clemens ordered that a simple marker should be placed at the grave, bearing, besides the name, the record of birth and death, followed by the german line: 'gott sei dir gnadig, o meine wonne'! ccxxxiii. beginning another home there was an extra cottage on the gilder place at tyringham, and this they occupied for the rest of that sad summer. clemens, in his note-book, has preserved some of its aspects and incidents. july , . rain--rain--rain. cold. we built a fire in my room. then clawed the logs out & threw water, remembering there was a brood of swallows in the chimney. the tragedy was averted. july . lee, massachusetts (berkshire hills). last night the young people out on a moonlight ride. trolley frightened jean's horse--collision--horse killed. rodman gilder picked jean up, unconscious; she was taken to the doctor, per the car. face, nose, side, back contused; tendon of left ankle broken. august . new york. clam here sick--never well since june . jean is at the summer home in the berkshire hills crippled. the next entry records the third death in the clemens family within a period of eight months--that of mrs. moffett, who had been pamela clemens. clemens writes: september . died at greenwich, connecticut, my sister, pamela moffett, aged about . death dates this year january , june , september . that fall they took a house in new york city, on the corner of ninth street and fifth avenue, no. , remaining for a time at the grosvenor while the new home was being set in order. the home furniture was brought from hartford, unwrapped, and established in the light of strange environment. clemens wrote: we have not seen it for thirteen years. katie leary, our old housekeeper, who has been in our service more than twenty-four years, cried when she told me about it to-day. she said, “i had forgotten it was so beautiful, and it brought mrs. clemens right back to me--in that old time when she was so young and lovely.” clara clemens had not recovered from the strain of her mother's long illness and the shock of her death, and she was ordered into retirement with the care of a trained nurse. the life at fifth avenue, therefore, began with only two remaining members of the broken family--clemens and jean. clemens had undertaken to divert himself with work at tyringham, though without much success. he was not well; he was restless and disturbed; his heart bleak with a great loneliness. he prepared an article on copyright for the 'north american review',--[published jan., . a dialogue presentation of copyright conditions, addressed to thorwald stolberg, register of copyrights, washington, d. c. one of the best of mark twain's papers on the subject.]--and he began, or at least contemplated, that beautiful fancy, 'eve's diary', which in the widest and most reverential sense, from the first word to the last, conveys his love, his worship, and his tenderness for the one he had laid away. adam's single comment at the end, “wheresoever she was, there was eden,” was his own comment, and is perhaps the most tenderly beautiful line he ever wrote. these two books, adam's diary and eve's--amusing and sometimes absurd as they are, and so far removed from the literal--are as autobiographic as anything he has done, and one of them as lovely in its truth. like the first maker of men, mark twain created adam in his own image; and his rare eve is no less the companion with whom, half a lifetime before, he had begun the marriage journey. only here the likeness ceases. no serpent ever entered their eden. and they never left it; it traveled with them so long as they remained together. in the christmas harper for was published “saint joan of arc”--the same being the joan introduction prepared in london five years before. joan's proposed beatification had stirred a new interest in the martyred girl, and this most beautiful article became a sort of key-note of the public heart. those who read it were likely to go back and read the recollections, and a new appreciation grew for that masterpiece. in his later and wider acceptance by his own land, and by the world at large, the book came to be regarded with a fresh understanding. letters came from scores of readers, as if it were a newly issued volume. a distinguished educator wrote: i would rather have written your history of joan of arc than any other piece of literature in any language. and this sentiment grew. the demand for the book increased, and has continued to increase, steadily and rapidly. in the long and last analysis the good must prevail. a day will come when there will be as many readers of joan as of any other of mark twain's works. [the growing appreciation of joan is shown by the report of sales for the three years following . the sales for that year in america were , ; for , , for , , ; for , , . at this point it passed pudd'nhead wilson, the yankee, the gilded age, life on the mississippi, overtook the tramp abroad, and more than doubled the american claimant. only the innocents abroad, huckleberry finn, tom sawyer, and roughing it still ranged ahead of it, in the order named.] ccxxxiv. life at fifth avenue the house at fifth avenue, built by the architect who had designed grace church, had a distinctly ecclesiastical suggestion about its windows, and was of fine and stately proportions within. it was a proper residence for a venerable author and a sage, and with the handsome hartford furnishings distributed through it, made a distinctly suitable setting for mark twain. but it was lonely for him. it lacked soul. he added, presently, a great aeolian orchestrelle, with a variety of music for his different moods. he believed that he would play it himself when he needed the comfort of harmony, and that jean, who had not received musical training, or his secretary could also play to him. he had a passion for music, or at least for melody and stately rhythmic measures, though his ear was not attuned to what are termed the more classical compositions. for wagner, for instance, he cared little, though in a letter to mrs. crane he said: certainly nothing in the world is so solemn and impressive and so divinely beautiful as “tannhauser.” it ought to be used as a religious service. beethoven's sonatas and symphonies also moved him deeply. once, writing to jean, he asked: what is your favorite piece of music, dear? mine is beethoven's fifth symphony. i have found that out within a day or two. it was the majestic movement and melodies of the second part that he found most satisfying; but he oftener inclined to the still tenderer themes of chopin's nocturnes and one of schubert's impromptus, while the “lorelei” and the “erlking” and the scottish airs never wearied him. music thus became a chief consolation during these lonely days--rich organ harmonies that filled the emptiness of his heart and beguiled from dull, material surroundings back into worlds and dreams that he had known and laid away. he went out very little that winter--usually to the homes of old and intimate friends. once he attended a small dinner given him by george smalley at the metropolitan club; but it was a private affair, with only good friends present. still, it formed the beginning of his return to social life, and it was not in his nature to retire from the brightness of human society, or to submerge himself in mourning. as the months wore on he appeared here and there, and took on something of his old-time habit. then his annual bronchitis appeared, and he was confined a good deal to his home, where he wrote or planned new reforms and enterprises. the improvement of railway service, through which fewer persons should be maimed and destroyed each year, interested him. he estimated that the railroads and electric lines killed and wounded more than all of the wars combined, and he accumulated statistics and prepared articles on the subject, though he appears to have offered little of such matter for publication. once, however, when his sympathy was awakened by the victim of a frightful trolley and train collision in newark, new jersey, he wrote a letter which promptly found its way into print. dear miss madeline, your good & admiring & affectionate brother has told me of your sorrowful share in the trolley disaster which brought unaccustomed tears to millions of eyes & fierce resentment against those whose criminal indifference to their responsibilities caused it, & the reminder has brought back to me a pang out of that bygone time. i wish i could take you sound & whole out of your bed & break the legs of those officials & put them in it--to stay there. for in my spirit i am merciful, and would not break their necks & backs also, as some would who have no feeling. it is your brother who permits me to write this line--& so it is not an intrusion, you see. may you get well-& soon! sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. a very little later he was writing another letter on a similar subject to st. clair mckelway, who had narrowly escaped injury in a railway accident. dear mckelway, your innumerable friends are grateful, most grateful. as i understand the telegrams, the engineers of your train had never seen a locomotive before.... the government's official report, showing that our railways killed twelve hundred persons last year & injured sixty thousand, convinces me that under present conditions one providence is not enough properly & efficiently to take care of our railroad business. but it is characteristically american--always trying to get along short-handed & save wages. a massacre of jews in moscow renewed his animosity for semi-barbaric russia. asked for a christmas sentiment, he wrote: it is my warm & world-embracing christmas hope that all of us that deserve it may finally be gathered together in a heaven of rest & peace, & the others permitted to retire into the clutches of satan, or the emperor of russia, according to preference--if they have a preference. an article, “the tsar's soliloquy,” written at this time, was published in the north american review for march ( ). he wrote much more, but most of the other matter he put aside. on a subject like that he always discarded three times as much as he published, and it was usually about three times as terrific as that which found its way into type. “the soliloquy,” however, is severe enough. it represents the tsar as contemplating himself without his clothes, and reflecting on what a poor human specimen he presents: is it this that , , russians kiss the dust before and worship?--manifestly not! no one could worship this spectacle which is me. then who is it, what is it, that they worship? privately, none knows better than i: it is my clothes! without my clothes i should be as destitute of authority as any other naked person. no one could tell me from a parson and barber tutor. then who is the real emperor of russia! my clothes! there is no other. the emperor continues this fancy, and reflects on the fierce cruelties that are done in his name. it was a withering satire on russian imperialism, and it stirred a wide response. this encouraged clemens to something even more pretentious and effective in the same line. he wrote “king leopold's soliloquy,” the reflections of the fiendish sovereign who had maimed and slaughtered fifteen millions of african subjects in his greed--gentle, harmless blacks-men, women, and little children whom he had butchered and mutilated in his congo rubber-fields. seldom in the history of the world have there been such atrocious practices as those of king leopold in the congo, and clemens spared nothing in his picture of them. the article was regarded as not quite suitable for magazine publication, and it was given to the congo reform association and issued as a booklet for distribution, with no return to the author, who would gladly have written a hundred times as much if he could have saved that unhappy race and have sent leopold to the electric chair.--[the book was price-marked twenty-five cents, but the returns from such as were sold went to the cause. thousands of them were distributed free. the congo, a domain four times as large as the german empire, had been made the ward of belgium at a convention in berlin by the agreement of fourteen nations, america and thirteen european states. leopold promptly seized the country for his personal advantage and the nations apparently found themselves powerless to depose him. no more terrible blunder was ever committed by an assemblage of civilized people.] various plans and movements were undertaken for congo reform, and clemens worked and wrote letters and gave his voice and his influence and exhausted his rage, at last, as one after another of the half-organized and altogether futile undertakings showed no results. his interest did not die, but it became inactive. eventually he declared: “i have said all i can say on that terrible subject. i am heart and soul in any movement that will rescue the congo and hang leopold, but i cannot write any more.” his fires were likely to burn themselves out, they raged so fiercely. his final paragraph on the subject was a proposed epitaph for leopold when time should have claimed him. it ran: here under this gilded tomb lies rotting the body of one the smell of whose name will still offend the nostrils of men ages upon ages after all the caesars and washingtons & napoleons shall have ceased to be praised or blamed & been forgotten--leopold of belgium. clemens had not yet lost interest in the american policy in the philippines, and in his letters to twichell he did not hesitate to criticize the president's attitude in this and related matters. once, in a moment of irritation, he wrote: dear joe,--i knew i had in me somewhere a definite feeling about the president. if i could only find the words to define it with! here they are, to a hair--from leonard jerome: “for twenty years i have loved roosevelt the man, and hated roosevelt the statesman and politician.” it's mighty good. every time in twenty-five years that i have met roosevelt the man a wave of welcome has streaked through me with the hand-grip; but whenever (as a rule) i meet roosevelt the statesman & politician i find him destitute of morals & not respect-worthy. it is plain that where his political self & party self are concerned he has nothing resembling a conscience; that under those inspirations he is naively indifferent to the restraints of duty & even unaware of them; ready to kick the constitution into the back yard whenever it gets in his way.... but roosevelt is excusable--i recognize it & (ought to) concede it. we are all insane, each in his own way, & with insanity goes irresponsibility. theodore the man is sane; in fairness we ought to keep in mind that theodore, as statesman & politician, is insane & irresponsible. he wrote a great deal more from time to time on this subject; but that is the gist of his conclusions, and whether justified by time, or otherwise, it expresses today the deduction of a very large number of people. it is set down here, because it is a part of mark twain's history, and also because a little while after his death there happened to creep into print an incomplete and misleading note (since often reprinted), which he once made in a moment of anger, when he was in a less judicial frame of mind. it seems proper that a man's honest sentiments should be recorded concerning the nation's servants. clemens wrote an article at this period which he called the “war prayer.” it pictured the young recruits about to march away for war--the excitement and the celebration--the drum-beat and the heart-beat of patriotism--the final assembly in the church where the minister utters that tremendous invocation: god the all-terrible! thou who ordainest, thunder, thy clarion, and lightning, thy sword! and the “long prayer” for victory to the nation's armies. as the prayer closes a white-robed stranger enters, moves up the aisle, and takes the preacher's place; then, after some moments of impressive silence, he begins: “i come from the throne-bearing a message from almighty god!.... he has heard the prayer of his servant, your shepherd, & will grant it if such shall be your desire after i his messenger shall have explained to you its import--that is to say its full import. for it is like unto many of the prayers of men in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of--except he pause & think. “god's servant & yours has prayed his prayer. has he paused & taken thought? is it one prayer? no, it is two--one uttered, the other not. both have reached the ear of him who heareth all supplications, the spoken & the unspoken.... “you have heard your servant's prayer--the uttered part of it. i am commissioned of god to put into words the other part of it--that part which the pastor--and also you in your hearts--fervently prayed, silently. and ignorantly & unthinkingly? god grant that it was so! you heard these words: 'grant us the victory, o lord our god!' that is sufficient. the whole of the uttered prayer is completed into those pregnant words. “upon the listening spirit of god the father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. he commandeth me to put it into words. listen! “o lord our father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle--be thou near them! with them--in spirit--we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. “o lord our god, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended through wastes of their desolated land in rags & hunger & thirst, sport of the sun- flames of summer & the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave & denied it--for our sakes, who adore thee, lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! we ask of one who is the spirit of love & who is the ever-faithful refuge & friend of all that are sore beset, & seek his aid with humble & contrite hearts. grant our prayer, o lord; & thine shall be the praise & honor & glory now & ever, amen.” (after a pause.) “ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak!--the messenger of the most high waits.” ............... it was believed, afterward, that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said. to dan beard, who dropped in to see him, clemens read the “war prayer,” stating that he had read it to his daughter jean, and others, who had told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege. “still you--are going to publish it, are you not?” clemens, pacing up and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers, shook his head. “no,” he said, “i have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. it can be published after i am dead.” he did not care to invite the public verdict that he was a lunatic, or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions and traditions and conclusions of mankind. to twichell he wrote, playfully but sincerely: am i honest? i give you my word of honor (privately) i am not. for seven years i have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me i ought to publish. i hold it a duty to publish it. there are other difficult duties which i am equal to, but i am not equal to that one. yes, even i am dishonest. not in many ways, but in some. forty-one, i think it is. we are certainly all honest in one or several ways--every man in the world--though i have a reason to think i am the only one whose blacklist runs so light. sometimes i feel lonely enough in this lofty solitude. it was his gospel he referred to as his unpublished book, his doctrine of selfishness, and of man the irresponsible machine. to twichell he pretended to favor war, which he declared, to his mind, was one of the very best methods known of diminishing the human race. what a life it is!--this one! everything we try to do, somebody intrudes & obstructs it. after years of thought & labor i have arrived within one little bit of a step of perfecting my invention for exhausting the oxygen in the globe's air during a stretch of two minutes, & of course along comes an obstructor who is inventing something to protect human life. damn such a world anyway. he generally wrote twichell when he had things to say that were outside of the pale of print. he was sure of an attentive audience of one, and the audience, whether it agreed with him or not, would at least understand him and be honored by his confidence. in one letter of that year he said: i have written you to-day, not to do you a service, but to do myself one. there was bile in me. i had to empty it or lose my day to-morrow. if i tried to empty it into the north american review--oh, well, i couldn't afford the risk. no, the certainty! the certainty that i wouldn't be satisfied with the result; so i would burn it, & try again to-morrow; burn that and try again the next day. it happens so nearly every time. i have a family to support, & i can't afford this kind of dissipation. last winter when i was sick i wrote a magazine article three times before i got it to suit me. i put $ worth of work on it every day for ten days, & at last when i got it to suit me it contained but , words-$ . i burned it & said i would reform. and i have reformed. i have to work my bile off whenever it gets to where i can't stand it, but i can work it off on you economically, because i don't have to make it suit me. it may not suit you, but that isn't any matter; i'm not writing it for that. i have used you as an equilibrium--restorer more than once in my time, & shall continue, i guess. i would like to use mr. rogers, & he is plenty good-natured enough, but it wouldn't be fair to keep him rescuing me from my leather-headed business snarls & make him read interminable bile-irruptions besides; i can't use howells, he is busy & old & lazy, & won't stand it; i dasn't use clara, there's things i have to say which she wouldn't put up with--a very dear little ashcat, but has claws. and so--you're it. [see the preface to the “autobiography of mark twain”: 'i am writing from the grave. on these terms only can a man be approximately frank. he cannot be straitly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it.' d.w.] ccxxxv. a summer in new hampshire he took for the summer a house at dublin, new hampshire, the home of henry copley greene, lone tree hill, on the monadnock slope. it was in a lovely locality, and for neighbors there were artists, literary people, and those of kindred pursuits, among them a number of old friends. colonel higginson had a place near by, and abbott h. thayer, the painter, and george de forest brush, and the raphael pumpelly family, and many more. colonel higginson wrote clemens a letter of welcome as soon as the news got out that he was going to dublin; and clemens, answering, said: i early learned that you would be my neighbor in the summer & i rejoiced, recognizing in you & your family a large asset. i hope for frequent intercourse between the two households. i shall have my youngest daughter with me. the other one will go from the rest- cure in this city to the rest-cure in norfolk, connecticut; & we shall not see her before autumn. we have not seen her since the middle of october. jean, the younger daughter, went to dublin & saw the house & came back charmed with it. i know the thayers of old--manifestly there is no lack of attractions up there. mrs. thayer and i were shipmates in a wild excursion perilously near years ago. aldrich was here half an hour ago, like a breeze from over the fields, with the fragrance still upon his spirit. i am tired wanting for that man to get old. they went to dublin in may, and became at once a part of the summer colony which congregated there. there was much going to and fro among the different houses, pleasant afternoons in the woods, mountain-climbing for jean, and everywhere a spirit of fine, unpretentious comradeship. the copley greene house was romantically situated, with a charming outlook. clemens wrote to twichell: we like it here in the mountains, in the shadows of monadnock. it is a woody solitude. we have no near neighbors. we have neighbors and i can see their houses scattered in the forest distances, for we live on a hill. i am astonished to find that i have known of these neighbors a long time; years is the shortest; then seven beginning with years & running up to years' friendship. it is the most remarkable thing i ever heard of. this letter was written in july, and he states in it that he has turned out one hundred thousand words of a large manuscript.. it was a fantastic tale entitled “ , years among the microbes,” a sort of scientific revel--or revelry--the autobiography of a microbe that had been once a man, and through a failure in a biological experiment transformed into a cholera germ when the experimenter was trying to turn him into a bird. his habitat was the person of a disreputable tramp named blitzowski, a human continent of vast areas, with seething microbic nations and fantastic life problems. it was a satire, of course--gulliver's lilliput outdone--a sort of scientific, socialistic, mathematical jamboree. he tired of it before it reached completion, though not before it had attained the proportions of a book of size. as a whole it would hardly have added to his reputation, though it is not without fine and humorous passages, and certainly not without interest. its chief mission was to divert him mentally that summer during, those days and nights when he would otherwise have been alone and brooding upon his loneliness.--[for extracts from “ , years among the microbes” see appendix v, at the end of this work.] mark twain's suggested title-page for his microbe book: years among the microbes by a microbe with notes added by the same hand years later translated from the original microbic by mark twain his inability to reproduce faces in his mind's eye he mourned as an increasing calamity. photographs were lifeless things, and when he tried to conjure up the faces of his dead they seemed to drift farther out of reach; but now and then kindly sleep brought to him something out of that treasure-house where all our realities are kept for us fresh and fair, perhaps for a day when we may claim them again. once he wrote to mrs. crane: susy dear,--i have had a lovely dream. livy, dressed in black, was sitting up in my bed (here) at my right & looking as young & sweet as she used to when she was in health. she said, “what is the name of your sweet sister?” i said, “pamela.” “oh yes, that is it, i thought it was--(naming a name which has escaped me) won't you write it down for me?” i reached eagerly for a pen & pad, laid my hands upon both, then said to myself, “it is only a dream,” and turned back sorrowfully & there she was still. the conviction flamed through me that our lamented disaster was a dream, & this a reality. i said, “how blessed it is, how blessed it is, it was all a dream, only a dream!” she only smiled and did not ask what dream i meant, which surprised me. she leaned her head against mine & kept saying, “i was perfectly sure it was a dream; i never would have believed it wasn't.” i think she said several things, but if so they are gone from my memory. i woke & did not know i had been dreaming. she was gone. i wondered how she could go without my knowing it, but i did not spend any thought upon that. i was too busy thinking of how vivid & real was the dream that we had lost her, & how unspeakably blessed it was to find that it was not true & that she was still ours & with us. he had the orchestrelle moved to dublin, although it was no small undertaking, for he needed the solace of its harmonies; and so the days passed along, and he grew stronger in body and courage as his grief drifted farther behind him. sometimes, in the afternoon or in the evening; when the neighbors had come in for a little while, he would walk up and down and talk in his old, marvelous way of all the things on land and sea, of the past and of the future, “of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,” of the friends he had known and of the things he had done, of the sorrow and absurdities of the world. it was the same old scintillating, incomparable talk of which howells once said: “we shall never know its like again. when he dies it will die with him.” it was during the summer at dublin that clemens and rogers together made up a philanthropic ruse on twichell. twichell, through his own prodigal charities, had fallen into debt, a fact which rogers knew. rogers was a man who concealed his philanthropies when he could, and he performed many of them of which the world will never know: in this case he said: “clemens, i want to help twichell out of his financial difficulty. i will supply the money and you will do the giving. twichell must think it comes from you.” clemens agreed to this on the condition that he be permitted to leave a record of the matter for his children, so that he would not appear in a false light to them, and that twichell should learn the truth of the gift, sooner or later. so the deed was done, and twichell and his wife lavished their thanks upon clemens, who, with his wife, had more than once been their benefactors, making the deception easy enough now. clemens writhed under these letters of gratitude, and forwarded them to clara in norfolk, and later to rogers himself. he pretended to take great pleasure in this part of the conspiracy, but it was not an unmixed delight. to rogers he wrote: i wanted her [clara] to see what a generous father she's got. i didn't tell her it was you, but by and by i want to tell her, when i have your consent; then i shall want her to remember the letters. i want a record there, for my life when i am dead, & must be able to furnish the facts about the relief-of-lucknow-twichell in case i fall suddenly, before i get those facts with your consent, before the twichells themselves. i read those letters with immense pride! i recognized that i had scored one good deed for sure on my halo account. i haven't had anything that tasted so good since the stolen watermelon. p. s.-i am hurrying them off to you because i dasn't read them again! i should blush to my heels to fill up with this unearned gratitude again, pouring out of the thankful hearts of those poor swindled people who do not suspect you, but honestly believe i gave that money. mr. rogers hastily replied: my dear clemens,--the letters are lovely. don't breathe. they are so happy! it would be a crime to let them think that you have in any way deceived them. i can keep still. you must. i am sending you all traces of the crime, so that you may look innocent and tell the truth, as you usually do when you think you can escape detection. don't get rattled. seriously. you have done a kindness. you are proud of it, i know. you have made your friends happy, and you ought to be so glad as to cheerfully accept reproof from your conscience. joe wadsworth and i once stole a goose and gave it to a poor widow as a christmas present. no crime in that. i always put my counterfeit money on the plate. “the passer of the sasser” always smiles at me and i get credit for doing generous things. but seriously again, if you do feel a little uncomfortable wait until i see you before you tell anybody. avoid cultivating misery. i am trying to loaf ten solid days. we do hope to see you soon. the secret was kept, and the matter presently (and characteristically) passed out of clemens's mind altogether. he never remembered to tell twichell, and it is revealed here, according to his wish. the russian-japanese war was in progress that summer, and its settlement occurred in august. the terms of it did not please mark twain. when a newspaper correspondent asked him for an expression of opinion on the subject he wrote: russia was on the highroad to emancipation from an insane and intolerable slavery. i was hoping there would be no peace until russian liberty was safe. i think that this was a holy war, in the best and noblest sense of that abused term, and that no war was ever charged with a higher mission. i think there can be no doubt that that mission is now defeated and russia's chain riveted; this time to stay. i think the tsar will now withdraw the small humanities that have been forced from him, and resume his medieval barbarisms with a relieved spirit and an immeasurable joy. i think russian liberty has had its last chance and has lost it. i think nothing has been gained by the peace that is remotely comparable to what has been sacrificed by it. one more battle would have abolished the waiting chains of billions upon billions of unborn russians, and i wish it could have been fought. i hope i am mistaken, yet in all sincerity i believe that this peace is entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political history. it was the wisest public utterance on the subject--the deep, resonant note of truth sounding amid a clamor of foolish joy-bells. it was the message of a seer--the prophecy of a sage who sees with the clairvoyance of knowledge and human understanding. clemens, a few days later, was invited by colonel harvey to dine with baron rosen and m. sergius witte; but an attack of his old malady--rheumatism--prevented his acceptance. his telegram of declination apparently pleased the russian officials, for witte asked permission to publish it, and declared that he was going to take it home to show to the tsar. it was as follows: to colonel harvey,--i am still a cripple, otherwise i should be more than glad of this opportunity to meet the illustrious magicians who came here equipped with nothing but a pen, & with it have divided the honors of the war with the sword. it is fair to presume that in thirty centuries history will not get done in admiring these men who attempted what the world regarded as the impossible & achieved it. mark twain. but this was a modified form. his original draft would perhaps have been less gratifying to that russian embassy. it read: to colonel harvey,--i am still a cripple, otherwise i should be more than glad of this opportunity to meet those illustrious magicians who with the pen have annulled, obliterated, & abolished every high achievement of the japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay & blithesome comedy. if i may, let me in all respect and honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, i taking third place, as becomes one who was not born to modesty, but by diligence & hard work is acquiring it. mark. there was still another form, brief and expressive: dear colonel,--no, this is a love-feast; when you call a lodge of sorrow send for me. mark. clemens's war sentiment was given the widest newspaper circulation, and brought him many letters, most of them applauding his words. charles francis adams wrote him: it attracted my attention because it so exactly expresses the views i have myself all along entertained. and this was the gist of most of the expressed sentiments which came to him. clemens wrote a number of things that summer, among them a little essay entitled, “the privilege of the grave”--that is to say, free speech. he was looking forward, he said, to the time when he should inherit that privilege, when some of the things he had said, written and laid away, could be published without damage to his friends or family. an article entitled, “interpreting the deity,” he counted as among the things to be uttered when he had entered into that last great privilege. it is an article on the reading of signs and auguries in all ages to discover the intentions of the almighty, with historical examples of god's judgments and vindications. here is a fair specimen. it refers to the chronicle of henry huntington: all through this book henry exhibits his familiarity with the intentions of god and with the reasons for the intentions. sometimes very often, in fact--the act follows the intention after such a wide interval of time that one wonders how henry could fit one act out of a hundred to one intention, and get the thing right every time, when there was such abundant choice among acts and intentions. sometimes a man offends the deity with a crime, and is punished for it thirty years later; meantime he has committed a million other crimes: no matter, henry can pick out the one that brought the worms. worms were generally used in those days for the slaying of particularly wicked people. this has gone out now, but in the old times it was a favorite. it always indicated a case of “wrath.” for instance: “the just god avenging robert fitzhildebrand's perfidity, a worm grew in his vitals which, gradually gnawing its way through his intestines, fattened on the abandoned man till, tortured with excruciating sufferings and venting himself in bitter moans, he was by a fitting punishment brought to his end” (p. ). it was probably an alligator, but we cannot tell; we only know it was a particular breed, and only used to convey wrath. some authorities think it was an ichthyosaurus, but there is much doubt. the entire article is in this amusing, satirical strain, and might well enough be printed to-day. it is not altogether clear why it was withheld, even then. he finished his eve's diary that summer, and wrote a story which was originally planned to oblige mrs. minnie maddern fiske, to aid her in a crusade against bullfighting in spain. mrs. fiske wrote him that she had read his dog story, written against the cruelties of vivisection, and urged him to do something to save the horses that, after faithful service, were sacrificed in the bull-ring. her letter closed: i have lain awake nights very often wondering if i dare ask you to write a story of an old horse that is finally given over to the bull-ring. the story you would write would do more good than all the laws we are trying to have made and enforced for the prevention of cruelty to animals in spain. we would translate and circulate the story in that country. i have wondered if you would ever write it. with most devoted homage, sincerely yours, minnie maddern fiske. clemens promptly replied: dear mrs. fiske, i shall certainly write the story. but i may not get it to suit me, in which case it will go in the fire. later i will try it again--& yet again--& again. i am used to this. it has taken me twelve years to write a short story--the shortest one i ever wrote, i think.--[probably “the death disk:”]--so do not be discouraged; i will stick to this one in the same way. sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. it was an inspiring subject, and he began work on it immediately. within a month from the time he received mrs. fiske's letter he had written that pathetic, heartbreaking little story, “a horse's tale,” and sent it to harper's magazine for illustration. in a letter written to mr. duneka at the time, he tells of his interest in the narrative, and adds: this strong interest is natural, for the heroine is my small daughter susy, whom we lost. it was not intentional--it was a good while before i found it out, so i am sending you her picture to use --& to reproduce with photographic exactness the unsurpassable expression & all. may you find an artist who has lost an idol. he explains how he had put in a good deal of work, with his secretary, on the orchestrelle to get the bugle-calls. we are to do these theatricals this evening with a couple of neighbors for audience, and then pass the hat. it is not one of mark twain's greatest stories, but its pathos brings the tears, and no one can read it without indignation toward the custom which it was intended to oppose. when it was published, a year later, mrs. fiske sent him her grateful acknowledgments, and asked permission to have it printed for pamphlet circulation m spain. a number of more or less notable things happened in this, mark twain's seventieth year. there was some kind of a reunion going on in california, and he was variously invited to attend. robert fulton, of nevada, was appointed a committee of one to invite him to reno for a great celebration which was to be held there. clemens replied that he remembered, as if it were but yesterday, when he had disembarked from the overland stage in front of the ormsby hotel, in carson city, and told how he would like to accept the invitation. if i were a few years younger i would accept it, and promptly, and i would go. i would let somebody else do the oration, but as for me i would talk--just talk. i would renew my youth; and talk--and talk--and talk--and have the time of my life! i would march the unforgotten and unforgetable antiques by, and name their names, and give them reverent hail and farewell as they passed--goodman, mccarthy, gillis, curry, baldwin, winters, howard, nye, stewart, neely johnson, hal clayton, north, root--and my brother, upon whom be peace!--and then the desperadoes, who made life a joy, and the “slaughter-house,” a precious possession: sam brown, farmer pete, bill mayfield, six-fingered jake, jack williams, and the rest of the crimson discipleship, and so on, and so on. believe me, i would start a resurrection it would do you more good to look at than the next one will, if you go on the way you are going now. those were the days!--those old ones. they will come no more; youth will come no more. they were so full to the brim with the wine of life; there have been no others like them. it chokes me up to think of them. would you like me to come out there and cry? it would not beseem my white head. good-by. i drink to you all. have a good time-and take an old man's blessing. in reply to another invitation from h. h. bancroft, of san francisco, he wrote that his wandering days were over, and that it was his purpose to sit by the fire for the rest of his “remnant of life.” a man who, like me, is going to strike on the th of next november has no business to be flitting around the way howells does --that shameless old fictitious butterfly. (but if he comes don't tell him i said it, for it would hurt him & i wouldn't brush a flake of powder from his wing for anything. i only say it in envy of his indestructible youth anyway. howells will be in october.) and it was either then or on a similar occasion that he replied after this fashion: i have done more for san francisco than any other of its old residents. since i left there it has increased in population fully , . i could have done more--i could have gone earlier--it was suggested. which, by the way, is a perfect example of mark twain's humorous manner, the delicately timed pause, and the afterthought. most humorists would have been contented to end with the statement, “i could have gone earlier.” only mark twain could have added that final exquisite touch--“it was suggested.” ccxxxvi. at pier mark twain was nearing seventy, the scriptural limitation of life, and the returns were coming in. some one of the old group was dying all the time. the roll-call returned only a scattering answer. of his oldest friends, charles henry webb, john hay, and sir henry irving, all died that year. when hay died clemens gave this message to the press: i am deeply grieved, & i mourn with the nation this loss which is irreparable. my friendship with mr. hay & my admiration of him endured years without impairment. it was only a little earlier that he had written hay an anonymous letter, a copy of which he preserved. it here follows: dear & honored sir,--i never hear any one speak of you & of your long roll of illustrious services in other than terms of pride & praise--& out of the heart. i think i am right in believing you to be the only man in the civil service of the country the cleanness of whose motives is never questioned by any citizen, & whose acts proceed always upon a broad & high plane, never by accident or pressure of circumstance upon a narrow or low one. there are majorities that are proud of more than one of the nation's great servants, but i believe, & i think i know, that you are the only one of whom the entire nation is proud. proud & thankful. name & address are lacking here, & for a purpose: to leave you no chance to make my words a burden to you and a reproach to me, who would lighten your burdens if i could, not add to them. irving died in october, and clemens ordered a wreath for his funeral. to macalister he wrote: i profoundly grieve over irving's death. it is another reminder. my section of the procession has but a little way to go. i could not be very sorry if i tried. mark twain, nearing seventy, felt that there was not much left for him to celebrate; and when colonel harvey proposed a birthday gathering in his honor, clemens suggested a bohemian assembly over beer and sandwiches in some snug place, with howells, henry rogers, twichell, dr. rice, dr. edward quintard, augustus thomas, and such other kindred souls as were still left to answer the call. but harvey had something different in view: something more splendid even than the sixty-seventh birthday feast, more pretentious, indeed, than any former literary gathering. he felt that the attainment of seventy years by america's most distinguished man of letters and private citizen was a circumstance which could not be moderately or even modestly observed. the date was set five days later than the actual birthday--that is to say, on december th, in order that it might not conflict with the various thanksgiving holidays and occasions. delmonico's great room was chosen for the celebration of it, and invitations were sent out to practically every writer of any distinction in america, and to many abroad. of these nearly two hundred accepted, while such as could not come sent pathetic regrets. what an occasion it was! the flower of american literature gathered to do honor to its chief. the whole atmosphere of the place seemed permeated with his presence, and when colonel harvey presented william dean howells, and when howells had read another double-barreled sonnet, and introduced the guest of the evening with the words, “i will not say, 'o king, live forever,' but, 'o king, live as long as you like!'” and mark twain rose, his snow-white hair gleaming above that brilliant assembly, it seemed that a world was speaking out in a voice of applause and welcome. with a great tumult the throng rose, a billow of life, the white handkerchiefs flying foam-like on its crest. those who had gathered there realized that it was a mighty moment, not only in his life but in theirs. they were there to see this supreme embodiment of the american spirit as he scaled the mountain-top. he, too, realized the drama of that moment--the marvel of it--and he must have flashed a swift panoramic view backward over the long way he had come, to stand, as he had himself once expressed it, “for a single, splendid moment on the alps of fame outlined against the sun.” he must have remembered; for when he came to speak he went back to the very beginning, to his very first banquet, as he called it, when, as he said, “i hadn't any hair; i hadn't any teeth; i hadn't any clothes.” he sketched the meagerness of that little hamlet which had seen his birth, sketched it playfully, delightfully, so that his hearers laughed and shouted; but there was always a tenderness under it all, and often the tears were not far beneath the surface. he told of his habits of life, how he had attained seventy years by simply sticking to a scheme of living which would kill anybody else; how he smoked constantly, loathed exercise, and had no other regularity of habits. then, at last, he reached that wonderful, unforgetable close: threescore years and ten! it is the scriptural statute of limitations. after that you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. you are a time- expired man, to use kipling's military phrase: you have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. you are become an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not for you, nor any bugle-call but “lights out.” you pay the time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline if you prefer--and without prejudice--for they are not legally collectable. the previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so many twinges, you can lay aside forever; on this side of the grave you will never need it again. if you shrink at thought of night, and winter, and the late homecomings from the banquet and the lights and laughter through the deserted streets--a desolation which would not remind you now, as for a generation it did, that your friends are sleeping and you must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them, but would only remind you that you need not tiptoe, you can never disturb them more--if you shrink at the thought of these things you need only reply, “your invitation honors me and pleases me because you still keep me in your remembrance, but i am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke my pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection, and that when you in your turn shall arrive at pier you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart.” the tears that had been lying in wait were not restrained now. if there were any present who did not let them flow without shame, who did not shout their applause from throats choked with sobs, the writer of these lines failed to see them or to hear of them. there was not one who was ashamed to pay the great tribute of tears. many of his old friends, one after another, rose to tell their love for him--brander matthews, cable, kate douglas riggs, gilder, carnegie, bangs, bacheller--they kept it up far into the next morning. no other arrival at pier ever awoke a grander welcome. ccxxxvii. aftermath the announcement of the seventieth birthday dinner had precipitated a perfect avalanche of letters, which continued to flow in until the news accounts of it precipitated another avalanche. the carriers' bags were stuffed with greetings that came from every part of the world, from every class of humanity. they were all full of love and tender wishes. a card signed only with initials said: “god bless your old sweet soul for having lived.” aldrich, who could not attend the dinner, declared that all through the evening he had been listening in his mind to a murmur of voices in the hall at delmonico's. a group of english authors in london combined in a cable of congratulations. anstey, alfred austin, balfour, barrie, bryce, chesterton, dobson, doyle, gosse, hardy, hope, jacobs, kipling, lang, parker, tenniel, watson, and zangwill were among the signatures. helen keller wrote: and you are seventy years old? or is the report exaggerated, like that of your death? i remember, when i saw you last, at the house of dear mr. hutton, in princeton, you said: “if a man is a pessimist before he is forty-eight he knows too much. if he is an optimist after he is forty-eight he knows too little.” now we know you are an optimist, and nobody would dare to accuse one on the “seven-terraced summit” of knowing little. so probably you are not seventy after all, but only forty-seven! helen keller was right. mark twain was not a pessimist in his heart, but only by premeditation. it was his observation and his logic that led him to write those things that, even in their bitterness, somehow conveyed that spirit of human sympathy which is so closely linked to hope. to miss keller he wrote: “oh, thank you for your lovely words!” he was given another birthday celebration that month--this time by the society of illustrators. dan beard, president, was also toast-master; and as he presented mark twain there was a trumpet-note, and a lovely girl, costumed as joan of arc, entered and, approaching him, presented him with a laurel wreath. it was planned and carried out as a surprise to him, and he hardly knew for the moment whether it was a vision or a reality. he was deeply affected, so much so that for several moments he could not find his voice to make any acknowledgments. clemens was more than ever sought now, and he responded when the cause was a worthy one. he spoke for the benefit of the russian sufferers at the casino on december th. madame sarah bernhardt was also there, and spoke in french. he followed her, declaring that it seemed a sort of cruelty to inflict upon an audience our rude english after hearing that divine speech flowing in that lucid gallic tongue. it has always been a marvel to me--that french language; it has always been a puzzle to me. how beautiful that language is! how expressive it seems to be! how full of grace it is! and when it comes from lips like those, how eloquent and how limpid it is! and, oh, i am always deceived--i always think i am going to understand it. it is such a delight to me, such a delight to me, to meet madame bernhardt, and laugh hand to hand and heart to heart with her. i have seen her play, as we all have, and, oh, that is divine; but i have always wanted to know madame bernhardt herself--her fiery self. i have wanted to know that beautiful character. why, she is the youngest person i ever saw, except myself--for i always feel young when i come in the presence of young people. and truly, at seventy, mark twain was young, his manner, his movement, his point of view-these were all, and always, young. a number of palmists about that time examined impressions of his hand without knowledge as to the owner, and they all agreed that it was the hand of a man with the characteristics of youth, with inspiration, and enthusiasm, and sympathy--a lover of justice and of the sublime. they all agreed, too, that he was a deep philosopher, though, alas! they likewise agreed that he lacked the sense of humor, which is not as surprising as it sounds, for with mark twain humor was never mere fun-making nor the love of it; rather it was the flower of his philosophy--its bloom and fragrance. when the fanfare and drum-beat of his birthday honors had passed by, and a moment of calm had followed, mark twain set down some reflections on the new estate he had achieved. the little paper, which forms a perfect pendant to the “seventieth birthday speech,” here follows: old age i think it likely that people who have not been here will be interested to know what it is like. i arrived on the thirtieth of november, fresh from carefree & frivolous , & was disappointed. there is nothing novel about it, nothing striking, nothing to thrill you & make your eye glitter & your tongue cry out, “oh, it is wonderful, perfectly wonderful!” yes, it is disappointing. you say, “is this it?--this? after all this talk and fuss of a thousand generations of travelers who have crossed this frontier & looked about them & told what they saw & felt? why, it looks just like .” and that is true. also it is natural, for you have not come by the fast express; you have been lagging & dragging across the world's continents behind oxen; when that is your pace one country melts into the next one so gradually that you are not able to notice the change; looks like ; looked like ; looked like --& so on back & back to the beginning. if you climb to a summit & look back--ah, then you see! down that far-reaching perspective you can make out each country & climate that you crossed, all the way up from the hot equator to the ice-summit where you are perched. you can make out where infancy verged into boyhood; boyhood into down-lipped youth; youth into bearded, indefinite young-manhood; indefinite young-manhood into definite manhood; definite manhood, with large, aggressive ambitions, into sobered & heedful husbandhood & fatherhood; these into troubled & foreboding age, with graying hair; this into old age, white-headed, the temple empty, the idols broken, the worshipers in their graves, nothing left but you, a remnant, a tradition, belated fag-end of a foolish dream, a dream that was so ingeniously dreamed that it seemed real all the time; nothing left but you, center of a snowy desolation, perched on the ice-summit, gazing out over the stages of that long trek & asking yourself, “would you do it again if you had the chance?” ccxxxviii. the writer meets mark twain we have reached a point in this history where the narrative becomes mainly personal, and where, at the risk of inviting the charge of egotism, the form of the telling must change. it was at the end of that i first met mark twain--at the players club on the night when he made the founder's address mentioned in an earlier chapter. i was not able to arrive in time for the address, but as i reached the head of the stairs i saw him sitting on the couch at the dining-room entrance, talking earnestly to some one, who, as i remember it, did not enter into my consciousness at all. i saw only that crown of white hair, that familiar profile, and heard the slow modulations of his measured speech. i was surprised to see how frail and old he looked. from his pictures i had conceived him different. i did not realize that it was a temporary condition due to a period of poor health and a succession of social demands. i have no idea how long i stood there watching him. he had been my literary idol from childhood, as he had been of so many others; more than that, for the personality in his work had made him nothing less than a hero to his readers. he rose presently to go, and came directly toward me. a year before i had done what new writers were always doing--i had sent him a book i had written, and he had done what he was always doing--acknowledged it with a kindly letter. i made my thanks now an excuse for addressing him. it warmed me to hear him say that he remembered the book, though at the time i confess i thought it doubtful. then he was gone; but the mind and ear had photographed those vivid first impressions that remain always clear. it was the following spring that i saw him again--at an afternoon gathering, and the memory of that occasion is chiefly important because i met mrs. clemens there for the only time, and like all who met her, however briefly, felt the gentleness and beauty of her spirit. i think i spoke with her at two or three different moments during the afternoon, and on each occasion was impressed with that feeling of acquaintanceship which we immediately experience with those rare beings whose souls are wells of human sympathy and free from guile. bret harte had just died, and during the afternoon mr. clemens asked me to obtain for him some item concerning the obsequies. it was more than three years before i saw him again. meantime, a sort of acquaintance had progressed. i had been engaged in writing the life of thomas nast, the cartoonist, and i had found among the material a number of letters to nast from mark twain. i was naturally anxious to use those fine characteristic letters, and i wrote him for his consent. he wished to see the letters, and the permission that followed was kindness itself. his admiration of nast was very great. it was proper, under the circumstances, to send him a copy of the book when it appeared; but that was , his year of sorrow and absence, and the matter was postponed. then came the great night of his seventieth birthday dinner, with an opportunity to thank him in person for the use of the letters. there was only a brief exchange of words, and it was the next day, i think, that i sent him a copy of the book. it did not occur to me that i should hear of it again. we step back a moment here. something more than a year earlier, through a misunderstanding, mark twain's long association with the players had been severed. it was a sorrow to him, and a still greater sorrow to the club. there was a movement among what is generally known' as the “round table group”--because its members have long had a habit of lunching at a large, round table in a certain window--to bring him back again. david munro, associate editor of the north american review--“david,” a man well loved of men--and robert reid, the painter, prepared this simple document: to mark twain from the clansmen will ye no come back again? will ye no come back again? better lo'ed ye canna be, will ye no come back again? it was signed by munro and by reid and about thirty others, and it touched mark twain deeply. the lines had always moved him. he wrote: to robt. reid & the others-- well-beloved,--surely those lovely verses went to prince charlie's heart, if he had one, & certainly they have gone to mine. i shall be glad & proud to come back again after such a moving & beautiful compliment as this from comrades whom i have loved so long. i hope you can poll the necessary vote; i know you will try, at any rate. it will be many months before i can foregather with you, for this black border is not perfunctory, not a convention; it symbolizes the loss of one whose memory is the only thing i worship. it is not necessary for me to thank you--& words could not deliver what i feel, anyway. i will put the contents of your envelope in the small casket where i keep the things which have become sacred to me. s. l. c. so the matter was temporarily held in abeyance until he should return to social life. at the completion of his seventieth year the club had taken action, and mark twain had been brought back, not in the regular order of things, but as an honorary life member without dues or duties. there was only one other member of this class, sir henry irving. the players, as a club, does not give dinners. whatever is done in that way is done by one or more of the members in the private dining-room, where there is a single large table that holds twenty-five, even thirty when expanded to its limit. that room and that table have mingled with much distinguished entertainment, also with history. henry james made his first after-dinner speech there, for one thing--at least he claimed it was his first, though this is by the way. a letter came to me which said that those who had signed the plea for the prince's return were going to welcome him in the private dining-room on the th of january. it was not an invitation, but a gracious privilege. i was in new york a day or two in advance of the date, and i think david munro was the first person i met at the players. as he greeted me his eyes were eager with something he knew i would wish to hear. he had been delegated to propose the dinner to mark twain, and had found him propped up in bed, and noticed on the table near him a copy of the nast book. i suspect that munro had led him to speak of it, and that the result had lost nothing filtered through that radiant benevolence of his. the night of january , , remains a memory apart from other dinners. brander matthews presided, and gilder was there, and frank millet and willard metcalf and robert reid, and a score of others; some of them are dead now, david munro among them. it so happened that my seat was nearly facing the guest of the evening, who, by custom of the players, is placed at the side and not at the end of the long table. he was no longer frail and thin, as when i had first met him. he had a robust, rested look; his complexion had the tints of a miniature painting. lit by the glow of the shaded candles, relieved against the dusk richness of the walls, he made a picture of striking beauty. one could not take his eyes from it, and to one guest at least it stirred the farthest memories. i suddenly saw the interior of a farm-house sitting-room in the middle west, where i had first heard uttered the name of mark twain, and where night after night a group gathered around the evening lamp to hear the tale of the first pilgrimage, which, to a boy of eight, had seemed only a wonderful poem and fairy tale. to charles harvey genung, who sat next to me, i whispered something of this, and how, during the thirty-six years since then, no other human being to me had meant quite what mark twain had meant--in literature, in life, in the ineffable thing which means more than either, and which we call “inspiration,” for lack of a truer word. now here he was, just across the table. it was the fairy tale come true. genung said: “you should write his life.” his remark seemed a pleasant courtesy, and was put aside as such. when he persisted i attributed it to the general bloom of the occasion, and a little to the wine, maybe, for the dinner was in its sweetest stage just then--that happy, early stage when the first glass of champagne, or the second, has proved its quality. he urged, in support of his idea, the word that munro had brought concerning the nast book, but nothing of what he said kindled any spark of hope. i could not but believe that some one with a larger equipment of experience, personal friendship, and abilities had already been selected for the task. by and by the speaking began--delightful, intimate speaking in that restricted circle--and the matter went out of my mind. when the dinner had ended, and we were drifting about the table in general talk, i found an opportunity to say a word to the guest of the evening about his joan of arc, which i had recently re-read. to my happiness, he detained me while he told me the long-ago incident which had led to his interest, not only in the martyred girl, but in all literature. i think we broke up soon after, and descended to the lower rooms. at any rate, i presently found the faithful charles genung privately reasserting to me the proposition that i should undertake the biography of mark twain. perhaps it was the brief sympathy established by the name of joan of arc, perhaps it was only genung's insistent purpose--his faith, if i may be permitted the word. whatever it was, there came an impulse, in the instant of bidding good-by to our guest of honor, which prompted me to say: “may i call to see you, mr. clemens, some day?” and something--dating from the primal atom, i suppose--prompted him to answer: “yes, come soon.” this was on wednesday night, or rather on thursday morning, for it was past midnight, and a day later i made an appointment with his secretary to call on saturday. i can say truly that i set out with no more than the barest hope of success, and wondering if i should have the courage, when i saw him, even to suggest the thought in my mind. i know i did not have the courage to confide in genung that i had made the appointment--i was so sure it would fail. i arrived at fifth avenue and was shown into that long library and drawing-room combined, and found a curious and deep interest in the books and ornaments along the shelves as i waited. then i was summoned, and i remember ascending the stairs, wondering why i had come on so futile an errand, and trying to think of an excuse to offer for having come at all. he was propped up in bed--in that stately bed-sitting, as was his habit, with his pillows placed at the foot, so that he might have always before him the rich, carved beauty of its headboard. he was delving through a copy of huckleberry finn, in search of a paragraph concerning which some random correspondent had asked explanation. he was commenting unfavorably on this correspondent and on miscellaneous letter-writing in general. he pushed the cigars toward me, and the talk of these matters ran along and blended into others more or less personal. by and by i told him what so many thousands had told him before: what he had meant to me, recalling the childhood impressions of that large, black-and-gilt-covered book with its wonderful pictures and adventures--the mediterranean pilgrimage. very likely it bored him--he had heard it so often--and he was willing enough, i dare say, to let me change the subject and thank him for the kindly word which david munro had brought. i do not remember what he said then, but i suddenly found myself suggesting that out of his encouragement had grown a hope--though certainly it was something less--that i might some day undertake a book about himself. i expected the chapter to end at this point, and his silence which followed seemed long and ominous. he said, at last, that at various times through his life he had been preparing some autobiographical matter, but that he had tired of the undertaking, and had put it aside. he added that he had hoped his daughters would one day collect his letters; but that a biography--a detailed story of personality and performance, of success and failure--was of course another matter, and that for such a work no arrangement had been made. he may have added one or two other general remarks; then, turning those piercing agate-blue eyes directly upon me, he said: “when would you like to begin?” there was a dresser with a large mirror behind him. i happened to catch my reflection in it, and i vividly recollect saying to it mentally: “this is not true; it is only one of many similar dreams.” but even in a dream one must answer, and i said: “whenever you like. i can begin now.” he was always eager in any new undertaking. “very good,” he said. “the sooner, then, the better. let's begin while we are in the humor. the longer you postpone a thing of this kind the less likely you are ever to get at it.” this was on saturday, as i have stated. i mentioned that my family was still in the country, and that it would require a day or two to get established in the city. i asked if tuesday, january th, would be too soon to begin. he agreed that tuesday would do, and inquired something about my plan of work. of course i had formed nothing definite, but i said that in similar undertakings a part of the work had been done with a stenographer, who had made the notes while i prompted the subject to recall a procession of incidents and episodes, to be supplemented with every variety of material obtainable--letters and other documentary accumulations. then he said: “i think i should enjoy dictating to a stenographer, with some one to prompt me and to act as audience. the room adjoining this was fitted up for my study. my manuscripts and notes and private books and many of my letters are there, and there are a trunkful or two of such things in the attic. i seldom use the room myself. i do my writing and reading in bed. i will turn that room over to you for this work. whatever you need will be brought to you. we can have the dictation here in the morning, and you can put in the rest of the day to suit yourself. you can have a key and come and go as you please.” that was always his way. he did nothing by halves; nothing without unquestioning confidence and prodigality. he got up and showed me the lovely luxury of the study, with its treasures of material. i did not believe it true yet. it had all the atmosphere of a dream, and i have no distinct recollection of how i came away. when i returned to the players and found charles harvey genung there, and told him about it, it is quite certain that he perjured himself when he professed to believe it true and pretended that he was not surprised. ccxxxix. working with mark twain on tuesday, january , , i was on hand with a capable stenographer--miss josephine hobby, who had successively, and successfully, held secretarial positions with charles dudley warner and mrs. mary mapes dodge, and was therefore peculiarly qualified for the work in hand. clemens, meantime, had been revolving our plans and adding some features of his own. he proposed to double the value and interest of our employment by letting his dictations continue the form of those earlier autobiographical chapters, begun with redpath in , and continued later in vienna and at the villa quarto. he said he did not think he could follow a definite chronological program; that he would like to wander about, picking up this point and that, as memory or fancy prompted, without any particular biographical order. it was his purpose, he declared, that his dictations should not be published until he had been dead a hundred years or more--a prospect which seemed to give him an especial gratification.--[as early as october, , he had proposed to harper & brothers a contract for publishing his personal memoirs at the expiration of one hundred years from date; and letters covering the details were exchanged with mr. rogers. the document, however, was not completed.] he wished to pay the stenographer, and to own these memoranda, he said, allowing me free access to them for any material i might find valuable. i could also suggest subjects for dictation, and ask particulars of any special episode or period. i believe this covered the whole arrangement, which did not require more than five minutes, and we set to work without further prologue. i ought to state that he was in bed when we arrived, and that he remained there during almost all of these earlier dictations, clad in a handsome silk dressing-gown of rich persian pattern, propped against great snowy pillows. he loved this loose luxury and ease, and found it conducive to thought. on the little table beside him, where lay his cigars, papers, pipes, and various knickknacks, shone a reading-lamp, making more brilliant the rich coloring of his complexion and the gleam of his shining hair. there was daylight, too, but it was north light, and the winter days were dull. also the walls of the room were a deep, unreflecting red, and his eyes were getting old. the outlines of that vast bed blending into the luxuriant background, the whole focusing to the striking central figure, remain in my mind to-day--a picture of classic value. he dictated that morning some matters connected with the history of the comstock mine; then he drifted back to his childhood, returning again to the more modern period, and closed, i think, with some comments on current affairs. it was absorbingly interesting; his quaint, unhurried fashion of speech, the unconscious movement of his hands, the play of his features as his fancies and phrases passed in mental review and were accepted or waved aside. we were watching one of the great literary creators of his time in the very process of his architecture. we constituted about the most select audience in the world enjoying what was, likely enough, its most remarkable entertainment. when he turned at last and inquired the time we were all amazed that two hours and more had slipped away. “and how much i have enjoyed it!” he said. “it is the ideal plan for this kind of work. narrative writing is always disappointing. the moment you pick up a pen you begin to lose the spontaneity of the personal relation, which contains the very essence of interest. with shorthand dictation one can talk as if he were at his own dinner-table--always a most inspiring place. i expect to dictate all the rest of my life, if you good people are willing to come and listen to it.” the dictations thus begun continued steadily from week to week, and always with increasing charm. we never knew what he was going to talk about, and it was seldom that he knew until the moment of beginning; then he went drifting among episodes, incidents, and periods in his irresponsible fashion; the fashion of table-conversation, as he said, the methodless method of the human mind. it was always delightful, and always amusing, tragic, or instructive, and it was likely to be one of these at one instant, and another the next. i felt myself the most fortunate biographer in the world, as undoubtedly i was, though not just in the way that i first imagined. it was not for several weeks that i began to realize that these marvelous reminiscences bore only an atmospheric relation to history; that they were aspects of biography rather than its veritable narrative, and built largely--sometimes wholly--from an imagination that, with age, had dominated memory, creating details, even reversing them, yet with a perfect sincerity of purpose on the part of the narrator to set down the literal and unvarnished truth. it was his constant effort to be frank and faithful to fact, to record, to confess, and to condemn without stint. if you wanted to know the worst of mark twain you had only to ask him for it. he would give it, to the last syllable--worse than the worst, for his imagination would magnify it and adorn it with new iniquities, and if he gave it again, or a dozen times, he would improve upon it each time, until the thread of history was almost impossible to trace through the marvel of that fabric; and he would do the same for another person just as willingly. those vividly real personalities that he marched and countermarched before us were the most convincing creatures in the world; the most entertaining, the most excruciatingly humorous, or wicked, or tragic; but, alas, they were not always safe to include in a record that must bear a certain semblance to history. they often disagreed in their performance, and even in their characters, with the documents in the next room, as i learned by and by when those records, disentangled, began to rebuild the structure of the years. his gift of dramatization had been exercised too long to be discarded now. the things he told of mrs. clemens and of susy were true--marvelously and beautifully true, in spirit and in aspect--and the actual detail of these mattered little in such a record. the rest was history only as 'roughing it' is history, or the 'tramp abroad'; that is to say, it was fictional history, with fact as a starting-point. in a prefatory note to these volumes we have quoted mark twain's own lovely and whimsical admission, made once when he realized his deviations: “when i was younger i could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but i am getting old, and soon i shall remember only the latter.” at another time he paraphrased one of josh billings's sayings in the remark: “it isn't so astonishing, the number of things that i can remember, as the number of things i can remember that aren't so.” i do not wish to say, by any means, that his so-called autobiography is a mere fairy tale. it is far from that. it is amazingly truthful in the character-picture it represents of the man himself. it is only not reliable--and it is sometimes even unjust--as detailed history. yet, curiously enough, there were occasional chapters that were photographically exact, and fitted precisely with the more positive, if less picturesque, materials. it is also true that such chapters were likely to be episodes intrinsically so perfect as to not require the touch of art. in the talks which we usually had, when the dictations were ended and miss hobby had gone, i gathered much that was of still greater value. imagination was temporarily dispossessed, as it were, and, whether expounding some theory or summarizing some event, he cared little for literary effect, and only for the idea and the moment immediately present. it was at such times that he allowed me to make those inquiries we had planned in the beginning, and which apparently had little place in the dictations themselves. sometimes i led him to speak of the genesis of his various books, how he had come to write them, and i think there was not a single case where later i did not find his memory of these matters almost exactly in accord with the letters of the moment, written to howells or twichell, or to some member of his family. such reminiscence was usually followed by some vigorous burst of human philosophy, often too vigorous for print, too human, but as dazzling as a search-light in its revelation. it was during this earlier association that he propounded, one day, his theory of circumstance, already set down, that inevitable sequence of cause and effect, beginning with the first act of the primal atom. he had been dictating that morning his story of the clairvoyant dream which preceded his brother's death, and the talk of foreknowledge had continued. i said one might logically conclude from such a circumstance that the future was a fixed quantity. “as absolutely fixed as the past,” he said; and added the remark already quoted.--[chap. lxxv] a little later he continued: “even the almighty himself cannot check or change that sequence of events once it is started. it is a fixed quantity, and a part of the scheme is a mental condition during certain moments usually of sleep--when the mind may reach out and grasp some of the acts which are still to come.” it was a new angle to me--a line of logic so simple and so utterly convincing that i have remained unshaken in it to this day. i have never been able to find any answer to it, nor any one who could even attempt to show that the first act of the first created atom did not strike the key-note of eternity. at another time, speaking of the idea that god works through man, he burst out: “yes, of course, just about as much as a man works through his microbes!” he had a startling way of putting things like that, and it left not much to say. i was at this period interested a good deal in mental healing, and had been treated for neurasthenia with gratifying results. like most of the world, i had assumed, from his published articles, that he condemned christian science and its related practices out of hand. when i confessed, rather reluctantly, one day, the benefit i had received, he surprised me by answering: “of course you have been benefited. christian science is humanity's boon. mother eddy deserves a place in the trinity as much as any member of it. she has organized and made available a healing principle that for two thousand years has never been employed, except as the merest kind of guesswork. she is the benefactor of the age.” it seemed strange, at the time, to hear him speak in this way concerning a practice of which he was generally regarded as the chief public antagonist. it was another angle of his many-sided character. ccxl. the definition of a gentleman that was a busy winter for him socially. he was constantly demanded for this thing and that--for public gatherings, dinners--everywhere he was a central figure. once he presided at a valentine dinner given by some players to david munro. he had never presided at a dinner before, he said, and he did it in his own way, which certainly was a taking one, suitable to that carefree company and occasion--a real scotch occasion, with the munro tartan everywhere, the table banked with heather, and a wild piper marching up and down in the anteroom, blowing savage airs in honor of scotland's gentlest son. an important meeting of that winter was at carnegie hall--a great gathering which had assembled for the purpose of aiding booker t. washington in his work for the welfare of his race. the stage and the auditorium were thronged with notables. joseph h. choate and mark twain presided, and both spoke; also robert c. ogden and booker t. washington himself. it was all fine and interesting. choate's address was ably given, and mark twain was at his best. he talked of politics and of morals--public and private--how the average american citizen was true to his christian principles three hundred and sixty-three days in the year, and how on the other two days of the year he left those principles at home and went to the tax-office and the voting-booths, and did his best to damage and undo his whole year's faithful and righteous work. i used to be an honest man, but i am crumbling--no, i have crumbled. when they assessed me at $ , a fortnight ago i went out and tried to borrow the money and couldn't. then when i found they were letting a whole crowd of millionaires live in new york at a third of the price they were charging me i was hurt, i was indignant, and said, this is the last feather. i am not going to run this town all by myself. in that moment--in that memorable moment, i began to crumble. in fifteen minutes the disintegration was complete. in fifteen minutes i was become just a mere moral sand-pile, and i lifted up my hand, along with those seasoned and experienced deacons, and swore off every rag of personal property i've got in the world. i had never heard him address a miscellaneous audience. it was marvelous to see how he convulsed it, and silenced it, and controlled it at will. he did not undertake any special pleading for the negro cause; he only prepared the way with cheerfulness. clemens and choate joined forces again, a few weeks later, at a great public meeting assembled in aid of the adult blind. helen keller was to be present, but she had fallen ill through overwork. she sent to clemens one of her beautiful letters, in which she said: i should be happy if i could have spelled into my hand the words as they fall from your lips, and receive, even as it is uttered, the eloquence of our newest ambassador to the blind. clemens, dictating the following morning, told of his first meeting with helen keller at a little gathering in lawrence hutton's home, when she was about the age of fourteen. it was an incident that invited no elaboration, and probably received none. henry rogers and i went together. the company had all assembled and had been waiting a while. the wonderful child arrived now with her about equally wonderful teacher, miss sullivan, and seemed quite well to recognize the character of her surroundings. she said, “oh, the books, the books, so many, many books. how lovely!” the guests were brought one after another. as she shook hands with each she took her hand away and laid her fingers lightly against miss sullivan's lips, who spoke against them the person's name. mr. howells seated himself by helen on the sofa, and she put her fingers against his lips and he told her a story of considerable length, and you could see each detail of it pass into her mind and strike fire there and throw the flash of it into her face. after a couple of hours spent very pleasantly some one asked if helen would remember the feel of the hands of the company after this considerable interval of time and be able to discriminate the hands and name the possessors of them. miss sullivan said, “oh, she will have no difficulty about that.” so the company filed past, shook hands in turn, and with each hand-shake helen greeted the owner of the hand pleasantly and spoke the name that belonged to it without hesitation. by and by the assemblage proceeded to the dining-room and sat down to the luncheon. i had to go away before it was over, and as i passed by helen i patted her lightly on the head and passed on. miss sullivan called to me and said, “stop, mr. clemens, helen is distressed because she did not recognize your hand. won't you come back and do that again?” i went back and patted her lightly on the head, and she said at once, “oh, it's mr. clemens.” perhaps some one can explain this miracle, but i have never been able to do it. could she feel the wrinkles in my hand through her hair? some one else must answer this. it was three years following this dictation that the mystery received a very simple and rather amusing solution. helen had come to pay a visit to mark twain's connecticut home, stormfield, then but just completed. he had met her, meantime, but it had not occurred to him before to ask her how she had recognized him that morning at hutton's, in what had seemed such a marvelous way. she remembered, and with a smile said: “i smelled you.” which, after all, did not make the incident seem much less marvelous. on one of the mornings after miss hobby had gone clemens said: “a very curious thing has happened--a very large-sized-joke.” he was shaving at the time, and this information came in brief and broken relays, suited to a performance of that sort. the reader may perhaps imagine the effect without further indication of it. “i was going on a yachting trip once, with henry rogers, when a reporter stopped me with the statement that mrs. astor had said that there had never been a gentleman in the white house, and he wanted me to give him my definition of a gentleman. i didn't give him my definition; but he printed it, just the same, in the afternoon paper. i was angry at first, and wanted to bring a damage suit. when i came to read the definition it was a satisfactory one, and i let it go. now to-day comes a letter and a telegram from a man who has made a will in missouri, leaving ten thousand dollars to provide tablets for various libraries in the state, on which shall be inscribed mark twain's definition of a gentleman. he hasn't got the definition--he has only heard of it, and he wants me to tell him in which one of my books or speeches he can find it. i couldn't think, when i read that letter, what in the nation the man meant, but shaving somehow has a tendency to release thought, and just now it all came to me.” it was a situation full of amusing possibilities; but he reached no conclusion in the matter. another telegram was brought in just then, which gave a sadder aspect to his thought, for it said that his old coachman, patrick mcaleer, who had begun in the clemens service with the bride and groom of thirty-six years before, was very low, and could not survive more than a few days. this led him to speak of patrick, his noble and faithful nature, and how he always claimed to be in their service, even during their long intervals of absence abroad. clemens gave orders that everything possible should be done for patrick's comfort. when the end came, a few days later, he traveled to hartford to lay flowers on patrick's bier, and to serve, with patrick's friends--neighbor coachmen and john o'neill, the gardener--as pall-bearer, taking his allotted place without distinction or favor. it was the following sunday, at the majestic theater, in new york, that mark twain spoke to the young men's christian association. for several reasons it proved an unusual meeting. a large number of free tickets had been given out, far more than the place would hold; and, further, it had been announced that when the ticket-holders had been seated the admission would be free to the public. the subject chosen for the talk was “reminiscences.” when we arrived the streets were packed from side to side for a considerable distance and a riot was in progress. a great crowd had swarmed about the place, and the officials, instead of throwing the doors wide and letting the theater fill up, regardless of tickets, had locked them. as a result there was a shouting, surging human mass that presently dashed itself against the entrance. windows and doors gave way, and there followed a wild struggle for entrance. a moment later the house was packed solid. a detachment of police had now arrived, and in time cleared the street. it was said that amid the tumult some had lost their footing and had been trampled and injured, but of this we did not learn until later. we had been taken somehow to a side entrance and smuggled into boxes.--[the paper next morning bore the head-lines: “ , stampeded at the mark twain meeting. well-dressed men and women clubbed by police at majestic theater.” in this account the paper stated that the crowd had collected an hour before the time for opening; that nothing of the kind had been anticipated and no police preparation had been made.] it was peaceful enough in the theater until mark twain appeared on the stage. he was wildly greeted, and when he said, slowly and seriously, “i thank you for this signal recognition of merit,” there was a still noisier outburst. in the quiet that followed he began his memories, and went wandering along from one anecdote to another in the manner of his daily dictations. at last it seemed to occur to him, in view of the character of his audience, that he ought to close with something in the nature of counsel suited to young men. it is from experiences such as mine [he said] that we get our education of life. we string them into jewels or into tinware, as we may choose. i have received recently several letters asking for counsel or advice, the principal request being for some incident that may prove helpful to the young. it is my mission to teach, and i am always glad to furnish something. there have been a lot of incidents in my career to help me along--sometimes they helped me along faster than i wanted to go. he took some papers from his pocket and started to unfold one of them; then, as if remembering, he asked how long he had been talking. the answer came, “thirty-five minutes.” he made as if to leave the stage, but the audience commanded him to go on. “all right,” he said, “i can stand more of my own talk than any one i ever knew.” opening one of the papers, a telegram, he read: “in which one of your works can we find the definition of a gentleman?” then he added: i have not answered that telegram. i couldn't. i never wrote any such definition, though it seems to me that if a man has just, merciful, and kindly instincts he would be a gentleman, for he would need nothing else in this world. he opened a letter. “from howells,” he said. my old friend, william dean howells--howells, the head of american literature. no one is able to stand with him. he is an old, old friend of mine, and he writes me, “to-morrow i shall be sixty-nine years old.” why, i am surprised at howells writing so. i have known him myself longer than that. i am sorry to see a man trying to appear so young. let's see. howells says now, “i see you have been burying patrick. i suppose he was old, too.” the house became very still. most of them had read an account of mark twain's journey to hartford and his last service to his faithful servitor. the speaker's next words were not much above a whisper, but every syllable was distinct. no, he was never old-patrick. he came to us thirty-six years ago. he was our coachman from the day that i drove my young bride to our new home. he was a young irishman, slender, tall, lithe, honest, truthful, and he never changed in all his life. he really was with us but twenty-five years, for he did not go with us to europe; but he never regarded that a separation. as the children grew up he was their guide. he was all honor, honesty, and affection. he was with us in new hampshire last summer, and his hair was just as black, his eyes were just as blue, his form just as straight, and his heart just as good as on the day we first met. in all the long years patrick never made a mistake. he never needed an order; he never received a command. he knew. i have been asked for my idea of an ideal gentleman, and i give it to you--patrick mcaleer. it was the sort of thing that no one but mark twain has quite been able to do, and it was just that recognized quality behind it that had made crowds jam the street and stampede the entrance to be in his presence-to see him and to hear his voice. ccxli. gorky, howells, and mark twain clemens was now fairly back again in the wash of banquets and speech-making that had claimed him on his return from england, five years before. he made no less than a dozen speeches altogether that winter, and he was continually at some feasting or other, where he was sure to be called upon for remarks. he fell out of the habit of preparing his addresses, relying upon the inspiration of the moment, merely following the procedure of his daily dictations, which had doubtless given him confidence for this departure from his earlier method. there was seldom an afternoon or an evening that he was not required, and seldom a morning that the papers did not have some report of his doings. once more, and in a larger fashion than ever, he had become “the belle of new york.” but he was something further. an editorial in the evening mail said: mark twain, in his “last and best of life for which the first was made,” seems to be advancing rapidly to a position which makes him a kind of joint aristides, solon, and themistocles of the american metropolis--an aristides for justness and boldness as well as incessancy of opinion, a solon for wisdom and cogency, and a themistocles for the democracy of his views and the popularity of his person. things have reached the point where, if mark twain is not at a public meeting or banquet, he is expected to console it with one of his inimitable letters of advice and encouragement. if he deigns to make a public appearance there is a throng at the doors which overtaxes the energy and ability of the police. we must be glad that we have a public commentator like mark twain always at hand and his wit and wisdom continually on tap. his sound, breezy mississippi valley americanism is a corrective to all sorts of snobbery. he cultivates respect for human rights by always making sure that he has his own. he talked one afternoon to the barnard girls, and another afternoon to the women's university club, illustrating his talk with what purported to be moral tales. he spoke at a dinner given to city tax commissioner mr. charles putzel; and when he was introduced there as the man who had said, “when in doubt tell the truth,” he replied that he had invented that maxim for others, but that when in doubt himself, he used more sagacity. the speeches he made kept his hearers always in good humor; but he made them think, too, for there was always substance and sound reason and searching satire in the body of what he said. it was natural that there should be reporters calling frequently at mark twain's home, and now and then the place became a veritable storm-center of news. such a moment arrived when it became known that a public library in brooklyn had banished huck finn and tom sawyer from the children's room, presided over by a young woman of rather severe morals. the incident had begun in november of the previous year. one of the librarians, asa don dickinson, who had vigorously voted against the decree, wrote privately of the matter. clemens had replied: dear sir,--i am greatly troubled by what you say. i wrote tom sawyer & huck finn for adults exclusively, & it always distresses me when i find that boys & girls have been allowed access to them. the mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. i know this by my own experience, & to this day i cherish an unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated bible through before i was years old. none can do that and ever draw a clean, sweet breath again this side of the grave. ask that young lady--she will tell you so. most honestly do i wish that i could say a softening word or two in defense of huck's character since you wish it, but really, in my opinion, it is no better than those of solomon, david, & the rest of the sacred brotherhood. if there is an unexpurgated in the children's department, won't you please help that young woman remove tom & huck from that questionable companionship? sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. i shall not show your letter to any one-it is safe with me. mr. dickinson naturally kept this letter from the public, though he read it aloud to the assembled librarians, and the fact of its existence and its character eventually leaked out.--[it has been supplied to the writer by mr. dickinson, and is published here with his consent.]--one of the librarians who had heard it mentioned it at a theater-party in hearing of an unrealized newspaper man. this was near the end of the following march. the “tip” was sufficient. telephone-bells began to jingle, and groups of newspaper men gathered simultaneously on mr. dickinson's and on mark twain's door-steps. at a fifth avenue you could hardly get in or out, for stepping on them. the evening papers surmised details, and huck and tom had a perfectly fresh crop of advertising, not only in america, but in distant lands. dickinson wrote clemens that he would not give out the letter without his authority, and clemens replied: be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove! the newspaper boys want that letter--don't you let them get hold of it. they say you refuse to allow them to see it without my consent. keep on refusing, and i'll take care of this end of the line. in a recent letter to the writer mr. dickinson states that mark twain's solicitude was for the librarian, whom he was unwilling to involve in difficulties with his official superiors, and he adds: there may be some doubt as to whether mark twain was or was not a religious man, for there are many definitions of the word religion. he was certainly a hater of conventions, had no patience with sanctimony and bibliolatry, and was perhaps irreverent. but any one who reads carefully the description of the conflict in huck's soul, in regard to the betrayal of jim, will credit the creator of the scene with deep and true moral feeling. the reporters thinned out in the course of a few days when no result was forthcoming; but they were all back again presently when the maxim gorky fiasco came along. the distinguished revolutionist, tchaykoffsky, as a sort of advance agent for gorky, had already called upon clemens to enlist his sympathy in their mission, which was to secure funds in the cause of russian emancipation. clemens gave his sympathy, and now promised his aid, though he did not hesitate to discourage the mission. he said that american enthusiasm in such matters stopped well above their pockets, and that this revolutionary errand would fail. howells, too, was of this opinion. in his account of the episode he says: i told a valued friend of his and mine that i did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and i think now i set the figure too high. clemens's interest, however, grew. he attended a dinner given to gorky at the “a club,” no. fifth avenue, and introduced gorky to the diners. also he wrote a letter to be read by tchaykoffsky at a meeting held at the grand central palace, where three thousand people gathered to hear this great revolutionist recite the story of russia's wrongs. the letter ran: dear mr. tchaykoffsky,--my sympathies are with the russian revolution, of course. it goes without saying. i hope it will succeed, and now that i have talked with you i take heart to believe it will. government by falsified promises, by lies, by treachery, and by the butcher-knife, for the aggrandizement of a single family of drones and its idle and vicious kin has been borne quite long enough in russia, i should think. and it is to be hoped that the roused nation, now rising in its strength, will presently put an end to it and set up the republic in its place. some of us, even the white-headed, may live to see the blessed day when tsars and grand dukes will be as scarce there as i trust they are in heaven. most sincerely yours, mark twain. clemens and howells called on gorky and agreed to figure prominently in a literary dinner to be given in his honor. the movement was really assuming considerable proportions, when suddenly something happened which caused it to flatten permanently, and rather ridiculously. arriving at fifth avenue, one afternoon, i met howells coming out. i thought he had an unhappy, hunted look. i went up to the study, and on opening the door i found the atmosphere semi-opaque with cigar smoke, and clemens among the drifting blue wreaths and layers, pacing up and down rather fiercely. he turned, inquiringly, as i entered. i had clipped a cartoon from a morning paper, which pictured him as upsetting the tsar's throne--the kind of thing he was likely to enjoy. i said: “here is something perhaps you may wish to see, mr. clemens.” he shook his head violently. “no, i can't see anything now,” and in another moment had disappeared into his own room. something extraordinary had happened. i wondered if, after all their lifelong friendship, he and howells had quarreled. i was naturally curious, but it was not a good time to investigate. by and by i went down on the street, where the newsboys were calling extras. when i had bought one, and glanced at the first page, i knew. gorky had been expelled from his hotel for having brought to america, as his wife, a woman not so recognized by the american laws. madame andreieva, a russian actress, was a leader in the cause of freedom, and by russian custom her relation with gorky was recognized and respected; but it was not sufficiently orthodox for american conventions, and it was certainly unfortunate that an apostle of high purpose should come handicapped in that way. apparently the news had already reached howells and clemens, and they had been feverishly discussing what was best to do about the dinner. within a day or two gorky and madame andreieva were evicted from a procession of hotels, and of course the papers rang with the head-lines. an army of reporters was chasing clemens and howells. the russian revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more intimate domestic interest. howells came again, the reporters following and standing guard at the door below. in 'my mark twain' he says: that was the moment of the great vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves in easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then “blowing a cone off,” as the telegraphic phrase was. the roof of the great market in naples had just broken in under its load of ashes and cinders, and crushed hundreds of people; and we asked each other if we were not sorry we had not been there, where the pressure would have been far less terrific than it was with us in fifth avenue. the forbidden butler came up with a message that there were some gentlemen below who wanted to see clemens. “how many?” he demanded. “five,” the butler faltered. “reporters?” the butler feigned uncertainty. “what would you do?” he asked me. “i wouldn't see them,” i said, and then clemens went directly down to them. how or by what means he appeased their voracity i cannot say, but i fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless enough. they went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant satisfaction with having seen them. it is not quite clear at this time just what word was sent to gorky but the matter must have been settled that night, for clemens was in a fine humor next morning. it was before dictation time, and he came drifting into the study and began at once to speak of the dinner and the impossibility of its being given now. then he said: “american public opinion is a delicate fabric. it shrivels like the webs of morning at the lightest touch.” later in the day he made this memorandum: laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment. the penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted just the same. certainly, then, there can be but one wise thing for a visiting stranger to do--find out what the country's customs are and refrain from offending against them. the efforts which have been made in gorky's justification are entitled to all respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back of them, but i think that the ink was wasted. custom is custom: it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts, seasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon gibraltar.--[to dan beard he said, “gorky made an awful mistake, dan. he might as well have come over here in his shirt-tail.”] the gorky disturbance had hardly begun to subside when there came another upheaval that snuffed it out completely. on the afternoon of the th of april i heard, at the players, a wandering telephonic rumor that a great earthquake was going on in san francisco. half an hour later, perhaps, i met clemens coming out of no. . he asked: “have you heard the news about san francisco?” i said i had heard a rumor of an earthquake; and had seen an extra with big scare-heads; but i supposed the matter was exaggerated. “no,” he said, “i am afraid it isn't. we have just had a telephone message that it is even worse than at first reported. a great fire is consuming the city. come along to the news-stand and we'll see if there is a later edition.” we walked to sixth avenue and eighth street and got some fresh extras. the news was indeed worse, than at first reported. san francisco was going to destruction. clemens was moved deeply, and began to recall this old friend and that whose lives and property might be in danger. he spoke of joe goodman and the gillis families, and pictured conditions in the perishing city. ccxlii. mark twain's good-by to the platform it was on april , , the day following the great earthquake, that mark twain gave a “farewell lecture” at carnegie hall for the benefit of the robert fulton memorial association. some weeks earlier gen. frederick d. grant, its president, had proposed to pay one thousand dollars for a mark twain lecture; but clemens' had replied that he was permanently out of the field, and would never again address any audience that had to pay to hear him. “i always expect to talk as long as i can get people to listen to me,” he sand, “but i never again expect to charge for it.” later came one of his inspirations, and he wrote: “i will lecture for one thousand dollars, on one condition: that it will be understood to be my farewell lecture, and that i may contribute the thousand dollars to the fulton association.” it was a suggestion not to be discouraged, and the bills and notices, “mark twain's farewell lecture,” were published without delay. i first heard of the matter one afternoon when general grant had called. clemens came into the study where i was working; he often wandered in and out-sometimes without a word, sometimes to relieve himself concerning things in general. but this time he suddenly chilled me by saying: “i'm going to deliver my farewell lecture, and i want you to appear on the stage and help me.” i feebly expressed my pleasure at the prospect. then he said: “i am going to lecture on fulton--on the story of his achievements. it will be a burlesque, of course, and i am going to pretend to forget my facts, and i want you to sit there in a chair. now and then, when i seem to get stuck, i'll lean over and pretend to ask you some thing, and i want you to pretend to prompt me. you don't need to laugh, or to pretend to be assisting in the performance any more than just that.” handbill of mark twain's “farewell lecture”: mark twain will deliver his farewell lecture carnegie hall. april th, for the benefit of robert fulton memorial association military organization old guard in full dress uniform will be present music by old guard band tickets and boxes on sale at carnegie hall and waldorf-astoria seats $ . , $ . , cents it was not likely that i should laugh. i had a sinking feeling in the cardiac region which does not go with mirth. it did not for the moment occur to me that the stage would be filled with eminent citizens and vice-presidents, and i had a vision of myself sitting there alone in the chair in that wide emptiness, with the chief performer directing attention to me every other moment or so, for perhaps an hour. let me hurry on to say that it did not happen. i dare say he realized my unfitness for the work, and the far greater appropriateness of conferring the honor on general grant, for in the end he gave him the assignment, to my immeasurable relief. it was a magnificent occasion. that spacious hall was hung with bunting, the stage was banked and festooned with decoration of every sort. general grant, surrounded by his splendidly uniformed staff, sat in the foreground, and behind was ranged a levee of foremost citizens of the republic. the band played “america” as mark twain entered, and the great audience rose and roared out its welcome. some of those who knew him best had hoped that on this occasion of his last lecture he would tell of that first appearance in san francisco, forty years before, when his fortunes had hung in the balance. perhaps he did not think of it, and no one had had the courage to suggest it. at all events, he did a different thing. he began by making a strong plea for the smitten city where the flames were still raging, urging prompt help for those who had lost not only their homes, but the last shred of their belongings and their means of livelihood. then followed his farcical history of fulton, with general grant to make the responses, and presently he drifted into the kind of lecture he had given so often in his long trip around the world-retelling the tales which had won him fortune and friends in many lands. i do not know whether the entertainment was long or short. i think few took account of time. to a letter of inquiry as to how long the entertainment would last, he had replied: i cannot say for sure. it is my custom to keep on talking till i get the audience cowed. sometimes it takes an hour and fifteen minutes, sometimes i can do it in an hour. there was no indication at any time that the audience was cowed. the house was packed, and the applause was so recurrent and continuous that often his voice was lost to those in its remoter corners. it did not matter. the tales were familiar to his hearers; merely to see mark twain, in his old age and in that splendid setting, relating them was enough. the audience realized that it was witnessing the close of a heroic chapter in a unique career. ccxliii. an investment in redding many of the less important happenings seem worth remembering now. among them was the sale, at the nast auction, of the mark twain letters, already mentioned. the fact that these letters brought higher prices than any others offered in this sale was gratifying. roosevelt, grant, and even lincoln items were sold; but the mark twain letters led the list. one of them sold for forty-three dollars, which was said to be the highest price ever paid for the letter of a living man. it was the letter written in , quoted earlier in this work, in which clemens proposed the lecture tour to nast. none of the clemens-nast letters brought less than twenty-seven dollars, and some of them were very brief. it was a new measurement of public sentiment. clemens, when he heard of it, said: “i can't rise to general grant's lofty place in the estimation of this country; but it is a deep satisfaction to me to know that when it comes to letter-writing he can't sit in the front seat along with me. that forty-three-dollar letter ought to be worth as much as eighty-six dollars after i'm dead.” a perpetual string of callers came to fifth avenue, and it kept the secretary busy explaining to most of them why mark twain could not entertain their propositions, or listen to their complaints, or allow them to express in person their views on public questions. he did see a great many of what might be called the milder type persons who were evidently sincere and not too heavily freighted with eloquence. of these there came one day a very gentle-spoken woman who had promised that she would stay but a moment, and say no more than a few words, if only she might sit face to face with the great man. it was in the morning hour before the dictations, and he received her, quite correctly clad in his beautiful dressing-robe and propped against his pillows. she kept her contract to the letter; but when she rose to go she said, in a voice of deepest reverence: “may i kiss your hand?” it was a delicate situation, and might easily have been made ludicrous. denial would have hurt her. as it was, he lifted his hand, a small, exquisite hand it was, with the gentle dignity and poise of a king, and she touched her lips to it with what was certainly adoration. then, as she went, she said: “how god must love you!” “i hope so,” he said, softly, and he did not even smile; but after she had gone he could not help saying, in a quaint, half-pathetic voice “i guess she hasn't heard of our strained relations.” sitting in that royal bed, clad in that rich fashion, he easily conveyed the impression of royalty, and watching him through those marvelous mornings he seemed never less than a king, as indeed he was--the king of a realm without national boundaries. some of those nearest to him fell naturally into the habit of referring to him as “the king,” and in time the title crept out of the immediate household and was taken up by others who loved him. he had been more than once photographed in his bed; but it was by those who had come and gone in a brief time, with little chance to study his natural attitudes. i had acquired some knowledge of the camera, and i obtained his permission to let me photograph him--a permission he seldom denied to any one. we had no dictations on saturdays, and i took the pictures on one of these holiday mornings. he was so patient and tractable, and so natural in every attitude, that it was a delight to make the negatives. i was afraid he would become impatient, and made fewer exposures than i might otherwise have done. i think he expected very little from this amateur performance; but, by that happy element of accident which plays so large a part in photographic success, the results were better than i had hoped for. when i brought him the prints, a few days later, he expressed pleasure and asked, “why didn't you make more?” among them was one in an attitude which had grown so familiar to us, that of leaning over to get his pipe from the smoking-table, and this seemed to give him particular satisfaction. it being a holiday, he had not donned his dressing-gown, which on the whole was well for the photographic result. he spoke of other pictures that had been made of him, especially denouncing one photograph, taken some twenty years before by sarony, a picture, as he said, of a gorilla in an overcoat, which the papers and magazines had insisted on using ever since. “sarony was as enthusiastic about wild animals as he was about photography, and when du chaillu brought over the first gorilla he sent for me to look at it and see if our genealogy was straight. i said it was, and sarony was so excited that i had recognized the resemblance between us, that he wanted to make it more complete, so he borrowed my overcoat and put it on the gorilla and photographed it, and spread that picture out over the world as mine. it turns up every week in some newspaper or magazine; but it's not my favorite; i have tried to get it suppressed.” mark twain made his first investment in redding that spring. i had located there the autumn before, and bought a vacant old house, with a few acres of land, at what seemed a modest price. i was naturally enthusiastic over the bargain, and the beauty and salubrity of the situation. his interest was aroused, and when he learned that there was a place adjoining, equally reasonable and perhaps even more attractive, he suggested immediately that i buy it for him; and he wanted to write a check then for the purchase price, for fear the opportunity might be lost. i think there was then no purpose in his mind of building a country home; but he foresaw that such a site, at no great distance from new york, would become more valuable, and he had plenty of idle means. the purchase was made without difficulty--a tract of seventy-five acres, to which presently was added another tract of one hundred and ten acres, and subsequently still other parcels of land, to complete the ownership of the hilltop, for it was not long until he had conceived the idea of a home. he was getting weary of the heavy pressure of city life. he craved the retirement of solitude--one not too far from the maelstrom, so that he might mingle with it now and then when he chose. the country home would not be begun for another year yet, but the purpose of it was already in the air. no one of the family had at this time seen the location. ccxliv. traits and philosophies i brought to the dictation one morning the omar khayyam card which twichell had written him so long ago; i had found it among the letters. it furnished him a subject for that morning. he said: how strange there was a time when i had never heard of omar khayyam! when that card arrived i had already read the dozen quatrains or so in the morning paper, and was still steeped in the ecstasy of delight which they occasioned. no poem had ever given me so much pleasure before, and none has given me so much pleasure since. it is the only poem i have ever carried about with me. it has not been from under my hand all these years. he had no general fondness for poetry; but many poems appealed to him, and on occasion he liked to read them aloud. once, during the dictation, some verses were sent up by a young authoress who was waiting below for his verdict. the lines pictured a phase of negro life, and she wished to know if he thought them worthy of being read at some tuskegee ceremony. he did not fancy the idea of attending to the matter just then and said: “tell her she can read it. she has my permission. she may commit any crime she wishes in my name.” it was urged that the verses were of high merit and the author a very charming young lady. “i'm very glad,” he said, “and i am glad the lord made her; i hope he will make some more just like her. i don't always approve of his handiwork, but in this case i do.” then suddenly he added: “well, let me see it--no time like the present to get rid of these things.” he took the manuscript and gave such a rendition of those really fine verses as i believe could not be improved upon. we were held breathless by his dramatic fervor and power. he returned a message to that young aspirant that must have made her heart sing. when the dictation had ended that day, i mentioned his dramatic gift. “yes,” he said, “it is a gift, i suppose, like spelling and punctuation and smoking. i seem to have inherited all those.” continuing, he spoke of inherited traits in general. “there was paige,” he said; “an ignorant man who could not make a machine himself that would stand up, nor draw the working plans for one; but he invented the eighteen thousand details of the most wonderful machine the world has ever known. he watched over the expert draftsmen, and superintended the building of that marvel. pratt & whitney built it; but it was paige's machine, nevertheless--the child of his marvelous gift. we don't create any of our traits; we inherit all of them. they have come down to us from what we impudently call the lower animals. man is the last expression, and combines every attribute of the animal tribes that preceded him. one or two conspicuous traits distinguish each family of animals from the others, and those one or two traits are found in every member of each family, and are so prominent as to eternally and unchangeably establish the character of that branch of the animal world. in these cases we concede that the several temperaments constitute a law of god, a command of god, and that whatsoever is done in obedience to that law is blameless. man, in his evolution, inherited the whole sum of these numerous traits, and with each trait its share of the law of god. he widely differs from them in this: that he possesses not a single characteristic that is equally prominent in each member of his race. you can say the housefly is limitlessly brave, and in saying it you describe the whole house-fly tribe; you can say the rabbit is limitlessly timid, and by the phrase you describe the whole rabbit tribe; you can say the spider and the tiger are limitlessly murderous, and by that phrase you describe the whole spider and tiger tribes; you can say the lamb is limitlessly innocent and sweet and gentle, and by that phrase you describe all the lambs. there is hardly a creature that you cannot definitely and satisfactorily describe by one single trait--except man. men are not all cowards like the rabbit, nor all brave like the house-fly, nor all sweet and innocent and gentle like the lamb, nor all murderous like the spider and the tiger and the wasp, nor all thieves like the fox and the bluejay, nor all vain like the peacock, nor all frisky like the monkey. these things are all in him somewhere, and they develop according to the proportion of each he received in his allotment: we describe a man by his vicious traits and condemn him; or by his fine traits and gifts, and praise him and accord him high merit for their possession. it is comical. he did not invent these things; he did not stock himself with them. god conferred them upon him in the first instant of creation. they constitute the law, and he could not escape obedience to the decree any more than paige could have built the type-setter he invented, or the pratt & whitney machinists could have invented the machine which they built.” he liked to stride up and down, smoking as he talked, and generally his words were slowly measured, with varying pauses between them. he halted in the midst of his march, and without a suggestion of a smile added: “what an amusing creature the human being is!” it is absolutely impossible, of course, to preserve the atmosphere and personality of such talks as this--the delicacies of his speech and manner which carried an ineffable charm. it was difficult, indeed, to record the substance. i did not know shorthand, and i should not have taken notes at such times in any case; but i had trained myself in similar work to preserve, with a fair degree of accuracy, the form of phrase, and to some extent its wording, if i could get hold of pencil and paper soon enough afterward. in time i acquired a sort of phonographic faculty; though it always seemed to me that the bouquet, the subtleness of speech, was lacking in the result. sometimes, indeed, he would dictate next morning the substance of these experimental reflections; or i would find among his papers memoranda and fragmentary manuscripts where he had set them down himself, either before or after he had tried them verbally. in these cases i have not hesitated to amend my notes where it seemed to lend reality to his utterance, though, even so, there is always lacking--and must be--the wonder of his personality. ccxlv. in the day's round a number of dictations of this period were about susy, her childhood, and the biography she had written of him, most of which he included in his chapters. more than once after such dictations he reproached himself bitterly for the misfortunes of his house. he consoled himself a little by saying that susy had died at the right time, in the flower of youth and happiness; but he blamed himself for the lack of those things which might have made her childhood still more bright. once he spoke of the biography she had begun, and added: “oh, i wish i had paid more attention to that little girl's work! if i had only encouraged her now and then, what it would have meant to her, and what a beautiful thing it would have been to have had her story of me told in her own way, year after year! if i had shown her that i cared, she might have gone on with it. we are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time nor the interest they deserve. we lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift-our personal association, which means so much to them-we give grudgingly and throw it away on those who care for it so little.” then, after a moment of silence: “but we are repaid for it at last. there comes a time when we want their company and their interest. we want it more than anything in the world, and we are likely to be starved for it, just as they were starved so long ago. there is no appreciation of my books that is so precious to me as appreciation from my children. theirs is the praise we want, and the praise we are least likely to get.” his moods of remorse seemed to overwhelm him at times. he spoke of henry's death and little langdon's, and charged himself with both. he declared that for years he had filled mrs. clemens's life with privations, that the sorrow of susy's death had hastened her own end. how darkly he painted it! one saw the jester, who for forty years had been making the world laugh, performing always before a background of tragedy. but such moods were evanescent. he was oftener gay than somber. one morning before we settled down to work he related with apparent joy how he had made a failure of story-telling at a party the night before. an artist had told him a yarn, he said, which he had considered the most amusing thing in the world. but he had not been satisfied with it, and had attempted to improve on it at the party. he had told it with what he considered the nicest elaboration of detail and artistic effect, and when he had concluded and expected applause, only a sickening silence had followed. “a crowd like that can make a good deal of silence when they combine,” he said, “and it probably lasted as long as ten seconds, because it seemed an hour and a half. then a lady said, with evident feeling, 'lord, how pathetic!' for a moment i was stupefied. then the fountains of my great deeps were broken up, and i rained laughter for forty days and forty nights during as much as three minutes. by that time i realized it was my fault. i had overdone the thing. i started in to deceive them with elaborate burlesque pathos, in order to magnify the humorous explosion at the end; but i had constructed such a fog of pathos that when i got to the humor you couldn't find it.” he was likely to begin the morning with some such incident which perhaps he did not think worth while to include in his dictations, and sometimes he interrupted his dictations to relate something aside, or to outline some plan or scheme which his thought had suggested. once, when he was telling of a magazine he had proposed to start, the back number, which was, to contain reprints of exciting events from history--newspaper gleanings--eye-witness narrations, which he said never lost their freshness of interest--he suddenly interrupted himself to propose that we start such a magazine in the near future--he to be its publisher and i its editor. i think i assented, and the dictation proceeded, but the scheme disappeared permanently. he usually had a number of clippings or slips among the many books on the bed beside him from which he proposed to dictate each day, but he seldom could find the one most needed. once, after a feverishly impatient search for a few moments, he invited miss hobby to leave the room temporarily, so, as he said, that he might swear. he got up and we began to explore the bed, his profanity increasing amazingly with each moment. it was an enormously large bed, and he began to disparage the size of it. “one could lose a dog in this bed,” he declared. finally i suggested that he turn over the clipping which he had in his hand. he did so, and it proved to be the one he wanted. its discovery was followed by a period of explosions, only half suppressed as to volume. then he said: “there ought to be a room in this house to swear in. it's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that.” a moment later, when miss hobby returned, he was serene and happy again. he was usually gentle during the dictations, and patient with those around him--remarkably so, i thought, as a rule. but there were moments that involved risk. he had requested me to interrupt his dictation at any time that i found him repeating or contradicting himself, or misstating some fact known to me. at first i hesitated to do this, and cautiously mentioned the matter when he had finished. then he was likely to say: “why didn't you stop me? why did you let me go on making a jackass of myself when you could have saved me?” so then i used to take the risk of getting struck by lightning, and nearly always stopped him at the time. but if it happened that i upset his thought the thunderbolt was apt to fly. he would say: “now you've knocked everything out of my head.” then, of course, i would apologize and say i was sorry, which would rectify matters, though half an hour later it might happen again. i became lightning-proof at last; also i learned better to select the psychological moment for the correction. there was a humorous complexion to the dictations which perhaps i have not conveyed to the reader at all; humor was his natural breath and life, and was not wholly absent in his most somber intervals. but poetry was there as well. his presence was full of it: the grandeur of his figure; the grace of his movement; the music of his measured speech. sometimes there were long pauses when he was wandering in distant valleys of thought and did not speak at all. at such times he had a habit of folding and refolding the sleeve of his dressing-gown around his wrist, regarding it intently, as it seemed. his hands were so fair and shapely; the palms and finger-tips as pink as those of a child. then when he spoke he was likely to fling back his great, white mane, his eyes half closed yet showing a gleam of fire between the lids, his clenched fist lifted, or his index-finger pointing, to give force and meaning to his words. i cannot recall the picture too often, or remind myself too frequently how precious it was to be there, and to see him and to hear him. i do not know why i have not said before that he smoked continually during these dictations--probably as an aid to thought--though he smoked at most other times, for that matter. his cigars were of that delicious fragrance which characterizes domestic tobacco; but i had learned early to take refuge in another brand when he offered me one. they were black and strong and inexpensive, and it was only his early training in the printing-office and on the river that had seasoned him to tobacco of that temper. rich, admiring friends used to send him quantities of expensive imported cigars; but he seldom touched them, and they crumbled away or were smoked by visitors. once, to a minister who proposed to send him something very special, he wrote: i should accept your hospitable offer at once but for the fact that i couldn't do it and remain honest. that is to say, if i allowed you to send me what you believed to be good cigars it would distinctly mean that i meant to smoke them, whereas i should do nothing of the kind. i know a good cigar better than you do, for i have had years' experience. no, that is not what i mean; i mean i know a bad cigar better than anybody else. i judge by the price only; if it costs above cents i know it to be either foreign or half foreign & unsmokable--by me. i have many boxes of havana cigars, of all prices from cents apiece up to $ . apiece; i bought none of them, they were all presents; they are an accumulation of several years. i have never smoked one of them & never shall; i work them off on the visitor. you shall have a chance when you come. he smoked a pipe a good deal, and he preferred it to be old and violent; and once, when he had bought a new, expensive english brier-root he regarded it doubtfully for a time, and then handed it over to me, saying: “i'd like to have you smoke that a year or two, and when it gets so you can't stand it, maybe it will suit me.” i am happy to add that subsequently he presented me with the pipe altogether, for it apparently never seemed to get qualified for his taste, perhaps because the tobacco used was too mild. one day, after the dictation, word was brought up that a newspaper man was down-stairs who wished to see him concerning a report that chauncey depew was to resign his senatorial seat and mark twain was to be nominated in his place. the fancy of this appealed to him, and the reporter was allowed to come up. he was a young man, and seemed rather nervous, and did not wish to state where the report had originated. his chief anxiety was apparently to have mark twain's comment on the matter. clemens said very little at the time. he did not wish to be a senator; he was too busy just now dictating biography, and added that he didn't think he would care for the job, anyway. when the reporter was gone, however, certain humorous possibilities developed. the senatorship would be a stepping-stone to the presidency, and with the combination of humorist, socialist, and peace-patriot in the presidential chair the nation could expect an interesting time. nothing further came of the matter. there was no such report. the young newspaper man had invented the whole idea to get a “story” out of mark twain. the item as printed next day invited a good deal of comment, and collier's weekly made it a text for an editorial on his mental vigor and general fitness for the place. if it happened that he had no particular engagement for the afternoon, he liked to walk out, especially when the pleasant weather came. sometimes we walked up fifth avenue, and i must admit that for a good while i could not get rid of a feeling of self-consciousness, for most people turned to look, though i was fully aware that i did not in the least come into their scope of vision. they saw only mark twain. the feeling was a more comfortably one at the players, where we sometimes went for luncheon, for the acquaintance there and the democracy of that institution had a tendency to eliminate contrasts and incongruities. we sat at the round table among those good fellows who were always so glad to welcome him. once we went to the “music master,” that tender play of charles klein's, given by that matchless interpreter, david warfield. clemens was fascinated, and said more than once: “it is as permanent as 'rip van winkle.' warfield, like jefferson, can go on playing it all his life.” we went behind when it was over, and i could see that warfield glowed with mark twain's unstinted approval. later, when i saw him at the players, he declared that no former compliment had ever made him so happy. there were some billiard games going on between the champions hoppe and sutton, at the madison square garden, and clemens, with his eager fondness for the sport, was anxious to attend them. he did not like to go anywhere alone, and one evening he invited me to accompany him. just as he stepped into the auditorium there was a vigorous round of applause. the players stopped, somewhat puzzled, for no especially brilliant shot had been made. then they caught the figure of mark twain and realized that the game, for the moment, was not the chief attraction. the audience applauded again, and waved their handkerchiefs. such a tribute is not often paid to a private citizen. clemens had a great admiration for the young champion hoppe, which the billiardist's extreme youth and brilliancy invited, and he watched his game with intense eagerness. when it was over the referee said a few words and invited mark twain to speak. he rose and told them a story-probably invented on the instant. he said: “once in nevada i dropped into a billiard-room casually, and picked up a cue and began to knock the balls around. the proprietor, who was a red-haired man, with such hair as i have never seen anywhere except on a torch, asked me if i would like to play. i said, 'yes.' he said, 'knock the balls around a little and let me see how you can shoot.' so i knocked them around, and thought i was doing pretty well, when he said, 'that's all right; i'll play you left-handed.' it hurt my pride, but i played him. we banked for the shot and he won it. then he commenced to play, and i commenced to chalk my cue to get ready to play, and he went on playing, and i went on chalking my cue; and he played and i chalked all through that game. when he had run his string out i said: “that's wonderful! perfectly wonderful! if you can play that way left-handed what could you do right-handed?' “'couldn't do anything,' he said. 'i'm a left-handed man.'” how it delighted them! i think it was the last speech of any sort he made that season. a week or two later he went to dublin, new hampshire, for the summer--this time to the upton house, which had been engaged a year before, the copley greene place being now occupied by its owner. ccxlvi. the second summer at dublin the upton house stands on the edge of a beautiful beech forest some two or three miles from dublin, just under monadnock--a good way up the slope. it is a handsome, roomy frame-house, and had a long colonnaded veranda overlooking one of the most beautiful landscape visions on the planet: lake, forest, hill, and a far range of blue mountains--all the handiwork of god is there. i had seen these things in paintings, but i had not dreamed that such a view really existed. the immediate foreground was a grassy slope, with ancient, blooming apple-trees; and just at the right hand monadnock rose, superb and lofty, sloping down to the panorama below that stretched away, taking on an ever deeper blue, until it reached that remote range on which the sky rested and the world seemed to end. it was a masterpiece of the greater mind, and of the highest order, perhaps, for it had in it nothing of the touch of man. a church spire glinted here and there, but there was never a bit of field, or stone wall, or cultivated land. it was lonely; it was unfriendly; it cared nothing whatever for humankind; it was as if god, after creating all the world, had wrought his masterwork here, and had been so engrossed with the beauty of it that he had forgotten to give it a soul. in a sense this was true, for he had not made the place suitable for the habitation of men. it lacked the human touch; the human interest, and i could never quite believe in its reality. the time of arrival heightened this first impression. it was mid-may and the lilacs were prodigally in bloom; but the bright sunlight was chill and unnatural, and there was a west wind that laid the grass flat and moaned through the house, and continued as steadily as if it must never stop from year's end to year's end. it seemed a spectral land, a place of supernatural beauty. warm, still, languorous days would come, but that first feeling of unreality would remain permanent. i believe jean clemens was the only one who ever really loved the place. something about it appealed to her elemental side and blended with her melancholy moods. she dressed always in white, and she was tall and pale and classically beautiful, and she was often silent, like a spirit. she had a little retreat for herself farther up the mountain-side, and spent most of her days there wood-carving, which was her chief diversion. clara clemens did not come to the place at all. she was not yet strong, and went to norfolk, connecticut, where she could still be in quiet retirement and have her physician's care. miss hobby came, and on the st of may the dictations were resumed. we began in his bedroom, as before, but the feeling there was depressing--the absence of the great carved bed and other furnishings, which had been so much a part of the picture, was felt by all of us. nothing of the old luxury and richness was there. it was a summer-furnished place, handsome but with the customary bareness. at the end of this first session he dressed in his snowy flannels, which he had adopted in the place of linen for summer wear, and we descended to the veranda and looked out over that wide, wonderful expanse of scenery. “i think i shall like it,” he said, “when i get acquainted with it, and get it classified and labeled, and i think we'll do our dictating out here hereafter. it ought to be an inspiring place.” so the dictations were transferred to the long veranda, and he was generally ready for them, a white figure pacing up and down before that panoramic background. during the earlier, cooler weeks he usually continued walking with measured step during the dictations, pausing now and then to look across the far-lying horizon. when it stormed we moved into the great living-room, where at one end there was a fireplace with blazing logs, and at the other the orchestrelle, which had once more been freighted up those mountain heights for the comfort of its harmonies. sometimes, when the wind and rain were beating outside, and he was striding up and down the long room within, with only the blurred shapes of mountains and trees outlined through the trailing rain, the feeling of the unreality became so strong that it was hard to believe that somewhere down below, beyond the rain and the woods, there was a literal world--a commonplace world, where the ordinary things of life were going on in the usual way. when the dictation finished early, there would be music--the music that he loved most--beethoven's symphonies, or the schubert impromptu, or the sonata by chopin.--[schubert, op. , no. ; chopin, op. , no. .]--it is easy to understand that this carried one a remove farther from the customary things of life. it was a setting far out of the usual, though it became that unique white figure and his occupation. in my notes, made from day to day, i find that i have set down more than once an impression of the curious unreality of the place and its surroundings, which would show that it was not a mere passing fancy. i had lodgings in the village, and drove out mornings for the dictations, but often came out again afoot on pleasant afternoons; for he was not much occupied with social matters, and there was opportunity for quiet, informing interviews. there was a woods path to the upton place, and it was a walk through a fairyland. a part of the way was through such a growth of beech timber as i have never seen elsewhere: tall, straight, mottled trees with an undergrowth of laurel, the sunlight sifting through; one found it easy to expect there storybook ladies, wearing crowns and green mantles, riding on white palfreys. then came a more open way, an abandoned grass-grown road full of sunlight and perfume; and this led to a dim, religious place, a natural cathedral, where the columns were stately pine-trees branching and meeting at the top: a veritable temple in which it always seemed that music was about to play. you crossed a brook and climbed a little hill, and pushed through a hedge into a place more open, and the house stood there among the trees. the days drifted along, one a good deal like another, except, as the summer deepened, the weather became warmer, the foliage changed, a drowsy haze gathered along the valleys and on the mountain-side. he sat more often now in a large rocking-chair, and generally seemed to be looking through half-dosed lids toward the monadnock heights, that were always changing in aspect-in color and in form--as cloud shapes drifted by or gathered in those lofty hollows. white and yellow butterflies hovered over the grass, and there were some curious, large black ants--the largest i have ever seen and quite harmless--that would slip in and out of the cracks on the veranda floor, wholly undisturbed by us. now and then a light flutter of wind would come murmuring up from the trees below, and when the apple-bloom was falling there would be a whirl of white and pink petals that seemed a cloud of smaller butterflies. on june st i find in my note-book this entry: warm and pleasant. the dictation about grant continues; a great privilege to hear this foremost man, of letters review his associations with that foremost man of arms. he remained seated today, dressed in white as usual, a large yellow pansy in his buttonhole, his white hair ruffled by the breeze. he wears his worn morocco slippers with black hose; sits in the rocker, smoking and looking out over the hazy hills, delivering his sentences with a measured accuracy that seldom calls for change. he is speaking just now of a grant dinner which he attended where depew spoke. one is impressed with the thought that we are looking at and listening to the war-worn veteran of a thousand dinners--the honored guest of many; an honored figure of all. earlier, when he had been chastising some old offender, he added, “however, he's dead, and i forgive him.” then, after a moment's reflection, “no; strike that last sentence out.” when we laughed, he added, “we can't forgive him yet.” a few days later--it was june th, the day before the second anniversary of the death of mrs. clemens--we found him at first in excellent humor from the long dictation of the day before. then his mind reverted to the tragedy of the season, and he began trying to tell of it. it was hard work. he walked back and forth in the soft sunlight, saying almost nothing. he gave it up at last, remarking, “we will not work to-morrow.” so we went away. he did not dictate on the th or the th, but on the th he resumed the story of mrs. clemens's last days at florence. the weather had changed: the sunlight and warmth had all gone; a chill, penetrating mist was on the mountains; monadnock was blotted out. we expected him to go to the fire, but evidently he could not bear being shut in with that subject in his mind. a black cape was brought out and thrown about his shoulders, which seemed to fit exactly into the somberness of the picture. for two hours or more we sat there in the gloom and chill, while he paced up and down, detailing as graphically as might be that final chapter in the life of the woman he had loved. it is hardly necessary to say that beyond the dictation clemens did very little literary work during these months. he had brought his “manuscript trunk” as usual, thinking, perhaps, to finish the “microbe” story and other of the uncompleted things; but the dictation gave him sufficient mental exercise, and he did no more than look over his “stock in trade,” as he called it, and incorporate a few of the finished manuscripts into “autobiography.” among these were the notes of his trip down the rhone, made in , and the old stormfield story, which he had been treasuring and suppressing so long. he wrote howells in june: the dictating goes lazily and pleasantly on. with intervals. i find that i've been at it, off & on, nearly two hours for days since january . to be exact, i've dictated hours in days & loafed days. i've added , words in the month that i've been here; which indicates that i've dictated during days of that time-- hours, at an average of , words an hour. it's a plenty, & i'm satisfied. there's a good deal of “fat.” i've dictated (from january ) , words, & the “fat” adds about , more. the “fat” is old pigeonholed things of the years gone by which i or editors didn't das't to print. for instance, i am dumping in the little old book which i read to you in hartford about years ago & which you said “publish & ask dean stanley to furnish an introduction; he'll do it” (captain stormfield's visit to heaven). it reads quite to suit me without altering a word now that it isn't to see print until i am dead. to-morrow i mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs & assigns burned alive if they venture to print it this side of a.d. --which i judge they won't. there'll be lots of such chapters if i live or years longer. the edition of a.d. will make a stir when it comes out. i shall be hovering around taking notice, along with other dead pals. you are invited. the chapter which was to invite death at the stake for his successors was naturally one of religious heresies a violent attack on the orthodox, scriptural god, but really an expression of the highest reverence for the god which, as he said, had created the earth and sky and the music of the constellations. mark twain once expressed himself concerning reverence and the lack of it: “i was never consciously and purposely irreverent in my life, yet one person or another is always charging me with a lack of reverence. reverence for what--for whom? who is to decide what ought to command my reverence--my neighbor or i? i think i ought to do the electing myself. the mohammedan reveres mohammed--it is his privilege; the christian doesn't--apparently that is his privilege; the account is square enough. they haven't any right to complain of the other, yet they do complain of each other, and that is where the unfairness comes in. each says that the other is irreverent, and both are mistaken, for manifestly you can't have reverence for a thing that doesn't command it. if you could do that you could digest what you haven't eaten, and do other miracles and get a reputation.” he was not reading many books at this time--he was inclined rather to be lazy, as he said, and to loaf during the afternoons; but i remember that he read aloud 'after the wedding' and 'the mother'--those two beautiful word-pictures by howells--which he declared sounded the depths of humanity with a deep-sea lead. also he read a book by william allen white, 'in our town', a collection of tales that he found most admirable. i think he took the trouble to send white a personal, hand-written letter concerning them, although, with the habit of dictation, he had begun, as he said, to “loathe the use of the pen.” there were usually some sort of mild social affairs going on in the neighborhood, luncheons and afternoon gatherings like those of the previous year, though he seems to have attended fewer of them, for he did not often leave the house. once, at least, he assisted in an afternoon entertainment at the dublin club, where he introduced his invention of the art of making an impromptu speech, and was assisted in its demonstration by george de forest brush and joseph lindon smith, to the very great amusement of a crowd of summer visitors. the “art” consisted mainly of having on hand a few reliable anecdotes and a set formula which would lead directly to them from any given subject. twice or more he collected the children of the neighborhood for charades and rehearsed them, and took part in the performance, as in the hartford days. sometimes he drove out or took an extended walk. but these things were seldom. now and then during the summer he made a trip to new york of a semi-business nature, usually going by the way of fairhaven, where he would visit for a few days, journeying the rest of the way in mr. rogers's yacht. once they made a cruise of considerable length to bar harbor and elsewhere. here is an amusing letter which he wrote to mrs. rogers after such a visit: dear mrs. rogers,--in packing my things in your house yesterday morning i inadvertently put in some articles that was laying around, i thinking about theology & not noticing, the way this family does in similar circumstances like these. two books, mr. rogers' brown slippers, & a ham. i thought it was ourn, it looks like one we used to have. i am very sorry it happened, but it sha'n't occur again & don't you worry. he will temper the wind to the shorn lamb & i will send some of the things back anyway if there is some that won't keep. ccxlvi. dublin, continued in time mark twain became very lonely in dublin. after the brilliant winter the contrast was too great. he was not yet ready for exile. in one of his dictations he said: the skies are enchantingly blue. the world is a dazzle of sunshine. monadnock is closer to us than usual by several hundred yards. the vast extent of spreading valley is intensely green--the lakes as intensely blue. and there is a new horizon, a remoter one than we have known before, for beyond the mighty half-circle of hazy mountains that form the usual frame of the picture rise certain shadowy great domes that are unfamiliar to our eyes.... but there is a defect--only one, but it is a defect which almost entitles it to be spelled with a capital d. this is the defect of loneliness. we have not a single neighbor who is a neighbor. nobody lives within two miles of us except franklin macveagh, and he is the farthest off of any, because he is in europe.... i feel for adam and eve now, for i know how it was with them. i am existing, broken-hearted, in a garden of eden.... the garden of eden i now know was an unendurable solitude. i know that the advent of the serpent was a welcome change--anything for society.... i never rose to the full appreciation of the utter solitude of this place until a symbol of it--a compact and visible allegory of it --furnished me the lacking lift three days ago. i was standing alone on this veranda, in the late afternoon, mourning over the stillness, the far-spreading, beautiful desolation, and the absence of visible life, when a couple of shapely and graceful deer came sauntering across the grounds and stopped, and at their leisure impudently looked me over, as if they had an idea of buying me as bric-a-brac. then they seemed to conclude that they could do better for less money elsewhere, and they sauntered indolently away and disappeared among the trees. it sized up this solitude. it is so complete, so perfect, that even the wild animals are satisfied with it. those dainty creatures were not in the least degree afraid of me. this was no more than a mood--though real enough while it lasted--somber, and in its way regal. it was the loneliness of a king--king lear. yet he returned gladly enough to solitude after each absence. it was just before one of his departures that i made another set of pictures of him, this time on the colonnaded veranda, where his figure had become so familiar. he had determined to have his hair cut when he reached new york, and i was anxious to get the pictures before this happened. when the proofs came seven of them--he arranged them as a series to illustrate what he called “the progress of a moral purpose.” he ordered a number of sets of this series, and he wrote a legend on each photograph, numbering them from to , laying each set in a sheet of letter-paper which formed a sort of wrapper, on which was written: this series of q photographs registers with scientific precision, stage by stage, the progress of a moral purpose through the mind of the human race's oldest friend. s. l. c. he added a personal inscription, and sent one to each of his more intimate friends. one of the pictures amused him more than the others, because during the exposure a little kitten, unnoticed, had walked into it, and paused near his foot. he had never outgrown his love for cats, and he had rented this kitten and two others for the summer from a neighbor. he didn't wish to own them, he said, for then he would have to leave them behind uncared for, so he preferred to rent them and pay sufficiently to insure their subsequent care. these kittens he called sackcloth and ashes--ashes being the joint name of the two that looked exactly alike, and so did not need distinctive titles. their gambols always amused him. he would stop any time in the midst of dictation to enjoy them. once, as he was about to enter the screen-door that led into the hall, two of the kittens ran up in front of him and stood waiting. with grave politeness he opened the door, made a low bow, and stepped back and said: “walk in, gentlemen. i always give precedence to royalty.” and the kittens marched in, tails in air. all summer long they played up and down the wide veranda, or chased grasshoppers and butterflies down the clover slope. it was a never-ending amusement to him to see them jump into the air after some insect, miss it and tumble back, and afterward jump up, with a surprised expression and a look of disappointment and disgust. i remember once, when he was walking up and down discussing some very serious subject--and one of the kittens was lying on the veranda asleep--a butterfly came drifting along three feet or so above the floor. the kitten must have got a glimpse of the insect out of the corner of its eye, and perhaps did not altogether realize its action. at all events, it suddenly shot straight up into the air, exactly like a bounding rubber ball, missed the butterfly, fell back on the porch floor with considerable force and with much surprise. then it sprang to its feet, and, after spitting furiously once or twice, bounded away. clemens had seen the performance, and it completely took his subject out of his mind. he laughed extravagantly, and evidently cared more for that moment's entertainment than for many philosophies. in that remote solitude there was one important advantage--there was no procession of human beings with axes to grind, and few curious callers. occasionally an automobile would find its way out there and make a circuit of the drive, but this happened too seldom to annoy him. even newspaper men rarely made the long trip from boston or new york to secure his opinions, and when they came it was by permission and appointment. newspaper telegrams arrived now and then, asking for a sentiment on some public condition or event, and these he generally answered willingly enough. when the british premier, campbell-bannerman, celebrated his seventieth birthday, the london tribune and the new york herald requested a tribute. he furnished it, for bannerman was a very old friend. he had known him first at marienbad in ' , and in vienna in ' , in daily intercourse, when they had lived at the same hotel. his tribute ran: to his excellency the british premier,--congratulations, not condolences. before seventy we are merely respected, at best, and we have to behave all the time, or we lose that asset; but after seventy we are respected, esteemed, admired, revered, and don't have to behave unless we want to. when i first knew you, honored sir, one of us was hardly even respected. mark twain. he had some misgivings concerning the telegram after it had gone, but he did not recall it. clemens became the victim of a very clever hoax that summer. one day a friend gave him two examples of the most deliciously illiterate letters, supposed to have been written by a woman who had contributed certain articles of clothing to the san francisco sufferers, and later wished to recall them because of the protests of her household. he was so sure that the letters were genuine that he included them in his dictations, after reading them aloud with great effect. to tell the truth, they did seem the least bit too well done, too literary in their illiteracy; but his natural optimism refused to admit of any suspicion, and a little later he incorporated one of the jennie allen letters in a speech which he made at a press club dinner in new york on the subject of simplified spelling--offering it as an example of language with phonetic brevity exercising its supreme function, the direct conveyance of ideas. the letters, in the end, proved to be the clever work of miss grace donworth, who has since published them serially and in book form. clemens was not at all offended or disturbed by the exposure. he even agreed to aid the young author in securing a publisher, and wrote to miss stockbridge, through whom he had originally received the documents: dear miss stockbridge (if she really exists), benefit street (if there is any such place): yes, i should like a copy of that other letter. this whole fake is delightful; & i tremble with fear that you are a fake yourself & that i am your guileless prey. (but never mind, it isn't any matter.) now as to publication---- he set forth his views and promised his assistance when enough of the letters should be completed. clemens allowed his name to be included with the list of spelling reformers, but he never employed any of the reforms in his letters or writing. his interest was mainly theoretical, and when he wrote or spoke on the subject his remarks were not likely to be testimonials in its favor. his own theory was that the alphabet needed reform, first of all, so that each letter or character should have one sound, and one sound only; and he offered as a solution of this an adaptation of shorthand. he wrote and dictated in favor of this idea to the end of his life. once he said: “our alphabet is pure insanity. it can hardly spell any large word in the english language with any degree of certainty. its sillinesses are quite beyond enumeration. english orthography may need reforming and simplifying, but the english alphabet needs it a good many times as much.” he would naturally favor simplicity in anything. i remember him reading, as an example of beautiful english, the death of king arthur, by sir thomas malory, and his verdict: “that is one of the most beautiful things ever written in english, and written when we had no vocabulary.” “a vocabulary, then, is sometimes a handicap?” “it is indeed.” still i think it was never a handicap with him, but rather the plumage of flight. sometimes, when just the right word did not come, he would turn his head a little at different angles, as if looking about him for the precise term. he would find it directly, and it was invariably the word needed. most writers employ, now and again, phrases that do not sharply present the idea--that blur the picture like a poor opera-glass. mark twain's english always focused exactly. ccxlviii. “what is man?” and the autobiography clemens decided to publish anonymously, or, rather, to print privately, the gospel, which he had written in vienna some eight years before and added to from time to time. he arranged with frank doubleday to take charge of the matter, and the de vinne press was engaged to do the work. the book was copyrighted in the name of j. w. bothwell, the superintendent of the de vinne company, and two hundred and fifty numbered copies were printed on hand-made paper, to be gradually distributed to intimate friends.--[in an introductory word (dated february, ) the author states that the studies for these papers had been made twenty-five or twenty-seven years before. he probably referred to the monday evening club essay, “what is happiness?” (february, ). see chap. cxli.]--a number of the books were sent to newspaper reviewers, and so effectually had he concealed the personality of his work that no critic seems to have suspected the book's authorship. it was not over-favorably received. it was generally characterized as a clever, and even brilliant, expose of philosophies which were no longer startlingly new. the supremacy of self-interest and “man the irresponsible machine” are the main features of 'what is man' and both of these and all the rest are comprehended in his wider and more absolute doctrine of that inevitable life-sequence which began with the first created spark. there can be no training of the ideals, “upward and still upward,” no selfishness and unselfishness, no atom of voluntary effort within the boundaries of that conclusion. once admitting the postulate, that existence is merely a sequence of cause and effect beginning with the primal atom, and we have a theory that must stand or fall as a whole. we cannot say that man is a creature of circumstance and then leave him free to select his circumstance, even in the minutest fractional degree. it was selected for him with his disposition; in that first instant of created life. clemens himself repeatedly emphasized this doctrine, and once, when it was suggested to him that it seemed to “surround every thing, like the sky,” he answered: “yes, like the sky; you can't break through anywhere.” colonel harvey came to dublin that summer and persuaded clemens to let him print some selections from the dictations in the new volume of the north american review, which he proposed to issue fortnightly. the matter was discussed a good deal, and it was believed that one hundred thousand words could be selected which would be usable forthwith, as well as in that long-deferred period for which it was planned. colonel harvey agreed to take a copy of the dictated matter and make the selections himself, and this plan was carried out. it may be said that most of the chapters were delightful enough; though, had it been possible to edit them with the more positive documents as a guide, certain complications might have been avoided. it does not matter now, and it was not a matter of very wide import then. the payment of these chapters netted clemens thirty thousand dollars--a comfortable sum, which he promptly proposed to spend in building on the property at redding. he engaged john mead howells to prepare some preliminary plans. clara clemens, at norfolk, was written to of the matter. a little later i joined her in redding, and she was the first of the family to see that beautiful hilltop. she was well pleased with the situation, and that day selected the spot where the house should stand. clemens wrote howells that he proposed to call it “autobiography house,” as it was to be built out of the review money, and he said: “if you will build on my farm and live there it will set mrs. howells's health up for sure. come and i'll sell you the site for twenty-five dollars. john will tell you it is a choice place.” the unusual summer was near its close. in my notebook, under date of september th, appears this entry: windy in valleys but not cold. this veranda is protected. it is peaceful here and perfect, but we are at the summer's end. this is my last entry, and the dictations must have ceased a few days later. i do not remember the date of the return to new york, and apparently i made no record of it; but i do not think it could have been later than the th. it had been four months since the day of arrival, a long, marvelous summer such as i would hardly know again. when i think of that time i shall always hear the ceaseless slippered, shuffling walk, and see the white figure with its rocking, rolling movement passing up and down the long gallery, with that preternaturally beautiful landscape behind, and i shall hear his deliberate speech--always deliberate, save at rare intervals; always impressive, whatever the subject might be; whether recalling some old absurdity of youth, or denouncing orthodox creeds, or detailing the shortcomings of human-kind. ccxlix. billiards the return to new york marked the beginning of a new era in my relations with mark twain. i have not meant to convey up to this time that there was between us anything resembling a personal friendship. our relations were friendly, certainly, but they were relations of convenience and mainly of a business, or at least of a literary nature. he was twenty-six years my senior, and the discrepancy of experience and attainments was not measurable. with such conditions friendship must be a deliberate growth; something there must be to bridge the dividing gulf. truth requires the confession that, in this case, the bridge took a very solid, material form, it being, in fact, nothing less than a billiard-table.--[clemens had been without a billiard-table since , the old one having been disposed of on the departure from hartford.] it was a present from mrs. henry h. rogers, and had been intended for his christmas; but when he heard of it he could not wait, and suggested delicately that if he had it “right now” he could begin using it sooner. so he went one day with mr. rogers to the balke-collender company, and they selected a handsome combination table suitable to all games--the best that money could buy. he was greatly excited over the prospect, and his former bedroom was carefully measured, to be certain that it was large enough for billiard purposes. then his bed was moved into the study, and the bookcases and certain appropriate pictures were placed and hung in the billiard-room to give it the proper feeling. the billiard-table arrived and was put in place, the brilliant green cloth in contrast with the rich red wallpaper and the bookbindings and pictures making the room wonderfully handsome and inviting. meantime, clemens, with one of his sudden impulses, had conceived the notion of spending the winter in egypt, on the nile. he had gone so far, within a few hours after the idea developed, as to plan the time of his departure, and to partially engage a traveling secretary, so that he might continue his dictations. he was quite full of the idea just at the moment when the billiard table was being installed. he had sent for a book on the subject--the letters of lady duff-gordon, whose daughter, janet ross, had become a dear friend in florence during the viviani days. he spoke of this new purpose on the morning when we renewed the new york dictations, a month or more following the return from dublin. when the dictation ended he said: “have you any special place to lunch to-day?” i replied that i had not. “lunch here,” he said, “and we'll try the new billiard-table.” i said what was eminently true--that i could not play--that i had never played more “than a few games of pool, and those very long ago. “no matter,” he answered; “the poorer you play, the better i shall like it.” so i remained for luncheon and we began, november d, the first game ever played on the christmas table. we played the english game, in which caroms and pockets both count. i had a beginner's luck, on the whole, and i remember it as a riotous, rollicking game, the beginning of a closer understanding between us--of a distinct epoch in our association. when it was ended he said: “i'm not going to egypt. there was a man here yesterday afternoon who said it was bad for bronchitis, and, besides, it's too far away from this billiard-table.” he suggested that i come back in the evening and play some more. i did so, and the game lasted until after midnight. he gave me odds, of course, and my “nigger luck,” as he called it, continued. it kept him sweating and swearing feverishly to win. finally, once i made a great fluke--a carom, followed by most of the balls falling into the pockets. “well,” he said, “when you pick up that cue this damn table drips at every pore.” after that the morning dictations became a secondary interest. like a boy, he was looking forward to the afternoon of play, and it never seemed to come quick enough to suit him. i remained regularly for luncheon, and he was inclined to cut the courses short, that he might the sooner get up-stairs to the billiard-room. his earlier habit of not eating in the middle of the day continued; but he would get up and dress, and walk about the dining-room in his old fashion, talking that marvelous, marvelous talk which i was always trying to remember, and with only fractional success at best. to him it was only a method of killing time. i remember once, when he had been discussing with great earnestness the japanese question, he suddenly noticed that the luncheon was about ending, and he said: “now we'll proceed to more serious matters--it's your--shot.” and he was quite serious, for the green cloth and the rolling balls afforded him a much larger interest. to the donor of his new possession clemens wrote: dear mrs. rogers,--the billiard-table is better than the doctors. i have a billiardist on the premises, & walk not less than ten miles every day with the cue in my hand. and the walking is not the whole of the exercise, nor the most health giving part of it, i think. through the multitude of the positions and attitudes it brings into play every muscle in the body & exercises them all. the games begin right after luncheons, daily, & continue until midnight, with hours' intermission for dinner & music. and so it is hours' exercise per day & or on sunday. yesterday & last night it was --& i slept until this morning without waking. the billiard-table as a sabbath-breaker can beat any coal-breaker in pennsylvania & give it in the game. if mr. rogers will take to daily billiards he can do without the doctors & the massageur, i think. we are really going to build a house on my farm, an hour & a half from new york. it is decided. with love & many thanks. s. l. c. naturally enough, with continued practice i improved my game, and he reduced my odds accordingly. he was willing to be beaten, but not too often. like any other boy, he preferred to have the balance in his favor. we set down a record of the games, and he went to bed happier if the tally-sheet showed him winner. it was natural, too, that an intimacy of association and of personal interest should grow under such conditions--to me a precious boon--and i wish here to record my own boundless gratitude to mrs. rogers for her gift, which, whatever it meant to him, meant so much more to me. the disparity of ages no longer existed; other discrepancies no longer mattered. the pleasant land of play is a democracy where such things do not count. to recall all the humors and interesting happenings of those early billiard-days would be to fill a large volume. i can preserve no more than a few characteristic phases. he was not an even-tempered player. when the balls were perverse in their movements and his aim unsteady, he was likely to become short with his opponent--critical and even fault-finding. then presently a reaction would set in, and he would be seized with remorse. he would become unnecessarily gentle and kindly--even attentive--placing the balls as i knocked them into the pockets, hurrying from one end of the table to render this service, endeavoring to show in every way except by actual confession in words that he was sorry for what seemed to him, no doubt, an unworthy display of temper, unjustified irritation. naturally, this was a mood that i enjoyed less than that which had induced it. i did not wish him to humble himself; i was willing that he should be severe, even harsh, if he felt so inclined; his age, his position, his genius entitled him to special privileges; yet i am glad, as i remember it now, that the other side revealed itself, for it completes the sum of his great humanity. indeed, he was always not only human, but superhuman; not only a man, but superman. nor does this term apply only to his psychology. in no other human being have i ever seen such physical endurance. i was comparatively a young man, and by no means an invalid; but many a time, far in the night, when i was ready to drop with exhaustion, he was still as fresh and buoyant and eager for the game as at the moment of beginning. he smoked and smoked continually, and followed the endless track around the billiard-table with the light step of youth. at three or four o'clock in the morning he would urge just one more game, and would taunt me for my weariness. i can truthfully testify that never until the last year of his life did he willingly lay down the billiard-cue, or show the least suggestion of fatigue. he played always at high pressure. now and then, in periods of adversity, he would fly into a perfect passion with things in general. but, in the end, it was a sham battle, and he saw the uselessness and humor of it, even in the moment of his climax. once, when he found it impossible to make any of his favorite shots, he became more and more restive, the lightning became vividly picturesque as the clouds blackened. finally, with a regular thunder-blast, he seized the cue with both hands and literally mowed the balls across the table, landing one or two of them on the floor. i do not recall his exact remarks during the performance; i was chiefly concerned in getting out of the way, and those sublime utterances were lost. i gathered up the balls and we went on playing as if nothing had happened, only he was very gentle and sweet, like the sun on the meadows after the storm has passed by. after a little he said: “this is a most amusing game. when you play badly it amuses me, and when i play badly and lose my temper it certainly must amuse you.” his enjoyment of his opponent's perplexities was very keen. when he had left the balls in some unfortunate position which made it almost impossible for me to score he would laugh boisterously. i used to affect to be injured and disturbed by this ridicule. once, when he had made the conditions unusually hard for me, and was enjoying the situation accordingly, i was tempted to remark: “whenever i see you laugh at a thing like that i always doubt your sense of humor.” which seemed to add to his amusement. sometimes, when the balls were badly placed for me, he would offer ostensible advice, suggesting that i should shoot here and there--shots that were possible, perhaps, but not promising. often i would follow his advice, and then when i failed to score his amusement broke out afresh. other billiardists came from time to time: colonel harvey, mr. duneka, and major leigh, of the harper company, and peter finley dunne (mr. dooley); but they were handicapped by their business affairs, and were not dependable for daily and protracted sessions. any number of his friends were willing, even eager, to come for his entertainment; but the percentage of them who could and would devote a number of hours each day to being beaten at billiards and enjoy the operation dwindled down to a single individual. even i could not have done it--could not have afforded it, however much i might have enjoyed the diversion--had it not been contributory to my work. to me the association was invaluable; it drew from him a thousand long-forgotten incidents; it invited a stream of picturesque comments and philosophies; it furnished the most intimate insight into his character. he was not always glad to see promiscuous callers, even some one that he might have met pleasantly elsewhere. one afternoon a young man whom he had casually invited to “drop in some day in town” happened to call in the midst of a very close series of afternoon games. it would all have been well enough if the visitor had been content to sit quietly on the couch and “bet on the game,” as clemens suggested, after the greetings were over; but he was a very young man, and he felt the necessity of being entertaining. he insisted on walking about the room and getting in the way, and on talking about the mark twain books he had read, and the people he had met from time to time who had known mark twain on the river, or on the pacific coast, or elsewhere. i knew how fatal it was for him to talk to clemens during his play, especially concerning matters most of which had been laid away. i trembled for our visitor. if i could have got his ear privately i should have said: “for heaven's sake sit down and keep still or go away! there's going to be a combination of earthquake and cyclone and avalanche if you keep this thing up.” i did what i could. i looked at my watch every other minute. at last, in desperation, i suggested that i retire from the game and let the visitor have my cue. i suppose i thought this would eliminate an element of danger. he declined on the ground that he seldom played, and continued his deadly visit. i have never been in an atmosphere so fraught with danger. i did not know how the game stood, and i played mechanically and forgot to count the score. clemens's face was grim and set and savage. he no longer ventured even a word. by and by i noticed that he was getting white, and i said, privately, “now, this young man's hour has come.” it was certainly by the mercy of god just then that the visitor said: “i'm sorry, but i've got to go. i'd like to stay longer, but i've got an engagement for dinner.” i don't remember how he got out, but i know that tons lifted as the door closed behind him. clemens made his shot, then very softly said: “if he had stayed another five minutes i should have offered him twenty-five cents to go.” but a moment later he glared at me. “why in nation did you offer him your cue?” “wasn't that the courteous thing to do?” i asked. “no!” he ripped out. “the courteous and proper thing would have been to strike him dead. did you want to saddle that disaster upon us for life?” he was blowing off steam, and i knew it and encouraged it. my impulse was to lie down on the couch and shout with hysterical laughter, but i suspected that would be indiscreet. he made some further comment on the propriety of offering a visitor a cue, and suddenly began to sing a travesty of an old hymn: “how tedious are they who their sovereign obey,” and so loudly that i said: “aren't you afraid he'll hear you and come back?” whereupon he pretended alarm and sang under his breath, and for the rest of the evening was in boundless good-humor. i have recalled this incident merely as a sample of things that were likely to happen at any time in his company, and to show the difficulty one might find in fitting himself to his varying moods. he was not to be learned in a day, or a week, or a month; some of those who knew him longest did not learn him at all. we celebrated his seventy-first birthday by playing billiards all day. he invented a new game for the occasion; inventing rules for it with almost every shot. it happened that no member of the family was at home on this birthday. ill health had banished every one, even the secretary. flowers, telegrams, and congratulations came, and there was a string of callers; but he saw no one beyond some intimate friends--the gilders--late in the afternoon. when they had gone we went down to dinner. we were entirely alone, and i felt the great honor of being his only guest on such an occasion. once between the courses, when he rose, as usual, to walk about, he wandered into the drawing-room, and seating himself at the orchestrelle began to play the beautiful flower-song from “faust.” it was a thing i had not seen him do before, and i never saw him do it again. when he came back to the table he said: “speaking of companions of the long ago, after fifty years they become only shadows and might as well be in the grave. only those whom one has really loved mean anything at all. of my playmates i recall john briggs, john garth, and laura hawkins--just those three; the rest i buried long ago, and memory cannot even find their graves.” he was in his loveliest humor all that day and evening; and that night, when he stopped playing, he said: “i have never had a pleasanter day at this game.” i answered, “i hope ten years from to-night we shall still be playing it.” “yes,” he said, “still playing the best game on earth.” ccl. philosophy and pessimism in a letter to macalister, written at this time, he said: the doctors banished jean to the country weeks ago; they banished my secretary to the country for a fortnight last saturday; they banished clara to the country for a fortnight last monday.... they banished me to bermuda to sail next wednesday, but i struck and sha'n't go. my complaint is permanent bronchitis & is one of the very best assets i've got, for it excuses me from every public function this winter--& all other winters that may come. if he had bronchitis when this letter was written, it must have been of a very mild form, for it did not interfere with billiard games, which were more protracted and strenuous than at almost any other period. i conclude, therefore, that it was a convenient bronchitis, useful on occasion. for a full ten days we were alone in the big house with the servants. it was a holiday most of the time. we hurried through the mail in the morning and the telephone calls; then, while i answered such letters as required attention, he dictated for an hour or so to miss hobby, after which, billiards for the rest of the day and evening. when callers were reported by the butler, i went down and got rid of them. clara clemens, before her departure, had pinned up a sign, “no billiards after p.m.,” which still hung on the wall, but it was outlawed. clemens occasionally planned excursions to bermuda and other places; but, remembering the billiard-table, which he could not handily take along, he abandoned these projects. he was a boy whose parents had been called away, left to his own devices, and bent on a good time. there were likely to be irritations in his morning's mail, and more often he did not wish to see it until it had been pretty carefully sifted. so many people wrote who wanted things, so many others who made the claim of more or less distant acquaintanceship the excuse for long and trivial letters. “i have stirred up three generations,” he said; “first the grandparents, then the children, and now the grandchildren; the great-grandchildren will begin to arrive soon.” his mail was always large; but often it did not look interesting. one could tell from the envelope and the superscription something of the contents. going over one assortment he burst out: “look at them! look how trivial they are! every envelope looks as if it contained a trivial human soul.” many letters were filled with fulsome praise and compliment, usually of one pattern. he was sated with such things, and seldom found it possible to bear more than a line or two of them. yet a fresh, well-expressed note of appreciation always pleased him. “i can live for two months on a good compliment,” he once said. certain persistent correspondents, too self-centered to realize their lack of consideration, or the futility of their purpose, followed him relentlessly. of one such he remarked: “that woman intends to pursue me to the grave. i wish something could be done to appease her.” and again: “everybody in the world who wants something--something of no interest to me--writes to me to get it.” these morning sessions were likely to be of great interest. once a letter spoke of the desirability of being an optimist. “that word perfectly disgusts me,” he said, and his features materialized the disgust, “just as that other word, pessimist, does; and the idea that one can, by any effort of will, be one or the other, any more than he can change the color of his hair. the reason why a man is a pessimist or an optimist is not because he wants to be, but because he was born so; and this man [a minister of the gospel who was going to explain life to him] is going to tell me why he isn't a pessimist. oh, he'll do it, but he won't tell the truth; he won't make it short enough.” yet he was always patient with any one who came with spiritual messages, theological arguments, and consolations. he might have said to them: “oh, dear friends, those things of which you speak are the toys that long ago i played with and set aside.” he could have said it and spoken the truth; but i believe he did not even think it. he listened to any one for whom he had respect, and was grateful for any effort in his behalf. one morning he read aloud a lecture given in london by george bernard shaw on religion, commenting as he read. he said: “this letter is a frank breath of expression [and his comments were equally frank]. there is no such thing as morality; it is not immoral for the tiger to eat the wolf, or the wolf the cat, or the cat the bird, and so on down; that is their business. there is always enough for each one to live on. it is not immoral for one nation to seize another nation by force of arms, or for one man to seize another man's property or life if he is strong enough and wants to take it. it is not immoral to create the human species--with or without ceremony; nature intended exactly these things.” at one place in the lecture shaw had said: “no one of good sense can accept any creed to-day without reservation.” “certainly not,” commented clemens; “the reservation is that he is a d--d fool to accept it at all.” he was in one of his somber moods that morning. i had received a print of a large picture of thomas nast--the last one taken. the face had a pathetic expression which told the tragedy of his last years. clemens looked at the picture several moments without speaking. then he broke out: “why can't a man die when he's had his tragedy? i ought to have died long ago.” and somewhat later: “once twichell heard me cussing the human race, and he said, 'why, mark, you are the last person in the world to do that--one selected and set apart as you are.' i said 'joe, you don't know what you are talking about. i am not cussing altogether about my own little troubles. any one can stand his own misfortunes; but when i read in the papers all about the rascalities and outrages going on i realize what a creature the human animal is. don't you care more about the wretchedness of others than anything that happens to you?' joe said he did, and shut up.” it occurred to me to suggest that he should not read the daily papers. “no difference,” he said. “i read books printed two hundred years ago, and they hurt just the same.” “those people are all dead and gone,” i objected. “they hurt just the same,” he maintained. i sometimes thought of his inner consciousness as a pool darkened by his tragedies, its glassy surface, when calm, reflecting all the joy and sunlight and merriment of the world, but easily--so easily--troubled and stirred even to violence. once following the dictation, when i came to the billiard-room he was shooting the balls about the table, apparently much depressed. he said: “i have been thinking it out--if i live two years more i will put an end to it all. i will kill myself.” “you have much to live for----” “but i am so tired of the eternal round,” he interrupted; “so tired.” and i knew he meant that he was ill of the great loneliness that had come to him that day in florence, and would never pass away. i referred to the pressure of social demands in the city, and the relief he would find in his country home. he shook his head. “the country home i need,” he said, fiercely, “is a cemetery.” yet the mood changed quickly enough when the play began. he was gay and hilarious presently, full of the humors and complexities of the game. h. h. rogers came in with a good deal of frequency, seldom making very long calls, but never seeming to have that air of being hurried which one might expect to find in a man whose day was only twenty-four hours long, and whose interests were so vast and innumerable. he would come in where we were playing, and sit down and watch the game, or perhaps would pick up a book and read, exchanging a remark now and then. more often, however, he sat in the bedroom, for his visits were likely to be in the morning. they were seldom business calls, or if they were, the business was quickly settled, and then followed gossip, humorous incident, or perhaps clemens would read aloud something he had written. but once, after greetings, he began: “well, rogers, i don't know what you think of it, but i think i have had about enough of this world, and i wish i were out of it.” mr. rogers replied, “i don't say much about it, but that expresses my view.” this from the foremost man of letters and one of the foremost financiers of the time was impressive. each at the mountain-top of his career, they agreed that the journey was not worth while--that what the world had still to give was not attractive enough to tempt them to prevent a desire to experiment with the next stage. one could remember a thousand poor and obscure men who were perfectly willing to go on struggling and starving, postponing the day of settlement as long as possible; but perhaps, when one has had all the world has to give, when there are no new worlds in sight to conquer, one has a different feeling. well, the realization lay not so far ahead for either of them, though at that moment they both seemed full of life and vigor--full of youth. one could not imagine the day when for them it would all be over. ccli. a lobbying expedition clara clemens came home now and then to see how matters were progressing, and very properly, for clemens was likely to become involved in social intricacies which required a directing hand. the daughter inherited no little of the father's characteristics of thought and phrase, and it was always a delight to see them together when one could be just out of range of the crossfire. i remember soon after her return, when she was making some searching inquiries concerning the billiard-room sign, and other suggested or instituted reforms, he said: “oh well, never mind, it doesn't matter. i'm boss in this house.” she replied, quickly: “oh no, you're not. you're merely owner. i'm the captain--the commander-in-chief.” one night at dinner she mentioned the possibility of going abroad that year. during several previous summers she had planned to visit vienna to see her old music-master, leschetizky, once more before his death. she said: “leschetizky is getting so old. if i don't go soon i'm afraid i sha'n't be in time for his funeral.” “yes,” said her father, thoughtfully, “you keep rushing over to leschetizky's funeral, and you'll miss mine.” he had made one or two social engagements without careful reflection, and the situation would require some delicacy of adjustment. during a moment between the courses, when he left the table and was taking his exercise in the farther room, she made some remark which suggested a doubt of her father's gift for social management. i said: “oh, well, he is a king, you know, and a king can do no wrong.” “yes, i know,” she answered. “the king can do no wrong; but he frightens me almost to death, sometimes, he comes so near it.” he came back and began to comment rather critically on some recent performance of roosevelt's, which had stirred up a good deal of newspaper amusement--it was the storer matter and those indiscreet letters which roosevelt had written relative to the ambassadorship which storer so much desired. miss clemens was inclined to defend the president, and spoke with considerable enthusiasm concerning his elements of popularity, which had won him such extraordinary admiration. “certainly he is popular,” clemens admitted, “and with the best of reasons. if the twelve apostles should call at the white house, he would say, 'come in, come in! i am delighted to see you. i've been watching your progress, and i admired it very much.' then if satan should come, he would slap him on the shoulder and say, 'why, satan, how do you do? i am so glad to meet you. i've read all your works and enjoyed every one of them.' anybody could be popular with a gift like that.” it was that evening or the next, perhaps, that he said to her: “ben [one of his pet names for her], now that you are here to run the ranch, paine and i are going to washington on a vacation. you don't seem to admire our society much, anyhow.” there were still other reasons for the washington expedition. there was an important bill up for the extension of the book royalty period, and the forces of copyright were going down in a body to use every possible means to get the measure through. clemens, during cleveland's first administration, some nineteen years before, had accompanied such an expedition, and through s. s. (“sunset”) cox had obtained the “privileges of the floor” of the house, which had enabled him to canvass the members individually. cox assured the doorkeeper that clemens had received the thanks of congress for national literary service, and was therefore entitled to that privilege. this was not strictly true; but regulations were not very severe in those days, and the ruse had been regarded as a good joke, which had yielded excellent results. clemens had a similar scheme in mind now, and believed that his friendship with speaker cannon--“uncle joe”--would obtain for him a similar privilege. the copyright association working in its regular way was very well, he said, but he felt he could do more as an individual than by acting merely as a unit of that body. “i canvassed the entire house personally that other time,” he said. “cox introduced me to the democrats, and john d. long, afterward secretary of the navy, introduced me to the republicans. i had a darling time converting those members, and i'd like to try the experiment again.” i should have mentioned earlier, perhaps, that at this time he had begun to wear white clothing regularly, regardless of the weather and season. on the return from dublin he had said: “i can't bear to put on black clothes again. i wish i could wear white all winter. i should prefer, of course, to wear colors, beautiful rainbow hues, such as the women have monopolized. their clothing makes a great opera audience an enchanting spectacle, a delight to the eye and to the spirit--a garden of eden for charm and color. “the men, clothed in odious black, are scattered here and there over the garden like so many charred stumps. if we are going to be gay in spirit, why be clad in funeral garments? i should like to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks and velvets resplendent with stunning dyes, and so would every man i have ever known; but none of us dares to venture it. if i should appear on fifth avenue on a sunday morning clothed as i would like to be clothed the churches would all be vacant and the congregation would come tagging after me. they would scoff, of course, but they would envy me, too. when i put on black it reminds me of my funerals. i could be satisfied with white all the year round.” it was not long after this that he said: “i have made up my mind not to wear black any more, but white, and let the critics say what they will.” so his tailor was sent for, and six creamy flannel and serge suits were ordered, made with the short coats, which he preferred, with a gray suit or two for travel, and he did not wear black again, except for evening dress and on special occasions. it was a gratifying change, and though the newspapers made much of it, there was no one who was not gladdened by the beauty of his garments and their general harmony with his person. he had never worn anything so appropriate or so impressive. this departure of costume came along a week or two before the washington trip, and when his bags were being packed for the excursion he was somewhat in doubt as to the propriety of bursting upon washington in december in that snowy plumage. i ventured: “this is a lobbying expedition of a peculiar kind, and does not seem to invite any half-way measures. i should vote in favor of the white suit.” i think miss clemens was for it, too. she must have been or the vote wouldn't have carried, though it was clear he strongly favored the idea. at all events, the white suits came along. we were off the following afternoon: howells, robert underwood johnson, one of the appletons, one of the putnams, george bowker, and others were on the train. on the trip down in the dining-car there was a discussion concerning the copyrighting of ideas, which finally resolved itself into the possibility of originating a new one. clemens said: “there is no such thing as a new idea. it is impossible. we simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. we give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. we keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.” we put up at the willard, and in the morning drove over to the congressional library, where the copyright hearing was in progress. there was a joint committee of the two houses seated round a long table at work, and a number of spectators more or less interested in the bill, mainly, it would seem, men concerned with the protection of mechanical music-rolls. the fact that this feature was mixed up with literature was not viewed with favor by most of the writers. clemens referred to the musical contingent as “those hand-organ men who ought to have a bill of their own.” i should mention that early that morning clemens had written this letter to speaker cannon: december , . dear uncle joseph,--please get me the thanks of the congress--not next week, but right away. it is very necessary. do accomplish this for your affectionate old friend right away; by persuasion, if you can; by violence, if you must, for it is imperatively necessary that i get on the floor for two or three hours and talk to the members, man by man, in behalf of the support, encouragement, and protection of one of the nation's most valuable assets and industries--its literature. i have arguments with me, also a barrel with liquid in it. give me a chance. get me the thanks of congress. don't wait for others--there isn't time. i have stayed away and let congress alone for seventy-one years and i am entitled to thanks. congress knows it perfectly well, and i have long felt hurt that this quite proper and earned expression of gratitude has been merely felt by the house and never publicly uttered. send me an order on the sergeant-at-arms quick. when shall i come? with love and a benediction; mark twain. we went over to the capitol now to deliver to “uncle joe” this characteristic letter. we had picked up clemens's nephew, samuel e. moffett, at the library, and he came along and led the way to the speaker's room. arriving there, clemens laid off his dark overcoat and stood there, all in white, certainly a startling figure among those clerks, newspaper men, and incidental politicians. he had been noticed as he entered the capitol, and a number of reporters had followed close behind. within less than a minute word was being passed through the corridors that mark twain was at the capitol in his white suit. the privileged ones began to gather, and a crowd assembled in the hall outside. speaker cannon was not present at the moment; but a little later he “billowed” in--which seems to be the word to express it--he came with such a rush and tide of life. after greetings, clemens produced the letter and read it to him solemnly, as if he were presenting a petition. uncle joe listened quite seriously, his head bowed a little, as if it were really a petition, as in fact it was. he smiled, but he said, quite seriously: “that is a request that ought to be granted; but the time has gone by when i am permitted any such liberties. tom reed, when he was speaker, inaugurated a strict precedent excluding all outsiders from the use of the floor of the house.” “i got in the other time,” clemens insisted. “yes,” said uncle joe; “but that ain't now. sunset cox could let you in, but i can't. they'd hang me.” he reflected a moment, and added: “i'll tell you what i'll do: i've got a private room down-stairs that i never use. it's all fitted up with table and desk, stationery, chinaware, and cutlery; you could keep house there, if you wanted to. i'll let you have it as long as you want to stay here, and i'll give you my private servant, neal, who's been here all his life and knows every official, every senator and representative, and they all know him. he'll bring you whatever you want, and you can send in messages by him. you can have the members brought down singly or in bunches, and convert them as much as you please. i'd give you a key to the room, only i haven't got one myself. i never can get in when i want to, but neal can get in, and he'll unlock it for you. you can have the room, and you can have neal. now, will that do you?” clemens said it would. it was, in fact, an offer without precedent. probably never in the history of the country had a speaker given up his private room to lobbyists. we went in to see the house open, and then went down with neal and took possession of the room. the reporters had promptly seized upon the letter, and they now got hold of its author, led him to their own quarters, and, gathering around him, fired questions at him, and kept their note-books busy. he made a great figure, all in white there among them, and they didn't fail to realize the value of it as “copy.” he talked about copyright, and about his white clothes, and about a silk hat which howells wore. back in the speaker's room, at last, he began laying out the campaign, which would begin next day. by and by he said: “look here! i believe i've got to speak over there in that committee-room to-day or to-morrow. i ought to know just when it is.” i had not heard of this before, and offered to go over and see about it, which i did at once. i hurried back faster than i had gone. “mr. clemens, you are to speak in half an hour, and the room is crowded full; people waiting to hear you.” “the devil!” he said. “well, all right; i'll just lie down here a few minutes and then we'll go over. take paper and pencil and make a few headings.” there was a couch in the room. he lay down while i sat at the table with a pencil, making headings now and then, as he suggested, and presently he rose and, shoving the notes into his pocket, was ready. it was half past three when we entered the committee-room, which was packed with people and rather dimly lighted, for it was gloomy outside. herbert putnam, the librarian, led us to seats among the literary group, and clemens, removing his overcoat, stood in that dim room clad as in white armor. there was a perceptible stir. howells, startled for a moment, whispered: “what in the world did he wear that white suit for?” though in his heart he admired it as much as the others. i don't remember who was speaking when we came in, but he was saying nothing important. whoever it was, he was followed by dr. edward everett hale, whose age always commanded respect, and whose words always invited interest. then it was mark twain's turn. he did not stand by his chair, as the others had done, but walked over to the speaker's table, and, turning, faced his audience. i have never seen a more impressive sight than that snow-white figure in that dim-lit, crowded room. he never touched his notes; he didn't even remember them. he began in that even, quiet, deliberate voice of his the most even, the most quiet, the most deliberate voice in the world--and, without a break or a hesitation for a word, he delivered a copyright argument, full of humor and serious reasoning, such a speech as no one in that room, i suppose, had ever heard. certainly it was a fine and dramatic bit of impromptu pleading. the weary committee, which had been tortured all day with dull, statistical arguments made by the mechanical device fiends, and dreary platitudes unloaded by men whose chief ambition was to shine as copyright champions, suddenly realized that they were being rewarded for the long waiting. they began to brighten and freshen, and uplift and smile, like flowers that have been wilted by a drought when comes the refreshing shower that means renewed life and vigor. every listener was as if standing on tiptoe. when the last sentence was spoken the applause came like an explosion.--[howells in his book my mark twain speaks of clemens's white clothing as “an inspiration which few men would have had the courage to act upon.” he adds: “the first time i saw him wear it was at the authors' hearing before the congressional committee on copyright in washington. nothing could have been more dramatic than the gesture with which he flung off his long, loose overcoat and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of his silvery head. it was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup; but the magnificent speech which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable farrago of nonsense about nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis of all copyright legislation, made you forget even his spectacularity.”] there came a universal rush of men and women to get near enough for a word and to shake his hand. but he was anxious to get away. we drove to the willard and talked and smoked, and got ready for dinner. he was elated, and said the occasion required full-dress. we started down at last, fronted and frocked like penguins. i did not realize then the fullness of his love for theatrical effect. i supposed he would want to go down with as little ostentation as possible, so took him by the elevator which enters the dining-room without passing through the long corridor known as “peacock alley,” because of its being a favorite place for handsomely dressed fashionables of the national capital. when we reached the entrance of the dining-room he said: “isn't there another entrance to this place?” i said there was, but that it was very conspicuous. we should have to go down the long corridor. “oh, well,” he said, “i don't mind that. let's go back and try it over.” so we went back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel, and came down to the f street entrance. there is a fine, stately flight of steps--a really royal stair--leading from this entrance down into “peacock alley.” to slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to do. it is like descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal landing-place where cleopatra's barge might lie. i confess that i was somewhat nervous at the awfulness of the occasion, but i reflected that i was powerfully protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white ties, white-silk waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight. of course he was seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and the passage along the corridor was a perpetual gantlet. i realize now that this gave the dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with proper appetite for his dinner. i did not again make the mistake of taking him around to the more secluded elevator. i aided and abetted him every evening in making that spectacular descent of the royal stairway, and in running that fair and frivolous gantlet the length of “peacock alley.” the dinner was a continuous reception. no sooner was he seated than this congressman and that senator came over to shake hands with mark twain. governor francis of missouri also came. eventually howells drifted in, and clemens reviewed the day, its humors and successes. back in the rooms at last he summed up the progress thus far--smoked, laughed over “uncle joe's” surrender to the “copyright bandits,” and turned in for the night. we were at the capitol headquarters in speaker cannon's private room about eleven o'clock next morning. clemens was not in the best humor because i had allowed him to oversleep. he was inclined to be discouraged at the prospect, and did not believe many of the members would come down to see him. he expressed a wish for some person of influence and wide acquaintance, and walked up and down, smoking gloomily. i slipped out and found the speaker's colored body-guard, neal, and suggested that mr. clemens was ready now to receive the members. that was enough. they began to arrive immediately. john sharp williams came first, then boutell, from illinois, littlefield, of maine, and after them a perfect procession, including all the leading lights--dalzell, champ clark, mccall--one hundred and eighty or so in all during the next three or four hours. neal announced each name at the door, and in turn i announced it to clemens when the press was not too great. he had provided boxes of cigars, and the room was presently blue with smoke, clemens in his white suit in the midst of it, surrounded by those darker figures--shaking hands, dealing out copyright gospel and anecdotes--happy and wonderfully excited. there were chairs, but usually there was only standing room. he was on his feet for several hours and talked continually; but when at last it was over, and champ clark, who i believe remained longest and was most enthusiastic in the movement, had bade him good-by, he declared that he was not a particle tired, and added: “i believe if our bill could be presented now it would pass.” he was highly elated, and pronounced everything a perfect success. neal, who was largely responsible for the triumph, received a ten-dollar bill. we drove to the hotel and dined that night with the dodges, who had been neighbors at riverdale. later, the usual crowd of admirers gathered around him, among them i remember the minister from costa rica, the italian minister, and others of the diplomatic service, most of whom he had known during his european residence. some one told of traveling in india and china, and how a certain hindu “god” who had exchanged autographs with mark twain during his sojourn there was familiar with only two other american names--george washington and chicago; while the king of siam had read but three english books--the bible, bryce's american commonwealth, and the innocents abroad. we were at thomas nelson page's for dinner next evening--a wonderfully beautiful home, full of art treasures. a number of guests had been invited. clemens naturally led the dinner-talk, which eventually drifted to reading. he told of mrs. clemens's embarrassment when stepniak had visited them and talked books, and asked her what her husband thought of balzac, thackeray, and the others. she had been obliged to say that he had not read them. “'how interesting!' said stepniak. but it wasn't interesting to mrs. clemens. it was torture.” he was light-spirited and gay; but recalling mrs. clemens saddened him, perhaps, for he was silent as we drove to the hotel, and after he was in bed he said, with a weary despair which even the words do not convey: “if i had been there a minute earlier, it is possible--it is possible that she might have died in my arms. sometimes i think that perhaps there was an instant--a single instant--when she realized that she was dying and that i was not there.” in new york i had once brought him a print of the superb “adams memorial,” by saint-gaudens--the bronze woman who sits in the still court in the rock creek cemetery at washington. on the morning following the page dinner at breakfast, he said: “engage a carriage and we will drive out and see the saint-gaudens bronze.” it was a bleak, dull december day, and as we walked down through the avenues of the dead there was a presence of realized sorrow that seemed exactly suited to such a visit. we entered the little inclosure of cedars where sits the dark figure which is art's supreme expression of the great human mystery of life and death. instinctively we removed our hats, and neither spoke until after we had come away. then: “what does he call it?” he asked. i did not know, though i had heard applied to it that great line of shakespeare's--“the rest is silence.” “but that figure is not silent,” he said. and later, as we were driving home: “it is in deep meditation on sorrowful things.” when we returned to new york he had the little print framed, and kept it always on his mantelpiece. cclii. theology and evolution from the washington trip dates a period of still closer association with mark twain. on the way to new york he suggested that i take up residence in his house--a privilege which i had no wish to refuse. there was room going to waste, he said, and it would be handier for the early and late billiard sessions. so, after that, most of the days and nights i was there. looking back on that time now, i see pretty vividly three quite distinct pictures. one of them, the rich, red interior of the billiard-room with the brilliant, green square in the center, on which the gay balls are rolling, and bending over it that luminous white figure in the instant of play. then there is the long, lighted drawing-room with the same figure stretched on a couch in the corner, drowsily smoking, while the rich organ tones fill the place summoning for him scenes and faces which others do not see. this was the hour between dinner and billiards--the hour which he found most restful of the day. sometimes he rose, walking the length of the parlors, his step timed to the music and his thought. of medium height, he gave the impression of being tall-his head thrown up, and like a lion's, rather large for his body. but oftener he lay among the cushions, the light flooding his white hair and dress and heightening his brilliant coloring. the third picture is that of the dinner-table--always beautifully laid, and always a shrine of wisdom when he was there. he did not always talk; but it was his habit to do so, and memory holds the clearer vision of him when, with eyes and face alive with interest, he presented some new angle of thought in fresh picturesqueness of speech. these are the pictures that have remained to me out of the days spent under his roof, and they will not fade while memory lasts. of mark twain's table philosophies it seems proper to make rather extended record. they were usually unpremeditated, and they presented the man as he was, and thought. i preserved as much of them as i could, and have verified phrase and idea, when possible, from his own notes and other unprinted writings. this dinner-table talk naturally varied in character from that of the billiard-room. the latter was likely to be anecdotal and personal; the former was more often philosophical and commentative, ranging through a great variety of subjects scientific, political, sociological, and religious. his talk was often of infinity--the forces of creation--and it was likely to be satire of the orthodox conceptions, intermingled with heresies of his own devising. once, after a period of general silence, he said: “no one who thinks can imagine the universe made by chance. it is too nicely assembled and regulated. there is, of course, a great master mind, but it cares nothing for our happiness or our unhappiness.” it was objected, by one of those present, that as the infinite mind suggested perfect harmony, sorrow and suffering were defects which that mind must feel and eventually regulate. “yes,” he said, “not a sparrow falls but he is noticing, if that is what you mean; but the human conception of it is that god is sitting up nights worrying over the individuals of this infinitesimal race.” then he recalled a fancy which i have since found among his memoranda. in this note he had written: the suns & planets that form the constellations of a billion billion solar systems & go pouring, a tossing flood of shining globes, through the viewless arteries of space are the blood-corpuscles in the veins of god; & the nations are the microbes that swarm and wiggle & brag in each, & think god can tell them apart at that distance & has nothing better to do than try. this--the entertainment of an eternity. who so poor in his ambitions as to consent to be god on those terms? blasphemy? no, it is not blasphemy. if god is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if he is as little as that, he is beneath it. “the bible,” he said, “reveals the character of its god with minute exactness. it is a portrait of a man, if one can imagine a man with evil impulses far beyond the human limit. in the old testament he is pictured as unjust, ungenerous, pitiless, and revengeful, punishing innocent children for the misdeeds of their parents; punishing unoffending people for the sins of their rulers, even descending to bloody vengeance upon harmless calves and sheep as punishment for puny trespasses committed by their proprietors. it is the most damnatory biography that ever found its way into print. its beginning is merely childish. adam is forbidden to eat the fruit of a certain tree, and gravely informed that if he disobeys he shall die. how could that impress adam? he could have no idea of what death meant. he had never seen a dead thing. he had never heard of one. if he had been told that if he ate the apples he would be turned into a meridian of longitude that threat would have meant just as much as the other one. the watery intellect that invented that notion could be depended on to go on and decree that all of adam's descendants down to the latest day should be punished for that nursery trespass in the beginning. “there is a curious poverty of invention in bibles. most of the great races each have one, and they all show this striking defect. each pretends to originality, without possessing any. each of them borrows from the other, confiscates old stage properties, puts them forth as fresh and new inspirations from on high. we borrowed the golden rule from confucius, after it had seen service for centuries, and copyrighted it without a blush. we went back to babylon for the deluge, and are as proud of it and as satisfied with it as if it had been worth the trouble; whereas we know now that noah's flood never happened, and couldn't have happened--not in that way. the flood is a favorite with bible-makers. another favorite with the founders of religions is the immaculate conception. it had been worn threadbare; but we adopted it as a new idea. it was old in egypt several thousand years before christ was born. the hindus prized it ages ago. the egyptians adopted it even for some of their kings. the romans borrowed the idea from greece. we got it straight from heaven by way of rome. we are still charmed with it.” he would continue in this strain, rising occasionally and walking about the room. once, considering the character of god--the bible god-he said: “we haven't been satisfied with god's character as it is given in the old testament; we have amended it. we have called him a god of mercy and love and morals. he didn't have a single one of those qualities in the beginning. he didn't hesitate to send the plagues on egypt, the most fiendish punishments that could be devised--not for the king, but for his innocent subjects, the women and the little children, and then only to exhibit his power just to show off--and he kept hardening pharaoh's heart so that he could send some further ingenuity of torture, new rivers of blood, and swarms of vermin and new pestilences, merely to exhibit samples of his workmanship. now and then, during the forty years' wandering, moses persuaded him to be a little more lenient with the israelites, which would show that moses was the better character of the two. that old testament god never had an inspiration of his own.” he referred to the larger conception of god, that infinite mind which had projected the universe. he said: “in some details that old bible god is probably a more correct picture than our conception of that incomparable one that created the universe and flung upon its horizonless ocean of space those giant suns, whose signal-lights are so remote that we only catch their flash when it has been a myriad of years on its way. for that supreme one is not a god of pity or mercy--not as we recognize these qualities. think of a god of mercy who would create the typhus germ, or the house-fly, or the centipede, or the rattlesnake, yet these are all his handiwork. they are a part of the infinite plan. the minister is careful to explain that all these tribulations are sent for a good purpose; but he hires a doctor to destroy the fever germ, and he kills the rattlesnake when he doesn't run from it, and he sets paper with molasses on it for the house-fly. “two things are quite certain: one is that god, the limitless god, manufactured those things, for no man could have done it. the man has never lived who could create even the humblest of god's creatures. the other conclusion is that god has no special consideration for man's welfare or comfort, or he wouldn't have created those things to disturb and destroy him. the human conception of pity and morality must be entirely unknown to that infinite god, as much unknown as the conceptions of a microbe to man, or at least as little regarded. “if god ever contemplates those qualities in man he probably admires them, as we always admire the thing which we do not possess ourselves; probably a little grain of pity in a man or a little atom of mercy would look as big to him as a constellation. he could create a constellation with a thought; but he has been all the measureless ages, and he has never acquired those qualities that we have named--pity and mercy and morality. he goes on destroying a whole island of people with an earthquake, or a whole cityful with a plague, when we punish a man in the electric chair for merely killing the poorest of our race. the human being needs to revise his ideas again about god. most of the scientists have done it already; but most of them don't dare to say so.” he pointed out that the moral idea was undergoing constant change; that what was considered justifiable in an earlier day was regarded as highly immoral now. he pointed out that even the decalogue made no reference to lying, except in the matter of bearing false witness against a neighbor. also, that there was a commandment against covetousness, though covetousness to-day was the basis of all commerce: the general conclusion being that the morals of the lord had been the morals of the beginning; the morals of the first-created man, the morals of the troglodyte, the morals of necessity; and that the morals of mankind had kept pace with necessity, whereas those of the lord had remained unchanged. it is hardly necessary to say that no one ever undertook to contradict any statements of this sort from him. in the first place, there was no desire to do so; and in the second place, any one attempting it would have cut a puny figure with his less substantial arguments and his less vigorous phrase. it was the part of wisdom and immeasurably the part of happiness to be silent and listen. on another evening he began: “the mental evolution of the species proceeds apparently by regular progress side by side with the physical development until it comes to man, then there is a long, unexplained gulf. somewhere man acquired an asset which sets him immeasurably apart from the other animals--his imagination. out of it he created for himself a conscience, and clothes, and immodesty, and a hereafter, and a soul. i wonder where he got that asset. it almost makes one agree with alfred russel wallace that the world and the universe were created just for his benefit, that he is the chief love and delight of god. wallace says that the whole universe was made to take care of and to keep steady this little floating mote in the center of it, which we call the world. it looks like a good deal of trouble for such a small result; but it's dangerous to dispute with a learned astronomer like wallace. still, i don't think we ought to decide too soon about it--not until the returns are all in. there is the geological evidence, for instance. even after the universe was created, it took a long time to prepare the world for man. some of the scientists, ciphering out the evidence furnished by geology, have arrived at the conviction that the world is prodigiously old. lord kelvin doesn't agree with them. he says that it isn't more than a hundred million years old, and he thinks the human race has inhabited it about thirty thousand years of that time. even so, it was , , years getting ready, impatient as the creator doubtless was to see man and admire him. that was because god first had to make the oyster. you can't make an oyster out of nothing, nor you can't do it in a day. you've got to start with a vast variety of invertebrates, belemnites, trilobites, jebusites, amalekites, and that sort of fry, and put them into soak in a primary sea and observe and wait what will happen. some of them will turn out a disappointment; the belemnites and the amalekites and such will be failures, and they will die out and become extinct in the course of the nineteen million years covered by the experiment; but all is not lost, for the amalekites will develop gradually into encrinites and stalactites and blatherskites, and one thing and another, as the mighty ages creep on and the periods pile their lofty crags in the primordial seas, and at last the first grand stage in the preparation of the world for man stands completed; the oyster is done. now an oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a man has, so it is probable this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen million years was a preparation for him. that would be just like an oyster, and, anyway, this one could not know at that early date that he was only an incident in a scheme, and that there was some more to the scheme yet. “the oyster being finished, the next step in the preparation of the world for man was fish. so the old silurian seas were opened up to breed the fish in. it took twenty million years to make the fish and to fossilize him so we'd have the evidence later. “then, the paleozoic limit having been reached, it was necessary to start a new age to make the reptiles. man would have to have some reptiles--not to eat, but to develop himself from. thirty million years were required for the reptiles, and out of such material as was left were made those stupendous saurians that used to prowl about the steamy world in remote ages, with their snaky heads forty feet in the air and their sixty feet of body and tail racing and thrashing after them. they are all gone now, every one of them; just a few fossil remnants of them left on this far-flung fringe of time. “it took all those years to get one of those creatures properly constructed to proceed to the next step. then came the pterodactyl, who thought all that preparation all those millions of years had been intended to produce him, for there wasn't anything too foolish for a pterodactyl to imagine. i suppose he did attract a good deal of attention, for even the least observant could see that there was the making of a bird in him, also the making of a mammal, in the course of time. you can't say too much for the picturesqueness of the pterodactyl--he was the triumph of his period. he wore wings and had teeth, and was a starchy-looking creature. but the progression went right along. “during the next thirty million years the bird arrived, and the kangaroo, and by and by the mastodon, and the giant sloth, and the irish elk, and the old silurian ass, and some people thought that man was about due. but that was a mistake, for the next thing they knew there came a great ice-sheet, and those creatures all escaped across the bering strait and wandered around in asia and died, all except a few to carry on the preparation with. there were six of those glacial periods, with two million years or so between each. they chased those poor orphans up and down the earth, from weather to weather, from tropic temperature to fifty degrees below. they never knew what kind of weather was going to turn up next, and if they settled any place the whole continent suddenly sank from under them, and they had to make a scramble for dry land. sometimes a volcano would turn itself loose just as they got located. they led that uncertain, strenuous existence for about twenty-five million years, always wondering what was going to happen next, never suspecting that it was just a preparation for man, who had to be done just so or there wouldn't be any proper or harmonious place for him when he arrived, and then at last the monkey came, and everybody could see at a glance that man wasn't far off now, and that was true enough. the monkey went on developing for close upon five million years, and then he turned into a man--to all appearances. “it does look like a lot of fuss and trouble to go through to build anything, especially a human being, and nowhere along the way is there any evidence of where he picked up that final asset--his imagination. it makes him different from the others--not any better, but certainly different. those earlier animals didn't have it, and the monkey hasn't it or he wouldn't be so cheerful.” [paine records twain's thoughts in that magnificent essay: “was the world made for man” published long after his death in the group of essays under the title “letters from the earth.” there are minor additions in the published version: “coal to fry the fish”; and the remnants of life being chased from pole to pole “without a dry rag on them,”; and the “coat of paint” on top of the bulb on top the eiffel tower representing “man's portion of this world's history.” ed.] he often held forth on the shortcomings of the human race--always a favorite subject--the incompetencies and imperfections of this final creation, in spite of, or because of, his great attribute--the imagination. once (this was in the billiard-room) i started him by saying that whatever the conditions in other planets, there seemed no reason why life should not develop in each, adapted as perfectly to prevailing conditions as man is suited to conditions here. he said: “is it your idea, then, that man is perfectly adapted to the conditions of this planet?” i began to qualify, rather weakly; but what i said did not matter. he was off on his favorite theme. “man adapted to the earth?” he said. “why, he can't sleep out-of-doors without freezing to death or getting the rheumatism or the malaria; he can't keep his nose under water over a minute without being drowned; he can't climb a tree without falling out and breaking his neck. why, he's the poorest, clumsiest excuse of all the creatures that inhabit this earth. he has got to be coddled and housed and swathed and bandaged and up holstered to be able to live at all. he is a rickety sort of a thing, anyway you take him, a regular british museum of infirmities and inferiorities. he is always under going repairs. a machine that is as unreliable as he is would have no market. the higher animals get their teeth without pain or inconvenience. the original cave man, the troglodyte, may have got his that way. but now they come through months and months of cruel torture, and at a time of life when he is least able to bear it. as soon as he gets them they must all be pulled out again, for they were of no value in the first place, not worth the loss of a night's rest. the second set will answer for a while; but he will never get a set that can be depended on until the dentist makes one. the animals are not much troubled that way. in a wild state, a natural state, they have few diseases; their main one is old age. but man starts in as a child and lives on diseases to the end as a regular diet. he has mumps, measles, whooping-cough, croup, tonsilitis, diphtheria, scarlet-fever, as a matter of course. afterward, as he goes along, his life continues to be threatened at every turn by colds, coughs, asthma, bronchitis, quinsy, consumption, yellow-fever, blindness, influenza, carbuncles, pneumonia, softening of the brain, diseases of the heart and bones, and a thousand other maladies of one sort and another. he's just a basketful of festering, pestilent corruption, provided for the support and entertainment of microbes. look at the workmanship of him in some of its particulars. what are his tonsils for? they perform no useful function; they have no value. they are but a trap for tonsilitis and quinsy. and what is the appendix for? it has no value. its sole interest is to lie and wait for stray grape-seeds and breed trouble. what is his beard for? it is just a nuisance. all nations persecute it with the razor. nature, however, always keeps him supplied with it, instead of putting it on his head, where it ought to be. you seldom see a man bald-headed on his chin, but on his head. a man wants to keep his hair. it is a graceful ornament, a comfort, the best of all protections against weather, and he prizes it above emeralds and rubies, and nature half the time puts it on so it won't stay. “man's sight and smell and hearing are all inferior. if he were suited to the conditions he could smell an enemy; he could hear him; he could see him, just as the animals can detect their enemies. the robin hears the earthworm burrowing his course under the ground; the bloodhound follows a scent that is two days old. man isn't even handsome, as compared with the birds; and as for style, look at the bengal tiger--that ideal of grace, physical perfection, and majesty. think of the lion and the tiger and the leopard, and then think of man--that poor thing!--the animal of the wig, the ear-trumpet, the glass eye, the porcelain teeth, the wooden leg, the trepanned skull, the silver wind-pipe--a creature that is mended and patched all over from top to bottom. if he can't get renewals of his bric-a-brac in the next world what will he look like? he has just that one stupendous superiority--his imagination, his intellect. it makes him supreme--the higher animals can't match him there. it's very curious.” a letter which he wrote to j. howard moore concerning his book the universal kinship was of this period, and seems to belong here. dear mr. moore, the book has furnished me several days of deep pleasure & satisfaction; it has compelled my gratitude at the same time, since it saves me the labor of stating my own long-cherished opinions & reflections & resentments by doing it lucidly & fervently & irascibly for me. there is one thing that always puzzles me: as inheritors of the mentality of our reptile ancestors we have improved the inheritance by a thousand grades; but in the matter of the morals which they left us we have gone backward as many grades. that evolution is strange & to me unaccountable & unnatural. necessarily we started equipped with their perfect and blemishless morals; now we are wholly destitute; we have no real morals, but only artificial ones --morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural & healthy instincts. yes, we are a sufficiently comical invention, we humans. sincerely yours, s. l. clemens. ccliii. an evening with helen keller i recall two pleasant social events of that winter: one a little party given at the clemenses' home on new-year's eve, with charades and story-telling and music. it was the music feature of this party that was distinctive; it was supplied by wire through an invention known as the telharmonium which, it was believed, would revolutionize musical entertainment in such places as hotels, and to some extent in private houses. the music came over the regular telephone wire, and was delivered through a series of horns or megaphones--similar to those used for phonographs--the playing being done, meanwhile, by skilled performers at the central station. just why the telharmonium has not made good its promises of popularity i do not know. clemens was filled with enthusiasm over the idea. he made a speech a little before midnight, in which he told how he had generally been enthusiastic about inventions which had turned out more or less well in about equal proportions. he did not dwell on the failures, but he told how he had been the first to use a typewriter for manuscript work; how he had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen; how he had installed the first telephone ever used in a private house, and how the audience now would have a demonstration of the first telharmonium music so employed. it was just about the stroke of midnight when he finished, and a moment later the horns began to play chimes and “auld lang syne” and “america.” the other pleasant evening referred to was a little company given in honor of helen keller. it was fascinating to watch her, and to realize with what a store of knowledge she had lighted the black silence of her physical life. to see mark twain and helen keller together was something not easily to be forgotten. when mrs. macy (who, as miss sullivan, had led her so marvelously out of the shadows) communicated his words to her with what seemed a lightning touch of the fingers her face radiated every shade of his meaning-humorous, serious, pathetic. helen visited the various objects in the room, and seemed to enjoy them more than the usual observer of these things, and certainly in greater detail. her sensitive fingers spread over articles of bric-a-brac, and the exclamations she uttered were always fitting, showing that she somehow visualized each thing in all its particulars. there was a bronze cat of handsome workmanship and happy expression, and when she had run those all--seeing fingers of hers over it she said: “it is smiling.” ccliv. billiard-room notes the billiard games went along pretty steadily that winter. my play improved, and clemens found it necessary to eliminate my odds altogether, and to change the game frequently in order to keep me in subjection. frequently there were long and apparently violent arguments over the legitimacy of some particular shot or play--arguments to us quite as enjoyable as the rest of the game. sometimes he would count a shot which was clearly out of the legal limits, and then it was always a delight to him to have a mock-serious discussion over the matter of conscience, and whether or not his conscience was in its usual state of repair. it would always end by him saying: “i don't wish even to seem to do anything which can invite suspicion. i refuse to count that shot,” or something of like nature. sometimes when i had let a questionable play pass without comment, he would watch anxiously until i had made a similar one and then insist on my scoring it to square accounts. his conscience was always repairing itself. he had experimented, a great many years before, with what was in the nature of a trick on some unsuspecting player. it consisted in turning out twelve pool-balls on the table with one cue ball, and asking his guest how many caroms he thought he could make with all those twelve balls to play on. he had learned that the average player would seldom make more than thirty-one counts, and usually, before this number was reached, he would miss through some careless play or get himself into a position where he couldn't play at all. the thing looked absurdly easy. it looked as if one could go on playing all day long, and the victim was usually eager to bet that he could make fifty or perhaps a hundred; but for more than an hour i tried it patiently, and seldom succeeded in scoring more than fifteen or twenty without missing. long after the play itself ceased to be amusing to me, he insisted on my going on and trying it some more, and he would throw himself back and roar with laughter, the tears streaming down his cheeks, to see me work and fume and fail. it was very soon after that that peter dunne (“mr. dooley”) came down for luncheon, and after several games of the usual sort, clemens quietly--as if the idea had just occurred to him--rolled out the twelve balls and asked dunne how, many caroms he thought he could make without a miss. dunne said he thought he could make a thousand. clemens quite indifferently said that he didn't believe he could make fifty. dunne offered to bet five dollars that he could, and the wager was made. dunne scored about twenty-five the first time and missed; then he insisted on betting five dollars again, and his defeats continued until clemens had twenty-five dollars of dunne's money, and dunne was sweating and swearing, and mark twain rocking with delight. dunne went away still unsatisfied, promising that he would come back and try it again. perhaps he practised in his absence, for when he returned he had learned something. he won his twenty-five dollars back, and i think something more added. mark twain was still ahead, for dunne furnished him with a good five hundred dollars' worth of amusement. clemens never cared to talk and never wished to be talked to when the game was actually in progress. if there was anything to be said on either side, he would stop and rest his cue on the floor, or sit down on the couch, until the matter was concluded. such interruptions happened pretty frequently, and many of the bits of personal comment and incident scattered along through this work are the result of those brief rests. some shot, or situation, or word would strike back through the past and awaken a note long silent, and i generally kept a pad and pencil on the window-sill with the score-sheet, and later, during his play, i would scrawl some reminder that would be precious by and by. on one of these i find a memorandum of what he called his three recurrent dreams. all of us have such things, but his seem worth remembering. “there is never a month passes,” he said, “that i do not dream of being in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a living. it is never a pleasant dream, either. i love to think about those days; but there's always something sickening about the thought that i have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream i am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell whether it is selma bluff, or hat island, or only a black wall of night. “another dream that i have of that kind is being compelled to go back to the lecture platform. i hate that dream worse than the other. in it i am always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to be funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that i am only making silly jokes. then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they commence to get up and leave. that dream always ends by my standing there in the semidarkness talking to an empty house. “my other dream is of being at a brilliant gathering in my night-garments. people don't seem to notice me there at first, and then pretty soon somebody points me out, and they all begin to look at me suspiciously, and i can see that they are wondering who i am and why i am there in that costume. then it occurs to me that i can fix it by making myself known. i take hold of some man and whisper to him, 'i am mark twain'; but that does not improve it, for immediately i can hear him whispering to the others, 'he says he is mark twain,' and they all look at me a good deal more suspiciously than before, and i can see that they don't believe it, and that it was a mistake to make that confession. sometimes, in that dream, i am dressed like a tramp instead of being in my night-clothes; but it all ends about the same--they go away and leave me standing there, ashamed. i generally enjoy my dreams, but not those three, and they are the ones i have oftenest.” quite often some curious episode of the world's history would flash upon him--something amusing, or coarse, or tragic, and he would bring the game to a standstill and recount it with wonderful accuracy as to date and circumstance. he had a natural passion for historic events and a gift for mentally fixing them, but his memory in other ways was seldom reliable. he was likely to forget the names even of those he knew best and saw oftenest, and the small details of life seldom registered at all. he had his breakfast served in his room, and once, on a slip of paper, he wrote, for his own reminder: the accuracy of your forgetfulness is absolute--it seems never to fail. i prepare to pour my coffee so it can cool while i shave--and i always forget to pour it. yet, very curiously, he would sometimes single out a minute detail, something every one else had overlooked, and days or even weeks afterward would recall it vividly, and not always at an opportune moment. perhaps this also was a part of his old pilot-training. once clara clemens remarked: “it always amazes me the things that father does and does not remember. some little trifle that nobody else would notice, and you are hoping that he didn't, will suddenly come back to him just when you least expect it or care for it.” my note-book contains the entry: february , . he said to-day: “a blindfolded chess-player can remember every play and discuss the game afterward, while we can't remember from one shot to the next.” i mentioned his old pilot-memory as an example of what he could do if he wished. “yes,” he answered, “those are special memories; a pilot will tell you the number of feet in every crossing at any time, but he can't remember what he had for breakfast.” “how long did you keep your pilot-memory?” i asked. “not long; it faded out right away, but the training served me, for when i went to report on a paper a year or two later i never had to make any notes.” “i suppose you still remember some of the river?” “not much. hat island, helena and here and there a place; but that is about all.” cclv. further personalities like every person living, mark twain had some peculiar and petty economies. such things in great men are noticeable. he lived extravagantly. his household expenses at the time amounted to more than fifty dollars a day. in the matter of food, the choicest, and most expensive the market could furnish was always served in lavish abundance. he had the best and highest-priced servants, ample as to number. his clothes he bought generously; he gave without stint to his children; his gratuities were always liberal. he never questioned pecuniary outgoes--seldom worried as to the state of his bank-account so long as there was plenty. he smoked cheap cigars because he preferred their flavor. yet he had his economies. i have seen him, before leaving a room, go around and carefully lower the gas-jets, to provide against that waste. i have known him to examine into the cost of a cab, and object to an apparent overcharge of a few cents. it seemed that his idea of economy might be expressed in these words: he abhorred extortion and visible waste. furthermore, he had exact ideas as to ownership. one evening, while we were playing billiards, i noticed a five-cent piece on the floor. i picked it up, saying: “here is five cents; i don't know whose it is.” he regarded the coin rather seriously, i thought, and said: “i don't know, either.” i laid it on the top of the book-shelves which ran around the room. the play went on, and i forgot the circumstance. when the game ended that night i went into his room with him, as usual, for a good-night word. as he took his change and keys from the pocket of his trousers, he looked the assortment over and said: “that five-cent piece you found was mine.” i brought it to him at once, and he took it solemnly, laid it with the rest of his change, and neither of us referred to it again. it may have been one of his jokes, but i think it more likely that he remembered having had a five-cent piece, probably reserved for car fare, and that it was missing. more than once, in washington, he had said: “draw plenty of money for incidental expenses. don't bother to keep account of them.” so it was not miserliness; it was just a peculiarity, a curious attention to a trifling detail. he had a fondness for riding on the then newly completed subway, which he called the underground. sometimes he would say: “i'll pay your fare on the underground if you want to take a ride with me.” and he always insisted on paying the fare, and once when i rode far up-town with him to a place where he was going to luncheon, and had taken him to the door, he turned and said, gravely: “here is five cents to pay your way home.” and i took it in the same spirit in which it had been offered. it was probably this trait which caused some one occasionally to claim that mark twain was close in money matters. perhaps there may have been times in his life when he was parsimonious; but, if so, i must believe that it was when he was sorely pressed and exercising the natural instinct of self-preservation. he wished to receive the full value (who does not?) of his labors and properties. he took a childish delight in piling up money; but it became greed only when he believed some one with whom he had dealings was trying to get an unfair division of profits. then it became something besides greed. it became an indignation that amounted to malevolence. i was concerned in a number of dealings with mark twain, and at a period in his life when human traits are supposed to become exaggerated, which is to say old age, and if he had any natural tendency to be unfair, or small, or greedy in his money dealings i think i should have seen it. personally, i found him liberal to excess, and i never observed in him anything less than generosity to those who were fair with him. once that winter, when a letter came from steve gillis saying that he was an invalid now, and would have plenty of time to read sam's books if he owned them, clemens ordered an expensive set from his publishers, and did what meant to him even more than the cost in money--he autographed each of those twenty-five volumes. then he sent them, charges paid, to that far californian retreat. it was hardly the act of a stingy man. he had the human fondness for a compliment when it was genuine and from an authoritative source, and i remember how pleased he was that winter with prof. william lyon phelps's widely published opinion, which ranked mark twain as the greatest american novelist, and declared that his fame would outlive any american of his time. phelps had placed him above holmes, howells, james, and even hawthorne. he had declared him to be more american than any of these--more american even than whitman. professor phelps's position in yale college gave this opinion a certain official weight; but i think the fact of phelps himself being a writer of great force, with an american freshness of style, gave it a still greater value. among the pleasant things that winter was a meeting with eugene f. ware, of kansas, with whose penname--“ironquill”--clemens had long been familiar. ware was a breezy western genius of the finest type. if he had abandoned law for poetry, there is no telling how far his fame might have reached. there was in his work that same spirit of americanism and humor and humanity that is found in mark twain's writings, and he had the added faculty of rhyme and rhythm, which would have set him in a place apart. i had known ware personally during a period of western residence, and later, when he was commissioner of pensions under roosevelt. i usually saw him when he came to new york, and it was a great pleasure now to bring together the two men whose work i so admired. they met at a small private luncheon at the players, and peter dunne was there, and robert collier, and it was such an afternoon as howells has told of when he and aldrich and bret harte and those others talked until the day faded into twilight, and twilight deepened into evening. clemens had put in most of the day before reading ware's book of poems, 'the rhymes of ironquill', and had declared his work to rank with the very greatest of american poetry--i think he called it the most truly american in flavor. i remember that at the luncheon he noted ware's big, splendid physique and his western liberties of syntax with a curious intentness. i believe he regarded him as being nearer his own type in mind and expression than any one he had met before. among ware's poems he had been especially impressed with the “fables,” and with some verses entitled “whist,” which, though rather more optimistic, conformed to his own philosophy. they have a distinctly “western” feeling. whist hour after hour the cards were fairly shuffled, and fairly dealt, and still i got no hand; the morning came; but i, with mind unruffled, did simply say, “i do not understand.” life is a game of whist. from unseen sources the cards are shuffled, and the hands are dealt. blind are our efforts to control the forces that, though unseen, are no less strongly felt. i do not like the way the cards are shuffled, but still i like the game and want to play; and through the long, long night will i, unruffled, play what i get, until the break of day. volume iii, part : - cclvi. honors from oxford clemens made a brief trip to bermuda during the winter, taking twichell along; their first return to the island since the trip when they had promised to come back so soon-nearly thirty years before. they had been comparatively young men then. they were old now, but they found the green island as fresh and full of bloom as ever. they did not find their old landlady; they could not even remember her name at first, and then twichell recalled that it was the same as an author of certain schoolbooks in his youth, and clemens promptly said, “kirkham's grammar.” kirkham was truly the name, and they went to find her; but she was dead, and the daughter, who had been a young girl in that earlier time, reigned in her stead and entertained the successors of her mother's guests. they walked and drove about the island, and it was like taking up again a long-discontinued book and reading another chapter of the same tale. it gave mark twain a fresh interest in bermuda, one which he did not allow to fade again. later in the year (march, ) i also made a journey; it having been agreed that i should take a trip to the mississippi and to the pacific coast to see those old friends of mark twain's who were so rapidly passing away. john briggs was still alive, and other hannibal schoolmates; also joe goodman and steve gillis, and a few more of the early pioneers--all eminently worth seeing in the matter of such work as i had in hand. the billiard games would be interrupted; but whatever reluctance to the plan there may have been on that account was put aside in view of prospective benefits. clemens, in fact, seemed to derive joy from the thought that he was commissioning a kind of personal emissary to his old comrades, and provided me with a letter of credentials. it was a long, successful trip that i made, and it was undertaken none too soon. john briggs, a gentle-hearted man, was already entering the valley of the shadow as he talked to me by his fire one memorable afternoon, and reviewed the pranks of those days along the river and in the cave and on holliday's hill. i think it was six weeks later that he died; and there were others of that scattering procession who did not reach the end of the year. joe goodman, still full of vigor (in ), journeyed with me to the green and dreamy solitudes of jackass hill to see steve and jim gillis, and that was an unforgetable sunday when steve gillis, an invalid, but with the fire still in his eyes and speech, sat up on his couch in his little cabin in that arcadian stillness and told old tales and adventures. when i left he said: “tell sam i'm going to die pretty soon, but that i love him; that i've loved him all my life, and i'll love him till i die. this is the last word i'll ever send to him.” jim gillis, down in sonora, was already lying at the point of death, and so for him the visit was too late, though he was able to receive a message from his ancient mining partner, and to send back a parting word. i returned by way of new orleans and the mississippi river, for i wished to follow that abandoned water highway, and to visit its presiding genius, horace bixby,--[he died august , , at the age of ]--still alive and in service as pilot of the government snagboat, his headquarters at st. louis. coming up the river on one of the old passenger steam boats that still exist, i noticed in a paper which came aboard that mark twain was to receive from oxford university the literary doctor's degree. there had been no hint of this when i came away, and it seemed rather too sudden and too good to be true. that the little barefoot lad that had played along the river-banks at hannibal, and received such meager advantages in the way of schooling--whose highest ambition had been to pilot such a craft as this one--was about to be crowned by the world's greatest institution of learning, to receive the highest recognition for achievement in the world of letters, was a thing which would not be likely to happen outside of a fairy tale. returning to new york, i ran out to tuxedo, where he had taken a home for the summer (for it was already may), and walking along the shaded paths of that beautiful suburban park, he told me what he knew of the oxford matter. moberly bell, of the london times, had been over in april, and soon after his return to england there had come word of the proposed honor. clemens privately and openly (to bell) attributed it largely to his influence. he wrote to him: dear mr. bell,--your hand is in it & you have my best thanks. although i wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of the ship that carried me i am glad to do it for an oxford degree. i shall plan to sail for england a shade before the middle of june, so that i can have a few days in london before the th. a day or two later, when the time for sailing had been arranged, he overtook his letter with a cable: i perceive your hand in it. you have my best thanks. sail on minneapolis june th. due in southampton ten days later. clemens said that his first word of the matter had been a newspaper cablegram, and that he had been doubtful concerning it until a cablegram to himself had confirmed it. “i never expected to cross the water again,” he said; “but i would be willing to journey to mars for that oxford degree.” he put the matter aside then, and fell to talking of jim gillis and the others i had visited, dwelling especially on gillis's astonishing faculty for improvising romances, recalling how he had stood with his back to the fire weaving his endless, grotesque yarns, with no other guide than his fancy. it was a long, happy walk we had, though rather a sad one in its memories; and he seemed that day, in a sense, to close the gate of those early scenes behind him, for he seldom referred to them afterward. he was back at fifth avenue presently, arranging for his voyage. meantime, cable invitations of every sort were pouring in, from this and that society and dignitary; invitations to dinners and ceremonials, and what not, and it was clear enough that his english sojourn was to be a busy one. he had hoped to avoid this, and began by declining all but two invitations--a dinner-party given by ambassador whitelaw reid and a luncheon proposed by the “pilgrims.” but it became clear that this would not do. england was not going to confer its greatest collegiate honor without being permitted to pay its wider and more popular tribute. clemens engaged a special secretary for the trip--mr. ralph w. ashcroft, a young englishman familiar with london life. they sailed on the th of june, by a curious coincidence exactly forty years from the day he had sailed on the quaker city to win his great fame. i went with him to the ship. his first elation had passed by this time, and he seemed a little sad, remembering, i think, the wife who would have enjoyed this honor with him but could not share it now. cclvii. a true english welcome mark twain's trip across the atlantic would seem to have been a pleasant one. the minneapolis is a fine, big ship, and there was plenty of company. prof. archibald henderson, bernard shaw's biographer, was aboard;--[professor henderson has since then published a volume on mark twain-an interesting commentary on his writings--mainly from the sociological point of view.]--also president patton, of the princeton theological seminary; a well-known cartoonist, richards, and some very attractive young people--school-girls in particular, such as all through his life had appealed to mark twain. indeed, in his later life they made a stronger appeal than ever. the years had robbed him of his own little flock, and always he was trying to replace them. once he said: “during those years after my wife's death i was washing about on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making in high and holy causes, and these things furnished me intellectual cheer, and entertainment; but they got at my heart for an evening only, then left it dry and dusty. i had reached the grandfather stage of life without grandchildren, so i began to adopt some.” he adopted several on that journey to england and on the return voyage, and he kept on adopting others during the rest of his life. these companionships became one of the happiest aspects of his final days, as we shall see by and by. there were entertainments on the ship, one of them given for the benefit of the seamen's orphanage. one of his adopted granddaughters--“charley” he called her--played a violin solo and clemens made a speech. later his autographs were sold at auction. dr. patton was auctioneer, and one autographed postal card brought twenty-five dollars, which is perhaps the record price for a single mark twain signature. he wore his white suit on this occasion, and in the course of his speech referred to it. he told first of the many defects in his behavior, and how members of his household had always tried to keep him straight. the children, he said, had fallen into the habit of calling it “dusting papa off.” then he went on: when my daughter came to see me off last saturday at the boat she slipped a note in my hand and said, “read it when you get aboard the ship.” i didn't think of it again until day before yesterday, and it was a “dusting off.” and if i carry out all the instructions that i got there i shall be more celebrated in england for my behavior than for anything else. i got instructions how to act on every occasion. she underscored “now, don't you wear white clothes on ship or on shore until you get back,” and i intended to obey. i have been used to obeying my family all my life, but i wore the white clothes to-night because the trunk that has the dark clothes in it is in the cellar. i am not apologizing for the white clothes; i am only apologizing to my daughter for not obeying her. he received a great welcome when the ship arrived at tilbury. a throng of rapid-fire reporters and photographers immediately surrounded him, and when he left the ship the stevedores gave him a round of cheers. it was the beginning of that almost unheard-of demonstration of affection and honor which never for a moment ceased, but augmented from day to day during the four weeks of his english sojourn. in a dictation following his return, mark twain said: who began it? the very people of all people in the world whom i would have chosen: a hundred men of my own class--grimy sons of labor, the real builders of empires and civilizations, the stevedores! they stood in a body on the dock and charged their masculine lungs, and gave me a welcome which went to the marrow of me. j. y. w. macalister was at the st. pancras railway station to meet him, and among others on the platform was bernard shaw, who had come down to meet professor henderson. clemens and shaw were presented, and met eagerly, for each greatly admired the other. a throng gathered. mark twain was extricated at last, and hurried away to his apartments at brown's hotel, “a placid, subdued, homelike, old-fashioned english inn,” he called it, “well known to me years ago, a blessed retreat of a sort now rare in england, and becoming rarer every year.” but brown's was not placid and subdued during his stay. the london newspapers declared that mark twain's arrival had turned brown's not only into a royal court, but a post-office--that the procession of visitors and the bundles of mail fully warranted this statement. it was, in fact, an experience which surpassed in general magnitude and magnificence anything he had hitherto known. his former london visits, beginning with that of , had been distinguished by high attentions, but all of them combined could not equal this. when england decides to get up an ovation, her people are not to be outdone even by the lavish americans. an assistant secretary had to be engaged immediately, and it sometimes required from sixteen to twenty hours a day for two skilled and busy men to receive callers and reduce the pile of correspondence. a pile of invitations had already accumulated, and others flowed in. lady stanley, widow of henry m. stanley, wrote: you know i want to see you and join right hand to right hand. i must see your dear face again.... you will have no peace, rest, or leisure during your stay in london, and you will end by hating human beings. let me come before you feel that way. mary cholmondeley, the author of red pottage, niece of that lovable reginald cholmondeley, and herself an old friend, sent greetings and urgent invitations. archdeacon wilberforce wrote: i have just been preaching about your indictment of that scoundrel king of the belgians and telling my people to buy the book. i am only a humble item among the very many who offer you a cordial welcome in england, but we long to see you again, and i should like to change hats with you again. do you remember? the athenaeum, the garrick, and a dozen other london clubs had anticipated his arrival with cards of honorary membership for the period of his stay. every leading photographer had put in a claim for sittings. it was such a reception as charles dickens had received in america in , and again in . a london paper likened it to voltaire's return to paris in , when france went mad over him. there is simply no limit to english affection and, hospitality once aroused. clemens wrote: surely such weeks as this must be very rare in this world: i had seen nothing like them before; i shall see nothing approaching them again! sir thomas lipton and bram stoker, old friends, were among the first to present themselves, and there was no break in the line of callers. clemens's resolutions for secluding himself were swept away. on the very next morning following his arrival he breakfasted with j. henniker heaton, father of international penny postage, at the bath club, just across dover street from brown's. he lunched at the ritz with marjorie bowen and miss bisland. in the afternoon he sat for photographs at barnett's, and made one or two calls. he could no more resist these things than a debutante in her first season. he was breakfasting again with heaton next morning; lunching with “toby, m.p.,” and mrs. lucy; and having tea with lady stanley in the afternoon, and being elaborately dined next day at dorchester house by ambassador and mrs. reid. these were all old and tried friends. he was not a stranger among them, he said; he was at home. alfred austin, conan doyle, anthony hope, alma tadema, e. a. abbey, edmund goss, george smalley, sir norman lockyer, henry w. lucy, sidney brooks, and bram stoker were among those at dorchester house--all old comrades, as were many of the other guests. “i knew fully half of those present,” he said afterward. mark twain's bursting upon london society naturally was made the most of by the london papers, and all his movements were tabulated and elaborated, and when there was any opportunity for humor in the situation it was not left unimproved. the celebrated ascot racing-cup was stolen just at the time of his arrival, and the papers suggestively mingled their head-lines, “mark twain arrives: ascot cup stolen,” and kept the joke going in one form or another. certain state jewels and other regalia also disappeared during his stay, and the news of these burglaries was reported in suspicious juxtaposition with the news of mark twain's doings. english reporters adopted american habits for the occasion, and invented or embellished when the demand for a new sensation was urgent. once, when following the custom of the place, he descended the hotel elevator in a perfectly proper and heavy brown bath robe, and stepped across narrow dover street to the bath club, the papers flamed next day with the story that mark twain had wandered about the lobby of brown's and promenaded dover street in a sky-blue bath robe attracting wide attention. clara clemens, across the ocean, was naturally a trifle disturbed by such reports, and cabled this delicate “dusting off”: “much worried. remember proprieties.” to which he answered: “they all pattern after me,” a reply to the last degree characteristic. it was on the fourth day after his arrival, june d, that he attended the king's garden-party at windsor castle. there were eighty-five hundred guests at the king's party, and if we may judge from the london newspapers, mark twain was quite as much a figure in that great throng as any member of the royal family. his presentation to the king and the queen is set down as an especially notable incident, and their conversation is quite fully given. clemens himself reported: his majesty was very courteous. in the course of the conversation i reminded him of an episode of fifteen years ago, when i had the honor to walk a mile with him when he was taking the waters at homburg, in germany. i said that i had often told about that episode, and that whenever i was the historian i made good history of it and it was worth listening to, but that it had found its way into print once or twice in unauthentic ways and was badly damaged thereby. i said i should like to go on repeating this history, but that i should be quite fair and reasonably honest, and while i should probably never tell it twice in the same way i should at least never allow it to deteriorate in my hands. his majesty intimated his willingness that i should continue to disseminate that piece of history; and he added a compliment, saying that he knew good and sound history would not suffer at my hands, and that if this good and sound history needed any improvement beyond the facts he would trust me to furnish that improvement. i think it is not an exaggeration to say that the queen looked as young and beautiful as she did thirty-five years ago when i saw her first. i did not say this to her, because i learned long ago never to say the obvious thing, but leave the obvious thing to commonplace and inexperienced people to say. that she still looked to me as young and beautiful as she did thirty-five years ago is good evidence that ten thousand people have already noticed this and have mentioned it to her. i could have said it and spoken the truth, but i was too wise for that. i kept the remark unuttered and saved her majesty the vexation of hearing it the ten-thousand-and-oneth time. all that report about my proposal to buy windsor castle and its grounds was a false rumor. i started it myself. one newspaper said i patted his majesty on the shoulder--an impertinence of which i was not guilty; i was reared in the most exclusive circles of missouri and i know how to behave. the king rested his hand upon my arm a moment or two while we were chatting, but he did it of his own accord. the newspaper which said i talked with her majesty with my hat on spoke the truth, but my reasons for doing it were good and sufficient--in fact unassailable. rain was threatening, the temperature had cooled, and the queen said, “please put your hat on, mr. clemens.” i begged her pardon and excused myself from doing it. after a moment or two she said, “mr. clemens, put your hat on”--with a slight emphasis on the word “on” “i can't allow you to catch cold here.” when a beautiful queen commands it is a pleasure to obey, and this time i obeyed--but i had already disobeyed once, which is more than a subject would have felt justified in doing; and so it is true, as charged; i did talk with the queen of england with my hat on, but it wasn't fair in the newspaper man to charge it upon me as an impoliteness, since there were reasons for it which he could not know of. nearly all the members of the british royal family were there, and there were foreign visitors which included the king of siam and a party of india princes in their gorgeous court costumes, which clemens admired openly and said he would like to wear himself. the english papers spoke of it as one of the largest and most distinguished parties ever given at windsor. clemens attended it in company with mr. and mrs. j. henniker heaton, and when it was over sir thomas lipton joined them and motored with them back to brown's. he was at archdeacon wilberforce's next day, where a curious circumstance developed. when he arrived wilberforce said to him, in an undertone: “come into my library. i have something to show you.” in the library clemens was presented to a mr. pole, a plain-looking man, suggesting in dress and appearance the english tradesman. wilberforce said: “mr. pole, show to mr. clemens what you have brought here.” mr. pole unrolled a long strip of white linen and brought to view at last a curious, saucer-looking vessel of silver, very ancient in appearance, and cunningly overlaid with green glass. the archdeacon took it and handed it to clemens as some precious jewel. clemens said: “what is it?” wilberforce impressively answered: “it is the holy grail.” clemens naturally started with surprise. “you may well start,” said wilberforce; “but it's the truth. that is the holy grail.” then he gave this explanation: mr. pole, a grain merchant of bristol, had developed some sort of clairvoyant power, or at all events he had dreamed several times with great vividness the location of the true grail. another dreamer, a dr. goodchild, of bath, was mixed up in the matter, and between them this peculiar vessel, which was not a cup, or a goblet, or any of the traditional things, had been discovered. mr. pole seemed a man of integrity, and it was clear that the churchman believed the discovery to be genuine and authentic. of course there could be no positive proof. it was a thing that must be taken on trust. that the vessel itself was wholly different from anything that the generations had conceived, and was apparently of very ancient make, was opposed to the natural suggestion of fraud. clemens, to whom the whole idea of the holy grail was simply a poetic legend and myth, had the feeling that he had suddenly been transmigrated, like his own connecticut yankee, back into the arthurian days; but he made no question, suggested no doubt. whatever it was, it was to them the materialization of a symbol of faith which ranked only second to the cross itself, and he handled it reverently and felt the honor of having been one of the first permitted to see the relic. in a subsequent dictation he said: i am glad i have lived to see that half-hour--that astonishing half- hour. in its way it stands alone in my life's experience. in the belief of two persons present this was the very vessel which was brought by night and secretly delivered to nicodemus, nearly nineteen centuries ago, after the creator of the universe had delivered up his life on the cross for the redemption of the human race; the very cup which the stainless sir galahad had sought with knightly devotion in far fields of peril and adventure in arthur's time, fourteen hundred years ago; the same cup which princely knights of other bygone ages had laid down their lives in long and patient efforts to find, and had passed from life disappointed--and here it was at last, dug up by a grain-broker at no cost of blood or travel, and apparently no purity required of him above the average purity of the twentieth-century dealer in cereal futures; not even a stately name required--no sir galahad, no sir bors de ganis, no sir lancelot of the lake--nothing but a mere mr. pole.--[from the new york sun somewhat later: “mr. pole communicated the discovery to a dignitary of the church of england, who summoned a number of eminent persons, including psychologists, to see and discuss it. forty attended, including some peers with ecclesiastical interests, ambassador whitelaw reid, professor crookas, and ministers of various religious bodies, including the rev. r. j. campbell. they heard mr. pole's story with deep attention, but he could not prove the genuineness of the relic.”] clemens saw mr. and mrs. rogers at claridge's hotel that evening; lunched with his old friends sir norman and lady lockyer next day; took tea with t. p. o'connor at the house of commons, and on the day following, which was june a th, he was the guest of honor at one of the most elaborate occasions of his visit--a luncheon given by the pilgrims at the savoy hotel. it would be impossible to set down here a report of the doings, or even a list of the guests, of that gathering. the pilgrims is a club with branches on both sides of the ocean, and mark twain, on either side, was a favorite associate. at this luncheon the picture on the bill of fare represented him as a robed pilgrim, with a great pen for his staff, turning his back on the mississippi river and being led along his literary way by a huge jumping frog, to which he is attached by a string. on a guest-card was printed: pilot of many pilgrims since the shout “mark twain!”--that serves you for a deathless sign --on mississippi's waterway rang out over the plummet's line-- still where the countless ripples laugh above the blue of halcyon seas long may you keep your course unbroken, buoyed upon a love ten thousand fathoms deep! --o. s. [owen seaman]. augustine birrell made the speech of introduction, closing with this paragraph: mark twain is a man whom englishmen and americans do well to honor. he is a true consolidator of nations. his delightful humor is of the kind which dissipates and destroys national prejudices. his truth and his honor--his love of truth and his love of honor --overflow all boundaries. he has made the world better by his presence, and we rejoice to see him here. long may he live to reap a plentiful harvest of hearty honest human affection. the toast was drunk standing. then clemens rose and made a speech which delighted all england. in his introduction mr. birrell had happened to say, “how i came here i will not ask!” clemens remembered this, and looking down into mr. birrell's wine-glass, which was apparently unused, he said: “mr. birrell doesn't know how he got here. but he will be able to get away all right--he has not drunk anything since he came.” he told stories about howells and twichell, and how darwin had gone to sleep reading his books, and then he came down to personal things and company, and told them how, on the day of his arrival, he had been shocked to read on a great placard, “mark twain arrives: ascot cup stolen.” no doubt many a person was misled by those sentences joined together in that unkind way. i have no doubt my character has suffered from it. i suppose i ought to defend my character, but how can i defend it? i can say here and now that anybody can see by my face that i am sincere--that i speak the truth, and that i have never seen that cup. i have not got the cup, i did not have a chance to get it. i have always had a good character in that way. i have hardly ever stolen anything, and if i did steal anything i had discretion enough to know about the value of it first. i do not steal things that are likely to get myself into trouble. i do not think any of us do that. i know we all take things--that is to be expected; but really i have never taken anything, certainly in england, that amounts to any great thing. i do confess that when i was here seven years ago i stole a hat--but that did not amount to anything. it was not a good hat it was only a clergyman's hat, anyway. i was at a luncheon-party and archdeacon wilberforce was there also. i dare say he is archdeacon now--he was a canon then--and he was serving in the westminster battery, if that is the proper term. i do not know, as you mix military and ecclesiastical things together so much. he recounted the incident of the exchanged hats; then he spoke of graver things. he closed: i cannot always be cheerful, and i cannot always be chaffing. i must sometimes lay the cap and bells aside and recognize that i am of the human race. i have my cares and griefs, and i therefore noticed what mr. birrell said--i was so glad to hear him say it --something that was in the nature of these verses here at the top of the program: he lit our life with shafts of sun and vanquished pain. thus two great nations stand as one in honoring twain. i am very glad to have those verses. i am very glad and very grateful for what mr. birrell said in that connection. i have received since i have been here, in this one week, hundreds of letters from all conditions of people in england, men, women, and children, and there is compliment, praise, and, above all, and better than all, there is in them a note of affection. praise is well, compliment is well, but affection--that is the last and final and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement, and i am very grateful to have that reward. all these letters make me feel that here in england, as in america, when i stand under the english or the american flag i am not a stranger, i am not an alien, but at home. cclviii. doctor of literature, oxford he left, immediately following the pilgrim luncheon, with hon. robert p. porter, of the london times, for oxford, to remain his guest there during the various ceremonies. the encenia--the ceremony of conferring the degrees--occurred at the sheldonian theater the following morning, june , . it was a memorable affair. among those who were to receive degrees that morning besides samuel clemens were: prince arthur of connaught; prime minister campbell-bannerman; whitelaw reid; rudyard kipling; sidney lee; sidney colvin; lord archbishop of armagh, primate of ireland; sir norman lockyer; auguste rodin, the sculptor; saint-saens, and gen. william booth, of the salvation army-something more than thirty, in all, of the world's distinguished citizens. the candidates assembled at magdalen college, and led by lord curzon, the chancellor, and clad in their academic plumage, filed in radiant procession to the sheldonian theater, a group of men such as the world seldom sees collected together. the london standard said of it: so brilliant and so interesting was the list of those who had been selected by oxford university on convocation to receive degrees, 'honoris causa', in this first year of lord curzon's chancellorship, that it is small wonder that the sheldonian theater was besieged today at an early hour. shortly after o'clock the organ started playing the strains of “god save the king,” and at once a great volume of sound arose as the anthem was taken up by the undergraduates and the rest of the assemblage. every one stood up as, headed by the mace of office, the procession slowly filed into the theater, under the leadership of lord curzon, in all the glory of his robes of office, the long black gown heavily embroidered with gold, the gold-tasseled mortar- board, and the medals on his breast forming an admirable setting, thoroughly in keeping with the dignity and bearing of the late viceroy of india. following him came the members of convocation, a goodly number consisting of doctors of divinity, whose robes of scarlet and black enhanced the brilliance of the scene. robes of salmon and scarlet-which proclaim the wearer to be a doctor of civil law--were also seen in numbers, while here and there was a gown of gray and scarlet, emblematic of the doctorate of science or of letters. the encenia is an impressive occasion; but it is not a silent one. there is a splendid dignity about it; but there goes with it all a sort of greek chorus of hilarity, the time-honored prerogative of the oxford undergraduate, who insists on having his joke and his merriment at the expense of those honored guests. the degrees of doctor of law were conferred first. prince arthur was treated with proper dignity by the gallery; but when whitelaw reid stepped forth a voice shouted, “where's your star-spangled banner?” and when england's prime minister-campbell-bannerman--came forward some one shouted, “what about the house of lords?” and so they kept it up, cheering and chaffing, until general booth was introduced as the “passionate advocate of the dregs of the people, leader of the submerged tenth,” and “general of the salvation army,” when the place broke into a perfect storm of applause, a storm that a few minutes later became, according to the daily news, “a veritable cyclone,” for mark twain, clad in his robe of scarlet and gray, had been summoned forward to receive the highest academic honors which the world has to give. the undergraduates went wild then. there was such a mingling of yells and calls and questions, such as, “have you brought the jumping frog with you?” “where is the ascot cup?” “where are the rest of the innocents?” that it seemed as if it would not be possible to present him at all; but, finally, chancellor curzon addressed him (in latin), “most amiable and charming sir, you shake the sides of the whole world with your merriment,” and the great degree was conferred. if only tom sawyer could have seen him then! if only olivia clemens could have sat among those who gave him welcome! but life is not like that. there is always an incompleteness somewhere, and the shadow across the path. rudyard kipling followed--another supreme favorite, who was hailed with the chorus, “for he's a jolly good fellow,” and then came saint-satins. the prize poems and essays followed, and then the procession of newly created doctors left the theater with lord curzon at their head. so it was all over-that for which, as he said, he would have made the journey to mars. the world had nothing more to give him now except that which he had already long possessed-its honor and its love. the newly made doctors were to be the guests of lord curzon at all souls college for luncheon. as they left the theater (according to sidney lee): the people in the streets singled out mark twain, formed a vast and cheering body-guard around him and escorted him to the college gates. but before and after the lunch it was mark twain again whom everybody seemed most of all to want to meet. the maharajah of bikanir, for instance, finding himself seated at lunch next to mrs. riggs (kate douglas wiggin), and hearing that she knew mark twain, asked her to present him a ceremony duly performed later on the quadrangle. at the garden-party given the same afternoon in the beautiful grounds of st. john's, where the indefatigable mark put in an appearance, it was just the same--every one pressed forward for an exchange of greetings and a hand-shake. on the following day, when the oxford pageant took place, it was even more so. “mark twain's pageant,” it was called by one of the papers.--[there was a dinner that evening at one of the colleges where, through mistaken information, clemens wore black evening dress when he should have worn his scarlet gown. “when i arrived,” he said, “the place was just a conflagration--a kind of human prairie-fire. i looked as out of place as a presbyterian in hell.”] clemens remained the guest of robert porter, whose house was besieged with those desiring a glimpse of their new doctor of letters. if he went on the streets he was instantly recognized by some newsboy or cabman or butcher-boy, and the word ran along like a cry of fire, while the crowds assembled. at a luncheon which the porters gave him the proprietor of the catering establishment garbed himself as a waiter in order to have the distinction of serving mark twain, and declared it to have been the greatest moment of his life. this gentleman--for he was no less than that--was a man well-read, and his tribute was not inspired by mere snobbery. clemens, learning of the situation, later withdrew from the drawing-room for a talk with him. “i found,” he said, “that he knew about ten or fifteen times as much about my books as i knew about them myself.” mark twain viewed the oxford pageant from a box with rudyard kipling and lord curzon, and as they sat there some one passed up a folded slip of paper, on the outside of which was written, “not true.” opening it, they read: east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet, --a quotation from kipling. they saw the panorama of history file by, a wonderful spectacle which made oxford a veritable dream of the middle ages. the lanes and streets and meadows were thronged with such costumes as oxford had seen in its long history. history was realized in a manner which no one could appreciate more fully than mark twain. “i was particularly anxious to see this pageant,” he said, “so that i could get ideas for my funeral procession, which i am planning on a large scale.” he was not disappointed; it was a realization to him of all the gorgeous spectacles that his soul had dreamed from youth up. he easily recognized the great characters of history as they passed by, and he was recognized by them in turn; for they waved to him and bowed and sometimes called his name, and when he went down out of his box, by and by, henry viii. shook hands with him, a monarch he had always detested, though he was full of friendship for him now; and charles i. took off his broad, velvet-plumed hat when they met, and henry ii. and rosamond and queen elizabeth all saluted him--ghosts of the dead centuries. cclix. london social honors we may not detail all the story of that english visit; even the path of glory leads to monotony at last. we may only mention a few more of the great honors paid to our unofficial ambassador to the world: among them a dinner given to members of the savage club by the lord mayor of london at the mansion house, also a dinner given by the american society at the hotel cecil in honor of the fourth of july. clemens was the guest of honor, and responded to the toast given by ambassador reid, “the day we celebrate.” he made an amusing and not altogether unserious reference to the american habit of exploding enthusiasm in dangerous fireworks. to english colonists he gave credit for having established american independence, and closed: we have, however, one fourth of july which is absolutely our own, and that is the memorable proclamation issued forty years ago by that great american to whom sir mortimer durand paid that just and beautiful tribute--abraham lincoln: a proclamation which not only set the black slave free, but set his white owner free also. the owner was set free from that burden and offense, that sad condition of things where he was in so many instances a master and owner of slaves when he did not want to be. that proclamation set them all free. but even in this matter england led the way, for she had set her slaves free thirty years before, and we but followed her example. we always follow her example, whether it is good or bad. and it was an english judge, a century ago, that issued that other great proclamation, and established that great principle, that when a slave, let him belong to whom he may, and let him come whence he may, sets his foot upon english soil his fetters, by that act, fall away and he is a free man before the world! it is true, then, that all our fourths of july, and we have five of them, england gave to us, except that one that i have mentioned--the emancipation proclamation; and let us not forget that we owe this debt to her. let us be able to say to old england, this great- hearted, venerable old mother of the race, you gave us our fourths of july, that we love and that we honor and revere; you gave us the declaration of independence, which is the charter of our rights; you, the venerable mother of liberties, the champion and protector of anglo-saxon freedom--you gave us these things, and we do most honestly thank you for them. it was at this dinner that he characteristically confessed, at last, to having stolen the ascot cup. he lunched one day with bernard shaw, and the two discussed the philosophies in which they were mutually interested. shaw regarded clemens as a sociologist before all else, and gave it out with great frankness that america had produced just two great geniuses--edgar allan poe and mark twain. later shaw wrote him a note, in which he said: i am persuaded that the future historian of america will find your works as indispensable to him as a french historian finds the political tracts of voltaire. i tell you so because i am the author of a play in which a priest says, “telling the truth's the funniest joke in the world,” a piece of wisdom which you helped to teach me. clemens saw a great deal of moberly bell. the two lunched and dined privately together when there was opportunity, and often met at the public gatherings. the bare memorandum of the week following july fourth will convey something of mark twain's london activities: friday, july . dined with lord and lady portsmouth. saturday, july . breakfasted at lord avebury's. lord kelvin, sir charles lyell, and sir archibald geikie were there. sat times for photos, at histed's. savage club dinner in the evening. white suit. ascot cup. sunday, july . called on lady langattock and others. lunched with sir norman lockyer. monday, july . lunched with plasmon directors at bath club. dined privately at c. f. moberly bell's. tuesday, july . lunched at the house with sir benjamin stone. balfour and komura were the other guests of honor. punch dinner in the evening. joy agnew and the cartoon. wednesday, july . went to liverpool with tay pay. attended banquet in the town hall in the evening. thursday, july . returned to london with tay pay. calls in the afternoon. the savage club would inevitably want to entertain him on its own account, and their dinner of july th was a handsome, affair. he felt at home with the savages, and put on white for the only time publicly in england. he made them one of his reminiscent speeches, recalling his association with them on his first visit to london, thirty-seven years before. then he said: that is a long time ago, and as i had come into a very strange land, and was with friends, as i could see, that has always remained in my mind as a peculiarly blessed evening, since it brought me into contact with men of my own kind and my own feelings. i am glad to be here, and to see you all, because it is very likely that i shall not see you again. i have been received, as you know, in the most delightfully generous way in england ever since i came here. it keeps me choked up all the time. everybody is so generous, and they do seem to give you such a hearty welcome. nobody in the world can appreciate it higher than i do. the club gave him a surprise in the course of the evening. a note was sent to him accompanied by a parcel, which, when opened, proved to contain a gilded plaster replica of the ascot gold cup. the note said: dere mark, i return the cup. you couldn't keep your mouth shut about it. 'tis pretty melt, as you want me ; nest time i work a pinch ile have a pard who don't make after-dinner speeches. there was a postcript which said: “i changed the acorn atop for another nut with my knife.” the acorn was, in fact, replaced by a well-modeled head of mark twain. so, after all, the ascot cup would be one of the trophies which he would bear home with him across the atlantic. probably the most valued of his london honors was the dinner given to him by the staff of punch. punch had already saluted him with a front-page cartoon by bernard partridge, a picture in which the presiding genius of that paper, mr. punch himself, presents him with a glass of the patronymic beverage with the words, “sir, i honor myself by drinking your health. long life to you--and happiness--and perpetual youth!” mr. agnew, chief editor; linley sambourne, francis burnand, henry lucy, and others of the staff welcomed him at the punch offices at bouverie street, in the historic punch dining-room where thackeray had sat, and douglas jerrold, and so many of the great departed. mark twain was the first foreign visitor to be so honored--in fifty years the first stranger to sit at the sacred board--a mighty distinction. in the course of the dinner they gave him a pretty surprise, when little joy agnew presented him with the original drawing of partridge's cartoon. nothing could have appealed to him more, and the punch dinner, with its associations and that dainty presentation, remained apart in his memory from all other feastings. clemens had intended to return early in july, but so much was happening that he postponed his sailing until the th. before leaving america, he had declined a dinner offered by the lord mayor of liverpool. repeatedly urged to let liverpool share in his visit, he had reconsidered now, and on the day following the punch dinner, on july th, they carried him, with t. p. o'connor (tay pay) in the prince of wales's special coach to liverpool, to be guest of honor at the reception and banquet which lord mayor japp tendered him at the town hall. clemens was too tired to be present while the courses were being served, but arrived rested and fresh to respond to his toast. perhaps because it was his farewell speech in england, he made that night the most effective address of his four weeks' visit--one of the most effective of his whole career: he began by some light reference to the ascot cup and the dublin jewels and the state regalia, and other disappearances that had been laid to his charge, to amuse his hearers, and spoke at greater length than usual, and with even greater variety. then laying all levity aside, he told them, like the queen of sheba, all that was in his heart. ... home is dear to us all, and now i am departing to my own home beyond the ocean. oxford has conferred upon me the highest honor that has ever fallen to my share of this life's prizes. it is the very one i would have chosen, as outranking all and any others, the one more precious to me than any and all others within the gift of man or state. during my four weeks' sojourn in england i have had another lofty honor, a continuous honor, an honor which has flowed serenely along, without halt or obstruction, through all these twenty-six days, a most moving and pulse-stirring honor--the heartfelt grip of the hand, and the welcome that does not descend from the pale-gray matter of the brain, but rushes up with the red blood from the heart. it makes me proud and sometimes it makes me humble, too. many and many a year ago i gathered an incident from dana's two years before the mast. it was like this: there was a presumptuous little self-important skipper in a coasting sloop engaged in the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade, and he was always hailing every ship that came in sight. he did it just to hear himself talk and to air his small grandeur. one day a majestic indiaman came plowing by with course on course of canvas towering into the sky, her decks and yards swarming with sailors, her hull burdened to the plimsoll line with a rich freightage of precious spices, lading the breezes with gracious and mysterious odors of the orient. it was a noble spectacle, a sublime spectacle! of course the little skipper popped into the shrouds and squeaked out a hail, “ship ahoy! what ship is that? and whence and whither?” in a deep and thunderous bass the answer came back through the speaking- trumpet, “the begum, of bengal-- days out from canton--homeward bound! what ship is that?” well, it just crushed that poor little creature's vanity flat, and he squeaked back most humbly, “only the mary ann, fourteen hours out from boston, bound for kittery point --with nothing to speak of!” oh, what an eloquent word that “only,” to express the depths of his humbleness! that is just my case. during just one hour in the twenty-four--not more--i pause and reflect in the stillness of the night with the echoes of your english welcome still lingering in my ears, and then i am humble. then i am properly meek, and for that little while i am only the mary ann, fourteen hours out, cargoed with vegetables and tinware; but during all the other twenty-three hours my vain self-complacency rides high on the white crests of your approval, and then i am a stately indiaman, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas and laden with the kindest words that have ever been vouchsafed to any wandering alien in this world, i think; then my twenty-six fortunate days on this old mother soil seem to be multiplied by six, and i am the begum, of bengal, days out from canton--homeward bound! he returned to london, and with one of his young acquaintances, an american--he called her francesca--paid many calls. it took the dreariness out of that social function to perform it in that way. with a list of the calls they were to make they drove forth each day to cancel the social debt. they paid calls in every walk of life. his young companion was privileged to see the inside of london homes of almost every class, for he showed no partiality; he went to the homes of the poor and the rich alike. one day they visited the home of an old bookkeeper whom he had known in as a clerk in a large establishment, earning a salary of perhaps a pound a week, who now had risen mightily, for he had become head bookkeeper in that establishment on a salary of six pounds a week, and thought it great prosperity and fortune for his old age. he sailed on july th for home, besought to the last moment by a crowd of autograph-seekers and reporters and photographers, and a multitude who only wished to see him and to shout and wave good-by. he was sailing away from them for the last time. they hoped he would make a speech, but that would not have been possible. to the reporters he gave a farewell message: “it has been the most enjoyable holiday i have ever had, and i am sorry the end of it has come. i have met a hundred, old friends, and i have made a hundred new ones. it is a good kind of riches to have; there is none better, i think.” and the london tribune declared that “the ship that bore him away had difficulty in getting clear, so thickly was the water strewn with the bay-leaves of his triumph. for mark twain has triumphed, and in his all-too-brief stay of a month has done more for the cause of the world's peace than will be accomplished by the hague conference. he has made the world laugh again.” his ship was the minnetonka, and there were some little folks aboard to be adopted as grandchildren. on july th, in a fog, the minnetonka collided with the bark sterling, and narrowly escaped sinking her. on the whole, however, the homeward way was clear, and the vessel reached new york nearly a day in advance of their schedule. some ceremonies of welcome had been prepared for him; but they were upset by the early arrival, so that when he descended the gang-plank to his native soil only a few who had received special information were there to greet him. but perhaps he did not notice it. he seldom took account of the absence of such things. by early afternoon, however, the papers rang with the announcement that mark twain was home again. it is a sorrow to me that i was not at the dock to welcome him. i had been visiting in elmira, and timed my return for the evening of the a d, to be on hand the following morning, when the ship was due. when i saw the announcement that he had already arrived i called a greeting over the telephone, and was told to come down and play billiards. i confess i went with a certain degree of awe, for one could not but be overwhelmed with the echoes of the great splendor he had so recently achieved, and i prepared to sit a good way off in silence, and hear something of the tale of this returning conqueror; but when i arrived he was already in the billiard-room knocking the balls about--his coat off, for it was a hot night. as i entered he said: “get your cue. i have been inventing a new game.” and i think there were scarcely ten words exchanged before we were at it. the pageant was over; the curtain was rung down. business was resumed at the old stand. cclx. matters psychic and otherwise he returned to tuxedo and took up his dictations, and mingled freely with the social life; but the contrast between his recent london experience and his semi-retirement must have been very great. when i visited him now and then, he seemed to me lonely--not especially for companionship, but rather for the life that lay behind him--the great career which in a sense now had been completed since he had touched its highest point. there was no billiard-table at tuxedo, and he spoke expectantly of getting back to town and the games there, also of the new home which was then building in redding, and which would have a billiard-room where we could assemble daily--my own habitation being not far away. various diversions were planned for redding; among them was discussed a possible school of philosophy, such as hawthorne and emerson and alcott had established at concord. he spoke quite freely of his english experiences, but usually of the more amusing phases. he almost never referred to the honors that had been paid to him, yet he must have thought of them sometimes, and cherished them, for it had been the greatest national tribute ever paid to a private citizen; he must have known that in his heart. he spoke amusingly of his visit to marie corelli, in stratford, and of the holy grail incident, ending the latter by questioning--in words at least--all psychic manifestations. i said to him: “but remember your own dream, mr. clemens, which presaged the death of your brother.” he answered: “i ask nobody to believe that it ever happened. to me it is true; but it has no logical right to be true, and i do not expect belief in it.” which i thought a peculiar point of view, but on the whole characteristic. he was invited to be a special guest at the jamestown exposition on fulton day, in september, and mr. rogers lent him his yacht in which to make the trip. it was a break in the summer's monotonies, and the jamestown honors must have reminded him of those in london. when he entered the auditorium where the services were to be held there was a demonstration which lasted more than five minutes. every person in the hall rose and cheered, waving handkerchiefs and umbrellas. he made them a brief, amusing talk on fulton and other matters, then introduced admiral harrington, who delivered a masterly address and was followed by martin w. littleton, the real orator of the day. littleton acquitted himself so notably that mark twain conceived for him a deep admiration, and the two men quickly became friends. they saw each other often during the remainder of the jamestown stay, and clemens, learning that littleton lived just across ninth street from him in new york, invited him to come over when he had an evening to spare and join the billiard games. so it happened, somewhat later, when every one was back in town, mr. and mrs. littleton frequently came over for billiards, and the games became three-handed with an audience--very pleasant games played in that way. clemens sometimes set himself up as umpire, and became critic and gave advice, while littleton and i played. he had a favorite shot that he frequently used himself and was always wanting us to try, which was to drive the ball to the cushion at the beginning of the shot. he played it with a good deal of success, and achieved unexpected results with it. he was even inspired to write a poem on the subject. “cushion first” when all your days are dark with doubt, and dying hope is at its worst; when all life's balls are scattered wide, with not a shot in sight, to left or right, don't give it up; advance your cue and shut your eyes, and take the cushion first. the harry thaw trial was in progress just then, and littleton was thaw's chief attorney. it was most interesting to hear from him direct the day's proceedings and his views of the situation and of thaw. littleton and billiards recall a curious thing which happened one afternoon. i had been absent the evening before, and littleton had been over. it was after luncheon now, and clemens and i began preparing for the customary games. we were playing then a game with four balls, two white and two red. i began by placing the red balls on the table, and then went around looking in the pockets for the two white cue-balls. when i had made the round of the table i had found but one white ball. i thought i must have overlooked the other, and made the round again. then i said: “there is one white ball missing.” clemens, to satisfy himself, also made the round of the pockets, and said: “it was here last night.” he felt in the pockets of the little white-silk coat which he usually wore, thinking that he might unconsciously have placed it there at the end of the last game, but his coat pockets were empty. he said: “i'll bet littleton carried that ball home with him.” then i suggested that near the end of the game it might have jumped off the table, and i looked carefully under the furniture and in the various corners, but without success. there was another set of balls, and out of it i selected a white one for our play, and the game began. it went along in the usual way, the balls constantly falling into the pockets, and as constantly being replaced on the table. this had continued for perhaps half an hour, there being no pocket that had not been frequently occupied and emptied during that time; but then it happened that clemens reached into the middle pocket, and taking out a white ball laid it in place, whereupon we made the discovery that three white balls lay upon the table. the one just taken from the pocket was the missing ball. we looked at each other, both at first too astonished to say anything at all. no one had been in the room since we began to play, and at no time during the play had there been more than two white balls in evidence, though the pockets had been emptied at the end of each shot. the pocket from which the missing ball had been taken had been filled and emptied again and again. then clemens said: “we must be dreaming.” we stopped the game for a while to discuss it, but we could devise no material explanation. i suggested the kobold--that mischievous invisible which is supposed to play pranks by carrying off such things as pencils, letters, and the like, and suddenly restoring them almost before one's eyes. clemens, who, in spite of his material logic, was always a mystic at heart, said: “but that, so far as i know, has never happened to more than one person at a time, and has been explained by a sort of temporary mental blindness. this thing has happened to two of us, and there can be no question as to the positive absence of the object.” “how about dematerialization?” “yes, if one of us were a medium that might be considered an explanation.” he went on to recall that sir alfred russel wallace had written of such things, and cited instances which wallace had recorded. in the end he said: “well, it happened, that's all we can say, and nobody can ever convince me that it didn't.” we went on playing, and the ball remained solid and substantial ever after, so far as i know. i am reminded of two more or less related incidents of this period. clemens was, one morning, dictating something about his christian union article concerning mrs. clemens's government of children, published in . i had discovered no copy of it among the materials, and he was wishing very much that he could see one. somewhat later, as he was walking down fifth avenue, the thought of this article and his desire for it suddenly entered his mind. reaching the corner of forty-second street, he stopped a moment to let a jam of vehicles pass. as he did so a stranger crossed the street, noticed him, and came dodging his way through the blockade and thrust some clippings into his hand. “mr. clemens,” he said, “you don't know me, but here is something you may wish to have. i have been saving them for more than twenty years, and this morning it occurred to me to send them to you. i was going to mail them from my office, but now i will give them to you,” and with a word or two he disappeared. the clippings were from the christian union of , and were the much-desired article. clemens regarded it as a remarkable case of mental telegraphy. “or, if it wasn't that,” he said, “it was a most remarkable coincidence.” the other circumstance has been thought amusing. i had gone to redding for a few days, and while there, one afternoon about five o'clock, fell over a coal-scuttle and scarified myself a good deal between the ankle and the knee. i mention the hour because it seems important. next morning i received a note, prompted by mr. clemens, in which he said: tell paine i am sorry he fell and skinned his shin at five o'clock yesterday afternoon. i was naturally astonished, and immediately wrote: i did fall and skin my shin at five o'clock yesterday afternoon, but how did you find it out? i followed the letter in person next day, and learned that at the same hour on the same afternoon clemens himself had fallen up the front steps and, as he said, peeled off from his “starboard shin a ribbon of skin three inches long.” the disaster was still uppermost in his mind at the time of writing, and the suggestion of my own mishap had flashed out for no particular reason. clemens was always having his fortune told, in one way or another, being superstitious, as he readily confessed, though at times professing little faith in these prognostics. once when a clairvoyant, of whom he had never even heard, and whom he had reason to believe was ignorant of his family history, told him more about it than he knew himself, besides reading a list of names from a piece of paper which clemens had concealed in his vest pocket he came home deeply impressed. the clairvoyant added that he would probably live to a great age and die in a foreign land--a prophecy which did not comfort him. cclxi. minor events and diversions mark twain was deeply interested during the autumn of in the children's theater of the jewish educational alliance, on the lower east side--a most worthy institution which ought to have survived. a miss alice m. herts, who developed and directed it, gave her strength and health to build up an institution through which the interest of the children could be diverted from less fortunate amusements. she had interested a great body of jewish children in the plays of shakespeare, and of more modern dramatists, and these they had performed from time to time with great success. the admission fee to the performance was ten cents, and the theater was always crowded with other children--certainly a better diversion for them than the amusements of the street, though of course, as a business enterprise, the theater could not pay. it required patrons. miss herts obtained permission to play “the prince and the pauper,” and mark twain agreed to become a sort of chief patron in using his influence to bring together an audience who might be willing to assist financially in this worthy work. “the prince and the pauper” evening turned out a distinguished affair. on the night of november , , the hall of the educational alliance was crowded with such an audience as perhaps never before assembled on the east side; the finance and the fashion of new york were there. it was a gala night for the little east side performers. behind the curtain they whispered to each other that they were to play before queens. the performance they gave was an astonishing one. so fully did they enter into the spirit of tom canty's rise to royalty that they seemed absolutely to forget that they were lowly-born children of the ghetto. they had become little princesses and lords and maids-in-waiting, and they moved through their pretty tinsel parts as if all their ornaments were gems and their raiment cloth of gold. there was no hesitation, no awkwardness of speech or gesture, and they rose really to sublime heights in the barn scene where the little prince is in the hands of the mob. never in the history of the stage has there been assembled a mob more wonderful than that. these children knew mobs! a mob to them was a daily sight, and their reproduction of it was a thing to startle you with its realism. never was it absurd; never was there a single note of artificiality in it. it was hogarthian in its bigness. both mark twain and miss herts made brief addresses, and the audience shouted approval of their words. it seems a pity that such a project as that must fail, and i do not know why it happened. wealthy men and women manifested an interest; but there was some hitch somewhere, and the children's theater exists to-day only as history.--[in a letter to a mrs. amelia dunne hookway, who had conducted some children's plays at the howland school, chicago, mark twain once wrote: “if i were going to begin life over again i would have a children's theater and watch it, and work for it, and see it grow and blossom and bear its rich moral and intellectual fruitage; and i should get more pleasure and a saner and healthier profit out of my vocation than i should ever be able to get out of any other, constituted as i am. yes, you are easily the most fortunate of women, i think.”] it was at a dinner at the players--a small, private dinner given by mr. george c. riggs-that i saw edward l. burlingame and mark twain for the only time together. they had often met during the forty-two years that had passed since their long-ago sandwich island friendship; but only incidentally, for mr. burlingame cared not much for great public occasions, and as editor of scribner's magazine he had been somewhat out of the line of mark twain's literary doings. howells was there, and gen. stewart l. woodford, and david bispham, john finley, evan shipman, nicholas biddle, and david munro. clemens told that night, for the first time, the story of general miles and the three-dollar dog, inventing it, i believe, as he went along, though for the moment it certainly did sound like history. he told it often after that, and it has been included in his book of speeches. later, in the cab, he said: “that was a mighty good dinner. riggs knows how to do that sort of thing. i enjoyed it ever so much. now we'll go home and play billiards.” we began about eleven o'clock, and played until after midnight. i happened to be too strong for him, and he swore amazingly. he vowed that it was not a gentleman's game at all, that riggs's wine had demoralized the play. but at the end, when we were putting up the cues, he said: “well, those were good games. there is nothing like billiards after all.” we did not play billiards on his birthday that year. he went to the theater in the afternoon; and it happened that, with jesse lynch williams, i attended the same performance--the “toy-maker of nuremberg”--written by austin strong. it proved to be a charming play, and i could see that clemens was enjoying it. he sat in a box next to the stage, and the actors clearly were doing their very prettiest for his benefit. when later i mentioned having seen him at the play, he spoke freely of his pleasure in it. “it is a fine, delicate piece of work,” he said. “i wish i could do such things as that.” “i believe you are too literary for play-writing.” “yes, no doubt. there was never any question with the managers about my plays. they always said they wouldn't act. howells has come pretty near to something once or twice. i judge the trouble is that the literary man is thinking of the style and quality of the thing, while the playwright thinks only of how it will play. one is thinking of how it will sound, the other of how it will look.” “i suppose,” i said, “the literary man should have a collaborator with a genius for stage mechanism. john luther long's exquisite plays would hardly have been successful without david belasco to stage them. belasco cannot write a play himself, but in the matter of acting construction his genius is supreme.” “yes, so it is; it was belasco who made it possible to play 'the prince and the pauper'--a collection of literary garbage before he got hold of it.” clemens attended few public functions now. he was beset with invitations, but he declined most of them. he told the dog story one night to the pleiades club, assembled at the brevoort; but that was only a step away, and we went in after the dining was ended and came away before the exercises were concluded. he also spoke at a banquet given to andrew carnegie--saint andrew, as he called him--by the engineers club, and had his usual fun at the chief guest's expense. i have been chief guest at a good many banquets myself, and i know what brother andrew is feeling like now. he has been receiving compliments and nothing but compliments, but he knows that there is another side to him that needs censure. i am going to vary the complimentary monotony. while we have all been listening to the complimentary talk mr. carnegie's face has scintillated with fictitious innocence. you'd think he never committed a crime in his life. but he has. look at his pestiferous simplified spelling. imagine the calamity on two sides of the ocean when he foisted his simplified spelling on the whole human race. we've got it all now so that nobody could spell.... if mr. carnegie had left spelling alone we wouldn't have had any spots on the sun, or any san francisco quake, or any business depression. there, i trust he feels better now and that he has enjoyed my abuse more than he did his compliments. and now that i think i have him smoothed down and feeling comfortable i just want to say one thing more--that his simplified spelling is all right enough, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far. as he was about to go, carnegie called his attention to the beautiful souvenir bronze and gold-plated goblets that stood at each guest's plate. carnegie said: “the club had those especially made at tiffany's for this occasion. they cost ten dollars apiece.” clemens sand: “is that so? well, i only meant to take my own; but if that's the case i'll load my cab with them.” we made an attempt to reform on the matter of billiards. the continued strain of late hours was doing neither of us any particular good. more than once i journeyed into the country on one errand and another, mainly for rest; but a card saying that he was lonely and upset, for lack of his evening games, quickly brought me back again. it was my wish only to serve him; it was a privilege and an honor to give him happiness. billiards, however, was not his only recreation just then. he walked out a good deal, and especially of a pleasant sunday morning he liked the stroll up fifth avenue. sometimes we went as high as carnegie's, on ninety-second street, and rode home on top of the electric stage--always one of mark twain's favorite diversions. from that high seat he liked to look down on the panorama of the streets, and in that free, open air he could smoke without interference. oftener, however, we turned at fifty-ninth street, walking both ways. when it was pleasant we sometimes sat on a bench in central park; and once he must have left a handkerchief there, for a few days later one of his handkerchiefs came to him accompanied by a note. its finder, a mr. lockwood, received a reward, for mark twain wrote him: there is more rejoicing in this house over that one handkerchief that was lost and is found again than over the ninety and nine that never went to the wash at all. heaven will reward you, i know it will. on sunday mornings the return walk would be timed for about the hour that the churches would be dismissed. on the first sunday morning we had started a little early, and i thoughtlessly suggested, when we reached fifty-ninth street, that if we returned at once we would avoid the throng. he said, quietly: “i like the throng.” so we rested in the plaza hotel until the appointed hour. men and women noticed him, and came over to shake his hand. the gigantic man in uniform; in charge of the carriages at the door, came in for a word. he had opened carriages for mr. clemens at the twenty-third street station, and now wanted to claim that honor. i think he received the most cordial welcome of any one who came. i am sure he did. it was mark twain's way to warm to the man of the lower social rank. he was never too busy, never too preoccupied, to grasp the hand of such a man; to listen to his story, and to say just the words that would make that man happy remembering them. we left the plaza hotel and presently were amid the throng of outpouring congregations. of course he was the object on which every passing eye turned; the presence to which every hat was lifted. i realized that this open and eagerly paid homage of the multitude was still dear to him, not in any small and petty way, but as the tribute of a nation, the expression of that affection which in his london and liverpool speeches he had declared to be the last and final and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement. it was his final harvest, and he had the courage to claim it--the aftermath of all his years of honorable labor and noble living. cclxii. from mark twain's mail. if the reader has any curiosity as to some of the less usual letters which a man of wide public note may inspire, perhaps he will find a certain interest in a few selected from the thousands which yearly came to mark twain. for one thing, he was constantly receiving prescriptions and remedies whenever the papers reported one of his bronchial or rheumatic attacks. it is hardly necessary to quote examples of these, but only a form of his occasional reply, which was likely to be in this wise: dear sir [or madam],--i try every remedy sent to me. i am now on no. . yours is , . i am looking forward to its beneficial results. of course a large number of the nostrums and palliatives offered were preparations made by the wildest and longest-haired medical cranks. one of these sent an advertisement of a certain elixir of life, which was guaranteed to cure everything--to “wash and cleanse the human molecules, and so restore youth and preserve life everlasting.” anonymous letters are not usually popular or to be encouraged, but mark twain had an especial weakness for compliments that came in that way. they were not mercenary compliments. the writer had nothing to gain. two such letters follow--both written in england just at the time of his return. mark twain. dear sir,--please accept a poor widow's good-by and kindest wishes. i have had some of your books sent to me; have enjoyed them very much--only wish i could afford to buy some. i should very much like to have seen you. i have many photos of you which i have cut from several papers which i read. i have one where you are writing in bed, which i cut from the daily news. like myself, you believe in lots of sleep and rest. i am and i find i need plenty. please forgive the liberty i have taken in writing to you. if i can't come to your funeral may we meet beyond the river. may god guard you, is the wish of a lonely old widow. yours sincerely, the other letter also tells its own story: dear, kind mark twain,--for years i have wanted to write and thank you for the comfort you were to me once, only i never quite knew where you were, and besides i did not want to bother you; but to-day i was told by some one who saw you going into the lift at the savoy that you looked sad and i thought it might cheer you a little tiny bit to hear how you kept a poor lonely girl from ruining her eyes with crying every night for long months. ten years ago i had to leave home and earn my living as a governess and fate sent me to spend a winter with a very dull old country family in the depths of staffordshire. according to the genial english custom, after my five charges had gone to bed, i took my evening meal alone in the school-room, where “henry tudor had supped the night before bosworth,” and there i had to stay without a soul to speak to till i went to bed. at first i used to cry every night, but a friend sent me a copy of your huckleberry finn and i never cried any more. i kept him handy under the copy-books and maps, and when henry tudor commenced to stretch out his chilly hands toward me i grabbed my dear huck and he never once failed me; i opened him at random and in two minutes i was in another world. that's why i am so grateful to you and so fond of you, and i thought you might like to know; for it is yourself that has the kind heart, as is easily seen from the way you wrote about the poor old nigger. i am a stenographer now and live at home, but i shall never forget how you helped me. god bless you and spare you long to those you are dear to. a letter which came to him soon after his return from england contained a clipping which reported the good work done by christian missionaries in the congo, especially among natives afflicted by the terrible sleeping sickness. the letter itself consisted merely of a line, which said: won't you give your friends, the missionaries, a good mark for this? the writer's name was signed, and mark twain answered: in china the missionaries are not wanted, & so they ought to be decent & go away. but i have not heard that in the congo the missionary servants of god are unwelcome to the native. evidently those missionaries axe pitying, compassionate, kind. how it would improve god to take a lesson from them! he invented & distributed the germ of that awful disease among those helpless, poor savages, & now he sits with his elbows on the balusters & looks down & enjoys this wanton crime. confidently, & between you & me --well, never mind, i might get struck by lightning if i said it. those are good and kindly men, those missionaries, but they are a measureless satire upon their master. to which the writer answered: o wicked mr. clemens! i have to ask saint joan of arc to pray for you; then one of these days, when we all stand before the golden gates and we no longer “see through a glass darkly and know only in part,” there will be a struggle at the heavenly portals between joan of arc and st. peter, but your blessed joan will conquer and she'll lead mr. clemens through the gates of pearl and apologize and plead for him. of the letters that irritated him, perhaps the following is as fair a sample as any, and it has additional interest in its sequel. dear sir,--i have written a book--naturally--which fact, however, since i am not your enemy, need give you no occasion to rejoice. nor need you grieve, though i am sending you a copy. if i knew of any way of compelling you to read it i would do so, but unless the first few pages have that effect i can do nothing. try the first few pages. i have done a great deal more than that with your books, so perhaps you owe me some thing--say ten pages. if after that attempt you put it aside i shall be sorry--for you. i am afraid that the above looks flippant--but think of the twitterings of the soul of him who brings in his hand an unbidden book, written by himself. to such a one much is due in the way of indulgence. will you remember that? have you forgotten early twitterings of your own? in a memorandum made on this letter mark twain wrote: another one of those peculiarly depressing letters--a letter cast in artificially humorous form, whilst no art could make the subject humorous--to me. commenting further, he said: as i have remarked before about one thousand times the coat of arms of the human race ought to consist of a man with an ax on his shoulder proceeding toward a grindstone, or it ought to represent the several members of the human race holding out the hat to one another; for we are all beggars, each in his own way. one beggar is too proud to beg for pennies, but will beg for an introduction into society; another does not care for society, but he wants a postmastership; another will inveigle a lawyer into conversation and then sponge on him for free advice. the man who wouldn't do any of these things will beg for the presidency. each admires his own dignity and greatly guards it, but in his opinion the others haven't any. mendicancy is a matter of taste and temperament, no doubt, but no human being is without some form of it. i know my own form, you know yours. let us conceal them from view and abuse the others. there is no man so poor but what at intervals some man comes to him with an ax to grind. by and by the ax's aspect becomes familiar to the proprietor of the grindstone. he perceives that it is the same old ax. if you are a governor you know that the stranger wants an office. the first time he arrives you are deceived; he pours out such noble praises of you and your political record that you are moved to tears; there's a lump in your throat and you are thankful that you have lived for this happiness. then the stranger discloses his ax, and you are ashamed of yourself and your race. six repetitions will cure you. after that you interrupt the compliments and say, “yes, yes, that's all right; never mind about that. what is it you want?” but you and i are in the business ourselves. every now and then we carry our ax to somebody and ask a whet. i don't carry mine to strangers--i draw the line there; perhaps that is your way. this is bound to set us up on a high and holy pinnacle and make us look down in cold rebuke on persons who carry their axes to strangers. i do not know how to answer that stranger's letter. i wish he had spared me. never mind about him--i am thinking about myself. i wish he had spared me. the book has not arrived yet; but no matter, i am prejudiced against it. it was a few days later that he added: i wrote to that man. i fell back upon the old overworked, polite lie, and thanked him for his book and said i was promising myself the pleasure of reading it. of course that set me free; i was not obliged to read it now at all, and, being free, my prejudice was gone, and as soon as the book came i opened it to see what it was like. i was not able to put it down until i had finished. it was an embarrassing thing to have to write to that man and confess that fact, but i had to do it. that first letter was merely a lie. do you think i wrote the second one to give that man pleasure? well, i did, but it was second-hand pleasure. i wrote it first to give myself comfort, to make myself forget the original lie. mark twain's interest was once aroused by the following: dear sir,--i have had more or less of your works on my shelves for years, and believe i have practically a complete set now. this is nothing unusual, of course, but i presume it will seem to you unusual for any one to keep books constantly in sight which the owner regrets ever having read. every time my glance rests on the books i do regret having read them, and do not hesitate to tell you so to your face, and care not who may know my feelings. you, who must be kept busy attending to your correspondence, will probably pay little or no attention to this small fraction of it, yet my reasons, i believe, are sound and are probably shared by more people than you are aware of. probably you will not read far enough through this to see who has signed it, but if you do, and care to know why i wish i had left your work unread, i will tell you as briefly as possible if you will ask me. george b. lauder. clemens did not answer the letter, but put it in his pocket, perhaps intending to do so, and a few days later, in boston, when a reporter called, he happened to remember it. the reporter asked permission to print the queer document, and it appeared in his mark twain interview next morning. a few days later the writer of it sent a second letter, this time explaining: my dear sir,--i saw in to-day's paper a copy of the letter which i wrote you october th. i have read and re-read your works until i can almost recall some of them word for word. my familiarity with them is a constant source of pleasure which i would not have missed, and therefore the regret which i have expressed is more than offset by thankfulness. believe me, the regret which i feel for having read your works is entirely due to the unalterable fact that i can never again have the pleasure of reading them for the first time. your sincere admirer, george b. ladder. mark twain promptly replied this time: dear sir, you fooled me completely; i didn't divine what the letter was concealing, neither did the newspaper men, so you are a very competent deceiver. truly yours, s. l. clemens. it was about the end of that the new st. louis harbor boat, was completed. the editor of the st. louis republic reported that it has been christened “mark twain,” and asked for a word of comment. clemens sent this line: may my namesake follow in my righteous footsteps, then neither of us will need any fire insurance. cclxiii. some literary luncheons howells, in his book, refers to the human race luncheon club, which clemens once organized for the particular purpose of damning the species in concert. it was to consist, beside clemens himself, of howells, colonel harvey, and peter dunne; but it somehow never happened that even this small membership could be assembled while the idea was still fresh, and therefore potent. out of it, however, grew a number of those private social gatherings which clemens so dearly loved--small luncheons and dinners given at his own table. the first of these came along toward the end of , when howells was planning to spend the winter in italy. “howells is going away,” he said, “and i should like to give him a stag-party. we'll enlarge the human race club for the occasion.” so howells, colonel harvey, martin littleton, augustus thomas, robert porter, and paderewski were invited. paderewski was unable to come, and seven in all assembled. howells was first to arrive. “here comes howells,” clemens said. “old howells a thousand years old.” but howells didn't look it. his face was full of good-nature and apparent health, and he was by no means venerable, either in speech or action. thomas, porter, littleton, and harvey drifted in. cocktails were served and luncheon was announced. claude, the butler, had prepared the table with fine artistry--its center a mass of roses. there was to be no woman in the neighborhood--clemens announced this fact as a sort of warrant for general freedom of expression. thomas's play, “the witching hour,” was then at the height of its great acceptance, and the talk naturally began there. thomas told something of the difficulty which he found in being able to convince a manager that it would succeed, and declared it to be his own favorite work. i believe there was no dissenting opinion as to its artistic value, or concerning its purpose and psychology, though these had been the stumbling-blocks from a managerial point of view. when the subject was concluded, and there had come a lull, colonel harvey, who was seated at clemens's left, said: “uncle mark”--he often called him that--“major leigh handed me a report of the year's sales just as i was leaving. it shows your royalty returns this year to be very close to fifty thousand dollars. i don't believe there is another such return from old books on record.” this was said in an undertone, to clemens only, but was overheard by one or two of those who sat nearest. clemens was not unwilling to repeat it for the benefit of all, and did so. howells said: “a statement like that arouses my basest passions. the books are no good; it's just the advertising they get.” clemens said: “yes, my contract compels the publisher to advertise. it costs them two hundred dollars every time they leave the advertisement out of the magazines.” “and three hundred every time we put it in,” said harvey. “we often debate whether it is more profitable to put in the advertisement or to leave it out.” the talk switched back to plays and acting. thomas recalled an incident of beerbohm tree's performance of “hamlet.” w. s. gilbert, of light-opera celebrity, was present at a performance, and when the play ended mrs. tree hurried over to him and said: “oh, mr. gilbert, what did you think of mr. tree's rendition of hamlet?” “remarkable,” said gilbert. “funny without being vulgar.” it was with such idle tales and talk-play that the afternoon passed. not much of it all is left to me, but i remember howells saying, “did it ever occur to you that the newspapers abolished hell? well, they did--it was never done by the church. there was a consensus of newspaper opinion that the old hell with its lake of fire and brimstone was an antiquated institution; in fact a dead letter.” and again, “i was coming down broadway last night, and i stopped to look at one of the street-venders selling those little toy fighting roosters. it was a bleak, desolate evening; nobody was buying anything, and as he pulled the string and kept those little roosters dancing and fighting his remarks grew more and more cheerless and sardonic. “'japanese game chickens,' he said; 'pretty toys, amuse the children with their antics. child of three can operate it. take them home for christmas. chicken-fight at your own fireside.' i tried to catch his eye to show him that i understood his desolation and sorrow, but it was no use. he went on dancing his toy chickens, and saying, over and over, 'chicken-fight at your own fireside.'” the luncheon over, we wandered back into the drawing-room, and presently all left but colonel harvey. clemens and the colonel went up to the billiard-room and engaged in a game of cushion caroms, at twenty-five cents a game. i was umpire and stakeholder, and it was a most interesting occupation, for the series was close and a very cheerful one. it ended the day much to mark twain's satisfaction, for he was oftenest winner. that evening he said: “we will repeat that luncheon; we ought to repeat it once a month. howells will be gone, but we must have the others. we cannot have a thing like that too often.” there was, in fact, a second stag-luncheon very soon after, at which george riggs was present and that rare irish musician, denis o'sullivan. it was another choice afternoon, with a mystical quality which came of the music made by o'sullivan on some hindu reeds-pipes of pan. but we shall have more of o'sullivan presently--all too little, for his days were few and fleeting. howells could not get away just yet. colonel harvey, who, like james osgood, would not fail to find excuse for entertainment, chartered two drawing-room cars, and with mrs. harvey took a party of fifty-five or sixty congenial men and women to lakewood for a good-by luncheon to howells. it was a day borrowed from june, warm and beautiful. the trip down was a sort of reception. most of the guests were acquainted, but many of them did not often meet. there was constant visiting back and forth the full length of the two coaches. denis o'sullivan was among the guests. he looked in the bloom of health, and he had his pipes and played his mystic airs; then he brought out the tin-whistle of ireland, and blew such rollicking melodies as capering fairies invented a long time ago. this was on the train going down. there was a brief program following the light-hearted feasting--an informal program fitting to that sunny day. it opened with some recitations by miss kitty cheatham; then colonel harvey introduced howells, with mention of his coming journey. as a rule, howells does not enjoy speaking. he is willing to read an address on occasion, but he has owned that the prospect of talking without his notes terrifies him. this time, however, there was no reluctance, though he had prepared no speech. he was among friends. he looked even happy when he got on his feet, and he spoke like a happy man. he talked about mark twain. it was all delicate, delicious chaffing which showed howells at his very best--all too short for his listeners. clemens, replying, returned the chaff, and rambled amusingly among his fancies, closing with a few beautiful words of “godspeed and safe return” to his old comrade and friend. then once more came denis and his pipes. no one will ever forget his part of the program. the little samples we had heard on the train were expanded and multiplied and elaborated in a way that fairly swept his listeners out of themselves into that land where perhaps denis himself wanders playing now; for a month later, strong and lusty and beautiful as he seemed that day, he suddenly vanished from among us and his reeds were silent. it never occurred to us then that denis could die; and as he finished each melody and song there was a shout for a repetition, and i think we could have sat there and let the days and years slip away unheeded, for time is banished by music like that, and one wonders if it might not even divert death. it was dark when we crossed the river homeward; the myriad lights from heaven-climbing windows made an enchanted city in the sky. the evening, like the day, was warm, and some of the party left the ferry-cabin to lean over and watch the magic spectacle, the like of which is not to be found elsewhere on the earth. cclxiv. “captain stormfield” in print during the forty years or so that had elapsed since the publication of the “gates ajar” and the perpetration of mark twain's intended burlesque, built on captain ned wakeman's dream, the christian religion in its more orthodox aspects had undergone some large modifications. it was no longer regarded as dangerous to speak lightly of hell, or even to suggest that the golden streets and jeweled architecture of the sky might be regarded as symbols of hope rather than exhibits of actual bullion and lapidary construction. clemens re-read his extravaganza, captain stormfields visit to heaven, gave it a modernizing touch here and there, and handed it to his publishers, who must have agreed that it was no longer dangerous, for it was promptly accepted and appeared in the december and january numbers ( - ) of harper's magazine, and was also issued as a small book. if there were any readers who still found it blasphemous, or even irreverent, they did not say so; the letters that came--and they were a good many--expressed enjoyment and approval, also (some of them) a good deal of satisfaction that mark twain “had returned to his earlier form.” the publication of this story recalled to clemens's mind another heresy somewhat similar which he had written during the winter of and in berlin. this was a dream of his own, in which he had set out on a train with the evangelist sam jones and the archbishop of canterbury for the other world. he had noticed that his ticket was to a different destination than the archbishop's, and so, when the prelate nodded and finally went to sleep, he changed the tickets in their hats with disturbing results. clemens thought a good deal of this fancy when he wrote it, and when mrs. clemens had refused to allow it to be printed he had laboriously translated it into german, with some idea of publishing it surreptitiously; but his conscience had been too much for him. he had confessed, and even the german version had been suppressed. clemens often allowed his fancy to play with the idea of the orthodox heaven, its curiosities of architecture, and its employments of continuous prayer, psalm-singing, and harpistry. “what a childish notion it was,” he said, “and how curious that only a little while ago human beings were so willing to accept such fragile evidences about a place of so much importance. if we should find somewhere to-day an ancient book containing an account of a beautiful and blooming tropical paradise secreted in the center of eternal icebergs--an account written by men who did not even claim to have seen it themselves--no geographical society on earth would take any stock in that book, yet that account would be quite as authentic as any we have of heaven. if god has such a place prepared for us, and really wanted us to know it, he could have found some better way than a book so liable to alterations and misinterpretation. god has had no trouble to prove to man the laws of the constellations and the construction of the world, and such things as that, none of which agree with his so-called book. as to a hereafter, we have not the slightest evidence that there is any--no evidence that appeals to logic and reason. i have never seen what to me seemed an atom of proof that there is a future life.” then, after a long pause, he added: “and yet--i am strongly inclined to expect one.” cclxv. lotos club honors it was on january , , that mark twain was given his last great banquet by the lotos club. the club was about to move again, into splendid new quarters, and it wished to entertain him once more in its old rooms. he wore white, and amid the throng of black-clad men was like a white moth among a horde of beetles. the room fairly swarmed with them, and they seemed likely to overwhelm him. president lawrence was toast-master of the evening, and he ended his customary address by introducing robert porter, who had been mark twain's host at oxford. porter told something of the great oxford week, and ended by introducing mark twain. it had been expected that clemens would tell of his london experiences. instead of doing this, he said he had started a new kind of collection, a collection of compliments. he had picked up a number of valuable ones abroad and some at home. he read selections from them, and kept the company going with cheers and merriment until just before the close of his speech. then he repeated, in his most impressive manner, that stately conclusion of his liverpool speech, and the room became still and the eyes of his hearers grew dim. it may have been even more moving than when originally given, for now the closing words, “homeward bound,” had only the deeper meaning. dr. john macarthur followed with a speech that was as good a sermon as any he ever delivered, and closed it by saying: “i do not want men to prepare for heaven, but to prepare to remain on earth, and it is such men as mark twain who make other men not fit to die, but fit to live.” andrew carnegie also spoke, and colonel harvey, and as the speaking ended robert porter stepped up behind clemens and threw over his shoulders the scarlet oxford robe which had been surreptitiously brought, and placed the mortar-board cap upon his head, while the diners vociferated their approval. clemens was quite calm. “i like this,” he said, when the noise had subsided. “i like its splendid color. i would dress that way all the time, if i dared.” in the cab going home i mentioned the success of his speech, how well it had been received. “yes,” he said; “but then i have the advantage of knowing now that i am likely to be favorably received, whatever i say. i know that my audiences are warm and responseful. it is an immense advantage to feel that. there are cold places in almost every speech, and if your audience notices them and becomes cool, you get a chill yourself in those zones, and it is hard to warm up again. perhaps there haven't been so many lately; but i have been acquainted with them more than once.” and then i could not help remembering that deadly whittier birthday speech of more than thirty years before--that bleak, arctic experience from beginning to end. “we have just time for four games,” he said, as we reached the billiard-room; but there was no sign of stopping when the four games were over. we were winning alternately, and neither noted the time. i was leaving by an early train, and was willing to play all night. the milk-wagons were rattling outside when he said: “well, perhaps we'd better quit now. it seems pretty early, though.” i looked at my watch. it was quarter to four, and we said good night. cclxvi. a winter in bermuda edmund clarence stedman died suddenly at his desk, january , , and clemens, in response to telegrams, sent this message: i do not wish to talk about it. he was a valued friend from days that date back thirty-five years. his loss stuns me and unfits me to speak. he recalled the new england dinners which he used to attend, and where he had often met stedman. “those were great affairs,” he said. “they began early, and they ended early. i used to go down from hartford with the feeling that it wasn't an all-night supper, and that it was going to be an enjoyable time. choate and depew and stedman were in their prime then--we were all young men together. their speeches were always worth listening to. stedman was a prominent figure there. there don't seem to be any such men now--or any such occasions.” stedman was one of the last of the old literary group. aldrich had died the year before. howells and clemens were the lingering “last leaves.” clemens gave some further luncheon entertainments to his friends, and added the feature of “doe” luncheons--pretty affairs where, with clara clemens as hostess, were entertained a group of brilliant women, such as mrs. kate douglas riggs, geraldine farrax, mrs. robert collier, mrs. frank doubleday, and others. i cannot report those luncheons, for i was not present, and the drift of the proceedings came to me later in too fragmentary a form to be used as history; but i gathered from clemens himself that he had done all of the talking, and i think they must have been very pleasant afternoons. among the acknowledgments that followed one of these affairs is this characteristic word-play from mrs. riggs: n. b.--a lady who is invited to and attends a doe luncheon is, of course, a doe. the question is, if she attends two doe luncheons in succession is she a doe-doe? if so is she extinct and can never attend a third? luncheons and billiards, however, failed to give sufficient brightness to the dull winter days, or to insure him against an impending bronchial attack, and toward the end of january he sailed away to bermuda, where skies were bluer and roadsides gay with bloom. his sojourn was brief this time, but long enough to cure him, he said, and he came back full of happiness. he had been driving about over the island with a newly adopted granddaughter, little margaret blackmer, whom he had met one morning in the hotel dining-room. a part of his dictated story will convey here this pretty experience. my first day in bermuda paid a dividend--in fact a double dividend: it broke the back of my cold and it added a jewel to my collection. as i entered the breakfast-room the first object i saw in that spacious and far-reaching place was a little girl seated solitary at a table for two. i bent down over her and patted her cheek and said: “i don't seem to remember your name; what is it?” by the sparkle in her brown eyes it amused her. she said: “why, you've never known it, mr. clemens, because you've never seen me before.” “why, that is true, now that i come to think; it certainly is true, and it must be one of the reasons why i have forgotten your name. but i remember it now perfectly--it's mary.” she was amused again; amused beyond smiling; amused to a chuckle, and she said: “oh no, it isn't; it's margaret.” i feigned to be ashamed of my mistake and said: “ah, well, i couldn't have made that mistake a few years ago; but i am old, and one of age's earliest infirmities is a damaged memory; but i am clearer now--clearer-headed--it all comes back to me just as if it were yesterday. it's margaret holcomb.” she was surprised into a laugh this time, the rippling laugh that a happy brook makes when it breaks out of the shade into the sunshine, and she said: “oh, you are wrong again; you don't get anything right. it isn't holcomb, it's blackmer.” i was ashamed again, and confessed it; then: “how old are you, dear?” “twelve; new-year's. twelve and a month.” we were close comrades-inseparables, in fact-for eight days. every day we made pedestrian excursions--called them that anyway, and honestly they were intended for that, and that is what they would have been but for the persistent intrusion of a gray and grave and rough-coated donkey by the name of maud. maud was four feet long; she was mounted on four slender little stilts, and had ears that doubled her altitude when she stood them up straight. her tender was a little bit of a cart with seat room for two in it, and you could fall out of it without knowing it, it was so close to the ground. this battery was in command of a nice, grave, dignified, gentlefaced little black boy whose age was about twelve, and whose name, for some reason or other, was reginald. reginald and maud--i shall not easily forget those names, nor the combination they stood for. the trips going and coming were five or six miles, and it generally took us three hours to make it. this was because maud set the pace. whenever she detected an ascending grade she respected it; she stopped and said with her ears: “this is getting unsatisfactory. we will camp here.” the whole idea of these excursions was that margaret and i should employ them for the gathering of strength, by walking, yet we were oftener in the cart than out of it. she drove and i superintended. in the course of the first excursions i found a beautiful little shell on the beach at spanish point; its hinge was old and dry, and the two halves came apart in my hand. i gave one of them to margaret and said: “now dear, sometime or other in the future i shall run across you somewhere, and it may turn out that it is not you at all, but will be some girl that only resembles you. i shall be saying to myself 'i know that this is a margaret by the look of her, but i don't know for sure whether this is my margaret or somebody else's'; but, no matter, i can soon find out, for i shall take my half shell out of my pocket and say, 'i think you are my margaret, but i am not certain; if you are my margaret you can produce the other half of this shell.'” next morning when i entered the breakfast-room and saw the child i approached and scanned her searchingly all over, then said, sadly: “no, i am mistaken; it looks like my margaret,--but it isn't, and i am so sorry. i shall go away and cry now.” her eyes danced triumphantly, and she cried out: “no, you don't have to. there!” and she fetched out the identifying shell. i was beside myself with gratitude and joyful surprise, and revealed it from every pore. the child could not have enjoyed this thrilling little drama more if we had been playing it on the stage. many times afterward she played the chief part herself, pretending to be in doubt as to my identity and challenging me to produce my half of the shell. she was always hoping to catch me without it, but i always defeated that game--wherefore she came to recognize at last that i was not only old, but very smart. sometimes, when they were not walking or driving, they sat on the veranda, and he prepared history-lessons for little margaret by making grotesque figures on cards with numerous legs and arms and other fantastic symbols end features to fix the length of some king's reign. for william the conqueror, for instance, who reigned twenty-one years, he drew a figure of eleven legs and ten arms. it was the proper method of impressing facts upon the mind of a child. it carried him back to those days at elmira when he had arranged for his own little girls the game of kings. a miss wallace, a friend of margaret's, and usually one of the pedestrian party, has written a dainty book of those bermudian days.--[mark twain and the happy islands, by elizabeth wallace.] miss wallace says: margaret felt for him the deep affection that children have for an older person who understands them and treats them with respect. mr. clemens never talked down to her, but considered her opinions with a sweet dignity. there were some pretty sequels to the shell incident. after mark twain had returned to new york, and margaret was there, she called one day with her mother, and sent up her card. he sent back word, saying: “i seem to remember the name; but if this is really the person whom i think it is she can identify herself by a certain shell i once gave her, of which i have the other half. if the two halves fit, i shall know that this is the same little margaret that i remember.” the message went down, and the other half of the shell was promptly sent up. mark twain had the two half-shells incised firmly in gold, and one of these he wore on his watch-fob, and sent the other to margaret. he afterward corresponded with margaret, and once wrote her: i'm already making mistakes. when i was in new york, six weeks ago, i was on a corner of fifth avenue and i saw a small girl--not a big one--start across from the opposite corner, and i exclaimed to myself joyfully, “that is certainly my margaret!” so i rushed to meet her. but as she came nearer i began to doubt, and said to myself, “it's a margaret--that is plain enough--but i'm afraid it is somebody else's.” so when i was passing her i held my shell so she couldn't help but see it. dear, she only glanced at it and passed on! i wondered if she could have overlooked it. it seemed best to find out; so i turned and followed and caught up with her, and said, deferentially; “dear miss, i already know your first name by the look of you, but would you mind telling me your other one?” she was vexed and said pretty sharply, “it's douglas, if you're so anxious to know. i know your name by your looks, and i'd advise you to shut yourself up with your pen and ink and write some more rubbish. i am surprised that they allow you to run' at large. you are likely to get run over by a baby-carriage any time. run along now and don't let the cows bite you.” what an idea! there aren't any cows in fifth avenue. but i didn't smile; i didn't let on to perceive how uncultured she was. she was from the country, of course, and didn't know what a comical blunder. she was making. mr. rogers's health was very poor that winter, and clemens urged him to try bermuda, and offered to go back with him; so they sailed away to the summer island, and though margaret was gone, there was other entertaining company--other granddaughters to be adopted, and new friends and old friends, and diversions of many sorts. mr. rogers's son-in-law, william evarts benjamin, came down and joined the little group. it was one of mark twain's real holidays. mr. rogers's health improved rapidly, and mark twain was in fine trim. to mrs. rogers, at the end of the first week, he wrote: dear mrs. rogers, he is getting along splendidly! this was the very place for him. he enjoys himself & is as quarrelsome as a cat. but he will get a backset if benjamin goes home. benjamin is the brightest man in these regions, & the best company. bright? he is much more than that, he is brilliant. he keeps the crowd intensely alive. with love & all good wishes. s. l. c. mark twain and henry rogers were much together and much observed. they were often referred to as “the king” and “the rajah,” and it was always a question whether it was “the king” who took care of “the rajah,” or vice versa. there was generally a group to gather around them, and clemens was sure of an attentive audience, whether he wanted to air his philosophies, his views of the human race, or to read aloud from the verses of kipling. “i am not fond of all poetry,” he would say; “but there's something in kipling that appeals to me. i guess he's just about my level.” miss wallace recalls certain kipling readings in his room, when his friends gathered to listen. on those kipling evenings the 'mise-en-scene' was a striking one. the bare hotel room, the pine woodwork and pine furniture, loose windows which rattled in the sea-wind. once in a while a gust of asthmatic music from the spiritless orchestra downstairs came up the hallway. yellow, unprotected gas-lights burned uncertainly, and mark twain in the midst of this lay on his bed (there was no couch) still in his white serge suit, with the light from the jet shining down on the crown of his silver hair, making it gleam and glisten like frosted threads. in one hand he held his book, in the other he had his pipe, which he used principally to gesture with in the most dramatic passages. margaret's small successors became the earliest members of the angel fish club, which clemens concluded to organize after a visit to the spectacular bermuda aquarium. the pretty angel-fish suggested youth and feminine beauty to him, and his adopted granddaughters became angel-fish to him from that time forward. he bought little enamel angel-fish pins, and carried a number of them with him most of the time, so that he could create membership on short notice. it was just another of the harmless and happy diversions of his gentler side. he was always fond of youth and freshness. he regarded the decrepitude of old age as an unnecessary part of life. often he said: “if i had been helping the almighty when, he created man, i would have had him begin at the other end, and start human beings with old age. how much better it would have been to start old and have all the bitterness and blindness of age in the beginning! one would not mind then if he were looking forward to a joyful youth. think of the joyous prospect of growing young instead of old! think of looking forward to eighteen instead of eighty! yes, the almighty made a poor job of it. i wish he had invited my assistance.” to one of the angel fish he wrote, just after his return: i miss you, dear. i miss bermuda, too, but not so much as i miss you; for you were rare, and occasional and select, and ltd.; whereas bermuda's charms and, graciousnesses were free and common and unrestricted--like the rain, you know, which falls upon the just and the unjust alike; a thing which would not happen if i were superintending the rain's affairs. no, i would rain softly and sweetly upon the just, but whenever i caught a sample of the unjust outdoors i would drown him. cclxvii. views and addresses [as i am beginning this chapter, april , , the news comes of the loss, on her first trip, of the great white star line steamer titanic, with the destruction of many passengers, among whom are frank d. millet, william t. stead, isadore straus, john jacob astor, and other distinguished men. they died as heroes, remaining with the ship in order that the women and children might be saved. it was the kind of death frank millet would have wished to die. he was always a soldier--a knight. he has appeared from time to time in these pages, for he was a dear friend of the clemens household. one of america's foremost painters; at the time of his death he was head of the american academy of arts in rome.] mark twain made a number of addresses during the spring of . he spoke at the cartoonists' dinner, very soon after his return from bermuda; he spoke at the booksellers' banquet, expressing his debt of obligation to those who had published and sold his books; he delivered a fine address at the dinner given by the british schools and university club at delmonico's, may th, in honor of queen victoria's birthday. in that speech he paid high tribute to the queen for her attitude toward america, during the crisis of the civil wax, and to her royal consort, prince albert. what she did for us in america in our time of storm and stress we shall not forget, and whenever we call it to mind we shall always gratefully remember the wise and righteous mind that guided her in it and sustained and supported her--prince albert's. we need not talk any idle talk here to-night about either possible or impossible war between two countries; there will be no war while we remain sane and the son of victoria and albert sits upon the throne. in conclusion, i believe i may justly claim to utter the voice of my country in saying that we hold him in deep honor, and also in cordially wishing him a long life and a happy reign. but perhaps his most impressive appearance was at the dedication of the great city college (may , ), where president john finley, who had been struggling along with insufficient room, was to have space at last for his freer and fuller educational undertakings. a great number of honored scholars, statesmen, and diplomats assembled on the college campus, a spacious open court surrounded by stately college architecture of medieval design. these distinguished guests were clad in their academic robes, and the procession could not have been widely different from that one at oxford of a year before. but there was something rather fearsome about it, too. a kind of scaffolding had been reared in the center of the campus for the ceremonies; and when those grave men in their robes of state stood grouped upon it the picture was strikingly suggestive of one of george cruikshank's drawings of an execution scene at the tower of london. many of the robes were black--these would be the priests--and the few scarlet ones would be the cardinals who might have assembled for some royal martyrdom. there was a bright may sunlight over it all, one of those still, cool brightnesses which served to heighten the weird effect. i am sure that others felt it besides myself, for everybody seemed wordless and awed, even at times when there was no occasion for silence. there was something of another age about the whole setting, to say the least. we left the place in a motor-car, a crowd of boys following after. as clemens got in they gathered around the car and gave the college yell, ending with “twain! twain! twain!” and added three cheers for tom sawyer, huck finn, and pudd'nhead wilson. they called for a speech, but he only said a few words in apology for not granting their request. he made a speech to them that night at the waldorf--where he proposed for the city college a chair of citizenship, an idea which met with hearty applause. in the same address he referred to the “god trust” motto on the coins, and spoke approvingly of the president's order for its removal. we do not trust in god, in the important matters of life, and not even a minister of the gospel will take any coin for a cent more than its accepted value because of that motto. if cholera should ever reach these shores we should probably pray to be delivered from the plague, but we would put our main trust in the board of health. next morning, commenting on the report of this speech, he said: “if only the reporters would not try to improve on what i say. they seem to miss the fact that the very art of saying a thing effectively is in its delicacy, and as they can't reproduce the manner and intonation in type they make it emphatic and clumsy in trying to convey it to the reader.” i pleaded that the reporters were often young men, eager, and unmellowed in their sense of literary art. “yes,” he agreed, “they are so afraid their readers won't see my good points that they set up red flags to mark them and beat a gong. they mean well, but i wish they wouldn't do it.” he referred to the portion of his speech concerning the motto on the coins. he had freely expressed similar sentiments on other public occasions, and he had received a letter criticizing him for saying that we do not really trust in god in any financial matter. “i wanted to answer it,” he said; “but i destroyed it. it didn't seem worth noticing.” i asked how the motto had originated. “about some idiot in congress wanted to announce to the world that this was a religious nation, and proposed putting it there, and no other congressman had courage enough to oppose it, of course. it took courage in those days to do a thing like that; but i think the same thing would happen to-day.” “still the country has become broader. it took a brave man before the civil war to confess he had read the 'age of reason'.” “so it did, and yet that seems a mild book now. i read it first when i was a cub pilot, read it with fear and hesitation, but marveling at its fearlessness and wonderful power. i read it again a year or two ago, for some reason, and was amazed to see how tame it had become. it seemed that paine was apologizing everywhere for hurting the feelings of the reader.” he drifted, naturally, into a discussion of the knickerbocker trust company's suspension, which had tied up some fifty-five thousand dollars of his capital, and wondered how many were trusting in god for the return of these imperiled sums. clemens himself, at this time, did not expect to come out whole from that disaster. he had said very little when the news came, though it meant that his immediate fortunes were locked up, and it came near stopping the building activities at redding. it was only the smaller things of life that irritated him. he often met large calamities with a serenity which almost resembled indifference. in the knickerbocker situation he even found humor as time passed, and wrote a number of gay letters, some of which found their way into print. it should be added that in the end there was no loss to any of the knickerbocker depositors. cclxviii. redding the building of the new home at redding had been going steadily forward for something more than a year. john mead howells had made the plans; w. w. sunderland and his son philip, of danbury, connecticut, were the builders, and in the absence of miss clemens, then on a concert tour, mark twain's secretary, miss i. v. lyon, had superintended the furnishing. “innocence at home,” as the place was originally named, was to be ready for its occupant in june, with every detail in place, as he desired. he had never visited redding; he had scarcely even glanced at the plans or discussed any of the decorations of the new home. he had required only that there should be one great living-room for the orchestrelle, and another big room for the billiard-table, with plenty of accommodations for guests. he had required that the billiard-room be red, for something in his nature answered to the warm luxury of that color, particularly in moments of diversion. besides, his other billiard-rooms had been red, and such association may not be lightly disregarded. his one other requirement was that the place should be complete. “i don't want to see it,” he said, “until the cat is purring on the hearth.” howells says: “he had grown so weary of change, and so indifferent to it, that he was without interest.” but it was rather, i think, that he was afraid of losing interest by becoming wearied with details which were likely to exasperate him; also, he wanted the dramatic surprise of walking into a home that had been conjured into existence as with a word. it was expected that the move would be made early in the month; but there were delays, and it was not until the th of june that he took possession. the plan, at this time, was only to use the redding place as a summer residence, and the fifth avenue house was not dismantled. a few days before the th the servants, with one exception, were taken up to the new house, clemens and myself remaining in the loneliness of no. , attending to the letters in the morning and playing billiards the rest of the time, waiting for the appointed day and train. it was really a pleasant three days. he invented a new game, and we were riotous and laughed as loudly as we pleased. i think he talked very little of the new home which he was so soon to see. it was referred to no oftener than once or twice a day, and then i believe only in connection with certain of the billiard-room arrangements. i have wondered since what picture of it he could have had in his mind, for he had never seen a photograph. he had a general idea that it was built upon a hill, and that its architecture was of the italian villa order. i confess i had moments of anxiety, for i had selected the land for him, and had been more or less accessory otherwise. i did not really worry, for i knew how beautiful and peaceful it all was; also something of his taste and needs. it had been a dry spring, and country roads were dusty, so that those who were responsible had been praying for rain, to be followed by a pleasant day for his arrival. both petitions were granted; june th would fall on thursday, and monday night there came a good, thorough, and refreshing shower that washed the vegetation clean and laid the dust. the morning of the th was bright and sunny and cool. clemens was up and shaved by six o'clock in order to be in time, though the train did not leave until four in the afternoon--an express newly timed to stop at redding--its first trip scheduled for the day of mark twain's arrival. we were still playing billiards when word was brought up that the cab was waiting. my daughter, louise, whose school on long island had closed that day, was with us. clemens wore his white flannels and a panama hat, and at the station a group quickly collected, reporters and others, to interview him and speed him to his new home. he was cordial and talkative, and quite evidently full of pleasant anticipation. a reporter or two and a special photographer came along, to be present at his arrival. the new, quick train, the green, flying landscape, with glimpses of the sound and white sails, the hillsides and clear streams becoming rapidly steeper and dearer as we turned northward: all seemed to gratify him, and when he spoke at all it was approvingly. the hour and a half required to cover the sixty miles of distance seemed very short. as the train slowed down for the redding station, he said: “we'll leave this box of candy”--he had bought a large box on the way--“those colored porters sometimes like candy, and we can get some more.” he drew out a great handful of silver. “give them something--give everybody liberally that does any service.” there was a sort of open-air reception in waiting. redding had recognized the occasion as historic. a varied assemblage of vehicles festooned with flowers had gathered to offer a gallant country welcome. it was now a little before six o'clock of that long june day, still and dreamlike; and to the people assembled there may have been something which was not quite reality in the scene. there was a tendency to be very still. they nodded, waved their hands to him, smiled, and looked their fill; but a spell lay upon them, and they did not cheer. it would have been a pity if they had done so. a noise, and the illusion would have been shattered. his carriage led away on the three-mile drive to the house on the hilltop, and the floral turnout fell in behind. no first impression of a fair land could have come at a sweeter time. hillsides were green, fields were white with daisies, dog-wood and laurel shone among the trees. and over all was the blue sky, and everywhere the fragrance of june. he was very quiet as we drove along. once with gentle humor, looking over a white daisy field, he said: “that is buckwheat. i always recognize buckwheat when i see it. i wish i knew as much about other things as i know about buckwheat. it seems to be very plentiful here; it even grows by the roadside.” and a little later: “this is the kind of a road i like; a good country road through the woods.” the water was flowing over the mill-dam where the road crosses the saugatuck, and he expressed approval of that clear, picturesque little river, one of those charming connecticut streams. a little farther on a brook cascaded down the hillside, and he compared it with some of the tiny streams of switzerland, i believe the giessbach. the lane that led to the new home opened just above, and as he entered the leafy way he said, “this is just the kind of a lane i like,” thus completing his acceptance of everything but the house and the location. the last of the procession had dropped away at the entrance of the lane, and he was alone with those who had most anxiety for his verdict. they had not long to wait. as the carriage ascended higher to the open view he looked away, across the saugatuck valley to the nestling village and church-spire and farm-houses, and to the distant hills, and declared the land to be a good land and beautiful--a spot to satisfy one's soul. then came the house--simple and severe in its architecture--an italian villa, such as he had known in florence, adapted now to american climate and needs. the scars of building had not all healed yet, but close to the house waved green grass and blooming flowers that might have been there always. neither did the house itself look new. the soft, gray stucco had taken on a tone that melted into the sky and foliage of its background. at the entrance his domestic staff waited to greet him, and then he stepped across the threshold into the wide hall and stood in his own home for the first time in seventeen years. it was an anxious moment, and no one spoke immediately. but presently his eye had taken in the satisfying harmony of the place and followed on through the wide doors that led to the dining-room--on through the open french windows to an enchanting vista of tree-tops and distant farmside and blue hills. he said, very gently: “how beautiful it all is? i did not think it could be as beautiful as this.” he was taken through the rooms; the great living-room at one end of the hall--a room on the walls of which there was no picture, but only color-harmony--and at the other end of the hall, the splendid, glowing billiard-room, where hung all the pictures in which he took delight. then to the floor above, with its spacious apartments and a continuation of color--welcome and concord, the windows open to the pleasant evening hills. when he had seen it all--the natural italian garden below the terraces; the loggia, whose arches framed landscape vistas and formed a rare picture-gallery; when he had completed the round and stood in the billiard-room--his especial domain--once more he said, as a final verdict: “it is a perfect house--perfect, so far as i can see, in every detail. it might have been here always.” he was at home there from that moment--absolutely, marvelously at home, for he fitted the setting perfectly, and there was not a hitch or flaw in his adaptation. to see him over the billiard-table, five minutes later, one could easily fancy that mark twain, as well as the house, had “been there always.” only the presence of his daughters was needed now to complete his satisfaction in everything. there were guests that first evening--a small home dinner-party--and so perfect were the appointments and service, that one not knowing would scarcely have imagined it to be the first dinner served in that lovely room. a little later; at the foot of the garden of bay and cedar, neighbors, inspired by dan beard, who had recently located near by, set off some fireworks. clemens stepped out on the terrace and saw rockets climbing through the summer sky to announce his arrival. “i wonder why they all go to so much trouble for me,” he said, softly. “i never go to any trouble for anybody”--a statement which all who heard it, and all his multitude of readers in every land, stood ready to deny. that first evening closed with billiards--boisterous, triumphant billiards--and when with midnight the day ended and the cues were set in the rack, there was none to say that mark twain's first day in his new home had not been a happy one. cclxix. first days at stormfield i went up next afternoon, for i knew how he dreaded loneliness. we played billiards for a time, then set out for a walk, following the long drive to the leafy lane that led to my own property. presently he said: “in one way i am sorry i did not see this place sooner. i never want to leave it again. if i had known it was so beautiful i should have vacated the house in town and moved up here permanently.” i suggested that he could still do so, if he chose, and he entered immediately into the idea. by and by we turned down a deserted road, grassy and beautiful, that ran along his land. at one side was a slope facing the west, and dotted with the slender, cypress-like cedars of new england. he had asked if that were part of his land, and on being told it was he said: “i would like howells to have a house there. we must try to give that to howells.” at the foot of the hill we came to a brook and followed it into a meadow. i told him that i had often caught fine trout there, and that soon i would bring in some for breakfast. he answered: “yes, i should like that. i don't care to catch them any more myself. i like them very hot.” we passed through some woods and came out near my own ancient little house. he noticed it and said: “the man who built that had some memory of greece in his mind when he put on that little porch with those columns.” my second daughter, frances, was coming from a distant school on the evening train, and the carriage was starting just then to bring her. i suggested that perhaps he would find it pleasant to make the drive. “yes,” he agreed, “i should enjoy that.” so i took the reins, and he picked up little joy, who came running out just then, and climbed into the back seat. it was another beautiful evening, and he was in a talkative humor. joy pointed out a small turtle in the road, and he said: “that is a wild turtle. do you think you could teach it arithmetic?” joy was uncertain. “well,” he went on, “you ought to get an arithmetic--a little ten-cent arithmetic--and teach that turtle.” we passed some swampy woods, rather dim and junglelike. “those,” he said, “are elephant woods.” but joy answered: “they are fairy woods. the fairies are there, but you can't see them because they wear magic cloaks.” he said: “i wish i had one of those magic cloaks, sometimes. i had one once, but it is worn out now.” joy looked at him reverently, as one who had once been the owner of a piece of fairyland. it was a sweet drive to and from the village. there are none too many such evenings in a lifetime. colonel harvey's little daughter, dorothy, came up a day or two later, and with my daughter louise spent the first week with him in the new home. they were created “angel-fishes”--the first in the new aquarium; that is to say, the billiard-room, where he followed out the idea by hanging a row of colored prints of bermuda fishes in a sort of frieze around the walls. each visiting member was required to select one as her particular patron fish and he wrote her name upon it. it was his delight to gather his juvenile guests in this room and teach them the science of billiard angles; but it was so difficult to resist taking the cue and making plays himself that he was required to stand on a little platform and give instruction just out of reach. his snowy flannels and gleaming white hair, against those rich red walls, with those small, summer-clad players, made a pretty picture. the place did not retain its original name. he declared that it would always be “innocence at home” to the angel-fish visitors, but that the title didn't remain continuously appropriate. the money which he had derived from captain stormfield's visit to heaven had been used to build the loggia wing, and he considered the name of “stormfield” as a substitute. when, presently, the summer storms gathered on that rock-bound, open hill, with its wide reaches of vine and shrub-wild, fierce storms that bent the birch and cedar, and strained at the bay and huckleberry, with lightning and turbulent wind and thunder, followed by the charging rain--the name seemed to become peculiarly appropriate. standing with his head bared to the tumult, his white hair tossing in the blast, and looking out upon the wide splendor of the spectacle, he rechristened the place, and “stormfield” it became and remained. the last day of mark twain's first week in redding, june th, was saddened by the news of the death of grover cleveland at his home in princeton, new jersey. clemens had always been an ardent cleveland admirer, and to mrs. cleveland now he sent this word of condolence-- your husband was a man i knew and loved and honored for twenty-five years. i mourn with you. and once during the evening he said: “he was one of our two or three real presidents. there is none to take his place.” cclxx. the aldrich memorial. at the end of june came the dedication at portsmouth, new hampshire, of the thomas bailey aldrich memorial museum, which the poet's wife had established there in the old aldrich homestead. it was hot weather. we were obliged to take a rather poor train from south norwalk, and clemens was silent and gloomy most of the way to boston. once there, however, lodged in a cool and comfortable hotel, matters improved. he had brought along for reading the old copy of sir thomas malory's arthur tales, and after dinner he took off his clothes and climbed into bed and sat up and read aloud from those stately legends, with comments that i wish i could remember now, only stopping at last when overpowered with sleep. we went on a special train to portsmouth next morning through the summer heat, and assembled, with those who were to speak, in the back portion of the opera-house, behind the scenes: clemens was genial and good-natured with all the discomfort of it; and he liked to fancy, with howells, who had come over from kittery point, how aldrich must be amused at the whole circumstance if he could see them punishing themselves to do honor to his memory. richard watson gilder was there, and hamilton mabie; also governor floyd of new hampshire; colonel higginson, robert bridges, and other distinguished men. we got to the more open atmosphere of the stage presently, and the exercises began. clemens was last on the program. the others had all said handsome, serious things, and clemens himself had mentally prepared something of the sort; but when his turn came, and he rose to speak, a sudden reaction must have set in, for he delivered an address that certainly would have delighted aldrich living, and must have delighted him dead, if he could hear it. it was full of the most charming humor, delicate, refreshing, and spontaneous. the audience, that had been maintaining a proper gravity throughout, showed its appreciation in ripples of merriment that grew presently into genuine waves of laughter. he spoke out his regret for having worn black clothes. it was a mistake, he said, to consider this a solemn time--aldrich would not have wished it to be so considered. he had been a man who loved humor and brightness and wit, and had helped to make life merry and delightful. certainly, if he could know, he would not wish this dedication of his own home to be a lugubrious, smileless occasion. outside, when the services were ended, the venerable juvenile writer, j. t. trowbridge, came up to clemens with extended hand. clemens said: “trowbridge, are you still alive? you must be a thousand years old. why, i listened to your stories while i was being rocked in the cradle.” trowbridge said: “mark, there's some mistake. my earliest infant smile was wakened with one of your jokes.” they stood side by side against a fence in the blazing sun and were photographed--an interesting picture. we returned to boston that evening. clemens did not wish to hurry in the summer heat, and we remained another day quietly sight-seeing, and driving around and around commonwealth avenue in a victoria in the cool of the evening. once, remembering aldrich, he said: “i was just planning tom sawyer when he was beginning the 'story of a bad boy'. when i heard that he was writing that i thought of giving up mine, but aldrich insisted that it would be a foolish thing to do. he thought my missouri boy could not by any chance conflict with his boy of new england, and of course he was right.” he spoke of how great literary minds usually came along in company. he said: “now and then, on the stream of time, small gobs of that thing which we call genius drift down, and a few of these lodge at some particular point, and others collect about them and make a sort of intellectual island--a towhead, as they say on the river--such an accumulation of intellect we call a group, or school, and name it. “thirty years ago there was the cambridge group. now there's been still another, which included aldrich and howells and stedman and cable. it will soon be gone. i suppose they will have to name it by and by.” he pointed out houses here and there of people he had known and visited in other days. the driver was very anxious to go farther, to other and more distinguished sights. clemens mildly but firmly refused any variation of the program, and so we kept on driving around and around the shaded loop of beacon street until dusk fell and the lights began to twinkle among the trees. cclxxi. death of “sam” moffett clemens' next absence from redding came on august , , when the sudden and shocking news was received of the drowning of his nephew, samuel e. moffett, in the surf of the jersey shore. moffett was his nearest male relative, and a man of fine intellect and talents. he was superior in those qualities which men love--he was large-minded and large-hearted, and of noble ideals. with much of the same sense of humor which had made his uncle's fame, he had what was really an abnormal faculty of acquiring and retaining encyclopedic data. once as a child he had visited hartford when clemens was laboring over his history game. the boy was much interested, and asked permission to help. his uncle willingly consented, and referred him to the library for his facts. but he did not need to consult the books; he already had english history stored away, and knew where to find every detail of it. at the time of his death moffett held an important editorial position on collier's weekly. clemens was fond and proud of his nephew. returning from the funeral, he was much depressed, and a day or two later became really ill. he was in bed for a few days, resting, he said, after the intense heat of the journey. then he was about again and proposed billiards as a diversion. we were all alone one very still, warm august afternoon playing, when he suddenly said: “i feel a little dizzy; i will sit down a moment.” i brought him a glass of water and he seemed to recover, but when he rose and started to play i thought he had a dazed look. he said: “i have lost my memory. i don't know which is my ball. i don't know what game we are playing.” but immediately this condition passed, and we thought little of it, considering it merely a phase of biliousness due to his recent journey. i have been told since, by eminent practitioners, that it was the first indication of a more serious malady. he became apparently quite himself again and showed his usual vigor-light of step and movement, able to skip up and down stairs as heretofore. in a letter to mrs. crane, august th, he spoke of recent happenings: dear aunt sue,--it was a most moving, a most heartbreaking sight, the spectacle of that stunned & crushed & inconsolable family. i came back here in bad shape, & had a bilious collapse, but i am all right again, though the doctor from new york has given peremptory orders that i am not to stir from here before frost. o fortunate sam moffett! fortunate livy clemens! doubly fortunate susy! those swords go through & through my heart, but there is never a moment that i am not glad, for the sake of the dead, that they have escaped. how livy would love this place! how her very soul would steep itself thankfully in this peace, this tranquillity, this deep stillness, this dreamy expanse of woodsy hill & valley! you must come, aunt sue, & stay with us a real good visit. since june we have had guests, & they have all liked it and said they would come again. to howells, on the same day, he wrote: won't you & mrs. howells & mildred come & give us as many days as you can spare & examine john's triumph? it is the most satisfactory house i am acquainted with, & the most satisfactorily situated.. .. i have dismissed my stenographer, & have entered upon a holiday whose other end is the cemetery. cclxxii. stormfield adventures clemens had fully decided, by this time, to live the year round in the retirement at stormfield, and the house at fifth avenue was being dismantled. he had also, as he said, given up his dictations for the time, at least, after continuing them, with more or less regularity, for a period of two and a half years, during which he had piled up about half a million words of comment and reminiscence. his general idea had been to add portions of this matter to his earlier books as the copyrights expired, to give them new life and interest, and he felt that he had plenty now for any such purpose. he gave his time mainly to his guests, his billiards, and his reading, though of course he could not keep from writing on this subject and that as the fancy moved him, and a drawer in one of his dressers began to accumulate fresh though usually fragmentary manuscripts... he read the daily paper, but he no longer took the keen, restless interest in public affairs. new york politics did not concern him any more, and national politics not much. when the evening post wrote him concerning the advisability of renominating governor hughes he replied: if you had asked me two months ago my answer would have been prompt & loud & strong: yes, i want governor hughes renominated. but it is too late, & my mouth is closed. i have become a citizen & taxpayer of connecticut, & could not now, without impertinence, meddle in matters which are none of my business. i could not do it with impertinence without trespassing on the monopoly of another. howells speaks of mark twain's “absolute content” with his new home, and these are the proper words' to express it. he was like a storm-beaten ship that had drifted at last into a serene south sea haven. the days began and ended in tranquillity. there were no special morning regulations: one could have his breakfast at any time and at almost any place. he could have it in bed if he liked, or in the loggia or livingroom, or billiard-room. he might even have it in the diningroom, or on the terrace, just outside. guests--there were usually guests--might suit their convenience in this matter--also as to the forenoons. the afternoon brought games--that is, billiards, provided the guest knew billiards, otherwise hearts. those two games were his safety-valves, and while there were no printed requirements relating to them the unwritten code of stormfield provided that guests, of whatever age or previous faith, should engage in one or both of these diversions. clemens, who usually spent his forenoon in bed with his reading and his letters, came to the green table of skill and chance eager for the onset; if the fates were kindly, he approved of them openly. if not--well, the fates were old enough to know better, and, as heretofore, had to take the consequences. sometimes, when the weather was fine and there were no games (this was likely to be on sunday afternoons), there were drives among the hills and along the saugatuck through the bedding glen. the cat was always “purring on the hearth” at stormfield--several cats--for mark twain's fondness for this clean, intelligent domestic animal remained, to the end, one of his happiest characteristics. there were never too many cats at stormfield, and the “hearth” included the entire house, even the billiard-table. when, as was likely to happen at any time during the game, the kittens sinbad, or danbury, or billiards would decide to hop up and play with the balls, or sit in the pockets and grab at them as they went by, the game simply added this element of chance, and the uninvited player was not disturbed. the cats really owned stormfield; any one could tell that from their deportment. mark twain held the title deeds; but it was danbury and sinbad and the others that possessed the premises. they occupied any portion of the house or its furnishings at will, and they never failed to attract attention. mark twain might be preoccupied and indifferent to the comings and goings of other members of the household; but no matter what he was doing, let danbury appear in the offing and he was observed and greeted with due deference, and complimented and made comfortable. clemens would arise from the table and carry certain choice food out on the terrace to tammany, and be satisfied with almost no acknowledgment by way of appreciation. one could not imagine any home of mark twain where the cats were not supreme. in the evening, as at fifth avenue, there was music--the stately measures of the orchestrelle--while mark twain smoked and mingled unusual speculation with long, long backward dreams. it was three months from the day of arrival in redding that some guests came to stormfield without invitation--two burglars, who were carrying off some bundles of silver when they were discovered. claude, the butler, fired a pistol after them to hasten their departure, and clemens, wakened by the shots, thought the family was opening champagne and went to sleep again. it was far in the night; but neighbor h. a. lounsbury and deputy-sheriff banks were notified, and by morning the thieves were captured, though only after a pretty desperate encounter, during which the officer received a bullet-wound. lounsbury and a stormfield guest had tracked them in the dark with a lantern to bethel, a distance of some seven miles. the thieves, also their pursuers, had boarded the train there. sheriff banks was waiting at the west redding station when the train came down, and there the capture was made. it was a remarkably prompt and shrewd piece of work. clemens gave credit for its success chiefly to lounsbury, whose talents in many fields always impressed him. the thieves were taken to the redding town hall for a preliminary healing. subsequently they received severe sentences. clemens tacked this notice on his front door: notice to the next burglar there is nothing but plated ware in this house now and henceforth. you will find it in that brass thing in the dining-room over in the corner by the basket of kittens. if you want the basket put the kittens in the brass thing. do not make a noise--it disturbs the family. you will find rubbers in the front hall by that thing which has the umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, i think they call it, or pergola, or something like that. please close the door when you go away! very truly yours, s. l. clemens. cclxxiii. stormfield philosophies now came the tranquil days of the connecticut autumn. the change of the landscape colors was a constant delight to mark twain. there were several large windows in his room, and he called them his picture-gallery. the window-panes were small, and each formed a separate picture of its own that was changing almost hourly. the red tones that began to run through the foliage; the red berry bushes; the fading grass, and the little touches of sparkling frost that came every now and then at early morning; the background of distant blue hills and changing skies-these things gave his gallery a multitude of variation that no art-museums could furnish. he loved it all, and he loved to walk out in it, pacing up and down the terrace, or the long path that led to the pergola at the foot of a natural garden. if a friend came, he was willing to walk much farther; and we often descended the hill in one direction or another, though usually going toward the “gorge,” a romantic spot where a clear brook found its way through a deep and rather dangerous-looking chasm. once he was persuaded to descend into this fairy-like place, for it was well worth exploring; but his footing was no longer sure and he did not go far. he liked better to sit on the grass-grown, rocky arch above and look down into it, and let his talk follow his mood. he liked to contemplate the geology of his surroundings, the record of the ageless periods of construction required to build the world. the marvels of science always appealed to him. he reveled in the thought of the almost limitless stretches of time, the millions upon millions of years that had been required for this stratum and that--he liked to amaze himself with the sounding figures. i remember him expressing a wish to see the grand canon of arizona, where, on perpendicular walls six thousand feet high, the long story of geological creation is written. i had stopped there during my western trip of the previous year, and i told him something of its wonders. i urged him to see them for himself, offering to go with him. he said: “i should enjoy that; but the railroad journey is so far and i should have no peace. the papers would get hold of it, and i would have to make speeches and be interviewed, and i never want to do any of those things again.” i suggested that the railroads would probably be glad to place a private car at his service, so that he might travel in comfort; but he shook his head. “that would only make me more conspicuous.” “how about a disguise?” “yes,” he said, “i might put on a red wig and false whiskers and change my name, but i couldn't disguise my drawling speech and they'd find me out.” it was amusing, but it was rather sad, too. his fame had deprived him of valued privileges. he talked of many things during these little excursions. once he told how he had successively advised his nephew, moffett, in the matter of obtaining a desirable position. moffett had wanted to become a reporter. clemens devised a characteristic scheme. he said: “i will get you a place on any newspaper you may select if you promise faithfully to follow out my instructions.” the applicant agreed, eagerly enough. clemens said: “go to the newspaper of your choice. say that you are idle and want work, that you are pining for work--longing for it, and that you ask no wages, and will support yourself. all that you ask is work. that you will do anything, sweep, fill the inkstands, mucilage-bottles, run errands, and be generally useful. you must never ask for wages. you must wait until the offer of wages comes to you. you must work just as faithfully and just as eagerly as if you were being paid for it. then see what happens.” the scheme had worked perfectly. young moffett had followed his instructions to the letter. by and by he attracted attention. he was employed in a variety of ways that earned him the gratitude and the confidence of the office. in obedience to further instructions, he began to make short, brief, unadorned notices of small news matters that came under his eye and laid them on the city editor's desk. no pay was asked; none was expected. occasionally one of the items was used. then, of course, it happened, as it must sooner or later at a busy time, that he was given a small news assignment. there was no trouble about his progress after that. he had won the confidence of the management and shown that he was not afraid to work. the plan had been variously tried since, clemens said, and he could not remember any case in which it had failed. the idea may have grown out of his own pilot apprenticeship on the river, when cub pilots not only received no salary, but paid for the privilege of learning. clemens discussed public matters less often than formerly, but they were not altogether out of his mind. he thought our republic was in a fair way to become a monarchy--that the signs were already evident. he referred to the letter which he had written so long ago in boston, with its amusing fancy of the archbishop of dublin and his grace of ponkapog, and declared that, after all, it contained something of prophecy.--[see chap. xcvii; also appendix m.]--he would not live to see the actual monarchy, he said, but it was coming. “i'm not expecting it in my time nor in my children's time, though it may be sooner than we think. there are two special reasons for it and one condition. the first reason is, that it is in the nature of man to want a definite something to love, honor, reverently look up to and obey; a god and king, for example. the second reason is, that while little republics have lasted long, protected by their poverty and insignificance, great ones have not. and the condition is, vast power and wealth, which breed commercial and political corruptions, and incite public favorites to dangerous ambitions.” he repeated what i had heard him say before, that in one sense we already had a monarchy; that is to say, a ruling public and political aristocracy which could create a presidential succession. he did not say these things bitterly now, but reflectively and rather indifferently. he was inclined to speak unhopefully of the international plans for universal peace, which were being agitated rather persistently. “the gospel of peace,” he said, “is always making a deal of noise, always rejoicing in its progress but always neglecting to furnish statistics. there are no peaceful nations now. all christendom is a soldier-camp. the poor have been taxed in some nations to the starvation point to support the giant armaments which christian governments have built up, each to protect itself from the rest of the christian brotherhood, and incidentally to snatch any scrap of real estate left exposed by a weaker owner. king leopold ii. of belgium, the most intensely christian monarch, except alexander vi., that has escaped hell thus far, has stolen an entire kingdom in africa, and in fourteen years of christian endeavor there has reduced the population from thirty millions to fifteen by murder and mutilation and overwork, confiscating the labor of the helpless natives, and giving them nothing in return but salvation and a home in heaven, furnished at the last moment by the christian priest. “within the last generation each christian power has turned the bulk of its attention to finding out newer and still newer and more and more effective ways of killing christians, and, incidentally, a pagan now and then; and the surest way to get rich quickly in christ's earthly kingdom is to invent a kind of gun that can kill more christians at one shot than any other existing kind. all the christian nations are at it. the more advanced they are, the bigger and more destructive engines of war they create.” once, speaking of battles great and small, and how important even a small battle must seem to a soldier who had fought in no other, he said: “to him it is a mighty achievement, an achievement with a big a, when to a wax-worn veteran it would be a mere incident. for instance, to the soldier of one battle, san juan hill was an achievement with an a as big as the pyramids of cheops; whereas, if napoleon had fought it, he would have set it down on his cuff at the time to keep from forgetting it had happened. but that is all natural and human enough. we are all like that.” the curiosities and absurdities of religious superstitions never failed to furnish him with themes more or less amusing. i remember one sunday, when he walked down to have luncheon at my house, he sat under the shade and fell to talking of herod's slaughter of the innocents, which he said could not have happened. “tacitus makes no mention of it,” he said, “and he would hardly have overlooked a sweeping order like that, issued by a petty ruler like herod. just consider a little king of a corner of the roman empire ordering the slaughter of the first-born of a lot of roman subjects. why, the emperor would have reached out that long arm of his and dismissed herod. that tradition is probably about as authentic as those connected with a number of old bridges in europe which are said to have been built by satan. the inhabitants used to go to satan to build bridges for them, promising him the soul of the first one that crossed the bridge; then, when satan had the bridge done, they would send over a rooster or a jackass--a cheap jackass; that was for satan, and of course they could fool him that way every time. satan must have been pretty simple, even according to the new testament, or he wouldn't have led christ up on a high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall down and worship him. that was a manifestly absurd proposition, because christ, as the son of god, already owned the world; and, besides, what satan showed him was only a few rocky acres of palestine. it is just as if some one should try to buy rockefeller, the owner of all the standard oil company, with a gallon of kerosene.” he often spoke of the unseen forces of creation, the immutable laws that hold the planet in exact course and bring the years and the seasons always exactly on schedule time. “the great law” was a phrase often on his lips. the exquisite foliage, the cloud shapes, the varieties of color everywhere: these were for him outward manifestations of the great law, whose principle i understood to be unity--exact relations throughout all nature; and in this i failed to find any suggestion of pessimism, but only of justice. once he wrote on a card for preservation: from everlasting to everlasting, this is the law: the sum of wrong & misery shall always keep exact step with the sum of human blessedness. no “civilization,” no “advance,” has ever modified these proportions by even the shadow of a shade, nor ever can, while our race endures. cclxiv. citizen and farmer the procession of guests at stormfield continued pretty steadily. clemens kept a book in which visitors set down their names and the dates of arrival and departure, and when they failed to attend to these matters he diligently did it himself after they were gone. members of the harper company came up with their wives; “angel-fish” swam in and out of the aquarium; bermuda friends came to see the new home; robert collier, the publisher, and his wife--“mrs. sally,” as clemens liked to call her--paid their visits; lord northcliffe, who was visiting america, came with colonel harvey, and was so impressed with the architecture of stormfield that he adopted its plans for a country-place he was about to build in newfoundland. helen keller, with mr. and mrs. macy, came up for a week-end visit. mrs. crane came over from elmira; and, behold! one day came the long-ago sweetheart of his childhood, little laura hawkins--laura frazer now, widowed and in the seventies, with a granddaughter already a young lady quite grown up. that mark twain was not wearying of the new conditions we may gather from a letter written to mrs. rogers in october: i've grown young in these months of dissipation here. and i have left off drinking--it isn't necessary now. society & theology are sufficient for me. to helen allen, a bermuda “angel-fish,” he wrote: we have good times here in this soundless solitude on the hilltop. the moment i saw the house i was glad i built it, & now i am gladder & gladder all the time. i was not dreaming of living here except in the summer-time--that was before i saw this region & the house, you see--but that is all changed now; i shall stay here winter & summer both & not go back to new york at all. my child, it's as tranquil & contenting as bermuda. you will be very welcome here, dear. he interested himself in the affairs and in the people of redding. not long after his arrival he had gathered in all the inhabitants of the country-side, neighbors of every quality, for closer acquaintance, and threw open to them for inspection every part of the new house. he appointed mrs. lounsbury, whose acquaintance was very wide; a sort of committee on reception, and stood at the entrance with her to welcome each visitor in person. it was a sort of gala day, and the rooms and the grounds were filled with the visitors. in the dining-room there were generous refreshments. again, not long afterward, he issued a special invitation to all of those-architects, builders, and workmen who had taken any part, however great or small, in the building of his home. mr. and mrs. littleton were visiting stormfield at this time, and both clemens and littleton spoke to these assembled guests from the terrace, and made them feel that their efforts had been worth while. presently the idea developed to establish something that would be of benefit to his neighbors, especially to those who did not have access to much reading-matter. he had been for years flooded with books by authors and publishers, and there was a heavy surplus at his home in the city. when these began to arrive he had a large number of volumes set aside as the nucleus of a public library. an unused chapel not far away--it could be seen from one of his windows--was obtained for the purpose; officers were elected; a librarian was appointed, and so the mark twain library of redding was duly established. clemens himself was elected its first president, with the resident physician, dr. ernest h. smith, vice-president, and another resident, william e. grumman, librarian. on the afternoon of its opening the president made a brief address. he said: i am here to speak a few instructive words to my fellow-farmers. i suppose you are all farmers: i am going to put in a crop next year, when i have been here long enough and know how. i couldn't make a turnip stay on a tree now after i had grown it. i like to talk. it would take more than the redding air to make me keep still, and i like to instruct people. it's noble to be good, and it's nobler to teach others to be good, and less trouble. i am glad to help this library. we get our morals from books. i didn't get mine from books, but i know that morals do come from books --theoretically at least. mr. beard or mr. adams will give some land, and by and by we are going to have a building of our own. this statement was news to both mr. beard and mr. adams and an inspiration of the moment; but mr. theodore adams, who owned a most desirable site, did in fact promptly resolve to donate it for library purposes. clemens continued: i am going to help build that library with contributions from my visitors. every male guest who comes to my house will have to contribute a dollar or go away without his baggage. --[a characteristic notice to guests requiring them to contribute a dollar to the library building fund was later placed on the billiard-room mantel at stormfield with good results.]--if those burglars that broke into my house recently had done that they would have been happier now, or if they'd have broken into this library they would have read a few books and led a better life. now they are in jail, and if they keep on they will go to congress. when a person starts downhill you can never tell where he's going to stop. i am sorry for those burglars. they got nothing that they wanted and scared away most of my servants. now we are putting in a burglar-alarm instead of a dog. some advised the dog, but it costs even more to entertain a dog than a burglar. i am having the ground electrified, so that for a mile around any one who puts his foot across the line sets off an alarm that will be heard in europe. now i will introduce the real president to you, a man whom you know already--dr. smith. so a new and important benefit was conferred upon the community, and there was a feeling that redding, besides having a literary colony, was to be literary in fact. it might have been mentioned earlier that redding already had literary associations when mark twain arrived. as far back as revolutionary days joel barlow, a poet of distinction, and once minister to france, had been a resident of redding, and there were still barlow descendants in the township. william edgar grumman, the librarian, had written the story of redding's share in the revolutionary war--no small share, for gen. israel putnam's army had been quartered there during at least one long, trying winter. charles burr todd, of one of the oldest redding families, himself--still a resident, was also the author of a redding history. of literary folk not native to redding, dora reed goodale and her sister elaine, the wife of dr. charles a. eastman, had, long been residents of redding center; jeanette l. gilder and ida m. tarbell had summer homes on redding ridge; dan beard, as already mentioned, owned a place near the banks of the saugatuck, while kate v. st. maur, also two of nathaniel hawthorne's granddaughters had recently located adjoining the stormfield lands. by which it will be seen that redding was in no way unsuitable as a home for mark twain. cclxv. a mantel and a baby elephant mark twain was the receiver of two notable presents that year. the first of these, a mantel from hawaii, presented to him by the hawaiian promotion committee, was set in place in the billiard-room on the morning of his seventy-third birthday. this committee had written, proposing to build for his new home either a mantel or a chair, as he might prefer, the same to be carved from the native woods. clemens decided on a billiard-room mantel, and john howells forwarded the proper measurements. so, in due time, the mantel arrived, a beautiful piece of work and in fine condition, with the hawaiian word, “aloha,” one of the sweetest forms of greeting in any tongue, carved as its central ornament. to the donors of the gift clemens wrote: the beautiful mantel was put in its place an hour ago, & its friendly “aloha” was the first uttered greeting received on my d birthday. it is rich in color, rich in quality, & rich in decoration; therefore it exactly harmonized with the taste for such things which was born in me & which i have seldom been able to indulge to my content. it will be a great pleasure to me, daily renewed, to have under my eye this lovely reminder of the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean, & i beg to thank the committee for providing me that pleasure. to f. n. otremba, who had carved the mantel, he sent this word: i am grateful to you for the valued compliment to me in the labor of heart and hand and brain which you have put upon it. it is worthy of the choicest place in the house and it has it. it was the second beautiful mantel in stormfield--the hartford library mantel, removed when that house was sold, having been installed in the stormfield living-room. altogether the seventy-third birthday was a pleasant one. clemens, in the morning, drove down to see the library lot which mr. theodore adams had presented, and the rest of the day there were fine, close billiard games, during which he was in the gentlest and happiest moods. he recalled the games of two years before, and as we stopped playing i said: “i hope a year from now we shall be here, still playing the great game.” and he answered, as then: “yes, it is a great game--the best game on earth.” and he held out his hand and thanked me for coming, as he never failed to do when we parted, though it always hurt me a little, for the debt was so largely mine. mark twain's second present came at christmas-time. about ten days earlier, a letter came from robert j. collier, saying that he had bought a baby elephant which he intended to present to mark twain as a christmas gift. he added that it would be sent as soon as he could get a car for it, and the loan of a keeper from barnum & bailey's headquarters at bridgeport. the news created a disturbance in stormfield. one could not refuse, discourteously and abruptly, a costly present like that; but it seemed a disaster to accept it. an elephant would require a roomy and warm place, also a variety of attention which stormfield was not prepared to supply. the telephone was set going and certain timid excuses were offered by the secretary. there was no good place to put an elephant in stormfield, but mr. collier said, quite confidently: “oh, put him in the garage.” “but there's no heat in the garage.” “well, put him in the loggia, then. that's closed in, isn't it, for the winter? plenty of sunlight--just the place for a young elephant.” “but we play cards in the loggia. we use it for a sort of sun-parlor.” “but that wouldn't matter. he's a kindly, playful little thing. he'll be just like a kitten. i'll send the man up to look over the place and tell you just how to take care of him, and i'll send up several bales of hay in advance. it isn't a large elephant, you know: just a little one--a regular plaything.” there was nothing further to be done; only to wait and dread until the christmas present's arrival. a few days before christmas ten bales of hay arrived and several bushels of carrots. this store of provender aroused no enthusiasm at stormfield. it would seem there was no escape now. on christmas morning mr. lounsbury telephoned up that there was a man at the station who said he was an elephant-trainer from barnum & bailey's, sent by mr. collier to look at the elephant's quarters and get him settled when he should arrive. orders were given to bring the man over. the day of doom was at hand. but lounsbury's detective instinct came once more into play. he had seen a good many elephant-trainers at bridgeport, and he thought this one had a doubtful look. “where is the elephant?” he asked, as they drove along. “he will arrive at noon.” “where are you going to put him?” “in the loggia.” “how big is he?” “about the size of a cow.” “how long have you been with barnum and bailey?” “six years.” “then you must know some friends of mine” (naming two that had no existence until that moment). “oh yes, indeed. i know them well.” lounsbury didn't say any more just then, but he had a feeling that perhaps the dread at stormfield had grown unnecessarily large. something told him that this man seemed rather more like a butler, or a valet, than an elephant-trainer. they drove to stormfield, and the trainer looked over the place. it would do perfectly, he said. he gave a few instructions as to the care of this new household feature, and was driven back to the station to bring it. lounsbury came back by and by, bringing the elephant but not the trainer. it didn't need a trainer. it was a beautiful specimen, with soft, smooth coat and handsome trappings, perfectly quiet, well-behaved and small--suited to the loggia, as collier had said--for it was only two feet long and beautifully made of cloth and cotton--one of the forest toy elephants ever seen anywhere. it was a good joke, such as mark twain loved--a carefully prepared, harmless bit of foolery. he wrote robert collier, threatening him with all sorts of revenge, declaring that the elephant was devastating stormfield. “to send an elephant in a trance, under pretense that it was dead or stuffed!” he said. “the animal came to life, as you knew it would, and began to observe christmas, and we now have no furniture left and no servants and no visitors, no friends, no photographs, no burglars--nothing but the elephant. be kind, be merciful, be generous; take him away and send us what is left of the earthquake.” collier wrote that he thought it unkind of him to look a gift-elephant in the trunk. and with such chaffing and gaiety the year came to an end. cclxxvi. shakespeare-bacon talk when the bad weather came there was not much company at stormfield, and i went up regularly each afternoon, for it was lonely on that bleak hill, and after his forenoon of reading or writing he craved diversion. my own home was a little more than a half mile away, and i enjoyed the walk, whatever the weather. i usually managed to arrive about three o'clock. he would watch from his high windows until he saw me raise the hilltop, and he would be at the door when i arrived, so that there might be no delay in getting at the games. or, if it happened that he wished to show me something in his room, i would hear his rich voice sounding down the stair. once, when i arrived, i heard him calling, and going up i found him highly pleased with the arrangement of two pictures on a chair, placed so that the glasses of them reflected the sunlight on the ceiling. he said: “they seem to catch the reflection of the sky and the winter colors. sometimes the hues are wonderfully iridescent.” he pointed to a bunch of wild red berries on the mantel with the sun on them. “how beautifully they light up!” he said; “some of them in the sunlight, some still in the shadow.” he walked to the window and stood looking out on the somber fields. “the lights and colors are always changing there,” he said. “i never tire of it.” to see him then so full of the interest and delight of the moment, one might easily believe he had never known tragedy and shipwreck. more than any one i ever knew, he lived in the present. most of us are either dreaming of the past or anticipating the future--forever beating the dirge of yesterday or the tattoo of to-morrow. mark twain's step was timed to the march of the moment. there were days when he recalled the past and grieved over it, and when he speculated concerning the future; but his greater interest was always of the now, and of the particular locality where he found it. the thing which caught his fancy, however slight or however important, possessed him fully for the time, even if never afterward. he was especially interested that winter in the shakespeare-bacon problem. he had long been unable to believe that the actor-manager from stratford had written those great plays, and now a book just published, 'the shakespeare problem restated', by george greenwood, and another one in press, 'some characteristic signatures of francis bacon', by william stone booth, had added the last touch of conviction that francis bacon, and bacon only, had written the shakespeare dramas. i was ardently opposed to this idea. the romance of the boy, will shakespeare, who had come up to london and began, by holding horses outside of the theater, and ended by winning the proudest place in the world of letters, was something i did not wish to let perish. i produced all the stock testimony--ben jonson's sonnet, the internal evidence of the plays themselves, the actors who had published them--but he refused to accept any of it. he declared that there was not a single proof to show that shakespeare had written one of them. “is there any evidence that he didn't?” i asked. “there's evidence that he couldn't,” he said. “it required a man with the fullest legal equipment to have written them. when you have read greenwood's book you will see how untenable is any argument for shakespeare's authorship.” i was willing to concede something, and offered a compromise. “perhaps,” i said, “shakespeare was the belasoo of that day--the managerial genius, unable to write plays himself, but with the supreme gift of making effective drama from the plays of others. in that case it is not unlikely that the plays would be known as shakespeare's. even in this day john luther long's 'madam butterfly' is sometimes called belasco's play; though it is doubtful if belasco ever wrote a line of it.” he considered this view, but not very favorably. the booth book was at this time a secret, and he had not told me anything concerning it; but he had it in his mind when he said, with an air of the greatest conviction: “i know that shakespeare did not write those plays, and i have reason to believe he did not touch the text in any way.” “how can you be so positive?” i asked. he replied: “i have private knowledge from a source that cannot be questioned.” i now suspected that he was joking, and asked if he had been consulting a spiritual medium; but he was clearly in earnest. “it is the great discovery of the age,” he said, quite seriously. “the world will soon ring with it. i wish i could tell you about it, but i have passed my word. you will not have long to wait.” i was going to sail for the mediterranean in february, and i asked if it would be likely that i would know this great secret before i sailed. he thought not; but he said that more than likely the startling news would be given to the world while i was on the water, and it might come to me on the ship by wireless. i confess i was amazed and intensely curious by this time. i conjectured the discovery of some document--some bacon or shakespeare private paper which dispelled all the mystery of the authorship. i hinted that he might write me a letter which i could open on the ship; but he was firm in his refusal. he had passed his word, he repeated, and the news might not be given out as soon as that; but he assured me more than once that wherever i might be, in whatever remote locality, it would come by cable, and the world would quake with it. i was tempted to give up my trip, to be with him at stormfield at the time of the upheaval. naturally the shakespeare theme was uppermost during the remaining days that we were together. he had engaged another stenographer, and was now dictating, forenoons, his own views on the subject--views coordinated with those of mr. greenwood, whom he liberally quoted, but embellished and decorated in his own gay manner. these were chapters for his autobiography, he said, and i think he had then no intention of making a book of them. i could not quite see why he should take all this argumentary trouble if he had, as he said, positive evidence that bacon, and not shakespeare, had written the plays. i thought the whole matter very curious. the shakespeare interest had diverging by-paths. one evening, when we were alone at dinner, he said: “there is only one other illustrious man in history about whom there is so little known,” and he added, “jesus christ.” he reviewed the statements of the gospels concerning christ, though he declared them to be mainly traditional and of no value. i agreed that they contained confusing statements, and inflicted more or less with justice and reason; but i said i thought there was truth in them, too. “why do you think so?” he asked. “because they contain matters that are self-evident--things eternally and essentially just.” “then you make your own bible?” “yes, from those materials combined with human reason.” “then it does not matter where the truth, as you call it, comes from?” i admitted that the source did not matter; that truth from shakespeare, epictetus, or aristotle was quite as valuable as from the scriptures. we were on common ground now. he mentioned marcus aurelius, the stoics, and their blameless lives. i, still pursuing the thought of jesus, asked: “do you not think it strange that in that day when christ came, admitting that there was a christ, such a character could have come at all--in the time of the pharisees and the sadducees, when all was ceremony and unbelief?” “i remember,” he said, “the sadducees didn't believe in hell. he brought them one.” “nor the resurrection. he brought them that, also.” he did not admit that there had been a christ with the character and mission related by the gospels. “it is all a myth,” he said. “there have been saviours in every age of the world. it is all just a fairy tale, like the idea of santa claus.” “but,” i argued, “even the spirit of christmas is real when it is genuine. suppose that we admit there was no physical saviour--that it is only an idea--a spiritual embodiment which humanity has made for itself and is willing to improve upon as its own spirituality improves, wouldn't that make it worthy?” “but then the fairy story of the atonement dissolves, and with it crumbles the very foundations of any established church. you can create your own testament, your own scripture, and your own christ, but you've got to give up your atonement.” “as related to the crucifixion, yes, and good riddance to it; but the death of the old order and the growth of spirituality comes to a sort of atonement, doesn't it?” he said: “a conclusion like that has about as much to do with the gospels and christianity as shakespeare had to do with bacon's plays. you are preaching a doctrine that would have sent a man to the stake a few centuries ago. i have preached that in my own gospel.” i remembered then, and realized that, by my own clumsy ladder, i had merely mounted from dogma, and superstition to his platform of training the ideals to a higher contentment of soul. cclxxvii. “is shakespeare dead?” i set out on my long journey with much reluctance. however, a series of guests with various diversions had been planned, and it seemed a good time to go. clemens gave me letters of introduction, and bade me godspeed. it would be near the end of april before i should see him again. now and then on the ship, and in the course of my travels, i remembered the great news i was to hear concerning shakespeare. in cairo, at shepheard's, i looked eagerly through english newspapers, expecting any moment to come upon great head-lines; but i was always disappointed. even on the return voyage there was no one i could find who had heard any particular shakespeare news. arriving in new york, i found that clemens himself had published his shakespeare dictations in a little volume of his own, entitled, 'is shakespeare dead?' the title certainly suggested spiritistic matters, and i got a volume at harpers', and read it going up on the train, hoping to find somewhere in it a solution of the great mystery. but it was only matter i had already known; the secret was still unrevealed. at redding i lost not much time in getting up to stormfield. there had been changes in my absence. clara clemens had returned from her travels, and jean, whose health seemed improved, was coming home to be her father's secretary. he was greatly pleased with these things, and declared he was going to have a home once more with his children about him. he was quite alone that day, and we walked up and down the great living-room for an hour, perhaps, while he discussed his new plans. for one thing, he had incorporated his pen-name, mark twain, in order that the protection of his copyrights and the conduct of his literary business in general should not require his personal attention. he seemed to find a relief in this, as he always did in dismissing any kind of responsibility. when we went in for billiards i spoke of his book, which i had read on the way up, and of the great shakespearian secret which was to astonish the world. then he told me that the matter had been delayed, but that he was no longer required to suppress it; that the revelation was in the form of a book--a book which revealed conclusively to any one who would take the trouble to follow the directions that the acrostic name of francis bacon in a great variety of forms ran through many--probably through all of the so-called shakespeare plays. he said it was far and away beyond anything of the kind ever published; that ignatius donnelly and others had merely glimpsed the truth, but that the author of this book, william stone booth, had demonstrated, beyond any doubt or question, that the bacon signatures were there. the book would be issued in a few days, he said. he had seen a set of proofs of it, and while it had not been published in the best way to clearly demonstrate its great revelation, it must settle the matter with every reasoning mind. he confessed that his faculties had been more or less defeated in, attempting to follow the ciphers, and he complained bitterly that the evidence had not been set forth so that he who merely skims a book might grasp it. he had failed on the acrostics at first; but more recently he had understood the rule, and had been able to work out several bacon signatures. he complimented me by saying that he felt sure that when the book came i would have no trouble with it. without going further with this matter, i may say here that the book arrived presently, and between us we did work out a considerable number of the claimed acrostics by following the rules laid down. it was certainly an interesting if not wholly convincing occupation, and it would be a difficult task for any one to prove that the ciphers are not there. just why this pretentious volume created so little agitation it would be hard to say. certainly it did not cause any great upheaval in the literary world, and the name of william shakespeare still continues to be printed on the title-page of those marvelous dramas so long associated with his name. mark twain's own book on the subject--'is shakespeare dead?'--found a wide acceptance, and probably convinced as many readers. it contained no new arguments; but it gave a convincing touch to the old ones, and it was certainly readable.--[mark twain had the fullest conviction as to the bacon authorship of the shakespeare plays. one evening, with mr. edward loomis, we attended a fine performance of “romeo and juliet” given by sothern and marlowe. at the close of one splendid scene he said, quite earnestly, “that is about the best play that lord bacon ever wrote.”] among the visitors who had come to stormfield was howells. clemens had called a meeting of the human race club, but only howells was able to attend. we will let him tell of his visit: we got on very well without the absentees, after finding them in the wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those i used to have with him so many years before in hartford, but there was not the old ferment of subjects. many things had been discussed and put away for good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for each other, who were so differently parts of it. he showed his absolute content with his house, and that was the greater pleasure for me because it was my son who designed it. the architect had been so fortunate as to be able to plan it where a natural avenue of savins, the close- knit, slender, cypress-like cedars of new england, led away from the rear of the villa to the little level of a pergola, meant some day to be wreathed and roofed with vines. but in the early spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful nakedness of the northern winter. it opened in the surpassing loveliness of wooded and meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days blue, and the last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor. we walked up and down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for the sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now we were far past turbulence or anger. once we took a walk together across the yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far down clashed through and over the stones and the shards of ice. clemens pointed out the scenery he had bought to give himself elbowroom, and showed me the lot he was going to have me build on. the next day we came again with the geologist he had asked up to stormfield to analyze its rocks. truly he loved the place.... my visit at stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his part and on mine. every morning before i dressed i heard him sounding my name through the house for the fun of it and i know for the fondness, and if i looked out of my door there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with some one. the last morning a soft sugar-snow had fallen and was falling, and i drove through it down to the station in the carriage which had been given him by his wife's father when they were first married, and had been kept all those intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use.--[this carriage--a finely built coup--had been presented to mrs. crane when the hartford house was closed. when stormfield was built she returned it to its original owner.]--its springs had not grown yielding with time, it had rather the stiffness and severity of age; but for him it must have swung low like the sweet chariot of the negro “spiritual” which i heard him sing with such fervor when those wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way northward. howells's visit resulted in a new inspiration. clemens started to write him one night when he could not sleep, and had been reading the volume of letters of james russell lowell. then, next morning, he was seized with the notion of writing a series of letters to such friends as howells, twichell, and rogers--letters not to be mailed, but to be laid away for some future public. he wrote two of these immediately--to howells and to twichell. the howells letter (or letters, for it was really double) is both pathetic and amusing. the first part ran: in the morning, april , . my pen has gone dry and the ink is out of reach. howells, did you write me day-before-day-before yesterday or did i dream it? in my mind's eye i most vividly see your hand-write on a square blue envelope in the mail-pile. i have hunted the house over, but there is no such letter. was it an illusion? i am reading lowell's letters & smoking. i woke an hour ago & am reading to keep from wasting the time. on page , vol. i, i have just margined a note: “young friend! i like that! you ought to see him now.” it seemed startlingly strange to hear a person call you young. it was a brick out of a blue sky, & knocked me groggy for a moment. ah me, the pathos of it is that we were young then. and he--why, so was he, but he didn't know it. he didn't even know it years later, when we saw him approaching and you warned me, saying: “don't say anything about age--he has just turned & thinks he is old, & broods over it.” well, clara did sing! and you wrote her a dear letter. time to go to sleep. yours ever, mark the second letter, begun at a.m., outlines the plan by which he is to write on the subject uppermost in his mind without restraint, knowing that the letter is not to be mailed. ...the scheme furnishes a definite target for each letter, & you can choose the target that's going to be the most sympathetic for what you are hungering & thirsting to say at that particular moment. and you can talk with a quite unallowable frankness & freedom because you are not going to send the letter. when you are on fire with theology you'll not write it to rogers, who wouldn't be an inspiration; you'll write it to twichell, because it will make him writhe and squirm & break the furniture. when you are on fire with a good thing that's indecent you won't waste it on twichell; you'll save it for howells, who will love it. as he will never see it you can make it really indecenter than he could stand; & so no harm is done, yet a vast advantage is gained. the letter was not finished, and the scheme perished there. the twichell letter concerned missionaries, and added nothing to what he had already said on the subject. he wrote no letter to mr. rogers--perhaps never wrote to him again. cclxxviii. the death of henry rogers clemens, a little before my return, had been on a trip to norfolk, virginia, to attend the opening ceremonies of the virginia railway. he had made a speech on that occasion, in which he had paid a public tribute to henry rogers, and told something of his personal obligation to the financier. he began by telling what mr. rogers had done for helen keller, whom he called “the most marvelous person of her sex that has existed on this earth since joan of arc.” then he said: that is not all mr. rogers has done, but you never see that side of his character because it is never protruding; but he lends a helping hand daily out of that generous heart of his. you never hear of it. he is supposed to be a moon which has one side dark and the other bright. but the other side, though you don't see it, is not dark; it is bright, and its rays penetrate, and others do see it who are not god. i would take this opportunity to tell something that i have never been allowed to tell by mr. rogers, either by my mouth or in print, and if i don't look at him i can tell it now. in , when the publishing company of charles l. webster, of which i was financial agent, failed, it left me heavily in debt. if you will remember what commerce was at that time you will recall that you could not sell anything, and could not buy anything, and i was on my back; my books were not worth anything at all, and i could not give away my copyrights. mr. rogers had long-enough vision ahead to say, “your books have supported you before, and after the panic is over they will support you again,” and that was a correct proposition. he saved my copyrights, and saved me from financial ruin. he it was who arranged with my creditors to allow me to roam the face of the earth and persecute the nations thereof with lectures, promising at the end of four years i would pay dollar for dollar. that arrangement was made, otherwise i would now be living out-of-doors under an umbrella, and a borrowed one at that. you see his white mustache and his hair trying to get white (he is always trying to look like me--i don't blame him for that). these are only emblematic of his character, and that is all. i say, without exception, hair and all, he is the whitest man i have ever known. this had been early in april. something more than a month later clemens was making a business trip to new york to see mr. rogers. i was telephoned early to go up and look over some matters with him before he started. i do not remember why i was not to go along that day, for i usually made such trips with him. i think it was planned that miss clemens, who was in the city, was to meet him at the grand central station. at all events, she did meet him there, with the news that during the night mr. rogers had suddenly died. this was may , . the news had already come to the house, and i had lost no time in preparations to follow by the next train. i joined him at the grosvenor hotel, on fifth avenue and tenth street. he was upset and deeply troubled by the loss of his stanch adviser and friend. he had a helpless look, and he said his friends were dying away from him and leaving him adrift. “and how i hate to do anything,” he added, “that requires the least modicum of intelligence!” we remained at the grosvenor for mr. rogers's funeral. clemens served as one of the pall-bearers, but he did not feel equal to the trip to fairhaven. he wanted to be very quiet, he said. he could not undertake to travel that distance among those whom he knew so well, and with whom he must of necessity join in conversation; so we remained in the hotel apartment, reading and saying very little until bedtime. once he asked me to write a letter to jean: “say, 'your father says every little while, “how glad i am that jean is at home again!”' for that is true and i think of it all the time.” but by and by, after a long period of silence, he said: “mr. rogers is under the ground now.” and so passed out of earthly affairs the man who had contributed so largely to the comfort of mark twain's old age. he was a man of fine sensibilities and generous impulses; withal a keen sense of humor. one christmas, when he presented mark twain with a watch and a match-case, he wrote: my dear clemens,--for many years your friends have been complaining of your use of tobacco, both as to quantity and quality. complaints are now coming in of your use of time. most of your friends think that you are using your supply somewhat lavishly, but the chief complaint is in regard to the quality. i have been appealed to in the mean time, and have concluded that it is impossible to get the right kind of time from a blacking-box. therefore, i take the liberty of sending you herewith a machine that will furnish only the best. please use it with the kind wishes of yours truly, h. h. rogers. p. s.--complaint has also been made in regard to the furrows you make in your trousers in scratching matches. you will find a furrow on the bottom of the article inclosed. please use it. compliments of the season to the family. he was a man too busy to write many letters, but when he did write (to clemens at least) they were always playful and unhurried. one reading them would not find it easy to believe that the writer was a man on whose shoulders lay the burdens of stupendous finance-burdens so heavy that at last he was crushed beneath their weight. cclxxix. an extension of copyright one of the pleasant things that came to mark twain that year was the passage of a copyright bill, which added to the royalty period an extension of fourteen years. champ clark had been largely instrumental in the success of this measure, and had been fighting for it steadily since mark twain's visit to washington in . following that visit, clark wrote: ... it [the original bill] would never pass because the bill had literature and music all mixed together. being a missourian of course it would give me great pleasure to be of service to you. what i want to say is this: you have prepared a simple bill relating only to the copyright of books; send it to me and i will try to have it passed. clemens replied that he might have something more to say on the copyright question by and by--that he had in hand a dialogue--[similar to the “open letter to the register of copyrights,” north american review, january, .]--which would instruct congress, but this he did not complete. meantime a simple bill was proposed and early in it became a law. in june clark wrote: dr. samuel l. clemens, stormfield, redding, conn. my dear doctor,--i am gradually becoming myself again, after a period of exhaustion that almost approximated prostration. after a long lecture tour last summer i went immediately into a hard campaign; as soon as the election was over, and i had recovered my disposition, i came here and went into those tariff hearings, which began shortly after breakfast each day, and sometimes lasted until midnight. listening patiently and meekly, withal, to the lying of tariff barons for many days and nights was followed by the work of the long session; that was followed by a hot campaign to take uncle joe's rules away from him; on the heels of that “campaign that failed” came the tariff fight in the house. i am now getting time to breathe regularly and i am writing to ask you if the copyright law is acceptable to you. if it is not acceptable to you i want to ask you to write and tell me how it should be changed and i will give my best endeavors to the work. i believe that your ideas and wishes in the matter constitute the best guide we have as to what should be done in the case. your friend, champ clark. to this clemens replied: stormfield, redding, conn, june , . dear champ clark,--is the new copyright law acceptable to me? emphatically yes! clark, it is the only sane & clearly defined & just & righteous copyright law that has ever existed in the united states. whosoever will compare it with its predecessors will have no trouble in arriving at that decision. the bill which was before the committee two years ago when i was down there was the most stupefying jumble of conflicting & apparently irreconcilable interests that was ever seen; and we all said “the case is hopeless, absolutely hopeless--out of this chaos nothing can be built.” but we were in error; out of that chaotic mass this excellent bill has been constructed, the warring interests have been reconciled, and the result is as comely and substantial a legislative edifice as lifts its domes and towers and protective lightning-rods out of the statute book i think. when i think of that other bill, which even the deity couldn't understand, and of this one, which even i can understand, i take off my hat to the man or men who devised this one. was it r. u. johnson? was it the authors' league? was it both together? i don't know, but i take off my hat, anyway. johnson has written a valuable article about the new law--i inclose it. at last--at last and for the first time in copyright history--we are ahead of england! ahead of her in two ways: by length of time and by fairness to all interests concerned. does this sound like shouting? then i must modify it: all we possessed of copyright justice before the th of last march we owed to england's initiative. truly yours, s. l. clemens. clemens had prepared what was the final word an the subject of copyright just before this bill was passed--a petition for a law which he believed would regulate the whole matter. it was a generous, even if a somewhat utopian, plan, eminently characteristic of its author. the new fourteen-year extension, with the prospect of more, made this or any other compromise seem inadvisable.--[the reader may consider this last copyright document by mark twain under appendix n, at the end of this volume.] cclxxx. a warning clemens had promised to go to baltimore for the graduation of “francesca” of his london visit in --and to make a short address to her class. it was the eighth of june when we set out on this journey,--[the reader may remember that it was the th of june, , that mark twain sailed for the holy land. it was the th of june, , that he sailed for england to take his oxford degree. this th of june, , was at least slightly connected with both events, for he was keeping an engagement made with francesca in london, and my notes show that he discussed, on the way to the station, some incidents of his holy land trip and his attitude at that time toward christian traditions. as he rarely mentioned the quaker city trip, the coincidence seems rather curious. it is most unlikely that clemens himself in any way associated the two dates.]--but the day was rather bleak and there was a chilly rain. clemens had a number of errands to do in new york, and we drove from one place to another, attending to them. finally, in the afternoon, the rain ceased, and while i was arranging some matters for him he concluded to take a ride on the top of a fifth avenue stage. it was fine and pleasant when he started, but the weather thickened again and when he returned he complained that he had felt a little chilly. he seemed in fine condition, however, next morning and was in good spirits all the way to baltimore. chauncey depew was on the train and they met in the dining-car--the last time, i think, they ever saw each other. he was tired when we reached the belvedere hotel in baltimore and did not wish to see the newspaper men. it happened that the reporters had a special purpose in coming just at this time, for it had suddenly developed that in his shakespeare book, through an oversight, due to haste in publication, full credit had not been given to mr. greenwood for the long extracts quoted from his work. the sensational head-lines in a morning paper, “is mark twain a plagiarist?” had naturally prompted the newspaper men to see what he would have to say on the subject. it was a simple matter, easily explained, and clemens himself was less disturbed about it than anybody. he felt no sense of guilt, he said; and the fact that he had been stealing and caught at it would give mr. greenwood's book far more advertising than if he had given him the full credit which he had intended. he found a good deal of amusement in the situation, his only worry being that clara and jean would see the paper and be troubled. he had taken off his clothes and was lying down, reading. after a little he got up and began walking up and down the room. presently he stopped and, facing me, placed his hand upon his breast. he said: “i think i must have caught a little cold yesterday on that fifth avenue stage. i have a curious pain in my breast.” i suggested that he lie down again and i would fill his hot-water bag. the pain passed away presently, and he seemed to be dozing. i stepped into the next room and busied myself with some writing. by and by i heard him stirring again and went in where he was. he was walking up and down and began talking of some recent ethnological discoveries--something relating to prehistoric man. “what a fine boy that prehistoric man must have been,” he said--“the very first one! think of the gaudy style of him, how he must have lorded it over those other creatures, walking on his hind legs, waving his arms, practising and getting ready for the pulpit.” the fancy amused him, but presently he paused in his walk and again put his hand on his breast, saying: “that pain has come back. it's a curious, sickening, deadly kind of pain. i never had anything just like it.” it seemed to me that his face had become rather gray. i said: “where is it, exactly, mr. clemens?” he laid his hand in the center of his breast and said: “it is here, and it is very peculiar indeed.” remotely in my mind occurred the thought that he had located his heart, and the “peculiar deadly pain” he had mentioned seemed ominous. i suggested, however, that it was probably some rheumatic touch, and this opinion seemed warranted when, a few moments later, the hot water had again relieved it. this time the pain had apparently gone to stay, for it did not return while we were in baltimore. it was the first positive manifestation of the angina which eventually would take him from us. the weather was pleasant in baltimore, and his visit to st. timothy's school and his address there were the kind of diversions that meant most to him. the flock of girls, all in their pretty commencement dresses, assembled and rejoicing at his playfully given advice: not to smoke--to excess; not to drink--to excess; not to marry--to excess; he standing there in a garb as white as their own--it made a rare picture--a sweet memory--and it was the last time he ever gave advice from the platform to any one. edward s. martin also spoke to the school, and then there was a great feasting in the big assembly-hall. it was on the lawn that a reporter approached him with the news of the death of edward everett hale--another of the old group. clemens said thoughtfully, after a moment: “i had the greatest respect and esteem for edward everett hale, the greatest admiration for his work. i am as grieved to hear of his death as i can ever be to hear of the death of any friend, though my grief is always tempered with the satisfaction of knowing that for the one that goes, the hard, bitter struggle of life is ended.” we were leaving the belvedere next morning, and when the subject of breakfast came up for discussion he said: “that was the most delicious baltimore fried chicken we had yesterday morning. i think we'll just repeat that order. it reminds me of john quarles's farm.” we had been having our meals served in the rooms, but we had breakfast that morning down in the diningroom, and “francesca” and her mother were there. as he stood on the railway platform waiting for the train, he told me how once, fifty-five years before, as a boy of eighteen, he had changed cars there for washington and had barely caught his train--the crowd yelling at him as he ran. we remained overnight in new york, and that evening, at the grosvenor, he read aloud a poem of his own which i had not seen before. he had brought it along with some intention of reading it at st. timothy's, he said, but had not found the occasion suitable. “i wrote it a long time ago in paris. i'd been reading aloud to mrs. clemens and susy--in ' , i think--about lord clive and warren hastings, from macaulay--how great they were and how far they fell. then i took an imaginary case--that of some old demented man mumbling of his former state. i described him, and repeated some of his mumblings. susy and mrs. clemens said, 'write it'--so i did, by and by, and this is it. i call it 'the derelict.'” he read in his effective manner that fine poem, the opening stanza of which follows: you sneer, you ships that pass me by, your snow-pure canvas towering proud! you traders base!--why, once such fry paid reverence, when like a cloud storm-swept i drove along, my admiral at post, his pennon blue faint in the wilderness of sky, my long yards bristling with my gallant crew, my ports flung wide, my guns displayed, my tall spars hid in bellying sail! --you struck your topsails then, and made obeisance--now your manners fail. he had employed rhyme with more facility than was usual for him, and the figure and phrasing were full of vigor. “it is strong and fine,” i said, when he had finished. “yes,” he assented. “it seems so as i read it now. it is so long since i have seen it that it is like reading another man's work. i should call it good, i believe.” he put the manuscript in his bag and walked up and down the floor talking. “there is no figure for the human being like the ship,” he said; “no such figure for the storm-beaten human drift as the derelict--such men as clive and hastings could only be imagined as derelicts adrift, helpless, tossed by every wind and tide.” we returned to redding next day. on the train going home he fell to talking of books and authors, mainly of the things he had never been able to read. “when i take up one of jane austen's books,” he said, “such as pride and prejudice, i feel like a barkeeper entering the kingdom of heaven. i know, what his sensation would be and his private comments. he would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.” he recalled again how stepniak had come to hartford, and how humiliated mrs. clemens had been to confess that her husband was not familiar with the writings of thackeray and others. “i don't know anything about anything,” he said, mournfully, “and never did. my brother used to try to get me to read dickens, long ago. i couldn't do it--i was ashamed; but i couldn't do it. yes, i have read the tale of two cities, and could do it again. i have read it a good many times; but i never could stand meredith and most of the other celebrities.” by and by he handed me the saturday times review, saying: “here is a fine poem, a great poem, i think. i can stand that.” it was “the palatine (in the 'dark ages'),” by willa sibert cather, reprinted from mcclure's. the reader will understand better than i can express why these lofty opening stanzas appealed to mark twain: the palatine “have you been with the king to rome, brother, big brother?” “i've been there and i've come home, back to your play, little brother.” “oh, how high is caesar's house, brother, big brother?” “goats about the doorways browse; night-hawks nest in the burnt roof-tree, home of the wild bird and home of the bee. a thousand chambers of marble lie wide to the sun and the wind and the sky. poppies we find amongst our wheat grow on caesar's banquet seat. cattle crop and neatherds drowse on the floors of caesar's house.” “but what has become of caesar's gold, brother, big brother?” “the times are bad and the world is old --who knows the where of the caesar's gold? night comes black on the caesar's hill; the wells are deep and the tales are ill. fireflies gleam in the damp and mold, all that is left of the caesar's gold. back to your play, little brother.” farther along in our journey he handed me the paper again, pointing to these lines of kipling: how is it not good for the christian's health to hurry the aryan brown, for the christian riles and the aryan smiles, and he weareth the christian down; and the end of the fight is a tombstone white and the name of the late deceased: and the epitaph drear: “a fool lies here who tried to hustle the east.” “i could stand any amount of that,” he said, and presently: “life is too long and too short. too long for the weariness of it; too short for the work to be done. at the very most, the average mind can only master a few languages and a little history.” i said: “still, we need not worry. if death ends all it does not matter; and if life is eternal there will be time enough.” “yes,” he assented, rather grimly, “that optimism of yours is always ready to turn hell's back yard into a playground.” i said that, old as i was, i had taken up the study of french, and mentioned bayard taylor's having begun greek at fifty, expecting to need it in heaven. clemens said, reflectively: “yes--but you see that was greek.” cclxxxi. the last summer at stormfield i was at stormfield pretty constantly during the rest of that year. at first i went up only for the day; but later, when his health did not improve, and when he expressed a wish for companionship evenings, i remained most of the nights as well. our rooms were separated only by a bath-room; and as neither of us was much given to sleep, there was likely to be talk or reading aloud at almost any hour when both were awake. in the very early morning i would usually slip in, softly, sometimes to find him propped up against his pillows sound asleep, his glasses on, the reading-lamp blazing away as it usually did, day or night; but as often as not he was awake, and would have some new plan or idea of which he was eager to be delivered, and there was always interest, and nearly always amusement in it, even if it happened to be three in the morning or earlier. sometimes, when he thought it time for me to be stirring, he would call softly, but loudly enough for me to hear if awake; and i would go in, and we would settle again problems of life and death and science, or, rather, he would settle them while i dropped in a remark here and there, merely to hold the matter a little longer in solution. the pains in his breast came back, and with a good deal of frequency as the summer advanced; also, they became more severe. dr. edward quintard came up from new york, and did not hesitate to say that the trouble proceeded chiefly from the heart, and counseled diminished smoking, with less active exercise, advising particularly against clemens's lifetime habit of lightly skipping up and down stairs. there was no prohibition as to billiards, however, or leisurely walking, and we played pretty steadily through those peaceful summer days, and often took a walk down into the meadows or perhaps in the other direction, when it was not too warm or windy. once we went as far as the river, and i showed him a part of his land he had not seen before--a beautiful cedar hillside, remote and secluded, a place of enchantment. on the way i pointed out a little corner of land which earlier he had given me to straighten our division line. i told him i was going to build a study on it, and call it “markland.” he thought it an admirable building-site, and i think he was pleased with the name. later he said: “if you had a place for that extra billiard-table of mine [the rogers table, which had been left in new york] i would turn it over to you.” i replied that i could adapt the size of my proposed study to fit a billiard-table, and he said: “now that will be very good. then, when i want exercise, i can walk down and play billiards with you, and when you want exercise you can walk up and play billiards with me. you must build that study.” so it was we planned, and by and by mr. lounsbury had undertaken the work. during the walks clemens rested a good deal. there were the new england hills to climb, and then he found that he tired easily, and that weariness sometimes brought on the pain. as i remember now, i think how bravely he bore it. it must have been a deadly, sickening, numbing pain, for i have seen it crumple him, and his face become colorless while his hand dug at his breast; but he never complained, he never bewailed, and at billiards he would persist in going on and playing in his turn, even while he was bowed with the anguish of the attack. we had found that a glass of very hot water relieved it, and we kept always a thermos bottle or two filled and ready. at the first hint from him i would pour out a glass and another, and sometimes the relief came quickly; but there were times, and alas! they came oftener, when that deadly gripping did not soon release him. yet there would come a week or a fortnight when he was apparently perfectly well, and at such times we dismissed the thought of any heart malady, and attributed the whole trouble to acute indigestion, from which he had always suffered more or less. we were alone together most of the time. he did not appear to care for company that summer. clara clemens had a concert tour in prospect, and her father, eager for her success, encouraged her to devote a large part of her time to study. for jean, who was in love with every form of outdoor and animal life, he had established headquarters in a vacant farm-house on one corner of the estate, where she had collected some stock and poultry, and was over-flowingly happy. ossip gabrilowitsch was a guest in the house a good portion of the summer, but had been invalided through severe surgical operations, and for a long time rarely appeared, even at meal-times. so it came about that there could hardly have been a closer daily companionship than was ours during this the last year of mark twain's life. for me, of course, nothing can ever be like it again in this world. one is not likely to associate twice with a being from another star. cclxxxii. personal memoranda in the notes i made of this period i caught a little drift of personality and utterance, and i do not know better how to preserve these things than to give them here as nearly as may be in the sequence and in the forth in which they were set down. one of the first of these entries occurs in june, when clemens was rereading with great interest and relish andrew d. white's science and theology, which he called a lovely book.--['a history of the warfare of science with theology in christendom'.] june . a peaceful afternoon, and we walked farther than usual, resting at last in the shade of a tree in the lane that leads to jean's farm-house. i picked a dandelion-ball, with some remark about its being one of the evidences of the intelligent principle in nature--the seeds winged for a wider distribution. “yes,” he said, “those are the great evidences; no one who reasons can doubt them.” and presently he added: “that is a most amusing book of white's. when you read it you see how those old theologians never reasoned at all. white tells of an old bishop who figured out that god created the world in an instant on a certain day in october exactly so many years before christ, and proved it. and i knew a preacher myself once who declared that the fossils in the rocks proved nothing as to the age of the world. he said that god could create the rocks with those fossils in them for ornaments if he wanted to. why, it takes twenty years to build a little island in the mississippi river, and that man actually believed that god created the whole world and all that's in it in six days. white tells of another bishop who gave two new reasons for thunder; one being that god wanted to show the world his power, and another that he wished to frighten sinners to repent. now consider the proportions of that conception, even in the pettiest way you can think of it. consider the idea of god thinking of all that. consider the president of the united states wanting to impress the flies and fleas and mosquitoes, getting up on the dome of the capitol and beating a bass-drum and setting off red fire.” he followed the theme a little further, then we made our way slowly back up the long hill, he holding to my arm, and resting here and there, but arriving at the house seemingly fresh and ready for billiards. june . i came up this morning with a basket of strawberries. he was walking up and down, looking like an ancient roman. he said: “consider the case of elsie sigel--[granddaughter of gen. franz sigel. she was mysteriously murdered while engaged in settlement work among the chinese.]--what a ghastly ending to any life!” then turning upon me fiercely, he continued: “anybody that knows anything knows that there was not a single life that was ever lived that was worth living. not a single child ever begotten that the begetting of it was not a crime. suppose a community of people to be living on the slope of a volcano, directly under the crater and in the path of lava-flow; that volcano has been breaking out right along for ages and is certain to break out again. they do not know when it will break out, but they know it will do it--that much can be counted on. suppose those people go to a community in a far neighborhood and say, 'we'd like to change places with you. come take our homes and let us have yours.' those people would say, 'never mind, we are not interested in your country. we know what has happened there, and what will happen again.' we don't care to live under the blow that is likely to fall at any moment; and yet every time we bring a child into the world we are bringing it to a country, to a community gathered under the crater of a volcano, knowing that sooner or later death will come, and that before death there will be catastrophes infinitely worse. formerly it was much worse than now, for before the ministers abolished hell a man knew, when he was begetting a child, that he was begetting a soul that had only one chance in a hundred of escaping the eternal fires of damnation. he knew that in all probability that child would be brought to damnation--one of the ninety-nine black sheep. but since hell has been abolished death has become more welcome. i wrote a fairy story once. it was published somewhere. i don't remember just what it was now, but the substance of it was that a fairy gave a man the customary wishes. i was interested in seeing what he would take. first he chose wealth and went away with it, but it did not bring him happiness. then he came back for the second selection, and chose fame, and that did not bring happiness either. finally he went to the fairy and chose death, and the fairy said, in substance, 'if you hadn't been a fool you'd have chosen that in the first place.' “the papers called me a pessimist for writing that story. pessimist--the man who isn't a pessimist is a d---d fool.” but this was one of his savage humors, stirred by tragic circumstance. under date of july th i find this happier entry: we have invented a new game, three-ball carom billiards, each player continuing until he has made five, counting the number of his shots as in golf, the one who finishes in the fewer shots wins. it is a game we play with almost exactly equal skill, and he is highly pleased with it. he said this afternoon: “i have never enjoyed billiards as i do now. i look forward to it every afternoon as my reward at the end of a good day's work.”--[his work at this time was an article on marjorie fleming, the “wonder child,” whose quaint writings and brief little life had been published to the world by dr. john brown. clemens always adored the thought of marjorie, and in this article one can see that she ranked almost next to joan of arc in his affections.] we went out in the loggia by and by and clemens read aloud from a book which professor zubelin left here a few days ago--'the religion of a democrat'. something in it must have suggested to clemens his favorite science, for presently he said: “i have been reading an old astronomy; it speaks of the perfect line of curvature of the earth in spite of mountains and abysses, and i have imagined a man three hundred thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and looking at it and holding it in his hand. it would be about like a billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub it with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might say, 'there seems to be some slight roughness here, but i can't detect it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look at.' the himalayas to him, the highest peak, would be one-sixty-thousandth of his height, or about the one- thousandth part of an inch as compared with the average man.” i spoke of having somewhere read of some very tiny satellites, one as small, perhaps, as six miles in diameter, yet a genuine world. “could a man live on a world so small as that?” i asked. “oh yes,” he said. “the gravitation that holds it together would hold him on, and he would always seem upright, the same as here. his horizon would be smaller, but even if he were six feet tall he would only have one foot for each mile of that world's diameter, so you see he would be little enough, even for a world that he could walk around in half a day.” he talked astronomy a great deal--marvel astronomy. he had no real knowledge of the subject, and i had none of any kind, which made its ungraspable facts all the more thrilling. he was always thrown into a sort of ecstasy by the unthinkable distances of space--the supreme drama of the universe. the fact that alpha centauri was twenty-five trillions of miles away--two hundred and fifty thousand times the distance of our own remote sun, and that our solar system was traveling, as a whole, toward the bright star vega, in the constellation of lyra, at the rate of forty-four miles a second, yet would be thousands upon thousands of years reaching its destination, fairly enraptured him. the astronomical light-year--that is to say, the distance which light travels in a year--was one of the things which he loved to contemplate; but he declared that no two authorities ever figured it alike, and that he was going to figure it for himself. i came in one morning, to find that he had covered several sheets of paper with almost interminable rows of ciphers, and with a result, to him at least, entirely satisfactory. i am quite certain that he was prouder of those figures and their enormous aggregate than if he had just completed an immortal tale; and when he added that the nearest fixed star--alpha centauri--was between four and five light-years distant from the earth, and that there was no possible way to think that distance in miles or even any calculable fraction of it, his glasses shone and his hair was roached up as with the stimulation of these stupendous facts. by and by he said: “i came in with halley's comet in . it is coming again next year, and i expect to go out with it. it will be the greatest disappointment of my life if i don't go out with halley's comet. the almighty has said, no doubt: 'now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.' oh! i am looking forward to that.” and a little later he added: “i've got some kind of a heart disease, and quintard won't tell me whether it is the kind that carries a man off in an instant or keeps him lingering along and suffering for twenty years or so. i was in hopes that quintard would tell me that i was likely to drop dead any minute; but he didn't. he only told me that my blood-pressure was too strong. he didn't give me any schedule; but i expect to go with halley's comet.” i seem to have omitted making any entries for a few days; but among his notes i find this entry, which seems to refer to some discussion of a favorite philosophy, and has a special interest of its own: july , . yesterday's dispute resumed, i still maintaining that, whereas we can think, we generally don't do it. don't do it, & don't have to do it: we are automatic machines which act unconsciously. from morning till sleeping-time, all day long. all day long our machinery is doing things from habit & instinct, & without requiring any help or attention from our poor little -by- thinking apparatus. this reminded me of something: thirty years ago, in hartford, the billiard-room was my study, & i wrote my letters there the first thing every morning. my table lay two points off the starboard bow of the billiard-table, & the door of exit and entrance bore northeast&-by-east-half-east from that position, consequently you could see the door across the length of the billiard-table, but you couldn't see the floor by the said table. i found i was always forgetting to ask intruders to carry my letters down-stairs for the mail, so i concluded to lay them on the floor by the door; then the intruder would have to walk over them, & that would indicate to him what they were there for. did it? no, it didn't. he was a machine, & had habits. habits take precedence of thought. now consider this: a stamped & addressed letter lying on the floor --lying aggressively & conspicuously on the floor--is an unusual spectacle; so unusual a spectacle that you would think an intruder couldn't see it there without immediately divining that it was not there by accident, but had been deliberately placed there & for a definite purpose. very well--it may surprise you to learn that that most simple & most natural & obvious thought would never occur to any intruder on this planet, whether he be fool, half-fool, or the most brilliant of thinkers. for he is always an automatic machine & has habits, & his habits will act before his thinking apparatus can get a chance to exert its powers. my scheme failed because every human being has the habit of picking up any apparently misplaced thing & placing it where it won't be stepped on. my first intruder was george. he went and came without saying anything. presently i found the letters neatly piled up on the billiard-table. i was astonished. i put them on the floor again. the next intruder piled them on the billiard-table without a word. i was profoundly moved, profoundly interested. so i set the trap again. also again, & again, & yet again--all day long. i caught every member of the family, & every servant; also i caught the three finest intellects in the town. in every instance old, time-worn automatic habit got in its work so promptly that the thinking apparatus never got a chance. i do not remember this particular discussion, but i do distinctly recall being one of those whose intelligence was not sufficient to prevent my picking up the letter he had thrown on the floor in front of his bed, and being properly classified for doing it. clemens no longer kept note-books, as in an earlier time, but set down innumerable memoranda-comments, stray reminders, and the like--on small pads, and bunches of these tiny sheets accumulated on his table and about his room. i gathered up many of them then and afterward, and a few of these characteristic bits may be offered here. knee it is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest & truest & highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them. jehovah he is all-good. he made man for hell or hell for man, one or the other--take your choice. he made it hard to get into heaven and easy to get into hell. he commended man to multiply & replenish-what? hell. modesty antedates clothes & will be resumed when clothes are no more. [the latter part of this aphorism is erased and underneath it he adds:] modesty died when clothes were born. modesty died when false modesty was born. history a historian who would convey the truth has got to lie. often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it. morals are not the important thing--nor enlightenment--nor civilization. a man can do absolutely well without them, but he can't do without something to eat. the supremest thing is the needs of the body, not of the mind & spirit. suggestion there is conscious suggestion & there is unconscious suggestion--both come from outside--whence all ideas come. duels i think i could wipe out a dishonor by crippling the other man, but i don't see how i could do it by letting him cripple me. i have no feeling of animosity toward people who do not believe as i do; i merely do not respect 'em. in some serious matters (relig.) i would have them burnt. i am old now and once was a sinner. i often think of it with a kind of soft regret. i trust my days are numbered. i would not have that detail overlooked. she was always a girl, she was always young because her heart was young; & i was young because she lived in my heart & preserved its youth from decay. he often busied himself working out more extensively some of the ideas that came to him--moral ideas, he called them. one fancy which he followed in several forms (some of them not within the privilege of print) was that of an inquisitive little girl, bessie, who pursues her mother with difficult questionings.--[under appendix w, at the end of this volume, the reader will find one of the “bessie” dialogues.]--he read these aloud as he finished them, and it is certain that they lacked neither logic nor humor. sometimes he went to a big drawer in his dresser, where he kept his finished manuscripts, and took them out and looked over them, and read parts of them aloud, and talked of the plans he had had for them, and how one idea after another had been followed for a time and had failed to satisfy him in the end. two fiction schemes that had always possessed him he had been unable to bring to any conclusion. both of these have been mentioned in former chapters; one being the notion of a long period of dream-existence during a brief moment of sleep, and the other being the story of a mysterious visitant from another realm. he had experimented with each of these ideas in no less than three forms, and there was fine writing and dramatic narrative in all; but his literary architecture had somehow fallen short of his conception. “the mysterious stranger” in one of its forms i thought might be satisfactorily concluded, and he admitted that he could probably end it without much labor. he discussed something of his plans, and later i found the notes for its conclusion. but i suppose he was beyond the place where he could take up those old threads, though he contemplated, fondly enough, the possibility, and recalled how he had read at least one form of the dream tale to howells, who had urged him to complete it. cclxxxiii. astronomy and dreams august , . this morning i noticed on a chair a copy of flaubert's salammbo which i recently lent him. i asked if he liked it. “no,” he said, “i didn't like any of it.” “but you read it?” “yes, i read every line of it.” “you admitted its literary art?” “well, it's like this: if i should go to the chicago stockyards and they should kill a beef and cut it up and the blood should splash all over everything, and then they should take me to another pen and kill another beef and the blood should splash over everything again, and so on to pen after pen, i should care for it about as much as i do for that book.” “but those were bloody days, and you care very much for that period in history.” “yes, that is so. but when i read tacitus and know that i am reading history i can accept it as such and supply the imaginary details and enjoy it, but this thing is such a continuous procession of blood and slaughter and stench it worries me. it has great art--i can see that. that scene of the crucified lions and the death canon and the tent scene are marvelous, but i wouldn't read that book again without a salary.” august . he is reading suetonius, which he already knows by heart--so full of the cruelties and licentiousness of imperial rome. this afternoon he began talking about claudius. “they called claudius a lunatic,” he said, “but just see what nice fancies he had. he would go to the arena between times and have captives and wild beasts brought out and turned in together for his special enjoyment. sometimes when there were no captives on hand he would say, 'well, never mind; bring out a carpenter.' carpentering around the arena wasn't a popular job in those days. he went visiting once to a province and thought it would be pleasant to see how they disposed of criminals and captives in their crude, old-fashioned way, but there was no executioner on hand. no matter; the emperor of rome was in no hurry--he would wait. so he sat down and stayed there until an executioner came.” i said, “how do you account for the changed attitude toward these things? we are filled with pity to-day at the thought of torture and suffering.” “ah! but that is because we have drifted that way and exercised the quality of compassion. relax a muscle and it soon loses its vigor; relax that quality and in two generations--in one generation--we should be gloating over the spectacle of blood and torture just the same. why, i read somewhere a letter written just before the lisbon catastrophe in about a scene on the public square of lisbon: a lot of stakes with the fagots piled for burning and heretics chained for burning. the square was crowded with men and women and children, and when those fires were lighted, and the heretics began to shriek and writhe, those men and women and children laughed so they were fairly beside themselves with the enjoyment of the scene. the greeks don't seem to have done these things. i suppose that indicates earlier advancement in compassion.” colonel harvey and mr. duneka came up to spend the night. mr. clemens had one of his seizures during the evening. they come oftener and last longer. one last night continued for an hour and a half. i slept there. september . to-day news of the north pole discovered by peary. five days ago the same discovery was reported by cook. clemens's comment: “it's the greatest joke of the ages.” but a moment later he referred to the stupendous fact of arcturus being fifty thousand times as big as the sun. september . this morning he told me, with great glee, the dream he had had just before wakening. he said: “i was in an automobile going slowly, with 'a little girl beside me, and some uniformed person walking along by us. i said, 'i'll get out and walk, too'; but the officer replied, 'this is only one of the smallest of our fleet.' “then i noticed that the automobile had no front, and there were two cannons mounted where the front should be. i noticed, too, that we were traveling very low, almost down on the ground. presently we got to the bottom of a hill and started up another, and i found myself walking ahead of the 'mobile. i turned around to look for the little girl, and instead of her i found a kitten capering beside me, and when we reached the top of the hill we were looking out over a most barren and desolate waste of sand-heaps without a speck of vegetation anywhere, and the kitten said, 'this view beggars all admiration.' then all at once we were in a great group of people and i undertook to repeat to them the kitten's remark, but when i tried to do it the words were so touching that i broke down and cried, and all the group cried, too, over the kitten's moving remark.” the joy with which he told this absurd sleep fancy made it supremely ridiculous and we laughed until tears really came. one morning he said: “i was awake a good deal in the night, and i tried to think of interesting things. i got to working out geological periods, trying to think of some way to comprehend them, and then astronomical periods. of course it's impossible, but i thought of a plan that seemed to mean something to me. i remembered that neptune is two billion eight hundred million miles away. that, of course, is incomprehensible, but then there is the nearest fixed star with its twenty-five trillion miles--twenty-five trillion--or nearly a thousand times as far, and then i took this book and counted the lines on a page and i found that there was an average of thirty-two lines to the page and two hundred and forty pages, and i figured out that, counting the distance to neptune as one line, there were still not enough lines in the book by nearly two thousand to reach the nearest fixed star, and somehow that gave me a sort of dim idea of the vastness of the distance and kind of a journey into space.” later i figured out another method of comprehending a little of that great distance by estimating the existence of the human race at thirty thousand years (lord kelvin's figures) and the average generation to have been thirty-three years with a world population of , , , souls. i assumed the nearest fixed star to be the first station in paradise and the first soul to have started thirty thousand years ago. traveling at the rate of about thirty miles a second, it would just now be arriving in alpha centauri with all the rest of that buried multitude stringing out behind at an average distance of twenty miles apart. few things gave him more pleasure than the contemplation of such figures as these. we made occasional business trips to new york, and during one of them visited the museum of natural history to look at the brontosaur and the meteorites and the astronomical model in the entrance hall. to him these were the most fascinating things in the world. he contemplated the meteorites and the brontosaur, and lost himself in strange and marvelous imaginings concerning the far reaches of time and space whence they had come down to us. mark twain lived curiously apart from the actualities of life. dwelling mainly among his philosophies and speculations, he observed vaguely, or minutely, what went on about him; but in either case the fact took a place, not in the actual world, but in a world within his consciousness, or subconsciousness, a place where facts were likely to assume new and altogether different relations from those they had borne in the physical occurrence. it not infrequently happened, therefore, when he recounted some incident, even the most recent, that history took on fresh and startling forms. more than once i have known him to relate an occurrence of the day before with a reality of circumstance that carried absolute conviction, when the details themselves were precisely reversed. if his attention were called to the discrepancy, his face would take on a blank look, as of one suddenly aroused from dreamland, to be followed by an almost childish interest in your revelation and ready acknowledgment of his mistake. i do not think such mistakes humiliated him; but they often surprised and, i think, amused him. insubstantial and deceptive as was this inner world of his, to him it must have been much more real than the world of flitting physical shapes about him. he would fix you keenly with his attention, but you realized, at last, that he was placing you and seeing you not as a part of the material landscape, but as an item of his own inner world--a world in which philosophies and morals stood upright--a very good world indeed, but certainly a topsy-turvy world when viewed with the eye of mere literal scrutiny. and this was, mainly, of course, because the routine of life did not appeal to him. even members of his household did not always stir his consciousness. he knew they were there; he could call them by name; he relied upon them; but his knowledge of them always suggested the knowledge that mount everest might have of the forests and caves and boulders upon its slopes, useful, perhaps, but hardly necessary to the giant's existence, and in no important matter a part of its greater life. cclxxxiv. a library concert in a letter which clemens wrote to miss wallace at this time, he tells of a concert given at stormfield on september st for the benefit of the new redding library. gabrilowitsch had so far recovered that he was up and about and able to play. david bispham, the great barytone, always genial and generous, agreed to take part, and clara clemens, already accustomed to public singing, was to join in the program. the letter to miss wallace supplies the rest of the history. we had a grand time here yesterday. concert in aid of the little library. team gabrilowitsch, pianist. david bispham, vocalist. clara clemens, ditto. mark twain, introduces of team. detachments and squads and groups and singles came from everywhere --danbury, new haven, norwalk, redding, redding ridge, ridgefield, and even from new york: some in -h.p. motor-cars, some in buggies and carriages, and a swarm of farmer-young-folk on foot from miles around-- altogether. if we hadn't stopped the sale of tickets a day and a half before the performance we should have been swamped. we jammed into the library (not quite all had seats), we filled the loggia, the dining- room, the hall, clear into the billiard-room, the stairs, and the brick-paved square outside the dining-room door. the artists were received with a great welcome, and it woke them up, and i tell you they performed to the queen's taste! the program was an hour and three-quarters long and the encores added a half-hour to it. the enthusiasm of the house was hair-lifting. they all stayed an hour after the close to shake hands and congratulate. we had no dollar seats except in the library, but we accumulated $ for the building fund. we had tea at half past six for a dozen--the hawthornes, jeannette gilder, and her niece, etc.; and after -o'clock dinner we had a private concert and a ball in the bare-stripped library until ; nobody present but the team and mr. and mrs. paine and jean and her dog. and me. bispham did “danny deever” and the “erlkonig” in his majestic, great organ-tones and artillery, and gabrilowitsch played the accompaniments as they were never played before, i do suppose. there is not much to add to that account. clemens, introducing the performers, was the gay feature of the occasion. he spoke of the great reputation of bispham and gabrilowitsch; then he said: “my daughter is not as famous as these gentlemen, but she is ever so much better-looking.” the music of the evening that followed, with gabrilowitsch at the piano and david bispham to sing, was something not likely ever to be repeated. bispham sang the “erlkonig” and “killiecrankie” and the “grenadiers” and several other songs. he spoke of having sung wagner's arrangement of the “grenadiers” at the composer's home following his death, and how none of the family had heard it before. there followed dancing, and jean clemens, fine and handsome, apparently full of life and health, danced down that great living-room as care-free as if there was no shadow upon her life. and the evening was distinguished in another way, for before it ended clara clemens had promised ossip gabrilowitsch to become his wife. cclxxxv. a wedding at stormfield the wedding of ossip gabrilowitsch and clara clemens was not delayed. gabrilowitsch had signed for a concert tour in europe, and unless the marriage took place forthwith it must be postponed many months. it followed, therefore, fifteen days after the engagement. they were busy days. clemens, enormously excited and pleased over the prospect of the first wedding in his family, personally attended to the selection of those who were to have announcement-cards, employing a stenographer to make the list. october th was a perfect wedding-day. it was one of those quiet, lovely fall days when the whole world seems at peace. claude, the butler, with his usual skill in such matters, had decorated the great living-room with gay autumn foliage and flowers, brought in mainly from the woods and fields. they blended perfectly with the warm tones of the walls and furnishings, and i do not remember ever having seen a more beautiful room. only relatives and a few of the nearest friends were invited to the ceremony. the twichells came over a day ahead, for twichell, who had assisted in the marriage rites between samuel clemens and olivia langdon, was to perform that ceremony for their daughter now. a fellow-student of the bride and groom when they had been pupils of leschetizky, in vienna--miss ethel newcomb--was at the piano and played softly the wedding march from “taunhauser.” jean clemens was the only bridesmaid, and she was stately and classically beautiful, with a proud dignity in her office. jervis langdon, the bride's cousin and childhood playmate, acted as best man, and clemens, of course, gave the bride away. by request he wore his scarlet oxford gown over his snowy flannels, and was splendid beyond words. i do not write of the appearance of the bride and groom, for brides and grooms are always handsome and always happy, and certainly these were no exception. it was all so soon over, the feasting ended, and the principals whirling away into the future. i have a picture in my mind of them seated together in the automobile, with richard watson gilder standing on the step for a last good-by, and before them a wide expanse of autumn foliage and distant hills. i remember gilder's voice saying, when the car was on the turn, and they were waving back to us: “over the hills and far away, beyond the utmost purple rim, beyond the night, beyond the day, through all the world she followed him.” the matter of the wedding had been kept from the newspapers until the eve of the wedding, when the associated press had been notified. a representative was there; but clemens had characteristically interviewed himself on the subject, and it was only necessary to hand the reporter a typewritten copy. replying to the question (put to himself), “are you pleased with the marriage?” he answered: yes, fully as much as any marriage could please me or any other father. there are two or three solemn things in life and a happy marriage is one of them, for the terrors of life are all to come. i am glad of this marriage, and mrs. clemens would be glad, for she always had a warm affection for gabrilowitsch. there was another wedding at stormfield on the following afternoon--an imitation wedding. little joy came up with me, and wished she could stand in just the spot where she had seen the bride stand, and she expressed a wish that she could get married like that. clemens said: “frankness is a jewel; only the young can afford it.” then he happened to remember a ridiculous boy-doll--a white-haired creature with red coat and green trousers, a souvenir imitation of himself from one of the rogerses' christmas trees. he knew where it was, and he got it out. then he said: “now, joy, we will have another wedding. this is mr. colonel williams, and you are to become his wedded wife.” so joy stood up very gravely and clemens performed the ceremony, and i gave the bride away, and joy to him became mrs. colonel williams thereafter, and entered happily into her new estate. cclxxxvi. autumn days a harvest of letters followed the wedding: a general congratulatory expression, mingled with admiration, affection, and good-will. in his interview clemens had referred to the pain in his breast; and many begged him to deny that there was anything serious the matter with him, urging him to try this relief or that, pathetically eager for his continued life and health. they cited the comfort he had brought to world-weary humanity and his unfailing stand for human justice as reasons why he should live. such letters could not fail to cheer him. a letter of this period, from john bigelow, gave him a pleasure of its own. clemens had written bigelow, apropos of some adverse expression on the tariff: thank you for any hard word you can say about the tariff. i guess the government that robs its own people earns the future it is preparing for itself. bigelow was just then declining an invitation to the annual dinner of the chamber of commerce. in sending his regrets he said: the sentiment i would propose if i dared to be present would be the words of mark twain, the statesman: “the government that robs its own people earns the future it is preparing for itself.” now to clemens himself he wrote: rochefoucault never said a cleverer thing, nor dr. franklin a wiser one.... be careful, or the demos will be running you for president when you are not on your guard. yours more than ever, john bigelow. among the tributes that came, was a sermon by the rev. fred window adams, of schenectady, new york, with mark twain as its subject. mr. adams chose for his text, “take mark and bring him with thee; for he is profitable for the ministry,” and he placed the two marks, st. mark and mark twain, side by side as ministers to humanity, and characterized him as “a fearless knight of righteousness.” a few weeks later mr. adams himself came to stormfield, and, like all open-minded ministers of the gospel, he found that he could get on very well indeed with mark twain. in spite of the good-will and the good wishes clemens's malady did not improve. as the days grew chillier he found that he must remain closer indoors. the cold air seemed to bring on the pains, and they were gradually becoming more severe; then, too, he did not follow the doctor's orders in the matter of smoking, nor altogether as to exercise. to miss wallace he wrote: i can't walk, i can't drive, i'm not down-stairs much, and i don't see company, but i drink barrels of water to keep the pain quiet; i read, and read, and read, and smoke, and smoke, and smoke all the time (as formerly), and it's a contented and comfortable life. but this was not altogether accurate as to details. he did come down-stairs many times daily, and he persisted in billiards regardless of the paroxysms. we found, too, that the seizures were induced by mental agitation. one night he read aloud to jean and myself the first chapter of an article, “the turning-point in my life,” which he was preparing for harper's bazar. he had begun it with one of his impossible burlesque fancies, and he felt our attitude of disappointment even before any word had been said. suddenly he rose, and laying his hand on his breast said, “i must lie down,” and started toward the stair. i supported him to his room and hurriedly poured out the hot water. he drank it and dropped back on the bed. “don't speak to me,” he said; “don't make me talk.” jean came in, and we sat there several moments in silence. i think we both wondered if this might not be the end; but presently he spoke of his own accord, declaring he was better, and ready for billiards. we played for at least an hour afterward, and he seemed no worse for the attack. it is a curious malady--that angina; even the doctors are acquainted with its manifestations, rather than its cause. clemens's general habits of body and mind were probably not such as to delay its progress; furthermore, there had befallen him that year one of those misfortunes which his confiding nature peculiarly invited--a betrayal of trust by those in whom it had been boundlessly placed--and it seems likely that the resulting humiliation aggravated his complaint. the writing of a detailed history of this episode afforded him occupation and a certain amusement, but probably did not contribute to his health. one day he sent for his attorney, mr. charles t. lark, and made some final revisions in his will.--[mark twain's estate, later appraised at something more than $ , was left in the hands of trustees for his daughters. the trustees were edward e. loomis, jervis langdon, and zoheth s. freeman. the direction of his literary affairs was left to his daughter clara and the writer of this history.] to see him you would never have suspected that he was ill. he was in good flesh, and his movement was as airy and his eye as bright and his face as full of bloom as at any time during the period i had known him; also, he was as light-hearted and full of ideas and plans, and he was even gentler--having grown mellow with age and retirement, like good wine. and of course he would find amusement in his condition. he said: “i have always pretended to be sick to escape visitors; now, for the first time, i have got a genuine excuse. it makes me feel so honest.” and once, when jean reported a caller in the livingroom, he said: “jean, i can't see her. tell her i am likely to drop dead any minute and it would be most embarrassing.” but he did see her, for it was a poet--angela morgan--and he read her poem, “god's man,” aloud with great feeling, and later he sold it for her to collier's weekly. he still had violent rages now and then, remembering some of the most notable of his mistakes; and once, after denouncing himself, rather inclusively, as an idiot, he said: “i wish to god the lightning would strike me; but i've wished that fifty thousand times and never got anything out of it yet. i have missed several good chances. mrs. clemens was afraid of lightning, and would never let me bare my head to the storm.” the element of humor was never lacking, and the rages became less violent and less frequent. i was at stormfield steadily now, and there was a regular routine of afternoon sessions of billiards or reading, in which we were generally alone; for jean, occupied with her farming and her secretary labors, seldom appeared except at meal-times. occasionally she joined in the billiard games; but it was difficult learning and her interest was not great. she would have made a fine player, for she had a natural talent for games, as she had for languages, and she could have mastered the science of angles as she had mastered tennis and french and german and italian. she had naturally a fine intellect, with many of her father's characteristics, and a tender heart that made every dumb creature her friend. katie leary, who had been jean's nurse, once told how, as a little child, jean had not been particularly interested in a picture of the lisbon earthquake, where the people were being swallowed up; but on looking at the next page, which showed a number of animals being overwhelmed, she had said: “poor things!” katie said: “why, you didn't say that about the people!” but jean answered: “oh, they could speak.” one night at the dinner-table her father was saying how difficult it must be for a man who had led a busy life to give up the habit of work. “that is why the rogerses kill themselves,” he said. “they would rather kill themselves in the old treadmill than stop and try to kill time. they have forgotten how to rest. they know nothing but to keep on till they drop.” i told of something i had read not long before. it was about an aged lion that had broken loose from his cage at coney island. he had not offered to hurt any one; but after wandering about a little, rather aimlessly, he had come to a picket-fence, and a moment later began pacing up and down in front of it, just the length of his cage. they had come and led him back to his prison without trouble, and he had rushed eagerly into it. i noticed that jean was listening anxiously, and when i finished she said: “is that a true story?” she had forgotten altogether the point in illustration. she was concerned only with the poor old beast that had found no joy in his liberty. among the letters that clemens wrote just then was one to miss wallace, in which he described the glory of the fall colors as seen from his windows. the autumn splendors passed you by? what a pity! i wish you had been here. it was beyond words! it was heaven & hell & sunset & rainbows & the aurora all fused into one divine harmony, & you couldn't look at it and keep the tears back. such a singing together, & such a whispering together, & such a snuggling together of cozy, soft colors, & such kissing & caressing, & such pretty blushing when the sun breaks out & catches those dainty weeds at it--you remember that weed-garden of mine?--& then --then the far hills sleeping in a dim blue trance--oh, hearing about it is nothing, you should be here to see it! in the same letter he refers to some work that he was writing for his own satisfaction--'letters from the earth'; said letters supposed to have been written by an immortal visitant and addressed to other immortals in some remote sphere. i'll read passages to you. this book will never be published --in fact it couldn't be, because it would be felony... paine enjoys it, but paine is going to be damned one of these days, i suppose. i very well remember his writing those 'letters from the earth'. he read them to me from time to time as he wrote them, and they were fairly overflowing with humor and philosophy and satire concerning the human race. the immortal visitor pointed out, one after another, the absurdities of mankind, his ridiculous conception of heaven, and his special conceit in believing that he was the creator's pet--the particular form of life for which all the universe was created. clemens allowed his exuberant fancy free rein, being under no restrictions as to the possibility of print or public offense. he enjoyed them himself, too, as he read them aloud, and we laughed ourselves weak over his bold imaginings. one admissible extract will carry something of the flavor of these chapters. it is where the celestial correspondent describes man's religion. his heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. i give you my word it has not a single feature in it that he actually values. it consists--utterly and entirely--of diversions which he cares next to nothing about here in the earth, yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven. isn't it curious? isn't it interesting? you must not think i am exaggerating, for it is not so. i will give you the details. most, men do not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are singing if it be continued more than two hours. note that. only about two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in a hundred have any wish to learn how. set that down. many men pray, not many of them like to do it. a few pray long, the others make a short-cut. more men go to church than want to. to forty-nine men in fifty the sabbath day is a dreary, dreary bore. further, all sane people detest noise. all people, sane or insane, like to have variety in their lives. monotony quickly wearies them. now then, you have the facts. you know what men don't enjoy. well, they have invented a heaven, out of their own heads, all by themselves; guess what it is like? in fifteen hundred years you couldn't do it. they have left out the very things they care for most their dearest pleasures--and replaced them with prayer! in man's heaven everybody sings. there are no exceptions. the man who did not sing on earth sings there; the man who could not sing on earth sings there. thus universal singing is not casual, not occasional, not relieved by intervals of quiet; it goes on all day long and every day during a stretch of twelve hours. and everybody stays where on earth the place would be empty in two hours. the singing is of hymns alone. nay, it is one hymn alone. the words are always the same in number--they are only about a dozen--there is no rhyme--there is no poetry. “hosanna, hosanna, hosanna unto the highest!” and a few such phrases constitute the whole service. meantime, every person is playing on a harp! consider the deafening hurricane of sound. consider, further, it is a praise service--a service of compliment, flattery, adulation. do you ask who it is that is willing to endure this strange compliment, this insane compliment, and who not only endures it but likes it, enjoys it, requires it, commands it? hold your breath: it is god! this race's god i mean--their own pet invention. most of the ideas presented in this his last commentary on human absurdities were new only as to phrasing. he had exhausted the topic long ago, in one way or another; but it was one of the themes in which he never lost interest. many subjects became stale to him at last; but the curious invention called man remained a novelty to him to the end. from my note-book: october . i am constantly amazed at his knowledge of history--all history--religious, political, military. he seems to have read everything in the world concerning rome, france, and england particularly. last night we stopped playing billiards while he reviewed, in the most vivid and picturesque phrasing, the reasons of rome's decline. such a presentation would have enthralled any audience--i could not help feeling a great pity that he had not devoted some of his public effort to work of that sort. no one could have equaled him at it. he concluded with some comments on the possibility of america following rome's example, though he thought the vote of the people would always, or at least for a long period, prevent imperialism. november . to-day he has been absorbed in his old interest in shorthand. “it is the only rational alphabet,” he declared. “all this spelling reform is nonsense. what we need is alphabet reform, and shorthand is the thing. take the letter m, for instance; it is made with one stroke in shorthand, while in longhand it requires at least three. the word mephistopheles can be written in shorthand with one-sixth the number of strokes that is required in longhand. i tell you shorthand should be adopted as the alphabet.” i said: “there is this objection: the characters are so slightly different that each writer soon forms a system of his own and it is seldom that two can read each other's notes.” “you are talking of stenographic reporting,” he said, rather warmly. “nothing of the kind is true in the case of the regular alphabet. it is perfectly clear and legible.” “would you have it in the schools, then?” “yes, it should be taught in the schools, not for stenographic purposes, but only for use in writing to save time.” he was very much in earnest, and said he had undertaken an article on the subject. november . he said he could not sleep last night, for thinking what a fool he had been in his various investments. “i have always been the victim of somebody,” he said, “and always an idiot myself, doing things that even a child would not do. never asking anybody's advice--never taking it when it was offered. i can't see how anybody could do the things i have done and have kept right on doing.” i could see that the thought agitated him, and i suggested that we go to his room and read, which we did, and had a riotous time over the most recent chapters of the 'letters from the earth', and some notes he had made for future chapters on infant damnation and other distinctive features of orthodox creeds. he told an anecdote of an old minister who declared that presbyterianism without infant damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be identified because it had lost its tag. somewhat on the defensive i said, “but we must admit that the so- called christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive.” he answered, “yes, but in spite of their religion, not because of it. the church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against eve. and every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. the greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before the christian religion was born. “i have been reading gibbon's celebrated fifteenth chapter,” he said later, “and i don't see what christians found against it. it is so mild--so gentle in its sarcasm.” he added that he had been reading also a little book of brief biographies and had found in it the saying of darwin's father, “unitarianism is a featherbed to catch falling christians.” “i was glad to find and identify that saying,” he said; “it is so good.” he finished the evening by reading a chapter from carlyle's french revolution--a fine pyrotechnic passage--the gathering at versailles. i said that carlyle somehow reminded me of a fervid stump-speaker who pounded his fists and went at his audience fiercely, determined to convince them. “yes,” he said, “but he is the best one that ever lived.” november . this morning early he heard me stirring and called. i went in and found him propped up with a book, as usual. he said: “i seldom read christmas stories, but this is very beautiful. it has made me cry. i want you to read it.” (it was booth tarkington's 'beasley's christmas party'.) “tarkington has the true touch,” he said; “his work always satisfies me.” another book he has been reading with great enjoyment is james branch cabell's chivalry. he cannot say enough of the subtle poetic art with which cabell has flung the light of romance about dark and sordid chapters of history. cclxxvii. mark twain's reading perhaps here one may speak of mark twain's reading in general. on the table by him, and on his bed, and in the billiard-room shelves he kept the books he read most. they were not many--not more than a dozen--but they were manifestly of familiar and frequent usage. all, or nearly all, had annotations--spontaneously uttered marginal notes, title prefatories, or concluding comments. they were the books he had read again and again, and it was seldom that he had not had something to say with each fresh reading. there were the three big volumes by saint-simon--'the memoirs'--which he once told me he had read no less than twenty times. on the fly-leaf of the first volume he wrote-- this, & casanova & pepys, set in parallel columns, could afford a good coup d'oeil of french & english high life of that epoch. all through those finely printed volumes are his commentaries, sometimes no more than a word, sometimes a filled, closely written margin. he found little to admire in the human nature of saint-simon's period--little to approve in saint-simon himself beyond his unrestrained frankness, which he admired without stint, and in one paragraph where the details of that early period are set down with startling fidelity he wrote: “oh, incomparable saint-simon!” saint-simon is always frank, and mark twain was equally so. where the former tells one of the unspeakable compulsions of louis xiv., the latter has commented: we have to grant that god made this royal hog; we may also be permitted to believe that it was a crime to do so. and on another page: in her memories of this period the duchesse de st. clair makes this striking remark: “sometimes one could tell a gentleman, but it was only by his manner of using his fork.” his comments on the orthodox religion of saint-simon's period are not marked by gentleness. of the author's reference to the edict of nantes, which he says depopulated half of the realm, ruined its commerce, and “authorized torments and punishments by which so many innocent people of both sexes were killed by thousands,” clemens writes: so much blood has been shed by the church because of an omission from the gospel: “ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is.” not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code. in the place where saint-simon describes the death of monseigneur, son of the king, and the court hypocrites are wailing their extravagantly pretended sorrow, clemens wrote: it is all so true, all so human. god made these animals. he must have noticed this scene; i wish i knew how it struck him. there were not many notes in the suetonius, nor in the carlyle revolution, though these were among the volumes he read oftenest. perhaps they expressed for him too completely and too richly their subject-matter to require anything at his hand. here and there are marked passages and occasional cross-references to related history and circumstance. there was not much room for comment on the narrow margins of the old copy of pepys, which he had read steadily since the early seventies; but here and there a few crisp words, and the underscoring and marked passages are plentiful enough to convey his devotion to that quaint record which, perhaps next to suetonius, was the book he read and quoted most. francis parkman's canadian histories he had read periodically, especially the story of the old regime and of the jesuits in north america. as late as january, , he wrote on the title-page of the old regime: very interesting. it tells how people religiously and otherwise insane came over from france and colonized canada. he was not always complimentary to those who undertook to christianize the indians; but he did not fail to write his admiration of their courage--their very willingness to endure privation and even the fiendish savage tortures for the sake of their faith. “what manner of men are these?” he wrote, apropos of the account of bressani, who had undergone the most devilish inflictions which savage ingenuity could devise, and yet returned maimed and disfigured the following spring to “dare again the knives and fiery brand of the iroquois.” clemens was likely to be on the side of the indians, but hardly in their barbarism. in one place he wrote: that men should be willing to leave their happy homes and endure what the missionaries endured in order to teach these indians the road to hell would be rational, understandable, but why they should want to teach them a way to heaven is a thing which the mind somehow cannot grasp. other histories, mainly english and french, showed how he had read them--read and digested every word and line. there were two volumes of lecky, much worn; andrew d. white's 'science and theology'--a chief interest for at least one summer--and among the collection a well-worn copy of 'modern english literature--its blemishes and defects', by henry h. breen. on the title-page of this book clemens had written: hartford, . use with care, for it is a scarce book. england had to be ransacked in order to get it--or the bookseller speaketh falsely. he once wrote a paper for the saturday morning club, using for his text examples of slipshod english which breen had noted. clemens had a passion for biography, and especially for autobiography, diaries, letters, and such intimate human history. greville's 'journal of the reigns of george iv. and william iv.' he had read much and annotated freely. greville, while he admired byron's talents, abhorred the poet's personality, and in one place condemns him as a vicious person and a debauchee. he adds: then he despises pretenders and charlatans of all sorts, while he is himself a pretender, as all men are who assume a character which does not belong to them and affect to be something which they are all the time conscious they are not in reality. clemens wrote on the margin: but, dear sir, you are forgetting that what a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart. byron despised the race because he despised himself. i feel as byron did, and for the same reason. do you admire the race (& consequently yourself)? a little further along--where greville laments that byron can take no profit to himself from the sinful characters he depicts so faithfully, clemens commented: if byron--if any man--draws characters, they are all himself-- shades, moods, of his own character. and when the man draws them well why do they stir my admiration? because they are me--i recognize myself. a volume of plutarch was among the biographies that showed usage, and the life of p. t. barnum, written by himself. two years before the mast he loved, and never tired of. the more recent memoirs of andrew d. white and moncure d. conway both, i remember, gave him enjoyment, as did the letters of lowell. a volume of the letters of madame de sevigne had some annotated margins which were not complimentary to the translator, or for that matter to sevigne herself, whom he once designates as a “nauseating” person, many of whose letters had been uselessly translated, as well as poorly arranged for reading. but he would read any volume of letters or personal memoirs; none were too poor that had the throb of life in them, however slight. of such sort were the books that mark twain had loved best, and such were a few of his words concerning them. some of them belong to his earlier reading, and among these is darwin's 'descent of man', a book whose influence was always present, though i believe he did not read it any more in later years. in the days i knew him he read steadily not much besides suetonius and pepys and carlyle. these and his simple astronomies and geologies and the morte arthure and the poems of kipling were seldom far from his hand. cclxxxviii. a bermuda birthday it was the middle of november, , when clemens decided to take another bermuda vacation, and it was the th that we sailed. i went to new york a day ahead and arranged matters, and on the evening of the th received the news that richard watson gilder had suddenly died. next morning there was other news. clemens's old friend, william m. laffan, of the sun, had died while undergoing a surgical operation. i met clemens at the train. he had already heard about gilder; but he had not yet learned of laffan's death. he said: “that's just it. gilder and laffan get all the good things that come along and i never get anything.” then, suddenly remembering, he added: “how curious it is! i have been thinking of laffan coming down on the train, and mentally writing a letter to him on this stetson-eddy affair.” i asked when he had begun thinking of laffan. he said: “within the hour.” it was within the hour that i had received the news, and naturally in my mind had carried it instantly to him. perhaps there was something telepathic in it. he was not at all ill going down to bermuda, which was a fortunate thing, for the water was rough and i was quite disqualified. we did not even discuss astronomy, though there was what seemed most important news--the reported discovery of a new planet. but there was plenty of talk on the subject as soon as we got settled in the hamilton hotel. it was windy and rainy out-of-doors, and we looked out on the drenched semi-tropical foliage with a great bamboo swaying and bending in the foreground, while he speculated on the vast distance that the new planet must lie from our sun, to which it was still a satellite. the report had said that it was probably four hundred billions of miles distant, and that on this far frontier of the solar system the sun could not appear to it larger than the blaze of a tallow candle. to us it was wholly incredible how, in that dim remoteness, it could still hold true to the central force and follow at a snail-pace, yet with unvarying exactitude, its stupendous orbit. clemens said that heretofore neptune, the planetary outpost of our system, had been called the tortoise of the skies, but that comparatively it was rapid in its motion, and had become a near neighbor. he was a good deal excited at first, having somehow the impression that this new planet traveled out beyond the nearest fixed star; but then he remembered that the distance to that first solar neighbor was estimated in trillions, not billions, and that our little system, even with its new additions, was a child's handbreadth on the plane of the sky. he had brought along a small book called the pith of astronomy--a fascinating little volume--and he read from it about the great tempest of fire in the sun, where the waves of flame roll up two thousand miles high, though the sun itself is such a tiny star in the deeps of the universe. if i dwell unwarrantably on this phase of mark twain's character, it is because it was always so fascinating to me, and the contemplation of the drama of the skies always meant so much to him, and somehow always seemed akin to him in its proportions. he had been born under a flaming star, a wanderer of the skies. he was himself, to me, always a comet rushing through space, from mystery to mystery, regardless of sun and systems. it is not likely to rain long in bermuda, and when the sun comes back it brings summer, whatever the season. within a day after our arrival we were driving about those coral roads along the beaches, and by that marvelously variegated water. we went often to the south shore, especially to devonshire bay, where the reefs and the sea coloring seem more beautiful than elsewhere. usually, when we reached the bay, we got out to walk along the indurated shore, stopping here and there to look out over the jeweled water liquid turquoise, emerald lapis-lazuli, jade, the imperial garment of the lord. at first we went alone with only the colored driver, clifford trott, whose name clemens could not recollect, though he was always attempting resemblances with ludicrous results. a little later helen allen, an early angel-fish member already mentioned, was with us and directed the drives, for she had been born on the island and knew every attractive locality, though, for that matter, it would be hard to find there a place that was not attractive. clemens, in fact, remained not many days regularly at the hotel. he kept a room and his wardrobe there; but he paid a visit to bay house--the lovely and quiet home of helen's parents--and prolonged it from day to day, and from week to week, because it was a quiet and peaceful place with affectionate attention and limitless welcome. clifford trott had orders to come with the carriage each afternoon, and we drove down to bay house for mark twain and his playmate, and then went wandering at will among the labyrinth of blossom-bordered, perfectly kept roadways of a dainty paradise, that never, i believe, becomes quite a reality even to those who know it best. clemens had an occasional paroxysm during these weeks, but they were not likely to be severe or protracted; and i have no doubt the peace of his surroundings, the remoteness from disturbing events, as well as the balmy temperature, all contributed to his improved condition. he talked pretty continuously during these drives, and he by no means restricted his subjects to juvenile matters. he discussed history and his favorite sciences and philosophies, and i am sure that his drift was rarely beyond the understanding of his young companion, for it was mark twain's gift to phrase his thought so that it commanded not only the respect of age, but the comprehension and the interest of youth. i remember that once he talked, during an afternoon's drive, on the french revolution and the ridiculous episode of anacharsis cloots, “orator and advocate of the human race,” collecting the vast populace of france to swear allegiance to a king even then doomed to the block. the very name of cloots suggested humor, and nothing could have been more delightful and graphic than the whole episode as he related it. helen asked if he thought such a thing as that could ever happen in america. “no,” he said, “the american sense of humor would have laughed it out of court in a week; and the frenchman dreads ridicule, too, though he never seems to realize how ridiculous he is--the most ridiculous creature in the world.” on the morning of his seventy-fourth birthday he was looking wonderfully well after a night of sound sleep, his face full of color and freshness, his eyes bright and keen and full of good-humor. i presented him with a pair of cuff-buttons silver-enameled with the bermuda lily, and i thought he seemed pleased with them. it was rather gloomy outside, so we remained indoors by the fire and played cards, game after game of hearts, at which he excelled, and he was usually kept happy by winning. there were no visitors, and after dinner helen asked him to read some of her favorite episodes from tom sawyer, so he read the whitewashing scene, peter and the pain-killer, and such chapters until tea-time. then there was a birthday cake, and afterward cigars and talk and a quiet fireside evening. once, in the course of his talk, he forgot a word and denounced his poor memory: “i'll forget the lord's middle name some time,” he declared, “right in the midst of a storm, when i need all the help i can get.” later he said: “nobody dreamed, seventy-four years ago to-day, that i would be in bermuda now.” and i thought he meant a good deal more than the words conveyed. it was during this bermuda visit that mark twain added the finishing paragraph to his article, “the turning-point in my life,” which, at howells's suggestion, he had been preparing for harper's bazar. it was a characteristic touch, and, as the last summary of his philosophy of human life, may be repeated here. necessarily the scene of the real turning-point of my life (and of yours) was the garden of eden. it was there that the first link was forged of the chain that was ultimately to lead to the emptying of me into the literary guild. adam's temperament was the first command the deity ever issued to a human being on this planet. and it was the only command adam would never be able to disobey. it said, “be weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable.” the later command, to let the fruit alone, was certain to be disobeyed. not by adam himself, but by his temperament--which he did not create and had no authority over. for the temperament is the man; the thing tricked out with clothes and named man is merely its shadow, nothing more. the law of the tiger's temperament is, thou shaft kill; the law of the sheep's temperament is, thou shalt not kill. to issue later commands requiring the tiger to let the fat stranger alone, and requiring the sheep to imbrue its hands in the blood of the lion is not worth while, for those commands can't be obeyed. they would invite to violations of the law of temperament, which is supreme, and takes precedence of all other authorities. i cannot help feeling disappointed in adam and eve. that is, in their temperaments. not in them, poor helpless young creatures--afflicted with temperaments made out of butter, which butter was commanded to get into contact with fire and be melted. what i cannot help wishing is, that adam and eve had been postponed, and martin luther and joan of arc put in their place--that splendid pair equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of asbestos. by neither sugary persuasions nor by hell-fire could satan have beguiled them to eat the apple. there would have been results! indeed yes. the apple would be intact to-day; there would be no human race; there would be no you; there would be no me. and the old, old creation-dawn scheme of ultimately launching me into the literary guild would have been defeated. cclxxxix. the death of jean he decided to go home for the holidays, and how fortunate it seems now that he did so! we sailed for america on the th of december, arriving the st. jean was at the wharf to meet us, blue and shivering with the cold, for it was wretchedly bleak there, and i had the feeling that she should not have come. she went directly, i think, to stormfield, he following a day or two later. on the d i was lunching with jean alone. she was full of interest in her christmas preparations. she had a handsome tree set up in the loggia, and the packages were piled about it, with new ones constantly arriving. with her farm management, her housekeeping, her secretary work, and her christmas preparations, it seemed to me that she had her hands overfull. such a mental pressure could not be good for her. i suggested that for a time at least i might assume a part of her burden. i was to remain at my own home that night, and i think it was as i left stormfield that i passed jean on the stair. she said, cheerfully, that she felt a little tired and was going up to lie down, so that she would be fresh for the evening. i did not go back, and i never saw her alive again. i was at breakfast next morning when word was brought in that one of the men from stormfield was outside and wished to see me immediately. when i went out he said: “miss jean is dead. they have just found her in her bath-room. mr. clemens sent me to bring you.” it was as incomprehensible as such things always are. i could not realize at all that jean, so full of plans and industries and action less than a day before, had passed into that voiceless mystery which we call death. harry iles drove me rapidly up the hill. as i entered clemens's room he looked at me helplessly and said: “well, i suppose you have heard of this final disaster.” he was not violent or broken down with grief. he had come to that place where, whatever the shock or the ill-turn of fortune, he could accept it, and even in that first moment of loss he realized that, for jean at least, the fortune was not ill. her malady had never been cured, and it had been one of his deepest dreads that he would leave her behind him. it was believed, at first; that jean had drowned, and dr. smith tried methods of resuscitation; but then he found that it was simply a case of heart cessation caused by the cold shock of her bath. the gabrilowitsches were by this time in europe, and clemens cabled them not to come. later in the day he asked me if we would be willing to close our home for the winter and come to stormfield. he said that he should probably go back to bermuda before long; but that he wished to keep the house open so that it would be there for him to come to at any time that he might need it. we came, of course, for there was no thought among any of his friends but for his comfort and peace of mind. jervis langdon was summoned from elmira, for jean would lie there with the others. in the loggia stood the half-trimmed christmas tree, and all about lay the packages of gifts, and in jean's room, on the chairs and upon her desk, were piled other packages. nobody had been forgotten. for her father she had bought a handsome globe; he had always wanted one. once when i went into his room he said: “i have been looking in at jean and envying her. i have never greatly envied any one but the dead. i always envy the dead.” he told me how the night before they had dined together alone; how he had urged her to turn over a part of her work to me; how she had clung to every duty as if now, after all the years, she was determined to make up for lost time. while they were at dinner a telephone inquiry had come concerning his health, for the papers had reported him as returning from bermuda in a critical condition. he had written this playful answer: manager associated press, new york. i hear the newspapers say i am dying. the charge is not true. i would not do such a thing at my time of life. i am behaving as good as i can. merry christmas to everybody! mark twain. jean telephoned it for him to the press. it had been the last secretary service she had ever rendered. she had kissed his hand, he said, when they parted, for she had a severe cold and would not wish to impart it to him; then happily she had said good night, and he had not seen her again. the reciting of this was good to him, for it brought the comfort of tears. later, when i went in again, he was writing: “i am setting it down,” he said--“everything. it is a relief to me to write it. it furnishes me an excuse for thinking.” he continued writing most of the day, and at intervals during the next day, and the next. it was on christmas day that they went with jean on her last journey. katie leary, her baby nurse, had dressed her in the dainty gown which she had worn for clara's wedding, and they had pinned on it a pretty buckle which her father had brought her from bermuda, and which she had not seen. no greek statue was ever more classically beautiful than she was, lying there in the great living-room, which in its brief history had seen so much of the round of life. they were to start with jean at about six o'clock, and a little before that time clemens (he was unable to make the journey) asked me what had been her favorite music. i said that she seemed always to care most for the schubert impromptu.--[op. , no. .]--then he said: “play it when they get ready to leave with her, and add the intermezzo for susy and the largo for mrs. clemens. when i hear the music i shall know that they are starting. tell them to set lanterns at the door, so i can look down and see them go.” so i sat at the organ and began playing as they lifted and bore her away. a soft, heavy snow was falling, and the gloom of those shortest days was closing in. there was not the least wind or noise, the whole world was muffled. the lanterns at the door threw their light out on the thickly falling flakes. i remained at the organ; but the little group at the door saw him come to the window above--the light on his white hair as he stood mournfully gazing down, watching jean going away from him for the last time. i played steadily on as he had instructed, the impromptu, the intermezzo from “cavalleria,” and handel's largo. when i had finished i went up and found him. “poor little jean,” he said; “but for her it is so good to go.” in his own story of it he wrote: from my windows i saw the hearse and the carriages wind along the road and gradually grow vague and spectral in the falling snow, and presently disappear. jean was gone out of my life, and would not come back any more. the cousin she had played with when they were babies together--he and her beloved old katie--were conducting her to her distant childhood home, where she will lie by her mother's side once more, in the company of susy and langdon. he did not come down to dinner, and when i went up afterward i found him curiously agitated. he said: “for one who does not believe in spirits i have had a most peculiar experience. i went into the bath-room just now and closed the door. you know how warm it always is in there, and there are no draughts. all at once i felt a cold current of air about me. i thought the door must be open; but it was closed. i said, 'jean, is this you trying to let me know you have found the others?' then the cold air was gone.” i saw that the incident had made a very great impression upon him; but i don't remember that he ever mentioned it afterward. next day the storm had turned into a fearful blizzard; the whole hilltop was a raging, driving mass of white. he wrote most of the day, but stopped now and then to read some of the telegrams or letters of condolence which came flooding in. sometimes he walked over to the window to look out on the furious tempest. once, during the afternoon, he said: “jean always so loved to see a storm like this, and just now at elmira they are burying her.” later he read aloud some lines by alfred austin, which mrs. crane had sent him lines which he had remembered in the sorrow for susy: when last came sorrow, around barn and byre wind-careen snow, the year's white sepulchre, lay. “come in,” i said, “and warm you by the fire”; and there she sits and never goes away. it was that evening that he came into the room where mrs. paine and i sat by the fire, bringing his manuscript. “i have finished my story of jean's death,” he said. “it is the end of my autobiography. i shall never write any more. i can't judge it myself at all. one of you read it aloud to the other, and let me know what you think of it. if it is worthy, perhaps some day it may be published.” it was, in fact, one of the most exquisite and tender pieces of writing in the language. he had ended his literary labors with that perfect thing which so marvelously speaks the loftiness and tenderness of his soul. it was thoroughly in keeping with his entire career that he should, with this rare dramatic touch, bring it to a close. a paragraph which he omitted may be printed now: december . did i know jean's value? no, i only thought i did. i knew a ten-thousandth fraction of it, that was all. it is always so, with us, it has always been so. we are like the poor ignorant private soldier-dead, now, four hundred years--who picked up the great sancy diamond on the field of the lost battle and sold it for a franc. later he knew what he had done. shall i ever be cheerful again, happy again? yes. and soon. for i know my temperament. and i know that the temperament is master of the man, and that he is its fettered and helpless slave and must in all things do as it commands. a man's temperament is born in him, and no circumstances can ever change it. my temperament has never allowed my spirits to remain depressed long at a time. that was a feature of jean's temperament, too. she inherited it from me. i think she got the rest of it from her mother. jean clemens had two natural endowments: the gift of justice and a genuine passion for all nature. in a little paper found in her desk she had written: i know a few people who love the country as i do, but not many. most of my acquaintances are enthusiastic over the spring and summer months, but very few care much for it the year round. a few people are interested in the spring foliage and the development of the wild flowers--nearly all enjoy the autumn colors--while comparatively few pay much attention to the coming and going of the birds, the changes in their plumage and songs, the apparent springing into life on some warm april day of the chipmunks and woodchucks, the skurrying of baby rabbits, and again in the fall the equally sudden disappearance of some of the animals and the growing shyness of others. to me it is all as fascinating as a book--more so, since i have never lost interest in it. it is simple and frank, like thoreau. perhaps, had she exercised it, there was a third gift--the gift of written thought. clemens remained at stormfield ten days after jean was gone. the weather was fiercely cold, the landscape desolate, the house full of tragedy. he kept pretty closely to his room, where he had me bring the heaps of letters, a few of which he answered personally; for the others he prepared a simple card of acknowledgment. he was for the most part in gentle mood during these days, though he would break out now and then, and rage at the hardness of a fate that had laid an unearned burden of illness on jean and shadowed her life. they were days not wholly without humor--none of his days could be altogether without that, though it was likely to be of a melancholy sort. many of the letters offered orthodox comfort, saying, in effect: “god does not willingly punish us.” when he had read a number of these he said: “well, why does he do it then? we don't invite it. why does he give himself the trouble?” i suggested that it was a sentiment that probably gave comfort to the writer of it. “so it does,” he said, “and i am glad of it--glad of anything that gives comfort to anybody.” he spoke of the larger god--the god of the great unvarying laws, and by and by dropped off to sleep, quite peacefully, and indeed peace came more and more to him each day with the thought that jean and susy and their mother could not be troubled any more. to mrs. gabrilowitsch he wrote: redding, conn, december , . o, clara, clara dear, i am so glad she is out of it & safe--safe! i am not melancholy; i shall never be melancholy again, i think. you see, i was in such distress when i came to realize that you were gone far away & no one stood between her & danger but me--& i could die at any moment, & then--oh then what would become of her! for she was wilful, you know, & would not have been governable. you can't imagine what a darling she was that last two or three days; & how fine, & good, & sweet, & noble--& joyful, thank heaven! --& how intellectually brilliant. i had never been acquainted with jean before. i recognized that. but i mustn't try to write about her--i can't. i have already poured my heart out with the pen, recording that last day or two. i will send you that--& you must let no one but ossip read it. good-by. i love you so! and ossip. father. ccxc. the return to bermuda i don't think he attempted any further writing for print. his mind was busy with ideas, but he was willing to talk, rather than to write, rather even than to play billiards, it seemed, although we had a few quiet games--the last we should ever play together. evenings he asked for music, preferring the scotch airs, such as “bonnie doon” and “the campbells are coming.” i remember that once, after playing the latter for him, he told, with great feeling, how the highlanders, led by gen. colin campbell, had charged at lucknow, inspired by that stirring air. when he had retired i usually sat with him, and he drifted into literature, or theology, or science, or history--the story of the universe and man. one evening he spoke of those who had written but one immortal thing and stopped there. he mentioned “ben bolt.” “i met that man once,” he said. “in my childhood i sang 'sweet alice, ben bolt,' and in my old age, fifteen years ago, i met the man who wrote it. his name was brown.--[thomas dunn english. mr. clemens apparently remembered only the name satirically conferred upon him by edgar allan poe, “thomas dunn brown.”]--he was aged, forgotten, a mere memory. i remember how it thrilled me to realize that this was the very author of 'sweet alice, ben bolt.' he was just an accident. he had a vision and echoed it. a good many persons do that--the thing they do is to put in compact form the thing which we have all vaguely felt. 'twenty years ago' is just like it 'i have wandered through the village, tom, and sat beneath the tree'--and holmes's 'last leaf' is another: the memory of the hallowed past, and the gravestones of those we love. it is all so beautiful--the past is always beautiful.” he quoted, with great feeling and effect: the massy marbles rest on the lips that we have pressed in their bloom, and the names we love to hear have been carved for many a year on the tomb. he continued in this strain for an hour or more. he spoke of humor, and thought it must be one of the chief attributes of god. he cited plants and animals that were distinctly humorous in form and in their characteristics. these he declared were god's jokes. “why,” he said, “humor is mankind's greatest blessing.” “your own case is an example,” i answered. “without it, whatever your reputation as a philosopher, you could never have had the wide-spread affection that is shown by the writers of that great heap of letters.” “yes,” he said, gently, “they have liked to be amused.” i tucked him in for the night, promising to send him to bermuda, with claude to take care of him, if he felt he could undertake the journey in two days more. he was able, and he was eager to go, for he longed for that sunny island, and for the quiet peace of the allen home. his niece, mrs. loomis, came up to spend the last evening in stormfield, a happy evening full of quiet talk, and next morning, in the old closed carriage that had been his wedding-gift, he was driven to the railway station. this was on january , . he was to sail next day, and that night, at mr. loomis's, howells came in, and for an hour or two they reviewed some of the questions they had so long ago settled, or left forever unsettled, and laid away. i remember that at dinner clemens spoke of his old hartford butler, george, and how he had once brought george to new york and introduced him at the various publishing houses as his friend, with curious and sometimes rather embarrassing results. the talk drifted to sociology and to the labor-unions, which clemens defended as being the only means by which the workman could obtain recognition of his rights. howells in his book mentions this evening, which he says “was made memorable to me by the kind, clear, judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as the sole present help of the weak against the strong.” they discussed dreams, and then in a little while howells rose to go. i went also, and as we walked to his near-by apartment he spoke of mark twain's supremacy. he said: “i turn to his books for cheer when i am down-hearted. there was never anybody like him; there never will be.” clemens sailed next morning. they did not meet again. ccxci. letters from bermuda stormfield was solemn and empty without mark twain; but he wrote by every steamer, at first with his own hand, and during the last week by the hand of one of his enlisted secretaries--some member of the allen family usually helen. his letters were full of brightness and pleasantry--always concerned more or less with business matters, though he was no longer disturbed by them, for bermuda was too peaceful and too far away, and, besides, he had faith in the mark twain company's ability to look after his affairs. i cannot do better, i believe, than to offer some portions of these letters here. he reached bermuda on the th of january, , and on the th he wrote: again i am living the ideal life. there is nothing to mar it but the bloody-minded bandit arthur,--[a small playmate of helen's of whom clemens pretended to be fiercely jealous. once he wrote a memorandum to helen: “let arthur read this book. there is a page in it that is poisoned.”]--who still fetches and carries helen. presently he will be found drowned. claude comes to bay house twice a day to see if i need any service. he is invaluable. there was a military lecture last night at the officers' mess prospect; as the lecturer honored me with a special urgent invitation, and said he wanted to lecture to me particularly, i naturally took helen and her mother into the private carriage and went. as soon as we landed at the door with the crowd the governor came to me& was very cordial. i “met up” with that charming colonel chapman [we had known him on the previous visit] and other officers of the regiment & had a good time. a few days later he wrote: thanks for your letter & for its contenting news of the situation in that foreign & far-off & vaguely remembered country where you & loomis & lark and other beloved friends are. i had a letter from clara this morning. she is solicitous & wants me well & watchfully taken care of. my, my, she ought to see helen & her parents & claude administer that trust. also she says, “i hope to hear from you or mr. paine very soon.” i am writing her & i know you will respond to your part of her prayer. she is pretty desolate now after jean's emancipation--the only kindness that god ever did that poor, unoffending child in all her hard life. send clara a copy of howells's gorgeous letter. the “gorgeous letter” mentioned was an appreciation of his recent bazar article, “the turning-point in my life,” and here follows: january , . dear clemens,--while your wonderful words are warm in my mind yet i want to tell you what you know already: that you never wrote anything greater, finer, than that turning-point paper of yours. i shall feel it honor enough if they put on my tombstone “he was born in the same century and general section of middle western country with dr. s. l. clemens, oxon., and had his degree three years before him through a mistake of the university.” i hope you are worse. you will never be riper for a purely intellectual life, and it is a pity to have you lagging along with a worn-out material body on top of your soul. yours ever, w. d. howells. on the margin of this letter clemens had written: i reckon this spontaneous outburst from the first critic of the day is good to keep, ain't it, paine? january th he wrote again of his contentment: life continues here the same as usual. there isn't a fault in it --good times, good home, tranquil contentment all day & every day without a break. i know familiarly several very satisfactory people & meet them frequently: mr. hamilton, the sloanes, mr. & mrs. fells, miss waterman, & so on. i shouldn't know how to go about bettering my situation. on february th he wrote that the climate and condition of his health might require him to stay in bermuda pretty continuously, but that he wished stormfield kept open so that he might come to it at any time. and he added: yesterday mr. allen took us on an excursion in mr. hamilton's big motor-boat. present: mrs. allen, mr. & mrs. & miss sloane, helen, mildred howells, claude, & me. several hours' swift skimming over ravishing blue seas, a brilliant sun; also a couple of hours of picnicking & lazying under the cedars in a secluded place. the orotava is arriving with passengers--i shall get letters by her, no doubt. p. s.--please send me the standard unabridged that is on the table in my bedroom. i have no dictionary here. there is no mention in any of these letters of his trouble; but he was having occasional spasms of pain, though in that soft climate they would seem to have come with less frequency, and there was so little to disturb him, and much that contributed to his peace. among the callers at the bay house to see him was woodrow wilson, and the two put in some pleasant hours at miniature golf, “putting” on the allen lawn. of course a catastrophe would come along now and then--such things could not always be guarded against. in a letter toward the end of february he wrote: it is . in the morning & i am writing because i can't sleep. i can't sleep because a professional pianist is coming to-morrow afternoon to play for me. my god! i wouldn't allow paderewski or gabrilowitsch to do that. i would rather have a leg amputated. i knew he was coming, but i never dreamed it was to play for me. when i heard the horrible news hours ago, be d---d if i didn't come near screaming. i meant to slip out and be absent, but now i can't. don't pray for me. the thing is just as d---d bad as it can be already. clemens's love for music did not include the piano, except for very gentle melodies, and he probably did not anticipate these from a professional player. he did not report the sequel of the matter; but it is likely that his imagination had discounted its tortures. sometimes his letters were pure nonsense. once he sent a sheet, on one side of which was written: bay house, march s, . received of s. l. c. two dollars and forty cents in return for my promise to believe everything he says hereafter. helen s. allen. and on the reverse: for sale the proprietor of the hereinbefore mentioned promise desires to part with it on account of ill health and obliged to go away somewheres so as to let it reciprocate, and will take any reasonable amount for it above percent of its face because experienced parties think it will not keep but only a little while in this kind of weather & is a kind of proppity that don't give a cuss for cold storage nohow. clearly, however serious mark twain regarded his physical condition, he did not allow it to make him gloomy. he wrote that matters were going everywhere to his satisfaction; that clara was happy; that his household and business affairs no longer troubled him; that his personal surroundings were of the pleasantest sort. sometimes he wrote of what he was reading, and once spoke particularly of prof. william lyon phelps's literary essays, which he said he had been unable to lay down until he had finished the book.--[to phelps himself he wrote: “i thank you ever so much for the book, which i find charming--so charming, indeed, that i read it through in a single night, & did not regret the lost night's sleep. i am glad if i deserve what you have said about me; & even if i don't i am proud & well contented, since you think i deserve it.”] so his days seemed full of comfort. but in march i noticed that he generally dictated his letters, and once when he sent some small photographs i thought he looked thinner and older. still he kept up his merriment. in one letter he said: while the matter is in my mind i will remark that if you ever send me another letter which is not paged at the top i will write you with my own hand, so that i may use with utter freedom & without embarrassment the kind of words which alone can describe such a criminal, to wit, - - - -; you will have to put into words those dashes because propriety will not allow me to do it myself in my secretary's hearing. you are forgiven, but don't let it occur again. he had still made no mention of his illness; but on the th of march he wrote something of his plans for coming home. he had engaged passage on the bermudian for april d, he said; and he added: but don't tell anybody. i don't want it known. i may have to go sooner if the pain in my breast does not mend its ways pretty considerable. i don't want to die here, for this is an unkind place for a person in that condition. i should have to lie in the undertaker's cellar until the ship would remove me & it is dark down there & unpleasant. the colliers will meet me on the pier, & i may stay with them a week or two before going home. it all depends on the breast pain. i don't want to die there. i am growing more and more particular about the place. but in the same letter he spoke of plans for the summer, suggesting that we must look into the magic-lantern possibilities, so that library entertainments could be given at stormfield. i confess that this letter, in spite of its light tone, made me uneasy, and i was tempted to sail for bermuda to bring him home. three days later he wrote again: i have been having a most uncomfortable time for the past four days with that breast pain, which turns out to be an affection of the heart, just as i originally suspected. the news from new york is to the effect that non-bronchial weather has arrived there at last; therefore, if i can get my breast trouble in traveling condition i may sail for home a week or two earlier than has been proposed. the same mail that brought this brought a letter from mr. allen, who frankly stated that matters had become very serious indeed. mr. clemens had had some dangerous attacks, and the physicians considered his condition critical. these letters arrived april st. i went to new york at once and sailed next morning. before sailing i consulted with dr. quintard, who provided me with some opiates and instructed me in the use of the hypodermic needle. he also joined me in a cablegram to the gabrilowitsches, then in italy, advising them to sail without delay. ccxcii. the voyage home i sent no word to bermuda that i was coming, and when on the second morning i arrived at hamilton, i stepped quickly ashore from the tender and hurried to bay house. the doors were all open, as they usually are in that summer island, and no one was visible. i was familiar with the place, and, without knocking, i went through to the room occupied by mark twain. as i entered i saw that he was alone, sitting in a large chair, clad in the familiar dressing-gown. bay house stands upon the water, and the morning light, reflected in at the window, had an unusual quality. he was not yet shaven, and he seemed unnaturally pale and gray; certainly he was much thinner. i was too startled, for the moment, to say anything. when he turned and saw me he seemed a little dazed. “why,” he said, holding out his hand, “you didn't tell us you were coming.” “no,” i said, “it is rather sudden. i didn't quite like the sound of your last letters.” “but those were not serious,” he protested. “you shouldn't have come on my account.” i said then that i had come on my own account; that i had felt the need of recreation, and had decided to run down and come home with him. “that's--very--good,” he said, in his slow, gentle fashion. “now i'm glad to see you.” his breakfast came in and he ate with an appetite. when he had been shaved and freshly propped tip in his pillows it seemed to me, after all, that i must have been mistaken in thinking him so changed. certainly he was thinner, but his color was fine, his eyes were bright; he had no appearance of a man whose life was believed to be in danger. he told me then of the fierce attacks he had gone through, how the pains had torn at him, and how it had been necessary for him to have hypodermic injections, which he amusingly termed “hypnotic injunctions” and “subcutaneous applications,” and he had his humor out of it, as of course he must have, even though death should stand there in person. from mr. and mrs. allen and from the physician i learned how slender had been his chances and how uncertain were the days ahead. mr. allen had already engaged passage on the oceana for the th, and the one purpose now was to get him physically in condition for the trip. how devoted those kind friends had been to him! they had devised every imaginable thing for his comfort. mr. allen had rigged an electric bell which connected with his own room, so that he could be aroused instantly at any hour of the night. clemens had refused to have a nurse, for it was only during the period of his extreme suffering that he needed any one, and he did not wish to have a nurse always around. when the pains were gone he was as bright and cheerful, and, seemingly, as well as ever. on the afternoon of my arrival we drove out, as formerly, and he discussed some of the old subjects in quite the old way. he had been rereading macaulay, he said, and spoke at considerable length of the hypocrisy and intrigue of the english court under james ii. he spoke, too, of the redding library. i had sold for him that portion of the land where jean's farm-house had stood, and it was in his mind to use the money for some sort of a memorial to jean. i had written, suggesting that perhaps he would like to put up a small library building, as the adams lot faced the corner where jean had passed every day when she rode to the station for the mail. he had been thinking this over, he said, and wished the idea carried out. he asked me to write at once to his lawyer, mr. lark, and have a paper prepared appointing trustees for a memorial library fund. the pain did not trouble him that afternoon, nor during several succeeding days. he was gay and quite himself, and he often went out on the lawn; but we did not drive out again. for the most part, he sat propped up in his bed, reading or smoking, or talking in the old way; and as i looked at him he seemed so full of vigor and the joy of life that i could not convince myself that he would not outlive us all. i found that he had been really very much alive during those three months--too much for his own good, sometimes--for he had not been careful of his hours or his diet, and had suffered in consequence. he had not been writing, though he had scribbled some playful valentines and he had amused himself one day by preparing a chapter of advice--for me it appeared--which, after reading it aloud to the allens and receiving their approval, he declared he intended to have printed for my benefit. as it would seem to have been the last bit of continued writing he ever did, and because it is characteristic and amusing, a few paragraphs may be admitted. the “advice” is concerning deportment on reaching the gate which st. peter is supposed to guard-- upon arrival do not speak to st. peter until spoken to. it is not your place to begin. do not begin any remark with “say.” when applying for a ticket avoid trying to make conversation. if you must talk let the weather alone. st. peter cares not a damn for the weather. and don't ask him what time the . train goes; there aren't any trains in heaven, except through trains, and the less information you get about them the better for you. you can ask him for his autograph--there is no harm in that--but be careful and don't remark that it is one of the penalties of greatness. he has heard that before. don't try to kodak him. hell is full of people who have made that mistake. leave your dog outside. heaven goes by favor. if it went by merit you would stay out and the dog would go in. you will be wanting to slip down at night and smuggle water to those poor little chaps (the infant damned), but don't you try it. you would be caught, and nobody in heaven would respect you after that. explain to helen why i don't come. if you can. there were several pages of this counsel. one paragraph was written in shorthand. i meant to ask him to translate it; but there were many other things to think of, and i did not remember. i spent most of each day with him, merely sitting by the bed and reading while he himself read or dozed. his nights were wakeful--he found it easier to sleep by day--and he liked to think that some one was there. he became interested in hardy's jude, and spoke of it with high approval, urging me to read it. he dwelt a good deal on the morals of it, or rather on the lack of them. he followed the tale to the end, finishing it the afternoon before we sailed. it was his last continuous reading. i noticed, when he slept, that his breathing was difficult, and i could see from day to day that he did not improve; but each evening he would be gay and lively, and he liked the entire family to gather around, while he became really hilarious over the various happenings of the day. it was only a few days before we sailed that the very severe attacks returned. the night of the th was a hard one. the doctors were summoned, and it was only after repeated injections of morphine that the pain had been eased. when i returned in the early morning he was sitting in his chair trying to sing, after his old morning habit. he took my hand and said: “well, i had a picturesque night. every pain i had was on exhibition.” he looked out the window at the sunlight on the bay and green dotted islands. “'sparkling and bright in the liquid light,'” he quoted. “that's hoffman. anything left of hoffman?” “no,” i said. “i must watch for the bermudian and see if she salutes,” he said, presently. “the captain knows i am here sick, and he blows two short whistles just as they come up behind that little island. those are for me.” he said he could breathe easier if he could lean forward, and i placed a card-table in front of him. his breakfast came in, and a little later he became quite gay. he drifted to macaulay again, and spoke of king james's plot to assassinate william ii., and how the clergy had brought themselves to see that there was no difference between killing a king in battle and by assassination. he had taken his seat by the window to watch for the bermudian. she came down the bay presently, her bright red stacks towering vividly above the green island. it was a brilliant morning, the sky and the water a marvelous blue. he watched her anxiously and without speaking. suddenly there were two white puffs of steam, and two short, hoarse notes went up from her. “those are for me,” he said, his face full of contentment. “captain fraser does not forget me.” there followed another bad night. my room was only a little distance away, and claude came for me. i do not think any of us thought he would survive it; but he slept at last, or at least dozed. in the morning he said: “that breast pain stands watch all night and the short breath all day. i am losing enough sleep to supply a worn-out army. i want a jugful of that hypnotic injunction every night and every morning.” we began to fear now that he would not be able to sail on the th; but by great good-fortune he had wonderfully improved by the th, so much so that i began to believe, if once he could be in stormfield, where the air was more vigorous, he might easily survive the summer. the humid atmosphere of the season increased the difficulty of his breathing. that evening he was unusually merry. mr. and mrs. allen and helen and myself went in to wish him good night. he was loath to let us leave, but was reminded that he would sail in the morning, and that the doctor had insisted that he must be quiet and lie still in bed and rest. he was never one to be very obedient. a little later mrs. allen and i, in the sitting-room, heard some one walking softly outside on the veranda. we went out there, and he was marching up and down in his dressing-gown as unconcerned as if he were not an invalid at all. he hadn't felt sleepy, he said, and thought a little exercise would do him good. perhaps it did, for he slept soundly that night--a great blessing. mr. allen had chartered a special tug to come to bay house landing in the morning and take him to the ship. he was carried in a little hand-chair to the tug, and all the way out he seemed light-spirited, anything but an invalid: the sailors carried him again in the chair to his state-room, and he bade those dear bermuda friends good-by, and we sailed away. as long as i remember anything i shall remember the forty-eight hours of that homeward voyage. it was a brief two days as time is measured; but as time is lived it has taken its place among those unmeasured periods by the side of which even years do not count. at first he seemed quite his natural self, and asked for a catalogue of the ship's library, and selected some memoirs of the countess of cardigan for his reading. he asked also for the second volume of carlyle's french revolution, which he had with him. but we ran immediately into the more humid, more oppressive air of the gulf stream, and his breathing became at first difficult, then next to impossible. there were two large port-holes, which i opened; but presently he suggested that it would be better outside. it was only a step to the main-deck, and no passengers were there. i had a steamer-chair brought, and with claude supported him to it and bundled him with rugs; but it had grown damp and chilly, and his breathing did not improve. it seemed to me that the end might come at any moment, and this thought was in his mind, too, for once in the effort for breath he managed to say: “i am going--i shall be gone in a moment.” breath came; but i realized then that even his cabin was better than this. i steadied him back to his berth and shut out most of that deadly dampness. he asked for the “hypnotic 'injunction” (for his humor never left him), and though it was not yet the hour prescribed i could not deny it. it was impossible for him to lie down, even to recline, without great distress. the opiate made him drowsy, and he longed for the relief of sleep; but when it seemed about to possess him the struggle for air would bring him upright. during the more comfortable moments he spoke quite in the old way, and time and again made an effort to read, and reached for his pipe or a cigar which lay in the little berth hammock at his side. i held the match, and he would take a puff or two with satisfaction. then the peace of it would bring drowsiness, and while i supported him there would come a few moments, perhaps, of precious sleep. only a few moments, for the devil of suffocation was always lying in wait to bring him back for fresh tortures. over and over again this was repeated, varied by him being steadied on his feet or sitting on the couch opposite the berth. in spite of his suffering, two dominant characteristics remained--the sense of humor, and tender consideration for another. once when the ship rolled and his hat fell from the hook, and made the circuit of the cabin floor, he said: “the ship is passing the hat.” again he said: “i am sorry for you, paine, but i can't help it--i can't hurry this dying business. can't you give me enough of the hypnotic injunction to put an end to me?” he thought if i could arrange the pillows so he could sit straight up it would not be necessary to support him, and then i could sit on the couch and read while he tried to doze. he wanted me to read jude, he said, so we could talk about it. i got all the pillows i could and built them up around him, and sat down with the book, and this seemed to give him contentment. he would doze off a little and then come up with a start, his piercing, agate eyes searching me out to see if i was still there. over and over--twenty times in an hour--this was repeated. when i could deny him no longer i administered the opiate, but it never completely possessed him or gave him entire relief. as i looked at him there, so reduced in his estate, i could not but remember all the labor of his years, and all the splendid honor which the world had paid to him. something of this may have entered his mind, too, for once, when i offered him some of the milder remedies which we had brought, he said: “after forty years of public effort i have become just a target for medicines.” the program of change from berth to the floor, from floor to the couch, from the couch back to the berth among the pillows, was repeated again and again, he always thinking of the trouble he might be making, rarely uttering any complaint; but once he said: “i never guessed that i was not going to outlive john bigelow.” and again: “this is such a mysterious disease. if we only had a bill of particulars we'd have something to swear at.” time and again he picked up carlyle or the cardigan memoirs, and read, or seemed to read, a few lines; but then the drowsiness would come and the book would fall. time and again he attempted to smoke, or in his drowse simulated the motion of placing a cigar to his lips and puffing in the old way. two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber--one of a play in which the title-role of the general manager was always unfilled. he spoke of this now and then when it had passed, and it seemed to amuse him. the other was a discomfort: a college assembly was attempting to confer upon him some degree which he did not want. once, half roused, he looked at me searchingly and asked: “isn't there something i can resign and be out of all this? they keep trying to confer that degree upon me and i don't want it.” then realizing, he said: “i am like a bird in a cage: always expecting to get out, and always beaten back by the wires.” and, somewhat later: “oh, it is such a mystery, and it takes so long.” toward the evening of the first day, when it grew dark outside, he asked: “how long have we been on this voyage?” i answered that this was the end of the first day. “how many more are there?” he asked. “only one, and two nights.” “we'll never make it,” he said. “it's an eternity.” “but we must on clara's account,” i told him, and i estimated that clara would be more than half-way across the ocean by now. “it is a losing race,” he said; “no ship can outsail death.” it has been written--i do not know with what proof--that certain great dissenters have recanted with the approach of death--have become weak, and afraid to ignore old traditions in the face of the great mystery. i wish to write here that mark twain, as he neared the end, showed never a single tremor of fear or even of reluctance. i have dwelt upon these hours when suffering was upon him, and death the imminent shadow, in order to show that at the end he was as he had always been, neither more nor less, and never less than brave. once, during a moment when he was comfortable and quite himself, he said, earnestly: “when i seem to be dying i don't want to be stimulated back to life. i want to be made comfortable to go.” there was not a vestige of hesitation; there was no grasping at straws, no suggestion of dread. somehow those two days and nights went by. once, when he was partially relieved by the opiate, i slept, while claude watched; and again, in the fading end of the last night, when we had passed at length into the cold, bracing northern air, and breath had come back to him, and with it sleep. relatives, physicians, and news-gatherers were at the dock to welcome him. he was awake, and the northern air had brightened him, though it was the chill, i suppose, that brought on the pains in his breast, which, fortunately, he had escaped during the voyage. it was not a prolonged attack, and it was, blessedly, the last one. an invalid-carriage had been provided, and a compartment secured on the afternoon express to redding--the same train that had taken him there two years before. dr. robert h. halsey and dr. edward quintard attended him, and he made the journey really in cheerful comfort, for he could breathe now, and in the relief came back old interests. half reclining on the couch, he looked through the afternoon papers. it happened curiously that charles harvey genung, who, something more than four years earlier, had been so largely responsible for my association with mark twain, was on the same train, in the same coach, bound for his country-place at new hartford. lounsbury was waiting with the carriage, and on that still, sweet april evening we drove him to stormfield much as we had driven him two years before. now and then he mentioned the apparent backwardness of the season, for only a few of the trees were beginning to show their green. as we drove into the lane that led to the stormfield entrance, he said: “can we see where you have built your billiard-room?” the gable showed above the trees, and i pointed it out to him. “it looks quite imposing,” he said. i think it was the last outside interest he ever showed in anything. he had been carried from the ship and from the train, but when we drew up to stormfield, where mrs. paine, with katie leary and others of the household, was waiting to greet him, he stepped from the carriage alone with something of his old lightness, and with all his old courtliness, and offered each one his hand. then, in the canvas chair which we had brought, claude and i carried him up-stairs to his room and delivered him to the physicians, and to the comforts and blessed air of home. this was thursday evening, april , . ccxciii. the return to the invisible there would be two days more before ossip and clara gabrilowitsch could arrive. clemens remained fairly bright and comfortable during this interval, though he clearly was not improving. the physicians denied him the morphine, now, as he no longer suffered acutely. but he craved it, and once, when i went in, he said, rather mournfully: “they won't give me the subcutaneous any more.” it was sunday morning when clara came. he was cheerful and able to talk quite freely. he did not dwell upon his condition, i think, but spoke rather of his plans for the summer. at all events, he did not then suggest that he counted the end so near; but a day later it became evident to all that his stay was very brief. his breathing was becoming heavier, though it seemed not to give him much discomfort. his articulation also became affected. i think the last continuous talking he did was to dr. halsey on the evening of april th--the day of clara's arrival. a mild opiate had been administered, and he said he wished to talk himself to sleep. he recalled one of his old subjects, dual personality, and discussed various instances that flitted through his mind--jekyll and hyde phases in literature and fact. he became drowsier as he talked. he said at last: “this is a peculiar kind of disease. it does not invite you to read; it does not invite you to be read to; it does not invite you to talk, nor to enjoy any of the usual sick-room methods of treatment. what kind of a disease is that? some kinds of sicknesses have pleasant features about them. you can read and smoke and have only to lie still.” and a little later he added: “it is singular, very singular, the laws of mentality--vacuity. i put out my hand to reach a book or newspaper which i have been reading most glibly, and it isn't there, not a suggestion of it.” he coughed violently, and afterward commented: “if one gets to meddling with a cough it very soon gets the upper hand and is meddling with you. that is my opinion--of seventy-four years' growth.” the news of his condition, everywhere published, brought great heaps of letters, but he could not see them. a few messages were reported to him. at intervals he read a little. suetonius and carlyle lay on the bed beside him, and he would pick them up as the spirit moved him and read a paragraph or a page. sometimes, when i saw him thus-the high color still in his face, and the clear light in his eyes--i said: “it is not reality. he is not going to die.” on tuesday, the th, he asked me to tell clara to come and sing to him. it was a heavy requirement, but she somehow found strength to sing some of the scotch airs which he loved, and he seemed soothed and comforted. when she came away he bade her good-by, saying that he might not see her again. but he lingered through the next day and the next. his mind was wandering a little on wednesday, and his speech became less and less articulate; but there were intervals when he was quite clear, quite vigorous, and he apparently suffered little. we did not know it, then, but the mysterious messenger of his birth-year, so long anticipated by him, appeared that night in the sky.--[the perihelion of halley's comet for was november th; for it was april th.] on thursday morning, the st, his mind was generally clear, and it was said by the nurses that he read a little from one of the volumes on his bed, from the suetonius, or from one of the volumes of carlyle. early in the forenoon he sent word by clara that he wished to see me, and when i came in he spoke of two unfinished manuscripts which he wished me to “throw away,” as he briefly expressed it, for he had not many words left now. i assured him that i would take care of them, and he pressed my hand. it was his last word to me. once or twice that morning he tried to write some request which he could not put into intelligible words. and once he spoke to gabrilowitsch, who, he said, could understand him better than the others. most of the time he dozed. somewhat after midday, when clara was by him, he roused up and took her hand, and seemed to speak with less effort. “good-by,” he said, and dr. quintard, who was standing near, thought he added: “if we meet”--but the words were very faint. he looked at her for a little while, without speaking, then he sank into a doze, and from it passed into a deeper slumber, and did not heed us any more. through that peaceful spring afternoon the life-wave ebbed lower and lower. it was about half past six, and the sun lay just on the horizon when dr. quintard noticed that the breathing, which had gradually become more subdued, broke a little. there was no suggestion of any struggle. the noble head turned a little to one side, there was a fluttering sigh, and the breath that had been unceasing through seventy-four tumultuous years had stopped forever. he had entered into the estate envied so long. in his own words--the words of one of his latest memoranda: “he had arrived at the dignity of death--the only earthly dignity that is not artificial--the only safe one. the others are traps that can beguile to humiliation. “death--the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all--the soiled and the pure--the rich and the poor--the loved and the unloved.” ccxciv. the last rites it is not often that a whole world mourns. nations have often mourned a hero--and races--but perhaps never before had the entire world really united in tender sorrow for the death of any man. in one of his aphorisms he wrote: “let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.” and it was thus that mark twain himself had lived. no man had ever so reached the heart of the world, and one may not even attempt to explain just why. let us only say that it was because he was so limitlessly human that every other human heart, in whatever sphere or circumstance, responded to his touch. from every remote corner of the globe the cables of condolence swept in; every printed sheet in christendom was filled with lavish tribute; pulpits forgot his heresies and paid him honor. no king ever died that received so rich a homage as his. to quote or to individualize would be to cheapen this vast offering. we took him to new york to the brick church, and dr. henry van dyke spoke only a few simple words, and joseph twichell came from hartford and delivered brokenly a prayer from a heart wrung with double grief, for harmony, his wife, was nearing the journey's end, and a telegram that summoned him to her death-bed came before the services ended. mark twain, dressed in the white he loved so well, lay there with the nobility of death upon him, while a multitude of those who loved him passed by and looked at his face for the last time. the flowers, of which so many had been sent, were banked around him; but on the casket itself lay a single laurel wreath which dan beard and his wife had woven from the laurel which grows on stormfield hill. he was never more beautiful than as he lay there, and it was an impressive scene to see those thousands file by, regard him for a moment gravely, thoughtfully, and pass on. all sorts were there, rich and poor; some crossed themselves, some saluted, some paused a little to take a closer look; but no one offered even to pick a flower. howells came, and in his book he says: i looked a moment at the face i knew so well; and it was patient with the patience i had so often seen in it: something of a puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. that night we went with him to elmira, and next day--a somber day of rain--he lay in those stately parlors that had seen his wedding-day, and where susy had lain, and mrs. clemens, and jean, while dr. eastman spoke the words of peace which separate us from our mortal dead. then in the quiet, steady rain of that sunday afternoon we laid him beside those others, where he sleeps well, though some have wished that, like de soto, he might have been laid to rest in the bed of that great river which must always be associated with his name. ccxcv. mark twain's religion there is such a finality about death; however interesting it may be as an experience, one cannot discuss it afterward with one's friends. i have thought it a great pity that mark twain could not discuss, with howells say, or with twichell, the sensations and the particulars of the change, supposing there be a recognizable change, in that transition of which we have speculated so much, with such slender returns. no one ever debated the undiscovered country more than he. in his whimsical, semi-serious fashion he had considered all the possibilities of the future state--orthodox and otherwise--and had drawn picturesquely original conclusions. he had sent captain stormfield in a dream to report the aspects of the early christian heaven. he had examined the scientific aspects of the more subtle philosophies. he had considered spiritualism, transmigration, the various esoteric doctrines, and in the end he had logically made up his mind that death concludes all, while with that less logical hunger which survives in every human heart he had never ceased to expect an existence beyond the grave. his disbelief and his pessimism were identical in their structure. they were of his mind; never of his heart. once a woman said to him: “mr. clemens, you are not a pessimist, you only think you are.” and she might have added, with equal force and truth: “you are not a disbeliever in immortality; you only think you are.” nothing could have conveyed more truly his attitude toward life and death. his belief in god, the creator, was absolute; but it was a god far removed from the creator of his early teaching. every man builds his god according to his own capacities. mark twain's god was of colossal proportions--so vast, indeed, that the constellated stars were but molecules in his veins--a god as big as space itself. mark twain had many moods, and he did not always approve of his own god; but when he altered his conception, it was likely to be in the direction of enlargement--a further removal from the human conception, and the problem of what we call our lives. in he wrote:--[see also , chap. lxxviii; , chap. ccv; and various talks, - , etc.] let us now consider the real god, the genuine god, the great god, the sublime and supreme god, the authentic creator of the real universe, whose remotenesses are visited by comets only comets unto which incredible distant neptune is merely an out post, a sandy hook to homeward-bound specters of the deeps of space that have not glimpsed it before for generations--a universe not made with hands and suited to an astronomical nursery, but spread abroad through the illimitable reaches of space by the flat of the real god just mentioned, by comparison with whom the gods whose myriads infest the feeble imaginations of men are as a swarm of gnats scattered and lost in the infinitudes of the empty sky. at an earlier period-the date is not exactly fixable, but the stationery used and the handwriting suggest the early eighties--he set down a few concisely written pages of conclusions--conclusions from which he did not deviate materially in after years. the document follows: i believe in god the almighty. i do not believe he has ever sent a message to man by anybody, or delivered one to him by word of mouth, or made himself visible to mortal eyes at any time in any place. i believe that the old and new testaments were imagined and written by man, and that no line in them was authorized by god, much less inspired by him. i think the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of god are manifested in his works: i perceive that they are manifested toward me in this life; the logical conclusion is that they will be manifested toward me in the life to come, if there should be one. i do not believe in special providences. i believe that the universe is governed by strict and immutable laws: if one man's family is swept away by a pestilence and another man's spared it is only the law working: god is not interfering in that small matter, either against the one man or in favor of the other. i cannot see how eternal punishment hereafter could accomplish any good end, therefore i am not able to believe in it. to chasten a man in order to perfect him might be reasonable enough; to annihilate him when he shall have proved himself incapable of reaching perfection might be reasonable enough; but to roast him forever for the mere satisfaction of seeing him roast would not be reasonable--even the atrocious god imagined by the jews would tire of the spectacle eventually. there may be a hereafter and there may not be. i am wholly indifferent about it. if i am appointed to live again i feel sure it will be for some more sane and useful purpose than to flounder about for ages in a lake of fire and brimstone for having violated a confusion of ill-defined and contradictory rules said (but not evidenced) to be of divine institution. if annihilation is to follow death i shall not be aware of the annihilation, and therefore shall not care a straw about it. i believe that the world's moral laws are the outcome of the world's experience. it needed no god to come down out of heaven to tell men that murder and theft and the other immoralities were bad, both for the individual who commits them and for society which suffers from them. if i break all these moral laws i cannot see how i injure god by it, for he is beyond the reach of injury from me--i could as easily injure a planet by throwing mud at it. it seems to me that my misconduct could only injure me and other men. i cannot benefit god by obeying these moral laws--i could as easily benefit the planet by withholding my mud. (let these sentences be read in the light of the fact that i believe i have received moral laws only from man --none whatever from god.) consequently i do not see why i should be either punished or rewarded hereafter for the deeds i do here. if the tragedies of life shook his faith in the goodness and justice and the mercy of god as manifested toward himself, he at any rate never questioned that the wider scheme of the universe was attuned to the immutable law which contemplates nothing less than absolute harmony. i never knew him to refer to this particular document; but he never destroyed it and never amended it, nor is it likely that he would have done either had it been presented to him for consideration even during the last year of his life. he was never intentionally dogmatic. in a memorandum on a fly-leaf of moncure d. conway's sacred anthology he wrote: religion the easy confidence with which i know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. mark twain, th cent. a.d. and in another note: i would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. i am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion maybe. but it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life hence it is a valuable possession to him. mark twain's religion was a faith too wide for doctrines--a benevolence too limitless for creeds. from the beginning he strove against oppression, sham, and evil in every form. he despised meanness; he resented with every drop of blood in him anything that savored of persecution or a curtailment of human liberties. it was a religion identified with his daily life and his work. he lived as he wrote, and he wrote as he believed. his favorite weapon was humor--good-humor--with logic behind it. a sort of glorified truth it was truth wearing a smile of gentleness, hence all the more quickly heeded. “he will be remembered with the great humorists of all time,” says howells, “with cervantes, with swift, or with any others worthy of his company; none of them was his equal in humanity.” mark twain understood the needs of men because he was himself supremely human. in one of his dictations he said: i have found that there is no ingredient of the race which i do not possess in either a small or a large way. when it is small, as compared with the same ingredient in somebody else, there is still enough of it for all the purposes of examination. with his strength he had inherited the weaknesses of our kind. with him, as with another, a myriad of dreams and schemes and purposes daily flitted by. with him, as with another, the spirit of desire led him often to a high mountain-top, and was not rudely put aside, but lingeringly--and often invited to return. with him, as with another, a crowd of jealousies and resentments, and wishes for the ill of others, daily went seething and scorching along the highways of the soul. with him, as with another, regret, remorse, and shame stood at the bedside during long watches of the night; and in the end, with him, the better thing triumphed--forgiveness and generosity and justice--in a word, humanity. certain of his aphorisms and memoranda each in itself constitutes an epitome of mark twain's creed. his paraphrase, “when in doubt tell the truth,” is one of these, and he embodied his whole attitude toward infinity when in one of his stray pencilings he wrote: why, even poor little ungodlike man holds himself responsible for the welfare of his child to the extent of his ability. it is all that we require of god. ccxcvi. postscript every life is a drama--a play in all its particulars; comedy, farce, tragedy--all the elements are there. to examine in detail any life, however conspicuous or obscure, is to become amazed not only at the inevitable sequence of events, but at the interlinking of details, often far removed, into a marvelously intricate pattern which no art can hope to reproduce, and can only feebly imitate. the biographer may reconstruct an episode, present a picture, or reflect a mood by which the reader is enabled to feel something of the glow of personality and know, perhaps, a little of the substance of the past. in so far as the historian can accomplish this his work is a success. at best his labor will be pathetically incomplete, for whatever its detail and its resemblance to life, these will record mainly but an outward expression, behind which was the mighty sweep and tumult of unwritten thought, the overwhelming proportion of any life, which no other human soul can ever really know. mark twain's appearance on the stage of the world was a succession of dramatic moments. he was always exactly in the setting. whatever he did, or whatever came to him, was timed for the instant of greatest effect. at the end he was more widely observed and loved and honored than ever before, and at the right moment and in the right manner he died. how little one may tell of such a life as his! he traveled always such a broad and brilliant highway, with plumes flying and crowds following after. such a whirling panorama of life, and death, and change! i have written so much, and yet i have put so much aside--and often the best things, it seemed afterward, perhaps because each in its way was best and the variety infinite. one may only strive to be faithful--and i would have made it better if i could. appendix. appendix a letter from orion clemens to miss wood concerning henry clemens (see chapter xxvi) keokuk, iowa, october , . miss wood,--my mother having sent me your kind letter, with a request that myself and wife should write to you, i hasten to do so. in my memory i can go away back to henry's infancy; i see his large, blue eyes intently regarding my father when he rebuked him for his credulity in giving full faith to the boyish idea of planting his marbles, expecting a crop therefrom; then comes back the recollection of the time when, standing we three alone by our father's grave, i told them always to remember that brothers should be kind to each other; afterward i see henry returning from school with his books for the last time. he must go into my printing-office. he learned rapidly. a word of encouragement or a word of discouragement told upon his organization electrically. i could see the effects in his day's work. sometimes i would say, “henry!” he would stand full front with his eyes upon mine--all attention. if i commanded him to do something, without a word he was off instantly, probably in a run. if a cat was to be drowned or shot sam (though unwilling yet firm) was selected for the work. if a stray kitten was to be fed and taken care of henry was expected to attend to it, and he would faithfully do so. so they grew up, and many was the grave lecture commenced by ma, to the effect that sam was misleading and spoiling henry. but the lectures were never concluded, for sam would reply with a witticism, or dry, unexpected humor, that would drive the lecture clean out of my mother's mind, and change it to a laugh. those were happier days. my mother was as lively as any girl of sixteen. she is not so now. and sister pamela i have described in describing henry; for she was his counterpart. the blow falls crushingly on her. but the boys grew up--sam a rugged, brave, quick-tempered, generous-hearted fellow, henry quiet, observing, thoughtful, leaning on sam for protection; sam and i too leaning on him for knowledge picked up from conversation or books, for henry seemed never to forget anything, and devoted much of his leisure hours to reading. henry is gone! his death was horrible! how i could have sat by him, hung over him, watched day and night every change of expression, and ministered to every want in my power that i could discover. this was denied to me, but sam, whose organization is such as to feel the utmost extreme of every feeling, was there. both his capacity of enjoyment and his capacity of suffering are greater than mine; and knowing how it would have affected me to see so sad a scene, i can somewhat appreciate sam's sufferings. in this time of great trouble, when my two brothers, whose heartstrings have always been a part of my own, were suffering the utmost stretch of mortal endurance, you were there, like a good angel, to aid and console, and i bless and thank you for it with my whole heart. i thank all who helped them then; i thank them for the flowers they sent to henry, for the tears that fell for their sufferings, and when he died, and all of them for all the kind attentions they bestowed upon the poor boys. we thank the physicians, and we shall always gratefully remember the kindness of the gentleman who at so much expense to himself enabled us to deposit henry's remains by our father. with many kind wishes for your future welfare, i remain your earnest friend, respectfully, orion clemens. appendix b mark twain's burlesque of captain isaiah sellers (see chapter xxvii) the item which served as a text for the “sergeant fathom” communication was as follows: vicksburg, may , . my opinion for the benefit of the citizens of new orleans: the water is higher this far up than it has been since . my opinion is that the water will be four feet deep in canal street before the first of next june. mrs. turner's plantation at the head of big black island is all under water, and it has not been since . i. sellers.--[captain sellers, as in this case, sometimes signed his own name to his communications.] the burlesque introductory our friend sergeant fathom, one of the oldest cub pilots on the river, and now on the railroad line steamer trombone, sends us a rather bad account concerning the state of the river. sergeant fathom is a “cub” of much experience, and although we are loath to coincide in his view of the matter, we give his note a place in our columns, only hoping that his prophecy will not be verified in this instance. while introducing the sergeant, “we consider it but simple justice (we quote from a friend of his) to remark that he is distinguished for being, in pilot phrase, 'close,' as well as superhumanly 'safe.'” it is a well-known fact that he has made fourteen hundred and fifty trips in the new orleans and st. louis trade without causing serious damage to a steamboat. this astonishing success is attributed to the fact that he seldom runs his boat after early candle-light. it is related of the sergeant that upon one occasion he actually ran the chute of glasscock's island, down-stream, in the night, and at a time, too, when the river was scarcely more than bank full. his method of accomplishing this feat proves what we have just said of his “safeness”--he sounded the chute first, and then built a fire at the head of the island to run by. as to the sergeant's “closeness,” we have heard it whispered that he once went up to the right of the “old hen,”--[glasscock's island and the “old hen” were phenomenally safe places.]--but this is probably a pardonable little exaggeration, prompted by the love and admiration in which he is held by various ancient dames of his acquaintance (for albeit the sergeant may have already numbered the allotted years of man, still his form is erect, his step is firm, his hair retains its sable hue, and, more than all, he hath a winning way about him, an air of docility and sweetness, if you will, and a smoothness of speech, together with an exhaustless fund of funny sayings; and, lastly, an overflowing stream, without beginning, or middle, or end, of astonishing reminiscences of the ancient mississippi, which, taken together, form a 'tout ensemble' which is sufficient excuse for the tender epithet which is, by common consent, applied to him by all those ancient dames aforesaid, of “che-arming creature!”). as the sergeant has been longer on the river, and is better acquainted with it than any other “cub” extant, his remarks are entitled to far more consideration, and are always read with the deepest interest by high and low, rich and poor, from “kiho” to kamschatka, for let it be known that his fame extends to the uttermost parts of the earth: the communication r.r. steamer trombone, vicksburg, may , . the river from new orleans up to natchez is higher than it has been since the niggers were executed (which was in the fall of ) and my opinion is that if the rise continues at this rate the water will be on the roof of the st. charles hotel before the middle of january. the point at cairo, which has not even been moistened by the river since , is now entirely under water. however, mr. editor, the inhabitants of the mississippi valley should not act precipitately and sell their plantations at a sacrifice on account of this prophecy of mine, for i shall proceed to convince them of a great fact in regard to this matter, viz.: that the tendency of the mississippi is to rise less and less high every year (with an occasional variation of the rule), that such has been the case for many centuries, and eventually that it will cease to rise at all. therefore, i would hint to the planters, as we say in an innocent little parlor game commonly called “draw,” that if they can only “stand the rise” this time they may enjoy the comfortable assurance that the old river's banks will never hold a “full” again during their natural lives. in the summer of i came down the river on the old first jubilee. she was new then, however; a singular sort of a single-engine boat, with a chinese captain and a choctaw crew, forecastle on her stern, wheels in the center, and the jackstaff “nowhere,” for i steered her with a window-shutter, and when we wanted to land we sent a line ashore and “rounded her to” with a yoke of oxen. well, sir, we wooded off the top of the big bluff above selmathe only dry land visible--and waited there three weeks, swapping knives and playing “seven up” with the indians, waiting for the river to fall. finally, it fell about a hundred feet, and we went on. one day we rounded to, and i got in a horse-trough, which my partner borrowed from the indians up there at selma while they were at prayers, and went down to sound around no. , and while i was gone my partner got aground on the hills at hickman. after three days' labor we finally succeeded in sparring her off with a capstan bar, and went on to memphis. by the time we got there the river had subsided to such an extent that we were able to land where the gayoso house now stands. we finished loading at memphis, and loaded part of the stone for the present st. louis court house (which was then in process of erection), to be taken up on our return trip. you can form some conception, by these memoranda, of how high the water was in . in it did not rise so high by thirty feet; in it missed the original mark at least sixty-five feet; in , one hundred and fifty feet; and in , nearly two hundred and fifty feet. these were “high-water” years. the “high waters” since then have been so insignificant that i have scarcely taken the trouble to notice them. thus, you will perceive that the planters need not feel uneasy. the river may make an occasional spasmodic effort at a flood, but the time is approaching when it will cease to rise altogether. in conclusion, sir, i will condescend to hint at the foundation of these arguments: when me and de soto discovered the mississippi i could stand at bolivar landing (several miles above “roaring waters bar”) and pitch a biscuit to the main shore on the other side, and in low water we waded across at donaldsonville. the gradual widening and deepening of the river is the whole secret of the matter. yours, etc. sergeant fathom. appendix c. i. mark twain's empire city hoax (see chapter xli) the latest sensation. a victim to jeremy diddling trustees--he cuts his throat from ear to ear, scalps his wife, and dashes out the brains of six helpless children! from abram curry, who arrived here yesterday afternoon from carson, we learn the following particulars concerning a bloody massacre which was committed in ormsby county night before last. it seems that during the past six months a man named p. hopkins, or philip hopkins, has been residing with his family in the old log-house just at the edge of the great pine forest which lies between empire city and dutch nick's. the family consisted of nine children--five girls and four boys--the oldest of the group, mary, being nineteen years old, and the youngest, tommy, about a year and a half. twice in the past two months mrs. hopkins, while visiting carson, expressed fears concerning the sanity of her husband, remarking that of late he had been subject to fits of violence, and that during the prevalence of one of these he had threatened to take her life. it was mrs. hopkins's misfortune to be given to exaggeration, however, and but little attention was given to what she said. about o'clock on monday evening hopkins dashed into carson on horseback, with his throat cut from ear to ear, and bearing in his hand a reeking scalp, from which the warm, smoking blood was still dripping, and fell in a dying condition in front of the magnolia saloon. hopkins expired, in the course of five minutes, without speaking. the long, red hair of the scalp he bore marked it as that of mrs. hopkins. a number of citizens, headed by sheriff gasherie, mounted at once and rode down to hopkins's house, where a ghastly scene met their eyes. the scalpless corpse of mrs. hopkins lay across the threshold, with her head split open and her right hand almost severed from the wrist. near her lay the ax with which the murderous deed had been committed. in one of the bedrooms six of the children were found, one in bed and the others scattered about the floor. they were all dead. their brains had evidently been dashed out with a club, and every mark about them seemed to have been made with a blunt instrument. the children must have struggled hard for their lives, as articles of clothing and broken furniture were strewn about the room in the utmost confusion. julia and emma, aged respectively fourteen and seventeen, were found in the kitchen, bruised and insensible, but it is thought their recovery is possible. the eldest girl, mary, must have sought refuge, in her terror, in the garret, as her body was found there frightfully mutilated, and the knife with which her wounds had been inflicted still sticking in her side. the two girls julia and emma, who had recovered sufficiently to be able to talk yesterday morning, declare that their father knocked them down with a billet of wood and stamped on them. they think they were the first attacked. they further state that hopkins had shown evidence of derangement all day, but had exhibited no violence. he flew into a passion and attempted to murder them because they advised him to go to bed and compose his mind. curry says hopkins was about forty-two years of age, and a native of western pennsylvania; he was always affable and polite, and until very recently no one had ever heard of his ill-treating his family. he had been a heavy owner in the best mines of virginia and gold hill, but when the san francisco papers exposed our game of cooking dividends in order to bolster up our stocks he grew afraid and sold out, and invested an immense amount in the spring valley water company, of san francisco. he was advised to do this by a relative of his, one of the editors of the san francisco bulletin, who had suffered pecuniarily by the dividend-cooking system as applied to the daney mining company recently. hopkins had not long ceased to own in the various claims on the comstock lead, however, when several dividends were cooked on his newly acquired property, their water totally dried up, and spring valley stock went down to nothing. it is presumed that this misfortune drove him mad, and resulted in his killing himself and the greater portion of his family. the newspapers of san francisco permitted this water company to go on borrowing money and cooking dividends, under cover of which the cunning financiers crept out of the tottering concern, leaving the crash to come upon poor and unsuspecting stockholders, without offering to expose the villainy at work. we hope the fearful massacre detailed above may prove the saddest result of their silence. ii. news-gathering with mark twain. alfred doten's son gives the following account of a reporting trip made by his father and mark twain, when the two were on comstock papers: my father and mark twain were once detailed to go over to como and write up some new mines that had been discovered over there. my father was on the gold hill news. he and mark had not met before, but became promptly acquainted, and were soon calling each other by their first names. they went to a little hotel at carson, agreeing to do their work there together next morning. when morning came they set out, and suddenly on a corner mark stopped and turned to my father, saying: “by gracious, alf! isn't that a brewery?” “it is, mark. let's go in.” they did so, and remained there all day, swapping yarns, sipping beer, and lunching, going back to the hotel that night. the next morning precisely the same thing occurred. when they were on the same corner, mark stopped as if he had never been there before, and sand: “good gracious, alf! isn't that a brewery?” “it is, mark. let's go in.” so again they went in, and again stayed all day. this happened again the next morning, and the next. then my father became uneasy. a letter had come from gold hill, asking him where his report of the mines was. they agreed that next morning they would really begin the story; that they would climb to the top of a hill that overlooked the mines, and write it from there. but the next morning, as before, mark was surprised to discover the brewery, and once more they went in. a few moments later, however, a man who knew all about the mines--a mining engineer connected with them--came in. he was a godsend. my father set down a valuable, informing story, while mark got a lot of entertaining mining yarns out of him. next day virginia city and gold hill were gaining information from my father's article, and entertainment from mark's story of the mines. appendix d from mark twain's first lecture, delivered october , . (see chapter liv) hawaiian importance to america. after a full elucidation of the sugar industry of the sandwich islands, its profits and possibilities, he said: i have dwelt upon this subject to show you that these islands have a genuine importance to america--an importance which is not generally appreciated by our citizens. they pay revenues into the united states treasury now amounting to over a half a million a year. i do not know what the sugar yield of the world is now, but ten years ago, according to the patent office reports, it was , hogsheads. the sandwich islands, properly cultivated by go-ahead americans, are capable of providing one-third as much themselves. with the pacific railroad built, the great china mail line of steamers touching at honolulu--we could stock the islands with americans and supply a third of the civilized world with sugar--and with the silkiest, longest-stapled cotton this side of the sea islands, and the very best quality of rice.... the property has got to fall to some heir, and why not the united states? native passion for funerals they are very fond of funerals. big funerals are their main weakness. fine grave clothes, fine funeral appointments, and a long procession are things they take a generous delight in. they are fond of their chief and their king; they reverence them with a genuine reverence and love them with a warm affection, and often look forward to the happiness they will experience in burying them. they will beg, borrow, or steal money enough, and flock from all the islands, to be present at a royal funeral on oahu. years ago a kanaka and his wife were condemned to be hanged for murder. they received the sentence with manifest satisfaction because it gave an opening for a funeral, you know. all they care for is a funeral. it makes but little difference to them whose it is; they would as soon attend their own funeral as anybody else's. this couple were people of consequence, and had landed estates. they sold every foot of ground they had and laid it out in fine clothes to be hung in. and the woman appeared on the scaffold in a white satin dress and slippers and fathoms of gaudy ribbon, and the man was arrayed in a gorgeous vest, blue claw-hammer coat and brass buttons, and white kid gloves. as the noose was adjusted around his neck, he blew his nose with a grand theatrical flourish, so as to show his embroidered white handkerchief. i never, never knew of a couple who enjoyed hanging more than they did. view from haleakala it is a solemn pleasure to stand upon the summit of the extinct crater of haleakala, ten thousand feet above the sea, and gaze down into its awful crater, miles in circumference and ago feet deep, and to picture to yourself the seething world of fire that once swept up out of the tremendous abyss ages ago. the prodigious funnel is dead and silent now, and even has bushes growing far down in its bottom, where the deep-sea line could hardly have reached in the old times, when the place was filled with liquid lava. these bushes look like parlor shrubs from the summit where you stand, and the file of visitors moving through them on their mules is diminished to a detachment of mice almost; and to them you, standing so high up against the sun, ten thousand feet above their heads, look no larger than a grasshopper. this in the morning; but at three or four in the afternoon a thousand little patches of white clouds, like handfuls of wool, come drifting noiselessly, one after another, into the crater, like a procession of shrouded phantoms, and circle round and round the vast sides, and settle gradually down and mingle together until the colossal basin is filled to the brim with snowy fog and all its seared and desolate wonders are hidden from sight. and then you may turn your back to the crater and look far away upon the broad valley below, with its sugar-houses glinting like white specks in the distance, and the great sugar-fields diminished to green veils amid the lighter-tinted verdure around them, and abroad upon the limitless ocean. but i should not say you look down; you look up at these things. you are ten thousand feet above them, but yet you seem to stand in a basin, with the green islands here and there, and the valleys and the wide ocean, and the remote snow-peak of mauna loa, all raised up before and above you, and pictured out like a brightly tinted map hung at the ceiling of a room. you look up at everything; nothing is below you. it has a singular and startling effect to see a miniature world thus seemingly hung in mid-air. but soon the white clouds come trooping along in ghostly squadrons and mingle together in heavy masses a quarter of a mile below you and shut out everything-completely hide the sea and all the earth save the pinnacle you stand on. as far as the eye can reach, it finds nothing to rest upon but a boundless plain of clouds tumbled into all manner of fantastic shapes-a billowy ocean of wool aflame with the gold and purple and crimson splendors of the setting sun! and so firm does this grand cloud pavement look that you can hardly persuade yourself that you could not walk upon it; that if you stepped upon it you would plunge headlong and astonish your friends at dinner ten thousand feet below. standing on that peak, with all the world shut out by that vast plain of clouds, a feeling of loneliness comes over a man which suggests to his mind the last man at the flood, perched high upon the last rock, with nothing visible on any side but a mournful waste of waters, and the ark departing dimly through the distant mists and leaving him to storm and night and solitude and death! notice of mark twain's lecture “the trouble is over” “the inimitable mark twain, delivered himself last night of his first lecture on the sandwich islands, or anything else. “some time before the hour appointed to open his head the academy of music (on pine street) was densely crowded with one of the most fashionable audiences it was ever my privilege to witness during my long residence in this city. the elite of the town were there, and so was the governor of the state, occupying one of the boxes, whose rotund face was suffused with a halo of mirth during the whole entertainment. the audience promptly notified mark by the usual sign--stamping--that the auspicious hour had arrived, and presently the lecturer came sidling and swinging out from the left of the stage. his very manner produced a generally vociferous laugh from the assemblage. he opened with an apology, by saying that he had partly succeeded in obtaining a band, but at the last moment the party engaged backed out. he explained that he had hired a man to play the trombone, but he, on learning that he was the only person engaged, came at the last moment and informed him that he could not play. this placed mark in a bad predicament, and wishing to know his reasons for deserting him at that critical moment, he replied, 'that he wasn't going to make a fool of himself by sitting up there on the stage and blowing his horn all by himself.' after the applause subsided, he assumed a very grave countenance and commenced his remarks proper with the following well-known sentence: 'when, in the course of human events,' etc. he lectured fully an hour and a quarter, and his humorous sayings were interspersed with geographical, agricultural, and statistical remarks, sometimes branching off and reaching beyond, soaring, in the very choicest language, up to the very pinnacle of descriptive power.” appendix e from “the jumping frog” book (mark twain's first published volume) (see chapters lviii and lix) i. advertisement “mark twain” is too well known to the public to require a formal introduction at my hands. by his story of the frog he scaled the heights of popularity at a single jump and won for himself the 'sobriquet' of the wild humorist of the pacific slope. he is also known to fame as the moralist of the main; and it is not unlikely that as such he will go down to posterity. it is in his secondary character, as humorist, however, rather than in the primal one of moralist, that i aim to present him in the present volume. and here a ready explanation will be found for the somewhat fragmentary character of many of these sketches; for it was necessary to snatch threads of humor wherever they could be found--very often detaching them from serious articles and moral essays with which they were woven and entangled. originally written for newspaper publication, many of the articles referred to events of the day, the interest of which has now passed away, and contained local allusions, which the general reader would fail to understand; in such cases excision became imperative. further than this, remark or comment is unnecessary. mark twain never resorts to tricks of spelling nor rhetorical buffoonery for the purpose of provoking a laugh; the vein of his humor runs too rich and deep to make surface gliding necessary. but there are few who can resist the quaint similes, keen satire, and hard, good sense which form the staple of his writing. j. p. ii. from answers to correspondents “moral statistician”--i don't want any of your statistics. i took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it. i hate your kind of people. you are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc.... of course you can save money by denying yourself all these vicious little enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? what use can you put it to? money can't save your infinitesimal soul. all the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment, where is the use in accumulating cash? it won't do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. and you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good-humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your knees, with your eyes buried in the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give the revenue-officers a true statement of your income. now you all know all these things yourself, don't you? very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a clean and withered old age? what is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? in a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as “ornery” and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your ceaseless and villainous “moral statistics”? now, i don't approve of dissipation, and i don't indulge in it, either; but i haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatever, and so i don't want to hear from you any more. i think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice of smoking cigars and then came back, in my absence, with your vile, reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor-stove. iii. from “a strange dream” (example of mark twain's early descriptive writing) ... in due time i stood, with my companion, on the wall of the vast caldron which the natives, ages ago, named 'hale mau mau'--the abyss wherein they were wont to throw the remains of their chiefs, to the end that vulgar feet might never tread above them. we stood there, at dead of night, a mile above the level of the sea, and looked down a thousand feet upon a boiling, surging, roaring ocean of fire!--shaded our eyes from the blinding glare, and gazed far away over the crimson waves with a vague notion that a supernatural fleet, manned by demons and freighted with the damned, might presently sail up out of the remote distance; started when tremendous thunder-bursts shook the earth, and followed with fascinated eyes the grand jets of molten lava that sprang high up toward the zenith and exploded in a world of fiery spray that lit up the somber heavens with an infernal splendor. “what is your little bonfire of vesuvius to this?” my ejaculation roused my companion from his reverie, and we fell into a conversation appropriate to the occasion and the surroundings. we came at last to speak of the ancient custom of casting the bodies of dead chieftains into this fearful caldron; and my comrade, who is of the blood royal, mentioned that the founder of his race, old king kamehameha the first--that invincible old pagan alexander--had found other sepulture than the burning depths of the 'hale mau mau'. i grew interested at once; i knew that the mystery of what became of the corpse of the warrior king hail never been fathomed; i was aware that there was a legend connected with this matter; and i felt as if there could be no more fitting time to listen to it than the present. the descendant of the kamehamehas said: the dead king was brought in royal state down the long, winding road that descends from the rim of the crater to the scorched and chasm-riven plain that lies between the 'hale mau mau' and those beetling walls yonder in the distance. the guards were set and the troops of mourners began the weird wail for the departed. in the middle of the night came a sound of innumerable voices in the air and the rush of invisible wings; the funeral torches wavered, burned blue, and went out. the mourners and watchers fell to the ground paralyzed by fright, and many minutes elapsed before any one dared to move or speak; for they believed that the phantom messengers of the dread goddess of fire had been in their midst. when at last a torch was lighted the bier was vacant--the dead monarch had been spirited away! appendix f the innocents abroad (see chapter lx) new york “herald” editorial on the return of the “quaker city” pilgrimage, november , . in yesterday's herald we published a most amusing letter from the pen of that most amusing american genius, mark twain, giving an account of that most amusing of all modern pilgrimages--the pilgrimage of the 'quaker city'. it has been amusing all through, this quaker city affair. it might have become more serious than amusing if the ship had been sold at jaffa, alexandria, or yalta, in the black sea, as it appears might have happened. in such a case the passengers would have been more effectually sold than the ship. the descendants of the puritan pilgrims have, naturally enough, some of them, an affection for ships; but if all that is said about this religious cruise be true they have also a singularly sharp eye to business. it was scarcely wise on the part of the pilgrims, although it was well for the public, that so strange a genius as mark twain should have found admission into the sacred circle. we are not aware whether mr. twain intends giving us a book on this pilgrimage, but we do know that a book written from his own peculiar standpoint, giving an account of the characters and events on board ship and of the scenes which the pilgrims witnessed, would command an almost unprecedented sale. there are varieties of genius peculiar to america. of one of these varieties mark twain is a striking specimen. for the development of his peculiar genius he has never had a more fitting opportunity. besides, there are some things which he knows, and which the world ought to know, about this last edition of the mayflower. appendix g mark twain at the correspondents club, washington (see chapter lxiii) woman a eulogy of the fair sex. the washington correspondents club held its anniversary on saturday night. mr. clemens, better known as mark twain, responded to the toast, “woman, the pride of the professions and the jewel of ours.” he said: mr. president,--i do not know why i should have been singled out to receive the greatest distinction of the evening--for so the office of replying to the toast to woman has been regarded in every age. [applause.] i do not know why i have received this distinction, unless it be that i am a trifle less homely than the other members of the club. but, be this as it may, mr. president, i am proud of the position, and you could not have chosen any one who would have accepted it more gladly, or labored with a heartier good--will to do the subject justice, than i. because, sir, i love the sex. [laughter.] i love all the women, sir, irrespective of age or color. [laughter.] human intelligence cannot estimate what we owe to woman, sir. she sews on our buttons [laughter]; she mends our clothes [laughter]; she ropes us in at the church fairs; she confides in us; she tells us whatever she can find out about the private affairs of the neighbors; she gives good advice, and plenty of it; she gives us a piece of her mind sometimes--and sometimes all of it; she soothes our aching brows; she bears our children. (ours as a general thing.)--[this last sentence appears in twain's published speeches and may have been added later. d.w.] in all relations of life, sir, it is but just and a graceful tribute to woman to say of her that she is a brick. [great laughter.] wheresoever you place woman, sir--in whatsoever position or estate--she is an ornament to that place she occupies, and a treasure to the world. [here mr. twain paused, looked inquiringly at his hearers, and remarked that the applause should come in at this point. it came in. mr. twain resumed his eulogy.] look at the noble names of history! look at cleopatra! look at desdemona! look at florence nightingale! look at joan of arc! look at lucretia borgia! [disapprobation expressed. “well,” said mr. twain, scratching his head, doubtfully, “suppose we let lucretia slide.”] look at joyce heth! look at mother eve! i repeat, sir, look at the illustrious names of history! look at the widow machree! look at lucy stone! look at elizabeth cady stanton! look at george francis train! [great laughter.] and, sir, i say with bowed head and deepest veneration, look at the mother of washington! she raised a boy that could not lie--could not lie. [applause.] but he never had any chance. it might have been different with him if he had belonged to a newspaper correspondents' club. [laughter, groans, hisses, cries of “put him out.” mark looked around placidly upon his excited audience, and resumed.] i repeat, sir, that in whatsoever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. as a sweetheart she has few equals and no superior [laughter]; as a cousin she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper she is precious; as a wet nurse she has no equal among men! [laughter.] what, sir, would the people of this earth be without woman? they would be scarce, sir. (mighty scarce.)--[another line added later in the published 'speeches'. d.w.] then let us cherish her, let us protect her, let us give her our support, our encouragement, our sympathy--ourselves, if we get a chance. [laughter.] but, jesting aside, mr. president, woman is lovable, gracious, kind of heart, beautiful; worthy of all respect, of all esteem, of all deference. not any here will refuse to drink her health right cordially, for each and every one of us has personally known, loved, and honored the very best one of them all--his own mother! [applause.] appendix h announcement for lecture of july , (see chapter lxvi) the public to mark twain--correspondence san francisco, june th. mr. mark twain--dear sir,--hearing that you are about to sail for new york in the p. m. s. s. company's steamer of the th july, to publish a book, and learning with the deepest concern that you propose to read a chapter or two of that book in public before you go, we take this method of expressing our cordial desire that you will not. we beg and implore you do not. there is a limit to human endurance. we are your personal friends. we have your welfare at heart. we desire to see you prosper. and it is upon these accounts, and upon these only, that we urge you to desist from the new atrocity you contemplate. yours truly, names including: bret harte, maj.-gen. ord, maj.-gen. halleck, the orphan asylum, and various benevolent societies, citizens on foot and horseback, and in the steerage. (reply) san francisco, june th to the , and others,--it seems to me that your course is entirely unprecedented. heretofore, when lecturers, singers, actors, and other frauds have said they were about to leave town, you have always been the very first people to come out in a card beseeching them to hold on for just one night more, and inflict just one more performance on the public, but as soon as i want to take a farewell benefit you come after me, with a card signed by the whole community and the board of aldermen, praying me not to do it. but it isn't of any use. you cannot move me from my fell purpose. i will torment the people if i want to. i have a better right to do it than these strange lecturers and orators that come here from abroad. it only costs the public a dollar apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here for? am i to go away and let them have peace and quiet for a year and a half, and then come back and only lecture them twice? what do you take me for? no, gentlemen, ask of me anything else and i will do it cheerfully; but do not ask me not to afflict the people. i wish to tell them all i know about venice. i wish to tell them about the city of the sea--that most venerable, most brilliant, and proudest republic the world has ever seen. i wish to hint at what it achieved in twelve hundred years, and what it lost in two hundred. i wish to furnish a deal of pleasant information, somewhat highly spiced, but still palatable, digestible, and eminently fitted for the intellectual stomach. my last lecture was not as fine as i thought it was, but i have submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have pronounced it good. now, therefore, why should i withhold it? let me talk only just this once, and i will sail positively on the th of july, and stay away until i return from china--two years. yours truly, mark twain. (further remonstrance) san francisco, june th. mr. mark twain,--learning with profound regret that you have concluded to postpone your departure until the th july, and learning also, with unspeakable grief, that you propose to read from your forthcoming book, or lecture again before you go, at the new mercantile library, we hasten to beg of you that you will not do it. curb this spirit of lawless violence, and emigrate at once. have the vessel's bill for your passage sent to us. we will pay it. your friends, pacific board of brokers [and other financial and social institutions] san francisco, june th. mr. mark twain--dear sir,--will you start now, without any unnecessary delay? yours truly, proprietors of the alta, bulletin, times, call, examiner [and other san francisco publications]. san francisco, june th. mr. mark twain--dear sir,--do not delay your departure. you can come back and lecture another time. in the language of the worldly--you can “cut and come again.” your friends, the clergy. san francisco, june th. mr. mark twain--dear sir,--you had better go. yours, the chief of police. (reply) san francisco, june th. gentlemen,--restrain your emotions; you observe that they cannot avail. read: new mercantile library bush street thursday evening, july , one night only farewell lecture of mark twain subject: the oldest of the republics venice past and present box-office open wednesday and thursday no extra charge for reserved seats admission........... one dollar doors open at orgies to commence at p. m. the public displays and ceremonies projected to give fitting eclat to this occasion have been unavoidably delayed until the th. the lecture will be delivered certainly on the d, and the event will be celebrated two days afterward by a discharge of artillery on the th, a procession of citizens, the reading of the declaration of independence, and by a gorgeous display of fireworks from russian hill in the evening, which i have ordered at my sole expense, the cost amounting to eighty thousand dollars. at new mercantile library bush street thursday evening, july , appendix i. mark twain's championship of thomas k. beecher (see chapter lxxiv) there was a religious turmoil in elmira in ; a disturbance among the ministers, due to the success of thomas k. beecher in a series of meetings he was conducting in the opera house. mr. beecher's teachings had never been very orthodox or doctrinal, but up to this time they had been seemingly unobjectionable to his brother clergymen, who fraternized with him and joined with him in the monday meetings of the ministerial union of elmira, when each monday a sermon was read by one of the members. the situation presently changed. mr. beecher was preaching his doubtful theology to large and nightly increasing audiences, and it was time to check the exodus. the ministerial union of elmira not only declined to recognize and abet the opera house gatherings, but they requested him to withdraw from their monday meetings, on the ground that his teachings were pernicious. mr. beecher said nothing of the matter, and it was not made public until a notice of it appeared in a religious paper. naturally such a course did not meet with the approval of the langdon family, and awoke the scorn of a man who so detested bigotry in any form as mark twain. he was a stranger in the place, and not justified to speak over his own signature, but he wrote an article and read it to members of the langdon family and to dr. and mrs. taylor, their intimate friends, who were spending an evening in the langdon home. it was universally approved, and the next morning appeared in the elmira advertiser, over the signature of “s'cat.” it created a stir, of course. the article follows: mr. beecher and the clergy “the ministerial union of elmira, n. y., at a recent meeting passed resolutions disapproving the teachings of rev. t. k. beecher, declining to co-operate with him in his sunday evening services at the opera house, and requesting him to withdraw from their monday morning meeting. this has resulted in his withdrawal, and thus the pastors are relieved from further responsibility as to his action.”--n. y. evangelist. poor beecher! all this time he could do whatever he pleased that was wrong, and then be perfectly serene and comfortable over it, because the ministerial union of elmira was responsible to god for it. he could lie if he wanted to, and those ministers had to answer for it; he could promote discord in the church of christ, and those parties had to make it right with the deity as best they could; he could teach false doctrines to empty opera houses, and those sorrowing lambs of the ministerial union had to get out their sackcloth and ashes and stand responsible for it. he had such a comfortable thing of it! but he went too far. in an evil hour he slaughtered the simple geese that laid the golden egg of responsibility for him, and now they will uncover their customary complacency, and lift up their customary cackle in his behalf no more. and so, at last, he finds himself in the novel position of being responsible to god for his acts, instead of to the ministerial union of elmira. to say that this is appalling is to state it with a degree of mildness which amounts to insipidity. we cannot justly estimate this calamity, without first reviewing certain facts that conspired to bring it about. mr. beecher was and is in the habit of preaching to a full congregation in the independent congregational church, in this city. the meeting-house was not large enough to accommodate all the people who desired admittance. mr. beecher regularly attended the meetings of the ministerial union of elmira every monday morning, and they received him into their fellowship, and never objected to the doctrines which he taught in his church. so, in an unfortunate moment, he conceived the strange idea that they would connive at the teaching of the same doctrines in the same way in a larger house. therefore he secured the opera house and proceeded to preach there every sunday evening to assemblages comprising from a thousand to fifteen hundred persons. he felt warranted in this course by a passage of scripture which says, “go ye into all the world and preach the gospel unto every creature.” opera-houses were not ruled out specifically in this passage, and so he considered it proper to regard opera-houses as a part of “all the world.” he looked upon the people who assembled there as coming under the head of “every creature.” these ideas were as absurd as they were farfetched, but still they were the honest ebullitions of a diseased mind. his great mistake was in supposing that when he had the saviour's indorsement of his conduct he had all that was necessary. he overlooked the fact that there might possibly be a conflict of opinion between the saviour and the ministerial union of elmira. and there was. wherefore, blind and foolish mr. beecher went to his destruction. the ministerial union withdrew their approbation, and left him dangling in the air, with no other support than the countenance and approval of the gospel of christ. mr. beecher invited his brother ministers to join forces with him and help him conduct the opera house meetings. they declined with great unanimity. in this they were wrong. since they did not approve of those meetings, it was a duty they owed to their consciences and their god to contrive their discontinuance. they knew this. they felt it. yet they turned coldly away and refused to help at those meetings, when they well knew that their help, earnestly and persistently given, was able to kill any great religious enterprise that ever was conceived of. the ministers refused, and the calamitous meetings at the opera house continued; and not only continued, but grew in interest and importance, and sapped of their congregations churches where the gospel was preached with that sweet monotonous tranquillity and that impenetrable profundity which stir up such consternation in the strongholds of sin. it is a pity to have to record here that one clergyman refused to preach at the opera house at mr. beecher's request, even when that incendiary was sick and disabled; and if that man's conscience justifies him in that refusal i do not. under the plea of charity for a sick brother he could have preached to that opera house multitude a sermon that would have done incalculable damage to the opera house experiment. and he need not have been particular about the sermon he chose, either. he could have relied on any he had in his barrel. the opera house meetings went on; other congregations were thin, and grew thinner, but the opera house assemblages were vast. every sunday night, in spite of sense and reason, multitudes passed by the churches where they might have been saved, and marched deliberately to the opera house to be damned. the community talked, talked, talked. everybody discussed the fact that the ministerial union disapproved of the opera house meetings; also the fact that they disapproved of the teachings put forth there. and everybody wondered how the ministerial union could tell whether to approve or disapprove of those teachings, seeing that those clergymen had never attended an opera house meeting, and therefore didn't know what was taught there. everybody wondered over that curious question, and they had to take it out in wondering. mr. beecher asked the ministerial union to state their objections to the opera house matter. they could not--at least they did not. he said to them that if they would come squarely out and tell him that they desired the discontinuance of those meetings he would discontinue them. they declined to do that. why should they have declined? they had no right to decline, and no excuse to decline, if they honestly believed that those meetings interfered in the slightest degree with the best interests of religion. (that is a proposition which the profoundest head among them cannot get around.) but the opera house meetings went on. that was the mischief of it. and so, one monday morning, when mr. b. appeared at the usual ministers' meeting, his brother clergymen desired him to come there no more. he asked why. they gave no reason. they simply declined to have his company longer. mr. b. said he could not accept of this execution without a trial, and since he loved them and had nothing against them he must insist upon meeting with them in the future just the same as ever. and so, after that, they met in secret, and thus got rid of this man's importunate affection. the ministerial union had ruled out beecher--a point gained. he would get up an excitement about it in public. but that was a miscalculation. he never mentioned it. they waited and waited for the grand crash, but it never came. after all their labor-pains, their ministerial mountain had brought forth only a mouse--and a still-born one at that. beecher had not told on them; beecher malignantly persisted in not telling on them. the opportunity was slipping away. alas, for the humiliation of it, they had to come out and tell it themselves! and after all, their bombshell did not hurt anybody when they did explode it. they had ceased to be responsible to god for beecher, and yet nobody seemed paralyzed about it. somehow, it was not even of sufficient importance, apparently, to get into the papers, though even the poor little facts that smith has bought a trotting team and alderman jones's child has the measles are chronicled there with avidity. something must be done. as the ministerial union had told about their desolating action, when nobody else considered it of enough importance to tell, they would also publish it, now that the reporters failed to see anything in it important enough to print. and so they startled the entire religious world no doubt by solemnly printing in the evangelist the paragraph which heads this article. they have got their excommunication-bull started at last. it is going along quite lively now, and making considerable stir, let us hope. they even know it in podunk, wherever that may be. it excited a two-line paragraph there. happy, happy world, that knows at last that a little congress of congregationless clergymen of whom it had never heard before have crushed a famous beecher, and reduced his audiences from fifteen hundred down to fourteen hundred and seventy-five at one fell blow! happy, happy world, that knows at last that these obscure innocents are no longer responsible for the blemishless teachings, the power, the pathos, the logic, and the other and manifold intellectual pyrotechnics that seduce, but to damn, the opera house assemblages every sunday night in elmira! and miserable, o thrice miserable beecher! for the ministerial union of elmira will never, no, never more be responsible to god for his shortcomings. (excuse these tears.) (for the protection of a man who is uniformly charged with all the newspaper deviltry that sees the light in elmira journals, i take this opportunity of stating, under oath, duly subscribed before a magistrate, that mr. beecher did not write this article. and further still, that he did not inspire it. and further still, the ministerial union of elmira did not write it. and finally, the ministerial union did not ask me to write it. no, i have taken up this cudgel in defense of the ministerial union of elmira solely from a love of justice. without solicitation, i have constituted myself the champion of the ministerial union of elmira, and it shall be a labor of love with me to conduct their side of a quarrel in print for them whenever they desire me to do it; or if they are busy, and have not the time to ask me, i will cheerfully do it anyhow. in closing this i must remark that if any question the right of the clergymen of elmira to turn mr. beecher out of the ministerial union, to such i answer that mr. beecher recreated that institution after it had been dead for many years, and invited those gentlemen to come into it, which they did, and so of course they have a right to turn him out if they want to. the difference between beecher and the man who put an adder in his bosom is, that beecher put in more adders than he did, and consequently had a proportionately livelier time of it when they got warmed up.) cheerfully, s'cat. appendix j the indignity put upon the remains of george holland by the rev. mr. sabine. (see chapter lxxvii) what a ludicrous satire it was upon christian charity!--even upon the vague, theoretical idea of it which doubtless this small saint mouths from his own pulpit every sunday. contemplate this freak of nature, and think what a cardiff giant of self-righteousness is crowded into his pigmy skin. if we probe, and dissect; and lay open this diseased, this cancerous piety of his, we are forced to the conviction that it is the production of an impression on his part that his guild do about all the good that is done on the earth, and hence are better than common clay--hence are competent to say to such as george holland, “you are unworthy; you are a play-actor, and consequently a sinner; i cannot take the responsibility of recommending you to the mercy of heaven.” it must have had its origin in that impression, else he would have thought, “we are all instruments for the carrying out of god's purposes; it is not for me to pass judgment upon your appointed share of the work, or to praise or to revile it; i have divine authority for it that we are all sinners, and therefore it is not for me to discriminate and say we will supplicate for this sinner, for he was a merchant prince or a banker, but we will beseech no forgiveness for this other one, for he was a play-actor.” it surely requires the furthest possible reach of self-righteousness to enable a man to lift his scornful nose in the air and turn his back upon so poor and pitiable a thing as a dead stranger come to beg the last kindness that humanity can do in its behalf. this creature has violated the letter of the gospel, and judged george holland--not george holland, either, but his profession through him. then it is, in a measure, fair that we judge this creature's guild through him. in effect he has said, “we are the salt of the earth; we do all the good work that is done; to learn how to be good and do good men must come to us; actors and such are obstacles to moral progress.” pray look at the thing reasonably a moment, laying aside all biases of education and custom. if a common public impression is fair evidence of a thing then this minister's legitimate, recognized, and acceptable business is to tell people calmly, coldly, and in stiff, written sentences, from the pulpit, to go and do right, be just, be merciful, be charitable. and his congregation forget it all between church and home. but for fifty years it was george holland's business on the stage to make his audience go and do right, and be just, merciful, and charitable--because by his living, breathing, feeling pictures he showed them what it was to do these things, and how to do them, and how instant and ample was the reward! is it not a singular teacher of men, this reverend gentleman who is so poorly informed himself as to put the whole stage under ban, and say, “i do not think it teaches moral lessons”? where was ever a sermon preached that could make filial ingratitude so hateful to men as the sinful play of “king lear”? or where was there ever a sermon that could so convince men of the wrong and the cruelty of harboring a pampered and unanalyzed jealousy as the sinful play of “othello”? and where are there ten preachers who can stand in the pulpit preaching heroism, unselfish devotion, and lofty patriotism, and hold their own against any one of five hundred william tells that can be raised upon five hundred stages in the land at a day's notice? it is almost fair and just to aver (although it is profanity) that nine-tenths of all the kindness and forbearance and christian charity and generosity in the hearts of the american people today got there by being filtered down from their fountain-head, the gospel of christ, through dramas and tragedies and comedies on the stage, and through the despised novel and the christmas story, and through the thousand and one lessons, suggestions, and narratives of generous deeds that stir the pulses, and exalt and augment the nobility of the nation day by day from the teeming columns of ten thousand newspapers, and not from the drowsy pulpit. all that is great and good in our particular civilization came straight from the hand of jesus christ, and many creatures, and of divers sorts, were doubtless appointed to disseminate it; and let us believe that this seed and the result are the main thing, and not the cut of the sower's garment; and that whosoever, in his way and according to his opportunity, sows the one and produces the other, has done high service and worthy. and further, let us try with all our strength to believe that whenever old simple-hearted george holland sowed this seed, and reared his crop of broader charities and better impulses in men's hearts, it was just as acceptable before the throne as if the seed had been scattered in vapid platitudes from the pulpit of the ineffable sabine himself. am i saying that the pulpit does not do its share toward disseminating the marrow, the meat of the gospel of christ? (for we are not talking of ceremonies and wire-drawn creeds now, but the living heart and soul of what is pretty often only a specter.) no, i am not saying that. the pulpit teaches assemblages of people twice a week nearly two hours altogether--and does what it can in that time. the theater teaches large audiences seven times a week-- or hours altogether--and the novels and newspapers plead, and argue, and illustrate, stir, move, thrill, thunder, urge, persuade, and supplicate, at the feet of millions and millions of people every single day, and all day long and far into the night; and so these vast agencies till nine-tenths of the vineyard, and the pulpit tills the other tenth. yet now and then some complacent blind idiot says, “you unanointed are coarse clay and useless; you are not as we, the regenerators of the world; go, bury yourselves elsewhere, for we cannot take the responsibility of recommending idlers and sinners to the yearning mercy of heaven.” how does a soul like that stay in a carcass without getting mixed with the secretions and sweated out through the pores? think of this insect condemning the whole theatrical service as a disseminator of bad morals because it has black crooks in it; forgetting that if that were sufficient ground people would condemn the pulpit because it had crooks and kallochs and sabines in it! no, i am not trying to rob the pulpit of any atom of its full share and credit in the work of disseminating the meat and marrow of the gospel of christ; but i am trying to get a moment's hearing for worthy agencies in the same work, that with overwrought modesty seldom or never claim a recognition of their great services. i am aware that the pulpit does its excellent one-tenth (and credits itself with it now and then, though most of the time a press of business causes it to forget it); i am aware that in its honest and well-meaning way it bores the people with uninflammable truisms about doing good; bores them with correct compositions on charity; bores them, chloroforms them, stupefies them with argumentative mercy without a flaw in the grammar or an emotion which the minister could put in in the right place if he turned his back and took his finger off the manuscript. and in doing these things the pulpit is doing its duty, and let us believe that it is likewise doing its best, and doing it in the most harmless and respectable way. and so i have said, and shall keep on saying, let us give the pulpit its full share of credit in elevating and ennobling the people; but when a pulpit takes to itself authority to pass judgment upon the work and worth of just as legitimate an instrument of god as itself, who spent a long life preaching from the stage the selfsame gospel without the alteration of a single sentiment or a single axiom of right, it is fair and just that somebody who believes that actors were made for a high and good purpose, and that they accomplish the object of their creation and accomplish it well, should protest. and having protested, it is also fair and just--being driven to it, as it were--to whisper to the sabine pattern of clergyman, under the breath, a simple, instructive truth, and say, “ministers are not the only servants of god upon earth, nor his most efficient ones, either, by a very, very long distance!” sensible ministers already know this, and it may do the other kind good to find it out. but to cease teaching and go back to the beginning again, was it not pitiable--that spectacle? honored and honorable old george holland, whose theatrical ministry had for fifty years softened hard hearts, bred generosity in cold ones, kindled emotion in dead ones, uplifted base ones, broadened bigoted ones, and made many and many a stricken one glad and filled it brimful of gratitude, figuratively spit upon in his unoffending coffin by this crawling, slimy, sanctimonious, self-righteous reptile! appendix k a substitute for ruloff have we a sidney carton among us? (see chapter lxxxii) to editor of 'tribune'. sir,--i believe in capital punishment. i believe that when a murder has been done it should be answered for with blood. i have all my life been taught to feel this way, and the fetters of education are strong. the fact that the death--law is rendered almost inoperative by its very severity does not alter my belief in its righteousness. the fact that in england the proportion of executions to condemnations is one to sixteen, and in this country only one to twenty-two, and in france only one to thirty-eight, does not shake my steadfast confidence in the propriety of retaining the death-penalty. it is better to hang one murderer in sixteen, twenty-two, thirty-eight than not to hang any at all. feeling as i do, i am not sorry that ruloff is to be hanged, but i am sincerely sorry that he himself has made it necessary that his vast capabilities for usefulness should be lost to the world. in this, mine and the public's is a common regret. for it is plain that in the person of ruloff one of the most marvelous of intellects that any age has produced is about to be sacrificed, and that, too, while half the mystery of its strange powers is yet a secret. here is a man who has never entered the doors of a college or a university, and yet by the sheer might of his innate gifts has made himself such a colossus in abstruse learning that the ablest of our scholars are but pigmies in his presence. by the evidence of professor mather, mr. surbridge, mr. richmond, and other men qualified to testify, this man is as familiar with the broad domain of philology as common men are with the passing events of the day. his memory has such a limitless grasp that he is able to quote sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, chapter after chapter, from a gnarled and knotty ancient literature that ordinary scholars are capable of achieving little more than a bowing acquaintance with. but his memory is the least of his great endowments. by the testimony of the gentlemen above referred to he is able to critically analyze the works of the old masters of literature, and while pointing out the beauties of the originals with a pure and discriminating taste is as quick to detect the defects of the accepted translations; and in the latter case, if exceptions be taken to his judgment, he straightway opens up the quarries of his exhaustless knowledge, and builds a very chinese wall of evidence around his position. every learned man who enters ruloff's presence leaves it amazed and confounded by his prodigious capabilities and attainments. one scholar said he did not believe that in matters of subtle analysis, vast knowledge in his peculiar field of research, comprehensive grasp of subject, and serene kingship over its limitless and bewildering details, any land or any era of modern times had given birth to ruloff's intellectual equal. what miracles this murderer might have wrought, and what luster he might have shed upon his country, if he had not put a forfeit upon his life so foolishly! but what if the law could be satisfied, and the gifted criminal still be saved. if a life be offered up on the gallows to atone for the murder ruloff did, will that suffice? if so, give me the proofs, for in all earnestness and truth i aver that in such a case i will instantly bring forward a man who, in the interests of learning and science, will take ruloff's crime upon himself, and submit to be hanged in ruloff's place. i can, and will do this thing; and i propose this matter, and make this offer in good faith. you know me, and know my address. samuel langhorne. april , . appendix l. about london address at a dinner given by the savage club, london, september , . (see chapter lxxxvii) reported by moncure d. conway in the cincinnati commercial it affords me sincere pleasure to meet this distinguished club, a club which has extended its hospitalities and its cordial welcome to so many of my countrymen. i hope [and here the speaker's voice became low and fluttering] you will excuse these clothes. i am going to the theater; that will explain these clothes. i have other clothes than these. judging human nature by what i have seen of it, i suppose that the customary thing for a stranger to do when he stands here is to make a pun on the name of this club, under the impression, of course, that he is the first man that that idea has occurred to. it is a credit to our human nature, not a blemish upon it; for it shows that underlying all our depravity (and god knows and you know we are depraved enough) and all our sophistication, and untarnished by them, there is a sweet germ of innocence and simplicity still. when a stranger says to me, with a glow of inspiration in his eye, some gentle, innocuous little thing about “twain and one flesh” and all that sort of thing, i don't try to crush that man into the earth--no. i feel like saying, “let me take you by the hand, sir; let me embrace you; i have not heard that pun for weeks.” we will deal in palpable puns. we will call parties named king “your majesty” and we will say to the smiths that we think we have heard that name before somewhere. such is human nature. we cannot alter this. it is god that made us so for some good and wise purpose. let us not repine. but though i may seem strange, may seem eccentric, i mean to refrain from punning upon the name of this club, though i could make a very good one if i had time to think about it--a week. i cannot express to you what entire enjoyment i find in this first visit to this prodigious metropolis of yours. its wonders seem to me to be limitless. i go about as in a dream--as in a realm of enchantment--where many things are rare and beautiful, and all things are strange and marvelous. hour after hour i stand--i stand spellbound, as it were-and gaze upon the statuary in leicester square. [leicester square being a horrible chaos, with the relic of an equestrian statue in the center, the king being headless and limbless, and the horse in little better condition.] i visit the mortuary effigies of noble old henry viii., and judge jeffreys, and the preserved gorilla, and try to make up my mind which of my ancestors i admire the most. i go to that matchless hyde park and drive all around it, and then i start to enter it at the marble arch--and am induced to “change my mind.” [cabs are not permitted in hyde park--nothing less aristocratic than a private carriage.] it is a great benefaction--is hyde park. there, in his hansom cab, the invalid can go--the poor, sad child of misfortune--and insert his nose between the railings, and breathe the pure, health-giving air of the country and of heaven. and if he is a swell invalid who isn't obliged to depend upon parks for his country air he can drive inside--if he owns his vehicle. i drive round and round hyde park and the more i see of the edges of it the more grateful i am that the margin is extensive. and i have been to the zoological gardens. what a wonderful place that is! i have never seen such a curious and interesting variety of wild-animals in any garden before--except mabille. i never believed before there were so many different kinds of animals in the world as you can find there--and i don't believe it yet. i have been to the british museum. i would advise you to drop in there some time when you have nothing to do for--five minutes--if you have never been there. it seems to me the noblest monument this nation has, yet erected to her greatness. i say to her, our greatness--as a nation. true, she has built other monuments, and stately ones, as well; but these she has uplifted in honor of two or three colossal demigods who have stalked across the world's stage, destroying tyrants and delivering nations, and whose prodigies will still live in the memories of men ages after their monuments shall have crumbled to dust--i refer to the wellington and nelson monuments, and--the albert memorial. [sarcasm. the albert memorial is the finest monument in the world, and celebrates the existence of as commonplace a person as good luck ever lifted out of obscurity.] the library at the british museum i find particularly astounding. i have read there hours together, and hardly made an impression on it. i revere that library. it is the author's friend. i don't care how mean a book is, it always takes one copy. [a copy of every book printed in great britain must by law be sent to the british museum, a law much complained of by publishers.] and then every day that author goes there to gaze at that book, and is encouraged to go on in the good work. and what a touching sight it is of a saturday afternoon to see the poor, careworn clergymen gathered together in that vast reading-room cabbaging sermons for sunday! you will pardon my referring to these things. everything in this monster city interests me, and i cannot keep from talking, even at the risk of being instructive. people here seem always to express distances by parables. to a stranger it is just a little confusing to be so parabolic--so to speak. i collar a citizen, and i think i am going to get some valuable information out of him. i ask him how far it is to birmingham, and he says it is twenty-one shillings and sixpence. now we know that doesn't help a man who is trying to learn. i find myself down-town somewhere, and i want to get some sort of idea where i am--being usually lost when alone--and i stop a citizen and say, “how far is it to charing cross?” “shilling fare in a cab,” and off he goes. i suppose if i were to ask a londoner how far it is from the sublime to the ridiculous he would try to express it in a coin. but i am trespassing upon your time with these geological statistics and historical reflections. i will not longer keep you from your orgies. 'tis a real pleasure for me to be here, and i thank you for it. the name of the savage club is associated in my mind with the kindly interest and the friendly offices which you lavished upon an old friend of mine who came among you a stranger, and you opened your english hearts to him and gave him a welcome and a home--artemus ward. asking that you will join me, i give you his memory. appendix m letter written to mrs. clemens from boston, november, , prophesying a monarchy in sixty-one years. (see chapter xcvii) boston, november , . dear livy,--you observe i still call this beloved old place by the name it had when i was young. limerick! it is enough to make a body sick. the gentlemen-in-waiting stare to see me sit here telegraphing this letter to you, and no doubt they are smiling in their sleeves. but let them! the slow old fashions are good enough for me, thank god, and i will none other. when i see one of these modern fools sit absorbed, holding the end of a telegraph wire in his hand, and reflect that a thousand miles away there is another fool hitched to the other end of it, it makes me frantic with rage; and then i am more implacably fixed and resolved than ever to continue taking twenty minutes to telegraph you what i might communicate in ten seconds by the new way if i would so debase myself. and when i see a whole silent, solemn drawing-room full of idiots sitting with their hands on each other's foreheads “communing” i tug the white hairs from my head and curse till my asthma brings me the blessed relief of suffocation. in our old day such a gathering talked pure drivel and “rot,” mostly, but better that, a thousand times, than these dreary conversational funerals that oppress our spirits in this mad generation. it is sixty years since i was here before. i walked hither then with my precious old friend. it seems incredible now that we did it in two days, but such is my recollection. i no longer mention that we walked back in a single day, it makes me so furious to see doubt in the face of the hearer. men were men in those old times. think of one of the puerile organisms in this effeminate age attempting such a feat. my air-ship was delayed by a collision with a fellow from china loaded with the usual cargo of jabbering, copper-colored missionaries, and so i was nearly an hour on my journey. but by the goodness of god thirteen of the missionaries were crippled and several killed, so i was content to lose the time. i love to lose time anyway because it brings soothing reminiscences of the creeping railroad days of old, now lost to us forever. our game was neatly played, and successfully. none expected us, of course. you should have seen the guards at the ducal palace stare when i said, “announce his grace the archbishop of dublin and the right honorable the earl of hartford.” arrived within, we were all eyes to see the duke of cambridge and his duchess, wondering if we might remember their faces and they ours. in a moment they came tottering in; he, bent and withered and bald; she, blooming with wholesome old age. he peered through his glasses a moment, then screeched in a reedy voice, “come to my arms! away with titles--i'll know ye by no names but twain and twichell!” then fell he on our necks and jammed his trumpet in his ear, the which we filled with shoutings to this effect: “god bless you, old howells, what is left of you!” we talked late that night--none of your silent idiot “communings” for us--of the olden time. we rolled a stream of ancient anecdotes over our tongues and drank till the lord archbishop grew so mellow in the mellow past that dublin ceased to be dublin to him, and resumed its sweeter, forgotten name of new york. in truth he almost got back into his ancient religion, too, good jesuit as he has always been since o'mulligan the first established that faith in the empire. and we canvassed everybody. bailey aldrich, marquis of ponkapog, came in, got nobly drunk, and told us all about how poor osgood lost his earldom and was hanged for conspiring against the second emperor; but he didn't mention how near he himself came to being hanged, too, for engaging in the same enterprise. he was as chaffy as he was sixty years ago, too, and swore the archbishop and i never walked to boston; but there was never a day that ponkapog wouldn't lie, so be it by the grace of god he got the opportunity. the lord high admiral came in, a hale gentleman close upon seventy and bronzed by the suns and storms of many climes and scarred by the wounds got in many battles, and i told him how i had seen him sit in a high-chair and eat fruit and cakes and answer to the name of johnny. his granddaughter (the eldest) is but lately married to the youngest of the grand dukes, and so who knows but a day may come when the blood of the howellses may reign in the land? i must not forget to say, while i think of it, that your new false teeth are done, my dear, and your wig. keep your head well bundled with a shawl till the latter comes, and so cheat your persecuting neuralgias and rheumatisms. would you believe it?--the duchess of cambridge is deafer than you--deafer than her husband. they call her to breakfast with a salvo of artillery; and usually when it thunders she looks up expectantly and says, “come in.” but she has become subdued and gentle with age and never destroys the furniture now, except when uncommonly vexed. god knows, my dear, it would be a happy thing if you and old lady harmony would imitate this spirit. but indeed the older you grow the less secure becomes the furniture. when i throw chairs through the window i have sufficient reason to back it. but you--you are but a creature of passion. the monument to the author of 'gloverson and his silent partners' is finished.--[ralph keeler. see chap. lxxxiii.]--it is the stateliest and the costliest ever erected to the memory of any man. this noble classic has now been translated into all the languages of the earth and is adored by all nations and known to all creatures. yet i have conversed as familiarly with the author of it as i do with my own great-grandchildren. i wish you could see old cambridge and ponkapog. i love them as dearly as ever, but privately, my dear, they are not much improvement on idiots. it is melancholy to hear them jabber over the same pointless anecdotes three and four times of an evening, forgetting that they had jabbered them over three or four times the evening before. ponkapog still writes poetry, but the old-time fire has mostly gone out of it. perhaps his best effort of late years is this: o soul, soul, soul of mine! soul, soul, soul of throe! thy soul, my soul, two souls entwine, and sing thy lauds in crystal wine! this he goes about repeating to everybody, daily and nightly, insomuch that he is become a sore affliction to all that know him. but i must desist. there are draughts here everywhere and my gout is something frightful. my left foot hath resemblance to a snuff-bladder. god be with you. hartford. these to lady hartford, in the earldom of hartford, in the upper portion of the city of dublin. appendix n mark twain and copyright i. petition concerning copyright ( ) (see chapter cii) to the senate and house of representatives of the united states in congress assembled. we, your petitioners, do respectfully represent as follows, viz.: that justice, plain and simple, is a thing which right-feeling men stand ready at all times to accord to brothers and strangers alike. all such men will concede that it is but plain, simple justice that american authors should be protected by copyright in europe; also, that european authors should be protected by copyright here. both divisions of this proposition being true, it behooves our government to concern itself with that division of it which comes peculiarly within its province--viz., the latter moiety--and to grant to foreign authors with all convenient despatch a full and effective copyright in america without marring the grace of the act by stopping to inquire whether a similar justice will be done our own authors by foreign governments. if it were even known that those governments would not extend this justice to us it would still not justify us in withholding this manifest right from their authors. if a thing is right it ought to be done--the thing called “expediency” or “policy” has no concern with such a matter. and we desire to repeat, with all respect, that it is not a grace or a privilege we ask for our foreign brethren, but a right--a right received from god, and only denied them by man. we hold no ownership in these authors, and when we take their work from them, as at present, without their consent, it is robbery. the fact that the handiwork of our own authors is seized in the same way in foreign lands neither excuses nor mitigates our sin. with your permission we will say here, over our signatures, and earnestly and sincerely, that we very greatly desire that you shall grant a full copyright to foreign authors (the copyright fee for the entry in the office of the congressional librarian to be the same as we pay ourselves), and we also as greatly desire that this grant shall be made without a single hampering stipulation that american authors shall receive in turn an advantage of any kind from foreign governments. since no author who was applied to hesitated for a moment to append his signature to this petition we are satisfied that if time had permitted we could have procured the signature of every writer in the united states, great and small, obscure or famous. as it is, the list comprises the names of about all our writers whose works have at present a european market, and who are therefore chiefly concerned in this matter. no objection to our proposition can come from any reputable publisher among us--or does come from such a quarter, as the appended signatures of our greatest publishing firms will attest. a european copyright here would be a manifest advantage to them. as the matter stands now the moment they have thoroughly advertised a desirable foreign book, and thus at great expense aroused public interest in it, some small-spirited speculator (who has lain still in his kennel and spent nothing) rushes the same book on the market and robs the respectable publisher of half the gains. then, since neither our authors nor the decent among our publishing firms will object to granting an american copyright to foreign authors and artists, who can there be to object? surely nobody whose protest is entitled to any weight. trusting in the righteousness of our cause we, your petitioners, will ever pray, etc. with great respect, your ob't serv'ts. circular to american authors and publishers dear sir,--we believe that you will recognize the justice and the righteousness of the thing we desire to accomplish through the accompanying petition. and we believe that you will be willing that our country shall be the first in the world to grant to all authors alike the free exercise of their manifest right to do as they please with the fruit of their own labor without inquiring what flag they live under. if the sentiments of the petition meet your views, will you do us the favor to sign it and forward it by post at your earliest convenience to our secretary? }committee address -------------------secretary of the committee. ii. communications supposed to have been written by the tsar of russia and the sultan of turkey to mark twain on the subject of international copyright, about . st. petersburg, february. col. mark twain, washington. your cablegram received. it should have been transmitted through my minister, but let that pass. i am opposed to international copyright. at present american literature is harmless here because we doctor it in such a way as to make it approve the various beneficent devices which we use to keep our people favorable to fetters as jewelry and pleased with siberia as a summer resort. but your bill would spoil this. we should be obliged to let you say your say in your own way. 'voila'! my empire would be a republic in five years and i should be sampling siberia myself. if you should run across mr. kennan--[george kennan, who had graphically pictured the fearful conditions of siberian exile.]--please ask him to come over and give some readings. i will take good care of him. alexander iii. --collect. constantinople, february. dr. mark twain, washington. great scott, no! by the beard of the prophet, no! how can you ask such a thing of me? i am a man of family. i cannot take chances, like other people. i cannot let a literature come in here which teaches that a man's wife is as good as the man himself. such a doctrine cannot do any particular harm, of course, where the man has only one wife, for then it is a dead-level between them, and there is no humiliating inequality, and no resulting disorder; but you take an extremely married person, like me, and go to teaching that his wife is times as good as he is, and what's hell to that harem, dear friend? i never saw such a fool as you. do not mind that expression; i already regret it, and would replace it with a softer one if i could do it without debauching the truth. i beseech you, do not pass that bill. roberts college is quite all the american product we can stand just now. on top of that, do you want to send us a flood of freedom-shrieking literature which we can't edit the poison out of, but must let it go among our people just as it is? my friend, we should be a republic inside of ten years. abdul ii. iii. mark twain's last suggestion on copyright. a memorial respectfully tendered to the members of the senate and the house of representatives. (prepared early in at the suggestion of mr. champ clack but not offered. a bill adding fourteen years to the copyright period was passed about this time.) the policy of congress:--nineteen or twenty years ago james russell lowell, george haven putnam, and the under signed appeared before the senate committee on patents in the interest of copyright. up to that time, as explained by senator platt, of connecticut, the policy of congress had been to limit the life of a copyright by a term of years, with one definite end in view, and only one--to wit, that after an author had been permitted to enjoy for a reasonable length of time the income from literary property created by his hand and brain the property should then be transferred “to the public” as a free gift. that is still the policy of congress to-day. the purpose in view:--the purpose in view was clear: to so reduce the price of the book as to bring it within the reach of all purses, and spread it among the millions who had not been able to buy it while it was still under the protection of copyright. the purpose defeated:--this purpose has always been defeated. that is to say, that while the death of a copyright has sometimes reduced the price of a book by a half for a while, and in some cases by even more, it has never reduced it vastly, nor accomplished any reduction that was permanent and secure. the reason:--the reason is simple: congress has never made a reduction compulsory. congress was convinced that the removal of the author's royalty and the book's consequent (or at least probable) dispersal among several competing publishers would make the book cheap by force of the competition. it was an error. it has not turned out so. the reason is, a publisher cannot find profit in an exceedingly cheap edition if he must divide the market with competitors. proposed remedy:--the natural remedy would seem to be, amended law requiring the issue of cheap editions. copyright extension:--i think the remedy could be accomplished in the following way, without injury to author or publisher, and with extreme advantage to the public: by an amendment to the existing law providing as follows--to wit: that at any time between the beginning of a book's forty-first year and the ending of its forty-second the owner of the copyright may extend its life thirty years by issuing and placing on sale an edition of the book at one-tenth the price of the cheapest edition hitherto issued at any time during the ten immediately preceding years. this extension to lapse and become null and void if at any time during the thirty years he shall fail during the space of three consecutive months to furnish the ten per cent. book upon demand of any person or persons desiring to buy it. the result:--the result would be that no american classic enjoying the thirty-year extension would ever be out of the reach of any american purse, let its uncompulsory price be what it might. he would get a two-dollar book for cents, and he could get none but copyright-expired classics at any such rate. the final result:--at the end of the thirty-year extension the copyright would again die, and the price would again advance. this by a natural law, the excessively cheap edition no longer carrying with it an advantage to any publisher. reconstruction of the present law not necessary:--a clause of the suggested amendment could read about as follows, and would obviate the necessity of taking the present law to pieces and building it over again: all books and all articles enjoying forty-two years copyright-life under the present law shall be admitted to the privilege of the thirty-year extension upon complying with the condition requiring the producing and placing upon permanent sale of one grade or form of said book or article at a price of per cent. below the cheapest rate at which said book or article had been placed upon the market at any time during the immediately preceding ten years. remarks if the suggested amendment shall meet with the favor of the present congress and become law--and i hope it will--i shall have personal experience of its effects very soon. next year, in fact, in the person of my first book, 'the innocents abroad'. for its forty-two-year copyright-life will then cease and its thirty-year extension begin--and with the latter the permanent low-rate edition. at present the highest price of the book is eight dollars, and its lowest price three dollars per copy. thus the permanent low rate will be thirty cents per copy. a sweeping reduction like this is what congress from the beginning has desired to achieve, but has not been able to accomplish because no inducement was offered to publishers to run the risk. respectfully submitted, s. l. clemens. (a full and interesting elucidation of mark twain's views on copyright may be found in an article entitled “concerning copyright,” published in the north american review for january, .) appendix o (see chapter cxiv) address of samuel l. clemens (mark twain) from a report of the dinner given by the publishers of the atlantic monthly in honor of the seventieth anniversary of the birth of john greenleaf whittier, at the hotel brunswick, boston, december , , as published in the boston evening transcript, december , . mr. chairman, this is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging up of pleasant reminiscences concerning literary folk, therefore i will drop lightly into history myself. standing here on the shore of the atlantic, and contemplating certain of its largest literary billows, i am reminded of a thing which happened to me thirteen years ago, when i had just succeeded in stirring up a little nevadian literary puddle myself, whose spume-flakes were beginning to blow thinly california-ward. i started an inspection tramp through the southern mines of california. i was callow and conceited, and i resolved to try the virtue of my 'nom de guerre'. i very soon had an opportunity. i knocked at a miner's lonely log cabin in the foothills of the sierras just at nightfall. it was snowing at the time. a jaded, melancholy man of fifty, barefooted, opened the door to me. when he heard my 'nom de guerre' he looked more dejected than before. he let me in-pretty reluctantly, i thought--and after the customary bacon and beans, black coffee and hot whisky, i took a pipe. this sorrowful man had not said three words up to this time. now he spoke up and said, in the voice of one who is secretly suffering, “you're the fourth--i'm going to move.” “the fourth what?” said i. “the fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours--i'm going to move.” “you don't tell me!” said i; “who were the others?” “mr. longfellow. mr. emerson, and mr. oliver wendell holmes--consound the lot!” you can easily believe i was interested. i supplicated--three hot whiskies did the rest--and finally the melancholy miner began. said he: “they came here just at dark yesterday evening, and i let them in, of course. said they were going to the yosemite. they were a rough lot, but that's nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot. mr. emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed. mr. holmes was as fat as a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundered, and had double chins all the way down to his stomach. mr. longfellow was built like a prize-fighter. his head was cropped and bristly, like as if he had a wig made of hair-brushes. his nose lay straight down in his face, like a finger with the end joint tilted up. they had been drinking, i could see that. and what queer talk they used! mr. holmes inspected this cabin, then he took me by the buttonhole and says he: “'through the deep caves of thought i hear a voice that sings, “build thee more stately mansions, o my soul!”' “says i, 'i can't afford it, mr. holmes, and moreover i don't want to.' blamed if i liked it pretty well, either, coming from a stranger that way. however, i started to get out my bacon and beans when mr. emerson came and looked on awhile, and then he takes me aside by the buttonhole and says: “'give me agates for my meat; give me cantharids to eat; from air and ocean bring me foods, from all zones and altitudes.' “says i, 'mr. emerson, if you'll excuse me, this ain't no hotel.' you see, it sort of riled me--i warn't used to the ways of jittery swells. but i went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes mr. longfellow and buttonholes me and interrupts me. says he: “'honor be to mudjekeewis! you shall hear how pau-puk-keewis--' “but i broke in, and says i, 'beg your pardon, mr. longfellow, if you'll be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and let me get this grub ready, you'll do me proud.' well, sir, after they'd filled up i set out the jug. mr. holmes looks at it and then he fires up all of a sudden and yells: “'flash out a stream of blood-red wine! for i would drink to other days.' “by george, i was getting kind of worked up. i don't deny it, i was getting kind of worked up. i turns to mr. holmes and says i, 'looky here, my fat friend, i'm a-running this shanty, and if the court knows herself you'll take whisky straight or you'll go dry.' them's the very words i said to him. now i don't want to sass such famous littery people, but you see they kind of forced me. there ain't nothing onreasonable 'bout me. i don't mind a passel of guests a-treadin' on my tail three or four times, but when it comes to standing on it it's different, 'and if the court knows herself,' i says, 'you'll take whisky straight or you'll go dry.' well, between drinks they'd swell around the cabin and strike attitudes and spout; and pretty soon they got out a greasy old deck and went to playing euchre at ten cents a corner--on trust. i began to notice some pretty suspicious things. mr. emerson dealt, looked at his hand, shook his head, says: “'i am the doubter and the doubt--' and calmly bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new lay-out. says he: “'they reckon ill who leave me out; they know not well the subtle ways i keep. i pass and deal again!' hang'd if he didn't go ahead and do it, too! oh, he was a cool one! well, in about a minute things were running pretty tight, but all of a sudden i see by mr. emerson's eye he judged he had 'em. he had already corralled two tricks and each of the others one. so now he kind of lifts a little in his chair and says, “'i tire of globes and aces! too long the game is played!' and down he fetched a right bower. mr. longfellow smiles as sweet as pie and says, “'thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, for the lesson thou hast taught,' and blamed if he didn't down with another right bower! emerson claps his hand on his bowie, longfellow claps his on his revolver, and i went under a bunk. there was going to be trouble; but that monstrous holmes rose up, wobbling his double chins, and says he, 'order, gentlemen; the first man that draws i'll lay down on him and smother him!' all quiet on the potomac, you bet! “they were pretty how-come-you-so by now, and they begun to blow. emerson says, 'the noblest thing i ever wrote was “barbara frietchie.”' says longfellow, 'it don't begin with my “bigelow papers.”' says holmes, 'my “thanatopsis” lays over 'em both.' they mighty near ended in a fight. then they wished they had some more company, and mr. emerson pointed to me and says: “'is yonder squalid peasant all that this proud nursery could breed?' he was a-whetting his bowie on his boot--so i let it pass. well, sir, next they took it into their heads that they would like some music; so they made me stand up and sing, 'when johnny comes marching home' till i dropped--at thirteen minutes past four this morning. that's what i've been through, my friend. when i woke at seven they were leaving, thank goodness, and mr. longfellow had my only boots on and his'n under his arm. says i, 'hold on there, evangeline, what are you going to do with them?' he says, 'going to make tracks with 'em, because-- “'lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime; and, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.' “as i said, mr. twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours and i'm going to move; i ain't suited to a littery atmosphere.” i said to the miner, “why, my dear sir, these were not the gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these were impostors.” the miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while; then said he, “ah! impostors, were they? are you?” i did not pursue the subject, and since then i have not traveled on my 'nom de guerre' enough to hurt. such was the reminiscence i was moved to contribute, mr. chairman. in my enthusiasm i may have exaggerated the details a little, but you will easily forgive me that fault, since i believe it is the first time i have ever deflected from perpendicular fact on an occasion like this. appendix p the adam monument petition (see chapter cxxxiv) to the honorable senate and house of representatives of the united states in congress assembled. whereas, a number of citizens of the city of elmira in the state of new york having covenanted among themselves to erect in that city a monument in memory of adam, the father of mankind, being moved thereto by a sentiment of love and duty, and these having appointed the undersigned to communicate with your honorable body, we beg leave to lay before you the following facts and append to the same our humble petition. . as far as is known no monument has ever been raised in any part of the world to commemorate the services rendered to our race by this great man, whilst many men of far less note and worship have been rendered immortal by means of stately and indestructible memorials. . the common father of mankind has been suffered to lie in entire neglect, although even the father of our country has now, and has had for many years, a monument in course of construction. . no right-feeling human being can desire to see this neglect continued, but all just men, even to the farthest regions of the globe, should and will rejoice to know that he to whom we owe existence is about to have reverent and fitting recognition of his works at the hands of the people of elmira. his labors were not in behalf of one locality, but for the extension of humanity at large and the blessings which go therewith; hence all races and all colors and all religions are interested in seeing that his name and fame shall be placed beyond the reach of the blight of oblivion by a permanent and suitable monument. . it will be to the imperishable credit of the united states if this monument shall be set up within her borders; moreover, it will be a peculiar grace to the beneficiary if this testimonial of affection and gratitude shall be the gift of the youngest of the nations that have sprung from his loins after , years of unappreciation on the part of its elders. . the idea of this sacred enterprise having originated in the city of elmira, she will be always grateful if the general government shall encourage her in the good work by securing to her a certain advantage through the exercise of its great authority. therefore, your petitioners beg that your honorable body will be pleased to issue a decree restricting to elmira the right to build a monument to adam and inflicting a heavy penalty upon any other community within the united states that shall propose or attempt to erect a monument or other memorial to the said adam, and to this end we will ever pray. names: ( signatures) appendix q general grant's grammar (written in . delivered at an army and navy club dinner in new york city) lately a great and honored author, matthew arnold, has been finding fault with general grant's english. that would be fair enough, maybe, if the examples of imperfect english averaged more instances to the page in general grant's book than they do in arnold's criticism on the book--but they do not. it would be fair enough, maybe, if such instances were commoner in general grant's book than they are in the works of the average standard author--but they are not. in fact, general grant's derelictions in the matter of grammar and construction are not more frequent than such derelictions in the works of a majority of the professional authors of our time, and of all previous times--authors as exclusively and painstakingly trained to the literary trade as was general grant to the trade of war. this is not a random statement: it is a fact, and easily demonstrable. i have a book at home called modern english literature: its blemishes and defects, by henry h. breen, a countryman of mr. arnold. in it i find examples of bad grammar and slovenly english from the pens of sydney smith, sheridan, hallam, whately, carlyle, disraeli, allison, junius, blair, macaulay, shakespeare, milton, gibbon, southey, lamb, landor, smollett, walpole, walker (of the dictionary), christopher north, kirk white, benjamin franklin, sir walter scott, and mr. lindley murray (who made the grammar). in mr. arnold's criticism on general grant's book we find two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly english, enough of them to entitle him to a lofty place in the illustrious list of delinquents just named. the following passage all by itself ought to elect him: “meade suggested to grant that he might wish to have immediately under him sherman, who had been serving with grant in the west. he begged him not to hesitate if he thought it for the good of the service. grant assured him that he had not thought of moving him, and in his memoirs, after relating what had passed, he adds, etc.” to read that passage a couple of times would make a man dizzy; to read it four times would make him drunk. mr. breen makes this discriminating remark: “to suppose that because a man is a poet or a historian he must be correct in his grammar is to suppose that an architect must be a joiner, or a physician a compounder of medicine.” people may hunt out what microscopic motes they please, but, after all, the fact remains, and cannot be dislodged, that general grant's book is a great and, in its peculiar department, a unique and unapproachable literary masterpiece. in their line there is no higher literature than those modest, simple memoirs. their style is at least flawless and no man could improve upon it, and great books are weighed and measured by their style and matter, and not by the trimmings and shadings of their grammar. there is that about the sun which makes us forget his spots, and when we think of general grant our pulses quicken and his grammar vanishes; we only remember that this is the simple soldier who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools and put into them a something which will still bring to american ears, as long as america shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts. what do we care for grammar when we think of those thunderous phrases, “unconditional and immediate surrender,” “i propose to move immediately upon your works,” “i propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” mr. arnold would doubtless claim that that last phrase is not strictly grammatical, and yet it did certainly wake up this nation as a hundred million tons of a-number-one fourth-proof, hard-boiled, hide-bound grammar from another mouth could not have done. and finally we have that gentler phrase, that one which shows you another true side of the man, shows you that in his soldier heart there was room for other than gory war mottoes and in his tongue the gift to fitly phrase them: “let us have peace.” appendix r party allegiance. being a portion of a paper on “consistency,” read before the monday evening club in . (see chapter clxiii) ... i have referred to the fact that when a man retires from his political party he is a traitor--that he is so pronounced in plain language. that is bold; so bold as to deceive many into the fancy that it is true. desertion, treason--these are the terms applied. their military form reveals the thought in the man's mind who uses them: to him a political party is an army. well, is it? are the two things identical? do they even resemble each other? necessarily a political party is not an army of conscripts, for they are in the ranks by compulsion. then it must be a regular army or an army of volunteers. is it a regular army? no, for these enlist for a specified and well-understood term, and can retire without reproach when the term is up. is it an army of volunteers who have enlisted for the war, and may righteously be shot if they leave before the war is finished? no, it is not even an army in that sense. those fine military terms are high-sounding, empty lies, and are no more rationally applicable to a political party than they would be to an oyster-bed. the volunteer soldier comes to the recruiting office and strips himself and proves that he is so many feet high, and has sufficiently good teeth, and no fingers gone, and is sufficiently sound in body generally; he is accepted; but not until he has sworn a deep oath or made other solemn form of promise to march under, that flag until that war is done or his term of enlistment completed. what is the process when a voter joins a party? must he prove that he is sound in any way, mind or body? must he prove that he knows anything--is capable of anything--whatever? does he take an oath or make a promise of any sort?--or doesn't he leave himself entirely free? if he were informed by the political boss that if he join, it must be forever; that he must be that party's chattel and wear its brass collar the rest of his days--would not that insult him? it goes without saying. he would say some rude, unprintable thing, and turn his back on that preposterous organization. but the political boss puts no conditions upon him at all; and this volunteer makes no promises, enlists for no stated term. he has in no sense become a part of an army; he is in no way restrained of his freedom. yet he will presently find that his bosses and his newspapers have assumed just the reverse of that: that they have blandly arrogated to themselves an ironclad military authority over him; and within twelve months, if he is an average man, he will have surrendered his liberty, and will actually be silly enough to believe that he cannot leave that party, for any cause whatever, without being a shameful traitor, a deserter, a legitimately dishonored man. there you have the just measure of that freedom of conscience, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech and action which we hear so much inflated foolishness about as being the precious possession of the republic. whereas, in truth, the surest way for a man to make of himself a target for almost universal scorn, obloquy, slander, and insult is to stop twaddling about these priceless independencies and attempt to exercise one of them. if he is a preacher half his congregation will clamor for his expulsion--and will expel him, except they find it will injure real estate in the neighborhood; if he is a doctor his own dead will turn against him. i repeat that the new party-member who supposed himself independent will presently find that the party have somehow got a mortgage on his soul, and that within a year he will recognize the mortgage, deliver up his liberty, and actually believe he cannot retire from that party from any motive howsoever high and right in his own eyes without shame and dishonor. is it possible for human wickedness to invent a doctrine more infernal and poisonous than this? is there imaginable a baser servitude than it imposes? what slave is so degraded as the slave that is proud that he is a slave? what is the essential difference between a lifelong democrat and any other kind of lifelong slave? is it less humiliating to dance to the lash of one master than another? this infamous doctrine of allegiance to party plays directly into the hands of politicians of the baser sort--and doubtless for that it was borrowed--or stolen--from the monarchial system. it enables them to foist upon the country officials whom no self-respecting man would vote for if he could but come to understand that loyalty to himself is his first and highest duty, not loyalty to any party name. shall you say the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? shall you also say that it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter and become a mouthing lunatic besides? oh no, you say; it does not demand that. but what if it produce that in spite of you? there is no obligation upon a man to do things which he ought not to do when drunk, but most men will do them just the same; and so we hear no arguments about obligations in the matter--we only hear men warned to avoid the habit of drinking; get rid of the thing that can betray men into such things. this is a funny business all around. the same men who enthusiastically preach loyal consistency to church and party are always ready and willing and anxious to persuade a chinaman or an indian or a kanaka to desert his church or a fellow-american to desert his party. the man who deserts to them is all that is high and pure and beautiful--apparently; the man who deserts from them is all that is foul and despicable. this is consistency--with a capital c. with the daintiest and self-complacentest sarcasm the lifelong loyalist scoffs at the independent--or as he calls him, with cutting irony, the mugwump; makes himself too killingly funny for anything in this world about him. but--the mugwump can stand it, for there is a great history at his back; stretching down the centuries, and he comes of a mighty ancestry. he knows that in the whole history of the race of men no single great and high and beneficent thing was ever done for the souls and bodies, the hearts and the brains of the children of this world, but a mugwump started it and mugwumps carried it to victory: and their names are the stateliest in history: washington, garrison, galileo, luther, christ. loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world-end never will. appendix s original preface for “a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court” (see chapter clxxii) my object has been to group together some of the most odious laws which have had vogue in the christian countries within the past eight or ten centuries, and illustrate them by the incidents of a story. there was never a time when america applied the death-penalty to more than fourteen crimes. but england, within the memory of men still living, had in her list of crimes which were punishable by death! and yet from the beginning of our existence down to a time within the memory of babes england has distressed herself piteously over the ungentleness of our connecticut blue laws. those blue laws should have been spared english criticism for two reasons: . they were so insipidly mild, by contrast with the bloody and atrocious laws of england of the same period, as to seem characterless and colorless when one brings them into that awful presence. . the blue laws never had any existence. they were the fancy-work of an english clergyman; they were never a part of any statute-book. and yet they could have been made to serve a useful and merciful purpose; if they had been injected into the english law the dilution would have given to the whole a less lurid aspect; or, to figure the effect in another way, they would have been coca mixed into vitriol. i have drawn no laws and no illustrations from the twin civilizations of hell and russia. to have entered into that atmosphere would have defeated my purpose, which was to show a great and genuine progress in christendom in these few later generations toward mercifulness--a wide and general relaxing of the grip of the law. russia had to be left out because exile to siberia remains, and in that single punishment is gathered together and concentrated all the bitter inventions of all the black ages for the infliction of suffering upon human beings. exile for life from one's hearthstone and one's idols--this is rack, thumb-screw, the water-drop, fagot and stake, tearing asunder by horses, flaying alive--all these in one; and not compact into hours, but drawn out into years, each year a century, and the whole a mortal immortality of torture and despair. while exile to siberia remains one will be obliged to admit that there is one country in christendom where the punishments of all the ages are still preserved and still inflicted, that there is one country in christendom where no advance has been made toward modifying the medieval penalties for offenses against society and the state. appendix t a tribute to henry h. rogers (see chapter cc and earlier) april , . i owe more to henry rogers than to any other man whom i have known. he was born in fairhaven, connecticut, in , and is my junior by four years. he was graduated from the high school there in , when he was fourteen years old, and from that time forward he earned his own living, beginning at first as the bottom subordinate in the village store with hard-work privileges and a low salary. when he was twenty-four he went out to the newly discovered petroleum fields in pennsylvania and got work; then returned home, with enough money to pay passage, married a schoolmate, and took her to the oil regions. he prospered, and by and by established the standard oil trust with mr. rockefeller and others, and is still one of its managers and directors. in we fell together by accident one evening in the murray hill hotel, and our friendship began on the spot and at once. ever since then he has added my business affairs to his own and carried them through, and i have had no further trouble with them. obstructions and perplexities which would have driven me mad were simplicities to his master mind and furnished him no difficulties. he released me from my entanglements with paige and stopped that expensive outgo; when charles l. webster & company failed he saved my copyrights for mrs. clemens when she would have sacrificed them to the creditors although they were in no way entitled to them; he offered to lend me money wherewith to save the life of that worthless firm; when i started lecturing around the world to make the money to pay off the webster debts he spent more than a year trying to reconcile the differences between harper & brothers and the american publishing company and patch up a working-contract between them and succeeded where any other man would have failed; as fast as i earned money and sent it to him he banked it at interest and held onto it, refusing to pay any creditor until he could pay all of the alike; when i had earned enough to pay dollar for dollar he swept off the indebtedness and sent me the whole batch of complimentary letters which the creditors wrote in return; when i had earned $ , more, $ , of which was in his hands, i wrote him from vienna to put the latter into federal steel and leave it there; he obeyed to the extent of $ , , but sold it in two months at $ , profit, and said it would go ten points higher, but that it was his custom to “give the other man a chance” (and that was a true word--there was never a truer one spoken). that was at the end of ' and beginning of ; and from that day to this he has continued to break up my bad schemes and put better ones in their place, to my great advantage. i do things which ought to try man's patience, but they never seem to try his; he always finds a colorable excuse for what i have done. his soul was born superhumanly sweet, and i do not think anything can sour it. i have not known his equal among men for lovable qualities. but for his cool head and wise guidance i should never have come out of the webster difficulties on top; it was his good steering that enabled me to work out my salvation and pay a hundred cents on the dollar--the most valuable service any man ever did me. his character is full of fine graces, but the finest is this: that he can load you down with crushing obligations and then so conduct himself that you never feel their weight. if he would only require something in return--but that is not in his nature; it would not occur to him. with the harpers and the american company at war those copyrights were worth but little; he engineered a peace and made them valuable. he invests $ , for me here, and in a few months returns a profit of $ , . i invest (in london and here) $ , and must wait considerably for results (in case there shall be any). i tell him about it and he finds no fault, utters not a sarcasm. he was born serene, patient, all-enduring, where a friend is concerned, and nothing can extinguish that great quality in him. such a man is entitled to the high gift of humor: he has it at its very best. he is not only the best friend i have ever had, but is the best man i have known. s. l. clemens. appendix u from mark twain's last poem begun at riverdale, new york. finished at york harbor, maine, august , (see chapter ccxxiii) (a bereft and demented mother speaks) ... o, i can see my darling yet: the little form in slip of flimsy stuff all creamy white, pink-belted waist with ample bows, blue shoes scarce bigger than the house-cat's ears--capering in delight and choked with glee. it was a summer afternoon; the hill rose green above me and about, and in the vale below the distant village slept, and all the world was steeped in dreams. upon me lay this peace, and i forgot my sorrow in its spell. and now my little maid passed by, and she was deep in thought upon a solemn thing: a disobedience, and my reproof. upon my face she must not look until the day was done; for she was doing penance... she? o, it was i! what mother knows not that? and so she passed, i worshiping and longing... it was not wrong? you do not think me wrong? i did it for the best. indeed i meant it so. she flits before me now: the peach-bloom of her gauzy crepe, the plaited tails of hair, the ribbons floating from the summer hat, the grieving face, dropp'd head absorbed with care. o, dainty little form! i see it move, receding slow along the path, by hovering butterflies besieged; i see it reach the breezy top clear-cut against the sky,... then pass beyond and sink from sight-forever! within, was light and cheer; without, a blustering winter's right. there was a play; it was her own; for she had wrought it out unhelped, from her own head-and she but turned sixteen! a pretty play, all graced with cunning fantasies, and happy songs, and peopled all with fays, and sylvan gods and goddesses, and shepherds, too, that piped and danced, and wore the guileless hours away in care-free romps and games. her girlhood mates played in the piece, and she as well: a goddess, she,--and looked it, as it seemed to me. 'twas fairyland restored-so beautiful it was and innocent. it made us cry, we elder ones, to live our lost youth o'er again with these its happy heirs. slowly, at last, the curtain fell. before us, there, she stood, all wreathed and draped in roses pearled with dew-so sweet, so glad, so radiant!--and flung us kisses through the storm of praise that crowned her triumph.... o, across the mists of time i see her yet, my goddess of the flowers! ... the curtain hid her.... do you comprehend? till time shall end! out of my life she vanished while i looked! ... ten years are flown. o, i have watched so long, so long. but she will come no more. no, she will come no more. it seems so strange... so strange... struck down unwarned! in the unbought grace, of youth laid low--in the glory of her fresh young bloom laid low--in the morning of her life cut down! and i not by! not by when the shadows fell, the night of death closed down the sun that lit my life went out. not by to answer when the latest whisper passed the lips that were so dear to me--my name! far from my post! the world's whole breadth away. o, sinking in the waves of death she cried to me for mother-help, and got for answer silence! we that are old--we comprehend; even we that are not mad: whose grown-up scions still abide; their tale complete: their earlier selves we glimpse at intervals far in the dimming past; we see the little forms as once they were, and whilst we ache to take them to our hearts, the vision fades. we know them lost to us--forever lost; we cannot have them back; we miss them as we miss the dead, we mourn them as we mourn the dead. appendix v. selections from an unfinished book, “ , years among the microbes” the autobiography of a microbe, who, in a former existence, had been a man--his present habitat being the organism of a tramp, blitzowski. (written at dublin, new hampshire, ) (see chapter ccxxxv) our world (the tramp) is as large and grand and awe-compelling to us microscopic creatures as is man's world to man. our tramp is mountainous, there are vast oceans in him, and lakes that are sea-like for size, there are many rivers (veins and arteries) which are fifteen miles across, and of a length so stupendous as to make the mississippi and the amazon trifling little rhode island brooks by comparison. as for our minor rivers, they are multitudinous, and the dutiable commerce of disease which they carry is rich beyond the dreams of the american custom-house. take a man like sir oliver lodge, and what secret of nature can be hidden from him? he says: “a billion, that is a million millions,[?? trillion d.w.] of atoms is truly an immense number, but the resulting aggregate is still excessively minute. a portion of substance consisting, of a billion atoms is only barely visible with the highest power of a microscope; and a speck or granule, in order to be visible to the naked eye, like a grain of lycopodium-dust, must be a million times bigger still.” the human eye could see it then--that dainty little speck. but with my microbe-eye i could see every individual of the whirling billions of atoms that compose the speck. nothing is ever at rest--wood, iron, water, everything is alive, everything is raging, whirling, whizzing, day and night and night and day, nothing is dead, there is no such thing as death, everything is full of bristling life, tremendous life, even the bones of the crusader that perished before jerusalem eight centuries ago. there are no vegetables, all things are animal; each electron is an animal, each molecule is a collection of animals, and each has an appointed duty to perform and a soul to be saved. heaven was not made for man alone, and oblivion and neglect reserved for the rest of his creatures. he gave them life, he gave them humble services to perform, they have performed them, and they will not be forgotten, they will have their reward. man-always vain, windy, conceited-thinks he will be in the majority there. he will be disappointed. let him humble himself. but for the despised microbe and the persecuted bacillus, who needed a home and nourishment, he would not have been created. he has a mission, therefore a reason for existing: let him do the service he was made for, and keep quiet. three weeks ago i was a man myself, and thought and felt as men think and feel; i have lived , years since then [microbic time], and i see the foolishness of it now. we live to learn, and fortunate are we when we are wise enough to profit by it. in matters pertaining to microscopy we necessarily have an advantage here over the scientist of the earth, because, as i have just been indicating, we see with our naked eyes minutenesses which no man-made microscope can detect, and are therefore able to register as facts many things which exist for him as theories only. indeed, we know as facts several things which he has not yet divined even by theory. for example, he does not suspect that there is no life but animal life, and that all atoms are individual animals endowed each with a certain degree of consciousness, great or small, each with likes and dislikes, predilections and aversions--that, in a word, each has a character, a character of its own. yet such is the case. some of the molecules of a stone have an aversion for some of those of a vegetable or any other creature and will not associate with them--and would not be allowed to, if they tried. nothing is more particular about society than a molecule. and so there are no end of castes; in this matter india is not a circumstance. “tell me, franklin [a microbe of great learning], is the ocean an individual, an animal, a creature?” “yes.” “then water--any water-is an individual?” “yes.” “suppose you remove a drop of it? is what is left an individual?” “yes, and so is the drop.” “suppose you divide the drop?” “then you have two individuals.” “suppose you separate the hydrogen and the oxygen?” “again you have two individuals. but you haven't water any more.” “of course. certainly. well, suppose you combine them again, but in a new way: make the proportions equal--one part oxygen to one of hydrogen?” “but you know you can't. they won't combine on equal terms.” i was ashamed to have made that blunder. i was embarrassed; to cover it i started to say we used to combine them like that where i came from, but thought better of it, and stood pat. “now then,” i said, “it amounts to this: water is an individual, an animal, and is alive; remove the hydrogen and it is an animal and is alive; the remaining oxygen is also an individual, an animal, and is alive. recapitulation: the two individuals combined constitute a third individual--and yet each continues to be an individual.” i glanced at franklin, but... upon reflection, held my peace. i could have pointed out to him that here was mute nature explaining the sublime mystery of the trinity so luminously--that even the commonest understanding could comprehend it, whereas many a trained master of words had labored to do it with speech and failed. but he would not have known what i was talking about. after a moment i resumed: “listen--and see if i have understood you rightly, to wit: all the atoms that constitute each oxygen molecule are separate individuals, and each is a living animal; all the atoms that constitute each hydrogen molecule are separate individuals, and each one is a living animal; each drop of water consists of millions of living animals, the drop itself is an individual, a living animal, and the wide ocean is another. is that it?” “yes, that is correct.” “by george, it beats the band!” he liked the expression, and set it down in his tablets. “franklin, we've got it down fine. and to think--there are other animals that are still smaller than a hydrogen atom, and yet it is so small that it takes five thousand of them to make a molecule--a molecule so minute that it could get into a microbe's eye and he wouldn't know it was there!” “yes, the wee creatures that inhabit the bodies of us germs and feed upon us, and rot us with disease: ah, what could they have been created for? they give us pain, they make our lives miserable, they murder us--and where is the use of it all, where the wisdom? ah, friend bkshp [microbic orthography], we live in a strange and unaccountable world; our birth is a mystery, our little life is a mystery, a trouble, we pass and are seen no more; all is mystery, mystery, mystery; we know not whence we came, nor why; we know not whither we go, nor why we go. we only know we were not made in vain, we only know we were made for a wise purpose, and that all is well! we shall not be cast aside in contumely and unblest after all we have suffered. let us be patient, let us not repine, let us trust. the humblest of us is cared for--oh, believe it!--and this fleeting stay is not the end!” you notice that? he did not suspect that he, also, was engaged in gnawing, torturing, defiling, rotting, and murdering a fellow-creature--he and all the swarming billions of his race. none of them suspects it. that is significant. it is suggestive--irresistibly suggestive--insistently suggestive. it hints at the possibility that the procession of known and listed devourers and persecutors is not complete. it suggests the possibility, and substantially the certainty, that man is himself a microbe, and his globe a blood-corpuscle drifting with its shining brethren of the milky way down a vein of the master and maker of all things, whose body, mayhap--glimpsed part-wise from the earth by night, and receding and lost to view in the measureless remotenesses of space--is what men name the universe. yes, that was all old to me, but to find that our little old familiar microbes were themselves loaded up with microbes that fed them, enriched them, and persistently and faithfully preserved them and their poor old tramp-planet from destruction--oh, that was new, and too delicious! i wanted to see them! i was in a fever to see them! i had lenses to two-million power, but of course the field was no bigger than a person's finger-nail, and so it wasn't possible to compass a considerable spectacle or a landscape with them; whereas what i had been craving was a thirty-foot field, which would represent a spread of several miles of country and show up things in a way to make them worth looking at. the boys and i had often tried to contrive this improvement, but had failed. i mentioned the matter to the duke and it made him smile. he said it was a quite simple thing-he had it at home. i was eager to bargain for the secret, but he said it was a trifle and not worth bargaining for. he said: “hasn't it occurred to you that all you have to do is to bend an x-ray to an angle-value of . and refract it with a parabolism, and there you are?” upon my word, i had never thought of that simple thing! you could have knocked me down with a feather. we rigged a microscope for an exhibition at once and put a drop of my blood under it, which got mashed flat when the lens got shut down upon it. the result was beyond my dreams. the field stretched miles away, green and undulating, threaded with streams and roads, and bordered all down the mellowing distances with picturesque hills. and there was a great white city of tents; and everywhere were parks of artillery and divisions of cavalry and infantry waiting. we had hit a lucky moment, evidently there was going to be a march-past or some thing like that. at the front where the chief banner flew there was a large and showy tent, with showy guards on duty, and about it were some other tents of a swell kind. the warriors--particularly the officers--were lovely to look at, they were so trim-built and so graceful and so handsomely uniformed. they were quite distinct, vividly distinct, for it was a fine day, and they were so immensely magnified that they looked to be fully a finger-nail high.--[my own expression, and a quite happy one. i said to the duke: “your grace, they're just about finger-milers!” “how do you mean, m'lord?” “this. you notice the stately general standing there with his hand resting upon the muzzle of a cannon? well, if you could stick your little finger down against the ground alongside of him his plumes would just reach up to where your nail joins the flesh.” the duke said “finger-milers was good”--good and exact; and he afterward used it several times himself.]--everywhere you could see officers moving smartly about, and they looked gay, but the common soldiers looked sad. many wife-swinks [“swinks,” an atomic race] and daughter-swinks and sweetheart-swinks were about--crying, mainly. it seemed to indicate that this was a case of war, not a summer-camp for exercise, and that the poor labor-swinks were being torn from their planet-saving industries to go and distribute civilization and other forms of suffering among the feeble benighted somewhere; else why should the swinkesses cry? the cavalry was very fine--shiny black horses, shapely and spirited; and presently when a flash of light struck a lifted bugle (delivering a command which we couldn't hear) and a division came tearing down on a gallop it was a stirring and gallant sight, until the dust rose an inch--the duke thought more--and swallowed it up in a rolling and tumbling long gray cloud, with bright weapons glinting and sparkling in it. before long the real business of the occasion began. a battalion of priests arrived carrying sacred pictures. that settled it: this was war; these far-stretching masses of troops were bound for the front. their little monarch came out now, the sweetest little thing that ever travestied the human shape i think, and he lifted up his hands and blessed the passing armies, and they looked as grateful as they could, and made signs of humble and real reverence as they drifted by the holy pictures. it was beautiful--the whole thing; and wonderful, too, when those serried masses swung into line and went marching down the valley under the long array of fluttering flags. evidently they were going somewhere to fight for their king, which was the little manny that blessed them; and to preserve him and his brethren that occupied the other swell tents; to civilize and grasp a valuable little unwatched country for them somewhere. but the little fellow and his brethren didn't fall in--that was a noticeable particular. they didn't fight; they stayed at home, where it was safe, and waited for the swag. very well, then-what ought we to do? had we no moral duty to perform? ought we to allow this war to begin? was it not our duty to stop it, in the name of right and righteousness? was it not our duty to administer a rebuke to this selfish and heartless family? the duke was struck by that, and greatly moved. he felt as i did about it, and was ready to do whatever was right, and thought we ought to pour boiling water on the family and extinguish it, which we did. it extinguished the armies, too, which was not intended. we both regretted this, but the duke said that these people were nothing to us, and deserved extinction anyway for being so poor-spirited as to serve such a family. he was loyally doing the like himself, and so was i, but i don't think we thought of that. and it wasn't just the same, anyway, because we were sooflaskies, and they were only swinks. franklin realizes that no atom is destructible; that it has always existed and will exist forever; but he thinks all atoms will go out of this world some day and continue their life in a happier one. old tolliver thinks no atom's life will ever end, but he also thinks blitzowski is the only world it will ever see, and that at no time in its eternity will it be either worse off or better off than it is now and always has been. of course he thinks the planet blitzowski is itself eternal and indestructible--at any rate he says he thinks that. it could make me sad, only i know better. d. t. will fetch blitzy yet one of these days. but these are alien thoughts, human thoughts, and they falsely indicate that i do not want this tramp to go on living. what would become of me if he should disintegrate? my molecules would scatter all around and take up new quarters in hundreds of plants and animals; each would carry its special feelings along with it, each would be content in its new estate, but where should i be? i should not have a rag of a feeling left, after my disintegration--with his--was complete. nothing to think with, nothing to grieve or rejoice with, nothing to hope or despair with. there would be no more me. i should be musing and thinking and dreaming somewhere else--in some distant animal maybe--perhaps a cat--by proxy of my oxygen i should be raging and fuming in some other creatures--a rat, perhaps; i should be smiling and hoping in still another child of nature--heir to my hydrogen--a weed, or a cabbage, or something; my carbonic acid (ambition) would be dreaming dreams in some lowly wood-violet that was longing for a showy career; thus my details would be doing as much feeling as ever, but i should not be aware of it, it would all be going on for the benefit of those others, and i not in it at all. i should be gradually wasting away, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, as the years went on, and at last i should be all distributed, and nothing left of what had once been me. it is curious, and not without impressiveness: i should still be alive, intensely alive, but so scattered that i would not know it. i should not be dead--no, one cannot call it that--but i should be the next thing to it. and to think what centuries and ages and aeons would drift over me before the disintegration was finished, the last bone turned to gas and blown away! i wish i knew what it is going to feel like, to lie helpless such a weary, weary time, and see my faculties decay and depart, one by one, like lights which burn low, and flicker and perish, until the ever-deepening gloom and darkness which--oh, away, away with these horrors, and let me think of something wholesome! my tramp is only ; there is good hope that he will live ten years longer-- , of my microbe years. so may it be. oh, dear, we are all so wise! each of us knows it all, and knows he knows it all--the rest, to a man, are fools and deluded. one man knows there is a hell, the next one knows there isn't; one man knows high tariff is right, the next man knows it isn't; one man knows monarchy is best, the next one knows it isn't; one age knows there are witches, the next one knows there aren't; one sect knows its religion is the only true one, there are sixty-four thousand five hundred million sects that know it isn't so. there is not a mind present among this multitude of verdict-deliverers that is the superior of the minds that persuade and represent the rest of the divisions of the multitude. yet this sarcastic fact does not humble the arrogance nor diminish the know-it-all bulk of a single verdict-maker of the lot by so much as a shade. mind is plainly an ass, but it will be many ages before it finds it out, no doubt. why do we respect the opinions of any man or any microbe that ever lived? i swear i don't know. why do i respect my own? well--that is different. appendix w little bessie would assist providence (see chapter cclxxxii) [it is dull, and i need wholesome excitements and distractions; so i will go lightly excursioning along the primrose path of theology.] little bessie was nearly three years old. she was a good child, and not shallow, not frivolous, but meditative and thoughtful, and much given to thinking out the reasons of things and trying to make them harmonize with results. one day she said: “mama, why is there so much pain and sorrow and suffering? what is it all for?” it was an easy question, and mama had no difficulty in answering it: “it is for our good, my child. in his wisdom and mercy the lord sends us these afflictions to discipline us and make us better.” “is it he that sends them?” “yes.” “does he send all of them, mama?” “yes, dear, all of them. none of them comes by accident; he alone sends them, and always out of love for us, and to make us better.” “isn't it strange?” “strange? why, no, i have never thought of it in that way. i have not heard any one call it strange before. it has always seemed natural and right to me, and wise and most kindly and merciful.” “who first thought of it like that, mama? was it you?” “oh no, child, i was taught it.” “who taught you so, mama?” “why, really, i don't know--i can't remember. my mother, i suppose; or the preacher. but it's a thing that everybody knows.” “well, anyway, it does seem strange. did he give billy norris the typhus?” “yes.” “what for?” “why, to discipline him and make him good.” “but he died, mama, and so it couldn't make him good.” “well, then, i suppose it was for some other reason. we know it was a good reason, whatever it was.” “what do you think it was, mama?” “oh, you ask so many questions! i think it was to discipline his parents.” “well, then, it wasn't fair, mama. why should his life be taken away for their sake, when he wasn't doing anything?” “oh, i don't know! i only know it was for a good and wise and merciful reason.” “what reason, mama?” “i think--i think-well, it was a judgment; it was to punish them for some sin they had committed.” “but he was the one that was punished, mama. was that right?” “certainly, certainly. he does nothing that isn't right and wise and merciful. you can't understand these things now, dear, but when you are grown up you will understand them, and then you will see that they are just and wise.” after a pause: “did he make the roof fall in on the stranger that was trying to save the crippled old woman from the fire, mama?” “yes, my child. wait! don't ask me why, because i don't know. i only know it was to discipline some one, or be a judgment upon somebody, or to show his power.” “that drunken man that stuck a pitchfork into mrs. welch's baby when--” “never mind about it, you needn't go into particulars; it was to discipline the child--that much is certain, anyway.” “mama, mr. burgess said in his sermon that billions of little creatures are sent into us to give us cholera, and typhoid, and lockjaw, and more than a thousand other sicknesses and--mama, does he send them?” “oh, certainly, child, certainly. of course.” “what for?” “oh, to discipline us! haven't i told you so, over and over again?” “it's awful cruel, mama! and silly! and if i----” “hush, oh, hush! do you want to bring the lightning?” “you know the lightning did come last week, mama, and struck the new church, and burnt it down. was it to discipline the church?” (wearily.) “oh, i suppose so.” “but it killed a hog that wasn't doing anything. was it to discipline the hog, mama?” “dear child, don't you want to run out and play a while? if you would like to----” “mama, only think! mr. hollister says there isn't a bird, or fish, or reptile, or any other animal that hasn't got an enemy that providence has sent to bite it and chase it and pester it and kill it and suck its blood and discipline it and make it good and religious. is that true, mother--because if it is true why did mr. hollister laugh at it?” “that hollister is a scandalous person, and i don't want you to listen to anything he says.” “why, mama, he is very interesting, and i think he tries to be good. he says the wasps catch spiders and cram them down into their nests in the ground--alive, mama!--and there they live and suffer days and days and days, and the hungry little wasps chewing their legs and gnawing into their bellies all the time, to make them good and religious and praise god for his infinite mercies. i think mr. hollister is just lovely, and ever so kind; for when i asked him if he would treat a spider like that he said he hoped to be damned if he would; and then he----dear mama, have you fainted! i will run and bring help! now this comes of staying in town this hot weather.” appendix x. a chronological list of mark twain's work published and otherwise--from - note .--this is not a detailed bibliography, but merely a general list of mark twain's literary undertakings, in the order of performance, showing when, and usually where, the work was done, when and where first published, etc. an excellent mark twain bibliography has been compiled by mr. merle johnson, to whom acknowledgments are due for important items. note .--only a few of the more important speeches are noted. volumes that are merely collections of tales or articles are not noted. note .--titles are shortened to those most commonly in use, as “huck finn” or “huck” for “the adventures of huckleberry finn.” names of periodicals are abbreviated. the initials u. e. stand for the “uniform edition” of mark twain's works. the chapter number or numbers in the line with the date refers to the place in this work where the items are mentioned. . (see chapter xviii of this work.) edited the hannibal journal during the absence of the owner and editor, orion clemens. wrote local items for the hannibal journal. burlesque of a rival editor in the hannibal journal. wrote two sketches for the sat. eve. post (philadelphia). to mary in h-l. hannibal journal. - . (see chapter xviii.) jim wolfe and the fire--hannibal journal. burlesque of a rival editor in the hannibal journal. . (see chapter xix.) wrote obituary poems--not published. wrote first letters home. - . (see chapters xx and xxi.) first after-dinner speech; delivered at a printers' banquet in keokuk, iowa. letters from cincinnati, november , , signed “snodgrass”--saturday post (keokuk). . (see chapter xxi.) letters from cincinnati, march , , signed “snodgrass”--saturday post (keokuk). . anonymous contributions to the new orleans crescent and probably to st. louis papers. . (see chapter xxvii; also appendix b.) burlesque of capt. isaiah sellers--true delta (new orleans), may or . . (see chapters xxxiii to xxxv.) letters home, published in the gate city (keokuk). . (see chapters xxxv to xxxviii.) letters and sketches, signed “josh,” for the territorial enterprise (virginia city, nevada). report of the lecture of prof. personal pronoun--enterprise. report of a fourth of july oration--enterprise. the petrified man--enterprise. local news reporter for the enterprise from august. . (see chapters xli to xliii; also appendix c.) reported the nevada legislature for the enterprise. first used the name “mark twain,” february . advice to the unreliable--enterprise. curing a cold--enterprise. u. e. information for the million--enterprise. advice to good little girls--enterprise. the dutch nick massacre--enterprise. many other enterprise sketches. the aged pilot man (poem)--“roughing it.” u. e. . (see. chapters xliv to xlvii.) reported the nevada legislature for the enterprise. speech as “governor of the third house.” letters to new york sunday mercury. local reporter on the san francisco call. articles and sketches for the golden era. articles and sketches for the californian. daily letters from san francisco to the enterprise. (several of the era and californian sketches appear in sketches new and old. u. e.) . (see chapters xlix to li; also appendix e.) notes for the jumping frog story; angel's camp, february. sketches etc., for the golden era and californian. daily letter to the enterprise. the jumping frog (san francisco) saturday press. new york, november . u. e. . (see chapters lii to lv; also appendix d.) daily letter to the enterprise. sandwich island letters to the sacramento union. lecture on the sandwich islands, san francisco, october . forty-three days in an open boat--harper's magazine, december (error in signature made it mark swain). . (see chapters lvii to lxv; also appendices e, f, and g.) letters to alta california from new york. jim wolfe and the cats--n. y. sunday mercury. the jumping frog--book, published by charles henry webb, may . u. e. lectured at cooper union, may, ' . letters to alta california and new york tribune from the quaker city--holy land excursion. letter to new york herald on the return from the holy land. after-dinner speech on “women” (washington). began arrangement for the publication of the innocents abroad. . (see chapters lxvi to lxix; also appendices h and i.) newspaper letters, etc., from washington, for new york citizen, tribune, herald, and other papers and periodicals. preparing quaker city letters (in washington and san francisco) for book publication. captain wakeman's (stormfield's) visit to heaven (san francisco), published harper's magazine, december, -january, (also book, harpers). lectured in california and nevada on the “holy land,” july . s'cat! anonymous article on t. k. beecher (elmira), published in local paper. lecture-tour, season - . . (see chapters lxx to lxxni.) the innocents abroad--book (am. pub. co.), july . u. e. bought one-third ownership in the buffalo express. contributed editorials, sketches, etc., to the express. contributed sketches to packard's monthly, wood's magazine, etc. lecture-tour, season - . . (see chapters lxxiv to lxxx; also appendix j.) contributed various matter to buffalo express. contributed various matter under general head of “memoranda” to galaxy magazine, may to april, ' . roughing it begun in september (buffalo). shem's diary (buffalo) (unfinished). god, ancient and modern (unpublished). . (see chapters lxxxi and lxxxii; also appendix k.) memoranda continued in galaxy to april. autobiography and first romance--[the first romance had appeared in the express in . later included in sketches.]--booklet (sheldon & co.). u. e. roughing it finished (quarry farm). ruloff letter--tribune. wrote several sketches and lectures (quarry farm). western play (unfinished). lecture-tour, season - . . (see chapters lxxxiii to lxxxvii; also appendix l.) roughing it--book (am. pub. co.), february. u. e. the mark twain scrap-book invented (saybrook, connecticut). tom sawyer begun as a play (saybrook, connecticut). a few unimportant sketches published in “practical jokes,” etc. began a book on england (london). . (see chapters lxxxviii to xcii.) letters on the sandwich islands-tribune, january and . the gilded age (with c. d. warner)--book (am. pub. co), december. u. e. the license of the press--paper for the monday evening club. lectured in london, october and season - . . (see chapters xciii to xcviii; also appendix m.) tom sawyer continued (in the new study at quarry farm). a true story (quarry farm)-atlantic, november. u. e. fables (quarry farm). u. e. colonel sellers--play (quarry farm) performed by john t. raymond. undertaker's love-story (quarry farm) (unpublished). old times on the mississippi (hartford) atlantic, january to july, . monarchy letter to mrs. clemens, dated (boston). . (see chapters c to civ; also appendix n.) universal suffrage--paper for the monday evening club. sketches new and old--book (am. pub. co.), july. u. e. tom sawyer concluded (hartford). the curious rep. of gondour--atlantic, october (unsigned). punch, conductor, punch--atlantic, february, . u. e. the second advent (unfinished). the mysterious chamber (unfinished). autobiography of a damn fool (unfinished). petition for international copyright. . (see chapters cvi to cx.) performed in the loan of the lover as peter spuyk (hartford). carnival of crime--paper for the monday evening club--atlantic, june. u. e. huck finn begun (quarry farm). canvasser's story (quarry farm)--atlantic, december. u. e. “ ” (quarry farm), privately printed. [and not edited by livy. d.w.] ah sin (with bret harte)--play, (hartford). tom sawyer--book (am. pub. co.), december. u. e. speech on “the weather,” new england society, december . . (see chapters cxii to cxv; also appendix o.) loves of alonzo fitz-clarence, etc. (quarry farm)--atlantic. idle excursion (quarry farm)--atlantic, october, november, december. u. e. simon wheeler, detective--play (quarry farm) (not produced). prince and pauper begun (quarry farm). whittier birthday speech (boston), december. . (see chapters cxvii to cxx.) magnanimous incident (hartford)--atlantic, may. u. e. a tramp abroad (heidelberg and munich). mental telegraphy--harper's magazine, december, . u. e. gambetta duel--atlantic, february, (included in tramp). u. e. rev. in pitcairn--atlantic, march, . u. e. stolen white elephant--book (osgood & co.), . u. e. (the three items last named were all originally a part of the tramp abroad.) . (see chapters cxxi to cxxiv; also chapter cxxxiv and appendix p.) a tramp abroad continued (paris, elmira, and hartford). adam monument scheme (elmira). speech on “the babies” (grant dinner, chicago), november. speech on “plagiarism” (holmes breakfast, boston), december. . (see chapters cxxv to cxxxii.) prince and pauper concluded (hartford and elmira). huck finn continued (quarry farm, elmira). a cat story (quarry farm) (unpublished). a tramp abroad--book (am. pub. co.), march . u. e. edward mills and geo. benton (hartford)--atlantic, august. u. e. mrs. mcwilliams and the lightning (hartford)--atlantic, september. u. e. . (see chapters cxxxiv to cxxxvii.) a curious experience--century, november. u. e. a biography of ----- (unfinished). prince and pauper--book (osgood r; co.), december. burlesque etiquette (unfinished). [included in letters from the earth d.w.] . (see chapters cxl and cxli.) life on the mississippi (elmira and hartford). . (see chapters cxlii to cxlviii.) life on the mississippi--book (osgood r co.), may. u. e. what is happiness?--paper for the monday evening club. introduction to portuguese conversation book (hartford). huck finn concluded (quarry farm). history game (quarry farm). american claimant (with w. d. howells)--play (hartford), produced by a. p. burbank. dramatized tom sawyer and prince and pauper (not produced). . (see chapters cxlix to cliii.) embarked in publishing with charles l. webster. the carson footprints--the san franciscan. huck finn--book (charles l. webster & co.), december. u. e. platform-readings with george w. cable, season ' -' . . (see chapters cliv to clvii.) contracted for general grant's memoirs. a campaign that failed--century, december. u. e. the universal tinker--century, december (open letter signed x. y. z. letter on the government of children--christian union.) kiditchin (children's poem). . (see chapters clix to clxi; also appendix q.) introduced henry m. stanley (boston). connecticut yankee begun (hartford). english as she is taught--century, april, . luck--harper's, august, . general grant and matthew arnold--army and navy dinner speech. . (see chapters clxii to clxiv; also appendix r.) meisterschaft--play (hartford)-century, january, . u. e. knights of labor--essay (not published). to the queen of england--harper's magazine, december. u. e. consistency--paper for the monday evening club. . (see chapters clxv to clxviii.) introductory for “unsent letters” (unpublished). master of arts degree from yale. yale alumni address (unpublished). copyright controversy with brander matthews--princeton review. replies to matthew arnold's american criticisms (unpublished). yankee continued (elmira and hartford). introduction of nye and riley (boston). . (see chapters clxix to clxxiii; also appendix s.) a majestic literary fossil harper's magazine, february, . u. e. huck and tom among the indians (unfinished). introduction to yankee (not used). letter to elsie leslie--st nicholas, february, . connecticut yankee--book (webster & co.), december. u. e. . (see chapters clxxii to clxxiv.) letter to andrew lang about english criticism. (no important literary matters this year. mark twain engaged promoting the paige typesetting-machine.) . (see chapters clxxv to clxxvii.) american claimant (hartford) syndicated; also book (webster & co.), may, . u. e. european letters to new york sun. down the rhone (unfinished). kornerstrasse (unpublished). . (see chapters clxxx to clxxxii.) the german chicago (berlin--sun.) u. e. all kinds of ships (at sea). u. e. tom sawyer abroad (nauheim)--st. nicholas, november, ' , to april, ' . u. e. those extraordinary twins (nauheim). u. e. pudd'nhead wilson (nauheim and florence)--century, december, ' , to june, ' u. e. $ , bank-note (florence)--century, january, ' . u. e. . (see chapters clxxxiii to clxxxvii.) joan of arc begun (at villa viviani, florence) and completed up to the raising of the siege of orleans. californian's tale (florence) liber scriptorum, also harper's. adam's diary (florence)--niagara book, also harper's. esquimau maiden's romance--cosmopolitan, november. u. e. is he living or is he dead?--cosmopolitan, september. u. e. traveling with a reformer--cosmopolitan, december. u. e. in defense of harriet shelley (florence)--n. a.--rev., july, ' . u. e. fenimore cooper's literary offenses--[this may not have been written until early in .]--(players, new york)--n. a. rev., july, ' u. e. . (see chapters clxxxviii to cxc.) joan of arc continued (etretat and paris). what paul bourget thinks of us (etretat)--n. a. rev., january, ' u. e. tom sawyer abroad--book (webster & co.), april. u. e. pudd'nhead wilson--book (am. pub. co.), november. u. e. the failure of charles l. webster & co., april . the derelict--poem (paris) (unpublished). . (see chapters clxxxix and cxcii.) joan of arc finished (paris), january , harper's magazine, april to december. mental telegraphy again--harper's, september. u. e. a little note to paul bourget. u. e. poem to mrs. beecher (elmira) (not published). u. e. lecture-tour around the world, begun at elmira, july , ended july . . (see chapters cxci to cxciv.) joan of arc--book (harpers) may. u. e. tom sawyer, detective, and other stories-book (harpers), november. following the equator begun ( tedworth square, london). . (see chapters cxcvii to cxcix.) following the equator--book (am. pub. co.), november. queen's jubilee (london), newspaper syndicate; book privately printed. james hammond trumbull--century, november. which was which? (london and switzerland) (unfinished). tom and huck (switzerland) (unfinished). hellfire hotchkiss (switzerland) (unfinished). in memoriam--poem (switzerland)-harper's magazine. u. e. concordia club speech (vienna). stirring times in austria (vienna)--harper's magazine, march, . u. e. . (see chapters cc to cciii; also appendix t.) the austrian edison keeping school again (vienna) century, august. u. e. at the appetite cure (vienna)--cosmopolitan, august. u. e. from the london times, (vienna)--century, november. u. e. about play-acting (vienna)--forum, october. u. e. concerning the jews (vienna)--harper's magazine, september, ' . u. e. christian science and mrs. eddy (vienna)--cosmopolitan, october. u. e. the man that corrupted hadleyburg (vienna)--harper's magazine, december, ' u. e. autobiographical chapters (vienna); some of them used in the n. a. rev., - . what is man? (kaltenleutgeben)--book (privately printed), august, . assassination of an empress (kaltenleutgeben) (unpublished). the mysterious stranger (unfinished). translations of german plays (unproduced). . (see chapters cciv to ccviii.) diplomatic pay and clothes (vienna)--forum, march. u. e. my literary debut (vienna)--century, december. u. e. christian science (vienna)--n. a. rev., december, , january and february, . translated german plays (vienna) (unproduced). collaborated with siegmund schlesinger on plays (vienna) (unfinished). planned a postal-check scheme (vienna). articles about the kellgren treatment (sanna, sweden) (unpublished). st. joan of arc (london)--harper's magazine, december, . u. e. my first lie, and how i got out of it (london)--new york world. u. e. articles on south african war (london) (unpublished) uniform edition of mark twain's works (am. pub. co.). . (see chapters ccix to ccxii.) two little tales (london)--century, november, . u. e. spoke on “copyright” before the house of lords. delivered many speeches in london and new york. . (see chapters ccxiii to ccxviii.) to the person sitting in darkness ( west tenth street, new york)--n. a. rev., february. to my missionary critics ( west tenth street, new york)--n. a. rev., april. double-barrel detective story (saranac lake, “the lair”) harper's magazine, january and february, . lincoln birthday speech, february . many other speeches. plan for casting vote party (riverdale) (unpublished). the stupendous procession (riverdale) (unpublished). ante-mortem obituaries--harper's weekly. received degree of doctor of letters from yale. . (see chapters ccxix to ccxxiv; also appendix u.) does the race of man love a lord? (riverdale)--n. a. rev., april. u. e. five boons of life (riverdale)--harper's weekly, july . u. e. why not abolish it? (riverdale)--harper's weekly, july . defense of general funston (riverdale)--n. a. rev., may. if i could be there (riverdale unpublished). wrote various articles, unfinished or unpublished. received degree of ll.d. from the university of missouri, june. the belated passport (york harbor)--harper's weekly, december . u. e. was it heaven? or hell? (york harbor)--harper's magazine, december. u. e. poem (riverdale and york harbor) (unpublished) sixty-seventh birthday speech (new york), november . . (see chapters ccxxv to ccxxx.) mrs. eddy in error (riverdale)--n. a. rev., april. instructions in art (riverdale)-metropolitan, april and may. eddypus, and other c. s. articles (unfinished). a dog's tale (elmira)--harper's magazine, december. u. e. italian without a master (florence)--harper's weekly, january , . u. e. italian with grammar (florence)--harper's magazine, august, u. e. the $ , bequest (florence)--harper's weekly, december , . u. e. . (see chapters ccxxx to ccxxxiv.) autobiography (florence)--portions published, n. a. rev. and harper's weekly. concerning copyright (tyringham, massachusetts)--n. a. rev., january, . tsars soliloquy ( fifth avenue, new york)--n. a. rev., march, . adam's diary--book (harpers), april. . (see chapters ccxxxiv to ccxxxvii; also appendix v.) leopold's soliloquy ( fifth avenue, new york)--pamphlet, p. r. warren company. the war prayer ( fifth avenue, new york) (unpublished). eve's diary (dublin, new hampshire)--harper's magazine, december. , years among the microbes (unfinished). interpreting the deity (dublin new hampshire) (unpublished). a horse's tale (dublin, new hampshire)-harper's magazine, august and september, . seventieth birthday speech. w. d. howells ( fifth avenue, new york)-harper's magazine, july, . . (see chapters ccxxxix to ccli.) autobiography dictation ( fifth avenue, new york; and dublin, new hampshire)--selections published, n. a. rev., and . many speeches. farewell lecture, carnegie hall, april . what is man?--book (privately printed). copyright speech (washington), december. . (see chapters cclvi to cclxiii.) autobiography dictations ( fifth avenue, new york; and tuxedo). degree of doctor of literature conferred by oxford, june . made many london speeches. begum of bengal speech (liverpool). christian science--book (harpers), february. u. e. captain stormfield's visit to heaven--book (harpers). . (see chapters cclxiv to cclxx.) autobiography dictations ( fifth avenue, new york; and redding, connecticut). lotos club and other speeches. aldrich memorial speech. . (see chapters cclxxvi to cclxxxix; also appendices n and w.) is shakespeare dead?--book (harpers), april. a fable--harper's magazine december. copyright documents (unpublished). address to st. timothy school. marjorie fleming (stormfield)--harper's bazar, december. the turning-point of my life (stormfield)--harper's bazar, february, bessie dialogue (unpublished). letters from the earth (unfinished). the death of jean--harper's, december, . the international lightning trust (unpublished). . (see chapter ccxcii.) valentines to helen and others (not published). advice to paine (not published). life on the mississippi by mark twain part . chapter under fire talk began to run upon the war now, for we were getting down into the upper edge of the former battle-stretch by this time. columbus was just behind us, so there was a good deal said about the famous battle of belmont. several of the boat's officers had seen active service in the mississippi war-fleet. i gathered that they found themselves sadly out of their element in that kind of business at first, but afterward got accustomed to it, reconciled to it, and more or less at home in it. one of our pilots had his first war experience in the belmont fight, as a pilot on a boat in the confederate service. i had often had a curiosity to know how a green hand might feel, in his maiden battle, perched all solitary and alone on high in a pilot house, a target for tom, dick and harry, and nobody at his elbow to shame him from showing the white feather when matters grew hot and perilous around him; so, to me his story was valuable--it filled a gap for me which all histories had left till that time empty. the pilot's first battle he said-- it was the th of november. the fight began at seven in the morning. i was on the 'r. h. w. hill.' took over a load of troops from columbus. came back, and took over a battery of artillery. my partner said he was going to see the fight; wanted me to go along. i said, no, i wasn't anxious, i would look at it from the pilot-house. he said i was a coward, and left. that fight was an awful sight. general cheatham made his men strip their coats off and throw them in a pile, and said, 'now follow me to hell or victory!' i heard him say that from the pilot-house; and then he galloped in, at the head of his troops. old general pillow, with his white hair, mounted on a white horse, sailed in, too, leading his troops as lively as a boy. by and by the federals chased the rebels back, and here they came! tearing along, everybody for himself and devil take the hindmost! and down under the bank they scrambled, and took shelter. i was sitting with my legs hanging out of the pilot-house window. all at once i noticed a whizzing sound passing my ear. judged it was a bullet. i didn't stop to think about anything, i just tilted over backwards and landed on the floor, and staid there. the balls came booming around. three cannon-balls went through the chimney; one ball took off the corner of the pilot-house; shells were screaming and bursting all around. mighty warm times--i wished i hadn't come. i lay there on the pilot-house floor, while the shots came faster and faster. i crept in behind the big stove, in the middle of the pilot-house. presently a minie-ball came through the stove, and just grazed my head, and cut my hat. i judged it was time to go away from there. the captain was on the roof with a red-headed major from memphis--a fine-looking man. i heard him say he wanted to leave here, but 'that pilot is killed.' i crept over to the starboard side to pull the bell to set her back; raised up and took a look, and i saw about fifteen shot holes through the window panes; had come so lively i hadn't noticed them. i glanced out on the water, and the spattering shot were like a hailstorm. i thought best to get out of that place. i went down the pilot-house guy, head first--not feet first but head first--slid down--before i struck the deck, the captain said we must leave there. so i climbed up the guy and got on the floor again. about that time, they collared my partner and were bringing him up to the pilot-house between two soldiers. somebody had said i was killed. he put his head in and saw me on the floor reaching for the backing bells. he said, 'oh, hell, he ain't shot,' and jerked away from the men who had him by the collar, and ran below. we were there until three o'clock in the afternoon, and then got away all right. the next time i saw my partner, i said, 'now, come out, be honest, and tell me the truth. where did you go when you went to see that battle?' he says, 'i went down in the hold.' all through that fight i was scared nearly to death. i hardly knew anything, i was so frightened; but you see, nobody knew that but me. next day general polk sent for me, and praised me for my bravery and gallant conduct. i never said anything, i let it go at that. i judged it wasn't so, but it was not for me to contradict a general officer. pretty soon after that i was sick, and used up, and had to go off to the hot springs. when there, i got a good many letters from commanders saying they wanted me to come back. i declined, because i wasn't well enough or strong enough; but i kept still, and kept the reputation i had made. a plain story, straightforwardly told; but mumford told me that that pilot had 'gilded that scare of his, in spots;' that his subsequent career in the war was proof of it. we struck down through the chute of island no. , and i went below and fell into conversation with a passenger, a handsome man, with easy carriage and an intelligent face. we were approaching island no. , a place so celebrated during the war. this gentleman's home was on the main shore in its neighborhood. i had some talk with him about the war times; but presently the discourse fell upon 'feuds,' for in no part of the south has the vendetta flourished more briskly, or held out longer between warring families, than in this particular region. this gentleman said-- 'there's been more than one feud around here, in old times, but i reckon the worst one was between the darnells and the watsons. nobody don't know now what the first quarrel was about, it's so long ago; the darnells and the watsons don't know, if there's any of them living, which i don't think there is. some says it was about a horse or a cow-- anyway, it was a little matter; the money in it wasn't of no consequence--none in the world--both families was rich. the thing could have been fixed up, easy enough; but no, that wouldn't do. rough words had been passed; and so, nothing but blood could fix it up after that. that horse or cow, whichever it was, cost sixty years of killing and crippling! every year or so somebody was shot, on one side or the other; and as fast as one generation was laid out, their sons took up the feud and kept it a-going. and it's just as i say; they went on shooting each other, year in and year out--making a kind of a religion of it, you see --till they'd done forgot, long ago, what it was all about. wherever a darnell caught a watson, or a watson caught a darnell, one of 'em was going to get hurt--only question was, which of them got the drop on the other. they'd shoot one another down, right in the presence of the family. they didn't hunt for each other, but when they happened to meet, they puffed and begun. men would shoot boys, boys would shoot men. a man shot a boy twelve years old--happened on him in the woods, and didn't give him no chance. if he had 'a' given him a chance, the boy'd 'a' shot him. both families belonged to the same church (everybody around here is religious); through all this fifty or sixty years' fuss, both tribes was there every sunday, to worship. they lived each side of the line, and the church was at a landing called compromise. half the church and half the aisle was in kentucky, the other half in tennessee. sundays you'd see the families drive up, all in their sunday clothes, men, women, and children, and file up the aisle, and set down, quiet and orderly, one lot on the tennessee side of the church and the other on the kentucky side; and the men and boys would lean their guns up against the wall, handy, and then all hands would join in with the prayer and praise; though they say the man next the aisle didn't kneel down, along with the rest of the family; kind of stood guard. i don't know; never was at that church in my life; but i remember that that's what used to be said. 'twenty or twenty-five years ago, one of the feud families caught a young man of nineteen out and killed him. don't remember whether it was the darnells and watsons, or one of the other feuds; but anyway, this young man rode up--steamboat laying there at the time--and the first thing he saw was a whole gang of the enemy. he jumped down behind a wood-pile, but they rode around and begun on him, he firing back, and they galloping and cavorting and yelling and banging away with all their might. think he wounded a couple of them; but they closed in on him and chased him into the river; and as he swum along down stream, they followed along the bank and kept on shooting at him; and when he struck shore he was dead. windy marshall told me about it. he saw it. he was captain of the boat. 'years ago, the darnells was so thinned out that the old man and his two sons concluded they'd leave the country. they started to take steamboat just above no. ; but the watsons got wind of it; and they arrived just as the two young darnells was walking up the companion-way with their wives on their arms. the fight begun then, and they never got no further--both of them killed. after that, old darnell got into trouble with the man that run the ferry, and the ferry-man got the worst of it-- and died. but his friends shot old darnell through and through--filled him full of bullets, and ended him.' the country gentleman who told me these things had been reared in ease and comfort, was a man of good parts, and was college bred. his loose grammar was the fruit of careless habit, not ignorance. this habit among educated men in the west is not universal, but it is prevalent-- prevalent in the towns, certainly, if not in the cities; and to a degree which one cannot help noticing, and marveling at. i heard a westerner who would be accounted a highly educated man in any country, say 'never mind, it don't make no difference, anyway.' a life-long resident who was present heard it, but it made no impression upon her. she was able to recall the fact afterward, when reminded of it; but she confessed that the words had not grated upon her ear at the time--a confession which suggests that if educated people can hear such blasphemous grammar, from such a source, and be unconscious of the deed, the crime must be tolerably common--so common that the general ear has become dulled by familiarity with it, and is no longer alert, no longer sensitive to such affronts. no one in the world speaks blemishless grammar; no one has ever written it--no one, either in the world or out of it (taking the scriptures for evidence on the latter point); therefore it would not be fair to exact grammatical perfection from the peoples of the valley; but they and all other peoples may justly be required to refrain from knowingly and purposely debauching their grammar. i found the river greatly changed at island no. . the island which i remembered was some three miles long and a quarter of a mile wide, heavily timbered, and lay near the kentucky shore--within two hundred yards of it, i should say. now, however, one had to hunt for it with a spy-glass. nothing was left of it but an insignificant little tuft, and this was no longer near the kentucky shore; it was clear over against the opposite shore, a mile away. in war times the island had been an important place, for it commanded the situation; and, being heavily fortified, there was no getting by it. it lay between the upper and lower divisions of the union forces, and kept them separate, until a junction was finally effected across the missouri neck of land; but the island being itself joined to that neck now, the wide river is without obstruction. in this region the river passes from kentucky into tennessee, back into missouri, then back into kentucky, and thence into tennessee again. so a mile or two of missouri sticks over into tennessee. the town of new madrid was looking very unwell; but otherwise unchanged from its former condition and aspect. its blocks of frame-houses were still grouped in the same old flat plain, and environed by the same old forests. it was as tranquil as formerly, and apparently had neither grown nor diminished in size. it was said that the recent high water had invaded it and damaged its looks. this was surprising news; for in low water the river bank is very high there (fifty feet), and in my day an overflow had always been considered an impossibility. this present flood of will doubtless be celebrated in the river's history for several generations before a deluge of like magnitude shall be seen. it put all the unprotected low lands under water, from cairo to the mouth; it broke down the levees in a great many places, on both sides of the river; and in some regions south, when the flood was at its highest, the mississippi was seventy miles wide! a number of lives were lost, and the destruction of property was fearful. the crops were destroyed, houses washed away, and shelterless men and cattle forced to take refuge on scattering elevations here and there in field and forest, and wait in peril and suffering until the boats put in commission by the national and local governments and by newspaper enterprise could come and rescue them. the properties of multitudes of people were under water for months, and the poorer ones must have starved by the hundred if succor had not been promptly afforded.{footnote [for a detailed and interesting description of the great flood, written on board of the new orleans times-democrat's relief-boat, see appendix a]} the water had been falling during a considerable time now, yet as a rule we found the banks still under water. chapter some imported articles we met two steamboats at new madrid. two steamboats in sight at once! an infrequent spectacle now in the lonesome mississippi. the loneliness of this solemn, stupendous flood is impressive--and depressing. league after league, and still league after league, it pours its chocolate tide along, between its solid forest walls, its almost untenanted shores, with seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface and break the monotony of the blank, watery solitude; and so the day goes, the night comes, and again the day--and still the same, night after night and day after day--majestic, unchanging sameness of serenity, repose, tranquillity, lethargy, vacancy--symbol of eternity, realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet, and longed for by the good and thoughtless! immediately after the war of , tourists began to come to america, from england; scattering ones at first, then a sort of procession of them--a procession which kept up its plodding, patient march through the land during many, many years. each tourist took notes, and went home and published a book--a book which was usually calm, truthful, reasonable, kind; but which seemed just the reverse to our tender-footed progenitors. a glance at these tourist-books shows us that in certain of its aspects the mississippi has undergone no change since those strangers visited it, but remains to-day about as it was then. the emotions produced in those foreign breasts by these aspects were not all formed on one pattern, of course; they had to be various, along at first, because the earlier tourists were obliged to originate their emotions, whereas in older countries one can always borrow emotions from one's predecessors. and, mind you, emotions are among the toughest things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion. captain basil hall. r.n., writing fifty-five years ago, says-- 'here i caught the first glimpse of the object i had so long wished to behold, and felt myself amply repaid at that moment for all the trouble i had experienced in coming so far; and stood looking at the river flowing past till it was too dark to distinguish anything. but it was not till i had visited the same spot a dozen times, that i came to a right comprehension of the grandeur of the scene.' following are mrs. trollope's emotions. she is writing a few months later in the same year, , and is coming in at the mouth of the mississippi-- 'the first indication of our approach to land was the appearance of this mighty river pouring forth its muddy mass of waters, and mingling with the deep blue of the mexican gulf. i never beheld a scene so utterly desolate as this entrance of the mississippi. had dante seen it, he might have drawn images of another borgia from its horrors. one only object rears itself above the eddying waters; this is the mast of a vessel long since wrecked in attempting to cross the bar, and it still stands, a dismal witness of the destruction that has been, and a boding prophet of that which is to come.' emotions of hon. charles augustus murray (near st. louis), seven years later-- 'it is only when you ascend the mighty current for fifty or a hundred miles, and use the eye of imagination as well as that of nature, that you begin to understand all his might and majesty. you see him fertilizing a boundless valley, bearing along in his course the trophies of his thousand victories over the shattered forest--here carrying away large masses of soil with all their growth, and there forming islands, destined at some future period to be the residence of man; and while indulging in this prospect, it is then time for reflection to suggest that the current before you has flowed through two or three thousand miles, and has yet to travel one thousand three hundred more before reaching its ocean destination.' receive, now, the emotions of captain marryat, r.n. author of the sea tales, writing in , three years after mr. murray-- 'never, perhaps, in the records of nations, was there an instance of a century of such unvarying and unmitigated crime as is to be collected from the history of the turbulent and blood-stained mississippi. the stream itself appears as if appropriate for the deeds which have been committed. it is not like most rivers, beautiful to the sight, bestowing fertility in its course; not one that the eye loves to dwell upon as it sweeps along, nor can you wander upon its banks, or trust yourself without danger to its stream. it is a furious, rapid, desolating torrent, loaded with alluvial soil; and few of those who are received into its waters ever rise again, {footnote [there was a foolish superstition of some little prevalence in that day, that the mississippi would neither buoy up a swimmer, nor permit a drowned person's body to rise to the surface.]} or can support themselves long upon its surface without assistance from some friendly log. it contains the coarsest and most uneatable of fish, such as the cat-fish and such genus, and as you descend, its banks are occupied with the fetid alligator, while the panther basks at its edge in the cane-brakes, almost impervious to man. pouring its impetuous waters through wild tracks covered with trees of little value except for firewood, it sweeps down whole forests in its course, which disappear in tumultuous confusion, whirled away by the stream now loaded with the masses of soil which nourished their roots, often blocking up and changing for a time the channel of the river, which, as if in anger at its being opposed, inundates and devastates the whole country round; and as soon as it forces its way through its former channel, plants in every direction the uprooted monarchs of the forest (upon whose branches the bird will never again perch, or the raccoon, the opossum, or the squirrel climb) as traps to the adventurous navigators of its waters by steam, who, borne down upon these concealed dangers which pierce through the planks, very often have not time to steer for and gain the shore before they sink to the bottom. there are no pleasing associations connected with the great common sewer of the western america, which pours out its mud into the mexican gulf, polluting the clear blue sea for many miles beyond its mouth. it is a river of desolation; and instead of reminding you, like other beautiful rivers, of an angel which has descended for the benefit of man, you imagine it a devil, whose energies have been only overcome by the wonderful power of steam.' it is pretty crude literature for a man accustomed to handling a pen; still, as a panorama of the emotions sent weltering through this noted visitor's breast by the aspect and traditions of the 'great common sewer,' it has a value. a value, though marred in the matter of statistics by inaccuracies; for the catfish is a plenty good enough fish for anybody, and there are no panthers that are 'impervious to man.' later still comes alexander mackay, of the middle temple, barrister at law, with a better digestion, and no catfish dinner aboard, and feels as follows-- 'the mississippi! it was with indescribable emotions that i first felt myself afloat upon its waters. how often in my schoolboy dreams, and in my waking visions afterwards, had my imagination pictured to itself the lordly stream, rolling with tumultuous current through the boundless region to which it has given its name, and gathering into itself, in its course to the ocean, the tributary waters of almost every latitude in the temperate zone! here it was then in its reality, and i, at length, steaming against its tide. i looked upon it with that reverence with which everyone must regard a great feature of external nature.' so much for the emotions. the tourists, one and all, remark upon the deep, brooding loneliness and desolation of the vast river. captain basil hall, who saw it at flood-stage, says-- 'sometimes we passed along distances of twenty or thirty miles without seeing a single habitation. an artist, in search of hints for a painting of the deluge, would here have found them in abundance.' the first shall be last, etc. just two hundred years ago, the old original first and gallantest of all the foreign tourists, pioneer, head of the procession, ended his weary and tedious discovery-voyage down the solemn stretches of the great river--la salle, whose name will last as long as the river itself shall last. we quote from mr. parkman-- 'and now they neared their journey's end. on the sixth of april, the river divided itself into three broad channels. la salle followed that of the west, and d'autray that of the east; while tonty took the middle passage. as he drifted down the turbid current, between the low and marshy shores, the brackish water changed to brine, and the breeze grew fresh with the salt breath of the sea. then the broad bosom of the great gulf opened on his sight, tossing its restless billows, limitless, voiceless, lonely as when born of chaos, without a sail, without a sign of life.' then, on a spot of solid ground, la salle reared a column 'bearing the arms of france; the frenchmen were mustered under arms; and while the new england indians and their squaws looked on in wondering silence, they chanted the te deum, the exaudiat, and the domine salvum fac regem.' then, whilst the musketry volleyed and rejoicing shouts burst forth, the victorious discoverer planted the column, and made proclamation in a loud voice, taking formal possession of the river and the vast countries watered by it, in the name of the king. the column bore this inscription-- louis le grand, roy de france et de navarre, regne; le neuvieme avril, . new orleans intended to fittingly celebrate, this present year, the bicentennial anniversary of this illustrious event; but when the time came, all her energies and surplus money were required in other directions, for the flood was upon the land then, making havoc and devastation everywhere. chapter uncle mumford unloads all day we swung along down the river, and had the stream almost wholly to ourselves. formerly, at such a stage of the water, we should have passed acres of lumber rafts, and dozens of big coal barges; also occasional little trading-scows, peddling along from farm to farm, with the peddler's family on board; possibly, a random scow, bearing a humble hamlet and co. on an itinerant dramatic trip. but these were all absent. far along in the day, we saw one steamboat; just one, and no more. she was lying at rest in the shade, within the wooded mouth of the obion river. the spy-glass revealed the fact that she was named for me --or he was named for me, whichever you prefer. as this was the first time i had ever encountered this species of honor, it seems excusable to mention it, and at the same time call the attention of the authorities to the tardiness of my recognition of it. noted a big change in the river, at island . it was a very large island, and used to be out toward mid-stream; but it is joined fast to the main shore now, and has retired from business as an island. as we approached famous and formidable plum point, darkness fell, but that was nothing to shudder about--in these modern times. for now the national government has turned the mississippi into a sort of two- thousand-mile torchlight procession. in the head of every crossing, and in the foot of every crossing, the government has set up a clear-burning lamp. you are never entirely in the dark, now; there is always a beacon in sight, either before you, or behind you, or abreast. one might almost say that lamps have been squandered there. dozens of crossings are lighted which were not shoal when they were created, and have never been shoal since; crossings so plain, too, and also so straight, that a steamboat can take herself through them without any help, after she has been through once. lamps in such places are of course not wasted; it is much more convenient and comfortable for a pilot to hold on them than on a spread of formless blackness that won't stay still; and money is saved to the boat, at the same time, for she can of course make more miles with her rudder amidships than she can with it squared across her stern and holding her back. but this thing has knocked the romance out of piloting, to a large extent. it, and some other things together, have knocked all the romance out of it. for instance, the peril from snags is not now what it once was. the government's snag-boats go patrolling up and down, in these matter-of-fact days, pulling the river's teeth; they have rooted out all the old clusters which made many localities so formidable; and they allow no new ones to collect. formerly, if your boat got away from you, on a black night, and broke for the woods, it was an anxious time with you; so was it also, when you were groping your way through solidified darkness in a narrow chute; but all that is changed now--you flash out your electric light, transform night into day in the twinkling of an eye, and your perils and anxieties are at an end. horace bixby and george ritchie have charted the crossings and laid out the courses by compass; they have invented a lamp to go with the chart, and have patented the whole. with these helps, one may run in the fog now, with considerable security, and with a confidence unknown in the old days. with these abundant beacons, the banishment of snags, plenty of daylight in a box and ready to be turned on whenever needed, and a chart and compass to fight the fog with, piloting, at a good stage of water, is now nearly as safe and simple as driving stage, and is hardly more than three times as romantic. and now in these new days, these days of infinite change, the anchor line have raised the captain above the pilot by giving him the bigger wages of the two. this was going far, but they have not stopped there. they have decreed that the pilot shall remain at his post, and stand his watch clear through, whether the boat be under way or tied up to the shore. we, that were once the aristocrats of the river, can't go to bed now, as we used to do, and sleep while a hundred tons of freight are lugged aboard; no, we must sit in the pilot-house; and keep awake, too. verily we are being treated like a parcel of mates and engineers. the government has taken away the romance of our calling; the company has taken away its state and dignity. plum point looked as it had always looked by night, with the exception that now there were beacons to mark the crossings, and also a lot of other lights on the point and along its shore; these latter glinting from the fleet of the united states river commission, and from a village which the officials have built on the land for offices and for the employees of the service. the military engineers of the commission have taken upon their shoulders the job of making the mississippi over again --a job transcended in size by only the original job of creating it. they are building wing-dams here and there, to deflect the current; and dikes to confine it in narrower bounds; and other dikes to make it stay there; and for unnumbered miles along the mississippi, they are felling the timber-front for fifty yards back, with the purpose of shaving the bank down to low-water mark with the slant of a house roof, and ballasting it with stones; and in many places they have protected the wasting shores with rows of piles. one who knows the mississippi will promptly aver-- not aloud, but to himself--that ten thousand river commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, go here, or go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at. but a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words; for the west point engineers have not their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known of their abstruse science; and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. captain eads, with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the mississippi which seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to prophesy against like impossibilities. otherwise one would pipe out and say the commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the mississippi into right and reasonable conduct. i consulted uncle mumford concerning this and cognate matters; and i give here the result, stenographically reported, and therefore to be relied on as being full and correct; except that i have here and there left out remarks which were addressed to the men, such as 'where in blazes are you going with that barrel now?' and which seemed to me to break the flow of the written statement, without compensating by adding to its information or its clearness. not that i have ventured to strike out all such interjections; i have removed only those which were obviously irrelevant; wherever one occurred which i felt any question about, i have judged it safest to let it remain. uncle mumford's impressions uncle mumford said-- 'as long as i have been mate of a steamboat--thirty years--i have watched this river and studied it. maybe i could have learnt more about it at west point, but if i believe it i wish i may be what are you sucking your fingers there for ?--collar that kag of nails! four years at west point, and plenty of books and schooling, will learn a man a good deal, i reckon, but it won't learn him the river. you turn one of those little european rivers over to this commission, with its hard bottom and clear water, and it would just be a holiday job for them to wall it, and pile it, and dike it, and tame it down, and boss it around, and make it go wherever they wanted it to, and stay where they put it, and do just as they said, every time. but this ain't that kind of a river. they have started in here with big confidence, and the best intentions in the world; but they are going to get left. what does ecclesiastes vii. say? says enough to knock their little game galley-west, don't it? now you look at their methods once. there at devil's island, in the upper river, they wanted the water to go one way, the water wanted to go another. so they put up a stone wall. but what does the river care for a stone wall? when it got ready, it just bulged through it. maybe they can build another that will stay; that is, up there--but not down here they can't. down here in the lower river, they drive some pegs to turn the water away from the shore and stop it from slicing off the bank; very well, don't it go straight over and cut somebody else's bank? certainly. are they going to peg all the banks? why, they could buy ground and build a new mississippi cheaper. they are pegging bulletin tow-head now. it won't do any good. if the river has got a mortgage on that island, it will foreclose, sure, pegs or no pegs. away down yonder, they have driven two rows of piles straight through the middle of a dry bar half a mile long, which is forty foot out of the water when the river is low. what do you reckon that is for? if i know, i wish i may land in-hump yourself, you son of an undertaker!--out with that coal-oil, now, lively, lively! and just look at what they are trying to do down there at milliken's bend. there's been a cut-off in that section, and vicksburg is left out in the cold. it's a country town now. the river strikes in below it; and a boat can't go up to the town except in high water. well, they are going to build wing-dams in the bend opposite the foot of , and throw the water over and cut off the foot of the island and plow down into an old ditch where the river used to be in ancient times; and they think they can persuade the water around that way, and get it to strike in above vicksburg, as it used to do, and fetch the town back into the world again. that is, they are going to take this whole mississippi, and twist it around and make it run several miles up stream. well you've got to admire men that deal in ideas of that size and can tote them around without crutches; but you haven't got to believe they can do such miracles, have you! and yet you ain't absolutely obliged to believe they can't. i reckon the safe way, where a man can afford it, is to copper the operation, and at the same time buy enough property in vicksburg to square you up in case they win. government is doing a deal for the mississippi, now--spending loads of money on her. when there used to be four thousand steamboats and ten thousand acres of coal-barges, and rafts and trading scows, there wasn't a lantern from st. paul to new orleans, and the snags were thicker than bristles on a hog's back; and now when there's three dozen steamboats and nary barge or raft, government has snatched out all the snags, and lit up the shores like broadway, and a boat's as safe on the river as she'd be in heaven. and i reckon that by the time there ain't any boats left at all, the commission will have the old thing all reorganized, and dredged out, and fenced in, and tidied up, to a degree that will make navigation just simply perfect, and absolutely safe and profitable; and all the days will be sundays, and all the mates will be sunday-school su-what-in-the-nation-you-fooling-around-there-for, you sons of unrighteousness, heirs of perdition! going to be a year getting that hogshead ashore?' during our trip to new orleans and back, we had many conversations with river men, planters, journalists, and officers of the river commission-- with conflicting and confusing results. to wit:-- . some believed in the commission's scheme to arbitrarily and permanently confine (and thus deepen) the channel, preserve threatened shores, etc. . some believed that the commission's money ought to be spent only on building and repairing the great system of levees. . some believed that the higher you build your levee, the higher the river's bottom will rise; and that consequently the levee system is a mistake. . some believed in the scheme to relieve the river, in flood-time, by turning its surplus waters off into lake borgne, etc. . some believed in the scheme of northern lake-reservoirs to replenish the mississippi in low-water seasons. wherever you find a man down there who believes in one of these theories you may turn to the next man and frame your talk upon the hypothesis that he does not believe in that theory; and after you have had experience, you do not take this course doubtfully, or hesitatingly, but with the confidence of a dying murderer--converted one, i mean. for you will have come to know, with a deep and restful certainty, that you are not going to meet two people sick of the same theory, one right after the other. no, there will always be one or two with the other diseases along between. and as you proceed, you will find out one or two other things. you will find out that there is no distemper of the lot but is contagious; and you cannot go where it is without catching it. you may vaccinate yourself with deterrent facts as much as you please--it will do no good; it will seem to 'take,' but it doesn't; the moment you rub against any one of those theorists, make up your mind that it is time to hang out your yellow flag. yes, you are his sure victim: yet his work is not all to your hurt-- only part of it; for he is like your family physician, who comes and cures the mumps, and leaves the scarlet-fever behind. if your man is a lake-borgne-relief theorist, for instance, he will exhale a cloud of deadly facts and statistics which will lay you out with that disease, sure; but at the same time he will cure you of any other of the five theories that may have previously got into your system. i have had all the five; and had them 'bad;' but ask me not, in mournful numbers, which one racked me hardest, or which one numbered the biggest sick list, for i do not know. in truth, no one can answer the latter question. mississippi improvement is a mighty topic, down yonder. every man on the river banks, south of cairo, talks about it every day, during such moments as he is able to spare from talking about the war; and each of the several chief theories has its host of zealous partisans; but, as i have said, it is not possible to determine which cause numbers the most recruits. all were agreed upon one point, however: if congress would make a sufficient appropriation, a colossal benefit would result. very well; since then the appropriation has been made--possibly a sufficient one, certainly not too large a one. let us hope that the prophecy will be amply fulfilled. one thing will be easily granted by the reader; that an opinion from mr. edward atkinson, upon any vast national commercial matter, comes as near ranking as authority, as can the opinion of any individual in the union. what he has to say about mississippi river improvement will be found in the appendix.{footnote [see appendix b.]} sometimes, half a dozen figures will reveal, as with a lightning-flash, the importance of a subject which ten thousand labored words, with the same purpose in view, had left at last but dim and uncertain. here is a case of the sort--paragraph from the 'cincinnati commercial'-- 'the towboat "jos. b. williams" is on her way to new orleans with a tow of thirty-two barges, containing six hundred thousand bushels (seventy- six pounds to the bushel) of coal exclusive of her own fuel, being the largest tow ever taken to new orleans or anywhere else in the world. her freight bill, at cents a bushel, amounts to $ , . it would take eighteen hundred cars, of three hundred and thirty-three bushels to the car, to transport this amount of coal. at $ per ton, or $ per car, which would be a fair price for the distance by rail, the freight bill would amount to $ , , or $ , more by rail than by river. the tow will be taken from pittsburg to new orleans in fourteen or fifteen days. it would take one hundred trains of eighteen cars to the train to transport this one tow of six hundred thousand bushels of coal, and even if it made the usual speed of fast freight lines, it would take one whole summer to put it through by rail.' when a river in good condition can enable one to save $ , and a whole summer's time, on a single cargo, the wisdom of taking measures to keep the river in good condition is made plain to even the uncommercial mind. chapter a few specimen bricks we passed through the plum point region, turned craighead's point, and glided unchallenged by what was once the formidable fort pillow, memorable because of the massacre perpetrated there during the war. massacres are sprinkled with some frequency through the histories of several christian nations, but this is almost the only one that can be found in american history; perhaps it is the only one which rises to a size correspondent to that huge and somber title. we have the 'boston massacre,' where two or three people were killed; but we must bunch anglo-saxon history together to find the fellow to the fort pillow tragedy; and doubtless even then we must travel back to the days and the performances of coeur de lion, that fine 'hero,' before we accomplish it. more of the river's freaks. in times past, the channel used to strike above island , by brandywine bar, and down towards island . afterward, changed its course and went from brandywine down through vogelman's chute in the devil's elbow, to island --part of this course reversing the old order; the river running up four or five miles, instead of down, and cutting off, throughout, some fifteen miles of distance. this in . all that region is now called centennial island. there is a tradition that island was one of the principal abiding places of the once celebrated 'murel's gang.' this was a colossal combination of robbers, horse-thieves, negro-stealers, and counterfeiters, engaged in business along the river some fifty or sixty years ago. while our journey across the country towards st. louis was in progress we had had no end of jesse james and his stirring history; for he had just been assassinated by an agent of the governor of missouri, and was in consequence occupying a good deal of space in the newspapers. cheap histories of him were for sale by train boys. according to these, he was the most marvelous creature of his kind that had ever existed. it was a mistake. murel was his equal in boldness; in pluck; in rapacity; in cruelty, brutality, heartlessness, treachery, and in general and comprehensive vileness and shamelessness; and very much his superior in some larger aspects. james was a retail rascal; murel, wholesale. james's modest genius dreamed of no loftier flight than the planning of raids upon cars, coaches, and country banks; murel projected negro insurrections and the capture of new orleans; and furthermore, on occasion, this murel could go into a pulpit and edify the congregation. what are james and his half-dozen vulgar rascals compared with this stately old-time criminal, with his sermons, his meditated insurrections and city-captures, and his majestic following of ten hundred men, sworn to do his evil will! here is a paragraph or two concerning this big operator, from a now forgotten book which was published half a century ago-- he appears to have been a most dexterous as well as consummate villain. when he traveled, his usual disguise was that of an itinerant preacher; and it is said that his discourses were very 'soul-moving'--interesting the hearers so much that they forgot to look after their horses, which were carried away by his confederates while he was preaching. but the stealing of horses in one state, and selling them in another, was but a small portion of their business; the most lucrative was the enticing slaves to run away from their masters, that they might sell them in another quarter. this was arranged as follows; they would tell a negro that if he would run away from his master, and allow them to sell him, he should receive a portion of the money paid for him, and that upon his return to them a second time they would send him to a free state, where he would be safe. the poor wretches complied with this request, hoping to obtain money and freedom; they would be sold to another master, and run away again, to their employers; sometimes they would be sold in this manner three or four times, until they had realized three or four thousand dollars by them; but as, after this, there was fear of detection, the usual custom was to get rid of the only witness that could be produced against them, which was the negro himself, by murdering him, and throwing his body into the mississippi. even if it was established that they had stolen a negro, before he was murdered, they were always prepared to evade punishment; for they concealed the negro who had run away, until he was advertised, and a reward offered to any man who would catch him. an advertisement of this kind warrants the person to take the property, if found. and then the negro becomes a property in trust, when, therefore, they sold the negro, it only became a breach of trust, not stealing; and for a breach of trust, the owner of the property can only have redress by a civil action, which was useless, as the damages were never paid. it may be inquired, how it was that murel escaped lynch law under such circumstances this will be easily understood when it is stated that he had more than a thousand sworn confederates, all ready at a moment's notice to support any of the gang who might be in trouble. the names of all the principal confederates of murel were obtained from himself, in a manner which i shall presently explain. the gang was composed of two classes: the heads or council, as they were called, who planned and concerted, but seldom acted; they amounted to about four hundred. the other class were the active agents, and were termed strikers, and amounted to about six hundred and fifty. these were the tools in the hands of the others; they ran all the risk, and received but a small portion of the money; they were in the power of the leaders of the gang, who would sacrifice them at any time by handing them over to justice, or sinking their bodies in the mississippi. the general rendezvous of this gang of miscreants was on the arkansas side of the river, where they concealed their negroes in the morasses and cane-brakes. the depredations of this extensive combination were severely felt; but so well were their plans arranged, that although murel, who was always active, was everywhere suspected, there was no proof to be obtained. it so happened, however, that a young man of the name of stewart, who was looking after two slaves which murel had decoyed away, fell in with him and obtained his confidence, took the oath, and was admitted into the gang as one of the general council. by this means all was discovered; for stewart turned traitor, although he had taken the oath, and having obtained every information, exposed the whole concern, the names of all the parties, and finally succeeded in bringing home sufficient evidence against murel, to procure his conviction and sentence to the penitentiary (murel was sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment); so many people who were supposed to be honest, and bore a respectable name in the different states, were found to be among the list of the grand council as published by stewart, that every attempt was made to throw discredit upon his assertions--his character was vilified, and more than one attempt was made to assassinate him. he was obliged to quit the southern states in consequence. it is, however, now well ascertained to have been all true; and although some blame mr. stewart for having violated his oath, they no longer attempt to deny that his revelations were correct. i will quote one or two portions of murel's confessions to mr. stewart, made to him when they were journeying together. i ought to have observed, that the ultimate intentions of murel and his associates were, by his own account, on a very extended scale; having no less an object in view than raising the blacks against the whites, taking possession of, and plundering new orleans, and making themselves possessors of the territory. the following are a few extracts:-- 'i collected all my friends about new orleans at one of our friends' houses in that place, and we sat in council three days before we got all our plans to our notion; we then determined to undertake the rebellion at every hazard, and make as many friends as we could for that purpose. every man's business being assigned him, i started to natchez on foot, having sold my horse in new orleans,--with the intention of stealing another after i started. i walked four days, and no opportunity offered for me to get a horse. the fifth day, about twelve, i had become tired, and stopped at a creek to get some water and rest a little. while i was sitting on a log, looking down the road the way that i had come, a man came in sight riding on a good-looking horse. the very moment i saw him, i was determined to have his horse, if he was in the garb of a traveler. he rode up, and i saw from his equipage that he was a traveler. i arose and drew an elegant rifle pistol on him and ordered him to dismount. he did so, and i took his horse by the bridle and pointed down the creek, and ordered him to walk before me. he went a few hundred yards and stopped. i hitched his horse, and then made him undress himself, all to his shirt and drawers, and ordered him to turn his back to me. he said, 'if you are determined to kill me, let me have time to pray before i die,' i told him i had no time to hear him pray. he turned around and dropped on his knees, and i shot him through the back of the head. i ripped open his belly and took out his entrails, and sunk him in the creek. i then searched his pockets, and found four hundred dollars and thirty-seven cents, and a number of papers that i did not take time to examine. i sunk the pocket-book and papers and his hat, in the creek. his boots were brand-new, and fitted me genteelly; and i put them on and sunk my old shoes in the creek, to atone for them. i rolled up his clothes and put them into his portmanteau, as they were brand-new cloth of the best quality. i mounted as fine a horse as ever i straddled, and directed my course for natchez in much better style than i had been for the last five days. 'myself and a fellow by the name of crenshaw gathered four good horses and started for georgia. we got in company with a young south carolinian just before we got to cumberland mountain, and crenshaw soon knew all about his business. he had been to tennessee to buy a drove of hogs, but when he got there pork was dearer than he calculated, and he declined purchasing. we concluded he was a prize. crenshaw winked at me; i understood his idea. crenshaw had traveled the road before, but i never had; we had traveled several miles on the mountain, when he passed near a great precipice; just before we passed it crenshaw asked me for my whip, which had a pound of lead in the butt; i handed it to him, and he rode up by the side of the south carolinian, and gave him a blow on the side of the head and tumbled him from his horse; we lit from our horses and fingered his pockets; we got twelve hundred and sixty-two dollars. crenshaw said he knew a place to hide him, and he gathered him under his arms, and i by his feet, and conveyed him to a deep crevice in the brow of the precipice, and tumbled him into it, and he went out of sight; we then tumbled in his saddle, and took his horse with us, which was worth two hundred dollars. 'we were detained a few days, and during that time our friend went to a little village in the neighborhood and saw the negro advertised (a negro in our possession), and a description of the two men of whom he had been purchased, and giving his suspicions of the men. it was rather squally times, but any port in a storm: we took the negro that night on the bank of a creek which runs by the farm of our friend, and crenshaw shot him through the head. we took out his entrails and sunk him in the creek. 'he had sold the other negro the third time on arkansaw river for upwards of five hundred dollars; and then stole him and delivered him into the hand of his friend, who conducted him to a swamp, and veiled the tragic scene, and got the last gleanings and sacred pledge of secrecy; as a game of that kind will not do unless it ends in a mystery to all but the fraternity. he sold the negro, first and last, for nearly two thousand dollars, and then put him for ever out of the reach of all pursuers; and they can never graze him unless they can find the negro; and that they cannot do, for his carcass has fed many a tortoise and catfish before this time, and the frogs have sung this many a long day to the silent repose of his skeleton.' we were approaching memphis, in front of which city, and witnessed by its people, was fought the most famous of the river battles of the civil war. two men whom i had served under, in my river days, took part in that fight: mr. bixby, head pilot of the union fleet, and montgomery, commodore of the confederate fleet. both saw a great deal of active service during the war, and achieved high reputations for pluck and capacity. as we neared memphis, we began to cast about for an excuse to stay with the 'gold dust' to the end of her course--vicksburg. we were so pleasantly situated, that we did not wish to make a change. i had an errand of considerable importance to do at napoleon, arkansas, but perhaps i could manage it without quitting the 'gold dust.' i said as much; so we decided to stick to present quarters. the boat was to tarry at memphis till ten the next morning. it is a beautiful city, nobly situated on a commanding bluff overlooking the river. the streets are straight and spacious, though not paved in a way to incite distempered admiration. no, the admiration must be reserved for the town's sewerage system, which is called perfect; a recent reform, however, for it was just the other way, up to a few years ago--a reform resulting from the lesson taught by a desolating visitation of the yellow-fever. in those awful days the people were swept off by hundreds, by thousands; and so great was the reduction caused by flight and by death together, that the population was diminished three-fourths, and so remained for a time. business stood nearly still, and the streets bore an empty sunday aspect. here is a picture of memphis, at that disastrous time, drawn by a german tourist who seems to have been an eye-witness of the scenes which he describes. it is from chapter vii, of his book, just published, in leipzig, 'mississippi-fahrten, von ernst von hesse-wartegg.'-- 'in august the yellow-fever had reached its extremest height. daily, hundreds fell a sacrifice to the terrible epidemic. the city was become a mighty graveyard, two-thirds of the population had deserted the place, and only the poor, the aged and the sick, remained behind, a sure prey for the insidious enemy. the houses were closed: little lamps burned in front of many--a sign that here death had entered. often, several lay dead in a single house; from the windows hung black crape. the stores were shut up, for their owners were gone away or dead. 'fearful evil! in the briefest space it struck down and swept away even the most vigorous victim. a slight indisposition, then an hour of fever, then the hideous delirium, then--the yellow death! on the street corners, and in the squares, lay sick men, suddenly overtaken by the disease; and even corpses, distorted and rigid. food failed. meat spoiled in a few hours in the fetid and pestiferous air, and turned black. 'fearful clamors issue from many houses; then after a season they cease, and all is still: noble, self-sacrificing men come with the coffin, nail it up, and carry it away, to the graveyard. in the night stillness reigns. only the physicians and the hearses hurry through the streets; and out of the distance, at intervals, comes the muffled thunder of the railway train, which with the speed of the wind, and as if hunted by furies, flies by the pest-ridden city without halting.' but there is life enough there now. the population exceeds forty thousand and is augmenting, and trade is in a flourishing condition. we drove about the city; visited the park and the sociable horde of squirrels there; saw the fine residences, rose-clad and in other ways enticing to the eye; and got a good breakfast at the hotel. a thriving place is the good samaritan city of the mississippi: has a great wholesale jobbing trade; foundries, machine shops; and manufactories of wagons, carriages, and cotton-seed oil; and is shortly to have cotton mills and elevators. her cotton receipts reached five hundred thousand bales last year--an increase of sixty thousand over the year before. out from her healthy commercial heart issue five trunk lines of railway; and a sixth is being added. this is a very different memphis from the one which the vanished and unremembered procession of foreign tourists used to put into their books long time ago. in the days of the now forgotten but once renowned and vigorously hated mrs. trollope, memphis seems to have consisted mainly of one long street of log-houses, with some outlying cabins sprinkled around rearward toward the woods; and now and then a pig, and no end of mud. that was fifty-five years ago. she stopped at the hotel. plainly it was not the one which gave us our breakfast. she says-- 'the table was laid for fifty persons, and was nearly full. they ate in perfect silence, and with such astonishing rapidity that their dinner was over literally before ours was begun; the only sounds heard were those produced by the knives and forks, with the unceasing chorus of coughing, etc.' 'coughing, etc.' the 'etc.' stands for an unpleasant word there, a word which she does not always charitably cover up, but sometimes prints. you will find it in the following description of a steamboat dinner which she ate in company with a lot of aristocratic planters; wealthy, well-born, ignorant swells they were, tinselled with the usual harmless military and judicial titles of that old day of cheap shams and windy pretense-- 'the total want of all the usual courtesies of the table; the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured; the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterward with a pocket knife, soon forced us to feel that we were not surrounded by the generals, colonels, and majors of the old world; and that the dinner hour was to be anything rather than an hour of enjoyment.' chapter sketches by the way it was a big river, below memphis; banks brimming full, everywhere, and very frequently more than full, the waters pouring out over the land, flooding the woods and fields for miles into the interior; and in places, to a depth of fifteen feet; signs, all about, of men's hard work gone to ruin, and all to be done over again, with straitened means and a weakened courage. a melancholy picture, and a continuous one;--hundreds of miles of it. sometimes the beacon lights stood in water three feet deep, in the edge of dense forests which extended for miles without farm, wood-yard, clearing, or break of any kind; which meant that the keeper of the light must come in a skiff a great distance to discharge his trust,--and often in desperate weather. yet i was told that the work is faithfully performed, in all weathers; and not always by men, sometimes by women, if the man is sick or absent. the government furnishes oil, and pays ten or fifteen dollars a month for the lighting and tending. a government boat distributes oil and pays wages once a month. the ship island region was as woodsy and tenantless as ever. the island has ceased to be an island; has joined itself compactly to the main shore, and wagons travel, now, where the steamboats used to navigate. no signs left of the wreck of the 'pennsylvania.' some farmer will turn up her bones with his plow one day, no doubt, and be surprised. we were getting down now into the migrating negro region. these poor people could never travel when they were slaves; so they make up for the privation now. they stay on a plantation till the desire to travel seizes them; then they pack up, hail a steamboat, and clear out. not for any particular place; no, nearly any place will answer; they only want to be moving. the amount of money on hand will answer the rest of the conundrum for them. if it will take them fifty miles, very well; let it be fifty. if not, a shorter flight will do. during a couple of days, we frequently answered these hails. sometimes there was a group of high-water-stained, tumble-down cabins, populous with colored folk, and no whites visible; with grassless patches of dry ground here and there; a few felled trees, with skeleton cattle, mules, and horses, eating the leaves and gnawing the bark--no other food for them in the flood-wasted land. sometimes there was a single lonely landing-cabin; near it the colored family that had hailed us; little and big, old and young, roosting on the scant pile of household goods; these consisting of a rusty gun, some bed-ticks, chests, tinware, stools, a crippled looking-glass, a venerable arm-chair, and six or eight base- born and spiritless yellow curs, attached to the family by strings. they must have their dogs; can't go without their dogs. yet the dogs are never willing; they always object; so, one after another, in ridiculous procession, they are dragged aboard; all four feet braced and sliding along the stage, head likely to be pulled off; but the tugger marching determinedly forward, bending to his work, with the rope over his shoulder for better purchase. sometimes a child is forgotten and left on the bank; but never a dog. the usual river-gossip going on in the pilot-house. island no. --an island with a lovely 'chute,' or passage, behind it in the former times. they said jesse jamieson, in the 'skylark,' had a visiting pilot with him one trip--a poor old broken-down, superannuated fellow--left him at the wheel, at the foot of , to run off the watch. the ancient mariner went up through the chute, and down the river outside; and up the chute and down the river again; and yet again and again; and handed the boat over to the relieving pilot, at the end of three hours of honest endeavor, at the same old foot of the island where he had originally taken the wheel! a darkey on shore who had observed the boat go by, about thirteen times, said, 'clar to gracious, i wouldn't be s'prised if dey's a whole line o' dem sk'ylarks!' anecdote illustrative of influence of reputation in the changing of opinion. the 'eclipse' was renowned for her swiftness. one day she passed along; an old darkey on shore, absorbed in his own matters, did not notice what steamer it was. presently someone asked-- 'any boat gone up?' 'yes, sah.' 'was she going fast?' 'oh, so-so--loafin' along.' 'now, do you know what boat that was?' 'no, sah.' 'why, uncle, that was the "eclipse."' 'no! is dat so? well, i bet it was--cause she jes' went by here a- sparklin'!' piece of history illustrative of the violent style of some of the people down along here, during the early weeks of high water, a's fence rails washed down on b's ground, and b's rails washed up in the eddy and landed on a's ground. a said, 'let the thing remain so; i will use your rails, and you use mine.' but b objected--wouldn't have it so. one day, a came down on b's ground to get his rails. b said, 'i'll kill you!' and proceeded for him with his revolver. a said, 'i'm not armed.' so b, who wished to do only what was right, threw down his revolver; then pulled a knife, and cut a's throat all around, but gave his principal attention to the front, and so failed to sever the jugular. struggling around, a managed to get his hands on the discarded revolver, and shot b dead with it--and recovered from his own injuries. further gossip;--after which, everybody went below to get afternoon coffee, and left me at the wheel, alone, something presently reminded me of our last hour in st. louis, part of which i spent on this boat's hurricane deck, aft. i was joined there by a stranger, who dropped into conversation with me--a brisk young fellow, who said he was born in a town in the interior of wisconsin, and had never seen a steamboat until a week before. also said that on the way down from la crosse he had inspected and examined his boat so diligently and with such passionate interest that he had mastered the whole thing from stem to rudder-blade. asked me where i was from. i answered, new england. 'oh, a yank!' said he; and went chatting straight along, without waiting for assent or denial. he immediately proposed to take me all over the boat and tell me the names of her different parts, and teach me their uses. before i could enter protest or excuse, he was already rattling glibly away at his benevolent work; and when i perceived that he was misnaming the things, and inhospitably amusing himself at the expense of an innocent stranger from a far country, i held my peace, and let him have his way. he gave me a world of misinformation; and the further he went, the wider his imagination expanded, and the more he enjoyed his cruel work of deceit. sometimes, after palming off a particularly fantastic and outrageous lie upon me, he was so 'full of laugh' that he had to step aside for a minute, upon one pretext or another, to keep me from suspecting. i staid faithfully by him until his comedy was finished. then he remarked that he had undertaken to 'learn' me all about a steamboat, and had done it; but that if he had overlooked anything, just ask him and he would supply the lack. 'anything about this boat that you don't know the name of or the purpose of, you come to me and i'll tell you.' i said i would, and took my departure; disappeared, and approached him from another quarter, whence he could not see me. there he sat, all alone, doubling himself up and writhing this way and that, in the throes of unappeasable laughter. he must have made himself sick; for he was not publicly visible afterward for several days. meantime, the episode dropped out of my mind. the thing that reminded me of it now, when i was alone at the wheel, was the spectacle of this young fellow standing in the pilot-house door, with the knob in his hand, silently and severely inspecting me. i don't know when i have seen anybody look so injured as he did. he did not say anything--simply stood there and looked; reproachfully looked and pondered. finally he shut the door, and started away; halted on the texas a minute; came slowly back and stood in the door again, with that grieved look in his face; gazed upon me awhile in meek rebuke, then said-- 'you let me learn you all about a steamboat, didn't you?' 'yes,' i confessed. 'yes, you did--didn't you?' 'yes.' 'you are the feller that--that--' language failed. pause--impotent struggle for further words--then he gave it up, choked out a deep, strong oath, and departed for good. afterward i saw him several times below during the trip; but he was cold--would not look at me. idiot, if he had not been in such a sweat to play his witless practical joke upon me, in the beginning, i would have persuaded his thoughts into some other direction, and saved him from committing that wanton and silly impoliteness. i had myself called with the four o'clock watch, mornings, for one cannot see too many summer sunrises on the mississippi. they are enchanting. first, there is the eloquence of silence; for a deep hush broods everywhere. next, there is the haunting sense of loneliness, isolation, remoteness from the worry and bustle of the world. the dawn creeps in stealthily; the solid walls of black forest soften to gray, and vast stretches of the river open up and reveal themselves; the water is glass-smooth, gives off spectral little wreaths of white mist, there is not the faintest breath of wind, nor stir of leaf; the tranquillity is profound and infinitely satisfying. then a bird pipes up, another follows, and soon the pipings develop into a jubilant riot of music. you see none of the birds; you simply move through an atmosphere of song which seems to sing itself. when the light has become a little stronger, you have one of the fairest and softest pictures imaginable. you have the intense green of the massed and crowded foliage near by; you see it paling shade by shade in front of you; upon the next projecting cape, a mile off or more, the tint has lightened to the tender young green of spring; the cape beyond that one has almost lost color, and the furthest one, miles away under the horizon, sleeps upon the water a mere dim vapor, and hardly separable from the sky above it and about it. and all this stretch of river is a mirror, and you have the shadowy reflections of the leafage and the curving shores and the receding capes pictured in it. well, that is all beautiful; soft and rich and beautiful; and when the sun gets well up, and distributes a pink flush here and a powder of gold yonder and a purple haze where it will yield the best effect, you grant that you have seen something that is worth remembering. we had the kentucky bend country in the early morning--scene of a strange and tragic accident in the old times, captain poe had a small stern-wheel boat, for years the home of himself and his wife. one night the boat struck a snag in the head of kentucky bend, and sank with astonishing suddenness; water already well above the cabin floor when the captain got aft. so he cut into his wife's state-room from above with an ax; she was asleep in the upper berth, the roof a flimsier one than was supposed; the first blow crashed down through the rotten boards and clove her skull. this bend is all filled up now--result of a cut-off; and the same agent has taken the great and once much-frequented walnut bend, and set it away back in a solitude far from the accustomed track of passing steamers. helena we visited, and also a town i had not heard of before, it being of recent birth--arkansas city. it was born of a railway; the little rock, mississippi river and texas railroad touches the river there. we asked a passenger who belonged there what sort of a place it was. 'well,' said he, after considering, and with the air of one who wishes to take time and be accurate, 'it's a hell of a place.' a description which was photographic for exactness. there were several rows and clusters of shabby frame-houses, and a supply of mud sufficient to insure the town against a famine in that article for a hundred years; for the overflow had but lately subsided. there were stagnant ponds in the streets, here and there, and a dozen rude scows were scattered about, lying aground wherever they happened to have been when the waters drained off and people could do their visiting and shopping on foot once more. still, it is a thriving place, with a rich country behind it, an elevator in front of it, and also a fine big mill for the manufacture of cotton-seed oil. i had never seen this kind of a mill before. cotton-seed was comparatively valueless in my time; but it is worth $ or $ a ton now, and none of it is thrown away. the oil made from it is colorless, tasteless, and almost if not entirely odorless. it is claimed that it can, by proper manipulation, be made to resemble and perform the office of any and all oils, and be produced at a cheaper rate than the cheapest of the originals. sagacious people shipped it to italy, doctored it, labeled it, and brought it back as olive oil. this trade grew to be so formidable that italy was obliged to put a prohibitory impost upon it to keep it from working serious injury to her oil industry. helena occupies one of the prettiest situations on the mississippi. her perch is the last, the southernmost group of hills which one sees on that side of the river. in its normal condition it is a pretty town; but the flood (or possibly the seepage) had lately been ravaging it; whole streets of houses had been invaded by the muddy water, and the outsides of the buildings were still belted with a broad stain extending upwards from the foundations. stranded and discarded scows lay all about; plank sidewalks on stilts four feet high were still standing; the board sidewalks on the ground level were loose and ruinous,--a couple of men trotting along them could make a blind man think a cavalry charge was coming; everywhere the mud was black and deep, and in many places malarious pools of stagnant water were standing. a mississippi inundation is the next most wasting and desolating infliction to a fire. we had an enjoyable time here, on this sunny sunday: two full hours' liberty ashore while the boat discharged freight. in the back streets but few white people were visible, but there were plenty of colored folk--mainly women and girls; and almost without exception upholstered in bright new clothes of swell and elaborate style and cut--a glaring and hilarious contrast to the mournful mud and the pensive puddles. helena is the second town in arkansas, in point of population--which is placed at five thousand. the country about it is exceptionally productive. helena has a good cotton trade; handles from forty to sixty thousand bales annually; she has a large lumber and grain commerce; has a foundry, oil mills, machine shops and wagon factories--in brief has $ , , invested in manufacturing industries. she has two railways, and is the commercial center of a broad and prosperous region. her gross receipts of money, annually, from all sources, are placed by the new orleans 'times-democrat' at $ , , .